MARCH 2006 SPRING ISSUE
INSIDE Special Feature on new exhibitions: The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art House of Oracles: A Huang Yongping Retrospective Black—Extreme—Vigorous—Figurative Guangzhou Triennale
A Tale of Two Performance Art Festivals: Transborder Language and Dadao Live Art Festival Projecting the Reality of China Through the Lens: On the Artistic Practice of Xing Danwen Qiu Ping: Beyond the Hand Playing with the Political: Feng Mengbo’s Street Fighter IV US$12.00 NT$350.00 US$10.00 NT$350.00
Editor’s Note Contributors
Chinese Brand and Chinese Method: p. 9 On the Exhibition The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art Zhou Yan
Curating Chinese Art in the Twenty-First Century: An Interview with Gao Minglu Christina Yu House of Oracles: A Huang Yongping Retrospective Marion S. Lee
46 Roundtable Discussion Pauline J. Yao Tracking the Bat Project p. 34 Michelle McCoy Black—Extreme—Vigorous—Figurative Martina Köppel-Yang
71 Interview with Hou Hanru Alice Ming Wai Jim Guangdong Museum of Art Alain Fouraux A Tale of Two Performance Art Festivals: Transborder Language and The Dadao Live Art Festival Adele Tan p. 49
Projecting the Reality of China through the Lens: On the Artistic Practice of Xing Danwen Gu Zheng
Qiu Ping: Beyond the Hand Andrzej Lawn Playing with the Political: Feng Mengbo’s Street Fighter IV April A. Eisman Revolutionary History and “Spring, King, Align Month” p. 96 Chang Tsong-zung
Zooming into Focus: Chinese Contemporary Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing Xenia Tetmajer von Przerwa Lu Hao at Goedhuis Contemporary Jonathan Goodman The unreality of Trade (trad) v. Joni Low p. 110 Chinese Name Index EDITOR’S NOTE YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Volume 5, Number 1, March 2006 This issue of Yishu presents an in-depth special Katy Hsiu-chih Chien feature on several recent exhibitions of Ken Lum contemporary Chinese art. It includes articles, reviews, and interviews that reveal diverse, Keith Wallace imaginative directions that curators are generating Zheng Shengtian in the presentation, interpretation, and Julie Grundvig understanding of artistic production by Chinese Kate Steinmann Larisa Broyde artists. Gao Minglu, who curated The Wall: Joyce Lin Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, exhibited Chunyee Li in both China and the United States, has, since his participation in organizing the controversial China/Avant-Garde in 1989, consistently proposed Judy Andrews, Ohio State University ways of considering contemporary Chinese art John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation that bring into consideration sensibilities and Okwui Enwezor, San Francisco Art Institute thought patterns he claims are distinct to the Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di'an, National Art Museum of China Chinese psyche. With The Wall, he explores these Fei Dawei, Guy & Mariam Ullens Foundation ideas with increased clarity. French curator Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Philippe Vergne, drawn to the work of Huang Hou Hanru, Independent Curator & Critic Katie Hill, University of Westminster Yongping and recognizing its importance without Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian at first comprehending why, speaks of his Sebastian Lopez, Daros-Latinamerica AG Lu Jie, Independent Curator inspiring experience organizing House of Charles Merewether, Australian National University Oracles: A Huang Yongping Retrospective at the Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Walker Art Center, the first major presentation in Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator the United States of this Paris-based artist. Wu Hung, University of Chicago Art & Collection Group Ltd. Martina Köppel-Yang curated Black—Extreme— Leap Creative Group Vigorous—Figurative in conjunction with organizers of the Shenzhen International Ink Raymond Mah Gavin Chow Painting Biennial, and produced an exhibition Jeremy Lee that presents manifestations of ink painting that relaITconsulting, Vancouver are not dependent on the tradition of discipline and form. Working with Yang Jiechang, whose Chong-yuan Image Ltd., Taipei work was featured in the exhibition, she introduced - a group of artists who consider ink painting a Yishu is published quarterly in Taipei, Taiwan and edited in medium with many functions rather than a form of Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates of Yishu are 5th of March, June, September and December. regimen and who endeavour to deliver ink Editorial inquiries and manuscripts may be sent to the painting into a larger discourse on contemporary Editorial Office: art. Hou Hanru, who has worked in numerous Yishu curatorial contexts around the globe, is inter- 410-650 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC Canada V6B 4N8 viewed by Alice Ming Wai Jim about the Second Phone: 1.604.649.8187; Fax: 1.604.591.6392 Guangzhou Triennale which he co-curated with E-mail: [email protected] [email protected] Hans Ulrich Obrist. Located in the Pearl River Delta region of China, where rapid—what he Subscription inquiries may be sent to either the Vancouver address or to Hawai’i: refers to as “post-planning”— urban development Journals Department is creating a new breed of city, this event has University of Hawai’i Press provided Hou with another platform to further 2840 Kolowalu Street, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA Phone: 1.808.956.8833; Fax: 1.808.988.6052 develop his innovative ideas which explore the E-mail: [email protected] ways art and the public, the local and the glocal The University of Hawai’i Press accepts payment by Visa or can interact in creative ways, and how the Mastercard, cheque, or money order (in U.S. dollars). museum can model itself to the particularities Advertising inquiries may be sent to either Vancouver address of its immediate social context. or Taiwan: Art & Collection Ltd. Yishu 16 also contains features on artists Xing 6F. No.85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Phone: (886) 2.2560.2220; Fax: (886) 2.2542.0631 Danwen, Qiu Ping, Feng Mengbo, and Liu Dahong E-mail: [email protected] focusing on surveys of their work and as well as www.yishujournal.com specific bodies of work. Exhibitions reviewed include Lu Hao at Goedhuis Contemporary, No part of this journal may be published without the written permission from the publisher. China Trade at Centre A in Vancouver, and the San Diego Museum of Art’s Zooming into Focus in Subscription rates: one year: US $48; two years: US $86 Subscription form may be downloaded from our Website Beijing. We thank Mr. Milton Wong, Mr. Daoping Bao, Paystone Technologies Corp., Raymond Mah, and the Leap Creative Group for their generous support.
Keith Wallace Cover: Huang Yongping. Photo: Cameron Wittig.
CHANG TSONG-ZUNG is a curator and writer and curatorial director of Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong and guest professor at the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Chang’s projects include a series of experiments in curatorial practice and the revival of traditional customs. His exhibition Yellow Box (2005) is being developed in Hangzhou as an ongoing study of China’s culture of connoisseurship.
APRIL A. EISMAN is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Pittsburgh and visit- ing fellow in the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität in Germany. She is currently working on her dissertation, Bernhard Heisig and the Identity Politics of East German Art.
ALAIN FOURAUX was born in Holland and worked with Rem Koolhaas for five years as one the main concept designers for the Beijing Books Building, Whitney Museum, Astor Hotel, Prada NY, and Prada SF. He is currently an architect based in Guangzhou. In 2004, he and David Zuman co- founded NERVECORP, a company that designs and manufactures a range of building compo- nents with integrated optical electronics.
JONATHAN GOODMAN is a poet and writer who is currently teaching at Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design, New York. He has been writing about contemporary Chinese art for ten years, authoring reviews and articles for such magazines as Art in America, Sculpture, and Art Asia Pacific. His essays have covered the work of such artists as Xu Bing, Cai Jin, and Tseng Kwong Chi.
GU ZHENG lives and works in Shanghai and is Associate Professor of the School of Journalism, and Vice-Director of the Research Center for Visual Culture, Fudan University. Gu has published books on both historical and contemporary photography including Expression of the City: 20th Century Urban Photography (2003). He has also curated numerous exhibitions including Miao Xiaochun: A Visitor from the Past (Epsite Gallery, Beijing, 2004) and Re(–)viewing the City for the Guangzhou International Photography Biennale (Guangdong Museum of Art, 2005).
ALICE MING WAI JIM is an art historian and critic. She is currently the curator of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A). Her writings on contem- porary Asian and diasporic art are widely published in anthologies, art journals, and magazines.
ANDRZEJ LAWN is an artist, art critic, and writer who received his undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and is currently completeing an M.F.A. in Sculpture at Pratt Institute, in New York. He has exhibited his artwork in both Toronto and New York.
MARION S. LEE is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the School of Art, Ohio University. Early nineteenth-century China and contemporary art are among her areas of interest.
JONI LOW is a recent graduate from the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. she is currently working at the vancouver international centre for contemporary asian art (Centre A) on a number of projects, including developing the Library Resource Centre.
MICHELLE MCCOY is an independent art writer based in Shanghai. Her work focuses on emerging art in mainland China. She received a B.F.A. with a concentration in sculpture from Pratt Institute, New York.
XENIA TETMAJER VON PRZERWA is a specialist in the field of contemporary Chinese art based in Beijing and a Sinologist and art historian by training. She received her education at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Currently, she is writing her Ph.D. dissertation, Politics of Positioning: Gender Identity in the Conceptual Photography by Women Artists in Contemporary Mainland China, under the supervision of Craig Clunas, at the Art Department of SOAS.
ADELE TAN is a Ph.D. candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She is currently researching the history of performance art in mainland China after 1979. In 2005, she spent five months in Beijing conducting fieldwork and archival research. She is also an assistant editor at Third Text.
MARTINA KÖPPEL-YANG is an independent art critic and historian with a Ph.D in East Asian Art History from the University of Heidelberg. She has studied in Heidelberg, Beijing, and Paris. She has written extensively on the subject of contemporary Chinese art and has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions on the subject, including Leased Legacy: Hong Kong 1997 (Frankfurt, 1997) and Odyssey(s) 2004 (Shanghai, 2004).
PAULINE J. YAO is Assistant Curator of Chinese Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and faculty member of the M.A. Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of Arts, San Francisco. Yao has curated exhibitions and written on subjects relating to modern and contemporary Chinese art. She holds an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.
CHRISTINA YU is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. She received an M.A. in Art History from Boston University and a B.A. from Wellesley College.
ZHOU YAN is a critic with a Ph.D. in art history from the Ohio State University, an M.A. in art theory from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and a Bachelor of Philosophy from Zhongshan University, Guangzhou. Zhou was a member of the Organizational Committee for the exhibition China/Avant-Garde, Beijing, 1989 and is co-author of the book Zhong Guo Dang Dai Yi Shu Shi (Chinese Contemporary Art: 1985–1986), published by Shanghai People’s Publisher in 1991.
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Chen Qiulin, I Exist, I consume, I am Happy, October 20, 2005, performance at University of Buffalo Center for the Arts Atrium. Photo: Nancy J. Parisi. Courtesy of the University of Buffalo Art Galleries.
After organizing three significant exhibitions—China/Avant-Garde (Beijing, 1989), Inside Out: New Chinese Art (New York; San Francisco; Monterrey, Mexico; Sydney, Australia and Hong Kong, 1998–2000), and Chinese Maximalism (Beijing, China and Buffalo, USA, 2003–2004)—Gao Minglu, critic and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, curated his fourth contem- porary Chinese art exhibition, The Wall: Reshaping Chinese Contemporary Art, which was co-orga- nized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the University at Buffalo Art Galleries, and the China Millennium Art Museum in Beijing. The exhibition was presented at the Millennium Art Museum in Beijing from July 22 to August 21, 2005, and then travelled to the United States, where it was shared among three venues in Buffalo: Albright-Knox Gallery, Anderson Gallery, and Center for the Arts of the State University of New York, from October 21, 2005, to January 29, 2006. China/Avant-Garde was an overview for a Chinese audience of the ’85 Art Movement, China’s avant-garde movement of the 1980s, while Inside Out was a comprehensive introduction to Chinese contemporary art for audiences abroad. When Gao organized Chinese Maximalism, his intention was to promote Chinese contemporary art as a brand in today’s art world within the context of post-colonialism. He chose one branch of Chinese contemporary art as the theme, apparently Minimalism, and defined it “Maximalism.” The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, however, is an even more ambitious project, in which Gao wishes to establish a more comprehensive, genuine Chinese art brand, theoretically supported by a critical methodology as a result of a decade-long research, which he calls “the theory of totality” (zheng yi xing).
The events during the opening days at Buffalo became an integral part of the show because they activated the exhibition and added significance to it. The conversation at the opening between Arthur Waldron, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, and Gao Minglu was an interesting inauguration for the show. Professor Waldron gave a keynote address, “The Great Wall of China: The Author’s Reflection after Fifteen Years,”a meditation on his book The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (1990). He examined the history of the Great Wall based on his textual research with historical documents. According to his study, the Great Wall became a symbol of Chinese nationality that has been transformed into a nationalist and ideological symbol advocated by the Chinese government after 1949. The development in the 1990s seems to have further proved this statement. Thus the Great Wall as a sign of nationalism professes nothing but propagandistic significance. Gao Minglu argued that examination of the Great Wall should be more than documentary research. The Great Wall is an object, an architectural entity. The evolution of its symbolic meaning and cultural significance has a great deal to do with the reality and context of a given time and space. For example, the Great Wall as a symbol of Chinese national pride and as a national monument was finally established during the Anti-Japanese War of the 1930s and 1940s, a fact of which Professor Waldron was not aware. (Gao discusses this discovery with convincing evidence in chapter 6, “Reconstructing Historical Memory: The Great Wall in the Twentieth Century,”in the exhibition catalogue.) Thus to the Chinese, especially Chinese artists, the Great Wall is a much more complicated symbol, not just a simple ideological sign. I’ve found that because of China’s political situation and the legacy of Cold War ideology, the approach of Chinese studies in the West, including Chinese contemporary art study, essentially remains more or less what I call “ideological criticism.”This manner of study, although practical, can become either relatively superficial or lopsided, even at times biased. Wittingly or unwittingly, this kind of academic misunderstanding exists in many fields, perhaps a coincidence of today’s conservative trend in the political and cultural spheres in the West. Thus the conversation between Gao and Waldron at the opening of the exhibition became significant in terms of sinology, the study of contemporary Chinese culture, and contemporary Chinese art in particular.
After the one-hour opening presentation and discussion, Chen Qiulin, a female artist from Sichuan province, re-enacted her 2003 act art I Exist, I Consume, and I’m Happy, in the Center for the Arts at the north campus of SUNY Buffalo. Eight male audience members (University of Buffalo students perhaps?) pulled a shopping cart with ropes in eight different directions while the artist, dressed in a white wedding gown, sat in the cart and put on makeup. When one of the students pulled the cart in his direction and reached a plate with a piece of cake on it in front of him, he won and became the “groom.”This cooperative and entertaining kind of performance won ardent applause. Was it for the winner who won his “bride” in the competition? Or it was for the performance itself? Maybe both. To me, this performance combined an ancient Chinese rite of “scrambling for the bride” with today’s sense of consumption, resulting in a spectacular and ingenious action. In a purely entertaining atmosphere it lashed out at the reality of China’s current consumerism through a “happy and pretty whip.”In China, women consume as they are simulta- neously consumed (the so-called “beauty economy” booms from south to north). And the marriage of tradition with contemporary ideas, like this one, could become a typical practice that might erase their contradictions. However, this piece seems to have attained a new meaning when executed in the United States, the birthplace of modern consumerism. The “fair” market rule is in fact a contest of powers; thus, sharing a piece of the pie of the Chinese market, today’s center of attraction, could be seen as a competition for market power. Again, the ancient “jungle law”— power is the Supreme Being—still works and still persists.
As in the show China/Avant-Garde in Beijing in 1989, act art in The Wall became the center of attention for the media. He Yunchang, an artist born in Yunnan, a southwestern province, and who now lives in Beijing, was naked and trapped in a large, transparent container in front of the Albright-Knox Gallery on October 21, an extremely chilly Friday evening. While a concrete mixer poured cement mortar into the container and then the mortar reached his chest, he was shivering with cold and suffering from the pressure of solidifying cement. Some audience members were shocked and started shouting, wanting to rescue him immediately, but that was rejected by the artist. When, after an hour, the cement had solidified thoroughly, he was “released” from the concrete cube by workers who broke through it with pickaxes, hammers, and chisels. His skin was crackled because of the corrosion of concrete. Even after this, he executed an “unfinished” action in Niagara Falls on the second day. If the first act could be seen as his contending with natural and industrial power, this time he only wanted to test his endurance in severe natural conditions. He was naked again and walked upstream into the Niagara River, reaching about a hundred feet from the falling water of the American Falls. He planned to stay in the water for twenty-four hours, but failed since the wet rope that tied him to a tree on the bank sunk into water and had become so heavy that he could no longer move forward. He was arrested after a tourist reported his actions to the police, and he was charged with “misconduct” and “exposing his body in public.”He was brought to the hospital, where he stayed for twenty-four hours (what a coincidence!) so that his physical and mental conditions could be checked. The event was reported by the Associated Press and appeared in many newspapers and on the Internet in both English and Chinese, so the act became known worldwide. The act against nature turned out, eventually, to be an act of contending with institutions and the legal system, a result far from the artist’s expectation. This was different from the gunshot act at the opening of China/Avant-Garde in Beijing in 1989, in which the artists Xiao Lu and Tang Song were arrested and released without trial ; the He Yunchang case was in fact brought to court. According to the judge, the case would be dismissed if no further violation of the law took place within six months, and if the artist paid a two hundred dollar fine. The artist was not concerned about the media sensation his action created, but rather with the failure of his plan. His intention was to create a marvelous spectacle: a naked person standing for twenty-four hours in the water near the cliff of the great waterfall and experiencing and meditating on the contest between human life and extreme nature.
This sensational event didn’t overshadow the artworks in the galleries, such as the painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and documents of act art. At the same time, the University at Buffalo Art Galleries screened five contemporary Chinese films, including Sanyuanli, directed by Cao Fei and Ou Ning (2003), Estranged Paradise, by Yang Fudong (2002), In Expectation, by Zhang Ming (1996), Xiao Wu, by Jia Zhangke (1997), and Tiexi District: West of the Tracks, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, by Wang Bing. All the films reflect the current urbanization taking place in China, which has caused a lot of problems, such as the impact of the urban emigrants and the hardship of laid-off workers. The films, commonly labeled as “experimental film” by the Sixth Generation of Chinese film directors, have drawn the intensive controversy inside China and are not even allowed to be shown in public there.
The phrase that came to my mind when I stepped into the galleries was “Chinese brand.”While the show Inside Out: New Chinese Art (1998) tried to provide the outside art world, as the title implied, with a retrospective and comprehensive picture of contemporary Chinese art, including the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas, The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art is an attempt to promote a Chinese brand. The former covered Rationalist Painting, Current of Life, and Anti-Art, of the 1980s as well as Political Pop, Cynicism, Apartment Art, and Conceptual Art,
of the 1990s. One may say these are also Chinese brands, but in the context of globalism and post-colonialism these forms demon- strate locality more than globality. And while the promotion of brands was a not major purpose of the show, the theoretical preparation for such brands was in development. After Inside Out, Gao Minglu began to con- struct the notion of a Chinese brand. An important step was his thematic show Chinese Maximalism (zhongguo jiduo zhuyi, 2003), which focused on a contemporary anti- modernism art phenomenon with a modernist mast. Unlike European modernism of the early twentieth century, which attempted to arbitrarily incorporate a utopian world into a two- or three-dimensional object, or a later modernism, such as Minimalism, that stressed the effect of “theatricality” and “objecthood” (Michael Fried, 1968) as well as resistance to any spiritual and empirical elements, Maximalism records spiritual process through time-consuming and repetitive “meaningless” forms and He Yunchang, Command of the General, October 21, 2005, performance at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo. labour intensive methods, which presents a totally different approach towards modernity in positioning art as a part of daily life itself, rather than representing any meaning about the human world and life. Featuring works by eighteen artists, Gao Minglu’s long catalogue essay “Chinese Maximalism: An Alterative ‘Metaphysical Art’” was published by Chongqing Publishing House, China, in 2003. In it he dis- cussed the definition of Maximalism and its artistic context, the methodology of Maximalism (against expression and presentation, a metaphysical operation, where meaning only lies in the process, with a fixed quantity, and with Zen Buddhism as destination), and claimed that Maximalism was a procedure that could be shared by Chinese contemporary art. The Maximalist methodology here included clear aims and ways of operation, the generation of meaning, the definition of the signifier, and the idea of destination/orientation, which is a sufficiently rich framework and an incredibly creative way to sum up a method for one branch of contemporary Chinese art.
The construction of a methodology for contemporary art criticism and history is a fundamental and strategic project. When tired of ideological and empirical criticism, Chinese critics might think of developing a new methodology that can analyze and accurately criticize contemporary Chinese art. Doing so will straighten out the intricate fabric of contemporary Chinese art. Otherwise, criticism will remain dualistic in its methods, namely, the application of those “ready-
Xu Bing, Ghosts Pounding the Wall, 1990–1991, installation. Photo: Tom Loonan. Courtesy of the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo. made” antitheses—the new vs. the old, the modern vs. the traditional, form vs. content, the politi- cal vs. the artistic, the official vs. the un/anti-official, the collective vs. the individual, the natural vs. the cultural, the sociological vs. the aesthetic, the signifier vs. the signified, the visual vs. the tex- tual, the common vs. the personal, and the public vs. the private—which has dominated Chinese art criticism for decades, but has always resulted in simplification, superficiality, or even arbitrariness. Gao Minglu has realized that it is time to rethink the critical criticism of the last two decades and has proposed a new and effective method for the criticism and historiography of Chinese contemporary art.
The intricacy and complicity of contemporary Chinese culture and art have bewildered not only outsiders, but insiders as well. For example, why has the term “avant-garde,”which referred to early modernists of the West, been used by Chinese artists and critics for more than twenty years? How can act art keep up its tension with mainstream culture and yet be so persistent? What is the difference between Chinese act art and performance art that occurred in the West in the 1960s and has been institutionalized now? Is there really “aesthetic autonomy,”detached from society, in Chinese contemporary art? Or, asked in another way, is there a branch of formalism in Chinese contemporary art? To answer these questions, there needs to be a special theoretical framework and discursive system that is operational in the analysis of art schools, trends, issues, and individual cases. This system requires the creation of structure, a construction of narrative modes, and a definition of rhetoric. Besides the philosopher’s mind and mastery of Chinese classics and Western scholarship, the most important property for an innovator of a new critical system is his or her sensitive perception and profound insight into the pulse of contemporary Chinese culture and art.
To analyze Chinese contemporary art, one needs a theoretical starting point. After a long period of observation and thinking, Gao Minglu proposed his theory of “totality.”It is, at first, a retort to the simplified manner of criticism—that is, dichotomous criticism. A typical example of this is the analysis of Political Pop from the early 1990s. Because of the June 4th Tian’anmen incident of 1989 and its political and economic aftermath, it was easy to interpret Political Pop as an intellectual
resistance against the left-turning political atmosphere and conservative ideology of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The fact that Political Pop paintings could only be exhibited abroad reinforced this interpretation. Gao Minglu, however, pointed out in his essay “Kitsch, Power and Complicity—On the Phenomenon of ‘Political Pop’” (1995) that this school adored and benefited from Mao’s discourse even while it satirized Mao’s myth and its accompanying notion of utopia. With such ambivalence, Political Pop encased itself, wittingly or unwittingly, in the structure of complicity with the ideological utopia. In the catalogue essay for The Wall, Gao further discussed the narrative modes of this dichotomy, including the individual vs. the collective (or individual vs. society) and male vs. female (or male-centeredness vs. feminism), and he explored the complicated, interdependent, or even interactive relationship of those antitheses.
Based on this foundation, Gao Minglu drew a general picture of Chinese contemporary art, one very different from Western contemporary art. Avant-garde discourse, with its dichotomy of aesthetics and politics in the West, was injected with the totality of aesthetic and social significance in Chinese contemporary art. Gao found that in the Euro-American theory of modernity and avant-garde there is dichotomy: political avant-garde vs. artistic-cultural avant-garde, or sociological modernity vs. aesthetic modernity. The former emerged with Henri de Saint-Simon, a nineteenth century French socialist who founded socialist utopian theory, while the latter began with Charles Baudelaire, whose writing led the artistic avant-garde. While Saint-Simon focused on revolution and modernization in society and the political field in order to form a bourgeois class, Baudelaire militated against the materialized modernity of bourgeois society. The artistic-cultural avant-garde, within a self-sufficient aesthetic system independent from the political avant-garde, went through different phases of formalism, including Suprematism, abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, etc. It gave way to postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s, when Pop culture replaced formalism’s elitism and the logic of a purely visual evolution was subverted by appropriation, fragmentation, the de-historicized, and visual collage.
When we look at the development of Chinese modern art, there is a totally different picture; that is, the integrity of politics and art are combined with the sociological and the aesthetic. The deep concern of artists regarding the surroundings in which they live, as well as spirituality, has remained a major issue. From the Storm Society (jue lan she) of the 1930s to the Star Society (xingxing huahui), Scar Painting (shang heng huihua), and Rustic Realism (xiang tu xieshi) of the late 1970s, to the emerging art groups of the 1980s, and the New Generation (xin shengdai), Political Pop (zheng zhi bo pu), and Cynical Realism (wan shi xian shi zhuyi) of the 1990s, all integrated into a totality. One can even include the abstract works that appear so close to Minimalism but were classified as Maximalism by Gao Minglu, because they do not embody a “formalist autonomy” that is independent from spiritual significance. Hu Shi (1891–1962), a Chinese thinker and Pragmatist of twentieth century, pointed out that “the real knowledge needed by humanity is not the absolute principle and reason, but rather the particular time, specific space, and my truth.” This pragmatist/empirical tenet could be considered a principle of “contemporaneity” because what concerns it most is the unity of people’s selected values and their environment. Time is always of a particular moment instead of a linear, historical construct, and space is always the present space. To be noticed, one must debate this totality theory in China. The questioner asks if this totality means unity/coincidence between the avant-garde and state ideology. Gao’s answer is that the totality theory does not deny antitheses; rather, it emphasizes interdependence, reciprocity, and even interaction. What it denies is the idea of seeing antitheses as something thoroughly antagonist, pushing towards absolute extremes, and then being applied to contemporary art
and culture. For Gao Minglu, the relationship of the avant-garde to state ideology is neither homogeneous nor totally heterogeneous. They are inter-inclusive and always in the position of negotiation, as we saw in Political Pop, referred to here by Gao Minglu as a “complicity structure.”
From the perspective of the totality methodology, the picture of contemporary Chinese art becomes clearer and more comprehensible. For instance, the living spaces of the Chinese avant-garde in last two decades have changed from the conquest of political space of the late 1970s and 1980s to a withdrawal into artists’ villages and Apartment Art of the 1990s. The conquest and withdrawal reflect an interaction between politics and art as well as a symbiotic relationship between the environment and artists. Combining a search for the truth of lived reality and the aesthetics of realism has created a branch of Social Realism in the avant-garde. The shift of concerns from rendao (representing true life), renwen (searching for ideal truth), to rentai (consuming the real) enabled artists to find their own comprehension of reality. The conceptual art of the last twenty years has gone from a “metaphysical inquiry” to a “monologue of ‘things.’”Its anti-art nature is not an unfolding of artistic logic, but a reaction to the outside environment where art was produced. While the line between art and life blurred, logic gave way to experience, and vision and text were in complete harmony. In act art, from the “public body” and “the ‘wounded’ body” to “privatized bodies,”the body as a medium subordinates itself to society, the group, and its surroundings. Its “ritualistic” features indicate reciprocity between individuals and their surroundings (society), as well as the contemporary and the traditional. Finally, women’s art of the 1990s, according to Gao Minglu, is firstly the result of interaction between women artists and the art context of the 1990s. However, this interaction can be seen in the work of almost all contemporary artists, not just those of a single gender. Contemporary Chinese women’s art stressed a peaceful transformation of identity and position for both genders in society. The issue of gender identity is entangled with more general issues such as humanity, human rights, modernity, and individuals and families, etc. It has not been an independent issue, as we can see in Western feminism. Therefore the harmonious, natural, and meditative properties in Chinese women’s art are different from its western counterpart, with the latter’s often antagonistic and confrontational characteristics.
Now that the structure of the totality methodology has been established, the next step is to select a mode for constructing narratives. Gao Minglu does this by applying thematic narratives. The themes he has defined include the change in the avant-garde’s living spaces, social realism, conceptual art, “demonized” act art, the Great Wall’s role in the reconstruction of historical memories, the spectacle of urban life, “marginalized” artists, and women’s art. All these themes are described and analyzed under the awareness of totality, and they reflect the dynamic pulses of contemporary art and culture. Though they are at times overlapping in terms of artists and schools of art, the clearness and accuracy of the entire picture have been retained. In re-reading the book Chinese Contemporary Art: 1985–1986 (1991), for which Gao Minglu was the major writer, I’ve found that he made adjustments to his themes such as “Rationalist Trend,”“Current of Life,”and “Post-’85—Anti-art,”which have been “dismantled” and integrated under the themes of change of living spaces, social realism, conceptual art, and act art in the catalogue. Because of a change of context, perspective, and way of thinking after 1980s, an adjusted thematic selection became necessary and imperative.
If we consider this methodology as a discursive system, the principle of “totality” can be a corner- stone, and the thematic narrative can form the framework of the system. The next step is to create rhetoric (categories or modules). With rhetoric, the principles can be carried out and the themes can be incarnated into real narrative. The fame that Gao Minglu has achieved as a “master of
Gu Wenda, 100,000 Kilometers, 2004–2005, installation. Photo: Tom Loonan. Courtesy of the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo. rhetoric” in the Chinese art critic community refers to his outstanding ability to construct cate- gories and terminology. In the 1980s, he coined the term “’85 Art Movement” in a well-known essay of the same title to describe the surging avant-garde movement launched that year. In that article, he introduced his concept of “totality,”namely, exploring art and politics, art and culture, and art and society as an integrated whole. The term “Rationalist Painting” was also created by him and has been accepted by artists and critics, becoming one of the keywords for the study of Chinese modern art of the 1980s. As I discussed above, the creation and promotion of the idea of “Maximalism” is his most effective effort in building a Chinese brand, which has become a clever antithesis to the term “Minimalism.”The point is that every category needs to match the signifier and the signified with theoretical support. The exhibition Chinese Maximalism and its catalogue essay provide the term with a firm theoretical foundation.
In the catalogue to The Wall, Gao Minglu both created and borrowed a series of rhetorical terms in order to interpret the intricate phenomenon of Chinese contemporary art. The term “Apartment Art,”for instance, refers to the avant-garde’s withdrawal from public and social space to a private and individual space on the one hand, and to conceptual art’s evolution from meta- physical inquiry to a monologue of “things” on the other. To conceptualize daily experience, these artists either used measurement as a mode of operation or stressed “process” as a critical idea in order to create conceptual works that could be displayed within a limited space and could explore an object’s meaning in a living environment. The term “Social Realism” was borrowed from Western art history of early twentieth century, when “Ashcan School” artists, as an example, ren- dered urban life in a realistic way during the period of the Great Depression. With this term, Gao Minglu described the art—mainly painting—done in realistic manner from late 1970s to the 1990s. He’s divided it into three phases: rendao (humanism), renwen (humanity), and rentai (individual living status). Each phase has its own perspective, orientation, and concern in terms of “truth:” while rendao represents true life, renwen searches for ideal truth, and rentai consumes the fragmented real.
With the creative application of the word “wall”—an architectural category and its allegorical extension—Gao Minglu practices his “totality” method and again promotes the Chinese brand. In the exhibition and the catalogue, “wall” is a mode of narrative and a mode of discursive rhetoric.
In his essay “The Great Wall in Contemporary Chinese Art,”in the quarterly Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique (Winter 2004, Duke University), Gao Minglu elaborated on the emergence of a so-called “Great Wall discourse” and Chinese artists’ re-creation of an ambivalent state of mind by means of the Great Wall as a symbolic emblem. In the exhibition catalogue, he developed the essay into a chapter titled “Reconstructing Historical Memory: The Great Wall in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art.”According to Gao Minglu, the Great Wall’s special position as the symbol of Chinese nationality was established during the Anti-Japanese War of the 1930s and 1940s, when the national crisis and its bloody reality brought the Great Wall into Chinese visual culture. Since then, the Great Wall as the signifier of a sign has been endowed with different meanings. In other words, the image and implication of the Great Wall have been reconstructed and re-interpreted over and over again; thus interpretation itself becomes a continuous process of shaping and reshaping Chinese modernity and cultural identity. For Gao, the act art on the Great Wall by Concept 21 in 1988, Zheng Lianjie’s project The Great Exploration, executed on the Great Wall in 1993, and Xu Bing’s Ghosts Pounding the Wall all are works of art that mourn memory and reflect on the national soul. Zhan Wang’s Fixing the Golden Tooth for the Great Wall, where he “repairs” the wall with stainless-steel bricks, and Cai Guoqiang’s explosive Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters are artworks that restore memory and reshape modern Chinese identity in the era of globalization. The combination of historical memories and contemporary interpretation is critical to Gao’s brand of the “Great Wall” for contemporary art.
The “wall” as rhetoric is a generalization derived from the Great Wall, and it defines the art that uses the “wall” as material, subject matter, or medium, while in a narrative way its manifold allegories can be applied to the description and analysis of different themes. When analyzing the shift in the avant-garde’s living spaces, for instance, Gao found that surmounting “the wall” between art and society became a characteristic of Chinese contemporary art practice. The “wall” in this case refers to a boundary, and the idea of its definition, blurring and/or surmounting it are conspicuous scenarios in contemporary art. The intangible wall between the two genders in women’s art, for example, is to him not a segregation of offense and defense, but a medium of interdependence and interaction between both genders. Furthermore, in front of the wall of art and society and art and politics, both genders are positioned in the same trench, and together they interact with the latter. Thus, the wall’s metaphoric significance of division, separation, and obstacle has been weakened in his totality theory, while its meaning of mediation, connection, and communication has been reinforced.
The works in the exhibition were generated, more or less, in relation to the “wall.”Those which possess the most powerful visual impact include, to me, Xu Bing’s gigantic Ghosts Pounding the Wall, Gu Wenda’s 100,000 Kilometers, a beacon-tower-like installation made of human hair bricks, and Zhan Wang’s Urban Landscape, installed with thousands of shiny stainless-steel kitchen utensils and a rockery. Although I saw Ghosts Pounding the Wall in various formats, I was overwhelmed and moved by this work when I saw it in the Albright-Knox Gallery. This enormous rubbing taken from the Great Wall occupies the thirty-foot high sculpture court, a display hall with a Greek Temple-like interior (is there any hint here in this juxtaposition of two “virtual” ancient civilizations?) in the Albright-Knox Gallery. The Great Wall as a symbol was transformed into a
monument, a wordless monument, which carries a profound, sometimes tragic, memory of history and culture to the Chinese mind. The tremendous amount of repetitive and boring labor spent in this work indicates the significance of process, seen in Maximalism, on the one hand, and it symbolizes depth and the tragedy of repetitive history on the other. The hair-brick Great Wall by Gu Wenda looks more like a scene from a funeral: the hair curtains hung on four sides are not unlike funeral curtains (a large, oblong sheet of silk with a message, presented at funerals) and the “beacon tower” in the center is like a grave, while the smell that exudes from the hair-bricks and hair-curtains reinforces the gloomy atmosphere. The individuality and collectivity represented by human hair integrates itself into history (indicated by the “beacon tower”) and becomes a mourning of history and introspection into the present. The dazzling splendor of Urban Landscape by Zhan Wang gives the audience a strong sense of the unreal or the absurd. Although Zhan made a “city” instead of “wall(s),”the interdependent and reciprocal relationship of these two terms in Chinese classical architecture—a city defined by walls, and walls that exist in a city— provides this stainless-steel city with the implication of walls: in the engulfing urbanization in China, the rockery, a man-made landscape in itself, has been alienated again by industrial culture represented by stainless-steel, so the “wall” between nature and culture, and between the traditional and the modern, has metamorphosed into an illusionary and maze-like “virtual reality” reflecting urbanization. This work reminded me of the installation Phantom City, shown at Documenta 11 by Bodys Kingelez, an artist from Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is a simulacrum of an “architectural model,”made of both architectural and everyday materials including cardboard, Plexiglas, tinfoil, and bottle caps, etc., and based on the artist’s observation of Kinshasa, the capital city of Congo. Like China, Congo faces in the emergent urbanization the confrontation and negotiation between tradition and reality that nearly all developing countries face. The bizarre and motley “phantom city” Kingelez constructed is an exaggerated parable and satire that imitates “modern architecture” and “modern city planning” while paying little attention to the native cultural context in conjunction with such urbanization. Its sense of absurdity is echoed in Zhan Wang’s “stainless-steel city.”The only difference is that the tension in Zhan’s work is stronger than Kingelez’s, since Zhan injects an element of tradition—the rockery and the concept of the ancient Chinese garden—and thus satire and parable become heavier because of their engagement with history.
A number of works featured in the exhibition directly respond to current urbanization in China, and, since the 1990s, many Chinese artists have enthusiastically committed themselves to an inves- tigation of it. What the artists demonstrate in their artworks, however, according to Gao Minglu, cannot be seen purely as the portrayal of Chinese city landscapes, but rather as commentary on current globalization in the form of dislocation and displacement, with visual art being a unique form for capturing the rapidly changing landscape as well as for showing a sentiment of resistance to globalization.
Besides installations, there are two-dimensional works in which we can see images of walls and/or the Great Wall. Ding Fang is the artist who applied “walls” as a symbol of Chinese nationality and culture in the early and middle 1980s. His work again moved me after nearly twenty years. As one of the major figures of “Rationalist Painting” in the ’85 Art Movement, Ding Fang became famous for the “sublime aesthetics” in his The Wall series and other paintings with symbol of the “loess” of northwestern China. In his essay “The Wall: A Symbol for Cultural Rumination,”Ding explained his comprehension of the “wall” as a symbol rich in profound historical connotation. This sense of historicity remains in his art and is out of tune with today’s “fragmented aesthetics” with their
elements of instantaneity, fragmentation, and triviality; and the artist is thus classified as the “marginalized modern man” by Gao Minglu. I’ve sensed, with gratification, an alliance with Anselm Kiefer in his painting, especially in City Series: Sand Storm (1999–2000). His deep concern regarding the deterioration of the natural environment and the impending spiritual desert can be traced to the same origin as his concern with respect to the national crises of the 1980s. He is close to Kiefer in terms of spirituality: both are concerned with heartfelt compassion, with national heritage and cultural identity, and the suffering and loneliness of human beings. The rolling sand storm in Ding Fang’s work and the plowed and burned land in Kiefer’s—as we can see in his Die Milchstrasse (The Milky Way, 1985¬–1987) in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery—are metaphors for the spiritual trauma of a nation.
The exhibition The Wall has “maximized” the sign “wall” in terms of the signifier and the signified. It appears in different visual modes, and its connotations have been greatly enriched. As the title of the exhibition implies, the “wall” functions as a critical allegory of today’s Chinese art, and, in this way, Gao Minglu attempted to “reshape contemporary Chinese art” through his construction of a new methodology. This benefits Chinese contemporary art internationally by means of mutual support of both a Chinese brand and Chinese methodology. While acceptance of a brand takes time because the accuracy and efficacy of a methodology requires its testing in history, to me, this exhibition is the strongest, most effective, and most comprehensive effort in advocating a Chinese brand and methodology thus far. For me, the only thing Gao Minglu might do is to further explore the historical resources and the traditional Chinese way of philosophical thinking when constructing his methodology in order to attain stronger support of history and philosophy. Other than that, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are everything one could wish for.
Notes 1 Gao Minglu considered using the term “behavioral art” as replacement for “performance art” in translating the Chinese term (xing wei yi shu); see The Wall catalogue, pp.162–63. While I prefer “act art” because the word “act” is more “collective” and “pertinent” than the “behavioral” and therefore is more suitable to the type of art in China in which an artist’s body is always related closely to his or her surrounding whether natural, social, or artistic. Also, the word “act” possesses the meaning of “performance.” 2 A happening titled Gunshot, among other approved and unapproved act art incidents at the opening of the China/Avant-Garde show in 1989, generated more journalistic sensation than any of the academic and artistic achievements. 3 Though two artists were arrested, only Xiao Lu executed the Gunshot act, according to Xiao Lu’s statement, released in 2004, fifteen years after the sensational act, see http://arts.tom.com/1004/2004/4/23-42617.html. 4 Currently there is a magazine named (jin ri xian feng, or Avant-Garde Today) that has published from late 1990s to the present. 5 Quoted from Gao Minglu edited, The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, the exhibition catalogue, (Beijing: Sunvale Culture, 2005), 47. 6 Some art historians consider French painters Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet as early Social Realists. 7 Increasingly severe sand storms hit Beijing and vicinity every spring.
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Huang Bingyi and Gao Minglu in front of Qin Yufen’s Chan Juan—Moon Women, 1998. Photo: Nancy J. Parisi. Courtesy of the University of Buffalo Art Galleries.
Christina Yu: The exhibition The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art is remarkable not only for the quality of the artworks featured and the great curatorial efforts involved, but also for its organizational nature—it is the first major collaboration between American museums and an important Chinese museum. It is also the most ambitious exhibition of contemporary Chinese art to travel beyond China. What was the motivation for such a joint venue?
Gao Minglu: Although there have been many ambitious Chinese contemporary art exhibitions, they are all displayed exclusively either in China or in the West, although strategically, it may make sense to curate a show mainly for a particular audience from a particular cultural area. The outcome of this approach shows both advantage and disadvantage. The disadvantage is that such an exhibition might be easily trapped in the preoccupation of postcolonial theory or exoticism, especially when you bring something from an original (or a local) context to the “international” environment. My motivation in having the same show displayed at both the sites of “the local (or original)” and “the international” is to try to give all viewers a sense of what original Chinese contemporary art is, although I understand “original” is always questionable and always determined by a specific curator and the institution he/she works for. It is this motivation, however, that can strengthen my will not to try to please the audience on either side, but only focus on what is the real. My goal is not to bring something kitsch. Therefore, I am very confident to say The Wall is truly the first one of its kind. It is my attempt to provide exposure to “the real” in the West as well as China. For me this is a true cross-cultural study and dialogue between very dif- ferent sets of institutional systems, political backgrounds, and aesthetic values.
Lu Shengzhong, Wall of People, 2003, installation. Photo: Jim Bush. Courtesy of the University of Buffalo Art Galleries.
Another thing that is also very important to note is that The Wall is a test of merging Western museum practice with the less formalized Chinese exhibition system, and for the first time collaborating on various details such as setting up the checklist, raising funds, shipping, the publication, and in particular a bilingual catalogue, etc. This unprecedented project can pave the way for more collaborations between China and the global art community.
Christina Yu: How long was the preparation process?
Gao Minglu: We started the project in 2001, and I got interdisciplinary research funding from the University at Buffalo that brought me to China every year from 2001 to 2003 to do research. We set up the primary checklist as early as 2003. There was only a slight change in the final list for the opening in 2005 in Beijing. This is the problem of dealing with the American museum system, which has always bothered me a lot. In both China and Europe, a curator can change his/her checklist even in a very short period before the opening. This can make a show more up-to-date. The American museum system usually finalizes the checklist a year before the opening, and does not allow a curator to make changes (except maybe only very minor changes). This is why I am a little bit frustrated, because The Wall cannot include some new works that fit the theme. Another time consuming aspect is the catalogue, which includes nine chapters and more than three hundred images, and all texts are written bilingually. The catalogue has more than four hundred pages, with a chronology from 1977 to 2004 and a bibliography of major publications in the field of twentieth-century Chinese art.
Christina Yu: What were some of the major difficulties in the process of this cross-continental collaboration?
Gao Minglu: The most difficult job was to get both the Beijing and Buffalo sites to run on the same track with similar speed and rhythm. Chinese institutions usually get started very slowly and later get a lot of intensive work done within two or even just one month before the opening. The style is so different from that of American art museums. In fact, I did not get into as much
political trouble as I thought I would, but instead had more difficulty dealing with financial and administrative support from the Chinese side.
Christina Yu: Given the nature of a travelling exhibition, you inevitably faced very different kinds of audiences—those from China and those from North America. Was the diversity of audience a concern when you planned the exhibition? Did you have a specific audience (or specific audi- ences) in mind?
Gao Minglu: In general, no. The sharp difference between local and international in the audience doesn’t bother me very much. Rather, I like to keep the focus of the exhibition coherent in different venues. This is one way to examine the response from different audiences. And it is also a challenge for the audience on both sides. In fact, I believe today the art audience needs challenges more than pessimistic acceptance. To please an audience is just to bring some illusion to their eyes.
To me, a curator is never able to truly anticipate how his/her audience will respond. The weight of the exhibition should not rely so much on my analysis of the audience’s interest, but rather, should focus on my own curatorial approach, which is to catch as much of the original context as I can.
Christina Yu: The Wall stands out immediately from other similar, large-scale contemporary Chinese art exhibitions by its inclusion of many young and emerging talents, some of whom had little exposure prior it. What were the reasons for including these lesser-known artists and juxtaposing them with leading artists in the contemporary Chinese art community?
Gao Minglu: Although The Wall includes artists whose ages range from their fifties to their twenties, the primary goal of the exhibition is not to give more exposure to young artists [than older artists]. Some artists, such as Chen Qiulin, He Yunchang, Xu Hongmin, Wu Jian, etc. are
Ding Fang, Plateau Series: The Great Gate, 2001, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.
Chen Qiulin, I Exist, I Consume, I am Happy, October 20, 2005, performance at University of Buffalo Center for the Arts Atrium. Photo: Nancy J. Parisi. Courtesy of the University of Buffalo Art Galleries. young and have never displayed their work in the U.S. But this is not the main reason. To bring them into The Wall is because their work and approaches fit the themes of the exhibition. There is no particular target at a new generation. Since The Wall also attempts to give a historical view with a thematic focus, the established and younger artists are equally important within the framework.
Christina Yu: Were these artists surprised when you invited them to participate in the exhibition?
Gao Minglu: I don’t know. Maybe not.
Christina Yu: In preparation for the exhibition, you travelled extensively in China. Where did you travel to? For how long? Was geographic coverage one of your concerns?
Gao Minglu: Since 2001, I and the other curator Huang Bingyi took many trips to China to look for new artists, artwork, and new art phenomena. I made at least six trips. Geographically, it’s quite broad. I visited Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, and Hangzhou. The artists who were included in The Wall, as well as in Chinese Maximalism (2003), which was originally designed as a section of the third part of The Wall, come from all these places.
Christina Yu: The Wall is the latest of a series of large-scale exhibitions you curated that are devoted exclusively to contemporary Chinese art. In comparison with the previous exhibitions, in particular China/Avant-Garde (1989) and Inside Out: New Chinese Art (1998), how is The Wall different from them? Did The Wall have any agendas different from your previous curatorial works?
Gao Minglu: For both China/Avant-Garde and Inside Out, the significance is “the first survey of its kind.”The former was the first avant-garde art [exhibition] to take place in China after many decades since the early twentieth century. The latter was the first big international survey exhibition of contemporary Chinese art with a wide range in both chronology (1980s and 1990s) and geography (mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong). The Wall, however, is not a survey exhibition. For me, the survey age of Asian art is over.
Surveys of contemporary Chinese art have been well represented in China and abroad through various biennials, triennials, and other exhibitions (e.g., those at the International Center for Photography, New York, and Asia Society, New York). While these presentations have provided a general overview of contemporary Chinese art, they have not focused on artists’ methodologies. Nor have they attempted to present the works within thematic or historical contexts.
Rather than simply presenting another chronological survey of contemporary Chinese art—no matter how large or impressive—I have organized an exhibition around historical, thematic, and intergenerational contexts, all united within the overarching theme of the “Wall.”For the first time, The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art seeks to promote a more sophisticated understanding of contemporary Chinese art by presenting contemporary Chinese art of the past two decades within the context of an intellectual narrative and a well-defined historical and theoretical framework.
One of the challenges of The Wall project has been to create an exhibition that speaks to both Chinese and Western audiences. As noted earlier, Chinese audiences have seen many survey shows and would likely dismiss another such exhibition as a simplistic exercise. However, many individuals in the West have not had the opportunity to see a wide variety of contemporary Chinese art. The Wall and its catalogue seek to bridge this gap—and promote a deeper knowledge of contemporary Chinese art—by presenting a balance between a large curatorial framework and an intimate examination of each individual work (the exhibition often includes several works per artist). The project examines each artist’s search for the principle of art making within specific Chinese cultural mechanisms; how he/she has learned from specific traditional philosophical concepts, aesthetic values, and techniques; and how he/she has developed innovative and experimental approaches to making art.
Christina Yu: Do you think The Wall is a continuation of the exhibitions you have curated in the past two decades? Is there any coherence among them?
Gao Minglu: The coherence is they are all big shows, and for each project, such as China/Avant- Garde, Inside Out, and The Wall, I spent about three years to prepare them. They all involve intensive research and administrative work. Personally, I tend to see a show as a critical platform in which the balance between the original phenomenon and the critical approach can be carried out well. They are all ambitious and monumental in terms of their scale and historical times. I don’t know why I made them in this way. Perhaps there were many reasons. It’s my style and ambition?
Or one of the reasons is chance. I got the right time, the right venue, and the right people, which supported me in doing what I wanted to do, although the challenges and difficulties were enormous. To curate a show is not something enjoyable for me—it is serious work. From this point of view, I am not a contemporary stylish curator. It’s too heavy. Maybe because I weigh too much historical significance on a show.
Christina Yu: Based on your experience of curating contemporary Chinese art exhibitions in the last two decades, how much has it changed? For example, in terms of the demography of artists, art institutions, and organizations, and the public’s perception of contemporary Chinese art?
Gao Minglu: It’s been rapidly changed from the 1980s to the twenty-first century. Contemporary Chinese art has gone though four phrases. First, the Post-Cultural Revolution Era (1978 to 1984). It’s a period of the new academicism seeking formal aesthetics or “abstract beauty” and the new realism, a tendency toward social critique represented by the Scar and Rustic painting movements. A couple of avant-garde groups, the Stars and No-Name painting societies, also emerged. The second was the period of the 1980s avant-garde movement. The third was the 1990s period of various post-Tian’anmen avant-garde such as the New Generation, Political Pop, Cynical Realism, and Apartment Art, etc. The fourth, 1999 to the present, has been a period of what I call “The Museum Age.”This period is characterized by the emergence of various official galleries and exhibitions of contemporary art. Both museums and the art market have become the dominant force in shaping contemporary Chinese art.
One can see how rapidly it changed since the 1980s. In the 1980s, there was no market, no opportunity for international Chinese contemporary art exhibitions. The new art of the 1980s was an iconoclastic, utopian-directed avant-garde movement. The end of the Cold War and the beginning of globalization has changed the Chinese art world since the early 1990s. In the 1980s, there were very few professional artists who made art for a living. Most artists were involved with self-organized group activities. Since the early 1990s, a lot of artists moved to Beijing’s art villages and have become professional artists. The art village (huajiacun) replaced art groups (qunti). Although both keep the form of collective activity, the difference is that the latter was interested in the manifesto and collective ideas, and the former is more interested in sharing information about the market and international exhibitions.
The avant-garde artists of the 1980s were interested in bringing art into public spaces. The artists of the 1990s made a retreat from public sphere and concentrate more on their own studio work. Although in China public audiences are always passive and rarely respond to contemporary art, I mean avant-garde art, or what one may like to call experimental art. The 1980s public was much more enthusiastic than that of the 1990s. It seems during the last two decades, there is less of a relation between art and the public in the 1990s. Today, art belongs to a market, as any business does, and has nothing to do with any social project or cultural idealism, as before. On the other hand, art returns to daily life, and the artist is no more than a businessman, or part of the wealthy middle class, if he/she succeeds in the market.
Christina Yu: Prior to the exhibition, you published several articles on the topic of the wall and boundaries. How did you initiate and formulate the theme and project?
Gao Minglu: The idea of The Wall first came out sometime around 1996 and 1997, when I was working on the exhibition Inside Out. The title of Inside Out itself seems pretty much like the pro- cess of transforming and crossing cultural boundaries and walls. Many artworks, such as Wang Jin’s Ice Wall, and some performance works I included in Inside Out, also inspired me to think about the idea of the wall. Later I turned it into a paper entitled “The Wall and Power: Nationalism, Ideology, and Dematerialization” to particularly focus on the issue of the wall. And I presented this paper in the conference titled “Jiangnan, International Chinese Contemporary Art Conference,”which took place in Vancouver in 1998. Although I kept thinking and writing about
Qin Yufen, Chan Juan—Moon Women, 1998, installation; background: Duan Jianyu, Hello, Hi and Hey, 2000. Photo: Nancy J. Parisi. Courtesy of the University of Buffalo Art Galleries. this topic, it did not turn into a reality of an exhibition project until I moved to Buffalo in 2001, when Sandy Olsen, the Director of the University of Buffalo Art Galleries, initiated a collaboration with the Albright-Knox, who were willing to have a Chinese contemporary art exhibition. They found me, and I submitted to them the proposal, with the theme of the wall detailed in the four parts we see today. Then it became a reality, and it took four years to accomplish the project!
Christina Yu: You are very concerned with the methodology used for the study of contemporary Chinese art and feel the theories and approaches to Western modern and contemporary art are not appropriate for the discourse of their Chinese counterpart. Many people have voiced similar concerns, but you are a pioneer in proposing some alternatives to the problem.
Gao Minglu: When I had just moved to the United States in late 1991, I was really eager to learn Western contemporary theory, such as postmodernism and poststructuralism, cultural studies, and even the theory of modernism. I remember at Harvard, I never went to sleep until three o’clock in the morning [in order] to read and write papers. My motivation for such hard study is to find a way to give a good interpretation of the Chinese contemporary art phenomenon. The Western influence has been so profound since the latter 1970s. And some issues, such as modernity and avant-garde, are also tightly bound with Western contemporary influence. Later, however, I found that all those theories are limited for the interpretation of Chinese art. I cannot simply pick up any postmodernist theory to discuss Chinese art. I also found that some of the Western canonical theory has been applied in the discussion of Chinese contemporary art. It really attracts a lot of Western readers but seems to me does not make sense to the original Chinese context and its historical development.
Two major problems in Chinese contemporary art study always bother me. One is a dichotomy- based approach, which likes to use certain pairs of notions (something vs. something) to describe Chinese contemporary art. This, in fact comes from the old theory of modernity as I discussed in some articles and in the first chapter of the catalogue. Another problem is an ahistorical view that is applied in the discussion of Chinese contemporary art. The ahistorical view is the foundation of certain postmodernist theory, such as the theory of deconstructionism. From this point of view, to look at contemporary Chinese art, one may find everything is contingent and transient and lacks historical logic. This postmodernist theory, which is also commonly used in the Western theory of globalization, in fact may not fit the Chinese model of modernity and contemporary art. Some Western theory of cultural studies has also been applied in the discussion of certain fields of contemporary art, such as women’s art. Since the author simply picks up the theory, such as feminist theory, without thinking deeply about the historical context and a close observation of its environment, Chinese women’s art seems a total duplication of the Western feminist model in these discussions. Of course, there are also many methodological problems in the research done in China. It is the right time now to think and debate about these methodological issues, especially since the study of Chinese contemporary art has reached a new phase.
Christina Yu: In your argument on the concept of modernity in contemporary Chinese art, you emphasized the temporal and spatial specificity of modernity and demonstrated that modernity in Chinese art is an ever-evolving state. Does it mean that modernity in Chinese art can have multiple identities and interpretations?
Gao Minglu: For people from the West, it is very difficult to imagine why modernity has been so important for the Chinese who have debated about it for more than a hundred years. Even at the dawn of the twenty-first century, amidst rapid globalization, “modern” (xiandai) was still the preferred term, as evident in phrases like “modern fashion” (xiandai shishang), “modern metropolis” (xiandai dushi), “modern style” (xiandai fengmao), and “modern design” (xiandai sheji). Of course, these designations all refer to the present moment, not the time of artistic modernism, especially in the sense of Euro-American historical line.
Meanwhile, contemporary Chinese also frequently use the term “contemporaneity” (dangdaixing) as a substitute of “modernity” (xiandaixing). When we speak about Chinese contemporary art, the “contemporary” refers to the past three decades of new artistic production since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. When we speak of the “contemporaneity” of Chinese contemporary art, however, we are referring to the special spiritual markers that tie this art to the specific social and cultural environment in a specific period, or what modern Chinese call shidai jingshen,or “spirit of epoch.”In the Chinese indigenous context, throughout the twentieth century, this “spirit of epoch” has often been read as the core of “modernity” (xiandaixing).
But this “modernity” should not to be confused with “modernity” in the Euro-American sense of that which comes between pre-modern and postmodern. In China, “modernity” more often refers to the spirit of contemporary times. It functions not as a marker of temporal logic (from pre-modern to modern and postmodern) in the Western sense, but refers particularly to a specific time and a concrete space and to the value-choices of society at that time. This sense of modernity even emerged at the beginning of Chinese modern history. For instance, Hu Shi, one of the most important Chinese thinkers of the early twentieth century, once said the truth and value of modern society is nothing more than a tool for dealing with the environment. As the environment
changes, the truth changes with it. Then he described that the approach to truth in a changing environment is a network in the form of the trinity as “the particular time, specific space, my truth.”I’d therefore, like to take this “trinity,”or what I call a “total modernity,”to define the principle of Chinese modernity. With this trinity, Chinese modernity may also be interpreted as a “permanent condition of contemporaneity.”
This trinity or “total modernity” is distinct from its Western “origin” of modernity, because the guiding principle of Western modernity, as many Western scholars have concluded, carries two fundamental points: First, “modernity” is about a historical time and epoch. The other is the theory of the two opposite modernities, which is based on a dichotomy, that is, aesthetic modernity set against the materialized (or social and political) modernity of bourgeois society. Accordingly, this split between two modernities is a result of the original project of cultural modernization, commonly called Rationalization (termed by Max Weber), which caused a separation between three autonomous spheres: science, morality, and art. This emerged sometime during the French Enlightenment. Apparently, this linear time and split modernity does not fit the Chinese model (maybe also some other non-Western countries). Because we can find that time-reverse, in the sense of Western historical lineage, is a very common art phenomenon in the modern history of these non-Western countries.
For instance, after the Cultural Revolution in the 1980s, when Chinese urban construction began to reach its first phase of modernization, the debate that first came out in the architectural field was not about modernism, but rather about postmodernism. Since the 1990s, however, the debates have shifted their attention to the theory and controversy about the modern and modernism due to the rapid urbanization. In the former case, postmodernity functioned as the initiation of searching for modernity in a suddenly open society with the influence of Western contemporary theory, while in the latter, modernity is being specified and merged into a true condition of Chinese urban construction within the booming globalized economic society.
This practice of sequence-reversed epochal terminology shows that the consciousness of time in China has always been determined by the local experience of space and social environment. And it is this consciousness that has always brought art into a persistent project of closing the gap between daily life and art, rather than to split them apart. The fundamental characteristic of Chinese modernity in art, therefore, is the concern of space and environment, rather than a logical time and the autonomous split between the spheres of art, morality, religion, and politics. As I said in my 1998 Inside Out essay “Toward a Transnational Modernity,”“Chinese modernity is a consciousness of both transcendent time and reconstructed space.”
With this approach of Chinese modernity, one may easily understand some complex contemporary art phenomena in China during the last two decades. For example, when we discuss the Chinese avant-garde, we have to understand the issue is not about modernism and material culture, it is about an integrated space that links art together with the environment. This is why although the avant-garde and its concept died in the 1970s in the West, it has been flourishing in China since the late 1970s. The fundamental difference is, however, in China the consciousness of the avant-garde has been embodied in a real social space, rather than merely represented in the materialized aesthetic space, namely in an object, as pursued by Western avant-garde.
The consciousness of space has also brought historical memory into a ritual space in which the contemporary and the past meet through certain ceremonial or monumental environments created
Yin Xiuzhen, Supermarket, 2002, installation. Photo: Nancy J. Parisi. Courtesy of the University of Buffalo Art Galleries. by Chinese artists. This is common in almost all the Great Wall and other historical monumental projects, such as Tian’anmen Square, etc.
With this approach, one may also understand the art of the 1990s and its investigation of the current urbanization. What the artists demonstrated in their artwork cannot be seen as purely the portrayal of Chinese city landscapes, but rather a commentary on modernity in the form of dislocation and displacement between local and international or global.
Contemporary Chinese women’s art can be another example of a phenomenalization of Chinese modernity. Rather than viewing Chinese women’s art solely as the art of a “minority,”or of unique individuals, as feminist pursuits, we should read Chinese women’s art as a particular way of responding to Chinese modernity as a whole, together with men’s art. As I discussed in the cata- logue, the approach to Chinese women’s art is to show women’s images as part of an urban scene, something like “women as city,”rather than as a purely gendered space.
Christina Yu: Also, complex yet crucial, is the debate about experimental art versus avant-garde art. You think “experimental” sounds passive, but you also admit that the use of “avant-garde” in the 1980s was based on the misunderstanding of the term at the time. At the same time, you chose “contemporary” (as in Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art) as a subtitle for the exhibition. Can you explain this choice?
Gao Minglu: Recently, some Chinese curators have tended to use the term “Experimental Art” (shiyan yishu) rather than “Avant-Garde” (either qianwei or xianfeng) to define contemporary Chinese art, expecting through this change to redefine Chinese contemporary art. This move may question the out-of-fashion usage of “avant-garde” or its dislocation in China today. Some might feel the term “avant-garde” to be too politically confrontational. Still, the notion of “experimental art” like “avant-garde” is itself a Western notion adapted in the 1960s to refer to new art. I think the term “experimental art” cannot include most Chinese contemporary art phenomena of the last two decades, because, compared with “avant-garde,”it sounds too passive and lacking in motiva- tion and direction.
For me, what is important is not the terminology of “experimentation,”but rather, the goal and significance of “experimentation.”Of course, meaningful “experimentation” cannot limit itself merely to form and language but must have embedded within it a concrete critique, whether linguistic or social. Especially at the present moment, when, under the onslaught of globalization and systematization, the direction of Chinese contemporary art’s experimentation is far from clear. In fact, the phrase “experimental” art came about initially in the early 1990s, appearing first in the “Timeline of Chinese Experimental Art” edited by Feng Boyi and Qian Zhijian. Later, “avant-garde” and “experimental” art were used interchangeably by Chinese critics and curators in reference to new art.
“Experimental” somehow seems more moderate and palatable than “avant-garde,”while still retaining the idea of seeking the new. Although it perhaps also has a sense of exploring boundaries and “self-marginalization,”the exact aims of “experimentation” remain unstated and opportunistic. Because, from the very beginning, experimentation has a subjective sense of indeterminacy, as everything hangs on the result of the experiment itself. Experimentation depends on the chance unification of subjective and objective conditions. For that reason, it is flexible. Perhaps for this reason, it was fitted to China’s rapid and chaotic internationalization and marketing in the 1990s. Nonetheless, it is inappropriate to use the term “experimental art” in reference to the Chinese art of the late 1970s and 1980s. The term also seems less than perfectly suited to the “underground” phenomena represented by Apartment Art during the early 1990s. And it is even less suited to Political Pop, Cynical Realism, and the New Generation painting schools, with an obvious eye towards real life.
On the other hand, “avant-garde” seems better suited to highlight the “contemporaneity” of contemporary Chinese art. As I mentioned above, contemporaneity is not a term connoting a logical time, but means the “spirit of the time.”Therefore, to be “avant-garde” is to have value- choices, to have a specific critical direction. This critique integrates two inseparable tendencies: social critique and self-critique. Self-critique refers to the avant-garde’s disillusionment with its own conservatism and corruption, with the lifelessness of artistic language and methodology. Thus “avant-garde” has a built-in sense of critique and protest. We can spot some characteristics of the Chinese avant-garde in the writings of Renato Poggioli, an authoritative theorist of the avant-garde.
The various uses of the term “avant-garde” by Chinese artists over the last two decades have already become a part of Chinese contemporary art history in and of itself. In the West, both “modern” and “avant-garde” as terms had lost their meaning with the onslaught of postmodernism in the 1970s. But in China, “avant-garde” still had meaning because it implied breaking free of constraints. Moreover, from the moment Chinese artists began using this term, its meaning was already different from the meaning derived from Euro-American modernism: the separation between aesthetics and politics implied by that earlier meaning was replaced in China by a unity of the aesthetic and the social. The tag of “avant-garde” accurately described the position of Chinese artists in the social context of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Therefore, we must accept the fundamental premise that in the twenty years since the 1980s, Chinese artists and critics have used the term “avant-garde” to define China’s new, contemporary art. The use of this term—including Chinese artists’“misunderstanding” of it as well as Western interpretations of China’s “avant-garde art”—has become a fundamental structural part of the history of Chinese contemporary art.
Christina Yu: After talking about the theoretical and conceptual frameworks you employed and developed in the exhibition, let’s move to the content of the exhibition and its relationship to these theories. With a central theme of the wall, the exhibition is divided into several sections dealing with the physical and metaphorical meanings of walls and barriers. What is the logic that divides the sections? The sequence of the sections is based on what kind of interrelation?
Gao Minglu: The concept of the wall comes from the concept of space, the central meaning of Chinese modernity. Through examining how contemporary artists have shaped and reshaped the various spaces, the sections of the exhibition attempt to present contemporary Chinese identity. I divided the exhibition into three parts. The first part is “Wall as Memory: Reconstructing History and Myth,”which features the works associated with the Great Wall. My purpose is to examine how the Wall has turned into an unending “The Wall discourse,”continually reconstructed and reinterpreted by the changing consciousness of modern identity of the different generations of artists. By shaping and reshaping the discourse on the Great Wall, these artists actu- ally bring historical memory to bear upon contemporary identity issues.
The second part is “Wall as On-going Social Space: Displacement and Dislocation.”Appropriation of architectural space, urban space, community space, private space, and public space has become the means of contemporary Chinese artists, which not only expresses the odd essence of the current Chinese urban spectacle, but also, more importantly, becomes a means of presenting urban class and identity. This reproduction and representation, however, is distorted and displaced. The representations of fragmentation and displacement in the urban space by Chinese artists demonstrate their ambivalence about the “modernity” brought on by globalization. They express their sentiment through observations of different classes, the changes in and devastation of the natural and built environments and urban context, and the disjuncture between material culture and the humanist spirit. This is the problem caused by modernity.
The third part is called “Wall as Concept: Cultural Boundaries and Identity.”I included two sections in this part: one is “Marginalized Men” and the other “Chinese Women’s Art.”Both relate to the issue of identity. What I want to address is the perspective of reading the artworks. The significance or meaning of the works cannot be judged based on the classical or modernist form, but by an integrated investigation of the unified text and context. Then we can find that there is always a dislocation or conversion between art language and its context. Chinese Women’s art, as I mentioned before, is not merely a gender space, but a space that reflects the whole city. The boundaries between tradition and contemporary, individual and society, have always been displaced in these works to fit a broader sense of Chinese social context.
Christina Yu: In the section “The Marginalized Modern Man,”you called artists such as Lu Shengzhong and Ding Fang “new traditionalists” or “new literati.”Can you explain these terms?
Gao Minglu: Originally, in the part “Wall as Concept,”there was to be another section called “Chinese Maximalism.”Since we turned that section into an autonomous exhibition in 2003, we eliminated it from The Wall. The idea of Maximalism, in fact, also fit “Marginalized Man” because artists use modernist forms, especially Minimalist-like forms, to address a totally different direction of anti-modernism. Their way of making artwork in a labour-intensive and time-consuming way neither aims at a utopian early modernism nor attempts to focus on the material making itself as in later modernism. What they want is to unify the process of making art with daily life. The
Zhan Wang, Urban Landscape, 2005, installation. Photo: Jim Bush. Courtesy of the University of Buffalo Art Galleries. concern is about current Chinese modernity, not modernism. Similarly, Lu Shengzhong and Ding Fang use classical aesthetics to make their commentary on current materialism and urbanization. Wu Jian’s elegant “abstract expressionist” oil painting is in fact a “life drawing” of the “mountain of city trash.”Because of the classical look to their work, this group of artists is not appreciated by the current fashionable global art world. Their sentiment of “restorationism” with a revolt to globalization seems pretty much like traditional Chinese literati painting. Therefore, I call them New Literati.
Christina Yu: Huang Bingyi curated the last section on contemporary Chinese film. What are the reasons and concerns to include the medium of film in the exhibition?
Gao Minglu: When Bingyi was thinking about the films she would like to put into The Wall, she was very much concerned with nitegrating them into the Wall theme. The five films all relate to the current urbanization in China, and all expose the real life of lower-rank urban people and the boundaries between immigrants and city dwellers. Location and dislocation are the common themes in these films. Some of them are still prohibited from being publicly presented in China. Because both the contents and themes fit into the Wall project, we included them as a film festival event.
Christina Yu: In the catalogue, you commented that Chinese contemporary art has entered the “Museum Age.”Artists have to compromise their art creations according to curatorial interests and market demands. Is this a rather pessimistic view?
Gao Minglu: From the point of view of individual freedom, it is pessimistic because in China the freedom to create art and the emancipation of thought have not been fully developed. Total institutionalization can corrupt art, though it may also bring freedom to each individual artist. There has been a long period of institutional critique in the Euro-American art world since the 1960s. Perhaps it can be traced back to Duchamp. Consequently, various autonomous spheres found their own way in which to coexist with others and to develop each independent economy, such as the museum economy, academic economy, and market economy. This is not the case in
the current institutionalization of art in China. The capitalist situation with a socialist character holds art creation, the art market, the academy, and governmental controlled museums and galleries together and mixes them into a melting pot in what I called a project of totality of the institution. Li Zhanyang, Street Scene No. 3—An Accident, 2001, coloured fibreglass. One may easily be corrupted in this Photo: Tom Loonan. Coutesy of the Albright-Knox Gallery. institution. It seems nobody can escape it, not even the previous avant-garde. The crisis of Chinese contemporary art is hidden within the current prosperity in Chinese art.
Christina Yu: You convincingly demonstrated the importance of differentiating art made by female artists (woman’s art) from feminist art in contemporary China. What are the differences between Chinese women’s art and feminist artworks created in the Western social context?
Gao Minglu: When the feminist movement emerged in the West in the 1970s, Euro-American women had already gained independence in education and economy. The movement was pretty much a political event in the evolution of women’s social freedom and equality to man. Independence and individualism were the basic principles of the movement. Although the issue of gender entered into discussions of the social and public sphere in China as early as the end of the nineteenth century, it has been shaped by its status as a Third World country with profound traditions.
In the current China, women have not gained independence, nor have Chinese men. They are facing the same crisis as Chinese people move into a process of reconfiguration of social rank and class. Family, rather than the individual, is therefore the most crucial unit to bear the pressure of this transition. It needs gender unification rather than a gender split in this historical moment. On the other hand, the traditional philosophy of family and community may also affect the approach of Chinese women’s art. While it is true that Chinese women have always formed an integral part of Chinese modernity, and that “sex” or gender is tightly linked to modernity and nationality, the progression within this society might, at most, be labeled “womanism.”
“Womanism” is a term for feminism coined in the Third World by the African American writer Alice Walker, whose goal does not lie in the confrontation between male and female, but in the harmonious coexistence of humanity in general. Is this not the primary, ultimate, and highest goal of all human beings? “Womanism” is “nonseparatism” and more accurately describes the trends which many women artists in China are concerned with, and which turn the male and female relations of conflict into harmonious and congruous ones. This kind of shift moves toward the peaceful, organic, and introspective, even though conflict is still represented in their work. Female consciousness has specific cultural connotations. It is determined by the tradition of a cultural region and its immediate context, and contemporary Chinese woman’s art is following such a course.
Christina Yu: To give a more tangible example, how do you compare Chen Qiulin’s performance I Exist, I Consume, and I Am Happy with Barbara Kruger’s I Shop, Therefore I Am?
Gao Minglu: I think Chen Qiulin’s approach is more neutral and Kruger’s is more critical of the male-centered society, although both have a very cynical appearance.
In order to understand Chen’s neutral stance, we have to know the term fenzi, which I discuss in the catalogue. Fenzi is a term used by Sichuanese to describe pretty women. It is a neutral or even complimentary word, accepted by both men and the women that it describes. At the core of what can be called fenzi culture is sexual harmony rather than gender conflict and splitting. Its foundation is the relationship between the sexes in Sichuanese folk culture, rather than an elite feminist consciousness of contemporary intellectuals. The works of Chen Qiulin attempt to draw attention to personal and regional traits rather than merely using a Western feminist approach.
What is her social critique in the work anyway? The current “beauty industry” in Chinese urban culture is a new economy that sees women as objects for consumption. Many women artists imitate this mass culture and utilize it as new vocabulary in their own work, as in the performance I Exist, I Consume, and I Am Happy. The eight men who pull the shopping cart that the beautifying Chen sits on are not only consumers of female beauty, but are also slaves to the men who represent masculinity and consumer culture. Chen positions herself, however, in a more neutral way that transcends pure gender difference and that targets the current “city image project” (chengshi xingxiang gongcheng) and its cultural significance.
Since the last decade, stereotypically female characteristics such as “beautiful,”“lively,”“stunning,” have come to be used to describe urban centres in China. In the same way that masculinity was an expression of the cultural temperament of the 1980s, femininity has now come into fashion. Likewise, the masculinity characteristic of the art of the 1980s was a feature of the larger culture and movement in modernity related to the resurgence of Chinese culture and nationalism. Since the end of the 1990s, the “petit-bourgeois” lifestyle has become the cultural penchant of a new generation of urban young people, and petit-bourgeois has adopted a strange femininity. The two extremes of the petit-bourgeois life are the mixture of romanticism and degeneration, which perfectly apply to Chinese urban culture. In my interpretation, this is exactly the context and content of Chen’s performance.
Christina Yu: If artworks created by Chinese artists, both men and women, grew out of the context of globalization and urbanization, can we recognize the touch of a woman’s hand by observing an artwork? Is there a wall or a divide between the two genders in contemporary Chinese art?
Gao Minglu: Of course, we can find a lot of distinctiveness in Chinese women’s art. In particular, many female artists working in China today favour everyday household materials including thread, yarn, cotton, cloth, quilts, clothing, and the like. These domestic materials effectively demonstrate an individual woman’s particular emotion and interest, which may build up a “wall” to block men’s comprehension of it. It cannot be, however, a basic approach for the criticism of Chinese women’s art. It is not appropriate to view the art practice of Chinese women through the lens of feminist theory alone, or to overemphasize the uniqueness of Chinese female artists’ individual perceptual experience without severing it from its social context and the larger art world, because their art has been developed in conjunction with other trends in contemporary Chinese art as a whole.
For instance, contemporary Chinese women’s art grew up within the movement of the Apartment Art of the early 1990s. In Beijing, Apartment Art was created in the residences of several artist couples, including Zhu Jinshi and Qin Yufen, Wang Gongxin and Lin Tianmiao, Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen, and Ai Weiwei and Lu Qing, among others. The women artists among them have since become some of the most significant contemporary Chinese artists. Rather than viewing these forms solely as the art of a “minority,”or unique individuals, they must be viewed in light of the collective experience of Chinese women, especially their response to Chinese modernity.
Furthermore, we should not fall into the trap and discourse of “individuality” determined by male elites since the beginning of the modern period. For example, after having convincingly and meticulously described the project of women artists in the 1990s, some critics, such as Liao Wen, one of the most active critics of Chinese women’s art, concluded that the kind of women’s art that heavily employs women’s work indicates a “female voice,”which is differentiated from the art of men in the 1990s. The reality shows, however, this phenomenon paralleled the emergence of Apartment Art in the first half of the 1990s, which signaled an artistic movement centered on the private sphere. In this period, it was not only women’s art that was process-oriented and concerned with labour and an intimacy with domestic materials, but also male artwork, as I argued in Chinese Maximalism. Perhaps the only gender distinction that could be made is that male and female artists generally worked with different kinds of domestic materials. Even though their choice of materials was different, their art practice generally conformed to the overall movement of avant-garde art at the time. Therefore, female consciousness was overlapped or shared with the contemporary consciousness of men as well.
Christina Yu: Can you talk about the design of the installations at both venues, in Beijing and Buffalo?
Gao Minglu: The space of the Millennium Museum of Art (MMA) in Beijing is a little bit awkward due to its low ceiling and very decentralized multi-compartmental space. This is extremely difficult for displaying The Wall, which requires an open space with a high ceiling. By converting this disadvantage into advantage, we deliberately made the space noisy as a reflection of current Chinese urban space. The different sections, as well as individual works made in various media, also seem to interfere with each other. Some works even bothered the audience. For example, Zhang Dali’s “sculptures,”modeled from nude construction workers, were hung in the hallway to interfere with the audience’s view and block their way. The audience had to circle around each individual piece. We found a second venue in Beijing Today Art Gallery for Xu Bing’s installation and Huang Yongping’s EP3, two extremely big installations.
In comparison with the Beijing venue, Buffalo’s space is very neat and clear in terms of the boundaries between different sections. The relationship between the three different venues also makes the exhibition diverse in its visual impact. We tried to take the particular advantage of each venue in order to install the most appropriate section. The Albright–Knox, for instance, with its high ceiling and open space, perfectly fit the first part “Historical Wall” as well as the second part “Wall as Social Space.”We put Xu Bing’s Ghosts Pounding the Wall in the Sculpture Gallery at the Albright–Knox. It’s so spectacular.
Christina Yu: For the opening of the exhibition in Buffalo, you invited several artists to perform. Were there performances at the opening in Beijing?
Gao Minglu: The live performance only took place in Buffalo. One is Chen Qiulin’s I Exist, I Consume, and I am Happy, which was performed at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries. The other was by He Yunchang, called The Command of the General. Zhou Yan has described them very well in detail in his article also published in this issue of Yishu. I tried to have some performances in Beijing. Due to two difficulties, it did not happen. One is the museum censorship. In China, performance is still not allowed to take place publicly. Second is the difficulty of funding. The proposal I got from several performance artists requested large budgets. I was not able to fulfill it. These two difficulties forced me to give up live performances in Beijing.
Christina Yu: The performances caused a sensation among the viewers in North America. He Yunchang’s planned performance at Niagara Falls the next day brought him to a U.S. court because of his “misconduct.”How was the lawsuit settled?
Gao Minglu: It was the Garden Police Department of Niagara City who placed the lawsuit against He Yunchang. They were very unhappy with his performance because they considered it interference with the public’s interest and a breaking of the law that prohibits any individual to get into the water. I went through the process of the lawsuit and even went to court with He as his interpreter.
Christina Yu: Do you think this accident reveals a wall or a barrier existing between art and society?
Gao Minglu: There is definitely a barrier between art and society. The concern of the police and the city government on the matter was totally different from that of the artist, the museum, and the curators. The former takes the public’s rights as a priority, the latter values the concept and aesthetic first. The confrontation between public and individual, discipline and freedom, the moral and the iconoclastic, can take place in any society. China is perhaps more conservative in the degree of ideology, but the basic issues remain almost the same.
Christina Yu: The subtitle of the exhibition is Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art. The prefix of “re-” indicates an existing model of narrating contemporary Chinese Art. What was the existing model? And what are some of the differences between the narrative you developed in the exhibition and the old one(s)?
Gao Minglu: The reshaping mainly refers to the “walls” that have shaped and reshaped contemporary Chinese art. My job, or other critics’,is to define the walls, boundaries, and spaces conceptually. This comes up with my emphasis on a thematic and methodological approach towards curatorial work. It does not target any specific model. It does, however, attempt to make a departure from international surveys of Chinese art, as I mentioned before, because I don’t think any survey can truly capture the origin of local contemporary art.
Christina Yu: Now that the exhibition has finished, do you think you achieved your goal?
Gao Minglu: I’d like to give the visual display of The Wall a score of A-, and the theoretical narrative an A. Because of lacking the finances (we almost had no major commissioned projects in The Wall), I had to find work that was already completed two years ago. Some of them, such as Yin Xiuzhen’s Supermarket, Zhan Wang’s Landscape Banquet, and Chen Qiulin’s Farewell My Concubine, etc. were made for my previous exhibitions, such as Harvest in 2002 and Maximalism in 2003. Lacking some up-to-date works always bothered me during the preparation of the exhibition. However, it is a spectacular, monumental show, I am quite confident to say. Plus, my feeling perhaps is common in any ambitious curator’s view. It could happen in any project. But I am happy with the catalogue, which turns out to be an art historical book, although it could be more refined if we were able to offer more editorial work, and if I had more time to work on it.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank those who have been enthusiastically involved with the project, in particular Sandy Olsen, the Director of the University at Buffalo, Louis, the Director of the AKAG, Karen Spodling, the Deputy Director of the AKAG, and Mr. Wang Yudong, the Director of the Millennium Museum of Art in Beijing, for their support. And especially Huang Bingyi, my colleague and the curator of the film section of The Wall, and Holly Hughes, the Director of The Wall exhibition, for their support and extreme hard work. Finally, thanks for your interview and thank you to Yishu for covering this exhibition.
Huang Yongping, Hoover Tower, 2005, installation. Courtesy of the University of Buffalo Art Galleries.
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Huang Yongping, 11 June 2002—The Nightmare of George V, 2002. Courtesy of the artist.
The first retrospective of work by Huang Yongping, this exhibition presents a profoundly engaging interpretation. Through the spectacular display of selected artworks dated from the mid-1980s onward in more than three galleries at the newly expanded Walker Art Center—and in the accom-
panying catalogue, with its thoughtful, provocative essays and a “Lexicon” written by different critics, as well as preparatory sketches, selected writings, and excerpts from notebooks by the artist—the exhibition compellingly illuminates complex issues about the artist and his production. These issues relate to global modernities, subjectivity, the currency of exchange, and power relations.
Philippe Vergne, who curated the retrospective at the Walker, explains in his catalogue essay, “Why Am I Afraid of Huang Yongping,”
The point [of the exhibition] is not so much whether or not we are discovering Chinese art through this artist, who actually holds a French passport. It is not to present Chinese art as the next big thing. The question is whether we are experiencing a transfer of artistic leadership to a new country, a new culture, a new methodology, and a new aesthetic. What is at stake is that an alternative, Chinese or not [my italics], might be conceivable. The interest in Huang’s work is not a flight from Western culture; it is not an exotic temptation or dream. It is, deeply, an attempt to embrace a speculative intellectual adventure.1
So to return to my initial question, why should we be afraid of Huang Yong Ping? Because he has remained as far away as possible from this “ancien régime” and has invented a language of his own. Because he has produced a series of epistemological breaks with the awareness that questions of epistemology are also questions of social order. Because instead of making us an offer we cannot refuse, he makes an offer we cannot understand, and by doing so he forces us to realize that it is up to us to change our ways of changing.2
On the crucial multivalent area “language,”the critic Hou Hanru comments at the beginning of his essay “Change is the Rule,”
Huang Yongping’s art is an entire ontology in itself. It is a universe unto itself, and like the universe itself, it’s a complex system generated out of paradox and perplexity, which endow it with ultimate dynamism and vitality. His art is powerful but intelligent, revealing the essence of existence: that the truth of the world is that there is no unique ontological truth.3
The House of Oracles helps us to begin accessing the artist’s “language”,“ontology”,or “universe” and enables us to probe and make multiple interpretations of his art. Forty-two artworks/installa- tions in various media are arranged within four overlapping, interconnected zones— Colonialism/Imperialism, Clash, Chance, and Daoism. Organized in the folded insert included in the catalogue, “Travel Guide to Huang Yongping” is designed to be used in tandem with “Huang Yongping: A Lexicon,”compiled by Doryun Chong, co-editor of the catalogue. The “Lexicon” consists of explicative interpretations of concepts and systems, influential book titles and individuals, symbolic motifs, and architectural constructs that inform or are encountered in the artworks/installations and in the writings of the artist.
Mounted at the beginning of the exhibition House of Oracles is the horizontal Long Drawing for Walker Art Center, which is of considerable width, spanning two contiguous walls. It consists of an orderly succession of simple sketches done in bright watercolour with individual generic identifications. Imparting an overall resonance of sustained spontaneity, the simple sketches stylistically evoke a feeling of naiveté. The miscellaneous things depicted help to structure, or form parts of, the individual works in the exhibition.4 Long Drawing, or its significance in respect to its location as the entry point to the exhibition and to Huang Yongping’s artistic practice, could be easily overlooked by eager visitors first arriving to view the exhibition. The “long drawing” is also dwarfed by the large installations in proximity—they are imposing, even majestic, and somewhat unusual in the context of an art museum.
One of the installations, 11 June 2002—The Nightmare of George V, of 2002, shows a stuffed, nearly life-sized Asian elephant that carries on its back a large padded cushion. Strapped on top of the cushion by means of a metal chain and thick double-braided ropes that encircle the body of the elephant is a rectangular seat with protective “walls” on all four sides made of cane stretched across painted wooden bars. Appearing starkly in the center of a wooden bar along one long “wall” of the seat is the crown and the crest of King George V (r. 1910–1936), the monarch of the British Empire and, later, titular head of the Commonwealth (1931).
The short raised “wall” at the front of the cane seat is covered almost entirely by a menacing, angry, life-sized tiger whose vertical body is held up by four paws clutching on the cane and wooden bars of the seat. Appearing to be standing on its hind legs, the tiger is posed face to face with the absent occupant of the seat. This spectacle refers to three historical events that took place from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first century.
According to Huang Yongping, the formal composition can be traced back to a similar coupling of a combative tiger and an elephant topped by a cane seat found among the taxidermy animals at the Musée national d’historie naturelle in Paris that had been brought back from the colonies as safari trophies by members of the French aristocracy. This particular arrangement of a tiger attacking an elephant was designed in 1887 by the Duc d’Orléans and based on his own experience during a hunt.5
Earlier, in 2000, Huang Yongping encountered a stuffed tiger in a museum in Bristol, England. The tiger was among those shot by George V on a three-day hunt in Nepal in 1911 and is the second historical event Huang alludes to. (At that time, the independent state of Nepal was an obliging ally of the British administration, especially in respect to colonial policies in India. Since the early nineteenth century, Gurkha soldiers from Nepal have been crack forces in the British military personnel in Asia.) By coincidence, the juxtaposition of the tiger and the elephant seen in the museum in Paris resembles the circumstance, according to description, in which George V shot one tiger while standing in a seat atop an elephant.
The years from 1887 to 1911 were the apogee of the development of Western colonialism, everything, including “pure” natural history and animal specimens, is closely related to political history.
The third event referred to is “the opening date of the Art Basel international contemporary art fair” (Switzerland). This annual art fair showcases art of the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries from top-notch dealers and is known for its faithful clientele—serious and wealthy collectors, curators, art dealers, artists, critics, and journalists.
Globally, the hierarchy of taste and the patterns of consumption, the support given to institutions and their curatorial programs, decisions about which artists are represented, and the shows held in commercial galleries are intertwined with political events and circumstances. These concerns are inextricably tied to earlier events, the “apogee of the development of Western colonialism” bracketed by the two events 1887 and 1911 referred to also by 11 June 2002—The Nightmare of George V.
Colonialism and its kin, imperialism, are thematized in other artworks. The modest but pungent Eight-Legged Hat (2000) shows a white pith helmet (an icon of British colonialism) held in the pointed beaks of four painted wooden sculptures resembling cranes. It may be a comment on
Huang Yongping, Large Turntable with Wheels, 1987, painted wood. Courtesy of the artist. exploration, among other things, an activity instrumental to any colonizing effort. Palanquin (1997) also includes a pith helmet on one of its poles, which are made of bamboo and cane. The installation gently reinforces the stubborn influence of over-determined historical events and circumstances, that is, the presence of absence as found in the unoccupied seat of the palanquin.
Returning to the Long Drawing with which this section began, I cite below eight short lines of identification next to individual sketches:
Liangjuan zhi [two rolls of paper] Sanbai liushiwu bianfu [three hundred and sixty-five bats] Yige feijitou [one aeroplane cockpit] Yizhi hu [one tiger] Yitou xiang [one elephant] Liangding zhimin mao [two “colonial” hats, referred to as “pith helmets”] Sange dawan [three large bowls] Yitai jiaozi [one palanquin]
The tiger, elephant, “pith helmets,”and palanquin named in four of the lines above help structure the three installations, 11 June 2002—The Nightmare of George V, the Eight-Legged Hat, and Palanquin.
Huang Yongping, Traveler’s Guide for Years 2000—2004, 2000, copper rod and map mounted on wood. Collection of Craig Robins, Miami Beach.
Based on its physical placement, Long Drawing presents an overview of the contents of the exhibition. On another level, this appealing drawing could be compared to the preliminary worksheets for individual installations that constitute the notebooks of the artist. Some of these, provided with translations in English, are included as inserts among the illustrations of completed artworks/installations in the catalogue. The catalogue editors comment on “the sheer beauty of collages of handwritten texts, drawings and photographs, as well as the wealth of information contained therein.”9
A characteristic of the “wealth of information” in the worksheets excerpted from the notebooks of the artist is a sense of fullness. Frequently included with the technical details (material, measure- ments, and procedures for construction) is the genealogy of each artwork/installation. Description of events integral to, or affecting, the conception of each work is rendered in collages that consist of drawings, photographs, and the fluid handwriting of the artist. These preparatory sketches also illuminate the artist’s deep intellect and broad knowledge through references to the dynastic history of China, the Confucian Yijing (Book of Changes), dense writings in the Daoist canon, as well as the thinking of influential artists and intellectuals working in Europe and America from the nineteenth century onward such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Lists and Chance
Yitiao kuzhi [one pair of trousers] Yige luzhi [one cooking stove] Shiliu ge zhuanpan [sixteen large turntables] Yige zhangpeng [one tent] Yitai dianhua [one telephone set] Yige huangguan [one imperial crown] Sizhi muniao [four wooden birds] Yizhi ying [one eagle] Shiliu ge luzhong pai [sixteen road/street signs]
Yibai lingba qian [one hundred and eight oracle slips] Wushi yigeng tongbang [fifty-one clubs in copper]
The items in two of the eleven lines above are taken from another segment of the Long Drawing and are used in the artworks/installations already described—the “imperial crown” (the sixth line above) represents the crest of George V on the cane seat in 11 June 2002—The Nightmare of George V and the “four wooden birds” (the seventh line above) are shown holding in their beaks the pith helmet in the Eight-Legged Hat. Thus, conceptually re-presented in the Long Drawing, these two installations point to the understanding that they have been deconstructed and their constituent parts have been depicted in different parts of the long horizontal scroll. That is, the two installations are reconceived in the context of the Long Drawing only to be broken up and presented in an unfinished state. Put another way, contrary to the standard perception that the object of art making is the finished artwork, importance is hereby granted to the constituent parts.
Read discursively, the lines of identification placed next to the sketches on the Long Drawing impart a rhythmic sense that is induced by their linguistic commonalities. The lines semantically all begin with numbers followed by “counters.”Counters are different characters that function as the numerical designations of things. To begin with the first set of lines previously cited from the Long Drawing, we see the individual counters for paper to be “rolls” [what]; cockpit, the quotidian character ge designates things ranging from time (weeks) to a cooking stove, turntables, a crown, and road signs; palanquin, tai, is the name for architectural parts (platform, terrace, and watch tower) as well as the physical mechanism of a telephone.
The basic patterns observed in these lines are emblematic both of the pervasive engagement with rhymes at differing levels of complexity that were shared by a range of textual and literary forms from an early historical time in China and of the dimension of orality in cultural production as a whole.
Moreover, considered as separate independent entities, the sketches and their verbal identification point to the making of lists. It is in this respect that the Long Drawing belies its complexity as an entry point to Huang Yongping’s deep intellect, his writing, and his artistic practice.
In a notebook, the artist discusses the malleability of lists as a form of taxonomic ordering that points less to the ideal of classification than to the projection of imaginary transformation and conceptual re-thinking.
“History books in ancient China were regarded as a kind of encyclopedia of things that had and hadn’t [my italics] happened yet.”10 In his discussion in a section of Notes on Augury (1992–2003), the hierarchical subject headings for biographies (liezhuan) in a wide assortment of historiographic writings that were in place since early imperial times are juxtaposed with the list found in the preface to Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things) by Michael Foucault, which is a citation from Jorge Luis Borges from “a certain Chinese encyclopedia.”11 By excerpting individual items from the two lists into one list that comprises individual two-pronged items—“(1)(a) emperor— belonging to the emperor, (2)(b) empresses and their clans—embalmed,”“(3)(b) scholars— tame”—the discussion proceeds to rupture the implicit nature of classification (as a measure to regulate standardization and to differentiate between normalcy and the “other”) for the intent to interrogate the position of the artist and art making.
Huang Yongping elaborates,
I am not quoting these classifications here out of a passion for library sciences, as Borges did, or to make an impossible, Foucaultian philosophical reflection on otherness. Nor is it because I am Chinese, but rather because I am familiar with the order of upsetting classification: the animal belonging to the emperor is also the emperor of animals. Empresses and their clans—the emperor’s relatives— embalmed, this is the category of those that have the power to have their bodies embalmed after their death. Scholars—tame, this corresponds to the essentials of Confucian philosophy. (3)(b) scholars— tame are both ranked third place in their respective classification [categories of biographies and the list cited from Borges: animals and men of this category all share the same nature—a scholar will never regard himself as the emperor who is ranked first.12
The discussion above may also probe assumptions in contemporary society ranging from differing relationships between the human and animal species, the obsession with death and afterlife, and the role of intellectuals.
After acknowledging that art and art making that are hidden within most items among the combined lists, Huang Yongping comments on it, and its importance warrants the length of the citation below:
An artist must find his position in the above-mentioned classification. For instance, if I were a diviner, I would therefore be situated between “healing the sick” and “retainers,”and this would determine my nature as artist. This nature is: the artist is here not to create works, but to search for the reason for making works—the reason that makes me decide to do this instead of that, in this way and not that way. The search for reasons is not determined by me. Consequently, divination becomes the indispensable medium to search for the reason. (It is similar to healing the sick: what is important is to find out the cause, but the cause of illness evolves and changes and is thus difficult to pinpoint.) . . . Now I add “creating works” and “participating in an exhibition” to this list of divination in which “participation,” “creation,”“suffering,”“marrying off,”“giving birth,”“taking,”“holding,”“setting out,”“fighting,” “sending forth,”“usurping,”and “appointing” are all verbs; thus it means action, not reflection. It is not even entirely about the difficulty of making a choice, but is about the necessity of making a decision, of acting, when faced with impending reality. This means getting away from the assumption that art and artworks are detached and have no interest at stake and putting them into a world similar to real life or as dangerous as war strategy. It also means introducing the concept of “auspicious” and “evil” into the artwork and its making.13
Thus described, art and art making are deeply implicated with “real life,”“war strategies,”and issues of morality. According to Huang Yongping, his art is also inextricably bound to the process of divination. After positing a series of practical issues about making an artwork (choices and ideas, ways of realizing a plan, determining materials, size and display) whose answers are sought out in divination, Huang Yongping summarizes,
Through each divination, I obtain a sign, which will be the reason for me to create a work; through each creation, I create a work. These two processes are the same: they both dismiss the illusion of the existence of many possibilities before action: divination is the work itself. The thing that we rely on, the original manuscript of divination, is definitely not created by us ourselves, but already ourselves. It doesn’t involve the idea of creation. It is given to us and enables us to escape from the trap of the idea of the so-called creativity of contemporary art.14
Explained in this way, divination points to the aid of both clarification of the practical concerns in making a work of art and a greater awareness of the overall status of each project. Put succinctly, engagement with divination in a specific matter or action as guided by, say, the Yijing, points less to the outcome of directed “answers” than to the conveyance of different circumstances surrounding the specifics at stake as well as the plausible outcomes.
Huang Yongping, Theater of the World, 1993–1995, metal, wood, insects, and reptiles. Collection of Pierre Huber; on long term loan to Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon.
Ordering, lists, and, as a corollary, the intervention of established practices and systems (“as dangerous as war strategy”), as well as the use of divination, are familiar concepts that have been employed by Huang Yongping since the early 1980s, when he was a prominent member of the Xiamen Dada. Iconic artworks from that time, Four Paintings According to Random Instructions and Wheel (1985), Large Table with Four Wheels (1987), Mona–Vinci (1987), Manuscript Goes Through the Wall (1987/2005), Trousers with Firecrackers (1987), and Dust (1987) are included in the exhibition and offer audiences the opportunity of studying familiar works that were largely known only from verbal descriptions.15
In the installation the House of Oracles (1989–1992), from which the exhibition derives its title, divination is represented both by its engagement with, and as the outcome of, one event in the Gulf War of 1991, when forces led by the United States attacked Iraq. The installation consists of a large tent that holds paraphernalia associated with war together with the means for, and the symbol of, divination. Four large wooden roulette wheels, with three of them forming a concentric trio and all meticulously engraved with lines that constitute a calendar, hang on one “wall” of the tent. Near them is a divination table. Placed on the floor by the opening of the tent is a large tortoise fashioned out of cane (the animal associated with divination since pre-imperial times). Nearby are two boards placed on sawhorses. Written on their black surfaces is the outcome of the divination: the United States would win the War, although its long-term result seems uncertain, with almost the opposite forecast for Iraq.
One Hundred and Eight Oracle Slips,or yibai lingba qian (1993), consists of one cardboard tube that holds a one hundred and eight cards, which are referred to as “oracle slips.”Printed on each slip, in juxtaposition, are lines from the late sixteenth-century text Bencao Ganmu (Compendium of Material Medica), a compilation on botanical and medical sciences, and images derived from the history of Western contemporary art. Citing a comment from Foucault on the shifting reception and understanding of books on medicine throughout different eras, Huang Yongping offers the following explanation:
Huang Yongping, The House of Oracles, 1989–1992. Collection Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris.
The rupture of a type of knowledge refers not only to the discontinuity on a vertical axis (time) but also to the irrelevances that exist on a horizontal axis (geography). A modern Westerner will find a Chinese medical book from 1590 amusing; in a similar way, a modern Chinese person will find contemporary works of art that the West is familiar with completely incomprehensible.
The concern with geography, the use of lists, and engagement with divination are implicated in the conception of two connected works, Globe (1999) and Travel Guide for 2000–2042 (2000). Globe is a globe with its surface stripped off, showing only an under layer of plain paper. Its imaginary surface is instead rendered like a continuing strip of peel, similar to that of a peeled skin of an orange or an apple and referred to as a “stretched-out globe.”Suspended from the ceiling, this two-dimensional object is fashioned at either end as curling scrolls. “Stuck” on the different geographical areas of the “globe” are four hundred and thirty-one labels, each supported by piece of copper wire. Huang Yongping points out that printed on the labels are the following words : “Predictions of future calamities all have very precise times; the locations remain rather vague and uncertain, however, and are thus outside our usual field of vision.”
The probing of classification and of boundaries—national, geographical, natural, zoological, and human—inform a number of the artist’s installations, among them Theatre of the World (1993), Passage (1993/2005), and Python (2000).
The cultural critic Edward Said proposes that “To identify a point as a beginning is to classify it after the fact.” The beguiling Long Drawing for Walker Art Center mounted at the beginning of the House of Oracles is appropriately listed in the catalogue as the concluding artwork.18
The House of Oracles is an important exhibition not only because it helps to introduce audiences in this country to the art of Huang Yongping, who is well known in Asia and Europe, but also because of the way in which the exhibition has been conceived. Arranged less chronologically than thematically (Colonialism/Imperialism, Clash, Daoism, Chance), the spectacular installation offers entry to the “universe” of Huang Yongping. This entry is framed less by the familiar assumptions with which Chinese contemporary art and artists are discussed, than by a heightened awareness of a world that seems to resist definition. House of Oracles helps us begin to grapple with an understanding of the world through the art and writing of Huang Yongping. In the same respect, the exhibition has helped launch a new paradigm for the study of art and artists that have hitherto been regulated/pre-determined by their ethnicity or nationality.
Funding for the preparation of the review essay was supported by a Professional Activity Grant from the Office of the Dean of Fine Arts, Ohio University.
Notes 1 Philippe Vergne, “Why Am I Afraid of Huang Yongping?” in House of Oracles: A Huang Yongping Retrospective, ed. Philippe Vergne and Doryun Chong (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2005), 25. (The catalogue is divided into two parts. One comprises plates of the exhibits with individual sets of preliminary worksheets, a list of exhibits, and the “Exhibition History” of the artist. The other half contains essays by Fei Dawei, Hou Hanru, and Philippe Vergne, the writings (including worksheets) of the artist, and the “Lexicon”. 2 Philippe Vergne, “Why Am I Afraid of Huang Yongping?” 31. 3 Hou Hanru, “Change is the Rule,” in House of Oracles, 12. 4 Exhibits in the House of Oracles were installed in Galleries Three, Four, and Five at the Walker. Owing to its weight, the imposing installation Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank (2000/2005) was located on the first floor by the lobby of the Vineland entrance to the Walker. 5 Understanding of 11 June 2002—The Nightmare of George V is taken from the explanation provided by the artist. (House of Oracles, 80–81, catalog number 34, with inserts of preparatory worksheets). For a discussion of Huang Yongping’s interest in Chinese medicine and species of the natural world both as emblematic of his “transgression of the order of things” and as marks of his “institutional assault,” see Hou Hanru, “Change is the Rule,” House of Oracles, 14–17. 6 House of Oracles, 80. 7 House of Oracles, 80. 8 For a heuristic account of exploration in the context of colonial photography, see James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 28-44. 9 “Editor’s Afterword,” House of Oracles, 93. 10 Huang Yongping, “Notes on Augury, 1992–2003,” House of Oracles, 91. 11 For the passage in the English translation see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), xv. 12 Huang Yongping, “Notes on Augury, 1992–2003,” House of Oracles, 91. 13 Huang Yongping, “Notes on Augury, 1992–2003,” House of Oracles, 92. 14 Huang Yongping, “Notes on Augury, 1992–2003,” House of Oracles, 92. 15 For a discussion of Huang Yongping’s art in the 1970s and early 1980s, see Fei Dawei, “Two-Minute Cycle: Huang Yongping’s Chinese Period,” House of Oracles, 6–10. 16 Travel Guide for 2000–2042 with inserts of preparatory worksheets, catalogue number 33, House of Oracles, 58. 17 Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975). 18 Long Drawing for Walker Art Center is listed as the last exhibit, 42, in “Works in the Exhibition,” House of Oracles, 92.
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Huang Yongping, installation shot. Courtesy of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Pauline J. Yao: Thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedules to join me today for this conversation. A few months ago, Doryun and I talked about the possibility of having a discussion with the curators and the artist on the occasion of the opening of House of Oracles, and I am so pleased we were able to make it happen. This is a remarkable exhibition and one that deserves special attention in terms of its intellectual range and practical execution. Over the last several months I have been in touch with Doryun as he has been working on the show and have been fortunate to hear bits and pieces about how it came together from a curatorial standpoint. I was intrigued not only because I am fascinated by Huang Yongping’s work but, as a curator, I am fascinated about the idea of his work being presented in a retrospective format within the frame- work of an art institution like the Walker Art Center.
I arranged today’s discussion to talk specifically about the genesis of the exhibition and some of the curatorial strategies that went into its creation. Given the well-researched and comprehensive catalogue accompanying the show, it didn’t seem necessary to get into discussing the particular artistic themes within Huang Yongping’s work; rather, I thought we could take a more practical approach and consider some of the curatorial issues one encounters in presenting this material in an institutional setting. I am delighted that Huang Yongping can join us and share with us his feel- ings on the exhibition and what it means to have all of these works assembled together at once.
So, if I may start at the beginning, Philippe, how did the exhibition come about? How did you and Huang Yongping meet in the first place?
Philippe Vergne: I have known Huang Yongping’s work since the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in 1989. But more specifically, I remember clearly seeing the show at Galerie Froment & Putman, Paris, in 1992, with the piece entitled House of Oracles. Like many people in the art world, I have seen Huang’s work here and there over the years. When I was in Marseille, Huang Yongping had an exhibition in an art centre there, and I remember looking at the work and being very curious, actually a little disturbed, because I truly did not know what I was looking at. It was very distress- ing because I had the feeling that the work was important, but I didn’t understand anything about it. Then, he was in a group show here at the Walker Art Center, curated by Francesco Bonami, with The Pharmacy (1995–1997), and it triggered my curiosity again. Later, when I was in Paris with my wife, who is also a curator, we were both curious about the work so we decided to make a studio visit with Huang Yongping. During that visit, it was very interesting because what Huang did was take us—through notebooks and journals—from the beginning. It was an incredible experience, because knowing bits and pieces of the work, and then talking with him and seeing everything together, I really understood—I mean I don’t think I really understood anything—but my intuition about the importance of the work became clear. I could tell that there was something else there. Somehow, because I couldn’t understand the work, I realized it was worth studying it, and that’s how the exhibition came to be. There is also the fact that Huang’s work seemed to fit in with the Walker’s mission to look outside the singular, one-way path of art history. When I started to talk about making an exhibition with Huang Yongping, a retrospective exhibition, the institution was actually very supportive. And for me, I was not thinking specifically about Chinese art or China per se, I was thinking about something much more like an intellectual journey in a place.
Pauline J. Yao: I find it intriguing that your introduction to Huang Yongping came through his texts, in other words, your discovery of his work has been intimately shaped by words, writing, and, above all, language. In most cases, this would make for a difficult type of project to imagine proposing to a museum as an exhibition. I mean to make that transition from the written word to the visual or object can be quite challenging, and then of course with Huang’s work there is the added dimension of translation and cultural translation. I guess what I am wondering is, how did the Walker come to be supportive of the idea of doing a show? Even you have admitted how difficult the material was for you to understand and surely it would be difficult for audience viewers as well.
Philippe Vergne: I think leap of faith, really. For me, after visiting Huang, I was totally convinced, there was absolutely no doubt. So that was simply the way that I presented the idea. But also it has to do with the fact that the Walker is a bold institution, and clearly this was outside of anything that was happening in institutions. Again, our institutional mission is to be open—we use the word global—to be open to understanding global modernity. This is a path that has been paved from the beginning. When Martin Friedman was the Director, there was a very important exhibition about Japan, and a few years ago Director Kathy Halbreich did a very important exhibition about Hélio Oiticica , and also Jac Leirner, and so on. I guess I am trying to say that there is a tradition here of trying to go a little bit outside the mainstream, and take a chance, a risk. The other side of it is that when we started to talk about the show it dawned on us that it was matching what was happening in the world. I was not originally thinking about doing a show about a “Chinese artist” because I really have a problem dealing with nationality as an artistic category. But, in this moment where China has started to be a presence and then to look at Huang Yongping and his career starting in the mid-1980s and moving into the present, it was just suddenly matching like a whole chronology that was absolutely changing the world.
Pauline J. Yao: I would like to ask Huang Yongping about his experiences at the beginning stages of the exhibition. When did it first become apparent to you that an exhibition was going to be put together as a retrospective, and how did you respond to this?
Huang Yongping (translator): It happened about two years ago, when I first got a phone call. My French was not that great, but I still managed to understand Philippe’s idea about the show. At that time, I was not quite sure it was going to be a retrospective, but I knew it was going to be a solo show. It was even before Bonami’s group show in 1998 that I knew the importance of the Walker. Mostly I knew that Joseph Beuys had done a show and performance here, so through this I knew the position of the Walker as an important museum for contemporary art. In 1997, I had a solo show in the Netherlands; it wasn’t a real retrospective, but it did include some of my works from 1980s. At the time they also had the idea to make it a travelling show, but it didn’t work out because they weren’t able to enlist support from other museums in Europe. I started to realize that it is actually a quite difficult undertaking for me to put on a one-man show. This is in part because the trajectory of my work is not exactly linear. I am not just following one single line, but I am following multiple lines or threads. Moreover, the interpretations of my works can get a little bit complicated due to the Chinese cultural references and also the political undercurrents. As well, a lot of the time my work can be elliptical in terms of its suggestions, so these things make my work a little bit different from other work in the contemporary art scene. So when Philippe called me and talked about the show, I immediately said yes. I said: “Yeah, why don’t we try?” because even though I didn’t know him very well, I am really very happy he had the courage to take this step.
Philippe Vergne: Actually, I don’t think it is courage. I think it needed to happen.
Pauline J. Yao: Yes. Maybe courage isn’t the best word, but there is some aspect of it. Perhaps it has to do with recognizing the elliptical, non-narrative nature of Huang Yongping’s work and then having the resolve to try to present this to the public. There is another sort of obvious challenge which is more curatorial or practical in terms of the work itself—finding it, re-creating it, and bringing it all together—for the first time. To me, this is an important component since so much of Huang’s work is sited for its original context.
Philippe Vergne: Indeed. For me, this show is part of an overall desire to fulfill a need for something different in the art world, for serious consideration of an artist who considers their work in an academic, non-Modernist way. There are not many of these artists around, especially when you look at the second half of the twentieth century. I don’t think that is courage; perhaps it is just identifying someone who is doing something else. Of course, this is also the same reason why the exhibition was a difficult one to do. We spent four years working on the show, in which unusual and strange circumstances led to that, but I think it was necessary.
I will say that something that was new for me was the way we worked together. Language was interesting. There is almost a non-linguistic way of communicating—through images, pictures, etc.—and trying to understand what each other wants to achieve through something which is not usual conversation. Actually, over the course of four years we almost never talked on the phone, except the first phone call. We used e-mail and images and tried to meet in person on a regular basis. For me, there are few artists like this in terms of curation. The artist makes so many of the decisions after we have had the initial conversation and established the overall style. After awhile everything just starts to unfold. I remember when I first saw the exhibition model Huang made in
Huang Yongping, installation shot. Courtesy of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. his studio and I was like, “Okay, it’s done.”[Laughs.] But really it was not done; we kept working and refining it.
Pauline J. Yao: I am curious, Huang Yongping, how did you conceive of the exhibition in terms of the layout and overall framework? It seems that this sort of experience is what makes a retrospective so valuable—it really provides an unprecedented opportunity for you to reflect on the trajectory of your work over time and to think about the different stories it tells.
Huang Yongping: First, I should explain that I think basically for me there are two periods for my work. The first period was when I was still in China, and the second one was after 1989, when I was no longer in China and had emigrated to France. These periods reflect two different ways of working and were factored into my conception for organizing the show. When I was still in China, mostly I worked in the studio, so I put my works on the wall and so on. But after 1989, basically there was no studio—or I can call it a “post-studio” period because, like many artists at the time, we made works on site, installations and so on, that connected to the specific locale of that place, its background, or particular characteristics. It was during that period when I was still in China that the question really came to me: What is the nature of art? What is art? So you can find many echoes in my work that have to do with the Western art of the 1960s; this is often paired together with the other pressing question facing China, which was how to move away from tradition. After 1989, things completely changed. When you look at my work, you can feel this kind of temporal gap, because the things I have done in the 1980s, say ‘85 or ‘89, they have the feel of things in the 1960s, because it was during this period when China was just beginning to open up, and there was all sorts of information coming in. We all were focused on how to absorb this information, how to sort through it, how to incorporate it into art. For me, it was akin to digesting all art history within five or ten years. After 1989, things changed because I had to confront reality, both on a personal level and in terms of the reality of the world. The result was a change in strategy where I was no longer overly concerned with what art is, but rather, its role in terms of site and place.
Huang Yongping, Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank, 2002/2005, sand, concrete. Collection of Guang Yi, Beijing. Courtesy of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Pauline J. Yao: I agree—so many of your recent projects have been site specific, engaging with the history and specifics of a particular place or locale. Being based in the United States, it hasn’t always been easy for me to see these projects in person and so this is part of why I find the idea of a retrospective so compelling. Your current practice is not strictly limited to producing objects inside the studio and then transporting them to the museum or gallery setting, though that certainly happens as well, so I guess I am wondering: how do you see this relationship shift when a piece of art that has been made for a particular site gets re-situated or re-presented in a different context? How did this get incorporated into the organizational concept of the show?
Huang Yongping: I think basically if a piece of work is applicable only to one site, then, when it is outside that site, that work is dead. So, one important thing for me in terms of this exhibition is how to revive those pieces. I also gave thought to the idea that when these pieces are put together with one another, there might be some new connections formed. As for the organization of the show, the space at the Walker was particularly intriguing to me, especially because of the layout of the gallery which starts off at a lower point then progressively goes upward. [There are stairs between the different gallery spaces.] I felt that it was a little bit like a spiral around a center point and therefore reflective of some temporal order. So I thought it wouldn’t really be very good to just use that and start with early works and move into the present. I wanted to mess up the temporal order a little bit and not stick to a chronological format. So the current arrangement is somewhat in order but also mixed up: mixing order and chaos—for example, in the last gallery there are mostly recent works. Another particular thing about this exhibition space was that there aren’t really any walls between the galleries, so there was relatively little wall space. Therefore, we made a special wall near the entrance to incorporate the work Passage, which requires two entrances to the gallery.
Pauline J. Yao: Doryun, you have been involved with the project from its early stages. What has been your experience in presenting this material?
Doryun Chong: Well, perhaps I can add something about methodology. Philippe and Huang Yongping were in the midst of discussing the show and how it would be shaped for about two years when I came into the picture, and probably I got hired because they thought I spoke Chinese and I didn’t. [Laughs.] To be honest, I knew Huang Yongping’s work just a little bit but not terribly well. Actually, one of the first times that I saw this work was probably when Pauline and I were in Shanghai for the 2000 Shanghai Biennial, where Huang installed Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank.In any case, I was really intrigued that the Walker would do a show like this, but it took me a while to intellectually get there with the work. Still, I could see that the way Philippe was operating was really kind of instinctive.
My previous professional training was in more traditional art as well as modern art, so my reading of Huang’s work seemed to occur in a more iconographic way. In some respects, this is the trouble I had with him and his work. It is so easy to see how it is Chinese, and therefore exotic, and in terms of the general audience of contemporary art, how are they going to see it as anything but exotic? It dawned on me that his work could be totally and utterly incomprehensible for most of the audience. It also took me awhile to realize that Philippe was doing this project not just for exotic or spectacular value, but because he instinctively sensed something about Huang’s signifi- cance. I was coming from a different direction because I wasn’t able to completely read Huang’s work—actually, I think it’s impossible. I mean, even if you’re really steeped in Chinese culture, I don’t think you can read his work completely. But there are a lot of elements and connections to traditional culture that I could pick up, and I knew enough to be able to read parts of it but not completely.
One part of our job in putting together this exhibition is to enable Huang’s vision, but the other, larger part is to be an interpreter for the audiences and the institution. I was really inspired by Philippe and his attitude, which was really about Huang’s art not as just something “Chinese” but ultimately how it is part of a global language.
Pauline J. Yao: This is so important. Often the curator’s role tends to be thought of in terms of which artists he/she works with rather than how the process of interpretation is managed. This becomes doubly complicated when dealing with cross-cultural contexts, because one cannot avoid explaining the specific cultural references being made, but, by the same token, you don’t want to overburden the audience with too much information. They need the tools to understand, but how to provide this without alienating people or, in some cases, pandering to notions of exoticism. In the case of Huang Yongping, at some point one has to speak to the exact text and what it is all about, or iconographical meaning, all of which play a vital role in the overall understanding. This is of course quite complicated because some of the references and texts are super esoteric. . . .
Doryun Chong: Yes, completely. And so my job really became to provide the tools or factual infor- mation to help guide them. It was really complicated because the range is so wide; we were not just working with the Yijing (Book of Changes) but other obscure references. In the case of Shanhai jing, it is so obscure and apocryphal that there aren’t even that many scholars who can tackle it. So we could have gone that direction and really approached his work almost like an archaeological artifact. We could’ve done that, but we all agreed that to do that would be a problematic thing. So our methodology became asking where you draw this kind of interpretative line.
Philippe Vergne: When Doryun came it really solved a lot of problems for me. I mean, it happened with Huang Yongping, but I think it actually could happen with anyone—someone like, let’s say,
David Hammons. For me, what I crave when I look at art, or when I read about art, is what Doryun referred to as iconology, not to interpret the work, but to have keys. Huang Yongping’s work for me was incredibly difficult because I don’t know traditional Chinese art, and so for me, the first base was to ask Doryun to separate the elements, like under a microscope, and identify A, B, C, D, and it ended up being the research that was done in the lexicon part of the catalogue. This is really important because it doesn’t just cover the Chinese elements, but the entire work. This is crucial and provides the audience the keys to understand.
Pauline J. Yao: For me the most amazing aspect of the exhibition is not only seeing Huang’s work together, but seeing his early works in person, because, for the most part, I only know these pieces through reproductions in books. It rarely happens that I can be so totally familiar with an artist’s work without ever having seen any of it in real life. It doesn’t get exhibited in China or the States, and, to my knowledge, the early pieces don’t get shown in Europe much either. So when I was looking at the show I found myself getting sort of obsessed with physicality, form, and taking this object-centered approach, which is really fascinating when you realize that so much of Huang’s work and thinking goes against this sort of approach and way of thinking.
Doryun Chong: Exactly. This is another curatorial challenge because many of his works we never saw until four weeks ago. I mean, we never saw the real thing. There are these incredible details that really affect your view and your understanding of it.
Philippe Vergne: There is something that was for me really interesting at the beginning that totally slipped my attention when I came to install his paintings [Four Paintings Created According to Random Instructions (1985)]. They were done on unstretched canvas, and, really, it is about that detail. I mean, they were made like one makes objects, not like doing paintings. This little detail makes the work totally different. And I don’t know if it is a misunderstanding, but I think it has to do with a proposal he is making, a proposal we cannot understand.
Huang Yongping: Yes, I agree. The first page in the House of Oracles catalogue shows these works as they were installed in a show in 1985. Actually I was not really involved with that show, and I never even went to see it. But, there are two issues here, one having to do with the roulette wheel in the foreground and the other having to do with the paintings. When I first saw this picture I was shocked because, first of all, those paintings are all framed, and that was not my intention. Also, on the roulette wheel the vertical rod should go straight up and not off to the side as shown. And at first, during the installation here, Doryun proposed putting the roulette on a low base or pedestal and told me that for the sake of the audience we needed that, but later we decided to take it off, and I am very pleased.
Philippe Vergne: Another factor was the actual process, the way he works in terms of installation. There are just things you cannot invent, like when an artist walks through the galleries and starts to move things around. There is the language of space, the language of form—and entering the gallery I would watch him install and then move something like half an inch. And I don’t know how to define that. There is no straight line in the show. There is no symmetry in the show. It is all about a form of chaos, or a form of unbalance. And this relates to one of Huang’s pieces not in the show—The Sixty-Year Cycle Chariot (1999–2000)—and it is unbalanced. I think in terms of our understanding and misunderstanding of this culture, it takes me to the Situationists, and the architecture of Situationism, and how through unbalancing a form, you open the door of unbalancing a social structure.
Huang Yongping sizes up an airplane wing. Photo: Doryun Chong. Courtesy of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Huang Yongping: The most important thing is to replace one method of form with another method of form. Even for Chinese audiences, the Yijing and Shanhai Jing are really difficult to read. So for the Western audience it’s even more so. I think for me the thing is that the more you explain it, the more confusing it gets. I think the objects just should be put here, and it’s a little bit like an enigma or puzzle—it has certain opacity. When you move around it from the outside, it might inspire some thoughts in you. But if you really go too much inside, then you are just really going to get really confused.
Pauline J. Yao: It is interesting to think about this and how it relates back to what we were talking about earlier—how people look at things and they see something Chinese or see something exotic there. There are these expectations out there and, like them or not, to some degree those issues probably are always going to be present. Can one really avoid the national frameworks, or, rather, avoid falling into the traps of categorization when organizing an exhibition in America of work by Chinese artists?
Philippe Vergne: He’s a French artist.
[Laughs all around.]
Pauline J. Yao: That is exactly what I am saying. He is a French artist and he is also a Chinese artist. These kinds of categories are always there. You and I may see them to be very fluid, but the general public doesn’t necessarily see it that way, or at least there may be difficulty in seeing multiple categories at once. This myopic view may come from unfamiliarity with contemporary art or may just be a symptom of the ways people think about issues of identity and so on. Perhaps I am just curious if you feel that things are different at the Walker, given its strong reputation for being able to take a multilayered approach. Partially, what I am recognizing here is the fact that this kind of exhibition most definitely could not have happened anywhere else.
Huang Yongping, sketch for Bat Project IV, 2004–2005. Courtesy of the artist.
Doryun Chong: I am still wondering if organizing his exhibition here was just part of the larger jigsaw puzzle. We have done an exhibition with the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, we’ve done a big Japan show, and I think each one probably poses a different kind of challenge, and maybe there were different levels of difficulty. And within the institution we still had to work out a lot of things with particular reference to this show.
Philippe Vergne: I don’t think doing this kind of show is actually that difficult. The reason we may see it that way is because the art world is becoming pretty lazy, and the level of research is not always happening. There is confusion between product and project in the art world. I think the reason why we see this exhibition as being maybe a little bit challenging is actually because Huang Yongping never fell into the trap of becoming a product. The work has always been exhibited as a project. To answer your question: when I say I think it’s necessary, I think it needed to happen. The methodology needed to be unfolded. At the end, it is not direct. It is not part of the jigsaw puzzle of institutional strategy. I think at the end it is about art. I think the work is ambitious. It carries a level of utopia. It carries a level of madness. It carries a level of things we cannot understand. That’s why it is absurd to do it, why it is a pain in the ass. But that’s also why we should do it.
Doryun Chong: What I learned from the show and from Huang Yongping through Philippe is that ultimately it really is about what are we trying to do with art and for art. So the ultimate challenge is really about the relationship between art and the institution, and that really goes back to the idea of an art institution as digestion, which is a recurring theme in Huang’s work. But I guess I also saw it as a challenge in terms of dealing with the fact that people are excited about China now and that China is on the front page of the news every day. By definition an institution like the Walker has a mission, and it creates cultural programs, and it then has to convey these ideas to the audience. So in some way we have to co-op that kind of excitement around China, but in doing so we also have to constantly question it so we don’t end up selling ourselves cheap. Do you know what I mean? As Philippe said, we are trying to be really suspicious of a national identity-driven kind of program, but at the same time we have to “sell it” somehow. . . .
Pauline J. Yao: This is a conundrum faced by most every curator at some point in time, and perhaps in the institutional setting the stakes are a little bit higher. It is no secret that museums in the U.S. are increasingly forced to adopt business strategies in order to make money and stay alive. At
every step along the way, choices are being made about what story to tell and how to tell it, and at end of the day, something—be it an image, an idea, an exhibition, or a book—is being bought and sold. We know that. The question becomes: what is being bought or sold? And do people know what they are “buying,”so to speak?
Doryun Chong: This is hard. I felt like I had to tell people a lot, you know—give them the factual information about Huang Yongping’s artistic practice and career trajectory. But also, this is what his work is about—there are these things happening in China and in the world. Also, at the same time, I had to convince them not to see him as just Chinese, because, you know, he is an artist, like any other artist we represent.
Philippe Vergne: Yes, I agree.
Pauline J. Yao: I thought I might switch gears a little bit since I wanted to talk about a particular project, something that is unique to this exhibition, the Bat Project IV, which has been an ongoing project for many years for Huang Yongping. House of Oracles provides an opportunity for Huang to realize this, shall we say, latest episode in the story.
Philippe Vergne: Final episode.
Doryun Chong: Yes, final episode.
Pauline J. Yao: Well, I would just be interested to hear from Huang Yongping about this Bat Project and its final episode here at the Walker.
Huang Yongping: [Shakes his head, laughing.]
Pauline J. Yao: You don’t believe this is the final episode? Do you think it will ever be shown in China again?
Huang Yongping: Like anything, we all know that if you repeat it too many times, it just won’t work. So whether or not a work can actually continue—the life of the work can continue—it depends upon whether or not it encounters any problems or incidents. So if everything goes well here and the exhibition just goes smoothly, then we could just put a period there. Otherwise. . . .
Philippe Vergne: I just want to say I think it’s great—we feel very fortunate—to be able to give Huang Yongping the possibility to do something that he hasn’t done before, and also it is wonder- ful that we have the possibility to work together in a collaborative way.
Pauline J. Yao: Doryun, perhaps you can speak to the practical side of things with respect to Bat Project? You two had an adventure together in locating the airplane parts, right?
Doryun Chong: Yes, we did. At first I began researching around to see where to find discarded air- plane parts, and I was looking specifically for the EP-3 model, which is the model of the American military surveillance aircraft that collided with the Chinese fighter jet back in 2001. We found somebody in Tucson, Arizona—a junkyard—and tried to negotiate with them, but it didn’t work out and we sort of gave up because it was just seeming too expensive. Also, it seemed that there was sensitivity over the fact that we were looking for a military plane. So we gave up for a few
weeks and then just by accident I read this tiny blurb in the New York Times that mentioned some- thing about Los Angeles sculptor Nancy Rubins, and in it she just talked about how she goes up to this particular junkyard outside L.A. to get her parts. So then everything kind of restarted from that. In February of 2005, I went there together with Huang Yongping. And there was this moment, in the beautiful landscape, and Huang is looking around at all these different cockpits and I am taking pictures, etc. But after two hours, we didn’t really find anything. To me, they all look the same, and I am saying “what about this one?” and Huang says, “it doesn’t have the right windows,”and meanwhile I am thinking it is okay, we can just modify it. After awhile I just real- ized that it is not really about getting any airplane just for the sake of having a real airplane in the gallery. And at the same time Huang’s insistence on getting something wasn’t really about authenticity either. So for me it was just a very interesting experience because I am trying to be an enabler for the artist’s project, but there were these moments where I am just kind of lost on what the point of trying to find what the right airplane is about. I think we were still so attached to the idea of having an object, since it is the first time this is realized outside of China. But like what he just said, if something happens to it, or something happens around it, this is not over.
Pauline J. Yao: But eventually you did find something and installed it, and it looks fantastic. As a self-contained unit with the photographs and documentation of earlier Bat Project installations in China, this piece has a way of functioning like an exhibition in and of itself. It is interesting how the controversy around the piece is dissipated here in the U.S. while other works in the show, like Theater of the World, with live insects, are likely to attract more controversy.
Philippe Vergne: The only thing we haven’t mentioned, because we all have a tendency to be at times very serious about art, has to do with humour. At the end, I think Huang Yongping is totally sarcastic, and the work is quite fun. In the House of Oracles piece, there are weapons, and I think he really uses humour and knowledge as weapons, which is quite rare.
Huang Yongping: Humour is necessary, because if the work is very political, you need some humour to lubricate it. Otherwise, it becomes a politician’s propaganda.
Pauline J. Yao: On that note, in the interest of time, I am afraid we will have to conclude our con- versation. Humour is integral to art in many ways. There has to be room to laugh, otherwise why do it? It has been a real pleasure to talk and laugh with all of you today. Thank you for your time and generous participation, and congratulations on the exhibition.
Philippe Vergne, Huang Yongping, and Doryun Chong: Thank you.
Transcription by Liu Shasha
Notes 1 Participants in the roundtable were Doryun Chong, Assistant Visual Art Curator, Walker Art Center; Huang Yongping, artist; Philippe Vergne, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Walker Art Center and curator of House of Oracles: A Huang Yongping Retrospective, and Pauline J. Yao, Assistant Curator of Chinese Art at the Asian Art Museum. Conversation was conducted in English with translation help provided to Huang Yongping by Yun Peng. Transcription provided by Liu Shasha. 2 Unfinished History, Walker Art Center, October 18–January 10, 1999.
Huang Yongping, Bat Project I, 2001, installation at the Fourth Shenzen Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition. Courtesy of the artist.
In the Overseas Chinese Town district of Shenzhen, an orderly tangle-town of carefully staggered and interlocking residential compounds leads to the back of the Overseas Chinese Art Terminal (OCAT) contemporary art centre. Behind the OCAT, against a backdrop of industrial buildings and ever more high-rises, is a tract of grass lined by trees and shrubbery on which Huang Yongping’s Bat Project I is installed.
Unannounced by any signage or placards, this reconstructed life-sized tail of an EP-3 U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft was, one recent afternoon, shading three men lying in a row on the grass. As the sun sank behind one of the tall residential plinths, several other people could be seen scattered about the lawn. None of them were inspecting or examining this seemingly displaced object painted with a cartoonish bat/lightning bolt emblem below the initials “PR” on the vertical stabilizer and “NAVY”and the U.S. Navy logo on the fuselage. Except for those napping, no one was even getting very close to it. The few whose gaze was pointed in the tail’s direction could have been looking not at it, but through it.
Huang Yongping, Bat Project I, 2001, installation at the Fourth Shenzen Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition. Courtesy of the artist.
Shenzhen, the former fishing village now called the “city of immigrants,”began a process of shot- gun urban development when it was designated China’s first Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in 1980. The city is seen as the testing ground for the country’s economic transformation into the “socialism with Chinese characteristics” fostered by Deng Xiaoping. According to official reports, Shenzhen’s GDP grew at an average rate of thirty percent from 1980 to 2001. Its official per capita income in 2004 was $7,171 USD, the highest in mainland China.1 Joining with its neighbours Hong Kong and Guangzhou, Shenzhen is part of an emerging Pearl River Delta mega-city.
Overseas Chinese Town (OCT) is an upper income-level planned residential area developed by the Overseas Chinese Town Group development company. It is home to spaces for contemporary Chinese art, such as the OCAT and the He Xiangning Art Museum, named in honour of the revolutionary painter. OCT contains a group of themed amusement parks—China Folk Culture Village, Happy Valley, Splendid China Miniature Scenery Park, and Window of the World. The OCT Group’s CEO, Ren Kelei, is also the director of the He Xiangning Art Museum, the institution that organized the 2001 Sino-French initiated sculpture exhibition, Transplantation in Situ, at the Fourth Shenzhen Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, which was originally to include Bat Project I.2
Coming upon that Shenzhen lawn, anyone can recognize that Bat Project I appears to be part of an airplane; there is no need to spend time considering what it is. To be sure, it fits the description and size of an airplane tail. What’s not obvious is why it’s there. It’s clearly a replica, not a relic or a readymade: there are no moveable parts, no rudder where a rudder should be. The materials are different. Moreover, it’s clearly not for amusement, like the miniature replicas of the Great Wall and the Leshan Buddha at nearby Window of the World. In fact, the tail, fabricated in 2001, shows a striking degree of rust and weathering, unfitting for a historical museum or amusement park. Closer inspection reveals countless layers of paint peeling to expose rusty metal panels. It has been spray-painted with graffiti tags and a mobile phone number. In the prefabricated, carefully planned environment of the OCT, Bat Project I sits like a question mark, discreetly asking to be investigated.
Huang Yongping, Bat Project II, 2002, installation at the Guangzhou Triennale. Courtesy of the artist.
The clue to the story behind Bat Project is the “flying mouse,”or fei shu emblem. In fact, it is two stories, the “actual” story and the “art” story. In 2001, a U.S. intelligence plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet in China’s airspace. The U.S. plane made an emergency landing on Hainan Island in the South China Sea, while the Chinese plane and pilot were both lost. A diplomatic crisis between the two nations ensued and the U.S. aircraft and crew were held on Chinese soil.
The very day that a resolution was reached—the EP-3 Bat was then released, dismantled, and flown back to the U.S. in pieces—Huang Yongping, himself in flight from Paris to Shanghai, initiated the “art” thread. His idea was to replicate the plane in its dismantled form according to his own, “irrational” instructions.3 Over the following months, Huang developed his proposal for the tail replica, which was intended to be exhibited in China to propose the event as “‘unfinished,’ as if it had a ‘tail’ it could not get rid of.”4 After the fabrication of Bat Project I was completed, but before the opening, it was stricken from the exhibition after intervention by French diplomatic officials. In the next two years, Huang made two more proposals for the piece, Bat Project II, the plane’s midsection and left wing, and Bat Project III, the right wing. Both were ultimately censored from exhibitions in Guangzhou and Beijing, respectively, for which they were fabricated. In 2002, the artist promised to donate Bat Project I to the He Xiangning Museum in Shenzhen, where it was permanently installed in 2003. Bat Project II remains in Guangzhou and Bat Project III in Beijing. In July 2005 Bat Project III was included, unannounced to the media, in an exhibition in the capital at the Today Art Museum.
The return to the U.S. of the EP-3, which was dismantled and transported in another airplane rather than flying back normally, signalled for Huang neither a loss of power nor a lack of techno- logical capability. Rather, he wrote, “It signifies power at its peak and technology with a bright future, because power at its peak is always linked to its decline, and the omnipotence of high technology cannot be separated from its incapacity.”5 Like the child of a powerful ruler who is escorted everywhere by bodyguards, the “escorted,”dismantled EP-3 was all at once being protected, made an example of, and watched—a symbol of power and dependence.
Huang Yongping, Bat Project II, 2002, installation at the Guangzhou Triennale. Courtesy of the artist.
Although based on an actual event, rather than a historical personal mythology, Bat Project echoes what Joseph Beuys demonstrated about the relationship of art to history: it can initiate or embody its own historical trajectory while simultaneously paralleling or continuing another, as in a plane crash that caused a diplomatic conflict. How far and where the trajectory goes is dependent upon the audience. Huang, it seems, prefers, having chosen a direction and location, to go out onto his trajectory, step back, and observe the changes.
Huang wrote in 1987, “Only art in the history of art exists; no other art exists. . . . If pursuing art in the history of art also means pursuing power . . . then to make something become art, you have to use power or make use of the medium of power.”6 The complex, well-documented history of the Bat Project gives an indication of Huang’s understanding of that medium of power. “When something is suppressed, it can lead to a reaction that will lead to another, related, artwork. . . . Out of the banning, another artwork is created. Not a repetition, but another independent work. One project cannot replace another—they exist as independent things,”7 Huang said. From these comments, and in the artist’s meticulous documentation of the Bat Project story, one can see that Huang understands that the act of censorship endows with power that which is censored.
However, Huang stressed that he did not anticipate the censorship.8 His 1989 essay “Art/Power/Discourse” suggested limitations in art that sets out to incite its own censorship. Huang wrote:
Yet is the goal of deliberately causing an exhibition to be canceled to reveal the existence of power, or is it to use another type of power—that is, by becoming the subject of “more” talk, and not only the subject of talk? As the Chinese idiom “three men create a tiger” shows, a lie gains credibility as it is retold tens of thousands of times. Therefore, power is increasingly acknowledged and affirmed as talk about it multiplies. Of course, it is also doubtful whether one can choose or decide on one’s own to become a power or to run away from it, because this involves not only personal intentions but also the differences between the initial project and its final realization—a project always diverges from the initial plan.9
Huang Yongping, Bat Project III, 2004, installation at Beijing, China. Courtesy of the artist.
Therein lies the fallacy in the quest for power in art: the unknown. Huang continues:
Art is not so absolute as to require that “it must be done this way”; nevertheless, it is possible for one to insist on this absoluteness with the deliberate aim of obtaining the result of an exhibition being closed down. Obviously, transgressing power relies very much on the use of the language of power— “it must be this way”! Since the artist cannot effectively control his own intention, as he would like to imagine it, the “creativity” through which the artist expresses his singular personality is a problematic concept. The concept of the “creativity of the artist” must time and again be “dried up” because it represents the last “drop” of romanticism. The impossible existence of creativity does not refer to the “inevitable influence of tradition,”as is usually thought; rather, it refers to the impossible existence of autonomous creativity.10
By not insisting on how it must be done, by surrendering absolute control, Huang resolves the power fallacy, and he does away with the notion of singular, visionary authorship. This introduces what is perhaps one of his prime artistic motivations—to create paradox. Recalling the anti-art- institutional tendencies of 1960s and 1970s Conceptual art, Huang wrote from Xiamen in 1986, “The highest and ultimate goal for the artist is to abandon art completely.”11 For Huang, this has meant putting forth an artwork or exhibition and then turning it against itself. Demonstrating exploration of Chan (Zen) Buddhism (with its “paradox of desires”)12 and Dada (a self-proclaimed anti-movement), the artist’s projects in the late 1980s consisted largely of work that would begin to self-destruct in its process of being made. The “events” staged by Xiamen Dada during this era included a 1986 exhibition in which, after closing, the exhibition’s contents were burned in the museum courtyard; another proposed one exhibition only to change it at the eleventh hour into another, the Events exhibition that took place at the Fujian Art Museum, consisting of objects found around the museum and brought inside; still another, in 1987, Artworks—To Be Dealt with as Garbage, had the artists bringing paintings to a dump and then photographing people’s interaction with the discarded art.13
The decay of Bat Project I could be construed as an act of abandonment, particularly given the advocating that was done to achieve its realization. And of course, Huang does insist on certain
Huang Yongping, Bat Project IV, 2004–2005. Courtesy of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. things. He would not, for instance, after suggestions from exhibition organizers, allow the scale of his life-size replica of the Bat to be changed.14 On the other hand, as a rule, he does not oppose external forces acting swiftly and directly on his work, and in many instances he invites them.
In late 2002, during production for the First Guangzhou Triennial, and what would become the second instance of the Bat Project being banned, Huang Yongping addressed the question of what would happen to the understanding of the original news event in relation to the artwork itself over the course of the exhibition. Huang said:
Time indeed allows for the switching among multiple meanings. When a sculpture is left in one place for many years, “new” becomes “old,”the unknown becomes familiar, or on the contrary, the familiar becomes the unknown. Memories originally related to a piece of news will no longer exist, and these airplane fragments will become an object for people to sneer at. Yes, in any case, time sneers at everything.15
Perhaps not intending to address the issue of a project’s future maintenance, the above statements provide an illuminating view into what has become of Bat Project I. It is an object that is hard to classify as anything other than a declarative statement of the simultaneity of its own existence and impermanence, like a lizard tail wasting away in the desert. In Bat Project I, time is sneering not only at newness and preservation, but also at the media event that inspired it and that is now perhaps forgotten.
Bat Project I’s lack of introduction, explanation, and preservation flies in the face of most other large-scale examples of public art. Here, just as in the Xiamen Dada “events”—when viewers’ reactions became the content of the work—there is no apology for the art object and exhibition’s demise. It is an exhibition of demise.
Bat Project’s form finds roots in Huang’s examination of a particular “metaphysical illusion created by the human brain”16: the idea of the “whole.”In his 1985 essay “Talking about Art,” Huang likened the Western concept of the “whole” to the “vessel” of Daoism. He wrote, “A ‘vessel’ is a whole that is assembled from originally separate parts, and it is greater than the totality of its parts. If we take the ‘vessel’ apart, however, dividing it into its constituent pieces, the ‘vessel’ will cease being a whole.”17 He continues, quoting chapter 28 of the Dao De Jing, “‘splitting the uncarved wood to shape into a vessel,’ the ‘vessel’ is not only a whole but also a part (of the uncarved wood), and represents the thing that corresponds to the term whole. In any case, the whole no longer exists either.”18
Sculpture is the physical embodiment of this “infinitely malleable”19 whole vis-à-vis a dismantled airplane. Seeming to anticipate the Bat Project, Huang continues, “The whole now exists in the form of disjointed pieces; precisely because the pieces do not need to be related to one another, however, it is inappropriate to regard the whole as being disintegrated.”20 By reversing the order— first carving, then creating a “vessel” (the airplane), Huang examines this idea of the impossibility of the “disintegration” of the disjointed whole, or “carved vessel.”Sure enough, Bat Project I is immediately recognized as a part of a larger thing, without the rest of its parts nearby. It seems impossible to imagine not being able to recognize it and the mind not reflexively filling in the missing parts.
During the period in his career when Huang was using divining practices and chance to execute his assault on the “autonomous creativity of the artist” and the “absoluteness of art,”the instruc- tions in the Daoist treatise Yijing (Book of Changes) and homemade roulette wheels were the interface to the material world. As those interfaces gradually disappeared from his practice, we see in the Bat Projects that Huang has not moved away from Daoist principles—if anything he uses them to become more expansive—and is undaunted by scale or politics. Huang’s making art according to chance perhaps left him with the temperament of the fortune-teller, in the way that the artist is a seeker not of answers, but possibilities; the answer—echoing Huang’s 2001 comment about time and ridicule—seems to be the same for everything, including art: doom.
Huang wrote in his personal journal about the Bat Project:
“What if the real and fake planes had the same fate?” and:
“The fact that something was made from the ‘tail’ (the tail of the plane) signified from the very begin- ning that this reverse order would result in resistance.”21
The above musings are typical of the artist’s challenge of reason. The notion of doom carries with it the stigma of superstition, fatalism, and irrationality. If the Bat Project’s tail-first construction would signal resistance, so too would a breech baby be destined to a difficult life.
Inevitably, Huang finds a point of entry through the bat, viewing it through the lens of Chinese medicine, language, and iconography. In the Chinese tradition, this animal is used to treat eye problems, signifies wealth and good fortune (“bat” and “wealth” are homonyms), and is good at absorbing qi (energy). Meanwhile, in the West, this animal signifies Halloween, vampires, a caped superhero (Batman), bad vision (“blind as a bat”), and insanity (“bats in the belfry,”“gone batty”). In the military intelligence context, it could be an image of stealth and nocturnal infiltration.
The fourth installment of Bat Project is part of the large-scale retrospective House of Oracles, which opened last October at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and has since travelled to MassMoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. For the latest manifestation of this project, Huang attached to the nose of a real decommissioned EP-3 (the final piece of the airplane) a 40-foot fuselage made of the bamboo scaffolding and blue, white, and red tarpaulin seen at many of China’s construction sites. Inside are documentation of Bat Project (2001–2005) and taxidermic bats hung from above. Huang’s read on the bat, played back to a global audience, could be seen as yet another introduction of the East to the West and vice versa. Likely, it is more complex than that—an ironic, playfully subversive suggestion (one person’s bearer of wealth is another’s blood-sucking monster), within the context of a two-nation standoff, of how language and tradition can shape thinking.
Huang said from Fujian province in December, “I put a period at the end of this project: in the future, in China, I will not continue to make work related to the Bat Project. It's over.”He says that none of the Bat Project sculptures in China were fully realized. Despite this, Bat Project I, II and III are in China now, and he suggested the potential for putting all the parts of Bat Project together into a composite.22
China does indeed have a Pinocchio-like “tail” (and a fuselage and two wings) that it cannot seem to get rid of today. But unlike Carlo Collodi’s wooden boy, who finds he has sprouted a backside appendage (and the ears of an ass) after his trip to the notorious Pleasure Island, Huang did not grow a tail because of some individual’s moral slip. It is a reminder of an event that created a tense moment and that brought the deep-seated, potentially clashing beliefs and desires of powerful individuals and nations to the surface. There is no traditional moral, only history and potential and a disjointed airplane with a long past.
Notes 1 Shenzhen Government Online, “Investment Environment,” http://english.sz.gov.cn/ftz/ (accessed January 8, 2006). 2 Bat Project chronological information compiled from “Bat Project: A Chronology,” in House of Oracles: A Huang Yongping Retrospective, ed. Philippe Vergne and Doryun Chong (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2005), 76–79; and a telephone conversation with Huang Yongping on December 22, 2005. 3 From the artist’s comment, “The way the Americans dismantled the spy plane was structural and rational, whereas I dismantled the plane in an irrational, nonstructural way. I cut up an airplane as if I were slicing a loaf of bread,” in “Bat Project,” trans. Yu Hsiao Hwei, in House of Oracles, 60. 4 Ibid., 60. 5 Ibid., 60. 6 Huang Yongping, “Thoughts, Creations and Activities in 1987,” trans. Yu Hsiao Hwei, in ibid., 52. 7 Comment from a telephone conversation with the artist on December 22, 2005. 8 Ibid. 9 Huang Yongping, “Excerpt from ‘Art/Power/Discourse’ (1989),” trans. Yu Hsiao Hwei, in House of Oracles, 87. 10 Ibid., 87. 11 Huang Yongping, “Excerpt from ‘On the Question of Language in “Art”’ (1986),” trans. Yu Hsiao Hwei, in ibid., 85. 12 The Buddhist “paradox of desires” can be roughly described as this: in order for humans to achieve enlightenment, they must give up all of their desires, including their desire to achieve enlightenment. 13 See “Notebook 01, 1980–1989” by Huang Yongping, trans. Yu Hsiao Hwei, in House of Oracles, 37–58. 14 From September 2002 letters of correspondence between Huang Yongping and the Guangdong Museum of Art reprinted from the artist’s journal, trans. Yu Hsiao Hwei, in ibid., 66, ii. 15 Comment from Alberte Gynpas Nguyen’s 2002 interview with Huang Yongping in ibid., 62, iv. 16 Huang Yongping, “Excerpt from ‘Talking about Art’ (1985),” trans. Yu Hsiao Hwei, in ibid., 84. 17 Ibid., 84. 18 Ibid., 84. 19 Ibid., 84. 20 Ibid., 84. 21 Huang Yongping, “Bat Project,” trans. Yu Hsiao Hwei, in ibid., 60, ii. 22 Comment from a telephone conversation with the artist on December 22, 2005.
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Hei Ji Sheng Xiang poster for Black—Extreme—Vigorous—Figurative exhibition at Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, November 2005.
Four positions, one space, one exhibition. Black—Extreme—Vigorous—Figurative is an exhibition of four artists I curated for the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute on the occasion of the Symposium of the Fourth Shenzhen International Ink Painting Biennial in November 2005 . Originally planned as Yang Jiechang’s solo show and retrospective, Black—Extreme—Vigorous—Figurative ultimately evolved into a collection of four solo shows: Yang Jiechang, Chen Tong, Zheng Gougu with the Yangjiang group (Chen Zaiyan, Sun Qinglin), and Chen Shaoxiong. Yang Jiechang himself preferred to broaden the concept of a conventional solo exhibition and reinvented a kind of traditional Chinese “literati” gathering by inviting three of his friends to join in his project. There was, however, one separate room that featured documentation of Yang Jiechang’s work since the early 1980s.
The Shenzhen Fine Art Institute is generally known for the organization of events focusing on the subject of ink painting such as the International Ink Painting Biennial, and it concentrates in particular on experimental ink painting—a focus that has become increasingly important since the early 1990s. Similarly, Black— Extreme—Vigorous—Figurative was conceived as an exhibition of experimental ink painting, but that the original concept and title seem to be reminiscent of traditional Chinese aesthetics is misleading. Rather, the exhibition belongs to the visual canon of contemporary art and to a variety of media: video, installation, ink painting, calligraphy, and performance. Furthermore, the artists—who, except for Yang Jiechang, Chen Tong, and Chen Zaiyan, were not trained in traditional Chinese painting—are obviously not interested in broadening the understanding of and range of discipline within ink painting through technical or formal experiments, as
is often the aim of experimental ink painting, nor do they propose a theoretical discussion about the subject. Instead, their attitude is that ink painting is just another method or subject at hand, rather than a discipline. Their approach is guided by their desire to eliminate the limitations put forth by disciplinary practices and to eradicate any aesthetic distance between life and art. Further, they raise the question of whether ink painting ultimately is able to engage in an equal dialogue with contemporary art discourse and whether it can be considered an innovative factor Zheng Guogu and Yangjiang group, Indoor Courtyard, 2005, installation, within this discourse. mixed media, detail.
Vigorous: Zheng Guogu and the Yangjiang group, founded in 2002 in Yangjiang and represented by Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin, installed Indoor Courtyard (Shinei tingyuan) within the exhibition space. Indoor Courtyard is a kind of fake literati garden consisting of an assemblage of citations from traditional landscapes: plants, a winding path, a bridge, stones and rocks, calligraphy, and a lake. The lake, however, is filled not with water but with crumpled pieces of paper with calligraphy scattered on top of massage machines producing “artificial waves” in the artificial calligraphy lake. Within this landscape, the visitor can indulge in various leisure activities: have a walk and contemplate the calligraphy and the garden. Zheng and the Yanjiang group realized a similar installation in 2004 with Sofa, Sofa, where, again, visitors were intended to enjoy themselves in an indoor version of a literati garden. The title here was taken from an anecdote about an old man visiting a garden, where, by mispronouncing the Chinese word for “calligraphy”—shufa—he made the artists think of a sofa. By bringing into association different elements such as the aesthetic and the vulgar, the traditional and the contemporary, art and ordinary life, he unintentionally expressed the artists’ concept. Zheng Guogu and the Yangjiang group employ visual elements of traditional Chinese culture only on a rhetorical level, citing these elements as metaphors of a convention that persists only as folklore. The artists emphasize this through the use of television screens showing 67 images of Indoor Courtyard, where tradition is nothing more than an image, an image that is similar to those found in the Hong Kong television soap operas that have come to shape the common perception of Chinese tradition—a folkloristic perception, but one that is nevertheless vigorous and part of everyday life. Typical of this kind of folklore is a sense of humour—also evident in Indoor Courtyard and other works by Zheng Guogu and the Yangjiang group—that can be traced back to the absurd anti-logic (wu litou) of many Hong Kong films such as those of Zhou Xingci.
Figurative: Incongruous also are the title and medium of Chen Shaoxiong’s Ink City of 2005, which he calls an ink video (shuimo luxiang). For this “new” technique Chen filmed about three hundred ink drawings depicting the life of city-dwellers as well as the streets of Guangzhou. Chen then arranged these scenes in rhythmic sequences and applied sound recorded in the streets to the respective scenes. The ink drawings were thus turned into motion pictures: a traditional technique was fixed upon a modern support and translated into a contemporary medium. In spite of this, there are congruencies between the two media, such as the immediacy of drawing/recording and the intimacy of perspective. The capability to quickly record images in ink drawing and in video reflects at once the artist’s intimacy with his hometown Guangzhou and the simple but fast lifestyle of this southern metropolis. In its allegorical character, Chen’s work reveals the humour and wit typical of Cantonese culture. Ink City is a logical extension of Chen’s ongoing series Streets, started in 1997, that consists of three-dimensional photo collages depicting panoramas taken in his hometown and in cities he has travelled to, as
Zheng Guogu and Yangjiang group, Indoor Courtyard, 2005, installation, mixed media, detail.
well as of Homescapes, started in 2002, which are miniature scenes of private apartments. In these portable cityscapes and interiors, the artist combined the one-dimensional medium of photography with the potential of three dimensions in collage, thus confusing the association between location and space as well as disrupting the spectator’s sense of perception. Similarly, with the drawings transformed into animation, Ink City obscures the distinction between ink painting and video, between a traditional and a contemporary medium. This suggests that every tradition and technique could be nothing more than another medium at hand, and Chen Shaoxiong instinctively broadens the range of the disciplines he uses. Chen Shaoxiong, Ink City, 2005, video.
Extreme: Chen Tong’s approach is quite different. He starts from training and teaching in traditional Chinese painting and drawing. His interest lies in literature, particularly that of French New Realism. Accordingly, his work focuses on critical observation, description, and documentation. Making quick sketches and drawing comic strips to grasp the characteristics of the moment and of his models are his main methods. Chen’s observation is acute and precise, and he pays close attention to details. His paintings seem factual and neutral, yet they are imbued with a critical, satirical stance that articulates the artist’s cultural and political engagement, which is best expressed in his long-term project, the Borges-Bookstore. In a recent series of large ink paintings, Chen Tong renders current events and controversial figures according to images taken from newspapers. The titles of these event-paintings (shishi hua)—a term coined by Chen Tong—are derived from the dates
Chen Tong, Events Create Heroes 29-10-2005, 2005, ink on Xuan-paper.
Yang Jiechang, Oh, My God!, 2005, series of two, calligraphy on paper, video and sound installation. printed on the respective newspapers. For the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, Chen painted the series Events Create Heroes and chose a route of extreme understatement in visual form as well as simplicity of technique to express his perspective. Herein he positioned himself within the tradition of Chinese literati painters.
Black: Yang Jiechang, who is known for his large monochrome black ink paintings, shows a series of two calligraphic works and two videos entitled Oh, My God!. The calligraphic works are a repetition of exclamations and swear words: The English “Oh, my God” and the Cantonese diu, meaning “fuck.”The videos record the process of writing and pronouncing these words. Like his video installation Lohkchat! of 2003, Oh, My God! records a reaction to an unexpected event or disaster. Yang’s writing is automatic and obsessive, and the calligraphy resembles a kind of encephalogram.
To leave swear words on paper for posterity and to call it calligraphy is a brazen challenge, particularly in the Chinese context, where writing and calligraphy stand as the epitomes of culture. But for Yang, it is more than a wicked experiment. He is trained in calligraphy and Chinese painting, and translating these traditional disciplines into a contemporary context is part of his artistic project. He has applied similar strategies to ink and wash painting (shuimo hua), as is evident in his 100 Layers of Ink (Qianceng mo) of 1989–1999 and his Double View (Chongguan) series of 1999–2005, as well as to meticulous colour painting (gongbi hua), such as his Crying Landscape (Hui jiao de fengjing) of 2003. Yang applies traditional techniques and materials in an unorthodox way, for example, putting layer on top of layer of ink, but, more importantly, he lends his paintings contemporary relevance by relating them to his own life experience as well as to current events. The two monumental calligraphic works of Oh, My God! consist only of “bad” strokes (bai bi), but the accumulation of those strokes is nevertheless coherent. Oh, My God! belongs to his series Double View. The title Double View
Yang Jiechang, retrospective 1982–2005: Massacre and Fire. stands for ,his technique of multiple layers of ink or paint and expresses his concept of the superimposition of images. The concept of Double View that reappears throughout Yang's oeuvre is that of ambivalence and dislocation through superimposition and repetition. This is also evident in the videos complementing Oh, My God!, which put emphasis on the process of writing and repetition.
As mentioned above, the documentary part of the exhibition was a retrospective of Yang’s oeuvre since the early 1980s, and it included photos of representative works as well as two original paintings: Yang’s graduation work, entitled Fire (Da huo), and Massacre (Da tusha), both from 1982; neither was accepted by the Canton Fine Arts Academy. There are several reasons why I included these works in the exhibition. First, they are the starting point of Yang Jiechang’s career. Second, and more significantly, showing them together with his recent work Oh, My God! allows a comprehensive vision of Yang’s artistic exploration. For more than twenty years, Yang has not only tried to make ink painting a part of contemporary discourse but he has also attempted to re-endow it with the spiritual and critical potential it traditionally had.
Having this in mind and looking at the exhibition as a whole, one can imagine that, by inviting his friends to participate in the show, Yang had more in mind than just a casual “literati gathering”—and that was to create a kind of collective energy that could open up a space for new possibilities.
January 8, 2006, Beijing/Vancouver
Beyond: The Second Guangzhou Triennale, which was on view from November 18, 2005 to January 15, 2006, was co-curated by independent curators Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich-Obrist and Guangdong Museum of Art curator Guo Xiaoyan. This second installment of the Guangzhou Triennale focused on the development of art in Canton and the Pearl River Delta and included a series of interdisciplinary platforms called D-Labs (Delta Laboratories) held across the region prior to the Triennale from November 2004 to November 2005. While the main exhibition was at the Guangdong Museum of Art, there were two additional venues: the Times Museum of Guangdong Museum of Art, slated to open around Chinese New Year 2006, the Guangzhou Xin Yi International Club which was the venue for the Self-Organization exhibition which represented independent art organizations, institutions, and communities in China, and the Special Projects which were installed throughout the city. In the following interview, Artistic Director and Co- curator Hou Hanru speaks to four particular areas of the Guangzhou Triennale: the theme and context of the exhibition; the new building of the Times Museum, designed by architects Rem Koolhaas and Alain Fouraux as a project outcome of the Second Guangzhou Triennale—a museum interwoven into a newly built eighteen-story residential building sponsored by the Times Development Group; the exhibition design concept of the main venue; and the Pearl River Delta in relation to Beyond: An Extraordinary Space of Experimentation for Modernization, as the Triennale’s full title reads.
ALICE M. W. JIM: The phenomenon of “post-planning” provides an important context for the 2005 Guangzhou Triennale. Can you elaborate on this notion?
HOU HANRU: Post-planning comes from observing urbanization in China where construction happens before any effective, long-term planning . . . so the planning process is only meant to repair the mistakes of the construction process. The result of city expansion in such a way proves to be a very different model of development and urbanization; it’s against any established philosophy of urbanization and hence modernization. This has been essentially driven by the Great Leap Forward ideology of Communism, combined with the pure capitalist, “liberal” market economy, and the Pearl River Delta is the most intensive example of such a model. . . . And that is why we call the project Beyond, since it’s beyond all known models.
ALICE M. W. JIM: During the D-Lab in Hong Kong—the last in the series of interdisciplinary meetings organized as part of the exhibition—you mentioned that the word “beyond” in Chinese translates into something else. . . .
HOU HANRU: Yeah, “alternative,” bieyang. Actually, I kind of made up this word for the title of the exhibition to mean another model or another typology or form. What’s interesting is that in Cantonese and Mandarin, the word is pronounced almost the same; in a similar way it coincides with its pronunciation in English. So the game of translating is also played in the title itself.
Yang Jiechang, We are good at everything, except for speaking Mandarin. PRD, 2005, flag 650 x 1250 cm, neon lights 200 x 500 cm, performance, video.
ALICE M. W. JIM: The idea of alternative means of organizing exhibitions is obviously very important to not only the premise behind this Guangzhou Triennale but also to your previous projects. Could you talk about the premise behind the Self-Organization component in consideration of this idea of ”Do-It-Yourself” participation or even “Do-It-Yourself” aesthetics?
HOU HANRU: Yeah, that’s right. Because I think there are two things. One is, in general, working as an artist, it’s kind of proposing a different view or understanding of the world or life, or whatever you want. . . . So by definition, this is always a kind of alternative to established values or ways of looking at things. On the other hand, I think it’s very important in the context of this so-called non-Western modernization process that there’s a possibility to propose another way to define artistic activities. And also, in term of making institutions, what kind of institution one needs in a different context and how much we can actually contribute with so-called alternative models of institutions, organizations, or social relationships as a way to enrich the global situation. So in terms of the current situation, China, Korea, and many other countries not only see that there’s a boom in the art scene, but also a boom in cultural infrastructure, with most of them trying to copy or import, you know, museum or gallery forms from the West. And the question is: is this really needed? Is this really corresponding to how the artists are working here? How much of this can be also seen as an opportunity to deviate from the established models? So this is how the question of alternative becomes very central to some of the projects I have been doing in this context. And I think it is also very important that a triennale or biennale should propose a kind of glocally and globally relevant organizational logic. So this is why, from Gwangju to Guangzhou, the focus is on this idea of “self-organization.”
ALICE M. W. JIM: Was the Self-Organization component of the Triennale to be considered similar to the satellite or alternative parallel exhibitions that are often staged concurrently, and often in opposition to the main official exhibition, even though it was actually presented as part of the overall exhibition?
HOU HANRU: Well, I don’t think one has to come up with the oppositional relationship between the established biennale and the alternative. Actually, I think this is part of the triennale and biennale, and even a very central part because, again, it’s a question of questioning or challenging
the definition of the physical form of the biennale/triennale, which has been previously defined as a specific form. So in a way, this is why we [the curators] very much emphasize how a biennale/tri- ennale shouldn’t only be one exhibition or something limited to a specific space and time. This is why we cannot avoid the question of the whole process of the laboratories [D-Labs] and the whole process of researching and engaging the local situation from the very beginning of the conception of the Triennale, and also the whole process of having the artist work in situ.
ALICE M. W. JIM: Could you talk about the actual design of the exhibition, with the wooden palettes and metal scaffolding on the ground floor, and perhaps discuss it in connection with the Chinese government’s intentions of one thousand museums by 2015?
HOU HANRU: Well, these two questions are not systematically related. Let’s come to the design first. I have been working on various projects quite systematically with architects (like Cities on the Move, Zone of Urgency in Venice, etc.) to create a special context for the exhibition. I don’t believe our work is something simply autonomous and neutral, so in a way I don’t quite trust the white cube. So every time, I think an exhibition should not only show single pieces of work but also create its entire world or situation so that the work can talk to people. That means there’s a process of redefining the reading or the meaning of the work through the creation of such a very direct relationship between the audience and the work, between time and space. So, with all of this in mind, specifically for a triennale that was focused on the Pearl River Delta, we thought the best people who had, at the same time, a global view and a local view on the situation, and who have been living in the region and doing research on this, was Map Office: the architects Laurent Gutierrez + Valérie Portefaix. In the last few years they did research on how the urbanization process has been interestingly . . . unconventional, let’s say, which is very close to the idea of post-planning—they called it “laissez-faire.”So the typology or the textuality of the urban situation in the whole region becomes a kind of patchwork or collage of very chaotic zones without a clear linear structure. So in this case, it’s a very, very interesting situation. They actually transported this as the basic structure for the exhibition; specifically, they were inspired by this model, and they wanted to break the centrality of the museum space. So they basically decided to physically reproduce what is the central specific urban situation. On the one hand, they are trying to literally
Collaboration by Rem Koolhaas and Alain Fouraux, new building of the Museum, floor plan and model. Courtesy Alain Fouraux.
reproduce the situation by introducing materials from the construction site—palettes and the metal scaffolding—and all of this together, of course, suggests very clearly that it’s about what’s happening in this area, that everywhere is a construction site. On the other hand, they also wanted to provide a relatively theoretical reading of these things; this is why they suggested reducing this literal representation or presentation in a kind of gradual way, to make it more abstract and theoretical as one proceeded through the space. This is why on the second floor, we don’t use the palettes anymore, and instead only reprint the floor plan of the structure on the floor like a kind of map. And on the third floor, it basically disappears.
ALICE M. W. JIM: Was there anything on the third floor structurally in terms of the design?
HOU HANRU: No, there was nothing. There’s only a kind of abstract suggestion, which is kind of immaterial. The process of the exhibition design was a kind of back and forth discussion between the curators and the artists/architects.
ALICE M. W. JIM: This rough look highly contrasted with what we saw or what we envisioned when we visited the Times Museum for the D-Lab which took place the day after the opening. The presentation there was very corporate and slick. The proceedings were also timed to coincide with the open house of the residential complex in which the museum would be integrated, adding to the fanfare. Could you comment on the irony of this? Was this the intended effect?
HOU HANRU: Yeah, well, this is the new situation in China. Contemporary art, or other experimental cultural activities, become something more attractive for the corporate world because they want to build up their image not only as knowledgeable in business but also as cultured, or they want to inject some kind of cultural element into the business. And that has to do with the branding of the corporate image. In the meantime, there are relatively few possibilities for artists and even public institutions to get more support or the kind of basic conditions in order to continue. Most of the museums now are not receiving enough support or funding from the State. They have to basically create their own assets, their own funding sources. So the corporation becomes a very important kind of sponsor.
ALICE M. W. JIM: The Times Development Group was a major corporate sponsor and co-organizer of the Triennale.
HOU HANRU: . . . in this case. Real-estate development is the biggest business now in China, the most immediate money-making business. On the one hand, there are two things. Some people, before going into the business sector, had spent time when they were younger, around our age, doing cultural work or even were artists or very interested in art, and now, when they have money, they want to do something with art as a kind of personal satisfaction or realization of a dream. In some cases, there are sponsors that come up with quite considerable amounts of money to support some cultural events. On the other hand, I also think now it’s getting more and more fashionable to promote a kind of packaging of good living, as a way to sell real estate. You can see all over China publicity and advertisements in magazines, newspapers, whatever, that try to promote a new middle-class identity.
Map Office (Laurent Gutierrez + Valérie Portefaix), My PRD Stories—Space and Material. Courtesy of Map Office.
ALICE M. W. JIM: Is this part of the New China?
HOU HANRU: I think so. I mean, at least, many people in China are yearning for this and it becomes an intangible model of New China. It interestingly corresponds to official demands to construct China into a kind of “well-to-do society,” xiaokang shehui, meaning a society which can provide a relatively comfortable standard of living for most of the people. For example, the dream was to have 800 USD dollars per year for Chinese in the eighties, and now they are very proud that this has been surpassed already. Now parts of society are looking to continue to upgrade. . . . So they think culture, especially experimental art, can provide them with a very fashionable image. This is one of the reasons why many developers are so interested in supporting art. On the other hand, there is more and more speculation on artwork in the business world. So, you now have a booming art market in China, and of course there are some ridiculous things such as the nine hundred auction sessions that have taken place in the last year throughout the country, which is incredibly spectacular but also dangerous. This is how much one can still negotiate in such a context of cultural integrity without losing the basic support from society. So this is of course not an easy thing to deal with. Again, it has to do with the question of alternative, how much one can smuggle alternativeness into such a trend. To get back to the Times Museum. . . . We wanted to show that a gallery is not only a place where you show work but also a place where you produce and realize ideas and projects, a place where art finds a way to reconnect with everyday life. So we wanted to build a museum which is articulated on the space as well as where production and exchanges of ideas happen, with, of course, an archive, maybe an educational program, and also a kind of residential section where artists can stay and share with the public their working process and living process and even display the works in the apartment so that it’s almost like a family. The main structure has three parts. One is on the street level, which is a more open public space, and then you have a very intimate part in the middle, which is apartments, and then you go to the roof where you have a larger space, which is a kind of sky garden. Since the museum is interwoven in the existing building, there are only some things from the street level that you can see at this museum. So there is a very interesting game being played between visibility and invisibility, materiality and process, time, space, and all those things.
ALICE M. W. JIM: To continue with the ideas of family and process, certainly what the giant blue PRD flag at the entrance of the main exhibition by Yang Jiechang from Guangzhou—with curving stripes next to a neon sign reading the title of the piece, We are Good at Everything Except for Speaking Mandarin. PRD—announces is this pride in Canton and the Pearl River Delta region and what is going on now. Can you elaborate on some of the conditions that make this possible?
HOU HANRU: Let’s say it’s essentially about position–taking in different ways. Of course, it’s not only about confrontation, it’s also about promotion. Let me talk about Beyond which has a historical reason: China is not only one place; China has a very diverse and complex structure which combines a lot of very diverse regional cultures. One of the most dynamic and contradictory cultures is of course Cantonese. Canton has always been the kind of place that is closely related to China, but quite subtly different from the dominant culture in Central China. In the meantime it has always been opening doors to the outside for China for the last thousands of years. One of the oldest mosques in the world is still visible now in Guangzhou. This is why Wong Hoycheong from Kuala Lumpur came up with the idea of building a mosque onto the tower of the museum (Minaret, 2005), which suggests that this is a place where multiculturalism has always been an everyday event. On the question of China . . . now there’s an interesting tendency: China is becoming more and more powerful, but how much can we preserve cultural diversity and the
Wong Hoy Cheong, Minaret, 2005, installation at Guangdong Museum of Art. possibility of positioning our independence in terms of lifestyle, social organization, culture, in terms of everything? This is a very urgent question because as part of the globalization process, things are becoming more and more homogeneous.
ALICE M. W. JIM: Under his PRD banner, Yang Jiechang and fellow musicians and artists also performed a rock music concert in which Yang sang about his father, who was a guitar maker. This resonated with the wild and comical PRC Anti-Heroes Cantonese experimental theatre performance by Cao Fei from Guangzhou next door, as well as, and especially with, Shanghai/Guangzhou artist Xu Tan’s big shopping bag outside the museum (Wine for 9 September, 2005), which, according to the artist, provided karaoke to workers who are not ever going to visit the museum. Together, these projects underscore the centrality of Cantonese music in the cultural production of the region.
HOU HANRU: Yes, Xu Tan invited Yangjiang artist Zheng Guogu’s father, who is a very interesting guy who is always trying to invent different kinds of gadgets, taking an alternative device as a social product, including building his own cowboy boot in the sixties, that was really crazy, and he actually organized his own rock band with retired singers using local songs, all these kinds of things, created a total hybrid mixture of folklore pop music and rock ‘n roll music, high and low cultures. This is a very typical Cantonese mentality or cultural state, so high and low and these kinds of notions are not categorized or organized in a conventional modernist way. They are very alive; they don’t limit themselves in an established way of defining things. Xu Tan was actually very interested in such possibilities. Of course Yang Jiechang also uses music in a very similar way, and there was another thing behind the karaoke. Personally, I have also been proposing another notion
related to post-planning. It’s called “internal globalization,”which is also a very interesting phenomenon, one very much in the Pearl River Delta region and also all around the whole country. Because of China’s modernization and integration into the global production and market system, more and more people are attracted to these specific regions that are producing for the global markets; they call it the “world factory.”In the Pearl River Delta, one of the reasons why urbanization happens so fast is because there is more and more industrialization happening here and new townships are being built to host all these production sites and new populations. And the new population from all around the country—even from outside, from Taiwan, Hong Kong, of course, and inner China—bring their own way of living, their own cultures, their languages. So in the past, the Cantonese language was more or less the dominant language, and nobody would speak Mandarin here. Now you have to speak Mandarin in all sorts of social situations because the population has changed in terms of the different levels of society—from the white collar highbrow upper-class to the workers, service workers, and so on. All this together is a very interesting social phenomenon that creates a lot of social conflict as well. So I call this situation “internal globalization.”It’s a bit like the migration from non-Western countries to Western because of the opportunities of work, etc. In the case of how to provide space for cultural entertainment, the cultural activities are an interesting challenge as well, so this is why Xu Tan decided to do this karaoke, which is an open work for the people on the street.
ALICE M. W. JIM: Well, we have run out of time. Hanru, thank you very much.
Design Collaboration: Rem Koolhaas and Alain Fouraux Client: Guangdong Museum of Art & Times Development Group Local Architect: Doreen Liu, NODE architecture Design Institute: CENDES LED installation: NERVECORP
Model of Guangdong Museum of Art. Courtesy of Alain Fouraux.
The new branch of the Guangdong Museum of Art has been generously sponsored by the Times Development Group. Its origin lies in the expanding effort of developers to accessorize their real estate with more and more seductive appetizers to help raise sales figures. What started with modest gardens, bird cages, and gypsum replicas of ancient architec- ture icons is rapidly evolving into a mature niche of the contemporary Chinese Model of Guangdong Museum of Art. Courtesy of Alain Fouraux. building industry. The result is luxurious mini-paradises carefully inserted be-tween newly erected residential highrises. Many of these oases are provided with a clubhouse executed in fancy materials, inspired by architectural styles ranging from ancient Rome to the super-modern structures of a Frank Gehry or a Zaha Hadid. Also, in the heart of such developments, one can find an oasis garden set in a background of elevator music playing from fake tree trunk speakers hidden among the palm trees. But there is something different here.
The first D-lab meeting for the second Guangzhou Triennale brought together the parties whose seemingly contradicting agendas would lead to the idea of this new museum. Artistic Director and Curator of the second Guangzhou Triennale Hou Hanru and architect Rem Koolhaas discussed the idea of a permanent facility to stimulate and sustain the local art movement in Guangdong. This was seen as a potential outcome of the Triennale. The Guangdong Museum of Art, which facilitated the D-lab, had already estab-lished an intimate relationship with the Times Development Group, which, in its quest for improvement, was looking for a more authentic manner in which to add value to its real estate. The outline formulated during D-lab 1 was a museum not for exhibition only, but rather, a place that would stimulate production and creative processes. It was an initiative designed to be strongly local and to appeal to artists from all over the world so that they could experience the unique conditions of working in an environment that is rapidly and continuously transforming. The idea was enthusiastically received by both the Times Development Group and the Guangdong Museum of Art. Since ambitions were high and budgets were tight, we had to engineer the operation as economically and efficiently as possible. Rem invited me, a Dutch born, China-based architect to collaborate on this project. Doreen Liu and her office NODE architecture were selected to function as local architect. After an initial meeting in Rotterdam, we set out on a site visit in late January 2005.
Floorplans for the Guangdong Museum of Art. Courtesy of Alain Fouraux.
Initially, the brief requested us to build a new museum in the garden of the second phase of three of the Times development. A platform of the proposal was to facilitate the local art community of the province of Guangdong with the means for producing art. This was to be a museum about experiencing art in production as well as art in exhibition, a place where artists could gather to exchange ideas and to work with all sorts of tools provided by the museum. To be able to meet the spatial demands for producing art, the building was to be about versatility rather than providing large amounts of generic exhibition space. The building was intended to be like a toolbox the museum can utilize in offering support and facilities for production of art in the broadest sense of the word, as well as a means to exhibit the results.
While strolling around the construction site, we soon discovered a hidden treasure in one section of the residential towers. The various plans from basement to rooftop offered exactly the versatility we had in mind for the new museum, and it suddenly seemed pointless to artificially generate a new building. We proposed to interweave the museum into the newly built nineteen-story residential building of the Times Development Group. The museum is distributed over several different floors of this building, generating a high degree of diversity by an archetype that is very common in contemporary urban China: the commercially developed residential building block. Chinese metropolises are collectively building up a vast amounts of square metres through this typology, resulting in ever-expanding urban peripheries filled with mono-programmed residential
Guangdong Museum of Art in relation to residental tower. Courtesy of Alain Fouraux. neighbourhoods equipped with primary facilities such as supermarkets, convenience stores, and restaurants. On an urban scale, these neighbourhoods increase traffic movement and contribute to the continuous congestion of the main infrastructural arteries in every large city in China. By integrating this museum into a building that was initially designed to be residential, we wanted to build up a case that there is no reason for the mono-programming of the residential peripheries of Chinese cities. The residential building block is able to absorb a multitude of commercial, cultural, and social urban amenities.
Fortunately, the visionary attitude of the Times Development Group gave us the opportunity to change the original design brief for a museum in the garden and to pursue a dream situated at the crossroads of blatantly opportunistic market-driven development and an almost old-fashioned socialist idealism. The result is that it the museum scheduled to open its doors around Chinese New Year 2006.
From the very beginning this project was contradictory in nature; on the one hand it was designed without a clearly formulated program, and on the other hand it had to be designed within a tremendously short period of time. Designing without a program can lead to highly tailor-made solutions, but it requires a lot of time for dialogue between client and designer. The client in this project consists of two parties, namely the Times Development Group, whose highest priority was to turn its real estate into a commercial success, and the Guangdong Museum of Art, which had the priority of making a fruitful platform with which to stimulate the production and understanding of art. The fact that the client consisted of two parties who had an overlapping, but on some issues a contradicting, agenda increased the time pressure even more. The design process was a trial and error session of different proposals through which we obtained a thorough understanding of the needs of our clients.
The museum contains a wide range of facilities for the production of art, such as a wood and metal workshop, video editing equipment, graphic stations, studios, a spray booth, casting tools, and so on. Besides its facilities for the production of art, the entire building is equipped with a public trajectory that offers the possibility to experience the making of art throughout all stages of the process and, at any point, to interact with the artists. The building attempts to trigger a
dialogue between artists and the public, to enhance the understanding of the artwork while potentially generating a source of inspiration.
A long strip of six by fifty metres in the basement parking garage contains workshops for the preservation and handling of incoming and outgoing artwork for exhibition and workshops for rough sculpture and model work. These activities can be witnessed while driving and parking your car.
On the ground floor of the building, in the commercial strip, the museum has a twenty-five by fifteen metre space that holds the entrance, ticketing, and lobby facilities, a museum shop, and a 7.8 metre high space for public events such as screenings, lectures, and discussions. On the mezzanine are staff offices for the museum. Part of the mezzanine can also be used as balcony for the public event space.
Three apartments on the fourteenth floor are slightly altered to facilitate three studios for artists in residence and three generous ateliers for them to work in. The ateliers can be used not only for production but to exhibit art within the intimacy of a domestic environment.
On the rooftop, on the nineteenth floor, are computer workshops, an archive/reading cafe, and a terrace for sculptural work. The top of the three residential towers is covered by a single seventy-five by three metre, large, lightweight roof. The roof functions as a horizontal billboard and can be clearly read from street level. It holds graphic Guangdong Museum of Art rooftop signage. Courtesy of Alain Fouraux. information about the activities of the museum and can be used for projections of all kinds. On the other side of the roof is a seventy-five by eleven metre exhibition hall. It is a large homogenous hall broken down in to different atmospheric zones by a variety of skylights. All spaces on the rooftop are interconnected by corridors located in the residual space of the existing building.
The different levels of the museum are connected by a generous elevator located in a light shaft between two of the residential towers. This elevator is used both for the public and for the trans- portation of artworks.
Since the museum is interwoven into an existing structure, it is hardly visible from the street. The only physical presence of the museum that is apparent from the outside is the horizontal billboard on the nineteenth floor. To mark out the location of the museum in the urban profile, a large double-sided LED sign is cantilevered out of the building, perpendicular to the length of the street. This sign contains graphic information such as the museum’s name and exhibition programs as well as all sorts of different kinds of video footage. It moves up and down the building along with the elevator, to indicate the distribution of the museum over different floors in the building. This moving sign over the full height of the building is the first of its kind, an installation by NERVECORP.
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Ko Siu Lan, 2080, Transborder Language 2005, performance, 60 minutes. Photo: Adele Tan.
It felt as if the month of May 2005 in Beijing was “framed” by two performance art festivals—or, rather, if we are to think of performance art as predicated on action, activity and interactivity, thus going beyond the conventional frames of visual art—“activated” at two ends. From May 1 to 3, Transborder Language: Performance Art/Language Art kicked off the 2nd Dashanzi International 1 Art Festival (DIAF), Language/Fable, at the 798 Factory District in northeast Beijing. The 3rd Dadao Live Art Festival took place from May 18 to 21, coinciding with the final celebrations of DIAF, which ended on May 22. Though billed as events independent of each other, their paths for 2005 were remarkably intertwined, as though each were nested within the other or shading the other imperceptibly. Transborder Language predates DIAF by a year; its intention was to explore the expressive confluence of performance art with another specific genre or form of art, such as poetry or sound. Its theme, however, is now shaped under the aegis of DIAF, with Huang Rui the festival director who also launched Transborder Language, as the mediating node. Huang also presided over the opening ceremony of the inaugural Dadao/Shocker Festival in 2003 in the Dashanzi 798 Factory District. Yet the occasional indistinction also led to conflicts when different agendas were pursued. Dadao was originally intended for the DIAF 2005 programme by virtue of its returning to the 798 factory district for its performance venue, but its organizers deemed the increasing commercialization of the district as a compromise to integrity and autonomy, especially since authorities were heavily vetting and censoring the contents of DIAF, a high-profile event, even more so this time around with it operating under the auspices of the “Year of France” in China. The eventual location was to be Taihu Art Space in Tongzhou, the eastern semi-rural suburbs of Beijing, and also the venue of the 2004 Open Art Performance Festival. This perhaps
reflects a historico-structural pattern of recent performance art in China, such as the splintering off of Dadao from the Open Art Performance Festival.2
Mild confusion arises too when the same nexus of people such as Shu Yang (one of the chief organizers of Dadao and Transborder Language in 2005 as well as of the first three Open Art Festivals) and Huang Rui move in and out of lateral co-operations in parallel performance festivals. But one can see these sets of anxiety and frustration as potentially erupting into an invigorating rhizomatic network of “points of intensity” in a Deleuze-and-Guattarian sense, inviting us to imagine a “Body Without Organs” in which de-regulated flows of self-organiza- Sheng Qi, Cover Me, Transborder Language 2005, performance, 3 days. Photo: Adele Tan. tion take over from meta-hierarchies.3 Such moves are consistent with the dialogic encounters that performance art in China wants to produce with both its own citizens and the international community.
“” The internationalist agenda is perhaps more palpable in Transborder Language, shored up largely by the substantial number of foreign participants and the supporting series of exhibitions, performances, discussions, workshops, and screenings that run across various genres and throughout the month of May in DIAF, as well as the greater financial and media muscle that this festival can flex through its institutional and corporate sponsors. On the other hand, Dadao seems content even to be working on a grassroots level although it regularly extends invitations to artists abroad and has been working closely with the Live Art Development Agency in London, resulting in the ostensible British-French split in the two festivals this year.
But both festivals are equally committed to the potentialities of performance art in the expanded field of “liveness.”If past performance art made inroads into what we had thought about form in the visual arts, then present-day live art makes one think about the extended fields of contexts in which art subsists: performance needs to be “A-live” to the contemporary needs of society, and in this case China. Dadao has consciously appended Live Art Clare Charnley and Shu Yang, Speech, Transborder Language 2005, performance, 60 min. Photo: Adele Tan. to its title since its inception as if to demarcate for itself a broader investment than what was given to its predecessor, the Open Art Festival. It too marks the re-embracing of theatricalization (through drama, dance, and music) in the traditional performing arts that the history of performance art in China has frequently
disavowed in favour of the visual arts lineage that emphasizes the body and action. In explaining the name Dadao, Shu Yang writes:
“Dadao” (the great Tao) . . . means the most basic, or ultimate, truth or way. The word "dao" also means a road, and "dadao" a broad, wide road. I hope that “live art” in China will be a broad road that can accommodate many different kinds of independent performance or performing arts, and that those people who are full of confidence in the future of performance art will be able to walk together down this road.4
And according to the publicity pamphlet of DIAF 2005,
The second edition of the DIAF will stage an exploration of the nature of languages and the language of fables: a research on the boundaries set by language communities, the different kinds of languages and the different contexts in which languages function. . . . “Language” materializes the spoken word— through vocabulary, grammar and punctuation, it serves as an essential commodity for the regulation of all interpersonal communication. “Fable” refers to a fictional story. Fables give us input about these subtleties that are only present in the periphery of everyday life about a transcendental world, about fears and wishes of men, about the darker side of life. Different artists will counter this thematic in their own artistic language. Not only in a static way (photography, video, visual art) but also by performing it. By bringing it out on the streets, as work-in-motion. The festival will therefore concentrate on live performances, from video performance over dance to circus and everything in between. [emphasis mine]
The communicative aspect of the controlling metaphors of myth and language was perhaps best mined by Hong Kong artist Ko Siu Lan, whose 2080 involved the audience in the children’s game of broken telephone where an English and Chinese version of a “fable” about China evolving into a developed country by 2080 was transmitted through the crowd that was itself split into two language groups. They were then invited to write whatever version of this fable they wanted to record onto mantou (steamed bread) that were then arranged onto the 450 cavities in the concrete ground tiles, to form a larger mantou flag. Two participants then read out the corresponding news article from the People’s Daily newspaper from which the “fable” originated.
But a far more interesting form of “lost in transla- tion” was Speech, the collaborative piece enacted by UK artist Clare Charnley and Shu Yang. Addressing the crowd with a microphone, Charnley, who knows no Chinese, mimed and mouthed the sounds of the newspaper reports via a live feed from Shu Yang reading the news reports to her. It was an exercise in frustration as well as circumspection as our hearing faculties were stretched to their limits whilst trying to make sense of these inadequate sounds. It was brought to ironic heights when Charnley then invit- ed the audience to respond to what she said. Most congratulated her on her courage, whilst others reit- erated the social commentaries in her re-produced broadcast, either trying to clarify what was said or taking the opportunity to give voice to their own opinions. Given that free speech and a free media are Poster for 3rd Dadao Live Art Festival 2005. held in a stranglehold by the Communist govern- ment, this performance pried open a brief democratic channel, and, even if little was really said, the intentions were nonetheless reciprocally and intuitively understood.
Li Haijun, Soul, Dadao Live Art Festival 2005, performance. Photo: Adele Tan.
At Dadao, which operates without an overarching thematic, the form and content seems rather more random, circumscribed by the potentialities of the venue. Yet its function has frequently been to facilitate rather than to delineate. The 2005 festival, however, appears to have had a particular feature this time around, and its choice of a more remote location feels like a deliberate decision to accommodate this. The Taihu Art Space is little more than a construction site with half-completed buildings, yet it is also a safe place removed from official interference, where performers can set off fireworks and set alight fuel with impunity. A great proportion of participants this year were students from the Chuanyin Chengdu Academy of Arts, and there is no mistaking that this festival was aimed at fostering young, budding performance artists in China. Amidst works by more seasoned performance artists from China and abroad, the student work looked more like an exercise in experimentation, derivative of past sources. Yet it is impossible to ignore a certain brash vibrancy in the works of these youths who have grown up in a historically different and open-market China. And by mining the art historical legacy of elder Chinese performance artists and carrying traces of their influence, these students also provide a prism into the present through which we can read past works that have now been reconfigured to speak of contemporary sentiments and youth trends. Li Haijun’s Soul, which involves tying a line of clear plastic bags, billowing in the wind, to the building scaffold, is reminiscent of Kwok Mang-ho’s pioneering Plastic Bag Happenings in Beijing in 1979 and Hu Geping’s Water Writing, and it leads one to think immediately of Qiu Zhijie’s Writing the Orchid Pavilion One Thousand Times as well as Song Dong’s writing and printing with water series. But the most intriguing reconceptualization of the binding motif of 1980s performance art in China had to be Xu Dian’s Bind. Instead of the mummified bodies of symbolic angst, Xu made the belts of fellow participants into a looping tool with which to tie the group together as they attempted to traverse the performance venue, charging and stumbling around as they went along in a sort of madcap, multi-legged race.
The efforts of Transborder Language and Dadao are contiguous with the well-travelled concept of Live Art. The theoretical rhetoric of Live Art has been couched within a Brave New World type of
Xu Dian, Bind, Dadao Live Art Festival 2005, performance, 10 minutes. Photo: Adele Tan. optimism and risk. But it is also a sort of rhetoric that throws down new gauntlets for performers and participants alike. Live Art is an expansive body of approaches offering audiences immersive experiences, engaging them as complicit partners in the making and reading of meaning. In the simultaneity, interactivity, and convergence of our media-saturated culture, Live Art invests in questions of immediacy, reality, and hybridity: creating spaces to explore the experience of things, ambiguities of meaning, and the responsibilities of agency. Live Art practices have constructed new strategies for the expression of identities beyond the old distinctions of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality; where the disenfranchised and disembodied become visible, where the politicsof difference are contested, where complexity is confronted and new ways of being in the world are illuminated.5
But this has only served to reveal the gap between aspirations and actualizations in regional festivals like Dadao and Transborder Language. Live Culture feeds off the mediatized, televisual, and Internet age that we all live in. What is still missing from these festivals is not only an intelligent meditation on the content of this age but also an attempt to work with technological potential in the adaptation of form as a means to interrogate old epistemological, physical, and psychological ends. In the sardine-can format of the festival schedule, where no broader informa- tion is provided to contextualize the artists and their oeuvre, the festivals inevitably degenerate into a consumerist scramble for photo opportunities. Yet the barrage of cameras, most of them digital or mobile phone–based, introduces a compelling problematic and layer of mediatization external to the performances. As Adrian Heathfield reminds us: “Being vigilant towards live culture then will involve a constant attention to what is lost when a performance is framed; through its incorporation within discourse, its placement within institutions, its rendition in the document, its residency within new forms and disciplines.”6 The image captured through the camera is already the first frame that registers this loss, and as the spectators look at the perfor- mances through the camera viewfinder, one wonders whether there will be substantial attrition of the experiential whole, where the activity of audio-visual documenting of this spectatorial
Hu Geping, Water Writing, Dadao Live Art Festival 2005, performance, 15 minutes. Photo: Adele Tan. encounter occurs at the expense of being able to think or feel through what is merely absorbed visually, especially since digital photos are easily uploadable to the Internet, shedding with that process corresponding information about the initial encounter. But that has been part of the long-held conundrum facing the history and theories of spectatorial inadequacies inherent in performance art.
Of course, these weaknesses should not blind us to the fact that performance art in China still does not have the cultural, economic, and organizational clout that those across the Atlantic have to fulfil more technically demanding work. It is the hope of the organizers that by persisting within these less than ideal conditions, they would one day have the opportunity to welcome a change in artistic and cultural approaches in China.
⁄ Such fluid modes of interaction have also translated into a shift of the geographic-symbolic kind. Mobility within space and time is an intrinsic element in performance art, and the use of the body is always site-specific if the body is to be considered the primary site from which we depart.
It is significant that these two performance festivals have registered the gradual movement away from a fixation that has plagued interpretations of contemporary Chinese art by finding new loci for their performance works, although the two festivals are still very much venue-bound— Transborder Language remains contained within the courtyard and gallery space of Beijing Tokyo Art Projects. Readings of Chinese visual art have tended to locate it back to well-worn symbols of Mao and the sites of Tian’anmen Square or the Great Wall of China, the last of which has been made the focal point of a large travelling exhibition titled The Wall: Reshaping Chinese
Contemporary Art, curated by Gao Minglu.7 Wu Hung writes of Tian’anmen Square as a “political space,”as
. . . an architectonic embodiment of political ideology and as an architectural site activating political action and expression. Defined as such, an official political space such as Tiananmen Square inevitably lies within the dominant political system and helps to construct this system; but it also stimulates public debate and facilitates opposition. To individual participants in both official and unofficial events that have unfolded here, this space is connected with their personal experiences and aspirations, but it also frames such experiences and aspirations within broad historical movements.8
Wu observes that the introduction and adoption of contemporary art forms from the West have
radically changed the position of the Square in Chinese art, from something to be depicted (whether positively and negatively) to something to be responded to. It is another instance of how a socially conscious avant-garde realizes its political intent through manipulating visual forms. In this case, the site-specificity of new works points to a “return of the real,”as artists re-conceptualize Tiananmen Square as an actual place of political/artistic activities and discourses.9
But if performance art were to stay true to its ethical and even ontological premises of searching out new spaces in which to respond to the current exigencies of contemporary life, then surely it would have needed to seek out new locations to investigate them. This is not to say that these politically and ideologically invested sites and symbols should be forgotten—the authorities would have liked us to purge the blights in our historical memories—rather, it is for us to become more reflexive and attentive to the ways in which we remember and at whose expense. Mao, Tian’anmen, and the Great Wall will not go away. This can be seen in Sheng Qi’s Cover Me in Transborder Language, where he surreptitiously papers over a blown-up print of his famous palm with photocopies of pictures from the Tian’anmen marches and parades. Diverse realities are still going on elsewhere, away from this centrist model of referents.
Dadao’s nomadic existence around Beijing has made incursions into urban commercial/industrial spaces as well as ruraland suburban ones. But it is the pulling power of DIAF that has drawn spe- cific attention to the 798 district (that has been threatened with demolition or conversion into a high-tech industrial park) and the vacuum it fills with its vibrant, organically grown cultural space in the capital. The festival concretizes—particularly to the media—the constant efforts of the artists to preserve the art district, but it also reveals the inherent contradictions and fraying rela- tions within social reality. The concerns of the artists in their earnest wish for cultural conserva- tion are in stark contrast to the condition of thousands of laid-off workers whom the Seven Star Corporation, which runs the district, is responsible for. Sale or development of the district would provide much-needed income to compensate these workers, whose living standards are well below many of the artists staked out in the 798 district.
The mass performance piece A Short Step (The Kilometre Zero Project), initiated by Adrian Hornsby, Jeremy Mercer, and Quinn Comendant for Transborder Language 05, probably captured the incongruities best in a dramatic pièce de résistance by taking a received image of China and recreating it using non-Chinese people, although the premise was to be cross-cultural, reflecting Sino-Western relationships rather than local interclass conflicts. So on May 1, 2005, four hundred foreigners (based on national projections that there will be four hundred new cities by 2020 and four hundred million rural migrants injected into them)—which could easily have been the artist inhabitants of Dashanzi—changed into the emblematic blue factory worker suits of the Chinese, walked through Dashanzi, gathered near the main gate for a photograph, and then went back.
Hornsby asks enigmatically: “Could one nation’s history ever have happened to another group of people? Would one nation’s future ever be acceptable to another nation’s citizens?”10 In this metonymic overture, however, we are also asked to imagine what other histories and social conditions can be allowed into Chinese art historical heuristics.
Finding different discursive sites in which to situate politics perhaps marks a working through of past traumas, where the compulsive repetition through representation of the above tripartite of symbols stands for an inability to get over a failure or a loss. The penchant contemporary Chinese artists have for representing the meaninglessness of contemporary life (repeated ad infinitum) through endless depictions of skyscrapers, motor highways, and consumer commodities is also threatening to go down this path, revealing little else to conscious thought.
Contemporary theory and art is in a double bind, pitched between mourning and melancholia. Would our politics and ethics allow for such getting over? Would we ever find “poetry after Auschwitz,”in the Adorno-esque turn of phrase? The existence of these two performance art festivals in Beijing answers back in the affirmative.
The author would like to thank the University of London Central Research Fund for making the research trip to Beijing possible.
Notes 1 Wordplay is employed in the titling of DIAF, although it is discernible only phonetically in Chinese. DIAF 2004 was titled Radiance and Resonance/ Signals of Time (Guangyin/Guangyin), and the 2005 DIAF was Yuyan/Yuyan. 2 A succinct history of the morphology of performance art festivals in contemporary China can be found in Shu Yang’s essay “Performance Art and Live Art in China: Why do ‘Live Art’ in China?” in Daniel Brine and Shu Yang, eds., China Live: Reflections on Contemporary Performance Art (Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, Live Art UK, Live Art Development Agency, London and Dadao Live Art Festival, Beijing, 2005). 3 See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Athlone Press: London, 1988). 4 Shu Yang, “Performance Art and Live Art in China: Why do ‘Live Art’ in China?” 36. 5 Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine, “Fluid Landscapes,” in Adrian Heathfield, ed., Live Culture, booklet accompanying the “Live Culture” event at the Tate Modern (Live Art Development Agency, London, and Tate Modern, London, 2003), 4. 6 Adrian Heathfield, “Going Live,” in Adrian Heathfield, ed., Live Culture, 13. 7 This exhibition first premiered in Beijing at the China Millennium Monument at the end of July 2005 and will travel to the United States, to the State University of New York, Buffalo, and the Albright-Knox Museum. 8 Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 9. 9 Ibid., 165–7. 10 Documented in the grey book segment of the festival catalogue, which was published after the conclusion of DIAF.
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Xing Danwen, A Personal Diary of Chinese Avant-Garde Art in the 1990s, 1993–1998, image from the series, Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming in The Third Contact. Courtesy of Xing Danwen, Kiang Gallery, Meredith Palmer Gallery, SCALO.
As an individual participating in the changing society of China, Xing Danwen took up photogra- phy in 1989 and used that modern visual medium to record her dialogue with contemporary China’s social reality. At that time, the role and the potential of photography as a means of artistic 91 expression had not been fully recognized in China. During the past fifteen years, social developments and changes have brought enhanced recognition to photography as an art form and to the role the photographic image plays in everyday life, thereby allowing it to become more diversified and complex. Xing Danwen’s art mirrors these social changes in all of their richness.
It is difficult to define Xing Danwen’s art. Her artistic practice with photography is abundant and varied, and her subjects—the body, memory, sexuality, cultural status, globalization, dislocation, consumption, desire—are extensive and reflect her personal concerns. However, despite the various methods she employs and the broad scope of the subjects she chooses, there is one thing that remains unchanged. Through the medium of photography, she continually demonstrates a personal critical view of the reality she encounters and the circumstances of the epoch she lives in.
A Personal Diary of Chinese Avant-Garde Art in the 1990s was one of Xing Danwen’s earliest works. With an individuated perspective and dynamic camera work, she created bold and unconstrained photographic images. She witnessed as a participant and documented the most remarkable moment of China’s contemporary art scene in the nineties: the emergence of performance art in
Xing Danwen, I am a Woman, 1994–1996, image 6 from the series. Courtesy of Xing Danwen, Kiang Gallery, Meredith Palmer Gallery, SCALO.
Beijing’s East Village (an artists’ village). The images depict and transcend the struggle and anxiety of artists who confronted the dilemma between reality and their inner selves. These artists often used their own bodies, at times in states of extreme agony, to reflect the contradiction and conflict they felt, and they attained immortality in the pictures created by Xing Danwen. These self-exiled artists, the extraordinariness of their ordinary lives, their performance art and happenings, have become, through Xing Danwen’s camera, a remarkable visual document of China’s contemporary art history. Her body of work also manifests the essential nature of photography itself—through the revelation of the camera lens, the extreme absurdity of life has been turned into a more powerful and important event than reality itself and has been drastically elevated to a new mytho- logical state. The artist’s strange, powerful surrealistic images have grown into a new structure of reality—a reality that can survive only in the picture. To a certain extent, her photography, while alienated from performance art itself, has alienated the photograph as a document of reality as well. One of the reasons for this is that the photographer, who stares at what is taking place in front of the lens through the viewfinder, is not satisfied to be merely an onlooker but creates an
interpretation with her own subjective eye, which transforms the action in front of the camera within the second of recording it. Under such circumstances it is nearly inconceivable for a photographer to remain aloof from events taking place in front the camera. The atmosphere of the performances, as well as the special mirror-like existence of the photographer herself, made it impossible for her to stay away from these events. Therefore, her visual representation is both participation and subjective interpretation.
Considering the body of work by Xing Danwen in an historical context, it seems possible that a new direction for photography was taking place in China. Her photographs were divorced from mainstream ideology and cast a glance toward marginal society or “others” from the standpoint of mainstream valuation. It was of major significance during that time. With her strongly subjective images, Xing’s photography boldly advocates marginal survival and rights, breaks with convention, and ascribes significance to the objects she photographed from her extraordinary visual perspective. From the very beginning of her photographic practice, she has explicitly shown without any hesitation a consciously subjective attitude. This extends through to her photo essays shot in China and other parts of the world. These works have a similar orientation—the artist uses imagery to express her inner voice and to air her own view of the world.
The female body has most often been represented under a male gaze. Xing Danwen’s I Am a Woman of 1994, boldly rejects this. It can be considered one of the earliest images of nudity shot by a woman in China’s photographic history. As advocated by its title, it represented the establish- ment of assertive self-consciousness by a woman. In an enclosed space, Xing Danwen, through rich and varied visual angles, tricky shadows, and interwoven female bodies, concocted a private space for women, intangible for others. This pictorial space could only be shot with the mutual trust and interdependence of the women involved. One of her photos of a woman facing a mirror is reminiscent of Facing the Mirror, painted by Wen Yiduo for Pan Guangdan’s 1927 psychoanalyti- cal novel Feng Xiaoqing. In the work of Wen Yiduo, the image of the character in the novel, Xiao Qing, was represented in the mirror. In the picture, though, it was the lead character Feng Xiaoqing who was watching herself in the mirror, and there is indeed another pair of eyes watching behind her back. Here, it is a privilege of the man to imagine the woman and structure her image, and it is the man who is motivated to watch and present it However, in Xing Danwen’s work, the same picture of a woman facing the mirror is of a woman watching a woman, a woman defining the emotion and body of a woman. By representing the woman’s body, Xing Danwen provided for the first time a concrete shape to the existence and advocacy of the new woman in China. If these photographic images mark the wakening and consciousness of the artist as a photographer, then her photographing the female body establishes her own female identity.
China is becoming globalized, and perhaps this is a necessity of history, but it carries a lot of external costs. Xing Danwen’s disCONNEXION series of 2002–2003 is about the electronic trash dumped in China by Western countries. This is a severe problem, but it is handled by the artist in an aesthetic way. These images, photographed in Guangdong, China, are graphic in their composition, and this industrial electronic trash originating from far away developed countries is presented elegantly and even sentimentally. Walter Benjamin once remarked on photography’s capability to transform garbage into an aesthetic object. However, Xing Danwen’s intention is not related only to aesthetics. She also returns to the intrinsic qualities of photography with an understanding of the expressiveness of colour, and she intelligently uses colour to contrast with her intention of emphasizing a more resolute critical perspective. One can easily recognize this
Xing Danwen, DUPLICATION, 2003, image 2 from the series, 148 x 120 cm. Courtesy of Xing Danwen, Kiang Gallery, Meredith Palmer Gallery, SCALO. from the disturbingly beautiful images constituted from inorganic plastic electronic products, the negative impact residing under the mask of globalization. Globalization is like a double-edged sword: while developed countries provide themselves opportunities for a powerful economy, the negative effects of environmental and social problems are exported. This virus, growing inside the body of globalization, is circulating around the world. Wherever there are benefits from globaliza- tion, there are also problems caused by it. China, while enjoying the benefits of globalization, is at the same time gulping its bitter fruit.
With her acute consciousness of the theme of globalization, Xing thoughtfully chooses photography as a global communicative visual medium, making her voice on such problematic issues available to the world outside China. Thus, Xing Danwen herself, a Chinese artist who is very active internationally, has benefited from globalization.
Xing Danwen, disCONNEXION, 2002–2003, image C2 from the series, 148 x 120 cm. Courtesy of Xing Danwen, Kiang Gallery, Meredith Palmer Gallery, SCALO.
Xing Danwen’s latest work, Urban Fiction, constructs a modern Chinese city in the process of rapid urbanization. Drawing upon fiction and a theatrical visual language, she intelligently exaggerates the worries, setbacks, and dreams of urban women who are immersing themselves in the middle class dream and thus displaying the loneliness and isolation of urban dwellers as well as the human alienation derived from modern life. As a result of China’s current real estate boom, with its growing number of modern high-rise towers, sales offices and showrooms are now a widespread presence in most cities. In these sales offices, one finds exquisitely crafted architectural models that show both architectural designs integrated with the surrounding community and the interiors of housing projects presented with the roofs opened. These are just maquettes, but they are also an illusion of reality. Real estate developers cleverly create fantasies and dreams. The proportionately scaled-down maquette is a visual marketing tool and a micro-scaled promise of desires that people feel they are able to own. Taking advantage of digital technology, Xing Danwen manipulates these private spaces and fills them with the desires of urban women, giving us the chance to peer together with her into all kinds of secret human dramas performed through her
Xing Danwen, Urban Fiction, 2004–2005, image 0 from the series, 227 x 160 cm. Couresy of Xing Danwen, Kiang Gallery, Meredith Palmer Gallery, SCALO. invented stories taking place inside these architectural models. Through these women’s various forms of behaviour and expression, one can detect complacency, pretentiousness, mistakes committed through blindness, and dead ends. All of these run counter to the myth of middle-class happiness promised by real estate advertisements. Xing lets us peep through the roofs and windows into the interior of what human life is, and she confronts the eternal conflict between dream and reality. Through a corner in a high-rise building, one gets to see the question and the “truth” that reside behind luxury and indifference: to what extent can people be the masters of their own destiny? Xing Danwen thinks that this entire body of work is “playful and fictitious, wandering and interweaving between reality and fantasy.”However, even though it is “wandering and interweaving,”it is just like a sharp needle shuttling back and forth, piercing the fantasy bubble of a desired Xing Danwen, Urban Fiction (detail), 2004–2005, image 0 from the series, 227 x 160 cm. Couresy of Xing Danwen, Kiang Gallery, Meredith Palmer graceful contemporary life. Gallery, SCALO.
No matter how experimental and shifting Xing’s artistic practice is, China’s ever-changing reality constitutes the background and context of her work. As her photography addresses “reality,”the subject matter she examines establishes her own “reality” artistically. The human desire existing in contemporary life has found its formation inside her images. Today in China, photography has become transformed from a popular medium into an art form. Indeed, there are quite a number of artists who know how to seize the opportunity of its popularity without much knowledge about photography itself and manage to get quick attention by using photography boldly. However, Xing Danwen’s artistic practice has, right from the beginning, proved that her involvement in photogra- phy arises from a profound interest, and she has consistently worked with a serious attitude. She understood well the potential of photography and devoted herself to the development of its potential whole-heartedly. She has proved her excellence with a sustained, reliable, and irreplace- able artistic achievement. Through her talents one can discover how photography as a modern medium can be endowed with contemporary significance.
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Qiu Ping, Finger Flowers from Venice, 1999, rubber gloves. Installation at Venice, Italy. Courtesy of the artist.
Like a blossoming flower opening its petals in preparation to spread the seeds for new life, the touch from the hand of an artist can breathe life into anything. Inseparably bound to each other, the artist and the hand coexist as an extension of the mind, making the experience of art possible. As the lily pad is the foundation for the flower, the hand becomes the basis for the artwork of Chinese-Swiss artist Qiu Ping.
Qiu Ping, Red School Desks, 2002, wood, rubber gloves. Installation at Erfurt, Germany. Courtesy of the artist.
Born in Wuhan, China, Qiu Ping studied traditional oil painting at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art), Hangzhou, earning a B.A. in 1987 before moving on to study sculpture at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, Germany. Under the tutelage of Wolfgang Knapp, Ping relinquished painting and the traditional function of the hand in the art-making process and instead redefined the function of the hand as a modular element for the creation of ideas while still maintaining a painter’s sensitivity for colour, form, and framing.
Ping, who has resided in Germany for the past fifteen years, makes sculptural objects and installations that often assume a Western aesthetic, merging decorative elements of occidental kitsch with her Chinese roots and Buddhist ideology. For example, in one work, latex dishwashing gloves are transformed into flowers wherein mass produced products of conformity create non-conformist shrines. Thinking in terms of rebuilding through art, Ping strives to identify spirituality within an objectified and consumerist world.
Created from a circular arrangement of open hands sewn together at the wrists, Qiu Ping’s Finger Flowers grow out of stalks of rubber dishwashing gloves. The palms and fingers of the gloves gently overlap and build upon each other to simulate the petals of each water lily blossom. Loosely “planted” at the bottom of a waterway, Ping’s flowers exist in delicate balance with the environment.
These seemingly innocuous flowers lose their air of innocence when one acknowledges the gender- coded nature of the original function of their material. Inherent within the colourful rubber dishwashing gloves lies the role of women in society. By transforming these gloves into blossoms, Ping recontextualizes domestic female identity while retaining a sense of the feminine. The flowers become symbols of rebirth and purity that create an aura of eroticism that contrasts with what are in fact anesthetized industrial objects.
With clusters of pink rubber glove blossoms floating down the canals of Venice (among other locations), there is no doubt of the kitsch implicit within this type of decoration. Finger Flowers is an example of Ping’s fundamental need to create and regenerate life. By taking something
mundane and reinventing it, Ping opens up the material to interpretation. The latex gloves come together giving a new context to the object out of its normal syntactical structure, denying the utilitarian promise they once offered, and sublimating their inherent kitsch.
Loosely anchored to the bed of the waterway, Ping’s latex glove flowers created a surface of forms that read as nature in the form of something entirely unnatural. Gently hovering over the depths of the canal, Finger Flowers exposed the abstract nature of the world, where nothing is concrete and everything exists in a constant state of flux. Focusing on the pulse of existence, Ping’s unorthodox flowers are permeated with the rhythms of life balanced in unison with their surroundings.
While having been installed in numerous locations around the world, Ping’s flowers have been constructed only with yellow and pink latex gloves. Being simultaneously secular and spiritual, the pink and yellow versions of Finger Flowers exist in a state of ambiguity. The yellow water lily, native to North America, exists as a plant with no associations with religion, but when seen from an Eastern point of view, the finger flowers take on the form of lotus flowers, which symbolize spiritual enlightenment. Ping’s finger flowers conform to a Buddhist Sutra: “The lotuses of heaven can change according to people’s wishes, flowering when needed. In this way they bring joy to the hearts of all. There is no need to declare one false and the other real. Both are called the wondrous lotus flower.”
Created in response to the Gutenberg School shootings in Erfurt, Germany, Qiu Ping’s installation Red School Desks served as a temporary monument commemorating the tragic event. On April 26, 2002, a nineteen-year-old expelled former student walked through the school shooting and killing fourteen teachers and two schoolgirls before a struggle with the police ensued. In the aftermath, a total of eighteen people lost their lives, including one police officer and the gunman, who took his own life.
Situated in the middle of a shallow waterway running through the city of Erfurt, Ping’s memorial is composed of nine red school desks and sixteen red school chairs arranged as though in a classroom. Distinctly visible above the waterline and in contrast to the flat cityscape of greys, whites, and browns, Ping’s desks have a restrained appearance that generates strong emotion. Speckled around the school desks Ping added her finger flowers into an already conceptually strong and sober work. The anonymity of the stark red chairs that makes this work so powerful is affected by the artist’s signature rubber gloves.
Placed in an incongruous site, yet creating an environment for meditation, Red School Desks compels viewers to slow down in order to rebuild a sense of awareness and to think about and question what happened. The empty chairs and tables take on anthropomorphic characteristics, becoming surrogates for the lost souls of the students and teachers who were the victims of this tragedy. Like the moving water that washes the riverbed out to sea, time will erode the memory of this incident.
In Ping’s recent 2005 performance Eating Chocolate, she continues to reprocess her idea of the body through the hand. Producing multiple casts of her own hands in chocolate, Ping creates a
Qiu Ping, Eating Chocolate, 2005. Performance at Berlin, Germany. Courtesy of the artist.
symbolic extension of herself and offers it up for consumption. The performance began with Ping standing behind a serving table, disembodying her chocolate hands into bite-sized morsels using a butcher knife. As Ping carved up her hands, each cut was echoed by the violent sound of the knife slicing through the chocolate and forcefully hitting the cutting board. Each piece of the chocolate hand was then offered to the audience to be consumed during the performance.
Because it invited the participation of the viewer, Ping’s performance questioned how art is experienced, exposing how everything is in a constant state of being reprocessed. Appealing directly to the body, Eating Chocolate demanded that the viewer participate from hand, to mouth, to body, to mind. Although some may consider this form of chocolate cannibalism disturbing, Ping used it only as a metaphor, offering up a bit of her own sense of spirituality for anyone willing to partake. Inviting viewers to look for an artistic experience beyond the visual, Ping demonstrated that only through the direct experience of all of the bodily senses can the viewer become one with the artwork.
In a world where everything is up for sale, and Buddhist monks in China are now attending business school, the direction Ping’s work is taking through performances like Eating Chocolate returns a refreshing form of idealism to the art world. Through the body Ping shapes her ideas and reveals that the material value of her work is second to its inherent spirituality and ideals. Using materials of the here and now, Ping is able to connect her adopted Western culture with the Eastern roots of her past, creating a synthesis of ideas and materials that serve as a historical bridge. Ping understands that the structure of art is everywhere and that through it, one may open the door to a greater sense of existence.
Notes 1 Ping Qiu, Ping Qiu . . . More than Fragile Flowers (Berlin: DNA—Die Neue Aktionsgalerie, 2005), 91. 2 Chang Chin-ju, “Lotus, Flower of Paradise,” Sinorama 22, no. 7 (July 1997), 38. 3 “18 dead in German school shooting,” BBC News, April 26, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1952869.stm.
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Feng Mengbo, Street Fighter IV, 1995, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.
There is little of substance published about Beijing artist Feng Mengbo, even though he is fre- quently mentioned as an important contemporary Chinese artist.1 When his name does appear, it is often in the context of Political Pop and, invariably, mention is made of his use of computers and computer imagery to deal with Chinese history. Generally, aside from such cursory comments, what is presented includes basic biographical facts, perhaps a page-long artist’s statement, and of course the artist’s work itself, which ranges from paintings to interactive CD-ROMs and computer games. I would like to focus on a close visual analysis of one of Feng Mengbo’s early pieces, Street Fighter IV, the key work in a series of four oil paintings from 1995 devoted to the arcade game of the same name. Painted four years after he graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts, this painting is one of the last works Feng created before branching into less traditional media. In particular, I will focus on how three aspects of Chinese history—the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Tian’anmen Square incident, and China’s opening up to a global economy—inform what might at first glance appear to be nothing more than a painted screen shot of an extremely popular video game.
Before turning to the painting, we need to take a closer look at the game that Feng is quoting. Street Fighter is an arcade game that one or two players at a time can play. Each player in the game chooses one character and is limited by that character's strengths and weaknesses (in the case of only one player, the computer is the second character). The basic concept of the game is to fight the evil M. Bison who threatens to take over the world. In order to fight him, however, the player
needs to win a series of other fights, each more difficult than the previous. Through mastering various combinations of button pushing and joystick wielding, the player can execute a variety of on-screen moves including combination punches, kicks, and jumps. By imaginatively and skilfully employing these moves, he or she can defeat the opponent.2
The original Street Fighter arcade game was released in 1986, one of several similar fighting games. Street Fighter II, however, released in 1991, created a huge stir that revitalized the gaming industry, spawning numerous copycat games as well as a whole franchise of Street Fighter sequels, including video games.3 Not only did its graphics far surpass anything on the market, but it also gave players more characters to choose from and much more control of the figures’ actions through pressure-sensitive buttons. It is this second game that Feng Mengbo quotes in his work.4
To the novice's eye, Feng Mengbo's Street Fighter IV (so named because it is the fourth painting in the series) seems to be merely a still from this animated video game. It shows two relatively three- dimensional characters fighting each other against the mostly static background of an “exotic” locale.5 The power bar near the top gives us their names—Wang and Chun Li—and shows us how close each character is to being knocked out (KO) and thus losing the battle. In this case Wang is currently behind in power but ahead in points.6
Works like this one, because of its clear references to the mass media, are often labeled Political Pop, a term applied to the artistic creations of several Chinese artists of Feng’s generation (he was born in 1966). Each of these artists, including Feng, combines elements of the artistic style and ideals of the People’s Republic of China with modern-day consumerism. Feng, however, denies any political role for his art, asserting that his work is based on his own private understanding of culture and that it is aimed at the widest possible public audience. He states he would “rather be considered a game artist than a Political Pop artist.”7 Yet Feng continually incorporates elements of Chinese history and culture into his artwork, a history and culture which—especially in Feng’s lifetime—is not apolitical.8
A more informed look at Street Fighter IV also reveals that Feng made several important changes to the game, changes that emphasize a political reading. The most important of these changes is his creation of an additional character, Wang. While Wang does not appear in any of the Street Fighter video games, he appears in all four of Feng Mengbo's Street Fighter paintings and is clearly the protagonist. This reading is emphasized by the fact that Wang’s vital statistics (“stats”) are on the left-hand side of the screen, and that he replaces the video game’s lead character, who is one of the game’s most popular characters, Ryu.9 Like Ryu, Wang is young with short dark hair. But instead of a martial arts uniform, he wears the uniform of the Red Army complete with a Communist red star on his hat. Wang is thus a young soldier in the People's Liberation Army (PLA), which makes him one of the three exemplary types—workers, soldiers, peasants—from Mao's People's Republic of China (PRC).
By replacing Ryu with Wang, Feng Mengbo inserts political ideology—that of the Communists— into the Street Fighter universe. In this context, Wang can be seen as a representative of the PLA fighting “evil” to improve society.10 In Streetfighter IV his foe is Chun Li, a real character from the video game. She is the game's only Chinese character and its only woman. Although one could read this confrontation as a reflection on the relative equality that women experienced in Mao-era China, I believe Feng Mengbo is instead asking us to compare his version of a Chinese character
with the game’s version.11 In comparison to the barefoot, simply dressed Wang, Chun Li wears contemporary Western style clothing. Although the background on which they fight belongs to her in the video game, in the painting, she is an outsider, a Westernized figure. This reading is further emphasized by changes Feng Mengbo made to the background scene. The mother and child on the far left, for example, have been de-modernized: their hair has lost its styling, and their matching clothes have lost their collars and waistlines to become smock-like. Similarly, a woman with bright red lipstick, wearing shorts and riding a bicycle in the background of the video game, has been replaced in the painting by an old Chinese man.12 These changes highlight the modern and feminine qualities of the Chun Li character, who has not been altered in the painting from how she appears in the game except for the elongation of her face to accentuate her “Asian” eyes. Chun Li can thus be seen to represent the corrupting influence of the West within China and stands as an enemy against whom Wang fights, not unlike the PRC he represents, which severely limited contact with the West for nearly three decades.13
Another element of the work that recalls the PRC is its didactic potential. During the Cultural Revolution, the arts were completely revamped and Revolutionary Operas and Ballets, in particular, were rewritten in the belief that culture could help mould the minds of the people, that one could learn how to act in society by watching heroes. Gaming takes that one step further. When we play a video game, we become the figure we are controlling. In this case, we become Wang. We tell him to kick and he obeys. If he dies, our game is over. By creating this figure so clearly within the Street Fighter gaming world, Feng Mengbo is asking us to step into the role of the PLA soldier. We become one of Mao's cultural revolutionaries fighting evil. Feng Mengbo's choice of the name Wang further emphasizes this reading because it is such a common name in China; this character is “Everyman,”and therefore anyone can become him.14 In both cases, the audience is the same: the masses rather than the educated elite. Video games are a low art that appeal to a broad audience, especially teenage boys, the same target audience from which the PLA took its soldiers.
Another link to the PRC is the style of his painting. Crisply and realistically delineated (albeit as animation), the work is similar to the Socialist Realism favoured in the Mao era. It was then that oil on canvas was first adopted by the government for its official art. Before that, oil painting was seen as distinctly “modern” and Western, a genre rarely used in China before the twentieth century. In the PRC, however, the realism of oil painting was embraced by the government and seen to be particularly useful for propaganda because it could depict reality like a photograph, but it could also be easily manipulated to reflect political ends such as in Dong Xiwen's Emperor Mao Declaring the PRC. In the case of Street Fighter IV, Feng Mengbo paints his new character, Wang, on an altered background because it suits his purposes.
One of these purposes might be commentary about a horrific event of the recent past. The Tian’anmen Square incident of June 1989 dashed youthful hopes for democracy when the govern- ment brought in the military and tanks to end their peaceful demonstration. Presumably Feng Mengbo was deeply affected by these events, not only as a twenty-three-year-old living in China, but also as a student at the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts, an institution that played a prominent role in these events. In this context, one can read Street Fighter IV as a commentary on the violence with which his generation was raised—the PRC’s emphasis on revolution and the valourization of the soldier as someone at the forefront of society—a violence that can be seen as a forerunner to the events at Tian’anmen Square.
Feng Mengbo, Street Fighter I, 1995, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.
Perhaps he is also pointing out the fact that youth throughout the world spend countless hours and enormous amounts of money on video games learning how to master moves that will enable them to kill their opponents.15 He himself states, “Why are there millions of young people who enjoy them video games? Why do they like to be the figures in the bloody game of ‘a naturally born killer’? When they kill the people on the screen with a machine gun, what are they thinking about? . . . I have no answer.”16 The primary point of so many of these games is killing, and not even for a good cause, but merely to get a high score. By inserting a PLA soldier into the game, perhaps Feng is trying to reinsert some sense of meaning into these games, something he says he was always looking for as a youth himself while playing them.17 Rather than killing merely for points, by becoming a PLA soldier, you are fighting for higher ideals. And yet this addition of meaning echoes the PRC-encouraged violence previously mentioned.
By quoting Street Fighter, Feng Mengbo may also be drawing attention to the fact that in a video game one can take action with impunity, whereas this was certainly not the case in twenti- eth-century China, as both Tian’anmen Square and the early years of the Cultural Revolution attest. As he states, “you can select the players and weapons, go to anywhere you like, and you can shoot anybody on the screen. You feel like a hero as Schwarzenegger or Yang Zirong—that makes you strong and powerful when you hold the mouse.”18 At least in the world of the game, one can learn the rules—which, unlike in the real world, do not change19 —and by mastering the keystroke combinations and employing them correctly, one can become master of the games universe.
Another reading of Street Fighter IV is about freedom. One of the reasons the Street Fighter game became such a mega hit was that the number of characters to choose from increased. Players can escape the real world by becoming one of these characters. Yet the freedom this entailed was merely assumed. In reality you are restricted by the characters offered and by the strengths and weaknesses programmed into them, not unlike in the real world. In the case of the PRC, people were limited to the roles of peasants, workers, or soldiers. In the post-Mao era, the roles one can
play are more ambiguous, which is perhaps unnerving to those used to knowing the rules and the accepted roles, especially when the consequences for acting incorrectly include such events as the massacre at Tian’anmen Square.20 And yet, unlike us—the art viewer or the games player—Feng has empowered himself by creating his own character.
Feng’s interest in the present day also appears in the fact that what he refers to in this work—a popular video game—is the perfect commodity. As Julian Stallabrass states in his 1996 book Gargantua, Manufactured Mass Culture:
. . . the labour forced on the player is not real, the instrumentalism not really consequential, and noth- ing (except time) is really consumed. As if previewing cyberspace, this simulation takes the form of a commodification which has arrived at a more rarefied stage, emptied of all materiality. Here in the world of the computer game, use value and exchange value are no longer opposed, but are collapsed into an ideal unity. The game world appears as a perfect, utopian market, in which bright, clear-cut commodities are, for once, all that they seem to be.21
It is this world that Feng Mengbo is directly copying, perhaps commenting on the commodification of Chinese society that began in 1978 with the opening of Chinese markets to the West. Without that, he would not have played a game like Street Fighter as a teenager in China. This sense of commodification also appears in the work itself, not only in its quotation of the game Street Fighter, but also in its inclusion of the Coca-Cola trademark into an otherwise Chinese scenario. The red of the Coca-Cola logo merges seamlessly with the red banners of provincial Chinese art and of Communism in both the game and the painting.22 But in the painting there is an under- current of irony: the PLA soldier, standing to the side of the Coca-Cola signs, fights for higher ideals, which end up being the commodification and Westernization of Chinese culture.23
With the corruption of state officials who became rich from the market economy through questionable dealings, there is certainly an ambivalence toward Westernization—a sense of China versus the West—which we can see in Feng Mengbo’s work if we broaden our view to include two other works in the Street Fighter series. In both Street Fighter I and II, Wang is pitted against Guile, the blond-haired, muscled American military man who is one of two Americans and a real character from the game.24 In Street Fighter I, which looks like the opening screen of the game, Wang and Guile are on opposite sides of the screen, their respective flags beneath them. This is China versus America. Whereas earlier I tentatively read Street Fighter IV as Wang/PLA fighting evil forces within China (i.e., Westernization), here it is extremely difficult not to read these two examples as Communism versus Democracy, or Communism versus Consumerism. The name Guile, although not altered by the artist, works well to emphasize a sense of dishonesty in the western half of each binary.
Street Fighter IV shows that Feng Mengbo is aware of some of the stereotypes the West has of China, an awareness that comes from both the recent influx of Western products and ideas into China and from his use of the Internet, which allows him to not only talk to Westerners but to view their online creations without government censorship.25 In particular, the stereotype of China as industrially backward is captured in this work. This can best be seen in the background of the image. The ground is made of cobblestones, there is an old-style electric light on a lamppost, and there are two open-air stalls from which people are presumably selling goods: the stall in the centre has meat strung up, and the other stall has a caged chicken and a man holding a chicken upside down by its neck. While each of these factors appears in the game, Feng made several important changes to emphasize the feeling of a “backward” town: several of the figures, including
Wang, are barefoot in the painting, the background has been cropped to de-emphasize the power lines at the top and to the right, and, as mentioned earlier, the clothes of the mother and child at the far left have been de-modernized and the modern woman on the bicycle has been replaced by an old Chinese man.
Another stereotype this painting touches upon is that of the “exotic” Asian woman as sexual dominatrix. The emphasis on Chun Li’s long and powerful legs—flaunted in a characteristic jump—the high-heeled boots, and the studded bracelet, as well as the fact that she is currently winning the fight, indicates a powerful and sexual woman. Feng Mengbo’s elongation of her eyes accents her Asian ancestry. Her success among teenage boys is attested to by countless fantasies where she is celebrated as arguably the “hottest” female game characters of all time. Chun Li can be seen to represent the evil that Wang fights, standing not only for the influence of the West in China, but also its seductive appeal, the glamour it possesses in the face of higher ideals such as those of the PLA, which appear backward in comparison. Punctuating this reading is the fact that Wang is currently losing the fight. That it is still early, however, and the game is not yet decided, perhaps reflects ambivalence on the part of the artist toward tradition and modernization.
The manner in which Wang is portrayed also seems to refer to a Western stereotype of China. Barefoot, dressed in a uniform that can also be read as a martial arts outfit, and with muscles rippling, Wang seems to be a reincarnation of Bruce Lee, who, before his untimely death, had dominated the martial arts film industry in Hong Kong, and who continues to be a major icon in the Western view of China. Although this film genre was disliked by the PRC, it is one that clearly appeals to the same audience that video games appeal to, mainly young men.
Feng Mengbo's entire life has seen the repeated repression and re-emergence of Chinese responses to an influx of Western art and human freedom to which living in Beijing gave him a front-row seat.26 It is not surprising, then, that his early work addresses Chinese history and Westernization and does so dressed in a conservative Social Realist style that focuses on the seemingly trivial subject matter of arcade games, which, on the simplest level, can be read as patriotism and support for the army.27 Nor is it surprising that he has never exhibited his work in China, preferring a global market instead, a market that has encouraged his work and allowed him to branch out into new media that would be considered scandalous in mainland China. Choosing to remain in Beijing, Feng Mengbo combines elements of the history and culture he has grown up in with elements of the global world that continues to affect his life, not only by its impact on contemporary Chinese culture but also by allowing him to support himself as a “modern” artist in China.
Notes 1 Yomi Braester, a professor at the University of Washington, has been doing research on Feng Mengbo that is yet to be published. He gave a paper at the 2004 Association for Asian Studies, “Cityscapes in Virtual Space: Urban and Recent Digital Art,” in which he addressed some of Feng’s most recent work. 2 The target audience for Street Fighter and similar games was teenage males. There is only one female character in the game. 3 Jer Horwitz and others. “The History of Street Fighter,” undated; http://www.gamespot.com/features/vgs/universal/sfhistory/history.html, accessed June 25, 2005). 4 The title “Street Fighter II” clearly appears in the first painting of the series. I am uncertain whether he is referring to the arcade game or the video game and will use the more general term, “video game,” for the rest of this paper. The main difference between the two is that an arcade game is played in an arcade at a standing console, a video game, at home on a computer or television. 5 These locales correlate with the various characters in the game. 6 The yellow bar shows how much power each character has. With each punch they receive, the yellow decreases toward the KO in the middle. The number above this “power” bar indicates how many points they have. In this case, Wang has 246, Chun Li 170. 7 Feng Mengbo, “Artist’s Statement,” 1998; member.neatease.com/~mbgame/page/tmdc9.htm (January 12, 2001). 8 Other works he has created include Game Over: Long March, 1994; Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, 1992–95; Taking Mt. DOOM by Strategy, 1998; and Taxi! Taxi—Mao Zedong I–III, c. 1992. 9 In Street Fighter, the first player’s character’s stats are on the left while the stats of the second player (or the computer, in the case of only one player) are on the right. That Wang replaces Ryu can best be seen in Street Fighter I, where Wang takes Ryu’s position in the top left box in the two rows of players faces the bottom of the screen. Ryu does not appear in any of the other boxes. 10 Feng Mengbo interprets this figure more specifically as a member of the Red Army, the precursor of the PLA. As such, “the character for me is quite ideal [rather] than reality.” The distinction between the Red Army and PLA is otherwise minute. Feng Mengbo, “RE: Article about ‘Streetfighter IV,’” April 13, 2005, e-mail message from artist to the author. 11 That Feng Mengbo wants us to focus on the Chinese heritage of these two figures is further emphasized by changes he made to the sign above them. While in the game the text is presumably the name of a restaurant (the first character is unclear due to the vertical line, but presumably means “Amoy,” an island near China), in the painting, it reads “Ai Min,” which translates as “love one’s people.” The meaning of this textual change, however, is ambivalent: Is Feng Mengbo admonishing Chun Li for choosing the West, or the two of them for fighting against each other? (Thank you to Sheri Lullo for the translations into English.) 12 These women in bright red lipstick and matching shorts are the most frequent bicycle riders in the video game; there are also modern-dressed men in bright green shorts in the game. 13 This contact was limited from the early 1950s until 1978. 14 According to China Today, “Today, there are 3,050 Chinese surnames, but 87 percent of all Han Chinese use 100 or so common ones. Among these, Li, Wang and Zhang are the most commonly heard, given to about 250 million Chinese.” See “Understanding the Beauty and Reasons Behind Chinese Names,” reprinted from China Today, March 1997, at www.night.net/rosie/0397-names.html (June 25, 2005). 15 Killing is one of the main activities in most video games; non-killing genres include puzzles and simulations. Julian Stallabrass, “Just Gaming,” in Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture (London: Verso Press, 1996), 88. 16 Feng Mengbo, 1998 17 “I spent many hours on video games. But even [though] I played a very crazy game, I still couldn’t enjoy it too much deeply, as many young boys what I know. I tried to see something behind the screen. There should be something there. . . .” Feng Mengbo, 1998. 18 Ibid. 19 Here I am referring to the constant changes in artistic policy that Feng Mengbo would have witnessed as a young man, especially during the 1980s. 20 This is not to imply that the demonstrators were at fault. 21 Stallabrass, 91. 22 Although the restaurant sign is green in the video still (fig. 2) and red in the painting, there are some versions of the game in which the sign is red. Since there are countless spinoffs of the Street Fighter game, as well as national variations, I have not been able to determine if Feng Mengbo intentionally changed the color or not. In either case, the red and white of the sign fits with the Coca-Cola logo on the cases behind it. 23 In a later work, Video Endgame Series: Long March, the Red Army protagonist throws crushed Coca-Cola cans as if they were bullets or grenades. 24 Street Fighter II was untitled. I am assuming it is the second in the series based on its subject. 25 Feng Mengbo supports this reading: “In games like SFII, Chinese scenes are quite often shown, which [are] huge[ly] different [from] the ‘real’ China as I know [it]. After my first oversea[s] visit [in] 1993, I understood these scenes were made from the reality of China Town in western countries.” Feng Mengbo, 2005. 26 As a major city, Beijing had considerable access to western art and ideas. Throughout the 1980s it hosted numerous exhibitions of western art, including one hundred works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1991; exhibitions on Picasso and Munch, 1983; works from Moscow, 1984; 300 Years of American Painting from the Brooklyn Museum of Fine Art, 1984; a Canadian exhibition of French Impressionism, 1985. Certainly as a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he would have also seen the Avant-Garde art exhibition at the National Gallery in Beijing in February 1989 and known of its subsequent scandal. 27 He is presumably aware of officially sponsored exhibitions that heralded, as Michael Sullivan states, “patriotism, support for the army, science, health, the one-child family, and protection of antiquities,” as well as the repression of avant-garde works such as the closing down of the Avant-Garde Exhibition in 1989. See Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996), 228.
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This is the 56th year of the People’s Republic of China, and in the Western calendar it is the year 2005. This essay was written in Chinese two years ago for friends, in summer of the 54th year of the People’s Republic (or 2003 in the Western calendar), but it was never published. This past autumn, my respected friend Liu Dahong completed his monumental set of paintings Red Calendar: The 24 Solar Terms of the Year; its broad historical vision and cosmic implications enlighten those of us who are ignorant of the relation between Heaven and History. This land- mark work has prompted me to revisit my own thesis and to present it as a humble corollary.
–Double Yang Festival, Autumn, 56th Year of the People’s Republic, Hong Kong, China
In the past decade, Chinese contemporary art has gained significant ground on all international cultural fronts. At this stage, even though it is still too early to tell whether these strongholds can be defended, no one can deny the immense expectations placed upon China’s contemporary
Liu Dahong, Red Calendar: 24 Solar Terms, 2005, oil on canvas. Photo: Eddie C. Y. Lam. Courtesy of Hanart TZ Gallery. artists. Putting art in the context of political history, the Long March led by Mao Zedong, symbol of China’s success in political modernization, makes an excellent comparative model for the soldiers of contemporary culture. In this paper I wish to suggest a cultural strategy by drawing a parallel between modernization and the new historical perspective it has brought in order to reflect on the “new” Long March that Chinese cultural workers still need to mount now that the Revolution has succeeded.
As strategy, the critical turning point for the Red Army was Mao Zedong’s emphasis on exploiting indigenous resources. By abandoning obvious military vantage points, he exchanged tangible advantages for unquantifiable advances in the territory of ideological conversion. Mao recognized that the latter territory was the domain that would truly submit to the rule of the new Communist regime. Today, two types of territories also exist for contemporary art: one gained through recog- nition by the international art community, which is comparable to Mao soliciting endorsement from the Communist International in Moscow, the other is the sphere of influence within China,
which depends upon indigenous acceptance of the methods and ideals of contemporary art. On neither front have Chinese artists depended entirely on imitating Western institutions; they have instead achieved success through merging new cultural trends with local resources and indigenous modes of expression. In the 1990s, Chinese artists were like folk militia in Western uniform, spreading the gospels of its Long March in the West, creating expectations for contemporary China. Within China, their international successes also gave hope to the cultural community. Therefore, the urgent task today is to satisfy these expectations by developing viable strategies and practical party lines. These strategies and party lines must ultimately return China to its own cultural roots as well as set an example for the rest of the world. In this case, the immediate task is to develop projects that are culturally, geographically, and historically close to the heart of China. Curators and theorists should join forces to stimulate creativity by excavating indigenous resources. In the past decade, the important achievement was to go out into the world and interact with Western societies. Today, it is more important to turn inward in order to confront local audiences and mobilize intellectuals at home.
To stimulate creativity and restructure indigenous resources, curators and theorists of contemporary art might learn from Mao’s strategy for the Long March, the aforementioned exchange of tangible territory for the intangible domain of ideological sympathizers. Curatorial practice should then be directed to local artists and other cultural workers as its principal audience so as to build a healthy dialogue between creative art and criticism. Curators should also expand the contents of art to
include more “native” materials, such as the traditional fine arts of the literati, or the unrefined folk arts and crafts. With this approach, it will be possible not only to expand the range of contemporary creative art but also to break the monopoly of the new academy (and so-called “experimental” art) and its “Moscow” inclinations; in other words, the fashionable tendency of contemporary art to align itself with the cultural trends of Europe and America to the neglect of China’s own context.
To have replaced the orthodoxy of Chinese politics and culture with Marxism is not simply a matter of introducing Enlightenment concepts or “progressive” ideas; it is the complete abolishment of everything Chinese culture had ever stood for and the reinvention of the nation anew. Mao Zedong had said as much himself. This is the most devastating shock to the Chinese body politic and to the integrity of its culture in three thousand years. To mark the new beginning, a primordial myth is needed, and it is the Long March. What has made this revolution different from all the others in China’s past history is its radical concept of history. The brave new world envisaged by
Marx is a utopia positioned at the end of history, and the revolution is an inexorable progress towards this end. However, this utopia has never been visited by any society, and no one knows what it is really like. For China, to have enforced acceptance of this hypothetical future as the unquestioned teleological purpose of history is where the real revolution lies. This is a real revolution, because traditionally China has always set its vision on the ideal “world of harmony” (da tong as termed in the Book of Great Learning), on the age of the historical Sage Kings and mythic Sages. Previous revolutions in China’s history had always been guided by the memory of a perfect age on which the order of the world was modelled. Therefore, traditional China always put its ultimate faith in the morality and truth of recorded history so as to gauge the actions of the present and to find its bearing in the face of an unknown future against the known, and sometimes idealized, past. A Chinese historical view does not posit itself at the end of time but keeps turning back towards concrete past examples. Historical progress into the future is therefore not linear but open and precarious. The present moment is not on a teleological trajectory but imbued with a long memory that constitutes reality. By comparison, the utopian dream of Christian Europe is about a heaven that is situated beyond history; it is heaven in a virtual space. What Karl Marx did was paint this hypothetical heaven on earth.
Therefore, the great significance of Mao’s Revolution was in having established the foundation for a radically new historical view. Its legacy is evident in the way China now marks its calendar: until the National Republic was founded, China persisted with the traditional practice of marking each
Liu Dahong, Red Calendar: 24 Solar Terms, 2005, oil on canvas. Photo by: Eddie C. Y. Lam. Courtesy of Hanart TZ Gallery. era with a new dating system (when the People’s Republic was founded in the Christian year 1949, it was the 38th year of the Republic of China); but with the Communist revolution this practice was abolished to align with the European calendar. China now marks history with the birth year of Jesus Christ, just like Christian Europe; this is because China is eager to become part of the West. This is a serious issue that demands some rethinking today. China constitutes a fifth of the world’s population, and it is remarkable that it has decided to abandon the primacy of its own history by subjecting itself to a foreign system of historical time. To abandon this right is to relinquish the hereditary claim to its own past, a subtle loss with far reaching consequences. As a counter example, we just have to look at China’s neighbour, Japan. Japan is one twenty-fifth the size of China, and even now it records each year according to its present Emperor, so that its people see history as a direct link to their own origin while keeping the Christian West at arm’s length.
In today’s world, “modernization” is generally accepted as the inevitable outcome of industrializa- tion and globalization. However, this does not mean we should not find our own solutions to the onslaught of change. “Modernization” is both a necessary evil and veritable benefit, and in dealing with all its complexities each society has cultivated its own version of contemporary culture. To reflect on and resolve the issue of modernity is the true mission of contemporary art, because there is perhaps no issue more urgent than that of meeting challenges to radical cultural conversion. In the case of China, reflecting on history is essential for the sake of finding our own footing, and indeed for the survival of indigenous culture in any significant way.
So the next stage of Revolution should be a New Long March. The questions we ought to ask are: “What should we do after the Revolution has succeeded?”“How do we apply our resources now that we are on the way to prosperity?” After Mao’s Long March, the Red Army successfully swept across the nation to success. But if we take an overview of twentieth-century history, it is evident that the success of the revolution of modernization is in fact total victory for western culture. For the Chinese, everything hitherto deemed essential for its cultural identity has been converted to the Western system, from dress and lifestyle to systems of measurement and structures of governance, and a host of local customs have been lost that should have been preserved. To be converted by another is to submit to another’s jurisdiction. This is the current situation; to address it the New Long March ought to be a cultural effort that takes the world as its field. The overwhelming success in China of McDonald’s and Starbucks, both far from the products of need, testifies to the victory of corporate culture and its seduction of a model lifestyle. It tells us that such cultural attractions and creative imagination will be the leaders in the new era. We should remember that on the first Long March, imaginative vision was precisely the reason that the Red Army lured both peasants and intellectuals to its ranks. The Red Army offered a seductive vision of the future, generating imagination and hope.
The historical significance of the Revolution was to have ushered in a new era and a new culture. Today, in order to complete its task, and to take its project to the world, the New Long March must once again align itself with history and the right order of Heaven and Earth. The Book of History (or the Spring and Autumn Annals) opens with the sentence: “Spring, King, Align Month.” The Gongyang Annotator asks why “King” is put before “Align Month.”He then tells us it is because of the Great Order. The Great Order provides structure and meaning for history. To do this it is necessary to recognize one’s historical lineage and to differentiate between the “mean” and the “peripheral,”the orthodox and the vanguard, the middle ground and the extreme. When everything finds its proper place, then culture will have arrived at a meaningful breakthrough. Then, and only then, will McDonald’s be properly placed in the order of things, and Starbucks taken at the right moment. Therefore, for Chinese cultural workers today, the task is not just to rediscover indigenous resources, but also to recover the magic of outdated ideological wisdom from the distant past in order to find orientation and global positioning on its revolutionary mission across the face of the earth.
Summer of the 54th year of the People’s Republic
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Xu Zhen, Rainbow, 1998, video, 4 minutes. Photo: Xu Zhen. Courtesy of Shangart.
The Haudenschild Collection focuses solely on the media of photography and video. In this respect, it is unique among the increasing number of collections of contemporary art from China. Starting in the late 1990s, Eloise and Chris Haudenschild travelled regularly to China and slowly acquainted themselves with local art scenes. They started their explorations in Shanghai, where they bought their first pieces from artists such as Yang Fudong, Shi Yong, and Xu Zhen. Zooming into Focus: Chinese Contemporary Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection debuted
at the San Diego State and University Art Gallery in October 2003. It was subsequently shown in Mexico City and Shanghai, only to end its travels with a grand finale at the National Art Museum in Beijing from November 5 to 20, 2005, becoming the first retrospective show of contemporary Chinese photography and video art ever held there. Although displayed in the side wing of the museum, the show occupied an impressive 1,000 square metre exhibition hall and showcased nearly fifty photo and video works by fourteen artists—the vast majority of them belonging to the Haudenschild Collection, with a few added pieces requested from artists to make the exhibition more representative of the overall field.
The first piece to greet visitors upon entering the exhibition space was Xu Zhen’s video Shout (1997), a version of which was also exhibited in the first Chinese national pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. For this work, Xu Zhen positioned himself at busy intersections and then proceeded to periodically emit a scream. The reactions of passersby are videotaped from the artist’s perspective. While many of the them are unfazed and go on about their business—life in the hectic metropolis having made them immune to unusual external stimulation—others turn around and stare, either to determine the origin of the scream or to simply gawk incredulously at its emitter. The video is highly intuitive in its interaction with the people on the street and immediately engages the viewer, thus making a great entrance piece for the exhibition.
Hong Hao, Mr. Hong Usually Wait Under the Arch Roof for Sunshine, 2001, photograph, 120 x 150 cm. Photo: Hong Hao. Courtesy of the artist.
Weng Feng, Sitting on the Wall, Haikou, 5, 2002–2003, photograph, 125 x 160 cm. Photo: Weng Feng. Courtesy of Shangart.
The eerie sound of slapping lured the visitor further into the exhibition space. At the far end of the corridor a narrow crevice in the wall that both revealed and obscured another of Xu Zhen’s video works, Rainbow (1998). The piece records a naked person’s back being violently slapped. All the viewer can see is the person’s flesh increasingly turning red. In the beginning, the distinct markings of hands are visible, but slowly these prints merge into an large, indeterminate patch of redness. The video was installed in a freestanding cube with only a narrow entrance. Emulating a crack in a wall, the installation effectively conjured up the feeling of voyeurism. It forcefully catapulted the viewer into a state of conflict where the enjoyment of the artwork seems to equate itself with the enjoyment of pain, which in turn elicits a certain degree of revulsion. Beyond doubt, this push-and-pull effect makes Xu Zhen’s work more haunting than usual, especially as the muffled sound of slapping lingers and accompanies the visitor as he or she continues on to view the photographs installed in the outside space of the room.
The majority of the photographs displayed in Zooming Into Focus clearly reflected the current canon of contemporary photography from China as it has been established by international museum and gallery exhibitions. A whole wall was dedicated to various prints from Zhao Bandi’s Zhao Bandi & Panda (1999) series and another to nine works from Yang Fudong’s Don’t Worry, It Will Be Better (2000) series. Cao Fei’s rabid-dog Elle cover girl in Beautiful Dog Brows (2002) lasciviously glared down at the viewer, and prints from Chen Shaoxiong’s Street (1998), Hong Hao’s Mr. Hong Usually Wait Under the Arch Roof for Sunshine (2001), Feng Mengbo’s Q4U (2003), Weng Feng’s Sitting on the Wall (2002), and Yang Zhenzhong’s Lucky Family (1995) were all also prominently displayed. The majority of video works were also among those already widely disseminated in the international art circuit. In addition to the ones mentioned above, visitors could see Chen Shaoxiong’s Anti-Terrorism Variety (2001), Yang Zhenzhong’s 922 Rice Corns (2000) and I Will Die (2002), as well as Zhao Bandi’s The Story of Panda Man Losing His Love (2003).
But among these “old-timers” were also some less well-known but equally important works. Zhu Jia’s early video work Forever (1994), for example, was displayed along with the tricycle to which the artist had tied the camera that filmed the piece. For twenty-seven minutes the viewer
was taken on a head-spinning, ten kilometre tour through Beijing. The blurry and ceaselessly rotating images deny the viewers’ ability to situate themselves in space as well as in time. Unlike other works that focus on and document the change in Beijing’s urban landscape, Zhu Jia’s video seems to point at the constants of urban life, such as the chatter of passersby, cars honking, rushed footsteps, loud arguments at busy intersections, and vendors shouting to promote their wares. Another piece that stood out were the two prints of Song Tao’s In Loud Crowds I Dream of Hanging Myself (2002). In front of the big black iron gate of a colonial-looking building, a young man is propped up as if he had been hanged. The fact that the cord above his head is attached to a small balloon only seems to become clear upon second glance, with the iron gate morphing into an evil black mask glaring down at its victim. The absolute stillness of the image and its absurd construction sucks the viewer into a void where reality is suspended and emotion reigns supreme. It gives Song Tao’s work a meditative aura but equally makes the viewer shrink back from this sombre state of dislocation and alienation. The overall effect was haunting, especially as the echoes of Xu Zhen’s slapping still resonated throughout the exhibition space.
While it is amazing that the National Art Museum allowed for such a show to be displayed in its hallowed halls, the censor’s prying eyes could not be completely prevented from finding some- thing to offend them. The huge black-and-white print (150 cm x 300 cm) of Liu Wei’s humorous take on traditional Chinese shan shui aesthetic, entitled Landscape (2000), illustrates a foggy mountainous vista reminiscent of Guilin’s famous peaks. But the mountains are not made of stone and vegetation but of human buttocks. In some cases pubic hair and genitalia are visible as well as mosquitoes feasting on their fleshy hosts. Sadly, a week after the opening, Landscape had disappeared from the exhibition walls. It seems as if, to put it crudely, it hauled ass.
Lu Hao, New Stone Boat, 2000, oil on canvas, 100 cm x 80 cm. Courtesy of Goedhuis Contemporary, New York.
Lu Hao’s Plexiglas sculptures of famous buildings and his drawings and paintings of buildings, beds, and other constructions look to an older China, one replete with the renown of a great classical culture. It would be easy to see his artistic efforts as defining a kind of nostalgia, a looking back intended to resurrect the bygone. It is clear that no matter what his intentions may be, Lu Hao is determined to mine the past of its legacy and introduce a traditional beauty into the postmodern culture as we know it today. However, unlike many of his colleagues, the artist is concerned not to diminish the past, but rather, to evoke it in ways that reflect his concern about the monstrous, anonymous high rises that have eaten up the small alleys that were once emblematic of China’s way of life. But rather than succumb to feelings of loss, Lu Hao recreates China’s aesthetic and architectural history in drawings and models that reiterate the strength of Chinese art as a continuum spanning across centuries of development. Art consequently becomes a pointing out of an ongoing triumph as well as an acknowledgment of what in most cases may only be described as inevitable change.
The emphasis of Lu Hao’s art, then, revolves around the notion that the past is worth recovering— he is like an archaeologist for a historical culture that contemporary capitalism appears bent on destroying. In a nearly heroic, and moving, effort to redeem the past, Lu Hao’s show acknowledges the classical structures that comprised it and implicitly argues for a wealth of cultural detail that is directly dependent on history. The one Plexiglas model shown in the exhibition is a small-scale replica of the Marble Boat anchored in Kunming Lake at the Summer Palace. As the gallery’s notes point out, Lu Hao’s copy refers to the destruction in 1862 of the original Summer Palace by Europeans, an act that the Chinese populace found fiercely provocative and countered with an equally fierce outpouring of patriotic feeling. Lu Hao’s model both derives from and supersedes its earlier manifestation. Unlike many contemporary mainland Chinese artists, Lu Hao has a direct- ness of purpose and intention that is rare today. Instead of relying upon the hidden reference or coy allusion, Lu Hao’s art states things as they are; his points are easily understood as attempts to keep tradition alive.
As a result, the artist tends to stand on the margins of the increasingly inflated rhetoric that is accompanying new Chinese art. Trained by the Chinese Ink Painting Department of the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts, Lu Hao graduated from that prestigious school in 1992; his genera- tion is younger than the installation-oriented generation of artists such as Xu Bing, Cai Guoqiang, and Gu Wenda. But while he does not belong to that vanguard, his position as an increasingly mature artist separates him from a younger generation that has taken its own cultural importance nearly for granted, even as it cashes in on artworks that cynically rely on suggested political themes to maintain a seemingly topical point of view. Granted, it’s possible that these youthful efforts are sincere in their intention, but much of the work seems strained and jaded. By compari- son, there is something refreshing about an artist like Lu Hao, who strives to build bridges between past and present cultural conditions. His architectural models of famous sites in Beijing are, literally and figuratively, enlivened by the placement of actual flowers, birds, insects, and fish that connect to the past with an optimism that refuses total innocence. Instead, the works favour a new historicism in which the great treasures of Chinese architecture become quite literally alive, both as models and as compositional structures in their own right.
Lu Hao thus refuses the blandishments of easy success, and easy money as well, given the inflated prices contemporary art in China commands. He strikes this viewer as someone committed to the idea and practice of a craft, an attitude he most likely learned while a student at the Central Academy. His Marble Boat (2000) is a tour de force of technical skill, with plastic sails rising above a three-level boat whose top two sections are supported by detailed columns. Perhaps the Marble Boat is a warning against the predations of Western-style cultural change; in the face of global capital, the model boat asserts a Chinese rebelliousness based on the extraordinary artistic achievement of the culture. Lu Hao’s point appears to be that the past can and should be recognized; without it, culture will decay and lose one of its greatest attributes, its historical presence. A foreigner looking in at the artist’s constructions understands that Lu Hao is not substituting empty rhetoric for genuine achievement; his plastic models and paintings and drawings draw on tradition as a way of compelling his audience to remember, for memory itself is suspect when the final goal of the artist is merely to sell: everything but cash goes up in smoke, and the past itself, as well as the act of remembering it, is easily forgotten.
Of course it is impossible to remain in the past; one needs to make it relevant to the present. Lu Hao’s achievement cannot be measured only by its fidelity to precedents, it must also recognize the cultural situation as it is now. I think he has done so by resurrecting the lively openness of the best
of Chinese culture in his houses, as well as in the drawings and paintings of his models, which are powerful works of art in their own right. In the large-scale series of oil paintings entitled Lotus Lantern, Lu Hao has taken a traditional Chinese motif—the lotus flower—and placed in the center of each bright pink and white blossom a small, traditional house. Merging culture with nature, the artist is attempting to find a point in which the two categories can meet, just as he struggles to find a language that would do justice to both the past and the present. In Lotus Lantern No. 2,of 2004, a cluster of flowers pokes its way out toward the viewer on thin stems against a deep, dark blue background. The eccentricity of painting a house in each of the flowers’ centers seems puzzling at first, but the decision of Lu Hao to work this way makes sense with further looking. Joining symbols together within the cohesiveness of the painting, he gives his audience both beauty and awareness of time, in the sense that both home and flower are emblems used in the history of Chinese painting.
Lu Hao’s studies in charcoal on paper and oil on canvas of Marble Boat reiterate his theme, con- temporizing historical consideration through the deft, somewhat stylized treatment of the boats. The drawing in charcoal is atmospheric, the boat apparently placed in water as fish draw up to its side. The oil on canvas is grander, with the boat’s basic structure outlined in white and open spaces filled in with black; small red fish sidle up to the exposed bottom of the boat, in much the same way the fish come up to the boat in the drawing. These portraits of Lu Hao’s model are examples of a strong and independent aesthetic, even as they relate, in their closeness in detail, to Marble Boat. Another paired set of works, again one an oil on canvas and the other charcoal on paper returns to historical furniture for its inspiration. The painting shows a beautifully built wedding bed in deep turquoise; the same structure is shown in the black-and-white drawing. Although Lu Hao studied ink painting in art school, his command of the Western medium of oil painting is bold, even masterful. It is seen again in the painting Bird Cage (1999), which depicts a plastic model of a Chinese building that houses birds on its bottom floor. In the painting there is a curved hook on which the house hangs; this is clearly a copy of an actual model made by the artist. The relationship between two and three dimensions here is both intricate and powerful, and each is handled with genuine skill.
The drawings, paintings, and models encapsulate what can only be seen as a firm nod toward tradition, even as Lu Hao uses the past to make sense of his present life. By doing so, the artist participates in the bravura techniques and accomplishments of his culture without sentimentalizing his position. His choice of materials—oil on canvas for the paintings and Plexiglas for the models—suggests a decision in favour of the contemporary, but the content of his art arises from a sharply intelligent joining of the old with the new. Lu Hao’s dual approach makes him an artist of real achievement in whose work Chinese culture can find some of its own cultural complexities mirrored. As China continues to evolve, manic capitalism is bringing it further and further into global politics and culture, and much of its new art reflects an equally new internationalism. While something is gained in the production of art that reflects the methodologies of Western artists during the past thirty years, presumably sharing the stage with the work of the foremost practitioners of contemporary culture in the West, artists such as Lu Hao take a different path, neither retreating backwards nor jumping ahead, preferring to take the middle ground. That middle ground places Lu Hao in his own conspicuous spot, not least because of his technical abilities and calm overview of the past.
(trad)v.
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Wang Tiande, Shanghai Tiande Garment Factory, Toronto Branch, 2005, installation with factory workers on site.
Most modern English dictionaries describe trade as a voluntary exchange of goods and services, a buying and selling of commodities (commerce), facilitated by a market and the medium of money (transaction). Tracing its etymology back to the sixteenth century, trade is recorded as “treading a path, a course of action,”referring to paths such as the Silk Road carved in from the East and the West, where people of diverse backgrounds met, exchanged, and overcame the inhospitable geographical conditions of the Taklimakan desert.1
Human technologies have transformed the nature of trade. The introduction of money, new modes of transportation, and mediums of communication have lifted this activity far away from its original footpaths and far removed from the initial face-to-face encounter. Perhaps today we take for granted the ease with which we can reach each other—we forget the hostile terrain, the indomitable will and curiosity of those who embarked upon those journeys. In the twenty-first century, we have transformed time and space, increased mobility, and created virtual connections that enable a plurality of simultaneous exchanges. The modes of communication have made it easier to access one another, yet the task of communication has grown more difficult.
Sui Jianguo, Made in China, Toronto, 2005, spray paint on board. Produced by Nevin Hendrickson.
The ebb and flow of trading, sharing, and exchanging depends of course on those involved and their openness to transformation. Inevitably, like any natural ecosystem, when a new element enters a given environment, the system is forever altered in some way through that contact. Author Paul Hawkens, in his comparison of ecology and business, points out how the most resilient and sustainable systems—the ones most adaptable to changes in the greater environment—are also the most diverse and complex.2 In the case of large groups of individuals, such as those that come together to make up imaginary communities, recognized today as nations, this diversity and complexity is undeniably applicable as sustainability emerges as one of this century’s primary environmental concerns on a global scale.
In the past forty years, mainland China and Taiwan have both experienced an incredible transfor- mation of their economies and societies by adopting open strategies for integrating into the world economy. Taiwan opened its doors to foreign investment and relaxed its protectionist policies in 1963, and became a burgeoning manufacturing and industrial hub in less than twenty years, only to morph again into an information-technology-based economy by the new millennium. Martial Law was lifted in the midst of this drastic change, with the first democratic elections held in 1992.
Mainland China, anxious to leave the internal traumas of the Cultural Revolution behind, shifted the emphasis of its development to production. In the early 1980s, the country plunged into economic modernization with its “open door” policy (kaifang zhengce) adopted in 1979. China received the influx of ideas and commerce waiting at the steps of its port cities and allowed this to intermix with the country’s own culture, history, and desires.
“We are suggesting that we should develop a little faster – just a little, because it would be unrealistic to go too fast.” – Deng Xiaoping, 19843
Deng Xiaoping’s measured suggestion for change in 1984 is more than a little ironic today. Both Mainland China and Taiwan have demonstrated annual growth rates of up to ten percent, while China’s may still surge in upcoming years. How does this high-speed development affect individu-
Paul Mathieu, three boxes with Kiss bowls, 2005, porcelain, 16 x 12 x 20 cm each als and their feeling of reality? The modern state relies on the use of human bodies to sustain its growth using what French philosopher Michel Foucault terms biopower, “an explosion of diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations.”4 These inva- sive techniques are very apparent in the spaces of mass production, where millions of workers— many of them migrants and women—are given the opportunity to make money, travel to the city, and imagine a different future, while also entrusting their fates to the mercy of the economy.
What happens when the modern state no longer needs these bodies? In the 1990s, with the gradual shifting from a manufacturing to an information-technology-based economy, and the rise of the Taiwanese dollar, many factories in Taiwan shut down, with some owners refusing to pay pensions to their employees.5 Chien Chieh-jen’s video, Factory, glimpses inside the Lien Fu garment factory and the lives of its former workers. Faces of middle-aged women peer from behind debris of chairs, clothes bundled in plastic wrap like corpses—these slow, silent images are interspersed with video clips of a more optimistic time, recorded memories of when the factory first opened. Production can bring hope and prosperity, but when things take an unexpected turn, those that fed the “body” of the modern state are often left to fend for themselves.
Activists in both Asia and the West have voiced ethical complaints about outsourcing and exploiting developing–world labour to increase profit margins of developed–world corporations. Artist Wang Tiande inverts the mechanisms of the global economy in his installation and performance, Shanghai Tiande Garment Factory: Vancouver Branch. Here, the idea is conceived in China, then produced in Canada before our eyes, where production and destruction, beauty and the scars of addiction and compulsive longing, collide on silk robes burned with cigarettes.6 Moreover, Sui Jianguo’s graffiti, Made In China, will be produced on-site in Vancouver, and then, if possible, ironically disassembled and transported back to Beijing, to be exhibited again elsewhere.
It is human nature to create and produce. This system of production, fragmented now in the global economy, can easily feel like a series of incomplete tasks, distanced from a final product and the natural human feeling of fulfillment after creating. On a psychological level, when humans
Song Dong, Stir Fry Beijing, 2005, three projection video installation. produce and fulfillment is however long postponed, these longings are channeled and resurface in interesting ways. We escape through dreaming, through the creation of utopias, new interfaces, and the fantasies within them. We create unreality—or maybe it is just that life is going too fast for things to remain ‘realistic’.Xing Danwen challenges the limits of regulatory power in her Urban Fiction Series by photographing miniature models of China’s architectural developments, enlarging them and adding subtle revisions such as sexual fantasies in a room’s exposed corner. Bodies also rebel through objects. The sexual resurfaces, in the shapes of ceramic vessels like Paul Mathieu’s Flower Vases and Bowls. A mass-produced aesthetic of eroticism and kitsch is silk-screened onto hand-shaped ceramics made from Kaolin clay, one of the world’s finest white clay that comes to be at its hardest when fired. Indeed, the more one tries to suppress something— be it idealism, desires, the need to create—the stronger it seems to return, as phantasmagoria, as art, and as dreams.
Song Dong deploys a different strategy to question the present. His video projection, Stir Fry Beijing, depicts the everyday task of cooking; yet when the lid is lifted and the steam rises, an image of an urban landscape ephemerally flashes. The term chao has a double-meaning; it is also used to describe hype, the way things are sensationalized, or fired up, by the media, advertising, and real estate speculations currently underway in Beijing. Yang Fudong’s shared interest in the ephemeral is fiercely idealistic: “The feeling of the city depends on all these people living their dreams.”7 His video series titled S10, a collaborative project between the artist and Siemens Business Communication Systems Ltd., makes visible those abstract connections that link millions of urban individuals on a daily basis. In the video, twenty male and female office workers sporting identical clothing are all connected in some way, by a shirtsleeve, a seam, or a web of ropes. Individual movement is limited and every move affects the direction of the team. Anxieties about dependence, job security, and individual freedom are intermingled with the potential rewards of financial stability, friendship, and collaboration.
Yang Fudong, S10–Photo 1, 2003, digital video, 8 minutes.
The world is fragmenting; yet with the explosion of the Internet, the fascinating development of online communities, marketplaces, and new communication and digital technologies, the world is becoming more interactive than ever. The success of the World Wide Web may lie in its ability to mimic the natural world—diverse, complex, with an openness to change, invisible creeping vines connecting people and places across space and time. Today we have so many different technologies for activities that, when pared down to its simplest form, can be of the same spirit as thousands of years ago. After all, what is trade before business, before the thought of profit? Trade is a basic human interaction and a medium of communication that exists to share ideas and better human existence. Trade is about relationships.
The results of these relationships and the spirit of trade can be associated with solid forms. The cross-cultural collaboration of Paul Mathieu’s ceramics, telling the story of ideas that were conceived by a Vancouver artist during a residency in Jingdezhen, are made from indigenous Kaolin clay and the help of the San Bao Institute’s finest potters. Stories are inverted and told from different points of view too, such as with Wang Tiande’s garment factory and Sui Jianguo’s Made in China, a painting whose trace of origin may vanish by his next exhibition. If cultural production in its core sense cannot be commodified, then the histories and the potential for more storytelling are what create meaning. Yet meaning is always changing. What began as a word, an expression, a definition, is also a story that can be told many ways. As Jorge Luis Borges writes in his prologue to El Otro, El Mismo (“The Other, the Same”): “It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.”Indeed China Trade offers a set of stories whose paths, both magical and concrete, have led us here to consider their connections, imbrications and relationships.
Notes 1 See, for example, the Oxford English Dictionary. Thanks to Alice Ming Wai Jim for her editorial contributions. 2 Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (New York: HarperBusiness, 1993), 20. 3 Deng Xiaoping, “Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” January 30, 1984, cited in Sources of Chinese Tradition: Volume Two, Second Edition, ed. William Theodore deBary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 509. 4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One (New York: Random House, 1978), 140. 5 Artist statement, 2004 Shanghai Biennale: Techniques of the Visible, ed. Fang Zengxian and Xu Jiang (Shanghai: Shanghai Fine Art Publishers, 2004), 117. 6 Ironically, for the Toronto Art Fair, Wang was unable to find local seamstresses who were not of Asian descent. 7 Artist statement, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, ed. Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 215.
Taiwan