J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 1 3 VOLUME 12, NUMBER 4

INSI DE

Special Feature: Contemporary Art in Hong Kong Who Invited Andy Warhol to China? The Hotan Project Conversation with Feng Mengbo Reviews of Zhao Yao, Duan Jianyu and Hu Xiaoyuan, Song Dong

US$12.00 NT$350.00 PRINTE D IN TAIWAN

6

VOLUME 12, NUMBER 4, JULY/AUGUST 2013

CONTENTS  Editor’s Note 16  Contributors

6 Apotheosis of the Bona Fide: Contemporary Art from Hong Kong Pamela Kember

16 "No Outside" for Socially Engaged Art Practices? The Reception of the Aesthetic Regime of Art and Its Frequent Malfunctions in Hong Kong 43 Frank Vigneron

33 On Producing Strategy: Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s “Hong Kong Intervention” Stephanie Bailey

43 Who Invited Andy Warhol to China? A Conversation with Alfred Siu Zheng Shengtian

56 56 The Hotan Project—Evaluating Interdisciplinary Research: A Conversation with Hou Hanru and Ou Ning Clara Galeazzi

69 The Technological Society Revisited: A Conversation with Feng Mengbo Lisa Claypool

77 Zhao Yao: Spirit Above All Voon Pow Bartlett 77 87 A Potent Force: Duan Jianyu and Hu Xiaoyuan Edward Sanderson

100 Wall-gazers and Nothing-doers: A Review of Song Dong Doing Nothing Liz Park

107 Chinese Name Index

100 Cover: Liu Xiaodong, East (detail), 2012, oil on canvas, 300 x 250 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

We thank JNBY Art Projects, Canadian Foundation of Asian Art, Chen Ping, Mr. and Mrs. Eric Li, and Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison for their generous contribution to the publication and distribution of Yishu.

Vol. 12 No. 4 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art  Katy Hsiu-chih Chien   Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C.C. Liu   Ken Lum Hong Kong has a history of contemporary art that long precedes its “handover” to -- Keith Wallace   Zheng Shengtian mainland China, yet the extensive attention  Julie Grundvig Kate Steinmann given to the latter over the past twenty years Chunyee Li has created a sense of uncertainty within  ⁽ ⁾ Carol Yinghua Lu the Hong Kong cultural community. In the Chunyee Li past few years, however, that uncertainty Chen Ping Debra Zhou appears to be shifting, and Yishu 57 opens   Larisa Broyde with three texts that explore various aspects   Michelle Hsieh of the Hong Kong art scene today—from Maryon Adelaar    Chunyee Li its growing profile internationally and   its socially engaged art practices to the Judy Andrews, Ohio State University growing issue of its migrant workers. Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Museo Reina Sofia In 1982, Andy Warhol made a visit to Hong Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator Kong and mainland China, but it is not Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China widely known how and why he went there. Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Zheng Shengtian, in his ongoing research Hou Hanru, Critic and Curator Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop on the influence of foreign visitors on Katie Hill, University of Westminster contemporary Chinese art, speaks with Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian Hong Kong businessman Alfred Siu about Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator Siu's invitation that year to one of the Lu Jie, Long March Space Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore world’s most famous artists and, ironically, Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University how little attention was paid to Warhol Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art during his visit to Beijing. Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District Clara Galeazzi speaks with Hou Hanru  Art & Collection Group Ltd. and Ou Ning about their Hotan Project. 6F. No. 85, Section 1, This ambitious, collaborative multi- Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 disciplinary artistic/ethnographic endeavour Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 engaged with a part of mainland China— E-mail: [email protected] southwestern Xinjiang—that is located at a    Jenny Liu strategic historical and cultural crossroad Alex Kao between China and Central Asia, but it   Joyce Lin   Perry Hsu previously received little attention from Betty Hsieh the art world. Lisa Claypool talks with Feng  Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. Mengbo about his ongoing development   http://yishu-online.com of ideas around art, the body, and new   Design Format technologies, an area in which he has been  1683 - 3082 a pioneer in China. Wrapping up Yishu 57 Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, are three substantive reviews of exhibitions March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, from London, Shanghai, and New York that advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: examine the work of artists Zhao Yao, Duan Yishu Editorial Office 200–1311 Howe Street Jianyu, Hu Xiaoyuan, and Song Dong. Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 Phone: 1.604.649.8187 Keith Wallace Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: offi[email protected]   1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com)

Erratum, Yishu 56: In the 2014 Biennial listing    Leap Creative Group on page 103, Ryuichi Sakamoto should be listed   Raymond Mah as Guest Director and Shihoko Iida as Associate   Gavin Chow Curator for the Sapporo International Art  Philip Wong Festival. For details, visit: http://www.sapporo- internationalartfestival.jp/en/. No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 200251

2 4

6 16 (Larisa Broyde) (Chunyee Li)

33 (Philip Tinari) (Judy Andrews) (Britta Erickson) (Melissa Chiu) (Sebastian Lopez) 43 (Claire Hsu) (John Clark) (Pauline J. Yao) 56 (Martina Köppel-Yang) Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor 69 Katie Hill Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda

77 856 87 : (886) 2.2560.2220 (886) 2.2542.0631 [email protected]

Yishu Office 100 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada : (1) 604.649.8187 (1) 604.591.6392 : offi[email protected] 107

Leap Creative Group, Vancouver

6

http://yishu-online.com Design Format

Contributors

Stephanie Bailey has an M.A. in Lisa Claypool teaches and curates Chinese art contemporary art theory from Goldsmiths at the University of Alberta. Her publications College, University of London, and a B.A. in explore science and imagery, interculturalism classical civilization with English literature and visuality, and exhibitions in modern from King’s College, London. Between 2006 and contemporary China. She recently and 2012, she lived in Athens, Greece, where completed her first book manuscript, she played a formative role in designing and Figuring the Social Body: Painting Manuals in managing the BTEC-accredited Foundation Late Imperial China, and is working on her Diploma in Art and Design at Doukas second, Artifactual Art: Painting and Science Education while writing on contemporary in Modern China. She is the author of “Ways art production and its discourses from of Seeing the Nation: Chinese Painting in the around the world as Art and Culture Editor National Essence Journal (1905–1911) and of Insider Publications and as a freelance Exhibition Culture,” which was published in critic and essayist. She is currently Managing the Winter 2011 issue of positions: east asia Editor of Ibraaz, and her writing has cultures critiques. appeared in publications including ART Clara Galeazzi is a freelance art writer PAPERS, Aesthetica, ARTnews, Artforum, currently based in Milan. She studied at Frieze, LEAP, Modern Painters, Notes on the School of Oriental and African Studies Metamodernism, and Yishu: Journal of (SOAS), University of London, where she Contemporary Chinese Art. worked on the topic of contemporary Chinese Voon Pow Bar tlett, Ph.D., is an artist, curator, art, documentary, and film. She is now lecturer, and writer, as well as an associate focusing specifically on Chinese new media. member of the Institute of Chartered Pamela Kember is an independent art Accountants in England and Wales. She was historian and critic as well as a Ph.D. candidate born in Beijing and educated internationally. at the University of the Arts London. Her Her focus is on exploring an expanded field research focuses on the connections among in the study of the complex causal framework home, memory, and identity within a spatial influencing global discourses on fine art. She context for Hong Kong’s transnational artists. currently works at Tate Research Centre: Asia She is on the Advisory Board of the Asia Art Pacific, in London. Archive, Hong Kong, and a Contributing

4 Vol. 12 No. 4 Editor of the Benezit Dictionary of Asia Artists Académiciens et Lettrés: Analyse comparative (New York, 2012). de la théorie picturale du 18e siècle en Chine et en Europe (2010), and I Like Hong Kong . . . Liz Park is a curator and writer committed Art and Deterritorialization (2010). to creating discursive spaces and generating forums for the discussions of contemporary Zheng Shengtian, Managing Editor of Yishu, political and social realities. She received an is a scholar, artist, and independent curator. M.A. in art history and curatorial studies For more than thirty years he worked at at the University of British Columbia. In China Academy of Art as Professor and Chair 2011-12, she was Helena Rubinstein Fellow of the Oil Painting Department. He was a in the Curatorial Program at the Whitney founder and board member of the Vancouver Independent Study Program. She will International Centre for Contemporary be Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at Asian from 1999 to 2011. He has been a Institute of Contemporary Art, University of board member of Asia Art Archive in North Pennsylvania, in 2013–14. America since 2009 and a Trustee of the Vancouver Art Gallery since 2011. As an Edward Sanderson is an art critic and independent curator, he has co-organized editor based in Beijing. His writing focuses numerous exhibitions including Shanghai on contemporary art in China, particularly Modern, at Museum Villa Stuck, Munich alternative artistic practices. He is a staff (2004–05), and Art and China’s Revolution, writer for the international reviews website at the Asia Society, New York (2008). He ArtSlant.com and has written for Flash Art, is currently Senior Curator for Asia with LEAP, and other print and online media. the Vancouver Biennale. He contributes

Frank Vigneron received a Ph.D. in Chinese frequently to periodicals and catalogues art history from the Paris VII University about contemporary and Asian art. and a Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He is now teaching in the Fine Arts Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His publications include Pour et Contre l.Académie: Les traités de pratique picturale en Europe aux 17e et 18e siècles (2010),

Vol. 12 No. 4 5 Pamela Kember Apotheosis of the Bona Fide: Contemporary Art from Hong Kong

hile diasporic artists from Hong Kong gradually have been making a significant mark on the international art scene over W the past decade, the same cannot be said for contemporary artists working inside Hong Kong, which has been a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China since its reunification with the mainland in 1997. This is not to say things haven't moved forward in the past fifteen years as art made in Hong Kong is beginning to find new audiences globally, but something that is surprising is the recent and sudden plethora of exhibitions focused specifically on new, or emerging Hong Kong born and based artists who, for the first time, are on the rise within the international art circuit.

Most noticeably, here in Britain, from London to Liverpool as well as the Georgian city of Bath, there have been at least five exhibitions in as many months, with more to come. Yet, just over a decade ago, if you were to discuss visual culture emerging from the former British colony, it would be focused on homegrown martial arts movies and Hong Kong based filmmakers Wong Kar-wai, Fruit Chan, and Ann Hui, who led the way for international, moviegoing audiences in producing some of the most engaging and provocative impressions of everyday life in Hong Kong's rich and diverse urbanscape.

During the 1950s, “Made in Hong Kong” was one of those ubiquitous labels applied to consumer products manufactured in the former British colony. Initially associated with the production of the plastic toys, fine goods, and electronics that flooded the North American market at that time, “Made in Hong Kong” extended into the global economy well into the early 1970s. More recently, the term has shifted from manufacturing-based industries toward recognition and promotion of Hong Kong as a centre of finance, investment, tourism, and communications, especially within the increasingly competitive markets for global technological industries.

Postcolonial “Hong Kong,” along with its increasing migrant workforce, diverse global citizens, indigenous spaces, and global urbanity, has since the mid 1990s explored various branding strategies put in place by BrandHK, the Government's tourism board, under various logos and, finally, in the new millennium settling for the label “Asia's World City,” thus positioning itself at the pinnacle of all other cities in the region. It is also pushing against the ubiquitous East-meets-West cultural mix epitomized in the image of the traditional Chinese junk floating in Victoria Harbour against

6 Vol. 12 No. 4 a backdrop of a twenty-first century Metropolis, to, now, a blend of “chic” and “timeless traditions“ that reflect a seeming cosmopolitanization of its unique culture that is being promoted globally. Apart from this official move towards promoting Hong Kong's “culture”—from local cuisine to the endless mega shopping malls, to horse and dragon boat races, to the lofty peaks and parks throughout the city—visual art in Hong Kong, in particular modern and contemporary art, has remained relatively unknown internationally, especially when compared to art from mainland China, by artists living both inside and outside of the nation. When contemporary Chinese art became synonymous with diasporic artists from the mainland (some who left following the 1989 unrest), with many finding themselves in self exile, or forced to migrate West, Hong Kong was not considered a destination of choice. And questions arise as to how it might fit into the growing body of knowledge that is given over to the ever complex notion of what represents art from Asia.

Modern Art in Hong Kong, published in the mid 1980s, was the title given to the first tome on twentieth-century Hong Kong visual art written in English. The book was themed around the chronological development of Hong Kong art, from pre-war-generation artists such as Bao Shaoyou and Luis Chan, to those “pioneers” emerging after WWII, including Fang Zhaolin, Kuang Yaoding, and Lu Shoukun, among others. The final chapter emphasized “the new spirit” that emerged under various small collectives such as the Circle, Group, One Art Group, and those practicing within various extramural studies departments in some of Hong Kong's universities and other higher education institutions. Although the book was commissioned by a commercial gallery, and its author, Petra Hinterthür, was a European employee of that gallery, it at least acknowledged a need to consider writing the history of art in Hong Kong from the inside, which is a topic that up until then had hardly been debated, let alone implemented. In her conclusion, after discussion with artists and others at the time, Hinterthür wrote of a number of factors that she felt hindered the growth of contemporary art; these ranged from educational factors, such as parental disapproval of their children studying art as it was not deemed a financially lucrative career, to economic ones that included inadequate studio spaces and few galleries or museums in which to showcase Hong Kong artists—which in turn made it difficult to attract patrons—to the lack of support by the community as a whole. Thus, she remarks, “artists in Hong Kong are in a challenging, but also frustrating position, confronted by the collision of two cultures . . . with little support by the community, it is surprising that such a wealth of art is produced.”1

Even today, for the names of any modern, let alone contemporary, Hong Kong artists to be on anyone's lips here in the UK is rare. Still, over the past decade, through the initial efforts of the savvy curators at the Chinese Arts Centre (CAC) in Manchester, who for some time have been exposing local audiences to artists from Hong Kong, as well as the London and Hong Kong-based commercial gallery Rossi and Rossi, links have been forged in the promotion of art from Hong Kong.

Vol. 12 No. 4 7 My own interest in exploring the question—Why Hong Kong art, now?— stems from my association over the past fifteen years with the city's local as well as diasporic artists. Hong Kong is also the place I grew up in and returned to until 2009, before coming back to London to undertake a Ph.D. on the artists of Hong Kong's diasporic communities. Moreover, there was little, if any, interest by international collectors, curators, and writers on the cultural creativity taking place in the city as well as for those migratory artists from Hong Kong living elsewhere. This situation profoundly affected a predominantly Western-oriented art auction scene focused on mainland China, which, to some extent, has led to Hong Kong being circumvented by those curators and museum directors orienting themselves Eastwards yet not looking at art from within this former British colony.

Particularly prevalent has been the impression that art made by Hong Kong artists has, since the 1960s, been perceived as an amalgam, a hybrid of East meets West, a “collision of two cultures” to use a phrase that Hinterthür wrote two decades ago. It is something that the writer Joan Kee, in her lucid and polemical critique of certain stances taken by art critics—some outsiders with a purportedly insider’s view—where she referenced the opening article by the late Jonathan Napack that was published in a fifteen-page supplement on the local art scene for Flash Art, in 2002, that continued to reinforce an East/West stereotyped view of Hong Kong's visual art scene.2 Napack's text, I later learned, was by all accounts extremely well supplemented financially by the local Arts Development Council (ADC), which at the time caused a great deal of criticism from those concerned with government funding of a commercial art magazine that gave such a biased, negative impression of the city's art scene. In fact, the title of the article you are now reading, “The Apotheosis of the Bona Fide,” is also a critical reflection of Napack's writing on Hong Kong in the 1990s as the “apotheosis of the bogus,” in which he stated, that the city, “went directly from feudal poverty to postmodern consumerism without an intervening stage of ‘modernity’.”3 Six years on, another wry article appeared on the online edition of Artforum by the then Beijing-based critic, Philip Tinari, commenting that “the local [Hong Kong] art scene does nothing better than organize panel discussions about its own shortcomings.”4 Tinari also quotes Napack’s earlier comment on, the “feudal poverty to postmodern consumerism” stance that he sees as serving Hong Kong's current art scene.5

Such summations, provocative as they might appear in the context of a private discussion or gathering, when published in two reputable art magazines whose editorial eye appears not to see anything amiss in this perpetual stereotyping, I believe, should not go uncontested. And yet, for such a money oriented city, it seemed remarkable that Hong Kong was unable at the time to see the art being made in the city as a major form of economic growth. By this I mean that the infrastructure in the mid to late 1990s hardly encouraged artists to dedicate their time to being full-time creative artists. Many of them continued to hold down full-time jobs and found it a struggle to secure affordable studio spaces.

8 Vol. 12 No. 4 In terms of the critical writing on and interest in local art, support was often left to a smattering of local magazines—Asian Art News, World Sculpture News, Orientations, and a pop-up, Tofu—that aimed towards a more cutting-edge approach to what was termed Hong Kong “culture.” But apart from those dedicated to the local existing or emerging art scene, it wasn't until Art Asia Pacific, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and Asian Art Newspaper, that a more global reach for writing on art from Hong Kong began to emerge with greater force.

Still, the collector base was almost nonexistent, especially for Hong Kong artists, and the city's art galleries were also few and far between except for a dedicated group including Hanart TZ Gallery, Schoeni Gallery, Alisan Fine Art, and John Batten's Gallery, which, from the early 1990s, were establishing the groundwork for many other regional galleries to invest in opening additional gallery spaces in Hong Kong. During the first decade of the twenty-first century there has also been a rise in the number of independent spaces and art organizations that have shifted the emphasis away from mainland Chinese art to an acknowledgment that Hong Kong artists have become major players in art from the region. These nonprofit arts organizations such as Asia Art Archive, Parasite, Osage Art Foundation, 1A Space, and Videotage are working to raise the profile of Hong Kong artists within the international arena.

Chow Chun Fai, Legend of the As all of these local centres have been collaborating with educational, Fist, 2012, enamel on canvas, 100 x 150 cm, installation view commercial, or non profit spaces internationally, particularly with curators in Hong Kong Eye, Saatchi Gallery, London. Photo: Peter and art dealers here in the UK, Hong Kong artists are now catching Macdiarmid. Courtesy of Getty Images for Sutton PR Asia. the attention of a number of art spaces in London. Most recently, two commercial spaces—Rokeby Gallery and Tintype Gallery—based in the

Vol. 12 No. 4 9 Shoreditch area of London, have Kui Ting Leung, Landscape GPS, 2012, ink and colour been representing Hong Kong-based on silk, 1,100 x 143 cm, installation view, Hong Kong artists over the past year, at least; an Eye, Saatchi Gallery, London. Photo: Peter Macdiarmid. additional boost recently, is that the Courtesy of Getty Images for Sutton PR Asia. Saatchi Gallery showcased Hong Kong artists in 2012 with Hong Kong Eye, a touring exhibition featuring work by eighteen artists. This was quickly followed by Rossi & Rossi's Hong Kong Masters in collaboration with Hanart TZ Gallery, which included seven established artists who are relatively unknown to UK audiences—Luis Chan, Irene Chou, Gaylord Chan, Liu Kuo-Sung, Chu Hing-Wah, Wucius Wong, and Leung Kui-Ting.

Also, at the end of last year, Hong Kong artists were presented as part of a new initiative with an invitation Irene Chou, The Universe is My Mind, 2007, ink and colour to participate in a collateral event on paper, 38 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Rossi & Rossi, at the 7th Liverpool Biennial, Hong London. Kong: All Are Guests (August 15 to November 20, 2012), which included artists Leung Mee-ping, Chow Chun-fai, and the collective CoLAB x SLOW. The title given to the Hong Kong representation Gaylord Chan, 3 X 2, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 92 x 122 cm. was in keeping with the theme Courtesy of the artist and Rossi & Rossi, London. of “hospitality” chosen by the Biennial’s newly appointed director, Sally Tallent, and there was a follow- up session to introduce the artists to visitors that included a presentation of their work during the first weekend's opening and press previews in the context of CoLab's community projects held both in Liverpool and nearby Manchester in collaboration with the Chinese Arts Artists in Hong Kong: All Are Centre. This was organized by Kwok Guests, 7th Liverpool Biennial. Left to right, front: Leung Mee- Ying, curator at CAC (and former ping and SLOW Collective founder Bella Ip. Left to right, Hong Kong artist) and a seminal back: Chow Chun-fai, Hung Lam, and Eddy Yu. Courtesy of figure in supporting and promoting Liverpool Biennial. Hong Kong artists as well as those of Hong Kong's diaspora.

Hong Kong: All Are Guests was presented and supported by Hong Kong's Leisure and Cultural Services, as well as the Arts Development Council

10 Vol. 12 No. 4 Koon Wai Bong, TRANSpose: of Hong Kong, both of which continue to play a role, albeit at times a Contemporary Ink Paintings by Koon Wai Bong, installation controversial one, in determining who gets selected to represent the city view at Museum of East Asian Art, Bath. Courtesy of the at various international art expositions. Still, the presence of Hong Kong artist. in Liverpool appeared to be well received as Tallent's ambition for City States included other Asian and East European cities and artists who usually remain outside the mainstream. Although it will not be repeated at subsequent biennials, at least it was an initiative that provoked more awareness and understanding of artists from Hong Kong and Asia in general. More recently, running through to the summer of 2013, is a solo show for one of Hong Kong's leading contemporary ink painters, a teacher at the Academy of Visual Arts, Koon Wai Bong, who has a significant presence in the Museum of East Asian Art in Bath and whose work has been attracting a great deal of interest.

So, why Hong Kong art now? I believe there are two key threads to unravel; the first has to do with what's going on both culturally and politically inside Hong Kong, and, the second is connected to the representation of Hong Kong's marginalized identity in relation to mainland China and Taiwan on the international art scene. Hong Kong is marginalized in the sense that since its return to mainland China under the "one country, two systems" policy, Hong Kong artists have been dealing with the double bind of being neither British nor Chinese. Also, their position within current sphere of international art biennials, triennials, and art fairs has tended to subsume the whole visual art scene within Hong Kong under the umbrella of China. Until recently, there has been little, if any, interest by international curators and art institutions in assessing the differences between art made in Hong Kong in relation to work being made in mainland China, or to those artists who left China post 1989.

Vol. 12 No. 4 11 Hong Kong’s gain of an international profile, one that was barely visible in the late 1990s, is a seismic one and unprecedented as local and regional galleries compete with what the UK-based Art Newspaper termed “high wattage,” those global dealers who are said to be “looking seriously at Hong Kong as a place to do business”6 even though commercial rents in the city are far in excess of those in other cities. Certainly, the demographic changes taking place throughout many emerging economies in Asia are attracting more international attention, and more galleries are opening up. This is not just a consideration for gallery owners, but also for artists themselves, who, allying themselves with dealers or trying to earn a living, have struggled in a city that has rarely provided space for artists to pursue their creative practices.

When I was living and working in Hong Kong, what struck me most about Suki Chan, A Hundred Seas Rising, 2012, 100-channel the ongoing debate about the lack of infrastructure for homegrown artists sound installation, 40 mins. loop. Courtesy of the artist. was the paucity of local art journals, art critics, collectors, and galleries for artists to become more known. Another factor has been that Hong Kong's geopolitical situation remains if not contested, then certainly problematic in terms of how it is "represented" at major international biennials or triennials. Its first participation at the Venice Biennale, for example, only took place in 2001. Entitled Magic At Street Level, with four participating artists—Warren Leung Chi-wo, Sara Wong Chi-hang, Ellen Pao, and Ho Siu Kee—the show was curated by the highly respected Hong Kong scholar and art dealer, Johnson Chang Tsong-zung. What was also noticable was the Arts Development Council's decision to combine Hong Kong with China, as the representative “country” at the 49th Venice Bienniale, despite the fact that China had its own space and independent curator. Despite a possible conflict of interest with Chang's commercial gallery's activities, under his curatorial directive, Hong Kong’s first Venice appearance gained favourable reviews and raised the profile of the participating artists. A similar situation had emerged earlier, at the third Asia Pacific Triennial

12 Vol. 12 No. 4 in Brisbane (1999), the first time Hong Kong had participated since its handover to the mainland, as artists from the former British colony, including Wilson Shieh were presented as “China” under the "one country, two systems" policy (which was intended to last for fifty years after the 1997 reunification) implemented under the conditions of Article 31 of the PRC's constitution. Although some concerns were raised at the time in the local art scene to Hong Kong suddenly being included as part of China rather than promoting its own unique culture, this repositioning of Hong Kong as China continues.

I feel this highly unsatisfactory alignment of Hong Kong vis-à-vis contemporary Chinese art is increasingly problematic, particularly with repect to the subtle yet contentious issue of Hong Kong's culture having been subsumed under the heading of “China” and its effect upon Hong Kong's identity; this has greatly affected the ability of international art- going audiences to distinguish what emerges out of Hong Kong. I would go so far as to suggest that this positioning has been detrimental to local visual art practitioners, more so than in other creative sectors such as design and architecture, where Hong Kong is building a separate niche within various platforms to present its home-grown talent globally. In some respects this is an outcome of the international art world's preoccupation with art from mainland China—arguably there is a distinction between contemporary Hong Kong and Chinese artists despite the fact that in the current postcolonial decade, artists in Hong Kong are frequently drawn to explore the politics of their non-nationhood identity vis-à-vis the mainland. Whether this has resulted in a diversification into new concerns that are often characterized by a sense of East and West legacies, it may be too early to say, but certainly local art critics and theorists, including Jaspar Lau Kin Wah and Linda Lai, have been engaged in debates on this topic for some time.

Still, despite these destabilizing forces, the current situation has changed dramatically for the art-buying public, and as the Hong Kong art fair emerges even stronger following Art Basel's investment of a 60% stake in the 2013 event held in May. A recent feature published as part of the Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants' annual dedicated six pages to Hong Kong's “art boom” and focused on both the commercial and non-profit sector, describing it as one of the “hottest arts scenes in Asia” and discussing how auction houses, such as Sotheby's and Christie's, are expanding in the region, particularly focusing on Hong Kong and the art being created there.7 Added to this, and despite fewer collectors in the past for art from Hong Kong, there are those entrepreneurs that we read of in the financial sections of newspapers, who with their newly disposable incomes are looking to invest in art. This seems to be offering previously unprecedented opportunities for international art galleries to invest in Asia, as can be seen with London's White Cube Gallery and New York's Gagosian Gallery, among others, opening up in Hong Kong.

In turn, one must still consider the benefits of the development of art in a city and of governing bodies, like the ADC, continuing to provide grants and affordable studios as well as promoting international recognition for

Vol. 12 No. 4 13 artists from inside and outside the city—something that was for many years disregarded in Hong Kong. Too fast, too soon tended to be the response to the frenzy towards collecting art from China during its boom, yet despite much media debate around the "China art bubble" dipping, or bursting, it remains buoyant in the current economic slowdown, if not floating as high as it did in the 1990s.

Another thread that links Hong Kong artists to the international art scene has been a small, yet significant handful of transnational artists, children of second generation Hong Kong migrants, who have made their names outside of the local art scene. Most prominent have been those trained abroad and who remain focused on making art within a transnational context: Anthony Key from South Africa and the UK, Paul Chan in New York, Suki Chan in London, John Young in Melbourne, and Simon Leung in California, to name a few whose work I have come to know well. However, their reputation as being from Hong Kong rarely surfaces in the media; instead, they are associated with their current place of residence, still often referred to as their host country, wherever their current home happens to be.

Writing back in 2005, the UK-based curator and critic on art from Asia, Eliza Patten, after a considerable amount of time invested in the art in the region, recognized the “hot property” hold on mainland Chinese art but responded with the question, “Where does that leave Hong Kong—in the grip of an identity crisis?”8 That same year, Hong Kong's “identity crisis,” whether in regard to the postcolonial position of Hong Kong or the rise in China's influence globally, reemerged globally, first in an article in the UK's Guardian newspaper, followed by TIME magazine in the US, in 2005, and subsequently, the Economist in 2009.9

Yet it is not all merely commerce and capital for the art market— philanthropists and collectors of contemporary art from southeast Asia are steadily emerging within the region and are keen to know more about artists from Hong Kong. Some are either donating their collections of Chinese art and artifacts to the new West Kowloon Cultural District's future Modern Art Gallery, M+, or else looking to invest in Hong Kong artists rather than to continue collecting from the mainland or from those Chinese artists living abroad. As in the case of the former Swiss ambassador to China, Uli Sigg, who in a recent interview responded to those critical of his multi-million-dollar donation to M+ that he felt that this new cultural district would offer the much-needed opportunity for Hong Kong's artists to form part of the collection in the future. This is in addition to seeing greater philanthropic potential for donations that he feels would bring greater overseas and mainland visitor numbers to the city. He further commented that not only could he sense that Hong Kong will be “an avant- garde model for the mainland,” and with the major share holder in the art fair bringing new and more international clients, but the city would also become a “ trading hub” for art.10 More importantly, he sees that this can only benefit artists in the city, helping them to gain greater recognition, as currently there is no Hong Kong museum methodically collecting art made

14 Vol. 12 No. 4 there over the past five decades or more. Yet this is changing with the M+ project and its four new cultural centres—one dedicated to the moving image, one to modern and contemporary art, one a multi-arts complex, and, finally, one given to establishing the first museum of its kind in the world dedicated to Chinese ink painting.

Certainly, with Hong Kong artist, Lee Kit representing China/Hong Kong at this year's Venice Biennale, to Art Basel's first fair in Hong Kong, to just reading in Art Newspaper that there will be a Hong Kong pavilion at an upcoming “Masterpiece London” Fine Art and Design fair, it might seem that the stylized core value branding of the Hong Kong dragon may yet be giving way to more engagement with discursive creative practices. The number of new courses in the UK for the study of art from Asia and the increase in scholars being appointed at the university level to address and challenge traditional Western art history are further indicators of the winds of change. Certainly Hong Kong, it seems, has at last lost that most cliché-ridden of tags, a “cultural desert,” or a transient way-station for refugees, and now is the fastest rising art market in the world. It remains to be seen whether, while continuing links with its past, as Johnson Chang Tsong-zung, mentioned to me recently on the subject of the rise of Hong Kong art, “China will be subsumed under Hong Kong.”11 I hope this will be the making of new conjunctions and new interplays between the diversity of the local art scene and its position within the global art scene. If there are alternative art histories still to be written that will include the apotheosis of art from Hong Kong in the new millennium, they may well be worth the wait.

Notes 1 Petra Hinterthür, Modern Art In Hong Kong, ed. Nina Corazzo (Hong Kong: Myer Publishing Ltd, 1985), 171. 2 Joan Kee, “Art, Hong Kong, and Hybridity: A Task of Reconsideration,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, No. 2, (2003), 90–98. 3 Jonathan Napack, "Apotheosis of the Bogus," in Airplanes and Parachutes: A Jonathan Napack Anthology, ed. Philip Tinari (Switzerland: Art Basel, 2007). 4 Philip Tinari, “Scene & Herd: Shopper's Paradise Hong Kong,” Artforum, Mrch 8, 2008, 1. 5 Ibid., 1. 6 Katie Hunt, “Chasing the Chinese Dragon Galleries Open in Hong Kong," Art Newspaper, March 14, 2013. 7 Heda Bayron, “Art Boom,” in Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants, July 2012, 14–9. 8 Eliza Patten, “The View From Here: Mainland China is Hot Property But Where Does That Leave Hong Kong?,” Art Review, August 2005, LV1, 90–92. 9 Vaudine England, “Hong Kong Suffers Identity Crisis as China's Influence Grows,” The Guardian, Philip Bowring, “Hong Kong's Identity Crisis,” Time, July 18, 2005; Hong Kong's Identity Crisis: Feeling Special, The Economist, March 6, 2009. 10 Uli Sigg, “Legendary Collector Uli Sigg Answers Critics of his Multi-Million-Dollar Donation to Hong Kong's M+,” ARTINFO China, July 31, 2102. 11 Johnson Chang Tsong-zung in conversation, Rossi & Rossi Gallery, London, “Hong Kong Masters,” December 5, 2012.

Vol. 12 No. 4 15 Frank Vigneron “No Outside” for Socially Engaged Art Practices? The Reception of the Aesthetic Regime of Art and Its Frequent Malfunctions in Hong Kong

Marian Pastor Roces, Whose History?, roundtable in Backroom Conversations, organized by the Asia Art Archive at ARTHK12, May 17, 2012, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive.

No Outside For Art Making During a roundtable titled Whose History? (organized by the Asia Art Archive during ARTHK12 on May 17, 2012), Marian Pastor Roces, a critic and independent curator from the Philippines, gave a paper on the limits of art history and how a certain tradition of this discipline—a history dominated by “period styles” that, as early as the 1970s, began to come under criticism—cannot be used to make sense of recent developments within the field of visual art. Roces emphasized that artists need to be fully engaged in the context of what she termed “the structures of power"; she argued that there is “no outside position” and that “radicalism must be waged within.”1 The idea of such engagement has been an important part of many art practices since the origins of conceptual art in Euro-America in the late 1960s and, particularly, in the origins of institutional critique. It is true that present-day artists can find their place anywhere, and their art practices are often “delocated”—that is, they are made just as much for the art gallery and the museum as for the World Wide Web, the street, the shopping mall, or the most remote locations outside of urban spaces.

16 Vol. 12 No. 4 During the same roundtable, Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid, told the audience an anecdote taken from his experience in Spain. He described how participants in a workshop organized by the members of the education services of the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía arranged a demonstration against the World Bank. Considering that the participants in that demonstration were working within an event organized by the museum, it was apparently seen by the Spanish mass media as another “art event,” something considered to be, according to Borja-Villel, merely a radical form of tourist attraction. He concluded by saying that “nothing happened” as a result. Mention of this demonstration did not appear in any of the cultural or political sections of Spanish newspaper, but only in those dedicated to fashion and anything perceived as “cool.” When Korean farmers confronted the Hong Kong police during the G7 of 2005, it was presented as political news and a clear sign of the extremely serious degradations of the livelihood of many social groups caused by the savagely neoliberal forms of economic globalization prevalent around the world. When artists coming out of a museum organize a demonstration against the World Bank, it is seen as slightly ridiculous, no matter how personally involved the participants are with these issues. One of the dangers to the reception by the public at large of the idea of a “no outside” for art practices resides precisely in these trivializing representations.

Manuel Borja-Villel, Whose These trivializing representations raise a question concerning the History?, roundtable in Backroom Conversations, representation of the forms of art practices I will call here “socially organized by the Asia Art Archive at ARTHK12, May 17, engaged.” One of the questions addressed here will be: How can artists 2012, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. engaged in these forms of art escape the effects of trivialization imposed Courtesy of Asia Art Archive. upon them by the traditional mass media, like the printed press and television? Only a certain kind of press would refrain from trivializing such events: the specialized art press that is read by a fairly small portion of the educated population of large urban centres and is not always accessible to a majority of readers, for a multitude of reasons. The other type of

Vol. 12 No. 4 17 press, whose owners seem to believe that only the most simplistic type of entertainment makes for good news, define their action and their usefulness increasingly through the demands of the financial bottom line. With this alternative, it becomes extremely difficult for art practitioners to ask the proper questions about the societies we live in, let alone try to answer these questions, because their practices tend to be misrepresented.

Socially Engaged Art Practices and Trivialization Are socially engaged art practices systematically trivialized in Hong Kong? Likely not. Hong Kong does not “enjoy” the same kind of newspapers as countries like the UK, in particular, where the tabloid press has been for many decades the source of much trivialization of art practices that do not belong to the innocuous forms of artwork from the past. An example of such trivialization was the front page of the Daily Mirror, in the 1970s, in which a sculpture conceived by the Minimalist artist Carl Andre that consisted of a line of bricks on the floor, was acquired by the Tate Museum for what was then a hefty sum of money. The Daily Mirror described this purchase as an insult to the British taxpayer; the title, in large bold fonts, read “What a Load of Rubbish.” Such insulting statements are seldom so violent in a place like Hong Kong where the outrage would more often be about public display of nudity than about public expenditure felt as excessive. A recent exception to this would be references made by the Hong Kong press to the arrest and prosecution of Ai Weiwei in 2011, but the seriousness of the questions he posed about the state of the mainland Chinese political system and the culture of corruption any one-party system will always generate, as well as the growing ferocity of the mainland Chinese authorities in trying to keep under wrap democratic activism, made of him a topic that can be addressed in seriousness by all media precisely because it did not have to be approached in terms of art practices.

Nevertheless, in Hong Kong there can still be some minor manifestations of the spirit of trivialization that seems to be very difficult to eradicate. I do not want to criticize The Works, the only television program in Hong Kong dedicated to the arts; all their reports on art activities in the city are of the highest quality, and we must be grateful to Radio Television Hong Kong for dedicating an important part of their resources to this domain (even French television, for instance, is remarkably poor in reporting current events in the arts). But even the producers and reporters of visual art events on The Works are not always entirely free of a certain tendency to trivialize, even if, thankfully, I could recognize only one example of that tendency in one of the reports they made in 2010 about the exhibition City-O-Rama, organized by MAP Office.

With video works representing a wide variety of artists whose work was exhibited in the stalls of street merchants in the SOHO and Central areas of Hong Kong island, MAP Office wanted to engage with a public not usually adept at looking out for these forms of art, creating a form of socially engaged art. They also tried to attract the art crowd—those more likely to haunt the clean air-conditioned spaces of galleries like Gagosian—to

18 Vol. 12 No. 4 Left: Dennis Oppenheim, Compression—Fern (Face), 1970, video, 5 mins., 13 secs., presentation at the exhibition City-O-Rama, 2010. Courtesy of MAP Office, Hong Kong. Right: Bill Viola, Angel’s Gate, 1989, video, 4 mins., 50 secs., minutes. presentation at the exhibition City-O-Rama, 2010. Courtesy of MAP Office, Hong Kong.

environments they are less likely to frequent in the pursuit of experiencing art. The works were not made according to a unifying theme, MAP Office preferring the artists to create their own questions and forms, or even to show older artworks. For example, Compression—Fern (face), made in 1970 by the American artist Denis Oppenheim, was described in the following way: “In this video, the carnivorous human being obliterates a gentle fern delivering a violent message. The interplay between the plant that has been an integral part of the earth’s resources and the homo sapiens who have been a destroyer and consumer is particularly poignant in this violent crushing of the fern. This plain plant is a symbol of all peaceful herbivore species, but the Homo sapiens is destroying every single specimen in its path. Of particular significance is the artist here only using one hand instead of two to illustrate his power against nature.”2 Another American artist, Bill Viola, showed a video made in 1989, which was described by MAP Office this way, “One of Viola’s early videos, Reflecting Pool, explores the apparent static nature of time. The protagonist—the artist—emerges from a dense forest and approaches the edge of a pool. There, he prepares to make a powerful jump but as he stands up in the air, something unexpected happens. For the artist, water is a symbol of life and rebirth, that continues to ripple and undulate after our passage.”3

The Works, generally aired on Tuesday evenings, showed City-O-Rama with the participating artists and curators explaining their positions. One of the stall owners, a lady selling flowers in front of the monitor showing Compression—Fern (face), was also interviewed, and she reacted with a very open and accepting attitude: “I love engaging in such crazy activities. These two artists are mad, so it’s fun. It’s all right if they put the installation here. I can just let my customers watch.”4 The original Cantonese is of course much more animated than the slightly more serious English translation offered in subtitles by the TV show. Obviously, it is important to keep one’s sense of humour, and it is true that this quote was the unselfconscious and endearing reaction of the stall owner, but this brief interview also falls into the tactics of trivialization that the traditional mass media often cannot help reverting to. The use of the term sou—translated as “crazy” in the

Vol. 12 No. 4 19 subtitles—to describe the two artists of MAP Office also can be translated as “odd” or “whacky” in English, and it immediately put the whole project on a level of “fun” that sounded much like the response by the Madrid press to the anti-World Bank demonstration by the Reina Sofía Museum group.

The reaction of the stall owner is also an indication that the cultural representation of the artist in the Hong Kong doxa is still one defined by a certain kind of cultural tradition, one that belongs just as much to the Chinese as to the Euro-American cultures—the artist as not quite right in the head and therefore both amusing and easy to dismiss. From painters like Bada Shanren [Zhu Da] (1626–1705) and Xu Wei (1521–93) to poets like Li Bai (701–62) and Han Shan (ninth century), the crazed artist is just as familiar to the Chinese as Salvador Dali or Lord Byron is to Euro-Americans. Ai Weiwei could have been dismissed just as easily in this context, but he was not, for the reasons already cited. The reaction of the stall owner, amused and quite clearly unconcerned by the artwork visible in her stall (she actually said that “it doesn’t hurt,” which implies that it doesn’t matter, really), is another, maybe more severe, obstacle to the “no outside” for art practices: if the reception to socially engaged art practices is mild amusement and actual lack of interest, something is not working, not being communicated.

Socially Engaged Art Practices as Dissensus If the word “education” appears in the context of socially engaged art practices, it often will provoke sighs of disappointment and fatigue. Educating the public about contemporary art practices always seems to be a dead end because the idea of education creates images of interminable hours listening to pontificating teachers. Similarly, this traditional type of education also involves the idea that what is being taught is superior to what the students might already know. In the case of contemporary art, such education is tantamount to saying that other manifestations of culture, like popular music, comic books, or soap operas on TV, are not as good, not as important, and need to give way to “higher” forms of human expression such as contemporary art.

Needless to say, this is the best way to frighten away any culturally curious person and, since we are not talking about traditional forms of education where assessment is essential (as in schools and universities where students need to earn a degree), it might be beneficial to consider other methods like the one explored by Jacques Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, the idea of universal education. His theory of education is based on a variety of missing links and was first created by the early-nineteenth-century French teacher Joseph Jacotot, who managed to “teach” French to non-French speaking pupils by simply offering them a bilingual edition of François Fénelon’s Télémaque and asking them to compare the two versions. Jacotot’s work was based on the idea—one also defended by Rancière throughout his works—that all people are in possession of equal mental capacities. If we follow Rancière, it would be interesting to argue that Joseph Jacotot’s “universal teaching” would be the best way to make available to more people the possibilities of socially engaged art practices. Based on this idea of

20 Vol. 12 No. 4 universal education, Jacotot, like Joseph Beuys over a century later, believed that anyone could be an artist.

In socially engaged art practices, where presenting the artworks and educating the viewers within the idea of universal education are one and the same, the situations made possible by the artists are sparking something new, something that was not planned in advance by either the artists or the spectators. As we shall see, this is the promise of what Rancière calls the aesthetic regime, as opposed to what he calls the representative regime. While the representative regime relies on inequality—the artist being seen as superior to the spectator and knowing all the implications of meaning in his or her work—the aesthetic regime relies on equality—artists and spectators are equal to the point where the artist does not know how the spectator will interpret the artwork.

This conception of art can be found in what Rancière refers to as “dissensus,” a movement that fragments the community by revealing what had been previously hidden. Dissensus operates on the decisions made by various institutions to include or exclude certain social groups and, therefore, on what can be considered serious or trivial. Dissensus therefore functions on two levels by questioning who counts as a subject worthy of taking part and what is worthy of being talked about.5 In politics, dissensus poses the question about who is competent about what. For instance, the position of traditional art critics and their voice of authority, based on the claimed superiority of their own experience of art, must be revised in disssensus as such assumptions are based on inequality and therefore useless within the project of universal education. Dissensus also questions the limits between the private and the public and always turns exhibition spaces into locations of dispute: this is what happens, for example, when artists and curators decide to avoid the traditional venues for art—the museum or gallery—and try to occupy other sites and circumstances.

Thus, artists who use the space of a gallery in order to integrate it with its surrounding area, or artists who put artworks outside any institutional space are examples of dissensus made to “rupture given relations between things and meanings and, inversely, invent novel relationships between things and meanings that were previously unrelated.”6 Both have political import as long as they have not been trivialized into forms of innocuous entertainment. Because there is “no direct cause-effect relationship . . . between the intention realized in an art performance and a capacity for political subjectivation,”7 there is a need for a degree of mediation between art practices and the majority of spectators, but these mediations need to be made by people who are cognizant of the intent of the artist and of the political implications of such dissensual practices. This is the problem with the non-specialized press, whose writers are generally unprepared to understand these reflections about art as dissensus, even in its most basic form, and who tend to transform everything into the worst kind of consensus, that is, one that does not even attempt to “question the self- evidence of the visible’’8 and forces everyone to accept the political and

Vol. 12 No. 4 21 social status quo even when it goes against the eudemonic ethics generally defended by socially engaged art practices.

In this context, even the latest Christopher Nolan Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), is presented as something that carries a political message (and if it does, it is a very simplistic one, and it gets even further trivialized by its own commercial context of distribution), while socially engaged art practices are barely positioned at the same level. If artists are thinking and integrating into their practices these reflections, they are unfortunately turned into irrelevant games and emptied of their significance through the kind of superficial reporting that is the only access point made available to those who are not aware of the existence of Rancière’s aesthetic regime. As long as primary and secondary school education remains mainly skill-based and does not address the possibility of art as dissensus, and as long as journalists in the non-specialized press turn these acts into entertainment (thus limiting the importance of art to a descriptive regime and its complete separation with the everyday), then artists will always be represented as working “outside.”

Socially Engaged Art Practices as Stimulus The “no outside” paradigm is the obvious context for making contemporary art today, just as it is true that art making has become decentered: the old centre(s) of art making have made way for a multiplicity of other situations where the old-fashioned centre/periphery relationship no longer makes any sense. If making art was all that mattered, we could then believe that the aesthetic regime conceived of by Rancière has come into being and is creating a near-utopia of expression and exchange. But art must rely on other vectors for its existence, and it is in the context of showing art, and writing and talking about art, that difficulties emerge that put the “no outside” paradigm into question. Are socially engaged art practitioners working inside the system of art? Probably so, as far as they are concerned— they are convinced of the equality between artist and spectator, but, in this case, the perception of the artwork is also made by institutions that do not accept the notion of equality. The traditional mass media—press and television—still very much rely on the teacher/student relationship that is denounced by Rancière: the journalist “knows,” and the spectator admiringly receives and accepts the information.

It is in this context of passive receivership that the “no outside” paradigm becomes problematic, and one symptom can be found in the frequently haughty tone columnists and journalists without any contemporary art background often take. The solution may reside in the recourse to non-traditional mass media—the blog and cyberspace in general would exemplify this locus of an interactive reception of socially engaged art practices. Unfortunately, the use of non-traditional mass media comes with a whole new range of difficulties that also put into question the “no outside” paradigm. When the traditional mass media trivializes contemporary art practices, like the ones that might fit Rancière’s aesthetic regime, the new non-traditional mass media existing in a network of exchanges is the place where “anything goes,” but often in a fairly negative way. There, in

22 Vol. 12 No. 4 the non-traditional mass media nothing is certain, and if that situation of uncertainty can create very productive forms of misreading, it can also lead to such profound misunderstandings that communication becomes its own worst enemy; the whole difference between creative imagination, positive and productive of new cultural arrangements, on the one hand, and destructive gossip, on the other, can be negative and lead to hatred and silence. But other spaces, like the street and even certain kinds of galleries where the project of undermining institutional stultification is enacted, may be the most efficient way to create the conditions of Rancière and Jacotot’s notion of universal education.

Socially engaged art is generally a part of the universal education and the aesthetic regime. Thus, spectators are left to negotiate meaning with the data provided by the artwork itself, letting it interact with his or her culture, language, and social background. This also allows the possibility of an absence of reaction: if the artwork offers no common ground with the experience of the spectator, as so often happens in a global context when exhibiting art, it is possible that the artwork might not “speak” to the spectator, and this has to be accepted in some cases, but chances are this will not happen very often, since the variants of interpretation are endless.

Wooferten, Yaumatei Self-Rescue Project and Demonstration Exhibition, 2012, Shanghai Street Art Space, Yaumatei, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Courtesy of Wooferten.

Vol. 12 No. 4 23 To look specifically at Hong Kong, the problem is that since art education, especially in secondary schools, is clearly skill-based, very few people are ready to accept the extreme flexibility of perception of the aesthetic regime described earlier. To be able to appreciate socially engaged art, one needs to eschew as much as possible the demands of the representative regime. In the case of the actions by the art collective Wooferten, as we shall see, it would be interesting to know who actually enjoyed these works.

The Wooferten collective, which received funding from the Hong Kong Right: Wooferten, Yaumatei Self-Rescue Project and Art Development Council for a year and established itself in the Shanghai Demonstration Exhibition, 2012, Shanghai Street Art Street Artspace in Yau Ma Tei, has made its mission to act in the domain of Space, Yaumatei, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Courtesy of socially engaged art practices. One of the seven curated exhibitions it has Wooferten. planned for its tenure at the Shanghai Street Artspace was titled Yaumatei Left: Wooferten, Yaumatei Self-Rescue Project and Self-Rescue Project and Demonstration Exhibition—the Chinese title is Demonstration Exhibition, 2012, Who Took Away Painter Attacking Yau Ma Tei! Self-Rescue Project and Demonstration Exhibition— Fung’s Stall? (Art action in support of “Painter Fung.”), was organized in April 2012 and involved a group of young artists who each Shanghai Street Art Space, Yaumatei, Kowloon, Hong decided on a strategy to enact the project of the show. On the collective’s Kong. Courtesy of Wooferten. Web site, where the names of the founding members are glaringly absent, the Wooferten collective thus describes its mission:

Wooferten is a non-profit art organization funded by Hong Kong Art Development Council. We are based at Shanghai Street Artspace in Yaumatei, an aging grass-root community and neighbourhood. Formed by a group of like-minded artists, curators, critics, researchers, educators, Woofer Ten aims at introducing a lively conception of contemporary art engaging the community. Therefore, instead of attempting an out-of-place white cube arty gallery, Woofer Ten moulds itself more like a community centre, a platform for art projects to explore new approaches in bridging the community and art making. Woofer Ten treasures the participation of our neighbouring community and audiences, and sees its art programs as creative interventions upon our community and society at large. Exhibitions will change from month

24 Vol. 12 No. 4 to month, alongside with plenty of ad hoc activities such as performances, guide tours, workshops, talks, screenings etc., offering the public not just experimental contemporary art and curating, but also art that are close to our everyday life and with social-political relevance.9

The collective adopted “guerilla tactics” to counter the destructive ways used by the large developers in Hong Kong and, in particular, how the government-funded Urban Renewal Authorities often seem to play an active role in the systematic modification—others would say eradication—of the local environment:

The project named itself “self-rescue” for it proposes to spread a self-help attitude, giving out suggestion to the Kai-fong (neighborhood community) of Yau Ma Tei (as well as beyond), some means to rebel against the blind development now prevailing in Hong Kong.

We encourage the public to not just appreciate, to cherish their community, but also through their action and participation to help preserve all the precious things that constituted the lively district. Our everyday livelihoods are in fact being subjected to more and more control as urban renewal joined hands with developers, allowing giant entrepreneurs sprawling crawls [sic] affecting almost every aspects of our daily lives. We surely do not have any real “weapons” to fight against them, but why not do something and start our resistance with our bare hands?10

One of the four events organized during the Yaumatei Self-Rescue Project and Demonstration Exhibition was the partial reconstruction of the stall of a painter called Mr. Fung who specialized in portrait making, a profession that has all but disappeared in the rest of Hong Kong and is used as an alternative to portrait photography. The street-stall of Mr. Fung that was once located just a block away from Wooferten in Shanghai Street had recently been partially demolished in one of the acts that are often presented as a desire to “clean up” an area of its original inhabitants. The son of the painter lent photos and some of his father’s personal items for the exhibition, and Mr. Fung himself was present at the opening of the exhibition. The desire of the artists involved, and that of Wooferten in particular, was clearly to abolish the traditional limits between artists and the public, high and low culture, and of what Rancière proposes as limitations to the idea of equality.

Emancipation and Outreach Programs Although they are in my view the most effective solutions for emancipation, punctual actions like the ones created by Wooferten cannot necessarily be sustained since, unfortunately, their funding comes from a government source (the Hong Kong Arts Development Council) and is not likely to continue forever. But punctual actions must continue in a variety of formats

Vol. 12 No. 4 25 and engage a variety of artists and other art collectives whose actions can be compared to the tactics imagined by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life. In de Certeau’s propositions, strategies are formulated and enacted from locations of power and are based on the idea of competition while establishing the boundaries of acceptable practices. Strategies set norms and conventions by working with finite ideas and always aim at conclusive forms. That is the way museums function, for instance, by establishing once and for all what deserves to be seen as art. De Certeau would see the way Wooferten functions as a tactic being used to achieve immediate or short-term aims. They are not enacted in specific locations or institutions and always appear within the gaps of conventional thought and patterns of everyday life.11 It would be unfair to consider the two projects created by M+, the “museum plus” of visual culture for the future Kowloon Cultural District, in Yau Ma Tei, also fall squarely in the category of the strategy. Even though it would be hard to maintain that M+ is not a museum institution—in spite of all its efforts not to fall into that specific rut—with some of its inherent restrictions, its creators are trying to create something else where the possibilities of tactics, like those enacted by small groups like Wooferten, will still be possible.

But what about forms of socially engaged art that seem to belong to both tactics and strategies? Tactics are something conceived and enacted by individuals or very small collectives in the context of very precise and punctual events (the way Wooferten enrolled the inhabitants of a neighbourhood to act against the destruction waged on their streets by big developers in Hong Kong) and strategies, something designed and enacted on a much larger scale by institutions related to the seats of power, like the Hong Kong government. Commissioned by M+ to house Cantonese performance opera, this traditional temporary bamboo theatre, of a type still visible from time to time in other areas of Hong Kong during traditional Chinese festivals (with sometimes theatrical troops performing from outside of Hong Kong), was also the occasion to celebrate other forms of popular culture such as the cinema. This bamboo theatre was constructed by an itinerant Chinese opera troupe the way it had been traditionally made for many decades in Hong Kong, and for centuries on the mainland. Such events, with generally free-of-charge performances, are particularly popular during the Hungry Ghosts Festival around the fifteenth night of the seventh lunar month, generally in August. Local and mainland Chinese troupes are invited by local associations (sometimes of non-Cantonese speaking groups from Fujian or Chaozhou who can thus enjoy Chinese theatre in their own dialects) to perform for the dead and for the living. Because hiring these theatre troupes is getting much more expensive, it is unfortunately a fast disappearing tradition in Hong Kong. The main organizer, the West Kowloon Cultural District authorities, wanted to remind the people of Hong Kong that a theatre dedicated to Chinese opera in all its forms would be a permanent and very prestigious fixture of this area in a few years’ time. It was also the purpose of M+, whose building is supposed to be finished around 2017, to remind the Hong Kong public of its participation in all of what the future West Kowloon Cultural District will have to offer.

26 Vol. 12 No. 4 Top: Gaylord Chan, New Year As far as the visual arts are concerned, the most obvious mark of M+’s Trophy, 2012, M+ Bamboo Theatre Exhibition, West involvement in this operation was to invite such veteran artists as Gaylord Kowloon Cultural District. Courtesy of M+ and WKCD. Chan, Chu Hing-wah, and Michael Wolf to create new artworks for the Bottom: Leung Mee Ping, occasion. This might actually be a good indication of the sort of activities 2012, during the exhibition Mobile M+, presented by this institution will be involved in (and already is, albeit as yet without a the West Kowloon Cultural District Authorities, Yau Ma permanent home): preservation and education about forms of art that are Tei, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Courtesy M+, WKCD, and Joel still represented as of interest to a minority in Hong Kong’s population. Lam.

More clearly part of a socially engaged practice, Mobile M+ was a project about disseminating artwork in the streets and the easily accessed spaces of Yau Ma Tei that one would generally only be encountered in the pristine

Vol. 12 No. 4 27 28 Vol. 12 No. 4 Vol. 12 No. 4 29 Pak Sheung-chuen, L, 2012, during the exhibition Mobile M+, presented by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authorities, Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Courtesy of M+ and WKCD.

rooms of a museum. Closer to the ideas of City-O-Rama, viewers were able to see installations (like the one by Leung Mee-ping) as well as interactive performances like the Pak Sheung-chuen’s. As was the case with City-O- Rama, is exhibiting in the street sufficient to be seen as a socially engaged art practice and be accepted by social groups generally not interested in contemporary art practices? Probably not. In many ways, these artworks put on display in the streets might even be more confusing for the public unless the curators and/or artists are more explicit, like Pak Sheung-chuen. To address the question of what kind of outreach educational programs could propose, it is important to remember that the main difficulty is not to demean those who would access these programs. The issue here is one of emancipation, to use also the vocabulary of Rancière, and instead of merely providing information, which is necessary to a certain degree, it is more important to awaken in those who generally have no access to any form of contemporary art (and especially socially engaged forms) a form of curiosity that would let them take “possession” of these artworks and art practices. It is, in fact, about encouraging personal interpretation in order to avoid the most common kinds of reactions such as “I don’t know” or “this is stupid.”

Susan Sontag famously and rightly opposed a certain kind of elucidation for artworks in an article titled "Against Interpretation": “The interpreter says, ‘Look don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C’?”12 Unfortunately, her text is far too what I would call “Westernocentrist” and assumes that any artwork can immediately be understood by spectators when they are left alone with their own reception of the work. This position basically assumes that anyone from any cultural background could construct personal interpretations about any artwork; an impossible proposition in a globalized art world where one can encounter artworks and art practices from cultures so different that most of its subtext can remain opaque. In the Mong Kok and West Kowloon districts of Hong Kong, for instance, where the activities of M+ have been increasingly frequent, a large portion of the people who have encountered these art events came in contact with forms of art whose origins can be traced to a multitude of unrelated cultural sources: the national Chinese culture, and the infra-national Hong Kong cultures, but also other forms of national cultures (many of them having Euro-American descent) and supra-national cultures (like “European” or “Asian”). This represents far too rich a field of cultural interaction to be simply taken at face value without losing so much

30 Vol. 12 No. 4 Michael Wolf, Cantonese Opera Showtime, 2012, M+ Bamboo Theatre Exhibition, West Kowloon Cultural District. Courtesy of Michael Wolf.

meaning that it becomes so many empty gestures; this situation needs the awakening of certain forms of curiosity.

As long as we expect the public—the people in the street—to possess the kind of formative process art education generally offers nowadays (from primary to secondary school and, I am sorry to say, all the way through tertiary education, the only hope being that postgraduate studies thankfully escapes the traps of such systems), the way art education is practiced in schools and universities will simply reinforce the inequality that makes accepting the forms of socially engaged art we have discussed so difficult. An emancipatory type of education cannot, unfortunately, be found in the specialized press. Anyone who has read magazines like Artforum or Documents sur l’art would know that they are not the kinds of reading anyone can follow, and as much as it would be tempting to rely on Rancière’s notion of equality here, it remains that a certain kind of education, namely, the type one has access to in higher education, is necessary to understand these texts. And even more accessible publications, like Beaux-Arts in France, Art in America, or the many often short-lived publications Hong Kong has known (Muse magazine for instance) require a type of curiosity on the part of readers that is often stifled and superseded by the much more readily available traditional mass media. What is needed, therefore, is more outreach programs, the kinds that exist in between the strategies and tactics that will hopefully offered by institutions like M+, but also more straightforward tactics in the form of actions like Wooferten or Pak Sheung-chuen’s L (this last one also blurring the line between the institutional strategies—this was performed during an M+ curated event—and the personal tactic; this was a performance presented within the larger projects of this artist).

L is an interlinked and multi-part urban intervention, consisting of performance, exhibition, and documentation. As an extension of Pak’s earlier publication 2011()10()24 made up of diary notes and sketches, it questions the role of art in improving everyday life as it mediates between the borders of spirituality, social interaction, and daily living. Throughout the exhibition period, Pak disseminates “artistic gestures” to the public by orchestrating everyday scenarios in the form of: street promotions of self- enhancement courses based on artistic concepts around

Vol. 12 No. 4 31 Temple Street; night classes aimed at “tired white-collar workers”; and collation of ideas from the classes and Pak’s research, promotion and delivery of his creative ideas—in the form of three publications and exhibition in neighborhood shops.”13

As Lars Nitve, executive director of M+, made clear from the outset, this institution would take special care to create outreach programs that will extend the benefits of having access to artists and art that stratum of Hong Kong society generally have not been offered previously. Now that M+ has already established its importance in the region as a museum, thanks to the donation of one of the most important collectors of contemporary Chinese art, Uli Sigg, there is little doubt that it will play an increasingly important role in Hong Kong, China, and the rest of Asia. Currently, it is impossible to know what forms these outreach programs will take. But there is a large measure of hope: with the Sigg donation, M+ already has a solid reputation as a repository of art, and Lars Nitve himself was involved with successful outreach programs during his tenure at Tate Modern in London. In an impressively positive description of the involvement of Tate Modern in outreach, published as part of a report titled Museums & Galleries: Creative Engagement, Ricky Burdett provides a long list of activities designed by this institution. Published in March 2004, the report “uses case studies to illustrate how national museums, libraries, and archives engage in a huge range of innovative activities with different communities across the UK, from business and science to youth and fashion.”14 These kinds of action go far beyond the simple act of education. Whether this can truly be put in place in Hong Kong, and whether it will leave as much leeway as possible for the emancipation of the public at large, will be in great part the responsibility of the main funding institution; that is, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority and, behind it, the Hong Kong government itself.

Notes 1 Available for viewing on the site of the Asia Art Archive, the roundtable was organized at the occasion of ART HK 2012. The speakers were Manuel Borja-Villel Director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Iftikhar Dadi Associate Professor and Department Chair, Department of Art, Cornell University, New York; and Marian Pastor Roces, critic and independent curator, The Philippines. The moderator was Reiko Tomii, independent scholar and co-founder of PoNJA-GenKon, New York. This talk was held on May 17, 2012. see http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/CollectionOnline/ SpecialCollectionItem/3320/. 2 MAP Office (2010) City-O-Rama, press release for the exhibition at 10 Chancery Lane gallery, November 4–November 20, 2010, www.10chancerylanegallery.com/exhibitions/catalog/2010/ CityORama/press_release/. 3 Ibid. 4 The Works, aired on November 11, 2010, produced by Radio Television Hong Kong. 5 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum International Publishing, 1999), 141. 6 Ibid., 141. 7 Ibid., 140. 8 Ibid., 141. 9 Wooferten, http://woofer10.blogspot.hk/. 10 Wooferten, from the Web page of the Yaumatei Self-Rescue Project and Demonstration Exhibition, ymtselfrescue.blogspot.hk. 11 Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du Quotidien, Vol. 1, Arts de Faire (Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1980) 10–18. 12 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 13. 13 From the Web site of the exhibition Mobile M+, http://www.mobile-mplus.hk/paksheungchuen.html/. 14 Ricky Burdett, Museums & Galleries: Creative Engagement, 2004, www.nationalmuseums.org.uk/ resources/.

32 Vol. 12 No. 4 Stephanie Bailey On Producing Strategy: Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s “Hong Kong Intervention”

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Hong hen it comes to morally ambiguous labour practices and Kong Intervention, 2009, C prints, 75 x 100 cm and 75 x laws, the debates have been raging. For example, we recently 56 cm each pair. Courtesy of the artists and Osage Gallery, have seen the uproar against migrant worker conditions in Hong Kong. W Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where the Saadiyat Island complex is making way for a branch of the Guggenheim, along with other Western institutions setting up outposts in this Gulf state. Then there are the migrant workers in China, who are denied equal access to healthcare and education in their province of work because of the hukou, a system of household registration that determines where and what public services migrant workers are entitled to. And we must not forget the United States, with its own guest worker programs designed to welcome a cheap workforce into the country without ever granting workers full citizenship.

In Hong Kong, the problems are similar, albeit particular, as with each of these cases. And, as with the above-mentioned examples, despite there being (by all official accounts) improvements, the migrant workers who make up a large chunk of Hong Kong’s domestic workforce still face conditions that drive the critics to liken this form of labour to indentured servitude. Many of these workers, most of them from Indonesia and the Philippines, come to Hong Kong via agencies operating essentially as legal human trafficking companies, binding workers to contracts that at times leave them in debt. Living conditions are no better: workers are said to sleep in laundry rooms on top of washing machines, even in washrooms or the floors of kitchens; there are even stories of customized “maid slots” installed under staircases.

Vol. 12 No. 4 33 Overall, it is a dire situation, and for over three decades various Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Hong Kong Intervention, 2009, C organizations in Hong Kong (a mixture of NGOs and independent bodies) prints, 75 x 100 cm and 75 x 56 cm each pair. Courtesy of have been investigating and appealing against practices of hiring—and the artists and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. moving—migrant workers into the city. Examples include Mission for Migrant Workers and Helpers for Domestic Helpers, both founded in the early 1980s in the Philippines and Hong Kong respectively. And, like other instances of art interrogating labour issues—GulfLabor1 in the UAE, for example—an artist’s project focusing on the migrant worker in Hong Kong was conducted by artist duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in 2009. Orchestrated with the support of Osage Gallery, the project was titled Hong Kong Intervention and consisted of a publication and an exhibition of images that was launched at the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010.

In this project, the artists gave Filipina/o domestic workers a toy grenade and instructed them to photograph the toy at their place of work. They were also asked to take a self-portrait with their back to the camera in a setting of choice. The resulting images create discomfort: a grenade left in a child’s room; on the kitchen table; by a pile of shirts. Then there are the “back shots”: images of young men and women, their identities protected but their clothes and chosen settings belying a certain individuality. Apparently, when these works were shown in Hong Kong, some homeowners recognized their properties and felt violated.2 The result was a double-sided reflection: the domestic helper in the master’s house and the master, recognizing the house and, in turn, the domestic helper. A private re-meeting between “master” and “slave” (or “lord” and “bondsman”, to borrow Hegel’s pre-Marxian terminology) conducted in a very public sphere—the contemporary art world and its market processes.

In an email interview with the artists, I sought to expand on the ideas invoked in the project (given the resulting publication contains only a paragraph from the duo) and asked about how property owners took offense to their residences being co-opted in such a way when faced with the images presented in a public exhibition. Sun Yuan responded:

34 Vol. 12 No. 4 Who can say that these homes only belong to their owners? These homes also belong to those who work there, as well as the photographers. If the work makes the audience aware of this problem, then these homes also belong to the audience. And when I think of this concept, the homes also belong to me, even though I have not been there yet.3

In this statement, Hong Kong Intervention becomes more about the subject of ownership (or lack thereof) within the framework of society and its social, political, and economic contracts. It is also about things—and beings— that we are connected to, that we see, but do not register, or situations we are entangled in but do not acknowledge. The artists’ observations of the Filipina maids who crowd the Central District’s main squares on Sundays, something that has been particular to Hong Kong culture since the 1980s, is in fact what started this project. Indeed, in a society with one of the largest gaps between rich and poor in the world, migrant workers have long been part of Hong Kong’s larger societal structure.

In essence, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s project was devised to produce an encounter between one side of society and another. Within this, the toy grenade was deployed as a universal motif suggesting a certain threat or violence. The grenades—like the individuals who produced the images for the project—are by association presented almost like social time bombs, ticking away within the murky divisions of global labour and its social hierarchies. According to the artists, the plan was to propose a practical strategy within a current reality: Hong Kong, a living environment with unpredictable outcomes. It is in this positioning between the reality and the logic of living in Hong Kong that a “super realistic” outcome, as the artists described it, was somehow produced. It is an approach that reflects the artists’ concerns with how an artwork might affect the reality of a situation, while exploring whether “a miracle could happen outside the reality.”4

Yet in the reality presented by the images in Hong Kong Intervention, the private world of the domestic worker feels distant and inaccessible. “Home” becomes a strange place of purgatory, a place where the migrant worker is subsumed into the lives of others—the owners of said homes. The households depicted in Hong Kong Intervention’s photographs tingle with a sense of alienation—despite their familiarity to some—because of the loaded context the migrant worker brings to them: a life replicated hundreds of thousands of times over, in which workers escape at the break of dawn on a Sunday for a mere one day off. There are few places to go except the city squares and a few shopping malls catering to the migrant community—there is no home to relax in but the master’s. To most viewers, these images are as alienating as the situation itself. But to the image-makers—the domestic workers—these photographs are personal documents. This personal element constitutes this project’s real value, although the domestic workers who took part only received a print of the images they took and a copy of the publication by way of “reimbursement.” This raises questions about a perhaps unintended complicity of the artists in taking part in the abusive labour practices they seemingly purport to criticize.

Vol. 12 No. 4 35 The impact of Hong Kong Intervention is intensified by an artistic distance or absence, here an approach that explores the concept of relations between viewer and object rooted within a social context. On the idea of “relation” discussed in an interview between the artists and Li Xianting, Sun Yuan explains:

“Relation” is a term that we learned when we began to study painting. The teacher used to say “relation” was what an artist would study for a lifetime. Back then I didn’t understand what he said. I thought relation was very simple. Why should it take a lifetime to understand?5

Relations are indeed simple: light must exist with the dark in a certain Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Hong Kong Intervention, 2009, C state of balance, just as society should maintain equilibrium within its own prints, 75 x 100 cm and 75 x 56 cm each pair. Courtesy of structure. Indeed, relations are enacted even when someone is challenged the artists and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. by some external provocation, including those who make a judgment on migrant worker conditions in one city only to recognize the impotence of claiming that other societies are less guilty of the same practices. It could also be a matter of relating one’s own life to that of another, even if that “other” has been devalued into something less than human. In essence, the challenge with Hong Kong Intervention is to consider how we are managing and valuing labour across all levels of capitalism.

In this sense, it is fitting, perhaps, that the publication for Hong Kong Intervention starts with an essay by David Elliot titled “Somewhere Between Rape and Adultery.”6 I asked the artists to expand on this idea, and Peng Yu wrote:

I wanted to enter Hong Kong homes forcefully, (allowing) these mechanisms of art to become (a platform of) conspiracy for the Filipino domestic workers. There is a similar relationship between artists and institutions.7

This statement adds another layer to the project’s function as a proposal. Peng Yu elaborates on the word “intervention” in the project’s title, a term

36 Vol. 12 No. 4 that, for them, “is too artistically conceptual.” The artists explain how the project’s intention was to present ideas around a “strategy,” be it a “progressive strategy” or “attack strategy,” an approach likened to a military operation.8 Such a view invokes a kind of objectivism necessary, perhaps, to produce strategies used to interrogate and affect social relations. For example, the meticulous nature of Hong Kong Intervention and the rules devised for the project’s enactment created a disconnection from the kind of “social practice” Michael Rakowitz once described as “misplaced ministerial work.”9 Instead, Hong Kong Intervention was a social experiment: a way of working site-specifically so as to effect a social and institutional critique using the purest material form—actual bodies in actual spaces.

And the project continues to create encounters among site-specific, individual, and global contexts. In terms of migrant labour—or, in a broader sense, indentured servitude—Hong Kong is, as the artists note, no stranger to labour issues. Only recently10 was a minimum hourly wage officially established in the city: worth as much per hour as a McDonald’s meal or a rice box. This fact is something Thomas Chan, head of the China Business Centre at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, critiqued in an article for China Daily:

[I]t is difficult to understand why the government set only an hourly minimum wage without a monthly equivalent. On the mainland, local governments fix both minimum hourly wages and minimum monthly salaries (and the monthly salaries include all of the entitlements of the workers required by law, including paid holidays). 11

What Chan says of the minimum hourly wage in Hong Kong is not irrelevant to the plight of freelance and part-time workers in the Western world, particularly in the creative industries. The use of freelance and part- time labour has become common practice for companies wanting to avoid covering full-time employee benefits such as medical insurance. This has spurned such responses as The Precarious Workers Brigade in the UK and the Independent Freelancers Union in the US and discussions surrounding post-Fordism within the creative industries.

In the case of Hong Kong, Chan writes:

[T]his new policy has . . . not contributed to increased welfare and a fair wage for the poorly paid employees of Hong Kong. Instead, it acts to destroy job security by turning monthly paid jobs into hourly paid temporary ones and to reduce the overall benefits of workers by removing all paid entitlements.12

Here, the issue of labour explored in Hong Kong Intervention and the question of workers’ rights extend beyond migrants, and, moreover, do not pertain to Hong Kong alone. From issues such as the refusal of political and

Vol. 12 No. 4 37 legal entitlements such as citizenship to control over how fiscal entitlements are distributed across all levels of the labour force, the real question this project puts forward is how labour is truly valued in the twenty-first century and what implications this has for all of us. As Peng Yu writes: Hong Kong, like many other societies, “needs this type of low-cost labour. But at the same time, it is felt that giving the Filipinos more benefits is not in the interest of local people. In a small place like Hong Kong, this contradiction is a common problem.”13

And the problem is common precisely because it lies at every level of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Hong Kong Intervention, 2009, C capitalist life and with every one of us who are engaged with it. But how do prints, 75 x 100 cm and 75 x 56 cm each pair. Courtesy of we relate to the value or devaluation of human beings within the mechanics the artists and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. of labour? For example, one of the key concerns for nations such as the UAE is that governments—and local populations—are afraid of what would happen should a transient and global workforce be granted actual rights. In the UAE, the anxieties are clear: with the local (and ruling) Emirati population comprising roughly 20% of the UAE’s total population, there are fears around losing a sense of national identity and cultural autonomy, not to mention the effect this would have on wealth. Problems are further complicated by the fact that a generation from across the Arab, African, and Asian worlds has been born and reared on UAE soil but has yet to be granted the legal right of abode and assimilation into Emirati society. There is an element of social exclusion here that extends beyond class boundaries enforced by market rule and state laws. On a social level, it moves into the realm of cultural relationships enacted within a single space such as the city.

Here, Hong Kong Intervention highlights another issue when it comes to migrant worker conditions: that the betterment of working practices should not be solely predicated on the establishment of citizenship; nor should such practices be conditioned solely by the state. The issue of labour practices must also be approached socially in that the situation is also about how we relate to each other across divisions of labour, class, and culture. In Shaohua Zhan’s essay “What Determines Migrant Workers’ Life Chances in Contemporary China? Hukou, Social Exclusion, and the

38 Vol. 12 No. 4 Market,” the issue of citizenship among migrant workers (likened to the former apartheid system in South Africa, with the hukou system in China presented as an example of exclusion based on legal boundaries enforced by the state) is presented as only one of the issues affecting quality of life for migrant workers. Shaohua Zhan identifies three mechanisms that lead to social differentiation and inequality: the market, legal exclusion, and social exclusion.14 Zhan elaborates:

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Hong [P]eople can draw a boundary between themselves Kong Intervention, 2009, C prints, 75 x 100 cm and 75 x and others, limiting the nature of social and economic 56 cm each pair. Courtesy of the artists and Osage Gallery, relationships across boundaries and excluding outsiders Hong Kong. from access to resources and opportunities within their social networks.15

In this, there is an issue of perception in Hong Kong Intervention that is key. When the divisions produced by such systems of production become so visible they are impossible to ignore, then what is to be done from that immediate perspective? In engaging with Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s project, the viewer is invited—or implored—to recognize a cultural and social “other” within a global order. In entering the world of the domestic worker, Hong Kong Intervention frames questions around the exploitation of low-cost labour while asking what this practice says about a capitalist (neoliberal) society such as Hong Kong.

This questioning of labour exploitation and how it relates to society invites a relational approach similar to how artists might consider their personal contexts in relation to the contexts they choose to investigate and explore. In the case of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, I ask if China, alluding to the political and social realities that exist in the mainland, informs their work and, more specifically, Hong Kong Intervention. On this, Sun Yuan comments:

It is completely unavoidable that one’s thoughts and experiences are influenced by their direct environment, regardless of the political or cultural environment. All these reactions are a natural instinct, which one can only (either) adjust to or (wholly) reject [in terms of] the experience you encounter.16

Vol. 12 No. 4 39 In the case of global, transient migrant workforce and the questions surrounding how a “global city” such as Hong Kong assimilates them, recognition is a necessary step to recalibrating the system of mechanized labour that permeates every level of capitalism. But is there also a problem with how we approach the problem? Asking Sun Yuan and Peng Yu whether Michel Foucault influenced the project insofar as it intervenes in a process of material circulation within the flows of capitalism (in this case, the trade of bodies and labour), Peng Yu’s reply is direct:

I don’t know Foucault as well as you. Foucault to you is the same as Sun Yuan is to me. This is what I meant by intervention, or division. Even without Foucault, I would have done this.17

The simplicity of relating—how “I” relates to “you” or how the individual Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Hong Kong Intervention, 2009, C relates to the collective—is effective precisely because it is immediate; that’s prints, 75 x 100 cm and 75 x 56 cm each pair. Courtesy of the point. Peng Yu’s response is but another reminder of how theorists the artists and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. can often lean on the texts and theories of others so as to make sense of something that is elementary. Peng Yu is more concerned with the immediacy of his colleague than he is to the ideas of a distant historical thinker. In this response, it is the encounters that take place in the every day—the here and now—that takes precedence over academic or historical theories when it comes to thinking about ways in which to overcome or improve a flawed or imbalanced system.

In the case of Hong Kong Intervention, a relational moment is attained via the impact achieved through the enactment and production of the images by the subject of the critique: the migrant worker, here depicted through a frame of reference determined and conditioned by the artists who are themselves caught up in their own institutionalized web. The result is a meeting between observer and participant and two different contexts that are at once similar and different. Thus, Hong Kong Intervention is also a challenge and a reminder. In producing this momentary encounter, issues that arise from such a meeting are brought to the foreground. Yet when it comes to society’s most pressing and ethically ambiguous problems, the artists’ do not accept the notion that it is their job to provide solutions,

40 Vol. 12 No. 4 though it is certainly within their remit to make things visible. Ultimately, it is the viewer’s job to relate (or not) to the work once it is presented. This kind of critical reciprocity determines the processes of relation experienced within Hong Kong Intervention as a social critique.

The purpose of such a critique is to present something systemic as material and therefore changeable. When asked to evaluate the success of Hong Kong Intervention, Sun Yuan explains how it entered the collection of the Singapore Art Museum and that a large part of the proceeds from the sale was donated to two charities: the Mission for Migrant Workers and the Bethune House: a temporary shelter in Hong Kong for displaced and distressed domestic workers of all nationalities. Sun Yuan describes this result as “an ideal outcome,” but does not end the evaluation there:

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Hong [M]y thoughts [on the project] were that there needs to be Kong Intervention, 2009, C prints, 75 x 100 cm and 75 x a way to solve this problem. Capitalist methods of donating 56 cm each pair. Courtesy of the artists and Osage Gallery, through charitable means will not erase the guilt; (one Hong Kong. must) have a more comprehensive resolution. This is only a suggestion, but it could bring about the necessary imminent change.18

This change is something Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are always inciting in their work. In Civilization Pillar (2001), for example, a column is made from wax and human fat: a searing depiction of the social contract—this idea that the individual is bound by a collective agreement that in turn produces the state and its rule of law—in its raw, material state. The column is quietly violent: an image of reality—of society bound by human bodies—presented without spectacle. Like Hong Kong Intervention, Civilization Pillar depicts the fleshy core of civilization while simultaneously exposing it. It is this core that the artists invite their audience to consider as something worth improving.

Then comes that eternal question: What is to be done? In Hong Kong, property developers are building residential blocks that some are calling human rights violations given how “living” spaces for domestic workers have been designed (or not) in the homes of their “masters”—spaces, as mentioned earlier, such as slots under stairs and beds over washing

Vol. 12 No. 4 41 Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Hong Kong Intervention, 2009, C prints, 75 x 100 cm and 75 x 56 cm each pair. Courtesy of the artists and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong.

machines in laundry rooms, for instance. That residential blocks are incorporating inhuman living conditions for domestic workers within their blueprints (and for Hong Kong people in general, given the prohibitively high price of residential homes in general) is indicative of how systemic and discriminatory labour abuses have become institutionalized into daily life. To face this issue, or at least consider it as just that—an issue—is a move toward producing new strategies with which to value not only our own lives and our labour, but also the lives and labours of others.

Notes 1 Gulflabor is a coalition of artists, writers, curators, and educators endeavouring to ensure workers’ rights are protected during the construction of new cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi. 2 According to Agnes Lin, founder and director of Osage. 3 E-mail interview between the artists and the author, conducted between March 14 and March 28, 2013. 4 Ibid. 5 Li Xianting, “Dialogue with Sun Yuan and Peng Yu,” April 7, 2004, www.sunyuanpengyu.com/article/ other/lixiantind1.html/. 6 David Elliot, “Somewhere Beyond Rape and Adultery: The Development and Work of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu,” Hong Kong Intervention (Hong Kong: Osage, 2009), 9–13. 7 E-mail interview between the artists and the author, conducted between March 14 and March 28, 2013. 8 Ibid. 9 Anthony Downey, “From Invisible Enemy to Enemy Kitchen: Michael Rakowitz in Conversation with Anthony Downey,” Ibraaz, March 29, 2013, http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/62/. 10 Thomas Chan, “Hong Kong’s minimum wage, trickery to cut entitlements” China Daily, April 1, 2011, www.chinadaily.com.cn/hkedition/2011-04/01/content_12259806.htm/. 11 Thomas Chan, “Hong Kong’s minimum wage, trickery to cut entitlements,” China Daily, April 1, 2011, www.chinadaily.com.cn/hkedition/2011-04/01/content_12259806.htm. 12 Ibid. 13 E-mail interview between the artists and the author, conducted between March 14 and March 28, 2013. 14 Shaohua Zhan, “What Determines Migrant Workers’ Life Chances in Contemporary China? Hukou, Social Exclusion and the Market,” Modern China 37, no. 3 (May 2011; published online before print February 14, 2011), http://mcx.sagepub.com/content/37/3/243.full.pdf+html/. 15 Ibid. 16 E-mail interview between the artists and author, conducted between March 14 and March 28, 2013. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.

42 Vol. 12 No. 4 Zheng Shengtian Who Invited Andy Warhol to China? A Conversation with Alfred Siu April 8, 2013, Glass Chapel, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

Alfred Siu with Andy Warhol Zheng Shengtian: Mr. Siu, in October 1982 Andy Warhol visited Hong portrait. Photo: Don Li-Leger.. Kong and also paid a short visit to Beijing, but there is very little information about this event besides his own short diary and some pictures taken by his photographer, Christopher Makos. It was said that Andy Warhol was invited by a mysterious young businessman in Hong Kong. Now I have the opportunity to talk to this man in person, you. Could you please first introduce yourself briefly who you are and tell me what you did at that time?

Alfred Siu: I was educated in the United States. I went to Stanford University in California, so while in the States I knew about all these famous artists.

Zheng Shengtian: Did you study art at that time?

Vol. 12 No. 4 43 Alfred Siu: No. I was actually an engineer. In 1982, I started a private club project in Hong Kong called the I-Club, and I would invite all the most interesting designers—actually I invited Joe D’Urso, whose design was influenced by minimalism—and part of the theme for the club was to have a lot of contemporary artwork. I approached Jeffrey Deitch, who was then a curator and art consultant in New York. Deitch is now very famous; he had his own studio called Deitch Projects, and now he is the director of Museum of Contemporary Art in LA (LAMOCA). He actually helped me to put together a collection of contemporary art, and we had some really good pieces. We had Robert Rauschenberg’s The Brush Stroke, some Jasper Johns, and a lot of Warhols. Actually, all these would be in the club interior, as part of the backdrop.

Zheng Shengtian: So at that time you were back in Hong Kong.

Alfred Siu: Yes.

Zheng Shengtian: What year did you move back to Hong Kong?

Alfred Siu: I graduated in 1979, and the I-Club project was in 1982.

Zheng Shengtian: Did you know Jeffrey before you went back to Hong Kong?

Alfred Siu: I gave him a cold call from Hong Kong, and I said: “Jeffrey, I need to put together a collection of contemporary art, and you have such a good eye, and I’ve read about you.” I called him to introduce myself and to invite him over to Hong Kong. We had a meeting, and I briefed him about what I needed, and he knew which artists were up-and-coming. He suggested Roy Lichtenstein right away, so we bought The Crying Girl, an enamel-on-steel work. At that time there were some incredible prices, I paid only $30,000 US for this piece, and later on I resold it and I am so sorry that I sold it so early! After only three years I sold it off at $130,000, and when I sold it, everyone in the auction room clapped because that was quite a lot of money at the time—I think it was 1985—but today I think that same painting would be over $2,000,000!

Zheng Shengtian: Yes, Lichtenstein is having a show now at Tate Modern. You mentioned that Andy Warhol did a project for you in New York.

Alfred Siu: Yes! Part of the collection that Jeffrey Deitch suggested was to get Andy Warhol’s stuff, so he flew me over to New York and introduced me to Andy Warhol. I think this was in 1981, because the club opened in 1982. That was a very enjoyable meeting with Andy because he was very famous, he always had the same look—very consistent, he always had the same pair of jeans—he was a very relaxed person, and very amusing! It was a lot of fun working with him—I think it took only one hour—he was really relaxed in his studio, he took a lot of Polaroid photos, he was just talking and shooting

44 Vol. 12 No. 4 at the same time. He was still doing it himself. I think later on others started doing it for him. He simply asked me what colours I liked, he just chatted and took Polaroids—he must have shot over one hundred Polaroids. After the session, he printed out all those Polaroid photos and then said: “Oh, do you like this one? How about this one?” I think the success of his portraits was that he made you feel so relaxed; he was so casual. His conversation continued, and he kept shooting and shooting! And, initially, one can get very uptight about getting painted, but I think part of the reason he was so successful was his ability to socialize, mix at parties, talk to people, and get you to enjoy the conversation. So that was my experience of Andy Warhol and his art. And then, of course, we invited him to come to the opening of the I-Club with the promise that we’d also have a side trip to China.

Zheng Shengtian: Did he propose it to you, or did you propose it to him?

Alfred Siu: I proposed it to him. It was kind of a surprise invitation. He thought about it for a while, and then he proposed it to his crew. He said, “China? What do you think? Beijing?” After a few minutes he said, “Why not, it will be fun!” So he had a whole entourage coming to the grand opening of the I-Club. He had a whole photography crew, and Jeffrey Deitch came with him too.

Zheng Shengtian: He said in his diary that Jeffrey Deitch received him at the airport. Did Jeffrey arrive first?

Alfred Siu: Yes, because he had to put the art collection in the I-Club. The I-Club had a gallery, so Jeffrey was helping me tune all the lighting and decide which pieces go where, and Jeffrey took care of Andy at the Hong Kong airport, Kai Tak Airport—it was the old airport then. So he came, and it was a great opening. It was fun for him because he loved partying, he loved all the glitter, and the pretty girls all dressed up because the I-Club aimed to get all the most interesting people to be members. We had the chairman of the Hong Kong Bank as one of the committee members; we had Sir Run Run Shaw because my mother is pretty active socially, so that was a fairly interesting group of people.

Zheng Shengtian: Was the I-Club a private club?

Alfred Siu: Yes, it was a private club.

Zheng Shengtian: Why did you want to put an art collection there? At that time, there weren’t that many Hong Kong business people who were knowledgeable about art, so why did the I-Club want to display such high- ranking artists?

Alfred Siu: It was really just bringing in the East and mixing in the West, and we had the best Chinese cuisine served in very Western contemporary interiors. I was trying to create something a little bit ahead of its time.

Vol. 12 No. 4 45 All the furniture we had was by famous European designers—we had a Mackintosh Room, a Josef Hoffmann Room—so the design and the artists were all together to create an atmosphere that people would enjoy. It was very refreshing. So Andy Warhol was obviously a very big part of it. The publicity around Andy coming to the opening really helped to get a lot of noise and PR.

Zheng Shengtian: Was the event reported widely in Hong Kong?

Alfred Siu: I would say so, yes, but at that time we didn’t have the Internet so it is not well documented!

Zheng Shengtian: How were those contemporary art pieces received by Hong Kong business people? Were they shocked by them? What was their impression?

Alfred Siu: I’ll tell you what I put at the entrance—it was a piece by John Chamberlain called The Crash, and it was literally half a car wreck, a heavy piece, and it hung on the wall, and people came and said, “Huh?! A car crash—is that art?” (Laughs.) It was very shocking. And then there were the Bruce Nauman light sculptures placed in a very important corner, and people just thought, “Hmmm, a broken fluorescent tube.” It ended up he was a very important light sculpture artist. And the Claus Oldenburg, which was a kinetic piece. So all these artworks were very refreshing, but people didn’t really think they were so important; they thought they were gimmicky. And then Roy Lichtenstein’s Crying Girl, you know, it’s like a Batman cartoon! So people didn’t really think that they were such serious artworks. Now, twenty or thirty years later, these would be the most important artists of that time!

Zheng Shengtian: Did you invite artists from the Hong Kong art community?

Alfred Siu: Yes, yes. They all came.

Zheng Shengtian: How did they respond?

Alfred Siu: They were fairly amused at the collection, but of course they didn’t know that these artists would become so famous today.

Zheng Shengtian: Do you remember any of the names of the artists from the local community who attended?

Alfred Siu: Actually the names have slipped my mind now. They were local artists and they were in a way a little ahead of the otherwise very traditional contemporary stuff.

Zheng Shengtian: Did Wucius Wong or other famous artists come?

46 Vol. 12 No. 4 Alfred Siu: Actually, these were people from Hong Kong; I didn’t invite anyone from mainland China.

Zheng Shengtian: Were there any artworks borrowed, or were they all from the I-Club’s collection?

Alfred Siu: They were mostly my collection.

Zheng Shengtian: Did you print a catalogue?

Alfred Siu: Yes, it’s in the archive now, and the pieces have been sold off, so I will try to retrieve the catalogue and give it to you.

Zheng Shengtian: I saw somewhere on eBay or Amazon that someone was selling the catalogue. I haven’t got it, but that’s why I asked you if you printed a catalogue or if someone else did it.

Christopher Makos, Andy Alfred Siu: That’s interesting. Maybe I should buy it! With Chinese Couple, Great Wall, 1982. Courtesy of Makos Archive, New York. Zheng Shengtian: It mentions an exhibition at the I-Club, including Andy Warhol.

Alfred Siu: Okay, I have those in the archive; I’d have to dig it out.

Zheng Shengtian: Was Andy Warhol the only Western artist at that event, or did you invite anyone else?

Alfred Siu: We had Tom Jones come around to sing, we had Marcel Marceau the French mime come to perform, we had some Playboy Playmates come

Vol. 12 No. 4 47 and do some shows. The idea was importing art and entertainment from overseas. It was a pretty interesting project.

Zheng Shengtian: Andy Warhol remembered that you took him to a market where there were eight thousand fortune-tellers. Where is that place?

Alfred Siu: It was in Beijing.

Zheng Shengtian: It was not in Hong Kong?

Alfred Siu: We took him to places in Hong Kong too, but in Beijing we took him to bird markets, and the most interesting encounter in Beijing was when we took him to visit a very famous—the name slips my mind again—a very famous, traditional art school, and the head of that department was very happy to see Andy, and as a gift he painted a Chinese flower painting for Andy, and it took him maybe only twenty or thirty minutes. Andy was watching, and he was very impressed. And in return—of course you know that if an artist gives you something you have to give something back—Andy took out his very fat brushstroke pen, and he painted the dollar sign and gave it to the artist. That would be a very expensive piece!

Zheng Shengtian: In Hong Kong, besides your opening, what else did he do Christopher Makos, Andy Imitating Dragon, Forbidden there? Where else did you take him? City, 1982. Courtesy of Makos Archive, New York.

Alfred Siu: He would do dim sum in the morning. We’d bring him to all the local famous sites, but he was very much a night person. He woke up very late, and he liked to party until very late.

Zheng Shengtian: How many days was he in Hong Kong altogether?

48 Vol. 12 No. 4 Alfred Siu: Three, maybe four days, and then we took him to China afterwards.

Zheng Shengtian: In one of the interviews with the photographer Makos, he said Andy told him he went to Hong Kong because he wanted to get some commissions to pay the rent—he wanted to get some money.

Alfred Siu: Yes, that’s right. At the nightclub we told all the guests and members that if they wanted a painting by Warhol, it was possible. But people then were very private and they didn’t commission Andy through the I-Club; instead, they all flew to New York afterwards; Andy took quite a few commissions from Hong Kong.

Zheng Shengtian: But he remembers that you took some beautiful ladies like Miss Taiwan to a party and let him choose. Did he choose any woman to do a portrait?

Alfred Siu: I think a lot of them ended up going to New York to find him afterwards because they didn’t like people to know that they had commissioned him. They didn’t want it to be known that they got Andy Warhol portraits in Hong Kong; they all went to him directly afterwards.

Zheng Shengtian: You told us the story about his portrait of Princess Diana and Prince Charles. Can you repeat that story?

Alfred Siu: Oh, yes. It was one of the pieces in the I-Club’s collection and it should be very valuable now. I bought the rights from Lord Snowden who had a photograph of Prince Charles and Lady Diana—they were alive and well then—and of course now Lady Diana is gone and Andy is gone so that’s why I think that particular commission would be very valuable now! Prince Charles and Lady Diana later separated. Of course, Andy Warhol preferred men, so he painted Prince Charles really handsome, really smart looking, and he made Lady Diana a little bit plump—not as attractive as Prince Charles. So that pair of paintings was interesting; he did both of them together, and he did them in a size different from his usual. Normally he does it in a square format, but for Lady Diana and Prince Charles, he did little rectangular portraits.

Zheng Shengtian: So did you get the photos before he came?

Alfred Siu: Yes, I bought the rights, and I gave him the photos and then he used them. He always did that. He used the photos to start. His portraits were not painted from life. He would use the Polaroid and then he would blow it up and paint from it. So that was a very special commission, and I think it is in a private collection now.

Zheng Shengtian: Then you sold them. Which year did you sell?

Vol. 12 No. 4 49 Alfred Siu: Yes, I sold them, I’d say in, well . . . the I-Club didn’t survive long because it ran into some problems in 1983, when it was announced that Hong Kong was going to return to China. There was this discussion about whether the lease would be continued, so everybody was a bit nervous as these lavish private clubs were falling out of favour. Therefore, all the collection was sold around 1985 or 1986.

Zheng Shengtian: You said that the trip to China was included in the package that you proposed to Warhol, so it wasn’t just a quick visit, because according to Warhol’s diary he was waiting for a tailor in Hong Kong to make him some clothes. Since he had to wait for two or three days to do the fitting before the group went to China. Was that how it happened?

Alfred Siu: Yes. He wanted to have some things made.

Zheng Shengtian: Was that before the opening?

Alfred Siu: I think there was the opening, then he went to China, and then he came back to Hong Kong. I remember there was no direct flight from Beijing at that time.

Zheng Shengtian: So after the opening he went to China. Did you go with him?

Alfred Siu: Yes, exactly. I went with Alfred Siu and Andy Warhol in Beijing. Courtesy of Alfred Siu. him. This is one of the photographs of Andy in front of the Palace Museum, in the Forbidden City. But he didn’t really enjoy sightseeing. It was too outdoors, and he didn’t like the sun. He was very fair skinned. He liked to be indoors, and he liked night activities. But there was nothing to do in China at night, so he would walk around with his crew and look for nightspots. We did find some but there were only pool tables inside. He would have a couple of beers and then, “No action, let’s go home.” He was expecting discos because in the 1980s, in New York, with clubs like Studio 54, and all these kinds of night scenes were where he liked to hang out and meet people, but in China there were no such activities for him.

Zheng Shengtian: Did the Chinese government know who was coming? Did they have any idea?

Alfred Siu: I don’t think he was that famous in China then.

Zheng Shengtian: Did any people from the cultural sector receive him?

Alfred Siu: Yes, there was the famous art school that I mentioned, one of my staff arranged this and contacted the school.

50 Vol. 12 No. 4 Zheng Shengtian: The best school was the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Do you recall the location of the campus?

Alfred Siu: I’m sorry. It’s slipped my mind because the itinerary was arranged by my staff.

Zheng Shengtian: If it’s the Central Academy then it’s in Wangfujing, in the centre of the city.

Alfred Siu: I think that is where it was, in Wangfujing.

Zheng Shengtian: You mentioned that there was an artist there.

Alfred Siu: Yes. He was the head of that department.

Zheng Shengtian: He was a traditional painter, and he demonstrated his skills for Warhol. Do you remember his name?

Alfred Siu: I’m sorry, I don’t, and I’ll have to retrieve my archive of files.

Zheng Shengtian: In one of the texts, this artist’s name is given as Ku-nien Chang, but I believe this is wrong because Ku-nien Chang was a famous brush painter who lived in the States, not in Beijing. At that time, in 1982, he lived in Michigan, so there must be some mistake; sometimes history gets recorded incorrectly. But another famous Chinese artist, Xu Bing, now the head of the Central Academy, said the artist was Li Keran. Li Keran was a famous professor from the Central Academy, but there’s no evidence that it was him. He has already passed away. It would be very interesting to find out who the artist was.

Alfred Siu: I’ll dig into the archives and find out who it was.

Zheng Shengtian: You still have the archives?

Alfred Siu: Yes, I’ll have to look very hard because it’s so long ago.

Zheng Shengtian: What else did you do at the school? Did you visit the student studios?

Alfred Siu: There was the painting demonstration, but we didn’t visit the student studios. It was mainly the professors. There were big desks and a lot of places where Warhol could paint. He was playing around with large rolls of paper rolls and looking at examples of Chinese art.

Zheng Shengtian: Did you go to any museums or palaces?

Alfred Siu: It was a fairly short trip so we squeezed in the Great Wall, the Palace Museum, and we walked around in some local markets—the bird markets,

Vol. 12 No. 4 51 collections of little antiques in the streets—and he watched a barber shop where people got their hair cut. He was very amazed by that. He took lots of photos of these local places! He also bought a lot of Mao souvenirs.

Zheng Shengtian: Did he tell you his impression of Beijing? Do you remember anything he said?

Alfred Siu: He was kind, and he did not say he wasn’t excited. I later chatted with his friends, who said he was sort of bored at night because there was nothing happening in Beijing. It was a pretty clean city; everybody lived very clean then, so there was no boozing, no nothing.

Zheng Shengtian: But he was very impressed with the lifestyle of Beijing because people were wearing uniforms and riding bicycles.

Alfred Siu: Oh yes, clearly the culture and everything was totally new for Christopher Makos, Andy Posing, Beijing Hotel Room, him. He was completely overwhelmed by the difference in culture; as you 1982. Courtesy of Makos Archive, New York. said, all these people on bikes, the modest lifestyle, the discipline, people not going out at night—it was so different. And I think two days was more than enough for him.

Zheng Shengtian: One of his most famous works is his portrait of Mao. From the early 1970s, after Nixon's visit to China, he started to do all kinds of Maos, all in different colours in a series like he did with Marilyn Monroe. In Beijing, did he mention anything about Mao?

Alfred Siu: Oh, the great leader. Every home had something about Mao. It was quite incredible for him to see that everyone would be wearing something, like a Mao badge, and a photo of Mao would be in most people’s

52 Vol. 12 No. 4 homes. He was worshipped like a god by a lot of people. For someone from a democratic society like the US, it was amazing how one person could be so influential in the whole country and how everyone really worshipped him. Because Mao was such a sensational political figure and character, I think Warhol probably felt he had to do his image.

Zheng Shengtian: Altogether, from Hong Kong to Beijing and back, it was about one week. Did you contact him afterward?

Alfred Siu: Not that much, but we were friends. The commissioning was finished. Friends would go over to see him directly, and I was busy in Hong Kong, so there was not much contact afterwards.

Zheng Shengtian: So Warhol didn’t mention that he wanted to come back?

Alfred Siu: No. The long distance flying was a bit much.

Zheng Shengtian: After so many years, in 2006, when Hong Kong businessman Richard Lau bought Andy Warhol’s Mao picture for $17,000,000 USD, were you surprised?

Alfred Siu: No, because I know how the value of contemporary art has gone up in the US. The US is amazing in its support for art; there are tax breaks for corporations who spend money on art, to get you a lower tax bracket. So for all these tax reasons companies buy art, otherwise the government will take their tax money anyway. And, consequently, there are corporations that have great art collections. The US is still the richest country in the world. I think last year China was higher in volume in buying and selling art than the States but the US is still the most active. So I wasn’t surprised. I watched the prices going up, and I think there’s too much money chasing after too few collectibles.

Zheng Shengtian: I forgot to ask you: In the I-Club collection, was there a Mao portrait included? He painted them in the 1970s.

Alfred Siu: No. He didn’t bring it over.

Zheng Shengtian: So you don’t have one piece that you can sell now for a million dollars?

Alfred Siu: No. I didn’t hold on to the collection!

Zheng Shengtian: Last year, the Hong Kong Art Museum had a show called Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal. Did you see the show?

Alfred Siu: I had a glimpse of it.

Vol. 12 No. 4 53 Zheng Shengtian: The exhibition shows a group of works called the Andy Warhol capsules, and that included boxes containing his stuff that he bought in Hong Kong and China, like a little souvenir and air ticket, those kinds of things. Did you see this? What did you feel when you looked at those things from thirty years ago?

Alfred Siu: I missed the guy. He was a lot of fun to be with—very entertaining, as I said, very amusing. Everybody became so close to him, and so easily, because he had a true artist’s character. He amused you, relaxed you, and made you see things differently; he had that ability.

Zheng Shengtian: Did you tell anybody during that exhibition that you were the guy who arranged the trip? Did the Hong Kong Museum know about this?

Alfred Siu: No, it was a long time ago, and it is all part of history now.

Zheng Shengtian: There was no media coverage on your role in Warhol’s China trip. That was very strange to me. I thought they should find you! Because you were the pioneer who brought contemporary art to Hong Kong and also to China. It was a historic event.

Alfred Siu: Well, thank you very much. I didn’t know I had that impact on the market. Thank you.

Zheng Shengtian: Actually, since I have been doing this research on the influence of foreign artists in China, the visits of Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg have been a major part. Many historians are very interested in this part of history, but they don’t have enough information. So I think your future conversation would be a great contribution to this history, and I think more people will come to talk to you. If you agree, when people ask me, should I give them your e-mail address?

Alfred Siu: Sure. I’d love to share my experience, I’d love to. Thank you very much, Sheng.

Don Li-Leger (photographer of this interview): Why did you not continue collecting art and building your collection? You must have really stuck your neck out at that time.

Alfred Siu: I did various other things. I really liked these cultural exchanges and I organized an international architectural competition in 1983. We advertised in Domus and Architectural Digest magazines, and we invited pretty impressive judges like Richard Meier and Arato Isozaki to sit on the panel, and that attracted a lot of entries. I think there were over six hundred entries, and the winner was Zaha Hadid, who is now a very famous architect herself.

Zheng Shengtian: That was another pioneering thing that you did.

54 Vol. 12 No. 4 Alfred Siu: That was not quite related to art but to architecture. So I did different things like that.

Don Li-Leger: I’m just curious: At some point you sold off your collection, and you didn’t do any more of that kind of entrepreneurial thing?

Alfred Siu: I actually went into construction, believe it or not! (Laughs). My friend said I’m an entrepreneur and I got listed in Australia, Hong Kong, and I did big projects like fitting out the airports—Cathay Pacific headquarters, we have different areas of interest. And believe it or not, I guess I have been in some pretty controversial projects, too.

Zheng Shengtian: How many of your portraits do you still have?

Alfred Siu: Not many. There’s one of my ex-wife—not many famous or important people. If they were to be auctioned off, they wouldn’t be worth much.

Zheng Shengtian: They would still be expensive because they’re by Andy Warhol! I saw one piece in Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong around 2007 or 2008. It was in Johnson Tsong-zung Chang’s gallery. Was the painting from you or from someone else?

Alfred Siu: All these friends went to Andy directly, so I don’t know who would have commissioned it. There was a famous architect, Remo Riva, who went to him, and Loretta Chu, a former Miss Hong Kong who is now married to Vincent Lo. She got some commissions from him. And the Miller’s who owned a duty-free shop, got a commission from Andy Warhol. And I think a few more, but I can’t recall the names.

Zheng Shengtian: Thank you.

Vol. 12 No. 4 55 Clara Galeazzi The Hotan Project—Evaluating Interdisciplinary Research: A Conversation with Hou Hanru and Ou Ning

Over the years, the institution of art could no longer be described simply in terms of physical space—studio, gallery, museum etc.—it was a discursive network of other practices and institutions, other subjectivities and communities.1

he Hotan Project is the fruit of a joint collaboration between artist Liu Xiaodong and curators Hou Hanru and Ou Ning. On June 22, T2012, Liu Xiaodong went to Hotan, in southwestern Xinjiang, with his equipment and team to start a two-month on-site work documenting the ordinary life of people living there. Hotan is located near the headstream of the Hotan River a few miles south of the Taklamakan Desert, the second largest desert in China. Since the third millenium B.C. the Hotan area has long been an important strategic and trading centre between China and Central Asia, becoming part of the Silk Road. After falling to the Arabs in the eighth century, then being conquered by the Mongols, in 1878 it became part of China. However, the majority of the population living in Hotan belongs to the Uyghur minority. Like the creative and distinctive method used in previous projects such as his Three Gorges documentary (2003–06), Liu Xiaodong worked on different levels producing plein air paintings that portrayed local jade miners, maintaining a diary of his observations, making sketches, and recording a video documentary.

In order to give a 360 degree overview of the Hotan area, curator Hou Hanru launched a parallel component that included field research, historical studies, and seminars. Ou Ning, together with a group of journalists and researchers, worked with Hou Hanru to carry out interviews and establish a constructive dialogue with local writers, craftsmen, and traditional musicians on the contemporary situation in Xinjiang.

The Hotan Project was a multifaceted, complex, and interdisciplinary work. But can a project combining three different perspectives reflect a neutral point of view on a region of China that has witnessed social and economic controversies over a long period of time? This conversation with Hou Hanru and Ou Ning aims at assessing the relationship between contemporary art and ethnography in this specific case. By examining the possible crossover between an artistic and an ethnographic approach, the interview analyzes the process of the Hotan Project. It takes into account how the collaboration started and the ideas behind it, the process of the on-site work, and the eventual reactions of both the locals and the visitors to the exhibition.

56 Vol. 12 No. 4 Clara Galeazzi: To successfully coordinate such a detailed project you need to constantly bear in mind the key points underlying the core idea you want to propose. Please introduce how working in tandem between you, Ou Ning, and artist Liu Xiaodong began. How did you interact? Did you all want to investigate the same aspects of the local society, or were each of you focused on different segments?

Liu Xiaodong, East, 2012, Hou Hanru: Since the very beginning of the project, I believe that our oil on canvas, 300 x 250 cm. Courtesy of the artist. common aim was to raise some intellectual questions on key phenomena about Xinjiang’s situation with Hotan as a focus. Knowing that it is a sensitive context socially, economically, and environmentally, we planned to address what is a complex situation with relatively objective observation and intellectual reflection rather than address it with direct political presumption. We sought to lead and witness a “dialogue” form of research and to construct a debate on a collective situation.

I have found this collaboration with Ou Ning and Liu Xiaodong enriching. I have been following Liu Xiaodong’s works since the 1990s, and I have always appreciated his style and ability to merge painting and research and his tendency toward developing work that concerns itself with “social reality” from a highly personal point of view and through intimate interaction with the surroundings. Therefore, I knew this project could lead to a deep and singular understanding of the multicultural history and reality in the region, one far from mainstream representations of minority groups that often tend to be “exotic” and “Orientalist” readings of the “Other.” We agreed that one of the priorities of the project would be to examine the situation of

Vol. 12 No. 4 57 social and cultural productions in Xinjiang by both exploring the real lives of people in the region and investigating the art and cultural productions achieved by cultural workers of different ethnic backgrounds, especially the voices of indepenedent literature, art, music, and crafts, etc. that are often overlooked by the “official representations.” Liu Xiaodong chose Hotan, well known for its long history of jade production, as his base and he painted the life of jade miners. He actually set up a tent by the river where jade mining took place in order to plunge into the real life of the workers. He even ventured into the domestic contexts of the workers—their families and daily activities. At the same time, like in his previous projects (the Three Gorges, Jincheng, etc.), a film crew was also documenting the process of his work and life. Since I, living abroad, could not spend a long time in Xinjiang, I entrusted Ou Ning to curate part of it by organizing a series of fieldwork case studies on the cultural production and histories across the region. Ou Ning has a great skill of investigation and mobilization with this kind of task. In a short time he was able to make an efficient selection of local writers, journalists, and musicians who were pleased to express their independent points of view on the regional situation and history. We can say that we all faced the project from different levels in terms of both modus operandi and our approach to the people involved.

Liu Xiaodong, South, 2012, oil on canvas, 300 x 250 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Ou Ning: A special synergy accompanied our collaboration. I must say that the complexity of the region has, in a certain way, contributed to the success of the project. Working in such a culturally rich place with a long and troubled history gave us many factors to consider. For geographical reasons, being a border territory, Xinjiang came under the domination of different groups, and has consequently absorbed some of the dominants’ peculiarities. Starting from the Qing dynasty (1644–1912 AD), the area has acted as a western border thus gaining importance in defense measures undertaken by China.

58 Vol. 12 No. 4 However, the area also deserves a meaningful analysis from an environmental and economic perspective. With a subsoil rich in oil and natural gas, the region has witnessed noteworthy clashes between the Han and Uyghur peoples over the management of energy sources. Having only a general understanding of the region’s intricate background made it necessary for me to grasp as much information as I could. The final result of the fieldwork met the high expectations I had for the visit. Working together with Liu Xiaodong and dealing with a wider context provided us the chance to connect with an authentic social reality. In my case, interviewing people, especially academics, was fundamental to investigating beneath the surface. I believe we were able to interact yet never overlap in our approaches the same topics; we analyzed subjects using a different means of interpretation as each of us had undertaken independent research.

Liu Xiaodong, North, 2012, oil on canvas, 300 x 250 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Clara Galeazzi: Over the past twenty years, academics have been discussing extensively the role of ethnography in art practices. On the one hand, using photographs, drawings, and videos as qualitative research, artists have broadened the boundaries of ethnography to include the “visual” as primary data, thus giving credence to so-called “visual ethnography.” Dipti Desai argues: “The turn to ethnography by artists signals the current epistemological shifts in art from artists as object makers to artists as facilitators and educators.”2 On the other hand, Hal Foster, talking about ethnographic projects and analyzing the crossover between art and ethnography, makes a strong statement arguing that “Almost naturally, the projects stray from collaboration to self-fashioning from a decentering of the artist as a cultural authority to a remaking of the other in a neo-primitivism guise.”3 Considering these classifications and remarks, how do you position the Hotan Project? Focusing especially on the work in loco, did you find yourself integrated, or did you position yourself as an outsider observer?

Hou Hanru: I consider the Hotan Project an initiative of cultural research that strives to highlight the contemporary complexity of the local/indigenous

Vol. 12 No. 4 59 Liu Xiaodong, West, 2012, oil on canvas, 300 x 250 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

society. Positioning this work in a “ready-made” interpretative framework can be a mistake, and it might impoverish not only the contributions of the local people, but also the meaning and the intent of the work as a whole. Our research in Xinjiang was intended to be more of a platform for intellectual debate than ethnography. When talking about anthropology or ethnography, it is easy to fall into a colonialist denotation that lies behind the traditional meaning of these concepts. Assuming that anthropology emerged from colonial expansion as an intellectual instrument of colonial control and domination of the colonized, I tried to go as far as I could from the assertion that one point of view can dominate through a different opinion; neither was I interested in addressing issues in a direct way that would give the feeling that “the observer” is actually imposing his or her own perspective. Instead, I wanted to rethink the fundamental question of methodology and categorization of knowledge of the “Other” to avoid positioning oneself as a superior observer and definer of the “Other,” and, hence, further eliminate the distinction between the “self” and the “Other.” By providing a major arena of encounter, reflection, and exchange, the Hotan Project has offered a cross-disciplinary pool of information for better understanding Xinjiang’s history as well as its present.

In the meantime, we are all simple individuals with different backgrounds and experiences. The interactions with the local people are at once intimate and contradictory. When dealing with a situation you are not familiar with, the attitude you have is very important, and respecting the situation is fundamental. The main purpose of Liu Xiaodong’s paintings was to capture his authentic feeling without fear of showing the muddy aspects of things. In this case, art serves as a tool to diminish misunderstandings. If I had to define Liu Xiaodong’s art, I would call it “dirty realism.” This does not come from any reference; it simply means that the reality in the region is “muddy”—complicated, complex, but vividly exciting, like one rolling in muddy soil and getting dirty. An artist like Liu Xiaodong is the one who rolls in the dirt!

60 Vol. 12 No. 4 Liu Xiaodong working on site in Urumqi, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

The official definition of Realism in the Chinese context, dominated by the heritage of Socialist Realism, often implies embracing the official definition of the “real,” or the “truth,” that is the representation of the ideal values of the dominant ideology typified by the notions of “red,” “bright,” and “glory.” It too often assumes “purified” connotations in which all the “unharmonious” and “non-beautiful” elements are eliminated, leading to a fictitious political correctness. This ideology still has a real influence on the younger generation of artists since it’s been so deeply implanted within the academic education in the country. Liu Xiaodong retrieves everything that the “clean” version of “realism” has abandoned, thus he makes “realism” more real. By keeping the style “dirty,” Liu Xiaodong has achieved a reputation for his persistence to paint from real life, from his direct and intimate encounters and exchanges with people in real life situations.4 In the case of the Hotan Project, Dirty Realism reveals and manifests all the “shadow” aspects of reality, all those that are ignored and even purportedly omitted by the “official realism.”

Clara Galeazzi: Liu Xiaodong mostly provided visual material based on spontaneous daily interactions with the local community. Ou Ning, your contribution, largely consisting of interviews, required that you read up on Xinjiang’s history and literature in order to address the “right people.” What were your research sources, and which criteria did you use to select the interviewees? Could you please explain what role you played during the interviews and how the local intellectuals perceived your interest?

Ou Ning: I went to Xinjiang for the first time around fifteen years ago to shoot a commercial film. Since then, I have been affected in a positive way by the region’s landscape, its colours and people, and the vastness of the

Vol. 12 No. 4 61 Ou Ning interviewing Muqam musician Asan Yaya, June 20, 2012. Photo: Xu Lili. Courtesy of Ou Ning.

space.5 As co-curator of the project, I seized this chance as an opportunity to learn and investigate “topicality.” Before beginning the Hotan Project in loco, I looked for Han, Uyghur, and Kazakh literature, and I read almost twenty books, most of them written by local intellectuals. From this study, I could easily choose whom I was going to interview and which topics to delve into.

Unlike Liu Xiaodong’s approach, Ou Ning interviewing novelist Dong Libo, August 25, 2012. in which he interacted mostly Photo: Zhu Rui. Courtesy of Ou Ning. with jade miners and villagers, my approach principally involved working with intellectuals. He likely managed to have a closer relationship with the locals as a friendly visitor, while my approach was always one-to-one. My aim was not to figure as an insider, or simply a listener/observer; I strove to build a discussion parallel to Liu Xiaodong’s live painting activity where the interviewee could feel at ease answering some questions without being annoyed by the camera. All the conversations were frank and open. The discussions were authentically fluid, yet strong. Features of their identity emerged distinctly during the conversations, revealing a marked sense of belonging to the territory. They recognized my interest was nourished by genuine curiosity; in a way I felt as if I were a child, eager to know more about their experiences and thoughts.

Clara Galeazzi: How did you avoid not falling into the stereotype of exoticism and Orientalism?

Hou Hanru: Orientalism, as it is perceived in Edward Said’s work, has a hint of colonialism, where the so-called “West,” the “Occident,” constructed the “East,” the “Orient,” as something existing outside, something fascinating, but inferior, and above all something extremely different from what the West is. In a way it can also be seen as a way to dominate and control the “Other” through “rationalizing” it.

62 Vol. 12 No. 4 Ou Ning interviewing writer Li Somehow, in a country as diverse as Juan, June 17, 2012. Photo: Xu Lili. Courtesy of Ou Ning. China is, the notion of Orientalism can shift from an East-West dichotomy to the duality and power relationship between the centre and the periphery, the Han and the minority, the urban and the rural, etc. Some academics have even suggested that the Chinese government’s policy of allowing the “autonomy” of ethnic minorities in some regions like Xinjiang (it’s officially coined as “Autonomous Regions,” along with a few others like Tibet, Ningxia, Guangxi and Inner Mongolia, modeled on the Soviet system in the 1950s) reveals the contradiction between respecting the difference of ethnicities and the “inner Orientalization” of them. On some exceptional occasions, some even talked about the “Palestinization” of the region when it comes to the question of current problems related to the complex and messy entanglements of social, political, religious, ethnic, and geopolitical conflicts.

The research in Hotan was not intended to judge or to create consensus over certain debates. We intended to initiate human contacts and intellectual reflection on some important issues from a down-to-earth base with a certain historical and cultural perspective so dialogues among the different individuals and groups concerned can start to take place. This dialogue includes things that are impossible to describe or represent in text: they are visual, audio, and performative, they are simply alive. One needs to experience them physically and contextually. One has to be a “dirty realist.”

Clara Galeazzi: Unlike standard fieldwork, where, in order to have a general understanding you need to go through all the written ethnography and its methodology, the Hotan Project, with its visual nature, allows you to have immediate feedback from the visitors to the exhibition. What was the public response to your artistic approach to Xinjiang? The work has been shown in Urumqi and in Beijing—were the public reactions similar?

Art and Society panel discussion, Urumqi, August 26, 2012. Photo: Zhu Rui.

Vol. 12 No. 4 63 A Cheng at the Art and Society panel discussion in Urumqi, August 26, 2012. Photo: Zhu Rui.

Hou Hanru: We have exhibited the project in two different locations. First, on August 26, 2012, we had an opening in Urumqi, and then on January 12, 2013, a second opening at the Today Art Museum in Beijing.

Given the nature of the work, on both the occasions, together with the painting exhibition, we held seminars gathering interlocutors who were met by Liu Xiaodong, myself, and especially Ou Ning and his research team to discuss various issues related to Xinjiang’s heritage and contemporary cultural production—from art, music, literature, architecture, to folk cultures. Although we were talking about the same project, the show in Xinjiang’s capital was somewhat different from the one in Beijing, not only in its location, but in curatorial approaches and selection of the works. In Urumqi, I wanted to find a site outside of an art context, an unconventional place for art, but a normal site of everyday life such as an old public school or a traditional courtyard. Unfortunately, due to the current situation of urban gentrification and ethnic conflicts that have destroyed a large part of the old city and divided the town into different communities, we couldn’t find such a location. The phenomenon of urbanization is also very rapid in this area of China, and the process of urban development is causing the dismantling of old buildings and the rapid construction of new ones. Eventually we had to come back to the Exhibition Centre proposed by the Urumqi municipality. It was an exhibition centre, so it didn’t look like a standard art gallery—the halls are designed for industry expositions. The hall we had was empty, dirty, with some spare furniture and other trash; it seemed more like a huge, useless warehouse than anything else. It seemed more like a huge storage room. We decided to show only four large paintings by Liu Xiaodong— North, South, East, and West—on a long wall standing in the centre of the hall, somehow recalling a monument in the the center of voidness. As a matter of fact, we decided not to clean the hall. On the contrary, we kept the room as it was with all the left overs on the side. The exhibition took place at the same time as the new Xinjiang Biennale that was in the rooms next door. The exhibition, seminars, and film screenings were visited by a large number of informed and uninformed people—we also screened the documentary film by Yang Bo, a young filmmaker, showing the process of Liu Xiaodong’s work while a Web site was created to present the research on Xinjiang’s cultural production that I mentioned earlier.

64 Vol. 12 No. 4 In Beijing, the exhibition also had a large attendance. With a very different curatorial approach, we emphasized the contrast and tension between the sublimity of the large paintings in the large gallery of Today Art Museum and the intimate and quasi-private atmosphere in the back room in which the archives about Liu Xiaodong’s work—diaries, drawings, small photos and paintings, etc., as well as the documents collected by Ou Ning and his team during their research process were presented. Both highly public and deeply personal readings of the project became possible. A more complex and rich perception of the project could hence be generated. Yang Bo’s documentary film was also shown in a form that recalls typical outdoor public screenings in a village or town square. During the exhibition at the Today Art Museum, we launched another seminar titled “Central Asia: History and Reality,” in which famous Xinjiang intellectuals and artists took part. The symposium turned out to be very engaging for the attendees who actively participated.

Left: Installation view of Hotan Project at Today Art Museum, Beijing, 2013. Courtesy of Today Art Musuem. Right: Left to right, Zhan Jianjun, Liu Xiaodong, Jin Shangyi at opening of Hotan Project, Today Art Museum, January 2013. Courtesy of Today Art Museum.

Ou Ning: The media in Beijing praised the exhibition, highlighting our intent to build a comprehensive and intelligent debate about questions rarely analyzed in public contexts. For example, how can different ethnic groups find a way to live together? How to balance economic development with historical preservation in Xinjiang? What is the DNA of Xinjiang’s literature and art? Is there a common value in Central Asia? Xinjiang, and the Hotan area especially, are perceived to be rather mysterious places. This peculiarity created a certain expectation for intrigued visitors. Although the project was also appreciated in Urumqi, the feedback was partially different in terms of the public and their engagement. It is important to point out that the Hotan Project was part of the first Xinjiang Biennale commissioned by the Chinese Ministry of Culture. However, ours was the only work tackling the region’s concerns by focusing on the local dimension on multiple levels.

Clara Galeazzi: So far, the Hotan Project has been staged only in mainland China. Even if it focuses on domestic issues, the open and diversified approach you used can be a constructive example for addressing further collaborations and discussions on inclusion/exclusion topics and other social realities. In May, Hou Hanru, you, together with Liu Xiaodong, will present the work in Tel Aviv, Israel. Is there any particular message you would like to communicate about this? Do you have any specific expectations?

Hou Hanru: I have been invited to Tel Aviv by curator Steven Henry Madoff to participate in a project called Hosts and Guests that will include a program of nine exhibitions, workshops, and events. For that occasion,

Vol. 12 No. 4 65 Installation view of the Hotan Project at Xinjiang Art Center, Urumqi. Photo: Zhu Rui.

66 Vol. 12 No. 4 Vol. 12 No. 4 67 Hou Hanru at the panel discussion Central Asia— History and Reality, Today Art Museum, Beijing, January 13, 2013.

I thought Liu xiaodong and the Hotan Project could be a perfect element. I decided to invite him to realize a new series of paintings in Tel Aviv as a kind of continuation of his Hotan series. In a way, there are some relevant and comparable issues between the situations in both Xinjiang and Israel/ Palestine when it comes to the question of “host and guests.” I also invited three Israeli artists to participate in the exhibition, so it’s a project with four artists. We will present a part of the Hotan Project’s work to a public that is probably less acquainted with Chinese society and history. Although at first glance, for people living in Israel, the content of Liu Xiaodong and Ou Ning’s research might appear to be very distant, in a way I think some common aspects with the situation there can be recognized. Obviously, we cannot compare the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the Chinese- Uyghur situation. However, both countries face complex social problems, and it seems they are fighting a never-ending battle where unraveling the knot appears almost impossible. One of the key problems is the mutual perception between people in dispute, namely, a kind of contemporary Orientalism. Here, art’s purpose is to explore how people might read each other and to question the history of intricate relationships between people of different cultures sharing the same territory.

Notes 1 Mark R. Westmoreland, “Ethnography + Art: Convergence or Collision,” Ibraaz, June 2011, http:// www.ibraaz.org/essays/11/.

2 Dipti Desai, “The Ethnographic Move in Contemporary Art: What Does It Mean for Art Education?” Studies in Art Education 43, no. 4 (Summer 2002), 307–23.

3 Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 302–09.

4 Zixuan Zhang, “Unknown Horizons,” China Daily, January 25, 2013.

5 Ou Ning, “Underneath the Sky of Xinjiang—A Journey in the Worlds of Reality and Literature,”Liu Xiaodong’s Hotan Project and Xinjiang Research, (Beijing: China CITIC Press, 2013), 230.

68 Vol. 12 No. 4 Lisa Claypool The Technological Society Revisited: A Conversation with Feng Mengbo

Next page: Feng Mengbo, acques Ellul’s observations about the technological society in his Not Too Late, 2009, computer, sound system, data projectors. eponymous book are a starting point for a study of Feng Mengbo’s Courtesy of the artist. work: “The machine is solely, exclusively, technique: it is pure J 1 technique, one might say.” Technique, in Ellul’s view, is universal, autonomous, and, what is more, it is not only the province of cogs, wires, and electronic parts—although machines are the purest example of technique—but much else besides, as technique transforms everything it touches into a machine, including human society.

In the age of a global mediasphere, where friends morph into Facebook icons, conversation is reduced to one-line Tweets, and private life is increasingly a relic of the non-digital past, we might find ourselves sympathetic to Ellul’s view of technique. Yet, for the visual artist Feng Mengbo, “technique” can be conceived in radically different terms: the machine is human, and its human dimensions have long been subject to interrogation in his work. His video installations, photographs, and paintings thus encourage us to rethink and reposition technological society as a physically embodied and historical phenomenon.

Two recent exhibitions find Feng Mengbo bringing into play modes of picture-making that are extensions of the body, and, at the same time, rooted in technology: the first, an installation titled Not Too Late (2010), makes the familiar, long-lived gesture of the calligraphic brush-and-ink stroke new by presenting it through strangely old-fashioned pixelated video screens and programmatic painting systems dating from the 1980s; the second exhibition, My Private Museum (2012), addresses the fading and morbid natural history displays in the dusty, deteriorating galleries of the Shanghai Natural History Museum (established in 1956) through circumspectly shot and framed photographs, some old-fashioned black-and white prints, others saturated with colour, and still others lenticular and three-dimensional, in a style that brings to mind photographs produced in the 1950s.

Lisa Claypool: Let’s talk first about the video installation Not Too Late. The work is generated by a computer software program and is mediated by a projector—machines create it—and yet it’s an artwork whose forms

Vol. 12 No. 4 69 70 Vol. 12 No. 4 Vol. 12 No. 4 71 are gestural in an entirely human way. In the video we are watching a Feng Mengbo, Not Too Late (details), 2009, computer, brushstroke cover the space of a wall—sometimes it vibrates, it fragments, it sound system, data projectors. Courtesy of the artist. disappears. There’s a manic energy to it.

Feng Mengbo: It’s a self-running video game. As far as I am concerned, machines always have been human. My father was a mechanic, and when I was growing up I would watch him sketch designs. He often would bring home all sorts of especially strange machine parts. I never asked about their function, but I used them to create whatever I wanted, like a machine gun. I even asked my father to improvise an automatic M-16 for me, and he actually did, though of course it didn’t have a working rifling in the barrel.

Lisa Claypool: How is Not Too Late a game?

Feng Mengbo: I designed it as a real-time video game installation. What I did before with my work was interactive, but this one you cannot play, you just watch. I am very interested in machinic painting systems. I am also very interested in going beyond the copy, beyond the image.

Lisa Claypool: What does it mean to “go beyond the copy, beyond the image?” In machine systems, images are mechanically generated and copied. How can a machine move beyond the copy and image?

72 Vol. 12 No. 4 Feng Mengbo: I don’t pay much attention to the visual image, at least in the work Not Too Late, an action painting created by video game. What I imagine is that in the future, painting absolutely won’t result in a concrete object, so perhaps I have gone beyond Jackson Pollock’s action painting— since in his era there wasn’t accessible computer programming. In my fantasy, in the future, painting won’t be something human beings can create. If humans designed robots, and if robots could reach our ideals—that is to say, if they were true individuals—based on their human character, they could move forward without any limitations. In the end, humans certainly would be beneath them, because our intelligence and ability—that is to say, the amount of knowledge we actually can accumulate in our natural life span—certainly could not surpass theirs. That’s because they are operating on binary code systems, which run much faster than our decimal system. If robots themselves could study the history of art, and, moreover, on their own start to subvert or disrupt it, their works of visual art of course wouldn’t be made for humans, and it would not be within the reach of our five senses to apprehend them; for instance, robots might create a pure binary-bit poetry.

Lisa Claypool: Can I push you to clarify a bit? Why call Not Too Late a game?

Feng Mengbo: First, I want to say that Not Too Late isn’t a project that has a temporal frame. What I mean in the title by “late” is that compared with the span of human life, the game belongs to the moment, to the now, and is not something that can continue to expand and develop.

As for the game, I learned a lot about games from my small dog Lego, who passed away a few weeks ago. I miss him so much. Lego was my treasure, and losing him is anguishing. I know he really understood what a game was.

The doorbell at my house is a long passage of music. I am someone who goes to bed late and wakes up late. Sometimes people come to the house and ring the bell, and I still sleep on, so Lego would run up the stairs, and bark along in tune with the doorbell, and I never trained him to do that. This is a game. The game is that after we both meet the basics of survival (eating food, water, reproduction, and so on), what remains to be satisfied are the things that aren’t critical to life but are still things that we need to experience—like joy.

From the first time I played a computer game, I knew this was what I desired—a game. In this way I enjoyed it, because it gave me a sense of success, a sense of failure, and even more. I am the kind of person who is used to being solitary, so the video game—the kind of game where one person can play with a machine—is my friend, always.

Not Too Late is a like a shooting game. That means you have a gun-sight. That’s your frame, that’s your view, that’s your lens. In shooting games, you’re

Vol. 12 No. 4 73 the cameraman and you’re the Feng Mengbo, Quake III Arena, 1999, interactive Internet director. That’s why I like it. If you performance, computer, sound system, data projectors, go anywhere, you always take your Internet connection. Courtesy of the artist. gun. If you want contact with people, the only thing you can do is shoot them. It’s a complete system, and it’s a system I like. So this video game continues my earlier work—I slowed down the visual components of Quake III Arena (1999), the gunmen and their weapons and the paths of their bullets through space, so that in the Not Too Late video you cannot see the gun, the dead body; you cannot see the blood. You can see only the abstract, slowed- down records of movement; everything returns to the brush and ink.

Lisa Claypool: Except that those saturated reds seeping behind the black ink look like blood to me.

Feng Mengbo: Yes, the colour explodes. It’s almost in your face because it’s very close to you. In the installation you’re always fighting with people, but you just cannot see them. So, even though the violence is not depicted literally on the screen, it’s actually a really bloody shooting game. In that moment of explosion, in the game, you are dead. That’s why after the red appears the screen returns to white—because when you are dead, you are reborn. Every time you are reborn, the screen becomes empty. And that’s also why the movement is so beautiful. It’s very active and strong.

Lisa Claypool: Passages of characters are repeated, and are then blotted out— they remind me of the Tang dynasty calligrapher Yan Zhenqing’s Requiem for My Nephew. There’s a kind of emotional impact to the characters that pass across the screen, a kind of grief. You just mentioned machinic processes in the practice of the American artist Jackson Pollock earlier in the twentieth century, but what about Chinese artists and calligraphers?

Yan Zhenqing (709–85), Draft of a Requiem to My Nephew, handscroll, ink on paper, 28.3 x 75.5 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Feng Mengbo: In video games people are trying to capture each other and kill each other—here we turn to Chinese calligraphic forms instead. Calligraphy has never been two-dimensional. People forget calligraphy is a record of a movement. It’s all about time. My work is never about the present moment: it’s always about the past and the future. What I learned from Jackson Pollock, for instance, is that painting isn’t about space, it’s about time. This issue has perhaps influenced my entire life.

74 Vol. 12 No. 4 Lisa Claypool: So we are watching a performance that is never the same twice. Can you talk more about that tension or contradiction between performance—something that can only exist now, in the moment we’re watching it—and your feeling that your work is about the past and future?

Feng Mengbo: What “tension” indicates is the presence of the two poles of the past and future, not necessarily the contradiction between them. Contradiction, for me, has another meaning, a meaning of opposition. “In the moment we are watching now” is an accurate rendition of the “two poles,” or liangji, in Chinese. I emerge in the middle, between them; thus, my work, also, is experienced in the present moment. The meaning of performance is that it is temporal and cannot be repeated; it’s a singular thing. When I play my guitar, I know that this is a moment that can never be reproduced, no matter what, which makes me feel helpless and sentimental, but it is an unwavering moment. The electronic guitar, to me, is calligraphy.

Lisa Claypool: Your work is truly experimental. Do you feel that you are faced with any particular limitations as a visual artist? What about the technologies you are working with?

Feng Mengbo, Siberian Tiger, Feng Mengbo: Calligraphy must be about the human being, the language, from the series My Private Museum, 2012, black-and- the culture. When I think about calligraphy, I believe it must be relevant to white photograph. these things. So that’s the edge, that’s my limitation. Last year I designed two computer fonts. They’re available and people can download them. Fonts are a good thing for calligraphy. I’m the crazy guy who collects fonts. I like fonts.

And as for the photographs in the series My Private Museum, I never crop them. That’s a rule. The wooden frame is the exact frame of the photograph. Instead of cutting, I use just one lens, and I myself move around with the camera. A second rule is that I never use Photoshop to change a photograph.

Vol. 12 No. 4 75 Lisa Clay: Let’s talk about that installation of photographs of the Shanghai Natural History Museum dioramas in My Private Museum. What was your fascination with that particular museum?

Feng Mengbo: I visited it for the first time two years ago. It has not changed since the 1980s—I was shocked. I took photos, but I didn’t know if I was going to do something with them. Then, when I went there the second time, six months later, I knew I had to do something. It would have been so easy for me to turn this project into an interactive video installation or to make a video by pushing the camera around very slowly, on a dolly, like a ghost. I still want to do that. But in the beginning, I just wanted to take photos.

Lisa Claypool: The photographs look like they’re produced from technology dating to the 1950s, or even earlier. So the medium itself evokes the era in which the museum was constructed. Am I right in thinking that is one of the reasons you wanted to photograph it?

Feng Mengbo: Time can be lost, very easily. But if you go to the museum, you can feel time. There’s nowhere else like this. If you go to the theater, to the cinema, or the street, even home, you never have this kind of feeling. But at the museum, you can just get lost in time. It’s so beautiful. And a photograph is an especially good fit for this. Photographs capture time, even dark moments. Plus, painting, for instance, is too artistic. I just want to keep a distance, and I can do that through the photograph. This distance gives me, myself, and you, the audience, the space for thinking beyond the photo. That’s why people go to the show. They don’t talk and are very quiet; they feel that distance.

I kept the reflection of light off the glass vitrines in the photographs because it enhances that sense of distance, of seeing something through the dirty glass. So it does make you feel you are in the museum, but, at the same time, you’re not faced with the real thing.

Lisa Claypool: When I first saw these photographs, I thought that there was something painterly about them. The dark lines, the colour fields, the flatness of the space of the dioramas—they evoke paintings. That sense of confusion—and it really is confusion about techniques of art making— characterizes my response to Not Too Late as well, as I did not initially realize it was a video game.

Feng Mengbo: In the calligraphy of Not Too Late—which is first rendered by a human hand then endlessly re-performed by the video game software— the brush is the movement of human beings, who still use the energy from the mind to the body to the brush to the tip of the brush to the paper. The video game captures those traces, and it is really fast. But the photos are quiet and ask for a kind of slow looking. The works are very different, and they employ different visual technologies, but they both express me.

Notes 1 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1964), 4.

76 Vol. 12 No. 4 Voon Pow Bartlett Zhao Yao: Spirit Above All Pace London February 12–March 16, 2013

ccording to the Pace London Gallery press release, the artworks in Spirit Above All were brought to Tibet to be blessed by a “Living A Buddha.”1 This is documented through mural photographs of the Tibetan landscape that provided the backdrop on the walls of the gallery upon which the paintings are hung. The press release also informs us that the artist is “fascinated by the relationship between art and its audience,” creating an “on-going cycle of self-assessment, and reconstruction of the old to produce the new, a process the artist describes as ‘self-consumption’.”2 Zhao Yao expresses the wish to challenge how art is perceived. He writes, ‘‘the attention should never be on the paintings themselves, which I deliberately repeat in different series to deconstruct their visual power, but the concept behind the forms. I am interested in the way we look at exhibitions and how our pre-existing knowledge, whether cultural, religious, or political, affects our perception of art. I like to provide context for my works, but not disclose my own opinion so the discussion can remain open. In the same way that the puzzles I use aim at training one’s brain to think logically, I want my exhibitions to challenge people’s conventional way of looking at art.”3

Spirit Above All consists of a series of paintings, nine in all, executed with acrylic on denim, averaging a size of 250 x 200 x 8 cm. The colour scheme of the installation gives an impression of a grey day in London. Nevertheless, I found myself drawn to the shapes and patterns on the canvases and challenged to recall my mathematical training. There were circles combined with triangles to look like rabbit ears, circles on squares, cuboids that look like square rooms placed on their sides and some on their oblique sides, with their roofs sliced off, providing views from the top, like scenes from ancient Chinese paintings. There were pentagons, octagons, parallelograms, and intersecting rings, executed in black, white, and light grey on the stripy bluish denim canvases.

Zhao Yao’s artworks and installation do not appear to be guided by any form or logic. In fact, as Zhao Yao himself reveals, there is no social significance or spiritual relationship in the installation, but merely an experiment to see how the different elements interact with each other and with the audience. The geometric patterns that can be found in brain teaser puzzles are to do with a desire to discover more about art; the references to Buddhism and Tibet bring into the work some external factors that may potentialize meaning or layers of meaning, or to bring into question what lies beneath its formal qualities and symbolic meaning.4

Vol. 12 No. 4 77 78 Vol. 12 No. 4 Vol. 12 No. 4 79 Nonetheless, in the context of the historical and social backdrop in which Previous page: Zhao Yao, installation view of Spirit Zhao Yao lives, the images and the particular way this installation is put Above All, 2012. Photo: Stephen White. © Zhao Yao, together, provoke an interesting discussion relating to a probable Russian courtesy of Pace London. influence, ideological and religious connotations, and, in particular, early and recent trends in contemporary Chinese art.

The juxtaposition of geometric shapes, spaces, and colours in the series Spirit Above All echo the Russian Constructivists, many of whom were also graphic designers. Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia in 1919, in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, and that was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art.5 Chinese artists such as Zhao Yao are living under a similar political turmoil and social upheaval. Where the Russian community had lost confidence in Tsar Nicholas II in the early twentieth century, the Chinese experienced trauma after the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. Where Russia turned from an agrarian society into an industrial one, mainland China also underwent a cataclysmic transformation where millions of farm workers migrated to find work in cities. An agrarian society was transformed into an industrial one; a projected four hundred million Chinese citizens became urban residents over the last decade.6

It is no surprise then, with China’s Kazimir Malevich, Scissors Grinder, 1912, oil on canvas, own industrial revolution following 78.7 x 78.7 cm. Courtesy of the Granger Collection, New York. its opening up to the rest of the world in the late 1970s, that Zhao Yao may share in concept the Russian constructivists’ celebration of the contemporaneity of machines. Zhao Yao’s current obsession with mathematical puzzles and the power of logic echo the incessant references to the machine aesthetic that can be seen in Kasimir Malevich’s Scissors Grinder (1912) and Natalia Goncharova’s The Laundry (1912).7 In particular, Zhao Yao’s Spirit Above All I-93A, with its cuboids, and Spirit Above All I-259, with black circles, are reminiscent of El Lissitzky’s Proun Composition in both the use of geometric shapes and in understated tonal range. Perhaps Zhao Yao is intentionally, or unwittingly, celebrating or challenging an aesthetic in China’s “Mechanical Paradise,” or its “Unfinished Revolution.”8

As the Constructivist movement was also in favour of art as a practice for social purposes, the analogy with Zhao Yao’s work can be taken a stage further, one beyond the visual seductiveness of plasticity of the abstract shapes into the receptionist theory from the work of Viktor Shklovsky and Mikhail Bakhtin. Here there is a shared desire of involving the audience, to create works that would make them active viewers. Shklovsky wanted to develop the meaning of art through the act of perception so that people could discover more about life from looking at art; in other words, he wanted to make things that are familiar to us unfamiliar, to oppose

80 Vol. 12 No. 4 Zhao Yao, Spirit Above All the “automatism of perception,” to “de-automatize” the perceptions of I–93A, 2012, acrylic on denim, 9 200 x 247 x 8 cm. © Zhao Yao, the audience. “The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to courtesy of Pace London. make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.”10

The above statement is almost contiguous to Zhao Yao’s own manifesto in the Pace London press release, where he declares more interest in the relationship with the audience than the artworks themselves. He demonstrates his desire to communicate with the audience in this exhibition by having straw mats for them to sit on and albums of documentary photography showing the ascent of the artworks to the Tibetan mountains. He compares his work to a relationship between a TV soap opera and its audience, and considers every piece of work as a collaborative effort with his audience, and a development from his previous series.

The concern for art to have a social purpose is also reminiscent of earlier Chinese artists who turned making art into social projects. Revolutionary artists of the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in Yan’an during the 1930s, such as woodcarvers Gu Luyan, who interacted with rural communities and invited them to critique their art.11 Later, during the 1980s, the Rustic Realism in China, which was first referred to as Scar art, depicted the impact of the Cultural Revolution on ordinary people in rural and border regions, Luo Zhongli’s Father is an influential example of Rustic Realism.12

Vol. 12 No. 4 81 Despite his claim of non-religiosity, Zhao Yao is impressed by the Tibetan people who kowtow to Lhasa every day as a form of pilgrimage, so much so that he arranged for the artworks to be carted up the difficult and treacherous (for both humans and artwork) path up the Tibetan mountain to be blessed by a “Living Buddha,” a reincarnation of a previous Buddha according to Buddhist religious doctrine. This recalls Chen Danqing’s Tibetan series, shown in October 1980 at the graduation exhibition of the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). Chen Danqing portrayed Tibetans in their everyday life in a dignified way, "avoiding the patronizing depictions of ethnic minorities common at the time."13

The abstract element of Zhao Yao’s work also has a Chinese legacy. It is not clear if his intention is, like avant-garde artists such as the 1980s Stars Group, to challenge aesthetic convention and political authority in China, or the “Abstract Aesthetic” of Wu Guanzhong, who argued against the dominant forms of realism in favour of abstraction—“no subject, just form.”14 However, the seemingly mathematical constructions of Zhao Yao certainly harken back to the days of the New Measurement Group of the 1990s when conceptual artists such as Wang Luyang, Gu Dexin, and Chen Shaoping worked as a team from their home and created a mini-movement referred to as Apartment Art.15 The New Measurement Group “aimed at eliminating individuality and the arbitrary” to create work “based on series of mathematically formulated propositions.”16 Zhao Yao goes even further by adding another layer—an empirical exercise—to his abstract canvases through observing, recording, condensing, and conceptualizing his journey on a Tibetan mountain.

It is interesting to note that Zhao Yao’s way of working reflects the trend of conceptual, process driven, abstract work that many Chinese artists have adopted on the world’s stage. “[R]ecent attempts to revitalize Conceptual art practice have become something of a trend and constitute a welcome alternative to the primitive commercial operations previously prevalent in the Chinese contemporary art world,” writes Carol Yinhua Lu.17 This situation is evidenced in a few exhibitions I have seen recently, both in Beijing and in other parts of the world. For example, his way of working with abstraction and a fascination with the audience are shared by another Chinese artist with a concurrent show in London. Le Guo “momentarily suspend[s] a painting not in order to encourage a spectator to assign fixed narratives and meanings to this image, but, instead, to encourage this spectator to imagine an unfixed process where potential forms become actualized and then frequently potentialized again.”18 Hong Hao, at Pace Beijing, digitally scans everyday objects to reduce them into abstract shapes to be presented neatly in a multitude of harmonious configurations and colours. Another concurrent show at Beijing Commune is that of Liang Yuanwei, who uses lipstick to draw on the irregular geometrical shapes formed by scrunched-up paper. Writing on one of her earlier shows, in 2012, the critic Leng Lin rejoiced at the transformation of contemporary

82 Vol. 12 No. 4 Zhao Yao, installation view of Spirit Above All, 2012. Photo: Stephen White. © Zhao Yao, courtesy of Pace London.

Vol. 12 No. 4 83 Chinese art from being preoccupied with socialist content to an exploration of art itself, which, in his view, emerged in Liang Yuanwei’s work as “consistent contemplation,” where “one can find the peacefulness of the traditional paintings from the Song dynasty.”19

The pursuit of peace and Cui Fei, Tracing VI-I, 2008, pigment print, 193 x 88.9 cm. harmony can be seen Courtesy of the artist and Warehouse Gallery, Syracuse. with some Chinese artists Next page, top: Zhao Yao, Spirit Above All I–700, 2012, working with nature, or acrylic on denim, 250 x 200 x 8 cm. © Zhao Yao, courtesy of at least natural materials. Pace London. Hu Xiaoyuan, at Beijing Next page bottm: Zhao Yao, Spirit Above All III–69, 2012, Commune in 2012, worked acrylic on denim, 200 x 222 x 8 cm. © Zhao Yao, courtesy of with found detritus of wood Pace London. and transformed them with paint, nails, and silk. The various shapes and sizes of wood, although not vertical in orientation, exude a mystical aura similar to that of totem poles. Another artist who uses natural materials to comment on the industrialized society is Cui Fei.20 She creates shapes that allude to Chinese calligraphy, much like Xu Bing, but with painstakingly positioned twigs, thorns, and seeds. These tender tendrils emanate an incorporeal aura. Despite Zhao Yao’s disinclination to discuss or disclose the true meaning of his work, the use of muted colours, pleasing abstract shapes, and mountain scenes are almost failsafe ways of conveying peace and contemplation.

Zhao Yao’s new canvases are drained of colour, a disaffected work to perhaps reflect a disaffection with life. Spirit Above All, albeit with a seemingly more upbeat title than I Am Your Night, which was exhibited at Beijing Commune in 2011, seems to demonstrate a loss of the artist's earlier vibrancy, fun, and joie de vivre. There is a new level of austerity and sparing use of shape. With this new restraint, it is tempting to read into Spirit Above All a dumbing down. Perhaps it points to a personal maturation of a young artist, or perhaps it is a result of his reflection on the uncertainty of a country undergoing such enormous changes.

Despite his assertion of not being interested in presenting to the audience a didactic stance, it is clear that Zhao Yao would like the audience to be challenged to think logically, to respond honestly and without

84 Vol. 12 No. 4 Vol. 12 No. 4 85 preconceptions. He also hopes that the installation will work nostalgically to evoke and to inspire memories, just as the use of denim recalls and connects to his previous exhibitions.

It is the reflection on process—of working beyond formal qualities—that is important to Zhao Yao as an artist. He invites us to bypass the art itself; it seems as if he hopes to arrive at the essence of the content, the concept. He has faith that the audience not only knows more than he does, but is also able to help him develop his work. His absorption with the audience may be interpreted as relegating the responsibility of constructing meaning, and becomes not “self-consumption,” but audience-consumption. In any case, there is an ambivalence that is manifest in the disparateness of Zhao Yao's works that may serve to encumber such affiliations.

Notes 1 Pace London press release, www.pacegallery.com. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 All views from the artist, if not indicated as coming from the press release, are from an e-mail conversation between author and artist. 5 "Constructivism," Wikipedia. 6 Lucy Hornby and Jane Lee, "China's urbanization drive leaves migrant workers out in the cold," Reuters, March 30, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/31/us-china-urbanisation- idUSBRE92U00520130331. 7 "Constructivism," Wikipedia.

8 In “Mechanical Paradise,” Robert Hughes’ first chapter in The Shock of the New (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 9, the author describes art movements such as the Futurists and the Vorticists as a reaction to the conditions of the industrial revolution of the beginning of the twentieth century in the West. "China’s Unfinished Revolution" is the title of a talk given by Jonathan Fenby, April 30, 2013, at King's College, London. 9 Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," http://blogs.ubc.ca/nachoip/2012/09/11/shklovsky-and-bakhtin/. 10 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Art in Theory 1900–2000, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 280. 11 Ibid, 79. 12 Gao Minglu, ed., The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art (New York: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2005), 369. 13 Chen Danqing, Artspeak China, http://www.artspeakchina.org/mediawiki/Chen_Danqing_. 14 Gao Minglu, The Wall, 369. 15 Wu, Hung, Chinese Art at the Crossroads (London: New Arts Media Ltd., 2001), 206. 16 Ibid.

17 See Carol Yinghua Lu, "Wang Luyang," Frieze no. 111 (November–December 2007), https://www.frieze. com/issue/review/wang_luyan/, on an exhibition of Wang Luyang’s work at the Arario Gallery in Beijing in 2007. 18 Author in conversation with Le Guo, March 19, 2013. 19 Beijing Commune catalogue on Liang Yuanwei, 2012. 20 AIA staff, "The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Won’t Want to Miss," May 5, 2013, http://www. artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/finer-things/2013-05-02/the-lookout-a-weekly-guide-to- shows-you-wont-want-to-miss-10/.

86 Vol. 12 No. 4 Edward Sanderson A Potent Force: Duan Jianyu and Hu Xiaoyuan Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai January 26–March 31, 2013

nder the all-embracing title of A Potent Force, curator Karen Smith presented the work of the Chinese artists Duan Jianyu and UHu Xiaoyuan at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum. Each artist was accorded two floors in which they were represented by a broad selection of works produced mainly since 2008. The umbrella title led one to perhaps expect some explicit connections between the two artists, but, for me, it was their differing backgrounds, styles, and sensibilities that came to be highlighted by their close proximity.

Taking the title as an indicator of her vision, Smith suggested that the phrase “A Potent Force” was designed “to intone the lyrical, introspective, and sentient intellectual process that characterizes these two subtle plays with painting (Duan Jianyu) and conceptual video and installation (Hu Xiaoyuan).”1 Smith proposed that this “force” “references the nature of both artists’ analysis of the world as they experience it.”2 The title, then, acted to express a general quality that resonated between the two artists’ work rather than a specific stylistic, formal, or conceptual attribute.

Smith describes A Potent Force as expressing “the force of socio-cultural shift in the margin of age that separates these two artists, which is underscored by the atmosphere in which they passed their formative years.”3 The “margin” she refers to here is the cusp between the differing experiences that mark the two artists’ generations—Duan Jianyu having been born in 1970 and Hu Xiaoyuan in 1977. As with many aspects of society in China’s recent history, such an apparently short period of time can represent the advent of massive social changes.

In the catalogue for the exhibition, Smith introduces Duan Jianyu and Hu Xiaoyuan’s background and practices before approaching the artists individually, and she acknowledges their differences by characterizing them as “two strongly individual artists”4 and (regarding their productions) as displaying “unrelated approaches to expression: two distinct languages.”5 Smith characterizes Hu Xiaoyuan as “belonging to a generation that is past cynicism, and no longer cares so earnestly,”6 pitting these characteristics against those of Duan Jianyu’s—that Duan Jianyu’s generation remains cynical and (yet) still cares “earnestly.”

Smith seems to be arguing that the connection between Duan Jianyu and Hu Xiaoyuan is related to the concurrence of the periods in which they grew up and developed their practices. The respective eras in which the

Vol. 12 No. 4 87 two artists were born, Smith proposes, mark two sides of a dividing line between one generation and the next. It appears that Smith aims to cast this generational “margin” as a focus of the exhibition, located in between these two artists’ productions.

In his own introduction to A Potent Force, the Director of the Rockbund Museum, Larys Frogier, describes it as “a duo exhibition.”7 Frogier makes it clear that Duan Jianyu and Hu Xiaoyuan are “two artists whose works do not proceed according to aesthetic affinity, closeness of practice, or friendships in a community of artists.”8 Such a statement might be understood to suggest that a coherent presentation of these two artists’ work would be difficult. However, to temper such an understanding and prevent A Potent Force from being seen as simply two unrelated solo shows, Frogier adds: “Here, the dialogue starts off by contradiction, friction, and paradox, in order to generate unexpected readings, surprising combinatory visual experiences, and thus productions of multiple meanings.”9

Both Frogier’s assertion of contradiction and Smith’s location of the cusp of generations as the locus for A Potent Force present these two artists as representative of differences rather than similarities. The proposal is not about producing affinities so much as presenting the respective artist’s works in their own right and contrasting one artist’s work with the other. However, it is troubling for me, at least in terms of presenting these two artists together in this show, that a strong set of connections seems difficult to articulate, and this leads to a concern that while the artists are interesting in their own right, they are less interesting when considered from the point of view of their conjunction within this show.

The arrangement of the show reinforces this split, as each artist is presented on separate floors of the museum. As one progresses up the floors of the Rockbund Art Museum’s tall, thin building, the visitor first encounters the two floors devoted to Hu Xiaoyuan’s work and then proceeds to Duan Jianyu’s on the upper two floors. The first floor, of Hu Xiaoyuan’s work, includes her sculptures and installations, with one video work being housed in a purpose-built space. The second floor of her presentation is a series of darkened, interconnecting spaces that create divided viewing rooms for three of her multi-channel video works.

Hu Xiaoyuan’s works focus on subtle aspects of the world, materials, and human actions, and the visual precision of her images and objects contrast with their inherent vagueness of meaning. As Smith states, “[Hu’s] work is also embedded with meaning that lies beneath the surface of the physical form and which is not at all obvious.”10

The earliest piece by Hu Xiaoyuan in this show, Summer Solstice (2008), is composed of an old wooden writing desk with a chair built out from it. In the small shelves at the back of the desk are a number of objects in coarse papier-mâché, including reproductions of a set of keys, an animal figure, plates, a potted plant, and some books. Two taxidermied sparrows stand on top of the shelves and look down upon the open desktop, which is filled with desiccated cicada casings. Emerging from beneath this collection of

88 Vol. 12 No. 4 Hu Xiaoyuan, Summer insect epidermises, a length of paper drops down, passing under the chair Solstice, 2008, wood, toilet paper pulp, metal clock, cicada and stretching out for several metres across the gallery floor. The paper shells, sparrow specimens, paper, dimensions variable. objects, the aged wood of the desk, and the crumbling cicada remains are Courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art Museum, all evocative of fragility and age and seem to display a concern with the very Shanghai. tactile nature of these objects.

The fragile nature of materials, especially paper, is demonstrated in another of Hu Xiaoyuan’s works, Useless (2008). It consists of a long sheet of silk hanging across the room upon which rests the torn remnants of a large sheet of paper pieced back together with sticky tape. The artist says she shredded the paper when she was “in the mood.”11 Under the paper, a speaker plays the sound of the artist’s performative ripping and activates the static remains with a

Vol. 12 No. 4 89 Hu Xiaoyuan, Useless, 2008, rice paper, Scotch tape, sound recording, 664 x 66 m. Courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

Hu Xiaoyuan, Useless (detail), 2008, rice paper, Scotch tape, sound recording, 664 x 66 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

mediated experience of the original act of destruction. This piece presents the emotionally charged residue of her absorption in this task.

Such obsessive behaviour surfaces throughout Hu Xiaoyuan’s work. Several new examples in her ongoing Wood series, begun in 2008, are shown here. The exposed grain on pieces of timber is meticulously traced in black ink on translucent silk. The silk is then attached onto the original beams, following but obscuring the source. In this way the artist presents a reproduction in place of, and in the same place as, the original—a ghostly reminder of what is hidden. Karen Smith characterizes this literal obfuscation of the source as

90 Vol. 12 No. 4 Hu Xiaoyuan, Drown Dust, a process in which the artist “asks that we become aware of looking, seeing, 2012, 3-channel video, 3 mins., 12 18 secs. Courtesy of the artist and does so by making it as hard as possible to recognize the content.” and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Next page: Hu Xiaoyuan, Hu Xiaoyuan’s videos maintain a similar air of reticence toward recognition Wood series, 2008–, wood, Chinese ink, raw silk, paint, and interpretation. In each of the three channels of the video Drown Dust dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art (2010), filmed sequences focus on small details of materials—dripping Museum, Shanghai. wet cloth, the frayed edge of a piece of paper, and the surface of a piece of coral. Panning across these materials, the camera’s intensely shallow focus is adjusted to accommodate their textures while never revealing the whole object or the wider context within which they exist.

This absence of context also applies to Axing Ice to Cross the Sea (2012), in the adjoining room. While the actions taking place remain difficult to explain or contextualize, this is the only piece by Hu Xiaoyuan in this show where we see these actions take place in a landscape. The two projections that flank a third have the camera directed out to sea, and a figure flails at the crashing waves in slow motion. The third projection is a slow pan across a white field of encrusted ice. These actions and images are difficult to interpret—they may be connected by the presence of water and ice, but the meaning behind them is ambiguous. What remains for me is a feeling that the actions of the figure express some kind of frustration.

Hu Xiaoyuan’s work thus manages to maintain a sense of tension between this obscurity of meaning and a visual clarity, walking a knife-edge between the two. The single piece in this exhibition where she stumbles is See (2012). On one wall, a projection shows a white screen that gradually resolves itself into a vertical shadow moving from left to right and then back again. It is eventually possible to recognize this as a view of a white studio wall, across from which a white board is being steadily pulled across. It is revealed in the

Vol. 12 No. 4 91 92 Vol. 12 No. 4 Vol. 12 No. 4 93 Hu Xiaoyuan, Axing Ice to Cross the Sea, 2012, 3-channel video, 9 mins., 40 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

Hu Xiaoyuan, See, 2012, video installation, 7 mins., 30 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

catalogue that the artist is hidden behind this board, attached to it by straps and laboriously dragging it across the frame, creating the ever-so-subtle shadow on its edge that is seen in the video. On the floor at the opposite end of See’s corridor-like exhibition space is a small monitor on whose screen is displayed facing the wall with only a penumbral glow to reveal that it is switched on. Smith reveals in the catalogue13 that this shows the side view of the artist‘s performance behind the board. This arrangement seems to willfully throw obstacles in the way of the viewer, frustrating the viewer with an unfulfilled promise to reveal the process of the performance. In a disappointing revelation, the hidden image on this smaller display is used as the cover of the catalogue, thus negating any tension that the installation might retain.

The top floors of A Potent Force accommodate Duan Jianyu’s works in a double-height space with light flooding in from the building’s skylights. Smith has described Duan Jianyu as “a storyteller of the first order,”14 and this would seem to be borne out by the elaborate imagery and settings on display in the artist’s paintings. Despite this, in an interview included in the catalogue, Duan Jianyu goes some way to clarify and contradict such a reading, saying, “my works lie beneath the surface within a narrative, but my aim is not to tell a story.”15 By saying this, she seems to be making clear that “narrative” and “story” should be clearly distinguished from each other. There is no direct suggestion by the artist of the relative value

94 Vol. 12 No. 4 of narrative versus story, but she considers her own work as reflecting the former. Although this is not directly examined in the catalogue texts, one could propose that a “story” refers to a retelling of fictional or real events and a “narrative” refers to a coherent understanding of the system of relations between all the elements of the artwork. Duan Jianyu continues her previous statement by saying that “my aim is not to tell a story. Rather, I try to create the structure within the narrative thread between reality and the surface plane, and to use a rhetorical method, to discuss the multiple possibilities of the narrative mode, in order to see what painting can bring.”16 I believe the first part of this statement supports my previous suggestion as to the meaning of “narrative,” the artist in this case highlighting the elements of “reality” and “surface plane” which I understand to be the surface on which the painting is created.

Duan Jianyu’s works implement this narrative through her painted images and the additional elements that are directly affixed or incorporated into the paintings’ surfaces (for instance, as embroidery applied to the canvas), or standing alone in relation to them (several pieces combine shoes with the paintings, like small installations).

The titles of Duan Jianyu’s works add a further layer to the narratives that are embedded in her works. These titles are as surreal and obscure as the imagery they are paired with. Smith has characterized some of these titles as “deceptively romantic” (as with The Mountain and Water Always Echo Our Love, Going Home, Homesickness) or “humorous” (How to Travel with a Watermelon, Mother’s Sister’s Mother’s Cousin’s Husband Is a Chef).17

Duan Jianyu, Beautiful Dream—The Daughter of the Sea, 2008, painting installation. Courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

Romanticism, particularly the romanticism of travel, appears in Beautiful Dream—The Daughter of the Sea (2002/2008), an early work by Duan Jianyu. This work includes a number of small unframed paintings in black ink on cardboard, representing a silhouette of a camel standing on a sand dune, a Dutch windmill set amongst a field of tulips, the profile of Mount Fuji in Japan, and palm trees against a setting sun. These images seem to

Vol. 12 No. 4 95 represent clichés rather than real places—common symbols standing in for the locations they represent. These paintings are presented on the gallery wall in combination with several framed hand-drawn maps depicting various locations, including France, North America, and China’s Hainan and Shanxi Provinces. These maps and the black ink paintings are all painted directly on the inside surfaces of opened up grocery boxes. Duan Jianyu’s maps, drawn freehand, show roads, railway lines, and rivers much as would appear on a real map. In the blank areas around these, however, the artist has added her own notes and illustrations, which again express a romantic world of palm trees growing in deserts, mountains, rose flowers, and dolphins leaping from the sea. Such additions seem to draw the prosaic representations of the real world that are characteristic of maps into Duan Jianyu’s subjective world of unexpected encounters and events.

Two works by Duan Jianyu in this Duan Jianyu, !!! No. 2, 2010, oil on canvas, wood, wire, exhibition consist of small paintings lamp. Courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art Museum, accompanied by a pair of shoes. These Shanghai. shoes are customized with hollowed-out heels that create secret compartments for tiny objects. In ! ! ! (No. 2) (2010), the shoes sit on the gallery floor, accompanied by two paintings of abstracted dripping patterns hung on the wall near floor level. Concealed in the false heels of these shoes are a miniature set of brushes, paint, and a palette. These Duan Jianyu, A Pair of suggest that the owner of these shoes is Embroidered Shoes No. 3–The Wordless Ending 02, 2011, the artist of the paintings; the hidden installation. Courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art art supplies suggest that painting is a Museum, Shanghai. surreptitious act. In A Pair of Embroidered Shoes No. 3—The Wordless Ending 02 (2011), a small painting by Duan Jianyu reproduces a landscape by the modern Chinese artist Wu Guanzhong—a photograph of the original being placed alongside it. Duan Jianyu has added to her own version colourful bursts of embroidered cross-hatching that are stitched directly into the canvas. Duan Jianyu’s own painting and her reproduction of Wu Guanzong’s paintings are presented with a pair of shoes that also have embroidery applied to their surfaces, with the shoes’ heels holding a tiny embroidery set of needles and thread. Again, these elements suggest that the wearer of the shoes is holding her means of production within her clothing.

Several other paintings in this exhibition by Duan Jianyu also include examples of embroidery stitched into the surface of the work or have additional elements placed on them (such as material draped over the corner of Mother’s Sister Mother’s Cousin’s Husband is a Chef No. 6 (2012), resembling a gathered curtain fringe). These elements build upon Duan Jianyu’s ideas of narrative as a link between image and object, breaking down the barrier between the viewer and the image that is so often defined by the limits of representation that are inherent to painting.

96 Vol. 12 No. 4 Duan Jianyu, Mother’s Sister’s In many cases, Duan Jianyu’s work has a particular focus on the natural Mother’s Cousin’s Husband Is a Chef No. 6, 2012, oil on world, the human presence within it, and the animals that populate it. A canvas, 140 x 180 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art Potent Force features two examples from the artist’s Going Home series, Museum, Shanghai. Going Home No. 1 (2009) and Going Home No. 3 (2010). The former presents a forest full of bright yellow flowers and the latter a flooded rice field being planted by several figures accompanied by water buffalo. These landscapes may represent memories from the artist’s own upbringing in the Chinese countryside, but the naturalistic scenes are in both cases interrupted by the unexpected presence of a naked woman, reclining on a donkey-drawn cart, or on the back of a buffalo, respectively. In Going Home No.1 this woman also leans against a golden tuba, a feature that adds to Duan Jianyu’s own brand of surrealism a potential reference to the French artist René Magritte. Is this figure “going home” to the countryside, and is it a comment on the artist’s own move from the country to the city? Questions such as these are not resolved in either of these works, which merely set up the juxtaposition of the elements within the picture and allow the viewer’s imagination to construct their own narrative.

Such impenetrability teases the audience. While Duan Jianyu’s painting is not highly crafted, one recognizes that this is a deliberate ploy and technique. As Smith says, Duan Jianyu’s work is “childlike and naïve and, yet, is a highly sophisticated mechanism for capturing the artist’s perceptive observations of the world.”18 It is realistic, yet the narratives she sets up through this realism remain obscure to the viewer. As curator Bao Dong has suggested elsewhere, Duan Jianyu’s work is a way to “use painting to mock painting.”19 If Duan Jianyu’s work is indeed mockery, then it is a truly sustained and elaborate example of subverting painting’s ability to represent

Vol. 12 No. 4 97 truthfully. Karen Smith, in a similar vein, writes, “the symbols of beauty [in Top: Duan Jianyu, Going Home No. 1, 2009, oil on canvas, 181 20 Duan Jianyu’s works] . . . tend to function as red herrings.” While there is a x 217 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art Museum, sense that the narratives in Duan Jianyu’s paintings are deliberately unclear, Shanghai. one nevertheless feels the artist has great faith in her construction of these Bottom: Duan Jianyu, Going Home No. 3, 2010, oil on images and their latent power and meaning. canvas, 120 x 250 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. In contrast to Duan Jianyu, Hu Xiaoyuan’s work displays little overt naiveté or humour, yet her works do retain a similar commitment to image- making and, similarly, this faith at times seems to be in conflict with her simultaneous urge to mask meaning.

Smith describes Hu Xiaoyuan’s work on the whole as having “no conscious narrative; no beginning and no end.”21 I would disagree on this point—

98 Vol. 12 No. 4 with the idea that narrative must have a beginning and ending. My understanding is that narrative is an ongoing process, without beginning or end (which might be said to be a feature of stories). I would also suggest that the complex installation of Summer Solstice sets up a rich potential for narrative, and Useless and the Wood series all record an activity by the artist that could be said to lead to a narrative understanding. What seems to be consistent, though, is that all Hu Xiaoyuan’s narratives are, as suggested earlier, obscure and difficult to pin down. In this way they relate to Duan Jianyu’s work, which is equally obscure, but in a different way. As Smith says, Hu Xiaoyuan “is consciously convoluted, intentionally confusing us,” and “wrapping her message in successive veils.”22

Despite Smith’s suggestion, quoted at the beginning of this review, that Hu Xiaodong “no longer cares earnestly,” the pieces in A Potent Force display sincerity and thoughtfulness. Duan Jianyu’s work, likewise, does not seem to display the cynicism that Smith ascribes to her generation so much as a generosity to her world that she presents as surreal to its core.

The overriding impression of A Potent Force, then, is that while these two artists produce very different styles of works, at a certain level they share an urge to reflect the complexity of the world around them, presenting aspects of this world as demonstrations of their own complex feelings and emotions in relation to it. The works that result all pose questions as to what the viewers are looking at and how they should interpret it. As frustrating as the results can be, these artists from two different generations prove that the process of narrative can provide rich results under very different circumstances.

Notes 1 Karen Smith, “A Potent Force: Duan Jianyu and Hu Xiaoyuan,” in A Potent Force: Duan Jianyu and Hu Xiaoyuan, eds. Karen Smith and Wang Dan (Shanghai: Rockbund Art Museum, 2013), 82. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 83. 6 Ibid., 85. 7 Larys Frogier, “Art Is an Act,” in A Potent Force: Duan Jianyu and Hu Xiaoyuan, 74. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 83. 11 Hu Xiaoyuan, “Useless,” http://www.huxiaoyuan.com/enworkstext.aspx?id=21&year=2008&wtid=21. 12 Smith, “A Potent Force,” 86. 13 Ibid., 87. 14 Ibid., 83. 15 , “A conversation between the Curatorial Team of Rockbund Art Museum and Duan Jianyu,” in A Potent Force: Duan Jianyu and Hu Xiaoyuan, 152. 16 Ibid. 17 Smith, “A Potent Force,” 84. 18 Ibid., 83. 19 Bao Dong, “How to Use Painting to Mock Painting,” trans. Jeffrey Crosby, in Duan Jianyu: The Seduction of Village, eds. Zeng Tingke and Hu Fang (Hong Kong: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards/ Blue Kingfisher Limited, 2011), unnumbered pages. 20 Smith, “A Potent Force,” 84. 21 Ibid., 83. 22 Ibid.,.

Vol. 12 No. 4 99 Liz Park Wall-gazers and Nothing-doers: A Review of Song Dong Doing Nothing Pace New York January 18–February 23, 2013

hen Bodhidharma came to China from India in the sixth century, he sat facing a wall for nine years in deep meditation at WShaolin Monastery, leaving the legacy of Ch’an, or Zen, in China. The invitation card to Song Dong’s exhibition Doing Nothing, at Pace Gallery, New York, January 18 to February 23, 2013, depicts the artist sitting cross-legged on a bed, facing a wall that bears the characters, which roughly translates to the work’s English title, Song Dong Facing the Wall. This photograph of a 1999 performance in which the artist sat gazing at the wall for ten days in India was enlarged to life size for his solo survey exhibition in the United States. This quiet image of a man who has his back to the camera is accompanied by the wall text:

A long long time ago Dharma went to China from India The reason was Zen.

A long long time after, Song Dong came to India from China The reason is Art.

Dharma did not speak Chinese. Thus Dharma faced the wall in silence For ten years Leaving his image on the wall.

Song Dong does not speak Indian Thus Song Dong faced the wall in silence For ten days Leaving Art on the wall.1

I see this work as a sort of a koan, an often paradoxical anecdote or question used in Zen to help the practitioner abandon analytic reason and leave open the mind for sudden realization and enlightenment. As in a koan, the viewers of the photograph are invited to contemplate the profound meaning of an action that seems trivial or absurd—in this case, staring at the wall. Song Dong’s end goal, however, is not Buddhist enlightenment; he meditates on the contemporary conditions of art production in the globalized world. This meditation, as though in a koan, is an attempt to move closer to the knotty problem at the core core of his work—the issue of translatability and

100 Vol. 12 No. 4 Song Dong, Facing the access to divergent sets of cultural knowledge that haunt and complicate the Wall, 1999, photograph and wallpaper, 80 x 120 cm. © reading of contemporary art from non-Western cultures. Song Dong. Courtesy of Pace New York. In a review of this exhibition for the New York Times, critic Roberta Smith describes Song Dong’s earlier works as “the generic international Conceptualism of his youth, however daring they may have seemed in China when they were first made,” and his more recent works as “simply well-done examples of done-to-death assemblage.”2 These statements reveal the writer’s wilful blindness to the uneven terrain of international contemporary art and the complicated relationship non-Western artists have to the hegemony of Western canons. Pace Gallery situates Song Dong’s

Vol. 12 No. 4 101 work in the heart of an art market that is at the moment expanding to non-Western countries, in particular East Asia, with its booming economy. This impulse to expand eastward is also pervasive in mega art events such as documenta and the various biennials and triennials, which are often marked by a desire to discover and/or highlight non-Western art practices. Despite these interests, the lack of critical discourse and existent literature on non-Western art in English makes it difficult to facilitate a deeper understanding of what it means to practice contemporary art outside of established geopolitical and cultural centres.

Smith’s use of “international Conceptualism” as a catch-all phrase to designate radical practices from China feels like a hasty dismissal, the effect of which is the flattening of these fraught dynamics and relations. The questions raised by Song Dong in this exhibition, on the other hand, point to the limits of knowledge and understanding in the ever-expanding field of contemporary art, contesting any singular definition of this field. Literally faced with an insurmountable and impenetrable wall, Song Dong contemplates art as the continual translation process and the partial transference of knowledge from one cultural context to another—and doing nothing as an exercise in keeping an active state of mind in light of these disjunctive and stilted processes of exchange.

Song Dong’s artist’s book Doing Nothing, produced for documenta 13, is a literal investigation of the limits of translatability. It records a series of attempts to translate Song Dong’s personal maxim from Chinese to English:

“That left undone goes undone in vain; that which is done is done still in vain; that done in vain must still be done.”

Song Dong, Doing Nothing Garden, 2010–12, rubbish with plants and neon signs, 7 × 32.5 × 23.5 m, installation at documenta 13. © Song Dong. Courtesy of Pace New York.

Various English versions provided by a range of sources—from Google Translate to lay people to professional translators—populate the pages of the slim book. In one of the two galleries the Pace exhibition occupied, the original pages of the publication were framed and hung in a row, while a neon sign on the opposite wall spelled out the Chinese characters in a long vertical line. In its reddish glow, the neon carried authority that the English translations could not. While the work appears to be a simple and

102 Vol. 12 No. 4 blunt gesture, the complex meaning of the sentences as they relate to Song Dong’s larger oeuvre deserves a closer look. An important accompaniment to the artist’s book project was Doing Nothing Garden, for which he let weeds and other plant matter grow on a twenty-foot-tall mound of dirt at Kassel’s Karlsaue Park as part of documenta 13. At Pace, a sped-up video documentation of the garden as well as Doing Nothing Mountains, a sculptural assemblage consisting of recycled remnants of old Chinese houses, were installed in proximity to the pages of the book and echoed Song Dong’s maxim. The mound of dirt, for instance, is “that [which is] left undone.” Yet an array of plant life that emerged from the dirt demonstrates that doing nothing does not mean inactivity. The imperceptible or invisible workings below the surface always inform what we are able to perceive in the present. “What is done” can also be the result of doing nothing. “That done in vain” is mindful and intended practice.

Song Dong, Doing Nothing Presence, absence, nothingness and intention are fundamental concepts Mountains, 2012, mixed media. © Song Dong. Courtesy in Zen and Eastern philosophy, but it would be limiting to situate Song of Pace New York. Dong’s work entirely within this tradition of thought. The combination of light-hearted absurdity and seriousness in many of Song’s works is as much drawn from Zen as it is from the history of conceptualism in Western art. Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” and the declaration that “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically,”3 for instance, are tremendously resonant within Song Dong’s practice. The two radically different traditions and histories of practice that merge in his work characterize an important problematic that confronts a growing number of artists from outside of the Western art centres. These artists are under immense pressure to straddle both traditions and operate dually for their

Vol. 12 No. 4 103 local audience, on the one hand, and for the more nebulous international audience, on the other. Yet, their ability to navigate both terrains skilfully holds promise for redefining and shifting the category of contemporary art beyond the bounds of Western art history.

The most significant reference Song Dong’s work calls up in Western art history is John Cage and his Zen-inspired “Lecture on Nothing” and the composition 4’33”. When Cage presented four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence to his bewildered audience, and when he said in a lecture “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it . . .,” he was demonstrating that silence is never completely empty of sound and nothing is ever a void. Similarly, for Song Dong, doing nothing is an action full of intent and awareness, an action that is meant to make one doubly aware of the nature of emptiness itself. Consider, for instance, an empty gallery. The more time spent looking at this emptiness, the more one becomes aware of the things that fill it—the smooth walls, the cold white paint, and the sterile light. They are exhibitionary apparatuses that have been naturalized over decades to make the gallery space appear as though it is a natural and standard receptacle for contemporary art. Such a space is not empty, but, rather, overflows with ideologies that are particular to the Western institution of art, and they frequently obscure the view of life just outside the gallery walls. For Cage, listening to silence was a way to tune into the sounds of the everyday, which, around the time of the lecture and 4’33”, was in the context of post- war America, with its booming industrial economy. As an artist who takes up the mundane subject of the everyday in works such as Eating Drinking Shitting Pissing Sleeping,4 Song Dong is also attentive to the very conditions of life that sustain his practice. Significantly, late-twentieth and early-twenty- first century China—the backdrop to much of Song Dong’s work—has been compared to the post-war US and its economic might. For both Cage and Song Dong, turning to ordinary actions, sounds, and images to explore emptiness in the face of excessive wealth and a triumphant show of industrial might is a conscientious decision grounded in the politics of the everyday.

Song Dong, Eating Drinking Shitting Pissing Sleeping, 1999, colour photographs, each 77 cm in diameter. © Song Dong. Courtesy of Pace New York.

A series of videos presented in the adjacent gallery intimates Song Dong’s position on the massive growth of urban centres in China. In Broken Mirror (1999), Burning Mirror (2001), and Crumpling Shanghai (2000), busy street scenes in China are destroyed by various interventions: a hammer enters the frame and shatters the mirror that had been reflecting the cityscape; a reflective scrim through which the audience was viewing the city streets is set on fire; and a hand reaches out to crumple up the sheet that held the image of the city on its surface. The videos emphasize the highly constructed and mediated ways in which China’s mega cities represent

104 Vol. 12 No. 4 Song Dong, Broken Mirror, themselves and accentuate the 1999, single-channel video, 4 mins. © Song Dong. Courtesy precarity of bustling metropolitan of Pace New York. life, their illusoriness, and their unchecked growth. The cities and their spectacle—“capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images”—are vulnerable to being shattered at any moment.5

These violent and destructive videos are presented alongside Catching Moonbeams on Water (2001), a quiet and meditative piece documenting many failed attempts at trying to harvest the moon reflected on the surface of the water. The title is a well-known phrase that comes from a Chinese opera in which a sage poet drowns as the result of trying to catch a moonbeam from the stern of a boat—in other words, futile efforts exerted toward an impossible task. Recalling Song Dong’s maxim, “that done in vain must still be done,” the piece is less about futility than it is about the intent and the process. With the pool of water reverberating with each failed attempt, the intention behind trying to grab the reflection of a fleeting ray of light is perhaps to acknowledge and shatter the world of illusions that keep people mesmerized and in docile participation. Watching the video, I recalled a Zen story of a nun who was studying for years without being able to achieve enlightenment. One night, she was watching the moon reflected in the pail of water she was carrying. Suddenly, the pail fell apart, the water gushed out, and the reflection of the moon disappeared. This was the moment when she achieved enlightenment.

As it is in this story and in much of Song Dong’s work, moments of sudden and profound realization come with a meditation on, and disturbance of, the structures that we actively try to hold together and within which we operate. When these structures are pricked, by doing nothing or something, with intention or without, the moments reveal a truly engaging and mindful way of being in the present—of being contemporary. For Cage, the definition of contemporary art is simply being in the present and sharing that moment that is always changing. When it comes to contemporary art from non-Western parts of the world, however, there seems to be a temporal disjunction at the intersection of one tradition and another. Just as Greenwich Mean Time designates where the margins of time lie, the

Vol. 12 No. 4 105 Western canon of art has planted itself firmly as the prime meridian of Song Dong, Catching Moonbeams in Water, 2001, contemporary art. To gaze at the wall, then, is to find oneself far away from video, 50 mins., 18 secs. © Song Dong. Courtesy of Pace degree zero in longitude, to be faced with the limits of one’s knowledge, New York. and to re-evaluate the privilege of one’s perspective and purview. To see these artists’ practices as more than just generic international conceptualism or exotic esoterica from afar, what the field of contemporary art needs, perhaps, are more wall-gazers and nothing-doers.

Notes 1 The translation is taken from Leng Lin, “Catching Moonbeams in Water,” written for Beijing Commune on the occasion of Song Dong’s exhibition, April 28–June 8, 2007. Song Dong’s wall text refers to Bodhidharma as Dharma, and the length of his meditation as ten years as opposed to the nine years noted in popular legends. Given the lack of written records about Bodhidharma, there are many apocryphal tales that surround his time in China. Lin’s full text is available at http://www.artnet. com/galleries/exhibitions.asp?gid=424891678&cid=117889/. 2 Roberta Smith, “Song Dong: ‘Doing Nothing,’” New York Times, February 7, 2013, http://www.nytimes. com/2013/02/08/arts/design/song-dong-doing-nothing.html?_r=1&/. 3 Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” 0–9, no. 5, (January 1969), 3–5, reprinted in Alex Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1999), 106-108. 0–9 was a limited-run mimeographed journal that was edited by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer in New York from 1967 to 1969. 4 This piece from 1999 is a series of fish-eye-view photographs of the artist doing exactly what the title states. 5 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 10.

106 Vol. 12 No. 4 Chinese Name Index

Vol. 12 No. 4 107 108 Vol. 12 No. 4 Vol. 12 No. 4 109 110 Vol. 12 No. 4 Vol. 12 No. 4 111 W ANG G U ANG YI (b. 1957) is a central figure of Yishu the Political Pop movement and recognized as a leader of the New Art Movement in China established in the 1980s. He is most recognized for Edition the socio-political paintings and prints from his Great Criticism series begun in 1998. Through his use of No. 5 the Chinese political icons and symbols of Western commercialism, his images respond to the deeply engrained legacy of propaganda experienced in To purchase a Yishu edition China during the Cultural Revolution. Originally print please send your request painted in 2005, in this work the artist uses his own to [email protected] or call 1.604.649.8187 (Canada), name as a substitute for luxury brand names common or contact Zhang Chaoxuan to his Great Criticism series. By calling attention to 134.6655.9126 (China). the consumer legacy of his own commercial success, Wang provides cheeky commentary on the experience Each edition is commissioned of China’s changing society. by and produced exclusively for Yishu; and is measured the same A RTWORK DESCRIPTION size as the Journal. ARTIST ------Wang Guangyi TITLE ------Great Criticism — Wang Guangyi (2009) MEDIA ------Serigraph DIMENSION ------210 x 295 mm EDITION SIZE ------200 PRICE ------US $400 plus shipping

Signed by the artist; produced by A Space Art, Beijing.

Since its inauguration in May 2002, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art has raised its profile internationally to become one of the most respected journals devoted to contemporary Chinese art. To further expand our platform for global dialogue and debate concerning issues in this field, Yishu launched its Chinese- language version in May 2012.

This edition is published quarterly—in March, June, September and December—and each issue features scholarly essays, interviews, conference proceedings, and critical commentary selected from Yishu’s English edition. With our English and Chinese editions, we endeavour to increase our efforts in promoting critical writing on, and contributing to the history of, contemporary Chinese art.

Yishu’s Chinese-language edition is made possible with the generous support of JNBY.

For purchase, subscription and advertising inquiries, please contact us at offi[email protected] or call 1-604-649-8187.

Rate: Single issue: USD $10 One year: USD $40 (includes postage)

Back issues available for order: October 2011, April 2012, August 2012, and December 2012 http://yishu-online.com Archive Web Site