January/February 2017 Volume 16, Number 1 Inside

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 VOLUME 16, N UMBER 1

INSI DE

Being, Becoming, Landscape: Its Ecological Impulse and Its Ethical Project Artist Features: Josh Hon, Lee Mingwei, Wang Jian Conversations: Huang Yong Ping, Juan Moreira, Wong Wai Yin Amazing Grace: Contemporary Chinese Christian Art

US$12.00 NT$350.00 P R INTED IN TAIWAN 6

VOLUME 16, NUMBER 1, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017

CONTENTS 32 2 Editor’s Note

4 Contributors

6 Lee Mingwei: Relating to Art and Artists in the Twenty-First Century Rachel Ng

22 nothingness was not: A New World Voon Pow Bartlett 44 32 Being, Becoming, Landscape: The Iconography of Landscape in Contemporary Chinese Art, Its Ecological Impulse, and Its Ethical Project Elena Macrì

44 A Missing Story in Havana: A Conversation with Juan Moreira Zheng Shengtian

57 Josh Hon: Dead Water Convulsion— Hong Kong—1980s 66 Leung Chi Wo

66 A Conversation with Wong Wai Yin Phoebe Wong

77 Containers, Napoleon’s Bicorne Hat, Snake: Huang Yong Ping Talks about Empires at Monumenta, Paris Yu Hsiao Hwei

90 Amazing Grace: Contemporary Chinese Christian Art 77 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky

108 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Lee Mingwei, Luminous Depths (detail), 2013, installation view in atrium of Peranakan Museum, Singapore. Photo: Sean 90 Dungan. Courtesy of the artist. We thank Yukon Art Space Co. Ltd. and Freddy Yang, JNBY and Lin Li, Cc Foundation and David Chau, Chen Ping, Kevin Daniels, Qiqi Hong, Sabrina Xu, David Yue, Andy Sylvester, Farid Rohani, Ernest Lang, D3E Art Limited, Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison for their generous contribution to the publication and distribution of Yishu.

Vol. 16 No. 1 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art PRESIDENT Katy Hsiu-chih Chien LEGAL COUNSEL Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C. C. Liu Yishu 78 presents a diverse selection of texts FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum beginning with a feature on Lee Mingwei, an EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian artist whom we last covered in 2002. Rachel EDITORS Julie Grundvig Ng looks at his work from the perspective of Kate Steinmann Chunyee Li cultural identity in a world of globalization and, CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li in addition, how his work is positioned with ADVERTISING Sen Wong respect to relational aesthetics. Among Voon Michelle Hsieh Pow Bartlett’s interests are Chinese artists ADVISORY BOARD engaged with abstraction, and here she explores Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Melissa Chiu, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden the work of Wang Jian and how it goes beyond John Clark, University of Sydney formal aesthetics and enters a realm embedded Lynne Cooke, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator in philosophical notions about nothingness. Artist Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator Fan Di’an, Central Academy of Fine Arts Leung Chi Wo has curated an exhibition of the Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator work of Josh Hon, and his text reflects upon Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, MAXXI, Rome an artist well remembered in Hong Kong for his Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop early experimental multimedia projects during Katie Hill, University of Westminster Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive the 1980s, a time when such work existed outside Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator the mainstream. Lu Jie, Long March Space Charles Merewether, Critic and Curator Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Yu Hsiao Hwei speaks with Huang Yong Ping Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art about his project Empires for the Grand Palais, Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago Paris, and provides insight into the thought Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District processes that come into play in conceiving ART & COLLECTION GROUP LTD. and realizing such a major installation. In his 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 conversation with Cuban artist Juan Moreira, Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 Zheng Shengtian builds upon his research into E-mail: [email protected] the exchanges between mainland China and VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu Latin America during the 1950s and 60s. Phoebe MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu Wong converses with Hong Kong artist Wong Wai Yin about two of her 2016 projects and Yishu is produced bi-monthly in Vancouver, Canada, and published in Taipei, Taiwan. The publishing dates are January, March, May, uncovers an art practice that is idiosyncratic and July, September, and November. All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: conceptual, but that also arises from everyday experiences that are patently familiar. YISHU INITIATIVE OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART SOCIETY 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 Phone: 1.604.649.8187 Elena Marcrì identifies a number of Chinese E-mail: offi[email protected] artists who reference the tradition of DIRECTOR Zheng Shengtian SECRETARY GENERAL Yin Qing shanshuihua—mountain and water painting— and considers how they bring it into a RETAIL RATES USD $12 / EUR 9 / TWD 350 (per copy) contemporary context that reveals a disparity SUBSCRIPTION RATES between China’s economic progress and the 1 Year Print Copy (6 issues including air mail postage): possibility of ecological sustainability. Finally, Asia $94 USD/Outside Asia $104 USD Patricia Karetzky takes us into territory Yishu has 2 Years Print Copy (12 issues including air mail postage): not yet explored: the introduction of Christianity Asia $180 USD/Outside Asia $198 USD 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD into mainland Chinese society, and, more 1 Year Print Copy and PDF (6 issues including air mail postage): provocatively, into the work of Chinese artists. Asia $134 USD/Outside Asia $144 USD The approach of these artists, however, is not DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group one of promoting the tenets of Christianity but of CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah exploring it in more personal and discreet ways. ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow DESIGNER Philip Wong PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com Keith Wallace WEB DESIGN Design Format ISSN 1683 - 3082

No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written Erratum: Photo captions on pages 76 and 77 of Yishu 77 should be dated 2015 not 2016. permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版(Yishu)創刊於 2002年5月1日典藏國際版‧第16卷第1期‧2017年1–2月社長：簡秀枝法律顧問：思科技法律事務所劉承慶創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）

總策劃：鄭勝天 2 編者手記主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 4 作者小傳史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 黎俊儀

網站編輯：黎俊儀 6 李明維：關係到二十一世紀的藝術行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 和藝術家廣告：謝盈盈黃萬芳（Rachel Ng）黃晨

顧問：王嘉驥田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 22 無非物：一個新世界安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 邱文寶（Voon Pow Bartlett）巫鴻林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 范迪安招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 32 當代中國藝術中風景的圖像學: 洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 胡昉生態關懷與道德目標侯瀚如 Elena Macrì 徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 高名潞 44 哈瓦那軼事──與胡安 · 莫雷拉費大爲的對話楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 盧杰鄭勝天 Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill Charles Merewether 57 韓偉康：死水痙攣──香港 Apinan Poshyananda ──1980年代出版：典藏藝術家庭梁志和（Leung Chi Wo）副總經理：劉靜宜行銷總監：林素珍發行專員：許銘文黃慧妍訪談地址：台灣台北市中山北路一段85號6樓 66 電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 黃小燕傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 電子信箱：[email protected]

編輯製作： Yishu Initiative of Contemporary 77 集裝箱、拿破崙帽、蛇──黃永砯談 Chinese Art Society Monumenta 2016 ：《帝國》計劃加中當代藝術協會

余小蕙會長：鄭勝天秘書長：陰晴地址： 200 - 1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 90 奇異恩典：當代中國的基督教藝術電話: (1) 604.649.8187 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky 電子信箱: ofﬁ[email protected]

訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與Yishu Initiative聯繫。

108 中英人名對照設計製作： Leap Creative Group, Vancouver 創意總監：馬偉培藝術總監：周繼宏設計師：黃健斌印刷：台北崎威彩藝有限公司

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

網址： http://yishu-online.com 管理： Design Format

國際刊號： 1683-3082

售價：每本12美元 / 9歐元 / 350台幣

一年6期（含航空郵資）：封面：李明維，浮光之淵（局部），新加坡亞洲94美元 / 亞洲以外地區104美元土生華人博物館天井內裝置。Sean Dungan攝影。兩年12期（含航空郵資）：藝術家提供。亞洲180美元 / 亞洲以外地區198美元

感謝力邦文化與楊豐收、JNBY與李琳、一年網上下載： 49.95美元 Cc基金會與周大為、Kevin Daniels、洪琪琪、一年6期加網上下載：徐依夢、余啟賢、Andy Sylvester、Farid Rohani、亞洲134美元 / 亞洲以外地區144美元 Ernest Lang、陳萍、賀芳霓（Stephanie Holmquist）和Mark Allison 、D3E Art Limited對本刊出版與發行版權所有，本刊內容非經本社同意不得翻譯和轉載。的慷慨支持本刊登載內容並不代表編輯部與出版社立場。 Contributors

Voon Pow Bartlett is an artist, curator, several international exhibitions, most recently lecturer, and writer as well as an associate the 37th edition of EVA International— member of the Institute of Chartered Ireland’s Biennial (2016), the Manchester Asia Accountants in England and Wales. She is Triennial (2014), and Marrakech Biennale interested in exploring an expanded field in (2012). He has represented Hong Kong in the the study of the complex causal framework Venice Biennale and exhibited at Tate Modern, influencing global discourses on fine art. She London; PS1, New York; Witte de Witte, The serves as a trustee of Third Text and as an Netherlands; Museu da Imagem e do Som, advisor to Contemporary Chinese Art Journal São Paulo; and the Contemporary Art Centre, and the British Chinese Art Association. She Vilnius, among others. founded Artefiction in order to promote a transnational dialogue. She is also a volunteer Elena Macrì is an independent scholar based at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. in Italy. She received her M.A. in Chinese Studies and Ph.D. in Chinese Art History Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky holds the from the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” O. Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at Bard specializing in Chinese modern and College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. contemporary art. During her career, she She has published several books, on subjects has also studied and conducted research in such as the art of the Tang dynasty and China, at the China Academy of Art and Chinese Buddhist art, and she has served as the Nanjing University of the Arts. Macrì’s Editor of Journal of Chinese Religions. She research interests focus on Chinese ink has written many catalogues and has curated painting theory and practice. Her dissertation several shows on contemporary Asian art. and published articles focus on the evolution of landscape painting and explore the Leung Chi Wo was born in Hong Kong and perception and depiction of landscape in graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the modern and contemporary Chinese art. She Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 1996 he has lectured extensively at the University of co-founded Para/Site Art Space, one of Hong Naples “L’Orientale,” and now she regularly Kong’s most important art spaces. Leung attends conferences, seminars, and talks, giving is now Associate Professor of the School of lectures and papers at different academic and Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. cultural institutions. In 2014, she co-curated Leung has had numerous solo exhibitions, Zhang Yanzi’s solo exhibition The Remedy, including his recent retrospective at OCAT which focused on ink painting. She is currently in 2015, Shenzhen, China, curated by Carol working on projects that promote the Yinghua Lu. His work has been included in particular aesthetics of Chinese ink art.

4 Vol. 16 No. 1 Rachel Ng recently completed her master’s Yu Hsiao Hwei is an art writer and translator degree in History of Art and Archaeology based in France. She is a regular contributor of East Asia at the School of Oriental and to several art magazines in Taiwan and China, African Studies (SOAS), London, and holds including CANS (Chinese Contemporary Art a bachelor’s degree in History of Art from News), ARTCO, ArtCo China, and Randian. University College London. Formerly an Since the 1990s, she has been focusing on assistant curator at the Singapore Art Museum, the exploration of Chinese contemporary art she oversaw the Vietnamese and Cambodian within the global context. contemporary art collections and has worked on several exhibitions on Southeast Asian Zheng Shengtian, an artist, scholar, and contemporary art. She was co-curator with independent curator, has lived and worked in Deutsche Bank for Time Present: Photography Vancouver since 1990. Before his immigration, from the Deutsche Bank Collection, the Zheng worked at the China Academy of Art, collection’s Asian debut. Her research interests Hangzhou, as Professor and Department lie in mining the conﬂuences between East Chair for more than thirty years. He is the Asian, Southeast Asian, and Western art, as co-founder of the Chinese Canadian Artists well as in immersive, experiential forms of art. Federation and Centre A, Vancouver. Currently Zheng is Managing Editor of Yishu: Journal of Phoebe Wong has a background in design Contemporary Chinese Art, Adjunct Director and anthropology. She is a Hong Kong-based of the Institute of Asian Art (IAA) at the culture worker with a special interest in Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, and Senior contemporary art, design, and visual media. Curator for the Vancouver Biennale. He has She is a co-founder of the Community curated numerous exhibitions, including the Museum Project, a research and curatorial 4th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai Modern, collective dedicated to revaluating indigenous Munich (2004–05), and Art and China’s creativity and the under-represented histories Revolution, New York (2008). He is a frequent and practices of the everyday. Wong was Head contributor to periodicals and catalogues of Research at the Asia Art Archive before about contemporary Chinese and Asian becoming an independent researcher and art. Four volumes of his writing on art were writer in 2012. Wong is currently a member published by the China Academy of Art Press of the International Association of Art in 2013. As an artist, Zheng has shown work in Critics, Hong Kong, and a Board Director China, the United States, Canada, and Russia of Videotage. since the 1960s. Zheng received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2013.

Vol. 16 No. 1 5 Rachel Ng Lee Mingwei: Relating to Art and Artists in the Twenty-First Century

t is progressively more difficult to critique and assess contemporary Lee Mingwei, Trilogy of Sounds, 2010, bronze wind art as it is practiced in the twenty-first century. Globalization, the chimes, installation view, Mount Stuart, Scotland. technology revolution, and capitalist expansion drive the positioning Photo: Keith Hunter. I Courtesy of the artist. of artists and artistic practices on international platforms and disrupt traditional art historical categorization with respect to the local and the particular. Is “contemporary art” commensurable with “contemporary Asian art” or “contemporary Chinese art?” The usefulness of such classifications is increasingly debatable. This is not only the result of the extreme mobility of contemporary artists—a trait deeply entrenched in the global nature of today’s biennials, art fairs, and exhibition programming—but also the concurrent flow of curators, critics, academics, and audiences. At the same time, the desire for visibility and exceptionality amid the homogenizing threat of globalization has resulted in resurgent nationalisms and ethnic consciousness.1 Approaches to art are being differentiated by cultural origin, even as diverse artistic traditions and cultures come into greater contact.2

6 Vol. 16 No. 1 The increased literacy about non-Western cultures, aesthetics, and histories once relegated to the periphery of Western-dominated art discourses has introduced new registers of meaning, bringing with it issues of translation and reception. Artistic content and form have also come under interrogation. Under these circumstances, understanding both the identity of the artist and their artistic practices is often a meditative process. However, while Western contemporary artists have certainly not been untouched by these new developments, cultural bias toward the West remains deep-seated, and the degree of inﬂuence between cultures unequal.3 The necessity of such negotiation falls mainly onto non-Western contemporary artists, such as Taiwanese, US-educated-and-based artist Lee Mingwei.

Born in 1964 in Taiwan, Lee Mingwei immigrated to San Francisco when he was thirteen and later studied textile art and architecture at the California College of Arts before earning an M. F. A. in sculpture from Yale.4 Lee Mingwei is known primarily for works that justiﬁably belong to what, in 1998, French art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud coined as “relational aesthetics”: “A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.”5 Lee Mingwei’s practice, however, is unique among artists working with relational art in privileging private, intimate exchanges over public ones, and in his sustained referencing of Chan or Zen Buddhist meditation and classical Chinese aesthetics. Before immigrating, Lee Mingwei spent six summers in a Chan Buddhist monastery outside Taipei training in meditation and studying Chinese painting, focusing on the Song dynasty.6 Yet, foregrounded in his practice are universal humanistic concerns of trust, intimacy, and authenticity. Lee Mingwei’s background and the open-ended nature of his practice make him a suitable agent for unpacking several pertinent issues, namely, the presentation and negotiation of identity in contemporary art and the reception of contemporary artistic forms such as relational aesthetics or participatory art. The conﬂuence of both in his work opens up a discursive space in which to debate the impact of globalizing, transcultural conditions on contemporary art.

Lee Mingwei’s practice has rarely been explored in terms of the contemporary politics of identity and of artistic form. To my mind, this is a lost opportunity in engaging more critically with his art, since most of the contemporary artists working prominently in relational art are from the West.7 It should be noted however, that Lee Mingwei has never really discussed his practice in such wider contexts. The line of inquiry I have taken here serves more as an exercise to mine the issues articulated above and interrogate the framework within which contemporary non-Western artists have been perceived.

Lee Mingwei and Identity It is interesting to examine the numerous ways that Lee Mingwei’s identity has been written about, as well as the ways it has not. Identity, as discussed here, refers neither to the artist’s personality nor biography, but to nationality

Vol. 16 No. 1 7 and ethnicity, and, thus, cultural identity. Lee Mingwei has been variously Next page: Lee Mingwei, Luminous Depths, 2013, referred to as “a Taiwanese artist,” “a Taiwanese-American,” “a Taiwan- installation view in atrium of Peranakan Museum, born artist living in New York,” “a New York-based artist,” and an artist of Singapore. Photo: Sean Dungan. Courtesy of the artist. “Taiwanese descent.”8 In other instances, mention of nationality, ethnicity, or country of residence is entirely omitted. In another case, he is labeled as a practicing Buddhist or one whose art has been inﬂuenced by Buddhism.9 Are these geographical and cultural categorizations of contemporary art and artists still useful today, or do they increasingly risk essentialism?

Against the late Lee Mingwei, Luminous Depths, 2013, installation twentieth century’s view in atrium of Peranakan Museum, Singapore. Photo: anxiety over identity Sean Dungan. Courtesy of the artist. politics—the subject’s ability, or lack thereof, to determine its own identity and the meaning of its own experiences— and a postmodern reality informed by disorder, ambivalence, and hybridization, identity occupies an uneasy position.10 The tendency to place less emphasis on fixed labels competes with the impulse to assert individual agency in a time when increasing disruption and fluidity in a globalizing society can threaten to diminish the visibility of minority groups and sub-cultures. On the surface, contemporary art seems to thrive on the former. It continues to push the boundaries of what art is, thereby rendering the notion of an artist unstable and almost superfluous at the extreme.11 The identity of the artist is ostensibly less relevant from this perspective, if it is primarily the form of the artwork that imparts its meaning. Moreover, much has been made of embracing cultural plurality and global perspectives in contemporary art; the titles of the last three editions of the Venice Biennale are axiomatic alone.12 The Guggenheim Museum’s recent UBS MAP Global Art Initiative into Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America further underpin this.13

Below the surface, however, it has been argued that the growing commitment to presenting non-Western artists—tellingly termed by a Korean art critic“minority artists”—derives primarily from their “exotic otherness.”14 Cultural marginality risks being equated with artistic originality and value, particularly when this marginality is heightened in an international setting, and threatens to colour aesthetic judgment.15 Often,

8 Vol. 16 No. 1 Vol. 16 No. 1 9 the result is a glamourized pseudo or superﬁcial understanding of the Lee Mingwei, The Sleeping Project, 2000/03, wood, artistic and/or sociocultural context whence the artwork is shaped. In an bedding, installation view, Taiwan Pavilion, 49th Venice age when cultural, economic, even aesthetic currencies are largely appraised Biennale. Photo: Kevin Ho. Courtesy of the artist. by the extent of their global reach, it has been suggested that curatorial strategies and vested capitalist agendas are responsible for such shallow translation.16 While warranting a separate discussion, it bears noting, for instance, that the Guggenheim Museum’s aggressive expansion beyond Western art is seen by its Swiss bank sponsor, UBS, as an opportunity to tap into both emerging markets and the art asset class.17

Lee Mingwei is certainly cognizant of the delicate maneuvering of identity and self-presentation that non-Western artists face upon entering the global contemporary art scene. “In reviews, Western journalists mainly focus on my proximity with Zen Buddhism,” he says, “while the Asian media talks more about the conceptual, aesthetic dimensions of my practice. I guess both groups exoticize me in a way that makes me understandable for their audience.”18 He is fond of wearing Chinese silk changpao gowns to events, and speaks regularly about the inﬂuence of Chan Buddhism and Song dynasty Chinese aesthetics.19 Lee Mingwei’s work at the Taiwan Pavilion for the 2003 Venice Biennale, The Sleeping Project, featured furniture he designed after ta couch-beds of the Song dynasty.20 The Letter Writing Project (1998–present) consists of pale wooden booths reminiscent of Buddhist temples or shrines, while the table set of The Dining Project (1997–present) bears a distinct Chan-like minimalism.21 Many of the meals documented in The Dining Project (1997–present) are also Chinese- style, eaten with chopsticks and bowls. At the same time, Lee Mingwei is a naturalized US citizen, speaks ﬂuent English with a strong American accent, and is equally conversant with both Chinese and Western culture.

10 Vol. 16 No. 1 Lee Mingwei, The Dining Lee Mingwei is not alone in crafting such a syncretic self-image or being Project, 1997/2007, wood, tatami mats, tableware, beans, conscious of its growing ambiguity. Cai Guo-Qiang, a China-born, Chinese projection, installation view, Museum of Contemporary artist now based in New York, is widely regarded as one of the world’s Art, Taipei. Photo: Lee Studio. Courtesy of the artist. leading contemporary artists. When asked how he perceived himself as a border-crossing artist, Cai Guo-Qiang replied that he qualified for the categories of “international,” “Chinese,” and “Asian” artist, but the most meaningful category for him was that of “New York artist” because there he could be “a normal person.”22 It is possible to read in Lee Mingwei and Cai Guo-Qiang’s responses a fairly relaxed (or conversely, evasive) proprietary attitude toward their identity and, indirectly, the interpretation of their works. From a cynical perspective, artists gain an advantage projecting a more fluid identity because it widens their appeal to a global audience and art market. This is especially so for non-Western artists, who face greater pressure to assimilate into the Western-oriented scene. Aihwa Ong’s anthropological analysis of contemporary Chinese art, for instance, formulates “Chineseness” as a fluid and abstract concept. It has a “divergent valuation,” possessing lucrative market value worldwide but a problematic sociopolitical valence depending on global current affairs.23 It is likely no coincidence that the most commercially driven or successful contemporary Chinese artists like Cai Guo-Qiang, Xu Bing, and Gu Wenda, are particularly deft and sensitive discussants of Chinese identity.24

Lee Mingwei’s leaning toward Song dynasty aesthetics is similarly nuanced. This preference is a continuing inﬂuence from his childhood studies on Song painting. More critically, such an aesthetic inclination is a conscious appeal to the modernism and minimalism prized by Western tastes. It conversely may be seen in its simplicity as a relatively “culturally muted” choice. For Lee Mingwei, “That reﬁnement was a conscious decision. If

Vol. 16 No. 1 11 Lee Mingwei, The Letter Writing Project, 1998/2015, wood, glass, paper, installation view, Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

the work isn’t clear and clean, it Lee Mingwei, The Letter Writing Project, 1998/2015, provokes a different reaction from wood, glass, paper, installation view, Taipei Fine Arts Museum. 25 people.” His work has been seen to Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum. perpetuate the serenity of Chinese art, which in itself is a popular and inaccurate assumption. As Lee Mingwei pointed out, “China had fourteen different dynasties. The Tang was almost baroque, with loud colours. The Song dynasty was at the other extreme.”26 Nevertheless, the Song dynasty as an artistic high point in Chinese art history is undisputed. Lee Mingwei’s referencing of its aesthetics gives his work a highly attractive pedigree that in turn bolsters his cultural and ethnic legitimacy. While it is, I think, pointless to determine if his predilection for Song dynasty aesthetics is a natural or strategic choice—it is most likely both—Lee Mingwei has evidently harnessed both Asian and Western traits to considerable international success. His recent mid-career survey exhibition Lee Mingwei and His Relations was shown at the Mori Art Museum (2014), Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2015), and the Auckland Art Gallery (2016), and his work is in the collection of world-leading museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Queensland Art Gallery.

To return to the earlier question about the relevance and productivity of geographical and cultural categorizations today, there appears to be no authoritative answer. As artists become highly cosmopolitan creatures, imbibing different cultures, to insist on ﬁxed identities and readings seems to border on conservatism or prejudice. Yet, even while acknowledging that audiences, too, are increasingly cosmopolitan and conversant in global cultures, I concurrently realized during the writing of this piece that the urge to essentialize remains ever-present. I felt this all the more acutely, in fact, because these border crossing non-Western contemporary artists are complicit in blurring boundaries while distilling cultures to selectively employ their key traits. With the international ﬂow of artists being overwhelmingly one-way—from outside the West into the West—this

12 Vol. 16 No. 1 problem presents itself mainly in non-Western artists, whose unfamiliar cultural identities perhaps make essentialism a more convenient approach, even to themselves.27

I would venture to make a connection with Gayatri Spivak’s theory of strategic essentialism, which posits that embracing essentialist formulations in the public arena can be self-serving for minorities.28 In an age where hyper-rationalization and commodification have nurtured an instinct for instant gratification and consumption, leaving both non-Western and Western audiences without a clear frame of reference may be risky. Plausibly, to avoid the sense of being culturally impotent or in limbo, non- Western artists, especially “Westernized” artists like Lee Mingwei and Cai Guo-Qiang, inscribe their work with expected cultural cues even as they resist definition. Western artists tend to stay in and move within the West; their experience of cultural displacement and the need for assimilation is nowhere as huge. Little wonder, then, that “globalization” is often perceived as nothing more than a form of “standardization,” one commonly termed “Americanization” or “Westernization.”29 It exposes the limits of totalizing paradigms associated with globalization or Westernization, with tensions arising between the rediscovery of particularity and the desire for unity. In this sense, globalization produces postmodernism.30 Policing one’s cultural identity consequently becomes a strategy to create signposts as their functions are simultaneously being eroded.

Lee Mingwei and Relational Aesthetics If globalization or Westernization has transformed the identities of artists working internationally, it has also affected the way they practice and how these forms are received. While Lee Mingwei’s practice justly falls under the rubric of relational aesthetics, and curators and critics have designated it so, it should be noted that he has never speciﬁcally referred to his work as such.31

Lee Mingwei describes his work as:

. . . consist[ing] largely of participatory installations where strangers can explore issues of trust, intimacy and self-awareness on their own; and one-on-one events in which visitors explore these issues with the artist himself through eating, sleeping, walking and conversation. My projects are usually open-ended scenarios based on everyday interactions, taking different forms depending on the participants. Time is central to this process, as the installations often change during the course of an exhibition.32

When Bourriaud wrote of relational aesthetics, he referred frequently to a group of artists better thought of as international rather than European, where most of them were from. These artists include Liam Gillick, Phillippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Carsten Höller, Vanessa Beecroft, and Maurizio Cattelan, all omnipresent names on the international art circuit.33 In

Vol. 16 No. 1 13 Bourriaud’s conception, the art of relational aesthetics is “the place that produces a speciﬁc sociability,” whose purpose is “no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist.”34

For Bourriaud and other art theorists, Rirkrit Tiravanija is seen to be paradigmatic of relational aesthetics.35 Strikingly, Tiravanija’s background and works most closely parallel that of Lee Mingwei’s. Exploring the relational dialectic between them not only illuminates Lee Mingwei’s practice; methodologically, it enables a more thorough evaluation of how relational art is translated and received across cultures. Whereas Tiravanija’s practice of relational aesthetics has been extensively critiqued, critical discussion of Lee Mingwei’s work and its form is hard to ﬁnd, giving impetus to this dialectical approach.36

Lee Mingwei, The Dining Project, 1997/2014. Installation view, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Photo: Yoshitsugu Fuminari. Courtesy of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

Like Lee Mingwei, Tiravanija is based in New York and had a multicultural upbringing. Born in Buenos Aires to Thai parents, he grew up in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Canada, and went to art colleges in Toronto, Chicago, and New York.37 His work pad thai (1990) is a continuing series that involves Tiravanija cooking and serving the ubiquitous Thai noodles to visitors in a casual setting. In Untitled (Still) (1992), he cooked curry. In another work, Untitled (Tomorrow Is Another Day) (1996), a wooden replica of his apartment was open to the public twenty-four hours a day to use, make food, sleep, bathe, hang out, etc. Respectively, these works resonate strongly with iconic works by Lee Mingwei such as The Dining Project (ﬁrst shown 1997), where he cooked for and dined one-on-one after hours in the gallery, with a participant chosen by lottery and The Sleeping Project (ﬁrst shown 2000), in which the artist spent a night in the gallery with a participant, again chosen by lottery.

For both of these artists, German artist Joseph Beuys’s (1921–1986) theory of social sculpture is cited as an inﬂuence.38 This is unsurprising in any case, since Beuys’ theory is a historical model for the kind of social catalyst works espoused by relational aesthetics.39 Developed by Beuys in the politically charged era of the 1970s, his theory posited that life was a social sculpture

14 Vol. 16 No. 1 40 Next page: Lee Mingwei, The everyone helped to create. For Beuys, social sculpture was an activist form Sleeping Project, 2000/2015, wood, bedding. Installation whose rhetoric of democracy and participation would bring about positive view, Taipei Fine Arts Museum. 41 Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts social transformation. Museum.

An overt political impetus is absent in Lee Mingwei and Tiravanija’s art, which is more light-hearted and concerned primarily with equality between art, artist, audience, and everyday life. As a result, most critiques of Tiravanjia’s work, and Bourriaud’s theory, have centred on Bourriaud’s implicit claim that relational aesthetics opposes capitalism and commodity fetishism, since it is deﬁned by the production of positive social relations between persons and not objects.42 In a leading critique of Tiravanija’s work, Janet Kraynak has argued against Bourriaud’s simplistic view in that the art institutions’ enthusiastic co-opting of Tiravanija’s work (same goes for Bourriaud’s other star mentions) has made the artist key to the work’s functioning, rather than the social situation created, the artist’s persona has ironically been commodiﬁed.43 Kraynak further highlights that this has reinstated authorial authority, thereby undermining relational aesthetics’ supposed democratization of art.44

Like Tiravanija, most writings about Lee Mingwei surreptitiously equate his work and self through a focus on biography. Lee Mingwei further encourages this by emphasizing his cultural inspirations, echoing Tiravanija’s thematization of his Thai ethnicity. In effect, this makes any experience of their work conditioned by their speciﬁc cultural attitudes.45 There is nothing wrong with this in itself—biographical readings or impositions apply to any art, especially given the traditional privileging of authorial intent—except that relational aesthetics is premised on a generative principle of equality and democratic co-existence.46

Several questions arise at this juncture: Is it “acceptable” for non-Western artists to draw on their cultural identity if they are working in open-ended forms of art like relational aesthetics? Does that not defeat the purpose of such forms, which supposedly encourage democratic encounters and equality of participation? How then are we to assess these practices? The ﬁrst question is admittedly uncomfortable, but it bears asking since there are very few internationally prominent non-Western artists working with relational aesthetics.47 A quick glance at how the practices of Vanessa Beecroft, Philippe Parreno, or Liam Gillick have been discussed reveals very little in way of speciﬁc cultural or ethnic references.

For Bourriaud, the ultimate criterion for appraising a relational artwork is whether “relations” are produced by it.48 His failure to call into question the quality of these relationships reﬂects an overly harmonistic conception of democratic co-existence and relational art that has come under criticism.49 The idealistic exclusion of conﬂict ultimately denies these relationships legitimacy and agency, since the possibility for self-determination through active negotiation between parties is negated.50 Lee Mingwei and Tiravanija, whom it may be argued have primed the approach of their practices through culturally tinted lenses, provide an opportunity to deepen this

Vol. 16 No. 1 15 16 Vol. 16 No. 1 Vol. 16 No. 1 17 critique. Paradoxically, it may be that cultural “otherness” or distinction allows their work to circumvent or mitigate this ﬂaw.

With Lee Mingwei and Tiravanija, the artist’s persona is internalized in the very relationship-producing structure of their work. Their pronounced cultural references are particularly striking in that both may be considered fully acculturated, “Westernized” artists who lived in the West from a young age. It is worth quoting Kraynak’s view of this in full: “The artist, repositioned as both the source and arbiter of meaning, is embraced as the pure embodiment of his/her sexual, cultural, or ethnic identity, guaranteeing both the authenticity and political efficacy of his/her work.”51 For non- Western artists working on the international scene like Lee Mingwei and Tiravanija, where cultural marginality is intensified, expectations of cultural authenticity and legibility weigh heavy. As Tiravanija recounts, “There were . . . questions concerning the authenticity of my Thainess, and [whether] I was using Thainess (culture) as an exotic flavour, for which [it] became in the Western context a successful work of art.”52 This search for authenticity generates a space for the negotiation and confrontation of difference out of which more realistic and actively engaged relations may be formed.

If we are to solely evaluate the quality of the relations produced, then this is where Lee Mingwei stands out. While comparable to Tiravanija’s practice and Bourriaud’s maxim, Lee Mingwei prioritizes privacy, trust, and intimacy, unlike the generally short-lived public encounters created by other relational artists. His key works involve either one-to-one situations like The Dining Project and The Sleeping Project or contemplative, personal acts like The Letter Writing Project and The Shrine Project, where visitors write letters and leave sacred mementoes, respectively.

This key difference, demanding a much deeper emotional-psychological investment and time commitment from both artist and participant, secures the conditions of possibility for truly empathetic connections to be forged. This empowers the creation of relationships that have the potential to transcend the artwork itself, in turn addressing the criticisms leveled against relational art. Indeed, several of The Dining Project participants have become Lee Mingwei’s good friends, and many participants were surprised at the intimacy of the conversations shared.53 A more extreme equalization of artist and participant takes place in The Sleeping Project, which demanded both individuals to submit to the most vulnerable state of being asleep.54 On this basis, Lee Mingwei’s practice perhaps better ﬁts Grant Kester’s theory of “dialogical aesthetics,” a form of relational art that shifts the emphasis to “a process of communicative exchange” rather than the open-ended site of encounter in “relational aesthetics.”55

Until now, I have used the rather awkward terms of “non-Western contemporary art” and “non-Western artists” as a less problematic alternative to “contemporary Asian art,” “contemporary Chinese art,” or “contemporary Taiwanese art.” To determine which designation is most appropriate for a cosmopolitan artists like Lee Mingwei requires another discussion, for these terms bear their own discursive baggage beyond the

18 Vol. 16 No. 1 present focus.56 They are all terms that could apply to Lee Mingwei, but the dilemma is whether such classiﬁcations should be assigned according to culture, ethnicity, or nationality. The troubled historical relations between Taiwan and mainland China further complicate this.57

I have also not cited other contemporary artists from Taiwan and instead have referred primarily to contemporary artists from China. Given that contemporary artists from China dominate the international discourse on non-Western contemporary art, this was a methodological choice. From Taiwan, Tsai Charwei and Yao Jui-Chung are other notable contemporary artists who similarly have gained international recognition. Like Lee Mingwei, both engage with multiple mediums and participatory forms to examine the human condition. A separate study of how these Taiwanese artists individually, and collectively, position their identities in the wider art world would be enlightening.

In seeking to resolve certain tensions between Lee Mingwei’s identity, the form of his practice, and his place in an international art context, more questions have emerged, to which there are no easy answers. From a critically reﬂexive standpoint, any reader should also call into question my own background as a non-Westerner of Chinese ethnicity in evaluating the assessments I have made here. When it comes to evaluating matters related to cultural identity, its presentation, and reception, this self-perpetuating conundrum will likely always present itself. If there is any solution, perhaps it is to reﬂexively turn that impulse to draw on essentialist assumptions into a tool that recognizes the inadequacies of our individual viewpoints. Once the possibilities for newer, deeper knowledge are broadened, a more inclusive notion of art and its reception can be framed.

To quote Guggenheim Museum Associate Curator, Weng Xiaoyu, but replacing the word “Chinese” with “non-Western”: “What is crucial to note here is that such ‘geographic-specificity’ does not intend to single out ‘a particular kind of’ practice that is ‘[non-Western],’ or to showcase that contemporary [non-Western] art ‘can be global;’ instead it examines how contemporary [non-Western] art practice and discourse are not only globally relevant in nature, but that they also play a radical role in critically reflecting on our global and contemporary reality.”58 For those seeking to navigate the globe of contemporary art, a sense of mobility, not just in terms of thinking but also of unmooring fixed perceptions, provides the best way forward.

Notes

1. Monica Amor, “Whose World? A Note on the Paradoxes of Global Aesthetics,” Art Journal 57, no. 4 (1998), 30; Aihwa Ong, “’What Marco Polo Forgot’: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconﬁgures the Global,” Current Anthropology 53, no. 4 (2012), 472. 2. For example, the 2000 Gwangju Biennale sought to revive Asian discourse as distinct from the West, while the theme of the 2006 edition was the formation of a new Asian identity. See Birgit Mersmann, “Global Dawning: The Gwangju Biennale Factor in the Making and Marketing of Contemporary Asian Art,” Third Text 27, no. 4 (2013), 529–31. 3. Steven Leuthold, Cross-Cultural Issues in Art: Frames for Understanding (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 22. 4. See Lee Mingwei. “Artist Statement,” http://www.leemingwei.com/artist.php/.

Vol. 16 No. 1 19 5. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Reél, 2002), 113. I use the term “relational aesthetics” interchangeably with “relational art” and “participatory art,” as has been the norm in critical literature. 6. Matthew Carver, “Lee Mingwei and His Relations: The Legacy and Deviation of Relational Aesthetics in the East,” Momus, February 18, 2015, http://momus.ca/lee-mingwei-and-his-relations- the-legacy-and-deviation-of-relational-aesthetics-in-the-east/; Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob, eds., Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 229. 7. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 7–8. 8. Veeranganakumari Solanki, “Lee Mingwei and Charwei Tsai: The Art of Ephemeral,” Flash Art (November December 2012), 90; Mori Art Museum, “Artist & Works,” http://www.mori.art.museum/ english/contents/lee_mingwei/artists_works/index.html/; Michelle Yee, “Enabling Cosmopolitanism: Lee Mingwei’s Intimate Moments and Strange Spaces,” Third Text 28, no. 1 (2014), 46; Lee Mingwei, “Presentation by Lee Mingwei,” Presentation at Museum of Chinese in America, New York, February 23, 2012. 9. Baas and Jacob, Buddha-Mind, 229. 10. See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Identity Politics,” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ identity-politics/#3; Mike Featherstone, “Localism, Globalism and Cultural Identity,” in Global Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 59. 11. Mark Brown, “Urban regenerators Assemble become first ‘non-artists’ to win Turner prize,” The Guardian, December 7, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/dec/07/urban- assemble-win-turner-prize-toxteth/. The 2015 Turner Prize was awarded to Assemble, a collective of architects who were the first non-artists to be nominated and win. 12. The 2015 edition was titled “All the World’s Futures,” the 2013 edition “The Encyclopedic Palace,” and the 2011 edition, “ILLUMInations.” 13. Guggenheim, “Guggenheim UBS Map, Global Art Initiative,” http://www.guggenheim.org/ guggenheim-foundation/collaborations/map#about/. 14. J. P. Park, “Koreans are White?” Third Text 27, no. 4 (2013), 513. Rasheed Araeen, “A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics,” Third Text 50 (2000), 3–20. 15. Russell Ferguson, “Introduction: Invisible Center,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 11; Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 179. 16. Jean Fisher, “Syncretic Turn: Cross-Cultural Practices in the Age of Multiculturalism,” in Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 235. On the problematic relationship between art institutions and corporate sponsorships, see Mark Rectanus, Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorships (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 17. Carol Vogel, “Guggenheim Project Challenges ‘Western-Centric View’,” New York Times, April 11, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/arts/design/guggenheim-and-ubs-project-plan-cross- cultural-program.html/. 18. Jonas Pulver, “Lee Mingwei Makes You Part of His Art,” The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, November 4, 2014, http://www.fccj.or.jp/number-1 shimbun/item/491-lee-mingwei-makes-you-part- of-his-art/491-lee-mingwei-makes-you-part-of-his-art.html/. 19. Other works include Through Masters’ Eyes (2004), a series of imitation works based on a painting by Ming dynasty painter Shi Tao; and Spice Box—Nü Wa (2005), a work inspired by the mythical Chinese goddess. 20. Lee Mingwei, “Presentation,” n. pag. 21. For a detailed description of The Dining Project, see Francis Maravillas, “The Unexpected Guest: Food and Hospitality in Contemporary Asian Art,” in Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-making, eds. Caroline Turner and Michelle Antoinette (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2014), 170–72. 22. Wall Street Journal, “At Lincoln Center: ‘Artists Without Borders’,” http://online.wsj .com/video/art- without-borders/642509E4-957E-4A95-BC0C-CD5BEC7D38D3.html/. 23. The strong market value of contemporary Chinese art may be attributed to the twinning of modern Chinese identity and China’s global capitalist might. See Ong, “Contemporary Chinese Art,” 482. 24. Ibid. When asked whether his translation of Book from the Sky from a Chinese to a Western audience was effective and his use of Chinese elements exoticizing, Xu Bing replied: “All the responses are different. Chinese audiences lose part of the meaning, and Western audiences lose another part, but each side gets the part that the other doesn’t. . . . The real problem is not what materials or cultural elements one uses, but the level of one’s reflection.” On his use of fake Chinese seal script, Gu Wenda commented that “When I used seal script, neither Chinese nor non-Chinese readers would be able to make that determination. So I am playing a double game. Chinese readers could interpret the concept of an unreadable language as the mythos of a lost history, while non- Chinese readers could interpret it as a misunderstanding of an ‘exotic’ culture.” See Simon Leung, Janet A. Kaplan, Wenda Gu, Xu Bing, and Jonathan Hay, “Pseudo-Languages: A Conversation with Wenda Gu, Xu Bing, and Jonathan Hay,” Art Journal 58, no. 3 (1999), 90–91. 25. Christine Temin, “Lee Mingwei; Beyond Labels,” Sculpture 27, no. 7 (2008), 31. 26. Ibid. 27. Take several leading non-Western contemporary artists for example: Xu Bing is based in New York and Beijing; Gu Wenda in New York, Beijing, and Shanghai; Korean artist Suh Do Ho lives in New York, London, and Seoul; Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is based in Berlin; Lebanese-born Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum is in London and Berlin. Conversely, it is much harder to recall any leading Western artists who have moved their practice to non-Western countries.

20 Vol. 16 No. 1 28. See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies:. The Key Concepts, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 73–75. 29. Frederic Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 57–59. 30. Featherstone, “Localism,” 60. 31. This is the approach taken by Mami-Kataoka, curator of his mid-career survey. Lee Mingwei’s work has been described as “an Eastern example of ‘relational aesthetics’.” See Matthew Carver, “Lee Mingwei and His Relations: The Legacy and Deviation of Relational Aesthetics in the East,” Momus, February 18, 2015, http://momus.ca/lee-mingwei-and-his-relations-the-legacy-and-deviation-of- relational-aesthetics-in-the-east/. 32. Solanki, “Art of Ephemeral,” 90. 33. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 7–8. 34. Ibid., 16, 13. 35. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (2004), 55. 36. This analysis is specific to Tiravanija and should not be applied to the works of the other relational aesthetics artists mentioned by Bourriaud. 37. Guggenheim, “Rikrit Tiravanija,” http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection- online/artists/bios/5339/Rirkrit%20Tiravanija/. 38. Temin, “Beyond-Labels,” 26. Doryun Chong, “Rirkrit Tiravanija,” in Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections, ed. Joan Rothfuss and Elizabeth Carpenter (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2005), 553. 39. Though scholars such as Doryun Chong and Claire Bishop have traced this relationship, Beuys is little mentioned by Bourriaud, for whom it is the avant-gardist drive behind social sculpture—the realization of universal utopia—that distinguishes it from relational aesthetics, since he argues that contemporary artists are no longer naïve or cynical enough to believe in it. See Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 30, 70. 40. Tate, “Social Sculpture,” http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/social- sculpture/. 41. Laurie Rojas, “Beuys’ Concept of Social Sculpture and Relational Art Practices Today,” Chicago Art Magazine, November 29, 2010, http://chicagoartmagazine.com/2010/11/beuys%E2%80%99-concept- of-social-sculpture-and-relational-art-practices-today/. 42. Stewart Martin, “Critique of Relational Aesthetics,” Third Text 21, no. 4 (2007): 371, 376. For fuller critiques, see Toni Ross, “Aesthetic autonomy and interdisciplinary, a response to Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 5, no. 3 (2006), 167–81. 43. Janet Kraynak, “Tiravanija’s Liability,” Documents 13 (Fall 1998), 28–29. 44. Ibid. 45. For instance, dining on tatami mats is highly specific cultural behaviour. 46. In Bourriaud’s words, there is “no precedence between producer and consumer.” Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 109. 47. There are of course, other non-Western contemporary artists (mainly Southeast Asian) working with relational or socially engaged art, especially using food as a medium of sociality, such as Mella Jaarsma, Amanda Heng, and Roslisham Ismail. These artists, however, have not received as much international attention as Lee Mingwei-and-Tiravanija. See Maravillas, “Food-and-Hospitality,” 159–78. 48. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 109. 49. Bishop, “Antagonism,” 65. 50. Ibid., 66–69. 51. Kraynak, “Liability,” 29. 52. Rirkrit Tiravanija, e-mail correspondence with Walker Art Center curatorial intern Aimee Chang, December 27, 2001. 53. Temin, “Beyond Labels,” 29. Charles Yannopoulo, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” Scene Magazine, June 3, 1999, http://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/guess-whos-coming-to-dinner/ Content?oid=1472228/. 54. Yee, “Enabling Cosmopolitanism,” 49. To ensure the sincerity of his invitation, Lee Mingwei refused to have participants sign consent forms. 55. Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 90; for an in-depth discussion, see 82–123. 56. For an overview of the discourse surrounding those terms, see Caroline Turner, “Introduction Part 1—Critical Themes, Geopolitical Change and Global Contexts in Contemporary Asian Art,” in Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-making, ed. Caroline Turner and Michelle Antoinette (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2014), 1–22; Paul Gladston and Katie Hill, “Contemporary Chinese art and criticality: From the general to the particular,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 11, nos. 2 + 3 (2012), 106–13. 57. See for example, Fan Pan, “Post-Colonial and Contemporary Art Trends in Taiwan,” in Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art, ed. Mary Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 321– 32; Sophie McIntyre, “Re-Orienting Taiwan: The China Factor in Contemporary Art from Taiwan,” Asia Art Archive, September, 2010, http://www.aaa.org.hk/Diaaalogue/Details/889/. 58. Sylvia Tsai, “Hou Hanru and Xiaoyu Weng Join Guggenheim as Curators of Contemporary Chinese Art,” ArtAsiaPacific, August 14, 2015, http://artasiapacific.com/News/ HouHanruAndXiaoyuWengJoinGuggenheimAsCuratorsOfContemporaryChineseArt/.

Vol. 16 No. 1 21 Voon Pow Bartlett nothingness was not: A New World

Nothingness was not, the existent was not; Darkness was hidden by darkness . . . There was neither death nor immortality then; no distinguishing sign of night nor of day; That which became was enveloped by the Void1

n his text supporting the Wang Jian exhibition, nothingness was not 无非物 (October 15–18 December 18, 2016), at Pifo Gallery, Beijing, Icurator Adrian George foregrounded the above verse from the Rigveda (1500–2000 B. C.), a collection of Vedic sanskrit hymns, and its reference to nothingness and the void, which in his view were made manifest by the artist’s drawings, paintings, and photographs. The theme of nothingness and void seems to reﬂect a current zeitgeist in China, expressing the sentiment of a cultural and historic wound such as the Cultural Revolution that has not only not been healed, but the horrors of brutality and suffering of that period have not even been fully acknowledged. This memory remains embedded in the minds of many individuals and their families who are still alive today. Such topical events across the Chinese art world include Wang Shilong’s work on the cultural wound “. . . a memory of pain and the inability to fully heal,”2 earlier in 2016 at Pifo Gallery’s exhibition, Poetique: The 9th Annual Exhibition of Abstract Art. At the Whitechapel Gallery, London, Making the New World: The Arts of China’s Cultural Revolution was a conference held in November 2016, in which speakers were invited to reassess the signiﬁcance of the arts and culture of the Cultural Revolution, and their subsequent impact on everyday life in China.

Wang Jian, nothingness was not, 2016, installation view at PIFO Gallery. Photo: Lv Wenzhi. Courtesy of the artist and PIFO Gallery, Beijing.

22 Vol. 16 No. 1 Wang Shilong, No. 84, 2009, silverpoint on paper, 29.5 x 21 cm. Courtesy of the artist and PIFO Gallery, Beijing.

Wang Jian, born in 1972, Handan, Hebei province, belongs to a generation who were brought up in the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution, where they were surrounded by hardship, hopelessness, jealousy, treachery, and injustice. This generation is caught in a web of ambivalence, trying to make sense of their parents’ anguish and memories, and their own ostensibly more privileged life with its attendant spiritual complacency. The price to pay is a disconnection from society that is probably unnervingly reﬂected back at them in the architecture of their new habitats, of modern indifferent facades characterized by hard concrete, rigid steel, and icy cold glass.

The title nothingness was not takes the ﬁrst line of the Rigveda, setting up a dialectic between nothingness, its negation, and the void. Is the exhibition meant to be a philosophical entreaty about nothingness—its existence or non-existence—and is nothingness enveloped by the void? I am immediately impelled and guided by the title to recall the famous If Not, Not (1975–76), by R. B. Kitaj, although no doubt I run the peril of being accused of legitimizing contemporary Chinese art through a Western counterpart. Regardless, the aesthetic of the void and its contemporaneous representation in art by Chinese artists would not have been coincidental to the teleology of globalization.

Vol. 16 No. 1 23 Kitaj’s If Not, Not, is a figurative R. B. Kitaj, If Not, Not, 1975–76, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 152.4 rather than abstract painting but the cm. Collection of National Gallery of Modern Art, sentiment expressed would seem Edinburgh. to stem from similar motivations arising from cultural disintegration and disillusionment. It too has been inspired by a poem, T. S. Eliot’s, The Waste Land.3 At first glance, Kitaj’s colourful painting seems permeated with life, of palm trees and fecund water beneath fiery skies, an almost paradisiac evocation, in complete antagonism to the poem.

This stony rubbish . . . A heap of broken images, where the sun beats And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief And the dry stone no sound of water . . .4

Closer inspection, however, exposes the disintegration of the composition of If Not, Not into disparate and incoherent fragments, bringing us closer to a sense of a wasteland, or, indeed, Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novel Heart of Darkness; Kitaj acknowledged both Eliot and Conrad as inspiration for this work. The building in the top left corner of the painting is the gatehouse to Auschwitz. Despite the painting’s vibrancy, Kitaj managed to convey a sense of stillness, of “death and destruction.”5 What clearer message of hopelessness and dystopic nihilism than to feature the idea of the wasteland, with Auschwitz prominently referenced, denoting hell on earth. The Jewish Chronicle Online writes that “If Not, Not, shows a paradise corrupted by horror.”6

The title of Kitaj’s painting was in fact borrowed from a 1968 book by historian Ralph E. Giesey’s, If Not, Not.7 The words are part of an oath that the people of the Aragon region of Spain were supposed to have uttered when they received their king: “We, who are worth as much as you, take you as our king, provided that you preserve our laws and liberties, and if not, not.”8 These words seem to imply choice and hope, ultimatum even. If you do this for us, then we will crown you king. If not, then you will not be our King. That’s quite straightforward. Wang Jian’s title, nothingness was not, on the other hand, is less so. The emphasis seems to verify the ﬁrst part of the title, “nothingness,” portending the disillusionment of life for many in China today. The Rigveda speaks of being “enveloped by the void.”

In fact, the problematic inherent in language is highlighted by George, which in his view is “unable to successfully (or even adequately) articulate a metaphysical conundrum such as the Void.”9 This in fact brings to our attention the translation of nothingness was not to the Chinese phrase of “无非物” that is also included in the title of the exhibition. The literal translation of “无非物,” is “there-is-only-this-and-nothing-else-thing”— “thing” or “object” being the meaning of “物,” as in “无非物.” This means

24 Vol. 16 No. 1 "无非物” is a thing that exists in its own right, in its own space, independent, almost in isolation, ﬂoating in free space. “Nothing-else” categorically denies anything else exists, while conversely proclaiming its own existence.

The English part of the title, nothingness was not, however, seems to imply there is something that it is not of, hence something else exists, or at least existed previously and now not, and “nothingness” itself is/was possibly subordinate to it. It also lends itself to imply that “nothingness” is possibly seeking to be what it is not—a longing or craving for something, the possibility of something. Paradoxically, there is nothing in a void, but everything in longing.

Moving on from language and semantics, images also carry their own baggage and are in no way a subordinate means of expression. As Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space, images “demand(s) , . . to be lived directly . . . When the image is new, the world is new.”10 The idea of nothingness forms the source and nadir of Wang Jian’s inspiration. Adrian George also urged the audience to surrender to the image, to the sensorial, and just to experience the artwork—“place yourself squarely in front of it and let go.”11 For some, the abstract “. . . works on the viewer very quickly: the combination of colour, form, and composition provokes an almost instinctive, instant response. . . .”12 For others, the nature of abstraction is that it has the potential to be impenetrable. This tenaciousness and expansiveness carry with it the capacity for an artist to express the inexpressible and the indescribable, for Wang Jian to feel perhaps the unfeelable and speak the unspeakable. Just as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is interpreted by some to intuit the indiscernible gap between civility and barbarity, so Wang Jian is looking for the elusive meaning that resides in the void, the “nothingness,” or what the nothingness was not.

Wang Jian, Huantie H3, 2016, Driven by ambivalence and acrylic, charcoal on canvas, 180 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the skepticism, Wang Jian is, through artist and PIFO Gallery, Beijing. his artwork, resolutely scrutinizing reality in order to explore a sensibility of chaos, futility, and, possibly, given the bleak title, the meaninglessness of life. He invests in a deliberate intensity of the void that seems to obviate from Kitaj’s insouciant burst of colourful energy. Whereas Kitaj’s If Not, Not is almost a literal evocation of hopelessness shrouded with hope, or hope thwarted by hopelessness, Wang Jian’s abstraction seems to challenge the meaning of life—its entrapments, choices, opportunities, and inequalities. His monochromatic works divest themselves of colour, as if in an act of cleansing, to purge the hopelessness and disillusionment of hope, even amid his quest to make sense. Kitaj’s If Not, Not emblematizes the wasteland, a disparate overlay of desert and paradise,

Vol. 16 No. 1 25 of life and of death, among the debris and the inferno, whereas Wang Jian’s paintings, for example, Huantie H3 (2016), on the other hand, drained of colour and containing only a few lines, as opposed to proﬁting from a nod to traditional Chinese landscape painting, nevertheless exudes an equally cold disaffection with life that is as destructive as it is defensive (huantie in Chinese means an iron hoop, and can also mean an iron weapon.)

Wang Jian, Jiangnan S1, 2015, Giclée print, 22.5 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the artist and PIFO Gallery, Beijing.

Whereas Kitaj brought stillness to a feverish composition, conversely, the seemingly simplistic monochromatic and spare qualities of Huantie H3 do not discount the sense of a complex multitudinous feeling of inviolacy that Wang Jian has brought to the void. Huantie H3 acknowledges a debt to the photographic original, Jiangnan S1 (2015), a semi abstract form on a journey to becoming a fully abstract composition. In the photograph, we see a coil of rope or thick wire abandoned on the pavement. It is as if a plumb line has been bent and twisted to signify a hangman’s noose. There is a stark difference in the mood between the original photograph and the final painting, the photograph being solid, flat, and its image unyielding. Within the composition of the painting there is a propensity for spatial ambiguity; it has depth, suggesting a three dimensional space, with lines in collision against flat spaces. While still evoking a black rope-like metallic coil, twisting itself resolutely on a white impasto ground, it also suggests voids, ravines, precipices, thus demonstrating the immensity of space.13 Huantie H3 embodies the journey that arises from the realities of the world that are captured in the photograph, and Wang Jian shares with us what exists for him. This painting traces a process of using reality to represent unreality, and bears the potential to transport someone in the right frame of mind to another world, a dream world.14 Perhaps it is a glimpse of something not normally perceived, but captured by the artistic eye during moments of intense observation, part of the “unseen world” that “belongs to the world that lies, visibly, about us. They are unseen merely because they are not perceived. . . .”15 By translating a photograph into a painting, the continuum from the real to the photographic and its omnipotence is expurgated, one—Jiangnan S1, the photograph—may be more categorical, denoting life or life and death . . . another—Huantie H3, the painting—is of

26 Vol. 16 No. 1 Wang Jian, Untitled, 2011–16, set of 9 Giclée prints, each 22.5 x 30 cm, 30 x 22.5 cm. Photo: Lv Wenzhi. Courtesy of the artist and PIFO Gallery, Beijing.

discovery, of trying to make sense of life by probing the void, perhaps the spiritual, the repository of lost social continuum, lost faith, lost dreams.

For Wang Jian, the light and the dark of a photograph signify “everything and nothing,”16 just as a void can be something but also nothing. He draws inspiration from everyday life, observing the quotidian spaces that contain their own resonances, residing in the spaces in-between. He looks for shadows and reﬂections in spaces to denote a sense of absence and/or loss, such as the feeling of melancholia and desolation that come with his photographs of empty hospital beds and empty chairs.17 For example, the single photographic image of a corridor in Jinze S1, with ﬁve doors leading from it and forming black spaces against a white background, stands in as a transitory or in-between place, “some place that is neither here nor there, that contains something and nothing. . . . It is a place one passes through in order to get to somewhere else.”18

Jinze H6 津泽 (2016), the charcoal and acrylic version of Jinze S1, is concerned with the expansion of the forms of a photograph into a real imaginative space. Wang Jian’s attraction to photography is not merely conﬁned to its ability for instantaneous compositional and radical cropping, but, as Adrian George emphasized, also to photography’s myriad possibilities of “contrasts,” and blurring of “boundaries,” a sense of “emptiness,” “absence,” or “erasure.”19 Wang Jian uses photography as a pragmatic rather than political tool that allows him to capture the actuality of his everyday life, to enable the supernatural quality of the photographic image, as if it has been ascribed with the magical power of being able to steal someone’s soul.20 Paradoxically, photography anchors Wang Jian to a sense of the real while allowing him to explore its propensity for ambiguity and mysticism. This is a vital component in the process of trying to articulate his preoccupation with the liminal, the edges, the in-between spaces that he imagines to be manifestations of the void.

Vol. 16 No. 1 27 The psychological reality of an Top: Wang Jian, Jinze H6, 2016, charcoal and acrylic on artist immured in his solitude, in paper, 55 x 74 cm. Courtesy of the artist and PIFO Gallery, the act of looking as part of his Beijing. Left: Wang Jian, Jinze S1, practice, is touchingly conveyed 2016, Giclée print, 22.5 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the artist and in how his works resonate with PIFO Gallery, Beijing. each other. The photograph Jinze S1 has an air of nonchalance, exhibiting the ability of the artist to be able to observe, to enter into the real sense of things, and distill life into the abstract. It provided the starting point and Jinze H6, the drawing, its realization. The former simmers and suggests, the latter oscillates, deafens and saturates, as if to illustrate that the Rigveda is based on the science of sound.21 The drawing looks as though the marks had been applied in a rage, with charcoal sticks thrown as darts on a blank white support—almost as an act of obliteration—to extinguish its ostensive potential to remain a pristine blank page. The immediacy of clutching the laden charcoal, as if drawing with his ﬁngers, enabled Wang Jian to force down black marks on paper, sometimes smudging, sometimes frantically erasing previous traces, and sometimes reinforcing with a more intense acrylic paint, creating a cataclysmic transition from the original peaceful looking photograph of a corridor. The drawing is ominous and portentous, preserving a sense of an eternal indomitability and an immediacy, an outburst like Jekyll becoming Hyde, an unspeakability, godlessness, and hopelessness that reﬂects humanity at war with itself. 22

As if to leave no room for doubt, a blacker than black acrylic zigzag laceration created in the middle of the space, leads us straight over a

28 Vol. 16 No. 1 Wang Jian, Jiangnan H2, 2015, precipice into a sheer drop; we are plunged into the void of the “soundless Acrylic, ink and charcoal on 23 canvas, 120 x 180 cm. Courtesy and formless,” as referred to in the Daodejing. Nothingness is squeezed out of the artist and PIFO Gallery, Beijing. of nothing. We ﬁnd ourselves in a bottomless well of immense quietude.

This pivotal graveyard of natural and synthetic black residues may have abandoned itself to a transcendent quietness, but it is by no means peaceful. The change through which we have been transported, this change in concrete space, functions not as a mere mental operation, and enables us not just to change place, but also to change our nature.24 The deep void in the central blackness of this drawing, this anxious quiet, corresponds to a sense of inner emptiness to which we have been taken to contemplate, so different from the earlier sense of ecstatic markmaking. There is an immensity expressed through an inner intensity, our inner hidden desert. “Once more emptiness stretched out inside me and I was a desert within a desert, my spirit has left me. The expanse of the spirit is lost in the inﬁnite, uninhabited expanse that is the desolation of earth’s place of solitude.”25

With Jinze H6, the exterior, superﬁcial space of a photograph is transported into the intimate space of the artist’s mind, his travails. Walking the tight rope between nostalgia and void, between ambivalence and guilt, without being seduced by the alchemy of artistic creation, as if once “poetically expressed, the sadness is diminished, and ponderousness lightened,”26 Wang Jian’s ambivalence seems like a collision of differing emotions, of spiritual complacency, of succumbing to irrational fears and the death wish of Dostoevsky’s “underground man”27 or nihilistic tendency of Nietzsche. This interstitial space seems surreal and impenetrable.

The unsettling part is that Wang Jian then goes on to forensically exterminate any small morsel or amoebic presence of life and hope.

Vol. 16 No. 1 29 Seemingly observed and executed with a mixture of relative indifference, his photographs, drawings, and paintings are spare, disinterested, and detached. He is presenting to us an understanding of nothingness that corresponds to hopelessness and a chilling indictment of the times he lives in.

In addition to the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the idea of Wang Jian, nothingness was not, 2016, installation view globalization and its attendant progress has also made a not inconsiderable at PIFO Gallery. Photo: Lv Wenzhi. Courtesy of the artist contribution to the feeling of ambivalence and futility. Wang Jian’s use of and PIFO Gallery, Beijing. black, fragmented, punctuated, obscured, and silhouetted imagery reflects this global zeitgeist and it is an increasingly common strategy deployed by artists in their engagement of the subject of illegibility and erasure of traumatic events in a period of contemporaneity. This aesthetic of plight and incongruity is thought to locate “an ethics of representation that is predicated. . . . on marking precisely that which cannot be represented, yet making it somehow legible.28 Nowhere is it more poignant than the aesthetics of darkness to emphasize the political illegibility and representational erasure of immigrants and refugees and their bare lives.29 The significant topic of “bare life” also formed a major part of Corey Schultz’s talk at the Making the New World: The Arts of China’s Cultural Revolution conference, where he discussed the “bare precarious life” of the Chinese peasant and migrant figures, holding down “3-D” jobs; that is, dirty, dangerous, and degrading.

Nevertheless, unlike many of his countrymen, Wang Jian has got out of the “warm bath of nostalgia,”30 eluded self-deception, duplicity, to “make(ing) Memory matter,”31 making a Bachelardian new world through making new images, while at the same time submitting to the ancient Chinese saying that “the common man has a share of responsibility in the fate of his country.”32 This attitude is a touching gesture at once of obeisance, resignation, and determination, and, perhaps, part of the cyclical nature of mankind.

30 Vol. 16 No. 1 Notes

1. Kenneth Kramer, World Scriptures: An Introduction to Comparative Religions (New Jersey, USA: Paulist Press, 1986), 129, in Adrian George, “writings on the unwritable,” curator’s statement, http:// pifogallery.bm11.artlogic.net/usr/library/documents/main/writings-on-unwritable-25-sept-final-eng. pdf/. 2. Wang Shilong’s works, such as No. 84 (2009), presented hundreds of undulating lines carefully drawn and then interrupted by a vertical tear. Poétique: The 9th Annual Exhibition of Abstract Art, April 23–June 5, 2016, Pifo Gallery, Beijing, https://www.artsy.net/artwork/wang-shilong-wang-shilong-no-dot-84/. 3. Despite T. S. Eliot’s own disavowal, it is commonly thought by critics that The Waste Land represented “the disillusionment of a generation.” See Eckart Gillen, “How R. B. Kitaj created his Holocaust masterpiece,” Jewish Chronicle Online, March 8, 2013, http://www.thejc.com/arts/arts- features/103107/how-r-b-kitaj-created-his-holocaust-masterpiece/. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. George, “writings on the unwritable.” 10. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994 [1964]), 47. 11. George, “writings on the unwritable.” 12. Author William Boyd recounting his interest in and meeting with John Hoyland, “Beautiful Geometry: William Boyd on John Hoyland,” Guardian, October 6, 2015, http://www.johnhoyland.com/test- article/. 13. Bachelard quotes Jules Valles (L’enfant, 238, French version), who says “L’espace m’a toujours rendu silencieux,” translated into English as “Space has always reduced me to silence.” Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, ch. 8, “Intimate Immensity,”183. 14. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 183. Bachelard’s “mark of infinity” is a description of a dreamlike infinity, like a daydream that “contemplates grandeur. . . . ,” “transporting the dreamer outside the immediate world. . . . ” 15. Paul Nash, Exhibit 7, Unseen Landscapes, exhibition leaflet, Paul Nash, Tate Britain, October 26– March 5, 2017. 16. E-mail conversation between author and curator, October 26, 2016. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. George, “writings on the unwritable.” 20. Matt Crowley, “Soul Theft through Photography,” Skeptical Briefs 24, no. 1 (Spring 2014), http://www. csicop.org/sb/show/soul_theft_through_photography/. 21. “Sama Veda,” Hindu Universe, http://www.hindunet.org/vedas/samveda/index.htm/. 22. This is perhaps better understood by listening to Paul Nash speak of the ravaged landscapes he depicted as a war artist during the World War I: “It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious. I am a messenger who will bring back word from me fighting to those who want the war to last forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.” Exhibit 2, We are Making a New World, 1918, exhibition leaflet, Paul Nash, Tate Britain, October 26–March 5, 2017. 23. George, “writings on the unwritable.” George quotes this verse from the Daodejing: “[T]here is something undifferentiated and yet complete, that existed before heaven and earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change," http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/ taoism/beliefs/tao.shtml/. 24. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 206. 25. Bachelard, Ibid., 205. Here Bachelard is quoting Henri Bosco. 26. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 201. 27. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (London and New York: Verso, 1997 [1982], 219–28. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864), is a narration of the “underground man” who, when confronted with the ominous and threatening aspects of modernity, responds with an undefinable passion that is at once arrogant yet fearful, insolent yet apologetic, angry yet sincere. 28. Veronica Tello, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugees Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 125–54. Tello is of the opinion that the artist Dierk Schmidt’s image confronts the viewer with a depth of black that emphasizes the political illegitimacy and invisibility of the vanquished refugees in question, ch. 5: “History Painting, Fiction and Paranoia: Dierk Schmidt’s SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics.” 29. The idea of “bare life,” meaning the human stripped of the right to live in human society, has been discussed by critics such as Tello, see Tello, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugees Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art, 11, 132, and ch. 5 n. 20, and T. J. Demos, “Life Full of Holes,” Grey Room 24 (Summer, 2006), 72–87. 30. “Cultural Policy for a Heroic Age: The Summary,” Richard King, speaker at Making the New World: The Arts of China’s Cultural Revolution, November 11–12, 2016, Whitechapel Gallery, London. 31. Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 53. Tello, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugees Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art, 213, n. 20. 32. Li Zehou, The Path of Beauty: A Study of Chinese Aesthetics, trans. Gong Lizeng (Hong Kong, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 158.

Vol. 16 No. 1 31 Elena Macrì Being, Becoming, Landscape: The Iconography of Landscape in Contemporary Chinese Art, Its Ecological Impulse, and Its Ethical Project

[Landscape] is never simply a natural space, a feature of the natural environment. Every landscape is the place where we establish our own human organization of space and time.1

andscape (shanshui) is a highly popular subject matter in Chinese art and for many centuries traditional landscape painting L(shanshuihua, literally “mountain and water painting”) has carried within its deﬁnition the presence of a metaphysical approach to the natural world, one heavily indebted to Daoist philosophy and well exempliﬁed in the concept of Tianren heyi (harmonious unity between nature and man).2

Conceived in conceptual terms, shanshuihua has always been more concerned with the symbolic representation of the natural world than with the depiction of actual or speciﬁc natural scenery, and landscape theory has revolved around a totalizing vision of nature, perceived as a tangible manifestation of a dynamic and unitary principle that gives rise to and rules everything in the universe.3 However, in the context of China’s serious environmental crisis, do these traditional notions still have a place in twenty-ﬁrst century landscape depiction and theory? Since the start of economic reform, the rapid and remarkable growth of the Chinese economy has resulted in huge changes, provoking tremendous side effects in terms of environmental impact. As a direct consequence, some contemporary artists have started to give considerable attention to those ecological issues that are strongly transforming Chinese physical environment.

This signiﬁcant change also was made possible by the driving force of new art forms, concepts, and images arising from the biennial boom, starting in China with the Third Shanghai Biennale (2000)4 that “opened up the Chinese art world to international art forms and concepts still outside China’s ofﬁcial mainstream.”5 Since then, a new context was provided for artists’ practice and what was very different within this context was that new concerns and content such as industrialization, urbanization, or environmental pollution started to have considerable impact on the conception of traditional landscape representation, leading many artists to rethink the role of shanshuihua, adjusting it to new current issues and exploring a new means of expression.

The twenty-ﬁrst century is generally seen as the moment during which Chinese landscape painting has become “postmodern.” With this term, art

32 Vol. 16 No. 1 historians refer to a set of new ideas and aesthetic criteria which inform contemporary landscape depictions and it is usually used to indicate the passage from customary shanshuihua’s structures, based on the core characteristics of the scholars’ tradition and imbued with traditional aesthetics, to contemporary perspectives, based on the idea of a deeply fragmented and anthropized spatial reality. 6

Some art historians and critics have underlined how shanshuihua has been forced to expand its outlook in response to the environmental crisis, broadening its definitions of what landscape is in the context of contemporary Chinese art. For example, Wu Hung has noted that Chinese artists “are no longer interested in providing images of natural beauty in unproblematized ways, or in producing visual pleasure through the contemplation of harmonious, readily acceptable forms.” 7 Yin Jinan, an authority on traditional Chinese painting, has stated that contemporary artists have transformed the depiction of nature into a “post-shanshui image in the postmodern era.”8 Gao Shiming has written that “what we see reflected in twentieth-century Chinese shanshui painting is the destruction and chaos wrought upon the natural landscape by the century’s civilizational conflicts, and the resulting pandemonium of symbols and images.”9

According to curator Lü Peng, Chinese artists are exercising “voluntary search for resources in Chinese traditional culture, even though they adopted their own contemporary perspective.”10 Traditional culture and contemporary perspectives are two concepts central to present- day shanshuihua and this idea implies new iconographic solutions that mix traditional landscape imagery with images related to the context of contemporary visual culture such as built environments, industrialized territories, and polluted places in order to reﬂect society’s new sense of the landscape. At a time when China’s push toward increased development and urbanization is invariably imprinted upon its landscape, some artists depict a wide range of new shanshui-types deﬁned by the impact of human activity on natural ecosystems and based upon a documentary approach to landscape. However, in their works, the legacy of traditional shanshuihua is always present, although it appears reinvented in a variety of forms, altered in its symbolic and aesthetic values and reshaped according to current needs in order to “give rise to realist shanshui based on a backdrop of actualities,” as Yongwoo Lee has pointed out.11

It appears clear that, in the ﬁeld of Chinese landscape studies, environmental issues are gaining increased consideration as a new research subject, although scholarly studies of shanshuihua from an ecocritical point of view are extremely few.12 This new organization of knowledge explains how the ideas of ecocritics can be used in relation to shanshui depiction, framing in large part the thinking of a new genre of contemporary shanshuihua in which landscape becomes a powerful metaphor for documenting China’s environmental degradation, stimulating discussion about the exploitation of nature, and documenting artists’ engagement in social critique. Some artists are essentially using landscape as a new

Vol. 16 No. 1 33 construct in which nature, ecology, and ethics appear strongly interwoven and whose symbolic meaning lies in the project for more sustainable development. This clearly exempliﬁes how the conceptual horizon of shanshui has moved from aesthetics to ethics.

New Iconic Elements for a New Second Hand Rose, video still from Drop in, 2011, 6 mins. Landscape Identity The role of visual culture in communicating issues about ecology is also important. Independent documentaries,13 short films,14 advertising spots,15 and artistic Ruby Lin, Gigi Leung, Liu Tao, Beautiful Mountains and performances16 have been used as Rivers of China, 2015, 6 mins., video still from CCTV New tools for promoting environmental Year’s Gala. awareness, while some artists and others in the creative field have preferred to foster public debates by using landscape as a visual construct MAD Studio, Shanshui City Project: Model of Nanjing to represent and symbolize the altered Zendai Himalayas Center, 2014, Venice Architecture state of the physical environment. For Biennale. example, in their music video “Drop in,”17 the folk rock band Second Hand Rose (Ershou meigui 二手玫瑰) shows a landscape littered with mountains marked with the red character chai 拆 (pull down), the same that is widely seen on the walls of traditional houses slated for demolition. MAD Studio’s architects Chen Bochong and Ma Yansong have launched a sustainable urban development project inspired by the aesthetics of traditional Chinese landscape painting in which the quality of a modern and efficient urban environment, whose architectural and design philosophy follows the concept of “lofty mountains and flowing water,” is improved by contact with the natural world.18 (image 2) The CCTV New Year’s Gala also has underlined the importance of environmental protection with a special performance entitled Beautiful Mountains and Rivers of China (Shanshui Zhongguo mei 山水中国美), in which the three singers, each personifying elements of landscape, sung about the enchanting natural heritage of China.19

These images, emerging from the context of Chinese contemporary visual culture, make clear the new conceptual implications of the landscape phenomenon, leading to key questions: Can we use ecological issues as a theoretical framework to examine the new ideas and values within landscape representation? How do these issues recontextualize and reframe traditional shanshuihua’s iconography? How do artists turn them into iconographic elements?

Using different strategies and media to conceptually innovate the idea of landscape representation and give it a new iconographic identity that merges traditional sensibilities with contemporary perspectives, landscape for some

34 Vol. 16 No. 1 artists now consists of a new visual construct deﬁned by the impact of human activities on natural ecosystem, activities that have altered the environment so extensively.20 In order to represent and better highlight contemporary concerns about man’s increasing detachment from nature, artists use visual elements that recall the imagery of traditional landscape painting, although revealing contemporary man’s dysfunctional relationship with nature, thematizing today’s threat to the natural environment. This new ﬁgurative mode creates a strong visual dissonance and is intentionally used to highlight the marginality of nature in a formally naturalistic representation, perfectly illustrating the documentary impulse of this new artistic genre in which the approach to landscape is more moral than metaphysical.

Top: Liu Wei, It Looks Like a Actually, the idea of landscape as a new artistic category typiﬁed by Landscape, 2004, photograph, 306 x 612 cm. Courtesy of Liu characteristics that invite investigation in terms of environmental issues Wei Studio. came to prominence in the early 2000s when some Chinese artists began Bottom: Zhan Wang, Garden Utopia, installation view, The to develop new ways of depicting nature. Qiu Zhijie’s series Points of the National Art Museum of China, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Landscape (2001), Liu Wei’s series It looks Like a Landscape (2004), Xu Bing’s Long March Space, Beijing. Next page: Feng Mengbo, series Background Stories (2004), Feng Mengbo’s Wrong Code Shanshui Wrong Code Shanshui, 2008, 1800 x 240 cm, exhibition view, (2007), Zhan Wang’s Garden Utopia (2008), Ni Youyu’s Landscape Case Galerie Rudolﬁnum, Prague, Czech. Courtesy of the artist. (2009), just to mention few, are all representative examples of how ecology has had a great impact on the traditional Chinese way of perceiving and representing landscape. In these works, shanshui appears as the product of the new socio-cultural perception of the natural world,21 essentially based on the idea of alienation from nature.

Vol. 16 No. 1 35 In order to understand this new ideological context, it is important to make Liu Xiaodong, Into Taihu, 2010, oil on canvas, 300 x 400 cm. a visual analysis of some of the images produced by artists such as Liu Courtesy of the artist. Xiaodong, Cai Guo-Qiang, Yang Yongliang, Yao Lu, and Qiu Anxiong, and to consider how they present to the public their new ideas about depicting the landscape. In some cases, environmental concerns can be represented in literal and concrete ways. Liu Xiaodong, an artist with an highly critic documentary style, has reﬂected many times on Chinese natural disasters 22 and in his oil painting entitled Into Taihu (2010), he draws inspiration from a nature increasingly dominated by pollution. This work, with its ﬂying

36 Vol. 16 No. 1 cranes that remind us of a painting realized by the Song dynasty emperor Huizong in 1112, depicts a group of boys inside a boat moving on the polluted water of Lake Tai (Taihu) in which the green colour alludes to a disaster caused by human actions that have been able to transform nature. This kind of depiction, that actually is a description, suggests an idea of the artist as a witness of his time, intent in gathering source materials for his work by exploring and collecting a series of visual data that are then transposed into visual elements of the painting. From this perspective, the artist’s experience becomes a kind of active environmental engagement mediated by an artistic approach, and the intent is to document the bare reality of the visual forms and denounce the lack of care and responsibilities that are necessary for ecological sustainability. Moreover, in documenting environmental problems, Lu Xiaodong creates a landscape in which social and political potential is implicitly present.

In the context of China’s serious environmental crisis, another internationally renowned artist, Cai Guo-Qiang, also turns his attention to ecological issues. For his retrospective exhibition held in 2014 at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, the artist realized Silent Ink, an installation grounded in contemporary visual reality that gives considerable attention to the effects of water pollution, in order to stimulate discussion about the exploitation of nature. Excavating a large convex depression in the floor of the museum, Cai Guo-Qiang filled it with liquid ink used for traditional painting and then has surrounded this artificial and black pond with the concrete rubble removed from the floor. The symbolism is unmistakable. This pile of rubble takes the form of artificial hills and the pond is a reminder of the water represented in traditional shanshuihua, thus Cai Guo-Qiang creates a juxtaposition of symbolic and contradictory references. He juxtaposes the present day man-altered environment with the suggestion of ancient imagery of landscape based on the idea of harmony between man and nature, conveying a deep sense of alteration to this long- standing relationship.

In other cases, some artists approach the landscape through more subjective figurative modes, although still depicting a contemporary shanshui that evokes the physical interaction with an altered environment.23 Yang Yongliang’s landscapes mix visual elements borrowed from contemporary urban reality with traditional landscape imagery. The first step in this artist’s creative process is to collect photos of cityscapes that then serve as materials for his composite digital photomontages.24 They are imaginary landscapes that evoke a seemingly naturalistic and traditional scenery made of mountains, rivers, waterfalls, fog, and vegetation. However, closer observation reveals the real visual content that comprises the composition; elements of man-made panoramas such as architectural structures, skyscrapers, electric pylons, and traffic jams that substitute and thus are transformed into natural elements. Formally, this reminds us of the composition, techniques, and aesthetic vision of traditional shanshuihua, and this suggestion is further enhanced by the use of red seals and s scroll- like structure. Yang Yongliang’s work focuses on the social impact of China’s

Vol. 16 No. 1 37 Cai Guo-Qiang, Silent Ink (detail), 2014, concrete fragments, steel bars, insulation, water pump, pond: 20,000 liters of black ink. Commissioned by the Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Collection of the artist. Photo: Zhang Feiyu. Courtesy of Cai Studio.

38 Vol. 16 No. 1 Cai Guo-Qiang, Silent Ink, 2014, concrete fragments, steel bars, insulation, water pump, pond: 20,000 liters of black ink. Commissioned by the Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Collection of the artist. Photo: Wen-you Cai. Courtesy of Cai Studio.

Vol. 16 No. 1 39 aggressive urbanization and are powerful images that convey the artist’s Yang Yongliang, Artiﬁcial Wonderland II—Taigu desire to raise awareness, as well as to raise a change in people’s attitude Descendants (detail), 2016, installation, 100 x 1063 cm. towards nature.

Addressing the landscape with Yang Yongliang, Artificial Wonderland II—Taigu an antithetical iconographic Descendants, 2016, installation, 100 x 1063 cm. structure and centred on current environmental issues is also found in Yao Lu’ works, which are stylistically similar to those of Yang Yongliang, although he is not as well known among the Western public. Yao Lu photographs landfills and rubble and then, through photomontage, he digitally creates his images in which mounds of garbage or debris covered in green or black protective nets are assembled in the form of mountains, cliffs, and hills covered in mist to evoke the iconography of traditional landscape painting. The green or black protective nets are something that can be seen everywhere, as much as garbage and debris in today’s China, symbolize the ubiquity of construction sites and the idea of China’s drive to modernity. Moreover, Yao Lu’s photographs represent landscapes that at first sight allude to beauty, but, ultimately, they are decidedly ugly. As critic and curator Gu Zheng has pointed out: “His works create an illusion of beauty with ugliness. By transferring ugliness to an aesthetic target, the former provides the gun powder for possible criticism and reflection of beauty itself while becoming a new aesthetic target.” 25

Qiu Anxiong reﬂects on the human relationship with the natural environment through works that incorporate painting, photography,

40 Vol. 16 No. 1 Yao Lu, Fishing Boats Berthed by the Mount Yu, 2008, chromogenic print, 60 x 50 cm. Courtesy of Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong.

Yao Lu, The Beauty of and video, in which landscape Kunming, 2010, C print, 120 x 90 cm. Courtesy of Galerie du is conceived as the conceptual Monde, Hong Kong. background of the development of China’s political history. The artist paints his compositions in acrylic on canvas and then, through photography and the use of a stop-motion technique, combines Qiu Anxiong, still from them into an animated video. His Temptation of the Land, 2009, animation, 13 mins. image sequences are populated by juxtaposed iconographic elements derived from multiple and contrasting visual sources such as landscapes and urban sceneries, natural features and architectural elements, and their function being to narrate, like Yao Lu, China’s rapid process of modernization that has led to an aggressive territorial transformation. In Temptation of the Land (2009), Qiu Anxiong depicts images of former idyllic natural landscapes turned into anthropic scenarios marked heavily by a human presence. He captures and represents the degeneration of the natural environment where the landscape largely has been obliterated and this serves as a metaphor for expressing its marginality in contemporary urban life, as well as contemporary society's dysfunctional relationship with nature.

The Ethical Function of Contemporary Landscape In depicting landscape, each of these artists comment on the altered environmental conditions now irremediably imprinted upon the Chinese landscape and artistically describe how human activities have reconﬁgured it. Partially following the aesthetic of traditional shanshuihua, they produce a complex and layered narrative in which landscape belongs no more to the realm of the metaphysical. It becomes a kind of “descriptive dystopia” that, by using traditional imagery to highlight the current state of the natural environment, evokes in a quite surrealistic manner the possibility of the worst environmental condition. This enables us to consider the ethical function of contemporary landscape, now conceived as a genre that should generate explicit rules to regulate, conduct, and restore the appropriate natural order of things.

Contemporary shanshui depiction appears as a subjective vision combined with the moral standings assigned to ecology. Just as ancient literati painters

Vol. 16 No. 1 41 used landscape imagery to transmit moral values, in the context of today’s increasingly urbanized society, some artists use landscape to highlight environmental values such as ecology and sustainability, stressing the reality of the altered natural environment and their emotional relationship with it in order to raise critical awareness on China’s serious environmental crisis. Society and nature are inextricably linked, but, in contemporary times, this seems lost, and in the works of these artists, man and nature are presented in opposition. In their shanshui depictions, landscape no longer possesses a philosophical dimension that requires a totalizing or highly symbolic representation of nature, but is conceived as an arena of human action, a space in which this human action that is so severely transforming nature is blamed.

We are here in the presence of a vision of nature that creates new values and links landscape’s essence to ethics.26 This new conceptual trend is indicated by “iconic elements” that function as ethical pointers and relate landscape to the new visual context in which a well deﬁned genre of contemporary shanshuihua develops.

These artists address real ecological problems in their works and invite us to re-envision our faith in unfettered progress, where human dominance over nature is deemed legitimate. From this perspective, landscape can act as a platform for critical thinking, helping people to envision a better future.

It is precisely this proﬁle that makes the artist focusing on contemporary landscape so compelling: it is the idea that life is incomplete without close contact with nature, that the artist’s use of landscape fosters critical thinking and raises questions about sustainability, and that the attempt to work in this way defends a landscape in which disharmony and ugliness have become a new aesthetic canon. Undoubtedly, this research constitutes an exempliﬁcation of the artist’s moral choices.

In twenty-ﬁrst century China, the representation of landscape has changed in correspondence with the natural surroundings and the cultural perspectives that have changed parallel to it. The natural environment is so highly polluted that artists have felt the moral urge to integrate environmental degradation into their artistic research to such an extent that this perspective is emerging as an independent artistic genre. This means that, besides rethinking shanshuihua’s role, adapting it to new current issues and exploring new means of expression, artists also have readjusted their social role and, in the context of contemporary Chinese art, they work as activists.

Notes

1. John B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 156. 2. See Li Shenzhi, “Reﬂection on the Concept of the Unity of Heaven and Man (“Tian ren he yi”),” in Chinese Thought in a Global Context: A Dialogue Between Chinese and Western Philosophical Approaches, ed. Karl-Heinz Pohl (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 115.

42 Vol. 16 No. 1 3. On the close relationship between Daoist metaphysics and ink painting, see Zhou Jiyin 周积寅, Zhongguo hualun jiyao 中国画论辑要 (Nanjing: Jiangsu meishu chubanshe, 2005), 1–60. See also Xu Fuguan 徐复观, Zhongguo yishu jingshen 中国艺术精神 (Guilin: Guangxi Shifan daxue chubanshe, 2007), 33–42. 4. On the importance of the Third Shanghai Biennale, see Wu Hung, “The 2000 Shanghai Biennale. The Making of a Historical Event,” Art Asia Pacific 31 (2001), 41–49. 5. Julia F. Andrews and Shen Kuiyi, The Art of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 284. On the same topic, see also Paul Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 240. 6. For an overview of works and styles related to conventional contemporary shanshuihua see Zhang Dachuan 张大川, Deng Jiade 邓嘉德 and Sun Ling 孙菱, Zhongguo dangdai huajia tudian: shanshui juan 中国当代画家图典: 山水卷 (Chengdu: Sichuan meishu chubanshe, 2001). See also Guo Guixing 郭贵兴, Zhongguo dangdai huihua jingdian xilie: qinglü shanshui 中国当代绘画经典系列: 青绿山水 (Zhengzhou: Henan meishu chubanshe, 2010). 7. Wu Hung, “Neither Heaven nor Home: Representing Landscape and Interior Space in Contemporary East Asian Art,” in Making History: Wu Hung on Contemporary Art, eds. Angie Baecker et al. (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2008), 235. 8. Yin Jinan, “The Evolution of Chinese Contemporary Shanshui,” in Shanshui: Poetry Without Sound? Landscape in Chinese Contemporary Art, ed. Peter Fischer (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 45. 9. Gao Shiming, “The Crisis of Landscape,” Artlinkart, http://www.artlinkart.com/en/artist/txt_ab/ fd3arulp/eeadrttn/. 10. Lü Peng, Fragmented Reality: Contemporary art in 21st Century China (Milan: Charta, 2012), 411. For a review of the exhibition, see Lü Peng and Bai Hua, Pure Views: Remote from Streams and Mountains: New Painting from China (Milan: Charta, 2011). 11. Yongwoo Lee, “Shan-shui and the Customs of Contemporary Real Landscapes,” in Humanistic Nature and Society (Shan-Shui). An Insight into the Future, ed. Wong Shun-Kit (Shanghai: Shanghai Himalayas Museum, 2015), 10. 12. The most significant study on ecological consciousness in Chinese contemporary art regards Chinese cinema. On this topic, see Sheldon H. Lu, “Introduction: Cinema, Ecology, Modernity,” in Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge, ed. Sheldon H. Lu and Mi Jiayan (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 1–14. 13. Wang Jiuliang 王久良, Beijing besieged by waste (Laji weicheng 垃圾围城) (documentary, China, 72 mins., 2011), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W73eKAjyNXs/. Wang Jiuliang has also directed Plastic China (Suliao Zhongguo 塑料中国, 2015). Chai Jing 柴静, Under the dome (Qióngding zhi xià 穹顶之下). (documentary, China, 104 mins., 2015), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=T6X2uwlQGQM>/. 14. Jia Zhangke贾樟柯, Smog journeys (Ren zai mai tu 人在霾途) (short film, China, 7 mins., 2015), http://youtu.be/zfF7ZmKMUX/. 15. Xiaozhu 小竹, Breathe again (Bie rang weilai zhixi 别让未来窒息) (advertising spot: China, 54 secs., 2015), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e1qGc66W9k/. 16. On this topic, see Tom Phillips, “China’s vacuum-cleaner artist turning Beijing’s smog into bricks,” The Guardian, December 1, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/01/chinese-vacuum- cleaner-artist-turning-beijings-smog-into-bricks/. See also Samuel Spencer, “Zhang Zhenyu Turns Pollution Into Paintings at Yallay Gallery,” Blouinartinfo, April 11, 2016, 2016, http://www.blouinartinfo. com/news/story/1372964/zhang-zhenyu-turns-pollution-into-paintings-at-yallay-gallery/. 17. Second Hand Rose (Ershou meigui 二手玫瑰), Drop in (Chuan men 串门) (video clip, China, 6 mins,, 2011), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF8Jwg_o8Aw/. 18. See Dai Zhikang 戴志康, Shanshui chengshi: weilai dushi shenghuo meixue: Sikao yu shijian 山水城市. 未来都市生活美学: 思考与实践, (Shanghai: Shanghai Himalayas Museum, 2015), 33–37. 19. CCTV Chunwan—CCTV 春晚, “2016 Yangshi Chunwan gequ 'Shanshui Zhongguo mei' Lin Xinru, Liang Yongqi, Liu Tao,” 2016 央视春晚歌曲《山水中国美》林心如, 梁咏琪, 刘涛 (video: China, 6 mins., 2015), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DORjVgmdSAY/. 20. On this topic, see Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 2. 21. On this topic, see Shen Kuiyi, “Shanshui: Reinterpreting and Reconstructing a Cultural Consciousness in Contemporary Chinese Art,” in Ershi shiji shanshuihua yanjiu wenji 二十世纪山水画研究文集, ed. Huang Jian 黄剑 (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2006), 284–86. 22. Among his most famous documentary works, there is the series centered on the Three Gorges Project. For an analysis of his works related to the dam’s project, see Thomas Christensen, The Three Gorges Project: Paintings by Liu Xiaodong (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 2006). On the same topic, see also Wu Hung, Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2008). 23. On this topic, see Pauline J. Yao, “The Expanded Aesthetic: Landscape and Contemporary Art in China,” in Ershi shiji shanshuihua yanjiu wenji, op.cit., 358–59. 24. See Alessandra Alliata Nobili, “Tearing Down the Past to Build the Future: Yang Yongliang, Chinese Artist Interview,” Art Radar Journal, April 1, 2013, http://artradarjournal.com/2013/04/01/tearing- down-the-past-to-build-the-future-yang-yongliang-chinese-artist-interview/. 25. Gu Zheng, “Concealment is the Essense of Reality: Yao Lu’s New Landscape,” 798 Photogallery, http://www.798photogallery.cn/en/exhibition_view.asp?id=75/. 26. On the relationship between landscape and ethics, see Massimo Venturi Ferriolo, Etiche del paesaggio: Il progetto del mondo umano (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 2002), 15.

Vol. 16 No. 1 43 Zheng Shengtian A Missing Story in Havana: A Conversation with Juan Moreira July 8, 2016 Juan Moreira Studio, Havana, Cuba

This interview is an extension of my research into exchanges between Latin Left to right: Zheng Shengtian, Marisol Villela, Juan Moreira. America and China during the 1950s and 60s—in particular with Chilean Photo: Don Li-Leger. artist José Venturelli and his inﬂuence in mainland China. In the 1960s, Cuban artist Juan Moreira assisted Venturelli in the painting of two large murals in Havana.1

Zheng Shengtian: May I call you Juan? We are of the same generation.

44 Vol. 16 No. 1 Juan Moreira: Yes, of course.

Zheng Shengtian: Juan, when I was a young artist in the early 1960s, I was in China, in Beijing, and we learned about the painting Camilo Cienfuegos (1961).

Juan Moreira: It is José Venturelli’s mural.

Zheng Shengtian: Venturelli lived in Beijing at that time, and he came to Havana and made two murals—Camilo Cienfuegos, in the Medical Retreat (now the Ministry of Health), and another, Sovereignty and Peace, in the Hall of Solidarity at Habana Libre, the former Havana Hilton hotel that was once the headquarters of Fidel Castro. In 1962 Venturelli went back to Beijing and showed his drawings of the mural Camilo Cienfuegos as well as photographs of it. So many artists in China, in Beijing, were very impressed by this mural. In more than half a century, however, no one in China actually has seen the painting, no one has seen the original. But we saw it today, with Chinese artists Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi who are visiting Havana with me.

Juan Moreira: Did you go to see both of the murals? Because there are two.

Zheng Shengtian: Yes, we saw two.

Juan Moreira: Venturelli worked for about eight months on each of these murals; he devoted a lot of time. I was his assistant.

Zheng Shengtian: That is why we have come to visit you, because we know you were the assistant to Venturelli at that time.

Juan Moreira: A Cuban painter, who has now passed away, Orlando Suárez, worked as an assistant with David Alfaro Siqueiros in Mexico. And Orlando Suárez—I do not know how it happened—but he was the one who invited Venturelli, who brought him to Havana. I worked with him on both murals.

Zheng Shengtian: Were Suárez and Venturelli friends?

Juan Moreira: Probably, but I do not know exactly how the connection was made. But yes, Orlando Suárez called me to work with Venturelli, and he was the one who brought him.

Zheng Shengtian: Maybe because Venturelli was also an assistant to Siqueiros, a long time ago, in Chile.

Juan Moreira: Orlando Suárez was also Siqueiros’s assistant, but in Mexico. I do not know if he and Venturelli knew each other before. If I once knew it, I have now forgotten.

Vol. 16 No. 1 45 José Venturelli, Camilo Cienfuegos, 1961, mural in the conference room of Ministry of Health, Havana. Photo: Don Li-Leger.

José Venturelli, Sovereignty and Peace, 1962, mural in the Hall of Solidarity, Habana Libre hotel, Havana. Photo: Don Li-Leger.

46 Vol. 16 No. 1 Vol. 16 No. 1 47 Zheng Shengtian: So at that time you were probably twenty-four years old.

Juan Moreira: More or less. I was born in 1938, but I do not remember exactly when the mural was done. But there is a very interesting anecdote. The ﬁrst mural, Camilo Cienfuegos, was the one in the Ministry of Health Building across the street from the Pabellón Cuba. So the story that I am going to tell is connected with this mural. Salvador Allende, do you know who I am talking about? He was Venturelli’s friend and later became the president of Chile. While doing this mural, Salvador Allende visited Venturelli, and that was when I met Allende, and one day he told me “Moreira, I am going to take with me this work from Venturelli”—it was a sketch. Then Venturelli said “No, that is a sketch, I am going to give you an original one, not that one.”

But what I was going to say is that when Allende left, Venturelli told me: “Look, there are going to be elections in Chile, and he is going to be a candidate for president of Chile. But this time, he will not be elected as president, he is only going to be a candidate, not president. But next time, he will be president.” And it was this way, exactly this way. I was very young, Allende was candidate for president of Chile, and it is true, he did not win, but years passed by and he was once more a candidate, and that time, in 1970, he was elected president of Chile. It was as Venturelli said, I do not know why, it was just something that he knew would happen.

With Venturelli, I learned a lot. I was young, and, well, I always painted, but he was a good teacher, and he helped me very much during the process of painting the murals. What else can I tell you? He was an excellent painter, and a very good person, but you should ask me something else more speciﬁc that you would like to know.

Zheng Shengtian: I visited Venturelli’s daughter, Paz, in Chile three years ago, and she told me that she was in Havana, too. She also told me about the time when her father was working on the murals, that Che Guevara visited the site, do you remember that?

Juan Moreira: Paz?

Zheng Shengtian: Do you remember her?

Juan Moreira: I know her. When the mural was being painted, Che went to see the mural. Che was someone who was highly respected by us, and in the mural Camilo Cienfuegos there is even a part in which Venturelli is depicted as a wounded character, and Che is helping him. Did you see that image in the mural?

Zheng Shengtian: Oh, that is Venturelli. So why is he lying down?

Juan Moreira: Well, he wanted to depict himself wounded. I do not know why—perhaps to imagine he was a guerrilla. And Che is there too.

48 Vol. 16 No. 1 José Venturelli, Camilo Zheng Shengtian: On one side of Venturelli is Tania the Guerrila, who Cienfuegos (detail), 1961, mural in the conference room fought with Che in Bolivia, and next to her is Che Guevara, is that correct? of Ministry of Health, Havana. Photo: Don Li-Leger. Juan Moreira: Tania, I do not know. Of course one is Che, and one is Venturelli. The woman has the outﬁt of a guerrilla, but I do not know who she is.

Zheng Shengtian: Could you tell us more about this mural? Is that General Castro to the left of Camilo?

Juan Moreira: Yes, I think that is Fidel between some plants.

Zheng Shengtian: And do you recognize the person at the end?

Juan Moreira: I do not remember, so many years have passed.

Marisol Villela: When was the last time you saw this mural?

Juan Moreira: Years ago. I worked ﬁrst as an assistant on that mural, and later I worked on the other mural as well, the one at the Habana Libre.

Marisol Villela: I mean when was the last time you revisited the mural?

Juan Moreira: I can’t tell you exactly.

Zheng Shengtian: Is this Camilo Cienfuegos in the centre?

Vol. 16 No. 1 49 Juan Moreira: Yes, that is Camilo. I went to see it several times after we José Venturelli, Camilo Cienfuegos (detail), 1961, ﬁnished it, but many years have passed since the last time. And when the mural in the conference room of Ministry of Health, Havana. mural was being made, friends of mine, as well as painters, visited us during Photo: Don Li-Leger. the process, and Venturelli allowed them to watch.

Zheng Shengtian: How long did you work with Venturelli in total?

Juan Moreira: With the ﬁrst mural I worked almost all the time, and in the other as well, the one at the Habana Libre; I was his assistant. I was very young. I was twenty-something. Venturelli was already an adult. I looked at him as the great teacher, with a lot of respect. I was the assistant, and nothing more, only the assistant. We were not friends really because we were not the same age; we did not go out to drink or eat together. He was more a teacher to me.

Zheng Shengtian: How many assistants were working with him at that time?

Juan Moreira: From what I remember, I was the only painter. Later, when there was need of another assistant for the Habana Libre’s mural, I brought one of my friends, who has now passed away, José Foble. I brought him to help, so at one point there were two of us.

Zheng Shengtian: What exactly did you do on the murals? Were you painting or, . . .?

Juan Moreira: I drew, because Venturelli designed the sketches and I helped to transfer the drawings onto the wall following his sketch. And sometimes I helped to do the underpainting. I helped to copy the sketch, the original drawing that Venturelli did, onto the wall, but he also drew.

50 Vol. 16 No. 1 José Venturelli, Camilo Zheng Shengtian: How did you transfer the sketches onto the wall? Did you Cienfuegos (detail), 1961, mural in the conference room use charcoal, or what method did you use? of Ministry of Health, Havana. Photo: Don Li-Leger. Juan Moreira: It was done using a grid system. Sometimes, for example, I blocked out an area for plants, trees, and rocks, all that, then Venturelli came and he gave the ﬁnal touch to everything.

Zheng Shengtian: What kind of paint did he use?

Juan Moreira: I am almost sure that it was acrylic. But I do not remember exactly, many years have passed, so I do not know if it was oil painting or not.

Zheng Shengtian: Were the materials from abroad or from Cuba?

Juan Moreira: I do not remember that as well. I know that Venturelli took care of all that. Maybe it was Orlando Suárez who brought the materials, but I do not know this detail, because I was so young at the time.

Zheng Shengtian: Suárez is a Cuban? Not Mexican?

Juan Moreira: Cuban.

Zheng Shengtian: Could you tell us a little about yourself? How did you become an artist?

Juan Moreira: When I was a child, I used to hide and not go to school because a billboard painting workshop opened on the same block as my house. I did not go to school and instead I went there to see how they painted the billboards. It was a company where they painted billboards for the highways, and I used to go there and watch how they did it. Then they

Vol. 16 No. 1 51 told me, “Go and get me some cigarettes, go and get me that.” One day I told my father, “I do not want to go to school anymore, I want to work there.” My father spoke with the owner, and when I was ten or eleven years old I went to work there. That was how I started.

But ever since I was a child, I used to lay down on the ﬂoor and draw, I was born with that. Later on I studied at the School of Painting in Havana, but because I had already gained a lot of experience with the billboards, I studied the content of four years of courses, and I graduated within two years.

Zheng Shengtian: When you worked on the murals, were you still in the art school (Escuela de Artes Plástica de San Alejandro), or had you graduated already?

Juan Moreira: Now I have doubts about that. I do not know if it was before or after my graduation, but I was with Venturelli all the time, mornings and afternoons.

Zheng Shengtian: Was it a volunteer job or paid job?

Juan Moreira: They paid me, but I do not remember how much. It was not Venturelli, but Orlando Suárez who paid me as an assistant. I was not interested in the money; what I was interested in was working with a great painter and learning from him. And I learned a lot from Venturelli when I saw him painting and doing the thousands of sketches. It was like school for me. He was patient with me, and if I had questions he would demonstrate how things were done.

Zheng Shengtian: Was he sick? Because Paz told me he had asthma. Did it inﬂuence his work?

Juan Moreira: Yes, during that time, he was already sick with tuberculosis. I remember that we walked from the Medical Retreat to the Habana Libre, where he was staying, and at every corner he was short of breath. I was walking with him and he had to stop to catch his breath. He was already sick.

Marisol Villela: But this did not affect him while he was painting?

Juan Moreira: No, only when he walked or climbed a steep street was he short of breath. But he worked perfectly ﬁne, he worked so much, eight hours or more at a time.

Zheng Shengtian: Even that short distance, a very short distance.

Juan Moreira: Yes, there were two blocks from the mural at the Medical Retreat to the Habana Libre. Later they gave him an apartment here, a house.

Zheng Shengtian: When you were working on this mural, of course you knew Camilo Cienfuegos, the person, the life of Camilo. What did you think about Camilo?

52 Vol. 16 No. 1 José Venturelli, Sovereignty Juan Moreira: Well, Camilo is a Cuban hero, and here everyone knew the and Peace (detail), 1962, mural in the Hall of Solidarity, story of Camilo as the hero he was in the Cuban Revolution. Venturelli Habana Libre hotel, Havana. Photo: Don Li-Leger. represented him in the mural the same way as he represented Che. But for us, the Cubans, Camilo was a hero, was a leader—he died but he was a very important person, just as was Che. For me it was an honour to be able to work with Venturelli, who painted those ﬁgures; there I was helping. I am proud of being able to assist him in the process. Everyone respects Camilo.

Zheng Shengtian: Was there an opening ceremony after the mural was ﬁnished that was open to the public? Did any ofﬁcial event take place?

Juan Moreira: I do not remember this detail—if there was or was not.

Zheng Shengtian: Can you remember if Castro saw the painting?

Juan Moreira: I suppose he saw it, but I do not remember that precise detail. I know that Che was there, and for sure he would have told Castro about it. But I do not know if Castro went to see it later. Maybe he went one day and I did not realize it. I do not know.

Zheng Shengtian: How about the second mural at Habana Libre hotel. Can you talk a little bit about the second mural? What is the content?

Juan Moreira: It also has content that is historical, about the Revolution. I think it is in that one, in the Habana Libre, where Che is also depicted. Camilo is in the one at the Medical Retreat. But both murals have patriotic, revolutionary content.

Vol. 16 No. 1 53 Zheng Shengtian: Is Camilo also in the one at the hotel?

Juan Moreira: Do you have the image here? Many years have passed, I do not know who all the patriots are in that painting. There is José Martí. There is someone who is handing over a shovel, and he seems to be an Indian, he could be a Cuban Indian. In Camilo Cienfuegos, someone is giving an Indian a riﬂe so they can join the guerrillas to ﬁght in the Revolution. In Sovereignty and Peace, there is an Indian with the sickle and that represents farming the land; that is part of the story, the idea. The mural is full of revolutionary content.

Zheng Shengtian: Does the art community in Havana celebrate those murals?

Juan Moreira: Yes, although I think they should have done more to make them evident to the public. But yes, artists and many people know them. But in my opinion they should have promoted them better. People from my generation, the artists from my generation, know the murals. But now youth are interested in conceptual art—the new art and all that—but the murals still are there for them to see.

Zheng Shengtian: Is this Camilo?

Juan Moreira: No, it is Fidel. Yes, it is Fidel drying his sweat.

Zheng Shengtian: Did you ever see Venturelli after the mural was ﬁnished, after he returned to China?

Juan Moreira: I think so, because Paz, Venturelli’s daughter, had an apartment here, and she lived here for some time, in Cuba. I knew Paz very well when she was younger, but now I am already old. I also met Venturelli’s wife, but so many years have passed.

Zheng Shengtian: Paz came back to study medicine in the university.

Juan Moreira: It’s possible, because I even saw her some years ago, we met by chance at the theatre, “Don’t you remember me? I am Paz,” “Oh, yes, Paz, how are you?” Yes, she loved Cuba very much. Yes, for sure she studied medicine here.

Zheng Shengtian: In Havana?

Juan Moreira: Yes, here in Havana. Do you remember, Alicia, Paz, Venturelli’s daughter? She sat in front of us at the theatre, and we chatted. I do not know if she continues coming to Cuba; I do not know if she still has the apartment.

Alicia Moreira: Venturelli was involved with the Taller de la Gráﬁca, as well.

54 Vol. 16 No. 1 José Venturelli, Sovereignty Juan Moreira: The Taller de la Gráﬁcade la Catedral. Orlando Suárez and Peace (detail), 1962, mural in the Hall of Solidarity, directed part of the culture here, and founded with José Venturelli this Habana Libre hotel, Havana. Photo: Don Li-Leger. experimental graphic workshop close by the cathedral, where drawings were made on lithographic stones. And Venturelli went there and made drawings, and I was young, and I went to see how Venturelli did the engravings. It is called a workshop because it is a very big place with many lithographic stones where the artists draw and make engravings. It still exists, and many artists visit it; it is a very important workshop. Venturelli taught there, drew on the stones, and he taught young people who went there at that time to make engravings on stone. The ﬁrst engravings on stone were made by Venturelli, and they remain there in the archives. Venturelli, besides being a great painter, a great muralist, was also a great teacher, and he liked to teach. That was his role in that workshop.

Zheng Shengtian: Yes, he did the same in China. He was our teacher. He had a studio in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, so everybody went there to see his work. Actually, an exhibition of Venturelli's work opened last week in this academy’s museum in Beijing.

Juan Moreira: Oh, what a surprise. Yes, all that Venturelli learned in China . . . And Venturelli, just as I told you before, was a great painter, a great teacher, and a very good person who liked to teach. I have told what I remember as a younger person, of my experiences with Venturelli. If I had been of Venturelli’s generation, maybe I would have had other things to tell. But I have you told what I remember.

Zheng Shengtian: Do you have any photos from that time?

Vol. 16 No. 1 55 Juan Moreira: Unfortunately, Juan Moreria in his home, Havana. Photo: Don Li-Leger. I do not, because at the time I was not really conscious of the relevance of the situation. I keep somewhere in my ﬁles a photograph of me and other friends of mine who were visiting the mural—but I do not have it at hand. Journalists went to interview Venturelli and take photos, but Venturelli was not there, so they asked some questions and I answered. They took a picture of me with the two or three other friends who were there, and it was published in the newspaper. The article talks about Venturelli’s mural. Sadly, Venturelli does not appear in it. I would have loved to have a picture with Venturelli, if he could have taken a picture with me, hugging each other, or talking. But the day that the journalist arrived he was not there, so in the photo from the newspaper, Venturelli is not there. Venturelli is a personality, a great painter, but he came to Havana, made those two murals, and just like other painters of that time, it was something very common.

Zheng Shengtian: That is a great José Venturelli (1924–1988). Courtesy of José Venturelli story. Thank you so much. This Foundation, Santiago, Chile. is a wonderful piece of history about the dialogue between Latin America, between Cuba, Chile, and China. It is very important because these kinds of encounters have happened, but rarely do we have a good record from someone who saw them and actually participated in them.

Juan Moreira: It is my pleasure.

Zheng Shengtian: Thank you so much.

This interview was made possible with the assistance of Raquel Carrera and Tonel (Antonio Eligio Fernandez), and videotaped by Don Li-Leger. Translation and transcription by Marisol Villela.

Notes

1. Part of this research appeared in Zheng Shengtian, “Interview with Paz Venturelli Baraona,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 14, no. 5 (September/October 2015), 57–71.

56 Vol. 16 No. 1 Leung Chi Wo Josh Hon: Dead Water Convulsion— Hong Kong—1980s

Josh Hon, Self-Portrait, 1976, graphite on paper, 52 x 45.7 n September 1982, British Prime cm. Photo: Leung Chi Wo. Courtesy of the artist. Minister Margaret Thatcher Imade her inaugural visit to Beijing to discuss with Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Deng Xiaoping the indeterminate future of the Crown Colony, Hong Kong. A few months later in this same year, Josh Hon had returned to Hong Kong after ten years of academic studies in the United States to spend Christmas of 1982 with his family.

In the 1980s, Hong Kong's complex situation of being unable to assert its subjectivity politically, to define its own future, bled into its visual art discourse, and the conversation of its own art scene had been predominantly influenced by “East Meets West”1 themes that were promoted by the Hong Kong Museum of Art, an institution that, since the 1960s, enjoyed almost a monopoly on art exhibitions as there was nothing else comparable to it. During this period in history, an example of this blend of Western and Eastern cultural associations could be found in the popular genre of modern Chinese ink art championed by Lui Shou-Kwan, a pioneer in Hong Kong since the 1950s, who distanced himself from the traditional Chinese painting style while maintaining the skilful use of the brush and wash work for abstraction. His work was a rarity in modern Chinese art, and was interpreted as a sublime representation of oriental thinking such as Zen, and, at the same time, it visually allowed a dialogue with his contemporaries in the West. Many of his students, like Wucius Wong and Kan Tai-keung, took this direction even further by using elements of graphic design. Similar genealogies and social connections among art teachers and students further developed into an established tradition of like-minded art groups and societies constituting the ecology of the Hong Kong East-West art scene. However, as a newcomer Josh Hon quickly emerged as one of a new generation of artists who, not bothering to pander to any affiliation, identified themselves with very different languages and agendas.

Although in the 1980s there was an efﬂux of Hong Kongese concerned about the unclear future of this city-state, we also saw the ﬁrst wave of many baby boomers returning from overseas studies, which had become

Vol. 16 No. 1 57 more affordable thanks to Hong Kong’s miraculous economic prosperity beginning in the 1960s. These new affluent Hong Kongese finished their university art education in Europe or North America, some even achieving a masters level certification, an extremely rare accomplishment for Hong Kong artists in the 1980s. With their critical formative years taking place in a Eurocentric country, these Hong Kongese art professionals were used to articulating themselves in a transnational language, and were often preoccupied with international issues such as postmodernism and other social situations related to contemporary art. These were the current themes being debated in New York, London, or Paris in the 1980s, while many local Hong Kong artists were still struggling for a language to address their East-West identity. Having trained as a painter with added knowledge in philosophy and cultural studies, Josh Hon took this transnational background and intensively experimented with a diversity of media to develop his artistic practice alongside the socio-political change of Hong Kong during the pre-Handover years.

Josh Hon, Where a Gentleman Won’t Stand Under, 1981, oil and pastel on canvas, 244 x 183 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The exhibition Dead Water Convulsion—Hong Kong—1980s2 presents a small selection of Josh Hon’s works from the 1980s. It begins chronologically with the oversized oil and pastel painting Where a Gentleman Won’t Stand Under (1981), one of the last pieces created in the US before his return to Hong Kong. The play of colour ﬁelds versus the illusion of three-dimensional geometrical space prompts a tension between

58 Vol. 16 No. 1 the spatial abstraction on the surface and the ambivalent description in its title. Where a Gentleman Won’t Stand Under is an excellent example of how Josh Hon’s academic interest in religion and philosophy informed his painting through the use of a precise construction of geometrical forms. The deeper philosophical complexity gives these seemingly abstract works an intellectual edge—an approach that was rare for even senior and more established artists in Hong Kong. In 1983, titled after the Chinese philosopher Mencius’ (孟子) teachings on the fate of human nature and created in tandem with the artist’s thoughts on the world, Where a Gentleman Won’t Stand Under was exhibited in his ﬁrst one-man show at the Hong Kong Arts Centre.3 This critically acclaimed show was a huge coup for such a young artist,4 paving a wide network of creative opportunities in front of him.

Josh Hon, Untitled, 1981, However, in the early 1980s in Hong Kong, art museums and art galleries oil on canvas, 132 x 188 cm. Photo: Leung Chi Wo. Courtesy were not yet ready for anything ground breaking and innovative. Art was of the artist. considered as recreation by the government management structure rather than providing a critical voice. Indeed, the policy to stimulate more cultural activities for recreational purposes was a direction that served to relieve the social discontent after the Leftist riots in 1967, a movement commonly regarded in part as being related to the rise of the Cultural Revolution in China that began a year before. Then a decade passed, and a new cultural identity in Hong Kong was championed by the ink painting movement, and other so-called “Western” or modern paintings and sculptures that carried traditional Chinese cultural symbols, something aligned to the narrative of the colonial government in its desire to create a Hong Kong that was modern (Western) while maintaining the charm of its ancient Chinese culture. It was completely different from Communist China across the border, which Britain did not want any Hong Kong citizen to identify with.

Vol. 16 No. 1 59 Josh Hon, Dead Water Convulsion, February 9–11, 1984. Dead Water Convulsion was a 3-day continuous event, and included an installation piece with a video-monitoring section on every two hours during the day and a performance piece (80 mins.) in the evening. Script by Jacob Wong and Edward Lam; music by Jim Shum; performed by Dick Wong, Arthur Chiang, and Pia Ho. Courtesy of the artist.

On the other hand, there was not yet any formal new media art education offered to artists in the colony at that time.

So it was the performing arts world that would really open up opportunities for Josh Hon’s artistic experiments and foster the growth of new media for Hong Kong, introducing to it video, installation, and performance. It was the same for many young performing artists who studied overseas and later returned to Hong Kong. Their training and practice favoured all kinds of collaborations. Willy Tsao5 and Jacob Wong,6 who experimented in contemporary theatre arts, were welcoming to the contributions of Josh Hon. Commissioned by the Hong Kong Arts Centre, Josh Hon made his first would-be theatre piece, Dead Water Convulsion (1984), translating forms into materials, body gestures, and text by closely working with experimental theatre artists. This was an installation that referred to different forms of water, with the piece being closer to performance art than theatre performance. The very rich visual experience was an ensemble of fragmentary components created with objects, sound, images, and actions. The once implicit formal elements in his paintings were now emancipated into multi-media narratives addressing the psycho-emotional impact that he found concurrently in Hong Kong society. During the mid 1980s, the prominent narrative was that Hong Kong inevitably would be returned in thirteen years to the People’s Republic of China, a nation whose chaotic and violent events during the Cultural Revolution continued to traumatically haunt the memory of many Hong Kong people. Phrases used in Dead Water Convulsion, such as “I am skittish and flirty,” “I am tolerant,” and “I value harmony,” reveal a helpless anxiety that is sensed in the performers’ insistent repetition and almost uncontrollable actions such as falling down or citing self-parody. If the artist is to perform in order to reflect the relationship between different beings, it was now being foretold as real life politics in Hong Kong. The fear generated among people that is subtly implied in Josh Hon’s artwork was already a bold statement for visual art at the time, especially considering many other artists were focusing only on formal developments in the name of modernism—from expressionistic portraits to colour field painting—or on traditional modes of practice like Chinese

60 Vol. 16 No. 1 painting with ink on paper or silk, which could be in the form of old literati landscape or new ink experiments. His training in a global art language has now been stringently negotiated into a very local situation—the artist, the audience, and society are all self-referenced.

Josh Hon, Death Water Convulsion I, 1984, oil on canvas, 106.2 x 142 cm. Photo: Leung Chi Wo. Courtesy of the artist.

Though intentionally titled the same as the theatre piece, two paintings, Dead Water Convulsion I and Dead Water Convulsion II, offer the audience only abstract forms without any explicit statement. One may consider them personal sketches afﬁliated with the development of forms and imageries shared by the performance and installation work. However, these paintings also reﬂect a creative plane with an internal logic fuelled with colours, forms, and the artist’s engagement, something that is consistent with Josh Hon’s long time practice in spite of many different media now entering into his life. Worthy to note here are the organic forms and the play with increasingly obvious brushstrokes that transit to more expressionistic effects in his following works—a possible indication of his expressive theatre works in addition to the global trend of painting at the time, such as the popular

Josh Hon, Death Water Convulsion II, oil on canvas, 1984, 132 x 172.25 cm. Photo: Leung Chi Wo. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 16 No. 1 61 Josh Hon, Face of Echo Hole, 1987, oil on canvas, 198 x 167 cm. Photo: Leung Chi Wo. Courtesy of the artist.

European neo-expressionism or transavantgarde that called for renewed attention to human ﬁgure.

In the paintings that followed, one can see the emergence of human ﬁgures in a very expressive mode both with his brushstrokes and colours. I would see this as an echo of the “rawness” Josh Hon once referred to in his discussion about the energy of his artistic collaborations in the mid-1980s.7 The rational and intellectual abstraction built through knowledge has been transformed into an ambivalence of complicated emotions via twisted and deformed ﬁgures and personalized motifs placed in an ambiguous visual space. At the same time, he also moved on to explore his own position in society—from educator to advocate and critic of the current cultural environment.

Josh Hon has been interested in creating artist initiatives that serve as an alternative to the institutions that were lacking the dynamic in promoting new ideas. He was an instrumental figure in Out of Context, one of the most important experimental art projects in Hong Kong during the 1980s, turning his studio and that of his fellow artists into a temporary art space that presented installations, happenings, and performances. The project itself was almost completely uncurated, anarchic, and took place for only seventy-two hours, but it had already become a landmark in the Hong Kong history of alternative spaces exhibiting for the first time a tremendous revealing of this new wave generation of Hong Kong artists. The installation As, If: Is (1987) is a site-specific piece for Out of Context. In the hot and

62 Vol. 16 No. 1 Left: Josh Hon, Rolling High, 1989, oil on canvas, 172.7 x 139.7 cm. Photo: Leung Chi Wo. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Wong Wo-Bik, Fire Place Series #3—15 Kennedy Road, 1987, silver gelatin print. Josh Hon’s studio at 15 Kennedy Road. Courtesy of the artist.

Josh Hon, As, If: Is, 1987, refrigerator, ice block, paint, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

humid October a large ice block melts in front of an unplugged fridge that is similar in size. Not only is the ice block or water a recurrent material and motif in Josh Hon’s art, the conceptual, interchangeable physical state of this work also reminds one of his consistent interest in philosophy that is hinted in the title and the work’s minimalist approach. As “as if” is punctuated and written with variations, it allows different meanings, and the inaccuracies and uncertainties indeed provide plenty of creative possibilities when adapted into his multi-media works As If His/Story I (1988) and As If His/ Story II (1989) to explore the notion of history.

While As If His/Story I might stir mixed reviews for its democratic approach to creative decisions and an almost-out-of-control outcome, As If His/History II made its impact in experimental theatre in Taiwan for its “shocking, immersive and subversive effects when it was ﬁrst staged at the Crown Theatre, Taipei on March 4 and 5, 1989.”8 Although more artistic accidents resulted with the participation of the audience in the ﬁrst performance, here we could still sense the energy in the video documentation of the second one. The piece was scripted carefully in respect to the installation of objects, body movement, text, and live music that left plenty of room for improvisation by the performers and even the audience. All parties that engaged in it had to explore their own position in

Vol. 16 No. 1 63 Josh Hon, HK as is, as/is: asism, 1987, oil on canvas, 199.3 x 166.3 cm. Photo: Leung Chi Wo. Courtesy of the artist.

the multi-track narrative. Fusion and contestation among various media and forms created both a construction and destabilization of meaning, resonant of the ambiguity that is referred in the title. This subversive and chaotic performance was almost like predicting a tragedy that was to transpire three months later.

The violent crackdown by the Chinese government on the students’ movement for anti-corruption and democracy on June 4, 1989 in Beijing broke the hearts of many Hong Kong people. Out of sorrow and anger, Josh Hon, with his peers, called upon many artists and students to refabricate in Hong Kong the statue of Goddess of Democracy that was destroyed by the People’s Liberation Army in Tian’anmen Square. Its short life was ended after a temporary display in the Victoria Park in Hong Kong. For many who took art making for granted, it was the beginning of questioning the function and value of art in a society that was now so traumatized. Particularly for Josh Hon, they were questions that always had been in his mind but had become increasingly pressing. Art was now no longer his priority as his pursuit in life began to turn to nature for answers. In the early 1990s, like many others in Hong Kong, Josh Hon decided to move to Canada, not only because of the unclear future of Hong Kong that would be overshadowed by the Chinese regime, but, perhaps more importantly, for a new life that allowed him to be close to nature and to rethink the meaning of art. He ended up in Hope, B.C., a small town situated outside of

64 Vol. 16 No. 1 Josh Hon and The Box of Vancouver with a population of only 7,000, where he moved on to the role Many Levels, As If, His/Story II, performance, Crown Theatre, of a psychotherapist, which he still practices today, counselling teenagers Taipei, March 4–5, 1989. Courtesy of the artist. with family issues. Currently, he makes small functional earthenware as well as paintings of his natural surroundings.

The art that Josh Hon art made in Hong Kong referred to the city, its people, and himself at a particular moment in history. Since his departure from Hong Kong, it was unfortunate that not all of his works produced in Hong Kong could be preserved. Considering the inﬂux of opportunities the later generations of Hong Kong artists enjoy today, I hope that Josh Hon’s work reminds us that the art scene in Hong Kong was actually founded by many revolutionary artists, who, like him, pioneered an early presence of contemporary art in Hong Kong when the artistic environment was nominal during an important period of history.

Notes

1. C. S. Laurence Tam, “Introduction,” Hong Kong Art 1970–1980 (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1981), 6. 2. The exhibition took place at Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A), Vancouver, Canada, July 6–23, 2016. This text is a revised version of the catalogue essay. 3. The Hong Kong Arts Centre was an instrumental institution founded in 1977. It promoted contemporary art and was particularly supportive of this new generation of Josh Hon and his peers, whose works were not yet included in the narrative of Hong Kong art constructed by the Hong Kong Museum of Art. 4. Nigel Cameron, “Paintings that speak clearer than words . . .” South China Morning Post, August 11, 1983. 5. Willy Tsao, a ﬂat mate of Josh Hon during his studies in the US, founded the City Contemporary Dance Company. 6. Jacob Wong, co-founder of multimedia theatre company Zuni Icosahedron, later became a curator of the Hong Kong International Film Festival. 7. C. S. Kung, “Josh Hon: Improvisation, decolonization and ‘Hope’,” in C. S. Kung, ed., The Box Book (Hong Kong: MCCM Creation, 2009), 231. 8. Mingder Chung, The Little Theatre Movement in Taiwan (1980-89)—In Search of Alternative Aesthetics and Politics (Taipei: Yang-Chih Book Co., 1999), 298.

Vol. 16 No. 1 65 Phoebe Wong A Conversation with Wong Wai Yin

Phoebe Wong: Entitled Without Trying, the exhibition at Spring Workshop, Wong Wai Yin, Being dead will be our only shared identity, Hong Kong (August 20 to October 16, 2016), was your first solo show in five 2016, lightbox, 96.5 x 39 x 15.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and years. In-between these years, you married fellow artist Kwan Sheung Chi, and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong. was occupied with child nurturing, which demanded much care and attention. With fifteen works on display, this show captures your recent thoughts and personal life experience. How have you been preparing for this exhibition?

Wong Wai Yin: It was two years ago that I resumed making art; it almost came to a stop in 2009 because of my family obligations. Returning from that professional hiatus, I started off with something that was easy to handle, both time-wise and technique-wise, so I did the posters, and named the series Without trying; the series that lends the title to the current show.

Phoebe Wong: I see your struggles expressed in these posters: “living in someone’s shadow,” “throw away the bad works,” “be ambitious,” “don’t compete with others,” and the like. You are questioning yourself . . .

66 Vol. 16 No. 1 Wong Wai Yin: True, these posters address my state of mind during that particular time period. Usually, a poster serves as a tool for communication that is directed to others, but with these posters, they are things I said to myself.

Phoebe Wong: The residency at Spring Workshop then led up to the exhibition. How did you gradually pick up the momentum, and come up with this body of work?

Wong Wai Yin, The ten Wong Wai Yin: Yes, the two-month, seconds that determine whether A gets made into a on-and-off residency at Spring work, 2016, booklet. Courtesy of the artist and Spring Workshop has been instrumental Workshop, Hong Kong. in the realization of the show. As you may have noticed, the titles of these artworks are in a prosaic style. My work isn’t usually born out of an idea, but of a sentence, a scene, or an emotion. Indeed, I have a habit of jotting down quotes or sentences from readings here and there, or thoughts that arise from my daydreaming. They then become a stimulus that I would subsquently develop into a work. The works reveal fragments of my readings, my everyday life—child caring, learning French, or a musical instrument, and so forth. In the booklet titled The ten seconds that determine whether A gets made into a work, published on the occasion of the exhibition, I put together a selection of those quotes and noted some thoughts about my art making.

Phoebe Wong: The collection of texts—the quotes and your writings— reads at once like a confession and a manifesto. I particularly like one line in the booklet, when you are being asked why art exists: “Well, art is like a women who has nothing, but gives off the impression that she doesn’t lack anything.”1 Furthermore, you also have said, “I can’t quite imagine how I can make work without talking about myself.”2

Wong Wai Yin, Tribute to On this note, you seem to have a ‘Inside Looking Out’—for the artist along my way, 2008, propensity to favour working with video. Courtesy of the artist. male artists. In an older work of yours, the video Tribute to ‘Inside Looking Out’—for the artist along my way (2008), features all your male artist friends. And in the video piece Everyone’s sick, (2016) the three interviewees are male artists or practitioners in the art ﬁeld. At the same time, you are concerned about the under-privileged conditions or predicaments that come with being a female artist. Do you consider that a contradiction?

Vol. 16 No. 1 67 Wong Wai Yin: Even Kwan Sheung Chi wondered about that and once Top: Wong Wai Yin, Everyone’s sick, 2016, 3-channel video, commented to me, “I’ve never seen you working with any female (artist).” 17 mins., 24 secs., 11 mins., 32 secs., 19 mins, installation [Laughs.] I do cherish friendship with females; unfortunately it is view of Without Trying, Spring Workshop, Hong Kong. Photo: something I seldom get. I do not have a lot of female friends even though I Michael C. W. Chiu. Courtesy of the artist and Spring was educated in a girls’ school. In any case, in the video piece Everyone’s sick, Workshop, Hong Kong. I invited those three male friends because we have known each other very Bottom: Wong Wai Yin, Everyone’s sick (detail), 2016, well, and all along I have found them a bit crazy. For this type of work— video. Courtesy of the artist and Spring Workshop, Hong using spiritual response therapy (SRT)—you have to be with your close Kong. friends. And because of that, they are very honest in the conversations.

Phoebe Wong: The conversations struck me as coming from people in a mid-life crisis. As these are fairly young individuals, thirty-somethings, I even thought they might be having a premature mid-life crisis. [Laughs.]

68 Vol. 16 No. 1 Wong Wai Yin: We never grow up, even though our youth passes away. [Laughs.]

Phoebe Wong: How did you apply the technique that you learned with SRT into those interviews? What was the process?

Wong Wai Yin: I have a crystal pendulum for the SRT, complete with a set of over thirty charts, and each chart contains a speciﬁc theme. According to the SRT, all elements in the universe work as a whole, and all people’s consciousness are inter-connected. I conducted the interviews by using SRT to address their problems, and thus in turn addressing my own problems.

Phoebe Wong: I notice that some common keywords are shared in the conversations, such as fear, suppression, ambition, violence, self- handicapping, and the like.

Wong Wai Yin: Yes, these words are on the chart, and pointed to by the pendulum. I didn’t invite these friends just because they are eccentric, it’s also because they don’t believe in metaphysics, so I was trying to provoke them too. They all made jokes about me while doing the SRT.

Wong Wai Yin, Clearing ten Phoebe Wong: In the short video thorns, 2016, video, 1 min., 33 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Clearing ten thorns, (2016) you Spring Workshop, Hong Kong. ﬁguratively eliminated the thorns that were bothering you by stomping and smashing foods that you have chosen to represent each of them. They are: cynicism, hierarchy, racism, bandwagon effect, patriotism, patriarchy, economic beneﬁt, authority, one party system, and positive psychology. There seems to be a randomness between the thorns and the foods you have used to represent them—for instance, an apple for cynicism, or, a piece of tofu for the one party system. And I’m very curious about your thoughts pertaining to be against “positive psychology.” What’s your experience with it? Is it different from the SRT that you are practicing?

Wong Wai Yin: Well, I’d say positive psychology tends to over-simplify things; it’s like brain washing. And very often, positive psychology promotes meaningful and fulﬁlled lives that go after fame, materialism, and success. I ﬁnd that problematic.

Phoebe Wong: Although I’m generally not a fan of autobiographical works, I enjoy the candid expression of emotions and the wrongdoing-type of humour in a number of your works, as seen in the cartoonish wooden ﬂash-of-lightening, the singing of a beloved French song, the gawky platform shoes that make you one centimeter higher than your husband, or the training of a dog—a ceramic dog. Always being ready to poke fun

Vol. 16 No. 1 69 at yourself is one of the things that makes you Wong Wai Yin. Curator Top: Wong Wai Yin, A centimeter taller than you, Anthony Yung once called you a satirist with unmitigated skepticism. 2016, video, 1 min., 44 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong. Having said that, I ﬁnd the show Left: Wong Wai Yin, The dog that won’t be trained, 2016, Without Trying as piecemeal. video, 29 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Spring Workshop, Perhaps that has something to do Hong Kong. with the lack of visual coherence and artistic progression that would exemplify an artist of your calibre and experience, if I may be allowed to say it. It is much to do with the fact that you have kept your execution simple, avoiding ostentation of any kind. Besides, your works tend to be microscopic in worldview, which is indeed commonplace among Hong Kong artists.

Wong Wai Yin: Well, I’m not the Wong Wai Yin, Opening all the world’s doors, 2016, keys, type of artist who is desperate to key box, key ring, installation view of Without Trying, Spring carve out an artistic career through Workshop, Hong Kong. Photo: Michael C. W. Chiu. Courtesy developing a signature style. Perhaps of the artist and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong. “piecemeal” is the right word—I use any material, medium, or format for my art making. So, sometimes it is difﬁcult to present myself or talk about my works by employing umbrella terms to describe them.

Phoebe Wong: Anthony Yung’s summing up of your practice back in 2009 is still applicable to your current works, “The works of Wong Wai Yin might appear to be insipid and bland—but why is this the case? As if a collection of dull diary entries, stale and humdrum, she nonetheless invites you to become a reader of it, and is unafraid to be seen as an unimaginative artist. She seems to have deserted her works, relinquished the pursuit of novelty and uniqueness, and is removed from an arrogant form of creation. By treating the ordinary work with unsurprising indifference, an unperturbed balance and an air of nonchalance has been created between the audience and the work itself.”3

70 Vol. 16 No. 1 In fact, in respect to a lot of your previous works, I’d easily put them under one label, namely, institutional critique; and apparently your ideas come before the medium or form.

Wong Wai Yin: Yes, I did move away from making works that ask the ontological questions of art, or, as you have put them under the label of institutional critique.

In the past few years, I have gone through a period of immense self-doubt: I worried if my art was any good at all to others. As in the process of water crystallization, saying good or bad things about it will result in ugly or beautiful formations. By the same token, I once worried that my works carried my negative energies. With the practice of meditation and SRT, I’d say I have reached a resolution—I have no more doubts about art like I used to. Now, I have more faith in art, and art is something I’d really love to do.

Wong Wai Yin, Wish you were Phoebe Wong: The act of burying past works appears to mark this shift, as eternal, 2016, installation view of Without Trying. Photo: shown in the installation Wish you were eternal, (2016) and the video Works Michael C. Chiu. Courtesy of the artist and Spring that know what the artist doesn’t (2016). The video, featuring the last words Workshop, Hong Kong. from the artworks, tickles my imagination by having a dialogue with the inanimate objects through a psychic medium. It reminds me of Christian Jankowski’s piece at the Taipei Biennial (TPB) in 2010, in which he presented a work that is about him consulting a medium for his art career. (Indeed, you were also being featured in the same iteration of TPB).

How did you come to know Percy Mak, a local animal communicator with the gift of having extra-sensory perception?

Wong Wai Yin: I had heard of him before. Four years ago, deeply saddened by the sudden death of my cat, I approached him to inquire about my cat. I wanted to know why he died all of a sudden. Perhaps this might not make

Vol. 16 No. 1 71 Wong Wai Yin, Works that know what the artist doesn’t. 2016, video, 6 mins., 1 sec. Courtesy of the artist.

72 Vol. 16 No. 1 a lot of sense to other people, but I simply couldn’t accept the fact that a cat would die. I was hopelessly miserable. Percy told me that my cat has had to leave this world because he is indeed a guru, and now has his mission in the otherworld in order to help out mistreated animals with their reincarnations.

Phoebe Wong: That sounds comforting, no? Do you differentiate the consciousness between an animal and an object?

Wong Wai Yin: As far as animism is concerned, in Percy’s view, there is no difference between animals and objects. As a psychic medium, Percy believes in uniformity; as one considers oneself an integral part of the universe, it is also possible for anyone to tap into the pool of common consciousness.

Phoebe Wong: I wonder how you feel when you hear what your artworks have said to you. For instance, “We love it when we see a smile, even if it is a silly grin. We want her to smile at us, or grin at us. Weeping. Gentle sobs nearby. We ought to know. We know her thoughts, and we sense what she thinks. We would like her to sit amongst us, all smiles, talking to us. We would like her to tell us stories of how we were born, how she perceives us, as individuals, as groups, as clusters and as a whole. . . . we know it all, but we are never tired of listening.”

Wong Wai Yin: Frankly, the awkward sentimentality gives me goose bumps. I never thought that my works would speak in such an old-school way. [Laughs.]

Wong Wai Yin, Talking Archive, Phoebe Wong: This leads to 2016, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Photo: Kitmin Lee. the other project you have also Courtesy of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. recently ﬁnished at the Asia Art Archive (AAA), being part of the 15 Invitations project that celebrates the AAA’s 15th anniversary in 2016.

Wong Wai Yin: It is indeed my second time to work on an AAA art project. To start off, I went through some of the previous 15 Invitations projects and noticed that people mainly used the AAA’s collections for their writing or for curating an exhibition. In other words, the materials were rarely the “protagonist”; they often played an auxiliary role, so to speak. I then took a humourous approach and decided to turn the materials into the main characters for my project, and, more importantly, I let them speak. It was rather instinctive that I had Percy again to work on another project as such. In addition, I also believed that it would be productive to involve the AAA staff members; so I got them to contribute to the project by sending in questions directed to the AAA collections.

Phoebe Wong: The end result is a seven-minute video with the title Talking Archive. Now, the questions are rather general, and directed towards the organization; that is, AAA. For instance, “As an art book, what’s your mission?,” “Are you happy with AAA?,” “Who would you like to come

Vol. 16 No. 1 73 Wong Wai Yin, Talking Archive, 2016, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Photo: Kitmin Lee. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.

Wong Wai Yin, Talking Archive, 2016, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Photo: Kitmin Lee. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.

visit you?,” “Do you have any advice to the researchers?,” and the like. I’m wondering why you do not address the question to a speciﬁc document, or book. It would perhaps turn out to be quirky, uneven, but one could relate to it in a more speciﬁc manner, no?

Wong Wai Yin: I received over one hundred questions; a lot of the content overlaps, though at the same time they are rather wide-ranging. In the end, I made the decision to select a barrage of questions related to AAA as an institution.

Percy came on board with the project without much prior knowledge of AAA. We booked a room at AAA’s ofﬁce where he worked alone with the selected questions given to him. When he reappeared a few hours later, he had all the answers (in Chinese). We then did the voice recording. The ﬁnal work is a video with a time-lapsed, single-take of the AAA library from day to night— one sees the activities at the library in fast motion—that is accompanied by Percy’s narration. It was great fun turning Percy’s voice into that of an alien who happened to have just come down from a UFO. [Laughs.]

Phoebe Wong: The answers are coherent, and Percy’s language is lyrical. Look at this: “Men and women of different ages, hair in black, red, grey,

74 Vol. 16 No. 1 gold, and white. They pull wheelbarrows. Pile, Pile, pile. Stack, stack, stack. They stack books into sculptures of varying size. Someone takes a book out of a pile. Sitting among the sculptures on a chair made of the same material, the person pulls out a notebook and pen and starts jotting down lines from the book. Some books are ﬂowering; others bear fruit. Some people pile up brick; others move around in the book-built structure.”

And, I have to say, it is super hilarious when Canto-pop lyrics were sung (by Percy) out of the blue: “I wait in solitude until late night. The night is growing older and darker.” (等 / 寂寞到夜深 / 夜已漸荒涼 / 夜已漸昏暗) [Laughs.]

Do you analyze what Percy came up with?

Wong Wai Yin: No, I usually don’t do that. I didn’t give him any information in advance, neither did I add any afterward. I did minor edits to the recorded sound track for the sake of ﬂuidity.

Phoebe Wong: The language in the piece is metaphorical in nature. I am curious about how he captures the fugitive thoughts with words?

Wong Wai Yin, Talking Archive, Wong Wai Yin: I have to tell you 2016, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Photo: Kitmin Lee. that, interestingly enough, that Courtesy of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. isn’t his normal way of speaking. As an animal communicator, Percy speaks to all kinds of animals and all animals speak in different ways. For example, my deceased cat speaks with Chinese idioms, a reﬁned language that suggests wisdom; whereas my friend’s poor cat that suffered from losing hair because of being subjected to blasting music, speaks with more coarse language. [Laughs.] According to Percy, for the AAA project, it was a total visual experience: a large number of vivid visual images emerged in his mind during the “talking session” when he was alone.

Phoebe Wong: The language and subject matter (content) appeared so ﬁttingly coherent.

Wong Wai Yin: That is pretty much by mere chance.

Phoebe Wong: For the monologues in these two videos, with the short prose and keywords being juxtaposed against each other, they struck me as stream of consciousness. From this perspective, as far as spiritual practice is concerned, and on top of your pursuit of self-transcendence, this also may suggest an exploration of a working method to bring forward new aesthetics. I see this approach more or less a methodological experiment too. How will you continue to explore this method in your future work?

Vol. 16 No. 1 75 Wong Wai Yin: I haven’t given much thought to the methodological Kwan Sheung Chi and Wong Wai Yin, And those who were matter. I don’t systematically think about how to make art. Perhaps I would seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could say my practice defies easy categorization, I don’t confine myself to any not hear the music, 2015, video installation. Courtesy of neat category of mediums or styles. Beside, now that I am a believer of the artist. mediumship and spiritualism, I see that as a state of mind, it has more effect on my personal life than on my art making. At one time I didn’t understand how the world functions, now I have a better comprehension. Given that I now have a different worldview, my aesthetics will naturally be different as well, which may be indirectly reflected in my practice, so to speak.

Phoebe Wong: This reminds me of a 2015 video piece you did in collaboration with Kwan Sheung Chi, and what you said in the title: And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. And, here, empathy counts.

Wong Wai Yin: All in all, I quite like the Without Trying show as I am able to talk about my worries, my fears, my motherhood, and other feelings through the works. It’s about personal issues that are subsequently resolved. And considering the autobiographical dimension you mentioned, I don’t think my work is only meaningful to myself, as what I have experienced is common to others too, thus people can relate. Many of my previous works speak to people in the art ﬁeld, whereas the present body of works speaks to non-art people. In this light, this exhibition reaches out to more people.

Notes

1. The ten seconds that determine whether A gets made into a work (Hong Kong: Spring Workshop, 2016), 57. 2. Ibid., 53. 3. Anthony Yung, “Satirist: Wong Wai Yin,” in L’Ecume des choses: L’art de Wong Wai Yin (Guangzhou: Observation Society, 2009), 1.

76 Vol. 16 No. 1 Yu Hsiao Hwei Containers, Napoleon’s Bicorne Hat, Snake: Huang Yong Ping Talks about Empires at Monumenta, Paris

onumenta began in 2007 as an annual event, has been a biennial since 2014, and is known in the world today as a unique art event. Each time, leading international contemporary artists are invited to dialogue with the Beaux-ArtsM architectural jewel of the Nave of the Grand Palais, Paris, an incomparable space—with a floor area of 13,500m, an average height of thirty-five metres, and the central dome rising to forty-five metres. As implied in its name, the very meaning and value of Monumenta’s existence lies in being eventful, spectacular, grandiose, and extraordinary. Following in the footsteps of Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra, Christian Boltanski, Anish Kapoor, Daniel Buren, and Emilia and Ilya Kabanov, Huang Yong Ping, the Chinese-born artist now living in the suburbs of Paris, is the seventh artist to be invited to take part in Monumenta. The official opening of Huang Yong Ping’s exhibition, Empires, especially conceived and created for Monumenta, took place on May 8, 2016. Using over three hundred shipping containers, a huge rollercoaster-like snake skeleton twisting through the entire space, and a Napoleon bicorne hat, he creates a complex picture of the world, and, at the same time, echoes the glass and metal structure of the building’s magnificent dome. From Napoleon to globalized trade, from military and political Empires to economic and capitalist Empires, Huang Yong Ping’s Empires throws into perspective people’s desire for and pursuit of power, and its ups and downs, within the course of history.

Using the Spectacular to Criticize the Spectacular?

Yu Hsiao Hwei: The exhibition booklet published for Monumenta features two sketches entitled Empires, from 2006 and 2008 respectively, long before you were invited to take part in this event. Monumenta ﬁrst took place in 2007, but by the autumn of 2006, the French Ministry of Culture had already announced the organization and character of the event, as well as the names of the ﬁrst three artists to be invited. Had they already asked you to make a proposal at that time?

Huang Yong Ping: I did the ﬁrst sketch on a page in my diary, so it is easy to date it—June 1, 2006—but at that time I was at the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de l’Ile de Vassivière in the centre of France, setting up my solo exhibition Panthéon. On the page of May 31, I wrote: Installations of Walking Up Language, Intestins de Bouddha (Buddha's intestines), Bois de Guanyin (Guanyin Wood) are all completed. On June 3, I wrote “exhibition

Vol. 16 No. 1 77 Huang Yong Ping, Empires, 2016, installation, metal, mixed media, 28.7 x 133 x 164.3 m. Photo: Fabrice Seixas. © ADAGP Huang Yong Ping. Courtesy of the artist, kamel mennour, Paris/London, and Réunion des musées nationaux–Grand Palais.

opening.” Obviously this sketch Huang Yong Ping, preparatory sketch for Empires, 2006. was done in between these two Photo: Fabrice Seixas / archives kamel mennour. © entries and there was really no ADAGP Huang Yong Ping. Courtesy of the artist. logical connection between them. It is futile to try to find the genesis of an artwork. The “ideas” behind creation are like the flow of the unconscious—sometimes they flow away, sometimes they get stuck in the shallows—they are unfathomable. I should make it clear that “making proposals to be selected” is not the way I work, and it was only in 2014, after receiving the invitation to take part in Monumenta, that the sketches I made in 2006 or 2008 didn’t ever really flow away.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Which of the Monumenta exhibitions had you seen previously? Were you able to use them as references, either positively or negatively, in terms of their successes or failures?

78 Vol. 16 No. 1 Huang Yong Ping, Empires, Huang Yong Ping: Again, you can find my response on the page of another 2016, installation, metal, mixed media, 28.7 x 133 x 164.3 m. diary, that of May 31, 2007 (the first edition of Monumenta opened on May Photo: Fabrice Seixas. © ADAGP Huang Yong Ping. Courtesy 30 with German artist Anselm Kiefer). That day I wrote: “. . . it looks as if of the artist, kamel mennour, Paris/London, and Réunion des it were from some place in Germany to another place in Germany, maybe musées nationaux–Grand Palais. he doesn’t want to consider what happened in the early morning of June 14, 1940.”1 On another page I wrote “Centre, power, honour, ‘great artist’? Bureaucracy, vanity, greatness, insignificance, state institutions, imperial buildings, the centre of the centre.” But one should not forget that things that are written down in this way are not always important—my diary often has blank pages—and in the same vein, one artist’s opinion of another artist is not always of significance. What is important is that I already had a general idea of what the symbolism of the Grand Palais’ Monumenta meant—it encompasses culture, reputation, attraction, recognition, and thus implies power.

I ran into Jean de Loisy2 at the Ilya and Emilia Kabakov opening of the sixth edition of Monumenta in May 2014. He told me that I should think about a project for this event (in fact, he was not on the selection committee for Monumenta). I didn’t expect that a month later I was going to be selected as the artist for the seventh edition. I deﬁnitely wouldn’t do it in the way that the Kabakovs did, yet I was not certain as to what I would do. Each time, Monumenta is approached by the next artist either by a reductio ad absurdum or by avoidance. However, the problem is that each person can only do what he or she is capable of doing. What I am capable or incapable of doing already clearly sets me apart from other people [artists], so there is no such question of using another artist’s Monumenta for “reference” or for “drawing lessons” from it.

Vol. 16 No. 1 79 Yu Hsiao Hwei: In the foreword to the exhibition booklet, the Minister of Culture wrote: “Each artist taking part in Monumenta must rise to the challenge of criticizing the spectacular by using the spectacular.” Was criticism of the spectacular one of the starting points of your creation of Empires? How do you see and deal with people’s expectations of Monumenta showing spectacular artworks?

Huang Yong Ping: This is called shooting yourself in the foot, but I didn’t get entangled in this kind of logic. First of all, “spectacular” isn’t my gun, and I could go so far as to say that I’m not even interested in the word; I’m only interested in “spectators” or “spectres.” An artist is at best nothing more than a spectator. Artworks, and in particular this artwork, Empires, are intimately linked to spectres such as Napoleon, Empires, multinationals, globalization, etc.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: The Minister of Culture introduced you as a “Chinese- born French artist,” whereas in the French media you are often referred to as a “Chinese artist,” and the Chinese media generally use terms such as “Chinese artist,” “overseas Chinese artist,” or “ethnic Chinese French artist.” How do you regard these labels? How would you most like people to identify you?

Huang Yong Ping: Everyone chooses a label that suits one’s needs, but at the same time they are deﬁning themselves by labelling others. In 1993, during the dispute prior to the work Théâtre du monde (Theatre of the World) being shown at the Pompidou Centre, someone wrote “ . . . who is, moreover, an artist, and therefore eccentric—and what’s more, in this case, he’s Chinese . . .3

If it is necessary to have this kind of multiple “eccentricity,” then I welcome the use of the label “Chinese,” but it also means that this idea of “Chinese” will cease to exist in the future. If necessary, people will be able to recreate a different “Chinese.” But this problem is here today, and no longer bears any resemblance to what Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) wrote in the seventeenth century, “Which is the more believable of the two? Moses or China?”4 At that time, “China” was seen as some kind of unknown “miracle.” Two hundred years after God is dead or just hiding, the world is dominated by a globalized market. Every country is now just a centre of activity, a place of exchange for this market; “China” no longer has any special status. Playing the “Chinese card” no longer has any strategic signiﬁcance. This is even truer for the expression “overseas Chinese.” This nineteenth century expression that travelled across the seas and oceans, still carries with it today a sense of radiating inward towards oneself, whereas the great machine of the globalized market operates by using its mighty centrifugal force.

Monumenta: A Typical Case of Expenditure

Yu Hsiao Hwei: The organizational model of Monumenta is rather particular. From what I understand, the artist receives an invitation from

80 Vol. 16 No. 1 the Ministry of Culture’s selection committee, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux—Grand Palais (Rmn-GP) is responsible for administrative operations and personnel and other exhibition expenses related to the installing and uninstalling of the exhibition, but the actual cost of the creation of the artwork is covered by the artist, his or her gallery, and sponsors. Therefore, raising money has become an inevitable part of the artist’s creation, it could even be said to be the key element; for instance, in the last edition of Monumenta, the reason that the Kabakovs’s exhibition was able to come back to life was because at the last minute they got funding from some Russian businessmen, their gallery sold some works and found some sponsors. So how do you feel about the contemporary art system, with the market and sponsors becoming more and more inﬂuential? What role did your gallery play?

Huang Yong Ping: The Grand Palais’ Monumenta exhibition is not an ordinary solo exhibition in an art museum, and it is even less like an exhibition in a gallery. Even though the support of art by France’s public budget is limited, and thus private sponsorship is necessary (if you take my project as an example, the support of the kamel mennour Gallery has been very important), one thing must be clear: an artist’s project is not changed by outside forces. This is very important for me and there is no way I would change something because of a gallery’s involvement. This kind of cooperation can be understood only as a kind of common “craziness.” But what I want to talk about is “expenditure,” not about “raising money.” The concept of unproductive expenditure comes from Georges Bataille—and is “luxury, mourning, wars, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (sexual behaviour deviating from reproductive purposes).”5 Monumenta’s idea of one artist, one work, and one large space is indeed a typical example of expenditure. It is done in order to go beyond the conventional cycle of today’s museum system, but also in order to transcend the cycle of exhibition/market and production/ collection in contemporary art, as well as to destroy the system of weighing pros and cons and overcautious thinking. It’s about consuming energy— artistic creative energy. For all participants Monumenta is like one festival, one ceremony, one utopia.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: What kind of role did the curator, Jean de Loisy, play? How do you feel about his understanding and interpretation of the work Empires? In the essay for the exhibition booklet, he wrote at great length to try to establish a connection between you creating a landscape—using shipping containers stacked up at different heights as the outlines of valleys and the snake’s meandering body as ﬂowing water—with the traditional aesthetics of Chinese landscape painting.

Huang Yong Ping: I saw a lot of Jean de Loisy during the two years of preparation. He was always terribly enthusiastic and was constantly bursting with ideas in order to help the project along. This was particularly true after I had not provided a written explanation of the project, and so this task then fell onto his shoulders as the curator; that is, he just stuck his neck out

Vol. 16 No. 1 81 82 Vol. 16 No. 1 Huang Yong Ping, Empires, to provide the first target. And he started the article using a quote of mine 2016, installation, metal, mixed media, 28.7 x 133 x 164.3 m. from the 1990s, “I believe in infinite openness of interpretation. Just as I Photo: Fabrice Seixas. © ADAGP 6 Huang Yong Ping. Courtesy don’t believe in interpretation.” This implied on the one hand opposing the of the artist, kamel mennour, Paris/London, and Réunion dictatorship of meaning (interpretation), and on the other hand provoking des musées nationaux–Grand Palais. the multiplication of meaning (interpretation). It appeared that this project was trying to transcend (transgress) art itself. It brought up issues of politics, economy, war, history, mythology, and so on. This is what we were both interested in. This was also the purpose of his conversation with Pascal Lamy (Director-General of the World Trade Organisation from 2005 to 2013) about the project.7 And when he was talking about the tradition of Chinese landscape painting, he also cited my point of view, “. . . I’ve rejected aesthetics; I specifically refused to make art according to the precepts of traditional Chinese aesthetics.”8 This shows that the intentions of an author and the expectations of the viewer are often at loggerheads. I accept this kind of paradox. The containers do indeed create “valleys,” but what about the “water”? During the days I have been answering your questions, the Seine in Paris rose to uncommonly high levels . . . the Grand Palais had to close for two days!

Containers: The World’s Largest Ready-mades

Yu Hsiao Hwei: In the past, when sponsors provided ﬁnancial, technical, or material support, their names would appear only on the promotional material, whereas this time they appear directly on your work: you can see all over the containers the name of the French shipping company that sponsored you; it has become part of your work. Was this a reluctant compromise or an intentional strategy on your part? Another question: this was the ﬁrst time I have noticed “colour” in your works; that is to say, your deliberate use of bright colours. According to the curator, the way containers were stacked, and the way the colours were put together, was all done according to your requirements. Could you talk about your use of colour, and also about what kind of effect you were aiming to create?

Huang Yong Ping: The French shipping group CMA CGM sponsored this exhibition, providing the 305 containers (forty-foot and twenty-foot containers), as well as undertaking the transportation and installation of the containers. At the beginning of this project, I had hoped to be able to use today’s globalized props—a geographical panorama of containers, including Maersk (Denmark), Hapag-Lloyd (Germany), MSC (Italy), COSCO (China), Matson (USA), UASC (Kuwait), Hanjin (South Korea), K-Line (Japan), Evergreen (Taiwan), etc. However, after several rounds of discussion with CMA CGM, the world’s third largest container shipping group, they said that in compliance with their company policy, they would only allow the use of their own or their subsidiaries containers. This work was built upon the harsh reality of competitive exclusion and a dog-eat- dog attitude among multinational corporations. So, inevitably, you see the real company logos on the containers everywhere because they are indeed part of my work. I positioned the container with the logo “Capital” on it to be on the bottom row right opposite the entrance, and just above it I

Vol. 16 No. 1 83 placed one that had the code “GESU” written on it, to make people think Huang Yong Ping, Empires, 2016, installation, metal, mixed of the homophone “Jesus,” and in this way think about capital (city)/ media, 28.7 x 133 x 164.3 m. Photo: Fabrice Seixas. © ADAGP capital (money) plus Jesus/religion. Then they could look up and see the Huang Yong Ping. Courtesy of the artist, kamel mennour, two containers on the seventh row forming a triangle, pointing towards the Paris/London, and Réunion des musées nationaux–Grand Palais. French ﬂag ﬂying above the dome of the building. If the viewer is attentive and sensitive, one can see that it is indeed all very carefully arranged. As for the colours, it is not something that I wanted to emphasize particularly; it is simply that containers from different companies have different colours.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: You moved 305 containers into the Grand Palais; in the use of these ready-mades, what rapport does your gesture have in comparison with Marcel Duchamp bringing a urinal into the art museum?

Huang Yong Ping: Aren’t containers Huang Yong Ping, Empires, 2016, installation, metal, mixed the world’s largest ready-mades? media, 28.7 x 133 x 164.3 m. Photo: Fabrice Seixas. © ADAGP And they were created in order to Huang Yong Ping. Courtesy of the artist, kamel mennour, facilitate the ﬂow of “ready-mades.” Paris/London, and Réunion des musées nationaux–Grand Palais. The concept of industrial ready- made goods has been transformed into a cultural ready-made or a historical ready-made—like Napoleon’s bicorne hat. The signiﬁcance of ready-mades today is to use objects to understand objects. Your mention of Duchamp makes me think of a work he created in 1912 entitled The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes. If I were to see the snake’s skeleton as the snake’s “double nudes,” could it really be encircling a bicorne hat?

84 Vol. 16 No. 1 Huang Yong Ping, Empires, Skinless and Fleshless Snake Skeleton 2016, installation, metal, mixed media, 28.7 x 133 x 164.3 m. Photo: Fabrice Seixas. © ADAGP Huang Yong Ping. Courtesy Yu Hsiao Hwei: Why do you always use snake skeletons with no skin of the artist, kamel mennour, Paris/London, and Réunion des or ﬂesh? Is it to open up the viewer’s imagination, to make space for musées nationaux–Grand Palais. the existence of different forms? This time, the gigantic snake weaving over Empires is inspired by and a reference to a snake specimen in the Natural History Museum in Paris; does this reference have any particular signiﬁcance?

Huang Yong Ping: Both snake skin and snake meat can be eaten by humans, and once eaten, the only thing left are the bones. So the snake’s skeleton is a snake’s minimalism. The remaining snake skeleton is similar to what you can see in the Gallery of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy: the snake’s skeleton has 102 teeth, and its lower jaw is separate . . . this has not been pulled out of thin air, and I especially wanted to get rid of any connotations of a dragon. However, completely unscientiﬁc features emerged from this “scientiﬁc” research; I made it weave above the neatly stacked containers, I made it coil around “that hat,” and was even ready to make it tie around itself.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Another question is about the size. An image with different proportions being ampliﬁed or reduced will produce different feelings, visualizations, references, and meanings. The containers are original objects of two different sizes that have been brought here intact, but what about the snake skeleton and Napoleon’s hat? By what proportions did you amplify each of them? What were the thought processes behind it?

Huang Yong Ping: Of course “size” and “proportion” are the keys to understanding this work. A container has its original proportions intact—it

Vol. 16 No. 1 85 is, after all, reality. Economic activity actually fights against “amplification” Huang Yong Ping, Empires, 2016, installation, metal, mixed or “reduction”; it calculates a kind of “objective” standard, a standard media, 28.7 x 133 x 164.3 m. Photo: Fabrice Seixas. © ADAGP of human reality. Whereas power, desire, and ambition are all forms of Huang Yong Ping. Courtesy of the artist, kamel mennour, amplification; politics that are not“amplified” can hardly be called “politics.” Paris/London, and Réunion des musées nationaux–Grand Palais. And the snake skeleton? It’s related to myth, to the supernatural, to the negation of a given object, and is thus amplified. The snake skeleton is “amplified” to make people “shrink” in comparison.

Seeing World Relations Through Games

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Although your Huang Yong Ping, Empires, 2016, 1:20 scale model, studio work for Monumenta is addressing view. Photo: Fabrice Seixas © ADAGP Huang Yong Ping. serious, major issues such as Empires Courtesy of the artist, kamel mennour, Paris/London, and changes in civilizations, it is and Réunion des musées nationaux–Grand Palais. also possible to appreciate it in a less serious way—as if it consisted of huge building blocks and a rollercoaster (some photos show you in your studio with the model where it looks as if you are really playing inside!). When you ﬁrst started this project, did you imagine Empires would also give people a sense of fun and games?

Huang Yong Ping: As early as 1984, when I was reading Wittgenstein, I became particularly interested in his theory of language-game. At the time I wrote: “The game here is a fable, a metaphor. The game is not a game. The game is not about playing, but you can play the game.”9 The composition and conception of this work can also be found in game theory, with three games as examples—mah-jong, go, and chess. Mah-jong corresponds to the containers because they are neatly stacked like mah-jong tiles; the mah- jong tile fa (to get rich) corresponds to the Cai logo (also to get rich) on the

86 Vol. 16 No. 1 containers. The way of playing mah-jong with containers is built on “getting rich” and “gambling,” playing the game with only three players (with one player missing), “three, missing one player.” Go corresponds to the carefully positioned skeleton of the snake. The snake skeleton weaves around in the space, just like go stones that are laid out on the board: the skeleton is “anonymous” because it is not a snake, and it is also an expression of the “collective” (it is made up of 316 vertebrae and 568 ribs). The skeleton demarcates the containers, encircles Napoleon’s hat, shatters the exhibition space, and then takes control of the space. As Gilles Deleuze said, “The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis.”10 Whether it be chess, the State, or court games, Napoleon’s bicorne hat is in the centre of the exhibition hall, sitting on top of the two-row three-tiered (tricoloured) “Arc de Triomphe” containers, all underneath the French ﬂag. In the game of chess, which is thought to have originated from a game played by emperors in ancient China, the positions and moves are all coded, and all provide corresponding power. Of course, these three kinds of games coexist within the one space, and this is to address the relationship between the containers, the snake skeleton, and Napoleon’s hat.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Both the English or French version of the title of the exhibition, Empires, uses the plural form. What Empires are you wanting to talk about, and what kind of connections do they have?

Huang Yong Ping, Empires, 2016, installation, metal, mixed media, 28.7 x 133 x 164.3 m. Photo: Fabrice Seixas. © ADAGP Huang Yong Ping. Courtesy of the artist, kamel mennour, Paris/London, and Réunion des musées nationaux–Grand Palais.

Huang Yong Ping: The title Empires was suggested by Jean de Loisy, which was quite logical given the striking image of Napoleon’s hat. I have already said that the title of a work is an intentional or unintentional snag, even a trap. Just like the empty bicorne hat that sits up there looks so much like an apparatus of capture (picture Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, where a whole chapter is devoted to discussing the apparatus of capture— state apparatus). Empires, em-pires.11 Looking at the work, you can see that there are three Empires tangled up together: The container empire— today’s multinational corporations? Napoleon’s empire—the “universal and homogeneous state” (in Alexandre Kojève’s words) from two hundred years ago until tomorrow? The snake’s empire—an inhuman, unpredictable chaos?

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Have you read Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire? When it was published in 2000, it immediately provoked discussion among

Vol. 16 No. 1 87 Huang Yong Ping, Empires, 2016, installation, metal, mixed media, 28.7 x 133 x 164.3 m. Photo: Fabrice Seixas. © ADAGP Huang Yong Ping. Courtesy of the artist, kamel mennour, Paris/London, and Réunion des musées nationaux–Grand Palais.

Western intellectuals, and was also translated into Chinese. Did this book inspire you in any way? The reason I ask is because at the end of the book it mentions that today, in a globalized capitalist empire, the most effective form of resistance is the “snake” (as opposed to Marx’s description in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte of the mole-like proletarian revolution)! In the landscape of a global network of capitalist Empires, a snake is able to slither and slide its way everywhere, is able to lunge directly at any point, striking at the heart of the empire. Looking at it from this angle, is the huge snake slithering all over the landscape of containers in the Grand Palais ready to leap up and attack?

Huang Yong Ping: Yes, I did read the Chinese translation of this book in 2003, but the Empires project started taking shape with the appearance of the bicorne hat. And the idea of Napoleon came from reading the German duo Hegel and Nietzsche, and the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. The hat I chose from the Battle of Eylau happens to be from the same year (1807) as the ﬁrst edition of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit.12 But what is even more of a coincidence is that, as you mention, a snake appears in Hardt and Negri’s Empire: “Today the snake’s road of struggle we witness either cannot provide us with any clear tactics, or it is simply that this road of struggle is completely incomprehensible to tacticians.”13 As Negri explains in the notes,

88 Vol. 16 No. 1 the snake comes from Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control: “If money’s old moles are the animals you get in places of conﬁnement, then control societies have their snakes. We’ve gone form one animal to the other, from moles to snakes, not just in the system we live under but in the way we live and in our relationships with other people too. Disciplinary man produced energy in discreet amounts, while control man undulates, moving among a continuous range of different orbits. ‘Surﬁng’ had taken over from all the old ‘sports’.”14 What is more, at the end of his essay, Deleuze writes: “A snake’s coils are even more complex than a mole’s burrow.”15 Is it possible that Deleuze also studied snake bones? The reason behind me saying this is to explain that we are moving away from the artwork itself, and entering into a text of interpretation and intertextuality.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: What role does the audience play in this “immersive” work? Are they purely spectators? Or are they the oppressed, vulnerable masses at the bottom of society? In such a vast space, beneath such a huge work, people do resemble ants.

Huang Yong Ping: What is immersive? I would prefer to call it enshrouding. It isn’t my work that is a huge shroud, but, rather, that the work and the people viewing it are in the same situation in the Grand Palais—in a huge iron cage. Is this work ﬁghting against the huge iron cage? Or is it in cahoots with the huge iron cage conspiring to oppress the viewers? However, from an aesthetic perspective, viewers like to be oppressed. The people who are really at the bottom of society, beggars and homeless people, no doubt never go into this huge iron cage, the same way that real artists may never visit an exhibition. An artist is nothing but a variant of a beggar or a homeless person.

Notes

1. On the morning of June 14, 1940, Hitler’s German troops entered Paris and occupied the city. 2. Jean de Loisy is current president of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, curator of the fourth Monumenta exhibition with Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan; he is also this edition’s curator for Huang Yong Ping’s Empires. 3. Nathalie Heinich, “Esthétique, symbolique et sensibilité: de la cruauté considérée comme un des beaux-arts,” Agone no. 13 (1995). Le text original est “ . . . qui plus est artiste et donc excentrique— et de surcroît chinois. . . .” 4. Blaise Pascal, Pensées de Blaise Pascal (Paris: édition Brunschvicg, 1897), 593. 5. Georges Bataille, La notion de dépense was ﬁrst published in 1933; it was later expanded on and published as La part maudite (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1949). 6. Interview with Jérôme Sans, Chine demain pour hier (Pourrières: Les Domaines de l’Art, 1990), 68–71. 7. The conversation is also published in the exhibition booklet. 8. Nos mondes en langues: conversation entre Huang Yong Ping et Francois Jullien (Paris: Klincksieck- Kamel Mennour, 2016). 9. Huang Yong Ping, “Image–Word–Objet,” Fei Dawei, ed., in New Wave Archives II (Shanghai: Renmin Publishing, 2007). 10. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Pleateaux (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980). 11. By dismantling the French word for empire into em-pire (pire means worse), Huang Yong Ping comments on empires. 12. In 1807 the French and the Russian armies met in battle in the small town of Eylau, Prussia; it was one of the bloodiest battles in Napoleon’s military career. Both sides suffered heavy losses; over 25,000 soldiers died. 13. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). A literal translation from the Chinese translation cited by Huang Yong Ping. 14. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992), 3–7. 15. Ibid.

Vol. 16 No. 1 89 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky

Amazing Grace: Contemporary Chinese Christian Art

Contemporary Chinese Christianity Christianity is not new to China. By the nineteenth century, after several centuries of proselytizing, missionary activities became increasingly successful.1 Christian teachings spread rapidly, enjoying support at all levels of society until 1949 when the new communist government enacted measures restricting the practice of all religions. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) the government outlawed religion, and temples of all denominations were attacked and destroyed.2 After 1979, the government eased such proscriptions and the central Religious Affairs Bureau, along with the State, approved religious associations and the United Front Work Department regulated religious practice. Ofﬁces were set up on national, provincial, and civic levels.3

The central Religious Affairs Bureau has two missions—managing the practical affairs of temples and writing policy.4 Since 2005, five state approved associations for the five recognized religions have been permitted—Buddhism, Daoism, and Islam each have an association, and Protestantism and Catholicism each have two associations—the China Christian Council and Three-Self Patriotic Movement Committee of Protestant Churches of China, and the China Catholic Patriotic Association and Chinese Catholic Bishops Conference.5 These governing bodies administer funds to regulate the restoration of temples, to help reclaim temple lands and buildings, and to ensure compliance with party regulations. Church activities are monitored, worship is endorsed only at state sponsored temples that are self-supporting financially and patriotic in accepting leadership of the party members.6 Service in such government organizations is not voluntary and members are not “necessarily believers given the dictum that party members must be atheists.”7 The Chinese Communist Party is wary of Christianity because it is a foreign religion and identified with imperialist Western military forces. More importantly perhaps is the fact that Christianity promotes wholehearted loyalty to its god and doctrines. Such attitudes instigate watchfulness and monitor strict adherence to regulations in education and the production of printed matter.8 Conditions are even more difficult for religious activity not scrutinized by the state.

Christianity, however, is not a monolithic entity in China; instead, there are a complex of factions with various regional or sectarian groups and independent practices. It is difﬁcult to calculate the number of the latter

90 Vol. 16 No. 1 Next page: Li Qiang, The as their observance is private and they are a disparate group with rural Sound Disappeared Project, 2004, installation. Courtesy of and urban populations that consist of both uneducated and academic the artist. followers. It is easy to imagine Christianity spreading among the troubled population of the poor rural areas and disenfranchised itinerant urbanites.9 In addition, as Daniel H. Bays, one of the most important writers on Christianity in China, notes: “Perhaps the most striking feature of contemporary Protestantism is the large number of new converts . . . who are products of Chinese popular culture.”10 But, surprisingly, there is a rising contingent among the intellectual class, who, finding the level of intellectual discourse in the Church unappealing, have little interest in attending or interacting with the Church; instead, they fashion their own kind of religious observation.11 The contemporary artists I will be discussing here belong to this group and many are professors in colleges. They are a part of the population, who, having no formal place of worship, practice in their homes, or “home church.”12 They think they represent the true church in order to distinguish themselves from those registered with government agencies and who follow a formal means of worship.13 There is no ideological or structural conformity among the home churches,14 and, more importantly, they do not consider themselves as part of the world religion—they reject Western institutional conventions and many do not go to church. Rather, they identify as Chinese followers of Christ, and in their intimate relationship to Jesus Christ and the Bible, they perform their own kind of personal prayer and rituals.15 It should be said, however, that such autonomous groups are vulnerable to punitive state action, including physical harassment, detention, fines, and labour re-education or prison sentences.16 In the current climate more restrictions are evident. For example, this year the government ordered that all crucifixes be removed from the exteriors of churches.17

Christianity is indeed blossoming throughout China today, and many artists who have turned to it are expressing their faith. There are other prominent Chinese artists who do not necessarily relate to speciﬁc religious convictions, but they are able to express their discontent with current social developments by contrasting the spiritual realm embodied in religious art with the harsh realities of everyday life, among them Miao Xiaochun, Cui Xiuwen, Gao Yuan, and Li Qiang.

For example, Li Qiang is not a practicing Christian, but for decades he lived in a poor village outside of Nanjing and his works record the practices of “home church” Christians in rural China. Born in 1966 in Jiangsu province, in a small town outside of Nanjing, Li Qiang graduated in 1993 from the Jiangsu Institute of Education, and he now lives and works in Beijing.18 For thirty years following graduation he lived in a rural area outside of Nanjing teaching art. His work documents the pious faith of the dour existence of the villagers who turned to Christianity in the 1980s when Western proselytizers arrived in the countryside. Today, economically, things are worse: the younger generation ﬂed the village to seek opportunities in the city, leaving the elders behind. Li Qiang sardonically told me that life was so difﬁcult in the poor village that the local priest escaped to Shanghai to be

Vol. 16 No. 1 91 an itinerant street sweeper.19 And one day Li Qiang realized that the local people, though illiterate, seemed to be reading in some way the Bibles given to them by the missionaries.20 His 2004 project, The Sound Disappeared, was the result of this observation:

I started to exchange the old used Bibles from the local Christian church with my new ones, while at the same time I wrote down the [villagers’] names and recorded the sounds [of their prayers] and put them together with the Bibles. During this process, I found many Christians cannot read and write. They had made marks somewhere inside the book, which accordingly they can read phonetically in order. “Thank you God,” they read, “for the sake of understanding the Truth.” I put these books, the mike, their recorded prayers and photos of them together since I hope the world can hear the sound.

Li Qiang, The Sound In a series of installations, he Disappeared Project, 2004, mounted on the walls framed photos installation. Courtesy of the artist. he took of his neighbours. In these black-and-white headshots, the subjects tend to avoid the camera lens; they appear reticent, sincere, and meditative. Their Bibles are placed together on a table placed near their photos and in some iterations of the installation they are open to the page where the transliteration of their prayers is written. Sometimes, microphones positioned near the Bibles suggest the source of the recorded prayers. Li Qiang also provided a book in which viewers were able to record their impressions of his work, as he is curious about the response of the audience.

92 Vol. 16 No. 1 Gao Brothers, Miss Mao No. 1, 2006, painted ﬁberglass, 49.8 x 30 x 24.9 cm. Courtesy of the artists.

Chinese Artists Who Are Adherents of Christianity One phenomenon of the Christianity movement in contemporary China is the substantial number of adherents who are artists, and this is in contrast to the dearth of Christian content in the West.

Well known in art circles are the Gao Brothers. Gao Zhen, born in 1956, and Gao Qiang, born in 1962 in Jinan, have a gallery cum cafe, The High Place, in the 798 district of Beijing. Together they pursue a number of different forms of artistic expression—painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and photographic projects. Western galleries and media have heralded in particular their artistic efforts that critique the government such as Ms. Mao (2009), a bitterly ironic recreation of the image of the Great Leader. His elongated nose is like Pinocchio’s and represents his many lies; his long pigtail alludes to Chinese subservience under the Manchu during the last dynasty and his enormous breasts signify his promiscuity. The work cannot be shown in China, but versions of it have appeared in Europe, and a more recent monumental work features a tiny Ms. Mao perilously perched on the top of a head of Lenin.21 Their art has also exposed the blackmail, intimidation, and abuse of prostitutes; a life-size bronze sculpture enacting the rough-handed arrest by police of a teenage girl was removed from the area in front of their Beijing gallery/cafe.22 But the religious aspects of their work have been for the most part largely ignored. A sense of the Christian

Vol. 16 No. 1 93 spirit is evident in their on-going performance series, Utopia of a Hug, Gao Brothers, Miserable Prostitute, 2007, painted which began in 2000. Taking place in various sites at home and abroad, the stainless steel, life-sized. Courtesy of the artists. performance is distinctly inspired by a Christian ethos and provides a salve for isolation and hurt. In the performances, strangers gather together to embrace each other, at times fully naked, in spite of the fact that in general, hugging and other types of overt expressions of physical intimacy are eschewed in China.23

Beginning in 2001, they staged a Gao Brothers, The Utopia of a Hug for Twenty Minutes, No. series of performances in one of the 1, 2000, C print, 110 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artists. hundreds of unfinished skyscrapers that populate Beijing. Friends, artists, itinerant labourers, and prostitutes, as well as passersby joined together for the event. The brothers then took photographs of these individuals and manipulated them in a computer, digitally adding to the crowd of figures a montage of photos of famous figures and events—a toppling statue of Mao, a raging fire, crimes being committed, bodies lying on the ground bleeding, Osama Bin Ladin clad only in underwear sitting in a great comfy chair drinking beer, tumbling acrobats, and blind men walking with canes among the chaos of sports cars, trucks, and bicycles. Still, a subtle reference to their personal religious beliefs appears towering over the rest of the image in the form of Christ’s crucifixion.

The Gao Brothers, however, do not belong to any speciﬁc Christian institution; instead, they live their lives guided by a resolute faith in what Jesus represents. In an interview, they averred they know little of Christian doctrine, have rarely entered a church outside of Europe, or formally observe any holidays or religious rituals.24 They explained that one night both dreamt of Christ, and upon awakening were astonished to ﬁnd they

94 Vol. 16 No. 1 Gao Brothers, The Forever Unﬁnished Building No. 4, 2008, C print, 100 x 296 cm. Courtesy of the artists.

Vol. 16 No. 1 95 had the same vision, and this led them to embrace a Christian belief. They explained that after the Tian’anmen event in 1989:

We experienced deep Gao Brothers, Humanities’ Anxiety of the Great Crucifix, disillusion, but we didn’t want 1995, mixed media sculpture. Courtesy of the artists. to let the disillusion drain us of our faith. Meanwhile, our life experiences constantly let us think of the crucifix, death, and rebirth, to think of everything which may be meaningful and meaningless, constructed and deconstructed, noble and comedic, holy and base. . . . We think it is these experiences and ideas that prompted the series World Night, Mass at Dawn, Century Dusk and Humanities’ Anxiety of the Great Crucifix, which was exhibited at the Jinan Painting Institute in 1995. But this was not a public exhibition; it was just open to some of our friends. In 1996, Dao Zi, the art critic, as our curator, planned to exhibit the Great Crucifix series at Capital Normal University Art Gallery in Beijing, but the exhibition was censored and canceled before it was open. This means this series has never been exhibited publicly in China or elsewhere in the world.25 This series is a result of our experiences and ideas; it is the symbolic expression of our spiritual dilemma, but also a way to go out from the dilemma.26

The series World Night, Mass at Dawn, Century Dusk, and Humanities’ Anxiety of the Great Crucifix (1995), consists of large-scale multi-media sculptures. One brilliantly red, giant form of the cross with cabinet doors suggests a number of narratives—when closed its surface is covered with seemingly random dates, which, they explained “ . . . suggest the years of past and future, the fates known and unknown . . .” When open, the cabinets convey the inner space of the Cross. In the giant light-filled red skeletal frame of the cross, they explain, “We think people have deviated from faith, hope, and love. We try to imply a condition of critical crisis after deviating from faith, hope, and love. That is why one form of the cross is tilted,”27 and, thus, affirms that the Great Crucifix is a visual metaphor of the age of God’s withdrawal from the world.

Even more provocative is their 2009 bronze sculpture, Mao Killing Christ with a Riﬂe, which referenced Edouard Manet’s Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico (1867), and it serves as an allusion to Mao’s suppression of any religion, including Christianity.28

Gao Brothers, The Execution of Painter and photographer, Cao Christ, 2009, bronze, life-sized. Yuanming, who was born in 1974 in Courtesy of the artists. Suzhou, Anhui province, currently teaches at Shanghai University.29 Now a Christian convert, Cao Yuanming is the gatekeeper at his local church in

96 Vol. 16 No. 1 Gao Brothers, Century Dusk, 1995, mixed media sculpture. Courtesy of the artists.

Gao Brothers, Century Dusk, 1995, mixed media sculpture. Courtesy of the artists.

Vol. 16 No. 1 97 Cao Yuanming, Waman Village Church (Pastor Series), 2007, C print, 140 x 118 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Cao Yuanming, DaZhang Church (Pastor Series), 2007, C print, 140 x 125 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Shanghai. Moved by the impoverished circumstances of his church and the devoutness of its adherents, he has compiled a photographic record of it and other small rural churches, with members of the congregations and30 their pastors holding photographic images of their places of worship.

Other works are infused with a haunting spirituality revealed in photographs of the faithful’s folded cloths that serve as cushions on their humble pews and of the cheap woodblock prints on paper icons representing their faith that are pasted on the walls of their homes and on the doors of local buildings. In a modernist compositional fashion, he arranged these small photos into a geometrical grid within large-scale C prints. In the C print of old and worn out stools on which the congregation sits, each stool takes on an anthropomorphic persona that emphasizes modesty and genuineness. In his own words, Cao Yuanming

98 Vol. 16 No. 1 Cao Yuanming, Humble Faith, explains how he has been investigating this unofﬁcial form of Christianity 2009, C print, 121 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist. that is taking place in local houses made into places of worship, and small rural churches not represented by the state supported churches:

I spent four years researching in various provinces, such as Anhui, Henan, Shandong, etc. Since the Cold War, religion has been the key to conﬂicts . . . There are nearly a hundred million Christians in China now. Churches in the countryside present the primary space where Christian culture and Chinese local culture meet and blend together. My artworks are mainly discussing Chinese peasants’ imagination towards foreign religion. They have never been to the West, nor have they seen the Western churches. They have built the churches based on their fantasy and fully intake the religion as a part of their life.

In another work from 2008, he buried resin-coated Bibles in the sand during the wheat planting season and harvested them with the crops one year later. In this way, he declares, he made fossils of the Bible, attesting to their spiritual survival over thousands of years. The process invested them with the ancient associations of the biblical culture from which they evolved.

Daozi, born in 1956 in Qingdao under the given name Wang Min,31 is a well-known art critic, writer, and professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. As a result of his participation in the 1989 Tian’anmen incident he was arrested and put in jail. He explained it was there, in jail, that he ﬁrst encountered Christianity, which he calls the new Christianity to distinguish it from its more traditional institutional forms.32 Today, he and others from the academic community in Beijing, along with people

Vol. 16 No. 1 99 from his neighbourhood, meet for unofﬁcial weekly prayer meetings in a Cao Yuanming, Chinese Church Stools Series, 2004–08, variety of local places. In the aftermath of recent personal turmoil, Daozi’s C print, 120 x 160 cm. Courtesy of the artist. faith has become more resolute, and being a visual person he turned to painting as a form of meditation, and it soon became a form of prayer. In addition, revitalizing the traditional Chinese ink painting technique was an important choice for him, as he is keenly aware of the secondary role this medium has taken in the realm of painting since the introduction and subsequent domination of Western oils and acrylics on canvas. Daozi calls his work, Saintism:

When we say Saintism art, in a broad sense we mean Christian art. In a narrow sense, Christian art emphasizes a more direct communication of the Christian faith, with clear missionary overtones. Because of this, in the contemporary semantic landscape it has been put in absolute service to theology and the essentials of the church. Thus it has appeared as conﬁned and marginalized. However, Christian art in its broad sense is “Saintism art.” It is art that does not only face the historical gospel and the church that defends it, but, rather, it also echoes the continually life-giving truth of the kingdom of God, and places importance upon the individual experience of the Christian faith, upon its characterization amidst the contemporary milieu, and upon the connections in the themes and subject matter of every work. It gives expression to the grace and truth, suffering and redemption, compassion and universal love of Christ. Thus, “Saintism art” changes with the aesthetics of the times, and on its own demonstrates free visual form and style. Through the deep

100 Vol. 16 No. 1 Cao Yuanming, Holy Bible, spiritually moving power of Christ, people will also enter 2007–08, C print, 100 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist. into the realm of sacred meaning. Among the mysteries of God, there is the mystery of freedom, which continually widens that which once chose a narrow ﬁeld of vision, and helps us out of the woods right now.33

Large-scale and freely executed with broad brushes in an ink wash medium on rice paper, the paintings evoke in a semiabstract manner traditional Christian symbols—a crucifix of simply arranged stalks of bamboo, angels in flight, haloed figures, a wine chalice, and a crown of thorns. These are the central themes of his improvisational monochromatic ink works, which have at times occasional splashes of colour. Executed during long meditative prayer sessions, these paintings, in their immediacy and evocative technique of free brushwork, resemble the spontaneous work of the thirteenth century Song dynasty Zen masters. In this way, Daozi has combined spiritual works of the past, using the technique and medium of Zen ink painting, with Christian iconography. His art, like much of the Chinese practice of Christianity, displays little of Western aesthetic culture—they are more representative of a domestic Chinese development. In recent works, Daozi is making more abstract compositions characterized by a liberal use of gold leaf, and, in addition, he carves seals with religious emblems and, in Chinese literati fashion, discretely applies them onto the rice paper.

Gao Ge, who was born in 1964 in Shandong province, now works and resides in Shanghai and Beijing and is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Shandong University of Technology.34 One of his paintings, The Good Fruit (2008), illustrates the fruits of the tree of goodness, for, as the Bible says, “Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit,” (Matthew 7:17). In delicate washes of grey ink

Vol. 16 No. 1 101 Daozi, Saintism, 2010, ink on rice paper, 152.4 x 96.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

102 Vol. 16 No. 1 Left: Daozi, Harvest, 2013, ink and colour on rice paper, 140 x 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Daozi, God and Gold, 2015, ink and gold leaf on rice paper, 137 x 69 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

applied to unprimed canvas, the image is barely visible. Moreover, it seems as if the internal structure of the fruit and its pit are visible through the veils of a light grey wash. The image of the fruit, almost ﬁlling the entire area of the canvas, takes on a monumental and luminous quality that is resonant of the famous mystical monochrome painting of Persimmons by the thirteenth century Zen artist Mu Qi.35 Gao Ge’s vision of a common everyday food conveys a mysterious spiritual quality as well, and its title, a quotation from the Gospel of St Matthew, provides a speciﬁc biblical reference. In a private with me communication he wrote:

After 2009, my works were mainly concentrated on the “Writing Bible” series. The peaceful and stable feeling gained from reading the Bible on a daily base seemed all came from God. Most of my works were inspired from the Bible, reﬂecting people’s anxiety and confusion caused by society . . . writing the Bible’s “Lord's Prayer” 7 times with one layer overlapping the other obviously has very clear spiritual direction. Each time, the repetitive writing is the best way for self-improvement while at the same time expressing a universal way and outlet for spiritual salvation…All I have is the praise and worship of God together with my admiration and longing for God. I am willing to humbly accept the revelation from heaven. The love and revelation of God were poured out as I continued to worship, praise, and express my longing for him. In his glorious presence, life is renewed, broken and rebuilt, experiencing the pulling out of the old life, as well as the planting of new life. When I am willing to put aside the old thinking mode in artistic creation, experience and method,

Vol. 16 No. 1 103 perspective, and even philosophy, style and genre—the humanistic structure, as well as the value on this planet, the Babel tower collapsed while the wisdom of heaven is released. This is the moment when glory comes, bringing the images from heaven releasing the mind of God!

Zhu Jiuyang, who was born in 1969 in Wu Qi, Gao Ge, The Good Fruit, 2008, ink on canvas, 101.6 x 91.5 cm. Shanxi province graduated in 1992 from Xi’an Courtesy of the artist. Academy of Fine Arts. Her work juxtaposes small narrative scenes posing isolated people against a vast blue canvas.37 Lost in a background suggestive of the sky, the small- scale figures, dressed in business attire, stand surrounded by everyday objects that float around them. In the lower centre of the work Eternal Love 2005 is a young couple illuminated by a brilliant but diffuse light. On either side of them are small stuffed animals. Above them, a cross appears. A man to the left faces the cross, and in the upper right are a car and another male figure. Rendered in various sizes, these subjects evoke a degree of spatial definition; they cast tiny shadows, but they are all overwhelmed by the surrounding blue environment. Zhu Jiuyang’s works emphasize the isolation of individuals within modern life and the anxieties that come with a consumer society.

Zhu Jiuyang, Eternal Love, 2005, oil on canvas, 121.9 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Ying De was born in 1968, Wang Qing county, Jilin province, and graduated from Jilin Yanbian Art College, he now has his studio at the Song Artist Village in Beijing.38 His triptych of a Christian baptism conveys the unity of spirit and the deep sincerity that can accompany vows of faith. In a murky setting, a woman, dressed in a white t-shirt, emerges from a body of dark water; drops drip over her face and clothes, and two friends hold up her hands in a gesture of support and triumph. Against the subdued sky and dark water, bright light emanates from their faces and clothes. In the side panels are two ﬁgures witnessing the moment. In another work, a young boy kneels in prayer enveloped by a brilliant light. Ying De’s extreme skill in

104 Vol. 16 No. 1 Ying De, Hosanna, 2009, oil realistic rendering adds poignancy to these works. Zhang Yi explained the on canvas, 152.4 x 228 cm. Courtesy of the artist. work in her essay “Dwelling with Love Keeping Watch for Spiritual Life— “Spiritual Love for China” for the Roving Contemporary Art Exhibition, held at 798 Gallery in Beijing:

The “Hosanna” series is of a theme that Ying De has continually created with, but this time the difference is that the canvas is full, overlapping with shouts of praise. The Holy Spirit shows up in this place. Hosanna, Hosanna, is a shout, is a reply, is repentance, is praise, is community. This cry for salvation ultimately evolves into responsive singing of praise; it is the salvation of God ultimately evolving into peace and joy. The characters in the picture are missing eyes, with only an open mouth, and hands raised high, each one singing together in praise, the Holy Spirit descending upon them. The spiritual life of Pastors Pollard and Fraser, who laboured in sowing in this place descends upon this scene as well, giving birth to those who enjoy the gospel, and to a few who devote themselves to it; together bear witness a hundred years of vicissitudes, of changing tides of time, and yet as God’s love was sown, it has grown stout and vigorous, never ceasing to bring life. The pure white clothing of the people is like a dove. The blood-red cross is particularly eye-catching. Holy white and glowing red, all the pairs of outstretched hands, are the seeds borne from the lives of two pastors. There are two kinds of light in Ying De’s paintings: one kind is harsh, leaving a strong human silhouette; another kind is soft, full of mystery, saturating the foreground of the painting like fog. (The full text of Zhang Yi’s article is available at Karetzky.com)

Vol. 16 No. 1 105 Today in China, people Ying De, Boy with Bird, 2009, oil on canvas, 152 x 120 cm. are finding themselves in a Courtesy of the artist. cold capitalist world after the Cultural Revolution destroyed the ancient humanist values of traditional Chinese culture (ren or benevolence of Confucianism has been replaced by greed) and are turning to both native and foreign religions for solace. Seeking meaning in a society of mindless acquisition of fame and fortune that seems to drive twenty-first century China, many people have turned to religion for solace and hope, both in Christianity as well as in the restored institutions of Buddhism and Daoism. Despite the state’s disparaging attitude to the practice of those religions not sanctified by the state, Chinese Christian adherents, many of them art professionals, do express their beliefs. Some artists take traditional Western images and interpret them in unique ways to infuse their art with spiritual meaning. Others directly express their Christian faith. It should be noted that the work of the Christian artist exists beyond the government’s monitoring of state recognized forms of religion, and they, as practitioners, are considered outsiders and are potentially subject to government disapproval. However, up until now, they seem to be free to express themselves.

Notes

1. Li Xian, “A Messianic Deliverance for Post-Dynastic China: The Launch of the True Jesus Church in the Early Twentieth Century,” Modern China 34, no. 4 (October 2008), 407–41. By the 1990s the True Jesus Church had over one million members. See also Vincent Goossaert, “1898: The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 2 (2006), 307–35. 2. Merle Goldman, ”Religion in Post Mao China,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, (January 1986), 145–56. 3. Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank, “The Politics of Reviving Buddhist Temple: State, Association, and Religion In Southeast China,” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 2 (2006), 338. 4. Ibid., 344. 5. Ibid., 340 n. 5. 6. Ibid. 440, CCP Central Committee 1982/1987. 7. Ibid. 8. Kuo Cheng-tian “Chinese Religious Reform,” Asian Survey 51, no. 6 (November/December 2011), 1042–64; see p. 1042. Since 2002, China’s Guojia Zongjiao Shiwuju (State Administration for Religious Affairs, SARA) has edited a series of textbooks on religious patriotism to be used in all ﬁve state- recognized religions: Christianity, Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, and Daoism. They required a textbook in a core course for ﬁrst-year students. Besides, the Chinese Communist regime has established many institutions to keep Christians on a tight leash, see 1044. 9. Daniel H. Bays, “Chinese Protestant Christianity,” The China Quarterly, no. 174, Religion in China Today (June, 2003), 501 “Many of them are extremely poor, and for them their adherence to Protestantism is less a manifestation of status than a strategy for survival. Those believers who have joined the throngs of workers migrating from rural to urban China, and who live day-to-day by temporary labour opportunities, constitute a very different social and cultural element in the urban Protestant community from the established middle class congregations.” 10. Daniel H. Bays, “The Growth of Independent Christianity in China, 1900–1937,” in Daniel H. Bays, ed., Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 307–16.

106 Vol. 16 No. 1 11. Fenggang Yang, “Lost in the Market, Saved at McDonald’s: Conversion to Christianity in Urban China,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44, no. 4 (Dec., 2005), 423–41; see p. 424 relates that an increasing proportion of urban converts are young and well-educated professionals. See also Bays, "Chinese Protestant Christianity," 490: “A certain number of Chinese intellectuals have themselves in some fashion adopted Christian ideas or advocate Christian values as useful for Chinese society. . .” and 496 “As Christian believers, intellectuals in China who study Christianity, including those who may be believers, have very little or no connection with the organized Church, whether TSPM or autonomous Christian communities, and normally do not reveal their personal beliefs. Yang points out that many commonly gather at McDonald restaurants for meetings.” 12. Bays, “Chinese Protestant Christianity,” 493. He believes that stricter state control might actually drive more believers out of open churches to house churches. Reacting to missionary-run churches, home churches, which are nationwide in scope, seek a return to primitivist Christianity, and put stress on direct spiritual experience of conversion or supernatural acts such as healing or prophecy. 13. Jacqueline E. Wenger, “Official vs. Underground Protestant Churches in China: Challenges for Reconciliation and Social Influence,” Review of Religious Research 46, no. 2 (December 2004), 171. 14. Ibid., 174. 15. Ibid., 175. 16. Bays, “Chinese Protestant Christianity,” 517. “Like all religious believers in China, Protestants have to live with state control of and interference in their activities. For TSPM pastors and congregations, that means monitoring by the state, required political study for pastors, certain restrictions on acceptable topics for preaching and intervention in church personnel matters. Autonomous groups are vulnerable to much more coercive and punitive state action, including physical harassment, detention, fines, and labour re-education or criminal proceedings and prison sentences.” 17. Ian Johnson, “China’s Churches Get Decapitated,” New York Times, May 21, 2016, http://www. nytimes.com/2016/05/22/world/asia/china-christians-zhejiang.html?_r=0/. 18. Li Qiang, http://www.artlinkart.com/en/artist/overview/d1easxn/. 19. Interview by the author with Li Qiang, July 2013. 20. Bays, “Chinese Protestant Christianity,” 495. Such lack of familiarity with institutional Christianity is characteristic of the people living in the countryside. “The great majority of Chinese Protestants live in rural areas, and many have only minimal knowledge of the Christian doctrines and ritual behaviour that would be familiar to most urban Christians.” 21. Jimmy Wang “In China, a Headless Mao Is a Game of Cat and Mouse,” New York Times, October 5, 2009, see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/arts/design/06gao.html?_r=0/. 22. Ibid. 23. "The Utopia of 20 Minutes Embrace," http://www.gaobrothers.net/news/BerlHug_en.html; see also Patricia Karetzky, “The Gao Brothers: All the World’s a Stage,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 6, no. 2 (2007), 61–67. 24. Interviews by the author with the Gao Brothers have transpired over several years, the most recent in Beijing, June 2016. 25. Dao Zi edited Crisis: the Great Crucifix Series and Other Works—Dialogue, Critical Discourse, and Study on the Gao Brothers’ Art (Hunan Fine Art Publishing House of China, 1996). 26. For full text, see gaobrothers.net. 27. Interviews by the author with the Gao Brothers have transpired over several years, the most recent in Beijing, June 2016. 28. Edouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, c. 1867–68 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/ paintings/edouard-manet-the-execution-of-maximilian/. 29. Cao Yuanming was a visiting professor at Purdue University Art Department in 2010 where he had an exhibition of his photos of Christian practice in rural China entitled No More Stranger. In the wake of missionaries expelled by the Communists in the last century, the rural population have turned to bulding their own simple and rustic houses of worship. See http://www.purdue. edu/newsroom/events/2010/100819AR-MartinGalleries.html/: “The rapid growth of Christianity in China is a perplexing phenomenon that may have profound social and political implications,” said Fenggang Yang, director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue. “When so many Chinese have taken upon Christian ways of life, this will inevitably challenge the Chinese to redefine their cultural identity and redesign their political system.” See also http://www.sicardgallery.com/ chinese-artists9/caoyuanming.htm/. 30. For more images of this series, see http://www.artlinkart.com/en/artist/wrk_sr/8c8guw/. 31. Http://www.artlinkart.com/en/artist/exh_tp/34barys/99egwwn; http://www.art100.hk/2016/02/26/daozi/?lang=en/. 32. Interviews by the author with the artist occurred over many years, the most recent was May 2016. 33. Complete text published in Patricia Karetzky, In God We Trust: Contemporary Chinese Christian Art (Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York: Bard College, 2011), 10. 34. Gao Ge (http://www.whiterabbitcollection.org/artists/gao-ge-%E9%AB%98%E6%AD%8C/) had a solo exhibit in Shanghai, and numerous shows in Beijing, Shanghai, and Qingdai. 35. Richard Barnhart, “Thinking abut Mu Qi,” (The Six Persimmons), http://www.npm.gov.tw/ hotnews/9910seminar/download/all/A02.pdf/. 36. E-mail interview with the artist, December 2016. 37. Zhu Jiuyang has had solo shows in Xi’an, Shaanxi province, in Shanghai, and in Beijing’s 798 Gallery district. She also has participated in many group shows; see http://www.artlinkart.com/en/artist/ exh_yr/c89axCn; see also http://en.tcgnordica.com/gallery/artist/zhu-jiuyang/. 38. Born in 1968, Wang Qing county, Jilin, province, Ying De graduated from Jilin Yanbian Art College, and now has his studio at the Song Artist Village. His works have been shown in fourteen exhibitions since 2001, including exhibitions at 798 and Song Artist Village. His works were also featured in all four Annual Easter Exhibitions at the Beijing International Christian Fellowship, where he acts as the curator. Ying De is a member of the French International Artist Exchange.

Vol. 16 No. 1 107 Chinese Name Index

Bartlett, Voon Pow Hon, Josh Mu Qi Xu Bing 邱文寶韓偉康牧谿徐冰

Cai Guo-Qiang Huang Yong Ping Ng, Rachel Yang Yongliang 蔡國強黃永砯黃萬芳楊泳梁

Cao Yuanming Huizong Ni Youyu Yao Jui-Chung 曹原銘宋徽宗倪有魚姚瑞中

Chen Bochong Kan Tai-keung Ong Aihwa Yao Lu 陳伯沖靳埭強翁愛華姚璐

Cui Xiuwen Kwan Sheung Chi Qiu Anxiong Yin Jinan 崔岫聞關尚智邱黯雄尹吉男

Dao Zi Lee Mingwei Qiu Zhijie Ying De 島子李明維邱志杰英德

Deng Xiaoping Lee Yongwoo Tsai Charwei Yu Hsiao Hwei 鄧小平李龍雨蔡佳葳余小蕙

Feng Mengbo Leung Chi Wo Tsao, Willy Yung, Anthony 馮夢波梁志和曹誠淵翁子健

Gao Brothers Li Qiang Wang Jian Zhan Wang 高氏兄弟李強王劍展望

Gao Ge Liu Wei Wang Min Zhang Peili 高歌劉韡王敏張培力

Gao Qiang Liu Xiaodong Wang Shilong Zhang Yi 高強劉小東王世龍張羿

Gao Shiming Lu Peng Weng Xiaoyu Zheng Shengtian 高士明呂澎翁笑雨鄭勝天

Gao Yuan Lui Shou-Kwan Wong Wai Yin Zhu Jiuyang 高媛呂壽琨黃慧妍朱久洋

Gao Zhen Ma Yansong Wong Wucius 高兟馬岩松王無邪

Geng Jianyi Mak, Percy Wong, Jacob 耿建翌麥慰宗王慶鏘

Gu Wenda Mencius Wong, Phoebe 谷文達孟子黃小燕

Gu Zheng Miao Xiaochun Wu Hung 顧錚繆曉春巫鴻

108 Vol. 16 No. 1 Vol. 16 No. 1 109 110 Vol. 16 No. 1 Vol. 16 No. 1 111 112 Vol. 16 No. 1