MARCH/A P R I L 2 0 1 7 VOLUM E 16, NUM BER 2

INSI DE

Artist Features: Lee Kit, Zhou Bin Shanghai Biennale, Yinchuan Biennale Exhibitions: Tales of Our Time and China: Grain to Pixel Book Review: Translation and Travelling Theory: Feminist Theory and Praxis in China

US$12.00 NT$350.00 P R I NTED IN TA IWAN 6

VOLUME 16, NUMBER 2, MARCH/APRIL 2017

CONTENTS 30 2 Editor’s Note

4 Contributors

6 SARS, Skincare, Real Estate, Rhythm: Lee Kit’s Politics of Space Godfre Leung

19 Zhou Bin: The Practice of Everyday Art Sophia Kidd 40 30 Life Is a Part of My Art: A Conversation With Zhou Bin Alice Schmatzberger

40 The Certainty of Futurism’s Uncertainty: The 11th Shanghai Biennale: Why Not Ask Again? Arguments, Counter-arguments, and Stories Julie Chun

51 When Art Takes an Elliptical Flight Beyond Lightning 51 Romain Maitra

62 A Sense of Place: Tales of Our Time at the Guggenheim Museum, New York Stephanie Bailey

73 China: Grain to Pixel Inga Walton

99 Translation and Travelling Theory: Feminist Theory and Praxis in China Linda Jean Pittwood 62 104 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Zhou Bin, Echo, Day 111, November 26, 2016, performance, Vienna. Courtesy of the artist. 75 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. 2 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 79 opens with features on two artists, FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum Lee Kit and Zhou Bin, whose work reflects EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian idiosyncratic approaches and eludes easy EDITORS Julie Grundvig labels. Both artists do, however, explore aspects Kate Steinmann Chunyee Li of the everyday and have an interest in the CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde crossover between art and life. Godfre Leung WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li ADVERTISING Sen Wong points out how Lee Kit has been preoccupied Michelle Hsieh with domestic spaces and the personal, even ADVISORY BOARD poetic, rituals we carry out within them, but he Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Melissa Chiu, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden also recognizes that a discreet critique of John Clark, University of Sydney global capitalism is embedded in his work. Lynne Cooke, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Sophia Kidd and Alice Schmatzberger survey Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator Fan Di’an, Central Academy of Fine Arts an ambitious performance project by Zhou Bin, Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator who engages public spaces as his stage for Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, MAXXI, Rome often spontaneous events, each of which is Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop delivered once a day over a one-year period, Katie Hill, University of Westminster Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive emphasizing that creativity can be a central Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian component of daily life. Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator Lu Jie, Long March Space Charles Merewether, Critic and Curator Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand We are also presenting reviews of two mainland Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Chinese biennials. One is among the oldest— Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago the 11th Shanghai Biennale reviewed by Julie Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District Chun—and the other is the newest—the ART & COLLECTION GROUP LTD. Yinchuan Biennale reviewed by Romain Maitra. 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Both exhibitions employ literary references as Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 inspiration for their concepts, and each was E-mail: [email protected] coincidentally realized under the curatorial VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu leadership of artists/curators from India. This MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu may indicate an effort by the Chinese cultural community to develop closer ties with their Yishu is produced bi-monthly in Vancouver, Canada, and published in Taipei, Taiwan. The publishing dates are January, March, May, neighbours in Asia rather than the customary July, September, and November. All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: recourse of turning to the West. YISHU INITIATIVE OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART SOCIETY 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 Stephanie Bailey visits the most recent Phone: 1.604.649.8187 exhibition at the Guggenheim New York featuring E-mail: offi[email protected] artists from Greater China, Tales of Our Time, DIRECTOR Zheng Shengtian and discusses the ways these artists express SECRETARY GENERAL Yin Qing a sense of place, while they simultaneously RETAIL RATES USD $12 / EUR 9 / TWD 350 (per copy) question the idea of any definitive representation SUBSCRIPTION RATES of China. Inga Walton assesses an ambitious, 1 Year Print Copy (6 issues including air mail postage): large-scale photography exhibition organized Asia $94 USD/Outside Asia $104 USD by the Shanghai Centre of Photography that 2 Years Print Copy (12 issues including air mail postage): tracks a history of photography in China and Asia $180 USD/Outside Asia $198 USD introduces us to the breadth of image making 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD 1 Year Print Copy and PDF (6 issues including air mail postage): before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution. Asia $134 USD/Outside Asia $144 USD We conclude with a book review by Linda DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group Jean Pittwood that examines the evolution CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah of feminism in China in the 1980s and 1990s, ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow DESIGNER Philip Wong the issue of translation from the West to East, PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. and how that has affected the development of WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com WEB DESIGN Design Format feminism within China itself. ISSN 1683 - 3082 No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written Keith Wallace 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2期‧2017年3–4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 沙士（非典SARS）、護膚、房地產、 行 政： 藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 生活的節奏: 李傑的空間政治？ 廣 告： 謝盈盈 梁漢柱（Godfre Leung） 黃晨

顧 問： 王嘉驥 田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 19 日復一日的藝術實踐──周斌： 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 《365天創作計劃》 巫 鴻 林似竹 (Britta Erickson) Sophia Kidd 范迪安 招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 胡 昉 30 生活是我藝術的一部分：對話周斌 侯瀚如 Alice Schmatzberger 徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 高名潞 40 未來主義不確定性之確定： 費大爲 楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 第十一屆上海雙年展：「何不再問？ 盧 杰 正辯、反辯、故事」 Lynne Cooke Julie Chun Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda 51 評首屆銀川雙年展「圖像，超光速」 出 版： 典藏藝術家庭 Romain Maitra 副總經理： 劉靜宜 行銷總監： 林素珍 發行專員： 許銘文 地 址： 台灣台北市中山北路一段85號6樓 62 地域之悟：紐約古根海姆美術館 電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 展出的「故事新編」 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 Stephanie Bailey 電子信箱：[email protected] 編輯製作： Yishu Initiative of Contemporary Chinese Art Society 73 「顆粒到像素：攝影在中國」 加中當代藝術協會

Inga Walton 會 長： 鄭勝天 秘書長： 陰晴 地 址： 200 - 1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 99 翻譯與旅行理論：中國女性主義 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 理論和實踐 電子信箱: offi[email protected] Linda Pittwood 訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與Yishu Initiative聯繫。

設計製作： Leap Creative Group, Vancouver 創意總監： 馬偉培 104 中英人名對照 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

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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

Stephanie Bailey is Senior Editor of Ibraaz, a present. She lectures frequently on art for the contributing editor of ART PAPERS and LEAP, various foreign Consulate General offices in and Editor-at-large at Ocula.com. A member of Shanghai and organizes art lectures at the the Naked Punch Editorial Committee, she also Shanghai American Center. She holds an M.A. writes regularly for Artforum International and in Art History from San Jose State University Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and and a B.A. in Economics from University is the curator of the Conversations and Salon of California at Irvine. She also completed Programme at Art Basel Hong Kong. Between graduate studies in East Asian Modern History 2006 and 2012, she lived in Athens, Greece, at Yonsei Graduate School of International where she played a formative role in designing, Studies, Seoul, and conducted research in managing, and teaching the BTEC-accredited Modern Art at University of California, Los Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at Angeles (UCLA). She is a regular contributor Doukas Education. Her interests include the to Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, articulations of history and relations of power and her art reviews have been published in coded into the production and exchange of Randian and LEAP online. culture. Recent essays have appeared in You Are Here: Art After the Internet (ed. Omar Sophia Kidd is a Los Angeles-based arts Kholeif; Space/Cornerhouse, 2014); Hybridize writer and independent curator specializing or Disappear (ed. Joao Laia; Mousse Publishing, in contemporary Chinese and live art. She 2015); Happy Hypocrite #8: FRESH HELL (ed. is currently finishing a Ph.D. at Sichuan Sophia Al-Maria; Book Works, 2015); Armenity, University in China, with a focus on literary catalogue for the Golden Lion-winning geography and regional aesthetics. Armenian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (ed. Adelina von Furstenburg; Skira, 2015); Godfre Leung is a Minneapolis-based critic and the 20th Biennale of Sydney catalogue, and assistant professor of art history at St. The future is already here—it’s just not evenly Cloud State University, Minnesota, USA. distributed (ed. Stephanie Rosenthal). His writing has recently appeared in Art in America, Art Journal, C Magazine, and Julie Chun is an independent art historian publications by the Museum of Modern and lecturer who has been based in Shanghai Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center, since 2011. She serves as the Art Convener of Minneapolis. He has an essay forthcoming in the Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai, the catalogue Jeremy Shaw: Variation FQ, due where she delivers monthly lectures at out later in 2017 from Walther König Verlag, museums and galleries to widen the public’s and is currently working on a book manuscript understanding of artistic objects, past and entitled Playback: Medium, Media, and Digital

4 Vol. 16 No. 2 Audio in Marclay, Tone, and Eno, which Her first book, Pictorial City: Urban Settings in analyzes critical uses of reproductive audio Contemporary Photography Art in China, will in three 1985 works of art and articulates an be published in mid 2017. Her recent research alternative account of the digital shift through focuses on the notion of the self within the perceptual matrix of the compact disc. contemporary art in China.

Romain Maitra is a columnist and critic of Inga Walton is a Melbourne-based writer and visual art and performance culture from India. arts consultant who writes widely about fine He is an independent curator of contemporary arts, fashion and textiles, film, and popular art and Senior Fulbright Fellow in the culture. She completed a B.A. (Hons.) at the Department of Art at Hunter College of the City University of Melbourne and continued on University of New York, New York City, USA. He to doctoral studies at La Trobe University, is also Consultant in the Sector for Culture at the Melbourne, Australia. Her work has appeared UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France. in over twenty various Australian and international publications, including Artist Linda Jean Pittwood is a Ph.D. candidate in Profile, art4d (Thailand), Artichoke, Artlink, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the Art Monthly Australia, Australian Art Review, University of Nottingham, UK. Her research Ceramic Review (UK), Ceramics: Art and focuses on representations of the female Perception (US), Ceramics: Technical (US), body in contemporary art from Beijing and Etchings, Eyeline, Fiberarts (US), Melbourne Shanghai. She has written for the Journal of Living, Neue Keramik (Germany), Poster, Contemporary Chinese Art and Modern China Sculpture (US), Surface Design (US), Textile, Studies and worked as a curator, project Trouble, The Journal of Australian Ceramics, manager, online arts editor, and journalist. The Washington Report On Middle East Affairs (US), Vault, and Vintage Life (UK). She has Alice Schmatzberger is an independent writer, also contributed entries to several books and lecturer, researcher, and consultant. She is numerous exhibition catalogues. the co-founder of ChinaCultureDesk (www. chinaculturedesk.com), a platform that offers support for institutions and businesses in Austria and China in arranging intercultural cooperation in the scientific, academic, and cultural fields. ChinaCultureDesk is also running an art space in Vienna dedicated to contemporary art and culture from China.

Vol. 16 No. 2 5 Godfre Leung SARS, Skincare, Real Estate, Rhythm: Lee Kit’s Politics of Space

ow a decade old, Lee Kit’s Lee Kit, picnic in 2003, acrylic on fabric. Courtesy career comes with an origin of the artist. Nstory. During the 2003 SARS outbreak in his native Hong Kong, when much of the city was under quarantine, Lee Kit and several friends ventured out into the city for a picnic. Then a student, he brought four of his hand-painted cloths to use as picnic blankets. This act, in the Lee Kit narrative, marks the artist’s first use of his acrylic on fabric paintings as everyday objects. This was soon followed by his use of a cloth Lee Kit, July 1st demonstration with friends, acrylic on fabric, painting as a banner, during Hong Kong’s 2004. Photo: Jaspar Lau Kin annual July 1 protest march in 2004.1 Wah. Courtesy of the artist. When Lee Kit began exhibiting widely in 2007, he was already presenting his work as having emerged from that originary act of the picnic, albeit indirectly so at first. The press release for his first solo exhibition, 3/4 suggestions for a better living at Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong, in 2007, announced that it was not only an exhibition of Lee Kit’s works, but also offered “a communal area: a full bar/cafe for his friends and visitors to enjoy.” He therefore introduced himself as a gallery-ready artist clothed in the legacy of participatory anti-art: “The picnic in the grass, the meal with friends, or a common bar: the communicative part of the works is as important as the actual object itself.” 2

Lee Kit’s origin story, however, reveals more than just another attempt to bridge the gap between art and life. It also indicates a political awakening that continues to sustain his work. Most overtly, the second use of Lee Kit’s cloth painting as a political banner recalls the deployment of Marcel Duchamp’s principle of the reciprocal readymade as a political act in postwar French art. Curator Martin Germann, in his catalogue essay on Lee Kit, casually notes the artist’s debt to Daniel Buren, whose Sandwich Men of April and May of 1968 featured two men walking around Paris donning Buren’s signature stripes on placards.3 The political banner’s larger

6 Vol. 16 No. 2 Left and right: Lee Kit, 3/4 suggestions for a better living, 2007, installation views, Para/ Site, Hong Kong.

Daniel Buren, Sandwich Men, 1968, performance, Paris.

significance to Lee Kit’s origin story, however, is the historical context of SARS to an activist history of Hong Kong:

. . . the unparalleled shutdown of the city and the atomization of society in quarantined segments led to an unexpected shift in the political awareness of the Hong Kong citizenry. Just after the end of the epidemic, record numbers of people turned out to protest against a new internal security law imposed by Beijing, causing its shelving and, more importantly, the emergence of an active political community.4

In the wake of the 2014 Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, we might see symmetry between the political context of SARS as a symbolic wellspring for Lee Kit’s work and the function of May ’68 to the Buren mythology.

At the age of four, my mother said she was going to buy a doll for me. I told her I didn’t want a doll, I wanted Nivea hand cream. I can’t exactly explain why. —Lee Kit, 20125

Of the two enduring visual faces of the SARS epidemic, namely face masks and ubiquitous hand-sanitizer dispensers, the latter figures prominently in Lee Kit’s work, though again indirectly. Aside from the aforementioned cloth paintings, Lee Kit is best known for his inkjet ink-on-cardboard transfers, which often feature skincare product logos sourced from the Internet. Most prominent among these are those of hand-care products, the paintings often accompanied by containers of the lotions themselves,

Vol. 16 No. 2 7 as in the 2010 exhibition Someone singing and Lee Kit, Nivea (Cream), 2010, acrylic, enamel paint, and tape calling your name, which features the product on cardboard, 50 x 77 cm. Courtesy of the artist. logos in paintings on the wall, video loops depicting containers of the products on a four- monitor installation, and three ready-mades on the floor—a tube of Vaseline, a paper take-out coffee cup, a tin of Nivea cream— each encased within a Plexiglas vitrine.6 In a recent talk at the Walker Art Center, Lee Kit mentioned that he always travels with an array of hand lotions in his suitcase.7 His fascination with lotions, therefore, can be seen in the context of one habit that resulted from the SARS outbreak: the compulsion to apply self-evaporating hand sanitizer, especially when re-entering from public to private space, and, especially, to be well stocked with antiseptics when traveling internationally. Lee Kit’s lotions, however, displace the post- SARS obsession with hygiene, especially as it is conflated with the threat of the public sphere, with comfort. Using hand lotions also often accompanies the use of hand sanitizers: to salve one’s hands after excessive cleaning. Indirectly, as is often the case with Lee Kit’s work, the figure of skincare actually speaks to larger sociopolitical stakes.

Lee Kit has left two other breadcrumbs for us to follow as we decode the fascination with brand-name lotions that recurs in his work. The hand- painted fabrics for which he is still best known were also repeatedly hand- washed to achieve their faded hues. The washing, Lee Kit notes, is meant to make the cloth “look like it has been used for years.”8 The life rhythms of using, washing, drying, folding, and storing, all of which have been invoked at one time or another in Lee Kit’s installation practices, also constitute his artistic process—he mentions that he spends far more time washing his cloth paintings than he does painting them.9 Here, again, we have compulsive washing, though with a different relationship to the private– public dyad. The life rhythms intimated by his cloth paintings’ distressed colours, now also the trademark palette of his cardboard paintings and his video projections, point to hand-care as both a necessary byproduct of his artistic practice and a balm for its aesthetics of domestic everyday life. Lee Kit’s other nod to these products, via the synecdoche of their logos, also speaks to the interiority of the domestic:

Who sees me naked, and who Lee Kit, installation view, How to set up an apartment for spends time alone with me Johnny?, 2011, installation view, Art Basel, 2011. Courtesy in the bathroom? Johnson & of the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. Johnson. Nivea. Many people talk to themselves, or are deep in thought in the shower. These are very intimate moments, and these inner conversations are not often shared with other people. . . . No one is around but all these bottles—that seem to be looking at us.10

8 Vol. 16 No. 2 Lee Kit, installation view, How to set up an apartment for Johnny?, 2011, installation view, Art Basel, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong.

Lee Kit, Henry (have you ever been this low?), 2011, installation view, Western Front. Photo: Kevin Schmidt. Courtesy of the artist and Western Front, Vancouver.

Against C. Y. Leung’s Hong Kong—or perhaps better said, Li Ka-shing’s Hong Kong—Lee Kit’s work imagines a utopian public sphere that is an extension of the domestic habits that we normally relegate to the private sphere. Two 2011 exhibitions articulate the other side of the private sphere at stake here: namely, the financial transaction of private spaces as real estate. At Art Basel 42, under the auspices of his former gallery Osage Art Foundation, Lee Kit exhibited How to set up an apartment for Johnny?, an installation that turned the art fair booth space into a demonstration flat, the type of off-site prototype apartment space often housed in malls or convention centres. Later that year, at the Western Front in Vancouver, British Columbia, he transformed the artist-run centre’s gallery space into a sparsely furnished living space belonging to a fictional character named Henry, who was inspired by Henry Tang, then embroiled in an adultery scandal and on the cusp of announcing his candidacy for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive position. The exhibition, entitled Henry (have you ever been this low?), imagines a disgraced Henry Tang “moving to Vancouver when he gets old, living in a big house but full of guilt and regrets.” 11

In keeping with Lee Kit’s practice of extending his artworks to everyday uses, the simulated living spaces in both exhibitions—the former being in fact a simulation of a simulation—served social purposes, as Lee Kit, the respective galleries’ staff, and their friends and associates ate communal meals in both installations. The exhibitions’ conceits, however, reveal a deep concern with

Vol. 16 No. 2 9 real estate that suggests a second duality in his aesthetics: on top of the public–private dyad, private space is conceived in Lee Kit’s work since 2011 as itself bifurcated. In this pair of 2011 exhibitions, the financial transaction of space as real estate is conceived as a parallel reality to the concerns with the life rhythms of the domestic by which his oeuvre is best known. Just as I have argued that skin care is a metonym for the politics of space for which SARS has provided a historical touch point, the domestic as it has and continues to play out in his work must be understood as the lived counterpart to the other function of private space: namely, its own financialization.

How to set up an apartment for Lee Kit, installation view, How to set up an apartment for Johnny? in fact bears little visual Johnny?, 2011, installation view, Art Basel, 2011. Courtesy resemblance to a demonstration flat, of the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. though it is described as one in the Osage Art Foundation’s press release for the exhibition.12 The space feels lived in, not pristine. Lee Kit’s cloth paintings, installed variously as table cloths, curtains, a makeshift barrier to enclose the bathroom area, and bedding and cushion covers, are not pressed, as they would be if the installation really was a demonstration flat, and they in fact hang even more loosely than they usually do in his exhibitions. Elsewhere, the cloth paintings are at least sometimes neatly folded or Lee Kit, installation view, How installed hanging on form-fitting to set up an apartment for Johnny?, 2011, installation wooden supports; here they hang view, Art Basel, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery, haphazardly on a wire drying rack. Hong Kong. The installation does, however, act like a demonstration flat. Though containing many saleable works of art—cloth paintings, cardboard paintings, and ready-mades—Lee Kit declared the installation, which was later re-exhibited at Osage Kwun Tong in Kowloon, indivisible and set the price for the entire “unit” according to its square footage, the rate determined by the typical price of space in a Hong Kong high-rise. By itself, this conceit falls within the tradition of institutional critique projects that draw out the implications of art within the real estate industry; a partial list includes works from the 1970s and 80s by Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, Louise Lawler, and PAD/D, and, more recently, by Glenn Ligon and Renzo Martens, and the brilliant RMB City: Investors’ World Premiere at the 2007 Art Basel Miami Beach by Cao Fei. However, it seems prudent to view How to set up an apartment for Johnny? and the subsequent Henry (have you ever been this low?) as a pair.13 Retroactively, the Henry exhibition colours the earlier exhibition’s clear concern with Hong Kong real estate also as an explicitly global concern. In the context of its European art fair audience, to shop for a Hong

10 Vol. 16 No. 2 Kong apartment would either be to secure a convenience apartment for international business travel or purely for speculation.14 The latter especially suggests the gulf between those who live in these spaces and those who buy, sell, and hold them. The demonstration flat, as an off-site prototype, hypostatizes this alternate reality of real estate to actual living, while its place at Art Basel also knowingly points to the common role of art and real estate as places for the investor class to safely park money.15

Johnny’s sequel, Henry (have you ever been this low?), is an exhibition whose scope is explicitly trans-Pacific. Its outward stakes are in Hong Kong, where the namesake of its protagonist, Henry Tang, was an extremely politicized and polarizing figure. While Tang’s adultery scandal was in the news during the exhibition’s run—Tang first publicly addressed the scandal the month before the exhibition opened—and his campaign for the office of Chief Executive, which ultimately came up short against C. Y. Leung, launched only a week and a half after the exhibition’s opening, Lee Kit’s invocation of Henry Tang, in keeping with his earlier invocation of Hong Kong’s July 1 march, is rooted in its relationship to activist protest and, especially, in a generational shift marked by political awakening. Early in 2011, public statements by Tang taken to be admonishing the younger, post-1980s generation were met with organized public demonstrations. A consortium of eight activist groups released a joint statement that read:

The whole of Hong Kong is at the mercy of real estate developers. . . . The government has not only slowed down the construction of public housing, but also turned a blind eye to the speculative behaviour of real estate developers.16

While the scandals, including another one surfacing in February 2012 pointing out that Henry Tang had built a basement addition to his house without a government permit, as well as the election bid, threatened to render the Western Front exhibition generic, an unacknowledged specificity underlies the exhibition and its two sites. Lee Kit himself has often insisted on the generic nature of his exhibition’s “Henry” figure as standing for any high- ranking politician, plutocrat, or even celebrity in a state of public disgrace. “I turned this Henry into a common individual,” the artist states, “like a lot of bourgeois Hong Kong immigrants in Vancouver.”17 The specificity, which distinguishes Lee Kit’s Henry from a Silvio Berlusconi or an Anthony Weiner, is therefore the specific relationship between Hong Kong and Vancouver.

In the Hong Kong imagination, Vancouver is much like Lee Kit describes above. Especially after 1997, and through the first decade and a half of “One Country, Two Systems,” Vancouver was not generally considered by Hong Kong’s international business class a city in which to live. It remained, however, a city in which to own. This trope of exile in the Canadian outpost allows for the character Jack in the 1999 Hong Kong action film Gen X Cops, played by actor and pop star Nicholas Tse, who as a juvenile delinquent had to be sent away to Toronto. There, art follows life, as Nicholas Tse himself spent several years in Vancouver in the early 1990s before being expelled from boarding school and returning to Hong Kong.18 The real estate

Vol. 16 No. 2 11 transactions that began as a hedge against the uncertainty of impending Chinese rule in the early 1990s leading up to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 became, at least rhetorically, a way to park money offshore—and perhaps also to provide an out-of-the-way place to send one’s “problem” teenagers. Within this narrative, the solitude of Lee Kit’s Henry, in his big, under-furnished house, is accompanied by the ignominy of being a Hong Kong plutocrat forced to drop out of “society” and reduced to actually living in his Shaughnessy mansion.19

The exhibition’s material site, Vancouver, adds a dimension that parallels the concerns voiced by the students who protested against Henry Tang back in Hong Kong. With Vancouver also undergoing a housing crisis, the local reception of an exhibition about a disgraced Hong Kong plutocrat occupying a Shaughnessy mansion would be quite different in Vancouver than in Hong Kong. The politics of space within this Canadian city have long been racialized, reaching its first heyday in the late 1980s, when Hong Kong real estate developer Li Ka-shing’s company Concord Pacific purchased 166 acres of underdeveloped waterfront property from the province of British Columbia following the city’s 1986 Expo world’s fair.20 Those racial-spatial tensions have become almost a cliché of Vancouver art, as evidenced by works such as Jeff Wall’s 1982 photograph Mimic, and, more directly, Ken Lum’s Nancy Nishi, Joe Ping Chau, Real Estate of 1990. I am writing this in the immediate wake of the British Columbia provincial government’s 15% tax on non-domestic real estate transactions, introduced in July 2016 and aimed to curb what is now the third wave of Asia-Pacific investment in Vancouver real estate.

As argued by Katharyne Mitchell, the actual migration from Hong Kong, and later Taiwan and mainland China, which was very real, is not at issue; it is “the perception of this speculative activity by long-term residents [of Vancouver]” that has shaped both the public discourse around Vancouver real estate and, now, thirty years of planning debates and policy.21 Coming immediately on the heels of Vancouver’s second world event, the 2010 Winter Olympics, it could not be lost on the exhibition’s Vancouver audience that the Olympic gambit resulted in a $320 million CAD shortfall as of 2012, to be absorbed by the province’s taxpayers. This deficit, caused by the delinquent Millennium Development Corporation, was expected be recouped through condo sales of the Olympic village apartments that Millennium was tasked with building.22 In the context of this public discussion in Vancouver about empty Olympic condos, as well as empty Shaughnessy mansions, Henry (have you ever been this low?) draws out the parallel realities of dwelling and real estate by perversely humanizing Henry Tang. Lee Kit writes:

Henry, in Hong Kong, is widely criticized. People don’t see him as human, but as a public figure, a signifier. So I want to create a space which rather than victimizing him, makes him human—a sad and lonely human.23

12 Vol. 16 No. 2 In the process, Lee Kit’s exhibition also turns 1% global real estate into a place where viewers imagine someone actually living; the gulf between media- circulated public persona and living, breathing, and feeling human beings is analogous to that between abstract, speculative real estate, and dwelling.

"The rhythm of the exhibition is mellow, brainwashing.” —Lee Kit, 201624

Lee Kit, Henry (have you In both How to set up an apartment ever been this low?), 2011, installation view, Western for Johnny? and Henry (have you ever Front. Photo: Kevin Schmidt. Courtesy of the artist and been this low?), cloth paintings play Western Front, Vancouver. a privileged role in domesticating the spaces. Above and beyond the little verisimilous details of everyday life—such as a cup sitting precariously on the corner of a side table in Johnny and a half-thumbed self-help book on a dining table in Henry—used, hanging fabrics bring together this pair of exhibitions’ shared concern with the rhythms of the domestic. Johnny is the more cloth-heavy exhibition, the exhibition almost wholly outfitted with the artist’s hand- painted fabrics. Most striking are the three fabrics hanging on a wire drying rack, with a fourth one bearing the Pet Shop Boys’s lyric “from revolution to revelation” folded and sitting on the rack’s lower shelf. As previously stated, this arrangement draws out the habitual rhythms of domestic life in the spaces referred to by the demonstration flat: the daily manual tasks of washing, drying, and folding, accompanied by stray lyrics caught in one’s head or hummed or sung to oneself in the routine of chores.25 In keeping with the sparseness of the titular character’s isolated living conditions— “permanently temporary,” as one reviewer put it—Henry features only two fabrics.26 Significantly, one is a small striped rag lying to dry on a radiator that Lee Kit had used to clean the furniture before the exhibition opened. Here again, the manual nature of the fabric’s use, along with its cycle of cleaning and drying, metonymically stands for “emotions that are subtle and often indescribable.”27

Lee Kit, Henry (have you ever been this low?), 2011, installation view, Western Front. Photo: Kevin Schmidt. Courtesy of the artist and Western Front, Vancouver.

Vol. 16 No. 2 13 Lee Kit’s concern with these manual uses of fabrics, which also hint at their tactile surfaces, emerged alongside an enormous amount of artistic attention to textile production, and especially to the porosity between textiles and the canvas-supported picture planes of paintings—and, accordingly, a porosity between the senses of touch and vision. In the work of contemporary painters such as Sarah Crowner, Michelle Grabner, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, and in the renewed interest in earlier figures such as Anni Albers, Faith Ringgold, Franz Erhard Walther, and Rosemarie Trockel, all of this somewhat clumsily fitting under the critical umbrella of the “haptic,” we encounter a treatment of cloth’s real or imagined tactility that makes an analogy between material texture and the manual nature of craft-based practices.28 While one would be hard-pressed to describe Lee Kit’s painting and washing of his fabrics as craft in the sense that one would speak of Sarah Crowner’s sewing together of canvas and fabric, similar themes of domesticity and, furthermore, intimacy seem at play in both.

Since 2011, Lee Kit’s work has become Lee Kit: Hold your breath, dance slowly, 2016, installation less explicitly about the politics of real map, Walker Art Center. Illustration: Gabriela Baka. estate. It also has shifted in orientation Courtesy of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. from cloth paintings to video projections, though then and now his installations still usually include his inkjet ink on cardboard transfers and store-sourced ready-mades, and sometimes also his karaoke-style video monitor installations. A recent exhibition, Lee Kit: Hold your breath, dance slowly (2016), at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, displayed the grounding of these new projection-oriented installations to be rooted in the same themes of domesticity as the earlier interiors. For the exhibition, the artist took the large open space allotted to him—a literal and proverbial “white cube,” he notes—and subdivided it into a series of interior-like spaces, including two almost completely closed “rooms.”29 On many of the walls hung his cardboard paintings, and the exhibition’s central thoroughfare hosted his 13-channel video installation I can’t help falling in love (2012). The exhibition, however, was less notable for what it included than for what it did not; specifically, many of the large walls were mostly bare, and others felt far too big for the small fragments of domestic life housed in or on them. More than anything, the exhibition felt like a small Hong Kong apartment stretched far beyond its reasonable size, perhaps pointing to that real estate market’s hyperinflation.

Due to the largeness of the exhibition space, especially the gallery height of its walls, and the sparseness of the exhibition—one colleague joked, “Did they finish installing?”—the exhibition, whose only lighting was provided by projections, monitors, one floor lamp, one outdoor LED light, and the natural light that made its way into the exhibition space from the Walker Art Center’s large west-facing windows, seemed more concerned with the passage of projected light through space than it was with any of the images being projected. Accompanying the crisscrossing and bleeding of light in

14 Vol. 16 No. 2 Lee Kit’s trademark washed-out palette, the faint soundtrack to I Can’t Help Falling in Love, an instrumental karaoke version of the Elvis Presley song of that name, could be heard throughout the gallery space. The result was an ambient exhibition aimed at the “background” of the senses, to borrow Brian Eno’s description of ambient music as “ignorable as it is interesting.”30 Lee Kit’s use in his video projections of soft dissolve effects as a montage technique also served to draw out and soften the transition from one video to the next—and, often accordingly, from one colour to the next. Another kind of inflation, perhaps.

Lee Kit: Hold your breath, Lee Kit frequently cites seventeenth- dance slowly, 2016, installation view, Walker Art century Dutch painter Johannes Center. Photo: Gene Pittman. Courtesy of Walker Art Center, Vermeer, another painter of the Minneapolis. domestic concerned with the passage of light through interior spaces, as his favourite artist. In Lee Kit: Hold your breath, dance slowly, 2016, the gallery space’s exit doorway, installation view, Walker Art Center. Photo: Gene Pittman. which leads to one last installation Courtesy of Walker Art Center, by Lee Kit in one of the Walker’s Minneapolis. interstitial, between-gallery spaces, he pays tribute to the Dutch master, leaving a sheet of translucent polyethylene from the installation process dangling over half of the doorway, the sheet made to gently and hypnotically blow back and forth by the museum’s HVAC system. Beyond referring to the curtains that often frame Vermeer’s picture planes and the recurrence of tapestries in their backgrounds, Lee Kit also invokes the history of artists triangulating the planar surfaces of easel paintings, textiles, and architectural walls.31 Here the crossover between Blinky Palermo’s own cloth paintings and his wall paintings in the late 1960s and Anni Albers’s discussion of “clothing” the architectural wall in her 1965 essay “Designing as Visual Organization” become important reference points, even if Lee Kit was not necessarily making direct reference to them.32 In that prehistory of the contemporary “haptic” textile painting, colour and texture were collapsed into one design element that ambiently affected the viewer’s perception. Lee Kit seems to acknowledge at least the later variants of this trend in his blown-up video projections, which reveal warp and weft- like projector grid lines that are most noticeable when he projects onto the surfaces of his paintings, coming very close to updating the terms of Laura U. Marks’s discussion of the haptic in pixelated 1990s video art for the digital age.33

Lee Kit: Hold your breath, dance slowly’s masterstroke was a video projection in the exhibition’s front-most gallery that could be considered an interior. Accompanying a floor lamp, several small paintings on the wall, and pair of teal candle holders on the floor, the projected image features a short, slowed-down video loop depicting a kitschy easel painting of a vase of flowers on a beige wall, to the right of and slightly below a wall-mounted lamp. This projection is fitted inexactly to one of the makeshift walls that

Vol. 16 No. 2 15 Lee Kit: Hold your breath, dance slowly, 2016, installation view, Walker Art Center. Photo: Gene Pittman. Courtesy of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Lee Kit: Hold your breath, dance slowly, 2016, installation view, Walker Art Center. Photo: Gene Pittman. Courtesy of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

divided the gallery space, whose doorway intrudes into the bottom left corner of the projection. The projected video continues, blown up due to the extra distance, as a decontextualized, abstract beige rectangle across a pair of perpendicular walls, both facing spaces darkened to accommodate video work and that enclose the exhibition’s farthest interior. Through an entryway into that far interior, the entryway perpendicular to the wall of the original projection, a small off-white rectangular sliver of projected light sneaks through. That farthest interior is also the brightest space in the exhibition, illuminated by an LED light meant for outdoor use. In the corner of that interior sit two white busts on the far corner of a white IKEA table, set against the backdrop of intersecting white gallery walls. Juxtaposed against that white-on-white is the final destination of the projection as a wholly decontextualized rectangular sliver, landing well higher than the normal viewer’s sightline. Originally depicting a beige wall, the sliver is “inflated” to off-white on its gallery-white wall support and made yet less luminous by the interference of the brightness of the LED light in that tight, mostly-enclosed space. The sliver is oddly off-putting, and at the same time banal, but, following Lee Kit’s Vermeer fandom, also kind of miraculous.

The traveling of that projection through small doorways, and also through the exhibition’s main thoroughfare, is subtle. One does not so much follow the traveling of that light as notice its destination in the far interior and trace its route back to the originating projector. This detective work done, the viewer notes the fading that takes place as the projection travels beyond the white wall in the front interior, where its depicted wall is beige, to the identically white wall in the rear space, where it is now off-white. This, along with the exhibition’s faint but insistently repetitive soundtrack, and its cycles of projected light shifting from baby blue to pale grey to soft pink, each video loop unsynchronized with the others, suggests an experience of

16 Vol. 16 No. 2 Lee Kit: Hold your breath, dance slowly, 2016, installation view, Walker Art Center. Photo: Gene Pittman. Courtesy of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Lee Kit: Hold your breath, life rhythms previously intimated dance slowly, 2016, installation view, Walker Art in the artist’s work by the obsessive Center. Photo: Gene Pittman. Courtesy of Walker Art Center, washing of the cloth paintings and Minneapolis. the concern with skincare in the cardboard paintings. This, it seems, is Lee Kit’s art of the Umbrella Revolution era: indirect, as his work is wont to be, more subtle than the “apartment” exhibitions of 2011, but also more poetically concerned with the habitual rhythms of domestic life, here still conceived as the lived alternate reality to the abstraction of global real estate speculation. It is perhaps ironic that during the occupation of Hong Kong’s Central district in 2014, Lee Kit had already moved to Taipei, at least partially due to the high cost of living in Hong Kong. Or maybe it is not ironic at all. In the artist’s own words: “Taipei is like a cocoon from which I can see Hong Kong more clearly. So I can see what I should contribute as a citizen and as an artist.”34

Notes 1. These two events appear in tandem in numerous interviews and articles, including Pauline J. Yao, “Lee Kit: A Slice of Life,” Leap: The International Art Magazine of Contemporary China 15 (June 2012), 127; John Jervis, “In Pursuit of Lee Kit,” Art Asia Pacific 82 (March/April 2013), 105–06; Martin Germann, “A small sound in his head,” Lee Kit: Never (Ghent: Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, 2016), 17; and Doryun Chong, “Lee Kit: Scenes of Everyday Life,” Parkett 98 (2016), 116 n. 2. Unlike the authors listed above, Christina Li has recently taken these events as integrally a pair of explicitly political moves—“an act of defiance,” she writes—aimed at Hong Kong’s politics of space, rather than as tokens of the participatory ethos of Lee’s work for which the protest is one of several conceivable applications of the matrix established by the picnic. Li, “Claiming Space: Occupation and Withdrawal in the Work of Lee Kit,” also in Parkett 98, 122–25. 2. Press release, Lee Kit: 3/4 suggestions for a better living, Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong, May 4– June 10, 2007, np. 3. Germann, “A small sound in his head,” 17. Buren reprised this gesture in a more unequivocally activist form in 1975’s Seven Ballets in Manhattan, which featured five participants carrying his stripes as “picket signs” in four lower Manhattan locations, as well as Times Square. On the reciprocal readymade as activist gesture in postwar French art, most forcefully argued in relation to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wall of Oil Drums—Iron Curtain, rue Visconti, Paris (1961–62), see Tom McDonough, “The Beautiful Language of My Century” Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), especially pages 87–97. Another reference to postwar French art, here by curator Jesse McKee in reference to the use of Lee Kit’s paintings as everyday objects: “Like Niki de Saint Phalle, is this auto-destructive painting?,” in Jesse McKee, untitled exhibition brochure essay for Lee Kit: Henry (have you ever been this low?) (Vancouver: Western Front, 2011), n pag.

Vol. 16 No. 2 17 4. Exhibition brochure, A Journal of the Plague Year: Fear, Ghosts, Rebels, Bars, Leslie and the Hong Kong Story (Hong Kong: Para/Site Art Space, 2013), n pag. Lee Kit participated in this group exhibition, which commemorated SARS’s role in catalyzing an artistic and activist civil society on its ten year anniversary. 5. Lee Kit, “Guest Entry #04: Lee Kit,” A Story/A Week by Heman Chong, weblog (June 25, 2012), published by A Prior Magazine, aprior.schoolofarts.be/blog-entry/guest_entry_04lee_kit/. 6. Lee Kit: Someone singing and calling your name, Osage Soho, Hong Kong, November 27, 2009– January 10, 2010. 7. Lee Kit, opening day artist’s talk for Lee Kit: Hold your breath, dance slowly, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA, May 12, 2016. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Quoted in Olga Viso and Misa Jeffereis, “Lee Kit: The Good Traveler,” in Lee Kit: Never, 28. 11. Quoted in Xue Tan, “From Skin Care Products to a Handmade Ball, Lee Kit Seeks Inexplicable Emotions in the Everyday,” Blouin Artinfo Hong Kong, June 1, 2012, hk.blouinartinfo.com/news/ story/806792/from-skin-care-products-to-a-handmade-ball-lee-kit-seeks-inexplicable-emotions-in- the-everyday/. 12. “Lee Kit creates a typical Hong Kong demonstration flat with a living room, a toilet, a bedroom, and a small kitchen,” press release dated May 11, 2011, Lee Kit: How to set up an apartment for Johnny?, Osage Art Gallery, n pag. 13. This seems to have been intended by Lee Kit himself. Though it clearly depicted a “large house,” as he described it, and not an apartment, Henry (have you ever been this low?) was described in the first sentence of its exhibition brochure as “the second exhibition in Lee Kit’s apartments series” (McKee). As far as I know, this series was never heard from again; presumably the first “apartments” exhibition was How to set up an apartment for Johnny? 14. On the audience and its role in the work, Lee Kit states: “a show-flat without visitors means nothing. . . . It’s like a temporary reality show.” Lee Kit, “Something Happened,” Hong Kong Gallery Guide 20 (June 2011), 53. 15. Jonathan Burgos and Netty Ismail, “New York Apartments, Art Top Gold as Stores of Wealth, Says Fink,” Bloomberg, April 21, 2015, bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-21/new-york-apartments- art-top-gold-as-stores-of-wealth-says-fink/. 16. Quoted in Elaine Yau, “Young Activists Hit Back at Henry Tang Jibe,” South China Morning Post (January 31, 2011), 1. 17. Quoted in Tan. 18. On this trope, see the discussion of what the author calls a post-1997 Canada-to-Hong Kong “repatriation narrative” in Lisa Funnell, Warrior Women: Gender, Race, and the Transnational Chinese Action Star (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 129–61. 19. Shaughnessy is a residential neighbourhood in Vancouver that boasts the city’s highest average house price. Due to its historical role as home to the city’s wealthy (Caucasian) elite, it became a heated battleground during the first moment of Hong Kong investment and immigration in the late 1980s and 90s, resulting in the loaded and racialized term “Monster House” becoming key term in planning and zoning debates. See John Punter, The Vancouver Achievement: Urban Planning and Design (University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 133–42. 20. Lance Berelowitz, Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010), 107–111. 21. Katharyne Mitchell, Crossing the Neoliberal Line: Pacific Rim Migration and the Metropolis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 68–86. 22. Jules Boykoff, Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games (New York: Routledge, 2013), 71–72. 23. Quoted in Chantal Wong, “Interview with Lee Kit,” Diaaalogue (November 2011), aaa.org.hk/ Diaaalogue/Details/1096/. 24. Lee Kit, “500 Words,” Artforum (August 8, 2016), artforum.com/words/id=62687/. 25. Song lyrics often appear in Lee Kit’s work. Elsewhere in How to set up an apartment for Johnny?, we encounter a New Order lyric on a cushion cover. 26. Mandy Ginson, "Lee Kit: Henry (have you ever been so low?)," Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 11, no. 2 (March/April 2012), 102. 27. Exhibition brochure, Lee Kit: Hold your breath, dance slowly (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2016), n pag. 28. For several examples of recent scholarship on the haptic, see Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); T’ai Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and “Touch,” the opening section of essays in the anthology The Textile Reader, ed. Jessica Hemmings (London: Berg, 2012). 29. Lee Kit, “500 Words.” 30. Brian Eno, “Ambient Music,” Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), 97. 31. The classic text on Vermeer’s flattening of picture plane, tapestry, and architecture is the chapter “The Dutch Art of Mapping,” in Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 119–68. 32. Anni Albers, “Designing as Visual Organization,” Selected Writings on Design, ed. Brenda Danilowitz (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 60–63. 33. See Marks, Touch, 1–20. 34. Lee Kit, “500 Words.”

18 Vol. 16 No. 2 Sophia Kidd Zhou Bin: The Practice of Everyday Art

Zhou Bin, Will and Testament, Day 1, August 7, 2016, performance and installation, Zhongnan Mountain, Xi’an, China. Courtesy of the artist.

365 Days—A Background During his retrospective exhibition at the Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art in April 2016, Zhou Bin announced to his audience that he is a “very good artist” and that he would be moving thenceforth into a period of producing even better work. In July of the same year, together with curator Lan Qingwei, project manager Ye Caibao, and project coordinators Yang Cui and Bo Zhenzhen, Zhou Bin began a crowdfunding campaign describing his intention to continue to do one artwork per day from August 7, 2016 to August 6, 2017. At the time of writing, the artist is approximately one-third through the project. People wishing to contribute to the campaign can purchase one day’s artwork for 365 RMB. At the end of the campaign, which is still underway, 365 contributors will mutually own

Vol. 16 No. 2 19 this meta-artwork project, which incorporates a number of different media: performance art, painting/collage, photography, sound, video, ready-mades, sculpture, and installation. This promise of collective ownership is but one interesting feature of an already complex project.

Back on Day 1, Zhou Bin began this major project in his hometown of Xi’an, Shaanxi, with a performance and installation artwork titled Will & Testament (Day 1, August 7, 2016) In this artwork, the artist climbed Zhongnan Mountain and spent the day seeking a pine tree that would be approximately the same age as himself. Sitting under the tree, the artist wrote his will and testament. He then bored a hole into the tree trunk and placed within it the piece of paper on which he had written his will, then secretly sealed it inside. This is a highly conceptual piece, and one can hardly imagine the artist’s loved ones or his will’s executor climbing Zhongnan Mountain upon the artist’s death in search of this particular tree.

Left and right: Zhou Bin, Cicada Wing, Day 12, August 18, 2016, performance and installation, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist.

365 Days in Theory On day 12, August 18, 2016, Zhou Bin scoured a demolition site in Chengdu, finding a discarded jack saw, a lock, propellers from an old fan, and a block of cement inlaid with steel rebar. After removing all the rust from these objects he hired a migrant electric welder to make a sculpture with them. The demolition site girds Tianfu Software Park, one of Chengdu’s largest creative industry parks. In this artwork, titled Cicada Wing (Day 12, August 18, 2016), we see the collision of ordinary everyday labour practices with the grand narratives of cultural production. We are witness to two creative utterances, one by the artist and a second made by his welder, a non-artist. In this living experiment, where boundaries between life and art are inevitably blurred, Zhou Bin seems to lose himself in the practice of “everyday creativity.”

In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, French sociologist and historian Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) describes an impasse between “collective modes of administration” and “individual modes of re-appropriation.”1 In his A 365 Day Project, Zhou Bin has returned time and time again to abandoned public spaces—places people and their governments have left

20 Vol. 16 No. 2 Zhou Bin, Piece of Steel Rebar, behind. Piece of Steel Rebar (Day 17, Day 17, August 23, 2016, audio recording, Chengdu, China. August 23, 2016) found the artist Courtesy of the artist. recording a construction worker sawing a piece of steel rebar at a demolition site. The artist notes that “during the otherwise everyday action of this worker, his body takes on seemingly abnormal contortions as he continues sawing the rebar,”2 and while he brings the corporeal visage of the migrant worker to our attention, this artwork is an audio recording and meant to engage another of our senses as a sound installation that will be included in the Project’s final exhibition, scheduled for autumn 2017.

Zhou Bin, The Meeting, In The Meeting (Day 20, August Day 20, August 26, 2016, performance, Chengdu, China. 26, 2016), the artist encountered a Courtesy of the artist. stray cat. He then sought as many opportunities as possible over the next three days to communicate with this cat. In Dumbbell (Day 42, September 17, 2016), the artist found a discarded stone dumbbell and then employed it as material for an installation artwork. In a similar piece, Memory (Day 50, September 25, 2016), Zhou Bin picked through Zhou Bin, 27 Jin, Day 66, performance and sculpture, a demolition site to find objects that October 11, 2016, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist. spoke to him and used them as well to make sculpture. In 27 Jin (Day 66, October 11, 2016) Zhou Bin bought steel rebar from an old woman who had spent an entire day sawing off this rebar from demolished cement structures and collecting it, 27 jin in total.3 The steel rebar would then be used to create a sculpture “in the woman’s image.”4 Smiley Face is slightly different (Day 27, September 2, 2016), being an example of one emerging pattern of what I refer to as “sticking” pieces, where the artist attaches objects to public surfaces. In Smiley Face, Zhou Bin found and collected seven discarded mosaic tiles, again at a demolition site, and brought them to a well-known and fashionable bar in Chengdu, where he installed them on the wall in the shape

Vol. 16 No. 2 21 Zhou Bin, Memory, Day 50, September 25, 2016, performance and sculpture, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist.

Left: Zhou Bin, Dumbbell, Day 42, September 17, 2016, performance and installation, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Zhou Bin, Smiley Face, Day 27, September 2, 2016, performance, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist.

of a smiley face. It was as if the artist was bringing the abandoned world of discarded materials and offering them to the attention of Chengdu’s elite.

Other “sticking” pieces include A Zhou Bin, A Coin, Day 65, October 10, 2015, Coin (Day 65, October 10, 2015) performance, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist. and Imprint (Day 138, December 22, 2016). In A Coin, Zhou Bin stuck a Euro coin to an elevator entrance using super glue. In Imprint, he pasted the words “Crystal Night” on the doorway of a Viennese café long reputed to have been anti- semetic and homophobic. The artist acknowledged that Crystal Night (Kristallnacht) refers to an incident that took place from November 9 through to the early morning hours of November 10, 1938, when Austrian and German fascists attacked Jewish people, marking the commencement of a long-term slaughter.5

Zhou Bin, Imprint, Day 138, December 22, 2016, performance, Vienna, Austria. Courtesy of the artist.

22 Vol. 16 No. 2 Left: Zhou Bin, Nine Balloons, Day 25, August 31, 2016, performance, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Zhou Bin, Tailing, Day 19, August 25, 2016, performance, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhou Bin, Waiting, Day 110, Other of Zhou Bin’s detournements November, 24, 2016, video, 5 mins., Vienna, Austria. are more whimsical, exemplifying Courtesy of the artist. how such an ambitious project calls for a multiplicity of approaches, for example, Nine Balloons (Day 25, August 31, 2016).6 Here, the artist distributed nine balloons at various stops on a long trek through Chengdu, at a public square, residential park, school, hospital, and a Chengdu vegetable market. He encountered various people along the way leaving the balloons at various spots, waiting to see what would happen to each, sometimes meeting unexpected surprises. For example, one of his balloons was picked up and incorporated into a woman’s street-side shop display. Another balloon was given by a parent to a child in a stroller. Then, in Waiting (Day 110, November 24, 2016), on Thanksgiving night he filmed people and in a state of waiting, “including a bent-backed beggar, a singing artist, officers on duty, people in a horse-driven carriage, billboard figures, as well as ceiling paintings in a church throughout which organ notes resound”.7 In Tailing (Day 19, August 25, 2016), Zhou Bin took to the streets, this time in his car. He tailed taxis from twelve noon until midnight, following each one for as long as possible before switching to following another taxi, recording the entire journey on video.

Zhou Bin, Savings Deposit, Other public space artworks find Day 156, January 9, 2017, performance, Vienna, Austria. the artist exploring not the map, but Courtesy of the artist. interstices, as in Savings Deposit (Day 156, January 9, 2017). Here, the artist explored an historic bank, looking for cracks in pillars and walls. He placed eight Euro coins throughout

Vol. 16 No. 2 23 these crevices. In Safety Line (Day 47, Zhou Bin, Savings Deposit, Day 156, January 9, 2017, September 22, 2016), one of what I performance, Vienna, Austria. Courtesy of the artist. call his “circling” pieces, he explored perimeters, walking a skein of red thread all the way around a security line placed at Chengdu’s Tianfu Square during National Day. He walked the loop until the thread ran out.8 In another artwork twenty-eight days later, Sugar Trail (Day 75, October 20, 2016, performance, Narrenturm Sanatorium Museum, Vienna, Austria), the artist revisited encircling.9 Here, Zhou Bin slowly moved around the outside of a sanatorium, leaving behind a sugar cube at every step, forming a long sugar trail. At the completion of placing the sugar cubes, he then ate all the remaining cubes to the point of vomiting, continuing to eat until the box was empty.

365 Days in Praxis—Statistical Bearings For Zhou Bin, the practice of everyday living has become the everyday practice of art. Of 156 artworks, a clear majority of these artworks are performance artworks, with the others being video, installations, painting, sound, sculpture, ready-mades, and photography (See Table 1 below). It is also important to note that all 156 artworks made thus far have been documented by photography and/or video.

Artworks 1 through 70 were created and implemented in China, with number 70 marking the transition from China to Europe, the duration of this single performance artwork lasting as long as the artist’s journey to Vienna, Austria (See Table 2 below).

Table 1—Quantitative Analysis of Artwork Media

Artwork Medium Number of Artworks Percentage of Artworks in at least (First 156 days) this Medium (first 135 days) Performance 137 88% Video 18 12% Installation Artwork 15 10% Painting 5 3% Sound 5 3% Sculpture 3 2% Ready-Made 2 1% Photography 2 1%

Table 2—Spatial Analysis of Artworks in Number and Percentage

Performance Artworks Number of Artworks Percentage of first 156 days (First 156 days) In public space 91 58% In private space 13 8% In both public and private 2 1% space In non-determined space 47 30%

24 Vol. 16 No. 2 Left: Zhou Bin, Safety Line, Day 47, September 22, 2016, performance, Tianfu square, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Zhou Bin, Sugar Trail, Day 75, October 20, 2016, performance, Narrenturm Sanatorium Museum, Vienna, Austria. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhou Bin’s A 365 Day Project is not about walking through a single city, but finds the artist moving within and between the Chinese metropolitan centres of Xi’an (Shaanxi province), Xining (Qinghai province), Chengdu, and Chongqing. Within Austria, Zhou Bin’s artworks have thus far centred on the cities of Vienna and Villach.

Zhou Bin, 4000 Kilometers, 365 Days—Patterns of Poetic Praxis August 18–23, 2015, performance, China National Of 156 artworks carried out thus Highway 108, Chengdu-Xi’an Section. Courtesy of the artist. far in this present series, nine are direct call-outs to earlier works within Zhou Bin’s thirteen-year arsenal of performance artwork. For example, we have “cartail dragging or dripping” artworks, recalling an important work, 4000 Kilometers (August 18–23, 2015), sixth in a series of twelve monthly works produced throughout Zhou Bin’s 2015 performance project MIND IN THE BOX: Action and Image

Zhou Bin, 4000 Kilometers, in Symbiosis, also curated by Lan August 18–23, 2015, performance, China National Qingwei, director of the Chengdu Highway 108, Chengdu-Xi’an Section. Courtesy of the artist. Museum of Contemporary Art. In 4000 Kilometers, the artist made a bronze model of his own head that he tied to the back of his car. Starting from Chengdu, with the bronze model dragging on the road, Zhou Bin and Lan Qingwei drove 4,000 kilometres to Xi’an and back to Chengdu, as they worked with the force of friction to re-create the sculpture. In this most recent A 365 Day Project, we see this theme once again, in Car Tail Dragging (Day 2, August 8, 2016). This time, the artist dragged a piece of wood taken from

Vol. 16 No. 2 25 his old home in Xi’an to Xining, Zhou Bin, Car Tail Dragging, Day 2, August 8, 2016, over a thousand kilometres away. performance and sculpture, Xi’an to Xining, China. The wood dragged at high speed Courtesy of the artist. along on the asphalt and cement, ultimately becoming hewn into a sharp, sword like shape. Another similar piece, Bringing Wolves Into Shu (Day 9, August 15–16, 2016), found Zhou Bin driving 2500 kilometers from Xining to Chengdu with an instrument installed at the back of the car that dripped wolf-blood broth—from cooked wolf soup—along the road. The idea was to use a wolf blood trail to attract wolves, a symbol of predatory wild animals, into Shu.10

Left: Zhou Bin, Bringing Wolves Into Shu, Day 9, August 15–16, 2016, performance, Xining to Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Zhou Bin, Food Chain, Day 140, December 24, 2016, performance, Vienna, Austria. Courtesy of the artist.

Most of A 365 Day Project’s artworks, however, do give birth to new motifs in Zhou Bin’s already prolific corpus. As I mentioned above, after culling through the works in this project, certain patterns emerge, including: newspaper artworks as well as works involving feathers, spiritual/traditional Chinese culture, death, change of natural state, and displacement. As this text is a precursor to subsequent texts on Zhou Bin’s unfolding art project, I will first explore two categories, briefly discussing a few political works as well as some works dealing with traditional Chinese culture. Two artworks addressing supremacy include Imprint (Day 138, discussed above), as well as Food Chain (Day 140, December 24, 2016) where the artist laid bird feed

26 Vol. 16 No. 2 on the ground in shape of a swastika, leading a flock of pigeons to form this symbol of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi philosophy. Romantic Mao (Day 62, October 7, 2016) contained a complex semiotic, where the artist wrote Chairman Mao Zedong’s Poem Swimming onto fallen leaves. Then he gradually submerged the leaves in a deserted children’s swimming pool, while also writing the poem on paper, folding it into a boat, and placing it in the water alongside a floating dead fish.

Zhou Bin, Romantic Mao, Day 62, October 7, 2016, performance, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhou Bin, Lotus Statue, In a recent text on Zhou Bin, I Day 33, September 8, 2016, performance, Chongqing, stressed the poetic, whimsical, non- China. Courtesy of the artist. determinate, and paradoxical nature in his work, suggesting that the artist had chosen to disengage from social and political intervention. In recent years we have seen the rise of Zhou Bin as a recognized performance artist in official performance circles throughout Europe and China. Prior to this project, it seemed fewer and fewer of his works took the artist into the streets. I had begun to typify Zhou Bin as a trans-local artist committed, it seemed, to “art for art’s sake,” producing performance works that were poetic rather than practical in nature, and thus diverging from Sichuan’s schools of realism and social intervention.

Vol. 16 No. 2 27 Left top: Zhou Bin, Watching the Self, Day 51, September 26, 2016, performance, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist. Left bottom: Zhou Bin, Air Dry a Flag, Day 24, August 30, 2016, performance, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Zhou Bin, Hold Dry a Piece of Paper, Day 69, October 14, 2016, performance, Chengdu, China. Courtesy of the artist.

It is clear now, however, that Zhou Bin has recommitted himself to Sichuan, although not exclusively. He seems to give himself over to wherever he is. In Sichuan’s capital city, Chengdu, he addresses migrant labour, institutional bullying, and traditional Southwest Chinese culture within A 365 Day Project. In Austria’s capital city, Vienna, he addresses the refugee crisis and fascism, as well as institutional power. No matter where he is, however, the artist consistently values and incorporates spiritual and Chinese traditional cultural precepts into his artistic practice. A number of works in this series are Buddhist in philosophical orientation. For example, Lotus Statue (Day 33, September 8, 2016) found Zhou Bin walking blindfolded along a lotus bud-shaped concrete pedestal upon which a Buddha statue would soon be installed. In this particular performance, he “uses acute awareness to feel out and interact with” his surroundings, and then “spontaneously creates.”11 Watching the Self (Day 51, September 26, 2016) was a beautiful study on meditation, where the artist communed silently with a bust of himself for eighty minutes.

A Daoist dimension to this A 365 Day Project saw the artist preoccupied with changes in natural states. Two of his works, Air Dry a Flag (Day 24, August 30, 2016) and Hold Dry a Piece of Paper (Day 69, October 14, 2016) found the artist cumulatively waiting almost twenty-four hours for water to evaporate into gas. Confucian elements appeared as well, such as in Rice Word Square (Day 34, September 9, 2016), where, on a rainy day, the artist carried an old piece of wood over his shoulder to a spot where he placed a 150 cm x 150 cm piece of white paper on the ground. He then walked repeatedly along the borders and diagonally, vertically, and horizontally

28 Vol. 16 No. 2 bisected lines onto the paper, all the while continuing to carry the wood on his shoulder.12 The tracks left on the paper by his repeated walking/tracing of these lines revealed a grid by which Chinese calligraphers practice their Chinese characters at an early stage of study.

Zhou Bin, Rice Word Square, In Zhou Bin’s A 365 Day Project, we Day 34, September 9, 2016, performance and painting, see the artist renew his commitment Chongqing, China. Courtesy of the artist. to outdoor and public spaces as well as to political and social intervention. He is still equally committed, however, to art for art’s sake, as well as to poetic explorations of time, space, and form. While I once analysed and discussed Zhou Bin’s work as representing the poetic pole of the poetry-praxis dichotomy, I can no longer do so. In previous texts for Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Art, including “Poetically Performance Art Dwells”13 and“Chengdu Performance Art, 2012–2016,”14 I juxtaposed Zhou Bin’s relatively “poetic” body of work (excluding earlier more political and social intervention works produced by the artist) to the “praxis” embodied in work by other Southwest performance artists, including works by older early 1990’s Chengdu collective 719 Artist Alliance and work by Chengdu’s Art Praxis performance collective (2009–2014), as well as in the works (1991–present) of former collaborator with Zhou Bin in 719 Artist Alliance, Zhu Gang.

In fact, in light of Michel de Certeau’s discussion of the “practice of everyday living” as the heart and pulse of political/social resistance, I see Zhou Bin’s practice as neither poetic nor practical, but occurring along a spectrum between the two. With 209 artworks to go, we will see a simultaneous deepening of multiple conversations while new discourses proliferate.

Notes

1. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 96. 2. Zhou Bin: A 365 Day Project, artwork descriptions written by the artist. This and all other translations in this text are by Sophia Kidd. 3. A Chinese jin is roughly equivalent half a kilogram. 4. The resulting sculpture is intended to be an abstract image of the woman, not a figurative one. 5. Zhou Bin: A 365 Day Project, artwork descriptions written by the artist. 6. “Detournement” is a term coined by Guy Debord and the Situationist International (SI) movement of the 1960s; see “Detournement,” www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Detournement/. 7. Zhou Bin: A 365 Day Project, artwork descriptions written by the artist. 8. Chengdu’s Tianfu Square is structurally and symbolically analogous to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, an open spatial enfoldment that can be traced back to classical Chinese urban models, with the Emperor’s Palace in a city’s centre. This public square is frequently cordoned off, being the go-to control point for police forces on days when public protest or terrorist attacks may occur. Tianfu means “heaven’s storehouse.” 9. Established in 1784, according to the artist’s artwork description, this is the world’s first sanatorium. 10. Shu is an archaic name for the southwest region of China containing present-day Sichuan. 11. Zhou Bin: A 365 Day Project, artwork descriptions written by the artist. 12. Diagonal, vertical, and horizontal bisecting lines walked by the artist comprise the Chinese character for “rice” (米). This kind of “rice word square” is used for practicing Chinese calligraphy and is a pillar of Confucian learning. 13. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 11, no. 2, (March/April 2012). 14. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 15, no. 5, (September/October 2016).

Vol. 16 No. 2 29 Alice Schmatzberger Life Is Part of My Art: A Conversation with Zhou Bin

n August 7, 2016, performance artist Zhou Bin embarked on a unique artistic endeavour, A 365 Day Project. This conversation Otook place on the occasion of his residency at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst (University of Applied Arts), Vienna, between October 2016 and January 2017.

Alice Schmatzberger: Could you describe in detail your approach to A 365 Day Project—your daily routine or the procedures you are following?

Zhou Bin: I started my new art project on August 7, 2016. It will continue for exactly one year, which means I have to create a piece of art every single day for 365 days—no matter where I am or what else I have to do.

The initial trigger was the preparation for a comprehensive exhibition in April 2016 that showed my performance projects from 1997 up until 2016. I had to review a lot of material. That exercise left me with a strange feeling, and I asked myself if I would ever be able again to create good or important pieces of art. This has a lot to do with the ability to transform, to turn into a new person so to speak. I had the sense that I needed a totally new creative project in order to transform and substantially renew myself and my creative potential, respectively.

This is the reason I started my A 365 Day Project. To produce an artwork every single day exerts great pressure. This commitment pushes my creative power to the limit. I wish to completely merge my art and my life during this one year. As soon as I wake up in the morning I ask myself: What can I create today? My complete attention is focused upon the creative process.

Sometimes I have no idea what to do, which troubles me quite a lot. But my objective is to get into a condition where I focus on creativity and art permanently. At the end of this project I hope to have transformed myself, to have changed, to be a different person, and to naturally consider if something in everyday life might be turned into an artwork.

Alice Schmatzberger: So every single day you have to create a piece of art, no matter whether it is an object or a performance?

Zhou Bin: Every day I have to do a performance. Sometimes these performances result in an object, an installation, a video, whatever. I do not plan or conceptualize these performances. I never know when or where

30 Vol. 16 No. 2 an idea will come to mind; for example, when I wake up, when I am out on the streets, during lunch, whatever. Therefore, nobody can support or accompany me all day long—and what is more, another person would be too much of a distraction for me. The documentation of my daily performances happens by means of photography or video. These objects, photos, and videos constitute an intrinsic part of my A 365 Day Project. Even though I am creating a piece of art every day, I consider those 365 days an artwork in itself.

Alice Schmatzberger: Could you explain some examples of your daily artwork? For example, performances that have you created during your residency here in Vienna?

Zhou Bin, Flight Path, Day 70, October 15, 2016, performance, Chengdu to Vienna. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhou Bin: One example was on my flight from Chengdu to Vienna when I injured myself with a self-inflicted wound on my left forearm (Flight Path). This scar resembles a flight path. I was thinking about refugees in Europe.

One day I walked along Ringstrasse and picked up various things from the street that had some connection to Vienna (Ring Finger Avenue). Or I collected dog feces from the streets and lawns and transferred them to the forecourt of the House of Parliament (Seven Pieces of Dog Feces).

Here in Vienna I discovered brightly coloured dish cloths. I had never used something like that before. They are very interesting tools because when they get dry they more or less keep the last shape they were left in after being used. I began to create little sculptures with them, and that process triggered a lot of ideas about what to do with them later on. I did not have enough time while in Vienna, but back in China I am thinking of using them in an exhibition, and perhaps to invite the audience to make their own sculptures with them.

In another work there was a pigeon dying on the sidewalk. I filmed that scene, the process of dying. In the end two policemen picked up the dead pigeon and threw it into a dustbin (Pigeon). I also did a performance in the nearby woods. I chose one specific leaf and then searched for around two

Vol. 16 No. 2 31 Zhou Bin, Cleaning Rags, Day 101, November 15, 2016, sculptures, Vienna. Courtesy of the artist.

Left: Zhou Bin, Ring Finger Avenue, Day 78, October 23, 2016, performance, Vienna. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Zhou Bin, Seven Pieces of Dog Feces, Day 82, October 27, 2016, performance, Vienna. Courtesy of the artist.

hours trying to find an identical or at least very similar one (Looking for Matching Leaves).

During my residency I also gave Zhou Bin, Pigeon, Day 84, October 29, 2016, video, 5 lectures at the University of Applied mins., Vienna. Courtesy of the artist. Arts. Together, with nine of my students, we went to a supermarket, and each of us bought one item for Euro 1.99. We stood in line at the cash desk, and the cashier of course noticed it. She thought it a funny idea, so in the end we all were laughing. This was a funny little piece of performance (Payment).

I also went to the south of Austria, to the small town of Villach. I walked across the local cemetery carrying a piece of ice until it melted (Moving around a grave). And for a second performance, I searched for graves of people who had died in 1970, the same year I was born (Death Death/Birth Birth).

Back in Vienna, one evening I set up my laptop on a small table in the street to display some of my performances. I hid around the corner and watched people watching what was happening on the screen. This represented for me a kind of small solo exhibition or street exhibition (Street Exhibition).

32 Vol. 16 No. 2 Zhou Bin, Looking for Matching Leaves, Day 107, November 21, 2016, performance, Vienna. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhou Bin, Looking for And then, just the other day, I went Matching Leaves, Day 107, November 21, 2016, to a small church nearby. I liked it performance, Vienna. Courtesy of the artist. because of its very specific acoustics. As soon as no one was in there, I blew up a balloon and let it burst, only to hear the wonderful sound of the echo (Echo).

This is just a small range of the artworks I created here in Vienna. And, as you can see, most of them are connected to everyday life.

Alice Schmatzberger: Thus photography and video are tools for documenting your daily performances. Are they also a means of self- reflection? You mentioned before that this project is closely connected to your ambition and also your ability for transformation. Do you therefore reflect regularly on how this endeavour is affecting you?

Zhou Bin: Right from the beginning I changed my life and daily routine. Strictly speaking, already some months before the start of the project as such, I tried to lead a regular life. I am not drinking any alcohol during these 365 days, and I very seldom go out with friends. So my life has changed quite a bit already. For example, why is it we could meet today only after 6:00 pm? Because it gets dark around 4:30 pm, and I need daylight for my work. I have to make use of those hours during the day. My daily piece of art is my first priority. Everything else has to take place in the evening.

Basically I have to constantly be thinking about my daily art project. As soon as an idea comes to my mind, I then realize it. Then I need to document it, upload the material onto my computer, and make some notes. Then I ask myself: “What am I going to do tomorrow?” So this becomes a great amount of work every day—and pressure.

This kind of pressure is not abstract. It completely influences my daily routine. I find this experience is similar to a spiritual practice in which one remains silent or walks in a certain conscious manner. In each case one

Vol. 16 No. 2 33 Left: Zhou Bin, Payment, Day 117, December 1, 2016, performance, Vienna. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Zhou Bin, Moving around a Grave, Day 131, December 15, 2016, performance at public cemetery, Villach, Austria. Courtesy of the artist.

needs a specific technique to realize one’s goal. In order to achieve personal transformation, I need this kind of project that changes me.

In China, information about this project—that is, short descriptions of the performances and objects—is released to the public every two weeks, mainly on WeChat. It would be too stressful for me to attempt to publish it on a daily basis.

Alice Schmatzberger: Back in 2010 you worked on a similar project: For 30 days create a piece of work everyday, June 22–July 21, 2010. Was this a comparable project with a similar approach, albeit on a smaller scale?

Zhou Bin: Before I began that 30 Days project, I did not believe that such a project could really be of any worth. The most important experience of that former project was not the creation of objects; instead, it was comprehending a state of mind, the mental condition I need to achieve in order to be most creative.

I try to maintain this mental condition, but in reality this is quite difficult. For example, when I go to bed I often cannot fall asleep immediately. I am anxious that on the next day perhaps I will not be able to create a new performance. And why, additionally, do I publish information about this project every two weeks? It functions as kind of supervision in that people are observing regularly what I am doing; therefore I feel I have a responsibility to do it. When I create something of bad quality, this exerts even more pressure. Objectively, it is not possible that every single piece of art will be of really good quality, as it is not possible to hit on an exciting idea every day. Sometimes the weather is bad, sometimes there is not enough time, or may be some other reason.

But, in the end, all this is not particularly important. The important thing is to be in a state of mind that enables me to intently consider the creation of an artwork and to stay focused at all times, to learn to maintain this mental condition for each one of these 365 days—for me, this is the essence of this project.

34 Vol. 16 No. 2 Alice Schmatzberger: Following your residency here in Vienna you will go back to China. How will your everyday life there proceed during the remaining approximately two hundred days of the A 365 Day Project?

Zhou Bin: I will return to Chengdu, then go to Xi´an for a short time, and again return to Chengdu. I have an exhibition in Xi´an and will do a performance there. I will pursue further my usual art activities and also teach at the New Media Art Department at Sichuan Art Academy. I am not going to deliberately avoid the daily routines and necessities outside of A 365 Day Project; I will try to find and maintain this inner state of mind that I mentioned previously.

If there were a project or an activity that would intensely compromise my work on the A 365 Day Project, I would reject it. For example, Chinese New Year is a very important family celebration. My family wants to travel abroad, but I will not accompany them. I will stay at home and take care of the dog instead. No travelling, no going out.

Alice Schmatzberger: You commented before on the link between art and life. From your perspective, how are they related?

Zhou Bin, Death Death/Birth Birth, Day 132, December 17, 2016, performance at public cemetery, Villach, Austria. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhou Bin: Art very often refers to important issues within our reality. Artists, writers, musicians, and philosophers all address such issues, but with different methods and tools. An artist has to find adequate means for expression—and this has to be different from the approach of a writer or philosopher, etc. The development of such a personal and appropriate creative method requires intense research work. However important the topic is that you are addressing as an artist, if your approach and methods are inadequate, you are not in a position to develop a good artwork. In the end, “how” is more important than “what.”

I believe that this is an essential question, especially for Chinese artists. For a long time art was merely an instrument, nothing more than a simple tool for a craftsman. There were so-called “official” artists who thought art itself was not important; art or creativity were of no value. Only the message was important. But China also has artists who are in opposition toward all official art styles.

Vol. 16 No. 2 35 In the end, both attitudes result in the same problem; however important and justified one’s message may be, one cannot create a good artwork without sufficient creative potential. A lot of creative research is needed to be able to express an important idea in an appropriate artistic manner.

The most important parts of the world concerning art are still Europe and the USA; they remain the cultural centres of gravity. For Chinese artists who wanted access to these desired centres, there was once one primary method of choice to gain Western attention—use a lot of Chinese symbols in your work and overtly display your Chinese identity. Another approach in attracting Western audiences and experts consisted in emphasizing one’s being from a Communist country and implying one’s opposition to the state. But this has nothing to do with art itself, and in the end those artists were never as highly esteemed as those from the West.

Left: Zhou Bin, Street Exhibition, Day 108, November 22, 2016, performance, Vienna. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Zhou Bin, Echo, Day 111, November 25, 2016, performance, Vienna. Courtesy of the artist.

Of course, one cannot deny one´s cultural identity. Chinese culture provides a lot of interesting aspects that we could use in artistic production. Another important resource for creative work is political reality. These two aspects can be integrated into the artwork, but this should not be done simply in order to attract Western attention. The creation of artworks requires transformation on the artistic level.

Alice Schmatzberger: Do you notice any parallels between A 365 Day Project and, for example, The Artist is Present, by Marina Abramovic? She also asked herself whether art and life can be separated from each other.

Zhou Bin: One important goal for me in A 365 Day Project is to push my creativity to the limit. Marina Abramovic, in her project The Artist is Present, did not have the pressure to create a new artwork every single day; she just repeated the same artwork every day. Her concept was preconceived right from the beginning. My A 365 Day Project exerts upon me as an artist a completely different pressure on a daily basis.

36 Vol. 16 No. 2 Alice Schmatzberger: This I fully understand. I just thought that there might be an underlying affinity because she was also searching for ways for performance art to “become” her daily life, to somehow blur the boundaries between art and life.

Zhou Bin: Once I have done my daily work for 365 days, maybe I will have become accustomed to creating an artwork daily. Perhaps I will have changed my life by then. So maybe there are some similarities with her project.

One of the most important aspects I have achieved in A 365 Day Project is the change in my working method. My previous performances often challenged my physical endurance. But this ongoing project pushes other aspects of my creativity to the limit. It is about mental or intellectual endurance and a generating of psychological pressure.

Hsieh Tehching is a very significant performance artist. He did four one- year projects. During one of these projects he had to push a time clock every hour for a whole year. This is quite extreme and very challenging for the body, because for a whole year you won´t really get sleep.

Concerning the temporal dimension, Hsieh Tehching and my projects are conceptualized in much the same way. But my working method is very different. Hsieh Tehching did not have to think about which time clock to push next. It was always the same time clock. So the challenge of his project lay solely in the physical dimension.

My one-year project constitutes more of a creative as well as a psychological challenge. Somehow it has a rather abstract quality. All the time I am thinking about how to create a new project, and every one of them has to be different from the ones before. Meanwhile, this mental pressure also affects my physical condition.

Alice Schmatzberger: So your A 365 Day Project revolves around personal transformation, artistic research, creative endurance, and the question of art and life?

Zhou Bin: My hope is for art and life to merge. The essential objective is to merge my creative processes with my life in a completely natural way.

I observe a lot of different phenomena daily; for example, we are sitting here and talking, and we hear noises from the courtyard or see a dove flying up in the sky. One has to carefully pay attention to all these little details that surround oneself in everyday life. And I immediately ask myself if I can turn these observations and perceptions into a piece of art, so that it should become a common habit to turn pieces of everyday life into pieces of art.

The screen saver on my computer displays this sentence: “Life is part of my art.” Usually we understand it the other way round; that is, art is part of life. I began painting when I was three or four years old. At my elementary level in school I already knew I would become a painter, because back then, for

Vol. 16 No. 2 37 me, artists were painters. Art was always at the centre of my life. Life without art is completely meaningless for me.

Alice Schmatzberger: How did you transform into a performance artist then?

Zhou Bin: In 1994 I lived and painted in the Yuanmingyuan art village. Back then there was another artist village, the East Village (Beijing Dongcun), famous for its performance artists. I heard about it but never went there. At the time, I regarded such actions as foolish. Then, in 1995, Yuanmingyuan was closed by the police, and since my girlfriend was from Chengdu and had just finished university, we went to Chengdu. I did not like it there, so I went back to Beijing and settled in Songzhuang. A little later, I married my girlfriend, and in 1997 we had a daughter, and therefore I again went back to Chengdu. It was there that I saw Chinese artists doing performance art for the first time. After having witnessed those performances, I never painted again. I immediately knew that performance was the kind of art I wanted to do myself. It is such a free way of expressing oneself. I could feel the massive power those performances exuded, and I became friends with those artists. Today, on WeChat, I found something about the East Village of Beijing, and recently a book about its history was published. I regret that I did not visit it back then.

Alice Schmatzberger: Meanwhile the focus of your work has shifted from a strong physical aspect and physical endurance to what could be considered creative endurance.

Zhou Bin: Yes, now I create very different artworks. Many artists want to be known for a specific effect in their work. They kind of aim for something like a signature feature and then orient themselves toward it. Often, they never again do anything else. I do not want to be labelled. For me it is necessary to approach the creative process in a very free manner. And it is even more necessary that I absolutely want to realize a specific work. When you develop a piece of art according to these parameters, develop it from inside yourself, there will automatically be a common thread in your œuvre that is not based on style.

Many people consider my artworks disparate or prolific. But when you look at them thoroughly, you can detect that they share similar characteristics, that they all have something in common. When you look at all these photographs and videos that document the diversity in my A 365 Day Project, there is nevertheless an inner coherence. They represent things I absolutely wanted to implement—they all relate to me—and thus they share common characteristics.

In my opinion such a method of working is free and independent. Between 1997 and 2015 I worked only in performance art. Performance art needs to be worked on in depth. Its methods need to be researched and explored in a profound way. Therefore, I intensely investigated the medium of performance art and its methodology for quite some time; one needs to do this to know how to give substance to an idea.

38 Vol. 16 No. 2 Since last year I have also considered creating installations. In 2015 I did a different one-year project, Mind in a Box. Each month I created a sculpture or an installation. The creative process behind this project was always a performative process, but the results were sculptures and installations.

Alice Schmatzberger: How did your stay in a foreign city affect your daily work?

Zhou Bin: It brought a whole new set of impressions: gadgets I have never seen before, a language I cannot understand (which limits my ability for personal interaction), not knowing where to buy certain material, etc. These are positive and negative experiences—with the positive predominating because of the inspiration I get from it.

A project team is taking care of a WeChat account and developing an exhibition, and I also will publish a book after the completion of the project. We also developed a crowd funding campaign at the beginning in order to finance parts of the project. At first I objected to this idea. I was afraid that the whole project would become too commercial. But with the sale price for each object being rather low, I agreed to it in the end. Every photograph or video created for documentary purposes during the A 365 Days Project can be purchased via the Internet for 365 RMB per piece.

One important fact is the participation of people: When all 365 objects are sold, then 365 people are involved because each must go to a separate buyer. These people are artists, curators, workers, students, whoever. Each photograph is signed. Every buyer should interpret his or her object, and these considerations will be part of the book. Therefore, this project has a public component, with some social and communal qualities.

104 pieces are already sold. The buyer cannot choose which piece to buy; they are distributed in chronological order. If you are, for example, the fifth buyer, you receive the photograph or video documenting day five.

Once the idea of selling art pieces had become public, some collectors wanted to buy the entire set of artworks. But to me that seemed too commercial an approach. Also, some of the potential buyers objected to the idea of purchasing photography or video; they did not think of them as possessing any value. In other cases, only if they were signed would some of the collectors be interested. Our attitude of saying “no” to certain demands is also a rejection of the art market system represented by a few influential collectors and galleries. In contrast, A 365-Day Project enables many people to participate.

Vol. 16 No. 2 39 Julie Chun The Certainty of Futurism’s Uncertainty: The 11th Shanghai Biennale Why Not Ask Again? Arguments, Counter-arguments, and Stories

Queue outside the Power Station of Art on November 12, 2016. Courtesy of Power Station of Art, Shanghai.

The Science of Fiction The decision by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta of Raqs Media Collective to weave the best selling Chinese science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem (San Ti)—part one of a serialized trilogy by Chinese author Liu Cixin—into the framework of the 11th Shanghai Biennale is a timely move in reconsolidating the artistic heritage of text and image. While Hollywood has employed the futuristic backdrop of Shanghai for several of its sci-fi and action thrillers, it is a belated move on the part of exhibition makers to bring the discussion of uncertain futures to one of China’s prominent megacities. While domestic and international artists have addressed the realities of rural uprooting, social displacement, and mass-scale building associated with accelerated urbanization, no significant group exhibition in China has thus far explored science fiction as a curatorial strategy for considering possible future scenarios.1 Similar to art, the appeal of science fiction rests on its ability to provide an interstitial space for viewers and readers to make sense of the transformations taking place around them.

The unprecedented long queue that encircled the Power Station of Art, the site of the Biennale, on the first public opening day (November 12, 2016), was a testament to how pop culture could entice new groups of viewers into

40 Vol. 16 No. 2 Queue outside the Power an artistic arena for a shared urban Station of Art on November 12, 2016. Courtesy of Power experience. The majority of those Station of Art, Shanghai. awaiting entry to the Biennale were young, likely the same crowds who are ardent followers of cosplay and comic-cons (comic conventions). Many of them would likely have read not only the first volume, The Three-Body Problem (2006), but also the entire trilogy, which includes Dark Forest (2008) and Death’s End (2010), thus having a head start in directly or indirectly understanding many of the artworks and installations relevant to the sci- fi theme.

Unifying the misfortunes of the shadowy past with an expansive vision toward the future, the serialized trilogy was written as a past time hobby by the then fifty-one-year-old engineer Liu Cixin, from Shanxi province. Following its huge domestic success, with dedicated followings of high school and university students and even young professionals, Liu Cixin’s trilogy was translated into English by Ken Liu with The Three-Body Problem receiving the prestigious Hugo Award for best science fiction in 2015, to become the first Chinese novel to be granted this high honour.2 A movie based on the book, which is being produced in China for release in 2017, is eagerly anticipated.

Science fiction writing in China has a rather longer history than might be expected. The genre was a Western literary import in the late nineteenth century. It promoted scientific innovation and technology, which was germane to early proponents of the Self-Strengthening Movement, an attempt to reform China in the mid-to-late nineteenth century toward Western technology and ways of thinking. Advocates of this reform, such as Liang Qichao and Lu Xun, were instrumental in translating Jules Verne’s epic tales into Chinese. As early as 1903, indigenous futuristic lore quickly established its own voice, with writers such as Wu Jianren. In the narrative of Wu Jianren’s 1905 sci-fi journey The New Story of the Stone (Xin Shitou Ji ), the protagonist’s search for modern China takes him to Shanghai, the beguiling city of lights, and later to the “Civilized Realm,” where a system of underground trains populate the city and underwater communication from a submarine is made possible via a wireless telephone.3

Although the 11th edition of the Shanghai Biennale is not based upon a literal reading of The Three-Body Problem, it is useful to understand the novel’s premise. The plot is based upon the classic narrative of the relationship between aliens and humans, yet the events unfold in the unconventional setting of China’s Cultural Revolution, with the female protagonist championing her cause by enlisting the assistance of a wealthy

Vol. 16 No. 2 41 American oil tycoon. Complications that set the actions in motion ensue from the chaos imposed by the tri-solarian system, which symbolizes the unstable forces known as the three-body problem in physics. According to Raqs Media Collective, who adapted the predicament from the novel to the exhibition, “Two bodies in space interact in a manner that is predictable, with the dynamics of their mutual gravitational forces governing how they rotate around each other—the moment a third body is introduced, things get complicated and unpredictable. Suddenly it appears as if everything can change.”4

What is a Question? What is the Question? To interrogate the shifts and confluence caused by the three-body problem, Raqs Media Collective posed the question “Why Not Ask Again?” as the main title of the 11th Shanghai Biennale. The inclusion of the word “again” signifies a return and re-examination that suggests an inquiry into whether or not we have been asking the appropriate questions in the first place. Raq Media Collective’s question follows a prevailing trend in which curators are seeking an open-ended dialogue with the public rather than setting forth a thematic dictum. In September, Maria Lind launched the 2016 Gwangju Biennale by offering “What Can Art Do?” as the title, while the 2016 Singapore Biennale asked, with its subtitle, “From Where We Are, How Do We Picture the World—And Ourselves?” There is an advantage and a disadvantage to making such an open-ended overture. While this format accommodates the possibility of expanding the field of inquiry, it can also lead to the pitfalls of a rhetorical question—a question asked for the sake of asking because there are no answers, as is exemplified by the unsolvable dilemma of the three-body problem.

Signifying the idea of search, discovery, Moinak Biswas, Across the Burning Track, 2016, 2-channel and journey, the 11th Shanghai video housed in a structure by Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Biennale presents “launching pads,” Müller. Courtesy of Power Station of Art, Shanghai. “stations,” and “terminals”—like an airport—offering a multitude of physical and figurative points of departures, layovers, and alternate routes to bring over one hundred objects and installation-based works by ninety-two artists and artist groups into the massive orbit of the 42,000-square-metre Power Station of Art. Despite the futuristic staging, the layers of what Raqs Media Collective calls the “substrates” of many of the artworks are tempered with the resonance of the historical and recent past, which, like the weight of gravity, anchors the Biennale to its rigorous discourse. Accordingly, the subtheme “Arguments, Counter-Arguments, and Stories,” is derived from the Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s last autobiographical film Jukti Takko aar Gappo (Reason, Debate, and a Story) (1974), which was re-scripted into a two-screen video, Across the Burning Track (2016), by Moinak Biswas. As the original footage of Ghatak’s film fluidly and disruptively intersects with contemporary images of India, the

42 Vol. 16 No. 2 viewer becomes a witness to vignettes of a fractured history within the site- commissioned mesh tent A House for Jukti, Takko aar Gappo (2016) designed by Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller. It is an odd ediface from which to observe the sequences of Biswas’s re-made film. Neither the architectural structure nor the filmic sequences offer support for understanding the important figure of Ritwik Ghatak or the historical circumstances of the “turmoil of 1970’s Bengal” that is stated but not explained on the wall text. Without context, the work becomes a dialogue in which Biswas and Raqs Media Collective are complicit in a shared cultural and historical consciousness, yet leaves most of the Chinese audience as passive viewers of a foreign film clip they are not able to fully comprehend.5

Top: Rabin Mondal, The King The spectre of India’s contentious history as Series, 1975–77, oil on canvas, pen and ink on paper. Courtesy well as its sociopolitical realities are more readily of Power Station of Art, Shanghai. accessible in the haunting paintings by Rabin Left: Vinu V.V., Noon Rest, Mondal, The King Series (1975–77), of emaciated 2014, tree trunk and sickles. Courtesy of Power Station of figures bearing witness of the 1943 famine. Art, Shanghai. Vinu V. V.’s Noon Rest (2014) of reposing sickles jammed into a tree trunk, reveals the politicized conditions of labour and rest. As a Dalit and an artist, Vinu V. V. offers work in which the assembly of tools of labour represented by the sickles constitute a social sculpture suggesting that repose can become a form of defiance, as exemplified by labour strikes and unrest. Beyond India, Christian Thompson also offers a postcolonial re-reading with his series Museum of Others (2016). As one of the first two Australian aboriginals to be accepted to Oxford University in the institution’s nine-hundred-year history, Thompson went on to a Ph.D. program in fine art. In the photographic portraits of notable British male figures, Thompson has incised their eyes and replaced them with his own, thus correcting the colonialist gaze of the past through a personal cathartic gesture.

Reality’s Simulacra At certain vectors within the Biennale, simulacra infringe upon reality, such as with the digitally fabricated oil spill upon the algorithmic representation of the River Thames entitled Flag (Thames) (2016), by John Gerrard. The singular work that cannot escape anyone’s notice is the monumental

Vol. 16 No. 2 43 wasteland The Great Chain of Top: Christian Thompson, Museum of Others, 2016, Being—Planet Trilogy (2016), which photographs.Courtesy of Power Station of Art, combined over forty sub-constituent Shanghai. John Gerrard, Flag (Thames), works to overtake the second floor 2016, video. Courtesy of Power of the Power Station of Art like a Station of Art, Shanghai. heaving leviathan. The space-specific behemoth is attributed to MouSen, the forerunner of China’s experimental theater who formed MSG, or Media Sceno Graphy, at the School of Intermedia Art at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. Produced by a collaborative cast including curator Liu Tian, thirteen planners and supervisors, as well as over forty artists, the mega- structure represents what Liu Tian calls “the power of today’s academy because no single artist can construct such an installation as it does not follow the logic of the art market or the museum.”6 This gargantuan, lunar- like expanse becomes an experiential theatrical stage, which, according to MouSen, represents a “storytelling machine” wherein the audience completes the narrative by entering the decrepit body of a crashed plane to roam the dark passages of dystopia’s underbelly. Within, we are witness to not only a purgatory of gloom and doom filled with a stockpile of dead bees that have suffocated in an enormous glass vitrine, but also to the mounds of human residual rubbish underfoot that offer archeological ruminations on civilization’s ruin.

Another installation of spectacular scale is Marjolijn Dijkman’s twenty- metre pendulum, Lunar Station (2015), which systematically etches the sands on a round platform situated below it. Swinging with precise determination, the pendulum inscribes its arc according to the earth’s natural rotation and mechanically computed assistance. Ivana Franke’s high intensity, strobe-lit Disorientation Station (2016) offers a disptuptive sensorial space in which to seek an alternative form of contemplation, thus mimicking the urgency to locate personal tranquility within a high-

44 Vol. 16 No. 2 MouSen+MSG, The Great Chain of Being—Planet Trilogy, 2016, installation. Photo: Julie Chun. Courtesy of Power Station of Art, Shanghai.

octane world. Tomás Saraceno also employs blinding light but directs it upon the arachnid weavings of Sonic Cosmic Webs (2016) to highlight the spellbinding aura of nature’s unfathomable beauty.

Marjolijn Dijkman, Lunar The 11th Shanghai Biennale does Station, 2015, steel pendulum, sand, table, video, found not fail to recharge our visual objects. Courtesy of Power Station of Art, Shanghai. and aural senses despite a few unanticipated mishaps plaguing some of the displays, such as the nonfunctional telescope that casts a blank gaze upon Matts Leiderstam’s Gift of Tears (2016), compromising the artist’s promise to reveal “incidental details [and] subtle codes” relating to the movement of refugees from West Asia to Europe on the surface of a sixteenth century painting of Jesus Christ. The greatest casualty, however, rests with Sun Yuan & Peng Yu’s monumental ceramic containers situated as the main centerpiece on Marjolijn Dijkman, Lunar Station, 2015, steel pendulum, the ground floor’s central foyer. So sand, table, video, found Far (2016) was to re-evoke Otto von objects. Courtesy of Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Guericke’s 1654 experiment of the Magdeburg hemispheres, a historic demonstration of the dynamic effects of atmospheric pressure of a vacuum. Unfortunately, a few days after the opening night, the forklift tractors required to create polarized tension by pulling apart the ceramic containers were hauled away due to funding miscommunications, causing the “performance” of So Far to come to a halt. Only the trace, or what Raqs Media Collective refers to as the “sediment,” remains to meet the quizzical

Vol. 16 No. 2 45 Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, So Far, 2016, ceramic containers, vacuum pump, two forklifts. Photo: Keith Wallace.

Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, So Far, 2016, ceramic containers, vacuum pump (minus two forklifts). Photo: Julie Chun.

glances of viewers upon their entry to the Biennale for the remainder of the next four months.

Repositioning Predictable Patterns In the dynamic universe of the Biennale, replete with unanticipated glitches, the exactingly calibrated still objects provide a counter-point as stable forms of contemplation. For several years, the Shanghai-based artist Liao Fei has been interrogating ways to visually articulate earth’s force fields. Much of Liao Fei’s artistic practice is inspired by the notion of the line, which the artist states “does not exist in nature but exists as a human invention.”7 The idea for his orrery (a mechanical model of the solar system), entitled Event (2015), featuring a rotating light bulb around a large mass of marble protected on one side by a curved steel plate, came from the principles of a sundial. Within the dark chamber of the gallery, there is an interplay of light and shadow that is meant to describe how the weight of shadows as movement and stasis are united in perpetual continuity. The arcing light slowly traces an elliptical configuration, which, like longitudes, latitudes, and the equator (the lines that exists for understanding the logic of the universe) remains intangible and invisible. Another work by Liao Fei, A Straight Line Extended (2015), on the second floor of the museum, manifests not only a system of delicate balance, which the line, this time in form of pieces of marble exactingly aligned on steel plates, must again negotiate, but also appears to defy the pressures of gravitational pull, which is indicative of another kind of linear force field.

“The study of the future is the study of process,” states Miao Qihao, former Deputy Director of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of

46 Vol. 16 No. 2 Liao Fei, Event, 2015, marble, Shanghai. Miao Qihao is one of steel plate, lamp bulb, robot arm. Courtesy of Power the interlocutors of 51 Personae, a Station of Art, Shanghai. community-based outreach project presented as a component of the 11th Shanghai Biennale. Curated by Chen Yun with the Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society, fifty-one unique encounters were organized Liao Fei, A Straight Line throughout Shanghai for the Extended, 2015, marble, steel plate, concrete base. Courtesy duration of the Biennale in which of Power Station of Art, Shanghai. the general public was invited into the lives of the city’s inhabitants from anywhere between a few hours to an entire day. The project attempted to forge a connection between people of all socioeconomic backgrounds and interests in order to expand the vision of art beyond the walls of the museum for it to spill out onto the streets. The eclectic assemblage representing the local community, some of whom were invited and some of whom applied to be included, was immensely varied. Speakers ranged from a Buddhist sculptor turned hotel chef turned street food vendor, a society of candy-wrapper makers, a researcher following the lives of itinerant peddlers, and a 76-year- old soccer veteran, to former movie poster painters, a transvestite nightclub owner, and an insect-loving librarian who is also a professional arm-wrestling referee. The project included activities in which the public took an active part, such as bicycling with and accompanying a kitchen-knife sharpener who makes house calls. This amusing compilation of fifty-one people, predominantly Chinese residents of Shanghai, celebrates the idiosyncrasies of the unsung heroes of real life. One encounter, “A Palliative Caregiver,” raised multi-dimensional questions about the changing status of Chinese nuclear families and the ways traditional values are shifting. With a roundtable discussion on the “Future of Dying,” this session offered a pragmatic reminder that despite all the possibilities and advances of science and technology, the one barrier that humans cannot defy is death.

Ghosts of Past and Future Perfect Death is one aspect of human inevitability. Other consequences include war, disputation, subjugation, and the list goes on. What may seem like phantasmagoric imaginings in science fiction can be interpreted as yearnings for locating solutions to social problems. According to Dun Wang, a scholar of Chinese literature, the intent of science fiction differs from that of science. While science seeks to test hypotheses and prove the possibilities of outcomes, science fiction in China has been, and still is, “grounded in and necessitated by social concerns.”8 Most notable fiction, science fiction or otherwise, exposes layers of social and moral concerns. It is such concerns that foregrounds Liu Tian’s “infra-curatorial project” entitled The Ghost Hunter (2016) of Mao Chenyu’s works. The infra-curatorial project was an invitation by Raqs Media Collective to seven young curators to mount auxiliary projects within and outside the physical space of the Biennale.

Vol. 16 No. 2 47 51 Personae, Li Zhonghua, “Master Knife-Sharper” November 13, 2016, 7:30 am to sunset. Courtesy of Power Station of Art, Shanghai.

For Liu Tian, his selection of the 51 Personae, Li Zhonghua, “Master Knife-Sharpener,” artist Mao Chenyu was important November 13, 2016, 7:30 am to sunset. Courtesy of Power on many accounts. Mao Chenyu Station of Art, Shanghai. represents the lesser-known but highly relevant “auteur” documentary filmmakers who are changing the direction of how China is represented through the medium 9 51 Personae, Miao Qihao, of film. The cultural encoding of “Seeker of Scientific Information,” January 14, the disparate objects such as old 2017, 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm. Courtesy of Power Station tables piled high, basket bins of of Art, Shanghai. grain, aging rice wine in a covered ceramic vat emitting a dank odor, and a bamboo ladder poised to the heavens, constituted the sprawling installation Paddy Films (2003–16)

to expose the tensions between the Mao Chenyu, Paddy Films, 2003–16, mixed media simplicities and complexities of installation. Courtesy of Power ever transforming societies in rural Station of Art, Shanghai. China. Each object holds subtle regional connotations that would likely be recognizable to viewers who come from rural towns, such as the Dongting Lake area in Hunan province, where Mao Chenyu hails from. Small television sets emit scenes of the local inhabitants going about their quotidian lives as captured on film by Mao Chenyu who has direct access to the activities in his neighbourhood, of which he is a part. As an autodidactic, Mao Chenyu is gaining recognition not only within the independent film world of China, but also in the non-mainstream Chinese art world as a theorist, writer, “unlicensed architect,” and a rice farmer. In 2012, Mao Chenyu founded an experimental social platform called Paddy Field that is a 20,000-square-metre rice paddy field transformed into a self-sufficient rice farm to finance his independent film projects seeking to express the anxieties of quotidian life while fostering awareness and respect for the local place and people.

48 Vol. 16 No. 2 Unlike the Shangahi Biennale two years ago, the selection of works by mainland Chinese artists for the current edition seems to align with a stronger thematic unity, perhaps because Raqs Media Collective has spent far more time in China than any previous foreign Biennale curator in observing and engaging with local artists and curators such as Liu Tian and Chen Yun, to foster an exchange of ideas and develop closer cohesive working relationships. In addition to the many roles he holds in the current Biennale, Liu Tian was also responsible for curating yet another component, Theory Opera, a performative event engaging theoretical discourse to take place on weekends at the Power Station of Art. With an articulate local bilingual team guided by the three Raqs Media Collective members, the 11th Shanghai Biennale demonstrated a greater fluidity in its process of organization and execution of ongoing events than in the past two editions. As of this writing, the final numbers are not yet in, but this year’s Biennale seems to be the most well attended, as suggested by large crowds at all times during the week and weekends when the museum is open. The public has also taken full advantage of free Tuesdays and with the exceptionally affordable entry ticket of 20 RMB (about 3 USD) per person, the lowest of any global biennial, many viewers are able to make repeat visits.

If art is a reflection of contemporary life, then from the colossal lunar infrastructure by MouSen to the tiny clusters of street lamps by Nabuqi, the 11th Shanghai Biennale deftly concedes that we, as earthlings, are obsessed hoarders. We hold dear material traces or sediments and justify their accumulation as a collection or an archive in case the future generations may forget who we were, with all our accomplishments. From the massive compilations such as Ha Bik Chuen’s The Ha Bik Chuen Archive (1960–2000) and Georges Adéagbo’s site-specific installation, The Revolution and the revolutions . . . ! (2016), to material mined from flea markets, to Simon Fattal’s papered Collage (2004) and Wang Haichuan’s assembly of discarded furniture from the Chongqing Copper Cash Manufactory Seven Days (2013)—to name just a few—the Power Station of Art can be repositioned as the Power Station of the Human Repository. The very stuffs that inform and guide and entertain us are laid bare at our feet, on the walls, and spatially hung in the cosmos of the Biennale, to suggest that our individual and collective world is a universe of abundant and overflowing material mass.

Cyclical Turns and Returns In China, contemporary art has fast become the new emblem of sophisticated high culture, while technology continues to symbolize the forward march of scientific socialism. Might art and science, as cultural constructs meant to give meaning to people’s lives, be the new opiates of the masses? Can it be that science fiction in China is returning to its historical impetus by promoting a vision for a strong China of the future?10 And is the 11th Shanghai Biennale a galactic depot filled with dazzling works of art well situated to promote this agenda for selfie-loving viewers? It is reasonable to doubt that the museum, stationed in a far-off outpost of the city, can draw in more than a young generation enamored of pop culture, be it art or science fiction. But it is hoped that it will. Why Not Ask Again? serves as an augury

Vol. 16 No. 2 49 Georges Adéagbo, "The revolution and the revolutions"…!, 2016, objects, artifacts, texts, paintings, magazines. Courtesy of Power Station of Art, Shanghai.

of the future’s possibilities that will Wang Haichuan, Seven Days, 2013, installation. Courtesy come and also as the past’s omen of Power Station of Art, Shanghai. that has arrived. We are asked to confront and question the triumph of human intelligence, which has not always been triumphant. At this time in history, whether Shanghai inhabitants are perturbed or not by global affairs, there are numerous crises that even technology cannot fully solve.11 As with the three body problem, can we locate the answers to the conundrums? More importantly, even if we can somehow eventually solve the riddle, how can we resolve the unforeseen adversities that are orbiting our way? The urgency is too great for us not to ask.

Notes

1. UCCA (Ullens Center for Contemporary Art) mounted three consecutive solo exhibitions as the “Secret Timezone Trilogy,” two of which had an element of science fiction; Ming Wong’s Next Year (June 11–August 29, 2015) and heterotopian temporal exploration in Korakrit Arunanondchai’s 2558 (August 21–October 19, 2015). The third solo in the series was Haegue Yang’s Come Shower or Shine, It Is Equally Blissful (October 30, 2015–January 3, 2016), which did not include any elements relating to science fiction. 2. Amy Qin, “In a Topsy-Turvy World, China Warms to Sci-Fi: Liu Cixin’s ‘The Three-Body Problem’ is Published in US,” New York Times, November 10, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/books/ liu-cixins-the-three-body-problem-is-published-in-us.html/. 3. Dun Wang, “The Late Qing’s Other Utopias: China’s Science-Fiction Imagination, 1900–1910,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 34, no. 2 (September 2008), 42. 4. Raqs Media Collective, “Why Not Ask Again? Arguments, Counter-arguments, and Stories,” First Curator’s Note, part of a media packet, March 2016, page 1 of a 2-page note. 5. On five separate occasions (November 25, December 1 and 12, 2016, and January 12 and 18, 2017), the present author spent time at the Shanghai Biennale in conversation with general audiences. Twenty-five out of twenty-five Chinese viewers queried were unfamiliar with the “turmoil of 1970s Bengal.”

6. Unpublished interview with Liu Tian and the author in Shanghai on January 3, 2017.

7. Unpublished interview with Liao Fei and the author in Shanghai on January 6, 2017.

8. Dun Wang, “The Late Qing’s Other Utopias,” 42.

9. Yomi Braester, “For Whom Does the Director Speak? The Ethics of Representation in Documentary Film Criticism,” in Paul G. Pickowics and Yingjin Zhang, eds., Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-first Century China (Lanham, MD, and London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 33–49.

10. Eriberto P. Lozada, Jr., “Star Trekking in China: Science Fiction as Theodicy in Contemporary China,” in James F. McGrath, Religion and Science Fiction (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 2012), 59–79.

11. For an overview of how the Internet that powers technology is far from green and clean, see James Glanz, “Power, Pollution, and the Internet,” New York Times, September 22, 2012, http://www. nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry- image.html/.

50 Vol. 16 No. 2 Romain Maitra When Art Takes an Elliptical Flight Beyond Lightning

he art of curating a biennial can be somewhat like piecing together a mammoth artwork out of chaos: the curatorial whole turns T out to be more significant than the sum of the pieces, and the distinction becomes blurred between those who practice art and those who conceptualize and mediate in the artist’s creative process. Further, with the collapse of the idea-versus-object dichotomy in the art world, curators are ideally positioned to make a biennial a critical site of experimentation in exhibition making in which art is made to push its peripheries toward the transformation of taste, culture, and knowledge.

Bose Krishnamachari is an artist and a curator as well as the co-founder of the Kochi Biennale Foundation in India, which has produced three editions of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB). He has juggled these multiple roles over several years. It seems that he has profitably applied his experience with the KMB to the first edition of the Yinchuan Biennale (September 10–December 18, 2016)—an opportunity that was offered to him by artistic director Hsieh Suchen of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Yinchuan (MOCA), the institution that hosts the Yinchuan Biennale. Impressed by the growth of the KMB from its humble origins, she approched Krishnamachri to curate this maiden Biennale in Yinchuan. It may be mentioned that in all three of its editions, the KMB used the city of Kochi as a wellspring and not merely a venue; the participating artists were asked to respond to Kochi’s rich history over centuries and to use it as a reference for their creative endeavours.

Designed by the team of Chinese architects waa (we architech anonymous), the facade of MOCA Yinchuan appears like the surging rapids of a river, the edifice drawing its cue from the local topography. Encompassing 15,000 square metres, MOCA stands like a solitary sentinel in a phenomenally spacious and desolate area surrounded by natural wetlands and a large organic plantation along the western banks of the Yellow River. This location is also endowed with a notable history, as this region of northwest China was an important stop along the Silk Road, which linked East and West, resulting in a diverse array of cultural interactions.

Situated between the Yellow River and the Helan Mountain, Yinchuan is the capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, where a large percentage of China’s twenty million Muslims live. However, Yinchuan has been largely isolated from the boom and bustle of the country’s contemporary art scene. The challenging feat, therefore, of establishing two significant signposts

Vol. 16 No. 2 51 such as MOCA and the Yinchuan Biennale, where there is no infrastructure Museum of Contemporary Art, Yinchuan. Photo: Romain for the practice, patronage, or marketing of contemporary art, stems from Maitra. the region’s “One Belt, One Road” policy, which aims to build economic and cultural ties between China and the countries to its west along the Silk Road. Also, significantly, MOCA is the only museum of contemporary art in the China that aims to foster links with Muslim countries, and thus stands as a major portal in welcoming Islamic art and culture.

As curator, Krishnamachari conceived of the Biennale’s enigmatic title, For an Image, Faster than Light, which he derived from the reference to light in the Upanishads—the Sanskrit phrase Tamasom jyotirgamaya (moving from darkness to luminescence)—in order to consider art an elliptical flight from darkness to light, much like the trajectory of a blind person acquires knowledge from the dotted alphabet of Braille. In conversation with him, he invoked the elusive image “one needs to swim against the tide, like a blind man seeking the impossible language,” and it is the blindness that marks the world’s myriad conflicts that the Biennale seems to ambitiously address with its 110 works by 73 artists from 33 countries.

However, surprisingly, once again it is proven that for the Chinese authorities, watchfulness is the watchword, and purgation is substituted with purge. Nearly two weeks before the Biennale’s opening, Krishnamachari’s curatorial introduction at the entrance to the Biennale that referenced the capacity of light in the exhibition’s title to distinguish between red—a state of dominance—and green—a state of acceptance— has proved a bitter irony because the signal of green was delivered to Ai Weiwei to participate in the Biennale, but it later changed to red when his work was unceremoniously excluded. Ai Weiwei tweeted that he had received from MOCA’s artistic director a “vague letter” about his exclusion stating that “the decision is made by higher officials.” He added further, on Instagram, that “. . . my artwork has been excluded due to my ‘political sensitivity.’ Censorship in communist regions has been present since the existence of the power. . . .” This shows that what we face is a world that

52 Vol. 16 No. 2 is divided and segregated by ideology. Art is used merely as decoration for political agendas in certain societies. China is trying to develop into a modern society without freedom of speech, but also without political arguments involving higher aesthetic morals and philosophies; art is only a puppet of superficial cultural efforts by government officials. This comes as yet another thorn of censorship in Ai Weiwei’s crown, but, understandably, it may have been asking for too much from this fledgling institution to make any gesture of resistance to the “higher officials.”

Robert Montgomery, Wipe Your Tapes With Lightning (Poem for Paul Reekie), 2016, wood, neon, and metal. Courtesy of Yinchuan Biennale.

And yet there is light in the distance against Yinchuan’s darkening evening sky. A long line of illuminated words in capital letters, spread like a sparkling rim along one side of the bridge over Mingcui Lake, greets me as I begin my walk to the site of the Biennale. On closer view, I can see that the line reads: THE BIRDS RETURN WITH UN-VIDEOTAPED- MEMORIES OF THE MOUNTAINS. THE SEA HAS NO NAME FOR CHINA OR EVEN FOR AMERICA. THE SEA HAS NO NAME FOR EVEN ITSELF. The title of this textual installation by Scottish-born wordsmith and artist Robert Montgomery, Wipe Your Tapes with Lightning (2016), is his tribute to Scottish poet Paul Reekie, and the use of capital letters apparently refers to the fact that after Reekie’s untimely death by suicide in 2010, a large box was found containing his unpublished poetry and prose, which was written mainly in capital letters. Montgomery is known for mounting in public spaces illuminated words with poetic allusions in order to steer the onlooker toward a state of introspection. His lines, with their subtle and suggestive ideas, often have been politically subversive, discreet gestures of defiance to the dominant language of signage or advertising that is meant for mass consumption. His language expresses critical views about his surroundings and about the world. It is a creative device that is best understood from his own view on poetry: “Poetry seems less about language than a defense against language. Poetry chases and threatens language. It is the last line of defense against language consuming the actual magic of the world.” These words remind us that memory can be cherished without recording it mechanically, like a robot, and natural existence does not require a mere official identity to “be.”

Vol. 16 No. 2 53 It was John Berger who once said that the Robert Montgomery, Wipe Your Tapes With Lightning function of the work of art is to lead us (Poem for Paul Reekie), 2016, wood, neon, and metal. Photo: from the work to the process of creation Romain Maitra. that it contains. And creativity could also be a letting go of certainties and an inducement to plurality of meaning within a work of art. In this regard, I prefer not to read the title of an exhibited Iván Navarro, This Land is Your Land Ladder (Water work, if there is one, and certainly not Tower), 2016, neon, wood, painted steel, galvanized steel, before looking at the work. But in some aluminum, mirror, one-way mirror, and electric energy, cases, as in conceptual art, captions and 480.1 x 267 x 267 cm. Photo: Romain Maitra. explanations can provide a missing link between an abstruse work of art and one’s understanding of it. In the case of Ivan Navarro’s minimalist and neatly aligned neon sculptures, for example, the lights do not guide me out of the dark, yet the title of his work could be the crack that lets the gleam filter through. In This Land Is Your Land Ladder (Water Tower) (2016), this Chilean-born artist uses his signature form of a round wooden water tower in which a neon ladder is placed. The title references a 1940 Woody Guthrie folk song, aiding one in following the intended meaning of the artist, who has now made the US his home. As the title suggests, the work is an implicit call for the integration of displaced immigrants into a foreign land; this is suggested metaphorically by the presence of the ladder.

From a distance Yoko Ono’s installation Ex It (1997/2007), placed outside the façade of MOCA, looks like a verdant growth of trees, but upon closer inspection it reveals a number of firmly closed, identical, nameless wooden coffins, lined up neatly in rows. From each coffin, one lean olive tree emerges from a hole cut into the top. Recorded sounds of chirping birds echo throughout the open space and momentarily disappear in the passing breeze—another delightful oscillation between suggestions of life and death. This implies a sort of ecological reincarnation within the domain of decay and death, such as can be witnessed in nature when a tree dies and becomes fertilizer for another other tree to grow. Yoko Ono is known to have expressed that when she dies, perhaps she will reemerge as a tree. And does this not also echo in our minds those undying lines of Oscar Wilde: “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grass waving above one’s head and listen to silence?”

The regenerative spirit and the continuity of life represented in Yoko Ono’s Ex It takes a reverse passage in Sydney-based Tim Silver’s Untitled (Object) (2016), which poignantly records the process of decay and death in time. In a dark room, a soft beam of light is projected on a sculpture cast from Silver’s own life-sized, prone body, made from Cedar Timbermate woodfiller, a pasty substance meant to conceal cracks in timber. However, this substance, with its mission to kill the traces of time, ironically performs a role reversal here by being itself killed through the process of time, as the sculpture will gradually crack and crumble under its own weight. Four

54 Vol. 16 No. 2 Yoko Ono, Ex It, 1997/2007, wood, soil, trees. Photo: Romain Maitra.

Tim Silver, Untitled (Object), 2016, 4 archival inkjet print photographs, Cedar Timbermate woodfiller. Photo: Romain Maitra.

archival inkjet photographic prints face the sculpture and, although the figures in these prints look poised, they register the disintegrating change that will eventually take place in the sculpture. Thus, Yoko Ono’s liberation of the mortal body is counterpoised here by Silver’s plaintive awareness of the fragility and decaying entropy of the same. At the same time, there is also a strange and intense beauty in the form and in the posture of the sculpture—a kind of elegance emanating from its impermanence.

Outside, at the other end of MOCA, numerous seemingly stray wooden chairs in irregular shapes stand frozen and from a distance look like a large, ancient dancing ensemble turning into a timeless frieze. Presented by the Chinese artist He Xiangyu, these untitled chairs (2009–11), which appear chipped and scarred with time, were fixed piecemeal with wooden logs salvaged from an old canal. At first glance, they convey an impression of being unstable, but after randomly sitting on a number of them, I found they were in fact stable, and also rather comfortable. In fact, these chairs were even used by a group of trained dancers in Beijing in 2011 who tried during their performance to stay balanced upon them without falling to the ground, something that symbolically could mean death. It is indeed fascinating to ponder the riddles of nature, time, and decay as embedded in these beautifully irregular objects that are made for regular use and comfort.

Vol. 16 No. 2 55 He Xiangyu, untitled, 2009–11, salvaged hardwood. Photo: Romain Maitra.

Titled Shoonya Ghar (Empty Is Sudarshan Shetty, Shoonya Ghar (Empty is this House), This House) (2016), Indian artist 2016, mixed-media installation. Photo: Romain Maitra. Sudarshan Shetty’s installation of a few run-down architectural structures with a bent passageway between them is presented in MOCA’s basement. In contrast, a snug, decorated room is also attached to this derelict construction and is packed with furniture of all kinds seen within humble semi-urban households—a woman’s dressing table is beside a bed, and there is even a partly lifted mosquito net, as if the householder has just got up and left the bed. Over the years, Shetty, who curated the latest edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, has offered a succession of different kinds of installations, from the astutely flamboyant to the mysteriously reflective, that have constantly expanded the boundaries of his art. This work’s title references the lyrics of medieval Indian sage Gorakhnath, who composed the Nirgun devotional songs. The lyrical text used by Shetty metaphorically describes an empty house and an empty community to refer to the human body while wavering between aspects physical and metaphysical. This wavering is typical of the composition inherent to doha, or the couplet, in which an image in the first line is countered by another opposing one in the following line to arrive at the synthesis of a larger, composite idea. Shetty has acknowledged his deep interest in this form of poetry, and presumably he has infused this mutually inclusive contrast in Shoonya Ghar, juxtaposing death with life, absence with presence—conceived in placing the desolate architectural structures in contrast to the compact room throbbing with the traces of human existence and warmth. However, the work’s paradoxical quality throws open the doorway to multiple interpretations. In the adjoining alcove, there is a projection of a sixty-minute movie that carries the same title as the installation, which Shetty refers to as being “personal,” and that is set in a stone quarry with a band of characters whose interpersonal relationships unfold cycles of love, decay, loss, memory, and longing.

Known for producing thought-provoking video and photography, Beijing- based conceptual artist Song Dong tends to infuse his work with his views on the social and human implications of modernity in Chinese societies.

56 Vol. 16 No. 2 Song Dong, Through the Wall, 2016, installation of found objects, 901 x 460 x 225 cm. Photo: Romain Maitra.

His works also invoke his personal equation regarding the rapid pace of his country’s economic development, which necessarily distances it from its spiritual connection with the past. In his architectural installation Through The Wall (2016), he points his finger at the many walls that we have built between people—political, economic, or psychological—walls that, to him, can be broken down and made into windows instead. A narrow room, with ramshackle wooden doors and window frames stands completely closed from outside. But as one steps inside this closed structure through a door, one sees framed mirrors covering all sides of the interior, each reflecting its facing side, and hanging from the ceiling are several illuminated hanging lamps. The whole interior thus presents itself as one big kaleidoscopic puzzle that may look impressive to some but garish to others. However, these face-to-face mirrors significantly evoke his idea of viewing the mirror as a receiver rather than a reflector, thus creating a corridor of acceptance rather than rejection.

Fred Eedekens, Thoughtless, The magic of transformed reflection 2016, aluminum, water, rubber, 200 x 500 x 160 cm. Photo: is also present in Belgian artist Fred Romain Maitra. Eerdekens’s installation Thoughtless (2016), in which thin shavings of twisted aluminum are hung above a water filled circular container on the floor in which is reflected the word “thoughtless.” We witness here how with a certain arrangement the pieces above lose their materiality below in the reflection, but gain meaning and significance in their own negation—and what is inherent in this artistic transformation is invisible to the eye.

British artist Anish Kapoor’s Untitled (Bell) (2010) is a mechanical sculpture that consists of a colossal bell of Bordeaux-wine-red wax that

Vol. 16 No. 2 57 Anish Kapoor, Untitled (Bell), 2010, wax and steel, 481.2 cm x 500 cm x 500 cm. Courtesy of Yinchuan Biennale.

gradually forms its own distinct shape from rotating slowly while its contour scrapes gently against the grooved side of a tall black steel slab. The work is reminiscent of his installation My Red Homeland (2003), which also incorporates painted wax, a steel arm, and a motor. In both cases, he maneuvers his viewer into an extended relationship with both space and time. Here, the form of the bell is enhanced by the kinetic rotation that brings it into its becoming; the aspect of time then transforms the work into a prolonged narrative in which the normally fixed and frozen moment of a sculpture is indefinitely extended. On another level, the soft surface of the bell takes us back in time into the process of bell-making, where clay serves as the initial stage before the bell is cast into its final stage in metal.

Despite the pressures of censorship, Santiago Sierra, Destroyed Word, 2012/2016, 10-channel art that exhibits a form of protest video projection, 21 mins. has grown and flourished while taking a variety of forms; and if art eschews being critical or interventionist, it runs the danger of becoming merely another commodity in a free-market economy. However, while protest art can be genuine under idiosyncratic, small-scale patronage, it can also operate as an attitude or stance, just another means of doing business. The form of protest chosen in the art of Spanish agit-prop activist Santiago Sierra, however, is mostly one of intervention and not of veiled critique, and his registering of dissent towards some aspect of the social or political order is novel and provocative, which he has practiced in different places in the world. He is also a virulent critic of the art world, which, as he once said, “looks like we are talking about a golden cage, a special place . . . art can be many things, but it also forms part of the capitalist system, and as such it houses the same injustices.” In his video installation, Destroyed Word (2012–16), the ten capital letters of the word KAPITALISM, built with different materials at ten distinctly different locations around the world, are spectacularly destroyed in novel ways relative to their respective locations.

58 Vol. 16 No. 2 Christiana de Marchi, Black 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1992, black canvas, 20 pieces, 37 x 45 cm each. Courtesy of Yinchuan Biennale.

Each of these acts is individually recorded and then juxtaposed in ten multiple frames within the single video installation.

The meaning of the curatorial title for the Yinchuan Biennale—the emergence of vision from darkness—fits perfectly with Dubai-based Italian artist Cristiana de Marchi’s Black, 1992 (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) (1992), a cluster of twenty stark-black canvases embroidered with black thread. This series superimposes physical blindness upon the metaphorical, alluding to the world’s blind refusal to consider the repercussions of climate change. Translating the United Nations warning of this imminent destabilization of nature and its effect on the planet, she has embroidered its text in Braille on the black canvases to symbolically spread awareness and knowledge to the dark, closed minds of the world’s leaders, just as Braille offers the light of knowledge to the blind. In addition, her radical use of needle and embroidery, traditionally the domain of women, sends an assertive message about the changing roles and voices of women across the wider world.

Sonia Mehra Chawla, If Sierra’s activism has heat and Blue Shores of Silence, 2016, HD video, 15 mins. Photo: de Marchi’s has light, then Indian Romain Maitra. multi-media artist Sonia Mehra Chawla’s high-definition video Blue Shores of Silence (2016) is a lament for the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that severely damaged the Sonia Mehra Chawla, Coromandel coast of South India, Residue, 2016, installation with serigraphic UV prints claiming innumerable lives and and drawing on wood, layered plexiglass and acrylic sheets, dislodging thousands of people 365.76 × 1524 cm. Photo: Romain Maitra. from the coastal communities. Chawla takes her title from Pablo Neruda’s On the Blue Shores of Silence: Poems of the Sea and pairs poetic excerpts from his book with visuals of locations in the deep interiors of the swamp along this coast and in the now vast degraded

Vol. 16 No. 2 59 belts of mangrove wetlands in the Cauvery Delta. Her video alludes to the importance of mangroves, which lessen the impact of waves and prevent tsunami-affected people from being washed out to the sea, while pointing to the alarming rate of global mangrove loss, which is estimated to be 150,000 hectares per year according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. However, what makes this work hauntingly melancholic is the use of an accompanying repetitive melody as an audio background. Her associated mixed-media installation Residue (2016), next to her video installation, reinforces the idea of ecological peril with her graphic take on the destruction of the earth with serigraphic UV prints and drawings on wood that are layered with Plexiglas and acrylic sheets.

Using multiple art forms like Brook Andrew, Building (Eating) Empire, 2016, mixed- installation, mixed-media media installation. Photo: Romain Maitra. art, performance, and video, Melbourne-based Brook Andrew has been questioning dominant cultural and historical discourses, especially those concerning colonialism and its legacies. However, unlike Sierra’s work, the visual vocabularies within his installations often have hidden meanings, and one senses a pleasant challenge to interpret the otherwise spectacular installation Building (Eating) Empire (2016). Its fleeting visual suggestions and elliptical associations create a visually dissonant assemblage of uneven-shaped cut outs of photographic figures, a smiling baby, a design of irregular zigzag lines, and a hanging neon light in the shape of a bird’s roost. This intriguing interrelation of images also builds an alternative discourse of reframing colonial history and its legacies.

Apart from the mixing of cultures, the historical route of the Silk Road fused different races and a variety of facial features that have now formed into a single political identity recognized by the Chinese state. However, the face loses its identity in Jakarta-based Tita Salina’s multiple-channel video installation S.O.S. (2016), where a woman’s face is replaced by a round mirror reflecting sunlight. By this effacing of the face, Salina brings to the fore, as she told me, the desire that is particular to many Asian women to be fair-skinned through the use of cosmetics that promise to lighten the colour of one’s skin. The mirror’s reflection also suggests her sending out oblique S. O. S. signs to this present world in which emotion so often is expressed with emoticons—the three letters could be interpreted as either “Save Our Soul” or, ironically, as the artist indicated in conversation with me, “Sell Our Soul.”

Dubai-based Alaa Mahmoud George Osodi, The Nigerian Monarch Series, 2006–16, Alqedra’s Lost Series (2015–16) C prints, 90 x 120 cm each. Photo: Romain Maitra. consists of teddy bears and other children’s playthings cast in concrete. That they are charred and despoiled can go unnoticed within the illuminated tent of mirrors that

60 Vol. 16 No. 2 surrounds them, as if the crucibles of her childhood memories in war-ravaged Palestine are now expunged in her present life in the commercially prosperous United Arab Emirates, where her Palestinian father migrated with her family.

Art by black Africans is conspicuous by its meagre presence in this Biennale. However, there is an acute documentation of Nigerian royal figures, along with their courtiers and attendants, by Nigerian photographer George Osodi in his Nigerian Monarch Series (2006–16). Although Nigeria has a formal presidency in the convention of democratic nations, traditionally the country is split into many small kingdoms. These kingdoms, some having ancient lineages, reflect ethnic, religious, and at times political divisions. Osodi’s photographic, densely coloured images are striking, and the wilful formality of his compositions reflects the serious demeanor of the royals and of those who surround them.

Top: Tita Salina, S.O.S., 2016, To conclude, here is an unnerving performance video. Courtesy of the artist. afterthought to ponder. During the Alaa Mahmoud Alqedra, Lost Series, 2015–16, concrete and two-day international conference mirrors. Photo: Romain Maitra. at the Biennale titled “Gate of the Sun Between the Mountain and the River,” which took its reference from the title of the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury’s novel Gate of the Sun, several artists, writers, curators, and theorists spoke and presented their views. But at no point during my attendance at the conference—for both days—was the aspect of censorship, with reference to the rejection of Ai Weiwei’s work discussed, let alone mentioned. Have these conferences, which are regular features at biennials and art fairs, become merely intellectual decorations to add refracted glory to those events? And does this indifference, or helplessness, about the exclusion of Ai Weiwei’s work not indicate that the Chinese art world long ago reconciled itself to the censorial role of the State while continuing to adopt itself with an adaptive mechanism that can allow it to flourish?

Vol. 16 No. 2 61 Stephanie Bailey A Sense of Place: Tales of Our Time at the Guggenheim Museum, New York

Sun Xun, Mythological Time, 2016, 2-channel colour HD animated video projection, with sound, and powdered pigments in gum arabic and casein paint on mulberry bark paper, installation view. Photo: David Heald. © Sun Xun. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection.

he geographical focus of Tales of Our Time, the second exhibition organized through the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation TChinese Art Initiative at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (November 4, 2016–March 10, 2017), is expansive. This was the intention of the curators, Foundation Associate Curator Xiaoyu Weng and Consulting Curator Hou Hanru, who commissioned Chia-En Jao, Kan Xuan, Sun Xun, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Tsang Kin-Wah, Yangjiang Group, and Zhou Tao to respond to the words “territory,” “border,” “boundary,” and “divide” in speculative and poetic terms.1 This invitation was inherently tied to the Foundation’s geographical concerns, which spans China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan—in other words, what has become commonly known as Greater China. As the curators state, the exhibition does not intend to be “a monolithic report on the state of contemporary art in China.”2 Rather, “China” is presented “not only as a country but also as a notion that is open for questioning and reinvention.”3

The show’s theme emerged after the curators completed studio visits and received artist proposals. Commissioned works (all 2016) are bound by the exhibition’s title, an homage to Chinese modernist writer Lu Xun’s 1936 collection of eight short stories, Gushi xin bian (Old Tales Retold), which invokes the ambiguities of the phrase shi xin bian by connecting “stories” with “real events.”4 Old Tales Retold reinterprets Chinese legends from the

62 Vol. 16 No. 2 vantage point of China’s early twentieth century, with each story reflecting Lu Xun’s “struggle with tradition, national identity, and cultural heritage in relation to the modernization of Chinese society”—a strategy the author employed “to reconstruct history through narrative.”5 (“At times,” Lu Xun wrote, “I base myself in historical fact; at others, my imagination roams free.”6) The artists in Tales of Our Time grapple with similar issues from a twenty-first century perspective—to borrow Xiaoyu Weng’s words, they enact “a sort of critical deterritorialization: they poke holes in the fabric of historical narratives and dissolve cultural boundaries, exposing ungovernable connections.”7

Staged over the Guggenheim’s Tower Level 4 and 5 galleries, the exhibition begins with Mythological Time, an immersive installation by Sun Xun. The walls of the exhibition’s entrance passage—including the ceiling—are covered in mulberry paper, a cladding that continues in a space where a film is projected over one wall, the paper curling over the room’s corner to create a concave edge. Ink-style paintings rendered in the artist’s characteristic classic-meets-contemporary aesthetic depict a landscape dotted with various figures, including miners, turning the entire installation into a techno-historical scroll. In the film, similar paintings are turned into animated landscapes drawn from Sun Xun’s home city of Fuxin, a coal mining region since the Qing dynasty, where the largest open-pit mine in Asia has since become a geological museum. References also extend beyond the artist’s personal microcosm to coal mining sites across the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, including Russia and America.8

Within these vistas, things come into view and events take place; comets crash down over pyramid-shaped hills, tanks roll through, and skeleton, fossil, and insect specimens encased in boxes sparkle on the screen as symbols of the past, both dead and eternal. Movement and metamorphosis is constant—from the statue of Chairman Mao that appears in a cloud of smoke and the statue of liberty that appears out of an explosion, to the fish that turns into a winged creature. In one moment, the view closes in on the arm of Mao’s statue, on which the nine mythical beasts found on the Forbidden City’s Hall of Supreme Harmony are perched, an immortal guardian positioned at the front of the line. The film is filled with such temporal compressions such as when a woolly mammoth comes into view as a coal-powered steam train chugs along in the foreground. The animals and insects in the film exude a fluctuating sense of curiosity, unease, and indifference. In one scene, a fox watches a bright white screen projected on a hyperbolic cooling tower. In another, a group of insects cling to a wooden trunk, their wings twitching, as power lines on one side of the horizon line up with a view of a power station on the other. These perspectives offer a mirror reflection for the viewers watching in the gallery space whose own microcosms, like the creatures portrayed, contribute to the reading of the piece, since the varied levels of meaning behind each symbol Sun Xun deploys is dependent upon who is looking.

The micro and macro thus come together through a weaving of “intriguing black holes,” which the artist believes exist both in “one’s own memory”

Vol. 16 No. 2 63 and in history, where countless holes exist.9 It is in these holes, or abstract spaces, that time at once compresses and stretches out—where events in history can often become “just one small point in time,” rather than being accepted as definitive points in history.10 Such ambiguity offers a liberation of sorts—the kind Sun Xun was going for when taking into account his opinion that art offers “the possibility to subvert a pre-existing order in a relatively gentle way.”11 The pre-existing order, in the context of Mythological Time, is made up of structured, linear, and sanctioned histories that officially define what are in fact many worlds.

Sun Xun, Mythological Time, 2016, 2-channel colour HD animated video projection, with sound, and powdered pigments in gum arabic and casein paint on mulberry bark paper, installation view. Photo: David Heald. © Sun Xun. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection.

Kan Xuan’s Kū Lüè Er (2016) offers another kind of temporal mapping in the form of eleven stop-motion videos that were created using images taken with a cell phone camera. Presented on square, flat-screen monitors, each depicts “remnants of ancient town-sites along the border of northern and southern China,” which Kan Xuan describes as the line along which “settled farming culture of the South meets the nomadic culture of the North,” where numerous ancient town-sites exist, many of which have histories that involve abandonment in one dynasty, and revival in another12 (the artist visited 110 ruins). This geography is often known as the precipitation line, a natural border that separates “the semi-humid southeast” of China “from the semi-arid northwest,” the latter region receiving less than 400 millimetres of rainfall annually.13 Historically, it was over and through this geography that the Mongols overtook China in the thirteenth century, during which Genghis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan, established the Yuan dynasty in 1271 and defeated the Song dynasty in 1279.14 A few centuries later, after the Chinese drove the Mongols out in 1368 and established the Ming dynasty,15 the northeastern Manchus would establish in 1644 China’s final dynasty, the Qing, which ended in 1912, after the 1911 Xinhai Revolution heralded a new chapter in Chinese history.16

Kū Lüè Er compresses this historical landscape into its present form. The project started when Kan Xuan sought out a town site in the Mongolian grasslands, only to learn that it had ceased to exist, and discovered a village by the name of Kū Lüè Er in the process. The characters in the name of this village intrigued her—they represent a dialect derived from Mongolian

64 Vol. 16 No. 2 Kan Xuan, Ku Lüè Er, 2016, 13-channel colour video installation, with sound, stone, and marble, installation view. Photo: David Heald. © Kan Xuan. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection.

that exists in China’s northern regions and means “an area of grassland enclosed on all sides” or “to circle a piece of land.” The latter interpretation fits with the way the artist depicts each site: with sequential images that flicker and move to incorporate multiple perspectives. In one segment, fields are observed from various angles before the camera lingers on a shot of a mound, before moving on. In another, the camera is trained on a single section of plain, the only visible movement being the shadows of the clouds moving below, until the focus steadily shifts. The intention was to recreate, as the artist noted, the perspective of the landscape from the vantage point of a bird or a crawling lizard.17 As in Mythological Time, the experience of history is thus returned to the earth, just as the majority of sites that Kan Xuan visited have been overtaken by nature. Suddenly, history is as much about a herd of goats (in the case of Kū Lüè Er), or the eye of a pigeon (in the case of Mythological Time), as it is about officially recorded events.

Kan Xuan, Ku Lüè Er (details), Between Kan Xuan’s moving images 2016, 13-channel colour video installation, with sound, stone, and Sun Xun’s film installation— and marble. © Kan Xuan. Courtesy of the Solomon R. through which China’s scope extends Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho towards Russia, America, Mongolia, Family Foundation Collection. Central Asia, and further afield as geographies and temporalities that overlap—two works by Chia-En Jao consider history from the perspective of the modern era. Screened in one room is Taxi, a film documenting five taxi rides to various locations of historical importance, or contention, in Taipei—from the former site of the most important Shinto shrine during Japanese colonial rule (now The Grand Hotel), to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial. The artist films the conversations that ensue with each taxi driver, including an admission from one driver of the effective brainwashing he received from the Kuomintang and the residual anti-communist sentiments he harbours as a result. What emerges is a history drawn from the varying recollections of men with first hand experiences of Taiwan’s tumultuous twentieth century, focusing on the period following Taiwan’s transition from Japanese to Republic of China (ROC) rule, defined as it is by the arrival of the Kuomintang, decades of martial law (known as the White Terror), and the Cold War. The ride to the American Military Club invokes this legacy, as does the journey to the Nylon Cheng Liberty Foundation, the former offices of the Freedom Era Weekly magazine dedicated to “100% free speech,”

Vol. 16 No. 2 65 where Nylon Cheng self-immolated in April 1989 when police stormed the building, just two months before the student movement in Beijing came to a climax. (The driver of the latter taxi, once a member of the elite Amphibious Reconnaissance and Patrol Unit, remembers training on a US submarine when Taiwan, or the ROC, “was still in the UN.”)

In another ride, the cab driver is Chia-En Jao, Taxi (details), 2016, colour UHD video emphatic about his refusal to speak with sound. © Chia-En Jao. Courtesy of Solomon R. about politics or religion after Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Chia-En Jao asks what he knows Family Foundation Collection. about his chosen destination: the Gikong Presbyterian church. The church was the former residence of Lin Yi-Hsiung, who was arrested following the pro-democracy demonstrations in 1979, and whose mother and seven-year-old twin daughters were killed in their home in 1980 while Lin Yi-Hsiung was in detention. The conversation between Chia-En Jao and the driver is at first slow, and somewhat repetitive, as the driver keeps insisting he does not like speaking about politics in his cab. Gradually, though, he begins to recall what is known as the Lin family massacre. He was in elementary school at the time, and it was big news: all unfolding when, he remembers, parents instructed children never to talk about politics. As the driver begins to open up, a trace of the elementary school boy returns. “At that time,” he begins slowly, “several non-KMT people said . . . perhaps . . . it could have been . . .” A long pause follows—as if he is suddenly unsure whether the White Terror is over or not. Then, the driver says that some suspected the Kuomintang for the murders, continuing to bring up more details of an event he clearly remembers, including the fact that the real culprit has never been found. At the end of the ride, even after money has been exchanged and a receipt printed, he continues to talk, admitting how “terrible” it is to remember “these things.” But to remember is exactly what Taxi wants to do. As the artist explains, “The Cold War actually isn’t over yet. It still exists in our collective society”; hence, Chia-En Jao pursued a project that brings “these collective experiences . . . to the fore,” no matter how painful, conflicted, or contradictory they may be.18

Hovering over these conversations is the figure of Chiang Kai-shek—an idol like those, including Mao, which Sun Xun also conjures in Mythological Time. Chiang Kai-shek’s spectre is confronted in Taxi on the journey to his memorial. The radio is turned on to the Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC) and a lunch program focused on the 2016 Brexit vote. The driver begins to describe the general patterns of civilization as he perceives it: first comes family, then tribe, then country, after which “the people governing the country take advantage of its citizens,” which results in rising taxes, and rebellion. (“Wherever there are people it’s the same, right?” the driver says.) When this theory is applied to Taiwan, the driver points out the existence of the indigenous tribes, who Han settlers faced—and fought—on their arrival

66 Vol. 16 No. 2 to the island, until “mutual assimilation” occurred “over a period of time.” (The driver continues: “What I mean is that when the KMT came to Taiwan in 1949, they also encountered opposition.”) Bringing Taiwan’s first nations into the picture problematizes the concept of its independence, recalling not only the histories of Japanese, Dutch, and Spanish colonization, but of Chinese settlement, too. When the camera cuts to a scene of a graveyard where people killed for political reasons were buried during the White Terror, the bloodied histories of the twentieth century feel ever present and ambiguous in the twenty-first. (“We’re all working to pay the bills,” says one driver; “whoever is in power makes no difference to us.”)

Chia-En Jao, Arms no. 31, This unflinching approach to history 2016, cast aluminum, textile patchwork, display case with as an affective and ambiguous fabric swatches, and paper handout with text, installation cartography of multiplicities is view. Photo: David Heald. © Chia-En Jao. Courtesy of inherent to Taxi, as it is to Tales of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Our Time—an exhibition predicated Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. on the legacies of modernization and the violent formations that have occurred therein, the effects of which continue to bind the Chinese world and beyond, even in its separations. (“That’s what the world is like everywhere,” a driver notes at one point: “coming together and moving apart.”) This binding is what Chia-En Jao focuses on in Arms No. 31, an installation presented outside the room where Taxi is screened. A large textile patchwork makes up a coat of arms devised by Chia-En Jao, at the centre of which is a shield paying homage to Taiwan’s indigenous tribes and the island’s natural resources, with an Atayal woman’s profile encased in a beetle-shaped frame and the red rays of the Japanese rising sun flag emanating in the background. To the right of this shield is a one-legged man in Japanese Army uniform standing on the “TR” bricks associated with Japanese construction during the colonial era. To the left is a man dressed in boxer shorts made from a flour sack stamped with “Chinese American Cooperation,” holding a bamboo stick over one shoulder and standing on the rubble of what is described as the Governor General’s office building that the Japanese bombed in World War II. This complex composition is accompanied by an explanatory key, which outlines the origins of each fabric used in the composition, from the ROC Marine Corps uniform and a Japanese Kimono, to a Taiwanese Hakka fabric with tung flower pattern. With these intertextual relations, Chia-En Jao offers a view of Taiwan’s modernization and its colonial histories in a way that counters any linear reading by literally weaving these histories into a physical fabric and presenting them as a complex and contradictory patchwork.

In contrast, Zhou Tao considers the effects of modernization from a perspective of a past predicated on the colonization of the future—namely, the rapid development that has occurred along the Pearl River Delta, where Deng Xiaoping established a number of Special Economic Zones in the 1980s following the implementation of China’s Open Door policy. In The Land of the Throat, images taken from various construction sites throughout Guangdong are montaged together to reference science fiction and the tradition of Chinese

Vol. 16 No. 2 67 shanshui landscape painting. These Zhou Tao, Land of the Throat, 2016, installation with sites include dumping grounds for 2-channel colour HD video with sound, installation view. construction debris and dug-up soil Photo: David Heald. © Zhou Tao. Courtesy of Solomon R. that form man-made hills like the one Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho that collapsed in Shenzhen in 2015, Family Foundation Collection. killing an estimated fifty-eight people and destroying thirty-three buildings in the process. The event was a central reference for Zhou Tao, who describes visiting Shenzhen the day after the event so he could see the situation with his own eyes, during which time he realized that this place was a “land of the throat”—a military metaphor that refers to places of strategic importance either as a “place” or “passage.”

The work is presented as a two-channel installation, located in a small, dark room in which one screen faces the other across a sloping floor. Scenes were all shot at dusk and offer frames where real sites are viewed close up, in which a waste mound resembles the surface of a barren planet, a cat in an open window looks more like an apocalypse survivor than a stray, and construction workers appear like midnight cowboys in a future world turned to dust, just as machine rooms and industrial buildings look like constructions designed for outer space. Here, the utopia of urbanization comes across as a recognizable dystopia, in which a homeland is viewed as a site of strategic importance for the sake of a future just like ancient town-sites presented by Kan Xuan, and the contested and conflicted island of Taiwan that Chia En-Jao explores. Even in the case of Sun Xun’s Mythological Time, the strategic importance of space resonates as well— here, history becomes its own land of the throat.

Zhou Tao, Land of the Throat (detail), 2016, installation with 2-channel colour HD video with sound. © Zhou Tao. Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection.

Having established these overlapping cartographical and temporal planes, a tearoom installation and garden set up in a corridor-like space to the side of the main gallery by the Yangjiang Group offers an interlude.19 Specifically designed—in theory at least—to slow people down, the title of the work, Unwritten Rules Cannot be Broken, is named after a Chan Buddhism saying: “One should not establish any rules or break any rules. While all rules are made to be followed, no rule is unbreakable.”20 Invoking the concept of

68 Vol. 16 No. 2 Yangjiang Group, Unwritten qi, or energy, viewers are invited to Rules Cannot Be Broken, 2016, plants, pond, wooden bridge, check their blood pressure before wooden tables and stools, teaware and accessories, and taking part in a tea gathering held tea gathering performance, blood pressure monitor and once a week. Tables look onto the record chart, acrylic latex paint and acrylic on foam, Guggenheim’s balcony, where a installation view. Photo: David Heald. © Yangjiang Group. Chinese garden has been installed Courtesy of Solomon R. courtesy of various plants, a fake Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho pond, and an arched wooden bridge. This balcony is separated from the Family Foundation Collection. room by glass windows, on which black calligraphic strokes have been applied with black paint. Inside the room, similar strokes in white appear on a green-coloured column that connects three floors of the museum’s galleries. These characters quote a newspaper headline: “Biden welcomes healthy competition between China and the United States, stating that the United States would never default.”21 The quotation turns the historical political relations (and tensions) between China and the U.S. into a spectral backdrop that, though ever-present, remains somewhat inaccessible to the Guggenheim’s public, the majority of whom will be unable to read the writing on the column wall. The result is a transcendence of politics without ever denying its presence for the sake of this installation’s core purpose, which is to create a social space that echoes similar occurrences the Yangjiang Group stages at their shared studio in Guangdong province. Described by the artists as a “mobile utopia” based on the sanctuary they have created for themselves back in China, the Guggenheim project feels like an in-between realm, not unlike the black holes Sun Xun describes with relation to memory and history. Inspired by the artists’ reflection on calligraphy as a manifestation of qi that can transcend time and space,22 the positioning of this installation to the side of the main exhibition heightens this feeling of limbo, as does the fact that it is only truly activated once a week, making the inactive setting an effective echo of the energy the work generates—and absorbs—from its use.

Yangjiang Group, nwritten From here, Tales of Our Time then Rules Cannot Be Broken, 2016, plants, pond, wooden bridge, moves upward to the Level 5 gallery, wooden tables and stools, teaware and accessories, and where two works round off the show. tea gathering performance, blood pressure monitor and Can’t Help Myself is a kinetic sculpture record chart, acrylic latex paint and acrylic on foam, by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu in which an installation view. Photo: David Heald. © Yangjiang Group. AI robot arm with a large sponge- Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New like brush is programmed to contain a pool of blood-red liquid on the York, The Robert H. N. Ho floor from going over a circular boundary programmed into the machine’s Family Foundation Collection. sensor. Contained in a space closed off by two large Perspex walls, the arm moves around with balletic grace, coming down whenever the liquid comes close to crossing the invisible line. These movements are documented by the trails of red splashes left on the walls, which over time build up to invoke the bloodied walls of a slaughterhouse. The work itself is simple in its expression: here, form—associated with modernism, modernization, and the mechanics of both—is a violent endeavour, palpable in the blood-red pool the machine works to contain, and heightened by the fact that, as the artists note, human programming is always behind the mechanics of our existence. This formal violence is also reflected in the form of the nation

Vol. 16 No. 2 69 state and the borders it so often Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Can’t Help Myself, 2016, Kuka aggressively establishes and defends, industrial robot, stainless steel and rubber, cellulose ether in not to mention the challenges the coloured water, lighting grid with Cognex visual-recognition nation state faces today, as the world sensors, and polycarbonate wall with aluminum frame, grapples with a twenty-first century installation view. Photo: David Heald. © Sun Yuan & Peng condition that is as much globalized Yu. Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New as it is polarized. In the case of York, The Robert H. N. Ho China, as Xiaoyu Weng writes, we have a country that is “entangled in a Family Foundation Collection. constant process of renegotiation of its physical territory, cultural traditions, and identity as a nation,” and “haunted by the threat of its unraveling into the global community, which then provokes nervous attempts to knit the nation back together.”23

This anxiety becomes intrinsically Tsang Kin-Wah, In the End Is the World, 2016, video linked not only with territory and installation. Photo: David Heald. © Tsang Kin-Wah. the need to assert and control Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New its boundaries, but also with the York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. definitions applied to the territory in question. In keeping, “China” becomes, to quote Xiaoyu Weng, “whatever we take that word to mean”—in other words, more than a physical space, to become an idea, a definition, a feeling, and/or a way of being. Or it potentially could become an assertion—a proposal that, in the real world, can produce truly violent responses. This is something that feeds into Tsang Kin Wah’s installation, In The End is the Word, which can be viewed in a room beyond Can’t Help Myself. Here, viewers look at a projection of a black-and-white film in which an image of the controversial Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea, as they are known in Chinese, becomes swamped by digitally added images of battleships and explosions that gradually fill the sea. The work references the conflict that has waxed and waned over these five islets ever since Japan annexed them in 1895 during the Sino-Japanese war, after which a defeated China ceded Taiwan. America took responsibility for the islands after World War II, returning them to Japanese control in 1972, and today, Taiwan, China, and Japan all have claims on them.24 In Tsang Kin-Wah’s projection, the islands become a reflection of this entangled history, with the pace of the military action depicted in the sea around the islands increasing gradually, as more digitally rendered ships speed between stationary vessels, and black smoke rises. The sound effects reflect the building up of the image into a climax that breaks when a sudden flush of white, capitalized words come streaming out from the horizon, through the gaps between the ships, and out of the projection itself, with words spilling into the room, covering the floor until it almost turns white. The density and speed with which the text comes out is so fast that only bits and pieces are grasped from the flow, like “IN THE WORLD,” “BLIND TO WHAT,” and “THE RIGHT TIME.”

The disruption of the projection’s frame with words that flow outward feels like a cathartic release of tension that opposes the robot ceaselessly

70 Vol. 16 No. 2 working to contain a liquid within a boundary in the next room. Yet this opposition creates a tense balance between expansion and contraction that these two works together exemplify—highlighted by the fact that visitors must leave Tsang Kin-Wah’s room through the corridor that closes off Can’t Help Myself behind Perspex. Highlighting the ambiguity of this exhibition’s conceptual frame, which is to consider “China” as a word that is constantly being interpreted, viewers are confronted once again with the blood-red liquid contained within a defined space after having seen Tsang Kin Wah’s projection of a historically contested territory that offers an example of how such processes of containment unfold in the real world. Here, words are presented as sites of “strategic importance” themselves; like the territories they also undergo processes of definition and redefinition throughout history. In his projection, this cycle is reflected in the fact that, once the words have finished spilling out of the frame, the image returns to the starting shot of these contested islands in a calm sea, only for the digitally rendered military action to start up again, leading to the same climactic conclusion.

Tsang Kin-Wah, No(thing/ But Tsang Kin-Wah’s words also Fact) Outside, 2016, vinyl, installation view. Photo: continue beyond the room where David Heald. © Tsang Kin- Wah. Courtesy of Solomon R. his projection is shown. As part of Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho No(thing/Fact) Outside, phrases Family Foundation Collection. have been plastered in vinyl on the floors, walls, stairwells and elevators of the museum, acting like the connective tissue between and beyond the two spaces and the works within them, just as the newspaper headline offered by Yiangjiang Group connect the politics of the world back into the ideal space of the exhibition. Such movement articulates the process of reterritorialization that follows the deterritorialization that Xiaoyu Weng describes in her curatorial essay, where she cites Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and frames the practices in this exhibition as lines that “point in multiple directions,” and which “unravel, but also rebuild.”25 This framing invokes the observation made by one driver Chia-En Jao spoke to in Taxi, who reflected on history as a universal process of coming together and coming undone: a condition viewed from a grounded perspective that is precisely what Tales of Our Time taps into. Indeed, it is through the stories this exhibition tells that history becomes plural: a matter of perspective rather than consensus. In each contribution, histories are expanded outwards—like time and space, stretched and pulled apart—through the location of their effects (and affects) in the inner worlds of people and places that embody their legacies, from the artists and their subjects, to the exhibition’s local and global audiences.

The complexity of shared and divergent inheritances thus materializes on a micro scale in order to create a messier macro picture, as shaped by each

Vol. 16 No. 2 71 person who experiences the exhibition as an assemblage of recollections and reflections. Through this expansive inclusivity, boundaries melt away and, like Tsang Kin-Wah’s words, continue to flow outwards beyond the site of projection. This appears to be in keeping with the curatorial intention, which is to offer both “China” and “Greater China” as terms for all to consider and define; a subtle subversion, perhaps, when taking into account the politics associated with the use and definition of both. As Deleuze and Guattari note, “Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities.”26 Where these lines lead, as is the case with Tales of Our Time as a whole, is to a multiplicity of feelings that contribute to a sense of place necessarily unbound by definition, yet vitally bound by relation.

Notes

1. Xiaoyu Weng on Tales of Our Time, video interview, November 3, 2016, https://www.guggenheim.org/ video/curator-xiaoyu-weng-on-tales-of-our-time/. 2. Tales of Our Time, exhibition statement, https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/tales-of-our-time/. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Xiaoyu Weng, “Counter-mythologies, or Tales of Our Time,” in Tales of Our Time (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2016), 23. 6. Lu Xun, “Preface,” in “Old Tales Retold,” trans. Julia Lovell, as compiled in The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun (Penguin Classics), Kindle edition, 296. 7. Xiaoyu Weng, “Counter-mythologies, or Tales of Our Time,” 23. 8. Sun Xun, video interview, November 3, 2016, on the occasion of Tales of Our Time, https://www. guggenheim.org/video/sun-xun-tales-of-our-time/. 9. Ibid. 10. Joyce Lau, “A Chinese Artist Consumed by the Idea of Inevitable Change,” New York Times, December 1, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/arts/sun-xun-a-chinese-artist-consumed- by-the-idea-of-inevitable-change.html?_r=0/. 11. Sun Xun, video interview, November 3, 2016, https://www.guggenheim.org/video/sun-xun-tales-of- our-time/. 12. Kan Xuan, video interview on the occasion of Tales of Our Time, November 3, 2016, https://www. guggenheim.org/video/kan-xuan-tales-of-our-time/. 13. Jiahua Pan, China’s Environmental Governing and Ecological Civilization (Heidelberg: Springer- Verlag GmbH, 2016), 5. 14. Jean Johnson, “The Mongol Dynasty, When Kublai Khan Ruled China,” Asia Society Center For Global Education, http://asiasociety.org/education/mongol-dynasty/. 15. Ibid. 16. See: Maxwell K. Hearn, “The Qing Dynasty (1644–1911): Painting,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, published October 2003, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/qing_1/hd_qing_1.htm/, and “The Chinese Revolution of 1911,” from The Office of the Historian, at https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/chinese-rev/. 17. Kan Xuan, video interview, November 3, 2016. 18. Chia-En Jao, video interview on the occasion of Tales of Our Time, November 3, 2016, https://www. guggenheim.org/video/chia-en-jao-tales-of-our-time/. 19. A three-person collective based in Yangjiang, composed of artists Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan, and Sun Qinglin. 20. Yangjiang Group, November 3, 2016, https://www.guggenheim.org/video/yangjiang-group-tales-of- our-time/. 21. Audio Guide, “Yangjiang Group,” for Tales of Our Time, https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/ tales-of-our-time/. 22. Yangjiang Group, November 3, 2016, https://www.guggenheim.org/video/yangjiang-group-tales-of- our-time/. 23. Xiaoyu Weng, “Counter-mythologies, or Tales of Our Time,” 21. 24. See: “Who really owns the Senkaku Islands?” on economist.com, published December 3, 2013, at http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/12/economist-explains-1/; and “How uninhabited islands soured China-Japan ties,” on BBC.com, November 10, 2014, http://www.bbc. com/news/world-asia-pacific-11341139/. 25. Xiaoyu Weng, “Counter-mythologies, or Tales of Our Time,” 23. 26. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 9.

72 Vol. 16 No. 2 Inga Walton China: Grain to Pixel

n May 2015, the Shanghai Centre of Photography (SCôP), the first institutional space in Shanghai dedicated to photography, was founded Iby photojournalist Liu Heung Shing, who also serves as the SCôP’s Director. The touring exhibition China: Grain to Pixel was curated by Karen Smith for SCôP, where it premiered in 2015 under the slightly different title of Grain to Pixel: A Story of Photography in China.1

The exhibition’s host venue in Australia, Monash Gallery of Art (MGA), Melbourne, is a purpose-built exhibition venue and storage facility that opened in June 1990. Designed by the Austrian-born Australian architect Harry Seidler (1923–2006), it houses a nationally significant collection of Australian photography—over 2,400 works spanning the nineteenth century to contemporary practice. MGA is the only cultural institution in the country—regional, state, or national—whose collection is focused solely on Australian photographic works.2

Weng Naiqiang, Red Guards in Tiananmen Square Gathered to See Chairman Mao, 1966, archival inkjet print, 50 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The Australian showing of China: Grain to Pixel (June 5–August 28, 2016) included a diverse selection of 139 works; a further seven were excised by Chinese authorities prior to being freighted. These works, Xiao Zhuang’s

Vol. 16 No. 2 73 Jiang Shaowu, Big Character Posters Created by Red Guards in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, 1967, archival inkjet print, 50 x 74 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Left: Xiao Zhuang, The Irrational Times 39, Nanjing, 1966, archival inkjet print, 40 x 40 cm. Courtesy of 798 Photo Gallery, Beijing. Right: Li Zhensheng, A Group of PLA Soldiers in a Military Hospital Holding Copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao, 1968, archival inkjet print, 35 x 35 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The Irrational Times 39, Nanjing, Weng Naiqiang’s Red Guards in Tiananmen Gathered to See Chairman Mao (both 1966), Jiang Shaowu’s Big Character Posters Created by Red Guards in Shenyang, Liaoning Province (1967), Li Zhensheng’s A Group of PLA Soldiers in a Military Hospital Holding Copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao (1968), Liu Heung Shing’s Taking Down Mao in Tiananmen Square (1980), Lu Nan’s Mental Hospital, Heilongjiang (1989), and an image from Han Lei’s series1986–2000 Earlier Black- and-White Photographs entitled Luochuan, Shaanxi province (1989), still appeared in the exhibition catalogue published by MGA.

A vintage book about Tibet by the British civil engineer, diplomat, and photographer John Claude White (1853–1918) was also removed from the exhibition.3 White served, rather unwillingly, as Deputy Commissioner of the Tibet Frontier Commission for the politically ill-fated British Expedition to Tibet in 1903–04, also known as the Younghusband Expedition, after Lieutenant Colonel Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (1863–1942), who led the mission. White’s deep personal interest in recording the topography, culture, and traditions of the North-East Himalayan frontier had developed during his time based in Darjeeling, and particularly after he was sent to Sikkim in 1888, where he remained for twenty years as the first resident Political Officer. During this time, White travelled extensively and left an extraordinary record of his time not only in Sikkim, but also his ventures into Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan, until his retirement from the Foreign Service in 1908.

74 Vol. 16 No. 2 John Claude White developed a warm personal friendship with Sir Ugyen Wangchuck (1862–1926), later the first Druk Gyalpo (King) of Bhutan, whose coronation White photographed in 1907. White was also well respected by other religious and local leaders in the region.44 Speaking to the Royal Geographical Society in 1909, Sir James Ronald Leslie Macdonald (1862– 1927), the commander of the Tibet mission’s military escort, reported that,

. . . the Tibetan representatives asked us that we should prevent any of our officers and men from entering any of their sacred places. After consulting, Colonel Younghusband issued orders that all monasteries and temples were to be out of bounds. Then a message came from the monasteries and chief Lamas to say that Mr. White was expressly excluded from this restriction, as he was welcome to visit the monasteries any time, and they would be glad to see with him any officers for whom he vouched. While Younghusband and I were debarred from visiting any of these places, Mr. White was welcome.5

John Claude White, Tibet, As the only member of the Tibet 1903–04, platinum photo pasted into photo album, expedition permitted to photograph the 37.5 x 26.5 x 5 cm. Private Collection. monasteries in Lhasa, White made the most of the privilege.6 His photographs preserved invaluable images of the main gateway into Lhasa through the Chorten (shrine), the Fort of Khampa Dzong, the Chakpori (medical school), and many other sites that no longer exist, either because of decay or as the result of systematic destruction carried out during China’s Cultural Revolution.7 White also documented the four Shapés, representatives of the absent Dalai Lama, who had fled to Mongolia during treaty negotiations with the British authorities.8 Recalling a later visit to Tibet, in 1906, in the company of Sir Ugyen, White lamented,

. . . notwithstanding the vast expenditure of money, the heavy loss of life, and the many hardships endured by the Lhasa Mission of 1904, Tibet has again become an absolute closed country to all Englishmen. In addition, [the British] Government’s unfortunate subsequent policy has been the means of handing over the Tibetans, bound hand and foot, to the Chinese, and all Tibetan officials are now obliged by their virtual masters, the Chinese, to enforce the Chinese traditional policy of exclusion of all Europeans.9

White’s images of Tibetan religious and cultural sites, particularly the Potala (residence of the Dalai Lama), and their social life and customs prior to China’s asserting full sovereignty over Tibet is probably not something Chinese officials would want emphasized overseas. During his ten visits to Australia (1982–2015), the popularity of the current (14th) Dalai

Vol. 16 No. 2 75 Lama—H. H. Tenzin Gyatso—has only increased.10 No images from White’s book appear in the MGA catalogue; nor is he mentioned in any of the introductory texts. Stephen Zagała, Senior Curator at MGA, explains, “The removal of the work about Tibet might suggest other things. There was a suggestion that Chinese authorities might have been sensitive to the July 4th anniversary of the Tian’anmen Square protests, too, but, once again, this is just speculation. No explanation was offered by the Chinese government concerning the works.”11

Evidently, these works were not considered particularly controversial or problematic when originally exhibited at SCôP; the reason for their removal by officials prior to leaving China is obscure. When asked about the circumstances surrounding this incident, Zagała commented, “As I understand it, some low-level bureaucrats or officers at Chinese customs contacted Shanghai Centre of Photography to inform them that the works would be removed. Customs officers must have some authority to limit the circulation of Chinese cultural objects beyond the border, and they decided to exercise that power.”12 This decision, as I understand it from Zagała, led to some consternation on the part of the curatorial staff at SCôP, who were understandably concerned about the overall integrity of the exhibition.

Initially, the option to have the John Claude White book hand delivered, and for MGA to print the missing photographic works in Australia, so that they might still be included, was considered. However, senior management at MGA ultimately decided against such a move given its potential to antagonize Chinese officialdom—the Gallery, as a municipal cultural facility, is administered by the City of Monash Council. As part of their deliberations, presumably MGA staff also had to consider the possibility of an adverse impact for the exhibition’s “program partners” (sponsors), the investment company Anxin Trust (who funded the catalogue) and the West Bund Development Group, both based in Shanghai. For his part, Zagała was perplexed by the rationale for removing these particular works. He remarked that, “The choices were a bit random and tokenistic. I mean, why censor the Tibetan story but not the story of the Catholic underground? I’m just drawing my own conclusion in suggesting that those images omitted suggest brutal or dystopian sentiments.”13

Of the photographic works removed, Han Lei, Luochuan, Shaanxi Province, 1989, silver gelatin it is hard to understand why ostensibly print, 22.5 x 15 cm. Courtesy of the artist and M97 Gallery, “patriotic” images such as those by Shanghai. Xiao Zhuang, Weng Naiqiang, and Li Zhensheng would be of concern to the Chinese authorities. Lu Nan’s Psychiatric Institution, Heilongjiang (1989) depicts male and female patients pacing in a courtyard, many of them congregating around a purpose-made table with curved benches. One individual is lying on this central table in a passive posture, gazing upward. Apart from the sadness

76 Vol. 16 No. 2 Lu Nan, Psychiatric Institution, Heilongjiang, 1989, archival inkjet print, 30 x 44.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

of their predicament and the circumstances of such facilities in China, there is nothing blatantly ominous about the image—no guards or orderlies are present, and the subjects do not appear to be in any state of alarm. Han Lei’s Luochuan, Shaanxi Province (1989) shows a man with a hat festooned with a spyglass, ribbons, and carnations, carrying a parasol. He meets the camera lens unflinchingly; he could be a local character, but more likely he is a regional circus or vaudeville performer, thus, on the surface, it does not seem to be a threatening image.

The title of the exhibition refers not to agrarian production (as in rice grain), although some viewers may have interpreted it thus, but to the texture of a photograph or negative produced using the manual process, pre-digital. As Karen Smith notes, “The richly subtle variations of the grain imbue black-and-white photographs with a timeless aesthetic beauty, one that is hard to reproduce or to emulate digitally, even with a zillion pixels. As technology becomes increasingly user friendly, in the face of an ever more pixelated future, the once ubiquitous material of photography, 135 and 120 film cartridges and the distinctive character from the grain are becoming lost to history and to the past.”14 The speed at which digital technology has been embraced by the general public since the late 1990s, has led to the use of filmstock and the more arcane photography techniques such as wet/dry plate, albumen printing, Mordançage, pinhole, and photogravure being consigned to the realm of the specialist and the niche. This enthusiasm for the digital medium “has been experienced with particular speed and breadth in China, which leapfrogged almost entirely over analogue and into the digital age. This is also the period in which photography emerged in China as a fully-rounded form of expression.”15

The first part of the exhibition, “Early Photography in China (1890s–1920s),” consists of only five images displayed in a wall module at the entrance to the space. One is of the diplomat and statesman Guo Songtao (1818–91), taken in the 1870s. Guo Songtao was the first Qing dynasty minister to be stationed in a Western country, serving in both Britain and France (1877–79). The woodbury-type portrait is credited to Lock & Whitfield Studio, a firm that had premises in London and Brighton

Vol. 16 No. 2 77 until the mid-1890s. The other works Lock & Whitfield Studio, Portrait of Guo Songtao, c. were produced by intrepid foreigners 1870s, woodbury type, 11.5 x 9.2 cm. Private Collection. who worked or lived in China for a period of years, including some well-known pioneers in the field. Their peregrinations throughout the country contributed immeasurably to the public’s knowledge and understanding of China at the time, and we are deeply indebted to them for recording these marvelous images of a bygone age.

Felice Beato, An Archway and Xili Pavilion in Front of Dagao Xuan Palace, 1860, albumen photo on paper, 24 x 29.4 cm. Private Collection.

One of the first exponents John Thomson, Monks in Hualin Temple, c. 1870s, of what would now be called albumen photo on paper, 28.5 x 22 cm. Private Collection. photojournalism, the Italian photographer Felice Beato (1832– 1909), produced An Archway and Xili Pavilion in Front of Dagao Xuan Palace (1860). Monks in Hualin Temple (1870s) is by the prolific Scottish photographer John Thomson (1837–1921). He traveled extensively throughout Asia and established a photography studio in Hong Kong in 1868. Thomson would author four books about his experiences in China, including the four-volume Illustrations of China and Its People (1873–74) and Through China With a Camera (1898). Thomas Child (1841–98) was employed in Peking as a gas engineer for the Imperial Maritime Customs from 1870 to 1889. A keen amateur photographer, he produced a series of over two hundred signed and dated full-plate images, principally of architecture and monuments. Child learned to speak Chinese

78 Vol. 16 No. 2 and documented the local populace and customs during his time there, including in Portrait of a Chinese Man (1880s).16

The French consul Auguste François (1857–1935) was posted to southern China between 1896 and 1904, first in Guangxi and then in Yunnan; he also visited Tibet. Known in China as Fang Su Ya, his diplomatic status and particular access allowed François to take thousands of photographs throughout his tenure, even shooting early moving image footage. His archive provides an extraordinary insight into Chinese society as the Qing dynasty was falling into decline; Self Portrait (1903) shows him toward the end of his term there.17

However brief in content, this initial display gives some indication of the early, and enthusiastic, engagement of Western photographers with the society and culture they experienced while living and working in China. It was perhaps not well displayed at MGA because of the very prominent blue wall module that dominated the entry space and provided the didactic introduction to the exhibition. This may have distracted some patrons, causing them to walk past the smaller cabinet to their right. Presumably, this was also the section of the exhibition where the John Claude White book would have been placed (had it been included). White’s images could have provided something of a visual counterpoint to that of the consul François, who served in a different area of China, for a “competing” government, and in a different official capacity to White.

The exhibition continues with “New China Photography (1930s–1960s),” spanning the transitional period whereby photography was an activity practised almost exclusively by Westerners in China, with their cumbersome and expensive equipment, to a time when the process was adopted by the Chinese themselves for their own purposes. The Chinese went from being “tourists” in their own country as the passive subjects of the curious Western gaze and clients of foreign-run photographic studios to active participants using a technology that allowed them to begin to define their own world view. As photography historian Xu Jianing has observed, “the opening of photo studios was an important step for photography in China, allowing Chinese to see this Western technology, and making photography consumable in daily life. Like other new inventions from the industrial revolution that were embraced, photography soon became a known and accepted part of Chinese social life.”18 Improvements in both the relative size and cost of photographic equipment and a simpler development process led to photography becoming a fad among China’s gentry, an opportunity afforded by this contact with Western culture and its various scientific developments.19

Included in this section was a cabinet containing five unmounted works, including two images by Zhuang Xueben taken from a folio and with calligraphic annotations: the striking profile portrait The Head Dress of Tu Woman in Minhe and Crossing the River by Bull Boat (both 1937). A copy of the hand-coloured book The Grandeur of the Gorges (1926) was opened to

Vol. 16 No. 2 79 Left: Zhuang Xueben, The Headdress of a Tu Woman in Minhe, 1937, silver gelatin print, 14.6 x 11.4 cm. Courtesy of Zhuang Wenjun. Right: Wu Yinxian, Mao Talking to Cadres of the 120 Division in Front of Yan’an Caves, 1942, silver gelatin print, 23 x 17 cm. Private Collection.

the plate Hung-Chuan, Red Boats: The Life-boats of the Yangtze. It is one of six books of photographs of China published by the Scottish businessman and photography enthusiast Donald Mennie (1875/1876–1944), but this was his most famous, and it led to his being proposed for membership as a member of the Royal Geographic Society.20 Wu Yinxian (1900–94) was active in both the photographic world and the emerging Chinese film industry. He is represented here by a 1939 image of the Canadian physician Dr. Norman Bethune (1890–1939) operating in a field hospital and the casual Mao Talking to Cadres of the 120 Division in Front of Yan’an caves (1942), which shows a man, not the later idealized cult figure.

Dr. Bethune, who died of septicemia, a bacterial blood poisoning, in the midst of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), left his Kodak camera to his colleague Situ Chuan (1912–50), popularly known as Sha Fei (flying sand). Sha Fei created an important photographic document of the Eighth Route Army, of which he and Bethune were members, which was used for propaganda purposes by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Almost a decade after the death of his mentor, Sha Fei was hospitalized in 1948 at Bethune Hospital in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, suffering from tuberculosis. In 1949, in a delusional state, he killed a Japanese surgeon involved in his treatment and was subsequently executed in March 1950. Two of Sha Fei’s images are included, Meal Break for the Performance Team (c. 1938–40), an aerial view of a propaganda troupe in a courtyard preparing to eat, and Three Girls (1935–36), showing young Communist enlistees in their uniforms against a rural backdrop.21

The influence of Mao Zedong’s series of speeches at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in May 1942 paved the way for photography in China as a powerful visual code that would predominantly serve the political imperatives and direction of the CCP. As an ideological tool, photography provided an efficient and evocative means for delivering Party information and promoting conformity, particularly the idea that “literature and art are subordinate to politics.” This section of the exhibition accounted for four of the works removed by Chinese officials, including the colour photograph Red Guards Streamed Into Tiananmen Square During Inspection

80 Vol. 16 No. 2 Sha Fei, Three Girls, 1935–36, by Chairman Mao (1966) by Weng archival inkjet print, 20 x 29.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Naiqiang. Weng Naiqiang was one of the few Chinese photographers who had access to Kodachrome and Ektachrome transparency film during the Cultural Revolution, which he photographed extensively. Curator Karen Smith describes the work as “exhilarating, in part due to the brilliant primary tones (unpolluted bright blue sky above and a million China-red books being waved at eye level) of the slide film he used. Visually, the mix of pure energy and celebratory optimism is transfixing.”22

Concerted efforts by the CCP to regulate China’s cultural and artistic output to serve political goals is evident in the remaining work by Li Zhensheng that was included in the exhibition, A Propaganda Team Performs for Laborers in the Countryside (1973). This work has similarities to Yin Fukang’s colourized giclée print Chinese Actors Including Male Star Zhao Dan Sing for the Workers of the Shanghai Shipyard (1960) in terms of expressing Mao’s edict that art should appeal, or should be seen to appeal, to the peasants. In 1950, Yin Fukang was assigned to the Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Press as an editor of photography-related publications, where he worked until his retirement in 1979. This photograph of well-known actors of the period would have received widespread circulation within China. Zhao Dan (1915–80), seen second from the right in a pale trench coat, was a popular actor during the first “golden age” of Chinese cinema in the 1930s.

Zhao Dan made his screen debut in Spring Sorrows (Li Pingqian, 1933), and went on to appear in some forty films, including Crossroads (Shen Xiling, 1937), and as the titular character in Lin Zexu (Zheng Junli, 1959). Zhao Dan’s prominent status as one of Chinese cinema’s leading male stars of stage and screen made him a target of the competing political forces that convulsed the country for the next forty years. The dreadful mistreatment he suffered led to the curtailment of his otherwise stellar career and periodic imprisonment. In 1939, Zhao Dan was arrested by the Nationalist warlord Sheng Shicai (1897–1970) while travelling with a “patriotic” drama troupe to China’s northwestern border province of Xinjiang, whereupon he was tortured and incarcerated from 1940 to 1945.

Following his release, Zhao Dan starred in The Life of Wu Xun (Sun Yu, 1950), based on the true story of a nineteenth-century beggar in Shandong who amasses enough money to open a charity school. Popular with the public, it nonetheless raised the ire of Mao, who criticized the film in an article published in Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) in May, 1951 as “spreading feudal culture.”23 In Red Crag (Shui Hua, 1965), Zhao Dan played a Communist prisoner, Xu Yunfeng, incarcerated by the Nationalists. This echo of Zhao Dan’s personal experience was not enough to overcome the prolonged suspicion of factions within the Communist Party. Despite

Vol. 16 No. 2 81 Li Zhensheng, A Propaganda Team Performs for Laborers in the Countryside, 1973, archival inkjet print, 30 x 44.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Yin Fukang, Chinese Actors Including Male Star Zhao Dan Sing for the Workers of the Shanghai Shipyard, 1960, archival inkjet print, 50 x 67.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

being admitted as a member of the Party in 1957, Zhao Dan was denied any further film roles after 1965 by the state-controlled Film Bureau.

Madame Mao (Jiang Qing, 1914–91), Mao’s fourth wife, was a former actress who used the professional name Lan Ping. Jiang Qing used her status within the so-called “Gang of Four” during the Cultural Revolution to exact revenge for perceived slights she had faced from major figures in the film industry in the pre-war Shanghai of the 1930s.24 Zhao Dan was one of those former colleagues whom Jiang Qing elected to persecute: he was incarcerated once again from 1967 to 1973. As Inmate 139, he was interrogated as a “traitor” who had abandoned the Communists for the Nationalists during his previous incarceration, and was compelled to write countless “confessions.”25

His career was obstructed by the Party for the last fifteen years of his life, and two days before he died of cancer, Zhao Dan belatedly fired back at his oppressors. In an article published in Renmin Ribao, October 8, 1980, entitled “Rigid Control Ruins Art and Literature,” Zhao Dan gave vent to 26 his frustration. From bitter personal experience, he opined that, “The

82 Vol. 16 No. 2 arts are the artists’ own business; the arts would have no hope whatsoever and would perish if the party regulated them too specifically.”27 As Yingjin Zhang has observed, “for Zhao Dan, the posthumous attribution to him of the image of a fighter for freedom and democracy in the arts only testifies to their conspicuous absence during his life”28

Mao abhorred traditional Chinese (Peking) opera, which he viewed as a “courtly” art form that was feudalistic, bourgeois, and excluded the masses. As a response, the Party sanctioned new “revolutionary” or “model operas,” expressive of the people’s struggles against both foreign and class enemies. Jiang Qing served as head of the Film Section of the CCP’s Propaganda Department in the 1950s. As part of Jiang Qing’s reforms of Chinese culture, she instigated the “Eight Model Operas,” or Plays (yangban xi), which consisted of five operas, two ballets, and one cantata approved by the Party. Zhang Yaxin is best known for photographing the original Eight Model Operas, and several subsequent approved productions, between 1969 and 1976. His meticulously produced still images were widely distributed and used across a variety of media, creating new aesthetic standards in China. As journalist Chengcheng Jiang has asserted, “The photographs would become some of the most iconic and recognized pictures in modern Chinese history, defining a visual style that dominated China for years, and continues to exert a powerful influence to this day. It has been said that Zhang Yaxin’s image of a gun-toting female revolutionary in front of a socialist flag exemplified beauty in China for a generation.”29

Two images, A scene from “Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy” (1971) showing four leaping dancers seemingly suspended in mid-air above the stage, and the contorted figure of A Ballet Dancer Performs “The White Haired Girl” (1974), give some idea of the quest for perfection and obsessive detail Jiang Qing directed toward her pet project. “Naturally, the camera angle helps; carefully chosen angles that were in keeping with Yan’an forum directives, conjoined with those of a new slogan coined for expressing the Cultural Revolution as ‘red, lofty, shining’—politically correct, heroic, uplifting,” Smith surmises. Zhang Yaxin’s works, she feels, “capture what is adjudged to be genuine impassioned vigour. What else would lead the dancers to such heights?”30 In an atmosphere of intense political maneuvering, paranoia, and strict conformity to the prevailing views, artists may well have been fearful of doing anything that might displease Jiang Qing, or that could be perceived as non-revolutionary. Perhaps that might engender in the performers a somewhat heightened sense of purpose? When asked by Chengcheng Jiang if he actually liked the Model Operas he’d spent so many years documenting, Zhang Yaxin’s response was blunt, “No, I did not. It was a political task given by my superior—I had no choice.”31

The death of Chairman Mao in 1976 introduced the policies of Deng Xiaoping (1904–97), who had outmanoeuvred Mao’s designated successor Hua Guofeng (1921–2008) for the leadership. This political transition is delineated in the exhibition as “Change and Social Experience (1978–2000).” The indications of Deng Xiaoping’s strategy of “opening and reform” are

Vol. 16 No. 2 83 Zhang Yaxin, A Ballet Dancer Performs The White Haired Girl, 1974, archival inkjet print, 80 x 89 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Liu Heung Shing, Beijing Long Distance Telegraph Station, 1980, silver gelatin print, 31 x 45 cm. Private Collection.

conveyed within several works by Liu Heung Shing, Taking Down Mao, Tiananmen Square, the Director of the Shanghai Centre Beijing, 1980, silver gelatin print, 16 x 23 cm. Private of Photography, Liu Heung Shing. Collection. Removed from the Australian version of the exhibition, Taking Down Mao, Tiananmen Square, Beijing (1980) shows one of the massive standardized portraits of Chairman Mao resting on blocks at the bottom of scaffolding, as six onlookers ponder his demotion. Other Western influences strike an incongruous note in Liu Heung Shing’s images such as Beijing Long Distance Telegraph Station (1980), where the phone units are in the shape of the American cartoon characters Snoopy (created by Charles M. Schultz) and Disney’s Mickey Mouse. Local audiences react with bemused smiles to the boisterous yellow feathered character Big Bird looming over them in Big Bird From the US Children’s Television Program “Sesame Street” (1981).32

84 Vol. 16 No. 2 There is a palpable shift in emphasis toward personal narratives and works that reflect upon human experience, shedding the overtly political agenda of previous decades. A younger generation of artists has chosen to employ documentary-style photographs to investigate social issues that would have been unacceptable or taboo subjects in previous decades. Lu Nan gravitates to those marginalized groups within Chinese society whose plight is largely unseen: the mentally ill, drug addicts, prisoners, and Tibetan peasants. He embarked on a lengthy project to document some of China’s estimated twelve million Catholics in the series On the Road: The Catholic Faith in China (1992–98). Catholic communities in China, who have faced a renewed state persecution since 1951 in the wake of the Korean War, continue to have their options for worship heavily regulated.

Liu Heung Shing, Big Bird Many “underground” believers in From the US Children’s Television Program "Sesame China reject the official Catholic Street," Beijing, 1981, silver gelatin print, 31 x 45 cm. Patriotic Association (CPA). They Private Collection. worship clandestinely, because they recognize the authority of the Holy See and the primacy of the Roman Pope in governing doctrinal matters. Saying Mass, Shaanxi (1992) gives an idea of the furtive nature of many of these meetings, with the faithful and their priest crammed into a small room with a makeshift altar, their faces illuminated by candles. Teenager Carrying Holy Image, Shaanxi (1992) shows a figure walking down a mountainous rural path who is supporting a large framed image of Christ in the devotional guise of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus (Sacratissimi Cordis Iesu). So big is the picture that we see only the bottom half of the legs and upturned fingers of the person bearing it, evoking religious imagery that depicts Christ carrying the cross-beam on the way to Calvary.

Lu Nan, Teenager Carrying Portraits of workers have remained Holy Image, Shaanxi, 1992, archival inkjet print, 60 x 41.2 a popular subject for contemporary cm. Courtesy of the artist. photographers, but there has been a shift away from the deliberately “heroic” and “selfless” overtones that characterized such idealized propaganda images produced during the Maoist era. The trope of the anonymous “model worker” toiling away toward the national good, as seen earlier in the exhibition in the works of Wang Shilong, Workers in Henan Province Making Steel From Scrap Metal During the Great Leap Forward (1958) and Peasants Following the Example of the Great Red Flag Canal (1974), has been replaced by the self-aware subject. Song Chao grew up around mines in Shandong and worked for a mining company (1997–2001)

Vol. 16 No. 2 85 before changing careers. Coal Miners #05 and Coal Miners #08 (both 2002) depict working men with a certain swagger. Posing with their helmets on and chests bared, one strikes a “what’s up?” posture like a hip-hop star, the other has the cord for his battery-generated safety light between his teeth like a centrefold with a rose stem. As Smith contends, “They are real people, doing a job that is dirty, tough and dangerous given the extraordinary number of deaths that occur each year, yet, they retain their dignity and a sense of humour. The empathy channeled through the photographs has a direct correlation with Song Chao’s personal experience in the mines; he doesn’t need to show a disaster to humanize these men or heroics to command respect.”33

Gentler images evoke a certain Wang Shilong, Workers in Henan Province Making Steel nostalgia, like those by Lu Yuanmin, From Scrap Metal During the Great Leap Forward, 1958, who captures quiet moments of archival inkjet print, 30 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the artist. contemplation and the beats of every day lives in localities. Elderly Man Puts On His Best Suit for the Photo Shoot (1993) is a study of a dignified older gentleman as he regards his appearance in the wardrobe mirror and adjusts his tie. Tacked to the adjacent wall, we see part of a poster depicting a local beauty in a bathing suit rendered in the style popularized by the Peruvian painter Joaquin Alberto Vargas (1896–1982).

In another image taken in Shanghai, Four Neighbours Playing Mahjong (1996-97), the ambient light in the apartment casts strange reflections on the wall. The viewer is drawn to wisps of smoke from one elderly lady’s cigarette and the apparently deserted birdcage over the kitchen sink—the players are too absorbed in their game to acknowledge Lu Yuanmin’s presence.

Li Lang has documented the Yi Song Chao, Coal Miners #08, 2002, silver gelatin print, 50 x minority people who live near 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist and M97 Gallery, Shanghai. Mount Liangshan on the border between Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. His otherwise pleasant photographs of Yi posing in a forest setting wearing traditional dress, Yi People No. 74, Sichuan and Yi People, No. 61, Sichuan (both 2001), are subverted by the backdrops. Spray- painted sheets of “Westernized” interpretations of Chinese landscapes—kitsch temples in water settings with bamboo and blossoms—serve to emphasize the disconnect between the actual lives of the people in these small communities and the staged versions of China’s “idyllic” past. These are not a people preoccupied with change and modernization, but the eviscerations wrought by the

86 Vol. 16 No. 2 Lu Yuanmin, Elderly Man Puts On His Best Suit for the Photo Shoot, 1993, archival inject print, 20 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Li Lang, Yi People No. 74, Sichuan, 2001, inkjet print, 118 x 112 cm. Courtesy of the artist and A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu.

Cultural Revolution, coupled with the dramatic pace of social and cultural change in China through the reform era, which have left many without an anchor to the recent past that might help them navigate the stresses of the modern age.

Further delineations within the exhibition come in the form of smaller groupings of works deemed to be expressive of certain themes. “Passage Through Life (1990s–present)” looks at the subject of life experience in China and the stages within people’s lives. This is at its most literal in Hai Bo’s They series, which focuses on group portraits. The thematic contrast is made between “then”—represented by a black and white photograph from an earlier period—and “now”—a colour portrait of the same people in the present. They Series No. 6 (1999) shows a group of sixteen young women, presumably a school photo, taken in 1973. Hai Bo reunites the classmates in the same positions and the same rows nearly thirty years later.

Vol. 16 No. 2 87 Hai Bo, They Series No. 6, 1999, digital colour print, 45 x 60 cm. Private Collection.

The uniformity of their earlier dark smocks and long plaits has given way to women of individuality, self-expression, and life experience.

Wang Qingsong’s Follow You (2013) shows a room full of exhausted students, heads bowed, and ostensibly asleep at their desks behind piles of textbooks. The only figure in the hall sitting upright wears a wig, glasses, and fake beard; he is hooked up to IV fluids from a stand in front of his desk, but the study process has clearly “aged” him. Scrawled across the walls of the enormous room in which they are grouped are the slogans “Progress everyday?,” “Education is crucial,” “Study well,” and “For sustained development.” Wang Qingsong’s complex tableau points to the enormous pressure placed on students in China to excel.

Wang Qingsong, Follow You, 2013, archival inkjet print, 90 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The section “Digital and Artistic Experiments (1990s–present)” highlights those contemporary artists whose diverse and creative attitude to the photographic medium serves as a means by which they interpret and express their vision of Chinese art and culture. Han Lei’s lenticular work, Angle of Incidence No. 1 (2014), proved popular with the two school groups visiting MGA the same day as I did. The cool and refined image of a marble statue depicting a youth drifting in and out of a bright alpine vista preoccupied many in the teenage audience. Positioned to the left of Han Lei’s work, Maleonn’s triptych Journey to the West (2008) contains a self-portrait in the first panel. Maleonn’s background directing short films and his passion for collecting unusual items are brought to bear as he presides over a fantasy river scene assemblage consisting of statuary, taxidermy, miniaturized grottos and temples, skulls, masks, and faded papers, all illuminated by a tangled cluster of bulbs under a canopy of tulle. Birdhead (Ji Weiyu and Song Tao) are more direct in their approach to the urban environment. Their

88 Vol. 16 No. 2 Maleonn, Journey to the West, 2008, archival inkjet print, 135 x 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

gelatin silver print Today 2014–04 (2014) presents a surveillance camera as its narrative focus, with the ubiquity of many cameras silently observing daily life prompting the duo to peer back at “big brother.”

Hong Lei was one of the first Chinese artists to experiment with the digital technology of the earliest versions of Photoshop, evidenced in his deft subversion of a traditional art form with the witty triptych I Dreamt That Aliens Landed on a Zhejiang Scroll Painting (2005). Just as Hong Lei would draw directly onto his negatives in some works, his experiments with digital image making became a process by which he integrated new creative devices into his personal exploration of Chinese artistic traditions and practices. Other artists delve directly into the photographic past in order to resurrect some of the more antiquated and labour intensive techniques. Documentary photographer Luo Dan’s work, for example, takes him on lengthy journeys across China to photograph small communities of people whose unassuming lives serve to illustrate how little these regions have changed for hundreds of years.

Birdhead, Today 2014–04, 2014, gelatin silver print, black python leather, black walnut, and cotton cloth frame, 83 x 103 x 8 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai.

For Simple Song, his third major series, Luo Dan travelled deep into the remote mountain areas of the Nu River in Yunnan and used wet-plate negatives (the collodion process) to give the six prints included here an

Vol. 16 No. 2 89 “antique” look. Di Jinjun shares this interest in the material aspects of photography and also employs the collodion process to link his portrait series Youth (2008–10) to images created a hundred years ago. Since 2009, Zhang Dali has been exploring cyanotypes on rice paper, as seen with Square (2014), from his World’s Shadows series. Geng Jianyi’s engagement with the materials of photography takes its inspiration from Dada-like automatic drawing, in which the photograph “draws” itself over time as the chemically altered paper is exposed to light outside of the darkroom. He also uses chemical developer to draw directly onto photographic paper in the darkroom, creating unique and innovative abstract monochrome works.34

The last of the exhibition’s exploratory Top: Hong Lei, I Dreamt That Aliens Landed on a Zhejiang sub-groups, “The Contemporary Scroll Painting, 2005, giclee print, hand tinted, 25 x 12.5 cm Aesthetic (1990s–present),” presented each. Courtesy of the artist and M97 Gallery, Shanghai. works that were considered to align Left: Luo Dan, Simple Song with an artistic approach that is No. 48, Ni Haoye and Her Daughter Hu Xuefen, Latudi distinctively Chinese in its outlook; Village, 2012, pigment print on fiber paper, 30 x 21 cm. that is, those works underscored Courtesy of the artist and M97 Gallery, Shanghai. by an emphasis on traditional and contemporary culture, philosophy, literature, and Eastern (esoteric) ways of seeing. Not surprisingly, landscape works and still life predominated. The floral compositions by Jiang Zhi that make up the series Love Letters are photographed while being consumed by fire. There is something decidedly vengeful about punishing the hapless flowers, as if they represent some unspecified romantic failure—Love Letters No. 9 (2014) is one such pyre of disappointment.

Lin Ran uses an almost obsolete large-format tripod camera with its oversize negatives to capture intense detail within untouched tracts of

90 Vol. 16 No. 2 Zhang Dali, Square, 2014, cyanotype on rice paper, 67 x 131.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Geng Jianyi, Landscape Sketch, 1999, handmade drawing on photo paper, 25.5 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai.

Di Jinjun, Student, 2012, wet land and water—mammoth objects plate collodion black glass, 30.4 x 25.4 cm. Courtesy of like Chrysanthemum Stone (2012) seem the artist. to exist independent of the passing of time. As Karen Smith describes it, “each scene is captured, solidly, enduringly, with an air of immutability and without a single person present to confront eternity with mortality.”35 The landscape works of Taca were directly inspired by the eleventh-to-seventh-century- BC anthology Book of Odes, the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry. Comprising 305 works, the book traditionally is said to have been compiled by Confucius. Taca planned out a route of sites mentioned in the book, which he then visited, producing 108 photographs. His series Odes forms a direct visual connection with this most revered text and its allegorical expression, thus anchoring the literary world to the physical one.

An attempt to reconcile another aspect of China’s contested past prompted Kan Xuan to set out on a quest around the countryside to document all

Vol. 16 No. 2 91 Jiang Zhi, Love Letters No. 9, 2014, archival inkjet print, 180 x 135 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Lin Ran, Chrysanthemum Stone, 2012, platinum palladium silk, 50 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

remaining traces of the tombs of the Emperors (2013–14). That she did so using an iPhone added a touch of the intrepid to her endeavour. Some of the resulting images—Millet Mounds (2012), for example—were later

92 Vol. 16 No. 2 Kan Xuan, Millet Mounds, 2012, archival inkjet print, 50 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

enhanced to dramatic effect to convey the aura and character of the sites as Kan Xuan experienced them, allowing the viewer to partake in these remote sites with her. Humour infuses the work of Yao Lu whose High Pavilion in Cool Summer (2013) appropriates the style of a Song dynasty painting with its elegant pavilions and decorative mountains, but uses digital technology to spoil the view. Green dust netting used to contain construction materials and rubbish has been added, Christo-like, to reflect the reality of urban expansion. A similar theme is present in Yang Yongliang’s Snow City No. 3 (2009), where the graceful arc of a mountain passage is marred by construction cranes. Liu Zheng documents the encroachment of the built environment and the resulting pressure on the surrounding landscape occasioned by the demands of metropolitan life. His New Landscape works (2015) show the unfortunate alterations wrought by the pace of change.

Following these relatively serene landscape and muted architectonic works, the conclusion of China: Grain to Pixel, bracketed as “The New World (2000–present),” is brash and exuberant. This finale presents the work of contemporary artists who have embraced both the diverse multiple media platforms the digital realm offers and the opportunities afforded by China’s cautious but evolving engagement with sociopolitical, economic, and cultural ideas that have become steadily more Westernized. Used for the catalogue cover image, the striking Miss Wan Studies Hard (2011) by Chen Man sees the titular figure streaking past the Gate of Heavenly Peace on a bicycle. Wearing a tiny skirt and with a Christian Dior quilted handbag slung over her shoulder, Miss Wan is nearly dwarfed by the tower of books precariously balanced on the back of her bike. These are tied in place with white packaging ribbon from the Dior boutique, indicating the powerful influence of consumerism, magazine advertising, and designer trappings

Vol. 16 No. 2 93 now prevalent in China. The image implies that it is not the slog toward academic excellence that will get you noticed, or necessarily lead to success, but the brands you’re seen wearing.

Chen Man communicates the pace Yang Yongliang, Snow City No. 3, 2009, ultra giclee print, 200 x of social and cultural change in 64 cm. Courtesy of the artist. contemporary China in generational terms; the model of “Miss Wan" is Wan Baobao, the granddaughter of Wan Li (1916–2015), who instituted the economic policy of the “household-responsibility system,” first adopted in 1979, and he later served as Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (1988–93). This work was originally exhibited as part of the Dior “Miss Lady” exhibition in Beijing (2011); the artist participated in another Dior-themed exhibition in Paris in 2013. Chen Man is closely associated with the fashion industry; her website chronicles her work for several designer brands and international fashion magazines, including those titles for whose cover the artist has posed. Prior to her graduation, the striking cover images Chen Man produced for the Shanghai-based fashion magazine Vision brought her considerable attention, including the November 2003 issue, included here as Vision- Sex Flower 1 (2003).36

Australian audiences may have been quite surprised to see a black-and-white image (2013) of actress Audrey Hepburn (1929–93) in the exhibition. Less familiar to them perhaps would be the one next to it (2009) of the Taiwanese pop singer Teresa Teng (Teng Li-Chun, 1953–95). Teresa Teng’s multi-lingual recordings contributed to her huge popularity in Asian regions, and her early tragic death from an asthma attack only added to her fame. She was accorded state honours at her funeral in Taiwan, attended by the then-President Lee Teng-hui. The works are actually by Zhang Wei, from his Artificial Theatre series, whereby he uses images of film and performance stars, political figures, and other “heroes” (Che Guevara, Lei Feng, Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King, Jr., among others) as the basis for digital reconstruction.37 He reassembles the faces of these well-known identities using multiple facial features derived from portraits he took in 2007 of ordinary individuals in China. Thus, at a casual glance the portraits resemble the more famous person, but on closer inspection there is something amiss.

94 Vol. 16 No. 2 Chen Man, Miss Wan Studies Hard, 2011, archival inkjet print, 50 x 74 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhang Wei, Audrey Hepburn, Zhang Wei’s works explore the 2013, giclee print, 60 x 48 cm. Courtesy of the artist. tension between personal identity—a contested area in China during previous decades—and the influence exerted by mass media, advertising, social media, and peer pressure upon an individual’s sense of self. The cult of celebrity, or cult of personality in the case of Mao and other world leaders, can also have an impact on an individual’s self-worth and behaviour. By skilfully combining the random features of unknown subjects to conform to the likeness of someone famous, Zhang Wei questions how much time we spend invested in the lives and concerns of public figures we don’t know. In merging the two, Zhang Wei breaches the visual gap between the ordinary person and the acclaimed entity and ponders to what extent our interest in these people is a projection of our own unfulfilled needs and aspirations.38 More recently, Zhang Wei applied this concept using European figure paintings in the Artificial Theatre—Profile Portraits of Unknown Women (2012) series, including the two included in this exhibition based on paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519), Lady With An Ermine [probably Cecilia Gallerani] (1483–90) and the (reversed) portrait Ginevra de’ Benci (c. 1480).

The seemingly indistinguishable space between art and fashion, and photography’s pivotal role in both, is evident in a number of works in this closing section of China: Grain to Pixel that look more like high-fashion campaigns or magazine editorials. Feng Hai, like Chen Man, was part of a small group of students invited to participate in the first master’s program in photography at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, taught by staff from Griffith University in South East Queensland. Feng Hai’s extravagant work Searching for Divinity (2010), with its riot of horse-headed figures clad in traditional Chinese courtly dress surrounding twin deities, is based on the ancient Chinese mythological text Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shan Hai Jing).

Vol. 16 No. 2 95 Next to Feng Hai’s piece is the work of multimedia artist and art director Chi Lei (Chili) whose career also traverses many aspects of popular culture. His background in the music industry and fashion magazine production is evident in the works Outside Six Realms of Existence, No. 1 (2012) and I Forgot Who You Are (2013). The latter work, with its sneering title, depicts a beautiful woman intent on self-mutilation. Dressed as if to go out clubbing, she is already missing both arms below the elbow, replaced with prosthetic apparatus, and seems determined to do further injury to herself. Surrounded by discarded high-heel shoes and wearing multiple designer watches, she appears to embody the extreme narcissism and self-obsession that can result in conditions such as body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), for which the fashion industry and its seductive, unrealistic advertising is often blamed, and which is further amplified by the corrosive influence of social media.

According to Liu Heung Shing, the Zhang Wei, Artificial Theatre— Portraits of Unknown Women, aim of China: Grain to Pixel is “to 2012, giclee print, 60 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist. show how photography has evolved in China in tandem with the world and as technology advanced.”39 An exhibition of considerable ambition mounted by a new institution, it could not expect to be as comprehensive in content as its time frame is long, over 150 years. In the context of China, photography was introduced as a practice of foreigners and soon became a political tool of the CCP, access to which was strictly controlled and rigorously vetted by the state. This self-made cultural vacuum, and the artistic inhibition it fostered, was incredibly difficult to transcend. As curator Karen Smith points out, “the subjects that had been sanctioned to photograph and those photographs so very widely disseminated under Mao as China’s national norm, was an idea of reality that was subsequently hard to shake off or to dispel. A visual code that was part of the nation’s DNA, affecting everything that was visual coming out of China, but including thoughts, words, actions and interactions.”40

Feng Hai, Searching for Divinity, 2010, archival inkjet print, 50 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Photography is often described as the most democratic of mediums since it is easily accessible, expedient, has the potential to confer great meaning, and can be practised by many—although few would characterize their efforts as art. A population that has been collectively deprived, for so long, of a means of expression will naturally seek to find the most direct means of reestablishing

96 Vol. 16 No. 2 Chi Lei, Outside Six Realms of that expression and Existence No. 1, 2012, archival inkjet print, 80 x 60 cm. attempting to reorient itself Courtesy of the artist. within the contemporary context. China: Grain to Pixel represents a highly creditable effort on the part of the Shanghai Centre of Photography to present a narrative of the history of the photographic medium in China and to engage with the wider contemporary dialogue as to what a meaningful expression of Chinese identity might look like today.

For the Australian audience, the exhibition provided a particularly broad survey of photographic practice in China and introduced the work of some of its leading figures to those who may not have had the opportunity to see such output before, particularly so for students. The circumstances of the removal of eight items scheduled to be shown at MGA, however, is a timely reminder that a medium so visceral and easily embraced by international audiences still prompts an unreasonable level of defensiveness and mistrust in some quarters.

Notes

1. September 6–November 30, 2015. A further iteration was exhibited at the China Cultural Center in Brussels as China: Grain to Pixel, 1980 to Today (August 23–September 18, 2016), http://www. cccbrussels.be/. The author of several books, Liu Heung Shing (also referred to as HS Liu) was described in 1983 in Newsweek magazine as “The Henri Cartier Bresson of China.” Liu Heung Shing shared the Pulitzer Prize (1992) with his colleagues at Associated Press in the category of “Spot News Photography” for images relating to the collapse of the Soviet Union. 2. The City of Monash, a local government area in the southeastern suburbs of Melbourne, was established in December 1994 as the result of the State Government of Victoria’s amalgamating of various local councils. The City of Monash Collection was formerly the Waverley City Gallery Collection and originally broad in scope, including textiles, prints, photographs, and paintings. An acquisition committee was established in 1980 to assess and develop the collection, and in 1984 a sub-collection was established to focus on Australian photography. Subsequently, the sub- collection became the strength of gallery and the decision was made to specialize in that field. 3. The disputed volume was probably White’s Tibet and Lhasa: Photographs by J. C. White, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Johnston and Hoffmann, 1908). 4. Kurt Meyer and Pamela Deuel Meyer, In the Shadow of the Himalayas: Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, Sikkim: A Photographic Record by John Claude White, 1883–1908 (Easthampton: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2005), 26–27. 5. Ibid., 116. 6. The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Photography Vol. 2, ed. John Hannavy (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1496. 7. Meyer and Meyer, In the Shadow of the Himalayas: Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, Sikkim: A Photographic Record by John Claude White, 1883–1908, 110, 121. 8. Ibid., 115. 9. John Claude White, Sikhim and Bhutan: Twenty-one Years on the North-East Frontier, 1887–1908 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 200. White also contributed articles about the region to National Geographic, Asiatic Review, Journal of the East India Association, and Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. 10. For an account of the Dalai Lama’s national visits to date, see www.dalailamainaustralia.org/pages/? ParentPageID=2&PageID=28/. There is also an Australian Tibet Council; see www.atc.org.au/. 11. Author in conversation with Stephen Zagała at MGA, August 25, 2016, and subsequent e-mail exchange between Zagała and the author, August 29, 2016, concerning the circumstances of these omissions.

Vol. 16 No. 2 97 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Karen Smith, “Grain to Pixel: A Story of Photography in China,” in Ying Jiang, ed., China: Grain to Pixel (Shanghai and Melbourne: Shanghai Centre of Photography and Monash Gallery of Art, 2016), 25. 15. Ibid. 16. Other works by Child form part of the Stephan Loewentheil Historical Photography of China Collection and were exhibited as Qing Dynasty Peking: Thomas Child’s Photographs (2016) at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, New York (September 23–October 25, 2016). See Eve M. Kahn, “A Photographic Record of 19th-Century China, “New York Times, September 23, 2016, C22, and online as “Call Him an Early Adopter: Thomas Child a 19th Century Photographer in China,” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/arts/design/call-him-an-early-adopter-thomas-child-a-19th- century-photographer-in-china.html?_r=0/. 17. See the Auguste François Association’s website, http://augfrancois.chez-alice.fr/. 18. Xu Jianing, “Photography in China Pre-1949,” in Ying Jiang, ed., China: Grain to Pixel, 42. 19. Ibid. 20. Donald Mennie, The Grandeur of the Gorges: Fifty Photographic Studies, With Descriptive Notes, of China’s Great Waterway, the Yangtze Kiang, Including Twelve Hand-coloured Prints (Shanghai: A. S. Watson and Co. and Kelly and Walsh Ltd., 1926). Mennie employed the wet-plate process, which was, even at that time, somewhat obsolete. He printed his work in photogravure and often employed hand-colouring, as seen with this volume, containing fifty photogravure plates, twelve of them coloured. The overall impression of the work is consciously “antiquarian,” evoking China’s “romantic” past, right down to the silk brocade pictorial binding. The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra has a large collection of Mennie’s works and holds edition 858 of 1000 copies of this volume. See http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=149891/ and http://artsearch.nga.gov. au/Search.cfm?CREIRN=33451&ORDER_SELECT=1&VIEW_SELECT=4/. 21. The first American exhibition of his works, Art, Documentary, and Propaganda in Wartime China: The Photography of Sha Fei, curated by Eliza Ho, was shown at the Urban Arts Space, Ohio State University, Columbus (January 19–March 27, 2010). 22. Karen Smith, “Grain to Pixel: A Story of Photography in China,” 28–29. 23. The Chinese Cinema Book, eds., Song Hwee and Julian Ward (London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 88. 24. Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 132–33. 25. Yingjin Zhang, “Zhao Dan: Spectrality of Martyrdom and Stardom,” in Mary Farquhar and Yingjin Zhang, eds., Chinese Film Stars, (Oxon: Routledge, 2010), 89. 26. Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949, 159–60. 27. Yingjin Zhang, “Zhao Dan: Spectrality of Martyrdom and Stardom,” 93. 28. Ibid., 94. 29. An exhibition of Zhang Yaxin’s works, Zhang Yaxin: Model Opera, was held at Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver, Canada (June 14–July 26, 2013). Jiang Chengcheng, “Zhang Yaxin: Photographing Chairman Mao’s Model Operas,” Time, June 17, 2013, http://time.com/3800320/zhang- yaxin-photographing-chairman-maos-model-operas/. 30. Karen Smith, “Grain to Pixel: A Story of Photography in China,” 32. 31. Jiang Chengcheng, “Zhang Yaxin: Photographing Chairman Mao’s Model Operas.” 32. A Chinese co-production of Sesame Street, called Zhima Jie, was created in 1998 and broadcast in Mandarin. Filmed in Shanghai, it ran until 2001, totalling 130 thirty-minute episodes. The series returned in 2010 as Zhima Jie: Da Niao Kan Shijie (Sesame Street: Big Bird Looks at the World). 33. Karen Smith, “Grain to Pixel: A Story of Photography in China,” 32. 34. Leah Dickerman, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (Washington, DC, and New York: National Gallery of Art and Distributed Art Publishers, 2005), 40–41, 482. Geng Jianyi is possibly inspired by the German painter Christian Schad (1894–1982). A member of the anti- establishment Dada art movement, Schad developed his own version of the “photogram.” He called these abstract and unpredictable experiments with cameraless images “immaterial collages,” later to be dubbed Schadographs by his colleague Tristan Tzara (1896–1963). 35. Karen Smith, “Grain to Pixel: A Story of Photography in China,” 33. 36. For more on Chen Man, see http://www.chenmaner.com/. 37. See more of the Artificial Theatre series at www.zhangwei-art.com/works/index/. 38. See also James Estrin, “Elvis, Madonna and Mao: Exploring Identity in China,” New York Times, June 23, 2016, http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/elvis-madonna-and-mao-exploring-identity- in-china/. 39. Liu Heung Shing, “Forward,” in Ying Jiang, ed., China: Grain to Pixel, 15. 40. Karen Smith, “Grain to Pixel: A Story of Photography in China,” 29.

98 Vol. 16 No. 2 Linda Jean Pittwood Translation and Travelling Theory: Feminist Theory and Praxis in China

“Everyone uses her own terminology and talks to herself.”1

in Dongchao’s Translation and MTravelling Theory: Feminist Theory and Praxis in China (2017) is a study of knowledge production. This book focuses on events and developments in women’s studies in China during the 1980s and 90s. Min Dongchao investigates the movement of feminist theory, asking why it tended to have been developed in the North (China’s wealthier regions) and then travelled to the South, or travelled from the West (non-China) to the East (China)—It is this trajectory of the way that Western feminist theory refracted on its entry into China that is the focus of Min Dongchao’s book. She critiques the notion of “transnational feminism,” suggesting that far from being a global, democratic network of theories, it is underpinned by capitalist and neoliberal hierarchies of power often imposed on the Third World by the West.

Using case studies in chapter five “The cases of two NGOs,” Min Dongchao argues that feminist theory and projects should be produced within China itself, rather than being led by academics of the Chinese diaspora, largely based in the US, because the pace of change within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) makes it almost impossible for those outside to keep up, and, therefore, to effectively combine theorizing with knowledge of the positive changes that may be taking place in real women’s lives. Within these indigenous projects and theories, Min Dongchao finds the greatest success amongst those that are interdisciplinary. Though she outlines the challenges inherent in connecting with the international community, she also highlights the ongoing importance of international exchange as well as how desire to collaborate has engendered some success in linking women’s studies and feminist academic communities within and outside of China over the last few decades, especially when compared to their counterparts in other academic disciplines.

Vol. 16 No. 2 99 Because of Min Dongchao’s direct involvement in women’s studies during the period this book focuses on, she is our intimate guide through the key events, projects, and debates within NGOs and departments of higher education, and she introduces us to the main actors via quotes extracted from extensive interviews conducted during her field research. Her book is not so much concerned with the content of the theories themselves, but, rather, with the methodological frameworks that were or were not adopted in China, or were developed in China, through the practices of women’s studies research, interdisciplinary research, the All China Women’s Federation (ACWF), NGOs, and a new generation of activists.

Her theoretical departure point, the “travelling theory” of Edward Said, James Clifford, Aijaz Ahmad and others, is typically the investigation of how theory itself changes as it moves between geohistorical contexts. For Min Dongchao, the more interesting story is about who applies these theories, in what ways and why, and the reasons some theories become mainstream and others not. This means focusing on the “theory brokers”—translators, NGOs, and politically and ideologically motivated funders—as well as on the link between the discursive and the material.

The first three chapters of this book chronicle Chinese feminist theory from the 1980s to the 1990s, under the headings of “Awakening Again,” “Duihua (Dialogue) In-Between,” and “Jiegui (Connecting with the International Track).” “Awakening Again” surveys the story of feminist explorations in the early years following the Cultural Revolution. Min Dongchao points out that there was a huge appetite for re-engagement with the international community and access to works in translation that previously had not been permitted to enter China. Several of her interviewees used the opening of doors and windows as a metaphor. However, as Chinese women began to engage with feminist scholars from elsewhere, differences emerged in how different groups of academics in women’s studies perceived themselves and each other and how they identified their most urgent priorities. In China, critiquing the Maoist rhetoric of equality, while at the same time reflecting on the tangible gains that the Communist Party had engendered for Chinese women, was the context for the formation of women’s studies as a discipline.

The chapter “Duihua (Dialogue) In-Between” locates some of the difficulties in establishing an international dialogue by focusing on translations of the terms “feminism” and “gender.” Min Dongchao is keen to bring the role of the translator out from the shadows, to repositioning this role as much more active than is commonly perceived. The debates concerned with translation, according to her detailed account, exposed differences in understanding between Chinese academics and their foreign counterparts, as well as delineating the different points of view within the Chinese women’s studies community. How, for instance, “feminism” is translated can be said to imply differing degrees of Westernization, essentialism, or even militantism. “Gender,” meanwhile, emerges as one of the key themes. Later in the book, Min Dongchao describes how the

100 Vol. 16 No. 2 concept of gender is taken on so strongly by the All China Women’s Federation that they conduct what they refer to as “gender training.” When Min Dongchao attended this training in 2003 she discovered how much the ACWF had departed from the Maoist idea that “the time is different, the men and women remain the same.”2 The ACWF, an organization upholding women’s rights and interests on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, was set up in 1949, is still in existence today, and it appears to have been delivering gender training as recently as 2012.

“Jiegui (Connecting with the International Track)” refers to the idea of catching up quickly with the world beyond China in the 1990s. It was part of efforts to reignite Deng Xiaoping’s reform of moving into a market economy and participating in globalization and “move on from the events of Tian’anmen Square in 1989.”3 Due to a lack of governmental support and funding, Chinese academics sought foreign funding to “do projects,” which Min Dongchao implies was an intervention into “real people’s lives” rather than theoretical research. Somewhat problematically, to produce successful proposals, academics had to fulfil foreign agendas and incorporate methods and theories prevalent in the West. This “transnational feminism” that Min Dongchao observed during this period could be interpreted as a kind of colonialization of Chinese feminist thought by the West.

Chapter five, “The Cases of Two NGOs,” contrasts the Chinese Society for Women’s Studies (CSWS), based in the US, and the Yunnan Reproductive Health Research Association (YRHRA), based in China. Min Dongchao was a board member of the CSWS in the early 2000s, and in the late 1990s used the YRHRA as a case study in her Ph.D. The mission of the CSWS was to promote the study of Chinese women in the international academic community and to facilitate collaboration between academics in and outside of China. Min Dongchao’s contention is that the CSWS was a “theory broker” and was reflective about the constant (re)negotiation of power that underpinned their work in China but ultimately could not link up with the non-academic community, thus permanently limiting the scope of their work. On the other hand, she finds a much more effective example of an organization engendering change and utilizing feminist theory in the interdisciplinary activities of the YRHRA. Headed by Zhang Kaining, a male professor with a background in biomedical science, the YRHRA managed to combine debates around the meaning of, for instance, the concept of being “women led” with sociological research into the causes of reproductive health issues for women, leading to solutions such as having women doctors from specific villages train their successors to improve the retention rate of women in the field.

The final chapter, “That was the past, What is the Future?,” proposes that academics in women’s studies need to historicize their own discipline and reconnect with politics; Min Dongchao suggests that the next phase for Chinese feminism could be critiquing the ways capitalism—and not just

Vol. 16 No. 2 101 patriarchy—affects the lives of women. She hints at the technologies that make international engagement part of the texture of everyday life now (she mentions in previous chapters, by contrast, how academics in the 1980s had to physically travel to Beijing to access research material and spend hours photocopying) but avoids explicitly stating how younger activists within China likely circumvent the Great Firewall to use non-Chinese and local social media to establish their networks. This new international connectivity is one of the reasons she gives for why the US-based Chinese Society for Women’s Studies disbanded around the year 2000. The role of societies such as the CSWS was that Chinese academics of the diaspora could act as “tour guides,” as Min Dongchao describes it sceptically, for their Western colleagues wanting to access the Chinese academy.

The value of this book is in its content and its methodological approach— both of which have implications for fields of study within the arts and humanities other than gender, women’s studies and feminism; including but not limited to art history, history and cultural studies. It breaks open a discourse that might be preventing deep transnational engagement on the topic of feminism. It also challenges the perception of the West as the centre and benchmark for academic and theoretical activity, while at the same time acknowledging the rich traditions of study in the West that Chinese academics continue to have to find ways to engage and negotiate with. This engagement, for Min Dongchao, is a discourse worthy of study in itself.

In using interviews with individuals in the Chinese academic community and those associated with NGOs, rather that simply referring to their published outputs, as a research methodology for investigating the movement of feminist theory, Min Dongchao links the theoretical to “real lives,” much in the same way that she tasks Chinese women’s studies academics with doing. This enables several important points to emerge. One is highlighting the importance of “the event” (a conference or project) as a contact zone or catalyst; sometimes creating an efficacious moment of dialogue or change, whilst on other occasions exposing a deep lack of or misunderstanding. Perhaps, though, the most important point she makes is asserting the centrality of translation to knowledge production, and, within that, the role of individual actors in the practice of producing translations— an issue often lost when scholars refer to the canon of critical theoretical texts. The importance of translation to this discourse is also mentioned in Gail Hershatter and Wang Zheng’s essay “Gender History: A Useful Category of Gender Analysis” (2008),4 which treads some of the same ground as Min Dongchao’s book, if from a slightly less personal perspective.

Min Dongchao exposes some of the myths that otherwise would make their way through the discourse of feminism in China without ever really being challenged or unpacked. An example is the purported influence of Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex5 (1949) on Chinese feminism. Min Dongchao challenges this by pointing out that translations of this

102 Vol. 16 No. 2 book were not easy to find in the early 1980s when it was making its supposed impact. It was, she suggests, the title as well as the quotation “One is not born, but becomes a woman” that sparked the Chinese feminist imagination or connected with feminist thinking in China at the time. Min Dongchao quotes from one of her research interviews that took place in 1999 with one of her colleagues, who says: “In fact I haven’t read The Second Sex properly. . . . I heard about de Beauvoir’s ideas from your women’s studies classes rather than actually reading her book.”6 This cannot be the only time a notion, rather than the full details, of the theory is all that travels—but Min Dongchao has been able to successfully provide evidence of the phenomenon.

This book doesn’t fully operate as a blueprint for how women’s studies scholars or young feminist activists should connect their theoretical work with practical projects or with “real people.” Min Dongchao is critical of scholars of her generation securing external funding to “do projects” and to work on policy, as this diverts them from more theoretical endeavours; and yet in the final chapter she is positive about Liu Xinting, a young scholar, who reflects in a research paper that intervention in the lives of factory workers is a priority for feminists. Min Dongchao, however, doesn’t adequately explain the distinction between the projects she is sceptical of her generation doing, and the concerns and methods of the younger generation of feminist academics. Thus, the book overall fails to completely fulfill its core mission to discuss the conditions that affected how feminist theory has been refracted through China; in the later chapters when we return to the idea of “travelling theory” it is slightly surprising, jolting the reader from engagement with the hugely rich case study chapter. Nevertheless, this book gives cause for reflection to anyone working on any aspect of Chinese studies or Chinese culture—even if they don’t think they are engaged with, or interested in, women and gender within this context. As Min Dongchao indicates in her final sentence, it is now for us to learn from Chinese women’s studies.

Notes

1. Min Dongchao, Translation and Travelling Theory Feminist Theory and Praxis in China (London: Routledge, 2017), 95. 2. Ibid., 111. 3. Ibid., 71. 4. Gail Hershatter and Wang Zheng, “Chinese History: A Useful Category of Gender Analysis,” American History Review (December 2008), 1404–21. 5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (first published 1949 in French, first published in English 1953, reprinted London: Vintage Classics, 2015). 6. Ibid., 24.

Vol. 16 No. 2 103 Chinese Name Index

Ai Weiwei Jiang Qing Liu, Ken Wang Qingsong 艾未未 江青 劉宇昆 王慶松 Bo Zhenzhen Jiang Shaowu Lu Nan Wang Shilong 薄珍珍 蔣少武 吕楠 王世龍 Cao Fei Jiang Zhi Lu Xun Wang Zheng 曹斐 蔣志 魯迅 王錚 Chen Man Kan Xuan Lu Yuanmin Weng Naiqiang 陳漫 闞萱 陸元敏 翁乃强 Chen Yun Kublai Khan Lum, Ken Weng Xiaoyu 陳雲 忽必烈 林蔭庭 翁笑雨 Cheng, Nylon Lan Ping Luo Dan Wu Jianren 鄭南榕 藍蘋 駱丹 吳趼人 Chi Lei (Chili) Lan Qingwei Mao Chenyu Wu Xun 池磊 藍慶偉 毛晨雨 武訓 Chiang Kai-shek Lee Kit Miao Qihao Wu Yinxian 蔣介石 李傑 繆其浩 吳印咸 Deng Xiaoping Lee Teng-hui Min Dongchao Xiao Zhuang 鄧小平 李登輝 閔冬潮 曉莊 Di Jinjun Lei Feng Mou Sen Xu Jianing 邸晉軍 雷鋒 牟森 徐家寧 Fang Su Ya Leung, C.Y. Peng Yu Xu Yunfeng 方蘇雅 梁振英 彭禹 許雲峰 Fei Sha Leung, Godfre Shen Xiling Yang Cui 沙飛 梁漢柱 沈西苓 楊翠 (Situ Chuan Li Ka-shing Sheng Shicai Yang Yongling 司徒傳) 李嘉誠 盛世才 楊泳梁 Feng Hai Li Lang Shui Hua Yao Lu 馮海 黎朗 水華 姚璐 Geng Jianyi Li Pingqian Song Chao Ye Caibao 耿建翌 李萍倩 宋朝 葉彩寶 Genghis Khan Li Zhensheng Song Dong Yin Fukang 成吉思汗 李振盛 宋冬 殷弗康 Guo Songtao Li Zhonghua Song Tao Zhang Dali 郭嵩燾 李中華 宋濤 張大力 Ha Bik Chuen Liang Qichao Sun Xun Zhang Kaining 夏碧泉 梁啟超 孫遜 張開寧 Hai Bo Liao Fei Sun Yu Zhang Wei 海波 廖斐 孫瑜 張巍 Han Lei Lin Ran Sun Yuan Zhang Yaxin 韓磊 林然 孫原 張雅心 He Xiangyu Lin Yi-Hsiung Tang, Henry Zhang Yingjin 何翔宇 林義雄 唐英年 張英進 Hou Hanru Lin Zexu Teng, Li-Chun Teresa Zhao Dan 侯瀚如 林則徐 鄧麗君 趙丹 Hsieh Suchen Liu Cixin Tsang Kin-Wah Zheng Junli 謝素貞 劉慈欣 曾建華 鄭君里 Hsieh Teching Liu Heung Shing Tse, Nicholas Zhou Bin 謝德慶 劉香成 謝霆鋒 周斌 Hua Guofeng Liu Tian Wan Li Zhou Tao 華國鋒 劉畑 萬里 周滔 Jao Chia-En Liu Xinting Wang Dun Zhu Gang 饒加恩 劉昕亭 王敦 朱罡 Ji Weiyu Liu Zheng Wang Haichuan Zhuang Xueben 季煒煜 劉錚 王海川 莊學本

104 Vol. 16 No. 2 Vol. 16 No. 2 105 A 100 km Walk By Shi Jin-Hua

安卓藝術 Mind Set Art Center Booth 3D33, Art Basel Hong Kong 2017

Performance 3-4pm, March 21-22, 2017

Text by Isabelle Kuo

Shi Jin-Hua, A 100 km Walk, 2016, pencil, canvas, document (video, text, inkjet prints, objects), 218 x 1007 cm (wall canvas), 156 x 1002.5 cm (ground canvas). Courtesy of the artist and Mind Set Art Center.

For someone living with type one diabetes, “measurement” and “walking” are not only essential for Shi Jin-Hua’s survival, but they also have been a source of inspiration throughout his artistic practice. He has been measuring his surroundings over the past decades, be it a tangible subject such as the circumference of a building or something intangible such as friendship, both of which he regards as personally meaningful and intimate. Shi Jin-Hua first executed A 100 km Walk round trips across the canvases equal one in 2012 during the artist’s residency at kilometer of walk and photographs were the National Changhua University of taken along the way as a document of it. Education, Taiwan, and resumed in 2016 A hundred and one shots from the one- at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. During hundred kilometers of walking was compiled the performance, Shi would walk back and into time-lapse photography, and then forth on a ten-meter long canvas laid on the accompanied with the recorded sounds of ground in front of a ten-meter wide canvas the pencil moving across the canvas. Shi on the wall, which he would draw upon with began moving quickly and lithely in front of a pencil. Whenever the pencil becomes worn the blank canvas and the audio recording was down, the artist would stop walking to hand sharp and intense. The volume of the sound sharpen it with a retractable blade he carries would eventually lower and become gentle and then resume walking and drawing. This when the artist physically slowed down. Shi process would last for hours, during which selected a section of recording to go with the the pencil drawing develops on the wall time-lapse photography from one of his slow while the artist’s footprints make marks in the walks while drawing on the canvas with great graphite powder that falls from the pencils vitality, and it is like the sound of the wind and accumulates on the floor. Thus far, the blowing in a wild and vast desert. project has witnessed the artist walking up to 10.54 km at National Changhua University During the execution of this performance of Education in 2012, and then up to 98 which now spans from 2012 to 2017, Shi has km at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in experienced various transitions as well as 2016, and will be completed when the artist unexpected difficulties: accomplishes the 100 km goal, which is scheduled to take place on the last day of the “I wasn’t really sure how this performance preview of the 2017 Art Basel Hong Kong. would turn out when I started,” Shi admitted. All the graphite powder will be collected in a “I started it with horizontal lines with some glass jar as part of the finished project. small curves. They were generally steady and concentrated. Somehow I started to What makes A 100 km Walk so unique and make big curves with sharp angles and distinctive is that Shi takes the artistic process strong momentum. When I stepped back to back to its purest state by employing the inspect the work from a distance, I found a most basic skill of line-drawing paired with beautiful abstract image on the wall.” The the body movement of walking, simple artist went on to explore the relationships elements that generate enormous power, between the lines and aesthetic composition. even before the artwork is completed. It is a In order to create more radical waves of line long journey that requires high concentration on the canvas, he expanded his movements and strong willpower, during which the artist from wrist and elbow to the full extent of is immersed in time as well as in his mind, his body. The kinetic energy generated by and it is through this intense communication the contraction and extension of his whole with the self, the body, and his sense of body became concentrated into the pencil beauty that allows him to project such point held in the artist’s hand, which in turn overwhelming and touching expression onto transformed into lines imbued with rhythm, the vastness of both the canvases. speed, grace, and powerful expression.

The distance walked was turned into lines Aesthetics is emphasized alongside the that have accumulated onto the wall canvas conceptual aspect of the performance in A and into his footsteps on the ground. Fifty 100 km Walk. With the passage of time, Shi

安卓藝術 MIND SET ART CENTER | WWW.ART-MSAC.COM Shi Jin-Hua, The Entrance of 386 Lane, 2016, oil and tune on canvas, 130.5 x 97 x 6 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Mind Set Art Center.

builds up abstract beauty through the lying on the floor. Since the graphite powder simple element of lines. They were drawn that fell from the wall canvas during the with various curves, and with speed process was then stepped upon, the ground and strength, generating imagery that canvas over time turned from white to grey, resembles the vast sea or the unlimited and finally an inky-like river has appeared universe. In order to create a sense of after hundreds and thousands of footsteps. depth in the drawing, the artist attempted Being tempered over time, what began as to create darkness in the middle area of two rigid canvases have become soft and the canvas while trying to retain the feeling wrinkled. Within the limited scope of these of permeability, and this was not easy to two canvases, A 100 km Walk thus is not achieve. At one stage he drew with 7B and only an aesthetic expression of the artist, 8B pencils, but the tone could not turn any but also represents the accumulation of time darker as the previous layers of graphite and physical strength, repeated labor, body were applied so densely that a layer of movement, the training of the mind, as well metallic sheen was formed on canvas. After as a quest for self-existence. many experiments, Shi finally achieved the ideal result by using charcoal pencils.

With thousands of lines superimposed one upon the other on the wall canvas, , and as the lines express traces of movement over a long period of time, a temporal space is formed in our experience of the work. On Shi Jin-Hua, Pen Walking #163, 2012-16, pencil, paper, the other hand, footprints from the artist’s and document, 215.5 x 95 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Mind Set Art Center. walking have accumulated on the canvas

安卓藝術 MIND SET ART CENTER | WWW.ART-MSAC.COM A B O U T S H I J I N - H U A

Born on the island of Penghu in 1964, Shi Jin-Hua is a conceptual and performance artist who currently lives and works in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Being a type 1 diabetic, monitoring and recording physical conditions and insulin injections have become part of his life since he was 17 years old. Confronting such battles in life all the time, Shi treats his own body as an instrument for artistic execution. His practice involves measuring and recording, a process which reflects an extraordinary spirit. He has participated in the Taipei Biennial and Asian Shi Jin-Hua, Walking in the Alley Alongside Art Biennial. His work is in the collections of White the Railway, 2016, oil and tube on canvas, 117 x 90.9 x 6.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist Rabbit Collection, Australia, Art Bank, Taiwan, and Mind Set Art Center. Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. The artist’s upcoming solo exhibition is going to be held at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in October 2017.

Shi Jin-Hua, A 100 km Walk, 2016, pencil, canvas, document (video, text, inkjet prints, objects). Courtesy of the artist and Mind Set Art Center.

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