MARCH/A P R I L 2 0 1 6 VOLUM E 15, NUM BER 2

INSI DE

Artist Features: Liu Ding, Maleonn, Frog King, Jin Shan, Maryn Varbanov Conversations: Lee Ufan, Siu King-Chung Exhibition: Really, Socialism?!

US$12.00 NT$350.00 PRINTED IN TA IWAN

6

VOLUME 15, NUMBER 2, MARCH/APRIL 2016

C ONTENTS 21 2 Editor’s Note

4 Contributors

6 Epiphany of Objects: Maleonn’s Papa’s Time Machine Julie Chun

21 Frog King: Totem: An Evolution 44 Valerie C. Doran

39 Frog King: Always a Step Ahead Christie Lee

44 A Conversation with Lee Ufan Stephanie Chou Wanjing

52 Really, Socialism?! Kang Kang

52 60 New Man: Liu Ding’s Approach and Situation Luan Zhichao

74 Episteme of Multiple Histories Julie Chun

97 A Conversation with Siu King-Chung about the Community Museum Project Sally Lai

108 Chinese Name Index 60

Cover: Maryn Varbanov and Song Huai-Kuei, black-and-white 74 photograph. Courtesy of Boriana Song.

We thank JNBY Art Projects, D3E Art Limited, Chen Ping, and Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison for their generous contribution to the publication and distribution of Yishu.

1 Vol. 15 No. 2 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 73 opens with a text on the innovative FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum handmade puppets developed by Shanghai artist EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace Maleonn. Puppetry is an area of creative practice MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian EDITORS Julie Grundvig that has received scant serious attention from Kate Steinmann the art world, and Maleonn's incorporation of Chunyee Li EDITORS (CHINESE VERSION) Yu Hsiao Hwei various found objects into the construction of Chen Ping his theatrical presentations demonstrates the Guo Yanlong CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde kind of resourcefulness and imagination that is WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li characteristic of the bricoleur. This aesthetic ADVISORY BOARD and approach to art making is also found in our Judy Andrews, Ohio State University first feature on Hong Kong legend Frog King, an Melissa Chiu, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden John Clark, University of Sydney industrious artist who is equally theatrical through Lynne Cooke, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. his interactive happenings and his tendency to Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator integrate found objects into his collages and Fan Di’an, Central Academy of Fine Arts assemblages. Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, MAXXI, Rome Completely opposite to the bountiful aesthetic Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Katie Hill, University of Westminster of Maleonn and Frog King is the painting and Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive sculpture of Korean artist Lee Ufan, a pioneer in Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian the Mono-ha art movement which emerged in Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator Lu Jie, Long March Space Japan in the 1970s, and whose work represents Charles Merewether, Critic and Curator another kind of richness, one that is minimalist Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art and exhibits influences derived from Korean, Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator Japanese, and Chinese artistic traditions and Wu Hung, University of Chicago Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District literature. PUBLISHER Art & Collection Group Ltd. The ghost of socialist realism appears in the 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 exhibition Really, Socialism?!, as well as in the Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 conceptual underpinnings of work by Liu Ding and E-mail: [email protected] Jin Shan, all of which are explored in this issue. VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu Often dismissed as an archaic artistic practice, Alex Kao socialist realism here comes under renewed MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu scrutiny in each of these three texts—not as Betty Hsieh an effort to revive it, but to bring forward new PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. considerations in understanding its legacy within WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com WEB DESIGN Design Format the present moment. ISSN 1683 - 3082 Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited In conclusion, Yishu 73 presents artists and in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, histories that have sometimes been overlooked, March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: like Maleonn’s puppetry, both within the canon of art history and in the definition of what constitutes YISHU EDITORIAL OFFICE 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 fine art. Maryn Varbanov was a significant figure Phone: 1.604.649.8187 in the evolution of contemporary Chinese art E-mail: offi[email protected] during the 1980s and contributed greatly not only RETAIL RATES USD $12 / EUR 9 / TWD 350 to the practice of textile art, or “soft sculpture,” (per copy) but to challenging longstanding traditions in SUBSCRIPTION RATES painting and sculpture that led to the advent of 1 Year Print Copy (6 issues including air mail postage): Asia $94 USD/Outside Asia $104 USD installation art in China. This issue concludes 2 Years Print Copy (12 issues including air mail postage): with a conversation with Siu King-Chung about Asia $180 USD/Outside Asia $198 USD his Community Museum Project, which brings 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD together visual art, design, and politics to create 1 Year Print Copy and PDF (6 issues including air mail postage): collective endeavours—often involving those who Asia $134 USD/Outside Asia $144 USD might be considered non-artists—that reflect DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group upon social protest, local initiatives, and urban CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow redevelopment as they have emerged in Hong DESIGNER Philip Wong Kong’s recent history. No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are Keith Wallace 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15卷第2期‧2016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）

2 編者手記 總 策 劃： 鄭勝天 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 顯靈之物: 「爸爸的時光機」 Julie Chun 中文編輯： 余小蕙 陳 萍 郭彥龍 21 蛙王圖騰：進化 行 政： 藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) Valerie C. Doran 顧 問： 王嘉驥 田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 39 蛙王: 先知先覺 巫 鴻 李穎文（Christie Lee） 林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 范迪安 招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 44 「對話」李禹煥 洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 周婉京（Stephanie Wanjing Chou） 胡 昉 侯瀚如 徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 52 真的嗎，社會主義？！ 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 高名潞 康康 (Kang Kang） 費大爲 楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 盧 杰 Lynne Cooke 60 「新人」：劉鼎的路徑和處境 Okwui Enwezor 欒志超 Katie Hill Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda

74 多重的歷史觀 出 版： 典藏藝術家庭股份有限公司 Julie Chun 副總經理： 劉靜宜 高世光 行銷總監： 林素珍 發行專員： 許銘文 97 與蕭競聰談「民間博物館計劃」 謝宜蓉 賴婉兒（Sally Lai） 社 址： 台灣台北市中山北路一段85號6樓 電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 電子信箱：[email protected] 108 中英人名對照 國際版編輯部：Yishu Editorial Office 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 電子信箱: offi[email protected]

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感謝JNBY、 陳萍、 賀芳霓（Stephanie Holmquist） 版權所有，本刊內容非經本社同意不得翻譯和轉載。 和Mark Allison 、D3E Art Limited對本刊出版與 本刊登載內容並不代表編輯部與出版社立場。 發行的慷慨支持 Contributors

Stefanie Wanjing Chou is an art journalist Valerie C. Doran is a Hong Kong-based and book writer. She holds a double curator, art critic, and translator specializing bachelor’s degree in Cinematic Arts from in the field of Chinese contemporary the City University of Hong Kong and art. Her most recent curatorial projects Stockholm University, and a master’s degree include The Garden of Winter Light, a group in Visual Art Studies from the Chinese exhibition with artists from Hong Kong, the University of Hong Kong. She started her PRC, Taiwan, Tibet, and Mongolia (Hanart art career as a film scriptwriter and later TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, 2015–16); and Frog moved to contemporary art study. Currently, King Totem, Hong Kong performance artist she writes a weekly art column for Ta Kung and painter Frog King’s highly acclaimed Pao (Hong Kong). She is also a regular solo exhibition (10 Chancery Lane Gallery, contributor to art magazines and websites Hong Kong, 2014). Doran was Editorial such as Artco, Art Map, A.M. Post, and Director for two major publications on CAFA Art Info. Distributed in mainland Chinese contemporary art: China’s New China, her newly published book is titled A Art, Post-1989 (1993, 2004), which has Flaneur’s Europe (China Travel and Tourism become an important reference book in the Press, 2015). field, and Three Parallel Artworlds: 100 Art Things from Modern Chinese History (2015), Julie Chun is an independent art historian named by ArtAsiaPacific as one of the ten and lecturer who has been based in outstanding art books of 2015. She is an Shanghai since 2011. She currently serves as academic advisor to the Asia Art Archive and Art Convener of the Royal Asiatic Society, a member of the International Art Critics China, where she delivers monthly lectures Association and has served as a member at museums and galleries to widen public of the Gallery Advisory Board of the Asia understanding of artistic objects, past and Society Hong Kong. She is also Curatorial present. She holds an M.A. in Art History Director of Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong. from San Jose State University and a B.A. in Economics from the University of California at Irvine. She has also completed graduate studies in Asian history at Yonsei Graduate School of International Studies, Seoul, and conducted research in modern art at UCLA. She is a regular contributing writer to Yishu and Randian online.

4 Vol. 15 No. 2 Kang Kang received a B.A. in Comparative Christie Lee is a Hong Kong–based arts Literature and Society from Columbia journalist. Her writing has appeared in University in 2015. As a writer and Art + Auction, Art in Culture, Artsy translator, she has contributed to art Editorial, BACCAEAT Magazine, and publications such as LEAP, The Art Indesign Media. She has a bachelor’s degree Newspaper, ArtReview Asia, and Yishu, as in English literature and political science well as books, catalogues, and monographs from McGill University. across different disciplines. She currently lives in New York. Luan Zhichao is a Beijing-based writer, translator, and curator. She writes regularly Sally Lai is an independent curator and for Art World Magazine, Artforum, and consultant who has worked in the field other art-related media. Her recent of contemporary Chinese and Asian art Chinese translation projects include Five since 1997. From 2008 to 2014 she was Sisters: Researching Performance in Restaging Director of the Centre for Contemporary (Gold Wall Press, 2014), Photography Chinese Art, UK. She has programmed Today (Phaidon, 2015), and Dalí (Beijing and commissioned leading Chinese artists Publishing Group, 2015), among others. including Ming Wong, Patty Chang, Song Dong, Birdhead, Pak Sheung Chuen, Lee Mingwei, Gordon Cheung, Yan Xing, Liu Ding, Susan Pui San Lok, and Erika Tan. Her writing has been published in Art Monthly, Art Asia Pacific, engage Journal, Untitled, The Journal of Visual Culture, and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Lai is on the advisory boards of Black Artists and Modernism (University of the Arts and Middlesex University research project) and of Visual Arts South West and The Attenborough Arts Centre, UK. She was a fellow of the Clore Leadership Programme (2005–06) and a finalist for the Women of the Future Award—Arts, Media and Culture (2011).

Vol. 15 No. 2 5 Julie Chun Epiphany of Objects: Maleonn’s Papa’s Time Machine

“There are people who weep, are sad and aroused watching the puppets . . .” —The Meditation of Arjuna (eleventh-century Javanese epic)

t is every mortal’s fantasy to turn back or thrust forward the hands of time. Since 1895, with the publication of H. G. Wells’s novel The ITime Machine, authors and filmmakers were inspired to imagine a vehicle that could transport human beings through time and space. Despite the very low odds of actual success, human creativity refused to be extinguished, and, since then, with the advent of the virtual world and increasing sophistication in computer gaming, a certain form of time travel became a simple click away. A personally tailored brand new world is now within just about every person’s reach.

Despite such technological advances, Maleonn, 2015. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of one artist in China has been the artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., exploring time travel in a rather Shanghai. anachronistic way by building his own contraption by hand. Born in 1972 in Shanghai, Ma Liang (马 良), better known as Maleonn, has found his own means of journeying between the two metaphorical states of the “past” and the “present” with relative ease. Coming of age during the Deng Xiaoping reform era, Maleonn graduated in 1995 from the Fine Art College of Shanghai University, where his major was graphic design. Fascinated by the divergent modes of visual technology that were fast becoming available in China, Maleonn embarked on a career in commercial video film, working as a director and art director before charting his course as a fine art photographer in 2003. His professional career, thus far, has been reliant on gadgets—much of it composed of electronic and digital devices that whirl and click with activity, oftentimes seeming to have minds of their own.

While many younger Chinese artists, especially those in their twenties and thirties, are mining the abundant realm of software for their artistic practices, appropriating the vast wealth of still and moving images available on the Internet or creating their own digital-based content, Maleonn has

6 Vol. 15 No. 2 Maleonn, 2015, view of time machine in the artist’s studio. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., Shanghai.

Maleonn, 2015, view of time recently turned his attention to machine in the artist’s studio. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. hardware. “It took me one year Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., and ten months to build this time Shanghai. machine. I still have much work to do on the accompanying objects, but the main piece is complete,” Maleonn explains as we stand inside an abandoned factory warehouse located north of Shanghai.1 The time machine is bulky and clunky, composed of what appears to be scrap metal and enormous cogs and wheels that turn, ornamented by a tuba flaring out from a crevice. The vehicle’s driver’s seat, which is nowhere near the control panels, is amusingly covered in plastic plaid tartan to ineffectively disguise its former entity as a beauty salon chair, complete with domed hairdryer. Despite such humourously idiosyncratic disjunctions, this unrefined machine is nonetheless unified by its own intricate and exotic monumentality, exuding the charm of a bygone era or a fantastical world tinged with whimsy found in the realm of children’s imagination.

The meticulously crafted time travel machine, designed by Maleonn and constructed with the help of his assistants, is further ornamented with miscellaneous objects that the artist has been collecting for over a decade during his travels abroad and in Shanghai. A wide assortment of new and used goods, which eventually find their rightful place as props or elements of

Vol. 15 No. 2 7 View of Maleonn’s studio. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., Shanghai.

set design and even costumes in Maelonn’s oeuvre, include stuffed animals, toys, old photographs, postcards, posters, certificates, letters, receipts, notebooks, and other odds and ends. The structural framework of the time machine’s disparate parts is primarily composed of found metal with some larger parts cast in bronze. The apparatus is massive and defies all logic of transcending gravity, let alone time. Why is a grown man like Maleonn tinkering with toys and exerting so much of his precious time, research, and resources in building a time machine that literally stands in place?

Maleonn is not an artist who goes Maleonn, A Band from Xi’an, from Studio Mobile series, out of his way to draw attention 2012, digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist. to himself or his art. Rather, he is reserved and soft-spoken. He is known in the Chinese art world for his body of photographic works, some of which he manually

re-colours to capture the surreal Maleonn, A Shanghai Movie Producer and His Family, from conditions of the imagined Studio Mobile series, 2012, digital photograph. Courtesy of subconscious. One of his most the artist. unique projects was Studio Mobile (2012). When he and all his colleagues lost their studio spaces on 696 Weihei Road, in Shanghai,

after a total eviction by the local Maleonn, A Couple from Zhengzhou, from Studio government, Maleonn created a Mobile series, 2012, digital photograph. Courtesy of the mobile photo studio and traveled to artist. thirty-five cities in China in a run- down truck photographing 200,000 participants.2 Before setting off on his nomadic journey, Maleonn used the social media platform Weibo (a Chinese hybrid of Twitter and Facebook) to locate in each city a minimum of eight participants who would be willing to provide food and lodging for him and his small team. In return, every host was able to take part in the Studio Mobile project by having his or her portrait taken according to their phantasmal whims. It took him eight months to make the full preparations. He personally added manual touches to the photographic

8 Vol. 15 No. 2 backdrops that depict typical interior and exterior scenes of China, which later becomes supplemented with props. The subjects came from all walks of life, ranging from tank drivers to Confucian scholars, and were placed in front of the backdrop to enhance greater visual interest. When not in use, the backdrops were rolled up and transported in the truck. He also assembled a wide accumulation of costumes and props to be used for the photo shoots, much of which he gave away to the participants as souvenirs along with their portraits. An arresting theme that resonates throughout the collection of photographs is uninhibited freedom. Framed by a physical red velvet curtain that reinforces the presence of a theatrical set, the portraits convey everyday Chinese people enclosed in their own world of fantasy—a quartet of four young men are self-styled as punk band members, a newly established family comprised of a mother, a father, and an infant are clad in matching pink panda suits, and a young couple in a forest are dressed as super heroes. The presentation of the individualized self-constructed world underscores the surreal, nonsensical, and outrageously hilarious alter egos who are far removed from China’s sterotyped images of obedient citizens.

Rehearsing with a handmade As Studio Mobile reveals, Maleonn’s puppet for Papa’s Time Machine, 2015. Photo: Kerstin working method borders on Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural fanaticism. This driving passion is Development Co., Ltd., Shanghai. carried over to his current project, Papa’s Time Machine. “During the past few years when I was involved in group exhibitions of photography, curators and colleagues would ask what I was working on. I explained my concept for Papa’s Time Machine and the time I was expending on puppet theatre research. The response was always the same. They just stared at me and uttered in complete disbelief, ‘you must be crazy.’ In hindsight, I realize they weren’t completely wrong. I don’t think I could have constructed all this if I was not crazy.” Maleonn laughs, gesturing at the commotion taking place around him in the warehouse as the wheels and cogs turn, life-sized armoured puppets clank about rehearsing their parts, and various crew members move about adjusting the mechanical parts of the backdrop.

The day is enveloped in heavy grey mist, and the penetrating chill seems to find its way through every pore in our jackets and scarves. Yet despite the damp and dim, a palpable sense of warmth emanates from the great flurry of activity produced by the life-sized puppets. Made of armour with intricately crafted joints, each puppet is animated by two puppet masters who are physically attached to the puppet bunraku-style to control its every move. Bunraku is a popular genre of Japanese puppet performance originating in the Edo period (1603–1868). The finely crafted and elaborately dressed dolls have distinct Japanese facial features and attire and are about half human size; their every move is specified by a principal operator and two assistants dressed in black so as to blend in with the dark backdrop. Maleonn’s puppets are much larger than the Japanese type, and

Vol. 15 No. 2 9 Left: Rehearsing with a handmade puppet and props for Papa’s Time Machine, 2015. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., Shanghai. Right: Maleonn, Makudge as a Young Man, 2015, handmade puppet for Papa’s Time Machine. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., Shanghai.

Scene from Papa’s Time Machine, 2015, Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Photo: Maleonn. Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., Shanghai.

Left: Maleonn, Father of Makudge, 2015, handmade puppet for Papa’s Time Machine. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., Shanghai. Right: Maleonn, hand of Makudge as a young man, 2015, handmade puppet for Papa’s Time Machine. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., Shanghai.

10 Vol. 15 No. 2 he insists that his puppet operators’ identities not be wholly obscured. During the stage performance, the puppet masters are dressed in chic black suits with their faces lit by a tiny LED light attached to the side of a hat—a special bowler hat mounted with old-fashioned aviator goggles that Maleonn has designed, thus giving each puppet controller the appearance of early-twentieth-century pilots. The main character of the performance is Makudge (pronounced Ma-kud-gee), presented at two different ages; one as a swanky, young handsome puppet sporting a bow tie, leather suspenders, and fanciful side burns. Then there is Makudge as a little boy with wide blinking eyes. Each are soon joined by their respective fathers— two puppets in elderly guises sporting spectacles, one with a black mustache and the other with a white beard. Taking a break from his rehearsal, the young man Makudge approaches Maleonn to pat him on the shoulder, and after expressing a dramatically startled look upon seeing me, shyly offers a handshake. Magically, the puppet has the power to instantly tease a smile, chasing away the gloom brought about by the day’s dreary weather. The commotion taking place within the inner sanctum of the warehouse marks the forward march of time, and yet all these preparations are to ensure a proper passage backward in time.

On three consecutive evenings from October 18 to 20, 2015, Maleonn’s Papa’s Time Machine had indeed transported an entire auditorium of people at the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (better known as the Power Station of Art) through a fantastical odyssey of light and darkness in a unique performance conflating shadow play and puppet theatre. The twenty-eight-minute journey was an emotional tour de force for those who witnessed the live performance. Maleonn seemed to have warped time, perhaps even suspending it, so that the audience was held in an indeterminate interstice to reflect upon the magically wondrous, yet hauntingly disquieting, cycle that is the circle of life. Despite the complexity of emotions the performance evokes, the storyline is relatively straightforward, and the dedication—as expressed by Maleonn in a short introduction—heartfelt. The narrative is a tale of fantasy, which also parallels reality. To recover his father’s failing memory, Makudge has invented a time machine that replays past events through shadow theatre plays. The inspiration for Maleonn’s project is derived from his own father, who has Alzheimer’s disease.

When the performance begins, the open stage is completely darkened and appears bare; there are no curtains or theatrical lighting to come between the viewers and the actors. Upon a simple raised platform, the first puppet we encounter is Makudge as a young man. The dapper figure makes a grand entrance with sweeping gestures as he engages with the audience members in the front row. He communicates using exaggerated body movements and nondescript sounds that have no relationship to any known language. The puppets all speak a vocabulary composed of sounds, which serve as their words. Like music, their onomatopoeia is universal, having the ease of traversing many national and geographical boundaries. This open and expressive noise is also the language of Makudge—the one who strives to turn back the hands of time.

Vol. 15 No. 2 11 He cranks the levers and sets the Scene from Papa’s Time Machine, 2015, Power Station wheels turning as deeper darkness of Art, Shanghai. Photo: Maleonn. Courtesy of the encloses and we witness, on an artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., immense translucent screen, a Shanghai. visual presentation that resembles Left: Scene from Papa’s Time Machine, 2015, Power the traditional style of a Shaanxi Station of Art, Shanghai. Photo: Maleonn. Courtesy of province shadow play, or pi ying the artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., xi (皮影戏). We can see the darkly Shanghai. moving silhouettes of the little boy Makudge and his father fishing by a river bank. They encounter an enormous fish with a gaping jaw and sharp teeth. Makudge nervously tugs at his father’s pant leg suggesting they move away, but the father bends down and peers into the mouth of the great fish. Soon they realize that the giant fish is in need of assistance. Together, father and son join forces to extract a large hook from the fish’s mouth.

The stage darkens once again, and Scenes from Papa’s Time Machine, 2015, Power Station when it is lit, little boy Makudge of Art, Shanghai. Photo: Maleonn. Courtesy of the and his middle-aged father appear artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., as bunraku-style puppets, to watch Shanghai. on the screen a shadow play of past scenes from their earlier lives. The next moving image is a familiar rite of passage—that of a boy learning to ride a two-wheeled bicycle with the help of his father. Once the boy gains his balance, the father releases his hold, at which point, the young boy pedals happily up and down invisible hills and vales. The shadow play on the back screen slowly dissolves as the drama takes

12 Vol. 15 No. 2 Maleonn, Father of Makudge visceral form in front of the screen with the armoured puppets. The bicycle as an Old Man, 2015, handmade puppet for Papa’s scene, manipulated by four puppet controllers, collapses into a fluid, unified Time Machine. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the sequence, with each of the two persons spinning the front and back spokes artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., of the bicycle wheel while the other two move the arms and pump the legs Shanghai. of young Makudge. The little boy squeals in glee and pedals even harder and harder until a pair of colossal wings suddenly emerges from his back like a butterfly to lift him soaring high in the air.

Rehearsing handmade puppets The scenes of little boy Makudge for Papa’s Time Machine, 2015. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. are infused with a sense of lyricism, Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., conveying wonderment, freedom, Shanghai. and childhood innocence. His youthful life exemplifies the ephemeral state of utopia, which in a blink of an eye gives way to the frailty of old age. We witness the father progressing into an elderly state until time eventually comes to tear father and son asunder. This is a moment that many of us know well for its universality—the loss of a parent due to sickness or old age. The performance not only celebrates the memory of carefree years, but is also a gentle reminder of the precious fragility of life, a contemporary memento mori, told through the accessible narrative of familiar ties that many of us have experienced directly or indirectly.

According to Maleonn, shadow plays and puppet theatre have several advantages as a contemporary art form:

They can both be understood by young and old alike. I have always been fascinated with live theatre because it has a capacity, similar to fine arts, music, and dance, to transcend certain barriers. The theatre has always been my home. My father is the first generation of Beijing Opera directors. He had a very famous career. In addition to his

Vol. 15 No. 2 13 role with the Beijing Opera, he worked as a director staging a total of thirty-five traditional Chinese dramas. My mother studied Shakespearean plays and worked as an actress in the Shanghai Youth Theatre, known for Shakespearean productions. As a child, I lived in the theatre. I used to write my own scripts backstage. My father always supported and encouraged my imaginative play. I first took a part on stage when I was six years old and both my parents hoped that I would pursue a career as an actor.

However, as he grew older, Maleonn sought to forge his own path. His older sister (by eleven years) had already followed in the footsteps of the family tradition as a theatre actress. Even though Maleonn thought enough members of the family were in show business, a lifelong contact with the vibrant stage, filled with costumes and props, kept him not too far from the arts. He loved painting, especially oil painting. True to his namesake, Ma Liang is a fairytale character who uses a magic brush and can transform reality with his fantasy.3 At the age of twelve, he was given the opportunity to attend Shanghai Huashan Art School, where, along with the rest of his classmates, he was taught the techniques of oil painting in the Soviet Socialist Realist style, the dominant mode of artistic training in China from the Maoist era that continues to have a lasting legacy. Upon entering the Fine Art College of Shanghai University, Maleonn majored in graphic design on the advice of his professor who predicted that the technical arts would be the “future of art.”

“But I didn’t like it,” admits Maleonn. “I love art because it encourages creativity, which is why I always had my heart set on being an artist.” After graduation, Maleonn focused on directing commercial video and film for ten years before crossing over to photography. It was at this period in Maleonn’s life, when he was absorbed in his artistic practice that his father began developing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, and Maleonn remembered a promise he had made:

When my father began losing his memory, I was reminded of an event from my childhood. We were in the swimming pool and my father asked me something at least four or five times but I was too distracted playing in the water. He asked me to stop thrashing about the pool and to float on my back. He told me to relax and lay still. When I did, he said, “That’s good. It’s good to stop and be still.” I now find that there has been a reversal of roles. I often have to repeat my question several times to my father. This was when I remembered the pact I made with him that one day we would do a project together. But when I remembered this promise, my father’s memory was already slipping, and I felt an acute sense of regret, especially since time was running out. It was then, two years ago, that I decided to work on a project dedicated to my father, to both of my parents who taught me so much and shaped me as the person I am today.

14 Vol. 15 No. 2 Yet, even though I had set my resolve, I was also apprehensive. I had no idea where to start, and I feared how such a project would be received by my peers and the public. I didn’t even know much about shadow theatre plays and puppetry. But about seven years ago, I had the chance to direct a documentary film about a puppet maker from Chenzhou, Fujian. It was my first exposure to Chinese puppet culture and immediately I fell in love. While I was deeply fascinated by the puppets themselves, I couldn’t follow the narrative of the performance because the production was in the local dialect. The music was a bit slow for me as well so despite my best intentions, I kept falling asleep during the performance. That was when I realized that young people had little interest in traditional puppet theatre. I felt extremely sad about this. I think much of this disconnect has occurred because the narrative references are of an old oral tradition, which the young people do not understand.

The memory of that experience and the promise I had made to father prompted me to take a renewed look at a traditional art form that was slowly losing its grasp on young audiences. I wanted to make puppet theatre relevantly engaging to those very audiences who were slowly drifting away. Traditional forms of art need to be continued but it requires a new vision to adapt to contemporary times so as to be accessible to current generation in ways that can be understood and appreciated.

Thus the stage was set for Papa’s Time Machine. Yet Maleonn lacked the necessary resources. “I had to spend a lot of time in preparatory research,” he admits. In China, public access to sites like YouTube and Google is not readily available. Thus, with every opportunity presented during an exhibition in Europe or overseas, he spent late nights scouring the Web, studying the various puppet forms and performances.

In the past two years, I have been to Europe three times during which time I downloaded and studied over four hundred puppet videos. I was very eager to find how other artists and artisans crafted their puppets. For example, in traditional Japanese bunraku puppet performance, the actors stand behind the puppets, which are small in size. People wear black and operate the puppets in shadows but the audience can still see them. This is an interesting way, because in Chinese shadow puppet theatre, the people who control the puppets are hidden completely behind the screen from the public’s view. I was intrigued by the Japanese method because it added another dimension to the performance by allowing the audience to notice and engage with the puppet operators as actors.

Vol. 15 No. 2 15 Maleonn, details of handmade puppets for Papa’s Time Machine, 2015. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., Shanghai.

Maleonn, details of handmade puppets for Papa’s Time Machine, 2015. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd., Shanghai.

16 Vol. 15 No. 2 Maleonn, details of handmade As mentioned previously, Maleonn’s puppets for Papa’s Time Machine, 2015. Photo: Kerstin puppet controllers are allowed Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural a greater degree of visibility and Development Co., Ltd., Shanghai. performative liberties than bunraku puppet masters. When he began the project, Maleonn needed to recruit performers. He states, “I used the Internet and posted on Weibo and Wechat: ‘I am making a crazy puppet project and looking for interested participants.’ That is how I found Michael Shu (舒鹏程), the lead actor who operates Makudge. Michael came to us from the Shanghai Puppet Theatre. He felt that the national theatre lacked dynamism and he wanted to explore a new direction in puppet performances. He and I continue to study and work together every day where we are constantly in discussion about how to improve the movement of the armour puppet’s hand, the eyeball, and every conceivable detail. I feel Michael has become Makudge. I am very lucky to have tremendous support from my patron and actors. Six months ago, I recruited more people when I was able to receive the support from Kelly Wang (王凯丽). She was the only one who believed in this project when everyone else thought I was crazy. Perhaps she is crazy, too,” Maleonn laughs.

Kelly Wang represents the new generation of young mainland collectors coming from families of significant wealth, who have been educated abroad, and are affecting the Chinese contemporary art world. At the age of twenty- one, the first artist Kelly Wang came into contact was Zhang Xiaogang, whose work she immediately collected. In the last eight years she has been steadfastly amassing works by numerous Chinese and international artists. At the end of 2013, while still in her late twenties, Kelly Wang established LIAN Contemporary Art Space (supported in full by LIAN Cultural Development Co., Ltd.), located in the Wuwei Creative District in Shanghai’s Yangpu District. This independent art space operates as an exhibition space as well as an artist residency that promotes the works by emerging and established Chinese and international artists. “My decision to support Maleonn’s project was actually based on an emotional one,” Kelly Wang comments. “Maleonn’s concept was strikingly unusual from what other Chinese artists were doing. Every piece he has made for Papa’s Time Machine is hand crafted, which further underscores the significance of each piece as a unique work of art. I believe Maleonn is a very important artist in China, which is why I want to support his project by creating a platform for wider audiences at home in China and abroad.”4

Maleonn is thankful for the support:

Before embarking on this project, I asked some dramatists how long it took for them to make a drama. They replied that they usually needed three to four months. I thought that was very quick. Many people have asked me how long

Vol. 15 No. 2 17 it took me to create the time machine, the puppets, and the set design. I reply, one year and ten months. When they ask if I am finished, I say I am not finished. I need more time, more months. In China, trying to get long-term patronage is extremely difficult because so much of the production is about a quick turnaround. Kelly Wang is willing to support a long-term project like mine without constantly pressuring me if I am done.

Papa’s Time Machine is indeed a never-ending story. While Maleonn has worked assiduously to develop the complete story and the full script of the performance, both the actions and the dramatics still require fine-tuning. There is also the challenge of sustaining the emotional euphoria from the current twenty-eight-minute performance to the anticipated seventy- minute full production. In the coming months, Maleonn and his team will continue their daily rehearsals, where the actors are required to spend great lengths of time operating the puppets and working out the technical details of every movement. Maleonn concedes the process is exhausting because it is about “exacting teamwork.” Yet, the results so far have proven to be visually stunning and emotionally charged, as exemplified by the bicycle scene, which is one of the pivotal highlights of the performance. Another memorable scene is the finale when Makudge is forcefully separated from his father by the invisible hand of time. As the little boy calls and gestures for his father who has sunk into a progressive aging and is slowly departing from the stage, there were hardly any dry eyes in the packed auditorium. One could easily criticize the scene, or the entire performance, as tugging at our subjective senses. Yet hasn’t that been the effect of many memorable works of art, past and present?

Fittingly, the shadow puppet tradition in China was also founded on yearnings related to love and loss. Early accounts claim that in 121 BC, Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty grieved the death of his favorite concubine. In an effort to lift the emperor’s spirits, a shaman by the name of Shao-weng managed to cause the image of the emperor’s deceased beloved to appear on the curtain.5 Scholars are now in agreement that there is insufficient evidence to support this brief textual excerpt as justifying the origins of pi ying xi, which, in fact, appeared much later during the Song dynasty (960–1280) and was later followed by an “unprecedented revival” in the Qing dynasty (1644– 1911).6 Some studies posit that the earliest puppet theatre, using stringed puppets, can be traced to India as early as 200 BC, where the purpose was to disseminate the tradition of Hindu oral narratives.7 Other sources indicate that the first recorded account of shadow play was in Java, Indonesia, in 840 AD. The epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana served to inculcate the Javanese rulers and the masses to moral behaviour, that still continues as tradition to this present day.8 According to Mikke Susanto, who curated the wayang puppet exhibition Ksatrai: Memahami Tripama & Hasthabrata on September 2014 at the Museum Sonobudoyo Yogyakarta, “The core message is simple; that their [the puppets’] life becomes inspiration for anybody

18 Vol. 15 No. 2 who wants to understand a good and useful life, to defend truth and to go through the life experience in a circle of life.”9

Regardless of the exact site and date of its origin, what is important is that puppet performances have always managed to assume local characteristics, in visual or narrative formats, to increase the accessibility for the viewing audience. Whether made from elaborately crafted and meticulously painted animal hide or intricately carved wooden forms, puppet culture in Asia has not been for the sole purpose of children’s entertainment as the term “puppet” sometimes suggests. Rather, puppet theatre serves as a critical vehicle, having a profound impact on the religion, social life, and thought of the masses, even becoming a tool for political subversion.10 Early shadow and puppet plays in China and Southeast Asia are also believed to be linked to ancestor worship, where the puppet took on the supernatural role of personifying ancestors.11 While Maleonn has expended much of his time and resources in his efforts to revive an outmoded visual form by reorienting the objects and narrative as a contemporary construct, Papa’s Time Machine is the artist’s expressed desire to pay homage to his father, which aligns it with the earlier forms of ancestor veneration. The content— the objects and the concept of the performance—are novel, albeit resting on the original purpose of the form.

Rehearsing with a handmade As we wrap up our interview, Maleonn’s last remarks are, “I do want to puppet for Papa’s Time Machine, 2015. Photo: Kerstin touch people through Papa’s Time Machine because it is a very personal Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and LIAN Cultural narrative for me. Yet please know that the story of Makudge is not just my Development Co., Ltd., Shanghai. story. It is everyone’s story because everyone has a father and a personal story associated with one’s father.” Maleonn’s production of Papa’s Time Machine is thus based upon but also much more expansive in scope than the artist’s autobiography. Alzheimer’s disease is a universal condition, as is the loss of memory and loved ones that affect us all during our

Vol. 15 No. 2 19 lifetime. During the three consecutive evenings of the performance, the audiences were reminded of aspects of life that we are aware of but often choose to forget—death, aging, loss of memory, and the general question of the meaning of life. The clunky objects composed of metal and found items may be lifeless in and of themselves. Yet with the activation of these inanimate objects through a powerful method of visual story telling, Maleonn effectively created the conditions for a moment of epiphany.

For Irish novelist James Joyce, the collected banal trivialities of life had the capability to render “a sudden spiritual manifestation.”12 For Joyce’s protagonist Stephen Hero, in the novel of the same title, even an ordinary object he encounters every day, such as the public clock of the Ballast Office, could be transformed when a spiritual gaze is cast. “The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanized.”13 It is not so much that the object itself achieves epiphany but that a renewed look at an ordinary object has the potential to prompt a revelatory realization where the past returns to overwhelm the present.

The physicality of Maleonn’s time machine appears to stand still, but in surprising ways, it does not. It metaphorically transports memories through metaphysical time. These armour puppets, as works of art, will outlive Maleonn’s father and even Maleonn, and continue to have a life of their own with each successive production, where as objects of epiphany they remind with gentle humility that, against all odds, human creativity refuses to be extinguished as it strives to share the stories of our past with those in the present and the future.

Notes

1. All quotations by Maleonn in this article are from an unpublished interview between the author and Maleonn, Shanghai, October 29, 2015. 2. For a selection of photographs from Maleonn’s Studio Mobile (2011), see “Maleonn’s mobile photo studio—in pictures,” Guardian, March 26, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2013/ mar/26/maleonn-mobile-studio-china-pictures/. 3. “Maleonn: A Chinese Artist’s Fantasy World,” The Culture Trip, n.d., http://www.theculturetrip.com/ asia/china/articles/the-fantastical-world-of-chinese-artist-maleonn/. 4. Kelly Wang, unpublished interview with the author, Shanghai, October 29, 2015. 5. Reprinted in Alvin P. Cohen, “Documentation Relating to the Origins of the Chinese Shadow-Puppet Theater,” Asia Major, third series, 13, no. 1 (2000), 85–86. 6. See complete article in ibid. See also Fan Pen Chen, “Shadow Theaters of the World,” Asian Folklore Studies 62, no. 1 (2003), 26. 7. Fan Pen Chen, “Shadow Theaters of the World,” Asian Folklore Studies 62, no. 1 (2003), 31. 8. Ibid, 33. 9. Mikke Susanto, “Knight, Between Soul and Action,” in Ksatria: Memahami Tripama and Hasthabrata, exhibition catalogue produced in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, held from September 20–29, 2014, at the Museum Sonobudoyo, Yogyakarta, 8. 10. Gabriele Fahr-Becker, ed., The Art of East Asia (Cologne: Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 1999), 344–45. 11. Ibid, 340. 12. James Joyce, Stephen Hero (Norfolk, CN: New Directions, 1963), 211. 13. Ibid.

20 Vol. 15 No. 2 Valerie C. Doran Frog King: Totem: An Evolution

n inimitable force unto himself, Frog King (a.k.a. Kwok Mang Ho) is a pioneering conceptual and performance artist who A has been breaking boundaries in Hong Kong and beyond since the late 1960s. Frog King’s artistic awareness is marked by a deeply integrated hybridity derived from dual roots based in two very different aesthetic-philosophical systems. One root draws from elements of Chinese cosmological philosophy that underlie all Chinese traditional art forms, in particular the connective mutability of the five elements of water, earth, fire, metal, and wood. In different manifestations these elements and their transmutations are present physically throughout Frog King’s work. The other root draws from the contemporary “art is life” philosophy of influential artists like Alan Kaprow and Fluxus artist Naim Jun Paik, early exponents of the happening and of the dissolution of the divide between artist and audience/art and daily life. In Frog King, the creative and philosophical DNA of these seemingly disparate and even incongruous sources of influence have mutated into a being of enormous creative vitality and a kind of all-embracing, life-affirming anarchy.

Left: Korean video artist Nam Jun Paik wearing "froggie sunglasses" for One Second Live Body Performance, 1994, New York City. Right: Mother and son wearing "froggie sunglasses" for One Second Live Body Performance, Àœ}̜«ˆ>ÊUÊ Hongkornucopia, Venice Biennale, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

This quality of hybridity is represented in the amphibious nature of the frog and captured in Frog King’s seal or emblem of the abstracted frog face, whose two triangular eyes also imply a bridge or a pair of sails as symbols of connectivity. The art historian David Clarke has described this “froggy” emblem as a kind of totem that marks Frog King’s universal tribe. In fact, this sense of the totemic is embedded throughout Frog King’s work. Each of his objects, actions, and environments represents a fractal embodiment of his conceptual utopia, containing within it all the

Vol. 15 No. 2 21 energy and history of his being-ness in the world, up to and inclusive of Frog King enthroned in his Frog’s nest, Frogtopia the temporal moment in which a work emerges—a moment that it often UÊœ˜}ŽœÀ˜ÕVœ«ˆ>, Venice Biennale, 2011. Courtesy of simultaneously commemorates. Any combination of these objects may the artist. be incorporated by the artist into a larger environment—his Frogtopia— within which he resides as king or shaman, dressed in his totemic Frog King costume. From within his world, Frog King extends open invitations to the audience to become his equal partners and guests, to enact “one second” or “one minute” performances with him, to create “live body installations,” to be photographed in a pair of his outrageous, colourfully constructed “froggy sunglasses”—and thus become part of Frog King’s visual archive of a decades-long, worldwide project, marking us all as equals in play, whether celebrity attendee or random passer-by.

Formerly a student of the New Ink Painting master Lui Shou-Kwan—one of Hong Kong’s seminal and influential experimental ink artists—in his early years Frog King (who at that time still went by his real name of Kwok Mang Ho) was already considered to be something of an enfant terrible: curious and disruptive, original and incorrigible. Frog King relates how he was so frequently tossed out of studio classes by his exasperated teacher that he took to making cassette recordings of Lui Shou-Kwan’s classes so that he could play back them back when he was actually ready to listen— days, months, or maybe even years later. Lui Shou-Kwan’s core group of disciples included artists who were to become major figures in Hong Kong’s contemporary ink painting scene, such as Wucius Wong, Irene Chou, and Leung Kui Ting, each of whom developed a distinctive voice and innovative methodology. But Frog King was the true iconoclast, becoming one of the earliest Chinese contemporary artists to explore the use of ink painting as a conceptual tool, integrating it as both action and material into multimedia installations, totemic columns, performances, happenings, and assembled

22 Vol. 15 No. 2 Left: Frog King, The Column, 1988, mixed media installation with two live turtles and 100 USD notes, Visual Arts Society 15th Annual Show, Shatin Town Hall, Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Performative installation by Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) at Epoxy Group’s Art Mall event, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

meta-environments, incorporating discards, everyday objects, fragments of torn and sometimes burned artworks, and a multiplicity of photographs, photographs of photographs, photocopies, and copies of copies depicting previous Frog installations, happenings, and other kinds of adventures in the artist’s life journey across time and space.

Born in Guangdong province in 1947, Frog King moved with his family to Hong Kong at the age of five, in the exodus from the mainland that followed in the wake of the Communist revolution of 1949. His mother, by all accounts a very strong woman, became the principal of a primary school and his father worked as an agent at one of Hong Kong’s international shipping ports. Frog King says that both his parents—one a disciplined educator dedicated to the education of young Hong Kong people, the other in a position of encounter and engagement with the world, had an enormous influence on him. On many levels, opening minds and encountering the world are both essential aspects of Frog King’s way of art and of life. Although in some ways his trajectory in his early years was on the surface fairly straightforward—studying art at Hong Kong’s Grantham College of Education, getting a job as a primary school art teacher, participating in local exhibitions with the Hong Kong Art Teachers’ Association and the Hong Kong Visual Arts Society, bonding with friends like sculptor Tong King-sum—Frog King’s iconoclasm was always in evidence, and he frequently created a kind of benign havoc with what was at that time in Hong Kong a rather unusual propensity for the conceptual and the performative. His first experiments with burning wood and other materials “to see what I could produce through the destruction of one element”1 in fact began in the late 1960s at Grantham College, as did his adoption of the habit of constantly documenting his encounters and his experiments through photography, the products of which became essential resources in his work.

By the early 1970s Frog King had moved to rural Yuen Long in Hong Kong’s New Territories, where he set up an artist’s studio, taught art in a

Vol. 15 No. 2 23 local primary school, and began Secondary school student and Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) his explorations—both deliberate enact a Big Plastic Bag Action with a live cow, Yuen Long and ingenuous—into the concept countryside, Hong Kong, ca. 1971. Courtesy of the artist. that “life is art.” He often involved his bemused but enthusiastic students in his experimentations with sculpture and installation and his explorations of the borders between culture and nature and between the discarded material and the pure form. The ubiquitous plastic bags that dotted both town Art students taught by Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) from Hoi and countryside were of particular Pa Street Government Primary School participate in his Big interest to him, and he explored Plastic Bag Action, Yuen Long, Hong Kong, 1970. Courtesy of both their positive and negative the artist. forms, how they held air and how they were able to become transformed through this relationship with the air both inside and outside of them. (Decades later the young Hong Kong conceptual artist Pak Sheung Chuen would engage with similar phenomenological qualities of the plastic bag as both a material and a space.) He would often take his young students on tours of the countryside, and they would use what they found to make art. In 1974 Frog King held his first conceptual art exhibition in Yuen Long, with the participation of his students, creating works using plastic bags and transmuted materials such as melted plastic pipes and burned cow bones—materials that he would continue to use in one form or another in other works and exhibition contexts. In 1976, the South China Morning Post interviewed Frog King, and he recounted some of these explorations during the five years he had spent teaching in Yuen Long.

When I can’t decide what to do I just go out on a bicycle and ride around the countryside. Sooner or later I find something that gives me a new idea. It may be a piece of wood or a lump of scrap iron. I take it all home. Fortunately, I have space to keep these things.

In Yuen Long I have made friends with all the rubbish collectors. They all know the kind of materials that interest me. The market people know me too. There is no art gallery in Yuen Long, so I walk around the market every day, treating it as an art exhibition. I talk to the villagers about the old ways of life. I find out about the original cultural roots of the villagers. And this all helps me to bring my work closer to nature. When I started teaching in Yuen Long people did not accept my ideas. There have been three principals in five years but I have remained throughout. Today I feel that people understand more of what I am trying to do. I have taught the students to see things in a new way. They all enjoy the work and are always interested in what I am doing myself. The students do things like

24 Vol. 15 No. 2 making a growing sculpture, combining different living plants together. When I take a lesson we go out into the countryside and design a fishpond, using a string of plastic base to represent the fish.2

Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) enacts Plastic Bag Happenings at Tian’anmen Square, Beijing, 1979. Courtesy of the artist.

Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) In 1979, Frog King made what enacts Plastic Bag Happenings at Great Wall, 1979. Courtesy proved to be an important trip to of the artist. Beijing, as one of a group of artists from the Hong Kong Visual Arts Society invited to participate in an exhibition at Beijing’s Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. In typical fashion, he soon wandered off on his own to stage his now-legendary “Plastic Bag Happenings” at Tian’anmen Square and the Great Wall. This is historically recognized as the first example of performance art in China. With China just emerging from the shadows of the Cultural Revolution and with few people having had contact with any form of contemporary art practice, clearly mystified Beijingers either pointedly ignored the artist, stared at him like he was a madman, or playfully followed him around, with a few intrepid students volunteering to help him out with his installation set-up. For Frog King, the main point was the creation of an experiential space of transformation and the documentation through photography of the process. In her 1985 book Modern Art in Hong Kong, Petra Hinterthur describes Frog King (again doing art under his real name, Kwok Mang- Ho) as a “painter, sculptor and environmental artist who also organizes happenings and performances . . . most famous for his controversial use of plastic bags that he either paints or ties to a staircase, bannister, pavements and even along the Great Wall of China. Sometimes he also piles them up in backyards and fields. Kwok occasionally paints his plastic bags with Chinese ink, fluorescent paint, gold or silver, but he always wants them to reflect his deep concern about our environment.”3

In looking back at some of Frog King’s activities in Hong Kong during the 1980s, one sees what a dynamic presence he was, someone very connected

Vol. 15 No. 2 25 to a whole spectrum of Hong Kong artists across generations and practices, despite his iconoclastic ways. One example is the Art Festival that he curated for the town of Tuen Mun in Hong Kong’s New Territories in November 1978: A series of exhibitions and happenings whose participating artists included everyone from the ink painter Wucius Wong to the eccentric senior artist Luis Chan, the expressionistic painters Gaylord Chan and Chu Hing Wah, and the young rebel sculptor Antonio Mak. At the opening of the event on November 6, Frog King improvised an experimental happening, in which over two hundred people participated, involving, of course, plastic bags.

Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) and friends at Kwok Gallery, Little Italy, New York, 1982. Courtesy of the artist.

In 1980, Frog King left Hong Kong Kwok Gallery Opening Party, February 8, 1982, Little Italy, to study in New York in a quest to New York. Courtesy of the artist. find more room to express himself and to experience the stimulation of more like-minded spirits. In short order he rented a tiny flat above a kung fu studio in Chinatown and enrolled at the Arts Students League, where he took classes until 1984. With his energy, curiosity, and a quirky form of entrepreneurship, Frog King organized and participated in numerous performances, happenings, and artist-led exhibitions, formed the Epoxy Group of expatriate Chinese artists with Ming Fay, Bing Lee, and Esther Liu, among others, became Visual Art Director of the multicultural music and performance group Yomoma Arts (1984–91) and in 1982 opened his own Kwok gallery for experimental and performance art, which managed to survive on a shoestring for two raucous years.

He soon became known for his energetic, eccentric calligraphy, Froggie Ink Paintings, and his wild cacophony of site-specific structures and environments made variously of string, ladder frames, and folding screens, and layered with a visually and experientially powerful chaos of discarded

26 Vol. 15 No. 2 Left: Froggie face emblem incorporating imagery of a bridge and sailboat, c. 1980s. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) enacting Live Body at Kwok at Lung Tin Village, Hong Kong, 1981. Photo: Henry Chan. Courtesy of the artist.

objects, fabric, snapshots, plastic bags, fragments of former paintings, and, even on occasion, amphibious animals such as turtles or snails ensconced in specially designed tanks. It was in New York that Frog King began to really evolve and disseminate his Froggie persona and where he created his emblematic hybrid image of the “frog face” that is also a bridge of connectivity. It is dizzying to realize the multiple platforms Frog King was able to find or create for his art during his early years in New York—from the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where he showed his Frog Installations and Frog Paintings (1982), to his Floating Hamburger Box Poetry and Performance event at New York’s famed La Mama experimental performance space (1988), to the Shit Show exhibition he organized at his eponymous KWOK Gallery, and the “Hot Sundays Park Performance and Outdoor Installations” he created with his group (1986). Given this wealth of activity, as well as the fact that he periodically returned to Hong Kong and other cities in Asia to stage events and show his work, it is hard to imagine that at the time Frog King was still relatively unknown, and certainly unheralded, in Hong Kong itself, outside of the inner art circles.

Frog King with local residents In 1995, Frog King returned to enacting Live Body Installation during the Papagayo Nights Hong Kong for a longer stay to Peformance Art Festival, 2013, Orkney Islands, Scotland. help care for his ailing mother, but Courtesy of the artist. with the intention of eventually returning to New York. In the end, though, he was drawn back into the Hong Kong arts scene, once again becoming an integral part of the city’s underground visual landscape with his happenings and performances, and frequent collaborations with other local artists across generational divides. He also continued to travel, accepting invitations from all over the world to bring his unique visual and performance art to places as disparate as Tokyo, Helsinki, and, quite recently, to the most far-flung area of the Orkney Islands. By his own estimate, Frog King has participated in over 5,000 solo and group exhibitions internationally. He has been the recipient of a number of honours and awards, and in 2011 he was selected to represent Hong Kong at the 54th Venice Biennale.

Vol. 15 No. 2 27 28 Vol. 15 No. 2 Opposite, top: Chow Chun Yet in the years after his return to Hong Kong, Frog King’s focus on process- Fai, Frog King,”The taxi didn’t stop when the driver see me based/performance art, on the one hand, and his propensity to give his in costume,” 2014, acrylic on canvas, 244 x 488 cm. Courtesy works away, on the other, meant that for many years art-making was not of the artist. Opposite, bottom: Detail of a viable means of economic survival for him. So Frog King went back to spontaneous installations outside of Frog King’s studio, teaching, setting up teaching studios in Hong Kong and in Korea with his Cattle Depot Artists’ Village, wife, the Korean artist Cho Hyun-hae, and also guest-lecturing at local Hong Kong, 2014. Photo: Valerie C. Doran. universities, where he became a mentor and inspiration to a generation of younger artists such as Tsang Tak Ping, several of whom have themselves chosen alternative paths outside of the mainstream institutional and market contexts of the contemporary art world.

One can still often catch glimpses of Frog King in full shamanistic regalia, lugging his large black suitcase full of the atomic elements of his Frog’s Nest and live body installations, as he tries—often unsuccessfully—to flag down a taxi to take him to one of his myriad destinations, which might be an art event, a school visit, or a political demonstration. (Hong Kong artist Chow Chun Fai even created one of his iconic taxi paintings showing Frog King in full regalia and unsuccessfully trying to get a ride.) Visitors to Cattle Depot “artists’ village” in the industrial area of To Kwa Wan, where Frog King has his studio, are bound to encounter the territory he has staked out for himself, the boundaries of which are fluid and marked with his outdoor installations, spontaneous assemblages, and scavenged treasures.

Calligraphic graffiti inscription Frog King has been described as an by King of Kowloon (Tsang Tsou Choi), Star Ferry urban folk artist, and in this and concourse, Tsim Tsa Tsui, Kowloon, February 4, 2005. other ways he demonstrates an Photo: David Clarke. Courtesy of David Clarke. interesting kinship with another self-proclaimed Hong Kong “king,” and an important (albeit unwitting) urban folk artist: Tsang Tsou Choi (1921–2007), the late, great, self-titled “King of Kowloon,” sometimes described as Hong Kong’s first homegrown graffitist. Unlike Frog King, Tsang Tsou Choi never saw nor dreamed of himself as an artist. He lived his life as one of the disenfranchised urban underclass, unable to find an economic or social foothold, and eccentrically obsessed with the idea that his ancestors had been given an imperial writ, which bequeathed to them large swathes of Kowloon peninsula as their fiefdom. To protest his family’s loss and re-stake his claim, Tsang Tsou Choi used an ink brush and a bucket of black paint to inscribe odd pieces of the urban public landscape—traffic light boxes, the sides of bridges, container walls—with his distinctive calligraphy, a kind of naïve version of the official lishu or standard script used by imperial officials in dynastic China. The Hong Kong city government would assiduously whitewash over the King of Kowloon’s graffiti whenever it came to their attention, but over the years his eccentric and passionate declarations made him an iconic, and even heroic, figure to many Hong Kong artists and activists who felt a close sense of identification with his assertive form of creative expression and his insistence on an autonomous identity. In a recent essay on Tsang Tsou Choi, artist and curator Ou Ning describes the King of

Vol. 15 No. 2 29 Kowloon’s significance as follows:

Tsang Tsou Choi’s deepest value lies in the way he directly reflects the true will of the Hong Kong people, evoking an identity of place that transcends all class distinctions. His unrelenting campaign of denunciation and protest has even made him into a kind of populist political icon, helping to consolidate the power of social mobilization. His state of madness is one in which all institutional systems and established rules are completely disregarded: from this perspective, he leaves normal artists behind in the dust.4

While the King of Kowloon’s demands to reclaim his family territory from the “empire” indeed have a visceral resonance for a number of people in Hong Kong, at the same time, this stake is a form of exclusion, a mark of possession and by extension of closing borders. By contrast, the process by which Frog King stakes out his territory is both ephemeral and all-inclusive: Like some kind of vagrant magician, he carries his ephemeral kingdom— his Frogtopia—with him, both literally and figuratively. Adorned in his Frog King costume, and usually lugging along bags or suitcases stuffed with the peculiar tools of his trade—which variously might include myriad pairs of Froggy sunglasses, homemade noisemakers fashioned of plastic bottles stuffed with buttons or dried beans, pots of Chinese ink, odd assortments of clothing, bits of coloured paper, and even parcels of dried herbs—he can transform any space he happens to be in, opening it up and making it universally welcoming to any who enter it. As such, Frog King’s “clan” extends beyond Hong Kong—it is all-embracing. While, like the King of Kowloon, Frog King claims his territory, at the same time he includes even the powers that be within his invitation. The King of Kowloon’s vivid graffiti is a declaration of ownership, and his imagined kingdom is by necessity exclusive, while Frog King’s art seeks to transform any bounded territory into a universal space of connectivity. The duality created by the reflective yet opposing natures of these two Hong Kong “kings” gives rise to a condition of tension that is cosmologically resonant yet at the same time painfully discordant: In a sense, this tension reflects the contemporary condition of Hong Kong itself. On reflection, it seems there is much more to be learned from a comparative study of the art and legacies of these two urban “kings.”

The exhibition Frog King: Totem (September 26—October 22, 2014, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong) presented a layered environment of art (and of realms) that sought to illuminate Frog King’s vibrant installation and performance work with ink art at its core and at the same time to reveal a deeper stillness at the heart of the artist’s expressive life. The main concept of the exhibition came in the form of a question, or a challenge, to Frog King himself: We have seen the whirlwind; can you dig deep and show us the eye of the storm? Frog King: Totem was meant to capture the layers of movement, of change, and of stillness in Frog King’s work: The flash of the shaman’s cloak as it is donned or as it is removed.

30 Vol. 15 No. 2 Top: Frog King working on site in preparation for the Frog King: Totem exhibition, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, September 2014. Photo: Valerie C. Doran. Bottom: Frog King using burning technique in creating a totem, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, September 2014. Photo: Valerie C. Doran. Right: Frog King writing calligraphy at the Àœ}̜«ˆ>ÊUÊ Hongkornucopia exhibition, Venice Biennale, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

In addition to the requisite site-specific Frog’s Nest created by the artist— an integral part of any Frog King environment—Frog King: Totem also incorporated dynamic new works, including the new form of “totems,” monumental action art ink paintings, and a select group of previous works spanning a period of forty years. Yet it was not meant as a retrospective, but rather offered a reflection of the energetic balance and freedom of Frog King’s approach to art and life that recognizes no borders across time and space—as well as a testament to the deeply cultivated levels of artistry underlying all Frog King’s oeuvre. The exhibition attests to a sometimes overlooked yet key aspect of Frog King’s artistic nature: that the choreographed chaos of his performances is counterbalanced, and indeed made possible, by the depth of craft, skill, and artistry always at his disposal, a level of cultivation that is apparent in the concentration one sees on his face when he is sculpting or painting, carving or burning: In that moment, he enters into a private artist’s world that comes into being in the moment of creation, and the energy whorl that emanates from within gives him a power and gravitas that is, in its own way, truly regal.

Vol. 15 No. 2 31 Among the earlier works showcased in Frog King: Totem is a set of uniquely crafted, luminous pieces from 1976 that Frog King calls his “fire collages.” These are fashioned from layers of irregular pieces of traditional lantern paper that the artist shaped by burning the edges. Frog King then marked the paper with calligraphic inscriptions consisting of readable characters or semi-abstract forms and coated these layers in lacquer from a furniture maker’s store, preserving their translucence and at the same time creating a unique texture that has an almost organic feel, as though made from the leaves of a jungle plant or the skin of an exotic reptile. When lit from behind, the calligraphic forms embedded in the works emerge like dark jewels from within the glowing core. These fire paintings represent one of the key periods in the evolution of Frog King’s artistic language, in which the element of fire and the act of burning—and thus transmuting— materials became an integral part of his creative process.

The new series of totems Frog King Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King), Fire Sculpture, 1978, Tuen created for this exhibition also Muen Art Festival, New Territories, Hong Kong. marked an important moment of Courtesy of the artist. transition in his constant process of evolution. While Frog King is known for his “frog columns” created from masses of photographs, Perspex, photocopies, and found materials, as well as his fire- sculpture towers, which he would construct from wood and burn down in performative rituals of marking and celebration, the new totems both return to, and open up a new direction for, the more purely sculpted forms of some of Frog King’s earlier works. In creating the totems, Frog King engaged deeply and energetically with the nature of the materials. Several of the major new totem sculptures began with dramatically shaped pieces of found wood salvaged from felled trees that Frog King shipped back from Korea. In the process of transforming them into totems, Frog King “attacked” the wood by using (literal) axe-cut strokes to interfere with their natural surfaces, a conceptual play on the texture strokes of traditional Chinese painting. Frog King then entered into the next stage of what he calls his “big fight” with the powerful nature of the wood, “killing it” by roughly and even violently splashing it with black ink and acrylic paint before bringing the works “back to life” through an intricate process of carving, painting, collaging, and selective burning.5

Other totems are at their core more like assemblages than sculptures per se, but they too are lovingly crafted, carved, and painted, with several of them incorporating found objects that Frog King has a special affection for and had been keeping for the right moment, including a heavy cement stand originally used as the base for a traffic signs, several shiny metal turbines from a car engine, and a collection of beautiful stones that he collected from beaches and river banks during his travels.

32 Vol. 15 No. 2 Frog King, detail of large piece of natural root Frog King, detail of root wood transformed into wood acquired in Korea, August 2014. Photo: Valerie a Frog King Totem sculpture, 2014. Photo: Valerie C. Doran. C. Doran.

Vol. 15 No. 2 33 34 Vol. 15 No. 2 Oppsite page: Detail of Froggie Frog King’s mixed-media, collaged screens are also totemic and beautifully Screen/Mobile Museum, 2014, mixed media. Photo: Valerie crafted, built up from the surface in dozens of layers of texture, media, C. Doran. genre, and expressive action. White paint brushed on to the wood surface is overlaid with fragments of other artworks, photographs, and laminated memorabilia: here a grid-patterned sheet from a school copybook is inscribed with a torn sheet of Frog King’s “Sandwich Calligraphy” patterned with a series of white dots that are inspired, says Frog King, by the markings of tribal face paint. A bold circular ink stroke cuts across the visual field, bordered by an interruption of beautiful splashes and scatterings of metallic gold dots, like imploded sunlight. As one walks around the screen, its many surfaces reveal innumerable, fragmented narratives, and it becomes clear that each screen is a kind of visual diary of many layers and many chapters. Frog King calls these screens his personal “mobile museums,” and each of them is a compendium of a lived life.

Frog King in Live Body Ink Performance with Frog Queen (Frog King’s wife, performance artist Cho Hyun-hae), Àœ}̜«ˆ>ÊUÊœ˜}ŽœÀ˜ÕVœ«ˆ>, Venice Biennale, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Frog King’s ink paintings and calligraphy are another manifestation of his own brand of positive iconoclasm: Here he extends, rather than deconstructs or destroys, the traditional media of ink painting. The absorbent quality of xuan paper, for example, might be extended to include the absorbency of a toilet paper roll or a coffee filter, which Frog King then adopts as the ground for his ink work. The movement of hand and brush is extended to the kinetic movements of the entire body, and ink might be flung by an audience member, poured from a bucket, or splashed onto the whirling body of the artist himself. This kind of experimental ink action art also has roots in Chinese artistic tradition—the “mad monk-painters” of the Tang dynasty are recorded as having engaged in various forms of action painting, in which they spouted ink from their mouths, painted with their hair and their fingernails and even poured ink onto large swathes of paper and then slid around on their buttocks to achieve interesting effects. As is proper in the Chinese painting tradition, Frog King stamps his paintings and calligraphy with carved artists’ seals bearing a calligraphic inscription or image. But rather than carving in soapstone or jade, Frog King often simply sketches out a design and then has it carved into a rubber seal by a local stamp-maker. A number of his seals are simply abstract forms that are the imprint of random objects: small plastic tubes or pieces of joinery that have caught his fancy.

Vol. 15 No. 2 35 An example of Frog King’s unique calligraphy seals, created using rubber stamps and random objects. Courtesy of the artist.

It is interesting and instructive also to contextualize Frog King’s ink art into the larger frame of Chinese conceptual art. Like the renowned conceptual artists Xu Bing and Gu Wenda, known for their invented “error-word” calligraphy and “false characters,” Frog King has also ventured to invent his own calligraphic script. Yet, unlike Xu Bing and Gu Wenda, Frog King does not does not seek to destroy meaning; rather, he seeks to aggregate it, to overlay it. This can be seen in Frog King’s signature “Sandwich Calligraphy,” which juxtaposes Chinese words with English, Japanese, Korean, or whatever other language he happens to encounter in his travels, and he often incorporates phrases from restaurant menus or overheard snatches of conversation, rejoicing in odes to the everyday. In this aspect of his calligraphic approach, Frog King also can be connected with another important mainland conceptual artist, Wu Shanzhuan. In his Red Humour series of works from the late 1980s and 1990s, Wu Shanzhuan also created memorials to the calligraphy of the everyday, copying down texts from street posters, signs in wet-market stalls, Communist Party announcements, etc., and creating floor-to-ceiling calligraphic environments of these found words—the intention of which was to expose the existential absurdity of this landscape of crossed messages. Yet Wu Shanzhuan’s exposure is meant as a constructive, rather than a destructive, act. Writing about Wu Shanzhuan’s work, critic Gao Shiming described an aspect of his sensibility that seems to apply equally to Frog King:

Different to the narcissistic focus of many artists, what has always concerned Wu Shanzhuan is the question: What concerns other people in this moment? In 1980s China, Sartre’s statement “Hell is other people” was quoted everywhere, but Wu Shanzhuan turned this concept on its head when he wrote: “God is other people.”6

It can be said that both Wu Shanzhuan and Frog King ultimately seek to use language as a metaphysical pointer towards a better way of life, but there

36 Vol. 15 No. 2 Frog King, Sandwich is an important difference in their approaches. Rather than the exposure Calligraphy, 2014, ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist. of existential absurdity that Wu Shanzhuan attempts in his Red Humour calligraphic environments, Frog King’s calligraphy is meant to celebrate the incongruity and absurdity of everyday life in the here and now and in the smallest cultural things that feed us (often quite literally, since, as mentioned, many of Frog King’s sandwich calligraphies incorporate restaurant menus in two or sometimes three or four languages). In a 1992 happening called One Sentence to Kwok, in which Frog King invited random people to write one sentence for or about him, a New Yorker named Eric Darton wrote the perceptive statement: “Kwok has never learned to speak just one language.” In fact, Frog King’s inability to speak in “just one language” means that he is never tongue-tied by the limitations of any particular mode of expression and so can leap easily and fluidly betwixt and between.

In contrast to the powerful brushwork of his ink paintings, the style of Frog King’s “Sandwich Calligraphy” script can seem childishly awkward and ingenuous—but one could also argue that this is the kind of awkward quality appreciated and even sought after by masters across time and cultures. (As Picasso allegedly once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” On the other side of the planet, and in another century, the Ming-period literatus Dong Qichang expressed similar thoughts regarding the virtues of “awkwardness.”)

Gu Wenda’s "error-word" In 2011, after his return from the calligraphy from his series Mythos of lost dynasties: Venice Biennale, Frog King staged an fake words, missing words, miswritten words . . . of poetry exhibition at the Hong Kong Fringe by Du Mu, 1986, ink on paper, 274.5 x 180 cm. Courtesy of Club entitled Nine Million Works. Hanart 100 Collection, Hong Kong. This title wonderfully captures the wild, prolific, and expansive playfulness that is essential to Frog King’s way of being and making art in the world. Yet, as we have seen, there is a more complex side to Frog King. While his works in Frog King Totem were generally free of the contemporary sheen of irony, there is often a palpable sense of social critique and the rumble of a dark side: A vibrational note of anger,

Vol. 15 No. 2 37 Left: Wu Shanzhuan, Red Humour, c. 1989, installation. Courtesy Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong. Right: Frog King performance during the Àœ}̜«ˆ>ÊUÊ Hongkornucopia, Venice Biennale, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

seen in a slash of ink across a collaged surface of images, or the explosive gesture of torn and burned fragments of paper embedded in a painting. Ultimately, it is not a lightheaded sense of anarchic cheerfulness to which Frog King aspires or turns our attention, but the importance of balance: The dark moments of human existence splashed by a sudden glow of light and the violent exclamations of the urban world countered by explosive moments of joy.

Notes

1. Quoted from a conversation between Frog King and the author, May 2014. 2. Jane Ram, “Hong Kong Diary: Always on the move in pursuit of art,” South China Morning Post, March 24, 1976. 3. Petra Hinterthur, Modern Art in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Myer Publishing, 1985), 123. 4. Ou Ning, “A Hong Kong History of Madness,” trans. Valerie C. Doran, in David Spalding, ed., King of Kowloon: The Art of Tsang Tsou Choi (Bologna: Damiani Press, 2013), 166. 5. Quoted from conversations between Frog King and the author, summer 2014. 6. Excerpted from Gao Shiming’s essay “Butterfrog in a Godless Heaven,” written on the occasion of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga Svala Thorsdottir’s exhibition Butterfrog at Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, in 2010. It is interesting to note that a fascination with the hybrid nature of the frog is another artistic and conceptual link between Frog King Kwok and Wu Shanzhuan.

38 Vol. 15 No. 2 Christie Lee Frog King: Always a Step Ahead

ong Kong artist Kwok Mang Ho’s latest exhibition Frog King: Recent Works, at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery (December 1, 2015– HJanuary 30, 2016), is suffused with contrasting and, in many ways, contradicting aesthetics and ideologies. Rather than this being an indication of some fault in style, however, the exhibition paints a fascinating portrait of an artist who refuses to be pinned down to a straightforward narrative.

Left: Frog King, Love Life Fun Despite complaints of weak knees #1, 2014, mixed media on wood, 210 x 36 cm. Courtesy and an aching back when we met of the artist and 10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong. on a unusually warm January day, Right: Frog King, Love Life Fun Kwok Mang Ho, or Frog King, #2, mixed media on wood, 250 x 50 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the as he is more commonly known artist and 10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong. in his role of artist, still appears to be the idiosyncratic figure he was three decades ago, when he simultaneously stunned and amused the New York art world with his flamboyant costumes of bug-eyed glasses, large medallions, gongs, and his sculptures and collages suffused with eccentric motifs. When stripped of this signature paraphernalia, he appears smaller than his usual gregarious self, but, at seventy years old, Frog King still hungers after innovation. Yet, rather than the now-familiar innovation in which Kwok Mang Ho strolled the streets of Hong Kong while decked tip-to-toe in amphibian- inspired paraphernalia, the innovation that I’m referring to here is that of self, as poignantly reflected in the exhibition. It’s been a mere year since Kwok Mang Ho’s last show at the gallery, Frog King: Totem, but the difference in curatorial direction between the two is apparent. While Frog King: Totem focused very much on the artist’s fantastically ornamental ink sculptures, Frog King: Recent Works combines current works with works that date back to the 1980s, representing Kwok Mang Ho’s far-ranging oeuvre.

Two totem sculptures, Love Life Fun # 1 and Love Life Fun # 2 on display at the Recent Works exhibition are conceived of a myriad of materials, with a section of one made from a series of inverted bamboo cones—they look like

Vol. 15 No. 2 39 the faces of smiling frogs—that are topped up by two scrap metal containers that Kwok Mang Ho salvaged from one of the garages opposite his studio at Cattle Depot artist village in To Kwa Wan. Wood boards are tacked to this central structure upon which are inked amphibian-like characters or calligraphic scribbles. The clash of the natural and artificial, or the spontaneous and the man-made, is reflected in the two large-scale collage paintings hung on one side of the gallery walls. There is a kind of doodling that Kwok Mang Ho emphasizes in his work that at first glance appears like gibberish but emerges to reveal a much more calculated process; in one spot, the word “feeling”—a word that seems to inform much of Kwok Mang Ho’s work—has been translated into multiple languages. In another work, there is a strip of paper with various frog faces. There also is a figure that looks halfway between a frog and a crab. And then, down comes the ink roller, ravaging its way across the canvases, simultaneously obscuring parts of the collage and imbuing it with layers of pigment, but also of meanings repeatedly made, obscured or destroyed.

Frog King, Frogscape A FIRE INK, 2015, mixed media on canvas, 102 x 102 cm. Courtesy of the artist and 10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong.

It’s clear that Kwok Mang Ho is as obsessed with attending to details as he is with expressing spontaneity. As Frog King eagerly points to one of his large-scale collage paintings, he explains, “This may appear random to the casual observer, but every single stroke and splash is highly controlled.”1 As much as Kwok Mang Ho’s aesthetic may appear to be a nod to the abstract expressionist style of Jackson Pollock or to the music-inspired compositions of Wassily Kandinsky, it also acknowledges Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaist ideals. On opening night, Kwok Mang Ho took over 10 Chancery Lane’s former prison wall, furnishing it with a scattering of readymades, including a treadmill, festival flags, and countless rolls of tissue paper that he had reclaimed from various places.

40 Vol. 15 No. 2 Frog King, Frogscape B, 2015, The connection between abstract expressionist art and spirituality is well mixed media on canvas, 102 x 102 cm. Courtesy of the artist documented. Kandinsky, in his analysis of Kandinsky’s works, asserted that and 10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong. the artist “felt that art must express the spirit but in order to accomplish this task it must be dematerialized.”2 Only art that resolves to create a language that reflects its maker’s innermost thoughts and desires would allow the artist to achieve spiritual awakening.

The complex relationship between spirituality and artistic expression continues at the far end of the gallery, where Frog King has erected a shrine of sorts. Titled Frog’s Nest, the altar is conceived from an abandoned theatre prop item that he retrieved from a local theatre group. Baseball-bat- like sticks hang from the top of the structure, while the large medallions at the front obscure much of the bottom part. At one point during our conversation Kwok Mang Ho conjures a “birthday cake”—part of the shrine—that he had made for gallery manager, Bo Kim, which in essence consisted of him dipping two toilet paper rolls into ink before plopping them atop a paper plate—a minuscule version of the paper ink sculptures that he’d first conceived in the 1980s. At the centre of the shrine sits Frog King—or rather, his costume sans the physical body.

Filled with intricate ink doodling and photos from Kwok Mang Ho’s “happenings,” his panel painting format chides the viewer to consider one

Vol. 15 No. 2 41 surface after the other, and encapsulates the passing of time. But here, the Frog King, Frog’s Nest, 2015, installation. Courtesy of the format takes on another meaning. If the gallery itself is to be interpreted as artist and 10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong. a shrine, then the Totem Frog King, essentially two Diptychs joined together, located at the gallery entrance, can also be likened to a yingbi, or a shadow wall that is usually placed at the front of a temple to bar evil spirits or ghosts from entering.

Yet Kwok Mang Ho is not so vain as to cast himself as a deity or martyr whom viewers should look up to. A shrine empty of Frog King suggests self- awareness but also a sense of desolation, as we see the paraphernalia but not the body, the objects but not the spirit. An uneasy question hangs over the gallery is whether this might be interpreted as hesitation and insecurity on Kwok Mang Ho’s part or as cheekiness.

After all, just when the public is getting accustomed to seeing the costume- clad Frog King that he has become celebrated for, he has decided to shed it, forcing both viewers and the artist himself to see his art in a new light. It is a thrilling act of disorientation, and for the artist it is a return to a “natural” state. “I have returned to my real self,” Kwok Mang Ho says, before adding, wistfully. “What is real, though? Maybe,” as he motions to his body, “this is only another illusion.”3

The “return” to a former self is suggested in the framed small-scale ink works that hang opposite the aforementioned large-scale collage paintings. Dating back to the 1980s, the figures or graphics are much simpler in form, shape, and application and seem somewhat disconnected from the rest of the works on display at the gallery. The frames also imbue the

42 Vol. 15 No. 2 Frog King, Long Live Fun B, 2015, mixed media on screen, 186.3 x 114 cm. Courtesy of the artist and 10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong.

calligraphy paintings with a sense of intactness, or finish, in contrast to the raw aesthetic of Kwok Mang Ho’s other, more recent works. Kwok Mang Ho attributes the opposing styles to his zodiac sign—“I’m a Pisces, so I have two personalities that are constantly in opposition to each other [one real and one spiritual or mystical]. When I want to go all out in unleashing what’s inside, there’s always a force that pulls me back.” In the exhibition, this opposition is manifested not only within each individual work but also in the apparent struggle between a more painterly approach, as seen in his earlier works, and a more analytic approach to art, as evidenced by the ink sculptures, collages, and screen paintings.

It is Kwok Mang Ho’s ability to synthesize of all these forces that makes his work so fascinating, with both myth and skill—the intangible and visible— playing equal roles in the construction of an artistic oeuvre. The path to total enlightenment is not without its struggles, and Frog King: Recent Works poignantly captures the ego of an artist who is forever evolving and ripening amid all its glorious conflicts.

Notes

1. All quotations by Kwok Mang Ho are from an unpublished interview with the author, January 20, 2016. 2. Peter Selz, “The Aesthetic Theories of Wassily Kandinsky and Their Relationship to the Origin of Non-Objective Painting,” Art Bulletin 39 (1957), 127–36.

Vol. 15 No. 2 43 Stefanie Chou Wanjing A Conversation with Lee Ufan

Considered a leading figure of the Japanese Mono-ha movement and the builder of its theoretical underpinnings, Lee Ufan (b. 1936, Kyongsang-namdo, Korea) held his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong from November 20, 2015 to January 9, 2016. This conversation focuses on Lee Ufan's ongoing series Dialogue.

Stefanie Chou Wanjing: To start our conversation, I would like to know about your daily life during the past four years, especially since the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition Making Infinity (June 24 to September 28, 2011). Can you share something about this? And how your new works have emerged from this experience?

Lee Ufan: Actually, my daily life has not changed much, but since the Guggenheim exhibition, I have tried to make more straightforward appraisals of myself as well as my work. This is done not only in a very simple way, but includes everything within my creations and myself. I want to restructure or reorganize them respectively.

Stefanie Chou Wanjing: How did the five new works in the Dialogue series come out of this?

Lee Ufan: I began Dialogue in 2007 Lee Ufan, Dialogue, 2015, oil on canvas, 146 x 114 x 5 cm. and 2008, before the Guggenheim © Lee Ufan. Courtesy of Pace Hong Kong. exhibition; it is a series that has now spanned seven or eight years. The dialogue itself is quite simple in that each canvas contains one, two, or a maximum of three brushstrokes. But this series has not changed for the past decade. I am not going to change now, but at the same time I want the work to be more fulfilling, more powerful, in order to show people my feelings through my work. The relationship between the canvas, the painting, and me becomes more powerful as well. You know, the canvas just represents emptiness. My brush strokes are few. But the large, untouched space is linked to what is for me the importance of emptiness.

44 Vol. 15 No. 2 Lee Ufan, Dialogue, 2014, oil Stefanie Chou Wanjing: There are two things that are particularly on canvas, 130 x 130 x 3 cm. © Lee Ufan. Courtesy of Pace significant as inspirations in your artwork—one is literature and the other is Hong Kong. philosophy. Sometimes, it seems that you pay even more attention to them than to painting. Can you share with us how literature and philosophy have influenced your works of the Mono-ha period, a movement that arose in Japan during the 1970s, and how they have influenced your current works?

Lee Ufan, Dialogue, 2014, Lee Ufan: Actually, I am an artist, watercolour on paper, 104 x 76 cm. © Lee Ufan. Courtesy of and my work is art. And I would Pace Hong Kong. like people to understand it as art. Therefore, literature and philosophy function as tools that allow people to understand my art. Since the majority of my work is about painting and sculpture, I use literature and philosophy only to help the audience, and also as a way to explain how I am performing within my art. It is different from literally being a writer or philosopher.

Stefanie Chou Wanjing: I heard you mention that Heraclitus, Laozi, and Zhuangzi, as well as Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau- Ponty, and Kitaro Nishida are the most influential philosophers to you. Can you explain how Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenomenon and Perception” influenced your Relatum series (1968–ongoing)?

Vol. 15 No. 2 45 Left: Lee Ufan, Relatum—Play of primitive, 2015, steel and stone. Right: Relatum—The cane of Titan, 2015, steel and stone. © Lee Ufan. Courtesy of Pace Hong Kong.

46 Vol. 15 No. 2 Vol. 15 No. 2 47 Lee Ufan: There might be some misunderstanding here. Actually, these philosophers do not have direct influence on my works. To put it more correctly, I need to borrow their sayings in order to help the audience to understand my works.

Stefanie Chou Wanjing: But you have proposed the philosophical idea that there is a triangular relationship between artist, glass, and stone, some of the materials you use in your work?

Lee Ufan: In general, other artists might have a concept first and then they want to find a way to reveal what is on their mind, so they will use different materials such as glass and stone to express it. But in my process, I position glass and stone and myself equally. We are the same, but not in the sense of a community, because we also have differences from each other. I do not order any one of these materials to be here or there, or use them for revealing my thoughts. Instead, I am communicating with them. And somehow we associate with and echo each other. As a result of this process, sometimes I see myself as a kind of conductor; thus I borrow the sayings of these philosophers as a way for the audience to access my work.

Stefanie Chou Wanjing: What do you think about how the repetition of lines and the systematic compositions contribute to evoke infinity?

Lee Ufan: Actually, I started exploring infinity in my art beginning in the 1970s, when I was working from point to line. [In his early painting series, From Point and From Line (1972–84), Lee Ufan combined ground mineral pigment with animal-skin glue, characteristic of nihonga painting, in which he was trained.] At that time, the idea of the “infinite,” in my mind, was like “when time ends, the time starts.” It was a kind of repetition on time, and at that period, during the Mono-ha movement, it was my concept. However, this led to another question: “On the canvas, how can I represent infinity with a more modern concept?” So, in the 1980s, I broke with the previous concept I had, but I cannot say I destroyed it. Until the 1990s, I found myself gradually moving to a new concept about infinity. Then I discovered that infinity was on the canvas. Somewhere with my brush strokes and the empty space, I constructed a new infinity on the canvas that I can feel and fulfill in my relationship with these elements. That sense of infinity is not something I name. It is only when the audience looks at the painting that the sense of infinity emerges from their own feelings. The brushstroke in the painting and the empty space—this is the new infinity.

Stefanie Chou Wanjing: It is said that modern art emphasized the purity of using materials, and a quite interesting point is that your artworks also appear to exhibit a high percentage of purity. Do you see your work being affiliated with modern art?

48 Vol. 15 No. 2 Lee Ufan, From Point, 1978, Lee Ufan: Well, as I suggested earlier, the artist tends to think he or she is glue and mineral pigment on canvas, 97.5 x 130.5 cm. © the one in control, and this is especially true with modernism, so, “I,” as the Lee Ufan. Courtesy of Pace London. modern artist will merely paint what is in his or her mind accordingly. They will claim that “this is my world, and this is the way it should be.” There is no outsider in their work, and it reflects only himself or herself as the artist. But in the abstract, the contemporary art scene now has parallels to the global political and economic environment; the canvas is liberated from the modernist painter, and there are no colonies. It is the same as what happens to the canvas—in the past, the artist, as a kind of colonizer, dominated and did whatever he or she wanted. But now I say that the canvas is in the same position as I am. I am having a dialogue with the viewer and with the canvas. I try to communicate with them through my brush strokes. So, to me, I am not an abstract artist at all, and all my work, no matter who is viewing it—I do not care whether the viewer is a farmer or a child—he or she would not see any abstraction in my works.

Lee Ufan, From Line, 1979, Stefanie Chou Wanjing: Another glue and mineral pigment on canvas, 162.6 x 130.2 cm. © interesting thing is that viewers from Lee Ufan. Courtesy of Pace London. different parts of the world can find cultural and aesthetic roots in your work according to their own backgrounds. Like Americans, for example, who might react to your work as Zen or esoteric Buddhism, yet the Chinese may tend to see in it a voidness that is evident in Daoism. What do you see as the difference?

Lee Ufan: This is a very good question since in the past in Europe or America or even in Asia, a lot of people would say my creations are an obvious expression of Zen and Buddhism, but now this is happening

Vol. 15 No. 2 49 less and less. Even the art critics are no longer thinking like this. They are trying to find a better understanding regarding my work in the context of contemporary art and figuring out what is inside it and trying to interpret it within this sense. Even in Korea, China, and Japan there are still quite a few people who will make this relationship to the East, but this number is lessening. I have been influenced by a lot of things, by Western culture as well as Eastern culture. It is also a question I keep asking myself: “Do my works have to do with the tradition of Buddhism or Western culture?” I think neither. Something I would like to show people are my concepts and how I am thinking. This provides them with a way to understand my work through communication with my thoughts.

Stefanie Chou Wanjing: In this sense, how do you respond to the energy and vibrations within your work when it comes to expression?

Lee Ufan: Well, if you put several of my paintings on the same wall, then Lee Ufan, installation view of Lee Ufan: New Works, 2015, they will appear very ordinary and simple. Also, the function of the space Pace Hong Kong. © Lee Ufan. Courtesy of Pace Hong Kong. is essential; you have to come into the space. For example, if you have only one painting on one wall, when someone comes in, the viewer will have a quiet, simple, peaceful cerebral dialogue with the painting, and this process leads exactly to experiencing the vibrations within my work. At other times, when people look at my paintings, they always want to find the meanings hidden within them. But, indeed, my paintings have nothing to do with meaning, nothing to do with images. It is just the space you exist in with my painting, and the viewing experience leads to a dialogue between you and my painting, and this is a kind of communication that one may not be able

50 Vol. 15 No. 2 to explain in words. It is the simple feelings in your heart that can vibrate together with my paintings and create an engagement with them.

Stefanie Chou Wanjing: I know you have been interested in classical Chinese painting. As an intellectual from the East but someone active worldwide, what do you see as the similarity of the application of “white space ” (or yohaku) in your work to both Chinese and Japanese painting?

Lee Ufan: To be honest, I was born in Korea and was raised in a very traditional Korean family where I read lots of ancient Chinese literature, and I really appreciate Chinese painting, especially from the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties. But at the same time, when I was growing up, I also liked Western painting a lot. I cannot tell what kind of influences I got by analyzing any one painting. It is very mixed in my mind so that I can feel it as something from nature and the universe. Of course, I spent my early years in Asia, then while growing up I learned more from the West, so now all these experiences became engaged inside me; they mixed and melded within me. All of this makes me what I am today. I should say, in the past few decades, I have spent half of my time traveling in Europe, and all of this traveling has made me who I am as well.

There are always a lot of people asking me about my identity. I just see myself as Lee Ufan, instead of belonging to any particular nation or region. So, in this case, my works are not useful for defining my identity.

Stefanie Chou Wanjing: My last question is about the space where we are standing now. Have you been here before, at Pace Hong Kong? How do you feel about doing site-specific works here? And if you were to do installation work for Hong Kong, then what would it be?

Lee Ufan: Well, for this exhibition, actually, I chose the simplest work from my overall oeuvre, and while I have the paintings with one brushstroke, two strokes, and three, I decided to bring those with one stroke. Hong Kong is an Asian city but it has so many different cultures mixed together, from the West especially, but also from China and South Asia. All these elements can be found in Hong Kong. I started to think about how I should pick works for this exhibition. I decided I would like to show my insights and the most essential part of me. It is the most representative of myself, of Lee Ufan, in the most recent works I have made.

Even though these works here may look simple, they do not represent the end of the series, but, rather, the start of my creations that will follow. And I would like to use this exhibition as a starting point, and introduce myself to Hong Kong, and the works with one stroke are the works I would like to introduce to a Hong Kong audience. But I have no idea about being invited to do a commissioned piece for Hong Kong since no one has asked me to do so yet. [Laughs.]

Vol. 15 No. 2 51 Kang Kang Really, Socialism?!

ew York-based curator David Xu Borgonjon’s curatorial project Really, Socialism?! at the non-profit Momenta Art, Brooklyn, New NYork (September 11 to November 9, 2015), is, as the title suggests, at once an interrogation of and affirmative exclamation on the critical relevance of socialism’s aesthetic legacies under global capitalism’s ever- more-abstract control. Accepting socialism’s direct and residual connections to the present, thinking socialist realism from within, and taking responsibility for its heritage are positions upheld, alas, only occasionally. As Chinese critic/artist duo Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding have observed, since contemporary art’s entry into China, “artists and art discussions often attempted to cast [socialist realism] off as an external form, positioning themselves in opposition to it in order to declare their independent, rebellious, free, and contemporary stance in their artistic practice.”1 Such unwillingness to engage may be attributed to a number of factors—from the vilification and distancing of all things socialist in the aftermath of trauma to nostalgia for utopian claims to universality and from structural complicity in the current state of affairs to market-inspired tendencies to exoticize and fetishize traces of socialist institutions’ spectacular collapse. Borgonjon’s research-oriented exhibition joins Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding in refusing to treat the ideology of socialist realism as false consciousness2 or reduce its aesthetics to mere propaganda—whose vestigial relevance has been likened to a “virulence deprived of its power to sicken.”3 While Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding’s research centres on the Chinese historiography, Really, Socialism?! takes examples from the entire landscape of aesthetic practice across socialist states, from official Soviet socialist realism and Chinese revolutionary romanticism to lesser-known strands of theory and phenomena—a grand gesture that yields a rather kaleidoscopic lesson on socialist realism as a radical form of aesthetic and organizational practice, one that requires quite a bit of background.

Firm in his political commitment to “examining the past of the socialist image in order to speculate on the future,”4 Borgonjon provides a welcome opportunity to attempt research and speculation with an unequivocally leftist and activist vocabulary and agenda. Unlike most neutralized art events, the unreservedly didactic Really, Socialism?! takes theory as a starting point but wastes no time on anodyne theoretical circumlocutions. It delves straight into the concrete historical materials, joined by a small, engaged audience—largely self-selected due to the time commitment required to sustain attendance of its numerous components—in a committed space

52 Vol. 15 No. 2 Top: Installation view of Really, that feels more like an open meeting Socialism?! with work by Lisi Raskin (left) and Yeyginiy Fiks of fellow travelers. Its ambitious (right), Momenta Art. Photo: Kikuko Tanaka. Courtesy of program included an exhibition Momenta Art, Brooklyn, New York. of paintings by Yevgeniy Fiks, Right: Lisi Raskin, Trees 1, Huang Jingyuan, and Lisi Raskin at 2015, acrylic and wood, 15.24 x 10.16 cm. Courtesy of the Momenta Art, the main venue of artist. the show, with the artists in lecture- conversations with Ksenia Nouril, Christine Ho, and Eda Čufer, respectively; on-site screenings with Jen Liu and Anna Rubin; a performance lecture by Chang Yuchen; Skype-in presentations by Arseny Zhilyaev from Moscow, and Jason Adams from Michigan; as well as guided visits to the Interference Lisi Raskin in conversation with Eda Cufer. Photo: Kikuko Archive and the collection of Tanaka. Courtesy of Momenta Art, Brooklyn, New York. Soviet art at the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University, as well as a two-session reading group of science fiction from socialist states in both virtual and physical space. To organize content of such variety and density into a brief window of time is a veritable coup that performs a kind of cognitive mapping of the genealogies of socialist realism, charting the many fronts that have emerged in its afterlife—an archaeology of knowledge that opens up to topics from queer futurity, the ethos of life drawing in China, and anti-dystopian sci-fi to Soviet avant- garde museology and abstract modernism (itself connected to Trotskyism through Clement Greenberg) in former Yugoslavia.

Vol. 15 No. 2 53 Taken as a whole, this global proposition gives structure to heterogeneous aesthetic configurations, which, though presented with all their difficult particularities, could appear secondary to the larger framework. This tendency underlies both the show’s weakness and strength—the works are at their most provocative when their tensions with one another as well as the curatorial framing are mobilized and brought to the fore, sometimes to the point of overshadowing individual contexts. In the leftist-didactic paradigm, simply raising awareness or accumulating knowledge is not necessarily conducive to change. The more urgent question becomes: How does contemporary artistic production accommodate the didactic mission of Leftist art à la Brecht, through or even despite the artist? What kind of counterpoints, tactics, and potential exits may be extrapolated from these practices? What can we learn from committed artistic and curatorial work and the negotiations that enable them? While it is beyond the scope of this article to expound on each participant’s contribution, the reader’s interests may be served by a preliminary walk-through of the exhibition, events, and related materials—presented in the form of a thematic syllabus over the course of two months—highlighting cases that are illuminating in regard to the curator’s (auto)didactic imperative.

Yevgeniy Fiks, Pleshkas of the Revolution (Sverdlove Square 2), 2013, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 101.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Starting with the paintings, Yevgeniy Fiks’s Pleshkas of the Revolution (2013) series depicts revolutionary monuments in Moscow that served as secret gay cruising sites in the Soviet era. Based on the artist’s own photographic documents,5 these images of iconic public spaces, rendered in a plain, familiar realist style, are completely devoid of human subjects—their light- toned, postcard-like quality almost passes as open-to-all—neutral and empty enough for any subjectivity to occupy. Those who don’t already know what to look for cannot see the latent presence of a minority population recriminalized years after the Revolution, whose forced public invisibility in the socialist realist mode of image-making attests to socialist realist monuments’ singular command over the creation of symbolic values that inform collective consciousness.

Slavoj Žižek maintains that “ideology is not simply . . . an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to

54 Vol. 15 No. 2 be conceived as ideological.” Ideological art as “the mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence.”6 Socialist realism’s universal promise operates on the unique modality where, instead of replacing the present with the future, it presents the future as the present. Painting becomes the tool of social transformation rather than a plain lie.

In this logic, the invisibility of homosexuality as a vice of the capitalist West is absent from vision for reasons beyond present-tense repression and denial of its existence in reality. To quote Maxim Gorky’s formulation:

Our teacher is our reality . . . reality does not let itself be seen. So then we must know not only two realities—the past and the present one, the one in which we live and take a known part. We must know yet a third reality—the reality of the future . . . We must somehow include this third reality now in our “everyday.” We must portray it. Without it we will not understand what the method of Socialist Realism is.7

Non-representation can thus be seen as an operative strategy for official homophobia to effectively enact the elimination of gender nonconformity in the future-to-come. Trained in the socialist realist tradition, Fiks exposes his own complicity by putting on an essentially Soviet act that cannot be acted out but that is rendered inoperative by the visual language of incompletion: the broad strokes and cursory brushwork resemble a full-colour underpainting of sorts made in preparation for the “real,” monumental socialist realist history painting that stops short of its teleological becoming. This arrested development, perpetually in the making, becomes the “third reality” that Gorky’s comrades attempt but shall never achieve.

The monochromatic, photorealist paintings of Huang Jingyuan’s I Am Your Agency series painstakingly reproduce stock photographs in real-life and fictional settings from a wide spectrum between the quotidian and the iconic. Instantly recognizable as an index of contemporary Chinese visual culture, yet indefinitely alienating in their striking resemblance to Mao-era propaganda photography, the images suggest a kind of interpenetration and indistinction between vernacular and official systems of representation in their psychological immediacy and formal theatricality. The painter’s adoption of an obsolete visual language for grotesque, uncanny effects speaks to the contemporariness of her subjects—archetypal characters in clichéd tableaux that constitute an agency, which produces its own image by imitating images. There is a startling and depressing ubiquity of such performativity on her canvases. If photography, an apparatus of reproduction, comes to be the site of mimesis as well as an instrument for discipline and control of the body that carries subjection to both sovereign power and individual liberty, painting embodies an entire system of representation that, insidious in a now-market-orchestrated retreat from consciousness, continues to regulate and consume contemporary agency.

Vol. 15 No. 2 55 Huang Jingyuan’s work is inevitably caught within the endless loop of Huang Jingyuan, I Am Your Agency No. 11, 2013, oil on image making and becoming-image, ever so powerful in the unprecedented canvas, 71.12 x 114.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist. availability and simultaneity of technology. Both painters seem less concerned with the constructive implications that socialist realism may have left behind than with the possible deconstruction of prevailing problematizations of painting and photography as well as the myth of socialist realism seen from both inside and outside. Working primarily in the West, they seem particularly aware of the global reception of works by artists from the former GDR, or Cynical Realism and Political Pop—once the poster child of contemporary Chinese art—and navigate, quite expertly, existing structures of bias, expectation, and judgment. Committed self- distancing from familiar antagonisms and discursive excesses associated with socialist realism becomes a form of inoperative resistance.

As part of a constellation of Still for The Red Detachment of Women, 1970, directed by multimedia performance, Jen Fu Jie and Pan Wenzhan. Liu’s video Pink Detachment (2015, work-in-progress at the time of screening) reimagines Red Detachment of Women, a 1970 dance film based on one of the Cultural Revolution’s Eight Model Operas sanctioned by Madame Mao. Red Detachment envisions a radical femininity of the young female militia manifest in a new language of ballet, whose formal and psychological affinity to the bodies of female meatpacking workers are the locus of Jen Liu’s theatre. Her appropriation of what has effectively become a kind of communist Red kitsch or fetish refuses to partake in our current systematic dismissal of and ideological closure toward cultural products of ideology, which, deeply problematic and perhaps not as progressive as a leftist would like to think, nonetheless open an immense field for play or hijacking. Socialist realism favours the

56 Vol. 15 No. 2 Jen Liu, still from Pink Detachment, 2015, video, 19 mins., 39 secs. Courtesy of the artist.

synchronized, mechanical, and robust female body of the revolutionary agent over classical ballet’s gendered body, the latter belonging to bourgeois visual pleasure and the former to the demands of world-historical event or streamlined meat production. But neither revolution nor production, through which the utopian promise of revolution must be achieved, is concerned with human subjects in the sense of Enlightenment humanism— under both circumstances, the woman’s body is essentialized through synchronized ritual performance. Whether the subject is feudal landowners of revolutionary times or contemporary factory workers in southern China, all turns/is turned into something practically and metaphorically useful: the “sausage” as postmodern mash-up of meat and waste.

Cover of the serial picture Jen Liu’s speculative play booklet (Lianhuanhua) Xiao Lingtong Manyou Weilai (Xiao evokes the position of Lingtong Travels to the Future), 1980, by Ye Yonglie, with certain key texts from the illustrations by Du Jianguo and Mao Yongkin (Liaoning Meishu red sci-fi reading group Chu ban she.} that is associated with the exhibition. What do we think of when we think about scientific fantasy in socialist states? The space race? Trofim Lysenko? Or the Great Leap Forward? Borgonjon’s selection of Russian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic texts that were part of the sci-fi reading group invokes what Fredric Jameson calls “the radical strangeness and freshness of human existence and of its object world in a non- commodity, in a space from which that prodigious saturation of messages, advertisements, and packaged libidinal fantasies of all kinds, which characterizes our daily experience, is suddenly and unexpectedly stilled.”8 Granted, some of the narratives presented in the reading group are plagued by a stylistic naiveté and moralistic didacticism; not all narratives are as interesting as their conditions of production, reception, and ideological position. But more mature writers, such as Angel Arango in The Cosmonaut and Stanislaw Lem in The Seventh Voyage, are a great pleasure to read. They reflect the ingenuity of the human imagination conditioned by complex cultural-political situations and committed to realist causes, demanding that the reader imagine from often-dystopian genres of fiction a space for

Vol. 15 No. 2 57 the practical science of dream, optimism, collaboration, and (sometimes misguided) benevolence, which also serves as a speculative point of connection for socialist experiences across the board.

Art historian Christine Ho’s research on collectively produced socialist realist art in China points to a critical lacuna in post-Cultural Revolution disengagement with Maoist culture. Similar in mode of production and dissemination to much of the infamous propaganda of the Cultural Revolution, collectively-produced works are often written off as ideological tools, born out of some kind of romantic naiveté and utopian delusion, or as artistic hypocrisy and compromise for Rent Collection Courtyard, 1974–78 (original 1965), 103 the sake of survival, and therefore excluded from most current forms of copper-plated fiberglass sculptures, installation view at aesthetic inquiry. As artists today seek forms of organization that destabilize 2010 Gwuanju Biennale. the dominance of institutionalized and institutionalizing capital (China in particular has seen new forms of the artist collective), one needs only to be reminded once more of the story of the collective sculpture Rent Collection Courtyard (1965)—Harald Szeemann’s longstanding fascination with its “coincidental postmodernism,”9 Cai Guo-Qiang’s 1999 Venice Biennale reconstruction of this Cultural Revolution icon, as well as recent controversies regarding his reproduction and re-exhibition of it—to realize the wealth of lessons to be learned from these historical experiments, provided that one doesn’t take an anti-communist stance a priori. Socialist realist art education, for example, once facilitated social integration and re-education. This humanist dimension of the socialist institution finds its way into Chang Yuchen’s touching account during her lecture about the life drawing training she and her father both undertook in their youth.

It goes without saying that the Cai Guo-Qiang, Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard, current lineup found in Really, 1999, commissioned by 48th Venice Biennale. Photo: Elio Socialism?! is but one possibility Montanari. Courtesy of Cai Studio. among the possible inquiries, and this limited exposé is only one of the many readings made available by the sequence of events. Facing what Jacques Rancière calls the general “undecidability”10 in the politics of art, or the impossibility of constructing an “appropriate” correlation between the aesthetics of politics and politics of aesthetics (such formulation exists in multiple), Borgonjon’s ambition is nothing less than the critical affirmation that the field of socialist aesthetics can continue to sustain and nourish this dialectic. The strongest exclamation point may be found in the mechanism of the exhibition itself. Under our present “economy of presence based on technologically amplified scarcity of human attention and physical presence,”11 or so goes

58 Vol. 15 No. 2 Chang Yuchen, How to Draw in China: K. M. Maskimov and the Chinese Academy, illustrated lecture. Photo: Kikuko Tanaka. Courtesy of the artist.

Hito Steyerl’s analysis of human economies in the art world, Borgonjon’s intensive curriculum is perhaps as costly as art events get in demanding a continuous interruption of the flow of New York City life, which gets quite intense. Whatever temporality the viewer operates in must now accommodate the no-longer-singular moment of the event, a repetitive happening that the keen participant might seize upon to negotiate temporal patterns that function as a synecdoche for the divide between “revolutionary time” and “political time” that past centuries have struggled with violently. In this sense, it is possible to consider Really, Socialism?! as an exercise in organization.

Notes 1. Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, “From the Issue of Art to the Issue of Position: The Echoes of Socialist Realism, Part I,” e-flux journal 55 (May 2014), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/from-the- issue-of-art-to-the-issue-of-position-the-echoes-of-socialist-realism-part-i/. 2. One example of such commonly held and taught views can be found in the Guggenheim Museum’s online Arts Curriculum “Art and Ideology, Late 1920s–1940s,” under the “Teacher Resources” section of the museum’s education department. It reads: “Socialist realism portrayed life only as the Bolsheviks wanted it seen, and in many ways created an idealistic world of fantasy that overlooked massive failures.” See http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/education/school-educator-programs/ teacher-resources/arts-curriculum-online?view=item&catid=722&id=48/. 3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Paintings for Now,” The New Yorker (June 4, 2007), http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2007/06/04/paintings-for-now/. 4. See David Xu Borgonjon’s curatorial statement at http://www.momentaart.org/momenta-art-really- socialism!.html/. 5. Original photographs appear in a photo book by Yevgeniy Fiks, Moscow (Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013). 6. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989). 7. Maxim Gorky, as quoted in “Socialism as Will and Representation,” in Evegeny Dobrenko’s Political Economy of Socialism, trans. Jesse M. Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 18. 8. Fredric Jameson. “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (July 1982), 155. 9. Cai Guo-Qiang, quoted in Zhu Qi’s “We Are All Too Sensitive When It Comes to Awards! Cai Guoqiang and the Copyright Infringement Problems Surrounding Venice’s Rent Collection Yard (2001),” Chinese Arts at the Crossroads: Between Past and Future, Between East and West, ed. Wu Hung (Hong Kong: New Arts Media, 2011), 56–65. 10. See Rancière’s Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 53–54. 11. Hito Steyerl, “The Terror of Total Dasein,” DIS Magazine, http://dismagazine.com/discussion/78352/ the-terror-of-total-dasein-hito-steyerl/.

Vol. 15 No. 2 59 Luan Zhichao New Man: Liu Ding’s Approach and Situation

here exists an overwhelming tension between Liu Ding’s artwork Liu Ding, For the Sake of Ten Thousand, 2014, sculpture, and me. Each of his pieces requires me to read as I am viewing, to 43 x 34 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Tcritique as I am reading, and to acknowledge as I am critiquing. I keep on feeling that I need a way of being fully present when confronted with his work. Indeed, describing the relationship between a viewer, or writer, and the artist as one of confrontation implies a sort of friction because it suggests a presence as well as rejection, the formation of a connection as well as a distance, and in some ways this is also the kind of gesture put forth by Liu Ding’s artwork. It does not invite or initiate relationships; nor does it fill in any unexplored or blank areas within our understanding of art institutions. Instead, I believe Liu Ding intends only to adjust and perfect the internal systems and mechanisms of his practice. This gesture renders the viewer’s presence superfluous and urges him or her either to avoid this confrontation or to deal with an inescapable question: How does one engage intellectually with art?

This sense of confrontation not only describes the way I feel when I am viewing his artwork, but it is also a constant between Liu Ding and his context of being an artist. Thus, despite the fact that he is fully aware of this context, he also maintains a sense of absolute questioning of it and an immersion of himself into it, to convey its appearance and setting and to reveal the mechanisms and logic that exist beyond its surface. Thus, the question: “How does one engage intellectually with art?” is one Liu Ding himself also reflects upon and explores in his work. The narration and organization of art history, the ideologies that govern it, and the experiences and habits that characterize it affect the creative process, as well as how art practices in turn reflect upon these issues. These problems have always been Liu Ding’s main concern, and his most recent work has taken this conceptual framework to a more specific dimension.

For the Sake of Ten Thousand (2014) is a sculpture from Liu Ding’s series on “heroes” that formed part of his Lake Washington solo exhibition at Antenna Space, Shanghai (March 29 to May 15, 2014). This series strictly adheres to the tenets of socialist realism, a style that found its way into China from the Soviet Union during the 1950s. Indeed, this style still dominates visual and literary art curricula in Chinese educational institutions and thus continues to shape the form that contemporary Chinese art is taking as a whole. For the Sake of Ten Thousand, therefore, not only questions the value placed on the “hero” archetype, but the ideological motive(s) behind it as

60 Vol. 15 No. 2 Vol. 15 No. 2 61 well. In the same exhibition and exploring similar themes, Class A (2014) and Class B (2014) are two commissioned paintings by a painter who was specifically directed by Liu Ding to complete an otherwise “traditional,” or even “classical,” painting according to the tenets of socialist realism. These two paintings represent a re-examination of socialist realist ideological tradition and the degree to which it has left an imprint on the way we in the art industry understand and represent the world.

Liu Ding, Class A, 2014, oil on canvas, 174 x 224 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The repetition inherent in the Liu Ding, Class B, 2014, oil on canvas, 203 x 225 cm. Courtesy stylistic conventions of socialist of the artist. realism and evident in these two artworks is not coincidental. In fact, it is one of the main topics of research currently being carried out by Liu Ding and his partner, Carol Yinghua Lu, who works as a curator and art critic. Aside from collaborating with Carol Yinghua Lu on different projects and publications, Liu Ding continues to examine the history, ideology, and tradition of socialist realism by reproducing in his own art practice the stylistic conventions and subject matter associated with it. The two series mentioned above, For the Sake of Ten Thousand and Class A and Class B, represent examples of his work in this area. While in some ways it can be said that socialist realism is the subject of exploration in these pieces, it also shapes the methodology of his practice as well.

If one were to suggest that this creative approach led to Lake Washington and came about in a case-specific and symbolic way, then Liu Ding expands upon this approach in his 2015 solo exhibition New Man (Motinternational, London, April 10 to June 27, 2015) by tracing the patterns and vicissitudes in intellectual, social, and political history. In doing so, socialist realism becomes more than just a nominal symptom wherein Liu Ding embarks on a longitudinal study of its evolutionary processes. Two pieces in the New

62 Vol. 15 No. 2 Liu Ding, Wang Shikuo in 1942 and Wang Zhaowen in 1951, 2015, oil on canvas, 250 x 180 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Liu Ding, Qi Baishi in 1950, Man exhibition, Wang Shikuo in 2015, oil on canvas, 250 x 180 cm. Courtesy of the artist. 1942 and Wang Zhaowen in 1950 (2015) and Qi Baishi in 1950 (2015), depict recreations of three artworks originally created by three different influential Chinese painters. As their respective titles suggest, these three pieces were all created during a particularly tumultuous period of China’s history. As such, they are all linked, directly or otherwise, to contemporary political thought, ideological habits, and aesthetic ideals in mid-twentieth-century China. Wang Shikuo went to Yan’an in the 1940s and played his part in the Communist revolution by teaching socialist realism at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts. He joined the Chinese Communist Party after the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art that was held in May 1942 and created the earliest surviving portrait of Mao Zedong. Wang Zhaowen, on the other hand, a leftist intellectual whose prolific contributions to socialist realist theory have not gone unnoticed, created

Vol. 15 No. 2 63 Portrait of a Woman, which personifies the contemporary aesthetic ideals and expression inherent in socialist realism. Finally, in his dedication to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in the early years of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Qi Baishi quoted a passage from one of Mao’s speeches at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, namely: “From the masses to the masses!” The speeches that were delivered at the Yan’an Forum have been highly influential in establishing the direction of modern art and literature in China. Finally, they also speak to how Qi Baishi positioned himself and his artwork at such a critical historical juncture.

Do Something New portrays a virtual gallery view of the paintings made by members of the 1970s No Name Group, including Zhao Wenliang and Li Shan. These pieces represent the aesthetic ideals engendered by a dogmatic political environment inherited by this particular generation of intellectuals. The montage-like assembly of photographs in Salon, Salon, You Melt My Heart, also hauntingly depicts the aesthetics and everyday reality of the time.

1989 (2015) represents what looks Liu Ding, 1989, 2015, oil on canvas, 230 x 180 cm. Courtesy like a computer screen shot that of the artist. could be closed at a moment’s notice and alludes to China’s sociopolitical situation in 1989, still a taboo topic in Chinese society. Depending on the context, any discussion of this particular period of history might be screened, concealed, or even erased. It seems as if the history of revolutions in China during the past century or so—scientific, social, political, cultural, democratic—and the tenets of socialist realism could all but disappear from its social reality and history books within a relatively short period of time, to be drowned out and replaced by the harsh realities of the market economy and the introduction of another system of modern discourse. But, despite the fact that history is a continuous sequence of events and processes across time and space, 1989 highlights a fracture in the historical discourse, and the silence surrounding the year 1989 proves deafening.

But is history thus fractured? Liu Ding addresses this question with 1999 (2014), a piece that was shown at the 10th Shanghai Biennale. With this work, he brings the historical experience of the 1990s into the present using a combination of thirty paragraphs representing his reflections on the state of contemporary Chinese art in the 1990s and a selection of twenty pop songs from the same period. In reinvigorating the experience and spirit of the 1990s and refusing to ignore, or forget, history, 1999 speaks to the importance of historical continuity and the way in which it affects one’s understanding of the present. In the same vein, by creating 1989 in the form of a Soviet socialist realist monumental style, especially in its strong graphic quality, Liu Ding highlights some notable lessons in

64 Vol. 15 No. 2 Liu Ding, Do Something Now, 2015, oil on canvas, 200 x 160 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Liu Ding, Salon Art, Salon Art, You Melt My Heart, 2014, 7 black-and-white photographs, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 15 No. 2 65 Liu Ding, 1999, 2014, installation at the 10th Shanghai Biennale. Courtesy of the artist.

66 Vol. 15 No. 2 Vol. 15 No. 2 67 history and the importance Liu Ding, New Man, 2015, oil on canvas, 250 x 180 cm. of historical experience. This Courtesy of the artist. work allows us to consider and evaluate the importance and interconnectedness of past events in our thought processes, cognitive maps, and social movements, and in the actual unfolding of history. To say that by pointing to the same time period, these two artworks reinforce the continuity of what had happened before and what happened after these ten years. Then, by juxtaposing two distinct, but visually interlinked pieces, another recent work, New Man (2015), negates that so-called “historical fracture” mentioned earlier. In New Man, a repainted fragment of Wu Zuoren’s historical 1950 painting Li Yong Xiang: Hero of Labour is paired with an image of Lin Han, a young contemporary art collector born in the 1980s, driving his Ferrari.

While these works cannot address all the events that have happened in China since the 1940s, they do highlight the contemporary social, cultural, political, intellectual, and ideological contexts within which socialist realism has been transforming. It is in this respect that Liu Ding is a discoverer. He uncovers elements in existing social narratives, utilizing history and its fragments to form the core of his artworks. In compiling these various scenarios into his work, he traces the evolution of Chinese society, thought, and culture and exposes the logic and methodology through which ideology becomes operational. He has not chosen to look forward and examine the future; instead, he chooses to look back and uncover the past. In this sense, Liu Ding is also a kind of documentarian. He uncovers new indicators beyond existing narratives to which he applies different combinations and permutations of “reality” and logic in order to experiment with new ways of reading history.

However, technically he is not a documentarian given the fact that his materials, narratives, and art are not utilized in an archive-like manner— there are no documents or data to be found in his work. Instead, he uses the same methodology found in “traditional” media to reconstruct a similar aesthetic quality and visual experience that comes with art. Class A, Class B, and For the Sake of Ten Thousand were produced through a re-articulation that strictly adhered to the basic tenets of Soviet socialist realism, and its offspring, Chinese socialist realism. The same can be said for Wang Shikuo in 1942 and Wang Zhaowen in 1950, Qi Baishi in 1950, and Do Something New, all of which came alive on the canvas by recreating socialist realist painting styles and compositional conventions. Indeed, presented in a pictorial format against the backdrop of a two-dimensional, anonymous gallery space that is depicted in the paintings, these works seem, on the one hand, to be strictly imitating certain stylistic and composition techniques.

68 Vol. 15 No. 2 On the other hand, however, emphasis on the painting technique disappears entirely through the application of flat colour and unembellished brushwork in the background. In Salon, Salon, You Melt My Heart, several black-and-white vintage photographs of chrysanthemum flowers taken in the 1980s are composed in a montage-like arrangement to encapsulate the aesthetics of studio photography of the time—a contemporary trend developed exclusive of socialist realist ideology. 1989 symbolizes an interlude in this narrative thread. Composed entirely of the same kind of flat paint application used in the background of the aforementioned paintings, on some level it represents the abstract and reductionist power of historical narrative. New Man also combines this painting and compositional technique for its background. Wu Zuoren’s 1950 painting Li Yong Xiang: Hero of Labour and the classic socialist realism it employs in the portrayal of its subject is appropriated and juxtaposed against the representation of a young art collector who serves to characterize a new and emerging generation. The car and its background, seemingly frozen in a static, non-hierarchical and flattened composition, are curiously but harmoniously connected in their rendering, exhibiting that familiar, yet now also alien, socialist realist artistic style.

Liu Ding embarks on his metamorphosis from the position of an innovator in terms of his observations on both historical processes and the artworks from different periods that he has incorporated into his work. He looks beyond pre-existing narratives and engages with artworks from a sense of initiative and perception wherein the existing artworks are used as a means to reflect upon artistic practice itself. What he wants to uncover is not the creations in themselves, but the aesthetic ideology and organization that guided the formation of these images and how we experience them in the first place. Instead of saying that his artworks examine socialist realism and its history, it is perhaps more appropriate to say that he examines the narrative that forms this tradition and history while reflecting on the mechanisms through which socialist realism’s ideology becomes operational.

This specific artistic rationale has led Liu Ding to shift from the case-study approach taken in Lake Washington to that of a more all-encompassing approach that is evident in the exhibition New Man. Moving from the reconstruction of a single image or artwork to collage or montage strategies, each painting is presented in its own context, focusing on conveying the conflict and tension within it. Images and image-construction form the artist’s method of research into the narrative of socialist realism. Obviously this narrative is chronological, evolving over a period spanning from the 1940s to the present. However, this narrative also becomes a montage of the images that are re-presented in Liu Ding’s artwork and the exhibition on the one hand, as well as a montage of the aesthetic techniques applied to these images and the exhibition on the other.

It is hard to categorize Liu Ding’s artworks, whether photographs or paintings, on the basis of medium. Even if a piece is represented as a painting or a photograph, such categorizations do not serve as the

Vol. 15 No. 2 69 motivation of his artistic creation. The employment of composition or imagery, painting or photography in Liu Ding’s work refers not to historical record or artistic techniques, but, again, to ideology, to various mechanisms behind the formation of an image or discourse, as well as the logic of narrative. The way his creative approach and works come together does not point toward the emergence of a new theory or aesthetic, but, rather, locates, discovers, and identifies what art and its associated ideologies are. Appropriation, recreation, and montage also exist as a sort of methodology in constructing image and narrative whereby the past and its fragments are transformed into elements of creation. In doing so, logic and strategy themselves also become elements of creation. This is a process of deconstruction and reconstruction: The images are first deconstructed conceptually to reveal the logic behind their development. Then these images are rearranged and reconstructed. Thus, image and methodology also contribute to the foundation of creative practice.

With respect to the New Man Liu Ding, installation view of New Man, 2015, MOT exhibition as a whole, it is International, London. Courtesy of the artist. impossible to go into detail and summarize it item by item. However, what can be said is that the unifying aspect of the gallery space serves to facilitate a dialogue between his artworks and the physical and psychological setting in which they are viewed. Essentially, the individual artworks and the overall exhibition both are the products of Liu Ding’s research into socialist realism. Thus, the accumulation of artwork does not necessarily speak to the concept of the exhibition; nor were the artworks created simply upon confirmation of the exhibition being planned. The materialization of the exhibition and its corresponding artworks ultimately are guided and connected by the same logic. The exhibition is not meant to be a display portfolio; rather, it is the result of dissecting and reformulating various historical, intellectual, material, and spatial elements that ultimately are part of the creative process. Thus, the crux lies in Liu Ding’s deconstruction of conventions pertaining to creation, aesthetics, technique, approaches, and space so that they all become neutral elements that are to be re-organized and re-constructed within a non-categorized and non-hierarchical framework.

Therefore, it is beside the point that Liu Ding’s main bodies of work not only draw from an arsenal of pre-existing artwork—much of it being documentary material that includes artworks, prints, and artifacts that have been extremely influential—but that they include artworks that are created in the spirit of socialist realism. Thus, emphasis should not be placed on the appropriation, reproduction, or inheritance of these elements; instead, his approach is a way of elucidating and uncovering the processes through which history is narrated. By critiquing pre-existing narratives through both inspection and introspection, this method gets at the core of what

70 Vol. 15 No. 2 constitutes history. This also suggests that Liu Ding refused to be only an observer in this process of looking back and reflecting on the past. Instead, he chooses to be present—not to reject, but to feel; not to abandon, but to immerse; not to judge, but to describe. However, Liu Ding does not make any subtle insinuations or judgments in his examination of socialist realism, but instead chooses a “Trojan horse” approach by infiltrating the systems of history, art, politics, and discourse itself to expose its manipulative logic and mechanisms. This is the approach that he has chosen in ensuring that his artistic practice unfolds through using the act of creation as a way of examining and reflecting upon itself.

Liu Ding, Mian Mian’s Art House, 38 Xiangyang Nan Road, 2:30–4:30 p.m., May 16, 2010. A non-public conversation between artist Liu Ding and curator Biljana Ciric, with moderator Carol Yinghua Lu. Courtesy of the artist.

To a certain degree, this creative journey can be seen as an extension of Conversations, Liu Ding’s project that began in 2010 and that consists of different conversations between himself and other members of the art profession. If one were to say that the Conversations project was conceived by the artist with living and sentient beings in the present, then in the artworks previously mentioned, the conversation is between the artist and those creators in history. Restored under Liu Ding’s particular perspective, these creators are the innovators and inheritors of historical narrative and the founders and messengers of subjectivity and ideology. Working against the grain with his art, Liu Ding is thus working towards history’s true subject.

The point of Conversations is to make these creators and experience present at the same time. Furthermore, it involves drawing in elements from intellectual history, cultural history, art history, sociology, ideology, and political events to contribute to the substance and essence of creation, as well as the subject’s situational context. In this sense, one could say that Liu Ding, through his restless creations, is seeking and establishing a profound relationship with the reality that is shaped by all these elements. It is only when putting these subjects in conversation with each other, with their contexts, and with history, present and future—when one is willing to revisit and reflect on existing creations that this relationship engenders— that they can emerge or be constructed. Hence, Liu Ding’s history is not about the past. Instead, it is more about the present. His work isn’t derived from archaeology, but aims towards a critical reflection of reality.

Vol. 15 No. 2 71 It is in this respect that Liu Ding continues his study of socialist realism in his art practice in a way that demonstrates its importance and urgency. Perhaps Liu Ding is an essentialist in this regard. Forcefully responding to the recent trend among contemporary Chinese artists who are being classified or categorized based on style, concept, or form, Liu Ding has made a clear distinction between the critical essence of an issue and its seeming appearance. The contexts of Liu Ding’s artworks are based on his approach toward artistic creation, in which he hones into the ideology that is embedded in art history books and the logic that drives the art system, as well as the sociopolitical value system determined by others. He takes this one step further by applying this framework to China’s specific context. And so, if we were to conclude that 1989, 1999, and New Man are creating a “conversation” between a specific historical moment and the present through the media of image and discourse, then the video installation Karl Marx in 2013 (2014) and the series of photographs Beijing are both examples of putting “conversations” into practice in the present.

Karl Marx in 2013, a record of Liu Liu Ding, Karl Marx in 2013, 2013, video, photography. Ding’s trip to Karl Marx’s grave site Courtesy of the artist. at Highgate Cemetary in London, and Beijing, a document of the artist’s day-to-day activities, are both Kafkaesque. Karl Marx in 2013 records what the artist saw and encountered when visiting the cemetery to illustrate the omnipresence of ideology—being visitors abroad, the Chinese tour group he was part of were behaving rashly and violently in their expression of bureaucratic and arrogant words— while Beijing lends us a view of the capital through the artist’s lens. He did not record these scenes as a documentarian or photographer, but, rather, presents scenes in a diary-style format. Posters, warnings, slogans, parks, as well as his neighbourhood and its architecture, are brought together, thus revealing the ways in which aspects of politics and ideology permeate ordinary lives. The Beijing crystallized in the photographs is the Beijing after the revision of the Communist Party of China’s Constitution at the 18th National Congress in 2012, but also the Beijing of the socialist realist paintings that the artist has been investigating. It is the Beijing after the transition of leadership from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, but also the Beijing of immutable ideology. It is the Beijing of a new era, but it is also the Beijing that has inherited the developments of the past century. It is here where the final “conversation” takes place and where Liu Ding, as creator, becomes the core of the subject. Just as bureaucracies and people become woven together in a labyrinthine fashion in Kafka’s writings, Liu Ding weaves together ideology and daily life, so that politics and artistic practice become intertwined, allowing the past and the present to inform one another.

From this perspective, every piece of Liu Ding’s artwork can be understood as a meta-creation. Because each work is embedded with the questions that

72 Vol. 15 No. 2 Liu Ding, Beijing (Series No. 1), preoccupy him, as well as with the approach and methodology he takes in 19 photographs, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. addressing them, the exhibition as a whole functions as a meta-model in that it also shares the same concerns and issues. But at the same time each artwork does not exist exclusively or independently. Different combinations and relationships within an open, but self-referential, installation space facilitate the broader and deeper conversations within and among his pieces. Artistic creation is thus freed from unified and homogenous representations, allowing external elements to flood in. Ultimately, Liu Ding’s artwork is intimately connected with these “externalities,” and he persists in investigating and depicting their intensity. However, these “externalities” also form the deepest and innermost core of the subject. Liu Ding begins the process by using the external to reflect on the internal. Using artistic creation as a method of examination and reflection frees him from the reality of the art scene; then he re-engages with this reality through his creations. In this manner, he is distant while present, referential but also in “conversation.” Thus, in Liu Ding’s work there is ultimately an external reality that is hidden. The only way of examining this reality is through ceaseless creation and re-presentation. Although this reality existed far in the past, it looms over us in the present like a spectre.

Here, the approach of observing and reflecting upon creation through the act of creation and the activation of “conversation” together comprise the outcome of Liu Ding’s practice—a type of creation that requires interpretation and observation that is the furthest, yet closest, to each individual and creator’s reality and political situation. In this respect, Liu Ding is a realist. He insists on being focused on detail, slowly moving toward a reality that seemingly cannot be grasped and has been forgotten or ignored in history. By combining a sense of detachment in his descriptions—thereby allowing reality to speak for itself—with visuals to construct a discourse related to the nature of reality, Liu Ding unceasingly reflects upon creation and the external situations of creation to describe the ultimate situation of the subject.

Vol. 15 No. 2 73 Julie Chun Episteme of Multiple Histories1

ccounts of the West’s unilateral “influence” of modern art on East Asia have resulted in profound critical re-examinations under the A imperative of twenty-first century transdisciplinary and cross- cultural studies. The much outdated notion of vanguard art emanating from centres in Europe and North America and disseminating to so-called peripheral regions has been contested and challenged in scholarship such as Ming Tiampo’s reassessment of the transnational impact of the Japanese contemporary art group Gutai, Partha Mitter’s revisionist examination of modernism in Indian art during the period 1922–1947, and Joan Kee’s insightful study situating Korean monochrome artists in the context of global contemporary art.2

As these scholars prove, important heuristic rewritings of art history do not merely contend that cultural and artistic exchanges took place across geographical and ideological borders, but reflect Michel Foucault’s philosophical program of “archaeology,” a method of examining cognitive structures according to their own terms.3 This process has served as a sharp axe in splintering the unwarranted master narrative of modernism. The dual solo exhibitions Relics, with work by Maryn Varbanov (1932–89), and Divine Ruse, with work by Jin Shan (b. 1977), at BANK, Shanghai, held from November 20, 2015, to January 6, 2016, continue the Foucauldian approach of archaeology to excavate and cast light on fragments of art history to reveal the conditions of China’s multiple histories.

History’s Fragments: Maryn Varbanov Maryn Varbanov’s work in Relics is presented in a small side gallery at BANK in the manner of an archival project with hand-rendered studies and small-scale plasticine models that were produced in the 1970s. The artifacts poignantly reveal the conceptual monumentality of Varbanov’s realized and unrealized fiber-based soft sculptural projects. Each visual element is encased in a long glass cabinet with the displayed objects enveloped in ethereal light seeming to emit a sacred aura. The linear case is flanked by white walls affixed with photos and texts that mark the important dates and events of Varbanov’s life.

According to BANK founder and director Mathieu Borysevicz, “Relics is the first of a series of exhibitions where we are taking the overlooked phenomena of the past in order to bring it forward for re-examination. This is the first of the installments—an exploration of looking back into the beginnings of

74 Vol. 15 No. 2 Maryn Varbanov, exhibition view of Relics, 2015. Photo: Alessandro Wang. Courtesy of the Estate of Maryn Varbanov and BANK, Shanghai.

the work.”4 The small mockups and models extend the definition of art by revealing their dual identity as historical traces. Borysevicz explains, “Each artifact is curious and enigmatic. They are charged little objects, which have been unearthed as interesting relics of the past.”5 Undoubtedly, these small fragments serve as evidence to redress an important aspect of understudied transnationalism that occurred in the mid to late 1980s in China. Moreover, they strive to shed light on its creator, Maryn Varbanov, a Bulgarian textile artist who was better known in Beijing and Hangzhou as Wanman (万曼) but remains relatively little known elsewhere.

Maryn Varbanov, exhibition Born Maryn Ivanov on September 20, 1932 in Oryahovo, Bulgaria, the artist view of Relics, 2015. Photo: Alessandro Wang. Courtesy of could not have known that he would later take on contingent identities. the Estate of Maryn Varbanov and BANK, Shanghai. After losing both his parents at the age of two, Maryn was adopted by a blacksmith with the surname Vurbanov. In 1950, he departed for Sofia where, in the following year, he was admitted to the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Art Nikolai Pavlovich.6 Changing the spelling of his surname from Vurbanov to Varbanov, he shifted his gaze outward beyond the confines of his native country. In September 1953, Varbanov arrived in Beijing to study Chinese language at Peking University, where he received the name Wanman from his Chinese teacher. After gaining acceptance to the preparatory class of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing to study painting and art history, Varbanov transferred in 1955 to the newly established Central Academy of Arts and Design to study textile design, dyeing, and weaving under Chai Fei (柴扉, 1903–1972). Chai Fei played an instrumental role in setting up the Textile Department in 1956 at the

Vol. 15 No. 2 75 Maryn Varbanov, exhibition view of archival photographs, Relics, 2015. Photo: Alessandro Wang. Courtesy of the Estate of Maryn Varbanov and BANK, Shanghai.

76 Vol. 15 No. 2 Vol. 15 No. 2 77 Academy where he taught creative techniques for textile-based art such as wax-coating wall hangings. In 1958, Varbanov graduated from the Academy and returned to Sofia with his classmate Song Huaikuei, whom he had wed in 1956.7

With the exception of short visits in 1960 and 1975, over twenty-five years had lapsed before Varbanov returned to Beijing with Song Huai-Kuei and their two children. In the interim, he had been preoccupied with trying to establish the Tapestry Department at the Academy of Art Nikolai Pavlovich in Sofia, teaching courses, designing installations in fiber art, and participating in soft sculpture exhibitions in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, France, and the United States. In 1984, an artistic exchange between France and China was initiated, and Varbanov co-organized the first Soft Sculpture Exhibition, which took place in November 1985 at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. Varbanov’s creations as well as those by Mu Guang, Han Meihun, and Zhao Bowei were shown in the exhibition. According to artist Shi Hui and curator Gao Shiming, “[Varbanov’s] creations, and those completed under his guidance, break away from the traditional plane surface concept and play an enlightening and stimulating role for China’s contemporary art tapestry and China’s modern art in general.”8 They further affirm, “the exhibition [of] 1985 is considered a defining moment for contemporary Chinese art.”9

Invited in 1986 to teach at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art), Varbanov became solidly established in Hangzhou, where he chaired the Institute of Art Tapestry Varbanov (IATV), co-founded by the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts and the Zhejiang Carpet Factory on September 20, 1986.10 For three years, Varbanov dedicated his life to teaching students at the institute, creating fiber-based art, collaborating with artists, and organizing exhibitions of soft sculpture until his untimely death to cancer on July 10, 1989. After Varbanov’s death, the institute was carried on by his students, Lu Rulai and others, and continues today under the same name (now translated as Maryn Varbanov Tapestry Research Institute or Maryn Varbanov Tapestry Research Centre) at the China Academy of Art. Subsequently, two of his female students, Shi Hui and Zhu Wei, whom Varbanov supervised, have taken their own rightful places in contemporary Chinese art as experimental “avant-garde” artists exploring the materiality of wool, silk, and fiber. Two alumni of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Gu Wenda and Liang Shaoji, having collaborated with Varbanov, went on to achieve international fame and commercial success in China and abroad for their respective installations involving uniquely woven and threaded works of art. Curator Hou Hanru claims, “I think [Varbanov] succeeded in opening up a new setting for art in China. The Chinese Avant-Garde back then was highly politicized. But Varbanov opened up an entirely new space from another perspective, with different depth. . . . He had a direct impact on the birth of installation art in China.”11

Yet, despite Varbanov’s pioneering contributions during a critical phase of contemporary Chinese art and his cross-cultural exchange initiatives

78 Vol. 15 No. 2 Top: Maryn Varbanov, MV24, involving conceptual ideas and artistic practices n.d., plasticine, mixed media, paint, 21 x 39.5 cm. Photo: from Sofia and Paris to Beijing, Shanghai, and Alessandro Wang. Courtesy of the Estate of Maryn Varbanov Hangzhou, we find hardly any mention of his and BANK, Shanghai. Right: Maryn Varbanov, name, if at all, within important contemporary MV14, n.d., plasticine, clay, cardboard, 34.5 x 19.5 cm. texts about art in China. In the English Photo: Kerstin Brandes. translation of Lu Peng’s encyclopedic tome A Courtesy of the Estate of Maryn Varbanov and BANK, History of Art in Twentieth-Century China (2010), Shanghai. no mention of Varbanov (or Wanman) can be located within the 1,284 pages that chronicle prodigious achievements by artists, artist groups, and artistic movements. Varbanov’s name also remains absent in Gao Minglu’s 409-page English-language art historical survey Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth- Century Chinese Art (2011). The omission is rather puzzling because Hou Hanru had included a chapter on Varbanov’s influences in Gao Minglu’s earlier book Zhongguo Dengdai Meishushi 1985– 1986, published in 1991.12 A brief paragraph about Varbanov could only be located in The Art of Modern China (2012) by Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, and in Michael Sullivan’s 1996 survey Art and Artists of Twentieth- Century China.13

The exact reasons for Varbanov’s caesura cannot be easily ascertained. Perhaps the main justification lies in the art historical prejudice that textile- based art falls under the rubric of craft or applied art rather than fine arts. While slowly materializing, there is still a dearth of significant scholarship on tapestry as a contemporary art form, which is believed to have gained prominence with the French artist Jean Lurçat (1892–1966).14 The lack of scholarship about Varbanov also alerts us to the broader polemics in the general field of art history in which nationalistic discourse often discounts a more holistic narrative. Curator and critic Sun Zhenhua also points out

Vol. 15 No. 2 79 that in order to properly assess Varbanov’s contributions, we can stand to gain a better understanding through historical circumstances , especially regarding how modernism was mediated between the Eastern Block and China. He notes, “the reality is such that our understanding of Maryn Varbanov is far from complete” and therefore should not be explained or understood as a reductive case of Western art being imported into China.15 Sun Zhenhua reviews several “crucial pieces of information” that are worth consideration.16 First, without a clearer understanding of Varbanov’s relationship with the West as a member of the Eastern bloc, Sun Zhenhua asks, how does “the relationship between Eastern European socialist states in Cold War . . . [with] the West and Western art differ from the Chinese case?”17 He posits, “Varbanov’s first knowledge of ‘the West’ and his decision to make [tapestry] a life’s work all took place in China,” rather than in Bulgaria. Sun Zhenhua cites Maryn Varbanov (compiled by Song Huaikuei and published in the bilingual format of Chinese and French by China Art Academy Press in 2001), which states “in May [1957], Varbanov was inspired by the exhibition of Jean Lurçat, the French tapestry artist, held at the Exhibition Hall of China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and decided to work in tapestry.”18 Second, Sun Zhenhua alludes to another anomaly that occurred in 1959. After graduation and his return to Sofia, Varbanov submitted a report to the Academy of Art Nikolai Pavlovich suggesting the establishment of a tapestry workshop. Rather than being sent to Paris or other urban centres of Western Europe, Varbanov was financed and sent by his academy in Sofia back to China for a month in 1960 with a directive to return with a syllabus and teaching plan.19 Sun Zhenhua asks the critical question, “Did Varbanov belong to ‘the East’ or ‘the West’? Was he the importer or the imported, or was he both? If we locate Varbanov in a crisscross structure, things will be far more complicated than we would like to make them.”20 Thus he proposes, “Research into these questions requires us to start with the most basic task of collecting [the] primary context of the twentieth century in order to examine our subject from a variety of angles in a comprehensive way. At the moment, we have to satisfy ourselves with a prognosis from the very limited material available.”21

Without sufficient resources and scholarship available in English or Chinese that could provide a clearer understanding of modernism in the Eastern Bloc during the years of the Cold War, it is indeed difficult to locate answers to the many questions about Varbanov’s role in the development of fiber art. Moreover, what of Varbanov’s own teacher Chai Fei? Where did Chai Fei derive his understanding of fiber based woven art? Also of importance, who were the forces and what was their reasoning for bringing Jean Lurçat’s 1957 exhibition to Beijing? Further research awaits about how people and events converged to affect the present state of fiber art and soft sculpture in China. Yet, in the interim, attempts to redress his omission from Chinese contemporary art history, Varbanov’s pupils and his daughter Boriana have worked tirelessly to excavate the traces of Varbanov’s life and work. Twenty years after his death, a large retrospective entitled Maryn Varbanov and the Chinese Avant-Garde in the 1980s: An Archival and Educational Exhibition was held at the Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou, from September 9 to 16,

80 Vol. 15 No. 2 2009. Many of Varbanov’s works, including paintings, installations, and sketch studies were on view with his tapestry works and soft sculptures, as well as supplemental works produced by his collaborators, former students, and current students of the Fiber and Space Art Studio (established in October 2003 by one of Varbanov’s students, Shi Hui). According to the curator of the exhibition, Gao Shiming, Varbanov “thoroughly re-organized the Chinese cultural legacy in terms of materials, symbols, and spirit, making the legacy of forms and ideas once again a source for artistic experimentation. By creation of contemporary art pieces, he reactivated Chinese tradition.”22 A half-day seminar was held on September 10th in conjunction with the exhibition in which Chinese scholars and the artist’s former students gathered to discuss their viewpoints on Varbanov and pay tribute. From this endeavour, a two-volume proceeding in the bilingual format of Chinese and English, Maryn Varbanov and the Chinese Avant- Garde in the 1980s, was published in 2011.

It was another four years after Varbanov’s retrospective in Hangzhou when Gao Shiming included Varbanov in the 2013 homage to 85 artists in the exhibition ’85 and an Art Academy also held at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the China Art Academy in Hanghzou.23 Two years later, in 2015, the evidence of Varbanov’s conceptual models and sketches has resurfaced once again, this time at BANK, a gallery in Shanghai, to recommence the dialogue and inquiry. The current exhibition seeks to reinforce Varbanov’s artistic magnitude and his uniquely innovative practice of conflating Eastern and Western weaving techniques and materials. The first page of the BANK exhibition catalogue, Relics: Maryn Varbanov, introduces the artist: “[Varbanov] pioneered the genre of ‘soft-sculpture’— now known as ‘fiber art’—by subversively re-appropriating the decorative art of tapestry and interrogating its underlying architectonic structure. Underscoring the identity of tapestry as an imported good, the artist drew from both Chinese and Eastern European trade histories. He interlaced Hellenic, Slavic, and Ottoman knitting sensibilities with traditional Chinese silk and wool weaving and inadvertently helped to lay the foundation for installation as an art form in China.”24

Whether it was intentional or not, the significant aspect of Varbanov’s contribution to early contemporary Chinese art was that he sought to expand the semantics of what constituted “fine art.” Varbanov generated the awareness for local artists to re-conceptualize the paradigm of painting and sculpture by introducing the new genre of mixed-media art and installation. While nascent performance art was gaining attention and being explored by the members of the ’85 New Wave Movement, led by the graduates of Zhejiang Academy of Art such as Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Song Ling, Bao Jianfei, and Zha Li and in Xiamen by members of the Xiamen Dada led by Huang Yongping as well as throughout China in underground collectives, officially sanctioned visual art for institutional displays were nonetheless relegated to traditional formats. Painting was confined to the two-dimensional construct of ink on paper or oil on canvas, and sculpture continued to adhere to the mandates of a socialist realist style that had

Vol. 15 No. 2 81 Maryn Varbanov, MV 11, n. d., plasticine, clay, cardboard, 10.5 x 21.5 cm. Photo: Alessandro Wang. Courtesy of the Estate of Maryn Varbanov and BANK, Shanghai.

Maryn Varbanov, Untitled— Frame Series, 1982, mixed media, modeling paste, and paint. Courtesy of the Estate of Maryn Varbanov and BANK, Shanghai.

been the enforced aesthetic program since 1949. Even in the early to mid- 1980s, sculpture in China’s public spaces functioned largely as markers for politically endorsed messages, and creative expression in materiality, subject matter, or even size remained under tight control.25

With tapestry, Varbanov introduced the novel invention of mixed-media to China that re-mediated the picture plane as a textural surface. He also subverted the position of sculpture by privileging the form, rather than the didactic subject matter, as its own monumental edifice. Furthermore, by taking the woven tapestry off the wall and situating it in space as a three- dimensional construct, Varbanov made mobile the immobile position of sculpture. The dense threads of fiber that Varbanov had woven into their final form were just as pliant yet enduring as the clay that could be molded

82 Vol. 15 No. 2 or wood that could be carved. Varbanov’s single wall hanging at BANK, Untitled—Frame Series (1982), affirms the supple organic quality of the texture despite the solid and tenacious nature of its materiality. The knots and loops of its thick, coarse threads appear to vacillate in motion like cascades of dripping stroke from an ink brush.

While we are deprived of the actual spatial experience of engaging with Varbanov’s innovative 3D architectural fiber sculptures in the current exhibition, the conceptual renderings encased as archive hint in microcosm the macrocosmic possibilities of the artist’s prodigious vision. In their tribute to Varbanov, both Gu Wenda and Zheng Shengtian have remarked that Varbanov was the first person who brought contemporary Chinese art and artists to the international stage in 1987, at the 13th International Tapestry Biennale in Lausanne, Switzerland.26 Post World War I Switzerland was a neutral territory outside the sphere of Cold War influence, serving as an auspicious site for international cultural and artistic exchange. Yet in the most recent, albeit brief, presentation by Gisellle Eberhard Cotton, “Lausanne Tapestry Biennial (1962–1995): The Pivotal Role of a Swiss City in the ‘New Tapestry’ Movement in Eastern Europe After WWII,” delivered at the 2012 Textile Society of America’s 13th Biennial Symposium in Washington, DC, Cotton asserts the importance of the Lausanne Tapestry Biennial as having achieved “a far reaching and sometimes unexpected impact,” citing Varbanov as an example.27 Cotton’s inconclusive assessment likely results from the lack of proper information about Varbanov and serves as an urgent reminder of the necessary research regarding the international confluence that occurred at the Lausanne Tapestry Biennale. In encountering the traces of Varbanov’s relics at BANK, we are reminded once again that fragments from history patiently require greater articulation.28 So the quest continues with the archeological excavation of the compelling figure of Maryn Varbanov, which promises to situate and assess his proper position in a pivotal juncture in Chinese history, one that was deeply charged with transnational yearnings.

History’s Artifice: Jin Shan Like Varbanov’s Relics, Jin Shan’s sculptural exhibition Divine Ruse also investigates the overlapping variations and contingencies embedded in China’s self-proclaimed and ordered histories. While Varbanov’s traces prompt us to revisit the circumstances of art in mid 1980s China, Jin Shan strives to cast his gaze upon the heterogeneous contradictions of cultural predicaments that critique his present circumstances. Jin Shan’s life and art are foregrounded in the very locale where his inspiration is derived—the city of Shanghai where he works and resides. Jin Shan was born in 1977 in Shanghai’s neighbouring province of Jiangsu and came to Shanghai in 1996 to study painting at East China Normal University. Finding painting insufficiently challenging, after graduation Jin Shan turned his attention to video art and conceptual installations before immersing himself in sculpture.

Jin Shan spends as much time thinking about the concepts for his art as

Vol. 15 No. 2 83 he does creating it, which, the artist admits, leaves him hardly any time for much else. When he is not teaching classes on drawing and watercolour painting at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Jin Shan can assuredly be found at work in his studio, which contain the artist’s creative impulses as well as the implements for his artistic creation—the large-scale molds for sculpture and oversized tables for his collections of studies, sketches, drafts, and scaled models. Here, in China, where quality not only of consumer products but even costly works of art can fall short of international standards, Jin Shan pays exceeding attention to technical mastery, which he credits as being inspired by his long time life partner, Maya Kramer, an American artist based in Shanghai.

Jin Shan takes pains to reveal the substrate of history that still resonates in today’s reality. The structure that currently houses his solo exhibition is a physical exemplification of this paradox. BANK, located on the short and narrow stretch of Xianggang Road, is a monumental edifice, a romantic ruin that once housed an actual bank. The facade of the former financial institution replicates in structure the stronghold complexes of ancient Greek and Roman temples that served as inspiration for neoclassical architecture in parts of Western Europe and North America. Braced with solid columns and ornate capitals supporting the superstructure of the entablature, the building has since eroded physically, with time and history as testament to the glorious yet turbulent era in which it was built. Just a few blocks away, on the major thoroughfare of Zhongshan East 1st Road, known as the Bund or Waitan, the former concession buildings that line this famous riverfront promenade of the Huangpu have all undergone major renovations financed in part by the Shanghai Municipal Government to emerge as symbols of Shanghai’s financial and cultural might.29

While in recent decades Shanghai Jin Shan, Retired Pillar, 2010, latex, synthetic glass, blast has been the playground for blower, timer, 303.2 x 115.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist and innovative building designers, BANK, Shanghai. capturing the global attention of preeminent architects and prestigious architectural firms, a peculiar building practice has been taking place in the development of new commercial and residential structures. About twenty miles northeast of Shanghai, at Taopu, in Putuo district, where Jin Shan used to have his studio, he would daily drive past the eclectic mix of neoclassical buildings that crop up unexpectedly from among modernist structures. The majestic presence of Greco-Roman pillars holding up facades of electronic malls and shopping centres evoke the simulacra of Disneyland or Las Vegas. Perhaps it is the Chinese postmodern taste for disjunctive styles or misunderstood anachronism that intrigues Jin Shan. The artist observes, “So much of the spiritual resonance that was inherent in the original context has now vanished or been diluted. What we are left with is the shell, the outer edifice with the loss of the inner spirit and essence.”30

To visually make concrete the disappearance of spiritual content, Jin Shan

84 Vol. 15 No. 2 constructed Retired Pillar (2010)—an emblem of the iconic architectural support of democratic Greek polis—as a hollow sculpture molded in latex. Immediately after its completion, the pristine white colonnade was laid to rest atop a plain pedestal, where it strived to respire with agonizing difficulty. Its “life” was dependent upon an electrical air pump that simulated as oxygen support. Retired Pillar can be read as a poignant allusion to Shanghai’s history of divided concession districts by the British, French, and American powers from 1843 to 1941. Yet, rather than standing erect like the pristinely renovated colonial buildings along the bund, Jin Shan’s pillar struggles for survival. Despite, or perhaps due to, its meteoric economic rise, Shanghai can seem like a desolate and hollow place for many Chinese migrants who come from neighbouring provinces seeking employment. Low-level workers are barely able to sustain their livelihoods in one of the most expensive cities in Asia.31 In describing the Retired Pillar, Ian Alden Russell, who curated Jin Shan’s 2012 solo exhibition at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, commented, “Utilizing complex mechanical systems and methods of replicating and producing cast copies . . . Jin Shan’s work critiques the human desires for wealth, prestige, and power indexed by such a symbol— a symbol that, through its excessive replication, has become exhausted.”32 As a city undergoing relentless massive transformations, Jin Shan’s architectural reference serves as a counter-monument to the post-Socialist economic conceit of Shanghai, signifying the process and the consequence of its mutation.

Mutation brought on by relentless replication also fosters impoverished meanings. Jin Shan believes many of the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures as well as original architectural structures were once imbued with a specific sense of purpose at the time of their creation. For example, the Parthenon, as a site of communal worship, was originally invested with a sense of spiritual endowment as people came together during cyclical rituals to pay respects with Panathenaic processions around the base of the temple. “Today, very few Chinese understand the original intent of classical prototypes. Many who now possess the financial means to go on overseas travels to Europe will snap pictures in front of a sacred site without attempting to comprehend its historical and cultural importance. They are impressed with the exterior grandeur of European classicism, and want to emulate these features when building their own homes or commercial offices. The end result, however, is an eclectic mish-mash, as found at Taopu and elsewhere, with a lack of clear understanding of what the mimesis implies.”33

To explore this paradox instigated by the contradictions in the desecrated form, in 2013, Jin Shan constructed another pillar. Entitled Kuroshio Current, this pillar was both a continuum and a departure from his 2010 column. Sharply diverging from the pristine white purity of Retired Pillar, Kuroshio Current radiates a slick black sheen. Rather than laying on its side, gasping for breath, the newer monolith asserts its verticality like an axis mundi, signifying an innate life force. Inevitably, this internal invisible force seems to have imploded on its own dynamic energy, for we witness organic

Vol. 15 No. 2 85 entrails oozing profusely from its Jin Shan, Kuroshio Current, 2013, plastics and mixed sleek sheath out onto the floor. media, 787.4 x 114.3 x114.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Composed of a unique material BANK, Shanghai. of mixed plastic devised by the artist, Jin Shan attempts to capture the inert tensions that abound in sculpture. He notes, “Kuroshio is the name of a current in Japan where warm and cold waters meet. For me, this juncture is the unseen point of friction and interplay.”34

Divine Ruse represents the culmination of a painstaking year’s worth of recent creations that reflects the artist’s concern about a crisis in representation. The strength of the show rests on the unified language of the dissonant sculptures’ unique materiality as well as the artist’s assertion of spiritual embodiment as a crucial élan vital belonging to the medium of sculpture. The viewers’ first encounter, as they step through the doors of BANK, is a wall that is aptly named Stolen Light (2015). Composed of what appears at first glance to be bricks, the yellow and pinkish blocks made from Jin Shan’s special mix of plastic imitate the quality of human and animal fat. Jin Shan explains, “For me the walls are very important for this current show. They act as a screen, a buffer for the negative energy. The two large pieces of the single wall simultaneously sets the stage as both a prelude and a backdrop. From within the walls there are drops of fluid that seep and drip out, resembling pools of blood from gunshot wounds. I want you to see what you choose to see. From a distance, as you enter the exhibition space, you will know immediately that there is something behind this wall. I wanted to create an ambience as if the entire space was holding a secret which only you did not yet know.”35

Proceeding further into the gallery Jin Shan, Stolen Light, 2015, plastic, steel. Photo: Kerstin space after passing by half of the Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and BANK, Shanghai. fractured wall, the viewer enters an expansive gallery space, where the other half of the wall for Stolen Light is situated surrounded by disparate sculptures standing upon their bases or positioned from the wall, initially appearing like iconic museum statues. Yet, one instantly recognizes that these vestiges are at odds with their original prototypes. They are violently torn asunder, but not in the way that classical sculptures have been dismantled through the deterioration of time, weather, or even intent. No, each sculpture seems to have imploded, once again from within, and what we are witnessing is the frozen nano-second of its rupture.

Jin Shan comments as he leads me around the exhibition:

The busts of Greek or Roman statues have been a

86 Vol. 15 No. 2 Jin Shan, Stolen Light, 2015, plastic, steel. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and BANK, Shanghai.

fundamental and foundational element of my life. Not only I, but also many students who study art, have spent hours and hours in front of plaster replicas of famous Greek and Roman sculptures sketching and drawing them in order to refine our technical skills. Yet Chinese students are not as fortunate as art students who live in major European or North American urban cities with access to the real objects at famous museums. It soon dawned on me that I was making copies from copies, meaning I was making studies from replicas, which also were made from the inferior material of plaster and clay. The plaster statue which I was focusing all my attention on was itself an artifice that had been replicated a thousand, ten thousand, perhaps, even over a million times and was much removed in time and distance from the original bust that was sculpted from marble in the ancient Greek or Roman period.

I had an opportunity to visit the Pergamon Museum in Berlin’s Museum Island in 2009, where I witnessed for the first time the original busts. Due to the time I had spent with the plaster replicas, I thought I was intimately well versed with each indentation and curvature of those forms. Yet, it wasn’t so. When I came face to face with the marble statues, I could actually sense the life force beneath the stone skin. It completely moved me. I am fully aware there are also copies at the Pergamon Museum, and I realize Roman statues are derivative of Greek originals, yet the time lapse between these two ancient civilizations is decisively shorter than the time period that comes between classical Greek

Vol. 15 No. 2 87 Jin Shan, Failed Light, 2015, horse skin, plastic, steel. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and BANK, Shanghai.

antiquity and contemporary China. Despite this prolonged spatio-temporal estrangement, I wanted to somehow capture the essence of life and spiritualism, which I felt were embodied in the original sculpture. They may be inanimate objects, but I believe they possess a soul, for how can they move us so deeply to empathy?”36

Accordingly, the Hegelian notion Jin Shan, Nowhere, 2015, plastic, steel. Photo: of spiritualism seems to emanate Alessandro Wang. Courtesy of the artist and BANK, Shanghai. from Jin Shan’s Nowhere (2015), a larger-than-life sculpture that, despite its profound stillness, displays the essence of dynamism found in the fifth-century BCE Diskobolos (Discus Thrower) or the first-century Hellenistic sculpture Laocoön and His Sons. The original form of Nowhere is cast from a plaster model of a statue that strongly resembles Polkykleitos’ famed Doryphoros (Spear Bearer) of fifth-century BCE. Yet Jin Shan has shifted the sculpture’s centre of gravity by tilting it slightly forward such that the contrapposto has been intensified to not only suggest, but to actually depict, a hurried sense of movement. The advantage of Jin Shan’s fluid mixed plastic is that it can be liquefied and condensed, thus allowing the artist to manipulate the mold before it hardens into concrete form. The manual process of pulling and stretching has torn asunder the exterior from the core, wherein we bear witness to the schism through its heightened tension of spontaneous separation. The artist remarks, “I physically deconstruct visual symbols of ideals and power from various

88 Vol. 15 No. 2 Jin Shan, Nowhere (detail), 2015, plastic, steel. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the Maryn Varbanov Estate and BANK, Shanghai.

culture and time periods . . . I melt, compress and augment these signs as a way to question our everyday assumptions and beliefs. As you can see, the sculpture is being pulled away from its core, yet you can still bear witness to the source, which is the core.”37

According to Jin Shan, that source, the core, representing the soul from where spiritualism and empathy flow is also the same locus of the ego’s lust for wealth, power, and fame. Indeed, the sculpture that the artist utilizes to investigate empathetic relations inherently comes heavily loaded with commentaries about power relations. Whether it was during the Greco- Roman period or China’s Cultural Revolution, statues representing heroic figures were situated at strategic sites to propagate an intended message, often disguised under aesthetic mandates.

In a radical departure, yet one that follows the logic of his artistic discourse, Jin Shan recently incorporated the iconic image of the Worker-Soldier- Peasant from the Cultural Revolution into his oeuvre. In his statue Mistaken (2015), the artistic style of Soviet socialist realism makes an inexorable comeback from China’s recent history. “Can you see what is on top of his head?” Jin Shan asks. “It is eye goggles worn by many of the steel factory

Vol. 15 No. 2 89 90 Vol. 15 No. 2 Jin Shan, Mistaken, 2015, workers during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The plastic, steel. Photo: Alessandro Wang. Courtesy main purpose was to protect their eyes. Yet, I wondered at the nonsense of the artist and BANK, Shanghai. of this logic. Why should people’s vision be protected when they were not even allowed to witness the circumstances of their own reality?”38 This explains, in part, why there are fists coming out of the statue’s eye, face, and head of Mistaken. The metaphor of the fist is indicative of physical strength and power as a common iconographic gesture in Cultural Revolution art, yet, here, the fists have also become the source for self-immolation thus underscoring the idiosyncratic nature in hierarchies of power-relations. The entire body of the statue is constructed from splinters of fragmented wooden window frames, mostly from homes built in the 1980s and now demolished, that the artist found and collected near his old studio. The reference to vision and windows brings to mind the familiar expression “the eyes are the window to the soul,” as the remnants illustrate how clarity of vision, when ruthlessly shattered, can leave the soul at a loss.

Why did Jin Shan decide to revisit an outmoded visual paragon? He explains: “During the Cultural Revolution, the Worker-Soldier-Peasant comprised the three identities of art. If you did not belong to these categories, you were nothing. It was as if you didn’t exist, which was why all the statues from this period have the similar traits. The makers of these sculptures tried to evoke spirituality with a visual rally that proclaimed, ‘We can do anything and everything! We can win in anything! We can overcome our enemies!’ These ideals expressed, and in some ways still express, the ideals of Chinese nationalism. I feel this sense of collective identity was also strong during the Greco-Roman times, which is why in this main exhibition space, I placed the largest sculpture that evokes the ideals of heroic men in ancient Greek culture together with the heroic emblem of China’s socialist realist statue. I believe human history shares similar traits even though it may have occurred at different times.”39 In correlating the visual signifiers from China and that from Greco-Roman traditions, Jin Shan’s artistic concept aligns with recent scholarship that pays critical attention to comparative analysis of the world’s two monumental imperial states in human history—the empires of ancient Rome and Han China.40 While these studies direct their gaze to ancient periods, Jin Shan casts a comparative gaze at the sculptural markers as index of power through visual inquiry.

In “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze describes Michel Foucault’s discourse of discipline as a power construct that “organiz[ed] vast spaces of enclosure” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reaching its height at the onset of the twentieth century.41 Discipline as a mechanism of control was effective as long as it was confined to a “closed system.”42 Interestingly, in describing the state of crisis resulting from the breakdown of interior environments of enclosure, Deleuze uses terms associated with sculpture: “Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other.”43 Jin Shan’s sculptures also reveal in visible form the tensions of transformation that can give rise to ruptures and discontinuities.

Vol. 15 No. 2 91 Accordingly, the forces that push and pull, as well as separate and converge, Jin Shan, installation view of Divine Ruse, 2015, plastic, are visual representations in Jin Shan’s sculptural works. Yet the formal steel. Photo: Alessandro Wang. Courtesy of the artist and destruction is ultimately unified by the strivings of their inner spiritual BANK, Shanghai. essence. The contradictions that are embodied in these sculptures may never be resolved but they, nonetheless, strive for resolution. The message of spiritual atonement is delivered poignantly in the last gallery at BANK, where three disparate sculptures by Jin Shan form a unified triptych brimming with Christian metaphors. Reminiscent of Retired Pillar, one piece is a deflated balcony, modeled after the one at the Vatican where the Pope addresses the public. Entitled Collapsed Icing (2015), the structure, in all its Easter-egg, pastel-mint glory, hangs pallid on the wall despite its three-hundred pound fortitude. On another wall, the pale-pink stained glass window Solar Eclipse (2015) simultaneously embodies the visual characteristics of an impotent

92 Vol. 15 No. 2 phallus and a desiccated labia. The male and female reproductive organs appear to have converged and collapsed into each other, not as a symbol of procreative force, but as a degenerated organ. Placed between Collapsed and Solar Eclipse sits a taxidermy donkey, Final Rays (2015), which has also been partially cast so that pieces of the mixed plastic are slowly falling off in chunks as if the beast was molting. It’s a complex interplay of signs and metaphors for which there is no easy read. A clue is provided, however. A large mirror is placed directly in front of the donkey on the floor where the corners of two walls converge. There is a faint nod to Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915), but the icon is no longer elevated in veneration, instead residing on the same terrestrial plane as humans. Jin Shan states, “From a material perspective, doors and windows are transitional spaces, portals that let light, objects and beings enter and exit. However, in a religious

Vol. 15 No. 2 93 context, church doors and windows take on greater significance, as portals Jin Shan, installation view of Divine Ruse, 2015, plastic, to salvation. To question this idea of a spirit ascending to another world, I steel. Photo: Alessandro Wang. Courtesy of the artist and cast a pulpit and a gothic style window and compressed them so they no BANK, Shanghai. longer function as openings, thus creating a situation for no-exit. Then, I took a taxidermy donkey, whose pose exudes a sense of passivity and sadness, and cast fragments of its body. I then added these fragments to the original taxidermy, animating the form to suggest that the spirit of the animal is exiting its body. Yet, as the passages of the pulpit and window are blocked, the donkey’s spirit has no place to go. Additionally, I staged a mirror in the corner of the room, into which the donkey is gazing. The mirror both reflects and amplifies the helplessness of the donkey, and at the same time, as viewers enter the space they see themselves reflected in the mirror alongside the donkey. In this way I implicate the viewer in this existential question of whether or not a spiritual realm exists.”44

As I stand before the triptych, gazing at my own image embedded in the mirror before me, I am reminded of a passage from Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences:

The relation of emulation enables things to imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other without connection or proximity: by duplicating itself in a mirror the world abolishes the distance proper to it; in this way it overcomes the place allotted to each thing. But which of these reflections coursing through space are the original images? Which is the reality and which the projection? It is often not possible to say, for emulation is a sort of natural twinship existing in things; it arises from a fold in being, the two sides of which stand immediately opposite to one another. However, emulation does not leave the two reflected figures it has confronted in a merely inert state of

94 Vol. 15 No. 2 opposition. One may be weaker, and therefore receptive to the stronger influence of the other, which is thus reflected in his passive mirror.45

While many contemporary artists have turned their attention to revealing the physical consequences of China’s urban landscape resultant from aggressive push for economic expansion, Jin Shan utilizes the historical traces of Shanghai’s exterior conditions to comment on the psychological tensions such aggression can engender upon society. Jin Shan holds a “passive mirror,” which is anything but, to reveal how power relations govern virtually every crucible of human construction from culture, history, religion, and the arts. Yet, these human constructions are the very artifice that can powerfully reveal the circumstances of the present, including scores of mutations and disruptions.

The city of Shanghai is Jin Shan’s starting point, and a challenge requiring thoughtful navigation. He underscores not only the spiritual and physical split, experienced by the Chinese society of which he is a part, but strives patiently to articulate the complicated nuances of the innate human need to locate a place of stability in a morphing world that will not cease to be still.

Notes

1. “Epistemes are conceptual strata underpinning various fields of knowledge and corresponding to different epochs in Western thought; historical analysis must ‘unearth’ them—hence the archeological model.” José Guilherme Merquior, Foucault (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 36. 2. See Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artist and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007); and Joan Kee, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). These are only a few notable examples. 3. This definition of Foucault’s “archaeology” comes from Merquior, Foucault, 36. 4. Mathieu Borysevicz, unpublished interview with the author, Shanghai, December 2, 2015. 5. Ibid. 6. Varbanov’s biographical information is taken from Shi Hui and Gao Shiming, eds., Maryn Varbanov and the Chinese Avant-Garde in the 1980s, part 2 (Hangzhou: Zhong guo meishu xueyuan chu ban she), 158–79. 7. Song Huaikuei had to submit a letter to the then Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Zhou Enlai, to seek permission to marry a foreigner. Shi Hui and Gao Shiming, eds., Maryn Varbanov and the Chinese Avant-Garde in the 1980s, part 2, 163. 8. Shi Hui and Gao Shiming, eds., Maryn Varbanov and the Chinese Avant-Garde in the 1980s, part 2, 177. 9. Ibid. 10. Shi Hui and Gao Shiming, eds., Maryn Varbanov and the Chinese Avant-Garde in the 1980s, part 1, (Hangzhou: Zhong guo meishu xue yuan chu ban she, 2011), 247, 265. 11. Lam Chong Man, “An Interview with Hou Hanru (May 27, 2010),” in Shi Hui and Gao Shiming, eds., Maryn Varbanov and the Chinese Avant-Garde in the 1980s, part 1, 106. 12. Gao Minglu, Zhongguo Dengdai Meishushi, 1985–1986 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chu ban she, 1991). This text is in Mandarin and has yet to be translated. 13. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 215. See also Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 260–61.

Vol. 15 No. 2 95 14. A search for Jean Lurçat in academic library databases reveals mostly exhibition catalogues from his exhibitions held from the 1950s to the 1980s. Many sources are available, predominantly in French, with a few bilingual editions in French and English. The sole biography on Lurçat found on WorldCat is Peintres et sculpteurs d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Genève: P. Cailler, 1956), by Claude Roy, which is available only in French. 15. Sun Zhenhua, “Discovering Varbanov: An Ongoing Process,” in Hui and Gao Shiming, eds., Maryn Varbanov and the Chinese Avant-Garde in the 1980s, part 1, 92. 16. Ibid., 93. 17. Ibid., 92. 18. Ibid., 93. 19. Ibid., 94. This same injunction is located in Shi Hui and Gao Shiming, eds., Maryn Varbanov and the Chinese Avant-Garde in the 1980s, part 2, 166. 20. Ibid., 93. 21. Ibid. 22. Shi Hui and Gao Shiming, eds., Maryn Varbanov and the Chinese Avant-Garde in the 1980s, part 1, 39. 23. In 2013, the exhibition ’85 and an Art Academy traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art at the China Art Academy in Hangzhou to the National Museum of China (NAMOC) in Beijing. See Gao Shiming, “The Symphony of Histories, the Emancipation of People,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 13, no. 2 (March/April 2014), 32–39. For the exhibition at NAMOC in Beijing, see http:// www.namoc.org/en/exhibitions/201311/t20131122_271462.htm/. 24. Relics: Maryn Varbanov, BANK exhibition catalogue (no imprint), 1. 25. Public sculpture in Shanghai attests to the prominence of Soviet socialist realist style statues from throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Examples include Zhang Yonghao’s Marx and Engels (1985), located inside Fuxing Park, Zhang Chongren’s Ni Er (1985), on Huaihai Lu, Yu Jiyong’s Monument Commemorating the May 30th Movement (1990), at People’s Square, and Monument to the People’s Heroes (ca 1986) and the Ever Victorious Army Monument (1986), on the Bund. Julie Chun, “Understanding Public Sculpture in China,” a lecture delivered to the Royal Asiatic Society China, Shanghai, February 25, 2014. 26. Ibid., 3. See also Shi Hui and Gao Shiming, eds., Maryn Varbanov and the Chinese Avant-Garde in the 1980s, part 1, 296. 27. Giselle Eberhard Cotton, “The Lausanne International Tapestry Biennials (1962–1995): The Pivotal Role of a Swiss City in the ‘New Tapestry’ Movement in Eastern Europe After World War II,” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, 2012, paper, 670,http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1669&context=tsaconf/. 28. On WorldCat, only three texts come up under a search for Maryn or Marin Varbanov: Maryn Varbanov, Maryn Varbanov: Wanman (Hangzhou: Zhongguo mei shu xue yuan che ban she, 2001), in Chinese and French; Ivanov Nezabravka, Marin Vurbanov, 1932–1989 (Sofia: Borina, 2008), in Bulgarian and French; and Maryn Varbanov, with a preface by Dora Vallier, Varbanov Tapisseries (Paris: Dora Vallier, 1978), in French. 29. Regarding the built culture of Shanghai as it relates to financial wealth and political power, see Shanghai Rising: State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity, ed. Xiangming Chen with Zhenhua Zhou (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 30. Jin Shan, unpublished interview with the author, Shanghai, December 2, 2015. 31. Wei Gu, “Shanghai Is Now the Most Expensive City in Asia for Luxury Living,” Wall Street Journal China, online edition, October 27, 2015, http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/10/27/shanghai-is- now-the-most-expensive-city-in-asia-for-luxury-living/. 32. Ian Alden Russell, Jin Shan: My Dad is Li Gang!, exhibition brochure (Providence, RI: Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, 2012), n. pag. 33. Jin Shan, unpublished interview with the author, Shanghai, December 2, 2015. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. See Walter Scheidel, Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Fritz-Heiner Mutscher and Achim Mittage, eds., Conceiving the Empire: China and Rome Compared (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Sunny Y. Auyang, The Dragon and the Eagle: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese and Roman Empires (London and New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2014). 41. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992), 3. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 4. 44. Jin Shan, unpublished interview with the author, Shanghai, December 2, 2015. 45. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 1966), 22.

96 Vol. 15 No. 2 Sally Lai A Conversation with Siu King-Chung about the Community Museum Project

Objects of Demonstration, iu King-Chung is an art and design critic, installation artist, and 2002, 1a Space, Cattle Depot Art Village, Hong Kong. independent curator. He is actively involved in arts policy and art Courtesy of Siu King-Chung. S and design curriculum development in Hong Kong. He is Associate Dean and Associate Professor at the School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he also leads the BA (Hons.) Art and Design in Education Programme. In 2002 he co-founded a curatorial collective, Community Museum Project, a platform for visualizing under-represented local histories and practices, often through cross-disciplinary collaborations and public participation.

Sally Lai: You are a founding member of Community Museum Project. Can you tell me how that collaboration came about?

Vol. 15 No. 2 97 Siu King-Chung: My late friend the curator Howard Chan, together A student project, analyzing the design and structure of with researcher Phoebe Wong and I, were doing research at the School of a barricade created by the protestors during the 2014 Design of Hong Kong Polytechnic University in the mid 1990s. We came Occupy Movement in Hong Kong; an exhibition version to the realization that documentation of local creativity was scarce and will be showcased at the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am that the popular understanding of creative culture was very limited. This Rein, Germany, in February. was reflected not only in the local discourse on art, design, and culture, Courtesy of Siu King-Chung. but also in our museum collections and curatorial practices. With this in mind we started to explore themes in local visual culture and began to curate experimental exhibitions with my students in the Art and Design

98 Vol. 15 No. 2 in Education course. In the late 1990s we were preparing to curate an exhibition on local protest objects, but it wasn’t until we met Pakchai Tse, who in 2001 was completing his graduate studies in the Applied Social Science Department of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, that we were widely introduced to activist circles in Hong Kong and were able to collect substantial material for the show. In order to apply for funding to realize the exhibition, we also had to come up with a formal organization (as required by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council), and so we came up the name Community Museum Project.

Sally Lai: What was it about objects made for protest that particularly interested you? What were the themes in local visual culture that were being articulated through these objects?

Siu King-Chung: We thought that objects made for protest were unique cultural manifestations of the populace and had cultural value similar to that of elite artworks made by artists. They are ephemeral, grassroots, yet ingeniously created as political expression. People employ a lot of artistic tactics in demonstrating, though they don’t perceive it as art. The fact that people are able to create and display these objects in processions, deploying ad hoc situational tactics and transforming makeshift materials (perhaps with limited skills) into expressive resources, not only demonstrates a sense of versatility in the people, it also reflects tolerance of different cultural and political views as well as the resourcefulness of a culture.

Making these objects fit whatever timely purposes arise in changing ideological situations is the basic ingenuity of this particular practice. Furthermore, unlike traditional art movements, these creative expressions can be instantly replicated or scaled up for a demonstrative procession or even into a movement or culture. With these performative objects, protests become powerful visual and cultural manifestations of a place. If we were able to look at them systematically and comparatively in the course of history, it would certainly tell a lot about the indigenous nature and creativity of a culture, not to mention its ideological views. The phenomenon of street demonstrations could also become a “freedom index” of a place or country, yet very few museums, collectors, or curators in Hong Kong seemed to pay serious attention to them in the past, especially in the 1990s.

Sally Lai: What was it about that specific moment in time, the late 1990s, that made the objects particularly interesting?

Siu King-Chung: This was around 1997, when Hong Kong would return to China’s sovereignty from British rule. The changes in political position and cultural perceptions of the Hong Kong people made their street expressions worth documenting and studying—especially the “before and after 1997,” although we were able to trace only local demonstrations back to the early 1990s. Yet we were quite determined to put up the exhibition Objects of Demonstration on June 30, 2002, the end date of the first reign of the first Hong Kong Chief Executive, Tung Chee Wah.

Vol. 15 No. 2 99 Sally Lai: It seems that the public is now even more engaged with visually communicating their protests. I am thinking particularly of the Yellow Umbrella demonstrations against mainland China’s vetting of electoral candidates and in turn influencing the race to be Chief Executive of Hong Kong in 2014, and the recent fashion demonstrations in Hong Kong protesting against the demolishing of the Pang Jai fabric market in Sham Shui Po.

Siu King-Chung: Yes, these recent developments are really interesting. My students and the Community Museum Project are now completing a project on the Yellow Umbrella Movement. The work will be showcased in the Protest by Design Exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany, in February 2016.

Sally Lai: How did the activists respond to having their objects presented within an exhibition?

Siu King-Chung: I remember when we had an opening at 1a Space at the Cattle Depot Art Village in Hong Kong and almost none of our friends from the art world came; nor did they attend our weekly seminars, despite the fact that the events were well publicized by the local media. Instead, the opening and seminars were well attended by our activist friends. They were enthusiastic about our program; some even regularly brought in new exhibits during the show.

It was as if they had finally found an alternative platform to publicly showcase and receive recognition for their role in various social movements; the objects did not remain ephemeral but represented more lasting statements of their political desires. It was perhaps this illusory sense of permanence that a quasi-museum setting temporarily provided for them.

To the social activists, the exhibition may have become a visual statement of their culture, though Community Museum Project deliberately avoided promoting any of their particular political views. What we were interested in was the different forms of indigenous creativity and visual tactics that were manifested through the (temporarily) collected items—the “objects of demonstration.”

Sally Lai: One thing that is interesting about the Objects of Demonstration project, as well as the objects themselves, are the categorizations that you employ to identify them—the Readymade, for example—which mimic museum categorizations. Can you tell me more about this and whether it serves as a way of organizing the material beyond the objects’ initial political context and function? For example, not all the objects related to the end of British rule and the return to China are grouped together.

Siu King-Chung: We were employing certain museum methodologies in thinking about the show, the first of which was to categorize our collected objects. We were able to devise a few categories, namely Readymade, as you

100 Vol. 15 No. 2 Objects of Demonstration captions showing each object, explaining its use, and defining its use. Courtesy of Siu King- Chung.

mentioned, as well as DIY Object, Text, Pictorial, Monument, and Body Performance. In fact, back then we anticipated these categories would need to be extended to include what I call “Mass-produced Protest Objects” and the “Internet-object.” In looking at these different forms of demonstration, we also came up with three levels of representation or potential discourse in regard to each individual object; that is, the material Object itself, the Object- as-defined and the Object-in-use. This was not unlike Joseph Kosuth’s chairs series. We wanted to showcase how these objects were being defined and used in the political, cultural, and visual contexts during the demonstration, and in the exhibition. We were using this format as a caption to some of our exhibits, though we had tried not to overemphasize their political agenda. To the Community Museum Project, the exhibition was more of a statement about Hong Kong’s material-visual culture than its political culture. We acknowledged that we were fulfilling the longstanding museum prophecy de-politicizing everything in its possession, yet we thought were making a little tweak within curatorial art practices in Hong Kong.

Joseph Kosuth, One and Although such “art-world language” Three Chairs, 1965, chair, photographs. Collection of might not be fully acknowledged MoMA, New York. © 2016 Joseph Kosuth/Artists Rights by our activist friends, they were, in Society, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly reality, already practicing it. They Gallery, New York. also became more aware of the kinds of visual tactics and strategies they had unconsciously derived for and from their political actions. In hindsight, this might have had some implicit effects on the way demonstrations were designed and carried out in Hong Kong in the years to follow.

Sally Lai: Because of your interest in local visual culture, you have often worked with ordinary people who are not art professionals in order to explore material culture. What are the unique challenges and benefits of collaborating with ordinary local people?

Siu King-Chung: Slowly we are becoming more acquainted with our non- artistic friends, and we are learning more about community. We no longer think in terms of “our” artistic community and “their” activist community,

Vol. 15 No. 2 101 and we have become more aware of the potential of our museological and visual tools in building community. If we wanted to build our art audience, we needed to build a community audience; if we wanted to expand our art community, we ought to build a bigger and broader community of practitioners. This was the motivation for the Community Museum Project: to work with non-art individuals.

Having built our network with activists and NGOs, we were introduced to people involved in other social movements, primarily against the gentrification of Hong Kong. One, the Lee Tung Street project, was related to a real estate redevelopment project in Wan Chai, initiated by the Urban Renewal Authority. The Community Museum Project was by no means political in its original intention, we just decided to visually document the street facades as a means to preserve the appearance or visual histories of the soon-to-be-demolished street. However, because of our unique visual approach (we made composite panoramic views of the street and invited the residents to tell stories in front of the panoramic images), the work attracted a lot of media attention. Not only was the Community Museum Project interviewed, but also the residents who were affected by the redevelopment agenda. Our work had unexpectedly become a way in which the residents could unveil their personal stories and for the voices affected by the redevelopment to be heard, so that a debate around these issues could ensue. This is how visual culture works; it needs uncommon images to mediate or promote social discourse.

Around the issue of gentrification, we started to investigate the impact on the community and people who would be affected. One domain was that of craftsmen, whose livelihoods have been threatened by the redevelopment plans in many districts of the city. We wanted to create exhibitions that showcased their craft and provided a platform for them to reveal their craftsmanship and trade, which had been sustained for decades. We also hoped to revitalize some of their crafts by introducing young designers to collaborate with them, so that there might be some cross-generational synergy on a creative and practical level. This was the 2007 project In Search of Marginalized Wisdom: The Craftspeople in Sham Shui Po in Hong Kong.

Working with non-art professionals made us more humble and socially more skillful. We had to develop a lot of different tactics to communicate with them, to win trust, to explain our “visual” and research approach, and to convince them to take ownership of what we requested of them. They also had to be impressed by the end results and to be proud of the collaborative processes. After all, for the Community Museum Project, making an artwork or an exhibition is only a by-product of all the social relations that have been successfully built with different stakeholders.

Sally Lai: In recent years there has been much discussion about the visibility of the “local” in relation to the development of large-scale organizations in Hong Kong such as M+. Do you feel that this has been resolved?

102 Vol. 15 No. 2 Siu King-Chung: There seem to be more “local initiatives” in the Hong Kong art scene nowadays; many work in the name of or with the “community.” However, they may be seen as too subversive, too grassroots, or sometimes too amateur and hence not deemed worthy of public money. I doubt that M+ would pay serious attention to them; nor are they yet interested in investigating these local, “lesser” movements.

But somehow, I think, someone will soon start to make sense of these local projects and reframe them into something that speaks the elitist language of the art world. Until that day, these local projects, although sometimes rather aggressively addressing certain critical local issues, will remain silent and humble in the art world. They will infiltrate naturally into our daily lives without being considered art, including by the initiators themselves. There have been many such projects within social work or the welfare circle, and now some artists are starting to become aware of and are being inspired by them.

Shop owner Mr. Chui became a docent of the exhibition, telling stories of his livelihood to the audience. Courtesy of Siu King-Chung.

Sally Lai: How do you connect this wider practice with your role as a lecturer?

Lee Tung Street: The Street as Siu King-Chung: Teaching at the You Have Never Seen Before, 2005, A-link Gallery, C. C. Wu School of Design allows me to Building, Wan Chai, Hong Kong. Courtesy of Siu King- create assignments for the students Chung. to look into wider aspects of visual culture in Hong Kong. In other words, the research for many of the Community Museum Project’s projects were inspired by the students’ projects. An example is the Fridge Project (2008), where we tried to make an extensive visual inventory of the contents of refrigerators in twenty-four households of differing social and economic backgrounds in order to reveal their food consumption patterns and, by implication, something about their livelihoods and lifestyles. This

Vol. 15 No. 2 103 Lee Tung Street: The Street as You Have Never Seen Before, 2005, panoramic view of Lee Tung Street's east facade. Courtesy of Siu King-Chung.

104 Vol. 15 No. 2 Vol. 15 No. 2 105 was an idea informed by an assignment that I initiated for a student study trip to Singapore in 2000. The aim was to make visual comparisons of “city characteristics” between Hong Kong and Singapore.

One group of students came up with In Search of Marginalized Wisdom, photographing the the idea of comparing the contents trolley-making process as a means to conduct research of refrigerators from the two cities, into local craftsmanship. Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong, 2006. another group proposed comparing Courtesy of Siu King-Chung. the contents of people’s wallets, and others proposed comparing the display patterns of goods at wet markets, etc. All of these provided food for thought for the Community Museum Project, and by referencing the students’ “project-prototype” (initial form/design) we slowly became more aware of the approaches and methodologies that we were employing in our Community Museum Project projects. We started to invent names and concepts for them: for example, we tried treating the “Street as a Museum,” by going through a process called “Cultural Scavenging”; and we collected visual data from the streets (or social situations) through a “Photo- stocktaking” method, so the community could be “visualized” using our information and exhibition design skills.

In Search of Marginalized Wisdom, featuring eight craftspersons at a to-be- demolished public housing estate in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong, 2006. Courtesy of Siu King-Chung.

Every year I am able to test these methods and approaches to visual culture topics with the design students. More and more students understand and get to practice some of these approaches in their own work. Hopefully this continues even after their graduation. Of course, there is always the social or community dimension in our projects; we use our design approaches to re-present and sometime intervene in social contexts. One example of collaboration between Community Museum Project and my students is the project on the Yellow Umbrella Movement that I mentioned.

Sally Lai: Within the context of what is now a very commercially focused art scene in Hong Kong, are the students responsive to a less commercially focused perspective?

106 Vol. 15 No. 2 In Search of Marginalized Siu King-Chung: I am lucky to be Wisdom, trolley-makers Mr. and Mrs. Lee collaborated with teaching in a design school and not designer Brian Lee to design and prototype a table using the an art school; students are doomed to craft of trolley-making. be primed by a commercial mindset by some other tutors. Most of them will find a job or are already working in the commercial world as designers, which is why they sometimes prefer to do non-commercial projects as a break in their routines. They are able to employ their design skills to visualize their social research and ideas. In recent years in Hong Kong there has been a lot of discussion about social innovation or social design. These discourses originated primarily from social work and design circles, although socially engaged art already had been prevalent in the scene for a while. The Community Museum Project, with me teaching at the design school, is able to take advantage of not only the students’ experimentations but also of the discourses in these different fields.

Left: You Are What You Freeze: Food Storage and Our Everyday Life, 2008, A-link Gallery, C. C. Wu Building, Wan Chai, Hong Kong. Right: A statistical visualization of the contents of refrigerators in twenty-four economically varied households in Hong Kong.

Perhaps design students may not see themselves as artists at all and therefore don’t necessarily feel the pressure of making “art” commercially for a living or for fame. They are inclined to do something more “social” in order to offset or counter their commercial work. This is why more and more commercial designers are engaging in social projects nowadays. I have students who have chosen to leave the design field to become full-time organic farmers- cum-social activists, supported by freelance design jobs on the side. Some have become part-time or full-time designers for NGOs and social enterprises, creating projects with communication and aesthetic appeal. Most significantly, these design guerrillas employ their design thinking and practical skills to influence some of the local social discourses and practices. For example, they have produced maps, exhibitions, and community programs that promote local farming or sustainable rural-urban lifestyle, etc. projects that would have been very different had they been produced by the social activists/workers on their own. I think these synergies among different social fields, on a practical and everyday level, are a lot more interesting than what is happening in the commercial art world in Hong Kong.

Vol. 15 No. 2 107 Chinese Name Index

Bao Jianfei Hou Hanru Ma Liang Wang Shikuo 包劍斐 侯瀚如 馬良 王式廓 Cai Guo-Qiang Hu Jintao Mak, Antonio Wang Zhaowen 蔡國強 胡錦濤 麥顯揚 王朝聞 Chai Fei Huang Jingyuan Mao Yongkin Wang, Kelly 柴扉 黃靜遠 毛用坤 王凱麗 Chan, Gaylord Huang Yongping Ming Tiampo Wong, Phoebe 陳餘生 黄永砯 蔡宇鳴 黃小燕 Chan, Howard Jin Shan Mu Guang Wong, Wucius 陳沛浩 靳山 穆光 王無邪 Chan, Luis Kang Kang Ou Ning Wu Shanzhuan 陳福善 康康 歐寧 吳山專 Chang Yuchen Kwok Mang Ho Pak Sheung Chuen Wu Zuoren 常羽辰 郭孟浩 白雙全 吳作人 Chou, Irene Lai, Sally Pan Wenzhan Xi Jinping 周綠雲 賴婉兒 潘文展 習近平 Chou, Stephanie Laozi Qi Baishi Xiamen Dada Wanjing 老子 齊白石 廈門達達 周婉京 Lee Bing Shao-weng （Li Xu Bing Chow Chun Fai 李秉罡 Shaoweng） 徐冰 Lee, Christie 周俊輝 李少翁 Xu, David Borgon- 李穎文 Chu Hing Wah Shen Kuiyi jon 朱興華 Leung Kui Ting 沈揆一 許大衛 梁巨廷 Dong Qichang Shi Hui Ye Yonglie 董其昌 Li Shan 施慧 葉永烈 李珊 Du Jianguo Shu, Michael Zha Li 杜建國 Liang Shaoji 舒鵬程 查立 梁绍基 Du Mu Siu King-Chung Zhang Peili 杜牧 Lin Han 蕭競聰 張培力 林瀚 Fay Ming Song Huaikuei Zhao Bowei 費明杰 Liu Ding 宋懷桂 趙柏巍 劉鼎 Fu Jie Song Ling Zhao Wenliang 傅杰 Liu Jen 宋陵 趙文量 劉珍 Gao Minglu Sun Zhenhua Zheng Shengtian Liu, Esther 高名潞 孫振華 鄭勝天 廖潔連 Gao Shiming Tong King-sum Zhu Wei Lu Rulai 高士明 唐景森 朱偉 盧如來 Geng Jianyi Tsang Tak Ping Zhuangzi Lu Xun 耿建翌 曾德平 莊子 魯迅 Gu Wenda Lu, Carol Yinghua Tsang Tsou-Choi 谷文達 盧迎華 曾灶財 Han Meihun Luan Zhichao Tse Pakchai 韓眉倫 欒志超 謝柏齊 Ho, Christine Lui Shou-Kwan Tung Chee Wah 何穎佳 呂壽琨 董建華

108 Vol. 15 No. 2 Vol. 15 No. 2 109 110 Vol. 15 No. 2 Vol. 15 No. 2 111 112 Vol. 15 No. 2 Limited edition prints Yishu and photographs by leading contemporary Art Editions Chinese artists.

No 1. No 2.

Xu Bing, Ding Yi, Book from the Ground Crosses 08 (not available) 2008, Serigraphy, 2007, Ink on paper, 297 X 178 mm, 210 X 295 mm, signed by the artist. signed by the artist. Produced by the artist. Produced by the artist. Edition of 200. Edition of 199.

No 3. No 4.

Wei Guangqing, Rong Rong & Inri, Made in China 2004 No. 2 2008, Seriograph on Caochangdi, Beijing paper, 175 x 296 mm. 2008, Digital photograph Produced by the artist. on Hahnemühle rag paper Edition of 198. Produced by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing. Edition of 200.

No 5. No 6.

Wang Guangyi, Hong Hao and Yan Lei, Great Criticism — Invitation Wang Guangyi 2010, Printed on paper, 2009, Serigraphy, 295 x 205 mm, 210 X 295 mm, Produced by the artist. signed by the artist. Edition of 300. Produced by A Space Art, Beijing. Edition of 200.

No 8. No 7. Huang Zhiyang, Zhong Biao, Dreamscape no. 0804 Dawn of Asia 2015, Serigraphy, 2010, Serigraphy, 328 x 197 mm, 210 x 300 mm, Produced by the artist. Produced by the artist. Edition of 200. Edition of 200.