July/August 2015 Volume 14, Number 4 Inside

J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 1 5 VOLUME 14, NUMBER 4

INSI DE

Reﬂection on Artistic Practices Now and Then in Shanghai Artist Features: Liu Wei, Huang Yongping, Xiaojing Yan Exhibitions: Adventures of the Black Square, London; The Language of Xu Bing, Los Angeles; Actions for Tomorrow, Sydney

US$12.00 NT$350.00 PRI NTED IN TA I WAN 6

VOLUME 14, NUMBER 4, JULY/AUGUST 2015

CONTENTS 28 2 Editor’s Note

4 Contributors

6 Bridging the Past, Present, and Future Julia Gwendolyn Schneider

21 Reﬂection on Artistic Practices Now and Then in Shanghai 44 Biljana Ciric, Hu Yun, Shi Yong, Luke Willis Thompson

28 Two Chinese Artists at Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society, 1915–2015 Voon Pow Bartlett

44 Urban Politics: Urbanization and Liu Wei’s Art Danielle Shang

60 Huang Yongping: If There Were Such a Thing 60 as a “Religious Monster” Yu Hsiao Hwei

73 Of Clouds and Cocoons: Inteview with Xiaojing Yan Matthew Ryan Smith

83 Xu Bing: Erasure and Impermanence Chanda Laine Carey

99 Yangjiang Group: Actions for Tomorrow Lisa Catt 83 110 Chinese Name Index

99 Cover: Xiaojing Yan, Ling-Zhi, 2014, bronze. Courtesy of the artist and Lonsdale Gallery, Toronto.

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

Vol. 14 No. 4 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art PRESIDENT Katy Hsiu-chih Chien LEGAL COUNSEL Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C. C. Liu FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum In contexts where history-making is of EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace the moment and not a self-conscious act MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian anticipating the future, its documentation is EDITORS Julie Grundvig Kate Steinmann often ephemeral, or even nonexistent. Yishu 69 Chunyee Li opens with a review of an exhibition and book, EDITORS (CHINESE VERSION) Yu Hsiao Hwei Chen Ping as well as a conversation, revolving around Guo Yanlong an ongoing project by Biljana Ciric seeking CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde inventive ways to bring alive and make visible WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li the history of contemporary art in Shanghai, ADVISORY BOARD where, beyond individual memories, a scarcity Judy Andrews, Ohio State University of material is available. Melissa Chiu, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Voon Pow Bartlett looks at history from a Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator different perspective in her discussion of an Fan Di’an, Central Academy of Fine Arts exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery that Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh examined the evolution of the “black square” Hou Hanru, MAXXI, Rome in abstract art; she explores the perplexing Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Katie Hill, University of Westminster inclusion of two artists from mainland China, Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Zhao Yao and Liu Wei, relative to the larger Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator premise of the exhibition. The studio practice Lu Jie, Long March Space of one of those artists, Liu Wei, is the subject Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand of Danielle Shang’s text, which looks more Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art deeply into how his art reflects urban change Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago as well as his employment of migrant workers Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District in the fabrication of his work, a subject often PUBLISHER Art & Collection Group Ltd. overlooked when considering the trajectory of 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, an artwork within the overall art system. Taipei, Taiwan 104 Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 Huang Yongping and Xiaojing Yan exemplify E-mail: [email protected] two different generations representing VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu the Chinese diasporic experience, and the Alex Kao interviews with them, one by Yu Hsiao Hwei MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu and the other by Matthew Ryan Smith, bring Betty Hsieh to light the particularities each has faced with PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. respect to when they emigrated, where they adopted their new home, and how their artwork WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com WEB DESIGN Design Format has been affected. ISSN 1683 - 3082 Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited In conclusion, Xu Bing and Yangjiang Group in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, challenge the tradition of calligraphy and bring advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: its discourse and practice into a contemporary Yishu Editorial Office context. As Chanda Laine Carey argues, Xu 200–1311 Howe Street Bing has worked for many years to expand our Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 understanding of linguistics through disrupting Phone: 1.604.649.8187 the tenets of Chinese calligraphy and bringing it E-mail: offi[email protected] into a more expansive discursive field. Lisa Catt SUBSCRIPTION RATES demonstrates how Yangjiang Group subverts 1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) the formal principles of Chinese rituals such as 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com) tea serving and calligraphy and inserts them DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group into everyday situations that are, in the case of CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow Sydney, Australia, far from their origin. DESIGNER Philip Wong 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14卷第4期‧2015年7–8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

6 銜接過去、現在和未來網站編輯：黎俊儀 Julia Gwendolyn Schneider 中文編輯：余小蕙陳萍郭彥龍

21 反思上海今昔的藝術實踐行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 胡昀、施勇、Luke Willis Thompson、 Biljana Ciric 顧問：王嘉驥田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 巫鴻 28 「黑方塊歷程」參展的兩位中國林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 藝術家：抽象藝術與社會，1915-2015 范迪安招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 丘文寶（Voon Pow Bartlett）洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 胡昉侯瀚如 44 城市政治：城市化建設和劉韡的藝術徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 尚端（Danielle Shang）姜苦樂 (John Clark) 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 高名潞 60 黃永砅──如果有一個「宗教怪物」費大爲的話楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 盧杰余小蕙（Yu Hsiao Hwei） Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill 雲和繭：閆曉靜訪談 Charles Merewether 73 Apinan Poshyananda Matthew Ryan Smith 出版：典藏藝術家庭股份有限公司副總經理：劉靜宜高世光 83 徐冰：消除與無常行銷總監：林素珍 Chanda Laine Carey 發行專員：許銘文謝宜蓉社址：台灣台北市中山北路一段85號6樓電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 99 陽江組：「明日行動」傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 Lisa Catt 電子信箱：[email protected]

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Voon Pow Bartlett, Ph.D., is an artist, curator, lecturer, Biljana Ciric is an independent curator based and writer, as well as an associate member of the in Shanghai. She is co-curator of the 2015 Third Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Ural Industrial Biennale for Contemporary Wales. She is interested in exploring an expanded Art (Yekaterinburg, Russia), and her upcoming field in the study of the complex causal framework projects include curating an exhibition at Kadist Art influencing global discourses on fine art. She serves as a Foundation (Paris) as well as speaking at a seminar trustee of Third Text and as an advisor to Contemporary hosted by CCA Kitakyushu (Japan) in 2016. Her recent Chinese Art Journal and the British Chinese Art curatorial projects include Just as money is the paper, the Association. She founded Artefiction and co-founded gallery is the room (2014), presented by the Osage Art the Keyword project in order to promote a transnational Foundation; One Step Forward, Two Steps Back—Us and dialogue. She is also part of the team that launched the Institution, Us and Institution (2013), presented by the Tate Research Centre: Asia-Pacific, a three-year funded Guangzhou Times Museum; Tino Sehgal Solo Exhibition project at Tate from 2012 to 2015. Bartlett has many (2013), at the Ullens Center for Contemporary years of experience teaching at undergraduate and Art, Beijing; Institution for the Future (2011), at postgraduate levels in the UK, including the University the Asia Triennial, Manchester; and Alternatives to of the Arts, London; the Centre for Transnational Art, Ritual (2012–13), at Goethe Open Space Shanghai and Identity and Nation Research; Chelsea School of Art; OCAT, Shenzhen. In 2013, Ciric initiated the seminar Central St. Martins, London College of Fashion; and the platform From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, in conjunction of Exhibition Making. She is a regular contributor with Glasgow School of Art. to several Chinese and international art publications, including Broadsheet, Yishu, Flash Art, and Independent Chanda Laine Carey is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Critic. Ciric has been a jury member for a number of and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism awards including the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award (2013) at the University of California, San Diego. Her and was a member of the nominating council for Vera research and art criticism focus on transculturation List Prize for Art and Politics (2014–15). She was and religion in a global context. Carey is a member nominated for the ICI Independent Vision Curatorial of the Yale-Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, which Award in 2012. honors outstanding scholarly achievement that promotes diversity. Her research has been funded by Hu Yun graduated from the School of Intermedia Art of distinguished American and international organizations the China Academy of Art in 2008. He works in various such as the Max and Iris Stern International Symposia, media including delicate drawings and watercolours Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the European as well as performances and videos. He was awarded a Science Foundation. She is currently completing three-month artist’s residency in London by the Natural her dissertation on Marina Abramović’s spiritually History Museum in partnership with Gasworks in 2010, transcultural aesthetic in a global context. and the resulting solo exhibition, Image of Nature, was shown at the Natural History Museum throughout Lisa Catt is fascinated by the ways cross-cultural 2011, with the works later collected by the museum. exchange and layers of history are negotiated through His project A Natural History Research, begun in 2011, art. She recently graduated with a master’s degree in is an ongoing project that uses different objects to Liberal Arts (Museums and Collections) from the fuse together aspects of his personal experiences and Australian National University. Her final research the colonial past with myths and historical truths. project explored expressions of Chinese identity in His solo exhibitions include Up To The Sky (2010), contemporary Indonesian art. During her studies, Catt Magician Space, Beijing; Image of Nature (2011), worked as an assistant curator at the National Museum Natural History Museum, London; Our Ancestors of Australia and curatorial intern at the National (2012), Goethe-Institut Shanghai; and Lift with Care Gallery of Australia. Currently she is working at the Art (2013), Aike-Dellarco, Shanghai. His works have also Gallery of New South Wales. been exhibited at the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale

4 Vol. 14 No. 4 (2012) and the 4th Guangzhou Triennial (2012). He is Art Museum, Nanjing. His recent solo exhibitions the co-founder of the independent art e-journal PDF include Let All Potential be Internally Resolved Using and the artist-initiated pop-up art store Youth Sale Beautiful Form (2015), MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai; Store. He currently lives and works in Shanghai. and Think Carefully, Where Have You Been Yesterday?, BizART, Shanghai. Shi Yong currently lives and works Julia Gwendolyn Schneider is an art critic based in Shanghai. in Berlin. She studied American Studies, Cultural Sciences, and Aesthetics at Humbolt University, Matthew Ryan Smith, Ph.D., is a freelance writer, Berlin, and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University, independent curator, and educator based in London, London. In 2001, she curated an exhibition on net art Ontario. He received his Ph.D. in Art and Visual at Humbolt University, and in 2002 she was assistant Culture (Curatorial Stream) from the University of curator for Urban Drift, an international collaborative Western Ontario in 2012. Currently, he is a sessional platform in Berlin for contemporary urban strategies. professor of art history at the University of Toronto, In 2006, she worked in arts administration for the Mississauga, and the University of Western Ontario. He Biennale of Sydney and the Australia Council for has also published extensively in exhibition catalogues, the Arts. Her writing has appeared in art catalogues art publications, and academic journals on several and art magazines such as springerin, Mute, artnet, aspects of contemporary art and visual culture, most von hundert, Camera Austria, and in the daily taz. In recently “Relational Manoeuvres in Autobiographical 2008, she undertook a research trip to Kyrgyzstan Video Art” in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and wrote about art production under post-Soviet (Fall 2014) and “Performative Appropriation of conditions. Since 2006, the Asia-Paciﬁc region has been Video Art on YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion” in a focus in her writing, including essays on numerous the Journal of Curatorial Studies (March 2015). He topics such as alternative art spaces, the survival of recently completed a book chapter on unsanctioned the Artists Village in Singapore, video art and media grafﬁti interventions in post-apartheid Johannesburg, activism in Indonesia, and the documentary titled which is to be published by the University of Indiana IPHONECHINA. Press in 2015.

Danielle Shang is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, Luke Willis Thompson works with ready-made forms and art historian. Her research interests include artistic (objects, but also sites, people, and processes) drawn and intellectual developments since 1976 in Chinese from contested narratives or historical blind spots. The contemporary art history. Her recent focus is on the divergent stories of each form coalesce momentarily impact of globalization, urban renewal, social change, around the artist’s biography to act both as markers and class restructuring on art-making in China, of and stand-ins for very particular personal lived where artists participate in the decentralized informal experiences and to interrogate rhetoric around the economy to produce works to be disseminated in the circulation and repatriation of artifacts and the class- institutionalized formal system of the global art world. bound art world’s mode of distribution.

Shi Yong graduated from the Fine Art Department Yu Hsiao Hwei is an art writer and translator based of the Shanghai Light Industry College in 1984. His in France. She is a regular contributor to several art works range from photography to video to interactive magazines in Taiwan and China, including CANS online projects, focusing on aspects of identity and (Chinese Contemporary Art News), ARTCO, ArtCo image. He has exhibited widely since the early 1990s China, and Randian. Since the 1990s, she has been and has participated in group exhibitions such as Face focusing on the exploration of Chinese contemporary (2012), Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; Grasstress art within the global context. (2011), Venice, Italy; Negotiations: The Second Today’s Documents (2010), Today Art Museum, Beijing; and the 3rd Nanjing Triennial: Reﬂective Asia (2008), RCM

Vol. 14 No. 4 5 Julia Gwendolyn Schneider Bridging the Past, Present, and Future Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room Osage Art Foundation, Shanghai November 20, 2014–February 28, 2015

A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006 Edited by Biljana Ciric Published by Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester, UK

ight after the entrance to the exhibition Just as money is the paper, Photo on entrance wall by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1948. the gallery is the room at Osage Art Foundation, Shanghai, visitors Photo: Yves Yang. Courtesy of Henri Cartier-Bresson were confronted with a wall covered by a black-and-white image. and Osage Art Foundation, R Shanghai. It showed a crowd of people standing in a row, tightly squeezed together. This iconic photograph was taken in December 1948 by Henri Cartier- Bresson, who was sent to China to document the turbulent transition from Kuomintang to Communist rule. The image captures the moment when the value of paper money plummeted and the Kuomintang decided to distribute forty grams of gold per person. Thousands waited in line for hours to exchange paper money for gold, and ten people were crushed to death. Instead of an introductory text on the gallery’s wall, Shanghai- based curator Biljana Ciric presented this image as part of a preface area that included several artworks to set the tone for her exhibition. For Ciric, Bresson’s photograph signals the change of direction that Shanghai took in 1949 (after the People’s Republic of China was established), when the city started to focus on becoming an economic hub and no longer represented the image of a cultural centre where, in the 1920s and 1930s, most intellectuals had lived.1

6 Vol. 14 No. 4 The exhibition Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room runs contrary to the idea of Shanghai as merely a consumer-oriented city. In this vein, it might be more telling that the same photograph was shown at the Fuck Off exhibition, held in Shanghai in 2000 and curated by Feng Boyi and Ai Weiwei. As Ciric points out: “For the exhibition, Ai Weiwei printed the image onto over ten thousand posters. The work, titled Fuck You, could be taken away by the audience.”2 For Ciric, “this image provides a symbolic bridge between past and present and the issues that Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room tries to introduce.”3 To understand this symbolic function, it is significant that the Fuck Off exhibition, which was a satellite event of the 3rd Shanghai Biennale in 2000, “positioned itself in a so-called un-collaborative manner with regard to the official art system, as well as in regard to the international commercial market for contemporary art since the Chinese title’s literal translation into English is something along the lines of ‘Uncollaborative Approach’.”4 This Biennale, curated by Hou Hanru, was the first Shanghai Biennale to develop into an international event, showing art with a wide range of media from China and abroad, whereas the two previous editions had been platforms for officially approved Chinese art. Some local artists, curators, and critics saw its new direction as a threat to the independence of experimental art; as Feng Boyi stated: “[It] marked the fact that the officially organized event had begun to accept and recognize so-called avant-garde art and artists to a certain degree.”5

In contrast to the development of an official contemporary Chinese art system indicated by the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room is related to almost thirty years of experimental art in Shanghai. It considers a period of time when the art market and the process of commodification had not yet taken over as dominant forces or were even completely absent, and no contemporary art system had yet been established. It is this aspect that the exhibition title takes up; in this title, Ciric quotes from Mladen Stilinovi’s manifesto “Praise of Laziness,” written in 1993 for a performance and first published in Moscow Art Magazine in 1998. Stilinovi’s text praises lazy artists from the East who are not caught up in the capitalist art system and have time to produce art:

Artists in the West are not lazy and therefore not artists but rather producers of something. . . . Their involvement with matters of no importance, such as production, promotion, gallery system, museum system, competition system (who is ﬁrst), their preoccupation with objects, all that drives them away from laziness, from art. Just as money is paper, so a gallery is a room.6

A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006 As an extension of her recent book A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, Biljana Ciric’s exhibition takes artist-organized exhibitions in Shanghai between 1979 and 2006 as its starting point. The aforementioned Fuck Off exhibition is one of thirty-four exhibitions that can be found in

Vol. 14 No. 4 7 this publication, which mainly occured without any institutional support and show the crucial role of artists in organizing and curating exhibitions in China. Ciric developed this comprehensive compendium out of curatorial research undertaken for her earlier exhibition, History in the Making: Shanghai 1979–2009, a comprehensive historical retrospective that included nearly ﬁfty artists.7

To contribute to a broader picture of Shanghai’s contemporary art history, Ciric felt an urgency to find, preserve, and study what documentation might exist of exhibitions that were often of an ephemeral nature and of which little evidence remains. In the introduction to A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, she talks about the difficult process of recollection in which reimagining became an important strategy: “My work in collaboration with artists to build an exhibition archive in Shanghai began in 2007 and continued for almost five years. As many of the original ephemera and documents related to the exhibitions have now been lost, some of the material presented in the archive . . . is re-imagined by the artists, according to their memories.”8 Substantially relying on artist interviews, the book gives a rich image that provides subjective insights into how these exhibitions came into being, under what conditions they were developed, and what discussions took place around them. Alongside the interviews, Ciric applied a specific methodology for the book’s overall structure: it is chronological in order, and each exhibition entry has an overview of the facts as far as they are known (information about the year, the title, the venue, the time period, the participating artist, the catalogue, the number of visitors, and sometimes additional information). Short introductions by Ciric place each exhibition in the context of its time and address its significance; she also reproduces floor plans and related visual material such as media coverage, catalogue pages, and photographic documentation when available. The book’s strict format makes it easy to see the changes that have taken place in exhibition-making over the years; for example, since 1996 exhibitions became much more curatorial in nature as artists experimented with various formats of exhibiting. For Ciric, who in her own curatorial work is always concerned with challenging exhibition formats that serve purely to showcase material objects, the strong curatorial impetus of some of these artist-organized exhibitions was one important reason to build this archive. She believes it will become a valuable asset for the collective learning process about what curating means,9 while altogether the book provides an insightful understanding of how the underground art scene in Shanghai once functioned.10

Displacing the Narrative of the Archive Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room draws attention to the fact that archives are, just like museum collections, tools for producing new knowledge and new working methods. While being “rooted in an archive of materials relating to artist-initiated exhibitions held in Shanghai from 1979–2006, the exhibition avoids presenting the actual archival material.”11 Instead, Ciric takes the grammar of artist-organized exhibitions as a point of departure to activate this archive. It was her curatorial decision to work

8 Vol. 14 No. 4 12 Marysia Lewandowska, with it “through inviting artists to respond to the archive.” She selected Shanghai. Exhibition 13 Histories Distributed, 2014, four local and eight international artists to “open up possible passages installation. Photo: Yves Yang. Courtesy of the artist for its revival, re-interpretation, and misinterpretation from today’s and Osage Art Foundation, perspective;”14 for Ciric, “knowledge of this history also involves reﬂection Shanghai. on our practices today and their possible future.”15

While most artists chose to create works in connection with one particular exhibition, Marysia Lewandowska decided to take the whole archive as a conceptual starting point. With her installation Shanghai. Exhibition Histories Distributed (2014), she inserted new elements into the narrative of the original archive. Her chosen title shifts the emphasis from a “history” to “histories,” highlighting their multiplicity; she also questions the idea of origin and ownership by describing these histories as “distributed.” For her contribution, Lewandowska visited the former sites of the archived exhibitions across Shanghai and documented their current state. Out of this research, she produced a map that visitors could take away and use to go to the actual sites; at the same time, it functioned as a guide for her installation that consisted primarily of conceptual photographs.

The foldout map listed the historical exhibitions and performances and the venues where they had taken place, which were mostly non-art-related spaces. Most of the exhibitions took place in public buildings, like cultural palaces or university student clubs, and in some cases informal settings like outdoor public spaces and, from the late 1990s onwards, some commercial spaces. By contrasting these venues with an account of the types of buildings Lewandowska found in 2014 at the original sites, it becomes obvious how the city has since “embraced predominantly corporate enterprises,”16 as entries of shopping centres and hotels are now dominating the account. The created image of ﬁnancial speculation does not only show the changes in the urban fabric of Shanghai; it also ﬁnds its correspondence in the commercialization of the Chinese contemporary art scene.

In Lewandowska’s photographs, the subject matter often focused on subtle links to the art-related events that formerly took place at these venues in the city. Sometimes this resulted in opposing undercurrents to the

Vol. 14 No. 4 9 Marysia Lewandowska, Shanghai. Exhibition Histories Distributed, 2014, digital print, 29.7 x42 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

commercialized status quo of the city. There was, for example, a photograph of a couple playing badminton in an empty corridor of a shopping mall. The shot was taken in the Hi-Shanghai HUGE Plaza Commerce and Leisure Village, which today occupies the building site, where, between 1991 and 1993, Hu Jianping’s Ranks Interventions took place. For the Ranks series Hu Jianping displayed artworks in public space on the broken walls of old buildings that were under demolition.17 In comparison, the unconventional use of the shopping mall for recreational sports suggests that the experimental nature of Hu Jianping’s interventions lives on. It also signals that what is important is not so much the materiality of the place itself, but how people will always ﬁnd a way of using space beyond what its function is intended to be—very much in the spirit of Henri Lefebvre’s The Practice of Everyday Life.18

Besides such subversive tendencies of the unexpected use of space shown in some of her photographs, Lewandowska was also deliberately adding another layer to her “city guide.” She expanded her survey by imagining Shanghai in 2044 as a city where the public sphere is no longer shrinking and where currently privatized spaces are released back to the public and become common property. This utopian projection into the future includes new institutional templates for the Shanghai art scene; the aforementioned shopping mall will, for instance, become the Osage Art in the Public Realm Research Cluster.

In the list of places Lewandowska managed to visit,19 one venue was a hub during the early-to-mid-1990s, and several influential exhibitions took place there.20 Ciric refers to this basement space at the Huashan Vocational Art School “as one of the most experimental venues in the whole country.”21 Today, this space still exists, but in a somewhat dormant way. It was abandoned after the last exhibition was held there in 1996. When Lewandowska saw it during her research, it looked like a “dumping ground” for artworks left behind by students from the art school. Wanting to highlight this relic from a time of visionary exhibition making, Lewandowska decided to “make a kind of trompe l’oeil”22 of this former basement gallery to frame her own installation. Therefore her series of photographs was presented on a wall with yellow painted panels that held the same width as the real panels she encountered in this space, and even more significantly, she reproduced a remarkable floor pattern from this former exhibition space onto the floor of Osage gallery as part of

10 Vol. 14 No. 4 her installation. With its peculiar shape and colours, those who knew the basement space would immediately recognize the pattern and would be transported back in time in their imagination.23

Let’s Talk about Money Not far from Lewandowska’s reproduced floor pattern, Shi Yong, an artist from Shanghai who has been active since the early 1990s, directly referred to that basement space where the floor decoration originated. As a part of his installation, Shi Yong reassessed two of the influential exhibitions held at Huashan Vocational Art School: Two Attitudes of Identity (1993) and Let’s Talk about Money—Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition (1996), which he both took part in and helped to organize. Through spoken monologues, the artist looked back at his practice and the surrounding conditions during the early and mid-1990s. In his version, the celebrated basement gallery becomes demystified:

“Underground!” “Underground!” This word is used by many and is always associated with resistance, a backbone to stand for strong arguments. But in actual fact, most of the time it is only because we don’t have a choice! . . . Those who did have control over the mainstream art scene did not provide us with any ofﬁcial kind of exhibition venues and we didn’t have any money to rent decent places. The only choice we had was the underground exhibition hall at the school where I taught. This humid space with low ceilings was provided for free by the school and fulﬁlled the needs of many other local Shanghai artists.24

Shi Yong, “Previously, Prominently placed in the middle of form often originated from a passiveness rather than Shi Yong’s installation is a box full resistance, like how we use umbrellas when it starts to of faded faxes. They are the remains rain. What about now?,’’ 2014, faxes, metal box. from the last exhibition held at the Photo: Yves Yang. Courtesy underground space in 1996. This of the artist and Osage Art Foundation, Shanghai. innovative exhibition is the ﬁrst and only one that was international in scale, according to Ciric’s compiled archive—“one of the rare projects Let’s Talk About Money: Shanghai First International in China organized by artists to Fax Art Exhibition, 1996, exhibition poster. Courtesy attempt to establish a dialogue of Shi Yong. among artists from both inside and outside the country.”25 It was curated by the artists Ding Yi, Shi Yong, Shen Fan, and Zhou Tiehai and initiated by Hank Bull, one of the directors of Vancouver’s Western Front, among the city’s ﬁrst artist- run centres, established in 1973. Over the course of the exhibition, the artworks arrived in form of faxes

Vol. 14 No. 4 11 from abroad26 alongside the Chinese artists’ faxes. They were mounted onto Charda Adytama, Going Home, 2014, installation, 27 the gallery walls on a daily basis. Today Shi Yong says that his faxes are “[l] performance. Photo: Yves Yang. Courtesy of the artist ike ghosts that escaped from a moldy tissue—they were transformed from and Osage Art Foundation, the cheapest form of communication to a form valued for something else. I Shanghai. just thought—what if we used the theme Let’s Talk About Money to ask how much these facsimiles are worth today?”28 At the time, to choose money as a thematic served as a warning about the direction China’s art world was taking, “while the artists continued to struggle to gain recognition in such an environment.”29 As Ciric points out, “the organizers fully understood when discussing money, one can’t avoid also discussing the economy, politics, and society’s structure. The theme was a deliberate provocation.”30

The way Shi Yong talked about the fax art exhibition highlighted how its conceptual format was very much a strategy framed by the reality they lived in at the time. As Shi Yong stated: “[I]n the pre-internet days of the 1990s in China, fax was one of the most convenient and economical ways to communicate with people overseas. Back then, we had no money and non- mainstream ideologies were still sensitive. So, when we used facsimiles as a medium and the theme of Let’s Talk about Money to facilitate an interesting international exchange exhibition, it pointedly addressed all the issues we had before us.”31 Different from Western idea-based exhibition formats, the fax exhibition was not informed by the desire to reach beyond the stable ground of institutions; instead, it was the lack of them as well as the speciﬁc political and economic context of China at the time that shaped the idea to use such an exhibition format. Its chosen medium also meant that it was possible to organize an international exhibition without censorship: “[I]t obviated the need to obtain ofﬁcial approval from the Cultural Bureau for artworks entering the country via the usual channels; because there were no physical artworks crossing borders, there was no customs agent checking their paperwork.”32

Fictionalizing the Archive Another contribution related to the fax exhibition was made by Charda Adytama, an artist from Indonesia. His link to Ciric’s archive is via Rachmansyah, “a long lost high-proﬁle Indonesian artist”33 who was said to be trying to participate in the First International Fax Art Exhibition in Shanghai. In the exhibition space, Adytama presented several handwritten documents on yellowed paper loosely lying on a table, where they could be studied. During the opening the artist invited people to join him around the desk and presented the story of Rachmansyah, his uncle, who had been trying to participate in the fax exhibition, although none of his faxes were ever transmitted. As Adytama told his audience, this probably had to do with Suharto’s authoritarian regime from 1966 to 1988, which restricted and censored communication between Indonesia and China; violent outbreaks druing the 1998 riots caused President Suharto to resign. We also learned from him that Rachmansyah’s wish to connect with his own past constituted a huge part of his motivation to participate in the First International Fax Art Exhibition. Along with his fax art contribution, he wanted to send to Shanghai images of his Chinese family ancestors and

12 Vol. 14 No. 4 Vol. 14 No. 4 13 was hoping to receive information about them. But Going Home (2014), as Adytama named his installation, was nothing that Indonesians of Chinese descent would have been able to do at that time, highlighting the fact that Rachmansyah could not connect with his personal family history in China.

On the wall beside the table, Adytama hung a colourful oil painting, depicting a ship in a rough sea painted with expressive brush strokes. Titled Perahu Kusamba, this painting was conceived by Rachmansyah in 1997, just before he decided to go into hiding, where he remains to this very day. From the account that Adytama gave, his exile seems to be related to the fact that he was a spy during the Suharto era. It was through his mother that Adytama was able to reach out to his uncle and to fulﬁll his wish to present his artwork in China. In relation to the overall story, the painting gains the status of a “document”; it relates to an artist whose very existence is questionable because we learn about him only from Adytama. The installation uses the general ambiguity in the relationship between historical and ﬁctional narratives and enables Adytama to “open up a place and space that prompts new associations and meanings, a place where memory and imagination are unveiled and meet.”34 It is within this space that a political moment can emerge, a moment that hints at the centuries of discrimination faced by generations of Chinese Indonesians.

Rachmansyah, Perahu Kusamba, 1997, oil on canvas (150 x 200 cm. Photo: Yves Wang. Courtesy of the artist and Osage Art Foundation, Shanghai.

But there is a more general issue at hand. For Adytama, the act of juxtaposing and letting two different memories collide is also a way of reclaiming, reconstructing, and criticizing the authoritative gesture of the formation of an archive and the institutionalizing consequences behind it.35 By destabilizing and dislocating the boundaries between fact and ﬁction, as well as through re- and de-contexualizing the archive, the artist questions the archive as a means for creating truth in general and points to its mutability and constructed status.

Displays of Resistance Next to Adytama’s contribution, Hu Yun selected three historical artworks from the early 1990s as his focus. One of these works was directly related to Shi Yong’s installation, as Hu Yun decided to show a documentary image of one of Shi Yong’s installation pieces, Incising, Erecting, Then Filling In (1993). While

14 Vol. 14 No. 4 Shi Yong used a pile of photographic paper he found in his studio—wrapped up in paper, but long expired—in reference to the experimental works he had created for the Two Attitudes of Identity ‘93 exhibition, Hu Yun’s choice of an archival image revealed the conceptual nature and the fragility of Shi Yong’s installation with its photosensitive material.

Left: Page from exhibition brochure for Two Attitudes of Identity ’93: Qian Weikang & Shi Yong Installation Works Show, 1993. Courtesy of Shi Yong. Right: Hu Yun, you see it on purpose, I did it by chance, 2014, installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Yves Yang. Courtesy of the artist and Osage Art Foundation, Shanghai.

Tang Guangming, Of the three artworks he chose, Hu production still for An Outing Once Failed, 1992. Yun, in a strong curatorial gesture, Courtesy of the artist. only made this piece clearly visible for the viewers. What the audience would have to detect on their own was that this reproduction of Shi Yong’s work was shown on a moveable wall that led into a small room, which they could enter. Inside this room, Hu Yun presented an old pair of wooden scales that were used in work by Qian Weikang in 1994 to measure in a physical experiment the biological input and output of his body, as well as a black-and-white film by Tang Guanming titled An Outing Once Failed (1992). In an almost dreamlike way, the film revolved around a performative event in which a group of young people in disguise met by a bunker in a suburb of Shanghai. Through his chosen mode of presentation, Hu Yun critically addressed current habits of exhibition viewing and art consumption. By calling his piece you see it on purpose, I did it by chance (2014), Hu Yun wanted to point out that exhibition viewers are always the ones who choose what they want to see, while artists are often not willing or able to explain every choice that goes into the making of their work.36 For attentive visitors, Hu Yun provided some instructions that would help them find the two concealed works: the guidebook presented all three artworks, and he showed on the outside wall a floor plan of the hidden space. “But the reality is, most of the audience is already used to being ‘pushed’ to see artworks, and they don’t have the time or the patience to read, to discover, to think,” says Hu Yun.37

Another work addressing the reception of visual art by the public deliberately resisted being experienced in its entirety. In the video installation One Word per Minute (2014) by Zhang Peili, a Chinese character was illuminated only once every minute on a small screen, thus dividing the content into segments that were ungraspable as a whole, and as the duration of this installation was not indicated, this gave the viewer the feeling of an

Vol. 14 No. 4 15 endlessly evolving sequence of Zhang Peili, Document on Hygiene No. 3, 1991, multi- characters. To further accentuate channel video installation, exhibition view at Garage its fleeting nature, the video was Show, 1991, Shanghai. installed in the transit area of Courtesy of the artist. the staircase between the two floors of the gallery. Also, in collaboration with Zhang Peili, Biljana Ciric decided to present an enlarged photograph documenting Zhang Peili’s iconic multichannel video installation Document on Hygiene No. 3, from the 1991 Garage Show, mounting it onto the wall in the stairwell as a complementary image for One Word per Minute. By employing this mode of display, Ciric wanted to highlight that Document on Hygiene No. 3, an important work in Shanghai’s exhibition history, can be seen as one of the artist’s early attempts at creating a sense of distance between the work and the viewer.38 As the photograph of Zhang Peili’s installation at the Garage Show illustrated, the artist had placed a field of bricks in front of the four television screens, which where staggered in a row and all showing the same video. Interpretations of this early work often (primarily) focus on the content of the video, in which a chicken is being washed in a small basin. It is generally viewed as an absurdist commentary following the launch of a nationwide hygiene campaign in 1991.39 In contrast, Ciric’s emphasis on the distance created by both works—a spatial distance in the case of the video and temporal one in One Word per Minute—can be read as an indirect critique of the alienating effects of consumerism and entertainment culture.

Mapping Abstraction in Shanghai While all the contributions mentioned so far concentrated on exhibitions from the early- to mid-1990s (except for Lewandowska’s involvement with the whole archive), Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room started with a focus on the abstract painting movement in Shanghai, which was influential during the 1980s. For this section Ciric invited Yu Youhan— who produced his abstract Circle series in the 1980s and was an influential teacher at the time—to show the development of abstraction in Shanghai through a subjective choice of abstract paintings by artists who had started to experiment with abstraction during that time. Besides works of his contemporaries (some were his students), Yu Youhan’s mapping of abstract painting included an expressionist work from the early 1950s by Fan Jiman, an artist who influenced his own practice. The time span between the chosen works went from this early work through the 1980s and into the 1990s. While the works by Feng Lianghong, Zhang Jian-Jun, Shen Fan and Yu Youhan show an organic tendency (all from the 1980s), the more recent works, such as Qin Yifeng’s Line Field 2 (1993) and Ding Yi’s Appearance of Crosses 1989–7 (1989), are more abstract and rigid in their display of striped and grid-like forms.

Next to the selected paintings, Yu Youhan showed brochures and catalogue covers from two inﬂuential foreign exhibitions that were held in Shanghai during the late 1970s and early 1980s. One exhibition was called French Rural

16 Vol. 14 No. 4 Yu Youhan, Mapping Landscape Paintings from the 19th Century and focused on Impressionism Abstraction, (in collaboration with Ding and Fauvism; this show was held at the Shanghai Exhibition Center in 1979. Yi, Fan Jiman, Feng Liang Hong, Qin Yifeng, Shen The other was American Paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Fan; archival materials which exhibited Abstract Expressionist work at the Shanghai Museum are provided by Zheng Shengtian). Photo: Yves in 1981. According to Ciric, these exhibitions “inﬂuenced the work of a Yang. Courtesy of the artists, Zheng Shengtian, whole generation of artists that became active in the 1980s.”40 Ciric’s book and Osage Art Foundation, Shanghai. also includes archival materials from two other important but unofﬁcial exhibitions in Shanghai that introduced abstraction: The Experimental Painting Exhibition,41 held at the Fudan University Teachers Club in 1983, and the Modern Painting: Six Men Group Exhibition,42 shown at the same venue in 1985. In the latter exhibition, which included works by Yu Youhan and his students Qin Yifeng, Ding Yi, and Feng Lianghong, as well as works by Wang Guqing and Ai Dewu, only abstract paintings were presented, “which was a very radical approach at the time,”43 according to Ciric.

While the more open social atmosphere after the adoption of Deng Xiaoping’s opening-up and reform policy in 1978 made it possible for artists to withdraw from the ofﬁcial academic painting style, by no means did it mean that the emergence of abstraction was widely accepted. With respect to this, Ciric’s book is more insightful than the exhibition in offering insight into the sociopolitical background in which these exhibitions took place. In the book, Zhang Jian-Jun explains why the Experimental Painting Exhibition was closed after only one day: “It was considered improper. The public could not understand abstract painting. Moreover, the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign (1983) just started.”44 The book also reproduces a newspaper article from the Liberation Daily that harshly criticized the exhibition and condemned the artists who produced abstract art, claiming that “[t]hose who created these works only indulge themselves in ‘self-admiration’”45 and do not serve the people.46 It is through such

Vol. 14 No. 4 17 comments that one can see how, at the time of their emergence, abstract works possessed a certain criticality. The decision to create abstract paintings could be seen as a belief in art as an autonomous practice, and as a call for freedom of expression, which stood in opposition to the ofﬁcial understanding of the role of art.

Reaching into the Past to Create the Future While the part of the exhibition that dealt with abstract art felt a bit like a canonizing gesture by Ciric, the way her exhibition revolved around the archive in general attested to the fact that the narrative in the archive she helped to create is only one way of looking at these historical exhibitions. Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room had no ambition to settle into a deﬁnitive history about particular exhibitions; instead, the individual contributions by the invited artists had different focal points, which together achieved a rich texture of cross-references, especially when they dealt with the same exhibitions.

With Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room, Ciric not only brought together artists from different backgrounds to revive and intervene into an alternative artist-focused history of local exhibitions, she also paved the way for future developments in artistic and curatorial discourse and knowledge production on a broader level. This became most apparent in her decision to invite the Slovenian artists’ collective Irwin,47 founded in Ljubljana in 1983, to revisit their unrealized proposal from 1993 to establish a Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) Embassy in China.48 The idea of this invitation is to work on the possibility of opening the NSK Embassy in Shanghai in 2016.

In Ciric’s exhibition, a hypothetical architectural model of the proposed NSK Embassy for Beijing from Irwin’s archive was included as well as a video about the group’s embassy in Moscow, which was “a month long live installation with a program of lectures and public discussions”49 held in 1992 at a private apartment. “The aim of the event was to confront the similar social and artistic contexts of the ex-Soviet Union and ex-Yugoslavia.”50 Obviously, Slovenia and China share less common ground, and although two decades have passed, what Irwin wrote in their artist statement for the NSK Embassy in China in 1992 is still valid for them today: “While in our embassy in Moscow, due to cultural and political similarities, we could expect mutual understanding; we cannot expect any such thing in Beijing. We enter a space completely new to us.”51 To aid the artists, Ciric initiated a ﬁrst encounter for the implementation of this long-term project. In November 2014 she invited Miran Mohar, one of the NSK’s ﬁve members, to Shanghai to establish relations with the local art community through conversations with artists and curators. While most of the discussions were private, in a program of public talks held at Osage gallery, Irwin’s practice was introduced, and a trans-local encounter between Irwin and some invited Chinese artists took place. One interesting aspect that was addressed by Mohar on this occasion was how Irwin’s Moscow-Ljubljana project had been based on the attempt to create an alternative structure for their artistic practice in the absence of a working art system in their transitional society at the time. To work on an exchange

18 Vol. 14 No. 4 around self-institutionalization might be one productive point of departure, which became noticeable in the talk between Mohar and the artist Huang Xiaopeng.52 In the spirit of a social art practice, Huang Xiaopeng teaches at the HB Station in Guangzhou, an alternative research-oriented art education project supported by the Guangdong Times Museum. Currently it is too early to predict if Irwin’s Embassy project for Shanghai will become a future reality, but the inclusion of such a proposal in the exhibition Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room has already been a fruitful step in creating a desire for the emergence of unexpected cross-cultural alliances.

Notes

1. Biljana Ciric, interview with the author, Shanghai, November 28, 2014. 2. Biljana Ciric, “Introduction: Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room,” in Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room, exhibition booklet, 2014. 3. Ibid. 4. Biljana Ciric, “2002 Fuck Off, Introduction,” in Biljana Ciric, ed., A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006 (Manchester: Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, 2014), 379. 5. Biljana Ciric, “Interview with Feng Boyi,” in Ciric, ed., A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, 390. 6. Mladen Stilinovic, “Praise of Laziness,” 1993, http://mladenstilinovic.com/works/10-2/. 7. History in the Making: Shanghai 1979–2009, Ju Men Road 436, Shanghai, September 10–October 10, 2009. The research for the exhibition was published in Chinese, in Ciric, ed., History in the Making: Shanghai 1979–2009, Artist Interviews and Work Archive (Shanghai: Shanghai Peoples Fine Arts Publishing House, 2010). 8. Ciric, “A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, Introduction,” in Ciric, ed., A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, 2. 9. Ibid., 3. 10. One thing that is noticeable, though, is that almost no women were part of these exhibition-making artists’ groups. Since the book does not address this, it remains unclear whether they were not involved or whether this would be yet another history to research and write about. 11. Ciric, “Introduction: Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room.” 12. Ibid. 13. The artists invited to activate the archive were: Charda Adytama, Yason Banal, Hu Yun, Irwin, Marysia Lewandowska, Shi Yong, Luke Willis Thompson, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Yu Youhan, Zhang Peili, and 3-Ply (an artist-led publishing initiative directed by Fayen d’Evie that chose the exhibition catalogue for Let’s Talk About Money for their Re-print series; see http://3ply. net/2014/12/02/shanghai-fax/). The preface compiled by Ciric included artworks by Gong Jianhua, Hu Yun, Marysia Lewandowska, Li Ran, and Zhou Zixi. 14. Ciric, "Introduction: Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room. 15. Ciric, “A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, Introduction,” 2. 16. Biljana Ciric, “Marysia Lewandowska: Shanghai Exhibition Histories Distributed,” in Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room. 17. For further information about Hu Jianping’s Ranks Interventions, see “1993 Ranks Interventions and exhibition by Hu Jianping,” in Ciric, ed., A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, 256–273. 18. Paraphrased by the author from a Skype conversation with Marysia Lewandowska, March 21, 2015. 19. Due to time constraints, Marysia Lewandowska could not visit all the sites of the former exhibition venues. 20. The exhibitions held at the basement gallery at Huashan Vocational Art School, and included in Ciric, ed., A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006 are the following: October Experimental Art Exhibition, 1992; Two Attitudes Towards Identity: Qian Weikang and Shi Yong Installation Work Show, 1993; Ape’ 94 Art Show, 1994; and Let’s Talk about Money: Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition, 1996. 21. Ciric, “A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, Introduction,” 3. 22. Skype conversation with Marysia Lewandowska, March 21, 2015. 23. Ibid. 24. This quote is from Shi Yong’s installation titled Previously, form often originated from a passiveness rather than resistance, like how we use umbrellas when it starts to rain. What about now?, 2014. 25. Biljana Ciric, “Hank Bull, Shen Fan, Zhou Tiehai, Shi Yong, and Ding Yi, Let’s Talk About Money: Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition, 1996,” in Elena Filipovic, ed., The Artist as Curator, Issue #6 (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2014), 24. 26. The fax art exhibition included international artists from the following countries: Japan, the United States, Canada, Holland, Germany, France, Belgium, Australia, Italy, Hungary, Mexico, Russia, Argentina, Uruguay, Austria, and the Philippines. See, Ciric, ed., A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, 304–305.

Vol. 14 No. 4 19 27. See Biljana Ciric, “1996 Let’s Talk about Money: Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition, Introduction,” in Ciric, ed., A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, 306. 28. This quote is from Shi Yong’s installation titled Previously, form often originated from a passiveness rather than resistance, like how we use umbrellas when it starts to rain. What about now?, 2014. 29. Ciric, “1996 Let’s Talk about Money: Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition, Introduction,” 306. 30. Ciric, “Hank Bull, Shen Fan, Zhou Tiehai, Shi Yong, and Ding Yi, Let’s Talk About Money: Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition, 1996,” 25. 31. This quote is from Shi Yong’s installation titled Previously, form often originated from a passiveness rather than resistance, like how we use umbrellas when it starts to rain. What about now?, 2014. 32. Ciric, “Hank Bull, Shen Fan, Zhou Tiehai, Shi Yong, and Ding Yi, Let’s Talk About Money: Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition, 1996,” 30. 33. This is quoted from a text displayed next to the work at Osage Art Foundation: “Rachmansyah, a long lost high-proﬁle Indonesian artist was trying to participate in the 1996 Let’s Talk about Money: First International Fax Art Exhibition in Shanghai, but some unfortunate event rendered it impossible for him to send his works. He also meant to seek and reconnect his own past through the exhibition. This occurrence led to his disappearance, adding more mysteriousness to his present.” 34. Charda Adytama, “Going Home,” in Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room. 35. Paraphrased by the author from an e-mail exchange between Charda Adytama and the author, March 24, 2014. 36. Paraphrased by the author from an e-mail exchange between Hu Yun and the author, March 28, 2014. 37. E-mail exchange between Hu Yun and the author, March 28, 2014. 38. For earlier works by Zhang Peili in this direction, see Zhang Peili, “Against the Public: The Point of Departure for Art Project No. 2 (Yishu Jihua Di Er Hao), 1988/2008,” in Wu Hung, ed., Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 112–13; and Gao Minglu, “Metaphorical Abuse in the Reception of Art: Works by Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi in the Late 1980s,” in Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (Cambrige, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), 242–51. 39. See, for example, Paul Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 178. 40. Biljana Ciric, “Mapping Abstraction—Shanghai,” in Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room. 41. For more information, see "'83 Experimental Painting Exhibition," in Ciric, ed., A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, 32–48. 42. For more information, see "1985 Modern Painting: Six Men Group Exhibition," in Ciric, ed., A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, 50–68. 43. Biljana Ciric, “1985 Modern Painting: Six Men Group Exhibition,” in Ciric, ed., A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, 51. 44. Biljana Ciric, “Interview with Zhang Jianjun,” in Ciric, ed., A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, 44. 45. Hunag Ke, “Abstract Painting, New Form and National Conditions,” Liberation Daily, 1983, in Ciric, ed., A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, 39. 46. Ibid. 47. Irwin’s members are Dušan Mandic, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik. 48. “The NSK State was created in 1992 by the groups comprising the Slovene arts collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). Amongst others these included the groups Laibach, Irwin, Noordung, New Collectivism and the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy. Neue Slowenische Kunst was founded in Ljubljana in 1984 as socialist Yugoslavia began to fracture. . . . The NSK State was created in the aftermath of Slovene independence. It has carried out a series of temporary ‘Embassy’ and ‘Consulate’ events in locations including Moscow, Ghent, Berlin and Sarajevo plus other collective actions. The State is conceived as a utopian formation which has no physical territory and is not identiﬁed with any existing national state.” Excerpt from The NSK TIMES blog, About NSK State, http://times.nskstate.com/about-nsk/. 49. “NSK Embassy was conceptualized by Irwin as a month long live installation with a program of lectures and public discussions, organized in cooperation by Irwin and Eda Cufer. The project was part of Apt-Art International and co-organised by Ridzhina Gallery.” See Irwin, NSK Embassy Moscow: How the East Sees the East, May 10–June 10, 1992, http://www.irwin.si/works-and- projects/nsk-embassy-moscow/. 50. “The lecturers were Rastko Mocnik, Marina Gržinic and Matjaž Berger from Slovenia, Vesna Kesic from Croatia, and Viktor Misiano, Valeri Podoroga, Aleksandr Yakimovich, Tatiana Didenko and Artiom Troitsky from Russia. The aim of the event was to confront the similar social and artistic contexts of the ex-Soviet Union and ex-Yugoslavia.” Ibid. 51. Irwin, “Revisiting the Project Proposal for the NSK Embassy in Beijing,” in Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room. 52. Public talk “Bella Ciao!—The Institutionalisation of Friendship,” with Irwin member Miran Mohar (Ljubljana), Huang Xiaopeng (Guangzhou), and Sang Tian (Beijing), November 28, 2014, Osage Art Foundation, Shanghai.

20 Vol. 14 No. 4 Reﬂections on Artistic Practices Now and Then in Shanghai: A Conversation with Biljana Ciric, Hu Yun, Shi Yong, and Luke Willis Thompson November 3, 2014 Moggoo Café, Shanghai

his conversation raises a number of questions related to artist- organized exhibitions during the 1990s in Shanghai and current T crises in exhibition-making practices in China. Shi Yong was one of the main organizers of several exhibitions in the early 1990s, most of them occurring at Huashan Vocational Art School. Luke Willis Thompson is an artist who, during October/November 2014, conducted a research residency in Shanghai looking at archival material related to the exhibition A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006, and a sample of his research was presented through the representation of Zhou Zixi’s documentation of the 1993 project Searching Campaign within that exhibition. Hu Yun is an artist who revisits the practices of Qian Weikang, Tang Guangming, and Shi Yong. All three artists participated in the following conversation during the exhibition Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room, presented by Osage Art Foundation. Through a number of commissions, this exhibition tried to re-activate the above-mentioned archive related to artist-organized exhibitions. Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room was curated by Biljana Ciric.

Biljana Ciric: I propose to start this conversation with the title of Shi Yong’s work for the exhibition Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room. The title of his work is Previously, form often originated from a passiveness rather than resistance, like how we use umbrellas when it starts to rain. What about now? Can you tell us your thinking behind this title?

Shi Yong: People who didn’t experience the 1990s might think of our work as a representation of our own attitude, our own position. But back then there was no market, and very few practiced contemporary art, so even if you just did work, people in the art community would remember you.

One more misunderstanding is about the activities and exhibitions that we organized; for example, exhibitions organized by Geng Jianyi in 1994 and 1995 in which we would create our work in different cities and jointly publish a book that brought together our activities, or doing exhibitions in non-museum spaces like the underground shelter of Huashan Art School. As some put it today, we were demonstrating a resistance to the mainstream, and we didn’t want to be part of it. Actually it wasn’t completely like that, because back then no one really paid attention to what we did anyway. Putting aside ideological issues, even the state museums and the mainstream art circle thought that we were producing nothing but garbage.

Vol. 14 No. 4 21 Actually, many exhibition formats at the time came out of these situations because we didn’t have any other way of doing things. If someone would give us a good and proper space for an exhibition, then of course we would have used it as well. We wouldn’t refuse that. But this was our reality, and these conditions framed and are characteristic of our practice. For example, by doing projects in your own home, you didn’t have any expenses, and the audience was always a few peers, usually art practitioners themselves. Having an exhibition last one month was unthinkable back then; if we had an exhibition for one week we were more than happy. Many shows lasted only a day or two. So those were our conditions back then.

Luke Willis Thompson: What did the imposed perspective from the mainstream—that they took your art as valueless—do to your work? Did it, in a perverse way, legitimize what were you doing? The exhibition practices that you describe sound to be insular, in both the size of their intended audience and their ability to travel around a community. So I wanted to propose this as an interesting condition for experimental work to come out of. But islands, to extend the metaphor further, are not conducive to keeping archives. So, although this might be a good condition for experimentation, at the same time it cost itself the ability to preserve its history and memory beyond those who already belong there.

Shi Yong: Back then, mainstream art was what was shown in museums, artists associations, and different district palaces. They exhibited mostly painting. We didn’t necessarily think that we should resist them, but we knew that we were different from them. So that’s why I describe our condition in my title as passive, because when the mainstream would put pressure on us, this pressure forced us to take a stand and form an attitude. So this was our acting force. If they liked what we were doing, we would probably think that our work had no future.

Regarding an insular position . . . actually, if you look at the artistic practices around China at that time, we were all isolated islands, but those islands had interconnections beneath the surface. Of course we have to be aware that we are talking about a very small group of people relative to the whole country.

Biljana Ciric: These islands existed in the early stages of contemporary art in China, but, later, due to politics within the art system, they would also change.

Shi Yong: Yes, these islands would change with time. So for some of them one would realize that they are not islands but solid land underneath.

Luke Willis Thompson: In regard to the choices of exhibition spaces that were used, initially they seemed to be a reaction to a lack of institutional spaces, but they don’t sound to me as though they are disinterested spaces relative to the art objects that would be presented within them. Moreover, they seem to be very precise in their application and assistance of the works themselves. The idea that both a house, a domestic site, and a construction

22 Vol. 14 No. 4 site had an equivalence in regards to their ability to replace the exhibition site asks us as audiences to contest the notion that you needed a designated space for exhibitions at all, and instead to want to understand the qualities inherent in those architectures that engender such experimentation. Surely there is decision-making going on there, certain complexities that are obviously motivated by more than just lack of space . . .

Shi Yong: Yes, I believe we made choices. Pressure from the mainstream created conditions that forced us to work in characteristic ways. So it was like we were guerrillas. But of course at the beginning we didn’t realize the importance of these choices. We would look at the foreign catalogues and the images of the exhibitions, admiring the spaces they were installed in. So we would make plans and drawings for exhibitions and projects based on the spaces that we had seen in these catalogues, in hope of gaining such opportunities. But in the end we worked with what we had; we couldn’t choose just any space. So it was these conditions in China—being trapped between ideological control of the state and a lack of any money or support—that formed and informed our practice.

Biljana Ciric: When did the actual “perfect” exhibition space, or white cube, start to have presence in China?

Shi Yong: I think it happened pretty late, after the commercialization of the art scene, probably in 2002 or 2003. If you remember, even ShanghArt Gallery’s early space actually looked like garbage dump—it wasn’t a white cube space at all, but then it also changed over the years. We also dreamed about this ideal space in which to show our work.

Luke Willis Thompson: Where is the metaphorical site of the garbage dump today? The garbage dump seems to have been cleaned away, and I want to know how to mourn that.

Shi Yong: Today art that is not very good has been produced on purpose. The work that we talk about, the one in our hearts, only remains in archival photographs. It does not exist anymore.

Biljana Ciric: Is it possible to have an experimental practice today?

Shi Yong: I think it is very necessary today, but with respect to the position of being on the margins, the pertinence of it will be very different from ours back then. I think the problem of state ideology still exists, but there is a new component today, and that is the market. Experimental practices are very necessary, as we have too many beautiful white cube spaces that have been created by the market, so we need works and artistic thinking that confronts the above-mentioned problems.

Biljana Ciric: The problem with the younger generation of artists like Hu Yun and Luke is that the only space they know is actually the white cube space. Their practice started within the white cube. They don’t have the

Vol. 14 No. 4 23 experience or the urge to question the white cube space and the production that arises from it. Many artists of the younger generation actually have had their ﬁrst exhibition in a commercial gallery, and that is very different from those earlier times we have been talking about. The white cube has become the natural environment that inﬂuences the production of artwork; there is no questioning of its modernist meaning and aesthetics.

Hu Yun: Actually, this perfect exhibition space reminds me of the English language. I think it is actually the same as English. It is language. Most of my generation of artists speak very good English, which is not the case with the older generation. So, basically, you have to speak that language and take this language—as with the white cube—as the foundation for your practice.

Shi Yong: So what is the actual difference between you two [Hu Yun and Luke]?

Luke Willis Thompson: I don’t know what the differences are. But there are ways to ask about the metaphorical conceptual garbage dump as the site of experimentation. Are we being nostalgic for the time that preceded the white cube? I don’t know whether it is about embracing the modernist white cube or whether there was something preﬁgured in that garbage dump and that fax machine that must exist somewhere else today. It doesn’t have to be the walls or the real estate, but it might be something hidden outside of the gallery that is lying in wait. It might not be the real estate, because we are burdened by real estate. We have generations who don’t have anywhere to live, and they are forced to be perpetually on the move. We don’t get to the island any more; we are perpetually at sea.

Shi Yong: Hu Yun mentioned language. I think this is important, and it inﬂuences one’s practice. This is especially true when English is not your mother tongue. So that would be the main difference between the two of you [Hu Yun and Luke]. Language frames the way we think. Actually, returning to the white cube space, I have nothing against it. Its main problem is that it became so commercialized and standardized. So my question is whether we can do something beyond that. We have the space, but the objects inside change. So can we use this as an opportunity, as a possible surprise, a way of doing something very different from the gallery’s regular mode of operation. This is a challenge and maybe a future direction. Bad art or commercially driven art has been produced within the white cube space because production is so standardized.

Luke Willis Thompson: Just for the record, English is my mother tongue, but I also have a father tongue. Why that is important to note? Artists all around will be bypassing the West. There is no reason that we have to meet via Europe or via North America. These are non-aligned conversations, and we need to ﬁgure out how to make them happen all the time. English doesn’t need to become the standardized philosophical tool that we are using here. To use the example in Dakar in the early 1980s, the Senegalese collective Laboratoire AGIT’art ran an early iteration of their activities out

24 Vol. 14 No. 4 of a former Chinese factory camp. There always have been non-aligned conversations in the history of global conceptual art.

Biljana Ciric: Shi Yong, during the 1990s, did you have an encounter with art practices from non-aligned countries?

Shi Yong: No, not at all. We had the urge to go international in the 1990s. For us, going international didn’t mean Africa or Latin America, but, very simply, only Western Europe and the USA. That was very clear.

Hu Yun: I believe in China it is the same today as it was during the 1990s.

Shi Yong: Even in the whole of Asia. To a certain extant, people from Asia are communicating with the West because they are very goal oriented.

Hu Yun: Within Asia, even today, there are very few connections among art practitioners.

Shi Yong: What I am going to say may not be nice to hear, but it is interesting. Back then we didn’t have any money. Our only chances were the opportunities abroad. Only by doing exhibitions abroad could you receive money. We were able to produce work with that money; otherwise we couldn’t. So if the West did not give us money, maybe Japan could have funding for doing an exhibition. We would take part in it for sure. In the 1990s this was the only ﬁnancial support that we could ﬁnd. Today, of course, it is very different. It sounds brutal, but that was reality. So it was not because we were interested in Japanese conceptual art; it was pure pragmatism.

Today, many institutions in China have a lot of funding—even more than institutions formerly had in the West. But in essence this looking to the West has not changed. Although Chinese institutions are probably equal on an economical level with many institutions around the world, they still think that they are inferior in terms of the cultural ﬁeld. So they try to do everything and anything in order to enter the power structure that is typiﬁed by the so-called West. So in essence, nothing has changed.

Biljana Ciric: So, basically all the work I have done related to Southeast Asia is useless?

Shi Yong: Not necessarily. From today’s perspective, it might seem to have little inﬂuence, but the future is not something that we can predict. It is same if you look at our Fax Exhibition of 1996. It didn’t seem important back then. We almost threw away all contributions to the exhibition. But looking back at it today, we understand it as an important project.

Luke Willis Thompson: I guess the point I wanted to make earlier, going back to the metaphor of the construction site, was that from my research here in Shanghai, the “white cube” interjected into whatever the construction site was going to transform into. The white cube interrupted

Vol. 14 No. 4 25 this transformation. There is a kind of directionality that was interrupted. Reﬂecting on this, if the exchange of ideas, and of dialogue, and the kinds of inference that build an artistic scene move West because of the money, what is that same money doing to the ideas aside from the commodiﬁcation of discourse? What happens to the source codes of conceptual work when it travels? Where do you think this will end up?

Shi Yong: You are right. Interruption occurred very violently. You can look at, for example, after 2004, when people who used to do installation started painting. You then realize the power of the market. It is hard to talk about the idea of persistence in the 1990s because there was no market—there was no monetary value to the things we did—but having the market as a force now means that to do what you want to do actually requires persistence.

Regarding money and how it inﬂuences ideas, some artists didn’t have inﬂuences, but speaking for my and Zhou Tiehai’s practices, we both had an interest in discussing art politics with the West throughout our work, so that was important for us. So, for example, my work New Image of Shanghai (2000) today is actually referring to this. You give me a visa, and I provide a performance for you.

About your last question . . . it is hard to say where conceptual art will end up. It is an open-ended question. But what we do know is that the West is still the centre. That is the current state of affairs, but it might change as well.

If Chinese artists are given a choice between taking part in the best exhibition in China or in an important show in West, every one of them will take part in the show in the West. So the power of speech is still in the West. Of course, the world changes every day, but so far this is the status quo. Do you feel disappointed hearing all this [question to Luke]?

Luke Willis Thompson: I don’t feel disappointed. We all know in what direction capital flows. But we need to object to that flow, even if it is just in the small field that we are part of. Or should we ask: Is this the most interesting art world that can be imagined?

Anyway, we are sketching this idea of the West in very simple terms. I have lived in many different places around the world that are arguably Western. I am attracted to the places that are other within these Western cities. Every city is composed of places of difference. Should our practices have some responsibilities and urgencies that don’t run along the same lines as capital?

Lets think about the status of the object, art, and culture that arises from these moments when things remain unequal. Let’s say that these objects of culture produced are the future for whatever the ﬁeld of art could be after it survives our current milieu. At some point, we need to ask: How does it rupture itself? How does it get out of line? That is radical work for me.

26 Vol. 14 No. 4 Or let’s put it in a different way. Why are we doing this? Is this archive sold in advance [referring to A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006]? Why preserve everything?

Biljana Ciric: Compiling an archive of artist-organized exhibitions in Shanghai is actually a learning process for me as a curator. Years back I discussed with a few local museums the idea of sharing this archive with them. They would need to continue archiving after I stopped. But no institution was ready for it, or they didn’t see the importance of it.

Luke Willis Thompson: You are working on an archive, you made an archive, but there needs to be a bug in it. It needs to kick back. How do you dig this archive out of the grave?

Biljana Ciric: Of course. That was whole idea of the exhibition Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room. I wasn’t satisfied with only making what is accessible to Asia Art Archive and publishing a book, as it is a grave that I am digging while I am building it. I was very much aware of that. I think this exhibition that we have been working on together was also an attempt to find a way to reactivate the idea of an archive, asking whether there is someone else interested in these materials besides me, and taking some kind of responsibility for making it visible. It was also my strategy in working with local and foreign artists; I knew that many local artists would have a problem relating to archival material in order to revisit it and turn it into their own work. At the same time, I think that the archive has many interesting points that can be shared, not only within China or Asia, but also globally. I was trying to find out whether we still have anything else in common besides capitalist flow and its mode of exchange. This was my attempt to give the archive life, to expand its life, and, actually, many collaborations and artists’ research projects started to develop for this exhibition through the archive.

Shi Yong: Yes, you dug a grave a long time ago, but you didn’t bury the archive.

Vol. 14 No. 4 27 Voon Pow Bartlett Two Chinese Artists at Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society, 1915–2015 Whitechapel Gallery, London, January 15–April 6, 2015

dventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society, 1915– Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art 2015, which opened to the public on January 15, 2015, at the and Society, 1915–2015, installation view at Whitechapel Gallery, London, was described in the Whitechapel Whitechapel Gallery, 2015. A Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery press release as a “A major new exhibition tracing a century of Gallery, London. Abstract art from 1915 to today.”1 The aim of the exhibition was to take “a fresh look” at the relationship between art and society and politics, shedding new light on the evolution of geometric abstraction. The more than one hundred works by eighty modern and contemporary artists, some household names, spanned countries and continents starting from Russia, with Kazimir Malevich—no surprise since Black and White. Suprematist Composition (1915) turns one hundred this year. Other well-known names included Alexander Rodchenko, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Rosemarie Trockel, Theo Van Doesburg, and Piet Mondrian. Taking over most of the gallery, the exhibition depicts for us, on two ﬂoors, the rise of Constructivist art from its revolutionary beginnings among the avant-garde in Russia and Europe through to 2015 in other parts of the world, including China, the Middle East, and South America.

28 Vol. 14 No. 4 Left: Kazimir Malevich, Black and White. Suprematist Composition, 1915, oil on canvas, 80 x 80 cm. Collection of Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Donation from Bengt and Jelena Jangfeldt, 2004. Right: Dan Flavin, ‘Monument ‘ for V. Tatlin, 1966–69, ﬂuorescent tubes and metal, 305.4 x 58.4 x 8.9 cm. © 2014 Stephen Flavin/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Tate Collection: Purchased 1971.

For the curator, Iwona Blazwick, Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, abstraction was “the promontory onto the horizon of progress. Its very blankness represented the exhilarating void of the unknown and a springboard for the imagining of new tomorrows.”2 Based on the early premise of geometric abstraction proposing a connection with “new models of social organization,” the press release explained that the exhibition is grouped under four themes, as follows: 1) “Utopia,” which imagines a new ideal society that transcends hierarchy and class, 2) “Architectonics,” which looks at how abstraction can underpin socially transformative spaces, 3) “Communication,” which examines the possibilities of abstraction for mobilizing radical change, and 4) “The Everyday,” which follows the way abstract art ﬁlters into all aspects of visual culture, from corporate logos to textile design.3

Adventures of the Black I will begin with a quick appraisal Square: Abstract Art and Society, 1915–2015, of the reviews and premise of the installation view at Whitechapel Gallery, 2015. exhibition, followed by a more Courtesy of Whitechapel in-depth discussion of the two Gallery, London. Chinese artists who were included. There was a general consensus in the reviews on the versatility of geometric shapes. Alastair Smart, writing for The Telegraph, noted that “[t]he exhibition demonstrated the remarkable creativity in abstraction employed by artists in the last one hundred years, based on simple shapes of squares and circles, triangles and oblongs,” and Time Out, “a geometric show that isn’t square.” Others were derisive, claiming that the show presented “art that aimed to change the world . . . [and that was] big on revolutionary ways . . . rather than ways of seeing”; the Guardian’s Laura

Vol. 14 No. 4 29 Cumming noted that “Malevich opened the show without context, without mention of its original roots in Cubism and the destructions of the First World War.”4

The exhibition’s essential premise is that the past century has been the most democratic in human history and was well served by abstraction, the most democratic genre in art history. However, while this may be so, the fact that the selection process was not transparently democratic came under fire. Cumming lamented the exclusion of some of the more notable abstract artists: “Some of our most cherished living artists, Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, Robert Mangold, Ellsworth Kelly—are abstract painters, after all. But go to the Whitechapel Gallery’s survey of abstraction and you won’t find a single one of them in this massive show.”5 My guess is that another premise for selection could be the Whitechapel Gallery’s history in identifying artists who represented “firsts.” Among them are Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, displayed at the Whitechapel in 1939, its first and only visit to Britain; the first major show in Britain of American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, in 1958; and the first shows of David Hockney, Gilbert & George, and Richard Long, in 1970 and 1971. As for those included in the current show, various other “firsts” were being lauded; Saloua Raouda Choucair, for example, who was producing abstract art in the 1940s, is considered the first contemporary abstract painter in the Arab world; Rasheed Araeen, who is the first Pakistani artist working with modular metal units in Britain; and Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, whose first solo show in London was at the Whitechapel in 1969.

Even more bafﬂing about the selection process, for me, was the inclusion of two Chinese artists who came from a background entirely removed from the art movements that contributed to the development of abstract art. It may be that Zhao Yao and Liu Wei, along with Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi and Czech artist Bela Kolarova, made up for other gaps in the

30 Vol. 14 No. 4 Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society, 1915–2015, installation view at Whitechapel Gallery, 2015. Left: Zhao Yao, Spirit Above All 1–93A, 2012. Right: Liu Wei, Purple Air, 2014. Courtesy of Whitechapel Gallery, London.

wider global arena, such as postwar abstraction in Japan and Korea, or, indeed, the abstraction inherent in the geometric patterns of Islamic art.

A plausible although unpalatable reason would be the exchange value of such art. It may be that for all the idealism initially associated with geometric abstraction, in recent times it has been co-opted by big business. This is echoed by the Telegraph’s Alastair Smart, “This show’s story may begin in the dizzy throes of early twentieth century Communism, but it surely ends in the remorseless clutches of twenty-ﬁrst century capitalism.”6 With the recent commercial success of contemporary Chinese art, it is not too much of a stretch in imagination, then, to understand why Liu Wei and Zhao Yao might have been included in the exhibition. Already, or concidentally, denim, used by Zhao Yao in his artwork, is once again big in the clothing shops this spring. One may even conjecture that this meeting of art and the fashion business is reminiscent of Bridget Riley and her contribution to the printed patterns used in fashion during the swinging sixties. A catalogue entry conﬁrms this: “[D]enim, . . . a material idealized for proletarian durability in the West, is a reminder of 1980s Chinese fashion.”7

But what is the context of abstraction for Chinese artists? Abstraction in the twenty-ﬁrst century offers more than commercial possibilities to younger Chinese artists such as Zhao Yao and Liu Wei. It can constitute a wholehearted embrace of the new, the liberating, and the exciting, just as it did for Malevich and his contemporaries before the Soviet government enforced Socialist Realism as ofﬁcial policy in 1934. Abstraction can also offer a new theoretical framework and language, and a welcome split from the past—a voluntary forgetting, “an art of willful amnesia.”8

Abstraction has a long history in China going back to its ban by the Chinese government in 1949 for its decadent capitalist connotations.9 Arising from

Vol. 14 No. 4 31 the Constructivist and Suprematist remits, abstraction holds a particular resonance for Chinese artists as they share a common root in its impulse for social change, one that is idealistic and revolutionary. With the ideologies of revolutionary utilitarianism during the Mao era still lingering, Chinese artists would probably not have difﬁculty relating to the early Russian paintings in the show, which demonstrate how artists were then able to break free of old conventions.

Malevich’s Black Quadrilateral, undated, is clearly the lynchpin of the show, signaling his sky-high claims for abstraction, maintaining that it would break its earthly bonds and rise into a stratosphere of the spirit: “Follow me, comrade aviators, sail into the chasm!”10 It can also represent a way of escaping the oppressive regime of the West, as exemplified by the great pioneer Latin American artists who fled from the residue of figurative traditions imposed upon them by their Catholic colonizers from Europe— think, for example, of the work of Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, and other members of the Brazilian neo-concretist movement of the late 1950s. For Chinese artists, abstraction also was a way to reject traditional art practices, a promontory to progress and an emblem of the Chinese Dream,11 a bid to wipe away the old order and start society anew. According to Blazwick, it “accustom(ed) painters to the new vision disengaged from objects . . . created an immense co-fraternity . . . cutting across the barriers of time and place . . . available on a single unhistorical and universal plane.”12

Zhao Yao, Spirit Above All 1–193A, 2012, acrylic on denim, 200 x 222 x 8 cm. © Zhao Yao. Courtesy of Pace London.

Zhao Yao’s work at the Whitechapel belongs to a series that was ﬁrst exhibited in London in 2013 at Pace Gallery. It looks like a handbook of geometric abstraction, the canvases being made up of “circles combined with triangles to look like rabbit ears, circles on squares, cuboids that look like square rooms placed on their sides and some on their oblique sides,

32 Vol. 14 No. 4 Lyubov Popova, Painterly with their roofs sliced off. . . . Architectonic, 1916, oil on board, 59.4 x 39.4 Pentagons, octagons, parallelograms, cm. Courtesy of Scottish 13 National Gallery of Modern and intersecting rings. . . .” His Art, Edinburgh. attraction to abstraction may have been derived from his obsession with mathematical puzzles.14 His seemingly mathematical constructions harken back to the days of the New Measurement Group in China in the 1990s, who “aimed at eliminating individuality and the arbitrary” to create work “based on series of mathematically formulated propositions.”15 This power of logic derived from mathematics echoes the incessant references to the machine aesthetic that can be seen in Malevich’s Scissors Grinder (1912) and Lyubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonic, (1916), and in Zhao Yao’s work such references can be seen in Spirit Above All I-93A (2012), with its cuboids, and Spirit Above All I-259 (2012), with its black circles recalling El Lissitzky’s Proun Composition (1925). Perhaps Zhao Yao is intentionally, or unwittingly, celebrating or challenging an aesthetic in China’s “Unﬁnished Revolution.”16 Or perhaps he is being cynical, as Robert Delaunay was, who was celebrating not so much the machine aesthetic, but who, according to Robert Hughes, while basking in the jubilation of modernity’s achievements in 1911 painted the Eiffel Tower thirty times, or perhaps Zhao Yao was trying to access the awe and antipathy of Ferdinand Leger’s Cardplayers (1917) after World War One.17

As far as Zhao Yao is concerned, every piece of his work entails a collaborative effort with his audience. He contends that it is important to him to acknowledge their presence, to show a desire to communicate, and to extend hospitality. He explained that some of his work is akin to TV soap operas and their relationship with their audiences: “I compare my recent work to a TV soap.”18

Zhao Yaos work also seems to embody a shared desire with the Constructivist movement to involve the audience. Viktor Shklovsky (1893– 1984), a Russian and Soviet literary theorist, critic, and writer, wanted to “de-automatize” the perceptions of the audience, to encourage the audience to learn about life through art through developing the skills of perception by making things that seem familiar to us unfamiliar. Zhao Yao’s provision of straw mats and albums of documentary photography at the Pace Gallery, London (showing his artworks being taken up a Tibetan mountain strewn round the gallery ﬂoor) is an indication of his desire to encourage learning through art, to invoke a more considered approach from his audience rather than the mere glance that most audiences give to artworks as they shufﬂe through the gallery.

Vol. 14 No. 4 33 34 Vol. 14 No. 4 Vol. 14 No. 4 35 Previous page and left: Zhao Yao, installation view of Spirit Above All, 2012. Photo: Stephen White. © Zhao Yao. Courtesy of Pace London.

This active engagement with the viewers may also be a legacy of earlier Chinese artists who shared a concern for art to have a social purpose or to turn making art into a social project. Revolutionary artists of the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in Yan’an during the 1930s, such as woodcarvers Gu Yuan, interacted with rural communities and invited them to critique their art. During the 1980s, Rustic Realism in China, which was first referred to as Scar Art, depicted the impact of the Cultural Revolution on ordinary people in rural and border regions. Luo Zhongli’s painting Father (1980) is an influential example, shifting the focus of attention from celebrities and state figures to the common people, elevating an ordinary sunburned peasant as the subject of art. Today, there are some Chinese artists who take agency from communality, which ironically harks back to the Mao days. In terms of today, Zhao Yao is not alone in advancing a form of participatory art, and in collapsing the boundary between art and life. Ai Weiwei famously lives his life performatively in our media driven age, Zhang Peili’s work is full of provocations, Xu Zhen’s irreverence sits interestingly next to Zheng Guogu’s sensitivity, and so on.

This social tendency may provide yet another reason for Zhao Yao’s inclusion in Adventures of the Black Square as part of the premise of the exhibition was that “contemporary artists still experiment and challenge ideas of representation and reality, influenced by society and the evolving world around them.”19 This was also exemplified by the inclusion of Sarah Morris’s 2008 film Beijing, 2008, a depiction of everyday life in Beijing even though the only presence of geometric forms in the imagery were Chinese flags flying in the background. Blazwick clearly demonstrated unmitigated support for the social function of abstraction and suggested that, freed from the conventions of display, from representation and genres, “abstraction became an aesthetic analogue for dissolving social and political hierarchies’ and can reach even into life. . . .”20

It is interesting that both Malevich and Zhao Yao were each in some way drawn to the mystical and to expressing in art spiritual reality beyond the

36 Vol. 14 No. 4 physical. For Malevich, the pinnacle of abstraction can be reached through the inﬁnite, the spiritual, God, and the “supremacy of pure feeling.” For Zhao Yao, empirical exercises in the exploration of abstraction make possible access to the spiritual realm—something he hopes to achieve by observing, recording, condensing, and conceptualizing his journey with the artworks up a Tibetan mountain. In Spirit Above All 1-93A (2012), there is an element of the coalescing of the geometric and the transcendental in a hexagonal shaped canvas printed over with geometric shapes and hung in the middle of a wall papered with a photograph depicting the landscape of a Tibetan mountain. Claiming to be non-religious, Zhao Yao is nonetheless impressed by the Tibetan people and the way they systemize their pilgrimage to Lhasa, the “place of Gods,” so much so that he organized the artworks to be carried in a difﬁcult and treacherous trek (for both humans and artwork) up the Tibetan mountain to be blessed by a “Living Buddha,” a reincarnation of a previous Buddha according to Buddhist religious doctrine.

Liu Wei, Purple Air No. 2, 2014, oil on canvas, 260 x 260 cm. © Liu Wei. Courtesy of White Cube, London.

If Adventures of the Black Square is the birthday party to Malevich’s Black Square, then Liu Wei may be a gatecrasher. Liu Wei’s work in the exhibition, Purple Air No. 2 (2014), is almost exactly antithetical to Malevich’s. The former is hard-edged, machine-made, and ﬂuorescent, and the latter, judging from Black and White. Suprematist Composition, 1915, in this show, is fragile, imprecise, and hand-painted. One has the precision of geometry, which is where the others falter. Liu Wei’s is impenetrable, while Malevich’s seem to have grown old gracefully, —their original black and white edges seeping into each other as if by osmosis.21 Liu Wei’s painting seems static, impermeable and lacking in dynamism, yet declamatory. Purple, pink, green, and blue emerge jarringly. To me, the translucency and luminescence of Purple Air No. 2 coexist in lurid disharmony. The sensory experience of

Vol. 14 No. 4 37 attempting to study this squabble of colours is disrupted by the effect of what seems like a cascade of stroboscopic and ﬂashing lights emitting from the painting.

For me, however, Liu Wei’s strength lies in the diversity of his work. Many Chinese artists have earned a permanent place in recent art history through the instant recognizability of their work. Not so Liu Wei, for whom familiarity seems banal and originality is key. There exists almost a gulf of irreconcilable differences within his work, for example, between Purple Air No. 2, at the Whitechapel and earlier works such as Indigestion II (2004), a two-metre high pile of excrement made of tar—one of the petrochemical industry’s residual products—or Love it! Bite it! (2006), made of edible rawhide bone treats for dogs. Looking at Liu Wei’s overall oeuvre, there is no suggestion that abstraction is a customary way of thinking for him, even if his work in Adventures of the Black Square may.

Although lacking Zhao Yao’s overt Liu Wei, Indigestion II (detail), 2004, installation. references to working with the Courtesy of the artist. audience and connecting with Tibet, some of Liu Wei’s disparate works nonetheless carry a form of social commentary, albeit on an acerbic level. Indigestion II is an exploration Liu Wei, Indigestion II, 2004, of contemporary urban life and the installation. Courtesy of the artist. architecture of the city. It is beset with satire and humour. The idea for the work originates, according to the artist, “from a picture of a giant that has gobbled up everything that crossed his path and who has excreted it all again just before the visitor passes by. If you take a good look at the excrement, it turns out that not everything he so greedily swallowed was digestible. The indigestible leftovers compose a miniature war scene.”22 Indeed, upon closer inspection one can see that the indigestible “kernels” of the excrement are actually hundreds of toy soldiers, airplanes, and instruments of war. It is a wry statement on some developed countries that have grown fat with progress, yet are plagued with war, human greed, and the unsustainability of today’s consumption. In Love it! Bite it!, the ﬂoor becomes a congested conglomeration of architectural models of iconic stature, such as the Roman Coliseum and the Guggenheim museum, as well as other large, majestic-looking public spaces, towering buildings, and cathedrals. The work reads like a three-dimensional history of Western culture condensed into pale, ghostlike detritus.

38 Vol. 14 No. 4 Liu Wei, Love It! Bite It!, Similarly, although not immediately apparent, Purple Air No. 2 is also 2006, installation. Courtesy of the artist. social commentary, the stylized skyscraper cityscapes alluding to urban development. According to the Whitechapel catalogue entry, “a complex abstract grid of vertical lines in neon colours reference the ever-changing urban landscape and the alienation and corruption of the individual in a megalopolis.”23 Liu Wei has been quoted as saying, “Cities are reality; all of China is a city under construction, and of course this inﬂuences me.”24

This is perhaps why Liu Wei’s work has been included in the section titled “Architectonics,” which aims to track the effects of industrialization and urbanization. We are given a glimpse into how abstraction enables and facilitates emotional and psychological outlets. Even if for some in the Chinese art world, abstract art (chouxiang yishu) in the twentieth century Western sense does not exist at all, 25 it nonetheless is a useful tool for Chinese artists who are living in the midst of the tumultuous energy and ebullience that has unraveled over the last two decades. The emphasis that has been placed on the revolutionary roots of abstraction resonates with the idea of revolution in social and political practices in today’s China, and in the contradictory and fractured nature of her “alternative modernity.” As abstraction holds up an Adorno-esque mirror to the growing abstraction of social relations in industrial societies,26 it is useful to be able to deliberate upon its social content, the abstract nature of social existence in China as it collides with the world in the process of globalization and as money and power take precedence over older social values.

It is also clear from the extensive array of work on display that abstraction offers artists the potential to play with meaning, even to resist meaning and interpretation. According to Blazwick, geometric abstraction enables artists and their communities to “throw off cultural baggage, to reinvent national

Vol. 14 No. 4 39 identity, and transcend the geopolitics of centre versus margin,” to achieve a “truer vision of reality.”27 To be fair, none of the paintings in the Whitechapel exhibition evoke the uproar or mental turmoil that Malevich’s Black Square did to the St. Petersburg public when it was ﬁrst exhibited in 1915.28 Still, the irony is that even though the state of abstraction seems to have lost its revolutionary impulse and is increasingly used to describe a dystopian present, contemporary artists are still exploring its protean, multivalent character to propose it as an avenue for hope, if not utopia. In fact, geometric abstraction at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century seems to offer a meta-critique of its own paradoxical history, yet “it still holds out the promise of the indeterminate, the unknown and the political. . . . [C]ritics cannot easily dominate the blankness of monochrome. It is a wild card, an active unconscious.”29

The indeterminable nature of abstraction may be the attraction to Chinese artists, providing the scope to ameliorate the mood of disenchantment in China that Geremie R. Barmé refers to as “national nihilism,” and which some believe, cannot even be addressed by “craven pragmatism and opportunism.”30 This presumed deplorable state of nothingness, indicted with the term “national nihilism,” is denied any entendre of philosophical skepticism or scrutiny of the impossibility of absolute cultural translation, or an interrogation of corporate diversion.37 “National nihilism” denies and challenges discursive possibilities for artistic practices to examine the development of distinctive economic models in relation to the operation of the social, and the relationship between history and the contemporary. What is at stake is the lack of a discursive space to interrogate such contradictions and misinterpretation.

The idea of nihilism is useful in understanding Zhao Yao’s work at the Whitechapel. On the one hand, he seems pretty amicable as an artist and that perhaps weakens the work to the point of irresolution. His artworks and installations do not appear to be guided by any form or logic. In fact, Zhao Yao himself revealed at an online interview with the author (January 31, 2013) that there is no social signiﬁcance or spiritual relationship in his installations; rather, they are merely an experiment to see how the different elements interact with each other, and with the audience. The geometric patterns created for brainteaser puzzles are to do with his desire to discover more about art and its relation with the audience. On the other hand, with art not from the mainstream, there is always an element of the impossibility of absolute translation, one of multiplicity of cultural references, and of course the enigma of art (the second scenario is too large a topic and not part of the remit of this article). From the transcultural perspective, nihilism is not necessarily clad with barbwire. Certainly, connoting Nietzschean existential angst can easily come to mind, but equally nihilism can also connote Eastern perspectives such as Buddhist doctrine of inaction and Nirvana or a Daoist emptiness and spontaneity, which can be afﬁrmative.31 Buddhism shares a nihilistic turning away from life and can be understood as a life-negating philosophy that seeks to escape an existence dominated by suffering, and for some it is their preferred religion. The ‘wu’ (nothingness) is an aspect of Daoism and can connote positively one who has freed oneself from all obstructing notions and distracting passions.

40 Vol. 14 No. 4 Zhao Yao’s attempt at attaining a truer vision of reality, may not be to throw off his cultural baggage, as Blazwick suggested as one aspect of abstraction.32 Instead, he references Buddhism through Tibet, and in his view, this inclusion is to bring into the work some external factor that may potentialize meaning or layers of meaning, or to bring into question what lies beneath its formal qualities and symbolic meaning.33 This comes full circle to reference nihilism as something not negative or adverse, not as a no-thing but as a positive effort. In combining geometric abstraction with a Tibetan Buddhist scene, he is setting up an inquiry of preconceived ideas of the norm, of other possible interpretations of religious and philosophical ideas, just as Malevich did with his exploitation of the suprematist work as “ﬁlled with the spirit of non-objective sensation.”

Liu Wei, on the other hand, is not known to reveal much about himself or the intent of his work. Instead, it is thought by Xhingyu Chen, writing in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art that he would prefer to challenge the audience to consider their relationship to art and to aspire to experience ﬁrst hand the power of art, even if through mundane, everyday situations.34 Choosing titles like Enigma and Puzzle only add to this inscrutability. However, according to Liu Wei himself, the cause for his reticence is about being misunderstood or misrepresented. “I’m really perplexed by the discrepancy between what I set out to express and what gets expressed in the end. This explains why I don’t write anymore and why I’m reluctant to grant interviews.”35 Whitechapel has presented him as suitably taciturn, that his work is about the democratization of meaning, quoting him that “having something (in a space) is extremely physical, something you can feel. I am only the intermediary, to provoke thought. This is democratic, but if I start providing explanations, I become an entity of power, hegemonic power.”36

The incorporation of the philosophical, the spiritual, and the presentation of perceptions of human qualities have existed in China since ancient times in the literati landscape—its garden culture and calligraphy. This underpinning of Chinese art is described by Wu Guanzhong as “abstract beauty, no subject, just form.”37 The interrogation of utopia resonates with the idealism of the Chinese Dream as part of the national yearning or a paradisical dreamland. According to the Chinese online dictionary, Chindict, the Chinese translation of utopia is 世外桃花源 (shiwai taoyuan), also referred to variously as “The Land of Peach Blossoms,” “The Garden of the Peaches of Immortality,” “imaginary land of joy and plenty,” and “Shangri-la.” Abstraction provides an interesting platform for Chinese artists, seeking their particular Chinese dream and carrying on the Unﬁnished Revolution. It allows for artists to free themselves from the bourgeious cult of the artist, albeit ironically transforming them into slaves to the institutionalization of art.

Abstraction lends itself to an interrogation of utopia, where, according to Blazwick, “Its ﬂoating, spatial dynamic made abstraction an analogue for Utopia as ‘no-place’.” 38 It allows for the parodying of the dystopian turn of a brave new world. For the Chinese government during the Anti-Spiritual

Vol. 14 No. 4 41 Pollution Campaign of 1983, this “no-place” is where abstraction inhabited the role of decadent bourgeois ideas.39

If anything, the works by Zhao Yao and Liu Wei in Adventures of the Black Square demonstrate the perspicacity of many Chinese artists, not as imitators, but as artists imposing an almost Machiavellian boldness to probe abstraction’s intellectual potential, to negotiate and interrogate meaning for an international audience, creatively and adaptably. What I would like to see is for this potential to be inclusive, not just for the international platforms and marketplace, but for there to be a discursive space for the construction of meaning from the local viewpoint. In the ﬁnal analysis, abstract art demonstrates the capacity to enable and inform during this period of accelerated confusion—of antipathy, ambivalence, nostalgia mixed with forgetting, censorship and self censorship—if not from traditions, prejudices, or ofﬁcialdom, then from the traumas of the recent past. The machine aesthetic encompasses agency, but also a dystopic potential to reduce artists to what Blazwick describes as “obedient apparatchiks or production line robots”40 More positively, I would like to think of this to lead to a new glocal relational, by that I mean art interacting with its social context in the local and the global, coming full circle to circumnavigate China’s venerable, age-old social values of guanxi.

Notes

1. "Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society, 1915–2015," press release, Whitechapel Gallery, January 2015, http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/about/press/adventures-black-square- abstract-art-society-1915-2015/. 2. Iwona Blazwick, “Utopia,” in Adventures of the Black Square, ed. Iwona Blazwick (London: Whitechapel Gallery and Prestel Publishing, 2015), 15. 3. "Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society, 1915–2015," press release, Whitechapel Gallery, January 2015. 4. Alastair Smart, “Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015, Whitechapel Gallery, review: ‘A journey worth taking’,” Telegraph, January 14, 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/11344507/ Abstract-Art-and-Society-1915-2015-Whitechapel-Gallery-review-a-journey-worth-taking.html/. The Bottom Line, ed. Martin Coomer, “Adventures of the Black Square,” Time Out, January 27–February 2, 2015, 73. Laura Cumming, “Adventures of the Black Square review- art that aimed to change the world,” Guardian, January 18, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jan/18/ adventures-of-the-black-square-review-whitechapel-abstract-art-that-aimed-to-change-the-world/. 5. Cumming, “Adventures of the Black Square review—art that aimed to change the world.” 6. Smart, “Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015.” 7. Catalogue entry for Zhao Yao in Blazwick, Adventures of the Black Square, 276. 8. Blazwick, “Utopia,” 17. Blazwick quotes art historian Benjamin Buchloh’s description of what abstraction was able to offer in the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe. 9. Michael Sullivan, “Orthodoxy and Individualism in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art,” in Artists and Traditions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 202. “The ban in China since 1949 on abstract expressionism, op art, kinetic art, minimal art etc., was not instituted on stylistic grounds. For example, theorists have said that China has no need of abstraction not on formalistic grounds but that abstraction was related to decadent capitalist culture but because China ‘already has, in calligraphy, a highly abstract art of her own’.” 10. Cumming quoting Kazimir Malevich, “Adventures of the Black Square review.” 11. The Chinese dream is popularly associated with Xi Jinping; it was his party slogan during his visit to the National Musem of China in November 2012 and frequently appears in the press. 12. Iwona Blazwick, “Utopia,” 15. Blazwick quotes critic and art historian Meyer Schapiro. 13. Voon Pow Bartlett, “Zhao Yao: Spirit Above All,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 12, no. 4 (July/August 2013), 77–86. 14. Zhao Yao, in conversation with the author, May 31, 2013. 15. Wu Hung, Chinese Art at the Crossroads (London: New Arts Media, 2001), 206. 16. “China’s Unﬁnished Revolution” is the title of a talk given by Jonathan Fenby on April 30, 2013, that the author attended, at King’s College, London. The speaker assessed the challenges facing China today and considered what the next generation of leaders will need to do to continue the revolution set in motion by Deng Xioaping. “But the basic line remains as it was with Deng Xiaoping in 1978 to

42 Vol. 14 No. 4 keep the red flag flying and to ensure that politics runs the world’s second biggest economy,” he said. Transcription of talk by Jonathan Fenby, http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/papers/ view/183657#sthash.bLSDNH2g.dpuf/. 17. Robert Hughes, “Mechanical Paradise,” in The Shock of the New (Thames and Hudson, London, 1992), 9. 18. English translation by the author of an interview with the artist (May 31, 2013), in which he said, “我把我最近的创作作比作电视剧.” 19. "Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society, 1915–2015," press release, Whitechapel Gallery, January 2015. 20. Blazwick, “Utopia,” 15. 21. As Adrian Searle puts it, “Malevich’s Black Square was made by a human, not a machine. Other artists in Adventures of the Black Square, the new exhibition at the Whitechapel, might draw straighter lines, disguise their touch and achieve more accurate geometries, but it doesn’t make them better.” See Adrian Searle, “Planet of the shapes: how art and society were driven to abstraction,” Guardian, January 14, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/ jan/14/abstract-art-adventures-of-the-black-square-whitechapel-review-planet-of-the-shapes/. “Malevich’s legacy and its 'hard-edged blackness' has become metaphorical. Time has taken its toll but has graced it with a beauty that even he might not have imagined. The black edges seemed to have liquefied into the white background, and the white background has developed a delicious buttery shade, making the whole painting shimmer.” 22. “Liu Wei,” Saatchi Gallery, http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/liu_wei.htm/. 23. Catalogue entry for Liu Wei, in Adventures of the Black Square, 271. 24. Guo Xiaoyan, “Liu Wei,” in Breaking Forecast: 8 Key Figures of China’s New Generation Artists, eds. Guo Xiaoyan, Jerôme Sans (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2010). 25. Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-century Chinese Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 311: “Paintings by Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Newman which were made in a utopian and abstract spirit and presented in pure, two-dimensional, geometric forms, can hardly be found in Chinese abstract art.” 26. Henry Geldzahler, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, 1969), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_art#cite/. 27. Blazwick, “Utopia,” 16. 28. Maks Karpovets, “Kazimir Malevich: the Ukrainian roots of his avant-garde art,” December 27, 2011, Time Out, no. 76, 2011, (this link can be found on http://www.day.kiev.ua/en/arhiv/no76-2011)/, http://www.day.kiev.ua/en/article/time-out/kazimir-malevich-ukrainian-roots-his-avant-garde-art, January , 2015. According to the article, Malevich’s Black Square presented a challenge to common sense and morals. “For Petersburg (sic) public, the avant-garde exhibit was a challenge to common sense and morals. The audience felt fooled, seeing the primitivism and vulgarity of the canvases which were an overt mockery of the visitors’ intellectual abilities.” 29. Blazwick, “Utopia,” 18. Blazwick quotes Angeline Morrison. 30. Geremie R. Barmé, In The Red (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 104, n14, 413. According to Barmé, "National Nihilism," 民族虚无主义minzhu xuwu zhuyi, has become one of China’s bugbears, a form of cultural treason. 31. Nietzsche’s idea of nihilism is often misunderstood as agnostic and suggesting an abyss of nothingness. Many scholars believe that he was actually an affirmative thinker, one who endorsed moral values and our capacity to create our own moral compass. He also saw in humanity the potential to overcome the malaise of modernity in late-nineteenth-century Europe; see Warren Hyson, "Loughner'sTerrible Violence and his Misunderstanding of Nietzsche," January 17, 2011, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/135404/ and Wayne Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 34. 32. Blazwick, “Utopia,” 16. 33. Zhao Yao, e-mail conversation between author and the artist, August 5, 2014.

34. Xhingyu Chen, “Liu Wei: Trilogy,” in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, No. 5 (September/ October 2011), 91–98. 35. “The Return of the Individual: A Home Conversation at the Beijing Pavilion,” November 4, 2007, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 7, no. 3 (May/June 2008), 70–77. 36. Iwona Blazwick and Magnus af Petersens, “Architectonics,” in Adventures of the Black Square, 61. 37. Quoted in Gao Minglu, Total Modernity, 81. 38. Blazwick, “Utopia,” 16. 39. Gao Minglu, Total Modernity, 80. 40. Blazwick, “Utopia,” 16.

Vol. 14 No. 4 43 Danielle Shang Urban Politics: Urbanization and Liu Wei’s Art

n this essay, I will investigate how the city of Beijing, its urban Map of Beijing showing areas of informal transformation, and the discourse of art globalization have shaped settlements, SinoMaps Press. Iartist Liu Wei’s vision and affected his art making. His art objects made from mutilated consumers’ products, his monumental structures built with discarded building elements, and his cognitive cityscape paintings articulate the phenomena of China’s urban gentrification, rural reterritorialization, consumerism, state capitalism, massive population migration, and restructuring of social class. I will also take a close look at his studio in an informal squatter community on the periphery of Beijing where he hires migrant peasant workers to execute his works, and, by extension, constructs a self-efficient and hybrid ecological fabric to prosper in the unofficial economy.

Beijing’s City Planning and Urban Transformation An imperial city for a thousand years, Beijing from its inception was meticulously planned and built with its ideological, symbolic, and ceremonial purposes embedded in its architecture and layout, reflecting the Chinese canonical prescription for a royal city built according to a perfect grid plan, with the imperial palace positioned in the centre. Significant edifices within the city all had their gates face south and were typically taller than other buildings to reinforce a hierarchical arrangement of space.

44 Vol. 14 No. 4 In 1949, when the Communist Party relocated the capital back to Beijing, the Soviet Union imposed a new plan of the city based on the spatial ideology of Moscow. The plan was implemented in 1953 with a strong emphasis on developing Beijing into a strong industrial centre. Manufacturing compounds and workshops mushroomed. What also emerged from the newly reconstructed cityscape was Stalinist high- rise architecture in the style of the Seven Sisters.1 The space outside the Tian’anmen Gate (or Gate of Heavenly Peace) of the Forbidden City was transformed into a bizarre, European-style public square with a tall obelisk commemorating dead soldiers at its centre. This model of urban planning was soon replicated throughout China in big and small cities and towns, often with a statue of Mao replacing the obelisk. In Wing-Shing Tang’s Planning Beijing Strategically: “One World, One Dream,” he argues:

What emerged from the Soviets was the following framework of a plan formulation for Beijing—it must be informed by the national economic plan, concerned with middle-ground issues within a deﬁnite time frame, aided by the political and borrowing from the experience of Moscow. . . . The industrial function of the city in line with the drive for industrialization at the national level was emphasized, but its cultural and historical past were neglected. All these were considered in terms of ﬁnancial cost.2

At the end of the 1970s, China began to integrate itself into the global economy, and Beijing was the locus for ﬂaunting China’s superiority to the world. Three master plans were submitted to the central government in 1982, 1993, and 2005 in a strenuous effort to “mutate”3 Beijing into a global city. When, in 2002, Beijing won the bid for hosting the 2008 Olympics, the race for gentriﬁcation and urban expansion was accelerated at a breakneck pace. The city’s augmentation was marked by the rapidly increasing number of enclosed freeway rings that quickly rippled from the city centre to uncharted hinterlands on the outskirts.

With the Forbidden City at the centre and its wall forming the first ring, the Second Ring Road [completed in 1992] follows the outline of the former city wall and defines the historic inner core with its threatened hutong [alleyway] fabric. The Third and Fourth Ring Road[s] accommodated most of the industrial development and associated housing of the early People’s Republic and [are] today Beijing’s urban motor with its prestigious Central Business District, new “western style” high-rise housing developments and the Olympic Park. The Fifth Ring Road defines the sprawling territory of Beijing’s secret population, the estimated five million migrant workers, while the Sixth Ring Road in contrast connects Beijing’s outer suburbs with its exclusive lush villa compounds.4

Vol. 14 No. 4 45 The avalanche of construction knocked down buildings and street blocks that had stood for centuries to make way for clusters of soaring skyscrapers that promised to pack in the ever-growing population. The heavy industrial plants that were installed under the direction of Moscow have now been removed from the city. Urbanization has been integral to modern China’s economic, social, and, ultimately, political restructuring under the new guidelines of state capitalism, helping to maximize proﬁts and to put Beijing on the world maps of ﬁnance, information technology, politics, consumerism, and entertainment.

Beijing’s urban gentriﬁcation and rural reterritorialization have defamiliarized the city and its social space, fomenting a growing gap between marginalized populations consisting mainly of low-income urban dwellers and migrant peasant workers and the newly emerging bourgeoisie representing the leading sectors of global capital. The uneven spatial renaissance produces a deleterious effect on the disadvantaged; many of them live in colossal squatter settlements outside the Fifth Ring. The squatters’ status of residence is illegitimate or unrecognized at best. As in many informal settlements in the world, construction is unregulated and is not guided by city planning. Infrastructure, public services, and welfare systems are insufﬁcient, although the land is often within a formal jurisdiction. However, unlike the shantytowns of Cape Town or favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Beijing’s informal housing does follow some zoning instructions and building codes to enable postal, Internet, telecommunications, sewage, and utility services. Additionally, the settlements are typically devoid of drug problems, violent crime, contaminating diseases, prostitution, and even vandalism. It is safe enough at night even when there are barely any streetlights after dark. However, with the increasing visibility of uneven wealth distribution, the tension between the rich and the poor is escalating, and the days of relative safety within the informal settlements are numbered.

The current environmental hazards are the dwellers’ immediate concerns. The water is usually contaminated; the soil is sometimes toxic; streets are often littered with mounds of uncovered garbage; and the air is fetid with dust and smoke. Also undermining living conditions in informal settlements are the insufficiencies of garbage removal, gas service, medical service, public transportation, and street lighting. Although austere, chaotic, and heavily polluted, these communities are temporary havens for countless migrant workers, eight-five percent of them between the ages of eighteen and fifty.5 Despite the fact that they seek jobs in the city and take shelter on the urban fringes, they are still rooted in their rural communities at home. Their parents, and sometimes spouses and children, still live in the countryside, where the families own properties and plots of land.

Nezar Al Sayyad calls for updating our analytical toolkit to approach the contemporary processes of informal urban development beyond Latin American models.6 In this spirit, I would like to take a closer look at urbanization in Beijing, paying special attention to the lives of people in

46 Vol. 14 No. 4 the informal settlements to discover, as Louis Wirth puts it, “the forms of social action and organization that emerge among individuals under these conditions of density, heterogeneity, and anonymity.”7 I would argue that patterns of economic decentralization and self-organized networks of informality are imperative for the Chinese “squatters,” especially the ones from the countryside, to complete the ultimate cycle of transformation from rural to urban in a state capitalist economy. The squatter settlements represent a new paradigm for understanding a different but essential urban culture of survival. I also would like to problematize the conventional logic of urban informality, as the informal settlements in Beijing do not simply consist of the activities of the destitute or correspond to a particular status of labour, but also include participation in the global economy by artists who produce artworks there that are then disseminated at prestigious cultural institutions. This decentralized, alternative economic mode of informality affords Chinese artists the opportunity to create works of mammoth scale and with sophisticated technologies but at low cost in order to compete in the international art market. In this sense, informality is not only a means to survive but also a form of catalyst for prosperity.

Liu Wei, AntiMatter–TV, Property of L. W. 2006, mixed media, 52 x 53 x 70 cm. Courtesy of It is against this background of uneven development that Liu Wei emerged the artist. after the seminal exhibition Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies and Delusion (1999), a privately organized underground exhibition, curated by artist Qiu Zhijie and Wu Meichun, held in the basement of a residential building and conceived of as a platform for artists to go against populism and stereotypes in favour of an alternative experience of art making and art viewing. In 2004, Liu Wei rented a small studio and hired a couple of assistants. In another two years, he moved into his current studio in Shijiacun, one of

Vol. 14 No. 4 47 the squatter communities on the northeast fringe of the city beyond the Fifth Ring Road. The village, far from the city centre, is, as Pauline J. Yao puts it, “an embodiment of the destabilizing and disorienting effects of the transition from an agrarian to an industrial and postindustrial economy.”8 Knowing that his studio, together with the informal squatters, could be forced to relocate anytime if the government reterritorializes the land for new developments, Liu Wei has nevertheless built his enterprise in two rows of houses ﬁled along a narrow courtyard.

In 2006, at the zenith of Chinese economic growth and the art market boom, Liu Wei produced the Antimatter series. Antimatter is a scientific term for the binding of antiparticles. Many physicists speculate a mirror universe to ours, one that comprises only matter. When matter and antimatter collide and try to annihilate each other, they produce a formidable destructive power. But the Chinese title fanwuzhi 反物質 is a double entendre that means antimatter as well as anti-materialism, a notion that is opposed to consumerism. Liu Wei appropriates this term as the punning title for a ventilation fan, a TV, a refrigerator and a washing machine that are sawed open, taken apart, and reconfigured with their insides out. The English phrases “antimatter,” “property of L. W.,” “anti-useful,” “anti-design,” “anti- space,” “anti-imagination,” and “anti-anything” are stenciled on each object as his open address to viewers, calling their attention to China’s new reality of inflating and wasteful material consumption.

There is another layer embedded in this series of “antis.” He is gently poking fun at Robert Morris’s infamous “antiform” statement. In his 1968 article “Antiform,” Morris wrote:

Only in the case of object-type art have the forms of the cubic and the rectangular been brought so far forward into the final definition of the work. That is, it stands as a self- sufficient whole shape rather than as a relational element. . . . In object-type art process is not visible. Materials often are. When they are, their reasonableness is usually apparent. Rigid industrial materials go together at right angles with great ease. But it is the a priori valuation of the well-built that dictates the materials. The well-built form of objects preceded any consideration of means. Materials themselves have been limited to those which efficiently make the general object form.9

Liu Wei by no means intends to revisit the plasticity of rectangular industrial materials, but he is enormously interested in the priori quality of materials and their posteriori evaluation. Revealing the process of cutting, composing, assembling, and reconstructing, Liu Wei calls our attention to the mutilated forms of the objects and presents a naked truth of material things that is alienating and unsettling.

In the same year, he extended the idea of reclaiming ownership of objects by stenciling “Property of L. W.” on debris from demolished buildings—

48 Vol. 14 No. 4 Liu Wei, Property of L. W., 2006, stencils on debris. Courtesy of the artist.

evidence of Beijing’s frenzied growth—to create a series of Duchampian readymades entitled Property of L. W. (2006). Economic growth is fueled by producing, consuming, and ultimately wasting increased quantities of products and materials so that the proﬁt can be made to partially reinvest in a further spiral expansion of productivity. Today, in China, it is not only building materials that are rapidly produced and then made obsolete, but also labour—manual labour and intellectual labour. To reappropriate discarded construction materials is for Liu Wei to embrace the fragmented past and to question the meaning of “private property” that connotes the new frenzy of consumerism, the new economic disparity, the huge waste of resources, and the increase in social conﬂicts ignited by inequality.

To further articulate the idea of reclamation, in the same proliﬁc year, Liu Wei inaugurated a third series, As Long As I See It (2006). In this series, Liu Wei ﬁrst took Polaroid pictures of a billiard table, a cabbage, a refrigerator, a washing machine, and a tree. The objects in the photographs were then cropped by the white borders of the photo paper. He then had the actual objects placed at the exact same positions and angles in accordance to the photographic images and displayed in the same composition next to the photographs, with the cuts visible to the viewer. By moving the objects away from their original settings and juxtaposing them next to the

Vol. 14 No. 4 49 Liu Wei, As Long As I See It—No. 1, 2006, pine trees, iron, concrete, telegraph poles, Polaroid photograph, 500 x 300 x 140 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

photographs in a gallery, Liu Wei gave these mundane things an elevated status, and demonstrated their existential reality twice: ﬁrst as subject of art in photographs and then as an object of art on display. Isolated from the original context, the peculiarity of the fragmentation is magniﬁed, as the viewer cannot help but wonder about the history of the objects and the locations of the settings. The compositional logic of the cuts in the objects lies in the white borders; the guiding principle in selecting objects to photograph and then to cut seems to be determined only by the gaze of the artist in his daily life. If taking Polaroid pictures seems effortless, cutting the objects and removing the fragments can be challenging, especially when the objects are telephone poles or juniper trees. Similar to Gordon Matta- Clark’s architectural fragments, Liu Wei’s objects assume their autonomy like shards conserved from archeological sites, but they are, in fact, as Pamela M. Lee points out in Matta-Clark’s cut pieces, “underwritten by its provenance, the property from which it is extracted or produced, exhibited and preserved. . . . Such property only emerges from—is thrown into stark relief by—the fragment itself, which lays claim to the site in its absence.”10

Through the process of cutting and Liu Wei, As long as I see it—Washing Machine, 2006, recomposing, the sculptural objects washing machine, Polaroid photograph, dimensions that Liu Wei puts on display are variable. Courtesy of the no longer ready-mades; however, artist. the characteristics of the original objects are still preserved, and the dimension of everydayness is brought into the open for scrutiny in an alternative social space. The cross sections invite the viewer’s gaze to penetrate the surface and interrogate the internal engineering systems, and to compare what the author has assigned through the lens with the actual material fragments. Here the gaze of the author and the

50 Vol. 14 No. 4 Liu Wei, Crucifixion, 2014, gaze of the viewer bring different iron, steel, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the values to the objects. Liu Wei’s gaze artist. claims ownership of the property by simply looking. The white borders of the Polaroid play out as the limits of the properties claimed by Liu Wei’s gaze. The viewer’s gaze functions as appraisal of that value and legitimizes the autonomy of the crippled and defunct objects that in return exemplify the fluidity that can exist between art as property and property as art. By exhibiting the defunctness of the objects, Liu Wei demystifies them to reveal what Daniel Buren calls “internal architecture” and “the ideological interface between art and the institution in which the art is circulated.”11

Liu Wei’s interrogation of material culture, urbanistic ramiﬁcations, and correlations of authorship, ownership, and production continues to be manifested in his works through his career, including the recent large installations by him that were on view at the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art from February 7 to April 17, 2015.

Liu Wei, Outcast, 2007, old doors, windows, iron, tables, chairs, soil, fans. Courtesy of the artist.

The Grid and the Geometric Liu Wei’s curiosity about urbanization and the reorganization of social structures culminated in series of colossal sculptural installations. The ﬁrst was his 2007 Outcast I, an enclosed, airtight mega-structure of a ghostly vacant conference room built with recycled doorframes and windows salvaged from demolished institutional and bureaucratic facilities around the city.

Then there was the dramatic installation Merely A Mistake (2009–11), which resembles an archipelago of vertically oriented architectural structures, aggressively sprawled across an enormous exhibition hall. The structures are assembled with layers of recycled timber building materials that are fastened

Vol. 14 No. 4 51 together with long stainless steel bolts to form geometric silhouettes Liu Wei, Merely a Mistake II (detail), 2009–11, recycled of pseudo ediﬁces in Gothic style with pointed arches on the top. A door frames, found wooden beams, acrylic board, kaleidoscopic pattern recedes into the inner centre of the structure on each stainless steel. Courtesy of side. The effect of multiple reﬂections is realized by the accumulated layers the artist. of a symmetrical pattern built with the scraps of wooden frames to form the object chamber.

As the viewer walks through towering structures his/her attention is drawn to the exposed material and the complex compositions of grids that are constantly shifting in scale and form, depending on the vantage point of observation, to create a somatic correlation between the viewer and the gestalt. The exposed cuts of the wooden beams remind the viewer of half torn down buildings or the Antimatter objects that Liu Wei turned inside out with violent force. The awareness of both the material and the construction process engages the viewer with the built space of salvaged wood beams, as well as the history of the places embedded in them. The contingent and relational viewership, integral to Liu Wei’s conceptualization of this work, opens up an inﬁnite number of readings.

One reading stems from the transformation of reclaimed, previously discarded building elements that are still left with the original paint on

52 Vol. 14 No. 4 them. The remnants of paint are mostly in maroon and pastel green, commonly used in Chinese institutional and bureaucratic facilities in Mao’s time, a now vanished episode in history. It can be thought of in terms of Rosalind Krauss’s index theory:

[I]t is the building itself that is taken to be a message which can be presented but not coded. The ambition of the works is to capture the presence of the building, to find strategies to force it to surface into the field of the work. Yet, even as that presence surfaces, it fills the work with an extraordinary sense of time-past. Though they are produced by a physical cause, the trace, the impression, the clue, are vestiges of that cause which is itself no longer present in the given sign.12

In other words, that episode in history is physically present but temporally remote. The reconﬁgured monumental gestalt that is built with these architectural remains, and, by extension, ruins, also underscores the potential of pragmatic use value of “trash,” the material waste in the process of urban redevelopment driven by conspicuous consumption. Liu Wei creates a new vocabulary with fragments and ruins to convey new social meanings directed at China’s breakneck pace of urban renewal. The once

Vol. 14 No. 4 53 familiar architectural elements, be they windows or doors, are morphed into an alienating phantasmagorical mega-cluster of what Rem Koolhaas calls “junkspace”13 disengaged from the condition of history and culture.

The geometric structures, when viewed from different positions, resemble various grid-like compositions of mathematic balance and geometric harmony that evoke an aesthetic idea of utopian equilibrium amid what seems like chaos and violence. According to Lutz Koepnick:

The Grid is not a product of the unpredictable temporality of the viewers’ physical movement and sensory perception but a prearranged logic of compilation and construction, a mechanism seemingly engineering uniformity, universality and unwavering stability. . . .14 [T]he grid enabled art’s capacity to distance itself from language, ﬁguration, and representation and provided visual experiences favouring simultaneity over the sequential, the spatial over the temporal, the abstract over the representational, and the universal over the particular.15

Liu Wei’s preoccupation with forms, shapes, and grids constitutes much of his visual vocabulary and emphasizes relational form and internal architecture, insisting upon optimizing visual pleasure through aesthetic balance and proportion—in this way it resonates with the philosophical utopian approach to the aesthetics of De Stijl and Bauhaus.

Studio Enterprise Liu Wei’s team of nearly three dozen workers executes these mega structures. Over twenty of them are full-time studio employees who complete various menial daily tasks: bargaining, purchasing, applying colours to the canvas, keyboarding, assembling, drilling, stacking, cleaning, and cooking, while Liu Wei, always handsomely dressed, juggles new artistic concepts and exhibition plans for his three representative galleries: Long March Art Space (Beijing), White Cube (London), and Lehmann Maupin (New York and Hong Kong), as well as proposals for numerous biennials and museum projects. It is Liu Wei’s conscious choice to separate his art from his person and to divide intellectual faculty from manual work. From the moment when the raw materials are hauled in, all procedures are implemented in the studio by his employees under his supervision. Aside from an administrative ofﬁce, storage, a room for him to entertain guests, and living quarters for the security staff, his studio compound also consists of two workshops: one for producing paintings and the other for making objects. Liu Wei’s foreman hires those working on the paintings, mostly women, and the fabricators, mostly men, from nearby shanty villages. He prefers they don't have any knowledge of art.

The training for the painters involves the repetitive practice of applying lines with various brushes and tools that are sometimes made by the studio. The only skill that qualiﬁes a peasant woman to earn a wage is the capability

54 Vol. 14 No. 4 of producing strokes either horizontally or vertically onto the canvas under strict directions of the artist; he does not allow room for individual creativity in the workshop. Walter Benjamin once explained the relation between practice and specialty:

With practice as the basis, “each particular area of production ﬁnds its appropriate technical form in experience and slowly perfects it.” To be sure, each area quickly crystallizes this form “as soon as a certain degree of maturity has been attained.” On the other hand, this same system of manufacture produces “in every handicraft it appropriates a class of so-called unskilled laborers which the handicraft system strictly excluded. In developing a greatly simpliﬁed specialty to the point of virtuosity, at the cost of overall production capacity, it starts turning the lack of any development into a specialty. In addition to rankings, we get the simple division of workers into the skilled and the unskilled.16

Liu Wei, Truth Dimension To produce the painting Truth Dimension No. 7 (2013), for example, Liu Wei No. 7, 2013, oil on canvas, 189 x 399 cm. Courtesy of ﬁrst sketches on his computer an image of an urban interior which does not the artist. represent an actual locale in reality but projects a sense of familiarity that is experienced in the city. The city is developing so fast that a new mise-en- scène constantly negates the old, resembling a palimpsest, giving no time to nurture an enduring memory attached to the concrete and the distinctive. He then allows the software to encrypt the picture into condensed vertical colour stripes before printing out the enlarged, detailed draft as a template for the workers to translate onto canvas by meticulously applying viscous strips of oil paint.

The artist decides the colour, width, and length of each strip. The transference process of “paint by command” closely resembles Warhol’s “paint by number,” but the lines do not need to be rendered as perfectly

Vol. 14 No. 4 55 as they would if produced by an automated device or by a professional artist. Accidental errors that betray lack of skill are welcome in voiding the rigid appearance of modularity. Occasionally, Liu Wei even dabs an unnecessary stroke here and there to leave a hint of his own hand. I once asked him whether art students or professionally trained artisans are also hired, Liu Wei replies that they are hired only occasionally when a deadline is dangerously impending:

Professionals are pain in the neck, because they have the tendency to mix colours or apply strokes on their own without consulting the instruction. They want to show off skills, which always collides with my concepts. Then my workers have to ﬁx their paintings to realize the visual effects that a trained artist’s hand cannot achieve.17

Only twenty years ago, all the artists had to either accept meagerly paid government-assigned jobs or scramble alongside migrant workers to eke out a living. Liu Wei, an academically trained and highly skilled artist originally from Beijing, once worked as an art editor for a small newspaper in order to collect a modest salary. Now he joins a signiﬁcant number of elite artists who employ peasant workers to fulﬁll domestic and vocational tasks, and he is able to afford a team of over two dozen studio helpers. But the fact of affordability alone is not enough to explain his rationale for creating a complex ecological entity within his studio. Conventionally, artists hire studio assistants as a way to enhance the standard of the creation. Many artists depend on their assistants’ talents and dexterity for producing works. Under normal circumstances, studio assistants are usually art school graduates, some even with MFAs. By hiring migrant peasants who have no artistic knowledge or craftsmanship, Liu Wei not only keeps a tight grip on the sole intellectual and artistic authorship of his work, but also underlines a parallel between his studio production and organized labour in manufactories, be it Foxconn or Nike, where unskilled migrant workers apply for assembly line jobs to execute end products that supply worldwide consumers’ markets and move China’s economy forward.

In his studio, Liu Wei is the CEO, the designer, the quality controller, the sole shareholder, the brand, and the spokesman; he is more than what Steve Jobs was for Apple. His gesture of meticulously separating art and thinking from manual labour uncomfortably implicates the removal of artists from the déclassé working class. It raises the question that Julian Bryan-Wilson once asked:

How is the making of a sculpture any different from the making of some other kind of commodity? At the heart of this question lie several critical issues: the division of labour under capitalism, the importance of skill or Techne, the psychic rewards of making the weight of aesthetic judgments, and the perpetually unﬁxed nature of the artist’s professional status since roughly the ﬁfteenth century.18

56 Vol. 14 No. 4 As for the hired peasant workers, the job in a studio is just a job, no more or less than jobs elsewhere. They are not there to seek opportunities for breaking into the elite art world; nor are they interested in arguing about authorship or proper credit. Similar to line workers who never assume the ownership of the products that they assemble, the studio workers do not question Liu Wei’s authorship and ownership of the paintings, objects, and structures that they participate in producing. If the job pays regularly, and the environment is not hostile, it is a job worth keeping. By working in the studio, they consider themselves socially useful, even though they are aware that they could never afford the products that they produce. It then makes sense when Liu Wei insists that art should not have longevity; it should only have a shelf life, like other mass-produced products. “We do not expect an iPad to last forever; why should we make such an unreasonable demand on art?” He argues, “After all, it is the concept, not the material, that constitutes art.” 19

This notion of “idea as art and art as idea” is new in China. So is the concept of a society of consumer. Liu Wei does not wish to contest commodification of art and the profit-based system of exchange. He understands that he is at the beneficial end of the economic spectrum. If art were not a commodity, he would not enjoy the autonomy and privilege that he does. In other words, he accepts the fact that artists are participants in the state’s capitalist logic, which inescapably poses moral concerns of inequality in art practice. When asked what his employees think of him, Liu Wei laughs and replies, “They think I am capitalist. But you know we get along very well. We are a family. Some of them have stayed with me for over ten years.” 20 In light of this, Andrea Fraser’s argument comes to mind:

If our only choice is to participate in this economy or abandon the art ﬁeld entirely, at least we can stop rationalizing that participation in the name of critical or political art practices or—adding insult to injury—social justice. Any claim that we represent a progressive social force while our activities are directly subsidized by the engines of inequality can only contribute to the justiﬁcation of that inequality—the (not so) new legitimating function of art museums. The only “alternative” today is to recognize our participation in that economy and confront it in a direct and immediate way in all our institutions.21

To a certain degree, Liu Wei’s interest in “an indexical trace of the economic and social reality of the place in which he works”22 owes something to relational art, such as the work of Santiago Sierra, who creates situations to expose the alienated labour and subsequent exploitation by paying itinerant workers to perform temporary, useless, and often physically difﬁcult tasks in galleries or museums. The itinerant labourers function as his exhibition material and his institutional critique. But Liu Wei’s intention is not to temporarily exhibit the economic context by hiring day labourers to perform as day labourers. Nor does he choose to confront the unequal economic system that he participates in. His position is ambiguous, but not without

Vol. 14 No. 4 57 critique. It is not difﬁcult to detect his attempt at intervening in the volatile Santiago Sierra, 250 Cm Line Tattooed On 6 Paid socioeconomic conditions within his studio ecology for him to be active in People, Havana, Cuba, 1999, left: screen shot from video; the self-organization of urban-rural informality. Meanwhile, he articulates right: gelatin silver print on the interface of two polarized social sectors through art production. Of paper, 76 x 104 cm. course exploitation occurs, and it probably exacerbates the already uneven economic and spatial effects as the artist proﬁts enormously from hiring informal laborers and taking up a studio space that is much larger than several labourers’ shelters combined, but at least the labourers are not subject to public humiliation or precariousness as in Santiago Sierra’s 250 Cm Line Tattooed On 6 Paid People (1999) where six unemployed young men from Old Havana were hired for $30 in exchange for being tattooed and displayed only for the sake of the ephemeral exhibition.

Liu Wei’s mutilated consumer products, his monumental structures built with ruins, and his cognitive cityscape paintings represent sprawling global cities, the encroaching junkspace, and the hegemonic material world. While Liu Wei is not ostentatiously taking a “correct” political stance to critique the obvious, there is no doubt that his art offers us a narrative of China’s collective consumption, urban expansion, rural transformation, uneven social organization, and volatile ecological patterns. His art practice does not propose a black-and-white political tone, but by his production studio physically existing in the precarious space of an informal and liminal shanty village, and by pushing the boundaries of the power structures that he inhabits within the framework of culture production, Liu Wei’s work is unmistakably embedded in urban politics. As Claire Bishop observes:

Politics and aesthetics . . . overlap in their concern for equality, their ways of intervening in how ideas are made and distributed, and the forms of their visibility. In short the aesthetic need not be sacriﬁced at the altar of social change, because it already contains this ameliorative promise . . . Good art . . . must negotiate the tension that pushes art towards "life" and separates aesthetic sensoriality from other forms of sensible experience. This friction ideally produces the formation of elements "capable of speaking twice: from their readability and from their unreadability."23

The informality of urban Beijing can offer itself as both the text and the context of new debates about fundamental social relations during

58 Vol. 14 No. 4 urbanization. Many artists’ communities in the informal settlements could be the site to introduce “new identities and practices that disturb established histories.”24 The artist occupies a dual spatial existence: he produces art in an informal settlement but participates in a formal culture and economy. Within the micro-economy of informality, the artist plays the role of architect, and the hired informal labourers act as contracted builders who undertake the physical work to realize his blueprint. The art and the economic practice underscore the informal labour force that moves the peri-urban economy toward a market system. On a macro level, it offers us a glimpse of the unique narrative of Chinese urbanization in the globalized world.

I also want to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Miwon Kwon and Dell Upton for helping me shape my critical ideas and sharpen my analytical skills. This essay is dedicated to them.

Notes

1. “Seven Sisters” refers to seven skyscrapers built in Moscow from 1947 to 1955. They later served as Soviet architectural role models for skyscraper projects in the Soviet Union. 2. Wing-Shing Tang, “Planning Beijing Strategically: ‘One World, One Dream’,” Town Planning Review 77, no. 3 (2006) (Globalisation and the Making of Asian World Cities), 265. 3. The process of mutation, according to Rem Koolhaas, is the transformation of both the city’s environment and traditional architectural forms under the pressure of globalization and urbanization. 4. Roland Bosbach, “Living in a white elephant—Jianwai Soho, Beijing,” Building Material no. 18 (Spring 2009) (global/local), 19, 24. 5. Changfu Han, Migrant Workers In China (Singapore: Cengage Learning Asia, 2011). 6. See Nezar AlSayyad’s “Urbanism as a ‘New’ Way of Life,” Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004), 7–30. 7. Ibid., 10. 8. Pauline J. Yao, “Dark Matter,” ArtForum, January 2012, https://artforum.com/inprint/ issue=201201&id=29816/. 9. Robert Morris, “Anti Form,” ArtForum 6, no. 8 (1968), 33–35. 10. Pamela M. Lee, Object To Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 58. 11. Ibid., 87. 12. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America, Part 2,” October 4 (1977), 65. 13. The concept of junkspace was created by Rem Koolhaas. There is not a simple and straightforward definition of it. It is a built environment to accommodate consumerism. It is not relevant to the history, environment, and culture of its site. Think of offices, malls, and airports. “If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet.” Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100 (Spring 2002),175. 14. Lutz Koepnick, [Grid < > Matrix] (St. Louis: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2006), 53–54. 15. Ibid., 8. 16. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 329. 17. Liu Wei, phone interview with the author, February 2014. 18. Julian Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 26. 19. Liu Wei, phone interview with the author, February 2014. 20. Ibid. 21. Andrea Fraser, “L’1%, C’est Moi,” first published in Texte zur kunst 83, September 2011, 114–127 http://whitney.org/file_columns/0002/9848/andreafraser_1_2012whitneybiennial.pdf/. 22. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall, 2004), 70. 23. Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” ArtForum, February, 2006, https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=200602&id=10274/. 24. James Holston, “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship,” in Making the Invisible Visible, ed. L. Sandercock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 48.

Vol. 14 No. 4 59 Yu Hsiao Hwei Huang Yongping: If There Were Such a Thing as a “Religious Monster”

uang Yongping’s ﬁrst solo exhibition in Italy, Bâton Serpent, Huang Yongping, Reptiles, 1989, papier-mâché, curated by Hou Hanru, took place at MAXXI museum, Rome, washing machines, 7 x 4 x 3 m. Magiciens de la terre, from December 19, 2014 to May 24, 2015. It consisted of a Grande Halle de la Villette, H Paris, France, 1989. Photo: monumental thirty-metre-long aluminum skeleton of a snake, inspired by Huang Yongping. © Huang various stories and pagan mythologies that exist in different cultures and Yongping, ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of the artist. religions, hung high under the ceiling and twisting along a great part of the curved gallery, as well as several large-scale installations and sculptures. The exhibition grappled with today’s particular geopolitical context where many conﬂicts taking place around the world have been triggered by religion. After MAXXI, the exhibition will tour to Beijing’s Redbrick Art Museum in the autumn of 2015 and to the Power Station of Art, Shanghai, in 2016. Yu Hsiao Hwei was commissioned by MAXXI in fall 2014 to do an interview with the artist for the exhibition’s catalogue; she has revised it for publication in Yishu.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: In 2014, the Centre Pompidou in Paris celebrated in style the twenty-ﬁfth anniversary of Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the Earth), now considered a ground-breaking exhibition that was a prelude to the globalization of contemporary art. 2014 was also a twenty- ﬁfth anniversary for you: You left China to come to Paris to take part in

60 Vol. 14 No. 4 Magiciens de la Terre in 1989, then decided to extend your stay in France temporarily because of the Tian’anmen incident but ended up settling down in this country. Looking back, how do you see the evolution of your life over the past twenty-ﬁve years?

Huang Yongping: The exhibition that marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Magiciens de la Terre and that opened on June 30th of last year could hardly be described as a grand commemoration. I had a feeling that controversies still existed. A historical change often happens this way, and it’s hard to state afterwards that the change happened at a particular point because of a certain exhibition or a certain person. For Jean-Hubert Martin, Magiciens de la Terre is undoubtedly the most important exhibition in his career as a curator, but for an artist, to be totally honest about it, it’s hard to know whether or not this exhibition was all that crucial to his or her artistic career. Martin invited some friends to a private party at his house on the evening of June 30th. He said that five of the seven artists that Monumenta, taking place in Paris in 2016, has invited to date took part in Magiciens de la Terre in 1989—Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski, Daniel Buren, and Ilya Kabakov. (Author’s note: Huang Yongping has been selected as the next artist for Monumenta.) Coincidentally, the French newspaper Libération also broke the news of Monumenta 2016 that day. Daniel Buren didn’t show up, but I knew that he was very critical of Magiciens de la Terre. In 1989, when I was installing my work at the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris, Buren interviewed forty artists. That was also the first time I met him. He asked the participating artists, “What do you think the meaning of your being here is in such a context?” Later on, he summed up the situation at that time: “Most Western artists replied that they had no idea, or, rather, that they got the big picture, but they were against an exhibition like this, criticizing its philosophy. However, despite their reservations about the exhibition, they believed that their works deserved to be exhibited for their qualities and that, whatever the context was, they were sure they could escape its control! The non-Western artists were generally less ambivalent. They were delighted and proud to be invited to a city like Paris, which recognized them at the same time as "magicians," a title that was rejected by Western artists who had had this label pinned to them without their consent.”1 I don’t remember how I actually answered that question (no doubt in an ambiguous way as usual; I would not have been so naive as to reveal my “pride”). In fact, my later development cannot be separated from the exposure I got from this top-quality Western scene. It was not only because of the specific context of the exhibition; it was also different from Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, the black artist who appeared for the first time in the West in this show and became very famous thanks to it. He was already sixty-six years old at that time. His diary-like small paintings were already an established and recognized style, whereas I was only thirty-five, and I was a long way away from the art I was used to doing in China—I was faced with a totally new environment and had to start all over again from zero.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: You returned to China for the ﬁrst time in 2000. In other words, for a period of ten years, you mainly worked in a Western

Vol. 14 No. 4 61 context (including Japan and Korea). How did this influence your thinking Huang Yongping, World Factory, 2002, installation. and practices? © Huang Yongping, ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Barbara Gladstone Huang Yongping: Yes, in the ten years from 1989 to 1999, I was basically Gallery, New York. active in a Western milieu: Europe, the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Jerusalem. This brought changes in the way I worked compared to when I had had a studio in Xiamen in 1989. Since 1989, my studio has been that of a traveling artist, a sort of “post-studio”: the whole world is a huge studio. I move from one exhibition to another, from one place to another. I also call this approach “waging guerrilla warfare” or “sniping”— that is, firing a shot, then changing position and tactics—as I am faced with many subjects and concerns, including global versus local, East, West, immigration, religious conflicts, colonial history, ancient and modern, etc. Over these ten years, I took part in fifty exhibitions and realized fifty works, many of which were temporary and were destroyed after the exhibitions.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: What about after 2000? Since then, you have been constantly going back and forth to China to take part in exhibitions, produce new works, teach, or lecture. Does this new situation have any speciﬁc impact on your work?

Huang Yongping: In 2000, after ten years of living in Paris, I went back to China for the ﬁrst time for a brief trip. Since then, I have been navigating between these two places. If 1989 is seen as the watershed that divided my work into “the Chinese period” and “the French period,” my work after 2000 is actually a denial of this simple, geographically based, division. It’s like trying to measure the size of an island: Should we measure it at high tide or low tide? Or is it simply impossible to measure the size of an island, because all islands are connected together beneath the sea? China’s rapid economic development over the past decade has turned it into the world’s factory. I made a project in Beijing in 2002 and straightforwardly gave it the title World Factory. In fact, this title came from a French word, “machine” (also

62 Vol. 14 No. 4 Huang Yongping, Colosseum, 2007, ceramic, soil, plants, 56 x 758 x 226 cm. Photo: David Regen. © Huang Yongping, ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo.

Huang Yongping, Pentagon, 2007, ceramic, soil, plants, 550 x 550 x 50 cm. From C to P, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York. Photo: David Regen. © Huang Yongping, ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of the artist.

machine in English). “Machine” is composed of “ma” and “chine,” in French “ma” means “my” and “chine” “China.” That piece was actually an allegory of economic globalization.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Many of your works today are produced in China, with the funding coming from the West because you exhibit extensively in the West. Does the fact that China’s labour and materials are much cheaper allow your imagination to run even wilder and the scale of your works to get bigger and bigger?

Huang Yongping: Over the past ten years, most of my works have actually been inseparable from China, the world’s factory. Another symbol of economic globalization is the standard shipping container. Between 2001 and 2010, I had my works shipped from China to the West in thirty containers of different sizes. Containers no longer refer solely to industrial products, merchandise, and trade, but actually greatly affect contemporary art. All of the works have to be split up and reassembled, so their sizes have to ﬁt the containers to facilitate long-distance shipping. This doesn’t mean that contemporary art has become something adapted to economic trade, but that by conforming to the irreversible economic globalization, art has

Vol. 14 No. 4 63 become another attempt at transnationalization: my works are neither Huang Yongping, Hei Hei Sina Sina, 2000–06, Chinese (despite being produced in China, with Chinese workers and raw installation View at MAXXI, Rome. Photo: Giorgio Benni. materials) nor Western (despite using Western funds and being exhibited in Courtesy of the artist and the West); they are all attempts at creating what I call a Third Art. Fondazione MAXXI.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: When you are working on a new work or an exhibition, the timing of the exhibition, as well as the historical background of the city or the exhibition venue, etc., are all important factors that you take into account. What about this time at MAXXI? From what angles did you consider this museum and the city of Rome? How did you decide what kind of dialogue to have with this context?

Huang Yongping, Contruction Site, 2007, installation View at MAXXI, Rome. Photo: M3 Studio. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione MAXXI.

Huang Yongping: Generally speaking, all exhibition projects can be divided into two categories: “a single work in a group show” and “multiple works in a solo show.” Every project is based on the consideration of certain concrete issues such as the timing of the exhibition, the context of the venue (from the general historical background to something as concrete as the surface area available), how I will allocate my energy and the exhibition budget, etc. The exhibition space at MAXXI is complicated but not without charm; a long, narrow, curving, and staggered exhibition space makes the otherwise generally linear visiting route more diversiﬁed. Of course, the historical background of Rome also attracts me. I made a project From C to P (“C” for the Colosseum of Rome and “P” for the Pentagon) at Gladstone Gallery, in New York, in 2007, contrasting the Colosseum of Ancient Rome with the Empire of today. However, the exhibition at MAXXI opened shortly after my solo show in Nantes, France, last year. To make these two exhibitions that were so close to each other time-wise distinguishable from each other, I had to create an entity composed of a number of old works realized at different periods of time. The exhibition at MAXXI is clearly related to religion and to my experiences of moving among different religions.

64 Vol. 14 No. 4 Vol. 14 No. 4 65 Yu Hsiao Hwei: Vatican City, the “holy land” for Catholics, is located in Rome. Yet you choose to tackle Christianity at the very start of the exhibition by placing an Islamic minaret at the entrance to the museum; then at the beginning of the gallery where you have your show, there is a huge Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheel. What are your intentions in evoking in Rome these different religions of the world?

Huang Yongping: It reminds me of Huang Yongping, Three Steps, Nine Footprints, the photos taken of the ﬁrst World 1995, plaster, metal, garbage bins from the city Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi, of Marseille, 16.5 x 15.4 x Italy, in 1986, where the Dalai Lama, 4 m. Trois pas, neuf traces, Ateliers d’Artistes de la Ville dressed in a yellow monk’s robe, de Marseille, Marseille, France, 1995. Photo: was sitting next to Pope John Paul II Huang Yongping. © Huang Yongping, ADAGP, Paris. and other religious leaders. What we Courtesy of the artist. call “different religions” is actually only one thing—that is, “religion,” but just with different clothes and trappings. In his study of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, Gilles Deleuze wrote: “Christ was neither Jewish nor Christian but Buddhist; nearer the Dalai Lama than the Pope.”2 If there were such a thing as a “religious monster” in this gallery, it would begin with the minaret being pulled down or put up, or both, then continue to the central pillar, which is a constantly spinning “prayer wheel” or huge “mace,” and end with the tail of a snake skeleton that is a walking-stick because the so-called “holy land” is nothing but a walled-in place that keeps some monsters or behemoths inside.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: In the particular geopolitical context of today, religion, or culture in the name of religion, is often used as the pretext or fuse for triggering a conﬂict. In your work Three Steps, Nine Footprints, in 1996, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity were directly connected to trash bins, an important element in the terrorist incidents in Paris in 1995. Another example is that the prayer wheel looks like a mace, as you mentioned; it can be both a prayer instrument and a weapon, while Tibetan Buddhism naturally makes one think of ethnic conﬂict and political resistance in Tibet. I would like to know whether your thoughts on religion are mainly about its philosophical or historical dimensions or whether you are also interested in its entanglement with current geopolitics.

Huang Yongping: Although Three Steps, Nine Footprints is not being shown in this exhibition, it is represented in the form of models and drawings in the ﬁfty-four-metre-long showcase and plays the role of connecting together other works, some here and some not. Three Steps, Nine Footprints referred to the traditional Chinese Daoist ritual “Yu Steps.” It is common knowledge that one man walking will leave only two footprints unless he is lame and has to walk with a walking stick. This inspired me to come up with an image of “three feet walking side by side,” an image of Buddhism, Christianity, and

66 Vol. 14 No. 4 Huang Yongping, Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank, 2000, sand, concrete, 350 x 607 x 438 cm. Photo: Huang Yongping. © Huang Yongping, ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Guan Yi Collection, Beijing.

Huang Yongping, Snake Slough, 2014, cloth, resin, paint, 120 x 70 cm. Photo: Martin Argyroglo / LVAN. © Huang Yongping, ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of the artist.

Islam hobbling alongside one another in the world. This is not a question of mutual influences in a general way; it is about juxtaposition and constant conversions. It’s like the stone in the Dome of the Rock Mosque, which is both the site where the Hebrew Abraham tied up his son to be sacrificed and the starting point of Muhammad’s “night journey.” Or, as Deleuze put it, “Christ . . . bird of the Buddha in surroundings which were not Buddhist.”3 As for the so-called geopolitical and ethnic conflicts, or political resistance, these are all simply representations.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: If religion is nothing more than a “monster” in your eyes, what are other monsters in the world? What is your relationship with religion as well as with these other monsters? Ultimately, what is your view of religion?

Huang Yongping: In a “human zoo” (to borrow a term from the colonial era), all monsters are specially protected. Art itself cannot escape the fate of monsters. When the monsters are getting more scarce and fragile, the human zoo becomes bigger and more sophisticated. Don’t ask questions about religion, especially to someone who is both a pantheist and an atheist.

Vol. 14 No. 4 67 Yu Hsiao Hwei: This exhibition at MAXXI consists of a number of works Huang Yongping, Eight Horses of Leonardo Da Vinci realized in recent years; for instance the minaret was conceived and Tearing Apart an Aircraft Carrier, 2004, metal, wood, produced for the Istanbul Biennial in 2009, and it addressed the particular 193 x 800 x 505 cm. Photo: André Morin / LVAN. © context of Turkey at that time. Now shown in Rome, the work is placed in a Huang Yongping, ADAGP, completely different context. How do you see artworks conveying different Paris. Courtesy of the artist. meanings as the context changes? Do you, from the outset, try to keep the works as open as possible through ambiguity (in other words, all additional meanings are part of your design), or do the works produce new meanings themselves in an incidental way?

Huang Yongping: My approach here is different from a site-specific one. Site-specific artworks cannot really be moved, because their meanings are closely tied in with a particular context. This is not different from condemning an artwork to death, although even death itself is actually movement. My “monk’s bag” or “toolbox” contains all kinds of things: sand, a minaret, a gourd, etc. There is sand in my work Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank (2000), but sand is not exclusive to Shanghai. In the same way, minarets don’t have to be related to Turkey, because there are minarets in Paris, Geneva, Qingdao. Gourds are not something specific to China, either; there is a huge gourd in the upper right-hand corner of Albrecht Dürer’s Saint Jerome in his Study.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: The minaret is placed on the ground horizontally, while the prie-dieu was either bought from a second-hand store or taken from a church and is in bad shape. In fact, what you give is a picture of religion seeming to be run down.

68 Vol. 14 No. 4 Huang Yongping: What is “run down”? Often a place is run down because nobody visits it. I think it’s better to call it a “remnant.” It’s like some people say that Europe’s four remnants are the British House of Lords, the Prussian General Staff, the French Academy, and the Vatican. These places are often magniﬁcent and full of tourists.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: You seem to have had a particular interest in “remnants” for a long time. For instance, in your recent solo exhibition Moults, last summer in Nantes, almost all the works, from Snake Slough (2014) and Eight Horses of Leonardo Da Vinci Tearing Apart an Aircraft Carrier (2004) to Bin Laden’s last hideout in Abbottabad (2013), or even your earlier works that used “digestion” or “vomiting,” all have something to do with the notion of “remnants.” What does this symbolize or mean to you? How can it help us to think about and analyze the transformation of the world today?

Huang Yongping: People like quoting the famous lines from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” When we try to understand today’s world through “remnants,” we will become remnants ourselves. It’s only a question of the amount of time each remnant lasts, from a split second to thousands of years.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: The exhibition includes a long vitrine, with drawings, models, manuscripts, and notebooks of various works you realized in the past. These items are like records and traces of the process of conception and elaboration of a project before its ﬁnal realization, and you describe the whole vitrine as Ce qui reste (Remnants). Do you collect traces of your creations in a systematic way? What’s your intention in showing these items—is it as if we were entering the artist’s brain or studio?

Huang Yongping, Abottabad, 2013, ceramics, soil, plants, 11.5 x 5 x 1.35 m Commissioned by Marseille- Provence 2013–European Capital of Culture, France. Photo: André Morin / LVAN. © Huang Yongping, ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.

Huang Yongping: These items are only a thousandth of the total amount of material that I have. Of course I don’t mean that this should be understood from the perspective of quantity; “a thousandth” is only an expression to describe that remnants are countless and are connected with waste paper baskets and trash cans, as well as destruction, change, and removal.

Vol. 14 No. 4 69 Yu Hsiao Hwei: The title of this exhibition, Bâton Serpent, reminds one of the story in Exodus, when God performed a miracle when he told Moses to throw his staff on the ground, and then God turned it into a snake, but when Moses reached out and took hold of the snake, God turned it back into a staff. In fact, this is not the ﬁrst time that you take allusions or imagery from the Bible. Could you talk about your relationship with the Bible? When did you start becoming interested in the Bible? How do you usually read and understand it?

Huang Yongping: All of the titles are intentional or unintentional traps— these traps being people’s desire to know more, like asking questions. In particular, when a work appears to be obscure, the title is mistaken for a signpost. In art, it’s often the signpost that comes ﬁrst, then the road is built afterwards, or we could put it this way: a signpost is put up where there is no road. I read the Bible in the same way as I read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I was attracted by the codes in these books, for instance, 3.324 (“Thus there easily arise the most fundamental confusions [of which the whole of philosophy is full]),” “5.6331 (For the form of the visual ﬁeld is surely not like this . . .”), or in the Bible, for instance, Genesis 3:1, 3:4, Exodus 4:2, 3:4, Daniel 1:7, Matthew 19:24, and so on. It’s the fragments, the countless fragments that attracted me. Only things like philosophy or poetry can exist in fragments.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Does that mean that you tend to interpret and understand things from the perspective of “fragments”? How do you see and use these fragments?

Huang Yongping, Bâton Serpent, 2015, installation view at MAXXI. Photo: M3 Studio. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione MAXXI.

Huang Yongping: Fragments, or fragmentary understandings, are more reliable than “full” knowledge. The problem is that it is almost impossible for one to attain a full understanding of something given one’s limited and transient existence; in this case, a full understanding is totally meaningless. Fragments are footnotes; you can totally ignore the main body of a text, and select only the footnotes.

70 Vol. 14 No. 4 Yu Hsiao Hwei: Let’s talk about snakes. You seem to have a fascination with snakes, images of which appear in many of your recent works. This time, there are also quite a few snakes in the exhibition, including a huge snake skeleton spanning the exhibition space. What are the qualities you like in a snake? What does it symbolize for you? What functions do they perform in this exhibition?

Huang Yongping, 95 Bras de Huang Yongping: I don’t have a Guanyin, 1997–2014, wood, metal, terracotta, various fascination with snakes. It’s simply materials, 245 x 100 x 100 cm. Photo: M3 Studio. © that the family of snakes is so huge, far Huang Yongping, ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of the artist. beyond our imagination: as small as earthworms in the soil, roundworms in the intestines, or as big as dragons hidden amid the clouds in mythology. Snakes, live snakes, snake specimens, snake skeletons, snakeskin, snake slough— everything is medicine. In my work 95 Bras de Guanyin (1997–2014), four hands are each holding a small dappled- white snake, found in a Chinese herbal medicine store. Reputed for their heat- clearing and detoxifying effects, these snakes are so small, only 3 millimetres wide and 15 centimeteres long. In Human Snake, which I made in Ohio in 1993, there wasn’t even the image of a snake, only the head of a “human snake,” a term used to refer to gangs that smuggle people to other countries. I made a project at the Palais des Papes, in Avignon, in 2000; I paved the floor of the Saint Michel chapel in blue-and-white tiles with decorations of yellow dragons and had a ladder made of snakeskin hung above Saint Michel’s statue; this was about “the fight between the snake and the dragon.” The Tower Snake that I realized at Gladstone Gallery in New York in 2009 was like a small edifice, the snake’s ribs being like the arches of vaults in churches. The audience would enter the abdominal region of the snake and go along the spiral up to the head. This time, at MAXXI, the snake (the snake skeleton) is connected with the red cloth of another work, Chefs (2012); one side of the red cloth attracts a string of heads/chieftains, and the other side attracts or repels a snake. At the same time, the snake is undergoing a metamorphosis and is becoming a staff, or the other way around. We can buy a small live snake, cook it, get rid of all the meat, and study the structure of its skeleton, and we’ll see that the head is composed of seven bones, and that the lower jaw bone can split apart. So snakes can open their mouths very wide; it’s possible for a snake to swallow an elephant. All of the bones can be pulled apart and be sustained by the elastic skin. Of course, it’s unavoidable to notice the meaning and symbols of a snake in a work; this is also a trap of the kind I mentioned above. The tradition of modern art once opposed “symbols” and claimed that “white is white”; it doesn’t mean anything. Of course, we can totally ignore its doctrines. In the opening book and the final book of the Bible,

Vol. 14 No. 4 71 Left: Huang Yongping, Tower Snake, 2009, bamboo, aluminum, iron, 11 x 12 x 7 m. Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2009. Photo: David Regen. © Huang Yongping, ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Yu De Yao museum, Shanghai. Right: Huang Yongping, Human Snake Plan, 1993, rope, metal, light box, tyres, oil barrels, clothes, variable dimensions. Photo: Genesis and Revelation, the image of the snake represents evil, and since the Huang Yongping. © Huang Yongping, ADAGP, Paris. creation of the world cannot be separated from evil, we have another new Courtesy of the artist. perspective of evil. As for my works, there is no such thing as a ﬁrst time or last time with regard to the appearances of snake; the snake is changeless and continuous, like time.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: I am very impressed by your library—the walls of books in your studio. It seems that you read extensively and are particularly interested in philosophy and theories. Looking at either the essays you wrote in the early days or the notes on your works that are compiled in notebooks, we can see that you have a very strong ability for abstract thinking. The concepts and ideas contained in your works are multiple and heterogeneous and are—to borrow the image of the “rhizome” put forward by Deleuze— nomadically chained and connected together. The interesting thing is that, in fact, your works are not abstract at all. They not only have forms and bodies but also appear distinctive, large-scale, even spectacular. In addition, you have always made your works yourself up to now, and even when you need to rely on workers to produce pieces, you would draw sketches and plans and supervise every detail—the measurements, materials, and so on. I always remember that you once said, “An artist is, after all, a craftsman!” Could you talk about how you see the relationship between these two? And why do you care so much about making the works yourself? Why have your works become bigger and bigger and more and more ﬁgurative?

Huang Yongping: A person can learn how to think, but it doesn’t make him a philosopher. A philosopher as “the scribe of nature” has always been a true scribe who is, after all, a craftsman. In the art history of the twentieth century, there is an impulse to go from one type of craftsman (one who paints or produces) to another type of craftsman (one who writes or talks), for instance, in early conceptual art and in certain minimalisms. This is what I want to avoid. An artist works in the same manner as a bird making a nest or a spider weaving a web. As for the question of “size,” it is simply a matter of the limits imposed. A spider can weave its web only between two branches of a tree; it’s impossible for it to weave a web from one side of the river to the other.

Notes

1. Talks between Jérôme Sans and Daniel Buren, in Au sujet de . . . Entretien avec Jérôme Sans (Paris: Flammarion, 1998). 2. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 155. 3. Ibid., 156.

72 Vol. 14 No. 4 Matthew Ryan Smith Of Clouds and Cocoons: An Interview with Xiaojing Yan

iaojing Yan is a Chinese-Canadian artist born in Nanjing, China, who currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Xiaojing Yan X received a B.F.A in decorative art from Nanjing Art Institute, Jiangsu, in 2000, and an M.F.A in contemporary sculpture from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, in 2007. The central themes running through her work concern immigration, identity, cultural difference, and transmigration. Often using traditional Chinese materials and practices within the contemporary aesthetic, she is known for creating sculptural objects and installations out of ﬁbre, wax, tissue paper, wood, shell, and silk. In this conversation, Xiaojing Yan and I discuss cultural crossovers and the inspiration behind recent projects.

Matthew Ryan Smith: How has your Chinese identity inﬂuenced your art- making in Canada?

Xiaojing Yan: Art is my way of telling how I feel about being Chinese- Canadian. When I was in China, I never thought about being Chinese. And I didn’t think about what it meant to be Chinese. When I left China to see the outside world, I did not consciously identify myself as Chinese, but my new culture did. All of a sudden, my habits, my personality, my appearance—it was all labeled Chinese. People around me remind me that I am Chinese every day. I often ask myself: What does it mean to be a good foreigner? Chinese culture, training, and traditions inspire my work. Here in Canada, adapting outside of my native culture molds and informs my work as I appreciate the richness of my multicultural background. Fifteen years as an immigrant is quite a long time. This experience has helped me begin to define myself in relation to Canadian culture as well as Chinese culture. My understanding of identity has changed. I am no longer tortured with the anxiety, loneliness, and struggle, and with the conflict of being between two cultures. I have grown from these experiences and have transcended that stage of my life. I now have a broader vision and much more freedom in my artistic imagination. I have lived most of my adulthood in Canada. I may not find the perfect balance between the two cultures; however, I feel we immigrants are creating a new, hybrid culture.

Matthew Ryan Smith: Do you make direct use of Chinese materials, traditions, or rituals in your work?

Xiaojing Yan: Yes. I am drawn to Chinese materials and traditions. I often take traditional Chinese techniques and reinvent them, thereby giving them

Vol. 14 No. 4 73 a new identity within a contemporary context and presentation. Rituals are intrinsic to the everyday lives of ordinary Chinese people. I haven’t explored this topic, but this might be a possible direction in the future.

Matthew Ryan Smith: Would you say that contemporary Chinese art has its own aesthetic?

Xiaojing Yan: What do you mean by “its own aesthetic”?

Matthew Ryan Smith: What I mean is: Does contemporary Chinese art follow a set of aesthetic criteria?

Xiaojing Yan: I think contemporary Chinese art has its aesthetics, and in recent years the Chinese art scene has grown into the most vibrant scene in the world. There are two major problems Chinese contemporary artists have been dealing with. On the one hand, they have to contend with inﬂuences from the outside world, mainly from the West. They may absorb, resist, or both. On the other hand, they have to deal with thousands of years of Chinese tradition. Maybe they deny, digest, adapt, or transform them into the contemporary world. It’s not only an issue for China; other countries with long histories, like India, are also facing this situation.

Matthew Ryan Smith: You once said, “I think in Chinese but speak in English.” How does this relate to your work?

Xiaojing Yan: Having been away from China for fourteen years, I now actually think, dream, and feel emotions in both Chinese and English. When I talk with other people who are bilingual in Chinese and English, we may switch between languages because no two languages are identical in meaning, but there is no doubt that Chinese assumes the larger proportion. Chinese takes such an important role in framing my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual world because it remains the most important stage of my life; childhood, too, has left its irrevocable imprint. I use art as the visual manifestation to express my invisible spirit. I see it as a translation process. When I have an idea, I need to ﬁnd the corresponding material, form, colour, and even display method to express my thoughts. Choosing the material is like choosing the right word from my vocabulary. As well, I am creating works in a different cultural context; in this sense, translation is not only from one language to another, but also from one culture to another.

Matthew Ryan Smith: How did you come to settle in the Toronto area?

Xiaojing Yan: I have lived in Toronto for almost twelve years. However, if the deﬁnition of home is where you feel you belong, the sense of belonging for me is in a constant ﬂux. Slowly I have started to call Toronto “home.” Due to my uprooted experience, my feeling of home is different than for people who were born and grew up here. I still have a traveler’s curiosity, the continual feeling of freshness, search, surprise, and freedom.

74 Vol. 14 No. 4 Matthew Ryan Smith: You’ve talked about having a sense of suspension between what you used to be and what you’re becoming, between what was and what is. How does this scenario play out in your work?

Left: Xiaojing Yan, Guan Yin, 2009, fabric hardener, Chinese tassel thread, 213.3 x 60.9 x 60.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Xiaojing Yan, Guan Yin (detail), 2009, fabric hardener, Chinese tassel thread, 213.3 x 60.9 x 60.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Xiaojing Yan: You are referring to a sentence that I wrote to describe my work Guan Yin (2009), a sculpture made of Chinese tassel thread. Guan Yin is the Goddess of Compassion in Chinese Buddhism. In Indian Buddhism, Guanyin is male, but when Buddhism arrived in China two thousand years ago, Guanyin became female. That change in itself was a struggle between transformation and adaptation, and, finally, finding the proper sense of belonging. I created a Guanyin statue by applying the fabric hardeners Paverpol and Powertex on red synthetic thread. This type of thread is normally used for creating the dangling tassels on Chinese lanterns and fans. As I have applied it, the thread is in a messy tangle meant to represent struggle. Even though she was touching the floor, I suspended the Guanyin figure by a wire to show how, in my adopted culture, I am suspended between what I used to be and what I am becoming. This metaphor of suspension occurs a lot in my work. I see the act of floating as an aesthetic and conceptual device. Suspension offers the viewer a looming sense of alarm and dangerous beauty in the work. It’s levitating life.

Matthew Ryan Smith: I see Cloud Cell (2014) as one of your strongest works. There, you’ve afﬁxed freshwater pearls to monoﬁlament thread on a grand scale in order to provide a semblance of a cloud. What is this work about?

Xiaojing Yan: Cloud Cell is my most recent work. It was inspired by the Chinese scholar’s stone, which is formed by nature into surprising shapes and textures. Scholars’ stones can be any colour, and their size also can be quite varied. Small ones are often placed on desks, while the big ones are installed in traditional Chinese gardens. In either situation, the scholar’s stone serves as a meditative tool, something for people to ponder and admire. I wanted to create a scholar’s stone that expresses the yin-yang

Vol. 14 No. 4 75 76 Vol. 14 No. 4 Opposite, top: Xiaojing sense of duality and dichotomy. I suspended over 13,000 freshwater pearls Yan, Cloud Cell, 2014, freshwater pearls, in space to form simultaneously both the water-eroded scholar’s stone and monofilament thread, aluminum. Courtesy of its horrific antithesis, the mushroom cloud produced by a detonated atom the artist. bomb. One, the stone, is slowly formed by natural forces and selected for Opposite, bottom left and right: Xiaojing meditation; the other, the explosion, is the result of man-made tampering Yan, Cloud Cell (detail), 2014, freshwater pearls, with these forces for the purpose of instantaneous destruction. Freshwater monofilament thread, pearls are themselves a product of a controlled natural process. China aluminum. Courtesy of the artist. produces more than 92% of the freshwater pearls in the world.

Left: Xiaojing Yan, Star Mountain, 2012, star anise, metal pins. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Xiaojing Yan, Star Mountain (detail), 2012, star anise, metal pins. Courtesy of the artist.

Matthew Ryan Smith: I see Cloud Cell as being closely related to another work, Star Mountain (2012), which is made from star anise and metal pins. What was the inspiration behind this work, and is there a connection to Cloud Cell?

Xiaojing Yan: I did not intentionally create these two works to have a relationship to each other. Like many Chinese artists, I have practiced ink painting since I was very young. Clouds, rocks, mountains, and water have been the most popular motifs in Chinese ink painting and have endured since ancient times. These are at the heart of Chinese aesthetics, philosophy, religion, literature, and art. Cloud Cell refers to a Chinese scholar’s rock, while Star Mountain was inspired by shanshui paintings, which use nature as subject matter. Chinese love mountains. Perhaps the most primitive reason for this is the legends and myths of Daoism and Shamanism. These legends speak of sages and immortals who lived forever deep in the mountain wilderness. The mountain areas were also regarded access points to the heavenly realm and the domain of magical spirits and powerful divinities.

Moreover, mountain regions have long been a setting and destination for pilgrimage. People travel to them in order to commune with the concentrated energy and strength there. It’s a sacred place for many Chinese and for me. Star anise is a cooking spice very popular in Chinese cuisine. I stuck the star anise pods onto the wall with metal pins to depict the staggered ridge lines and clefts of a barren, eroded mountain range, as many Chinese shanshui paintings have depicted before. Some of the pods are whole, and some are in pieces. These pods and their shadows suggest the silhouettes of trees, creatures, people, etcetera. The star anise pods are like the fresh water pearls in that both are individually unique. Both are closely knit to my cultural and personal origin. Another indispensable element of the Star Mountain is the aroma. The smell of the star anise is very strong and distinctive. When I had the work installed at the Red Head Gallery in Toronto, people could smell it when they entered the building at the far end

Vol. 14 No. 4 77 of the hallway, still quite some distance from the gallery. For me, smell and Xiaojing Yan, Bridge, 2009, ceramic spoons, shadow are intangible, yet they offer perfect sensations to create a seductive monoﬁlament thread, 609.6 x 152.4 x 182.8 cm. Photo: K. and alluring atmosphere. Jennifer Bedford. Courtesy of the artist.

Matthew Ryan Smith: What is the meaning behind Bridge (2009) and Zig Zag Bridge (2011)?

Xiaojing Yan: Bridge is an Xiaojing Yan, Bridge (detail), 2009, ceramic spoons, installation made of 1,364 monoﬁlament thread, 609.6 x 152.4 x 182.8 cm. Courtesy Chinese ceramic soup spoons of the artist. suspended in the air to form a ﬂoating representation of a typical Chinese three-arched bridge. The symbolism of the bridge is a broad topic that can be explored from many perspectives. The bridge can be actual or abstract; it can function as transit between two worlds, a sentimental link between two communities, a passage of knowing and discovering oneself and the world. A bridge connects two continents, yet it belongs to nowhere. The bridge is a place between worlds, neither one nor the other. Standing on the bridge, one can have a different perspective. It’s a place; it’s a space beyond. It could represent transformation—you are not the same person who crossed

78 Vol. 14 No. 4 from the other side. I view myself as a bridge linking two cultures together, forever suspended and never really crossed. The stone-arched bridge is the most common type one sees in China. In formal garden design, an arched bridge is placed so that it is reﬂected in still water. The zig-zag bridge isn’t intended to be functional, but, rather, has a decorative purpose meant to add an interesting, jagged feature to the ﬂuid scenery of lakes and ponds and to enlarge the scope of the sightseer’s stroll while he or she is crossing over the water’s surface.

Matthew Ryan Smith: More recently, you have moved on to producing video works. What does this offer you that other materials or mediums do not?

Xiaojing Yan: When I wash my brush, I always enjoy looking at the ink as it dissolves in clean water. It’s like a plume of smoke dancing, ﬂying, and transforming. It’s utterly captivating. I decided to capture this. I shot a water fountain and edited each frame to show a steady pulse of water that seems to push out against gravity. One of the most important aspects of Chinese aesthetics is suggestion. The water’s arcs and undulations recall the scholar’s rock; similar forms emerging from different yet fundamentally connected materials. Ink-Water-Stone (2014) was exhibited together with Cloud Cell. Water is similarly viewed by Chinese as a source of continuous energy, one that is always in the process of making and shaping, always regenerating and never ending. Movement and dynamics in black and white are more interesting than static colour. Canadian author Michael Ondaatje writes

Vol. 14 No. 4 79 about the scholar’s stone in his World War II novel The English Patient: Xiaojing Yan, Ink-Water- Stone, 2014, video, 4 mins., “In Asian gardens you could look at a rock and imagine water, you could 20 secs. Courtesy of the artist. gaze at a still pool and believe it had the hardness of rock.” As I said earlier, I consider materials, colours, techniques, and display methods all parts of my vocabulary. I am learning new words all the time. The more I know, the more articulately my work can express my thoughts.

Matthew Ryan Smith: What is the role of transmigration in your work?

Xiaojing Yan: In the Buddhist tradition, transmigration is a concept related to the reincarnation of the spirit into a new body after death. The new body can be anything alive, such as a ﬂower, an animal, a human, etcetera. Transmigration involves the change of a corporeal being into another. Making art for me is such a process—moving ideas, and through my spirit, from my inside into the physical world.

Matthew Ryan Smith: The titles of some of your recent works include Cloud Cell, Wave (2014), Ling-Zhi (2014), Cloud (2013), and In the Pond (2012). Can you talk about the connection between your work and the natural world?

Xiaojing Yan: I haven’t treated Xiaojing Yan, Ling-Zhi, 2014, bronze. Courtesy of the the natural world as a primary artist and Lonsdale Gallery, Toronto. theme in my works. However, the meditated natural world has always permeated Chinese culture, and often the natural world is symbolized or densely coded. I have always been interested in Chinese visual forms, symbols, and traditions, and I have wondered how could I transform these elements into new visual forms that are both contemporary and traditional, with respect to visual form and in the content of the works. Sometimes I play with concepts; sometimes I’m more focused on forms, textures, materials, and their relationship with a potential space. Cloud, rock, wave (elements of Chinese shanshui landscape painting) and Ling-Zhi, a type of mushroom that represents immortality in Chinese legend, all have rich, coded meanings in Chinese culture. My works suggest these connections. However, I emphasize more the visual forms that I have transformed. I wish new perceptions and new meaning will come forth from experiencing my works.

Matthew Ryan Smith: Do you see your work as autobiographical?

Xiaojing Yan: I have never thought of my work as autobiographical. But now that you ask, I can look back and do see the autobiographical aspect.

80 Vol. 14 No. 4 Vol. 14 No. 4 81 My work ties to my personal experience of being a Chinese immigrant in Canada, embracing the precarious circumstances of living between cultures. It has been a tool for self-expression in dealing with my life situations. Does that count as autobiography?

Matthew Ryan Smith: I would say it does.

Xiaojing Yan: The immigrant’s new experience, adjustment, communication, cultural belonging, loss, and cultural identity may not be fully resolved for me, but these are no longer my focal points of interest. I am unsure if, in the next ﬁve to ten years, my work will become even less autobiographical, or if the personal points of reference will start to collect more in my adult experience and leave these formative years behind.

Matthew Ryan Smith: What are your major inﬂuences?

Xiaojing Yan: I like to look to artists and writers who have a multicultural background, perhaps because we share a similar experience. In a world marked by hybridity and diversity, multiple viewpoints are generated and enrich our lives. I also like to look into artists who are using materials in an inventive way or who explore an idea from a new perspective. But I have never been inﬂuenced by a single artist, and I have been more interested in other things from different ﬁelds rather than only art. Everyday reality interests me.

Matthew Ryan Smith: Whose work are you most interested in right now, and why?

Xiaojing Yan: There are so many great artists making fantastic works, such as the Venezuelan painter Carlos Cruz-Diez. I was fortunate to experience his work first hand at his solo exhibition at Jiangsu Art Museum, in Nanjing. I admire how he uses light as such an insubstantial material to create an aesthetic universe that submerges the observer in the artist’s autonomous reality of colour, time, and space. I also like how Sarah Sze turns everyday humble objects into immense and intricate site-specific works. I like Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptures for the array of influences her work brings together, both Eastern and Western and from literature, history, and science. Shea Hembrey makes me wonder how one can be so creative and have such a broad range of ideas. There are too many artists to name here.

Matthew Ryan Smith: Do you have any upcoming projects or exhibitions?

Xiaojing Yan: I am currently installing my solo exhibition, Hybrid Vigour, at the Latcham Gallery in Stouffville, Ontario. Another solo exhibition at Varley Art Gallery in Markham, Ontario, the city in which I now live, is scheduled for 2017. I am focusing on a new, as yet undetermined, project toward that.

82 Vol. 14 No. 4 Chanda Laine Carey Xu Bing: Erasure and Impermanence

The Language of Xu Bing December 20, 2014–July 26, 2015 Los Angeles County Museum of Art

ong the subject of diverse inquiries into his arts, methods, materials, and erasure of linguistic meaning from written language, Xu Bing Lalso currently stands as one of the most significant figures of pedagogical authority in global contemporary art. As an artist of worldwide renown and Vice President of China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Xu Bing’s authoritative current position in institutional structures of power stands in marked contrast to the earlier challenges to conventional aesthetic and epistemological narratives through the deconstruction of language—most notably, the Chinese and English languages. Since his return to China in 2008 (after having moved to the U.S. in 1990) and to the art school where he was educated, Xu Bing’s focus on language has been refined, expanded, and condensed in the animated video The Character of Characters (2012). This seventeen-minute video is the focal work of The Language of Xu Bing, a retrospective exhibition presented by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from December 20, 2014 to July 26, 2015. The small, tightly focused exhibition highlights the continuity of Xu Bing’s diverse concerns with the printed word and calligraphy, and the works included bring to the forefront the values of teaching and learning that inform his oeuvre.

Xu Bing, Art for the People, Exquisite tensions are present in the 1999, banner for Museum of Modern Art, silk. Courtesy of exhibition, much of which pivots on the Xu Bing Studio. presentation of calligraphy and ink painting through the medium of the woodblock print. Although he applied to study in the department of painting, Xu Bing was admitted to study the revolutionary medium of printmaking during his time at CAFA. Unlike painting, printmaking was a medium popular among and available to all levels of society. Xu Bing’s facility with the brush and his origins as a child of intellectuals merged with an identity as a print-focused artist committed to serving the people through a variety of methods and media. This idea of service to the people stretches back to his time in the 1970s at a labour camp making calligraphic banners during the Cultural Revolution and his art education in the 1980s to his 1999 commission Art for the People, for the façade of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and into the present. Xu Bing’s approach to art as public service is currently operating through his leadership at the institutional level, and through his artwork—most

Vol. 14 No. 4 83 publicly as a history, celebration, and subtle critique in The Character of The Language of Xu Bing, installation view, Los Characters of the changes occurring in the written Chinese language. Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: © 2015 Museum Associates/LACMA. In his 2009 essay surveying the work of Xu Bing in terms of a Zen concept applied to artistic social service, Gao Minglu speciﬁes the Zen idea of emptiness as important to understanding the positive results of Xu Bing’s practice of draining meaning from written language.1 Like emptiness, impermanence is a Buddhist value, one emphasizing the importance of understanding the constantly changing nature of all phenomena. The visual experience of erasure came to the fore as a potent expression of impermanence, gently and resolutely woven through The Language of Xu Bing. Impermanence could describe most of the work included in the exhibition, from the presentation of serial and progressive imagery in prints,

84 Vol. 14 No. 4 to the process of appearance and disappearance left in the silken traces of living worms in Xu Bing’s Silkworm Books (1994) and throughout the transient images of the animation The Character of Characters.

In the main gallery of the exhibition, The Character of Characters occupied one whole wall and was projected as a long, horizontal animated video intended to emulate the format of a traditional hand scroll. Paired works in a similar format on the perpendicular walls ﬂanked this projection. One side displayed Holding the Brush (1996), on the wall, and Softening the Brush (1996) was installed directly below it in a vitrine. These works focus on calligraphy and its rituals and can be described as progressive prints in that the reductive process of printmaking is revealed through the serial repetition of a single block, printed repeatedly in stages, with each print

Vol. 14 No. 4 85 clearly showing the intervention of Top: Xu Bing, Holding the Brush, 1996, handscroll, the artist’s hand. This form of serial woodblock print, 70.49 x 596.27 cm. Photo: Xu Bing printmaking, also used skillfully in Studio. The Carolyn Hsu and René Balcer Collection. © the early works of American artist Xu Bing. Robert Rauschenberg, is a print Left: Xu Bing, Silkworm Book, 1998, book encased format that Xu Bing has used to in silkworm cocoon. 5.08 x 43.5 x 43.18 cm. Photo: © develop narrative structure within 2015 Museum Associates/ the overall work, beginning with LACMA. Bottom: Xu Bing, Softening a black monochrome and ending the Brush, 1996, handscroll, woodblock print, 70.49 x with a white monochrome. This practice emerges early in his work, during 596.27 cm. Photo: Xu Bing his M.F.A. thesis project Five Series of Repetitions (1987), in which the Studio. The Carolyn Hsu and René Balcer Collection. © progressive element of the printmaking technique turns on a centre-to- Xu Bing. periphery form of organization, as well as a linear approach that applies principles of reduction in the development of the ﬁnal image.

Drawing upon illustrations from the artist’s woodblock printed instruction book An Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy (1994–96), Holding the Brush and Softening the Brush are expansions of single elements within the calligraphic tradition writ large in the reproducible medium of a hand scroll format print that disseminates its imagery. This produces tension through the essential opposition between the aura of the singular artistic authority established by an individual’s mastery of the brush and the populist accessibility of the print. As prints, these works are distinctive for the ﬁneness and delicacy of their lines, which approach the reﬁnement of those of etching and lack the rougher simplicity of wood block carving that is evident in their source material, An Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy.

Holding the Brush begins with a completely black woodblock print that marks the entry into the iconographical progression of the print, followed by the title in three characters situated at the top centre of the next panel. These three characters look like they are Chinese characters, and in their

86 Vol. 14 No. 4 vertical orientation they recall the conflation of language systems in Xu Bing’s well-known Square Word Calligraphy. The three characters are English words oriented to the vertical format of traditional Chinese text. In the next panel, a brush emerges, complete, supported in its vertical orientation by the thumb, instantly instructive of the appropriate way in which to hold the brush in the tradition of Chinese calligraphy. The distinctive differences between Eastern and Western techniques of brush arts are further specified by the design of the brush itself, with the loop at its end indicating its appropriate resting place hanging on a brush rack, which is specific to ink brush painting in China.

In the panels that follow, the naturalistic form of an elegant hand emerges, visible up to the wrist. It floats in a field of dark black ink until the sixth panel, which marks the halfway point in progress of the serial image. The second half of this work reverses the process of reduction, applying the methods of printmaking to erase the image after revealing it. This approach changes the pictorial focus from figure to ground, progressively separating the hand from a black background into a white one and then removing elements of the figure itself—from the hand holding the brush to fingers grasping the brush, returning to the delicate balance of thumb and brush alone. In the second to last panel, erasure continues and leaves only the tip of the brush itself, the brush’s essence. The last panel erases the permanence of the ink and brush, leaving a monochromatic expanse of blank, soft white, grass paper.

Softening the Brush presents a more complex set of images that again arouses an awareness of the visual experience of impermanence through the erasure of the image. Beginning once more with the deep black monochrome of the uncarved block, the title of the work is the ﬁrst to appear in the emergence of the iconography. Across a series of eleven panels, Xu Bing reveals ﬁrst one, then two brushes in wells of water—one pointed and

Vol. 14 No. 4 87 sharp, the other with its bristles fanned with softening. As the narrative of the print progresses, the possibility of the process of block carving as a field of abstract and representative form plays out, with more emphasis given to the medium of the print and the process of making than to the task of softening the brush. In the third panel of the print, alongside an image of a complete, pointed brush in its water well, is a set of loosely geometric marks that reflect the beginning of scratching, hatching, and defining of forms essential to the completed object represented beside them. Giving a sense of both the application of marks needed to depict the brush and an abstract composition alongside it, Xu Bing creates a tension between the painting and printing mediums where the very existence of the softening brush is subject to the masterful precision of the sharp chisel employed to render the image. In succeeding panels, the alternation of fanned and pointed bushes in their respective wells gives a sense of the brush entering and emerging from the water without illustrating movement. In the background, the precision and mastery of choices offered by the printmaker’s process plays out as the imagery becomes more and more refined.

In the seventh panel, the image on the block reaches its most highly ﬁnished form, with a completely smooth background emerging in white. Side by side, the two brushes in ﬁnely depicted wells begin to be subject to a process of erasure, ready to be used by the calligrapher. In a process representing a move to the completion of the task, the brushes disappear in the eighth and ninth panels, leaving the wells empty. Swift erasure of all traces of the wells, leaving only the title, completes the narrative of softening the brush. Arguably, Xu Bing also softens the brush through the application of the chisel, revealing an impermanent existence, leaving only the more lasting evidence of the print.

This tension between print and brush is even Xu Bing, The Mustard Seed Garden Landscape, 2010, more overt on the opposite side of the gallery, handscroll, woodblock print, 34.29 x 527.69 cm. Photo: where The Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Xu Bing Studio. The Carolyn Hsu and René Balcer Scroll (2010) is installed. This long work draws Collection. © Xu Bing. upon Wang Gai’s four-volume painting manual of 1679, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. This text is the classic manual of calligraphy painting and provides detailed instructions on the representation of traditional subjects; however, the wall text noted in an oblique way that Xu Bing’s work “challenges established concepts.” Beyond the challenge to the traditional methods and medium of landscape painting presented by his monumental print, which has been adapted to reproduce the format of painting, Xu Bing also engages in a practice of erasure on multiple levels. As he stated in his text for the Fourth Guangzhou Triennial:

I followed one principle in creating this work: every image taken from the Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll is recreated in its original dimensions. This creative constraint highlights the signiﬁcance of the manual as a dictionary

88 Vol. 14 No. 4 Background: Xu Bing, The Mustard Seed Garden Landscape, 2010, handscroll, woodblock print, 34.29 x 527.69 cm. Foreground: Wang Gai, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, 1679, four books. Photo: Xu Bing Studio. The Carolyn Hsu and René Balcer Collection. © Xu Bing.

and reference book and, at the same time, further distances my work from the freedoms of a figurative painting surface. Also worth mentioning is that after finalizing the composition, I invited a professional carver to make the blocks rather than carving them myself. I was not acting as a creative printmaker. In premodern China, a painter would first finish a painting and then let a carver transfer it onto woodblocks. Deprived of the room for emotional and creative expression, the carver acts like a printing machine and faithfully reproduces the image. This preserves the objectivity of the components of my work.2

Xu Bing, Silkworm Book, Like the scroll itself, the exhibition Medical Dictionary, 1995, book encased in silkworm The Language of Xu Bing was cocoon. 15.24 x 61.6 x 61.91 cm. Photo: © 2015 Museum sensitive to the signiﬁcance of Associates/LACMA. reference texts and included an example of Wang Gai’s text in a vitrine beneath The Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll. Occupying the centre of the gallery were examples of similar reference texts selected by the curators from Xu Bing’s oeuvre, from the Silkworm Book Series, Medical Dictionary, and a 1995 calligraphy manual by Yan Zhenqing.

Two forms of erasure took place in the making of The Mustard Seed Landscape Scroll. First, Xu Bing ensured the erasure of the painter from the creative process by developing the composition with collage elements comprising all the images from the painting manual. Secondly, and more explicitly, Xu Bing emphasized the conceptual nature of the piece through the erasure of his own hand in the print by hiring another carver to make the blocks. Thus he made his identity as a printmaker ﬂuid, temporary, and impermanent. This artistic choice suggests Xu Bing’s detachment from discourses about talent and genius that have long surrounded work made by his hand. Through two iterations of the practice—the printed reproductions from Wang Gai’s original text and his composed and carved scroll—Xu Bing elevates printmaking, generally considered a lower form

Vol. 14 No. 4 89 than painting, to a high status within the context of contemporary and Xu Bing (collaborations with René Balcer), conceptual art. The artist’s importance in longstanding debates about the Backbone, 2011, offset printing on cigarette paper, hierarchies of media and originality of authorship in the value of the object 190.5 x 1143 cm. Photo: © 2015 Museum Associates/ remain open to further inquiry. LACMA.

The ﬁrst piece one encountered in the exhibition was Backbone, a part of the Xu Bing: Tobacco Project, during which he collaborated with a friend, writer and television producer René Balcer. This striking work suffered here from a lack of contextual support; for example, it was not clearly explained why its formal qualities are so different from that of the rest of the work in the exhibition. For Backbone, Balcer created a poem using only words drawn from historic tobacco packaging in a celebration of, and salutation to, the African American women who performed the work of tobacco processing.3 Xu Bing’s stencil-style prints anchor the abstract quality of the poem’s language, which was developed from the original tobacco branding designs—each word-image is hung in an individual frame. Neither typeface nor script, the branding text foregrounds the original technique of stenciling as Balcer’s poem recedes into the form of the prints in varying shades of red. Xu Bing’s use of offset lithographic printing methods to reproduce text originally created with the much simpler stencil technique reﬂects his deep commitment to the medium of the print, a legacy of his formal education.

Similar contrasts between the mediums of painting and printing are evident in Square Word Calligraphy Classroom (1994), which was placed in two small galleries adjoining the Boone Children’s Gallery. Scholars and critics working from myriad perspectives consistently foreground the cross-cultural appeal of Square Word Calligraphy. As Gao Minglu argues via a class-based analysis, Xu Bing “transformed a traditional ‘high-class’ literati art into a practical tool of popular culture, or even of daily cultural practice. . . . Xu Bing’s English calligraphy therefore reveals his ambition to

90 Vol. 14 No. 4 Xu Bing, Square Word engage in a kind of universal aestheticism.”4 This appeal to an increasingly Calligraphy Classroom, 1994, installation. Courtesy inclusive, transcultural, and ultimately universal experience of calligraphy of Xu Bing Studio. operates primarily in the bicultural realms of Chinese and English language and culture. In the video component of Square Word Calligraphy Classroom, An Introduction to New English Calligraphy (1994), a single instructor, a young, fair-haired woman with an upper-class English accent, speaks to the viewer in the language of the text found in the book, which is the other major component of the classroom installation. Her opening lines extol the spiritual value of calligraphy before introducing its elements, illustrated by close-ups of demonstration strokes and graphics from the instruction manual. She explains:

Calligraphy is different from writing. It is not merely a tool of communication, but it is an activity that combines artistic expression with spiritual energy. From the ﬁrst stroke of a word to its completion our bodies are involved. It is a process of communicating with nature, of experiencing beauty, and discovering our inner selves.5

Dressed in a light brown blouse that combines elements of Western and Eastern clothing design, including breast pockets and an interpretation of a Mandarin collar, the narrator of the video represents a ﬁgure of transculturation of Chinese aesthetic values. Her Asian inﬂuenced dress, fair skin, and English accent are located between the worlds of Chinese intellectual authority and China’s British colonial past and provide an icon of accessible, authentically Anglo pedagogy of the English language adapted to calligraphy.

The calligraphy classroom called to mind my own early childhood experience with the techniques of the Chinese brush. Learning to paint plum blossoms at the San Diego Museum of Art as an elementary school

Vol. 14 No. 4 91 student was my first contact with formal art education outside the Xu Bing, The Character of Characters, 2012, video still. traditional classroom. Upon reflection, I find that the inclusion of Xu Photo: © 2015 Museum Associates/LACMA. Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy Classroom in a space dedicated to children Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. expands opportunities for experiencing the different cultures of the brush in a manner that balances the freedoms of painting with the rigours of calligraphy. Presented in a museum that serves the diverse, and often Spanish-speaking communities of Los Angeles, New English Calligraphy presented as Square Word Calligraphy also allows for the expansion of Xu Bing’s transcultural ideals—expansion not into a realm of universal accessibility, but an expansion of the technique of Square Word Calligraphy into the realm of all languages that utilize the Roman alphabet.

The Character of Characters is an animation originally commissioned by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. It offers Xu Bing’s meditation on the interaction of Chinese and Western cultures and a survey of the mythology and history of Chinese calligraphy as well as insight into its pedagogy. In a handful of the work’s twenty-nine narrative sections, Xu Bing draws on forms found in earlier work, resulting in a retrospective survey of his didactic art that is informative to those new to it and a delight for those already familiar with it. Accompanied by a lengthy catalogue essay by the artist produced for the 2012 Asian Art Museum exhibition, Out of Character, Decoding Chinese Calligraphy, The Character of Characters is the centerpiece of LACMA’s exhibition. Xu Bing’s essay “The Character of Characters an Animation,” in the catalogue of the same title available from the Asian Art Museum (which also generously includes a DVD of the animation), forms a key complement to his artwork and ideas, elucidating themes and underpinnings in a wide- ranging thesis on Chinese culture and language.

After the opening title in Chinese and English in The Character of Characters, a single horizontal stroke manifests itself slowly across the screen, representing the numeral one. It crosses the entire ﬁeld of vision—a monumental mark within which an entire terrestrial cosmos exists through the textural play of animated ink. The accompanying soundtrack plays a rumbling, windy, thunderous sound, replacing an invisible brush as the stroke crosses the screen, leaving the eye gazing only at a swath of ink that resonates with the birth of a world of its own, a ﬁrst cause of existence that Britta Erickson describes as the unitary principle of Laozi’s philosophical text the Daode jing.6 The point of view rapidly recedes from the single stroke

92 Vol. 14 No. 4 to reveal the giant stroke as a small part of an entire Buddhist text, Zhao Mengfu’s (Yuan dynasty; A.D. 1354–22) Sutra on the Lotus of the Supreme Dharma. The vast expanse of flawlessly formed characters calls to mind the forms of erudition undone in Xu Bing’s best-known work, Tianshu, Book from the Sky (1989). In the opening of The Character of Characters, calligraphy and the cosmos of the printed scroll call to mind the original title of Tianshu, A Mirror that Analyzes the World. On the wide screen, the single stroke is written as large as the character scroll that is its ground, figure, and macrocosmic reflection. The characters of Zhao Mengfu’s Lotus Sutra begin to quake and shake, breaking apart and sinking into a heap in the lower portions of the screen, creating transitional moments of impermanence from which another world arises. In his reflection on this portion of the animation, Xu Bing writes of the orderly and devout nature of the scroll, drawing attention as well to the cultural constraint of the individual that it reflects in terms of both Buddhist ideals and ancient Chinese pedagogical values.7

In the scene that follows, Xu Bing’s rendition of Zhao Mengfu’s Autumn Colors on the Que and Hua Mountains (A.D. 1295) rises out of the characters of the Lotus Sutra. Unlike in typical Yuan dynasty painting, the scene and entire animation is in black and white, with rare accents of red. In the landscape, myna birds, an embodiment of the living word, famous for their ability to copy human speech, squawk. Among other sounds of nature, the voices of human beings emerge, seeming to respond to the birds from another grouping of trees, in unintelligible vowel sounds belonging to no language. Xu Bing presents a global understanding of the rise of humankind, language, and pictograms as the continents now rise up, populated by simple characters across the sweep of the scroll from the Americas to East Asia and Australia.

Coming into focus on the East Asian continent, which dissolves into a cloudlike form, a single eye writ large ﬁlls the screen of The Character of Characters. It then becomes two eyes, one above the other, then four—the legendary ﬁgure Cang Jie, inventor of written characters. His form appears as the essence of his mythological anatomy. In the next scene, landscape returns as a refrain, referencing Wang Gai’s earlier-referred-to classic text The Mustard Seed Garden Manual, as well as Xu Bing’s Landscript works (1999–2006). A landscape derived from the forms of the famous painting and calligraphy manual connect the past and present through Xu Bing’s

Vol. 14 No. 4 93 conceptual mode—as a book flies through the scene, its blank pages fill with Xu Bing, The Character of Characters, 2012, video still. characters that leap from the landscape onto its pages. In a new scene, the Photo: © 2015 Museum Associates/LACMA. flying book, filled with characters, lands at the centre of a group of children, Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. who are copying from it.

In an extremely complex section of the animation in The Character of Characters, a conceptual anatomy of human cognition provides a model for cultural distinctions between visual and auditory forms of script. To communicate the experience of integrating two languages, Xu Bing created a complex image integrating elements of human anatomy and metaphors of its process into an instructive, moving image. Forms of eye and ear are shown attached by thin tubes to a pulsing brain. That brain is linked to a series of neuronal connections and exchanges. These “organs” of processing, have the appearance of a digestive system, which channel and integrate the experience, comprehension, and knowledge of language. The actions involved represent understanding of the basics of two different language systems, one based on Chinese characters and the other on the Roman alphabet. The pictographic form of the Chinese language is oriented toward the eye, while the Roman alphabet consists of sonic characters. By having Roman script enter the ear and Chinese characters enter the eye, Xu Bing clearly marks the perceptual differences between the two. In the complex system of cerebral interchanges that are modeled in the animation, the phonic form of languages based in alphabetic script meets, and at times tangles or fails to unite with, the visuality of characters. The process of learning, translation, and eventual uniﬁcation of languages ends in complete cognitive processing, and thus their forms emerge from the other side of the system as the character and letters of the word “tree” are ﬁgured as vibrating, dynamic, and vigorous.

The moving elements of this vignette are accented in red that emphasizes the biological effort, represented by machinery, involved in the process, as well as being viviﬁed by pulsing tones in the soundtrack that give a sense of biological processes heard from a remote distance, almost like an echo through a stethoscope. A series of different visualized mechanisms and sounds bring to life the organs of the neuronal model. Some suggest slot machines, industrial machinery, wheels, gears, rocket ships, and a maze- like video game that populate the conceptual neuroanatomy of language processing, doing the work. Remarkably, this fast-moving, complex, and compelling passage in the video receives almost no discussion in the accompanying essay but is a key element of The Character of Characters that

94 Vol. 14 No. 4 invites sustained and careful consideration, serving as a signiﬁcant addition to models of the artist’s thought processes.

Mystery and sacred awe are evoked in the section on character divination subtitled “Character Talismans,” the first in a series of vignettes enhanced by a particularly evocative soundtrack of attenuated bell tones and expressive percussion. Elegant, disembodied hands guide the manifestation of guihuafu, “scripture delivered by the spirit,” which is venerated by figures surrounding the large character. The scenes that follow are distinctive for their imagistic use of large fields of negative space. The cultural concerns embedded in these scenes are especially clear in Xu Bing’s essay, drawing attention to the sacred value and uses of characters in mystical rites, celebrations, blessings, and worship. In a section of the essay devoted to the riddles of characters, a riddle within Xu Bing’s oeuvre underlies his discussion of Lady Sui Hui’s palindrome, a chart of characters that can be read in any direction, forming poems. It is the inspirational source of his transculturally potent work Magic Carpet (2006).

Opening a series of scenes that present a brief introduction to traditional calligraphy techniques, animated scissors cut ﬁber from living animals, including a horsetail, boar’s hair, and even baby’s hair. In the sequences that follow, instructive elements from Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy come to life through animated motion, including proper posture and holding the brush, and bone, tendon, and muscle metaphors are used to describe calligraphy strokes. These elements of Xu Bing’s pedagogical art receive greater explication through new detail and historical commentary in his essay, providing valuable insights for those who have difﬁculty understanding discussions of technique in Square Word Calligraphy and little knowledge of the history of and pedagogical literature around Chinese calligraphy.

In his discussion of pedagogical discourse in relationship to Chinese culture and formal education, Xu Bing highlights different elements of methodology, assessment, and accomplishment. As elements of Chinese success strategies for education, Xu Bing places emphasis on the relationship between students learning calligraphy as a practice of traditional acculturated restraint, combined with force-fed teaching methods, and rigorous examinations. He explicitly positions traditional culture as a source of contemporary international achievement.8 China’s participation in the International Mathematics Olympiad is an example, and is remarkable for China’s consistent placement at the highest rank, which reﬂects the quality of mathematical education in particular.9

Vol. 14 No. 4 95 In the series of historical references that comprises one of the most Top: Xu Bing, The Character of Characters, 2012, video provocative series of images, The Character of Characters rapidly shows still. Photo: © 2015 Museum Associates/LACMA. calligraphy in the form of brushed ink and rubbings by the emperors of Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. the Song, Tang, and Ming dynasties, followed by the cursive calligraphy Bottom: Xu Bing, The Character of Characters, of Mao Zedong. A crowd surrounding Mao Zedong, suggesting the cult 2012, video still. Photo: © 2015 Museum Associates/ of his leadership, differentiates his calligraphy. After this introduction LACMA. Courtesy of Xu of political power personified by the brush, a huge red seal replaces the Bing Studio. austere black ink and exceeds the boundaries of the screen. The large, red, five-pointed star of the Communist Party appears at the center of the seal, which represents the Writing Reform Committee of China, which was established in the 1950s and which developed the simplification scheme to make literacy more accessible to the Chinese people.

This moment of transformation through simplification is marked as one of the most dramatic shifts in the narrative within The Character of Characters, and in its use scale and colour, it is similar in visual impact to the single stroke that opens the animation. The seal of the Writing Reform Committee appears on the screen via the swift strike of a stamp and is diametrically opposed in form and action to the first long, careful stroke of the animation. The representation of the impact of reform begins with a vivid acknowledgment of erasure as impermanence, specifying losses to language through the simplification of characters. This passage quickly communicates, with lucid expression, the impact such simplification has had on traditional characters and their imagistic communicative power. Through the examples of the characters for child, flying, and love, Xu Bing uses red to indicate the excised portions, drawing attention to the core of the characters’ meaning, while also using red to represent the colour of editing and mark out their transformation. In this way, he shows how the character for child lost its “head,” flying lost its “wing,” and love lost its “heart.” As the scene is taking place, at the far right of the screen, the sound of a gunshot signals the start of a race. As two lines show progress to the finish, the speed of simplified characters appearing on the screen wins the race against traditional characters, while ideogrammatic emoji

96 Vol. 14 No. 4 icons appear above and below the characters and at the end of the race. These passages in the animation, from imperial to governmental power and tradition to modernity, signify important experiences of impermanence within Chinese culture that have harmony with, and make an elegiac counterpoint to, Xu Bing’s writing on Confucian values and the role of neutrality in “learning through changes and through accretion.” 10

In the scenes that follow these, Xu Bing illustrates components of ancient ground warfare techniques mapped out in the form of a giant character. He describes “how the layout of the character is like the arrangement of troops” as explained by Madame Wei in her Jin dynasty treatise “The Brush Array.”11 Xu Bing illustrates elements of modern first-strike fighting tactics alongside the defenses, protections, and fortifications described in the ancient text. These illustrations represent modern tanks, riflemen, and the atomic bomb as having the same strategic function as ancient moats and walls did as metaphors within ancient modes of calligraphy. In this current era of fighter planes, technological warfare, and drones, the comparison of the metaphoric scabbards, armour, and moats of Madame Wei to weapons of modernity, but not contemporaneity, is open to new interpretations as language and culture adapt to the new century.

Xu Bing’s focus on contemporary technology centres not on warfare but on the marketplace, brands, and technologies of urbanism. The final scenes highlight stability and impermanence in values, and the animation closes with a focus on copying images technologically, rather than with the brush. This focus on copying defines Xu Bing’s analysis of the enduring quality of the “collective Chinese character.”12 Streets of ink wash map urban rhythms of heavy traffic patterns, as vehicles range over roads laid out loosely by strokes of ink. Patterns of collective movement transform into shopping bags along the same route. They cluster and conform around centres that transform into world-famous brand logos appearing on the edges of a fragment of the urban grid. The logos of Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Rolex, Calvin Klein, and Gucci appear and disappear, leaving in their wake

Vol. 14 No. 4 97 architectural footprint doorways like those represented on blueprints of architectural ﬂoorplans. In his essay, Xu Bing parallels this sequence with critiques of Chinese who “in foreign countries they burst in and out of stores feverishly buying famous brand products [and] blindly worship famed international architects.”13 This thesis calls to mind a portion of the introduction of his essay, in which Xu Bing argues that China has developed quickly without adopting Western values.14 This raises interesting questions about the complexities of human values as represented by consumerism and purchasing power and reﬂects an understanding purchasing power as a transcultural value of the global marketplace rather than a spectacular symptom of late capitalism.

The content of the final scenes of The Character of Characters focuses on production in the marketplace, on the Chinese tradition of copying applied to branding as well, but not in terms of counterfeit luxury goods or inexpensive commodities. The practice of copying takes form through the technological model of xerographic reproduction, as a machine not just for copying, but one that produces its own version of counterfeit rebranding. In one of the final scenes of the animation, sheets of paper marked with the red, gridded square of calligraphy practice appear, emblazoned with an apple in a calligraphic stroke. The sheets feed spontaneously into a copying machine and emerge from the other side free from the guidelines in the shape of a pear. This clever sequence of the impermanent erasure of apples transformed into pears concludes the narrative. Pages of pears float into the final images of The Character of Characters—the skyline of contemporary Beijing. Its most recognizable buildings, especially those designs by Rem Koolhaas and Ai Weiwei, stand out in a cityscape of credits emblazoned in Roman and Chinese characters. The cityscape signals the location of the work’s origin as well as the end of Xu Bing’s most complex commentary on the Chinese language to date.

Notes

1. Gao Minglu, “Xu Bing’s Art: Making the Meaning(less) to Serve People,” in Reading Space: The Art of Xu Bing, ed. Carolyn C. Guile (Hamilton, NY: Department of Art and Art History, Colgate University, 2009), 40. 2. Xu Bing, “The Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll (English),” Fourth Guangzhou Triennial, http:// www.gdmoa.org/zhanlan/threeyear/Thefourth/24/en/Works/22078.jsp/. 3. John B. Ravenal, “Tobacco as Universal Language,” in Xu Bing: Tobacco Project, Duke/Shanghai/ Virginia, 1999–2011 (Richmond and Charlottesville: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2011), 26. 4. Gao Minglu, “Xu Bing’s Art: Making the Meaning(less) to Serve People,” 40. 5. Xu Bing, An Introduction to New English Calligraphy, video, 1994. 6. Xu Bing et al., The Character of Characters: An Animation by Xu Bing (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2012), 21. 7. Ibid., 33. 8. Ibid., 44. 9. “International Mathematical Olympiad,” https://www.imo-ofﬁcial.org/results.aspx/. 10. Xu et al., The Character of Characters, 47. 11. Ibid., 54. 12. Ibid., 60. 13. Ibid., 58. 14. Ibid., 27.

98 Vol. 14 No. 4 Lisa Catt Yangjiang Group: Actions for Tomorrow The 4A Centre of Contemporary Art, Sydney January 17–March 7, 2015

ydney’s Chinatown is a bustling mélange of buses, trains, ﬂea markets, grocers, cinemas, karaoke bars, food courts, and university Scampuses. Tourists stream from the nearby entertainment epicentre of Darling Harbour as young backpack-clad students dart to class or congregate outside a local noodle bar. These students—the overwhelming majority of which hail from the China, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Korea—are now the locals here.

Among the densely packed blocks of modern city life run rows of Edwardian buildings. Preserved from the early twentieth century, their historic shop fronts speak of the area’s mercantile past, once a part of the city’s original produce market, where traders—many Chinese—would bring their fruits and vegetables to market and stay overnight in nearby boarding houses. In one of these shop fronts is the highly inconspicuous but highly respected 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

In Sydney, Chinatown is not a typical location for a contemporary art space, but departing director Aaron Seeto explains:

Being based in Chinatown we have a very different audience to other organizations in Sydney. Having a street front, we interact quite differently with people, who you would probably not consider to be your “normal” contemporary art audience. So our programming around this time [Chinese New Year] is quite important, not only to draw these people into the space but to develop a relationship with them.1

Understanding 4A Centre’s strong focus on community engagement, one can see that its location is no accident. Its position in the heart of Chinatown is entirely strategic. The Centre’s ability to absorb and respond to its external surroundings is exactly what makes it such a unique—and successful—cultural space.

During the exhibition Yangjiang Group—Actions for Tomorrow, one could be forgiven for walking past 4A and thinking it was but another Chinatown retail space. A casual glimpse would register tightly-packed clothes racks, a table piled high with shirts, and gaudy coloured signs screaming advertising catchphrases—all of which feel typical of the neighbourhood. The silver lettering running across the front window— FINAL DAYS—reinforces this assumption.

Vol. 14 No. 4 99 FINAL DAYS, however, is not a sales slogan aimed at enticing foot trafﬁc, but, Yangjiang Group, FINAL DAYS, 2015, commissioned rather, the title of a site-speciﬁc installation that is part of the exhibition by by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian contemporary Chinese artists Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan, and Sun Qinglin— Art, Sydney. Photo: Zan also known as Yangjiang Group. Founded in 2002, these artists have exhibited Wimberley. Courtesy of the artists and Vitamin Creative as a group extensively across Europe and Asia and have become renowned for Space, Guangzhou. their anarchic attitudes and absurdist streak. Their blunt rejection of the over- intellectualization of contemporary art, together with their propensity for alcohol-fuelled art-making sessions that last through all hours of the night, has seen them cultivate a distinct artistic persona.

Actions for Tomorrow marked the debut in Australia of Yangjiang Group and, attesting to the dynamism of 4A, accentuated the experiential nature of the art that these artists produce. It allowed for an appreciation of the artists’ preoccupation around concepts of response and transformation, and not just their unorthodox behaviour.

As much of the programming of 4A is receptive to its surroundings, so too is the practice of Yangjiang Group. Their very name—that of their hometown in Guangdong province—points to the strong sense of locality. Building upon a lineage of collective contemporary art practice in the region, most notably that of Guangzhou collective Big Tail Elephant Group (Xu Tan, Chen Shaoxiong, Lin Yilin and Liang Juhui), their work is decidedly different from that of their northern Chinese counterparts. While it retains an undeniable energy, it does not convey the political heat and relentless social force that often characterizes art coming out of Beijing and Shanghai.

Broader differences in regional identity explain why the mindset and conversations of southern Chinese artists come from a completely different place. “In the hierarchical territorial map of power holders in Beijing,” writes Professor Helen F. Siu, “[southern China]. has always been one of the most distant from the centre. . . . The local population is distinguished by an enterprising ethos, a life-style, and political thinking unorthodox by Beijing standards.”2

100 Vol. 14 No. 4 Yangjiang Group, FINAL The area’s breakneck modernization, particularly the urbanization of DAYS, 2015, commissioned by 4A Centre for Guangzhou, spurred by its close proximity to Hong Kong and the Special Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Photo: Zan Economic Zones of Shenzhen and Zhuhai, has brought, again as Helen F. Wimberley. Courtesy of the Siu suggests, “unprecedented prosperity that challenges the basic tenets artists and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou of socialist government.”3 This has had a profound effect on the region’s visual arts. As museum director and curator Melissa Chiu articulates: “With little of the political gravity of Beijing or decadent history of Shanghai, Guangzhou’s signiﬁcance lies in its economic prosperity.”4

Whether in performance, installation, or calligraphy, the art of Yangjiang Group is underpinned by actions—often spontaneous—that strive to blur the lines between art and life. It is driven by a playful and energetic response to place, wherever the group may be. For Seeto, it was this element of social connectivity that particularly piqued his interest in bringing them to Sydney. Yangjiang Group is not just about making art for the wall, but also about how the everyday can be incorporated into a contemporary art context. The transformation of 4A’s entrance into a retail setting, for example, immediately communicates this philosophy to all visitors to the gallery, from the most discerning to the casually curious.

However, it is not just the transformation of space that is signiﬁcant in FINAL DAYS, but also that of everyday materials. Presented in a gallery setting, the mass-produced clothes used in this commissioned work assume a completely different meaning: from a common commodity sold in the local markets of Yangjiang to a piece of visual art displayed in Sydney. This transformation is further emphasized through the milky skin of dripped wax that covers the entire installation.

The wax accentuates the physicality of the installation; its application bestows the clothes with a distinct sculptural form. As such, visitors move through the space with a heightened spatial awareness, passing the display of clothes with attentiveness that is not typically triggered when shopping at the average retailer. To feel such a pronounced presence is an experience

Vol. 14 No. 4 101 markedly distinct from that afforded by today’s global digital marketplace. Nowadays, consumers don’t need to physically enter a shop: they can remain at home, clicking their mouse, credit card details at the ready. FINAL DAYS thus invites a broader consideration of the changing ways in which individuals participate in commerce.

Commerce is an activity often explored by Yangjiang Group, a tenable Yangjiang Group, FINAL DAYS, 2015, commissioned response from artists who have lived and worked in a region that has by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian experienced rapid urbanization since the 1990s. Considering the speed at Art, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy of the which they have watched the world around them change, it is interesting to artists and Vitamin Creative note how their use of wax creates a palpable tenor of slowness. In FINAL Space, Guangzhou. DAYS, solidiﬁed drips hang suspended, in stalactite formations, rendering the installation static. This stillness stands at odds with the jostle of the street outside—and subverts the insatiable consumerist desire beyond.

Just like the clothing featured in the installation, the loudly coloured signboards hail from the artist’s local environment in Yangjiang, splashed with the characters of marketing expressions idiomatic to Chinese retailers. Despite these culturally speciﬁc elements, the installation blends seamlessly into the market ambience of the neighbourhood. As mentioned earlier, this is very much a testament to the area’s multiculturalism and 4A’s ability to tap into this very fabric.

However, the artists’ decision to displace their local environment to the context of Sydney can also be seen as commentary on the conﬂation of the local and the global in society today. At the same time, a subversive hint toward contemporary consumerism—and perhaps the contemporary art market—once again emerges from their work. Interestingly, the exhibition

102 Vol. 14 No. 4 itself was supported by the online fundraising platform Kickstarter in a joint campaign with the newly established Art Basel Crowdfunding Initiative.

Yangjiang Group did not solely devote their “actions” to 4A’s entrance. A mix of commissions and existing works, the exhibition overall is more akin to a takeover of the entire interior of the gallery, from the up- and downstairs gallery spaces to the kitchen and ofﬁce, all part of the initial proposal by the artists. According to Seeto: “Everything was fair game.”5

This is most evident in the participatory piece Tea Office (2015). Created to engage the administrative areas of 4A, Tea Office served as a designated site within the exhibition space where staff could sit and take a cycle of Chinese teas every morning. Serving as a ritualistic and sensory experience, it involved brewing, pouring, smelling, and finally drinking the tea in a particular sequence. This work once again explores the potential transformation of routines of the everyday through disrupting the barriers that normally exist between art and daily life.

The work also aims to recalibrate an individual’s relationship with their external environments, restoring energy and encouraging clarity of mind. Tea Ofﬁce, once again, induces a sense of slowness, as participants are encouraged to focus on how each sense responds to the tea.

Yangjiang Group, Tea An extension of Tea Ofﬁce was the Garden, 2015, produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary performance Tea Garden, which Asian Art, Sydney. Photo: formed part of a live art event Blue Murder Studios. Courtesy of the artists and that 4A and Yangjiang Group held Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. at Sydney’s Chinese Garden of Friendship to celebrate Chinese New Year. In the Tea House Pavilion, which sits within the walled garden, the artists shared tea with a group of attendees. While the selection and preparation of teas adhered to cultural understandings of ceremony and medicine speciﬁc to China, the overall performance dissociated the act of tea drinking itself from any formal or traditional context.

Whether or not participants felt a shift in their spiritual perception as promised in the event’s brochure, it was nonetheless an experience open to myriad reactions. As a diverse range of art-goers sipped and inhaled, inhaled and sipped, the group’s central creed played out—that “high” culture could be practiced by anyone, in striking contrast to the sense of tradition and heritage the surrounding gardens represent.

A second performance, After Dinner Shu-fa, held at the same event, was based on a similar premise. It is a work that the group has performed several times in several contexts, each a different iteration. Upon a large

Vol. 14 No. 4 103 sheet of paper laid on the ground, Yangjiang Group, After Dinner Shu-fa (Your Lover’s the artists took turns painting a Love Appears in Your Mind’s Eye), 2015, performance series of Chinese characters. Their produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, frenetic and exaggerated gestures Sydney. Photo: Blue Murder caused ink to splatter and drip Studios. Courtesy of the artists and Vitamin Creative across the paper; they laughed and Space, Guangzhou. joked. These actions completely opposed the masterly nature, the repose and concentration, with which calligraphy is traditionally associated. Yangjiang Group’s radical use of calligraphy (and this is a recurring subject within their work) reimagines a practice that is steeped in history, hierarchy, and tradition, transforming it into an act that is now full of jest and humour and that is accessible to everyone. They bring it into common experience.

After completing the Chinese characters, the artists then began to write an English version of what they wrote in Chinese. The translation unfolded in a considered cursive to slowly reveal the message “Your lover’s love is in your mind’s eye.” This declaration of love’s ephemerality may not have been the grand reveal wished for by the audience’s high proportion of couples— in addition to Chinese New Year, it was also Valentine’s Day. However, the message does attest to Yangjiang Group’s acuity as observers who respond to, and incorporate, the contexts that surround them.

Finally, the leftovers of the evening’s Yangjiang Group, After Dinner Shu-fa (Your Lover’s meal—a series of contemporary Love Appears in Your Mind’s Eye), 2015, performance Asian dishes that guests could produced by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, pick up as they wandered about Sydney. Photo: Blue Murder the gardens—were laid over the Studios. Courtesy of the artists and Vitamin Creative English and Chinese inscriptions, Space, Guangzhou. delicately placed with the precision and steadiness one would have expected during the earlier round of calligraphy. This served as their ﬁnal act in a subversion of the social hierarchy embedded within the practice of calligraphy: a structure based upon the elevation of a few and the exclusion of many. This critique perhaps could also be extended to echo within the context of the art world—as the food scraps were laid out, it was easy to apply their gestures to questions about the consumption of art today.

This simultaneous appropriation and rejection of aspects of traditional Chinese culture is a deﬁning feature of the Yangjiang Group’s practice. As artist Zheng Guogu explained: “You need to follow traditions ﬁrst and then break from those traditions . . . each new generation has radicals who must break with tradition.”6

104 Vol. 14 No. 4 Many contemporary artists from China—and indeed within the broader Asian region—are exploring the relationship between the past and the present or the tensions between tradition and modernization to express deeper sociopolitical uncertainties. This is not the case when considering the art of Yangjiang Group; the artists deﬂect outright any politicization of their work, and this further distances their art from that of the political, cultural centres of Beijing and Shanghai.

Yangjiang Group, GOD IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE RMB!, 2015, Chinese ink and acrylic paint, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy of the artists and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. Next page: Yangjiang Group, Actions for Tomorrow, 2015, exhibition view with Das Kapital Football, 2009/2014, in foreground, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Courtesy of the artists and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

However, when viewing their work, it is challenging to refrain from political readings. This is particularly so when encountering other works featured in Actions For Tomorrow, especially those that present a seemingly explicit engagement with ideas pertaining to commerce and economics. Upstairs at 4A, the proclamation GOD IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE RMB! and its Chinese translation are scrawled across the gallery walls in the artists’ distinctive freeform calligraphy—that is, one that is barely legible.

The frequent presentation and interpretation of contemporary Chinese art through the lens of politics and protest generates an association between the work and issues such as China’s market liberalization, its presiding communist rule, and the ethical system underpinning contemporary Chinese society. However, Yangjiang Group does not acknowledge such

Vol. 14 No. 4 105 106 Vol. 14 No. 4 Vol. 14 No. 4 107 readings within their work. According to Zheng Guogu, the twenty-four- metre calligraphic mural GOD IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE RMB! was made in response to the current situation of Chinese investment in the Australian property market: “It is widely publicized that Chinese real estate agents are bringing a massive amount of capital into Australia, particularly Sydney. . . . This kind of new change reﬂects a new conﬂict within society.”6

Within Australia, however, Chinese investment at the top end of Sydney’s real estate market has become an internal political issue, giving way to a xenophobic rhetoric that predictably ﬂares up over foreign investment in Australia. But Yangjiang Group is not looking to enter into this debate; instead, they are simply acknowledging it, although in a provocative way. The impetus to create GOD IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE RMB! came down to the idea of transformation. The group wanted to transform the social tension surrounding the real estate issue into something that was purely aesthetic and energetic. “It’s not conceptual art; it has nothing to do with the symbols. . . . it’s about how your body reacts—it’s an immediate response, an instinctive and emotional response,” remarked Zheng Guogu.7

Within this context, for Yangjiang Group, calligraphy is about a ﬂow of energy that connects the external to the internal and gives way to a creative response. Traditionally, the artists have sought to heighten this experience through the consumption of alcohol—it allows them to forget the rules and experiment in a new realm of expression. But these days it is apparently more of a sober affair, with tea proving a preferred alternative: “When people drink the tea, an energy enters into the body through meridian, which allows the energy to circulate,” explained Zheng Guogu.8

There is a strong connection to the way the artists talk about their use of calligraphy in terms of energy ﬂow and the traditional Chinese principle of qi. Although acknowledging such a connection, the artists prefer to focus upon the response of their work as elicited in the here and now, rather than anchor it to systems of wider cultural meaning. And while prescribed with a comparable degree of esotericism, their chaotic calligraphy encapsulates a disruptive outburst, a spontaneous force that exists aside from the notions of stability and balance associated with qi.

The other large calligraphic installation commanding the upstairs space was Das Kapital Football (2009/2014). Karl Marx’s seminal text is written across 7,000 individual pieces of rice paper, which have been massed together, crumpled and layered, into one large form that blankets most of the room. Written by a group of Chinese amateur calligraphy artists, the text took one month to complete and is the lasting element of a performance by the same title.

In the performance, three simultaneous football matches are played, corresponding to the three volumes of Marx’s manifesto. During the match, pieces of calligraphy are thrown onto the ﬁeld, bundling around players’ feet and obstructing movement within the game. They become barriers between the teams as well as team members themselves.

108 Vol. 14 No. 4 Yangjiang Group, Das Given the direct reference to Karl Marx’s manifesto, it is once again easy to Kapital Football, 2009, performance. Courtesy fall into a political reading of the work. However, the piece presents another of the artists and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. way in which Yangjiang Group has reimagined a cultural tradition, bringing an exclusive artistic practice into the realm of the popular—in this case, sport. The collective has literally thrown calligraphy out to the masses to be tossed around and played with.

And herein lies the very foundation of its art: a playful response that serves to reach the widest audience possible. With political preconceptions put aside, the work of Yangjiang Group is best appreciated at face value: an unexpected transformation of the everyday into an art experience.

Notes

1. Aaron Seeto, unpublished interview with the author, Sydney, Australia, February 24, 2015. 2. Helen F. Siu, “Cultural Identity and the Politics of Difference in South China” Daedalus 122, no. 2 (Spring 1993), 20. 3. Ibid. 4. Melissa Chu, “Static interference: the Big Tail Elephant Group of Guangzhou.” Art Asia Paciﬁc no. 24 (1999), 44. 5. Seeto, unpublished interview with the author. 6. “Actions for Tomorrow: Yangjiang Group,” Das Platforms Video, online video interview, February 6, 2015, http://dasplatforms.com/videos/yangjiang-group-actions-for-tomorrow/. 7. Luise Guest, “Anarchy, Tea and After Dinner Calligraphy: Interview with the Yangjiang Group,” Daily Serving, http://dailyserving.com/2015/01/anarchy-tea-and-after-dinner-calligraphy-interview-with- the-yangjiang-group/. 8. “Actions for Tomorrow: Yangjiang Group.” 9. Luise Guest, “Anarchy, Tea and After Dinner Calligraphy: Interview with the Yangjiang Group.” 10. “Actions for Tomorrow: Yangjiang Group.”

Vol. 14 No. 4 109 Chinese Name Index

Ai Dewu Hou Hanru Shi Yong Yu Youhan 艾得無侯瀚如施勇余友涵

Ai Weiwei Hu Jianping Siu, Helen F. Zhang Jian-Jun 艾未未胡建平蕭鳳霞張健君

Bartlett, Voon Pow Hu Yun Sui Hui Zhang Peili 丘文寶胡昀蘇蕙張培力

Cangjie Huang Xiaopeng Sun Qinglin Zhao Mengfu 倉頡黃小鵬孫慶麟趙孟頫

Chen Shaoxiong Huang Yongping Tang Guangming Zhao Yao 陳劭雄黃永砯湯光明趙要

Chen Xhingyu Lao Tze Tang Wing-Shing Zheng Guogu 陳幸宇老子鄧永成鄭國谷

Chen Zaiyan Liang Juhui Wang Gai Zhou Tiehai 陳再炎梁鉅輝王概周鐵海

Chiu, Melissa Lin Yilin Wang Guqing Zhou Zixi 招穎思林一林汪谷青周子曦

Deng Xiaoping Liu Wei Wu Guanzhong 鄧小平劉韡吳冠中

Ding Yi Lu Xun Wu Meichun 丁乙魯迅吳美純

Fan Jiman Luo Zhongli Xu Bing 范紀曼羅中立徐冰

Feng Boyi Madame Wei Xu Tan (Wei Shuo) 馮博一徐坦衛夫人（衛鑠） Feng Lianghong Xu Zhen Qian Weikang 馮良鴻徐震錢喂康 Gao Minglu Yan Xiaojing Qin Yifeng 高名潞閆曉靜秦一峰 Geng Jianyi Yan Zhenqing Qiu Zhijie 耿建翌顏真卿邱志杰 Gu Yuan Yangjiang Group Seeto, Aaron 古元陽江組司徒福興

Guanyin Shang, Danielle Yao, Pauline J. 觀音尚端姚嘉善

Ho, Robert H. N. Shen Fan Yu Hsiao Hwei 何鴻毅申凡余小蕙

110 Vol. 14 No. 4 Vol. 14 No. 4 111 112 Vol. 14 No. 4 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, Great Criticism — Hong Hao and Yan Lei, Wang Guangyi Invitation 2009, Serigraphy, 2010, Printed on paper, 210 X 295 mm, 295 x 205 mm, signed by the artist. Produced by the artist. Produced by A Space Art, Edition of 300. Beijing. Edition of 200.

No 7.

Zhong Biao, Dawn of Asia 2010, Serigraphy, 210 x 300 mm, Produced by the artist. Edition of 200.