November/December 2013 Volume 12, Number 6 Inside

november/december 2013 V o l u m e 1 2 , N u m b e r 6

Ie n s i d

Artist Features: Cai Jin, Shao Yinong and Muchen Interviews: Ai Weiwei, He Chongyue, Au Hoi Lam Curatorial Inquiries 14: What Do We Aspire To? Reviews: Xu Tan, 5th Auckland Triennial

US$12.00 NT$350.00 pintr e d i n Ta iwan

VOLUME 12, NUMBER 6, november/december 2013

CONTENTS 2 Editor’s Note 20 4 Contributors

6 A Conversation with Ai Weiwei Zheng Shengtian

20 A Bridge to the Forgotten: Remembrance in Shao Yinong and Muchen's The Assembly Halls Shan Windscript

36 He Chongyue: Layers of Time and Space 36 Alice Schmatzberger

45 Time and Love: Cai Jin’s New Works Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky

60 Objects of Experience: A Conversation with Au Hoi Lam Stephanie Bailey

78 Curatorial Inquiries 14: What Do We Aspire To? Carol Yinghua Lu and Nikita Yingqian Cai 45 82 The 5th Auckland Triennial: If You Were to Live Here … Richard Dale

98 The Evolution of Land—The Evolution of Us: Xu Tan’s Search for Questions Evelyn Lok

108 Chinese Name Index

Cover: He Chongyue, A Billion to One: Dictated Parenthood and 82 the Feudal Mind No. 7 (detail), 2006, colour photograph, 152 x 190 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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

Vol. 12 No. 6 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   Ken Lum As time and events seem to accelerate, history becomes an ever more slippery -in-chief Keith Wallace   Zheng Shengtian concept. With mainland China’s transformation  Julie Grundvig since the late 1970s, the previous era of the Kate Steinmann Chunyee Li Cultural Revolution is receding from the consciousness of many Chinese citizens.  (chinese version) Carol Yinghua Lu Chunyee Li The first three texts in this issue demonstrate Chen Ping the importance of remembering and of not Dongyue Su Debra Zhou letting the past, something that can serve as circulation manager Larisa Broyde a lesson for the present, disappear. Ai Weiwei  coordinator Michelle Hsieh recounts his experiences as a child during web site  Chunyee Li the Cultural Revolution, his entry into making advisory  art, and his years as a young Chinese artist Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum in New York. Photographers Shao Yinong John Clark, University of Sydney and Muchen examine the shifting uses of Lynne Cooke, Museo Reina Sofia Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator traditional assembly halls from their original Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator functions and their politicization during the Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Cultural Revolution to their current state of Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh disrepair or repurposing. He Chongyue, also a Hou Hanru, Artistic Director, MAXXI, Rome Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop photographer, determinedly explores the recent Katie Hill, University of Westminster past by researching wall and stone tablet Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian messaging as forms of political and cultural Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator communication, the One-Child Policy, and the Lu Jie, Long March Space Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore aging population in China and its diminished Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University role within a modern Chinese society. Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago Yishu 59 also features texts on two women Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District artists, Cai Jin, from Beijing, and Au Hoi Lam,  Art & Collection Group Ltd. from Hong Kong; we are given overviews of 6F. No. 85, Section 1, their respective work and how it has evolved Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 over the years. These women demonstrate Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 quite different sensibilities; Cai Jin is notable Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 E-mail: [email protected] for her expressive use of paint, and Au Hoi Lam exhibits a contemplative restraint in her vice general manager Jenny Liu Alex Kao drawings, paintings, and sculptures. marketing manager Joyce Lin circulation executive Perry Hsu Betty Hsieh Nikita Yingqian Cai and Carol Yinghua Lu  Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. continue their Curatorial Inquiries discussions with a fourteenth edition, exploring the idea of web site http://yishu-online.com web design Design Format institutional critique as proposed by Andrea  1683 - 3082 Fraser. They too look at the recent past, and Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited how critics and curators remain stuck within in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, accepted terminologies when analyzing advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: artwork. In conclusion, we feature two reviews, Yishu Editorial Office one covering the 5th Auckland Triennial 200–1311 Howe Street under the directorship of Hou Hanru, and one Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 considering Xu Tan’s exhibition in Guangzhou Phone: 1.604.649.8187 that combined recent projects with some of his Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: [email protected] earlier work. subscription rates 1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com) Keith Wallace    Leap Creative Group   Raymond Mah art director Gavin Chow designer Philip Wong No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版創刊於 2002年5月1日典藏國際版文選創刊於 2012年5月1日典藏國際版‧第12卷第6期‧2013年11–12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) 4 作者小傳編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 黎俊儀

6 與艾未未的對話中文版鄭勝天執行主編：盧迎華編輯：陳萍黎俊儀蘇東悅 20 越過遺忘的惡水：邵逸農、周曉鳴慕辰《大禮堂》中的記憶表現行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 王侍（Shan Windscript）廣告：謝盈盈網站編輯：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li) 36 何崇岳：時空層次顧問：王嘉驥田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) Alice Schmatzberger 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 巫鴻林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 45 時間與情愛：蔡錦的新作范迪安招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) Patricia Karetzky 洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 胡昉侯瀚如 60 經驗的客體：與區凱琳的對話徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 白慧怡（Stephanie Bailey）姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 倪再沁高名潞 78 策展問題之十四：我們期望什麼？費大爲楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 蔡影茜（Nikita Yingqian Cai）盧杰盧迎華（Carol Yinghua Lu） Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill Charles Merewether 82 第五届奧克蘭三年展——《如果你生活 Apinan Poshyananda 在這裏……》出版：典藏雜誌社 Richard Dale 副總經理：劉靜宜高世光行銷總監：林素珍發行專員：許銘文 98 我們和土地的演變：徐坦所搜索的問題謝宜蓉駱浩妍（Evelyn Lok）社址：台灣臺北市中山北路一段85號6樓電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 電子信箱： 108 中英人名對照 [email protected] 編輯部： Yishu Office 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 傳真：(1) 604.591.6392 電子信箱: [email protected]

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售價每本12美元。封面：何崇岳：計劃性生育－07，2006，彩色攝影，訂閲：一年84美元，兩年158美元（含航空郵資）。 152 x 190 公分，藝術家提供網上下載：一年49.95美元感謝JNBY、加拿大亞洲藝術基金會、陳萍、網上訂閱： http://yishu-online.com 李世默夫婦、賀芳霓（Stephanie Holmquist）和Mark Allison 對本刊出版與發行的慷慨支持版權所有，本刊內容非經本社同意不得翻譯和轉載。本刊登載內容並不代表編輯部與出版社立場。 Contributors

Stephanie Bailey has an M.A. in of Fudan University and was a participant contemporary art theory from Goldsmiths in the de Appel Curatorial Programme, College, University of London, and a B.A. in Amsterdam, 2009–10. classical civilization with English literature from King’s College, London. Between 2006 Richard Dale is an independent curator and and 2012, she lived in Athens, Greece, where art writer living in Auckland, New Zealand. she played a formative role in designing and He played a formative role in introducing managing the BTEC-accredited Foundation new Chinese art to New Zealand and curated Diploma in Art and Design at Doukas the first solo exhibition of Zhang Huan Education while writing on contemporary performances on video to tour Australasia. art production and its discourses from He is former art critic for the New Zealand around the world as Art and Culture Herald, the country’s largest newspaper, for Editor of Insider Publications and as a which he still occasionally writes, and has freelance critic and essayist. She is currently also written for Art+Text, Art Asia Pacific, Managing Editor of Ibraaz. Her writing has and Art New Zealand. He lectures regularly appeared in publications including ART on contemporary East Asian art, with a PAPERS, Aesthetica, ARTnews, Artforum, focus on its recent history, and has a special Frieze, LEAP, Modern Painters, Notes on interest in performance and conceptual art. Metamodernism, and Yishu: Journal of The last exhibition he curated was Article 27, Contemporary Chinese Art. 2009, commissioned to recognize the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Nikita Yingqian Cai currently lives Human Rights. His latest writing includes in Guangzhou and is Curator at the a review of Art Basel Hong Kong Art Fair, Guangdong Times Museum. She curated 2013, for the New Zealand Herald. and edited publications for A Museum That is Not (2011) and Jiang Zhi: If This Is a Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky holds the Man (2012, co-curated with Bao Dong) and O. Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at Bard organized No Ground Underneath: Curating College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. on the Nexus of Changes (2012, co-curated She has published several books, on subjects with Carol Yinghua Lu). She was one of the such as the art of the Tang dynasty and founders of Ping Pong Space (2008–10), in Chinese Buddhist art, and she has served as Guangzhou, which functioned as a platform Editor of Journal of Chinese Religions. She of activities and artistic production for has written many catalogues and has curated local artists. She is also a critic and writes several shows on contemporary Asian art. frequently for various catalogues and publications. Her major focuses are context- Evelyn Lok recently completed a double responsive curating, educational curating, B.A. and B.Ed. in English Language and exhibition studies, and institutional critique. Fine Arts from the University of Hong She graduated from the Journalism School

4 Vol. 12 No. 6 Kong. Her thesis focuses on the idea of the Studies) at the University of Melbourne, unique “two language and three-dialect” Australia, in 2012, and is currently a Ph.D. linguistic situation in Hong Kong and how it candidate in the School of Historical and contributes to its citizens’ personal identities. Philosophical Studies at the same university, Having spent her childhood in Toronto, researching memory and contemporary she is an aspiring writer with an interest in Chinese history. Her research interests cover contemporary Asian art, specifically issues a broad range of subjects including concerning language and bilingual and memory, violence, and contemporary multicultural identity. Chinese art and history.

Carol Yinghua Lu lives and works in Zheng Shengtian, Managing Editor of Yishu, Beijing. She is a contributing editor for is a scholar, artist, and independent curator. Frieze. She has written frequently for For more than thirty years he worked at international art journals and magazines China Academy of Art as Professor and Chair including e-flux journal, The Exhibitionist, of the Oil Painting Department. He was a Yishu, Tate Etc., and Contemporary. She was founder and board member of the Vancouver on the jury for the Golden Lion Award at International Centre for Contemporary the 2011 Venice Biennale and was one of the Asian from 1999 to 2011. He has been a co-curators for the 9th Gwangju Biennale, board member of Asia Art Archive in North in 2012. Together with Liu Ding, Lu co- America since 2009 and a Trustee of the curated the 7th Shenzhen Biennale 2012, Vancouver Art Gallery since 2011. As an and they were also the guest curators for independent curator, he has co-organized Museion, Bolzano, in 2013. numerous exhibitions including Shanghai Modern, at Museum Villa Stuck, Munich Alice Schmatzberger is a natural scientist, (2004–05), and Art and China’s Revolution, art historian, independent writer, researcher, at the Asia Society, New York (2008). He and lecturer, and is author of the blog www. is currently Senior Curator for Asia with chinaculturedesk.com. She is currently the Vancouver Biennale. He contributes working on an academic project on frequently to periodicals and catalogues artists’ selves in contemporary Chinese about contemporary and Asian art. photography, video, and digital art.

Shan Windscript was born in mainland China and has studied and lived in Australia since 2001. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the University of Sydney before moving to Melbourne to pursue her postgraduate study. She completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Arts (Cultural

Vol. 12 No. 6 5 Zheng Shengtian A Conversation with Ai Weiwei Ai Weiwei's studio, Caochangdi, Beijing July 19, 2013

Zheng Shengtian: When people talk about you, they often mention that Ai Weiwei at his studio. Photo: Don Li-Leger. you were a son of the poet Ai Qing.1 Ai Qing was wrongly convicted during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957. You were born in the same year. Can you talk about your childhood following that? What did “Rightist” mean to you back then? My father was labeled a “Rightist” as well, and so was my eldest brother. I know very well what it feels like when your family members are accused of such a political crime. At school, you instantly felt the blow coming at you.

Ai Weiwei: I need to rewind my memory, though.

Zheng Shengtian: Was your father convicted before you were born?

Ai Weiwei: At the time I was born, my father already had been labeled a “Rightist.” I was born on May 18, 1957. The date was written on my birth certificate, which I did not see until two years ago. For a long time, even my mother could not recall the exact date. My father was in Shanghai, but the Writer’s Association wanted him back in Beijing when my mother was about to deliver. My parents had planned to stay in Shanghai with Liu Haisu.2 I would have been a Shanghainese if they did, but I was very lucky to have been born in Beijing.

Soon after I was born, my parents were relocated to Northeast China and worked at the No. 852 Military Plantation. They brought me with them. I cannot remember many details about the place because I was too young. All I can recall are some photographs, and in one of them my father looked incredulously thin. I had never seen him so thin before. At that time, I was like every kid in the neighbourhood: I was dirty, wearing torn clothing, and roaming all day in the vicinity of the plantation picking mushrooms. My father’s job was to cut lumber. Some time later, we were transferred to Xinjiang province through the favour of Wang Zhen,3 who was a friend of my father’s during the Yan’an period. Back then my dad was with a team of performers who went to Nanniwan to entertain Wang Zhen’s military troop.4 Our lives in Xinjiang were relatively peaceful, and although he was punished as a “Rightist,” my father somehow maintained a privileged status equivalent to a division commander of the army. The place where we stayed in Xinjiang was a military farm. As I remember it, my father was idle all day. He frequented a botanical garden nearby to pass time, since he was not allowed to write.

6 Vol. 12 No. 6 Vol. 12 No. 6 7 Zheng Shengtian: Did they treat you well in terms of material necessities?

Ai Weiwei: Our family was given two rooms. They were dormitory rooms in the Soviet style. The monthly ration included two packages of Peony brand cigarettes. I was collecting cigarette packages at the time, so I was hoping my father could finish his cigarettes quickly, just so I could get the package. I remember the Peony label was blue, which was indicative of better quality cigarettes, and only those with higher status could have access to them. The monthly wage was two hundred yuan, which was not bad at the time.

Zheng Shengtian: Did you go to kindergarten?

Ai Weiwei: Yes. We were living in the headquarters of the No. 8 Agricultural Division. Our neighbours were all staff and cadres from the division. My dad often played chess with a former Kuomintang (KMT) deputy division commander who defected to the communist army. There were times when they got into arguments while playing chess. Among the communist residents, this former KMT commander had a distinct aura of style. Then, when I was nine, the Cultural Revolution started. The division headquarters became unsettled right away because of its paramilitary features. There was a militia troop named the “Armed Branch” in the region.

On January 26, Xinjiang fired the first shot of China’s Cultural Revolution. I remember hearing lots of explosive noises. I saw my family boarding up the door. I heard running footsteps on our rooftop. Because the rooftop was made of tiles, which were not soundproof, I could hear the bullets whistling by. The next morning, I saw my family was in a panic. Children could easily sense the magnitude of fear emanating from the adults. Outdoors, I saw a crowd had gathered, and I saw dead bodies on the ground. One of them was my schoolmate Ma Lu. He had been out carrying water and unfortunately was caught in the shooting. It was a very cold night. The temperature in January in Xinjiang can drop to -30 degrees Celsius. I saw Ma Lu had been hit in his body, and bullets had pierced through his fingers. The bucket of water had frozen into ice.

Zheng Shengtian: Were you an elementary student?

Ai Weiwei: Yes. I was only nine years old. The atmosphere was frightening. The number of deaths that resulted from the incident was less than ten, but the victims had been shot dead in various locations around the division headquarters. Rumours were spreading about the possible places where the troop-shooters entered the headquarters, where they exited after the mission was accomplished, and the possible angles from which the bullets were shot. There were even illustrations posted on the wall. I, as a kid, was very curious about what the adults had to say about this incident. Soon after that, I remember, there were big character posters against my father, and overnight they had filled up the walls in the headquarters. On these posters were written slogans like “smashing someone’s nasty head,” “peeling someone’s camouflage skin,” and so on. I was more confused than frightened. I had been desensitized by the constant exposure to these

8 Vol. 12 No. 6 kinds of verbal attacks since I was little, and this attack seemed to be a bluff because it did not correspond to real physical harm. I was aware that something bad was happening, but I was not intensely frightened.

However, the adults were very frightened. I saw my father in great fear, and his fear increased as he was prosecuted repeatedly in the non-stop political campaigns that had been getting more and more intense since 1957. In the end he broke down. He was known to have attempted suicide three times; fortunately he failed. He must have been in a very desperate state of mind. He wanted to take his own life despite the fact that four children were relying on him, and that he had survived so much suffering already. Soon after that, we were exiled to the most remote military location on the border of the northern desert. The place was nicknamed Little Siberia, and the military unit was known as No. 8 Company of No. 2 Battalion of the No. 144 Regiment.

I was with him on a military truck when we were travelling to this new place. Our belongings were light. We had no furniture because the furniture we had been using belonged to the military. We did not have books because I had burnt them all, as I was told to do by my father. He used to have a big collection of books. I think there might have been at least a few thousand. Some books came from abroad. They were very beautiful books with pictures. Some of them would not ignite. I had to tear out the pages and throw them into the flames. Some books had beautiful gilt-stamped religious pictures, and casing made of gilt-stamped linen. I gave these cases to my classmates, and they were amazed. None of them had seen books as beautiful as that.

Zheng Shengtian: Were these books from his collection in Beijing that he later brought over to Xinjiang?

Ai Weiwei: Yes, the books were shipped from Beijing. Some had been brought back from abroad when he traveled. He liked books very much. However, he had them burnt to ashes in order to save us from trouble. If he had not done that, the Red Guards would have kicked open our door and searched his books to look for any evidence of a “crime.” Therefore, my parents had to destroy all the traces of their past.

Zheng Shengtian: Did you ever witness your father being publicly denounced and physically humiliated?

Ai Weiwei: After we were sent to the remote farm of the 8th Company, my father was repeatedly condemned and denounced in the general meetings that were held specifically for that purpose. Since these public meetings were held weekly, and sometimes even daily, I certainly had seen my father being publicly humiliated. Witnessing this made me very uncomfortable. After all, he was my father. I saw him forced to march through the neighbourhood lanes with a broken kitchen pan in hand. As he drummed the pan, he had to shout out his confession: “I am a criminal and

Vol. 12 No. 6 9 Ai Weiwei with one of his cats. Photo: Don Li-Leger.

I am a Rightist, for I am against the Party and Socialism.” Behind him, there were children throwing stones at him.

There was one moment that struck me deeply. Late one night, he had not returned home from the denouncement meeting. The meeting was held in the battalion instead of the company. The “Rightists” who were perceived to be most reactionary in the region were gathered together for the denouncement. My father was condemned as the “biggest Rightist of all,” and his crime was described as “the most heinous.” The funny thing was that the locals who accused him knew little about what he had done. They spoke of him as the “reactionary novelist,” which was not true since my father had never written a novel. In the denouncement meeting, he had to arch his back. Behind him stood a Red Guard, who was holding a red- tasseled spear and poked him aggressively. Then, a bottle of black ink was splashed on him from head to toe. So, on this particular evening, he was condemned in the battalion until late into the night. Back then, we had no electricity at home; not only we did not have an electrical lamp, we also didn’t have an oil lamp. We lit our room with a makeshift lamp that was made with a medical bottle that we took from the clinic. We filled it with oil and then we drilled a hole through the metal cover and secured a shoelace in it as the wick. This “lamp” generated a lot of smoke that would blacken my nose overnight.

So I was waiting for him to return home that night. When he stepped into the room, I was frightened by his look. His face was all covered in black ink. He tried to wash himself and go to sleep, but the ink wasn’t easy to wash away because we did not have soap. His face remained black for many days. We were very poor.

Zheng Shengtian: During those days, what happened to you? Was there any discrimination against you at school?

Ai Weiwei: My schoolmates were nice to me. There was no discrimination because I studied well at school and was favoured by my teachers and classmates. They were a bit vigilant, however, because I was a son of someone who belonged to the “Five Black Categories.”5 When they elected the class representatives, for example, I got the most votes, but I was not

10 Vol. 12 No. 6 assigned to be the monitor of the class. The best position I might get was commissary in charge of studies. Everybody knew that my family background was problematic.

Zheng Shengtian: Had you started to learn drawing and painting at that time?

Ai Weiwei: No. I had never liked art, to be honest.

Zheng Shengtian: When did you start to learn art?

Ai Weiwei: Back then I was very impressed by my father’s drawing skills. I saw him using a pen to draw a plant leaf, or to delineate the contour of my mother at sleep. With only a few strokes, the forms emerged with clarity. I thought that was great. Few people had that kind of ability. He certainly had great artistic talent. He could have been a remarkable visual artist if he had not given up drawing for writing poems. He did not exert much influence on me, though. Because he took delight in talking about art, I began to feel close to it. Moreover, we had previously had many art books at home.

Zheng Shengtian: Had he not encouraged you to do some painting?

Ai Weiwei: Never. In the political climate of those days, he could not do that. Instead, he was hoping I would become a worker. By worker, I mean in the sense of an employee, and not necessarily a worker in manufacturing. The truth was that artists were all very unlucky back then. Making art seemed absurd. Therefore, he had never hoped for any of his children to carry on his legacy in art. He wanted us to be decent workers. Being a worker back then was a rather satisfactory choice.

Zheng Shengtian: That’s right. The worker in those days was most honoured.

Ai Weiwei: You just do what you ought to do. That’s why he didn’t encourage us to paint or write poems. I looked at him with sympathy. He was a poet who was deprived of the privilege of writing. That was miserable, wasn’t it? He had profound knowledge of aesthetics, and he wrote about theories of poetry in his twenties. He didn’t have a chance to pursue it, however, and his writing only caused him trouble. I did not start learning arts until I graduated from middle school. Having said that, I did have some advantages over my peers in artmaking because I had been working on wall posters on the blackboard in school.

Zheng Shengtian: What was the most significant influence that you gained from your father?

Ai Weiwei: I think it has to be his moral conduct. He was an honest man. He was punctual. He lived an austere life. A simple pair of cloth shoes was what he had for a year, and the same clothes for several years. He was

Vol. 12 No. 6 11 warm to his friends. He always spoke the truth. He showed genuine feelings of delight and sadness. His straightforwardness very often embarrassed everyone around him.

Zheng Shengtian: This is known as “to teach by example.” Rather than being taught by his lecturing, you learned by observing what he did.

Ai Weiwei: He never lectured us.

Zheng Shengtian: Did he never attempt to teach you directly through conversation?

Ai Weiwei: In his entire life, my father never set aside time to lecture us. He showed us only by example. He would set the dinner table attentively, positioning the chopsticks in perfect order. Before bedtime, he took off his shoes and aligned them with each other. His job was to clean the public outhouse in the village. Those outhouses were filthy, but those ones under his care were very clean. He spread sand on the floor. He cleaned every toilet thoroughly, without complaining. He never spoke of anyone who gave him a hard time. Having lived through so much suffering during the Cultural Revolution, he never grumbled. He was very tolerant and forgiving.

Zheng Shengtian: Was he not feeling that he was unjustly treated?

Ai Weiwei: He certainly knew that what had been done to him was absurd. That’s for sure. However, he had never cried out for sympathy. The only times he talked about the injustices was when people drew it out of him. He commented when the atrocity of the Cultural Revolution was over: “After twenties years of injustice, I was given only three words: gao cuo le (it was a mistake).” The government has never admitted they were wrong.

Zheng Shengtian: In your childhood memory, did your mother show any sign of resentful feelings about the injustices against your family?

Ai Weiwei: As a woman, she sometimes had those feelings; however, she was a frank and cheerful person. Had she not had that personality, she would have left my dad for good. When all this misfortune took a toll on us, she was only twenty-four, and things could only get worse. She was assigned to raise cattle at the farm, and she was accused of stealing the cattle feed for her family. Can you imagine the situation we were in? Why on earth would we steal and eat cattle feed? Yet, the accusation was believed to be solid evidence for her “crime.”

Zheng Shengtian: So your lives on the remote farm were the hardest for your family?

Ai Weiwei: Yes. That time was quite difficult for us.

Zheng Shengtian: Was Wang Zhen not protecting your family any more?

12 Vol. 12 No. 6 Ai Weiwei: He himself was doomed. In those days, my father was on the verge of death. One day he had me sit beside his bed, and said to me he was soon to die. His physical health was ruined by hard labour. He was assigned tens of washrooms to clean. It was wintertime and all the toilets were frozen. He had to break the ice and move it out with his bare hands. The ice was just too heavy for him, and in the end, he got a hernia. One of his eyes became blind because of malnutrition. The food we had was no more than vegetable soup. So he was telling me that he was soon to die. He wrote two names for me on a piece of newspaper. These people, he said, would probably adopt me. I took a look and noticed the two names were Jiang Haiji and Jiang Haitao, his two siblings. It was only then that I knew he had brothers. I remember this very well because it showed how little communication I had had with my father!

Zheng Shengtian: Did your father have a southern accent?

Ai Weiwei: He was born in the southeastern province of Zhejiang. Although he stayed in the north most of his life, he still sounded like someone from Zhejiang when he spoke.

Zheng Shengtian: How was your life after your family returned to Beijing at the end of the Cultural Revolution?

Ai Weiwei: My father went to Beijing to see doctors, but we did not officially move back here. At that time, his “Rightist hat” had been removed; however, he was still not granted permission to come back to Beijing. He came here in the name of medical treatment for his eye. He sought shelter at a worker’s home. We of course followed him back to Beijing, which made him unhappy. When he was angry, he said to me: “Look at your classmates. They have already gone to the village.”6 He was unhappy to see me idle at home. At this time, Jiang Feng,7 Zhang Ding,8 and some other old colleagues of my father were also idle. Their positions had not been reinstated. But as the political air had loosened up a bit, these people offered to teach me drawing. I took them up on the offer only because there was no place for me at home, and the atmosphere of the society was very oppressive and critically political. That was in the years 1976 and 1977. I went out drawing at the Beijing Railway Station, the Summer Palace, and other places around the city. I took it as an escape, and that was the only reason I started to learn drawing.

Zheng Shengtian: Had anyone given you a tutorial?

9 Ai Weiwei: Huang Yongyu, Zheng Ke,10 and some others, such as Xu Lin lu.11 I learned line drawing from Zhang Ding. These people were all out of jobs. They used to be labeled niu gui she shen (evil people of all kinds).

Zheng Shengtian: What made you decide to apply to the Beijing Film Academy?

Vol. 12 No. 6 13 Ai Weiwei: It was Zheng Ke’s idea. Zheng Ke was a professor from the Central Academy of Arts and Design, originally from Hong Kong. After I finished junior high, I had hoped not to go to college because of my bad experiences in schools. On the last day to sign up for the university entrance exam, however, Zheng Ke urged me to apply, saying: “University enrollments are back to normal, and you must go and try it.” I listened to him and took the exam with two others who studied drawing together with me. I was admitted to the Beijing Film Academy and became part of the first generation of students since the university resumed its normal program of education. I studied at the Department of Set Design. Two years later, I went to the United States because my girlfriend helped me with the application for studying abroad and private sponsorship. So I started to learn English, did some part-time jobs, and took the TOEFL test in order to get into the U.S. art schools.

Zheng Shengtian: In the two years at the Beijing Film Academy, how were your studies?

Ai Weiwei: I remember the chair of the department was Ge Weimo.12

Zheng Shengtian: And among the senior teachers was Li Zongjin?13

Ai Weiwei: Li Zongjin had long since retired by the time I was there. He was an old friend of my family, and an old “Rightist.” In terms of my study at the Academy, my paintings were not conventional. They looked post- Impressionistic. By the today’s standards, they were conventional, but they were perceived outrageous at that time and disliked by my teachers. At the end of the semester, we had a class critique. The teacher purposely skipped my paintings. Perhaps in his eye, I was the sort of person who did not abide by school rules and norms and therefore unworthy of his critique. I did not care, since I was planning to go the U.S. anyway.

Zheng Shengtian: So you quit the Academy and went to the U.S. in 1981. That was the same year I went to the U.S.

Ai Weiwei: We have similar experiences.

Zheng Shengtian: I went there in September.

Ai Weiwei: I was there in February.

Zheng Shengtian: Was it about the same time as Chen Yifei’s14 arrival in the U.S.?

Ai Weiwei: He was there a bit earlier than me. Chen Danqing15 and I arrived about the same time.

Zheng Shengtian: Can we talk about your life in the U.S.? What struck you most when you went to the United States?

14 Vol. 12 No. 6 Ai Weiwei: When my plane flew over New York City and prepared to land at night, I saw the dazzling sea of light.

Zheng Shengtian: Do you mean the first time you arrived in New York?

Ai Weiwei: Right. As I remember, the scene was like molten steel coming out of a furnace. The beautiful nightscape was contrary to the image I had about the imperialist states, as we had been informed that “day by day, the enemies are tumbling, and day by day we are getting stronger.” The moment I landed in New York, I couldn’t believe how incredibly remarkable the city was.

Zheng Shengtian: During those days in New York, Chinese artists had to draw portraits on the street to earn money. I knew some of them well, such as Lin Lin and Chen Danqing. Every time I went to New York, I would go visit and some of you on the street. How important was this kind of experience to you?

Ai Weiwei: My experience in the U.S. was the most important experience of my life. There I learned about personal freedom, independence, and the relationship between the individual and the state, as well as the power structure of that society—and art, of course. I learned a lot. Everyday I would immerse myself in city life. My experience was different from the majority of Chinese, who lived in Flushing and other parts of Queens— I lived right there in Manhattan. I took part-time jobs. When my visa expired, I became illegal, and I quit school. All the time I just hung around. I was really “in” compared to my other Chinese friends. Have you seen the catalogue published by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing with the many photographs that I took in New York?

Zheng Shengtian: I saw it and liked it. I have been planning to bring this exhibition to Vancouver, but it has not happened yet. I still want to do it. The moments shown in those photographs are intimate for me, too. I would like to know if you felt you were part of the New York scene, or still an outsider.

Ai Weiwei: I was not one of them. I felt that I had been utterly a creature roaming outside. However, compared with other Chinese artists, Lin Lin and I were quite deeply engaged with the local culture. We were young at the time and soon identified with the values of the free world because of our recent history. We hated totalitarian society very much and longed for the so-called free world. Later, we became more critical or the U.S. when we found out the country didn’t have as much freedom as it claimed. I did not desire money. Even though we were struggling financially and we had difficulty overcoming cultural barriers and assimilating ourselves into the mainstream, I was experiencing a new life that was more truthful than my previous one. This experience had a huge impact on me.

Zheng Shengtian: Right. We can see that from some of your works. At that time, migrant Chinese artists had two kinds of dreams. One kind of artist ambitiously believed that although he or she was now a street artist,

Vol. 12 No. 6 15 Left: Ai Weiwei, Lower East Side eventually his or her work would be exhibited at art museums. The other Restaurant, 1988, from the series New kind was more concerned about how to earn more money and buy a house York Photographs, black-and-white photograph. Courtesy of the artist. in the U.S. someday. What was your position? Right: Ai Weiwei, Self-Portrait, East 3rd Street Apartment, 1986, from the series New York Photographs, black- and-white photograph. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei: Neither of them. First of all, I did not have high hopes. I had the artist. previously thought of working hard to become a good artist in New York but soon ruled out that possibility after I realized the complexity of cultural differences. Therefore, I didn’t think I had a chance. If there was no possibility, I thought, I shouldn’t maintain any desire for it. Perhaps under the influence of Marcel Duchamp, I came to realize that art is an attitude, a way of life. Therefore, I literally gave up painting. I frequently changed my living places, and each time I moved I had to throw away my paintings. After I moved a few times, I decided not to paint any more. My paintings took up lots of space in my small room, and I didn’t have a place to exhibit. Even if I had, what could I have gotten from the exhibition? I was not so much interested in selling them. For example, I took part in an exhibition in New York. When it was over, none of my paintings sold. To compensate me for my effort, the organizer bought several of them for three hundred dollars. I took it as a joke. Back in the mid-1980s, there were only about fifty artists in the U.S. doing well in the art market. So I completely gave up hope about being an artist in New York. You mentioned that some Chinese artists were trying to earn money. Those aspects of the “American dream”: making money, establishing a stable career, and achieving higher social status were the things I was least interested in. My indifference toward money and social status perhaps came from my earlier experiences. I had never heard my father utter the word “money.” Our family did not have enough money, so we just muddled along with no thought of tomorrow.

Zheng Shengtian: What did you hope for in New York? Did you just drift through life?

Ai Weiwei: At that time I had no hope; I had only despair. Every morning I got up, and I had no clue about how to spend the day. Sometimes I would walk the streets, without any reason or any direction.

Zheng Shengtian: Some despairing artists in New York indulged in drugs and alcohol. Were you one of them?

Ai Weiwei: To me, drinking was too expensive. So was doing drugs.

16 Vol. 12 No. 6 When my friends bought marijuana, I would smoke it. I kind of liked marijuana, but I rarely bought it for myself. Twenty dollars for a small package was too costly for me.

Zheng Shengtian: Last year, through a friend, I was introduced to an elderly couple in San Francisco. They told me that when you had just arrived in the U.S. in the 1980s, you exhibited your sketches and watercolour paintings at the SF Chinese Cultural Center. They visited the show and bought some of your work. Do you remember that?

Ai Weiwei: I do. He was my English teacher. He taught us to sing English songs like Old MacDonald Had a Farm. Then he learned that I had some paintings, and he bought them. Recently I heard that he sold the paintings to a collector. I am happy for him.

Zheng Shengtian: It was I who connected him to the collector.

Ai Weiwei: Oh. He was fortunate to have your help. Those paintings were made when I was in China.

Zheng Shengtian: Recently, Alison Klayman made the documentary film Never Sorry (2012) about your story. It was widely praised. But if we are chatting as friends, would you say you really have never felt sorry in your life? Have you not done anything that you regret? Even in your childhood, did you do something wrong that upset your parents and that made your regretful?

Ai Weiwei: Of course I have. I have regretted many things, for example, my early education. Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, I was given little education. However, this was not something my regrets could help. We lived in a fast-developing society. If you were put on one path for your life, you were deprived of the opportunity to explore another one that might also work for you. You would never know which path could have been the best for you. I think life is arbitrary. My birth in Beijing, my encounters, and my present life are all arbitrary. Had I been well educated, I might have been a scientist. Who knows? Now, obviously, I don’t have this opportunity— am I right?

Zheng Shengtian: Have you ever made a decision that you later regretted?

Ai Weiwei: I really don’t think too much about this. I am adaptive to different circumstances. Had I not been living in China, I could make a living elsewhere. I have the ability to survive.

Zheng Shengtian: My last question. This morning I asked Don Li-Leger (videographer of this interview): If you were given a chance to ask one question of Ai Weiwei, what would it be? He thought about it and said: I want to know his motivation. So I want to pass this question on to you. As an artist and activist, what has been your motivation?

Vol. 12 No. 6 17 Zheng Shengtian and Ai Weiwei. Photo: Don Li-Leger.

Ai Weiwei: My answer may sound like a cliché. I think you only live once. A life is like the fortune that is owned by every one of us. We all have dreams. We are entitled to be happy about it, to be enthusiastic, or even frightened about it. This entitlement cannot be explained, and it cannot be known to where it leads. However, this life is going to be taken away from us. All the possibilities will be gone at the end. Therefore, I hate any power or system that deprives people of their most basic natural rights and their happiness. I am an artist. Some people also call me an activist. In fact, I am interested in understanding the rights of human expression and the possible ways of expression. I think that the right to express oneself is the essence of life. Without it, life has no form. This is what I came to believe after going through many troubles and difficulties.

Zheng Shengtian: Are you saying that you had not planned to be an activist in the first place?

Ai Weiwei: No. I became who I am because I encountered many things in which I had to make a simple decision: to speak the truth or remain silent to avoid risk. I would certainly analyze the risk factors. But how dangerous could it be? In deciding to return to China, the first question I asked myself was how much danger I would be facing. Everybody assumed that people like Lin Lin and I were unlikely to return to China. However, I returned and kept asking myself: how dangerous could it be? During those eighty-one days when I was imprisoned last year, I was fairly calm. I have always admired my father for his six-year imprisonment by the KMT government in the 1930s.16 Now I was thrown into prison, too. I thought my father and I were now even. Our “crime” was similar, too. He was accused of “disrupting public order,” and my indictment was “inciting subversion of the state.” My crime was as severe as his, and my sentence seemed to be more than his. When I was detained, I was told that I would be locked up in prison for thirteen years, and my dad was sentenced only to six years. I said to the people who detained me that my arrest reminded me of what happened to my father eighty years ago. They replied that it is a different era now.

Zheng Shengtian: Do you know why, instead of in thirteen years, you were released in three months?

18 Vol. 12 No. 6 Ai Weiwei: The funniest thing is, we will never know why things are the way they are.

Zheng Shengtian: There must be some inside story.

Ai Weiwei: I want to ask you. What is the reason? Please tell me. [Laughs.]

Zheng Shengtian: I don’t know. Last month I was at the Venice Biennale. I heard there were more than a thousand Chinese artists coming for the event. This reminds me of your installation Fairytale, at documenta 12, in Kassel. You brought one thousand and three Chinese to Kassel. You seemed to have foresight that was vindicated at Venice. You predicted the “Chinese invasion” of Europe—or we could say that you made a rehearsal of it at Kassel. How did you come up with this idea of bringing a thousand Chinese to Europe? Did you predict what would later happen, or was it just a coincidence?

Ai Weiwei: I don’t know. In my opinion, China was an old country and had been preserved as if it were a fossil. I knew that when it joined the world, it would change the world’s landscape.

Zheng Shengtian: First I saw the Chinese in Kassel; then, I saw the Chinese artists in Venice. It seems that history is replicating itself. Only this time, the crowd was intimidating.

Ai Weiwei: I often walk on the streets or in the subway station. Everywhere I go, I see lots of people. I say to myself: There are way too many Chinese, which is frightening. When the staff of our company [studio] dine together, I think: Wow! There are so many Chinese who consume a lot of things everyday. That is tough.

Zheng Shengtian: Let’s stop here. Thank you for your time.

Transcribed and translated by Dongyue Su.

Notes

1 Ai Qing (1910–96) was a leading figure in modern Chinese poetry in the twentieth century.

2 Liu Haisu (1896–1994) was a Chinese artist and founder of Shanghai Institute of Fine Arts.

3 Wang Zhen (1908–93) was leader of the Chinese Communist Party and onetime general of the People’s Liberation Army.

4 Nanniwang was an area of desolate land in Yan’an. It was transformed into cultivated land thanks to the efforts of Wang Zheng's troops in the 1940s.

5 The “Five Black Categories” were the targets of denouncement during the Cultural Revolution. They included landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, criminals, and Rightists.

6 The phrase chadui , or join the farm team, referred to a political movement generally called “sent to countryside” from approximately 1968 to 1976, in which a huge number of urban youth migrated to the countryside.

7 Jiang Feng (1910–82) was a Chinese artist and former leader of the Chinese Artist Association.

8 Zhang Ding (1917–2010) was a Chinese artist and former President of the Central Academy of Arts and Design.

9 Huang Yongyu (1924–) is a Chinese artist specializing in ink painting and printmaking.

10 Zhen Ke (1906–87) was a Chinese designer.

11 Xu Linlu (1916–) is a Chinese artist specializing in ink painting.

12 Ge Weimo (1929–) is a Chinese artist specializing in oil painting.

13 Li Zongjin (1916–1977) was a Chinese artist specializing in oil painting.

14 Chen Yifei (1946–2005) was a Chinese artist specializing in oil painting.

15 Chen Danqing (1953–) is a Chinese artist and writer.

16 Ai Qing was sentenced to six years because of his Leftist political views, but he was released earlier than he should have been. The Kuomintang was the government of the Republic of China from 1927 to 1949.

Vol. 12 No. 6 19 Shan Windscript A Bridge to the Forgotten: Remembrance in Shao Yinong and Muchen's The Assembly Halls

he struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against Tforgetting. – Milan Kundera1 This essay was prompted by my observation that a resistant force in China today runs counter to the Chinese government’s ongoing efforts to repress society’s memory of past atrocities. Specifically, it is in the realm of contemporary Chinese art I have witnessed this determination to revive a past that government officials have covered up. In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, in the late 1970s, innumerable paintings under the designation of Scar Art came to the fore that exposed the deep emotional wounds that the preceding political turmoil had engraved on the nation’s collective psyche. With the emergence of the ’85 New Wave Movement in the 1980s, the Cultural Revolution and Maoism remained dominant themes in the art world, although many artists had developed new creative narratives and styles to express their views.2 From the 1990s to the present, with China’s ever-accelerating rate of social and economic development, the incidence of memory traces in Chinese art, rather than decreasing, has flourished. I refer, in particular, to Zhang Xiaogang’s Bloodlines: A Big Family (1995) family portraits depicting the Cultural Revolution period; Sui Jianguo’s monumental sculpture of hollow Mao suits, Legacy Mantle (1997); and Yin Xiuzhen’s installation Ruined City (1996) made up of debris from houses that were being demolished in old Beijing. Artists in China have made the past not only a major influence for their artistic expression but also a pivotal point on which they reflect, using it to criticize and raise concerns about present social and political matters in China.3 On the basis of these observations, this essay aims to evaluate the significance of contemporary Chinese art in relation to issues of China’s social memory that have been caused by the government’s ongoing history of memory abuse.

From the myriad of memory-related works produced by contemporary Chinese artists, I have chosen a photographic series titled The Assembly Halls, produced by husband-and-wife team Shao Yinong and Muchen between 2002–06. By analyzing these artworks in relation to the phenomenon of social forgetfulness in China, I argue that social and collective memory, repressed by the Chinese official line, returns here with critical force. The Assembly Halls captures collective sites of memory and compels viewers to bear witness to China’s act of social forgetting; furthermore, by examining the series in relation to the concept and aesthetic of “ruins,” I propose that the artwork does not only revive what is forgotten, but also urges the Chinese government and its people to remember the mortality of progress and the future.

20 Vol. 12 No. 6 Top: Shao Yinong and Muchen, Bottom: Shao Yinong and Shenbian, 2004, C print, 122 x Muchen, Renzhaiqian, 2004, C 168 cm. Courtesy of the artists print, 122 x 168 cm. Courtesy and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, of the artists and 10 Chancery Hong Kong. Lane Gallery, Hong Kong.

Vol. 12 No. 6 21 Collective Memory and Totalitarian Forgetting in Contemporary China Shao Yinong and Muchen, Yincun, 2004, C print, 122 x 168 cm. Courtesy of the artists and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Memory, commonly acknowledged to be fundamental to human survival Hong Kong. and development, has gained extensive attention since the mid-twentieth century and recognition in the fields of humanities and social sciences for its indisputable social and cultural significance. The influential French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) first introduced the notion of collective memory as a distinctive form of memory, different yet inseparable from individual memory. The term refers to a common way of perceiving and understanding a past event shared by members within a group or society. Generated and maintained by members of the group, collective memory, at the same time, provides the group with an essential framework within which individual memory is shaped, influenced, and sustained.4 Halbwachs’s claim transformed the way remembering was understood—as a purely personal, private ability, a socially operated process of retrieving knowledge from a shared past among members within a group.

Building on Halbwachs’s concept, German scholar Jan Assmann (1938) took these ideas one step further by introducing the idea of cultural memory (Kulturelles Gedächtnis)—the means and process by which societies preserve and pass on collective knowledge across generations through cultural mnemonics in order to ensure a sense of cultural continuity.5 For Assmann, the act of remembering is not only a social phenomenon; it is also a culturally facilitated process in which the collective knowledge of one generation within a society can be transmitted to members of different generations.6 Although both Halbwachs and Assmann’s concepts reject the idea that memory is purely an individually generated and possessed

22 Vol. 12 No. 6 function, they do not discount the ability and significance of individual memory. Rather, their concepts place the emphasis on the interplay and interdependence between social (collective), cultural, and individual memories and highlight the significant influence that the sociocultural aspects of memory have on individual consciousness.

This understanding of the social and cultural dimensions of memory has broadened the scope of studies and discourses on memory. Memory has also been overlaid with important political connotations. As knowledge of past experiences helps define an individual’s understanding of the present, so too, social and cultural memory function as essential elements in forming and maintaining cultural identities. As Paul Connerton puts it: “It is an implicit rule that participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory.”7 By this reasoning, memory can be seen as having a strong connection to nationalism, and thus it can be subject to political manipulation on behalf of the State, in the construction of national identities, and in the maintenance of control over members of its society.8 What societies remember and forget is therefore of critical political significance.

Both Connerton and Aleide Assmann, the wife of Jan Assmann, have pointed out the need for totalitarian regimes to govern what its social members remember and forget.9 Aleide Assmann points to the fact that totalitarian states survive on the alteration or destruction of cultural memory to coordinate the past with their present situation.10 “Every scrap that is left over from the past has to be changed or eliminated because an authentic piece of evidence has the power to crush the official version of the past on which the rulers base their power.”11 Paul Connerton similarly suggests that totalitarian regimes rely on governing how social groups remember in order to maintain control of its citizens.12 The methods that totalitarian governments have used range from radical destruction to systematical erasure of the remnants of the past.13 The Party slogan in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, “who controls the past . . . controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,”14 is the ultimate measure of the psychology of any totalitarian regime’s needs for enforcing social forgetting.

The concept of memory as a political instrument can be easily applied to a state like China in which political power is in the hands of a single-party regime. I think of the radical destruction of traditional culture during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, where the belief that only when the ghost of the past was erased can a new beginning be written. I think of the tactical historical alterations during the early years of Dengist reform, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adopted the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party15 only to place the unresolved issues of the Cultural Revolution on the road of oblivion. I think of the nationwide Patriotic Education Campaign initiated by the CCP in1991, in which contemporary Chinese history was reformulated to construct a Chinese nationalism based on a particular patriotic historical memory.16

Vol. 12 No. 6 23 24 Vol. 12 No. 6 Shao Yinong and Muchen, Tongji, 2004, C print, 122 x 168 cm. Courtesy of the artists and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong.

Vol. 12 No. 6 25 And I have seen the consequence of this force of forgetting—a lacuna in Shao Yinong and Muchen, Xiaoqiao, 2004, C print, 122 x the Chinese collective consciousness where memory loss is at risk. Today, 168 cm. Courtesy of the artists and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, in mainland China, the majority of Chinese youth can barely describe what Hong Kong. happened during the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, many of them have little interest in delving into that political calamity; some even consider it funny and the experience of the political event adventurous.17 They cannot “remember” what happened on June 4, 1989. The image of the “Tank Man,” the internationally recognized icon for the struggle between society and state power is simply unknown to most Chinese people. In Antony Thomas’ 2006 documentary film Tiananmen Square: The Tank Man, a group of students from Beijing University, when shown the image of the “Tank Man,” did not understand its meaning and context.18 One of them suggested that it might be related to an art performance.19

The Assembly Halls

The ways China’s political oligarchy has enforced “collective forgetting” and the significant impact this strategy has had on the Chinese collective consciousness is countered by some works of contemporary Chinese art that re-invoke social memory. The Assembly Halls consists of more than forty large-scale colour images of assembly halls, selected from an estimated number of more than two hundred photographs. Of central significance to the representation of memory in The Assembly Halls is the concomitant entreaty that China remembers both its present and its future. But prior to any discussion about the means by which this exhortation is made, it is crucial to first understand both the historical and cultural status the assembly halls hold in China.

26 Vol. 12 No. 6 Traditionally, assembly halls embraced a range of structures in which local communities would congregate for a variety of social activities that included meetings, celebrations, entertainments, public announcements, commemorations, and so forth. Their sizes and styles varied greatly depending on the size of the local population, its cultures and customs, and the prevailing economic conditions. Larger towns and cities, for example, would generally adapt or construct bigger and more elaborate buildings, while smaller and less affluent towns or villages often used farm barns or family ancestral halls. Despite the different sizes, styles, and locations of the assembly halls, they shared a common interior layout that featured a central area or stage and a space for the audience.

However, as the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76) began, the traditional role of the assembly halls shifted, or, to be more precise, their social function and purpose was, to a greater extent than in the past, unified and simplified, while their sociopolitical importance increased enormously. During this decade, the assembly halls became the sole locus for mass political activities such as propaganda campaigns and struggle sessions that were carried out by the CCP and included public humiliation, denunciations, and persecutions. They became the “battleground” upon which hostile encounters with the old world took place. Within their walls, festooned by red flags and political slogans, the full spectrum of human emotions—passion, greed, envy, anger, violence, humiliation, and triumphs—erupted. In addition, many villages and towns, invigorated by the prevalent national political movement of the Cultural Revolution, pressed forward to build new assembly halls or renovate the old ones in order to affirm their political enthusiasm and revolutionary ambitions for the future. Chengxi village in Shanxi province, for example, a previously abandoned ancestral temple, once at the centre of local community gatherings, was in 1966 replaced by a new assembly hall.20 Indeed, throughout the turbulent decade of the Cultural Revolution, assembly halls were transformed into de facto theatres in which all kinds of political “dramas” were played out. Needless to say, most of them were tragedies.

As the venue for mass meetings, assembly halls became indelibly embedded in the Chinese consciousness as the embodiment of a generation’s collective memory. Although most assembly halls were already in existence and were being used as communal gathering places before 1966, at no time previously in Chinese history had they been all associated with one single national political movement, one that imbued them with a shared past. They are what Jiaji Wang refers to as the “carriers of the collective memory,”21 or in Pierre Nora’s words, les lieux de mémoire—the sites and repositories of memory.22

These sites of memory, instead of being cherished and preserved as a link to one of the darkest pages in modern Chinese history, seem to have been largely neglected by today’s society. As the Cultural Revolution has become an unwanted part of China’s grand official historiography, so too have the assembly halls, and they have been disappearing at an alarmingly rapid pace. In the face of China’s dramatic socioeconomic development and

Vol. 12 No. 6 27 ongoing urbanization, these damp halls often hold little value in terms Shao Yinong and Muchen, Gaotang, 2004, C print, 122 x of conservation to unsympathetic local authorities who advocate their 168 cm. Courtesy of the artists and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, destruction in order to make way for the dazzling city skylines of the future. Hong Kong. Many that did not escape the wreckers’ ball were torn down before Shao Yinong and Muchen were able to record their images, while others were demolished soon afterwards. The couple regretfully expressed, “We often lamented that we could not take photos fast enough to keep up with the rapidity of demolitions.”23

The demise of the assembly halls brings me back to Shao Yinong and Muchen’s photographic series, in which the remnants of the unwanted past seem to have found refuge. In expressing their aim of retaining the present state of the sites, the artists have produced the series based on a fixed principle: taking simple, direct, and systematic executions with minimal artistic rendition.24 All photographs are taken from the centre rear of the interior, with the camera placed at eye level facing directly toward the central stage. Each hall is photographed without human occupants and using only existing light, such as window or ceiling light. In a neat, archival documentary fashion, the images are consistently centered, level, and symmetrical.

A further characteristic of the series relates to the overall effect they produce on the viewer. Taken on a 4 x 5 view camera and made into large prints measuring 122 x 168 cm, the images show the interiors of the assembly halls to be strikingly spacious, vivid, and substantial. The images’ vividness and sense of hyper-reality produce a rather illusory effect, however, especially when they are displayed on a gallery wall. When hung on a gallery wall they effectively convey an illusion of “space within a space.” For example, when I

28 Vol. 12 No. 6 Shao Yinong and Muchen, saw four photographs from the series at APT5 (Asia Pacific Triennial), at the Xianlin, 2004, C print, 122 x 168 cm. Courtesy of the artists Queensland Art Gallery in 2006, standing before them, I had the tantalizing and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong. sensation of stepping into the pictures, as if they had metamorphosed from two-dimensional prints into an entrance to another world.

Shao Yinong and Muchen’s photographic series not only underlines their dogged determination to record and preserve such images before they disappear; it also facilitates the act of remembering through preserving residues of the Cultural Revolution. Britta Erickson has described their work as similar to that of “anthropological research.”25 The fine quality of the images exposes every detail of wear and tear and the passage of time. The artists’ somewhat minimalist and uniform visual approach has given the assembly halls the appearance of a collection of scientific specimens awaiting the critical examination of the researcher’s eye. In this space devoid of subjective narration and intervention, yet full of the abject remnants of the past, imaginary noises seem to materialize from the eerie silence.26

Closer examination of the works in the series reveals subtle differences and complexities. Apart from the photographically unified visual arrangement that gives the impression of simplicity and unity, no other identical traits can be found between any two assembly halls. Some of them seem to have fallen into total disuse, while others have been refurbished and well maintained. A few assembly halls have had the privilege of being restored to their former glory and converted into museums and memorials. Being overwhelmed by these variations, I found it more advantageous to inspect the images by categorizing them into three groups of halls: abandoned, repurposed, and preserved.

The images of the abandoned assembly halls stand out simply because of their display of obsolescence. Shenbian hall, for example, reveals its current

Vol. 12 No. 6 29 state of utter desolation through its chaotic, devastated, and hauntingly gloomy interior: its crumbling walls and ceiling are falling to pieces, its floor covered in a rubble-strewn mess, and above its empty stage, a single theatre lamp is radiating across a shambolic room, forlornly trying to revive the former splendor of the site. But the overall gloomy, cold tone only serves to draw the final curtain on Shenbian’s present state of desolation. Less chaotic but equally dilapidated is the assembly hall at Renzhaiqian village, a barn built in the 1970s that is now abandoned and filled with debris. Its corroded concrete walls are presented in a slight sepia tone, while a beam of soft light illuminates its empty stage through narrow windows, somehow evoking a feeling of nostalgia. In the hall at Yincun, quotations from Chairman Mao painted in red on the walls during the Cultural Revolution are still clearly visible, while the damaged ceiling is full of cracks and holes and a moldy floor announces its total desolation and uselessness.

The second group of assembly halls consists of those that have been put to a use different from that encountered during the Cultural Revolution. These transformations can be observed in two distinct forms: one that involves obvious interior conversions and one that does not. With regards to the assembly halls that have been physically refurbished, the most distinctive example is the assembly hall at Tongji University, which has been given a fresh life as a luxurious theatre. Its vibrant yellow colour scheme exudes a compelling sense of youthfulness and modernity. In contrast, Xiaoqiao hall takes on a retro-style transformation. Adorned with red lanterns and porcelain-potted flowers, it is now a traditional Chinese style restaurant. In these assembly halls that have been physically transformed, not a single clue of a past related to the Cultural Revolution can be detected.

Those repurposed assembly halls that have not been refurbished or modernized still carry some vestige of internal deterioration. What gives them the appearance of still being functional is what fills their spaces. For instance, in Gaotang hall, which is a simply constructed barn, the audience area is occupied by rows of dark-coloured wooden chairs. A lectern has been placed in the centre of the stage in front of a red backdrop loosely hanging on the rear wall. Above it, a horizontal red banner states, “Gaotang village primary school art and cultural performance celebrating the June 1st Children’s Day,” which indicates Gaotang hall’s current function as a primary school assembly hall. In Xianlin, the assembly hall has become the business premises for a company that promotes and sells massage oils. Jishui hall, a building with a dilapidated timber ceiling and corroded metal chairs spread across the floor, is used for the storage of industrial machinery. Changfang hall is now used partly as a live theatre and partly as a meeting place.

Finally, the third group of the assembly halls consists of those that have been restored to their former glory and converted into museums honouring the CCP. Such sites were often important revolutionary centres preserved as demonstration bases for the Patriotic Education Campaign. The assembly

30 Vol. 12 No. 6 Shao Yinong and Muchen, hall in Xibaipo is one of the finest examples of that genre. In the late 1940s, Jishui, 2004, C print, 122 x 168 cm. Courtesy of the artists the CCP leaders established their base at Xibaipo, a small village in China’s and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong. Hebei province. The local meeting hall then became the main command post for the CCP.27 Xibaipo’s assembly hall was selected as one of the demonstration bases for patriotic education and is now a Revolutionary Memorial Museum. Its interior has been intentionally renovated to its original state: a lattice window is glazed with rice paper, and rustic ceiling lights hang from timber beams. The auditorium has been divided evenly into two by a casually placed velvet cord. Beyond the division, amongst the saturated sea of red Communist Party flags, are black and white photographs of Mao Zedong and Zhu De. They have been prominently hung high up in the middle of the rear wall. Below them, on a table, a small plastic red sign says, “Photography is prohibited,” asserting the uniqueness of Xibaipo assembly hall. It has become evident to me that Shao Yinong and Muchen’s photographs of the assembly halls serve a dual purpose. They are not just about remembering but also, equally, about forgetting. By presenting material evidence of the ways that memory links us to a shared past has been destroyed, replaced, or concealed, the series illuminates different facets of forgetfulness—the utter destruction and desolation of abandoned halls, the reinvented values and existence of repurposed ones, and the pseudo conservation of preserved ones. Presenting the physical traces of the Cultural Revolution, the artists compel viewers to bear witness to not only fading historical memories but also to the act of forgetting itself—an act that is, after all, driven and performed by society.

Still, the aesthetic and social significance of The Assembly Halls goes beyond the ways it engages with remembrance and forgetfulness. In fact, to my mind, a central issue raised by the series is China’s present state of progress and its blind faith in the future.

Vol. 12 No. 6 31 I reached this understanding by first reading the photographic series as Shao Yinong and Muchen, Changfang, 2004, C print, 122 x a work about ruins. By ruins I refer not only to physical decay—after all, 168 cm. Courtesy of the artists and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, many of the assembly halls in Shao Yinong and Muchen’s photographs have Hong Kong. not been destroyed or abandoned but are renovated and still in use. Rather, I consider the state of ruin as the disruption of their former purpose. As Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle suggest, “The ruin is a ruin precisely because it seems to have lost its function or meaning in the present.”28 The assembly halls, it seems, fit well into this concept of ruin because of their former role as a political locus during the Cultural Revolution is no longer of value to present society. Although some of the halls may still be functional and others may well have been given a fresh lease on life, they can still be considered ruins because the totality of their original function and purpose has collapsed. To borrow American aesthetic scholar Robert Ginsberg’s observation about ruins, “Functional structures are present and may still be functioning, but their intended service to deliberate aims has ended. When original unity is destroyed, purpose is smashed.”29 Shao Yinong and Muchen’s photographic series of the assembly halls is founded upon the ruins of the Cultural Revolution, the wreckage of a fading past.

The significance of ruins, then, is the effect they have on our perception of the continuity of temporal reality. A ruin as seen by the current eye is always a ruin of something from the past.30 While the remnants of this past are indubitably present, the event itself is always an absent. What the beholder perceives in a ruin is what Andreas Huyssen calls an “imagined present of a past.”31 “Any ruin posits the problem of a double exposure to the past and the present,” Huyssen further asserts.32 Hence a ruin always contains two incongruous temporal realities—one that has a past, the other the present.

32 Vol. 12 No. 6 The conflation of the past and present, to our consciousness, promises a hallucinatory liberation from the eternal arrest of the space-time continuum. Time in a ruin is no longer an irreversible, linear “one-way street”; rather, it is layered with segments of different historical moments. Gazing upon ruins, we see not only an image of a past but also a present that was once the future-to-be imagined in that past. As Svetlana Boym observes, “Ruins make us think of the past that could have been and the future that never took place, tantalizing us with utopian dreams of escaping the irreversibility of time.”33

It is at this point that I reach what for me is the heart of Shao Yinong and Muchen’s The Assembly Halls. The significance of this photographic series lies in how it immediately brings our memories of different temporalities together. In this process, the past becomes a mirror through which we look at our present. It is here, in the assembly halls, that the old world was once believed to be fading and a new world emerging. Yet today it is also here, in the assembly halls, that we see only broken pieces of those revolutionaries’ dreams. We see that their dream of a better future, propelled by their faith in progress, turned out to be nothing but an illusion, having been outrun by a different era’s renewed belief in another kind of progress. The Assembly Halls compels the viewers to contemplate China’s present from a perspective of the past; to think about the new in the face of the old; and to reevaluate the meaning of today upon the wreckage of a predecessor’s dreams.

The Assembly Halls urges China to remember its past, its forgetfulness, and, ultimately, it serves as a memento mori for China to remember the mortality of progress and the future. Throughout contemporary Chinese history, the past has always been a thorny issue for the CCP. It is in works of art that a powerful counterforce to the Chinese government’s enforcement of social forgetfulness is to be found. In this essay, I embarked on a journey to examine and evaluate the act of remembering in contemporary Chinese art. The works I chose to support my discussion, Shao Yinong and Muchen’s The Assembly Halls, has proved to be an important part of a powerful opposition against the current Party-state’s ongoing memory repression. Shao Yinong and Muchen, by documenting the residue of the Cultural Revolution, have also documented China’s social forgetfulness. Their photographs of the ruined assembly halls warn the nation about the perils of forgetting the past and of its blind faith in progress and the future.

Around the time I was finishing this essay, that “sensitive time” of year came around again, the anniversary of the Tian’anmen Square massacre. While thousands of people were gathering in Hong Kong to mourn the flowers of Chinese youth who were lost in the brutal crackdown that occurred in 1989, in mainland China, commemoration activities and public discussions related to June 4 remain forbidden; Internet access to terms such as “six four,” “23,” “candles,” and “never forget” are blocked; Web blogs and comments containing polically sensitive words are deleted. Behind the closed doors of mainland China, life proceeds as usual, undisturbed by the emotional remembrance that is taking place in the outside world.

Vol. 12 No. 6 33 As a feeling of despair swept over me, Chinese art, once again, shone Shao Yinong and Muchen, Xibaipo, 2004, C print, 122 x brightly the continuous ray of hope. At 798 Art Zone in Beijing, an 168 cm. Courtesy of the artists and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, exhibition in June 2012 subtlely grieved the tragedy of June 4. It had an Hong Kong. interesting title, Bridge over Trouble. On the invitation, a headline stated: “There are places in time and space where people have hurt each other. Until a bridge can be built, these places remain like an open wound in history.”34 I often think of Shao Yinong and Muchen’s Assembly Halls as such bridge, reaching out to the lost and forgotten times in the deep, dark, troubled waters of Chinese history.

34 Vol. 12 No. 6 Notes 1 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 3. 2 Wu Hung, “Ruins, Fragmentation, and the Chinese Modern/Postmodern,” in Inside Out: New Chinese Art, ed. Gao Minglu (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 59–66; see 61. 3 Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 42–45. 4 Maurice Halbwachs, “The Collective Memory,” in The Collective Memory Reader, eds. Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 139–42. 5 The concept of “cultural memory” was originally described in 1992 in Jan Assmann, Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung Und Politische Identität in Frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 2000); also see Jan Assmann, “Introduction: What Is 'Cultural Memory'?” in Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, 1–21 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1–9. 6 Jan Assmann, “Introduction: What Is 'Cultural Memory'?" 8–9. 7 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3. 8 John D. Brewer, “Memory, Truth and Victimhood in Post-Trauma Societies,” in The Sage Handbook of Nations and Nationalism (London: SAGE, 2006), eds. Krishan Kumar and Gerard Delanty, 214–27; see 215–17. 9 See Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 97–107; Connerton, How Societies Remember, 14; and Paul Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008), 59–72. 10 Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 105. 11 Ibid. 12 Connerton, How Societies Remember, 14. 13 Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting.” 14 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 2003), 37. 15 The full name is Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China. The English version of the Resolution can be found at http://www. marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/history/01.htm/. 16 For an in-depth discussion of how social and historical memory is repressed and manipulated by the Chinese official accounts, see Shan Windscript, “A Modern History of Forgetting: Social and Historical Memory Rewritten in Contemporary China, 1966-present,” Quarterly Journal of Chinese Studies 1, no. 4, (2013), 59–68. 17 Jicai Feng, “Cultural Revolution in the Eyes of the New Generation,” in Ten Years of Madness: Oral Histories of China's Cultural Revolution (San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, 1996), 251–58; see 251. 18 See Antony Thomas’s film Tiananmen Square: The Tank Man, 53 mins. (Hindmarsh, South Australia: DECS-Tape Services, 2006). 19 Ibid. 20 See Hu Zengchun Fei and Liu, “Nongsuo Shidai De Jiyi 'Wenge' Wutai Cheng Zhenggui Wenwu" (Concentrated memory of an age: The stage of the "Cultural Revolution" becomes cultural heritage), in Xunzhao Yanmo De Lishi (In search of lost history) (Shanxi: Shanxi Bureau of Cultural Heritages, 2010). 21 Jiaji Wang, “Guanyu [Dalitang]" (About [the assembly halls]), 2005, MCAF, http://www.mcaf.net/ html/D-e-sept-dec-2005-Berlinde-text-Jason-Wang.htm/. 22 Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History, in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1–20. 23 Shao Yinong and Muchen, “It Is Not Merely a Memory,” in Burden or Legacy: From the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art, ed. Jiang Jiehong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 85–89. 24 Ibid. 25 Britta Erickson, “Memory Devolved and Evolved/Fantasy: Photographic Works by Shao Yinong and Muchen" (Beijing: MCAF, 2005), http://www.mcaf.net/html/D-e-sept-dec-2005-Berlinde-text-Britta- SYN-MC.htm/. 26 Britta Erickson considers the fact that the assembly halls are devoid of people a crucial factor in reviving the memories of the Cultural Revolution. See ibid. 27 Information about Xibaipo and Xibaipo assembly hall can be obtained from the Xibaipo local government Web site: http://www.xibaipo.gov.cn/node2/node1318/node1321/node1325/index.html/. 28 Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, "Introduction," Ruins of Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–14; see 6. 29 Robert Ginsberg, “The Ruin as Function," in The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 33. 30 Ibid. 31 Andrea Huyssen, “Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity," in Ruins of Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 17¬–28. 32 Ibid., 20. 33 Svetlana Boym, “Ruins of the Avant-Garde: From Tatlin's Tower to Paper Architecture," in Ruins of Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 58–85; see 58. 34 The curators of this show were Guan Yizhao and Stephan Hausmeister. Information about Bridge over Trouble can be found at http://www.artbetween.org/.

Vol. 12 No. 6 35 Alice Schmatzberger He Chongyue: Layers of Time and Space

Alice Schmatzberger: How did you arrive at working with photography, especially with large and ultra-large-format cameras?

He Chongyue: It was in 1983, when I first had contact with photography on a very accidental occasion. I was born in a time when not many families could afford to have a camera or to take pictures.1 But in 1983, I went to see Gao Weidong, who later was my first teacher in photography, as I was curious to discover how photos were developed. At that time, most of the photos being made were black-and-white. I was so surprised to see the differences of colour and I enjoyed their rich nuances. Later I started to learn from this teacher in my spare time, as at that time not many people in the art world were able to quit their jobs. In the 1980s and 1990s, I needed to work to make a living, and at the same time I wanted to develop my photographic interests further. It was not until 2005 that I started to work as a professional artist.

Alice Schmatzberger: What were your earliest works?

He Chongyue: The first works were not about art. My earliest works are some photos about rubbish trashed at the 798 Art District in Beijing, the Chongqing Tank District, and similar art districts in Shanghai. They were titled “遗弃的遗弃” (yiqi de yiqi), the leftovers of the leftovers. I shot some trashed sculptural works by renowned artists such as Sui Jianguo and Qin Ga. Similar good works would be worth a million Yuan if they were put on exhibition, but when they were trashed, they were worth nothing. I visited many art districts and shot a lot of such discarded pieces of artwork. This whole series was done in 2003 and 2004. Now I choose photography because it can directly express my own ideas.

Alice Schmatzberger: In the late 1990s you were a member of a group interested in promoting large-format work in photography. How did this experience stimulate or influence your approach towards photography?

He Chongyue: In 1998, I joined a group called China Large Format Photographers’ Association. There were about eight or so people in the group, and it helped to shape my vision about how to move forward with my own art. But the 798 Art District was also important. It was the beginning of the new market for contemporary Chinese art, and it became a hot spot for exhibiting art. I was able to get to know many contemporary

36 Vol. 12 No. 6 artists there. So, in 2005, I resigned from my former job and became an artist. Just last night I saw huge buses carrying many visitors to 798, with tour guides. It has become more and more a tourist site.

Alice Schmatzberger: Contemporary photographic art is now mainly a matter of digital photography and post-production, whereas you are working with a rather special technique—large-format photography.

He Chongyue: The large-format camera provides very clear images and layers of richness and saturation. And this camera can produce really big images, which is also an important feature for contemporary photo works. More importantly, it is complicated to operate this camera and also expensive to shoot. Therefore, it demands that I think very carefully about what I am going to shoot. I must have a serious artistic investment in shooting a specific work. Over a long period of time, I have become used to carefully considering what subjects to shoot.

Alice Schmatzberger: And you prefer to work in series?

He Chongyue: I think people born in the 1960s have a sense of responsibility and conscience about recording what has been happening in our times. Only photography can faithfully keep those records for future generations. I cannot speak clearly or fully with a single image about, for example, the problems of the One-Child-Policy, the aging population, etc. In that case, viewers would not be able to understand what I mean and what problems I am talking about. So I must work in a series in order to adequately address these issues.

Alice Schmatzberger: You are shooting all your images in the countryside. What kind of preparation is necessary in order to do that?

He Chongyue: The only thing I have to do is meet with the respective local officials and convince them to agree to the project, I need to get their permission. Only after that, after the official agreements have been achieved, are the local villagers willing to participate in the photo shoots. I tried several times to work without the permission of local village heads—I wanted to do everything by myself—and see if these villagers would like to join me in the shoots, but actually I never succeeded. So finally I had to return to talking to the local officials first.

Alice Schmatzberger: I understand that concerning your topics you conduct a lot of research. You talk to experts; for example, with sociologists about developments in demography, or with philosophers about the value of human existence, and you use a diverse range of social statistics and information sources.

He Chongyue: Of course, it is as you said. In China there are a lot of social discussions about the old and inhuman policies. I myself have experienced these times, the Cultural Revolution, famines, etc. I have experienced all these social miseries. Therefore, I have strong feelings and I can reflect in-depth upon those sad memories.

Vol. 12 No. 6 37 Alice Schmatzberger: And each one of your images has its own specific He Chongyue, Image—The Red Era Background 03, historical background, politically or socially. 2005, black-and-white photograph,150 x 375 cm. Courtesy of the artist. He Chongyue: I think my artworks are very much related to social realism, which I am not sure is the right translation. Some foreign journalists describe my work as being photo documentary. I don’t think I agree with this term, “photo documentary.” I focus my lens on social reality, and I observe the significance of these social stories more than the significance of documentary representation.

Alice Schmatzberger: Let´s talk about your series Image, a trilogy consisting of Image—The Red Era Background, Image—1957, and Image—1978. Each of these three parts consists of eight works.

He Chongyue: This body of work deals with the period ranging from the beginnings of the Chinese Communist Party to the remnants of later policies and slogans, as well as records on the walls of houses documenting China’s the social development over the last six decades. There are many historical stories behind these walls. And yes, each work has its own specific background story.

Alice Schmatzberger: The pictures in Image—The Red Era Background show posters and inscriptions on the wall, as well as carvings on stone tablets. Are these political messages in the sense of public communication of state policy, and often dating back to earlier times, for example, imperial China?

He Chongyue: Some of those stone tablets date to the 1930s. When the Communist soldiers arrived at a site they inscribed state slogans, encouragements, admonishments, etc. onto these stone tablets. Others are from the 1940s, a time when Mao Zedong launched the revolution and before the CCP controlled the government and the country. Still others are from the times after the new China had been established, in 1949. The posters and carving directly on the wall in Image—The Red Era Background 03, for example, are originally from the Qing dynasty.2 This work was shot at a place called Hong Si Men, located in Nanjiang

38 Vol. 12 No. 6 county,3 which has old architecture from the Qing dynasty. But the Communists started to put their own inscriptions over the older ones from the imperial era. At the beginning of 19334 the Fourth Division of the Red Army came in and cut out the old characters, and they inscribed seventeen slogans onto the old walls and stone tablets. It was a convenient way for the soldiers to use these walls and stone tablets for their own propaganda. Originally these stone tablets were all part of buildings, especially in south China where houses were built using bricks. There was a very old-fashioned city gate from 1933 covered with the most modern slogans, although even if one slogan covered up the earlier slogans, the new slogan itself would be replaced by another one in the near future. Later, by the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy, in order to increase interesting tourist spots and create sightseeing sites, some of these inscriptions were cut out, and together with the stone tablets, detached from their original context on a building, and set up separately elsewhere.

Alice Schmatzberger: And does every single image within the entire trilogy have such a specific historical background story?

He Chongyue, Image—The Red Era Background 02, 2005, black-and-white photograph, 150 x 375 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

He Chongyue: Yes. The sub-series Image—1957 and Image—1978 both come from a similar significant social background, referring to the specific respective year in the title. I am always trying to concentrate on conveying the social background. For example, for Red Brick Canteen, from the series Image—1957, I shot the picture at a farmer’s house by the road of Yanting county.5 Although the house looked old, I could still see its former shape,

He Chongyue, Image–1957 01 condition, and scale. At this point in time, Chairman Mao launched the (Red Brick Canteen), 2006, black-and-white propaganda of “It is great to open people’s communes.” From then on photograph, 150 x 375 cm. Courtesy of the artist. communes were established throughout rural China. Inside people’s

Vol. 12 No. 6 39 communes, canteens were opened for the general public, thus implementing He Chongyue, Image—1957 05, 2006, black-and-white the slogan “The first important thing is the big party, and the second is the photograph, 150 x 375 cm. Courtesy of the artist. public. Politics are united with Communes.” There were more such slogans such as “Communism is a heaven, and People’s communes are bridges.” Inside these commune canteens, no one needed to pay for eating. It was propagated that “eating is free so that people could make a great effort to work.” By 1958 private kitchens and cooking was completely banned.

Later, this system of communes was further developed and expanded into other areas such as dressing, seeing doctors, schooling, and going to theatres. Some communes even offered “all inclusive” services, with eight or ten inclusions, for example, free eating, marrying, funeral ceremonies, etc. All affairs of life and welfare were taken care of by the communes. In order to expand “the communist factors,” each village started communist public canteens by dismantling private home kitchens, confiscating all woks, pans, and bowls. From then on, all food and welfare for communist members were distributed through the canteens. This was in fashion without rationing. But this development also marked the beginning of a big famine. According to official reports, the three-year famine that followed killed almost thirty to forty million people. I took this photograph fifty-four years later, and it is really difficult to still find such a well-preserved location with traces of this past as the one in this photograph.

The trilogy Image–1978 is more focused on the transformation after the economic reform of 1978. China has changed a lot over the last decades. You can see the political slogans and followers of such campaigns all across China. The photographs record the background of these respective years, and, again, each photo talks about a different story. For example, different leaderships disseminate their own beliefs and interpretations in specific slogans that end up as writings on the walls. We still have such slogans. During the periods of governance of Jiang Zemin,6 and Hu Jintao respectively, these slogans were, for example, about the “Three Representations”7 or the “Eight Honors and Eight Disgraces.”8

Alice Schmatzberger: On the other hand, both your other series A Billion To One: Dictated Parenthood and The Feudal Mind and The End–An Ageing Population–The Family Planning address present-day problems.9 A Billion To One deals with the policy of birth control; that is, the One-Child Policy and the law regulating family planning and population. The End, on the

40 Vol. 12 No. 6 other hand, approaches the consequences of this demographic change, the consequences of China´s growth and increasing urbanization, the resulting rural exodus, etc.

He Chongyue: Both series are related to each other. The issues in The End arise directly from A Billion To One. I will continue exploring these issues as there are still a lot of levels and layers to explore connected to these ideas. It already has been my focus for a long time. The One-Child Policy brought China huge disasters over the last thirty years, and the effect has not been revealed fully yet. These problems have just emerged, such as the different ratio between men and women—the so-called gender imbalance—and the demographic changes of an over-aging population. It will take a longer time to reveal the deep side effects affecting the generation of the One-Child policy, as it is still quite young. I started A Billion to One one year after the beginning of The End10 because I felt that I must shoot this older generation before it perishes. In the autumn of 2012, I went to Qinghai province and to the north of Shanxi province to do more of these photo shoots. The issue of aging will be further explored in my images.

Alice Schmatzberger: Were the billboards you depict in A Billion To One used to propagate the One-Child Policy in public spaces? Did you know about them already, or did you come across them by coincidence? And do the inscriptions on them still reflect the actual state policy on family planning?

He Chongyue, A Billion to One: Dictated Parenthood and the Feudal Mind No. 7, 2006, colour photograph, 152 x 190 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Vol. 12 No. 6 41 He Chongyue: Many years ago I aimlessly drove my car down to southern China. I went through Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, and every now and then I saw these billboards. Most of them were set up along expressways, along the major roads, so that many people would see them. I am still looking for more of them. The One-Child Policy started around the end of the 1970s, so these billboards were mainly installed between the 1980s and the 1990s; those twenty years were the strictest years for this policy. While it remains state policy, the enforcement of it has begun to relax; for example, when you live in the countryside and your first child is a boy, then you cannot have a second child. But if you have a daughter as a first child, then you can have a second child.

Alice Schmatzberger: So, one could say that while the complete Image trilogy focuses on China´s past, A Billion To One is about the present status- quo, and The End is about the very near future—it’s like an extension of the former topics, about the present and forthcoming consequences resulting from former social policies.

He Chongyue: Yes, they are signalling some bad things, which might happen—like a prediction. So the first is already gone, the second on-going, and the latter is like the end result, with only old people with some children left in the countryside. This is why I do not agree with my work being judged as documentary photography. Probably it is something in-between—most of my works have a story to tell, but it´s more a discussion about sociological points of view.

Alice Schmatzberger: Could it be understood as a kind of social analysis of today´s society?

He Chongyue: Exactly.

Alice Schmatzberger: Are you making statements about values of modern society, about old or new or necessary values?

He Chongyue: For contemporary society we really need a great value system to support us, but the whole value system is decaying, breaking down.

Alice Schmatzberger: Finally, I am really interested in one fascinating small detail: If one takes a closer look at the pictures from the Image trilogy as well as at those from A Billion to One, one notices small circular mirrors hanging on the walls and on the billboards. What are the mirrors about?

He Chongyue: In ancient times we had a great saying that used the mirror as a metaphor. Different dynasties followed this wisdom for a long time. It goes like this: If you use history as a mirror, you will recognize and understand the changes of the times, why dynasties are replaced by other dynasties. If you use bronze, or any other reflecting material as a mirror, you can only place yourself in a good position; for example, you change your clothes and can see how you look. But if you use a human being or your personal feelings as a mirror—which is the meaning of this

42 Vol. 12 No. 6 ancient metaphor—you are not only reflecting upon history, you are also intermingling or encoding yourself into history. Thus, I am using myself, my own person, as the mirror.

Alice Schmatzberger: You therefore inscribe yourself into history, thus emphasizing the link between the past and the present—the former being the root of the latter—through your own presence in these images and thus representing even another layer of time.

He Chongyue: Exactly. I am observing what has been happening in society. I am one of them. I am observing, like an analyst.

Alice Schmatzberger: You put yourself in the position of an observer, but not from the outside—instead, from the inside?

He Chongyue: I am coming back to one of your previous questions. If I were a documentary photographer, if my work was for documentary purposes only, I would not take so much time to go to different rural areas or to do such in-depth research. I would not carry out all of this preparation. My purpose is to explore these social issues from a more in-depth prespective over a longer period of time. Again, concerning the mirror metaphor: If you use the person as a mirror you can identify the true from the false; you can distinguish between them. For the last ninety years there have been a lot of social disturbances and problems, but they are like leftovers from the past. So the question is not if I am or am not a documentary photographer. I am using my photography so that I have a voice to speak with and have things to tell about history.

Alice Schmatzberger: You did not make use of the mirror, this symbol for a connection between the past and the present, within the series The End. What is the reason behind this decision?

He Chongyue, The End—An Ageing Population—The Family Planning Series, 2010, colour photograph, 120 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 12 No. 6 43 He Chongyue: In this series I depict the elder, local villagers. These are the people who supported us, the rest of society, through their planting and growing of food; they represent our society. They grew vegetables and corn. They nourished us and provided food services in the canteens. They are parents or grandparents. They always had to deal with a lot of different developments in history. They are not the right people to blame for the problems in society today. If I would place a mirror among them, this would be a very disrespectful gesture. In the other series the mirror stands for reflection, for a critical point of view—that would not be the correct thing to do here.

Alice Schmatzberger: How do you intend to progress with your work from now on?

He Chongyue: I am working on a portrait series. I plan to go back to these villages where I shot the series The End, and I will make single portrait images of the peasants, very formal ones, almost royal-looking, and using traditional China blue as a background. I do not have a fixed number of people to photograph. Roughly there might be about fifty to eighty. Most of the people will be seniors. For me, it is about giving them back some kind of dignity; they did nothing wrong.

Notes 1 He Chongyue was born in Beijing in 1960. 2 1644–1912. 3 Sichuan province. 4 “In the winter of 1932, the Fourth Army Division had to flee during Chiang Kai-Shek’s fourth siege. They occupied Bazhong and Nanjiang River in early 1933 to lay the foundation for the Chuan-Shaan Province of the China Soviet Republic, thoroughly destroying the existing old social order in the border regions of Sichuan and Shaanxi. . . . In December 1932 and February 1933, the government distributed Proclamation on the Land Issue and Proclamation on Land Reform by the Chuan-Shaan Provincial Soviet Government. . . . In the Chuan-Shaan Soviet, the Fourth Army Division left behind stone-carved slogans that have been called wonders of cultural propaganda. Examples include the first carving after the Red Army crossed into Sichuan, ‘Strive for a Soviet China’; there are the ‘Make all of Sichuan Red’ and ‘Evenly Distribute Land,’ and others such as ‘What is Gained from Striking Reactionaries Belongs to those who Strike the Reactionaries’ and ‘Better Land for those who Join the Red Army.’ All of these are accurate reflections of that period in history. . . . The markers left behind with the Red Army’s immediate departure and the disastrous results of the instant return to the old rural social order are testament that though revolution can thoroughly change the past, it cannot wholly determine the future direction of society.” Artist´s Web site, www.hechongyue.com/ works1a1.html/. 5 Sichuan province. 6 1989–2002 General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, 1993–2003 President of the People's Republic of China. 7 “Three Representations” was the sociopolitical guiding ideology of the Communist Party under Jiang Zemin beginning in 2002. According to this theory, the Communist Party of China should be representative of advanced social productive forces, advanced culture, and the interests of the overwhelming majority. See also: http://english.cpc.people.com.cn/66739/4521344.html/ or http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_representations/. 8 “Eight Honours and Eight Disgraces,” also known as “Eight Honours and Shames,” represents a “social core value system” developed by former General Secretary Hu Jintao for the citizens of the People's Republic of China, including, for example, slogans such as “Love the country, do it no harm,” “Follow science; discard superstition,” and “Live plainly, work hard; do not wallow in luxuries and pleasures.” See also: http://news3.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-10/18/content_5220576.htm/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Honors_and_Eight_Shames/. 9 A Billion to One: Dictated Parenthood and the Feudal Mind is a series that has been on-going since 2006. The End—An Ageing Population—The Family Planning Series is a series that has been on-going since 2007. 10 The End depicts peasants and rural communities from villages in Hebei, Sichuan, Yunnan, Shanxi, and Guizhou. It is intended not only to show the consequences of social policies, urbanization, and workers' migration, but also to show the dignity and pride of the rural population.

44 Vol. 12 No. 6 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky Time and Love1: Cai Jin’s New Works

ai Jin is a leading feminist artist whose work relates to women’s biological and physiological experiences as well as their mental Cvulnerabilities. Her paintings have evoked passionate responses from exhibition reviewers and catalogue essayists with animated descriptions of the single iconographical subject that has dominated her compositions for over twenty years—the leaves of a dead banana plant. Cai Jin’s engagement with this subject began with an epiphany she experienced in her hometown, Tun Xi in Anhui province, China from which she drew the inspiration for a series that has evolved into hundreds of works. She was enthralled by the scene of a dead banana plant.

The huge leaves enclosed the pod of the banana plant, with flesh as red as blood. The original green of the plant was long faded. The shape and colour of this withered tree completely transfixed me: it was a strange and inexpressible sensation; and somehow it seemed that inside its trunk and its leaves the tree was still breathing. After a few days I was still completely enveloped in the atmosphere of that plant. One day I took a 100 x 100 cm canvas and began to paint. As my brush moved automatically across the canvas, I experienced a great feeling of pleasure, as though I were painting something that was already familiar to me. The viscous plant was like sperm spreading and wriggling all over the canvas.2

At this time, Cai Jin took two rolls of photographs of the banana plant that subsequently served as the inspiration for over two hundred paintings. These works of art are distinctive for their consistency in presenting the motif of a dying plant, which she usually depicts close up, as well as for her use of a brilliant red palette, an expressive application of paint, and the employment of media other than canvas. The banana plant is often referred to in her titles as “beautiful woman banana plant,” or canna plant (meirenjiao). In either case, it is the dry stalks and leaves that occupied most of her large-scale canvases, but, as she revealed in her statement, they are not quite dead.

From the beginning of her painting career, in 1992, Cai Jin has used red as the primary colour of her canvases, and in the oversized ones its impact is nearly overwhelming. Usually used sparingly, especially in Asia, red is an explosive colour that elicits numerous layers of meaning. Most obviously, it’s the colour of blood. Many people have perceived splashes of blood in

Vol. 12 No. 6 45 Cai Jin, Banana No. 19, 1993, oil on canvas, 120 x 110 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

46 Vol. 12 No. 6 Cai Jin’s paintings, among them Francesca Dal Lago, who states, “They remind one of a wound that does not heal or hint to . . . a recently consumed act of violence . . . or a descent into the deep realms of the soul.”3 Another reviewer warned, “This is not a show for the faint of heart, though. For those to whom the sight of flesh and blood is best kept away in aseptic chambers overseen by anonymous figures clad in plastic garments, this might be a difficult visual experience.”4

Cai Jin explains: “The colour red drives me crazy. In its colour field my paintbrush becomes especially sensitive. The paint brush gets driven by inner need and it totally controls my sensations.”5 Early on, the sexual nature of Cai Jin’s manner of treatment and subject were heralded. Li Xianting found, “This is a psychology that goes beyond sex, or perhaps it is a feeling related to sex: affection and hatred, passion and self-abuse, expressing the strong conflict between the expansiveness of life and the repression of self.”6

In China, the meaning of red is embedded in ancient pictographs; it is the suggestion of danger and, by extension, social entanglements—whether conjugal or political. For this reason, perhaps, the pillars on government buildings are traditionally painted red. In the China of Cai Jin’s youth, red was omnipresent; it was the colour of the flag, the red army, the little red book, and then, as now, the colour of large public slogans painted on walls and boards. Wu Hung cites the writer Chen Lei on the meaning of red for those who grew up during the Cultural Revolution: “It is the colour of authority and subjectivity: it transcends the things that bear it and evokes intuitive responses in us.”7 Wu Hung concludes that red represented the Communist future, and although the era of the Cultural Revolution and its propagandist use of red had ended, this colour still has a strong hold on that generation. In contrast, it is also a primary colour that denotes good luck, and adorns New Year’s posters, gift envelopes, marriage decorations, and more. As Cai Jin has explained, it is a colour with which she has been familiar since her childhood, aside from the Cultural Revolution, as her father was the leader of an opera troupe whose costumes were often fashioned from bright red fabrics.8 It is possible that all of these meanings— sex, violence, social entanglement, and joy—inform her paintings.

But red, despite its many symbolic associations within Chinese culture, may be also understood in purely aesthetic terms; that is, as a meditation on red akin to the colour field painting practiced in New York during the 1960s and afterward. Mark Rothko’s large rectangles of red come to mind, especially those that were on display at the Tate Modern in London.9

In addition to monochrome compositions with red backgrounds, Cai Jin has occasionally incorporated various other hues—blue or green or ochre— that contrast with the warm red tones. She renders the strands of the dying leaves with a multicolour palette and applies the paint as dots, dashes, and squiggles, thus the oil paint, combined with the irregular highlighting of the surface of the leaves that twist and turn in space, imparts a glossy,

Vol. 12 No. 6 47 almost viscous quality. Cai Jin’s technique of using pigment in this way Cai Jin, installation view at Bronx Museum, 1997. also links her to the Abstract Expressionists; she explores the textural Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art. possibilities of the buildup of oil paint to create incrustations and passages of impasto. Moreover, the rich modeling of the forms and the thick swaths of paint give the impression of decaying organic matter, a tactile quality that contributes to the overall sensuality of the paintings.

The third distinctive element of Cai Jin’s works, in addition to the theme of bananas and the use of red, is the way she used different media. Inspired perhaps by the Surrealists, Cai Jin began experimenting with applying her paint to a number of unusual surfaces. In 1995, she painted the banana motif on bicycle seats, bed mattresses, chairs, bathtubs, and high-heeled silk shoes. The choice of these various mediums introduced another form of narrative that went beyond the colour red. For example, when Cai Jin applies the design to silk high-heel pumps that are then hung as a mobile or arranged on the floor, the composition elicits tales of sexual violence, of a party turned nightmarish—the leaf pattern now resembling blood stains.10 When she executes it on a large-sized mattress, there are again red stains that could suggest a narrative of a miscarriage or a sexual encounter gone wrong, perhaps of murderous intent. A painted bathtub conjures the same type of scenario, but this object also hints of self-mutilation. Such imagery contrasts with the meaning inherent in the materials—the party

48 Vol. 12 No. 6 Cai Jin, Banana No. 284, 2007, shoes imply festivities, the bed restfulness, and the bathtub cleansing and oil paint on bathtub, 70 x 60 x 284 cm. Courtesy of the artist. soothing, but, treated in this fashion, they become vehicles of agitation and distress. Moreover, the expressive manner of applying the paint—splashed, dripped, and layered dots—also calls to mind the image of blood and gore, spilt in such a way that it oozes over and covers surfaces. The materials— mattress, bathtub, etc.—are witness to violence acted upon an unseen person, and because of the associations of these domestic objects and the red palette, the works seem to refer to women. On the other hand, one

Vol. 12 No. 6 49 Cai Jin, Shoe Mobile, 2008, oil paint on silk shoes. Courtesy of the artist.

50 Vol. 12 No. 6 might also be tempted to imagine in these works the murderous hand of a woman acting out of rage.

Cai Jin’s choice of subject—a dead banana plant—is distinct, but flowers in China traditionally were associated with feminine beauty, and Chinese women artists, few though they historically may have been, almost always specialized in the subject, from Ma Shouzhen (1548–1604)11 to Ma Quan of the eighteenth century.12 Although Cai Jin’s focus on the banana plant may be considered within this traditional context, showing dead flowers was taboo, thus dead flowers were an inauspicious subject in China. Yet Cai Jin’s desiccated plants convey the fleeting and passing period of youthful female beauty in particular and of nature in general. However, at the same time, Cai Jin’s dry leaves are reinvigorated with red and intimate that their decomposition gives birth to new forms of organic growth and affirms the cycle of life. Women who paint flowers are also common in the West, the most germane example here being the work of American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, whose large-scale close up renderings of flowers serve as a symbol of the self, both physical and psychological.13 Cai Jin’s efforts share more with O’Keeffe’s self-exploratory art than with the work of her Chinese predecessors.

What is rarely mentioned in the critical writings on Cai Jin is her expert draughtsmanship: she minutely observes and skillfully draws the leaves, effectively applying highlighting and shading to create the illusion of three- dimensional forms. The way they twist, turn, and overlap in a shallow space has a calligraphic quality. In addition, in Chinese fashion, the staccato rhythms of the brush, elongated delicate contours of the outline, and downward angles of the bent leaves convey strong, lyrical emotions. These skills are the product of Cai Jin’s training in the fine arts, which began in her childhood. She started to draw as an elementary school student, at first copying illustrations in children’s periodicals such as Young Red Soldier. In 1982, after high school, she wanted to pursue a career in art, and she entered the Fine Art Department of Anhui University. Having graduated from there in 1986, she began teaching at the Fourth Engineering Middle School of the Hefei Railway Department. In 1989 she entered the Fifth Advanced Studies class, in the Oil Painting Department of the Central Art Academy of Art in Beijing, graduating in 1991. Two years later she was employed at the Teachers’ College in Tianjin. This is when the Banana Plant series began.14 In 1997, Cai Jin travelled to the United States, visiting Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, and then she settled in New York, where, in 1999, she gave birth to a daughter. For two years she stopped working.15 In 2007 she returned to China, where she now lives and works.

A visit to her studio during the summer of 2013 revealed that Cai Jin still persists in rendering her beloved banana leaves, but increasingly she is experimenting with a more muted colour scheme than her signature red. The four canvases assembled to make a single composition in Meirjenjiao Nos. 329, 330, 332, 334, completed in 2012, have a light cocoa coloured background of unpainted canvas that appears luminous against the black, white, and grey tones. But there is a richer contrast in the modeling of the

Vol. 12 No. 6 51 Cai Jin, Meirjenjiao Nos. 329, 330, 332, 334, 2012, oil on canvas, 380 x 400 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

52 Vol. 12 No. 6 Cai Jin, Landscape No. 42, oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art.

Cai Jin, Installation view at Chambers Fine Art. Left: Landscape No. 45, 2013, oil on canvas, triptych, 300 x 150 each. Right: Landscape No. 37, 2013, oil on canvas, triptych, 300 x 150 cm each. Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art.

highly detailed stalks and leaves, now illuminated by a strong light coming from above that creates dark shadows and brilliant highlights. The muted grey shades, despite the large size of the canvases, impart the intimacy of a drawing.

The strokes are freely applied and at times aggregate to create the forms without reliance on the drawing of outlines. A new calmness is evident in her work through the return to focusing on canvas as a medium rather than using other domestic objects as in her earlier work, the restriction of colour, and a more tempered application of paint. Other examples of her new work, a series of canvases titled Landscapes, were recently exhibited at Chambers Fine Art in Beijing.16 Compared to Meirenjiao, these depictions differ in palette, technique, and theme. Covering the oil and canvas paintings are a number of irregular organic shaped motifs rendered as areas of pigment against a neutral ground. The dynamic of the composition is no longer centripetal, as in the banana paintings, but centrifugal: the forms seem to randomly adhere to the canvas in collusion with some magnetic force.

Vol. 12 No. 6 53 54 Vol. 12 No. 6 Cai Jin, Landscape Nos. 51, 48, 49, 50, 2013, oil on canvas, 70 x 25 cm each. Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art.

Vol. 12 No. 6 55 Cai Jin, Landscape No. 54, 2012, oil on canvas, diptych, 200 x 250 cm each. Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art

Cai Jin, installation view at Chambers Fine Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art.

Freed from the confines of contours, the accumulation of brush strokes resemble cellular matter with large and small masses of variously sized and multicoloured dots creating seemingly random patterns that convey a sense of tranquility—at times the paintings look like a cloud filled sky. The more abstract nature of these canvases displays a new confidence in Cai Jin’s painting process and a new freedom from the pressure to create a representational likeness.

The paintings in this exhibition vary in size and shape. Some are large-scale rectangles, others are two or four large canvases combined; a few are oval- shaped with one a series being four narrow rectangles. A single chromatic theme with incidental dots of colour dominates the canvases. For example, Landscape 42 has various tones of blue with sparingly applied passages of yellow and minute but potent additions of magenta. Other canvases have bright pastel hues that recall floral bouquets in the way the dots of pigment aggregate into clusters of colour.

At the other end of the scale are monochromatic compositions. Layers of irregular shapes rendered in grey paint cover the surface of the untreated beige canvas, which makes the background appear like a source of diffused light. Similarly, on a canvas with a grey-toned ground, the abstract forms, modeled in white or grey with black accents, are more readily evident— they float in an undefined space. These organic forms resemble some sort of matter that might be seen through a microscope or stellar bodies that fill a night sky. As in her earlier work, Cai Jin still uses large areas of a single shade, much like a colour field artist would, and applies the paint in an

56 Vol. 12 No. 6 expressive way, but gone are the twisting and turnings of the earlier banana leaves, the heavy impasto, and the three-dimensional build-up of forms. In some works, Cai Jin continues to offer a narrative, but a more generalized and abstract one that is suggested by the placement, size, and distribution of colour on the surface, as exemplified in the four-part vertical set of canvases titled Landscape No. 51 (2013). Against the grey ground, light-hued forms in the first panel, suggesting animal or human shapes, descend among clouds and seem to be moving to the right. In the second panel the forms, now growing larger and darker, seem somewhat more stable as they settle in the lower part of the composition. Luminous light grey shapes fill most of the third panel, with diffuse accents of aqua, and in the last panel one witnesses a rising miasma of blue in the lower area and grey figures that drift to the top. Perhaps this is a portrayal of a confrontation between opposing forces that is peacefully resolved, like oil and water, or an oblique reference to a Daoist creation myth such as one in the fourth-century-BC Daoist scripture, the Daodejing: “The Way gave birth to unity; unity gave birth to duality; duality gave birth to trinity; trinity gave birth to the myriad creatures.”17

Cai Jin still paints with red. In the Chambers Fine Art exhibition there is one large-scale double canvas composition, Landscape No. 54 (2012), that has red shapes on a pink background relieved by passages of small brushstrokes using various colours, among them accents of teal. There is a lyrical quality to this painting that frees her use of red from the violent associations present in earlier work.

In concert with her painting, Cai Jin has been continuously drawing. In the mid-1990s she focused on rendering the banana plant with pencil on paper. She used a thin tremulous line for the contours of the stalks and leaves and employed short, fuzzy, but muscular, strokes to define the interiors of the broken stalks and dried leaves. In the Chambers exhibition, Cai Jin depicted fruit—pomegranates and pears—singly or in groups against a blank background. Based on her close observation of the subject, her drawings, like the banana leaf series, are naturalistic and realistically modeled; the fruits rub up against one another, bounce in space, or settle on an invisible ground. They are beautifully drawn with special attention paid to the minute variations of the contours of the fruit, the subtle changes in the bumps and depressions of its surface, and imperfections in the skin. One can see they are ripe, a traditional representation of fecundity and the cycle of nature. When I look at her drawing of five fruits lined up in single file across the paper, I can’t help but remember the mystical Zen painting Five Persimmons, from the thirteenth century, by Mu Qi of the southern Song dynasty, accomplished with a seemingly simple execution of broad washes of various tones of ink.18 In contrast, one can see that Cai Jin’s spirit is not entirely at ease, and the churnings of her ballpoint strokes are restive and nearly manic.

In conclusion, viewing the paintings in the current exhibition in the context of Cai Jin’s art over the last few decades, one can see continuity of style as

Vol. 12 No. 6 57 well as change. Using the banana plant as the focus of her early works, she invested it with a number of narrative scenarios. In the new compositions, instead of confining energetic polychrome organic shapes within the contours of the deteriorating leaves, she applies small passages of varied colour all across the canvas. In these, Cai Jin seems relieved of her earlier angst, as if she has found a degree of peace at midlife, both with her hard won success as an artist and her return to China, where she is surrounded by her mother and her teenage daughter with whom she shares a love of art. In retrospect, the banana leaf works seem to represent the creative energies of a young artist finding her way into the international arena, absorbing the styles of art practices in the West and the passions of a young, single woman living far from home. The struggle between the contours of the forms and the interior strokes has come to an end, and a serene floating vision now greets the viewer.

Cai Jin, Pear No. 5, 2012, ballpoint pen on paper, 54 x 78 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art.

58 Vol. 12 No. 6 Notes 1 Laura Nyro, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2soIL_0ICE/.

2 Li Xianting, “The Image of Obsession: Caijin's ‘Banana Plant Series’,” trans. Valerie C. Doran, in Cai Jin (Beijing: Peoples Fine Arts Publishing House, 1995), 6.

3 Francesca Da Lago, "Embroidered with Paint," in Cai Jin (Beijing: Courtyard Gallery, 1999), 6.

4 Stephanie Tasch Zehdenicker, "Cai Jin at Asian Fine Arts Berlin, October 15–November 13, 1999,” Chineseart.com, http://www.chinese-art.com/Contemporary/volume2i,sue6/Caijin.htm/.

5 Kang Hong, “Unveiling Her Self,” Critical Essays About Artist, May 2004. http://caijin.artron.net/main.php?pFlag=news_2&newid=43088&aid=A0006804&columnid=3/.

6 Li Xianting, “The Image of Obsession,” 6.

7 Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 63.

8 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky, “Beijingnuren: Five Women Artists from Beijing, Five Different Styles,” Journal of Women’s Art 23, no. 2 (2003), 28–33.

9 Jonathan Jones, “The Tate’s Mark Rothko Exhibit: A Room With a View of the Subconscious,” Jonathan Jones on Art Blog, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/ mar/30/tate-modern-mark-rothko-room/. See also markrothko.com, http://www.rothko.com/art.shtml.

10 Patricia Karetzky, Femininity in Contemporary Asian Art . . . If the Shoe Fits and Vernal Visions 2002–2003, Lehman College Art Gallery, The City University of New York (CUNY).

11 Attributed to Ma Shouzhen (Chinese, 1548–1604), Orchid and Rock (1572), accession number 1982.1.7, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, http://www.metmuseum.org/search- results?ft=Ma+Shouzhen+%281548-1604%29&x=6&y=2/.

12 Shu Jianhua, Ma Quan: Paintings of Flowers, Chinese ed.) (Hangzhou: Hangzhou China Academy of Art Press, 2012).

13 "Natural and Still Life Forms," Georgia OKeeffe Museum, Santa Fe, Mew Mexico, http://www. okeeffemuseum.org/natural-and-still-life-forms.html/.

14 For biographical material see Kang Hong, “Unveiling Her Self,” Critical Essays About Artist, 2004 http://caijin.artron.net/main.php?pFlag=news_2&newid=43088&aid=A0006804&columnid=3/.

15 Ibid.

16 Return to the Source: Cai Jin, May 25–July 7, 2013, Chambers Fine Art, Beijing, http:// chambersfineart.com/artists/Cai%20Jin/CJ_Landscape_42.shtml/.

17 Victor H. Mair, Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way, by Lao Tzu (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 9.

18 Richard Barnhart, "Thinking about Muqi," December 23, 1985, keynote in "Dynastic Renaissance: Art and Culture of the Southern Song" held at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, www.npm.gov.tw/hotnews/9910seminar/download/all/A02.pdf/.

Vol. 12 No. 6 59 Stephanie Bailey Objects of Experience: A Conversation with Au Hoi Lam

gnes Lin, of the Osage Art Foundation, once said that to know the Lui Chun Kwong, Landscape No. 0722, 2007, acrylic and work of painter Au Hoi Lam is to know about her life.1 There is mixed media on canvas, 213 x 92 cm. Courtesy of the Aindeed a distinct sense of autobiography in Au Hoi Lam’s practice, artist. which feels like an extension of the artist’s life and her intellectual and emotional responses to it. One work, If only there were no lies 11.11.2011 (2010), was produced after Au Hoi Lam’s professor, painter Lui Chun Kwong, invited her to transform one of his stripe paintings, Landscape No. 0722 (2007), into another work of art. Au Hoi Lam produced an installation in which she cut up the painting into 4,212 fragments, each marked with dates beginning from May 1, 2000, to November 11, 2011, and then organized and packed them into envelopes according to month. About the work, and more specifically the date in its title, Au Hoi Lam writes: “11.11.2011 represents a promise between Mr. Lui and I since 2000,”2 referencing the clandestine affair between the two, which, until 2011, largely informed her drive to expression. During this period, Au Hoi Lam developed a meticulous style of painting that is formally deconstructive while paying homage to the legacies of minimalism and abstract art. Rainbows (2010), for instance, recalls at once Jasper John’s target motif, Buddhist mandalas, and, simply, a laboriously and delicately rendered point of focus—abstraction made from figuration. In the following conversation, Au Hoi Lam talks about the thinking behind her work, which has also been informed by her experiences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where she attained her Master’s in Philosophy after she received both her Bachelor’s and then a Master’s in Fine Art from the CUHK Fine Art Department.

Stephanie Bailey: There is a strong autobiographical layer to your work. When did your art practice become an extension of yourself in this way?

Au Hoi Lam: I never planned for it to happen this way. I make work that comes from personal feelings or that responds to a real attachment to the subject. When I make work, I find inspiration in a story. Everything behind the visual elements of the work seems to be about my relationships with people and references the stories about them or the subjects related to them, but it is not really explicit. It is an approach that is true to me, and, in the end, becomes something abstract. I offer symbols or icons that imply there is a story, but most of the time the audience probably cannot completely decode the symbols I am using in order to understand the whole narrative.

60 Vol. 12 No. 6 Vol. 12 No. 6 61 Stephanie Bailey: Much of the work you produced in 2010 and 2011 was in Au Hoi Lam and Lui Chun Kwong, If only there were no response to your relationship with Lui Chun Kwong. I wanted to ask how it lies 11.11.2011, 2010, work in progress. Courtesy of the feels to expose such a personal part of your life like this? artists.

Au Hoi Lam: Actually, up to now I have never presented my work as an overt response to my relationship with Mr. Lui. This is the first time I am acknowledging it to this extent, which feels unfamiliar. Before the autumn of 2011, my friends did not know about my relationship with Mr. Lui, or that I had a daughter with him. So, at that moment, all of my work was the result of living within a secret that I could not reveal. It was like having all of these things inside of me, and yet, even when I painted or wrote I could not tell the truth, so I just kept producing work without disclosing the real feelings that drove their creation. In 2010, I had a solo exhibition at the Edge Gallery in Hong Kong, and one of my best friends, who was among the first people I told about my daughter, said to me that she had a completely different feeling about my work after hearing this story. She imagined how other people would see totally different things if they didn’t know the background.

Stephanie Bailey: In the work If only there were no lies 11.11.2011, you have one small painting in which you depict the word “parrhesia” in English and in Greek, which forms part of the installation. This refers to what Michel

62 Vol. 12 No. 6 Foucault described as the act of truth-telling (a term he took from ancient Greek), which he considered as a necessary risk for a self-caring individual. It’s interesting how you referenced this idea while you were concealing your own truths.

Au Hoi Lam: Yes, my response to this concept of parrhesia in the work is related to my reading of Foucault. I did a Master’s of Philosophy between 2005 and 2009 and read most of Foucault’s late work about the care of the self and truth-telling. In terms of my choosing to study philosophy, I wanted to find a solution to the personal situation I was in. I love philosophy, so I did a full-time, two-year program. I really liked Foucault’s late work. Foucault reconstitutes the spiritual precept “care of the self” as the founding principle and axis of the philosophy in Western antiquity. Moreover, he elucidates the paradoxical subject-truth relation and justifies philosophical ascesis as a way to salvation. Parrhesia forms the basis of ascesis. In fact, late Foucault was not just about a system of thought; it was something genuinely related to life. So Foucault’s idea of parrhesia and self- control as formulated in his works The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82,3 really struck me. At the same time, I understood that simply reading a book couldn’t give me the answers to life or lead to self-transformation. But Foucault’s concept of parrhesia is about being true to yourself or doing what you believe, even though in some

Vol. 12 No. 6 63 complicated situations you might find it is not possible to maintain this principle, which in turn produces a state of struggle or self-control. The idea related strongly to my situation while also providing a simple link between the creation of artworks that respond to this experience and to everyday life in general.

Stephanie Bailey: This idea of everyday life recalls some of the art practices that have come out of Hong Kong. Your work is reminiscent, visually at least, of the work of artist Lee Kit, who has also stated an interest in the relationship between art and daily life and who also studied in the Fine Art department at CUHK, one year below you. In turn, Lee Kit’s work also owes a debt to the influence of professor Lui Chun Kwong, who, of course, was also a major influence on your life and practice.

Au Hoi Lam: My work is about life situations and it is certainly related to daily life. But I do not regard “daily life” as a thematic subject, background, or ontological condition of art as Lee Kit does. I guess the similarity that you found may come from a sense of lightness. Not only in terms of light and colour, but also because the work doesn’t speak loudly, and seems to be self-contained. Compared to artists from the broader region of China, you can really feel that some Hong Kong artists are focused on something introspective in their work, and they demand more than just an expression of something on the surface. Though, for example, in Mr. Lui’s and Lee Kit’s work there appears to be a focus on colour and formal elements, it is not just about arranging visual elements within a frame: you can feel there is a feeling or a spirituality to the work, but they don’t present it or state it in an overt way. They just let the audience feel it.

This kind of approach reminds me of something I am working on for an artist-run project called Painting On and On. I am the convener of the project’s fifth exhibition Taciturn, held in October 2013, which will present Au Hoi Lam, Rainbows, 2010, eight Hong Kong painters in the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity pencil and acrylic on linen, diptych 35.5 x 35.5 x 2 cm Gallery, Hong Kong. Mr. Lui, Lee Kit and I are participating artists, each. Courtesy of the artist.

64 Vol. 12 No. 6 Au Hoi Lam, Parrhesia, pencil and the title, Taciturn, is used to describe people who seldom like to and acrylic on printed cotton mounted on primed canvas, speak and prefer to keep silent. It is representative of an artistic attitude 20 x 25 x 2 cm. Courtesy of the artist. – “taciturn” artists who make artworks that are quiet, unexciting, not entertaining, and maybe even too vague to comprehend. Yet, such a notion for creative production is not completely static. These artists are not in an ivory tower; it’s just that they make a choice to be this way—quiet. For me, “taciturn” describes my silence. In contrast to parrhesia, “taciturn” is a situation that represents my unseen struggle of expression and telling the truth from 2000 to 2011.

Stephanie Bailey: At Art Basel in Hong Kong 2013, you presented a salon- style installation of works as part of Osage Gallery’s booth, titled Drawing & Waiting Room (2009–ongoing). You positioned four seats that looked like they came from a bus stop or a metro station. Did the context of an art fair space inform your conception of this installation as a waiting room?

Au Hoi Lam: I wanted to set up a small area, like a waiting room with my drawings and paintings, where people, including myself, could sit. Indeed, my concept is that the Drawing & Waiting Room could be set up anywhere and anytime I want—the environment of the art fair is just one of the occasions or possibilities the installation might manifest itself. Regarding the chairs, I ordered them from mainland China; they are new but look old. The thinking behind it was how I often want to find a place to hide or just be separate when I am around a lot of people. It was also about the theme of waiting. From 2009 onward, I began relating to the theme of time, which was also linked to my personal situation of waiting. In Art Basel Hong Kong, I presented the theme again, but in a different context and against

Vol. 12 No. 6 65 Au Hoi Lam, Drawing & Waiting Room, 2013, installation at Art Basel Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong.

66 Vol. 12 No. 6 a different background. In the booth installation, I showed a mix of older and recent works, some of which were made in 2009, installed alongside the chairs. It was like an “independent corner,” or “room,” painted with a turquoise wall: a waiting room with drawings and paintings. I don’t think the variation between styles and material matters in this case, because somehow each element is related, even if they were not produced as a cohesive series of work. Some of the work is related to the theme of time; for example, one is about the 86,400 seconds of a day: 86400 Seconds of a Day (86400 = 294 x 294 – 36) (2009). On the other hand, some of them are not related to the theme of time explicitly, but are more about my wanting to spend time simply doing something. It could be anything, actually. Like in the process of waiting, I draw something, and suddenly I am not waiting for a specific thing or person. Rather, I am in this condition of waiting.

Stephanie Bailey: Is it a longing, too, this idea of waiting, or a desire for something absent and formless?

Au Hoi Lam: Yes, and I think this is related to both passing time and leisure. I find that in the times of waiting for something absent or for something that has not yet happened, it seems you have a lot of time and you are not in a hurry. But if you just sit around waiting, the feeling is not good, so you might do something: play with your mobile phone or write something. I choose to draw, make a canvas—something related to my interests—to fill in the time.

Vol. 12 No. 6 67 Stephanie Bailey: It is interesting that you produced a waiting room in Au Hoi Lam, 1, 1124, 3650, 86400, from Number series, a space—the art fair—where time takes on a different kind of pace and a 2011, pencil and emulsion on cotton towel, approximately short timeframe that is geared purely toward selling. 38 x 38 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Au Hoi Lam: Sometimes the work depends on the situation. But while the work was in part made for the art fair, I also regard it as an ongoing project. Of course I wanted people to sit for some time and look at the work or take a rest during the fair. But if they only glanced at it, that’s fine, too. It was not necessary to sit there. I think there is an element of imagination with the work. If you put it in a situation like an art fair, someone might have an intuitive response. Everyone can relate to time and its limits. It is a general condition.

Stephanie Bailey: Your solo exhibition My Father Is Over the Ocean was also on view at the same time as the art fair, from March to May 2013 at Osage Kwun Tong Gallery in Hong Kong. The autobiographical account of the grief you felt after your father’s death and how you dealt with losing your father through your work in a very sustained way, felt very similar in terms of how you processed your emotions pertaining to your personal life,

68 Vol. 12 No. 6 Au Hoi Lam, 86400 Seconds of a Day (86400 = 294 x 294 – 36), 2009, pencil and acrylic on linen, 122 x 122 x 5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

which so often fed into the work that dealt with your affair with Mr. Lui. I wonder how the production of the works for this exhibition—this series of works—related to or differed from work you have done in the past in terms of your process and approach?

Au Hoi Lam: I think the most different thing about this exhibition is how my relationship to art has changed. As I prepared this exhibition, I felt a change in how I considered my relationship to art objects. Before, I had this need to make everything perfect or finished. But this time, I just let it go and let things be. I could do gestures: drawing, sanding, or using other techniques. In the process, I felt I wanted things to come more naturally and with not too much sophistication. I think this is the big difference in my approach to making an artwork now compared to my earlier practice. For example, my father’s mattress, which I used as part of the exhibition—I did not find it beautiful. In the beginning, I wanted to cover the mattress with a canvas or a bed sheet and draw something over the surface and present that as a finished painting. But later, I found this was not okay. I preferred to let the mattress show itself, and I left some parts of it untreated.

Stephanie Bailey: This exhibition has the same kind of obsessive or compulsive quality in how you deal with experience, as was the case with your works produced around your affair with Lui Chun Kwong, in that the work is about deconstructing certain feelings. In the case of My Father Is Over the Ocean, this was manifested in the use of the pages from a diary to present the days as they passed after your father’s death, for instance, to the use of every part of his bed in the exhibition, including the slats, which you used as surfaces upon which to engrave certain characters that spell out questions you would have liked to have asked him. Yet this exhibition

Vol. 12 No. 6 69 Au Hoi Lam, There are Some Pearls, 2012–13, pearl head pins, new printed cotton single and double bedding set, three felt birds handmade by the artist’s daughter, two mattresses from a set of bunk beds. From the exhibition My Father Is Over the Ocean. Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong.

70 Vol. 12 No. 6 Au Hoi Lam, Sixty Questions about your father is different in that it has more to do with absence and for My Father (or for Myself), 2012–13, pencil, acrylic gel loss, rather than waiting or concealing something. The autobiographical medium, oil-based ink, screws, pinewood from used bunk elements are more open, more fluid, which fits with the metaphor of the sea beds. From the exhibition My Father Is Over the Ocean. you employ in the title of the exhibition in that emotion is not contained as Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. much as it is released.

Au Hoi Lam: When I was making work related to my secrets, I had to think about consequences and had to be cautious. But this time, because the subject is my father, it seemed I could really express something from inside my heart. I was relaxed and was able to stay in this kind of space of expression. Before, I always needed to cover up my real feelings, but this time I could unveil them. I was much more free, and I felt at ease and at peace when doing this work.

Stephanie Bailey: But there is still that element of concealing and revealing here, too; you crossed out certain sections of a text you wrote as part of the installation for the exhibition, which was pinned on the wall.

Au Hoi Lam: There were some small adjustments in the text I wrote related to my daughter and my family. When I decided how to show the work, I felt that some of the text was a bit too private or maybe too detailed, and I sensed my family members might feel embarrassed, so I just crossed these details out by making marks over them and erasing parts of the text in this way. I think that’s okay—I do not need to reveal every detail. There is a Cantonese saying “欲言又止,” which a journalist translated into “Words get in the way.”4 It means there is something you might want to say but you stop yourself and emit a sound that is not clear, translatable, or

Vol. 12 No. 6 71 Au Hoi Lam, Notes (Bunk Beds & Boat), 2012–13, inkjet printer ink, colour pencil crayon, newsprint paper copper nails, seven pieces, 34.3 x 21.7 cm each. From the exhibition My Father Is Over the Ocean. Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong.

72 Vol. 12 No. 6 distinguishable. For this exhibition, I left the most important parts in, in terms of how much I wanted to express. I said what I wanted to say, but not in a very loud way. I think that format or approach is good; it’s like a memorandum of that decision to unveil and conceal—or a manuscript.

Stephanie Bailey: There is also something performative about your work, in how the process is deeply informed by personal experiences.

Au Hoi Lam: I think with My Father Is Over the Ocean, the point is about unveiling, and it is a turning point. Indeed I do not regard it as a usual “exhibition,” but an occasion or an event that processed my act of mourning in an artistic way. Before this show I had never made a solo exhibition that was an installation or played with the space in this way. I just did each painting one by one. I would try one thing and then finish, and then start another painting, and so on. At that time, the works I made seemed separate from each other: in the past I looked at each painting as independent. But now, I am considering the whole space and the works I produce within that and I will continue with this idea. So this has been a quite different process.

Stephanie Bailey: How do you view your approach as an artist whose life often becomes the subject of her work?

Au Hoi Lam: I think this kind of artist becomes absorbed and entangled in their life and situation and can only find a way out by making art about such an experience. Your question reminds me of Frida Kahlo. But from a certain point of view, I think that any kind of work could be viewed as a fragment of the artist’s autobiography. I find that, as an artist, I am someone who likes to draw or make things. The subjects I choose depend on what I am feeling at the time. I’ve heard some artists talk about how they have to paint everyday, that they cannot stop, or they wouldn’t be happy if they didn’t paint. I agree to a certain extent, but I am not like this. If I don’t have something I want to draw or make into an artwork, I think it’s fine to

Au Hoi Lam, There Is a Song (Twelve Words Twelve Months Twelve Exercises), 2012–13, pencil, acrylic, emulsion paint, linen, wooden board and frame, 12 pieces, 95.9 x 126.3 x 5.2 cm each. From the exhibition My Father Is Over the Ocean. Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong.

Vol. 12 No. 6 73 just stop. There is no need to keep working for a career or for the sake of working. Artists need to achieve different things, and it seems like there are a lot of things to achieve. I prefer to regard making art as leisure.

Stephanie Bailey: Or pleasure?

Au Hoi Lam: Pleasure may be part of it. But at the moment I just find it better not to regard painting as a career.

Stephanie Bailey: Is this more of a philosophical position for you? Thinking about your background in Foucault, I note how you have used the word leisure to talk about your work.

Au Hoi Lam: I said “leisure,” but I mean something a bit different from the daily usage of that word, which often refers to “hobbies.” Leisure for me means “free time” that is related to an existential and spiritual state. I prefer to prepare myself with the rhythm of “free time” when making art, rather than looking on it as a career or profession. This attitude is the result of my reflection upon the past ten years. For me, approaching art as “career” is not good, or could even destroy me. So I have started to consider art “leisure”; it has nothing to do with “gain” or “loss” in any sense, successful or unsuccessful. Of course, to say I don’t regard art as a career might sound contradictory, but this is a principle that I apply to myself.

Stephanie Bailey: But even in producing such a personal homage to your father, using items and elements from his life and yours, you are indeed putting these works “up for sale,” although this is also perhaps another kind of letting go.

Au Hoi Lam: Actually, when I was making this exhibition, I thought there was no need to think about that. Simply, making this exhibition made me calmer and gave me something to focus on. It always seemed better to produce work than just sitting around grieving.

Stephanie Bailey: In the process of making work, how do you translate your feelings through form and material?

Au Hoi Lam: In the beginning, it’s very much about intuition. Aside from working with canvas, I also use fabric and daily objects, which I draw or paint directly on. For me this practice is a link to daily life. Sometimes, I find that the formal material for painting conveys a certain sense of detachment and that painting itself is like a readymade form; it has its legacy, and sometimes I feel this legacy is not for me. I don’t want to just take the readymade form. I want to explore something I feel can be expressed in terms of my own personal sensitivity towards that form. I search for suitable forms that I would like.

Stephanie Bailey: You talk about this legacy of painting that is not your own. . . .

74 Vol. 12 No. 6 Au Hoi Lam, Dad, What Shade Au Hoi Lam: In the first year of study in CUHK in 1997, I wrote a wish and of Blue Did You See Today?, 2012–13, pencil, colour pencil, put it into a time capsule with my classmates. We opened the capsule before acid-free paper, copper nails, corkboard, acrylic board and our graduation in 2001, after four years of study. I wrote, “I hope I will wooden frame, 13 pieces, 100 x 100 x 2.4 cm each. From become a good painter.” I think at that time I was kind of obsessed with the the exhibition My Father Is Over the Ocean. Courtesy of ideas of “painting” and “painter,” and I was not sensitive at all to “becoming the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. a good artist.” I trusted “painting” and had a “belief” in painting itself. While I was studying, I had this idea that I wanted to do something with or about painting. I thought at the time that I could do something different, or nuture an old legacy; the Western legacy. But now I don’t really hold this with me. As a mission, it is too heavy. Holding on to this legacy was a burden. Perhaps I was too serious before.

Stephanie Bailey: Are there specific painters you were thinking about?

Au Hoi Lam: When I was studying I thought about geometric abstraction intuitively. I like the abstraction of Cy Twombly’s paintings or Agnes Martin’s, but at the same time I found Twombly’s style had reached the highest point in terms of sensitivity so how could one build on that? At that time, I also felt that I had some stories in my heart that I wanted to tell, and I moved towards a balance between abstraction and figurative elements. The work was quite oppositional; the elements were not in harmony, and that was quite difficult for me. It seems if you like abstraction, you like something pure, quiet, or without a message, but at the same time, I wanted to say something, so I struggled in this process of bringing the two together.

Vol. 12 No. 6 75 Stephanie Bailey: Lee Kit also talked about this in an interview with Yishu Au Hoi Lam, 1978–2011, pencil and acrylic on linen, 122 x 122 in 2009.5 x 5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Au Hoi Lam: I was one year senior to Lee Kit, and I think at that time the students influenced each other in their artistic preferences. Probably it’s one of the topics we’ve discussed at school. Most of us liked Agnes Martin; we seemed to prefer textures and subtlety. Of course, Mr. Lui and his attitude to painting influenced us, too. For me, if you look at my work Window 6 Memo (2003), it looks abstract but represents a window, with memo paper. It is not a real abstract work because when you look at abstraction in art history, those artists really had their ideas and their concepts. I am not doing that, or I don’t understand that sensibility. Maybe I haven’t thoroughly studied what is behind abstraction. Of course, I’ve studied art history, but I don’t thoroughly read the works or the theories behind abstraction, so you could say I just know the surface. Of course, the surface could be enough. If you trust the visual element, there is no need to find a hidden meaning.

Stephanie Bailey: This view is interesting in thinking about your philosophical education, one that is also concerned with abstraction and “forms.”

76 Vol. 12 No. 6 Au Hoi Lam: In the beginning, I wanted to study both fine arts and philosophy, though at the time I preferred philosophy. I entered the Department of Fine Art at the CUHK and enjoyed it because I could also study philosophy as my minor. It was at a quite difficult timewhen I graduated; I started to study in France with a scholarship for a Diploma in Fine Arts, but I could not complete the scholarship because I found out I was pregnant. I returned to Hong Kong and when the baby was born, I entered my Master of Fine Arts program in CUHK. It took me two years to graduate, but after that I still felt life was difficult to handle. Art could not help me; it seemed I had some questions, and I wanted to find a solution. At that moment, if I might say, I harboured complicated thoughts about my relationship with my professor and also about the ethics of life. Actually, it is not so easy for me to tell this story even now, as it is related to so many different people. Most of the time when I need to explain why I have done this and that, or if I tell the whole story, it seems someone will get hurt, so it is not easy to explain my work.

Stephanie Bailey: I wonder if you feel there is a cultural perspective in terms of the kind of self-exposure you undergo through your work. When I think about Tracey Emin, for instance, whose work is also very gestural, performative, and always autobiographical, I wonder if she would feel the same kind of restraint you engage with when making art.

Au Hoi Lam: The cultural background is different. Reticence, introversion and reservedness are traditional values of the literati in Chinese culture. I do appreciate such a disposition no matter if applied to a way of life or to an art practice. For Emin, if the people around her accept that kind of expression as genuine and a true self-representation, that is most important, but I’m not sure if her work hurts her friends or family. For myself, sometimes I don’t know if I’m conservative or what, but I feel like I have to consider others and prefer to be reticent. It’s not worth saying something for art’s sake, nor is it necessary for everything to serve the artwork. If what you say might have personal consequences to people in your life, I wonder if it’s worth it.

Stephanie Bailey: Would you say your work is confessional?

Au Hoi Lam: It is confessional, but it is incomplete.

Notes 1 Expressed by Lin in conversation with the author in May 2013.

2 Au Hoi Lam, “If only there were no lies 11.11.2011,” Works By Au Hoi Lam (Hong Kong: Osage Gallery ltd., 2013), 6.

3 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82 (New York, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and Fearless Speech (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001).

4 Edmund Lee, "Au Hoi-lam," Time Out Hong Kong, May 12, 2009, http://www.timeout.com.hk/art/ features/50587/au-hoi-lam.html/.

5 Stephanie Bailey, “Four Discussions with Hong Kong Artists: Leung Chi Wo, Lam Tung Pang, Morgan Wong, and Lee Kit,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 10, no. 3, (May/June 2011).

Vol. 12 No. 6 77 Nikita Yingqian Cai and Carol Yinghua Lu Curatorial Inquiries 14: What Do We Aspire To?

lmost ten years after the canonical founding of institutional critique and her own first use of it in an essay on Louise Lawler, Andrea Fraser reflected upon the process of the institutionalization of this idea and A 1 its related practices. This famous 2005 essay by Fraser, in which she pushes the boundaries between the inside and the outside by claiming, “we are the institution,” still makes inspiring reading. Institutional critique, like many conceptual terms, still evokes a sense of the “Western-centric” in the context of China. The question Fraser poses in the essay remain valid nonetheless: “It's a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.”2 So what do we aspire to?

How About Taking a Hard Look at Ourselves and Our Surroundings While conducting research for the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, which I co-curated with Liu Ding and Su Wei in May 2012, we visited a considerable number of artists and curators active in China during the 1990s and revisited that decade through their accounts. We were unsatisfied with what we had read about this period of artistic events and practices in existing narratives and had an impulse for other stories that were less heard, or even unheard, but that could contribute to our understanding about this recent period of our past, as well as current developments.

During our research, we did not know exactly what we were looking for, but what we did know was that something was there. We knew there was more beyond the surface of certain events, certain art movements, certain categories of artworks, and certain success stories that continue to circulate and consolidate over and over again—a consensus about what is successful and valid within the art system. The disguised logic of such consensus in the Chinese art community today should be examined in relation to the economic, political, social, and intellectual movements in China of this period. The dominant way of understanding issues in these fields is today still guided by a kind of binary thinking: reform vs. conservatism, West vs. China, capitalism vs. socialism, market economy vs. planning economy. It is almost impossible to carry out any in-depth analysis of the complex and intricate relationships among political capital, economic capital, and cultural capital within such a value system. Wang Hui, a Chinese thinker, once pointed out in his discussion of the intellectual climate of Chinese society in the 1990s that it was a critical phenomenon in China that the intellectual circle gave up their analysis of the movement of capital and did not pursue research into the mutual penetration and simultaneously confrontational relationship among the market, society, and

78 Vol. 12 No. 6 the state in China. Instead, the intellectual world confined its perspective to the framework of morality or the ideology of modernization.

We also saw that our colleagues in China generally feel that the proposals for modernizing the contemporary art world consisted either in isolating the discourse of contemporary Chinese art from the rest of the world by championing its uniqueness and distinctive nature, or in looking and aspiring toward a very generalized picture of the Western art system, mostly based on fragmented knowledge of how the art system operates in Western Europe and America. While pursuing either of these directions and blinded by the grand aim and anxiety to create a distinct Chinese system, many researchers and practitioners in art leave out what is really happening with the art around us and miss out on the internal movement of art.

Discussions about the practice of art in China are scarce. Instead, we mostly dance around coined terminologies and approach the work of artists with inadequate experience and with an awareness that is based on hearing the same terms again and again and an assumption that we know what these terms actually entail. The space for the unknown, the uncertain, and the imaginary is extremely marginal. There is always a rush to solidify experiences that can be obtained from immediate reality and that can demonstrate the validity of artistic practice within a short time. Or we simply refuse to see what we see. Even when we encounter works of significance, many of us will not look at them because they are inconsistent with our previous experience; they do not conform to what is known to be good or the categories that already exist. Worse still, we tend to start looking within a universalized paradigm of what is considered to be successful with respect to popular appeal and market value, a paradigm that has become widely internalized since the full-fledged implementation of a market economy in China during the 1990s.

As curators we felt that most of the available literature about contemporary art practices in China is coloured by the above prejudices, inadequacies, and boundaries we set for ourselves. Much of the writing and critique that exists does not reflect the nature of art making, and, instead, stops short at former experiences mostly derived from reading, hearing, and making assumptions. When Geng Jianyi had his first major survey exhibition, at Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai in 2012, his publication for the exhibition did not include any essays written by curators or art critics about his work. The only text to be found in the hefty catalogue was a thank-you note he wrote to everyone who had supported the project. When asked why it had taken so long for him to receive his first solo show in China, he said, “Why has it taken so long for people to say that my work has been important?”3 The absence of analytical texts in this publication about his practice and works made more obvious the long-term disregard and ignorance of art critics and curators working in China. For a long time there has been no lack of works, artists’ practices, and thoughts that have been left out or set aside due to our carelessness, our attraction to immediate outcomes, and our habitual conformity to established thoughts.

Vol. 12 No. 6 79 As curators, we needed to find out for ourselves what happened. We called up artists, curators, and art critics whose works and writings we had encountered and taken an interest in, and we requested meetings and interviews to be recorded on video. We started by asking each the same question: What was it that you were doing after 1989, a year when both the world and China were launched into radical transformation ideologically and politically?

What had drawn us to the work of these practitioners was the fact that there seemed to be no space in the dominant discourses of art in China for their way of thinking, their kind of work, whether from their overall careers or from certain stages of their careers. In some instances, there is no established category that these artists belong to. Others have been included in a particular movement that turns out to actually limit or even obscure an understanding of that artist’s work.

In “What do I as an Artist Provide?,” Andrea Fraser writes that those artists whose work was often associated with institutional critique never claimed to use the term. Fraser recounts how the perception of institutional critique as a canon of art evolved with the expansive understanding of the word “institution” and how that understanding ultimately points to a kind of self-questioning and self-critical spirit that does not limit itself to a specific or physical perception of the institution. Fraser, herself one of the earliest champions of the term institutional critique, reflects such a self-critical spirit and reveals the limitation and predicament of artistic discourses in their attempts to describe and come to grips with artists’ practice through summarization and categorization of individual practices. In the same way, the artists and critics we talked to during the course of our research on artistic practices of the 1990s in China paid little attention to the movements and discursive terms that then populated critical discourses; instead, they were all involved in their individual ways of thinking and working.

What we tried to do through our research into the 1990s, and by making some of the individual voices and specific instances visible, was to call for critical reflection on the ideological positions and intentions behind current art historical discourses in Chinese art and to ask: Whose position is the existing art historical narrative based on, and what is the motivation and mechanism behind such writing? We believe the fact that some of these practices, thinking, and artworks previously have remained out of sight is not because of their quality; instead, the problem lies in our own perception. We have lacked the instruments and vision to discover them. It is the framework that was the problem, not the work itself and not the art itself. It is the rest of the art world that is responsible for not seeing what has always been in front of us. We are all implicated in such an art world, the one we are critiquing here.

Fraser’s essay calls for and stresses an awareness of the distinction to be made between the practice of art and the practice of looking at art and talking about it, and makes us aware that they are two distinctive exercises. Fraser reveals the fact that as curators and researchers who came later to

80 Vol. 12 No. 6 research a previous period of art history, we should not mistake existing thoughts and understanding for the practice itself and thus expect the practice to perform what has been written about it. What Fraser shows in her essay is that apart from institutional critique, both the practice that it defines and its own definition are changing, as new circumstances and deeper understandings evolve.

Many gaps have appeared between discursive practice and art historical research about artistic practice. In talking with members of The Stars Group, we learned that many of the participants, including the main initiators of this artist group in the late 1970s in Beijing, exhibited their works outside the National Art Gallery and protested when this exhibition that was mounted on a fence in the park outside the gallery, was cancelled on its third day. The Stars Group did not go into this event with a clear political agenda. But in some of the accounts written by art critics about this moment in art history, the artists of The Stars Group are generally portrayed as martyrs and opponents to the government. Such gaps make it even more important for later researchers and curators to talk to those who were actually involved and to be mindful of the different positions and ideological intentions behind prevailing literature and descriptions.

It would be a mistake for any curator or researcher to take any canon of art as the starting point for his or her work or to build a whole system of practice based on such a canon. In China, where a new landscape of contemporary art institutions is growing, it is important to keep looking within ourselves and at the specific premises and histories of our own past to gain insights and develop proposals for current institutional practice. The model of institutional practice in Europe and America can be a reference point but not the ultimate solution. The self-questioning spirit of institutional critique is, however, a valid heritage for any of us in this field. The spirit of unending re-examination is more about looking inward than looking outward, about pushing at the limits of our internal thought, assumptions, experience, and values rather than aiming at a specific target or emulating something that seems to be already established.

We titled the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale Accidental Message: Art Is Not a System, Not a World, and wanted to share the discoveries from our recent research and present an understanding that art is far from any set concept or linear progression of movement and thought. Art is about constantly seeing, thinking, feeling, asking, listening, reflecting, and getting close to the very subject of discussion, without ever expecting a conclusion.

Notes 1 Andrea Fraser, “What do I as an Artist Provide?,” Artforum, vol. 44 (September 2005), 278.

2 Ibid.

3 Geng Jianyi, Artist's Statement, www.timeoutshanghai.com, September 7, 2012.

Vol. 12 No. 6 81 Richard Dale The 5th Auckland Triennial: If You Were to Live Here . . .

Poster for The Fifth Auckland Triennial.

n the spectrum that is the global biennial and triennial circuit, the Fifth Auckland Triennial, organized by the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o ITamaki from May to August 2013 and featuring thirty-five artists and collectives, was at the modest end of the scale. This makes it about the same size as the very first Sydney Biennale, which was held in 1973. The Sydney event, of course, is the longest-running and most prestigious biennial in the region. In 2012 Sydney hosted its eighteenth edition, which included one-hundred-and-one artists and over two hundred artworks. Brisbane’s Asia Pacific Triennial just completed its seventh edition, taking its usual

82 Vol. 12 No. 6 approach of having multiple curators—a selector from every participating country, which is a trend in some of the large exhibitions in the region— in comparison to the Auckland Triennial, which has always engaged the work of a single director. This was the first of our triennials to have been curated by a celebrity of the global exhibition circuit, Hou Hanru. At his opening talk, the gallery was so full that he had to stand on a platform above the heads of a packed audience, an unusual sight for Auckland, where such enthusiasm, rare in the art sector, is more typically seen in our sports stadiums.

So while small in scale in comparison to our neighbours, this triennial made the largest claims for itself. The show was titled If you were to live here . . ., and Hou Hanru’s stated intention was to investigate the conditions of living today, in the world, generally, but with an emphasis on many of the participants in Auckland in particular. He stressed multiplicity, diversity, and made constant references to experimentation, not as artistic impulse so much as exploring new forms of social relations, subjectivity, and habitation—the latter the dominant focus of the exhibition. His selection of artworks fell within the parameters of current practice, consisting mainly of video and photography with some installations, including a sound piece by Japanese Ryoji Ikeda, test pattern [live set], 2013, audiovisual artist Ryoji Ikeda in the only non-institutional space, a series of six concrete concert. Concept composition: Ryoji Ikeda; computer industrial storage towers recently converted to exhibition use in an new urban graphics/programming: Tomonaga Tokuyama. Photo: park on the city’s waterfront. The rest of the artworks were spread throughout Liz Hingley. Courtesy of the artist and Auckland Triennial. the city in the public art gallery network, ranging from the Auckland Art

Vol. 12 No. 6 83 Gallery, university galleries, regional galleries, and Artspace, a kunsthalle- Peter Robinson, If You Were To Work Here: The Mood type independent institution, making this triennial more of an art sector in the Museum, installation detail, 2013, 240 felt-covered and institutionalized event than might have been expected from Hou aluminium rods. Courtesy of the artist and Auckland Hanru in comparison to, say, his choices at the 2007 Istanbul Biennial which Triennial. included a range of diverse venues such as an education centre, a hotel tower, and a textile market.

An additional installation by New Zealander Peter Robinson was on view at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, the first time this national institution has been included in a triennial. Robinson’s contribution was the first event of the triennial, and in a sense it kicked the whole thing off. In four parts, his piece involved the transportation and display of 240 metal

84 Vol. 12 No. 6 rods. Each rod was covered in tightly bound felt in one of four colours, with each colour representing an emotional state or temperament related to the order of humours in Greco-Roman medicine. In Robinson’s schema, red was equated with hopeful feelings, yellow with anger, green with despair, and blue with calm. Here, I assume the intention to use the antique system was a reference to the museum, the architecture of which is a highly regarded example of Neoclassical revival. On the opening day, the rods were carried en masse from the Auckland Art Gallery across the city to the War Memorial Museum by volunteers on foot imitating a hikoi, a term used for a protest march by Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. Once the hikoi had arrived at the museum, staff there were invited to place a selection of rods throughout the permanent exhibition halls, choosing a rod with the colour that would best reflect their feelings about the institution at the time. The museum staff was allowed to change any of the rods during the triennial as the mood struck them.

This multi-layered artwork fell into the area of institutional critique by suggesting new ways of looking and exhibiting, as well as suggesting an alternative mode of workplace communication. This was a welcome art action for many of us, as it was also the first intervention by an artist in the museum since 1997, when a group of young artists tried a similar strategy with an exhibition called The Oriental Room, which was closed prematurely, and I think unjustly, on the grounds that it was unsuitable for the institution.

With this triennial, Hou Hanru brought together themes seen in his recent work, which could be summarized as a dialectic between the circulation of global and local cultural capital. As he stated in his catalogue essay, “Engaging artists and their work with the local geo-political-cultural conditions and local communities . . . becomes a necessity.”1

The film essay The Forgotten Space (2010) by Allan Sekula (who died in August 2013) and Noël Burch was central to this discussion. Taking the sea as the primary means of distribution in the global economy, the filmmakers focused on the container and shipping industry as key vectors in the circulation of (cultural) capital, letting its workers speak, along with those displaced by the harsh consequences of economic growth and technological innovation. The film is a sobering reminder of international trade’s toll on human dignity and the environment, providing a wide framework in which to locate the very local and particular concerns that were reflected in some of the artworks in the triennial, many of which addressed with equal force to The Forgotten Space the tensions arising out of global forces on local conditions.

These included photographs of a ten-year project by Bruno Serralongue at Artspace that documents the rebuilding of Kosovo after the 1989–99 war, which is still showing signs of a slow recovery from the conflict and the Nato bombing campaign. In another artwork, a video with photographs at the Auckland Art Gallery, a playful reading of a village in the city of

Vol. 12 No. 6 85 Guangzhou by Chinese artist Zhou Tao, titled Should this be Nan Shitou? Nanshi Tou (South Stone), showed the artist and another male of similar age enacting absurdist scenes as an original way to document the community of this former shipbuilding zone, where he lived for a year and which is now encroached upon by aggressive urban renewal. Two other videos from Central America, also at AAG, included an intimate portrait of Abraham Cruzvillegas’s poor Mexico City neighbourhood, showing the richness of life there in footage of streets, houses, and gardens. Curiously, the video was interspersed with a selection of copulating couples worthy of his compatriot, the cinema auteur, Carlos Reygadas, whose film, Battle in Heaven (2005), crosses the divide between the rich and poor, and includes a mildly notorious scene of a ageing corpulent couple in sexual congress, similar to what we see in the Cruzvillegas video. Finally, Puerto Rico-based artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla suggested playful modes of civil disobedience in their videos, including one made to highlight the Bruno Serralongue, impact of the United States military and environmental damage from Journaliers (Bosch), Pristina, Kosovo, 11 avril 2012, 2012, tourism on Vieques Island, located off the coast of Puerto Rico. The tables Ilfochrome print mounted on aluminum, framed with glass, are literally turned when a local activist sails to the island on an upturned diptych 52 x 63 cm each. Courtesy of the artist and table propelled by an outboard motor. In each of these cases, the artwork Auckland Triennial.

86 Vol. 12 No. 6 Zhou Tao, Nan Shitou (South comes out of a long familiarity and commitment with its locality. Stone), 2011, single-channel HD video, 25 mins., 22 secs., Living on the opposite side of the world to Europe has meant that in New 36 inkjet prints, 27.9 x 21.5 cm each. Courtesy of the artist Zealand we have a heightened awareness of dualities concerning the global and Auckland Triennial. and local, proximity and distance, and its anxiety-making correlate, centre and periphery.2 Over the past three decades, New Zealand has undergone far-reaching structural changes under successive neoliberal governments, with policies that have sustained relatively high unemployment in combination with drastically reduced state welfare. In the context of continual economic instability, an increase in the number of migrants from the Pacific and Asia to the urban centres of New Zealand has created a pressure-cooker of social and racial tension with occasional xenophobic outbursts. This development is at odds with the perception of New Zealand as a South Seas paradise. Our national identity is predicated on a range of self-defined mythologies, such as being an egalitarian and peaceful society, a “God’s Own” land endowed with stability, affluence, and a beautiful landscape.

A video (with performance) at the Auckland Art Gallery by US artist Amie Siegel called Winter (2013), drew upon these ideas. In it, she updates apocalyptic scenarios, setting her characters in one of New Zealand’s foremost works of modern architecture, the house architect Ian Athfield designed for himself in the late 1960s and which is an important and progressive design in the context of New Zealand’s history of architecture. The house is a series of geometric shapes in white, overlooking Wellington Harbour. Siegel’s actors wander through the house with a sense of unease, and here the utopian setting doesn’t provide a safe haven for survivalists from impending global catastrophe—an idea about New Zealand that has

Vol. 12 No. 6 87 appeared in literature and cinema3—but only amplifies end-of- Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autoconstruction: The Film, world anxieties. 2009, HD video, single- channel, colour, sound, 63 mins. Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City. The Triennial attempted to keep utopian possibilities alive, however, especially in what Hou Hanru called The Lab, which he described as the brain of the event. Held in an exhibition space in the middle of the Auckland Art Gallery, The Lab was conceived as central to the exhibition, being a forum of sorts, a theatrum mundi for architects, urbanists, artists, sociologists, and other professionals to explore new and healthier models primarily for Auckland—such as for the city’s infrastructure by showing new social housing models, or focussing on marginalized sites and resources around the Auckland isthmus. Five architectural and urbanization projects were presented in The Lab over three months.

Hou Hanru, for whom the idea of The Lab has become a kind of signature in his shows, claimed a political ambition for this version of The Lab: “Mirroring the strategy of Occupy as a resistance to the hegemonic powers of the capital and its political alliances, along with the art projects in the Triennial, The Lab allows the most pressing questions of our time and our real lives to become the fuel for our intellectual and imaginative machines,”4 he writes. Analogies between non-institutional art activities, exhibition spaces, and the Occupy Movement have been a theme in Hou Hanru’s recent writing. Any sense of the radical disavowals or transgressions that are the hallmark of the Occupy Movement was less in evidence in The Lab, however, which seemed only to set its sights on the modification of existing conditions, in what Slavoj Žižek has called “utopia as a single imaginary possibility.”5

In the last of The Lab’s projects, Disasters, Fires and Slow-motion Earthquakes, for example, the issue of destroyed architecture in states of

88 Vol. 12 No. 6 Allora & Calzadilla, Half Mast/ Full Mast, 2010, dual-channel HD colour video, 21 mins., 11 secs. Courtesy of the artists and Lisson Gallery.

Vol. 12 No. 6 89 Amie Siegel, Winter, 2013, super 16mm transferred to HD video, colour, sound, performance. Courtesy of the artist and Auckland Triennial.

90 Vol. 12 No. 6 The Lab, Disasters, Fires and Slow-motion Earthquakes, 2013. Courtesy of the Auckland Triennial.

emergency was addressed through a focus on church buildings, many of which suffered damage in New Zealand’s most recent natural disaster, the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Subsequent to the disaster, there is a question over the ability to keep many more heritage church buildings around the country because of costly new post-earthquake regulations and huge insurance fee increases, with demolition a real possibility if new structural strengthening isn’t done. The Lab presented models of restored churches and annexes designed by students from the University of Auckland’s School of Architecture, showing ways the church communities could be resuscitated, in some cases by creating adjunct buildings with commercial uses for new income and hopefully increasing parishioner numbers. However, the limited scope of these proposals didn’t offer alternatives beyond the existing social and political order.

If The Lab was business as usual, it was nonetheless thrilling to see realized elsewhere Hou Hanru’s notion of the gallery as a model for new social relations. The smallest venue of the triennial, the George Fraser Gallery, held Shu Tu Tong Gui, an exhibition and performance by the Yangjiang Group, from Guangdong. Here participation was essential and welcomed. The three artists—Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan, and Sun Qinglin— and their assistants showed a hospitality, generosity, and sense of inclusion that I haven’t experienced at an exhibition before: they involved visitors in a tea-drinking ceremony and beer-drinking games, showed them new ways of configuring calligraphy, and engaged them in convivial discussion.

Their event might have fallen somewhat short of the ideal speech situation found in, say, Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, which has a strongly critical political and ethical content to it and aims to achieve resolution between competing parties, in other words, the sort of political endeavour that an experimental biennial could encourage. Yet the

Vol. 12 No. 6 91 group’s generosity suggested here at least the somewhat weaker ethic of Yiangjang Group, Shu Tu Tong Gui (Calligraphy civility that keynote speaker Sarat Maharaj identified in his opening and Scratching leading to the Same Thing), 2013, address as a unique potential that the biennial-type occasion has for participatory community event, tea ceremony, intersubjective communication.6 calligraphy. Courtesy of the artists and Auckland Triennial.

South Auckland, which has a large Pacific Island and Maori population, was incorporated into the triennial series for the first time, with the newly appointed Auckland Council community space Fresh Gallery showing works that potentially engaged with its communities in a similar way to the Yangjiang Group. Inside the gallery, Australian artist Keg de Souza created Tropical Thunder, a fale-type structure (an open-sided meeting house ubiquitous throughout Polynesia) out of commodities related to Pacific Islanders’ consumption bought from the shops and market where the gallery is sited, such as heavily patterned plastic tablecloths and brilliantly coloured fruit cordial bottles. Visitors were welcome to enter the structure, intriguingly making an alternative discursive space, here played out in the Pacific mode.

Musings on the possibilities of ideal communicative spaces are readily challenged when faced with the real, as I found with the work of New Zealander Luke Willis Thompson. His controversial artwork at the Auckland Art Gallery was untitled, and consisted of three metal garage doors, the type that roll up. These garage doors were removed from a house in South Auckland in which a crime had occurred, the scene of a tragic

92 Vol. 12 No. 6 Keg de Souza, Tropical incident in which an enraged property owner confronted and mortally Thunder, 2013, plastic tablecloths, fans, bottled soft stabbed a neighbourhood teenager caught spraying graffiti on his doors. drink, risograph printed maps. Courtesy of the artist and The killer, a middle-aged white man, was charged with manslaughter but Auckland Triennial. disturbingly received some public support for his vigilantism. The incident, a signifier of increasing irrationality within the city, and the eventual lenient sentence for the attacker, sent shock waves around the country. While this artwork was powerful, it could be argued that displaying the doors in the gallery performs another type of violence to the real event, with the possible danger of fetishizing these objects within the gallery context. This is a complex work, to be sure, with no easy readings.7

Willis Thompson, like others that Hou Hanru included in the triennial, addressed important political and historical issues in a direct way. So too did a second work at Fresh Gallery, a brightly painted collaborative mural by ex-Black Panther activist and designer emory douglas, Portuguese artist Rigo 23, and Christchurch-based Wayne Youle. The design, all in flat tones and geometric, drew on flag designs and highlighted issues around indigenous people’s sovereignty and universal rights, revealing that New Zealand had been in a minority of four—along with Australia, Canada and the US—among the nations of the world when it voted against the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People on September 13, 2007.

Their painting dovetailed with another work that also activated thoughts on race and hegemony by the French artist collective Claire Fontaine,

Vol. 12 No. 6 93 which continued its series on the theme of “foreigners everywhere,” created in neon. In multiple languages, except English, versions of the phrase hung from the ceiling of the Auckland Art Gallery’s Mackelvie Gallery, a room of Victorian academic painting. Displayed in Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Samoan, and Maori, and in the context of Auckland’s expanding ethnic diversity, the phrase argued for multiculturalism while holding in tension a sense of the xenophobia latent in New Zealand society.

The phrase in Maori, kei nga wahi kautoa a tauiwi, was given special status in the exhibition, appropriately for Maori as the tangata whenua, the “people of the land.” It was also prominently displayed on the outside of Gus Fisher Gallery at the University of Auckland. Maori are represented in the worst statistics in terms of health, prison occupancy, unemployment, home ownership, and social advancement, far out of proportion to their population ratio. As a statement on New Zealand’s colonial legacy, the phrase “foreigners everywhere” in Maori is a bitter one.

In October 2007, the New Zealand government security apparatus undertook an infamous operation against Maori, referred to in the single representational sculpture of the triennial also at the Auckland Art Gallery, Ka Kata Te Po, a collaboration consisting of Maori artists Saffronn Te Ratana, Ngataiharuru Taepa and Hemi Macgregor. Their artwork was in an atrium space, suspended from the ceiling. It consisted of a black shiny Luke Willis Thompson, Untitled, 2012, three garage figure with a bull’s head and police uniform held inside an angular green doors, security lights. Courtesy of the artist and latticework, as if trapped. It was cleverly placed allowing multiple viewing Auckland Triennial.

94 Vol. 12 No. 6 Emory Douglas, Rigo 23, sites: you could view the work from underneath, or above. It commented Wayne Youle, Untitled, 2013, mixed media mural. Courtesy on the 2007 police raid that was brutal and incompetent, and that targeted of the artists and Auckland Triennial. activists on the east coast of the North Island, home of the Tuhoe, the region’s iwi (or tribal nation), which had been demanding political autonomy, if not secession, from New Zealand. The arrests proved to have been illegal, and all charges, apart from firearms possession, were eventually dropped. Known as the “Terror Raids,” the event became important in revealing the extent of state surveillance. The implications of the state’s actions should have been brought into the Lab, especially as the Tuhoe’s historical claims under the Treaty of Waitangi between the Maori and the British crown were partially resolved in a settlement during the course of the triennial. Indeed, generating discussion from issues raised by the artworks themselves could have made the Lab a more organic intellectual hub than the narrow focus that eventuated.

Yet, as the selected works from the triennial I have discussed demonstrate, Hou Hanru’s exhibition was resolutely political, the most overt that I have seen in New Zealand. For someone who had no experience of the country before being invited, he proved himself to be sensitive to our politics with all its nuances, carefully negotiating the biculturalism that has defined postcolonial New Zealand. He brought together a range of artwork from other countries by artists whose concerns, although embedded in the particulars of their locality, also resonated here. With many of these artists Hou Hanru has an ongoing relationship (such as with Ou Ning, who

Vol. 12 No. 6 95 Claire Fontaine, Foreigners Everywhere (Mãori), 2013, neon, framework, transformer, cables. Courtesy of the artist and Auckland Triennial.

introduced his Bishan Project, and who will be familiar to readers of this journal). He shares with them the same concerns. There is a sense, then, that rather than being a standard biennial-type event with a representative selection of artists picked from the international art circuit smorgasbord, the triennial in Auckland has become part of an ongoing and deepening dialogue about the world with which Hou Hanru is engaged.

Notes 1 Hou Hanru, "If you were to live here . . .," catalogue essay for the triennial (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, 2013), 11.

2 A series of seven lectures held at the University of Auckland in 1960 was called Distance Looks Our Way: The Effects of Remoteness on New Zealand. An exhibition of New Zealand artists also called Distance Looks Our Way was held at the Seville Expo in 1992 and was one of a number of exhibitions that explored our geographical isolation.

3 One example appears in John Wyndham’s 1955 post-holocaust novel The Chrysalids, where New Zealand is the fictional country of Sealand, which provides refuge for the protagonists by the end of the story. Amie Siegel referred in a gallery interview to the New Zealand film The Quiet Earth (1985), directed by Geoff Murphy, as an influence.

4 Hou Hanru, "If you were to live here . . .," 20.

5 See Slavoj Žižek, "The Liberal Utopia: The Market Mechanism for the Race of Devils," 2007, www. Lacan.com/zizliberal2/.

6 This concept was under-theorized by Maharaj in his address. Slavoj Žižek writes about civility as a practice of treating others as “equal, free and autonomous . . . [in which] the fragile web of civility is the social substance of free independent individuals.” See Slavoj Žižek, "The Liberal Utopia."

7 A further complication is suggested by Auckland-based artist and writer Ralph Paine in dialogue with EyeContact editor John Hurrell. Paine writes: “It was perhaps one thing to buy these doors but after that the story goes terribly wrong. The procedures were botched, protocols incautiously abandoned. . . . The work appears set up all for the vanities and overweening claims of a certain kind of contemporary art.” See John Hurrell, 5th Triennial of Auckland (Discussion 2), EyeContact, eyecontactsite.com/2013/06/5th-triennial-of-auckland-discussion/.

96 Vol. 12 No. 6 Saffronn Te Ratana, Ngataiharuru Taepa, Hemi Macgregor, Ka Kata Te Po, 2011, installation with painted cardboard and fibreglass figure. Courtesy of the artists and Auckland Triennial.

Vol. 12 No. 6 97 Evelyn Lok The Evolution of Land–The Evolution of Us: Xu Tan's Search for Questions

Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou August 19–November 22, 2013

u Tan’s solo exhibition, while incorporating early and more Xu Tan, installation view of Questions, Soil and “Socio- recent projects, is anything but a retrospective. The arrangement Botanic” at Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. Xof the work at Vitamin Creative Space seemingly showcases a chronological progression that tracks the years of his use of different media—from installation to performance to video. On the surface, the subject matter among the works does not seem to have much in common. However, the site-specific exhibition format—due to the irregular curved walls of the gallery—draws attention to an intermingling of concepts between earlier pieces and newer ones.

Xu Tan’s concerns of late—as the exhibition title Questions, Soil and “Socio-Botanic” suggests—relate to the environmental present and future of the Pearl River Delta region, but it is easy to see that the issues he raises are applicable to fields much further beyond. Leitmotifs such as the ownership of land, folk knowledge, perception of the unknown, and the desire for a conversation between artist and audience occur and reoccur within several of the works. As such, Xu Tan’s consistent questioning does not ever seem to end in answers. This, I find, is what is pushing him to move from an art that is based in aesthetics to more community-based, dialogic works that aim to rehumanize what Claire Bishop, in her article on the social turn in contemporary art, calls “a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalism.”1

98 Vol. 12 No. 6 Uniform Velocity, Variant Velocity No. 1 (1992), Xu Tan’s earliest piece in the exhibition, allows us to witness the beginning of Xu Tan’s story as an artist and follow the evolution of his concepts. It is a vibrant, playful installation illustrating the sensationalism of the rapid development of Guangdong following the opening of China’s borders in the late 1970s, and the flood of foreign stimuli that poured into China from the expanse of a newly introduced world. Three panels depict a jumble of historical references such as a rough map alluding to the Yugoslav war in the early 1990s bursting from a hulu (calabash), as well as an image of a urinating baby held up by hands of an adult, captioned with “从小培养良好便溺习惯” (cong xiao pei yang liang hao bian ni xi guan) which can be translated into “develop good habits of relieving oneself." Several items, including assorted fiberglass preserved meats and Western medicine bottles indicative of the rapid urbanization and availability of improved healthcare in the Pearl River Delta, hang from the colourful neon “fishhooks” that are rapidly spinning in place. In the middle of the installation stands a large, neon green wire crocodile, while to the right, a small television screen plays scenes from a late 1980s video game. What we experience is local Guangdong culture and folk knowledge mixed with appropriated international cultural icons that arrived with the contemporaneous burst of global information flowing into Guangdong at that time.

This bombardment highlights Guangdong’s increasing “materialistic acquisitive drive”2 in the decade or so that followed the late 1970s, now that Xu Tan, Uniform Velocity, Variant Velocity No. 1, it was able to compare itself with neighbouring economies. Yet it possessed 1992/2013, installation. Courtesy of the artist and a “weak public ethic with which to counter the passion of individuals, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. families, and small groups of friends for materialistic acquisition.”3

Vol. 12 No. 6 99 100 Vol. 12 No. 6 Xu Tan, The Last Castle of Culture, 2000, installation. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

The image of the urinating baby, as well as an array of medical equipment strewn throughout the piece make reference to Guangdong’s citizens pushing to improve urban standards and rapidly absorb the culture and Xu Tan, Problem—1, 1995–96, experience of distant countries with which it was now competing. In this installation view in the exhibition Possibility—Big complex work, the audience is subjected to an overwhelming amount of Tailed Elephant, Guangzhou. Courtesy of the artist and stimuli, seemingly spiraling out of control, much like the crocodile that is Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. faced with the spinning fluorescent “fish hooks” of cultural bait.

Vol. 12 No. 6 101 This work suggests Xu Tan’s observation of the wide-eyed wonder of Xu Tan, Problem—1, 2013, installation. Courtesy of the that era, but it is also a mischievous jab at the hodgepodge of cultural artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. iconography that was melding into a new social environment. This same playfulness can be seen even in later works, for instance, The Last Castle of Culture (2000).4 However, experiencing Uniform Velocity, Variant Velocity No. 1 in 2013 is incredibly different from experiencing it in 1992. The viewer is thus led on a search for recognizable icons from his or her memory but ultimately is unable to construct a complete picture. This ambiguity is reinforced by the anonymous cavalry of soldiers in the image panels, and the familiar yet paradoxically inaccurate, hence unfamiliar, foreign cultural icons such as the “Arch of Triumph” that references the Arc de Triomphe in Paris that are also visible in the work.

In Problem—1 (1995–96), Xu Tan revisits his desire to provoke a discussion between artist and audience. From the original performance/installation, all that remains is the soil from a replica of a mini-Mayan pyramid built with six cubic metres of earth from the construction site next to Airport Road (Ji Chang Lu), Guangzhou. During the performance, this pyramid was gradually divided into smaller and smaller pieces, and as the form diminished, it was flattened into the ground. In the 1995–96 piece, the audience was able to sense the soil through vision, sound, and smell. As such, Xu Tan experimented with ways to expand his concepts into other domains as well as through new media.5 Five projections on the wall flashed questions of rights (quotes from Roman law) and of ownership;

102 Vol. 12 No. 6 for example, “Who has the right to own Sarajevo?” One then wonders: Is it our soil? Whose soil is it really? This work is an outward and assertive look at society at large—the questions Xu Tan ponders no longer pertain only to the Pearl River Delta; instead, it is an omnipresent issue with implications around the world. The quotes ask questions that are countered by archival images of native Mayans that make reference to its culture as one of the first developed civilizations, and that are then mixed with images from whale anatomy to war in eastern Europe. With these constantly changing slides of questions and answers, the only conclusion is a paradox of justifications for ownership of land. It is this subversion of the familiar, and the answering of one question with another question in a search for new perceptions that create continuity with Xu Tan’s recent work.

In Social Plants and Thought Spasm (First Chapter) from 2012, the artist returns to the idea of nostalgia, as in Uniform Velocity, Variant Velocity No. 1, to question once again the truth of the world as we understand it. In this video, Xu Tan stands in a young forest near Shenzhen and wistfully speaks of memories of bygone times:

In [the] past (especially before 1980s) we did not have enough objects that we could use to remember our own past Closing my eyes, I try to raise images from my memory of a past time When I open my eyes, and I see the young environment my memories disappear like using hands to hold water, water pouring through my fingers I realize that if I want to keep some memories, I need some objects, and words, and sentences and with voices, expression, and gesture language

The vestiges of the past that are in his older works are, perhaps, telling of a muddled history that disallow his memories to persist. On the other hand, his comments regarding memories could be seen as a call to actively leave behind (artificial) traces—objects, words, sentences, voices, expression, and gestures—that Xu Tan speaks of in his video for the benefit of future generations. Is this also, then, a call for making social art? This question foregrounds Xu Tan’s gradual development of his art from more aesthetic concerns to the later research-based pieces that engage local communities.

Social Plants and Thought Spasm (First Chapter) in particular subverts the idea of the familiar just as Uniform Velocity, Variant Velocity No. 1 does. In this nineteen-minute video, the viewer sees only shots panning across trees while Xu Tan narrates the scene. Through his commentary, the viewer realizes that this presentation of trees may not be what it seems. As the surrounding area became urbanized into today’s Shenzhen, the subtitles announced that “people swept away everything, then, rebuilt and replanted.”6 Xu Tan compares these young forests to human society and has coined the terms “social forests” and “social plants” that are “growing up not according to human will,” and hence are called “social wild plants,” or “social natural plants” that relate to their conformity to the “vegetational

Vol. 12 No. 6 103 104 Vol. 12 No. 6 Xu Tan, Social Plants and order”7 given by human society. In this piece, Xu Tan takes on a challenge to Thought Spasm (First Chapter), 2012, video, 19 acquaint himself more with his natural surroundings. It is a critique of the mins. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, artificial necessity of the trees in this particular geographical context on the Guangzhou. outskirts of Shenzhen. There are also questions of ownership, as the trees were not planted municipally, but by the public.8 Using video, he is able to more strongly articulate his questions, and not just through words, but also through contemplative silences that allow the audience to consider his words and formulate their own opinions about his comparison of nature to the rapid occupation of land.

Uniform Velocity, Variant Velocity No. 1 also contrasts widely with the more mature style and subject matter developed since Problem—1. As in Social Plants and Thought Spasm (First Chapter), Xu Tan seems to be at a conceptual standstill; these two later works encourage contemplation and a questioning of ideas rather than resorting to a relatively simple observation of the world around us, and I see these two works as springboards for him to achieve a social turn in his art as seen in his most recent projects, Questions, land—soil (2013) and 2013–2113 (2013).

Xu Tan, Questions, land— Xu Tan belongs to the age of contemporary artists who, as Bishop says, soil, 2013, video installation. Courtesy of the artist and “after the fall of Communism deprived the Left of the last vestiges of the Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. revolution that had once linked political and aesthetic radicalism,”9 and became interested more in the creativity and significance of collaborative activity rather than a “relational aesthetic.”10 Such artists also had a strong belief in “the empowering creativity of collective action and shared ideas.11 A perfect example would be Xu Tan’s Searching for Keywords (2006–08) and Keywords School (2008–11)—both ongoing investigations into connections between words and individuals through “keywords” that provoke discussion and dialogue between the participants of his art and the artist himself. Through this, Xu Tan aimed to foster a new, more personal understanding of the chosen words. It was also through this process that Xu Tan, in Bishop’s words, “allow[ed] [the project] to emerge through consensual

Vol. 12 No. 6 105 collaboration”12 rather than to focus on product over process as is the Xu Tan, 2013–2113, 2013, video installation. Courtesy of the tendency within capitalism.13 artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

This collaborative action is exactly what is evident in Questions, land—soil. Completed in the summer of 2013, Xu Tan interviewed farmers, Tanka people (an ethnic minority in southern China who traditionally have lived on boats), and sustainable farming innovators about the use and ownership of soil, filming miraculous rooftop banyan trees and floating farms in Hong Kong and rural Guangzhou as optimistic examples of new land usage. In doing so, he manages to refer back to his earlier artistic interests again through the subversion of the familiar as he documents trees and vegetation that grow without any soil at all. Xu Tan’s art blurred the lines between the gallery and the outside as his research also became increasingly part of his art form. This is clear in his more recent practice—in his interview projects, Xu Tan brings an observer along, and that individual’s reflections comprise the wall of field notes in the reading room section of the exhibition. With an outsider’s eyes, the viewer is brought into a more intimate understanding of Xu Tan’s works and is able to learn more about his research practices. Conversely, the audience is also able to learn much more about these social innovations,14 folk knowledge,15 and glimpses into lives that are largely unknown.

For 2013–2113, Xu Tan chose an area two metres square in rural Panyu that is to be left untouched for the next one hundred years. Filming the

106 Vol. 12 No. 6 Xu Tan, reading room and field notes for Questions, land—soil, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

ground and recreating that space in the gallery with a projector facing down toward the floor, he speculates about what may happen to the area after one hundred years if it is left untainted by human activity. With sophisticated soil testing results available as reports that the audience can peruse at the gallery, he also reveals the constituent minerals and chemicals that are present in the soil.

Xu Tan’s most recent projects, therefore, suggest hopeful implications for the land. With his inquiring spirit, Xu Tan incessantly questions land ownership and the ways society has worked with the land to indicate ownership. In the evolution of his concepts and artistic practices, he encourages a multitude of ways for us to retake possession of the land. Perhaps the next step is for him to formulate answers to his questions.

Notes 1 Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum, February 2006, 180.

2 Ezra Vogel, "The Takeoff of the Guangdong-Hong Kong Region," in One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong Under Reform (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 437.

3 Ibid, 440.

4 In this installation, an open-air toilet was built on the ground of Goethe’s former residence in Weimar, Germany.

5 In an interview with Asia Art Archive, the artist’s rationale for moving from painting in the 1980s to installation in the 1990s was said to be the result of increasing interest in conceptual works. Xu Tan, "Interview with Xu Tan on Chinese contemporary art in the 1980s." Materials of the Future": Asia Art Archive, October 28, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvsPY37Ug24/.

6 Xu Tan, subtitles from Subtitles from Social Plants and Thought Spasm, 2012.

7 Ibid.

8 As related to me by the gallerists at Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

9 Bishop, "The Social Turn," 179.

10 Ibid., 179.

11 Ibid., 179.

12 Ibid., 180.

13 Ibid., 180.

14 For instance, one of the interviewees is Michael Leung of HK Honey, a Hong Kong urban apiarist committed to teaching others about conscious food and local sustainable farming practices.

15 Specifically relating to knowledge of the ankaT people as told in an observer’s account for Questions, land-soil, part of field notes exhibited alongside works at Vitamin Creative Space.

Vol. 12 No. 6 107 Chinese Name Index

Ai Qing Jiang Haiji Mu Qi Zhang Xiaogang 艾青蔣海濟牧溪張曉剛

Ai Weiwei Jiang Haitao Muchen Zheng Guogu 艾未未蔣海濤慕辰鄭國谷

Au Hoi Lam Jiang Zemin Ou Ning Zheng Ke 區凱琳江澤民歐寧鄭可

Cai Jin Lee Kit Qin Ga Zheng Shengtian 蔡錦李傑琴嘎鄭勝天

Cai Yingqian, Nikita Lee Shau Kee Shao Yinong Zhou Tao 蔡影茜李兆基邵逸農周滔

Chen Danqing Li Xianting Su Wei Zhu De 陳丹青栗憲庭蘇偉朱徳

Chen Yifei Li Zongjin Sui Jianguo 陳逸飛李宗津隋建國

Chen Zaiyan Lin Lin Sun Qinglin 陳再炎林琳孫慶麟

Deng Xiaoping Lin, Agnes Wang Hui 鄧小平林茵汪暉

Gao Weidong Liu Ding Wang Jiaji (Chia-Chi) 高衛東劉鼎王嘉驥

Ge Weimo Liu Haisu Wang Zhen 葛維墨劉海粟王震

Geng Jianyi Lok, Evelyn Windscript, Shan 耿建翌駱浩妍王侍

He Chongyue Lu Yinghua, Carol Wu Hung 何崇岳盧迎華巫鴻

Hou Hanru Lui Chun Kwong Xu Linlu 侯瀚如呂振光許麟廬

Hu Jintao Ma Lu Xu Tan 胡錦濤馬璐徐坦

Huang Yongyu Ma Quan Yin Xiuzhen 黃永玉馬荃尹秀珍

Jiang Feng Ma Shouzhen Zhang Ding 江豐馬守貞張仃

108 Vol. 12 No. 6 Vol. 12 No. 6 109 110 Vol. 12 No. 6 Vol. 12 No. 6 111 112 Vol. 12 No. 6