A Shanshui Journey: Contemplating Contemporary China’s Temporality

by

Ke Ma

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts and Culture

in

Graduate School of Humanities

Cultural Analysis

The University of Amsterdam

Instructor: Niall Martin

22 December 2017 Table of Contents

Introduction………………………………...... ……………………………………………....1

1. From the Past to the Present: Contextualising Shanshui Art………………………………5

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………5

1.1 A Baradian Reading of Shanshui Art…………………...……………………………7

1.2 The Death of Literati and Shanshui as a site of Nostalgia…………………………..11

1.3 The Reflective Nostalgia: Aesthetic Dissensus………………………………...... 15

Conclusion………………………………...………………………………...... 17

2. Way of Conflating: Shanshui as an Unreturnable Home……………………………….....18

Introduction………………………………...………………………………...... 18

2.1 The Uncanny as an Aesthetic Experience………….………………………………..19

2.2 The Source of the Uncanny: The Past and Present……………………………….....23

2.3 Visual Rhetoric of the Uncanny: A Pretence of Realism……………………………25

Conclusion………………………………...... ………………………………...... ……28

3. Revitalising the Ideal: Shanshui as a Performative Future ……………………………….30

Introduction………………………………...... ………………………………...... 30

3.1 The Eight Views………………………………...... ………………………………..32

3.2 Framing a New Landscape………………………………...... ……………………..34

3.3 The Ideal as A Process………………………………...... …………………………38

Conclusion………………………………...... ………………………………...... 40

4. Questioning the White Cube: Shanshui Art as a Method……………………………….....42

Introduction………………………………...... ………………………………...... …...42

4.1 The Role of Museum in Framing Shanshui………………………………...... 44

4.2 The Museum’s Failure to Be a Museum………………………………...... 47

4.3 The Paradox of Art and Shanshui in the Global Art World…………………………50

Conclusion………………………………...... ………………………………...... 52

Conclusion………………………………...... …………………………….….....…………..54 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….57 1

Introduction

At best, reflective nostalgia can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias.

(XVIII, Boym)

Shanshui (“山水”) painting in Chinese translates literally as “mountain-water” painting. It refers to a traditional genre of Chinese ink painting depicting the natural world, including mountains, rivers, waterfalls, vegetation, and sometimes human beings, etc. This genre of art arose in the 5th century and matured in the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279). From then until the

20th century, Shanshui art underwent a relatively linear development. Despite the fact that

Shanshui art includes a variety of artistic styles, there exist some shared visual features, which typically result in an experience of a homely and harmonious sensory feeling.

During the 20th century, the discourse about traditional Shanshui art experienced multiple ruptures due to international and domestic wars, political movements, and the processes of modernisation and globalisation. Consequently, the traditional practice of

Shanshui art no longer exists in today’s Chinese society, though its fractured lineage still appears in a variety of cultural practices.

The reference of Shanshui can be identified in many domains. For example, in Chaoyang

Park, Beijing, a new skyscraper plaza was erected that mimics the contours of mountains; in many rural sightseeing areas such as Guilin, Shanshui art is used rhetorically to promote tourism; many contemporary artworks appropriate elements of Shanshui, and art exhibitions are curated to revolve around the notions of Shanshui.

Considering the fact that Shanshui art is a genre of art that is imbued with a distinctive ancient Chinese episteme that no longer fully exists in modern society, this thesis sees the re-emergence of Shanshui art in contemporary China not only as the manifestation of traditional Chinese culture’s peculiar affinity with nature but, more crucially, a site on which a poetic Chinese past is constantly dreamed, imagined and utilised. Within contemporary

Chinese culture, Shanshui has, to certain extent, come to function as a focus for nostalgia.

And to begin an analysis of its cultural operation, consequently, it is useful to further press 2 that term.

Nostalgia (from nostos – return home, and algia – longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists. Originally, the term nostalgia was used as a medical diagnosis. In 1688,

Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer suggests in his medical dissertation that “from the force of the sound Nostalgia… (it defines) the sad mood originating from the desire for return to one’s native land” (qtd. in Boym 3). Since the 18th century, however, the impossibility of exploring nostalgia as disease mobilized the term into the realm of philosophy, as “a sign of sensibility or an expression of new patriotic feeling” (Boym 11). Modern nostalgia, as Svetlana Boym suggests, exhibits “a modern yearning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values” (8). Along with the processes of globalisation and modernisation, this yearning has been ubiquitous and has pervaded many spheres. Very often, this historical mood is simply turned into a symbol that is packed with capital and ideology. “Nostalgia is to memory as kitsch is to art” (qtd. in Boym XIV) – historian Charles Maier’s observation touches the core.

However, aligning with Boym, I believe that precisely because the nostalgic manifestations “are side-effects of the teleology of progress” (10) and are “a longing for the space of experience that no longer fits the new horizon of expectation” (10), they also contain the sparkles of social critiques. Particularly, when nostalgia, as a concept that derives from the Western tradition, is mobilised into the Chinese context, its critical aspects might take different shapes. Hence, a nuanced analysis of the specificity of nostalgic manifestations can be productive and is perhaps much needed. With regard to Shanshui, the domain of contemporary art seems a productive area of investigation for it carries certain autonomous dynamics from which a critical reflection on a specifically Chinese temporality becomes possible.

Among many artworks of this kind, three recent examples will be discussed in this thesis.

Artist Yang Yongliang’s Artificial Wonderland II: Travellers among Mountains and Streams

(2014) appropriates Fan Kuan’s prominent Shanshui painting of the same name by replacing the ink strokes with the photographs of urban structures in Shanghai. Hao Liang’s Eight 3

Views of Xiaoxiang (2016) creates a novel version of “Xiaoxiang”, a prominent motif in

Shanshui art that designates an ideal world. Liang Shuo’s installation art Distant Tantamount

Mountain (2017) unfolds the aesthetics of Shanshui art in the emblematically Western construct, the White Cube. Although the elements of Shanshui art are used differently in these artworks, they share one crucial similarity. That is, from the perspective of aesthetic experience, these contemporary artworks no longer merely produce the homely sensory feelings like the traditional Shanshui art. Instead, the strange disposition of the elements of

Shanshui art produce confusing and uneasy sensory feelings, since they contain conflicts between the sensory presentation of the traditional Shanshui art and the factual ways to make sense of it. To read these unfamiliar re-compositions, I will use as the methodological lens what French philosopher Jacques Rancière called aesthetic “dissensus” in art, a concept that designates art’s re-framing of the common experience by creating “a specific form of sensory apprehension” (Aesthetics 29). Based on the nodes of sensory dissensus in the three artworks,

I will discuss how Shanshui art is creatively and destructively used for critical contemplations about the Chinese temporality.

As such, this thesis is a journey that explores the place of Shanshui in contemporary

Chinese art and how it provides a site for reflection on a distinctively Chinese past. In making this journey I also examines what happens when Chinese artworks are brought into conversation with some Western theoretical concepts. Nostalgia functions here as my cross-cultural bridge, enabling me not only to bring these two aspects into conversation but also to make visible of the ways in which the contemporary discourse of Shanshhui intra-acts with the notion of modernity and its manifestations.

The thesis will be divided into two broad parts: a reflection about Shanshui as a site of nostalgia and the readings of the three contemporary Shanshui artworks. Chapter One will be devoted to the former, in which Shanshui of the past and present will be contextualised and the methodology to navigate in the three artworks will be considered. Chapter Two will take a close look at Yang’s artwork Artificial Wonderland II: Travellers among Mountains and

Streams. In this artwork, Shanshui no longer engenders the harmonious and pleasant, but 4 presents an uncanny sensory experience, which not only questions the current mode of urbanisation and modernisation but also unsettles the taken-for-granted “Chineseness”.

Chapter Three will discuss artist Hao’s re-configuration of the Shanshui motif “Xiaoxiang”.

In this painting series, the alternative visual arrangements of the Shanshui elements challenge the conventional paradigm that shapes the image of Shanshui as an ideal world. This move turns Shanshui into a site where the future can be contemplated. Chapter Four will explore

Liang’s installation art Distant Tantamount Mountain. By relating to the traditional aesthetics of Shanshui, this artwork gives an institutional critique towards the ideology of the White

Cube and the Western-constructed global art world.

To anticipate my argument, I would like to suggest that, firstly, the reemergence of

Shanshui art in contemporary China can be conceived as a site of nostalgia where the reflection about temporality is carried out in two interconnected aspects. On the one hand, it deepens the critical understanding about contemporary China’s relationship to its history; on the other hand, it produces certain de-colonial dynamics that challenge Western-hegemonic modernity. Secondly, while the Western concepts retain their explanative and analytical power, they are also altered when they are put into the Chinese context. Nevertheless, it is precisely through this noisy encounter that a productive cross-cultural dialogue can be initiated.

5

Chapter One

From the Past to the Present: Contextualising Shanshui Art

In the 18th century, Chinese painter Zou Yigui, comparing the differences between the

Chinese and the Western paintings, noted, “the Western artists excel in structure…the shadow cast is based on perspective. It is so real that one is tempted to walk into a landscape painting. Nevertheless, they do not have much merit in stroke techniques. Hence, those cannot be called paintings” (qtd. in Li 51). Although culturally biased, this claim indicates the hugely different aesthetic roots of the pre-modern Western and Chinese paintings. As a form of art that played one of the most crucial roles in Chinese art history, Shanshui art makes use of discernible and distinct visual arrangements in comparison with Western landscape art.

Unlike Western landscape art, in which the realistic representation of the landscape once played an important role, Shanshui art has never sought to “objectively” represent Nature.

From a macroscopic perspective, there are two shared visual features that can be regarded as the manifestations of such “non-objectiveness”. Firstly, the perspectives shown in Shanshui paintings are always multiple and scattered, which distinguish from the ways in which our naked eyes optically capture the space and the objects within a singular space-time. Secondly, there are extensive empty spaces – the areas that are not painted – remaining on the silk paper.

To take the ancient literatus Guo Xi’s (1020 – 1090) painting Early Spring (1072)1 as an instance, from the bottom to top, the painting contains near, middle and distant perspectives.

The depiction of objects such as mountains, trees, waterfall and streams from different optical perspectives breaks the spatial limit of the painting. In addition, there are a few spaces left empty, particularly on the upper part of the painting. With this, various scenes that could not be seen in the same moment and location by the naked eyes, are encapsulated into one.

Visual perception is more than a camera-like eye that mechanically registers light and colours; it also associates with complex neuronal activity that is concerned with cultural cognition and memory, just as Norman Bryson suggests, when “human beings collectively

1 See Fig. 1. 6

Fig. 1 Early Spring (1072) by Guo Xi 7 orchestrate their visual experience together it is required that each submit his or her retinal experience to the socially agreed description(s) of an intelligible world” (91). Indeed, the ways in which the world is perceived and represented can be specific to that culture, which is also exemplified in Shanshui art.

This chapter seeks to discuss the particularity of Shanshui art as well as its historical and social conditions, which, consequently, leads to the following questions: 1) What particular epistemological perceptions underlie the visuality of Shanshui art? 2) From which perspective can we perceive the re-emergence of Shanshui art in contemporary China as nostalgic? 3) How can we identify the criticality of these manifestations of nostalgia, particularly in the domain of art?

To address the questions above, I will divide the chapter into three sections. Firstly, I will discuss the distinctive elements of the aesthetics of traditional Shanshui paintings. Here, unlike most of the art historians who read Shanshui art through ancient Chinese philosophical concepts, I will use Karen Barad’s New Materialist terminology to elucidate the aesthetics of

Shanshui, which will help make more explicit aspects of Shanshui art’s contemporary relevance. Slowly zooming out from the visuality of Shanshui art, I will then extend the discussion to the historical, social and political conditions of Shanshui art in order to comprehend the politics of Shanshui nostalgia, especially in the sphere of contemporary art.

Finally, I will discuss the ways in which Rancière’s notion of aesthetic dissensus can be used as a theoretical lens to close-read the contemporary artworks about Shanshui and identify their political potentials.

1. 1 A Baradian Reading of Shanshui Art

As a pre-modern civilisation largely shaped by the practice of agriculture, ancient Chinese culture had a close affinity with nature. Shanshui art, consequently, is embodied with a unique understanding of the world. Guo, who painted Early Spring, was not only a painter but also a prominent Shanshui art theorist. He notes that, for Shanshui art, the depiction of the mountain should not be understood merely as a mimesis of the mountain per se, for “the 8 mountain contains in itself – holds together – the profusion of the world” (qtd. in Jullien 53).

For him, without mists and clouds, the mountain would be “like a springtime devoid of vegetation”; without the waters, it would be “unappealing”; without the crisscrossing paths, the mountain would not be “animated”; and without the woods and forests, it would not be

“living” (qtd. in Jullien 53). The emphasis on the interrelations between different elements that constitute the mountain suggests that, for Guo, nature is more of a set of relations than a self-contained object. In other words, nature is a manifestation of “a dynamic interaction of mountains and waters and, by resonating extension, Heaven and Earth, solid and void, light and dark, the enduring and ephemeral” (Hay, 450).

Guo’s understanding of nature as a set of relations reveals a tiny corner of the iceberg of

Shanshui art – the inseparability of subject and object, the ontology of relations – that perhaps sounds unfamiliar to Western art history. Indeed, the representational framework, which is conventionally used to talk about paintings in the Western context, runs contrary to the aesthetics of Shanshui art. However, the recent developments in New Materialist discourse surprisingly shares some overlaps with the basic notions of Shanshui art.

Consequently, it seems useful to consider how Karen Barad’s New Materialist terminology can help us to approach that iceberg and in doing so, help us re-examine the bridge that separates and connects the East and the West.

For Barad, the idea that “beings exist as individuals with inherent attributes, anterior to their representation” (“Posthumanist” 804), is a kind of Caucasian metaphysical presupposition that “underlies the belief in political, linguistic, and epistemological forms of representationalism” (804). Based on Swedish scientist Niels Bohr’s research in quantum physics, Barad proposes an epistemological framework in which things do not pre-exist but come into being as things, or strictly speaking, as “phenomena”, through the apparatuses’ filtering of the agential intra-action of the universe. In that sense, objects are not independent but inseparable from the observer. Or strictly speaking, there are no “objects” but only observed phenomena. Phenomena are also not independent because they are produced through/by apparatuses, a term that describes “specific exclusionary boundaries” (816) 9 through which phenomena take temporal shapes. To put it differently, apparatuses can be seen as physical, cultural, social or political “filters” that enable one to perceive a certain form of existence in a certain way. In addition, the apparatuses are themselves phenomena, and any particular apparatus is “always in the process of intra-acting with other apparatuses”

(817), which implies that there are no static boundaries between different phenomena.

Consequently, the world we perceive is not an exterior and pre-existing object but “an ongoing open process of mattering” (817), of which Barad calls “agential intra-activity in its becoming” (818). And within this intra-activity, every phenomenon is produced through the apparatus that is enacted by the agential cut in a specific space-time.

The ancient literatus Song Bing (375 – 443) noted, “Shanshui uses its form to flatter

Tao”2 (“Painting Landscape”). Tao in Chinese literally signifies “way/path”. It is also a philosophical notion that is closely associated with Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian thinking.

However, due to the muddy overlaps of interpretations, Tao has almost become a notion that is undefinable. However, since both Tao and Barad’s epistemes reject the ontological existence of individual objects but affirm the immanent dynamics of the world, I propose to use Barad’s notion of ongoing movements of matter’s intra-active becoming to understand

Tao in Shanshui art. To again consider Song’s suggestion, the aesthetic core of Shanshui art hence revolves around the ways in which a painting visually captures the dynamics of the agential intra-action of nature, of the world and of the universe, and the ways in which the viewer aesthetically receives the dynamics of mattering. The shared tropes of the multiple, linear perspectives and the blank spaces in Shanshui art precisely resonate with an understanding.

According to Barad, discursive practices and material phenomena are not external to one another but mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity. This understanding dissolves the divisions between the knower and the known, between the subject and the object. For Shanshui art, the multiple, linear perspectives also suggest such subject-object union. While the Western landscape artist usually tends to hold a static position to observe

2 Translated from Chinese: “山水以形媚道”. 10 and depict the apparatus-phenomenon that is frozen in that location and moment, Shanshui painters particularly emphasise the sensory experience of being immersed in nature. Indeed, the notion of travel/wander3 plays a crucial part in understanding nature. Guo explicitly explains the functions of travel/wander in terms of observing the mountain that, from below one can look up toward the summit, conferring on it "a lofty distance" (qtd. in Jullien 53).

Nevertheless, it only offers the limpid aspect of the mountain. Standing in front of the mountain, one can examine its backdrop, conferring on it a "profound distance" (53) on it, but its aspect can be heavy and somber. And from the nearest mountains, one can contemplate the far-off mountains, conferring a "level distance" (53), and its aspect can be both bright and dark. For him, a singular perspective always intersects nature, and hence conceals nature’s dynamics of the agential intra-action. For him, to activate different apparatuses of the body and mind, namely, to initiate a variety of agential cuts, helps to better one’s comprehension of nature.

As “reality is composed of not of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena but of things-in-phenomena” (Barad, “Posthumanist” 820), differences and differentiations in

Barad’s sense are not essential but temporal and relational, since “matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-acting becoming...a congealing of agency” (822). That is, matters we perceive as phenomena are not fixed objects but a phase of the process within the ongoing agential intra-action. The emptiness in the context of

Shanshui resonates with this understanding of the nature of things. Ancient Chinese philosopher Laozi conceives the emptiness as a process of bringing about, not in an analytical manner, but from the perspective of efficacy. For him, despite the fact that emptiness is semantically oppositional to fullness, the two terms entail an unnameable dialectic interconnection that enables them to mutually (re)generate each other (Fan 566). Regarding

Shanshui art, I propose to use matter’s different statuses of agential congealing to understand the concept and the visualisation of emptiness. As forms of matter are the basic units that have the potential to constitute any form of “things”, fullness can be understood as

3 In Chinese: “you” (“游”). It can be literally translated as “to swim, travel or wander”. 11

“matter-as-phenomena”, which one perceives as concrete, graspable phenomena through his apparatus in that specific space-time. Conversely, “emptiness” in this sense, shall be referred to as “matter-not-as-phenomena”, which one does not (fully) perceive through the apparatus that he possesses in that particular space-time, even though its existence is epistemologically, although not logically, acknowledged. The empty space, namely, the space that is not painted, symbolically recognises the “matter-not-as-phenomena” and allows for the interdependency and interconvertibility of phenomena.

Regarding the aesthetic reception and judgment, Guo notes that, “among different

Shanshui paintings, the most outstanding ones are those that welcome the viewers to live and travel/wander in the paintings”4 (32). Unlike traditional Western paintings that usually hang on the wall and require the viewers to gaze at the painting with disembodied eyes, Shanshui paintings are rolled in scrolls, which require the viewer to bodily move the scroll and to continually change their optic focal points in order to appreciate the painting. Dwelling in the paintings, one would attain not only the visual enjoyment of the painted mountains and waters but also the empty space for contemplation. In some of the Shanshui paintings, images of human beings – usually ordinary travellers – can be discovered when paying careful attention to detail since they constitute only very tiny spaces in the painting. This way of positioning human beings in Shanshui, again, suggests the merit of being a modest insider of the observed and being part of the dynamics of agential intra-action of the world. In this sense, Shanshui art is not so much a way of seeing that assigns the power to the disembodied eyes but rather a way of doing that requires the viewer to use different faculties to aesthetically step out of oneself and engage with matter’s intra-activity.

Having discussed the applicability of Barad’s concept of intra-agency to Shanshui, I will now zoom out and consider the use of nostalgia as a frame for Shanshui art’s operation within contemporary Chinese culture, particularly in the sphere of contemporary art.

1. 2 The Death of Literati and Shanshui as a Site of Nostalgia

4 Translated from Chinese“世之笃论,谓山水有可行者,有可望者,有可居者,有可游者。画凡至此,皆入妙品。但可 行可望不如可居可游之为得。” 12

Continuity has been generally regarded as a distinguishing feature of the pre-modern

Chinese culture (Chen 65), which is also exemplified in the historical discourse of Shanshui art. However, throughout the past hundred years, this continuity, including that of Shanshui art discourse, has experienced unprecedented destruction due to a number of political and social revolutions and reformations. How should we view Shanshui – as a historical past – in the contemporary world? What dynamics are inherent in this site of returning, of nostalgia?

In this section, some social and political contexts about the art discourse of Shanshui will be introduced and contemplated.

Before the 20th century, the artistic practice of Shanshui paintings witnessed a relatively steady, linear route of development. For the artistic production of Shanshui, apprenticeship played a crucial role in the teaching and practicing of the art form. Regarding artistic reception, it was usually appreciated and critiqued in private spaces such as the gardens of literati, libraries, etc. What is also crucial about Shanshui art discourse is the practioner: the literati, an intellectual/scholar-official stratum that played an important role in producing traditional Chinese culture. On the one hand, this social group was influenced by the

Confucian school’s indoctrination that one should show “restraint over one’s personal desire, treat the world as one whole community and recognize one’s duty to the state” (66). On the other hand, Taoist and Buddhist thinking also let them seek a free life. Moving in between these two forms of thinking, being an ideal literatus therefore meant to be responsible for the world and at the same time to refuse to bow to the influential personages and the hegemonic power5. The general visuality of Shanshui art also reflects the circumstances and the worldview of this intellectual stratum. As a kind of art that depicts the natural instead of the social, on the one hand, it shows the literati’s aesthetic disengagement with the worldly life.

But on the other hand, Shanshui art also indicates the literati’s vision of a harmonious social world. For example, the human figures depicted in Shanshui paintings are almost never high officials or noble lords but ordinary peasants, travellers etc., which indicate the literati’s close political stance with the common people. Many believe that the reason why Chinese

5 The legends about literati such as Fan Zhongyan (989-1052), Su Shi (1037-1101) and Wang Yangming (1472-1529) are the examples of the ideal image of literati. 13 traditional art, including Shanshui art, developed along such a unique and linear path is mainly because of the stability of this literati class (68). However, the radical changes in the past hundred years in China have disrupted the “organicism” of this literati tradition.

Many scholars believe that China has experienced “repeated discontinuity” (59) since the

1900s. That is, in this period, there was not only a complete break with a three-thousand-year cultural entity, but there were also “repeated fractures and rejections within the different periods in recent history” (59). The literati culture was first shaken by the abolition of the imperial civil-service examination system in 19056. From then until Mao’s rule, the literati class faded away and was slowly replaced by modern intellectuals who were usually specialised in some particular domains. Later in the Maoist political movements, the literati tradition was even more radically scattered. Particularly, the Cultural Revolution, which lasted for ten years, is usually regarded as the major factor that is directly responsible for the elimination of traditional Chinese culture, particularly the elitist culture. That is, this political movement not only destroyed a number of cultural relics but also degraded the whole intellectual class. In that period, the literati tradition was wiped out and the linearity of the discourse of Shanshui art was completely fragmented.

Boris Groys suggests, “the Communist community was in many ways more radically modern in its rejection of the past than countries in the West… (Hence) the post-Communist subject travels…from the future to the past, from the end of history, from posthistory, postapocalyptic time, back to the historical time” (155). Indeed, since the political and economic turn around the 1990s, studies of ancient Chinese civilisation have swept across the country. More and more discussions that aim at re-building Chinese cultural traditions are activated by people’s aspirations to find their cultural roots. As both an object of philosophical thinking that is alternative to and that questions the Western thinking, and as a type of visual manifestation that promises an aesthetic experience of dwelling and feeling at home in the agential intra-activity of the world, Shanshui art hence is generally seen as one of

6 The Chinese imperial examinations were a civil service examination system in the Imperial period to select candidates for the state bureaucracy. This examination system can be traced back to the Han Dynasty (221-206). From the Tang Dynasty (618-907) to 1905 (the Qing Dynasty), the system was widely utilised as the ordinary people’s major path to the bureaucratic body. 14 those cultural roots. However, as the practice of the traditional Shanshui art was conditioned on a different historical specificity, it cannot be simply picked up and continued as an unbroken thread nowadays This aching dilemma of yearning for yet not being able to return to the past turns Shanshui art – as the material manifestation of the past – into an object of nostalgia. The contemporary cultural objects that incorporate Shanshui, consequently, can be seen as a site that is embodied with the nostalgic symptoms.

For Boym, nostalgia has two sides. She suggests that, as a historical mood, there are two kinds of nostalgia that characterise one’s “relationship to the past, to the imagined community, to home, to one’s selfperfection” (42). The first is the restorative nostalgia in which temporal distance is “compensated by intimate experience and the availability of a desired object” and the feeling of displacement “is cured by a return home, preferably a collective one” (44). More specifically, because “restoration signifies a return to the original stasis”, “the past for the restorative nostalgic is a value for the present; the past is not a duration but a perfect snapshot” (49). Moreover, the past to restorative nostalgia is not supposed to “reveal any signs of decay” but to “be freshly painted in its ‘original image’ and remain eternally young” (49). However, there is also a reflective nostalgia that focuses “not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on history and passage of time” (49). It is to resist “the pressure of external efficiency and take sensual delight in the texture of time not measurable by clocks and calendars” (49). In the reflective nostalgia, the longing for the past and critical thinking are no longer opposed to one another, and nostalgia becomes “affective memories” that do not “absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection” (50). That is, for reflective nostalgia, the past bears the multiple potentialities and possibilities of historical development and has “a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness” (50).

In this sense, the nostalgic site of Shanshui can be problematic and dangerous because it contains the seeds of cultural nationalism and fundamentalism (Gao 115). In addition, it might also run the risk of reducing traditions to a variety of cultural products for capitalist consumption. But on the other hand, it can also trigger critical visions and discussions about 15 how to see and what to do with the contemporary. Indeed, Chinese art scholar Gao Shiming proposes that contemporary discourses about the traditional shall be seen as a form of

“re-construction” rather than “return”, and it is “a continually changing, wearing and tearing as well as developing history” (Gao 116). In this process, references to the past must also be

“extended to contemporaneity, becoming part of the contemporary reality…of the ‘base’ for cultural creation, and of the shaping of the contemporaneity”(115). To a large degree, Gao also calls for reflective nostalgia.

The three artworks that will be discussed in the following chapters resonate with reflective nostalgia, for they all engage with Shanshui creatively and destructively. In other words, Shanshui emerges in their artworks not as a closed sign that points to a static, attainable custom but instead as a lens allows us to envision the current entanglements of the ancient Chinese civilisation, modernity, Communism, globalisation, etc. In their artworks,

Shanshui is deconstructed and re-composed in order to unsettle and reshape the normative understanding about not only the historical past but also its relation to other discourses, such as urbanisation, modernisation, the concept of the ideal, the notion of art, etc. As such, I believe that Rancière’s account of politics and the aesthetic regime of art can provide us a method to productively tackle the artworks’ reframing of today’s Shanshui landscape from the perspective of aesthetics.

1. 3 The Reflective Nostalgia: Aesthetic Dissensus

Rancière categorises art in three different frameworks. First, there is the ethical regime of art that is “a matter of knowing in what way ‘images’ mode of being affects the ethos” (The

Politics 21). Second, there is the representative regime of art in which it is the notion of representation or mimesis that organises “the ways of doing, making, seeing, and judging”

(22). The third category is what Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of art, within which the

“artistic phenomena are identified by their adherence to a specific regime of the sensible, which is extricated from its ordinary connections and is inhabited by a heterogeneous power”

(23). 16

To more fully understand this aesthetic regime, some further notions need to be introduced. For Rancière, politics, the political and aesthetics can be examined through perspective of the sensory experience. He indicates that we are living in a time of consensus in which a general agreement on the distribution of the sensible is constructed and guarded by the police, his term for what is more commonly described as ‘politics’. In other words, this consensus can be seen as a machine of power that generates a seemingly natural and reasonable vision for different subjects. The aesthetics of politics challenges such consensus by forming certain collective political actions to reshape this taken-for-granted sensory experience. And the politics of aesthetics, which reside in what he calls the aesthetic regime of art, also intervene in that consensual distribution of the sensible. However, the ways in which dissensus is produced in this aesthetic regime are different from the aesthetics of politics. For the aesthetic of politics, a “we” who have a collective subaltern voice is always formulated to disrupt the consensus (Dissensus 141-142), but for the politics of aesthetics, art objects create dissensus by re-configuring, re-shaping and re-organising the world of common sensory experience as “the world of a shared impersonal experience”(141).

More specifically, in the aesthetic regime of art, “the property of being art is no longer given by the criteria of technical perfection but is ascribed to a specific form of apprehension”

(Aesthetics 29), for artistic strategies revolving around the visibility of certain sensory experience are usually used in order to “change the frames, speeds and scales according to which we perceive the visible or to question the self-evidence of the visible; to rupture given relations between things and meanings and, inversely, to invent novel relationship between things and meaning that were previously unrelated” (Dissensus 141).

Consequently, the dissensus produced by the aesthetic regime of art does not come into being in the form of a didactic critique of politics but in the form of a re-distribution of a certain artistic mode of visibility. In this sense, art is political neither because of the

“messages and sentiments it conveys concerning the stake of the world” (Aesthetics 23) nor it because art objects “choose to represent society’s structures, or social groups, their conflicts in identities” (23). Rather, it is political because of “the very distance it takes with respect to 17 these functions, because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space” (23). That is, although it seems that art belonging to the aesthetic regime only re-configures the general sensory experience on an aesthetic level, it also contains the potential to transform this altered sensory experience into the life form since a work of art always “fashions and sustains new subjects” (Tanke 103).

The three contemporary artworks can fit into Rancière’s conceptualisation of the aesthetic regime of art because they all break down the boundaries between art and non-art in different manners. And more importantly, Shanshui art emerges in these broken boundaries no longer as a snapshot of a lost past. Instead, the configuration of Shanshui art in each artwork is fragmental: it can be the notion of Shanshui, the silhouette of Shanshui or the episteme of Shanshui. In doing so, Shanshui becomes a field of creative reframing, a site of reflective nostalgia.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I contextualise the re-emergence of Shanshui art as a site of nostalgia from three aspects. First, I use Barad’s terminology to unveil and analyse the epistemological perceptions that underlie the visuality of the traditional Shanshui art. I argue that Shanshui art is enfolded with a set of understandings about the world that effectively question the representationalist assumptions, particularly the ideological subject/object division. Secondly,

I give a historical reflection about the reasons why Shanshui art in today’s Chinese society has become a site of nostalgia. Based on Boym’s understanding about restorative and reflective nostalgia, I discuss the conditions under which the contemporary references of

Shanshui contain creativity and criticality. I contend that, in the domain of art, the reference of Shanshui art can be examined through Rancière’s notion of dissensus. In doing so, I construct a theoretical framework in which the contemporary re-emergence of Shanshui in art is regarded as a form of re-distribution of the sensible in the site of nostalgia. In the following chapters, I will close-read the three artworks and discuss their specific ways of intervening the consensual sensory experience about and the emotional yearning of Shanshui. 18

Chapter Two

Way of Conflating: Shanshui as an Unreturnable Home

In an interview, Chinese artist Yang Yongliang said, “growing up in Shanghai, I was surrounded by lots of traditional architecture – and saw a lot of it removed. China has changed so much, dismantling its heritage in the pursuit of urbanization. I want to ask questions about these things, about consumerism and how we live today” (“Yang

Yongliang’s Best Photograph”).

Yang’s experience with the urban transformation in China, particularly that of Shanghai, is not peculiar to him. Indeed, the social, economic and emotional impacts of urbanisation on

Chinese people’s lives have become one of the critical features of contemporary cultural productions, including artistic productions. Against this social context, Yang’s artworks, mostly combining the elements of photography and traditional Shanshui art, can be seen as a response to the rapid transformation of urban space in China. Among them, Artificial

Wonderland II: Travellers among Mountains and Streams (2014)7 is an artwork in which

Shanshui visuality is provocatively referenced. Based on literatus Fan Kuan’s painting of the same name8 that was created during the Northern Song Dynasty (960 – 1127), Yang’s photograph meticulously appropriates Fan’s portrayal of the natural landscape and translates it into a contemporary form.

Fan’s original Travelers among Mountains and Streams is often described as one of the most representative pieces of Shanshui art. In Yang’s photographic artwork, however, Fan’s painting is overturned from two perspectives. First, instead of literally copying Fan’s image of the natural landscape, the content of Yang’s Shanshui is turned from the “natural” to the

“artificial”. The objects presented in Yang’s work are no longer “natural objects” such as trees, branches, animals, etc. Instead, urban structures such as architecture, high voltage lines, electrical poles, demolition areas, constructions cranes and so on compose the contours of

Shanshui. Secondly, the media used in Yang’s work are not ink and brush, but a number of photographs that were taken in the city of Shanghai. This artistic appropriation has been so

7 See Fig. 2,3,4. 8 See Fig. 5. 19 carefully executed that, from a distance, Yang’s Artificial Wonderland II: Travellers among

Mountains and Streams (Below shortened to Artificial Wonderland II) seems almost identical to Fan’s depiction of the natural landscape. Only when stepping closer to the work does one realise that it is an uncanny megalopolis disguised in the poetics of natural landscape.

To use the trope of visual deceit to create the uncanny might be simple. However, precisely due to its simplicity, Artificial Wonderland II is enabled to straightforwardly engender its powerful effects like a machine, from which its mechanical system can be discussed. Hence, in this chapter, I would like to focus on the mechanism of the uncanny that operates in between the viewer and Artificial Wonderland II. First, I will introduce how the uncanny is perceived as an aesthetic locus of the artwork. Next, I will discuss the source of the uncanny that is used in Yang’s artwork. Last, I will further examine the ways in which the combination of photography and the traditional ink painting of Shanshui enhance the uncanny effects of the artwork. Along with the analysis, I argue that the artwork, as a form of uncanny being, questions not only the current mode of urbanisation and modernisation in

China but also Shanshui art’s ideological relationship with “Chineseness”.

2. 1 The Uncanny as an Aesthetic Experience

Standing in front of Yang’s Artificial Wonderland II at a certain distance, a majestic contour of the natural landscape in black and white appears. For those who are familiar with traditional Chinese art, one can immediately identify the artwork as a reproduction of a typical Shanshui painting, or more specifically, Fan Kuan’s (950 – 1032) Travellers among the Mountains and Streams. Having initially made the presumption that this artwork is associated with the natural landscape, when the viewer moves some steps closer, a shocking emotion starts to creep over him or her. The presumption is overturned: the artwork depicts neither Shanshui nor the natural landscape. Apart from waters and stones, there are no flora and fauna residing in the majestic mountains. Instead, man-made modern objects such as skyscrapers, highways, voltage lines, electrical poles, demolition sites, construction cranes

20

Fig. 3 Artificial Wonderland II (details)

Fig.2 Artificial Wonderland II: Travellers among Mountains and Streams (2014) by Yang Yongliang

Fig. 4 Artificial Wonderland II (details)

Fig. 5 Travellers Among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan (950 – 1032) 21 etc., compose a megalopolis that is disguised as natural scenery. Sharing the similar grains and shapes with the natural objects, these man-made objects are put in order so carefully that, from a distance, the viewer would take them for vegetation and stones. However, once one identifies the artwork as an image of a megalopolis, it also becomes strange. The image of the megalopolis looks real yet unreal. On the one hand, every part of the image is presented in a realistic, accurate manner. On the other hand, the spatial arrangement of the megalopolis is not plausible.

In trying to articulate this visual experience, one might use the psychoanalytic concept of uncanny, which means a kind of subjective feeling of being “not quite ‘at home’ or ‘at ease’ in the situation concerned, that the thing is or at least seems to be foreign to him” (Jentsch 2).

Particularly in this case, the uncanny can be perceived as a form of “negative” aesthetics: of something that is grotesque and fearful. Although the degree to which different individuals will experience the uncanny might differ, the logic of its operation is similar. Sigmund Freud has analysed a set of instances that produce the uncanny on the aesthetic level, and based on those instances, he concludes that the uncanny is a class of things of which “the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs” (Freud 634). More specifically, the “uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (634). As we can see, for Freud, the uncanny does not reside in the perceived object itself. Rather, it is an emotional reaction that comes to demarcate the limits of imagination and the failure of possessing a cohesive symbolic order due to the sudden presence of something that points to a repressed past.

Moving back to Yang’s artwork, it is noticeable that neither Fan’s depiction of the natural landscape nor the cityscape full of construction sites is uncanny. In fact, they are both conceived typically, as something familiar.

Fan’s Shanshui art has been historically recognised as one of the finest examples of classic Shanshui painting. In the painting, the clusters of plants at the top of the mountain are like distant forest clinging to the perches. In the central axis, the middle mountain 22 majestically dominates the whole space. At the left side of the scroll, a slender white waterfall falls from the middle of the mountain. And at the bottom of the painting, a traveller, together with his domestic animals, walks along the path in a relaxed manner. As mentioned earlier, the traditional Shanshui art does not seek to objectively represent the nature. Instead, it is a visual form that expresses the dynamics of the agential intra-activity of the world, a harmonious bridge between the real and the spiritual, and between the mundane and the transcendental. In this sense, Shanshui is a visual imagination and realisation of an ideal space in which people can dwell with pleasure. Hence, the aesthetic effects that Fan’s painting generates are by no means strange or horrifying. Rather, it is supposed to emit a tranquil and welcoming aesthetic ethos.

Likewise, the photographs of urban structures per se are not uncanny, particularly for in the Chinese context. Since the “reform and opening-up”9 in 1978, China has witnessed unprecedented urbanisation. Particularly from 2001 onwards, the state has attempted to facilitate the growth of traditional as well as “modern service” such as finance, insurance, real estate, logistics, information services, etc. (Yeh et al., 2837). In the same year, China also entered the World Trade Organization that allows for greater access to foreign markets.

Consequently, the job market in urban areas, especially in large cities, has further expanded

(2838). On the one hand, the economic and political transformation has energised the rapid expansion of the city as well as produced a variety of city plans, which have consequently led to the continuous actions of demolition of the old and construction of the new. On the other hand, urbanisation has also become “an important economic index in the national vocabulary”

(Ou 214). A city, therefore, “has to keep upgrading and expanding itself to alleviate the pressure on development” (214). Moreover, unlike more democratic states, the city planning in China is intertwined with both the capitalist market and the political power of the state, which can lead to effective yet sometimes unpredictable ways of space-changing. For example, whereas Pudong can serve as a great example of something being conjured into

9 The “reform and opening-up", started in December 1978, refers to the economic reforms termed “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” in China.

23 being as if by magic, some urban construction can also be delayed due to the unexpected change of rules (Abbas 21). Despite the fact that this mode of development has led to an economic boom in the past three decades, the natural environment has witnessed unprecedented destruction and a variety of critical issues in urban space has arisen. Critiques towards the side effects of this mode of development are common, yet the scale and speed of this form of urban transformation have made the spectacles of mass construction a common experience in people’s daily lives.

Since neither of the two kinds of visuality in Yang’s artwork is strange in itself, why is it that, as soon as they are conflated into one, one would feel unsettled? In the following part, I will examine the ways in which their combination can become a source of the uncanny.

2. 2 The Source of the Uncanny: The Past and Present

In Roland Barthes’ essay “Rhetoric of the Image”, he calls the immediate visual cognition of the image its denoted meaning. And on the second level, there is connoted meaning in which cultural contents are put into consideration (157). In Yang’s artwork, the audience’s first uneasy moment arrives when one cannot with certainty define whether the artwork represents the natural landscape (Shanshui art) or a cityscape (photos of urban objects), which corresponds to Barthes’ notion of denoted meaning. In the process, the artwork becomes “a distinctive kind of sign in that it draws more attention to itself” (Potts 31). But since this

“short-circuiting” (30) of the semiotic process is typical of modern art, particularly abstract art, much elaboration is not needed. The secondary connoted meaning that we attribute to the work, however, shall be carefully considered.

Yang once said in an interview, “I hope all the Chinese can hold onto the roots associated with our own culture. If not, then what makes you Chinese? Just having a Chinese face doesn’t mean anything” (“Yang Yongliang: Bearing Witness”). No matter how problematic Yang’s definition of “Chineseness”, his words in some ways demonstrate a certain anxiety about the loss of cultural roots in contemporary China. Indeed, decades of wars, political reformations and revolutions, and most recently, processes of modernisation 24 and globalisation, have, to some extent, separated contemporary China from its various cultural traditions. Regarding the idea of using the lands, the logic behind the discourse of the

Shanshui tradition and the logic behind the discourse of modern urbanisation are essentially different from each other.

For Shanshui art, the land, or the natural landscape, is not portrayed as a form of resource but a spiritual space where one can acquire the transcendental experience. And this experience also links to the aspiration of being a person of virtues10 (Escande 103). Here the natural landscape is closely linked to the image of an ideal space in which people can dwell with pleasure. For modern urbanisation, however, the natural landscape is regarded as a kind of resource from which capitalist profits can be extracted.

When taking account of the two modes of thinking, we can see the artwork does not only semantically conflate the notions of the natural landscape and the cityscape. More crucially, this conflation paradoxically links an imaginary space from the past to a factual contemporary space. From the artwork we can see, the ideal space has been slowly occupied by the mass production of modernisation. From far to close, the diverse subject and objects – traveller, vegetation, horses – that used to be the key players in expressing the agential intra-activity of the world have disappeared, and the homogeneous man-made objects are mechanically expanding with scale and speed until the verges of the mountains are taken over.

Perhaps the “traveller” in the title also refers to the viewer: he travels between the historical space and the contemporary space. On the one hand, the historical ideal keeps recurring in the contemporary space. On the other hand, the present is automatically eroding and engulfing that historical space. The fabrication between the two makes it difficult to clearly distinguish the past and present.

Freud has identified two possible sources that can shape the uncanny experience. First, the uncanny can occur when “infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression” (639). Second, it happens when “the primitive beliefs that have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” (639). However, he also points out that

10 Translated from Chinese: “而中国山水画…使他（观者）感到在作品里神游，能体会无限经验：这种无限经验意 味着精神提升，也意味着与贤人态度的契合。” 25

“these two classes of uncanny experience are not always sharply distinguishable” (640), since the primitive beliefs are most intimately connected with and based on the infantile complexes

(640). In the case of Shanshui’s recurrence in Artificial Wonderland II, both sources are also closely intertwined. On the one hand, Shanshui recurs as something that has been repressed

(and perhaps also surmounted) because the Communist rule has produced a rupture between the historical and the present. On the other hand, the ideal space of Shanshui, which is conceived as a pre-modern belief that has been surmounted (and repressed) by modern scientific thinking, is arranged in Yang’s work as something “actually happens” (Freud 639) in the present. It actually happens not because Shanshui is put into a contemporary exhibition space but because what constitutes the pre-modern Shanshui – the urban structures – is something from the present. In this way, the ideal Shanshui space that is thought to have been banished in the past, revives in the present as a ghostly apparition that disturbs the viewer’s cognition of time.

Earlier it is mentioned that the “traveller” in the title can refer to the viewer, but it shall be made clear that this traveller is different from the traditional Shanshui traveller. That is, whereas the traditional Shanshui painting invites the viewer to dwell in the dynamics of

Shanshui, Yang’s artwork forces the viewer to travel. The viewer has to travel not because there are any promised transcendental potentials inherent in Shanshui but because there is no place for him to rest in time. In other words, the seemingly repressed and surmounted past has revived in the present, which compels the viewer to constantly travel in time without any terminals provided. And it is through this form of travelling – not being able to reach home – the uncanny starts to emerge.

2. 3 Visual Rhetoric of the Uncanny: A Pretence of Realism

In Freud’s examination of the uncanny in literature, he suggests that real-life experiences of the uncanny and those in fiction are different because fictions do not undergo “reality-testing”

(640). Hence, in order to create an uncanny effect in fiction, according to Freud, the author has to “deceive us by promising to give us a sober truth, and then after all overstepping it” 26

(641). That is, the writer first has to pretend to move into the common reality in order to falsely give the reader a sense of security and familiarity, and once the reader is deceived, the writer can bring about events that never or rarely happen (641). From this process, the uncanny can be effectively energised because the reader would react to the invented event as if it is real. Although the cognitive process of reading an image differs from that of reading a text, Freud’s insight on the strategy of creating the uncanny – a pretence of realism – also echoes the visual rhetoric in Yang’s Artificial Wonderland II. Realism in the form of visual arts usually refers to the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, avoiding artificial conventions, dramatic elements, etc. Central to this visual rhetoric is perhaps Yang’s use of photography and the photographs. Namely, on the one hand, the content of photographs – the black and white urban structures – is used to substitute the ink strokes, as a medium to mimic Fan’s Shanshui painting; and on the other hand, the medium (the photographs) used to mimic the painting is also mediated by the nature of photography.

In terms of the use of the photographs, the pretence of realism is conspicuous. It is realistic in a sense that the contours of Shanshui are so carefully mapped out that, when the viewer stands in front of the artwork at a certain distance, he would take it as a reproduction of Fan’s painting. In other words, the artefact – Fan’s Shanshui painting – is truthfully represented at the beginning of the story, and this truthfulness only breaks down when the viewer comes close to the artwork. And such effect is perhaps created through the artist’s marvellous craftsmanship of playing with Photoshop software.

Regarding the use of photography, more specific discussion is needed. Many scholars have discussed the nature of photography and contend that this medium suggests a certain degree of “being real”. Barthes, for instance, thinks that the click of the shutter can truthfully capture a precise moment in time, and each singular image that is shot in a specific time and location assumes “an awareness of ‘having been there’” (159). In other words, a photograph is believed to have a special connection with reality because it requires the presence of the objects for its production, while a painting supposedly can depend wholly on the artist’s imagination (Savedoff 202). Hence, when the viewer looks closely at Yang’s artwork, the 27 realistic details of the urban structures force him to believe they are part of the real world.

However, such a belief is questioned once the viewer pays more attention to the visual composition of the painting, in which the optical perspectives are, similar to other Shanshui paintings, continuous. And because of the multiple perspectives of Shanshui painting, the cityscape is not portrayed from a static optical perspective, which challenges the viewer’s assumption of the photographs being a window of the real world and decentre humans as the locus of vision.

In fact, for Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser, the belief in photography’s objectivity has always been delusional, because the discourse of scientific research and thinking, which is rooted in the invention and use of the camera, has never been neutral. For Flusser, the traditional image such as a painting is, ontologically, an abstraction of the world, from which human imagination is used (as a form of apparatus) to demarcate “the real world” (Towards

4). A photograph, as a form of technical image, is also an abstraction of the world rather than

“a window of the world”. But this abstraction is more complicated in a sense that the direct source of abstraction is not the real world but the scientific theories: a form of conceptualised text (4). Namely, photographs are not the products of human imagination in a strict sense but a textual production based on the ways in which scientific theories conceptualise human imagination (“The Codified World” 40). And the scientific conceptualisation of imagination might be widely seen as neutral, but it is still a form of “apparatus” – according to Flusser – in which visual actualisation of an object is filtered and mediated by an apparatus whose logic is computational. Hence, regarding the artwork’s strategic pretence of realism, what is central to the viewer’s sensory struggle is actually a clash between the visual outcome of human imagination and a scientific conceptualisation of imagination, and between a pre-modern apparatus and a modern apparatus.

The use of the photographs and photography leads the viewer to doubt “what is real”, from which the tension between the past and present in the artwork is further increased. To put it differently, the inability to determine “what is real” constantly discourages and shatters the viewer’s faith to hold on to any coherent forms of temporality. 28

Conclusion

The merger of Fan’s Shanshui painting and the photographic urban structures has made

Yang’s Artificial Wonderland II an indefinable “thing” in its perpetually automatic expansion.

By using the trope of visual deceit, the artwork forces the viewer to constantly and restlessly limp between the past and present. On the symbolic level, there is a novel conjunction of

Shanshui as a historical ideal space and the urban structures as a disputed contemporary space. This conjunction causes the viewer’s inability to anchor oneself in time. On a rhetorical level, there is also a meticulous combination between the Shanshui painting as an abstraction of imagination and the photographs as an abstraction of the scientific texts. This combination of media makes the artwork look real yet unreal, which further enhances the degree of uncanny. In this process of “the uncanny production”, Shanshui has played a crucial part. Firstly, it serves as a seemingly repressed and surmounted past that in a ghostly fashion is resurrected in the present. Secondly, the visuality of Shanshui – especially the spatial arrangement – deepens the degree of the uncanny through its rejection of the delusive

“objectivity” – a form of modern scientific thinking.

Moving from the close reading to a bigger picture, the key question would be: what artistic significance is intrinsic to the uncanny? Perhaps it would be useful to think with Arnd

Schneider’s proposal towards the concept of appropriation. For him, appropriation has always been involved with social and political dynamics. A crucial question for perceiving appropriation hence should be “who appropriates what, where and from whom?” (218). This implies a situating of appropriating practices in “different power relations, which go beyond the more formal approaches in art history where ‘appropriation’ has been defined as taking something out of one context and establishing it into new one” (218). To apply his suggestion to Yang’s Artificial Wonderland II, perhaps the strange mixture between the past and present precisely reveals the artist’s endeavour to de-stabilise the viewer’s rooted identity of being purely Chinese or being purely modern. Escande notes that “for the Chinese historical experience, the notion of ‘modernization’ is closely linked to ‘the Western’…hence,

‘modernization’, to some extents, means ‘unchineseness’. Similar to Japan, issues about 29

‘transcending modernity’ in China is perhaps associated with nationalism” (103). Indeed, in many Asian countries, including China, “the imaginary West has performed different functions in nationalist discourse. It has been an opposing entity, a system of reference, an object from which to learn, a point of measurement, a goal to catch up with, an intimate enemy, and sometimes an alibi for serious discussion and action” (Chen 216). Hence, if we see the realistic photographs of the urban structures as an entity pointing to the notion of the

West/modern and Fan’s magical Shanshui painting pointing to the notion of Chineseness, the conflation of the two entities in one piece can then be seen as a form of aesthetic dissensus, for it disagrees with the ideological framework in which the West and modernisation are positioned at the opposite of Chineseness. In this way, the uncanny of Artificial Wonderland

II is political, for it dismantles the viewer’s taken-for-granted cohesive sensory experience that is distributed by that oppositional relation. Is it the past or is it the present? The perpetual unclearness of time suggests the impossibility to differentiate the boundaries among

Chineseness, modernity and the West. Therefore, despite the fact that the uncanny resides in

Yang’s work, it imposes a negative – unhomely, uncomfortable – sensory experience upon the viewer, it also “aids to help create the fabric of a common experience in which new modes of constructing common objects and new possibilities of subjective enunciation may be developed” (Rancière, Dissensus 142). Indeed, for Artificial Wonderland II, this objective has been achieved: the uncanny has fully exercised its aesthetic power to transform one sensible world to another, in which new possible relationships between the past and present, between Chineseness and modernisation, from now on, can be differently rethought and renegotiated. In this sense, the nostalgic practice becomes reflective through the negation of the return to home. In other words, by problematising the ontology of “home” in the artwork, one is forced to see the unreturnable home as “the imperfect mirror images” (Boym 252) and

“try to cohabit with doubles and ghost” (252).

30

Chapter Three

Revitalising the Ideal: A Performative Shanshui Future

In the analysis of Artificial Wonderland II, Shanshui distortedly appears as a historical emblem of the ideal space where people can harmoniously settle in, a cultural image that shows people’s aspirations towards a better world. But how relevant is this traditional vision of the ideal today? Is this image still linked to our present and ideas about the future? With these questions in mind, this chapter will engage with the problematics and potential of the

Shanshui ideal through Chinese artist Hao Liang’s Eight Views of Xiaoxiang (2016).

As a contemporary visual artist who is immersed in ancient aesthetics, Hao has always favoured the use of traditional visual language – ink strokes – to make his art, including his recent work Eight View of Xiaoxiang. The concept of “Eight Views of Xiaoxiang” is not new in the history of East Asian arts. The phrase literally signifies eight beautiful sceneries in

Hunan province, China. Nevertheless, historically, the term has become a shared trope in

Shanshui art that has transcended the implied geographic specificity. A variety of ancient

Chinese, Korean and Japanese painters, including Song Di (1015-1080), Muqi (d. 1281), An

Gyeon (b. 1400), Sōami (d. 1525), Wen Weiming (1470-1559), and Kano Shoei (1519-1592) etc., have painted the eight views according to the descriptive subtitles, which are Wild Geese

Descending to Sandbar, Sail Returns from Distant Shore, Mountain Market Clearing Mist,

River and Sky in Evening Snow, Autumn Moon over Dongting, Night Rain on Xiaoxiang

Evening Bell from Mist-shrouded Temple, Fishing Village in Evening Glow11. It was widely believed that the eight views, by encapsulating different facets of natural beauty, perfectly visualise an ideal space, an Eastern utopia of “Peach Blossom Spring”12. Despite the fact that the eight views created by different painters are all touched with their own artistic styles, a set of similarities can still be discerned: the paintings all in some ways adhere to the textual descriptions of the eight views; moreover, belonging to the genre of Shanshui art, the

11 Translated from Chinese “潇湘夜雨”,“平沙落雁”,“烟寺晚钟”,“山市晴岚”,“江天暮雪”,“渔村夕 照”,“洞庭秋月”,“远浦归帆”. 12 “Peach Blossom Spring” (In Chinese:“桃花源”) was originally a fable written by Tao Yuanming in 421 about a chance discovery of an ethereal utopia where the people lead an ideal existence in harmony with nature, unaware of the outside world for centuries. Later, “Peach Blossom Spring” has become a term that connotes the idea of utopia or ideal space. 31 visuality of these paintings also share similarities regarding the use of materials and spatial compositions in the paintings.

With this context in mind, when I first saw Hao’s version of Eight Views of Xiaoxiang, I felt quite surprised: the painting series shares few similarities with the traditional examples.

Firstly, the original subtitles have been replaced by Myriads of Transformation, Mind Travel,

Relics, Scholar’s Traveling, Evanescence, Dazzle, Cosmos and Snowscape. Consequently, the eight paintings no longer correspond to the original textual depictions of the views but are juxtaposed with a wide range of images appropriated from the discourse of Shanshui art. In a further contrast to the formula of the traditional Shanshui paintings, in which the depicted scenes always give the viewer a timeless and harmonious feeling, Hao’s paintings are full of visual contradictions. Unlike many modern artworks that radically rupture the traditional aesthetics, the paintings of Hao do not engender any sensory feelings of violence. Being a

“mild” artwork, however, the co-existing harmonious yet inharmonious effects turn the artwork into a paradox that constantly confuses the viewer.

Rancière compares the aesthetic regime of art to “fiction”, for it also “involves the re-framing of the ‘real’, or the framing of a dissensus” (Dissensus 140). In other words, parallel to fiction, art is a way of “changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation; of varying frames, scales and rhythms” (141) and a way of “building new relationship between reality and appearance, the individual and the collective” (141). To do so, artwork often develops and produces a sensory form of “strangeness” (141), from which the awareness of the reason for that strangeness can be raised. Based on this, if we regard the confusing and uncertain sensory experience as this kind of “strangeness”, then what kind of awareness is raised? Particularly, how does such an uncertain experience re-frame the traditional perception of Eight Views of Xiaoxiang and of the ideal?

In this chapter, I will regard the uncertainty as a starting point of aesthetic dissensus to discuss the ways in which Hao’s Eight Views of Xiaoxiang deviates from the conventional vision of the ideal. To do so, I will first give an introduction of the historical discourse of

Xiaoxiang Eight Views and examine Hao’s replacement of the subtitles. Secondly, I will 32 provide an account of my own engagement with one of Hao’s eight views – Scholar’s

Traveling13 – in order to further reflect on my uncertain feeling towards the artwork. Finally,

I will point out the ways in which the uncertainty can be seen as a form of aesthetic dissensus in Hao’s artwork and argue that the uncertainty of the artwork critically de-stabilises the historical ideal as an object of nostalgia and reconfigures it as an open process.

3. 1 The Eight Views

Xiaoxiang (“潇湘”), in some older sources, refers to the lakes and rivers region in south central China (corresponding to today’s Hunan province), where the natural landscapes have a misty, peaceful atmosphere. However, to put into the context of the discourse of Chinese arts, Xiaoxiang is more of a concept than a geographic entity. That is, the term Xiaoxiang and its related images are widely used in classical poetry and paintings for symbolic purposes.

The word Xiaoxiang was already pronounced in the ancient poetry Chu Ci14 (around the 2nd century), and since then it has been slowly turned into one of the most popular images in literature. The acclaimed poets Li Bai (701-762) and Su Shi (1037-1101), for example, often used Xiaoxiang to address the poetics of the natural sceneries. In terms of visual art, it is generally believed that Xiaoxiang had not been explicitly referenced until the 11th century

(The Northern Song Dynasty), when the official Song Di painted eight Shanshui paintings that were named Eight Views of Xiaoxiang. The harmonious effects that the paintings provoked immediately caught people’s attention (Murck, 26)15. Later, more and more literati started to paint Shanshui art under the name of Eight Views of Xiaoxiang16. Since the 12th

13 See Fig. 7,8,9. 14 Chu Ci is an anthology of Chinese poetry traditionally attributed mainly to Qu Yuan and Song Yu from the Warring States Period (ended 221 BC). 15 Unfortunately, Song Di’s original painting series of Eight Views of Xiaoxiang has not been found. But many pieces of literature that made comments about his paintings have been preserved. 16 Some researchers are likely to consider Song’s political role, as an exiled literati-official in Xiaoxiang, as the factor that Song painted the Eight Views. However, many also reject such a conjecture, because on the one hand, the remaining documents cannot sufficiently prove such connections, and on the other hand, the popularity of Eight Views of Xiaoxiang, including the admiration from the emperors such as Emperor Huizong of Song, suggests the invalidity of such political connection (Shi, 68). Particularly in the contemporary discourse of Asian art, many tend to hold the idea that Eight Views of Xiaoxiang is the “definitive of landscape painting on ideal land in general” (Yi 32). Considering the fact that most of the narratives about Xiaoxiang today lean towards the notion of the ideal instead of exile, this thesis will approach Xiaoxiang through the notion of the ideal, as it is more relevant for the contemporary Shanshui culture.

33 century, a number of Xiaoxiang paintings were exchanged among traders and the ruling class from the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. Consequently, painters from these two areas also picked up the Xiaoxiang trend and painted the eight views with their own styles (26).

Most of the painters who have painted Eight Views of Xiaoxiang, particularly those from

Japan and Korea, never actually visited the geographic Xiaoxiang. Hence, the textual descriptions of the eight views have become the main guidance for them to grasp this dreamland. Indeed, if we look at the eight subtitles – Wild Geese Descending to Sandbar, Sail

Returns from Distant Shore, Mountain Market Clearing Mist, River and Sky in Evening Snow,

Autumn Moon over Dongting, Night Rain on Xiaoxiang, Evening Bell from Mist-shrouded

Temple, Fishing Village in Evening Glow – we can see that Song’s narratives of the eight views have constructed a very specific method to appreciate the natural landscape and to visualise it on the painting surface. Despite the fact that painters from different temporal and geographical locations had distinctive artistic styles, when these paintings are put together, we can notice that they all conform to Song’s narratives of the eight views. In that sense, the repetitive reoccurrences of Song’s eight views have slowly constructed a timeless paradigm to conceive what can be aspired to and hoped about Xiaoxiang.

The deviation from such a tradition in Hao’s artwork is firstly evident in the replacement of the eight subtitles. Compared with Song’s subtitles, in which the concrete objects and specific space-times are described, Hao’s subtitles – Myriads of Transformation, Mind Travel,

Relics, Scholar’s Traveling, Evanescence, Dazzle, Cosmos and Snowscape – are more abstract in the sense that they tend to denote “an idea, quality, or state” instead of “an existent particularity” (Heath 3). Moreover, “the greater abstractness is defined as greater generality and inclusiveness” (Iliev and Axelrod 716). Since the degree of abstractness is usually associated with the image’s scope or inclusiveness, Hao’s subtitles can be considered more inclusive yet also more ambiguous than the original subtitles. Snowscape, for example, not only includes “River and Sky in Evening Snow”, but is also open to any possible interpretations that do not relate to the images of river, sky and evening. Subtitles such as 34

Evanescence even go beyond the object-based visual perception, to which limitless contexts and interpretations can be attributed. Moreover, unlike the traditional subtitles in which the relations between the movement and stillness, human, nature etc., are in some way balanced, one cannot see a clear thread that connected these views. All in all, one can no longer understand Xiaoxiang in a linear, logical way from the subtitles: they are fragmented and obscure, refusing to indicate any particular physical views. Therefore, on a linguistic level,

Hao’s subtitles do not try to prescribe and impose any specific ways of seeing but only offer a set of sensory fields with extremely uncertain boundaries in which the previously constrained figurativeness of Xiaoxiang are set free. Such semantic liberation for Xiaoxiang is only the artwork’s first step to destabilise that ideal.

3. 2 Framing a New Landscape

For Hao, “the painting surface is not simply a material vehicle embodying space and time, but a medium for contemplations of such” (“Hao Liang: Eight Views of Xiao Xiang”).

Indeed, the disjuncture between Hao’s eight views and the traditional ones can be identified by the viewer’s different sensory experiences with space-time in the paintings. To take Muqi

Fachang’s Fishing Village at Sunset 17 as an example, we can sense a homely atmosphere.

Based on the content of the title, the painter lets the light ink gently spread on the top of the mountains to imply a representation of sunset. The colours, shapes and forms of the misty mountains, the fishing boats, as well as the luxuriant trees cohesively work together, creating a pleasing balance. Such an ultimately harmonious and logical composition makes the painting a recognisable and rational space-time. The notions of space and time, thus, do not disturb the viewer appreciating the painting. They become invisible, transparent, as if they can vanish into one’s unconscious.

Inspired by Wang Ximeng’s (1096-1119) painting A Thousand Li of Rivers and

Mountains, in which the depicted landscapes tend to be continuous and delicate, and geographer Xu Xiake’s (1587 -1641) book Travel Diary of Xu Xiake, in which the natural

17 See Fig. 6 35

Fig. 6 Fishing Village at Sunset (around the 13th century) by Muqi Fachang

Fig. 7 Eight Views of Xiaoxiang – Scholar’s Travelling (2016) by Hao Liang

Fig. 8,9 Eight Views of Xiaoxiang – Scholar’s Travelling (details)

36 sceneries are poetically described, Hao initiates a fragmented dialogue between the two literati in the painting Scholar’s Traveling. Standing in front of the painting, I am also lost in space-time. But the experience of being lost here is no longer “to lose space and time” but “to be lost in it”. In other words, the painting has the power to constantly compel me to grasp the locality of space-time yet does not give any clear answers. Let me revisit my experience with this painting to indicate some of the paradoxes that it presents to its viewers.

Similar to the traditional Shanshui art, Hao’s Scholar’s Traveling contains no privileged position from which one can survey the entire scene. I started my virtual journey in the lower right corner of the painting and saw some jagged rocks of grotesque shapes emerging out of a lake. In the upper part, the placid mountains stand far away and are bathed with mild sunshine. Moving to the middle of the painting, however, a fire was blazing on the surface of the lake. At this point, the weather seemed to be changing gradually: more and more clouds were intertwined with the mountains, and the sky became darker and darker. I presumed the weather was changing. However, as soon as I made such an assumption, some stars appeared amid the clouds and mountains, leaving the time undeterminable. Among those steep mountains on the left side, there seemed like a man-made road that led to those caves, but the clouds, again, complicated my certainty about that. On the lower side of the painting, the giant bamboos were not in line with the scale of the mountains. Perhaps those mountains were only miniature versions of the natural landscape? But the transformation from day to night dispelled such speculation.

Such a disordered composition of phenomena could have been experienced as uncanny, but I was not frightened in this journey. Nevertheless, rather than the pure harmonious pleasure that I usually gain from traditional Shanshui art, Scholar’s Traveling to me is bewildering, a mixture of wonders and doubts. Analogically, if the traditional paintings give the viewer a sense of being immersed in a pond of still water, then Scholar’s Traveling puts the viewer into a flowing river in which the vision of the ideal constantly appears and disappears. This paradoxical, uncertain experience of being simultaneously disturbed and attracted by the painting derives from the co-existence of harmony and disharmony in the 37 same painting surface. On the one hand, all the elements in the painting fit together. The colours of light blue, grey and green – the cold tone – are repetitively used and form a comfortable rhythmic order. Regarding the composition of the objects, I can hardly find any details that are so outstanding that they block the visibility of other parts, which also gives me a sense of security. In short, the painting is beautifully balanced. And yet, the painting is also packed with illogical scenes. It is disharmonious in the sense that the ordering of the objects – the fire on the water, the uncanny juxtaposition of day and night, the disproportioned bamboos and landscape etc., – disagree with the “outside world”. To put it differently, they constantly challenge one’s habitual way of perceiving and conceiving the world.

Something of the effect of this conflation of the harmonious and disharmonious is suggested in Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the word “pharmakon”. Pharmakon means simultaneously poison, remedy and scapegoat. Derrida focuses on the contradictory meanings of the first two and argues that the word puts the philosophical oppositions between good and bad, true and false, positive and negative, etc., into question. He suggests that the essence of the pharmakon “lies in the way in which, having no stable essence, no ‘proper’ characteristics, it is not, in any sense (metaphysical, physical, chemical, alchemical), of the word, a substance…It is rather the prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced”

(Dissemination 125-16). In this sense, the word pharmakon is ambivalent because “it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other… the pharmakon is the movement, the locus and the play: (the production of) difference” (127).

Scholar’s Traveling can be seen as parallel to Derrida’s understanding of pharmakon, in that it too is distinguished by its combination of harmonious and disharmonious elements.

Whereas the harmonious atmosphere of the painting keeps attracting me to delve into its space-time, the disharmonious effects at the same time refuse to give me any clear cues to make sense of that space-time. The two oppositional sensory experiences hence configure my uncertain attitude towards the artwork. In light of this, Scholar’s Traveling can perhaps be perceived as a visual outcome of what Derrida calls “the movement and the play” (127), 38 which keeps the pleasant and unpleasant sensory experiences simultaneously appearing and remaining transformative from one to the other. Every reaction or interpretation that I give is partial, or using Barad’s terminology, is only a singular “agential cut”. From this angle, perhaps we can see Scholar’s Traveling as a form of dissensual being that refuses to truthfully depict the appearance of Xiaoxiang. By contradictorily juxtaposing a number of visual elements that can be potentially used to visualise Xiaoxiang, the painting seems, paradoxically, to make Xiaoxiang disappear, since it presents a space-time that we can never fully grasp and understand. As such, Xiaoxiang is no longer a static image of the ideal but an ongoing process that resists any determinist interpretations and remains open to any forms of imaginations.

The question then is, what is the function of such uncertainty in relation to the historical discourse of Eight Views of Xiaoxiang and the notion of the ideal? In other words, what critical perception does the artwork produce? In the next part, some considerations regarding the political significances of the artist’s new Xiaoxiang will be discussed.

3. 3 The Ideal as a Process

As an image of the ideal developed in East Asian countries, the genealogy of Xiaoxiang, or more generally, Shanshui, has many facets that differ from the Western notion of utopia.

However, in both the Eastern and the Western traditions of thinking about utopia, the basic starting point of longing for an ideal space has always been our desire for a better life.

However, in the past few decades, there is the awareness that the pursuit of the ideal has once been and still can possibly be a threatening shadow. China under Mao’s iron rule, the former

Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have each once swallowed the bitter pill of radical utopianism, for in their pursuit of a harmonious whole they have brutally negated other forms of beings. In such a way of chasing the ideal, “there cannot, by definition, be any room for eccentricity…for all historical actuality is here brought to judgment before the bar of trans-historical values and is found utterly wanting” (Shklar 371). Indeed, we shall always be aware that the action of envisioning an ideal world always contains the risk of turning it into 39 its opposite. Utopia contains dystopia. However, it would also be equally unjust to dismiss the productive effects of the ideal, for it consists in the power of imagination and aspirations for the future, and it is through the exercise of such power, that the lived reality can be constantly confronted with the change and the vision for that change. Or in Arjun

Appadurai’s words, “we need to see the capacity to aspire as a social and collective capacity without which words such as ‘empowerment’, ‘voice’ and ‘participation’ cannot be meaningful” (289). And at the same time, we can also see “the imagination is a vital resource in all social processes and projects, and needs to be seen as a quotidian energy, not visible only in dreams, fantasies, and sequestered moments of euphoria and creativity…it is a typical part of a picture of the inversion, subversion, sublation, or transcendence of the social” (287).

Hence, perhaps what is crucial about pursuing the ideal does not lie in the accountability of the ideal but the apparatus that shapes our approach to perceive and perform that ideal.

Based on the analysis above, I argue that central to the artwork’s reflection of the ideal is the sensory experience of uncertainty, for, as Rancière notes, it “hollows out that ‘real’ (in this case, the cohesive narrative of the ideal) and multiplies it in a polemical way” (Dissensus

149). More specifically, unlike literatus Song’s object-oriented textual descriptions of

Xiaoxiang, Hao’s subtitles do not prescribe a hegemonic visual format and hence are open to multiple reconfigurations of Xiaoxiang. Moreover, contrary to the previous Xiaoxiang paintings in which the ideal had always been composed univocally, Hao’s eight views envision the “un-envision-ability” of that ideal. As such, the notion of Xiaoxiang is aesthetically re-framed by Hao’s deconstruction of the previous frame.

Despite the fact that the ideal in Hao’s version of Xiaoxiang can no longer be clearly understood, it does not mean the ideal does not exist. The uncertain dynamics that circulate between the viewer and the artwork are, actually, the potentials and the possibilities of the ideal in its becoming. It is not perceivable because of the fact that in Hao’s Xiaoxiang, the ideal is no longer a static, timeless object but a temporal open process. And the very possibility of understanding and moving towards the ideal lies in the dynamics between the artwork and the viewers, or in Karen Barad’s sense discussed in earlier chapters, it lies in the 40 dynamics of agential intra-action of the entangled “us” (the artwork, the viewers and the imagination of the ideal). The uncertainty that undermines the hegemonic paradigm of the eight views actually produces an opportunity for the ideal to be performative. The ideal in this sense becomes an unfinished process, an agential configuration and reconfiguration in its becoming. In such fluid ideal space, subjectivity is no longer individuality but “a relation of responsibility to the other” (Barad, Meeting 391). That means, our intra-actions matter for the ideal that we are trying to seek, for “each one reconfigures the world in its becoming…they become us. And yet even in our becoming there is no ‘I’ separate from the intra-active becoming of the world” (394). The ideal space need not, and perhaps cannot, be anticipatorily conceptualised and pictured, for what we do now is responsive to that aspired ideal. In other words, pursuing an ideal means to be responsive to the possibilities that might help us and the world flourish. It is a form of “meeting the universe halfway”: “to take responsibility for the role that we play in the world’s differential becoming” (396). The present is the future: what we do now is what the ideal can be.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have discussed the mechanism that produces uncertain feelings in Hao’s

Eight Views of Xiaoxiang. On the linguistic level, the previous specific textual description of the eight views are replaced by eight ambiguous terms from which more diverse meanings of

Xiaoxiang can be created. Further, through the close reading of Scholar’s Traveling, I suggest that the visuality of the eight paintings also brings about a sense of uncertainty since it constantly refuses and fails the viewer’s attempts to fabricate a cohesive narrative about the ideal.

Rancière explains that the aesthetic dissensus is “a conflict between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it” (Dissensus 139). In Eight Views of Xiaoxiang, the uncertainty is exactly the evidence of that conflict, in which the viewer’s sensory experience (organised by the artwork) and the viewer’s “natural logic” (139) (arranged by the historical discourse of Xiaoxiang) collapse. In this collapsing movement, the ideology of 41 having and reinforcing a univocal narrative of the ideal is undone by the artwork’s re-articulation of the ideal as being a fluid space-time: a site of process in which changes can potentially happen in any moment and location.

Unlike Yang’s Artificial Wonderland II, of which the node of dissensus is produced in the form of shock – an uncanny moment – Hao’s Eight Views of Xiaoxiang transports the viewer to an alternative sensible world in a gentle and smooth way. That is because the artwork, in favouring the traditional aesthetics of Shanshui art, does not intend to fully destroy and rupture that “imagined home”. We can sense that a number of artistic tropes of

Shanshui are appropriated under the artist’s affections. Immersed in Hao’s Xiaoxiang, one can productively reflect on the meanings of Xiaoxiang yet also enjoy the refined drawings of

Shanshui: it is uncanny yet beautiful. In this sense, perhaps we can say that the nostalgic image of Xiaoxiang is still there, but it is revitalised as an active, productive and performative

Xiaoxiang. The ideal of Xiaoxiang and of Shanshui, therefore, is no longer only about the viewer’s aesthetic meditation in the agential intra-action of the world but about the viewer’s participation, about taking “responsibility for the role that we play in the world’s differential becoming” (Barad, Meeting 396).

42

Chapter Four

Questioning the White Cube: Shanshui Art as a Method

Chinese artist Liang Shuo’s Distant Tantamount Mountain (2017)18 is a site-specific piece of installation art commissioned by the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. Unlike Yang

Yongliang and Hao Liang’s artworks, in which Shanshui is explored in the two-dimensional surface of the painting, Liang’s artwork discusses the notion of Shanshui through the artist’s re-organisation of the three-dimensional museum space.

Entering the exhibition space of Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, one is immediately engulfed by a man-made mountain that is built of discarded wooden planks. The mountain is so gigantic that not only does it reach the very high ceiling of the exhibition hall but it also keeps growing and rolling into all the other exhibition rooms in the museum. Resonating with the hyphenated structure of the title Distant-Tantamount-Mountain, the different parts of the mountain are allotted to several exhibition rooms. In this way, the mountain as a whole is continuous yet discontinuous, interconnected yet disconnected. Instead of being provided with a spatial location from which one can attain an overview of the mountain, the views are decentred and produced through one’s bodily actions, namely, in walking and climbing this gigantic mountain.

The Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden is located in a hilly neighbourhood in the city of

Baden-Baden, Germany, an area dominated by the Black Forest. As an artist who is interested in the theme of landscape, Liang has visited the Black Forest a few times. In an interview, Liang said, “similar to the relationship between the mountain in China and the visuality of Shanshui art, I found the Black Forest and the German landscape paintings are closely interconnected. However, I am not sure whether such connection derives from the landscape or human beings because they are always mutually constructed” (“The Interview:

Liang Shuo”). Indeed, the decision about whether a physical view can be an aesthetic view is always culturally and historically constructed. Standing in between the Western and the

Eastern understandings about “views” of the natural landscape, Liang’s installation art, on the

18 See Fig. 9,10,11. 43 one hand, echoes the posture of the southern German landscape outside the museum. On the other hand, the views of the landscape are coded with the ways of looking and doing that derive from the discourse of Shanshui art.

As a Chinese viewer, what is most interesting to me about this artwork as a form of cross-cultural encounter is the way in which the epistemological perceptions underlying the notion of Shanshui are unfold in the Western context, namely, the encounter with Shanshui in a museum space in Germany. As I have discussed earlier, Shanshui does not designate the landscape as a static object but the dynamics of the intra-action of nature. The question to be raised here consequently is, ‘how can this understanding of the world be actualised in the museum space?’ Indeed, the relationship between the museum and this manmade mountain is ambivalent. For example, the mountain’s attachment to the white walls creates the impression that the two are avoiding yet embracing, fighting yet supporting each other. And because multiple exhibition rooms are used to present a continuous mountain, the boundaries demarcated by these rooms can also be imaginarily blurred by the viewer’s visualisation of the mountain in his or her consciousness. This aesthetic experience produces a kind of indeterminacy to the functions and meanings of the museum space, which questions the ontological being of the museum.

Rancière points out that art is political because of the very distance it takes with respect to the common world, because of “the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and people in this space” (The Politics 23). In this case, the space-time of the museum is suspended by the artwork and re-distributed with ambivalent meanings and sensory feelings in order to present the mountain as Shanshui. Such re-distribution of the space, I will argue, is precisely a locus of dissensus. But how and in what ways do the meanings and functions of the museum have to be altered in order to stage the mountain as Shanshui? Having this question in mind, this chapter will explore the interrelations between Distant Tantamount Mountain and the Staatliche Kunsthalle

Baden-Baden, between Shanshui and the White Cubes, and between Shanshui art and the global art world. To do so, I will first reflect on the role that the museum plays in shaping a 44

Shanshui experience. Secondly, I will discuss the ways in which the concept of the museum is challenged because of the presence of Shanshui. Based on these two angles, I would like to argue that, by critically negotiating the condition of display in the museum space, the artwork gives an institutional critique of the global art discourse that tends to be exclusively constructed through the lens of the Western art history.

4. 1 The Role of Museum in Framing Shanshui

As I have suggested earlier, nature in Shanshui art is not seen as a static object that can be fully grasped by human faculties but something unrepresentable, for it is the manifestation of the agential intra-activity of the world. Such understanding can be connected to the Western concept of the sublime, a quality of greatness or vastness, whether physical, moral, intellectual or artistic. That is, the term sublime describes the situation when an experience

“slips out of conventional understanding” (Shaw 2) or when one feels that an object or an event is so powerful that “words fail and points of comparison disappear”(2). In this sense, the sublime marks the “limits of reason and expression together with a sense of what might lie beyond these limits” (2). This also explains the sublime’s association with the transcendent, conceived by the theologian John Milbank as “the absolutely unknowable void”

(qtd. in Shaw 2). Similarly, the notion of Shanshui promises a transcendental world. However, this transcendental world is not exterior to, but interior to our world, which is different from the Western tradition where “from Plato’s forms, through the Christian concept of God, to

Descartes’ cogito…there is a realm or an entity y that goes beyond or surpasses x”

(Møllgaard 83). Rather, the transcendental world of Shanshui designates the experience of

“‘there is’ world” (83), which shall be understood as “a hole in time, an atemporal forgetfulness” (84). This immanent sublimity of Shanshui perhaps partly explains the visual differences between the classic European landscape art and Shanshui art. That is, whereas sublimity in European landscape paintings is often visualised through the contour, size and the intensity of colours, the sublimity in Shanshui in art is likely to be framed by the multiple perspectives and the play of blankness. By forming a visual narrative, Shanshui is staged as 45 something in our world but cannot be fully comprehended within a singular space-time, for it is enfolded, I have argued, with the flux of agential intra-actions. Accordingly, the way to appreciate Shanshui art, as I have mentioned, does not emphasise taking a centred view of the landscape, but perceiving the landscape with a variety of views, including views that can be physically perceived (matter-as-phenomena) and cannot be physically perceived

(matter-not-as-phenomena).

Consequently, central to the difficulties of building a Shanshui mountain in the museum space is to present the unrepresentability of Shanshui. In other words, how is it possible to create a Shanshui experience without demarcating a determined, static object? As we can see,

Liang overcomes the difficulties, and this is due largely, I will argue, to his re-configuration of the museum space.

Similar to the aesthetic of traditional Shanshui art, the viewer who comes to see Liang’s artwork is required not only to use the disembodied eyes to “gaze” but also use his or her body to “travel” in the installation art, since there is not a spatial position to attain the overview of the mountain. Strolling around in the exhibition, the views of the mountain are constantly produced, eliminated, recreated, vanishing, since in the process of the “travelling”, the views of the mountain in the next room always interfere with and reshape the views in the previous room. Moreover, the white walls, in blocking the views, also produce a moment for the viewer to recognise what cannot be perceived at that moment and location, which echoes the blank space in Shanshui art. In addition, this experience of Shanshui is not pre-given.

Instead, the views can only be produced through each viewer’s agential cuts, namely, the viewer’s bodily performances in the museum. As such, the mountain is arranged as a

Shanshui experience, an experience that ceases to be collective, pre-determined and structured. In other words, the method to obtain the views of Distant Tantamount Mountain promises the unpromised views of nature.

As such, it is important to consider the framing of this experience of shifting views. And

Derrida’s understanding about the concept of “frame” might lead to some insights. For

Derrida, although the frame (parergon) of art appears as something merely decorative, it does 46

Fig. 9, 10, 11 Distant Tantamount Mountain (2017) by Liang Shuo

Fig. 12 The Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden 47 have intrinsic value. That is, “what constitutes them as parergon (means ‘frame’, ‘addition’ and ‘remainder’) is not simply their exteriority as surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon (work)…without this lack, the ergon would have no need of a parergon” (The Truth 59-60). Indeed, an artwork always requires a frame. This frame not only affirms the ontology of art but also shapes the configuration of art.

This function of framing in Distant Tantamount Mountain is particularly discernible. Namely, it is through the White Cubes’ framing that the aesthetics of Shanshui – the experience of the mountain as the dynamics of agential intra-action of the world – are produced. The White

Cubes frame the mountain by containing yet concealing it. Indeed, to take the Latin route of the sublime into consideration – sub (up to) and limen (lintel, literally the top piece of a door), perhaps the term itself indicates that “there is no sense of the unbounded that does not make reference to the placing of a limit or threshold” (Shaw 119). The White Cubes in Staatliche

Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in this case function as such a threshold, where the sublimity of the mountain can come in. However, by letting the sublime come in, the White Cube, paradoxically, fails to be a frame, because the mountain has to permeate the floors, the ceilings and the white walls.

4. 2 The Museum’s Failure to Be a Museum

The Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden was built in 1909 in Greco-Roman style. Like many other European art museums, its architecture echoes religious monuments such as palaces or temples19. Entering the museum, one sees several windowless exhibition halls and rooms painted in white. They are the White Cubes that are almost completely separated from the outside world. This type of spatial arrangement in the museum has become the norm of display in today’s global contemporary art world, but the origin can be traced back to the birth of musea in the 19th century in Europe.

The Western museum, as a result of the Enlightenment, is a space for cultural representation. For Tony Bennett, the functions of the prison and the museum are

19 See Fig. 12. 48 complementary. Aligning with Michel Foucault, he believes that, by detaching criminals from society, the prison “separates a manageable criminal sub-class from the rest of the population” (90). Likewise, the museum is instilled with new codes of public behaviour that distinguish the good and the bad. And by prescribing normative manners towards unsophisticated/uneducated people in this public space, the museum reveals its supervisory function that is similar to the prison (98). In this sense, the museum is a site that identifies with power. In other words, there is some “rhetoric of power embodied in the exhibitionary complex – a power made manifest not in its ability to inflict pain but by its ability to organize…an order of things and to produce a place for people in relation to that order” (67).

For Carol Duncan, despite the fact that museums and rituals seem antithetical, they are actually ideologically interconnected. More specifically, museums have inherited the function of rituals because they are built to “represent beliefs about the order of the world, its past and present, and the individual’s place within it” (Duncan 8). Among all kinds of museums, art museums are “especially rich in this kind of symbolism” (8), for as sites, they are

“programmed for the enactment of something …(and) designed for some kind of performance” (12). The staging of ritual within the atmosphere of art museums has become evident particularly since the 1950s when the White Cube became the most popular condition of display in the art sphere. According to Brain O’ Doherty, the white cube is “unshadowed, white, clean, artificial – the space is devoted to the technology of esthetics…their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time and its vicissitudes.” (15) It is through this apparent neutrality that the artworks in the White Cube can appear to be self-contained and free from historical time and hence attain an aura of timelessness and purification. Consequently, when people walk into a White Cube space, “in return for the glimpse of (surrogate) eternity that the white cube affords us, we give up our humanness and become the cardboard Spectator with the disembodied Eye” (O’ Doherty 38).

The Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden serves as a clear example of this kind of exhibition space. By embodying the monumental atmosphere from the outside and the spotless White Cubes from the inside, the building naturalises the ideology of the museum. In 49 the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, time becomes timeless; space is staged as neutral, which aesthetically self-affirms its power to take everything under its control, to put everything into order and to contain the valuable art objects and their aura. The very composition of the museum turns this space into a site of consensus because a particular way of making and doing and a specific way of experiencing space and time are pre-given and disciplined.

To see Distant Tantamount Mountain from this perspective, one would discern that by re-inscribing a very different ethos in the space, the artwork counteracts the aesthetics of politics of the museum. From the perspective of the art object itself, the continuity of the mountain questions the solidity of the boundaries. In addition, because the mountain is so vast that it permeates different rooms, the museum loses its ability to contain the artwork as a property. From the perspective of the viewer’s experience, space and time that are originally staged as eternal and disciplinary become unformed. To put it differently, because the views of the mountain do not pre-exist as views, but are produced through the viewer’s agential cuts, the museum loses its influence as a site of power that organises and regulates the mass. As such, Distant Tantamount Mountain produces an aesthetic dissensus with respect to the space of the museum and the very being of the museum.

One might wonder, if the White Cube is not the ideal display space for Shanshui, what would it be? Certainly, there was no “installation art” in pre-modern China, but the art of rock mountains that is hugely influenced by Shanshui paintings and the notion of Shanshui might better our understanding here. As mentioned earlier, coming from a different cultural background, traditional Chinese art finds itself being enjoyed surrounded by daily objects.

Chinese literati have an appreciation for rocks with grotesque shapes, for it is believed that their very forms refract the dynamics of the mountains in Shanshui. However, the stones are not exhibited in a particular exhibition space. Rather, when a stone in the garden is claimed as “art” – an affirmation of its aesthetic value – the space becomes a gallery that contains art.

Hence, there is no radical dichotomy that divides art space and secular space: the two are overlapped. Moreover, the architectural design of the traditional Chinese gardens and 50 buildings often emphasise the aesthetics of “movement of steps and shift of scenes”20. That is, a fine piece of architecture often provides the visitor unlimited views by concealing yet revealing the objects. For instance, a stone mountain is usually partly blocked by other objects such as a pavilion, plants, etc., and perhaps reflected by a water pond next to it. In that way, when one moves his steps and changes his spatial and temporal positions, one can not only see different facets of the stone but the ways in which the stone and other objects configure and re-configure different views. Indeed, Liang also says that “one of the key features of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden is that once you enter into the museum, you are completely disconnected with the outside, which is different from the Shanshui architectures that I have visited in China” (“The Interview: Liang Shuo”). Perhaps it is this cultural difference that leads Liang to construct such an oversized mountain that the museum fails to contain. This aesthetic dissensus, hence, can be seen as a cross-cultural strategy that critically negotiates the relationship between the non-Western art and the

Western-constructed global art institution.

4. 3 The Paradox of Art and Shanshui in the Global Art World

I have discussed the museum’s role in framing the artwork above, but as Philip Shaw suggests, the frame does not have to be physical, for “art is defined by its institutional context”

(117). Indeed, art becomes art precisely because there is an “artworld” – in Arthur C. Danto’s sense – that stands behind it. The “cultural contexts” or “an atmosphere of art theory” (581) is what constitutes the power of the “artworld” to affirm an object to be art. Andy Warhol’s

Brillo Box (1964) is a piece of art that is distinguished from daily objects because his Brillo

Box consists of “a certain theory of art” (581), and “it is theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is” (583). In this sense, the relationship between the “artworld” and the real world is similar to “the City of Gods stands to the Earthly City” (582). Since the first appearance of “global art” in 1989, the “artworld”21

20 Translated from the Chinese saying: “移步换景”. 21 Since “artworld” will be discussed in relation to globalisation, which exceeds Danto’s specific conceptualisation of the term, in the following part, I will use “art world” instead of “artworld” to address the globalised art institution. 51 has been expanding and slowly includes more and more non-Western art. As opposed to the modern ideas of progress and hegemony, the global art world intends to include all the categories of art from different regions in the world. It is essential separate “world art” and

“global art”. World art, as an advocate of modernity, accepted art from different political and geographical areas under the condition of division between mainstream art and ethnographic art. By contrast, the global art world incarnates the global capitalist economy, which has the power to turn differences into the identical symbolic capital on the market (“Contemporary

Art as Global Art” 3). In this way, the global art world is a progressive version of “world art”, because global capital transcends cultural borderlines and put all forms of art within the same network and discussions.

However, this global art world is not without its negative aspects. Firstly, so-called global contemporary art demands a unifying frame in which art of different cultures, especially the “peripheral” cultures such as minority, feminism etc., also have their places in this art world. Nevertheless, “art history as it was developed for the European model is not a neutral and general tale that could be easily applied to other cultures that lack such a narrative”

(Art History after Modernism 61). Another significant deficit would be the power of global capital that can “reduce everything to an artwork of its own kind.” (Hartle and Chang 25).

While a variety of different forms of artwork are absorbed in the global art market, the specific logic of a certain art discourse – such as Shanshui – is likely to be excluded. In this way, art forms of different cultures are, to a certain degree, at stake, because the global market pushes them to be more and more standardised commodities: not through changing their appearances, but through altering their nature and inner logic. Indeed, the very difficulties to build a Shanshui artwork in the White Cube museum and the artwork’s overcoming of the difficulties – the very material configuration of Distant Tantamount

Mountain – precisely respond to these problems. In other words, in order to make visible the inner logic of Shanshui art discourse, the original meanings and functions of the museum – as an outcome of Western art history – have to be temporarily suspended.

One might argue that since Distant Tantamount Mountain is still operated under the 52

Western-based art system – the collaboration with the museum, curator, art critics, etc. – it is not radically political and does not go beyond the institution. Indeed, the previous readings of

Distant Tantamount Mountain from the perspectives of Shanshui and that of the museum suggest that they have an interdependent relationship. On the one hand, the museum is positioned as if it fails to contain the artwork in order to stage the aesthetic of Shanshui experience; but on the other hand, precisely because the museum successfully frames the aesthetic experience of Shanshui, the artwork affirms the validity of the museum.

Such a relationship is also suggested in Rancière’s theories. For him, art is modest. It is modest not only “as regards its capacity to transform the world, but also as regards claims about the singularity of object” (The Politics 21). Hence, art is not “the founding of a common world through the absolute singularity of form” (21). Rather, it is a way of

“redisposing the objects and images that comprise the common world as it is already given, or of creating situations apt to modify our gaze and our attitudes with respect to this collective environment” (21). By saying the aesthetic experience produced by art is formed as if it is given, he points out the inability of art to directly go beyond the art world and directly intervene with consensus. Hence, perhaps we should consider that “it’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution” (Fraser 286). In other words, the artwork

– by its very re-distribution of the aesthetics of museum space – sees itself as an assemblage of agency that can choose what value should be institutionalised, what forms of practice should be rewarded, and what kinds of rewards should be aspired to in the context of global contemporary art (287). Hence, perhaps we can conclude that, instead of negating the global art world in order to “protect the local”, the artwork positively embraces the intercultural practice in the age of globalisation by aesthetically re-distributing that normative practice itself.

Conclusion

When I encountered Liang’s Distant Tantamount Mountain, the difficulty of using a single word to describe the relationship between the mountain and the museum made me wonder: 53 why does Liang have to symbolically tear down the white walls in order to build a mountain?

My exploration of the interplay between the White Cubes and the Distant Tantamount

Mountain in this chapter was guided by this question. Consequently, I have taken the White

Cubes and the mountain that Liang creates as a single entity and have explored the functions of the White Cubes. Considering Liang’s intention is to construct a Shanshui experience in the white gallery, I suggest that the sublimity of the mountain is framed through the artwork’s dissensual intervention with the spatial arrangement of the museum. In this framing process, the original functions of the white cubes in the museum are suspended and aesthetically challenged. More specifically, whereas the museum supposedly prescribes its disciplinary power through providing a ritual-like experience, the artwork’s redistribution of space-time turns this experience into a Shanshui experience. In this way, I argue, the artwork produces an aesthetic dissensus that questions the politics of aesthetics of the museum.

Such institutional critique towards the condition of the display is crucial and relevant, particularly considering the specificity of the inner logic of Shanshui art. As a form of non-Western art, Shanshui is not suited for appreciation within the White Cube, for the very logic of such an art form and artistic perception emphasises the interaction between the viewer, the art object and non-art objects. However, because of global art’s hegemonic power that reduces every form of art to the same kind, Shanshui art, in many cases (including the exhibitions of the previous two artworks), has to adhere to the logic of the White Cube.

Distant Tantamount Mountain as an artwork situated within the global art world, provides us with an insightful, playful and creative political response to this problematic situation. From its critical revelation of the mismatch between the mountain and the museum space, between the non-Western aesthetics and the Western-based art world, the artwork suggests that the

Western modernity, in this case, the Western modern art history, is a culturally based temporality whose sensitivity to the non-Western art shall always be re-examined. A more inclusive way of thinking about global art is hence proposed.

54

Conclusion

In Chinese, the word “乡愁” is similar to nostalgia and can be literally translated as

“town/village-melancholy”. As a Chinese living in the Netherlands, I got trapped in this mood in many occasions, in which I saw usually an idyll of my native land slowly vanishing on the horizon. To me, the longing for Shanshui is doubled: the doubled affections for its poetics and the doubled melancholy for its impossible return. But as Boym writes, “reflective nostalgia sees everywhere the imperfect mirror images of home, and tries to cohabit with doubles and ghosts” (252). Thanks to her reminder, I try to look at this emotion differently, hoping to discover the creativity and criticality embedded in its dynamics. This paper is precisely an attempt to reveal and reflect on the creative and critical aspects of the nostalgia in Chinese context. Perceiving the contemporary cultural practices that relate to Shanshui art as a site of nostalgia, I examined three artworks that are situated in this site.

In Chapter One, I contextualise Shanshui art within the Western theoretical framework.

Firstly, I use Karen Barad’s New Materialist terminology to elucidate the aesthetic perceptions of the world enfolded in the visuality of Shanshui art. Secondly, I take account of the historical and political conditions about traditional Shanshui art and provide a conceptual frame – the site of nostalgia – to look at contemporary China’s historical mood towards its

Shanshui past and the manifestations of it. Because the purpose of the thesis is to discover the creativity and criticality of nostalgia, I turn to three contemporary Chinese artworks that touch upon the theme of Shanshui and see them as the manifestations of nostalgia that are possibly embedded with certain dynamics that are worth exploring. Because the three artworks all break the boundaries between art and non-art, Shanshui art and other forms of art, and because they all form the singular sensory experiences different from that of traditional

Shanshui art, I suggest that Rancière’s notion of aesthetic dissensus can be a helpful lens for a close-reading.

From Chapter Two to Chapter Four, I dive into the analysis of the artworks. In Chapter

Two, I explore the mechanism of the uncanny sensory experience produced by Artificial

Wonderland II. I suggest that the strange conflation of Fan’s Shanshui painting and the 55 realistic photographs of the indifferent urban structures uncannily disorients the viewer not only spatially but also temporally, which questions the existence of the “home” – the fixed idea of Chineseness – to which the viewer tries to return. This leads to the calling for not only a better mode of urban development but also the re-negotiation between the past and present, between Chineseness and modernity. Chapter Three discusses Hao’s painting series Eight

Views of Xiaoxiang by specifically looking at the painting Scholar’s Traveling. Historically,

Eight Views of Xiaoxiang has been a motif of Shanshui art that usually conveys the idea of a utopia, an imaginary ideal world. Whereas in the past the eight views have always been painted according to certain instructive standards, this artwork breaks those standards and gives the viewer an uncertain and contradictory image about what an ideal Shanshui space can be. In this way, the ideal of Shanshui no longer belongs only to the irreversible past but also the present and the future, for each viewer’s perceptions and associations all become part of the (re)configuration of the ideal. In the last chapter, the ambivalent relationship between the art museum and Liang’s installation art Distant Tantamount Mountain catches me and invites me to reflect on the relationship between Shanshui art and the White Cube, between the between the non-Western art discourse and the global artworld. By comparing and reflecting on how space is differently perceived and arranged in Shanshui art discourse and the Western art museum, I argue that the ambivalent relationship between the installation and the museum derives from the mismatch and inequality between the inner logic of Shanshui art and that of the Western constructed art museum. In this way, the artwork posts an institutional critique to the Western hegemonic global art discourse by revealing and playing with the manifestation of such power relations.

Shanshui art is dissensually used in the three artworks in different manners. Artificial

Wonderland II tends to stage Shanshui art as an unhomely home that one finds impossible to return to, and therefore register his or her Chineseness as a fixed identity. Eight Views of

Xiaoxiang turns Shanshui art into a space of uncertainty and possibility in which the utopian imagination can be performed contingently and democratically. In Distant Tantamount

Mountain, Shanshui art re-emerges as a tool that helps to carve out a political space, in which 56

China’s alternative modernity and the non-Western art’s specificity are presented. Shanshui in the three artworks is not framed as a conclusive origin or truth but a site in which the politics of past, present and future is locally and globally reflected. Hence, they all creatively and critically revitalise the melancholy of Shanshui and through the practice of revitalisation,

Shanshui art as an unreachable temporality “opens up a multitude of potentialities, nonteleological possibilities of historic development” (Boym 50)

The sinologist Francois Jullien once attempted to create a Chinese approach to Western culture, which he describes as a “detour via China” (qtd. in Bolewski, 4), “a process of distancing from the Western thinking as an effective strategy where Chinese philosophy functions as an ‘outside’ from which to see more clearly the values and preoccupation of western culture” (4). As a Chinese, vice versa, I take a similar approach to engage with

Chinese Shanshui art through the lens of Western thinking. Along with the analysis, it shows that Western concepts such as nostalgia, dissensus, agential intra-activity etc. can productively travel to the context of Shanshui art, albeit that some meanings need to be nuanced according to China’s historical circumstances. I hope that by doing so, I have, to an extent, defined cultural specificity not as some static thoughts or existence, but as a productive space in which dialogues between not only the past and present but also the East and the West are initiated.

57

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