Sheng Project: a Flâneur’S Archive
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Gao Shiming Sheng Project: A Flâneur’s Archive Interlocutors: Gao Shiming, Chief Curator of The Sheng Project Lu Jie, Curator and Founding Director of the Long March Project Tang Xiaolin, Co-curator of The Sheng Project Zhang Yang, Co-curator of The Sheng Project Mo Ai, theorist and scholar of Chinese modern art and literature The Sheng Project is a collective curatorial project focused on both the material and immaterial archives of Zheng Shengtian (Sheng). Collected over the course of his personal and institutional practice over six decades in and beyond China, the archive presents to the curatorial team a specific case of intellectual history, one that idiosyncratically navigates pre-socialist, socialist, and post-socialist periods in China. Just before launching their curatorial publication as the project’s public inauguration, the core members of the curatorial collaborative explained their interests and the methodology of the project. Curatorial Introduction The Sheng Project is a joint curatorial project between the Long March Project, Beijing, and Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thoughts at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. Launched in 2015 as a longue durée enquiry into the complexity of its subject, the project takes Sheng, an eminent pioneer in contemporary Chinese art, his life and art career, as the subject of research. By scrutinizing his encounters in art and life experiences for more than a half century, it attempts to reactivate our sense and perception of Chinese art and society in the Revolution and post-Revolution era. The Sheng Project does not align itself with standard curatorial production, which tends to summarize research into a static format of exhibition. Instead, the project will be inaugurated with “A Proposal for the Sheng Project,” which is integral to the project’s oftentimes growing and diversifying curatorial methodology. In this stage, an unconventional publication will be assembled with the ongoing research––a chronology, parallel histories with material or oral evidence, an index to his complete paintings, contextual knowledge in the arts and literature of his time––into a multi-layered curatorial proposition aimed at Chinese and international stakeholders interested in different models of international exchange of the arts. Sheng’s life is constructed as elaborately as history itself. Through him, we can discover the twists and turns, coincidences, encounters, and forked Vol. 16 No. 4 33 paths of the last century of Chinese history, and sense the confluence of surging undercurrents. “I was supposed to go to Mexico,” Sheng recalls of his first travel abroad in the 1980s. This plain utterance now holds profound implications nearly forty years later. Time flows eternally, yet history occurs only once. We are guided into the twists and folds of twentieth century history in search of the abounding historical meanings, possibilities, or potentials that hide within. Sheng likens his life to a zócalo (the main public square in Mexico cities), one that bustles with people coming and going. Structured around the image of a zócalo, the exhibition will unfold along Sheng’s personal life and experiences, mapping the multiple historical frameworks of Revolution/ Post-Revolution, Cold War/Post-Cold War, Imperialism/Neo-Imperialism, with the support of his extraordinarily rich collection of documents and archives. It projects the “two modernisms” in revolution and art of the twentieth century, and interconnects the divided and periodized disrupted thirty years—from the May Fourth Movement of 1919 to the founding of communist China in 1949, then to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, and the new period that has since followed—in China’s historical narratives. Furthermore, these documents reveal a richness of contingencies among different generations in the zócalo of life that unfolds into a century forming a fascinating labyrinth of destinies under the interaction of various and unexpected historical forces. The title of the project originates from the name of an online databank The Second Curatorial Workshop of the Sheng set up by Sheng himself (http://shengproject.com/). Yet this eponymous Project, held in March 2016, Hangzhou. Courtesy of Zheng curatorial project is not a retrospective of an individual person or an Shengtian. exhibition of historical documents. As a long term project that spans various fields such as art making, research, curating, and education, in the past two years the curatorial team has engaged more than fifty art practitioners in and beyond of the disciplinary field of contemporary 34 Vol. 16 No. 4 Chinese art to participate in a series of research, as well as introspective and expository workshops and conferences. The outcomes of these curatorial and editorial meetings will be compiled into what we call a “book in action” that is to be published by the end of 2017. By working together with professionals from different generations, this project endeavours to reconnect fragmented memories and therefore becomes a ground zero for the self-emancipation of Sheng’s contemporaries. In this respect, The Sheng Project is a proposal to all within the field of contemporary art. Through the Sheng Project, the curatorial team anticipates inviting other peer practitioners to inspect the subjective realm of history that is Sheng’s personal archive. Our project is about fostering an openness toward historiography by taking personal life experience as a departure point. We believe that only by responding with the whole of our minds and bodies and by immersing ourselves in the sparks caused by the collision between self and event can the past be illuminated. And only by reconstructing another kind of site can we encounter and embody history, can we gain a grasp on history, and can we ultimately become history. Unpacking the Complexity of an Archive Tang Xiaolin: When my research on modern and contemporary Chinese art history crossed over into Sheng’s archive, what was interesting for me was how much his art, spanning multiple decades, offered clues that were different from my preconceived ideas of history. The first challenge of our curatorial work was to unfold the complexity of Sheng’s art practice in this respect. Zhang Yang: Yes, in fact, this way of thinking helped us observe today’s reality with fresh perspectives and a specific historical sensitivity. Plastic Art from Tang Xiaolin: For example, we were able Czechoslovakia, exhibition catalogue, 1955. Courtesy of to observe within Sheng’s archive two Zheng Shengtian. different kinds of international outlooks that co-existed with one another. In addition to the Socialist Internationalist historical horizon, an international association of political parties whose aim was to advance democratic socialism that he embraced as an art student during the 1950s, his practice since the 1980s has focused more on the kind of contemporary Chinese art that presents itself to international audiences. As a matter of fact, these two notions of “international” respectively point to a world order of Cold War and post-Cold War. Gao Shiming: This touches upon a phrase that Sheng mentioned, which also served as an important clue for us: “I was supposed to go to Mexico.” What was poignant about this statement is that young Chinese artists’ view of the “international” once was directed toward Mexico, not New Vol. 16 No. 4 35 York. The deeper connection behind this Modern Printmaking from Yugoslavia, exhibition is Sheng’s notion of modernism in the catalogue, 1957. Courtesy of Zheng Shengtian. socialist era in China. He used the term “Socialist Modernism” that usually refers to the movement in Eastern Europe and parts of the Soviet Union and had always wanted to explore the hidden history of it. The most important intellectual resource for China in the 1950s and 60s was Socialist Realism, but under the socialist political system that existed at that time, there were also modernist cultural practices. The cohabitation of these two threads of socialist art is very much worth thinking about since we are aware of the significance to the history of Western modernism of the debate between realism and modernism that took place in the writings of Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s. In my mind, tracing this intellectual resource back to its specific context is an important intellectual dimension that comes out of The Sheng Project. Tang Xiaolin: What Sheng has characterized Selected Mexican Paintings, exhibition catalogue, 1957. as Socialist Modernism is specifically two Courtesy of Zheng Shengtian. cultural threads that started with China’s efforts to modernize and revolutionize in the 1930s. The first is the practice of modernism in the 1920s and 30s passed down by an older generation of artists who had studied in France and Japan, such as Lin Fengmian, Wu Dayu, Ni Yide, and Pang Xunqin, among others, followed by another generation of artists including Wu Guanzhong and Zao Wou-Ki. The second kind were artists such as Shu Chuanxi, who had studied in East Germany and subsequently brought back art forms that differed from Soviet Realism. Those artists were also influenced by David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, who represented the tide of the Mexican Mural Movement that had swept across China, as well as the ethnic art practices of Renato Guttuso, José Venturelli, and Eugen Popa, artists who came from socialist camps in South America and Eastern Europe. From the perspective of Sheng’s own experiences, he was taught directly at the Central Academy of Art by Dong Xiwen, whose fame was made specifically by his painting The Founding Ceremony of the Nation (1953). Sheng was deeply influenced by the concept of “revolutionization, nationalization, and modernization” espoused by Dong Xiwen, who particularly encouraged him to study works by foreign leftist artists, such as “the big three” of the Mexican Mural Movement, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Siqueiros, and other artists such as Renato Guttuso and José Venturelli who did not fit into the scope of a dogmatic realist agenda.