New Works by Fang Lijun Aileen June Wang

:      march / april 9 March/April 2009 | Volume 8, Number 2

Inside

Artist Features: Wang Guangyi, Xiao Lu, Fang Lijun, Conroy/Sanderson, Wu Gaozhong, Jin Feng

Rereading the Goddess of Democracy

Conversations with Zhang Peili, Jin Jiangbo

US$12.00 NT$350.00 A Declaration of Protest

Late at night on February 4th, 2009, the Public Security Bureau of Chaoyang District in Beijing notified the Organizing Committee of the Twentieth Anniversary of the China/Avant- garde Exhibition that the commemorative event, which was to be held at the Beijing National Agricultural Exhibition Center on February 5th, 3 pm, must be cancelled. There was no legal basis for the provision provided.

As the Head of the Preparatory Committee of the China/Avant- garde Exhibition in 1989, and the Chief Consultant and Curator of the current commemorative events, I would like to lodge a strong protest to the Public Security Bureau of Chaoyang District in Beijing. These commemorative events are legitimate cultural practices, conducted within the bounds of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. The Organizer and the working team have committed tremendous time, resources, and energy to launch Gao Minglu, organizer and curator of these events. Members from the art and cultural communities the events commemorating the twentieth as well as the general public are ready to participate. Without anniversary of the 1989 China/Avant-garde Exhibition, reads his protest letter in front of any prior consultation and communication, the Public Security an audience in Beijing, China on February Bureau of Chaoyang District arbitrarily issued an order to forbid 5th, 2009. The local police bureau ordered cancellation of the planned art exhibition at our events—such action is an utter violation of the Constitution the Beijing National Agricultural Exhibition and a blatant transgression of our civil rights. I am deeply Center without any explanation. Gao was also one of the principle organizers of the China/ indignant at such enforcement and would reserve my right to take Avant-garde Exhibition twenty years ago. further legal actions. Photo: Yang Zhilin

Gao Minglu, At early morning on February 5th, 2009 6

VOLUME 8, NUMBER 2, MARCH/APRIL 2009

CONTENTS 2 Editor’s Note 25 4 Contributors

6 Visual Political Science: Another Wang Guangyi Huang Zhuan

25 Xiao Lu: The Confluence of Life and Art Jonathan Goodman

33 Hauntings: Rereading the Goddess of Democracy Robin Peckham

43 43 Beauty in Despair: New Works by Fang Lijun Aileen June Wang

50 Recurring Intimations of Disorder: A Conversation with Zhang Peili Paul Gladston

59 The Great Economic Retreat: New Images of Urban China Zheng Shengtian

65 The Modern Chinese Landscape in New Media Arts: A Conversation Among Fang Xiaofeng, 59 Chen Anying, Zhao Wenbing, and Jin Jiangbo

72 Conroy/Sanderson: Two Heads Are Better Than One Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky

86 Wu Gaozhong: Sites of Intimate Remembrance that Get Under the Skin Maya Kóvskaya

97 Jin Feng: Art Is a Way of Life: A Case Study from 2003 to Today Biljana Ciric 72 106 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Wang Guangyi, Cold War Aesthetic—People Wearing Gas Masks, 2008, coloured fiberglass, projection, 180 x 40 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

1 Editors Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art president Katy Hsiu-chih Chien In China, contemporary art has a relatively short   Ken Lum history, and one that is considerably different from that of other regions in the world. While artists  Keith Wallace living in China avidly began exploring new forms   Zheng Shengtian   Julie Grundvig and content during the 1980s, it was only in the Kate Steinmann 1990s that their art received widespread attention editorial assistant Chunyee Li from beyond China’s borders, and by the turn of circulation manager Larisa Broyde the millennium, its place in the international realm   Joyce Lin was clearly secured. But as history progresses, web site  Chunyee Li and as a younger generation of artists brings forth new ideas and approaches to art making, advisory  critical attention towards many of those earlier Judy Andrews, Ohio State University artists often wanes. Yishu continues to follow Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum those groundbreaking artists, and in this issue John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation we present some fresh perspectives on the work Okwui Enwezor, San Francisco Art Institute of Wang Guangyi, Xiao Lu, Fang Lijun, and Zhang Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Peili, all artists who established their reputations Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China Fei Dawei, Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation at the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute Continuing an exploration into the recent past, Katie Hill, University of Westminster Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive 2009 marks twenty years since the conception Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian of the Goddess of Democracy, a sculpture that Sebastian Lopez, Institute of International Visual Arts radiated a compelling presence during the Lu Jie, Independent Curator Charles Merewether, Critic & Curator Tian’anmen Square protests. Rarely has this Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University historic icon, which has been reproduced and Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand placed in public spaces around the world, Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago directly been discussed within the context of Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar the students who constructed it and the various influences that determined its aesthetic form  Art & Collection Group Ltd. and symbolic meaning. 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, The thoughts of artists Zhang Peili and Jin Taipei, Taiwan 104 Jiangbo are presented in separate conversations. Phone: (886)2.2560.2220; Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 Although they represent different generations, E-mail: [email protected] each brings into consideration the impact of new media on art within the context of contemporary    Leap Creative Group China. Jin Jiangbo’s conversation is preceded by an introduction to his art and a selection of images   Raymond Mah art Director Gavin Chow from one of his most recent photographic projects, designer Philip Wong which records the impact of the economic downturn on the manufacturing industry in China. webmaster Website ARTCO, Taipei

 Chong-yuan Image Ltd., Taipei Finally, we have three features on artists Conroy/Sanderson, Wu Gaozhong, and Jin  - Feng. These artists are perhaps less well known but, through the nurturing of three distinctly Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited in different sensibilities, they are making important Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, March, contributions to contemporary art. May, July, September, and November.

All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may Keith Wallace be sent to:

Yishu Office 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 Phone: 1.604.649.8187; Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.yishujournal.com

YISHU EDITIONS Subscription rates: Now available. Four limited-edition prints by 1 year (six issues): $84 USD (includes $24 for airmail postage); some of the most important Chinese artists. in Asia $78 USD (includes $18 for airmail postage). 2 years (twelve issues): $158 USD (includes $48 for airmail Please see inside back cover for images and postage); in Asia $146 USD (including $36 for airmail postage). contact information. No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher.

Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版‧第8卷第2期‧2009年3 - 4月

典藏國際版創刊於 2002年5月1日 2 編者手記社長：簡秀枝作者小傳總策劃：鄭勝天 4 創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）

主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 6 視覺政治學：另一個王廣義副編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 黃專史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 編輯助理：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li) 25 蕭魯：生活和藝術的合流 Jonathan Goodman 行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 網站編輯：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li) 廣告：林素珍 33 縈繞不散：重讀民主女神岳鴻飛 (Robin Peckham) 顧問：王嘉驥安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 43 絕望之美：方力鈞的新作巫鴻王藹霖（Aileen June Wang) 林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 范迪安招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 50 無序的常兆：與張培力的對話洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) Paul Gladston 侯瀚如徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 59 經濟大撤退：中國都市的新圖像姜苦樂 (John Clark) 鄭勝天姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 倪再沁 65 新媒體藝術中的現代中國圖景— 高名潞費大爲方曉風、陳岸瑛、肇文兵與楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 藝術家金江波的訪談盧杰 Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor 72 Conroy / Sanderson：一不頂倆 Katie Hill Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda 86 吳高鐘：貼膚的憶境 Maya Kóvskaya 出版：典藏雜誌社台灣臺北市中山北路一段85號6樓電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 97 金鋒：藝術是一種生活方式— 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 2003年以來的個案研究電子信箱：[email protected] Biljana Ciric 編輯部： Yishu Office 200-1311 Howe Street, 中英人名對照 Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 106 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 傳真：(1) 604.591.6392 電子信箱: [email protected]

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3 Contributors

Chen Anying is Associate Professor of Art Paul Gladston is Senior Lecturer in Theory and Aesthetics at the Academy of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies and Arts & Design, Tsinghua University, Beijing. Director of the Institute of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Biljana Ciric has an M.A. from East China Nottingham, Ningbo, China. He studied Normal University, Shanghai. She was fine art at Edinburgh College of Art and Yale Director of the Shanghai Duolun Museum University before receiving an M.A. and a of Modern Art Curatorial Department Ph.D. in Critical Theory from the University and Net-Working Curator (China) for the of Nottingham. His recent publications Singapore Biennale 2006. Her ongoing include Art History After Deconstruction Migration Addicts project was presented at (2005) and “Sublime Ruins—Monumental the Venice Biennale 2007 Collateral Events Follies: The Photo(historio)graphy of and the Shen Zhen/Hong Kong Bi-city Erasmus Schroeter,” in Post-Conflict Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture. Cultures: Rituals of Representation (2006). An independent curator based in Shanghai, she is also Artistic Director of Ke Center Jonathan Goodman studied literature at of Contemporary Arts and the executive Columbia University and the University of curator for the Intrude Public Art Project, Pennsylvania before becoming an art writer presented by Zendai MoMA. In addition, she specializing in contemporary Chinese art. is a regular contributor to several Chinese He teaches at Pratt Institute and the Parsons and international art publications including School of Design, focusing on art criticism Yishu, Flash Art, and Broadsheet. and contemporary culture.

Fang Xiao-feng is Associate Professor at Huang Zhuan received his M.A. in the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua Chinese Art History from Hubei Academy University, and Chief Editor of Zhuang-Shi. of Fine Arts in 1988. He is currently Fang received his doctoral degree from Associate Professor and M.A. advisor at the School of Architecture, Tsinghua the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts University, in 2002. He is also an architect, and Director of OCT Contemporary Art having designed the Leifeng Pagoda on the Terminal and He Xiangning Art Museum. banks of the West Lake, Hangzhou. Fang has Huang has curated numerous exhibitions, also written several books on architecture including the First Guangzhou Biennial and design. (1992), the 3rd Asia-Pacific Triennial (1999), the 2nd and 4th Shenzhen Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition (1999, 2001), and the 1st Guangzhou Triennial (2002).

4 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky holds the and contemporary perspectives, as well as O. Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at Bard artists of the Chinese diaspora. Wang is co- College. She has published several books on curator of two upcoming exhibitions on subjects such as the art of the Tang contemporary Chinese art in the New York dynasty and Chinese Buddhist art and has area, How Chinese: Expanding the Discourse served as Editor of Journal of Chinese of Chinese Contemporary Art at the Chinese- Religions. She has written for many catalogues American Arts Council (May 2009), and New and has curated several shows on Tales for Our Age at the Visual Arts Center contemporary Asian art. of New Jersey (December 2009).

Maya Kóvskaya, a Beijing-based art critic and Zhao Wenbing is a Ph.D. candidate in curator, has curated numerous exhibitions, history of art and design at the Tsinghua including China Under Construction II for University, Beijing. the Fotofest Photography Biennial and China On The Road (Brussels, 2008). Her writing Zheng Shengtian, Managing Editor of Yishu, has appeared in numerous art catalogues, is a scholar, artist, and independent curator. academic volumes, and magazines, including For more than thirty years, he worked at Flash Art, Contemporary, Art Post, Art iT, Art China Academy of Art as Professor and Map, Eyemazing: International Contemporary Chair of the Oil Painting Department. He is Photography Magazine, and positions: east asia a founding board member of the Vancouver cultures critique. International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and a trustee of Long March Foundation. Robin Peckham is a Beijing-based writer He has been a member of the Academic researching the structural history of art Committee for the Shanghai Biennale since systems in the greater Chinese world. He is 1998 and was a co-curator of the 4th Shanghai also a director of Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing. Biennale (2004). He has organized numerous exhibitions, including the recent exhibition Aileen June Wang, Ph.D., is an adjunct Art and China’s Revolution at Asia Society professor at Rutgers, The State University of and Museum, New York. He contributes New Jersey and The College of New Jersey. frequently to periodicals and catalogues about She has specialized and published in the contemporary Chinese and Asian art. field of Italian Renaissance art, and worked at Christie’s New York. Her current research interests include Chinese artists whose work simultaneously engages classical traditional

5 Huang Zhuan Visual Political Science: Another Wang Guangyi

ang Guangyi has always held a special position in contemporary Chinese art, one that stems from his inherently contradictory nature. Though his Great Criticism Wartworks will never again provide us with the visual shock that they did in the early 1990s, we cannot deny that these images—or, more accurately, his handling of these images—once precisely expressed the contradictory experiences we were having at the time: from indescribable belief to angry deconstruction, from the mettle of heroism to the fashionable pandering of consumerism, from grave criticism of international political relations to nationalist catharsis. He reveled in continuously creating visual suspense, but before we had time to guess the answer to the riddle, he would destroy it. In terms of art history, he counts as an artist who is full of power yet remains unfathomable.

The Misread Great Criticism From art criticism to mass media, from art history to the art market, Wang Guangyi has always been seen as a poster boy for Chinese pop art. This classification can be traced back to the First Guangzhou Biennial, Oil Painting of the Nineties, held in 1992. At that exhibition, he won the highest academic award, the Document Award, from Chinese art critics for his Great Criticism artworks. The award comments read:

In Great Criticism, familiar historical forms have been deftly linked to what were once irreconcilable popular contemporary icons, sending a hopelessly tangled metaphysical problem into suspension. With the language of pop art, the artist has opened up a contemporary problem: so called history is a linguistic prompt that connects with contemporary life; Great Criticism is one of the best examples of such a linguistic prompt to arise in the early nineties.1

While this was a somewhat sketchy appraisal, it was following the After ’89 New Chinese Art Exhibition held in Hong Kong in 1993 that the title “political pop” was unequivocally bestowed upon the Great Criticism series. Li Xianting, who coined the term political pop, describes it thus:

Since 1989, many representative figures of the ’85 New Wave Movement successively discarded their metaphysical stances, and, without consulting each other, all started to walk the path of pop, most of them deconstructing the most influential subjects and political events in China in a humorous manner.2

He believed that for the then-current Chinese deconstructionist culture, political pop was identical to “cynical realism,” except that the former found its inspiration from “reality within the broader social and cultural frame,” and the latter “more from an experience of the reality pertaining to the self and its immediate surroundings.”3 Wang Guangyi’s 1989 Mao Zedong and 1990 Great Criticism series came to be seen as the representative works for this style of painting.

6 In 1992, Western art magazines such as Flash Art and Art News gave prominent coverage to Great Criticism, which led to Wang’s inclusion in the Cocart International Art Invitational held in Italy and the 45th Venice Biennale. Since then, political pop as represented by Great Criticism not only became the main reference point through which Westerners came to know contemporary Chinese art, but also became the main critical field through which to judge the success or failure of Wang Guangyi’s art. Critics felt that “this artwork, in terms of art, is just a low value double copy,” reflecting the notion that “as China passes its political peak and moves towards its economic peak, the impetuous creative state of artists is the illness of the period where our history develops into a commercial society.”4 Another criticism was that political pop pandered to America’s Cold War strategic need to suppress China.5 Thus, Great Criticism became famous because of its affiliation with political pop, but it inevitably paid the price of such fame through a misreading based upon an old methodology.

One could venture that this classification and critique of Great Criticism mostly results from displacing Wang Guangyi from the developmental logic of his own art history, as well as removing him from the specific context of modern Chinese art. In an article discussing the cultural development and emergence of Chinese pop art, I proposed that:

The pop art that arose in postwar America had two backgrounds, one in cultural history and one in art history. The former refers to the nourishment it gained from the mass popularization and utilitarian aesthetic pedigree of American culture, and was also a physical reaction to the fragmented, superficial, and sensory consumer culture that emerged after World War II. The latter refers to the refutation of elitist strains of modernism such as abstract expressionism. Warhol’s visit to China in the early 1980s, and, more importantly, Robert Rauschenberg’s solo exhibitions in Beijing and Lhasa in 1985, kicked off the spread of American pop ideas in China. This moment just happened to arrive at the peak of China’s ’85 [New Wave Movement], which was marked by themes of enlightenment and rebellion. It was this set of circumstances that produced such a bizarre shortfall in meaning: pop was lackadaisically understood to be a Dada-style destructive kind of art, and its deconstructionist underpinnings were poorly understood. For political reasons, Chinese society quickly completed its transformation from an enlightened culture to a consumer culture in the early 1990s, and Chinese artists, still stuck in a tragic mood by the failure of cultural enlightenment suddenly realized that they were buried in a completely unfamiliar economic world. The loss of ideals and the death of the critical identity left their thoughts in a chaotic mixture of modernist enlightenment construction and postmodernist deconstructionist concepts, which made pop a natural stylistic choice for the period. Of course, this choice was based on a clear misunderstanding of pop: it was both seen as a weapon of critique and used as a tool for deconstruction.

Early Chinese pop art clearly contained mutations that were wholly different from Western pop ideas. First, the appropriation of readymade images was “historicized” and definitely not limited to that which was “current.” This differed markedly from the “random” or “neutral” image selection method in the West. Second, the linguistic strategy of “removal of meaning” was replaced by an attitude of rearranging meaning as a result of the abovementioned appropriation method. This formed the most bizarre and contradictory semantic and cultural traits in Chinese pop art: it deconstructed the original images by reconstructing the meaning of the image, and it removed the cultural burden through a culturally

7 Wang Guangyi, Solidified Arctic Region, 1985, oil on canvas, 150 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

critical attitude. It was because Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism rearranged the highly different images of Chinese political history and Western consumer history that [his work] produced a new form of critical power.6

Obviously, without acknowledging the dual nature of the cultural qualities in Chinese pop art and seeing it only and simply as a direct product of Western modernism, it would be difficult to make faithful judgments about its logical relationship to the cultural enlightenment and social criticism of the 1980s.

For a time, in the early 1980s, Wang Guangyi was a utopian, believing that a healthy, rational, and strong civilization could save a culture that had lost its beliefs. His early artistic activities with the Northern Art Group, and his early series Solidified Arctic Region, displayed a passionate and delusional pursuit of culture that was marked by order, succinctness, and coldness. This idealized approach was quickly replaced by a strongly analytical form of image making, and in his Post-Classical series, which he began in 1987, he discarded his humanist sentiments and used a method of revising the images of Western art history to carry out his project of “cultural analysis” and “schematic critique.” If we say that in Black Rationality and Red Rationality, the subject of analysis was still limited to classical art and literature, then it was with Mao Zedong AO that he first began using political images as material for analysis. Maybe we shouldn’t take too much stock in this term analysis, because the marks and letters Wang Guangyi applied to the surface of the leader’s image were not truly the result of analysis, nor did they indicate any political standpoints or attitudes. They had only one function: to break away from the established expectations of significance and aesthetic judgment that people had towards these kinds of political images.

In 1989, Wang Guangyi classified the images, concepts and methods that he produced during this period as a “clearing out of humanist passions.”7 We can understand this as a desire to maintain tension between abstract and hollow humanist passions and a cold, rational attitude critical of socialist realism. It should be pointed out that during this period, whether he used classical art

8 Wang Guangyi, Red Rationality: Revision of the Idols, 1987, oil on canvas, 120 x 150 x 3 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Wang Guangyi, Mao Zedong AO, 1988, oil on canvas, 120 x 150 x 3 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

and literature, or political images, it was mainly directed at the deficit of meaning created by the universal humanist passions of the ’85 New Wave Movement; he was not taking a “political” stance, and it was wholly unrelated to the pop strategy of deconstructing the meaning of images, even though it made use of readymade images. Wang Guangyi once described his motives behind using political images such as that of Mao Zedong:

I had wanted to provide a basic method for clearing out humanist passions through the creation of Mao Zedong, but when Mao Zedong was exhibited at the China Avant/Garde exhibition, observers multiplied the humanist passions by a hundredfold to imbue Mao Zedong with even more humanist import. . . . Mao

Following page: Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism—Art and Totem, 2007, oil on canvas, 400 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

9 10 11 Zedong touched on the question of politics. Though I was avoiding this question at the time, it really touched on it. But at the time I wanted to use an artistic method to resolve it; a neutral attitude is better, as a neutral attitude is more of an artistic method.8

What should attract our attention here is the way he proposed a “neutral attitude,” because we can see his “neutral attitude” towards politics and ideology in his later art. This neutral attitude is not detachment; instead, it indicates that art can make effective judgments about political events and history only after it has removed specific political standpoints and humanist passions, so that it can naturally present its inherent significance and value. This forms the basic methodology of Wang Guangyi’s “visual political science,” and it is an effective way for us to understand his political nature, which has its roots in his appraisal of classical and contemporary art.

The post-classical period was an important stage in Wang Guangyi’s transition from modernism to more contemporary ideas. This period clearly divided classical art from contemporary art, and he believed that the former included art of the classical period as well as modern art: “They [classical and modern art] draw their meaning from the overarching classical knowledge structure, they are natural arts that are the product of a projection of humanist passion.” What they express are mainly mythological illusions, religious passion, and the common and mundane emotions of the individual. In contrast, contemporary art discards its dependent relationship to “humanist passion” and its quest for the meaning of art; it “enters into a relationship of resolving the problems of art and establishes a logically verifiable linguistic background which uses the past cultural facts as experiential material.”9

What really brought about Wang Guangyi’s transition from being a modern artist to a contemporary artist and gaining recognition in art history was his Great Criticism (1990). It seems that it was here that he finally found a method for creating images that both “used past cultural facts as experience” and was “logically verifiable.” With Great Criticism, he also discarded all efforts towards a complete artistic style and directly collocated two materially different images—Cultural Revolution style political posters and Western consumer advertisements—together in the same picture, a method that seems more like a stylistic gamble, using a contradictory attitude to narrate the empty state that culture faced in the bizarre landscape in which the enlightenment era was replaced by the consumer era. It appears that if we view the politics of Mao Zedong as nothing more than a method of image arrangement, then it was with Great Criticism that the politics truly became the experiential material for logical verification. But this politics differs from the narrow sense of political realities, political events, and political authority in the original meaning of political pop because the collocation of “images” from the materialist age and “signs” from consumer culture is not necessarily present in order to appraise the two, but, instead, to construct an imagined relationship that can be explained in multiple ways. To put it more simply, if Great Criticism deconstructed or criticized something, then what it deconstructed and criticized was merely the mode of political conception that lies within humanist passion; if it created something, perhaps it merely created a neutral image that at the same time could continuously attract attention and ask for explanation. The artist is often pleased by this and has noted:

I think the reason that people remember Great Criticism, even if they don’t like it, the reason they remember it might be linked to the term “non-standpoint.” I didn’t used to know this word: it is determined by the “neutral standpoint.” Everyone thought I was “criticizing” something, that I had a clear standpoint, but they slowly realized that I hadn’t really done anything. Perhaps Big Criticism drew its meaning from all of these

12 serendipitous reasons. Later I happened upon a conversation with a philosopher, and he said that in philosophy this attitude was called the “non-standpoint.”10

The non-standpoint does not insinuate not having a standpoint, but suggests a repudiation of set modes of thought and biases, using instead a kind of neutral relationship to make the object present a more varied and open potential. Zhao Tingyang, the philosopher friend whom Wang Guangyi just mentioned in the preceding quote, describes the non-standpoint thus:

The non-standpoint says that every standpoint has its useful place, so different standpoints are used in different places, and no standpoint is denied. That is to say, the non-standpoint merely strips away the absolute values or values the priority of any viewpoint . . . . Non-standpoint thinking first resists one’s own biased thinking. Only when one’s own biases are closed off and prevented from becoming the basis of evidence can he see others, hear others, and understand others.11

Perhaps we can trust in art critic Yan Shanchun’s psychoanalysis of Great Criticism:

Wang Guangyi ingeniously grasped the tension between Warhol’s “ease of understanding” and Beuys’ “abstruse.” I think that this kind of artistic taste is most suited to his personality: agile and adaptive like the monkey—Warhol’s “acceptance with pleasure,” and fierce as a tiger Beuys’ “merciless criticism.” To place these mutually contradictory art images together is just the kind of “humor” that he created for contemporary art.12

Another art critic, following the same lines, proposed that the works from this period manifested “the idea of bringing Gombrich’s image form revisionism together with Derrida’s deconstructionism.”13 These are all logical considerations to take into account in our observations of Wang Guangyi’s “visual political science.”

Dangerous Premonition In March 1989, having returned to Zhujiang after taking part in the China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing that February, it seems that Wang Guangyi was not consumed by the excitement of the exhibition’s success; instead, he busied himself with the creation of his first installation piece, Inflammable and Explosive Materials (1989). The materials for this piece were extremely simple,

Wang Guangyi, Inflammable and Explosive Materials (detail), 1989, installation. Courtesy of the artist.

13 14 consisting of strips that resembled pieces of gunpowder bags and some nonsense letters, enough to lead to associations with his Post-Classical works. Later on, I jokingly said that it was a true piece of “poor art,” because it was just like his then impoverished living conditions. The critics had different explanations of this artwork, but they all viewed it as a turning point. Yan Shanchun believed that it was a “relatively rough mutation of Beuys’ art,”14 and that its significance was comparable to the significance that Gertrude Stein and Girls from Arles had for Picasso.15 Lü Peng made the following reading of Inflammable and Explosive Materials:

It brings to mind the “clearing out of humanist passion” that the artist recently spoke of . . . . The topic the artist is facing is how latent drives (which include highly complex spiritual content, including no shortage of extremely personal stuff) can be effectively controlled, so that the appearance of signs is not laden with people’s clear extensions of meaning. Unlike some of the previous painted series, Inflammable and Explosive Materials appears to have no clear extension of any image forms from art or cultural history, which has made it harder to assess. Perhaps it is the artist’s sensitivity towards the future, but the implications of the artwork became quite easy to assess a half-year later. This series was begun in March 1989, and no matter how much chaos, restiveness, unsettledness, crisis, and opportunity was confusingly intertwined from the second half of 1988 to early 1989, Inflammable and Explosive Materials was perplexing and hard to explain. It was a “riddle,” and it disintegrated right at the point where its meaning began. That is to say that just as the artist was cutting into reality, he dissolved the problems of reality. So from the beginning, people will feel that the traces of pop had faded. It was the change in reality that provided people with a new context for assessing the work. There was a change in circumstances, and Inflammable and Explosive Materials was moved to a position that retracted and exposed its original meaning. In the end, the “blind spots” virtually disappeared, and the symbolic meaning of the work emerged.16

Maybe it is only people who actually experienced that period in history who can have a feeling for the sense of crisis and indescribability of that time. It was all-encompassing and specific; it was a composite crisis of reality composed of China’s culture, economy, politics, society, psychology, and belief. Those might have been the circumstances that led to the creation of Inflammable and Explosive Materials, but it is quite apparent that the artist wasn’t hoping to express this crisis of the experiential world, nor was he directly expressing some political opinion. What he applied to this crisis seems to have been a kind of analytical stance: placing within his artistic logic for observation, the logic that “dissolved the problems of reality as it cut into reality.” In the solemnity of this political topic we can see Beuys’ misanthropy, and in the neutrality towards these topics we can see Warhol’s cynicism. Surely, in dealing with crisis, he is accustomed to presenting it using the premonition method of Inflammable and Explosive Materials and doesn’t wish to attach any kind of actual realistic meaning: to prevent people from having specific readings and linear conceptions of the meaning of crisis is to allow them to have a more multifaceted understanding towards crisis.

If there is really any kind of transitional significance to that piece, it is that not only will we be able to understand the pop methodology and real motives behind Great Criticism that appeared the following year, but, more importantly, it is that we will be better able to assess the methodological value of the more political topics he would approach later on in the 1990s.

Opposite page: Wang Guangyi, The Temperature Comparison Between China and America, 1990, gypsum, Loess, wires (later displayed as a photograph of objects). Courtesy of the artist.

15 Wang Guangyi, Visa, 1994, artificial fur, silkscreen, wood boxes, 120 x 80 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Researching the System 1990 was a watershed year for Wang Guangyi’s art. It was in this year that he moved to Wuhan, and not only did he begin work on Great Criticism, but he also created a well-known installation work, The Temperature Comparison Between China and America. In a sense, it was this among other artworks that truly brought Wang Guangyi’s art into line with real political thought, because it was here that specific ideological themes began to replace historical and political signs as the focus of his visual analytical work.

Temperature is a neutral term with multiple meanings, and Wang Guangyi once joked that perhaps it was the heat of Wuhan that inspired him to produce The Temperature Comparison Between China and America. In fact, temperature and climate often take on political meanings in our lives, such as with the “spring of reform” or the “Cold War,” and it is just this kind of ideological discourse that constructs our imaginary context and often leads us to consciously or unconsciously ignore and halt our pondering of the complex and ruthless mechanism of control that lies behind it. Perhaps the use of “temperature” in these two works is to prompt us to think about a fundamental reality: temperature often functions in the political narrative. We can see in these works a moderate transition from Inflammable and Explosive Materials toward a concrete observation of the ideological system. The problems these artworks raise and the methods the artist used are identical to those of Great Criticism. Though they don’t have the same potential for widespread dissemination and multifaceted interpretation as Great Criticism, which used clear political images and consumer signs, they also avoided an unnecessary misreading.

After 1993, Wang Guangyi successively created a series of installations with titles such as Eastern European Landscape, Visa, Drugs, Blood Test, Similarities and Differences Between Concepts of Food Quality Management in Two Different Political Systems, Source of the Species, A History of European Civilization, and Basic Education. In these works, he transferred the sense of crisis from Inflammable and Explosive Materials into the realms of international politics, psychology, and sociology (during this time he also made a number of canvas works with the same themes, such as Necessary Handshake, Necessary Ceremony, Necessary Meeting, and Entry Visa). There was a very

16 Wang Guangyi, Eastern European Landscape, 1992, artificial fur, silkscreen, wood boxes, 90 x 50 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

pragmatic reason behind the formation of these works. After the 45th Venice Biennale, Chinese artists had the opportunity to compete with international contemporary artists on the same stage. While most Chinese artists at home and abroad were busying themselves employing traditional cultural signs to affirm their cultural identity, Wang Guangyi began instead to observe the ideological systems in international politics. He described his work during this period as “turning internal problems into external problems.” There are two levels of meaning to this: one, extending artistic problems into the fields of political and social problems; two, extending domestic problems into the international arena. He raised this issue in a statement about Visa:

Visa comes from the “national image” that is present at the visa offices of each country’s embassy. In this sense, the visa places everyone in the shadows of the power issue between states. Here, everyone becomes the investigated. Perhaps in contemporary civilization and society, among all of the applications one makes in his life, the visa is the most “ideological” in nature. Everything that is shaped by ideology, such as man’s emotions, beliefs, and national identity, finds embodiment in the visa.17

In the visa process, which we are all accustomed to and accept as normal, Wang Guangyi has seen the “shadows” of the investigators representing state power. In the same way, in Blood Test, he has seen in the blood testing process the “investigative relationship towards individual life” of the national medical system; in Similarities and Differences Between Concepts of Food Quality Management in Two Different Political Systems, he has seen the essence of the power of control exercised over people’s lives by the food management system; in Basic Education, he has seen the terrible logic within the similar war preparedness education programs enacted in countries on both sides of the Cold War. And these are all from a methodology of “symptomatic reading” of the “loopholes” in the ideological script. In 1995, I made the following reading into those works:

Visa and Eastern European Landscape touch on international themes, and they are related and synchronized with the state of political culture for the

17 “non-mainstream culture,” “spread of ideology,” “anti-marginalization,” and “postcolonial culture” on a global scale. Wang Guangyi may already be aware that to simply call his previous work “political pop” would doubtlessly face him with a value judgment crisis: it would place all contemporary Chinese art experimentation into the narrow, Cold War-like and marginalized “Chinese discourse,” or, at best, the “Eastern discourse.” This would break off and suffocate the most challenging segment of contemporary Chinese art—that which turns Chinese problems into global problems. The story that Visa and Eastern European Landscape tell is about states and politics, but it is no longer cynical, closed, or Cold War-like, but a story that is open and has meaning for all of mankind. These works also display some of the artist’s work process attributes: the directness of signs, courage, and resourcefulness in managing tensions between materials.18

Though these artworks were featured in all levels and types of international exhibitions, perhaps owing to the sensitivity of their theme or limitations of the domestic environment, these “system research” works were not exhibited in China until the 1997 First Contemporary Art Academic Invitational held in Beijing. It was with this exhibition that Wang Guangyi began applying his “system research” to local social practice (although the works were never seen by the audience because the exhibition was banned by officials). His original proposal for the exhibition was entitled Anyone Could Be a Disease Carrier. In the proposal, he wrote:

. . . this work tells the story of how the ancient and serious theme of “others and hell” has been quickly vulgarized in contemporary society. Today, a kind of universal spirit of suspicion has become a kind of “civilized fashion” accepted by all. When we place this spirit of suspicion into the contemporary context, we have plenty of reasons to feel that everyone is suspect, so in this “vulgarized psychological story,” we have all unconsciously become the catalysts of this “civilized fashion.”19

This project was an extension of Blood Test. It expanded the criticism of the medical system’s power to engage in control of the body into a decoding of the entire society controlling the system, revealing the paradoxical relationship and psychological reality of controller and controlled mutually controlling each other in contemporary civilization, a concept that reaches similar conclusions in Foucault’s theoretical analysis of “the body tamed.”20 The work that Wang Guangyi actually prepared for the exhibition was an installation titled Quarantine—Anyone Could Be a Disease Carrier. He made it with readymade objects such as vegetables, fruits, shelves, and hygiene posters, bringing this particular probing of the system to a much more concrete level: the collaboration between the disease-control system and the hygiene propaganda to attain control over the public. After these, he went on to create a number of similar works such as Hygiene and Quarantine—Any Food Could be Poisonous and The 24 Hour Process of Food Rotting, to explore the shadows cast over our minds by the reality of all kinds of systems within post-Cold War civilization. These works also serve as his transition towards new artistic problems.

In his “system research,” Wang Guangyi engaged a method similar to a pathological reading towards concrete ideological themes and gave his “visual political science” a kind of methodological significance: he would often predetermine a certain ideological theme to attract people’s visual attention but would avoid making superficial values judgments or critiques of them. He would, instead, use strong visual images (such as with Visa and Blood Test) and contextually suggestive mixed media (such as with Similarities and Differences Between Concepts of Food Quality Management in Two Different Political Systems and Hygiene and Quarantine—Any Food Could be Poisonous) to form psychological suggestions, encouraging people to discard direct

18 Wang Guangyi, Age of Materialism, 2000, silkscreen, wood boxes, food, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

readings about the meaning of images and materials and focus their attention on what has been consciously or unconsciously omitted.

The Mythology of Materialism In the late 1990s, China evolved into a society that was a blend of two ideologies: on the one hand, socialist ideology held the basic set of values that controlled the state system and political life, where a complete system of highly spiritual images and symbols maintained the orthodoxy and legitimacy of the materialist mythology; on the other hand, consumer culture controlled the daily lives, especially the economic lives, of the Chinese through the market values of individualism and freedom of choice. At the same time, there is also a system of material symbols and signs in the media, Internet, advertising, and entertainment to establish a mass cultural mythology. This state of control by dual ideologies makes up the basic reality of contemporary Chinese society today.

Using his Age of Materialism as a “trademark,” Wang Guangyi’s art entered into a new depth of inquiry. This artwork used various framed awards from the old ideological era and all kinds of material necessities to show the lasting influence that the material world, the social system, and cultural memory still has over us. The cultural memories of the age of materialism and the banal desires of the age of consumerism were placed into a more complex relationship.

In the works that followed, Materialist, Workers’ Memorial, History of a Newspaper, and East Wind—Golden Dragon, the investigation of the mythological history of materialist ideology became the focus. The artist referred to his work from this period as research into the “socialist visual experience,”21 and he devoted special attention to the image and ritualization processes of the fabricated subject, the “people,” within this mythological history.

On the surface, Age of Materialism would appear to continue the visual forms of Great Criticism— except that the images of people had gone from being flat surfaces to three-dimensional sculptures —but this artwork implies that the dualist logic of politics/consumption and East/West that is present in Great Criticism had begun to be replaced by a more complex relationship. Unlike the pop methodology used in Great Criticism, which brought together materialist age “images” with consumerist age “signs,” Age of Materialism highlighted subjective qualities in images of “the people”:

19 they are both historical and real, self-determined and submissive, both the symbolic body of power and the subject of control. Here, the coexistence of mythological memories and the power of reality show the multifaceted meanings of these classic ideological images. When these sculptures were exhibited at the First Guangzhou Triennial of Contemporary Art, Wang Guangyi gave this self-reading:

In these new “sculpture” works, I was trying to remove the obvious oppositional aspect and take that inherent, somewhat unclear simple power, that is to say, I wanted to reconstruct the power and meaning that those socialist visual elements have. This power and meaning has a direct link to my experience of existence, and it is the same as the most basic things that make up our culture.22

His proposal for the 2001 Fourth Shenzhen Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition was also rooted in his interest in the relationship between the production of socialist ideology and the development of the spirit. The inspiration for the first proposal for Workers’ Memorial (sometimes called Forces of Nature) came from the old prefabricated concrete slabs in the street that had been imprinted with advertisements. The plan was this: to recreate

Wang Guangyi, Workers’ Memorial, 2001, fibre, iron, glass. Courtesy of the artist.

20 twenty slabs of prefab concrete on site that would be imprinted with the names of model workers and dead or injured workers from Overseas Chinese Village in Shenzhen from the past twenty years, then cover the slabs with acrylic, so that each slab would have the significance of an alternative memorial plaque through which to explore and express “some of the things or ‘relationships’ behind a beautiful piece of human scenery.”23 In the Workers’ Memorial that was actually exhibited, he directly copied or appropriated the sculptures from traditional worker’s memorials and placed them in glass cases, giving these icons that are so familiar to the Chinese a kind of estranged or alienated visual effect, alerting people to the implications of focusing anew on these “workers.”

East Wind—Golden Dragon was a work that Wang Guangyi proposed for the National Heritage Exhibition, held in England. This exhibition was about exploring the significance of the cognitive and visual history related to the emergence in recent times of the concept of “nation” in China, and exploring the visual forms and elements (signs, products, ceremonies, space) of the nation’s shift from being a cultural body to a political and spiritual body. The East Wind Golden Dragon was the first automobile designed by the Chinese after the establishment of the People’s Republic. As Mao’s mobile podium, this vehicle also became a symbol of political power. It showed the process of the automobile evolving from an industrial product to a kind of a sign of culture, politics, and consumption. The historical relationship between a sign of political delusion and a sign of consumption, a modern industrial product, was the meaning that East Wind—Golden Dragon set out to explore:

The East Wind Golden Dragon was a product of China’s industrial revolution era dreams. It was hammered out by countless people to be given to Chairman Mao. It was an industrial product that was full of belief and of the last gesture to imperial power. Copying it today in the name of art expresses the conflict between belief and material desire. East Wind Golden Dragon is a material testament to national heritage, and it also shows the relationship between power and the will of the people. “National heritage” happens to cover both of these levels. I will use cast iron to reproduce the East Wind Golden Dragon in full size, giving it a museum feel and allowing it to contain the weight of history—the strong desire of a people to grow up, or the multifaceted nature of desire. Simply put, the East Wind Golden Dragon is a product of belief. In other words, it is in itself a “proposal” for China’s industrial revolution.24

If we are to say that in the 1980s Wang Guangyi was a cultural utopian in the traditional sense and that in the early 1990s he used pop image methodology to dispel the rational mythology of the enlightenment period and replace it with a satirical attitude, then in his Materialism series he used conceptualist methods to document the illusions of heroism that still remain in a thoroughly material society and concealed a more complex cultural utopian sentiment.

Cold War Aesthetic As one of the more challenging contemporary artists in China, Wang Guangyi seems to make a move in every junction of art history: from the “rational painting” of the Solidified Arctic Region series to the analytics of his Post-Classical period; from “clearing out the humanist passions” to Great Criticism; from research of Eastern and Western political systems to reshaping the visual mythology of local materialism. It is in this endless questioning of art history that he has gradually formed a unique “visual political science.” In this political science, instead of saying that the historical and political resources are the matrix for expressing set political concepts, it would be more accurate to say that they are a kind of visual strategy and dialectical wittiness. He has always maintained a careful, neutral attitude towards history and politics and does not make value

21 Wang Guangyi, Cold War Aesthetic—People Living in Fear, 2007, coloured fiberglass, 215 x 60 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

judgments lightly. He allows those highly solemn political topics to maintain a kind of sublimity. On this matter he is very close to Beuys’ attitude towards politics: “he does not care about the art of politics, only about the politics of art.” It is the unity between transcendence and strategy that makes his role in Chinese contemporary art more like that of an historical soothsayer than that of a pure critic. Perhaps it is only because of this that he is considered by critics to be an artist who embodies the qualities of both Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol.

In 2007, Wang Guangyi played another card from his visual political science—Cold War Aesthetic. This ambitious project also made use of dual historical and political resources. With the nationwide civilian military preparedness from the height of the Cold War in the 1960s as the backdrop, it reveals his visual illusions about the real world. The “three defenses” (defending against atomic, chemical, and biological weapons) was a national defense education movement that took place in the 1960s when Sino-Soviet relations were at their worst. It has virtually all of the political traits of the Cold War: a highly specific hypothetical enemy, a high level of ideology, and a high level of pertinence to the entire populace. Compared to the “internal revolution” of the Cultural Revolution that was taking place at the same time, it is marked more by peculiarly international traits. It is clear that just like Great Criticism, with its usage of political image resources, Cold War Aesthetic is not about dredging up our visual memories of this movement but about proving reality. Here is how the artist describes this project:

The Cold War had a brutal side, which was of course imagined. It also had a game side to it. At the same time, it influenced our view of the world. To this day we still look at the world with a Cold War mentality. Today’s political state of affairs is the fruit of seeds planted during the Cold War; it is the same with 9-11, the same with Al-Qaeda. These are all different means of expression from the Cold War.25

Of course, we can’t look too much into this description for the meaning of this work. In fact, perhaps what the artist is really interested in is that the Cold War has provided him with another opportunity to activate his visual and verbal wit. This fits nicely with his artistic personality: letting himself stray far from his own creations and model visual world and allowing this world to expand to a greater degree of meaning through the discussion of others. That is exactly what he calls “aesthetics”:

22 Wang Guangyi, Cold War Aesthetic— People Taking Cover in the Air-Raid Shelters, 2008, coloured fiberglass (six pieces), 415 x 107 x 215 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

As I see it, my art is searching for dually opposed stuff. The Cold War mentality fits with a lot of my own ideas. The Cold War mentality has shaped a lot of my views on the world and art. In this way, we can imagine an enemy, and that enemy is the starting point for all of our behaviour. The flipside is the same. Our enemies will imagine us to be their enemies, and that’s the beauty of this world, in the beauty of this opposition, existing with this oppositional stuff.26

Cold War Aesthetic is marked by the same methodological traits as Great Criticism, Visa, Materialist, and The Face of Belief, except that what is being reproduced is no longer crazy historical images, but historical scenes that are cold to the point of being suffocating. These magnified and solidified scenes are more like a historical catalyst, providing us with a new field of vision for understanding the meaning of life and the world. Perhaps this work Wang Guangyi, Cold War Aesthetic—People has returned to the “external problems” from before but Killing the Virus-Carrying Insects, 2008, coloured fiberglass, projection, 81 x 61 x 106 cm. Courtesy within a wider field of thought. of the artist.

The Cold War is political heritage from the twentieth century that has been left to mankind. It wasn’t a conclusion of history, but a new seed that was planted in human history. The Korean War, the Vietnam War, nuclear testing, China’s Cultural Revolution, the 1968 uprisings across Europe, the Beatles and the Rock movement, the space race—all of these real historical spectacles are not only influencing our psychological orientation and cultural consciousness, they are also influencing the future direction of the world. In this sense, Cold War Aesthetic is a visual prophecy that is being provided to the world’s new history by a Chinese artist.

While this essay was being written, Wang Guangyi encountered a rare individual political crisis. The crisis stemmed from his announcement of withdrawal from a Chinese-themed exhibition to be held at the Marseilles Fine Arts Museum. The announcement was made to express his anger at the disruption of the Beijing Olympic Torch rally in France. This act made him a target of criticism from the Internet mobs. His actions were seen as a “risk-free patriotic show,” and he was seen as

23 a shallow democratist. Though these attacks were far removed from artistic issues and even fell in the range of illogical personal attacks, this crisis showed that in comparison to Wang Guangyi the artist, Wang Guangyi the public figure lacked a “visual political science” with which to face the real world. Just as in the art world, correct political attitudes and viewpoints are no guarantee of a correct outcome. In the end, this world is divided by different interests.

In this essay we have another reading of Wang Guangyi. We don’t know whether this Wang Guangyi—when compared to the Wang Guangyi who has been called the father of Chinese political pop or with the Wang Guangyi who has been shaped by publicity and market mythology—will prove to be closer to the true Wang Guangyi. Perhaps the “real” Wang Guangyi never existed.

Translated by Jeff Crosby

This is a revised version of a text from the catalogue Visual Polity: Another Wang Guangyi, published by Linnan Fine Arts Publishing House (2008) for an exhibition organized by the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal at the He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen.

Notes 1 Lixiang Yu Caozuo: Zhongguo Guangzhou—Shoujie Jiushi Niandai Yishu Shuangnianzhan Youhua Bufen (Ideals and operation: China Guangzhou—First ‘90s Art Biennial, Oil Painting Segment), 1st ed. (Chengdu: Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, October 1992), 104. 2 Li Xianting, “Zhongyao de Bushi Yishu” (The importance isn’t art) (Nanjing: Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House, 2000). 3 Li Xianting, “‘Hou 89’ Yishu zhong de Wuliaogan he Jiegou Yishi—‘Wanshi Xieshi Zhuyi’ yu ‘Zhengzhi Bopu’ Chaoliu Xi” (Feelings of boredom and a deconstructive mentality in ‘After ‘89’ art: Analyzing the trends of ‘Cynical Realism’ and ‘Political Pop’), in Piping de Shidai: 20 Shiji mo Zhongguo Meishu Piping Wencui (A time of criticism: A collection of Chinese art criticism from the late twentieth century), vol. 1 (Guangzhou: Guangzhou Fine Arts Publishing House, December 2003), 386. 4 Duan Lian, “Shiji mo de Yishu Fansi” (Rethinking turn-of-the-century art), 1st ed. (Shanghai: Shanghai Art and Literature Publishing House, May 1998), 142. 5 Ibid., 12. 6 Huang Zhuan, “Wei Guangqing: Yi zhong Lishi hua de Bopu Zhuyi” (Wei Guangqing: An historicized form of Pop), in Zuo Tu You Shi (Interplay of images and history), 1st ed. (Guangzhou: Lingnan Fine Arts Publishing House, November 2007), 1. 7 Wang Guangyi, “Guanyu Qingli Renwen Reqing” (About clearing out the humanist passions), Jiangsu Pictorial 10 (1990). 8 Lü Peng, “Tushi Xiuzheng yu Wenhua Piping” (Image alteration and cultural criticism), in Dangdai Yishu Chaoliu zhong de Wang Guangyi (Wang Guangyi within the trends of contemporary art), 1st ed. (Changdu: Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, October 1992), 36. 9 Wang Guangyi, “Guanyu Qingli Renwen Reqing.” 10 Wang Guangyi and Wu Shanzhuan, “Guanyi Yixie Wangshi de Fangtan” (Guangyi remembers some things from the past), Asia Art Archive, unpublished. 11 Zhao Tingyang, Lun Keneng Shenghuo (Discussing the life possible), 1st ed. (Beijing: China People’s University Publishing House, July 2004), 7, and Meiyou Shijie guan de Shijie (A world without a world view), 1st ed. (Beijing: China People’s University Publishing House, December 2003), 3. 12 Yan Shanchun, “Dangdai Yishu Chaoliu zhong de Wang Guangyi” (Wang Guangyi within the trends of contemporary art), in Dangdai Yishu Chaoliu zhong de Wang Guangyi (Wang Guangyi within the trends of contemporary art), 1st ed. (Chengdu: Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, October 1992), 20. 13 Lü Peng, “Tuxiang Xiuzheng yu Wenhua Piping,” 42. 14 Yan Shanchun, “Dangdai Yishu Chaoliu zhong de Wang Guangyi” (Wang Guangyi within the trends of contemporary art). 15 Ibid., 21. 16 Lü Peng, “Tushi Xiuzheng yu Wenhua Piping,” 40. 17 Wang Guangyi, “Wo Jinqi de Guongzuo Qingkuang” (My recent work situation), Gallery 4 (1994), 64. 18 Ibid. 19 Shoujie Dangdai Yishu Xueshu Yaoqing Zhan (Catalogue for the First Contemporary Art Academic Invitational Exhibition), 1st ed. (Guangzhou: Lingnan Fine Arts Publishing House, December 1996), 122. 20 Michel Foucault, Guixun yu Chengfa (Surveiller et punir), trans. Liu Beicheng and Yang Yuanying (Beijing: Shenghuo-Dushu-Xinzhi Joint Publishing Company,1999), 153. 21 Charles Merewether, “Guanyu Shehui Zhuyi Shijue Jingyan” (About the socialist visual experience), interview with Wang Guangyi in Wang Guangyi (unpublished by HanART Gallery, Hong Kong). 22 “Chongxin Jiedu: Zhongguo Shiyan Yishu Shi Nian” (Reinterpreting: Ten years of Chinese experimental art), Beijing Youth Daily, November 28, 2002. 23 “Bei Yizhi de Xianchang: Di Si Jie Shanzhen Dangdai Diaosu Yishu Zhan” in the exhibition catalogue for Transplanted scenes: Fourth Shenzhen Contemporary Sculpture Art Exhibition (Shenzhen: Shenzhen Museum of Art, 2003), 119. 24 Wang Guangyi, “Dui Huangquan Zuihou de Zhuihou Lizan” (The last gesture to imperial power), unpublished. 25 Excerpted from “Wang Guangyi: Faxian ‘Leng Zhan’ zhi Mei” (Wang Guangyi: Discovering the beauty of the “Cold War”), Guangzhou Daily, December 29, 2002. 26 Ibid.

24 Jonathan Goodman Xiao Lu: The Confluence of Life and Art

lthough she belongs to the avant-garde generation of the 1980s and 1990s that has done well within China and internationally, Xiao Lu is different from many other recognized Aartists. Contradictions abound in her career. Despite having shunned publicity for many years, she is a famous art persona, and is considered a major artist on the basis of a very small body of work. In her installations, performances, and photographs, she insists on art’s connection to life and emphasizes the constrained circumstances of women in China—circumstances that have made her vulnerable as a person despite her heroic actions as an artist. Xiao Lu is famous for having fired two shots in 1989 into her large installation titled Dialogue (1988), a gesture that presented the public with an example of undeniable rebellion. At the same time, however, she was hesitant for a long period to speak about the meaning of her actions; now, as she has matured (and after a long stay in Australia), she has become less diffident, even providing the details of her historic 1989 performance for the popular press.

Yet it cannot be said that Xiao Lu is an outsider; she comes from an influential art family. Her father, Xiao Feng, a well-known painter who studied in Russia in the early 1950s, was first a professor and then, from 1983 to 1996, the president of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art). Her mother, Song Ren, was a professor at the same academy. Xiao Lu was not interested in art when she was young; she comments: “As a child I liked ballet, and if I hadn’t broken my foot at the age of twelve, I might never have started drawing and painting.”1 Xiao Lu goes on to say, “My career started in the passive mode.” Despite her slow beginnings, she would go on to study at excellent schools: from 1979 to 1984, she attended the Middle School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, one of China’s best art schools, and from 1984 to 1988, she was enrolled in the department of oil painting at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, from which she graduated with a B.F.A. degree.

Like many artists who belong to China’s avant-garde, as well as for the international avant-garde since the early years of the twentieth century, Xiao Lu is devoted to blurring the gap between art and life. Asked why she makes art, Xiao Lu is characteristically blunt: “I don’t even know what art is, but I know why I do it. When your heart reacts to some person or emotion, regardless of whether it is good or bad, if you put something intense into it, the experience that you get back will also be intense. The link between myself and my work is not a concept but a true experience of life.” In fact, most of her work corresponds to events in her life, from the famous Dialogue to her most recent, unfinished installation piece, which is the result of a doomed love affair. According to Xiao Lu, Dialogue has to do with “certain vexations and perplexities I had to deal with in puberty.” For this installation, the artist had two telephone booths made; one shows a life-sized, black-and- white photograph of a woman talking into a telephone, with her back to the viewer, while the other presents a man doing the same thing. Linking the two booths is a mirror, before which a telephone with a fallen receiver sits on a pedestal.

25 Xiao Lu, Dialogue, 1989, installation/performance at the China/Avant-garde exhibition, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.

In 1988, Xiao Lu, in a conversation with Song Jianming, a teacher at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, had come to the conclusion that the piece, created as her graduation work at the academy, needed something to offset its careful construction. She writes that Song’s “first impression was that it was too clean, that it needed to be broken somehow. We talked about how to break the mirror and discussed using a gun.” As a result of the conversation, Xiao approached a friend, Sha Yong of the Zhejiang Shooting Team, to borrow a pistol. He agreed to help her, but he didn’t get to the graduate school’s art opening in time for her to shoot the work: as a result, Xiao asserts, “No gunfire was heard in 1988.” But then, a year later, Dialogue was accepted for the exhibition China/ Avant-Garde at the National Art Museum in Beijing. As Xiao writes, “This time I got a gun [from a friend, Li Songsong] and fired it.” Tellingly, what began as a work documenting what the artist calls a “personal emotional clash” took on epic, and public, significance because of the political events of the time. Xiao comments: “For me personally, the gunfire of 1989 was no different from that intended in 1988 . . . . But because the gun was fired in 1989—a critical moment in Chinese history and in the history of art in China—its effect would spread beyond the original work.” In other words, “a deeply individual cause produced an effect which took on social and political dimensions. This was due to an accident in history.”

The curator of China/Avant-Garde, Gao Minglu, has pointed out that the action was a symbolic suicide: Xiao Lu fired twice in rapid succession at the mirror, which reflected her image. According to Xiao Lu, her eventual lover Tang Song, who claimed equal responsibility for the piece, was merely an acquaintance and fellow student at Zhejiang at the time, and the original decision to fire the gun—even in 1989—had nothing to do with him, although he was fascinated by the idea and was by her side at the shooting incident, urging her to do it. Seemingly oblivious to the consequences, Tang Song himself was arrested by police, and later Xiao Lu turned herself in to authorities. The exhibition closed for five days, ostensibly for the Spring Festival. Then, on February 14, the museum and the police department received threatening phone calls, whose

26 caller claimed he would cause an explosion in the gallery if the show went public again. On February 17, the show opened again, only to close two days later. Shortly thereafter, beginning on April 15, the demonstrations for democracy at Tian’anmen Square took place. Even though for Xiao Lu the gunfire of 1989 was identical to that intended in 1988, her extravagant gesture was popularly considered a blow for the democracy movement in China in large part because it so closely preceded the demonstrations. This claim was grafted onto the installation and action by others, rather than the artist herself. (Tang Song had also been invited to submit work of his own to the China/Avant-Garde exhibition, but instead he limited his participation to suggesting a red cloth backdrop to Xiao Lu’s installation [Xiao Lu rejected the proposal] and being present for the shooting. It was in the aftermath of these events, after the two were released from detention, that Tang Song began his own promotion of the political interpretation of Dialogue.)

Taken aback by the journalistic response to her action—Xiao Lu made the front page of several Western newspapers—she decided to go to Australia in December 1989. (She returned to Beijing in 1997.) Earlier, before her trip to Australia, but after the Tian’anmen Square incident, political activists had been arrested in a number of Chinese cities. Tang Song, active as an orator and organizer in Hangzhou, went into hiding in Hangzhou, Guangzhou, and Shanghai. Xiao Lu sought ways to get him out of the country, managing to get a temporary visa to Australia for herself, with a view to being able to help Tang Song get to Australia as well. Shortly after that, he succeeded in making a clandestine passage to Hong Kong, and, impatient with the process of attaining refugee status, eventually stowed away and arrived in Australia in mid 1991. He then spent some months as an illegal alien at the Villawood Detention Centre before being released around Christmas. Meanwhile, Xiao Lu was somehow getting by in Sydney.

Relations between the two declined, in large part because Tang Song would neither marry her nor father her child. The couple remained together in Australia, but when Xiao Lu returned to China and settled in Beijing, she ended the relationship and faced life without many prospects as an artist. This was largely due to her extreme hesitance about making work again. All the attention had the effect of disorienting her, and she did not make work for more than a decade. Asked about her lapse into inactivity, Xiao Lu replies, “It is very hard to explain briefly why I stopped producing artworks, just as it is very hard for me to explain in a word why I didn’t speak out after firing the gun in 1989.” Yet she sees her stay in Australia as essentially a private struggle, fostered by what she calls “the demon in my heart.” Her conflict is rooted in her integrity, which derives from her willingness to take on her “demon.” She writes, “My actions were controlled by an intangible force. The truth of life and the truth of art formed a whole which was impossible to separate . . . . When I couldn’t face myself, I made art, and when I couldn’t face society, I fell silent. When I could neither face myself nor society, I did nothing at all.” Although some may see Xiao’s silence as a fault, her statements support the notion that she did what she has always done—proceed according to the feelings that led her.

As for Xiao Lu’s Dialogue, the installation languished in storage in Beijing until the fall of 2006; on November 22 of that year, the China Guardian Auction Company held a special auction entitled Twenty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art, which included Dialogue. In honour of the piece, curator Gao Minglu, Xiao Lu’s friend and supporter, wrote an article entitled “The Sound of Gunshots—Half a Lifetime of Dialogue.” Dialogue sold for 2,310,000 yuan, or, more than 300,000 USD. After checking all the documents on the Web and all the publications about Xiao Lu’s case, the lawyer representing the Guardian Auction Company regarded Dialogue as Xiao Lu’s work rather than Tang Song’s, despite the claims of the latter that he was a co-author of the installation.

27 Xiao Lu, 15 Gunshots . . . from 1989 to 2003, 15 black-and-white photographs, 100 x 45 cm each. Courtesy of the artist.

For all her autonomy and independence, Xiao Lu also believes in the truth of a specifically female identity, one that embraces the supposedly feminine, and, Chinese, virtues of modesty and restraint. She believes in female intuition and relies on it as the source of her creativity, yet her emotional affiliations are complicated. The scenario concerning Dialogue outlined above might sound like a soap opera, but the implications of Xiao Lu’s act may be most powerful when they are considered in light of feminism: Xiao Lu’s refusal to be “nice,” as we can tell from the aggression enacted through the two shots fired at Dialogue, may be categorized as an action of willfulness. It would be easy to cast her in a feminist role, yet Xiao Lu denies feminism’s effect on her and on society in general. She comments, “Feminist art has not yet formed a movement in China; it is still in a marginal condition. The situation of female artists in China is, speaking about my personal case, a major factor in the misreading of works. This is because the right to speak about art in China is mainly controlled by men, and judgment about the value of art created by women, and the explanation of art created by women is still largely in the hands of men.” This sounds very much like a feminist statement, but by comprehending it in this way only, we deny the personal element, which is central to Xiao Lu’s artistic practice. Xiao Lu’s art always originates in private experience rather than in public events.

“If,” the artist writes, “we look at work created by women as a whole, it is often in a state of having lost its voice. Add to this the characteristic cultural upbringing of women in China—‘Be gentle, good, respectful, restrained, and submissive’—with the household as your foundation and your husband as your glory, and you find that you have to support a ‘good’ family and maintain a low profile in public and in private.” Xiao Lu finishes her point, however, with a statement that is true biographically as well socially and politically: “When strong women show a little independent awareness, they mostly end up single.” Given the fact that the artist herself is single, it is hard to see the comment as a social statement alone. Interestingly, Xiao Lu argues for a gendered imagination, believing that women should be the ones to address female concerns: “The sensitivity and intuition characteristics of women are lacking in men. Any artistic or literary talent characteristic of women must rely on female consciousness to come to fruition.” Asserting that “in China, there is as yet no feminist movement in any true sense,” Xiao Lu goes on to delineate her position vis-à-vis the struggle between the sexes: “In my opinion, relations between men and women are not based in mutual submission, but in mutual understanding. Antagonism is for the sake of dialogue, and a true liberation of women in China . . . should be founded in mutual respect between men and women.”

28 So, despite her act of violence, which tellingly only hurt her ability to continue working, Xiao Lu chooses to emphasize “mutual understanding” as central to improving relations between the sexes. At the same time, however, she contributes to the notion that she is a victim by continuing to make work involving her troubled personal life. Her photographic series entitled 15 Gunshots . . . from 1989 to 2003 consists of photographic life-sized self-portraits in which the artist points a gun at the viewer. Each image is covered by a sheet of Plexiglas that Xiao Lu has fired at, leaving a small hole in the material. (Xiao Lu went to a military base to shoot the individual images.) As the title suggests, Xiao has remained involved with not only the meaning, but also the actions of Dialogue. Once again we see the artist recapitulate her decisive choice, although she makes it clear that the new piece is both about firing the gun and the sterility of Xiao Lu’s relationship with Tang Song. Describing 15 Shots, Xiao Lu states, “Fifteen years ago, I fired the gun in the National Art Museum of China. When I walked out of the detention center in Dong Cheng District, Beijing, I was drawn to him [Tang Song] by an invisible power that pulled us through for fifteen years. Today, I aimed the crosshair again, only this time at myself. One shot for each year, fifteen shots in a row. We are over.”

The 1960s saying that “the personal is political” has had a long and rather controversial life in the actions of artists in the West, even recently, when artists have concentrated on the attributes of their identity—their ethnicity, race, or sexual preference. Now, with Xiao Lu’s aesthetic, and public, repudiation of her former lover, it seems that the artist herself is making good on the statement, working outward from her experience toward a striking public action. Unfortunately, the shots are once again self-directed, demonstrating Xiao’s difficulty in remaining true to herself and not being self-destructive, especially when facing the consequences of a failed relationship. Her assertions prove that she is driven by emotions rather than by ideas: “I’m not good at theoretical explanations, let alone making art critique. I just want to live up to my feelings. The means of art serves only to satisfy my inner desire, no matter whether it demands a painting, a poem, or a gun. All in all, it boils down to my mood at that particular moment.” Both Dialogue and 15 Shots, like Xiao Lu’s art generally, “cannot be interpreted by the term ‘art’.” Given Xiao Lu’s highly personal, idiosyncratic outlook, art is made as a result of “a survival instinct.” She ends her expressive statement with a comment not on what art can do but rather what experience means to her; she writes that creation “is what life is all about.”

29 Xiao Lu, Sperm, 2006, installation/performance. Courtesy of the artist.

Xiao Lu/Wen Zai, X . . ., 2007–ongoing, unfinished installation, music by Wen Zai. Courtesy of the artist.

Xiao Lu/Wen Zai, X . . . (detail), 2007–ongoing, unfinished installation, music by Wen Zai. Courtesy of the artist.

30 All this rhetoric might strike some as burdensome, but Xiao Lu also possesses a sense of humour, which saves her from an excessively grim attitude. Sperm, the installation/performance that took place at the Kangda Hotel in Yan’an in May 2006, addressed the more than forty artists and several dozen experts and scholars who came together to study, debate, and create exhibition proposals in a project that examined the Long March of Mao and his followers. (Lu Jie, founder of the Long March Foundation, was the curator of the project.) Xiao Lu came along for the three-day forum, with the specific goal of getting pregnant. Armed with a temperature- control machine, twelve bottles in which to place sperm, and a rack to hold the bottles, the artist interpreted literally Mao’s dictum that “the Long March is a sower of seeds.” Xiao Lu sees pregnancy as biological, resulting in what she calls the “essence,” which is engendered when a male sperm and female egg meet; as emotional, when a male and female mind meet and create “spirit”; and as a way of life, when essence, energy, and spirit come together in harmony. In her commentary, she describes herself as seeking all three, but sadly there were obstacles: “No time, too old, no luck.”

Faced with an inharmonious situation, Xiao Lu retreated, choosing only “essence” as her goal. Sperm was required. Her performance consisted of setting up the machine and the deposit jars in a lounge adjacent to the meeting. All male visitors, symposium participants and visitors alike (there was no age limit), were asked to participate in the project, which required that the sperm be deposited in the collection jars and then returned to the refrigerator (to keep the sperm from degrading, they must be frozen). For her part, Xiao would undergo artificial insemination during her fertile period each month, using the sperm that had been collected. The first attempt to collect sperm failed: no one volunteered to deposit it. But Xiao Lu clearly intends to repeat her performance again. She recorded her effort with a wonderful photograph, taken during the meeting, in which she stands demurely surrounded by the paraphernalia necessitated by her request. Asked to explain the event, Xiao Lu produces a number of insights regarding love: “There are a myriad different kinds of love between people. For me, love is the affirmation and appreciation by one person of the value of the existence of a certain other person. It is premised on desire but goes beyond desire itself.” Feeling as she did that her time, age, and luck were “insufficient” to achieve the differing categories of pregnancy, she chose essence—yet no child resulted from her tragicomic efforts.

Without a child, Xiao Lu sees her life as unfulfilled. Yet she continues in her artistic pursuit of meaningful encounters. In her most recent piece, begun in New York in 2006, unfinished and not yet titled, she addresses the emotional consequences of a brief love affair with a Westerner. The partial progress of the installation indicates that the artist is taking a step forward; its complexity, its verve, and its anguish show that the artist, now in her mid-forties, continues to develop. The piece’s large elements may be seen in Xiao Lu’s studio. They consist of a very large metal construction in the form of an X; in its crux are apples that have been allowed to rot. On either side of the giant letter (which according to Xiao Lu stands for the x, or male, chromosome) are paintings made with Chinese medicinal herbs; these works include writings taken from Xiao Lu’s and a friend’s email correspondence. Beautifully painted, the English words and Chinese characters encompass a brief relationship that nonetheless has been highly meaningful to the artist. In some ways the most important part of the work is its aural element; asked to demonstrate his own feelings, the Westerner, a musician, poured his emotion into a composition recorded on a CD, in which he played variations on Beethoven—the piano part of the scherzo of the A-major Sonata for Cello and Piano, opus 69. Accompanying the classical music are electronically generated heartbeats and gasps or, possibly, moans and cries.

31 As he passionately expresses himself on the piano, the gasps, indicative to Xiao Lu’s audience of lovemaking, slowly grow louder in the background of the music. The feelings indicated by the sound sculpture demonstrate an equality that supported the complex relationship—a relationship very different from the one she had with her previous boyfriend, Tang.

Like many independently minded artists, Xiao Lu is a creature of contradictions; she cannot be categorized. Yet, upon study, her seeming inconsistencies stand out as evidence of a unified sensibility; it is even possible for her art to be described as logically coherent, despite its embrace of emotional, as opposed to intellectual, truths. Now that she is beginning to work again, in a large studio in the outskirts of Beijing, she holds dinner meetings best described as salons, in which her friends—writers, artists, and curators—sit and drink tea and eat as they discuss the fate of contemporary art in China. Within her studio, Xiao Lu is a redoubtable presence, presiding over the groups that gather at her home. She speaks her mind freely; her pointed remarks concerning such topics as the art world, the general value of men, and her own career demonstrate a sharp tongue. Yet beneath the mask of irony, it is also clear that she cares deeply about the role of women in Chinese culture and life.

Indeed, Dialogue, so central to the public’s perception of her as an artist, shows that Xiao Lu has always been concerned with the boundaries limiting women artists. Breaking the law by firing a handgun, she struck a blow for psychic freedom that was more than rhetorical. Her subsequent stay in prison, lasting three days, also made it clear that the price to be paid for so violent a gesture was genuine. We know, though, that Dialogue occurred a long time ago; the installation Xiao Lu fired upon was work done for her graduate degree. Yet in her most recent, unfinished piece, we see Xiao still searching for a way to make sense of the vagaries of life as well as art. She has the following to say about art and experience: “When I get an idea, I may think of many different results, but I don’t hypothesize in definite terms about those results. As happened with the work Dialogue, the true significance of my work Sperm continued on, beyond the time during which it was displayed. The continued existence of one’s life in itself is the best work of art.”

Xiao Lu’s romantic assertion about life being “the best work of art” summarizes an attitude, by now a tradition, in which she sees life not only as equivalent but even superior to her vocation as an artist. Many contemporary artists share this attitude, but they do not substantiate it with art that lives up to their high rhetoric. Xiao Lu is different because her art respects the theoretical equivalence of experience and images, which result in an unusually balanced sensibility despite the sometimes-outrageous nature of her acts. Dialogue began as a psychologically driven tableau, until a political interpretation of the shots placed her in a public position—which she did not want. Notoriety seems to have regularly accompanied her career, but the supposed willfulness of Xiao Lu’s aesthetic distances her from her public’s approval or adulation or criticism. Xiao Lu is an artist whose ability to find the right symbolic tableau for a complex array of emotions raises her work to a high level. Her achievement, at once naïve and jaded, innocent and culpable, is central to the furious outpouring of Chinese art in the last twenty years. Because of her determination to be herself, she has easily swung into a position of mastery and independence. We are lucky to have so talented and inspired an artist.

Notes 1 All of Xiao Lu’s quotations are taken from an interview conducted in the fall of 2008.

32 Robin Peckham Hauntings: Rereading the Goddess of Democracy

t seems appropriate to begin a discussion of the Goddess of Democracy statue erected in Tian’anmen Square in the spring of 1989 with a meditation on discontinuity. The sculpture Iwas, above all, an event: a temporal image that both marked the unceasing passage of time and resisted its flow. The Goddess of Democracy stood as a marker delimiting a particular point in the chronology of contemporary Chinese art; arguably, it was the only work perched directly upon a turning point of the political and cultural avant-garde in China. The sculpture represents a rupture that it helped create. It was a confrontation, but also a plea; a spectacular performance, but also an expression of resignation. This paradoxically dual nature defines the historical moment at which it was positioned. But, if the Goddess of Democracy stood between the before and the after, it also stood between the inside and the outside. It was a public expression of private desire, a message from “the people” (or, more strictly, its creators, then temporarily resident in the centre of Beijing) to an outside audience. The construction, duration, and eventual destruction of the sculpture made up an extremely textual affair narrated in a voice aware of its own state of continual construction, a voice aware of its own impending failure, and a voice aware of the obviously cumbersome but ephemeral structure underlying it. We begin in the Beijing of 1985, not because contemporary art re-emerged from some imagined hiatus in that year, but because of what this iconic date has come to represent in terms of recent art history. In the fall of 2007, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) staged its first exhibition: a retrospective of the ’85 New Wave Movement. The exhibition raised several important themes concerning the spirit of this movement, among them its filmic aspect, emerging notions of archival memory and trauma, and the relationship between art and activism. UCCA hosted a series of screenings of the works of fifth-generation filmmakers, highlighting their role in the artistic movement that has become known as the filmic moment in China’s avant-garde discourse. The ’85 New Wave Movement brought to the fore of artistic circles the recent graduates of 1982, the first class to pass through the state arts institutions since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Not least among these young cultural producers were auteur filmmakers such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, whose work enjoyed unprecedented influence over colleagues working in other media. Thematically and stylistically, the installation, video art, performance, photography, and painting of the mid 1980s drew heavily on the nostalgia, cultural nationalism, memory, and spiritual humanism that has come to signify Chinese films of the 1980s, allowing for a shared discourse that brought a fascinating degree of dialogue between artists of varying media and consuming publics. This element of the 1985 movements foreshadows the role of televisual media in the construction of Tian’anmen in 1989 as both political event and media spectacle in ways that cannot be ignored, especially with respect to the Goddess of Democracy as both icon and index of the memory and hope of the protesters.

Besides these screenings, the UCCA exhibition also coincided with the publication of a series of documents related to the ’85 New Wave Movement, a self-referential curatorial move that calls to mind the 1985 emphasis on public discourse and temporal communication via the example of the archive. One obvious instance of this trend is presented by the four serial publications that became the primary lines of communication within the arts community: The Trend of Art Thought

33 and Fine Arts in China, and, to a lesser extent, Fine Arts and Jiangsu Previous page: Goddess of Democracy recreated at the Pictorial. The first two began publication in 1985 and were shut down University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in 1989; the latter two continued publication but abandoned coverage Canada. Photo: Keith Wallace. Right: Goddess of of progressive artistic production. This move toward publication and Democracy, 1989. Photo: archival formats that began in earnest around 1985 is important for © David and Peter Turnley. its several discursive appropriations; through it, contemporary artists began using the language of posterity and inserted their work into the narrative of art history (albeit a narrative that consciously broke from or warped that of “classical” Chinese art); they also began to construct and define the boundaries of their own community. This was the beginning of the formation of a speech community moderated by leading critics such as Gao Minglu, Li Xiaoshan, and Li Xianting, and consisted of a large portion of Chinese-speaking artists engaging in artistically progressive work, a trend that had enormous consequences for the plane of commerce and political action on which the gallery and museum system would later be built, tentatively uniting as it did a variety of first- and second-tier mainland and diasporic cities that would otherwise have remained isolated art scenes. And, perhaps most importantly, it assured a solid-state survival and broad dissemination of contentious works whose public deployments were cut short by authorities. The twin roles of memory and trauma are important here: in addition to a community imagined via these texts, the filmic emphasis on external and imagined history mirrored in this publication work set the groundwork for the making public of ostensibly private traumas that were beginning to surface in the genre of Scar Art, which engaged in the recollection of personal experiences with the tumult of the Cultural Revolution.

The third element emphasized by the UCCA exhibition is the well- documented link between art and activism explored in the 1980s, a trend that persisted right to the threshold of Tian’anmen in 1989. The China Symposium '89, hosted in Bolinas, California on the eve of the demonstrations in the square, provides an intriguing window into the attitudes of artists and intellectuals during the last days of this period. A brief glimpse of the conference session entitled “Art and Activism,” moderated by media magnate Hong Huang and including participants as varied as Ni Zhen, Bei Dao, Liu Binyan, Chen Kaige, and Wang Ruoshui, provides ample evidence of this. We find on the one hand Liu Binyan, “China's foremost literary conscience,” who advocates a position influenced by Mao Zedong's dictum at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art—that is to say that all art should and, necessarily, does reflect a certain moral and political stance, which, from Liu Binyan’s perspective, is one that resists state apparatus and ideology.1 At Bolinas, he was met with staunch opposition from the rising generation of cultural producers, who were largely influenced by the academic debates that reemerged in the early 1980s: luminaries such as Bei Dao and Chen Kaige each espoused distinctive goals for art and literature outside of politics, and argued for the position that self expression and exploration—the privileging of experience over ideology—can serve a broader political purpose that rejects narrow categories of oppositional arguments and national concerns. These two positions arguably come together

34 35 to form the general spirit of the ’85 New Wave Movement, which both reflected and reconciled this tension by allowing for a category of artistic content that, in its turn away from didactic or protest art, fights the propagandists that prolong and reproduce the cultural struggles of preceding generations. Said Ruan Ming: “Only under the banner of freedom can all forms of art flourish, regardless of whether the aims of that art are the ultimate concerns of mankind, or a strong and prosperous nation, or simply profit.”2 It is this sense of responsibility, if not to ideology in art, then at least to ideologies of the production of art, that characterized the discursive field from which the Goddess emerged.

Through an accompanying seminar addressing the themes of “Looking Back/Moving Forward,” “Art and Activism,” and “The Legacy of the Chinese Avant-Garde,” the UCCA exhibition situates the ’85 New Wave Movement in an historical context including narratives of both artistic development and the social processes that accompany it. In many ways, the movement did represent a key moment in the shifting paradigms of cultural industries and cultural circles in contemporary China, and the dialogue between public and private that characterized virtually all exhibitions in this period is an unavoidable manifestation of these wider social tensions. As of 1985, there were no private galleries in China; state-managed galleries tended to act as tomblike museums in their ossified displays of socialist realism and official histories. The few official art gatherings, such as the Sixth All-Chinese Arts Exhibition of 1984, tended toward these same themes, while legitimately contemporary exhibitions, such as A Modern Exhibition of Five Artists, curated by Huang Yongping, involved restricted guest lists mandated by the powers that be and were thus largely private phenomena. As the decade progressed, the clamour of artists looking for public exposure grew more and more vocal, culminating in the February 1989 exhibition China/ Avant-garde held in the National Gallery in Beijing. (Now infamous, it was shut down twice in its brief two weeks of existence on accusations of politically and aesthetically offensive work.) This back-and-forth was not new: ten years before, the first Stars exhibition had been held on the steps outside the National Gallery, while that of 1980 was finally permitted a space inside. For the next ten years, exhibitions would be held in the polar extremes of public parks and private homes. But this continual conflict became an obsessively contemplated subject in its own right only with the ’85 New Wave Movement; until then, it was merely a structural reality of artistic production.

Two more broad trends characterize the development of the movement that came into the limelight in 1985, one spatial and one temporal. The first involves the geography of authorship: namely, a trend towards art collectives and cells as the locus of avant-garde production rather than individual artists. Such collectives, including Xiamen Dada, the Stars group, the Pond Society, 75% Red 20% Black 5% White, and the Northern Art group, paralleled the development of jointly edited theoretical journals with their practical emphasis on a certain degree of anonymity and a submersion of personal interest within a broader desire for public visibility. These collectives served several historically important functions: they created regional circles of avant-garde practitioners, allowed for collaborative platforms, contributed to a nascent sphere of civil society, enlarged a sense of oppositional solidarity, and created a space in which artists and academics could critically engage with the social consequences of new aesthetics. This trend, however, interacted only ambiguously with its temporal counterpart, although both have certainly had a lasting impact on the life of new art in China. That is to say, this move towards collective production on a spatial plane was to some degree countered by a move toward national mobility and regional ephemerality on a temporal plane: as exhibitions became increasingly subject to fleeting displays in public locations and a pressing urge to showcase group work alongside and for the benefit of other groups, the artistic cell began to decline as a feasible unit. Logistically, regionality became less important, and these bases of production were no longer as necessary for dialogue with like-minded artists. But the rise of the traveling exhibition was also important for

36 other, possibly more productive reasons. First and foremost, it set the physical boundaries of the discourse of contemporary Chinese art, linking dispersed communities and isolated individuals into a single plane of cosmopolitanism reinforced by a network resembling an interest-specific print capitalism created by the new publications. As much as the creation of this plane served to homogenize regional artistic production, it also allowed for heightened visibility on the international scene and a greater sense of solidarity amongst a certain class and generation. If this moment marked the decline of the cell, it also marked the rise of the national spirit so exalted in the early years of the ’85 New Wave Movement.

A more concrete discussion of the exhibitions at stake in the preceding generalizations may be necessary to complete the portrait of this cultural matrix: potential directions for further research may include the chronology of the following shows, beginning, of course, with the Stars exhibitions beginning in 1979 and their bold demands for individual recognition, democratic politics, and public exhibition rights. There were also the private shows of the Sichuan School, known for their redeployment of realist depictions of minority life, the everyday, traumatic rural memories, and the romanticized countryside. There was the Modern Exhibition of Five Artists, held in Xiamen, a show that challenged the potential of the collision between socialist realism and Western European traditions of socially critical realist art. There were the Southern Salon gatherings, which brought together performance events and art objects in a surprising confluence of media. There were the Northern Art exhibitions, which challenged the intuitive theories of the southern schools and argued for a synthesis of Chinese and European traditions. And there was, ultimately, China/Avant-garde, which pushed the discourse of public art to the limits appropriate to its historical context. These often-colliding styles and exhibitions gave rise to a formative pluralism that helped establish a diverse field of influences from which work of the late 1980s could draw: from the new formalism of the earliest contemporary artists to the scar art and native soil movements of 1985, from fifth-generation cultural criticism, cultural reconstruction, and “consciousness of the tragedy of life” to their successors with their returns to cultural roots and the pursuit of a universally humanistic “purified language.”3 It was the field composed of these contending schools, depicted here in broad strokes coalescing into the ’85 New Wave Movement, that gave birth to the Goddess of Democracy long before her physical avatar was erected.

The construction of the doomed monument began on May 27, 1989, with a request from the Federation of College Students to the Central Academy of Fine Arts; a group of male undergraduates in the sculpture department adapted the design from a miniature work already in progress and created it in a brilliant bricolage such that the multi-piece statue, once constructed, could only be destroyed—never dismantled. The statue was unveiled on May 30. The ceremony, which involved a dedication, an announcement to the foreign media, and a performance of the socialist anthem known as the “Internationale” and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, drew 50,000 spectators into the square and helped revive the flagging movement that had grown into an amalgam of students, workers, and residents. At its very inception, the Goddess was already a “monument to democracy,” already prepared for its eventual ignominious end that would be outlived by “the desire . . . for the ideals it symbolized.”4

Stylistically, the Goddess was heir to a diverse range of predecessors. There is, on the one hand, the obvious comparison with the Statue of Liberty. It has been remarked that this visual citation reflects the media savvy of the student protesters in their effort to reach out to international audiences via omnipresent satellite television news links. Strangely, some have denied this intention, even going so far as to say that they intentionally downplayed the resemblance to the American statue, fearing that the symbol might be interpreted as too blatantly pro-American and perhaps reflecting negatively on Chinese values.5 Another notable stylistic precursor of the

37 Goddess of Democracy is the school of socialist realism, unavoidable in any art history of modern China. Tsao Hsingyuan has pointed specifically to Vera Mukhina’s sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937) as a model for certain features. This influence complicates the question of audience even further. Does a citation of the dominant mode of state-sponsored art imply that the students were attempting to create a dialogue with the culture czars of the Party administration? Or does it simply reflect their technical training? Given that a multiplicity of audiences—local and international, televisual and immediate, sympathetic and oppositional—ended up viewing the piece, the intention may not matter at all; the effectiveness of the piece in speaking distinctly to these various audiences may be more important.

Aside from these two aesthetic influences that seem to be somewhat contradictory on political grounds, the statue was also endowed with certain mythological connotations. Its stance and demeanor cited, for example, southeastern Chinese representations of Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, and related Buddhist figures. Its hollow construction and blank white silhouette call to mind the statuettes of Mao carried through the square on official state holidays. And its physical material and composition refer to youthful or scholastic visual production, a very conscious manipulation and exploitation of the creators’ status as students. Pausing here, we may evaluate the sculpture from a purely art-historical perspective (that is to say, taking the work as an art- historical one). This first reading of the piece already seems to be a weak one—it is more a symbol than a creative product to be taken as an object of critique. Although it stands at the pinnacle of a specific creative genealogy, this particular tracing can be situated only problematically for a number of reasons: first, its collective production, in line with both the educational system of the time and the emphasis on art collectives inherited from the preceding decade, and second, its cross-cultural legibility. We seem to once again encounter the troublesome problem of audience— intended, imagined, actual, and critical.

The image of this Goddess of Democracy reached several discrete audiences: student demonstrators, visitors to the square, sympathetic and hostile elements of the government, and remote media consumers. Each one involves a relation that could potentially be exploited by the creators of the statue: students could be encouraged to continue their rallying, direct spectators could be drawn in greater numbers and convinced to support the students materially, international observers could pressure the Chinese government, the government could be convinced that the students did indeed seek nothing but dialogue. Many of these functions were fulfilled; it seems that only the last achieved little immediate success. The statue does not in itself, however, seem to completely ignore the potential of a government audience. Indeed, it seems to enter into a speaking relationship with power more directly than it does with any of the other involved parties—but in a way that is frictive and confrontational rather than dialectically productive. In its architectonic placement in Tian’anmen Square, with the goddess positioned provocatively in a stance directly opposite to and exchanging gazes with the portrait of Mao, the monument explicitly addressed the powers that control the design of the square. This message, however, was intended for observing audiences— there is no expectation of an answer sent down from above by the authorities. Its stance is a masquerade of defiance and hope directed toward those already inclined to support the movement at some undefined future point. The intended audience thus appears to be largely already- sympathetic viewers, both foreign and domestic. This would explain the somewhat muddled and contradictory statements about the role of the Statue of Liberty in the design of the Goddess of Democracy, in that a wide range of audiences must be addressed to maximize the potential of the piece. This is the work of cultural syncretism as a subversion of cultural genealogy.

Does this cross-cultural legibility and reception by multiple audiences—both actual and intended—lead to a disparity between the intended and received messages? Perhaps it is misleading

38 to refer to these packets of meaning as messages. There is no theme, no didactic point attached to the Goddess of Democracy. Rather, like the filmic structures of much of the installation art of the mid-1980s, she is a summarizing fragment of a national spirit, the concrete manifestation of a collective desire. She is a symbol, an index, an image: she displays herself, spectacularizes the physical context of her surroundings, provides hope, and legitimates the existence of a defensive solidarity. That is to say, the statue says nothing in particular, but it offers up a range of meanings. It may be useful to view this type of dialectically-invalid speech as an “allegorical package,” a “process of unmooring” by which the specific locality—a student work deployed in Tian’anmen square in 1989—is interpreted and absorbed into global discourses of democracy and human rights and eventually re-territorialized into a new locality—an American living room, a public plaza in Hong Kong, or a classroom at Peking University (all spaces in which the image of the statue has been viewed or rematerialized).6 This operation is here evident on several levels: the student designers adapted and appropriated the allegorical signifier of the Statue of Liberty, combined it with the extracted sense of place defined by classical Chinese and socialist artistic themes, and then re-packaged their own allegory for global consumption. But we need not view these tactics purely as the media savvy of the students themselves; rather, meaning is here produced through the frictive articulation of the relationship between the local and the global, and meaning so produced is by its very nature specifically oriented toward a particular territorial audience.

Let us return to the question of the placement of the statue within the political space of Tian’anmen Square, a major theme revisited again and again in Western academic discussions about the role of the goddess in the June 1989 demonstrations. Wu Hung draws attention to the revamped formal composition of the square, with its symmetrical spatial relationships maintained but its psychological landscape entirely dismembered.7 Beyond the simplistic observation that the Goddess looks Mao directly in the eye as if challenging his watchful gaze, the statue also adds a degree of disruption and a degree of mediation to the central axis of Tian’anmen—much as Mao’s mausoleum did upon its addition to the square. More importantly than where the Goddess was placed, however, might be the question of how she was perceived as an addition to the environment. For this it will be necessary to borrow another concept from Wu, albeit one he did not apply directly to the statue.

Wu notices a transition in the development of the space of Tian’anmen during and after the late Deng Xiaoping years: from the construction of “hard” monuments to the installation of “soft” monuments. In his view, hard monuments “commemorated history and demanded faith,” while soft monuments are “deliberately short-lived and specific.”8 This transition seems to mirror that from imagining the community of the nation as a political sphere to spectacularizing this same community. The Goddess of Democracy appears to be one of the earlier structures placed in Tian’anmen to embody the rubric of soft monumentality: it is opportunistic or even spontaneous, short-lived, movable, and primarily immaterial—an almost perfect reference to the performances and parades that take place on the same ground during state holidays. It is an instance of play through time, a movement of temporality at the centre of a space collapsed into meaninglessness by its own carnivalesque spectacle. In this reading, the goddess may not have interrupted the symmetry of the square at all; rather, the statue may simply be viewed as an ephemeral actor upon a shifting stage. It is telling that one of the earlier soft monuments placed in Tian’anmen was thus one of resistance, a spectacle that appropriated and subverted an official system of signs; its tactics, themselves borrowed from the parades organized for Mao and Deng, were almost immediately recuperated and transformed into the innocuous inflatable sculptures and temporary fountains to which the square began to play host every National Day under Jiang Zemin. Despite their unavoidable recuperation, however, a view of the art of the Goddess of Democracy as tactical seems another productive way to approach the question. Following Michel de Certeau, the “tactic

39 insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety,” whereas the “strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper.”9 The strategic is the buildup and defense of the edifices of the square itself; the tactical is the mobile and nomadic response to this architecture of hard monumentality.

If, however, we are to view the Goddess of Democracy as a response of this sort, we must also interrogate her status as an initiating agent, as a protest, or a vehicle of communication. Earlier we evaluated the statue’s role as an allegorical package, having self-contained meaning. But how might it produce or transfer meaning through its design? Esherick and Wasserstrom provide one intriguing possibility in their notion of political theatre, or political communication that adapts an established or even ritualistic form and then alters or plays with the content in order to advance its own message.10 In this case, the Goddess is both participant and witness in the construction of a monument in the vernacular of socialist realism that fits into the architectonic scheme of Tian’anmen while simultaneously using it as a vehicle for radical political demands. But this explanation retains a high degree of ambiguity on a key point: is the formal element of the message intended seriously, a request for the benevolent attentions of the addressed parties? Or is it simply a sarcastic and mocking derision of conservative values? Both readings are available, and the latter becomes increasingly seductive given the disappointing state of the protests by the time the Goddess was erected.

This tactical move did have at least some sincere intentions, however. Its very spectacle—one of fleeting temporality set against a backdrop of monumental space—allowed the sculpture to attract the attention of an enormous number of on-site spectators, probably upwards of 300,000 over a period of several days.11 This resurgence of interest in the demonstrations at Tian’anmen gave the students an organizing locus and activity around which to regroup, and probably also brought them material aid. Unfortunately, the added attention may also have caused authorities to move more quickly towards a crackdown. For a brief moment, the students finally moved towards a small-scale, well-organized, and democratic structure, the most representative element of which is the “Democracy University” founded at the base of the Goddess of Democracy the day the military began to open fire along the Western stretch of Chang’an Jie. The failure of organization, however, gave way to the final performance of the Goddess of Democracy, the denouement of its forcible removal, which had been expected from the very unfolding of the monument.

It was a moment witnessed across the world, the perfect complement and closing element to the arc begun with the spectacular unveiling ceremony marked by its admittedly futile optimism and the flavour of an open international community. Pushed from the side by a tank, the statue fell forward and was smashed into pieces. If Tsao Hsingyuan is to be believed, however, its ghost lives on, a collective memory of a submerged desire. Indeed, its design has already been adopted almost precisely in iterations from Hong Kong to San Francisco, across Asia, Europe, and North America. These copies represent not so much the success of a particular artistic model, but, rather, the distributed quality of a redemptive hope; the Goddess has become the icon of the entire process of the second Beijing Spring, the movement that overtook the city for the first half of 1989. As such, its very victory lies in its failure to materialize in the space for which it is supposedly destined. Drawing from an account of a recent mass movement in another Asian city, it may be useful to apply to the figure of the Goddess a model of justice that comes by never arriving.12 Tsao Hsingyuan, in her Los Angeles Times editorial published in June 1989, expressed the hope that a permanent replica of the statue will one day stand in its intended place.13 If this ever occurs, the justice sought by the students and workers of 1989 will be emptied of its future promise and

40 instead brought to bear on the present, thus diminishing the work of all those who looked to the future for strength and destroying the sense of responsibility for further action that the destruction of the statue enforced in the witnesses of June 4. Monumentality, in this sense, is the death of the ghost of a type of justice that must always remain in the future in order for the promise of the Goddess of Democracy to remain intact.

We have strayed far afield from our analysis of the conditions of the production of the Goddess of Democracy—perhaps too far. But the sheer variety of the readings presented here may indeed be useful in marking out the space of cultural possibility opened up by the statue and its performance. It seems that the most dramatic features of the piece were its intended ephemerality, its figuration as a haunting always simultaneously in the past and in the future, its performative and performance-based monumentality, its cultural and historical pastiche, and its public expression of private desires. In retrospect, it is obvious how these elements have been absorbed into the dominant mode of discourse on contemporary Chinese art, but a more rigorous interrogation of the consequences of the Goddess is in order. Many key questions have yet to be asked: how are geographies and genealogies of 1990s Chinese art defined by the relationships brought to bear on the figure of the Goddess of Democracy? What other trajectories of artistic evolution did the process of her creation and destruction shut down? Why were only certain elements of her construction retained in the post-1989 art explosion?

There can be no definitive answers to these questions. At best, we can hope only to map out a sketch of the art scene in Beijing in the three or four years after June 1989, perhaps framing the developments therein in terms of the discursive formations set in motion in 1985 and carried to their peak by the Goddess herself. On the level of content, two major schools of visual art assumed positions of primary influence in the early 1990s: cynical realism and political pop. Arguably, these styles were already in place during China/Avant-garde, and their rise may have had little to do with the events in Tian’anmen—although they certainly did nothing to rekindle the feelings of nostalgia and idealism so dominant in 1985. Movements of cultural resurgence, too, became impossible after 1989; the objects of artistic critique were externalized, alienated from the field of culture and assigned to the spheres of national government or international economics. The neo-conceptualism of the mid 1980s was replaced with a flattening of tone, and nostalgia was overtaken by the primacy of the empty image. Satire and banality became the order of the day. However, it must be emphasized that these developments had already been set in motion long before June 1989; the constant battle between public and private had already created a discursive environment so rife with tension that an event as politically insignificant as the China/Avant- garde exhibition probably played as large a role in the implosion of the avant-garde as the popular movements of protest later that year.

More interesting than these matters of ideological content and artistic form, however, are the structural changes undergone by the Chinese contemporary art scene after 1989. The China/Avant-garde exhibition also played a large role in the closing of the public galleries to contemporary art, but it was definitively the link between this exhibition, art students, and the spring protests—a link drawn but perhaps not imagined by the government—that sounded the death knell for legal public art in Beijing. It was, after all, students at the Central Academy of Fine Arts who erected the statue of the Goddess of Democracy, which became the prime emblem of the movement and a bridge between public and private art. And it was these same students and sympathetic artists who carried banners reading “No U-Turns,” an iconic phrase borrowed from the February exhibition. Artists were forced to return to some form of the underground,

41 and, because of the stylistic shifts mentioned above, public protest art lost its appeal. But perhaps as a measure of appeasement, or perhaps as an emergency-release pressure valve of sorts, or perhaps merely as an attempt to stimulate the cultural economy, the government simultaneously authorized the opening of private art spaces (although the first commercial gallery project in China, initially scheduled to open in early June 1989, was put on hold). In trends that would continue well into the new millennium, these private galleries joined an international network of Chinese artists of the diaspora working across the globe. This networking resulted in several, most likely unintended, results that the government found politically expedient, at least at that time: first, politically dangerous contemporary art was funneled out of the country and directly into the hands of foreign buyers and collectors, while foreign capital flowed right back into the country; second, a discursive space distinct from that of the intellectual academy and large publications was created, such that critics and theorists no longer diluted the official debates of the supposedly legitimate intelligentsia. Many artists of the time found this arrangement amenable to their needs as well, for precisely the same reasons. The system took hold, and the next generations of artists were trained and educated entirely within a gallery system, rarely needing to negotiate the boundaries of official exhibition (although this is not to downplay the arguably public though far from mainstream phenomenon of the artist villages that emerged in the 1990s). The process was probably largely unavoidable given the current development of channels of capital flow through China anyway, but the interplay between art and policy is an interesting one indeed. This sketch is, of course, a gross oversimplification of the structural development of the art market, but it is nevertheless a useful one in terms of evaluating how the Goddess of Democracy may have played a direct role in the contemporary solidification of the eternally fraught boundary between public and private, inside and outside, before and after—the very themes addressed by the work itself. Perhaps, as the institutions of contemporary art begin to return to the movements embodied by 1985 and many pieces initially sold to foreign buyers return to the mainland, we will bear witness to another transformation, another re-territorialization and re-absorption of the political and the public into the nihilistic and oneiric images that dominated the 1990s. Or perhaps, as the dominant but questionably informed cultural authorities of the Western art markets seem to believe, “the Chinese government has managed to defuse the explosive potential of contemporary art simply by allowing it to flourish.”14

Notes 1 Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Art and Activism,” in Geremie R. Barmé, ed., On the Eve: China Symposium ‘89, Bolinas, California, April 27–29, 1989, http://tsquare.tv/film/Bolinas7lee.html. 2 Ibid. 3 Valerie Doran, China’s New Art, Post-1989 (Hong Kong: Hanart TZ), XVII. 4 Tsao Hsingyuan, “A Goddess Old in Form, New in Spirit,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1989, Opinion Desk, 1. 5 Ibid. 6 Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 238. 7 Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 16. 8 Ibid., 242. 9 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xix. 10 Joseph Esherick and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “Acting Out Democracy: Political Theater in Modern China,” in Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, ed. Elizabeth Perry and Jeffrey Wasserstrom (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994), 33. 11 Roderick MacFarquhar, The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 455. 12 Vicente Rafael, “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines,” Public Culture 15, no. 3 (fall 2003), 425. 13 Tsao Hsingyuan, “A Goddess Old in Form, New in Spirit,” 1. 14 Barbara Pollack, “Art’s New Superpower,” Vanity Fair, December 10, 2007.

42 Aileen June Wang Beauty in Despair: New Works by Fang Lijun

ang Lijun’s exhibition at the Arario Gallery (November 6, 2008 to January 17, 2009) presented complex and intriguing ideas that show him breaking out of the mold that Finitially made him famous. As one of the pioneers of the Cynical Realism movement in contemporary Chinese art, Fang established his international reputation with images of generic- looking men with shaved heads and of swimmers in endless bodies of water. He continued to produce these for a long time, and he was a consistent favourite in the art market. Yet once one understood his iconic youths with their varying expressions of boredom, indifference, or disdain, every work seemed to convey the same message, and his success raised the question of how his art would develop. In the current exhibition, Fang responds to that question with works offering new layers of meaning that allow multiple interpretations. He introduces new motifs and characters that use earlier ideas as a springboard to expand in several directions.

Fang’s recent work appears, at first glance, to be visually pleasing and light in mood. Beautiful colours (apple red, sky blue, and cotton-candy pink) suggest happy times. Colourful butterflies, white birds, and winged babies are depicted flying across the canvases, and pudgy, pink-fleshed little figures frolic in the sculptural installations. While at the exhibition, I witnessed a group of college girls approach the sculptures in the first gallery, commenting on how “cute” they were. As soon as they ventured closer and saw that the “cute” figures were actually torturing each other on strange-looking contraptions, or being squished into pink blobs, they fell silent and walked away in short order. Indeed, the exhibition initially suggested that the artist has let go of his trademark cynicism and bleak perspective, but in fact, he presented a conflicted, more pessimistic view of the world than before.

Previously, Fang developed his themes primarily through human figures, whose appearances mirror his own. Now he expands his visual vocabulary and encompasses a broader perspective than in the past. Critic Karen Smith has noted that babies and dark skies appeared as motifs starting in the late 1990s.1 To this cast of characters he has now added flying insects such as butterflies and fruit flies, and winged creatures like bats and birds. In some instances, they replace the human figures entirely. They are rendered meticulously in a style different from the broad strokes of earlier works. These “characters” lend a new complexity to Fang’s oeuvre because of their capacity to convey double meanings. Familiar motifs from the past do still appear, such as the painted children with shaved heads and the sculptures of babies that recall those same bald youths. Water remains a major element in several paintings and signifies danger and the unknown.

Each work carries a date as its title. According to the gallery’s catalogue, the titles indicate dates of completion. Although dates rather than description may, on the surface, seem matter-of-fact and devoid of deeper meaning, they serve as a guide to the trajectory of Fang’s thoughts. Considered in sequence, the paintings and sculptures tell the story of an artist vacillating between optimism

43 Fang Lijun, 2007.1-3, 2007.2-3, 2007.3-3, 2007, oil on canvas, 540 x 750 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery.

and hopelessness. The current gallery installation does not display Fang’s works chronologically, so one has to reconstruct the narrative independently. Two of the earliest paintings, 2007.2.15 and the triptych 2007.1-3, 2007.2-3, 2007.3-3, show the artist reflecting on the cycle of life and death. The subject tackled in the former seems to be the catalyst for ideas explored in subsequent works. A composite of monochrome black-and-white images, suggesting newspapers as their source of origin, 2007.2.15 depicts the human casualties of war, famine, and murder. Hovering above this bleak landscape are specks of pink and yellow, which turn out to be winged babies and flying insects. The first triptych panel, 2007.1-3, depicts a baby floating within an ambiguous backdrop of grey and blue and occupies almost the entire space. The background extends across the next two panels, 2007.2-3 and 2007.3-3. In the centre panel, 2007.2-3, the baby has grown into a little child who jumps with outstretched arms toward a colourful array of butterflies and winged insects. In 2007.3-3, the same insects completely cover the prone figure of the child, and a small winged baby can be seen in the upper right corner. The three panels read from left to right, and suggest a narrative of three stages of human life, from birth to death, although death comes in childhood here. 2007.3-3 calls to mind the natural process of decay, in which maggots feed on a corpse. A maggot is the larval phase in the life cycle of a fly, so the appearance of flies on the child’s body, instead of maggots, adds notions of metamorphosis and rebirth to this image of death. One may even relate this last image to the Buddhist belief of reincarnation, wherein a soul has as much chance of being reborn in the next life as an insect as it has of being reborn as a human being. Thus the flies and winged babies in 2007.2.15 and 2007.1-3, 2007.2-3, 2007.3-3 seem to represent the survival of the human soul after death.

The forms, colours, and details of the butterflies in Fang’s paintings recall those embedded within the designs of Qing dynasty vases and embroidered silk garments. The butterfly is a

44 Top: Fang Lijun, 2008.10.1, 2008, oil on canvas, 7 panels, 270 x 840 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery, New York. Bottom: Fang Lijun, 2007.2.15, 2007, oil on canvas, 250 x 360 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery, New York.

common motif in traditional Chinese art because it is a symbol representing happiness. It was also popularized by the beloved Chinese legend of the Butterfly Lovers as a representation of metamorphosis and the continuity of the spirit. In this legend, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, who fell in love as students during the Eastern Jin dynasty, are forced to separate when Zhu’s family arranges for her to marry another man instead of Liang. As a result, Liang dies of a broken heart. When Zhu’s boat passes by his grave on her way to her future husband’s home, a storm stops the boat from advancing. Zhu disembarks to pay respect at Liang’s tomb, and, at that moment, the ground opens up. Zhu immediately leaps into the gap and to her death. After some time, the grave opens again and two butterflies fly out, the spirits of Liang and Zhu transformed and reunited.

With this legend of Liang and Zhu in mind, the butterflies in the large oil painting 2008.10.1 can been seen as representing, on the one hand, the tragedy of human society with its senselessness, and, on the other, the possibility of hope even in death. Two landscapes unfold across seven panels in a format recalling traditional Chinese screens. On the left is Fang’s appropriation of an iconic photograph taken during the Vietnam War which shows General Nguyan Ngoc Luan, South Vietnam’s national police chief, shooting a suspected Vietcong captain at point-blank range. Fang shifted the row of buildings in the original photograph from right to left and added black crows and bats descending like scavengers that seemingly sense imminent death. The bullet creates a visible path from the gun barrel to the victim’s head. Exiting on the other side is a piece of brain, which transforms farther along the painting into a small baby with white wings who flies towards a sunrise and snow-capped mountains, and joins an array of butterflies and birds. The execution scene is rendered in black and white, evoking a newspaper image as in 2007.2.15. The landscape at the other end of the painting is in colour, with the crows and bats replaced by the butterflies

45 Fang Lijun, 2007.12.4, 2007, oil on canvas, 65 x 91 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery, New York.

and birds. The juxtaposition of the two scenes creates a narrative of both despair and hope. While one side displays the horror of cold-blooded murder, the other side offers a positive spin on the victim’s death. Death, even though involuntary, enables his soul (the winged baby) to leave behind the mortal world for paradise. Another multi-panel work, 2007.12.4, develops a similar idea, but in a less positive vein. The narrative begins on the left with a view of a weathered, misshapen steel wall punctured by a hole. Each subsequent panel depicts a closer view of it, as if the viewer were drawing nearer with each step. The last panels reveal a fly just beyond the hole, which joins other insects in a blue sky. The images of the wall bring to mind an ugly and undesirable place, but what the fly represents is ambiguous. Is the viewer the fly? Or is the viewer someone who remains on the other side of the wall, unable to reach the open sky? This ambivalence engenders a sense of yearning.

The bat, appearing frequently and sometimes together with butterflies, is also a motif used effectively to create layers of meaning. In 2008.6, we see a large group of them hanging upside down above a baby lying on a table in a room. The weathered, water- stained, and cracked walls evoke a prison cell (a setting used in several of the artist’s paintings). Moreover, rats, cockroaches, and centipedes crawl all over the ground. A soft light bathes the baby and the table and contrasts with the dark corners of the room. A white tablecloth, arranged to create swags across the ends, suggests a sacrificial altar. In traditional Chinese art, bats signify good fortune, because “bat” in Chinese sounds like the word for “good luck.” Their appearance with the baby thus conveys the hope that new life brings. The positive message is complicated, however, by their positions immediately above the baby and their focused gazes, which contribute to a feeling of barely concealed danger. One bat even looks toward the baby with its fangs bared. The bats’ location in the dark recesses of the room also contradicts their function as harbingers of good luck. The prison-like setting suggests that the baby arrives in an ugly, limited world surrounded by predatory creatures, and it seems but a matter of time before the encroaching shadows will consume the baby’s light.

2008.6 is part of a larger series in which three weathered concrete walls appear. The paintings in this series are titled sequentially, for the first day of the month from May to September. The most intriguing is 2008.5.1, a painting within a painting, in which an image of a blue sky with puffy white clouds is framed by an ornate gilded frame and hangs on a barren wall. Upon closer inspection, the viewer sees that the fictive painting’s surface is spattered with blood and pasted with the actual bodies of flies. The flies appear to have mistaken the sky for the real thing and tried to fly into it. Victims of this mistake litter the ground below, recalling birds that have attempted to fly through a glass pane. Referring to another work in this series, Fang said: “Wherever you are, the authorities make good things for you to see and conceal what they say is bad, thereby keeping people in the dark. My painting is about a reality we can see,

46 Top: Fang Lijun, 2008.6, 2008, oil on canvas, 250 x 360 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery, New York. Middle: Fang Lijun, 2008.5.1, 2008, oil on canvas, 250 x 360 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery, New York. Bottom: Fang Lijun, 2008.6.15, 2008, oil on canvas, 250 x 360 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery, New York.

47 against one we are encouraged to believe in.”2 Fang’s use of flies is particularly clever in relation to certain European still-lifes and portraits from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The European artists would sometimes add a fly, often on the edge of an illusionistic frame in a portrait or resting on a fruit or flower, to emphasize the success of their painted illusion, a claim for painting as a window to the real world. 2008.5.1 presents the other side of the coin from that of 2007.12.4. Whereas the earlier work postulates the possibility of escape from a bleak life, the fly in 2008.5.1 discovers belatedly that the possibility of freedom is but an illusion, and the price is death.

The feeling of impending doom evoked by 2008.6 also cloaks paintings depicting masses of children, such as 2008.3.30 and 2008.6.15. Each child looks like the next, face pointed upward with an expression of anticipation. All are crammed like sardines into boats or high-rise buildings. The children are in such abundance that their individuality is lost, and the life of each seems to bear little value. Moreover, the bird’s-eye view of the paintings reveals what the children may not have realized yet: concentric waves around the base of the buildings in 2008.6.15 suggest that they are sinking, and the boats are so heavy that only their top edges are above water. Several children are already in the water swimming around the edges of the waves. In both paintings, there is no land in sight, and no additional boats. The familiar bats, black crows, butterflies, and flies circle overhead. Their aesthetically pleasing colours and delicate details, along with the children’s innocent expressions and bright attire, make viewing the paintings a strangely enjoyable experience, despite the pessimistic message.

Fang expanded his art production into sculpture only recently, in 2006. The three-dimensional works in this new exhibition explore the same ideas as his paintings, but they do away with optimism. One of the strongest pieces is 2007.9.1, a seemingly abstract sculpture of nine pink cylinders lined up vertically on a rack. The order and symmetry of the composition lend the piece a formal beauty. That beauty is compromised, however, by the realization that the colour is derived from disturbingly realistic sculptures of fetuses, unceremoniously crammed one on top of another in the cylinders and submerged in a clear liquid. Is it amniotic fluid or formaldehyde? Are they waiting to be born, or are they dead specimens? The piece gives the phrase “test tube babies” a dark connotation. As

48 Top left: Fang Lijun, 2007.9.1, 2007, rubber, PMMA, 200 x 100 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery, New York. Middle left: Fang Lijun, 2007.9.1 (detail), 2007, rubber, PMMA, 200 x 100 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery, New York. Bottom left: Fang Lijun, 2007.8.5, 2008, mixed media, 110 x 63 x 63 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery, New York. Right: Fang Lijun, 2008.9.11 (detail), 2008, mixed media, 2 pieces, 2 rails, 170 x 127 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Arario Gallery, New York.

with his paintings depicting masses of children, the sculpture provocatively questions the value of human life, leaving the viewer with feelings of horror and morbid fascination.

Fang also introduces a new character in his repertoire, the pink-fleshed giant “baby,” in his sculptural work 2008.9.11. Its skin colour is a nauseating light pink that looks synthetically produced. Variations of this baby also appear in the miniature worlds of 2007.6.6, 2007.8.5, 2007.8.10, and 2008.2.20. In the exhibition’s feature work, 2008.9.11, giant babies are crammed into two cages that are connected like railway cars. Each figure brandishes a weapon, which in some cases protrudes through the railings. The title here, obviously, does not simply record a date of completion. The date 9.11 inevitably recalls the day of the worst terror attack on U.S. soil, making the viewer question whether these babies are future terrorists. Karen Smith suggests that the cages signify ideology, which controls and imprisons the minds of the masses. She interprets the figures as products of the modern Chinese culture and its obsession with material wealth, or as oppressed people on the verge of revolt.3 The title suggests a threat, however, with the viewer outside the cages as the target. The padlocks on the doors are unlocked, so the figures can easily escape their enclosures, though they may not have realized that just yet. The roles of viewer and subject, circumscribed in the paintings, are reversed here. Now the threat of danger is directed toward the viewer.

Throughout his career, Fang has depicted human figures looking up, as if in constant search for hope, answers, or salvation. In his world, however, these hopes are ultimately betrayed. Fang may look for the silver lining in the dark clouds of human experience, but in most cases he views life as a futile endeavour. His new works show beauty in images of despair, inducing sadness in the viewer. I suspect Fang views this world with the same sentiment.

Notes 1 Karen Smith, “Fang Lijun: A Humanist In an Inhuman World,” Fang Lijun: 2008.11.06, exhibition catalogue (New York: Arario Gallery, 2008), 12. 2 Ibid., 18. 3 Ibid., 15.

49 Paul Gladston Recurring Intimations of Disorder: A Conversation with Zhang Peili

he following conversation with the artist Zhang Peili was recorded at the TChina Academy of Art in Hangzhou on June 6, 2008. Much of the conversation relates to a large-scale, multi-channel video installation by Zhang, entitled A Gust of Wind, which was exhibited at the Boers-Li Gallery in Beijing during April and May of the same year. Throughout the conversation Zhang seeks to elaborate on intense uncertainty with regard to the possibility of direct linguistic communication that has characterized his work as an artist since the 1980s. As Zhang makes clear, in A Gust of Wind this uncertainty can be understood to extend beyond formalist questions surrounding the function of language to the myths of predictability, continuity, and progress that we habitually construct in relation to our phenomenological experience of life. In Zhang’s view, these myths obscure the fact that life is persistently susceptible to catastrophic change; a position that resonates strongly in light of the Chinese government’s current, ideologically driven aspiration to arrive at a harmonious (neo-Confucian) society, as well as the disruptive effects on that aspiration not only of recent natural disasters, such as the Sichuan earthquake, but also the present, man-made, world-wide financial downturn, or, as it is widely referred to in China, “the global economic tsunami.”

It is also interesting to note that during this conversation Zhang focuses on a number of concepts signified in Mandarin Chinese that incorporate the character for wind (feng). For example, Zhang’s comments on the uncertainty

50 51 of the first impressions we have of other people resonate with the Previous Page: Zhang Peili, A Gust of Wind, 2008, 5-channel Chinese notion of feng du, or personal demeanour. The discussion of video installation, 13 mins. 14 secs. Courtesy of Boers-Li uncertainty as a historical constant can arguably be associated with Gallery, Beijing. the term feng su, or custom/tradition. Discussions of the character of Zhang’s work also touch on the concept of feng ge, or style. And the incorporation of a well-appointed living space in A Gust of Wind suggests a relationship to feng shui, the geomantic system traditionally used in China to determine the orientation of the sites of houses, cities, graves, etc. As C. A. S. Williams has indicated, the literal translation of feng shui, “wind and water,” carries with it associations with “climatic changes said to be produced by the moral conduct of the people through the agency of the celestial bodies”.1 The representation of wind as a destructive force in Zhang’s work might then be seen as a sign of an underlying lack of moral propriety on the part of the prevailing social order. Also of note is that within a Buddhist cosmology, as mediated by Japanese culture, the character for wind—as one of five basic elements or “rings”—is conventionally understood to stand both for “tradition” and “style.”2

Paul Gladston: Let’s start with your recent installation, A Gust of Wind (in Mandarin Chinese, Zhen Feng),3 at the Boers-Li Gallery in Beijing. You are quoted as saying in the catalogue: “This [video installation] is an artificial reality, an imagined fact. I want to find out about this supposed gap between artificial realities and external realities. Is there really any difference between a reality produced by video (yingxiang de shishi) and a reality captured by video (shishi de yingxiang)?”4 Could you explain the difference, as you see it, between “a reality produced by video” and “a reality captured by video?”

Zhang Peili: Yingxiang de shishi and shishi de yingxiang sound similar. The difference is manifested in the change of word order. The two are different concepts. Yingxiang and shishi are in a relation of nouns to adjectives, just like “my son” and “son of mine.” One is the main body; the other is derived from it. Video was derived from reality, and reality was captured by video; that is to say, video was used to record reality. However, video has actually become a kind of dominant language that pervades people’s consciousness. It creates realities, and these realities also influence people’s lives or minds. The reality produced by video is sometimes even more realistic than reality itself. At least, it gives people the illusion of its own reality. This is why I have the following question: what is the function of video and its relationship to reality? I don’t think that I can give a simple answer to that question—at least it’s very difficult to give an exact answer.

Paul Gladston: A Gust of Wind signifies a catastrophic event: the violent destruction of a richly furnished domestic setting by a sudden storm. Why did you decide to stage such an event as it might be carried out in a film studio and then represent/produce it through the use of multi- channel video?

52 Left: Zhang Peili, Sanitation Document No. 3, 1991, single- channel video, 24 mins. 45 secs. Courtesy of Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing. Right: Zhang Peili, 30 x 30, 1988, single-channel video, 32 mins. 9 secs. Courtesy of Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing.

Zhang Peili: I’ve always believed that people live in an illusion and that there is some kind of hidden force or “superpower” behind this illusion. This superpower is not controlled by human beings and is not subject to perception. What we perceive or discover is not the superpower. Some critics thought that some of my early works, such as Sanitation Document No.3 (1991) and 30 x 30 (1988), had something to do with politics. I’m not sure about those interpretations, and I don’t want to explain further. What I felt during the early stages of my development as an artist was that there is a kind of underlying force or power. Sudden changes or disasters, which have been caused either by nature or by human beings, made me realize that people live in an illusion, and this feeling has become stronger as my career as an artist has developed. All these beautiful and supposedly stable states are so fragile. They are just illusions. Changeable and destructive states are inevitable. They are the realities.

Paul Gladston: Could you say a little more about that.

Zhang Peili: Yes, I would like to add a bit more about the way the aftermath of the disaster is represented/produced by A Gust of Wind. The work as a whole is made up of two parts: a multi-screen video and the remains of the set used during the production of the video. The multi-channel video is itself in three parts. First, it shows a very decent, elegant life situation that most people would aspire to. Second, it shows the process of the wind destroying the situation represented in the first part. Third, it’s about the remains and ruins of the situation represented in the first part. The three parts are like the acts of a play. Though the third part would tend to make people feel sad, it’s the most lasting part. Nothing of the original situation can remain forever. Only the state of destruction remains eternal.

Paul Gladston: So your work seeks to demonstrate that while we aspire to stability and continuity, in actuality nothing is permanent, stable, or continuous?

53 Zhang Peili: I was just trying to question the ideology of permanence and stability. I tried to detach this ideology from my actual experience of events. We might frequently face such an issue: a comfortable life is changed. As for the adoption of materials to show this issue, it could be a watermelon, a cigarette, or something else; it’s just an excuse, a means to an end. Behind the materials are time and the unknown power, which remain eternal. I used wind in my work. However, what is the wind? What does it symbolize? I don’t know. There might be another power behind the wind which tries to change things through the wind. I’m not sure what that is either. I don’t want to deny real life or give up real life because of the unknown power. My attitude is not religious; religion is certain and specific while my outlook is always uncertain.

Paul Gladston: The art historian and critic Gao Minglu has argued that since you were involved with the Hangzhou-based group Chi she (the Pond Society) during the 1980s, your work has consistently shown skepticism toward the possibility of direct public communication.5 Do you share this view?

Zhang Peili: From my point of view, artworks shouldn’t be like a diary. When artists create works of art—facing different materials, media, or objects—they attempt to find meaning among very mixed phenomena. It appears that art has the capacity to communicate something. But, actually, I don’t think I have expressed anything in particular. I don’t think language has a reconstructive function. I’m not sure what it is I would like to express, and I’m not sure of the function of language either. My attitude toward language is highly ambiguous.

Paul Gladston: So you have a persistent sense of doubt about the significance of art?

Zhang Peili: I’m not even sure of the word “doubt” because doubt is also indicative of a certain attitude.

Paul Gladston: Many of your works are open to interpretation from the point of view of poststructuralist theory. Your own comments suggest that A Gust of Wind, for example, could be interpreted as a demonstration of

Zhang Peili, Happiness, 2006, dual-channel video with sound, 6 mins. 39 secs. Courtesy of Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing.

54 Jean Baudrillard’s contention that the simulation of reality— hyperreality—has now overtaken reality itself.6 It is also a work that some might interpret as an instance of the postmodern sublime insofar as it can be understood to present an unpresentable instance of dynamic illimitability.7 The single-channel video Happiness (2006) involves the seemingly endless repetition of a scene from a propaganda film made during China’s revolutionary period showing a crowd of people responding collectively to the words of a speaker with seemingly ecstatic joy. This could be read from the point of view of deconstructive theory as a citation or grafting that persistently re-contextualizes and, therefore, re-motivates a borrowed text in Zhang Peili, Lowest Resolution, 2005, single- channel interactive video installation with such a way that its significance is sound, 14 mins. 42 secs. Courtesy of Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing. rendered profoundly uncertain, much in the same way as a word loses its meaning if it is said over and over again.8 In the case of Lowest Resolution (2005–07), you show a Chinese sex education video using digital technology that makes the image increasingly illegible—more heavily pixilated—the closer one gets to it. Arguably, this could be interpreted as a feminist critique of the patriarchal gaze as well as a performative demonstration of what poststructuralists would argue is an inescapable slippage between desire and knowledge; that is to say, the notion that the closer one gets to a desired presence or meaning the more indeterminate it becomes. All of which places your work more or less squarely in relation to the legacy of the Western avant-gardes and post avant-gardes. What is your view of these interpretations?

Zhang Peili: I often think that the way in which my works have been interpreted has nothing to do with me. All interpretations, no matter what kind of theories have been used, are reasonable. I don’t care how my works are interpreted. I think judging a piece of work is just like the impressions we have of a person. For example, some people may have the impression that I’m quite rough if they see me quarrelling, while others may have the impression that I’m quite shy. If I am not totally sure of the significance of my works, how can other people be totally sure? However, when the works are interpreted from different perspectives by each individual, all these interpretations can be thought of as reasonable if they are based on the information provided by the works themselves.

55 Paul Gladston: If we can’t align it directly with the influence of “Western” poststructuralism and the legacy of the Western avant-gardes and post avant-gardes, where does this open-ended attitude to differing forms of interpretation come from?

Zhang Peili: I don’t know. I always think doing something is just like a spider spinning a web. The web can either be disgusting or good-looking from a human point of view. Human beings have aesthetic feelings while spiders don’t. Spinning a web is a kind of instinct for spiders, and the web is a tool. Webs might be destroyed, but spiders wouldn’t think of the reasons behind that destruction and wouldn’t draw a conclusion either. However, human beings think and worry about things. We still continue to live even though we worry about things because we live through time. In A Gust of Wind, the house was destroyed. The remains—both actual and on video—act as a focus for memory. Instinctively, human beings reconstruct the house and continue to seek a good life. It’s like a circle. I don’t believe in outright skepticism. If I did, there’s nothing to be done. I think one can feel happiness even in a damaged life circumstance. It’s human nature to pursue the illusion of a good life.

Paul Gladston: We have already discussed how your work can be interpreted from what might be seen as a contemporary Western theoretical perspective. In my view, it is also possible to interpret your work in relation to a vernacular Chinese intellectual tradition. For instance, your own reading of A Gust of Wind would seem to resonate strongly with the Buddhist notion of the void or nothingness as a marker of the illusory nature of worldly things. It would also seem to have affinities with the traditional Chinese notion of the Dao as an ineffable force immanent to a world of things in constant flux that also has the potential to engender reciprocal states of harmony.9 Comparing Western and Chinese cultural perspectives, which—if either— is more fitting as a basis for the interpretation of your work?

Zhang Peili: I’m not a specialist in Chinese culture or philosophy. I’m not a specialist in Western culture and philosophy either. Comparatively, I think Chinese philosophy is more stable—not like Western philosophy, which has evolved and changed radically over time. Also, Chinese philosophy emphasizes harmony and contentment. Though it seems Western philosophy and Chinese philosophy share certain similarities after postmodernism, Western philosophy still places greater emphasis on logic, reason, and analysis, whereas Chinese philosophy emphasizes feeling, experience, and meditation. As a result, we have different views towards many things. It’s just like a Westerner doing taiji: no matter how good this person is at carrying out the moves, it wouldn’t seem as natural compared to a Chinese person doing taiji. I don’t know why it should be like that. I haven’t thought consciously about my relationship to Chinese and Western cultures or philosophies, or how to find a connecting point between them. I sometimes try to avoid this question—whether I belong to Western or Chinese culture. I don’t think it’s necessary to draw a clear

56 cultural boundary. The creativity of my work is influenced by my personal surroundings: the people I meet and the books I read, etc. The people and books are no longer what we saw or read thousands of years ago, or five hundred years ago, or even two hundred years ago. I think my works have both Western and Chinese elements. And I don’t like to be restricted purely as a Chinese and limited by my cultural characteristics. The best thing is to be natural and to be oneself. I think others have the right to judge my works from different cultural perspectives, but it’s not something I myself should think about too much.

Paul Gladston: As you suggest, one of the discernible differences between Western postmodernism/poststructuralism and the Chinese intellectual tradition is that the former ultimately lays stress on critical analysis, instability, incompleteness, and difference while the latter seeks to reconcile the persistence of uncertainty to nature and reciprocal states of harmony. Do you think it’s possible to say something similar with regard to the relationship between Western postmodernist art and contemporary Chinese art? For example, while A Gust of Wind depicts a catastrophic event, it is still arguably a harmonious piece of work in formal and narrative terms. It doesn’t conform exactly—it seems to me—to Western notions of the postmodern sublime that argue for the persistence of difference . . . the persistence of ruins.10 As you yourself have said, the ruins left behind by the gust of wind act as a conspicuous focus for reconstructive memory— a trace or synecdoche that returns us to the lost state of apparent continuity and stability from which we started. It has a “good” circular form, if you will. Indeed, the constant repetition of the video in the gallery reinforces this circularity.

Zhang Peili: I’m not sure. Though I have been abroad often and have seen many artworks, I haven’t really tried to compare and analyze artworks from the West with those in China. I personally think there are many Western works that emphasize harmony too. So I can’t give a positive or negative answer to your question. I think Chinese artworks tend to be quite beautiful. However, whether the piece of work is beautiful or not is decided by each viewer’s aesthetics or attitudes. Some Chinese artists also make very violent, unbearable works, but some people may still find harmony in this kind of work. I think in the end it really depends on how the individual viewer reads or interprets the work.

Paul Gladston: The following question is about the function of art. You have commented that the significance of your work—aesthetic or otherwise—is uncertain. If that’s the case, can it still have a function, or is this just a Western preoccupation?

Zhang Peili: What I meant by the uncertain significance or meaning of a piece of work is that it’s very difficult to explain the complete significance or provide a concept to define the work. Even the creator of the work finds it difficult to provide this. Someone once said a piece of work is just like a

57 box into which you can put whatever you like. Though everyone has his/her own understandings of the works, it wouldn’t mean that the works have no functions or meanings for viewers. Due to the openness of the work, it can mean something to everyone. Most of the time, artists don’t think too much about the impact of their works on the audience; rather, they focus on what the works might mean to themselves. It’s just like the metaphor I gave earlier—the story of the spider. Artists create works out of instinct. Objectively, artists’ works are like a web made by a spider, which influences its surroundings: the people, the mosquitoes, etc. As to whether the influences are positive or negative, it’s difficult to tell.

Paul Gladston: Do you think criticism and critical theory have a function in relation to the production and reception of works of art?

Zhang Peili: Sure, there must be some function that can be either positive or negative. I personally feel it’s very difficult to judge what’s positive and what’s negative. All comments are misunderstandings. The process of being misunderstood is part of the continuous process of the work. It’s difficult to define what kind of function this has, though.

Transcribed and translated by Xu Sujing

Notes 1 See C. A. S. Williams, Chinese Symbolism and Art Motifs (Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle, 2006), 187. 2 Miyamoto Miyamoto, A Book of Five Rings, Victor Harris (trans.) (New York: Overlook Press, 1974), 43. 3 Zhang Peili’s video installation A Gust of Wind (Zhung Feng) was exhibited at the Boers-Li Gallery in Beijing between April 26 and May 24, 2008. 4 See Robin Peckham et al., Zhang Peili, A Gust of Wind (Beijing: Boers-Li Gallery, 2008), 8–9. 5 Gao Minglu, The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art (Beijing: Millennium Art Museum, 2005), 142–43. 6 See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 7 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 8 See Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” in Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985). 9 See Wang Keping, The Classic of the Dao: A New Investigation (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1998). 10 As the curator and critic Wu Hung has argued, it is possible to interpret contemporary Chinese art in relation to the concepts of fragmentation and ruination historically associated with Western modernism and postmodernism. However, Wu argues, these concepts should be read differently in relation to the particular circumstances surrounding the production and reception of contemporary art in China since the ending of the Cultural Revolution. For Wu, contemporary Chinese art has used fragmentation and ruination thematically and performatively both as a critical repetition of the fragmentary and ruinous meta-language of the Cultural Revolution and as a continuing critical commentary on the upheavals and uncertainty brought about by the implementation of China’s transformation and openness policy since the late 1970s. In making this point, however, Wu does not explore fully the possibility of a relationship between Chinese cultural attitudes toward ruin and fragmentation and those of the West. Wu’s tendency is to address the issues of ruins and fragmentation simply in terms of Western attitudes that have been assimilated and translated in relation to the concerns of modern Chinese culture. In this, Wu significantly downplays the possible persistence of historical Chinese cultural attitudes towards ruin and fragmentation in relation to the production and reception of contemporary Chinese art. While Zhang Peili’s comments in the interview above support Wu’s contentions with regard to the critical use of fragmentation and ruination by contemporary Chinese artists in relation to events in China over the last four decades, he also seems to offer comments that suggest a relationship between his work and the traces of vernacular Chinese culture, not least, strong Buddhist and Daoist aspirations towards harmonious reciprocation between otherwise persistent states of difference (as signified by the Ba Gua—the well known Chinese symbol for the reciprocal relationship between Yin and Yang). This is arguably something that is also played out, as my own comments in the interview suggest, through the conspicuous formal and narrative circularity of A Gust of Wind. It is therefore possible to view Zhang’s work as a complex interweaving of a modern Chinese—Western influenced—desire for critical difference with the traces of a vernacular Chinese desire to reconcile the persistence of difference with desired states of stability and continuity. For Wu Hung’s comments on ruins and fragmentation and contemporary Chinese art, see Wu Hung, Making History: Wu Hung on Contemporary Chinese Art (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2008), 3–10.

58 Zheng Shengtian The Great Economic Retreat: New Images of Urban China

Chen Chieh-Jen, Factory, 2003, Super 16mm transferred to DVD, colour, silent, single-channel, 30 mins. 50 secs. Courtesy of the artist.

n 2003, the Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen made a 16mm silent colour film, Factory, in which female textile workers were invited to return to their former workplace, the Lien Fu IGarment Factory, which had been closed and abandoned seven years earlier. In his artist’s statement for the 5th Shanghai Biennale, in which as a co-curator I had invited him to participate, Chen noted: “In places all over the world, many labourers have had similar experiences—a production relationship between the ‘transplanted’ and the ‘untransplanted.’ In order to find low- priced labour, factories constantly shift locales. But after being abandoned, unemployed workers have no choice but to linger on in the same place. They cannot move.”1

In the late 1990s, hundreds of thousands of factories shifted from one side of the Taiwan Strait to the other. In the 1980s, for example, an electronic information industry had rapidly developed in Taiwan, composed mostly of processing and assembling plants. The total gross output value of this industry reached $74.7 billion USD in 2001.2 But it faced the same beleaguered situation as other Taiwan industries at the end of the last century. In their search for lower operating and production costs, many factories rushed to relocate in mainland China, especially to Dongguan, a small town in the Pearl River Delta. The scope of this shift was tremendous. In a few years, this sleepy town became one of the most important centres in the world for production and assembly factories. It was said: If there is a traffic jam between Dongguan and Shenzhen or Hong Kong, the price of computers in the international market will rise.

59 60 Opposite top: Jin Jiangbo, While the workers of the Lien Fu factory were desperately waiting The Great Economic Retreat: The Dongguan Scene for compensation that never arrived, millions of mainland Chinese (sixth floor dormitory of a foreign capital television labourers from all over the country congregated in Dongguan and manufacturing enterprise), 2008, photograph. surrounding towns to take up their new jobs. According to China’s Courtesy of the artist. Fifth National Census, from 1990 to 2000 the population of Dongguan Opposite second from top: Jin Jiangbo, The increased from less than 2 million to 6.44 million, making it the third Great Economic Retreat: The Dongguan Scene largest city in Guangdong province, after Guangzhou and Shenzhen. (second floor dormitory of a foreign capital television Almost five million of its residents are temporary, eighty percent of the manufacturing enterprise), 3 2008, photograph. whole population. These anonymous migrant workers have produced Courtesy of the artist. more than three hundred billion RMB to add to China’s GDP every Opposite second from bottom: Jin Jiangbo, year and put Dongguan on the map of the global economy. The Great Economic Retreat: The Dongguan Scene (third floor dormitory of a foreign capital television However, the decrease of Dongguan’s processing industry accelerated manufacturing enterprise), 2008, photograph. with almost the same speed as its increase. After 2007, more and Courtesy of the artist. more factories in the Pearl River Delta closed their operations owing Opposite bottom: Jin Jiangbo, The Great Economic to an increase in labour, land, and environmental protection costs. Retreat: The Dongguan Scene (financial department The general decline in the world’s economy rubbed salt into business at the office tower of a foreign capital television owners’ wounds and forced them to abandon their facilities once manufacturing enterprise), 2008, photograph. again as it had happened a decade earlier in Taiwan. It was reported Courtesy of the artist. that more than one thousand shoe factories closed in the area last year. Some shut literally overnight, without notice and without paying their dues. The owners vanished for good, and countless unemployed workers were driven to the brink of desperation.

In 2007, a young man with a large Hasselblad camera and tripod appeared in the industrial ruins of Dongguan. Jin Jiangbo, a Shanghai- based conceptual artist, took many photographs of the empty workshops, abandoned warehouses, and deserted dormitories, all looking like a horrifying war zone or ghost town. A selection of these photographs was exhibited at the Nanjing Biennale and the Second ShContemporary Art Fair in 2008 under the title The Great Economic Retreat (Jinji Da Chetui).

Jin Jiangbo was born in Zhejiang Province, China, in 1972. In the same year, Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni visited China and made his controversial three-and-a-half-hour long film Chung Kuo (China). Antonioni said: “I went to China not in order to know it but to have a look and to record what was passing in front of my eyes.” The scenes passing in front of his eyes obviously did not please Chinese leaders. The film was criticized as having “a vicious motive, [and] despicable tricks” and was banned in China.4 Thirty-five years later, Jin Jiangbao decided to record what was passing in front of his eyes with his digital equipment. The artist explained in an interview: “I prefer to use photography to record the complexity and bare reality of this world directly because it is more natural and less virtual than interactive modes.”5

Jiangbo has gained international recognition for his interactive installations. In terms of subject matter, he has always been interested in China’s role in the global context. His early installations China Tyrannosaurus (2005), The Third Eye (2005) and The Phantom of Time

61 (2006), focused on issues related to globalization, international politics, Opposite top: Jin Jiangbo, The Great Economic Retreat: and cultural dialogue. In 2005, I invited Jin Jiangbo to participate in The Dongguan Scene (reception lobby at the office tower of an exhibition I curated for the Toronto International Art Fair. The title a foreign capital television manufacturing enterprise), of the show, Art Rising, was adapted from a headline of the national 2008, photograph. Courtesy of the artist. newspaper The Globe and Mail for its special edition “China Rising” Opposite second from top: Jin (Zhongguo Jueqi). Jin Jiangbo made a new version of his multimedia Jiangbo, The Great Economic Retreat: The Dongguan Scene installation The Third Eye, which connected audiences from both (large production workshop of a foreign capital television Toronto and Shanghai by using camcorders and the Internet in the manufacturing enterprise), 2008, photograph. form of a well. I called it “one of the most unusual and playful projects” Courtesy of the artist. and commented: “I think this energy will continue as long as Chinese Opposite second from bottom: Jin Jiangbo, society continues to experience one of the most invigorating social and The Great Economic Retreat: The Dongguan Scene (entrance 6 economic experiments in modern history.” of a foreign capital television manufacturing enterprise), 2008, photograph. Courtesy of the artist. Jin Jiangbao has remained true to his mission of being on the front Opposite bottom: Jin Jiangbo, line. As of 2007, he took time to study the small commodity market in The Great Economic Retreat: The Dongguan Scene China, especially Yiwu, an inland city three hundred kilometers south of (packaging workshop of a Taiwanese paper enterprise), Shanghai, in Zhejiang province. According to a report prepared by the 2008, photograph. Courtesy of the artist. United Nations, the World Bank, and Morgan Stanley, Yiwu is the largest small commodity market in the world. Twenty years ago, the town had only three narrow streets in a three-square-kilometer area. Now there are twenty-five thousand factories manufacturing and supplying about four hundred thousand varieties of commodities with the lowest price to the global market. More than one thousand containers leave Yiwu every day for two hundred destinations around the world.7

Jin Jiangbo conducted field research on Yiwu’s industrial production: What proportion of the commodities being produced by family businesses meets the product quality criteria? Who are those manufacturers? Is the right of intellectual properties respected? How is industrial waste treated in the light of environmental problems? These questions sound like a survey for a social studies paper, but the output of Jin Jiangbao’s investigation was in fact a body of fascinating photographs. He captured the scenes that reflect the bizarre look of the market: In contrast to the massive area and the loads of merchandise visible in the photographs, there are almost no shoppers around. The market appears dead in daylight, and comes to life in the evening only because the rental costs are lower. Signs such as “Reliable,” “Pollution-free meat,” and “Green pure vegetables” are visible everywhere due to an awareness of poisoned products and counterfeit commodities. The artist has called it a “de-naturalized market.”8 It is the first time that Jin Jiangbo has used photography as a medium.

Susan Sontag wrote in her commentary on Antonioni’s Chung Kuo: “Photography does not simply reproduce the real, it recycles it—a key procedure of a modern society. In the form of photographic images, things and events are put into new users, assigned new meanings, which go beyond the distinctions between the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the useful and the useless, good taste and bad.”9 Jin Jiangbo’s view of photography is definitely not merely subjective. As critic Yang Xiaoyan put it, his “subversive on-site photography” is the artist’s “visualized political practice.”10

62 63 Jin Jiangbao’s next photographic project provided further evidence of the artist’s active role in intervening in life. Later in 2007, he travelled to Dongguan when he heard that a large number of foreign enterprises’ closed down not long before. “The sustained growth power and the advantages to foreign trade by exporting low-cost workforce and products have passed their prime due to the double blows of the depreciation of the U.S. dollar and the revaluation of the RMB,” as the artist observed. “Moreover, the microeconomic adjustment measures for economic structure may bring great change to the overall industry chain. For instance, the issuing of a new labour law resulted in the wide retreat of a number of foreign-funded enterprises in Dongguan city, with ten thousand foreign-invested enterprises withdrawing from Guangdong province within only one year. Though this is regional on the surface, it has exerted sweeping impact on China’s overall economy, which strongly reflects the internal problems long rooted in the economic structure. In light of this situation, I went to excavate and record it, and managed to release the ‘denaturalized times scenery’ with panoramic views through the window of art in order to find out the strengths of modern art.”11

Jin Jiangbo’s use of the panoramic view accurately reflects the width and depth of this great economic disaster. The vastness of the working spaces beside small traces of a hasty departure— a cup, a fire extinguisher, or a slogan on a broken sign—provide the shocking contrasts of the tragic moment. Looking at this almost surreal scene, one is compelled to raise a simple question: what went wrong? Besides wide-angle large scale photographs, Jin Jiangbao plans to make an installation in the future that includes many articles he collected on the sites while he was shooting as well as videos of the artist’s interviews and conversations with Chinese economists and bankers. He also plans to do some surveys on the Internet. Jin Jiangbo says: “The concern about China’s reality could be meticulous and specific, and powerful as well. Many elements of Chinese society are beyond the western experience and boast a unique modernity with Chinese characteristics, and that is the real modern landscape.”12

The real modern landscape that Jin Jiangbao has captured, a new page of the astonishing and sometimes catastrophic transformation of China’s urban life, is brought to our attention. Does the artist “photograph for the purpose of establishing evidence,” as Walter Benjamin indicated?13 Without doubt, Jin Jiangbao’s The Great Economic Retreat is an extraordinary practice in what has become nowadays a money- and market-oriented Chinese contemporary art scene. The political significance of Jin Jiangbao’s images may help us to re-examine the fundamental role of contemporary art today in China and encourage a revitalization of the notion of social practice in art that was, in the twentieth century, among the most important contributions to contemporary art in China.

Notes 1 Chen Chieh-jen, Factory, 2003, artist’s statement. 2 Jin Xingyi, “Dongguan Moshi: Qiji he Liubian, Dongguan Mima Zhiyi” (Dongguan model: Miracle and transformation), Dongguan Secret Code 1, April 16, 2008, http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=931283&PostID=13431664&idWriter=0&Key=0. 3 See the Web sites of the Statistics Bureau of Dongguan and the Statistics Bureau of Huizhou: http://tjj.dg.gov.cn/website/web2/ showArticle.jsp?ArticleId=482&columnId=222&parentcolumnId=115 and http://www.hzsin.gov.cn/ReadNews.asp?NewsID=484. 4 Geoffrey York, “China lifts ban on film icon,” November 2, 2004. 5 Du Xiyun, “Study of Unnatural Market—An Interview with Jin Jiangbo,” Retreat (Wall Art Museum Beijing, 2008), 137. 6 Zheng Shengtian, “Art Rising: A Look at Chinese Contemporary Art,” Toronto 2005 International Art Fair catalogue, 21–22. 7 Xiao Hua, “Decode Yishu Miracle” (Yiwu Qiji Jiemi), Southern Weekly (Nanfang Zhoumo), March 2, 2006. 8 See Du Xiyun, “Journey to ‘Simplicity’ and ‘Truth’: Jin Jiangbo’s Latest Works of Photography,” in Retreat (Beijing: Wall Art Museum, 2008), 82–83. 9 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor, 1990), 174. 10 Yang Xiaoyan, “Subversive on-site photography, Jin Jiangbo’s visualized political practice,” in Retreat (Beijing: Wall Art Museum, 2008), 14. 11 Zhao Wenqing, “Modern China Landscape in New Media Arts: An Interview with the New Media Artist Jin Jiangbo,” unpublished. 12 Ibid. 13 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1936, http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/benjamin.htm

64 The Modern Chinese Landscape in New Media Arts: A Conversation Among Fang Xiaofeng, Chen Anying, Zhao Wenbing, and Jin Jiangbo

Technology vs. Modernity Fang Xiaofeng: Is modernity a concept of time or a style, a way of thinking, or a reality? The topics relevant to art and design often seem fairly broad, yet it is worthy of discussion. In modernity, there are problems of technology that are difficult to evade. Many people comprehend modernity from a technical point of view. Since you have long been engaged in the creation of new media art, it is probable that you are more sensitive to the technical aspect. Would you like to talk about China’s modernity from this perspective?

Jin Jiangbo: It is by no means easy to define modernity. The fundamental force in advancing society ultimately lies in the progress arising from technology, be it the invention of a steam engine or current genetic technology. Some of what was thought to be science fiction has become reality, and the understanding of life and ethical doctrines is constantly changing. The world is changing, and science and technology play a critical role in the process. For artists, ideological diversity and artistic innovation are influenced by the changes in different tools. For example, the media we are talking about is considered new. In past times, the advent of printing technology and engravings was also considered “new media.” This is equally true of the invention of photography. The rapid development of the modern computer, networks, and information technology has brought huge changes to cultural identity and to ideas of time and space, which spurs on the morphology of new media art such as virtual reality, interactivity, and experience. Embodied by the cultural perception and understanding of the world, the modernity of art is closely allied to the technical revolution. The concept of future art will vary greatly from our current understanding. After changes occur through the power of technology, the gallery may not be necessarily on- site, and a museum’s collection may not be necessarily materialized. They might be located within virtual reality. The world is stepping up its pace; modern times and the concept of modernity have changed.

Chen Anying: What technology do you think exerts the most impact on modern art?

Jin Jiangbo: All of them. What influences art is science and technology. Science and art share the same aim; both emphasize originality and invention. The way that artists consistently question the world resembles

65 the way scientists constantly solve problems, and the use of new materials and tools influences the way art is exhibited and presented. Nowadays, some artists visualize people’s dreams by employing the research methods of psychology and physiology. Even the psychological theories of Freud are not something literal, and when placed in performance art, for example, they transcend the previous visual art experience. Some artists adopt nanotechnology to make artwork that can freely develop. There are no materials that cannot be made useful for artists. Moreover, after the artist’s concept is established, the platform for grafting material and technology accordingly will take shape. Therefore, it is hard to tell which particular kind of science and technology influences art.

Chen Anying: In the history of new media art, photography was invented first, and then came film, video, and, finally, the computer. Which technologies do artists mainly adopt for the current new media art?

Jin Jiangbo: Just like the modernity that we have brought into question, it is difficult to define new media art. You can define it in terms of time, philosophy, and sociology. In the final analysis, new media art has one major feature—that is, its compatibility with various vehicles—and it differs greatly from the relatively simple relationship between painting and its materials. The relationship between new media art and materials is relatively rich, covering various means, and this has much to do with social diversity, including communications, networks, satellites, video, and computers, etc. The reason we call it new media is that it has not been clearly defined. When photography appeared for the first time, we did not find a proper name for it, but we would have called it new media if we had invented it now.

New Art Media vs. China’s Reality Chen Anying: What major aspects come into your artwork? Or, rather, what aspects of reality do you care about most?

Jin Jiangbo: It can be defined in phases or stages. Each generation has its own time mark, and our generation was born in an era, the 1970s, in which economic belief took the place of all other beliefs. As I grew up, I experienced the trends of “ten-thousand-yuan households,” “go into business,” “Special Economic Zone,” and “reform and opening up policy.” As the understanding of society and the participation of our generation in it are so related to the economy, what we are facing is the kaleidoscope of a society supported by belief in the economic reality. Moreover, accelerating globalization and the intensifying flow of global wealth have produced a profound effect upon our growth and outlook. I was affected least by politics and most by the economy. This is quite different from the previous generation who were sent out to the countryside and those who grew up during the Mao Zedong era. Therefore, I prefer to express my point of view, including my study, into the economics of society.

After thirty years of reform and the policy of opening up, the contradiction within China’s economy has become rather delicate and even perilous. There

66 is much to be studied. The sustained growth power—the advantages of foreign trade by exporting a low-cost workforce and products—have passed their prime due to the double blows of U.S. dollar deprecation and RMB revaluation. An alternative mode for the expansion of domestic demand has not been found yet. So, how to sustain economic development? The reason and cause of it could be well reconsidered if the problem is placed before artists. Numerous social realities, accumulated as well as impending, will take place in the course of economic structural change. Under such a circumstance, there will appear myriad preposterous things that are beyond reality as well as historical experience. I am very interested and concerned about this and eager to study it. How these realities are caused needs further discussion. Moreover, the microeconomic adjustment measures for economic structure may bring great change to the overall industry chain. For instance, the issue of the new labour law resulted in the wide retreat of a number of foreign-funded enterprises in Dongguan city, with ten thousand foreign-invested enterprises withdrawing from Guangdong province within only one year. Though this appears to be of regional consequence on the surface, it has exerted a sweeping impact on China’s overall economy, which strongly reflects the internal problems long rooted in its economic structure. In light of this situation, I went in to find and record it, and I managed to present a panoramic view of it through the window of art.

In addition, I have also taken time to study the small commodities market in China, whose owners, business families, account for 80% of it. How many commodities being produced by family businesses are quality controlled? Is there any intellectual right or originality involved in these commodities? These problems also need further exploration. Faced with the world of “made in China,” what are the attitudes of the commodity manufacturers? I am also surveying this point and conducting field research into the reality of industrial production. Within China’s development, there exist environmental problems and other issues concerning industrial waste and the consumption of Western industrial waste—it all sounds really absurd. Recently, I went to Dongguan and conducted surveys and investigations into the vestiges of foreign enterprises that retreated not long before. Though creating art in an unlikely art manner is a feature of the present modernity in art, the current sightless situation in China’s art market discourages many artists to care about this very real reality.

The concern about China’s reality could be specific and powerful as well. Many Chinese products beyond the Western experience boast a unique modernity with Chinese characteristics, and that is the real modern landscape.

Fang Xiaofeng: This is, in fact, a development in modern Western art, which regards art as a part of a document. The understanding of art in modern society has undergone great changes, and I sense a kind of methodological shift in your artwork.

Jin Jiangbo: You are right. There is a similarity to some degree to earlier work in terms of methodology, but when I changed to working on-site,

67 it was rather different. Photography only plays a partial role. The exhibition of my work also consists of videos of my interviews and conversations with Chinese economists and bankers, many articles on the issue at hand, and some Internet surveys, which help to broaden the concept of the way I intervene with on-site art.

Zhao Wenqing: What are the most important influences on the formation and development of China’s current new media art?

Jin Jiangbo: The formation and development of the new media art is mainly attributable to the commitment of Chinese artists. Many great modern artists carry out experimental practices with new media art, giving a huge impetus to it. Another influence lies in the power of criticism, which is currently rather weak. Little criticism about new media art can be found. One of the important reasons is that technology also helps to generate a sense of distance. China’s new media art grows out of the soil of modern art, and it needs to consist not only of artists but of critics and art institutions. The Western experience and models such as electronic arts festivals can be learned from if China’s new media art expects to become an independent art form. China is now carrying out discussions and research, yet the study of new media art is not sufficient and has a long way to go; it must become specialized and then implemented.

Zhao Wenbing: What kind of impact can the background of contemporary Chinese society exert upon the development of the new media art?

Jin Jiangbo: From the perspective of a national strategy, new media art— electronic art or digital art—is regarded as important in accelerating the development of the creative and culture industries. For instance, Tsinghua University is attempting to make interdisciplinary research between media arts, sciences, and global exchange; Shanghai is hosting an e-arts festival, trying to exploit the government’s resources in the development of new media art. Under such circumstances, different understandings of the arts, as well as different concepts of culture, will result in different ideologies. Many of these are combined with other industries such as entertainment and product design. Some of the participants aim to represent an art ideology; therefore, the encouragement of modern art can be fairly rich, and complicated as well.

Zhao Wenbing: In today’s China, modern art or design projects pertinent to modernity are relentlessly pursued and shown with great enthusiasm. What is the reason for this phenomenon?

Jin Jiangbo: The key point of this question is that China really yearns for success. All people expect to succeed and transcend the experience of history. We hope, in thirty short years, to complete the road that took Western countries over two hundred years. That is why you see people unyieldingly pursuing modernity, and that is the very root of the problem.

68 Zhao Wenbing: Delacroix once described modern artists this way: “The modern artists not only express their emotions but also depict the outside world and analyze everything.” Meanwhile, we also see that modern society becomes all the more complicated; thus it is worth analyzing. Which aspects do you take most interest in and take pleasure in representing through your artwork? What is your attitude: critical, sarcastic, or what?

Jin Jiangbo: Sometimes it depends on my own interests and sometimes it depends on social concerns. Artists can be rational, but my behaviour and approaches are different according to different problems. For example, I once made eight bronze figures with acupressure points. I took it as a platform for global politics, and some acupressure points represented some well-known world politicians. Every time one activated an acupoint, a politician would appear on the display and perform a show. The so-called artwork mocked the global political situation and the trend of politicians becoming big stars. This is a political reality. At that time, I was just playing with sarcasm. However, I will make good use of real, accurate, and targeted means to deliver my series of artworks concerning China’s commodities market. The focus of my work varies each time; so does my process.

Western Perspectives vs. Modern China Chen Anying: It seems that Western art has been concerned about “Made in China,” but many view this problem with a sarcastic smile. I am wondering how the Western artists you have known look at this problem?

Jin Jiangbo: The Western artists’ view of China exists at various levels. Some still maintain the impression left from the times of Mao Zedong, and they never thought that China would be developing so fast. Some thoughts of Westerners about China are based in incomprehension because China is a reality beyond Western experience. However, as China is developing so fast, its modernity has transcended the Western pattern. Currently, there are some Western artists who care about “made in China.” They may have done considerable study on commodities and consumer goods, but they seldom study China’s unique economic pattern such as the warehousing system, and the peer and family system in China’s broad market, which are rare in the Western industrialized experience; therefore, foreign artists fail to probe it deeper, and lack on-site experience.

Zhao Wenbing: According to your own experience, what kind of mindset do Western countries have when they look at China? Or, rather, how can one look at modern China as represented through the means of new media?

Jin Jiangbo: Western art circles have nourished different points of view and for different purposes in terms of modern art in China. Some people with an interest in China prefer to collect China’s modern art in the context of economic globalization; different political civilizations generate different

69 cultural tendencies, so some people get engaged in the study of China’s political civilization from an interest in different cultures, so Popper’s political philosophy came into being. Still, other collectors and art organizations expect to build China’s modern collecting practices and unearth the value of China’s modern art, and they might even eventually manipulate the market price behind the scenes. Their purposes and attitudes are different. I think their interest in China’s modern art comes from these perspectives. As for how Western countries look at China’s modern society as represented through new media and other means, in fact, I have already mentioned this before. As China’s modern society is really extraordinary, it is more valuable to study the reality of it; in such a short time, we have witnessed China’s modernity transcending the Western experience, thus it is worthwhile to study.

Memory Share vs. On-site Experience Zhao Wenbing: In October 2007 and at the beginning of 2008, the new media art exhibition Memory Share was jointly made by you and Qiu Zhijie in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. The exhibited artworks were interactive, yet there were big differences reflected in different cultures of these two cities. What were the major differences between the two exhibitions?

Jin Jiangbo: Shenzhen Fine Art Institute held this exhibition with a certain focus. They were concerned more about new media art and regarded it as a breakthrough point. The exhibition promoted an on- site experience and interactivity with the public, so they arranged the exhibition to be held at the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute and Shenzhen Book City, which is completely open, can entertain children, and is capable of leading them in the direction of understanding new media art. However, the exhibition in Hong Kong was quite different. Hong Kong put more emphasis on the dialogue between the exported art and the local art, so they set up a forum called “New Media Art in the Context of New Post-modernism.” While such exchanges are based on distinguishable cultural soils with art that appears different from each other, our paintings here revealed more microscopic social references such as my addition of elements related to the Cultural Revolution, which can be seen in the work of China Tyrannosaurus. Hong Kong artists placed much more emphasis on emotional experience. Following the Western artists, they stressed technical aspects, translated technical language, explored technical possibilities, and then integrated them.

Chen Anying: Would you like to briefly introduce the symbolic significance of China Tyrannosaurus, displayed in the exhibition Memory Share?

Jin Jiangbo: Works about the dragon in traditional Chinese culture abound. The dragon is symbolic of conquering for Westerners, which is actually different from China, where the image of a tyrannosaurus

70 represents conquering. So I made the tyrannosaurus an image of a lovely creature with a mechanically rigid structure, which means that China’s reality is not as aggressive as the Westerner imagines it to be. With China’s rising, the claim of a “China threat” and the suppression of China by the Western world cannot hold much water faced with such a lovely tyrannosaurus. I was just hoping to convey China’s reality in the form of a tyrannosaurus instead of the traditional dragon.

Industrialization vs. China’s Art Reality Zhao Wenbing: How do you comprehend the concept of an art industry? In today’s China, what kind of picture would you map for the so-called “art industry?”

Jin Jiangbo: In modern commercialized society, an art industry is inevitable. Regardless of Western civilization or Eastern civilization, both of them put a great deal of emphasis on commercialization. Nowadays, China’s art industry is booming, especially in Beijing where art exhibitions are held one after another. I consider it benign because it reflects the market demand in a broad sense. Moreover, China’s art market exceeded that of France last year, ranking it third place worldwide. However, if the art market really reflects the actual art value, it is normal; otherwise, it is a sheer art bubble. In the Western world, it takes a series of rigid measures and considerable time to produce an exhibition or create a non-profit gallery, while it is all too commercialized in China. Certainly, foreign countries also have many such commercial galleries, but they spend considerable time and make great effort to seek out good artists. It seems that things here are not well controlled. This is also the result of booming commerce in such a short period of time. The real art industry, instead of being a mere business deal through an art exhibition or gallery, should also involve art criticism and galleries focusing on arts in different fields, and it should avoid the situation in China where one artist gets engaged with several galleries. The qualifications of the exhibition organizer are also a key factor, because the art industry is now really flourishing and competitive and needs experienced individuals.

Fang Xiaofeng: This can be a feature of modern art, and Western countries have shared the same experience. As a matter of fact, it has been a part of the overall economic pattern since the Industrial Revolution, when art began to become a commodity and finally an industry. The artists are placed in a dilemma: resisting art industrialization while profiting from the art market, which is subtly manifested with different individuals.

Jin Jiangbo: On the whole, there is lack of game rules, yet sometimes there occurs a violation of the rules, so the artists were at a loss as to what to do because industrialization emerged too swiftly.

71 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky Conroy/Sanderson: Two Heads Are Better than One1

he work of Neil Conroy and Lesley Sanderson explores essential questions of identity. In their art, which is executed in mixed media— Tdrawing, painting, photography, video, and more—they continuously contemplate the nature of the self and the other. The varied contrasts that their work presents may be viewed as a philosophical contemplation of the eternal dualism central to Daoist understanding, that is the dynamic interface of yin- yang: east and west, true and false, perceived and real, presence and absence, female and male, young and old, body and soul, individual and society. More specifically, Conroy/Sanderson consider cultural, racial, and gender identities, including the arenas of colonialism and contemporary society in Britain, and in modern China, in ways that challenge viewers to consider their personal biases and perceptions. Their imagery, rich in such yin-yang polarities, raises questions that beg in-depth consideration: both aspects are presented, and there is no real resolution, only a dynamic balance of opposing circumstances. So the works present a conundrum, a Zen koan. Though contemplation of the themes is encouraged, a playful attitude prevails which at times alludes to the Surrealist masters of the last century. Well executed, exact, and refined, the pieces are spare, but at the same time somehow lush in their detail.

In one of their early collaborations, Fabrication and Reality, of 1998, such contrasts are apparent in the title, materials, and combination of human and architectural forms.2 The artists present a detailed drawing in a Plexiglas frame of a section of Conroy’s inner wrist enlarged beyond recognition—like the paired Buddhist mandalas that represent the dual aspects of the cosmos, the phenonmenal and the spiritual—along with a backlit carbon copy of the tallest building in Malaysia. As Helen McDonald has argued, the works impart ambiguities and contrasts:

These ambiguities set up a dialogue between one another across the panels, so that the body assumes the building’s monumentality and the glowing towers become erotically charged. Links to the female body and to Asian cultural identity can still be traced in this work, but the emphasis has shifted to the processes of reinvention, including those entailed in artistic collaboration, and to the new spaces opened up by the realities of cultural hybridity in the contemporary world. As such, Fabrication and Reality is a subtle feminized critique of Eurocentrism. Because of its involvement with the ambiguity,

72 Conroy/Sanderson, Absentee, 2005, video installation. Photo: Neil Conroy. Courtesy of the artists.

73 Conroy/Sanderson, Fabrication and Reality, 1998, graphite on paper, carbon paper, medium-density fibreboard, viewing device, interior lighting. 155 x 150 x 41 cm. Photo: Neil Conroy. Courtesy of the artists.

however, it is also one step removed from the female nude, identity politics, and the question of subjectivity. This detachment is expressed metaphorically, in the following way: at the back of the box, behind the drawing of the body, there is a tiny viewing lens. The spectator uses this lens with the expectation of viewing a structured “interior,” only to encounter an intense blue light. The light dissolves distinctions between inside and outside, promising new formations that will entice new manifestations of desire.3

Such polarities are also present in other works that specifically relate to China. Absentee, a video installation of 2005 exhibited in London at the Pitzhanger Manor House and Gallery in Ealing (PM Gallery),4 contrasts home and the world, where interior and exterior, foreign and national are pointedly referenced. In the words of the artists:

We projected a slowly dissolving image of a migrant worker sleeping on the street in Beijing onto a Victorian four-poster bed. The dialogue within the work was between the association of the period of empire that the house and bed signifies and economic exploitation of others. This we see as being re-staged throughout the world, in this case, the contemporary situation of displacement through economic migration that one sees all around cities like Beijing, where we were for a month in 2004.

74 Conroy/Sanderson, This work is very quiet, atmospheric, and there is a sense Meantime, 2005, video projection, 2 mins. Photo: of reverence within the piece, largely because of the Sasha Su-Ling Welland. Courtesy of the artists. bedroom it was sited in. The room’s main focus is the bed, the wallpaper, a dressing table with mirror, and of course our video that was projected onto softly pleated material at the head of the bed. The image slowly appears out of white light, comes into focus and full colour, holds for a few seconds, then slowly dissolves back into white.5

This piece tracks one of the sad disparities that govern our world; as if our own political injustices were not enough, we are also witness to the inequities of the global world. It is an ironic vision, a homeless Chinese improbably enjoying the creature comfort of a British bed. There are multifarious associations: the outside world insistently intruding on the boudoir, the sad reminder of how the insular riches of a capitalist society are dependent on exploiting migrant labour, the many contrasts between home and abroad, and colonialist and capitalist policy. In another piece, Meantime (2005), a two-minute video, the roles are reversed. Here the two artists, dressed in pajamas, incongruously stand among a throng

75 Conroy/Sanderson, Have Always Touched the Ground Before, 2005, photograph, 112 x 112 cm. Photo: Neil Conroy. Courtesy of the artists.

76 of Chinese on a crowded shopping street in Shanghai. As the artists described the work:

We appear in a busy shopping street in Shanghai dressed in pajamas, clothing which infers a private encounter in the West, but which in China takes on a different cultural resonance, one that has to do with inhabiting public space in a way unfamiliar in the West. Our clothing and disappearance into the crowd suggests vulnerability, a state of unease, and of being at odds with ourselves or our environment. We are caught between the intimacy of a shared private space and the visibility of public spaces. Meantime explores the private and the public and the influence of place and environment within our subjectivities. It is between the private and the public that our sense of ourselves is formulated.6

In a surrealistic, dreamlike sequence, the figures are transposed to another time and place. So many of the participants in the video seem unconcerned about the events that are being filmed in their midst. The artists stand facing forward, their rigid posture making their lack of interaction in a foreign environment painfully evident and their vulnerability all the more obvious. Although they share the same bizarre circumstances, their personal differences are highlighted: she is Chinese, he a white male; she is in pink, he in blue. This fantastic interposition recalls nightmares in which the dreamer is projected into a situation inappropriately clothed, or unclothed, and thereby rendered unable to fit in, incapable of functioning. Dreaming, suggested by the bedclothes, touches the issues of being awake and being asleep, of dream and reality, and of consciousness and unconsciousness.

The idea of being dressed in pajamas and interposed into an incongruous setting is employed in other pieces. In one permutation, Have Always Touched The Ground Before, a site-specific photograph from 2005, the couple appears in the PM Gallery in London, posed symmetrically in the foreground. In the middle ground is a narrow display wall in front of which is a white marble sculpture of a female turned in dramatic torsion; her theatrical movement highlights the stillness of the couple. In the background, undraped windows establish the twilight of the outside world. Standing stiffly and again facing forward, the subjects each convey the same estrangement and lack of interaction with their surroundings as they did in Meantime. They almost appear to be floating, but in this case the couple also represents an artwork. Placed in the gallery, the work of art has a life independent of its creator. Extracting the work from their private realm and interjecting it into the public arena of the art world results in bifurcation of the artists into two parallel existences. But both

77 the work and the artists are inextricably interrelated and scrutiny, evaluation, and/or appreciation of one is reflective of the other.

The installation Unfamiliar Narratives (2004) substitutes meticulously and beautifully rendered drawings of the figures in their pajamas for the photograph.7 Filling two narrow, pillar-like compositions, each showing a sliver of the standing figure, the drawings are imposed on a large plywood construction. The wood is simply articulated as a room whose distinguishing features—walls, floor, ceiling and windows—are drawn

Conroy/Sanderson, Unfamiliar Narratives, 2004, routered plywood, graphite on paper, slide projection, 3 x 2.5 x 2.5 metres. Photo: Neil Conroy. Courtesy of the artists.

78 in perspective. At the bottom of the piece, in between the drawings, is a slide projection of the video Meantime. Incongruities in the work abound, and examining them reveals layers of pictorial and thematic illusionism. The rigidity of the mechanical architectural interior enhances the softness and irregularity of the drawings. Though the one point- perspective is exact, it is bereft of chiaroscuro and detail and thus remains a schematic rather than a convincing three-dimensional space. Moreover, the figures are too large for the setting they are placed in. The contrast of the nuanced pencil drawings against the tan textured plywood is striking, and the shared medium of the hand-drawn figures

79 Left: Conroy/Sanderson, Here We Are, 2003, three lightboxes, 91 x 152 cm each. Photo: Neil Conroy, Don Jackson. Courtesy of the artists.

suggests a continuity of space: it is as if, revealed through narrow slits in the wall, there exists another dimension. These hand-drawn icons of the artists are then seen in contrast to the “real” video images from their Shanghai experience. Thus there are layers of space and time both physical and illusory. Apparently passive, the figures have great presence, directly staring out at the viewer, despite their bedtime attire. As the artists explain:

Unfamiliar Narratives uses generic drawing styles, such as two large observational drawings and a large diagram computer-routered into plywood, which are placed alongside video projection. This work continues our exploration of the tenuous and fragile line between the private and public and the vulnerability of subjectivity. The reference of space/architecture that is both ambiguous and particular, interior and exterior, quiet and bustling, imaginative and real refer to how spatial relationships impact on subjects. Again, we the subjects are dressed in pajamas to suggest alternative readings within different cultural contexts.8

Several other types of self-portraits engage the pair and subject their images to various forms of manipulation that obscure their identity and broaden the content of the images. Once again, these interpretations can be seen as antithetical couplets. Using the format of close-up frontal head and upper body view, Here We Are (2003) presents two separate headshots of the artists. In one, Sanderson is expertly wrapped in bandages, and behind her is a backdrop of beautiful blue sky with high- hanging cumulus clouds. The second image shows the cloudy sky, and the third image has the couple posed, completely bandaged together, in front of tropical plants.

The horizontal arrangement and the imagery suggest contrasting states of existence—singular and plural, alone and connected, wounded and whole, earthbound and paradisiacal. The arrangement suggests

80 Left: Conroy/Sanderson, Here We Are, 2003, three lightboxes, 91 x 152 cm each. Photo: Neil Conroy, Don Jackson. Courtesy of the artists. Top right: Conroy/Sanderson, At Arm’s Length, 2005, lightbox, 89 x 195 cm. Photo: Neil Conroy. Couresy of the artists. Bottom right: Conroy/ Sanderson, Victor and Victoria, 2004, lightbox, 91 x 152 cm. Photo: Bev Stout. Courtesy of the artists.

a progression through different states of being. Indeed the masked features of the images suggests an interior life unknowable to the viewer. Ironically this work visually alludes to René Magritte’s painting The Lovers (1928) and other of his works set against a beautiful cloudy blue sky. In this way Here We Are also calls forth another set of disparities—questions of social conformity or ostracization, anonymity or recognition, the mundane or spiritual.

Focusing on the question of national and personal identity and the problems of immigration, Victor and Victoria, of 2005, is also a dual portrait, but the photograph is taken on a British residential street. Although the format of an ID photo with a head and upper body shot in flat light is adopted, Band-Aids cover the eyes and mouth and bear comical outline drawings of these features. Disfigured in this way, the figures lack expression and the ability to see or to speak.9 They are constricted to behave within the confines of their imposed masks, their assigned profile. As the artists maintain, “the work deals with complex relationships of power between subject and viewer, suggesting the power implicit in the act of viewing. The body becomes a site onto which

81 conflicting intimate or detached perceptions can be projected.”

The situation is similar in At Arm’s Length (2004) in which the figures are again posed in the same setting, but here they inhabit a large red hood with holes cut out for their eyes.10 Their outstretched arms extend in a type of greeting. Denied personal identity, detached and alienated from their setting, the subjects are invisible, the artists explained:

At Arm’s Length was made for an exhibition, Strangers to Ourselves, in 2004, which was organized in response to the social, political, and economic issues surrounding migration. The exhibition took place over twenty-three venues in South East England, and then London. Our piece was about notions of welcome and rejection of people, and ideas of power over others, as symbolised by the hood, which we hoped made the subjects threatening, whilst also being a ludicrous cowling. The hood in this piece is different to that in Not There At All, shifting the dialogue to a suggested vulnerability because of the inability to see out.11

Conroy/Sanderson employ full-body portraits in Not There At All (2005) and the theme is similarly expanded to the larger question of cultural identity. The piece takes place in the Music Room of the PM Gallery. Shown in profile, Conroy sits at the piano, apparently playing. Nearby stands Sanderson in full frontal posture. They are dressed in formal attire, but for the continuous coil of light blue cloth that winds round and totally obscures their heads. In performance mode, Sanderson does not look at her accompanist. She stands on her right foot, her left foot relaxed behind; her right hand rests on the piano, while the other rests at her side. The interior is not lit, but the light from oversized windows gently illuminates the room. Leafy trees are visible outside the window. The artists described their work:

Not There At All is a site-specific photograph Conroy/Sanderson, Not There At All, 2005, made in reference to the music room of photograph, 112 x 112 cm. Photo: Neil Conroy. a heritage Victorian house in England. Courtesy of the artists.

82 83 Conroy/Sanderson, The Great Disaster, 2006, photographs, 81 x 81 cm each. Photo: Neil Conroy. Courtesy of the artists.

It explores the convention of the private music recital, so much a part of European history and heritage. An absurd hood that covers the subjects’ head and links them disrupts this image. The photograph aims to unsettle a scene that both elevates and preserves privilege, the respectable, and the historical by an interjection that undermines these values. The work attempts to signal situations within the contemporary world where people are disempowered.12

Perhaps the climax of these works is achieved in The Great Disaster (2006). Once again the ID photo format, this time the profile view, is employed. The couple is shown individually in separate photos; they face each other wearing molded plastic full-head masks.13 Dressed in formal attire, they are positioned stiffly against a neutral background. The artists explained:

The Great Disaster is a double self-portrait made for an exhibition in Salzburg, a UNESCO city. It responds to the city’s civic emphasis on the preservation of historical legacies. Every autumn the statues and national monuments are covered with plastic covers to protect them from the heavy winter snows, which we mimic in the rigid plastic masks. At play is a duality between protection and confinement, concealment and transparency, and vulnerability and status, themes that concern us in our migrant, shifting contemporary world. 14

84 In using a number of inventive formats for their self-portraits, Conroy and Sanderson express many of the complex issues of contemporary life. They have taken their personal diversity and multi-ethnic identity and projected it on the world in which they live, viewing through their work the multifarious circumstances of cultural, sexual, and ethnic identity, the roles of insider and outcast, the contrast between dream and reality, and the distance between past and the present.14

Notes 1 Lyrics from “My Analyst Told Me,” by Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross; see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StDLnFrbi78&feature=related. 2 Fabrication and Reality is made of graphite on paper carbon paper, composite board, wood viewing device in the rear of the piece, and light (measuring 154.9 x 73.6 x 40.6 cm). 3 Helen McDonald, Erotic Ambiguities (London: Routledge, 2001), 211. 4 Pitzhanger Manor House and Gallery, a historic heritage house in Ealing, West London, was the residence of the famous London architect John Soane, who bought the building in 1800, and subsequently redesigned it. Attached to the house is West London’s largest contemporary art gallery; see http://www.ealing.gov.uk/services/leisure/ museums_and_galleries/pm_gallery_and_house/history/. 5 Personal communication, July 2008. 6 Personal communication, July 2008. 7 Unfamiliar Narratives was a commission for the Biggest Draw exhibition at the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, in 2004. Made of routered plywood, drawings, and slide projections, it measures 3 x 2.5 x 2.5 m. 8 Personal communication, July 2008. 9 Victor and Victoria (152.4 x 88.9 cm) was exhibited in 2004 at the Cruel/Loving Bodies exhibition at the Duolun Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai (see http://home.earthlink.net/~swelland/clbphotogallery/id1.html) and at 798 Space, Dashanzi Art District, Beijing 2005, among other venues. 10 At Arm’s Length, light box (195.6 x 88.9 cm), was exhibited in Here We Are, Pitzhanger Manor House and Gallery, London, in 2005, and Stranger to Ourselves, in an exhibition that took place over twenty-three venues in South East England, and then London among other venues in 2004. 11 Personal communication, July 2008. 12 Personal communication, July 2008. 13 The Great Disaster, (two photos, 81 x 81 cm), was exhibited at the 5020 Gallery, Salzburg, Austria, in 2006. 14 Personal communication, July 2008.

85 Maya Kóvskaya Wu Gaozhong: Sites of Intimate Remembrance that Get under the Skin

n his sculptural works, Wu Gaozhong has created evocative sites of nostalgic remembrance through the use of an array of everyday Iobjects embedded with boar bristles. The sculptural “reincarnation” of objects that were important at pivotal moments in his life opens the possibility of stimulating an awakening of personal sensations within the viewer, offering metaphorical visual cues that potentially refer us back to specific things in our own lives and associations that only we ourselves know.

Marcel Proust, in his celebrated fictive memoir, Remembrance of Things Past, recounts a transformational experience that later triggers an important epiphany about the nature of time and memory. He wrote:

Upon biting into a madeline cookie dipped in tea, the stirrings of a long-past memory are involuntarily evoked: I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.1

86 Wu Gaozhong, Army Cap, Proust describes how this sensation is sparked by the most mundane 2008, wood and bristle, 41 x 33 x 13 cm. associations and the irresistible call of a reanimated past. He writes: Courtesy of the artist.

. . . an exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.2

Yet accessing the past in this way is not a matter of sheer will. Indeed, it is precisely these sorts of seemingly banal cues from everyday life that possess the capacity to reconnect us with our past.

If Proust were to comment on the sculptural works of Wu Gaozhong, he might consider these ordinary objects in the same terms in which he discussed the evocative power of the senses of taste and smell, noting that they “remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”3 Indeed, the artwork of Wu Gaozhong has a way of getting under the skin and tapping into the hidden well of lost memory. His latest series of sculptural installation pieces that evoke everyday objects are made of carved pear wood embedded with thousands upon thousands of boar bristles, creating the appearance of sprouting hair, and their evocative power is situated in the relationship between the passage of time and the frail yet potent capacities of memory.

Time, for Proust, can be understood in terms of “inner time,” which has a distinctly emotional characteristic and can be contrasted with the socially shared conception of “chronometric time.” He wrote, “The past still lives in us . . . . [It] has made us what we are and is remaking us every moment! . . . An hour is not merely an hour! . . . It is a vase filled with perfumes, sounds, places, and climates! . . . So we hold within us a treasure of impressions, clustered in small knots, each with a flavour of its own, formed from our own experiences, that become certain moments of our past.”4 We are all too often unable, however, to excavate this hidden treasure of our past by means of intentional conscious effort because it is buried in our subconscious mind. In this way, the time that is past is lost to us. What Proust called “involuntary memory” is a conception of memory in which subtle triggers from everyday life spontaneously evoke recollections of the past, in contrast to “voluntary memory,” which is an intentional effort to remember the past. While our conscious efforts to remember often leave us empty-handed in our pursuit of the past, it is precisely the sorts of everyday objects that Wu Gaozhong uses in his work, that trigger deep associations with

87 Wu Gaozhong, Beautiful Eden, 2003, photograph, 60 x 367 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

experiences and submerged memories that lie hidden beneath the surface of the narratives we construct about ourselves. How can we access those lost treasures, reanimating memory and unifying the “inner time” of our private, emotive, interior world with the exterior “chronometric time” of shared public life? Perhaps the sort of art, like Wu Gaozhong's, that turns on the pivot connecting the intimate, personal, and private with the widespread, common, and public, can show us how the seemingly insignificant little things often contain the stuff of life itself.

Wu Gaozhong's visual language also bears a superficial resemblance to the conceptually playful investigations of the Surrealists. His boar bristles growing from replicas of everyday objects seem to both resemble and extend the visual thread of Meret Oppenheim's iconic fur-lined teacup, Breakfast in Fur (1936), but also differ in important ways. Oppenheim's teacup, saucer, and spoon, covered and lined with the pelt of a Chinese gazelle, have been described as possessing a “subtle perversity.”5 By evoking the softness, inwardness, and concavity of female genitalia, as well as hinting at larger relations of poetic absurdity that challenge notions of rationality, Oppenheim's cup is said to have possible feminist connotations that critique the typically hard, convex, erect, and self-referential phallic male sculptures of that time. Wu Gaozhong's startling use of materials, however, is not designed to induce our free associations about hair or hairy objects, but, rather, to visually represent the spectre of memory itself, lodged in an object that acts as a catalyst upon our psyches, taking us back to moments deep within ourselves.

The appearance of sprouting hair in Wu Gaozhong's sculptural work was a natural extension of the visual logic of his earlier series of objects rendered “furry” with moldy growth. In 2000, he began experimenting with a variety of organic compounds placed in bottles, allowing them to rot, molder, and be transformed by the strange new phosphorescent life forms proliferating there. In his next series of work, he created and then photographed a series of moldy landscapes and traditional Chinese architecture, with pagodas, temples, memorial archways, and the like rendered ethereal by the decadent beauty of rot and decay. Beautiful Eden, one of the landscapes in this series of works, resembles a magical interpretation of traditional Chinese landscape painting or a classic “sea of clouds” tableau, with pastel mountain

88 peaks of rotting matter poking out from a blanket of snowy white synthetic cotton. These moribund mountains, as well as the images of traditional architectural structures in Rainy Season, are alluring even as they allude to toxicity, corruption, and decay. Is Wu Gaozhong's Beautiful Eden a place of putatively pure “human nature” before the “fall,” outside of “time” and removed from the consequences of human actions, or is it a space of pure primordial nature, in which inherently flawed human beings have no rightful place?

While Wu Gaozhong's moldy landscapes have an otherworldly aura, his sculptures of everyday objects “growing hair” bring us back down to earth. Particularly touching are the works that invoke his personal effects, carved in pear wood and sprouting hairs that grow from the wood-like memories coming out from under the skin. The works in this series represent the sorts of things that each of us has—objects that come to mean something in the irreducible contexts of individual everyday lives, in this case the favourite pair of once-hip sunglasses; dog-eared love letters; a computer bag; a tea kettle; a diploma, a flyswatter; the scissors on which Wu Gaozhong’s son cut his hand, accidentally, at the age of three; a book rescued from his college dorm, which burned during the 1989 student demonstrations; and the map of Beijing from 2003, when the artist decided to move to Beijing from Suzhou, in his native Jiangsu province, to pursue his career in the centre of China's art scene. Marking Wu Gaozhong's life-shaping experiences are objects like the boots he wore as a factory worker for eight years following the Cultural Revolution before being admitted to art school to become a painter; the sensual pink suitcase, adorned with long white bristles, that carries his hopes with him back and forth from Suzhou to Beijing; and the alarm clock that measures out the infinitesimal, irresistible passage of time.

Wu Gaozhong's works also have a dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish quality, and some are literally borne of bad dreams. In the installation work Dark Night, Stranger, Bed, Flashlight, Cardboard Box (2005), Wu Gaozhong visually and spatially re-members (that is, he puts back together again the parts of a haunting experience, between dream and waking, into a coherent whole) a moment long since past. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud proposed that psychological healing and the recovery of repressed memory can be facilitated by the conscious articulation

89 and verbalization of subconscious fears and fetishes, and that dreams can reveal latent, repressed desires. In this installation, Wu Gaozhong remembers and re-presents concretized embodiments of a childhood nightmare of an intruder hiding under his bed, offering himself, as an adult, an opportunity for an examination of his childhood anxieties. The installation includes a normal-sized bed, underneath which is a cardboard box and a massive flashlight—both sprouting his trademark boar bristles. The enormous, oversized flashlight, of course, can be read as a classic phallic symbol, a source of self-possession and empowerment acquired from the father. Wu Gaozhong's father once used a flashlight to illuminate the terrifying, unknown space beneath the bed, where the child was sure an intruder was hiding, and revealed a cardboard box instead of a monstrous stranger, thereby allaying the child's fear. If remembrance—and the knowledge it can bring to us about ourselves and what has made us who we are—can function as a form of healing and empowerment, then perhaps these works can remind us to consider the humble objects in our own lives with new eyes—eyes that see these objects' capacities to connect us with an ethos, a feeling, a moment fixed in time, granting us an awareness that the moments represented therein, however infinitesimal, thus remain a part of us.

Taken as a series or individually, these works offer a visual parallel to one of Proust's central leitmotifs—“involuntary memory” and its power to reconnect us with parts of ourselves and our lives that have been submerged in the sediment of experience, accumulated by the relentless passage of time. In evoking and representing—literally making that

90 Wu Gaozhong, Rainy Season— Memorial Arch, 2001, photograph, 75 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Left: Wu Gaozhong, Sunglasses, 2006, wood and bristle, 28 x 26 x 12 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Top right: Wu Gaozhong, Scissors, 2006, wood and bristle, 52 x 36 x 12 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Bottom right: Wu Gaozhong, Kettle, 2007, wood and bristle, 43 x 33 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

91 Opposite page: Wu Gaozhong, Boots, wood and bristle, 75 x 40 x 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Top: Wu Gaozhong, Dark Night, Stranger, Bed, Flashlight, Cardboard Box (detail from installation), 2005–06, wood and bristle, 68 x 46 x 48 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Bottom: Wu Gaozhong, Dark Night, Stranger, Bed, Flashlight, Cardboard Box (detail from installation), 2005–06, wood and bristle, 129 x 35 x 74 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

92 93 94 95 Previous page: Wu Gaozhong, Dark Night, Stranger, Bed, Flashlight, Cardboard Box (detail from installation), 2005–06, wood and bristle, 280 x 120 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Wu Gaozhong, Dark Night, Stranger, Bed, Flashlight, Cardboard Box (detail from installation), 2005–06, wood and bristle, 150 x 200 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

which is past once again present—moments from the past, this body of works draws out the significant and the permanent from the seemingly trivial and the transitory in an age where almost everything seems fleeting and ephemeral, simultaneously reminding us of the powerful and continuing presence of a seemingly invisible past in our present lives and selves.

Wu Gaozhong deftly casts intimate moments from his own life into works that speak to the larger experience of a generation, a nation, and in many ways of all of us. These objects that are so personal to the artist are powerful precisely because of their capacity to evoke unique private memories. As such, they offer fragile but tenacious visual anchors to our pasts.

Notes 1 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann’s Way: Within a Budding Grove, trans C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1982), 48–51. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 ”Publication excerpt,” MoMA Highlights (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999), p. 155; cited at http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results. php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A4416&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1.

96 Biljana Ciric Jin Feng: Art Is a Way of Life A Case Study from 2003 to Today

in Feng has been an active participant in many ongoing projects, exhibitions, and discussions about art since he moved to Shanghai in November of 2003. During Jthese years he has also been able to maintain a unique role as a person working at the margins, both inside and outside the inner art circle, who continues to have a profound influence in Shanghai. The sense of belonging and the strong community atmosphere that exists in Shanghai has allowed Jin Feng to play the role of a catalyst, someone who tries to bring different people together and initiate new dialogues. Many in Shanghai refer to this kind of activity as jianghu, but Jin Feng also plays the very important role of mediator and spokesperson, which he also handles very well.

When Jin Feng moved to Shanghai, he left behind his teaching position at Changzhou Teacher’s University of Technology and began working as director of the Academic Department of the Duolun Museum of Modern Art to develop the exhibition and education program. In his position as Academic Director, Jin Feng worked to institute basic museum working standards and to establish himself within this new environment. At that time Jin Feng was known for his mixed-media works and photographs; My Vanishing Portrait 1 to 6 is one of his most representative works of art from the late 1990s. The days of museum work were important for him, and it was during that time that he began the writing projects that later became one of his major contributions to the art world through his blog and other arts-related Web platforms. Jin Feng’s critical discourse and perspectives expressed through the written word have been a crucial contribution to contemporary Chinese art as there are few critics who follow the most current and experimental artist practices.

During his time at Duolun, he established strong relationships with the local art community through various discussions and a number of curated projects, among them the Shanghai Duolun MoMA Exhibition of Young Artists in 2004. At the same time, Jin Feng kept working on his own artistic production, but he kept it out of the limelight during this period, a time that could be considered transitional for the artist. Rarely showing his work at that time, Jin Feng made only one piece for the Shanghai Duolun MoMA exhibition of young artists, a sculpture of Saddam Hussein entitled Shaking Hands (2005), which was inspired by the scene of Saddam’s statue being dismantled in Baghdad. Although this piece has somehow gone relatively unnoticed in recent years, it was an important challenge for the artist to turn to other media rather than his previous photography and video work. Also, Shaking Hands is one of the first works in which he uses news events from everyday life as a point of departure; this emphasis on social issues later became one of the most notable characteristics of his approach to art making.

Jin Feng left Duolun MoMA in early 2005 and directed all of his attention to making art. The piece that finally drew attention to his practice, and that is still today discussed

97 Jin Feng, My Vanishing Portrait 3, 2000, colour photographs, 120 x 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

98 in artistic circles, was for a very short time shown in the exhibition Asia Traffic at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in late 2005. This sculpture, Kneeling for 492 Years (We Stood Up to Take a Breath) (2005), represents Qin Hui and his wife in upright positions. Qin Hui was a chief counselor of the Southern Song dynasty: he maintained security within the region by signing a peace treaty with Juchen (Jin), who controlled the north. Yue Fei, a general of the Southern Song, didn’t abide by the treaty, and so Qin Hui executed him. Because he relinquished Northern China to Juchen and executed Yue Fei, Qin Hui is known as a traitor within Chinese history. In present-day Hangzhou, once the capital of the Southern Song, there remains a sculpture near the West Lake that shows Qin Hui and his wife kneeling in front of Yue Fei’s tomb asking for forgiveness. Jin Feng made his sculpture in the likeness of the original, but he shows the couple standing instead of kneeling. For the opening of the exhibition, Qin Hui’s descendant, Qin Shili, was invited by the artist to write an inscription, and he wrote: “The beautiful country can’t compare with the past. For truly great men look to this age alone.” Jin Feng’s piece attracted a great deal of media attention and much debate over the Internet. Many people criticized Jin Feng for allowing the traitor to stand up. Citizens in Shanghai threatened to gather in front of the museum and protest, asking for the artwork to be removed from the museum. In consequence, the piece was removed before the exhibition officially ended, but the issue remained a topic of hot debate.

In this work, Jin Feng achieved two primary goals: to shift the work’s meaning beyond the spaces of the gallery by bringing forth an issue that echoes throughout Chinese society and to create a work that would allow him to finally make an impact in contemporary art circles who have their own level of critical discussion. Another important strategy for Jin Feng was to search out resources for creativity that have a strong resonance within the Chinese community and meanings that non-Chinese audiences, who in many cases do not possess the same background knowledge, might have a hard time understanding.

Another piece is Appeal Without Words (2006), which Jin Feng showed in the 38 Solo Exhibition in Shanghai for a very short period of time during the opening. Jin Feng invited one hundred people painted in gold to stand in the exhibition space as live sculptures. Referring to the local phenomenon of soundless protests in Beijing, where thousands who are petitioning the government for justice but are not heard, the artist invited actual protesters to the exhibition site.

After the Qin Hui piece, Jin Feng did not exhibit again for awhile; instead, he developed new strategies for exhibiting his work by sharing his projects and ideas on the Web. The isolation he experienced during this period and his urge to speak inspired him to find his own way of showing his work. In this way, his blog as well as Web sites like art-ba-ba (www.art-ba-ba.com) became very important. Through his blog (http://blog.sina.com. cn/jfeng) he attracted considerable attention; so, although he was barred from regular exhibitions, Jin Feng continued with this new strategy of creating work and announcing it on the Net. He constantly tracks people’s comments about his work and practice on his blog, and he replies to everyone, thereby further spreading his socially oriented approach to art making. During his period of isolation which continues till today, Jin Feng’s primary approach to exhibition making was presenting living sculpture, that is, enlisting people from real life, usually people who have had very strong issues mark their lives in one way or another. These issues are well known to the Chinese public and are incorporated into the concept that Jin Feng stages with the actors he involves.

99 100 Right: Jin Feng, Insult Art, 2007, performance. Courtesy of the artist and BizArt, Shanghai. Left: Jin Feng, Kneeling for 492 Years (We Stood Up to Take a Breath), 2005, sculpture. Courtesy of the artist Following page: Jin Feng, Appeal Without Words, 2006, performance. Courtesy of the artist.

Jin Feng’s performance piece Insult Art can be considered a new step in this approach. The event was presented at the BizArt Center in Shanghai in 2006. He staged the event for two hours and moved his daily working environment into the exhibition space, revealing his ideas and thoughts through news images, blog content printouts, his daily research on the Internet, and information that he might use as material for his future works. The gallery walls were covered with images and texts printed on A4 paper. Jin Feng invited the Shenzhen-based Insult Company, who can be hired to harass and insult individuals one doesn’t like, to the site along with a lawyer whose role it was to protect the interests of the artist. The Insult Company had the task of doing research on Jin Feng himself, and “insulting” his art, his process, and his character. As Jin Feng was not present at the site during the event, the lawyer stood by. Led by his experience in recent years and by the attacks on his work arising from public opinion, Jin Feng made this event an example of some of the reaction to his artistic practice. The event consisted of a mixture of preconceived actions and totally out-of-control situations, which made it difficult for the audience to distinguish when the artist had determined what was happening and when it was spontaneous. This work, and others that followed it, were important in the maturation of his concept of art becoming a way of life.

Each year Jin Feng presents about seven new works, which are mostly self-produced and promoted. Because of his persistence, he has gained a great deal of recognition in the Chinese art world. Jin Feng’s efforts to push further and build new channels of communication are not possible to accomplish in every work. But he continues to struggle with himself as an artist and as a contributor to society, and is compelled to discuss such matters through his work and his blog. Jin Feng is one of the rare artists from his generation who has managed to overcome his own barriers and move forward. He is able to actively work outside of the commercial gallery circuit, as he doesn’t really think of pursuing the commercial world, or, if he does, then he considers how to make such endeavours more complicated and challenging.

On the other hand, while Jin Feng has received considerable attention within China, he hasn’t achieved much visibility at an international level. One of the main obstacles in this regard is the strong local context for much of his work and the lack of exposure that relates to the difficulty of presenting his work within the gallery system and international exhibition platforms.

101 102 103 Top left: Jin Feng, The Soles of Ma Zhongxin Belong to Me, 2006, photograph, 120 x 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Ma Zhongxin is a world- famous global traveler. I signed a contract with him in which we both agreed that conceptually, the soles of Ma Zhongxin’s feet belonged to me. I tattooed a stamp saying “Jin Feng Guo Shou” (handled by Jin Feng) on his soles, which accompanies him during his global travelling. As long as Ma is travelling, it will be an ongoing project. Only when Ma finishes with world travels will the work be deemed fully complete.

Bottom left: Jin Feng, File for Old Lady Wang Xiaoliu, 2007, installation, 800 x 600 x 500 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Wang Xiaoliu is widely known in Danyang City, Jiangsu province. The kind old lady has brought up over two hundred disabled children abandoned by their families. All the possessions of old lady Wang Xiaoliu, including furniture, daily necessities, and household appliances, were bought by the artist, placed into different categories, and put into glass cases specially made according to their sizes. Figures of Wang Xiaoliu and three of the abandoned children brought up by her, Wang Xisheng, Wang Guoxian, and Wang Guoping, were also placed the glass cases.

104 Left Jin Feng, Confucius is Crying! (detail), 2006, plasticine and interactive Web site, 185 x 70 x 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Confucius is Crying! is both a sculpture and an interactive Web work using a blog. I try to explore communication between artists and the general public as well as new channels of communication. There are two steps to completing Confucius is Crying!: first, the sculpture of Confucius is Crying! is exhibited at the studio of the artist. Materials used include plasticine sent from Guangzhou via express service. Under certain temperatures, plasticine can be used to reshape sculptures. The second step is to invite the audience to wipe away Confucius’s tears, and thus recreate the image of Confucius. What kind of image will show up in the end? Right: Jin Feng, Confucius is Crying!, 2006, plasticine and interactive Web site, 185 x 70 x 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

In 2006, Jin Feng proposed to Zendai MoMA in Shanghai the following project: a solo exhibition of work by Sun Zhigang in which Jin Feng would perform the role of the curator. In 2003, an infamous event, in which Sun Zhigang was arrested and beaten to death in Guangzhou for not carrying a temporary resident permit or valid ID, put an end to the history of detention and repatriation, and his death pushed the justice system forward in the handling of migrant workers. Sun majored in art and design at Wuhan University of Science & Technology and completed courses in 2001. He was fond of painting, design, and sculpture. Jin Feng’s proposal was to memorialize the deceased through the curation of his artworks. This project has since remained in proposal form.

In 2008 Jin Feng did have a solo exhibition at Zendai MoMA titled Site/ Problem—A Case of Jin Feng, but it presented a challenge for the artist: how to break away from the retrospective presentation of his work that we are all now very familiar with. We have come to expect some surprise from Jin Feng that will undoubtedly also be a surprise for the artist himself, a project that will be hard to judge or criticize with our existing value systems.

The failure of many retrospective presentations is the result of framing the artist within a certain identifiable oeuvre. This kind of categorization is something that Jin Feng is still not ready for, or maybe it’s too early, or maybe he will never be ready. No matter what, Jin Feng will continue on in his own particular path. As he has said: “Art is a way of life, so it’s almost impossible to frame [my work] into a retrospective notion of presentation, because my approach to making art is a dynamic idea in motion that questions itself at every moment.”

105 Chinese Name Index

Bei Dao Li Xianting Stars group Yang Xiaoyan 北島栗憲庭星星畫會楊小彥

Chen Anying Li Xiaoshan Sun Zhigang Yue Fei 陳岸瑛李小山孫志剛岳飛

Chen Chieh-Jen Liang Shanbo Tang Song Zhang Peili 陳界仁梁山伯唐宋張培力

Chen Kaige Liu Binyan Tsao singyuan Zhang Yimou 陳凱歌劉賓雁曹星原張藝謀

Deng Xiaoping Lu Jie Wang, Aileen Zhao Tingyang 鄧小平盧杰 June 趙汀陽王藹霖 Fang Lijun Ma Zhongxin Zhao Wenbing 方力鈞馬中欣 Wang Guangyi 肇文兵王廣義 Fang Xiaofeng Mao Zedong Zheng Shengtian 毛澤東 Wang Ruoshui 鄭勝天方曉風王若水

Ni Zhen Zhu Yingtai Gao Minglu 倪震 Wang Xiaoliu 祝英台高名潞王小六

Northern Hong Huang Art Group Wen Zai 洪晃北方群體文載

Huang Yongping Qin Hui Wu Gaozhong 黃永砅秦檜吳高鐘

Huang Zhuan Qin Shili Wu Hung 黃專秦世禮巫鴻

Jiang Zemin Qiu Zhijie Xiamen Dada 江澤民邱志杰廈門達達

Jin Feng Ruan Ming Xiao Feng 金鋒阮銘蕭峰

Jin Jiangbo Sha Yong Xiao Lu 金江波沙勇蕭魯

Lü Peng Song Jianming Xu Sujing 呂澎宋建明徐蘇靜

Li Songsong Song Ren Yan Shanchun 李松松宋韌嚴善錞

106 107 108 109

Xiao Bo, Reception, 2008, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 x 6 cm. Courtesy of Platform China Contemporary Art Institute.

HIGHLIGHTS OF CIGE 2009:

PARTICIPATING GALLERIES 80 galleries from all over the world, including ShanghArt (Shanghai), Xin Dong Cheng, Platform, Tang Contemporary, Boers-Li (Beijing), Krinzinger (Vienna), Nadi (Jakarta), Noda (Nagoya), Zeit-Foto Salon (Tokyo), Arario, Keumsan. (Seoul), The Drawing Room (Makati City), Mori (Sydney). Galleries scheduled to launch their debut shows in East Asian Art Fair, such as Majmua (Pakistan), Ayyam (Syria), La Casona (Cuba), Watatu (Kenya), will also be presented at CIGE.

MAPPING ASIA – China International Gallery Exposition, known as CIGE, will be held from April Young Asian Artist Solo Shows 16-19 at CWTC exhibition hall in Beijing. Since its inaugural launch in 2004, The whole 2nd floor of the China CIGE has established a solid international reputation as one of the top art World Trade Center Exhibition Hall fairs in Asia; special sections such as MAPPING ASIA have garnered much will host exclusively a number of solo exhibitions of young and emerging attention from art enthusiasts and collectors. MAPPING ASIA invites young artists from Asia. talented artists from Asia, ranging from Tokyo to Istanbul, via a series of strict selection processes by galleries and CIGE’s art committee. INTERNATIONAL SOLO SHOWS This section will feature solo exhibitions of 12 international Due to the recent volatility of global economy, speculations have been made in artists. CIGE offers residencies to regards to the future development of the art market. CIGE, therefore, becomes these artists. Artists in residency are encouraged to experience Beijing and the focal point for art specialists and dealers to take a glimpse of how the art work towards the realization of site- world might evolve. specific projects. In efforts to promote CIGE at an international level, this year the fair’s SUBLIMINALS At the entrance of the China World organizer appointed a special committee comprised of experts and senior Trade Center, CIGE will present 9 not- curators, including Alexander von Vegesack, Director of Vitra Design Museum, for-sale projects in collaboration with Sook-Kyung Lee, Curator from Tate Liverpool, and Melissa Chiu, Director of non-profit art organizations. Asia Society Museum. VIDEO LOOPS present video, film and documentary In 2008, CIGE attracted an attendance of 50,000 gallerists, collectors, artists, screening programs by young and established artists, art initiatives journalists, critics and art lovers; and set a new sales record of 40 million US and organizations. Dollars — a 40 percent increase of profit compared to 2007.

Date: April 16 -19 Email: [email protected] Venue: China World Trade Center, Beijing Web: www.cige-bj.com