July/August 2016 Volume 15, Number 4 Inside

J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 1 6 VOLUME 15, NUMBER 4

INSIDE

Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modernist Calligraphy Hong Kong After the Umbrella Protests New Media Arts from Taiwan Artist Features: susan pui san lok, Wang Bing, Xie Nanxing, Zhang Kechun Buried Alive: Preface

US$12.00 NT$350.00 PRINTED IN TAIWAN

VOLUME 15, NUMBER 4, JULY/AUGUST 2016

CONTENTS 29 2 Editor’s Note

4 Contributors

6 Lines in Translation: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modernist Calligraphy, Early 1980s–Early 1990s Shao-Lan Hertel

53 29 Spots, Dust, Renderings, Picabia, Case Notes, Flavour, Light, Sound, and More: Xie Nanxing’s Creations Carol Yinghua Lu

45 Zhang Kechun: Photographing "China’s Sorrow" Adam Monohon

53 Hong Kong After the Umbrella Protests John Batten

65 65 RoCH Redux Alice Ming Wai Jim

71 Wuxia Makes Me Nervous Henry Tsang

76 New and Greater Prospects Beyond the Frame: New Media Arts from Taiwan Claudia Bohn-Spector

81 In and Out of the Dark with Extreme Duration: Documenting China One Person at a Time in 76 the Films of Wang Bing Brian Karl

91 Buried Alive: Preface Lu Huanzhi

111 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Zhang Kechun, Buddha in a Coal Yard, Ningxia (detail), 81 from the series The Yellow River, 2011, archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 cm. © Zhang Kechun. Courtesy of the artist.

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

Vol. 15 No. 4 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art PRESIDENT Katy Hsiu-chih Chien LEGAL COUNSEL Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C. C. Liu Yishu 75 opens with a text by Shao-Lan Hertel FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum that explores cross-cultural encounters EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian among three artists—Wang Dongling, Roman EDITORS Julie Grundvig Kate Steinmann Verostko, and Andreas Schmid—as it pertains Chunyee Li to the evolution of calligraphy in China during EDITORS (CHINESE VERSION) Yu Hsiao Hwei Chen Ping the 1980s and into the 90s, a relatively early Guo Yanlong CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde period for contemporary Chinese art, and WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li the subsequent interaction with aspects of ADVERTISING Sen Wong Michelle Hsieh Western abstract art. This is followed by Carol ADVISORY BOARD Yinghua Lu’s rumination on the painter Xie Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Melissa Chiu, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Nanxing, whose highly conceptual works both John Clark, University of Sydney challenge the practice of painting and propose Lynne Cooke, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator a provocative dialogue between the figurative Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator Fan Di’an, Central Academy of Fine Arts and the abstract. Adam Monohon writes about Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Zhang Kechun’s pensive photographs that Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, MAXXI, Rome bring into play interactions between simple Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop daily activities and the signs of social and Katie Hill, University of Westminster Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive economic changes that have taken place Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator along China’s vast Yellow River. Lu Jie, Long March Space Charles Merewether, Critic and Curator Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Hong Kong has experienced changes of a Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator different kind during the past decade, both Wu Hung, University of Chicago socially and culturally, and John Batten offers Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District an update on the Hong Kong art scene and, in ART & COLLECTION GROUP LTD. 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 particular, the strong assertion of its sense of Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 identity and growing internationalism following Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 E-mail: [email protected] the Umbrella Protests of 2014. Issues of VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu identity also arise through perspectives from MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu the Hong Kong diaspora as expressed in the Yishu is co-published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan and Vancouver, reflections of Alice Ming Wai Jim and Henry Canada, and published in Taipei, Taiwan. The publishing dates are Tsang on the recent new media work of susan January, March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: pui san lok and her dynamic video montage YISHU INITIATIVE OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART SOCIETY emphasizing the magic and motion of wuxia, a 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 genre that represents for the rest of the world Phone: 1.604.649.8187 E-mail: offi[email protected] an imaginary China. DIRECTOR Zheng Shengtian SECRETARY GENERAL Yin Qing Claudia Bohn-Spector discusses an exhibition RETAIL RATES USD $12 / EUR 9 / TWD 350 (per copy) of new media work from Taiwan and these SUBSCRIPTION RATES artists’ exploration of the vulnerable relationship 1 Year Print Copy (6 issues including air mail postage): between nature, society, and science. Wang Asia $94 USD/Outside Asia $104 USD Bing and Lu Huanzhi test the conventions 2 Years Print Copy (12 issues including air mail postage): Asia $180 USD/Outside Asia $198 USD of what constitutes art—the former, as 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD author Brian Karl points out, by showing his 1 Year Print Copy and PDF (6 issues including air mail postage): documentary-like films of the marginalized Asia $134 USD/Outside Asia $144 USD in the context of an art gallery in addition to DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah the cinema circuit, the latter by presenting ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow a fictional novel as a work of art. While Lu DESIGNER Philip Wong PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. Huanzhi’s writing functions as an artwork it WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com WEB DESIGN Design Format also serves as an inventive commentary on ISSN 1683 - 3082 the condition of the artist and the state of contemporary art within society today. No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher.

Keith Wallace Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版(Yishu)創刊於 2002年5月1日典藏國際版‧第15卷第4期‧2016年7–8月社長：簡秀枝法律顧問：思科技法律事務所劉承慶創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）

編者手記總策劃：鄭勝天 2 主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 4 作者小傳史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 黎俊儀

網站編輯：黎俊儀 6 轉譯中的線條: 1980年代早期至 1990年代早期現代主義書法中的跨中文編輯：余小蕙陳萍文化相遇郭彥龍何小蘭 (Shao-Lan Hertel) 行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 廣告：謝盈盈黃晨 29 斑點、塵埃、效果圖、皮卡比亞、顧問：王嘉驥「破案筆記」、味道、光、聲音及田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 其他 ——謝南星的創作安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 盧迎華巫鴻林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 范迪安招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 45 張克純: 留影河殤洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 胡昉墨曉波 (Adam Monohon) 侯瀚如徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 53 「雨傘運動」以後的香港高名潞 John Batten 費大爲楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 盧杰 Lynne Cooke 65 《神雕俠侶》終極版 Okwui Enwezor 詹明慧（Alice Ming Wai Jim） Katie Hill Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda 71 武俠令我惑出版：典藏藝術家庭股份有限公司副總經理：劉靜宜曾慶偉（Henry Tsang）行銷總監：林素珍發行專員：許銘文社址：台灣台北市中山北路一段85號6樓台灣新媒體：前景無限電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 76 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 Claudia Bohn-Spector 電子信箱：[email protected]

編輯製作：加中當代藝術創進協會 (Yishu Initiative of Contemporary 81 進出在漫長的黑暗中：王兵影片中 Chinese Art Society) 記錄的中國個人故事會長：鄭勝天秘書長：陰晴 Brian Karl 會址： 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 91 活埋電子信箱: ofﬁ[email protected] 陸換之訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與Yishu Initiative聯系。

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John Batten has lived in Hong Kong for two decades and of Exhibition Making. She is a regular contributor is a regular critic and commentator on art, culture, and to several Chinese and international art publications, urban planning for publications such as the South China including Broadsheet, Yishu, Flash Art, and Independent Morning Post, Perspective, and Ming Pao Weekly. He is Critic. Ciric has been a jury member for a number of currently President of the International Association of awards including the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award (2013) Art Critics Hong Kong; Organizer of the yearly charity and was a member of the nominating council for Vera art event, Hong Kong ArtWalk; and Convenor of Central List Prize for Art and Politics (2014–15). She was & Western Concern Group, a heritage conservation and nominated for the ICI Independent Vision Curatorial urban planning advocacy group. Award in 2012.

Claudia Bohn-Spector, a Los Angeles-based Shao-Lan Hertel has been working as an associate independent scholar and curator, received her doctorate researcher at the Art History Institute of the Freie in art history from the University of Munich, Germany. A Universität Berlin since 2012. She is currently specialist in American art and culture, she has organized completing her doctoral studies in east Asian art numerous fine art exhibitions, most notably Speaking history with a dissertation on developments and in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, transformations in calligraphy in twentieth- and 1961–1976 (with Sam Mellon) at the Armory Center for twenty-first-century China. From 2010 to 2011, Hentel the Arts in Pasadena, CA, and the critically acclaimed received a Chinese government scholarship to study survey of Los Angeles photography This Side of Paradise: at the Modern Calligraphy Research Center, China Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs (with Jennifer Academy of Art, Hangzhou. Her writing has appeared A. Watts) at the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. in Meister und Schüler/Master and Disciple: Tradition, Bohn-Spector also founded and directs Thistle & Weed Transfer, Transformation (VDG Weimar, 2016), Press, a small fine art publishing house specialized in Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler limited edition art books, and MICRONAUT, a curatorial aller Zeiten und Völker (De Gruyter, 2015), and Huang partnership focused on fine art exhibitions. Binhong and the Evolution of Modern Ideas in Art (China Academy of Fine Arts Publishing House, 2014). Biljana Ciric is an independent curator based She is co-editor of Elegant Gathering in a Scholar’s in Shanghai. She is co-curator of the 2015 Third Garden: Studies in East Asian Art in Honor of Jeong-hee Ural Industrial Biennale for Contemporary Lee-Kalisch (VDG Weimar, 2015). Art (Yekaterinburg, Russia), and her upcoming projects include curating an exhibition at Kadist Art Alice Ming Wai Jim is Associate Professor of Foundation (Paris) as well as speaking at a seminar Contemporary Art at Concordia University in hosted by CCA Kitakyushu (Japan) in 2016. Her recent Montreal, where she teaches contemporary art, curatorial projects include Just as money is the paper, the media arts, ethnocultural and global art histories, gallery is the room (2014), presented by the Osage Art international art exhibitions, and curatorial studies. Foundation; One Step Forward, Two Steps Back—Us and She is a founding co-editor of the scholarly journal Institution, Us and Institution (2013), presented by the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas and Guangzhou Times Museum; Tino Sehgal Solo Exhibition is the 2015 recipient of the Centre de documentation (2013), at the Ullens Center for Contemporary d’Artexte Award for Research in Contemporary Art, Beijing; Institution for the Future (2011), at Art. Her writing has appeared in art journals and the Asia Triennial, Manchester; and Alternatives to anthologies such as Third Text, Journal of Curatorial Ritual (2012–13), at Goethe Open Space Shanghai and Studies, Journal of Visual Culture, Triennial City: OCAT, Shenzhen. In 2013, Ciric initiated the seminar Localising Asian Art (Cornerhouse Publications, 2014), platform From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in

4 Vol. 15 No. 4 Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), visiting fellow in the Asia-Pacific Fellowship program Human Rights and the Arts: Perspectives from Global at the Tate Research Centre in 2013. In collaboration Asia (Lexington Books, 2014), and Mass Effect: Art and with artist Liu Ding, Lu has been working on a research the Internet in the 21st Century (MIT Press and the New project re-examining the lasting legacy of socialist Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015). realism in the contemporary art and intellectual practice and discourse in China. Brian Karl has worked as a curator, producer, and director at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Adam Monohon is a graduate student in the History (LACE); Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, of Art and Archaeology of East Asia at the University New York; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies California; Art in General, Brooklyn, New York; (SOAS) and a graduate of the History of Art and Creative Time, New York; and the Kitchen, New Design program at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. Monohon York; and has served as editor for Tellus, the Audio is interested in the history of photography as well Art Magazine. His art criticism has been published in as modern and contemporary non-Western art; he Artforum, Art Practical, Art Quarterly, Daily Serving, is especially interested in contemporary Chinese Flash Art, Frieze, and Hyperallergic, among other photography. Having completed his undergraduate publications. His writings on social science and thesis on landscape in contemporary Chinese the humanities have appeared in Journal of Middle photography, he is writing his master’s dissertation on Eastern Studies, Journal of North African Studies, and the Beijing-based April Photography Society. Migration Studies. He has also produced experimental video documentaries and installations that have been Henry Tsang is a visual and media artist and curator screened at the Jewish Museum, the Whitney Biennial, based in Vancouver. His artworks incorporate digital and the New York and San Francisco Film Festivals, media, video, photography, language, and sculptural among other venues. He has taught courses in art, elements that follow the relationship between the music, and cultural anthropology, including at the New public, community, and identity through global flows School, New York; Fordham University, Bronx, New of people, culture, and capital. His recent art projects York; Colby College, Waterville, Maine; University of include Maraya (2008–present), a collaboration with Michigan, Ann Arbor; California College of the Arts, Glen Lowry and M. Simon Levin that investigates the San Francisco; and San Francisco Art Institute. reappearance of Vancouver’s False Creek in Dubai as the Dubai Marina; Orange County (2003–04), a video Lu Huanzhi lives and works in Shanghai. He is an installation shot in Orange County, California and amateur historian and the author of Collected Works Beijing; and Olympus (2006), an interactive new media on Violence, which is yet to be published. His main work that focuses on Torino and Vancouver. Both profession is working for an insurance company. works explore the overlapping urban and sociopolitical spaces in each of the respective cities; and Welcome Carol Yinghua Lu is a Ph.D. student in art history at the to the Land of Light (1997), a public artwork installed University of Melbourne. She is a contributing editor of along Vancouver’s sea wall that underscores Chinook Frieze Exhibitionist and is on the advisory board of The Jargon, a nineteenth-century local trade language, and Exhibitionist. Lu was on the jury for the Golden Lion the English that replaced it. Tsang’s curatorial projects Award at the 2011 Venice Biennale. She also served as include Self Not Whole: Cultural Identity and Chinese- the co-artistic director of the 2012 Gwangju Biennale Canadian Artists in Vancouver (1991); Racy Sexy (1993); and co-curator of the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale and City at the End of Time: Hong Kong 1997 (1997). in 2012. From 2012 to 2015, she was the artistic director He is also an associate professor at Emily Carr and chief curator of OCAT Shenzhen. Lu was the first University of Art and Design.

Vol. 15 No. 4 5 Shao-Lan Hertel Lines in Translation: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modernist Calligraphy, Early 1980s–Early 1990s1

his essay considers the impact of cross-cultural encounters within the field of modern calligraphy art in China from the early T1980s to the early 1990s.2 Against the historical backdrop of the modernization (xiandaihua), academization (xueshuhua), and purposeful “purification” (chunhua) of the arts in the People’s Republic of China from the late 1970s onward, the gradual reopening of art academies post-1976 saw traditional Chinese arts, as formerly pursued by the class of so-called wenren scholar-artists, including the genres of poetry, brush writing, ink painting, and seal carving, was to some extent restored and redefined. Here, the initiation of the first calligraphy class for foreign students ever to be undertaken at a Chinese art institution—at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts3 (Zhejiang meishu xueyuan) in Hangzhou in 1980—can be noted as a pivotal moment with regard to its embeddedness within the broader framework of academized discourses that evolved around the definition and disambiguation of designations like “modern calligraphy” (xiandai shufa) and “contemporary calligraphy” (dangdai shufa).4

Wang Dongling writing calligraphy for Roman Verostko while Andreas Schmid watches, Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, 1985. Courtesy of Roman Verostko.

Within this context I will discuss works by the Chinese calligrapher Wang Dongling (b. 1945), the American digital artist Roman Verostko (Chinese name Ke Rongmeng, b. 1929), and the German light-installation artist Andreas Schmid (Chinese name Shi Andi, b. 1955),5 all of whom were active at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts during the ﬁrst half of the 1980s. These three cases serve to illustrate and exemplify the shifting landscape of calligraphy discourse during this time as well as its lasting effects on the three artists’ subsequent art production. While Wang Dongling was

6 Vol. 15 No. 4 Top: Roman Verostko, Untitled appointed as instructor in #81, 1987, algorithmic pen and brush, paper, ink, Hi-DMP 1985 for the newly established multi-pen plotter, 14 pen stalls, artist software Hodos, 45.7 x foreign-student calligraphy class, 60.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Andreas Schmid, Lichtungen Andreas Schmid, during his stay (Clearings), 2009, light installation with steering in China from 1983 to 1986, in mechanism, 21 vertically turn was among the small group arranged fluorescent lamps with filtered tubes on of foreigners who attended this transparent acrylic glass cylinders programed in two class. Roman Verostko, moreover, cycles, 4 mins., 30 secs., 5 mins., 50 secs. Garden experienced defining moments as an artist brought about by art-related Chamber of the Domnick Collection, Nürtingen, now exchanges in China, notably with Wang Dongling. Manifestations of the in the Daimler Art Collection, Berlin. Photo: Volker Naumann. 1980s modernist calligraphy movement are readable in their works as an Courtesy of the artist. attempt to translate and incorporate new elements of a cultural Other, in this case, particularly, the styles, techniques, and concepts of twentieth- century Western art in a coherent and systematic way, as visible traces indicating the mobility of (culture-) specific aesthetic concepts at given moments in time. Comprehensible as “third texts,”6 these artworks not only indicate the transmissional routes and flows of cross-cultural exchange, but, also, the trans-/formative processes of cultural production, as well as the production of knowledge and meaning with regard to the premises of defining and evaluating art critically and historically, in both global and local contexts.

In spite of Wang Dongling, Verostko, and Schmid’s current activities among different artistic disciplines and geographical regions, their early- 1980s exchanges in art can be said to have triggered mutually effective, fundamental transformations that informed these artists’ aesthetic and

Vol. 15 No. 4 7 8 Vol. 15 No. 4 Opposite page: Wang conceptual approaches to line, Dongling, Yi hua (Primordial Line), 2013, ink on xuan paper, space, and time. This is evident 178 x 96 cm. Courtesy of the artist and INK Studio, Beijing. particularly in Wang Dongling’s Right: Andreas Schmid, abstract (chouxiang), or text-less Raum.Zeichung: Intersection, 2009, space-related drawing, (feizi/wuzi), calligraphy, and, in coloured adhesive tape, acrylics, rope, and drawings turn, Schmid’s minimally composed on walls, ﬂoor, and windows, installation view, Kunstverein light-and-space art, both of which Nürtingen. Photo: Cyrill Harnischmacher. Courtesy of found fuller formulation from the the artist. late 1990s onward in their respective hallmark styles and formats.

Some Notes on Chinese Calligraphy in the Twentieth Century Chinese calligraphy is a form of artistic expression that, technically speaking, can only be performed and consumed by a literate audience acquainted with the Chinese written language; it is therefore considered by many as an exclusive symbol of Chinese culture. This powerful and ambiguous—in the sense that calligraphy is not an innocent art form but can also function as an instrument for social and political manipulation— rhetoric of calligraphy as the essence of Chinese culture is reiterated through the work of contemporary calligraphy artists, including Wang Dongling, who in his essay “On the Essence of Modern Calligraphy” has written: “Chinese calligraphy is the core art of traditional Chinese arts, it is most capable of embodying the essence of Chinese art.”7

Though the conception that calligraphy indeed circumscribes a hermetic discursive realm limited to the Chinese-speaking world is to some extent valid, the historical realities of “modern” and “contemporary calligraphy” as art phenomena can in fact be defined as permeated, and even spurred, by cross-cultural encounter and transmission. Throughout the twentieth century, and owing, among other things, to the major campaigns of the Communist government that succeeded in raising literacy rates significantly, calligraphy underwent a gradual yet radical transition from its former existence as an exclusive art possessing “inherent potential . . . to furnish social coherence”8 among the bureaucratic elite to a widespread manifestation of visual and popular culture in China.9 In the wake of China’s political, cultural, and economic opening up to the rest of the world from the late 1970s onward, the exchange and flow of art concepts gained momentum among art and intellectual circles; in some respects this interaction was a reprisal of the waves of modernization prevalent in cultural circles of the Republican period in China (1912–49), culminating in the May Fourth Movement of 1919.10 After the 1970s, books on Western artists were published in Chinese and significant works of Western-language art history and postmodern theory were translated. A thirst for knowledge was not only evident in dealings with the non-Chinese world; an intensive interest in and critical reflection upon China’s own cultural past developed, giving rise to questions of national identity, the heritage of traditions, and the relationship of China to the West.

With the reopening of art academies that had been closed during the Cultural Revolution, a set of new subjects was introduced to the curriculum,

Vol. 15 No. 4 9 thus institutionalizing genres of Western art traditions, incuding oil painting and sculpture, as well as traditional Chinese genres, including the brush- and-ink arts. In light of the widespread endeavour among Chinese artists to rejuvenate and modernize the arts, experimental forms of calligraphy emerged that speciﬁcally drew inspiration from Western Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism. Next to Wang Dongling, well-known pioneers of the modernist calligraphy movement include the late Huang Miaozi (1913– 2012), and Gu Gan (b. 1942).11 Gordon Barrass, in the singular English publication The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China (2002) that aimed at a systematic and comprehensive discussion of calligraphy in twentieth-century China, has provided the following deﬁnition of the modernist Chinese calligraphers emerging in the mid-1980s:

The exponents of Modernism believed that calligraphy would never become a means of creative expression in modern China unless it broke free from the rigorous rules that had constrained it for centuries. Modernist calligraphy, they argued, should unashamedly proclaim itself a form of ﬁne art. They intended, therefore, to be more painterly in their whole approach to calligraphy, including the way they structured their characters, the compositions they created and their use of inks. . . . Instead of being inward-looking, like the calligraphers of the past, they wanted to draw inspiration from other arts, both Chinese and Western.12

With calligraphy no longer the symbol of rigid social stratification and exclusion that characterized it throughout most of its history, its relocation from a predominantly political domain to an institutional academic realm and its establishment as an independent practice gave way for the “purification of the art form” as denoted by Yueh-ping Yen13— “purification” denoting “pure art” not only in the sense of l’art pour l’art, but of an emancipation from its particular enmeshment with political and social control in China’s history. Along similar lines, Wang Dongling claimed in 2004: “Calligraphy has only just attained its complete liberation and broken away from its functional restrictions; entering a category of unrestrained aesthetic appreciation, it thus attains the genuine meaning of a purified nature [chuncuixing] of art.”14 Such a claim must be read also in the context of Wang Dongling’s function as Director of the Research Center for Modern Calligraphy (Xiandai shufa yanjiu zhongxin) at the China Academy of Art, the only one of its kind worldwide.15 Moreover, the initiation of the first foreign-student calligraphy class at this art school in October 1980 can likewise be taken as going hand-in-hand with the initial “experimental undertaking of ‘modern calligraphy’” (“xiandai shufa” shiyan) proclaimed in the same year.16

Lines in Translation: At the Art Academy, Early 1980s Born in 1945 in Rudong, Jiangsu province, Wang Dongling gained a considerable reputation as a talented calligrapher at an early age, and was thus assigned, among other things, to write big character posters (dazibao) during the Cultural Revolution. Enrolling at the re-established Zhejiang

10 Vol. 15 No. 4 Academy of Fine Arts in 1979, he belonged to an initial group of five students nationwide to receive a calligraphy degree in 1981. Appointed then as the teacher of the first foreign-student calligraphy class, Wang Dongling was not only highly motivated to convey to his pupils the principles of calligraphic technique, composition, and style, but was likewise eager to learn more from his students about modern Western traditions of depicting form, handling space and surface, and the use of various materials in art. Western painters including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell are named by Wang Dongling, alongside his calligraphy instructors of that time, Lin Sanzhi (1898–1989), Lu Weizhao (1899–1990), and Sha Menghai (1900–1992), as significant role models that guided and informed his artistic output thoughout the 1980s.17 The impact of these role models was to gain particular siginificance around the turn of 1990, when Wang Dongling spent his first and longest period abroad to date as a visiting professor for calligraphy in the United States, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Minnesota, from 1988 to 1992.

Triggered by the encounters taking place within the increasingly active microcosm of his international-student calligraphy class, in the course of the 1980s Wang Dongling’s conviction that Chinese calligraphy must undergo a radical renewal strengthened. In his view, calligraphy should receive not only full acknowledgement as an independent art form in itself—which, throughout history had never been the case due to its unbroken ties to ofﬁcialdom and politics—but also gain signiﬁcance internationally on the global stage of visual arts.18 Works produced by Wang Dongling in the latter half of the 1980s illustrate unorthodox, experimental approaches to writing and new conventions indicating the characteristics of modernist calligraphy; polychrome and over-sized in format, they bear the unhinged, isolated bodies of single written characters, often in combination with other visual or pictorial elements and materials and not the familiar visual unity of sequential text columns executed in monochromatic ink.

Roman Verostko, multi-pen Even after his graduation, and plotter showing Chinese brush mounted on drawing arm while teaching at the art academy, executing a brush stroke. 1987, Hi-DMP multi-pen plotter (pen Wang Dongling continued to attend stalls removed for paint brush routine). Courtesy of the artist. certain classes. In 1985, he attended a course titled “History of Modern Art in Western Society,” which was given by American artist and art historian Roman Verostko at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, who served as a visiting professor from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minnesota.19 Wang Dongling and Verostko’s acquaintance was soon to turn into friendship, bringing the two back together again some years later in the United States. Verostko was one of the earliest artists who, in the 1980s, following thirty years of studies and practice in painting, opened up the computer-based ﬁeld of algorithmic art, work created using a set of code-driven instructions pre-written by the artist. The Victoria

Vol. 15 No. 4 11 and Albert Museum in London, which has a number of Verostko’s multi- pen plotter drawings in its collection, states in its web archive entry on Verostko’s 1990 work Pathway Series, Bird 2 that the artist “was a member of the ‘The Algorists,’ a term coined in 1995 to describe a set of artists, who, since the 1960s and 1970s, had been working with a shared interest in the use of bespoke software for generating art using the computer. . . .”20 By 1987, Verostko had developed the ﬁrst software-driven “brushed” paintings, which were executed with Chinese brushes mounted on a pen plotter. The execution of algorithmic drawings with a pen plotter is still pursued by Verostko today, and he is considered a key ﬁgure in the experimental development of this computer-based art form.21 As is stated in the V&A Collections Archive in its entry on another work from Verostko’s Pathway Series dating from 1987:

Between 1982 and 1985 Verostko created The Magic Hand of Chance, a program that generated visual improvisations on a large PC monitor. He went on to develop his own software to control a pen plotter, adapting the machine to hold multiple pens. An algorithm, or set of instructions, dictates the shape, distribution and colour choice for each line.22

Verostko’s The Magic Hand of Chance Wang Dongling, seal made for Roman Verostko, inscribed corresponds essentially with the system of Xiao jing zhai (Little Footpath Studio), 1989. Courtesy of writing calligraphy, inasmuch as both define Roman Verostko. a “program” of strictly set rules that precisely dictate aspects of brush movement, stroke order, structural composition, colour tonality, and so on, yet, at the same time, these rules always also underlie the elements of momentary chance and contingency. Indeed, Verostko’s stay at the art academy in Hangzhou was, in 1985, the period in which he finalized the development of his original software program, and Verostko states that Wang Dongling’s introduction of Chinese brush traditions directly influenced the software he then created for using a brush with pen plotters. Many of his plotter drawings dating from after 1985 carry a Chinese seal. Among these, the seal with the inscription “Little Footpath Studio” (Xiao jing zhai), which was frequently used by Verostko after 1989— to be seen for example in the most recent 2016 work Presence—was the one Wang Dongling carved for him in 1989 while he was staying in the United States as a visiting professor himself.23

Lines in Translation: Years Abroad, 1989–1992 His travels abroad from 1989 to 1992 marked Wang Dongling’s ﬁrst and, as yet, longest sojourn outside China. During this time, Wang Dongling’s different technical and stylistic backgrounds and sources of inspiration came to the fore, posing both a challenge and an opportunity for him as an artist. Developments that had already begun to take shape prior to this trip now found enhancement, making way for further changes in his future art production.

12 Vol. 15 No. 4 Roman Verostko, Presence, 2016, print, 70 x 50 cm. Courtesy of DAM Gallery, Berlin.

Wang Dongling with his As documented by Gordon calligraphy class at the University of Minnesota, Barrass, Wang Dongling’s stay was c. 1990. Courtesy of Weimin Lu. a rather traumatic experience in the beginning.24 In addition to encountering the foreignness of his new environment, Wang Dongling did not speak a word of English, and he had few established social networks. Also, the teaching assignments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Minnesota proved somewhat demanding. The American students in his calligraphy class were neither knowledgeable about the Chinese language and script nor familiar with holding and guiding a calligraphy brush. However, at the same time that Wang Dongling saw himself confronted with various obstacles, his perspective as a calligrapher received signiﬁcant new input. He traveled a lot and spent much time in museums where he absorbed famous works of Western art and closely studied their treatment of space, line, and colour. The knowledge and insight he gained through teaching and learning provoked substantial transformations in his approaches to calligraphy, both in theory and practice.25 As Barrass further indicates, by exploring the connections

Vol. 15 No. 4 13 between abstract art and calligraphy art, Wang Dongling discovered a way to bridge the gap, or the seemingly untranslatable, culturally speciﬁc dimension posed by Chinese calligraphy. All in all, he was convinced that calligraphy, in order for it to survive and reinvent itself within a contemporary context, must become more “painterly.”26

Roman Verostko and Wang Dongling: Untitled, ca. 1990, pen-plotted algorithmic drawing and calligraphy, ink on paper, 60.9 x 45.7 cm. Courtesy of Roman Verostko.

Wang Dongling, who today still names the aforementioned Western painters as ongoing inspiration, began to develop new types of composition. Less text-oriented and more focused on the conceptualization of singular characters, their meaning and motifs, he laid emphasis on the pictorial shape of Chinese script and experimented with ink effects and various backgrounds. One can reasonably assume that these changes were also ignited by collaborative works produced together with Roman Verostko when Wang Dongling was invited to live with Verostko and his wife at their home in Minnesota for several months. While Verostko ﬁrst created the algorithmic pen plot drawings, Wang Dongling responded to the drawings with the addition of calligraphic characters that he arranged freely around the pen-plotted structures. An untitled pen plot and calligraphy work executed around 1990, in which Wang Dongling quoted a text passage from the classic Book of Changes (Yijing), shows this interplay between algorithm and hand. More than anything, the interactively created work demonstrates a cross-cultural attempt to combine different media, materials, and methods of producing brush lines—perhaps in search of commonalities; perhaps with an awareness that certain differences will remain and even should be retained. This interaction further bears testimony to the respect and fascination of both artists for one another: of Verostko for Wang Dongling as a master of the ancient Chinese art of calligraphy and of Wang Dongling

14 Vol. 15 No. 4 Left: Wang Dongling, Hong yu hei (yi) (Red and Black No. 1), 1991, ink and color on paper, 68 x 68 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Wang Dongling, Xin shang Bijiasuo (Salute to Picasso), 1992, ink on paper, 69 x 68 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

for Verostko as a pioneer artist who was able to generate brush strokes in his “studio with an ‘electric brain’” (i.e., diannao, the Chinese word for “computer.”)27

While Wang Dongling had already produced several “abstract,” that is to say, “no-character” (feizi) calligraphies prior to 1989, his experiences abroad seem to have retriggered and reinforced the exploration of this particular approach to calligraphy. In fact, a large number of the artworks he made during the years 1989–92 belong to this category. They display his experimentation with fundamental aesthetics and techniques of Chinese calligraphy, including aspects of tension, rhythm, speed, and constant variation of the brush stroke. Also, an intentional incorporation of Western influences is apparent with regard to composition, style, and the use of colour—and not lastly signified by the very titles of the works themselves: Red and Black (Hong yu hei) (1991), referring to Stendhal’s (1783–1842) nineteenth-century novel Le Rouge et le Noir, or Salute to Picasso (Xin shang Bijiasuo) (1992). Altogether, this productive phase suggests a search for modes of an adequate artistic language that Wang Dongling felt was more compatible with his time and surroundings. In this sense, his abstract calligraphy from this period indicates an adventuring into the potentials of a liberalized form of calligraphic art and a questioning of its conventional definition as an inherently text-bound genre. It can also be considered a process of artistic negotiation necessitated by the circumstances of place and time, as an attempt to transcribe and thus un-alienate the culturally specific phenomenon of Chinese calligraphy.

Following this line of thought, it makes sense that many of Wang Dongling’s works produced around 1990 display a departure from the written word entirely and seem to turn toward, or rather re-turn, to painterly elements.28 Though many works are evidently inspired by Expressionist and Abstract Expressionist traditions, interestingly, the momentum and the gestural quality of the brush line remain largely within the parameters of calligraphic methods. Trained in classical calligraphy, the work The Historical Records (Shiji, 1990) ﬁnds, for example, Wang Dongling’s brush moving across the picture plane, alternating between rounded (yuan) and angular (fang) strokes; between abrupt, darting “reverse-attack” movements (nifeng xiabi), and tempered, sluggish ones (liubi); between centred (zhong)/hidden (cang), and slanted (ce)/exposed brush tips (loufeng); and

Vol. 15 No. 4 15 applications of both dense and moist (nong) tones of swelling ink (zhangmo); Wang Dongling, Shiji (The Historical Records), 1990, ink and a brittle, sweeping brush showing techniques of ﬂying white (feibai), and colour on paper, 67 x 68 cm. Courtesy of the artist. denoting the effect that is created when moving the brush with speed, such that the ink line reveals white “traces” where the paper beneath is left untouched. Evidently attempting to connect with stylistic models in the Western tradition, many works are lively and fresh, a quality that is attained through their vigorous and natural or “unintentional” brush momentum, conveying an air of tranquility with their subtly balanced, harmonic compositions and colours. The brush stroke itself is implemented conﬁdently in a bold and elaborate manner. By contrast, some works, with their jagged angles and an emphasis on linear shapes, as with his Salute to Picasso, have to some extent an awkward or forced aspect about them. His use of the brush gives the impression that it is searching, probing; as if it is not quite sure whether to go this way or that, appearing slightly lost, or off-track. It seems that the artist is unsure whether to consider this work calligraphy or painting, or something in between. The idea of this brush being displaced is in fact appropriate, inasmuch as the written characters in a work of calligraphy are generally understood as presenting a formal vehicle through which the calligrapher conveys the state of his mind and innermost feelings. Moreover, since traditional calligraphy provides a strict chronological sequence of stroke order, it seems as if the complete absence of a linear narrative framework had in some way pulled away the rug from underneath Wang Dongling’s feet,

16 Vol. 15 No. 4 Wang Dongling, Tuo ba ji his brush now literally “expanding (Expanding into the World), 1990, ink on paper, 101 x 102 into the world,” as the title of the cm each sheet. Courtesy of the artist. 1990 work Tuo ba ji announces. Here, in turn, the viewer’s temporal experience of a calligraphic artwork is deconstructed, or reﬁgured, inasmuch as the process of time is traditionally grounded in his or her reading of the strict sequentiality of a stroke order.

Beginning in the early 1990s, and further maturing around the turn of the century into the present, the development of Wang Dongling’s by now hallmark format of large-scale calligraphy works, often connoting Daoist and Chan (Zen) Buddhist concepts, shows the fruit of that previous, often restless state of exploring and contesting the constitutive boundaries of the art form. In hindsight, what may have felt to be lost in translation would prove to be an asset, paving the way toward the bold works of the early 2000s, whose spatially dense, layered structures present a rediscovery of the classical black-and-white composition based on monochrome ink, all the while furthering the idiom of abstract or “non-character” calligraphy.

Wang Dongling: XuanhuangDark (Heaven) and Yellow (Earth), 2005, ink on paper, 145.4 x 366.4 cm. © Wang Dongling. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of the artist, 2013.

Lines in Translation: Andreas Schmid’s Space-and-Light Art Returning to the 1980s, and now switching perspectives, we can consider early cross-cultural transmissions in calligraphy art through the lens of a Western-trained artist who had attained the exclusive opportunity to enrol in the foreign-student calligraphy class under Wang Dongling at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts.29 As already referenced in the introduction of this essay, one case to be examined is that of Andreas Schmid. Originally from Stuttgart, Germany, Schmid has been based in Berlin since 1987, where he lives and works as an artist and curator for projects primarily in Germany and mainland China. Schmid’s signature format, emerging in the late 1990s, is the large-scale spatial installation, often presented in public, or in publicly accessible spaces, and making use of ﬂuorescent light tubes as graphic linear elements.30 His ongoing curatorial activities and special interest and expertise in contemporary Chinese art became known in the Western-speaking art world through his co-curating the seminal, internationally acknowledged traveling exhibition China Avantgarde at the House of World Cultures in Berlin in 1993.31

Vol. 15 No. 4 17 While Schmid’s conceptual and aesthetic approaches to art are informed by Top: Andreas Schmid, Lichtungen—Brescia the postwar Western avant-garde art, including Minimal art, Conceptual art, (Clearings—Brescia), 2013, light installation with steering and Gestural Abstraction, they are likewise rooted in his intensive studies of mechanism, installation view, Krypta San Salvatore, Museo Chinese calligraphy and seal carving with Wang Dongling in Hangzhou in di Santa Giulia, Brescia. Photo: Jürgen Altmann. Courtesy of 1984 and 1985. After having pursued an education in modern Western oil the artist. painting at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart (Staatliche Akademie Bottom: Andreas Schmid, Treibholz (Driftwood), der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart), from 1974 to 1981, the beginning of the 2004/2005, permanent light installation, foyer of the 1980s saw Schmid searching for new languages of artistic expression and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Photo: Andreas Schmid. visual representation. He sought inspiration not only through the visual arts, © VG Bild-Kunst. but also through other media and genres and the experimental music of composer John Cage (1912–92) and artist Gordon Matta Clark (1943–78).32

18 Vol. 15 No. 4 The meaning, then, that the methods and concepts of Chinese calligraphy were to have for Schmid’s work can, even must, be thought in terms of a mutually transformative relation inasmuch as they define contemporary Chinese calligraphy practice as a field of cultural and artistic translation, in consequence enabling us to see “Chinese calligraphy” with different eyes. Given that painting was the predominant form Schmid was working in at the time, I will introduce first three paintings he made between 1982 and 1983. These examples illustrate the period immediately preceding Schmid’s departure for China as well as his first months abroad. This period can be considered transformational for Schmid’s approaches to art and visual representation in general, including aspects of handling of space, line, colour, and, in particular, formative to Schmid’s later Raumzeichnugen (drawings in space) and light-based installations. These works consist of elements that are inherently related to his early foundations in Chinese calligraphy.

Andreas Schmid, Bewegung IA (Movement IA), 1982, oil on canvas, 153 x 178 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The large-sized 1982 abstract oil painting Movement IA (Bewegung IA), made one year prior to Schmid’s departure to China, displays a strong sense of visual coherence and self-containment. Sprays of energy are released in restless gestures of the brush; the opaque, crayon-like use of bright, strongly saturated colours is bold; the shapes and lines are arranged densely, as though they were pulling, pushing, and tugging toward and away from one another, therein creating effects of tension and friction within the composition. Likewise, the large-sized Moving (1982–83), executed in Chinese ink, gouache, and oil, can be said to contain an element of restlessness. Here, however, this restlessness has an utterly different quality. What prevails is a subtle sense of unease, and an air of discomfort; something that is altogether absent in its predecessor, Movement IA. If IA could speak, its voice would be shouting out loud with conﬁdence; Moving, by contrast, seems curiously restrained, even vulnerable. Its composition manages to hold itself together

Vol. 15 No. 4 19 Andreas Schmid, Moving, 1983, Chinese ink, gouache and oil on canvas, 178 x 139 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

only through the individual, just visible, thinly drawn lines that loosely connect the pictorial elements into an open fragmented structure. Although Moving appears to present a sense of retraction and withdrawal, there exists at the same time an awareness of an undescribed space probing the constitutive function of the void. Moving can be read as a response to Movement IA; something new, literally, has been set in motion—a new thought, or intuition, a questioning perhaps, of what had been there before—and is now formulating itself through an adjusted relationality of things, perhaps in apprehensive anticipation of soon leaving home for China? In Moving, Schmid appears to be shifting and reshuffling his vocabulary, arranging individual pictorial elements and reconfiguring them into a new logical constellation. While the idea of “movement” in the title Movement IA implies a self-contained, complete action, the active verb of “moving” in the title of the latter work emphasizes an ongoing, open-ended nature of something in mid-action. The apparent process of reshuffling and reconfiguring parallels the aforementioned experiences of Wang Dongling during his sojourn in the USA, when he sought out new possibilities to articulate Chinese calligraphy art. In Schmid’s case, the formerly vigorous, aggressive application of colour is superseded by wisps of thread-like lines, balancing fragile structures that seem to be suspended in space.

If we interpret Moving as a questioning of the conﬁdence to be perceived in Movement IA, then another work, made later in 1983 upon Schmid’s arrival in China, can be read as providing a form of interim resolution to issues of form and composition. In this third, untitled piece, executed with Chinese

20 Vol. 15 No. 4 Andreas Schmid, Untitled, ink and gouache on xuan paper, 1983, hanging scroll, Chinese ink and gouache on paper, novel elements, whose potentiality 133 x 60.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist. was already perceivable in Moving, are now translated into a new confidence of form, composition, and brushwork. The dynamics of this work convey what could be titled a “third movement” in Schmid’s work—one that appears to move with a light-footed pace and in an easy going manner. Floating lines are soft and fluid, the ink flowing from the brush as if of its own accord. Delicate curves and circular motioins define shapes, rather than the sharp angles and zigzags that characterized his earlier work. Still, the tenderly drawn lines, which are combined with gentle blots of ink, remain slightly reminiscent of the thin threads found in Moving; their alternation with stronger brush strokes in turn echoes the boldness of Movement IA. Different, however, is that the overall mood of this “third movement” is tranquil and mellow, conveying a condition of being at rest.

Given the dense and tougher texture of oil paint and the hard brittleness of the flat-ended brushes common to Western-style painting, this transformation of movement is, in part, due to the fluid, water-based materiality of Chinese ink and the supple, highly-absorbing hairs characteristic of Chinese brushes. And yet, in spite of Schmid’s making use of materials and techniques that are a convention in Chinese calligraphy— brush and ink, the large-size hanging scroll format, the composition of a vertical alignment of visual elements, the seemingly sequential order of rendering these elements (in allusion perhaps to a one-column calligraphy scroll), and the harmonious treatment of described and undescribed space—works like the untitled one of 1983 are a bit too different from conventional models of calligraphy for them to be defined properly as works of calligraphy.

Evolving over time as a formal, nonﬁgurative visual system, calligraphy does not serve to “represent” forms and phenomena of the natural world in a mimetic sense, as is the case in pictorial representation.33 Given the presentational function of Chinese calligraphy as a technique of making- present, the (indivisible) relation of self and world, it is feasible to speak of a phenomenology of Chinese calligraphy in that it “does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own.”34 Schmid’s discovery of Chinese calligraphy was precisely this “world of its own,” which underwent further exploration after his return to Europe in 1986. This is particularly evident

Vol. 15 No. 4 21 in the light installations that Schmid has created over the last three Left and right: Andreas Schmid, Relation, 2015, decades. His transference and application of genre-speciﬁc concepts and permanent light installation with steering mechanism, aesthetics characteristic of Chinese calligraphy include aspects of rhythm, composed of 19 LED modules, 6113 cm x 443 cm, view from void, latency, resonance, and change; all of which are essential in order for Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Courtesy of the artist. Schmid’s space-and-light art to operate in any meaningful way.35

Here, the most obvious and possibly the most significant point of reference to the field of Chinese calligraphy is the function and meaning of the line, especially the implementation of graphic lines as the principal visual element. While Chinese calligraphy traditionally uses brush, water, and ink to create lines, the lines in Schmid’s “drawings in space” are created by (natural) light, colour, and shadow. In his minimally composed light-art installations that are created for three-dimensional spaces, both interior and exterior, he moreover makes use of light sources including fluorescent coloured light tubes and LEDs—“strokes” of light that illuminate and fade out repetitively, following pre-set computer-programmed intervals and loops according to algorithms of changing patterns. The viewer is thus surrounded by an ever-changing landscape of appearing and disappearing beams of light, and he or she can sequentially experience various states of brightness and darkness, filled space and empty space, movement and stillness, and, in particular, the transitory states in between. According to Schmid’s understanding of each specific space as a resonative body (Resonanzkörper) that possesses atmospheric effect, his drawings are not only an expansion into the space, but are also a form-giving element of space itself. Schmid thus describes his working process as an interplay of form and space, and his aim is to stimulate “characteristic tones” and a

22 Vol. 15 No. 4 “personal rhythm” that resonate with the given conditions in situ: “For me, the decisive requirements for working on a space are listening to and grasping its characteristics.”36

Schmid’s conceptual handling of space is very close to established conceptions in traditional calligraphy. Whether it is the two-dimensional field of the writing paper or the three-dimensional field of an interior architectural space, in both cases, linear structures serve to define and order space within a clearly circumscribed area. These areas are initially demarcated by their formal boundaries: in the former case, by the paper edges, in the latter case, by the walls, ceiling, and floor. Through the sequential placement of individual lines within the set boundaries of the area, this systematic build-up of a relational structure line-for-line is carried out according to particular parameters that rely on age-old Chinese conceptions of aesthetic composition. In traditional Chinese calligraphy, the brush moves forward through time and space, continuously weaving together sequences of individual strokes in an uninterrupted flow. The visible chronology of ink traces is readable as an ongoing dynamic reaction to what has immediately preceded, and always in simultaneous anticipation of what is going to come next. To some degree, then, the initial line in a work sets the overall course, or tone, of the piece, and even informs what the very last stroke will look like.

The musical metaphor of the basic tone, or keynote, is useful. Next to the dialectical tension that is continuously maintained between polar elements, such as black-white, void-matter, latency-visibility, absence- presence, potentiality-actuality, open-closed, etc. (as indicated by Chinese aesthetic terminological pairings like heibai, xushi, canglou, kaihe, it is this musical quality—or rather tonal quality (that is, yun, meaning “resonance,” “tone,” “rhyme,” or “verse,” and referring to the moment of resonance that, according to traditional Chinese aesthetics, is sought to be evoked within the perceiver)—implied by Schmid that bears a relation to traditional Chinese calligraphy theory and is crucial to his space-and-light art.37 As Schmid elaborates:

During my years in the People’s Republic of China from 1983 to 1986, I studied the nature of the line, for example in classical Chinese calligraphy and the history of calligraphy. The relationship between black and white within a single character as well as the relationship of characters to one another, both graphic and spatial, was the object of my study. But equally important was working through the mental tension in drawing the line. The lines of each individual character act in space, the character itself creates space, just as the sequence of characters within the whole process. Our own thinking is transferred indelibly and directly to the paper. At the same time, writing develops a rhythm of its own. The whole sheet has—by way of writing—a form and a link to content. Furthermore, a

Vol. 15 No. 4 23 dramaturgy develops, a score of writing. This position goes far beyond the mere writing of a text and is clearly an artistic act. Fascinating for me is a statement, conﬁrmed by practice, that was made by the calligrapher Wang Dongling in November 1983, that the calligrapher can hear the speed with which the brush needs to be moved (“You will hear how fast you need to write.”). Besides technique, a feeling for the precision of the placement on the sheet and in space develops. These experiences ﬁnd their application in my spatial works in the European context.38

Linked with this aspect of resonance, when considering Schmid’s space- and-light installations, is the element of performativity enacted by the beholder in his or her respective experience of the works. He or she is compelled to pursue the gradual fluctuating of the neon tubes as they light up and fade out in sequential movements that can only be comprehended in real time, never at a single glance. For example, for his 1997 work Open Space (Offener Raum), a studio space at Wiepersdorf Castle was prepared with materials including steel ropes Top: Andreas Schmid, Offener Raum (Open Space), and strings, such that their linear 1997, drawn lines and steel ropes, Wiepersdorf Castle, arrangement corresponded with Brandenburg. Courtesy of the artist. the wandering fields of natural light Bottom: Andreas Schmid, and shadow throughout the day. Urbanes Tattoo (Urban Tattoo), 1998, colour photograph, Schmid speaks of of this work as strings, adhesive tape, iron bars, installation view, City a plastic drawing within a three- Museum Esslingen. Courtesy of the artist. dimensional space, where individual fragments are connected in a complex time-based composition that can be perceived only when one walks around it.39 The conscious employment of natural light as part of the composition is particularly evident in the example of Urbanes Tattoo (Urban Tattoo) (1998). This installation, which includes a large colour photograph showing the view from a skyscraper into central Shanghai is a kind of collaboration with the light and shadows cast on the floor of the exhibition space by a window, thus creating the illusion of looking down into a street from the window of a high building in Shanghai.

Further, as Schmid states: “[S] ome works undergo, through the conscious inclusion of natural light, a change of expression in time. They are fulﬁlled only with the

24 Vol. 15 No. 4 actions of the beholder in time.”40 Thus the beholder is, in a performative way, essential to the genesis of the work itself. In the context of traditional Chinese calligraphy, similarly, the beholder is considered to partake in the genesis of the work; that is, by seeking to visually and mentally reconstruct the creative process of the calligraphic work by “reading” the successive narrative of the brush line, stroke for stroke, dot for dot, and column for column. Here, too, the work cannot be consumed with a single glance; its chronological development, marked by a definite starting point and a definite ending point, must be retraced consecutively—in real time. In this sense, Schmid’s well-phrased description of his works undergoing a continual “change of expression in time” also serves to provide an entirely applicable and useful definition for calligraphy art. Moreover, nowhere could the idea of the beholder as partaker/creator through whose actions the work achieves some form of fulfillment be truer than in the context of Chinese calligraphy.

If Schmid’s light installations have today attained refinement, conceptual complexity, and technical precision, works like the aforementioned untitled painting of late 1983 can be read as a threshold that foretold the later transition toward his light-and-space art—which in turn can be considered abstracted forms of calligraphy. Moreover, rather than simply denoting works like the 1983 untitled painting as being “calligraphy-inspired,” Schmid has noted that it is more correct to describe these as “premonitions,” or “presentiments,” foreshadowing “an idea of what calligraphy might mean” to him. Schmid recounts that the 1983 untitled work—the very first one he made upon arriving in China—gave expression to his intuition that “there was something significant in store” for him in China and in studying Chinese calligraphy.41

Andreas Schmid, Durcheilter Finally, the painting Hurried-Through Space (Durcheilter Raum), made by Raum (Hurried-Through Space), 1989, egg tempera on Schmid in 1989, can be considered similarly as a threshold work among canvas, 87 x 222 cm. Courtesy of the artist. his larger oeuvre. It can be juxtaposed with Wang Dongling’s 1990 work Expanding into the World, the two correlating like a complementary couple. Hurried-Through Space shows a poetical interpretation, or abstraction, of a text-written calligraphy. The focus of the brush is on its own movement, on the gestural, self-referential effects of brush and ink; the two abstracted “columns” of writing, as one could imagine them to be, echo each other

Vol. 15 No. 4 25 harmoniously in their graphic shapes and their well-chosen positions on the otherwise empty paper. Although the composition appears carefully premeditated, the overall impression of the work is that of spontaneity and dynamism. This is largely due to the loose, unforced, seemingly random movement of the brush, and we can retrace in our mind’s eye how the brush indeed hurried through the space of the paper on the spur of a moment. The aspect of swiftness that is implied both through the title and the brushwork of this piece may have been inspired by the advice given to Schmid by Wang Dongling while he had been his student: to become attuned to “hearing how fast one needs to write.”

Lost and Found in Translation? In conclusion, in light of the far-reaching collective cultural endeavour in China to recover, rejuvenate, and emancipate the arts from the late 1970s onward, the phenomena of cross-cultural encounter and exchange taking place within the art and academic scenes of the early to mid-1980s have been investigated as to their impact on and meaning for the emerging ﬁeld of contemporary Chinese calligraphy. In this context, the works by calligrapher Wang Dongling, digital artist Roman Versotko, and light- installation artist Andreas Schmid provide exemplary cases that show the emergence of what at that time carried the status of “third texts,” operating beyond the outdated trajectory of calligraphy as an “inherently” and exclusively “Chinese” realm. Though we might be inclined to think that certain dichotomous ways of thinking have long been overcome by now, we still do well in citing art historians like Gao Shiming:

East and west, south and north, developed and developing countries, First World and Third World—these traditional dualist models no longer seem adequate to describe today’s world where culture and politics, power and capital, self and Other are intertwined. We need a system for reconﬁguration of cultural identity and new mechanisms for knowledge production. This requires the establishment of a new cultural subjectivity.42

In face of ongoing heated conservative debates on the meaning and potential of calligraphy art in China, Gao Shiming’s claim is truly a pertinent one. It would be welcome to see further research into the history of contemporary calligraphy—a history that is and in fact always has been constituted by cross-cultural flows. Within the discursive field of Chinese calligraphy art, these flows still struggle to be named and evaluated.43

Notes

1. This essay is based on the author’s paper “Zhuanyi xiantiao: lun 1980 niandai zaoqi Zhongguo ‘xiandai zhuyi’ shufa ji qi kua wenhua yiyi” (Translating the Brush Line: Modernist Calligraphy in Early-1980s China and its Cross-cultural Signiﬁcance), presented at the Academic Forum of the International Festival of Calligraphy, Hangzhou, 2015 (2015 Zhongguo Hangzhou xiandai shufa guoji luntan), China Academy of Art (Zhongguo meishu xueyuan), Hangzhou, May 8–9, 2015. I am grateful to Andreas Schmid, Roman Verostko, and Wang Dongling for kindly providing me with ample material and information in preparation of this essay. I would like to thank Yang Piaopiao of Freie Universitüt Berlin, for her much appreciated help concerning questions of translation.

26 Vol. 15 No. 4 2. For a concise historical overview of the development of calligraphy in and outside of China after 1949 with special regard to its exhibition history, see Lu Dadong, “Zhongguo ‘xiandai shufa’ dashi nianbiao” (Chronology of significant events within “modern calligraphy” in China), in Zhongguo xiandai shufa lunwen xuan (Selected essays on modern calligraphy in China), ed. Wang Dongling (Hangzhou: Zhongguo meishu xueyuan chubanshe, 2004), 353–73; and “‘Shu fei shu’ yu xiandai shufa sanshi nian dashi ji” (“Writing Non-Writing” and a record of thirty years of significant events within modern calligraphy), in Shu fei shu: wenxian—Writing Non-Writing: Documents, eds. Xu Jiang et al. (Hangzhou: Zhongguo meishu xueyuan chubanshe, 2015), 226–38. The singular Western-language publication aiming at a systematic and comprehensive discussion of calligraphy in twentieth- century China is Gordon S. Barrass, The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China (London/Berkeley: British Museum Press/University of California Press, 2002). 3. Initially founded as the National Academy of Art (Guoli yishuyuan) in 1928, the academy was renamed the China Academy of Art in 1993. 4. For a disambiguation of “modernity” and “contemporaneity” in Chinese calligraphy in the context of the here-discussed calligrapher Wang Dongling, see, for example, Guan Huaibin, “Wang Dongling yu xiandai shufa de ‘dangdai xing’ jiangou” (Wang Dongling and the construction of “contemporaneity” in modern calligraphy), in Wang Dongling shufa yishu—The Way of Calligraphy: Wang Dongling’s Work, ed. Xu Jiang (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 2001), 48–57. 5. For Wang Dongling’s biography as well as a recent comprehensive publication of his works, see Shu fei shu: Wang Dongling—Writing Non-Writing: Wang Dongling, ed. Wang Dongling (Hangzhou: Sanshang dangdai yishuguan, 2015). For Verostko’s biography, selected artworks and writings, and further documentaion, see http://www.verostko.com/. For Schmid’s biography and work projects as well as artist statements, selected interviews, and articles, see http://www.andreasschmid.info/ index.html/. 6. This refers to the journal Third Text: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture, whose editorial of the first issue launched in 1987, titled “Why Third Text?,” programmatically announced: “Third Text represents a historical shift away from the centre of the dominant culture to its periphery in order to consider the centre critically“; see Third Text, no. 1 (Autumn 1987), 3–5. Here, editor Rasheed Araeen further stated that “It is imperative to abandon the models of binary oppositions which impose fixed ordering systems, and according to which cultural practices are classified in terms of Same and Other. And it is to this end that considerations of art cannot be separated from questions of politics,” and concluded: “Without recognizing the hierarchical structure underpinning definitions of cultural difference, however, it is impossible to account for the almost total exclusion of non-Western artists form the history of modern art.” Ibid., 4. 7. The original Chinese of this quote is “Zhongguo shufa shi Zhongguo chuantong yishu de hexin yishu, zui neng tixian Zhongguo yishu jingshen.” Wang Dongling, “Xiandai shufa jingshen lun” (On the Essence of Modern Calligraphy), in Wang Dongling ed., Zhongguo xiandai shufa lunwen xuan (Selected Essays on Modern Calligraphy in China), 320–326, 320. 8. Lothar Ledderose, Mi Fu and the Classical Tradition of Chinese Calligraphy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 33. 9. As investigated by Yueh-ping Yen in Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005). 10. For a study of the politically and ideologically contested field of art during this period, especially the traditional literati arts, see Aida Yuen Wong, Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-Style Painting in Modern China (Honolulu: Association for Asian Studies, 2006). 11. A discussion of these two artists is given in Barrass (2002), 172–81, and 182–93, respectively. 12. Ibid., 29. 13. Yen (2005), 158. 14. The original Chinese of this quote is “Shufa cai huode wanquan de yishu jiafang, tuoli shiyong de shufu, jinru shenmei ziyou de fanchou, cong’er dadao zhenzheng yiyi shang de yishu de chuncuixing,” in Wang Dongling ed., Zhongguo xiandai shufa lunwen xuan (Selected Essays on Modern Calligraphy in China), 322. 15. There do, of course, exist other academic institutions in China that promote research on contemporary calligraphy within their curricula, yet there is no other individual institution designated (solely) as a research center for “modern” or “contemporary calligraphy.” 16. As proclaimed by a group of Wuxi- and Suzhou-based artists, see Lu Dadong, “Zhongguo ‚xiandai shufa’ dashi nianbiao,“ (Chronology of significant events within “modern calligraphy“ in China), 356. 17. As recounted by Wang in personal interviews with the author on October 27, 2010, and July 1, 2011. 18. Ibid. See also Barrass, The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China, 165. 19. The syllabus of the course can be accessed at www.verostko.com/china/images/EngSyllZhej1985.pdf/. 20. V & A Collections Archives, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O499689/pathway-series-bird-2- drawing-roman-verostko/. 21. For Verostko’s most recent pen-plotted algorithmic works, see the Digital Art Museum (DAM) website: http://www.dam-gallery.de/index.php?id=49&L=1/. 22. V & A Collections Archives, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O239973/pathway-series-drawing- roman-verostko/. 23. “Little Footpath Studio” was the alternative name Wang Dongling gave Verostko’s “Pathway Studio” in Minnesota. In an e-mail message containing an image of the seal, Verostko elucidated that Wang had carved it while staying with him in 1989, writing: “This is my Pathway Studio Seal carved by Wang in an old style. You will recognize that it is a ‘Little’ Pathway Studio. He understood that the program driving my ‘electric brain’ was titled ‘Hodos,’ the Greek word for ‘Path’ or ‘Way.’ I told him that I chose this term as a modest Western term that alluded, in my mind, to the Eastern concept of ‘Tao.’ The term ‘Pathway’ refers especially to path of the ink pen as it draws, searching for a ‘form,’ seeking its ‘way.’ Wang chose ‘Little’ path and the appropriate classical term for studio [zhai].” Roman Verostko, e-mail message to the author, November 14, 2010. For images of Verostko’s various seals, see http://www.verostko.com/seal.html/.

Vol. 15 No. 4 27 24. Barrass, The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China, 166. It may be noted here that it seems symptomatic that Barrass’s publication (as mentioned, the only one of its kind in Western language) is a rare, if not the only one in which Wang Dongling’s artistically formative sojourn outside China is thematized in some detail. While publications on Wang Dongling’s art have been amassing increasingly over the past two and a half decades, it was already remarked in the introduction that the issue of cross-cultural aspects in Wang’s art are hardly considered, which appears a major omission in light of the significant impact these apects can be seen to have had and continue to have in his context. 25. See ibid., 166–67. 26. See ibid., 167. 27. As Verostko states: “[A]s a shufa master, Wang introduced me to Chinese brush traditions that influenced the software I then developed for using a brush with pen plotters. Later, as a visiting artist in the U.S., Wang lived in our home and became fascinated with the brush strokes executed by the plotter”; see http://www.verostko.com/seal.html/. 28. Wang, who likewise had a background in painting, initially intended to become a painter and not a calligrapher. The bachelor's program in painting he had enrolled in Nanjing University in 1963 was unusual in that it devoted much of its focus on calligraphy. “In retrospect, Wang feels that this was his first step on the road to becoming a calligrapher.” Barrass, The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China, 163. 29. Schmid was in fact the second person from Germany who received an artist scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for art studies in the People’s Republic of China (the first person being Angelika Obletter in 1980/1981), and the calligraphy class he attended in Hangzhou comprised of no more than five students. As recounted in a personal interview with the author on April 11, 2016 30. Next to the work Relation (2015), further examples are Transit: Gleisdreieck Berlin (2012) and Colorfield Chemnitz (2009/2010); see http://www.andreasschmid.info/kunst_raum.php?wid=75&l=en/ and http://www.andreasschmid.info/kunst_raum.php?wid=28&l=en/ respectively. 31. The exhibition, which was curated together with Hans van Dijk and Jochen Noth, traveled on to the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, and the Brandts Klaedefabrik, Odense, between 1991 and 1993. Schmid’s most recent exhibition project, curated together with Thomas Eller, was Die 8 der Wege: Kunst in Beijing, which took place in the Uferhallen, Berlin, from April 30 to July 13, 2014. 32. As asserted by Schmid in a personal interview with the author on April 3, 2011. 33. Contrary to common belief, the proportion of Chinese written characters that can be identified as pictograms, meaning visual structures that, in an iconological sense, imitate the visual appearance of the things that they signify, today comprises less than five percent of the entire corpus of recorded written characters. See Richard C. Kraus, Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 15–18. 34. This refers to philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1908–1961) assertion that “Painting does not imitate the world but is a world of its own”; see Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The World of Perception, trans. Oliver Davis (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 97. On the presentational function of Chinese calligraphy, see, for example, Wen C. Fong’s essay “Chinese Calligraphy as Presenting the Self,” in Chinese Calligraphy, eds. Ouyang Zhongshi et al. (New Haven and London and Beijing: Yale University Press and Foreign Language Press, 2008), 1–31. 35. For explanations of his approach to “drawing with spaces,” see Schmid’s essay “Präzision und Offenheit: Mit Räumen zeichnen,” http://www.andreasschmid.info/texte.php?l=de&id=7/ (n. pag.). For an English-language translation of excerpts from this essay, see “Präzision und Offenheit: Drawing with Spaces” http://www.andreasschmid.info/texte.php?l=en&id=7/ (n. pag.). The essay was originally published in Minimal Concept: Zeichenhafte Sprachen im Raum, ed. Christian Schneegass (Amsterdam/Dresden: Akademie der Künste, 2001), 87–94. 36. Schmid, “Präzision und Offenheit,” n. pag. 37. On the musical dimension in the context of traditional Chinese aesthetics, see Kenneth DeWoskin, “Early Chinese Music and the Origins of Aesthetic Terminology” in Theories of the Arts in China, eds. Susan Bush and Christian Murck (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 187–214. 38. Schmid, “Präzision und Offenheit,” n. pag. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. As elucidated in an interview with the author on April 11, 2016. It is noteworthy to mention that Schmid was “pre-educated” in terms of East Asian calligraphy already prior to his three years of studies abroad. In 1982, Schmid visited the exhibition Worte des Buddha: Kalligraphien japanischer Priester der Gegenwart, Sammlung Seiko Kono, Abt des Daian-ji, Nara (Words of the Buddha: Calligraphies by Contemporary Japanese Priests, Seiko Kono Collection, Abbot of Daian-ji, Nara), curated by Roger Goepper (1925–2011) at the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, April 24 to June 20, 1982. It was the revelatory event of seeing this exhibition which initially sparked Schmid’s interest in East Asian calligraphy. 42. “A Be-Coming Future: The Unweaving and Rebuilding of the Local,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, no. 5 (September/October 2009), 29–37, 31. 43. As the presentation of the paper on which this essay is based incidentally showed; see n. 1. I am therefore all the more thankful for Zheng Shengtian’s initiative in approaching me at the conference and suggest an essay submission to this journal.

28 Vol. 15 No. 4 Carol Yinghua Lu Spots, Dust, Renderings, Picabia, Case Notes, Flavour, Light, Sound, and More: Xie Nanxing’s Creations

o the audience that has followed his creations, Xie Nanxing’s works have undergone significant changes since 2011. The most visible Tchange relates to the problem that his new paintings pose, namely, how should they be viewed? Perhaps the problem can be expressed like this: How should the irregular “stains” of paint that appear on his canvases be understood? How can this artist’s decision be accepted when he lays bare an effect within the artwork but refuses to provide its source or origin? Xie Nanxing began to explore and design a number of methods of what he calls “camouflage paintings” or “escape-from-painting paintings” as early as 2005. What he did was take all of the skills and techniques that he had mastered and hid them, leaving behind only vestiges for the world to see. This strategy was not, however, one of lazy arrogance in assuming that mere remnants of his painting were enough to constitute a finished work. Instead, it came from an earnest belief that these residual marks truly constituted the work he was interested in making.

Left: Xie Nanxing, Triangle Relations Gradually Changing No. 2, 2013, oil on canvas, 220 x 220 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne. Right: Xie Nanxing, Triangle Relations Gradually Changing No. 5, 2013, oil on canvas, 190 x 190 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne.

In From the Issue of Art to the Issue of Position: Echoes of Socialist Realism at OCAT Shenzhen from January 19 to April 12, 2014, I included three pieces from a group of paintings that Xie Nanxing was working on called Triangle Relations Gradually Changing (2013). This group of works consists of ﬁve pieces in total. The process of creating them involved taking one canvas and covering it with another. He applied paint on the top canvas and allowed it to seep through onto the canvas underneath, creating a different image altogether. When he exhibits them, much as he has done with other paintings made in a similar manner, Xie Nanxing displays only the canvases placed beneath the ones that he actually painted upon. We see only traces of the painting process that the artist used on the top canvas, resulting in a kind of common “by-product.” To emphasize this effect, the artist adds not

Vol. 15 No. 4 29 a single brush stroke to the ﬁnal printed image that is the outcome of the paint bleeding through from the ﬁrst canvas.

Unless one visits his studio, we can only occasionally see—through photographs—the paintings that were placed on top and that left behind these stains and markings, and even in this context, the images tend to be small in scale, like when an illustration is published within an article. Because there are no exceptions to this pattern, not adding anything to the bottom canvas, the ﬁnished work, can be considered his general working principle. In his approach to this kind of stubborn economy in the making of his work, the artist takes no uncertain position: “I don’t want to draw a single stroke on the inner canvas, because if I were to make just one stroke or dot, it would be unable to escape its relationship with the context of art history. I also don’t want anyone who studied art theory or any kind of curator to say anything. No one can escape the web of art history. This is a really scary thing. Theorists and curators can put these connections together at any time. Therefore, I don’t apply a single stroke on the canvas.”1 Regardless of whether or not it is intentional, then, there is a strong sense that the artist is rejecting our desire to experience the full narrative of the canvas. On the one hand, these explorations are based on deep faith in and a dependence on the medium of painting, but, on the other hand, the artist regards the propagation of painting methods and the spreading of general painting awareness with suspicion.

Xie Nanxing has been using this method of creation for some time. The Xie Nanxing, untitled (No. 2), 2009, charcoal and oil on earliest piece in which you can see an inkling of painting a canvas placed on canvas, 220 x 325 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs top of another canvas is his 2009 untitled (No. 2), part of a three-piece series Meile, Beijing/Lucerne. of paintings in which the iconography is derived from the narrative of Snow White and Seven Dwarves. This narrative serves, however, as a guise for the artist’s personal expression. Two of the paintings, untitled (No. 1) (2009) and

30 Vol. 15 No. 4 untitled (No. 3) (2009), take the fairy tale of Snow White in order to sketch an outline for a murder scene’s original case notes. The artist uses nicknames, casual banter, humour, and profanity along with solid and dotted lines to connect a web of reasonable connections that reinvent this classic children’s tale. In untitled (No. 2) (2009) he placed over the centre of the bottom canvas another canvas roughly half its size. He then painted a portrait of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the smaller canvas and then removed it. Only that which went outside the edges of the smaller canvas or penetrated through it are the remains of the original image. These traces, along with the words written around the centre—“Her” (with an arrow pointing to what was Snow White), “Adopted Daughter and Second Miracle,” “Note: the differences between different kinds of musical instruments,” etc.—form the body of the picture. These symbols seem related but don’t tell too much; the vague text is not intended to explain the story. It is instead intended to prevent too detailed of an investigation into the narrative, thus channeling our imagination toward the actual painting itself.

Once, in a lecture, Xie Nanxing described his motive: “Since 2005, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to pay more attention to painting’s language problem. Instead of static representational objects like before, I’ve discussed more the scene and object’s feeling of space. Actually, strictly speaking, that kind of picture still belongs to figurative painting. It is a question that is difficult to avoid in the field of painting. It is the starting point of painting, and it is a thread that has run unbroken.”2 For the past ten years, then, the artist’s conception of his work has, in this respect, been the same. By increasingly making his own practice more and more extreme, he is shouting himself hoarse about the value of painting itself. It is a kind of value that does not rely solely on the experience of art history or the inertia of viewers’ and critics’ common reality. Artists who have faith in this kind of value ascribed to painting hope that by blocking all of those channels that have already been part of general experience, a deeper gaze into painting can be achieved. Of course, Xie Nanxing quickly became aware that these attempts to expand our experience of seeing and understanding paintings are part of a never-ending battle that could not be won at any time. The barriers Xie Nanxing faces perhaps come from a rejection by some of his artistic peers or from within the art itself. After all, shared experience is often a kind of common language or currency and is perhaps both the starting point and destination of an artist’s work. Of course, the audience has even less of an ability to understand his sources than the art professionals. As he moves forward with his efforts, Xie Nanxing must be constantly wary about falling into another trap: that of being included in the camp of “abstract painters.”

To a large extent, much of what Xie Nanxing has rejected is actually the object of his work’s dialogue: the dualism between theory and practice, and the dogma of China’s art historical discourse. It is difﬁcult to escape the inertia of attaching names to things, but even stronger is another kind of reality—that the basis of naming things is built on a very limited theoretical experience and consciousness. This is something that an artist

Vol. 15 No. 4 31 whose individual experience is always wrapped in the cultural context often cannot be fully aware of or play on. If Xie Nanxing had read Geng Jianyi’s 1988 article entitled “On Works and Audience,” he would know that this effort in which the artist/creator grapples with “theoretical frameworks” and “audiences” has been long underway in China, and that he is far from alone in the struggle. The artist must decide whether to become a revolutionary and bring a revolution in language to popular attention or take the narcissistic route of being self-obsessed with visual language, and alienate sympathizers who might become less and less interested in the artist’s increasingly personalized subtle gambits and begin to love only the artist’s aesthetic style. What the artist faces is that he or she is unable to control the way their creations are seen. In his article, Geng Jianyi repeatedly afﬁrms this kind of dilemma: “The ﬁeld for the personalization of language and the news-worthy development of language is no longer one full of plants or lush forests. The trees of form have been felled for the most part, but so far people are still reluctant to part with the land.”3

After the mid 1980s, the diffusion of thought and discourse around “language purification,” a proposal among mostly academic artists in China calling for artistic creation to be confined to a consideration of stylistic concerns in opposition to previous experiments where concerns with social issues were present, had far-reaching effects. The ’85 New Wave Movement saw an over-dependence on philosophical theories as the starting point and meaning for artistic practice. Then in the late 1980s, in response to the ’85 New Wave Movement, there emerged an oversimplified understanding to position theory as absolutely oppositional to artistic practice and language. As a result, artists chose to distance themselves from theory, which previously was considered a legitimate starting point and basis for creation. In the meantime, many artists also tended to overstress the singular relevance of sensation and intuition towards artistic creation. In 1988, under the pen name Hu Cun, Li Xianting wrote that “the artists . . . have realized what the most unbearable aspect of New Wave Art is: having too many concepts and rough language, for which they blame the form of a raucous movement, and its strong political and philosophical inclination.”4 Driven by this understanding, artists were keen to purify their exploration of language. He noted, “When all of the relatively separate parts come together, what shows before us is the great contrarian mindset of New Wave Art. Compared to the quick movements, they emphasize calming down; compared to all kinds of relatively new theories with new concepts coming and going, they emphasize the value of the work itself. Instead of intense passion and aesthetic connotation, they emphasize the purification of language.”5 When this kind of deliberately antagonistic mindset becomes a tendency in exhibitions, seminars, and media outlets, he argued, “[I]t deviates from the purpose of emphasizing artistic discipline and becomes a kind of social trend.”6 Moreover, as a social trend, it does not provide artists with too many choices. Geng Jianyi said that “The path of being narcissistic about language and the one that promotes the news-worthy nature of language are frustrating to all artists. The restaurant of style is already full. Latecomers arriving at this point can only linger outside the door.”7

32 Vol. 15 No. 4 Xie Nanxing, Ten Self-Portraits (No. 3), 1997, oil on canvas, 150 x 130 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/Lucerne.

Xie Nanxing, untitled (No. 2), 1999, oil on canvas, 190 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne.

Vol. 15 No. 4 33 As a result of the self-discipline of his artistic nature, Xie Nanxing was unwilling to subject himself to this kind of trap in being confined by such limited choices. He was also unwilling to continue benefiting from an already widely accepted image of his artwork—that it had style and class—even though those definitions and interpretations had already brought him dazzling success. Xie Nanxing, who graduated in 1996 from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts Printmaking department, made a name for himself shortly after graduation with a series of painted portraits of young people, including self-portraits. This series of paintings used bloodied young men’s bodies and visual drama to convey a sense of psychological oppression and victimization. Before 1998, young people’s bodies and scenes of their daily lives were often grouped under the moniker “Youth Cruelty Painting.” Although the artist agreed that the purpose of these works was related to drama and tragedy, he also never agreed that his intention was to make a link between youth and cruelty: “Actually ‘Youth Cruelty Painting’ is just something put forward by the critics. To be so quickly lumped together like this is actually pretty unfair to the artists. When I first started to paint this kind of thing, I wanted to communicate and participate with the viewer. I wanted to see if I could paint something that made the viewer feel uncomfortable, upset psychologically, and shaken.”8

By the end of 1999, Xie Nanxing ceased creating this series and started Xie Nanxing, untitled (liquid), 2000, oil on canvas, 220 x 380 thinking about how the picture could avoid using figurative images—like a cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ naked body, blood flowing from wounds, symbols like blood stained sheets— Lucerne. and instead express a kind of psychological experience or feeling by depicting everyday objects. From 2000 to 2001, the artist turned his focus to depicting liquids, the flame on a stove, a bit of light cast onto the wall, the end of a corridor, chandeliers, etc. to try to find basic objects that could connect with a dramatic psychological experience. From this stage onward, Xie Nanxing had already begun to plot his course to “escape from painting,” or, more perhaps more accurately, “escape from the image.”

34 Vol. 15 No. 4 Xie Nanxing, untitled (Flame), 2000, oil on canvas, 220 x 380 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne.

The body, allusion to its harm, and efforts to make the audience uncomfortable were trends that permeated the Chinese art world in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They included performance art exhibitions that took “human and animal” as their theme and appeared in nationwide tours, Post-Sensibility performance art, and examples of performance art that were featured in the exhibition Fuck Off, which took place during the 2000 Shanghai Biennale. These movements and reactions, on the one hand, came from the uncertainties of artists regarding the increasing industrialization, marketization, and domestication of art. On the other, they echoed similar creative trends coming from Europe, like London’s 1997 Royal Academy exhibition Sensation, which featured many of what was known as the Young British Artists. Xie Nanxing came to realize that although his own works were also reﬂective of the human and animal trend of the early 2000s, he was unwilling to allow the sensational or narrative dimension of the images and the results they achieved stop him. What he hoped for was a step-by-step approach to a more profound intent within the process of painting and creation. In the artist’s own words, his paintings had something special from the beginning: “Although I am expressing through the visual, what I actually hope is for my visual language to extend into other areas, like with sound or things happening in other dimensions. (This does not mean I want to make video art.)”9

However, at this stage, his works are known mainly through what has been described by art historian Lu Peng as a part of the “video painting” wave that emerged in the new century. Lu Peng wrote:

In the new century, artists have received a cue from those like Gerhard Richter: Even if it’s a photographic image, it can still stimulate the motifs, materials, or meanings of a painting. So-called photo-based paintings are conceptual paintings from the ﬁrst decade of the twenty-ﬁrst century. Many artists enjoy working in this style, and it has already led to a long list of works from artists like Li Songsong, Li Dafang, Xie Nanxing, and Yin Chaoyang. Indeed, painting that pulls its conceptual motivation from photography is a sea change as it is a shift from symbolic painting to narrative painting. It shows that people are attached to all kinds of

Vol. 15 No. 4 35 past experiences and can’t rid themselves of the spiritual Xie Nanxing, untitled (picture of voice I), 2001, oil on canvas, influence that today’s life has on us. However, these kinds of triptych, 220 x 380 cm each. Courtesy of the artist and artists’ images, even borrowing from historical photographs, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne. have also been modified or adapted so that they are difficult to identify, and are actually a kind of reconstruction of the borrowed image. They are a kind of fictional narrative.10

Starting in 2001, Xie Nanxing Xie Nanxing, untitled (picture of voice II), 2002, oil on created two groups of triptychs, canvas, triptych, 220 x 380 cm. Courtesy of the artist and entitled untitled (Picture of Voice I) Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne. and (Picture of Voice II), that let the audience, through pictorial language, sense other content like the surface of a lake, a whooshing sound, the effect of cars passing at speed, or the sound of a car in the distance. The ﬁrst of these series’ three paintings are differentiated by their portrayal of rain falling upon glass at three different speeds. The same year he also painted three portraits, untitled (Ear), Untitled (Portrait No. 1), and Untitled (Portrait No. 2). Each are derived from the same video and are of the same speciﬁc woman but concentrate on three different parts of her head. In this way of limiting his choice of images to the same source of image, the artist created constraints on his iconography; it could even be said that he was hard on himself by strictly forcing himself to excavate all of painting’s possibilities. At this stage, the question of what to paint was

36 Vol. 15 No. 4 Xie Nanxing, untitled (Ear), 2001, oil on canvas, 150 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne.

Xie Nanxing, untitled (Portrait No. 1), 2001, oil on canvas, 150 x 298 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne.

Xie Nanxing, untitled (Portrait No. 2), 2001, oil on canvas, 150 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne.

nowhere near as important to the artist as how to paint. It could be said that the act of painting itself could generate additional sensations. Of course, the questions of how to paint and what might be achieved through painting also determine how the artist chooses subject matter. Attempts in this manner were also made by Xie Nanxing in 2003, in which six painted compositions, all of them untitled, were taken from the same photograph. However, the different characters depicted in each painting, or in those without a person, the subtle changes of space constituted the differences between these works. The artist has said, “The content of each piece is different, but they all present the same picture. You would think that the ﬁlm was taken at random, but actually they are the same picture. This way offers more space, time, and psychological aspects than a single image, and it extends further in a way. This is unrelated to the series having six different paintings but instead is more indebted to their continuity.”11

This strategy of continuously repeating the visual description of an object appeared again in 2005 with a series of four paintings, also untitled. What

Vol. 15 No. 4 37 Xie Nanxing, untitled (No. 4), 2003, oil on canvas, 150 x 360 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne.

Xie Nanxing, untitled (No. 6), 2003, oil on canvas, 150 x 360 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne.

this particular series showed was the same billiard table viewed from different angles. For the artist, the billiard table is a familiar object, its main role a source of youthful night entertainment. However, that is not the subject of these four pictures. The real protagonist is light or experience that emerges related to light. “Light, in my works, is like a medium,” the artist says. “In the 2005 works, I used light’s penetrative properties. For example, when you paint a portrait looking towards the light, you almost can’t make out the person’s ﬁgure, because where the picture is thin, light extends, and in the thick places it will make everything black. I think that this is really interesting. It generates for me different expectations towards painting. It’s like a miracle. You can’t possibly imagine all of the shapes that light creates.”12

Left: Xie Nanxing, untitled (No. 1), 2005, oil on canvas, 220 x 385 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne. Right: Xie Nanxing, untitled (No. 2), 2005, oil on canvas, 220 x 385 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/Lucerne.

In the blue-coloured three-piece series The First Round with a Whip No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 (2008), the artist, fascinated by the shape of the light or attempting to veil the original image, calculated that by putting various Beijing billboards backwards, backlighting them, then capturing the scene with a video camera before playing the video back on a television and taking a photograph of the television screen to serve as the ﬁnal reference for his painting, would deny us, the audience, the ability to trace what we were seeing to its original source. This decision puts the viewer in the same limited space as the artist—and again the focus was on the act of painting itself rather than the signiﬁcance of the content.

38 Vol. 15 No. 4 Xie Nanxing, The First Round with a Whip No. 3 (also known as The Wave No. 3), 2008, oil on canvas, 219 x 384 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne.

Left: Xie Nanxing, We No. 1, 2009, oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne. Right: Xie Nanxing, We No. 3, 2009, oil on canvas, 210 x 160 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne.

After enacting these extreme practices by removing the picture’s content and then employing symbolism in order to explore painting’s possibilities, the artist seemed to brieﬂy return to the track of the picture’s narrative. This return also caused him to begin to prioritize art history as a point of inquiry. As usual, he asked questions, as well as took lessons from the remains of history as a starting point. The 2009 series We consists of three pictures on the subject of copying paintings. Xie Nanxing went online and downloaded a few works from one period by the French Dada artist Francis Picabia. The most representative works of Picabia’s were paintings that represented dramatic colours with graphics of machine parts, but during his lifetime, the style of his creations evolved constantly, and he never focused on mastering the technique of drawing. He was not a traditional painter; he just wanted to express himself fearlessly by constantly changing content and styles. When Xie Nanxing read through Picabia’s history and works, he realized that, at one point, Picabia had drawn a number of covers for erotic magazines. The drawings were not considered good, and people thought his abilities were perhaps in decline. Xie Nanxing copied three of his erotic magazine covers as a way to get to know Picabia better, and, to a certain extent, this series of works found Xie Nanxing initiating his own form of self-examination. The deeper story here is the anxiety and uncertainty in the heart of the creator: Should an artist continually change styles? Is change a symbol of fearless expression, like with Picabia, or is it the cause of failure? From researching and contemplating Picabia’s life and working

Vol. 15 No. 4 39 process, Xie Nanxing seems to have come to this conclusion: Whether or Xie Nanxing, Improvisation 500 (Oblivion), 2011, oil on not an artist paints well is related to his character and is not entirely tied up canvas, 190 x 290 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs in creation itself. Meile, Beijing/Lucerne.

The careful study of people and events in art history at this stage of Xie Nanxing’s artistic output is notable. After We, Xie Nanxing drew his content from an interior decorating reference book entitled Dazzling Colorful Home Furnishings and imitated through paint some of the renovation design drawings found within it. The original names of the design drawings, their composition and furniture, spoke to the artist of an obscure but necessary link with art history. The artist gave the works in this series the somewhat sensational names Improvisation 500 (Oblivion) (2011), White Asses (2011), and Velásquez’s Innocent X (2010). On the topic of why he chose to depict renovation design drawings, the artist said:

[T]he foundation is rooted in the fact that I realized interior design drawings and designers are related to painters of the past. They know the history of the art of painting and its performance techniques. They pretty much know all of it. They probably studied fine arts and went through all of the training. Painters are faced with a white canvas while interior designers are confronted with a space. If you look at a magazine of renovation renderings, you can see European style. It will discuss size, colour, and light. It’s a purely technical visual language, but painting uses that same language. For example, you are supposed to express luxury without being superficial. The lighting fixtures, the bedroom, the entrance, etc., are all supposed to achieve a kind of effect. In painting, how to use colour, composition, and proportions are similar to the way interior design discusses them. Both discuss how to approach a blank

40 Vol. 15 No. 4 Xie Nanxing, White Asses, canvas and an empty space. Both use symbolism, colour, 2011, oil on canvas, 220 x 325 cm. Courtesy of the artist and light, and psychology, so, I thought, they really are not very Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne. far apart. Painting is a standard form of high art, while interior design is kind of cheap one-time-use aesthetics. The methods behind interior design drawings express that they have definitely been influenced by art history’s technical progress. It’s like a piece of dust on the table. How could it not be seen as coming from a piece of the Mogao Grottoes? Through this kind of obscure connection, I realized that design renderings are the same as this piece of dust, and pieces and parts of their methods still resemble painting. It’s a microcosmic reflection of the larger world.13

Xie Nanxing, untitled No. 2, To Xie Nanxing, all of our 2011, oil on canvas, 190 x 278 cm. Courtesy of the artist and experiences with painting are just a Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne. mote of art history’s dust. Inﬂuences and relationships remain, but they are far from the entire picture. To the creator and the reader, confronting this dust is unavoidable, but one can also choose to refuse it. In 2011, Xie Nanxing created another untitled series, again using one canvas to cover the other; on top, he completed a painting with a narrative structure. In Xie Nanxing’s own words, this kind of painting technique “is a little bit like traditional rice paper painting. After you are ﬁnished with the drawing on top, the pattern that remains below is unrecognizable. However, the painter cannot paint the top layer without caring about the underlying layer. It doesn’t matter if it’s the top layer or bottom layer, both are you.”14 The content of these narrative paintings relates to classic novels and myths as well as to painters recorded in art history. These paintings tell the story of the relationship between painting, space, object, and the painter himself.

Vol. 15 No. 4 41 Xie Nanxing, untitled No. 3, 2012, oil on canvas, 220 x 325 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne.

However, as mentioned earlier, Xie Nanxing exhibits only the underlying printed image. The splotches and ink traces, however, allow the viewer to still speculate on the composition of the top layer. Xie Nanxing calls these traces “ashes.” It is not abstraction, but also it is clearly not figurative in form. The artist’s true hope is that by using this kind of a painting method, he can break away from the trajectory of art history, enter into an isolated position, a void, and, in the end, finally redefine how he is identified in the context of art.

Among these “dust” or “shadow” or “ashes” paintings, as the artist calls them, a 2013 series entitled Triangle Relations Gradually Changing contains a painting whose source material is a 2005 work by Lucian Freud, The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer. In this painting, a female model sits next to the painter holding his leg, and the painter is some distance away from a half-painted canvas, unable to return to the easel. Xie Nanxing chose this painting because he believed that the question of authenticity the painting discusses—the model embodies reality itself and tries to drag the artist away from the canvas—is a metaphor for some of the problems regarding painting that he himself had been contemplating. Freud’s achievements lie in sketching, but in his later years he began to contemplate the issue of what is real when it comes to people. To Xie Nanxing, the model is clinging to the artist, preventing him from moving forward and continuing to paint the painting. In this painting, what Freud is saying is that what was real was the fact that the model was holding him tight, while the painting (of the model) itself was just an illusion.

Freud influenced many Chinese painters, as his skill was extraordinary, but his expressions were also unique. In Xie Nanxing’s painting, Triangle Relations Gradually Changing, No. 3, he replaced the image of Freud with one of his own. In his own painting, he was the very artist who was held by his pursuit for the real and thus was unable to reach the canvas and finish his own painting in a symbolic sense. Since Xie Nanxing’s painting practice is aimed at addressing the issues arising from figurative painting, the result would eventually be, as the artist has pointed out in conversation, a kind of disastrous representation. After all, what he was subject to and had

42 Vol. 15 No. 4 Xie Nanxing, Triangle Relations Gradually Changing No. 3, 2013, oil on canvas, 190 x 190 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing/ Lucerne.

experienced was the same kind of training in technique, brushwork, and modeling, as well as in art history, as the other artists of ﬁgurative painting. It is only natural that Xie Nanxing would not reveal the top layer of canvas to us, as his real self was on the run, leaving behind a shell and a disguise for us to speculate. This attempt to escape the tradition of ﬁgurative painting has remained the core concern of Xie Nanxing’s practice in recent years, but there is an uncertain future. Just as this painting was in essence something of a self-portrait, there always remains the possibility that the artist will end up being caught in-between.

Translated by Michael Winkler

Notes

1. Xie Nanxing, After the Second Round with a Whip, January 17, 2014, transcript of lecture given at Shenzhen’s OCAT Library. Unpublished. 2. Ibid. 3. Geng Jianyi, “On Works and Audience,” Fine Arts in China 22, (1988), 1. 4. Li Xianting, “The Era Awaits the Life Passion of Great Souls,” Fine Arts in China 37 (1988), 1. 5. Ibid., 1. 6. Ibid., 1. 7. Geng Jianyi, “On Works and Audience,” 1. 8. Xie Nanxing: it’s not interesting if I am the only one playing, “AMNUA Sketch III” exhibition series interview at Xie Nanxing’s studio in Caochangdi, Beijing, with Wang Yamin, March 2015, http://www. nuamuseum.org/Detail.aspx?id=388/. 9. Xie Nanxing, After the Second Round with a Whip. 10. Lu Peng, Painting Theory: Hands and Concepts. Artron, http://review.artintern.net/html. php?id=60536/. 11. Xie Nanxing, After the Second Round with a Whip. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid.

Vol. 15 No. 4 43 Adam Monohon Zhang Kechun: Photographing “China’s Sorrow”

“ t represents the root of the nation,” Zhang Kechun has said of the Yellow Zhang Kechun, Men Climbing a Billboard, Qinghai, from the 1 River. “I wanted to photograph the river respectfully.” Awash in tans series The Yellow River, 2011, archival pigment print, 137.16 and greys, mist and haze, Zhang Kechun’s photographs capture the x 166.37 cm. © Zhang Kechun. I Courtesy Beetles + Huxley, delicate tension between society and nature so characteristic of life along the London. Yellow River. As much a source of life as a bringer of death, the Yellow River has played a fundamental role in the development of civilization in China since its earliest days. A central character in many an extraordinary story, both folkloric and historic, the river is deftly explored as subject in the nearly twenty photographs presented in a recent exhibition in London at Beetles + Huxley (April 20–May 21, 2016), the photographer’s ﬁrst solo show in the United Kingdom. This exhibition was composed of works from two series and thus provides a useful overview of Zhang Kechun’s young oeuvre.

Beginning in 2010, Zhang Kechun set out on a fold-up bicycle from the mouth of the Yellow River, where it pours its silt-ﬁlled waters into the Bohai Sea, just north of the Shandong Peninsula. From Dongying, a city in

44 Vol. 15 No. 4 Shandong that has grown along the river’s southern edge, Zhang Kechun made his way upstream, photographing the river as it snakes its way towards its source in the Yueguzonglie Basin, tucked away in a quiet plateau high in the Bayan Har Mountains of Qinghai—a world away from the bustle of Dongying, a city of two million. From its source in Qinghai, a sparsely inhabited and largely rural province peopled as much by Han Chinese as those of Tibetan, Mongol, and Hui extraction, to Shandong, a province of enormous wealth and large population, the Yellow River passes through nine provinces in all. To follow it from source to mouth is to take a journey from past to present, from an atemporal mountain plain to hyper-modern urban enclave. To do the inverse, as Zhang Kechun has done, is a sort of soul-searching for the urban dweller.

Zhang Kechun’s first journey upriver resulted in The Yellow River (Bei Liu Guoguo), a series of photographs that capture life along the river, or the absence thereof, in ethereal tones. Begun in 2010, The Yellow River is the product of a three-year sojourn, conducted in segments along the river, a journey as much spiritual as literal. After finishing The Yellow River, Zhang Kechun began a second series exploring the Yellow River, Between the Mountains and Water (Shanshui zhi Jian), in 2013. Ostensibly focused more closely on the relationship between people and their environment, on the mountains and water so central to Chinese conceptions of landscape, this second series is largely an elaboration of themes first explored in Zhang Kechun’s first. The exhibition as a whole privileges Zhang Kechun’s earlier work by showing more of them and including only those images from the photographer’s later series that deal explicitly with the Yellow River and that share a limited, muted colour palette. Together, the works create a stark yet intimate portrait of the Yellow River. Any intimacy or calm that Zhang Kechun creates, however, is on reflection undercut by a near inexplicable tension that infuses the works.

Some two millennia before the birth of Christ, on what is today known as the North China Plain, the world seemed to be coming to an end. Quiet settlements arrayed along the banks of the Yellow River were washed away in the powerful torrents of water that began to breach the river’s formerly static banks. Entire villages were swept away in the wake of the heavy, silt- ﬁlled waters and vast swaths of land formerly cherished for their fertility were lost to the river’s unstoppable advance. Far from a momentary event, the erratic ﬂoods continued for some thirteen years,2 wreaking havoc on those unable to leave the lowlands.

The leader of the allied tribes who lived on the land unsettled by the river’s unpredictable ebb and ﬂow, Emperor Yao, is said to have written:

Like endless boiling water, the ﬂood is pouring forth destruction. Boundless and overwhelming, it overtops hills and mountains. Rising and ever rising, it threatens the very heavens. How the people must be groaning and suffering!3

Vol. 15 No. 4 45 Taken aback by the ferocity of flooding, Yao sought the advice of the Four Zhang Kechun, A Family Spending the Weekend Under Mountains (siyue), his special advisors, in hope of finding “someone who a Bridge, Shandong, China, 4 from the series The Yellow could regulate the waters.” On their advice, Yao appointed Gun, who River, 2012, archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 cm. spent the next nine years overseeing efforts to construct dams and dikes, © Zhang Kechun. Courtesy of Beetles + Huxley, London. desperately seeking to stem the waters’ flow. In time, Gun was replaced by Yu, who brought the river to heel; through deft efforts, Yu spared the lowlanders from the waters’ omnipresent threat. Shun, the successor of Emperor Yao, was so impressed with Yu’s ability to tame the seemingly unstoppable river that he appointed Yu his heir.

In stemming the floods Yu is said to have opened nine passages through which the excess water that had formerly menaced the lowlanders could run easily to the sea. In doing so, Yu divided the territory into nine provinces that, after the passing of Shun, Yu would unite, establishing the first Chinese dynasty, the Xia (c. 2010–1600 B.C.). Yu set the capital at Yangcheng, a city at the foot of the sacred Mount Song, not far from the banks of the river he had brought under control. Under the Xia dynasty, the Yellow River must have taken on an even more epic aspect than it carries today, the knowledge of the terror it had wrought and the heroic feats required to bring it to heel still a recent memory for those who then lived in reach of its waters. Today, the tale of the great flood lives on as mythology, an epic flood story tucked away in China’s oldest written histories. Yet Zhang Kechun’s photographs manage to bring to the fore the tension of the days when Gun and Yu valiantly fought the river’s waters.

The Chinese title of The Yellow River, Zhang Kechun’s ﬁrst series of photographs, Bei Liu Guoguo, meaning “the rivers rushes north,” is far more

46 Vol. 15 No. 4 telling than the English one. Taken from the Book of Songs (Shijing),5 the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, the title suggests a conscious casting of Zhang Kechun’s gaze back to the earliest epochs of Chinese history in his efforts to understand the river at which he aimed his lens. Compiled by Confucius during the Warring States Period (475–221 B.C.), the Book of Songs, one of the Five Classics (Wu Jing) of Confucianism—for centuries a central text in the education of China’s elite—brings together some three hundred exemplary works of Chinese poetry from the eleventh to seventh centuries B.C. Zhang Kechun’s title, in particular, references a segment of a poem by an anonymous author describing the Yellow River. “The river is immense; the river rushes north”6 it reads, conjuring up the river’s quiet power in an elegant, eight-character couplet.

Alongside the Book of Songs, another collection of poetry, the Songs of Chu (Chu Ci), stands as an exemplary record of the poetry of early China. It is in the echoes of Chu culture that Han Shaogong (b. 1953), a Chinese novelist who emerged as a leader of the Xungen (“Root Searching”) Movement, locates the true roots of Chinese literature. As part of a campaign led by Mao Zedong to instill socialist values in educated, urban youth through rural living and manual labour, Han Shaogong was “sent down” (xiafang) to live along the Miluo River. While settled along the river in Hunan as a sent down youth (xiafang qingnian), not far from a shrine to Qu Yuan, the central poet of the Songs of Chu Han Shaogong writes: “I used to consider a question all the time: Where has the magniﬁcence of Chu culture gone?”7 Apart from a few local phrases taken from the lines of poetry in the Songs of Chu, Han Shaogong insists, “the traces that Chu culture has left behind are infrequently seen.”8 Despite the area around the Miluo River being rich in places mentioned in the Songs of Chu, Han Shaogong notes, the temples and pavilions that dot the region are infrequently dedicated to Chu people. Instead, they pay tribute to individuals from outside the area. “Confucius and Guan Yu are from the north, while the Buddha is from India,” he states, yet buildings dedicated to them dot the land around the Miluo River.9

Among the Miao, Dong, and Yao minorities in Hunan’s Xiangxi prefecture, Han Shaogong found the forgotten culture of the Chu living on. While mainstream Chinese culture has long since forgotten the contributions of the Chu, Han Shaogong argues, Chu culture lives on in the minority communities of Xiangxi. He explains,“In the year three hundred B.C. the Miao people laboured in the area around Dongting Lake”; however, “having fallen victim to disasters both natural and manmade, they followed a stream southwest,”10 settling in present-day Xiangxi—carrying with them Chu culture. “It seems,” Han Shaogong writes, “a segment of Chu culture ﬂowed down to Xiangxi.”11 Free from the exigencies of urban life and Han Chinese norms, the last breaths of the great culture captured in the Songs of Chu has survived in the ways of these rural minorities.

While Zhang Kechun’s choice of title explicitly links his photographs to the Book of Songs, the ofﬁcial counterpart to the Songs of Chu, his works are undoubtedly imbued with the same sort of nostalgia that underpins Han Shaogong’s writing. Zhang Kechun’s ﬁrst photographic journey,

Vol. 15 No. 4 47 undertaken to create The Yellow River, was a project of near-literal “root searching,” setting out from the high-rises of Dongying towards the river’s actual source. In photographing his way towards the pristine grasslands of Qinghai, Zhang Kechun was working not only toward the less spoiled environs of the Yellow River’s source, but also journeying toward the metaphorically unspoiled—the roots of Chinese culture. Qinghai, like Xiangxi, besides being far more rural and sparsely populated than any of China’s coastal provinces, is home to large populations of ethnic minorities—in whose daily lives and culture, Han Shaogong insisted, the true roots of Chinese culture lived on.

Zhang Kechun’s two series are photographic manifestations of the once solely literary Xungen Movement; in The Yellow River and Between the Mountains and Water Zhang Kechun produces in images what the Xungen authors constructed in words. As Li Qingxi explains in the essay “Searching for Roots,” these Xungen authors began to “feel that it was actually easier to see the true face of the world . . . beneath the surface of daily reality.”12 As a consequence, they turned their attention away from extraordinary subjects toward the lives of common people (minjian shenghuo).13 “[T]hese writers,” Li Qingxi continues, “were in the process of extricating themselves from the existing categories of politics, economics, morality and law, and gradually entering the categories of nature, history, culture, and humankind.”14

Beyond this shift in content, Xungen authors began “using ‘lyrical elements’ to burst open the structure of the story.”15 Plot was stripped away as unnecessary. Instead, values, aesthetic and moral, were freely explored. As Li Qingxi notes:

The heart of the matter is that these works transformed external conflicts of action into internal conflicts of value, moving from the realm of time-space into the realm of the heart. Indeed, there are few exciting climaxes, and confrontations between characters either have been eliminated or at least no longer serve as the motivation or lever for the narrative. Yet conflicts of value are everywhere.16

Zhang Kechun, wittingly or not, transposes these concerns from the pages of a literary work to the photographic images of his two series. The half- built—perhaps half-ruined—structures that appear in his frames and the small ﬁgures that dot many of his images offer little in the way of excitement. Never shocking, they instead attest to a conﬂict of values that plays out along the river. Zhang Kechun’s photographs capture a quiet struggle between tradition and reality, humanity and nature, and the material and the spiritual.

In People Fishing by the River, Shaanxi, China, for instance, two men tucked in coal-coloured inner tubes loll about in a pool of deep water ringing an enormous, fragmented concrete and brick cylinder. Jutting out of the loess-tinged water at an odd angle, the half-ruined shaft stands as testament

48 Vol. 15 No. 4 Zhang Kechun, People Fishing by the River, Shaanxi, China, from the series The Yellow River, 2012, archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 cm. © Zhang Kechun. Courtesy of Beetles + Huxley, London.

Zhang Kechun, People Crossing the Yellow River with a Photo of Mao Zedong, Henan, from the series The Yellow River, 2012, archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 cm. © Zhang Kechun. Courtesy of Beetles + Huxley, London.

to some abandoned endeavour. In Zhang Kechun’s image, the colossal ruin breaks the otherwise unmarked horizon, creating a kind of visual dissonance symbolic of the struggle between humanity and nature that has long played out along the Yellow River.

A later photograph, People Crossing the Yellow River with a Photo of Mao Zedong, Henan, captures a procession of swimmers, each clinging to a pair of garish orange floats, making their way across the river, a portrait of Mao Zedong fixed atop an inner tube at its centre. Here the tension is not between humanity and nature, but tradition and reality—or perhaps simply the past and present. Echoing Mao’s attempt to swim across the Yangzi River at seventy-two to prove his continued vigour, the aging crowd of swimmers clings to that which has been lost. Awash in the pale haze of diaphanous light that is characteristic of Zhang Kechun’s images,17 the whole scene feels as if it belongs to some lost realm—a fitting metaphor for the nostalgia that imbues the photograph and, presumably, propels the crowd at its centre.

Vol. 15 No. 4 49 “I absolutely have to be admitted,”18 the young narrator—and central character—of Zhang Chengzhi’s 1984 Xungen novel Rivers of the North (Beifang de He) said beneath his breath. Standing atop a mountain of loess overlooking the Yellow River, he assured himself of his successful passing of the entrance exam for the graduate course in geography in which he hopes to enroll. A stream of consciousness novel, Rivers of the North, follows the narrator as he travels the Loess Plateau of northern China, preparing for his exam. Zhang Chengzhi writes of the many tributaries of the Yellow River and the landscapes of the Loess Plateau, conjuring up vivid images of the Wuding River in Shaanxi, the Huangshui River in Qinghai, and the Yellow River itself—as well as the land through which they run.

Bereft of plot, Rivers of the North takes as its substance the emotions experienced by the book’s narrator as he traverses the North China Plain. The novel’s interest is the tension between the narrator’s textual knowledge of the lands before him and the intensity of their actual, physical presence. As the narrator becomes increasingly caught in the tension between academic descriptions of the geographical features before him, from volumes like The Physical Geography of China,19 which the narrator has clearly read closely, and the impossibility of explaining the sheer force of the actual landscape before him, it becomes clear that the novel is as much about traversing the psychic geography from youth to adulthood as it is about the literal geography of the Loess Plateau.

Not dissimilarly, Zhang Kechun’s photographs of the Yellow River take the viewer on more than the literal journey they document. Inspired by Rivers of the North, Zhang Kechun, some time after having graduated with a degree in design, set out to Dongying to begin this three-year project that would become the ﬁfty-odd photographs that comprise The Yellow River. Like the young man on the cusp of the next stage in his life at the centre of Rivers of the North, Zhang Kechun drifted idly across the North China Plain, taking in the indescribable scenes that unfolded before him. Although it is not a strict retracing of the novel’s protagonist’s path, The Yellow River clearly owes a debt to Zhang Chengzhi’s lucid, searching prose.

A Man Standing on an Island in the Zhang Kechun, A Man Standing on an Island in the Middle of the River, Shaanxi, China Middle of the River, Shaanxi, China, from the series The captures the vastness of the landscapes Yellow River, 2012, archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 that would have confronted the cm. © Zhang Kechun. Courtesy of Beetles + Huxley, London. narrator of Rivers of the North as he trudged through Shaanxi and elsewhere along the Yellow River. A lone ﬁgure stands atop a broad loess shoal, a faded orange dinghy resting just before him. In the distant background, obscured by a scrim of smog, a ridgeline can just be made out running along the horizon, unmarked by human presence. A sort of Rückenﬁgur, the man stands in for the viewer, for the wandering narrator of Rivers of the North, or for Zhang Kechun himself, a young man indirectly confronting himself by instead exploring the vastness of the country in which he was born.

50 Vol. 15 No. 4 Referred to as both China’s “Mother River” and “China’s Sorrow,” the Yellow River has proven itself since time immemorial as capable of nurturing life as it is of taking it. Its forces, for better or worse, have indelibly shaped Chinese society. And, if accounts of the Xia dynasty are to be believed, those same forces even gave birth to it, spurring the start of a dynastic cycle that would carry on into the twentieth century. Today, however, civilization is as a much a threat to the river’s flows as the river is to civilization. The glaciers that feed the river have shrunk some seventeen percent, as of a decade ago,20 while the lakes the glaciers feed—which in turn fuel the river’s flow—are themselves threatened by desertification of the grasslands in which they sit. The invisible force of global warming has upset the river’s delicate balance.

Zhang Kechun, People Drink The consequences of these Tea by the River, from the series Between the Mountains changes, and of the astonishing and Water, 2013, archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 rates of development and cm. © Zhang Kechun. Courtesy of Beetles + Huxley, London. pollution manifest in China in the last decades, seep into Zhang Kechun’s images in surprisingly subtle ways. In People Drink Tea by the River, one of a few photographs from Zhang Kecun’s second series Between the Mountains and Water, included in the Beetles + Huxley exhibition, the remains of a massive overpass sit as modern ruins along the river’s shore. In the distance, along the river’s opposite bank, a crop of highrises lines the shore, all but impressions through the thick smog that hangs in the air. Having set out to photograph his ideal of the river,21 it is clear that Zhang Kechun has come to terms with the omnipresence of pollution and the scars of development that are evident in his second series—much like the group of ﬁgures who sit, casually, among cast-off towers of concrete, sipping tea.

Zhang Kechun, Buddha in a Absent from this exhibition are Coal Yard, Ningxia, from the series The Yellow River, 2011, the many images from Zhang archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 cm. © Zhang Kechun. Kechun’s ﬁrst series that deal Courtesy of the artist. with coal. While much of the land along the Yellow River is too scant in resources to sustain much industry, there is one exception, as Jim Yardley has noted in the New York Times, “The northernmost route of the Yellow River courses through the centre of China’s coal country.”22 In the cover photograph of the catalogue for The Yellow River series, Buddha in a Coal Yard, Ningxia, a Hui man, dressed in white cap, white shirt, and black pants stands staring at a massive Buddha head, surrounded by piles of earth and the tracks of earth movers. A failed casting of a sculpture commissioned by coal bosses, Zhang Kechun explains, “it was abandoned to the side of a coal extraction pit.”23 Depicting a Muslim man caught in a moment of quiet reverence toward a Buddhist statue commissioned as some sort of repentance by men cashing in on one of China’s most destructive industries, the image is a pure distillation of

Vol. 15 No. 4 51 the issues Zhang Kechun has been forced to confront in traveling along the Yellow River’s banks.

As Yardley notes in his 2006 New York Times article on the Yellow River: “Throughout history the Yellow River has spawned floods, and emperors who could not protect the people were said to have lost heaven’s mandate to rule.”24 While Yu was the first to tame the river’s floods, “The Communist Party has built more dams than any dynasty,”25 bringing the river’s flow firmly under control, but not without cost. Through the photographs’ ethereal tones and inexplicable tensions, Zhang Kechun quietly alerts us to this crisis. Navigating the myriad contradictions of values that confront China today with all the aplomb and poetic power of the best of Xungen literature, Zhang Kechun creates images that stand alone as brilliant, tragic—sometimes comic—scenes of life today along the land from which Chinese society sprung. Together, the photographs combine to create a lyric portrait of the river that stands as so much more than the sum of its parts.

Notes

1. Emily Rauhala, “Root of the Nation: Zhang Kechun Photographs China’s Yellow River,” Time, November 13, 2012, http://time.com/54766/root-of-the-nation-zhang-kechun-photographs-chinas- yellow-river/. 2. Yang Lihui and Deming An, Handbook of Chinese Mythology (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 74. 3. Wu Kuo-Cheng, The Chinese Heritage (New York: Crown, 1982), 69. Translation by Wu Kuo-Cheng of a passage from The Book of History (Shang Shu). 4. Sima Qian, The Grand Scribe’s Records: The Basic Annals of Pre-Han China, trans. William H. Nienhauser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 21. 5. Yin Xiamo, “‘The River Rushes North’: Photographer Zhang Kechun’s Solo Show (‘Bei Liu Guoguo’: Zhang Kechun Sheying Gezhan),” FOTOMEN, http://fotomen.cn/2014/05/guoguo/. 6. Original text: Heshui yangyang, bei liu guoguo. See Mang Ye and Xianyi, eds., “Shuo Ren,” in Book of Songs (Shijing), Gushi Yuan Han-Ying Yicong (Beijing: Waiwen Chubanshe, 2001), 87. 7. Han Shaogong, “The Roots of Literature (Wenxue de Gen),” in The Roots of Literature (Wenxue de Gen) (Jinan: Shandong Wenyi Chubanshe, 2001), 76. This and all subsequent translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 77. 11. Ibid. 12. Li Qingxi, “Searching for Roots: Anticultural Return in Mainland Chinese Literature of the 1980s,” in Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey, eds. Pang-Yuan Chi and David Der-wei Wang (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 111. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 115. 16. Ibid., 116. 17. Zhang Kechun has said: “I choose cloudy, gloomy days to photograph and I overexpose my photos,” a process that lends them their ethereal quality. Rauhala, “Root of the Nation.” 18. Zhang, Rivers of the North (Les Rivières du Nord), trans. Catherine Toulsaly (Beijing: Editions Littérature Chinoise, 1992), 30. 19. Ibid., 9. 20. Jim Yardley, “A Troubled River Mirrors China’s Path to Modernity,” New York Times, November 19, 2006. 21. Rauhala, “The Root of the Nation, Zhang Kechun Photographs China’s Yellow River.” 22. Yardley, “Troubled River Mirrors China’s Path to Modernity.” 23. Zhang Kechun, “Documentary China: Zhang Kechun (Jishi Zhongguo: Zhang Kechun),” interview by Jiazazhi, http://www.vice.cn/read/jiazazhi-in-china-with-zhangkechun/. 24. Jim Yardley, “A Troubled River Mirrors China’s Path to Modernity.” 25. Ibid.

52 Vol. 15 No. 4 John Batten Hong Kong after the Umbrella Protests

A street barricade closing ong Kong’s political and arts landscape has dramatically evolved Connaught Road during the Umbrella protests, Admiralty, over the last five years. Divisions and anger that had brewed for Hong Kong, November 2014. Photo: John Batten. Hyears and that was first seen when nearly one million people marched against the incumbent Tung Chi-hwa government on July 1, 2003 (the annual celebration and public holiday for the Establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region), escalated with public demonstrations in 2013 and 2014 that ostensibly demanded greater democracy and “proper” universal suffrage, but also reflecting previous grievances about government/property developer collusion, air pollution, intensity of redevelopment of older urban areas, and increasing numbers of cross-border mainland visitors overwhelming local services. The culmination of this anger were the Umbrella protests that closed parts of Hong Kong with the erection of barricades, occupation of public roads, and protests in Mong Kok, Admiralty, and Causeway Bay for seventy-nine days in late 2014.

After the barricades and protesters were forcibly cleared on December 15, 2014, differences between pro-government and pro-democracy factions further increased in early 2015. Street protests in the form of groups

Vol. 15 No. 4 53 1967 Hong Kong riots, police on Nathan Street, Mong Kok District.

organized as being on “shopping trips” in Mong Kok targeted mainland visitors who were seen to be “invading” Hong Kong, responding to a comment by Hong Kong’s current Chief Executive, Leung Chun-ying, that Hong Kong people should now “go shopping” to help the economy recover (a spurious assertion, as later economic ﬁgures showed that actual retail sales activity and visitor numbers had not been adversely affected by the Umbrella protests).

By early 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping had extended his tightening of political power on the mainland through a crackdown on corruption by public officials, senior military and public security figures and, later, business leaders. This was part of a concerted power struggle between factions aligned to Xi Jinping and those of the previous president, Jiang Zemin. For the first time since the Cultural Revolution and Hong Kong’s 1967 riots, mainland politics had spilled into Hong Kong, with mainland officials, through the China Liaison Office, taking a stronger public attitude and directing—despite the city’s autonomy in these areas—Hong Kong’s internal affairs.

The best expression of this new presence of the mainland can be seen on Hong Kong’s public buildings, including fire stations, hospitals, schools, and police stations—institutions previously deemed politically neutral. All these buildings now fly Chinese flags, and the sovereign power is emphasized by the imposition of regulation flag sizes: the Hong Kong SAR flag is smaller and hung slightly lower than the Chinese flag. Furthermore, in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, disenchantment with the Leung Chun-ying government has seen filibustering by pro-democracy legislators of proposed government legislation, including urgent updating of copyright protection legislation— whose introduction is currently shelved—amid fear that it could be used to stifle freedom of expression and artistic license.

Meanwhile, mainland academics, ofﬁcials, and Hong Kong’s pro- government supporters condemned the Umbrella movement and called on all arms of the law to prosecute protesters. The rule of law and due process has always been defended by the legal profession and has recently

54 Vol. 15 No. 4 View of tent city during the been strongly affirmed by Hong Kong’s Chief Justice of the Court of Final Umbrella protests, Admiralty, Hong Kong, November 2014. Appeal, Geoffrey Ma Tao-li. In early 2016, five Hong Kong book publishers Photo: John Batten. who had sold books exposing the private lives and financial affairs of mainland officials were taken from Hong Kong, possibly by mainland police, and detained in Guangdong. This news made headlines around the world and was condemned by the Hong Kong public and international human rights commentators. Hong Kong has autonomy in internal governance and policing, and this serious breach of “one country, two systems” and Hong Kong autonomy has spooked the Hong Kong public. For many people, the abduction of these book publishers confirms the loudly stated views of many young people that “Hong Kong is dying.” This is expressed in the dystopian post-Umbrella film Ten Years produced by Ng Ka-leung which controversially won the Best Film award at the 2016 Hong Kong Film Awards and tells five stories of Hong Kong in 2015 under the thumb of the mainland, with the previous pragmatic approach of “one country, two systems” in tatters.1

I don’t, at the moment, share this pessimism; Hong Kong has always played a much more nuanced role than it has historically been credited for, as, for example, a colonial British trading and military enclave; an annoying southern city for the northern Beijing leadership; China’s capitalist outpost; and an East/West melting pot. The mainland will tolerate Hong Kong— despite each side’s outraged posturing and complaining—unless a truly popular, widespread sweep of independence or revolution emerges in the city. The emergence of “localist” and “Hong Kong independence” political parties at the moment has little mainstream support. A majority of Hong Kong’s public will continue to wish and clamour for greater democracy and maintenance of Hong Kong’s “core values”—namely, the rule of law, press freedom, and the intolerance of corruption. If those core values are fundamentally undermined, then Hong Kong will—and only then—as many have and too often disparagingly predicted, become “another Chinese city.”

Vol. 15 No. 4 55 This political story is a background for everything currently happening in Birdy Chu, view of multimedia installation It's Just Hong Kong—including business, sport, property development, and art. the Beginning, 2015, Goethe- Gallery, Hong Kong. Courtesy Exhibitions focusing on the recent protests and related issues have freely of the artist, Goethe-Institut, Black Box Studio, Hong Kong. and without censorship been mounted since the protesters were dispersed in December 2014. Exhibited at the Goethe Institut, Birdy Chu’s video and photographs documented, including interviews with protesters, the main Umbrella site in Admiralty. Kacey Wong Kwok-choi’s Art of Protest—Resisting Against Absurdity exhibition at the now-closed AJC Gallery was a thoughtful and critical exploration of aspects of the protests and police tactics featuring documentation of the artist’s highly theatrical performances at the time, including a replica of an army-style armoured vehicle.

Kasey Wong-Kwok-choi setting up his pink cardboard tank The Real Culture Bureau prior to participation in the annual July 1st protest rally, Hong Kong, 2012.

South Ho Siu Nam and friends spent many days and nights at the Admiralty and Mong Kok Umbrella protest sites: the resulting good day good night black-and-white photography exhibition at Blindspot Gallery was a contrasting and poignant display of vast, empty roadway protest spaces

56 Vol. 15 No. 4 South Ho Siu Nam, The Umbrella Salad III, archival inkjet print, 45.7 x 45.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong.

South Ho Siu Nam, The Umbrella Salad XXIV, archival inkjet print, 45.7 x 45.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong.

devoid of people alongside images of the protesters’ daily and mundane activities. His photographs highlighted, as I noted in the exhibition’s accompanying photobook, “an unprecedented time of futile exhilaration and optimistic crisis.”2 The Umbrella protest sites of Admiralty were revisited in Samson Young’s guided walk So You are Old by the Time You Reach the Island from the Hong Kong Convention Centre during Art Basel 2016. Participants were given headphones and a radio to hear a narrated

Vol. 15 No. 4 57 ﬁctional story and listen to the occasional evocative sounds of bells as Samson Young, So You are Old by the Time You Reach they walked near “the dark place” (scene of an alleged police bashing of a the Island, 2016, guided walk. Photo: John Batten. Courtesy protester) and toward the main, now deserted tent city of Admiralty. of the artist.

On another note, Ivy Ma’s Last Year exhibited forty predominantly black- and-white frontal portraits of young Umbrella participants at Gallery Exit. Her display had intentional similarities with Gerhard Richter’s 48 Portraits installation of a line of portraits of famous men shown at the 1972 Venice Biennale. The importance of the Umbrella movement can be judged only by the passing of time—and by youthful future generations, as Ivy Ma indicates by quoting two lines from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a poem of hope penned during the darkest days of the Second World War: “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language/And next year’s words await another voice.”

Hong Kong’s mainstream contemporary art scene has largely been unmoved by the city’s political future. But the art scene itself has undergone a reassessment over the last ﬁve years, with a number of inﬂuential factors converging. The 2008 monetary crisis forced central banks worldwide, including in China, to pump money into the banking system to keep interest rates low; with the consequent availability of capital and low interest paid on deposits, investors sought assets that offered capital gains. Physical assets, predominantly property, but also art—including art in some niche areas and markets, including contemporary Chinese art— attracted unprecedented interest. Hong Kong’s international auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, joined by the mainland’s Poly Auctions and others from Korea and Japan, saw record sales. However, with the mainland’s recent corruption crackdown and the knowledge that buying art is an

58 Vol. 15 No. 4 Ivy Ma, Last Year—10 Nov avenue for money laundering, this enthusiasm 2014, 2014, ink, pencil on archival print, 70 x 46.5 cm. has reached a plateau. Hong Kong’s primary Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Exit, Hong Kong. contemporary art market has been more ﬁckle. A handful of international galleries have opened in Hong Kong, but it appears their main motivation is Hong Kong’s liberal taxation regime, excellent logistics support, ease of entry and exit of art, and the need to geographically cover representation of their artists in Asia. For these same reasons, Hong Kong has evolved as the best location for a major international art fair, and the efﬁcient operations of the Swiss-owned Art Basel have made Hong Kong its third worldwide location, complementing Basel in Switzerland and Miami Beach in the USA.

Factors directly beneﬁting Hong Kong artists include a general growing interest in the art market, which has tracked publicity about worldwide record prices paid for contemporary art. Hong Kong’s growing middle class has more leisure time as fewer people work or attend school on weekends. This has translated into people wanting more recreation options, including visiting museums and public exhibitions to appreciate and learn more about art. M+, the new museum at the West Kowloon Cultural District slated to open by 2019, has been astute in organizing a series of exhibitions, on different themes and featuring a variety of media, at changing venues around Hong Kong. Publicity, even negative criticism by legislators in the Legislative Council about the project’s delays, has increased the reporting on art and art policy issues in the mainstream news media, and consequently raising awareness about contemporary art with the general public.

Government art and culture policies dating back ten years are coming to fruition: the number of yearly fine arts graduates has increased ten-fold, and there is also a wider range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in fine arts, new media, and cultural management from which students can choose. Likewise, debates about Hong Kong’s political reforms and influence of the mainland in Hong Kong affairs have reflected rising concern about freedom of expression and Hong Kong’s own particular cultural and “core” values, resulting in an interest in Hong Kong culture, including art. And, likewise, with the increasing numbers of fine arts graduates, there is a growing appreciation of the importance of good art writing, criticism and curatorial professionalism.

Crowds at Art Basel HK, 2016. I often equate the art done in Photo: Keith Wallace. Hong Kong with the music of the British band Mumford & Sons. This popular "indie" band features up-tempo acoustic guitars of gradual chord sequences. Or, with respect to the art scene’s more introspective moments, I think

Vol. 15 No. 4 59 of the clear, tortured voice of the Irish singer Damien Rice, a favourite of Hong Kong artists, university students, and the city’s increasingly educated, well-travelled “cosmopolitans.”3 Similar to these musicians, Hong Kong artists and their work, increasingly engage across international boundaries and can more easily be seen and appreciated. Their work is often overtly personal while hinting at wider social issues. However, the art often seems complacent with its execution and social positioning. I particularly have this feeling when I see curators’ (and increasingly, collectors’) favourite Firenze Lai, an artist whose work hints of Edvard Munch-like psychological tension of sole ﬁgures or groups of people in a swirling landscape, perfectly illustrating interpersonal angst; as her illustrations often do when they appear in Ming Pao Weekly, a popular magazine predominantly read by the educated middle class.

Firenze Lai’s work invariably is culturally neutral, with ﬁgures in a landscape that could be anywhere. Her naïve-like, gentle expressionism has similarities in style and subject matter with the work of senior Hong Kong artist Chu Hing-wah, whose ink-on-paper paintings are ﬁrmly rooted in the inner- city life of Yau Ma Tei, where he grew up. Chu Hing-wah’s twenty years as a psychiatric nurse lends a genuinely personal impression of life in Hong Kong, which he projects with a schizoid aura as a cinema-like city of junkies, prostitutes, gambling dens and of “outsiders,” the estranged and lonely, alongside parks of playing children cared for by chatting grandmothers.

Lee Kit, a well-travelled Hong Kong artist (now predominantly Taiwan- based) and arguably its most internationally exhibited, has a focused, worldly approach. His recent work increasingly uses painted impressions of the logos of international consumer items as cardboard installations, wall- mounted or simply placed on the ground, often accompanied by daily items and home furnishings. There is a world of familiarity in Lee Kit’s work.

Following Lee Kit’s lead, Hong Chu Hing-wah, The Unchanging Yau Ma Tei, 1999, Kong’s art scene and Hong Kong ink and colour on paper, 179 x 97 cm. Courtesy of the artist artists are becoming more worldly. and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong. And in an exciting development, the art being presented by Hong Kong’s public galleries, some private galleries, and independent art organizations has reached new levels of international diversity and depth. In a season of performance art, John Cage’s rarely seen or heard Writings through the Essay: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience was mounted by M+ in the Cattle Depot, a decommissioned abattoir of colonial heritage buildings in Tokwawan. Projected through mounted speakers, the ambience of

60 Vol. 15 No. 4 musical sound and Cage’s own voice in a beautiful open space calmed the atmosphere and brought alive the architecture.

Lee Kit, I want to be things, The city has seen a range of sound art 2010, installation view at Osage, Hong Kong. Photo: recently; this is great inspiration for a John Batten. wave of young Hong Kong cross-media and sound artists—of which one, Edwin Lo, himself organized a tour by French sound and graphics innovator Jean-Claude Eloy. The monthly Sonic Anchor performances, spearheaded by Samson Young, are a forum for new media, sound, and discussion. Recently, Taiwan sound and performance artist Betty Apple (Cheng Yin-ping) and sound and graphics artist Wang Hsin- jen performed at Sonic Anchor, and during Art Basel, Taiwan curator Guo Jau-lan mounted a small exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. The semi-commercial Empty Space Gallery recently presented an ambitious set of international sound artists. Festivals organized by soundpocket and the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble has kept new music performances and ambient soundscapes as a focus of consideration and enjoyment.

Wang Hsin-jen, sound art performance at Sonic Anchor, Hong Kong Art Centre, 2015. Photo: John Batten.

Rendition of the renovated Hong Kong Museum of Art. Courtesy of Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Vol. 15 No. 4 61 The challenge for Hong Kong’s public art institutions is, as in other places of the world, to spread the appreciation of art to more people. Each of these public galleries will be challenged to provide a level of service previously unknown in Hong Kong. The public will expect a more relaxed viewing experience and better self-education facilities to appreciate the displayed art. The Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong’s original and previously only public museum showing contemporary art, is currently closed for renovation. The enlarged museum will have dedicated galleries to permanently display the story of Hong Kong modern and contemporary art and increased space to accommodate travelling exhibitions. When the museum reopens, competition between new public art spaces will be much keener. The Old Bailey Galleries at Tai Kwun, the new dedicated spaces for contemporary art designed by Herzog & de Meuron within the large former Central Police Station and Victoria Prison heritage complex in Central Hong Kong, will open sometime in 2017. One of Tai Kwun’s ﬁrst exhibitions will be mainland artist Cao Fei’s large survey exhibition, currently on exhibition at MOMA’s PS1, New York. The small M+ arts pavilion in the West Kowloon Cultural District, inspired by the (albeit annual, temporary) Serpentine Gallery pavilion in London, is nearing completion and will soon begin its exhibition program despite being located near the currently noisy and dusty M+ museum construction site. Tsang Kin-wah, Hong Kong’s representative at the 2015 Venice Biennale, will be among the ﬁrst exhibitions.

A recent weekend seminar, Community Art and Heritage Preservation, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong highlighted how grassroots, community, and activist groups have tapped community talent and interest in art to develop personal, political, and social awareness. Public objections to intense property development and the construction of transport infrastructure in Hong Kong’s older urban areas and countryside has increased concern that Hong Kong’s built heritage and unique urban ambience is being destroyed as street markets, outdoor restaurants (dai pai dong), street and neon signage, traditional and long-standing shops and businesses disappear. Community art projects do raise issues, but, it is the determined action by urban planning activists that have successfully challenged, and continue to challenge, government plans for mass redevelopment projects and destruction of Hong Kong’s limited built heritage.

Likewise, plans to further develop Hong Kong’s countryside and the previously closed border areas with Shenzhen have been met with spirited protests and objections. The recent 2nd Emptyscape Art Festival in Ping Che, near Fanling, celebrated Hong Kong’s rural lifestyle and highlighted the beauty of the countryside. Amid village housing, an abandoned school, and fields of growing vegetables were art installations. On a simple stage, musicians played and the audience quietly listened. In a seemingly cleansing action, artist Ng Ka Chun led a group of children to construct figures using found material and then mounted them on poles; these were then paraded around the village. This part of the North-East New Territories might soon be developed and Ping Che village and the surrounding fields destroyed. In Hong Kong, with its fragile environment, the challenge is always how

62 Vol. 15 No. 4 to balance the needs of housing and infrastructure while conserving quiet places, preserving rural ways of life, and ensuring a sustainable future.

Hong Kong’s independent or semi-independent (including those with some government funding) art spaces and organizations include Videotage, Parasite, 100ft Park, Lumenvisum, C&G Artpartment, 1aspace, soundpocket, Asia Art Archive, Spring Workshop, and the newer Floating Projects, Neptune, Things that can happen, and Rooftop Institute. Overall, these spaces offer an eclectic art programme and indicate growing diversity in Hong Kong’s arts scene.

Architect's rendition of new Another future new space is the Mills Gallery, initiated by a former textile Old Bailey Galleries at Tai Kwun. Courtesy of Central manufacturer turned property company, which will convert its original Police Station/Tai Kwun, Hong Kong. factory into a contemporary art space in homage to Hong Kong’s once vibrant textile industries. In the Mills’ temporary space, artist Kwan Sheung Chi, a possible Hong Kong representative artist at a future Venice Bienniale, installed a simple but sinister installation. Hong Kongese (literally “Hong Konger,” a term popular during the Umbrella protests and now used by localist groups) comprises a large layout of badges, while two rooms— named Room and Hong Kong, respectively—are situated prominently in the gallery. The first room merely had a phased light-emitting pillar, security cameras, and door-opening sensors, which led to the second room. Inside this second room was a paper map of Hong Kong folded into the shape of a world globe (reviving a previous art project of Kwan’s) and sitting on a spot-lit plinth under the gaze of another security camera. Walking around this room, a viewer soon realizes that the door sensor allowing exit is not working, whether intentionally or accidentally. It is difficult not to suppress apprehension or fear of entrapment, despite knowing that it is inside the relatively safe environment of an art installation. The door will open if another person triggers the sensor in the first room. Then, on exiting the installation, a bed of Hongkongese badges, red in colour and reminiscent of

Vol. 15 No. 4 63 Kwan Sheung Chi, Hong Kongese, 2016, metal badges, dimensions variable. Photo: John Batten.

Kwan Sheung Chi, Room, 2016, installation. Photo: John Batten.

Cultural Revolution Mao badges, must be walked over. Visitors are invited to take one.

Kwan Sheung Chi’s installation appears to succinctly sum up Hong Kong, in metaphor, at this very moment. It is the unintended, organic, mutual support needed in coordinating the entry and exit of doors by visitors to exit Kwan’s installation that emerges as the most signiﬁcant aspect of the piece. It recalls the Umbrella banners in those ﬁnal days of protest and camaraderie in Admiralty: “You Can’t Kill Us All!” and “We Will Be Back.”

A version of this essay was originally published in Chinese in ARTCO Monthly no. 284 (May 2016), pp 124–27.

Notes

1. The ﬁve directors of each story in Ten Years are Ng Ka-leung, Jevons Au, Chow Kwun-wai, Wong Fei-pang, and Kwok Zune. 2. John Batten, “Then.Now,” introductory essay in South Ho’s good day good night photobook (Hong Kong: Brownie Publishing, 2015). 3. Among many possible descriptions, “cosmopolitans” is a perfect term to describe Hong Kong’s increasingly worldly young people.

64 Vol. 15 No. 4 Alice Ming Wai Jim RoCH Redux

I Monochrome negative pans of still wuxia characters cut to scenes of the martial arts heroes in billowing robes leaping weightlessly across the screen, in the midst of combat with bare fist-on-flesh and sword-clanging sounds. But this is only for a few seconds because these fantastic scenes of wire-fu, revitalized as a dominant martial arts film and television genre since the 1980s, quickly switch to Google Street Views of Chinese restaurants and takeaways clearly not in Asia. A slight nausea affects me while watching these long-shot sequences, each repeated in rapid fire, yet of different flying bodies and far-flung places and in erratic order over the course of four minutes.

s part of UK-born and -based artist susan pui san lok’s multifaceted RoCH Fans and Legends project, Trailers (2015), as its A title suggests, is a sampling of cinema trailers and title sequences from around twenty different versions of The Condor Trilogy. Originally a new school wuxia epic by Jin Yong, a.k.a. Louis Cha, the trilogy was first published as a serial from 1957 to 1963 in three different Hong Kong newspapers.1 Since then, the influential classic has spawned over forty different film and television adaptations with multiple productions and co-productions from Hong Kong and mainland China to Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore. More recently, adaptations in video games and comic books as well as innumerable re-versions, dubs, and translations by wuxia fans have further enabled the global consumption of this popular culture genre. The trilogy’s fictional narrative is set against the backdrop of a series of wars of chivalry fought in the late Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) up to the establishment of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). RoCH is the popular acronym for Return of the Condor Heroes, the title of the trilogy’s second novel about the taboo romance between a wuxia master and her younger apprentice.

Undeniably lok’s RoCH Fans and Legends is enmeshed in economic and technological considerations about how cultural products are conceptualized, marketed, and distributed in the digital era. The worldwide phenomenon of remix has come to be identiﬁed as a contentious practice of recombining or reconﬁguring pre-existing media content to fabricate a new work that “in whatever form or medium it takes place, is concerned with recordings.”2 A deeply research-based transmedia project,

Vol. 15 No. 4 65 RoCH Fans and Legends wrestles with susan pui san lok, Trailers (film stills), 2015, single-channel history as personal baggage and artistic video with sound, 4 mins. Courtesy of the artist. material in its appropriation of already recorded, available sources attached to questions of political and cultural memories and identities. Available online, Trailers, for example, doubles unapologetically as the promotional vehicle for lok’s 65 minute feature length 3-channel film, Trilogies (2015); it showcases, as trailers should, only the tantalizing moments when male and female xia (heroes) are executing gravity-defying qinggong stunts such as supernatural flying, scaling walls, or somersaulting over trees.3

The leap is paramount here: the freedom that comes with repeated lightness makes escaping the weight of history, or one’s past, thinkable. The leap occurs during any sort of transition between two different ways of life, crucially and decisively shaping and deﬁning who we will become.

Dating back to the thirteenth century and later appearing in 1920s Shanghai silent movies, wuxia’s popularity in British Hong Kong in the late fifties and sixties, and its resurgence since the 1980s has been widely attributed to the search for a Hong Kong identity beginning in the postwar years of social instability that culminated in the 1967 riots instigated by pro-communist protesters against British colonial rule, and the later anxiety around the imminent return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997. The concurrent rise of the Four Asian Tigers—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—during this period would see, in 2000, Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee’s critically acclaimed Taiwanese-Chinese-Hong Kong-American co-produced martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon become the highest-grossing foreign film in US history, boosting the product awareness of the wuxia “brand” in general.

Dean Chan has linked the continued popularity of wuxia narratives and the genre’s uptake in particular by the games industry to China’s economic rise and new forms of Chinese economic nationalism explicitly cultivating culturally-speciﬁc digital content.4 In this context, one other kind of leap needs to be taken into account—that of the resulting transnational movement and circulation of not only people but also goods, capital, technologies, services, and ideas within the region and beyond. Strategies of selective repetition and visual mashups in Trailers negotiate the diasporic leap of wuxia as it migrates across time and space, generations and place- attachments, disquiet public spaces and private spheres. Chan notes: “Wuxia

66 Vol. 15 No. 4 susan pui san lok, Trilogies, narratives delineate an imagined cultural China”; they “collectively support 2015, 3-channel video with sound, 65 mins., installation and substantiate particular fabulations about Chinese cultural identity . . . view. Photo: Bevis Bowden. 5 Courtesy of the artist. as signs of Chineseness-as-difference.”

II Genghis Khan loved his pearls. Just one pearl was worth a fortune, let alone a thousand of them. Born and raised in Mongolia, Guo Jing, his protégé, could shoot eagles out of the sky with single arrows with skills taught to him by martial arts experts of the Peach Blossom sect. He would, however, return a loyal and chivalrous hero to his own Han people defending the Song Empire against the Mongol campaigns.

In lok’s Trailers, the Google Street View panoramas culled from incessant Internet searches depict the most banal of mixed-use urban neighbourhoods, but the scenes are peculiar in that the eating establishments captured within them contain the words “empire,” “fortune,” and “peach”—words all found in popular classic names for Chinese restaurants. These visual cultural cues are what tie together the two seemingly disparate sets of intercut images; ﬁctive period heroes from antiquity leap over Chinese restaurants in contemporary London ‘burbs as easily as they do imaginary cultural China. What keeps us grounded in reality, however, is nostalgia—clamorous claims to different reconstructed versions of authentic Chineseness manifested in pirated media and fortune cookies—the latter which actually originated in Japan in the late nineteenth century.6

From context and articulation to subject matter and conditions of production, the remix aesthetics of RoCH Fans and Legends exempliﬁes the trans-local experiences of wuxia that are inextricably tied to complex notions of belonging in Asian diasporas—ﬂoating, multiple, and unstable

Vol. 15 No. 4 67 variations on a theme. The “floating life” metaphor is commonly used in susan pui san lok, Trilogies (film stills), 2015, 3-channel reference to the perilous route of the exilic, the refugee (boat people), or video with sound, 65 mins. Courtesy of the artist. the pre-handover economic emigration of flexible citizens (yacht people) in Hong Kong, such as the family portrayed in Chinese-Australian Clara Law’s 1996 film Floating Life. In the case of Trailers, the metaphor—the cultural conditioning of drifting, connecting, hovering—can also be extended to a discussion of the relationship between wuxia and what Jean Duruz calls “floating food”—the mobility of foodscapes intimately connected to memories—in her study of micro-narratives of “Asian” food consumed in a North London kitchen.7

Duruz’s analysis of what she calls “floating food” to complicate “conventional identity categories and their place-attachments”8 provides a useful premise for contextualizing the references made here to Chinese food. Both floating media, or mediated diasporic public spheres, and mobile food can be said to be embroiled in what Graham Huggan argues is the “constitutive split within the postcolonial, the entanglement of its ostensibly anti-imperial ideologies within a global economy that often manipulates them to neo-imperial ends”—without postcolonialism, which “concerns largely localized agencies of resistance,” postcoloniality, which “refers to a global condition of cross-cultural symbolic exchange,” exonerates voyeuristic consumption of the Other as exotic spectacle.9 This is the niche profitized on by a differentialist alterity industry built on the marketing and consumption of radical otherness. As Huggan notes, the discourse of the postcolonial exotic has become one of the main ways the booming alterity industry, until recently managed mostly by and for the West, processes cultural difference in a range of forms toward its commercialization.10

III It was not until 1996, with the founding of the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, that I truly came to a better understanding of what it meant to be Chinese through Hong Kong cinema, which, along with Japanese anime, were what the festival featured in its first few years, expanding only later to feature an international repertory of genre films. Those first two summers of the festival, I became a martial arts movie junkie. From rented videos to bootlegged

68 Vol. 15 No. 4 susan pui san lok, Trailers, copies and tapes circulated via friends of friends of friends, 2015, single-channel video with sound, 4 mins., and Roch it was a way to ﬁnally get in touch with my cultural heritage Fan, concertina artist book in vitrine, 10.2 x 18.7 x 841.5 as a Canadian-born Chinese, a CBC. The rest of the year, as cm. Photo: Bevis Bowden. Courtesy of the artist. a visible minority, wuxia was the visual motif and narrative trope for a version of diasporic Chineseness that had long meant a racial slur directed my way, but during the festival it—and being Chinese—was something “cool.” Later on would come the street-market VCDs, then DVD boxed sets, Bit Torrent and Netﬂix, as well as several generations of assorted playback devices.

Despite the workings of late capitalism on postcoloniality, RoCH Fans and Legends suggests the popularity of wuxia never entirely resided in the realm of transnational consumption driven by the alterity industry. Rather, its travelling has also been tethered to diasporic leaps that have trans-local dimensions, such as the circulation and spatial interconnectedness of situated mobile actors as well as the way, as Duruz writes, “‘floating’ food, as the mobility of memory and imagination for charting foodscapes of belonging and intimacy, allows new places for temporary anchorage and, perhaps, different forms of identity re-alignment.”11 The political economy of (mostly invisible and informal) networks of production and distribution of “foreign films” link different Asian diasporic communities in their shared interest to consume affordable derivatives of the same images circulated as “poor images,” to use Hito Steyerl’s term, in the privacy of their homes, accompanied, of course, by “ethnic” food, more authentic than in the home country, “available for diasporic digestion,” as Duruz puts it.12 This is not to say that the diasporic reconnections through these cultural practices are immune to what Lisa Lau defines as re-Orientalism, the perpetration of self-Orientalizing tendencies.13 They of course are not, but what is at issue here is how, to borrow from José Esteban Muñoz, there tends also to be a simultaneous pushback to dis-identify, to perform a re-circuitry;14 it just depends who is in the driver’s seat.

Vol. 15 No. 4 69 “To think difference and to think susan pui san lok, Trilogies, 2015, 3-channel video with remix differently,” David Gunkel sound, 65 mins., installation view. Photo: Bevis Bowden. notes that “mashups produce Courtesy of the artist. or deploy short circuits in the networks of popular culture by deliberately crossing two or more seemingly incompatible sources.”15 Insofar as lok’s RoCH Fans and Legends project instrumentalizes Big Data (data sets so high in velocity, volume, and variety that they require advanced information technologies to process) its simultaneous searchability and disambiguation, to address the transnational consumption of wuxia, it also unexpectedly corrals a viewership toward a localized diasporic site of everyday practices and cultural consumption. Through the use of what are essentially grounded geospatial technologies of Google Street View, Trailers is not virtual tourism but an identity journey, one that is virtually pieced together from pre-existing sources that in their movements constantly dance with the alterity industry but at the same time resist it through considered selection and repetition. The transnational consumption of wuxia hinges upon the marked ambivalence to Asian alterity and the seemingly effortless ability of its cultural adaptations to circulate in global operating networks. In RoCH Fans and Legends, the lithe bodies of its leaping protagonists do not deny the effects of the gravity of the diasporic spaces they ﬁnd themselves in; rather, they suggest innumerable, cyclical episodes of micro-narratives that more often than not short-circuit presumptions that world-making practices are so freely negotiable.

Notes

1. Beginning in the 1950s, new school wuxia (martial chivalry) literature published in Hong Kong rejuvenated the centuries-old genre through the practice of newspaper serialization. The distinction between the old school (jiupai—fiction published under the Republic of China regime from 1911 to 1949) and the new school (xinpai) conventionally denotes regional and political differences rather than artistic differences between them. Stephen Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 21–22, 86. 2. David Gunkel, Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics After Remix (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), xxvii. 3. In contrast, lok’s Trilogies samples scenes from the actual films. 4. Dean Chan, “Playing with Indexical Chineseness: The Transnational Cultural Politics of Wuxia in Digital Games,” EnterText 6, no. 1 (Autumn 2006), 182, https://www.brunel.ac.uk/__data/assets/ pdf_file/0004/185908/ET61Wux7DChanED.pdf/. 5. Ibid., 182–83. 6. Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food (New York: Twelve, 2008). 7. Jean Duruz, “Floating Food: Eating ‘Asia’ in Kitchens of the Diaspora,” Emotion, Space and Society 3, no. 11 (2006), 45–49. 8. Ibid., 48. 9. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), ix. 10. Ibid., 68. 11. Duruz, 48. 12. Ibid. 13. See Lisa Lau, “Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Orientals,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 2 (2009), 571–90. 14. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 31. 15. Gunkel, 156, 158, citing Slavoj Žižek, Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), ix. Gunkel draws from what Slavoj Žižek calls a “short circuit” even though the latter never wrote about remix.

70 Vol. 15 No. 4 Henry Tsang Wuxia Makes Me Nervous

susan pui san lok, Trailers, have been aware of wuxia since my early childhood, and I loosely 2015, single-channel video with sound, 4 mins., and Roch followed a televised series of this genre (I can’t remember which one) Fan, concertina artist book in vitrine, 10.2 x 18.7 x 841.5 when traveling in Guangdong in the mid-1990s. I am an admirer of cm. Photo: Bevis Bowden. I Courtesy of the artist. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Lee Ang’s breathtaking crossover film that introduced wuxia to Western audiences, Zhang Yimou’s heroic Hero (2002), and even Wong Kar-wai’s enigmatic and arguably post-wuxia film Ashes of Time (1994)—all part of this genre. But I did not know who Jin Yong was until I became familiar with susan pui san lok’s RoCH Fans and Legends project, and I was only marginally aware of his influence on wuxia as a transnational cultural phenomenon. The fantastical stories of swordsmanship and heroism in these films and projects stir up a sense of unease, a self-consciousness that reflects a discomfort with depictions of a classical China that I know so little about.

Wuxia exposes an anxiety about my own Chineseness. I feel vulnerable to being called out as ignorant of the history that these books, comics, television, and ﬁlms are at times loosely based upon but that nevertheless represent a culture I have a presumed yet unrequited relationship with.

Vol. 15 No. 4 71 Having been born in Hong Kong in the 1960s, I had a claim on an identity that was not yet the norm, as the majority of the population there in the 1960s had been born elsewhere. We identiﬁed as part of the dominant culture even if we were second-class citizens next to the British.

My family moved away a year after the 1967 riots and in most ways left Hong Kong behind. Canada had just opened its immigration to the larger world. This was a country where, since its founding in 1867 as a nation, the White Canada movement in British Columbia had fomented racism and inﬂuenced government policies to disenfranchise and shut out Asians. We arrived only two decades after the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which had a lineage dating back to 1885 that began with the Chinese Head Taxes designed to discourage and then eventually prohibit Chinese immigration to Canada.

The Vancouver I grew up in was dominantly WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), and the ruling class was not dissimilar to that of Hong Kong. But the most signiﬁcant difference was corporeal; I remember the rupture that my body experienced after moving to this part of the world. I felt physically different, with a visceral sense of loss. Perhaps it was the confrontation with a dominant culture that we could no longer identify with. In Vancouver we had become racialized. Our bodies were no longer normal; they had become different, Sinicized, Chinese-iﬁed. Certainly we knew we were Chinese, but in Hong Kong that was seen as “natural”—it was the “foreigners,” the gwai lo, who were not. However, like all presumptions based on ethnicity, this perception was inadequate and overly simplistic, sometimes making invisible those who were neither Chinese nor colonizers, such as the many Indians and Filipinos who also called Hong Kong home.

We were part of the ﬁrst wave susan pui san lok, Condor, 2015, chalk wall drawing. speciﬁcally of Hong Kongers Photo: Charlotte Jopling. Courtesy of the artist. migrating to Canada—previous migrants came from Taishan and Zhongshan counties years before— and now there are about 500,000 of us, mostly in Vancouver and Toronto. The second and much larger wave took place after the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration that sealed the eventual return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. Conversely, Hong Kong has the highest concentration of Canadian citizens in Asia, with approximately 300,000 Canadian citizens of all ethnicities living there.

Our new world was big, exciting, and full of strangeness. It both expanded and contracted, resulting in our stretching and molding to the new environment and unfolding culture while ﬁnding commonality, opportunity, and comfort food in the former cultural, ethnic, and economic ghetto of Chinatown, where the non-whites had historically been relegated to live and do business (with the indigenous peoples removed to reservation lands). And even though it was Chinatown where my mother worked, my father had many business dealings, and my sister and I went to daycare;

72 Vol. 15 No. 4 we weren’t an immediate ﬁt with the lo wah kiu (老華橋—older overseas Chinese). These older immigrants spoke different dialects, and there were regional and cultural differences that needed to be negotiated if you were a newcomer from Hong Kong.

Nevertheless, we managed to maintain a sense of Hong Kong culture. One of the customs that we tried to maintain was afternoon tea, a British tradition that had become a Hong Kong standard, along with Ovaltine, Horlicks, yin-yang tea (half tea, half coffee), and hot Coca-Cola (perhaps not so British). Our family would search for places that served proper tea, and, as a treat, would go to the top of the Hotel Vancouver where my parents would be served tea with milk on ornate trays and my sister and I would have hot chocolate poured steaming hot out of ﬁne silver teapots.

susan pui san lok, Condor When my parents would occasionally come across a story in the news or (detail), 2015, chalk wall drawing. Photo: Charlotte through friends about someone or some occurrence in Hong Kong, they Jopling. Courtesy of the artist. often remarked wistfully about how life might have been if they had stayed there. These moments were an embarrassment to me. I was again reminded of our difference, how we didn’t quite ﬁt and probably never could. And I knew that Hong Kong, because it continued to grow and develop while my relationship to it grew more distant with each passing year, became even more foreign than the Vancouver I was becoming increasingly shaped by. I refused to identify with those who kept up with the ﬁlm, television, and music from Hong Kong because I needed to do the same where I thought I needed to belong.

Within this environment, I refused to attend Chinese school and thereby maintained my illiteracy in Chinese, something I was strangely proud of at the time and later came to regret. My resistance was rooted less in deﬁance and more in shame. I was somewhat surprised that my parents did not press

Vol. 15 No. 4 73 74 Vol. 15 No. 4 me to attend; perhaps they sensed my unease. I lost much of my Cantonese speaking ability; what I retained came forth in a strange, placeless accent. I began to pronounce my surname incorrectly, for the sake of those who weren’t familiar with its romanization, but really for my own sake, so I wouldn’t attract more attention to myself. I didn‘t want to feel any more vulnerable than I already was.

susan pui san lok, Trilogies, 2015, 3-channel video with sound, 65 mins., installation view. Photo: Bevis Bowden. Courtesy of the artist. Opposite page: susan pui san lok, RoCH Fan, 2015, concertina artist book, 10.2 x 18.7 x 841.5 cm. Photo: Charlotte Jopling. Courtesy of the artist. Opposite bottom: susan pui san lok, RoCH Fan (detail), 2015, concertina artist book, 10.2 x 18.7 x 841.5 cm. Photo: Charlotte Jopling. Courtesy of the artist.

Like many others from Hong Kong, I found that my relationship with China was unclear and unsettled. Whenever someone conﬂated Hong Kong with China, I was adamant that the two were completely different, that my Hong Kong was the British Hong Kong—even if I wasn’t proud of it, at least it wasn’t Hong Kong, China. Since 1997, Hong Kong has maintained its separate identity as a Special Administrative Region, but, yes, it is indeed now part of China. And that is a China different from Taiwan, which also claims to be China. The political violence and instability of the 1960s caused by factions in Hong Kong supporting the two Chinas has caused many since to identify with neither, resulting in families like mine emigrating in large numbers to Anglophone countries abroad.

So when I encounter a wuxia fiction or film, an ingrained ambivalence overcomes me. I can identify with the escapism it offers, the action, the pathos of the heroes fighting for justice against the system. I can see parallels with cinematic tropes such as fantasy, historical period pieces, Western cowboy films, and martial arts gung fu flicks. I can appreciate the subtexts of the struggle of Hong Kong and China’s colonial and anti- colonial past. But what makes wuxia popular to the overseas Chinese causes me to cringe. The nostalgic representation of an idealized Chinese past, however ensconced in unjust power relations, reflects an homogeneity of Chinese tradition and history that belies my experiences and beliefs. What exacerbates this condition is the nag of inauthenticity that I am not Chinese enough to understand or appreciate the specificities referred to in these melodramas. I am caught in the liminal space of knowing some but not enough, the discomfiting state of having just enough familiarity that the stories and references cannot be consumed or desired as purely exotic, and perhaps worst of all, conjures up the challenge to be more Chinese than I am willing to be. How is it that wuxia can summon such anxiety?

Vol. 15 No. 4 75 Claudia Bohn-Spector New and Greater Prospects Beyond the Frame: New Media Arts from Taiwan

“ f I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week,” the IEnglish naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin wrote in his 1887 autobiography, belatedly realizing the signiﬁcant role artistic imagination plays in the formation of a superior human brain.1 Perhaps he should have liked to paint, to draw, or to take pictures, circumnavigating the globe not only as a scientist, but as an artist as well. Best known for his path-breaking contributions to evolutionary theory, Darwin irrefutably established, in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, that all living things descend from a common ancestor and that their continued existence depends on natural selection, a process ensuring the survival of those most resourceful and adaptable to change. A similar argument could be made for the endurance of humans (and artists) in our hyper-linked contemporary world, where innovative technologies and ever-changing communication patterns favour individuals with nimble minds, capable of thinking outside the box and creatively translating the challenges of our global information age into provocative works of art.

Beyond the Frame: New Media Arts from Taiwan, an exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art (March 11 to June 19, 2016), offers an interesting take on this age-old evolutionary truism. It blends novel, interactive technologies with traditional and experimental forms of expression, pointing the way to an art of the future. Showcasing robotics, virtual reality, video, and computer-guided interactive media, this small but intriguing show opens windows not only into our era’s digital preoccupations, but into its physical and metaphysical underpinnings as well, deftly juxtaposing Eastern and Western thought and culture.

The show appropriately opens with Origin, a digital video animation created between 1999 and 2003 by New York-based Taiwanese artist Daniel Lee. It’s a Darwinian meditation on human development, at once alluring and disturbing in its tracing of humanity from ﬁsh to reptile and primate to an image of the artist himself. On a small screen, accompanied by low, primordial sounds, a water-borne animal seamlessly morphs into human form, making eye contact with the viewer as it shape-shifts. Its hybrid body, represented in shades of grey against a matching background, is as cool and smooth as a porcelain sculpture, recalling the art of grisaille in western European painting. The two-and-a-half minute display is executed to perfection in slow animation, reminding us of humanity’s reptilian roots

76 Vol. 15 No. 4 Daniel Lee, Origin, 1999–2003, and of the ancient Western art of physiognomy, long discredited as pseudo- digital video animation, 2 mins., 30 secs. Courtesy of the scientific, in its disconcerting mix of animal and human features. artist and Long Beach Museum of Art. The work sets the stage for the exploration of the creative intersections between nature, art, and technology that follows. Just steps beyond Origin, in a separate, darkened gallery, a giant tapestry of white and crimson peonies awaits the viewer, with digital butterflies flitting merrily across deep-green leaves and out of the picture frame. Spirit of Flower-Brilliant Colors, created by Lin Juin-Ting in 2009, is a wall-sized interactive video installation that uncannily senses viewers’ presence in the gallery. As viewers enter, inviting peonies gently blossom, closing again as viewers leave. The more visitors there are in the room, the more flowers will open, exuding both an ethereal beauty and a mildly Orwellian air of surveillance. The floral scenery itself moves almost imperceptibly to the left, unfolding its imagery like a precious Chinese scroll. Native to central and eastern Asia, the common garden peony is among the longest-used flowers in Eastern culture and one of the national emblems of China. Here, the peony recalls both traditional Chinese literati painting and sixteenth-century Dutch still life painting in its ability to stir reflection on the mutability and transience of life.

Wu Chi-Tsung’s Wire II of 2003 also delves into the traditions of Chinese art, albeit in an entirely different fashion. A tall projector in the middle of the gallery is mounted with a slowly turning metal wheel and wire mesh, through which a beam of light is cast onto the opposite wall. The resulting circular image, subtly shifting as the wheel turns, is reminiscent of the picture produced by a camera obscura, a blurred reﬂection of an undulating landscape beyond. Watching the monochrome picture as it slowly transforms induces a meditative trance, a poetic comment perhaps on the passage of time, natural change, and the variability of human perception.

Vol. 15 No. 4 77 This idea of human presence and its relationship to modern technology Top: Lin Juin-Ting, Spirit of Flower–Brilliant Colors, 2009, reverberates throughout the exhibition. The most interactive works in the interactive installation. Photo: Brandon Sigeta. Courtesy show are Yao Chung-Han’s DzDz, from 2015, a computerized installation of the artist and Long Beach Museum of Art. using fluorescent lamps and speakers, and Tseng Wei-Hao’s 2013 Maze Bottom: Wu Chi-Tsung, Wire works, made from carbon ink on wood and amplifiers. Both artists invite II, 2003, installation. Photo: Wu Chi-Tsang. Courtesy of the the viewer to physically engage with their works, touching or stepping into artist and Long Beach Museum of Art. them to produce electronic sound. DzDz resembles a darkened stage with an array of bright light beams thrown onto a black platform from above. Loud and pulsing sounds result and lights flicker as viewers move through the work, like dancers in a discotheque. If musically inclined, one could “play” the light beams like the strings of an instrument. Tseng Wei-Hao’s black and

78 Vol. 15 No. 4 Left: Yao Chung-Han, DzDz, 2015, sound and light installation. Photo: Brandon Shigeta. Courtesy of the artist and Long Beach Museum of Art. Right: Yao Chung-Han, DzDz, 2015, sound and light installation. Photo: Josiane Lai. Courtesy of the artist and Long Beach Museum of Art.

Tseng Wie-Hao, Maze—Black, 2013, sound installation. Photo: Josiane Lai. Courtesy of the artist and Long Beach Museum of Art.

white Maze panels are equally performative, asking viewers to press their hands against the wooden panels to elicit sharp electronic peeps and squeals. Their ﬁngerprints become an indelible part of the work, traces of viewer participation and forensic evidence of a brief contact enjoyed. Both artists’ works poignantly evoke the physical world, engaging space, sound, and touch to remind us of the body in a digital age of vast technological ﬂux.

A species of an altogether different kind occupies the last gallery of the show, Shyu Ruey-Shiann’s Eight Drunken Immortals, from 2012. Inspired by a form of martial arts known as zui quan, or drunken gung fu, it consists of eight sets of trolley wheels moving around on a white ground. Black and green ink is dispensed as the wheels turn, leaving circular traces of wet pigment in random fashion. Hitting, dodging, swaying, falling, ground and aerial ﬁghting, and other combat styles are all fair game in zui quan, which is based on the erratic movements of people under the inﬂuence of alcohol.

Vol. 15 No. 4 79 Shyu Ruey-Shiann, Eight Drunken Immortals, 2012, installation. Photo: Brandon Shigeta. Courtesy of the artist and Long Beach Museum of Art.

Shyu Ruey-Shiann, Eight Drunken Immortals (detail), 2012, installation. Photo: Josiane Lai. Courtesy of the artist and Long Beach Museum of Art.

Here, robotic “ﬁghters” splatter ink in a mutated form of action painting, resembling, if not mirroring the technique and meaning of ancient Chinese ink drawings and calligraphy. The practice of depicting humans as immortals is traditional in Chinese art, referring to the mythological story of the Eight Immortals, an octet of warriors emblematic of wealth, longevity, and the ﬁght against evil.

The inevitability of change seems to be the overarching theme of the show—from the natural to the man-made, from the old to the new, from primitive mark-making to sophisticated computer-generated imagery as a tool for artists. Despite the high-end machinery employed in this exhibition, the biological world and its generative forces retain an enduring, if threatened, presence. The clash between nature, art, and science is just one aspect of this engaging multimedia exhibition, distilling reality into compelling narratives and creative experiences at once simple and complex.

Notes

1. Charles Darwin, 1887, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwing—Day 28 of 188, http://www. turtlereader.com/authors/charles-darwin/the-life-and-letters-of-charles-darwin-day-28-of-188/.

80 Vol. 15 No. 4 Brian Karl In and Out of the Dark with Extreme Duration: Documenting China One Person at a Time in the Films of Wang Bing

Wang Bing, Crude Oil (film n the modern era, we have become accustomed to sitting in the dark still), 2008, 840 mins. Courtesy of the artist. for hours at a time to watch moving images flicker and glow in the Idedicated public spaces of cinemas. What are we doing in those obscure places? While we focus on flashes of illumination emanating from a series of pictures somebody else has chosen for us, how much in parallel or how divergently do we experience such impressions?

Our interpretations are prompted by glimpses of others’ lives on the screen, fragments put in some kind of arbitrary order to propose different logics or make some new kind of sense. They carry triggers of sympathy or empathy—or revulsion—emotional intelligences that pass through lenses and ﬁlters with at times very few words, or with an unusual abundance of them; and the mundane details that become more poignant because they are so deliberately focused upon, framed, fetishized. We make something composite out of the faces and bodily postures and gestures we see—the thoughts we’ll never quite know but catch ﬂeeting intimations of, and perspectives we witness from over a shoulder, but will never live. And when

Vol. 15 No. 4 81 Wang Bing, Crude Oil (ﬁlm still), 2008, 840 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

Wang Bing, Crude Oil (ﬁlm still), 2008, 840 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

these moving images are projected for us over extended durations, almost as a challenge—not just one or two hours but four at a stretch, say, or eight, ten, twelve, or more—what are the goals and what is the impact both for casual and for more intentional viewers?

Starting in the late 1990s, Chinese documentarian Wang Bing set himself apart from mainstream moviemaking in China by recording and representing people who exist at society’s margins. His early efforts prepared him for later work in which he directed viewers toward mediated encounters with a new set of simultaneously intense yet quotidian realities on a larger scale, realizing elaborately distended projects such as what was to be a seventy-hour long ﬁlm in 2008, Crude Oil (Caiyou riji), which ended up running a mere fourteen hours due to the director’s illness. Crude Oil nonetheless manages to convey deep draughts of tedium and ennui through extended exposure to the daily lives of workers at an industrial site in China’s Gobi Desert, a sort of virtual reality without the fantasy or vertigo.

In all his realized projects, unusually direct and sustained views of strangers are offered—oddly intimate, up closer and more sustained than most

82 Vol. 15 No. 4 audiences are accustomed to. Prompts to viewers’ sense of “there but for fortune or fate might go I” inform such observations of the difﬁcult circumstances of others, from the near-distance of theatre seats—a gap in real, lived experience that Wang Bing tries to lessen himself during his productions by trailing and dwelling for lengthy periods alongside those he documents, before channeling those documents into distillations for his ﬁlms’ viewers. For all the impression they give of something we normally wouldn’t or maybe shouldn’t be seeing, his projects attempt to sidestep the sensation of voyeurism by making patent that the subjects of these portrayals have allowed and even welcomed his presence and his recording devices in their midst.1

In recent years, the outcomes of Wang Bing’s projects have been screened in milieus outside the cinema—such as art galleries in Paris and San Francisco, where, in early 2016, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts staged a mini-survey of his work, Wang Bing: Three Portraits (February 23–April 9, 2016). Despite the small number of projects represented and the intimacy maintained with its subjects, the range and durations of the works in this show nevertheless offered a monumentality of scope.2

Wang Bing: Three Portraits, installation view at CCA Wattis Institute, 2016, with Fengmin: A Chinese Memoir, 2007 (ﬁlm still), 227 mins. Photo: Johnna Arnold. Courtesy of the artist, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

Wang Bing, Man with No The semi-cavernous Wattis gallery Name (film still), 2009, 94 mins. Courtesy of the artist. was partitioned to delineate separate viewing rooms for the 227 minute- long Fengmin: A Chinese Memoir (He Fengming) (2007) and Man with No Name (Wumingzhe) (2009, 94 minutes), two “smaller” films, each portraying just a single character. Both rooms were outfitted with three large leather upholstered lounge chairs, encouraging longer stays for visitors to these screening cubicles and the greater possibility of their forging stronger bonds with the projected images. Those bonds form, in the first case, through one woman’s direct address of a harrowing personal narrative from the Cultural Revolution, and, in the second, with an anonymous individual who unselfconsciously both putters and strives beyond the edges of civilization to glean from depleted fields of corn and piles of refuse enough sustenance to eke out an

Vol. 15 No. 4 83 existence on his own, retreating for rest and recuperation through a small opening in a dirt mound to a burrow home that is half cave, half hole in the ground, followed there by the camera, and, thus, by viewers.

The cozy darkened rooms at the Wattis where these two lone figures’ stories play out—one in a non-stop flow of words, the other mutely—flanked a more expansive space featuring a larger-scale projection of Crude Oil facing a few short rows of more conventional theatre chairs set on low risers. This functional yet heightened stage-set-like installation foregrounded the audience’s role as one component in the chain of mediations completing the cycle of Wang Bing’s field-based “research” that led to his image-production of humans and then ultimately to the reception by others of those images. In essence, the act of viewing itself was put on display in this show, while framed as yet another intimate, interpersonal act.

This highlighting of a sort of complicity on the part of those who receive Wang Bing: Three Portraits, installation view at CCA the images signals the shift in presentation mode from the film festival Wattis Institute, 2016, with Crude Oil (film still), 2008, 840 circuit that has been the foundational basis for prior distribution of most mins. Photo: Johnna Arnold. Courtesy of the artist and CCA of Wang Bing’s oeuvre, a shift that also elevates the films themselves to a Wattis Institute, San Francisco. different status as cultural products—as art rather than simply artistic films. And, as art, they are of more than passing interest, with a well-defined set of articulations that cohere into a developing, overarching sensibility, if without significant distinction or innovation in the conceptual realm.

As film, and specifically as film that depicts marginalizing and at times traumatizing aspects of modern life in China, the accumulated enterprise of these, and the remainder of the director’s output, is simultaneously a demonstration of what China “is” and how it can be represented. Among

84 Vol. 15 No. 4 extremes in Wang Bing’s filmic representation is first and foremost the perseverance of his subjects in what are almost without exception abject circumstances, a condition of endurance that is matched by the filmmaker’s own most prominent formal technique: the frequently lengthy running time of the films, along with, to a lesser degree, his own dwelling in those same milieus with his subjects during the preparation for and production of the films themselves.

Left: Wang Bing, Fengmin: A Chinese Memoir, 2007 (ﬁlm still), 227 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. Right: Wang Bing, Fengmin: A Chinese Memoir, 2007 (ﬁlm still), 227 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.

Additional extremes embodied in these works typically include a lack of verbal exchange between Wang Bing and those subjects, and the resulting experience offered to audiences through these ﬁlmed images of others who thus remain more unfathomable—as in the case of the titular ﬁgure in Man with No Name, who does not utter a single word during the entirety of the presented footage, in which he closely watched by the camera and its operator.

There are other formal attributes defaulted to by the director—an observational cinema with strictly synchronized sound and no added voiceover or musical soundtrack, either letting the subjects speak for themselves through words (the epic autobiographical recounting of Fengmin: A Chinese Memoir) or simple actions (again, Man with No Name, but also Crude Oil at the Wattis, as well as most of Wang Bing’s other ﬁlms not in this exhibition). In his movies, generally, there is very little direct acknowledgement of the camera by their human subjects, even while it remains mostly in close quarters with them.

These “middle” period ﬁlms of Wang Bing that were shown by Wattis are stark, putting forward absent or degraded human relationships to an extreme—faltering versions of which are shown more directly in his later ﬁlms such as Three Sisters (San Jimei) (2012) and Father and Sons (2014).

Subdividing the longer trajectory of each film in slow, methodical fashion, individual scenes, each also long in duration, depict the slow passing of time through mundane activities signaling a necessary patience on the part of subject, filmmaker, and viewer alike. The filmmaker’s productions make use of available lighting only, which is particularly striking in a number of low- light interiors (or, as in other instances when a subject turns on a lamp or lights a fire), relying also on small cameras, often hand-held or set levelly to record simple static shots.

Vol. 15 No. 4 85 While his films may seem random in method, there are aspects that show Wang Bing: Three Portraits, installation view at CCA Wattis signs of choice and deliberation on the part of the otherwise demure Institute, 2016, with Fengmin: A Chinese Memoir, 2007 (film filmmaker. For example, he appears to intentionally remain a certain still), 227 mins. Photo: Johnna Arnold. Courtesy of the artist, distance back when following subjects who are outdoors, as in the subjects’s CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, and Galerie Chantal walking to her apartment complex at the outset of Fengmin, which injects Crousel, Paris. the outside’s greyer, hard cast into the cozier, cluttered interior of the woman’s living room (which predominates as the setting for the remainder of the film), or many walkabout moments in the harsh settings of Wang Bing’s other films such as Three Sisters.

These are not just portraits of Wang Bing, Man with No Name (ﬁlm still), 2009, 94 individuals or individuals beset mins. Courtesy of the artist. by society, but of individuals locked in relationships that are physical within relentless and stark natural landscapes or human-built environments, and most of all about survival. The settings are themselves complex and challenging characters that his human subjects engage with constantly—whether seemingly settled into, as in the case of the living room of the eponymous subject in Fengmin, or uneasily, precariously, but persistently committed to, as in Crude Oil, or the roving through the ﬁelds by the foraging man in Man with No Name, while he being closely accompanied by Wang Bing’s camera.

These rareﬁed intimacies that Wang Bing is able to forge with others are not without precedent in documentary ﬁlm. The close attention to detail and the willingness to remain focused almost uncomfortably at times on unfolding scenes among often abject characters is akin to the unwavering gaze that Frederick Wiseman has been casting on individuals and social

86 Vol. 15 No. 4 settings for decades in ﬁlm after ﬁlm, from the mental incarcerations of Titticut Follies (1967) to the mundane negotiations about life and death situations in Welfare (1975) and the existential aspects of cultural production in La Danse (1995).

There is a whole history of cinema verité and direct cinema in the West, of course, which has attempted to unflinchingly or transparently as possible show the truths of its human subjects in situ, or to be more or less open about those signs of the filmmakers’ presence and/or choices in filming, editing, and so forth. From the 1950s on, the likes of Jean Rouch, Maya Deren, Ricky Leacock, and D. A. Pennebaker all inserted themselves and their cameras intently into both quotidian and highly charged circumstances and shared the results via glimpses they provided of striking people and places. More recently, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, J. P. Sniadecki, and others associated with Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab have also roamed unusual landscapes (Castaing-Taylor’s Sweetgrass [with Ilisa Barbash, 2010] and Sniadecki’s People’s Park [with Libbie Dina Cohn, 2012]) and even seascapes (Cataing-Taylor’s Leviathan [with Verena Paravel, 2013]), while attempting a more immediate representation of a variety of human conditions.

Since his public debut in 2003 with the ten-hour-long documentary Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (in three parts: “Rust,” “Remnants,” and “Rails”), Wang Bing has gone on to produce a series of distinctive, deliberate portraits that have been projected onto screens more and more far-flung worldwide. The availability of previous Chinese documentary films for foreign viewing and consciousness has been relatively sparse, in part because production of Chinese documentaries was relatively rare, with a much less well-developed support industry and educational context in China than for feature fiction films there. Among those others who have produced multiple documentaries in China, Huang Wenhai (Crust, 2010; Reconstructing Faith, 2010) is perhaps closest in style (and sometimes in theme) to Wang Bing, though Huang Wenhai is primarily concerned with more urban contexts and less dedicated to establishing the idiosyncratic ambience of particular settings or intense connections with the depicted subjects than in Wang Bing’s works. Jia Zhangke, meanwhile, among the more realist-leaning so-called Sixth Generation filmmakers, has produced several documentaries as well, but with an output much more concentrated to date in feature fiction films.

Other predecessors in the documentary realm in its widest sense include Wu Wenguang, who, besides his The Memory Project about the Great Famine, produced a series of straightforward documentaries in the 1990s and early 2000s, including Bumming in Beijing (1990), which concentrates on young cultural workers and is, if not exactly mass-scale in its reach, nonetheless much more at the geographical centre of things in China. Li Hong’s Out of Phoenix Bridge (1997) followed the lives of four young maids in Beijing over the course of two years. These, however, again lack the rareﬁed atmospherics and heightened aesthetic sensibility that Wang Bing has brought to his subjects, and, while also marking the struggles of recent

Vol. 15 No. 4 87 generations of Chinese individuals, they tend to focus on more generic Wang Bing, Man with No Name (ﬁlm still), 2009, 94 types of individuals in more typical urban contexts. mins. Courtesy of the artist.

Such quick comparisons in style suggest that Wang Bing does indeed have a handle not only on media technology or even something that might casually be described as “aesthetic,” but on the kind of human relationships that might result from a sustained effort at deploying such technologies as a mediating portal between individual humans.

For Wang Bing, the absence of meaningful precedent and infrastructure for producing highly personalized artistic documentaries in China meant his own process and the results of his work grew out of both constricting and liberating circumstances, and required an extraordinary diligence of consideration and labour on his part in order to realize the productions. Those circumstances were constricting in terms of the logistical realities— that is, no mentoring or formalized technical education, limited means of production, uncertain methodologies for identifying and getting to know his subjects, and challenging logistics for following through on them all. But those circumstances were also liberating too, in terms of his being able to develop a form and style without the burden of historical conventions and anxiety of inﬂuence, whether knowingly or unknowingly in emulation or reaction.

The necessity or value in labour is a human effort that Wang Bing and his subjects hold in common. The close-up portraits as well as the following

88 Vol. 15 No. 4 Wang Bing, Man with No small groups of individuals Name (ﬁlm still), 2009, 94 mins. Courtesy of the artist. all point to the irony of the alienating and punishing effects of social systems and how those systems fundamentally and continuingly affect individual lives. Ideology is the wrenching drive that impels whether they believe or not—the Cultural Revolution, intensive industrial activity, and modernity in China more generally—and thus Wang Bing’s projects can be read as tracking the extreme impacts that ideology has on human lives. The political import of this is apparent, implicitly or explicitly criticizing systems of society’s organization.

Wang Bing’s work focuses not simply on the details, as the Wattis exhibition statement suggests, but on the pragmatics of human survival.3 Something of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy is embodied in these figures, their stories, and their movements: “I can’t go on; I must go on.” Wang Bing’s own experience in taking up documentary filmmaking was similarly pragmatic because he did not qualify or was not accepted for other vocational training in architecture or feature filmmaking. Pragmatics are also manifest in his small-scale, unscripted productions, which maneuver beneath the radar of governmental intersection and censorship.

My allusion to Beckett here prompts the question of how the ﬁlms of Wang Bing read to those outside the place and people he portrays. Is some of the main appeal due to the exceptional portal these ﬁlms provide into the lives of ordinary people in an exceptional place, something typically little seen by foreigners? How much are we voyeurs, then, in enjoying these glimpses, as readily willing to serve as these human subjects of Wang Bing’s attention (and ours) may seem?

Are these individuals, semi-orphaned by Chinese society, substantially different from Western instances of homeless foragers represented on film (one might recall François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows [1959], Martin Bell’s Streetwise [1984], or Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I [2000]), incarcerated persons (any of hundreds of films could be invoked here), or groups of anonymous lives wasted working and waiting (I think of Bob Rafaelson’s Five Easy Pieces [1970])? If there is likely often something revelatory for both foreigners and Chinese natives in Wang Bing’s films, there is perhaps still a whiff of exotica for the foreigners, at least, and the bracingly humane empathy of his direct gaze is channeled to other Chinese viewers, who might rarely have been afforded the luxury of representation of such cruel realities. Perhaps tellingly, the title character in Fengmin speaks of the pushback she received from her familiars about her insistence on exposing the truths of her own experience.

Vol. 15 No. 4 89 Wang Bing speaks of his approach to documentary filmmaking as differing from the conventional approach to feature films in that he employs no pre-determined storyboard but pursues instead an “adventure into the unknown,” in words that sound as if they could have been uttered by Rouch. Both auteurs mythologize the non-predetermined nature of their films.4 At the same time, Wang Bing has referred to himself as a traditional filmmaker while stating that there is no difference between people generally in China and Europeans, suggesting a denial of attraction to the exotic.

Perhaps one striking basis for appreciation of Wang Bing’s work is the views it provides across class as well as cultural differences and their accompanying assumptions about, for instance, family relations (for example, the children, seemingly abandoned in Wang Bing’s Three Sisters or his Father and Sons [2014], an outgrowth of his attempt at making The Ditch, a feature ﬁlm of his own). As obscure and marginal as his subjects are, there is a sensation of bringing something into the light that might remain otherwise dim or invisible, and, conversely, something like entering the dark and adjusting to perceptions of an extraordinary world of sensation in more obscurely lit interiors, which tend ordinarily to be hidden from the rest of the world’s view but are nonetheless worthy of being seen.

Notes

1. This is true except perhaps for some of the children Wang Bing pursues, given that those who are arguably too young to decide for themselves what they are willing to do and make uncertain movements at times, facing back toward the camera a little longer than most of those others who go about their business/labours. 2. Wang Bing: Three Portraits, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, February 23–April 9, 2016. Brochure in conjunction with exhibition, text available at http://www.wattis.org/ MEDIA/00777pdf/. 3. Wang Bing: Three Portraits. 4. Mentha Project, “The True Nature of Story—A Conversation with Wang Bing,” https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=X_EenguA7Og/.

90 Vol. 15 No. 4 Lu Huanzhi Buried Alive: Preface

INTRODUCTION

uried Alive is a text-based artwork by Lu Huanzhi. He has completed the Preface and Chapter One, and the text is B currently being further drafted for publication through a series of exhibitions and events. Buried Alive was presented for the ﬁrst time at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (February 20–April 30, 2016) within the framework of the exhibition Habits and customs of ______are so different from ours so that we visit them with the same sentiment that we visit exhibitions, which I curated. This exhibition featured works by 3-ply, Irena Haiduk, Ho Tzu Nyen, Siniša Ilić, Li Liao, and Lu Huanzhi. The ﬁrst installment of Buried Alive, a work in progress, was published by the Kadist Art Foundation and 3-ply. Yishu will publish Buried Alive in two installments, the Preface in this issue, and Chapter One in the following issue.

Through his book Buried Alive, Lu Huanzhi resists the visual within contemporary art, and creates contemporary art that is, as he describes it, anti-contemporary. He deﬁnes himself as an amateur as he believes that only through so-called informal writing can an individual resist capital and state control, allowing the truth to be revealed to that individual. This model of practice, as well as the structure of the book, references the tradition of the Chinese literati, who would hold ofﬁcial positions within the state, but often spent their leisure time thinking and writing, and would self-publish after retirement. Buried Alive opens up a discussion about the position of the artist within the social context of China, as well as mapping a complex critique of current Chinese society, which pursues pure capitalism without utopia. Buried Alive was translated into English by Elaine Chenyun Wu.

Biljana Ciric

Vol. 15 No. 4 91 Preface November 12, the 12th year of the new century. Afternoon. Heavy rain. Rain tapped on the somewhat grayish window panes. A middle-aged man with a top hat and dressed in dark gray raincoat dashed into my firm, which was located on the fifteenth floor of a building on Jiangsu Road. He presented himself as an artist and told me his name was Qian Liuxiang. I looked at him, feeling as if I had encountered some virtual reality: a KGB agent, out of some old movie from the remote past that had fallen into oblivion, had suddenly landed in the present, right in front of me, and he looked exceptionally vivid and real as if he had been re-digitized.

I understood that usually under such a scenario something was about to happen. I waited, silently. As expected, he leisurely took off his top hat and his raincoat and put it on a hanger, smiling and walking towards me, quite slowly. He sat down in front of me and gave me a resume. It seemed that he was here to apply for a job.

I took a glance at the resume: “I wonder . . . “

“You are not fast enough, Mr. Lu.”

He took out from his pocket a black and white butterﬂy and put it on my desk. I stared at the butterﬂy, wondering. My heartbeat quickened. It looked so real. It took a closer look to realize that it was a beautifully crafted reproduction. It was made of composite materials and was of good quality. In its front part, rear part, and lower abdomen there were several pinhole cameras of sophisticated design. It was a mini-drone.

“Are you spying on me?”

“I heard your conversation with Fu Zhou and knew you would do some investigation for him. I was a bit curious. So I decided to pay you a visit.”

92 Vol. 15 No. 4 I had guessed correctly, which made me more uneasy. It was extremely bizarre:

Fu Zhou had asked me to do some investigation, but now it seemed the answer had come to me even before I had started my investigation. I couldn’t help feeling that I was trapped in some kind of virtual reality and there was no way to get out of it.

“So you are spying on Mr. Fu Zhou?”

Qian Liuxiang’s smile disappeared. He nodded: “Yes, I’m spying on Fu Zhou. Mr. Lu, you don’t need to carry out any investigation. I’ve been spying on Fu Zhou for ten years.”

I was astonished: “Ten Years? How is that possible?”

“To be precise, it’s a bit more than ten years, Mr. Lu. In total it’s been 3,785 days.”

“Why do you do that? Do you work for the government?”

“No. I work only for myself.” He looked around, taking a good look at my humble ﬁrm.

I was a bit indignant. “This is outrageous! It’s a crime! Are you aware of that?”

Qian Liuxiang turned around, wearing the expression indicating that he pitied me deeply: “I understand your feelings, Mr. Lu. Take it easy. Listen to me. Fu Zhou is merely one of the nineteen. I spy on nineteen people in total. I have been spying on them for ten years.”

Wow. I was stunned, speechless.

“I’m working on an artwork,” I heard Qian Liuxiang explaining in a detached and objective tone.

“An artwork?”

“A contemporary artwork entitled Buried Alive.”

“Contemporary artwork? I don’t quite get it.”

“I know, Mr. Lu. Many people don’t get it. So I’m almost ready to give it up.”

I looked carefully at his no-longer-young face. All of a sudden, I detected danger. “Excuse me. What did you mean by giving it up?”

“Mr. Lu, I have just ﬁnished reading your book Collected Works on Violence. The book was a typical example of the School of Written Words. It was

Vol. 15 No. 4 93 beautifully written and very interesting. Hence I want to give you a chance to give Fu Zhou a heads up, telling him that I will. . . . “ He threw a quick glance at his watch and continued: “ . . . post online all the video clips collected during the ten years that I’ve been spying on him in about eight hours, which would be 12 o’clock in the evening. That is to say, from tomorrow on people all over the world could have access to watching his life in the past ten years, day by day, just like watching a movie. Every little bit of his privacy will be exposed to broad daylight.”

OMG. I gasped and my mind went blank.

It took me two seconds to manage to form a response: “You should deﬁnitely not do that! Deﬁnitely not! By no means should you release those video clips!”

“I come here to give you notice, Mr. Lu, not to negotiate. I’ve already made up my mind.”

He was right about that. I quickly calmed myself down. I knew I could not stop him. However, as a friend of Fu Zhou, I couldn’t just do nothing under such critical circumstances. I must do all I could to prevent Fu Zhou from being hurt. I put on a ﬂattering smile, trying to persuade him out of the idea. “Mr. Qian, are you really aware of the consequences? You would end up in prison for the rest of your life. If there’re some irreconcilable conﬂicts between you and Mr. Fu, I promise I would…”

Qian Liuxiang interrupted: “It’s not just about him, Mr. Lu.” His eyes shone with determination. “I will also release the videos of the other eighteen people. There will be no exception.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Yes, I am.”

He stood up, walking towards the door. He picked up his raincoat from the hanger, putting it on in a taking-your-time manner and buttoning it up. Then he put on his top hat, looking like a KGB agent again. He waved goodbye to me, opened the door, and walked out, disappearing from my sight.

The highly deceptive butterﬂy was still on my desk. It had not changed its form, as if its disguise was still valid and I were unaware that it was actually a mini-drone.

The above-mentioned recollections are based on my memory. Parts of them, like the conversation between Qian Liuxiang and me, were written down word-by-word from the video clip recorded by the surveillance camera in the ﬁrm. That was the ﬁrst meeting between Qian Liuxiang and me. It was very brief. Even now that I look back, I still feel it was unreal, like some expired virtual reality.

94 Vol. 15 No. 4 Fu Zhou is a Professor at Huaxia University and Dean of the Department of Politics. I got to know him during the process of writing Collected Works on Violence. In the videos of Buried Alive presented by Qian Liuxiang, every detail of our communication was recorded (details to be seen in Chapter 3). We don’t meet frequently—probably just once or twice a year. On the afternoon of November 10, the 12th year of the new century, two days prior to Qian Liuxiang’s presenting himself at my ﬁrm, Fu Zhou gave me a call quite unexpectedly. He said he wanted to see me, the sooner the better, and we should meet at his famously huge study. It was almost dusk by the time I drove there. With the sunset reﬂected in the lake, the overall scenery was imbued with a sense of autumn.

The ﬁrst thing Fu Zhou said to me was: “I am under surveillance.”

“By the government?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. I’m not that important. It’s not worth it.”

He skipped the polite greeting part and plunged right into the topic. He drove to the university today. And on the campus, he saw a butterfly in black and white flying around him in about a dozens of meters, twice. He was curious and found it strange. A female student in his class who was fond of all kinds of gossip reminded him that there was a kind of mini-drone often used by paparazzi. In order not to alert the celebrities that they were stalked, the drones were usually made in the form of butterflies, birds, or dragonflies. He felt nervous upon hearing this and immediately thought he was being followed.1

I am an insurance investigator. Before Collected Works on Violence was published I had been living a life as an investigator and worked for several insurance companies. Afterwards, I resigned and spent some years travelling around in the country. Later I realized it was a mistake and decided to come back to Shanghai and return to my former career. I set up a small investigation ﬁrm specializing in the investigation of insurance compensation.

Fu Zhou chose me because of my professional background. He was eager to see me because he wanted me to ﬁnd out who was spying on him. He told me he was sure that the person spying on him was someone he knew and it was purely a personal matter with no political power involved. And that’s why he dared not hire private detectives, as he was afraid they wouldn’t keep their mouths shut and hence would stain his reputation.2

Later Qian Liuxiang also confessed that it was his greed that got him into trouble. He had intended to record everything but in the end the timing for action had to be moved up. If not for that small but fatal mistake, the surveillance on Fu Zhou and the other eighteen people would have lasted at least another ﬁve months. According to his original plan, he was supposed to release the videos of Buried Alive in the spring of the 13th year of the

Vol. 15 No. 4 95 new century.3 When the phone was hung up (when Qian Liuxiang was on phone with me, he would suddenly hang up the phone for safety’s sake), I hadn’t managed to ask him whether the timing meant something special for him.4 Probably it was just a random choice. Maybe it was because he liked the warm and enchanting spring or just because he was a pervert. All in all, according to his original plan, there would be no encounter between Qian Liuxiang and me even though I was, unfortunately, recorded in Buried Alive thanks to Fu Zhou.

Nevertheless, the one small mistake Qian Liuxiang made during the time- consuming and tedious surveillance task, the timidity and prudence that Fu Zhou was born with, and the fact that I randomly chose such a career to make a living with at the age of twenty were intriguingly interwoven, leading to an interesting turn of fate. I was not only deeply involved, but my hysterical passions were also inspired. And after expending so much effort and using so many resources, my long-lasting passion led me to experience far more dangers than getting Collected Works on Violence published. In spite of all the difﬁculties, I wrote this book, a book featuring Qian Liuxiang and titled with the same name as his notorious Buried Alive.

No matter how wild my imagination went, I couldn’t have imagined that the craziest loss of control in my personal history would have a lingering impact that lasted twenty years and deprived me of any possibility for turning back. If we traced it to the source, it all began in the afternoon of November 12, the 12th year of the new century, when Qian Liuxiang stepped out of my ﬁrm. Now that twenty years have passed, I still remember how I drove in the heavy rain to Yangcheng Lake to look for Fu Zhou. I can still feel the sense of desperation and helplessness that overwhelmed me at that time. The following is what I experienced.5

There was a heavy traffic jam all along the way. Despite the rain and fog, I could still see the spying mini-aircraft floating in the air, like a bird overhead looking at people on the streets. Since the new millennium, Shanghai has already become a city with no privacy. Hundreds of spying mini-aircrafts fly up in the air, day and night, and millions of surveillance cameras are scattered around the city. Surveillance is everywhere.

My forehead was sweating heavily as I dialed Fu Zhou’s number. But his phone was turned off. With nothing better to do, I gave an oral instruction to turn on my news feeds in order to take a break. The somehow sissy host, a virtual “general” showed up, broadcasting the news. A female suicide bomber (known as “bomb ass” among the netizens) had blown up a building up in Seattle, causing dozens of casualties. . . . A new intercontinental ballistic missile equipped with hypersonic glide warhead had been put into service. . . . The “general” showed off his sense of humor by commenting on the political correctness of the police state. He cleared his throat and stressed the beneﬁts of the maintenance of stability: a strong national defense force and a ubiquitous network of counter-crime measures ensured the welfare of the people and prevented them from the attacks of terrorists. . . .

96 Vol. 15 No. 4 The butterﬂy was still in my pocket. Qian Liuxiang had left it with me as a token of friendship, for it could be used as evidence.6 Later it was taken by the police as evidence for Qian Liuxiang’s crime and to justify his arrest warrant.

In the best luxury hotel by Yangcheng Lake I found Fu Zhou. It turned out he was having a big feast with some other professors. They drank lavishly and ordered mitten crabs. No wonder he had turned off his cell phone and asked his student not to reveal his whereabouts. If I hadn’t lost my temper and threatened his student on the phone, I wouldn’t have had the slightest clue of his whereabouts.

After my brief, Fu Zhou was stunned and frenzied. He walked back and forth irritatedly right in front of me and kept murmuring to himself. After a while, he seemed overwhelmed by depression and sadness. I feared he would commit suicide. He found Qian Liuxiang’s phone number and made a call. Qian’s phone was dead, which meant the last attempt to stop Qian Liuxiang failed. On our way back to Shanghai, Fu Zhou made a call to his old friend Wang Pinqin, a noted curator who was at that time in Shanghai working on an exhibition. He explained to me that Wang Pinqin and Qian Liuxiang were both from the art circle and they knew each other well.

The three of us met at a pub downtown. Wang Pinqin was of middle height and had luxuriant hair. He was dressed elegantly. Fu Zhou handed him the mini-drone—that is, the butterfly—asking: “Is this just a prop? Does Qian Liuxiang just want to present some kind of performance?” Apparently Fu Zhou clung to his last hope and wanted to make a last desperate stand. Wang Pinqin took the butterfly and looked at it for a good while as if he were doing his job as a curator: to examine a piece of art. After a while he looked up and said: “For others I cannot say for sure, but that’s definitely not the case for him.”

It seemed that Wang Pinqin was anxiety-ridden.7 It was only after the release of the videos of Buried Alive that I realized he was also one of the nineteen. We waited anxiously for the arrival of midnight as if we were waiting for death penalty. That evening seemed endlessly long. Fu Zhou called several others to come. They argued vehemently about what legal actions they would take against Qian Liuxiang after the videos went public. I looked at them and could do nothing. All of a sudden, I felt a stir in my mind and got excited. That was the initial impulse for writing this book. But I felt ashamed right away. How could I have such a selﬁsh idea while my old friend Fu Zhou was experiencing an ordeal? I must give it up!

Midnight. As forecasted by Qian Liuxiang, Buried Alive was released right on time. None of the nineteen people escaped. A huge stir among the public was ignited. People were indignant and condemned the act. In the meantime, viewing number soared all over the world. Tens of millions of people talked about it. Youngsters made all kind of hilarious parodies. Image consumption promoted the growth of the GDP. The farce lasted for over half a year.

Vol. 15 No. 4 97 However, Qian Liuxiang, an enemy of the state, disappeared. No one could account for his whereabouts. It was a miracle in a city like Shanghai, where surveillance was everywhere. It was said that the police maneuvered many robots to track him down. Numerous surveillance images were collected (from the dozens of surveillance aircrafts and tens of thousands of cameras located at the areas that might be linked to Qian Liuxiang) to be examined for clue. But still he could not be found. Rumors abounded. I guessed he escaped under disguise, and it had taken him years of careful preparation, planning, and deployment.8 He reemerged abruptly one morning a year later. He told me over the phone that he went underground. But I didn’t have the courage to tell him that I was in the middle of writing a book entitled Buried Alive, which featured him and the nineteen others.

Nineteen Old Poems The full name of Qian Liuxiang’s Buried Alive is Buried Alive: An Imitation of Nineteen Old Poems. The link between Qian Liuxiang’s Buried Alive and a collection of the most widely acclaimed ﬁve-character poems occurred purely by chance. The notion of “Nineteen Old Poems” occurred to him quite accidentally, but it struck him that the poems were an ancient version of “anti”-buried alive. In other words, they noted down the various rebellions against time and everyday-ness burying individuals’ lives alive. Later he admitted that he was inspired by that and came up with an ambitious and adventurous idea: by replacing written words with an enormous number of moving images, he would do just the opposite, to present a contemporary version. The title he initially thought of was very straightforward: Buried Alive—Nineteen Old Poems. According to his explanation, the ﬁgure “nineteen” was rich but not complicated. It was exactly the right one. He was so excited back then and devoted himself to action in an almost frenzied way. Choosing from people he knew, it took him less than a week to pick up nineteen people. He installed surveillance cameras secretly at the places the people lived and worked, making records of their everyday life. Through his editing, he lifted them out of their daily life, which made up the visual images in his Buried Alive.9

I asked about the exact meaning of “doing just the opposite.” His answer was simple and crisp: “If you cannot rule the world, then rule yourself. Otherwise you’d be buried alive.” Then he hung up.10

To be ruled by others is to be buried alive. Such has been Qian Liuxiang’s belief throughout time.11 The chance reading of Nineteen Old Poems was merely a trigger for Buried Alive. The title itself indicated a certain criticism, as if it divided life into two parts: the meaningful and the meaningless. All that falls into the category of “meaninglessness” could be seen as being “buried alive.” Probably in Qian Liuxiang’s view, the history of the individual’s body, so-called “life,” is just a journey through society made by the body under the reining in of the subject and following the trajectory of meaning. To remain autonomous and alive, one needs to advance at full speed. Any deviation or stagnation is an error and waste. It is a movement towards the meaningless. It is to be buried alive. You are alive but already dead.

98 Vol. 15 No. 4 In this regard, the videos of Buried Alive should not just be seen as records of facts. In other words, they should not be seen as some kind of visual live record or historical images of private life meant to resist personal narratives in public. They should be seen as images generated after the body has been scanned by meaning. The author’s value orientation as revealed behind the images should not be overlooked. And in my view, it was extremely rigorous and classic. In one conversation, I made an arbitrary statement: the individual was the subject and there was no leeway; otherwise the subject would be faced with devaluation. Only by being put under the management of the will of the subject could the body effectively generate meaning and value. The free expansion of the body was invalid and chaotic and would lead only to meaninglessness, emptiness, and negation. Upon hearing this, Qian Liuxiang neither denied nor admitted anything; he just changed the subject.12

Perhaps it was from his superman-style, ﬁrm belief that Qian Liuxiang managed to gain endless passion and strength to ﬁght against the everyday- ness, to initiate a jihad of meaning, to become an evil artist who followed none of the rules of the real world and refused to be materialized by capitalist logic, at the cost of devastating or destroying others’ life as well as his own future.

However, during the interviews I did, almost everyone, including Fu Zhou, spoke highly of Qian Liuxiang before midnight on the night of November 12, the 12th year of the new century. They could hardly imagine the gentle guy who never spoke much would turn out to be so vicious: to lay bare their everyday private lives, including bedroom life, on the screens of tens of millions of people all over the world. Given their indignation, their appraisal of him should be considered quite credible. What pained and confused them was why Qian Liuxiang could despise and hate them this much.

As a matter of fact, this was also my question. In our subsequent conversations, I mustered up my courage to ask him, more than once, but I never got an answer. As soon as I mentioned the nineteen people, he would turn silent. He used terribly long silences to punish me. I had to give up and not nag him. But to understand why the nineteen people were picked and how they ﬁt his diagnosis of being “buried alive” was of pivotal importance for me in writing this book.

I decided to get my answer through other channels. The ﬁrst problem I encountered was how to watch all the videos of Buried Alive. To spy on nineteen people for ten years was an enormous workload. It would be impossible to watch all the videos, even if dozens of people watched them 24/7 for several years. Therefore I had to adopt a kind of police methodology. I hired a team of hackers. (Professional data companies charged extremely high prices and, anyway, they were unwilling to take the job because the videos of Buried Alive were collected through illegal surveillance and they didn’t want to be involved in legal trouble.) The hackers used robots to watch all the videos on a supercomputer designed for civil use. And following

Vol. 15 No. 4 99 my requirements and work structure, they extracted data and made a visual survey of all the videos. The charges were high but still within a range that I could afford. I also ordered special software from an anonymous hacker to deal with data extraction, in order to capture and retrieve the visual materials that were needed for the efﬁcient writing of the book.

The second task was quite tedious and enormous: to survey people around the nineteen people through interviews. I divided them into several categories: families/relatives, co-workers, friends, acquaintances, and less than acquaintances. Then I developed the list further based on how close they were to the nineteen people and designed several questionnaires. The nineteen people all had their different conditions. But for the sake of the objectivity of the survey, the adequacy and effectiveness of the data collected, and fairness in terms of treating the nineteen people (not to create huge disparities amongst them), I restricted the number of people who should be interviewed while researching each of the nineteen people to around thirty or forty. There were two ways to determine the interview list: first, from the data exacted by the hackers from videos of Buried Alive, and second, from the detailed survey of all those around the nineteen people by the investigation company I had hired. The second step helped me to include people who didn’t appear in the videos of Buried Alive within my interview list. The third step was to make a comparison between the two lists and finalize the list of people who must be interviewed. The total number reached over seven hundred. Fourth, the investigation company would conduct interviews and conversations, and the whole process would be videotaped. Fifth, all the interview videos, of over seven hundred people, would be handed to a data company that would perform data extraction and visual investigation according to my requirements and work structure. The cost for this investigation was substantial. And, given my pathetic financial capacity, I managed to make the payments only in several installments, and it took me three years to complete the project.

Such a methodology started to take shape while I worked on the Collected Works on Violence. By making some adjustments, I was able to resort to it again while I worked on this book. Though it was a bit complicated, it came in handy. The toughest part of the work was interviewing the nineteen people. I found the nineteen people and approached them following the order in which Qian Liuxiang edited in the videos of Buried Alive. The first was Fu Zhou. He was surprised to hear that I intended to write a book about it. Though it was only half a year since his “Good Friday”—November 12, the 12th year of the new century—he generously agreed to participate in my interview after I elaborately explained the writing plan to him. But after that I received a bunch of rejections: Fan Liming, Pei Song, and Wang Pinqin. Wang Pinqin’s reaction was extremely fierce. He called me several times, trying to warn me not to bother his families, relatives, friends and co-workers. He was so smart that he saw through my working mode already. (I guessed he immediately read my Collected Works on Violence from start to finish.) He became all the more indignant when we started to interview people around him and even threatened to find someone to beat me up.13

100 Vol. 15 No. 4 Among the nineteen people, six refused to be interviewed. Apart from the three I mentioned already, the other three were Guo Peng, Ma Guanjun, and Katherine. Twenty years later they still refuse my request for an interview. Katherine’s reaction was the most interesting. Every time I Skyped with her, she always looked at me with full sympathy. She would shake her head and sigh, as if I were a poor, bad boy peeping at her. In a sense, I was. In order to write this book, I watched the video clips extracted from Buried Alive day in and day out, memorizing every little detail. I extracted data and compiled an index. I probed into the nineteen people’s privacy, familiarizing myself with all the details of their bodies. I could be claimed as the number one authority on them, worldwide. I admitted that if the book were to be published, to some extent it would further the damage Qian Liuxiang imposed upon them. Given this, after I finished the first draft of the book, I postponed its publishing plan indefinitely.

With what I had experienced, together with the interviews of over seven hundred people and data extracted from all the videos of Buried Alive, and with a full understanding of the various micro-events and details, I started to feel that I had touched upon some answers. When they were young, the nineteen people were just like Qian Liuxiang. They were radical and rebellious against the order of reality. But eventually they changed. What was more dramatic, most of them became successful, living a gorgeous life, physically and spiritually. In Qian Liuxiang’s view, they surrendered themselves to capital, to the country, to the system and the rules. The sublime vision to fight against enslavement evaporated and disappeared from their bodies for good.14 But they turned a blind eye to all that. They fit Qian Liuxiang’s definition of being “buried alive.” In other words, they were dominated by the order of reality.

During our conversation, I once used myself as an example and tried to discuss with Qian Liuxiang the dilemma between ﬁghting against or acknowledging the order of reality. I argued that probably there were people (by which I referred to the nineteen people, but in order not to irritate Qian Liuxiang I intentionally talked ambiguously) who made some tiny efforts to strive for freedom, but they didn’t want to be trapped in a condition that was too dangerous, and hence they struggled between resistance and compromise. He categorically denied my defense. He believed that all that was considered safe equated with being dominated, ruled, and reigned over. Safety and freedom were not compatible. Only freedom that was intricately connected to danger could be seen as true freedom. Otherwise it was nothing but illusion and cynicism. In other words, it was hypocritical. He described the society we lived in as “I will guarantee your safety as long as you surrender your weapons.”15

He saw the nineteen people as shameful traitors. Probably this was the closest thought to the real answer. He despised weakness and compromise. He tended to measure daily life with the highest standards. He recklessly created illegal states, putting himself in a position beyond law and ethics. He ﬁrmly stood on the side of meaning and imposed it on the nineteen people as a

Vol. 15 No. 4 101 kind of absolute ethics of freedom and responsibility. As far as I’m concerned, during the ten years he spied on them, he had already realized that a body was no longer the organism/social body that could be driven by the subject. That’s why he became so desperate and ﬁnally decided to go underground.

However, it is our instinct to pursue happiness and success. The body is autonomous. Life is autonomous. This is the biggest difference between Qian Liuxiang and me. It has also been the driving force for me to continue to write and rewrite this book over the past twenty years. But I don’t deny that my initial motive was inspired by the subject matter: I wanted to paraphrase visual narratives in the form of an all-word text.

If the meaning and value judgements imposed on the images by Qian Liuxiang could be removed, then in my view the videos of Buried Alive constituted an unprecedented long-term mapping of the life of nineteen individuals. Fragmented as they were, they demonstrated an extraordinary ten years during which these individuals fought for survival against the background of the global expansion of capital. Numerous micro-events, like countless fragments, made records of the vivid history of the body on a daily basis, together with the various minutiae that were amusing, gloomy, or cruel. They revealed that vividness and vigour of life couldn’t be prevented or extinguished by meaning or value.

As a matter of fact, Qian Liuxiang also came to realize the danger and weakness in his critique and the patronizing way he adopted to diagnose other people. That’s why he gave up editing at an earlier stage. He wanted the audience to watch the unedited version of Buried Alive and to feel the meaning and value judgements he imposed on the images through their own imagination. This was why he released both the edited version and unedited version at the same time. The edited version could be seen as an introduction or lead-in to the unedited version (see more in Chapter 1 to be published in Yishu 76). Nevertheless, did the free and somewhat unexpectedly bizarre editing by audiences all over the world, especially young people, exceed Qian Liuxiang’s expectations? Did this mean that his smart, calculative assumptions were wrong?

I didn’t think so. The audience he envisioned was not the mainstream—the tens of millions of people who were fond of watching gossip in front of their screens—but the various stragglers who quietly lived within those central cities and who fought against the system and institutes of contemporary art. They accounted for only a very small group of people. Probably they were the very last group of human beings who were still fascinated and tortured by the vision of utopia and were dreaming of independence and autonomy. In this regard, Buried Alive could be seen as a scream that Qian Liuxiang had been preparing for a long time, a desperate punch at the future. And to go underground was already on his agenda.

Given the quantity of the interviews as well as the videos of Buried Alive, the narratives collected were brimming with conﬂicts, emotions, contracts,

102 Vol. 15 No. 4 and disorders. They differed significantly. Some parts were totally opposite to each other. In this book, multiple narratives were adopted to deal with all the disagreements and disorders. I would rather let conflicting information emerge among all the hustle and bustle than conceal/whitewash/erase it through seemingly clear and fluent monologue.

Certainly I have to admit that this book is still quite subjective. My prejudice is included. Despite all the efforts I’ve made, prejudice could hardly be automatically and thoroughly eliminated. Perhaps the efforts I’ve made only make my prejudices take on a more deceptive disguise and make them more difﬁcult to discern within the context of multiple narratives. Please keep that in mind.

In addition, though Qian Liuxiang is featured as the protagonist in the book, it is not a biography of him. I titled it Buried Alive because it is based on Buried Alive: An Imitation of Nineteen Old Poems. It is because of Buried Alive, the artwork, that Qian Liuxiang and the nineteen people are delineated in this book. In this regard, this book can also be seen as a note of my personal journey, proﬁling the things I’ve experienced, the people I’ve met, and the spectacles I’ve witnessed during the twenty years since I was involved in the incident of Buried Alive.

Twenty Years Later It takes only twenty years for the world to go upside down. We now have new ethics and no longer feel ashamed of making love with robots. On the contrary, it has become the coolest new fashion, widely and passionately sought after all over the world.

Life is carrying on for the sake of creating proﬁt: genetic modiﬁcation techniques enable us to produce offspring with the perfect image that we all desire. Various organs have been manufactured by bio-factories to replace the old organs in our bodies, imbuing us with youth and vitality and extending our life expectancy. As a result, we never complain and take everything for granted.

Time and history will never disappear, and they will all be transformed into images and data. We are accustomed to forgetting something immediately and for good. Memory has been discarded. Seeing is recording: the cameras and sensors attached to intelligent apparel will automatically record everything we see and experience and store it in the cloud. The trajectory of our movement and health conditions are all under real-time measurement and analysis. Even a fart will be recorded as health data. Our bodies have been entrusted to databases that know us much better than we know ourselves. Eventually, the gear and databases will become accessible only to a few mega-corporations under the control of a small elite group and directly connected to the state machine. We all live under continuing surveillance by our gear. But we are very calm and cooperative. Since the erosion of privacy is inevitable and irreversible, why not accept that fact in exchange for the convenience brought about by the automatic life?

Vol. 15 No. 4 103 To me, it seems like the latest version of virtual reality. Life becomes increasingly like a “set-up” meticulously designed by capital. It is unfathomable, and everything around it is operating at full speed. I feel dazzled and uncomfortable and fear that I will be left behind. I have to constantly refresh myself, reform myself, and learn from the youngsters to use the latest gear. Despite all my efforts, a few years ago I still had to shut down my ﬁrm and retire at an early age. Insurance investigation has long been digitized and stored in a real-time manner, and human labour is no longer a must. I do some business to make a living, and in the meantime, I carry on writing as an amateur writer. And that’s how I started once again to work on the book.

Qian Liuxiang has long fallen into oblivion.16 The last call he made to me was thirteen years ago. But as a known terrorist, he is still on the wanted lists for the ministries of State Security of both China and the United States. Each year ofﬁcers from the National Security Agency in Shanghai ask me if there are other channels to contact him. I often try to imagine where he is. I guess he must live in a place that is crappy but far away from surveillance cameras, data, images, the Internet, gear, equipment and information exchanges. Only in places where capital actively surrenders that anonymity can concealment be possible. For his own safety, he has no other choice but to allow himself to be eliminated by time and to gradually become useless. The advancements of technologies make illegitimacy very costly. We are all online so that any action will be automatically detected or predicted. The network of data will never miss anything. I think that’s why Qian Liuxiang has never called me again and chooses to disappear, never making new works again.

Over the seven years from the end of November, the 13th year of the new century, to the middle of October, the 20th year of the new century, there were sixty-eight conversations between him and me. It was quite unusual. Even today I still can’t explain why he chose me as someone he wanted to talk to. Once I asked him very directly: “Why do you call me?” He laughed and didn’t give me an answer.17 Back then, such a reaction actually deepened my suspicion. I suspected that he, secretly, had chosen me to be the storyteller to spread his feat. This idea was not totally groundless. I had evidence to back me up. He paid a visit in person to my ﬁrm; he did me a favor by allowing me to give Fu Zhou a heads-up (from the videos he collected, obviously he knew that among the nineteen people, Fu Zhou was the only one I knew); he left me with the mini-drone in the shape of butterﬂy as a token of kindness; he read Collected Works on Violence; and he took the risk of calling me constantly to talk about his new works.18 But I also had my confusion: as quite a well-known artist on the Shanghai art scene, why did he choose me—an unknown amateur writer who had nothing to do with contemporary art?

Twenty years later I am still confused, but I don’t care about it anymore. I tend to believe that he talked to me probably because he was too lonely. The rewriting of this book, to some extent, can be seen as a way to memorize the encounter between him and me. Today, the power of imagination has been

104 Vol. 15 No. 4 bought out by capital and works only for proﬁt and governance. There will never be any other artists who will do the same thing as Qian Liuxiang—to exile and even destroy themselves in order to ﬁght against the order of reality. There will never be any other contemporary artworks like Buried Alive that test the boundaries of our comprehension in such a reckless way. We have been civilized and disarmed.

To rewrite this book, I interviewed once again the nineteen people and their acquaintances.19 I found that the majority of the nineteen people had already downloaded the unedited version of Buried Alive as some kind of evidence for their memory of the past. They told me that it was a fact that Qian Liuxiang’s surveillance of them and the release of all the video footage was destructive to them. It struck them so hard that the pain caused could never be erased. Hence, they would never forgive Qian Liuxiang. However, it was also a fact that the videos were a record of their life in the past. The downloading of the videos indicated that they had recovered from the damage and they could now face the videos in a relatively calm manner and dare to use them as a kind of personal archive of themselves (see Chapter 6 for more information).

Nevertheless, another fact stunned me ever more: all the nineteen people, including the three who rejected my request for a second interview,20 had installed cameras in their home. Some even installed cameras in their bedrooms, and I heard they shut them down only after they turned off the lights. Not only these nineteen people, but their acquaintances, also installed cameras at their home. At ﬁrst I thought they did this to prevent theft or burglary. But it turned out not. During my second interviews, I learned that in Shanghai the new generation of intelligent surveillance system built by the government was already almighty. Thieves had nowhere to hide. But the two hundred people in question all decided to keep an eye on themselves. There was no exception. They recorded their lives on a daily basis. They did exactly the same thing as Qian Liuxiang had done spying on the nineteen people.

Why was that? Why would all the people recorded in Buried Alive transform into Qian Liuxiang twenty years later?

Fu Zhou gave me an answer. “It’s normal,” he said. “We live within images. We make records and then play them. It’s just like that. We became visualized creatures long ago. If you don’t believe that, you could give it a try by turning off images. You would immediately feel you couldn’t bear it, as if you were living in primitive society. None of us could bear it. You’d feel your life is not complete, the records are not complete and your credibility is at danger. Moreover, no one could understand why you become so radical. They would only see you as a maniac. But we are not Qian Liuxiang. We never hurt others!”21

Fu Zhou also announced to me: in the near future when we make records of the images of ourselves, we will also be able to record our brain waves. Surveilling ourselves and making a record of everything represents credit

Vol. 15 No. 4 105 and social responsibility. Self-surveillance is for the sake of constructing database. Our judgment about whether someone is credible or responsible will be based on whether he records everything about himself and builds a credible database.22

It seems I have been left behind by time after all.

The first draft of the book consisted of four chapters only. The first chapter, “Buried Alive (to be continued),” gave an introduction to Qian Liuxiang’s Buried Alive and outlined some key points of the book. The second chapter, “Artist Qian Liuxiang,” briefly reviewed the life of Qian Liuxiang and his earlier works. An emphasis was put on casting more light on how he gradually became so radical, overcame his own sense of guilt, and determined that he would initiate the project Buried Alive. In the third chapter, “The History of Relations,” I wrote about why Qian Liuxiang chose these nineteen people and their relationships during the ten years he spied on them. The fourth chapter, “Biographies,” featured the life stories of the nineteen people, the contents of which were based on the videos of Buried Alive and the interviews with over 700 people they are acquainted with.

During the rewriting, two more chapters were added to the book. The ﬁfth chapter, “In Conversation,” made a record of the conversations between Qian Liuxiang and me as well as the art he worked on after he went underground, as well as anecdotes about his being a terrorist. In the sixth chapter, “Twenty Years Later, A Second Interview,” I wrote about the second interviews I did and the status of the nineteen people.

I think that even after twenty years the publishing of this book would still do harm to the nineteen people. Katherine rejected my request for an interview, again. The way she looked at me was brimming with sympathy, making me feel that I was a deceitful child. I need to ask Katherine and the others for forgiveness:

Thank you for your tolerance and for accepting my ﬁrst and second interviews. Your friendliness and kindness make me feel warm and nice. But I don’t want to become hypocritical because of that and to impose self-censorship upon myself. I’ve always been frank with you, never hiding from you the plan to write this book or the logic of my writing. I want to reiterate: in this book, I have made use of a lot of quotations from the videos of Buried Alive, which were collected in an illegal way. I will not delete the paragraphs or details that are of paramount importance but may make you feel uncomfortable. If this book feels unbearable to you or makes you feel embarrassed or insulted, I’m sorry. I am very, very sorry for that.

School of Written Words I’ve elaborated in the preface to Collected Works on Violence the history and theories of the School of Written Words and why I chose to follow such a school. I don’t want to reiterate. However, after all, it’s been twenty years,

106 Vol. 15 No. 4 and during those twenty years, images steadily and triumphantly continue to assume a dominating role: written words are fading out, conversations are getting shorter; it is only images that never stop. We have all been transformed into “men of images”: We are immersed in images 24/7 as we work and shop via screens and monitor ourselves as well as others via what we wear; even data have become visualized. As a writer of the School of Written Words, to live such a protracted and dramatic change would naturally mean to experience ordeal and anguish and to become increasingly radical and political. I often feel that I’m more and more like a “body bomb.” Under such an atmosphere, to rewrite this book—the second all-text book of mine—makes me feel uneasy. I have come to realize that subconsciously I have been trapped by the same dangerous confusion that overwhelmed Qian Liuxiang when he was working on Buried Alive: whether or not have we been buried alive by images.

In this regard, I feel it’s necessary to add a few words.

We are surrounded by books of images and are no longer confined to gazing at screens. They are increasingly integrated with the illusionary technologies of virtual reality, confining our bodies within brand-new experiences of simulation. They can be updated constantly in order to make us feel better and satisfied with being surrounded by images. As to written words, they have been transformed into voiceovers for images and serve images with humbleness. As the new economic utopia, they have attracted substantial investment from around the world.

Thoughts and academic research are also becoming digitized through images. Academic theses are turning into documentaries that are written, directed, and performed by the same person: gorgeous pictures, grand music, plus a conﬁdent author who talks with ease and ﬂuency in front of the camera. He talks, raises questions, refutes and explains, radiating great charm. The author is the image.

Images are invincible, which means that the suppression of independent and written words are everywhere within our daily actions. A publisher, a nice guy who has always been friendly with me, has constantly tried to persuade me to give up on written words over the past three years. As someone who ﬁnds new life within images, he despises texts composed fully of written words. He confronted me: “Nowadays who would spend time reading a classic book produced in the era of printing?” It’s quite provocative. The following is a part of a recent argument between us:

The Publisher (with great frustration and indignation caused by my failing to live up to his expectations): Qian Liuxiang’s Buried Alive contained all the images of the nineteen people’s lives during the past ten years. You also videotaped the interviews you did with the over seven hundred people. During your second interviews with them, you wore the gear and shot the whole process including the living environment of those people. These were precious images, so why didn’t you use them? Why waste them for nothing?

Vol. 15 No. 4 107 Are you idiotic?

Lu Huanzhi (I just wanted to briefly respond to avoid an argument that would definitely hurt our relationship): I wanted to do things in a simple way. To make a book of images needed a lot of images to fill the book. And the production cost could be huge.

The Publisher (who took this seriously): That I get. I can invest in the book. You can stay assured that I would never interfere with your freedom of writing. You know me!

Lu Huanzhi (I was forced to explain): I appreciate your kindness. However, I don’t need investment in my writing. I just don’t want to become part of the economy. That’s why I want to follow the School of Written Words. The Publisher (who thought my intelligence was at a problematic level, which boosted his sense of superiority): You are still preoccupied with the School of Written Words? Or you just don’t want to confess the failure? All right, you’re nostalgic and I understand that. But you cannot be too arbitrary and turn a blind eye to the reality. The world is moving forward and people have already redeﬁned the notion of the book. Now everyone knows that books are images and nothing else!

Lu Huanzhi (I was on the verge of losing my temper): After all, what you said is nothing but the will of capital, which intends to tame all authors through images, a logic of economy. Would it be even possible that you would never interfere with my freedom of writing? What is a book of images after all? Economy! All books of images rely on investment; otherwise the authors of those books would never be able to afford the production of such books. Institutional sponsorship in nature also relies on investment. Where does the money of institutional sponsorship come from? Corporations, which expect return on their investment. Institutional sponsorship is nothing but a mode of capital operation. As a conclusion: as long as there are images, true freedom cannot be achieved. Investment has to go through censorship: application, review, and approval. That is exactly interference, isn’t it? How could authors get the freedom to produce whatever they want? Moreover, the procedure will have permanent inﬂuence upon authors in terms of how they shape themselves. Eventually authors will start to censor themselves to see if they ﬁt the criteria for investment or sponsorship. The more powerful and ideal the images are, the more heavily they rely on investment since the production cost would be super high. Without investment, without agreeing to follow the logic of economy, it would never be produced. Isn’t that the case?

The Publisher (who didn’t see that I took this seriously too): In my knowledge, censorship of investment does exist. But it’s deﬁnitely not that serious. You are exaggerating!

Lu Huanzhi (once starting to talk, I no longer feared that the relationship

108 Vol. 15 No. 4 would be jeopardized): As a visual machine to control us, images are an integral part of the state machine. Images represent capital and the system. They are planning everything for us, just as now you want to plan things for my book. If we trace the source of production, all images originate from the bastards who are gorgeously dressed and take a seat in either ﬁrst-class cabins or their private jets. They manipulate global politics and the economy. Images function as a visual channel for these bastards to brainwash us. It’s a 100% visual way of ruling.

The Publisher (whose bottom-line was tested and hence lost his temper): I’m so disappointed! I don’t see how you have become this radical, naïve, and political!

Lu Huanzhi (I once again felt the pain of breaking with someone after he revealed his true colours): You’re right. I’m a follower of the School of Written Words. It’s never about nostalgia. It’s always about political actions. It’s not I who turns a blind eye to reality. I’m ﬁghting against it. It’s a dead end for us if we just want to be men of images. We need to take a different path and to become invisible.

The Publisher (who was also in pain but covered that well): Invisible? What do you mean by that?

Lu Huanzhi (I couldn’t help laughing): We need to ﬁght against images and rely purely on written words.23

Yes. To become an invisible man, a man who will not be captured or caught freeze-frame by images, means to become the opposite of a “man of images” and to resist the order of reality that is embedded in our bodies. The numerous and endless images make our bodies numb and hollow. Images discipline us, manage us, brainwash us, and drain our power of imagination, leading to the fact that innovations in the “technique of ruling” far exceed the speed of our thinking. Images are the core for elites all over the world to take control of society. If we don’t want to die within the delight of visual senses or be overwhelmed by the coding of the all-image society, we will have to escape and go beyond images. We will need to turn a blind eye to images, to not take them seriously, and to sabotage and subvert images from within. All in all, we will need to resort to some low-cost method that everybody can afford in order to ﬁght back, to prevent images from taking full control over us.

To become an invisible man also means to be a member of the School of Written Words: to write books, essays, and slogans, etc. As a pioneer in resisting images, the School of Written Words foresaw the arrival of today’s all-image society long ago. The resistance that they launched and that has continued for several generations is also visionary: to return to and use the ancient all-word texts. It seems like an intentional retreat. But as a matter of fact it equips everybody with the power to ﬁght back. It is convenient, efﬁcient, and requires no extra cost. Only in this way could we afford it and

Vol. 15 No. 4 109 go beyond the power of capital and ﬁght against our own visual sense, or, in other words, the visual sense of the “men of images.”

It is doomed to be a protracted war that will be arduous, time-consuming, and unwinnable.

We need written words to give a direct blow to our cerebral cortex in order to revive ourselves and to stop being devoured by images. We need therapy in the form of sentences rather than images. We need the courage to ﬁght against an all-image reality. We need to shut down images and cameras.

We need to restore our instinct, our willfulness, our adventures, our insights, our irrationality, our abnormality, our laughter. We need to do that through written words.

Notes

1. Qian Liuxiang, Buried Alive (unedited videos, 1006 mins): Fu Zhou, November 12, the 12th year of the new century. 2. Ibid. 3. Records of Qian Liuxiang’s phone conversations, May 16, the 14th year of the new century. 4. In the following several conversations with him, I forgot to raise the question. Later, even though I had the question in mind, I felt that a long time had passed and that it would seem abrupt to bring up the issue again all of a sudden. There was no need to make a fuss. So I never asked him the question. 5. While writing this book, to make sure I remembered it correctly I checked the clips on my event date recorder of November 12, the 12th year of the new century. Some of the details were based on the clips recorded that day. 6. Records of Qian Liuxiang’s phone conversations, July 29, the 14th year of the new century. 7. Twenty years later when I interviewed him again, Wang Pinqin told me that he was always very sensitive and that back then he already had the feeling that he was one of the nineteen. 8. I guessed that Qian Liuxiang had hired hackers at a very early stage and utilized robots. Otherwise it would have been impossible for him to post the enormous video clips of Buried Alive online and on time all by himself. As to how he managed to escape, I never ﬁgured it out. Given the highly sensitive nature of the issue, I never asked him about that when we talked. By the way, during the twenty years, I think all the so-called speculations or explanations were nothing but rumors. 9. Records of Qian Liuxiang’s phone conversations, March 12, the 15th year of the new century. 10. Ibid. 11. Interview clips: Shao Zhengping (August 13, the 13th year of the new century), Tang Liang (September 2, the 13th year of the new century), and Wu Xiaoxia (February 1, the 14th year of the new century). 12. Records of Qian Liuxiang’s phone conversations, March 12, the 15th year of the new century. 13. The consent of Wang Pinqin was gained before I pointed out such facts. He accepted my interview twenty years later and apologized to me. But even if he had still refused to give his consent, I would have pointed out the facts without changing a single word. 14. Qian Liuxiang, Buried Alive (unedited videos, 918 mins.): Wang Pinqin, March 16, the 8th year of the new century. 15. Records of Qian Liuxiang’s phone conversations, April 11, the 17th year of the new century. 16. I have looked into many art-related archives during the past decade, and the name of Qian Liuxiang is nowhere to be found. 17. Records of Qian Liuxiang’s phone conversations, March 22, the 14th year of the new century. 18. Fu Zhou also thought the same. During our private conversation and interviews, he reiterated it several times. 19. The three people who rejected my request were Fan Liming, Katherine, and Pei Song. 20. I learned of the conditions of the three of them through interviews with their acquaintances. 21. From the interview video with Fu Zhou on March 22, the 32nd year of the new century. 22. Ibid. 23. Lu Huanzhi, Gear 7, September 19, the 32nd year of the new century.

110 Vol. 15 No. 4 Chinese Name Index

Cao Fei Huang Miaozi Li Xianting Tsang, Henry 曹斐黃苗子栗憲庭曾慶偉 Cheng Yin-ping Huang Wenhai Lin Juin-Ting Tseng Wei-Hao (Betty Apple) 黄文海林俊廷曾偉豪鄭宜蘋 Jia Zhangke Lin Sanzhi Wang Bing Chu Hing-wah 賈樟柯林散之王兵朱興華 Jiang Zemin Lo, Edwin Wang Dongling Chu, Birdy 江澤民羅潤庭王冬齡朱迅 Jim, Alice Ming Lok, Susan Pui San Wang Hsin-jen Emperor Yao Wai 駱佩珊王新仁堯帝詹明慧 Lu Peng Wang Pinqin Fu Zhou Jin Yong (Louis 呂澎王品欽傅周 Cha) Lu Weizhao Wong Kar-wai 金庸陸維釗 Gao Shiming 王家衛高士明 Ke Rongmeng Lu, Carol Yinghua Wong, Kasey (Roman Verostko) 盧迎華 Geng Jianyi Kwok-choi 柯榮孟耿建翌 Ma Guanjun 黃國才 Kwan Sheung Chi 馬冠軍 Genghis Khan Wu Chi-Tsung 關尚智成吉思汗 Ma, Geoffrey Tao-li 吳季璁 Lai, Firenze 馬道立 Wu Wenguang Gu Gan 黎清妍吳文光古干 Ma, Ivy Lau, Lisa Ee Jia 馬琼珠 Wu, Elaine Guan Yu 劉伊佳 Monohon, Adam Chenyun 關羽 Law, Clara 墨曉波鄔晨雲 Gun 羅卓瑶 Ng Ka Chun Xi Jinping 鯀 Lee Ang 吳家俊習近平 Guo Jau-Ian 李安 Ng Ka-leung Xie Nanxing 郭昭蘭 Lee Kit 伍嘉良謝南星 Guo Jing 李傑 Qian Liuxiang Yao Chung-Han 郭靖 Lee, Daniel 錢六想姚仲涵 Guo Peng 李小鏡 Qu Yuan Yin Chaoyang 郭彭 Leung Chun-ying 屈原尹朝陽 Han Shaogong 梁振英 Sha Menghai Young, Samson 韓少功 Li Dafang 沙孟海楊嘉輝 He Xiaolan 李大方 Shi Andi Yu (Shao-Lan Hertel) Li Hong (Andreas Schmid) 禹何小蘭施岸迪李紅 Zhang Chengzhi Ho Tzu Nyen Li Liao Shun 張承志何子彦舜李燎 Zhang Kechun Ho, South Siu Nam Li Qingxi Shyu Ruey-Shiann 張克純何兆南徐瑞憲李卿曦 Zhang Yimou Hu Cun Li Songsong Tsang Kin-wah 張藝謀胡村李松松曾建華

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