On Huang Yong Ping 69 Ryan Holmberg

Home , Beijing World Park, Hu Xiaoyuan, Zhao Xiaoding

:      september / october 9 September/October 2009 | Volume 8, Number 5

Inside The 53rd Venice Biennale

Gao Shiming on Unweaving and Rebuilding the Local

A Conversation between Michael Zheng and Hou Hanru

Artist Features: Huang Yong Ping, Hu Xiaoyuan and Qiu Xiaofei, Chen Hui-chiao

Reviews: The China Project, Qiu Zhijie, Ai Weiwei, Shan Shan Sheng

US$12.00 NT$350.00

VOLUME 8, NUMBER 5, September/october 2009

CONTENTS 2 Editor’s Note 47 4 Contributors

6 Making Worlds: The 53rd Venice Biennale Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker

29 A Be-Coming Future: The Unweaving and Rebuilding of the Local Gao Shiming

38 The Snake and the Duck: On Huang Yong Ping 69 Ryan Holmberg

47 Objectivity, Absurdity, and Social Critique: A Conversation with Hou Hanru Michael Zheng

62 A Conversation with Hu Xiaoyuan and Qiu Xiaofei Danielle Shang

69 Dreaming through Art: On Chen Hui-chiao 75 Chia Chi Jason Wang 75 The China Project Inga Walton

89 Qiu Zhijie at Chambers Fine Art Jonathan Goodman

95 The Visual Roots of a Public Intellectual’s Social Conscience: Ai Weiwei’s New York Photographs Maya Kóvskaya

89 101 Shan Shan Sheng’s Open Wall Inhee Iris Moon

106 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Ai Weiwei, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (detail), 1983, silver gelation print, © Ai Weiwei. Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Center, Beijing.

Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art president Katy Hsiu-chih Chien The first four texts inYishu 34 tackle different   Ken Lum topics and concerns, yet it is striking how certain  Keith Wallace issues—the postcolonial, cultural hybridity, the   Zheng Shengtian Chinese diaspora, and the ongoing negotiation   Julie Grundvig between the local and global—resonate Kate Steinmann among them. These issues are by no means editorial assistant Chunyee Li unfamiliar, but as regions such as Asia assume circulation manager Larisa Broyde a more visible and self-sufficient presence,   Joyce Lin they are becoming increasingly complex and web site  Chunyee Li contentious, taking on new as yet unformulated and provocative directions—and Yishu intends to advisory  continue to be a means to voice them. Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum John Clark, University of Sydney In a review of the 53rd Venice Biennale, Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker references the 2008 Okwui Enwezor, San Francisco Art Institute Guangzhou Triennial’s theme of “farewell to Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China postcolonialism” as a jumping off point to explore Fei Dawei, Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation how the representation in Venice of artists of Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Chinese descent, both from mainland China and Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop the diaspora, exhibits more self-determined Katie Hill, University of Westminster identities than it did during the past decade. Gao Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Shiming proposes the necessity of nudging China Sebastian Lopez, Institute of International Visual Arts into “building a new home, a different system” Lu Jie, Independent Curator in order to develop a stronger domestic cultural Charles Merewether, Critic & Curator Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University identity and critical discourse. Ryan Holmberg Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand brings into question the work of Huang Yong Ping Philip Tinari, Independent Critic & Curator and his employment of cultural hybridity as a Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago tool for critiquing the West, while Hou Hanru and Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar Michael Zheng discuss video within mainland China, and how its relationship to modernity and  Art & Collection Group Ltd. the West has resulted in a practice with its own 6F. No. 85, Section 1, distinct characteristics. Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Phone: (886)2.2560.2220; While these issues are clearly important in Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 the evolution of contemporary Chinese art, E-mail: [email protected] artists such as Hu Xiaoyuan, Qiu Xiaofei, and Chen Hui-chiao bring other perspectives to the    Leap Creative Group process and product of making visual art. They   Raymond Mah are less caught up in identity and global politics, art Director Gavin Chow instead searching for more internal subjectivities designer Philip Wong and alternative approaches to what art can webmaster Website ARTCO, Taipei represent. Finally, Yishu 34 offers reviews of important exhibitions that take us to Brisbane,  Chong-yuan Image Ltd., Taipei New York, Beijing, and Venice, exemplifying the  - vast range of cultural geographies through which contemporary Chinese art travels. Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, March, Keith Wallace May, July, September, and November.

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

ERRATUM Yishu Office 200–1311 Howe Street On the cover of Yishu 32 Xi Xiaoze should Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 have been spelled Xie Xiaoze. Yishu Phone: 1.604.649.8187; Fax: 1.604.591.6392 apologizes for this error. E-mail: [email protected] Web site: www.yishujournal.com

YISHU EDITIONS Subscription rates: Now available: Five limited-edition prints by 1 year (six issues): $84 USD (includes $24 for airmail postage); some of the most important Chinese artists. in Asia $78 USD (includes $18 for airmail postage). 2 years (twelve issues): $158 USD (includes $48 for airmail postage); in Asia $146 USD (including $36 for airmail postage). Please see back cover for images and contact information. No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版‧第8卷第5期‧2009年9 - 10月

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

主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 6 製造世界：第53届威尼斯雙年展副編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker 編輯助理：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li)

29 即將到來的歷史―論「本土」行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 網站編輯：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li) 的拆解與重建廣告：林素珍高士明顧問：王嘉驥田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 38 蛇與鴨：評黄永砯安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) Ryan Holmberg 巫鴻林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 范迪安 47 客觀性、荒誕性和社會批判：招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 候瀚如訪談洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 胡昉鄭濟忠（Michael Zheng）侯瀚如徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 62 與胡曉媛和仇小飛的對話姜苦樂 (John Clark) 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 尚端（Danielle Shang）倪再沁高名潞 69 藝術的織夢者─陳慧嶠費大爲楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 王嘉驥（Chia Chi Jason Wang）盧杰 Lynne Cooke 75 中國計劃 Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill Inga Walton Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda

89 邱志杰在前波畫廊出版：典藏雜誌社 Jonathan Goodman 台灣臺北市中山北路一段85號6樓電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 95 一位公共知識份子社會良知的視覺史：電子信箱：[email protected] 艾未未的紐約攝影編輯部： Yishu Office Maya Kóvskaya 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 101 盛姗姗的「開放長城」電話: (1) 604.649.8187 傳真：(1) 604.591.6392 Inhee Iris Moon 電子信箱: [email protected]

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封面：艾未未，布魯克林威廉斯堡（局部），1983，明膠鹵化銀，北京三影堂攝影藝術中心提供訂閱單可從本刊網址下載。

Contributors

Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker is Director the Real and Reality (2009), Edges of the of the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, and Earth: Migration of Contemporary Art and the former director of the Museum Geo-politics in Asia (2003), and Visual Villa Stück, Munich, and the Vancouver Thinking: Intangible Dialogue between Art Art Gallery. She has curated numerous and Phenomenology (2002). exhibitions on both contemporary and historical art, with a special emphasis Jonathan Goodman studied literature at on the history of the modern. In Columbia University and the University of 2004–05, she was Curator of Shanghai Pennsylvania before becoming an art writer Modern (with Ken Lum and Zheng specializing in contemporary Chinese art. Shengtian), and, in 2005–06, Curator of He teaches at Pratt Institute and the Parsons Art of Tomorrow: Hilla von Rebay and School of Design, focusing on art criticism Solomon R. Guggenheim (with Karole and contemporary culture. Vail and Brigitte Salmen). In 2001–02 she was Exhibition Director of The Short Ryan Holmberg, currently Mellon Century (curated by Okwui Enwezor). Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Southern California, is a Gao Shiming is Deputy Director writer and art historian specializing in of the Advanced School of Art and modern and contemporary East Asian Humanities, China Academy of Art. art, with a particular focus on Japan His main research interests include and manga. His writing has appeared in the intellectual history of art, visual numerous publications, including Artforum culture, and curatorial practices. He International, Art in America, Japan has curated many exhibitions, such as Forum, and International Journal of Farewell to Post-colonialism: The 3rd Comic Art. Guangzhou Triennial (2008), Alchemy of Shadow: The 3rd Lianzhou International Maya Kóvskaya, a Beijing-based art Photography Festival (2007), Micrology: critic and curator, has curated numerous Micro-politics in Chinese Contemporary exhibitions, including China Under Art, and The Yellow Box: Contemporary Construction II, for Fotofest Photography Art and Architecture in a Chinese Space Biennial (2008), and China On The Road (2006). His recent publications include (Brussels, 2008). Her writing has appeared Mask and Mirror: Visual Studies on in numerous art catalogues, academic

volumes, and magazines, including Art and Perception, Ceramics: Technical, Flash Art, Contemporary, Art Post, Art Etchings, Artichoke, Melbourne Living, iT, Art Map, Eyemazing: International Eyeline, Textile, and regularly in Journal Contemporary Photography Magazine, of Australian Ceramics and Trouble. She and positions: east asia has contributed to Sculpture, Ceramic cultures critique. Review, Fiberarts, art4d, and Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, and has Inhee Iris Moon is an independent three essays in Untitled: Portraits Of curator who has organized many Australian Artists (2007) by Sonia Payes. exhibitions. Most recently, she curated a solo exhibition of the work of Nam June Chia Chi Jason Wang is an art critic and Paik at the Central Academy of Fine Arts curator based in Taiwan. He was the curator Art Museum, Beijing (2009), and Nam of the Taiwan Biennial (2008), the Taiwan June Paik: Intimate and Meditative Works Pavilion at the 51st International Art by the Master for the Korean Cultural Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2005), Service, New York (2008). She is also a and the 9th International Architecture freelance writer for several international Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2004), art magazines. and co-curator of the Taipei Biennial Great Theatre of the World (2002). He has Danielle Shang is an independent contributed widely to various art catalogues contemporary Chinese art critic, curator, and magazines, and he has served on the and consultant. She lives and works in Los Academic Advisory Board of Asia Art Angeles, California. Archive since 2004. He has also taught full- time at the Department of Arts and Design, Inga Walton is a Melbourne-based writer National Hsinchu University of Education, and arts consultant. She completed a since 2006. Bachelor of Arts (Hons.) at the University of Melbourne and is currently working on Michael Zheng is an artist based in a Ph.D. in history at La Trobe University. Beijing and San Francisco whose work Formerly the visual arts editor for the has been exhibited internationally. He is monthly newspaper Independent Arts a participating artist in imPOSSIBLE! Review, in Victoria, her work has appeared and one of the primary coordinators of in the Australian titles Poster, Ceramics: the exhibition.

Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker

Making Worlds: The 53rd Venice Biennale

Guangzhou @ Ireland @ Venice One of the most memorable events at the 53rd Venice Biennale was a seminar that took place in a sweltering, over-crowded hall in the Irish Pavilion.1 As Homi K. Bhabha sardonically noted at the beginning of his presentation, the narrow, interlocked chairs into which both panel and audience were uncomfortably squeezed created

. . . an association of ideas and bodies at the same time, very much like many art practices where affect and sweat and all kinds of bodily fluids mix and blend, sexualities are questioned, nationalities become blurred, boundaries immediately become tangible. . . . An orgiastic experience is being provided in this wonderful city [of great sexuality]. . . . This is not going to be a sober seminar!

In fact, despite the wanton grandiloquence and dazzling intellectual displays of its participants, this seminar was a deadly earnest exercise in power. Some of the Western art world’s most respected luminaries had been invited by Sarat Maharaj, co-curator of the Third Guangzhou Triennial (GZT 2008), to participate in a conversation that would “query” the Guangzhou Triennial and its call for, as the triennial’s title suggested, a farewell to postcolonialism.2 The occasion was not only the opening of the Venice Biennale, but also the launch of a special issue of the Irish journal Printed Project,3 which was intended, according to its guest curator/editor Maharaj, to add to the reflections, debates, and analysis surrounding the GZT 2008 and, above all, to address the “ongoing methodological instigations, to use Ezra Pound’s word, . . . that are urging and nudging us, even perhaps twisting our arms, asking us to think about these questions.”4

Bhabha, a leading theorist in the field of postcolonialism, accepted the challenge to participate, as did Daniel Birnbaum, artistic director of the 53rd Venice Biennale; Chris Dercon, director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich; and Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Also present was Gao Shiming, deputy director of the Advanced School of Art and Humanities, China Academy of Art. It was Gao who had argued passionately, as a co-curator of the GZT 2008, that contemporary discourse and artistic production should be liberated from Western models such as postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, hybridity, and alternative modernities.5 They had become, Gao had proposed, propaganda strategies to manage difference in “a new policy of domination” and as “tools of a new ideology of global capital” that have

evolved into little more than high-sounding but increasingly hollow slogans of political propaganda.6

Bhahba launched a dismissive counter-attack on any suggestion that postcolonialism could be described as a model:

If, like me, you had some modest responsibility for floating the concept, we were trying to get away desperately from the fiat of models. . . . The post-colonial model does not exist. That is not my problem. It has never existed in my own work.”7 Bhabha’s version of globalization, he argued forcefully, is “that the incomplete project of decolonization—which has not had its chance—is recognized today in the profound inequalities of globalization.” In an eloquent and persuasive monologue on these inequalities, Bhabha noted that “what is important about identification, or identity, or the politics of recognition, is how much authority you have, or you don’t have, through the mediation of that concept.” Authority, he continued, is about access, or “where you can put the object, or where you are not allowed to put the object, or who writes the label, or who in fact proceeds to write the essay on the label, and what resources institutionally are there—and who has the right to narrate.8

The next person with the right to narrate was Daniel Birnbaum, artistic director of the 53rd Venice Biennale. Having arrived late due to prior obligations, Birnbaum deftly moved the topic from postcolonialism to his own conversation with Maharaj, which had been published in the catalogue to the 53rd Venice Biennale under the title Philosophical Geographies.9 In the course of this conversation Maharaj had referred to a “spiritual geography” of Europe10 reputedly proposed by the Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) in a lecture in Vienna in 1935 titled Die Philosophy in der Krisis der europäischen Menschheit (Philosophy in the Crisis of European Mankind). Maharaj further suggested that Husserl had made claims for “Europe’s singular achievement” of having “broken through to a more theoretical, transcendental plane” while “the cultures of India or China remained bogged down at the mythic level.”11 At the Irish Pavilion, seventy-four years and countless interpretations of Husserl’s 1935 lecture later, Birnbaum continued his ongoing conversation with Maharaj by describing Husserl’s spiritual gestalt of Europe as a “brutal map” based on the principle of exclusion.12

The next speaker, Chris Dercon from Munich, quickly shifted the conversation from Husserl to the principle of (postcolonial) inclusion and the plethora of pavilions that, in 2009, constituted the Venice Biennale. “It seems,” he contended, “as if we have another form of mapping! . . . I am quite struck to find suddenly a pavilion of Catalunya. I am very struck to find all these regions popping up trying to establish not quite an identity— no, but a kind of management of culture, a kind of mismanagement of different cultures, maybe a kind of mismanagement of performing the difference.”13 Biennials, he conceded, had “created a kind of guarantee for participation,” but, he wondered, in two years’ time, would cities such as Lyon or Berlin have their own pavilions? Dercon’s key concern was,

however, neither exclusion nor inclusion but rather what he termed the “dictatorship of the present.” One of the major crises of the visual arts, he argued, was not the dictatorship “of the management of multiculturalism, or the management of performing the so-called difference, but the management of amnesia. . . . ‘farewell to postcolonialism’ should mean ‘farewell to amnesia’!” Dercon concluded his presentation by suggesting that we should perhaps not say farewell to postcolonialism. “There are other, more urgent farewells.”

This challenge was taken up by Charles Esche of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. “Postcolonialism was a convenient excuse for what we might call the West, or what we might call Western Europe, not to deal with its history and not to have to face its memories, but actually to displace the issue. . . . There is a crisis. It is not a crisis of identity but a crisis of memory. It is also a crisis of reflection.”14 Esche referred to writings by Maharaj that described the move in Europe in 1989 “from a world of juxtaposition [as exemplified by the Berlin Wall] towards a world of entanglement.” Saying farewell to postcolonialism, Esche argued, would perhaps allow for a new understanding of the fact “that we are all immediately entangled even before we encounter any notion of the Other. We are entangled through the economy, we are entangled through politics, we are entangled through our digital exchange.” Nevertheless our notions of the nation state and the bureaucratic structures on which we are dependent do not “reflect on entanglement, or fully on themselves.”15

It was time for Gao Shiming to speak. The conversation could finally move away from a familial, internal discourse among curators and theoreticians based in the West. Now a curator and theoretician from China—indeed the very person who had called for a “farewell to postcolonialism”—had the right to narrate. Perhaps he would challenge the progenitor of postcolonialism himself, endorse or reject notions of entanglement, or defend his Liberationist calls to abandon Western theoretical models and English as the international language of intellectual exchange. Perhaps once again, as he had done at the Guangzhou Triennial in 2008, Gao would rebel against the dictatorship of the past (and not the present).16

The room was still as Gao began to speak. First he apologized for his difficulty with English before complimenting Bhabha on his narrative of “the re-emergent past and the coming future.” Then, in the grand tradition of Western academic jousting, he dealt an elegant blow to the (metaphysical) body. Referring to Bhabha’s opening query (“farewell to post-colonialism but say hello to what?”), Gao asked him, “Is this question itself on the basis of a linear history?” Bhabha’s reaction was swift and unequivocal: “No! None of the work I have done could have been done if I had thought in linear terms.” Bhabha then embarked on a lengthy reply, which concluded with the statement that modernity was “the most messianic project ever with its notion of the now, and the now, and the new, and the now, and the now.” The gauntlet had been thrown down and the debate could begin. To my astonishment, before Gao could reply or make the kind of substantial contribution to the discussion that other panel participants had been allowed, the conversation was declared over. Audience and participants alike rushed to the next event. As Gao Shiming passed me we greeted one another. “How eloquent Homi Bhabha is as a speaker,” he remarked, smiling.

National Participations and Collateral Events in a World of Entanglement The pre-eminence of the Venice Biennale as an international platform for contemporary visual art remains undisputed despite the rapid growth of biennials and triennials around the world. This is due, in part, to the Venice Biennale’s distinct combination of national pavilions, major surveys curated by the Biennale’s artistic director in official venues such as the Arsenale and the Palazzo delle Esposizione,17 and the burgeoning off-site exhibitions and pavilions categorized as eventi collaterali or Collateral Events.18 These off- site events, situated in spectacular historical palazzi or modest, vernacular houses and shops, have spread like a virus across the city, turning Venice itself into an anarchistic, multi-venue “exhibition.” Far more exciting than most of the “official” national pavilions situated in the Giardini, the Venice Biennale’s Collateral Events have increasingly provided fear-defying forays into contemporary cultural and political waters. They have certainly provided a safe haven for those countries whose nationhood is placed in question by others, such as Taiwan and Palestine, or for those nations who insist on their right to narrate, especially after the Wende or “change” in Europe in 1989, when the shift “from a world of juxtaposition towards a world of entanglement” resulted in a flurry of newly created or newly aligned nations seeking an international platform to express their hard won, independent cultural and political identities.

Chris Dercon’s description of this process as another form of mapping is correct. His consternation, however, at the rapid expansion of “regional” pavilions such as that of Catalunya, and his characterization of them as possibly “a kind of mismanagement of performing the difference,” does not take into account either the complexities of Catalunya’s political formation as a “historical nationality” within the Spanish state19 or the history of the Venice Biennale itself. From its very beginnings, the Venice Biennale has experimented with shifting definitions of the national and the regional. In 1893 the Venetian City Council passed a resolution to organize a biennale artistica nazionale, a biennale of national art. The 1 Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città die Venezia (the first Venice Biennale), inaugurated on April 1, 1895, became instead an international exhibition with one section of Italian artists participating by invitation only, and another with Italian artists selected by jury.20 By the time of the 8th Venice Biennale, in 1909, with its more than 450,000 visitors, the first “national” pavilions had been constructed in the Giardini. Among them was the Padiglione Bavarese, initiated by artists belonging to one of Europe’s most influential artists’ associations, the Munich Secession, from the state or “region” of Bavaria.21 It was not until 1912 that the Bavarian Pavilion would become the German Pavilion. The history of the German Pavilion and its physical transformation during the period of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany were addressed in the 53rd Venice Biennale by the German commissioner, Nicolaus Schafhausen, who caused a sensation by choosing the British artist Liam Gillick, rather than a German national, to “represent” Germany.22

Indeed, the 2009 Venice Biennale provided fertile ground for a number of daring reinterpretations of national identities and for adventurous experiments in “representing” a country, or a city-state, or an occupied territory, or a Special Administrative Region. It also opened its doors to

Arabic and Muslim culture in an unprecedented fashion. Among the Collateral Events in the 53rd Venice Biennale were Palestine c/o Venice; East-West Divan: Contemporary Art from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran; and ADACH Platform for Venice, curated by Catherine David for Abu Dhabi/United Arab Emirates. Among the national participations were Morocco, the Syrian Arab Republic, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (with surely the best-funded pavilion of the entire Biennale).

The interest and excitement generated by the participation of these countries and territories was reminiscent of the exhilaration in 1999 when Chinese artists first made their presence felt in Harald Szeemann’s legendary 48th Venice Biennale. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported at the time that Szeemann had set new accents: “The favourites of the art market today are apparently the Chinese.”23 Carol Vogel of the New York Times asked Szeemann about this new presence. “I felt it was important to get a freer look at another history,” he answered, “to see how Chinese history has changed the appearance of our own culture.’’24 The change in the appearance of Western culture at the turn of the twenty-first century was nowhere more evident than in the French Pavilion. Constructed in 1912, the year of the founding of the Republic of China, the French Pavilion had originally been designed as a representative display of French cultural power and national pride. In 1999 the expatriate Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping “perforated”25 the neoclassical pavilion and its ionic columns with nine wooden pillars dominated by legendary creatures from the two- thousand-year-old book Shan Hai Jing, or The Classic of Mountains and Seas.26 The curators of the pavilion, Hou Hanru and Denys Zacharopoulos, described Huang’s One Man, Nine Animals as provoking “the powerful experience of navigating intellectual, cultural, and political uncertainties.”27 Did Huang Yong Ping’s installation in the French Pavilion in 1999 reflect the uncertainties of the expatriate Other? Or did it claim the territory for itself? Was it “bogged down at the mythic level” or was it operating at a “more theoretical, transcendental plane”28 of the Philosophical Man who, according to Edmund Husserl in 1935, maintained a “critical attitude toward anything and everything pregiven in the tradition?”29

Francesca Dal Lago, who curated the Chinese section of an exhibition titled Passage to the East in the 1993 Venice Biennale, suggested in a review of the 48th Venice Biennale, in 1999, that the work of expatriate Chinese artists such as Huang Yong Ping, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Chen Zhen, although labelled “Chinese,” was produced “in a Western cultural sphere [and] often employs ‘Chinese’-indexed symbolism to discuss cultural hybridity and the dilemma of living between two worlds.”30 The work of both Chen Zhen and Cai Guo-Qiang in the 1999 Venice Biennale capitalized, according to Dal Lago, “on the widespread Western ignorance of Asian cultural manners, mixed with a spiritual awe and respect for the esoteric ‘East’. They thus create a discourse which ultimately does not acquire any specific ‘meaning’, neither in China nor in the ‘West’.”31 The International Jury in 1999 obviously did not agree. They awarded Cai Guo-Qiang the Golden Lion, La Biennale di Venezia International Prize, for his large-scale environment, Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard, in the Arsenale.32 The 108 decaying,

10 life-sized figures created out of sixty tons of clay33 were a reconstruction of a sculpture, completed in 1965, that toured in China and was copied and given as gifts to Albania, North Korea, and North Vietnam.34 Cai’s installation was almost certainly, Britta Erickson suggested at the time, “one of the final sculptures in the Socialist Realist manner” and a metaphor “for the failed promise of socialism in China.”35 The “irony of a work created by an anonymous collective being recast for the glory of an individual artist” would not be lost on some viewers, Erickson concluded.36 For Dal Lago, Cai’s environment was a “trademark spectacle.” The work produced by artists living in China, on the other hand, she argued, was “rarely nice.” Instead it was “rough, violent, unsophisticated, vulgar, and kitsch” art that consciously mimicked “the daily experience of urban reality in China: well packaged and often glittering on the outside, irrational and morbid within.”37

A decade later, the promise of a glorious era for “Chinese” art in the West and at the Venice Biennale seems to have faded. The years of extravagant, spectacular works (and astronomical prices for all art Chinese) are probably over. This is not only due to the current economic crisis and a new-born distaste for excess and hyperbole. The short attention span of the West has been exhausted, and even some leading collectors in China have shifted their interest to artists from other cultures.38 Unfortunately, the myriad opportunities the West had been offered over the past twenty years to engage with the art and culture of China in a differentiated and thoughtful manner were often gambled away in repetitive group shows of “Chinese” art from European collections in the “Orientalist format of ‘national grouping’,” as Dal Lago wrote in 1999, which falsely created the “feeling of an homogeneous ‘Chinese’ style, eliminating single creativities.”39

The conditions for exchange between East and West are dramatically different from what they were a decade ago. Among China’s intellectual community, there is a strong desire to escape the “introspective postcolonial self-imagination,” as Gao Shiming writes in this volume.40 Above all, Chinese artists and intellectuals are no longer content to play the role of the Other in an entangled, post-West41 world. Gao observes that:

. . . despite the huge success of “Chinese contemporary art” in the international arena and the capitalist market over the past twenty years, it appears that Chinese contemporary art was merely successful as an alternative modernity, as a local version of contemporary art. Its success was due to identity politics and the playing of the “China card.” Today, we are above celebrating the success of this cultural-political strategy. We are no longer satisfied with fighting for space and rank in the globalized edifice in the name of the Other, and in the name of fairness. Now, we are considering building a new home, a different system, a historic site for cultural creation and for subject renewal. It is the site of contemporary Chinese art.42

The 53rd Venice Biennale, in 2009, like the Third Guangzhou Triennial, in 2008, was a site for subject renewal and for “contemporary Chinese art.”

11 The China Pavilion What Is to Come (Jian Wei Zhi Zhu) Fang Lijun, He Jinwei, He Sen, Liu Ding, Qiu Zhijie, Zeng Fanzhi, and Zeng Hao Curators: Lu Hao and Zhao Li

Exactly one hundred years ago, Isaac Taylor Headland, a professor at Peking University, published a report titled Court Life in China: The Capital, Its Officials and People. He described the return of Prince Chun (Zaifeng) from Europe43 and his subsequent purchase of a brougham, a European- style carriage. “As straws show the direction of the wind,” he wrote, “these incidents ought to indicate that Prince Chun will not be a conservative to the detriment of his government, or to the hindrance of China’s progress.”44 Reading “straws” and “directions” would become a fine art among Western observers seeking to comprehend, interpret, anticipate, and manage China in the following century. At the 2009 Venice Biennale, the curatorial strategy of the China Pavilion was also, in the words of its curator, a “straw and direction” approach. The intent was to describe to the world “where the wind blows”45 in the context of “the confrontation between globalization and domestic interests” in China. The Zen-like character of this strategy was intentional and designed to evoke a world that is in motion as “we pick up the traces of the fragments left over in the social reform.” Finally, the China Pavilion was to offer a roadmap to a future based on a “new value system.”46 It would also be endowed “with more Chinese characteristics,” and would focus attention on emerging artists from the region.47

Lu Hao, one of the curators of the 2009 China Pavilion, is a renowned Chinese artist who was invited to participate in the 1999 Venice Biennale. Then he had hoped to place live birds, fish, and insects in exquisite, miniature, plexiglass architectural models of what Li Xianting called “the most ideological buildings in China.”48 Instead, Lu had to satisfy himself with synthetic fauna. A decade later, as co-curator of the China Pavilion, a former industrial site in the Arsenale dominated by gigantic, disused oil containers, Lu situated artworks like miniature, synthetic fables that metaphorically revealed “what is to come” (jian wei zhi zhu). “We are to see the world,” Lu Hao wrote in his curatorial statement, “in a grain of sand.”49

This was nowhere clearer than in the installation of the work of Fang Lijun, another renowned Chinese artist who participated in the 199350 and 1999 Venice Biennales. In 2009, Fang created forty gilded, miniature, truncated figures between twenty and forty centimeters high and wedged them underneath the China Pavilion’s oil cans in a “spatial visual shock” that was said to reflect on the scale of “the many social problems the human race faces [including] energy, the environment, and war.”51 Lu Hao described Fang’s work, and that of artist He Sen, as belonging to the category of

Fang Lijun, 2009.3.23, 2009, mixed media installation. Courtesy of the artist.

12 Top: Fang Lijun, 2009.3.23, “Dragging self back into reality.”52 2009, mixed media installation. Courtesy of the artist. Sen’s installation, Taiji World, Middle: He Sen, Taiji World, consisted of fifty small framed 2009, installation with oil on canvas, frames, and wood paintings that were installed, crates. Courtesy of the artist. salon-style, on shipping crates Bottom: Zeng Fanzhi, Transformation Plan— at the far end of the pavilion. Transforming the “Oil Depot” into “the Stacks,” 2009, wood, From a distance the brightly paper, and steel, 149 x 316 x 39 coloured paintings appeared to cm. Courtesy of the artist. be monochrome. Only in close proximity could one recognize that the paintings consisted of a thick layer of compressed pigment that had been “engraved” by traditional Chinese brushes (which were made of wolf hair53) into depictions of traditional Chinese landscapes, flowers, and birds. The third artist in this category, Zeng Fanzhi, created an installation titled Transformation Plan—Transforming the “Oil Depot” into “the Stacks.”54 Zeng took East-West publications and disassembled them into fragments. He then illustrated the books and made comments in them before re-binding them in the classical Chinese manner.55 The books were finally placed on a shelf-structure across a passageway in the pavilion, their Chinese titles incomprehensible to the Biennale’s Western audience. In an interview between Lu Hao and Zeng on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, Zeng explained that his artistic process is one of destruction: “I have never wanted the audience to see the truth.” His art works depict “the inner spiritual world.”56

Concern for the bewilderment and trauma of those who have not yet benefited from the extremely rapid transformation of Chinese society in the past twenty years is a key element of the work of He Jinwei.57 His large- scale, two-part, red velvet hanging served as the entrance to the China Pavilion and was titled Is the World Before your Eyes Real? Over seventy individual paintings were stitched onto each hanging in a “world map” in which persons, social incidents, symbols, and emblems were magnified or microscopically examined. When asked by Lu why his artworks did not assume one particular style, He answered that “only commodities need replications, and only the market requires constant production.”58

Left: He Jinwei, Is the World Before Us True (detail), 2008, velvet, oil on canvas, each painting 18 x 14 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Right: He Jinwei, Is the World Before Us True, 2008, velvet, oil on canvas, each painting 18 x 14 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

13 After thirty years of painting on canvas, Zeng Hao abandoned the familiar world of two-dimensionality and created a “macro-narration” in three- dimensional space in the form of a 4.5-metre square perspex box containing over two hundred objects of daily life suspended by wire. This work, titled 2009-6-7 (the date the Venice Biennale opened to the general public), was installed not in the darkened industrial ruins of the China Pavilion but in the adjacent Giardino delle Vergini, or Garden of the Virgin. Replicas of newspapers, airplanes, toilet paper, highrises, and sofas floated seamlessly in Zeng’s synthetic world of equivalence and disorder. Also situated in the garden was Qiu Zhijie’s site-specificDomino: The small knocking down the big, which consisted of wooden dominoes of various sizes arranged on the lawn in the shape of a tree. For Zeng, it is important to hold to the “game- mindedness of art and to bear the social responsibilities. Part of the idea stems from Plato’s reactionary thought in driving poets out of Utopia and the other part from traditional Chinese literati’s recognition of the structure of the spirit.” 59

Left: Qiu Zhijie, Domino: The small knocking down the big, 2009, installation of wood dominoes of various sizes. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Zeng Hao, 2009–6–7, 2009, Perspex, found objects, 4.5 m square. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Zheng Shengtian.

One of the key aspirations of the 2009 China Pavilion, according to Lu Hao, was to cleanse “self-identity represented by other than self.”60 This was especially evident in the provocations of Liu Ding, whose six “theme” stores, vitrines filled with myriad personal, aesthetic, and everyday objects, lined the main passageway of the China Pavilion. Liu Ding’s Store—The Utopian Future of Art, Our Reality consisted of the installation at the Biennale (the storefront) and a Web site (www.liudingstore.com) at which paintings signed by the artist could be purchased for 1,500 RMB. Container of Experience, “a vitrine filled with some plaques, some framed photographs, a carved wood pedestal, a tree branch, a lot of glass laboratory flasks, and a rock, also signed by Liu Ding,” was being offered on the Web site for 741,093 RMB.61 In addition, Liu Ding’s Store was offering a “tailor-made utopia of art” for visitors, who were invited to provide their “interests, ideas, special items, or dimensions.” The fee for this service would cover not only production materials and payments to other artists whose work is included in the vitrine, but also a “proprietor’s thinking fee.”62 In addition to Container of Experience, five other theme stores were available: The Perfect Sphere, Gold, A Momentary Lapse of Willpower, The Weight of a History Book, and Changing Sensibilities. According to the artist, the project was “based on the artistic ideal of unifying things of different values within a new order to create a model for a free artistic society.”63

The response to China’s national pavilion in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 in the Western international press was largely indifferent, while Art Radar Asia noted dryly that it was less successful than in the past and “unable to generate much buzz for China during the festival’s opening days.”64 But the key question is what the measure of “success” should be.

14 Top: Liu Ding, installation The 2009 China view of Liu Ding’s Store—The Utopian Future of Art, Our Pavilion was an Reality, 2009. Courtesy of the artist. experiment that Liu Ding, Liu Ding’s Store— refused to offer The Utopian Future of Art, Our Reality, 2009, vitrine with “Chinese” art or objects, 210 x 100 x 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist. spectacle. Instead it Liu Ding, Liu Ding’s Store— pitted highly personal The Utopian Future of Art, Our Reality, 2009, vitrine with artworks against objects, 210 x 100 x 80 cm. the dark stage of an Courtesy of the artist. industrial ruin. During the opening days of the Biennale the British newspaper the Independent reported that the chairman of the Biennale had announced that the Chinese Pavilion would move to a new location in the future, among the “conventional venues” in the Giardini65 Thus the China Pavilion was possibly situated for the last time in 2009 in the few remaining untamed spaces of the Arsenale, where both “Chinese” art and contemporary Chinese art had repeatedly dazzled Western audiences.

In 2003, a panel discussion organized by Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art brought together leading curators and academics from Asia for a discussion titled “Looking Forward from Venice: The Prospects of Contemporary Chinese Art.” Johnson Chang Tsong-zung, who would co- curate the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial five years later, asked, “How do we measure the indicator of international success for contemporary Chinese art? Our ultimate expectation is that it should lead and influence artistic creation in other parts of the world in theories and ideas. This is also the foremost goal of contemporary Chinese art internationally.”66 This was certainly to be true of the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial. Perhaps the spectacle- resistant experiment of the China Pavilion 2009 will also be recognized as a turning point. As Lu Hao wrote in his curatorial statement, the works that were presented are part of a new “lingual system“ and “are no longer the political symbols known to and accepted by the West, nor are they dazzling, commercialized and superficial popular imagery.”67

15 The Hong Kong Pavilion Pak Sheung Chuen, The Horizon Placed at Home Making (Perfect) World: Harbour, Hong Kong, (N22°17’400” Version), Hong Alienated Cities, and Dreams Kong, 05/04/2009, 45 plastic bottles filled with sea water Pak Sheung Chuen collected from Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong. Commissioner: Tobias Berger Courtesy of the artist and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. The Hong Kong Pavilion is neither large nor grand, but it does have a Pak Sheung Chuen, Half fortuitous location for an off-site Collateral Event. Situated directly opposite Soul, Half Body, Venice, 21/05/2009, 63.4 kilograms the entrance to the Arsenale, one of the key venues of the Venice Biennale, worth of stones. Courtesy of the artist and the Hong Kong and next door to the only café in the area, it is ideal for dropping in or for Arts Development Council. meeting people. It is also, by virtue of its (physical) association with the Pak Sheung Chuen, From the Queen to a Flower: 1, Hong Arsenale, a location that signifies the avant-garde (or the now, and the now, Kong, 06/2009. Courtesy of the artist and the Hong Kong and the new, as Bhabha would say). The complex issues and contradictions Arts Development Council. surrounding the participation of Hong Kong in a “nationally” structured Pak Sheung Chuen, NYPLP1: page 22/Half Folded Library, international exhibition such as the Venice Biennale have been obscured 58th Street Branch Public in that it has been subsumed into the category of Collateral Event. The Library, 127 East 58th Street, New York. Courtesy of the potential of this event to become a platform of exchange that will open artist and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. doors, showcase, promote, reaffirm, and elevate, and to enable Hong Kong Pak Sheung Chuen, Travel art to bask in the limelight was noted by Ma Fung-kwok, Chairman of Without Visual Experience, Malaysia, 07–11/10/08, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and the Commissioner of the photographs, various sizes. Courtesy of the artist Pavilion, in his foreword to the catalogue of this year’s exhibition, Making and the Hong Kong Arts (Perfect) World: Harbour, Hong Kong, Alienated Cities, and Dreams.68 Development Council. Pak Sheung Chuen, Breathing in a House, Korea The curator of the Hong Kong Pavilion in 2007, Norman Ford, had (Busan), 01–10/09/2006 (10 Days), plastic bags. nevertheless questioned the designation of Hong Kong’s participation as Courtesy of the artist and the Hong Kong Arts a Collateral Event when he asked, “meaning, like collateral damage, we Development Council. happened unintentionally?”69 In the newly aligned world of 2009, however, a certain indifference to the “naming” of the participation of Asian city states, regions, and nations seems to have set in. Instead, one senses here too a new confidence as to one’s role in the world, a heartfelt conviction as to the right to participate in such international events, and the sheer pleasure of having written one’s own labels and having the right to narrate. External reassurance is no longer needed or sought; new curatorial strategies are the order of the day. In the case of the Hong Kong Pavilion this has meant a shift from the format of a group exhibition to a solo presentation by one of Hong Kong’s younger and most respected artists, Pak Sheung Chuen.

Cleverly playing on the title of the 53rd Venice Biennale, Making Worlds,70 Pak’s (perfect) universe—the pavilion, its courtyard, and a typical Venetian canal visible through its rear gate—were exquisitely choreographed by the artist according to four categories: Harbour, Hong Kong, Alienated Cities, and Dreams. In Harbour it is Pak’s intention to create artworks out of everyday objects; in Hong Kong to gather together things and objects “that are scattered across the city, waiting and longing to be elucidated.” Artworks created in New York, Tokyo, Korea, and Venice, as Pak “isolates” himself from Hong Kong—“a city with which I am too familiar”—are to be found in Alienated Cities, while Dreams consists of those artworks that “will perhaps act as an initiation for realizing future happy memories,” and are, in fact, instructions to the viewer on how to combine “past memories and future imaginations.”71

Some of Pak’s best-known works have been included in the 2009 Hong Kong Pavilion. NYPLP1: page 22 / Half Folded Library: 06-24/06/2008 documents a site-specific installation in New York’s 58th StreetBranch

16 Library where Pak secretly folded the upper corner of every other page 22 of all books in the library, 15,500 volumes in total. Breathing in a House: Korea (Busan), 01–10/09/2006: 10 days consists of transparent plastic bags containing Pak’s breath, which he collected over a period of ten days until the bags had filled the apartment.Making (Perfect) World should, however, not be regarded as a retrospective exhibition in the classic sense of the word. It is instead, the artist says, a “cohesive vision” consisting of newly commissioned works together with “re-edited” older works “to coincide with the site and context of Venice.”72 One of the most powerful of these works is A Travel Without Visual Experience: Malaysia, 07–11/10/2008: 5 days/4 nights tour group. In 2008 Pak joined a tour group travelling to Malaysia. In order to simulate blindness he either closed or bound his eyes for the entire journey. “During the trip, I was still doing all the sightseeing and took many photos, but instead of seeing, I only used my body to sense and experience my surroundings.”73 Each photograph was labelled, with a date and time stamp on the photographs. In the caption to m081009.1133, Pak wrote: “In my imagined world, all mosques are blue.”74

The Venice audience of A Travel Without Visual Experience: Malaysia was asked to have cameras ready, flash on, before they entered the darkened room in which photographs that Pak had taken in Malaysia during his simulated blindness were exhibited. Only when the viewer took a flash photograph of the room could she or he see Pak’s photography for the blind. “You can’t change the world, so you try to change the way you see it,” Pak explained in an interview. “This is basically how I work and live. I am creating a world, a perfect world.”75

The Macau Pavilion Divergence Lee Yee Kee, Bonnie Leong Mou Cheng and Kitty Leung Mou Kit, João Ó Bruno Soares Curator: Kent, Ieong Chi Kin

Pak’s perfect world was less evident in the work presented in the Macau Pavilion. Here, an exhibition titled Divergence meandered through a former scoletta, or little school, in Venice’s Campo Bandiera e Moro: up narrow stairs, into dark rooms and hidden corners. Divergence, the press release for the pavilion tells us, should not be understood as ambiguity but as “a deviation from a perceived direction which can induce wrong variations out of rationality.”76 The distinguished jurors who selected the participating artists were equally metaphorical in describing their understanding of the theme of the pavilion, especially

17 Bonnie Leong and Kitty Leung, Space in Flux: Man-Made Landscape, 2009, sequins and beads on linen, 1.8 x 4.6 m. Photo: Kitty Leung. Courtesy of the artists.

Ung Vai Meng, the former director of the organizing institution, the Macau Museum of Art: “Since a certain date, the sky of Macau has become bizarre. Clouds overhead are leashed by a round of turbid and suffocating light, while underneath those brand-new, gold-glittering luxury hotels are packed with throngs. . . . In the struggle between the city’s alienated expression and concealed fatigue, the artists throw us a stream of hypotheses without answering.”77 For the eminent Chinese critic Feng Boyi, also a juror, the exhibiting artists’ works “chime with the very many issues arising in the regional culture of the Macau SAR [Special Administrative Region of China].”78

The disjunctive, metaphoric subtexts of the colonial, regional, and national waters that Macau and its artists must navigate in the twenty-first century is the true subject of its participation in the 2009 Venice Biennale, exactly ten years after Macau was transferred to China after more than four hundred years of Portuguese rule. Four artists and three projects were selected by the jury. Lee Yee Kee’s installation in a blackened room, Timeless Tunnel, is disorientating and anxiety-provoking in its endlessly repeating cycles and mirrored reflections of the filmed interior of a tunnel. In a recent interview, Lee observed that this work is “about not going forward or backward, which is kind of like what’s happening in Macau today. . . . [It] gives a very strong impression of this sense of contradiction and being lost. I want people to see themselves as actually being inside the tunnel with the mirror, to feel what I felt. . . . There’s the sense that it’s a never-ending trap.”79 Lee is referring to her experiences as a child when she would play in the tunnel of an air raid shelter on Guia Hill, the highest point of Macau.

During his presentation at the Irish Pavilion, Charles Esche had observed how entangled we are through the global economy, and through our digital exchanges. Two of the artists in the Macau Pavilion, Bonnie Leong Mou Cheng and Kitty Leung Mou Kit, addressed this “connectivity” in their work Space in Flux: Network Cube. Over a thousand glass tiles, each measuring half a square inch, were assembled on the gallery floor in a map-like installation nearly two metres wide and four metres long that recorded the density and frequency of Internet connections in Europe and Asia. Another large-scale work by the same artists, Space in Flux: Man-Made Nature, hung on the wall. A multitude of small beads in various shades of black and pearl white had been embroidered to create a gestural landscape of mountain ranges rising above the traces of fields and riverbeds. According to the artists, the work explored the “paradoxical state of closeness and distance.

18 Bonnie Leong and Kitty Leung, Space in Flux: Man-Made Landscape, 2009, sequins and beads on linen, 1.8 x 4.6 m. Photo: Kitty Leung. Courtesy of the artists.

“Physical boundaries,” they noted in the exhibition label for the work,“are no easy ways to separate cultures, economies, regions, and even nations.”

João Ó Bruno Soares simulated light-box advertisement for a one-way air ticket from Venice to Macau for the astonishing price of only €19.99 glowed in the evenings at the entrance to the Macau Pavilion and attracted potential travelers during the day who didn’t realize that they had stumbled onto life imitating fiction. For those astute enough to question this extraordinary “deal,” it soon became clear that it was counterfeit, a subterfuge to recall an event that had slipped into history leaving even its supporters stranded on the beach. 1999 referred to the year when Macau was transferred to China and the ten-day-long advance booking period to the tenth anniversary of this event in 2009. The dates of the travel period (June 10 to December 22) recalled respectively the national day of Portugal and the date of Macau’s transfer to China. And the fictitious, low-cost airline, EurAsia Airways Limited? “It is Eurasian,” the artist explained in an interview, “so, a little like myself, between Europe and Asia.”80

João Ó Bruno Soares, EurAsia Airways Limited, 2009, installation. Photo: the artist. Courtesy of the artist and the Macau Art Museum.

19 The Taiwan Pavilion Cheng-Ta Yu, Ventriloquists: Introduction, 2008, HDV, video Foreign Affairs: Artists from Taiwan installation, colour/sound. Hsieh Ying-Chun, Chen Chieh-Jen, Chien-Chi Chang, Cheng-Ta Yu Courtesy of the artist. Commissioner: Fang-Wei Chang

Foreign Affairs, the title of Taiwan’s eighth exhibition at the Venice Biennale, hinted at the illicit as well as at the august and conjured up its ongoing dilemma on the international stage. Once again the Taiwan Pavilion was situated at the edge of Venice’s magnificent San Marco Square. Locals and tourists alighting from the numerous vaporetti that jostle for moorage at its door could not avoid seeing the large banner, reading Foreign Affairs: Artists from Taiwan, hanging from the Palazzo delle Prigioni (prisons’ palace) on the promenade Riva degli Schiavoni. A complement to the prisons of the Ducal Palace and a former seat of the Magistratura responsible for prosecuting common criminals, the Palazzo accords cultural events that take place in its historic halls—including the Taiwan Pavilion—vestiges of the unlicensed if not the unlawful.

If, in the past, the Taiwan Pavilion was renowned for its vibrant, high-tech, installation-based exhibitions, in 2009 it was noticeably more restrained. This year’s commissioner and curator, Fang-Wei Chang, observed that past exhibitions had been “very much about desire.”81 Chang decided instead to place her emphasis on “cross-regional art” within the present global political, economic, and social context. These concerns, Chang explained, are closer to those of many artists working in Taiwan today: “They are looking out rather than facing inwards. And this is what we are trying to do with the Taiwan Pavilion in 2009.”82

20 “Cross-regional” practice in Taiwan in 2009 has a quality of entanglement that Sarat Maharaj would love, especially in the hands of the youngest artist participating in the Biennale, Cheng-Ta Yu, who is still a university student. Both video works by Yu included in Foreign Affairs turned their attention to foreign residents in Taiwan. In Ventriloquists: Introduction, Yu stands behind his subjects, who attempt (unsuccessfully) to repeat his phrases in Mandarin. In Ventriloquists: Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su two women from the Philippines who married into Taiwanese families sing popular songs and try to communicate with the artist in Mandarin, Taiwanese, and English. As Yu explains,“It was a conversation within the cracks of language and, unable to always convey what we meant, situations of miscommunication and dissonance occasionally arose.”83 For the resultant digital work on display, the artist translated their conversations in Mandarin or Taiwanese into English subtitles using English words but the grammar of the original language. “In previous Biennales in Venice the exhibitions in the Taiwan Pavilion were always asking, ‘Who am I’? This question confuses us. This time,” Cheng-Ta Yu explains, “we are saying ‘I am’!” Artists of his generation, Yu added, are “not concerned with what kind of Taiwanese artist we might be. We don’t think about that. My main concern is: how can I communicate with other people? And in what way? My work is not an end in itself, it is just an interface.”84

Cheng-Ta Yu, Ventriloquists: Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su, 2009, HDV, video installation, colour/sound. Courtesy of the artist.

The older generation of artists from Taiwan participating in the 2009 Venice Biennale do not share Cheng’s indifference to categories of identity. “Interfacing” on the global stage is part of their everyday life as well. Nevertheless, they remain intensely aware of the barriers Taiwanese citizens often face when they travel or even apply for a visa to go abroad, a process that can be humiliating and bitter. One of Taiwan’s most distinguished artists, Chen Chieh-Jen, went to the American Institute in Taiwan in September 2008 to secure a visa so that he could participate in the New Orleans Biennial. He was refused on the basis that the officer suspected that he was intending to emigrate illegally to the United States. Chen established a blog (The Illegal Immigrant) as a public forum for Taiwanese who had encountered similar problems. Within days it had registered several hundred responses. The tales of those who replied were re-enacted and recorded on high-quality, 35 mm film and converted to DVD format. The result is the powerful and polemic work Empire’s Borders I (2008–09), shown at this year’s Venice Biennale. While Chen Chieh-Jen was careful to stress that his experience was similar to that encountered by foreign spouses and immigrant workers in Taiwan,85 the focus of Empire’s Borders I remained Taiwan’s complex relationship with the United States and its political and economic dependence upon these ties. America, he wrote, “has always been

21 Top: Chen Chieh-Jen, Empire’s Borders I, 2008–09, 35mm transferred to DVD, single- channel, colour/sound, 27 mins. Photo: © Chen You-Wei. Courtesy of the artist. Bottom: Chen Chieh-Jen, Empire’s Borders I, 2008–09, 35mm transferred to DVD, single-channel, colour/sound, 27 mins. Photo: © Chen You- Wei. Courtesy of the artist.

a dreamland of freedom, democracy, and progress, the standard by which everything has been judged. Ultimately the United States is portrayed [in Taiwan’s mainstream media] as the world’s suzerain where all desires can be satisfied.”86

Left: Chen-Chi Chang, Chen X. Family, New York City, 1998. Right: Chen-Chi Chang, Chen X. Family, Fuzhou, China, 2007. © Chien-Chi Chang/Magnum Photos.

But the life of those who do succeed in emigrating illegally to the States is harsh and lonely. Desires remain unfulfilled; families are separated for decades; only low-paid, menial jobs are available. It is in this netherworld of illegality that the artist Chien-Chi Chang began photographing Chinese immigrants living in New York, as well as their families in Fuzhou, over a period of seventeen years. Eventually he would become a “courier,” bringing photographs of the divided families to one another. His photographs of Fuzhou documented the physical transformation of the place, which came to be known as “widow village” (where everyone waits),87 while black-and- white images recorded the life of those who live in the “cracks” of American society in the hope of providing a better life for their families.

Also operating internationally in territories of extreme need and poverty is the architect/activist Hsieh Ying-Chun, who has been working on reconstruction projects since Taiwan’s devastating earthquake in 1999. Currently engaged in similar efforts in China following the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008, Hsieh presented photographic and video documentation of his projects at the 2009 Taiwan Pavilion under the title

22 Left: Hsieh Ying-Chun, houses with woven bamboo roofs built by the Thao tribe. Photo: © 921 Minbou. Right: Hsieh Ying-Chun, villagers adding recycled bricks and window casements to the main structure, Caopo Township, Sichuan. Photo: © Rural Architectural Studio.

Mutual Subject: What To Be Done. The distinguishing features of Hsieh’s practice are its commitment to using indigenous materials and building styles and an ability to adhere to extreme budget limitations. Solutions are home-grown, not imported. In commenting on the nature of the Mutual Subject, Hsieh Ying-Chun writes: “when I let go of control and allow my work to transcend its own boundaries, the results are spellbinding.”88

Venice Biennale Special The Singapore Pavilion Mention Award. Left to right: Homi Bhabha, Sarat Maharaj, Ming Wong: Life of Imitation Jack Bankowsky, Tang Fu Kuen, Ming Wong. Photo: Tara Ming Wong Tan. Courtesy of the National Commissioner: Lim Chwee Seng Arts Council, Singapore. Curator: Tang Fu Kuen

Special Mention—Expanding Worlds A special mention goes to Ming Wong (Singapore Pavilion) for examining the history of Singapore’s multiethnic cultural identities via the demise of the country’s once flourishing film industry. Ming Wong’s video-works use innovative forms and techniques to reflect on the sense of shame and exclusion that accompanies the imposition of racial and sexual stereotypes. 89

International Jury, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009 (Jack Bankowsky, Homi K. Bhabha, Sarat Maharaj, Angela Vettese, Julia Voss)

On June 6, 2009, the International Jury of the 53rd Venice Biennale announced a number of awards of Special Mention: Remaking Worlds (Lygia Pape), Curating Worlds (Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset), Translating Worlds (Roberto Cuoghi), and Expanding Worlds (Ming Wong, Singapore Pavilion). The Singapore Pavilion was certainly deserving of this recognition. However, the jury’s description of the installations of Ming Wong as reflections on “shame and exclusion” seemed curiously at odds with the work itself. Perhaps a postcolonial (re)framing that the artist himself would resist? Life of Imitation, as one of Ming Wong’s works was titled, was in fact a celebration of Singapore’s golden age of cinema in the 1950s and 60s when “multiple worlds” proudly co-existed and “language, gender, appearance and traditions were continually [and successfully] negotiated.”90 Wong’s sophisticated re-reading of Singapore’s national cinema through re-enactments avoided pathos and nostalgia by means of “sly and comic” mimicry91 and provided a rich palimpsest of constantly shifting worlds. To (mis)appropriate Homi K. Bhabha’s remarks at the Irish Pavilion the day before the awards were announced, Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation

23 Top: Ming Wong, Life of Imitation, 2009, 2-channel DVD, 13 mins. Courtesy of the National Arts Council, Singapore. Bottom: Ming Wong, poster for Life of Imitation, 2009. Courtesy of the National Arts Council, Singapore.

questioned sexualities and blurred nationalities. Instead of making boundaries immediately tangible, however, Wong dissolved them.

The fourteenth-century Palazzo Michiel del Brusa on Venice’s Canal Grande, in which the Singapore Pavilion was located, provided the perfect mélange of theatricality and historical detritus, grand rooms and intimate niches, that Life of Imitation demanded and deserved. No (historical or contemporary) excess was too extravagant. Visitors were greeted in a grand entrance hall by large- scale canvases by Singapore’s last surviving billboard painter, Neo Chon Teck. Rare historical artifacts and ephemera from the collection of Wong Han Min followed, presented in plastic covers along with period posters and handbills. Ming Wong’s Four Malay Stories from 2005 in Sala 3 showed Wong attempting to learn (in Malay) lines by sixteen stock characters from films in the 1950s and 60s. Two new works from 2009, Life of Imitation (based on Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, 1959) and In Love for the Mood (based on Wong Kar Wai’s melodrama In the Mood for Love, 2000), were brilliantly installed by Wong and curator Tang Fu Kuen in separate rooms, Sala 1 and Sala 2, which were separated from the main hall by heavy, red velvet curtains. In Life of Imitation three actors, each from a different ethnic group, portrayed a “black” mother and her “white” daughter who vehemently denied her racial roots: “I’m white. White!” By placing the projectors so that the reflection of one actor’s portrayal could be seen simultaneously beside another’s in the Sala’s elaborate historical mirrors, Tang and Wong “exposed slippages in acting guises and stances,” as was noted in the exhibition catalogue.92 Similarly, In Love for the Mood was presented on three screens placed diagonally across a darkened room in a manner that allowed for a meditative but disjunctive atmosphere of what Tang describes as “performative veneers of language and identity” that exerted a hypnotic fascination.

Asked whether he was the Asian Tarantino who saw thousands of films while jobbing in a video shop, Ming Wong replied: “I watch these films through other people’s memories. Many of these old foreign language films have no subtitles, so I have to watch it through a friend’s interpretation. It’s like watching someone else watching a film.”93

24 Ming Wong, In Love for the Beyond a Restrictive Dichotomy Mood, 2009, 3-channel DVD, 4 mins. Courtesy of the National I am reminded of an Italo Calvino quote from Invisible Cities Arts Council, Singapore. where Kublai asks Marco [Polo], “When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?” Fiona Tan94

In her exhibition, Disorient, in the Dutch Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale Fiona Tan presented a rich, audiovisual tale in which voice- overs recounted excerpts from The Travels of Marco Polo. Her associative montages evoked “a fantasy of the West’s Orient” that is “so hung with paintings and overgrown with ornament, so covered in textured wallpaper, tapestries and richly coloured carpets that the eye is in danger of losing its bearing in space.”95 Tan noted: “I am straining to see and imagine the future beyond the restrictive dichotomy of East and West (one which always implies East versus West).”96

The fables of Marco Polo have been a source of inspiration for numerous artists at the Venice Biennale, most notably Nam June Paik who represented Germany in 1993, and Cai Guo-Qiang in 1995. In the garden of the German Pavilion Nam June Paik installed a work titled Marco Polo (in progress) that consisted of a VW Beetle, a refrigerator and television monitors.97 Cai Guo- Qiang created a performance and installation titled Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot and delivered traditional Chinese medicines to Venice on a Chinese fishing boat.98 In 2005, anothermountainman (Stanley Wong Ping- pui) metaphorically chastized Marco Polo for his failure to mention tea in his tales of China by recreating a tea house at the Hong Kong Pavilion.99 And at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, an exhibition titled A Gift to Marco Polo celebrated the legendary journeys of the Venetian merchant with the work of Fang Lijun, He Douling, Wang Guangyi, Wu Shanzhuan, Ye Fang, Yue Minjun, Zhang Peili, Zhang Xiaogang, and Zhou Chunya.100 The “gift” of Yue Minjun, who had also participated in the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, was a series of circular oil paintings that appropriated the work of the early Chinese Modernists Qi Baishi, Xu Beihong and Zhang Daqian.101 Yue placed vignettes of their work within the (visual) confines of “a perplexing labyrinth which is similar to the oriental labyrinth taken back by Marco Polo to the Venetians” seven hundred years ago.102

The fascination that Marco Polo has exerted on the imagination of curators and artists at the Venice Biennale until the present day is an indication of the abiding power of exotic and orientalist views of the “East.” Nevertheless, a number of exhibitions and events at the 53rd Venice Biennale revealed an important shift. The gestural and highly personal exhibitions at the pavilions of China, Hong Kong, and Macao; the sophisticated exploration of a world beyond restrictive dichotomies at the Singapore Pavilion; and the models of responsible action in an entangled, global world in the pavilion of Taiwan represent a distinct, and overdue, farewell from the oriental and occidental labyrinths of the past.

25 Notes 1 Sarat Maharaj: A conversation relating to the publication of Printed Project, no. 11: “’Farewell to Post-colonialism’—Querying the Guangzhou Triennial 2008,” Irish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Friday, June 5, 2009. The Irish Pavilion was the exhibition venue for both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. 2 The Third Guangzhou Triennial, which took place from September 6 to November 16, 2008, in Guangzhou, China, was co-curated by Johnson Chang Tsong-zung, Gao Shiming, and Sarat Maharaj. See Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, no. 1 (January/February 2009), 6–29. 3 Sarat Maharaj, ed., “Farewell to Post-colonialism: Querying the Guangzhou Triennial 2008,”Printed Project, no. 11 (May 2009). 4 Sarat Maharaj, Conversation at the Irish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Friday, June 5, 2009. See Ezra Pound, Instigations of Ezra Pound, Together with an Essay on the Chinese Written Character by Ernest Fenollosa (New York, Boni and Liveright: 1920). 5 Gao Shiming, “The Self Imagining of Guangzhou Triennial 2008: An Exercise in Negation,” in Maharaj, ed., Farewell to Post-colonialism, 13. 6 Gao Shiming, “A Be-Coming Future: Unweaving and Rebuilding of the Local,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, no. 5 (September/October 2009), 30. 7 Conversation at the Irish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Friday, June 5, 2009. 8 Ibid. 9 Sarat Maharaj, “Philosophical Geographies,” in Making Worlds: Exhibition, ed. Rossella Martignoni (Venice: Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia and Marsilio, 2009), 277–83. 10 Edmund Husserl’s phrase “geistige Gestalt Europas” was translated by David Carr in 1970 as “the spiritual shape of Europe.” Today it would be more commonly translated as “spiritual gestalt.” The term “spiritual geographies” is not to be found in the original lecture by Husserl but rather in interpretative texts by later writers: see Marc Redfield, “Derrida, Europe, Today,”South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 2 (2007), 378. 11 Maharaj, “Philosophical Geographies,” 282. Without denying that much of Husserl’s 1935 lecture contained problematic references to other cultures and to what nowadays would be called the Other, it is important to recall the context in which he was speaking. No longer allowed to speak in public under the Nazi dictatorship in Germany or to teach, Husserl offered in Vienna a passionate defense of the then gravely threatened European “philosophical man” and described what today would be called his core cultural characteristics. One of these characteristics is the “peculiar universality of his critical stance, his resolve not to accept unquestioningly any pregiven opinion or tradition so that he can enquire, in respect to the whole traditionally pregiven universe, after what is true in itself.” This “universal critical attitude toward anything and everything pregiven in the tradition,” Husserl insisted, “is not inhibited in its spread by any national boundaries.” Translations by David Carr in Edmund Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, June 1970), 286 and 288. 12 Conversation at the Irish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Friday, June 5, 2009. In 1935 Husserl declared that the spiritual gestalt of Europe should not be “understood geographically as on a map.” Translation by Carr in Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 273. 13 Conversation at the Irish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Friday, June 5, 2009. 14 Ibid. 15 In this regard Charles Esche also suggested that museums, especially those with global aspirations, reflect on their own locations, their colonialist aspirations, and the displacement of objects from one place to another in the building of their collections. 16 “After post-colonialism, history is in the future. As long as we eradicate metaphysical pathos, we will no longer care about who we used to be, only who we will be. . . . We cannot and need not return.” Gao Shiming,” Observations and Presentiments after Post-colonialism,” in Farewell to Post- Colonialism: The Third Guangzhou Triennial (Guangdong: Guangdong Museum of Art, , 2008), 37. 17 Formerly known as the Italian Pavilion. 18 A record number of seventy-seven participating countries and forty-four Collateral Events were included in the 2009 Venice Biennale; see http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/, accessed July 2009. 19 “The Spanish Constitution of 1978 declares that Spain is an indissoluble nation that recognizes and guarantees the right to self-government of the nationalities and regions that constitute it. Catalonia, alongside Basque Country and Galicia, was set apart from the rest of Spain as a Historical nationality and given the ability to accede to autonomy automatically, which resulted in the 1979 Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalonia, accessed July 2009. 20 See http://www.labiennale.org/en/biennale/history/, accessed July 2009. 21 Geschichte des Deutschen Pavillons (history of the German Pavilion), http://www.deutscher-pavillon. org/history.htm, accessed July 2009. The Munich Secession was founded in 1892, followed by the Vienna Secession in 1897 and the Berlin Secession in 1898. The highly influential 1. International Exhibition of the Munich Secession took place for the first time in 1893. 22 See http://www.deutscher-pavillon.org/english/home.htm, accessed July 2009. 23 Dorothee Müller, “Kinderschänder im Kunstverein—Frauen und Chinesen: Harald Szeemann hat bei der Biennale in Venedig neue Akzente gesetzt,” Süddeutsche Zeitung no. 132 (June 12/13, 1999), 17. 24 Carol Vogel, “At the Venice Biennale, Art Is Turning Into an Interactive Sport,” New York Times, June 14, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/14/arts/at-the-venice-biennale-art-is-turning-into-an- interactive-sport.html?scp=1&sq=june 1999 venice biennale&st=cse&pagewanted=2, accessed July 2009. 25 Francesca Dal Lago, “Of Site and Space: The Virtual Reality of Chinese Contemporary Art,” Chinese Art 2, no. 4 (August/September 1999), http://www.chinese-art.com/Contemporary/volume2issue4/ Feature/feature.htm, accessed July 2009. 26 See Vera V. Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, “Conception of Terrestrial Organization in the Shan Hai Jing,” Bulletin de l’Ecole francaise d’Extrême-Orient, 82, no. 82, (1995), 57–110. 27 Denys Zacharopoulos, Hou Hanru, “France: Jean Pierre Bertrand/Huang Yong Ping,” 48a Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte: dAPERTutto (Venice: La Biennale di Venezia and Marsilio, 1999), 46.

26 28 Maharaj, “Philosophical Geographies,” 282. 29 Translation by Carr in Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 286 and 288. 30 Dal Lago, “Of Site and Space.” 31 Ibid. 32 http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/history/premi.html?back=true, accessed July 2009. 33 The installation commissioned by the 48th Venice Biennale consisted of “108 life-sized sculptures created on site by Long Xu Li and nine guest artisan sculptors, 60 tons of clay, wire and wood armature, and other props and tools for sculpture, four spinning night lamps, facsimiles photocopies of documents and photographs related to Rent Collection Courtyard (dated 1965)”; see Cai Guo- Qiang, “Project No. 33: Installation,”http://www.caiguoqiang.com/project_detail.php?id=33&iid=0, accessed July 2009. 34 See Britta Erickson, “Cai Guo-Qiang takes ‘The Rent Collection Courtyard’ from Cultural Revolution Model Sculpture to Winner of the 48th Venice Biennale International Award,” Chinese Art 2, no. 4 (August/September 1999), http://www.chinese-art.com/Contemporary/volume2issue4/Other/other2. htm, accessed July 2009. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Dal Lago, “Of Site and Space.” 38 See “On Being a Conscientious Collector: Zhang Rui in Conversation with Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker” and “Gaining Happiness Through Collecting: Yang Bin in Conversation with Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 7, no. 8 (November 2008), 38–49. 39 Dal Lago, “Of Site and Space.” 40 Gao Shiming, “A Be-Coming Future,” 32. 41 See Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, “Post-West: Guangzhou Triennial, Taipei Biennale, and Singapore Biennale,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, no. 1 (January/February 2009), 16–29. 42 Gao Shiming, “A Be-Coming Future,”36. 43 In July 1901 Prince Chun travelled to Germany to extend the regrets of the emperor of China for the murder of the German ambassador Baron von Ketteler during the Boxer Uprising. See http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaifeng, July 2009. 44 Isaac Taylor Headland, Court Life in China: The Capital, Its Officials and People (New York: F. H. Revell, 1909), 109, http://www.romanization.com/books/courtlifeinchina/chap11.html, accessed July 2009. 45 Lu Hao, “See a World in a Grain of Sand,” Theme of Chinese Pavilion EN, May 2009, press kit, China Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009. 46 Ibid. 47 Press release, Chinese Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennial, What Is To Come (Jian Wei Zhi Zhu 见微知著), June 5, 2009. 48 Monica Dematté, “Chinese art . . . It’s dAPERTutto!,” Chinese Art 2, no. 4 (August/September 1999), http://www.chinese-art.com/Contemporary/volume2issue4/Post89/post89.htm, accessed July 2009. 49 Lu Hao, “See a World in a Grain of Sand.” 50 “In one section of the exhibition, called Passage to the East, in the grounds of the Giardini, the works of the Gutai Group, the Lettrist Group, and Yoko Ono were displayed alongside those of Shigeko Kubuta and a selection of new Chinese artists (mostly painters) that included Xu Bing, Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Yu Hong, Feng Mengbo, Wang Guangyi, Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Yu Youhan, Ding Yi, Wang Ziwei, Li Shan, Sun Liang, and Sung Haidong.” Peter Hill, True Lies and Superfictions, report no.7, School of Creative Arts Research Seminar Series 2004, University of Melbourne, Australia; see http://www.sca.unimelb.edu.au/research/seminar_papers/, accessed July 2009. See also Marcia E. Vetrocq, “Identity crisis: 1993 Venice Biennale art exhibition, Italy,” Art in America, September 1993, 5; see http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n9_v81/ai_14406755/pg_5/, accessed July 2009. 51 What Is to Come, exhibition handout. 52 Lu Hao, “How I Choose Artists,” press kit, China Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009. 53 What Is to Come, exhibition handout. 54 Ibid. In the press materials for the pavilion, Zeng Fanzhi’s work is also titled Alteration Plan: Transforming the Oil Depot into a Book Shelf. 55 The English translation of Lu Hao’s text provided in the press kit reads: “Zeng Fanzhi first tries to find books on Western-Eastern cultural classes in the social, economic and cultural arenas before breaking them down into fragments.” 56 Lu Hao and Zeng Fanzhi Q & A, press kit, China Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009. 57 Lu Hao placed He Jinwei’s work in the category Resuscitation of Humanitarian Concern. 58 Lu Hao and He Jinwei Q & A. 59 Ibid. 60 Lu Hao, “How I Choose Artists.” 61 Winnie Wong, What People Are Saying, http://www.liudingstore.com/, June 1, 2009. 62 See www.liudingstore.com. 63 Ibid. 64 Katherine Don, “China Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale,” RedBox Review, June 9, 2009 (http:// review.redboxstudio.cn/2009/06/china-pavilion-at-the-53rd-venice-biennale/, accessed July 2009. 65 “Art attack: Inside the weird and wonderful world of the Venice Biennale,” Independent, Friday, June 5, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/art-attack-inside-the-weird- and-wonderful-world-of-the-venice-biennale-1696893.html, accessed July 2009. 66 Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 2, no. 3 (September 2003), 51. 67 Lu Hao, “How I Choose Artists.”

27 68 Ma Fung-kwok, “Message from the Commissioner,” Artist from Hong Kong: Making (Perfect) World (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Development Council, 2009), 4–5. 69 See http://www.venicebiennale.hk/vb2007/exhibition_curator.php, accessed July 2009. 70 The artistic director of the 53rd Venice Biennale, Daniel Birnbaum, adapted the title from Ways of Worldmaking (1978) by the American philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906–98). 71 All quotations are from Pak Sheung Chuen, “Initial Concepts for Making (Perfect) World,” Artist from Hong Kong: Making (Perfect) World (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Development Council, 2009), 25. 72 Ibid., 25. 73 Artwork list, handout, Hong Kong Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009. 74 Pak Sheung-chuen, Visual/Textual City ODD ONE IN II: Invisible Travel (Hong Kong: MCCM Creations and Para/Site Art Space, June 2009), 137. 75 Ibid., 222. 76 Divergence: Exhibits from Macau, China: Collateral Event of the 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, press release, Arte Communications, June 2009, http://www. artecommunications.com/index.php/en/component/content/article/1370-esposizioni-e-mostre-2009- macao-53-esposizione-internazionale-darte, accessed July 2009. 77 Divergence: Macau’s Proposed Artworks for the 53rd Venice Biennale, eds., Terence Hun Kuong U and Isabel Carvalho (Macau, Museu de Arte de Macau, 2009), 28. 78 Ibid., 25. 79 “Macau Interview: Gigi Lee Yee-kee,” Air Macau Magazine, June 1, 2009, http://www. airmacaumagazine.com/2009/06/01/macau-incoming-8/, accessed July 2009. 80 Interview with the author, June 5, 2009. 81 Fang-Wei Chang, interview with the author, June 3, 2009. 82 Ibid. 83 Cheng-Ta Yu, artist’s statement, Foreign Affairs: Artists from Taiwan (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan, 2009), 109. 84 Cheng-Ta Yu, interview with the author, June 3, 2009. 85 Chen Chieh-Jen, artist’s statement, Foreign Affairs, 60. 86 Ibid., 59. 87 Ibid., 82. 88 Hsieh Ying-Chun, artist’s statement, Foreign Affairs, 29. 89 “Official Awards of the 53rd International Art Exhibition,” La Biennale di Venezia, June 6, 2009, http://www.labiennale.org/en/news/awards-n.html?back=true, accessed July 2009. 90 Tang Fu Kuen, “Notes from the Curator,” Ming Wong: Life of Imitation, Singapore Pavilion (Singapore: National Arts Council, 2009), 9. The catalogue also contains essays by Hu Fang, Benjamin Mckay, Sherman Ong, Ben Slater, Russell Storer, Wong Han Min, and the curator, as well as an interview with the artist by Suzanne Prinz. 91 Ibid., 10. 92 Ibid., 10. 93 Suzanne Prinz, “Interview with Ming Wong,” Ming Wong: Life of Imitation, 52. 94 “Fiona Tan, Interview with Orsola Miletti,” 65. 95 Thomas Elsaesser, “Fiona Tan: Place after Place,” Fiona Tan: Disorient, Dutch Pavilion, 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia (Amsterdam: Mondriaan Foundation, June 2009), Section 2, 30. 96 Press release, Fiona Tan: Disorient, Dutch Pavilion, 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. 97 Florian Matzner, “Kunstwerk des Monats im Juni 1994: Nam June Paik,“ Landesmuseum Münster. http://www.lwl.org/LWL/Kultur/WLMKuK/ausstellungen/kdm/kdm_archiv/moderne/1993_1998/1994_ 06/index2_html, accessed July 2009. 98 Britta Erickson, “Cai Guo-Qiang takes ‘The Rent Collection Courtyard’ from Cultural Revolution Model Sculpture to Winner of the 48th Venice Biennale International Award.” 99 “Investigation of a Journey to the West by Micro + Polo”, Hong Kong Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale, 2005, http://www.venicebiennale.hk/vb2005/eng/index.htm, accessed July 2009. 100 A Collateral Event co-organized by the Venice International University; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Shanghai; and InCART (Institutions of Chinart), A Gift to Marco Polo was curated by the renowned critics Lu Peng and Achille Bonito Oliva and took place in the historic buildings of the University on the island of San Servolo. 101 Qi Baishi (1864–1957), Xu Beihong (1895–1953), and Zhang Daqian (1899–1983) were important early twentieth-century Chinese painters. 102 Lu Peng and Achille Bonito Oliva, eds., “Yue Minjun,” A Gift to Marco Polo, (Venice: Marsilio, 2009), 70.

28 Gao Shiming A Be-Coming Future: The Unweaving and Rebuilding of the Local

1. At the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, the London city government used a sightseeing bus filled with people of different nationalities and ethnicities to present a multicultural spectacle to the world, a gesture that attempted to depict peaceful co-existence among diverse nationalities and cultures. Yet the notion of a harmonious postcolonial world is to be found not only in the post-imperialist West, but also in supposedly de-colonized non-Western societies. The greatest benefit of this notion is that it prompts a continuous questioning of centuries of exclusionist policies and conventions in the West and the desire for a heterogeneous, tolerant, pluralistic, and open society. In the postcolonial West, policies of multiculturalism have been aimed at guaranteeing an open, vital, civil society and a new West that would emphasize tolerance and diversity. But is it really time to celebrate the victory of this utopian ideal and of postcolonialism?

Postcolonialism has earned a place in the enclosed and dominant worldview history of nation-states. It has been integrated with various social movements in the past forty years and cleared new critical and narrative ground. Its merits are obvious in literature, the arts, and politics. However, these merits have quickly degenerated to one of routine within the last twenty years. We often see and hear symbolic forms of cultural critique in various international exhibitions and symposiums labeled with key terms such as: “identity,” “the Other,” “translation,” “immigrant,” “migration,” “indigenous,” “difference,” “diversity,” “hegemony,” “marginalization,” “minority,” “oppression,” “visible/invisible,” “class,” “sex,” and so forth. Today, given the existing postcolonial toolkit, these concepts and ideas that once possessed revolutionary critical force have assumed another dominant form of discourse, this time, in the name of “political correctness.” The formerly deconstructive and anti-hegemonic critical strategy is setting up its regime, a “regime of the Others,” within academia. For over a decade, postcolonialism has become an aggregate of theoretical criticism and strategy, a catchall field of a “politics of discourse.” What this politics of discourse has created is a society formally free to realize a society that praises difference, but that cannot create difference itself.

Multiculturalism and political correctness, in essence, allows every one the right to safeguard him- or herself, and that every one should tolerate all others. However, once politicized and transformed into an ideology, diversity and tolerance can quickly degrade to cultural relativism, or even cynicism, thus constituting the emasculation of the cultural ideal. Politics and capital will quickly occupy territory upon the retreat of value judgment, forming the hegemony of managers and the tyranny of Others. Unfortunately, it is

29 only the combination of power and self-interest that sustains the industry of major international art exhibitions, endlessly creating the typological stars of multiculturalism and the “post-colonial subject.”

Multiculturalism no longer seems to be a threatening and dangerous “virus,” but, rather, a “vaccine” that has helped a still-powerful organism called “the West” develop “antibodies.” Indeed, through the apparent pursuit of this ideal of harmonious co-existence among an increasingly diverse citizenship, a newer, upgraded “post-West” version of multiculturalism has emerged. In this version, the ideals of postcolonialism and multiculturalism have been skillfully transformed through propagandistic strategies in order to manage difference, while concepts of identity, hybridity, and diversity have gradually evolved into lofty-sounding, but increasingly hollow, political statements.

On the one hand, in contemporary everyday life in the West, coexistence with difference or the Other is now inevitable. On a social or existential level, diversity is a fact of life. On the other hand, the ideology of multiculturalism has also been embraced by global capitalism, which has transformed it in order to safeguard and develop multinational interests. As a result, a “multicultural management mechanism” has replaced critical multiculturalism, and the negotiation of difference has resulted in a new policy of domination. Calls for diversity, tolerance, and for letting the Other speak in the halls of government have become tools of political propaganda as well as of a new ideology of global capital. The task of the artist exposing the complexities and contradictions of this political predicament is significant once again.

However, in the last forty years, politics has been transformed into politics of discourse, which is an assembler of identity politics, representation politics, and translation politics. In the realm of politics, art is an agent of control and, in the realm of art, politics become a prosthesis of significance. A prosthesis implies some sort of handicap. What is the apparent handicap within contemporary art that requires a prosthesis? Can the artist’s critique of society and history be effectively applied in the real political world? Or is artistic discourse and action (handicapped or not) doomed to remain outside the realm of politics?

Today, when multiculturalism has witnessed a transformation from critical enlightenment to a politics of control and management, can we still talk about creativity, discourse among equals, and the voice of the Other? In an age of value negotiation, in the condition of multi-vocal modernity, and a non-linear historical view, can we still speak about the future?

Today, what is important is not the definition of “here” and “now” within a dualist paradigm of the global and the local. What is imperative is to develop a long-term historical vision and to approach our different pasts and our collective futures. What kind of society is possible if we abandon the national state and the temporal world view that structures the modern world? In the struggle between global capitalism and the aspirations and doctrines of an ideal, multicultural society constructed on the premises of inclusion and equality, have we lost an emerging world? Has the Other, who once signaled the crossing of known boundaries, the transcendence of the living space and the realm of the imagination, been institutionalized, and lost his or her identifying characteristics and become homogenized?

30 How do we talk about the forthcoming “order” without relapsing into the language of imperialism or tribalism? Can we reconstruct our history, plan an open future, and create a diverse and undetermined pact with the present by going beyond the cultural mechanism of nation and country?

II. Over the past twenty years, two influential discourses in international academic circles—multiculturalism and “the clash of civilizations”—have conjured up different pictures of the world. On one side, some discussions around multiculturalism attempted to represent a positive statement about the postcolonial global village; on the other side, the theorists of “the clash of civilizations,” led by the American political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927–2008), revealed new global tensions of ideas, values, and beliefs after the end of the Cold War. At the forefront of intellectual discourse today, we can find clear arguments that counter these two discourses. Regarding the former, the Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Zizek (b. 1949) questions whether it is multiculturalism or the cultural logic of transnational capitalism. Regarding the latter, the Vietnamese American artist Trinh T. Minh-ha (b. 1952) has shown us the first world in the third world, and a third in the first. In the face of the current global financial crisis, the discourses of Zizek and Trinh T. Minh-ha are especially significant. Within what framework should we discuss the present world—this pluralistic global-local conglomerate—carrying as it does the collective fate of mankind? 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.

The Turkish Sinologist Atif Dirlik (b. 1940) has explored an important antinomy in the globalization process of the capitalist market that exists between cultural homogenization and heterogenization. He points out that whether the world develops towards homogenization or heterogenization depends on which aspect we look at, and what sort of meaning we assign to what we see. This is because homogenization and heterogenization not only take place with the progression of the logic of the economy and race, but also as a consequence of the development of culture that grasps and manipulates difference. Dirlik’s discussion of homogenization and heterogenization implies an anxiety about the modes of production of globalized culture. Complex cultural integration is taking place everywhere in the modern world and is known as “cultural hybridity” in the jargon of contemporary cultural studies. Hybridity is not the same as the theory of “cultural integration” that was highly influential in twentieth century China. As a concept within cultural criticism, hybridity eliminates the tension and conflict between identification and difference and between homogenization and heterogenization, as though all intricate contradictions and differences are recognized. But the question is, does cultural hybridity suggest the possibility of a new mode of cultural production? The concept of hybridity is so general as to be superficial, and does not resolve the question of what constitutes cultural homogenization-heterogenization, but, instead, seems only to sidestep and eliminate it. One might say that hybridity is becoming a synonym for a confused, abstract, mixed notion of culture that is not bound by values. More importantly, hybridity no longer signals the production

31 and negotiation of difference, but, rather, is a rough generalized describing on a present situation. As such, it disguises dialogue and struggles between different cultures in the global-local context; it deflects the possibility of cultural production in the global flow of symbols, forms, and ideas.

We must confront the far more complex and mobile state of cultural production in the global-local context. Here, what we should consider is no longer hybridity and “creolization,” but re-signification in the interaction between global and local. In this process of re-signification and cultural recoding, the issue of homogenization-heterogenization becomes part of the production process of global capitalism, and is no longer just an introspective postcolonial self-imagination.

III. James Cantalupo (1943–2004), the former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of McDonald’s Corporation, once said: “It is the aim of McDonald’s to become a part of local culture as much as possible. . . . People call us ‘multinational.’ I prefer to call ourselves ‘multi-local’.”1 Cantalupo’s remarks clearly point out the multi-local character of today’s capital, which is totally different from what we usually call international. In contemporary life, international has little to do with the Internationale anthem and its revolutionary ideals of liberating all mankind, where, in China, its sentiment is still manifested as a concept and desire of current development. From Shenzhen’s Window of the World amusement theme park to Yiwu’s international small commodity market, from the contrasting sights on either side of the river at the Shanghai Bund to the theme song of the Beijing Olympics that promotes “One World, One Dream,” the idea of the “international” is manifested in different ways in contemporary Chinese society. Cantalupo’s reference to the multi-local implies more than just transnational capitalism in the post-Cold War era with its hegemonic overtones. Indeed, transnational is often the subtext of “international,” presaging the capitalist cultural strategy of localization in the process of globalization.

This cultural strategy is applied within a post-international context or the complex interaction between global and local. In a canonical “international space” such as an international airport, we see identical multinational brands, unique local specialties, and travelers with suspended identities. Here, there are clear distinctions between homogeneous and heterogeneous, between international and national. But in the post-international context, everything is ambiguous. Nationalism can be a feature of the cultural policy of a nation or the cultural marketing strategy of multinational capital. By re-packaging themselves with local cultural elements, multinational enterprises redefine the cultural character of their products. This strategy greatly enhances the ability of capital and consumption to penetrate into quite diverse local societies. In this process of localization, global capital reinvents itself and becomes multi-local.

Globalization not only creates sameness, it also creates divisions. Over the past few decades, production of difference has been a core concern of intellectuals. But today, the most important differences of time, space, and society are realized by the production and consumption of global capitalism.

32 IV. A few months ago, the Hollywood animation film Kung Fu Panda became a worldwide hit and had an especially enthusiastic reception in China. Its American director, John Stevenson, remarked that the film was a tribute to Chinese culture, a “love letter written to China.” Indeed, the movie abounds with typical Chinese elements from the panda to martial arts, landscape to architecture, Chinese characters to firecrackers, chopsticks to noodles. In its soundtrack with a distinct Chinese flavour, scored by the Hollywood-based German composer Hans Zimmer (b. 1957) and the British composer John Powell (b. 1963), and in its use of Chinese terms such as shifu (master), we can feel the sincerity of this “tribute.” However, this “love letter written to China” is a hybrid of Chinese vocabulary and Hollywood syntax.

From the much criticized Mulan2 to the acclaimed Kung Fu Panda today, Hollywood has apparently deepened its understanding of China. This is shown not only in the more accurate use of cultural signs, but also in the creation of authentic Chinese settings and mood. More important, unlike Mulan, Kung Fu Panda does not simply employ a Chinese story and Chinese symbols, but it also borrows heavily from the camera style and forms of Chinese film, especially Hong Kong action cinema. Those familiar with Hong Kong films can easily detect the influence of actors Jackie Chan (b. 1954) and Stephen Chow (b. 1962) in the film. It is said that the two characters K. G. Shaw and J. R. Shaw are the director’s tribute to the Shaw Brothers, the largest producers of Hong Kong kung fu movies in the 1970s. An Internet article reveals how Kung Fu Panda drew on the conventions of Hong Kong film:

From the director’s interview, we know that the scene where Shifu gives the giant panda Po training in martial arts through the game of snatching buns was borrowed from a Jackie Chan film. Rather nervously, they asked Jackie Chan to come and see it and he was full of praise for it. Actually, Po the panda is based entirely on Jackie Chan—with his lively facial expression, exaggerated body language, humorous martial arts moves and acrobatic jumps. Po is given all the martial arts skills of Jackie Chan, who was also asked to dub the role of Monkey. The way Po falls clumsily to the ground is just like a trademark Stephen Chow move. Even in the final duel, we can see Chow’s famous trick of stepping on the opponent’s toes. Kung Fu Panda also takes inspiration from Ang Lee. In the opening scene, the panda, wearing a cape and a bamboo hat shielding his eyes, walks into a little shop, orders a bottle of wine and then starts a fight with a few challengers. . . . This familiar scene is taken from the inn scene with Jen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In terms of the presentation of martial arts, the trick of standing on a tree branch and flying through the air doing the splits is Chinese kung fu Americans learned from Ang Lee in Crouching Tiger.3

But no matter how much we emphasize the Chinese influence on Kung Fu Panda, the fact remains that China is still an object that is being described in the film, a typical example of representation of the Other. For Hollywood, telling the story of the Other does not involve only the question of who has the power of discourse—it is also a lucrative business. In China, the film

33 grossed over ten million renminbi, its highest box office revenue worldwide. The overwhelmingly positive reception by Chinese audiences was not a result just of the Chinese subject matter, but of a sense of familiarity brought about by Hollywood’s emulation of Hong Kong cinema. At the same time, we should not forget that Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow have been heavily influenced by Hollywood. Hollywood copies Hong Kong cinema, which used to copy Hollywood, and sells the Hollywood version of a Chinese story back to China. With this reciprocal copying and consumption, the issue of what is typical or characteristic has become rather complicated. The cultural logic of Kung Fu Panda is: I follow what you’ve followed from me, and you consume what I’ve consumed from you.

The cultural logic of global capital is to identify with various “local” cultural environments. Such localization can change its mode of operation, but it will never give up its power as subject. Despite the vast number of Chinese elements, the spiritual core of Kung Fu Panda is still American. Po the panda is actually a street-dancing American youth—fat and free with a Hip-Hop spirit. The story of the panda learning martial arts is really an old-fashioned Hollywood tale whereby an ordinary youth defeats the monster, saves the world, and thereby proves himself. It has nothing to do with the Chinese martial arts spirit that stresses “crying out against justice and avoiding the use of force as far as possible.”4

The box-office success ofKung Fu Panda has provoked much discussion in China. Some observers argue that it promotes Chinese culture and is “more Chinese than the Chinese,” while others call its representation of Chinese culture superficial and “another cultural and capitalist invasion.”5 But today, we can no longer judge cultural production and consumption simply from a nationalist or traditionalist standpoint. Whether we consider identification or difference, identity politics or symbol economy, internationalization or nationalism, they have all been assimilated into the marketing strategies of global capital in various local markets. Can we say that the Chinese elements in Kung Fu Panda, the localization strategy of McDonald’s, and the cultural codes of Chinese contemporary art follow the same logic? What is the difference between cultural and economic nationalism and putting a local brand on global products? It is hard to differentiate between the recoding of cultural meaning and the manipulation of meaning in the marketing of goods. What is global and what is local? This is now the major question. The relationship between cultural resignification of the local, nationalism, and the localization marketing strategy of global capital, is equally complex and difficult to determine.

In the 1950s, the renowned Sinologist Joseph Levenson (1920–69) refers to how the West has changed China’s language, while China has expanded the Western vocabulary. Half a century later, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944) laments that China has changed the world, but does so without a blueprint. The remarks of Levenson and Koolhaas represent two different Western views of China during different periods. However, in the face of the present global flow of symbols and capital-cultural production, these two views of China are too simple. Kung Fu Panda has created a new global fashion of chinoiserie. It is said that Hollywood versions of The Tale of the White Serpent, Journey to the West, and Dream of the Red Chamber will be made in the next few years. As long as the Chinese economy continues to boom, this vogue will continue. But this new vogue in China for things Chinese is very different from the passion for

34 chinoiserie popular in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Its site of consumption is first of all in Chinese territory, and its production mechanism is also far more complex, involving, as it does, continued reciprocal copying and consumption.

V. In a 1983 article, the Italian author Italo Calvino (b. 1923) reminded us that in the Odyssey, the story of Odysseus’s journey home already exists before the protagonist’s return.6 That is to say, the story precedes the events that it narrates. One needs to find, remember, and think about the journey home, since there is a real danger that the return journey may have been forgotten before it even takes place. To trace the return journey, one cannot rely on simple memory alone. Memory matters only when it has condensed past traces and future plans. The return journey must be planned and repeatedly told. This telling is not a review of the past but a preview of the future. Thus, the return journey becomes the exit from the labyrinth that is reality—both the point of departure and the way out.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus’s faithful wife is an important character. Her name, Penelope, means “web” or “wool” in Greek. To fend off her many odious suitors, this faithful and clever wife devised the trick of weaving a burial shroud by day and undoing it by night. This is not the decisive stratagem suggested by Odysseus to end waiting (the Trojan Horse ended the stalemate in the Trojan War), but a strategy to buy time for the sake of waiting. In the Odyssey, Penelope is a metaphor for the native land and home. If Odysseus’s fate is to become lost on his return and to make discoveries during this return, Penelope’s is that of waiting and of deconstructing and reconstructing while waiting.

In the end, Penelope decides that whoever can string Odysseus’s bow will be her husband. This is the real moment of reconstruction and choice- making. The criterion of reconstruction depends on the rigid bow that only Odysseus can string. This is the moment when Penelope becomes an executor of fate, and Odysseus can finally move from being a wanderer, and a stranger, to become the returning hero. The return also signifies rebuilding and proving the self. At this moment, Penelope’s reconstruction of the native land merges with Odysseus’ rebuilding of the self.

VI. With respect to the issue of contemporary Chinese culture, the key to the reconstruction of the “local subject” is whether the “local narrative” is “about” China or “from” China.

We may believe that we are starting with the local, but this local does not consist of an existing base. Instead, it too is still in the process of deconstruction and reconstruction, departing and arriving. Reconstruction of the local subject implies the construction of the subject’s introspective space. Here, discourse finds its base, and a local perspective is established. With the establishment of a local perspective, the coding of the tension between Chinese and contemporary changes. In the contemporary local context, the interpretative anxiety and the question of the legitimacy of “Chinese contemporary art” can be substituted for by a question about the creation of “contemporary Chinese art.” From this perspective, we will find that “contemporary Chinese art” has a more diverse, complex, and profound meaning than “Chinese contemporary art.”

35 The point is not whether China is the Other in modernity. The question is whether, despite the huge success of “Chinese contemporary art” in the international arena and the capitalist market over the past twenty years, it appears that Chinese contemporary art was merely successful as an alternative modernity, as a local version of contemporary art. Its success was the result of identity politics and the playing of the “China card.” Today, we are above celebrating the success of this cultural-political strategy. We are no longer satisfied with fighting for space and rank within the globalized edifice in the name of the Other and in the name of fairness. Now, we are considering building a new home, a different system, a historic site for cultural creation and for subject renewal. It is the site of contemporary Chinese art. However, till today, we still lack an in-depth understanding of contemporary Chinese art. We even lack the basic discourse and framework for understanding the operative modality of contemporary Chinese art.

Contemporary Chinese art is pluralistic, quite different from the empty designations of hybridity or multiculturalism, both of which have become little more than a propaganda strategy of global capitalism. Pluralistic Chinese art, contemporary Chinese art, retains an inner tension, and is an ambiguous mess given the total lack of exchange between Chinese painting and contemporary art and between academic painters and experimental artists. The question is whether we can create a meaningful dialogue between these different systems.

When we discuss the choices embedded in art within the complex Chinese context today, we should examine three areas: first, the institutional experience and the value of Chinese painting both in the academy and in the market; second, the status of contemporary cultural production in the mass media and the consumer context; third, the modernity of consultation in confronting the heritage of art history and ideas in the last century, and how to create our own meaning in the current environment of global production and the flow of signs, images, and meaning.

Contemporary Chinese art no longer refers to a cultural import, the cultural practice of an alternative modernity, or a local version and localized model of contemporary art that originates in the West. Moreover, we don’t need to worry about whether it is a Western form or a Chinese form, or how to define “national character” or “Chineseness.” Contemporary Chinese art is an unfinished project, a world of possibilities. By virtue of being about possibilities, contemporary Chinese art has nothing to do with any form of nationalism or fundamentalism.

Neither East, nor West, Neither South, nor North, Now, I am here.7

The poetry of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami (b. 1940) celebrates an awareness of the subject’s state of existence. The subject is not a given, a natural self. Instead, the self is established through continuous liberation and practice of freedom. At work in this open-ended self is not the enlightenment of the object but the enlightenment of the subject. Thus, the subject becomes self-renewing, rather than an agent in the field of ideological flow.

36 This is what the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–84) called “technologies of the self” or “topology of the subject,” an ethics of circumstance and related to the subject’s aesthetic of living. This is not a standardized system composed of values and rules, but an open system of various possibilities involving a new understanding of enlightenment. For Foucault, the ethics of enlightenment consists of two parts: the subject’s critique of reality and the subject’s self-reconstruction. It also implies a deconstruction and reconstruction of the cultural subject. In 2003, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo held an exhibition entitled China: Crossroads of Culture. With a large number of historical relics, this exhibition showed the remarkable tolerance and diversity of Tang China. It was a “global village” of the eighth century. The exhibition reminds us that “China” is a cultural subject represented in terms of “civilized rule,” a community of the imagination and an all-encompassing open subject. This calls for us to imagine the future in terms of the repeated deconstruction and reconstruction of the “local” and the “subject,” and to actively discover the things that are “coming” and “forthcoming.”

I recall the poet Xiao Kaiyu (b. 1960), an artist who took part in the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial in 2008. While on his way to Qinghai to research local customs, he spoke at length with various local Uighur and Tibetan poets and became intensely aware of the “inner frontier” of the native land. He wrote: “Ethnicity and fatherland is doomed by birth. It is an accident at first, then we get accustomed to it and identify it as destiny . . . . Don’t we belong to a nation not yet named? As I pass through city streets, wander around icebergs, deserts, beasts, and temples, reconciliation and dreams move naturally inside my body.”8

This text was originally written for the third platform of the project /GAM/ (Global Art and the Museum), which took place in May 2009 at Goethe-Institut Hong Kong with the title A New Geography of Art in the Making, and which was organized by ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Goethe-Institut Hong Kong in collaboration with Chinese University of Hong Kong, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies. It will be published in the forthcoming third /GAM/ volume in 2010.

Notes 1 Li Conghua, Revolution of Consumption, p138, (Beijing: Renmin University of China Press, 2007), 138. 2 Mulan (1998) is an animated feature film produced by Walt Disney Pictures. It is based on the legend of Hua Mulan . 3 “Why do we like Kung Fu Panda?,” From the blog of Xiao Yaochi, July 3, 2008. 4 In Chinese, Bu Ping Ze Ming, Zhi Ge Wei Wu. 5 “Why do we like Kung Fu Panda?,” From the blog of Xiao Yaochi, July 3, 2008. 6 Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? (New York: Pantheon, 1999), 21. 7 Abbas Kiarostami, With the Wind: Poems of Abbas Kiarostami (Beijing: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2006), 85. 8 Farewell to Post-colonialism: the Third Guangzhou Triennial, ed. Gao Shiming, Sarat Maharaj, and Johson Chang (Guangdong: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2008), 560.

37 Ryan Holmberg The Snake and the Duck: On Huang Yong Ping

“

lay sculpture is a term now used to describe an idea Isamu Huang Yong Ping, Tower Snake, 2009, aluminum, Noguchi began experimenting with in the late 1930s: to use the bamboo, steel, 660 x 1189 x 1128 cm. Courtesy of the artist modernist vocabulary of sculptural form within the context of and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, P New York. leisure, recreation, and purposeless play. Most of what he designed was for children’s playgrounds and included angular swing sets in primary colors, cubistic climbing blocks, and biomorphic landscaping. At the same time, a fair number of these projects, none of which were realized in full before the 1970s, have an atavistic subtext, from references to monuments of the ancient world to almost protozoan biological structures. As if to suggest that to play like a child is to reincarnate the most archaic forms of human civilization and the most primordial forms of life on earth.

The same conceit resonates strongly in Tower Snake (2009), the newest work by Huang Yong Ping. First exhibited at Gladstone Gallery in New York in the summer of 2009, Tower Snake can be seen as a kind of “play sculpture” that links interactive amusement to ultimately atavistic fantasies. As an object, it is as much a pavilion as a sculpture. It measures approximately six and a half meters high and twelve by eleven at its base, and is constructed of green and beige bamboo upon iron scaffolding. One ascends the tower upon a spiral walkway of bamboo slats that narrows toward the top before ending abruptly

38 Left: Isamu Noguchi, Slide Mantra, circa 1986, marble, 3.10 x 3.10 m. Photo: Shigeo Anzai. Courtesy of The Noguchi Museum, New York. Right: Huang Yong Ping, Tower Snake, 2009, aluminum, bamboo, steel, 660 x 1189 x 1128 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York. at a chained-off precipice above the tower’s centre. The entire walkway is roofed with an aluminum armature in the shape of a giant reptilian skeleton that is Jurassic in scale, the eponymous “snake” of the tower. Ascending the tower thus doubles as passage through the entrails of the beast. One enters through its rear, then traverses its guts, emerging at the tower’s pinnacle below the snake’s mouth before having to backtrack to exit. The walkway creaks for the entire climb and descent, and, for safety, a gallery attendant allows no more than three people on it at a time; missing and splintered flooring slats are there to confirm the hazard.Tower Snake is like an old amusement park ride; the effect is one of faux trepidation, like a rickety ruin threatening to collapse at any moment and swallow the traveler whole, or an ancient and neglected suspension bridge splintering and swaying (as Tower Snake does just a tiny bit) above a bottomless maw. One almost expects the roar of the beast to reverberate over-loudly through the gallery and strobe flashes of lightning to illuminate the chilling mountain climb. But Huang pulls back, keeping his sculpture of kitsch sublime at a rudimentary level of seemingly vulnerable materials and beastly iconography.

Tower Snake is essentially a “duck,” architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s famous epithet for a type of symbolic or iconic architecture, not necessarily zoomorphic, in which structure is subordinate to the signification of the building’s intended function. “The duck,” they wrote in their influential Learning from Las Vegas (1972), “is the special building that is a symbol . . . where the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form.”1 The name came from the Big Duck in Long Island, New York. Built in 1931, this giant, twenty-foot-high, white ferroconcrete duck was shaped as it was as an advertising gambit for the poultry store it housed, which specialized in duck and duck eggs. Tower Snake has a similar character. It is, first of all, an architectural folly: it can be entered but is not meant to be inhabited, and its restricted interior space and questionable structural integrity dictate limited if not mono-functionality. Its symbolic form is not, like the original Duck, for retail commerce, but still it functions as a kind of advertisement. A good advanced capitalist work, Tower Snake trades in images and experiences rather than material goods, and what it has on offer is a certain very conventional idea of China.

39 Much of Huang’s art deals with Daoism—not Daoism as a moral philosophy, but Daoism as an adaptation of earlier epistemological and ritual systems of divination and alchemy and populated with fantastic cosmological beasts.2 Most writers take Huang at his word and hold that his Daoist appropriations serve the dual purpose of cultural decentering vis-à-vis the West and finding Chinese vernacular analogues for historical and neo-avant-garde aesthetic strategies of chance and non-intentionality. But as Huang’s embattled Xiamen Dada years recede into distant history, and as he now basks in the wealth of international patronage, this position Big Duck, Long Island, New of oppositionality is really no longer tenable. Critic and curator Robin York. Laurence put it well in a review of Huang’s Oracle of Bones retrospective: “It is difficult to reconcile the monumentality, materiality, and spectacularity that have increasingly characterized his art with his stated determination to confound or refute the ego-driven Western myth of the artist.”3 Add to this the fact that his figuration of China has become more and more fossilized in cliché. It serves little as inquiry into Chinese thought or culture as a viable alternative to Western intellectual or aesthetic paradigms, and fully in the maintenance of an exotic national identity for the ends of ethnic self- marketing in a global art market. It is important to remember the occasion of Huang’s break into the Western art world: the Magiciens de la terre exhibition in Paris in 1989. This show, widely recognized as a watershed in global art exhibitions, has also been roundly criticized for its reinforcement of discredited stereotypes regarding the non-Western artist. “The discourse of Magiciens,” explained Okwui Enwezor in a roundtable for Artforum Intemational in 2003, “was still very much dependent on an opposition within the historical tendencies of modernism in Europe—namely, its antipathy to the ‘primitive’ and his functional objects of ritual, and, along with this process of dissociation of the ‘primitive’ from the modern, its attempt to construct exotic non-Western aesthetic systems on the margins of modernism.”4 I think Huang’s success can in large part be attributed to how well his work has fit into the shoes readied for the non-Western artist by European modernism. Not only does his work not problematize this primitivist discourse, but, since Magiciens, has reveled in it evermore.

Tower Snake is a strong case in point. Given the Daoist derivation of similar creatures in other works, one assumes the snake here should be understood in that context. Note how the structure resembles the legendary Dark Warrior (xuanwu), the Guardian of the North in traditional Daoist cosmology and a figure that appears elsewhere in Huang’s work. Though later rendered as human, the xuanwu was originally zoomorphic, a compound animal with a tortoise body and the head and tail of a snake, or, in other cases, a snake coiled upon the back of a tortoise. A green structure domed with a serpent, Tower Snake is not the first Huang work to make an architectural analogy out of the xuanwu. Take, for example, Theater of the World—The Bridge (1995), with its overlapping turtle and snake-shaped terrariums. In ancient Daoist thought, the configuration also represents the creation of the universe, suggesting an atavistic dimension to Huang’s “play sculpture,” though articulated in strongly nationalistic terms alien to Noguchi’s worldview.

The image of China offered here is patently essentialist. Huang is often upheld for his critique of the West and especially its colonial history, his

40 open engagement with cultural hybridity, and his promotion of religious ecumenicalism. But, with one or two exceptions, he turns no such political eye toward China, which is figured instead through Daoism as a place rooted in an archaic and magical past, with no imperial history, no historical discontinuities, and no cultural or ideological heterogeneities of its own. I think the structure of Tower Snake is designed to replicate these notions at the level of form, at least in a general way: it spirals up and then tapers off as if into infinity or the heavens—a typical symbolical conceit in sacred geometries or (more apposite) in old science fiction programs, where the psychedelic swirl of a worm hole transports the unsuspecting to a land before time. Tower Snake is thus a “duck” of an ideological kind. It is no doubt “a building that is a symbol.” The atavistic and essentialist notion of China that it symbolizes is not just supposed to be seen in its external iconography and spiral plan but also to be experienced bodily by traversing its interior. In this, it has much in common with a playground pavilion or a theme park ride.

The turn to “play sculpture” marks a departure for Huang, but its advent is fully continuous with his earlier work. It stems from his wide-ranging and longstanding investment in the amusement theme park and its historical antecedents. I think the case can be made that two different phases of Huang’s career—his early localization of the strategies of the avant-garde and his later adoption of a postcolonialist critical mode—were informed if not led by an interest in the history of amusement spectacles. The earliest such references are fast and loose. They involve popular amusement forms, particularly the roulette wheel, used in various works from the Xiamen Dada period (1986–89) and later and “inspired,” according to Hou Hanru, “by the Chinese fortune-telling tradition and gambling.”5 More specific references are tied to Huang’s engagement with nineteenth-century colonial and imperial history. This is clearest in 11 June 2002—The Nightmare of George V (2002), a modified recreation of a taxidermy configuration the artist saw at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. It consists of a tiger attacking an elephant-borne carriage emblazoned with the British Royal Coat of Arms. A simple statement of resentment against British colonialism in South Asia, the work is also intended as a comment on the role of exhibitionary techniques in the service of colonial power and self-representation. This work is a kind of post-colonialist “edutainment,” aimed most of all at pleasuring the liberal political persuasions of the art world and its expectations of “criticality” while taking care not to make too great a demand on viewer attention or intelligence. In other words, Huang makes postcolonialism—its trope of hybridization, its project of cultural decentering, and its anti-colonial and anti-imperial sentiments—fun, and to this end he has harnessed popular amusement and exhibitionary forms.

It is a sequence worth further consideration. First, in the late 1980s, commercial themed spaces began proliferating across China, beginning as the entertainment wing of neoliberalization in the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, and then into Beijing, other major urban centres, and numerous tourist sites, becoming a subject of global fascination in the middle part of the present decade. Second, from the mid 90s to the present, Chinese artists have been working in sculptural and installation modes that

41 Left: Huang Yong Ping, Large Turntable with Wheels, 1987, painted wood. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Huang Yong Ping, 11 June 2002—The Nightmare of George V, 2002. Courtesy of the artist.

increasingly resemble the structures one finds in themed spaces generally across the world or locally in China. With his historical theme rides, flying taxidermy, and pyrotechnic spectaculars, Cai Guo-Qiang is the indisputable champion of this mode. Of course, it is an international trend, applicable not just to Chinese artists, and it cannot be divorced from the museum and art fair preference for bombastic, easy-to-understand, space-filling work. Nonetheless, the strong predilection for amusement theme forms, particularly amongst leading Chinese artists, begs for explanation.

In the case of Huang, the main lesson learned from the modern theme park seems to be the theatrical power of miniaturization and monumentalization. As anyone who has been to a theme park knows, dwarfism and gigantism are basic operations, often working in tandem to imaginatively render the patron larger or smaller than the normal scale of human life. Monumental landforms can be shrunk to the size of an amusement ride, intercontinental geography can be condensed within a multi-hectare enclosure, and animals can be doubled or more in size to create pretend terror. For Huang, this scaling dynamic applies to a wide range of subject matter, including medicine flasks and historical buildings, as well as his favorite subject matter, the mythical Daoist bestiary. The Theater of the World—The Bridge (1995) is a clear example. In two terrariums—again, one shaped like an oversize serpent, the other like an oversize tortoise—live animals deemed propitious in Daoist mythology were pitted against one another in a death match that evokes not so much the intended existential and cosmic allegories as a Ray Harryhausen feature or a Japanese kaiju battle. Also relevant is Python (2000), a forty-metre- long wooden snake skeleton, its openwork structure and notch assembly resembling a giant version of those do-it-yourself dinosaur skeleton kits made of balsa wood and sold at museum gift shops and Chinatown novelty stores. Though later exhibited in gallery spaces, Python was first produced as a site-specific work for the German town of Hann Müden. Always ready to play the ethnic theming card, Huang noted how the town, surrounded by low mountains and fed by multiple waterways, had great feng shui, and in recognition of its auspiciousness offered a sculptural version of a Chinese aphorism: “Where there are high mountains and big lakes, dragons and snakes emerge.”6 But what the work resembles most of all—with its fang-

42 Left: Huang Yong Ping, filled jaws open, tongue flicking, crawling across the land, over a bridge, installation view of Python, 2000, and Theatre of and finally sliding into the town’s waters—is the animatronic terrors of the the World—The Bridge, 1993–95, Walker Art Center, amusement park jungle cruise and darkride. Like the bamboo Tower Snake, Minneapolis. Courtesy of Walker Art Center, Python uses woodcraft and Chinese culture to mask its essential relation Minneapolis. to the entertainment industry. It could just as well be a Chinese Godzilla Right: Huang Yong Ping, Theatre of the World—The readying to gobble up a small European town. Bridge, 1993–95, metal, wood, insects, reptiles. Collection of Peter Huber, on long-term loan to Musée d’art contemporain Chinese theme parks are numerous in kind. Best known, however, de Lyon. and offering the most for the plastic artist is the miniature park. It is an amusement form most intimately associated with post-Mao neoliberalization in Chinese consumer leisure culture.7 First was Splendid China, which opened in Shenzhen in 1989. It features miniature replicas of the Central Kingdom’s grandest monuments: the Great Wall, the Temple of Heaven, Potala Palace, and so on. In 1993, Beijing World Park opened. Like Splendid China, it is a miniature park, but this time of the world’s natural and architectural wonders, amongst them the pyramids of Giza, the Roman Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Niagara Falls, and the Manhattan skyline. In 1995, a similar park named Window of the World opened in Shenzhen, and others followed elsewhere in China. Though not in all cases resembling those at such commercial parks, miniaturized monuments appear with considerable frequency in Huang’s work. There is Two Typhoons (2002), two four-metre-high towers shaped like the spiraling minaret at Samarra and made out of paper. The towers resemble two enlarged unfurling woodblock-printed scrolls, one with a Buddhist text in Sanskrit and the other a Qu’ranic text in Arabic. Similar in theme is (543- 622) (2000), consisting of a wood model, a meter and a half in height, of the French Baroque Chapelle de la Salpêtrière set upon an Islamic prayer rug and installed with a small Tibetan prayer wheel. I cannot help but think again of Venturi and Scott Brown. As a perfect example of the “duck” within pre-modern religious architecture, the architects cite the Byzantine-era Little Mitropoli in Athens, which like Huang’s Salpêtrière Chapel miniature is an undersized church (7.62 metres in length by 12.1 metres wide) on a Greek cross plan, “evolved structurally from large buildings in greater cities, but developed symbolically here to mean cathedral.”8 Miniaturization, in other words, reduces a building to a sign of itself in its most general ideological aspect—a useful feature for an allegorical artist like Huang in need of clear and compact cultural symbols.

43 Huang Yong Ping, Two Typhoons, 2002, paper, ink. Courtesy of the artist.

Huang Yong Ping, Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank, 2002/2005. Collection of Guang Yi, Beijing. Courtesy of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Different in theme from these religious examples is Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank (2000/05), a miniature version of the famous HSBC Building in the Shanghai Bund, an icon of British colonial power in China. Huang’s version was three and a half metres high, made of sand (with a dash of cement), and was allowed to crumble over the course of its exhibition. 1/4 Hoover Tower

44 Huang Yong Ping, 1/4 Hoover Tower, 2005, wood, plastic sheeting, 7 x 2.8 x 2.8 cm. Installed at Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University. Courtesy of the artist.

(2005) is a schematic representation of the tower at the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. It is built out of two- by-fours and red-, white-, and blue-striped tarp. Stenciled onto the walls of its interior are phrases implicating American international aid as a facet of imperialism. Huang’s use of miniature buildings for anti-imperial allegories culminates in Colosseum and Pentagon, both from 2007 and included in his previous exhibition at Gladstone. These half- to two-and-a-half-metre-high buildings are constructed of terracotta blocks that have been fired to look badly weathered and assembled with gaps to read as structural fissures. The blocks double as planters for saplings and other green leafy flora, as if the civilizations that erected and maintained these structures have long since passed, their monuments ceded to entropy and a slow return to nature. This allegorical register points to a basic difference between Huang and his miniature theme park models: while the commercial park aims at timelessness, the representation of a monument in frozen ideality, Huang often figures its physical or moral demise.

If they were assembled, Huang’s miniaturized monuments would form a theme park of the ruin of empires, but a very selective one. In striking contrast to Huang’s numerous anti-monuments to Roman, British, and American Empire is the absence of a comparable intervention into the long and ongoing history of Chinese imperialism, territorial disputes, and

45 ethnic conflict. For no good reason, China is exempt from Huang’s critique. Huang Yong Ping, Colosseum, 2007, ceramic, soil, plants, China is granted the status of exception, with Daoism functioning as an 226.1 x 551.2 x 758.2 cm. © Huang Yong Ping. Courtesy alibi. Since the mid 1990s, Daoism has functioned in Huang’s work most of Gladstone Gallery, New of all as a method to figure China outside of political and social history. It York. produces a work like Tower Snake, the perfect culmination of the two theme park tropes explored mostly separately in preceding work: the monumental building miniaturized and the mythical bestiary monumentalized. Seen in the context of his other work, it is also an aggressive cultural statement. In Huang’s miniature theme park, Tower Snake would have a central position. As a symbol of ancient and eternal China, it would provide, like the 1/3- sized Eiffel Tower at Beijing World Park, a commanding prospect across a landscape of dwarf monuments representing not the world eternal but the world according to a standard hyperbolic fantasy regarding rising China. Behold the Chinese dragon, a tourguide might say, towering and roaring above a Western civilization eclipsed.

Notes 1 Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977), 87. 2 For an overview of Daoist elements in Huang’s work, see Doryun Chong, “Huang Yong Ping: A Lexicon,” in House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2005), text volume, 97–107. 3 Robin Laurence, “Huang Yong Ping,” Border Crossings 26, no. 3 (August 2007), 132–36. 4 “Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-scale Exhibition,” Artforum International (November 2003), 154. 5 Hou Hanru, “Change is the Rule,” House of Oracles, text volume, 13. 6 House of Oracles, image volume, 54. 7 See, for example, Thomas J. Campanella, The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), 241-79; and Hai Ren, “The Landscape of Power: Imagineering Consumer Behavior at China’s Theme Parks,” in Scott A. Lukas, ed., The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2007), 97–112. 8 Learning from Las Vegas, 105.

46 Michael Zheng Objectivity, Absurdity, and Social Critique: A Conversation with Hou Hanru January 12, 2009, on the occasion of the exhibition imPOSSIBLE! Eight Chinese Artists Engage Absurdity, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and MISSION 17

Left: Zhang Peili, WATER— I. Chinese Video Art in the 1980s Standard Version from the Dictionary Ci Hai, 1991, single- channel colour video, 9 mins. Michael Zheng: Shall we start with how video art began in China? There are 35 secs. Courtesy of the artist. quite a few video works in the exhibition imPOSSIBLE! In the West, video Middle: Zhang Peili, 30 x 30, 1988, single-channel was first used by artists to record performances and events. In that way, at colour video, 9 mins. 32 secs. Courtesy of the artist. least in the West, video art developed hand in hand with performance art. Is Right: Zhang Peili, Document the same true in China? on “Hygiene No. 3,” 1991, single-channel colour video, 24 mins. 45 secs. Courtesy of the artist. Hou Hanru: Yes, the case in China is really similar. In the 1980s, when video was introduced to China as an artistic medium, it began to be used by lots of performance artists. They didn’t really have video—they had documentary, like photography, video documentaries, and very, very brief videotapes, because at that time such technology was not so popular. Only professionals had video cameras—mainly people working in television or with advertising companies. The equipment was very expensive, so few artists had access to it. One of the first artists to really use video both to document his performances and to make independent work was Zhang Peili. I think it was in 1988, with his work 30 x 30. He documented a few performances where he was breaking mirrors on the floor and then gluing them back together and then breaking them again and gluing them back together again. It lasted for an hour or so. Following that, he produced several works that used video not only as a documentary tool, but also as a medium that possesses an independent kind of structure and narrative. These works include the famous Document on “Hygiene No.3” (1991), where he washed a chicken for hours. In another work, WATER—Standard Version from the Dictionary Ci Hai (1989), he had a famous television announcer reading the dictionary entry for “water” from the most popular Chinese dictionary.

Numerous video works emerged in the period to become the first wave of video art in China. Actually, I also did a video work in 1988 in the collaborative performance project Speaking, Communication, and Humanity, with Yang Jiechang, that was very much inspired by Nam June

47 Paik. We had a huge installation that extended through three different halls. It involved a camera recording a candle, which was broadcast on a screen, and then you had the actual candle outside. So it was really this typical kind of conceptual recycling of a real image, a representation, and an object. We were able to find a video camera because an artist friend also worked at a television station.

Michael Zheng: So back then you were an artist?

Hou Hanru: Yes. I was also writing. I was involved with curating, and I did some performance. Actually many of our friends were acting at once as artists, critics, curators, and so on.

Michael Zheng: When you mentioned that candle piece, it reminded me of Bruce Nauman’s piece where he used a camera as a stand-in for his live performance. What people see is actually a monitor of him in the back. So I guess the thinking was quite similar.

Hou Hanru: It was really around 1985–86 that performance and other conceptual works were introduced to China. At that time, we were all involved in writing, translating, and trying to bring in different things. Several artists, including Huang Yong Ping, were very much influenced by Joseph Beuys and his idea of social sculpture. I translated some of his writings and introduced his art in various magazines and books. In his performance work, he had an idea of art as a kind of avant-garde education for social transformation, which was very influential at that time

Michael Zheng: When you mentioned the avant-garde movement . . .

Hou Hanru: I meant in general, globally, but also especially in China when the idea of the avant-garde was introduced, in the period when the whole of Chinese society started discovering the world.

Michael Zheng: In the 1980s?

Hou Hanru: Yes, in the 1980s especially you went through this kind of liberation—from a very closed, very limited situation during the time of the Cultural Revolution and pre-Cultural Revolution to a real discovery of freedom, discovery of the world, discovery of a lot of things. The art scene itself is automatically related to this kind of tendency, this wave of social transformation. Again, artists like Joseph Beuys had an important role in it because his work directly engaged social and political revolution. At that time, all kinds of information was brought into China, including the first information on modernism, from modern art to the more contemporary movements. The artists really tried to catch up.

Michael Zheng: With the so-called mainstream?

Hou Hanru: Well no, not the mainstream, but [the artists tried] to build up a scene of protest, rebellion, and maybe of claiming freedom beyond the official system. So if you know the whole situation from 1979’s Stars Group to the 1985 New Wave Movement—and then in 1989 there was the China/Avant- Garde exhibition—these ten years were really hugely dramatic and radical.

48 Michael Zheng: The changes you describe seem to go along with the Chinese government’s so-called Open Door Policy, which started at the beginning of the 1980s. I was still there at that time. It seemed to me that the policy brought in a whole slew of new ideas and opportunities, even for areas like science, etc.

Hou Hanru: That was a very interesting time in all fields, from science to culture, from economics to politics. Everyone was somehow willing to radically change, and on the other hand [everyone was] maybe politically naive as well. After the drama of the Cultural Revolution, at all levels, from individuals to the political system, people tried to embrace new things. I think, in fact, the first years of the political opening were much more experimental than today, but much more naive as well. During a very short period, you could actually talk about various issues—even challenge taboos.

Michael Zheng: How is this reflected in the artworks of the period? What were the artists rebelling against, and how?

Hou Hanru: Well, the first thing was for artists to question the propaganda art of the Cultural Revolution. Can reality or truth only be represented by the official image of the real, or can reality be something that is more directly connected to everyday experience?

Michael Zheng: So in a way it went from the Soviet style of socialist realism to art based more on daily phenomena, on people’s daily activities.

Hou Hanru: There were even a lot of people rediscovering classical traditions from Renaissance art to pre-Soviet kinds of art. That became a very important part of the new academic education and a way to replace the Soviet model of socialist realism. What was essential was the gradual abandonment of the models of heroic representation to embrace the everyday.

Michael Zheng: Direct experience . . .

Hou Hanru: Direct experience, the more empirical kind of visual truth.

Michael Zheng: This helps me to think about the pieces by Zhang Peili that you mentioned. They really exemplify this phenomenon.

Hou Hanru: There is the question of objectivity—objectivity being the real meaning of the truth.

Michael Zheng: And not in the ideological sense.

Hou Hanru: Exactly. This actually corresponds to the very pragmatic, political attitude that has driven political change, marked by the day when Deng Xiaoping said that the criterion for measuring truth is practical results. It’s not the ideological truth any more. It brought China to a very interesting kind of pragmatic change.

Michael Zheng: I still remember the political slogan he put forth: “It doesn’t matter what colour the cat is; as long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat.”

49 Hou Hanru: This is still very influential, even today, and today there are a lot of artists who continue to exhibit this tendency. Artists are very interested in ideas about being open to the real, taking objectivity as the truth, etc. Actually, this influence is very visible in many of the early video works.

Michael Zheng: Even now.

Hou Hanru: Even now, in straightforward documentary video work, especially in the late 1980s to early 1990s. You have people from then, like Wu Wenguang and Wen Pulin, to younger filmmakers like Jia Zhangke, who were very concerned with objectivity, which has in fact been a long-standing concern in experimental films—starting with Ozu, the Japanese filmmaker, to the Italian realistic films in the1 940s and 1950s, down to a lot of French films. The influence of all these can be seen in how many Chinese artists engage themselves with video, using the camera as a way to witness from a distance.

Michael Zheng: That Zhu Jia, Forever (installation view from Zooming into brings to my mind Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video from Zhu Jia’s work Forever Haudenschild Collection, National Art Museum of China, (1994), in which he Beijing), 1997, video, 28 mins. attached his video Courtesy of the artist and ShanghART, Shanghai. camera to a tricycle wheel and let it “see” while he rode through the city.

Hou Hanru: Exactly. That really involved a physical intervention into the real and, at the same time, you can see a very interesting absence of this arty intention.

Michael Zheng: The artist’s hand.

Hou Hanru: So that opens up a very important tendency in art making that you can connect to, say, Western conceptual art, which also looked into the idea of being objective, but, its engagement within the particular context in China in the 1990s makes it unique. At the same time, other artists were working in completely different directions. There were artists doing abstract paintings and looking into the autonomous status of art making. And next to it, also very important, was the tendency of Dada—avant-garde kinds of experiments fighting against the mainstream, creating a kind of alternative truth.

Michael Zheng: Who are some of the representative artists working that way?

Hou Hanru: You see, for example, Huang Yong Ping early in the 1980s. By the way, about documentary, he and his group Xiamen Dada produced a wonderful video documentary of the performance they conducted. The group did some of the most radical experiments, non-art, anti-art actions. They were trying to challenge how art is defined in history, both in the Chinese context and in general. In this particular performance, they collected trash and turned it into an exhibition in a local gallery. That provoked a lot of controversy and excitement.

Michael Zheng: And he also washed the art history books.

50 Top: Zhu Jia, stills from Hou Hanru: He used a kind of rotating system, a plate that indicated Forever, 1997, video, 28 mins. Courtesy of the artist and by chance what actions to perform. So washing those two books was ShanghART, Shanghai. determined by this device. He was very inspired by Duchamp’s idea of Bottom: Huang Yong Ping, The History of Chinese Painting using chance as a way to decide what to do in art. The machine indicated and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the to him to pick up these two art history books, a history of Chinese painting Washing Machine for Two and a history of modern Western painting, and to wash them in a washing Minutes, 1987–93, Chinese tea box, paper, pulp, glass. machine for two hours. The idea was really to create, instead of making and Collection of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, T. B. Walker answering the question in a clean way. He understood that the more we get Acquisition Fund, 2001. into these kinds of questions, the more dirty and muddy things get. This is indeed the paradox of all kinds of human intellectual and artistic work: it always ends up to be something beyond our plans.

Michael Zheng: It’s interesting that this second group of the avant-garde had some of the characteristics of the first group, in that by using chance they tried to relinquish the artist’s hand in the work.

Hou Hanru: Especially when talking about video. All these artists started using video as a way to document.

Michael Zheng: So the piece you mentioned was a performance?

Hou Hanru: [It was] an event they did in 1986. They did different events. The first was an exhibition where they brought their paintings and, after the exhibition, they burned them outside the museum. They decided that art

51 should die. For the second, they rented a museum space and then moved Xiamen Dada, burning of artwork after an exhibition on all the trash from the courtyard of the museum into the museum as the November 23, 1986. Courtesy exhibition. The next day, they moved everything back. of Huang Yong Ping.

Michael Zheng: It’s like Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) but in a much more theatrical and extreme way.

Hou Hanru: Yeah, totally. It’s also interesting to see that it happened in a provincial city. It didn’t influence anybody. So it was a totally autonomous action by a small group of people.

Michael Zheng: Do you think they were able to do that because they were so remote from Beijing, in Xiamen?

Hou Hanru: Probably, but most importantly they were smart and opportunistic in a positive sense.

Michael Zheng: What were some other artists doing at that time?

Hou Hanru: You had Zhang Peili doing his first paintings, and also Wang Guangyi, Gu Wenda, Wu Shanzhuan, etc., as well as other artists doing more performance-based actions. You also had people experimenting with traditional materials such as ink paintings, doing something that goes beyond the tradition, and so on. I don’t think we have enough time to talk about the whole 1980s.

II. Subsequent Generations and the Continuing Project of Modernization

Michael Zheng: The exhibition imPOSSIBLE! Eight Chinese Artists Engage Absurdity includes some of the younger generation of artists who work with

52 different media, including video. How would you compare and contrast their practices to the first generation of video artists?

Hou Hanru: I think this generation is much more into using video as a medium with its own language.

Michael Zheng: As a genre by itself?

Hou Hanru: Yes. This generation is much more open to the diverse possibilities that video art can provide. In fact, it’s difficult to simply divide the artists by generation because they all emerged as artists using video as a main medium in more or less the same period. The whole situation is highly diverse and rich. Artists like Zhang Peili, Wang Gongxing, Zhu Jia, Song Dong, etc. continue to produce video installations while others develop their works from documentary film backgrounds. Others like Yang Fudong, Lu Chunsheng, Chen Xiaoyun and Shi Qing, etc. are more into experimental fiction films. Wang Jianwei, Wu Ershan, Song Dong, and Yin Xiuzhen, among others, systematically connect their video work with multimedia theatre production. Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen, Song Tao, Lin Yi Lin, Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Ju Hui, and Xu Tan relate their video works to urban developments, while others are working with electronic music and the performing arts. What is also very remarkable is that a number of women artists like Kan Xuan, Liang Yue, and Cao Fei are producing some of the most amazing video work about their everyday life experiences, from spiritual contemplation to festival-like youth culture events to some miraculous moving pictures. This is why I came up with the project Everyday Miracles for the Chinese Pavilion in the 2007 Venice Biennale featuring four women artists including Shen Yuan, Yin Xiuzhen, Kan Xuan, and Cao Fei. Now a new generation like Qiu Anxiong, Tang Maohong, and Sun Xun, along with older artists like Gu Dexin and Chen Shaoxiong, are focusing their work on animation. In the end, more attention should be paid to the fact that pop culture, commercial digital and electronic images, advertisements, and, especially, the Internet, are exerting increasing influence on the imagination and creation of artists today. It can certainly bring new challenges to their artistic integrity, position, and criticality, while a much more open environment and new communication strategies are being developed.

Michael Zheng: Kan Xuan’s video works have a performative aspect to them.

Hou Hanru: In the early works, yes. Actually now her work has evolved into addressing how a camera looks at things.

Michael Zheng: Xu Zhen’s work seems to have some similarity to that.

Hou Hanru: Exactly. Actually they are very close friends. They, along with Yang Zhenzhong, share a lot of similarities such as using the camera as a psychological tool to question social relationships.

Michael Zheng: Yes, it’s funny you mentioned that they all know each other. In Yang Zhenzhong’s piece I Will Die (2000–04), in which he videotaped various people saying the phrase “I will die,” you can see many faces from that group of people.

53 Hou Hanru: Yes. Xu Zhen, stills from Shout, 1998, single-channel video, 3 mins. 41 secs. Photo: Xu Zhen. Courtesy of ShanghART, Michael Zheng: But it seems to me that the development of the new video Shanghai. technology, especially the digital technology, has had a major impact on the kind of works these artists are doing now. A good example is Yang Zhenzhong’s work, which uses a lot of editing techniques.

Hou Hanru: The introduction of the video camera as an individual instrument, its changes from the analogue Hi8 camera to the high definition digital camera and the development of technology for editing video on personal computers have completely changed how artists work. This is why I titled the exhibition I curated in 1994 for the Spanish Foundation, Never Go Out Without My DV Cam. Introducing this tool at the individual level has really allowed everybody to become a video artist, which raises a very interesting question: How should we decide if something is a work of art or not? Technological advances allow lots of artists to develop potential talent into more advanced projects. This is why many younger generation artists like Kan Xuan, Xu Zhen, and Yang Zhenzhong produce a huge amount of video work.

Michael Zheng: In a short period of time.

Hou Hanru: And [they] also manage to get highly sophisticated production, editing, and acting. That was a very important revolution. It opened up a new place somewhere between the traditions of visual art and independent filmmaking and changed completely, even institutionally, how things can

Yang Zhenzhong, I Will Die, 2000–04 (Nagoya, Japan version), single-channel video, 21 mins. 40 secs. Courtesy of ShanghART, Shanghai.

54 Yang Zhenzhong, stills from be categorized. On the other hand, the introduction of video installations I Will Die, 2000–04, single- channel video, 21 mins. 40 in museums and galleries presents a very interesting transition from the secs. Composite photo: Yang Zhenzhong. Courtesy of rejection of installation art in the official institutions to a full acceptance of ShanghART, Shanghai. any kind of new forms. And that happened in the last ten years—especially from 2000 onward, like at the 2000 Shanghai Biennale. The power of inserting the moving image into museums had something do to with this change, because it is always something that directly imposes a kind of presence that you cannot ignore.

Michael Zheng: In that way it’s blurred—maybe it’s video art, maybe it’s a journalistic documentary of certain events. Nonetheless, its strong visual presence speaks to something.

55 Hou Hanru: The very direct presence of the moving image created fresh and new experiences. People loved it. It’s interesting how video art has become a new mainstream art. This is why institutions now have new-genre departments and new media departments. Of course, this is also related to the boom of media entertainment industries in China. That has completely changed the cultural hierarchy of society. Twenty years ago, if you were a film star, that was great. Now it’s better if you’re a television and film star and are present in all kinds of advertisements. And then you can become a singer and whatever. And this kind of new cultural hierarchy is helping society accept the moving image, the electronic moving image.

Michael Zheng: I see examples of this in some of the exhibitions you have curated in San Francisco. They contain a lot of moving images, about which you cannot definitively say “this is video art” in the traditional sense. The works often speak to social realities somewhere else. Nevertheless, they have a very strong visual presence, and you cannot help but be engaged by it.

Hou Hanru: Yes, because of the power of the image and the facility of accessing this media creates the whole possibility of opening up another territory outside the established institutional framework. And this is why you can easily organize independent film festivals or video projection events and relate them to other activities completely outside the existing establishment. And this actually helps, in turn, to influence and change the establishment.

Michael Zheng: Is this type of work being done a lot in China nowadays?

Hou Hanru: I think so. Curiously, because video has become a mainstream instrument, even many painters, successful painters, have started to do video work. It presents new possibilities for them to be considered more “contemporary.”

Michael Zheng: Do you think that could be a kind of a fluke, or is it genuinely exciting new territory?

Hou Hanru: Well, I think it’s usually both. I mean, it’s inevitable that you have some forced excitement, but you always have some very interesting products in the end. Sometimes those products are not necessarily the mainstream thing. Maybe they are even the side product of something else, yet they remain significant works.

Michael Zheng: How does that fit into the program you’re developing at The San Francisco Art Institute? I remember back to when you first introduced the program, you wanted to do something related to the Pacific Rim.

Hou Hanru: From different angles, my work here has tried to address the relationship between an art program and a space in San Francisco, and how the focus of cultural production is now shifting in different geographic directions. Primarily, there is the influential emergence of the Asian Pacific cultural scene and art scene. I am showing works from China, Taiwan, and Japan. A large number are video works that reflect different aspects of this boom. On the other hand, what’s also important is that I look into the political implications of this new situation, including alternative economic models. This is also how different cultures negotiate the project of

56 modernization and modernity, and how they come up with their own way of dealing with that as a resistance, or a kind of alternative to mainstream global capitalism. This is why we’ve been working on World Factory (2007), which introduces many different informal, alternative models of the economy, urbanization, migration, border crossing, etc. In this process, there is a huge amount of video work being produced, not only in China, but also in many similar contexts where video has played an important role as a direct tool documenting this process. It’s also because video’s flexibility and accessibility to every individual embodies possibilities for a new understanding of what cultural democracy could be.

Michael Zheng: That, in addition to the inherent capacity of video to construct narrative and fantasy, makes it a rich medium to do a lot of things.

Hou Hanru: I think the notion of fantasy is very important. In 2004, I curated a show in France called Fabricated Paradise with fifteen artists from China. The idea was to look into what position the artists were trying to construct in this society using multimedia languages from performance to installation to video. What they were doing was not only documenting or reproducing what they saw, but also trying to construct a personal individual fantasy or dreamland—a paradise in resistance to the imposition of the huge social production machine.

Lu Chunsheng, History of Michael Zheng: I think the Chemistry II, Excessively Restrained Mountaineering extreme example of that Enthusiasts, 2006, single- channel video, 95 mins. paradigm is Lu Chunsheng’s Courtesy of ShanghART, Shanghai. work. He took the form to such a mature and developed level, for example, in his History of Chemistry (2006).

Hou Hanru: Yes, he’s inquiring into something that even he cannot understand. It’s very interesting. Indeed, it is not only Lu Chunsheng, there are also a few other people who have been interested in this question. Maybe Lu Chunsheng’s work is the most accomplished in that sense, though. Also, he has very deep thoughts on this, and he never uses plain language to explain it.

Michael Zheng: Maybe he couldn’t explain it himself?

Hou Hanru: Actually, he could explain it, but he doesn’t want to. That’s what I understand. It’s really important because he preserves the possibility of being mysterious.

Michael Zheng: A certain mystery is always palpable in his work.

III. Absurdity, Theatricality, and Photography

Michael Zheng: We’ve talked a lot about video so far. ImPOSSIBLE! Eight Chinese Artists Engage Absurdity has a lot of video work in it, but it is not necessarily based on a specific medium. Its organizing principle is really based on the observation that many artists from China share a tendency toward theatricality and absurdity in their sensibility and their choice of artistic languages. I wonder, if put together in a certain way, they could be

57 read as the artists’ responses to the social reality in China, which at times can be very extreme. How, from your involvement in these things, do you perceive this phenomenon?

Hou Hanru: The tradition of theater, of theatricality, has always been very important in Chinese culture. The ritual aspect of life has always been central to Chinese life, and also was very much enforced by propaganda culture in the last sixty years or so. This propaganda generates the need for anti- propaganda. To negotiate with the imposition of the mainstream ideological theatricality, artists might feel the need to create their own ritual systems.

Michael Zheng: An antidote to deal with the reality.

Hou Hanru: So they come up with something theatrical. On the one hand, the theatricality allows them to deal with critique—to amplify and radicalize some symbolic images and languages. Theater always includes some very uncanny things such as humour, irony, parody, mockery, etc. Also myth. In a place where straightforward critique is still very difficult, hiding behind this kind of twisted ritual can be very effective in expressing different thoughts. So somehow you can always decipher a certain social critique in this theatricality. I think this is something that can help us understand some of the works and why they appear so interestingly twisted.

Michael Zheng: Yeah, twisted and exaggerated. To me, it harkens back to much older generations, such as the Yangzhou Baguai in the Qing dynasty, whose works all have this very twisted kind of persona. Like Zheng Ban Qiao.

Hou Hanru: [It is a] distortion of the real. When you resort to theater, mise en scéne, you can always create a second persona who says something even truer than the person is supposed to be saying in real life. In the end, this is maybe how art works in society.

Michael Zheng: It seems to be more pronounced in a lot of Chinese artists’ works.

Hou Hanru: Yes. Fundamentally, today it is very much related to social critique. Even the most individual gesture is still related to that kind of dynamism. And this is something that might answer another plausible question: How do you distinguish Chinese art from Western art? It’s difficult to draw a clear distinction, but, proportionally, most of the artworks from China are still highly political in that sense. But it would be a huge mistake if one ignored individual positions and languages simply for the sake of being political.

Michael Zheng: When I was in China, I actually sensed that. It seems to me that a lot of the desire to create comes from critiquing social reality. Maybe it’s because China is still developing, so there are naturally many more social issues to deal with, as opposed to more developed countries where there are fewer problems. To shift gears, I’d like to touch upon photography, because there are several photographic works in this exhibition, including those of Lu Chunsheng and Xing Danwen. How do you see photography’s role in the development of contemporary Chinese art?

Hou Hanru: Interestingly, photography also contributed to the discussion of truth versus reality, truth and objectivity. Many artists who are interested

58 in society are interested in photography, in making works that are like plain journalistic photographs that record reality as it is being discovered and introduced and used and propagated—as a very important alternative to the official propaganda. They are interested in using photography as a way to record and to show the truth, in the everyday sense, in the sense of a totally different philosophical direction. The current importance of photography also has to do with the important photographs that people continue to rediscover, recovering the historical memory that has been censored, erased, banned for the last fifty years. Today people are rediscovering huge photographic archives of historical events. So China is still going through a process of re-digesting its own history. On the other hand, the artists actually learned photography as a part of embracing conceptual art, in which photography is used very similarly to video as documentation of events, performances, happenings, etc. Also in the late 1980s, people like Zhu Jia, Wang Youshen, and others used photography as a kind of installation material to reflect on social events and deal with the notion of objectivity. Then, later on, more people were interested in exploring the artistic aspect of photography, the language itself, the process itself, and also using photography as a way to create another kind of mise en scéne, another kind of theatrical narrative.

Lu Chunsheng, Hey, Lana, Then there are artists like Yang Yong and Zheng Guogu, who use 2000, photograph, 72 x 108 cm. Courtesy of ShanghART, photography in a very down-to-earth, popular way, and, in the process, Shanghai. deconstruct photography’s sublime aspects. They use compact cameras to produce low-quality prints and make them in different formats, larger or smaller, recycling them in the storytelling process. These stories are sometimes being told, organized, set up, written, and performed in extremely ironic ways. That way, photography is a kind of non-photography, a kind of counter photography. If you look at the work of these artists, they’re not dealing with the quality of the photography itself. It’s a Dadaist approach to deconstructing photography itself. That opens up a whole new space for artists to act.

59 Then you have another group of artists, who have been heavily influenced by the commercial use of photography such as advertisements, magazines, and other popular media, using photography as a means to propagate commercial values. Artists like Yang Yong , Cao Fei, He Yong, and others are engaged with a very interesting question today: How much is Chinese society turning into a radically consumer-oriented society? In this society, what kind of new images are being produced, and how much can contemporary art still have a role in it?

Michael Zheng: Xing Danwen’s new work seems to be trying to address some of these issues.

Hou Hanru: I think the trajectory of Xing Danwen’s work is very interesting. She started out making very straightforward documentary photographs. Some of her documentary photographs were of performances by Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and others in the early 1990s, and of the underground music scenes—Cui Jian and those people. It was really something quite beautiful. And then she shifted into a new period where she used photography and digital manipulation, which allows her to do something totally different. Hers is a very typical case; it shows how an artist in such a period of technological and social transformation tries to adapt to the evolution of the situation. I think it’s a highly pragmatic process. But the outcomes are not always relevant. . . .

IV. Animation and Artists from the Chinese “Diaspora” Michael Zheng: What about the animation scene?

Hou Hanru: In the transition of Chinese society into a consumer-oriented society, the whole country is undergoing a structural shift that is very much influenced by television, electronic images, video games, music video, etc., which actually provides the younger generation of artists new, more playful tools that utilize the language of computer animation, which provides a lot of freedom for the imagination to construct fantastical narratives. You can see a whole group of artists, including some of the artists we have mentioned and some younger artists, producing a lot of animation. That also opens up possibilities for the art world to merge itself with a new booming scene consisting of design, communication, and the so-called culture of communication. This is potentially pushing China toward the production of a new pop culture, or a new youth culture in the Asia Pacific region, which has already been generating some of the most amazing pop culture—from Japanese manga to Hong Kong Cantonese songs to Hong Kongese, Korean, and Taiwanese films, and of course the Japanese cartoon films. All popular culture in this region is becoming more and more globally influential.

Michael Zheng: Before you Michael Zheng, Groundbreaking, 2003, single- completely tire out, maybe I can ask channel video, 6 mins. 34 secs. you one last question, because there Courtesy of the artist. are two artists in this show who are from the Chinese diaspora, including myself and Ni Haifeng. What is your observation about these works?

Hou Hanru: It’s very interesting that they are somehow quite specific. You

60 Left: Xing Danwen, Urban are artists who came from the 1980s avant-garde and moved to the West Fiction, Image No.13 (detail), 2005, digital photograph, 219.4 at the end of 1980s or early 1990s. Now you find yourselves more involved x 170.1 cm. Courtesy the artist. with the questioning of identity by necessity somehow. Ni Haifeng, for Right: Xing Danwen, Urban Fiction, Image No.13, 2005, example, made a digital image of himself in which he transformed the digital photograph, 219.4 x digital code behind the electronic photographic image into a painting. 170.1 cm. Courtesy the artist. Also, his videos show him struggling with disappearance. All these show a particular moment of those people struggling to construct a position for themselves, which is kind of an in-between position. And this can allow them to look at both the global reality and Chinese reality from a very particular angle, from positions that are very unique.

Ni Haifeng, The Face, 2004, Michael Zheng: We have a certain single-channel video, 14 mins. 50 secs. Courtesy of the artist. distance, and at the same time we have both identities.

Hou Hanru: Also, it’s important to note that China is getting more global. Not just in the sense that more Chinese art looks more international or is exhibited around the world. Many diaspora artists now go back to China to produce work, to do things, to exhibit. That makes China’s art scene truly global because they bring with them a totally different experience. Alongside, of course, you have artists from other countries coming to do things, to make work, to exhibit in China. But again, this group of so-called diaspora artists have a very particular role, because not only do they bring their own experience, but they also act as a kind of translator because they can communicate directly with the local art communities.

Michael Zheng: [This is] partially what I’m trying to do with this exhibition, to bridge the two sides.

Hou Hanru: Yes. It’s very interesting to consider how long this situation will last until really global communication becomes a routine for everybody. I guess we’re still in a very complicated and uncertain transitional period, where all these elements and contradictions form a very powerful, dynamic situation that can continue to provide a lot of energy for people to do things.

Michael Zheng: Well, this has been a very illuminating conversation. Thank you very much.

Hou Hanru: You’re very welcome, Michael.

61 Danielle Shang A Conversation with Hu Xiaoyuan and Qiu Xiaofei

Hu Xiaoyuan and Qiu Xiaofei were both born in 1977 in Heilongjiang, a northern Chinese province bordering Russia. It was not until they attended the high school adjacent to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing that they finally met and eventually fell in love. Together, they advanced to the Central Academy of Fine Arts and graduated in 2002. Hu Xiaoyuan’s installations are often assembled with hair, paper, fabric, and furniture to offer an intimate insight into her existence and self-transformation. Qiu Xiaofei’s paintings, three-dimensional painting- sculptures, and installations are his attempt to debate the relationship between concept and aesthetics.

Danielle Shang: How did you two meet?

Hu Xiaoyuan: In high school. We were in the same class.

Qiu Xiaofei: We are an infamous couple. Everyone from our high school knows about us.

Danielle Shang: Was it love at the first sight?

Qiu Xiaofei: I was sitting right behind her at the reception for freshmen in our first year. She was the prettiest girl in our class. I was dared by other boys to pull her hair. And I did.

Hu Xiaoyuan: I turned around and yelled at him. But secretly, I knew that it was love at first sight.

Danielle Shang: You have been together for thirteen years. When you are making art, do you consult with each other?

Hu Xiaoyuan: No, we don’t. But we have the desire to tell each other what we have in mind. As a human, I’m eager to have an audience. I hope for the audience’s empathy, be it only one person in the audience. We play the role of audience for each other. Unfortunately, our personalities conflict from time to time. Our communication about each other’s art is usually nothing but criticism. When he is ecstatic about his ideas, I just think he is crazy. I always give him my blunt two cents without him asking for it.

Qiu Xiaofei: She likes to give me a hard time.

Hu Xiaoyuan: You like to be a pain in my neck, too.

Mine was a piece that I made in 2004. It contains three Braille Bibles in which I painted with watercolour my daily activities and personal

62 Hu Xiaouyuan, Mine, 2004, Braille and watercolour, 31.5 x 24.5 x 3 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

belongings. I was so excited that I couldn’t stop myself from painting all the time. One day Xiaofei said to me: “What are you doing? It’s so boring. Quit and let’s go out and have some fun.” Off he went with my brother and left me at home by myself. I cried my heart out and thought: “What an impossible brat!”

Qiu Xiaofei: But you know that Xiaoyuan’s criticism is so important to me. Her arguments force me to consider other possibilities.

Hu Xiaoyuan: His arguments make me believe in my own ideas even more!

Danielle Shang: Have you ever changed your mind after arguments?

Hu Xiaoyuan/ Qiu Xiaofei: Hardly ever.

Danielle Shang: Xiaofei, which of your work is your own favorite?

Qiu Xiaofei: Permanent Address (2008). It was a site-specific installation, which was included in the group show Subtlety last year at the Platform China, Beijing.

Left: Qiu Xiaofei, Permanent Address (outer room), 2008, found objects. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Qiu Xiaofei, Permanent Address (inner room), 2008, painted objects. Courtesy of the artist.

Danielle Shang: I saw a few objects from the installation the other day. They are still in the side room.

63 Qiu Xiaofei: Yes. It will be difficult to remove them because they were Left: Qiu Xiaofei, X-ray Reproduction (detail), 2003, permanently attached to the floor. The original strategy was very oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm. straightforward: I wanted to make conventional household objects Courtesy of the artist. Right: Qiu Xiaofei, X- unmovable by attaching them to the floor with concrete. For quite a ray Reproduction, 2003, few years, I had to constantly relocate, which provoked so much anxiety newspaper image and photocopy of painting. and uncertainty in me. Many of my works from the past speak to the Courtesy of the artist. psychological consequences of those frantic times in my life. For Permanent Address, I knew exactly where to place the light and how the walls should be.

It took me a month to construct the site. The gallery sealed off the side room in which I was working, because there was another exhibition in the next room. I could only access the little side room through a window. I climbed in and out every day for a month to build the installation. Being site specific and perfectly carrying out the initial concept, Permanent Address fulfilled all the potentials. I enjoyed the actual process of making it.

Danielle Shang: There’s a great deal of attention paid to painting in your work, be it installations or sculptures or paintings. Permanent Address occupies two rooms. One of them is a painting installation—from the walls to the TV set, every object was carefully crafted and painted over to look like the real thing. What message do you try to deliver through the action of painting?

Qiu Xiaofei: The subjects of my work are often derived from existing illustrations, photos, or objects. If an artist’s creation is said to be art, then those existing images and objects can be said to be non-art. Dada and Fluxus have anti-art tendencies because they believe that life is art: they blur the boundary between art and non-art by employing non-art to realize art. But I don’t think that it is good enough. I want to use art to discuss non- art. When I make a sculpture and paint the surface with great detail, my creation looks like a replica of an existing object, not an artwork: the result of my art is non-art. I find it extremely ironic. Meanwhile, the process of painting gives me pleasure because it is time-consuming and the subjects are old things. What a contradiction to our eager desire for the future! This is what satisfies me about painting.

Danielle Shang: Your work seems emotive: big and expressive brushstrokes, simple compositions. But it sounds as if the actual procedure is not so quick and spontaneous.

64 Qiu Xiaofei: It’s not. I paint with rationality, not emotion. I sketch out grids on the image and on the canvas first, then I transfer the image mathematically from a magazine to the canvas according to the exact composition. I paint meticulously, and I spend numerous hours calculating the grids.

Danielle Shang: Wouldn’t it be easier to use a projector instead of making grids by hand?

Qiu Xiaofei: I despise the idea of using a projector because it diminishes the hand of an artist.

Danielle Shang: How long does it normally take you to finish a large painting?

Qiu Xiaofei: About four weeks. From up close, my work displays painterly skills; from a distance, my work looks like a fine replica of the original picture. In fact, at my exhibition Helongjiang in 2006, I had the original pictures from magazines juxtaposed next to my paintings. It was obvious that my paintings were merely reproductions, but all the attention from the audience was paid to the childhood memories. The memories were important, but not the most important. Painting is a vehicle for me to voice two objections. The first is to object to time; my vision is backward instead of forward. The second is to object to the creation of an artist; my art is not to create but to copy.

Danielle Shang: Given that your training at the academy was grounded in academic realism with an emphasis on precision and classical representation, why do you want to make anti-art? Are you rebelling against the rigidity of the technique?

Qiu Xiaofei: People are convinced that artists possess extraordinary imaginations, magnificent hands, and deeper thoughts than philosophers. It is not true. I want to object to those illusions.

Danielle Shang: The recent large paintings that I saw in your studio are no longer candidly derived from magazines or photos, are they?

Qiu Xiaofei, My Lover and I Qiu Xiaofei: No, they are Have Reunited, 2009, oil on canvas, 200 x 240 cm. Courtesy not. But, again, I don’t of the artist. compose the images. I pick a sentence from a reading and have Google look up images for me. Then I combine the found images from the computer and finish the least essential portion of the job—painting it on the canvas. I let electronic technology dictate my art.

Danielle Shang: What sentences have you Googled?

65 Qiu Xiaofei: Some sentences were chosen on purpose, such as “art is half Hu Xiaoyuan, The Summer Solstice, 2008, wood, papier luxury product and half grandson of the brain”; some were pure nonsense, mache, iron clock, cicada slough, stuffed spadgers, such as “I have beautiful bones.” I want to use literature and the action of paper. Courtesy of the artist. painting to further reject artistic creation, and ultimately to reject art.

Danielle Shang: Xiaoyuan, which of your work is your own favorite?

Hu Xiaoyuan: Summer Solstice (2008), which was in the exhibition Subtlety as well. Also, Three Clothes, Six Objects (2008). I spent many long and poignant hours making those pieces. The emotional depth and rational dimension of the work can only be developed through a lengthy manual labour process. I like to think that time is actually a medium. My meditations on time and duration are often the departure points of my work.

Danielle Shang: The materials that you choose to work with are often paper and silk. Why are you particularly fond of paper and silk?

Hu Xiaoyuan: To be specific, it is often toilet paper or raw silk. To make the objects for the installation Summer Solstice, I soaked the plain toilet paper in water to make pulp and molded the objects with the papier mâché. I made bowls, keys, medicines, dictionaries, pencils, plants, etc., which are all necessities in our daily lives, but dispensable as well. So was the toilet paper. This sense of insignificance and fragility was the connection between the material and the objects.

The unfinished work you just saw in my Hu Xiaoyuan, Mute, 2008, watercolour, silk, clock, studio was also made of toilet paper; iron megaphone, tone arm, dimensions variable. however, it was made of soiled toilet Courtesy of the artist. paper. There were body discharges on it from me: feces, urine, blood, and oil. The toilet paper itself doesn’t interest

66 Hu Xiaoyuan, 3 Clothes, 6 Objects, 2008, wooden armoire, silk clothes, Chinese pigment, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

me this time, but the stains on the paper. The material does not dictate my work; what I want to express through my work dictates my choice of material. The same goes for choosing raw silk to make the installation Mute (2008); it worked for that particular piece. It was not because I wanted to have feminine characteristics in my art.

Hu Xiaoyuan, Untitled (part Danielle Shang: Why are you interested in the of an in-progress installation) 2009, papier maché, wood. body waste on the toilet paper? Courtesy of the artist.

Hu Xiaoyuan: The economic hard times have had a big impact on the art market. The prices that once were sky-high now are slashed ridiculously: many works are without bidders at the auctions; speculators are eager to dump their collections; critics and curators are beginning to pay attention to art, not the market. Those curious but natural phenomena remind me of the arbitrary relationship between shit and gold, art and artists. As my body wastes are my products, art is the product of artists. I want to make art with my body wastes and have it valued by others as something precious like gold or diamonds. But how the audience will judge my art stained with my body discharges is out of my hands.

Danielle Shang: The delicate abstract picture that I saw in your studio was a piece of flattened tissue paper with your blood on it. It looked as if it were thoughtfully painted with ink. It was really brilliant. Duchamp’s paysage fautif and Warhol’s piss paintings come to mind. But unlike Duchamp’s or Warhol’s, your peculiar dynamic is absent of sexual context or self- indulgence. You are offering a critique with a dose of humour. It reminds me of Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit (1961).

67 Hu Xiaoyuan: The picture that you saw is only a component of the installation. I can see the similar cynicism in Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit. His work is more unapologetic and immediate. The current situation with contemporary Chinese art mirrors the occasion in Europe during the 1960s. However, we are now not only confronted by the commercialization of art, but also by the cultural legacy of colonialism and Orientalism. The former one is possible to cope with; the latter one is much trickier. In my work, besides the cynicism, I also express helplessness, melancholy, and a sense of awkwardness as a female artist. The installation is a skeleton of my height, made of the toilet papier mâché, standing in a corner of a room with my body waste on the walls. It’s a bit self-mocking.

Danielle Shang: Do you read what Western art critics write about you?

Hu Xiaoyuan: No, not particularly. It bothers me that Western art critics always want to include contemporary Chinese art into Western art history instead of acknowledging contemporary Chinese art as having its own identity. Why do they have to try to fit Chinese art into their art critic system? Isn’t it a bit unfair to assume their authority?

Danielle Shang: It’s a tough job for Western art critics. Contemporary Chinese art has a history of a mere twenty years. In the first ten years, hardly any Westerner had access to China. Therefore, there’s no established point of reference against which to measure contemporary Chinese art, not to mention tracing a continuous path of historical development in Chinese art.

Qiu Xiaofei: Exactly. This problem also presents one of the many differences between Chinese art and Western art. Many Western artists want to position their art in art history. But Chinese artists are not very concerned about art history or being part of it.

Danielle Shang: How do you think Western critics should approach contemporary Chinese art? How can Western art critics reveal the true meaning of Chinese art and culture?

Hu Xiaoyuan: From a historical point of view, contemporary Chinese art belongs to a unique system, one that is deeply connected with China’s own history, philosophies, culture, and social structure. Those are the essentials needed for the West to constitute a less homogeneous understanding of contemporary Chinese art. There are too many critics, collectors, and curators who don’t even bother with learning about China before they manifest their judgments. However, there are people from the West who have diligently submerged themselves into Chinese culture and reality. Uli Sigg is one of them. He would not commit to buying any art before learning about the nuts and bolts of the work and the artist.

Danielle Shang: I hope that one day contemporary Chinese art will have its deserved spot in the art world. The discourse of postcolonialism is going to be a big job, involving not only the Western art critics and collectors, but also, or, perhaps, more importantly, the artists and the institutions within China. The last Guangdong Triennial which was based around the idea of farewell to postcolonialism was a good attempt to give a platform to such a discourse.

68 Chia Chi Jason Wang Dreaming through Art: On Chen Hui-chiao

Top: Chen Hui-chiao, installation view of the exhibition Smiles of the Skeptic, 1997, IT Park Gallery, Taipei. Courtesy of the artist. Bottom: Chen Hui-chiao, installation view of the exhibition A Separate Reality, 1995, IT Park Gallery, Taipei. Courtesy of the artist.

hroughout the 1990s, one quality often seen in Chen Hui-chiao’s work was its duality. In 1997, Wu Mali first noted the contradictions Tinherent in Chen’s work in an article entitled “The Skeptic Pursuit of Beauty.” Wu went as far as to suggest that these contradictions were in fact a reflection of Chen Hui-chiao’s emotional state or subconscious.1 At the time, Chen’s work tended to focus on antagonistic elements in the material nature of objects. For instance, she often combined roses, feathers, cotton, and water with the geometric shapes of stainless steel, acrylic board, glass, needles, etc., and connected them to a universe built on dualism: living/inorganic matter, temporary/eternal, indeterminate/geometric shapes, flowing/static, hard/soft. Interestingly, such juxtaposition and combination of opposites also characterize the formal approaches adopted by the Surrealists in Europe during the 1920s. Where Chen Hui-chiao differs is that her means of juxtaposition is not meant as a questioning of reason or as an act of subversion. On the contrary, in Chen’s works, materials such as stainless steel, acrylic, and glass tend to serve as a vessel or platform, mainly for the purpose of holding or physically supporting objects. In other words, they act as a unifying mechanical framework.

From a ritualistic point of view, these containers could be considered akin to holy objects used in the presentation of sacrifices to the gods. The objects in the 1997 installation at IT Park Gallery in Taipei, Smiles of the

69 Skeptic, in which roses, cotton, Chen Hui-chiao, You Are the Rose, I Am the Needle (detail), and other materials were placed 1993, roses, needles, table, 185 x 105 x 70 cm. Photo: IT Park inside glass containers, are like Photo. Courtesy of the artist. sacrificial offerings. In earlier Chen Hui-chiao, You Are the Rose, I Am the Needle (detail), work, such as You Are the Rose, 1993, roses, needles, table, 185 I am the Needle (1993) , Chen x 105 x 70 cm. Photo: IT Park Photo. Courtesy of the artist. Hui-chiao dry-processed roses, Chen Hui-chiao, Amorphous and pierced them with needles, Company, 1997, glass, cotton, ping pong ball, 90 x 90 x 90 an allusion perhaps to the trials cm. Courtesy of the artist. of life or martyrdom for religious Chen Hui-chiao, Whispering, I Pass through the Darkness, 2 faith. Moreover, the overlapping 1997, digital print, 35 x 35 x 6.5 nature of the needle holes reflects cm. Courtesy of the artist. Chen Hui-chiao, Then the complex encounters of life and Sleep, My Love . . ., 1998, bed, synthetic fur, needles. alludes to the profound mystery Courtesy of the artist. of fate. In this context, it is notable that Chen Hui-chiao’s Smiles of the Skeptic installation marked the beginning of her exploration of “consciousness.” Here, her earlier exploration into the materiality of objects was taken one step further and transformed into an allusion to consciousness. As such, although the exhibition area was filled with fabricated transparent containers, these containers were now vehicles of consciousness, and particular emphasis was placed on their transparency.

In 1997, Chen began to move away from geometric frames made of heavy metals and glass. At the same time, the idea of the flow of consciousness was transformed into a fantasia of imagination. In addition, her exploration of materiality gradually gave way to a symbolic manifestation, which then became the artist’s main formal strategy. The needles, thread,

70 Chen Hui-chiao, Inside of Memories & The Silver Dust, 2006, water, video projection, DVD, LED lights, wall painting, glass. Courtesy of the artist.

cotton, and fabric used by Chen is now elaborated into poetic associations signifying the sky, stars, day, night, wind, rain, and even sounds from the natural world. In the piece Whispering, I Pass through the Darkness (1997), Chen adopted a more direct narrative, using computer graphics to explore how human subjectivity operates, as well as the significance of God and nature in life and death.

Dreaming lies at the very heart of Chen Hui-chiao’s schemata of consciousness. In her statement about the 1997 exhibition, Chen talked about an exploration of perception focused on the “body” and “spirit” and her attempt to “focus on her own sense of awareness” wherein “dreaming” serves as a shortcut to “perception.” This new approach also enabled her to move from wandering and searching by returning to “simple instinct.” Inspired by the work of Carlos Castañeda, Chen Hui-chiao’s exploration of consciousness and self-awareness, especially her passion for dreams and astrology, is actually infused with her interests in the mysticism of shamanism.3 In terms of artistic creativity, Chen’s installation pieces Never Shout or Trample the Dream Awake . . . and Then Sleep, My Love . . ., both produced in 1998, the latter a bed covered in synthetic fur which is embedded with needles, are excellent examples of this tendency in her work.4

If we take the human body as a mechanical entity, then dreaming constitutes a form of liberation from physical constraint, a realm in which consciousness is free to roam. In the same way, the world of dreams is always filled with struggle and even dissatisfaction with reality. Although Wu Mali noted Chen’s thirst for freedom in 1997, what is more intriguing is the expressionism the artist employed in the 1990s, wherein freedom is invariably tied to a framework from which it cannot flee. In this context, awareness is restricted by the human form, and the only way it can break free and soar is in dreams. In 2006, Chen Hui-chiao held a solo exhibition, Here and Now, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, that focused on the subject of dreams—or, to use her own words, “a feeling that originates from inside one’s own body.”

Because dreams are a reflection of reality, conflicts and even danger are inevitable. Yet in the works of Chen Hui-chiao, dreams are expressed as a return to truth and even utopia. Both Ancient Feeling (2006) and Inside of Memories (2006) refer to a symbolic and spiritual realm, replete with

71 romantic nostalgia about primordial nature and the origins of the cosmos. Chen Hui-chiao, Ancient Feeling, 2006, FRP, yarn, vinyl Such imagery is also very close to a surreal dreamscape. graphics. Courtesy of the artist.

Although roses have thorns, these are found on the stalk and not on the flower itself. In her earlier work, Chen pierced the whole flower with needles, ensuring it was covered in “thorns.” The rose has long been used as a symbol of love in literature, whereas sticking needles in something is a clear declaration of pain or death. The act makes love something difficult to seize control of or hold. It also makes it easier to be injured when trying to do so. In 2005, Chen Hui-chiao took up a position as artist-in-residence in the artist village founded by Glenfiddich Distillery in Dufftown, Scotland. This experience introduced her to the Scottish thistle, which made a strong impression. In Ancient Feeling, inspired by her experience in Scotland, she portrays tall-standing thistles with thorns on the stems as the guardians of “love” and “dreams.”6 From her earlier roses that signified martyrdom to the more recent iron will of the thistles, Chen Hui-chiao has unyieldingly protected and guarded her own inner world of dreams.

Chen Hui-chiao has always employed a highly personal and intimate visual language in her work that could even be characterized as private. Within this context, it is not such a large step to note that Chen is an artist who dreams through her work. Although works completed in this way appear open, their inner workings are often composed of hidden emotional codes, things the audience knows nothing about. Chen Hui-chiao named her 2008 solo exhibition at IT Park Gallery The Double Flame, a title derived from a book of the same name by Mexican poet Octavio Paz. The book depicts and discusses love. For Paz, eroticism originates in sexuality and is fed by a red flame. Love, on the other hand, is nurtured through eroticism and is represented by an oscillating blue flame. It is these two flames combined that create the double flame of life.7

In The Double Flame, Octavio Paz describes the sublimation of emotion. In other words, inspiration or awakening in life starts by transcending the primitive instinctual passions of our physical selves. In this construct, love is the very essence of human emotion, constantly being nurtured and refined. As a dreamer, Chen Hui-chiao sees this process as one of “dream weaving.” In fact, Chen takes the idea of the double flame and reinterprets it as a metaphor for her own progress in the world of art.

72 Chen Hui-chiao, Round and Around #3 (from The Double Flame exhibition), 2008, silver thread and computer stitching on chamois, two pieces, each 35 x 35 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

In The Double Flame exhibition, Chen Hui-chiao used needlework to make her own painting, and the contradictions of duality that were present in earlier work were no longer evident. This exhibition was also an extension of the spirit that informed her 2006 Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition. As a dreamer, Chen continues to weave dreams through art, noting in her artist’s statement that she takes the earth, the sky, and the oceans as her boundaries. Astrology, sailing on the sea, and flying are some of the means for weaving her fantasia, and these provide a boundless world in which the imagination can roam at will, thereby liberating the “Wings of Senses.”8 Regardless of whether a scenario is found in reality or in dreams, the coming together of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, even if mysterious, is still real. This mixture of emotions not only provides us with a tool for the understanding of life but also encourages self-transcendence and facilitates transformation of the spirit. In her own inner transference, Chen Hui-chiao alludes to the importance of giving free rein to her heart through art. At the same time, she also looks at her own life and expresses the greatest respect and reverence for those who encouraged and inspired her or who continue to strive to travel the same artistic road.

Chen Hui-chiao, The Sky of The year of 2008 was the 20th July (from The Double Flame exhibition), 2008, coloured anniversary of the establishment of thread and computer stitching on chamois, stitching on yarn, IT Park Gallery in Taipei. And it was ping pong balls, feathers, twenty years of financial hardship, dried flowers, 135 x 240 cm. Courtesy of the artist. during which Chen Hui-chiao, one of few founders, has worked as its director. Because of this, the gallery became an irreplaceable “cross of burden” in her life. Although there had been moments of joy few people knew about, this cross of burden exposed her to personal ambivalence. She was constantly torn between the difficult job as director and her own career as a free, dreaming artist. It made it difficult for her to soar creatively and at one extreme point, when too many personal sacrifices were being made, was taking away her freedom. Against this backdrop, The Double Flame solo exhibition in 2008 could be seen as exemplifying the artist’s desires in that it demonstrated an impressive degree of self confidence and showed how she has regained her freedom through the power of dreaming.

Some of the pieces Chen Hui-chiao presented at The Double Flame exhibition deliberately referenced the geometric abstract painting of artists such as Richard Lin (b. 1933), Tsong Pu (b. 1947), Jun T. Lai (b. 1953), and Hu Kun-jung (b. 1955). For Chen, this was intended as a mark of respect, yet, despite her deliberate use of similar forms, in her hands the geometric

73 abstract motifs used by these elder artists lost their original geometric Chen Hui-chiao, The Double Flame, 2008, coloured thread feel and structure, and transformed instead into the apparently accidental and computer stitching on velvet, 270 x 135 cm and 120 x but entirely unavoidable mysterious coming together of time and space. 135 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Chen also infuses her paintings with imagery of constant cosmic changes, reminiscent of the Milky Way. More specifically, as she transforms the geometric abstract formations used by the elder artists, Chen Hui-chiao also infuses her work with her own individual view of the cosmos, offering her own harmony and an unfolding visual imagination that is a mixture of dreamscapes and fantasy.

Chen Hui-chiao has become an even Chen Hui-chiao, Heather (from Double Flame exhibition), more active dreamer. She continues 2008, coloured thread and computer stitching on to weave her dreams in art and, chamois, 120 x 180 cm. through such dream journeys, is Courtesy of the artist. freed and able to make peace with her own destiny. The artist also shares certain expectations with those who have accompanied her on this wonderful artistic journey, and as she says in her artist statement for this exhibition: “We must keep moving forward until we encounter the unknown.” Dreams belong to the unknown, but for Chen Hui-chiao, artistic creation is tantamount to creating her own dreams. Not only is it an important channel through which she is inspired, it also allows her to embark on the boundless exploration of life and the universe.

This is a revised version of a text that will be published by IT Park Gallery, Taipei, in the forthcoming catalogue, The Double Flame.

Notes 1 Wu Mali, “The Skeptic Pursuit of Beauty,” Mountain Art, no. 90 (September 1997), 74–75. 2 For an image of the work, see the exhibition catalogue Chen Hui-chiao: Here and Now (Taipei: Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, 2006), 65–66. 3 For more discussion on the influence of the works of Castañeda on Chen Hui-chiao, see Chin Ya- chun, “The Day She Caught the Clouds: The Creative Art and Life Journey of Chen Hui-chiao,” in Artist Navigators II—Selected Writings on Contemporary Taiwanese Artists (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2008), 100, 104, and 106. 4 For an image of the work, see Chen Hui-chiao: Here and Now, 57–58. 5 Ibid., 25–30 and 45–48. 6 In Scotland the thistle is a symbol of nationhood. Legend has it that the thistle, which is tall and covered in hard thorns, successfully stopped Scotland being invaded by the Northern European barbarians in the Middle Ages, saving the people from a life of subjugation. 7 Octavio Paz, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, trans. Helen Lane (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1995). 8 Wings of Senses is also the name of two pieces of works by Chen Hui-chiao—Wings of Senses (1995) and Wings of Senses II (2006). For images, see Chen Hui-chiao: Here and Now, 33–34 and 63.

74 Inga Walton The China Project Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection March 28–September 13, 2009 Zhang Xiaogang: Shadows in the Soul March 28–July 19, 2008 William Yang: Life Lines March 28–August 9, 2009 Three Chinese Directors March 28–June 28, 2009 Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

he Queensland Art Gallery’s (QAG) flagship event is the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT), which commenced in 1993. TThe satellite Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) opened in December 2006 headlining the fifth installment of the Triennial and will host APT6, as it is now known, commencing in early December 2009. The advantage of hosting such a highly regarded international event is that it serves as an important catalyst for the QAG to acquire numerous works in order to further shape their collection of contemporary Chinese art, which stretches back to the 1980s. This curatorial prescience has resulted in a collection unrivalled within Australia and admired internationally for its depth and scope.

The rather blunt and uninspiring title of the GoMA’s recent exhibition, The China Project, belied a sprawling tripartite tour de force. It encompassed most of the ground floor, and at some moments bordered on the overwhelming. An accompanying film program focused on the work of three prominent directors and served to emphasise the growing influence and popularity of Chinese cinema in the West.

Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection served as the project’s anchor. It was a wide-ranging selection of 150 works by fifty artists and primarily drawn from the QAG’s extensive permanent holdings, including key works acquired from previous Triennials. The exhibition was conceived around five thematic groupings: the growing avant-garde and the legacies of the Cultural Revolution; the development of two styles, Cynical Realism and Political Pop; the importance of the written word, or the Chinese ideogram; the significance of performance art and photography; and works that cite tradition and history, as technique and motif, to radically transform and comment. The last conceptual point seems to have been left dangling, as if in mid-thought, and begs the question as to what is being “radically transformed and commented” on. This serves to emphasize whether the stated connective themes of the exhibition were articulated as clearly as they otherwise might have been throughout the progression of exhibition spaces and in the grouping of works.

Wang Qingsong, China Red, The difficulty for any public 2008–2009, ink and synthetic polymer paint on paper, institution mounting a retrospective 28 x 13 metres, installed dimensions variable. Photo: of its own holdings is that its core Inga Walton. Courtesy of the artist. patronage group may have seen many aspects of the exhibition before and might find it repetitive. As an interstate viewer, it was hard to judge how effectively the GoMA addressed this issue curatorially, apart from observing that they

75 included new works on loan and commissioned others specifically for Ah Xian, works in the artist’s studio from the Metaphysica this exhibition. One such site-specific commission was Wang Qingsong’s series, 2007. Courtesy of the China Red (2008–09), which smothered one wall of the cavernous Long artist. Gallery in countless hand-painted pink sheets of paper. In China Red, Wang revisits some of the themes of his earlier staged photographic work, Commercial War (2004), which focused on the power of advertising and the misconceptions it can create in the minds of a susceptible public. In the format of the installation, he also sees a distinct similarity with the large “personality” prints (da zi bao) of party leaders posted on walls and buildings by competing factions during the Cultural Revolution. “In the past the streets were hung with posters in fights over political beliefs,” Wang observes. “Now the struggle is over financial power and business gain. Ads for items are like psoriasis found everywhere on our city streets.”1

Wang plastered side-by-side hand-copied advertising and marketing slogans for designer brands, services, groceries, and other items to emphasize the ultimate futility of product hierarchy in the consumer market. China’s increasingly consumer-driven society, obsessed with appearance, luxury goods, and status symbols, has left pedestrians mired in a blizzard of paper. “The struggle for ad placement in public space in China is not unlike a battlefield strewn with casualties after a pitched battle for power. Today one brand wins. The next day, its competitor will replace it with better positioning on public spaces,” says Wang. “Every day, new ads go up, and old ones fall down, scattered in pieces and discarded on the ground under newly erected billboard advertisements.”2

Tucked into an alcove near the Xu Zhen, ShanghART Supermarket (Australia), 2007– GoMA’s restaurant, another 08, mixed media installation, 210 x 610 x 835 cm. Photo: commissioned work, ShanghART Inga Walton. Courtesy of the Supermarket (Australia) (2007–08), artist. is Xu Zhen’s latest meticulous reconstruction of a typical Chinese convenience store. The empty

76 packets, jars, boxes, and cartons, blank magazines, idle cash register, absent staff, and spotless interior are like an abandoned film set, eerie but comfortably familiar. This work, paradoxically defined by the “absence” of content, refers to China’s desire to emulate Western standards of service, product range, and lifestyle choices but suggests that this compulsion is mere window dressing in many important respects. Recent scandals about contaminants in Chinese food products and other goods, most notably milk and infant formula last year, and pet food in 2007, all tainted with melamine, have raised widespread concerns about quality control and an entrenched bureaucratic corruption. Xu makes the point that unchecked and poorly regulated consumption is potentially hazardous when product placement and profit becomes more important than ingredients.

The serene and enigmatic busts of Ah Xian (born Liu Ji Xian), with whom the QAG has had a fruitful association, sit along a plinth the length of the Long Gallery. Along with several other Chinese artists who have since established flourishing careers in Australia, Ah Xian sought political Ah Xian, Human, Human— asylum here in 1990 after the Tian’anmen Square massacre. His exploration Lotus, Cloisonné Figure 1, 2000–01, hand-beaten copper, of the human form, both in sculpture and on canvas, with the Heavy Wounds enameling in the cloisonné technique, 158 x 55.5 x 32 cm. series (1991–93), brings an immediacy, tension, and poignancy to the idea Collection of the Queensland of a “body of work.” On loan for this exhibition are thirty-six new bronzes Art Gallery, Brisbane, through the Queenlsand Government’s from his Metaphysica series (2007), ranging in hue from pale green to dark Gallery of Modern Art Acquisition Fund. brown. Each figure has a somewhat incongruous, playful object perched on its head—a red fish, a pagoda, a lamp, a Guanyin figurine. Ah Xian sourced these ornaments, believed to confer good luck and health, from various markets in China.3 Five works from the China, China series (1998–2002), developed at the ancient capital of porcelain production, Jingdezhen, reference traditional landscape scroll paintings, as well as the decorative patterns and motifs popularized to the point of cliché on ceramic export ware and silk. For practical purposes in the casting process, the subjects’ eyes are always closed, and their blank, meditative solemnity is oddly disturbing.

Alluding to the type of censorship and brutality enforced by totalitarian regimes, the static restfulness of the features could easily convey a death mask, often the macabre trophy of execution. The surface design all but obliterates any trace of individualism, like a claustrophobic, lavishly embellished mask behind which the sitter is rendered mute. This is all the more pronounced with Human, Human—Carved Lacquer Bust 1, Dragon (2000–01), the vivid red of which makes the subject look gruesomely flayed in relief. Ah Xian’s contribution concludes with the resplendent life-sized Human, Human— Lotus, Cloisonné Figure 1 (2000–01).4 Made using the traditional cloisonné technique, it was the only successful attempt at this process that Ah Xian and his assistants achieved of three at the Jingdong Cloisonné Factory in Hebei province. The lotus flowers bloom and encircle the female figure, symbolizing spiritual unfolding, but they also appear constricting, as if she is forcibly tranquil, like some Chinese Ophelia.5 For all their sumptuous beauty, Ah Xian’s works would seem to embody the cautionary phrase from the Analects of Confucius, “Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety; make no movement which is contrary to propriety.”

77 Positioned at the entrance to the Long Gallery like giant fibreglass bookends is Wang Wenhai’s lumpen Mao Zedong and Mao Zedong (2003), with one figure dressed as Chairman and positioned slightly in front of the other, who is clad as Emperor. Although it is likely to be interpreted as an ironic, postmodern, or kitsch work, Wang is apparently sincere in his admiration of Mao. He became a Red Guard in 1966 and was introduced to visual art as a guide at the Yan’an Revolutionary Museum in 1970.6 The work is a more extreme example of the preponderance of nostalgic or revisionist Mao memorabilia, whereby he is recast as a benevolent pop-culture figure in the Andy Warhol vein, a demi-god whose despotic excesses are discreetly overlooked as if history is being metaphorically air-brushed. Wang has produced numerous such deferential objects in homage to his hero, but does he assume or expect that the wider audience is that credulous? Perhaps we are obliged to suspend our disbelief with this work, or, better still, to view it as an inflated example of the kind of tacky travel souvenirs found in many countries that bear the label “Made In China.”

A rebuttal of such fetishization and nostalgia for Mao is offered by the confrontational Red-colour News Soldier portfolio (2008) of nine black- and-white prints by documentary photographer Li Zhensheng taken during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76)—the earliest works included in the exhibition. Li worked for the Harbin Heilongjiang Daily for almost twenty years and amassed a remarkable archive of over 30,000 photographs, the

Wang Wenhai, Mao Zedong and Mao Zedong, 2003, fiberglass, each figure 320 x 130 x 130 cm. Photo: Inga Walton. Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, through a Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant, 2007.

Ai Weiwei, Pillar through Round Table, 2004–05, pair of elmwood half tables assembled into a single table (Qing dynasty ,1644–1911) bisected horizontally by an ironwood pillar (Qing dynasty, 1644–1911), on two ironwood pillar fragments, 140 x 656.5 x 123 cm (installed). Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.

78 Li Zhensheng, Reading of negatives of which he carefully secreted under the floorboards of his home. “A letter to peasants from the Central Committee of the These stark images include a march of artists and writers on their way Communist Party,” Harbin, 11 October 1968 (from Red-colour to undertake manual labour in the countryside, a public execution, rows news soldier portfolio), 1968, of swimmers reciting Mao’s writings, a performance of the model opera printed 2008, digital print, 51 x 35.7 cm. Collection of Militia Women in 1966, and a massive rally of the People’s Liberation Army the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. (PLA) denouncing Deng Xiaoping.

Left: Zhou Xiaohu, Utopian Theatre (detail), 2006,11- channel video and fired clay installation, 11 DVDs (1 min. each, colour, sound), 11 television monitors, 10 sets of headphones, 189.5 x 456 cm (installed). Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, through the Queenlsand Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisition Fund (2007). Right: Zhou Xiaohu, Utopian Theatre, 2006,11-channel video and fired clay installation, 11 DVDs (1 min. each, colour, sound), 11 television monitors, Ai Weiwei is currently the undisputed and ubiquitous star of the Chinese 10 sets of headphones, 189.5 x 456 cm (installed). art scene, and his works are grouped in one room. Painted Vases (2006), Collection of the Queensland fourteen Neolithic earthenware vessels that have been over-painted, are Art Gallery, Brisbane, through the Queenlsand Government’s transformed into luscious eye-candy objects in coalescing colours ranging Gallery of Modern Art Acquisition Fund (2007). from soft pastel shades to darker hues. Table with Two Legs on the Wall (2005) and Pillar through Round Table (2004–05) reassemble and combine Qing dynasty tables into absurd sculptures. Ai has arguably performed various acts of cultural vandalism against these antiquities, subverting their

79 historical role. He challenges the viewer to determine the relative value of Xu Bing, A Book from the Sky, 1987–91, woodblock print, these objects; has he destroyed, distorted, or merely recontextualized them? wood, leather, ivory, banners: Should they be venerated simply because of their age or be made relevant to 103 x 6 x 8.5 cm (each, folded); 19 boxes: 49.2 x 33.5 x 9.8 cm modern sensibilities? More abstractly, Ai’s work contemplates the rampant (each, containing four books). The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer destruction of China’s historical past to make way for its oppressively Collection of Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art modern and industrialized present. Gallery, Brisbane, through the International Exhibitions Program and with the The wonderfully intricate fired-clay and multimedia installationUtopian assistance of The Myer Foundation and Michael Theatre (2006) by Zhou Xiaohu is a fascinating highlight of Three Decades. Simcha Baevski through the Queensland Art Gallery The miniature clay figures serve as actors re-creating scenarios as diverse Foundation (1994). as a UN committee hearing, the arrival of a dignitary at the airport, a lone helicopter trying to rescue people from a landslide, a show trial, and an assassination in full public view. The form of the set mimics a panopticon, a circular prison in which the cells surround a central observation tower, a concept originated by English jurist and social reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832).7 Through video, Zhou employs the filmic elements of clay animation to “replay” these events. Each “take” is looped to capture the attention of a fickle global audience who collectively treat even the most serious occurrence as just another form of vicarious entertainment.

In this ambitious piece, Zhou uses a similar mise en scène to that which appeared in his earlier animated video and sculptural dioramas like Utopian Machine (2002), Obsession-Century Celebration (2003), and Crowd Around (2003–05). He uses these works to suggest the ways in which we are complicit in this all-consuming mass media culture of public surveillance monitors, mobile phones and digital cameras, paparazzi ambush, and news crews hovering incessantly like expectant mosquitoes. With a compulsive desire for attention and notoriety, some individuals participate in the invasion of their own privacy via personal blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, and the oxymoron that is reality TV. The erosion of personal liberty and potential manipulation of the media by the state becomes less discernible to a public so otherwise distracted. Zhou questions the extent to which we have become dependent on technology, and its role in disseminating a new, more insidious form of propaganda. The viewer is left to wonder whether we are dulled into submission and passivity by the aimless consumption of dross?

Pure visual drama is provided by Xu Bing’s monumental A Book from the Sky (Tian shu) (1987–91), with broad ribbons of calligraphic script soaring across the length of an entire room. The stark black-painted

80 Guan Wei, Echo, 2005, walls, grey floor, and shafts of light cast through the banners lent the synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 42 panels, 273 x 722 work a somewhat sombre look compared to the warmer hue of previous cm overall. Collection of installations. Separated from their sober wooden cases by some distance, the Queensland Art Gallery, purchased through the one hundred traditionally bound books are placed in grids on the floor, Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art all painstakingly printed with thousands of characters carved by hand. Acquisitions Fund (2006). As none of the characters are “legitimate” or “readable,” this extravagant literary gesture also presents a conundrum, as though the artist has poured forth some form of personal hieroglyphics or invention, which only he can decode. To produce an impenetrable text could be seen as a protest against censorship or as a sign of defiance, caprice, paranoia, or secrecy. Considered a subversive statement when a version was first exhibited at the China Art Gallery (now the National Art Museum of China) in 1988, the work appears to play with notions of truth and its relationship to words.8

We are accustomed to seeking out the meaning in virtually everything we see, convinced that there must be one. Xu denies us this resolution, and so we continue to ponder the contradiction of this deliberately nonsensical, perennially enigmatic communication. With his unintelligible symbols, Xu seems to want us to engage with the concept of printed language as a semi-permeable barrier to which some are admitted and some kept in abeyance, depending upon one’s familiarity with the form of language being used. Looking at the work is much like being in a foreign country and not knowing the language. In confounding us with his words, Xu levels the linguistic playing field, restoring the wonder of printed language for its own sake, as artistic expression or spectacle. He detaches it from the requirement of signification, so, in a sense, it means whatever the artist or the viewer wants it to; the interpretive element is surrendered and made more universally applicable. More broadly, perhaps Xu’s work forms a quiet reverie for the slow decline of the printed word and traditional publishing, the tactile act of reading a book or newspaper, and how that shapes the way we engage with the world. As technology advances, it seems that these vehicles of communication will be rendered increasingly redundant, perhaps soon to be kept in storage as museum pieces themselves.

Zhou Xiaohu’s work acts as an interesting contrast to Xu’s, though both were created with an intense, almost obsessive attention to minute details and with a tremendous appreciation of scale. Both artists seem to be reflecting on the manner in which we receive and participate in the act of communication, and where we place an emphasis, or prioritize a medium, as individuals and as a society. These works are at different ends of the same conceptual spectrum; the written/printed word is losing ground to the visual/technological one, both in terms of the dissemination of information

81 and in social interactions. Zhou is more concerned with the way technology mediates the flow of information that surrounds us. We cannot understand the audio content of what is being communicated within his work without putting on the headphones. Yet we can choose not to participate in that aspect of the work and interpret it purely on the visual components. Such opting out does not necessarily diminish our appreciation of Zhou’s work, which reminds the audience that receiving and processing information is ultimately self-determined. Zhou proposes that we question the role and influence of media outlets and services for ourselves rather than rely on merely being instructed, or informed. How we filter or select the data we are bombarded with daily through many different outlets must be a considered decision if it is to be beneficial in how we perceive and interpret issues.

Guan Wei came to Australia in 1989 to take up an artist-in-residence position at the Tasmanian School of Art, and now lives in Sydney. He is well known for his delicate and enthralling wall paintings and installations that seem to float across the space.9 Guan has often engaged with narratives of displacement, migration, “otherness,” and cross-cultural difference within his works in order to express the difficulties of assimilation into an unfamiliar environment and a foreign mindset. In Echo (2005), Guan appropriates a famous Chinese intellectual landscape painting by Wang Yuanqi (1642– 1715), a great scholar and artist of the early Qing dynasty, as the template for his forty-two panel work. Guan “quotes” nine images of Europeans exploring the Pacific Ocean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Captain James Cook’s landing in Australia on April 29, 1770.

Guan attempts to merge these two great traditions of history painting, using cartographic references and a muted sepia tone to suggest the rough contemporary sketches that later became romanticized formal engravings for books and memoirs. He chronicles the resulting destruction and violence towards indigenous populations in the pursuit of colonial and territorial expansion. The shipmate in the foreground carries a Communist red flag, not the expected Union Jack. Perhaps Guan is drawing a link between European mistreatment of native peoples and the behaviour of the dominant (Han) Chinese in their annexing of Tibet, and more recently the clashes with ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Guan has said of this work, “I would like to introduce a fresh approach where historical analysis develops in a nonlinear, transcultural, and multilayered way. . . . By transposing historical images in a different aesthetic relationship and cultural context, the painting becomes more complicated and supernatural; it recharges our history with sublime and poetic characters.”10

The foyer area is employed to house Zhang Peili, Endless Dancing, 1999, video installation, 8 several large “spill-over” works, Betacam tapes, 20 mins., including Zhang Peili’s Endless Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, purchased through Dancing (1999). Eight inward-facing Queensland Art Gallery Foundation (2001). screens on a raised circular platform displays the twenty-minute film, which depicts an instructor working with amateur couples interspersed with footage of professional dancers at competition level in all their flouncing, fixed-smile finery. The installation worked exceptionally well in terms of engaging the viewer in the central space, almost to the point of one being incorporated into the work itself by the surrounding swirling dancers and strident music.

82 Chen Zhen, Invocation of The GoMA is also home to the Washing Fire, 1999, timber frame, metal, sound, abacus Australian Cinémathèque cinemas, beads, wooden chamber pots, red light globes, broken which hosted the complementary calculators, cash registers, computers, and television filmic section of The China Project. sets, approximately 300 x In the recess area between the 240 x 240 cm. The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection cinemas sat Invocation of Washing of Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Fire (1999), by Chen Zhen (1955– Brisbane, through The Myer Foundation, a project of 2000), like some sort of strange, the Sidney Myer Centenary pulsating wicker cauldron. Chen Celebration 1899–1999, through the Queensland Art references traditional Chinese Gallery Foundation (1999). medical theories of organic wholeness and alchemic ideas of purifying fire through water in the creation of this farrago. Replete with various surplus consumer commodities and redundant appliances to be purged within the artist’s creation, Chen looks to restore a balance between the material and the spiritual. (It is to be hoped that the cacophonous audio track, ostensibly of women cleaning chamber pots in Shanghai streets, is turned off when the Cinémathèque is in session).

Three Decades was unquestionably the most impressive display of contemporary Chinese works seen in Australia since the Asia Society touring exhibition Inside Out: New Chinese Art, which it dwarfed in scale and inclusiveness of media.11 In its totality the show provided an excellent overview of practice, which the commissioned works served to reinforce. There were many elements that delivered a definite “wow” factor, while others were intriguing, thought provoking, visually enthralling, and simply beautiful. The inclusion of so many new media works, including those by Ni Haifeng, He Yunchang, Qiu Zhijie, Yang Zhenzhong, and Zhang Huan, among others, reflects the QAG’s commitment to this increasingly popular and relevant art form and the way it has been embraced by Chinese artists. These works were well displayed both at separate viewing stations with seating and interspersed with other pieces throughout the ensuing rooms.

Paradoxically, it was the sheer scale of the primary exhibition, and the difficulty of negotiating so many works within a given time frame, that ultimately proved to be a drawback. To do justice to the wide variety of media included and have the opportunity to engage with them fully would inevitably require quite a substantial investment of time over multiple viewings. Such a commitment is unrealistic for many visitors attending this “destination event,” and this problem highlights the complexities of mounting such a large-scale project, which also needs to be manageable for attendees on a practical basis. The cadence of works also seems in some places rather forced, as if putting as many examples of the collection on display was the more overriding goal. The tendency to “show off,” as it were, seems to have trumped a more refined or nuanced selection.

Assembling such a large number of disparate works did not necessarily result in a cohesive statement, though perhaps it was not destined to. Some works seemed jarringly placed, while others were merely uninspiring, having apparently little to do with one another, regardless of the conceptual and thematic fine print. Others did not coalesce well within the same space and could have done with more room to breathe, particularly in the case of some of the photographic groups that seemed crammed together. The stated themes for the exhibition also seemed to peter out amidst the clamour for space, where the conceptual linkage could have been made

83 more aggressively. Perhaps fewer works better grouped could have made those themes more resonant for the audience and easier to navigate for those needing more guidance.

Shadows in the Soul, a major retrospective of seventy-eight works by Zhang Xiaogang, co-curated by Leng Lin and Suhanya Raffel, adjoined the main exhibition. In a significant coup, the majority of the works were on loan from Zhang’s personal collection, including two large suites of drawings, Guishan (1982) and The Ghost Between Black and White (1984), which have not been previously shown in a public museum. The former consists of largely pastoral scenes and resembles quick cartoons, but the Ghost works were beautifully articulated with a decidedly Surrealist tone, demonstrating Zhang’s great dexterity as a draughtsman. Zhang’s experience of the Cultural Revolution permeates his works. He was eight when it began and eighteen when it ended. For Zhang it remains “a psychological state, not a historical fact. It has a very strict connection with my childhood, and I think there are many things linking the psychology of the Chinese people today with the psychology of the Chinese people back then.”12

Zhang’s best-known works, the Top: Zhang Xiaogang, Amnesia and Memory ongoing Bloodline: The Big Family series: Red Girl, 2007, oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm. Private (1993–2007) series, are drawn Collection. from his own encounter with rare Bottom: Zhang Xiaogang, family studio portraits, many of The Ghost Between Black and White No.10: Dialogue which were routinely destroyed Between Two Ghosts, 1984, pencil on paper, 29 x 21 cm. during the Cultural Revolution. Collection of the artist. The wanton erasure of family and personal histories, the impact of this loss on collective memory, and the sensation of being adrift in the world create an atmosphere of restrained grief, of being psychologically dismembered by social forces. The works express the inevitable tension between the individual and the faceless masses of China against whose collective well being the individual struggles for identity. The figures, often dressed in identical Mao suits or plain, high-collared separates, have distinctive red bloodlines that demonstrate the links among people. Splotches, stains, and washes symbolize wounds and marks left by trauma. The works otherwise become quite monotonous, with indistinct backgrounds framing the pursed lips, controlled features, and blank eyes of the subjects. The figures loom larger than life and are oppressive in their dour watchfulness, but ultimately they remain lifeless.

Similarly, Zhang’s Amnesia and Memory series (2002–) appears to liken ideology and conformity to a collective amnesia, or a selective blindness. In the accompanying catalogue essay, Leng Lin observes, “The artist believes that amnesia is sometimes more important than memory, for history requires constant revision.”13 It is difficult to discern whether Zhang is suggesting that willful acts of forgetting are often preferable to acknowledging the past in

84 Zhang Xiaogang, Duplicated Space No. 2, 1990, oil on paper, 50 x 40 cm. Collection of the artist.

order to secure some semblance of self-preservation and protection; certainly the stupefied subjects in this series do not convey confidence. The various series of works, including selections from the blurry In Out series (2006–) are decidedly repetitious, so it is refreshing to see the range of Zhang’s work when not confined to a narrow pictorial template of his own making.

Zhang Xiaogang, Of greatest interest are Zhang’s Reincarnation, 1989, pencil, ink, and oil on paper mounted more gritty earlier works, on cloth, 76.6 x 53.3 cm. Collection of the Queensland such as Red Moon (1984), Art Gallery, Brisbane. Noiseless World (1985), Yin and Yang (1988), New Year’s Eve (1989) and the arresting Duplicated Space No. 2 (1990). Reincarnation (1989), a response to the events at Tian’anmen Square, evokes the Surrealist tendencies of the Ghost drawings, replete with allegorical symbols. The overall white theme signals mourning—we see multiple planes of existence, decapitation, and a severed arm. An open book with a head tumbling onto it implies the denial and suppression of knowledge. The scene is shielded by an open folding screen in the background; shrouds graze the floor and lilies fall from the sky, all forming an allegory of death. Zhang’s works are an acquired taste, but this

85 William Yang, William, Father, Mother, Graceville, 1974 (from the GoMA self-portrait series), 2008, digital print, 41.5 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

survey was certainly inclusive William Yang, William in Scholar’s Costume, 1984 and would have delighted (from the GoMA self-portrait aficionados of the artist with its series), 2008, digital print, 94.5 x 62.7 cm. Courtesy of insight into his creative process the artist. and studio practice. There was also an auspicious confluence between Zhang’s Description (2007–) series of photographic images, captured from unrelated film and television stills and inscribed in silver ink with his personal musings, which seemed to preface the more emotive and direct approach of William Yang, the other featured artist of The China Project.

Yang is an influential figure in the Australian arts firmament as playwright, performance artist, photographer, author, and activist. His grandparents migrated from China in the 1880s, and much of Yang’s recent work has been of an autobiographical nature, focusing on his sense of identity as a third-generation Australian-Chinese, his familial relationships, coming out as a gay man, and his wider cultural heritage.14 Installed in a long cabinet the length of GoMA’s foyer, Life Lines is a deeply personal exposition of Yang’s experiences, starting with his childhood in the North Queensland town of Dimbulah. Eighteen framed photographs of various sizes chronicle important moments and personages in his life: part social history, part travelogue, part quasi-documentary.

Yang has annotated the works in his own looping handwriting, adding an immediacy and candour to the narrative that cannot fail to resonate with the viewer. “I call myself a diarist of my own life because that is how my documentary photography has evolved,” Yang has observed.15 Some of the “thought bubbles” are brutally frank:

86 When I was about six years old, one of the kids at school called me ‘Ching-Chong Chinaman, Born in a jar, Christened in a tea- pot, Ha, Ha, Ha’. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I knew from his expression that he was being horrible to me, so I went home to my mother and I said to her, ‘Mum, I’m not Chinese, am I’? My Mother said to me very sternly, ‘Yes, you are’. Her tone was hard and it shocked me. I knew in this moment being Chinese was like a terrible curse and I could not rely on my mother for help. Or my brother, who was four years older than me, very much more experienced in the world, he chimed in, ‘And you’d better get used to it’!16

The most striking and personally revealing work is William in Scholar’s Costume, 1984 (2008) where the artist writes movingly of finally finding peace within his own skin. The text almost negates the extravagant costume in which Yang is “performing” for the camera:

I learned Taoism, a Chinese philosophy, and this led to me embracing my Chinese heritage which hitherto had been denied and unacknowledged. People at the time called me Born Again Chinese, and that’s not a bad description, as there was a certain zealousness to the process. But now I see it as a liberation from racial suppression and prefer to say I came out as a Chinese.17

In front of the images Yang has placed other various objects; some rest on a small shelf affixed to the wall, others are raised on small plinths, but most sit along the base of the cabinet. Yang uses these personal talismans, significant mementos, and smaller framed family photos to enhance his storytelling technique.18 These keepsakes—a Song dynasty plate, a Mao cap, a fragment of tile found at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, a handmade birthday card from the renowned artist Shen Jiawei, Yang’s name written thrice on a sheet of rice paper by calligrapher Yao Dit Xiong—express sentiment and contribute to Yang’s sense of self. “The objects are a bit like photographs. They signify my life story like chapters. They are souvenirs, but they also have a meaning,” he says.19

On the opposite wall, a site-specific commission extends upwards to the second floor level of the building. Yang has erected a photographic collage tree of his extended family interspersed with significant historical Chinese landmarks in Australia. Yang’s linear approach with Life Lines has its own gentle rhythm, making it easy for an audience to identify with his journey of discovery and empathize with his perspective. His anecdotal, confessional style draws the viewer in. “I have felt that people liked my personal story because they can engage with it, but it has been very hard to do. I feel exposed,” Yang comments.20 Since Yang is one of the best-known Queensland artists, it was perhaps both appropriate and agreeably predictable that his work would preface the wider exhibition in such a way.

Three Chinese Directors, at the Australian Cinémathèque, rounded out the The China Project, linking the new media work exhibited in Three Decades to a broader filmic experience. Focusing on Xie Jin 1( 923–2008), Jia Zhang- ke, and Zhang Yimou, thirty films were screened twice, each over a three– month period.21 The program included eight of Xie’s films, highlighting the director’s deep commitment to exploring the role of women in a Communist

87 society. The seminal Wutai Jiemei (Stage Sisters) (1965), which was banned William Yang, Life Lines (detail), 2009, site-specific and the director denounced for his bourgeois humanism, ranks as Xie’s photographic installation. masterpiece. Jia Zhang-ke won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival Photo: Inga Walton. in 2006 with his feature Sanxia Haoren (Still Life), which used the imminent flooding of the 2,000-year-old town of Fengjie, by the controversial Three Gorges dam, as a backdrop to two characters in search of their missing spouses. Jia often blurs the distinction between film and documentary in his work, which the selection of films ably demonstrated, including his début feature, Xiao Wu (Pickpocket) (1997), and one of Jia’s rarely screened student efforts, Xiao Shan hui jia (Xiao Shan Going Home) (1995).

Zhang Yimou remains one of the most honoured and famous Chinese directors in the West, and recently he directed the opening and closing ceremonies of the XXIX Olympic Games in Beijing.22 The selection included his three nominations for Best Foreign Language Film at the annual Academy Awards, Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (Da Hong Deng Long Gao Gao Gua) (1991), and Hero (Ying Xiong) (2002).23 With period fare like Red Sorghum (Hong Gao Liang) (1987)24 and Curse of the Golden Flower (Man Cheng Jin Dai Huang Jin Jia) (2006), all starring his muse Gong Li, Zhang garnered a reputation for his use of saturated colour and unabashed fondness for opulent spectacle. Zhang’s flair for large-scale action choreography and the dramatic excess that characterizes House of Flying Daggers (Shi Mian Mai Fu) (2004) was balanced with more intimate, character-driven works like The Road Home (Wo De Fu Qin Mu Qin) (1999), Not One Less (Yi Ge Dou Bu Neng Shao) (1999),25 and Happy Times (Xingfu Shiguang) (2002).

The China Project was certainly an emphatic display from an institution justly proud of a collection that is coming into its own in terms of relevance and prestige. The QAG further demonstrated its ability to obtain contributions from major artists to realize its curatorial aims. Special mention should be accorded to the QAG’s efforts to engage the next generation of gallery

88 patrons.26 In the staffed Children’s Art Centre within the exhibition, a purpose-designed space with three large benches and long banquettes, William Yang’s Australia Now encouraged younger patrons to discover their Chinese zodiac, engage with the artworks, and tell their stories on specially designed paper. Song Dong, whose photographic series Stamping the Water (1996) appeared as part of Three Decades, presented the additional Writing with Water (2002). The work is inspired by Song’s childhood experience of practicing his calligraphy skills by writing with water on stone because his family could not afford ink and paper. Now Song writes an “invisible diary” every day and watches as his watery thoughts gradually evaporate on the stone block. The darkened space incorporates a video installation of the artist’s process and six large rocks on a spongy surface with calligraphy brushes and a water trough at the ready. Song’s personal example encouraged children to participate in the expressive process.27

Top: William Yang, Life In mounting this project there was a deliberate attempt to embrace a broad Lines (detail), 2009, objects and photographs in vitrine. range of artists who work could be said to exemplify contemporary Chinese Courtesy of the artist and Queensland Art Gallery, art: those from mainland China, those who could be considered part of Brisbane. the Chinese diaspora (including artists who have emigrated to Australia), and artists of Chinese descent who were born and raised in Australia. This made for an inclusive range of narratives and expressive content from artists who demonstrate a willingness, perhaps even a compulsion, to engage with the tragedy, conflict, compromises, and seismic shifts that have affected modern China. Almost without exception, their works suggest a profound sensitivity towards and engagement with the turbulent interplay of ideas influencing the transition of art from one particular cultural milieu to a

Top: Jia Zhang-Ke, production still from 24 City, 2008, Courtesy of MK2. Bottom left: Xie Jin, production still from Stage Sisters, 1965. Courtesy of China Film Archive. Bottom right: Zhang Yimou, production still from House of Flying Daggers, 2004. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

89 global one. Intrinsically aware of China’s long artistic history, these artists have successfully engaged, manipulated, and experimented with Western ideas to address the hybrid environment in which many of them live and work. Across the wide range of paintings, assemblages, photography, new media, works on paper, ceramics, sculpture, and installation the works deftly traverse distinctly different geographical, cultural, and philosophical regions, replete with their own specific and unique signifiers.

Notes 1 Quoted on the artist’s Web site, www.wangqingsong.com/2004pages/commercial_war.htm. 2 Ibid. 3 Rosemary Neill, “The Face: Profile,” inThe Weekend Australian, Review section, March 21–22, 2009. In order, the ornaments atop the figures are described as: pagoda; crab; San Xing Dui standing statue; Immortal on a deer; pigeon; girl on a lotus leaf; monkeys on horseback; mask; Peking dog; crane on tortoise; cicada on bamboo; pair of pigs; Maitreya; Buddha hand with lotus; cow head; loop- handled ewer with snake design; horse; baby boy; cicada on leaf; tortoise; statue with human head and bird body; elephant; catfish; Arhat; children washing elephant; monkey; little boy with buffalo; Buddha head; Immortal on goose; rabbit; Zhaojun Chu Sai; red fish;Guanyin ; rooster; golden toad; kerosene lamp; boy on lotus leaf. 4 The work won the (now discontinued) AUD $50,000 inaugural National Sculpture Prize (November 30, 2001–March 10, 2002) at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and was acquired by the QAG the following year. 5 These works are discussed extensively in the earlier exhibition catalogue, Ian Were, ed., Ah Xian (South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2003). 6 See Ian Were, ed., The China Project, exh. cat. (South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2009), 179, and Kitty Hauser, “Public Works,”, The Weekend Australian, Review section, May 16–17, 2009, 2. 7 Were, The China Project, 91. 8 Xu Bing: Exhibition of Print Making Art, October 15–23, 1988. For an extensive discussion of Xu’s works, see Claire Roberts, “Between Heaven and Earth: Xu Bing, the Academy and Contemporary Chinese Art,” in Were, The China Project, 48–55. For more images and background see www.xubing. com. 9 See the artist’s Web site, www.guanwei.com.au. 10 Guan Wei, artist’s statement, “Echo,” Sherman Galleries, Paddington, October, 2006. 11 At the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (June 3–August 13, 2000). Thirteen of the artists were included in both exhibitions: Cai Guo-Qiang, Fang Lijun, Wenda Gu, Hong Hao, Liu Xiangdong, Qiu Zhijie, Song Dong, Wang Jin, Wang Jinsong, Xu Bing, Zhang Huan, Zhang Peili, and Zhang Xiaogang. 12 Jonathan Fineberg, “Memory and Desire,” in Leng Lin and Jonathan Fineberg, Zhang Xiaogang: Revision, exh. cat. (New York: Pace Wildenstein Gallery, 2008), 17. 13 Leng Lin, “Zhang Xiaogang: Shadows in the Soul,” in Were, The China Project, 198. 14 The placement of “Australian” first is Yang’s. “I’m Australian, I identify as being Australian; it’s like a disguise that I’m being Chinese, and people believe me.” See Russell Storer, “A conversation with William Yang,” in Were, The China Project, 263. 15 Catherine Lambert, “Yang meditates on objective affections,” The Herald Sun, Arts News section, September 24, 2006, 19. 16 Text for Self Portrait #2,(photographer unknown), 1947 (2008) in Were, The China Project, 269. 17 Text for William in Scholar’s Costume, 1984 (2008), assisted by Yensoon Tsai, ibid., 256. 18 This aspect of the exhibition draws on Yang’s 2005 performances of Object of My Meditation at The Studio, Sydney Opera House. These were continued as Objects for Meditation the following year at North Melbourne Town Hall (October 18–21, 2006). See the artist’s Web site and blog: www. williamyang.com and http://williamyangartist.blogspot.com, respectively. 19 Catherine Lambert, “Yang meditates on objective affections.” 20 Ibid. 21 For a lengthy appraisal see Ben Cho, “Still lives, flying daggers and the legend of Tianyun mountain,” in artlines, no. 1 (March–May 2009), 22¬–25, and Kim Machan, “Sanxia Haoren (Still Life),” ibid., 46. 22 In collaboration with choreographer Zhang Jigang, Zhang Yimou also directed the Beijing portion of the closing ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics. 23 Nominated at the 63rd, 64th, and 75th annual Academy Awards, respectively. House of Flying Daggers was nominated for Best Cinematography (Zhao Xiaoding) at the 77th Awards, and Curse of the Golden Flower for Best Costume Design (Yee Chung Man) at the 79th Awards; Zhang’s films are rivaled among his only by Ang Lee’s films. 24 Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, (1988). 25 Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, (1999). 26 For a discussion of the QAG’s philosophy and the implementation of its children’s art program, see Andrew Clark, “Art is for everyone: Contemporary art for contemporary kids,” in artlines, no. 1 (March–May 2009), 30–31. 27 The installation came with its own soundtrack, courtesy of Brisbane-based composer Nicholas Ng. Research Fellow at the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre at Griffith University, Ng is particularly interested in the healing properties of music, using both acoustic and electronic soundscapes and particularly his favourite instrument, the erhu. Ng has worked with William Yang on stage productions.

90 Jonathan Goodman Qiu Zhijie at Chambers Fine Art March 12–May 9, 2009

Qiu Zhijie, Tattoo II, 1994–, t just 40 years of age, chromogenic print, mounted on aluminum, 140.5 x 123 Qiu Zhijie has already cm. Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art, New York. A contributed some of the most interesting pieces of contemporary art from mainland China. He is among the youngest of a group of artists—among them Xu Bing and Cai Guo- Qiang—who have produced work of outstanding merit and social perspective. Interested in language, he has come up with startlingly compelling images that make use of Chinese characters, such as Tattoo II (circa Qiu Zhijie, 2006, Shape of Time, C print,126 x 96 cm. 1994), in which he painted his Courtesy of the artist and bare torso with the character Chambers Fine Art, New York. bu (meaning “no”), finishing its extremities on the white walls behind him. While the artist considers this work to be a study of figure and ground, it may also be viewed as a rejection of the media frenzy that has taken over China. Additionally, there are several series in which he photographically recorded himself drawing characters in the air with a flashlight, pointing out how language is itself a time- based medium, subject in this case to being written with the flashlight. His investigation of how words are graphic performances as well as referent symbols constitutes one of the most interesting projects in recent years by a Chinese artist.

Among Chinese artists in general, and in the case of Qiu in particular, there has been a return to involvement in the tradition of ink painting. For about twenty years the main thrust of progressive contemporary Chinese art has been supported by artists’ keen interest in Western avant-garde practices, including performance and conceptual art. Artists such as Zhang Huan took American art advances of the 1970s and made them his own with performances that documented the excitement and slightly bemused creativity of someone producing new art in international venues. Now, in his most recent exhibition at Chambers Fine Art, Mochou: Recent Works by

91 92 Above: Qiu Zhijie, installation Qiu Zhijie, Qiu has decided to continue ideas brought up by his exhibition view of Mouchou: Recent Works by Qiu Zhijie. Courtesy at the same gallery last year. The new show, however, has a remarkable of the artist and Chambers Fine Art, New York. history. It was scheduled to open on March 12, 2009, but as of March 11, Top: Qiu Zhijie, installation U.S. customs had not as yet released the fourteen paintings that were to view of Mouchou: Recent Works by Qiu Zhijie. Courtesy make up the exhibition. Qiu, arriving in New York on March 10, had little of the artist and Chambers choice but to paint on the gallery walls themselves if the show was to open Fine Art, New York. Middle left: Qiu Zhijie painting on time. Using brushes and ink bought in New York’s Chinatown, Qiu spent the wall at Chambers Fine Art, March 11, 2009. Courtesy of twenty straight hours producing images on the wall, finishing the job at the artist and Chambers Fine 11:00 a.m. on the day of the opening—quite a feat for someone suffering Art, New York. Middle right: Qiu Zhijie from jet lag. After Qiu was done, he more or less collapsed immediately, painting the wall at Chambers almost missing the opening festivities. Fine Art, March 11, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art, New York. Facing the need to domesticate some of his iconographic renderings (many Bottom: Qiu Zhijie, Boomerang, 2009, ink on wall of them not easily understood by the Western viewer), Qiu recreated images (detail of mural). Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine of things that he had noticed during the single day he spent in New York. Art, New York. The pictures included a conch shell in the apartment where he was residing and straws that were part of the Vietnamese take-out he subsisted on; other images included a gas mask, his daughter’s hand opening a book, and large stalactites and stalagmites—taken both from his imagination and his stay in New York—as well as other attributes of nature. The actual ink paintings held by customs were released on March 27, but by then the wall paintings had taken right of place. The ink-on-paper images generally relate not only to Qiu’s personal experience, but also to his ongoing investigation of the city of Nanjing, once a capital city and one severely damaged by the Japanese invasion during the Second World War. In particular, Qiu took an interest in the Yangtze River Bridge, in many ways a symbol of Chinese industrial modernization, but also, sadly, a site where many Chinese people have chosen to take their lives. John Tancock’s essay in the catalogue for the New York show quotes Qiu on the reasons individuals might be moved to commit suicide:

In the past, the key word in our society was revolution, but right now the key word is success. You have only two choices: success or failure. That’s the reason why so many people kill themselves on this bridge. They come to this symbolic place, which is so tall, so powerful.1

93 Qiu, known for his teaching and activism as well as for his works of art, has made A Suicidology of the Yangtze River Bridge (2007–present) an ongoing project. As a place of symbolic value, it can hardly be more appropriate for both the demonstration of China’s social changes and the problems that are concomitant with such advances. Investigating the bridge in many ways, including direct action with suicide-prevention groups, Qiu has taken this theme and addressed it in a wide variety of media—photos, paintings, and installations among them. The group of works comprising the Mochou exhibition is tangential to the Yangtze River bridge project; Mochou is the name of a highly popular tourist site also in Nanjing, as well as of a legendary young woman whose poverty forced her into an unhappy marriage in order to pay for her father’s funeral. Despairing, she killed herself in the lake now bearing her name.2

Photographs documenting the massive efforts made by Qiu to finish the gallery paintings show the artist hard at work, creating wall images whose origins may be personal but that bear up nicely in the face of public scrutiny. For example, the conch shell is cut apart, revealing the spiraling structure within; the accompanying Chinese characters say, “glimpse treasures of the world within.” This image is exquisitely handled, and, like much of Qiu’s current iconography, carries a philosophical tone, much in keeping with traditional Chinese art. Another picture, at once lyrical and whimsically amusing, shows an august pine tree with horizontal branches, among which sit loudspeakers; the dictum written in Chinese reads, “listen to the pines.” Straddling private idiom and public responsibility, Qiu paints personal and impersonal histories in ways that thoroughly engage his audience. A third image is described as another directive: “climb up to the moon.” In this case a ladder is painted penetrating a dark cloud with stars as well as the moon itself. At first the installation is confusing, but over time, it slowly reveals itself as a series of Chinese meditations on nature and culture. Sometimes the nature and culture are mixed, as in the picture of a bee with a stinger; beautifully rendered, the insect is closely accompanied by characters that say “boomerang.”

Qiu’s seeming retreat to traditional ink painting can be seen as a denial of Western influence. He has chosen a broad, specifically Chinese cultural focus that enables him to work within the tradition of ink painting. In fact, Qiu’s materials and process show him to be technically prodigious in the manner of the ancients in whose path he follows. It seems clear that, like fellow artist Xu Bing, Qiu bridges the gap between the old and the new by spelling out innovative ideas using old methodologies—a particularly creative means of connecting to the past and suggesting the future. The traditional means of ink painting are shaken up a bit, so that they can communicate not only refined sentiments but also rough realities that serve as both a celebration and a warning for supposed progress in a social sense. Qiu is not hiding his head in the ground, but neither is he wholeheartedly embracing the modernist enterprise. His double vision most likely has occurred because art during Mao’s reign was mostly cut off from modernism. In effect, Chinese art jumped directly from a weakened socialist realism developed during the Cultural Revolution to postmodernism; this jump has protected the Chinese contemporary artist from too much reliance on modernism. In the vacuum that occurred, artists like Qiu found ways to pay attention to the specificities of the Chinese legacy even as they seemingly embraced the new techniques of American and Western art.

94 Qiu Zhijie, Listen to the Pines, 2009, ink on paper, 123 x 83.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art, New York.

The individual paintings that U.S. customs let go too late to be included in the installation constitute the origin of some of the works Qiu sketched during his intense twenty-hour burst of creativity. The images include the aforementioned ladder climbing up to and then through the moon and pine tree with loudspeakers, as well as a baby holding parachutes and seizing the wind. Expressionistic in their presentation, the ink paintings embrace both the old and the new without yielding to one particular way of thinking. This is where Qiu functions at his best: as someone who brings up to date the myths and pictures of antiquity. In many ways, his practice, which has charmed and impressed the New York art world, could not be further away from New York’s emphasis on newness for its own sake (itself a mode of production that is several generations old). Rather than distancing himself from his cultural context, Qiu takes it on as part of a widening tableau within which he can make his art. It is this that gives his ink paintings their dignity. At the same time, the artist is careful to bring contemporary phrasing into his illustrations of aphorisms that may or may not belong to an actual literary heritage—the alternative would be that Qiu wrote the texts himself. It seems that Qiu and many other contemporary practitioners are comfortably aligned with what has preceded them.

95 Early on in his career, Qiu offered Qiu Zhijie, Writing the “Orchid Pavilion Preface” One art that stemmed from the classics. Thousand Times, 1990–97, ink on paper. Courtesy of the One of the most interesting pieces artist and Chambers Fine Art, in the New York version of Inside New York. Out, the exhibition that ten years ago introduced a Western audience to contemporary Chinese art, was his Writing the “Orchid Pavilion Preface” One Thousand Times (1990–97), in which he rewrote the Orchid Pavilion Preface roughly a thousand times on the same sheet of paper. Ironically, the supposed original of the copy Qiu used for his exercise is itself a copy. It is said that Emperor Tang Taizong (307–65) had the original—done by a great ancient calligrapher named Wang Xizhi—buried with him because of his love for Wang’s work.3 In this remarkable work of art, Qiu uses negation, here the physical as well as imaginative negation of a great calligraphic text, to make a point about creativity; by copying a copy to the point of oblivion, Qiu not only destroys the readable text of the Orchard Pavilion Preface, he also makes the point that any authentic version of it is a myth, as it possesses no recognizable origin. This idea may strike Qiu’s Western audience as deeply contemporary, but we remember that the venerable text he worked from is itself a version of an original permanently lost. Here Qiu makes inspired use of a lyric story involving calligraphy—a narrative that he updates by violating its tradition.

With the recognition that copying is itself a useful activity, capable of both rendering homage to and tearing down the image being replicated, it is relatively easy to see Qiu’s broad use of imagistic predecessors as an antidote to the dullness brought about by the new emphasis on creativity alone. We know that nothing is understood without recognition of historical context, and we know that Qiu is attempting a merger between what he already knows and what he is about to paint. Looking to the past, he also demonstrates an aesthetic of the future, whereby the rules of classicism are loosened by an expressionist drive. Qiu is not alone in his pursuit of a historically ambiguous style; other Chinese artists have dealt with the classics by altering and even destroying their meaning (think of Xu Bing’s Tianshu [Book from the Sky]). But he is certainly a skilled and even inspired practitioner of methods that transcend the past to speak of the present and future. As a result, the classical implications he makes use of so well yield to a larger vision, one founded on the present path of eclecticism. In Qiu’s art, the copy becomes a support of the original, no matter whether it is an ancient text or an up-to-the-moment reiteration of earlier versions on the wall.

Notes 1 John Tancock, Mochou: Recent Works by Qiu Zhijie (New York: Chambers Fine Art, 2009), 14. 2 Ibid., 14. 3 Norman Bryson, “The Post-Ideological Avant-Garde,” in Gao Minglu, ed., Inside Out: New Chinese Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 56–57.

96 Maya Kóvskaya The Visual Roots of a Public Intellectual’s Social Conscience: Ai Weiwei’s New York Photographs Three Shadows Photography Art Center, Beijing January 2 – April 18, 2009

i Weiwei has long been a controversial figure in the Chinese art world. Some portray him as a brash, overgrown punk, others as a A local cult figure surrounded by groupies, while still others find his directness and sharp tongue troublesome. What’s more, his uneuphemized critiques of the myriad failings of contemporary Chinese society and political life have made him into a sensitive index of the shifting boundaries of the permissible in contemporary Chinese public discourse. Yet, while he is unarguably one of the most high-profile Chinese contemporary artists alive today, the significance and import of his work is often seen in terms of its formal qualities, an understanding that fails to capture the work’s most compelling characteristics. His honours and accolades are certainly many and diverse. He was the recipient of the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award in Chinese Contemporary Art, and his art has been showcased at major international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1999), 2nd Guangzhou Triennial (2005), Biennale of Sydney (2006), documenta 12 (2007), and Liverpool Biennale (2008). This summer he has a major solo show at the Mori Art Museum (2009), in Tokyo. But while these achievements have brought Ai Weiwei to international prominence, it is his courageous conviction and provocative stance as a public intellectual that permeates his life and his work, adding considerable significance to his interventions.

Ai Weiwei’s robust social conscience did not simply emerge overnight in the glow of the Olympics after his involvement in the design of the “Bird’s Nest” Beijing National Stadium, along with Herzog & de Meuron, his co- collaborators in the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2008), as some might have us believe. Rather, his passionate convictions were formed early in life and have been an important part of his work since his days as a student.

The continuity in his passionate belief in the need for public intellectuals and art that can bear witness to who we are and our changing times was powerfully illuminated by an impressive array of 230 photographs that premiered this January for the first time anywhere at the Three Shadows Photography Arts Centre in Beijing. These photographs were taken during Ai Weiwei’s sojourn in New York’s East Village (1983–93) and selected from over 10,000 of his images from this period that were archived by the staff at Three Shadows. Ai Weiwei’s New York Photographs are a testament to the keen social and cultural acuity that enabled him, even as an outsider, to capture seminal moments in the history of the times.

The glib portrayals of Ai Weiwei as playful punk, slick manoeuverer, or swaggering egotist are complicated and confounded by the fearless earnestness and trenchant sensitivity revealed in the continuity between his preoccupations as a young man incessantly shooting photographs while living in New York’s East Village and his activities since returning to

97 Beijing. He played a mentoring role in the performance art hotbed known as the Beijing East Village until the crackdown that dispersed the community in mid-1994. His Samizdat-style publications of the White, Gray, and Black Cover Books (1994–97) offered critical discourse and introduced then- unknown seminal artists. In 2000, he co-curated defiantly uncommodifiable works at the landmark Fuck Off group exhibition in Shanghai. After helping design the Olympic “Bird’s Nest,” he became an outspoken critic of the urban “cleansing” that flushed the labourers who had built the New Beijing and Olympic facilities out of the city like detritus before the games. And his prolific blog entries (seehttp://blog.sina.com.cn/aiweiwei ), rife with wrathful judgments upon the pathologies of our times, alongside the endless parade of documentary photographs that he compiles almost compulsively, provide a symmetrical textual counterpoint to the rich body of photography from the New York years and beyond.

His recent work, such as The Names Project, extends and enlarges Ai Weiwei’s commitment to being a public intellectual in practice as well as principle. For The Names Project, he has assembled an entire team to research, track down, and list the more than 5,000 names, ages, birthdates, place of residence, and death of the children who were crushed to death in the May 12, 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake in Sichuan province. Defying cagey and disgruntled local officials eager to keep secret the dirty insider deals that led to the so-called “tofu” school construction projects that crumbled like the curds (doufu zha) in a brick of tofu when the earthquake hit, leading to massive casualties among students while nearby government buildings remained intact, Ai Weiwei has persisted in collecting name after name of the children who perished. He defiantly writes about this and many other issues of social injustice on his blog and now on Twitter, in spite of constant intimidation attempts by officialdom, the repeated closure of his mainland blog, and a bevy of plainclothes informants tailing his every move.

Irrespective of his meteoric rise in recent years, which seemingly mirrored the skyrocketing fortunes of Chinese art in general, Ai Weiwei is anything but a metonym for mainstream contemporary Chinese art. Attempts to portray him this way miss the point—and the power—of his work and role as public intellectual. And while his sculptures, installations, and interventions have been showcased worldwide to critical acclaim, it is this newly unveiled and vast body of early photography that offers the clearest metonym for the artist himself.

Although Ai Weiwei was born in Beijing in 1957, he spent his formative years in northwest China, where his father, Ai Qing, a prominent poet, like so many intellectuals of that era, was exiled during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 and sentenced to labour reform designed to humiliate intellectuals. Ai Weiwei grew up watching his father being forced to clean toilets and not allowed to write for two decades; he learned early about the consequences of impolitic expression as well as the arbitrary nature of power, which expresses itself efficaciously in the silencing of public discourse, most effectively through self-censorship, quiescence, and compliance. Indeed, his father’s persecution for having written “the wrong kind of poetry” left a scathing impression on the young man. His attitudes towards power and authority—his unrepentant independent judgment, stalwart stubbornness, and unapologetic, persistent criticisms of the state of society and the structure of power in China—were forged in the crucible of such early childhood travails. Twenty years after the exile began, the political balance of power in the capital shifted. His father was exonerated and the family was allowed to return to some semblance of a

98 normal life in Beijing following the close of the Cultural Revolution and the initiation of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening.

As Western culture began to trickle back into the country in the late 1970s, young artists like Ai Weiwei were electrified by the variety of expressive forms in circulation as well as tempted to test the boundaries of acceptable expression in public in the new era of tentative reform. Art became a major part of this process of cultural testing that helped broaden the horizons of the State-dominated public sphere. In 1978, Ai Weiwei was among the small group of experimental artists who founded China’s first avant-garde art collective, The Stars (which included Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, Wang Keping, and other major artists still noteworthy today). At a time when people were still wary following the tumultuous and repressive decade of the Cultural Revolution, the daring and unauthorized public exhibitions and activities on the part of The Stars were of seminal cultural significance and played a role in setting in motion a generation of visual pioneers who began experimenting with Western art forms and media while trying to come to terms with China’s recent past and rethinking the role that art and cultural production could play in shaping the trajectory of its future.

When, in 1981, the opportunity arose to study in the U.S., Ai Weiwei set off for New York, spending time in Berkeley as well before returning to Beijing to be by his father’s side on his deathbed in 1993. Ai Weiwei’s critical nature was fortified by the trademark American belief in the power of the individual to shape society. Since his return to Beijing, Ai Weiwei has consistently played the role of contentious public intellectual and member of China’s cultural vanguard in the capacity of critic, curator, architectural designer, and innovative multidisciplinary artist.

While Ai Weiwei’s installations and sculptures often feature readymades that he has transformed with a conceptual twist, hinting at the deep impact of Duchamp on his work, it is his photography that reveals most starkly the presence of the person within the artist and the extent to which he takes the role of public intellectual seriously.

Until now, his best-known photography works have included the performance art sequence Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), in which we see three frames that document the irreverent smashing of an antique, and Studies of Perspective (1995–2003), in which we see the artist’s hand in the classic gesture of defiance towards authority as he gives the middle finger to symbols of State power such as Tian’anmen Square, the White House, and the Eiffel Tower. This year the long-awaited debut of Ai Weiwei’s New York Photographs at Three Shadows, China’s premier museum-scale photography venue, has offered a detailed look at one of his most important bodies of work to date.

The New York Photographs exhibition odyssey began in 2006 when RongRong (Three Shadows co-founder and celebrated photographer in his own right) approached Ai Weiwei with an idea. The two had been good friends since the days of the Beijing East Village, where RongRong lived from 1993 to 1994 and Ai Weiwei was involved with the performance art scene. The subsequent discussion of Ai Weiwei’s enormous body of documentary photographs set in motion the labour-intensive project of archiving the over 10,000 negatives that had been taken during the decade or so in America. Spearheaded by RongRong and presided over by Exhibition Coordinator

99 Stephanie Tung, the Three Shadows team devoted countless hours to overseeing the digitizing of the images. To put this stockpile of jumbled negatives into coherent order, the team used a detective-work process to arrange the plethora of disorganized strips into chronological sequence. After coming up with an approximate ordering, using clues ranging from film type, landmarks, news items, recurring personages, and more, they went at each image with a series of “who, where, what, when, why” questions to piece together the stories behind the pictures and place them into a larger social and historical context. After myriad intense 7:00 a.m. meetings with the ever-busy Ai Weiwei, the team finally settled on the final cut of 230 images, which were presented in the exhibition at Three Shadows.

Ai Weiwei, At the Museum of Modern Art, 1987, silver gelatin print, © Ai Weiwei. Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Center, Beijing.

Highlights of the show range from self-portraits to telling images of many once-obscure, now famous Chinese culturati. These include composer Tan Dun, Misty poet Bei Dao, Taiwanese performance artist Hsieh Tehching (Xie Deqing), film director Feng Xiaogang, and many others who spent time with Ai Weiwei, who offered a cultural crash-pad for itinerant artsy Chinese at his flat when they passed through New York. His portraits of close American friends like Allen Ginsburg, as well as his acutely perceptive, eyewitness images of iconic events and seminal cultural phenomena that still resonate today—such as Wigstock and the struggles of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights movement; the pervasive problems of gentrification and homelessness; police brutality at the 1988 riots in

Ai Weiwei, Wigstock Concert at Tompkins Square Park, 1988, silver gelatin print, © Ai Weiwei. Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Center, Beijing.

Ai Weiwei, Bleeding Protestor, Tompkins Square Park Riots, 1988, black-and-white photograph, © Ai Weiwei. Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Center, Beijing.

100 Ai Weiwei, Williamsburg, Tompkins Square Park; Brooklyn, 1983, silver gelatin print, © Ai Weiwei. the angry and prescient Courtesy of Three Shadows 1990 protests of George Photography Art Center, Beijing. H. W. Bush’s Gulf War; the controversial Tawana Brawley affair—summed up the tenor of the times with startling insight.

The rivulets of blood streaking down the face of a pony-tailed man, darkening his T-shirt in a spreading stain, in Ai Weiwei’s Bleeding Protestor: Tompkins Square Park Riots look more like inkwash Rorschach blots than the results of police brutality. Yet the incensed stare, the face straining in mid-chant, and the outrage or aghast disquiet of his fellow protestors is anything but artificial. The scene was 1988, and the riot depicted was the culmination of months of tension in New York City over gentrification and the rights of the urban poor to some sort of shelter in the city. The park had become a magnet for homeless people, and after each police roust, legions of the hungry, tired, and poor would re-encamp in ever greater numbers supported by a vocal coalition of progressive citizens disgusted with the 1980s brazen materialism and selfish gentrification, as well as the disregard for those unwilling or unable to ascend the social ladder, that was so unrepentantly glorified during the Reagan Era. When the Tompkins Square protestors ignored the police curfew, the officers responded with indiscriminate violence, and the once-peaceful protest ignited into a raging riot that drew widespread condemnation of police brutality.

Images of glorious, bouffanted drag queens reinventing Diana Ross’s legendary I’m Coming Out during Wigstock, in 1988, immerse us in an emerging gay rights movement that is still one of the major civil rights issues of our time. The spectre of homeless people sleeping beneath lavish commissioned public art works speaks of the contradictions inherent in an economic system rooted in unsustainable, insatiable consumption (until that consumption falters and we find ourselves where we are now). And the angry protests against the first U.S. Gulf War, in 1990, remind us of the presence of the past in our collective present and future.

In a Chinese art scene that suffers the collective hangover of the brutal denouement of the social movements of 1989 shared by the broad mass of society and much of the intelligentsia, Ai Weiwei’s pointed invective against social ills and abuses of power is unsettling. Since the mid 1990s, China’s art scene has been an environment where genuine political critique (as opposed to cynically manipulative foreigner-pleasing production) is seen as passé, even naïve, and the province of the foolish hornet’s-nest-stirring few who haven’t “gotten” that “to get rich is glorious” and the most vanguard expression of patriotic pride in the fatherland. Meanwhile, many of China’s auction-house darlings discovered in the mid-nineties that foreigners (the only market for Chinese contemporary art at the time) fetishized easily-recognizable, easily-

101 Ai Weiwei, I’m Not Going, digestible, pseudo-subversive or at least kitschy, iconically “Chinese” political 1990, silver gelatin print, © Ai Weiwei. Courtesy of Three symbolssuch as Chairman Mao, red stars, cute girls in red guard uniforms Shadows Photography Art Center, Beijing. and pigtails, sad-eyed families rendered uniform by political oppression, or masked faces that bespoke a tragic double life under communism, popified versions of Cultural Revolution iconography mismatched with Western brands. While they may have started as with a critical sensibility, by the new millennium these same artists had become well-fed, well-shod, complacent assembly lines, churning out their own “brands” and so deeply entrenched in the maintenance of the status quo that it would be perverse to look to their work for any critical optics or subversive sentiment.

In this context, Ai Weiwei’s New York Photographs offer persistent visual and historical roots that link his incisive pronouncements on cultural production and art in today’s China to ways for the artist to engage the political without becoming a tool. His decade of photographs offer a prescient visual harmony to his blunt pronouncements about the character of cultural production and art in today’s China—both of which are still, in his view, largely “the subservient accessory or sacrificial object of politics”—and the role of art and the artist caught in the closing wedge between a post-totalitarian State and a globalized, mendacious market. “We live in an era in which the system of values and the possibilities of critical judgment are extraordinarily chaotic and confused,” Ai Weiwei declares. Even so, he sees a place for speech and action in the public sphere and the power of individuals to shape the course of history. When asked if he worries about the danger of becoming a casualty of repression like his father, he offers a shrug and a smile. “The way I see it,” he says, “this is my life. I don’t have a second life, and I don’t have a second kind of life. I think that in this respect, every person has a responsibility.”1

Notes 1 Conversations with the artist, summer 2008 and spring 2009.

102 Inhee Iris Moon Shan Shan Sheng’s Open Wall

he Venice Biennale opened with its usual glamour and vitality for the 53rd time on June 7, 2009 and will run until the third week Tof November 2009. Founded in 1895 to celebrate the wedding anniversary of the Italian king, the Venice Biennale has been recognized as the most prestigious, current, and sophisticated modern and contemporary art institution in the world. Beginning in 1930, limited numbers of participating nations used their own pavilion at Giardini to display the work of representative artists, but as the importance of the event became recognized by an increasing number of countries, in recent years venues such as palaces, cathedrals, and academic institutions throughout the city have been used to host collateral and parallel exhibitions. This year, despite critical economic contingencies, the Venice Biennale, in its ever-expanding form, boasted participants from seventy-seven countries, setting a new record as the largest Biennale ever, with forty-four officially endorsed collateral events held outside the Arsenale and Giardini yet still within and throughout the city. Venice, in its entirety, became a stage itself, as if to confirm Boris Brollo’s curatorial statement in his introductory essay to the collateral exhibition The Ideal City:

Venice is a paradoxical city which could well take the place of The Ideal City painted in the school of Piero della Francesca in Urbino. A stylistic accent or a zoom in on one of its corners results in a metaphysical scenography, almost a “non-place.” With his Casanova, Federico Fellini magnified this idea in an imaginary collective, although betraying realistic fidelity to the place. Venice, therefore, is a theatre, open spaces, that concept so dear to our art historian Franco Russoli: the concept of an “open museum.”

Brollo took Russoli’s concept further and applied the notion of the ideal city/open museum by placing his outdoor group sculpture exhibition on the beautiful island of La Certosa, which sits across the lagoon from the Biennale entrance. The glorious colour changes the island showed throughout the day illuminated the eight hugely diverse and sui generis grand-scale sculptures. Works like The Elephant, made with rubber by Serge Van de Put, and the gigantic Ring by Koen Vanmechelen were placed directly in the lagoon, combining the sky, the land, the water, and the artworks as part of the larger composition, and together, nature and the man-made objects created a recondite scene that reflected the metaphysical scene—almost the non-place-like stage mentioned by the curator. Viewing the exhibition evoked memories of Max Ernst’s painting of The Elephant Celebs (1921) or Yves Tanguy’s Infinite Divisibility (1942). It was one of the most beautiful

103 and dream-like Collateral Exhibitions of the 53rd Venice Biennale. The Shan Shan Sheng, Open Wall, 2009, 2,200 hand-made sculptures of Claire Becker, Pino Castagna, Riccado Licata, Vinicio Momoli, glass bricks, 1.8 x .6 x 18.2 m. Photo: Marcel Lam. Courtesy Jual Ripelles, Serge Van de Put, Koen Vanmechelen, and Shan Shan Sheng of the artist. displayed on the lagoons of the island provide a real but almost surreal experience, if surrealism can be understood as our realities in their most unknown, unfamiliar, and unexpected extremes.

One of the pieces in The Ideal City that attracted much attention was a large-scale glass installation project, Open Wall, conceived and produced by a Shanghai-born, San Francisco- and Venice-based Chinese American artist, Shan Shan Sheng. Restaging a randomly chosen section of the Great Wall of China, Open Wall is an approximately 20 meter long, 2 metre high, and 80 centimetre deep structure that consists of 2,200 glass bricks, a number that corresponds to the 2,208 years the Great Wall has existed. It is an incarnation of the Great Wall, an astonishing, iridescent sculpture indicating the threshold of both transparency and opacity, and a critical symbol of China’s intersection with Western culture. According to Sheng in an unpublished artist’s statement, Open Wall “represents the newfound openness of contemporary China: A country that wishes to retain its rich cultural heritage whilst being open to global economy and the international exchange of ideas.” Open Wall, presented by the Italian committee for UNESCO’s International Association of Art, thus can be seen as a work that combines the rich architectural heritage of the East with the artist’s contemporary aesthetic vision and will; it is a representation of a temporary threshold between water and sky, past and present, and the psychosocially or symbolically (in)visible walled cities of Venice and China, thus marking a critical intersection of Chinese and Western cultures. Easily disassembled and reassembled, Sheng’s Open Wall evokes a moment of flux and mutual consumption in the era of cross-cultural dialogues; to change, instability, fluctuation and modification, and to interdependence and interchangeability.

104 Left: Shan Shan Sheng, Open Sheng used translucent Venetian glass bricks, a medium she mastered in Wall, 2009, 2,200 hand-made glass bricks, 1.8 x .6 x 18.2 m. the Murano glass studio in Venice, to refer to dynastic Chinese architecture, Photo: Marcel Lam. Courtesy of the artist. intermittently inserting the warmly coloured glass bricks to create a Right: Shan Shan Sheng, Open luminescent structure. Sheng’s glass bricks are copies, albeit different in Wall, 2009, 2,200 hand-made glass bricks, 1.8 x .6 x 18.2 m. colour and material, of the original bricks used to construct the Great Wall. Photo: Marcel Lam. Courtesy of the artist. Each brick is the same size as the ones in the Great Wall, and each is engraved with a date and its corresponding Chinese Lunar year. The dates represent significant historical moments that took place during the existence of the Great Wall: for example, 564 B.C., which was the year construction of the Great Wall began, and 1254 A.D., which was the birth year of Marco Polo, who served as China’s first connection to Venice.

Open Wall, then, is an example of Shan Shan Sheng’s fascination with architecture, materials, national memory, history, and the perception of time. The Great Wall was originally built as a series of discontinuous, autonomous zones, with each section corresponding to a dynastic phase during the period 564 B.C. to 1644. As a discontinuous sequence of materials and styles, the Great Wall is distributed along 6,400 kilometers—each brick laid out lengthwise, edge-to-edge, would circle the globe—and is the only man- made architectural structure that can be seen from outer space. For many centuries, the Great Wall created the sense of a boundary that shut out the world beyond; parts of the Great Wall were used as customs posts along the Silk Road. The Chinese were keenly aware of the world outside their borders, and the walls, emblems of power, protection, and closure, were built to keep invaders at bay.

The idea of building and rebuilding a monumental structure with brick modules over different periods of time inspired Shan Shan Sheng, who reconstructed the wall with glass bricks, translating the notion of a brick into “a kind of cultural currency, to be distributed and redistributed in the process of installation.”

Here, the term “currency” can be understood as a “medium of exchange,” and a very significant part of this is the notion of “exchange,” which means both to give and to take. What is being exchanged, the medium, can be anything that matters to cross-cultural dialogues, such as principal, resource, investment, or security. By creating and seeing the glass brick as a new universal currency in the realm of art, Sheng alludes to the possibility of building and rebuilding an open system that can be more accessible to people of different cultures around the world. Although glass technology

105 has improved immensely, and Sheng’s murano glass is known to be of the Shan Shan Sheng, Open Wall, 2009, 2,200 hand-made strongest quality found in the glass industry, the artist suggests that the glass bricks, 1.8 x .6 x 18.2 m. Photo: Marcel Lam. Courtesy fragility of the medium, and, by extension, the subject matter, should be of the artist. treated with respect during the process of exchange.

The idea of making a new world through the re-interpreting of the old, of making a world that reflects structures such as the Great Wall, seems to correspond with the main exhibition of the 53rd Venice Biennale, which was titled Fare Mondi (Making Worlds) and curated by Daniel Birnbaum. As Birnbaum explained in an interview with Mariachiara Marzari pubished in the Magazine-guide di venezia e del Veneto, “the title has a very different ring in the languages I understand—sometimes it sounds technical, sometimes theological, sometimes architectural, and sometimes it gives you a sense that it’s about craftsmanship. I guess these multiple meanings actually communicate quite well as to what an artist does; namely, many different things.” He explains further in the official Venice Biennale press release that “a work of art is more than an object, more than a commodity. It represents a vision of the world, and if taken seriously must be seen as a way of making a world. A few signs marked on paper, a barely touched canvas, or a vast installation can amount to different ways of world-making.”

Sheng is renowned for her large-scale paintings and suspended sculptures in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing, and her conceptual art installations activate and transform the reading of traditional Chinese motifs and sites of memory. Shan Shan Sheng is concerned with the dualities of East and West, tradition and innovation, with heightening viewer’s experience, and with creating a ritualized atmosphere between history and the present. Sheng’s Open Wall project captures a section of China’s Great Wall, translating the historic structure into a temporary zone of glass architecture. Her installation engages in a dialogue with the current period of relative openness in contemporary China by this dynamic and pivotal moment in history. The beauty of the artist’s glass brick project is that she will be able to disassemble and reassemble the glass modules to create other structures that will enrich and further her cross-cultural dialogue, as well as take the installations to various other places in order to expand the notion of a great open wall. The glass bricks will inspire Sheng to create new structures that are just as rich in meaning and powerful in aesthetics.

106 Chinese Name Index

Ah Xian Hu Kun-jung Qiu Anxiong Wong Ping-pui, Stanley 阿仙胡坤榮邱黯雄黃炳培 Ai Qing Hu Xiaoyuan Qiu Xiaofei Wu Ershan 艾青胡曉媛仇小飛烏爾善 Ai Weiwei Huang Rui Qiu Zhijie Wu Shanzhuan 艾未未黃銳邱志杰吳山專 Bei Dao Huang Yong Ping Rong Rong Wu Wenguang 北島黃永砯榮榮吳文光 Cai Guo-Qiang Ieong Chi Kin, Kent Shang, Danielle Xiamen Dada 廈門達達蔡國強楊子健尚端 Jia Zhang-ke Shen Jiawei Xiao Kaiyu Cao Fei 蕭開愚曹斐賈樟柯沈嘉蔚 Xie Jin Kan Xuan Shen Yuan Chan, Jackie 謝晉成龍闞萱沈遠 Xing Danwen Chang Chien-Chi Lai, Jun T. Sheng Shan Shan 邢丹文張乾琦賴純純盛姍姍 Xu Beihong Chang Fang-Wei Lee Ang Shi Qing 徐悲鴻李安石青張芳薇 Xu Bing Chang Tsong-zung, Johnson Lee Yee Kee Song Dong 徐冰李綺琪宋冬張頌仁 Xu Tan Chen Chieh-Jen Leng Lin Song Tao 徐坦泠林宋濤陳界仁 Xu Zhen Chen Hui-chiao Leong Mou Cheng, Bonnie Su, Emily 徐震梁慕貞艾蜜莉蘇陳慧嶠 Yang, William Chen Shaoxiong Leung Mou Kit, Kitty Sun Xun 楊威廉陳劭雄梁慕潔孫遜 Yang Fudong Chen Xiaoyun Li Xianting Tan Dun 楊福東栗憲庭譚盾陳曉雲 Yang Jiechang Chen Zhen Li Zhensheng Tang Fu Kuen 楊詰蒼李振盛鄧富權陳箴 Yang Yong Chow, Stephen Liang Ju Hui Tang Maohong 楊勇梁鉅輝唐茂宏周星馳 Yang Zhenzhong Cui Jian Liang Mei-Lan Tang Taizong 楊振中梁美蘭唐太宗崔健 Yao Dit Xiong Liang Yue Tsong Pu Deng Xiaoping 姚迪雄梁玥莊普鄧小平 Ye Fang Lim Chwee Seng Tung, Stephanie 葉放 Fang Lijun 林水生董曉安方力鈞 Yin Xiuzhen Lin, Richard Ung Vai Meng 尹秀珍 Feng Boyi 林壽宇吳衛鳴馮博一 Yu Cheng-Ta Lin Yi Lin Wang Chia Chi, Jason 余政達 Feng Xiaogang 林一林王嘉驥馮小剛 Yue Minjun Liu Ding Wang Gongxing 岳敏君 Gao Shiming 劉鼎王功新 Zeng Fanzhi 高士明 Lu Chunsheng Wang Guangyi 曾梵志 Gong Li 陸春生王廣義 Zeng Hao 鞏俐 Lu Hao Wang Jianwei 曾浩 Gu Dexin 盧昊汪建偉 Zhang Daqian 顧德新張大千 Ma Desheng Wang Keping Gu Wenda 馬德升王克平 Zhang Huan 谷文達張洹 Ma Fung-kwok Wang Qingsong Guan Wei 馬逢國王慶松 Zhang Peili 關偉張培力 Ma Liuming Wang Wenhai He Douling 馬六明王文海 Zhang Xiaogang 何多苓張曉剛 Mao Zedong Wang Xizhi He Jinwei 毛澤東王羲之 Zhang Yimou 何晉渭張藝謀 Michael Zheng Wang Youshen Zhao Li He Sen 鄭濟忠王友身何森趙力 Neo Chon Teck Wang Yuanqi Zheng Ban Qiao He Yong 梁俊德王原祁何勇鄭板橋 Ni Haifeng Wen Pulin Zheng Guogu He Yunchang 倪海峰溫普林鄭國谷何雲昌 Pak Sheung Chuen Wong, Ming Zhou Chunya Hou Hanru 侯瀚如白雙全黃漢明周春芽 Hsieh Tehching (Xie Deqing) Prince Chun (Zaifeng) Wong Han Min Zhou Xiaohu 謝德慶醇親王 (載灃) 黃漢民周嘯虎 Hsieh Ying-Chun Qi Baishi Wong Kar Wai Zhu Jia 謝英俊齊白石王家衛朱加

107 108 109 110 PRESS RELEASE The annual 9th ARTSingapore is back with the launch of a “New Finds” section A New International Forum for Artists’ Career Development

Nguyen Thi Kim Chi Singapore, 3 August 2009 – Emerging artists can now showcase their artworks Blue, 2008 Oil on canvas, in ARTSingapore 2009’s “New Finds” section. Set to become a prestigious addition to 240 x 120cm. Zen Collection the renowned Asian contemporary arts fair, “New Finds” will grant emerging talents an Singapore opportunity to be awarded an accolade for the “Most Outstanding Emerging Artist” and “Most Promising Emerging Gallery” to help kick start one’s career for them within the arts industry.

“We are keeping in mind the current economic recession in Singapore and hope that “New Finds” will provide emerging artists with a platform to develop and establish their career in the arts industry,” says Chen Shen Po, Fair Director for ARTSingapore 2009.

Currently in its 9th year running, the premium arts event will be held over five days from 8 – 12 October 2009 at Suntec Singapore, International Convention and Exhibition Centre. The contemporary art fair expects 15,000 visitors this year and will house millions worth of artworks ranging from paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, photographs and digital art by international and regional artists and galleries. Building on its reputation in offering quality South East Asian pieces amongst stakeholders and artists, ARTSingapore 2009 will also include new features like the abovementioned “New Finds” and the Asia International Photography Fair.

Other noteworthy participants include local galleries like Fill-Your-Walls, a space that provides support to local emerging artists, and Momentous Arts. Fill-your-walls complements the vision of the “New Finds” section as it has showcased over 250 works of art by 60 local artists since 1st December 2008.

Momentous Arts also showcases an eclectic selection of paintings, works on paper, original prints, ceramics and sculptures. Personifying youth and vitality, the gallery has featured a variety of vibrant and energetic art collection of local and international artists since its inception in 2002.

Visitors and participants in the ARTSingapore 2009 can also indulge in art talks, fringe art events and museum visits while viewing unique and beautiful artworks. Complementing the art appreciation experience with fringe activities, VIPS get to enjoy free access to the Asian Civilisation Museum, National Museum of Singapore, Singapore Art Museum, Peranakan Museum and NUS Museum from 1st to 20th October 2009.

W a n g G u a n g y i (b. 1957) is a central figure of Yishu the Political Pop movement and recognized as a leader of the New Art Movement in China established in the 1980s. He is most recognized for Edition the socio-political paintings and prints from his Great Criticism series begun in 1998. Through his use of No. 5 the Chinese political icons and symbols of Western commercialism, his images respond to the deeply engrained legacy of propaganda experienced in To purchase a Yishu edition China during the Cultural Revolution. Originally print please send your request painted in 2005, in this work the artist uses his own to [email protected] or call 1.604.649.8187 (Canada), name as a substitute for luxury brand names common or contact Katherine Don to his Great Criticism series. By calling attention to 86.158.1018.9440 (China). the consumer legacy of his own commercial success, Wang provides cheeky commentary on the experience Each edition is commissioned of China’s changing society. by and produced exclusively for Yishu; and is measured the same A r t w ork description size as the Journal. Artist ------Wang Guangyi Title ------Great Criticism — Wang Guangyi (2009) Media ------Serigraph Dimension ------210 x 295 mm Edition Size ------200 Price ------US $300 plus shipping

Signed by the artist; produced by A Space Art, Beijing.