Art and Visual Culture in Contemporary Beijing (1978-2012)

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Infrastructures of Critique: Art and Visual Culture in Contemporary Beijing (1978-2012)

Elizabeth Chamberlin Parke

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto

Infrastructures of Critique: Art and Visual Culture in Contemporary Beijing (1978-2012)

Elizabeth Chamberlin Parke

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto 2016

Abstract

This dissertation is a story about relationships between artists, their work, and the physical infrastructure of Beijing. I argue that infrastructure’s utilitarianism has relegated it to a category of nothing to see, and that this tautology effectively shrouds other possible interpretations. My findings establish counter-narratives and critiques of Beijing, a city at once an immerging global capital city, and an urban space fraught with competing ways of seeing, those crafted by the state and those of artists. Statecraft in this dissertation is conceptualized as both the art of managing building projects that function to control Beijing’s public spaces, harnessing the thing-power of infrastructure, and the enforcement of everyday rituals that surround Beijinger’s interactions with the city’s infrastructure. From the spectacular architecture built to signify China’s neoliberal approaches to globalized urban spaces, to micro-modifications in how citizens sort their recycling depicted on neighborhood bulletin boards, the visuals of Chinese statecraft saturate the urban landscape of Beijing. I advocate for heterogeneous ways of seeing of infrastructure that releases its from being solely a function of statecraft, to a constitutive part of the artistic practices of: Song Dong (宋冬 b. 1966), Cao Fei (曹斐 b. 1978), Lu Hao (卢昊 b. 1969) and Ning Ying (宁瀛 b. 1959) where it is reconfigured as a space of critique.

Structured around four typologies, I begin with roads and Ning’s films where the outdated roads refuse to keep pace with the rise in private car ownership. From traffic, I move to Song’s trash based works that make visible the contemporary buying habits of Beijingers in contrast to earlier state policies of frugality and recycling. Then, I consider the migrant workers whose labour is building the city, whose multitudes the state strives to conceal, and whose bodies artists exploit

ii as a medium. Lastly, from embodied practices and spaces, I excavate the buried fiber optic networks that produce the immateriality of the Internet to discuss how Cao’s online practice parodies China’s rapacious urbanization predicated on the real estate market. Iconic buildings of contemporary China colonize her works, but instead of being aesthetically pleasing monuments to the global contemporary, they are a critical commentary on state policies that monetize collectively owned land.

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Acknowledgments

The constellation of debts I have accumulated over the course of this project is vast, and it is with pleasure that I can now offer thanks. The first words of thanks must go to my committee: Meng Yue, Evie Gu, and Barbara Fisher who were rigorous, supportive, and insightful. Their thinking, high standards of scholarship, and commitment to this project shaped and improved it in ways I could not have foreseen. Linda Rui Feng and Wang Ban were the external readers that graduate students dream of. They upended my assumptions, helped to reformulate central questions in the dissertation, and as a result, made it stronger. Yomi Braester introduced me to thinking of Beijing as a place, space, and assemblage of cultural productions. His scholarship and guidance over the years continues to fuel my ideas about art and the city. Thanks also go to the many artists and curators in Beijing and Hong Kong answered questions, gave interviews, and allowed me to reproduce images of their works.

At The University of Toronto, I have experienced what good librarians can do for a project of this scale. Lu Gan and John Shoesmith were patient with my random inquiries and helped to uncover resources I would never have found without them as guides. I have also had the pleasure of a network faculty mentors, Alison Syme, John Paul Ricco, and Kajri Jain all contributed to framing of initial questions, refining of conceptual issues, a grappling with theoretical concerns. The meetings of the Critical China Reading Group clarified my arguments. Joan Judge, Tong Lam, Josh Fogel, and Yiching Wu asked the questions that needed to be asked, and showed through their work and generosity how to be engaged and thoughtful academics and mentors. I have also benefited from the stellar administrative staff Norma Escobar and Natasja VanderBerg in the Department of East Asian Studies.

This past year at the Jackman Humanities Institute provided the balance of intellectual stimulation and time to translate this stimulation into words on the page. Orchestrated by Bob Gibbs, Kim Yates, Monica Toffoli, and Cheryl Pasternak, the JHI is a thing that matters and the dissertation improved infinitely because of impromptu discussions, wandering conversations, and rigorous thinking with my fellow fellows.

Also of particular pleasure in Toronto are the members of my extended graduate cohort: Sarah

Richardson (who was there from the beginning and cheered me across the finish line), Li Yanfei, Chen Xi, Gary Wang, Shasha Liu, Doris Sung, Akshaya Tanka, Marlo Burks, Catherine Schwartz, and Alyson Brickey. Being part of such an intellectually stimulating community was humbling and a pleasure. When I needed it they listened to inchoate ideas and other times they simply shared a meal with me. On the subject of food, what began as an impromtu trial of the Hart House 5 Buck lunch became a standing Wednesday lunch date. Hannah Moland, Angela Glover, and Chris Beck listened to fledgling ideas, taught me about portable alters, misericords, and suggested science fiction novels, all of which incalculably improved my thinking and writing.

The most important words of thanks go to my families in Vermont and Toronto. The Parkes and the Kwans urged me forward, sustained me with love and good food, and have never questioned “why Beijing”? I offer particular thanks to my parents, Lauck and Libby, who charted the path as teachers and scholars. Without their abiding support, calm and measured guidance, and love this dissertation wouldn’t have begun, and it certainly wouldn’t have been finished. Julia accompanied me to conferences, removed many unnecessary commas, and brought her money card to Asia. Her humor and kindness was vital. Although he came late to the process, Barnstable upended our world and rearranged it for the better. Will saw the potential before I could, urged me to keep working, and always knew which book to lend me from his library. I promise I put them back in their proper places, although there are likely crumbs between the pages.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... vi

List of Figures ...... viii

1 Introduction ...... 1 Statecraft ...... 4 Center of history, government, and culture: Beijing ...... 7 Frameworks of looking: theoretical concerns of the dissertation ...... 10 The structure of the dissertation ...... 14 0.1 A video interlude: Beijing 2015 ...... 18

2 Bumps in the Road: Ning Ying’s Beijing Trilogy ...... 20 Cinematic Irony ...... 22 Linking up with the world ...... 23 Pace of movement: walk, bike, drive ...... 29 Obsolescence ...... 40 Widening roads ...... 50

0.2 A Hoarding Interlude: Static screens in Beijing ...... 65

3 Ritualizing Statecraft: Song Dong and his garbage works ...... 67 Being Civilized, Officially ...... 72 A Beijing-based Practice ...... 80 Ordering the hoarder ...... 82 Displacement in Beijing: Hutong ...... 95 Garbage finds its Place ...... 105

0.3 A Failed Infrastructural PR Campaign Interlude ...... 114

4 Human Infrastructure: what holds it all up ...... 116 Modern workers ...... 118 Migrant artists ...... 120 Selling bodies, Selling art ...... 123 Displacing agency ...... 130 People as Infrastructure ...... 136 Numerical articulations ...... 141 vi

5 Fibre-optics: Cao Fei Online ...... 148 Computing, China, and Cyborgs ...... 149 Documenting Everyday Disjunctures: DV sub-culture in China ...... 151 From the real to the virtual ...... 154 Military Industrial Complexes and the World Wide Web ...... 161 Financial Webs ...... 168

6 Conclusion ...... 173 Research outcomes and next steps ...... 178

Bibliography ...... 182

Figures ...... 224

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List of Figures

INTERLUDE ONE

0.1 Beijing 2015 (北京市十二规划展览馆) Source: www.bjpc.gov.cn/125ghg/xgzl/bj2015.html

CHAPTER TWO

2.1 Lin Yi Lin, Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road 1995.

2.2 Ning Ying I Love Beijing film still 2001.

INTERLUDE TWO

0.2 Hoarding in Beijing. source: photo by author 2009.

CHAPTER THREE

3.1 “Fei pin shou hui zhe Lao Deng he Li Juzhe” Ren Min Ri Bao June 2006.

3.2 Strive to collect scrap metal and other waste materials!, early 1970s. Source: Landsberger collection online: chinaposters.net

3.3 Beijing Besieged by Waste, 2011. Source: author’s photograph

3.4 Song Dong, Waste Not, 2005. Source: courtesy of Beijing Tokyo Art Projects

3.5 Song Dong and his mother Zhao Xiangyuan at the Gwangju Biennale, Korea 2006

3.6 Song Dong, Waste Not detail. Source: The Barbicon, 2012

3.7 Song Dong, Waste Not detail. Source: The Barbicon, 2012

3.8 Song Dong, Waste Not. Source: The Barbicon, 2012

3.9 Zhao at BTAP, 2005. Source: courtesy of Beijing Tokyo Art Projects

3.10 Mother is organizing things at home, Beijing 2005. Source: Waste Not Catalogue.

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3.11 Garbage sorting online propaganda posters, 2013. Source: Beijing sheng huo laji fenlei wang, http://210.73.71.125/

3.12 Three garbage streams, Beijing, 2012. Source: author’s photograph.

3.13 Three garbage streams dumpsters Beijing, 2012. Source: author’s photograph.

3.14 Garbage sorting mascots. Source: Beijing Today, 5/6/2011.

3.15 Recycling poster Beijing, 2012. Source: author’s photograph.

3.16 Subway recycling poster Beijing, 2012. Source: author’s photograph.

3.17 Early separation of garbage Beijing, 2012. Source: author’s photograph.

3.18 Separate garbage bins for recycling and garbage Beijing, 2012. Source: author’s photograph.

3.19 Song Dong Hutong, 2010. Source: ©Song Dong, courtesy of Pace Beijing.

3.20 Sleeping Recycler, South China Post 5/12/12.

3.21 Song Dong, Hutong, 2011. Source: author’s photograph.

3.22 Beijing Master Plan, 1985. Source: Cornell Map Library (OCLC: 64088874).

3.23 Republican Era Beijing. Source: Hou Renzhi. Beijing li shi di tu ji. Beijing chu bian she, 1988.

3.24 “Housing for Beijinger’s” Ren Min Hua Bao August 1989

3.25 Stumbling block cartoon. Source: Beijing Traffic Management Bureau website http://www.bjjtgl.gov.cn/uploadfile/manhua/027.jpg

3.26 Tricycle on a main road in Beijing, 2012. Source: author’s photograph.

3.27 Song Dong, Doing Nothing Garden, 2012. Source: Wiki Creative Commons, Heinz-Josef Lücking

3.28 Yao Lu Ancient Springtime Fey, 2006. Source: © Yao Lu, courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NY

3.29 Zhao Liang, Beijing Green, No. 2 2004-2007. Source: 3 shadows gallery Beijing.

3.30 Song Dong, Doing Nothing Garden. Source: Il Post http://www.ilpost.it/2012/06/07/le-foto- di-documenta-13/documenta-13-3/

3.31 Song Dong, Doing Nothing Garden. Source: Il Post http://www.ilpost.it/2012/06/07/le-foto- di-documenta-13/germany-art-documenta-5/

INTERLUDE THREE

0.3 Photoshop failure of Huili government officials inspecting a newly paved road. Source: www.chinasmack.com/2011/pictures/floating-chinese-government-officials-stun-netizens.html

CHAPTER FOUR

4.1 Beijing hoardings. Author’s photograph, 2010.

4.2 Zhu Fadong. This Person is for Sale 此人出售, 价格面议, 1994. Courtsey of the artist.

4.3 Zhang Huan. To Raise the Level of a Fish Pond, 1997. Source: Courtsey of the artist.

4.4 Wang Jin. 100%, 1999.

4.5 Scrawled numbers. Author’s photograph, 2011.

4.6 Scrawled numbers. Author’s photograph, 2011

4.7 Lu Hao. A Grain of Sand, 2003. Courtsey of the Peabody Essex Museum, MA.

CHAPTER FIVE

5.1 Cao Fei. RMB City Catalogue, detail Jia Zhangke film still, artist photograph, 2007.

5.2 Cao Fei. iMirror detail of land for sale, 2007.

5.3 Cao Fei. RMB City, 2007-2011.

5.4 Cao Fei. RMB City detail, 2007-2011.

5.5 Advertisement for RMB City at Art Basel Miami, 2007. Source: Art Forum, Dec. 2007.

5.6 Bank of China Advertisement. Author’s photograph, 2011.

5.7 Bank of East Asia (BEA) Advertisement. Author’s photograph, 2009.

5.8 Bank of China, South China Morning Post, July 28 2009.

CONCLUSION

6.1 ‘♥ PRC ZL’. Car at the University of Toronto. Author’s photograph, 2014

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1 Introduction

This dissertation is a story about the relationships between artists, their work, and the city of Beijing. My objective is to move beyond art that represents the city or the urban condition, to reveal the ‘representational logic’ of infrastructures.1 For my purposes, representational logic both creates and participates in changing people’s habits, social practices, and in the built environment. Infrastructure and infrastructural networks transmit representations while at the same time are participants in shaping notions of modernity, nation-hood, and statecraft. This dual function of infrastructure means it is constitutive and formative of the lived experience of a city. My discussion is delimited to the ‘representational logic’ of four infrastructural networks: roads, garbage, internet, and migrant-labourers that are then examined through four artists’ practices.

It is my contention that contemporary Beijing-based artists use elements of urban life in their practices to consider how the city is changing and evolving. In the chapters that follow I offer an account of the physical and cultural presence of infrastructure in Beijing through a close examination of artists’ practices in Beijing focusing on their representations of hard infrastructure while concurrently contextualizing these practices as part of and constitutive of the soft infrastructure of Beijing’s art worlds.2

1 Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 7. Larkin uses representational logic to indicate the form and the function of infrastructure in relationship to various media (eg. radio and TV). He argues that media that requires infrastructure to transmit it is also concurrently shaped by the limits of that infrastructure. Accordingly in this dissertation I contend that infrastructure in Beijing mutually shapes how artists represent it in their practices, and in particular, artists emphasize the limitations of the infrastructure in order to reveal alternative narratives of recent infrastructure building booms in the capital. 2 Hard infrastructure is bridges, pipes, and roads etc.; while soft infrastructure is the social or human networks formed around, and via, the networks of hard infrastructure. For a discussion of infrastructure and its various definitions see Jesse H. Ausubel and Herman, eds., Cities and Their Vital Systems: Infrastructure Past, Present, and Future, Series on Technology and Social Priorities. (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1988), 1–21; Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2010), 264; A. M. (Abdou Maliqalim) Simone, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” Public Culture 16, no. 3 (2004): 407–29. For the seminal work on the ecology of art worlds: Howard Saul Becker, Art Worlds, 25th anniversary ed., updated and expanded (Berkeley, Calif. ; London: University of California Press, 2008). For a Chinese policy definition of various forms of infrastructure see China’s New Urbanization Strategy (New York: Routledge, 2013), 177. 1

Roland Barthes argues for an expanded reading of the city, to fight against reducing the complexity of urban structures to a drastically simplified visual shorthand: the Eiffel Tower is Paris, Rem Koolhas’ CCTV Tower is Beijing in the 21st century. Refuting such a reading in favor of multiplying the readings of the city is important because, it can potentially make us aware of actors and stakeholders that are usually over looked in analysis of urban spaces.

According to Barthes, city is first of all a readable text, a visual sign, even an art piece rather than a mere system of spatial functions. I assume this semiologic understanding of the city as both a text and visual product. Without this acknowledgement of the visual work in a city, a city’s meanings are silenced rather than to be made to sing, and more importantly, we miss an important political dimension that can be used to address the complexity and poetry of the vast visual field that is a city.3 Barthes’ insight corresponds to modern European and America urban histories where cities were built to follow the principle of visibility, observation, and exhibition.4 While the exhibitive principle was not the main consideration of Republican era Beijing,5 it grew more important in the socialist era and has become the dominant mode in postsocialist Beijing. Rather than simply seeing Beijing’s architecture as either utilitarian or monolithic monuments manifesting the power and authority, I instead examine the myriad of other signifying and image practices of the city, seeking to uncover the semiologic work of urban structure and city space.

Building from Barthes’ formulation of an urban semiology, this project pairs art and infrastructure to link these human endeavors. While an inquiry of art and infrastructure may at first seem a strange pairing, if we consider the necessary skills and virtuosity required to produce a sculpture or a highway system, their similarities become clearer. Both art and infrastructure contain spatial elements that function to demarcate space. For instance, in the last chapter, artist

3 Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (London; New York: Routledge, 1997), chap. Roland Barthes. “Semiology and the Urban,” 164. 4 For seminal studies on the role of visibility, power, and urban planning see, Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Elland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 5 Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 73. Dong makes the case for the distinction between the cities discussed by Mitchell and Beijing; however, the 1949 change to socialism is reflected in increased visibility and particular typologies of building. See chapter two for a discussion of Ning Ying’s interpretation of the multiple temporalities in Beijing reflected in her films. 2

Wang Jin (王晋 b.1962) for his 1999 performance work 100% reterritorializes the space created by elevated highways. The creativity and virtuosity of building infrastructure and creating art are fundamentally tied to human experiences. Shaping the urban space through networks of roads can be seen as analogous to the interpretation through film of these roads, as is the case in the films of Ning Ying (宁瀛 b. 1959). In this dissertation, by reconsidering the necessary creativity in urban planning alongside of artistic practices, I demonstrate similarities in this paring. In their introduction to Cities and their Vital Systems Robert Herman and Jesse H. Ausubel equate human achievement in the arts and civil engineering: “[r]eflecting on the history of human endeavor, we are impressed by the creative achievements expressed through the arts, and engineering and science. The infrastructure is a dramatic statement that embodies all of these aspects.”6 Herman and Ausubel equate art and infrastructure because of their relationship to the Greek term techne that means art or craft. This opens up an opportunity for my research to discuss how art that represents infrastructure and is meant to be looked at can in so doing critique the current urban condition of Beijing. In the analysis that follows I demonstrate the characteristic visibility of art when placed in contrast to the relative invisibility of infrastructure exposes there is “something to look at” as Jacques Rancière outlines in his “Ten Thesis on Politics.”7

For Rancière the politics of the police delimit what is permissible to say or to show. Politics of the police for Rancière are based on exclusions whereas politics, as he conceives it, is predicated on dissensus. Dissensus is the working for an equality in the system where the politics of the police are disrupted by refusing to look away, that is to say by seeing that which the police define as ‘nothing to see.’

It [politics of the police] is, first of all, a reminder of the obviousness of what there is, or rather, of what there isn’t: ‘Move along! There is nothing to see here!’ The police says that there is nothing to see on a road, that there is nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of circulation.8

6 Jesse H. Ausubel and Herman, eds., Cities and Their Vital Systems: Infrastructure Past, Present, and Future, Series on Technology and Social Priorities. (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1988), 1. 7 Jacques Rancière, “Ten Thesis on Politics,” Theory and Event 5, no. 3 (2001): 22. 8 Rancière, “Ten Thesis on Politics.” 3

In contrast, politics as Rancière defines it “…consists in transforming this space of ‘moving- along’ into a space for the appearance of a subject: i.e., the people, the workers, the citizens: It consists in refiguring the space, of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein.9 By flipping the notion of a road from being a space of circulation to a space of the subject, Rancière demonstrates how space and “seeing what is there” becomes a political act that allows for the immergence of a subject. In this case, infrastructure, what I am ‘looking at’, becomes not just about the circulation of services, electricity, or people, but instead a politically charged act of ‘refiguring.’ This disruption, not of services, but of assumptions, then can open a space of critique in which art and infrastructure are cast as things to look at, one typically looked at—art, the other the less commonly looked at, infrastructure—visibility being that which uncovers the assumptions of infrastructure being neutral and evenly distributed. “Politics makes visible that which had no reason to be seen…”10 Thus the close examination of representations of infrastructure that follows in the chapters makes visible the ‘politics’ at play in contemporary Beijing and artmaking in the capital. In tandem with Rancière’s notions of visibility as a political act this dissertation engages with conceptions of statecraft in order to uncover the multiple layers of meaning at work in the city

Statecraft

Politics and infrastructure in China have a long relationship. Infrastructure was critical to projecting legitimacy through methods of statecraft (经世 jing shi,经世之道, jing shi zhi dao) throughout late imperial China if not earlier.11 The cultural history of statecraft has a central position in Chinese politics. Civil service examinations were designed to shape and mold future officials, and variously struggled to include or exclude certain branches of learning; furthermore, the exams functioned as an inculcation of managerial skills necessary for the administration of statecraft by the future leaders of the state. The study of statecraft marked the late imperial period,

9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 “Statecraft, N.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press), accessed August 8, 2014, http://www.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/189245. Luo Zhufeng, ed., “Jing Shi,” Hanyu Da Ci Dian (Shanghai: Hanyu da ci dian chu bian she, 1994 1988), 860–1. 4

5 one that was formative for the first generation of Communist leaders.12 What the state chooses to build, historically and today—be it the Grand Canal or the Three Gorges Dam— demonstrates a long and systemic use of infrastructure to concentrate and redistribute resources and to concretize state policies.13 In the Maoist era, for example, the building of the Nanjing Bridge and the resulting images, in the form of posters, stamps, and toys that circulated within the country of this engineering feat, incorporated the citizenry into the shared project of statecraft. The mere act of looking at representations of the bridge functioned to further the links between citizens and the bridge.

The physical expressions of statecraft are just one constitutive part of infrastructure in the Chinese landscape. Furthermore, statecraft as I interpret it in my research, is the fostering of ritualizing behaviors through policy. For instance, the inculcating daily practices of sorting one’s recyclables, to the rhetorical labeling actions as being ‘being cultured’ (有文明 you wen ming) such as standing in line waiting for a bus, as opposed to ‘having no culture’ (沒有文化 mei you wen hua) such as spitting in public. In this way statecraft as reflected in infrastructure projects is made more intimate through these ritualization campaigns. Multiple examples are traced demonstrating how statecraft in the built environment often crosses over into daily habits of citizens. Chinese historian Kenneth Pomeranz conceives the role of infrastructure and the State, one that mine follows, the state’s use of infrastructure as part of statecraft situates large- scale project as demonstrations of the State.14 Much of the current leadership was educated and trained as engineers, and large building projects fueled the economic growth by generating tax revenue and lending practices and been an aspect of maintaining stability.15 Infrastructure is a

12 Benjamin Elman, Statecraft and Classical Learning: The Rituals of Zhou in East Asian History (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010); Marc Edelman and Angelique Haugerud, eds., The Anthropology of Development and Globalization: From Classical Political Economy to Contemporary Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005). 13 David Barboza, “In China, Projects to Make Great Wall Feel Small,” The New York Times, January 12, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/13/business/international/in-china-projects-to-make-great-wall-feel-small-.html. 14 Edmund III Burke and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., The Environment and World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), chap. Introduction and China’s Environment, 1500-2000.” 15 Joel Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009); Burke and Pomeranz, The Environment and World History, 127; Henry Sanderson and Michael Forsythe, China’s Superbank: Debt, Oil and Influence: How China Development 5

6 critical part of statecraft, used to project and demonstrate a government’s power. Yet, at the same time that infrastructure can be taken as the projection of state power, it is also my contention that infrastructure can be where the lived, heterogeneous, neoliberalized experience of urban Beijing is discernable. For the purposes of my study, statecraft as evidenced in four macro systems of infrastructure—roads, waste removal, internet, and the human workforce—can shed light on how artists Ning Ying, Song Dong (宋冬 b. 1966), and Cao Fei (曹斐 b. 1978) produce works that subtly critique and undermine these structures of the state.

In post-reform Beijing, the building of roads, Central Business Districts (CBD), and a new airport perform their role as ‘monuments to modernizing’ and as actors that herald the economic rise of a post-Socialist China.16 Bruno Latour and other theorists of actor-network-theory (ANT) assert that non-human actors are active in shaping technology on par with human actors.17 The assertion of things’ thing-power is the active working to de-center and de-prividlege human actors: “[th]ings and artifacts, too, can become actors and thus deserve to be studied on par with humans.” 18 Peter Verbeek continues stating, “artifacts coshape human actions.”19 The symbiotic relationship between things and human actors is critical to the discussion that follows in each of the chapters. For example, the changes in foot traffic patterns captured in the first of Ning Ying’s films documents the growing reliance in Beijing on widened highways that are impassible without the building of pedestrian overpasses. As a result, street stalls are reimagined when hawkers place blankets on the overpasses that are less permanent, but oriented to the foot traffic’s movement to the bridges away from the street level. While it is impossible to capture the

Bank Is Rewriting the Rules of Finance (Singapore: Bloomberg Press, 2013); Jeremy Wallace, Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 16 Kenneth Pomeranz, “China’s Environment, 1500–2000” in The Environment and World History, ed. Edmund III Burke and Kenneth Pomeranz, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 153. 17 In regards to non-human actors and their relationship to the field of A-N-T (Actor-Network-Theory) see: Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, illustrated edition (Oxford University Press, USA, 2005). 18 Peter Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 102. 19 Ibid., 158. 6

7 multitude of actors, things, and spaces of a city—what Henri Lefebvre termed the ‘mille-feuille’ of city life—by holding artists’ representations of the city up against ‘official’ representations a texturing of life in the capital comes into focus.20 To demonstrate the differences and overlaps in visions of urban life in Beijing is to begin to develop a reading of Beijing that takes the city as an assemblage.21

Each chapter uncovers how artists present a heterogeneous and often fractious representation of Beijing’s infrastructure systems. On one hand artists create representations of broken, non- functioning systems, while on the other hand there are State versions of these same systems that are depicted as smooth, undisrupted, functional. The gaps between, for instance, the traffic choked ring roads, and the unpaved side streets, reveal the persistent unevenness of modernity in the capital despite the narratives generated in municipal master planning documents. I demonstrate that the artists’ representational logic of these infrastructures is often less fluid and less functional than official government-crafted versions. It is in these different logics of how representations of infrastructure can support, confirm, deny, or question the motivations of infrastructural statecraft. Regardless of the differences in interpretations of infrastructure a productive gap thereby opens up by analyzing infrastructure through this lens. To return to Larkin, “[i]nfrastructures are not simply neutral conduits, then; they mediate and shape the nature of economic and cultural flows and the fabric of urban life. One powerful articulation of this mediation is the monumental presence of the infrastructures themselves.”22

Center of history, government, and culture: Beijing

Beijing is the focus of my research for three reasons. First is its cultural and historical weight. Second, the city is representative of the visual saturation typical of hyper-urban Chinese cities today. And third, the capital offers an environment of art production and urban planning inform each other. Beijing looms large. The city’s aspirations to become, and resultant rise, to the status of a world-class city; however, it must be considered in conjunction with its historical and

20 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 86. 21 Ignacio Farias, Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010). 22 Larkin, Signal and Noise, 6. 7

8 cultural weight.23 The weight of the capital is made apparent in official government rhetoric that situates the city as the ‘historical and cultural center’ (历史和文化中心 li shi he wen hua zhong xin) of the nation.24 In fact, the city’s form itself seems to proclaim its centrality; its historical form mimics the character for center, zhong 中, with the walled city as the perimeter and the north-south axis—so key to dynastic principles of good governance—bisecting the city.25 Moreover, the centrality of Beijing in art historical and urban planning scholarship is evident in the quantity of recent scholarship on the capital’s transformation post 1979.26 However, despite recent scholarship on the city that brings together the social, cultural, and historical context of

23 The tensions between the perceieved benefits of globalization and those actually experienced by citizens are rightly pointed out by Ban Wang tensions that are often reflected in the promotion of building Central Business Districts before investing in public transit systems for instance. Global cities participate in a capitalist system that privledges the flow of transnational capital and uneven development. “Globalization, trumped up before its real benefits are felt, is often a new trick on the part of corporate executives and their hired economists…[.]” Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 181. 24 For an overview of Beijing’s changing morphology and its relationship to Chinese city building see: Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Fang Ke, Dang Dai Beijing Jiu Cheng Geng Xin: Contemporary Conservation in the Inner City of Beijing (Beijing: Zhong guo jian zhu gong ye chu ban she, 2000); Wang Jun, Cheng Ji (Beijing: Sheng huo, du shu, xin zhi san lian shu dian, 2003); Wang Jun, Cai Fang Ben Shang De Cheng Shi, Beijing di 1 ban (Beijing: Sheng huo, du shu, xin zhi san lian shu dian, 2008); Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters; a Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971); Alfred Schinz, The Magic Square: Cities in Ancient China (Stuttgart: Axel Menges, 1996); Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, “Imperial Architecture along the Mongolian Road to Dadu,” Ars Orientalis 18 (1988): 59–93; Shuishan Yu, “To Achieve the Unachievable: Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue and Chinese Architectural Modernization during the PRC Era” (University of Washington, 2006); Victor F. S. Sit, “Soviet Influence on Urban Planning in Beijing, 1949-1991,” The Town Planning Review 67, no. 4 (October 1996): 457–84; Joseph Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950 (Honolulu, 2000); Duanfang Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity, and Space, 1949-2005 (London; New York: Routledge, 2006); Wusan Dai, Kao Gong Ji Tu Shuo, Di 1 ban (Jinan Shi: Shandong hua bao chu ban she, 2003); Piper Gaubatz, “Changing Beijing,” Geographical Review 85, no. 1 (January 1995): 79–80. 25 For an overview of the relationship between city planning and projection of governance see: Cao Zixi, Wang Caimei, and Yu Deyuan, eds., Beijing Tong Shi, Comprehensive History of Beijing (Beijing: Zhongguo shu dian, 1994); Victor F. S. Sit, Beijing: The Nature and Planning of a Chinese Capital City, World Cities Series; Variation: World Cities Series. (Chichester; New York: Wiley, 1995); Hok-Lam Chan, Legends of the Building of Old Peking (Seattle Univ. of Washington Press, 2008); Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990). 26 Yomi Braester, Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing; Yu Shuishan, “Redefining the Axis of Beijing: Revolution and Nostalgia in the Planning of the PRC Capital,” Journal of Urban History 34, no. 4 (May 1, 2008): 571–608; Shuishan Yu, Chang’an Avenue and the Modernization of Chinese Architecture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013). 8

9 the city, discussions of how artists use their practices to critique urban planning, particularly with a focus on infrastructure has not heretofore been addressed.

My research is focused on Beijing because of the high level of visual saturation that is focused on urban planning and is disseminated throughout the city through various media: print, advertisements on bus screens, museums, hoardings, and community banners. Beijing inhabitants are exposed daily to a myriad of planners’ visions for their city on television, on billboards, and on-line. One such example, a key primary source in my research, is the journal 城市中国 Chengshi Zhongguo, first published in 2005, that offers readers articles, photo essays, and info-graphics on all matter of topics related to ‘the city.’ The editorial board, in the first issue seeks to produce a magazine that can help to intervene (介入 jie ru) in what they perceive as a vacuum (真空 zhen kong) in city planning and a publication that communicates issues to a broader audience. Editor Jiang Jun states:

At the same time that we have better city planning and more outstanding magazines, yet we still do not have a good city focused publication [that] belongs to the public; it is as if these two lines [cities and magazines] are from one origin [yet remain] parallel, unable to find a point of intersection. The space between these two lines, this vacuum, is our starting point [for this magazine]. 27

Chengshi Zhongguo’s intervention into the issues surrounding contemporary Chinese city planning is to provide a platform in the form of a publication. The rise in interest in urban planning and issues specific to cities in China is further indicated by the availability of this magazine, its online presence, and recent selected translation into English.28

In addition to visual renderings and projections of the master plans are the textual documents of these plans available electronically and from the Beijing Municipal Archives.29 What the images do differently than the texts is conveyed by how the official planners envision the city. Scholar of

27 Jiang Jun. “Introduction to the magazine” Za zhi jian shao in issue 01, 2005 n.p. Original text:当我们有了更好的城市规划，也有了更优秀的杂志时，我们却还没有一本好的、属于公众的城市类杂志，就像两条系出同源的平行线，找不到交点。这两条平行线之间的真空就是我们的起点。 28 Brendan McGetrick and Jiang Jun, Urban China Work in Progress, Bilingual edition (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2010). 29 “Beijing Municipal Archives Homepage,” accessed July 7, 2014, http://www.bjma.gov.cn/index.ycs. 9

Chinese propaganda Anne-Marie Brady describes this shift in relation to changing approaches to propaganda: “[i]n the era of Jiang Zemin and his successor, Hu Jintao, slick advertising campaigns have replaced political campaigns.”30 What is key here is that while the propaganda looks different than propaganda tactics of, say, the 1960s, it is still manufactured and conceived of as propaganda. The utopian farm collectives of the past have been reimaged as utopian urban cities of the future. But the fictions of state propaganda—be they double digit grain production or city building—are quickly unmasked by the everyday citizen’s experience in Beijing. The experience is one marked by traffic jams, prohibitively expensive housing, and overcrowded public transportation, which contrast sharply with the slick propaganda of master plans. And it is this contrast, this gulf between the imaged city and the lived city in which I situate my research.

Lastly, I situate my research in Beijing because I believe that the city represents a unique coupling of art making and post-socialist urban China.31 Beijing is an ultimate example of the juncture of political economy and aesthetics. The government dictates the plan of the city: zoning laws, land use rights, and networks of infrastructure; however, the architecture and what the city looks like is driven by global capitalism.32 Beijing is an ancient capital, but it is also a recent economic boomtown. Balancing the city’s various identities continues to be a precarious task for the city’s urban planners. Making sense of these identities and how to interpret them is a task being undertaken by the city’s artists.

Frameworks of looking: theoretical concerns of the dissertation

Framing my analysis of art in the city is that Beijing is a space and place that is loaded and coded with historical, political, and cultural meanings. Making sense of the multitude of meanings these artists offer additional modes of making sense of this monolith, one that adds to and strives for multiple readings of the capital. In order to elucidate such multiple readings, the dissertation

30 Anne-Marie Brady, Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 3. 31 Michael Keane, China’s New Creative Clusters: Governance, Human Capital and Investment, 1st ed. (Routledge, 2011). 32 Regarding these issues of global capitalism see: Gong Haomin, Uneven Modernity: Literature, Film, and Intellectual Discourse in Postsocialist China (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2012). 10

11 engages with theoretical and conceptual concerns across the fields of critical visual studies and urban studies.

The field of urban studies, particularly the emerging field of non-Western urban studies, also informs the research concerns of this dissertation.33 A rich field of Beijing city studies has emerged including work by Victor Sit, Fang Ke, and Yang Dongping.34 However, these works are disciplinarily constrained to geography and have yet to consider the role of artists within Beijing. Additionally, undergirding the theoretical and conceptual concerns of my research is what geographers Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift call the ‘new urbanism’ one that “…needs to recognize the engineering of certainty through varied technologies of regulation (such as traffic signs, postal rules, waste management).”35 Taking into account how the city of Beijing is regulated and controlled offers a different lens of inquiry into how artists participate in or evade such regulatory systems. This is particularly evident when artists demonstrate the breakdown of such ‘technologies of regulation’ in their artworks.36

Beyond the methods of research from urban studies and urban geography that inform my inquiry, more broadly the dissertation, is an assertion of critical art historical studies, one that takes the form of the city as its starting point. In order to do so, I bring together Sinology, art history, and Nicolas Mirzoeff’s notion of “counter-visuality” to interpret the visual materials produced in and

33 Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne, eds., Urban Theory Beyond the West: A World of Cities (Paperback) - Routledge (London: Routledge, 2011); Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (New York: Routledge, 2006); For an exemplar of such scholarship in a Chinese city see: Carolyn Cartier, “Transnational Urbanism in the Reform-Era Chinese City: Landscapes from Shenzhen,” Urban Studies 39, no. 9 (August 1, 2002): 1513–32. 34 Sit, “Soviet Influence on Urban Planning in Beijing, 1949-1991”; Fang Ke, Dang Dai Beijing Jiu Cheng Geng Xin: Contemporary Conservation in the Inner City of Beijing; Yang Dongping, Cheng Shi Ji Feng: Beijing He Shanghai de Wen Hua Jing Shen (City Monsoon: Beijing and Shanghai’s Cultural Counciousness) (Beijing Shi: Xin xing chu ban she, 2006). 35 Ash Amin and N. J Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 26; See also Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001). 36 For an overview of the complexity of large urban scaled technical systems, their material and immaterial aspects, and how the failures and successes of these systems are governed see Olivier Coutard, ed., The Governance of Large Technical Systems (New York: Routledge, 1999), 1–16, 11

12 of Beijing.37 Taking Mirzoeff’s notion of ‘counter-visuality and adding to it curator Christine Nippe’s emphasis on the “…role of the visual in the perception of the city [.]”38 where the visual is defined by a variety of mediums (film, art, visual culture, and online) my investigation of the visual foregrounds this study in and of the city. However, in order to comprehend the visual field of the city, I do not make a distinction between visual culture and ‘high art’ believing that in the context of seeing and being seen in the city is continent upon a spectrum of visual practices. While many of my examples are art works displayed in galleries, I also bring to bear on these art works visual culture examples gathered during fieldwork. The visual culture of Beijing’s streets and roads as well as print media, television, and online content inform artists working there. Therefore should be considered part of the visual constellations I set out to examine.

The inclusion of such a wide variety of visual productions is further informed by the work of scholars of Chinese cultural production Judith Farquhar, Robin Visser, and Yomi Braester.39 Each of these scholars approach cultural production in an expansive way through examples from multiple categories that result in unexpected but fruitful comparisons. In many ways these writers acknowledge through their studies the importance of attending to the multiple actors at work in urban settings, taking human and non-human actors as equally informative to the understanding of contemporary China. For example, Farquhar describes her “source material” as ranging from film, advertisements, to fiction.40 Braester also embraces a multi-modal approach tracing a neighborhood’s history as depicted on stage, to film, and eventually reproduced on stage and in advertisements for a new housing development. I too, situate artists’ works amongst contemporaneous examples of films, billboards, and literature in order to provide a wide visual landscape of contemporary Beijing, as well as to draw conclusions based on a poly-modal, poly-

37 Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., “Introduction: For Critical Visuality Studies,” in The Visual Culture Reader, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013), xxix–xxxviii. 38 Christine Nippe, “City Representations in Net Art,” in The Electronic City, ed. Ulrike Bucher and Maroš Finka (Berlin: BWV Verlag, 2011), 26. 39 Judith Farquhar, Appetites: Food and Sex in Postsocialist China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), Online through Rbarts; Robin Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Braester, Painting the City Red. 40 Farquhar, Appetites, 5. 12

13 visual urban space. To be an artist in Beijing today is to be constantly bombarded by the city’s sights, sounds, tastes. Therefore, capturing this range of productions is the rationale for such an expanded set of “source materials” in this dissertation.

The primary sources included in my project range from interviews conducted with curators and artists, government documents such as white papers (bai pi shu 白皮书), Beijing city master plans (zong ti gui hua 总体规划), planning documents, to academic art and urban planning journals such as Mei Shu (美术 Art), Cheng shi Zhongguo (城市中国 Urban China), Cheng shi gui hua (城市规划 City Planning), and popular magazines such as Ren Min Hua Bao (人民画报 China Pictorial). These primary materials are under examined in terms of their relationship to art and the city. And as of yet, they have not been read against, or in conjunction with each other. These sources form the core of the primary source material in my research. These primary sources provide rich evidence of the varied and ongoing discussions of the role of art in urban planning, how creative industries are vital to emerging global cities, and how artists have envisioned themselves as part of the urban fabric.

Guiding my interpretations and analyses of the polyphony of source materials is the gap described above between the imagined/imaged landscapes of Beijing in propaganda productions with lived realities of the city. Urban historian Zhou Rong has described such visualizations of the city’s preferred image as “PPT Cities” referring to digital renderings made for Power Point Presentations (PPT).41 While art historian Poyin Auyeung described such visual tactics as creating the “billboard image” of the city.42 Despite what planners and property developers would like people to believe, it is not an easy city in which to live. But the disparity between imagined and reality is an opportunity to use this gap as a productive space of discourse to consider how Beijing can be further understood. Additionally, there are always leakages and

41 Zhou Rong, “Leaving Utopian China,” Architectural Design 78, no. 5 (2008): 36–39. See the second interlude and chapter 4 for an extended discussion of digital rendering of images of cities and their role in city image creation. 42 Poyin Auyeung, “Art, Urbanism, and Public Space: Critical Spatial Responses to Urban Redevelopment in Beijing (1976-2000)” (CUNY, 2008), 350, http://search.proquest.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/pqdtglobal/docview/304675526/83C4192BA8FE412BPQ/1 ?accountid=14771. 13

14 exchanges between the layers of this spectrum creating eddies and turbulence that complicates the official versus unofficial images of the city.

Complicating the spectrum of official versus unofficial is the main work of the dissertation. Perry Link describes the linguistic difference between official and unofficial speech:

The official language was used in newspapers, on the radio, and at political meetings, and its distinctive features separated it clearly from everyday talk, which was used for buying fish, scolding children, gossiping about one’s sister-in-law, and other such daily-life activities.43

Such “daily-life” activities are a starting point for my research into how artists are making sense of such activities through their artworks. In this dichotomy, one that is by neither so clearly demarcated in the visual fields of Beijing nor in the linguistic situations mentioned by Link, are the moments where heterogeneous version of the city of Beijing become visible.44

The structure of the dissertation

Each chapter revolves around an artist and an infrastructural element of the city. This allows me excavate how artists envision the city especially in light of one particular infrastructural system.45 Cities are massive, heaving, changing entities, but by focusing on one particular infrastructural aspect that is ether represented in or alluded to in these artists’ works, my analysis of both the art work and the city is more closely attentive to details, specifics, and especially importantly, the discordances. Because the city is a multifaceted environment, replete with hard

43 Perry Link, An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 13; Patricia M. Thornton, “Framing Dissent in Contemporary China: Irony, Ambiguity and Metonymy,” The China Quarterly, no. 171 (2002): 661–81. 44 I acknowledge that in the context of the PRC’s Communist government the terms ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ are loaded with meanings and are overly binary. I am not using these terms to indicate that the artists’ works are ‘banned’ or ‘censored’—in fact many if not all of the works discussed in the dissertation have been exhibited in China—what I am emphasizing, and more importantly, want to complicate with these binary terms, is the tension between the government produced image of Beijing in contrast to non-governmental images of the same city. 45 A special issue of the PMLA in 2007 was dedicated to depcitions of infrastructure and cities in literature studies in order to develop a “phenomenology for thinking about these urban multitudes…[.]”. Patricia Yaeger, “Introduction: Dreaming of Infrastructure,” PMLA 122, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 9–26. See in particular her four categories of examining city literature, categories I intersect with often in my analysis of artworks that follows Ibid., 13. 14

15 and soft infrastructure, honing and focusing each chapter on one particular element will, I hope, allow for a micro-view of Beijing, one that is often overlooked for more sweeping and macroscopic view that then tend to blur and edit out details that are counter to such overarching visions. For example, recall the dazzling fireworks that opened the 2008 summer Olympics. The firework ‘footsteps’ marched from the Forbidden City along the central north-south axis, ending at the Bird’s Nest with a round of spectacular explosions. This fly-over view of the city was firstly, in large-part computer generated for the TV feed, and secondly, edited out the large swaths of demolition in the historic (and supposedly historically protected) center of the city that was undertaken to build many of the Olympic venues.

Peeling back and selecting elements of the city to investigate in this dissertation is indebted to Michel de Certeau’s description of New York from the World Trade Tower viewing platform.46 While a city when seen from this ‘god-like’ viewpoint is orderly and comprehensible. This order and comprehension is lost when one is at street-level navigating the hustle, bustle, and mess of the city when embedded in it becomes impossible. My position is then is to hover somewhere between street and sky—picking out a discernable pattern/order from above, but not at the expense of dispensing with the messiness of the city at the street level.

In chapter one I examine Ning Ying’s Beijing Trilogy (For Fun (1993), On the Beat (1995), and I Love Beijing (2001)). I question how, as a native Beijinger, her intimate knowledge of the streets and roads of Beijing is performatively translated onto film and argue that in this is a latent critique, a cinematic irony of the quality of roads in the city. In her three films Ning offers three speeds of movement through the city: walking, biking, and driving. As we progress from walking to driving, Ning’s camera lingers on the lack of quality roads. I demonstrate how this accounting of the poor road surfaces can be seen as a critique of the scale and pace of development undertaken in the central and historic neighborhoods of Beijing. Despite official rhetoric of progress and modernization, Ning’s films produce counternarratives of road system production.

46 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California Press, 2002), 91. 15

Chapter two focuses on the infrastructure of Beijing’s waste removal system and Song Dong’s ongoing investigation of vernacular found objects, including the cache of objects acquired by his mother. I argue that Song’s preoccupation with things, and more specifically things that are categorized as garbage, can be seen as a metaphor for the changing scale of Beijing. His careful organization of his mother’s things, ranging from those that are truly garbage such as used toothpaste tubes, to the more evidently useful like clothing wardrobes, is an attempt to sort and make sense of her life through a biography of her things. The categorizing reclaims her things from the dustbin of history. Song’s installations vacillate between putting things in place as is the case in Waste Not, and deliberately putting things out of place as in Doing Nothing Garden, where he dumped garbage in the center of Kassel for Documenta(12). The tension between things in place and things out of place mimics the public service messages urging Beijingers to sort their garbage into three streams of waste: kitchen, recyclable, and other. The city’s growing garbage problem and ecological degradation has put mounting pressure on citizens to ‘green’ their waste streams. Sorting and categorizing of garbage is discussed and visualized as a patriotic duty, recalling early PRC propaganda campaigns. Song’s installations are an artistic interpretation of these government sanctioned sorting regimes that bring citizens in contact with the waste management infrastructure of recycling and garbage.

Chapter three shifts from non-human hard infrastructure systems to consider the intersection of hard and soft infrastructure as they collide at the node of the human bodies at work building Beijing. I attempt to reveal what is ultimately behind China’s infrastructure building boom: the working bodies of migrant laborers. In contrast to the hardware of roads, waste systems, or Internet networks, I consider how the body of migrant workers embodies a liminal state within the city of Beijing and in their depictions in contemporary art. Migrant workers are the basis for China’s post-Maoist flourishing economic reforms. The physical working bodies of migrants in major urban hubs such as Beijing are irreplaceable, yet often rendered invisible. Tracing the working body as depicted and recorded in art uncovers who is doing the work to make this infrastructure possible. As the Chinese government continues its massive population move to move farmers off rural land and into the city, estimated at over 250 million people, and as East

Asian cities continue to grow faster and faster regionally, how and why inhabitants make sense of their urban existence will continue to be more and more important.47

In the final chapter I shift from the embodied physical aspects of the first three chapters to move to the virtual world. In this chapter I discuss Cao Fei’s RMB City, a dystopian virtual vision of Chinese cities, to probe how this alternative city sheds light on how pre-2010 online worlds were used by artists as spaces of critique. Her work online in the ‘metaverse’ of Second Life, a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), offers a version of what unfettered growth could do to Beijing. While Cao’s imaginary city is exaggeratedly dysfunctional, it offers visitors an often-frustrating experience of how many citizens, including her, experience the real world city of Beijing.

In the conclusion I offer additional veins of inquiry predicated on the idea that infrastructure can at once represent “grids of domination” 48 in the hands of the state, but can also be inverted to reveal other narratives in the hands of artists. These other official and unofficial narratives, be they in Beijing, Hong Kong, or Singapore are what ultimately the artists examined in my dissertation offer in their reinterpretations of roads, garbage, city planning, and real estate, providing the careful viewer a way out of the grid of domination—they can multiply the readings of the city.

47 Ian Johnson, “China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities,” The New York Times, June 15, 2013, sec. World / Asia Pacific, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinas-great-uprooting-moving-250- million-into-cities.html. 48 Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, “Governing Cities: Notes on the Spatialisation of Virtue,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17, no. 6 (1999): 744. 17

0.1 A video interlude: Beijing 20151

Beijing 2015 (fig. 0.1) is a propaganda film produced for the 12th 5-year plan for Beijing, available through the municipal government’s online museum.2 In this film, the viewer is shown Beijing as it is imaged to look like by the official planners in 2015, while in the chapters that follow I return to specific details of this film in relation to artists’ particular works, what I want to emphasize here, is how the themes of roads, waste, electricity are put in conversation with culture, art, and historic preservation in this video. As I have outlined above, the co-existence and co-dependence of hard and soft infrastructure is a key theme in all the chapters. Moreover, in this short film the link between how Beijing’s municipal government is projecting a particular image comes into focus. It is a Beijing marked as a world-class city, one that has high tech transportation, commerce, and a diverse population. It is a city that is well designed and highly functional in terms of the movement of people and goods, and on a conceptual level the flow of ideas and innovation. This is the official version of Beijing that city planners would like us to see.

The film begins with a shot of the Earth floating in space, and then transitions to a rapid zoom into the city of Beijing. The opening sequence finishes by hovering over the Bird’s nest—a symbol of Beijing’s rise to prominence with the 2008 Summer Games. The fly over places the viewer at the northern end of the imperial north-south axis, looking south to gaze back at the historical center of Beijing. We are being given the imperial subject position from this standpoint. The reassertion of the north-south axis was a key component of the 2008 Olympics; therefore, by repeating its importance in the film underlines the continued and future importance of the axis.3 Reinforcing the ‘god-like’ or in this case imperial viewing position, the film quickly

1 This visual interlude is indebted to the organizational structure of Cinema at the City’s Edge. The editors describe their decision to include short, concentrated discussions of images: “[t]hese screen shots and brief annotations are also attempts to prioritize the visual register over the rhetorical mode more common in critical writing.” Yomi Braester and James Tweedie, Cinema at the City’s Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia (Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 11. I follow their lead with the inclusion of image focused, close reading interludes in this dissertation. 2 Produced in 2011 and available at http://www.bjpc.gov.cn/125ghg/xgzl/bj2015.html. Copy on file with author. 3 Yu Shuishan, “Redefining the Axis of Beijing.” 18

19 shifts from the Olympics to the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC military parades held on Tian’anmen Square. The military’s central role in this introduction to Beijing is carefully integrated alongside images of high-speed new train stations and the Central Business District (CBD). The military-industrial complex is centrally displayed.

The spectacles and parades of the opening sequence give way to computer-animated sequences later on in the film. These sections are punctuated by corporate-style video footage. This blending of the imagined (animated) world with staged live action footage creates a kaleidoscopic version of fictional/real Beijing. Key areas of growth like technology are shown both on a map of Beijing indicating new hubs of development, but are further underscored by having actors in lab coats. This production technique seems to make the claims being made more plausible, more believable, and more official.

The video is a production of Brady’s ‘slick advertising’ in the guise of propaganda.4 Its raison d’être is to convince viewers that the goals and promises of the 12th 5-year plan are being implemented and are coming true. And yet there is a vast disconnect between this imaged Beijing and the lived Beijing. To recall Urban China’s editor Jiang Jun’s description above, it is this space that is the starting point for the discussions in the following chapters. By keeping Beijing 2015 as an example of an officially produced video in mind when reading, the reader will be better able to envision what the rhetoric of planning documents looks like to the municipal government, and be better able to see the contradictions between various interpretations offered by the artists discussed.

4 Brady, Marketing Dictatorship, 3. 19

2 Bumps in the Road: Ning Ying’s Beijing Trilogy

In 1995 performance artist Lin Yilin (林一林 b. 1964) took 90 minutes to cross a road. In Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road he used concrete blocks to build, dismantle, and rebuild a protective human-sized wall (fig. 2.1). Lin’s wall shielded him from the oncoming traffic, screening his body with concrete as he progressed from one side of the street to the other. Highlighting various paces of movements within an urban context, the slow meditative motion of the artist contrasts sharply with the fast moving cars. The rushing traffic and Lin’s painstakingly slow progress dramatically emphasizes the dangers of the road and the heterogeneous space and pace of roads in an economically reforming China.1 Lin’s street crossing, an everyday occurrence for most city dwellers, performed in such a belabored manner creates a call and response between the artist and his urban landscape. As Lin moves forward, inching across the busy artery, drivers honk, enraged by the inconvenience of this impromptu roadblock. The road became Lin’s stage, and his act transforms a mundane space of a road and turns it into a space of performance.

Lin’s critique revolves around the pace of development, and its relationship and influence on the daily lives of city dwellers in Shenzhen, a city drawn into existence by the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping and cemented during his 1992 inspection tour. Lin’s decision to perform the piece in one of the special economic zones in southern China was triggered by his own experiences living in Guangzhou.2 His performance is an example of contemporary art practices that are informed by, and produced in, the urban environment. More specifically for my purposes, his work is imbricated in road building infrastructure boom of post-Mao China.

In a similar way, the Beijing born filmmaker Ning Ying approaches the urban environment also using roads as settings for her critiques of Beijing’s post-1978 changes. While Ning and Lin use different media, what links these two artists is how they perceive the city and how they respond to their urban environments. Ning and Lin use urban spaces to create works that comment on the

1 Hu Fang Some Basic Content: http://linyilin.com/index.php/article/?lang=e&type=1&id=2. 2 Email to the author. About this work in particular see: http://linyilin.com/index.php/art/detail/?lang=e&id=2. 20

21 contemporary situation in urban China. Thus I will argue that Ning uses the road as a stage in her films to reveal ironic interpretations of the typology of China’s developmentalist project. In this chapter I examine how Ning Ying’s portrayal of roads in her Beijing Trilogy: For Fun (找樂 Zhao Le, 1993), On the Beat (警察故事 Jing cha gu shi, 1995), and I Love Beijing (夏日暖洋洋 Xia ri nuan yang yang, 2001) shape the audience’s interpretation of the city, and I argue that her depictions of roads have embedded critiques of urban life. For my purposes roads are considered as a physical manifestation of state planning and as a material trace of urban policies. By observing Ning Ying’s relationship to and with roads, her films reveals structures of everyday responses to top down urban masterplans, in contrast to how streets and roads are actually used by citizens. I consider roads as an assemblage of statecraft and everyday use, where tensions are formed or eased and where Ning chooses to locate her critique of the changes to her hometown. Furthermore, when considering the films as a body of work, the trajectory of how the characters use roads embodies the changes in the city: where in the first film a street vendor is shooed away by the main character, by the last film, the main character often makes pit-stops to eat at street vendor’s stalls setup under overpasses and bridges.

Prior scholarship on Ning’s trilogy focused on class and gender in relation to the urban changes in the city, however, the specific relationship to changes in the road network has not been addressed.3 The subtle changes in how Ning’s characters perform on the streets and roads of Beijing charts the concurrent changes to the city’s road network that rapidly expanded post-1978. Not only does Ning reveal how her characters approach the spaces of the roads, she also shifts from beginning with hutongs, traditional alleyways in Beijing, in the first film, to neighborhoods in the second, and eventually finishing the trilogy on the expansive ring roads. Changes in the scale of roads and their relationship to the characters, arching from small alleys to the large highways, emphasizes her interest in how road infrastructure is a marker of physical and psychological changes to the capital.

3 Cui Shuqin, “Ning Ying’s Beijing Trilogy,” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 241–63. 21

Cinematic Irony

Film critics have frequently pointed out the obliqueness of Ning’s humor, often using the adjectives “subtle” and “sly” as well as the phrase “subtly subversive” to highlight the indirectness of her critiques.4 Moreover, critics frequently refer to the use of incisive comedy in her films labeling it “pointedly funny”5, “deadpan but unmistakably caustic”6, “parodic”7 and, most tellingly, in her own words she characterizes On the Beat as “dryly hilarious”8 and in an interview describing the films as “subtle” and using “black humor”9 to convey her ideas on contemporary Chinese society and the role of the filmmaker within that society as a critical voice. These references to approach in terms of indirect criticism and type of humor used in her social commentary evaluate the films as a whole, not specifically in relation to how and why roads are so crucial in where this critique is visible; therefore, I propose that by focusing on the typology of the road is where her irony is most apparent. In my discussion of Ning Ying’s trilogy I demonstrate continued use of such tactics of indirect criticism in the urban environment because for Ning the paving and building of Beijing’s road network is neither completely frictionless nor wholly welcomed by all citizens, yet is characterized as a major driver of China’s developmentalist project. I further argue that elements of the roads’ composition, size, quality, surface treatments (paved or gravel), and modes of transit are junctions of public and private interactions that are always already mediated by the state through statecraft, composed as an assemblage of traffic laws and regulations, traditional behaviors, and built structures.

4 “New Chinese Cinema: Spotlight on Ning Ying,” Cinematheque Ontario 15, no. 1 (2004): 40–41. 5 Kracier, “On the Beat,” in “Press Kit Ning Ying,” Toronto International Film archives: F–40–647. 6 Amy Taubin, “Labors of Love,” Village Voice, April 2, 1996. 7 Ibid. 8 “Press Kit Ning Ying,” Toronto International Film archives: F–40–647. For additional press clippings see Ning Ying’s website: https://sites.google.com/site/ningyingfilms/%E5%8C%97%E4%BA%AC%E4%B8%89%E9%83%A8%E6%9B%B 24. 9 Ning Ying, Ning Ying interviewed for Visible City Project and Archive, pt. 22:48-52, accessed August 21, 2015, https://vimeo.com/46300294. 22

The Village Voice film critic Amy Taubin labeled Ning’s approach “urban ethnography.”10 Subsequently, I argue that the road where this urban ethnography uncovers the tactics deployed by citizens in a Beijing in the midst of a transforming city.11 In order to show Ning’s cinematic irony I trace three main themes across the trilogy: obsolescence, pace, and the widening of roads in order to structure a synthetic discussion of the trilogy. Ning envisioned the films as interrelated and as having concordances with each other; therefore, the themes chosen highlight these similarities. In resisting or accepting the process as Beijing is transformed, feelings of becoming obsolete, or dealing with the increasing pace of development are the tactics and modes of resistance of the characters in Ning’s films. 12 The characters circumvent urban changes or show innovative ways of making sense of the changes to Beijing from the beginning of her filming in 1992 to completion of the films in 2001. Ning’s characters re-inscribe Beijing’s sites of global capitalism thus creating a subtle critique of contemporary Beijing’s urban transformations.

Linking up with the world

Roads are a broad category.13 Inverting the typical symbolic function of roads and highways as marking progress, I instead interpret the depictions of them in Beijing as negative sites of modernity’s progress. In February 1995, roughly concurrent with the release of Ning’s first two

10 Taubin, “Labors of Love.” 11 Previous scholarship on Ning Ying’s films focused on her desire to capture Beijing as it was changing before her eyes and her feelings of displacement amid these changes. Building on this work, my argument focuses on a detailed visual analysis of characters and objects read through the themes of pacing, obsolecance, and widening of roads that have been underexamined these earlier works. Braester, Painting the City Red; Li Yiming, “Shen me shi dian ying? ‘Zhao le’ he ‘ Min Jing gu shi’ de dian ying xing tai (What is a film? The morphology of ‘For Fun’ and ‘On the Beat’),” in 90 nian dai de “Di wu dai” (The 5th generation of Chinese filmmakers in the 1990s), ed. Yuanying Zhang, Pan Hua, and Shen Yun (Beijing: Beijing guang bo xue yuan chu ban she, 2000); Ning Ying, Yang Yuanying, and Huang Aihe, “Wo de Dian Ying Shi Jie Yu Shi Jie Dian Ying Zhong de Wo: Ning Ying Fang Tan Lu,” in Tamen de Sheng Yin: Zhonguo Nv Dian Ying Dao Yan (Beijing: Zhongguo she hui chu ban she, 1996). 12 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. James C Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1985); James C Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 13 I using the term road to include roads, streets, alleyways, hutongs, ring roads, and all of the attending road network infrastructure—bridges, overpasses, fly-overs, sidewalks, and foot bridges. This follows categorization used in scholarship on urban planning. See for instance the list of city road infrastructure in chapter nine of Dang dai Zhongguo de cheng shi jian she (City Construction in Contemporary China) (Beijing: Zhongguo she hui ke xue chu ban she, 1990), 208. 23

24 films, an article was published in RMHB with a photograph of a major clover-leaf highway intersection, is titled Beijing walks toward the world (Beijing zou xiang shi jie 北京走向世界). Here, the verb to walk (zou 走) is coupled with the highway, which is definitely not a space for walking, as a marker of this movement toward the world.14 The slippage between the word and image in this article is revealing of the unequal development of this move towards the world as well as the developmentalist project.15 Rather than smoothing circulation, roads in post-1978 Beijing reveal instead the uneven nature of the economic reforms that mark this period of time. Samuel Liang notes how “[t]he ambitious diagram of axes and belts drawn by local officials and planners symbolizes a new ‘ideology’ of development…” one that is “…a bureaucratic tool.”16 Beijing’s recent infrastructural boom—driven by the 2001 granting of status to the WTO and the awarding of the 2008 Olympics—is often subsumed into neo-liberal rhetoric of ‘progress’ or developmentalism; however, there is a second possible reading of Beijing’s roads, one that produces heterogeneous and ironical readings of the city as captured in these films.

Mundane and often maligned, the roads of Beijing are ubiquitous in Ning Ying’s films. Whether the characters are on foot, bike, or in cars, the roads are silent participants in each of her films. The roads activate and enable Ning Ying’s indirect critiques of Beijing and contemporary China. Contrary to Marc Augé’s assertion that roads are an example of super-modernity’s ‘non- spaces’17 road studies scholars investigate roads as vivid, lively, and important spaces that participate in local politics and memories.18 Specifically, the notion that roads and the quality of

14 For a discussion of a similar slogan “link up with the tracks of the world” (yu shi jie gui 与世界接轨) and its relationship to contemporary art in Beijing see Sasha Su-Ling Welland, “Experimental Beijing: Contemporary Art Worlds in China’s Capital” (University of California, Santa Cruz, 2006), 33 http://proquest.umi.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/pqdweb?did=1192181221&Fmt=7&clientId=12520&RQT=3 09&VName=PQD. 15 Burke and Pomeranz, The Environment and World History. 16 Samuel Y. Liang, Remaking China’s Great Cities: Space and Culture in Urban Housing, Renewal, and Expansion, 1 edition (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 57. 17 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995). 18 For ‘road studies’ scholarship: Jennifer Cole, “The Work of Memory in Madagascar,” American Ethnologist 25, no. 4 (1998): 610–33; Tamara Giles-Vernick, “Na Lege Ti Guiriri (On the Road of History): Mapping out the Past and Present in M’Bres Region, Central African Republic,” Ethnohistory 43, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 245–75; Christian Krohn-Hansen and Knut G. Nustad, eds., State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives (London ; Ann Arbor, MI: 24

25 roads is a marker of modernity and as a result attaining 1st world status is a critical part of ‘road studies.’ The denial of temporal coevalness allows for non-Western countries to be seen as being ‘of another time’ or as having infrastructure that is backwards. The relationship between roads and modernity according to Sharon Roseman is “… the opposition between the existence and the absence of paved roads linking the countryside to the cities and thus to economic and technological ‘progress.’”19

Roads are a critical aspect of modernization programs in 20th century China. Chinese historian Lu Hanchao fruitfully explored the discussion of modernity and its relationship to infrastructure in Shanghai. Lu demonstrates the importance of infrastructure in the contested relationship between modernity and China by focusing on two everyday objects—streetlamps and piped water. He shows the populace’s shift from rejection to acceptance as these markers of modernity infiltrate the urban landscape.20 Roughly concurrent with the addition of electricity and piped water in Shanghai were comments by reform-minded Kang Youwei who believed poor condition of Beijing’s roads were an embarrassment to the country.21 The linkage between the state of roads and modernity was firmly established in Kang’s mind. He had seen the building of roads

Pluto Press, 2005); Orvar Lofgren, “Concrete Transnationalism? Bridge Building in the New Economy,” Focaal 43 (2004): 59–75; Sharon Roseman, “How We Built the Road: The Politics of Memory in Rural Galicia,” American Ethnologist 23, no. 4 (1996): 836–60; Adeline Masquelier, “Encounter With A Road Siren: Machines, Bodies and Commodities In the Imagination of a Mawri Healer,” Visual Anthropology Review 8, no. 1 (1992): 56–69; Barbara Bender and Margot Winer, eds., Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2001); Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty First Century (London ; New York: Routledge, 2000); Demetrie Dalakoglou, “The Road: An Ethnography of the Albanian–Greek Cross-Border Motorway,” American Ethnologist 37, no. 1 (February 2010): 132–49; David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism (London: Verso, 2006). 19 Roseman, “How We Built the Road: The Politics of Memory in Rural Galicia.” 20 Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 21 Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 37-8. For Westerners’ accounts of the state of roads in Beijing see Juliet Bredon, Peking; a Historical and Intimate Description of Its Chief Places of Interest, 2d ed., and enl (Shanghai [etc.]: Kelly and Walsh, 1922); George Norbert Kates, The Years That Were Fat: Peking, 1933-1940, 1st ed (New York: Harper, 1952). 25

26 and provisions for their upkeep in British ruled Hong Kong and felt that Beijing’s roads were inferior.

By the establishment of the PRC in 1949, the call for road improvements reached a fevered pitch. Public works projects to usher in an era of socialist modernity were a critical aspect of the new government’s policies where infrastructure projects functioned to legitimize the new regime, thereby concretizing statecraft in highly visible, usable infrastructure.22 In a 1954 planning document The Key Points from Beijing’s Renovation and Expansion Draft Plan (改建与扩建北京规划草案的要点 Gai jian yu kuo jian Beijing gui hua cao’an de yao dian) the following section of the draft titled “[The] System of Roads and Public Squares” discussed the past situation of roads in the capital:

Throughout history, the shape of Beijing’s main roads were orderly and symmetrical in shape, these are all advantages. But the repetition of this ‘checkerboard pattern’ (qi pan) of roads [meant that], as the roads were lengthened, the main roads [then] had numerous intersections. Because of this, [the city’s roads] were poorly suited to a modern city’s traffic needs; In addition, the roads were too narrow, the number of hutongs excessive, and even though there is a railway around the city, the city walls cuts it off [from the rest of the city.] [Because of this] the vast majority of traffic is concentrated on just a few main roads [.] [As a result] the capital’s traffic [is] gravely effected. Consequently, in order to make the original roads suitable [for the modern city] it is necessary to widen, open access to, and to straighten the original roads [.] [We must] join the ring roads to radial roads in order to improve the road system [of Beijing].

一历史上形成的北京道路干线，具有整齐，对称等优点；但千篇一律的棋盘式的道路，使路程加长，使通主要道路的道口特别多，不适合于现代化城市的交通需要；加以道路过窄，小胡同过多，又有环城铁路，城墙等阻隔，使绝大部分交通量集中在几条干线上，严重地影响了首都的交通。因此对原有道路必须适当的展宽，打通､取直，并增设环状路和放射路，以改善道路系统。23

This policy document presents the failings of the old road system couched in terms of the needs of a modern city (现代化城市 xian dai hua cheng shi) prescribing correctives to these failings where in order to become a modern capital the roads have be widened, opened up, and lengthened. These changes allude to faster movement of people and goods suggesting speed,

22 Victor Sit, ed., Chinese Cities: The Growth of the Metropolis Since 1949 (Oxford ; New York, 1985), 266–67. 23 Zhang Jinggan, ed., Jian Guo Yi Lai de Beijing Cheng Shi Jian She Zi Liao Cheng Shi Gui Hua Nei Bu Zi Liao (Beijing: Beijing jian she zhu bian ji wei yuan hui bian ji bu, 1987), 174-5. 26

27 which is another characteristic ascribed to modernity. Secondly, the document details a rationalized space that is formulated around a network of ring roads and controllable spatialities.24 This type of large-scale city alteration recalls the Hausmannization of Paris, or what Marshal Berman refers to as ‘urbicide’ caused by large-scale building of wide roads in historic cities. The sweeping changes to the urban fabric through bulldozing districts to create wide arteries and expanding road widths was a concern for urban planners beginning with Liang Sicheng’s post 1949 plan for Beijing, and contemporary Beijing historians often compare Baron Hausmann’s plans for Pairs to the changes in Beijing’s structure particularly with regards to the removal of the city walls and the changes to Chang’anjie.25 Not only were road-building projects a critical aspect of Communist statecraft in the early 1950s, but the overall improvement in cities appearances was also important to demonstrating the legitimacy of the government. From 1949 until 1952 many projects to improve the appearance (面貌 mian mao) of cities were initiated by the new Communist government.26

One such project was the filling in of Dragon Beard Ditch (Long Xu Gou 龙须沟) in southeastern Beijing. The project became infrastructure propaganda for the Communists who commissioned Lao She to write a story about the ditch.27 The story revolves around a multifamily courtyard (大杂院 da za yuan) and its proximity to the open, sewage-filled ditch. The lack of municipal oversight before the Communist take over in 1949 meant that the ditch often flooded endangering the inhabitants. The young daughter eventual drowns in the ditch, her martyrdom spurs the other characters to lead better lives enabled by the filling of the ditch by the

24 David Bray, Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005); Gaubatz, “Changing Beijing”; Sit, Chinese Cities. 25 Historian of Beijing Wang Jun highlights the ‘roaring of bulldozers’ in relation to Beijing’s transformations, comparing them to the changes made to Paris by Baron Haussmann. Wang Jun, Cheng Ji, 11; 314–5; Yu, “To Achieve the Unachievable: Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue and Chinese Architectural Modernization during the PRC Era.” The Liang-Chen plan sought to preserve the historical center of Beijing and the city walls by moving the center of government to the west of the Forbidden city. Despite Liang and Chen’s attempts the communist government located their base of power inside the old city. Liang Sicheng, Liang Sicheng Quan Ji (Beijing: Zhongguo jian zhu gong ye chu ban she, 2001). For a detailed discussion of the contested plans for Beijing see also Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing; Braester and Tweedie, Cinema at the City’s Edge. 26 Dang dai Zhongguo de cheng shi jian she (City Construction in Contemporary China), 26. For an overview of urban planning programs (5 year plans) see Beijing Zhi Cong Shu (zong he jing ji guan li juan), vol. 33 431-446. 27 Braester, Painting the City Red. 27

Communist Party. Here the overt link between infrastructure and politics is made clear—the Communists fix the ditch, build a road, and as a direct result, life is better for all. Dragon Beard Ditch not only demonstrates the connection between good urban infrastructure and a functioning government, but it also highlights the use of media in order to spread the message. Eventually the play was adapted for film in 1952 and directed by Xian Qun.28 The choice to employ film to aid in the dissemination of the message of the Communists’ drive to improve roads in Beijing is an important point as it demonstrates the link of statecraft—fixing the road—and the use of images of this project to confirm and disseminate state infrastructure projects as improving citizens lives.

A telling example of importance of road building in the new regime of statecraft is explicated in the play and film Dragon Beard Ditch. The ditch in Dragon Beard Ditch functions as a villain in the play and the film, whereas the road built by the communists is a foil for the ditch, one that leads to ‘progress’ and a literal pathway out of the old society (旧社会 jiu she hui). The Dragon Beard Ditch project (龙须沟工程 Long xu gou gong cheng) undertaken by the Beijing municipal government was a high profile project demonstrating the new city improvement campaigns after the 1949 Communist government takeover.29 The improved living conditions after the ditch was cleared of rubbish, sewage pipes laid, and a road build on the filled in ditch exemplified the new society the Communists were building. Such progress is exemplified in the two photographs of the ditch included in Dang dai Zhongguo de cheng shi jian she.30 The photographs represent the passage of time, which is tightly coupled to the Communist statecraft project of modernizing Beijing.31 The Dragon Beard Ditch project was not just about the physical changes to a ditch in

28 Xian Qun, Long Xu Gou, Drama, (1952); For a brief overview of the living standards in Beijing's slums post- 1949 see Gaubatz, “Changing Beijing,” 85-6. 29 For an overview of the ways in which roads figure in 5 year plans begun after 1949 see Dang dai Zhongguo de cheng shi jian she (City Construction in Contemporary China), 208–17. 30 Ibid., 27. 31 Related issues of improved living conditions such as sewage and clean water are also implications of the filling of the ditch. See the images in Ren Min Hua Bao “Shou du shi zheng jian she” 3/1951. The complex relationship between modernity and the discourse of hygiene is exemplified in this project; however, it is beyond the scope of this chapter. For a key study of the relationship between modernity and hygiene see: Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 28

Beijing, but is an early example of a mian zi project (面子工程 mian zi gong cheng). The label mian zi project is used to describe a project that garners prestige or improvement in reputation, one that is often the physical manifestation of state policy or statecraft.32 In the case of the before and after photographs of the ditch, the demarcation of the new society versus the old society is distinct visually and ideologically underscoring the vector of time in the form of concrete progress.

Mian zi has the conceptual resonance with one’s reputation; therefore, mian zi projects reflect the prestige of a project’s outcomes, frequently transmitted and circulated through photographs, newspaper reports, or films. This circulation and afterlives of the project are often more important than the local usefulness of the project. Citizens seeing the before and after images in newspapers, on stage, or in the film version are able to, hopefully, extrapolate the state’s role in improving people’s lives through this infrastructural project. The ideological benefit garnered from the circulation of images and texts about a project like Dragon Beard Ditch, extends far beyond the particularities of one place. Contemporaneous examples of mian zi projects include the 2008 Olympic buildings that became part of the image of a world-class Beijing. By 2001 when Beijing was named the host city of the 2008 Olympics, the most notable changes to the city were to be infrastructural. Improving the subway system and the ring roads became a top priority for the government.33 In projecting itself as a ‘global city’ it was incredibly important for Beijing to improve its infrastructure.34

Pace of movement: walk, bike, drive

In the final scene of the film version of Dragon Beard Ditch a fleet of bicycles rides toward the camera on the new road created by filling in the ditch. The transition from the beginning of the film where citizens moved on foot to this shot demonstrates how the increase in speed and flow

32 For an extended discussion of the importance of the term mian as related to architecture and urban planning see Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing. 33 Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside. 34 For further discussion of the term ‘global city’ see John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990); Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); For a discussion of the local reception to large projects undertaken for global events like the Olympics see Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 104-108. 29

30 function as metaphors for modernity and progress enabled by the new Communist government. The increased speed of circulation of both people and goods that is facilitated by paved roads is evident through a linear reading of Ning’s three films. In each film, Ning depicts the results of China’s infrastructure boom in Beijing’s urban-scape from the standpoint of a different pace of movement. For Ning “the three movies [you see] are faster and faster.”35 Yomi Braester describes the trilogy’s shape as “…a progression—first moving by foot, then by bicycle, and finally by car—to cover a small neighborhood, a district, and finally the entire city.”36 The increasing speeds of the characters mirror the increasing pace of urban development in China by 2001, while also having an inverse relationship with the characters’ ages: as the films get faster the characters get younger. When considered as a corpus, the three films reflect the larger structural changes to the capital’s roads. Roads function as both a stage for the characters performing their interactions with and in post-Mao Beijing, but also as a space of display for Beijing to perform becoming a world city. Furthermore, the films of Beijing Trilogy show how characters use roads and depict the multitude of minor alterations in everyday habits in relation to roads. For example, at the beginning of On the Beat people are displaced from street level to a pedestrian bridge, hauling themselves up and over the road to ease the flow of car traffic below them. Braester highlights this change commenting that at this time in Beijing, “…roads became obstacles to everyday mobility… [.]”37 The changes in street infrastructure indicate a shift in statecraft that facilitates vehicular traffic flow over bicycle and foot traffic. Metaphorically citizens are displaced in favor of the movement of private cars and transportation of goods.

For Fun is loosely based on Chen Jiangong’s 1984 novella Looking for Fun (找乐 Zhao Le) and follows the main character Old Han, renamed from Old Li in Chen’s novella, as he transitions from his job as janitor at a Beijing opera troupe into retirement.38 In his retirement boredom and

35 Ning Ying, Ning Ying interviewed for Visible City Project and Archive, pt. 13:59-14:00. 36 Braester, Painting the City Red, 262. 37 Ibid., 263. 38 Zhao Le was first published in Zhongshan in 1984. Chen Jiangong, Zhao Le, Di 1 ban (Changchun: Shi dai wen yi chu ban she, 2001); Jeanne Tai, trans., Spring Bamboo: A Collection of Contemporary Chinese Short Stories, 1st ed (New York: Random House, 1989). For Fun uses the structure of a group of retirees who get together to sing Beijing opera, however, the setting of ‘Winch Handle Alley’ （lu lu ba hu tong 轆轳把胡同 ) is not specified in the 30

31 his desire to be useful, he searches for fun related to his knowledge and experience with Beijing opera performances. Wandering the streets on his first day of retirement he finds a group of aging opera dilettantes who perform informally in a park. After meeting the group a jump cut moves the film to a new location—in the Jiaodaokou district39—where Old Han pushes to formalize the group as an official “old people’s opera club” (lao nian ren jing ju hui 老年人京剧

会) with an indoor space at an officially sanctioned space in a courtyard.40 Old Han alienates the group with his strict adherence to rules and regulations. At the same time that internal strife threatens the cohesion of the club, the building is also facing demolition and relocation (chai qian 拆迁) and subsequently so too does the old people’s opera club. Ultimately, the official club disbanded and returned to the informal performance space of a park. In the final scene of the film, Old Han swallows his pride and rejoins the group.41

The opening panning shot of the film begins at the corner of Ganjin hutong (甘井胡同) and Liangshidian jie (粮食店街) turns left and follows the street north ending in a fade to an exterior shot of the opera house where Old Han is the custodian.42 From the first shot of the film we trace at eye-level the streetscape of this area of the city. Li Yiming describes the sequence:

film adaptation. Furthermore, the timeframe of the novella is set at the end of the Cultural Revolution (c. 1976-78) whereas the film is set in the early 1990s. The main character’s name is also changed in the film from Li to Han. These important differences make the two pieces interrelated, but also distinct from each other. 39 The location is revealed at 46:24 with a close up shot of the newly established old people’s opera club sign with the Jiaodaokou in the title. 40 Chen’s knowledge of Beijing’s morphology and culture are indicated in a 1994 interview and likely also shaped how Ning scouted locations, for shooting her eponymous film. Laifong Leung, Morning Sun: Interviews with Chinese Writers of the Lost Generation (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), 23. See also Ning Ying’s interview regarding location scouting in Beijing and the relationship to her films. Ning Ying, Ning Ying interviewed for Visible City Project and Archive.maps. available: https://vimeo.com/46300294. 41 Li Yiming, “Shen me shi dian ying? ‘Zhao le’ he ‘ Min Jing gu shi’ de dian ying xing tai (What is a film? The morphology of ‘For Fun’ and ‘On the Beat’),” 409. 42 This is based on the location of the Qianmen supermarket visible in this opening shot and a comparison with current maps of this location. For a discussion of the importance of the Qianmen and Tiantan areas in Beijing particularly in rrelation to entertainments see Dong, Republican Beijing; and more specifically regarding theatres (xi yuan 戏院) in this part of the city, see Lin Zencheng et al., ed., Beijing Shi Chang Zhi Nan (Beijing: Beijing chu ban she, 1988), 9. This area of the city is historically known for commercial and entertainment, and experienced a resurcence during the reform and opening up era that capitalized on this history. 31

Already, in the first shot of For Fun, the main style of the entire film is established: revealed in its entirety, in a wide-angle long tracking shot, is a Beijing street bustling with activity and a constant stream of traffic.

《找乐》全片的第一个镜头，就已为影片奠定了风格基调：在一个大全景的张移镜

头中，北京街道上人声熙攘、车水马龙的景象被充分地展示出来。43

Li characterizes the street scene as characteristic of the film’s approach to recording the lifestyles of Beijingers, one that is foregrounded on the street view of the city. Ning records the hustle and bustle of this part of the city showing the audience through a slowly paced tracking shot the setting for the narrative.

The narrative of the film starts just before Old Han retires, but first we see him performing in a scene of the Monkey King’s antics in Journey to the West (Xi You Ji 西游记), as an extra on stage. Even at this early moment in the plot pacing is critical. At 6:16 we see him dressed as a dragon ready to go on stage, this is then followed by a jump cut rapid and loud drumming. For the next minute and a half, the shots alternate between the stage with Old Han running loops between onstage and off in a stream of extras, to close ups of the beating of the drums. As the drums crescendo, marking the climax of the production, and stage hands shout “hurry, hurry” (kuai, kuai yi di’r 快，快一点儿). At minute 7:15, we see a tight shot on Old Han, who is now sweating and out of breath preparing for his final run across stage. He yells to the drummers demanding they slow down. His inability to keep pace with the music is a metaphor for his retirement, a point I return to below in my discussion of the theme of obsolescence. Directly following this scene, a fade transition shifts us to the opera house’s foyer where a socialist slogan and clock are centered in the frame. Old Han, now changed into his beige Mao suit, emerges from the right hand door and glances back at the clock that reads 10:12. This sequence foreshadows other scenes of pacing and drumming that appear later in the film, but more importantly, as it takes place in the first ten minutes of the film, emphasizes pacing, and being unable to keep pace with, as a main trope in the film.

43 Li Yiming, “Shen me shi dian ying? ‘Zhao le’ he ‘ Min Jing gu shi’ de dian ying xing tai (What is a film? The morphology of ‘For Fun’ and ‘On the Beat’),” 414. 32

Following the sequence of drumming and pacing that lasts less than two minutes, there is later another fade to a clock takes place. This fade is to Old Han’s windup alarm clock ringing at 6:00 am. The clock has a map of China and a group of red guards on its face with a hand holding Mao’s little red book as the second hand. The clock, a keeper of pace, is also a material marker that is repeatedly emphasized in multiple close up shots throughout the film. It functions to emphasize the slowing down of Old Han’s daily routines after his retires. Not only is the alarm clock a physical and auditory marker of pace, but it also represents a past that seems ideologically out of step with reform-era 1990s Beijing because of its overt iconographic link to the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The alarm clock serves as a visual relic of the Cultural Revolution with the red guards and waving of the little red book. Old Han however is still using it nearly thirty years later thus; it visually and ideologically fixes him in the past.

The clock as a pace setting device functions to demonstrate Old Han’s difficulty in adjusting to retirement. For instance, when on his first morning of retirement, the alarm goes off, Old Han jumps out of bed, but he no longer has a need for the clock’s incessant ticking. He has retired and can go back to bed, which he does, but his shifting in turning in bed indicated his unhappiness with this new lifestyle of leisure. The pace of his working life’s routine is a hard habit to break. Constantly reminding the audience of time and pace is the ticking of the clock that is audible throughout the scene.

Pace returns throughout the films in the form of drumming and musical timing. The beating of drums aurally mimics the ticking of the alarm clock. The issue of pacing as metered by the drumming plays out in Old Han’s first encounter with the retirees where a signer accuses the drummers of being too fast. The ability, or not, of the retirees to keep pace with the music I interpret as a metaphor for their generation trying to keep up with the rapid changes to Beijing during the 1990s. The final fight that pushes Old Han out of the group stems from his insistence that another performer is always late on his entry into his song. The alarm clock and the drums function to visually and aurally convey the issues of pace within the diegesis of the film.

Old Han’s punctuality finds a new home when he organizes and formalizes the opera troupe in their new home at Jiaodaokou. While he has retired, or stepped off the stage, (下台 xia tai) evident in the scene where he is literally forced off the platform in his old office (21:49) by his younger replacements, Old Han through his ticking alarm clock, and his adherence to timeliness

34 in the opera group continues to represent pace throughout the film. Filling up his days with activities serves to smooth the transition from his working life to his retired life. Ultimately, however, it is his overly strict approach to time that causes dissonance in the group when he refuses to allow singers to perform if they are late.44

In addition to the pace of life set by the drums and alarm clock, walking structures the speed film, and because of this, how much the viewer sees of Beijing is proportionally curtailed. Ning describes limiting the setting of each of the three films specifically to build from the hutong of For Fun towards the neighborhood of On the Beat and ending in the entire city in I Love Beijing. Even in the first tracking shot described above, the speed of the camera is slow and meditative, corresponding closely to a walking speed. An average adult walks at roughly 4-5 km per hour, and it is this speed that encompasses the sphere of Old Han’s post-retirement life. We see him in the back of a moving truck, but other than this one appearance riding in a motorized vechicle, the audience only sees him walking. Li Yiming describes how the camera and audience moves with Old Han on the morning after he retires: “Following Old Han, we walk (走) with him to his old opera house, and along with him [,] we enter ( 走进) the janitor’s room [of the opera house]. 接

着老韩头走来到他退休的剧院，我们从他走进传达室的镜头开始。45 The audience experiences Old Han’s retirement world through his constantly moving feet. On his way to the park on the first day of retirement he ends up regulating other pedestrians’ pace when he fills in for a friend as a volunteer sidewalk patrolman. He takes this job seriously; snapping shut his friend’s stool, refusing to sit down on the job, and marches around ensuring that people are following the regulations that are helpfully posted on a large sign behind him.

In the early 1990s Beijing was in transition from a city of bicycles and pedestrians into a motor city. Multiple changes to the streetscape began to take place and necessitated jobs like traffic

44 Farquhar, Appetites, 102–6. 45 Li Yiming, “Shen me shi dian ying? ‘Zhao le’ he ‘ Min Jing gu shi’ de dian ying xing tai (What is a film? The morphology of ‘For Fun’ and ‘On the Beat’),” 410. 34

35 wardens to regulate people crossing large intersections.46 Pedestrian bridges and barriers that prevented road crossings other than at intersections have become the norm in Beijing. Now, the city’s road planning favors the smooth flow of automobiles, while pedestrians are forced to climb up and over or descend down and under major arteries—walking citizens are trumped by the car. The pace of movement in the city has increased from 4-5km per hour, to the speed of a private vehicle, and those left walking are quickly being left behind.

Where the alarm clock, drums, and walking function to meter time in For Fun, in contrast, in On the Beat, it is the bicycle that measures pace of movement for the characters and the diegesis. The roads of On the Beat reveal the tensions between speeds of travels. The New York Times film critic Janet Maslin characterizes the pace of On the Beat “unfolds slowly as it watches the police make their rounds. They travel at a leisurely pace.”47 The narrative of On the Beat revolves around two police officers in their daily routines. On the Beat opens with a black screen with an audio track overlay. Cutting from the black screen and audio, the film opens at a morning meeting in a district police office. Gathered around the conference table the police officers are given their daily dose of propaganda and orders. The mention of reform and opening up temporally locates the viewer, but it is on the street where Deng Xiaoping’s economic changes are even more apparently revealed when the new recruit, Wang Liangui, and his mentor Yang Guoli, start their patrol. The two officers mount their bikes and ride out onto a main street where commerce and capitalism control of the roads. Storefronts are filled with goods and vendors are selling breakfast.48 On the Beat follows the two police officers as they patrol their sub-district and enforce the government’s policies where petty crimes, gambling, and neighborhood spats constitute most of their police work. However, the daily excitement builds with the appearance

46 “Beijing's overloaded transportation (Chao fu he de Beijing jiao tong),” Ren Min Hua Bao, February 1989, 3–8; Beijing Shi Dao Lu Jiao Tong Guan Li Zhan Xing Gui Zen (Beijing Traffic Regulations (Beijing: Beijing chu ban she, 1983). 47 Janet Maslin, “The Lot of Beijing’s Finest Is Not Happy or Heroic,” New York Times, 1996, 18. I want to note here that there are concerning factual errors in Maslin’s review of the film, however, her point on the pacing of the film by bicycle is accurate. 48 Part of the Reforms included assigning unassigned workers to work units. This led to a category of ‘self- employed workers’ (ge ti hu 个体户). This profoundly changed the work unit structure of the Mao times because getihu workers could work for themselves and make more money than if they worked in a state work unit. The visual evidence of this can be seen in the initial bike ride of the police officers in On the Beat. James Lull, China Turned on: Television, Reform, and Resistance (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), 7. 35

36 of a rabid dog in the district, which leads to a citywide directive to capture all pet dogs. Yang’s domestic life suffers as the police chief demands overtime shifts to adhere to the new policy.49 Eventually the rapid dog is captured and killed, but Yang’s zealous enforcement leads to a physical confrontation with another dog owner. The final scene of the film returns the viewer to the same boardroom from the opening shot with the police chief reading out the announcement of Yang’s suspension; the shot cuts to black and the film ends.

The inequities of the reforms are visible on the roads in On the Beat. While private citizens are acquiring cars, the police are left to patrol on bicycles.50 The police represent the state, however, in the film the precinct only has one jeep and one motorcycle, and the lack of vehicles hampers their ability to do their state-mandated job. In turn their effectiveness as state functionaries is also diminished. In one scene in the film the on duty police officers are watching an American cop show on television and they start discussing how American cops get to a scene by car whereas they arrive on bike (64:06). While On the Beat is not an adaptation of a novella like For Fun, Chen Jiangong, in an interview with Leung Laifong, published in 1994, recounts a 1986 visit to the USA where he rode along with the local police. He was asked by the police how they differed from their Chinese counterparts Chen replied “[t]here is not much difference. The most obvious difference is that American policemen patrol in cars, whereas Beijing policemen patrol on bicycles.”51 The reality of the police station’s lack of motorized vehicles when viewed in contrast to both the American cop show and the rise in private cars at this time in Beijing is a marker of concurrent and often competing temporalities. Bicycles were sufficient modes of transport for cops who were policing people who were also on foot or on bicycles. Now that they are also policing people in cars, the bicycle seems to be a woefully outdated tool. The bike- riding police are unable to keep pace with the motorizing city of Beijing. The bicycle was effective in narrow hutongs, often patrolling where cars couldn’t, but as the hutongs are

49 Shi Yaohua, “Maintaining Law and Order in the City: New Tales of the People’s Police,” in The Urban Generation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 330–31. 50 Indicative of the lack of car traffic is that it wasn’t until 1981 that the first Beijing traffic penalties for traffic violations were initiated. “Beijing Traffic Law,” accessed December 15, 2014, http://www.bjjtgl.gov.cn/publish/portal0/tab117/info7336.htm. A nation wide traffic law was approved in 2004“PRC Traffic Law,” accessed December 15, 2014, http://www.gov.cn/banshi/2005-08/23/content_25575.htm. 51 Leung, Morning Sun, 24. 36

37 demolished and roads widened, the bicycle pace is no longer effective in policing. Ning’s ironic commentary is that regardless of the lack of usefulness of the bicycle, the police still parrot the slogans of reform seemingly oblivious to the fact that those reforms are out pacing their ability to do their jobs effectively.

The pace of the bicycle is one way that Ning criticizes the different temporalities competing in Beijing in the mid-1990s; however, as in For Fun, there are other indicators of pace in the film. Old Han’s willingness to navigate the bureaucracy necessary to set up the opera club is contrasted with the layers of government revealed in On the Beat. In the opening scene of the film is the dryly-delivered reading of the state policies of reform. The police chief reads in a monotone voice the dictates and policies on policing issued by the state in 1994.52 Throughout the film we see how the pace of reforms has outstripped the ability of the police to keep up with the resulting changes. From the opening shots where Wang Liangui, the new recruit, and Yang Guoli begin their patrol Yang complains about migrants (wai di ren 外地人, lit. outsiders) causing difficulty in the neighborhood, and yet, these migrants are being encouraged tacitly by the state through relaxing of policies of internal migrations from rural areas to the city.

At various points in the film we see migrants from outside Beijing who have moved into the neighborhood seeking jobs in the city. For instance, the card shark originally from Shaanxi who is detained for illegal gambling, a man selling pornographic posters, and a man who is accused of following a girl home. Neither the retired old ladies who work as the neighborhood committee, nor the police can keep abreast of the new arrivals. The economic reforms that permeate the language of the daily meetings are seemingly in conflict with the jobs of the police to maintain social harmony and stability. Yang’s remarks on his old mentor being able to solve crimes quickly because everyone knew everyone else recalls a different time and pace of life that is fading into the past.53

52 The opening intertitles situate the year of the film as 1994, the year of the dog. The correspondence between the zodiac year and the main action of the film is to capture (and sometimes kill) dogs is another ironic tactic in the film that was characterized as ‘tail-chasing’ by film writer Denis Lim in the Village Voice in 2001. 53 Yang states that he has worked as a police officer for seven years and his mentor for 15 before he died so most of the accumulated experience straddles the late Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and the early Reform era (1978- 1991). 37

The tortuous pace of change in the state apparatus is most evident in the layers of meetings surrounding the capturing of dogs to avert a rabies outbreak. Following the killing of a dog, the police attend a ceremony at the Western District Public Security Bureau replete with a marching band. For the next five minutes Ning’s camera takes us through the various layers of bureaucracy beginning with the Western district meeting and ending in the neighborhood committee (31:55-36:02). From the mid-level officials, to the neighborhood police boardroom, to ‘granny police’ the filtering down of the official policy on dogs is belaboured. The pacing of the information dissemination is reflective of Ning’s critical assessment of this multi-layered officialdom. Film critics interpret this approach as exposing the ways information is spread in at this point in time as being a “subtle critique of [the] bureaucratic mentality in Communist China”54 and that “the jargon-heavy administrative reports become a running joke throughout the film.”55 The joke is clear to the audience, but those delivering the reports are serious, and it is the lack of adherence to these policies that leads to Yang Guoli’s suspension at the end of the film. Ning’s unflinching recording of these boring meetings shows the audience the persistence of the government structures despite the widespread changes visible on the streets and roads. While citizens are still patrolled and surveilled by the state, their willingness to flaunt these laws indicates the extent to which the bureaucracy can no longer keep up with the changes it has sanctioned.

In Ning’s final film in the trilogy, I Love Beijing, the whole city is the backdrop and the taxi moves the audience through the urban landscape. In the first patrolling sequence of On the Beat we see the two policemen biking past a sign that reads “Specializing [in] Lada [and] Polonez [cars]”( 专营拉大乃玆 zhuan ying Lada Naizi). The influx of car traffic is visible in the tracking shots where tricycles, mini-vans (面包车 mian bao che), buses and private cars compete for space on the road. Moreover, the change from the opening shot of For Fun, to that of On the Beat makes the snarl of traffic in the opening shot of I Love Beijing even more striking. I Love Beijing utilizes the car to move the narrative around Beijing, and the resulting traffic problems from increased private car ownership foreshadows the conflicts revealed in the film. The speed

54 “New Chinese Cinema: Spotlight on Ning Ying,” 41. 55 Liam Lacey, “This Beat Is Grounded in Reality,” The Globe and Mail, June 7, 1996. 38

39 of a car is only as fast as the conditions of travel allow, and based on the opening segment, the flow of traffic is slower by car than by foot.

Old Han’s strolling gait contrasts with the taxi driving main character Dezi in I Love Beijing. Similar to the first two films, the plot of the final film in the trilogy is simple; a philandering taxi driver roams the streets of Beijing looking for fares and love to varying successes.56 The quickening in pace in the other two films crescendos in I Love Beijing however, it is not in the car that this is exhibited, but rather in the shots of the city taken from outside the car that reveal a different, faster pace. In particular the speed of construction is a trope that Ning returns to over and over in this film. A key example comes when Dezi encounters migrant workers walking along the road early in the morning. It is never clear if they are returning from or going to work, but this ambiguity is the point. Taken in conjunction with the nighttime shots of the city that show starkly illuminated construction sites, these sequences show a 24-hour work cycle driving the building of Beijing at this time. The nights and days of Beijing are no longer metered, but are instead an unceasing stream of migrants coming to Beijing for work and better opportunities than available in the countryside.57

When this film was being made it marked a definitive moment in Beijing’s urban identity; 2001, this was the year that Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics and China was admitted to the WTO. These two historic events produced massive changes to the city and country in the name of becoming a world-class city. Demolition and relocation that had marked much of the 1990s increased rapidly and Beijing’s morphology was resituated from east west to north south in the name of Olympic preparation.58 The changes evident in For Fun of changes such as the looming construction crane in the initial shot of Old Han searching for an indoor location for the retirees, are amplified and omnipresent in I Love Beijing. Entire city blocks are under construction and taxi drivers are frequently lost in their own city, befuddled by changes to the capital. Dezi’s incessant roaming of the city causes the breakdown of his marriage and at the same time enables

56 Dezi drives a Volkswagon (大众汽车) one of the first and most successful foreign car companies to import cars to China. 57 See chapter four for an extended discussion of migrant workers in the city. 58 Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing; Braester, Painting the City Red; Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside. 39

40 his various love affairs. It is through his restlessness metered at the pace of driving that we experience the Beijing of 2001. The ambling pace of For Fun seems quaint in comparison, and the bikes of On the Beat appear as if from a different decade rather than from only six years earlier.

Obsolescence

Different paces structure For Fun, On the Beat, and I Love Beijing and thus serve to signal the increasing speed of change in Beijing. The pace of the characters’ movement is determined by the mode of transit they use, and this in turn delimits how much of city—neighborhood, district, city—the audience sees. As the pace of movement increases in the films, obsolescence of the characters and things in the films also becomes visible. In all three films, objects and characters are aging and becoming obsolete, and are no longer able to keep pace with the city; ultimately they are rendered unnecessary in reform-era Beijing.

In For Fun, obsolescence crystalizes in the character of Old Han. His lengthy tenure and age at the opera company makes him the default ‘master’ despite his reality of his lowly rank in the organization of the troupe.59 He is an archive of knowledge, both in how to perform the troupe’s operas, how to run the organization, and work in the bureaucratic structures. In one scene, he tutors his replacements how to do simple tasks such as how to sort the mail and organize the daily papers. He then harangues his replacement for doing these tasks any differently than he would. Old Han’s assertion of a certain way of doing things, his way, preserves his legacy at the troupe, and in so doing attempts to perpetuate continuity after he retires. Old Han wants to maintain traditions even after he is gone; it is as if he is fighting against his own obsolescence. Yet, despite Old Han’s desire to keep things the same is quickly discarded by his replacements. For instance, after shooing away a pancake vendor from the front steps of the theatre, Old Han discovers his replacements buying pancakes from the same seller, who is back in front of the theatre, the following day. Despite all of his attempts to inculcate his replacements, his old ways of doing things are represented as being outdated.

59 Old Han’s replacements refer to him as shi fu 师傅, a form of address for a skilled worker and a sign of respect for an older man. While Old Han is welcomed into the retiree group for demonstrating his vast knowledge of operas; however, during the climax of the film he is sharply criticized by a higher-ranking opera connoisseur. 40

The main plot point of For Fun is Old Han’s retirement. I read this life transition as a metaphor for the socialist era model worker becoming obsolete in the post-Mao era Beijing. For Fun is a film about aging and it is also a film that reveals the clashes between the Maoist generation (1949-1976) and the reform generation (1978-). Ning states “[w]hen these circles disappear, this art form will cease to exist in everyday life, although it will for some time live on in theatres, like a museum exhibit, ever more distant and fossilized.” 60 Ning’s word choice is telling. She links the old generations who are keeping these art forms alive as being a kin to fossils and that they are “destined to disappear.” The knowledge of the art forms as well as the bodies enacting them are in Ning’s mind falling out of use, being fixed in a past, and are no longer going to be part of the lived reality of Beijing. Her comments assess of the role of the past in contemporary Beijing as being unnecessary and thus being superseded. Each of the main characters finds themselves becoming out of date and out of step with a reforming China.

Ning makes the friction between the two generations visible with the introduction of Old Han’s replacements. The two young men arrive for work late and do sloppy work, mis-numbering the newspaper, and buying snacks from the street vendor. In contrast, Old Han’s strict adherence to rules and his bureaucratic nature eventually alienate him from the retirees opera group he helped to organize. In one scene, a mid-level cultural official tries to dissuade him from organizing the troupe by telling him it will be very difficult (很难，很难 hen nan, hen nan). Following a jump cut, we then see the dedication ceremony marking the opening of the troupe. This short sequence signifies Old Han’s willingness to work the system despite its stultifying rules and paperwork; he is a product of such a system and is content to work within it. However, in the final scene we see Old Han returning to the informal gathering in the park accepting that his strict observation of rules was unwelcomed in the group. Old Han is a relic of socialist social organization; for example, he is undeterred by the paperwork necessary in securing space to practice in Jiaodaokou demonstrating his knowledge of how bureaucracy works in the realm of officialdom. Old Han’s character becomes obsolete first when he retires from the troupe, and second when he becomes too domineering in the retirement opera group. It is in Old Han’s foibles, his love of rules, and his ultimate inability to find a place in the reforming Beijing that

60 Ning Ying, “The Director’s Remarks,” July 26, 1993. 41

42 reveals Ning’s appraisal of tradition within the context of Beijing’s rapid modernization. In the character of Old Han she distills China’s burden of tradition as well as the burden of such rapid market reforms.

Obsolescence, like the theme of pacing, is also evident in material objects and in the characters themselves. Old Han moves from his living quarters at the opera troupe to a one-room apartment, and takes with him a few possessions. In his last moments in his old room he removes and cleans a photograph of a young woman, presumably his deceased wife. He tenderly gazes at her photograph, conveying to the audience a sense of nostalgia for both her death and his leaving his job at the troupe. The photograph is a formal portrait in black and white, and is similar in composition to portraits of ancestor photographs traditionally displayed in homes. The unaging photograph of the wife highlights the passage of time in Old Han’s life. The final shot of the moving house sequence shows Old Han sitting on the back of a full moving truck clutching his wife’s photograph in his arms. The metaphor of Old Han looking back as the truck moves forward further emphasizes this transition in his life, while during the rest of the film he appears to be resisting the effects of this change. The following day when he returns to check on his replacements, he finds a pinup girl hanging in his office. The reserved portrait of his wife made obsolete by the flashier and sexier calendar girl chosen by the young men.

Obsolescence and aging are present in the objects in the film but also in characters amplifying Ning’s critique. The members of the old people’s opera club can be read as archives of the PRC’s recent past, many of whom would have been born before 1949 if they were to retire in 1993 when the film was shot.61 They are ‘leftover subjects’ of the Maoist era (1949-1978) of the PRC.62 These retirees have been left behind by the reforms and out lived their usefulness in terms of working. Ning, in her Director Remarks makes this link explicit when she describes the aging amateur Beijing opera aficionados as being “like a museum exhibit, ever more distant and

61 Supporting this assumption is that in the novella, Looking for Fun, 1935 is cited as when the main character that Old Han is based, arrives in Beijing. Chen Jiangong, Zhao Le, 71. 62 ‘Left-over subjects’ (yi-min 一民) is a term traditionally used to describe government officials who refuse to serve a new dynasty. This term is applied to scholar-officials in the Song and has been discussed in terms of their artistic production. See: Barnhart, Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting; Cahill, Hills beyond a River: Chinese painting of the Yuan Dynasty, 1279-1368. 42

43 fossilized.”63 Physically the troupe is composed of infirm bodies: one man is wheel chair bound, one’s vocal cords are broken, and one member is practically blind (1:22:38). The members of the club are socially marginalized by both their age and infirmities. They are social cast-offs, bound together by their interest in tradition and their social alienation. One character makes his obsolescence clear during an interview with a television reporter when he states the time his legs were crushed “1966 July 16th 7:00PM” (1:01:58) for this character time stops when he is no longer able to work as an engineer. In a socialist society where participation as a worker was fundamental to one’s identity and nationalism, being rendered obsolete is a crushing blow.

China’s reorientation from a planned, collective economy to one that is predicated on neoliberal economic principles has fundamentally changed daily life. In the early 1990s China’s economy shifted from the collective to the individual. This shift is predicated on economic reforms begun in the late 1970s that opened China to foreign investment and ushered in global neo-liberal capitalistic structures.64 Old Han, his knowledge of traditional arts and his inability to transition from work to retirement makes him a metaphor for China in the early 1990s. In 1992, one year before For Fun was released, Deng Xiaoping took a ceremonial ‘inspection tour’ of the special economic zones along China’s southern coast.65 The timing of Deng’s tour with the production of For Fun presents an interesting contrast. The purpose of Deng’s tour was to bless economic reforms in southern factories and endorsing the shift from a planned economy to one modeled on global processes of neo-liberalism and the global flows of capital. In contrast to Deng’s assertion of China’s future as a neo-liberal economy, For Fun depicts Old Han as a stalwart supporter of the collective. Neo-liberalism, as David Harvey defines it, is predicated on

63 Ning Ying, “The Director’s Remarks.” 64 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 65 Imperial ‘Inspection tours’ have a lengthy history in imperial China. Qin Shihuangdi is reported to have made three inspection tours to the east. These tours function as controlling devices as the emperor sees his territory, his subjects see him seeing the territory and thus he visually and literally asserts his control over the space. For the role of sight as a tool of power see: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). The Qing emperors Kangxi and Qianlong also made inspection tours that were then recorded in a group of scroll. The scrolls are digitally visible here: http://www.learn.columbia.edu/nanxuntu/start.html. Therefore, Deng’s reenactment of the inspection tour trope was a calculated political move. See Suisheng Zhao, “Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour: Elite Politics in Post-Tiananmen China,” Asian Survey 33, no. 8 (August 1993): 739–56. 43

44 individualism and the dismantling of a social safety net.66 The assertion of the individual over the collective good is a main characteristic of this political economy; and throughout the film these tensions between reforms and the past are palpable.

Old Han’s replacements at the opera troupe represent the new generation who stand to gain the most from reforms. In contrast, the old people’s opera club represents the revolutionary generation. Judith Farquhar, in her discussion of these characters, puts it bluntly, “[t]his generation is soon to pass.”67 Assuming a retirement age of 60 for men would been born in the 1930s and would have lived through: the transition from the Republican era to the People’s Republic of China, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Reform and Opening Up. Yet, even fifteen years into the Reform Era, in terms of most people’s daily lives, things have changed little. The unevenness of development fuels the underlying critique in the film—why give up old ways of doing things if the future is so uncertain. Old Han continues to use his aging alarm clock and battered furniture, just as he holds on to bureaucratic ways of administering the retiree opera group.

Old Han’s insistence on bureaucracy and rules marks him as a work unit (dan wei 单位) worker. Danwei formed the bases of Chinese collectivization post-1949. Especially visible in the built structures of major cities, the danwei provided food, housing, medical care, and education to its workers.68 The work-unit was a state enterprise, one that provided the so-called ‘iron rice bowl’ (tie fan wan 铁饭碗) to workers. The iron rice bowl guaranteed housing, food, healthcare, and pensions to all danwei workers. In For Fun it is no longer the iron rice bowl but ‘the rusting rice bowl.’ As the economic reforms took hold, government enterprises were privatized and the iron rice bowl disappeared. Many retirees found themselves without basic necessities and without skills to find new jobs. The safety of the collective, enhanced by the assurance of food, shelter, and healthcare made many nostalgic for the past and wary of the future.

66 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 67 Farquhar, Appetites, 106. 68 Bray, Social Space and Governance in Urban China. Gu Chaolin and et al., Zhongguo Da Cheng Shi Bian Yuan Qu Yan Jiu (Beijing: Ke xue chu ban she, 1995), 85–87. 44

The fears of no longer having the state and the collective to rely on are visible even on Old Han’s first day of retirement. Old Han is drawn to the group and immediately starts to reorganize it. His rejection of his retirement independence is indicative of the Maoist collective rhetoric. Old Han prefers the past to the present, being in a group to being on his own. Ning made Old Han into a metaphor for China in the 1990s and this most is evident at the climax of the film when the group, following a performance at a temple fair where the troupe failed to win, is walking along a paved road together. The scene begins (68:26) with the sounds of their scuffing feet on a desolate road sparsely illuminated by street lamps. Unwilling to be placated by the group, Old Han explodes at the members shouting criticism at his fellow performers. He abruptly stops under a street light then moves out of its pool of light to stand on a repaired crack in the road. This fissure, visible at his feet, functions as a metaphor for the fraying social ties in the group, but also can be interpreted to represent the breaking down of society’s breaking down of the collective It’s not ME! It’s You! (bu shi WO! Shi nimen! 不是我！是你们！). The collective of the troupe is unable to sustain the push and pull of the various individual members and it is on the road that Ning reveals this to the audience. The second scene where Old Han storms out of the courtyard, he is also depicted on a cracked and buckled road surface. The fraying social ties and breaking down of the iron rice bowl are reflected in the microcosm of the retiree opera group and in the surface of the road. His way of life, his ideals, and ideology are metaphorically and literally splitting underneath him.

All three of the main characters, Old Han, Yang Guoli, and Dezi, are rendered obsolete or are in the process of becoming obsolete in the films. In On the Beat Yang Guoli’s (杨国力) name marks him from the first decade of the PRC. He explains to the new recruit that he was born in 1959, a decade after the founding of the nation, and therefore his name reflects characteristic revolutionary fervor of that era —guo li 国力—powerful nation. As Yang and Wang cycle through the neighborhood, Yang’s name and the revolutionary ideology it represents seems at odds with the large scale building projects, particularly those around the newly established Central Business District (CBD) west of the second ring road that Ning captures in a lingering shot. The generational shifts apparent in the policemen’s discussion of names pins Yang’s character to the Maoist era, while the concerns and issues he is called upon to police are those of the reform era. His nostalgic monologue that follows his explanation of his name to Wang strengthens this point. Yang describes how in the past his mentor knew everyone and everyone’s 45

46 business—which thieves used what tactics to break in—the implication of this statement is the higher degree of surveillance and control that underlay society at that time. And yet, Yang also parrots the state line when passing an empty block of courtyard houses saying that things are better now that the inhabitants have moved to high-rise apartments. Yang’s attempt to be flexible and conform to the new urban realities in the 1990s reaches a breaking point when he slaps a suspected dog owner for disrespecting a police officer and the law he represents. This scene represents Yang’s metaphorical and literal transition to being obsolete as it results in his suspension and the end of the film.

Yang’s strict adherence to regulations, like Old Han’s, characterize these men as inflexible and unable to transition to the changing social and ideological world of 1990s Beijing. While they are both older than the main character in I Love Beijing, Dezi too is becoming obsolete. Not even his ownership of a car can save him from the ever-increasingly fast paced onslaught of change in the capital. During one of the taxi company’s meetings, reminiscent of the bureaucratic meetings of On the Beat, Dezi and the other drivers learn that older cars are to be removed from the road even though the drivers own their own cars. In this instance despite being young and a car owner, Dezi is literally being fazed out of circulation with this new policy (18:04). While a dan wei in 2001 had changed significantly from 1993, the year of the first of Ning’s films, Dezi is still subject to the state policies and mandates that control his livelihood. Secondly, in a conversation with other drivers Dezi discusses that wealthy customers now prefer to own their own cars rather than to hire taxis. The shape of Dezi’s life, inscribed by the wheels of his car, are depicted in the film as collapsing around him. The final shot of the film is of a young woman singing and crying in the back of his car, but it is the direction of the shot that is even more poignant. Ning’s camera shoots the road looking back towards the past. The literal backward glance that closes the film, underscores Ning’s feelings of her changing city, the characters she’s followed, and her ambivalence of what it all means.

Where Ning uses aging people and material objects in For Fun, she uses the stark contrasts between new and aging in On the Beat. The contradictions made visible through her cinemagraphic tactics emphasize asymmetrical results of the reforms, particularly in terms of the quality of the roads. The roads only passable by bicycle versus the elevated second ring road where China’s financial hub is being built. By presenting coexisting, yet disjunctive

47 temporalities in On the Beat Ning exposes her ironic view of Beijing’s uneven development is the object of her critique.69

The simple narrative arc of On the Beat allows the theme of obsolescence to dominate the film. For example, the aging neighborhood committee mirrors the retirees in For Fun. Committees such as this functioned in two ways: one it provide something to do for retirees, and gives them a sense of purpose in the reform era, secondly they function as a mode of community surveillance.70 This style of surveillance belongs to the Maoist Era. In For Fun a distinct change in Old Han’s posture and sense of being needed is visible when he takes over for a friend as a volunteer street warden. Despite the fact that Old Han is only taking over for a couple of minutes, his whole outward appearance is transformed as he dons the red armband. Enforcing rules is something he is capable of doing and he does it well.71 The aging committee in On the Beat is utilized in a different way. Ning juxtaposes the age of the committee members and their tactics, which are only possible when there is very little private space as there is in hutong housing, this type of surveillance is impossible in a high-rise apartment building,72 with the desire of Yang to see Beijing’s built environment modernized. These are contradicting desires that reveal concurrent temporalities of Beijing at this historical moment. Just as reforms in housing are being enjoyed—Yang lives in a ‘modern’ apartment with material markers of reforms: color TV, radio, and a framed wedding photo in Western dress—he is also dependent

69 Ning discusses her interest in shooting where there are multiple temporalities visible, particularly in terms of architectural styles, see Ning Ying, Ning Ying interviewed for Visible City Project and Archive. 70 John Friedmann, “Invisible Architecture: Neighborhood Governance in China’s Cities,” in The New Blackwell Companion to the City (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 693. 71 Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “Beijing Retirees Looking to Keep Active Volunteer to Walk the Beat,” The New York Times, October 28, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/world/asia/beijing-china-volunteer-retiree- patrol.html. 72 Maoist era housing was specifically designed to facilitate mutual surveillance. The danwei apartment blocks were built with only one entrance and one exit; therefore everyone’s comings and goings were public knowledge. Kitchens and bathrooms were often shared spaces (this can be seen in the police barracks in OtB) making it possible to see people’s cooking and hygiene habits. See Bray, Social Space and Governance in Urban China. In terms of traditional housing in Beijing, courtyard houses lack plumbing so public bathrooms are the norm and provide opportunities for surveillance. Moreover, because of the housing crisis during the Cultural Revolution many households were forced to live together in a traditional single family home. The proximity of living space, and the single entrance of a courtyard house mimicked the intended surveillance of danwei apartments. For a film that reveals the cramped living quarters of subdivided courtyard houses see Wang Wang Xiaoshuai, Shi Qi Sui De Dan Che (Beijing Bicycle) (Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment (Firm), 2002). 47

48 on older forms of control. The neighborhood committee represents a state control mechanism that is outdated as Beijing transitions to high-rise apartment towers.

Material and spatial markers of obsolescence are so used in On the Beat. As a pinup girl replaces Old Han’s portrait, and his alarm clock dates him as being from another era, it is the bicycles used by the police that serve to mark them as being out of date with a modernizing Beijing. When the police get a tip that there’s a dog hiding in an old prince’s palace, they descend en mass and discover a slowly disintegrating building piled high with discarded, broken, and disused objects. The police discuss what this place was: a palace pre-Liberation, and a lumberyard during the Cultural Revolution, but come to no conclusion as to what it is now (19:47). This space is multiply obsolete, no longer a luxurious residence, or a productive workshop, it is also not yet tourist site or museum, which is likely due to the amount of money necessary to restore it. The value of this property, located within the second ring road, will become astronomical by the mid-2000s, but at this moment captured in the film it is useless, slowing decaying under its own material weight and abandonment.

Spatial changes to Beijing that demonstrate how people and things are in the process of being superseded are indicated in all three films, but in I Love Beijing the stark contrast between the space of a university dan wei and that of the road is particularly penetrating. At one point in the film Dezi seduces a young library worker who sneaks him home to her family apartment inside a university campus. When they enter the campus, Dezi exclaims “[y]our compound is so quiet and peaceful” (ni men da yuan zi’r zhen an jing!你们大院子’儿真安静) (32:32).73 Before they enter the campus Dezi and the woman have spent the day together riding escalators and driving along modern elevated highways. In contrast, he campus streets are, dimly lit, quiet, and mostly empty. This stark contrast sets up a binary between the commercial roads and spaces Dezi takes the woman to during the day and one of the few remaining vestiges of the dan wei system, the university campus. Bolstering the idea that the university dan wei is being cast as out of date is the accompanying dialogue between Dezi and the woman, particularly when they discuss the

73 The subtitles read: “It’s so quiet at night!” however this translation loses the temporal and spatial element of the dan wei compound that Dezi is commenting on. The vast ‘big compounds’ (大院 da yuan) of universities were all encompassing, which is clarified in the dialogue where the young woman details how her whole life has been spent inside the da yuan. 48

49 costs of things and salary. The woman claims that their drinks are equivalent to a week’s salary whereas Dezi is a spendthrift confident that his ability to make money will keep up with his spending habits. The centralized system of the university with controlled salaries and appointments appear in this narrative to be failing to compete with the market reforms in other sectors.74 In I Love Beijing the college educated librarian is consumed by material desires she is unable to attain; she dreamily lists the foreign brands she wants to buy: “Versace, Armani, Gucci…” after she goes abroad to make money (32:55-7). The security of a job, housing, and social services that the university work unit can and has offered her pale in comparison to the sparkly commodities out of her monetary reach. This scene presents a doubling effect, Dezi is realizing that taxi drivers making lots of money from wealthy clients is declining, at the same time that the woman is comprehending that the work unit life can’t sustain her desired lifestyle. Located at both ends of the spectrum from centrally planned jobs of the dan wei to the reform market dan wei of the taxi company, neither Dezi nor the woman are safe from the planned obsolescence of Beijing in 1999.

Only two years later, in 2001, China is awarded the 2008 Olympics and granted membership to the WTO sealing the fates of many of the State Owned Enterprises (SEO) and rapidly increasing the pace of market reforms undertaken by the government. The stresses of being or becoming obsolete are by 2001 a reality for all of them, and concurrently the ability of the city to morph and change with the reforms reaches a breaking point. It is in this space of rupture that the 2008 Olympics provide city planners and government officials a convenient justification for land expropriation, initiation of large scale transit building (subways and major highways), and whole sale rebuilding of major parts of the city along the north south axis.75 The construction that is alluded to in For Fun at Jiaodaokou when the opera group is forced to relocate, seen in On the Beat in the form of steamrollers and demolition sites, is a leitmotif in I Love Beijing, where construction cranes, dusty unfinished highways, and streams of migrant workers coming and going from 24 hour work cycles haunt the film. The pace of change and the resulting

74 I acknowledge the constructed nature of the ‘free market’ and use this term with skepticism here. 75 Wolfgang Maennig and Andrew S. Zimbalist, International Handbook on the Economics of Mega Sporting Events (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012); Paul Close, David Askew, and Xin Xu, The Beijing Olympiad: The Political Economy of a Sporting Mega-Event (London: Routledge, 2007). 49

50 obsolescence crescendo in the final film of the trilogy, where in the final sequence the film slides into slow motion to linger on the beautiful passenger’s face with tears falling down her cheeks (1:14:43). This final sequence shot through the reflection in the rearview mirror and backwards from the front of the car to the back seat. The angles of the shots use of slow motion, and location within the taxi underscore Ning’s ambivalence towards Beijing’s changes over the course of the three films. We are left moving forward yet looking backward, racing towards an uncertain future full of cars and fossilizing traditions, personal wealth and consumer products, lost loves, sadness and nostalgia.

Widening roads

The third and final theme evident in these three films is related to road construction and the push to widen (tuo kuan, 拓宽 part of speech: verb), and increase the width (kuan du, 宽度, part of speech: noun) of major thoroughfares in the city. This is directly related to increasing the speed of movement particularly that of cars. Wider, straighter roads, such as those advocated in the 1954-planning document cited above (zhan kuan 展宽), and the speed one.76 By example it is interesting to note that urban planners use the narrowing of roads in contemporary cities as a traffic-calming device. Moreover, the use of tuo kuan is an active verb that evokes a sense of action and movement when it is used as it is in master planning documents such as the 1993 Beijing Master Plan that was issued the same year that Ning Ying released the first film in the trilogy.77

Scholars of Chinese urbanization such as Victor Sit, Fang Ke, AnneMaire Broudehoux, and Piper Graubtz, have variously discussed the expanding the road network in Beijing and the active

76 Tong Zheng and Zhou Yongyuan, Jian Guo Yi Lai de Beijing Cheng Shi Jian She [Post-Liberation City Building in Beijing] (Beijing: Beijing jian she shi shu bian ji wei yuan hui, 1985), 260–6; For the political implications of supporting so-called ‘wide-boulevardism’ during the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent shifts in road width post 1978 see Sit, Beijing, 271. 77 State Council, Beijing Cheng Shi Zong Ti Gui Hua Beijing Master Plan (1991-2010), 1993, http://pkulaw.cn/fulltext_form.aspx?Db=lar&Gid=16777714. See specifically part 10, section 55.1 on traffic planning. 50

51 push to create highways that cut through the city.78 Wang Jun dedicates an entire chapter to the changes to Beijing’s roads: Da ma lu zhi bing 大马路之痒 (The Boulevard Itch).79 For Peng Zhen, in his 1956 essay “Concerning questions of Beijing’ city planning” (Guan yu Beijing de cheng shi gui hua wen ti 关于北京的城市规划问题), the width of roads in the capital was the second major point after population planning and controls. He says, “Roads must not (bu neng) be too narrow.”80

Widening and paving of roads requires a panoply mechanized heavy equipment including bulldozers, asphalt-paving trucks, and steamrollers.81 Wang and Yang encounter two steamrollers while on their beat in a hutong. Building roads and especially the act of paving a road with asphalt (li qing 沥青), are tightly bound to modernization, hence the steamroller is a potent visual and metaphorical symbol of modernity. Designed to compact gravel, creating a solid and hard base for the road surface, it literally and metaphorically paves the way forward for roads, crushing everything in its path.

In contrast in a 1950s photograph of two steamrollers are parked on Chang’an Street in front of Tiananmen gate is captured in a photo essay titled “60 glorious years of steamroller development in China.”82 The Communists widened Chang’an Street as one part of their major modernization project of Beijing’s ‘feudalist’ center.83 This image is visual propaganda for the Communist’s

78 AnneMarie Broudehoux, The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing (New York; London: Routledge, 2004), 2; Sit, Beijing, 271; Gaubatz, “Changing Beijing" citing the “… wide monumental streets.” in Beijing, 80; Fang Ke, Dang Dai Beijing Jiu Cheng Geng Xin: Contemporary Conservation in the Inner City of Beijing, 2. 79 Wang Jun, Cai Fang Ben Shang De Cheng Shi (Reporter’s Notebook), 23–35. 80 Zhen Peng, Peng Zhen wen xuan: (1941-1990 nian). (Beijing: Ren min chu ban she, 1991), 307. 81 “Road Paving Equipment Advertisement,” Ren Min Ri Bao, December 27, 1993. 82 “60 Glorious Years of Steamroller Development in China” Hui Huang 60 Nian, Wo Guo Ya Lu Ji Fa Zhan Li Cheng,” 2009, http://www.wjjd.cc/conews/detail-13625.html. For similar images of steamrollers and built icons of Beijing in October 1953 and October 1950 Ren Min Hua Bao. For a discussion of paving Chang’an jie see Tong Zheng and Zhou Yongyuan, Jian Guo Yi Lai de Beijing Cheng Shi Jian She (Post-Liberation City Building in Beijing), 260. 83 For further discussion of the early PRC urban plans for Beijing see Yu Shuishan, “Redefining the Axis of Beijing”; Mingzheng Shi, “Rebuilding the Chinese Capital: Beijing in the Early Twentieth Century,” Urban History 25, no. 01 (1998): 60–81; Mingzheng Shi, “Beijing Transforms: Urban Infrastructure, Public Works, and Social Change in the Chinese Capital, 1900-1928” (Columbia, 1993). 51

52 radical change to Beijing’s urban plan, as well as a demonstration of their control of the technology. The statecraft embedded in this image works on the register of planning, the steamroller indicating the future appearance of smooth paved roads, while at the same time another register of modulating and creating a ritual of viewing images of progress as manufactured through roadworks.

In On the Beat steamrollers are no longer unproblematic or positive emblems of modernity or revolutionary building projects, but occupy an ironic role in the film that is indicative of Ning’s visualizing of multiple temporalities jostling together in a Beijing in 1995-6. The sequence continues as the two police bike down the hutong. Playing a small, but potent visual role in On the Beat, two steamrollers interrupt this picturesque image of a Beijing hutong. Comically oversized as compared to the police officers, the steamrollers bear down on the hutong forcing the police to dismount their bicycles. Film critic Shelley Kracier describes the steamrollers as “behemoths of progress rolling down a narrow alleyway… scattering cyclists in their path.”84

Not even the police can stop the forces of development. Ning uses alternating camera angles— from low to high and back again—to increase the stature of the steamrollers and heighten the sense of foreboding as they rumble through hutong. Filming the steamrollers from a very low angle to make them seem larger and she captures the police officers unceremoniously pressed against the side of the hutong. The meeting of technology and humans in the hutong demonstrates the power of technology at the expense of daily life. The steamrollers lumber off camera, and the police re-mount their bikes. The sequence ends with another elevated shot further dehumanizing the police as they become invisible within the urban fabric seen from an elevated angle. They seem to disappear within the megalopolis of Beijing.

Heading out on their morning beat, bicycling police patrol the perimeter of their district, and then enter the densely inhabited hutongs. It is the following sequence of shots after the police enter the hutong where Ning’s subtle commentary is first made clear. Her cinematography, juxtaposition of humans with road technology, and the birds-eye shot that closes the sequence reveal her cinematic irony. The sequence begins with the camera at a level position creating a

84 Kracier, “On the Beat.” 52

53 flat shot. The police wind through the hutong, passing vegetable stands and other daily activities along their route. Ning then cuts to a bird’s-eyeshot of the hutong contextualizing the hutong within the urban fabric that is quickly giving way to the policy of ‘demolition and relocation’ (chai qian 拆迁). Ning then cuts back to a level shot of the police in the hutong. Yang parrots the official take on the relocation policies saying how much better the area will be when new apartment complexes are built. Yang’s presence as the voice of the official government stance on development is a constant throughout the film. It is his adherence to policy that eventually causes his downfall. By embodying the official position in his actions and approach to his duties, Ning inserts her own commentary on the government’s urban policies showing how uneven and disconnected from reality they are.

This whole sequence is less than 2 minutes, however, it is a critical section of the film as it reveals the tenor of Ning’s critique of contemporary urban planning in Beijing. The sequence captures the changes to Beijing’s built environment that were especially rapid during the 1990s.85 By invoking steamrollers as emblematic of the march of modernization, unrelenting and overwhelming, Ning comments on the future of hutong life. Hutongs are no match for steamrollers, bulldozers, cranes, and other construction technology. Ning’s sequence showing the meeting of the police and the steamrollers recalls the earlier visual tropes of road building, and modernity, where the forces of change seem unstoppable in the presence of the foreboding machines.

The complex discourse of road technology and road building as a marker of modernity is the focus of Joao de Pina-Cabral’s research in rural Portugal. He characterizes paved roads (note here the distinction of ‘paved roads’ indicating the use of a steamroller in order to produce the

85 Many other films, artworks, and literary works deal with the pace of demolition during the 1990s. See for example: Beijing Bicycle (dir. Wang Shaoshuai), Shower (dir. Zhang Yang), Dialogue series (artist Zhang Dali), City Tank (Chengshi zhanche Qiu Huadong), and writers Wang Shuo and Wang Xiaobo. For a detailed analysis of the relationship between city and cultural production see Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside; Robin Visser, “Spaces of Disappearance: Aesthetic Responses to Contemporary Beijing City Planning,” Journal of Contemporary China 13, no. 39 (2004): 277–310. The 2008 Olympics and the construction leading up to it often overshadows this prior period of construction, however, I would argue that the 1990s were far more psychologically and physically disruptive to Beijingers and Beijing. See on history, trauma and nostalgia of the 1990s literature see: Wang, Illuminations from the Past, esp. 212-234. 53

54 road surface) as “bring[ing], ‘progress’, ‘modern ideas’, and modern facilities.”86 For Pina- Cabral, paved roads indelibly mark the landscape and alter how peasants move through the landscape, moreover, paved roads bring with them concepts of progress and modernity. For Beijing and the Beijing that Ning captures in the steamroller sequence, paved roads function in a similar way. Yang’s running commentary echoes this rhetoric of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ as he sees the demolition and relocation as the only way forward. For him, Beijing’s future is one without hutongs, but rather one with wide paved roads and apartment blocks. Ironically, Yang’s vision of the future is one that ensures that his job will be harder, and as a result, he will be more alienated from his constituency.

The leveling of hutongs for road widening and apartment tower building fundamentally changes how people interact on a daily basis. Hutongs are narrow, have communal toilets, and subdivided courtyard housing. Historically, hutongs were created because courtyard houses had their main gates facing the laneway. Unbroken walls with few windows characterize the outer walls of and when placed one house after another, large stretches of unbroken walls were created. These traditional houses of the upper classes varied in size from just one inner courtyard to multiple courtyard complexes. Multiple generations would live together creating extended families all under one roof. Changes to this living situation began when the Communists took control and wealthy families were stripped of their courtyards. Categorized as bourgeois courtyards were stigmatized as being ‘feudal’ and often divided up and unrelated families moved into them. The ever-present specter of the market overshadows preservation discussions. The only remaining hutongs and courtyard houses are located on prime restate in the ‘old city.’87 Balancing the market with calls for preservation is an ongoing project.88

86 Joao de Pina-Cabral, “Paved Roads and Enchanted Mooresses: The Perception of the Past Among the Peasant Population of the Alto Minho,” Man 22, no. 4, New Series (December 1987), 719. 87 The term ‘old city’ refers to the Ming walled city as well as the Qing walled ‘Chinese city’ located outside of Qianmen. Beijing Shi cheng shi gui hua she ji yan jiu yuan, ed., Beijing Cheng Shi Zong Ti Gui Hua: 1991 - 2010; 北京城市总体规划 1991-2010. (Beijing: Beijing Shi cheng shi gui hua she ji yan jiu yuan, 1992). 88 As a result of international calls for preservation, Beijing’s municipal government has restored some hutongs, however, recent policy changes have endangered these areas again as the pressure to make money becomes too strong. “‘Untouchable’ Area of Old Beijing under Threat,” accessed May 14, 2010, http://www.china.org.cn/china/2010-05/13/content_20033631.htm; Iain Mills, “Beijing Agonizes over Urban Regeneration,” accessed May 14, 2010, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/LE11Ad01.html; Andrew Jacobs, “Bulldozers Meet Historic Quarters in Beijing, to Mixed Reaction,” The New York Times, July 20, 2010, sec. World 54

Changing how traffic circulates within Beijing, especially within the second-ring road, has been the focus of Beijing’s last two 25-year plans. The most common way to create a car and truck friendly city has been to widen east-west roads. The traditional road network (dao lu wang 道路网) of Beijing is one that has emphasized the central axis. Wide north-south roads within the second-ring road were common, but east-west streets were predominately narrow hutongs. This made it difficult to move east to west. Maps of Beijing from the 1950-70s demonstrate how few continuous east-west streets there were and Anne Marie Broudehoux links the opening up of new east-west streets as an indication of the effect the market reforms had on the physical structure of Beijing.89

The concurrent temporalities visible in On the Beat demonstrate the unevenness of development in China in the 1990s. Glass skyscrapers were being finished at the same time that people in hutongs are reliant on public bathrooms and shared water standpipes. The disjunctures between the lives of the people that Yang is policing compared to his own home is another moment where the audience is made aware of the differences. Arjun Appadurai argues that disjunctures and differences are markers of the modern world.90 Ning too focuses on disjunctures, both temporal and physical; to highlight the changes to Beijing’s urbanity and to strip away the glossiness of urban planners produced images of the city.91 For example, in the long zoom-out shot showing the two police on their beat begins at street-level after the steamrollers have passed. By the end of the shot when Ning pulls her camera back, she has zoomed out until the police are but small

/ Asia Pacific, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/world/asia/21beijing.html?_r=1&hp; Michael Wines, “China: Redevelopment Plan Scrapped for Historic Beijing Neighborhood,” The New York Times, September 7, 2010, sec. World / Asia Pacific, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/08/world/asia/08briefs-REDEVELOP.html?_r=1. Preservation groups such as Beijing Cultural Heritage Program also advocate for restoration and protected status: en.bjchp.org. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the complex relationship among preservation, the real estate market, and Beijing’s urban plans, however, it is necessary to mention it here as it is a critical underlying component to the critique that Ning is making in On the Beat in 1993, the same year that the 1991-2010 Master Plan was accepted by the Beijing Municipal Council. 89 Broudehoux, The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing. 90 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference,” Public Culture, 1990. 91 Ning Ying, Ning Ying interviewed for Visible City Project and Archive. 55

56 dots. The shot looks west from inside the second ring road towards the emerging financescape 92 of Beijing’s Financial Street (Jinrong jie 金融街).93 The police are peddling across dirt streets marked by zones of total demolition at the same time that the sleek skyscrapers loom only a few blocks away. Ning’s smooth zoom-out naturalizes the scene.94 The audience’s eyes track the police as they bike across the screen, progressively getting smaller and smaller as the financescape grows larger, dominating the top of the screen.

Ning’s tactic of contextualizing the police within the larger, changing urban fabric of Beijing creates a scalar relationship; one in which the police are subsumed by the market as represented by Financial Street. Ning repeats this tactic throughout On the Beat and continues it in I Love Beijing. The physical motion of the camera and the subsequent narrative zooming in and out emphasizes the disorienting and disjunctive nature of Beijing. Functioning both as a mask and projection of the current time and the time of the future, hence I would argue that the scene of the police juxtaposed against Financial Street highlights the same issues of concurrent temporalities—the reality of life in the hutong at the same moment as the hutong is being destroyed.

I Love Beijing opens with a long (92 second) establishing shot, shot from high above a major intersection. The camera pans in and out showing details of the intersection and then jump cuts to a wide angle shot of the whole intersection. Overlaying the shot is an audio track of a radio traffic report, so the commotion of the road is immediately evident to the viewer. Cars block busses that are in turn blocked by a solid wall of bicyclists. The rhythm of the intersection eventually becomes discernable, however, a sense of chaos often overrides the delicately choreographed movements. The camera then cuts to a black title screen. The next sequence of

92 Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference.”, 7. 93 Jinrong jie is located in central-western Beijing and is bordered by the second-ring road. The street is home to domestic banks and was created in order to attract international finical institutions and is a central business district in the city. Jinrong jie is prominently displayed in photographs of models of the building plans we see being made reality in On the Beat see the 1992 Beijing zong ti gui hua State Council, Beijing Cheng Shi Zong Ti Gui Hua (Beijing Master Plan (1991-2010)), Beijing municipal planning research publications, 27. 94 In her interview with the Visible City Project and Archive, Ning Ying specifically discusses scouting locations that reveal the multiple times jostling in Beijing in the early 1990s. These concurrent and disjunctive spaces creates, for Ning, provide a chance to show how Beijing is transforming and to refute the visual narratives of ‘progress.’ Ning Ying interviewed for Visible City Project and Archive. 56

57 shots moves the viewer from an office façade into an office where a man and woman sit facing the viewer as they are asked personal questions about their marriage. It is only after a few questions from an off-screen narrator that the viewer realizes the two are filing for divorce.

The juxtaposition is jarring shifting as it does from the cacophony of the intersection where the scale dehumanizes the figures, to the intimate space, closely cropped shot in the divorce office. At first, that there is any connection between the first two shots is unclear. Only after the third scene to Dezi’s cab does the viewer begin to comprehend the connection between the first intersection sequence and the divorce office. The opening five minutes of sequences Ning obtusely links Beijing traffic problems to an equally contentious taxi driver’s personal life. Snarling traffic mirrors the tumultuous relationship between Dezi and his wife. Since the film’s release in 2001, traffic is only increased as a problem in the capital; hence if cab drivers’ marriages were in peril due to the psychological stresses of driving in Beijing in 2001, one can only imagine the rates of divorce in 2012.95

The emotional stresses in the life of a taxi driver frame an otherwise uneventful narrative. Dezi is a philanderer whose multiple love affairs punctuate the film. He uses his cab to woo lovers, using the road as a pickup location for fares and sex. His sleek black cab brings him social status and a measure of wealth. He brags about his ability to make money that is demonstrated in affording to keep a mistress in her own apartment. The depiction of Dezi’s ultimately unhappy life takes place on the move, as his taxi rarely stops. The road presents a contradiction: time on the road is money, but time on the road ruins his marriage and love affairs. Comparatively,

95 Qiang Guo and Shenxia Song, “Driving mad! 4 milllon cars clog Beijing roads”, Global Times, December 21, 2009, English edition, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-12/21/content_12681158.htm; Kevin Riley, “Motor Vehicles in China: The Impact of Demographic and Economic Changes, ” Population and Environment 23, no. 5 (May 2002): 479-494; C. P. Lo, “Urban Indicators of China from Radiance-Calibrated Digital DMSP-OLS Nighttime Images,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92, no. 2 (June 2002): 225-240; “Rushing on by road, rail and air - China's infrastructure splurge; China's infrastructure splurge, ” The Economist 386, no. 8567 (February 16, 2008): 30.

Beijing builds more roads to alleviate the traffic that in the end does little to ease the burden of the city’s traffic problems. The snarled traffic in the opening shot of I Love Beijing can be read a visual metaphor for the fraught personal lives of the film’s characters.

Ning’s decision to open the film by juxtaposing and pairing traffic and Dezi’s love life demonstrates the subtle ways that she inserts her ironic commentary on contemporary Beijing. Dezi’s personal life is both enabled and at the same time ruined by the road. The road-scape under construction that streams outside the cab throughout the film, mirrors the inner turmoil of his life. The roads in I Love Beijing are not the sleek, glossy, black roads of an imagined, hypermodern Beijing. They are bumpy, unfinished, and dusty. Just as in On the Beat in the scene with the steamroller, the disjunctures between smooth highways to unpaved potholed roads mark the unevenness of development in the capital. Dezi and his cab pick their way through the city that is in the midst of demolition and rebirth.

Dezi’s Beijing contrasts with the official, government images. Road projects aimed at improving the cities main arteries and are celebrated in The People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao). The article, Beijing adds another Major Traffic Artery: Guang’an road fully opened to traffic (京城交通又添大动脉:北京广安大街全线通车), details a newly opened east-west artery in southern Beijing. What is striking about this article is the tenor of the language used to describe a road with the length of only 6.2 km. As discussed above, the south of Beijing is historically more economically depressed and the infrastructure less developed than the rest of Beijing. The article uses similar language describing how the road will improve the area, how the road is necessary because the area is ‘backward’ and ‘old.’

“…成为北京南城建设与开发的新起点。”

“…the project was started to improve southern Beijing’s construction”

广安大街原两侧多为已有几十年历史的旧城居民区，交通及市政设施十分落后，成为制 96 约北京南城发展的主要因素之一。作为北京市委、市政府“开发南城，造福人民.”

96 Wu Kunpeng, “Jing cheng jiao tong you tian da dong mai Beijing Guang’an dajie quan xian tong che (Beijing transportation adds another major artery: Guan’an street fully open to traffic),” Renmin Ribao, July 6, 2001. 58

Originally, on both sides of Guang’an main street were historic residential areas [.] Traffic and municipal facilities were extremely backwards. The lack of traffic development in southern Beijing has been one of the major factors restricting the area’s development. The Beijing municipal committee and the city government have implemented the ‘Develop Southern Beijing to Build Good Fortune for the People.’

The temporal aspect of the language, particularly the adjectives (旧，落后) used in this article positions the building of the new the road with progress and development. The ‘backwardness’ of southern Beijing can only be overcome with the new infrastructure that will ‘open-up’ and bring ‘good fortune to the people.’ The road as a physical entity is being used as a metaphor for Reform and Opening up as a national policy. The new road will improve the economy and modernize this forgotten area of Beijing.

As I discussed in the case of For Fun and On the Beat, narrow hutongs historically made moving from east to west in Beijing difficult.97 In order to widen the hutongs to make them into roads like Guang’an Dajie large-scale demolition would have to take place, necessitating the relocation of many families. To mediate the impact of the destruction, articles such as this one inculcate readers that demolition is necessary for progress and development. Thus opposing the road is opposing reform, progress, and ‘good fortune.’ Articles such as this intimately link road construction to a simplistic and teleological view of city planning: more roads ensure more development and thus increase wealth. By reading such state sanctioned rhetoric on roads and contrasting it with Ning’s depiction brings into focus a strikingly different perspective.

Ning rejects roads that are sleek and polished, instead turning her camera towards construction sites and roads being built. The roads and road-scapes of I Love Beijing function similarly, checking the viewer’s reality through their unfinished-ness. Ning seeks out settings in which the quality of the road is highlighted. Dezi’s cab frequently shot in the center of the frame with a road construction site captured in the background. The dust from the building catches in the

97 It is beyond the scope of this chapter, but should be noted that the structure of Beijing’s historical ‘road network’ is intimately tied to its imperial past. Beijing has been a capital city since the founding of Dadu by the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in 1272. See introduction for overview of literature related to Beijing’s historic urban plans, its projection of power, and relationship to statecraft. The number of major roads in an imperial capital is dictated by the Kaogongji (考工记 2nd century BCE) the ancient guide to imperial city planning: “The master craftsman constructs the state capital. He makes a square nine li on one side; each side has three gates. Within the capital are nine north- south and nine east-west streets. The north-south streets are nine carriage tracks in width.” Dai Wusan, Kao Gong Ji Tu Shuo (Kao Gong Ji with Explanatory Images). 59

60 headlights blurring the shot. The hulking machinery dwarfs the cars on the road as well as the workers. The composition of the shot is such that the squeeze of the traffic through the construction bottleneck is made more apparent.

Ning also frequently shoots from the back of another car, aiming her camera back towards Dezi’s cab thus delimiting the viewer’s field of vision and increasing the sense of crowding on the road that is under construction. Ning’s inclusion of this construction scene demonstrates her use of an ironic mode of critique. She does not film Dezi and his cab in settings that are sleek or finished, but rather in a city rife with construction. The roads are wide and broad, but undisciplined and unfinished.

After Beijing’s adoption of the 1993 Master Plan, and the subsequent master plans, road construction further accelerated. Highways, ring roads, and major thoroughfares have altered the morphology of the city. By linking road construction to Ning’s films the theme of widening becomes clear in how and where she captures her characters. Whether it is policemen on bicycles, dwarfed by paving equipment, or a taxi driver lost in his own hometown, Ning reveals the disconnects between the roads as imagined and depicted in master plans, and the daily use of those roads by Beijingers. There is always a distance between theory and practice, but by making this distance a key aspect of her trilogy, Ning provides with an alternative narrative to the prevailing wisdom of road widening. The traffic snarl that opens I Love Beijing coupled with the frantic radio announcement of traffic problems serves to disabuse viewers of thinking that wider roads necessarily improve flow of traffic. The heterogeneous nature of Beijing’s road use—bicycle, tricycle, motorbikes, cars, trucks, among others—refuses the logic of disciplined road planning. Whether it is pedestrians forced up and over major roads as they are in For Fun, historic preservation sublimated by road widening, or taxis being forced off roads in favor of private cars Ning uses the spreading width of roads as a theme of critique.

Conclusion

In the photograph of Lin’s performance (2.1), the artist performs the building of a wall. Looming over Lin and his wall cum barricade are three super-sized skyscrapers, four counting the image of the skyscraper in the billboard at his right. Lin’s small contribution to the emerging built landscape seems almost laughable in its diminutive size. Yet Lin’s commentary in this piece is not diminutive, it is incisive and foreboding of the relationship of the individual in China’s urban 60

61 spaces. Like the police officers in On the Beat the scale of the building overshadows an individual’s mark on the landscape. The surrounding cranes, scaffolding, construction fences, and stacks of raw materials indicate that this is a road-scape under construction.

Figure 2.2, a still from I Love Beijing, shares formal, compositional, and conceptual similarities to figure 2.1. Both of the pieces highlight the small scale of the protagonist in relation to their built environments. In Lin’s case, the photographs of the performance are taken from a low angle that exaggerates the titling of the skyscrapers and distorts the scale of the artist within the landscape. In the case of I Love Beijing, the wide-angle shot reduces the cab, driven by the main character Dezi, in the landscape. The wideness of the road combined and the shot’s composition works to subsume the cab in the landscape. The dominating presence of the urban built environment as compared to the smallness of the human bodies in Lin and Ning’s pieces a commentary on the state of the individual in the city. The built environment towers and looms over the human.

Not only do these pieces share formal similarities, they also share narrative similarities. The road is the site on which, and through which, these parallels are visible. It is the context of the road that makes the pieces function. Lin’s performance of crossing requires a busy road in order for it to work conceptually—a small lane with no traffic wouldn’t have the same effect. In I Love Beijing Dezi’s entire life revolves around the road. He is a cab driver fixated on making money. The more he is on the road, the more money he makes. Lastly, the tactile qualities of the roads pictured in the two pieces are also comparable. The roughness and unfinishedness of the roads are evident. The roads as pictured in these two pieces are not yet slick polished surfaces but rather are in the process of being completed. In Safely Maneuvering, it is the coarse material of the cinder blocks that suggest the haptic quality of being unfinished. Cinderblocks, the most basic of building materials, are used to create a building’s basic form and then covered by more polished materials such as drywall and paint. Lin’s use of these rough building blocks further amplifies the piece’s sense of being perpetually unfinished. The road in the still from I Love Beijing is similarly fragmentary. The half-finished buildings in the background with cranes hovering over them also give the roadscape a sense of being inchoate. The lack of sidewalks, foliage, or people beside the road creates a dusty, gritty, and forlorn impression of barrenness. The dust and grit kicked up behind the cab in I Love Beijing evoke the texture of the cinderblocks as they scrape against each other a Lin builds his wall. The issues of cities under 61

62 construction and where then the artist fits within the new urban-scape are distilled in Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road and also inscribed in Ning Ying’s Trilogy. By looking at the roads these issues become apparent, making viewers aware of the commentaries present in these pieces.

Ning Ying engages with, and reflects on, the city. I have argued that in her Beijing Trilogy she uses her depiction of roads to reveal her indirect critique of Beijing’s urban condition through the themes of pace, obsolescence, and widening of roads. The ambivalence of Ning’s portrayal of Beijing’s roads spans a critical ten years of Chinese economic development. For Fun captures the uncertainty of the early 1990s; On the Beat depicts the social fissures and petty crimes of a city coming to terms with internal migrations and new living arrangements; and lastly the 2001 release of I Love Beijing, coincided with China entering the WTO and winning the 2008 Olympic bid. Against this historical background her characters deal with feelings of obsolescence and insecurities of how to deal with the transition from a socialist command economy to a neoliberalized one. Old Han, Yang, and Dezi are marked as transitional characters because of their adherence to old socialist methods. They are not yet the modern subjects the state is seeking to produce.

Change is represented in the films through the characters’ increasing pace of travel from walking to biking, to driving. The different paces of movement of Ning’s characters mark her characters as in-between subjectivities. There is a sense that in all three films the characters are always lagging behind the ever-faster modes of mobility. These modes of travel mirror Beijing’s economic and social transitions, and while the pace of movement from the first to the final film does suggest a certain teleological understanding of progress, with the rise in private car ownership, even the taxi in I Love Beijing is in the process of being outdated and passé. One can hardly imagine the gangster character hiring a taxi in today’s Beijing; he would likely have a couple of personal cars at his disposal. The characters attempt to keep up with changes to their city, but they fail. It is in watching their failings that Ning’s counternarrative to China’s economic miracle is evident. The traffic jam at that begins I Love Beijing or the demolition of the retirees club in For Fun capture the heterogeneous experiences of Beijingers. Ning’s films restore the overlooked and often silenced scale of life in a changing Beijing.

The films are united in terms of setting and the mobility of the characters. They are particularly interested in aging, the effects on road widening, and deterritorialization because of rapid urbanization. At each of these points the ways in which statecraft interprets and molds behavior is captured in the films. From Old Han’s inability to let go of his ways of doing things to Yang’s overzealous enforcement of policies, the characters in the three films are all depicted in ways that demonstrate Ning’s oblique criticism of changes to the capital. The readings of the city are multiplied through the variety of characters depicted Ning’s trilogy. As viewers we watch the characters struggle to find their way in an evolving urban landscape, one that is more often than not inhospitable.

The difficulties encountered by the characters, especially when they are on the move, reflects the unevenness of development in Beijing post market reforms. Because infrastructure as a product of good statecraft is often used to convey progress and modernity, the filming of unfinished or clogged roads in these films instead function as a critique of market reforms and the neoliberalization of China’s economy. Roads are deceptively mundane, but they are not Agué’s ‘non-spaces.’ Instead, as is the case in Beijing Trilogy “roads hide histories; motorways contain multitudes.” 98 Through a close examination of how people use roads to move or to make a living, the tactics of irony are evident. The subtleness of critique is similar to traditional literati modes of expression in paintings where hidden transcripts of oblique critiques and subversive ideas were depicted in images. Ning’s films utilize similar tactics in order to highlight contemporary urban issues effecting her characters and Beijingers.

Each of Ning’s three films approach Beijing at different speeds of circulation to reveal various aspects of the sprawling megalopolis. Her films, like Lin Yilin’s performance, disrupt the expected or prescribed flow of movement along roads. The disturbances captured expose the problems and issues of China’s rapid urbanization. At the same time the films unsettle the statecrafted policies and images that suggest road development, in terms of number and width, is fundamental to Beijing’s world-class-ness. This counter-visuality, the claiming of the right to look at roads as not merely markers of modernity and progress, but as indicators of the breaking down of the socialist social contract, makes roads ‘something to see.’ Roads therefore are not

98 Joe Moran, On Roads: A Hidden History (London: Profile Books Ltd, 2009), 17. 63

64 just utilitarian means of mobility, but are stages for citizens’ unexpected and unregulated performances. Ning’s characters disrupt the engineered certainty of cities.99 By filming the breakdowns in regulation, as she does when the pancake (jian bing 煎饼) street vendor occupies the sidewalk, colonizing the space meant for walking and transforming it into a space of trade— Ning is making a critique of such systems. It is impossible for the state to regulate and control all uses of streets and roads, but in Ning’s films we see the unofficial uses of roads. By refusing to move along and not see, as Rancière’s police would like us to, Ning critiques the notions of progress and ‘worldclassness.’ Notions of progress and opening up on a conceptual and physical level are mobilized by the state to craft perceptions of improvement. The turbulence depicted in Ning’s films creates friction to slow such notions.

In the following chapter, I discuss waste as it relates to issues of statecraft undertaken in different ways than hard infrastructure building of roads, instead of building ‘monuments to modernity’ the statecraft examined next relies on disciplining of behavior in order to convey policy decisions.

99 Amin and Thrift, Cities, 26. 64

0.2 A Hoarding Interlude: Static screens in Beijing

Images that visually reproduce the rhetoric of policy documents like Beijing’s Master Plan can also be seen in lining the edges of roads and encircling construction sites. These structures are hoardings, defined by architectural historian Ian Borden as “those impermanent constructions, those two-dimensional panels which line the streets and spaces of the city. … a mask across the face of the city…they hide a multitude of sins.”100 One such hoarding (figure 0.2) that was photographed in Beijing’s southern Qianmen district, we see a streetscape, complete with a façade of shops, regularly spaced streetlights, flower plantings, and other street furniture. In the lower third of the image is a grey brick wall that is punctuated with traditional glazed tiled rooflines. The redevelopment of the historical Qianmen shopping street, one that was a key element in the pre-2008 run up to the hosting of the summer Olympics, is cloaked in construction hoarding that has been co-opted as prime advertising space for the sale of the real estate development. The hoarding shows the development in its future and virtual incarnation; architectural plans made concrete on a two-dimensional surface. Yet the current reality of the city’s multi-temporalities, to recall Ning Ying’s comment above, peaks out above the hoarding, reminding the viewer of the mendacity of the images depicted on the hoardings.

In the images on hoardings, the future is projected as always-already finished. The roads are built and the shops inhabited. These images function to erase the time and process of building, projecting to the viewer a future as imagined on the static screen of the hoarding. They present a completed city devoid of the inconveniences—dusty construction sites, disrupted traffic, displaced citizens—of building that city, instead they function to sell a notion of futurity to the by-passer. In many ways hoardings work as a visual insurance for the eventual completion of the building projects that they envelop.

The cinematic inflections of the hoardings are an important aspect of this ubiquitous visual form in Beijing. The vertical orientation of the hoardings, coupled with their long stretches of horizontality formatted images simulate the form of a widescreen cinema screen. The scrolling past of the images that is created by the relationship between the viewer’s eyes and his/her

100 Iain Borden, “Hoardings,” in City A-Z, ed. Steve Pile and N. J Thrift (London: Routledge, 2000), 104. 65

66 motion of walking, biking, or driving past such static hoardings provokes a reading of the hoardings as moving-images. For instance, as one moves through the city, particularly by car, the resulting streaming of the images creates a proto-cinematic experience where the expanse of the hoardings are set in motion by the car’s speed and viewed thus as moving-image by the passenger.

Not only do the hoardings create a screen interface between the citizen and the city being constructed behind the hoardings, hoardings also function as another method of screening—the blocking out of—the undesirably images hidden behind them. To return to Borden’s assertion that hoardings function as a mask, the relationship between projects such as the renovation and reconstruction of the Qianmen shopping district and this analogy becomes more profound if we consider the role of city beautification projects (mian zi gong cheng 面子工程) that can be literally translated as ‘face’ projects.101 The beautification projects undertaken ahead of the 2008 Olympics were often shrouded in hoardings in order to block bypassers’ views into the construction sites, or to swaths of the city that were demolished to make way for subway stations, high-rise apartment buildings, or other ‘modernization’ projects.

Hoardings are an integral part of Beijing’s visual field. They screen from sight that which is behind them, but they also function as screens, projecting images of the future city yet to arrive. The space created by the physical form of the hoardings is capitalized on by advertizers who quickly commodify the space to sell the corresponding real estate project, or when used by city planners, to sell a particular image of the city. In the short urban planning video, Beijing 2015, we saw the animated version of Beijing’s future. The static screens of hoardings such as 0.2 are a physical manifestation of this same planning impulse.

101 See page 39, footnote 32 for a more detailed discussion of mian zi. 66

3 Ritualizing Statecraft: Song Dong and his garbage works

The June 2010 issue of the state run illustrated magazine People’s Pictorial (人民画报 Ren Min Hua Bao, hereafter RMHB) featured a two page spread dedicated to the work of two Beijing recyclers (废品回收者 fei pin hui shou zhe).1 The term ‘recyclers’ is used in this glossy magazine article to describe and depict an official rendering of the act of recycling and waste management; moreover, the choice of the term recycler ‘green-washes’ the work of the two in the RMHB article. The article emphasizes the pleasure that these two recyclers take in their work using phrases such as: “李咯咯地笑 Li chuckled [.]” “她笑嘻嘻的说. She said, giggling [.]”, “李和邓都是和善，乐天的人 Ms. Li and Mr. Deng are good people, who are happy-go- lucky… [.]”2 The photograph that accompanies the article captures the couple smiling into the camera standing against the backdrop of their neatly sorted recyclables (fig. 3.1). The painstakingly stacked and bundled newspapers at right frame the image while the sunlight glints 3 off the couple’s smiling faces. The article concludes with the slightly bombastic statement:

也许更重要的是，他们的工作对于中国的环境保护来说是不可或缺的.

Perhaps even more importantly is that their work is essential for the protection of China’s 4 environment.

1 “废品回收者老邓和李举志.” Recyclers Old Deng and Li Junzhi. (Fei Pin Hui Shou Zhe Lao Deng He Li Juzhi) RMHB, June 2010. The terms fei (wu) pin and hui shou are related terms but have important differences: fei pin is defined as ‘useless things’ (wu yong zhi wu); whereas hui shou is defined as to ‘recycle material from old things’ (jiu huo shou hui li yong); Luo Zhufeng, ed., “Fei Wu,” Hanyu Da Ci Dian (Shanghai: Hanyu da ci dian chu bian she, 1994). Ibid. “Hui SHou.” 3:610. Lingusitically, thus the use of particularly terms serves to delimit the (perceived) use-value of the material being collected. Christine Furedy, “Waste Recovery in China: Formal and Informal Approaches,” BioCycle June (1990): 80–84; Susanne Hauser, “Waste into Heritage,” in Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory, ed. Brian Neville and Johanne Villeneuve (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 2 “Fei Pin Hui Shou Zhe Lao Deng He Li Juzhi.” 3 The photograph’s composition recalls the stylistic edicts initiated by Jiang Qing of representations that were to be ‘red, bright, and shining’ (红光亮 hong, guang, liang) during the Cultural Revolution. Julia Frances Andrews and Shen Kuiyi, The Art of Modern China (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2012), 192; Julia Frances Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 233. 4 RMHB June 2010, 70. 67

The work of this two-person recycling collection business, as the text assert, therefore can be seen to stand in metonymically for all of China’s environmental protection efforts. These statement links the couple’s relatively small contributions to the national recycling system making their work seem crucial to the protection of China’s environment. The article references numerous men and women engaged in recycling in cities across China, yet maintains the labels of recyclers versus scavengers. By placing these workers under this socially welcomed label, the article reveals one interpretation of this type of work; recyclers are seen as a vital function in 5 society, whereas scavengers are seen as out of place, even a public nuisance.

The state sponsored and produced version of the role of recyclers, what I term an ‘official’ interpretation of the status of recyclers and the work they do, contrasts sharply with this example of an exchange captured on a cell video camera on a public bus in Shanghai. The 2011 incident illustrates the contested and fluctuating social position and function of garbage, particularly the visceral and vicious response that garbage can provoke in people when they perceive it to be out of place. In the video clip a man identified in the subtitles as an old scavenger (拾荒老人 shi huang lao ren) attempts to purchase a bus ticket with his bag of recyclables in tow, and the ticket taker immediately harasses him. The video of the exchange went viral on the popular Chinese video-sharing site YouKu, eventually garnering network news coverage and a widespread online discussion. In a clip from the news report, the verbal exchange is subtitled, as the audio is difficult to hear:

Female bus worker: 全是垃圾。你这是垃圾你知道吗？

All of this is garbage! Can’t you see that?

Scavenger: 垃圾 (怎么样)?

6 Yeah, it’s garbage, so what?

Starkly evident in this exchange is a debate over what one perceives as useless garbage as compared to material that constitutes a livelihood. For the scavenger the bags of used plastic

5 Ibid. 6 “Jiang Su City News,” News Banquet (Jiang Su dian shi tai, August 2011). Copy of video on file with author. 68

7 bottles represent stored value that can be exchanged for money. His fight to keep the bags with him on the bus demonstrates the value he placed on the bottles, to lose the bags would be to lose his ability to survive. The impact of the loss is difficult to overstate, for while the bottles appear to be garbage to the other passengers, it represents a living that shares much with the two recyclers discussed in the RMHB article discussed above. The results, however, are very different. Another passenger eventually throws one of the scavenger’s bags from the bus. The incident incited many comments by viewers of the video, many whom pointed out that the bus was mostly empty, and the scavenger was a paying customer just like the other passengers and 8 therefore had every right to be on the bus. The resulting commentary on how the scavenger was treated and if he had the right to bring his recycling onto a public bus, establishes the uneasiness that exists between garbage and daily life. The plastic bottles the scavenger attempted to bring onto the bus were no longer merely inert things, but became repellant. The bottles, or as they were perceived by the other passengers as garbage provoke him to anti-social behavior where he takes another person’s property and throws it off the bus.

The violence enacted on the bus is because garbage is a question of perception—for one person it was a livelihood, for another it was simply garbage. The tensions between the government’s push for a consumerist society and the resulting throwaway lifestyle are disastrous. These types of programs and policies can be read as an inner conflict of contemporary Chinese society where the stress on boosting domestic consumer demand (la dong nei xue 拉动内需), the pervasiveness of advertisements, and the explosion of available consumer goods is diametrically opposed to a 9 conservationist or ecological outlook. The quantity of disposable water bottles—often a hallmark of a throwaway lifestyle—that the man carts on to the bus is ultimately a metaphor for

7 For prices paid for recyclables see Table 3 in Li Zhen-shan et al., “Municipal Solid Waste Management in Beijing City,” Waste Management 29, no. 9 (September 2009): 2599. 8 “Jiang Su City News.”, for examples of some of the comments posted online in response to the treatment of the scavenger, see minute 1:44. 9 The tensions are not specific to China. For a recent editorial discussing the diametric opposition between consumption and conservation see George Monbiot, “Consume More, Conserve More: Sorry, but We Just Can’t Do Both,” The Guardian, November 24, 2015, sec. Comment is free, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/24/consume-conserve-economic-growth- sustainability#comments. For a satirical take on boosting domestic consumption as a economic tool used by the PRC see ChinaMyuzikVideos, We Love Our FAI, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOnAYCPdhgw. 69

70 the tension between consumerism and the end result when consumables reach the end of their perceived lifecycles and are thrown away.

The distinction being made on the bus between garbage and valuable recyclables raises related questions of cleanliness and perceptions of proper behavior when using public facilities. Tightly bound up in such narratives are issues of hygiene and the idea of being civilized, issues that have been explored in the context of Tianjin in the work of Ruth Rogaski or conceptually in 10 Foucault’s work on French society’s relationship to sexuality, deviancy, and surveillance.

The potential of garbage to evoke such polarizing emotions has been analyzed by anthropologist 11 Mary Douglas in her writing on social conceptions of purity and impurity. In the case of the bus incident the offending bags were seen as a contamination of the public space that in turn provoked the other passenger to perpetrate an act of violence. Garbage, or to use Douglas’ term impurities, can be seen in multiple ways: for the scavenger the bottles are a source of money, for the other man they are a disturbance in his perception of separation between purity and impurity. In short, garbage when it is perceived as being in its correct place: garbage bins, landfills, out of sight, represents social order. In contrast, when garbage is perceived out of place visceral responses such as that on the bus occur.

In this chapter I demonstrate how Song Dong plays with our discomfort with material detritus and why by shifting things to be ‘in-place’ (Waste Not, 2005), and ‘out-of-place’ (Hutong, 2010; Doing Nothing Garden, 2010-2012) we as viewers are made more aware of our contested relationships with garbage. Using Douglas’ theoretical investigation of social behaviors, or ritualized actions that establish what is clean versus unclean is a starting point for my examination of the recent works of Song’s that use garbage as a material to elicit a range of responses from his audience. The responses span the range illustrated by the two case studies above, one where plastic bottles are expelled from a public bus as impure, and one where

10 Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences, Vintage Books ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vintage books ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 11 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1991), 2. 70

71 recyclables are an example of national ecological programs and thus pure—at times Song organizes garbage into neat categories that viewers perceive as ‘in-place’ whereas in other works, Song puts garbage ‘out of place’ creating a sense of discomfort similar to the extreme discomfort that the bus passenger experienced. Song’s oeuvre is a practice steeped in the tensions between things in their ‘right’ place and things out of place, and therefore open up a space of critique of contemporary China material accumulations.

Song Dong constructs installations consisting of garbage and repurposed items in order to help 12 his audience grapple with contemporary China’s ‘cultural economies of waste.’ More broadly speaking garbage has proven a fruitful subject for interrogating lifecycles of things, habits of discarding, and changing cultural norms of obsolescence, and most germane to this chapter, is the shifting, often tenuous, and overly binary classification of things as ‘useful’ or ‘useless’ that 13 writers artists, and filmmakers explore, noting and analyzing. The distinctly divergent examples outlined in the two anecdotes above serve as reminders to how vastly different an individual interpretation of garbage is. The interpretation of the value of waste becomes a point of critique; Song’s garbage based practice serves to highlight shifting modes of consumption, notions of ‘uselessness’ versus ‘usefulness’ and conceptions of in-place versus out-of-placeness examined in three recent large-scale installations: Waste Not (2005), Hutong (2011), and Doing Nothing Garden (2013). More broadly, this chapter also probes the contradiction of the state’s positioning recycling and resource recovery as purely benign to suggest that the tension between the smiling faces of the recycling couple and that of the old man on the bus are in fact two sides of the same coin. Issues of urban poverty, dispossession, and the declining social safety net all contribute to an urban underclass who is often forced then to take on recycling in order to survive. These are telling outcomes of policies linked to larger macro-systems of statecraft, and

12 Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke, eds., Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), x–ix. 13 I am using the term ‘thing’ versus ‘object’ following the work of ‘thing theorists’ Bruno Latour and Bill Brown who argue that things should be considered animate objects enmeshed in networks of associations with other things and humans. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 2005); Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 1–22. 71

72 are critical aspects of urban development in contemporary Beijing that come into focus when looking through the lens of garbage and recycling.

Being Civilized, Officially

Unlike the couple that is lauded for the recycling collection service they provide to Beijingers, the scavenger is reviled for his bags of recyclable plastic. Ultimately however, both the scavenger and the couple are doing the same work, it is simply given a different valence of meaning—recyclers versus scavengers; linguistic shift in labels that works to cast the same work in two very different lights. The RMHB article references numerous men and women engaged in recycling in cities across China, yet maintains the label of ‘recyclers,’ never calling them scavengers. By placing these workers under this socially welcomed label, the article reveals one interpretation of this type of work. Recyclers are seen as providing a vital function to society, whereas scavengers are seen as out of place, particularly if they attempt to enter public spaces 14 with the fruits of their scavenging. Moreover, where as the couple is seen as being ‘essential’ in China’s environmental efforts, the scavenger who is also undoubtedly part of the same circuits of small-scale recycling that the couple in the RMHB article are, is never afforded the same social standing, rather he is seen by the other passengers as a nuisance and his property expendable.

The two conflicting examples introduced above demonstrate the roles garbage and recycling play in contemporary Chinese cities. Garbage’s contested place in society is overlaid complicated with symbolic and linguistic codes. A critical issue today is determining when something is garbage and should be thrown away, versus when a thing should be recycled for its salvageable resources. The scavenger’s collected items have a ‘stored value’ they represent raw material whose latent value is released when recycled. Therefore, the scavenger’s items may at first glance appear to be garbage, the items are part of a much larger network of use discarding, and reuse. The secondary of value as revealed in recycling demonstrates how things circulate and acquire value even beyond their first ‘useful’ lifespans or incarnations. A 2011 policy document

14 Ibid. 72

73 issued by the Beijing Municipal Commission of City Administration and Environment (BMCCAE) specifies the state-sanctioned definition of recyclables as:

可回收物，是指在日常生活中或者为日常生活提供服务的活动中产生的，已经失去原有全部或者部分使用价值，回收后经过再加工可以成为生产原料或者经过整理可以再利用的物品，主要包括废纸类、塑料类、玻璃类、金属类、电子废弃物类、织物类等. …

Recyclables refers to everyday items or items related to everyday housework that have lost all or part of value or usefulness which after sorting, can be recycled for their raw material and be re-used. [Recyclables] primarily include: waste paper, plastics, glass, 15 metals, electronics, and fabric.

In both cases discussed above, the materials being collected fall under the city’s definition of recyclables, not garbage. The municipal government has recognized and legislated that material such as plastic, paper, and glass should be considered useful raw material in the cycles of 16 consumption and discarding. What the video and RMHB articles highlight is how the act of classifying the scavenger’s plastic bottles as ‘garbage’ versus the materials collected in the RMHB story as ‘recyclables’ casts one as a menace to society’s order while the other represents order.

The economies of waste and recycling demonstrated in these aforementioned examples are emblematic of a long history of consumption and rejection in Beijing, one that has shaped urban planning, laws, and political propaganda. Historian Madeline Yue Dong in her book Republican Beijing dedicates an entire chapter to the relationship between recycling and the Tianqiao district 17 in the capital between 1911-1949. As Dong explains the collecting and reselling of goods and performances in Tianqiao during this period formed a critical aspect of the city of Beijing as a whole. Beijing’s districts such as Qianmen and Tianqiao made their names by proffering goods

15 Article seven section sixty eight of the Beijing Municipal Ordinance on Household Waste, Beijing shi shi zheng shi rong guan li wei yuan hui, “Beijing sheng huo la ji guan li tiao li,” November 18, 2011, http://www.bjmac.gov.cn/pub/guanwei/F/C/C3/201112/t20111207_24010.html. Adopted in Beijing 11/18/2011 by the Standing Committee of Beijing Municipal People’s Congress during the 13th meeting, 28th session.” 16 See chapter two for discussion of obsolescence and the lifespans of things and people as depicted in the films of Ning Ying. 17 Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 172-207. 73

74 and experiences to people looking for entertainment. Secondhand shops were places that traded in goods that came from shady sources—sometimes stolen, sometimes fake, sometimes legitimate—but consumers knew this about the stores and flocked to Tianqiao for the chance to 18 see what they could find. In a photograph that accompanied a June 1986 RMHB article entitled 19 “Images of Old Beijing,” a man is selling secondhand goods (旧货 jiu huo). The caption indicates the seller’s proximity to Tiantan and Qianmen, which would have ensured constant foot traffic. The arrangement of the secondhand goods is aesthetically pleasing: the pots on the left frame the other carefully ordered goods arrayed on the ground. Despite the fact that the secondhand goods aren’t new, their careful display that groups like objects together, makes the objects attractive and therefore more likely to catch a shopper’s eye. Moreover, the grouping of similar items together creates a sense of order; these categories emphasize the usefulness of these items over their used status. If the things were jumbled together a passer-by may mistake the things for junk and be overwhelmed and disinclined to buy from the seller. Below I return to this exhibition of organization in a discussion of how it is deployed in the installation Waste Not to reclassify things from junk to art.

Dealing with garbage in Beijing was not only a concern of hygiene (卫生 wei sheng) and a way of physically demonstrating the Communist government’s commitment to ‘serving the people’ ( 服务人民 fu wu ren min), but it was also a way for precious resources to be recaptured and reclaimed. The overall cleanliness of a city was often linked to notions of ‘progress’ while pre- Liberation cities were castigated as ‘filthiness’ that was considered to be ‘backward.’ In a 1990 report complied by the Urban Social and Economic Survey Organization of the State Statistical Bureau (国家统计局城市社会经济调查总队) contributor Zhao Huiyun describes Chinese cities in the past:

18 Ibid., 192; For a discussion about the Dong Xiao Market and the care shoppers took when buying there see, Beijing Shi wei yuan hui., Beijing wang shi tan (Beijing: Beijing chu ban she: Xin hua shu dian Beijing fa xing suo fa xing, 1988), 212. 19 Deng Youmei, “Beijing Jiu Ying,” RMHB, June 1986. See also the photograph of the pre-Liberation Tianqiao market in the front matter of Beijing wang shi tan n.p.. 74

旧中国城市环境卫生工作相当落后，城市脏､乱､差壮况相当普遍。建国后，政府十

分重视市容环境卫生事业的发展。

In old China [pre-1949], urban sanitation was very backward. Cities were dirty and disorganized, and this inferior situation was very common. After the founding of the PRC, the government attached great value to the [physical] appearance of cities, and [as a 20 result,] urban sanitation industries were developed.

The complex relationship between sanitation, cities, and notions of national progress are deeply embedded in this assessment of the shift in sanitation post 1949. Linking patriotism with issues of sanitation, waste collection, and recycling was a common theme post Liberation.

The recycling of Tianqiao outlined by Dong in the Republican period was recast during the 1960s and 1970s as a patriotic duty to the nation. Joshua Goldstein, building on Dong’s work on Beijing’s recycling history, describes the shifts in how recycling was conceptualized by the state to argue that the recapturing useful resources such as glass, paper, and scrap metal replaced recycling in the form of selling unwanted or broken consumer goods as a duty:

A powerful ideological homology existed between the ideal of dedicating one’s heart and soul as a citizen—and thereby becoming and indispensable ‘screw’ in the glorious socialist experiment—and contributing every unused scrap of metal to be melted down 21 make new screws for the industrial machines of the new system.

The state’s need to inculcate behavior that emphasized conserving and recovering resources was critical to the PRC. Exemplifying Goldstein’s argument is a poster from the early 1970s (fig. 3.2). The three figures represent the revolutionary triumvirate: worker, peasant, solider leading the vanguard of revolution. The three figures rendered in the Socialist Realist style stare off into the middle distance at their left. Drawing the eye from the lower left to the upper right is a steep diagonal formed by woman’s right elbow and the worker’s left hand that extends up raising Mao’s little red book. Below the bombastic slogan, Strive to collect scrap metal and other waste

20 Zhongguo Cheng Shi Si Shi Nian (China, Forty Years of Urban Development), Di 1 ban (Beijing: Zhongguo tong ji xin xi zi xun fu wu zhong xin, 1990), 466. 21 Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua L Goldstein, eds., Everyday Modernity in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 272–73. 75

22 materials! , is a diagram showing how 10 tones of scrap metal can be recycled into 9 tones of 23 useful steel. The poster, by including both images of scrap and post-production goods, makes explicit the connection between the electric pylon and ships in the upper register of the image and the recycling of scrap. Moreover, the revolutionary spirit of the three figures further impresses the viewer with the patriotic duty one has to recycle. The slogan at the top reads: 24 “Preparing for war and natural disasters is the duty of everyone.” By using propagandistic language, composition, and Socialist Realist rendered figures, the poster implicates the viewer in the nation building activity of collecting and recycling scrap metal. The message of this poster is that saving and collecting is a duty of every citizen. In this poster example, unlike the example above of the scavenger on the bus, recycling is not only embraced, but is cast as a key element of participation in one’s civic duty to the state.

The relationship between waste and recycling continues to evolve in contemporary Beijing, but as a result of developmentalist economic policies that privilege consumption over thrift, it is becoming steadily more contentious and problematic. The Chinese government’s recent ‘green’ campaigns and international attention to China’s degraded environment have brought recycling to the forefront of municipal propaganda campaigns. Recycling focuses on the reclamation of usable resources. The early PRC mobilized rhetoric of protecting resources as one’s patriotic duty. The Great Leap forward’s backyard iron smelting campaigns are one of the most visible 25 and misdirected examples of recycling in the service of the state. What is more the concept of a consumerist culture at this time was an anathema. At this time a throwaway culture predicated on plenty was not a facet of life in the PRC, general scarcity and lack were pervasive due to economic and political policies. The irony of contemporary recycling campaigns is the resulting

22 大力面收废钢铁及其它废旧物资！Da li mian shou fei gang tie ji qi ta fei jiu wu zi! 23 For a discussion on typical diversion rates and recovery of resources in China see Christine Furedy, “Waste Recovery in China: Formal and Informal Approaches,” BioCycle June (1990): 80-4. 24 备战备荒为人民。Bei zhan, bei huang, wei ren min. 25 Yu Hua’s novel depicts the failings of backyard steel smelting that was one of the disasters of the Great Leap Forward. Yu Hua, Huo Zhe, Di 1 ban, Yu Hua Zuo Pin Xi Lie (Shanghai: Shanghai wen yi chu ban she, 2004). 76

26 recovered material creates many harmful unusable byproducts. Manufactured Landscapes (dir. Jennifer Baichwal, 2006) traces the global circuits of e-waste imported from the west to China for manual processing. As China’s economy and consumption patterns continue to grow, the problem of ‘green washing’ or overstating the ecological impact of recycling is an issue, and yet, government policies continue to stress the role of individual participation in daily rituals of recycling sorting as a means of alleviating pollution. Certainly recycling is an important aspect to managing the planet’s resources, but it is not the magic bullet. It must be paired with reduction in production and consumption as well, which based on current Chinese economic strategies of boosting domestic consumption, in direct opposition. Globalized circuits of production and consumption are exacerbated by neoliberalist economic reforms, so while Chinese government policies tout sorting of garbage the answer to environmental problems and a method of becoming a civilized world-class citizen, in reality much larger scale changes at the 27 industry level must be made.

Today’s recycling campaigns encourage citizens to think of recycling as directly related to future generation’s quality of life and as part of being a good citizen of contemporary Beijing. This ritualization of behavior is exemplified in slogans that emphasize the concepts of being ‘civilized’ and ‘polite’ are introduced and conflated with the act of reducing waste and separating recyclable goods. The tactic of linguistically linking being civilized (做文明有礼的北京人 zuo wei ming you li de Beijing) with a particular social activity such as reducing and sorting trash was deployed especially around the beautification (mianzi cheng) projects associated with the

26 Adam Minter, “China’s Trash Is Getting Dirtier,” BloombergView, September 18, 2014, http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-18/china-s-trash-is-getting- dirtier?utm_source=The+Sinocism+China+Newsletter&utm_campaign=979ce85d5f- Sinocism09_19_14&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_171f237867-979ce85d5f- 24566193&mc_cid=979ce85d5f&mc_eid=4f35ce8173; Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), http://www.booksamillion.com/p/Junkyard-Planet/Adam-Minter/9781608197910; “70% of Annual Global E-Waste Dumped in China,” May 24, 2012, http://china.org.cn/environment/2012- 05/24/content_25461996.htm. 27 In 2014 China and the US agreed to cap and reduce carbon emissions. This is the scale at which changes have to be made in order to create observable changes in global warming. Better regulations of recycling industries must also be passed. Lenore Taylor and Tania Branigan, “US and China Strike Deal on Carbon Cuts in Push for Global Climate Change Pact,” The Guardian, November 12, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/12/china-and-us-make-carbon-pledge. 77

28 2008 Olympics. Prohibitions on spitting and cutting in line were other actions that were deemed ‘uncivilized.’ Such admonitions on correct behavior, as defined by the state, is also 29 linked to the rhetoric of quality (素质 su zhi) that is expected in cities like Beijing. Such ritualistic statecraft attempts to modify and mold micro behaviors of the citizenry.

While garbage and recycling have been historically important to Beijing’s city metabolism, it 30 was not until 2003 that the first municipal white paper on garbage was issued. Like the banner that focuses on how being civilized is related to recycling habits, the municipal policies outlined 31 in the white paper focus on habits of discarding as critical to shaping a ‘new’ Beijing. The government white paper stresses the links between proper garbage management and preparations for the 2008 Olympic games concluding the white paper with the phrase, “New Beijing, New 32 Olympics (新北京新奥运 Xin Beijing Xi Aoyun).” The goal of the white paper is to emphasize the importance of efficient trash disposal and to highlight the environmental factors related to 33 better resource recovery, especially in light of the awarding by the IOC of the 2008 Olympics. Summarized by the phrase: “…reduce household trash, turn them into resources and harmless

28 Highlighting the issue of waste treatment and reduction is that an entire issue of China Today was dedicated to this topic. Titled “The War with Waste” (August 2010 vol. 59, no. 8) the issue covered practices put in place for reducing waste during the Shanghai Expo, increasing recycling of household garbage, and reversing the stereotypes for recyclers (Li Wuzhou “One Man’s Junk: Viewing Garbage as a misplaced resource and business opportunity,” 17-19). Moreover, the China Today is a main English language publication (renamed from China Reconstructs in 1990, see chapter three, footnote 57). The press coverage in England and Chinese underscores the importance of these issues both to a domestic audience as well as to showing an international audience; China Today is published in seven languages, China’s awareness of its ecological problems. See below for extended discussion of sorting waste streams and their relationship to Song Dong’s installation practice. 29 For an extended discussion on the use of su zhi in the policies of the PRC see Tamara Jacka, “Cultivating Citizens: Suzhi (Quality) Discourse in the PRC,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 17, no. 3 (2009): 523–35. 30 Beijing shi shi zheng guan li wei yuan hui zu zhi, “Beijing Shi Sheng Guo La Ji Zhi Li Bai Pi Shu. White Paper on Beijing Household Garbage Disposal” (Posted on the Beijing solid waste management website, 2003), http://www.bswad.org.cn/tabid/119/InfoID/757/Default.aspx. Accessed January, 2013. 31 “‘Beijing shi sheng huo la ji zhi li bai pi shu’ zai Jing fa bu.” Ren Min Ri Bao 12-24-2003. http://www.people.com.cn/GB/huanbao/1073/2263152.html 32 Beijing shi shi zheng guan li wei yuan hui zu zhi, “Beijing Shi Sheng Guo La Ji Zhi Li Bai Pi Shu. White Paper on Beijing Household Garbage Disposal.” 33 Ibid. 78

79 materials, use them for the recycling industries (…生活垃圾减量化、资源化、无害化和产业化” (sheng huo la ji jian liang hua, zi yuan hua, wu hai hua, he chan ye hua…).

However, in reality there is a gap between the government policies and the reality of the garbage systems in Beijing. The disjuncture between theory and practice was revealed by photographer Wang Jiuliang in his 2010 exhibition City Besieged by Waste at the Songzhuang Art museum (fig. 3.3). Wang photographs garbage dumpsites, vividly depicting what he calls ‘a seventh ring road’ around Beijing. The ‘ring road’ is visible, a Google Earth map where each yellow pin 34 indicates a location of a garbage dump Wang has discovered. Wang uses the location coordinates of the dumpsites to map the sites using Google earth creating an intersection of art and mapping technologies in order to make visible Beijing’s unregulated garbage dump 35 problem. His photography has raised awareness of the seriousness of Beijing’s garbage problem; the exhibition and recent documentary about his work probed environmental issues 36 related to China’s rapid growth and development sparking an international discussion.

Not only did the exhibition examine the garbage dump sites surrounding Beijing, but also vividly depicts the relationship between the city center and the periphery that scholar Wang Min’an 37 describes in his essay 垃圾与城市结构 La ji yu cheng shi jie gou. Wang argues that the city center rids itself of trash and it is the surrounding suburbs that absorb the waste produced in the center. The circuits of rubbish in Beijing correspond to Wang’s analysis, the trash and recycling collected in the city core are trucked outside the city to be disposed of in landfills (legal or not)

34 Wang Jiuliang, “La Ji Wei Cheng. Garbage Surrounds the City,” Nan Fang Zhou Mou, January 7, 2010, http://www.infzm.com/content/39708. 35 “Wang Jiuliang: yong yin xiang 'gai xie' la ji wei cheng de ren (Wang Jiuliang: someone who is using images to revise the beseige of garbage in the city,” Xin Jing Bao, January 21, 2012, http://news.qq.com/a/20120121/000299.htm. See also: Zhong Gang (钟刚). “王久良:希望让更多人看到包围我们的垃圾场” Nan Fang Du Shi Bao, 2009. Available online: http://nf.nfdaily.cn/nfdsb/content/2009- 12/14/content_7082825.htm. See also the documentary on Wang’s project: Wang Jiuliang, Wei Cheng La Ji. Beijing Besieged by Waste, Documentary (dGenerate Films, 2011). 36 Laji wei cheng. City Besieged by Waste. Songzhuang Art Museum, 2010. For reviews of the exhibition see: http://www.artda.cn/view.php?tid=3770&cid=49. Laji wei cheng http://news.qq.com/zt2010/laji/. Eric Hillaire, “Beijing Rubbish Dumps: Beijing’s 7th Ring Road,” The Guardian, March 26, 2010, sec. Environment, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2010/mar/26/beijing-rubbish-wang-jiuliang-photography. 37 Wang Min’an, “La Ji Yu Cheng Shi Jie Gou,” Hua Cheng 01, no. 017 (2011). 79

80 or recycled at centers also on the edges of the city. Continuing his deconstruction of cities and their relationship to rubbish, Wang goes so far as to assert that “[c]ities and rubbish are dependent upon each other for survival (城市和垃圾相依为命 cheng shi he la ji xiang yi wei 38 ming).”

For Wang a city is a city because of its constant production and removal of rubbish from the core to the fringes. This conceptual thinking about cities is concretely seen in Wang’s Google earth map of Beijing. The circuits of commodities brought into the city as new goods, purchased, and eventually discarded, constitute a key element of the city for Wang. Additionally, the small scale recycling of discarded goods also provide livelihoods in the peri-urban areas of the city; this connects Wang Jiuliang’s maps and photographs of trash pickers with Wang Min’an’s theorizing of garbage and the city. Wang’s assertion that rubbish and cities are mutually sustaining is a critical aspect to my following discussion of Song Dong’s works and the role of government developmentalism in post-Socialist China.

A Beijing-based Practice

Song Dong was born in Beijing and continues to live and work in the city. He graduated with a degree in oil painting from Capital Normal University in 1989. However, following the 1989 Tian’anmen square crackdown Song ceased to paint, choosing instead to use performance, video, and installation in his mature practice. Unlike many artists of his generation, Song has never lived abroad for an extensive period of time, choosing instead to stay and to draw inspiration 39 from his hometown of Beijing. Song’s intimate relationship with Beijing’s underlying structural organization is evident in works such as A Pot of Boiling Water, 1995 and Transposition of the Center Axis, 1997. In these works, Song uses the city and its traditional

38 Ibid., 207; For an English version see, Wang Min’an, “On Rubbish,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 7–8 (December 1, 2011): 340–353. My translation differs slightly. 39 A few notable examples of artists who have lived and worked extensively abroad: Xu Bing, Zhang Huan, Ai Weiwei, Wang Gongxin, and Cai Guo-qiang. Wu Hung, Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and Future, Between East and West (Hong Kong: New Art Media. Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001); Britta Erickson, On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West (Stanford, CA: Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2004). 80

40 lanes (胡同 hutongs) as a stage. Song’s performative appropriation of Beijing’s streets and places indicates his intimate knowledge of the city, it also highlights the long history of urban planning in the city. Beijing’s structure is rooted in imperial urban planning that favored a 41 strictly north to south orientation. Beijing’s streets within the second ring road still adhere to 42 the grid plan put into place in Beijing at the beginning of the Yuan dynasty. Having grown up inside the now demolished city walls, Song Dong is keenly aware of Beijing’s imperial 43 organizational structure. Song’s interest in linearity and axiality are present in his work A Pot of Boiling Water. In order to make his fleeting mark on the city, Song uses a teakettle filled with boiling water to draw a line of water down the center of a hutong, marking his daily progression from his home to his mother’s. Song’s progression demarcates a routine in his life, one that also makes visible the familial ties between mother and son. Song’s interest in family relationships is further explored below, but what I want to focus on in this example is Song’s act of progressing down the street. Fundamentally, Beijing’s urban plan is designed to either promote movement or 44 to actively deny it. The many layers of walls and gates in old Beijing make the movement of a pedestrian difficult. In Song’s photograph series the low camera angle also serves to tilt the ground plane; this composition narrows the visibility to just the hutong. The grid pattern of twelve images chart Song’s progress along the hutong that is eerily devoid of other figures. The empty hutong underscores Song’s performance as being an intimate and personal event, a

40 For a brief history of the term hutong and its use in Beijing see “Beijing de Hu Tong,” Ren Min Hua Bao. Nov., 1982. 41 For discussion of the historical and imperial urban planning precedents for Beijing’s urban form see for example, Frederick W Mote, Imperial China, 900-1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990). See also introduction of this dissertation. 42 Beijing’s streets and gates were originally based on plans set in the Zhou Li and put into practice in the Tang dynasty capital of Chang’an. Xuan Zheng and Peilie Huang, eds., Zhou Li (Shanghai: Pei Ying guan, 1887). 43 Song Dong grew up in Xi Si (西四) defined as the area south of Ping’anli, west of Xi Si North street, north of Fu Cheng men inner street, and east of Ba Zhao Deng Yu street. See: Beijing Bai Ke Quan Shu (Beijing Encyclopedia), Di 1 ban, vol. Xi cheng qu 14 (Beijing: Aolinpike chu ban she, 2001), 237–39. 44 Imperial rule and the north-south axis were so tightly bound that when the Communists took power in 1949, the east-west axis was built up in order to underscore the rejection of China’s imperial past. See Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing; Yu Shuishan, “Redefining the Axis of Beijing”; Zhang Jinggan, Jian Guo Yi Lai de Beijing Cheng Shi Jian She Zi Liao Cheng Shi Gui Hua Nei Bu Zi Liao, 34. 81

‘painting’ of his daily route that leaves a temporary trace on the route his feet have made countless times before. The ephemeral axis Song makes along his lane links it to the grand imperial axial structure of the city.

Song’s interactions and interest in creating a dialogue between his own life in Beijing and the city as a historical and cultural center are also apparent in his work Transposition. For this piece Song took photographs along the length of Beijing’s north-south axis and transposed them on the north-south axis of his home, which he shared with his wife, artist Yin Xiuzhen (尹秀珍 b. 1963). Song marks his home with the imperial north-south axis that has organized Beijing for hundreds of years, thereby linking his personal home with the larger ‘cosmo-magical’ 45 characteristics of Beijing. Transposition joins Song’s home with the historically rooted axis- linear urban plan of Beijing. The practices of both Song and Yin are concerned with how Beijing is changing in response to economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. The pace and scale of construction in the city is unprecedented and the rapidly changing topography of contemporary Beijing is a topic that both artists explore in their practices. Wu Hung in his catalog essay, “Vernacular” Post-Modern: The Art of Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen, identifies ruins, fragments, and relics as central themes in their practices; key themes that underlies and 46 reiterates their connection to Beijing. Song and Yin employ discarded, demolished, or unwanted items in their work effects.

Ordering the hoarder

In 2005, Song Dong and his mother, Zhao Xiangyuan (趙湘源 1934-2008), transported the contents of her house to Beijing Tokyo Art Projects (BTAP) for what would become the 47 exhibition, curated by Wu Hung, Waste Not (fig. 3.4). The task of moving the contents of

45 Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters; a Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City, 449–51. For an excellent collection of digitized maps many that highlight the north-south axis of Beijing see the Capital Library project Beijing Memory (Beijing jiyi) available at www.bjmem.com 46 Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen, Chopsticks, ed. Christophe W. Mao, illustrated edition (New York: Chambers Fine Art, 2002). 47 Wu Hung, ed., Waste Not (Beijing: Tokyo-Gallery + BTAP, 2009); Zhang Lijie, “Song Dong ‘Wu Jin Qi Yong,’” San Yue Feng, January 2, 2011; Betti-Sue Hertz et al., Song Dong: Dad and Mom, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2011). 82

Zhao’s life to BTAP was not simple. Due in part to a lifetime of poverty punctuated by the political denouncement of first her father then her husband and their subsequent deaths, Zhao developed hoarding tendencies and refused to throw out items that most people would consider 48 trash.

There are obvious scalar differences between Zhao’s individual household management as compared to the nation-state sponsored raw material recovery. However, while Zhao’s approach to objects that metastasized to a pathological level of hoarding, we can also imagine her as a proto-recycler. Her devotion to saving things, banking them for later use, is similar to the governmental drives to recover usable raw materials. While Zhao never completed the process of extracting usable raw materials from the things she kept, her attention to their perceived stored value is similar to the ritualizing and disciplining of behaviors sought by government white papers on garbage and recycling.

Song Dong conceived of the project as a way in which he and his mother could work through her compulsive hoarding together with the end goal being an installation of her things they produced. Wu Hung, in his catalogue essay describes the initial meeting in 2004 as Waste Not being motivated “…not so much to make a work of art as to free his mother from the cocoon she had 49 built for herself…her habit of saving things had become pathological.” At the heart of the piece was Song’s desire to create a therapeutic method for his mother to sort through her things, allowing the family to reconnect with her and for her to deal with her inability to throw anything away. Highlighting this desire, Song wrote in his proposal for the exhibition that “[t]he most important thing was to pull my mother out of her isolated world filled with grief, to give her a bit 50 of fresh air to breath.” For Song Dong he felt that the process of removing, organizing, and sorting all of Zhao’s possessions would provide a space and freedom from the grief the things had come to represent.

48 For a brief overview and definition of compulsive hoarding as a psychiatric disorder see: Sanjaya Saxena, “Recent Advances in Compulsive Hoarding,” Current Psychiatry Reports 10 (October 16, 2008): 297–303. 49 Wu Hung, Waste Not, 14. 50 Ibid., 15. 83

Waste Not contains over 10,000 individual items giving the viewer a physical manifestation of the psychological trauma caused by the hardships, political purges, and anxiety Zhao faced in 51 sustaining a basic existence during most of her lifetime (fig. 3.5). Born to a well-off family, Zhao’s father secretly helped the Communists while working for the Nationalist government and it was this loyalty that led to the family’s relocation to Beijing after the Communists took power in 1949. However, during the “Eliminating Counter-Revolutionaries” purge of 1953, Zhao’s father was denounced as a political traitor and jailed for almost eight years because of his prior association with the Nationalists. As a direct result of his imprisonment, Zhao and her mother were left without a source of income and were shunned as family members of a ‘counter- 52 revolutionary.’ Zhao’s poverty and the diligence in saving this necessitated continued after her mother died, her father remarried, she married, and had two children. Zhao’s husband Song Shiping received a good job posting and the grinding poverty of her early life might have begun to ease, however, a repeat scenario of her father’s denouncement, her husband was sent for re- education during the Cultural Revolution only returning to Beijing in 1978. Zhao’s anxiety and constant concern for having enough for her family is understandable when read in tandem with the fickle political campaigns of the PRC. People across the country in the late 1950s and early 1960s experienced widespread droughts, famines, and ongoing shortages of material goods. Continuing shortages in consumer goods were evident into the 1980s when citizens still needed 53 ration coupons to purchase basic goods.

Zhao’s experience with grinding poverty and political campaigns was very personal; however, it is also indicative of a lifetime spanning pre-Communist through the Reform and Opening up era (1978-present). Zhao explained her rationale for buying scraps of fabric:

51 “Song Dong: Waste Not,” The Barbican, February 2012, http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event- detail.asp?ID=12878. 52 Wu Hung, Waste Not. 7-8. 53 Neil MacGregor, “A Chinese Food Coupon,” A History of the World (London: BBC, 2010), http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/HEnF-9rNRsubH5E1XULdFg. 84

Why buy such bits of fabric? Because, with every bit you bought like this, you could save half a foot worth of fabric coupons, and you also saved about two inches worth in 54 cash. Poorer people could only get by this way, just to survive.

Her language expresses the desperation of trying to endure and the methods she used to conserve in every aspect of her purchasing, not only did she save fabric coupons this way, she also saved some cash. The tactic of displaying the large quantity of small seemingly useless things like fabric scraps that Zhao hoarded creates a subtle critique of China’s recent history and its effects on everyday people. It makes visible trauma of grinding poverty as a result of political purges, and the scarcity of consumer goods. An example such as the fabric scraps that are painstakingly bundled and arranged allows the viewer to be party to the extreme measures, or a ‘making do,’ 55 that people such as Zhao undertook in order to provide for their families.

The display of the bundled and sorted groups of Zhao’s things displayed in a gallery or museum space as an installation shifts the work from the realms of the personal and private to the space of the collective and the public. Janet Hoskins describes the difference between personal things and public things: “biographical object gives it an identity that is localized, particular, and individual, while those established with an generated by an outside protocol (what we might call a public 56 commodity) are globalized, generalized, and mechanically reproduced.” In bringing her things to the public space of the gallery, they are constantly shifting between the localized and the generalized—they are things personal to Zhao, but are at the same time easily recognizable to viewers as public commodities: toothpaste tubes, shoes, shopping bags.

The displaying of things, personal or not, is an exhibition strategy used by artists. Waste Not’s conceptual framework is derived from an art historical tradition of found objects, and ready- 57 mades. In fact Song Dong recalls seeing Robert Rauschenberg’s 1985 exhibition at the

54 Wu Hung, Waste Not, 81. 55 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 56 Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (New York: Routledge, 1998), 8–9; Janet Hoskins, “On Losing and Getting a Head: Warfare, Exchange, and Alliance in a Changing Sumba, 1888-1988,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 3 (1989): 419–40. 57 For an overview of art historical examples of artists working with found objects or garbage see Susanne Hauser’s chapter “Waste into Heritage” in Waste-Sites. Susanne Hauser, “Waste into Heritage,” in Waste-Site Stories: The 85

58 National Art Museum as a college student. Rauschenberg’s use of found objects repurposed as ready-mades and combines was a new and unexpected artistic strategy for young artists visiting 59 the show, and was remarked upon in national art journals Meishu and Liao Wang.

While the piece does have formal connections to the readymade tradition, however, the ‘junk’ of Waste Not is fundamentally different because there exists a personal relationship between the things and Zhao. For Wu Hung, “[a]lthough Waste Not ultimately owes its use of ready-mades 60 to Marcel Duchamp’s redefinition of art, it is a far cry from this conceptual origin.” Wu declares Zhao’s things are not found or ready-made in the same sense for they are first and foremost, her things. Following this logic, we can position Zhao as the single author at work building this unique collection. In addition to being the author of the material that makes up Waste Not, her participation in the sorting and arrangement of her things in the gallery space also defines her as the archivist or the curator of the piece, therefore in this context, Waste Not shares an archival impulse similar to the fictional character in Ilya Kabobov’s work The Man who Never Threw Anything Away (1985-1988) who carefully kept, organized, labeled, and sorted 61 everything he ever owned. Kababov’s piece and Waste Not present biographical ties to things that appear to be mostly trash. For the viewer, the things in the installations are ‘enlivened’ with the narratives thereby recovering them from being simply trash. It is through the stories that are associated with the things and the organization of the things that prevent these installations from collapsing into the category of trash and present instead an archival impulse.

Recycling of Memory, eds. Brian Neville and Johanne Villeneuve (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 39–54. The August 1980 issue of 美术 “Mei Shu” (Art) featured one of the most notable examples of found objects in the mix-medium piece, Bed by Robert Rauschenberg (1955). 美术 August, (1980): 27. 58 Interview with author, The Art Gallery of Ontario, January 26th 2016. 59 Wang Luxiang and Li Jun, “Wai Guo Mei Shi Shen Me de Yi Shu Yu Ying Gai de Yi Shu,” Meishu, no. 2 (1986): 64–67; Yang Chaoling, “Meiguo Xian Dai Yi Shu Jia Lao Shen Bo Zuo Pin Zai Zhongguo Yin Qi Fan Xiang (The Works of American Contemporary Artist Robert Rauschenberg Cause Reprocussions),” Liao Wang, October 28, 1985, 48. 60 Wu Hung, Waste Not, 2. 61 For Ilya Kabakov’s view of garbage see his text in Boris Groĭs et al., Ilya Kabakov, Contemporary Artists (London: Phaidon, 1998), 98–105. 86

Waste Not can be considered as an index of the suffering one family experienced in New China, however, it is in many ways indicative of many people’s experiences during the first decades of 62 the PRC and can be seen to function as a testimonial to the multitude of other untold stories. For instance one author Zhang Lijie wrote of the exhibition:

物尽其用展现了中国一代人的人生哲学，这种哲学是与高速运转的现代社会的生产消费模式相违背的，但这种生活哲学却是在物资匮乏的年代生存的先决条件。 (Wu jin qi yong zhan xian le Zhonguo yi dai ren de sheng zhe xue, zhe zhong zhe xue shi yu gao du yuan zhuang de xian dai she hui de sheng chan xiao fei mo shi xiang wei bei de, dan zhe zhong sheng huo zhe xue que she zai wu zi gui fa de nian dai sheng cun xian 63 jue tiao jian).

Zhang’s description is revealing particularly in the word choices that reveal an embedded consumerist ideology. For example, the adjective kui fa (匮乏; to lack, to be short of something), thereby characterizes the past historical moment through the lens of a contemporary consumerist structure. The review of the installation of Waste Not goes on to describe how the things on display provides a chance to see an entire generation’s philosophy of life, one that valued thrift and frugality as a means of survival. The tone of the review reveals how imbricated the contemporary moment is in analyzing past ways of interacting with things. The reviewer is unable to separate the different regimes of consumption that Waste Not seeks to uncover.

There is a jarring contrast between contemporary society’s consumption patterns and those exhibited by Zhao’s anachronistic approach to objects. The socialist sounding slogan of the work Waste Not underscores the divergent time periods of great scarcity to great abundance. The deprivations experienced by Zhao in her lifetime were not unusual; however, her pathological attachment to her things was unique. The process of working through her things in order to create the installation necessitated distinct categorization to gain control over the roughly 10,000

62 Wu Hung, Waste Not, 187. The link to the blog cited in the catalogue is no longer functional; therefore, I cite Wu Hung’s translation here. 63 Zhang Lijie, “Song Dong ‘Wu Jin Qi Yong,’” San Yue Feng, January 2, 2011. For a fictional example of this generation’s impluses towards things, thrift, and saving see Ma Jian, Beijing Coma, trans. Flora Drew (New York: Picador, 2008), 236. 87

88 items in the gallery. At the same time, this process allowed Zhao to come to terms with her attachment to things and helped free her from her hoarding practices. The process and act of sorting Zhao’s belongings is intimately tied to the final piece and images of Zhao examining her things are included in the BTAP catalogue (fig. 3.6). The finished installation of her things is at once intensely personal and public. The private things that represent Zhao’s biography, some valuable, most not, are neatly arranged in orderly rows, piles, and stacks in the public space of the gallery.

In contrast to the orderly rows and piles of the final installation is this image of Zhao’s home before the exhibition process began. For Mary Douglas there is a relationship between the pattern and the material of that pattern: “[g]ranted that disorder spoils pattern; it also provides the 64 materials of pattern.” The materials for making a pattern are strewn throughout Zhao’s apartment in a state of disarray. In this image, taken inside Zhao’s apartment, we see how the things looked in situ. The crowded hallway seems to close in around her as she moves from room to room, and elicits in the viewer a sense of anxiety or revulsion. This anxiety or revulsion is similar to the reaction the bus ticket taker had in the event discussed above, in which the out- of-placeness, or the profusion of things makes one nervous. Returning to Douglas this feeling is generated when one perceives a thing as being out of place. For example, if one examines Zhao’s apartment and feels that some of the items are garbage and aren’t located in the trash bin, or the ‘correct’ place for trash, then the feeling of revulsion may ensue. Geographer Tim Ednensor suggests that a method of combating this feeling is to create categorizes of things, 65 thereby purifying and stabilizing the things’ meanings by giving them a ‘proper place.’ By creating familiar distinct categories Ednensor argues that things initially perceived of as trash, 66 are transformed and aestheticized no longer appearing to be garbage. Such is the transmutation when Zhao’s things are sorted, grouped, and arrayed on the gallery floor in comprehensible categories. In contrast to the feelings evoked in the photograph of Zhao’s home—anxiety and revulsion, the viewer of Waste Not understanding this to be ‘art’, recognizes the orderliness of

64 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 94. 65 Tim Edensor, “Waste Matter,” Journal of Material Culture 10, no. 3 (2005): 311–32. 66 Ibid. 88

89 the piece and relaxes because the things are in comprehensible categories—bags with bags, like with like.

The organized structure of Waste Not serves to underscore its relationship to issues of waste and recycling in Beijing. The classification systems seen in the public government propaganda posters online mirror the piles of things created by Song Dong and his mother in Waste Not (fig. 67 3.7, 3.8, 3.9). Government policies have sought to ritualize how citizens discipline their waste. In the white paper discussed above the relationship between sorting one’s garbage and being a part of a progressive modern society is emphasized. There is a distinct disconnect between Song Dong and his mother in relation to how they approach things. This generation gap is indicated in Zhao’s hoarding that seems so out of place in a contemporary consumerist society of plenty. And yet by keeping everything Zhao is also reflecting back to viewers the wastefulness of consumer patterns. Her constant accumulation without throwing anything away short-circuits the usual life cycle of things (3.10). This led to an unlivable situation. The messy unsorted apartment shares little with state propaganda images urging recycling and sorting. The sanitized images on posters in apartment complexes never reveal the dirty realities of shifting through garbage for the few salvageable things. Zhao’s insecurity that the prosperity of the post-Mao society would last led her to redefine waste. She stored up apparently unnecessary things against a perceived uncertain future marking her as a relic of a past society.

68 The recycling of unwanted, but still usable items has a long history in the city. Zhao’s own interactions with such circuits and economies of used goods the city is recorded in the original catalogue for Waste Not. Zhao recounts one of her cabinet’s history: “Shiping (Zhao’s husband) 69 and I bought this cabinet in 1968, from the Chang’anmen waste depot, for 5 yuan … As Wu Hung notes below this description the Chang’anmen waste depot was a marketplace for used items that could be purchased cheaply. Zhao, when discussing her childhood in the catalogue, recounts how she and her mother were forced to sell unnecessary household items when her

67 Beijing Municipal Commission of City Administration and Environment (BMCCAE) website on trash sorting: http://www.ljfl.org.cn/contents/76/238.html. 68 Dong, Republican Beijing. 69 Wu Hung, Waste Not, 93. 89

90 father was imprisoned in order to afford to eat. Throughout her lifetime Zhao participated in Beijing’s secondhand markets as both a purchaser and as a seller. Her economic status as it rose and fell precipitated her interactions with recycling in this sense, and what is interesting when viewing Waste Not, is the ‘standing reserve’ of plastics, paper, and metal that she hoarded and 70 didn’t sell to recyclers.

Conditioning residents to separate their waste is part of government environmental campaigns 71 outlined in the 2011 document “Regulations on Beijing household waste” (3.11) The government position on sorting is reiterated in propaganda posters and in other visual elements throughout the city. There are banners urging people to reduce their garbage in order to be more civilized as discussed above, and taxis often have mini billboard like advertisements hung from the back of the driver’s seat that reiterate this sentiment (fig. 3.12). In this photograph taken in Beijing in 2012, the sorting of waste into three ‘waste streams’ or pre-chosen categories is depicted: kitchen waste, recyclable, and other waste. The text reads: “It’s not bothersome at all!” 72 The laying out of the waste into three categories inculcates the public to sorting their trash. The three waste streams advocated by the garbage policy are branded on dumpsters in housing 73 complexes to keep the message focused on just three categories (fig. 3.13). Sorting of garbage facilitates recovery of valuable resources such as paper and metal, as well as reducing space needed for landfills. The rapid urbanization of Beijing and its 22 million inhabitants have 74 strained the local waste management systems. On May 6th 2011, Beijing Daily published an 75 article with this photograph of the three waste streams as mascots (fig. 3.14). Getting citizens

70 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977). 71 See especially section three: Beijing shi shi zheng shi rong guan li wei yuan hui, “Beijing sheng huo la ji guan li tiao li.” Accessed January 2013. 72 Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 73 Li Zhen-shan et al., “Municipal Solid Waste Management in Beijing City,” 2598. 74 Yi Xiao et al., “The Composition, Trend and Impact of Urban Solid Waste in Beijing,” Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 135, no. 1–3 (2007): 21–30. 75 Annie Wei, “Local Man out to Change the Way We Treat Trash,” Beijing Today, May 6, 2001, http://www.beijingtoday.com.cn/feature/local-man-out-to-change-the-way-we-treat-trash. 90

91 to sort their own waste streams lessens waste management departments’ costs and shifts the work from the state, to the individual, couching this work a duty of the citizen, a rhetoric similar to the scrap metal poster discussed above. Moreover, the sorting advocated by these mascots also reflects the differing attitudes expressed above between the scavenger and the recyclers in the RMHB article. In the case of the scavenger, his things weren’t sorted in a comprehensible way to the other passengers and were considered trash. In contrast, the sorted recyclables of the couple in the RMHB article represented a ‘standing reserve’ of resources to be reborn through the 76 recycling system.

In 2010 the Beijing municipal government collected and transported 6,506,100 tons of household 77 trash to 19 local facilities. The data for recycling of plastics, tin, or cardboard was not reported in the national statistical yearbook for 2010. However, based on fieldwork observations from 2006-2011, the trade in recyclables continues to be a visible and viable trade in Beijing. Recycling in contemporary Beijing is not limited to scrap paper, plastics, and metal and it is possible to sell almost anything back to dealers, from old furniture to water coolers, plastic bottles, to computers. Some recycling dealers advertise what they are willing to take; the sign in 78 figure 2.16 lists iron, non-rusted steel, old paper, and building materials among other things.

There is a methodical organizing of materials that translates into aesthetic in its regularity. Every recycling truck is packed the same way: cardboard is placed in first creating a solid foundation. On top of the cardboard are placed green tarpaulins full of plastic bottles, and lastly Styrofoam is lashed to the top of the mound. Throughout Beijing recycling dealers maintain this sorting and packing recipe. Every night heavily loaded trucks and tricycles flow out of the city to wholesaler depots where another exchange is made. Wholesalers buy in bulk from the buyers who then sell on to recycling plants one particular material type (3.15). The layers of the recycling market reveal the robustness of the market—if there was no money to be made—then it wouldn’t be

76 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. 77 Zhongguo guo jia tong ji ju, Zhongguo Tong Ji Nian Jian, (Zhong wen hai wai ban). (Beijing: Zhongguo tong ji chu ban she, 2010), 435. 78 For a detailed discussion of the circuits of recycling of building materials in Beijing see: Kao Shih-yang, “The City Recycled: The Afterlives of Demolished Buildings in Post-War Beijing” (University of California, Berkeley, 2013). 91

92 collected. Ding Shuqian, following Wang Yaping’s characterization, labels un-recycled building 79 materials as ‘misplaced capital.’ To counteract this loss of capital, citizens are taught through posters hung in a variety of urban sites how to separate garbage from recyclables. The BMCCAE dedicates an entire website to teach and educate citizens on how and why to separate 80 their trash.

In figure 3.16 an elderly woman in a hutong decorating the garbage and recycling bins with a red paper cut that mimics the look of the traditional paper cuts with the good luck character fu. The advertisement appropriates the traditional paper cutout used to decorate a family’s door, and has replaced it with triangles made of arrows following the signage used by the Beijing solid waste (fig. 3.14). The advertisement is also reminiscent in its composition to Song Dong’s documentation of his performance of A Pot of Boiling Water discussed earlier; the low camera angles reduce the visible environment to just the hutong, narrowing the focusing the viewer’s gaze. By blending the historic and cultural meanings of recycling, pictured here as the hutong and the red paper cut, the message of environmentalism is situated and contextualized for the viewer.

The rationale for emphasizing the sorting step of recycling is that it is the most labor intensive and thus the most important step to have done within the home, thereby shifting the burden of labor from municipal workers to individual citizens. Beijing began actively promoting neighborhood based (小区 xiao qu) sorting campaigns in 1996, and as a June 17th 2010 Ren Min Ri Bao article explains, Beijing is a world leader in garbage sorting, having issued the first

79 Ding Shuqian, “Jian She La Ji De Xun Huan Li Yong,” Cheng Shi Wenti 09 (2009): 20. 从生态经济系统的意义上说, 废弃物是“放错了位置的资源”, 将其回收利用以生产新型建材, 是消除污染、使其资源化的主要方法之

一, 可以缓解我国城市环境负荷的压力, 实现经济和环境的可持续发展. Cong sheng tai jing ji xi tong de yi yi shang shuo, fei qi wu shi ‘fang cuo le wei zhi de zi yuan’, jiang qi hui shuo li yong yi sheng chan xin xing jian cai, shi xiao chu wu ran, shi qi zi yuan hua de zhu yao fang fa zhi yi, ke yi huan jie wo guo cheng shi huan jing fu he de ya li, shi xian jing ji he huan jing de ke chi xu fa zhan.” 80 BMCCAE, “Beijing Sheng Huo La Ji Fen Lei Wang (Beijing Household Garbage Sorting Website),” accessed March 14, 2013, http://www.ljfl.org.cn/. 92

81 sorting ordinance in 1957. However, in this claim to garbage sorting history, the article also obfuscates the material goods situation in China in 1957, repackaging it and greenwashing this historical fact to underscore China’s long history of ecological awareness while the very different consumer regime was in effect in the 1950s in China. Moreover this article fails to link the rise of the urban poor who predominately work in the sorting industry with the rise in buying of consumer goods by the growing urban middle-class.

Various kinds of media are used by the state in order to disseminate proper garbage sorting habits. Public service announcements are placed in elevators in apartment complexes, at bus stops and on community billboards (fig. 3.17). The recycling campaigns have also changed the design of street garbage bins. Instead of the garbage bin, now the city streets are flanked with bins divided into ‘recyclable’ and ‘non-recyclable’ (fig. 3.18). Beijing’s waste separation campaigns urge citizens to recognize not all trash is created equal, and that by sorting one’s 82 trash, valuable resources can be recovered. Beijing’s most recent plan implementing the three different waste streams is not unfamiliar to Beijingers.

As Song Dong and his wife became internationally successful artists and were able to purchase things for Zhao, her inability to part with things grew stronger. Her attachment to things runs counter to the logic of late capitalist consumerism, a logic that is predicated on constant consumption and elimination. The shifting relationship between people and their things is the object of satire in a cartoon published in September 1999 in RMHB. The main characters are roving recyclers who were traditionally called drum beaters（打⿎⼉ da gu’r) after the drums

81 Sun Xiuyan, Yu Yichun, and Xu Xu, “Beijing: La Ji Jian Liang Nan Zai Na’r,” Ren Min Ri Bao, June 17, 2010, sec. Min sheng zhou kan. “全世界第一个提出‘垃圾分类’的城市是哪一个？是东京、巴黎、还是伦敦、歌本哈根？统统不对，正确答案是：我们可爱的首都北京。”

82 Section one article 10 in the 2011 Beijing Municipal Garbage Regulation advocates using a wide variety of media to help spread the message on garbage reduction and separation. (报刊、广播、电视和网络等媒体应当加强对生活垃圾管理的宣传,普及相关知识,增强社会公众的生活垃圾减量、分类意识。Bao kan, guang bo, dian shi he wan luo deng mei ti ying dang jai qiang dui sheng huo la ji guan li de xuan zhuan, pu ji xiang guan zhi shi, zeng qiang she hui gong zhong de zheng huo la ji jian liang, fen lie yi shi.) Full text available at: http://www.bjmac.gov.cn/ 93

83 they played to notify the neighborhood of their presence. They travel the streets and hutongs of Beijing collecting unwanted items. At far left, under the title ‘the 1950s,’ we see the peddler calling out for old clothes and scrap metal. Below this figure is ‘the 1960s’ calling out for people to sell their old newspapers, old bikes, and toothpaste tubes, in the 1970s the types of things have shifted to watches and sewing machines. Each decade marks changes in consumer habits based on what the peddler is collecting. In the 1980s he is calling out for unwanted electric water coolers. The punch line of the cartoon is that under the title ‘today’ a man wants to get rid of his now outdated ‘386’ computer model. The cartoon reveals the growing wealth of the Chinese through the evolving consumer goods that are being discarded, from newspapers to electronic devices. The cartoon also subliminally links the greater amount of consumer goods with progress and modernization, glossing a message of the benefits of economic reforms and opening up that characterized the 1980s and 1990s. While the cartoon can be read as a satire of consumerism in contemporary China where the desire for the newest version means people are constantly throwing things away, I would also suggest that concurrently the cartoon is lauding the long standing tradition of reuse and recycling of unwanted goods. The fact that the recycler is still collecting goods indicates a continuum of this type of labor from the 1950s until today, but at the same time highlights the rapidity of the growth of a throwaway culture. Within the urban regime of this cartoon, the small-scale recycler peddling through the city is a shifting character. The cartoon attempts to cut and paste the recycler onto a new consumerist regime without attending to the vast economic changes that enable the new paradigm of consume, use, discard.

The installation of Waste Not demonstrates the quantity of things Zhao hoarded, many of which she could have sold to recyclers who patrol hutongs and apartment blocks in Beijing. By short- circuiting the networks of recycling as depicted in the RMHB cartoon Zhao’s accumulation of goods serves as a testimony to the changing availability of consumer goods in China, but it also displays the distrust Zhao had in this availability being reliable. Her life was full of moments where things seemed to be improving only to become harder than before. Hoarding scraps, cast- offs, broken objects, allowed her to feel in control of her life and to protect herself from future

83 Wang Bingyu, Lao Beijing Feng Su Ci Dian (Dictionary of Old Beijing Folk Customs) (Beijing: Zhongguo qing nian chu ban she, 2009), 132–33; Beijing Shi wei yuan hui., Beijing wang shi tan (Discussion of past events in Beijing), 210–11. 94

95 calamities. The categorization of this garbage created a space for her to process her past and her fears of what the future would bring. The careful and aesthetic laying out of and giving a place to her things stabilizes them into recognizable patterns and groupings transforming the garbage into art.

Displacement in Beijing: Hutong

The out-of-placeness that Waste Not evokes in the viewer is likewise present in Song’s piece, 84 Hutong exhibited in 2010 at the blue-chip Beijing outpost of The Pace Gallery. This work was part of a group exhibition called ‘Beijing Voices: Together or Isolated’ (Beijing zhi sheng: zai yi 85 qi huo u fang zi shang) that ran from Nov 30, 2010 to Feb 28, 2011. The exhibition is held annually at Pace Beijing showcasing contemporary works from the past year with no overt curatorial structure. For his work in the show Song created two grey brick walls pinioning a flatbed tricycle by mounting the wheels on the outside the wall, rendering it immobile (fig. 3.19).

As the RMHB cartoon on recycling discussed above depicted, such flatbed tricycles are ubiquitous modes of transit used for light freight in Beijing. They are practical as they allow the rider to carry large quantities of goods, but are also economical, as they are pedal-powered. This photograph, published in The South China Post, captures another use of the tricycle—an 86 impromptu bed for a quick nap (fig. 3.20). What is interesting about Song’s choice of the san lun che in the context of the themes explored in my analysis of Waste Not is that workers engaged in the recycling trade in Beijing mostly commonly use these tricycles. The man’s sign in figure 36 reads: ‘scrap collector’ meaning that he, like the couple in the RMHB discussed at the beginning of this chapter, buys discarded items to resell them to larger recyclers/resource recovery operations. The functionality of motorized flatbed tricycles make them a common form of transportation for people working in the recycling industry, and the photograph that accompanies the RMHB article, captures in the foreground of the image, the handlebars of the

84 Pace Gallery represents some of the most influential global contemporary artists, for a full list see http://www.pacegallery.com 85 Pace Beijing. Beijing zhi sheng. Press release available online: http://www.pacegallery.com/beijing/exhibitions/11235/beijing-voice-together-or-isolated 86 “Sleep Ware,” The South China Post, May 31, 2012. 95

96 couple’s san lun che (fig. 3.1). Song’s use of common everyday objects, especially those that are tied to Beijing, is a theme in his practice; in his catalogue essay for the 2002 exhibition Chopsticks Wu Hung highlights the use of the vernacular in Song’s works going so far as to label 87 Song’s practice “vernacular post modern.” Wu Hung argues that Song’s intentional and specific use of Beijing idioms and flavors characterizes his works. He states that “using the Beijing dialect, in studying them I hope to discern the unique wei’r (taste, flavor) and luzi (way, 88 approach) of their [Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen’s] art.” Wu Hung’s claim that Song’s use of objects, language, and placement characterizes his style as ‘vernacular post modern’ can be readily extended to the interpretation of Hutong. The title of the piece is in Beijing hua the term hutong that originates from the Mongolian and is now native to Beijing, used to describe the 89 small lanes and alleys that traverse the city.

The three main components of the piece: the two walls and the tricycle are all indicative of Beijing. First, the grey bricks used in the piece’s walls recall traditional building materials, because of this association; the color grey is intimately tied to Beijing as a whole. In the run up to the Olympics the planning committee even designated grey as the city’s color the rationale being that: “[t]he grey Great Wall winds in mountains and grey si he yuan courtyards lie in 90 hutongs. Grey is the tone of traditional architecture in Beijing.” Second, the tricycle is a convenient mode of transportation for navigating the small hutongs as many of Beijing’s laneways are only wide enough for one car to pass at a time. Song’s deployment of two looming walls is indicative of his ‘vernacular post modern’ sensibility. Walls and gates have long characterized Beijing and one of the most heated debates in Beijing’s urban planning history was

87 Song Dong and Xiuzhen, Song Dong & Yin Xiuzhen, 9. 88 Ibid. 89 From the Mongolian gudum, used in the Yuan dynasty. “Hu Tong,” Hanyu Da Ci Dian (Shanghai: Hanyu da ci dian chu bian she, 1994 1988), s.v. hutong. 90 “Introduction of The Colours: The Great Wall Grey.” Beijing Olympic website: http://en.beijing2008.cn/43/71/article211987143.shtml. English grammatically corrected above. For a discussion on how color and city branding are interrelated see Stephanie Donald, Tourism and the Branded City: Film and Identity on the Pacific Rim (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 126. 96

91 what to do with the city’s walls after the Communist takeover. The scale of the walls is such that they loom over the viewer and even in the vast gallery space of 22,000ft2, the walls are imposing. The walls are connected on one side to creating a three-sided rectangle inside of which is the trapped tricycle (fig. 3.21). The initial confrontation between the viewer and the walls recall early impressions of Beijing such as Oswald Sirén’s The Walls and Gates of Pékin. Sirén begins his book with the following impressionistic description of Chinese cities:

Walls, walls, and yet again walls form, so to say, the skeleton or framework of every Chinese city. They surround it, they divide it into lots and compounds, and they mark more than any other structures the common basic features of these Chinese 92 communities.

According to Sirén, in order to comprehend Chinese city structure one must first begin with the walls that delineate and organize the space. The spatial organization based on walls and gates is 93 rooted in historical precedents such as the Zhou Li and the Kao Gong Ji. In contrast to the walls of the hutong that visually contained, but didn’t impede Song as he dripped water in A Pot of Boiling Water, the walls in Hutong delimit the movement of both the tricycle and the viewer. There is no possibility of entering the space between the walls as the bike blocks entry and its axle is trapped rendering it immobile, unmovable, and useless (wu yong).

Song’s decision to use high windowless walls in the customary grey brick of Beijing immediately recalls the piece’s namesake—the hutongs of the old city. Hutong life is one of the unique aspects of Beijing. The narrow alleys were formed as courtyard houses were built along streets. Courtyard houses (四合院 si he yuan) are traditional houses that are bound on four sides with high, mostly windowless walls. Hutongs are the narrow spaces between opposing courtyards. Song was born and raised in a hutong, and even after becoming a recognized artist he continued to live in a hutong near Xi Si.

91 Liang Sicheng, Liang Sicheng Wen Ji, Di 1 ban (Beijing: Zhongguo jian zhu gong ye chu ban she, 1982). For an extended discussion of the competing plans for Beijing’s city walls see Wang Jun, Cheng Ji (Beijing: Sheng huo, du shu, xin zhi san lian shu dian, 2003). 92 Osvald Sirén, The Walls and Gates of Peking; Researches and Impressions (London: J. Lane, 1924), 1. 93 Zheng and Huang, Zhou Li. Dai Wusan, Kao Gong Ji Tu Shuo (Kao Gong Ji with Explainatory Images). 97

The trapped bicycle in the installation recalls the changes in street layouts in contemporary Beijing. Small man-powered vehicles such as this tricycle are often the only vehicles that can penetrate the narrow winding hutongs of Beijing. While Song exaggerates the narrowness of this hutong to emphasize that the tricycle is hopelessly trapped, yet some of Beijing’s hutongs are barely wider. As discussed earlier, the building of large east-west arteries have been the focus of Beijing’s urban plans since the beginning of the Reform and Opening Up. This is another way that Beijingers’ movements in the city have been re-ritualized, shifting from historical precedents that favored security, ritual, and the central position of the emperor meant that wide thoroughfares running east west were the exception in Beijing. In 1985 when this map detailing the Master Plan for Beijing was published only three thoroughfares cross the city unimpeded (fig. 94 3.22). By locking inhabitants of the city into specific patterns of movement, state control and 95 protection were enacted on a daily basis by citizens. The lack of major east-west thoroughfares 96 minimized lateral movement in the city similar to unidirectional tricycle in Hutong.

Maps of Republican era Beijing reveal how numerous hutongs were in Beijing at that time (fig. 97 3.23). Despite protection of the inner city of Beijing, including many hutongs, the number of hutongs has diminished rapidly after the standing committee approved the master plan of Beijing in 1992. Scholar of historic Beijing Wang Jun estimates that “…China had 7,000 hutongs… in 1949 and 3,000 in the 1980s. Since the late 1990s they have vanished at a rate of around 600 a 98 year.” The Beijing Municipal government has designated areas of hutongs for preservation;

94 “Beijing Shi Qu Zong Ti Gui Hua Fang an (Beijing City Master Plan Proposal)” (Beijing, 1985). 95 For historical precedents urban planning in the service of state control see: Dai Wusan, Kao Gong Ji Tu Shuo (Kao Gong Ji with Explainatory Images); Zheng and Huang, Zhou Li. The prescriptions for correct city planning in the Zhou Li and the Kao Gong Ji limit the number of gates and streets in a city, making it easier to section off a city district if there was a threat to security. The PRC-era danwei system mimics this type of district level control. See David Bray, Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005); for the role of garbage removal in a danwei see E. M. Bjorklund, “The Danwei: Socio-Spatial Characteristics of Work Units in China’s Urban Society,” Economic Geography 62, no. 1 (January 1, 1986): 25. 96 For a discussion of the historical genealogy of street level control see Gu Chaolin and et al., Zhongguo Da Cheng Shi Bian Yuan Qu Yan Jiu (Beijing: Ke xue chu ban she, 1995), 85. esp. figs. 5-2. 97 Hou Renzhi, Beijing Li Shi Di Tu Ji (Beijing Historical Atlas) (Beijing: Beijing chu ban she, 1997), 59–60. 98 Tania Branigan, “Chinese Developers Demolish Home of Revered Architects,” The Guardian, January 30, 2012, sec. World news, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/30/chinese-developers-demolish-home-architect. 98

99 however, in practice even protected hutongs are not safe from being demolished. Beijing’s master plan states a goal for this planning period is for the preservation of hutongs, yet despite 100 this official rhetoric, hutongs are still bulldozed. For example, in 2012 during Spring Festival the courtyard home of Liang Sicheng was demolished, despite previously being within a 101 historically protected area of the city. Liang Sicheng, the son of Qing reformer and intellectual Liang Sichao, trained as an architect at the University of Pennsylvania and founded 102 and taught at the Tsing Hua school of architecture. He was commissioned to design a plan for Beijing at the founding of the PRC. In his plan, the so-called Liang-Chen plan, he proposed that in order to protect Beijing’s historical center, a new Communist center be built to the west of the 103 city. Liang’s plan may have avoided the real estate fervor that has gripped central Beijing since the beginning of the reform era. Once the government decided not to build a new center and to retrofit Tian’anmen and Zhonghainan for government buildings, the fate of historic Beijing was sealed, making future alterations a foregone conclusion as the government 104 necessarily expanded.

99 For NGO-work being done to protect and ensure that protection is enforced see the work being done at: Beijing wen hua yi chan bao hu zhong xin. http://www.bjchp.org/. 100 For policies related to protecting hutongs see Beijing Shi cheng shi gui hua she ji yan jiu yuan, ed., Beijing Cheng Shi Zong Ti Gui Hua: 1991 - 2010 (Beijing: Beijing Shi cheng shi gui hua she ji yan jiu yuan, 1992), 34-35. See chapter two section ‘Widening’ for a discussion of the cinematic renderings of hutong demolition. 101 Zhan Hao, “Liang Sicheng Gu Ju Bei Chai Yin Re Yi Wang You Tan Fu ‘Wei Xiu Xing Chai Chu,’” Xin Wen Wan Bao, Jing Hua Wang, January 29, 2012, http://news.jinghua.cn/351/c/201201/29/n3614700.shtml. The fact that the work was done during the Spring Festival indicates that the developers were hoping to avoid media coverage. 102 Some of Liang Sicheng’s most famous works include: Jie Li, Ying Zao Fa Shi Zhu Shi (Chinese Building Manual), ed. Liang Sicheng, Di 1 ban (Beijing: Zhongguo jian zhu gong ye chu ban she, 1983); Liang Sicheng, Ming Jia Yan Zhong De Beijing Cheng, Di 1 ban (Beijing Shi: Wen hua yi shu chu ban she, 2007); Liang Sicheng, Liang Sicheng Wen Ji (Collected Writings of LIang Sicheng); Si Cheng Liang, A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture: A Study of the Development of Its Structural System and the Evolution of Its Types, ed. Wilma Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). For a recent CCTV documentary on Liang and his first wife see: Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin (http://cctv.cntv.cn/lm/journeysintime/special/liangsicheng_linhuiyin/). A brief list of his works see: http://jishi.cntv.cn/program/lianglin/lianglinft/index.shtml 103 Zhan Hao, “Liang Sicheng Gu Ju Bei Chai Yin Re Yi Wang You Tan Fu ‘Wei Xiu Xing Chai Chu.’” In an ironic twist, the advertisements displayed on the webpage of the article are for recycling companies who promise top dollar for recycling building goods (bricks, pipes, construction site waste) demonstrating the intimate nature of preservation and recycling—while the article discusses the loss of the historic home of Liang, the ads that make the money for the news outlet are for the left over goods after a house is demolished. 104 Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing; Braester, Painting the City Red. 99

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The post-1978 real estate reforms fundamentally altered Beijing’s structure, appearance, and composition. Anne Marie Broudehoux discusses how central Beijing, and in particular 105 Wangfujing Street, changed because of the real estate reforms. The desire to protect historical courtyard houses and hutongs of central Beijing often is in direct conflict with developers’ 106 desires. This is the bind of Beijing inside the second ring road—the pressure to preserve historic Beijing is outweighed by the desire to make money, improve transit, and to improve 107 living conditions. The tricycle pinioned between two walls in Hutong is a metaphor for the historical center of Beijing. The walls, symbolizing the pressure of real estate developers to squeeze out hutong locking the tricycle into a delimited space—a space there is no escape from. The slits through which the axle protrudes allow for one rotation forward or back, but no meaningful motion is possible. The attempt to preserve historic hutongs have been similarly stymied for example the area around the Drum and Bell tower was to be protected, but has 108 recently seen widespread demolition and relocation. To move forward at the insistence that demolition and relocation is ‘progress’ is to ensure destruction of the hutongs in the name of profit, while to move backward relegates inhabitants to overcrowding due to lack of building during the Cultural Revolution. In a RMHB article from August 1989 the juxtaposition of life before relocation in the hutong to the life in new high-rise apartments is incomparable (fig.

105 Anne Marie Broudehoux, The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing (New York ; London, 2004). 106 For an extended discussion of the various forces at work in development transactions in contemporary Beijing see Fang Ke, Dang Dai Beijing Jiu Cheng Geng Xin (Beijing: Zhong guo jian zhu gong ye chu ban she, 2000). 107 An extension of subway line 8 started for the Olympics in 2008 will inscribe a subterranean axis from the Olympic green to the north gate of the Forbidden City. This has necessitated excavation of some of the oldest parts of Beijing close to the Drum and Bell towers. In terms of improving living conditions in the hutongs, many lack central plumbing and rely on communal toilets and bathhouses. Also plaguing courtyard houses that make up the hutongs is the overcrowding and subdividing that was rampant during the Cultural Revolution. Courtyards that once housed a single family were given over to multiple families to combat the lack of new building during this time of upheaval. Mike Davis has gone so far as to describe central Beijing as a slum citing the overcrowding and lack of facilities. Davis, Planet of Slums. 108 For the contradictory policies see the protection document, Beijing Cheng Gui Hua Wei Yuan Hui, “Beijing Zong Ti Gui Hua, Di Qi Zhang Li Shi Wen Hua Ming Cheng Bao Hu,” 2005; and the rationale for clearing this same area after 2007: Official Website of the Beijing Government, “Beijing Clearing Drum and Bell Towers’ Shaky Homes,” eBeijing, accessed February 8, 2013, http://www.ebeijing.gov.cn/BeijingInformation/BeijingNewsUpdate/t1291276.htm. 100

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109 3.24). The grey walls of the hutongs contrast sharply with the modern high-rises with the lush greenery and lakes pictured in full-color. The inconveniences such as shared water taps are highlighted on the second full page spread as compared to the individual kitchens in the new high-rises. The article concludes with how the government is working to increase the average square footage person in Beijing. What is occluded in this article is while moving to the outskirts of the city increases a person’s square-footage, it doesn’t mention the methods of compensation or how single-story dwellings common in hutongs are not as profitable to 110 developers as multi-story compounds. In 1998-1999 the price per square foot for buildings 111 within the second ring road was reported as 8277.1 yuan per square meter. The walls of Song’s Hutong press in against the tricycle trapping it between the competing forces of urbanization and historical preservation.

In Hutong Song Dong sandwiches a tricycle between two high walls to investigate the relationship between hutongs and Beijing’s evolving urban plans. The two walls can be read as a metonym for all the hutongs of Beijing—those still intact and those destroyed. Song’s use of the tricycle, a key element in Beijing’s semi-regulated recycling trade, is a pointed testimony to the changes in the city’s form and the systems that regulate waste removal. As the city continues to transform the historic center from hutongs composed of single story courtyards to high-rise apartment complexes will tricycles be able to keep up with the increased garbage and recycling production? Perhaps the trapped bike of Hutong offers a glimpse of what is to come, no longer able to rove the streets of Beijing at will, the tricycle can only move one pedal rotation forward or backward. The curatorial statement of ‘Beijing Voice’ echoes concerns with China’s pace of development: “The rapid speed of development has created a Chinese society without a means 112 to let go of this pace, a country that can be described as an “impatient country.” The

109 Sun Yifu “Beijingren de Zhu Fang” Ren Ming Hua Bao August 1989. 110 Fang Ke, Dang Dai Beijing Jiu Cheng Geng Xin: Contemporary Conservation in the Inner City of Beijing. 111 Meng Xiaosu, Mo Tianquan, and Zhang Jing, Beijing Fang Di Chan Nian Jian (1998-1999) (Beijing Real Estate Almanac 1998-1999) (Beijing Shi: Zhongguo ji hua chu ban she, 1998), 231. 112 While the text is available in both Chinese in English, my translation into English differs slightly. Original text: 超速的发展模式，让中国社会成为无法放缓节奏的“急之国.” “Chao su de fa zhan mo shi, rang Zhongguo she hui cheng wei wu fa fang huan jie zou de ‘zi zhi guo.’” 101

102 impatience mentioned in the curatorial statement is stymied in Hutong; the trapped tricycle can only move slightly. The lack of movement is enforced by the walls and stands in stark contrast to the speed of development outside of the gallery walls.

The discourse around Beijing’s rapid urbanization and the concurrent demolition is a fruitful 113 topic for many artists and scholars. On particularly apt comparative example to Hutong, is film director Chen Kaige’s short 100 Flowers Hidden Deep, in which he examines the psychological trauma associated with the urban development forces of demolition and relocation 114 (拆迁 chai qian ). The short opens with movers bringing furniture into a new apartment building with people setting off firecrackers for good luck. In the second shot a man wearing children’s an quan yellow cap inquiring if the movers will help him to move his stuff from a hutong to the new location. He introduces himself as Mr. Feng, a homonym for the word crazy (feng 疯 lit. crazy), suggesting to the viewer that his slightly strange dress and manner of speaking belie deeper psychological issues. Chen Kaige’s early insertion of the question of Mr. Feng’s sanity gestures to the trauma many people experienced during relocation from hutongs to new high-rise apartments. Having described where the house is using vernacular landmarks, Mr. Feng and the movers head to his house. As the movers and Feng drive past glittering new high- 115 rise buildings, the raised highways disorient the young man. He comments that he doesn’t know where he is and one of the movers replies that only native Beijingers get lost in Beijing 116 today. Eventually, Feng navigates the movers to his ‘home.’ In actuality it is a demolition site

113 For key examples see: Robin Visser, “Spaces of Disappearance: Aesthetic Responses to Contemporary Beijing City Planning,” Journal of Contemporary China 13, no. 39 (2004): 277–310; Robin Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Braester, Painting the City Red; Dongping. Yang, Cheng Shi Ji Feng: Beijing He Shanghai De Wen Hua Jing Shen (Beijing Shi: Xin xing chu ban she, 2006); Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing. Artists, among others, dealing with demolition include, Ou Ning and Cao Fei Mei Shi Jie, Zhang Dali AK-47 Demolition Series, and Wang Jinsong 100 Signs of Demolition. 114 Chen Kai-ge’s short is part of a two part series of ten minute long shorts produced by Nicolas McClintock called The Trumpet. Aki Kaurismäki et al., Ten minutes older. The Trumpet (Panorama Entertainment, 2004). 115 In fact, the shots of the drive are disjunctive and present an impossible route. The camera cuts from various parts of Beijing that are physically distant from each other: from the east third ring road, to the south-east corner where the China World Trade tower comes into view. Chen’s cuts disorient the viewer, even a native Beijinger, in a similar way to Mr. Feng’s own disorientation and inability to navigate the new Beijing. See also Dezi the taxi driver in I Love Beijing (dir. Ning Ying) who finds himself in unknown corners of Beijing. 116 Chen Kaige, “100 Flowers Hidden Deep” in Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet Video, 2002, sec. 2:23. 102

103 with only a tree marking where the house once was. In a moment of realization of Mr. Feng’s state of mind and the trauma that the demolition has caused, the movers agree to play along and mime moving Mr. Feng’s possessions. The spell is broken when one of the movers “drops” a priceless vase sending Mr. Feng into a fit of tears and no longer able to see the old house. Everyone prepares to head back to the new apartment, but the truck becomes stuck. When the movers investigate they find a bell that used to hang on the eves of Mr. Feng’s house. This bell enchants the scene at which point the film switches to a computer rendering that rebuilds the old house, complete with the bell, and Mr. Feng’s mental image of the house magically reappears to the movers and the viewer. The computer rendering is reminiscent of an architect’s blueprint and animation done using AutoCAD software, but this image is quickly destabilized and replaced by an ink wash of the courtyard that recall ink and brush paintings such as Wu Guanzhong’s Former Residence of Qiu Jin (1988) in the simplicity and abstraction of the forms, 117 emphasis on the walls and gates, and washy application of ink. While the house and surrounding hutongs are demolished and gone, the disjunctive animation sequence underscores that the memory of the house can’t be so easily packed up and carted away, as it lives on in Mr. 118 Feng’s mind. In Chen’s short Mr. Feng is out of place in the move to the new apartment tower, displaced both physically and mentally. Mr. Feng’s insistence on his home still being there is 119 indicative of the psychological trauma associated with demolition and relocation policies. The word feng glosses the exact condition of Mr. Feng’s state of mind, however, it also recalls the psychological issues that Zhao dealt with in her hoarding. The shifts from a life of scarcity to one of abundance proves to be too much for Zhao to manage as does the shift from hutong life to apartment tower living as is the case with Mr. Feng. Exposing the unseen and often unacknowledged damage that urban development and economic reforms is a concern of both Song and Chen’s works. Ultimately, Zhao and Mr. Feng are rendered out of place in contemporary Beijing and marginalized because of their inability to give up a way of life that is

117 Note a similar AutoCAD aesthetic used on the cover of Wang Jun, Cheng Ji. 118 Chen Kaige, “100 Flowers Hidden Deep.” 119 For scholarship that deals with trauma and demolition see for example Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008); Wu Hung, ed., Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art (Chicago, IL: Smart Museum Of Art, 2008); and Braester, Painting the City Red. 103

104 tied to the past. By emphasizing the out-of-placeness of people and things 100 Flowers Hidden Deep, Waste Not, and Hutong bring to the fore issues surrounding the urban transformation of Beijing.

Another way that Song exemplifies the out-of-placeness in Hutong is by playing with scale. In chapter one I discussed the widening of roads as it relates to the increased vehicular traffic and the speed of that traffic in Beijing. Conterminously with more motorized traffic on the roads, tricycles have become displaced by the faster and larger vehicles. The two themes of this chapter—things out of place and chapter one—road building are brought together in a cartoon 120 produced for the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau (fig. 3.25). The title of the cartoon is Stumbling Block (Lan Lu Hu) setting the tone for the negative connotation for the activities depicted in the cartoon. The typical street is tree lined with telephone booths and garbage bins along the left side. A female pedestrian with furrowed brows pushes a stroller around the bottleneck in the street. Seven recycling peddlers busily buying back newspapers, bottles, and old windows form this bottleneck, or stumbling block. The same visual lexicon seen in the RMHB article on the recyclers is deployed here; at the bottom left of the cartoon a man weighs newspapers that are bound together while on the ground glass bottles and tin cans are separated from each other indicating two different streams of recycling. Rather than lauding the recyclers as part of China’s greening campaigns such as we saw in the RMHB article or the cartoon cited earlier, the message of this cartoon street side recycling is hindrance for the flow of traffic. The cross face of the woman with her stroller is mirrored in the anthropomorphized ‘face’ of the green car trying to squeeze through the gauntlet of recyclers. The narrowness of the street coupled with the numerous and busy traders is being pictured here as an impediment to the vehicle traffic. Moreover, the cartoon is posted on the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau’s website that indicates a particular bias towards keeping roads clear for vehicles rather than for the flatbed tricycles used by the peddlers in this cartoon. This cartoon illustrates how out of place and out of scale the tricycles have become in Beijing. The recyclers here, and in Song

120 Cartoon title: Lan Lu Hu (栏路虎). Image available under the propaganda section of the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau website, http://www.bjjtgl.gov.cn/uploadfile/manhua/027.jpg

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Dong’s piece are relegated to being a ‘stumbling block’ in the too narrow street, the too narrow hutong.

When tricycles are in a typical one-story hutong, they are to scale with the hutong walls; however, when roads are enlarged such as they have been in this image taken at Dong Shi Si Tiao in 2012, the scale of the road and buildings render the tricycle out of place, out of scale (fig. 3.26). The tricycle is toy-like in scale making it seem out of place, and out of step with the pace of motorized traffic. Compare the relationship in scale of a tricycle in a hutong versus the scalar differences of a tricycle on a six-lane road, the narrowness of a hutong envelopes a tricycle where as the intersection at Dong si shi tiao dwarfs the tricycle rendering it out of place. The tricycle in contemporary Beijing’s urban environment produces, like Zhao’s unsorted things, an anxiety that stems from a perceived out-of-placeness; a sense that something is out of step, not in an equivalent scale. Waste Not and Hutong both evoke a sense of out-of-placeness: in one the installation moves from out of place to order while the other moves the opposite way. Where hutongs and tricycles were historically part of Beijing, because of the rapid urbanization in the city these spaces and things are becoming out of place where they once were part of the place. It is the vernacular material traces in Waste Not and Hutong that demonstrate an intolerance of things out of place in contemporary Beijing. In the case of Zhao, her thrifty nature was out of place in a city of rampant consumerism where new goods are readily available and the allure of late capitalism derives its enchantment from constant consumption and rejection of old goods. In the case of Hutong the miniature hutong Song created, it is out of place in a city plagued by real estate speculation and as it squeezes the tricycle between its two walls the visual metaphor created is that hutongs and tricycles are out of place in contemporary Beijing. The quality of being out of place is a theme that Song returns to often in his practice and this via out-of- placeness that opens a space of critique in which he discusses Beijing’s changes.

Garbage finds its Place

In this final section I investigate how garbage finds its place in Song Dong’s recent commission for documenta(13). For the exhibition he created hillocks of household and construction garbage cloaked in weeds and wildflowers and nestled neon characters in the mounds (Doing Nothing

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121 Garden, fig. 3.27). Even without the knowledge of the hillocks’ composition, they seem immediately out of place on the closely cropped manicured formal lawn of Karlsaue Park. The public park features a wide bowling alley flat lawn with the neo-classical Orangerie standing at one end, and strictly linear radial canals spiking off at the opposite end. Song Dong’s installation sits dwarfed in the expanse of green almost blending in, but set apart by a ring of red tubing that encircles the mounds (3.28). Song’s garden is reminiscent of miniature tabletop gardens when seen from this aerial viewpoint. In other contexts Song explored using unconventional materials to suggest hills and mountains. For example his performance and video Eating Landscape 2005 he used fish heads to create mountain peaks and broccoli florets as trees. In both Eating Landscape and Doing Nothing Garden, Song toys with creating landscapes with unconventional things. Trained as a painter Song is aware of the weighty tradition of landscape painting in Chinese art history.

Song’s use of garbage and construction rubble in Kassel is evocative of landscape painting tradition. Comparative examples of contemporary artists drawing on landscape painting tradition include artists Yao Lu and Zhao Liang who rework and re-imagine contemporary landscape photography. They employ formal, compositional, and formatting elements from traditional ink painting in their photographic works. For example, Yao crops his digitally manipulated photographs mimicking the format of round fan paintings as in Ancient Spring time Fey (2006) 122 (fig. 3.29). He also includes red seals on the photographs that recall the artist and collector seals imprinted on ink paintings. Zhao’s photograph, Beijing Green, No. 2 2004-2007 (fig. 3.30) on the other hand, recalls the texturing brushwork of Fu Baoshi in his photograph of construction mounds. The vegetation along the manufactured ridgeline is recalls, for example, the patterns of brushwork of Fu Baoshi in his painting The Three Gorges. However, neither Song, Yao, nor Zhao are merely recalling or slavishly copying elements of historical landscape painting tradition

121 Song Dong, “dOCUMENTA (13),” accessed February 11, 2013, http://d13.documenta.de/#/research/research/view/doing-nothing-garden-2010-12; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, The Book of Books Catalogue Documenta (13) (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 534–39. The entire phrase reads: 不做白不做做了也白做白做也得做 Bu zuo bai bu zuo zuo le ye bai zuo bao zuo ye de zuo . 122 Yao Lu uses composite digital images overlaid to produce his images. The mounds consist of trash covered with green construction mesh meant to keep the dust down and conceal the trash. Email correspondence with gallery archivist John Weisenberger, Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NY. March 2013. 106

107 through in their works. All three of these artists aestheticize waste in order to highlight contemporary problems related to waste management. By including and highlighting contemporary scourges like desertification, air pollution, and rapid construction these artists inject an element of critique that updates the content of their images while drawing of historical forms. Using landscape as a topic in art in order to question state of affairs is a common trope in 123 ancient and contemporary Chinese art. Yao and Zhao weave together contemporary construction tools cranes and plastic green tarps to keep the dust down with compositions that recall Song dynasty landscape compositions. In Zhao’s photograph the low camera angle disorients the viewer creating a momentary slippage in which the green plastic mounds topped with weeds appears to be a lush mountainside. It is only when one’s eyes stumble upon the looming crane in the upper right hand corner that the fiction is revealed, and the mountainside returns to being a mound of construction rubble.

Yao’s landscape fictions are even more detailed and convincing at first glance. The pavilions and boats recall typical elements in landscape paintings and in painting manuals such as The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. When one compares Yao’s central mountain peak with an image of a ‘host-guest relationship among mountain peaks,’ or how the figures in the 124 boat at the upper left of the photograph, it recalls the ‘boats on a lake’ depicted in the manual. Yao’s ingenious inclusion of traditional landscape painting elements—mountains, boats, mist, and water—initially fools the viewer. Yao’s photographs are historical mediated in the use of his traditional lexicon of forms, however, the past and present collapses together when the fiction is revealed, when the mist is seen for what it really is, pollution.

Yao and Zhao’s works are intentional fictions. The artists play with viewers’ expectations of a traditional Chinese landscape image, instead forcing us to confront contemporary China’s changed landscape. During the preparations for the 2008 Olympics towns and villages were

123 Alfreda Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). See also my argument in chapter one regarding ‘hidden’ meanings in Ning Ying’s films. 124 Gai Wang, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, 1679-1701: A Facsimile of the 1887-1888 Shanghai Edition with the Text Translated from the Chinese and Edited by Mai-Mai Sze, Bollingen Series (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977); Wang Gai fl. 1677-1705, Jie Zi Yuan Hua Zhuan (Beijing: Ren min wen xue chu ban she, 1982). 107

108 frantic to ‘green-ify’ (绿化 lü hua) the environments. In an ironic and overly literal interpretation of this greenification, one town in Fumin County went as far as to paint a hillside green to cover up a barren hillside. Reported in the Capital Times (《都市时报》) in 2007 the town was 125 derided by the press for the poorly executed attempt at environmental improvement. In exchanging green paint for actual green foliage the town was accused of “putting on a green hat” a moniker pointing out the small effect that the paint actually had on the county’s environment.

The cloaking of garbage or rubble in the art of Zhao and Yao or in the case of Fumin, serves only a temporary solution to the rapid environmental decline in China. And the stopgap nature of solutions such as that at Fumin or in the case of the Asuwei landfill outside of Beijing, the use of 126 deodorant guns to stave off the smell of garbage. These misguided efforts fail to directly address the myriad of environmental issues facing contemporary China. And they fail in many ways because they are out of sight and in place. The perfuming of landfills while ludicrous, maintains a segregation of sorts—the garbage is transported to the landfill a logical place for discarded things. What becomes unbearable is when the stench of the garbage infiltrates non- discarded life. According to Julia Kristeva “[i]t is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, 127 positions, and rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” The smell of the garbage disturbs the system just as the photograph of Zhao with all of her belongings clogging up her apartment disturbed our sense of what was trash and what was cross-dressing as useful things. As borders and rules are broken Kristeva argues we become repulsed and experience the feeling of abjection. By cloaking piles of garbage in green tarps it hides in plain sight the things that are disrespectful of rules, yet even so misplaced garbage is fundamentally a thing out of place.

125 Li Nan, “Ti Da Shan Dai ‘lu Mao zi’ Yunnan Fumin Xian You Qi Lou Lu Shan Ti,” Dou Shi Shi Bao and Ren Min Ri Bao Wang, February 14, 2007, http://opinion.people.com.cn/GB/5400774.html. 126 Li Tianyu, “Asuwei Tian Mai Chang Gai Mo Zhi Chou,” Xin Jing Bao, March 23, 2010, http://news.bjnews.com.cn/2010/0323/66908.shtml. 127 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, 0th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 108

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The photographs of Zhao and Yao play with landscapes of waste to dupe viewers with initially beautiful landscapes, but in so doing also reveal a nefariousness born from the content of the landscapes. Rather than mist rising from a lake, the mist is in fact pollution clogging up the upper half of the photograph. The body of water in the background with the boat is revealed to be a dry riverbank in the foreground. What links Zhao and Yao’s photographs to Song’s garden installation is shared play with the material of waste. The artists disarm the viewer by displacing garbage from the landfill to the central theme of their works. To varying extents the presence of the garbage is revealed. For instance, the waste-landscape of Yao’s photograph the garbage is evident, whereas in Zhao’s photograph the green mat disguises the rubble. In the case of Doing Nothing Garden the composition of the mounds is a public secret as it appears on the sign installed by the garden to inform visitors of the artist, title, and date but because of the vegetation 128 covering the mounds, it goes mostly forgotten by visitors.

The green veiled construction waste landscapes of Zhao and Yao are two-dimensional and contained within the confines of the picture plane. In contrast, Song’s garden is a large-scale outdoor installation. The differences in medium—photograph versus installation—affect the viewer’s phenomenological experience with the work. In the case of Doing Nothing Garden as one walks around the mounts, the movement of the viewer causes the mounds to undulate and shift, animating the vistas (fig. 3.31). The interplay between the viewer and the environment creates a dynamic relationship. Not all of the characters are visible at once so that the viewer’s movement around the hillock both reveals and hides parts of the phrase. Moreover, the choice to use Chinese characters disenfranchises viewers to whom characters are unreadable. Ultimately, while Song urges viewers to ‘do nothing’ the conceptual work of the piece demands a high level of engagement and perhaps, frustration, because the viewer can’t simply ‘do nothing’ while examining the piece.

The linguistic struggle that the characters present is mirrored by a psychological struggle to come to terms with the composition of the garden. When documenta(13) opened, the hillocks were clothed in grass and wildflowers, however, underneath this bucolic garb were household and

128 Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). 109

110 construction waste. The cultural capital amassed at an international art fair such as documenta and the rejected base matter of the garden is dissonant. What ameliorates this disjuncture is the removal of each element of waste’s individual identity or as Douglas puts it “[s]o long as identity 129 is absent, rubbish is not dangerous.” Our inability to identify any individual piece of garbage creates a safe distance from which we recognize the garden as a work of art rather than a piece of refuse. In the case of Doing Nothing Garden, Song draws on the impersonal nature of the waste and its attendant lack of ‘identity’ in order to hide in plain sight a pile of garbage. This is a very different strategy than in Waste Not where he used the polar opposite approach to waste. In Waste Not, Zhao’s traumatic biography foregrounds each and every thing in the installation. This makes her things, in Douglas’ formulation, dangerous because they are “recognizable out of 130 place, a threat to good order… .” In the case of the Doing Nothing Garden, viewers are asked to not see the public secret that the garden is in fact composed of waste, on the other hand in Waste Not, viewers must see the garbage as an individual’s things and because the things still have an identity, they are threatening despite their careful classification and arrangement. Song’s two divergent strategies of exhibiting personal versus impersonal waste put consumption and elimination at the center of the works. In both of these approaches to waste it is out-of- placeness that links the works.

Section three article thirty-seven of the 2011 Beijing Municipal Ordinance on Household Waste states:

单位和个人应当按照生活垃圾分类管理责任人公示的时间、地点投放生活垃圾，不得随意丢弃、抛撒生活垃圾.

[A]ccordingly, it is work units and individuals who should promulgate who is responsible for household waste separation, times of operation, and where to put it. [People] must 131 dispose of household waste properly. Do not discard [or] throw away waste arbitrarily.

129 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 160. 130 Ibid. 131 Beijing Municipal Ordinance on Household Waste, Beijing shi shi zheng shi rong guan li wei yuan hui, “Beijing sheng huo la ji guan li tiao li.” Adopted in Beijing 11/18/2011 by the Standing Committee of Beijing Municipal People’s Congress during the 13th meeting, 28th session. 110

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Legally, as outlined in this ordinance, people must put garbage in its proper place. Shifting things out of their proper place, as Song Dong does, creates a tension with the official rhetoric of waste disposal. Waste is a mode and a material that make Song’s critique visible.

If we consider that historic representations of an orderly world represented things in their correct place, thereby confirming Confucian notions of order; and that these images were considered auspicious and sought after images, they stand in direct opposition to the logic of out-of- placeness I have charted in Song Dong’s engagement with waste-matter and secondhand 132 objects. At times Song draws on and highlights the identity of the waste, while at other times, such as Hutong and Doing Nothing Garden; he focuses on the anonymity of the waste. This tactic of named versus unnamed waste creates a space of critique in which viewers confront the basic human nature of waste creation and the concomitant desire to rid oneself of waste. The anxiety felt when confronted with garbage out of place is assuaged in the careful classification and organization of Waste Not, but resurfaces in Hutong because of the tricycle is out-of-place, trapped in the impossibly narrow hutong. Lastly, a garden now flourishes on top of the mound of waste in Doing Nothing Garden reading as more garden than waste, thus stabilizing viewers’ ability to classify the installation. Instead of feeling repulsion at a pile of garbage in the midst of an art exhibit, Doing Nothing Garden presents comprehensible hillocks of green to viewers. Below the surface lurk piles of garbage, however despite knowing this because we can’t assign specific identities to the waste—we can’t see specific distinct pieces of trash—thereby, 133 ameliorating the revulsion of it as garbage.

Conclusion

Issues surrounding contemporary Beijing’s solid waste disposal, as depicted in Wang Jiuliang’s photographs, reveal the immediate need to reform how waste is dealt with in the city. Greening campaigns that emphasize recapturing resources indicate a commitment to altering social behaviors, however, the tensions between economic growth and ecological preservation are

132 For a discussion of paintings that were auspicious for having things ‘in the right place’ see Timon Screech, Obtaining Images: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2012), 44. 133 Douglas, Purity and Danger. 111

112 mounting. I scrutinized Song Dong’s practice as a meditation on things being in or out of place revealing Beijing municipal campaigns designed to inculcate citizens in recycling sorting. While Song Dong’s works that I have discussed do not overtly deal with environmental issues, the structure and conceptual frameworks visible in the works demonstrate Song’s continuing engagement with his hometown. Moreover, by displaying his mother’s mounds of things that were stockpiled as insurance against future disasters, viewers see what happens when the circuits of consumption are blocked, creating a surplus of things meant only to be kept for a short period of time.

Single use plastic bottles and bags represent some of the most persistent ecological problems. They continue to leach chemicals after they are discarded and are rarely captured for recycling. The stabilization of meanings that I have discussed in my analysis of Waste Not when the objects are organized in the gallery, they are transmuted from garbage to a collection; however, at the same time the persistent materiality and the sheer quantity of the objects should also be considered a warning sign for contemporary modes of consumption. While few of us turn to hoarding as a coping mechanism, I would venture to say we would all be shocked if we were to keep even a day’s worth of trash we produce. The excesses of contemporary consumption are reminiscent of the city of Leonia in Italo Cavino’s Invisible Cities, a city whose passion is “the 134 joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.” Yet as a result of this ‘joy of expelling’ Leonia is constantly expanding, pushing waste outward—recalling Wang Min’an’s description of cities and waste—the imaginary city surrounding itself with the 135 effluence that will eventually destroy the city. The excesses of consumption threatening the imaginary city of Leonia are all too common today as landfills reach full capacity, drinking water is polluted, and natural resources are depleted. Zhao’s underlying ethos and mentality of “waste not, want not” offers a welcome change to contemporary society’s incessant consumption.

The three installations I’ve discussed in this chapter force viewers to confront the uncomfortable realities associated with late capitalist accumulation by vacillating between the poles of placed

134 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1st ed (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1974), 116. Curator Ou Ning has also linked the work of Song Dong to Calvino’s imagined city of waste expulsion, the text however is no longer accessible online as of writing. 135 Wang Min’an, “On Rubbish.” 112

113 and displaced things. At one end of the spectrum, Song Dong investigates the organizing of vernacular items common in people’s lives; he sorts and stabilizes their meanings as things not trash, at the opposite end, he disorganizes and displaces things to produce feelings of anxiety at trash masquerading as art as is the case in the Doing Nothing Garden. Song presents viewers with an unofficial display waste sorting that in its vastly different aesthetic than state produced images of recycling. The distance between these representations is revealing when compared with each other creating a space of critique. As the maps produced by Wang Jiuliang of Beijing’s illegal dumpsites demonstrate, the infrastructure for waste removal is not to keep pace with consumption rates in Beijing. Moreover, the greenwashing of recycling creates the appearance that higher rates of recycling are the magic answer to ecological issues facing China. The irony of many recycling programs, particularly those that import materials from abroad, is that recovery while generating reusable end products, in the process also produces toxic bi- products. Just as grass cloaks the Doing Nothing Garden masking the deeper reality of the building materials beneath, recycling is not without hidden costs. The oblique critique in Song’s greenwashed grass garden is that hidden dangers of out of place material lurk just out of sight.

I began this chapter with a vignette of two recyclers who had migrated to Beijing and found work in the city. In the following chapter I chart the importance of the human bodies at work building the roads and sorting the trash of in Beijing. This human infrastructure is so critical, yet all too often so overlooked in discussions of urbanization. In particular, I address the contested relationship between artists and migrant workers in terms of exploitation within artistic practices.

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0.3 A Failed Infrastructural PR Campaign Interlude On June 26th 2011 a photo of three officials from Huili county in Sichuan inspecting a road was 1 published on the local government’s website (0.3). The photo was intended as a public relations campaign indicating the commitment of the officials to improving local road infrastructure. The efficacy of government being concretized by the smooth, wide, black asphalt road spreading out beneath the men’s feet; except the photo was so obviously photoshopped. Netizens quickly noted the poor quality of the composite image, and began mocking the photo verbally and with their own renditions of the image in increasingly funny and impossible and bawdy scenarios.

What is particularly striking about this otherwise unremarkable photoshopped image is the way the new road is performatively and subjectively positioned in the image. The officials did in fact inspect a road, but the photographer determined that the actual road, which appears to be a concrete surface because of the grooves and the beige coloring, wasn’t worthy of appearing in the photograph. Instead an asphalt road surface is substituted. Subsequently, I contend that while intestinally or not the photoshopped image reiterates narratives of paved road surfaces as being linked to progress. The road’s completion and the subsequent inspection by the government are deployed in the image to present to citizens notions of progress and efficacy—in short effective statecraft. The officials no doubt inspected this road knowing that photographs of their visit would be taken and could then be used to promulgate the message of a completed road, and the metaphorical message of new links now made possible because of the road. Furthermore, the officials are taking credit for the finishing of the road by ‘inspecting’ it, thus 2 associating their power with a completed infrastructure project.

1 The photo appeared on the county government webpage, but was quickly removed as the meme picked up traction. For a cached version see “Floating Chinese Government Officials Inspect New Road – chinaSMACK,” accessed February 17, 2016, http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/pictures/floating-chinese-government-officials-stun- netizens.html; For a synopsis of the event see Peter Walker, “Chinese Faked Photograph Leaves Officials on Street of Shame,” The Guardian, June 29, 2011, sec. World news, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/29/chinese-county-ridicule-doctored-photograph. 2 Inspections, inspection tours, and visual records created to commemorate them have a long history in Chinese statecraft. For instance Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Inspection Tours taken to solidify his reform legacy see “Feng Yun Ji Zhuang Zhi Deng Xiaoping Tong Zhi Xun Shi Nan Fang Ji Shi,” Ren Min Hua Bao, 1992. For an interpretation of the policital rationale for such an undertaking see Zhao, “Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour.” 114

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The outcome of the dissemination this image was, however, very different than the county government intended. How digital imaging technologies—in the form of image manipulation software—functions to reveal the mendacity of public relations image and to underscore viewers’ increasing savvy and skepticism when viewing digitally produced media. The obvious manipulation of the image stands in contrast to a majority of mass media images that viewers consume, passively or actively, that are also altered. While most viewers assume some amount of airbrushing and image manipulation, the blatant tampering with of this image underscored two things, one was the use of such techniques by government agencies, and the second was the reaction to the poor quality of the photoshopping. The comments on the image and the images produced in response focus mostly on the lack of skill in the use of photoshop, not the use of the software in the first place. For instance, many of remixed composite images take the three officials and put them in increasingly humorous and ridiculous settings, are skillful productions. The gripe that a majority of the viewers seemed to have with the image was that it was badly made, not that it was done in the first place.

Digitally manipulated images are a fact of contemporary viewership; however, figure 0.3 presents a unique case study of the power of the Internet to disseminate images widely, but also shows us how images can quickly exceed their original contexts and purposes. This image purports to offer a snapshot into a successful project’s completion, a moment capturing a triumph of statecraft and a public relations photo-op. Yet, unlike Beijing 2015 or the hoarding image, it is an image of an actual physical road. But ultimately, it isn’t. While the officials did see and inspect it, it is not the road depicted in figure 0.3. Netizens called this image to account, and in so doing demonstrated how digital images, when poorly created, can quickly reveal images’ deceit. The co-opting and use of digital media is pervasive, and artists and government’s adeptly use the tools of social media. Parsing the explicit narratives and the implied meanings of images requires skillful looking and consumption of the myriad of images seen daily.

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4 Human Infrastructure: what holds it all up

The worker is a perennial topic for artists in China, one that is tightly coupled with the Communist Revolution, ideological culture work, statecraft, and the nation building projects of 1 the Maoist era (1949-1976). Since the economic and social reforms of the late 1970s, artists have fixated on the migrant worker as form, material, and concept. The figure of the migrant worker is often used as a symbolic shortcut in the domestic and international media as a short 2 hand for China’s rapid urban transformation. The representation of migrant workers has become an index of urbanization. Unpicking the relationships between representation of migrant workers and the lived realities of this population group is fundamental to understanding why this population continues to represent the speed of China’s urbanization (often cast as a positive thing by the government) while at the same time to live in a state of exception and exclusion within the same spaces they build and inhabit.

It is no longer clear how to represent a worker or even who constitutes a worker. It seemed clear enough in Mao’s famous 1942 decree that art should serve the people, and as a result, artists 3 began glorifying the revolutionary triumvirate of worker, peasant, and soldier. According to Stephanie Donald, workers were “part of the triumvirate of red class excellence, gong nong bing 4 (workers, peasant-farmers, soldiers). Poster art revered them.” The reverence and status of the worker in art making began to come to an end following the economic and social reforms begun in the late 1970s.

1 Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979; Julia Frances Andrews, A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998). 2 In this chapter I focus specifically on the body of the migrant worker in various media. For studies of the body in contemporary Chinese performance art and the critical responses to performance art involving the body that fall outside of my focus see: Silvia Fok, Life and Death: Art and the Body in Contemporary China (Bristol: Intellect, 2013); Thomas J. Berghuis, Performance Art in China (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2006); Chen Lvsheng, “Zou Huo Ru Gui de Qian Wei Yi Shu,” Meishu, no. 4 (2001): 26–29. For the first image of performance art in the Chinese journal Meishu (Art) see the photograph of Song Yonghong and Song Yongping’s 1986 performance; “Meishu,” Meishu 2 (1987): 34. 3 Mao Zedong, Zai Yan’an Wen Yi Zuo Tan Hui Shang de Jiang Hua (Talks at the Yan’an forum on literature and art) (Beijing: Ren min chu ban she, 1967). 4 Stephanie Donald, “Beijing Time, Black Snow and Magnificent Chaoyang: Sociality, Markets and Temporal Shift in China’s Capital,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 7–8 (December 1, 2011): 335. For examples of posters available online see chineseposters.net 116

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Beijing’s urban plans have long taken into account the size of the city’s population as well as 5 passing policies in order to curtail unchecked population growth. Now in the current postsocialist moment of urban planning and market reforms, the migrant population is a necessary aspect of urbanization and the state’s ability to maintain the rapid rate of urban growth. In terms of governmentality and statecraft, the uneasy and at times outright illegal existence of migrants 6 underscores how difficult the state finds this category of the population. Migrants require access to social services, housing, and education, and many have become more permanent urban dwellers, yet government policies remain unclear on how contemporary society will deal with migrant worker issues.

In this chapter I focus on works by contemporary artists that represent the figure of the migrant worker, (nong min gong 农民工) a more specific category of ‘worker,’ one that signals the positionality of only having one’s labor to sell and who is displaced from the countryside (nong cun 农村). The nongmingong is marked linguistically and conceptually as a migrant who must 7 rely on his or her ability to labor in order to survive. I trace the figure of the nongmingong in both art and in public spaces. The nongmingong are common in Beijing, yet despite their high visibility, they are often overlooked and relegated to an invisibility that is problematic for this 8 marginalized segment of the population. These interventions range from insightful modes of critique to those that are exploitative and problematic, collapsing at the worst of times into what

5 Tong Zheng and Zhou Yongyuan, Jian Guo Yi Lai de Beijing Cheng Shi Jian She (Building Beijing after the founding of the PRC), 183. 6 Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 7 Clara Kwan Lee, Against the Law (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2007), 195–97. 8 The issues of mass internal migration further complicate the difficulty in defining who is a worker in post 1978 China. I discuss the changes in this category in depth below, but throughout the article to signal my focus on manual labour, I use the term nongmingong. This term is used by Premiere Wen Jiabao in February 2003 and serves as an epigraph for the UNESCO project “Together with Migrants” an exhibition I discuss in detail below: UNESCO, Women Zai Yi Qi (Together with Migrants) (Chengdu: UNESCO, 2004), 8. In following Wen’s terminology, in order to better represent the unique positionality of nongminggong in contemporary Chinese society, and signal the heavily coded nature of all three of these characters, hereafter, I use the pinyin without the English. See Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market; Zhang, Li, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 5. 117

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9 artist Allan Sekula termed ‘the find-a-bum-school of concerned photography.’ The conceptual range of this trend further reflects larger issues in contemporary Chinese society and its uneasy relationship with the migrant worker, both as a source of labor and as individual citizens.

Modern workers

The manual worker’s social position began, post 1978, to change. Previously a fixture of urban centers was a heroic worker, key to the revolution, but was now instead transformed to a semi- tolerated outsider (外地人 wai di ren). The 1977 economic and political transition that ushered Deng Xiaoping to power created new opportunities for artists, but also made the worker a difficult subject to address in art. The evolution of nongmingong that emerges directly as a response to China’s economic and urbanization policies is used to show how artists have engaged with, re-categorized, and re-conceptualized the representation of the nongmingong along side the shifting definitions in contemporary China.

Luo Zhongli’s huge oil painting Father 父亲 (1980) polarized the Chinese art world despite being selected for inclusion in a national art exhibition demonstrating how a seemingly Mao approved subject—the worker-peasant—can elicit a range of reposes. Articles and responses in 10 the art journal Meishu attest to the artistic community’s divergent reactions to the painting. The large scale, close up of a man’s face captured in great detail the hard life of peasants. Often compared stylistically and compositionally to the work of American photo realist painter Chuck Close, Father presented viewers a radically different way of imagining the life of the revolutionary peasant-worker. However, ideologically, the painting seems to work within the framework of Maoist thought—lauding and elevating the lowly worker-farmer to the status of leader or icon. Yet, as the government pushed for the Four Modernizations and Reforms and Opening Up, Father seemed to be decidedly neither modern nor backward according to critics—

9 Allan Sekula, Dismal Science: Photo Works, 1972-1996 (Normal: University Galleries, 1999). 10 Zhao Zhaokan, “Qing Nian You Hua Gong Zuo Zhe Chuang Zuo Zuo Tan Hui Zai Beijing Zhao Kai,” Meishu 9 (1981): 44; Shao Yangde, “Zai Tan Dui ‘Fu Qin’ Zhe Fu Hua de Ping Jia—cong Dian Xing Yi Yi Tan Qi Yu Shao Da Zhen Tong Zhi Shang Que (Another Discussion of the Painting Father – an Evaluation Starting from [the Painting’s] Typical Significance, a Discussion with Comrade Shao Dazhen),” Meishu, no. 4 (1982): 43–46; Wang Gang, “‘Fu Qin’ yu ‘Gao Da Quan’ (Father and ‘Gaodaquan’ [The Image of the Char- Acter of a Perfect Person – Noble, Mighty, Comprehensive – Created during the Cultural Revolution]),” Meishu, no. 1 (1982). 118

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11 despite the modern index of the ballpoint pen behind his ear. Father is both the beginning of a genealogy of antagonism as it relates to representations of workers, and it sets the contested stage 12 for the next forty years of artistic engagement with nongmingong subjects.

In many ways Father presages the discussions and critiques of works by Zhu Fadong (朱发东 b. 1960), Zhang Huan (张洹 b. 1965), Song Dong, Wang Jin (王晉 b. 1962), and Lu Hao I’m pursuing in this chapter. The fraught relationship between artists and the subject of how (and if) to represent workers is my main concern; in so doing I argue that the particular category of nongmingong in contemporary Beijing vacillates between high visibility and invisibility in the urban environment. The new spaces of spectacle are predicated on the bodies of nongmingong, but who remain segmented from the lived spaces of the city. They are concealed behind tall 13 construction walls, so-called ‘hoardings’ (4.1), in dormitories and canteens that separate them from the inhabitants of the city, and temporally, they are also obscured from the urban visual field due to the 24-hour work cycles during which they spend the day sleeping and are absent from the streets. Despite being the workforce that enables the skyline of Beijing to be punctuated by world renowned buildings like Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV Tower, migrant workers occupy a tenuous, dangerous, and even an illegal subject position in contemporary China. Artists have variously sought to reveal or conceal this in their works.

Considering what made Father such a problematic work is illuminating. In Father the peasant— ichnographically identifiable in the type of head covering, the darkness of his skin, and the terraced fields used as a background—Luo chose a humble peasant as the subject of this over-life 14 sized painting. This scale of subject was, until then, reserved for only Mao, so in this aspect

11 Martina Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: A Semiotic Analysis, the Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979-1989 (Timezone 8 Limited, 2003), 97–103. 12 I follow Foucault’s formulation of genealogy. Michel Foucault, Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (Brighton [Eng]: Harvester Press, 1980), 117. 13 Iain Borden, Hoardings in City A-Z eds. Pile and Thrift, 104-6. For Borden hoardings “hide a multitude of sins” an interesting formulation in the context I am working in where nongmingong are often hidden behind the hoardings out of view and rendered invisible by the walls despite being integrated in the urban sphere. 14 Yuejin Wang, “Anxiety of Portraiture: Quest for/Questiong Ancestral Icons in Post-Mao China,” in Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 243–72. See also Peasant Pesant National Museum exhibition. 119

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15 Father was iconoclastically appropriating the scale of representation. This is one reason that Luo’s painting was so intensely debated. Secondly, Father, at this particular moment in Chinese economic reform, seemed to run counter to the image of China’s modernization push that the government was projecting both domestically and internationally. While economic reforms had just started to take hold, and it would be more than a decade before Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Southern Tour’ in 1992 that solidified China’s post-Socialist course of reform, the 11th CPC Central Committee of 1978 had already begun establishing the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) that would rapidly transform China from a predominately centrally planned agrarian economy to a 16 global manufacturing center. It is in this context that the ambivalent reception of Father has to be considered. And while the man in the painting is identifiably rural, he can, I argue, also be seen as the father to the migrant workers who began to seek economic opportunities off the land and in the SEZs and cities such as Beijing. Thus Father is a fitting example of this pivotal moment where the (soon to be migrant) peasant-turned-worker, becomes a trope in contemporary art making.

Migrant artists

The link between migrant worker and contemporary art practices is elucidated by Beijing-based curator Karen Smith; “[t]he government had not entirely anticipated the emergence of certain social phenomena, such as the first waves of migrant workers to settle in the capital in the early 17 nineties, just one of the many inevitable outcomes of economic reform.” Smith goes on to discuss the interrelated histories of artists, many of whom were also migrants to Beijing, as well as and migrant workers. I’ll return to this shared history, but I want to look briefly at the 1980s in order to deepen the context of artmaking as it relates to nongmingong in the 1980s. Critic and scholar Gao Minglu employs the term rendao (人道) to characterize this moment in post-Cultural Revolution (1977-1985) because, according to him, artists were concerned at this

15 Ibid., 243–50. 16 John Friedmann, China’s Urban Transition (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 57–76. 17 Karen Smith, Heart of the Art, in Beijing: Portrait of a City (Hong Kong: Blacksmith Books, 2008), 113. 120

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18 time in recording realism and reflecting the current social situation. The desire to reflect reality can be seen as corrective to the highly mediated and constructed visual vernacular of the 19 Cultural Revolution, particularly as that demanded by the Gang of Four. Artists seeking new ways of making sense of the post Cultural Revolution world, these same artists who were part of the first college class after the reopening of universities, sought out subject matter from the world around themselves. Through his observations of a farmer who stood guard over a public latrine guarding the night soil from other farmers eager to steal this valuable resource for themselves, 20 Luo came to paint Father Luo’s contribution to the ‘Native Soil’ (本土画 ben tu hua) trend in painting not only indicates artists’ desire to give voice to the humble and overlooked members of 21 society, it also focused on correcting the overly edited propaganda images.

The range of artistic expressions—’85 New Wave, Native Soil, and New Realism, among others, 22 of the 1980s demonstrates the array of stylistic possibilities artists explored. A so-called culture fever, wen hua re (文化热), characterized this decade encouraged by newly available translations, opportunities that came with a return to a normal schedule of university entrance exams, and greater cultural and artistic freedoms. As these artists coalesced into a discernable group, one that was made up of both academic artists as well as artists working outside the academy, their

18 Problematically, Gao doesn’t translate rendao into English in his text. That being said, in the context of this trend in artmaking the term would suggest artmaking that is concerned with the human condition, or humanism. Gao Minglu, The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, 1st ed (Buffalo, NY: Albright Knox Art Gallery, 2005), 88–91. 19 Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979, 393–96. 20 Luo Zhongli, A Letter from the artist of Father (Fuqin) trans. Michelle Wang in Wu Hung, ed., Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 23–25. 21 See for instance the workers who populate propaganda posters: Stefan Landsberger, Chinese Propaganda Posters: From Revolution to Modernization (Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 2001, 2001); Stefan Landsberger, “Stefan Landsberger’s Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages,” accessed May 3, 2010, http://www.iisg.nl/landsberger/. My point here is not that Native Soil artists were depicting ‘truth’ as compared to propaganda images, rather it is to show how artists in the context of more relaxed cultural policies began to conceive of different modes of representing their subjects. 22 Fei Dawei and Huang Zhuan, ’85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art (Beijing: Century Publishing Group, 2007). 121

122 relationship to social problems and issues was an optimistic one.23 Many artists felt that it was possible, and indeed necessary, for art to function as part of society. This rationale was quickly dispelled after two events in 1989: the shuttering of the China/Avant-Garde exhibition at the National Museum of Art in February, and the June crackdown on student protesters at 24 Tiananmen. The artistic idealism of the 1980s was over.

The artistic environment in Beijing in the following decade was markedly more cynical and less optimistic in how cultural producers could influence society. The 1990s saw artists using new mediums and modes of representation such as performance. Returning now to the point Smith made above linking migrants and artists in the 1990s, she traces the first artist commune of Yuan Ming Yuan, named for its proximity to the Old Summer Palace in northwest Beijing. Here we can see unexpected linkages among economic reforms, migrants, and artists: the peasants who had built simple houses had left the area to work in factories where they were provided with dan 25 wei housing. This left empty rooms that artists rented because they were cheap and available. As artists, particularly those artists who chose to work outside of the official system, like Zhang Dali who refused to leave Beijing to take up his government work placement after graduation, these artists sought to reformulate their practices under stricter government policies post-1989. 26 As a result new artistic communities grew in Beijing. These were fringe communities: in both the spatial and conceptual sense. They existed in peripheral parts of Beijing that were still rural farmland, thereby allowing artists living there to evade overbearing government supervision and censorship.

23 Zhongguo Dang Dai Mei Shu Shi, 1985-1986, Di 1 ban (A History of Chinese Contemporary Art: 1985-1986 vol. 1) (Shanghai: Shanghai ren min chu ban she, 1991). 24 Gao Minglu, Zhongguo Xian Dai Yi Shu Zhan (Exhibiting Chinese Modern Art)(Beijing: China Art Gallery, 1989). 25 Smith, “Heart of the Art, “ 110. 26 See Zhang Dali’s interview available online at: http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/CollectionOnline/SpecialCollectionItem/12255. Moreover, this historical moment saw a duel system develop between artists choosing to work within the state system (体制内 ti zhi nei) and those choosing to work outside of it (体制外 ti zhi wai). It is beyond the scope of the present study; however, the two systems and their interconnected histories warrants further study. 122

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On the opposite side of the city, but just as peripheral to the downtown center, was the Beijing 27 East Village (1993-1995). The dates of existence of this second crucial node in the emerging avant-garde art community overlap and intersect with five historically important moments in recent Chinese history: in 1992, Deng’s Southern Tour of SEZs reasserts his grip on power and his vision of economic reforms, and this was a the year that artists no longer need a membership to the Chinese Art Association in order to exhibit; in 1993 the first Chinese artists are included in the Venice Biennale; in 1994 the first national law on labor relations is approved; and in 1995 28 migrant workers without proper residency papers are forced to leave the capital.

Selling bodies, Selling art

This was a period of economic changes and growing global attention on art making from China. A discernable trend was emerging: nongmingong became a topic, medium, and participants in 29 many artists’ practices. Two works: This Person is for Sale 此人出售, 价格面议 by Zhu 30 Fadong (1994) (4.2) and To Raise the Level of a Fish Pond 为鱼塘增高水位(1997) (4.3) by Zhang Huang are indicative of new methods developing in the artworld of the 1990s relating to nongmingong. Moreover, what is relevant to my argument is how these artists positioned themselves as either advocates or exploiters of nongmingong—often simultaneously doing both.

The selling of one’s physical labor is often overlooked in the official narrative of China’s postsocialist urbanization, particularly because it calls into question the central government’s investment in a Marxist state while supporting policies of ‘socialism with Chinese

27 Smith, “Heart of the Art, “ 114. 28 For key examples among many see: “Feng Yun Ji Zhuang Zhi Deng Xiaoping Tong Zhi Xun Shi Nan Fang Ji Shi,” Ren Min Hua Bao, 1992, 2–7; Lü Peng, Fragmented Reality: Contemporary Art in 21st Century China (Milano: Charta, 2012), 24; Achille Bonito Oliva, Punti cardinali dell’arte: XLV Esposizione internationale d’arte: la Biennale di venezia (Venezia: Marsilio, 1993); Zhang, Li, Strangers in the City; Zhonghua Renmin Gonheguo Lao Dong Fa (Labour Law of the People’s Republic of China), 1994, http://www.molss.gov.cn/gb/ywzn/2006- 03/02/content_108641.htm. 29 Another key example would be Luo Zidan ½ White Collar, ½ Peasant (一半白领，一半农民 yi ban bai ling, yi ban nong min (1998). 30 Lv Peng, ed., Zhongguo Yi Shu Bian Nian Shi, 1900-2010 (A History of Chinese Art Year by Year from 1900 to 2010), Beijing di 1 ban (Beijing: Zhongguo qing nian chu ban she, 2012), 1173. 123

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31 characteristics.’ Leaving the land for work opportunities in urban areas, created surplus labour, and marked the failure of Mao’s peasant project. The transactional relationship between nongmingong and the construction sector fundamentally underpins Beijing’s urban transformation; however, the visibility of this transaction is obscured. In contrast, Zhu Fadong’s performance This Person is for Sale remedies this invisibility by exposing the economic 32 relationship and exchanges. In the opening intertitles in the video production produced in tandem with the performance by the Smart Museum, Chicago, Zhu describes how the ‘floating population （流动人口 liu dong ren kou) migrated to urban centers because of economic 33 reforms and opportunities for making money. Dorothy Solinger characterizes the urban 34 citizen’s conception of the floating population as “unrooted noncitizens, wanderers… .” 35 Despite this characterization of migrants, Zhu declares, ‘I am one of them.’ His blunt assertion of a shared identity is another point of intersection of nongmingong and contemporary artists. As discussed earlier, there are links between contemporary artists and fringe locations in Beijing that provided cheap rents and less official scrutiny, elements that both artists and nongmingong sought in the capital. Zhu exemplifies this overlapping of two populations, this shared spatiality

31 Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market, 178– 79. 32 “Inspired by some of Karl Marx’s theories on labour, Zhu Fadong’s performances pertain to the artist’s search for personal freedom.” Cees Hendrikse, ed., Writing on the Wall: Chinese New Realism and Avant-Garde in the Eighties and Nineties (Groningen; Rotterdam: Groninger Museum; NAI Publishers, 2008), 136.

33 As Zhu clarifies in the video, ‘floating population’ or liu dong ren kou, refers to people living in a location without a household registration (hu kou) for that place. Again this range of terminology demonstrates the difficulty in defining this segment of the population, and moreover, how the various terms also have inherent judgments attached to them. See also Zhu’s artist statement available in translation in Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art, 213–4; for the original text see, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, and Zeng Xiaojun, eds., Hei Pi Shu (The Black Cover Book) (Hong Kong: Tai Tei Publishing, 1994), 57. 34 Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market, 1. 35 Video documentation of the 1994 performance made in 1998 for exhibition at the Smart Museum in Chicago, see: Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, Rev. ed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 136. Video available via the DSL collection youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvJIofc0B3fChd5bAubEAag 124

125 and identity. At the same time he actively declares his belonging to the floating population and 36 the art world.

Regardless of the social and cultural distinctions, Zhu identifies and accepts this label of a 37 member of the floating population. In fact, Zhu had himself migrated multiple times from 38 Yunnan to Haikou, an SEZ, and eventually to Beijing in search of economic opportunities. Therefore Zhu’s adoption of the identity of migrant is confirmed by his biography and is not just an identity he was performing for this piece. This distinction is important because the social stigma and prejudices faced by migrants was, and is, still strong in Beijing. Donald explains:

But for Beijingers in 1998, and even today, the sight of a scruffy migrant worker on a bus, or jostling with thousands of others to get a mainline train home at Spring Festival, is an excresence [sic] of the market, a necessary but hardly welcome temporary addition to the urban landscape. S/he speaks with the wrong accent, s/he doesn’t belong in the laneways, or in the new high-rises that have taken the place of many of them in the past ten years, and significantly, s/he reminds the aspirational middle class (zhong chan jie ji) that class divisions, until the late 1970s the preserve of Maoist categories and critiques, are now 39 visible as haves and have-nots, as locals and outsiders.

It is within this social context that we must understand Zhu’s performance. Three specific locations help to further illustrate how it can be integrated into the larger genealogy of nongmingong works I am developing: the first is Zhu shot from behind at Tiananmen square, the second is of him entering a construction site, and the last is his standing outside McDonald’s on Wangfujing. In these three public spaces Zhu’s expendability is contrasted and constructed in concert with politically, socially, and commercially layered spaces of Beijing’s geography. As Wu Hung and Yomi Braester, among others, have articulated, Tiananmen is China’s preeminent

36 Smith, “Heart of the Art.” 37 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984). 38 Wu Hung, Transience, 137. 39 Donald, “Beijing Time, Black Snow and Magnificent Chaoyang,” 329. 125

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40 space of state spectacle. The square is constructed and constituted by a mandate of state visibility: the shows itself to visitors while at the same time monitoring those visitors through cameras, guards, and plain-clothes policemen. Zhu’s intervention is his constant reference to making visible the transactability of his body. Sewn on the back of his jacket is a sign with written text that reads: This person for sale Price (sic) negotiable (此人出售价格面议)—while in a space of high visibility. Zhu’s gesture is politically daring, albeit subtle, because it reveals the unspoken but fundamental reason for migrants to come to cities: an economic transaction. Migrants are in the city to sell their labor that is worth more in that market despite policies that discourage migrants from leaving rural areas. These policies are implemented in the form of discriminatory hukou laws and threats of police raids on migrant communities in Beijing.

The second location I want to highlight is the sequence where Zhu, turning off a main road 41 choked with traffic, enters a space of demolition. In the background are half-finished apartment blocks, two cranes (China’s so-called national ‘bird’) standing like guards on either side. Zhu is filmed from behind making the text on his back clearly visible to the audience. This makes the underlying conception of the work patently clear: the nongmingong who demolished the houses, who operated the cranes, and who built the new apartments for sale, were purchased to undertake the work of ‘urbanizing’ this section of Beijing. The bitter irony of this section of the performance is Zhu’s collection of Mao badges—acting in this piece as memorial totems to an era that lauded the worker and promised the security an iron rice bowl (铁饭 tie wan) for 42 life—pinned on the front of his jacket. As he turns towards the camera we see the red glow of

40 Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing; Braester, Painting the City Red. 41 The exact location isn’t entirely clear, however, based on the map of the performance routes and the locales in Beijing the were being demolished at this time I would suggest this segment was likely shot along Xuanwuen street. See the map of the performance in Wu Hung, Transience, 141. The video documentation doesn’t appear to chronological, but one performance still shows Zhu entering the Xuanwumen subway stop suggesting this is a probable location for the sequence I am discussing here. The topic of southern Beijing’s ‘renewal’ undertaken at this time and its impact on the social and psychological fabric of the city has been the focus of many documentaries and artworks. See in particular, Chen Kaige’s 100 Flowers Hidden Deep, Cao Fei and Ou Ning’s Meishijie, and A Disappearance Foretold (dirs. Olivier Meys and Zhang Yaxuan). Context for the large scale relocation and demolition campaigns (chai qian) and its relationship to Beijing’s real estate market in the 1990s, among many such examples, see: Cheng Jie, “Huo Bi an Zhi Chu Shi Shi Chang Pingan Da Jie Shun Li Chai Qian,” Beijing Fang Di Chang, 1998, 16–17. 42 The Mao badges recall a past socio-cultural moment that Ning Ying also gestures towards in For Fun in the use of particular objects owned by Old Han. See chapter one. 126

127 the badges framed in a low-angle shot. The low angle makes Zhu’s body appear bigger, blocking out the surroundings. This can be read as a fleeting compositional nod to Socialist Realism where low angles forced audiences to look up in reverence to oversized working bodies. But Zhu is not the model worker of propaganda posters, he is a nongmingong ‘one of them’ no longer the vanguard of revolution, instead a body exploited for labor, a body for sale.

The visibility and publicness of Zhu at Tiananmen Square is echoed in the second location. The cropping of the shot serves to highlight Zhu as the only person in the field of demolished housing. The half-destroyed buildings in the background lend a sense of ruination and desolation to the sequence while the flat open space of Tiananmen, in contrast, is designed to enable high 43 visibility and long distance vantage points regulating how the space is used. The order of Tiananmen contrasts with the heaps of bricks and mounds of dirt in this sequence, but Zhu’s insertion of his body into this space, this no-man’s land, serves to make him seen. The bold declaration in red characters of ‘This person for sale’ stands out against the dun colored demolition site. The juxtaposition of the moving body of Zhu entering and wandering through this space serves to make his statement visible within the context of the work likely being done by nongmingong. By entering the space of migrant work and the political spectacle space of Tiananmen comments on the variety of spaces nongmingong flow through and encode through 44 those movements.

A last location that shows the concepts of transactibility and visibility embedded in the performance is the southern end of Wangfujing near where it intersects with Chang’an street 45 east. Historically transaction is embedded in the function of this street. Zhu’s choice of location is again apt: Wangfujing is a place with historic links to commerce in particular the Dong’an market that were being revived in the mid-90s. For instance, in 1992 Wangfujing was

43 Wang Ban, “What Is Political Theatre? : A Critique of Performance Studies,” in China and New Left, ed. Wang Ban and Lu Jie (Toronto: Lexington Books, 2012), 81–92. 44 It is beyond the scope of my argument here, but creating a nongmingong geography of Beijing would reveal nodes vacillating between the two spaces I discuss: highly regulated state spaces, often tourist destinations and everyday spaces of work that are unregulated, or at least less overtly regulated by the state. The proximity of Beijing’s railway station to Tiananmen also means as a result of this that many nongmingong move through Tiananmen on their way to and from contracts. 45 The performance photographs and the map of Zhu’s route: Wu Hung, Transience, 136; 141. 127

128 home to the largest McDonalds in the world as well as the future site of the mega mall and 46 development complex Oriental Plaza (东方广场). In 1994 the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) was moved to make way for development prompting “an outcry…from Beijing’s many artists and intellectuals, to whom the forthcoming demolition of the academy would symbolize 47 the complete defeat of art and education under the invasion of a market economy.” By offering to his selling of his body in a space fraught with tensions between global capital flows state structures like CAFA enhances Zhu’s gesture of making seen the transactions happening along this street every minute.

The four locations which are linked in the video documentation with jumpcuts, captured in Zhu’s mobile performance each evoke issues of visibility/invisibility, and in these locations of seeing, how bodies are capable of being reduced to a monetary transaction. Whether in the highly orchestrated space of Tiananmen, the rubble of a construction site, or near the commerce of Wangfujing, Zhu’s choices of location reveal the conceptual work of the piece. Zhu’s linkages between offering himself for sale in these particular places is a gesture to his own identity as a migrant, but also his awareness of the myriad of instances of buying and selling of labour that take place daily in Beijing.

In contrast to Zhu’s performance where he used his own body and personally identified as a 48 migrant is Zhang Huan’s performance To Raise the Level of a Fish Pond. Zhang’s work was

46 Nicholas D. Kristof, “Beijing Journal; ‘Billions Served’ (and That Was Without China),” The New York Times, April 24, 1992, sec. World, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/24/world/beijing-journal-billions-served-and-that- was-without-china.html; Broudehoux, The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing; Visser, “Spaces of Disappearance.” 47 Wu Hung, Transience, 111. 48 A photograph of this performance is the first image on Zhang Huan’s website and the cover image of the 1998 exhibition Inside Out. The image has become on of the most recognizable contemporary Chinese art works, and certainly the most well known of his. According to Zhang “…I received the most benefit from the fish pond piece (To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond). This piece changed my situation, my life. Everybody likes this piece.” Mathieu Borysevicz, “Before and After: An Interview with Zhang Huan,” Art AsiaPacific, no. 30 (2001). Zhang Huan, “Zhanghuan.com,” accessed August 20, 2014, http://www.zhanghuan.com/; Gao Minglu, ed., Inside out: New Chinese Art (San Francisco; New York; Berkeley: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Asia Society Galleries; University of California Press, 1998). 128

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49 his contribution to Wildlife a multisite exhibition curated by fellow artist Song Dong. While Zhang’s piece also took place in Beijing, rather than moving through the built environment of the center of the city, instead, Zhang, along with 40 农工 nong gong (Zhang’s term) stood still occupying a muddy pond on the edge of the city, their bodies displacing water and thus raising 50 the overall water level. The peri-urban setting indicated by the green space, recalls the ‘fringe- ness’ of migrants in contemporary Chinese society. For while migrants “…raise buildings, lay highways, sweep streets, and shine shoes. They clean houses, cut hair, babysit children, and wash cars. They sell produce on busy street corners, peddle clothes in open-air stalls, and hawk 51 all manner of conveniences from the back of bicycles [.]” they still live in states of exception.

Loyalka’s list of jobs, one that is by no means exhaustive, stands in contrast to critic Gu Chengfeng’s characterization in his essay From leading character to onlooker of contemporary nongmingong as represented in art. He uses the term marginalized people (bian lu ren 边缘人), people who are not part of mainstream society to describe nongmingong: “这些 ‘离土又离乡’ 的进城农民工有明显的 ‘边缘人’ 特证. These nongmingong who have ‘left the land and the 52 countryside’ for the city clearly have the traits of [being a] ‘marginalized people.” The juxtaposition between the full integration of nongmingong into various jobs sectors in the complex urban ecology and Gu’s assertion that they are marginalized people must be considered when analyzing Zhang’s performance.

49 Song Dong and Guo Shirui, Ye sheng: 1997 nian jing zhe shi (Wildlife: Starting from 1997 Jingzhe) (Beijing: Xian dai yi zhu zhong xin, 1997).Wu Hung, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China (Chicago: Smart Museum Of Art, The University Of Chicago, 2000), 142–144. The pond where the performance took place is identified as Nanmofang in Beijing by Karen Smith. Karen Smith, “Zero to Infinity: The Nascence of photography in contemporary Chinese art of the 1990s” in Wu Hung, Wang Huangsheng, and Feng Boyi, eds., Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art: 1900-2000 (Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2002). For a discussion of Song’s performances with groups of nongmingong see below. 50 See Zhang’s artist statement available in English and Chinese at on his website. “http://www.zhanghuan.com/ShowWorkContent.asp?id=39&iParentID=21&mid=1.” 51 Michelle Dammon Loyalka, Eating Bitterness: Stories from the Front Lines of China’s Great Urban Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 3. 52 Gu Chengfeng “Cong zhu ren gong dao kan ke” in Sun Zhenhua and Lu Hong, eds., Yi shu yu she hui: 26 wei zhu ming pi ping jia tan zhong guo dang dai yi shu de wen ti (Changsha: Hunan mei zhu chu ban she, 2005), 274. Gu is inverting the government slogan “leave the soil, not the countryside” li tu bu li xiang to reflect the fact that when nonggongmin leave the soil they, for the most part, also leave the countryside. 129

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Displacing agency

Displacement is evoked subtly in both Zhu and Zhang’s pieces; both create a sense of unease, even alienation: Why are the men standing topless in a pond? Why is a man offering to negotiate how much he is worth? Both performances provoke such questions. Yet the resulting answers return us to my concern of representation and exploitation. Zhu’s agency in his performance is undoubted: he is selling himself for a price that is negotiable. On the other hand, in Zhang’s performance, the agency of the participants is denied. They are rendered voiceless through Zhang’s artistic choices. They are neither named and nor credited as individuals in the work’s title, and it is unclear that they were compensated for their work. Moreover, because Zhang asserts his authorship of this image, he retains his individual subjectivity. By doing this he denies the subjectivity of the other participants in the performance, and he objectifies them. Instead of reading as individuals, the men in the pond become objects of the audience’s gaze. Heretofore discussions of this work have analyzed the futility of raising the fishpond as it relates to the marginalized status of nongmingong in China. This perpetuates and sublimates the act of objectification taking place within the performance and in the afterlives of the performance documentation. Moreover, the audience further participates in the objectification of the nongmingong when in looking at the image as it provokes an emotional affect. The provocation of emotion is what affective labor is designed to do. In regarding the gesture of Zhang’s performance the audience is not implicated in the larger systems that have resulted in the surplus of nongmingong available as laborers. We regard the performance, but we are not explicitly implicated or forced to acknowledge our participation in the objectification. We do not know who these men are. We do know Zhang Huan. More to this point, the displacement of the water due to the introduction of the bodies is the result of simple fluid mechanics; yet the resulting 53 waves of the performance have been enormous on Zhang Huan’s career. Therefore, we have to consider that this work does two things: it makes visible the marginal status of migrants, but in that same moment, is also exploitative of this marginality.

53 The importance of this photograph, for Zhang Huan’s career in particular and contemporary Chinese art globally, is evidenced by it being the cover photo for the 1998 exhibition Inside Out that is credited as the first major exhibition of Chinese contemporary art in North America. See Gao Minglu, Inside out. 130

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Helpful in understanding how we might conceive of this performance as both revealing and 54 exploitative of nongmingong is to categorize it as affective labor. For Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt affective labor is “immaterial even if it is corporeal” thus despite Zhang Huan’s 55 use of his body and others’ bodies, the resulting ‘product’ is that of an image. Winnie Wong, in her study of the painting village of Dafen known for copies of Western masterpieces, articulates the distinction between global contemporary artists and the laborers. She states, “[g]enerating new forms of immaterial labor in every conceivable way, the contemporary artist thus functions as a middleman in the stratified world of global artistic labor. …This mobility, so distinct from the subaltern’s unfree labor—captured by the censorious state or the factory regime—is crucial 56 to the imagination of a ‘global contemporary.’” In this formulation we can consider Zhang Huan to be the middleman who captures the unfree labor of the nongmingong through their participation in the performance. The performance illustrates the lack of agency or voice of the nongmingong thus revealing their subaltern subjectivity. The collective action of the performance does little to dispel notions of biopower as conceptualized by the state, and in fact the immaterial labor of Zhang’s work is inline with government policies that are designed to 57 move China from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.

In her study of propaganda and its relationship to Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Anne-Marie Brady clarifies China’s economic shift away from “a product-based, labor 58 intensive economy to one based on information and technology.” The government’s desire to move the economy from ‘labour intensive’ to ‘information and technology’ cloaks the physical working bodies still so crucial to production. Many artists are occupied with making visible the

54 Michael Hardt and Vittorio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Michael Hardt, “Immaterial Labor and Artistic Production,” Rethinking Marxism 17, no. 2 (April 2005): 175–177,331. 55 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 292. 56 Winnie Won Yin Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 237. 57 Zhang Huan often found himself in legal trouble for his early performances, as did many of the East Village residents. My point here is that the type of labour, not the product (the performance itself), is the shift from manufacturing to services that the central government supports. 58 Brady, Marketing Dictatorship, 126. 131

132 bodies still very much involved in ‘a product-based’ economy. While the Chinese government would perhaps like to shift to a tertiary economy, the evidence in Beijing points to a continued existence of a large-scale manual labour workforce, still rooted in the physical body, very much based on selling labour not information or technology based skills. The building of urban centers while facilitated by mechanization is still at its heart driven by the bodies of migrant workers.

An illustrative counter example, one that shares similarities in terms of performance as well as a stated desire to reveal workers within the capitalist system, is Santiago Sierra’s 250cm Line 59 Tattooed on 6 Paid People (1999). In this work evidenced in the title and in the artist’s statement, Sierra hired six unemployed men for $30 in exchange for allowing Sierra to tattoo a line across their backs and record the event. Sierra, like Zhu, immediately involves the viewer in the economic exchange in the form of bodies for sale; the pivot of the two works. Sierra and Zhu make apparent the relationships between the body of laborers and the selling of this body in the market. Each man will forever bear the line he was paid to have inscribed on his body, providing a constant reminder of the capitalist system that exploits the worker’s body for whatever ends produce maximum profitability. This recalls Marx’s formulation of the process of capitalist accumulation:

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes that develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the Lazarus layers of the working

59 Santiago Sierra, Santiago Sierra: Works 2002-1990, ed. Katya. Garcia-Antón (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 2002). 132

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class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the 60 absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.

Zhu, Sierra, and Zhang all use bodies as the raw material of their works. In contrast, Zhang’s performance, neither in the title, nor in the artist’s statement explicitly reveals the economics of exchange at work in the piece. Zhu and Sierra directly implicate the viewer in the critique of the capitalist system by forcing him/her to see these bodies just as a source of labor, as commodities that can be purchased in exchange for money. In Zhang’s work the work of the participants goes unpaid or at least unacknowledged—the nongmingong are only described collectively, never as individual subjects—the mechanics of the economic exchange remain obscured and therefore unexamined and therefore accepting of a system where bodies are available for nothing more than their labor. Zhu and Sierra aestheticize labor but do so in order to critique the capitalist system that exploits bodies for sale, bodies as raw material.

The vulnerability of the men’s naked chests and their befuddled glances at the cameras illustrate the shift Gu Chengfeng describes the transition of nongmingong in Chinese art from main 61 characters (主人公 zhu ren gong) to spectators (看客 kan ke). The once heroic bodies of workers that populated propaganda posters are replaced with the concave chests and impassive stares of these unacknowledged and unnamed nongmingong.

Within the realm of contemporary visual production, the now unstable category of worker, no longer the heroic worker of Socialist Realism, is being rethought and reimagined. Although the actual physical work being done and represented has stayed the same—building the nation through large-scale infrastructure projects—now the worker-as-migrant is no longer imbued with an ideological glow. The representation of the worker has transitioned from being highly visible, and central to image making that portrayed the government’s philosophy, to the contemporary moment where attempts are made to make migrants invisible, unacknowledged for the dirty,

60 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin Classics. (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin in association with New Left Review, 1990), 798. 61 Gu Chengfeng “Cong zhu ren gong dao kan ke” in Sun Zhenhua and Lu Hong, Yi shu yu she hui: 26 wei zhu ming pi ping jia tan Zhongguo dang dai yi shu de wen ti (Art and Society: 26 critics discuss this topic in contemporary Chinese art) (266-281). 133

134 dangerous, and difficult (the 3Ds) jobs they fill, and are often castigated as undesirables within 62 the urban space. And when nongmingong are acknowledged as they are an article from China Today, the emphasis is on the quantity, the statistics, never on their individuality as citizens: “Of the county’s 230 million farmer-turned workers 150 million went to cities as migrant workers, 63 according to 2009 statistics released by the National Statistical Bureau.” By using data and statics as the main descriptor of this population, the nongmingong, in the view of the state, is 64 converted from individual to “global mass” one that has been regularized in order to control it. This statistical rendering illustrates Chinese biopolitics at work.

The statistical characterization of nongmingong serves to segment this population, partitioning it off from other social categories. However, despite the desire of the government to define this population, Zhang’s fishpond piece demonstrates the blurring of social boundaries and the evolving shared and overlapping spatialities of Beijing between various actors: artists, nongmingong, urban citizens, and so on. Zhang’s work is exploitative of the nongmingong in the work, but the piece underscores the spatial integration taking place between different 65 communities in Beijing. The complex relationship between migrant workers and urbanites is one of constant negotiations of inclusion and exclusion, need and rejection, visibility and invisibility. As Karen Smith noted in her discussion of the development of artists’ communities in the 1990s, the relaxation of internal migration, the demand for cheap housing, and the desire to be far away from official observation meant that in the 1990s many artists were in fact living

62 John Connell, Kitanai, Kitsui and Kiken: The Rise of Labour Migration to Japan (Economic & Regional Restructuring Research Unit, University of Sydney, 1993). For a similar sentiment in China see Børge Bakken, ed., Migration in China (Copenhagen: NIAS, 1998), 35-37. The photo reproduced in the chapter was taken at the Beijing labour market, a location that Zhu Fadong visited during his performance. 63 Hou Ruili, “New Dreams, New Troubles Haunt New-Wave Migrants,” China Today, 2010, 10. 64 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, 1st ed (New York: Picador, 2003), 242–3; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 65 For how lived spaces were administered pre-economic reform and why the changes to assigned danwei housing have fundamentally changed the lived experiences in urban China see Bjorklund, “The Danwei”; Bray, Social Space and Governance in Urban China. 134

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66 among nongmingong. Curator of the 2003 exhibition “Together with Migrants,” Yang Shin-Yi draws specific parallels between Zhang and migrants:

…the term “Mang Liu Artists” (盲流艺术家) which was used by Wen Pulin at the end of the 1980’s, to capture the poor living conditions, of artists fundamentally very similar to Mingongs.’ Artists who create works based on the theme of the Minggong have actually 67 lived such a life. Zhang Huan’s work is a good example of the Mang Liu artists.

The problematic grouping of Zhang Huan as being ‘very similar to the Mingongs’ and the difficulty of equating artists with them, what this statement does elucidate is that spatially artists and nongmingong were integrated, interacting, and in the case of the artists I am discussing, participating in various performance pieces. Above all, it neglects subtle differences in class and economic status between the artists and the migrant workers. While many of these artists chose the lifestyle of migration and to live in provisional housing rather than accepting their government job placements, on the other hand, nongmingong rarely had the option to turn down work. Yet, what is revealing in this curatorial statement is the interweaving of lived experiences in Beijing. Both groups collided in the dense urban spaces of the capital. This colliding and perhaps eventual collusion can be viewed in terms of ‘people as infrastructure’ as formulated by AbouMaliq Simone. Simone describes the interactions and negotiations in public and private 68 spaces of the city of Johannesburg between various urban actors as “people as infrastructure.” Simone’s formulation, unlike the flattening of difference as in Yang Shin Yin’s characterization of the similarities between nongmingong and artists, preserves the asymmetry of these relations, which I believe to be so crucial to constructing new readings of this genre of contemporary art.

66 Smith, “Heart of the Art.” 67 UNESCO, Women Zai Yi Qi (Together with Migrants), 56; see also 61–3. Characters not in the original text. The term mang liu can have derogatory undertones, means literally, blind drifters. It is often applied to characterize the large number of migrants to cities who, to urbanites at least, seem to be drifting without a clear purpose. Yang Shin- Yi prefaces his curatorial engagement with mingongs (his term) with discussions of Zhang Huan’s To Raise a Level of a Fish Pond that created a debate about the participation of nongmingong; however, despite this self-reflexivity in terms of how curators and artists need to be sensitive to ethical issues surrounding marginalized populations, in the next section of his curatorial statement, Yang Shin-Yi problematically equates Zhang Huan’s life to mingong. 68 Simone, “People as Infrastructure.” 135

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People as Infrastructure

An example of Simone’s notion of ‘people as infrastructure’ was the UNESCO multiyear research project Together with Migrants that took the nongmingong and artists as the nexus of new forms of interaction and exchange in order to foster new ways of being together in the city. This project comprised an art exhibition at the Today Art Museum in 2003, a second show at Jianwai SOHO in 2006, and research on issues related to migrants by the Chinese Academy of 69 Social Sciences. The representation of migrant workers in contemporary artmaking is heralded thusly:

‘Together with Migrants’ is the first contemporary art exhibition focusing on ‘Mingongs,’ i.e. migrant workers in China, addressing migrant workers and their related social and cultural issues from 1999-2003. This is the first opportunity for many Mingong-related 70 works, long renowned in the Chinese art community, to be viewed by the public.

Selected as the cover image for the final UNESCO report, 100% (1999) (fig. 4.4) by artist Wang Jin (b. 1962) exemplifies Simone’s notion of people as infrastructure, and moreover, it makes 71 nongminggong visible within a public space of Beijing. In the photograph the outstretched arms of the top row of men brace the concrete beam on the underside of an overpass in the Chaoyang district of Beijing. The dynamic lines of the elevated highway that moves off to the left-hand side of the image contrasts with the stillness and concentration of the men. Their shoes and clothing suggest they are nongmingong: most of them wear cheap canvas shoes and

69 Zhan Shaohua, Rural Labour Migration in China: Challenges for Policies (UNESCO, 2005): http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001402/140242e.pdf. Interestingly, in the full 2003 bilingual report, the title in Chinese doesn’t include any reference to migrants: the title is Women zai yi qi (Us, all together my translation). Full report available at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001355/135575mb.pdf. For the 2006 exhibition see www.aaa.org.hk/WorldEvents/Details/6119. 70 Yang Shinyi “‘Together with Migrants’ A Contemporary Art Exhibition. Curatorial Concepts and Inspirations.” UNESCO, “Women Zai Yi Qi (Together with Migrants),” 56. The importance of this exhibit to contemporary Chinese art history is underscored by curator Lv Peng’s inclusion of the exhibition in his Fragmented Reality: Contemporary Art in 21st Century China as well as being in Contemporary Chinese Primary Documents, edited by art historian Wu Hung. Lü Peng, Fragmented Reality, 96; Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art, 431. 71 Artists’ information available via the Gallery Chinese Contemporary and Pékin Fine Arts http://www.chinesecontemporary.com/wang_jin_cv.htm; http://wwww.pekinfinearts.com/artists/artists.php?id=17&menunum=1&subnum=10&item=2. 136

137 nondescript pants and shirts, and none of them wears a wristwatch. Only three central figures wear white, which immediately attracts the eye’s attention. The muted tones of the photograph, dusty even, provoke thoughts of Beijing’s spring sandstorms, or the smog that now often 72 envelops the city. Compositional elements suggest the character for work (工 gong), apt 73 because Wang Jin used 40 ‘mingong’ in the performance. The satire of forty men holding up something as mammoth as an overpass is incisive. Wang, by reinserting bodies of workers back into the space of the underpass, makes visible the labor that was done to build the overpass. Metaphorically the work is still being done, as the men appear to be supporting the bridge.

The choice of location, underneath an elevated highway, is also important for a nuanced reading of the work. However, it must first be mentioned that in the following analysis I rely on the performance documentation—photographs—as these have been exhibited and published extensively, while there is limited information on the actual moments of the performance. Underpasses are only created when roads need to be elevated like this. Until the mid-1980s Beijing, being notoriously flat (often called ‘a big pancake’ da bing, 大饼) by urban 74 75 historians), had few overpasses or flyovers. As increasing car and truck traffic demanded more roads and highways, overpasses were an inevitable outcome of increased road building and reliance on cars. In 1999 the still relatively newly created space under overpasses adds a layer of meaning to 100% indicating new urban forms—overpasses—and new ways of being in relation to those forms—staging performance art.

72 Most often the photograph of the performance is reproduced in black and white. See for instance: Gao, The Wall; UNESCO, Women Zai Yi Qi (Together with Migrants). The image I am using for reference is in color. Reprinted in Hendrikse, Writing on the Wall, 151. 73 Zhang Kangkang, “Yi Yi Gu Xing Wang Jin Zuo Pin Du Jie (Taking the Bit between His Teeth: Reading and Examining Wang Jin’s Work),” Jin Ri Xian Feng 9 (July 2000): 141. Zhang uses mingong; therefore I retain his term here. 74 Wang Jun, Cheng Ji (Record of a City). 75 During the 1990 Spring Festival televised celebration Cai Guoqing sang “The Bridges of Beijing” Beijing de Qiao highlighting both the historically important bridge: Luguo Bridge, but also the San Yuan bridge built at the intersection of the third ring road and the airport expressway. The video produced for karaoke bars equates Beijing’s modernity with flyovers and bridge exchanges, visually reinforcing that overpasses are symbols of post- Mao Beijing. See: http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/kAk55woXz0s copy also on file with author. 137

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The everydayness of the men’s clothing throws into relief the strangeness of their actions. Perhaps as futile as trying to raise the level of a pond, Wang’s gesture ultimately shares more with Zhu’s work. Superficially however, Wang’s piece too seems exploitative of the marginal status of nongmingong. Wang doesn’t make clear that he paid the workers. However, by placing bodies in the space of work and in positions of work, regardless of the futility of this work, it implicates us in the circuits of exchange that create opportunities for workers to have to hold up roads (with their sweat and blood). Whereas standing in the fishpond segregated the nongmingong from a logical space or action of work, the space of the overpass underscores Wang’s interest in the relationship between people and architecture. Wang describes his interest in people, architecture, and the relationship evident in 100%:

’98 年我想到一些关于人和建筑以及人和建筑的关系一类的问题. [In] 1998, I had some thoughts regarding people and to architecture, and the connection between people and architecture [.] These sorts of topics.

Continuing,

76 … 那么，与建筑有最密切关系的建筑者是民工. In that way, it is the migrant worker [who] has the most intimate relationship with architecture.

Wang explicitly connects the migrant worker (民工) to the work of building architecture. For him, the link between humans and architecture is located in the bodies of nongmingong. The retention of the nongmingong bodies as actors in this performance expresses Wang’s understanding of this relationship. This stands in contrast to Zhang’s work where the relationship between the men and the pond is unclear. For Zhang, the decontextualization of nongmingong works to provoke the effect of displacement, but for Wang, the maintaining the visual relationship of nongmingongs’ bodies with architecture is crucial. Additionally, the gesture of holding up the overpass, as ineffectual as it is, resituates the working bodies in relation to the space. This work forces the audience to consider who built the architecture, the infrastructure, in fact, the entire built environment.

76 UNESCO, “Women Zai Yi Qi (Together with Migrants),” 136. I have modified the English translation to more closely reflect the Chinese text. 138

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Wang is interested in people and architecture and making visible the biopower necessary in the building of cities. The body politics of construction are also evident in Song Dong’s contribution to the UNESCO exhibition was Together with Migrants (与农民在一起 Yu nong min zai yi qi). This work included 200 nongmingong positioned in various locations throughout the art gallery: 77 in the elevator, the hallway, and the main exhibition space. Whereas Wang’s intervention was to reinsert bodies into finished constructions, Song inserted nongmingong into the white cube space of the art gallery, thereby inverting implied class dynamics of an art gallery. Gao Minglu traces Song’s interest in working with nongmingong to 2000 after which “…Song has been more 78 concerned with class issues in the city especially those concerning peasant workers.”

Gao identifies Song’s interest in class issues in Together with Migrants in 2003. Song, in his artist statement, quotes Mao’s notion that ‘countryside surrounds the city’ to highlight the inequalities he observes in contemporary society. For Song, the peasant occupies the elevated status in theory, but not in practice. Moreover, the interest in class relations pervades Song’s 79 description of his contribution to the exhibition. Song’s intervention is to reterritorialize the gallery space with the bodies of the workers in much the same way that Wang did with the space under the overpass.

Song’s artist statement is also revealing in regards to the large number, totaling 200, of nongmingong he included in his performance. The focus on quantities is reminiscent of the frequently cited statistics of nongmingong, one such example I cited above. In fact, Song includes a number: 120 million (1.2 亿), in his appraisal of the nongmingong population. These statistical representations occlude in their sheer size the various individual voices of nongmingong; moreover, Foucault defines this process as ‘massifying’ thereby connecting it to

77 Hao Yimin and Zhao Nannan, “‘Women Zai Yi qi’ Yi shu Zhan Yu Min gong Ling Ju li Jie chu,” Jing Hua Shi Bao, November 23, 2003, http://www.people.com.cn/GB/paper1787/10705/973090.html. 78 Gao Minglu, The Wall, 217. Welland, “Ocean Paradise,” 428; Thomas J. Berghuis, Performance Art in China, 2006, 148 In Dancing with Migrants, dancer and choreographer Wen Hui hired thirty construction workers to perform with her performance troupe. Her husband, documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang, recorded the rehearsals, performances, and thoughts of the migrants, while thirteen other artists, musicians, and dancers were also involved. For the work Bonsai Song worked with a group of nongmingong. This work foreshadowed elements of his 2003 piece, particularly in having the nongmingong perform shirtless. Gao Minglu, The Wall, 216–17. 79 UNESCO, Women Zai Yi Qi (Together with Migrants), 128. 139

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80 biopower and the seizing of power from individuals by the state. In light of this, we can consider Song’s performance as being critical of this process of “massifying” in that he forces the audience to confront individual bodies, individual members of the nongmingong class, face 81 to face rather than being mediated through nameless statistics. This is particularly the case in the elevator portion of the work where Song had seven nongmingong ride the elevator, which only had a maximum capacity of thirteen people. The small, enclosed space of the elevator heightens the physical proximity between the seven nongmingong and six other people; Song 82 describes this move as creating a minority out of the exhibition attendees. The intertwining and interacting between nongmingong and urban residents happens frequently, but could be characterized as being party to ‘massifying’ rather than a one-on-one experience; however, the space of the elevator forces such interaction to be acknowledged, to be seen, and to be experienced at the level of individuals, not as a statistic.

Numbers and nongmingong are another point of comparison between Wang Jin and Song Dong’s practices. In critic Zhang Kangkang’s discussion of Wang Jin’s work 100%, he states: “那些日子，他的眼前除了数字，什么都看不见了. In those days, other than numbers, he [Wang] 83 couldn’t see anything else.” Zhang attributes Wang’s fascination with numbers in part to the new millennium and the world population reaching 6 billion, and since Wang illustrated his interest in nongmingong, it is plausible that numbers and nongmingong are therefore linked in his practice as they are in Song Dong’s.

80 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 243. 81 See for instance “Descriptive Statistics on the Floating Population” in Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market, 18–19. In an art context, and despite his lament of how nongmingong have become onlookers, he can’t help but to include statistics in his discussion of migrant workers and their role as subjects in art, thereby perpetuating notions of a mass rather than indivduals. Gu Chengfeng “Cong zhu ren dao kan ke” in Gu Chenfeng, “Cong zhu ren gong dao kan ke,” 274. 82 UNESCO, Women Zai Yi Qi (Together with Migrants), 131. See also a review of the show published in Jing Hua Shi Bao Hao Yimin and Zhao Nannan, “‘Women Zai Yi qi’ Yi shu Zhan Yu Min gong Ling Ju li Jie chu,” Jing Hua Shi Bao, November 23, 2003, full-text available online: http://www.people.com.cn/GB/paper1787/10705/973090.html. 83 Zhang Kangkang, “Yi Yi Gu Xing Wang Jin Zuo Pin Du Jie (Taking the Bit between His Teeth: Reading and Examining Wang Jin’s Work),” 141. 140

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Numerical articulations

A Grain of Sand (一粒沙 yi li sha) by Lu Hao (2003) illustrates the precarious position of nongmingong in contemporary Chinese society (fig. 4.5). Lu’s piece is a micro carving on a grain of sand; the text inscribed is a basic biography of a migrant worker killed by his boss for asking for his pay.84 For migrant workers urban living is often a matter of life and death. This is what is at stake when we see the numbers scrawled in the city.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an inscription is to trace “upon some hard substance for the sake of durability.” 85 Lu’s gesture to also be making durable the barest, the most pared down of biographies of a nongmingong who was murdered by his boss. A Grain of Sand might then be considered ‘public calligraphy’ one that reflects back to society a bleak outlook of nongmingong. This work makes visible the man; the individual nongmingong who lost his life rather than being cloaked by power’s ‘massification.’ Lu’s choice of material and the scale of the work reinforce the intention of the work. When exhibited as it was in Mahjong at the Peabody Essex Museum in 2009, a magnifying glass is provided, but viewers still have to work to see the writing on the stone.86 The miniature stature of the piece contrasts with the magnitude of the story it tells; a man’s life was taken.

Sand is also omnipresent at construction sites as it used as a material for various building processes. Linking the worker’s biography to a material he likely worked with underscores the act of memorializing his life. While this work doesn’t include the body of nongmingong in the absence works to show the body more acutely. Moreover, contrary to other works I have discussed above, the agency of the man is preserved in Lu’s work while also suggesting the multitude of similar stories through the choice of material.

84 Bernhard Fibicher and Mathias Frehner, eds., Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005). 85 “inscription” n Oxford English Dictionary, n.d., http://dictionary.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/cgi/entry/50225178?query_type=word&queryword=simular &first=1&max_to_show=10&single=1&sort_type=alpha. Acessed November 28th, 2011. 86 Fibicher and Frehner, Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection. 141

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A close inspection of the grain of sand confirms the poor quality of the carving.87 The characters are childlike in their form, (see for example the 二 of 2003 that lists downward and to the right). Yet, despite the crudeness of the characters, they are legible. Their power to communicate isn’t concealed, just as the strings of numbers aren’t concealed. Both of these examples are evidence of the nongmingong experience in the dense urban environment of contemporary China.

Many artists have taken note of the scale of nongmingong working in cities and incorporated 88 these issues into their practice. The public spaces of the city are filled with numbers jostling for attention. Anthropologist Michael Taussig, in relation to acts of defacement, has theorized the notion of the public secret.89 In the context of Beijing, the public secret is the uncertain, semi- illegal status of nongmingong. Despite their hyper-visibility and the spatial integration in the urban space that actually work to obscure, rather than reveal, nongmingong remain a public 90 secret “that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated.” The inscriptions of multitudes of phone numbers visible on almost every imaginable surface in Beijing are, I would suggest, a starting place from which to trace this public secret.

In Beijing one is accosted by numerical graffiti, aimed at migrant workers, the strings of numbers are phone numbers function as ads for services to produce faked documents and certifications (fig. 4.6).91 Most often the services are procuring counterfeit documents, for example, for a driver’s license or various certifications or diplomas. The demand for such

87 For examples of high quality carving see: Yang Shilin and Wang Xiuying, “Wei Diao Yi Se (Microcarving..),” Ren Min Hua Bao, 1995; Wu Zhang, “Qu Ru de Wei Dao Yi Shu (The Micro-Carving Art of Qu Ru),” Ren Min Hua Bao, 1981. 88 Other notable examples would include Liang Shuo’s Urban Migrants (1999-2000), Zhang Dali’s Offspring (2003-ongoing), Luo Zidan ½ White Collar, ½ Blue Collar (1996). 89 Taussig, Defacement, 2; 5-7. 90 Ibid., 5. Emphasis in the original. 91 I am not suggesting that only migrant workers make use of the numbers, but that the population constitutes a targeted audience for the advertisements. Observations based on fieldwork, Haidian district, Beijing, 2011. A quick baidu.com search reveals services for providing faked documents ranging from household registration documents to documents certifying someone as an electrician. Other goods and services: rooms for rent, air conditioning repair, water delivery, waterproofing, and milk delivery are advertised in a similar way. However, here I’m focusing only on only numbers that are accompanied by the two characters ban zheng. This tactic of advertising is referred to as xiao guang gao (small adverts) or tie xiao guang gao (small sticker adverts). 142

143 services demonstrates the need to legitimate the status of migrants in the city, and the abundance of the phone numbers concretizes the abstract knowledge of Beijing’s estimated seven million migrant workers. These strings of numbers, many of which are accompanied with the characters 办证 ([help with] obtaining a certification), inundate public spaces, sidewalks, billboards, overpasses, telephone booths, and streets (fig. 4.7). Migrant workers from rural areas working in urban centers are often caught in a double bind. They provide a vast cheap manual labor force, however, residual socialist era residency laws exclude them from social services available to urban residency holders. Anthropologist Ahiwa Ong describes this ambiguous status of migrants as ‘states of exceptions.’92 The advertisements in the form of these phone numbers make this “state of exception” of migrants visible.

In addition, the numbers are written records of information; and therefore it is pertinent to draw on Bruno Latour’s definition of the term ‘inscription.’93 The phone numbers are thus functioning as a materialized sign. They record a market for migrant workers’ need for documentation, and they make the presence of the workers in the city tangible as a trace of migrants; a trace that is visible to all urban dwellers regardless of their legal status.

Inscription is not just the purview of the urban visual field, but contemporary artists also use inscriptions as a tactic to wrestle with the processes of urbanization and communication. One particularly pertinent example is Qiu Zhijie’s piece Writing the ‘Orchid Pavilion Preface’ 1,000 Times (重复书写兰亭序一千遍) (1997).94 In this piece Qiu grapples with the failure to communicate meaning through his repeated inscribing of text on one sheet of paper. Eventually the entire sheet of paper is black with ink, obscuring any legible text. Qiu’s inscription has made the preface unreadable. The viewer is left with only the title of piece as a hint at the content of the work. However, performance documentation assures the audience that under all the layers of

92 Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2006). 93 Bruno Latour, Pandora’s hope: essays on the reality of science studies, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1999, 306. For more on the implications of inscriptions especially in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) see, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979). And Stanford’s digital humanities site: http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/23/235. 94 Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art, 188–89; Gao Minglu, The Wall, 154. 143

144 ink, the text is there. It is as if in the effacing of the individual characters of the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion, we are made more aware of the text’s existence.

The futility of copying something 1,000 times on one piece of paper recalls of the constant battle in the public spaces of Beijing between the writers of the phone numbers and the city works crews that work to remove or at least cover up the numbers. As Qiu’s ink builds up, and eventually creates a field of blackness, so too does the contest between posting the numbers and removing them that plays out in the public space of the city. In the act of making something difficult to read, difficult to see, we become more attuned to what is being covered up.95 This is the battle between the writing and subsequent removal that unmasks the public secret of the nongmingong existence in the city.

Government sponsored programs to remove small advertisements often target people who have been caught posting or writing these adverts.96 However, the removal of the numbers, an attempt at restoring the space, often doesn’t obscure the strings of numbers, instead it creates a palimpsest. The layers of writing and removal serve to mark a contested public space inscribing the various actors seeking to use the space. The territorializing of space to use as advertisement and the reterritorializing of the space by the state through cleanup campaigns can be read as a metaphor for the ongoing negotiations between nongmingong, the state, and the market. This is the public secret the phone numbers reveal—the secret of the need for migrant workers, while at the same time denying them full rights to urban citizenship, and therefore condemning them to a state of exception within the urban sphere.97 The numbers are an important testimony to the tension between the state and the large reserve of bodies reduced to selling their labor.

95 Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics.” 96 Chongqing jing fang da ji xiao guanggao “tie shou” xian yi ren zi qing ‘jie zuo.’ Zhongguo wan Ju Jiao Shan Xi. September 28, 2010. Available online at: http://jjsx.com.cn/c10/0928/19005757002.htm; Xu Xiaofan, “Man Qiao Jin Shi Xiao Guang Gao (Small Advertisements Cover the Whole Bridge),” Zhongguo Qing Nian Bao, March 18, 2012; Pei Rao, “Gao Wen Gao Ya ‘shui Qiang’ Zhuan Zhi Cheng Shi ‘niu Pi Xuan,’” Xin Jing Bao, April 15, 2014. 97 The strings of numbers are pervasive in Beijing; critic Liu Meng calling them pollution and a harm to public space echoing the sentiment in the Xin Jing Bao article cited above that they are an illness (niu pi xuan psoriasis): Liu Meng, “Ping shuo yu jian yi” [Comments and Suggestions] in Han Xiaohui, ed., Cheng Shi Pi Ping. Beijing Juan, [Urban Criticism: Beijing] Di 1 ban (Beijing: Wen hua yi shu chu ban she, 2002), 233. 144

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Returning to Taussig’s analysis the “public secret” is “the knowing what not to know?”98 Viewers are made more aware of the numbers and the networks they represent through their removal, much in the same way that viewers are more aware of the text Qiu Zhijie continuously writes despite being unable to ‘read’ it. The numbers make us aware of the vast need for legitimization—the need for faked documents—while also making us aware of the need to “know what not to know”—that the state’s need for migrant labor ensures the continued presence of migrants in the city regardless of being denied legal status. Through the act of covering of the phone numbers, migrants’ state of exception remains a “public secret.”99

Yen Yuehping has examined public inscriptions (题字 ti zi) detailing the history of this form and terming it ‘public calligraphy.’100 Examples such as Mao’s calligraphy on the Monument to the People’s Heroes or the masthead of 人民日报 (The People’s Daily) are evidence of this type of public inscriptions. More to this point is to recall my earlier discussion of how workers and peasants were to be depicted. Mao’s mandate to power was predicated on him as a protector of workers; however, workers’ in today’s post-Mao economic situation is precarious and dangerous. The promises of state protection, stable jobs, and access to education and healthcare have receded into the realm of impossibility for most nongmingong. Gaining a certification, even if it is faked, might enable a nongmingong to secure employment, but the heroic promises of Mao’s worker utopia are gone.

The connection between power and public calligraphy is an important one. The role and power of the written word in Chinese statecraft has long pre-1949 history, and one that continues today: “[p]olitical orders and communications did not just appear primarily as written texts, they had to

98 Taussig, Defacement, 2. 99 Also helpful in thinking about what the numbers reveal is to consider them part of hidden transcripts of the nongmingong in relation to these strings of numbers. Scott, Weapons of the Weak; Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. 100 Yen Yuehping, Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 17; Richard Curt Kraus, Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 145

146 be written in the author’s original calligraphy as well.”101 Thinking of 题字 as an inscription— often they are carved into durable surfaces—is illuminating in terms of how power is communicated and immortalized through the gestural act of calligraphy. In contrast to the writing of the phone numbers that is castigated as a public nuisance and illness, calligraphy by those in power is both welcomed and expected. Yet this agonistic relationship between those in power and those with little power both of whom write in public is indicative of the urban condition in China. Careful examination of the numbers, particularly those that use paint reveal the flowing gestural motion of the writer’s body (figs. 4.6, 4.7). The need to write quickly is predicated on the fear of being caught by the authorities, which precipitates the scrawling appearance of the numbers. As the numbers and characters flow together with loops of paint still visibly connecting them, the viewer sees in that mark the hand of the painter; the trace of the gesture, the sign of the individual. Mao’s distinctive calligraphy marks well-known spaces and monuments, thereby connecting him as an individual to that place; in this way his power over that space is inscribed physically and metaphorically. In contrast, the unknown, unnamed writers of the 小广告 xiao guang gao, while also inscribing spaces, remain weak in relation to the power of the state.

Conclusion

The traces of nongmingong in contemporary art are more difficult to decode than during high Maoism, but works such as those by Wang Jin, Song Dong, and Lu Hao give audiences new ways of conceptualizing the lived experience of this crucial portion of society. While the surplus of laborers continues to feed the neoliberal marketplaces of contemporary China, being attuned to traces and inscriptions of the nongmingong continues to be pertinent. Critical understandings of human infrastructure and knowing that “there is nothing to see here” should in fact compel more rigorous inspections. As in I Love Beijing where the nongminggong passed silently by Dezi’s cab, to look at and to see the nongminggong is to restore the right to look. This type of counter visuality uncovers the occluded and excluded actors of Beijing, disrupting the crafted

101 Yen Yuehping, Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society, 15; Emily Martin, Chinese Ritual and Politics, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 34 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 2 note 1. 146

147 visions produced by the state. Fighting the invisibility of nongmingong through tactics such as performance and installation maintains the artist’s function as a critical and illuminating voice.

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5 Fibre-optics: Cao Fei Online

Cao Fei is a multi-disciplinary artist whose studio, since 2008, is based in Beijing. Growing up in Guangzhou during the early years of China’s economic reforms and establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZs), indelibly marked her practice, one that draws from pop references from Hong Kong, explosive urban growth, and critically examines China’s transition from a command 1 economy to a post-socialist market economy. She is the daughter of renowned sculptor Cao Chong’en who was professor at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art. Cao draws on her experiences growing up in southern China, her family, and her keen eye for youth sub-cultures many of whom populate her artistic works. Her interest in youth culture, new media, and blending these elements in her videos, photographs, and online worlds express often bleak and dystopian versions of China’s future. Her experiences of a China opening up to foreign investments, growth in personal computing, the internet, and accessible tools like digital video 2 cameras set her apart generationally from artists born in the 1960s. This historical context marks her work a bellwether for how technology was interpreted and used by artists of the so- called ‘post-80s generation’ (八零后).

In this chapter I trace Cao Fei’s creation, rendering, and performing of her cyborg identity in the guise of her avatar China Tracy, her meditations on the function of the computer-human interactions, and the Internet’s role in the formation of youth sub-cultures. In the last section of the chapter I examine banking advertizements from the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region of China that offer interesting formal and compositional comparisons to Cao’s online project RMB City (2007-2011).

The counternarratives visible in her online works iMirror (2007) and RMB City represent a critique of contemporary urbanization in China particularly surrounding real estate transactions, dematerialized capital flows, and the resulting urban living conditions. Just as computing is being used more and more within dense urban spaces in China, so too was Cao’s practice

1 Cao Fei: interview with the author, Beijing May 23, 2011. Audio on file with author. 2 For a consice history of the Internet in China, when it was first available, how it is monitored, and how it is used in government propaganda and thought work see, Brady, Marketing Dictatorship, chap. 6. 148

149 moving towards an online based practice. I suggest in my readings of iMirror and RMB City that they be considered as meta-gestures that imbricate the monetization of urban spaces and the electronic communications systems that function to funnel and fuel the real estate market in 3 China.

Computing, China, and Cyborgs

The People’s Republic of China produced its first domestically manufactured personal computer 4 able to process Chinese characters in 1985. Illustrating the magnitude and speed of computer integration in daily life is that in just over a decade after the first Chinese computer was produced, computers were so prevalent in Beijing homes that by 1997 the Beijing Statistical Yearbook began to include computers (计算机 ji suan ji) as a ‘main durable consumer good’ (主要耐用消费品 zhu yao nai yong xiao fei pin) along with washing machines, color TVs, and 5 refrigerators, in its annual data sets. By 2005, the sector’s growth supported Lenovo’s purchase of IBM’s PC division. Concurrent with hardware developments in personal computing was the growth in available and reliable broadband internet access stimulated through government incentives such as those offered by the telecommunications bureau that “… cut service charges and many Internet service providers (ISPs) launched less expensive service packages in 2000 to 6 encourage Internet use.”

The resulting access to less expensive, Internet enabled computers paved the way for artists like Cao to begin to expand their practices from real life (RL) to an online world, or Second Life (SL). In Cao’s case, her online experiences in the online, virtual world of Second Life took form most prominently at the 2007 Venice Biennale, but clarified that she’d already been imagining an online aspect of the work: “[b]y the time I was invited to participate in the China Pavilion at

3 Stephen Graham, Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places (London; New York: Routledge, 1996); Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism. 4 Michael Pecht, “Computers,” in China’s Electronics Industry: The Definitive Guide for Companies and Policy Makers with Interest in China (Norwich, MY: William Andrew, 2006), 159. 5 Beijing shi tong ji ju, ed., Beijing Tong Ji Nian Jian (Beijing: Zhong guo tong ji chu ban she, 2011), 203–4. 6 Pecht, “Computers,” 162. 149

150 the Venice Biennale, I had already been thinking that the virtual world could somehow be 7 brought into the commission.” Cao’s interest and intent to create and online world for the Venice Biennale indicate an important turning point in her practice

Further theorizing the links between urban life and the dematerialized data flows that keep a city running is Bruno Latour’s pronouncement that “[i]n addition to the flow of water in the pipes, we need the circulation of signs in wire networks. Water leakages must be avoided; data leakages 8 must be mopped up.” By mopping up the data leakages of Cao Fei’s digitally based practice it is possible to see her vision of contemporary Chinese cities, one that is often out of step from the 9 official and ‘unleaking’ networks of China Telecom and China Netcom. Cao Fei questions and subverts the official narrative of the unquestioned, smooth, unquestioned and welcomed urbanization of Beijing using the infrastructure of the Internet to convey her counternarrative, or as she puts it she is building “… a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self- contradictory, inter-permeative, pan-political, extremely entertaining, and laden with irony and 10 suspicion.” Cao’s online work in Second Life is decidedly and intentionally fraught with issues problems of urbanization that other narratives are quick to airbrush away. This is the space in which I am working in this discussion; attempting to draw together infrastructures of technology—represented by the web—and artwork produced using this infrastructure.

Cao Fei’s technologically mediated practice in the online metaverse of Second Life presents viewers with an extended documentary on her own transformation into a cyborg, her interest in

7 “‘i.Mirror by China Tracy (AKA Cao Fei)’ (2007) | ART21,” Art21, accessed January 31, 2016, http://www.art21.org/images/cao-fei/imirror-by-china-tracy-aka-cao-fei-2007-0. 8 Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant, Paris Ville Invisible (Les Empecheurs de Penser En Rond) (Paris: Institut Synthelabo pour le progres de la connaissance, 1998), 27. 9 For the official website of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology see: http://www.miit.gov.cn/n11293472/index.html see also: Guo jia xin xi zhong xin (China) and Zhongguo xin xi xie hui., eds., Zhongguo Xin Xi Nian Jian: China Information Almanac (Beijing: Zhongguo xin xi nian jian qi kan she, 2001). 10 Full text available online at: http://rmbcity.com/about/ and in her catalogue RMB City Catalogue, Vitamin Creative Space, 2007. 150

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11 this identity, and her eventual move away from online worlds in her practice. In the second half of the chapter, I examine the use of infrastructure in the form of networked technology in Cao Fei’s multi-year online projects iMirror and RMB City to contend that her dystopian city in Second Life functions as both a reflection of, and a counter-narrative to, Beijing’s recent rapid 12 urbanization fueled by technology.

Documenting Everyday Disjunctures: DV sub-culture in China

Despite an interest in leaking the real into the virtual and vice versa, methods of documentary photography and filmmaking inform Cao’s approach to her subjects even while her subjects engage in elaborate costume driven fictions. The documentary impulse in Chinese video art and filmmaking, led by Wu Wenguang (吴文光) and his Cao Chang Di Work Station (草场地工作站), can be traced to low cost of DV cameras and artists’ desires to produce alternative narratives 13 than those found through state run media outlets. The documentary impulse of artists and filmmakers in contemporary China has been productively examined by scholars, particularly as being indicative of the result of the widespread availability of handheld DV cameras at relatively 14 low cost. Cao’s interest in, and use of, documentary photography and film styles lends her

11 Second Life is an online metaverse created by users with the tag line “Your world. Your imagination.” http://secondlife.com/whatis/?lang=en-US 12 Consider the deployment of technology in the 2008 Olympic slogan that decried the games as “high-tech” games see: http://en.beijing2008.cn/bocog/concepts/ and http://scitech.people.com.cn/GB/25509/56813/122467/ this then constitutes an ‘official’ narrative of technology, one that in the analysis that follows is markedly different than the narrative told by Cao Fei. The categories of the hi-tech Olympics as archived on the Party news site Xinhua News include: “high-tech city” (科技城市 ke ji cheng shi) “high tech life” (科技生活 ke ji sheng huo) http://www.xinhuanet.com/olympics/kjay/. 13 Wu Wenguang, Xian Chang (Tianjin: Tianjin she hui ke xue yuan chu ban, 2000); Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang, eds., From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006); Yomi Braester, “From Real Time to Virtual Reality: Chinese Cinema in the Internet Age,” Journal of Contemporary China 13, no. 38 (2004): 89; Chris Berry, “Wu Wenguang: An Introduction,” Cinema Journal 46, no. 1 (2006): 133–136; Chris. Berry, Xinyu. Lü, and Lisa. Rofel, eds., The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010). For the online home of Wu Wenguang’s CCD workstation see: http://www.cidfa.com/archives/. Cao Fei’s awareness of Wu’s importance to the DV filmmaking field is evident in her 2013 film The Haze and Fog (commissioned by the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, Manchester) in which she cast Wu as a central character. 14 Zhang, Xianmin. and Zhang, Yaxuan., eds., Yi Ge Ren de Ying Xiang : DV Wan Quan Shou Ce [ All about DV : Works, Making, Creation, Comments] (Beijing: Zhongguo qing nian chu ban she, 2003). 151

152 work a sense of veracity and proximity to her subjects. In her longer format documentary films co-produced with Ou Ning (欧宁): San Yuan Li 三元里 (2003) and Mei Shi Jie 煤市街 (2006) hand held DV cameras are used and the narration is unscripted in order to allow the subjects to 15 speak for themselves. In fact, in Mei Shi Jie Cao and Ou Ning give the camera over to the protagonist and long time resident of the street, Zhang Jinli (张⾦利). It is Zhang’s footage and

16 other residents that Ou and Cao gave DV cameras that make up the majority of the film. It is evident in these early works that Cao engaged with documentary methods, compositional strategies and techniques. These are all elements that translate and suffuse her later virtual machinima documentaries in Second Life.

Cao Fei’s practice repeatedly wavers between the real and the imaginary, offering a perspective that questions perceived notions of what is tangible and what is fiction. Many of the issues explored early in her career in works such as COSPlayers (2004) inform, haunt, and shape her 17 work online in Second Life. In her 2004 series COSPlayers, Cao assumes an anthropological participant-observer position in her documentation of youth who dress as their favorite 18 characters, many drawn from Japanese anime series. This youth subculture flourishes in the urban spaces of contemporary China where the fantasy role-playing youth seek reprieve from

15 Annelie Lütgens and Gijs van Tuyl eds., The Chinese: Photography and Video from China (Wolfsburg: Hatje Cantz, 2004), 22. 16 Ou Ning and Cao Fei co-directed San Yuan Li and Mei Shi Jie. Cao Fei and Ou Ning, San Yuan Li, Video, 2004; Ou Ning, Mei Shi Jie (dGenerate Films, 2006). Hou Hanru et al., “San Yuan Li,” in Jin Ri Xian Feng 13 (Shanghai: Shi ji chu ban ji tuan, 2005). For a full text transcription of an interview conducted at a screening of Mei Shi Jie see: 2007 年 9 月 14 日天琳放映会讨论实录: September 14th 2007 Tian Lin fang ying hui tao lun shi lu http://www.alternativearchive.com/ouning/article.asp?id=486. 17 www.caofei.com. 18 Cosplay is a portmanteau of costume and play. Fans of particular characters dress, act, and even pretend to have the same superpowers as their characters. For an announcement of the upcoming issue featuring Cosplay see: “Cosplay 同盟宣言,” 青年文学家 Youth Literator [sic] no. 8 (2010): 64. The subsequent cover of issue 10 featured two young females dressed in full Cosplay regalia and was accompanied by the text: “China’s first youth literature on Cosplay” (中国第一本 Cosplay 青春文学杂志 Zhongguo di yi ben Cosplay qing chun wen xue za zhi). 青年文学家 Youth Literator [sic] no. 10 (2010). 152

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19 their mundane lives. The insertion of the surreal represented by the costumed youth, therefore acts to disrupt the rows of apartment buildings, transforming a polluted creek into a battlefield.

The insertion of surreal or bizarre elements by artists serves to highlight the daily strangeness of living in contemporary China. Intentional disruptions with such fantastical moments or figures are also evident in the work of filmmaker Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯), particularly in his 2006 film, 20 Still Life (三峡好人 San Xia Hao Ren). Still Life is set in the already surreal and continuously empting landscapes of along banks of the Three Gorges dam project. The film features buildings 21 that blastoff, transforming from mundane concrete shells to explosive rocket ships. The characters acknowledge the lift-off of the building, but with little fanfare. The awareness of, and yet disinterest in, the strangeness of daily life in Jia’s films and a similar impulse in Cao’s COSPlayers indicate a shared ethos towards this contemporary moment in China. The parents of the Cosplayers who continue reading the newspaper or working while their children are dressed as fictional characters are as unfazed as the characters in Still Life.

Cao specifically references Jia’s play with ‘reality’ by including three stills from Still Life in the 22 RMB City catalogue (5.1). The stills occupy half of a page and are located below the RMB City virtual version of the Three Gorges Dam called ‘the People’s dam’ (ren min ba ⼈民坝). Cao’s decision to place her version of the dam alongside Jia’s speculative version alludes to her interest in slipping between the real and the fictional, and to highlight the strangeness yet at the same time everydayness of bizarre scenes happening in contemporary China.

19 Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond, eds., Brave New Worlds (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2007). 20 Braester, Painting the City Red, 307–9. 21 Cao Fei makes an explicit connection between RMB City and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life in the RMB City catalogue by including three film stills below her own virtual rendering of the Three Gorges damn in RMB City. Cao Fei and Hu Fang, RMB City: Cao Fei SL Avatar: China Tracy. Ren Min Cheng Zhai: Cao Fei Di Er Ren Sheng Hua Shen: Zhongguo Cuixi (Guangzhou: Vitamin Creative Space, 2008), n.p. 22 Cao Fei, RMB City, ed. Hu Fang and Cao Fei (Guangzhou: Vitamin Creative Space, 2008). 153

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From the real to the virtual

The examples for Cao’s early practice detailed above are first and foremost staged in the physical world. They may present the viewer strange juxtapositions, but are created with people 23 in RL. By the time Cao Fei is exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale, she had begun a multiyear exploration of her second life that marked a transition to a digital online practice. This was a move away from the realities of her earlier work, but still maintained her interest in documenting youth sub-cultures. While there are distinctions between these two moments in her practice, her methodology of tracking and recording what can be termed her documentary style, is consistent in her practice.

24 While the network is undoubtedly physical and real, the virtual worlds created in the network, 25 what cyberpunk author William Gibson termed “cyberspace” are, in contrast, fictions. In 2007 China Tracy, Cao Fei’s avatar most recognizable fiction, and cyborg manifestation, made her 26 global debut at the Venice Biennale in an all female Chinese pavilion curated by Hou Hanrou. Choosing to leave the real world for the online world of Second Life, Cao Fei began what would become a four-year adventure into cyberspace. Second Life is an online multi-user built metaverse defined by the OED as, “an alternative world or universe, especially one that is

23 I am adopting the terminology used in Second Life whereby first life (FL) is the physical world. In contrast, one’s second life (SL) is ones online persona and life as lived and experienced by one’s avatar. 24 For a discussion of Internet and telecommunication networks’ assumed invisibility see Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (Ecco, 2012); Nicole Starosielski, “‘Warning: Do Not Dig’: Negotiating the Visibility of Critical Infrastructures,” Journal of Visual Culture 11, no. 1 (April 1, 2012): 38–57; Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 25 William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: Voyager, 1984); William Gibson, Burning Chrome (New York: Arbor House, 1986). Gibson is often credited with both coining the term cyberspace and starting the cultural phenomenon of ‘cyberpunk.’ See: Larry McCaffery et al., “Cyberpunk Forum/Symposium,” Mississippi Review 16, no. 2/3 (1988): 16–65; Larry McCaffery, ed., Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, 1991); Jane Chi Hyun Park, “Stylistic Crossings: Cyberpunk Impulses in Anime.,” World Literature Today 79, no. 3 (December 2005): 60–63. 26 Shen Yuan et al., Ri chang qi ji (Shanghai: Shanghai wen yi chu ban she, 2007); Robert Storr, Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tenses: La Biennale Di Venezia, 52. Esposizione Internazionale D’arte (Venezia: Windsor Books, 2007), 122; Richard Vine, New China, New Art (Munich: Prestel USA, 2008), 190–191. The other three artists were: Kan Xuan, Shen Yuan, and Yin Xiuzhen. 154

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27 abstract, theoretical, or hypothetical.” This move to the metaverse marked a shift in her practice away from documenting sub-cultures in real life such as those in Cosplayers, but given the large demographic cross-over between Cosplayers and online games, the shift is a logical one in the context of Cao’s broader interests of practices and spaces of sub-cultures.

Cao’s documentation and recording of subcultures reveals the disjunctures in daily life, such as those discussed above, and she is fascinated by spaces and practices that deviate from perceived norms. Second Life provided Cao a new realm of possibilities, an online community of ‘players,’ many of whom identify as part of various of sub-cultures formed ‘in-world,’ one she was quick 28 to take advantage of and document. Documenting in-world interactions, lifestyles, and events presented Cao with a creative challenge as the typical tools: DV film camera or a digital camera, aren’t useful when online. Cao began to explore other methods of recording her growing Second Life existence, eventually producing iMirror.

29 The 28-minute “Second Life documentary film” was produced entirely in Second Life using the techniques of machinima, a portmanteau of machine and cinema that describes the 30 production of an animated film by using the graphics engine of a video game. Machinima is a tactic deployed by other Chinese artists, for example Feng Mengbo (冯梦波 b.1966), who repeatedly uses the technique in his practice, for instance in Q4U exhibited at Documenta(11) in 2002. In this work, Feng, camera in virtual hand, recorded himself and his friends playing the 31 popular multi-user first-person shooter video game Quake created by id Software in 1996.

27 “Metaverse, N.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, 2014), http://www.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/271922. For a brief explanation of the economics of Second Life and how revenue is produced see Vili Lehdonvirta, Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 11–12; Linden Labs, “Second Life Official Site,” 2014, http://secondlife.com/. 28 Wagner James Au, The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World (New York: Collins, 2008), 69–84. 29 The use of the term ‘documentary’ in the title serves to signal to the viewer that this recording of a digital animation is to be considered as a documentary. 30 “Machinima, N.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, 2014), http://www.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/276435. The entire iMirror documentary is available online on Cao Fei’s Youtube channel ChinaTracy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vcR7OkzHkI 31 Documenta 11, Platform 5: Ausstellung, Ausstellungsorte (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 11; Vine, New China, New Art, 174. 155

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Yomi Braester describes Feng Mengbo’s Quake based works as being indicative of Chinese artists and filmmakers decision to “renounc[e] celluloid altogether” and being indicative of their focus instead on “…hyperreal space, one that does away with all reference to material urban 32 existence and functions as a self-sufficient realm.” For Braester, Feng Mengbo’s works are postcinematic and postspatial, but are too indicative of the ‘urban contract’ between artists, 33 filmmakers, and urban planners he details in the book. Braester introduces Cao Fei’s iMirror in the context of Feng’s Quake based works, arguing that unlike Feng’s computer generated character, China Tracy on the other hand represents a “self-sufficient” actor in Second Life. Ultimately, Braester concludes that while Feng and Cao deploy digital renderings of themselves differently, their works both reject cinema as a means of making sense of the emerging urban moment in China.

Rejection of the real in favor of the virtual is a shared attribute in Feng and Cao’s computer- based works; a rejection that is a means of making sense of the massive changes in Chinese urban centers. The unfazed parents in COSPlayers hints at the failures of the real to capture and translate the changes in Chinese cities. Cao’s shift to the virtual, while a distinct change in venue, is still marked by her distinctive approach to her subjects through documentary informed recording. Regardless of the change in mediums or methods of recording, Cao retains an ethnographic approach to her online works, an approach that can be traced to her earlier works discussed above. The difference in her approach in Second Life is subtler as it is a shift from an ethnography shot from behind the camera to her active participation—one might even go so far as to call it participatory ethnography—in her Second Life works. This signals a break with her earlier documentary works where she tended to maintain a distance from her subjects, a distance mediated by the lens of her camera or video camera. Her movement out from behind the camera to in front of it marks a shift in her practice; one that is specific to her Second Life based works. The first two sections of iMirror capture her experiences that are quote “part real, part role

32 Braester, Painting the City Red, 304. 33 Ibid., 307–9. 156

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34 playing.” In these two sections China Tracy is on display in front of the camera, but in the last 35 section, she retreats back behind the virtual camera. The last section dwells on different residents of Second Life, documenting them in a similar way to earlier pieces such as COSPlayers or Mei Shi Jie. iMirror demonstrated Cao’s fascination with Second Life, but also revealed the limits to artistic production in Second Life, limits Cao would push in the extension and companion piece to iMirror, RMB City. RMB City is a multi-year program where Cao built an entire self-contained island-city rather than relying on other player built spaces that featured extensively in iMirror. In fact, the long shots of the ‘for sale’ signs in iMirror (fig. 5.2) presage Cao’s eventual move to purchase tracts of these virtual real estate in order to exert total control over the building of her city-state.

Investors and art collectors were able to purchase virtual land in RMB City, adding another layer of complexity to the piece and commenting on the nature of both real estate speculation in 36 Beijing and in the contemporary Chinese art market. The name of the project is a cheeky pun—RMB stands as short hand for Ren Min Bi (lit. the people’s money,人民币), the name currency of Mainland China. The sly linguistic pun of the title is mirrored in the irreverent representations of well-known icons: a rusting Mao floats offshore with a bodhisattva bobbing in a shopping cart nearby. The rostrum of Tian’anmen sports a portrait of a panda in the place of Mao, while the Monument to the People’s Hero is crowned with a lazily rotating bike wheel. The iconoclastic jumbling of China’s modern icons is tempered with the rough, jerky animation of Second Life, shielding Cao’s caustic derision of Chinese cities that is more evident in the textual sources that go with RMB City.

34 Cao Fei and Hu Fang, RMB City, sec. Wagner James Au n.p. Full text also available online: http://www.caofei.com/texts.aspx?id=21&year=2007&aitid=1 35 As with most first person video games, Second Life players can choose a variety of ways of seeing their characters, either from the “real life” viewpoint that allows a player to see as if from the avatar’s eyes or “mouse look” that allows a birds eye view. Michael. Rymaszewski, ed., Second Life : The Official Guide (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2007). 36 The virtual real estate was released at Art Basel Miami in 2007 (December 6th-9th), the advertisement ran on page 222 in the December 2007 issue of Art Forum. The same ad is reproduced in the RMB City catalogue, Cao Fei and Hu Fang, RMB City n.p.. 157

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The slickness of the surfaces, for instance the gloss of the bulbous pink spheres of the China Pearl tower, could initially be mistaken for such officially commissioned graphic animations such as the Beijing 2015 video (fig. 0.1) introduced in the video interlude above; however, upon closer inspection, Cao’s biting humor becomes visible. For instance, the Bird’s Nest in RMB City is rusting and the lattice work broken. Likewise, another architectural monument to Beijing’s global debut—Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV tower—dangles precariously from a crane hook. Cao’s refusal to laude these globally recognizable buildings, or to give them a place of prominence in RMB City is markedly different than how official renderings visually treat these buildings. Compare for instance how such buildings are treated in Beijing 2015. The diverging narratives might be placed in a binary: Cao Fei’s is a dystopic narrative, while Beijing 2015 is utopic. By bringing these two animated videos into dialogue with each other the drastic differences become more apparent. Neither narrative is objective or realistic, but how they present the urban landscape gives us a glimpse into what the planners’ imagine a city can be. For Cao it is a city without gravity, piled with iconic buildings that are treated like cast off toys; the urban planners of Beijing 2015 envision a city without trash, traffic, or dust. Somewhere between these extremes exists the daily, lived experience of Beijing.

Official digital renderings are produced, distributed, and screened to demonstrate to viewers what a future, albeit one yet to arrive, can and will look like. One such visual production companies is Crystal CG (shui jing shi 水晶石). One of the leading Chinese ‘digital entertainment’ companies, Crystal CG was responsible for digital renderings seen at the 2008 Olympics and 2010 World Expo as well as a digital production of one of the most recognized Chinese scroll paintings: Along the River at Qing Ming Festival (Qing Ming Shang He tu 清明上 37 河图). The highly rendered animations reflect the official narratives of urbanization in China free from potholes, trash, or slow Internet connections. Digital renderings and animations such as these offer a visual interpretation of what is to come, presenting a future yet to be realized, but

37 http://www.archcrystalcg.com/flash/index.html. For an overview of Crystal CG’s major projects including the 2008 Olypmics, 2010 World Expo and digitizing Along the River at Qing Ming Festival, see: http://www.crystalcg.com/cn/about_us.html. For a discussion of the relationship between creativity and Crystal CG’s products including Along the River at Qing Ming Festival: Tian Yuan and Lu Jing, “‘走出去’发现我国文化创意产业的待掘市场” (Zou Chu Qu’ Fa Xian Wo Guo Wen Hua Chuang Yi Chan Ye de Dai Jue Shi Chang), Ren Min Zheng Xie Wang, July 25, 2012. 158

159 already inhabited and fully functioning. It is as if by creating these animations urban planners, politicians, and the animators have always already accomplished the building process. In terms of viewership, these images function similarly to the rosy futures offered during high Maoist propaganda dissemination where the future with its promised bounty of crops and goods was just out of sight, floating somewhere in the middle distance behind the viewer, but always visible to 38 the model workers gazing out of the picture plane. Art critic Hou Hanru discusses the relationship between post-Olympic Beijing and digital renderings thusly:

[t]hanks to the progress of computer technologies, especially 3D simulation and animation programs, architects can now turn their professional, highly technical, complicated ideas, concepts, and designs into brilliantly colorful, super-realistic 39 renderings…

Hou continues to unpick the relationship between the slick advertising images produced to sell buildings and the companies that make them, offering the example of Crystal Digital Technology Company as an example of the collusion between official rhetoric of large-scale spectacles such 40 as the Olympics or major building programs like Rem Koolhaas’ OMA CCTV tower. Hou’s assessment of the collusion between digital rendering companies and the government is evident in his wry analysis: “[a]s long as one does not have a dream different from what is taught by the political big brothers, one can enjoy this heaven combining the best things in reality and fiction, 41 or the very real fiction, in the happiest way, and be proud of it!”

While Hou makes the link between the virtual images produced in the service of architects and the government’s dissemination of such images to peddle the idea of these images to citizens, he

38 See chapter two for a discussion of such compositional strategies used in propaganda posters. Landsberger, Chinese Propaganda Posters. 39 Hou Hanru, “Living With(in) the Urban Fiction (Notes on Urbanization and Art in Post-Olympic China),” Yishu 8, no. 3 (2009): 6–29. 40 Beijing Crystal Digital Technology Company was initially named Crystal Imaging (北京水晶石电脑图像 Beijing shui chang shi dian nao tu xiang). For an early advertisement for the company see Beijing Fang Di Chan 1999. This ad demonstrates Crystal CG’s links with the emerging Beijing real estate market, a decade before Hou would draw out this connection in his Yishu article (op. cit). 41 Hou Hanru, “Living With(in) the Urban Fiction (Notes on Urbanization and Art in Post-Olympic China),” 11. 159

160 neglects to include the myriad of other outlets where this type of image appears; the larger visual field in which such images circulate in contemporary China. These types of digitally produced images are splattered across Beijing—on hoardings wrapping the multitude of construction sites, on leaflets passed out to passengers stuck in the endless traffic of the city, on packed subway 42 cars’ screens, on government websites. Hoardings are created to specifically disengage with 43 reality: to offer the viewer an escape into a clean, orderly, and unpolluted world.

RMB City borrows the visual lexicon of digital renderings and animations; the project goes on to subvert, alter, and tweak this grammar to create a recognizable language. This is a language that speaks less of glossy skyscrapers, and more about an uncertain dystopic urban future. Cao acknowledges the inspiration of many aspects of RMB City that are adapted from Chinese cities, but are transmogrified in RMB City:

RMB City 不是一个魔像之城, 它既没有还原今天的全部也没有唤起我们对过去的怀念。这是一面从局部开始反光的镜子…

RMB City is not a magical portrait of a city [;] it neither restores the present, nor evokes 44 our nostalgia for the past. It’s a mirror that partially reflects… [.]

Tellingly, to return to Hou’s assessment of digital productions in contemporary China, the magic metaphor offered by Cao in RMB City manifesto resonates with his description of digital 45 technology that “…functions perfectly as a magician.” Cao refuses to create a magical city,

42 Images taken from author’s fieldwork photos and ephemera gathered in Beijing from 2008-2012. 43 Recall here the discussion in chapter three of Chen Kaige’s 100 Flowers Hidden Deep. Chen uses AutoCAD-like animation sequence to create the architectural drawings in the animation of the imaginary house being reconstructed in Mr. Feng’s mind. This, along with the AutoCAD inspired cover of Wang Jun’s book indicates a broad adoption of digital animation used both in art practices, architectural firms, and in advertisements for real estate in contemporary Chinese visual culture. Wang Jun, Cheng Ji. 44 My translation differs than that in the catalogue. For the original Chinese and English texts see Cao Fei and Hu Fang, RMB City, sec. Ren Min Cheng Zhai Xuan Yan 人民城寨宣言, section two ‘Mirror City’ Jing Cheng 镜城). 45 Hou Hanru, “Living With(in) the Urban Fiction (Notes on Urbanization and Art in Post-Olympic China),” 11. For a different viewpoint of the use of the digital in architectural design and networked cities see, Fei Jing and Fu Gang, “0 与 1:网络城市和建筑散文化 Zero and 1: The networked city and the culture of dispersed architecture,” Jin Ri Xian Feng 8 (2000): 131–134. 160

161 instead she gives viewers familiar elements of contemporary urban spaces in China, rendered into dystopic spaces reflective of a partial reality.

Cao, by using the Internet and attendant technologies, transforms herself into a woman-cyborg. And in case viewers were unclear if Cao consciously adopted her identity as a cyborg she makes it crystal clear in the first intertitle screen of iMirror. Quoting media scholar William Mitchell from his book ME++:

I construct, and I am constructed in a mutually recursive process that continually engages my fluid, permeable boundaries and my endlessly ramifying networks. I am a spatially 46 extended cyborg.

Cao’s willingness to inhabit a cyborg identity is clarified immediately in the use of this quote to introduce the documentary. Therefore, her adoption of a cyborg identity must be considered in an analysis of her online-based works because she self-identifies as a cyborg.

Military Industrial Complexes and the World Wide Web

Much of the early research that led to the Internet was funded by the US Department of 47 Defense. Computers and particularly networked computers, key to a functioning Internet, must 48 always be considered as part of the military industrial complex. China’s computing sector is no

46 William J. William John Mitchell, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 39. 47 ARPANET Protocol Handbook (San Francisco: Data Composition, 1978); Janet. Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999), http://link.library.utoronto.ca/eir/EIRdetail.cfm?Resources__ID=63259&T=F. For a Chinese account of the workings of ARPANET as they relate to computer networking see Cao Dongqi and Liu Fuzi, eds., Ji Suan Ji Wang Luo Ruan Jian Ji Chu [Foundations of Computer Networking Software}] (Hebei: Ren min you dian chu ban she, 1982), 46–54. 48 Blum, Tubes; Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Swerve eds (New York: Zone Books, 1991); B. Jack Copeland, “The Modern History of Computing,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2008, 2008, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/computing-history/. Note particularly the relationship to cryptology at Bletchley Park and its relationship to Allan Turing’s work on computing and artificial intelligence. 161

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49 different. In China Reconstructs October 1989, the article “Science and Technology in the New China” details the growth of computers in China:

The most significant achievement to date has been the development of the huge Galaxy computer, capable of performing 100 million operations per second. Manufactured by the National Defense Science and Technology University (NDSTU), the computer took six years (1977-1983) to develop. …Only a few countries in the world have the capacity to produce this new type of computer. The NDSTU has also developed China’s first 50 simulation computer.

This brief article on science and technology offers just glimpses into a wide range of hi-tech sectors—from nuclear energy to particle accelerators—but what is pertinent to my point here is the relationship between the NDSTU and the creation of the Galaxy computer. No information is given about the applications for the Galaxy, how citizens will benefit from this computing breakthrough, or why this accomplishment is a key aspect of the “New China”, but what is stressed is that this computer possessed by China and only “a few countries” have this technology. The assertion being made is that technology equals power, that power comes from the National Defense Science and Technology University, and that power is aiding China’s international standing in the realm of computer technology. We can connect the role of computers, technology, and national defense as being part of what Arjun Appadurai identifies as 51 the ‘technoscape’ at work in the disjunctures in contemporary global economy. The China

49 See the inclusion of the computer screen depicted in the poster “The achievements in national defense, science, and technology are glorious” Chinese Propaganda PostersLandsberger, Chinese Propaganda Posters, 84. 50 Rao Fengqi, “Science and Technology in the New China,” China Reconstructs 38, no. 10 (October 1989): 44. Note that the Galaxy computer was completed in 1983, just two years before figures 1 and 2 discussed above. Moreover, the function of China Reconstructs (中国建设 Zhongguo Jian She) as a publication is to communicate China’s current affairs to a global audience. It was founded by Soong Ching Ling (Mme. Sun Yat-Sen) and published in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, German, Portuguese, and Chinese. See China Reconstructs 38, no. 10 (October 1989): 6. 51 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 33–34. 162

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Today article conveys to the reader a future where Chinese computers are on par, technologically 52 and temporally with the rest of the world.

53 The future envisioned in 1989 is detailed in the February 2010 China Today article “Fastest 54 Supercomputer in China.” The article reviews super computers in recent Chinese history, citing a 2008 New York Times article that “touted China’s entrance into the top levels of the global 55 high-performance computer industry.” As with the October 1989 article the parity between China’s computer sector and the world’s is highlighted and the rapid arrival of a future where China has surpassed the competition is implied. What is markedly different in the February 2010 article is the forthright discussion of how supercomputers are part of the average citizen’s life.

How far removed is the supercomputer from our daily lives? Many people see it as something that only animates the realm of scientists and engineers, never really impacting the rest of us.

For online game players, it is the supercomputer that makes possible the thousands of millions of users that access a single website. The World of Warcraft, for example, has as 56 many as 4,000,000 players online at any given moment.

The application of China’s fastest computers is largely supporting MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games). The World of Warcraft is one, Second Life is another.

52 For why temporality matters in the study of non-Western cultures, Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 53 China Reconstructs was renamed China Today in January of 1990. Israel Epstein, “To Our Readers: Celebrating New China’s 40th Birthday,” China Reconstructs 38, no. 10 (October 1989): 6. Epstein writes, “[f]or every today includes its yesterdays and is the threshold to tomorrow.” The shift linguistically from reconstructing, with its connotation of rebuilding from destruction, is jettisoned for ‘today’ signifying a sense of arrival of the present and a looking towards the future. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter, the temporal aspects of this name change are pertinent to shifting notions of China’s international status and share aspects with the narrative of futurity I am detailing here. 54 Zhou Chang, “Fastest Supercomputer in China,” China Today 59, no. 2 (February 2010): 78–79. 55 Ibid., 79. 56 Ibid. 163

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Viewed with concern, MMOGs and online gaming in general, has been categorized as an addiction. Particularly in the popular press and media, elements of a ‘moral panic’ surround 57 discussions of Internet use by youth in China. The first research report on youth and the Internet was issued by The China Internet Network Information Center in 2007; the same year 58 iMirror was completed. Cao’s interest in sub-cultures and youth engagement with emerging technologies made using Second Life a natural environment to continue to document and record these groups; however, around the same time the monitoring and interest in protecting youth from the perceived harm of an ‘Internet addiction’ was also gaining public popularity.

The increased attention on controlling access and content online entered the discourse of the late 2000s, but it wouldn’t be until 2010 that the first white paper The State of the Internet in China 59 (中国互联网状况) was published. The publication of the white paper marks the first time government policy was disseminated and made official through the mechanism of a published white paper widely available to the public, in contrast to the more specialized research reports 60 cited above (研究报告 yan jiu bao gao).

The opening two sentences of the foreword set the tone of the white paper:

57 Marcella Szablewicz, “The Ill Effects of ‘opium for the Spirit’: A Critical Cultural Analysis of China’s Internet Addiction Moral Panic,” Chinese Journal of Communication 3, no. 4 (2010): 454. 58 “Zhongguo Wang Lu You Xi Shi Chang Yan Jiu Bao Gao (Chinese Online Game Market Research Report)” (Beijing: China Internet Network Information Center, 2009), https://www.cnnic.cn/hlwfzyj/hlwxzbg/200911/P020120709345304096696.pdf; Cao Fei, i·Mirror (Beijing: Cao Fei, 2007). 59 Zhonghua ren min gong he guo guo wu yuan xin wen ban gong she, ed., Zhongguo Hu Lian Wang Zhuang Kuang (Beijing: Ren min chu ban she, 2010). Also available in full text on the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China webpage: http://www.gov.cn/zwgk/2010-06/08/content_1622866.htm. Issued June 8th, 2010. For an meta-study on research on the Internet in China see: David Kurt Herold and Gabriele de Seta, “Through the Looking Glass: Twenty Years of Chinese Internet Research,” The Information Society 31, no. 1 (2015): 68–82. 60 For a brief history of white papers in China see: Xie Shuguang, Gan Guangwei, and Cai Jihui, Pi Shu Yan Jiu: Li Lun Yu Shi Xian (Beijing: She hui ke xue chu ban she, 2011), sec. Pi shu yan hua jian shi, 008-013 and sec. Pi shu da shi ji, 216-219. For the origins of the white papers in the UK see Michael Wheeler‐Booth, “White Papers,” in The New Oxford Companion to Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), http://www.oxfordreference.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/10.1093/acref/9780199290543.001.0001/acref- 9780199290543-e-2332. 164

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互联网是人类智慧的结晶，20 世纪的重大科技发明，当代先进的重要标志。互联网深刻影响着世界经济、政治、文化和社会的发展，促进了社会生产生活和信息传播的变革。

The Internet is a crystallization of humankind’s intelligence, a major scientific and technological invention of the 20th century, [and an] important symbol of the advanced contemporary era. The Internet has deeply influenced the world’s economy, governance, culture, and society’s development, [it has] promoted society’s production and living, and 61 changed how information is disseminated.

There are keywords used in this white paper that highlight the interweaving of humans and technology. For example: humankind (人类) as part of, and stemming from, humankind’s, intelligence (智力) or wisdom (智慧). The white paper emphasizes the human’s role in technology.

The inclusion of the category of ‘culture’ (文化) along with the development of economics (经济), governance (政治), and society (社会), stakes a claim to developing culture in relation to the Internet—as conceived and controlled by the government—the policy promulgated by this 62 document exerts further control over this sector. It is as if in the absence of widely distributed white paper, the Internet had, up until 2010, retained the perception of that critique was 63 possible.

61 Zhonghua ren min gong he guo guo wu yuan xin wen ban gong she, Zhongguo Hu Lian Wang Zhuang Kuang, 1. 62 The Chinese Internet is censored. This is widely known and the policy is often referred to as the “great firewall.” Censorship and how it is enacted in China is beyond the scope of this chapter, however, my point here is that in making public this white paper, the government made its policy on the Internet evident while at the same time staking a claim to how the Internet should be used. The subtext being that these were the only ways one could use the Internet. See: Brady, Marketing Dictatorship, 125–45. For an interesting study on the methods of censoring the thousands of blogs, Sina weibo accounts, and webpages see: David Bamman, Brendan O’Connor, and Noah Smith, “Censorship and Deletion Practices in Chinese Social Media,” First Monday 17, no. 3 (March 4, 2012), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3943. 63 Ai Weiwei’s blog is one of the most consistent critical voices before and after the white paper was issued. For a selection of his posts see Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009, ed. Lee Ambrozy, trans. Lee. Ambrozy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). He continues to post via twitter (officially blocked in China) and his blog: http://aiweiwei.com/. For a comparative example of an artist’s collaboration with a dissident using social media see Coco Fusco’s piece La Plaza Vacia (The Empty Plaza), Video (2012) that uses a 165

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The second section of the white paper is even more explicit in detailing the government’s plans for how the Internet and so called “cultural industries” will work together. “Cultural industries” is a label used to describe artists, designers, and cultural spaces (galleries, museums, heritage 64 sites, etc.). The relationship between urbanization and cultural industries has been well 65 documented. The white paper states:

互联网促进了文化产业发展。网络游戏、网络动漫、网络音乐、网络影视等产业迅速崛起，大大增强了中国文化产业的总体实力。

The Internet has promoted the development cultural industries. The rapid rise of online games, cartoons, music, films, and television and related online industries has 66 strengthened China’s cultural industries overall.

The text continues, detailing the rise in revenues and increasing online ad sales. The last sentence in the paragraph on the relationship between the Internet and cultural industries underscores the relationship between ‘national culture’ (民族文化) and the Internet:

网络文化产业已成为中国文化产业的重要组成部分。中国政府大力推动优秀民族文化的网络化传播，实施了一系列文化资源共享工程，全国在线数据库总量达到

text by dissident journalist and blogger Yoani Sanchez. For an anthropological interpretation of social media and political action see Daniel Miller, “Digital Politics and Political Engagement,” in Digital Ethnography: Anthropology, Narrative, and New Media (London: Berg, 2013). 64 For key examples among many see: Keane, China’s New Creative Clusters; Richard L Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2004, 2004). 65 For an example of urban regeneration beginning with artists’ spaces and lofts in Shanghai see Yuan Jing, “八棉讲古半岛说今 Ba Mian Jiang Gu Ban Dao Suo Jin ‘Peninsula 1919 Creative District’,” Cheng Shi Zhongguo 44 (December 2010): 104–111. For scholarship on this phenomenon see: Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Richard Douglas Lloyd, Neo- Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2006); Shenjing He, “State- Sponsored Gentrification Under Market Transition The Case of Shanghai,” Urban Affairs Review 43, no. 2 (2007): 171–98. 66 Zhonghua ren min gong he guo guo wu yuan xin wen ban gong she, Zhongguo Hu Lian Wang Zhuang Kuang, 8. 166

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30 多万个，初步构建起具有一定规模的文化信息资源库群，有效满足了人们多样化的精神文化需求。

Internet cultural industries have become an important component of China’s cultural industries. The Chinese government has already made strides to disseminate China’s splendid national culture via the Internet by implementing a series of cultural resource sharing projects, and establishing more than 300,000 national databases to satisfy the 67 people’s diverse spiritual and cultural needs.

By the time the Internet white paper was being disseminated in China in 2010, Cao’s online metaverse was coming to an end. In 2011 RMB City ceased to be actively developed although it continued to be accessible in Second Life. Cao determined the four-year span of the city early on in the planning of the project, however, the historical proximity to the Internet white paper is telling. Cyberspace was slipping away as a viable space in Cao’s oeuvre.

RMB City is dependent on supercomputers for it to function; and yet, at the conceptual work of the project reveals the disjunctures and contradictions in the contemporary urban moment in its form and content. Nigel Thrift argues that the jumbling of temporal spaces is a result of late capitalism that brings past present and future into competition with each other creating a 68 ‘raucous conglomeration.’ RMB City is a raucous conglomeration in composition, where the riot of buildings that colonize the island jockey for position and the viewer’s attention (fig. 3.3). At the same time, RMB City existing as it does online, is enmeshed in, and made possible by, technology that is closely related to the military-industrial complex. Cao’s own awareness of this relationship is suggested in her inclusion of a space station, labeled the ‘People’s Aerial 69 Castle’ (人民空港) floating off the shore of the island, the fighter jets, rockets and missiles

67 Ibid., 9. 68 Thrift 1998. In Scott McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008). 69 人民空港 is translated both online and in the catalogue as ‘People’s Aerial Castle’ however, I suggest that ‘People’s Airport’ is a more fitting translation of the Chinese. Cao Fei and Hu Fang, RMB City. 167

168 that buzz around the airspace of the city indicate the military’s presence even in RMB City (fig. 70 5.3).

Financial Webs

Initially the Internet provided a new avenue for critique evidenced by Cao’s iMirror and RMB City, both of which made visible certain subcultures and practices online. In this final section, I pivot from Cao’s artistic online-based practice, to consider elements of Chinese domestic bank advertisements that appear to use similar visual strategies her work and suggest that her style has been usurped by the market and to further underscore how the timing of the ending of her online world demonstrates an end of the Internet being a space of critique (fig. 5.4). Additionally, I want to initiate a broader discussion of visual culture in the PRD that deploys imagery of networks and infrastructure. These images are an attempt to make the mostly hidden, mostly virtual, mostly dematerialized processes of global capital flows visible, and in this way are comparable to ways that Cao Fei drew attention to the role of the Internet, RMB City and, iMirror participate in dematerialized capital flows through virtual economies where real world money is converted into virtual land or avatars. Moreover, her personal connection to Guangzhou and her sustained engagement with issues related to the changing economic landscape of post-socialist China allows for intriguing linkages between her practice and these bank adverts. She makes clear her awareness of the PRD and its importance to RMB City by 71 including various images of ports and harbors of the region in the catalogue for RMB City.

The character Kinski in Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis describes virtual capital in terms of luminosity: “[t]he glow of cyber-capital. So radiant and seductive. … It’s cyber-capital that 72 creates the future.” Hong Kong is deeply embedded in cyber-capital and in marketing the tools of cyber-capitalism: bank accounts, stocks, bonds, securities metastasizing cyber-capital globally. Hong Kong, and the PRD more broadly, are built on the glow of cyber-capital. Cao too drew on cyber-capital or virtual investment to enable her to sell virtual land to collectors and ‘build’ RMB

70 Ibid. 71 Cao Fei, RMB City. 72 Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis: A Novel (Simon and Schuster, 2003), 90; 91. 168

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73 City (5.5). Secondly, I end this chapter with a discussion of banking’s visual culture in the PRD because of the rapacious incursions of mainland capital in Hong Kong and Macau. Investment capital is fueling the region’s real estate boom, a boom critiqued in iMirror and RMB City in Cao’s use of ‘land for sale signs’ in iMirror and the accretion of buildings jumbling over one another in RMB City. A driving theme in both iMirror and RMB City was state investing and speculation that she illustrated through online land purchases. The hysterical growth of China’s economy is driven predominately by land reform and the buying and selling of land use rights. The real estate speculation and overall market effervescence in Hong Kong is a reality presaged that was already a reality in Cao’s online metaverse city.

A driver of Hong Kong’s banking successes is hinged on the relationship to and with the currency of the rmb. Following changes to banking laws beginning in 2003, the flow of mainland currency into Hong Kong—where the currency is the Hong Kong dollar—began to steadily 74 increase. Yu Yongding, a former President of the China Society of World Economics and Director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, describes the global shift from American dollars to the rmb as part of the currency’s 75 “internationalistion.” He cites Hong Kong as an example: “rmb deposits in Hong Kong are 76 growing exponentially.” Hong Kong’s return to the mainland in 1997 brought with it a fully established global banking ecology, one that functioned in Hong Kong dollars. Hong Kong’s transition from British colony to a Special Administrative Region (SAR) included shifts in this banking ecology where banks could now offer rmb accounts through Hong Kong banks.

73 “Virtual Realty - Artforum.com / Scene & Herd RMB City,” accessed April 28, 2010, http://artforum.com/diary/id=21839. See also figure 3.5 from the Art Basel Miami launch of RMB City. The role of virtual economies is summarized in Lehdonvirta, Virtual Economies. Discussions of Chinese ‘gold farmers’ are related, but beyond the scope of the current study. ‘Gold farmers’ are hired by game players to collect online funds or to play in their place to continue to advance in an online game. Julian Dibbell, “The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer,” The New York Times, June 17, 2007, sec. Magazine, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17lootfarmers-t.html?pagewanted=all.o 74 “Hong Kong Banks to Conduct Personal Renminbi Business on Trial Basis” (Hong Kong Monetary Authority, 2003), http://www.hkma.gov.hk/eng/key-information/press-releases/2003/20031118-4.shtml. 75 Yu Yongding, “The Renminbi’s Journey to the World,” Xinhua English News, September 11, 2012, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2012-09/11/c_131857607.htm. 76 Ibid. 169

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A key aspect of the visual culture of the RMB in the PRD is bank advertisements (figs. 5.6, 5.7, 5.8). It is these rmb service advertisements that I bring into dialogue with the issues raised earlier in this chapter. Like the Internet that seems to somehow be both everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, global flows of capital are also invisibly, visible. Banks exist as brick and mortar, but the flows of investments and the markets these flows represent have been occluded 77 by neo-liberal economic logic. Banks in Hong Kong use the symbol of mainland currency (symbolized by 元 or ¥) to illustrate the flow of capital from the mainland to Hong Kong. Guangzhou’s proximity to Hong Kong ensured rapid economic growth, much of which followed kinship networks of overseas diaspora communities of Chinese living abroad. The returning capital and investment in the economic growth of the PRD surrounded Cao growing up. The driver of economic development in Guangzhou and in China in general were land use reforms that made land a commodity instead of being state owned. Cao dwells extensively on the issue of land as a commodity in iMirror with long shots of ‘land for sale signs.’ She continued this interest in the commodification of land in RMB City where collectors could purchase virtual land for real money. Cao’s awareness and inclusion of the results of investment in the PRD, evident first in her online practice, and having grown up seeing first hand the economic shifts to Guangzhou, demonstrates her engagement with larger political and social concerns of contemporary China. It was these concerns that initially fueled her online discussion the monetization of land and real estate in iMirror and RMB City.

These bank advertisements represent invisible networks of capital. Produced by banks they share Cao’s fixation on the currency of the rmb, only in this case rather than linguistic fixation, the banks use schematics of networks and the symbol of the rmb to signal the movements and flows of capital. Additionally, both these ads and RMB City focus on the architecture of China’s megacities in their depictions of urban landscapes. The skyline of RMB City is reminiscent of the skylines in these ads. Note the inclusion of geographically distant skyscrapers jostled together, collapsing time and space. In the Bank of East Asia (BEA) ad the networks of above the high-speed train are cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen all of which are linked to Hong Kong. Interestingly the font for the mainland cities is larger than that used for Hong Kong

77 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990). 170

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78 suggesting a subtle power shift from Hong Kong to Beijing. A phallic train shoots out from the CCTV tower, that given the building’s moniker of the ‘big underpants’(大裤衩 da cu cha) 79 presents an overtly sexualized dynamic embedded in the ad. Sexual connotations aside, these advertisements are clear in their message: the rmb currency is coming to Hong Kong and we banks are going to make it easier for our customers to transfer between currencies. In fact the full page Bank of China ad is literally paving the way for the rmb, by removing unnecessary friction in such transfers, offering ‘instant opening of rmb accounts’ in Hong Kong. These three ads represent the neoliberal idea of barrier free trade; they offer a vision of a world where capital glides seamlessly across borders, seeking new, unimpeded ways to multiply. The clean streets, shiny skyscrapers, and speeding trains represent a utopian future predicated on the currency of rmb. These ads share a vision with the official videos of Lanzhou and Beijing discussed above. In contrast, Cao Fei offers us something else entirely. A rusting, listing, polluted dystopia of RMB City that forces us to consider alternative narratives to those proffered in these official images.

Conclusion

The sleek bank advertisements recall, both compositionally and formally, the official city planning video Beijing 2015 as well as work created by Crystal CG. It is in Hong Kong’s bid to increase the city’s cultural profile that Crystal CG and such glossy renderings speak to Cao’s digital practice. Crystal CG has produced renderings of the huge development of the West Kowloon cultural district that will house M+ designed to be the region’s major hub of

78 In fact the desire to downplay Hong Kong’s economic power led to Beijing developing the Tianjin Binhai area that is being built as a “northern Manhattan” “Tianjin Binhai Xin Qu Yu Jian Cheng Zhongguo Bei Fang de ‘Manhadun,’” Xinhua Wang Tianjin Pindao, July 27, 2002, http://news.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/2002- 07/27/content_500538.htm. Accessed October 8, 2013. Plans are to create a financial and industrial hub closer to Beijing, one that is well serviced by networks of infrastructure and proximity to Tianjin’s port: see the Binhai New Area government website’s description of the advantages of the area: Tianjing zheng fu wang, “Binhai New Area,” I Want to Know 我想了解新区, accessed October 8, 2013, http://www.bh.gov.cn/html/bhxqzww/XQYS22360/List/index.htm. Moreover, the geographic distance of Hong Kong as well as its past as its colonial past means the Central government is always distrustful, therefore by moving banks and financial services to Binhai New Area (滨海新区) means the government will be able to better control the national financial sector. 79 “Suzhou Dong Fang Zhi Men Pi Zhi Xiang ‘Qiu Ku’ Yangshi ‘Da Ku Cha’ You Ban Le,” (Suzhou's Eastern Gate is accused of resembling 'long johns', the 'big underpants' of the CCTV tower has a companion. Renmin Ribao, Da He Wang, September 3, 2012, http://gs.people.com.cn/n/2012/0903/c183342-17436090.html. 171

172 contemporary Asian art. These digital images blur the virtual and the real in a creepily seamless way, giving the viewer the sense of completion when in fact ground hasn’t yet been broken on the project. The slick, completed visions created by Crystal CG edit out any of the dust, slums, or rust that Cao’s RMB City is so careful to preserve. And yet, the irony is that her work will be collected and exhibited by M+ based in part on the continued financial strength, buoyed by the influx of rmb investment, to Hong Kong. This is the glow of cyber-capital making a future for contemporary art in Asia.

But not everything glows. In the next chapter, I focus on the human bodies that are building the roads, collecting the garbage, laying the cables of China’s infrastructure boom. The speeding movement of rbm represented in the guise of a high-speed train shooting from the mainland appears to move unhindered, in a smooth, and easy pathway to Hong Kong. These images present a version of economic development where infrastructure: trains, cars, and bridges are symbols of the neoliberalization of China. The hard infrastructure depicted in these ads represents a similar method of statecraft as detailed in chapter one. This is statecraft manifested through building projects. From the filling in of ditches to create safe, hygienic neighborhoods to high-speed railway lines linking major urban nodes like Shanghai and Beijing, infrastructural statecraft concretizes state policy. Of course how people use roads and railways is also disciplined. In this chapter how and why Cao Fei sought out an online world as a space of critique demonstrated there was a period of opportunity that the Internet initially offered artists. Yet, as official uses usurped the space of the Internet, the virtual world was reterriorialized and disciplined by statecraft in the form of ritualization of self-censorship or in the more overt practices of censorship by the Great Fire Wall.

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6 Conclusion

In this dissertation I have explored the artistic and visual responses to the economic unevenness of post-reform China with particular focus on various systems of infrastructure. I’ve focused on art and film produced in Beijing from 1993 to 2012 against the backdrop of the capital’s physical and cultural transformation following the 1978 economic and social reforms and opening up. In order to undertake this analysis of the dense urban landscape of Beijing, I focused on specific networks of infrastructure—roads, waste, internet, and migrant workers’ bodies—examining their spatial, ethnographic, and cultural aspects in concert with the formulation of Chinese modes of statecraft that have historical, physical, and ritualizing effects on citizens. Theoretically, beginning from Mirzoeff’s call for studies of counter visuality and Rancière’s formulation of the importance of seeing the things that are labeled ‘nothing to see,’ I’ve questioned what is at stake when looking and seeing art that represents infrastructure.

The government’s concretizing of progress has taken the form of large-scale building projects that often have little relationship to the needs of everyday citizens. There is a vast disconnect between the state’s top-down centralized planning approach that is on display in urban planning museums now common in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. At these museums when looking at the scale-models, visitors embody de Certeau’s god-like vantage point, looking down at the entire city and taking in the vastness of the space in a way that is impossible to do in the real city.1 The spectacles presented in urban planning museums are presented as imaged realities disconnected from the lived experiences of the city. Yet the imaged cities of planning museums and documents can also be theorized as blueprints for a future yet to arrive, and as promises for plans made, but not yet accomplished. They are physical expressions of futurity. They present to the viewer the as of yet to be finished projects of the state. The temporal delay between plan and realization is of secondary importance because the plan’s function is to project into the future and to reassure the continued existence of the state. As I discussed in chapter three, but could also be applied to other state policies outlined in the chapters, futurity enables the state to project beyond the current reality in order to suggest completion that will take place

1 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 173

174 at a later time. The suggested completion demonstrates the validity and potency of the state through these projects, projects that I have defined as constitutive of Chinese statecraft. Linguistically, futurity is expressed in the adherence to master plans that are formulated in 5-year spans, and are always already being enacted even as they are being approved. Discussions of the 5-year plans take place in the future tense, what will happen. Master plans, such as those used in 2 the municipal government of Beijing, are grandiose in their sweep and timeframe. We might 3 consider these policy documents and planning museums to be statecraft blueprints. As such, these blueprints direct views to how the future will look regardless of how the current building, road, bridge, Internet network currently functions. By suspending ones disbelief and only seeing the fiction offered by these blueprints, inhabitants can enjoy the official version of their city; exemplified in the Beijing 2015 video. The gravity defying flyovers, tidy streets, and lack of pollution presents a blueprint of the future of the capital. It depicts a projection of the future city. Architectural scholar Zhou Rong describes such animated fictions that use computer-generated 4 imagery and high production values “PowerPoint cities.” Yet the reality of the megacity is more along the lines of Ning Ying’s bumpy unpaved roads, Song Dong’s unsorted heap of construction material, Cao Fei’s rusting RMB City, or the miserably bare life inscribed on Lu Hao’s Grain of Sand. When considering these representations of the city as being similar to the unofficial speech patterns discussed by Perry Link, as compared to the official grandiose visions of Beijing proffered by urban planners, government officials, and developers striking contrasts 5 are thrown into relief. The results when concatenated present heterogeneous interpretations of the capital.

The notion of statecraft is revealing in how the Chinese government calculates and projects the grandiose vision that differs from citizens’ lived reality. I’ve shown how in addition to this form

2 See for instance the multi-year timeframes for Beijing master plans: Beijing Shi cheng shi gui hua she ji yan jiu yuan, Beijing Cheng Shi Zong Ti Gui Hua. 3 Joshua Wade Neves, “Projecting Beijing: Screen Cultures in the Olympic Era” (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2011), http://search.proquest.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/pqdtft/docview/896463611/abstract/141DC8FF789642D54 F2/1?accountid=14771. 4 Zhou Rong, “Leaving Utopian China.” 5 Link, An Anatomy of Chinese. 174

175 of statecraft, Chinese citizens are also encouraged to ritualize behaviors as fundamental aspects of being a good member of the state and having the desirable characteristics of culture and 6 quality (you su zhi, you wen ming) attributed to a modern citizen. I’ve suggested that this is another form of statecraft, one that facilitates a comprehension of the slippage between the lived experiences of Beijing and those suggested by the state’s blueprints and master plans. The striving to become, such as exhibited in policy documents, planning videos, and propaganda banners, demonstrate the act of developing, of becoming. This desire is always an unfinished project.

Characterizing these reforms, reforms that were accelerated, intensified, and justified to citizens for the 2008 Olympics, Beijing’s urban morphology, and some would argue culture, were radically transformed. Rather than dwelling on the speed or scale of these changes, I scrutinized the visual production locating artists’ critiques in their works to demonstrate alternative narratives that contaminate and complicate official, monolithic, and often unexamined rhetoric of the state’s desire for Beijing to become a ‘world-class city with Chinese characteristics’ (中国特

色世界城市 Zhongguo te se shi ji cheng shi).7 It is my contention that artists through their representation of infrastructure critique of Beijing’s world-class cityness. It is through tactics of indirect critique and hidden transcripts that when uncovered and decoded reveals these artists’ ironic interpretations of Beijing’s urbanization processes. While it is not the project here to dispute the speed or scale of change in Beijing, or China more broadly, what is lost in this hyperbolic language is how artists, through visual production, are responding to and making sense of contemporary Beijing. Such a response to the grandiosity is the project initiated by curator Carol Yinhua Lu, artist Liu Ding, and Su Wei titled ‘Little Movements’ that was

6 Here we might also consider ritualization to be an aspect of worship, one that is practiced and encouraged in relation to political legitimacy. In a South Asian context see, Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, Cambridge South Asian Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 290. 7 http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-06/17/content_8388295.htm http://www.bjpc.gov.cn/125ghg/xgzl/gywb.html see also English pdf: bj.12five 175

176 designed to function as a counterbalance to what they sees as the overemphasis on scale and speed in the art world.8

I have looked at contemporary Chinese artists based in Beijing to argue that they shape, engage and interpret the contemporary urban moment. The artists discussed in the previous chapters make use of everyday objects, from tricycles to taxis that when captured on film, in installations, and in virtual spaces, confront the viewer with alternative ways of making sense of the urban landscape of Beijing. The artists detailed in my research draw from a rich visual field that stands out against a backdrop that keeps changing and shifting due to the rapid pace of urbanization. The resulting disjunctures are at times jarring, represented fore example in the typical press photo of a traditional hutong with Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV tower in background, but are also at the same time, representative of a lived experience.

The artists discussed are also intimately aware of historical forms of the city, forms that predate the founding of the PRC. The historic planning of Beijing continues to coexist and shape the city from hutongs and courtyard houses, to how traffic moves across the city east to west. Cao Fei and Song Dong both integrate historical elements of Beijing into their practices that address the contemporary urban changes in the city. These artists live and work in what is at times an infuriatingly difficult city. Beijing is designed to make an individual feel small, and to make her feel dominated. This is intentional in the morphology of the city, and is a remnant from the imperial urban design based on the capital designs outlined in the Zhou Li, brought to reality in the Tang capital of Chang’an, and replicated in Yuan dynasty Dadu.9 Contemporary Beijing retains the form and scale of the earlier imperial periods, but is now greatly enlarged and scaled vertically as well as horizontally. The artists living and working in this city are aware of how un-walkable it is, how massive the physical area of Beijing is. The meandering movements of Ning’s characters underscore the ways in which the shape of the city circumscribes ones movements.

8 Liu Carol Yinghua and Liu Ding, Little Movements: Self-Practice in Contemporary Art (Shenzen: OCAT, 2011), http://www.ocat.org.cn/index.php/Exhibition/?aid=253. 9 Steinhardt, “Imperial Architecture along the Mongolian Road to Dadu”; Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning; Rem Koolhaas, Ole Bouman, and Mark Wigley, “Volume 8: Ubiquitous China,” March 1, 2007; Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters; a Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City. 176

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Many of the works I’ve analyzed explore notions of inbetweenness or n out-of-placeness. The characters of Ning’s film and Song Dong’s mother represent relics of a rigidly Socialist social structure. Old Han, in For Fun and Zhao Xiangyuan, in Waste Not, are slow to adapt a post- Mao society that favors increasing consumption and heralds market changes over the social safety net. The obsolescence of Old Han’s few belongings is mirrored in Zhao’s collection of used toothpaste tubes, and even in the treatment of nongmingong bodies in A Grain of Sand. These figures seem temporally out of step when considered against the rapacious speed of the neoliberal market. The pace of building of infrastructure when set in contrast to Old Han, Zhao, or the still bodies in Wang Jin’s 100% casts these figures as occupying a different time. This relates to infrastructure because “infrastructure both records our past and shapes the present and future.”10 It is in recognizing infrastructure’s temporal characteristics and linking this to how certain figures discussed in the chapters appear temporally out of step that the oblique critiques of Ning, Song, and Wang become evident. These are disruptions to the teleological flow towards state mandated progress.

Disruptions need not take physical manifestations such as in Lin Yilin’s performance, but take the form of conceptual disruptions as well. There are acknowledged linkages and codependences between large complex infrastructure systems “… it appears that transportation and communication systems may advance in tandem.”11 This is evident historically for example in the advancement of telegraph and railway systems moving together across space. In the case of Beijing, as in many cities, highways and fibre-optic networks too have tended to advance together. By first looking at these networks as facilitating and producing modes of circulation as crafted by the state, but then looking for counter modes of circulation such as those depicted in RMB City the networks of roads and fibre-optics it can be argued provide spaces for unexpected and unsanctioned circulation. The critical rendering of Chinese urbanism created in Second Life is one example of using the Internet in an unplanned way. The performance of the nongminggong under the overpass too is an unexpected outcome of the building of elevated highways. Infrastructure networks produce intended and unintended practices and spaces. The

10 Ausubel and Herman, Cities and Their Vital Systems, 13. 11 Ibid., 9. 177

178 tensions between these different types of practices are represented in the material examined in the chapters.

In the introduction I opened a discussion of official versus unofficial using Perry Link’s linguistic formulation of daily-life speech patterns. Song Dong and Cao Fei both approach the prescribed official uses of recycling or the Internet and appropriate these uses for unofficial means. The greenwashing of the recycling industry is reflected in the trapped tricycle in Song’s Hutong demonstrating the irony of mandated individual garbage sorting while at the same time making it impossible for small scale recyclers to move through the megacity. For Cao Fei the reterritorialization of the Internet by institutions means it is no longer a viable space of critique. The state’s ritualization of online behavior shut down cyberspace as a place where unofficial ‘everyday talk’ could exist.12 Instead, she shifted her practice out of the virtual into the real world, making videos like Haze and Fog (2013) and East Wind (2011) that take place on the actual streets of Beijing instead of in the pixels of Second Life. By placing a truck dressed up as the character Thomas from the children’s television show Thomas the Tank Engine and driving along the roads of Beijing, Cao disrupts the prescribed official use of roads, turning them into a space of disturbance.

Research outcomes and next steps

The ramifications of this research are multiple. In particular the past twenty years of growth in the Chinese economy has solidified the country’s position as a key driver in the global economy. Neo-liberal reforms have fundamentally altered social services, job prospects, housing, education, and culture.13 China’s hyphenated status as ‘post-social’ coupled with ruthless neoliberal economic tactics are visible throughout the country, but are especially acute in hyper- urban centers such as Beijing. The gravitational pull of Beijing’s art world has responded to economic reforms, out pacing—in terms of number of galleries, museum, and auction houses— Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chongqing. While working in the capital comes with greater governmental scrutiny, artists have successfully navigated and flourished there. However, the

12 Link, An Anatomy of Chinese. 13 Gong Haomin, Uneven Modernity. 178

179 artists that compose this study are aware of and engage in the cultural politics at play in the city. Using their artistic practices as a tool of critique, these artists produce works that highlight the issues and effects of Beijing’s growth. However, these artists avoid direct confrontational or brash critiques—although this has been an effective marketization technique for many contemporary Chinese artists, one that plays on Western notions of the repressive regime curtailing artistic expression. In contrast the artists discussed here use subtle methods.

Future research on infrastructure and statecraft will expand to include considering urbanization 14 projects as a ‘root metaphor’ for the late-Socialist, Chinese state. The carefully tended relationship between bank lending and urbanization projects underpins the economic growth of 15 China post-1992 and by theorizing this link as part of a state sponsored ‘root metaphor’ expands our understanding of how political relationships, worship—in this case, state encouraged nationalism—are all bound up in, and can be traced to, a root metaphor of infrastructure.

In my next project, I will examine private expressions of wealth, luxury cars, which are displayed in public spaces and through this display perform the power of the owner. The publically funded infrastructure of roads and highways are now the exhibition space for private demonstrations of high net worth. The statecraft that gave rise to the infrastructure boom—some might go so far as to call it an infrastructure glut—provides miles of highways branching out from mega cities. The role of the road and now the luxury car in Chinese contemporary society is changing. Where once China was known as the bicycle kingdom and private cars were an unthinkable dream, top-end imported cars now dominate the marketplace.16 The viral video of a girl stating that she would rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back of a bicycle on the dating show If You Are the One (Fei Cheng Wu Rao) is indicative of the status attributed to high-end

14 Dirks, The Hollow Crown, 290. 15 Sanderson and Forsythe, China’s Superbank. 16 Debra Bruno, “The De-Bikification of Beijing,” CityLab The Atlantic, April 9, 2012, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/04/de-bikification-beijing/1681/; Maureen Fan, “Creating a Car Culture in China,” The Washington Post, January 21, 2008, sec. World, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2008/01/20/AR2008012002388.html; Tania Branigan, “China and Cars: A Love Story,” The Guardian, December 14, 2012, sec. World news, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/14/china-worlds- biggest-new-car-market. 179

180 cars.17 While this blatant statement of enchantment with luxury goods has been roundly criticized, and the Party’s reforms cracking down on corruption and overspending have taken hold, expensive cars continue to clog Beijing’s alleyways and highways. The mobile luxury cocoons of comfort that ferry businessmen and Party officials around cities recall the roving automobile setting in the novel Cosmopolis.18 With quality shocks, drivers are shielded from the potholes and uneven road surfaces that most Beijing drivers encounter.19 Another way drivers are buying their way out of ritualized road behaviors is by buying fake license plates. For instance, fake military police license plates allow owners to evade detention for traffic violations, as most city police are unwilling to risk detaining someone potentially belonging to the military police service. The social threat of a military police license plate is only one way driving is becoming more dangerous in China. Recently, the incidences of one party threatening the other with knives have characterized many post-accident interactions. These violent post-accident interactions are another example of the weaponization of driving in Beijing. Future research questions, therefore, will revolve around thinking of the car as both a status symbol and as a mobile threat.

High-speed accidents have also risen in the capital, many including the children of high officials. This is unsurprising as luxury cars are often purchased for their speed. The flashiness coveted by buyers of Ferraris and BMWs frequently turns against the owners in cases such as the crash involving a son of an aide close to Wen Jiabao during the power transition to Xi Jinping in 2012. This was presaged by the now infamous shout of ‘Li Gang is my father!’ when Li Gang’s son crashed his car on a university campus killing a pedestrian. These types of incidents recall the established relatedness of transportation and communication infrastructure networks because high-profile car accidents are often captured on smartphones and uploaded to micro-blogging sites that facilitate widespread dissemination. Public knowledge and outrage surrounding luxury cars is quickly promulgated online, where as prior to the widespread use of the Internet such incidents would have only been known locally. Urbanization in China is often described in terms

17 “Fei Cheng Wu Rao,” If You Are the One: Jiangsu TV, accessed October 1, 2014, http://fcwr.jstv.com/. 18 DeLillo, Cosmopolis. 19 Guo and Song, “Driving Mad! 4 Mln Cars Clog Beijing Roads.” 180

181 of speed and rate of change, so too are sports cars. Examining the intertwining relationships between urbanization in the form of highway networks and luxury cars is a new vector of inquiry into life in contemporary urban Chinese cities.

Lastly, expensive car culture has spread throughout the Chinese diaspora becoming a way of exhibiting and displaying nationalism. For example there are car meet ups organized by Chinese expats living in California where they come together to show off their cars and display their wealth.20 The meet ups are characterized by flashy arrays of cars, but they are also a chance to network with other Chinese from a similar social class and background. Nationalism is also expressed on cars purchased while studying and working abroad. The Ontario license plate reading: ‘♥ PRC ZL’ on a baby blue Porsche parked on the University of Toronto campus proudly proclaimed the owner’s patriotic fervor (fig. 6.1). Two potential vectors of inquiry are stimulated by these examples: one would be to map the networks of guan xi formed around the diaspora car culture meet ups, and the second would be to tracing the linkages between patriotism and vanity plates purchased in Canada. Corruption scandals continue to occupy the central administration and outrage citizens; therefore, cars and their symbolic function in contemporary Chinese society are becoming more pertinent. Driving certain types of cars is a performance of private wealth and privilege on roads built with public funds. The social tensions manifested in this type of performance require close attention and further study.

20 “The Rich Kids of China Are Livin’ Large in America,” accessed November 19, 2014, http://www.vocativ.com/video/world/china/the-rich-kids-of-china/?mc_cid=956f74179f&mc_eid=4f35ce8173. 181

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