Chinese Experimental Art in the 1990S an Overview of Contemporary

NOVEMBER 2002 FALL ISSUE

 Chinese Experimental Art in the 1990s An Overview of Contemporary Taiwanese Art Contemporary Art with Chinese Characteristics The Long March Project 2002 Zunyi International Symposium

US$10.00 NT$350.00 YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

Volume 1, Number 3, Fall/November 2002

 Katy Hsiu-chih Chien  Ken Lum   Zheng Shengtian   Julie Grundvig Paloma Campbell   Larisa Broyde   Joyce Lin    Kaven Lu

  Judy Andrews, Ohio State University John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation Okwui Enwezor, Curator, Art Institute of Chicago Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di An, Central Academy of Fine Arts Fei Dawei, Independent Curator Gao Minglu, New York State University Hou Hanru, Independent Curator & Critic Katie Hill, Independent Critic & Curator Martina Köppel -Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Sebastian Lopez, Gate Foundation and Leiden University Lu Jie, Independent Curator Ni Tsai Chin, Tunghai University Apinan Poshyananda, Chulalongkorn University Chia Chi Jason Wang, Art Critic & Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago

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 - Yishu is published quarterly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited in Vancouver, Canada. From 2003, the publishing date of Yishu will be March, June, September, and December. Advertising inquiries may be sent to our main ofﬁce in Taiwan: Taipei: Art & Collection Ltd. 6F, No. 85, Section 1, Chunshan North Road, Taipei, Taiwan. Phone: (886) 2-2560-2220 Fax: (886) 2-2542-0631 e-mail: [email protected]

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Cover: Xu Bing, Ghosts Pounding the Wall, 1990-91, rubbing on paper. Production view on the site of the Great Wall at Jinshanling. Courtesy of the artist 

 Contributors

 A “Domestic Turn:” Chinese Experimental Art in the 1990s Wu Hung p. 4

 Illusion of Reality a Real Illusion: An Overview of Contemporary Taiwanese Art Yao Jui-Chung

 Contemporary Art with Chinese Characteristics: Shen Fan, Ding Yi, and Xu Zhen Amy Pederson p. 23  Globalization, Urbanization, and New Chinese Art Zhang Zhaohui

     Long March: A Walking Visual Exhibition Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie

 A Conversation with Lu Jie Philip Tinari p. 40  The Long March to Lugu Lake: A Dialogue with Judy Chicago Sasha S. Welland

 International Symposium – Curating in a Chinese Context Denise Blake Oleksijczuk

 2002 Zunyi International Symposium p. 106  Enhancing Variety Versus Diluting Diversity Monica Dematté

  Identity Politics? Allegorical Existence? On the Way to the Fantastic David Ho Yeung Chan

 Chinese Name Index p. 121 

DAVID HO YEUNG CHAN is an M.A. candidate at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York as well as a curator based in Hong Kong and Vancouver.

MONICA DEMATTÉ is an independent curator and writer. She has curated a number of international exhibitions including As Seen from Afar (Beijing: Italian Cultural Ofﬁce Gallery, 2001).

WU HUNG is Harri A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art, Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia, Consulting Curator of the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, and Chief Curator of the First Guangzhou Triennial, Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000). His most recent book is Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and Present, Between East and West (Hong Kong: New Art Medium, 2001).

LU JIE is an artist, writer and independent curator. He is the founder of the Long March Foundation, and co-curator of The Long March: A Walking Visual Display with Qiu Zhijie. His writing has appeared in such publications as Shin Tao Daily (Hong Kong) and Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing (China). His book, Jiang Guo Fang: The Forbidden City, received the Best Produced Book Award from the Hong Kong Government in 1994.

YAO JUI-CHUNG is a curator, critic and artist. He represented Taiwan at the 1997 Venice Biennale and was included in the exhibition Asia Sanpo in Japan in 2001. He is the author of Contemporary Installation Art of Taiwan: 1991-2001.

DENISE BLAKE OLEKSIJCZUK, a former Curator of Contemporary Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, recently completed her Ph.D. in Art History at the University of British Columbia. She currently holds a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London.

AMY PEDERSON completed an M.A. at the University of British Columbia in 2000 and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of California in Los Angeles.

PHILIP TINARI is a freelance writer, curator, and translator based in Beijing. His ﬁrst exhibition Made in Asia? was held at the Duke University Museum of Art in 2001. His writing has appeared in The Far Eastern Economic Review.

SASHA SU-LING WELLAND is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She conducted ﬁeldwork, as an afﬁliate of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, on contemporary Chinese art worlds and late socialist public culture in Beijing from 2000-2002. Her writing has appeared in Chain, Flyway Literary Review, From Beijing to Port Moresby: The Politics of National Cultural Policies, and Hedgebrook Journal.

ZHANG ZHAOHUI is the Art Director of S-Ray Art Center. He received an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from Bard College in New York in 1998 and has curated a number of exhibitions including Mask vs Face in Beijing in 2002 and New Urbanism in Guangzhou in 2002. His writings have appeared in Art China and Jiangsu Art Journal.

QIU ZHIJIE is an artist, writer and co-curator of The Long March: A Walking Visual Display with Lu Jie. He organized Phenomena and Image, the ﬁrst video art exhibition in China, in 1996 and served as Managing Editor for the contemporary art magazine Nextwave in 2001. His own work has been included in a number of exhibitions including the 2002 Gwangju Biennial in Korea.

  “ :”      

 

Figure 1: Artist Village in Yuanmingyuan. Photo: Zheng Shengtian

Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000), the First Guangzhou Triennial organized by the Guangdong Art Museum, provides a comprehensive survey and attempts a systematic explanation of Chinese experimental art of the period. The three main themes of the exhibition are “Memory and Reality,”“Self and Environment,”and “Global and Local.”This essay discusses the ﬁrst two themes, which together point to a new direction in Chinese experimental art of the 1990s – a “domestic turn” that transformed experimental art into a powerful vehicle of social critique. Before focusing on actual works of art, however, it is necessary to investigate the preconditions of this movement by looking at important changes in the lifestyle and social identity of experimental artists. These changes were crucial in that they encouraged social engagement and gave the artists a sense of independence – two factors indispensable to any kind of social criticism.

        China underwent a profound socioeconomic transformation during the two decades after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Starting in the late 1970s, a new generation of Chinese leaders initiated a series of reforms to develop a market economy, a more resilient social system, and an “open door” diplomatic policy that exposed China to both foreign investments and cultural inﬂuences. The consequence of this transformation was fully felt in the 1990s. Major cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, were completely reshaped. Numerous private and joint venture businesses appeared, including privately owned commercial art galleries. Educated young men and women moved from job to job in pursuit of personal well-being and a large “ﬂoating population” entered metropolitan centers from the countryside to look for work and better living conditions.

 Many changes in the world of experimental art in the 1990s were related to this larger picture. Although a majority of experimental artists received formal education in art colleges and had little problem finding jobs in the official art system, many of them chose to become freelance “independent artists” (duli yishujia) with no institutional affiliation. There were, of course, artists who still wished and even struggled to maintain their jobs in public institutions but

Figure 2: Fang Lijun, Series 3, number 15, 1993. Courtesy of the Tacoma Art Museum they were often forced to give up such and the Henry Art Gallery options – as a result of their unorthodox artworks and approaches or their unconventional lifestyle and irregular travel schedule. To be “independent” also meant to become “professional” – a move that changed the career paths, social status, and self-perception of these artists. On the surface, freelance artists were free from institutional restrictions. In actuality, however, they had to submit themselves to other kinds of liabilities and rules in order to support their livelihood and art experiments. It was in the 1990s that experimental Chinese artists learned how to negotiate with art dealers and curators and obtain funding from foreign foundations to ﬁnance their works. Quite a few of them developed a double persona, supporting their “unsaleable” experiments with money earned from the sale of their paintings and photographs.

Starting in the late 1980s and especially during the 1990s, a large number of experimental artists emigrated from the provinces in China to major cultural centers, especially the country’s capital, Beijing. The result was a situation that differed markedly from the 1980s. In the ‘85 Art New Wave (85 Meishu Xinchao), most “avant-garde” art clubs and societies developed in the provinces and were active on the local level, while Beijing maintained its traditional position as the stronghold of ofﬁcial art and academic art. In the 1990s, Beijing became the mecca for young experimental artists throughout the country. Local experimental communities still existed but Beijing emerged as the unquestionable center of experimental art – mainly because it constantly attracted talented young artists from all over the country.1 These emigrant artists (mostly in their twenties) emerged after the 1980s to the forefront of experimental art. To this new generation, the Cultural Revolution was a remote past and their works often responded to China’s current transformation, not to history and memory. They found such stimuli in Beijing – a city most sensitive to social changes and political tensions in the 1990s.

A direct consequence of these two changes was the emergence of residential communities of experimental artists, known as “artist villages” (huajia cun). The first of such communities was located in Beijing’s western suburbs near the ruins of Yuanmingyuan, the former imperial park. While avant-garde poets and painters began to live there in the late 1980s, it was not until 1991 that it became known as an artists’ village (fig. 1). It attracted media attention in 1992, as reports of its bohemian residents stimulated much popular interest. Around the same time, it was also “discovered” by art dealers and curators from Hong Kong and the West. After Fan Lijun (who was living there at the time) appeared in three large international exhibitions in 1993, including China’s New Art, Post-89 in Hong Kong, China Avant-Garde in Berlin, and the 45th Venice Biennale (fig. 2), it developed a reputation as the “exhibition window” of Chinese experimental art.

 In a broader sense, the artists’ community at Yuanmingyuan introduced a particular lifestyle and provided a model for later “villages,”including the one in Songzhuang, east of Beijing. Located in rural settings, these communities are also close enough to downtown Beijing to maintain close ties with the outside world. The initial reason for artists to move into such places has been mainly economic: it is cheap to buy or rent houses and to convert them into large studios and residences. Once a community has appeared it brings additional benefits to its members. First of all, it generates a sense of comradeship. The residents share an identity as independent artists; some of them are close friends who have known one other for a long time. Living in close proximity promises convenience for socializing and occasions for entertainment. Visitors, including important foreign curators and art dealers, can see works of a dozen or so artists in one day; it is no secret that such visits are crucial to obtaining global fame and financial gain. On the other hand, such possibilities necessarily imply social stratification. Some of the artist-villagers are internationally renowned while others struggle to eke out a basic living. Although artists in such a community are subjected to mutual influence (especially from those “successful” styles and subjects), they rarely form close groups based on common social or artistic causes. Such lack of shared commitment explains the ambiguous artistic characteristics of these communities. While a “village” attracts a large number of experimental artists to a single location, it does not necessarily inspire new ways of thinking and expression.

There is one noticeable exception to this general situation. From 1992 to 1994, the so-called East Village (Dongcun) in Beijing became the base of a group of emigrant artists who worked closely together and initiated a new trend in experimental art. Unlike the communities at Yuanmingyuan and Songzhuang, the East Village artists developed a closer relationship with their environment – a polluted place filled with garbage and industrial waste – since moving there was considered to be an act of self-exile. Bitter and poor, these artists were attracted by the “hellish” qualities of the village that contrasted with the “heaven” of downtown Beijing. Inspired by this contrast, their works were energized by a kind of intensely repressed desire. The significance of the East Village community also lies in its formation of a close alliance of performing artists and photographers who served as both audience and critics to one another (fig. 3). This alliance later broke down

Figure 3: Zhang Huan, To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond. Photo credit: Robyn Beck. Courtesy of the Tacoma Art Museum and the Henry Art Museum

 under the allure and pressure of commercialism. When photographs of “East Village performances” became valuable, arguments over their authorship turned old friends into enemies.

Whether in Beijing or in the provinces, experimental artists of the 1990s were preoccupied with two interrelated issues: their participation in the international art scene and the “normalization” of experimental art in China. The latter issue became increasingly urgent as tension grew between the international standing of these artists and their domestic status. Once again, we ﬁnd a huge difference between the 1980s and the 1990s. While the ‘85 Art New Wave was predominately a domestic movement closely linked to China’s internal situation at the time, experimental artists of the 1990s articulated their images and ambitions in an international context.

In sharp contrast to their popularity among foreign curators and collectors, Chinese experimental artists throughout the 1990s were still struggling for basic acceptance at home. Although books and magazines about avant-garde art were easy to ﬁnd in bookstores, actual exhibitions of this art – especially those of installation, video and computer art, and performances – were generally discouraged by the art establishment (including state-run art galleries and schools). Even worse, misunderstanding and antagonism caused frequent cancellations and early terminations of experimental art exhibitions. This led experimental artists and curators to consider the “normalization” of experimental art the most pressing issue to face in China. In an effort to bring this art into the public sphere, exhibitions not only served as testing cases for legal rights, but also provided crucial means to establish rights to practice experimental art.

A prevailing view among advocates of experimental art during the early and mid-1990s was that this art could be legalized only when it had realized its economic potential. They subsequently launched a campaign for this purpose. The most important event in this campaign was the first Guangzhou Biennale, which opened in October 1992 and showed more than four hundred works by three hundred and fifty artists. Sponsored by private entrepreneurs, the exhibition had the self-professed goal of establishing a market system for contemporary Chinese art. Two other exhibitions held in Beijing in 1996 and 1997, entitled Reality: Present and Future and A Chinese Dream respectively, had the same general goal but served the more specific purpose of facilitating domestic auctions of experimental art. That these two shows took place in the Yanhuang Art Gallery and the Beijing International Art Palace – both “semi-official” exhibition spaces – represented another new phenomenon in the 1990s.

Through these and other exhibitions, “independent curators” (duli cezhanren) began to play a leading role in the “normalization” of experimental art. Not usually not employed by official or commercial galleries, these individuals organized experimental art exhibitions primarily in order to develop experimental art in China. They found their models in the curators of large international exhibitions. From the mid-1990s, many of their exhibitions indicated a new direction: these curators were no longer satisfied with finding just any available space to put on an exhibition – even a primary space such as the National Art Gallery. Rather, many of them organized exhibitions in order to create regular exhibition channels and eventually a new “exhibition system” in China. It became possible for these curators to pursue this goal as a result of the new conditions in their country. They believed that China’s socioeconomic transformation had created and would continue to create new social sectors and spaces that could be exploited for developing experimental art. Their campaign for a new exhibition system involved multifaceted social maneuvers, including working with official and semi-official museums to

 Figure 4: Xu Bing, Ghosts Pounding the Wall, 1990-91, rubbing on paper. Production view on the site of the Great Wall of Jinshanling. Courtesy of the artist renew or revolutionize their programs, advising private companies and entrepreneurs to support experimental art, and organizing exhibitions in various kinds of non-exhibition spaces such as shopping malls, bars, abandoned factories, and the street. This last effort is especially signiﬁcant in that it resulted in a series of “experimental exhibitions” aimed at inventing new forms, spaces, and modes of interaction with the public.

While participants in the 1990s experimental art movement (including artists, curators, and art critics) acquired a strong sense of independence that had not been possible before in the art world of the People’s Republic of China, they developed an equally strong desire to engage in contemporaneous social and political problems. These two general characteristics provide us with important clues to understand these artists and their projects. The following discussion shifts the focus of analysis from artists to their works. All my examples are chosen from the ﬁrst Guangzhou Triennial and are illustrated in the exhibition’s catalogue.2

   Many of these projects reflect China’s historical experience, express collective and individual memories, and forge dialogues between the past and present. Often large-scale performances, many of these projects took place at historical sites, the most prominent being the Great Wall (arguably the most important symbol of Chinese civilization and the modern Chinese nation). These works reflect different historical visions and artistic aspirations. For example, Xu Bing’s Ghosts Pounding the Wall (1990-91) involved a crew of students and local farmers. For twenty-four days, the artist labored to make ink rubbings from a thirty-meter-long section of the wall (fig. 4). The crew wore uniforms printed with Xu Bing’s “nonsense” characters. The project was conceived as a grand performance and each stage was recorded on film and video. When the rubbings were assembled into an installation for exhibition, the audience found themselves encountering a paper Great Wall that transforms the solid national monument into its volumeless shadow.

Zheng Lianjie, on the other hand, transformed the Great Wall into a spectacular work of art. Also assisted by local farmers, he used red cloth to tie tens of thousands of bricks broken off from the Wall. The message of this project, entitled Binding Lost Souls: Huge Explosion, is twofold: on the one hand, the artist planned the project as a shamanistic performance to heal the historical wound of the old Wall, with each of the broken bricks standing for a “lost soul.”On the other hand, with its

 enormous scale and stunning visual effect, his site-speciﬁc installation reinforces the glory and mythology of the Great Wall – which to Zheng continues to symbolize China and its future.

In contrast to these sweeping historiographical contemplations on China’s nationhood and cultural origins, some experimental works created in the 1990s resurrect dark and painful memories from the country’s past. Wang

Figure 5: Installation view of Zheng Xiogang’s paintings at the 2001 Art Youshen’s Washing: The Mass Grave at Datong in Basel. Photo: Zheng Shengtian 1941 remains one of the most poignant examples. In his installation, the newspaper pages on the wall report the discovery of a pit containing the remains of tens of thousands of Chinese who were buried alive by Japanese soldiers during World War II. Below the wall, photographic images of the unearthed human remains were placed in two large basins under circulating water. “The water washes the image away,”the artist explains, “just as time has washed people’s memories clear of this atrocity that occurred ﬁfty years ago.”3 The vulnerability of printed images and the impermanence of the history and memory that they represent and preserve is a central theme in the works of Wang Youshen and other experimental artists like Zheng Xiaogang.

In some of Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings from the early 1990s, an infant lies before a dark background comprised of eroded and scratched archival photographs, which are physical remains of the past and symbols of historical memory itself. Whether in the earlier Red Characters or the later Big Family, his paintings are always invested with his memories of the Cultural Revolution (fig. 5). As I have discussed elsewhere, the Cultural Revolution continued to influence experimental artists.4 Some artists, such as Ye Yongqing and Zhou Tiehai, evoke the image of Figure 6: Liu Dahong, Door Guards, 1991, oil on cardboard, 40 x 40 cm. Big Character Posters to encapsulate that bygone Courtesy of the artist era. Other artists, such as Liu Dahong (fig. 6) and Yangjiechang, resurrect communist heroes and heroines but turned them into characters of highly individualized narratives. Memories of the Cultural Revolution also inspired symbolic representations of political power, such as Mao Xuhui’s Patriarch, Geng Jianyi’s Hole, and Zhang Hongtu’s Studs (fig. 7). The last work imitates the shiny red door of an imperial gate in the Forbidden City. According to the artist, this door is an important signifier in China because it simultaneously exhibits and conceals political power. Both functions enable those in power to control Chinese people. Essentially iconoclastic, Zhang Hongtu’s gate mocks this political philosophy. In the place of the glamorous and golden bosses on an imperial gate are ugly metal rivets that resemble rows of phalluses in various degrees of impotence.

Zhang Hongtu is one of the experimental Chinese artists who combined memories of the Cultural Revolution with a Pop art style, which resulted in the formation of Political Pop (zhengzhi popu). Generally speaking, Political Pop signaled a deepening stage in the deconstruction of a previous

 political visual culture. Unlike “scar art” (shanghen meishu) painters from the 1980s, Political Pop artists had no interest in depicting tragic events from the previous decades. They derived speciﬁc visual references from the Cultural Revolution but erased any original political signiﬁcance.

A typical strategy was to distort the references and juxtapose them with signs from heterogeneous sources, including commercial trademarks and advertisements (Wang Guangyi) (ﬁg. 8), textile Figure 7: Zhang Hongtu, Studs, 1992, metal, wood, paint. patterns (Yu Youhan), sexual symbols (Li Shan), and 243 x 218 cm. Courtesy of artist computer images (Feng Mengbo). As an important trend in Chinese experimental art, Political Pop brought post-Cultural Revolutionary art to an end. Its radical fragmentation of Cultural Revolution images exhausted the source of its pictorial vocabulary and reduced it to a number of pre-conceived compositional formulae. This interpretation corrects a misunderstanding often found in Western introductions to contemporary Chinese art, which tend to identify Political Pop as a “dissident” political art produced under a Communist regime. In fact, most Political Pop artists were protesting against any ideological and political commitment; their intention was to de-politicize political symbols – not reinvest them with new political meaning. Although genuine social and cultural criticism existed in Chinese experimental art in the 1990s, it was related to an observation and representation of reality, not history.

Reality, however, can never be separated entirely from history and what links the present to the past are often personal memories. From this perspective, Chinese experimental artists of the 1990s demonstrated an unmistakable interest in forging such “memory links” through their works. Hai Bo, for example, customarily juxtaposes two photographs taken several decades apart. The ﬁrst – an old group photo – shows young men or women in Maoist or army uniforms; their young faces glow with an unyielding belief in the Communist faith. The second photograph, taken by Hao Bo himself, shows the same group of people (in some cases the surviving members) twenty or thirty years later. In an almost graphic manner, the two images register the passage of time and stir the recollections of viewers and certain moments in their own lives.

Differing from the photographs that frame a temporal duration with a beginning and an end, the subject of Wang Gongxin’s Old Stool is time itself. His video installation consists only of a small black-and-white video screen attached to an old-fashioned wooden stool. The single image on the screen is a moving index ﬁnger that scratches the stool’s worn surface. The ﬁnger’s motion leaves its trace on the furniture and alludes to the movement of time.

Wang Gongxin’s work is allegorical, but other experimental representations of the passage of time have more concrete subjects that are more biographical in intent. An outstanding example of this is the installation Women/Here by Sui Jianguo, Zhan Wang, and Yu Fan. As an “experimental exhibition” in its own right, this work responded to an important event: the Fourth International Women’s Congress held in Beijing in 1995. Although many leaders of women’s movements around the world traveled to China to participate in the event, they were, for the most part, kept separate from Chinese people. The three artists’ answer was to hold a different “congress” (in the form of an art exhibition) in order to create an alternative space where, in their words, “an ordinary Chinese woman could become part of the international event and the contemporary movement

 of women’s liberation.”5 Their strategy was to make their mothers the “artists” in the exhibition, while reducing their own role to that of an editor of readymade materials in the form of their mothers’ private belongings and personal mementos. Compiled into chronological sequences and displayed in a public space, these fragmentary materials tell the lives of three Chinese women, unknown to most people beyond their families and work units.

Women/Here demonstrated that, by the mid-1990s, Chinese experimental artists had largely freed themselves from the baggage of the Cultural Revolution. Their art now directly and forcefully responded to contemporary issues in Chinese society. Indeed, a close examination of Figure 8: Wang Guangyi, Great Castigation Series: CASIO, Chinese art from the late 1980s to the early 1990s shows 1990, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist a steady increase in representations of contemporary subjects. Prior to 1993, the two art forms most sensitive to this change remained photography and oil painting. After 1993, performance, installation, digital imaging, and video became increasingly prevalent. A whole generation of independent photographers emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Reacting against the doctrine of socialist realism, these photographer sought to represent “real” Chinese people (often the nameless and injured). Zhang Haier’s portrayals of urban prostitutes are among the earliest examples of this genre.

Yuan Dongping photographed mental asylum patients from all over China. Taken from eye level and left deliberately unpolished, his photographs convey a social criticism in the photojournalistic mode. Liu Zheng’s My Countrymen represents a further development of this photographic practice. Although his subjects are also “stigmatized” people in the form of the disabled and impaired, old and sick, homosexual and transsexual, and beggars and wanderers, he abandoned the earlier informal journalistic approach in favor of visual monumentality and technical perfection.

In the field of oil painting, a turning point was the New Generation (Xinshengdai) exhibition, held in the Museum of Chinese History next to Tiananmen Square in 1991. Artists in the exhibition included Liu Xiaodong (fig. 9), Yu Hong, Song Yonghong, and Wang Jinsong among others. As the brightest products of China’s best art colleges, these young painters aimed at representing the “spirit” of their time. What distinguished them from orthodox socialist realists was their understanding of this “spirit.”Instead of depicting revolutionary masses and broad historical dramas, they developed a penchant for representing fragmentary and trivial urban life. Their works rejected grand narratives and symbolism in favor of seemingly meaningless scenes found in everyday life around them: beauticians with exaggerated fake smiles, lonely men and women in a sleeping car on a train, and a group of yuppies taking a picture in front of Tiananmen (fig. 10).

These painters claimed that their works were devoid of deep meaning since life itself no longer had deep meaning. It can be argued that superficiality had become the real subject of New Generation art. The painted scenes of beauty salons, escalators, and night markets are the most common “surface” phenomena in a metropolis. These scenes were selected not because they were part of “reality” but because they best signified the concept of the superficial – which is also understood in terms of emotion and mood. New Generation paintings neither represent nor

 Figure 9. Liu Xiaodong, Midsummer, 1989, oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm. Courtesy of the artist demand strong feelings, such as love or hate. Some of them are lightly humorous or affectionate while others carry darker connotations of resentment or indifference. The boundary between New Generation painting and Cynical Realism is thus a blurry one. Although Cynical Realism is more well-known in the West, it was actually a branch of New Generation painting in the early 1990s. Cynical realist artists like Fang Lijun and Liu Wei have the same educational background and paint in a similar painting style as New Generation artists but distinguish themselves by their self-identiﬁcation as rogues (liumang) and their attitude of malaise.

The impact of New Generation painting was strongly felt in the Chinese experimental art created during the middle and late 1990s and continued to represent contemporary social life – but often in a more exaggerated or distorted manner. The oil painter Zeng Hao, for example, depicts well-dressed young professionals and their material possessions as toy ﬁgures and furniture; their miniature form heightens the sense of dislocation and objectiﬁcation. Likewise, Yang Fudong’s

 Figure 10: Wang Jinsong, Taking a Picture in Front of Tiananmen, 1990, oil on canvas, 125 x 185 cm. Courtesy of Hanart TZ Gallery comic portrayal of The First Intellectual (2000)comments on the vulnerability and insecurity of the emerging generation of yuppies – a byproduct of China’s social and economic reforms. Wang Xingwei’s Again Not the Perfect Score explores the illogicality of the visual culture of today’s well-to-do Chinese.

The Sichuan performance artist Luo Zidan conducted many projects amidst actual urban spaces. The subject of his Half White Collar, Half Blue Collar is the confusion that arises when people try to ﬁt into the new socioeconomic system. Staged on the streets of Chengdu, this performance enabled Luo Zidan to interact openly with an audience. The increasing popularity of performance among experimental artists in the 1990s was, to a large extent, related to the desire of artists to engage in public issues and with the public. In their search for new visual languages to further such engagement, these artists found that performance art offered many ways with which to directly interact with society. A forerunner of such experiments is Wang Jin, who, beginning in 1993, conducted a series of powerful performances to address public issues. These performances, including Red Flag Canal and Beijing-Kowloon, focused on the relationship between past and present in relation to modern Chinese history. Another group of performances responded to the rapidly growing capitalist economy in China. Knocking at the Door (1993), for example, consisted of seven old bricks from the walls of the Forbidden City, each bearing on its uneven surface a supra-realistic depiction of an American currency note. Wang Jin continued to paint such “cash bricks” and used them to “restore” damaged sections of the palace wall. Other projects produced by Wang Jin express (again in ironical forms) the growing materialism in contemporary Chinese society. A new catchword in colloquial language for “making a fast buck” is “stir-frying money” (chao qian). Making the verbal expression literal, Wang Jin rented a space and set up a food stand in a night market in central Beijing in 1995. With all the aplomb of a master chef, he fried a wok full of coins for his customers. This project was called Quick Stir-frying Renminbi.

   Among all branches of contemporary Chinese art produced during the 1990s, experimental art most sensitively responded to the drastic changes in the environment: the vanishing of

 traditional landscapes and lifestyles, the rise of post-modern cities and new urban cultures, and the large-scale emigration of populations. This art also responded to changes in the livelihood and social role of the artist in China. During this period, a large number of experimental artists moved from the provinces to major cosmopolitan centers, where they reinvented themselves as independent artists working for international exhibitions and a global art market. Not coincidentally, these artists were intensely concerned with identity and self-representation became a predominant subject of their work in various mediums, including painting, photography, performance, installation, and video. Their works reﬂected an urgent quest for individuality in a transforming society.

Underlying the heightened interest in representing the environment and the self of the artist was a “generational shift” in experimental art. Most artists who favored these subjects came to the forefront during the mid-1990s. While many of them were responding to the initiatives of the New Generation artists, their more active engagement with social issues led them to abandon the pictorial realism of New Generation painting. Their works – often taking the forms of installation, performance, and photography – document their direct and sometimes aggressive interaction with China’s current transformation.

An important aspect of this transformation (and one that attracted much of their attention) was the rapid development of the city. A striking aspect of a major Chinese metropolis like Beijing or Shanghai in the 1990s was the never-ending destruction and construction that was manifest in the forest of cranes and scaffolding, the roaring sound of bulldozers, and the dust and mud. Old houses were coming down every day to make room for new hotels and shopping malls. Thousands and thousands of people were relocated from the inner city to the outskirts. In theory, demolition and relocation were conditions for the capital's modernization. In actuality, these conditions brought about a growing alienation between the city and its residents: they no longer belonged to one another.

This situation is the context and the content of many works in 1990s experimental art. Zhan Wang’s Temptation, for example, is about the disappearance of the human subject – a basic phenomenon associated with any form of demolition and dislocation. The installation consists of a group of “human shells” made of clothes and glue. The extremely contorted gesture of each torso gives the impression of passion, pain, torture, and a life-and-death struggle. Empty and suspended, these human forms are created not as self-contained sculptures but as individual “signs” of desire and loss that have the inﬁnite potential to be installed in different environments. Meaning is contingent on their speciﬁc location. Suspended on scaffolding, they suggest a heightened sense of instability and anxiety. Placed on the ground, they are associated with dirt and evoke the notion of death. The most dramatic installation was the scattering of these hollowed mannequins throughout a demolition site. Both the ruined houses and the mannequins testify to a fascination with torn and broken forms and an attraction to destruction and injury.

Rong Rong’s photographs of Beijing’s demolition sites are also devoid of actual human figures. However, he has filled the vacancy with images left in the half-destroyed houses. These images originally decorated an interior but now form part of the exterior. A pair of dragons indicates a former restaurant; a Chinese New Year painting suggests traditional taste. These “leftover” images range from various pin-ups of Marilyn Monroe to Hong Kong fashion models. Torn and fragmented, these images still exercise an alluring power over the spectator – not only with their seductive figures but also with their seductive spatial illusionism. With an enhanced

 three-dimensionality, abundant mirrors, and painting-within-paintings, they transform a plain wall into a space of fantasy.

These works can be viewed together with the photographs by Zhang Dali, the most famous graffiti artist in China. Between 1995 and 1998, Zhang Dali sprayed more than two thousand images of himself – a profile of his shaven head – all over Beijing, often in half-destroyed, empty houses (fig. 11). He thus transformed urban ruins into sites of public art, however temporarily. The locations he chose for his performance/photography projects highlight three kinds of comparisons. The first kind contrasts a demolition site with an official monument. The second contrasts abandoned residential houses with preserved imperial palaces. The third contrasts destruction with construction. Rising from the debris of ruined houses are glimmering high-rises of a monotonous, international style.

Zhang Dali’s interest lies not simply in representing demolition, but in revealing the different fates of demolished residential houses from buildings that are revered, preserved, and constructed. His photographs serve as a bridge between Rong Rong’s “urban ruin” pictures and another popular subject of 1990s Chinese experimental art: representations of the emerging new cityscape. Ni Weihua’s Linear Metropolis, for instance, registers the artist’s fascination with the intricate and abstract patterns of new types of buildings and roads – patterns that stimulate sensations never before experienced in Chinese visual culture. The new Chinese city deliberately seems to rebel against its predecessor. Whereas a traditional Chinese city has the typical, orderly image of a chessboard-like space concealed inside a walled enclosure, the new city is sprawling, fast and noisy, chaotic, and aggressive. The new city refuses to remain a quiet and a passive object of aesthetic appreciation.

Whereas Ni Weihua interacted with Beijing through his excited gaze, Zhao Bandi produced an image of the city through his “public welfare” art and Lin Yilin and Liang Juhui (two members of Guangzhou’s experimental group Big Tailed Elephant) made their art part of the city’s very movement. Lin Yilin conducted his 1995 performance Safely Crossing the Linhe Road on one of the busiest streets in Guangzhou. He built a freestanding brick wall on one side of the street and then took away bricks one by one from the wall to build a second wall next to the ﬁrst. He continued this process many times until the wall “moved” to the other side of the street. While simultaneously simulating construction and destruction, this performance interrupted Guangzhou’s trafﬁc and presented itself as an integral feature (and problem) of the city. Liang Juhui also synchronized his performance One-Hour’s Game with the city’s movement – but he moved vertically instead of horizontally. He played computer games for a whole hour in an exposed elevator of a future highrise.

The emerging city attracts experimental artists not only with its new buildings and roads but also with its changing population made up of an increasingly heterogeneous group of people living in an increasingly crowded place. To Chen Shaoxiong (another member of Big Tailed Elephant) a heterogeneous city resembles the stage of a plotless tableaux; what unites its characters is the place they share. This notion underlies his photographic installations, which are collectively entitled Streets and conceived and constructed exactly like a series of puppet theaters. Representing a street or square in Guangzhou, each installation consists of two detached layers. In front of a large panoramic photograph are cut-out miniatures consisting of passersby, shoppers, and policemen amidst telephone booths, trafﬁc lights, different kinds of vehicles, trees, and anything one ﬁnds along Guangzhou’s streets. Although these images are crowded in a tight space, they do not

 interact. The mass they form is a fragmentary one, without order, narrative, or a visual focus.

Similarly, the Tianjin artist Mo Yi represents his city through a study of its residents. His research started in the late 1980s, after he was criticized for producing “detached, lonely, and suspicious” images of people in Tianjin. In reaction to this critique, Mo Yi began to photograph people on the street by either tying his camera behind his neck or hanging it behind his waist and using an extension cord to take pictures. Thus, he was able to separate the camera lens from his gaze and see what people and the city look like when they were not subjected to his eyes. The experiment grew into a multi-year project and Mo Yi produced a large group Figure 11. Zhang Dali, Demolition, Beijing, 1998 of random photographs that have acquired a unique anthropological signiﬁcance. Entitled Expressions of the Street, this series of photographs record the gradual changes on people’s faces over the years.

There is no doubt that Chinese experimental art produced during the 1990s owes a great deal to the transformation of the city and the emergence of new urban spaces and lifestyles. However, the chaos and high pressure associated with urban life drove many artists to rediscover nature through their art. Thus, when Wang Jianwei makes a video about continuous cycles of planting and harvesting crops or Song Dong tries to afﬁx a seal on the surface of a river, they are not imitating Zen monks or the ancient literati. Rather, these attempts to engage with nature signify an attempt to return to a different time and space – a departure from the time and place in which the artists actually belong.

The examples discussed above make it clear that experimental representations of the environment are inseparable from artistic self-representations. In fact, such a close relationship sets experimental art apart from other branches of contemporary Chinese art. For instance, although academic painters also depict landscape and urban scenes, they approach their subjects as though they belong to an external, observed reality. Experimental artists, on the other hand, find meaning only from their interaction with the surrounding world. When they document such interaction, they customarily make themselves the center of a photograph or video (as seen in Zhang Dali’s Dialogue or Song Dong’s Water Seal). Zhu Fadong’s performance/video project This Person is for Sale exemplifies this self-representational formula. In this video, he is presents as a member of the “floating population” – people who have left the countryside and entered large cities for jobs. The video records the many trips the artist took around Beijing during 1994. Every morning, he went out with two lines written on his back: “This person is for sale; please discuss price in person. ” Following him, we travel all over Beijing: Tiananmen Square, a McDonald’s restaurant, the National Art Gallery, Beijing University, the East Village of experimental artists, and a labor market where he mingled with other members of the floating population. This video has the effect of bringing a city, a population, and the artist into a single representation, with the artist remaining at the center.

When we shift our focus to self-representation, we ﬁnd four basic modes frequently employed by experimental artists in the 1990s. The ﬁrst is an “interactive” mode discussed above which involves the artist expressing him or herself through an interaction with his or her surroundings. The

 subject of interaction, however, not only includes the environment but also people – as seen in Zhuang Hui’s Group Portraits and Chen Shaofeng’s Dialogue with Peasants of Tiangongsi Village. Both works (the former a series of large-format photographs and the latter a huge assembly of oil portraits) are “performative” in nature. For Zhuang Hui, taking a group picture of an entire crew of four hundred and ninety-ﬁve construction workers or six hundred employees of a department store, requires patient negotiation as well as skilled orchestration. Such interaction with his subjects is the real purpose of his art experiment, whereas the photographs in which he appears merely certify the project’s completion. Chen Shaofeng developed a similar approach in the conducting of his interactive project. When he was painting portraits of more than three hundred men, women, and children from Tiangongsi village, he invited his sitters to sketch him at the same time.

The second mode of self-representation discourages explicit depiction of individual likeness. Rather, artists express themselves through symbolic images and objects. Zhan Wang’s Temptation is one such representation since the hollowed “human shells” imply the artist’s own disappearance. To Cai Jin, the image of the banana plant is deeply associated with her own memories and personal life. She has painted this image on canvases as well as on various objects. Yin Xiuzhen’s Suitcase is another example of work produced in this genre. Folding her old clothes and packing them into a suitcase, she then seals the clothes with cement mortar. The performance can be read as a symbolic burial of her past – as signiﬁed by her “relics” that are now invisible underneath solid concrete. Cang Xin’s performance Trampling on the Face takes a different form but conveys a similar sense of self-sacriﬁce. Covering a courtyard with plaster masks made from his own face, he and his guests stepped on them and smashed them into pieces.

At the opposite spectrum from these symbolic representations, the third mode demands an explicit display of the body, which the artist employs as an unambiguous vehicle for self-expression. This body art emerged in Beijing’s East Village, where artists like Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming developed two types of performance characterized by masochism and gender reversal. Exemplifying the latter type, Ma Liuming invented his female alter-ego, Fen-Ma Liuming, as the central character in his/her performances. Masochism is a trademark of Zhang Huan: almost every performance he undertakes involves self-mutilation and simulated self-sacrifice. In some cases he offers his flesh and blood; in other cases he tries to experience death by either locking himself inside a coffin-like metal case or placing earthworms in his mouth. By subjecting himself to an unbearably filthy public toilet for a whole hour, he not only identifies himself with the site but also embraces it. In a similar spirit, Yan Lei photographed his beat-up face in 1995. Masochistic self-representation acquired an even more extreme form in the late 1990s, as represented by several works in Infatuated with Injury, a private experimental art exhibition held in Beijing in 1999.

The fourth and last mode of self-imaging is that of self-portraiture, which constitutes an important genre in 1990s experimental art. A common tendency among experimental artists, however, is a deliberate ambiguity in portraying their likeness – as if they felt that the best way to realize their individuality was through self-distortion and self-denial. A particular strategy for this purpose was self-mockery, which became popular in the early 1990s and was epitomized by Fang Lijun’s skinhead youth with an enormous yawn on his face. As a trademark of Cynical Realism, this image encapsulated a dilemma faced by Chinese youth in the post-89 period and introduced what may be called an “iconography of self-mockery” (which many experimental artists followed in the second half of the 1990s). Another method of self-denial is “self-effacement” and the making of

 Figure 12. Façade of Guangdong Museum of Art. Courtesy of the Guangdong Museum of Art one’s own image blurry, fragmentary, or in the act of vanishing. Many works in the exhibition It’s Me (1998) fall into this category. More than one-third of the self-portraits by experimental artists in the recent publication Faces of 100 Artists also use this formula.6 A similar idea underlies Jin Feng’s self-portrait entitled The Process in Which My Image Disappears. It shows the artist writing en face on a glass panel: as his handwriting gradually covers the panel, it blurs and ﬁnally erases his image.

Notes 1 In particular, artists in several large cities, including Guangzhou, Shanghai, Chengdu, Taiyuan, and Nanjing, formed close working relationships to produce interesting works. Other experimental artists continued their individual activities in Hangzhou, Changchun, Ji’nan, and Yangjiang. 2 Wu Hung, ed., Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (Guangzhou: Guangdong Art Museum, 2002). 3 “Everyday Sightings: Melissa Chiu interviews the Chinese artist Wang Youshen,” Art Asia Paciﬁc 3, no. 2 (1996): 54. 4 Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 1999), 17-22. 5 Sui Jianguo’s letter to the art critic Gu Zhenfeng. Provided by the artist. 6 Shen Jingdong, 100 ge yishujia miankong (Faces of 100 artists), 2001. Private publication.

      :      

 -

Figure 1: Wang Te-Yu, No. 27, installation view. Courtesy of the artist

As we begin this new century, the young generation seems unable to escape from the world of “illusion.”Media such as television, computers, films, cartoons, and advertising have replaced “real” life, and even created a life that is more real than real life. These fictitious worlds used by sales and marketing organizations, these beautiful utopias, these dark and violent worlds, these surreal spaces with their revelatory stimulation of the sense organs, have not only provided a means of escaping the real world, but also of satisfying the desires that we cannot fulfill in our present realty. Although we can scarcely avoid choosing ways to escape reality as we try and find our own utopia, in the process of our search, we adopt a kind of temporary paralysis and self-immersion to escape the helplessness of real life.

   Humans need air to live, and cannot survive without it for any length of time, yet it is invisible, colourless, odourless and often intangible. So how can it be utilized in art? It requires a “host” in order to demonstrate its presence, which should be supple and yet able to show tension. When Te-Yu Wang presented her work No. 27 at the IT Park in Taipei in 1997, she used transparent plastic to make three airbags (ﬁg. 1). She then pumped these bags with air until they ﬁlled the exhibition space completely. If the public wanted to enter the exhibition space, they had to stay close to the wall, sandwiched against it, feeling their way along. In keeping with her style, the public was unable to see anything at this exhibition; all they could do was experience the tension, transparency and constriction of the air. If the public is allowed to enter a work in order to experience it, it is not necessary for them to be able to “see” the work. They can go inside the work and play, think and touch, abandoning all the usual protocols and social implications associated

 with visiting an exhibition. The work does not need to reveal any profound meaning or adhere to any particular theory.

It is significant that Te-Yu Wang names her works by assigning numbers to them and that each of her works focuses on a single subject. Looking at one or two pieces, one might not think they are particularly special. But when one takes into account the fact that she has created over forty pieces in the series using this pure and immaterial method, one can see the meaning of the system she is trying to establish. According to her, the use of such scientific methods to organize and structure art is part of a kind of long-term scientific experiment. Only one element is in progress at one time, and these are then slowly developed into a whole system, so we cannot look at each individual piece of work separately; we have to look at the complete process of their development. This is important in looking at contemporary art in general, to filter out transitory modern works in which the primary aim is to comply with style and fashion.

This enables us to understand and research the motivation and intentions which fuel her development, while at the same time avoiding implied meanings and word association from the title, therefore allowing the piece to exist with a degree of purity. Te-Yu feels that works of art should be experienced, and that excessive explanations or theories can restrict the imagination of the audience. This is what people find attractive about installation art. Unless one takes part and witnesses it first hand, it is very difficult to appreciate its unique qualities.

Te-Yu’s works have another characteristic: the use of neutral colours, particularly black, white, and “transparent.”She believes that “transparency” is another type of colour, but that one must appreciate it through senses other than sight. These colours are not warm or sensual. She uses them as a means of standing back from reality and avoiding points of reference. Through the use of transparency she hints at a world that does not exist.

It cannot be denied that materials have a reality of their own. But they also exist in an environment in which they are in contact with other materials. This type of materialism and the artists who practice it maintain that if the material is not allowed to speak, then all that is created is an artist’s reality, undervaluing the unique character of the material. By maintaining the reality of the material, the artist draws attention to its intrinsic nature. This intrinsic nature is related both to the original environment of the material and the relationships within its current context. Only in drawing out the intrinsic nature and originality of a material, through the nature of the materials and the way in which the artist arranges them, is the subject of their installation art established.

In his exhibition Aura Beyond (2001), at the Taipei City Fine Art Museum, Howard Chen covered a flat surface with pins to create a huge area of “cold light” (fig. 2). It took ten workmen ten days to cover the marble floor of the gallery with thirty thousand ordinary drawing pins. The points of the drawing pins were all placed neatly facing the door at forty-five degrees, touching the floor and arranged in a large square. On entering, the first thing that the public noticed was a dark circle, since the entrance faced the dark side of the drawing pins. When some members of the public saw this dark circle from the entrance, they immediately turned around and walked out. However, this work was just like eating sugar cane; the public had to go round the area slowly and when they reached a certain angle the reflection of the light bounced off the thousands of drawing pins, causing them to twinkle and shimmer like a silvery wave. Furthermore, the sharp points of the drawing pins created a sense of danger, which is another important element of this work. The audience seemed to want to approach the drawing pins to see if they really were ordinary pins like

 Figure 2: Howard Chen, The Way of Round Existence, 2002, 1000 x 1000 cm. Courtesy of Yao Jui-chung the ones that we use every day, but they kept their distance behind an invisible barrier. There is a Chinese saying: “You can look from afar but you should not treat with disrespect.”

Chen’s hallmark has become “creating something large from small individual components.” His many hours of hard work arranging the numerous drawing pins created a visual space that resembled a ﬁeld. Maybe in using industrial material such as drawing pins he is giving continuity to the practice from the agricultural age of sowing seedlings by hand, cherishing the memory of a bygone era. Or perhaps he is evoking the current destruction of the natural environment. When we see the wave of light, like the light that shines off the sea, the drawing pins are no longer merely drawing pins. What we perceive is no longer merely the objects in front of us; everything has already become an abstract concept that exists beyond the original materials.

Naturally, works of this kind also have aesthetic aspirations. If we look at them from the view of “suprematism” then, just like the painting Black on Black by Kasimir Malevich, they reject “meaning” and reproduction for the sake of visual indulgence and are certainly not at the service of any external objects. Their main purpose is art for art’s sake. But Chen’s use of ready-made objects to break out of his painted grid-lines is probably not an attempt to uphold this theory. His complete adaptation of handicraft processes and their replacement with a type of mechanical man-made process precludes chance and requires no thought or skill. The whole project has been planned in advance and is just a question of putting everything in the right place. The only difﬁcult challenge lies in laying down adequate plans to achieve the required result. This mode of production is essentially the same as the production-method of industrial civilizations; both are detached from the hard physical work and produce a feeling of alienation. What is different is that Chen uses this artiﬁcial sowing to arouse people’s feelings towards the environment. The natural environment can never be replaced, no matter how hard we try.

, ,  Photography is a means of reproducing reality. Its ability to mimic real life and capture movement has become a powerful tool for many artists. It has also become a potent means of depicting female beauty. In recent years Lu-Lu Hou has used photography to subvert society’s popularly held values about women and the effect that these have on the appearance of females. Her work Peek-a-Boo (1996) consists of ﬁve black-and-white photos (ﬁg. 3). The artist herself is the protagonist in the photographs, but her face is not visible; only her skirt and the top half

 of her body is shown. The first photograph reveals the hem of a skirt; in the second, we see her hand lifting the bottom of her skirt slightly; in the third and fourth there are white downy objects visible from underneath her skirt; and in the fifth, her skirt is almost completely lifted. Only then does the audience realize that the downy objects which they thought were her private parts, are, in actual fact, a bunch of white flowers.

Lu-Lu not only uses humour to create a mood but also poignant self-exposing tactics which give the voyeur the thrill of having committed an illicit act – compensating for the repression and social constraints of real life. So what are Lu-Lu Hou’s aims? To put it simply, she is criticizing the way in which we look at things and, in particular, the male view of sexuality. These ﬁve photographic stills show a continuous movement resembling an animated series – a comic strip. We can interpret them as a series of visual instructions or see them as a set of images that feature individual movements. Hidden behind this is a “story in images.”Using authoritative educational methods, this group of photographs not only questions the power of patriarchy but also criticizes and subverts the use of the female image in Taiwan’s contemporary public media.

Figure 3: Lu-Lu Hou, Peek-a-Boo, 1996, photographs, 50.8 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the artist

So how does society really view the female body and what are its attitudes? Are they based on “desires of the ﬂesh,”“sex appeal,”“animal desires,”or “lack of desire?” Lu-Lu uses herself as the subject of her work but reverses the traditional roles so as to make the audience feel that they are the subject, as she looks out at them challengingly. By doing this, she not only mocks the superior attitude of men, but also examines, in a very clever way, the difference between the ways that women are seen by others and the ways in which they see themselves.

Chen Cheng-Tsai’s Portraits of Angels (2001) investigates the subtle psychological changes that take place when “normal” and “disabled” people view each other (ﬁg. 4). Chen led art workshops at the Cultural Education Foundation for the Handicapped in Taipei and was deeply moved by their innocence. He set out to photograph three handicapped people over a period of thirty minutes as they sat awkwardly in front of his camera (in the end he actually photographed twenty people). Before he began photographing them, he established a few conditions: the subjects could not leave their seats, they could not talk to each other, and they had to face the camera. He also asked them to think about certain things in order to make them feel more comfortable in front of the camera. For example, he asked them to think about pleasant things that had happened to them or their family. However, the majority of the subjects forgot about this completely when he began taking the photographs.

While Chen speciﬁcally chose the handicapped as the subject of his photographs, he used his subjects to measure the psychological state of the audience on being confronted by an unfamiliar sight. This work was also interesting from an aesthetic point of view. The three photographs were arranged on white walls forming three sides of a square. The bottom of the photographs were slightly higher than the eye-level of the audience, so that they were forced to look up at the work.

 Chen was inﬂuenced by the style of Western religious triptychs depicting the Holy Trinity. He applied the “holiness” of that style with the aim of bringing about an investigation into our notions of beautiful/ugly and normal/different. What values are society’s morals based on? On what basis are the standards for beauty and ugliness determined? Figure 4: Chen Cheng-Tsai, Portraits of Angels, video installation, It was not his intention to highlight the unusual 30 minutes. Courtesy of Yao Jui-Chung appearance of the subjects that he photographed but rather to use the photographs to break the dual relationship of the work and the audience by changing the position of the audience from watchers to those who are being watched.

Human instinct has given way to our faculty of logic. We come across many strange and mechanical facial expressions in perfectly structured forms of life, but when we are faced with different aspects of humanity, do we have nothing to say? On being faced with an absurd or unfavourable situation, perhaps all one can do is ridicule himself or herself and become apathetic. On being faced with a situation in the real world where one has no options, all one can do is escape into a world of cynicism and build a personal “mechanical paradise” that one can dominate.

In One White One Black (2000), Peng Hung-Chih used dogs as his subject matter (ﬁg. 5). Why has Peng focused on dogs for so long? The following is taken from the artist’s statement about his work:

There are several reasons why I always use dogs as the main subject of my works. The ﬁrst is that dogs and people need each other, both materially and psychologically. The second is that we don’t really know if the way that dogs behave is natural or whether we have led them to behave in the way that they do. I have seen dogs exhibit so many human traits, jealousy, authority […]. Sometimes I think that civilization has developed to such a degree that people have forgotten how to be people. Perhaps it would be better if we learned how to be dogs.

There are two important additional themes that derive from the symbol of the dog. One is that of the “faithful servant” or the “master and servant” relationship; the other is the use of dogs as a projection of our own bestial nature (fighting over land, stealing food, resorting to flattery and sycophancy). All these selfish traits that are hidden in the darker recesses of human nature are evident in the “cute dogs” that Peng uses in his works. If we compare our own hidden animal nature and the natural behaviour of dogs, we will find that human nature in reality resembles their nature to some extent. By ridiculing dogs, Peng is actually ridiculing human nature.

     Shu-Min Lin’s piece Glass Ceiling (1996) is an installation piece that was created using three- dimensional holograms (fig. 6). What are three-dimensional holograms and what is there effect? In simple terms, they use the latest innovations in laser technology, such as interference to create life-like images of humans – a type of visual hallucination. However, because of the limitations of the technology, the colours are all monochrome as there is no way to reproduce life-like colours. Shu-Min Lin laid the three-dimensional holographic images under glass into the floor of a very ordinary-looking space that appeared, on first sight, to be completely empty. However, upon entering the space and looking at the floor, the public saw a crowd of faces looking up at them. Many people were startled and wondered how there could be people hiding under the floor spying up at them. The three-dimensional holograms reproduced extremely realistically an objective

 reality when, in actuality, the images were locked in a ﬂat photographic world – an illusory “heaven” from which they could never escape.

Lin’s aim is to use everyday objects to reduce the distance between observation and art and to surprise the audience since the contents are copies of real things. In other words, he aims to substitute original objects with ﬁctitious images and illusions that can never be destroyed. He is highlighting the feeling that all living things, “bodies with souls,”are just like these holographic beings that have no inner light. They look life-like but are, in fact, just walking corpses. These beings do not just recreate reality but substitute reality with hyper-reality. This type of hyper- reality only exists in the sense organs. Without our sense organs, we would exist in a dreamlike void. Confronting hyper-reality and the void that results from it was the main reason why he later developed his idea of the “world beyond experience.”

In Ku Shih-Yung’s exhibition City of Light, which was held at the train station in the city of Banqiao, he showed the video Lightness, the Way to Make You Lighter (fig. 7). This video used the principle of infinite refraction with mirrors to create a mirror ball in order to examine the cyclical nature of the universe and the philosophy of immaterial and immortal life. In the three and a half minute video, he stands on a grassy plain wearing casual white clothes. From his pocket he takes out a piece of chewing gum, places it in his mouth and begins slowly to blow a white bubble. Surrounded by deafening blowing sounds, the ball gradually grows until it lifts him off the ground and floats into outer space. When the balloon reaches the edge of the universe, it finally explodes, and the debris falls back onto the plain where the artist was originally standing.

This work also shows the phenomenon of “cold detachment” created in society by multimedia, a phenomenon that led to Ku’s thoughts on a “potential reality” that supersedes reality. Its characteristic is that as soon as we come up against any misfortune our imprisoned consciousness still cannot access it. It appears that we are our own biggest blind spot; the more we look at ourselves the less clearly we see things. Perhaps it hides some concealed connecting point that

Figure 5: Peng Hung-Chih, Little Danny, 2001, installation. Courtesy of the artist



Figure 6: (LEFT) Lin Shu-Min, Glass Ceiling, 1996, hologram and lights installation, 840 x 480 cm. Courtesy of the artist Figure 7: (TOP) Ku Shin-Yung, Lightness, the Way to Make You Lighter, 2000, video installation. Courtesy of Yao Jui-Chung we have not yet discovered. In the past, people interacted directly with each other through “warm connections.”In the digital age, we face “cold connections.”It seems that people are making themselves immaterial through speed. Human civilization has always been developing towards this state of lightness, unlimited by space or time.

Ku’s use of light should not be confused with the understanding of “light” that we learn about in physics. It is related to the mental burdens caused by numerous external factors such as society and our conscience. The lack of freedom, and the unhappiness caused by such burdens, force people to find a temporary, illusionary satisfaction in order to avoid facing reality. A kind of “illusionism” that takes the place of our real world and turns it into potential reality. Thus, it seems that in this potential reality lies the foundations for us to exit from heavy reality. Light becomes an important component of potential reality but through what kind of connection point is this light expressed? It appears to have become the focal point in looking at the future and, since the invention of photographic techniques, light seems to have become related to cold. Cold film hides the even colder world. In comparison to the sun’s warm and powerful rays, this cold light seems to reflect a different kind of potential world. The cold light that Ku Shih-Yung puts forward essentially hides behind the digital world – the absolute certainty of “0” and “1” and the cold feeling of detachment that accompanies this.

Unlike the negatives in traditional photography which resulted from a combination of optics and chemistry, digital images can be re-arranged. They are not restricted to the instant that the shutter is closed. Any mistake can be corrected. Even people’s feelings can be manufactured. Thus, when a digital image appears on the monitor screen, no matter how warm or touching the image hidden behind it is the cold detachment and certainty of the equipment. There is a kind of indescribable distance between truth and reality, an ultra-thin transparent film, and the image slips into our reality as if through a one-sided reflective window (the type used in the interrogation of criminals). While looking through this window precludes any possibility of conversation, it does not reflect reality, nor our dream world; it is an illusory screen through which we will never be able to see clearly. The scenes being enacted on the other side appear to be more real than real life.

 Figure 8: Yao Jui-Chung, Savage Paradise, 2000, photo installation, 480 x 900 x 500 cm. Courtesy of the artist

My series of works Heaven (2001) and Savage Paradise (2000) are a collection of recent photographs that were taken all over Taiwan (ﬁg. 8). The aim of the photographs is to show the false, unfamiliar, and cold reality of Taiwan. They can be seen as a modern version of the magniﬁcent traditional landscape painting styles, using gold-leaf to symbolize religion and authority. I attempted to destroy the original depth in the paintings in order to create a space that looks both real and false, thereby increasing the feeling of unfamiliarity.

The gold-leaf also provides a space for imagination. All of the skies have been blocked in with gold. On a psychological level this relates to an inner mental space. The hand-dyed marks make the photographs look as if they have been dug out of a wasteland – documents of the unnamed disasters that the world has experienced. The series shows the profound sense of loneliness following the destruction of the world. These works are created as imitations of the original. These mass-produced imitations all come from one original. But the original has been destroyed so we can only use the imitations to understand reality.

Reﬂecting this world, these works attempt – through a playful, light-hearted expression – to narrate a cold alienation and a transitory and unnamed grief. Because of the unknown that the past and the future hold and the uneasiness and dread that derive from this, we have created gods and monsters in an attempt to understand ourselves and conceal the bestiality that hides behind our human yearnings. As the spirit brieﬂy escapes from reality into the ephemeral realms that these creations inhabit, humanity yields to our underlying yearnings and an image is no longer simply an image. It permeates all creative domains, all new artistic languages, and world outlooks. And it is just a starting point, where a new heaven awaits us, even if it is not the real one.

     :  ,  ,   

 

Letting a hundred ﬂowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a ﬂourishing socialist culture in our land. Chairman Mao1

To get rich is glorious. Deng Xiaoping2

Mass culture, according to Kang Liu, has been the dominant form of cultural expression within China for the past ﬁfty years. Viewing the culture of the masses as preparing the ground for revolution, Mao placed these forms at the heart of his revolutionary vision, writing in 1944 that, “an army without culture is a dull-witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.”3 But Mao’s increasingly manipulative cultural policies were ruptured by his death in 1976, marking an end to a decade of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and then again in 1979 with the creation of Special Economic Zones in the move to a new Deng-era, then post-Deng-era, China: to get rich is glorious. The stakes have changed and pop culture has become a renewed battleground, but, for Kang, these battles are now largely symbolic acts.4 While still alive and ﬂourishing, these old collective forms and structures are now hollowed out by “hypermarketization,”possessing only a residual ideological core. Always performed within the sphere of the everyday, revolutionary institutions and discourse were replaced by capitalist forms.

The current rise of Chinese indigenous commercial popular culture has been encouraged by the government as an attempt to counter Western imports, but has also been key to strategies designed to limit or curtail political and ideological discussion after the heated debates of Cultural Fever, the “Great Cultural Discussion” that stretched from early 1985 to June 4, 1989. Xudong Zhang marks this period as giving rise to the mirage of a specifically Chinese construction of public culture, reminiscent of the “Public Sphere” articulated by Jürgen Habermas. For the first time, semi-autonomous discursive space seemed to arise from outside state ideological apparati,5 but phantasm-like conclusions often result from utopian models of analysis. Habermas’s theory of formations of a nineteenth century European bourgeois modernity, and the stability and applica- bility of its structure have been severely destabilized, if not entirely discounted, by challenges launched on the grounds of ethnocentrism as well as gender and class bias by more recent critics in terms of its original field of use, something indicative of the difficulties involved in adapting it and similar theories to a Chinese usage.6 But this kind of problematic permeates the entire employment history of Western modernist and poststructuralist theoretical constructs within the context of Chinese cultural production.

Spurred by the need for new vocabularies and methodologies with which to reformulate collective cultural and ideological subject positions in the face of alarmingly rapid societal transformation, the thick language of twentieth century Western philosophy was introduced into China as symbolic capital in the 1980s. As was the case with the transposition of older forms of collective popular culture during the New Era (or Xin Shiqi, a decade of social and intellectual excitement ending June 4, 1989), this alchemical process became infected with the taint of consumerism, having been

 Figure 1: Shen Fan, 88-006, 1988, oil on paper, 138 x 69 cm. Courtesy of ShanghART Gallery received not as ideology but as a fetishized and scientiﬁc system of knowledge indelibly coloured by its Euro-American sources.7

This furious accumulation of cultural and ﬁnancial capital was echoed and underscored by the accretion of symbolic, intellectual capital in terms of Western theory, and while the New Era must be viewed as an essential intervention in post-Mao China to mark a point of rupture with the past, Zhang conceives of the crisis of Deng’s China as paralleling the crisis of Chinese modernism more generally, in that both suffer from discrepancies between content and form.8 Chinese political agendas shifted from idealism to pragmatism, leading the way into an era of “post-politics,”and theory and practice have ﬁssured again and again. Contrasting an increasingly positive Chinese reception of poststructuralist theory in the 1990s with the widespread hostility demonstrated towards it in the 1980s, Rey Chow likens the ongoing relationship between theory and knowledge to that between labor and a managerial economy; accretions of the labor of knowledge are transformed by the speculative economy of theory and acquire a new force, just as this operational model has done in the market sector.9 This equation then becomes both the result of a pragmatic acceptance of the new economic order and evidence of an enthusiasm for Realpolitik.

But while discursive and economic power shifts can to some extent be mapped and gauged, where is agency to be located in this shifting field? For Zhang, the discursive liberation sought during the post-Mao and pre-Tiananmen era served only as a search for weak and limited freedom, and, he argues, “the tacit mutual understanding or collaboration between the state and the intellectual endeavor seemed always to have been taken for granted by the participants of the Cultural Fever,”10 a collaboration and conspiracy between the intelligentsia and the formation of a market economy which was made explicit in the aftermath of the crackdown on the intellectual elite post-June 4. After this date, Zhang positions Chinese intellectuals as taking flight and finding refuge within the realm of high culture and consequently removing national cultural life from the everyday sphere and depriving the public of their potential roles within it.

Kang, espousing a Gramscian methodology in which the margins of the symbolic order are pregnant with the possibility of political agency and invulnerable to the coaptation and

 re-appropriation warned of by Foucault, advocates a return to the everyday as the site of both the global and the local.11 He does so in order to afﬁrm the social relevance of common, collective experience, particularly in terms of the capitalist transformation since the mid-1990s of everyday Chinese life under Western consumer cultural hegemony. Perhaps subscribing to the romantic utopianism imbedded in Habermas’s theorization of the Public Sphere, Kang invokes the circa May ‘68 Marxism of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau’s theories of the political practice of everyday life, and, like Zhang, views the operations detailed above as having destabilized the status and undermined the credibility of the intellectual elite,12 those same voices which provoked the debates of the previous era. But Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang problematize this formulation in the introduction to their 2000 text Postmodernism and China, contending that, “the demise of intellectual high culture in the face of consumerism then gives rise to a whole variety of jouissance derived from the public’s widespread belief that they are decidedly putting something behind them.”13 As such, any recourse to popular culture as the primary unit of cultural production and study is invariably shadowed by the pleasure gained from the deposition of former sites of social power. Pop cultural forms do not become any fuller, but instead remain hollow and opaque, serving as screens onto which to project the punitive and consumer-oriented desires of a new public. One might make the same argument regarding the importation of Western theory. Perhaps its translation into a Chinese usage has been equally hollow and phantasmatic, masking a hidden economy related both to the accelerated accumulation of market-based capital, and the enthusiastic acquisition of hegemonic Western symbolic capital. Nevertheless, all aspects of the new post-1989 “everyday” sphere can be viewed as simultaneously working to render old authorities and their “parasitic” intellectuals homeless. After Tiananmen Square, the ancien régime of intellectuals was effectively beheaded in the quelling of the intellectual debate in which they starred and in the upsurge of hypermarketized popular cultural production from which they were increasingly disassociated.

However, while previous generations of Chinese intellectuals were more or less dependent on the state to prescribe the limits of their intellectual and ideological horizons, those producers of avant-garde cultural materials currently coming of age have become farther and farther removed from the institutional confines of the university and government art academies, drawing ever nearer to an international style and marketplace. Located formatively in regards to the “…horrendous capitalization and commodification of the early 1990s and the concurrent rise of mass culture,”14 these individuals are now provided a choice – to rely on the support of tradition and the state and become “official artists,”a role Shanghai Museum curator Li Xu equates to the stature of domestic animals such as pigs and dogs, or to embrace (post)modernity and become avant-garde, “wild animals,”allying themselves with the potential forces of distinction, power and authority present within global capital and international art markets and institutional networks.15

Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu identifies two phases in postmodern Chinese art; the first, “Political Pop” (zhengzhi bopu), began in 1993 as critique and ended shortly thereafter as commodity, while the second, on-going phase consists of the adoption of the vocabularies of installation, performance, body, video and mixed-media art in an attempt to “…create an international postmodern art that is independent of nationality and ethnicity.”16 While practitioners of the second phase sought to distance themselves from the first, they also shared the same desire for international recognition and, Lu argues, in any case all avant-garde art in China is political, regardless of content and all Chinese avant-garde artists are marginalized and displaced. Like Chinese intellectuals, Lu asserts Chinese avant-garde artists as having opted out of domestic politics, but more so than with intellectuals, he positions their work as largely unaccepted within the national public arena. The

 advent of the new socialist market economy introduced a new space for cultural activities, but, as is the case with domestic pop culture or Western theory, the freedom available in this ﬂeeting dilation is countered by the intensiﬁed consumerism that subjugates it. Exemplifying the dialectical prison of global and local positions, the domestic or internal rejection of this new kind of art work and artist is coupled and exacerbated by an external international reception that relies on the mysterious but irreducible objet a of Chineseness.

For Zhang, the fundamental commitment underlying the Great Debate, and perhaps the current situation, “…was to search for an internal history that sustains and justifies its “external” symbolization in the global discourse,”17 but here the old modernist problems of historicism and teleology present themselves. A powerful political strategy in the face of overwhelming cultural and ideological change has been to invoke nationalism via recourse to tradition so that any narrative for China’s global economic success is provided with a secure ontological anchor to the past. But this return is made problematic on several accounts, not least of which are the constructions resulting from neo-conservative movements (such as the schools of Futurology and Neo-Confucianism) which position tradition as a totally stable structure underlying all commercial and cultural advances and modernisms occurring within the present day. The notion of a single center and single cultural core has haunted Chinese ideology and the Chinese studies, but, as Ien Ang has argued, China “…can no longer be limited to the more or less fixed area of its official spatial and cultural boundaries nor can it be held up as providing the authentic, authoritative, and uncontested standard for all things Chinese.”18

New economies create new spaces, and while discursive hegemony continues to oscillate between State-produced and imported Western models, the latter were offered to transcend the boundaries of the former and constitute a new symbolic subject position, while the former intervened to reiterate the specificity of Chineseness in terms of both geography and ideology, and to mediate the alien nature of Euro-American importations. The twin models of managed labor and theoretical knowledge developed by Chow in her attempt to “reimagine a field” are characterized by, “…a recurrent symptom, the habitually adamant insistence on Chineseness as the distinguishing trait in what would otherwise purport to be mobile, international practices,”19 while Ang unpacks the term even further. He defines Chineseness as the marker of an unchosen minority status, an externally imposed identity, a classificatory practice, a territorialization of power, a marginalization of the other and, in reference to Frantz Fanon’s theories of blackness, an overdetermination from without.20 Viewing Chineseness as a necessarily unstable discursive construct, subjective experience and operational category, Ang proposes the application of a diasporic paradigm as producing a disruption of the ontological construction of tradition and provoking a “crisis of Chineseness,”21 which in turn indicates a larger crisis within Chinese modernity. The questioning of the term “Chineseness” seemingly necessitates an interrogation of Chinese modernity and is positioned by Ang as leading to a potentially productive complication of Chinese studies, much as rethinkings of gender have complicated feminist studies.

In recent Lacanian investigations, authors such as Joan Copjec have asserted the psychological location of sexual difference as preexisting the social order and therefore impossible to deconstruct since language, culture, and ideology only record the failure of its inscription. Following this model, identities based on race, class or ethnicity (such as Chineseness) are assumed after the fact by always-already sexed subjects and hence open to analytical disassembling.22 This idea of race as socially produced complicates Ang’s central theoretical axiom that Chineseness “…is not a category with a ﬁxed content […] but operates as an open and indeterminate signiﬁer whose

 Figure 2: Shen Fan, 93-82-2, 1993, oil on paper, 150 x 96 cm. Courtesy of ShanghART meanings are constantly renegotiated and rearticulated in different sections of the Chinese diaspora.”23 Asserting the myth of consanguinity, of a shared race and blood, as consistently positioned as the zero degree of Chineseness, Ang warns of the surrender of agency and passive subject construction which can result from biological determinations of race or identity. But he does not indicate where an active subject can be found, concentrating instead on where it is not.

Notions of Chineseness stabilize and ground any global discussions and operative models which take China as their location, but also limit any potential global affect through their reactive positioning and forced marginalization; once the location “Chinese” is named, any associated text is then open to the accusation that its scope is too limited to be of global import. But the ﬁctional nature of an ethnically and geographically homogenized Chineseness, whether reduced to blood or Putonghua literacy, is constantly unmade and problematized through the ethnic and cultural fragmentation and disparity present within the PRC’s national borders, and also, more forcefully, within the growing awareness and concentration on overseas Chinese nations and diasporic communities scattered throughout the world. For Chow, in the insistent invocation of tradition in terms of the constitution of Chineseness, “…rarely, if ever, has the question been asked as to what exactly is meant by Chinese.”24 Accordingly, antiquity remains the ontological site of Chineseness and the Chinese subject which results is a “…non-mimetic, literal-minded, and therefore virtuous primitive – a noble savage.”25 Chow views the attainment of a truly postmodern condition within China as thwarted by an enforced dialectical racism caused by the constant burden of an unintelligible ethnicity, the facts of which, following Fanon’s model of “the fact of blackness,”must be self-consciously articulated in order to be overcome. Ang also calls for an interrogation of Chineseness as a category, but in light of the recent disruptions of and challenges issued to blackness as a basis for subjectivity in our current era of post-identity politics and post-blackness, this call may prove to be an extremely volatile avenue of approach.

Determining Chineseness as an “…ethnic supplement which occurs first and foremost as a struggle for access to representation while at the same time contesting the conventional simplifica- tion and stereotyping of ethnic subjects as such,”26 Chow invokes Derridean deconstruction as a recipe for the accomplishment of the aforementioned task, but does not acknowledge as much. In deconstruction, every word or defining concept holds within it the possibility of its own unmaking, and the term “deconstruction” itself acquires value only in a contextual inscription whereby it lets itself be determined by other words such parergon (that which is neither inside

 nor outside the work), pharmakon (both poison and antidote), différance (both difference and deferral), or supplement (both fulﬁlling a lack and creating an excess – both an addition and a substitution). This slippery contingency demanded by Derrida can be recognized in the competing struggles of popular culture and elite intellectualism, tradition and modernity, state-instituted ideology and Western philosophical traditions, which have already been mapped out within this text; Chineseness ﬁlls a lack but creates an excess, it adds but also takes away.

In deconstruction, the structures targeted for analysis must be inhabited in a certain way, operating internally and strategically borrowing all potentially subversive resources from the old structure while always in a certain way falling prey to its own work; Derrida states, “the movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside,”instead, “they are not possible or effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures.”27 Viewed in this manner, the instability of these terms and of this analytical model seem perfectly suited to the unstable ﬁeld of Chinese postmodern avant-garde production, and their ambiguous nature appears to enter the binarism of Hegelian dialectics from both sides, threatening the philosophical process from within, always keeping at a remove any possibility of certainty or Absolute Truth, but perhaps also reiterating the unintelligible ethnicity critiqued by Chow.

However, while the Chinese critical reception of Western poststructuralist theory has often charged it with inauthenticity and as yet another source of Western hegemony, in this instance I believe the use of deconstruction can be argued for and defended as an appropriate method of investigation into Chinese avant-grade aesthetic production on the grounds that it is not a hermetic operational category, but rather relies on an existing edifice within which to house itself. Deconstruction may provide the rhizomatic kernel needed to radically reconceptualize the aspects of traditional Chinese culture which permeate the reception and interpretation of contemporary art production, as well as that required to destabilize the hegemonic and often “scientific” positioning of Western theoretical texts. According to Dirlik and Zhang, the application of these theories to Chinese postmodernism causes the resulting formulation to act as a supplement to Euro-American formations merely through its juxtaposition,28 or “complicit proximity.”But it seems that the difficulty inherent within Ang’s model of the shifting signifier (also an unacknowl- edged Derridean concept), and Chow’s model of the supplement lies in their sublimation of the theoretical sources foundational to their texts.

Liu Kang states, “it is well known that the phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics” designates China’s peculiar situation of the coexistence of incommensurable forces, of a market-oriented economy and a bureaucracy founded on the past command economy and Maoist ideology.”29 But this designation is reﬂected and reinforced by an insistence on “Chineseness” in all aspects of postmodernist or modernist discourse or practice, and so the question posed in this article is what then occurs when Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic term is remade into the ﬁeld of cultural, not market production; what happens when the phrase “contemporary art with Chinese characteristics” is devised, not in terms of a return of the repressed, or revival of Chinese Culturalism or Neo-Confucianism, but in terms of an alternative postmodern practice, one which is international in scope but Chinese in its location, and unstable enough to provoke, indeed insist, on its own deconstruction while shedding light on those texts and contexts that hastened its formation?

The avant-garde Chinese artist is intrinsically individual, and thus fundamentally opposed to the collective cultural notions that have dominated China since the beginning of its revolutionary

 formation; political regardless of his or her particular viewpoint; and engaged in ethnicity-free “international” practice but necessarily marked out as Chinese. Fraught with contradictions, this figure becomes orphaned and homeless, existing apart from the grounded domain of indigenous pop culture and the floating sphere of elite culture, tethered in part to the international art market but also yoked to some notion of Chineseness. But perhaps this fragile condition, fragmented and unstable, is the ideal lens through which to closely examine the status and role of contemporary Chinese cultural production, and perhaps it is the individual artist, not the collective forms of expression, which holds the possibility of the Lacanian Act, defined as a rupture which changes the Symbolic or social order, of committing social and political effect through the artistic gesture.

Ruptured, unstable, and inherently dynamic, “China” as a context for postmodernism and postmodernist practice is a problematic project. But while Dirlik and Zhang acknowledge the postmodern as applicable only to those segments of Chinese society which had previously undergone some form of modernism, a limited proportion due to the coexistence of pre- and post-capitalist economic models with socialist ones, they argue for the justiﬁcation of this fractured condition as the ideal climate for the use of postmodernism against the spatial and temporal teleologies of modernity.30 However, one might also argue that the difﬁculty of locating a unit of study within these often seismic shifts outweighs the convenience of this proposition.

Other than the figure of the avant-garde artist, what then can serve as the vector of analysis, as the primary materials for deconstruction? In Saskia Sassen’s 2000 text “The Global City: Introducing a Concept and its History,”she makes the claim that the global weakening of national units, such as “China,” create a recession of power which is potentially reclaimed or remade at the sub-national level. The “Global City,”i.e. Shanghai, is the prime unit in this new geography and, “insofar as the national as container of social progress and power is cracked, it opens up possibilities for a geography of politics that links sub-national spaces across borders.”31 Global capital and immense, fluid pools of labor create transnational, cross border spaces often having a tighter weave than networks within nationalist confines, and construct a space which is both geographically grounded and trans-global in nature. As such, the problematic frame of “China” can be momentarily laid aside in favor of the stronger, transnational unit of the city of Shanghai, which can itself be further indexically reduced to the single entity of Lorenz Helbling’s ShanghART Gallery, a commercial venture possessing an exact geographical location, cultural parameter, and clearly defined ties to both financial and stylistic internationalism. Unlike Western conceptions of a gallery’s representative scope as fixed on a selection of artists working within specific aesthetic issues or concerns, ShanghART represents over forty artists of varying backgrounds working in diverse styles. The city becomes the index of the nation and the gallery of the city, with each possessing a non-identical but unbreakable tie to the other, like a clue to a crime or a negative to a photograph.

The location of the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, Shanghai has been problemati- cally claimed as the “authentic origin” of China’s Westernized cultural production,32 a designation coloured by both desire and disgust. Split between Japanese and Euro-American Imperialism, Shu Mei Shih positions colonial Shanghai as an illicit playground of sexuality and commodification, later serving as a symbol of national humiliation for the Chinese Communist Party and viewed as a “foreign” city from both Capitalist and Communist perspectives. “It was a city of sin, pleasure and carnality, awash with the phantasmagoria of urban consumption and commodification,”33 but it was also a city far from Beijing with its iron-clad political and ideological control, and full of competing influences that gave the fleeting impression of freedom, of a semi-autonomous discursiveness of the kind invoked by Zhang in terms of the New Era. Identified with both

 Figure 3: Shen Fan, Happy-P-5-1, 2002, oil on paper, 96 x 96 cm. Courtesy of ShanghART

Chineseness and the Western Other, Shanghai’s fraught twentieth century history has caused its early modernist forms to be dismissed by certain critics as consumptive, not productive, with the city serving as “…a space where modern institutions were transplanted from foreign countries, not a place connected to the indigenous idea of locale or local culture.”34 This disavowal of any productive capacity in terms of Shanghainese modernism is uncannily echoed in the external embrace and internal critique of Chinese contemporary artists who adopt Western or international forms or styles as dislocated from their cultural or ethnic locations.

But the colonial buildings of Shanghai, such as the Park Hotel, once the tallest buildings in Asia, are now dwarfed by the metal and glass giants that surround them, as well as by the new crop of monsters squatting in the former rice fields of the Pudong financial district just across from the river from the Bund. Beijing is China’s capital while Shanghai is its metropolis, and in the last ten years the city has seen over two hundred and twenty skyscrapers built. More than twenty of them top two hundred and twenty meters, a set of numbers rapidly approaching the rhizomatous explosion of tall building construction in Manhattan around the turn of the century.35 Anthony King and Abidin Kusno draw parallels between these efflorescences in terms of constructions of nationalism, modernity, and the formation of a visual language of American capitalism,36 but an act of rupture, of a literal turning-upside-down, occurs in the Chinese appropriation. In Chinese culture, architecture and city planning served as cosmological and spatial indexes of the universe, a model displaced under Mao when the “universe” became cut off from the outside world and turned inwards. Traditional Chinese architectural styles employ horizontal, not vertical, representations of power; buildings, whether domestic or institutional, were rarely multi-storied

 Figure 4. Shen Fan, 96-P-21, 1996, oil on rice paper, 96 x 96 cm. Courtesy of ShanghART and an ascending hierarchy of privacy structured space on a North-South axis. For Abidin and Kusno, the shift to verticality implies an acceptance of the global system of architecture produced by the logic of the capitalist system, yet “Chinese characteristics” are always maintained – there may be a Starbuck’s across from the Chinese Communist Party’s ﬁrst meeting place, but, “…no high-rise towers are allowed to be visible from the walled courtyards of the imperial palace.”37 In the importation of capitalist, Western architectural styles, in the displacement of traditional Chinese architecture, and in the reopening of what Mao closed, something entirely new is created: a postmodern capitalist Western architectural style with a Chinese supplement, which in turn exposes both an excess and a lack in the models from which it was derived.

Shen Fan is very thin and given to wearing enormous clothing and smoking cigarettes almost constantly, except when he is behind the wheel of his new Jeep Cherokee. The car is immaculate; its only ornament is a small plastic-encased picture of his four-year-old daughter, Wan Wan. He is ﬁfty, native to Shanghai and part of a school of abstract painting centered in that city, the only such movement in China but perhaps also part of a larger national trend centering on “…the sheer personal and sometimes disagreeable style of modern European and American artists”38 increasingly adopted on the part of contemporary Chinese artists. Represented by ShanghART Gallery, work is contained within the permanent collection of the Shanghai Museum. Regularly holding solo exhibitions in private galleries in London and New York, he has been well received by both international critics and the marketplace.

 Shen Fan’s studio is, in a word, fabulous and comprises the entire top ﬂoor of a colonial warehouse, boasting an elevator, wood case windows, hardwood ﬂoors and panoramic views of the foul band of offal known as Suzhou Creek (also the source of potable water for the city – little wonder it tastes so bad). The walls are whitewashed and exposed brick with post-and-beam construction, and the ceilings stretch anywhere from twenty to thirty feet in height. The total area is maybe 12000-15000 square feet and Shen asks me how much this space would cost in Chelsea or Soho. He seems pleased when I tell him that I doubt Frank Stella has a space this large or attractive, and tells me he pays nine thousand dollars a year in rent, although I recently learned that commercial development projects will soon displace him and all other artists with studios along the creek.

During a visit to Shanghai in the fall of 2001, I was told by a London dealer that Shen also has a fabulous flat. The dealer claimed responsibility for this financial success and complained about the increasingly inappropriate attitudes and diminished gratitude of many Chinese artists regarding the advantages that he has provided. Now, he complained, they can pick and choose whereas before they were lucky to get anything. On this same trip, contemporary artists and Chinese curators recounted horror stories of the early 1990s “art market fever,”a time when international dealers and curators would descend on Beijing and Shanghai, having heard rumors which labeled these cities as new hotbeds of fashionable art at affordable prices. Rooms would be booked at airport hotels, cattle calls issued, and eager emissaries from the West would receive long, snaking lines of artists, desperate for exposure and the chance to exhibit and sell abroad. Things are changing, but some long for the old days, leaving me unsurprised at the sheer virulence of the recent trend of using dead humans or body parts in installation pieces and shows such as Useful Life and Fuck Off, both of which were directed squarely at the bourgeois sensibilities of the Western art market and institutional system, as well as towards the influx of foreigners arriving for the officially sponsored 2000 Shanghai Biennale.

But Shen Fan’s work is more sublimated than this. His oeuvre began in the 1980s with the employment of drawing techniques, and then shifted to the use of watercolors applied directly by the artist’s hand, as in 88-006 (ﬁg. 1). Xiao Kaiyu narrativizes this transition, writing, “Shen himself explains this by saying that he wants to allow one part of the body – the hand – to directly touch and penetrate the surface of the painting.”39

Since the 1980s, he has created series of untitled works on paper made by rubbing rough sheets of rice fiber onto the painted ground of a canvas. Employing black almost exclusively, three examples from 1993 present the greasy and muffled transmission of now-vanished original gestures (fig. 2). The traditional painterly forms of the primary works are transposed to photographic negatives of a sort, and the final, finished pieces made into indexes, or absolute reductions of painting. The forms employed most recently are squares like Happy P-5-1 (2002) (fig. 3) or circles such as made from ceramic. They are coloured only red, black, white or blue. Inside the restrictive formal paradigms he has chosen, Fan lays out very seductive gestural marks – like fingers or water or bodies, thick and fat and crawling everywhere inside there frames. He tells me his friends say his most recent pieces employ strokes of paint resembling nothing more than people copulating. In his studio, his paintings are hung on the wall and laid on the floor and tables on which they are made. This deliberate lowering and horizontality recalls the techniques of Pollock, but Shen desublimates the prison of the frame of painting and the ground of the wall by a consistent complication of the traditional techniques and forms of painting. Shen Fan’s work is about nothing if not negation and refusal. The wall, the frame, perspectival and illusory depth are placed in jeopardy, and what remains also remains to be examined.

 In her 1984 essay “Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism,”Mary Kelly traces the transposition of the authenticating artistic mark from a painterly origin to one that is bodily. Detailing the progressive disruption of the unity of modernist pictorial space almost since its discursive post-war formulation by Clement Greenberg via an Abstract Expressionist case study, Kelly notes the reliance of this field on the category of the artistic text, primarily given at the level of the “picture” and indexed by the artistic gesture which is positioned as the “imaginary signifier” of “Modern Art.”40 Against the mimetic hegemony threatened by mechanical reproduction, gesture, she argues, maintains a residue of figuration, marking the subjective status and hand of the artist, while being subordinated by the mastery of the frame.

Writing in 1996, Chinese critic Wu Liang asserted Shen’s paintings as aesthetically removed from the everyday, but “…surprisingly close to the essence of our lives – repetition, labour, reitera- tion, propagation, as meaningless and futile an effort as that of Sisyphus, an anti-heroism, unknown to the public and with nothing to dazzle in their performance.”41 Liang terms the work “charmingly monotonous,”concerned with Figure 5. Ding Yi, Appearance of Crosses 2000-9, 2000, acrylic on tartan, 140 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist interiority but without content, game-like and coloured by the artist’s pessimistic worldview. Perhaps, Liang hyposthesizes, Shen “…thinks that everything in human life is repetition,”and uses this proposition as the basis for his work, but salvation arrives in the form of Greenbergian medium speciﬁcity – the works are “..not denotative of the world, only themselves,”42 and so any potentiality of ideological or aesthetic critique is diffused by the frame.

In Freudian psychoanalysis, trauma is that which we cannot name but which drives us to act; trauma exists within the register of the Real, but dissolves when encountered. It initiates an investigation into memory, but the memory accessed is displaced by a screen which allows access only through circuitous deferral. This deferral is termed repression, which in turn is split into two aspects, primal and proper. Primal repression is motivated by unpleasure and arises at a moment of trauma, or rupture at which point an unconscious instinct is denied entry into consciousness. The end result is the establishment of a psychic ﬁxation to which an image is attached, but repression does not withhold from the conscious mind all aspects of the primal scene. Repression proper serves as an after-effect with the primal scene having been mediated or distorted to allow partial access on the part of consciousness.

German critic Dieter Ronte, also writing in 1996, attributes a value to Shen’s work as corresponding to Western conceptions of Chineseness while formally related to Euro-American modernist artistic criteria, and like Liang, he notes the democratic and somehow Chinese monotony of his paintings; “Shen Fan’s works remain structured within themselves. No points are given preference over others and none are neglected.”43 Heralding the mastery of the frame, Ronte hypothesizes Shen as encountering the frenetic pace of Shanghai’s global city with the tranquility of high Modernism, as sublimating the experience of the everyday.

Ding Yi is also an abstract painter, also Shanghainese, also has his works within the permanent collection of the Shanghai museum, and is also represented by ShanghART. Educated at the Fine Arts Academy at Shanghai University and at forty, a decade younger than Shen Fan, Ding Yi’s

 Figure 6. Ding Yi, Appearance of Crosses 2000-97-B21/B24, 1997, chalk and charcoal on paper, 260 x 80 cm. (four panels). Courtesy of the artist work must be differently located, contextualized and understood. Like Shen Fan, however, there is a strong structural element to his work, specifically taking the form of a kind of fetishized scientificity (fig. 5 to 7). In a 1992 article by Bo Xiaobo, Ding is positioned as affecting a “pure scientific attitude,”with the artist himself quoted as saying, “my painting is as clear and well integrated as 1+1=2.”44 Having done research into the field of vision, the artist describes his first experimental results as straight lines made with a pen and T-square. Motivated by a desire for further accuracy, this technique led to airbrush and digital technologies, then to hand-drawing, the adoption of shishi as the central focus of his work, and the principle of automatic color selection. This gradual process of reduction is reiterated in Ding Yi’s self-naming, his choice of a simplified signature which transformed his original name, Ding Rong, to one whose pictographic characters were more austere.

Threatened with non-existence by the hollow, industrially produced “specific objects” of the 1960s, Kelly claims an authentic presence was maintained within modernist western artistic production through “…an insistence on temporality and by the intrusion of non-self-referential contents,”but “what was evacuated at the level of the signifying substance of creative labor (gesture, matter, colour) – signifiers of a unique artistic presence, reappeared in the figure of the artist: his person, his image, his gestures.”45

Shishi, a cross-like shape, is a registration mark used in offset printing and, according to Li Xu, “since 1988 Ding Yi has appropriated this language to draw attention to his desire to present the appearance of that which is real.”46 The juxtaposition of precise and regular frames and gestures, the ground of paper, painted canvas, or tartan fabric marked always by crosses, and the random scientiﬁcity of his automatic color selection perform an aesthetic reduction akin to the artist’s self-apellation; working tirelessly towards the negation of any content, which he views as the inevitable ﬂaw of the traditional Chinese painting techniques and forms in which he was trained,

 Ding Yi desires to create a “…language that has no material form and which has nothing to say,”47 in a vernacular that he desirously cites as internationally legible and removed from the speciﬁcity of any kind of Chinese reference. But like his choice, his name “Ding Yi” maintains a hand or a presence in his work. The appearance of tartans and crosses – a constant formal choice from the mid-1990s to the present day – serves as another kind of signature, making these materials into an amalgam instantly recognizable as “a Ding Yi.”Chineseness cannot be escaped.

Unlike Shen Fan, in the 1990s Ding softened his grids and relinquished the stricter procedural and structural aspects of his work, replacing the mechanically produced with marks made by hand and limiting himself for a time to the use of red, but he did not relinquish his use of the shishi, or scientiﬁc gesture. Like Shen Fan’s crawling lines, fat with pigment, Ding Yi applies shishi repetitively, viewing it as “…something to eliminate all the functions of indicating, imitating and symbol[izing],”48 thus allowing the mark to serve as both a symbol of technical exactitude and a negation of subjective expression. For critic Monica Dematté, “the link between the artist and his work, emphasized and enhanced through a prolonged, strenuous physical contact and labor, has been established by the patient repetition” of this action.49

Writing on repression within a clinical context, Freud describes the analyzed as “spinning a thread of associations” until she or he is encounters a thought, “…the relation of which to what is repressed becomes so obvious that he is compelled to repeat his attempt at repression.”50 But there is no rule that governs the relation of distortion to the resistance of the conscious, and, in fact, repression acts in a highly individualized manner. The only rule is that repression is not a singular event with permanent results, but, Figure 7. Ding Yi, Appearance of Crosses 92-20, 1992, acrylic on canvas, rather, demands a consistent expenditure of force 200 x 240 cm. Courtesy of the artist in order to remain operative.

Like Shen Fan, Ding Yi has also been conferred a double genealogy comprising Western aesthetic forms with a residually Chinese cultural cast despite his ambition to create an entirely scientific and geographically non-specific artistic vocabulary. Referring to Ding’s move from traditional canvas to the readymade of tartan fabric, critic Huang Du invokes a Duchampian ontology to the work, but also likens it to the “sudden realization” process of spiritual experience native to Chinese Buddhism. Additionally, he attempts a salvation of the work from the taint of Western hegemonic scientific discourse by asserting Ding’s application of “an Eastern aesthetic different from Mondrian’s absolute rationality and cruelty of physics.”51

Like Dieter Ronte’s positive assessment of Shen Fan’s work due to its appropriation of Western modernist formal criteria, Ding Yi has also been critically interpreted as responding to the everyday concerns, textures, sounds and images, to the public culture of his Shanghainese environment. ShanghART owner Lorenz Helbling writes of Ding Yi that his work contrasts dramatically with the rapid pace of the city, and views his monotonous working style of, “…meticulously putting layer over layer of strokes on the paper or canvas, [as] a way to live, a way to keep a clear mind amid the pounding turmoil of this relentless city.”52 But he also identiﬁed a characteristic in Ding’s work that could be equally located in Shen’s, an indexical quality relating fundamentally

 conﬂicting but particularly Chinese notions of strict limitation and random freedom. The subjugation of the gesture to the frame in the work of both men is perhaps indicative of a long-fought battle between collectivity and individuality, but it seems certain that any kind of détente or resolution cannot be located on the same ground.

In contrast to both Ding and Shen, Xu Zhen is a Shanghainese video artist born in 1977, only one year after Mao’s death. Also a member of the ShanghART stable, at twenty-ﬁve, Xu has only formally produced art for ﬁve years but has attained a striking level of international success. He has been included in such seminal group exhibitions as Useful Life and Fuck Off, has had solo exhibitions in Asia, Europe and North America, and was the only contemporary Chinese artist invited to contribute to the 2000 Venice Biennale.

Figure 8: Xu Zhen, Caihong (rainbow), 1998, stills from a video installation. Courtesy of Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art

Given to using death and corpses as artistic supplies, violence of a graphic nature has a distinct and de-sublimated role to play in Xu Zhen’s work. Caihong (1998), or “rainbow,”was the piece selected to appear in Venice and consists of a tightly framed, four-minute loop of a naked human back which gradually reddens under the strain of heard but unseen blows (ﬁg. 8). The slaps land at broken, uneven intervals and as they increase in number, individual hand prints emerge, pale against an engorged ground; one part of the body – the hand – is allowed to directly touch and wound the surface of the work, the skin of the body.

What is taken away, Kelly reminds us, will always return, and the painterly mark is given back through the photographic residue of performance as the actual visible body itself. The transposition of gesture becomes the transposition of bodies, and Greenberg’s scientific and neo-Kantian corpus/cogito is ceded to the uniquely identified and self-owned body of Husserl in a desire to override morphology. Incontestable notions of authenticity loop back to the artist’s own body, and, Kelly writes, “the discourse of the body in art is more than a repetition of the eschatological voices of Abstract Expressionism; the actual experience of the body fulfills the prophecy of the painted mark,”while its art refers back to the essential content and irrefutable experience of pain.53

In the 1998 video piece Shouting, as in Caihong, repetition comes into play both in terms of the physical gestures performed by the actor or actors, but also in terms of the very nature of the medium itself. While only five minutes long, any viewer of Shouting may have occasion to watch Xu Zhen yell at crowds of Shanghainese pedestrians two, five, fifty, one hundred times. A loud howl is let loose from his mouth, faces turn, alarmed towards the camera and then swing about when any notion of danger, or spectacle, or impending violence is diffused.

 For Freud, instincts and vicissitudes, drives and their mutations are always multiple and partial, but correspond to certain laws of operation. Pleasure must be balanced by unpleasure, and the pressure exerted towards the conscious must be balanced by an unceasing unconscious counter-pressure. While repression essentially affects ideas on the subject’s psychological borders, successfully repressed events remain within the domain of the unconscious, and any escape into consciousness can instigate psychosis.

In the work of Shen Fan and Ding Yi, traumatic encounters with political, economic and social realities, as well as with the violently shifting ground of the everyday, are kept at bay through the constant counter-pressure of secondary repression; the gesture is always subordinate to the frame, the individual to the collective structure. But Xu Zhen is differently located due to a temporal and ideological displacement and in spite of geographical proximity. His management of trauma is also dramatically different, and he appears to move not away from, but towards the primal scene in a deliberate strategy of desublimation. In the 1999 performance recorded by video, I’m not doing anything, the artist swings a dead cat around a room not for five minutes but for forty-five, until it is reduced to a pulpy and unidentifiable meat. Queried as to his motivation and rationale for this choice of material, he responded with Warhol-like blankness; “Cats, I think, are kind of sexy.”54

The work was removed from an Italian exhibition after complaints were received labeling it as objectionable, perhaps revealing the extent of Western moral taboos still held in terms of the boundaries of art and life, beauty and obscenity, violence and performance. While regularly domestically fetishized as the location of individual freedom, Xu commented that, “there is a big gap between the West that exists in our imaginations and the West that really exists,”adding that the situation is “…really not that different from China.”55

But the reception of this work and others by other artists employing a similar or advanced degree of corporeal violence has not been limited to an entirely external and international scope. After Fuck Off, in which I’m not doing anything was featured, the PRC Ministry of Culture issued a decree forbidding certain art activities engaged with corporeality to be performed or reproduced, further specifying that all art must be examined prior to exhibition and should promote and reﬂect Marxist and Chinese Communist Party thought. But this crack-down was not limited to artists, and in 2001, I encountered several gallery owners who were only then – almost one year after the Biennale and its alternate exhibitions – having their permits to operate reinstated. One such gallerist spoke to me at a show of white on white abstract paintings; this kind of show, he said, might not be as interesting as Fuck Off but was certainly safer. Underlining a connection between the contemporary Chinese art world and the larger national cultural sphere, Britta Erickson wrote, “A return to Marxist thought was also suggested by the Central Committee as part of a solution to the current civil unrest: the government sees a need for the re-infusion of moral values and limits.”56

But the degree of vehemence and passion to these negative receptions should not be overlooked. That both China and the West would make Xu Zhen a target of censorship may be a sure indication of the impact of his work, and the possibility of rupture or societal change present within it.

For Zhang, the “liberalization” sought by the intellectual elite and new participants in the everyday sphere was countered by the neo-authoritarianism pursued in economic and political arenas, thus allowing Cultural Fever to serve as both a set of responses to modernity and “…a fast-forward

 replay of the entire era of modern intellectual history.”57 But this formulation is complicated when Market Fever becomes the location of analysis, as is the case with the three artists discussed here. The authoritarian nature of state institutions and ideological controls maintains an increasingly tenuous hold, and while all three are residents of Shanghai, it is entirely conceivable that any or all could migrate to London, New York, Tokyo, or Zurich, forever becoming “foreign” artists in the eyes of the nation and forced to partially and traumatically relinquishing the Chineseness which is inescapable to them abroad.

Zhang’s model of an accelerated history is echoed by Dirlik and Xudong in their conception of China’s entire post-Mao period as a fast-forward version of the post-war West, as well as their assertion that, “…modernity with a vengeance is clearly the force that shaped the same libidinal and ideological landscape that gives rise to both a high modernism and a parasitic postmodernism at the same time.”58

But in the motif of the collapse of history and modernity as outlined by these authors, it is possible to deduce an accompanying implosion of aesthetic history. Rather than the diachronic unfolding recounted by Kelly in her narrative of Western modernism, a synchronic simultaneity produces itself; in a collapse of Kelly’s theory, Shen Fan’s work, or Ding Yi’s, or Xu Zhen’s, may be proposed as containing both the painterly and the bodily gesture, the scientiﬁcity of form of Greenberg and the individualized self-ownership of Husserl, all connected to the irreducible content of pain. In the mid-1960s in Düsseldorf, Joseph Beuys created an installation work he titled Zeige deine Wunde, or “show your wounds,”which depended on the participation of the audience to become a performance. It is tempting to ask these artists to display their wounds as the proof of this theorization, as proof of the “authentic” nature of their art, or of their own “Chineseness,”but biographical art criticism is not my aim and I prefer to leave any primal scene of pain well behind the screen of aesthetic production and secondary repressions. The trauma and violence inherent within the rhizomatic implosions which make up the ground of Chinese post/modernity, although well-documented, cannot and should not be directly represented or located as content in art. Instead, the operations of cultural, aesthetic, ideological, political and social exchange which ﬂow around these traumas can be mapped and deconstructed in order to interrogate the status of Chineseness via avant-garde art, or vice versa, in order to textualize and contextualize what these terms mean and to create productive avenues of investigations into future forms, to make fodder for future deconstructions.

Notes 1 Mao Zedong, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” (February 27, 1957), First Pocket Edition, 49-50. 2 Liu Kang, “Popular Culture and the Culture of the Masses in Contemporary China,” in Postmodernism and China (London/Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 137. 3 Mao Zedong, “The United Front in Cultural Work” (October 30, 1944), Selected Works 3, 235. 4 Liu Kang, “Popular Culture and the Culture of the Masses in Contemporary China,” 129. 5 Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham NC/London: Duke University Press, 1997), 3. 6 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991) and Craig Calhoun, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993). 7 Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms, 4 and 15. 8 Ibid., 10. 9 Rey Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, ed. Rey Chow (Durham/NC/London: Duke University Press, 2000), 1. 10 Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms, 12. 11 Kang, “Popular Culture and the Culture of the Masses in Contemporary China,” 136-139. 12 Ibid., 129.

 13 Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang “Introduction: Postmodernism and China,” Postmodernism and China, ed. Rey Chow (London/Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 12. 14 Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms, 18. 15 From a conversation with Li Xu in Shanghai on September 22, 2001. 16 Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu, “Chapter 6: POST MODERNIZATION: The Intellectual, the Artist and China’s Condition” Postmodernism and China (London/Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 155. 17 Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms, 64. 18 Ien Ang, “Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm,” Modern Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory, 2000, 282. 19 Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” 2. 20 Ang, “Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm,” 281. 21 Ibid., 286. 22 See Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, Massachusetts/London: MIT Press. An OCTOBER book), 1994. 23 Ang, “Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm,” 282. 24 Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” 11. 25 Ibid., 12. 26 Ibid., 3. 27 Jacques Derrida, “Writing Before the Letter,” Of Grammatology (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1974), 41. 28 Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang “Introduction: Postmodernism and China,” 2. 29 Kang, “Popular Culture and the Culture of the Masses in Contemporary China,” 123-43. 30 Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang “Introduction: Postmodernism and China,” 2-3. 31 Saskia Sassen, “The Global City: Introducing a Concept and Its History,” in Mutations, 2000, 113. 32 Kang, “Popular Culture and the Culture of the Masses in Contemporary China,” 132. 33 Shu Mei Shih, “Chapter 9: Modernism and Urban Shanghai,” The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semi-Colonial Shanghai 1917-1937, 2001, 232. 34 Ibid., 271. 35 Anthony D. King and Abidin Kusno, “On Be(ij)ing in the World: ‘Postmodernism,’ ‘Globalization,’ and the Making of Transnational Space in China,” in Postmodernism and China, ed. Rey Chow (London/Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 48-49. From 1890 to 1908, three hundred and six skyscrapers were built in New York City. 36 Ibid., 49. 37 Ibid., 61. 38 Xiao Kaiyu, “Shen Fan – One View of Beauty, Perhaps,” www.shanghart.com. 39 ibid. 40 Mary Kelly, “Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism,” in Art After Modernism, 1984, 89. 41 Wu Liang, “The World of Shen Fan” (Shanghai, 1996), www.shanghart.com. 42 Ibid. 43 Dieter Ronte, “Shen Fan” (Bonn, 1996), www.shanghart.com. 44 Bo Xiaobo (English version: Zhao Zhengxin), “A Series of Paintings Shown in Crosses” (1992), www.shanghart.com. 45 Kelly, “Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism,” 95. 46 Li Xu, “Ding Yi,” in Asia Paciﬁc Triennial (Brisbane, Australia: Queensland Art Gallery, 1993), www.shanghart.com. 47 Ibid. 48 Wu Liang, “Shishi as a Mark of Organization,” www.shanghart.com. 49 Monica Dematté, “Simplicity, Complexity, Synthesis: Ding Yi’s Painting Process,” in Guangzhou, March (1994), www.shanghart.com. 50 Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915), The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989), 571. 51 Huang Du, “Ding Yi: The Appearance of Crosses,” www.shanghart.com. 52 Lorenz Helbling, “15 x Red by Ding Yi,” (Shanghai, June 1996), www.shanghart.com. 53 Kelly, “Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism,” 96. 54 Chen Xiaoyun, “An Interview With Xu Zhen,” www.chinese-art.com 4, no. 3, 2001. 55 Ibid. 56 Britta Erickson, “From the Edge of Beyond: Artists Probe the Mundane and the Horriﬁc,” www.chinese-art.com 4, no. 3, 2001. 57 Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms, 4 and 7. 58 Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang “Introduction: Postmodernism and China,” 8.

 , ,    

 

Figure 1. View from the New Urbanism exhibition at the Guangdong Museum of Art (July 3 - July 28, 2002). Courtesy of Zhang Zhaohui

At the beginning of a new century, more and more discussions on cities appear in ofﬁcial texts and public discourse. New metropolitan culture is becoming a hot topic along with people’s desire for endless consumption. Chinese cities are being constructed higher and higher, and on a larger and larger scale. The urban population is increasing dramatically. The rapid changes taking place in Chinese cities are widely being viewed as symbols of economic prosperity, modernization and internationalization.

In essence, the metropolitan revolution that China is currently undertaking is extensive in its breadth and depth, and can be seen as a transformation of Chinese social structure from a traditional agricultural society into a modern urban culture. These changes affect the destiny of China’s 1.3 billion people. The international metropolises of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and others, while still only in an embryonic form, are already experiencing dramatic developments in

 psychological awareness, social norms, ethics, lifestyles and aesthetics, which will create a brand-new visual world and spiritual landscape for public and private social spaces. This urban visual culture, which intermingles international trends with the current Chinese social context, is ﬂourishing and can be termed “New Urbanism.”

For young artists who grew up alongside China’s economic reforms and urbanization, the metropolis is not only the stage for their artistic practice, but also their existential background. They are the active practitioners of New Urbanism. They manifest this in their new lifestyle, in delicate and diverse self-expression and continuous artistic practice, which further develops and renovates New Urbanism’s lively and fresh landscape. The large-scale exhibition entitled New Urbanism, which opened on July 3, 2002, at the Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, showcased the concerns and thoughts of young artists about urbanization on various levels (ﬁg. 1 to 4). These artists explore the possibilities of contemporary art and seek to discover whether their own explorations represent the direction of future development for a new and progressive visual culture.

     Xinhua news journalist Gu Wanming reported on March 4, 2002, that lately many property developers of apartment and villa complexes in Chinese cities were working hard to decorate the facade of their buildings in order to increase their attractiveness. Urban squares and gardens are also branding their buildings with concepts titled “Roman Pillar,”“Roman Sculpture,” “Continental Passion,”“A Californian Sunshine Garden” and so on. One residential area in Guangzhou is bordered by a narrow and smelly ditch used for the dumping of wastewater. A gigantic billboard above it reads: “Living by water enriches life with vigor.”In the old area of Huangpu District in Shanghai, the narrow gate of one villa zone is decorated with groups of Roman sculptures. These sculptures appear extremely out of place in the old district, and have been executed in low-grade stone and with poor skill. People ﬁnd them totally inappropriate in their current surroundings.

Architecture is commonly believed to be one visual art form, which is closely related to every other. Even if its practical function often overshadows its aesthetic aims and artistic achievements, it still reflects the true spiritual tone and cultural creativity of a society within its specific historical period. “Continental Style” is popular all over China and extremely stereotypical, highlighting the superficial aesthetic perspectives from which people look up to Western values. Property developers, architects, building owners and construction managers put up complexes in these new and exotic styles, while universally deploying the same local construction techniques that have been in use for decades. As a matter of fact, it is not difficult to see the double impact of overseas and local traditions upon many aspects of urban development. In the urbanization movement under the current international context, overseas influence is dominant. It is a given in public discourse and critical narrations that the “West” is an omnipotent though murky concept. It is used as a generic term for all overseas spiritual and materialistic culture that is considered more advanced and prestigious than those of the Orient, and so, of China.

As a result, people consider “Western Style” a positive term, while “vernacular taste” is a negative one. However, contemporary Western culture is not abstract, but instead is the product of many rich and substantive forms. Historically speaking, these forms include those passed on from ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and modern times. Geographically speaking, ramifying forces in the West can be seen in the resulting dichotomies which distinguished

 old and orthodox Europe from a modern and successive United States, which looked on Japan as an Asian version of the West, while the tiger economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore were regarded as representatives of a “ﬁltrated” West.

Different versions of the West are represented in Japanese TV series and South Korean fashion styles, both of which are popular among China’s viewing public. Furthermore, the West is further impressed upon people’s imaginations through the mass media. Here the West in its different versions is most clearly marked out and made palpable. What is more problematic is the fact that decision makers in power fail to understand the most advanced cultural achievements of the West. They refuse to make efforts to assimilate the West’s most advanced achievements and integrate these within China’s socio-cultural framework. In addition, the mindlessness of blindly following others and the predominate utilitarian motives of property developers and entrepreneurs only serves to worsen the situation. It is not difficult for us to understand the reason for the popularity of “Continental Style” and the rest, beyond seeing them as in bad and vulgar taste and a perversion of Western classical architecture, crudely copied and deployed in urban Chinese architecture.1 Chinese local and national traditions exert less and less of an impact on urbanization in terms of its appearance and scope of influence. However, due to the protection granted to their social mechanisms, allowing for the control of the vested interests involved, native and local traditions are still embedded in the sub-consciousness of government decision-makers who can influence and control the development of urbanization through administrative intervention. The ongoing demolition and re-development of local cityscapes, the popularity of the so-called “three pattings” amongst officials supervising these projects, and the prevalence of the “grandiose” and “image” fuelled projects as discussed above all demonstrate the same problem.2 Fei Xiaotong has commented that, “As our society undergoes a course of rapid change, transforming our society from a native and traditional one to a modern once, living lifestyles which are still defined by that native and local society, are highly problematic.”3 Now the problems of native and traditional lifestyles are highlighted in the special situation of cityscapes formed in the “indeterminate zone of city and village” or in “villages within cities,”which are an outcome of excess rural labourers migrating into the cities. Moreover, it is also seen in the behavior of China’s nouveau riche who practice the “seven worse habits” when travelling in developed countries.4 It is difficult to get rid of these habits, just as it would be for a rustic person from the countryside to step into a grandiose mansion for the first time and suddenly find himself or herself a member of the middle-class.

Similarly, the problems of managerial style created in traditional society smear the urban landscape in China with the same embarrassingly uncivilized color, as seen in the grotesque traditional roofs but gigantic towers of concrete, done in an affected manner copied line for line from a pseudo-foreign style. It seems that we have a long way to go to create an urban civilization that could emulate the advanced social sensibilities of the outside world. For now, we should focus upon trying to inﬂuence the short-sighted visions of the nouveau riche, who seem to have lost their minds as soon as the coins started tickling into their pockets.

The absence of creativity in the contemporary cultural sense is the major barrier preventing the sustainable development of comprehensive state power. Over the last ten years, the physical cityscape in China has undergone dramatic changes. However, much has been lost through a male-dominated bureaucracy. Pragmatic economic interest seeking quick relief – regardless of the consequences – and a ﬁxation with Western tastes coupled with a vernacular nationalism, all hinder China’s further development. In the meantime, traditional local streetscapes are being

 Figure 2. View from the New Urbanism exhibition at the Guangdong Museum of Art (July 3 - July 28, 2002). Courtesy of Zhang Zhaohui completely destroyed. However, a contemporary urban view, combining Chinese aesthetics and temperaments has not yet been formed. In the long run, globalizing trends and conservative cultural forces will ﬁght it out for dominion over Chinese urbanization.

         Urbanization and globalization have been two major themes in China’s development from the beginning of this century onward. Even though these two trends are closely associated with each other and have continued to develop over the last twenty years, they had never become mainstream discourse nor have they attracted attention from the rest of the world. These two trends have had a close and fundamental relationship to the life and destiny of the inhabitants of the cities and countryside. In contrast, the urbanization development in the past was based on privatization and industrialization, which emphasized economic development and the improvement of living standards – as well as tackling the problem of providing adequate food and clothing for all the populace. International exchange was limited to the ﬁelds of economics, trade and industry. Rigid governmental control was never loosened. Furthermore, few could participate in the exchange of information prior to the present wider availability of computers and internet access.

During the 1980s, the liberation of thought and the development of the economy became two major focuses, which could have simultaneous or alternative influences, and began to attract considerable social concern and interest. During the first decade of the government’s pro-Western rhetoric, reflections upon indigenous traditions became very popular among the intellectual community, giving rise to a sense of tension and threat that led to and ended with the Tiananmen incident in 1989. During this period, the achievements of urban construction and economic development had not affected the lifestyle and creative activities of artists, including many young artists who held new ideas and were fascinated by utopian cultural idealism and “enlightenment.” Later on, some of these artists and curators promoted “Gaudy Art” that contained a certain realistic basis. Its most productive period coincided with a sociologically “get rich quick” imperative that inevitably ended up being characterized by images of coarse peasants coveting a place in the rapidly urbanizing city, laden with all the essential consumables.5 Since then, Gaudy Art has stagnated, failing to find a developmental logic that would allow it to vault itself upwards into a new manifestation. Moreover, it was too subjective to interpret Chinese art and social reality with

 Figure 3. View from the New Urbanism exhibition at the Guangdong Museum of Art (July 3 - July 28, 2002). Courtesy of Zhang Zhaohui reference to the relationship between Western pop art and the social history of art. What is more important is that Chinese Gaudy Art did not produce representative artists and convincing art works. From the perspective of urban visual culture, Gaudy Art was a concrete reﬂection of local and national aesthetics during the primary stage of urbanization. In addition, it had a close relationship with a commercial economy that reﬂected typical peasant taste. Before the emergence of a contemporary urban culture, driven by a new economy and represented by China’s information and hi-tech industries, rustic aesthetic taste will continue to hold a position on the cultural horizons of Chinese cities.

Even so, since the beginning of this new century, China has begun escalating its attempts to merge more closely with the international community, especially after acquiring the right to host the Olympic Games in 2008 and to join the WTO, and since launching Shanghai’s bid to host the 2010 World Expo. Learning English and adopting a more international focus are central concerns of the Chinese government and public alike. Against such a background, internationalization and localization alternatively diverge from and intersect with one another. As a result, China’s metropolitan spectacle will continue to be revitalized.

Over a period of several years, twenty cities in China have revised their development strategies, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. The international metropolis is seen as the ultimate goal for development, an ambition that is obviously unrealistic for many cities. In fact, only Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have such potential. In order to become an international metropolis, cultural facilities are a must. Therefore, it is an imperative for China’s urban outlook that concert halls, theatres, museums, libraries, cultural centers and urban cultural plazas are built. However, as it has been said in the media lately, the cultural awareness of urban citizens cannot simply be raised by the building of a great number of cultural facilities. The hardware of facilities must ﬁt the needs of existing software, for instance, the overall style of the city, the cultural standard of its citizens, and the marketing strategy of such cultural facilities.6 For the development of contemporary visual art, the dramatic increase of exhibition spaces offers a social stage for the publicizing and popularization of contemporary art. Some public museums with a more advanced awareness and management regime are exploring the Western manner of exhibition operation, such as the holding of biennials and the professionalization of their curatorial practices. Hence, developments in urbanization change the landscape of cities and accelerate the reform of the contemporary art system and the diversiﬁcation of the art forms deployed.

 During the 1980s, twenty years after the economic boom, Japan built around two hundred museums which now extensively collect art treasures from around the world, while also heavily promoting contemporary art and artists, resulting in an increase in Japan’s image as a culturally internationalized country. China’s contemporary situation is similar to that of Japan in the 1980s. Many funds from civil society are being put into the art world. The government has also encouraged the development of new art and the furthering of artistic innovation. What is foreseeable is that Chinese contemporary art, the art system, and the market will seek to signiﬁcantly develop its public image and to create a realistic environment for the channelling of its inﬂuence internationally, as well as locally through urbanization. As art gradually becomes a commercial as well as a social product, the new avant-garde art that young people are so receptive to can become an effective method for them to express their own ideas.

    Urbanization recasts the temperament and spirit of urban residents. In the new millennium, the emergence of Chinese urban culture will have a close relationship with youth culture. It can be said that youth culture is the key composite of contemporary urban culture in China. The youth culture that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe and America is now reappearing in Mainland China after a time lag of thirty to forty years. The backbone of youth culture in China is those people who were born in the 1980s into one-child families. They grew up along with economic reform and urban development and are now known as the “Cartoon Generation” or the “New Generation.”Even if Chinese young people are not as rebellious and radical as the student movements in Europe and America in the 1960s, this new urban generation has completely discarded the ethics and values of traditional China. It comes naturally then that they are also enthusiastic participants in and audiences for an art that keeps furthest away from the traditional and closest to the contemporary. They are gifted in communicating and expressing their individu- alities with visual language. They should be, having grown up in an advanced media-driven culture. For example, the background and contents of their lives are drawn from television, MTV, VCD, DV, and the Internet. Pop culture, which is rampant on the international stage and takes images as its media, exerts a distinct impact upon youth. As a result, their receptability to visual culture is far greater than that of their seniors. Generally speaking, they are good at using visual language or symbols to express themselves. They pay considerable attention to their hairstyles, clothing and accessories. This interest in visual statement also influences their choice of profession. In the past, people preferred to choose professions of high prestige in society, such as professors, government officials, merchants, lawyers, doctors and so on. However the profession-choosing tendencies of this new generation has undergone a dramatic change. Now they desire to be athletic stars, cartoonists, writers, TV hosts, pop singers, hairdressers, and so on. It is obvious that such a significant change has a close relationship with the spread of information through the public media.7 Whereas some respond to the challenges of contemporary reality using the traditional strategies of a cynical worldliness, this new generation instead calmly faces up to the needs and demands of these new social norms.

Young Chinese growing up in urban centres display very similar traits to those youth living in Asian cities such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, and so on. Urban trends learned from Europe and America have a close relationship with contemporary art, which naturally links Chinese urban youth with contemporary avant-garde art. First, urban youth accept and often have an intimate understanding of experimental contemporary art because it relates most directly to their own feelings. Secondly, urban youth are the major practitioners of contemporary art. Finally, contemporary art that is inﬂuenced by advanced culture has been welcomed by

 well-educated and open-minded young people who have an international outlook, in a country where otherwise traditional habits and attitudes are deeply rooted.

Over the last twenty years, increasingly advanced public media has promoted a signiﬁcant change in social roles. Old roles have been discarded gradually as new social images have stepped into the popular media. Age differences have become more and more distinct, caused by the dramatic changes taking place in the urban environment. Those in the “New Generation,”aged between twenty and thirty years old, have grown up alongside economic reform and urbanization. They are well-educated and are capable of ﬁtting into international contemporary urban life. Social progress provides them with a stage for personal development. The youth culture they represent is unprecedented in Chinese history and is attracting more and more attention from overseas.

It is reasonable to expect that the fresh and internationally styled temperament of Chinese urban youth will bring vigor to the urbanization of China. They are maturing gradually and stepping into mainstream society. Their aesthetic tastes will unavoidably have an impact upon mainstream aesthetics and its attitudes towards international culture. This outcome should build a foundation upon which a new culture and art, with a contemporary perspective and fresh starting point, can be built. Additionally, after this youth culture joins the mainstream of commercial consumer society, experimental new art will be given a new popular color and its social impact will become more pervasive.

       The contemporary metropolis has been the cradle of avant-garde art; especially in key cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou that have become centers for the explorations of the avant-garde. Over the last decade, contemporary art activities in these cities has continuously developed and have presented the achievements of artists who have managed to make an international impact while still holding true to their local inspirations. These artists include the Beijing artists Gu Dexin, Zhang Huan, Wang Jin, Wang Jianwei, Zhan Wang, Sun Yuan, Yin Xiuzhen; the Shanghai artists Yang Fudong, Xu Zhen, Yang Zhenzhong; and the Guangdong artists of the Big Tail Elephant Group, as well as Zheng Guogu, and Cao Fei. Comparatively speaking, Beijing artists are primarily concerned with common daily experiences with a previously unnoticed potential for depth and cultural resonance, the investigation of which assists in the transformation of traditional art language into modern and contemporary forms. Shanghai-based artists are gifted in producing impressive images, which combine their feelings with the delicate psychology of their living spaces. Guangdong artists challenge the harsh reality of their commercial environment with artistic language or contemporary visual or intellectual games while allow them to make quick turns within their pan-market-oriented surroundings. The different development standards and features of urbanization in different cities has become the background on which to highlight their artistic progress. Their interactive relationship with urban life becomes an important index for evaluating their artistic quality.

The exhibit New Urbanism introduces to its audience young artists who come from nine cities across China. Their works bring to us the responses that new generation artists are making about their urban living environment and social atmosphere. Liu Wei’s short video In the Depth of Flowers superimposes fields of garbage from outlining suburbs upon the magnificent buildings of the city center, exposing the relationship between urban development and environmental pollution. Wang Nengtao’s photo Subversion of the Earth takes the form of a documentary and uses panoramic photography to exhibit a gigantic construction field filled with seventy huge

 Figure 4. View from the New Urbanism exhibition at the Guangdong Museum of Art (July 3 - July 28, 2002). Courtesy of Zhang Zhaohui cranes (fig. 5). This work exposes the scale of China’s urbanization and comments upon an unpredictable future only two years away, while also ridiculing our wild exploitation of environmental resources. Li Li’s work Reflection presents audiences with the uncertainties of his generation in their personal roles as well as their search for self-identity. Wang Qiang’s installation Children Factory piles up all sorts of toys in the attempt to distill the essence of childhood memories still remaining in the contemporary city (fig. 6). Sun Yi’s work Virtual Murder demonstrates the false promises of online existence, and explores the blind enthusiasm of living life online. Ya Liang’s video/performance/installation/photography work Fly to Work is a comprehensive art project still under development. As part of this, she asked her relatives in the countryside to embroider her thirty-thousand word novel onto nine hundred shoe insoles and then bring these into the urban environment of Beijing. She actualizes corporate ideals into another art project and offers a recording in photography and on video of the rapid running of two feet, symbolized by red shoe insoles, combining language, performance, installation and video. Meanwhile, she represents the countryside and city as bound together forms of tradition and modernity. Zhang Hao from Harbin uses x-ray imaging to record the different varieties of metal rings worn by young people. The work exhibits the unique interests and aesthetics of urban pop youth. Liang Yue’s Welfare Advertisement series warns us against the traps of commercial society in the form of humorous public ads. Wang Qiang from Nanjing uses computer chips to construct a weird but fascinating landscape in a digital city of the future. Liu Ding uses the language of minimalism to produce simple, cheap and enjoyable visual images. Cao Jinping from Chongqing works with paintings and photos to explore new ethical issues on the urban environment and natural life with unforgettable visual language. It seems that he is calling for a new awareness of the environment and personal ethics.

Zhang Bin’s short video demonstrates the inner world of introversion and impulse of the young people. The rich and sinewy detail in his video reﬂects upon the tension that often exists between our personal feelings and the demands of the materialistic world. Ren Qian’s works New Idols are created by inserting himself into all kinds of pop star promotions which he later sells as fan

 photos, bearing his own signature. He negates the psychology of pop idolatry while in the meantime creating a work that is good-natured, relaxed and humorous. Yu Jin from Chengdu records the comments of foot-washing ladies in his work Foot-Washing Story and exposes the disjuncture between our expectations of personalized service and privilege with the reality of mass commercialism and the anonymity of modern urban life.

Wuhan, the biggest city in central China, has been a great source of Chinese avant-garde art from where many excellent artists have emerged. The exhibition New Urbanism selects four young artists from Wuhan. They are Li Yu, Gong Jian, Gong Xinyu, and Liu Bo. Li Yu has been actively

Figure 5. Wang Nengtao, Subversion of the Earth, photograph. Courtesy of Zhang Zhaohui participating and promoting punk culture and youth culture in Wuhan. His work Catalogue of Worn-out Fashion photographs young people dressed up in second-hand clothes smuggled in from overseas, in the form of fashion photos and tags the clothes with very low prices. Such clothes have been very popular among young people. Li Yu’s work reveals the pro-Western orientation of Chinese youth and the difﬁculties of their own materialistic conditions. Gong Jian and Gong Xinyu collaborate in their work entitled The Whole Afternoon Has Been So Boring that expresses urban youth’s predicament of trying to have fun in circumstances devoid of passion and feelings. Liu Bo’s work substitutes Barbie for urban women and narrates their “stories of the heart” through the images and language of the plastic ﬁgurine. Li Yu expresses his worries about the current living standards of urban life and the loss of our vital instincts under commercialization.

Guangzhou is the most advanced city in China in terms of its urbanization and commercialization. Contemporary art has a close relationship to its urban development. In particular, the artistic practice and exploration of Big Elephant Tail Group has centered on the topic of urban life, which has made a great impression on local young artists. The feelings and attitudes of new generation artists in Guangzhou towards urbanization are more various, peaceful and tolerant than those of their seniors. Different historical experiences in the primary and advanced stages of urbanization have lead the two generations of avant-garde artists to pursue different social investigations.

 Yu Xudong’s installation Network Shoes provides an artistic sample to challenge the omnipresent narrations of the Internet, instead of being in a hurry to offer his own opinions on the global network. Shen Ruiyun overlaps various materials and charting techniques to expose the unfath- omable and irresistible temptations of contemporary urban life. Artist Jiang Heng comments upon the new urban aesthetics, which reduce life to simulated sensations. These aesthetics can be seen in shops that sell sexual products and on advertisements on television, suggesting the urgency of the new changes taking place within the urban scene. A homegrown artist from Guangzhou, Liang Jianhua’s Light of the City transforms the nostalgia and disillusionment of Guangzhou residents over the transformation of their cityscape into dreamlike and poetic musings. Zeng Yicheng’s

experimental photography in the style of fashion ads, expresses the concepts of life and the pursuit of beauty at the time of the mechanization and the machine with an intimate and inspiring artistic language targeted at a young and contemporary audience. It eliminates the simple, visual pleasures and ideals found in fashion ads and the bravado and cliché of avant-garde art, and delivers new images compatible with our contemporary times.

  The ongoing nature of China’s urbanization can be seen in many aspects of daily life. China’s urbanizing process also happens to be coinciding with the greater integration of the world’s cultures, which creates all kinds of possibilities for the development of new art, visual culture and a new visual landscape. Architects, urban planning designers, sociologists, anthropologists, artists, critics and curators all over the world are expressing their great interest in this mid-process urbanization.

The developing urbanization of China is turning out to be an all-round social revolution. It will just as readily ﬁnd itself in conﬂict with other cultural thoughts and forces at home and abroad, as it will assimilate with these. For avant-garde artists at the forefront of contemporary art, urbanization in China provides a fresh sociological and artistic platform for their creative activity.

 Figure 6. Wang Qiang, Children’s Factory, 2001, multi-media installation. Courtesy of Zhang Zhaohui

This platform is orientated towards the international community while developing synchronically alongside with it. Urbanization shall provide the opportunity for artists to rise to the forefront of international art while the basic tenets of Chinese culture, including visual culture, will change from a traditional form into a contemporary manifestation with international features. In the long run, China will endure the turbulent and unprecedented upheavals of urbanization and internationalization. Art inspired by these times is consequently sure to be especially engaging and dazzling.

Notes 1 News Weekly 6 (2000) is devoted to the problems of urbanization. 2 A new slang term in China referring to ofﬁcials who pat their heads, chests and hips. Patting their heads means that they are making a decision which is rash and thoughtless and against expert opinion. Patting their chests means that they are conﬁdent of the correctness of their decision. Patting their hips means that they expect to to lose their position in the event of a project failure. 3 Fei Xiaotong, Xiangtu Zhongguo (From the soil), (Hong Kong, Beijing: Shenghuo Dushu Xinzhi, 1985), 7. 4 According to reports in the media, Chinese people exhibit seven vices when they travel abroad. These include taking off their shoes anywhere, spitting everywhere, making a lot of noise, pushing instead of queuing up, wearing their pyjamas on the street, being hot-tempered and having bad manners. 5 Liao Wen and Li Xianting, Oah La La Kitsche (Hunan: Hunan Art Publishing House, 1999). 6 Meng Jing, “Cultural Spaces: Too Many Projects Eager to Start,” News Weekly (27 May 2002): 29. 7 Miao Fanzu, New Humankind, (Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House, 2001), 81.

  :    

    

Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie at the Zunyi International Symposium. Photo: Zheng Shengtian

  As curators, our attention to contemporary art in China focuses on the relationship between artistic creation and interactive reception by its viewers inherent in the current exhibition culture. A major characteristic of art in contemporary China is that art has left the audience and has moved from the broad masses of the people toward the elite, from private studios toward hierarchical structures (things like biennials, blockbuster exhibitions, and other authoritative spaces), and from China toward the world beyond China. These three movements have led the avant-garde directly into the trap of the global market and the maze of mutually determinant relationships that it implies. The emergence of an international platform for artists could be called the deﬁning characteristic of Chinese art in the 1990s. Other sociological questions about art in China – questions like the relationship between the masses and the elite, between tradition and reality – fell to the back, as the “differentiation of China and the West” came to occupy a premier position, becoming a guiding parameter for both theoretical debate and artistic creation, systematically producing our feelings of awkwardness and grievance. This is a classic example of artistic consumption coming to drive artistic production. It is unreasonable to let artistic production sink to ﬁt the limited understanding of foreign art consumers, or to wait for the Chinese economy to develop such that domestic art consumers can support contemporary art. The excuses of the market hide the true problems of art itself – the rift between the masses and the elite, and the disconnect between tradition and reality. We must begin from our own understanding of ourselves as practitioners of Chinese art, raising anew these issues that have been set aside in recent years. In this process, one important task is to revisit our memory of the Chinese revolution and assess the impact of socialism on contemporary visual culture.

 The key influence on Chinese art has been the system which drives its circulation as currency, i.e. the dislocation produced by the current system in which exhibition, collection, and exchange proceed in a unidirectional manner “from in towards out,”with “out” referring mainly to the West. We believe that Chinese contemporary art is beset by the illusory conviction that it is avant-garde. Revolution remains in certain slogans and individual feelings, but in China, professional revolu- tionaries have often been the least revolutionary of all. Contemporary Chinese art emphasizes signification over experience, preaching away in the empty language of inflated conceptualism.

In recent years, we first imported expressionism and made it cooperate with the formalist elements of traditional art, producing many feeble images. Next came Political Pop, which announces itself as avant-garde while speaking the same didactic language of the cartoon comic books, New Year’s prints, and illustrations that were the artistic mainstream before 1989. In this way, art was made once again into a footnote of ideology. In the same way, conceptual art has devolved into a fixed canon of visual and linguistic devices. Are these manifestations of collective consciousness or collective unconsciousness indeed a singularly Chinese phenomenon? Or is this simply the state of affairs in each periphery of our post-colonial world? How do these peripheries respond to the question of tradition vs. modernity? How are their responses similar to and different from ours? We hope to re-interpret these questions using the framework of “from outside toward inside.” By this we mean not simply seeing ourselves as the center, thus falling into the struggle between “essence” and “utility,”but to make a broad-ranging comparison between ourselves and other historical and geographical locales in the process of forced contact with the West in order to reconsider the process of dissociation of signification. In other words, we wish to re-examine the fixed interpretation of the “local context” which has come to seem conventional. This method of turning the telescope around, looking “from the outside in” may be beneficial to art both in China and abroad.

By and large, Chinese contemporary art has reﬂected the historical and social reforms of the past twenty years. Chinese ink and wash art lingers in a strangely un-moored traditional circle. From the perspective of the audience, it has reoccupied its position as art for the elite and has thus become their metaphysical candy. At the same time, owing to the onset of outside ideology and market demand, Chinese ink and wash has weakened into the darling of an elite market, suggesting the generally awkward situation of traditional culture in contemporary China. So-called avant-garde art diverges from tradition, but in doing so has been incorporated into the ideological realm of conceptual art. avant-garde art has easily attained elite status, consolidating its authority based on its success in the overseas market even as its interpretation of Chinese history and society becomes shallower and shallower.

The dialectic between “essence” and “utility” (tiyong zhibian) was a passive strategic response to the compulsion and stimulus of the outside world on China in the early twentieth century. It never necessitated a self-conscious re-formulation of Chinese culture. Its conclusions about the relationship between cultural tradition and modern circumstance retain an illusion that we are searching for something essentialist. Contemporary Chinese art, setting off from this dichotomy, has formulated strategic responses to the questions of how to utilize traditional cultural resources, resources stemming from socialist revolutionary culture, and resources from abroad. It thus avoids ontological and methodological innovation, particularly emphasizing “results.”In many ways we misread Chineseness similarly to our Western counterparts. Because we accept the burden of self-stereotyping, the utilitarian praxis that underlies such a self-deprecating activity must maintain an illusion of success and privilege. This traps Chinese artists in a vicious circle: because

 they are excessively attentive to the reception of their works internationally, artists on the one hand leave behind the local in the name of personal success, but on the other hand begin to complain of frustrations in dealing with the international realm stemming from their cultural background as members of the periphery. We must begin by clearing the slate; only then will we be able to develop a more constructive approach. What remains important is that we can ﬁnd a contribution to the world in the raw material of our historical and lived experience. The answer is not to care uselessly about the volume of our voice, but rather to use that voice to say something substantive, and ﬁnd new possibilities in this process of self-interpretation and self-restructuring.

The question of how we face up to the “West” is in reality the question of how we face up to ourselves, and only a critical and creative self-understanding will provide the foundation for an answer. This old topic still looms large over contemporary art in China. It connects with other important questions facing art in China, questions about the possibility of art’s survival, how art ought to relate to Chinese society, and how art might free itself from the problems of its ideological landscape, economic set-up, and educational system. The “from inside toward outside” exhibition patterns that have characterized Chinese art for the last decade have many proverbial positive effects, but their limitations are also becoming more and more apparent. Among them is the way in which the art scene’s superficial response to ideology has failed to seriously engage the issues at stake – a phenomenon apparent in increasingly superficial social criticism based on the failure of the Chinese revolution or the loss of faith in utopia and idealism. A deeper understanding of local context is necessary – especially its centuries-long encounter with modernity, the gain and loss of its quest for utopia, the completeness or incompleteness of its revolution, and the mutually constitutive relationship between nationalism and internationalism, and the contributions, errors, misreadings, rebirths, restructurings, and localizations of Western ideologies in the process of entering China have already deeply entered China’s social and individual consciousness. The question of how to re-visit these issues through visual culture is a new departure for the future. As such, it is not only the work of China but is China’s responsibility to humanity. We should set to relocate ourselves in the local and international consciousness. This means nothing less than attempting to reconstruct society. Visual art bears a significant responsibility to reconstruct the consciousness that lies below this society.

One hundred years of revolutionary struggle and the lived experience of socialism not only inﬂu- ence every facet of contemporary society in China, but have also left a deep residue in the memory of the people. This permeates every corner of Chinese contemporary visual culture, becoming a resource – sometimes apparent, sometimes not – for Chinese contemporary art. Revisiting revolutionary memory in this way, we hope neither to parody nor to subvert the conservative or authoritative elements of socialist life. Nor do we seek to turn history into mythology by simplify- ing the past, maintaining the integrity of the grand narrative via creative nostalgia. Our working method is to subtly explore this historical period's traces in contemporary visual culture, re-organizing the chaos and rescuing it from overused, canonized discourse. We must search for the points where historical memories converge with contemporary ideological trends, re-sensitizing ourselves to the subject and bringing the past into the present so that we can examine the traces’ effects, both negative and positive. This requires the integration of ﬁeldwork and linguistic analysis, of the archaeology and architecture of knowledge. The theatricality of the stories of the Long March, the richness of the locales into which it extended, the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of the questions it raises – all of these provide us with a roadmap for reconstruction.

    The Long March is a journey of visual creation and display. It follows the route of the historical Long March. Its curatorial aim is to allow people on this route to see contemporary art from China and abroad, and to create art in their presence. The Chinese people are currently on another Long March, the journey toward a socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics. Long Marcher Deng Local performers of the dance “Ten Farewells to the Red Army” viewing the Long Xiaoping said, “only development is hard March flag in Lijiang,Yunnan province. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation reason.”The results of this reform era are evident, as the annual growth rate for the Chinese economy has hovered around nine percent for more than a decade. While rapid urbanization and commercialization have happened along the route of the Long March, such changes have also caused cultural losses and ideological voids. At the same time, a new cultural paradigm has emerged in China, whereby people regard wealth as glorious. What do people today think about communist idealism, the seeds of which were sown along the route of the Long March? What do they think about revolutionary practice, in which retreat can become victory and achievement, and which substitutes “Chinese reality” and “the local context” for foreign “truth?” What do they think about the theoretical and practical implications of the transfer of power to Mao Zedong, an event that happened during the Long March? From the viewpoint of visual culture, Long March Culture is missionary and metaphorical. It turns the kind of culture that derives from the people to serve the people into a valid mainstream language. It surpasses concrete authority, which is rooted in collective memory.

The biggest problem facing contemporary Chinese art is that its audience is limited to overseas organizations and markets, and to a handful of major cities like Beijing and Shanghai. The vast majority of Chinese have no opportunity for direct contact with contemporary art. Furthermore, precisely because The Long March travels cities other than Beijing and Shanghai – places labelled as relatively “backward” – the people with whom it comes into contact have virtually no experience with Western art. Therefore, there is special significance in sharing Chinese and foreign contemporary art with them. This activity looks to review the cause and effect relationships between revolutionary history and cultural ideology in the People’s Republic of China, especially Mao Zedong’s ideology of “art for the people,”in conjunction with ideologies that were prevalent in the West during the Mao era, including some that were inspired by Maoism. It looks to analyze how “Western” thought and art have influenced the creation and reception of art in China in the past and present. It will re-examine how our reading and rewriting of things Western and the Western reading and rewriting of things Chinese has affected the self and mutual understanding and the further creation of the West and China. Just like other simplifications and misreadings of Chinese culture, Western Maoists also set out to reinterpret Chinese history based on their own power. We must raise a new inquiry, seeing misreading as misreading, and acknowledging the creative power implied therein. Thus, this exhibition also includes artworks from other countries, just as the historical Long March involved contemplation of foreign thought and the integration of “sinicized” readings of such thought into Mao’s guerrilla warfare tactics. The Long March will examine the influence upon history of these shifts in thought, along with that of the process of national migration, capital flows, cultural changes, and the engagements, intersections, exchanges, and connections between human and supernatural, individual and collective, and reality and

 utopia. This will not only be a process of yearning and following the original Long March – a historic journey that deeply inﬂuenced human society – but one of searching and building the historic journey into something new.

The working model created by the historic Long March provides us with not only a subject to discuss, but also a substantive praxis for a critique of contemporary mainstream exhibition culture. Chinese contemporary art is in the earliest stages of constructing a formal system, but has begun the game of comparison and competition with the West, buying wholeheartedly into a system based on major museums and biennial exhibitions. We must think more carefully about the structural relationship of this system to the global artistic hierarchy, and to contemporary tourist culture. Nowadays, a city looking to become a global metropolis has a de facto obligation to develop an apparatus for contemporary art. We need to remain sensitive and respectful of the situation of alternative art in peripheral locales. Otherwise, a Chinese art system that takes “oppose discursive hegemony” as its slogan will in reality be nothing more than a tool of neo- colonialism. The Long March looks to integrate the production, consumption, and interpretation of art in a single scene, three issues which have traditionally remained separate. It looks to overcome the traditional distance between viewer and creator, to close the gap between “host” and “guest,”and to seek a new understanding of space. In this way, The Long March will merge exhibition with creation, and allow consumption and production to interact.

The Long March is an exhibition about exhibitions. It is not an exhibition in the traditional sense, with artworks hanging in a ﬁxed space, both literally and metaphorically. It expands the notion of human exhibition culture through the juxtaposition of temporality and permanence. The twenty sites along the route of the Long March are excursions into the historical, political, geographic, and artistic context of each place. Each activity is divided into three parts: creation, display, and debate. The display portion involves original works, slides, video, ﬁlm, and books; the debate portion involves the artists and curators, as well as the workers, peasants, soldiers, students, and merchants encountered along the road. Some of the conceptual and performance works created by artists may touch on both the “exhibition” and “debate” portions of a given activity, making the activity even more interactive. By exhibiting Chinese and foreign contemporary art to the masses, by re-reading Chinese and Western documents with them, by revisiting history and memory, by collecting their memories and interpretations of the old and the new Long March, by recording the details of these varied interactions, by restructuring these visual and textual materials and incorporating them into the next stage of the project: in this way the entire exhibition will continue to develop while on the road, becoming a way for every participant to continually adjust their thinking.

The whole Long March project will become a multi-media, multi-layered study in the anthropology and sociology of art, a hypertext connecting urban with rural and reality with imagination. Through a dialogue with international contemporary artistic thinking, it will also serve as a rewriting of post-Cold War art history.

After ﬁnishing the on-the-road portion of Long March: A Walking Visual Display, a touring exhibition will be organized as the second half of the project. The exhibition will travel through China and abroad. A massive catalogue documenting the exhibition will be published, along with a twenty-part documentary ﬁlm and some multi-media electronic materials.

1998-2002

     

 

Long Marcher Lu Jie and Lisa Horikawa on the road. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation

I came to The Long March from the outside. At the urging of my friend Feng Boyi, I made the journey to Zunyi to take part in the international curatorial symposium that was the eighth stage of the project. Over dinner on the ﬁnal night of that symposium, a conversation with chief curator Lu Jie drew me to continue on the road for another week, to make the trip to Maotai and into Sichuan, and to help as an editor and translator from the Beijing ofﬁce once I returned to the city I have called home for the last year.

What follows is the heart of a second conversation that took place between Lu Jie and me late on my last night with the marching ranks, in a hotel room seventeen stories above the Chongqing train station from which they would depart for western Sichuan in a few hours. Having spent nine days traveling through Guizhou province with this tightly knit group, this was my chance to gain some theoretical and historical clarity on the curatorial praxis in which I had been a participant-observer.

Let’s start with some basic history. Where did the idea for the Long March project come from, and how did it develop in the four years that you have been working on it?

The Long March project was initiated during my time in London almost four years ago. I was one of the ﬁrst two Mainland Chinese to study curating abroad. I was at Goldsmiths College, University of London, which is a very open place, very provocative and controversial. As you know many of the YBAs are from Goldsmiths. And that was the ﬁrst time for me to seriously re-examine my memory, my individual experience in China, in connection with collective memory and consciousness of the quest for revolution outside of China. One day when I was in the dining hall, I was approached by an English student asking me to join the communist party. This to me

 sounded bizarre; I was very arrogant. I said to him, you cannot possibly want to talk to me about communism, I am from communist China. But as the dialogue went further and deeper, I realized that there are so many interpretations of communism, the idealism, the quest for an ideal world. And I still think that it’s right in the center of discourse in Western Europe. So I suddenly realized how ignorant I was. I discovered that many British intellectuals are quite pro-left in their thinking, something of which my fellow artists in China and I were not aware before.

The key word we use at Goldsmiths is “context.”Apart from the theoretical and practical training of “creative curating,”I was able to free myself from my original fixed answers for many things. For instance I was able to re-examine Chinese communism and revolutionary memory in an international context, and when I was finalizing my graduation projects I was thinking about what I wanted to do every second. Finally, one night around midnight an idea came to me. The next day I was due to present my proposal, and I started to reorganize myself, who I am, what I went through, what I’m doing, why I’m here, all these questions. I started to think about what people have done, how they work, what my fellow Chinese curators had done. I started to examine those things, and then to think about what hasn’t been done, how I am different from these curators no matter abroad or in China. I began to feel anew my criticism of much of the curatorial work that had been done to that point. I was frustrated that very often when you are displaying Chinese visual culture or exhibiting Chinese contemporary art, especially abroad, it’s a game of constructing Chineseness in a political way, but political in a superficial way. The most popular thing is Political Pop, which is playing with politics, but not seriously engaging it.

In contrast to “context,”“strategy” has been a key word for the Chinese art world in the last ﬁfteen years or so. I got to thinking that these kinds of strategies bring you something very effective for the short-term, something along the lines of Western vogues for Russian art in the 1980s, or South American art, or whatever the third-world art of the moment happens to be. But when you are attracting people’s attention, when you are creating this political exoticism, what comes next? I was not trying to say that my colleagues have done something wrong, but I was thinking that for art in China right now, maybe we should go further, take a greater departure which will not have a forced or faux arrival, and perhaps ultimately come up with something that is not just valuable in the short-term. I realized that through my time at Goldsmiths, I had done a lot of research on the politics of museum space and representational culture. I also began to think about the many inquiries I have about contemporary Chinese art. Forced avant-gardism is not necessarily faux avant-gardism, and it’s very easy to simply criticize the elitist or careerist tendency of contemporary Chinese art, or criticize the power of the market. I rather think all the problems have more to do with a poor theoretical base and a wrong curatorial impulse. In one sentence, the theory and art practice are separated. You see lots of Western jargon introduced and overused, but it has little to do with practice. It’s as if the theoretical tools of psychology, cultural studies, gender, postcolonial studies, and other important investigative frameworks have been introduced, but have been rehashed in certain formulae rather than made to truly engage with the work that is being produced. I also believe it is very important to introduce the study of visual culture, a profound way of looking at art by contextualizing and linking with different disciplines.

I began to think of travel, to think about my journey through different cultures, from Fujian to Hangzhou, to Shanghai, London, Hong Kong, New York, back to London and back to New York again; from traditional painter to editor to translator to art dealer, and now to curator. So thinking of myself crossing all different borders and disciplinary lines, I started to feel that art, or culture, or life, everything is all in one, it’s not separated. It’s more or less a journey. You bring things to

 people during the journey and you bring things back, and there are always illusions and imaginations and dislocations involved. I’ve come along a journey, and I feel like no matter whether in the United States or China, criticism is too often about binary things. For example, we could be against modernism, or we could be against the capitalist system, or the capitalist system itself could face off against communism. But what I ﬁnd particularly interesting are all the non-binary meanings that have been produced in this transformation of the Chinese system – the translations, the different ideologies, locations, and geographies.

This all sounded to me like a Long March, and soon thereafter, the idea of the Long March as we now know it occurred to me. I had this moment of realization where I decided that the Long March must be the ideal way to examine all of these themes. Because in every Chinese mind, the Long March is the narration, the story of beginning from conﬂict, the rupture with tradition, the problem with modernity, and then the search for utopia. In it we encounter the problem of how important theory can be in a local context, and the relationship between theory and practice. The historical Long March is just that. Imagine this army on the run, every day making very practical decisions about where to move next. But at the same time, they were constantly thinking the unthinkable, trying to imagine a new society that must have seemed decades away from the cold grasslands of Gansu or the treacherous rapids of whichever river they were trying to cross. I was struck by this uncanny, romantic clash between idealism and pragmatism, and in it I found what we now call “The Long March Methodology” in our curatorial ranks.

Through the metaphor of the Long March, we found a structure to talk about the issues that now lie behind each of the twenty sites on our journey. Issues like the idea of the genius, the role avant-garde art, the relationship between self and other, the relationship between the Han Chinese majority and minority ethnic groups. Issues like Christianity in China, sharing and distributing resources, and the possibility of a new democratic society. The story of the Long March is precisely the story of these issues. I suddenly realized that the problems remain, the questions haven’t been answered, although China has been dealing with them all the time – two hundred years ago, one hundred years ago, during the Long March, after the Long March, and now.

I’m always hesitant to speak teleologically about art, but there is a certain political thrust to what you are doing – political in the sense of having a “message,”and bringing that message to others whether they be fellow art-insiders of the people along the Long March route. I’m curious whether you think there is a “goal” to the Long March, and what that goal might be.

The goal is all of this! It’s all right here. Because I’ve given it such structure, I feel like it’s already there. It’s very organic, a very open-ended structure through which one can examine a lot of issues. And it is not like another project where you might only be able to examine one or a few issues; in combining the historical route of the Long March and the conceptual framework of a “walking visual display” with art exhibitions, workshops, cross-platform dialogues, publications, and ways of distribution and communication, we are able to deal with many issues simultaneously and in a parallel manner. Both art objects and non-art objects, art issues and non-art issues can be juxtaposed in this structure under the Long March metaphor: that the quest for utopia, the desire for revolution, is a reciprocal thing, an ongoing journey of translation and transformation, local and international, a mix of inside-out and outside-in. Of course my point of departure is China, and the inquiry of “what is China?” is always in my mind.

 Local Tibetan people viewing Wim Delvoye’s work. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation

That’s why I keep going, and people are always saying I’m being too ambitious. For example, in the Jackson Pollock project in Maotai, I was basically questioning the cultural system behind Pollock’s works, the cultural buildup that assigns capitalized value. Another very important thing I want to do is to think hard about what is art. “What is art?” is a question that’s been answered a million times, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. And it’s still quite trendy and popular now, to try to go back and revisit those issues. But for me, spending so much time and effort looking for the so-called non-artists, or amateur artists, or folk artists, to me it’s meaningful because we’re so used to the contemporary art system that we hardly ever even question it.

Johnson Chang talked at the Zunyi International Symposium about how maybe at the end we do not need a curator, we do not need an exhibition. And this is the original Chinese idea, that life and art always merge, are always one. It never becomes a profession, because if art becomes a profession in China it’s very low class. In Chinese history, the court artists are always the most criticized. These kinds of notions of art and craft are very different from the Western point of view. In China, craft refers to that which is useful, because it’s separated from your life. The provocative, independent artists are always the ones embraced by the society, so I already feel that lots of things had to be done in order to prepare a much broader and deeper foundation base for Chinese art to exploit its own resources, and in the meantime for the outside world to really understand Chinese art in a better way. So that’s my initiative, and that’s what most participants in the Zunyi Symposium have been saying about a new departure, a new foundation base.

In Zunyi we talked a lot about curating in a so-called “Chinese context.”In talking about this context, are we simply creating a category in which to place the issues which arise when talking about art in China, or are we presenting a new way of thinking about art and society that might run counter to what we ﬁnd in the West?

It’s not purely to counter what’s in the West. It’s not that we’re sure we can deliver something here, but at least we can deliver and share certain experiences, which we believe are interesting. The international curatorial symposium in Zunyi was a good opportunity for people to understand that the kind of curatorial environment you ﬁnd in London or New York is quite different from

 Artist Wang Chuyu carrying out his performance work Celebrate. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation

China. That was what I meant when I made a joke during the conference that I was not a good artist so I became an editor, not a good editor so I became a dealer, not a good dealer so I became a curator. In China at the moment, the curator has to create their own way to make things possible, in the meantime conscious of their claim to independent or avant-garde art. Issues arise of the curator’s original initiative and power. So, for example, the translation of certain terms and methods from West to China are not necessary, because they are not necessarily grounded in the Chinese context.

Of course I agree very strongly that context is a very complex issue. What is “Chineseness,”after all? It’s a very difﬁcult question. But to me, at least to have an inquiry is quite important right now. And we’re talking about contribution, talking about the goal: it’s not only that we are examining who we are and what we want to do right now for our own purposes. It’s also that by examining who we are we offer a channel, a forum for others who are very interested in Chinese art right now. If we can open things up for them to get rid of the mentality that “this year China, next year Vietnam, next year Cuba,”– each a novelty to be consumed by the international power structure – we have done good. If there’s a way to make people think that, “wait a minute, maybe this Chinese thing is really something; maybe the Chinese visual culture is in the process of producing something that might be a very interesting reference point,”then we have succeeded. Sometimes I feel that contemporary art is exhausted, but that it may not be exhausted in China.

One event that seems different from many of the others along the march was the collaboration with Judy Chicago at Lugu Lake. What was the rationale behind bringing a master artist at a late stage in her career to a place with which she had no previous contact to work with some of the youngest female artists in China? Was anything gained from this collaboration?

Many people ask, if you schedule one event, one site, where you want to do feminist art, why didn’t you pick up someone else who is fashionable right now? Well, you know feminist movements have been a serious part of modernization and revolution in China; it is not just a fashionable thing that just appeared in the art world recently. But to me feminist art has become

 a pure gesture in China, it’s consumerized and fashionable. It’s not serious or profound anymore, it has no energy to engage society or try to ﬁnd a new departure for the visual arts, to go to a different level in a different time. Right now it has become only a canon of works about the viewer and the viewed one, the gazer and the gazed, it’s all about sex, little about gender. You go to galleries and you see everybody posing herself.

We chose to work with Judy Chicago precisely because she is not “fashionable,”precisely because she is not the hottest new thing on the scene right now. We are interested in feminist art in China, which has a very different genealogy and timetable from feminist art in the West, and particularly in America. Even though Chinese “feminist art” started to develop more recently than in the West, it grows out of a different context. In fact, part of the communist revolution was about feminism, and through the People’s Republic there have been certain ofﬁcial manifestations of feminism quite different from what you see in the West, and which came before the women’s movements of the 1970s. So we are interested in seeing what Chinese artists from different generations might have to say to a master of early feminist art in from the West. This is not about being fashionable, it’s about creating a dialogue and a discourse.

And the responses were not so good, which is very interesting. We can even say we failed. The failure is the beauty of Long March too. It failed in that most of the artists submitted proposals designed to ﬁt into the canon of “feminist art,”and in that many of them had much more knowledge of Euro-American discourse and artworks then of their own. Judy and other participating international artists were giving back materials and knowledge of the Chinese feminist movement and of course, they have their own interpretation and dislocation. It was so interesting to see that dialogue was actually not possible, at least not at this stage. Still, I believe both parties gained a lot from this “failed dialogue.”

Like you said earlier, and like so many people touched on at the Zunyi meeting,“strategy” is a word that comes up over and over again when we talk about contemporary art and public space in China. What is the Long March’s strategic departing point? What does it do differently from an alternative exhibition in Beijing or Shanghai?

The strategy is journey and marching. In any journey or march you cannot plan, so you have to identify yourself, ask if are you willing to do it, and then go forward. With that in my mind always, our original metaphor is the motto of the original Long March that “the most important element for the Long March is campaign.”We sometimes use the word propaganda, which is kind of cool and funky, but the idea of campaign works in many ways. It’s about a mutual understanding among colleagues, the idea of unifying and sharing resources, the drive to cooperate and unify in the name of a larger goal. And for that part I spent three or four years trying to convince people to work together to do this. Ultimately it is about your own relationship with yourself and with the people, the space and the time.

Some artists when they heard this thought, “What a load of crap, the Long March, I’m hearing calls from the Venice Biennale!” But after many years, big-time artists started coming to us. For example the sculptor Jiang Jie, whose work sits beside me right now: we never thought that she would participate, and so we never invited her, because we made the wrong judgment that her work doesn’t ﬁt into this project – I call it “formalist sculptural installation.”Then one day we got a phone call when we were out on the road, it was her saying she’d like to participate, and that she had a work to donate to us. This is a campaign among artists, our own colleagues and so-called

 comrades. But the second layer is when the artists and curators organize, when we have these kinds of interactions and dialogues. Our goal is to generate a discourse, a methodology of speaking plain language for the public to understand. You cannot say I agree or disagree, I’m interested or not. I just work with this context, to hear people’s desire, to work with it and to satisfy it.

It’s like in the stage of the project that happened on the train from Kunming to Zunyi. Our plan was to convert the dining car into an “art car.”The conductor said no. But to me, there is no “no,” we must do it. And at the end we did it. We just keep trying to convince them, but not force them, and we will always have the right way to introduce art to people. Keep in mind that all this effort is not to stage a show, so that you can have some proof, and then introduce the theory to others. It’s totally based on my own theory and understanding that I do not think country people understand art less than academy professors in Beijing. If you asked Professor Wang from the painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, “what is performance art?” or “what is experimental art?” or asked him to interpret a piece of Qiu Zhijie’s work, he would be as confused as a villager in Guangxi province. I don’t just assume that the public, the villagers or workers don’t know art. If those are the assumptions we must work within, well then let’s not do art.

One difference is that Marxism has a discourse of salvation to it, but I’m not sure you’d make such a bold claim for art.

You’re right, but then what is art?

Still though, when I ﬁrst read the Long March Foundation website, I was somewhat put off by the paramilitary talk of “marching art to China’s peripheral population.”At the same time, the Maoist dictum of “art for the people” is alive and well in the discursive community of art in China, leading to some very interesting work, including some on the Long March. How do you reconcile the idea of creating for “the people” and the temptation to force art on people to make ourselves feel better?

It’s always a double-layered thing. Bring art to people, not only to deliver something to them, but to be examined by them. In the meantime, examine yourself. At the same time, examine the people. The challenge is to go in all directions. I’m not promoting art for the people, or criticizing art not for the people; it’s all inquiries, a set of inquiries. I’m not saying that I want to make a thing to make people say “oh yeah, you’re good.”But I do not want to lose any opportunity for communication or dialogue. If it sounds narrow-minded, then that’s quite dangerous.

When we initiated this project, people were joking, “what, you want to parachute art into the villages, to make people understand that?” My answer is always, well how did Chairman Mao teach Marxism, which is totally an imported theory, to make a local landlord abandon his family’s thousand years’ property, and make thousands of people leave their lands to join the Long March, to die on the road? How would you be able to do that? It’s simple: to speak in their language and become real, and to convince people.

My last question is about the idea of revolution and where it ﬁts into your curatorial practice. Is it a concept that holds weight anymore? Is it something you still believe in after your personal experiences in China and abroad? Do we still need revolution, or talk of revolution?

 Inside contents of the Long Marcher Lisa Horikawa’s backpack. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation

To me that’s a very important question. People normally ask, “Isn’t it a ﬁxed answer that communism failed? Why do you want to do something with communism?” Some journalists call and say that even your own communist party has criticized Mao, so why do you want to do the Long March? And I can immediately say, well the Long March is not only about Chairman Mao. To me revolution is not only the communist movement. The desire for revolution is always there. And at any time, you can have a new interpretation of revolution. To me revolution is a must, it’s part of a human being, that we always want to maintain this search for an ideal society. We want something different, and it has to be idealistic and romantic. It won’t necessarily be realized, it might never be realized, but it’s an ongoing process. So I think it’s great to have a new interpretation of this. Revolution is to bring back the Long March to the people, not to a certain few representative leaders. Again it is a call for people to hold on to their idealism and romanticism.

Chongqing, August 18, 2002

 A LONG MARCH GLOSSARY

 : 1) A process of movement through space, time, or thought without a ﬁxed beginning or end, particularly one that involves excessive hardship or multiple transformations. 2) Short form of The Long March: A Walking Visual Display, a series of activities designed to interrogate Chinese visual culture and revolutionary memory, circa 2002. 3) An historic event in which Mao Zedong led a ﬂailing Red Army over six thousand miles from their base in Ruijin, Jiangxi province to Yan’an, Shaanxi province, simultaneously suffering tremendous casualties and developing the ideological and organizational structures that would come to serve as the basis of the People’s Republic of China.

 : 1) One who partakes of a Long March involving him/herself alone or in cooperation with others. 2) A member of the artistic, curatorial, or documentary teams of The Long March: A Walking Visual Display.

  : A curatorial and organizational praxis that: a) stresses adaptation to local and temporal circumstances. b) continues to seek the implementation of its aims particularly in the face of seemingly insurmountable setbacks. c) sees no boundary between work and leisure or theory and reality. d) seeks a dialogue with history through space, believing that space has memory.

 : A particularly tenacious adherent to the Long March Methodology, either in the course of The Long March: A Walking Visual Display or elsewhere.

  : Linguistically articulated dialogue, debate, or ideas arising during, as a result of, or in relation to The Long March: A Walking Visual Display. Examples include: the proceedings of The Long March curatorial symposium in Zunyi (August 8-10, 2002); an article published in a Chinese newspaper about a Long March event in Kunming; a lunchtime conversation among residents of Maotai about the Long March event in which they were participating; an idea that occurs to an artist, or viewer as a result of their participation in or knowledge of The Long March.

  : Material objects created during or incorporated into The Long March: A Walking Visual Display. (Key to this concept is the non-distinction between “artworks” created by “artists” selected for formal participation and objects that enter the collective consciousness of The Long March by happenstance.)

  : Objects, ideas, or images left along the route of The Long March: A Walking Visual Display. Examples include an installation work by Feng Qianyu left as a bridge across a river in Guangxi province, the countless Long March postcards, stickers and T-shirts distributed to people encountered on the march, and images left in the collective memories of communities in which Long March events occurred.

  : A happening along the route of The Long March: A Walking Visual Display, either premeditated or spontaneous. Completed temporally, the event continues indeﬁnitely to condition the memory as well as the progress of The Long March.

  : Different from a typical artistic installation in that its creator is a scholar, critic, or curator as opposed to an artist in the traditional sense, it seeks directly to address issues or themes that have arisen during The Long March in visual form. Analogous to a visual artist’s written statement, it seeks to give the power of visual language to thinkers generally conﬁned to written language.

      :     

 . 

Figure 1. Long March Site Six artists, (from left to right) 1st row: Song Yanping, Lei Yan; 2nd row: Su Yabi, Huang Yin, Wei Shuling, Sun Guojuan, Pang Xuan, Huang Ru, Zhang Lun, Fu Liya, Shen Yu, Su Ruya. Photo: James Tweedie

On a gray July 28, 2002, fourteen Chinese artists traveled on foot and in cars along a rain-washed road from the village of Luoshui to a newly constructed wooden guesthouse several kilometers down the western shore of Lugu Lake (fig. 1). Upon arriving, the artists gathered in the courtyard of the two-story inn, built along the lines of a traditional Mosuo dwelling, and examined the art proposals hung on the walls of the first floor. A camera crew set up their equipment beneath hand-held umbrellas and began filming the artists as they discussed the whereabouts of American artist Judy Chicago, with whom they were to meet that morning. Chicago had been invited by the organizers of The Long March: A Walking Visual Display to this remote corner of Yunnan province to serve as guest curator for site six of their traveling show.1 She had chosen the theme – “If Women Ruled the World” – for the planned feminist art activity to be staged at Lugu Lake, a location of renown among anthropologists and tourists alike for the matrilineal culture of the Mosuo, a Chinese minority group. When it was announced that Chicago lay sick in bed on the second floor and would not be able to come down for the meeting, the artists realized they would have to present the manifesto they had penned and signed hours earlier to an emissary for the famous feminist.

Judy Chicago, originally Judy Cohen, changed her surname to the city of her birth in 1970 as a protest against patriarchal naming traditions. The humorous effects of this nom de plume emerge in questions such as that asked by the Luoshui village chief when told of Chicago’s arrival: “Isn’t that an American city?” The reputation of the sixty-three-year-old artist as an originator of ﬁrst wave feminist art in the United States rests most solidly on her piece The Dinner Party (1975-79). Both attacked and celebrated, this large-scale installation has, in the words of Deborah Johnson, “long been thought of as the feminist art manifesto, par excellence.”2 Working in collaboration with historians and other artists, Chicago created a table in the shape of an equilateral triangle with place settings for thirty-nine women of mythical or historical signiﬁcance. The opening in

 the table’s center reveals a white tile ﬂoor painted with the names of 999 additional oft-forgotten women. The identity of each woman at the table is crafted through intricately stitched table runners and porcelain plates painted with vulva-like imagery.3

Several months before the tense moment outside Chicago’s guesthouse, a call for female artists to send proposals for the Lugu Lake event appeared on the tom.com website, a major avenue for arts information exchange in China.4 In a statement by Judy Chicago, translated into Chinese, she compelled artists to consider Mosuo society as a feminist inspiration, asking: “Just like in the Lugu Lake area, ‘if women ruled the world,’ what would the world be like?” This original announcement suggested that Chicago, twelve invited artists, and twelve local Mosuo women would convene at Lugu Lake to explore the history, imaginary, myth, and reality of matriarchal society through an art exhibition. Female artists from around China, to whom Chicago is generally well known, began to send in their proposals.

Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie, the chief and assistant curators of The Long March, conceived of the Lugu Lake exhibit as one of twenty stops on their ambitious ﬁve-month traveling art show that follows the route of the original Long March. In 1934, the Communist Red Army, under attack by the Kuomintang in the southeast, began a six thousand mile trek to the northwest. They abandoned prior attempts to revolutionize the urban proletariat and shifted their propaganda efforts toward a rural population, lecturing to peasants and garnering support for their guerrilla tactics as they marched through the interior to an eventual base in Yan’an. This grueling year-long ordeal now serves as a foundational story about the consolidation of the Chinese Communist Party and its developing maxim of “to serve the people” through teaching and learning from them. In his 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art,”Mao Zedong cemented this mode of political consciousness raising to the practice of art. With Yan’an as the ﬁnal site of their “walking visual display,”Lu and Qiu return to this historical crux of the matter of art.

In his retrospective and highly interpretative re-staging of the march (which this time involves transport by plane, train, and bus and a media entourage of camera people), Lu Jie, a Chinese curator with graduate training in the West, hopes to bring contemporary art to the people. His stated aim, as director of the New York-based Long March Foundation, is twofold: to introduce international contemporary art to China’s “peripheral population” and to draw international attention to Chinese contemporary art. The ﬁrst stop of Lu’s march included a showing of Godard’s La Chinoise at the former Red Army headquarters in Jiangxi where the Long March began in 1934, an event emblematic of his overall effort to create artistic cross-cultural dialogue. He plans to create a museum exhibit for the West with highlights from this tour through China’s hinterland.

Although none of the Red Army troops actually reached Lugu Lake, Lu Jie and his associate Qiu deemed it close enough to their route and attractive enough, with its well-documented matrilineal Mosuo culture, to serve as the perfect locale for a feminist theme. Over a year in advance, Lu convinced Chicago to join his project. From there on out, struggles ensued in almost every possible way.

Chicago’s on-line proposal piqued the interest of many Chinese artists, but disputes arose around how to interpret the project’s direction. The questions posed by artists presage the inevitable denouement of multi-layered conﬂict. Were they to consider the largely forgotten history of the some two thousand women who participated in the original Long March; the relationship

 Figure 2. Lei Yan, If the Long March Were a Feminist Movement, 2002, computer-altered black-and-white photograph. Courtesy of the artist between the Han majority of China and the southwestern ethnic minority group of the Mosuo; or the power dynamics of an international art world still largely driven by a moneyed West? Why were so few women invited to participate in the rest of Lu’s Long March, with Lugu Lake a seeming push to segregate them in a single location? And, why was such a large portion of the budget allocated to host Judy Chicago’s travels in China, when the same amount could support the cost of materials and travel for numerous Chinese women to participate in the exhibit?

When questioned about this last ﬁrst-over-third-world executive decision, Lu Jie responded that the presence of such a prominent ﬁgure would set the stage for greater debate. However, he tacked on the statement that he also wished to “re-educate Judy Chicago.”In this ambiguous addendum, Lu might have simply gotten carried away with his own tongue-in-cheek adoption of Communist political language. Or, he might have been registering the internal contradictions of his own role; he stood aware of the necessity for a big name and a big issue (enter Chicago and her controversial feminism) to garner international attention, yet this need on his part was exactly what he wants to overturn in the art world. Whatever the case, he didn’t foresee that the resulting debate would turn on him, and lead to an even more guerrilla exhibit than his own, an impromptu affair organized by Chinese women in reaction to their charged encounter with Chicago.5

Ill will began to surface when several Beijing-based artists withdrew from the project after being told that the organizers would not help pay their expenses to Lugu Lake, something they asserted had been verbally promised to them. Meanwhile, Lu and Chicago revised their original curatorial plan. Overwhelmed by the number of proposals they received and not wanting to deny inclusion to any of the artists who had responded, they changed the format to a “proposals exhibit.”They informed the artists that all submitted proposals would be displayed at Lugu Lake. If they wanted to travel there to exhibit or create original works, they would have to foot the bill themselves. When artists tried to clarify how the event would be organized, they were told to just show up with art in hand. When others complained about the financial difficulty of making the journey, they were told that the comrades of the original Long March knew how to “eat bitterness.”In Beijing, in particular, word traveled hastily about how the project represented an attempt to exploit Chinese women artists for the international reputation of its male curators. Some promoted boycotting the event as the reproduction of a male power structure unsurprisingly similar to that of the original march. Observations ranged from: “Why should third world women eat bitterness, when first

 Figure 3. Zhang Lun, Happy Existence at Lugu Lake, 2002, color photographs of installation and performance. Photo No. 1 in 50-part series: Judy Chicago with Luoshui Village Chief. Photo credit and courtesy of the artist world women worry about whether they can drink coffee at Lugu Lake?” to “Women of the original Long March were used by men as cannon fodder; should we let this happen again?”

When Judy Chicago ﬁnally arrived in China, making a ﬁrst stop in Beijing to present a slide lecture, frustrated artists greeted her with a barrage of questions about the Lugu Lake exhibit. Similarly irritated by organizational miscommunication, Chicago tried to make the best of the situation by insisting upon the importance of a joint pilgrimage to a place she described as a kind of feminist utopia, a still existing matriarchal society. She declared that she hadn’t come from so far away to not cooperate with Chinese women, but if she had to, she would travel to Lugu Lake and exhibit her work in a solo stand for women’s rights to make art as part of the Long March.

“Beautiful Lugu Lake – Mysterious Land of Daughters” read the tickets we purchased at the entrance to the Lugu Lake Nature Preserve after two days of travel on narrow roads, curving back and forth on the switchbacks that traverse the spectacular mountainous terrain. Fourteen artists, largely from the southwestern provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan, joined by Shen Yu, director of the Chinese Women’s Art Research Center in Chongqing, eventually chose to make the trip to Lugu. As the bus dodged ominous rocks from previous landslides, heated discussion about the organization of the exhibition continued among participants. Upon arriving in Luoshui, a cluster of basic guesthouses and restaurants strung along the lakefront, the artists remained unsure of how the exhibit would unfold. They began scouting out locations for performance and installation pieces and making connections with locals whose cooperation they required.

That evening, the first meeting between Judy Chicago, who had traveled separately with Lu Jie and their camera crew, and all of the participating artists finally took place in a dimly lit Luoshui restaurant. Through a translator, Chicago asked the artists to sit in a circle. After they introduced themselves, she stood and presented her idea of how they might work together. She described the inn where she was staying, separate from the artists’ lodging and some distance from the village, as so beautiful that she and Lu Jie had decided to spend their own money to rent out the entire place. She suggested that they all hang or stage their works there, following the model of the Womanhouse installation she, Miriam Schapiro, and their students had created in a dilapidated Los Angeles mansion in 1972. She implied that the location away from the village provided safety to exhibit without the interference or censorship of local officials, a perhaps overly cautious

 Figure 4. Zhang Lun, Happy Existence at Lugu Lake, 2002, color photographs of installation and performance. Photo No. 13 in 50-part series. First photo taken after Judy Chicago’s departure from the piece. Photo credit and courtesy of the artist concern passed on to her by Lu Jie. When she asked the assembled artists for their opinion, the room fell silent, until a few reluctantly stated that they had already chosen spots for their pieces and would have to assess the layout of her guesthouse before they could consider it.

Chicago departed after they agreed to meet the next morning at the site of her proposed Chinese Womanhouse. Little did she know that all variety of meetings continued on, some into the early morning. One group of artists anxiously rushed to meet the new village chief, with whom they had arranged a tenuous appointment. These artists needed local participants for their performances and spent hours around a ﬁre explicating the relation of their pieces to local culture. The chief, in turn, explained for them in practiced detail the workings of Mosuo family structure, in which all children live in their mother’s household, even as adults. He expected that, as with most tourists who have fueled the local economy since the construction of a new road in 1997, these visitors viewed the Mosuo mode of sexual relations as an exotic curiosity. Men may make secret or open night visits to female partners, who choose whether or not to let in the prospective mate. Some couples form life-long relationships but continue to live separately by day, with all children raised by their mothers and maternal uncles.6 This earnest man in a cowboy hat was the one to describe for the outsiders this system of matrilineal descent; and it was he, not a woman, who could grant them the help they needed, but only after he returned from a trip to help dig a well and repair a road.

Around midnight, most of the artists crowded into a room at their guesthouse and debated the pros and cons of accepting Chicago’s Womanhouse proposal. Objections were raised about a framework associated with a different feminist time and place – the 1970s in the US, rather than one developed out of a Chinese historical context. Worries were also expressed over whether the ﬁnal project would be attributed to Chicago alone – the main problem many had with The Dinner Party7 – with the names of her Chinese collaborators silenced, and over who would control future rights to the work produced. While some advocated for splitting from the Long March organization to proceed on their own, they reached a compromise the next morning in the form of a manifesto. They asserted that the exhibit be called Dialogue with Judy Chicago at Lugu Lake rather than Womanhouse, that all artists be given equal recognition for their participation in the project, and that each artist be granted the moral and legal right over individual work.

 And so, on July 28, with cameras rolling, they sat on the porch of Chicago’s inn and presented the signed document to Lu Jie, who stood in for the ailing artist. Several artists also critiqued what they saw as the hierarchical presentation of the “proposals exhibit,”hung earlier that morning under the direction of Lu and Qiu. Chicago’s series of Tibetan prayer ﬂags (the Mosuo practice a variant of Tibetan Buddhism), each posing a rhetorical question about how the world might be different if women ruled, ﬂew from the entranceway of the guesthouse, whereas the proposals of the Chinese artists were displayed on the walls of the courtyard inside. Lu took their manifesto and complaints upstairs to Chicago’s room. She then emerged, supported down the stairs by Lu and her husband, to uncertain applause from her audience. She agreed to the three points outlined in the manifesto, but then tearfully told them how hurt she felt by their criticism, having traveled so far only to support them.

As the next two days unfolded, several artists displayed photographs, paintings, and installations at Chicago’s inn. Due to its physical remove from nearby village and tourist activity, the audience for these pieces consisted of artists, camera crew, and guesthouse employees. Others, particularly performance artists who required local participation or different environmental settings, staged their pieces on the lakeshore south of Luoshui or in the village itself. They attracted slightly more varied audiences.

Some artists chose to deal with the larger context of the Long March as occasion for historical reflection. Lei Yan, a recently retired soldier, displayed computer-altered black-and-white photographs. If They Were Women features the male leaders of the Long March adorned with 1930s female hairstyles. If the Long March Were a Feminist Movement places a cluster of female comrades in the same position on the road (fig. 2). However, if one reads the caption in small print, several of the women remain nameless; those recorded by official history are wives of famous leaders. In the mode of open-air propaganda film, Huang Ru arranged for old prints of classic Chinese movies, all featuring women in lead roles, to be projected in the courtyard of a Luoshui guesthouse.

Another group of artists addressed questions of gender relations as mapped onto human landscape, such as Huang Yin’s photographs of graffiti taken inside of men and women’s toilets. She first hung the photos on the wall outside the toilets at Chicago’s guesthouse. Later, she moved them to the mud wall near the village she had originally scouted out. Pang Xuan folded hundreds of red origami boats, suggestive in shape of vulva, and at dusk arranged them in a large-scale pattern that traced on the beach the Mosuo symbol of respect for female genitalia. Red candles, sputtering in the rain, were placed in the paper boats so that the symbol glowed briefly against the dark gravel. Li Shurui created an aesthetically breathtaking environmental installation that consisted of transparent mosquito tents in an arc echoing the shoreline of the lake. Water lapped through the private airy spaces, suggestive in her mind of the freedom Mosuo enjoy in their sexual relations. Su Ruya stood late in the afternoon at the edge of the lake in a wind-billowed nightgown and flung roses into the water as an offering to the Goddess Mountain, central in Lugu Lake iconography, as an eternal bride. In contrast with this romantic oblation, Song Yanping’s installation presented a stark arrangement of tripods made of tree branches stuck into the gravely beach. From the center of each tripod hung a frilly white cloth bag, symbolizing for her the promise of marriage, filled with either rice or sand. She lit a fire beneath each bag, and then poked a hole in the cloth, so that the bags’ contents steadily poured out and extinguished the flames beneath.

 Sun Guojuan’s Stuck to You explored the recent impact of tourism on the area. In a room with a museum-like display of photographs and explanatory passages on Mosuo culture, she scattered chunks of sticky candy and scraps of paper printed with Mosuo lineages across the floor. As people walked through the room, candy and paper stuck to the bottom of their shoes, the messy remains of local culture that tourists walk away with. Wu Weihe and Bai Chongmin, a feminist husband- and-wife team, staged outside their interpretation of Mosuo funerary tradition, in which the corpse is arranged in a fetal position and wrapped in white cloth before cremation. They sculpted from cotton matting a child-sized figure swaddled in strips of cloth, which a white robed Bai cradled in his arms as he was rowed along the shore in a Mosuo canoe. Against a backdrop of dramatic gray clouds and water, he disembarked and placed the figure on a raised dais of rocks. They endeavored to honor the Mosuo worldview, in which death represents a return to the mother’s womb, and the memory of Wu’s recently deceased mother.

Two final pieces required the participation of Judy Chicago, which she hesitantly offered. Fu Liya invited her to sit side-by-side with a female Mosuo elder on the side of the lake, while two local men dressed as day-glo mermaids went fishing for a glass bottle containing possible answers to the “if women ruled the world” proposition. After they towed the bottle to shore, the two women each pulled out a paper strip bearing equally cryptic responses. Zhang Lun, with the aid of the village chief, arranged for fifty Mosuo to take turns being photographed with the visiting feminist dignitary. At the Mosuo Cultural Museum, where local dancers performed for a tourist crowd, Zhang transformed the display of a traditional female ancestral hall into her studio by hanging a wallpaper-sized, pink-toned print of her oil-painted flower photographs on the back wall. She requested that Chicago sit in the place reserved for female elders and pour tea for each Mosuo person as they came, one by one, to sit with her by the fire and have their photo taken. After the twelfth cup of tea, Chicago exclaimed, “No one in America would believe I’d poured tea for anyone!” and left the scene. Following an angry outburst of her own, Zhang Lun continued taking photos as each Mosuo person poured a cup of tea for him or herself. Perhaps this moment of breakdown, marked by the sudden disappearance of Judy Chicago in Zhang’s series of images – themselves a record of the touristic projections of the artists on this local community, best demonstrates the dialogue that occurred at Lugu Lake. Just as no Chinese women have a place set for them at her famous The Dinner Party, her absence now also troubles this hearth and all essentialist visions, no matter how well meaning, of a single universalist feminism (fig. 3 and 4).

Notes 1 For more information, see the organizers’ ofﬁcial website: http://www.longmarchfoundation.org. 2 Deborah Johnson, “The Secularization of the Sacred: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party and Feminist Spirituality (1975-79)” in Women Making Art: Women in the Visual, Literary, and Performing Arts since 1960, eds. Deborah Johnson and Wendy Oliver (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 88. 3 The Brooklyn Museum of Art recently acquired the piece, thereby securing a permanent place for it in institutionalized art history. See Roberta Smith, “For a Paean to Heroic Women, a Place at History’s Table,” The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2002, E34. 4 The address for this Chinese language website is http://arts.cn.tom.com. Judy Chicago’s translated call for proposals was ﬁrst posted on April 28, 2002. 5 Upon returning from Lugu Lake, the Kunming-based artists Fu Liya and Sun Guojuan organized an exhibition at the Yunnan Art Academy, where they displayed written and photographic records of the journey to Lugu Lake, the events that transpired, and the artworks completed on site. The exhibit ran from August 4-8, 2002, and the organizers estimate that approximately four hundred people came to view it. The artists have collective plans to edit both a book and a video documentary about their Lugu Lake experience. 6 For one ethnographic account of this kinship system, see Cai Hua, A Society without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China, trans. Asti Hustvedt (New York: Zone Books, 2001). 7 In response to a similar accusation in the US, Chicago has responded as follows: “I now recognize that those who issued this accusation were ignorant about the real nature and the very egalitarian quality of the [Dinner Party] studio. True, The Dinner Party was my piece, but that did not mean that those who helped me complete it were exploited. On the contrary, they were enriched by the experience, not only by the art making but by my treating them and their ideas with a level of respect that most of them had never enjoyed before.” Judy Chicago, Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist (New York: Viking Press, 1996), 68.

   ‒     

  

Artist Wang Chuyu’s performance at the end of the Zunyi International Symposium. (Vote counting). Photo: Zheng Shengtian

The goal of the international symposium was to exchange information and resources between participants from near and far to make an accounting of and lend support to innovative curatorial practices in Mainland China. The symposium began with a slide presentation on the ongoing Long March project curated by Lu Jie, the Chairman of the Long March Foundation from New York, and Qiu Zhijie, an artist from Beijing. Retracing the once perilous eight thousand kilometer route taken by Chinese Communist Party soldiers in 1934, the curators have staged art presentations and events in local communities along the way. The project’s purpose is to bring art to people living in the countryside, far from China’s artistic centres. As a curatorial model, the Long March represents an effort to realign art practices with socialist principles. According to Lu Jie, the aim is “to reconnect contemporary Chinese art with our collective consciousness...to encourage artists to make art for their own people.”The main issue addressed at the symposium, which formed part of the Long March project, was how to work with and against the powerful and oppositional forces of foreign art authorities and government censorship to tie curatorial practices more ﬁrmly and precisely to China’s historical experience of modernity.

The symposium consisted of a meeting of a group of thirty-three curators, gallery owners, critics, and artists that took place over three days in the southwestern province of Guizhou. An even balance was struck between participants from Mainland China and visitors from outside, many of whom were of Chinese descent, coming from Japan, Norway, Germany, Canada, England, the United States, and Hong Kong. The meeting began in a Chinese postal workers holiday resort in the countryside near Guiyang and concluded in Zunyi, the city on the route of the Long March where the Red Army’s march turned from defeat to victory. At a famous meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in Zunyi in 1935, Marxist doctrines were adapted to the Chinese context, and

 Mao Zedong was selected to lead the revolution. The curators of the Long March: A Walking Visual Display chose to hold the symposium in Zunyi because of its associations with this crucial turning point in Chinese history – the beginning of the restoration of the empire under Mao. Given that Chinese contemporary art is itself at a crucial stage of development, the curators clearly believed that this location would encourage the participants to draw links between the past and present Long Marches. Yet, the provocative question asked during the ﬁrst session by Per Boym from Norway,“Do we need empires in the art world?”,was left unanswered. By linking the symposium on curating in China to the history and aftermath of the revolution, the curators were asserting its place in history. They understood that the making of history is a process requiring documentation. To this end, the symposium was recorded on videotape, in photographs, and the proceedings were transcribed and translated into English for publication in this journal.

A key concern of the participants from Mainland China was how to manage and resist the negative forces of official repression inside China and the unbridled influence of art institutions from outside. The sudden interest of Western institutions in the work of Chinese artists coincided with the exodus of eight-hundred activists and artists who participated in and helped to organize the pro-democracy demonstration that was crushed by the People’s Liberation Army on June 4, 1989. Although reference to the year 1989 was understood by those at the symposium as the moment that contemporary Chinese art began to orient itself towards Western authorities and audiences, the participants never mentioned the Tiananmen Square massacre. The possibility that government repression helped to initiate this shift could not be voiced in a room of art professionals out of fear that one of them would inform the government. Since Chinese people have no official means through which to vent dissatisfaction with the political system, conversations between the participants at the symposium on “officialdom” concentrated on evidence that suggested that the repression is lifting, that things are opening up, and more artistic experiments are being tolerated by state authorities than ever before.

Western interest in Chinese art grew dramatically in the 1990s. The influence of post-colonial theories encouraged many curators and academics in the West began to adopt a more global perspective on art and its histories by studying and exhibiting art by Asian, African, and Aboriginal artists. These circumstances created a situation in which Chinese artists both abroad and in China began to make their work in response to the values and expectations of Western curators. This placed Mainland China’s curators in the untenable position of having to learn about Chinese art from people outside of China. The situation is similar to that of the film industry, wherein the most advanced films by Chinese filmmakers are not allowed to be shown there. At present, if you want to learn about the realities of life in China through its art and film, you have to leave the country.

Thus, the challenges facing curators in Mainland China come from both internal and external sources: ofﬁcial repression of the country’s most advanced artists, and Western competition for their artists’ works. Because many of China’s artists are now mainly producing art for foreign audiences, their innovations are rarely seen in the Chinese contexts to which they refer. Consequently, these artworks no longer function as statements of cultural afﬁrmation and humanity for Chinese audiences, and the high prices paid for Chinese art in the West in no way compensates for this loss. Despite formidable constraints, however, the curators based in China spoke of the new galleries and exhibitions that are beginning to promote artistic practices and discourses within China that associate aesthetic innovation with its experiential context.

 Indeed, that the organizers of the Long March symposium invited an equal number of outsiders and insiders to this discussion demonstrates their willingness to expand on the notion of what constitutes a “Chinese context.”In other words, it suggests that there is a new willingness to acknowledge the importance in China of the work done in other countries by Chinese and non-Chinese artists and curators. As Monica Dematté wrote in a paper addressing the symposium, “[Chinese] identity has undergone great change. It isn’t pure anymore. But it hasn’t lost its interest, it is stimulating, diverse, and lively in an unprecedented way.”Wu Meichun, the Director of the New Media Art Centre in Hangzhou, commented that, “It has only been since the Shanghai Biennial in 2000 that experimental art has truly started to develop inside of China, and it has already reached a crucial stage.”This biennial was co-curated by Zhang Qing, Hou Hanru and three other curators. The symposium made it clear that Chinese art professionals are eager to reap the beneﬁts of the exchanges taking place between Mainland China and expatriates and descendants from abroad.

Installation and performance work are also slowly gaining acceptance in China. A performance ended the second day’s sessions. Wang Chuyu from Xi’an created a work in which everyone became actively involved. He asked the audience to vote on who, among those present at the meeting, would be the best curator of the Long March. This subversive action, with the potential risk it posed to the reputations of the Long March curators, was in fact a shrewd re-enactment of the election of Mao as leader of the Communist Party at Zunyi sixty-seven years ago. It was also a sly critique of the lack of democracy in China. The performance enlisted the participation of everyone in the room; the ballots were cast in a box, carefully counted and recorded on the wall. The second ballot, the determining one, gave the winners of the ﬁrst round the opportunity to make impromptu charismatic speeches to either win the conﬁdence of the crowd or to ask them to vote for someone else. The winners were Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie. The performance enabled participants to actively engage with each other as a community. The selection process served to cement the relationships being forged during the meeting in the countryside near Zunyi. Thus, Wang Chuyu’s playfully incisive performance resonated perfectly with the new Long March’s objective of fostering novel artistic experiences on Chinese soil.

    :     

August 10, 2002, Zunyi International Symposium. Photo: Zheng Shengtian

 :     

Gu Zhenqing: The theme for our conference is “Curating in the Chinese Context.”I’d like to introduce the format for today’s meeting. Each of our three meetings will have a separate theme, and the theme of this morning’s meeting, like the theme of the conference, is “Curating in the Chinese Context.”The chair is Mr. Zheng Shengtian, and the discussants are Zhang Qing and Johnson Chang.

Zheng Shengtian: I’ve just heard my introduction by Gu Zhenqing. I would like to add that I am also a trustee of the Long March Foundation, the organizer of the Long March project and this symposium. In this capacity, I’d like to warmly welcome everyone to today’s symposium. The work I’ve been involved in recently is not about the Long March, but about something that happened simultaneously with the Long March: modernism in Shanghai in the 1930s. The reason why I mention this is because one of the things we’ve discovered is the importance of communications and exchange between China and the West. At the same time that all of the things were happening in Shanghai in the 1930s, the Long March were taking place here, in the southwest of China. And the Long March was another kind of interaction, another kind of exchange. Over the last few years there have been many, many important events and exhibitions in Chinese art. The two gentlemen sitting to my right have been instrumentally involved in curating some of the most important events, so I’d like to begin today’s dialogue by asking Mr. Johnson Chang to say a few words.

 Johnson Chang: Thank you, Professor Zheng. I originally wanted to speak on curating in the international arena and its connection to the Long March, but there is some distance between the “international context” and the actual history of the Long March, so I will address these topics separately. As far as our generation is concerned, the historical Long March is both the establishment of a new sovereignty and a creation myth for the current system. The Long March was about how to promote a new way of thinking, how find a new and appropriate response to modernization, and about how to apply that response to China. In terms of establishing a new order, the Long March was extremely successful. Looking at Chinese contemporary art from this perspective, this Long March is about taking the readings which art has developed of contemporary society, its integration of fantasies and dreams about this society, and making some adjustments. What I find interesting about this Long March is that it has abandoned the notion of a fixed exhibition space in favor of building a formless exhibition space that dwells in thought. When we curate Chinese art in the international context today, one could say we are taking some Chinese experiences, some Chinese interpretations, and introducing them anew. Perhaps this is not a simple process of introducing these things abroad, since modernism in China is fundamentally a Western import. And as China in the 1960s and 1970s was shut off from the rest of the world, the situation today is in many ways a return, a coming full circle. If there is any meaning in this, it is that at last, China is returning to available resources, and returning to the land. You could also say that this exhibition is the beginning of a new Long March, a Long March that is necessary not only to contemporary China, but also to the West.

Zheng Shengtian: Now we invite Mr. Zhang Qing from the Shanghai Museum, the curator of the Shanghai Biennial, to speak.

Zhang Qing: I’d like to begin my talk based on a specific experience, my experience of curating the Shanghai Biennial on behalf of the Shanghai Art Museum. As a public servant, I’d like to say first and foremost that curating is about being a servant. Whether you are someone from the Long March in the early days, or you’re an old survivor of the Long March, or you’re someone involved in today’s art, we’re all servants of the revolution. For those of us participating in today’s Zunyi conference, I think in addition to this being an opportunity for us to talk about the Chinese revolutionary experience, it is also a time to stop, to put an end to the importation of the Western philosophical thought that is imported in the form of dogmatic tenets. In the ideal world, we would be able to take Western philosophy and tenets of international modernism, and combine them with the unique local idioms of China. For me as a curator, that’s my goal. And in our practice, we can attain new ways of explaining and creating understanding, and can we develop a model for Chinese art. To borrow a phrase from one of the world’s greatest curators, Mao Zedong, we should first “cast our eyes downward and not look up to the sky.”If you are unwilling to cast your eyes downward and have not the strength, then you will never understand the affairs of China. One thing that I’ve learned is that I should understand the mechanics of an independent area or field…China forces you to basically put aside your experience, the experience of past curatorial projects. It’s important as servants, number one, that we understand China’s cultural policies, China’s laws, and that we curate in a way that is in line with the thought and the special characteristics of China.

One of the things that I learned in curating the Shanghai Biennial was the relationship between shipping companies, insurance, and customs. In addition there was the issue of ﬁnance, and as many of the cultural institutions in China do not have foreign exchange accounts. To realize an international exhibition in China, you must have some ﬁnancial skills. Perhaps, this is something

 that is taken for granted in the West. For example, one of the sponsors was from Holland, and they provided their funds in the form of a wire transfer in Dutch currency. The Bank of China immediately changed it into RMB, and we could do nothing because the French shipping company wanted to be paid in Francs. So we learn as we go. Another aspect of course is dealing with the local government. In the Cai Guoqiang exhibition I participated in earlier this year, the artist wanted to do a pyrotechnical work in Pudong, but the municipal government will not permit this kind of activity. So the problem was how to resolve this issue, and the Shanghai TV station had an opportunity to get Cai Guoqiang involved in the ﬁreworks display that was being planned for the APEC conference in September 2001, and in this way we were able to resolve that particular problem. It’s also important to remember that the artists are the true heroes, and we are mere servants. If we don’t remember this, we won’t ever make the grade as servants.

Johnson Chang: We can’t continue the dialogue in this way; it’s not the revolutionary manner! Zhang Qing and I have both written short papers, but we shouldn’t just sit here and read them; we should talk about the issues. Actually the question we care most about is what are the curator’s motives in organizing an activity. In other words, when a curator plans something like this, who does he hope will attend? What result is he looking for? Everyone says, “curating is a kind of power.”But what kind of power, a power to do what? I’d like Zhang Qing to speak for a minute about the Shanghai Biennial, about the differences between the last one in 2000 and the upcoming one in November. Who is the intended viewer of the Biennial? What kind of results are we looking for from this exhibition?

Zhang Qing: This is a very good question. Let me give you a little background to the Biennial. The 1st Shanghai Biennial was very much a China Biennial. The artists and the participants were working in international forms, but it was very much a Chinese Biennial. The 2nd Biennial was centered on ink, and the 3rd Biennial was an actual biennial in that it involved people from the international arena. At the time when we began planning the third biennial, there were a number of Chinese artists, curators, people involved in the international art world, and working with them, we had the means to undertake a truly international biennial. I think one of the target audiences for this year’s biennial is going to be the students. The university students, but also the Shanghai citizen. The theme of this year’s biennial is “Constructing a Metropolis” and there will be an architectural design competition involving university students of architecture. The third aspect of Shanghai, something that is very much a part of life for every Shanghainese, is the architecture of Shanghai, so we plan to do an exhibition, “one hundred years of architecture in Shanghai.”

Johnson Chang: I’m an outsider looking at the Shanghai Biennial. Looking at the Long March project, it seems as if it’s aimed at expanding the space for exhibiting contemporary art in China. And looking at the 3rd Shanghai Biennial, it seems that the questions you asked were of a strategic nature, i.e., how, in the scope allowed by politics, could we gradually expand the space for contemporary art. This brings us back to what Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie are doing now, which is very much an attempt to expand the space in which we can view and understand and engage with Chinese art. What are you doing in this regard?

Zhang Qing: I think our purposes are the same. Based on what I saw last night at the slide presentation, I have a great respect for Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie and what they have accomplished, to engage people otherwise outside the international art world. I think in that regard I share their purpose. Whether one is working on a biennial in Shanghai, in Chengdu, in Guangzhou, or like Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie a biennial in the villages, it all has meaning.

 Johnson Chang: One of the characteristics of the 1990s was a Chinese artist viewing the Western inner circle as a Shangri-la, an ideal. A lot of Chinese felt like the circle of intellectuals with cultural authority had been off-limits to them before, and so the most pressing question was how to break into that circle. It’s not unlike Western tourists going to Lijiang looking for Shangri-la. The fact is when you go to Lijiang, you find a lot of tourist trinkets and curios that are otherwise available in Shanghai and are unremarkable. So another challenge that obviously we face is to bring art inward into China. What I find most interesting about exhibitions that have recently taken place in China is that they’re more organic; they’re less like the Guangzhou trade fair, where they lay out goods for the rest of the world to come and see, and say that this is China. They’re more about asking stimulating questions and interacting with the local public. Many of the exhibitions were essentially designed to initiate a dialogue in artistic circles, and many of the exhibitions were made for people in the art world. I think the obvious next step for exhibitions in China is to be able to engage with people outside the art world. So my question to Zhang Qing is, as a next step, is it conceivable that we go as far as to abandon the exhibition itself, so that artists may have events and do works and have activities for one another that are not exclusive and that are accessible to the public? Or to go out and actively engage with the non-art public, and among them find things that are artistic, things that can further the dialogue?

Zhang Qing: I’d like to ask Johnson a question now. You have curated the Hong Kong pavilion at the Venice Biennial; given the form that you’ve just suggested, how would you realize that in a place like Venice?

Johnson Chang: Of course we have to continue the revolution. I have to admit that I can be somewhat utilitarian in curating exhibitions. In doing exhibitions I’m somewhat self-serving. I look to myself, try to understand myself and what it is I’m trying to accomplish. So again the revolution must continue on that front. Getting back to China and what we’re trying to accomplish here, one of the issues is the relationship with officialdom. And what’s really interesting to me about this project is that most of the participants were actually graduated from China’s official art academies and institutes, and that they are now engaging with a different face, as someone who is outside officialdom, and there seems to be an interesting dynamic that is coming out of this. What I mean to say is that artists from the official academies have basically created the expanding art circle in the last twenty years. So if you step back and look at it, it is clear that in alternative official art, as they say in Chinese opera, you’ll have those who sing the role of the white face, who are the good guys, and those who sing the role of the black face, the bad guys. As things evolve, the stages for the black face and the white face are coming together, and it’s quite obvious that the government is taking a far more active role in promoting Chinese contemporary art abroad. So in a way, experimental art is converging with official culture.

Zhang Qing: My question to Johnson is if there is indeed a black face and a white face, and if we are to wait for ofﬁcials to move forward in contemporary art, do we need to have another Long March?

Johnson Chang: Indeed I think that therein lays the true meaning of this exhibition. Of course we need a new Long March! The question of this new Long March is not only how do we make ourselves rich, but after we get rich, what do we do? The Long March is the process of China’s modernization, but after we’ve reached modernization, what next?

 A continuing performance: an anonymous man playing the role of the artist Qu Guanci, carrying the self-portrait soft sculpture of the artist, while crossing the legendary Luding Suspension Bridge. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation

Zheng Shengtian: I would like to open the dialogue up to everyone, but in particular to the many curators who have come to be with us today. I think we should start with the curators of the Long March, and ask them to respond what these two men have just said.

Lu Jie: My earlier hope was that everyone would have a chance to talk, so I’ll just answer quickly. I think the purpose of the Long March project is really to understand, to re-read, to re-interpret the relationship between modernity and China. Only when we understand will we know in which direction we need to go once the modernization process is achieved.

Johnson Chang: Modernity to me is really a change in one’s view of history. And so what I just said about getting rich might sound a bit misleading. I don’t understand modernization as economic development; it’s more holistic than that. We cannot afford to not address modernity, but the question remains, how should we do this?

Lu Jie: The focus of this Long March project is to reconnect the current practice with our collective consciousness, and to contextualize the relationship between modernity and China, and is there an alternative.

Qiu Zhijie: I agree with what Lu Jie said, and of course bringing the historical Long March into international art discourse is one of the objectives of this particular project. It’s not an issue of political history, but about how modernity fits into Chinese society. So the purpose of this whole project is to examine whether, within this Chinese history of modernization – which is the history of the Long March – there might be any experience that is indigenous to China which we can actually uncover, characteristics which can be called Chinese. In fact the globalization process for China began passively. And because it was passive, it always ends up being examined by others as something from outside. So that’s why in the process of making exhibitions during the last ten or fifteen years, it’s always been about how others look at us, how we are examined by foreign institutions. This is also the source of a great deal of conflict and complexity. This whole sense of not being fairly treated is actually a huge influence on curating. It is also mutual, because from the

 Local people experimenting to paint in the manner of Jackson Pollock at the historical point of Chishui River in Maotai, where the Red Army crossed during the original Long March. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation other side, the overseas experts who pick the artists for display in international shows also feel that they’re doing their best to promote the artists, and that we must feel a corresponding sense of gratitude. Lu Jie and I both believe that in order to change the situation, the problem is not with other people but with us; not in trying to be understood by other people but trying ﬁrst to understand ourselves.

So the new Long March for us is actually an active search on our own initiative to seek a modernity, which belongs to us, to seek a modernity that we want. Our main concern is what sort of new experiences we can provide for other people, not what we can get from others. That’s why we have taken a very humble attitude by seeking out native, indigenous artists and resources from the countryside where one would not expect to ﬁnd artists. This is a response to Zhang Qing’s question just now, after Chinese contemporary art has been ofﬁcially recognized, has been taken

 within the official arm, whether we still need a new Long March. This type of positive initiative in terms of presenting our own culture, this not being passively selected, was always a Chinese cultural attitude before the Opium War. So for us it’s about this dialectic between the positive initiative and passive receptive attitude toward modernity. I think this is a much deeper question than the tension between the official and the unofficial, the government and the underground. We see Zhang Qing’s work inside the system as another kind of Long March.

Zheng Shengtian: I’d like to ask some of the Chinese curators in the audience – people like Feng Boyi, Gu Zhenqing – to respond to what the two discussants, and now the two curators of the Long March, have said.

Feng Boyi: As a curator, we do encounter a variety of problems and issues with this ofﬁcial dialectic. But to me, this is a technical, not a substantive, question. I agree very much with what Johnson Chang just asked about who is our audience. And I also agree with Zhang Qing’s statement that a curator is a servant. But it is also very important that we take a peer relationship with the artists, in line with what we’re trying to achieve. Curators are after all somewhat like artists in their own right: through their understanding of artists’ works, they seek to raise a cultural critique, or stimulate artistic production, in line with the particular aims and goals of their curatorial concept. But more than that, curators are intermediaries. I participated also in the satellite exhibition called Fuck Off, which took place simultaneously with the Shanghai Biennial in 2000. The Chinese translation of that title was basically “to not cooperate,”and as far as I understand, the position of Chinese art from the very beginning has been to not cooperate with ofﬁcialdom. That’s how it was interpreted, but in fact what we were trying to achieve was an uncooperative attitude with the Western institutions of power, the Western sources of art authority. Many of the exhibitions that had taken place up until that time were underground exhibitions. In the end it created a force where artists felt like they had to respond to the needs of the Western curators who came to pick artists for exhibitions abroad.

In curating, I think we’re moving from being “uncooperative,”to being more cooperative. I am working with University of Chicago professor Wu Hung right now to curate the first Guangzhou Triennial at the Guangdong Museum of Art in November. I think the situation in Guangzhou is unique. Here we have the opportunity to present a massive retrospective of Chinese art in the 1990s, and to do it in a public venue. It’s an example of the kind of thing we might be able to achieve in the future. There are possibilities; it’s not just black or white. There are many different possibilities, many different things that can happen. I personally work very much within the system, I work for the Chinese Artists’ Association, and over time I’ve seen progress. Installation works are now an acceptable approach to art in China. Performance art still hasn’t gotten to the level of acceptance yet. There are a lot of works that involve violence that are still very much unacceptable to officialdom. A piece of news: In Beijing, next year, the Artists’ Association is going to do an international biennial, and the ministry of culture will be involved. They approached me and said I have experience in this regard, and would I participate. I said, when the time comes I will certainly participate, because I believe in the old Mao aphorism, “a spark can set the whole prairie on fire.”

Zheng Shengtian: I’d like to hear from some of our international curators. Your understanding of this “Chinese context” may be quite different from our own. The situation of Chinese art is changing; many artists are no longer intent on going abroad to find support for their work, but emphasize rather the domestic audience, be it official or non-official.

 Wu Meichun: I had some feelings when I saw the presentation last night of the pictures from the Long March up to this point. It has only been since the Shanghai Biennial in 2000 that experimental art has truly started to develop inside of China, and it has already reached a crucial moment. What is crucial is that in the past, the intended viewer of our experimental art was a foreigner, and only rarely did these works have any influence on people in China. I think more important than issues of official versus unofficial discourse are the organic relationships between the curator and artists, art institutions, galleries. All are facing the question of how to bring art to viewers. So after watching the presentation about the Long March so far, I was very moved. I have curated a lot of exhibits myself, and I think that this exhibition depends entirely on the diligence of the curators. It is like a field experiment to see how long they can continue. Most important about the Long March is the behavior of its curators, which will influence a great number of artists and others. But after hearing Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie speak, I am skeptical of the influence that this exhibition will have on the artists and their works. The works introduced in their events still cling to the previous art system and exhibition protocol. Perhaps these works were previously displayed in museums; now they have been dragged somewhere else and displayed. How to create a chemical reaction with the viewers or artists along their route, and not merely to display works in an environment that they do not understand, that is the challenge. I think this is what they are striving for, as evidenced by the way they constantly amend their curatorial plan in line with actual experience, and this is extremely moving.

Guan Yuda: Listening to the curators speak, including Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie, I feel like we haven’t been able to get out of a certain conceptual framework. If we speak about the current curatorial system, the situation of the entire art world is leaning more and more toward relatively stable exhibition methods. This is also to say that the power of the system and the ﬂexibility of the system are expanding. We need only look back for a moment on the situation in the art world between the 1960s and today, and we will discover, the 1960s were a time when the entire system adjusted itself, and the situation in artistic and cultural circles changed accordingly. I think one of the issues is that in this particular culture, exploring local issues is important. So I think the approach that Qiu Zhijie and Lu Jie have taken in this Long March is very similar to an ofﬁcial approach, for example in the way they collaborate with CCTV, or with certain local cultural institutions. They use emblems, signs, elements that can be instantly recognized internationally, and will carry some force. And I think that’s been done by some of the curators here today. It’s an obvious example of something someone might leverage for his or her artistic purposes. But in leveraging this, what impact do we have on artistic discourse.

To me, the Long March seems like assigning essays to a classroom full of students based on a theme. Artists can participate, be on-site, not on site, can interact, not interact, or even just can completely avoid interaction. That said, and I think that the subject of curating is a very complex issue, and something that we probably won’t be able to resolve in this discussion. I do think that the experience of travel, movement through China, that in itself is a very valuable experience. So by moving from place to place, there is this theme of the changes involved, it’s different and separate from place to place. And that’s the real interesting and important thing that’s going on here. I do like the aspect, the fact that we have moved from the city. Often exhibitions in China are done against the background of the city and centered on issues in the city, so there is something good about this move. From a cultural standpoint, this is a step forward, and an important one.

Zheng Shengtian: We’re well beyond our time. We only have about ten more minutes and I’d like to get some input from some of our overseas guests.

 Charles Merewether speaks at the Zunyi International Symposium. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation

Charles Merewether: On to the last commentary, because in relation to what I saw last night and the Long March project to this point, one of the things I find striking about it is – and I’ll use the metaphor of traveling as a way to begin – what it seems to me, and I’m not particularly interested as a non-Chinese person in the question of whether there’s a new model here. But it seems to me that there’s a new dynamic here that I have not been aware of in terms of contemporary Chinese art practice. And that is the model wherein artist and curator, both of whom are people from the metropolis, are functioning in two manners in terms of travel. That’s to say that they’re traveling both locally, going through different towns and cities that connect with the local, but that they’re also producing something in terms of the record of it that can travel internationally. So what seems critical here in terms of being a Chinese metropolitan artist or curator, is the ability to be Janus-faced – that is to be able to look in two directions, to be able to function in two directions simultaneously, both in terms of a real connection with the local, and maintaining a connection with the West or the international. So the manner in which I understand this project is that the local is being translated through the metropolis, into the international sphere, and the international being translated back into the local. And what strikes me about this project is that it seems to me – someone said that this is an issue of the domestic, a domestic issue – in English there’s an expression which is “getting one’s house in order.”So the thing that I find most significant is that this project is actually an act of recovery of historical consciousness, that is, how does one recover historical consciousness without forsaking modernity?

Jo-Anne Birnie-Danzker: I originally wanted to speak about how the curators from outside China consider the discussion that’s gone on in light of post colonialism and exoticism. But what was striking me as I was listening today was not that everything was so exotic but that it was remarkably familiar. The idea that the curator should be a servant is a central issue at the moment in Europe and North America where curator-stars are becoming more the rule than the exception. And I certainly consider myself as being the servant of a shipping company! Another aspect which is remarkably familiar is that at this moment, as an aspect of the reform of the entire department of culture for the city of Munich, we’re actually engaged in a long-term process with the aid of

 moderators looking at the fundamental questions of who are we serving, what is our audience, what are we actually doing, what is the function of an exhibition? So I think we’re engaged in a similar process, and I’m very grateful that I can be here, because I think that all the work is on the same level, with the same issues. And essentially, as Charles Merewether just noted, the recuperation is from the local to the metropolitan to the international and back to the local.

Per Boym: I’ll ask some questions because there is one aspect of the seminar that interests me and which I am very concerned with myself from the Norwegian perspective. And I would say like someone else that there can’t be “a Chinese context;” there must be a hundred or so Chinese contexts. And the effort to try to combine seems doomed. Even in a small country like Norway, I would say that curating in a Norwegian context would also be very misleading because the contexts are so very different. So the force of my question will be: the Long March, as a model, historically, was a great achievement that restored an empire. But do we need empires in the art world?

Zheng Shengtian: For time reasons, I’d like to leave everyone with that question. After lunch we’ll reconvene here.

 :  :       

Gu Zhenqing: This afternoon, the discussants will be Ken Lum, editor of Canada’s Yishu magazine, and Lu Jie, chief curator of the Long March. I will personally serve as chair of the discussion. This morning’s discussion on context grew very long, I think it was a very interesting debate or dialogue that we had going, and I’d like to continue that for perhaps a half hour. But given how much remains to be said, I think that another half an hour is all we can spare, and so let’s pick up where we left off this morning.

I think given the presence of so many Chinese curators and so many international curators, I think this is a perfect context in which to continue our discussion on context. The Chinese art “fever” was very important in the 1990s, and continues even now, and we should talk about this. As to the question of globalization, and the phenomenon of Chinese artists leaving China and participating in the international ﬁeld, these international artists that are practicing abroad perhaps don’t represent Chinese identity and issues that are internal to China. By looking at their works, you might not know that they were Chinese. In many cases you would have to meet the artist themselves to know that they were Chinese, so removed are they from the China context. I think this kind of attitude toward Chineseness is passive. For many artists, being outside the Chinese context was a way to avoid Orientalist and post-colonial work. So while they may have feel like they respond to things that are happening in China, in actuality, they don’t. And as a result, what you see is not the authentic Chinese artist. For instance, the artists participating in the last Venice Biennial, it took me forever to ﬁnd them. This Long March is different. It actively goes and seeks out Chinese resources and collective consciousness in China. And it looks to tradition, to the past, to memory, to recreate a modernist discourse. It seeks to realize the capacity within China to recreate a discourse, a context. So I hope that this Long March project represents a new model for curating. These are just some thoughts I had based on this morning’s conversation. I know that Lu Jie wanted to respond to some things that Guan Yuda said this morning, so I’d like to turn the microphone over to him.

 Lu Jie: I’d like to respond to some of the points made by Wu Meichun this morning. She said that the true importance of the Long March lies in its ideals, but that it is not interactive enough, that it is not effective when really placed in public spaces, in front of regular people. I would first like to explain that when we talk about interaction, we call it the “Long March Method.”In that term there are many layers, and we have tried quite our hardest to consider each of these layers. For example, in our ten-plus exhibitions in Kunming, we collaborated with many alternative and independent spaces. Working with artists in Kunming was a form of interaction. At the same time, in the projects we completed in Kunming, we called on some of China’s most famous painters – Zhang Xiaogang, Yang Shaobin, Yue Minjun – to work outside of this medium and put together conceptual installation works. This is another kind of interaction, between the curator and the artist, and also with the public – a three-directional interaction. Expanding the possibilities available to working artists is another responsibility of the curator. Then there is another layer: for example, when we were at Jiangwutang Military School in Kunming, we gave away original works of Xu Bing’s New English Calligraphy to villagers and children, so that they could take them home and study. I was very excited when a New York gallery insider expressed his amazement at this gesture; it makes me think that when we do things in the public space, perhaps it is possible to leave convention behind. Another example, which I did not introduce last night, is that of the German artist living in New York Ingo Gunther. Gunther plans to open a Long March Information Center in Manhattan, a two-month long exhibition in which he will tell New York viewers of what we are doing here, opening up the familiar topics of the Long March for discussion once more. At the same time, he will combine Chinese contemporary art and Chinese modern history, and use these things to interact with New York viewers. Then there are Chinese artists like Xiao Xiong, now doing an exchange work. Xiao Xiong is traveling the route of the Long March in reverse, from Yan’an to Ruijin, and coincidentally he is in our midst today. Each day he takes the object he obtained the previous day, and exchanges it for something new with someone he meets in his travels. He began with a portrait of Chairman Mao, and through this unceasing exchange, he has touched on themes of revolution, experience, history, the Long March, and art. He works quite hard on a daily basis to interact with people from different social strata and professional backgrounds. Finally I would like to address the point Guan Yuda made that the Long March is stuck in the conventional art system and following a conventional exhibition praxis. In making this point he said that we have used the official apparatus to publicize our activities. My answer is that when we debate things in China, it is relatively easy to take an oppositional stance, and that this is not building something new. We have never claimed that there is anything wrong with any of the curatorial praxes now in play in China. Many of the propaganda methods invented during the Chinese revolution or which took shape just after that revolution were quite avant-garde and experimental. Many of these stratagems had an influence on the international art world. Now we think they can have an influence on contemporary art, and the Long March seeks to re-interpret and re-use these methods.

Qiu Zhijie: Guan Yuda’s remarks this morning seemed to take the Long March as being “sent down” to the countryside, something this unambiguous. I think it is biased to see the Long March in this way. When we take contemporary artists to the people, one goal is transmission, but another is to have the art examined by these viewers. It is also a chance to enfranchise otherwise ignored artists, people like the natural-light photographer Li Tianbing, or the man who has carved a mountain with bas reliefs of Chinese leaders, Jiang Jiwei. Another aspect is that the Long March operates on many levels, as in the works Lu Jie just spoke of. I have two other examples. One is Shi Yong’s Long March project in Shanghai. He has created a Long March through the streets and buildings named for sites on the historical Long March, places like Ruijin Hospital and Yan’an

 Lu Jie, Ken Lum, Gu Zhenqing, and Robert Bernell at the Zunyi International Symposium. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation

Road. Thus, in China’s most cosmopolitan city, he has undertaken an experiment that is a call to Shanghai’s collective consciousness. The second example is Beijing artist Qin Ga, who is continuously tattooing his body with the route we are following on our Long March. So our interactions are not conﬁned to the villages, but happen also in major cities, with particular individuals, and on all levels of society. This means ﬁrst that we are unearthing all possible resources to make our hopes into reality. Second, it means that we are drawing on the wisdom of the masses to propel everyone to realize their goals. Third, it is a gesture of respect to Chinese history. Fourth, it is a kind of interaction and cooperation. I make these four points to contend that the Long March is about creation based on an assigned topic. But I would also like to ask: what is so wrong about assigned topics? And if we say that this is creation based on an assigned topic, who has given the assignment: Lu Jie or Chinese history? If we don’t want to respond to these so-called assigned topics, then why do we still bother to consider the “Chinese context?”

Edward Lucie-Smith: I just thought the moment had come to remind the audience of parallel activities which have happened in other parts of the world. The idea of wandering artists and wandering exhibitions occurred in Russia before the period of the Bolshevik Revolution, with a group who were indeed called “The Wanderers.”You also had experiments like the art school in Kitev, which was originally run by Marc Chagall, and afterwards by Malevich. So all of these are examples which one has to take into account when one things of how one thinks of “out into the hinterland” of a very large country. And I think one of the things you have to ask yourselves is what mistakes the Russians made, why in the end it didn’t indeed work. It’s no good saying this hasn’t been tried before, because it has. So I think one of the things you need to do in order to make the Long March idea work, is that you mustn’t be too entirely Chinese, you must look at examples of things that happened elsewhere in the world.

Gu Zhenqing: I’d like to ask Ken Lum to speak, someone who has taken part in a great number of international exhibitions. He is also a great writer and critic, as well as the editor of the journal Yishu.

 Ken Lum: Thanks very much. I’m not so sure what I’m stepping into after all these discussions of authenticity and non-authenticity in terms of Chinese essentialism – especially since I don’t speak Mandarin Chinese. I do want to continue a little bit on what we started this morning. For me, the crux of the issue is not so much this debate about authenticity in terms of Chineseness or not-Chineseness, and when I say that, I don’t also believe in this idea that somehow an artist is just a world traveler, and can revel in non-identity. I think that’s a completely privileged position. So for me, the issue is not one of Chinese and non-Chinese, or authentic versus non-authentic, or indigenous versus non-indigenous, or official versus non-official. For me I think the important issue is that of historicism versus ahistoricism. There are many taboos that remain in China. And even in a conference like this, sometimes I wonder whether it’s possible to fully express all the issues that people want to express, but may not be possible yet in China today. I also don’t believe in this idea that somehow the problems here are the taboos…sometimes you get responses from Europeans and North Americans that “oh, we have taboos too” and so on. I think they’re of a qualitatively different order. I think what’s missing in China, and that’s only now beginning to be addressed, is the problem of how does one make an accounting of a situation in which only twenty years ago, there was very little curating, and today you have very sophisticated curated shows. Where twenty years ago you had very few artists making work in a manner that one could say was contemporary. And yet today there are many contemporary Chinese artists doing all sorts of performance, photography, installation, and video. So for me, it seems to be that there seems to be a kind of missing link. The kind of situation of creative activity today didn’t just emerge out of a vacuum. And it’s linked to all kinds of historical memories which remain largely unspoken. I also think, just because I have experience with the recent Documenta in Kassel, you can see all kinds of work from Indian artists, Iranian artists, artist from Ghana, Benin. Without losing any of the local concerns, these artists have made work that you could show anywhere in the world now, and actually be able to read this work, be able to appreciate this work. For lack of a better word, I don’t like this term, but certainly it’s under the rubric of neo-conceptualism, the kind of linguistic framework that ties all this work together. The question that interests me is how did this neo-conceptualism, how did this framework, become stylish in China, and secondly, how did it become established so pandemically? And finally, what are the historical components that are unsaid in this emergence?

Gu Zhenqing: Next I’d like to ask Lu Jie to speak from the technical perspective about the power and interpretation of visual space. Everyone is welcome to raise questions.

Lu Jie: Lum’s story and his personal view, along with Gu Zhenqing’s comments about the role of the curator among the historical and political changes in China right now, all make me think of some questions. Both talked about the power and interpretation of visual space, but, interestingly enough, from different perspectives. Even so, it occurs to me that both share a binary, almost oppositional perspective. It’s almost as if what was being played out here was what Johnson Chang referred to this morning about the black face and the white face in Chinese theater. There’s no doubt that what they’re speaking about was their own experience, and that it’s factual and accurate. But the Chinese context, again, is very complex; it’s not bipolar or binary.

On the next topic, the relationship between independent and ofﬁcial should not be considered in a binary way. In China, even deconstruction and construction are not binary. To me the dilemma of the Chinese curator is that it seems like everything is so confused here. As a curator, both personal satisfaction and professional success require you to promote new artists and hold interesting exhibitions. At the same time, it is very popular now to talk about the public space

 and about independent curating. How do we resolve this binary? I ask this question in order to say that these roles have already come together. I believe that this is precisely an effect of the so-called “Chinese context” on the work of curators, but that the issues this raises must still be debated. Gu Zhenqing just said that in theory, independent spaces are also required to have their exhibitions ofﬁcially approved, but that in actuality, no one gets them approved – I think this is very interesting.

There is a joke here that when people ask me why I wanted to be a curator, my answer is “when you’re not a good painter, you become an art critic; when you’re not a good critic, you become an art dealer; when you’re not a good dealer, you become a curator.”That’s who I am. I was an artist, I was a critic, I was a dealer, and I’m a curator now. This joke is very serious. I want to say that the Chinese context, in relation with curators’ work, my personal experience is that almost all Chinese critics and curators or art dealers were artists before, or are still practicing art. Why does one sacriﬁce their career to come to this point? It has to do with the coming together of resources, and the emergence of new artistic careers, all of which is a relatively recent phenomenon.

I want to summarize my conclusion about the power of space, the power of the curator. In China this power is not given by the society, but sought by the individual. The work of all curators right now is to continue integrating resources, and in this way to make new things possible. I am interested in whether in this process there might be something new – that perhaps because our context, our situation is different, because of this complexity, our practice might produce something interesting that might become a contribution to the visual art world.

Ken Lum: I think you may have misunderstood me slightly. I think clearly the most interesting art that’s produced today is not produced in America or Europe, but in China and so on. I would define avant-gardism as a kind of creative response to a social situation that is a contradiction between what can be said and what cannot be said. So that you have a situation where officialdom is imposing, then the creative response to that would make for more nuanced, more sophisticated art. That’s why it’s not a coincidence that you have so much interesting art coming from countries in Africa, coming from Persia, India, and China, all of them responding to their local political and social determinants. I also want to say that I don’t think I was suggesting that these terms should be binarisms, but I think they are monadic terms. Several years ago, I saw a fantastic show of Polish conceptual art, art dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, work that was being produced under conditions of martial rule. If you had the good fortune to see that show…I remember being shocked by how American or Western conceptual art paled in comparison, because they had something specific to say, and it was a specific response. And it was a specific response to a political situation without having to announce itself in a decorative form.

Edward Lucie-Smith: What I really wanted to say is two things, very much linked to the story you just told about Manet. First of all, I think Chinese independent curators should be careful about what they wish for. God often gives people what they wish for, and then they find that’s exactly what they didn’t need. What I mean by this is that there’s now a very strong case for saying that the supposed avant-garde in the United States and Europe is now in fact the equivalent of the nineteenth century salon. The great museums have turned what we’d like to call the avant-garde into official art. And in fact many manifestations, which we still call avant-garde, would be impossible in Europe and in the United States without very substantial official support, and without the frameworks applied by great museums. So the avant-garde is no longer simply officially tolerated in the United States and Western Europe; it has become officially necessary. I think that

 Local people performing the dance of “Ten Farewells to the Red Army” in Lijiang. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation those of you have been concerned with organizing the Long March series of exhibitions would agree with me that a certain amount of controversy is necessary to push the envelope. And that if it weren’t doing this, there would be no point in doing the exhibitions at all. So what I am saying to you here is that the curatorial community ought to be very careful in China about allowing itself to become completely official. Officialization won’t necessarily mean that the avant-garde will be doing anything different than it is doing now. It will simply mean that the context has changed to the point where what the curatorial community is doing will no longer have that force to change society which perhaps it possesses at this moment. In the United States, it invariably exists in a completely official context. It is only here in China, which you remain in opposition. I might be Europeanist, but I feel that you ought to cherish that status, as opposed to the status of Europe.

Charles Merewether: Before I absolve myself, I’d like to pose one question, which of course doesn’t have to be answered. The longer I sit here, the longer I feel that contemporary Chinese art is expressing an identity consciousness. We talked about the relationship between the avant-garde and the local, and it seemed to be very disturbing to many people. We talked about the relationship between the Chinese avant-garde and the West, and that seemed to disturb many people as well. We talked about those Chinese artists who remain at home and those who leave, and that seemed to be a disturbing vision as well. We talked about the relationship between the Chinese avant-garde and ofﬁcial art, and that also seemed to be a disturbing issue. Which leads me to a very simple question, to whom does the Chinese avant-garde belong?

Wu Hong: I think what I was preparing here; the media is a power structure. Websites in China are not considered media. And in that regard we’re given a certain amount of leeway in what we can print. And frankly, we’re below the radar screen. How long this situation will continue is really hard to say. But inasmuch as we are below the radar screen over at TOM.com, I’d like to think that we could continue to do good and positive things. On the other side, we have commercial pressures. The owner of the website, Li Ka-hsing, is an entrepreneur, a capitalist with no interest in art. I’d like to also comment on something that was said this morning. So the question on a lot of our minds I think is, to what degree the average person needs what we are doing. It is very likely that the people singing karaoke downstairs are finding that as spiritually fulfilling as they would like. So is what we’re doing significant to them, or is it significant only to us? Are we driven by another kind of exoticism, a certain aspiration to Shangri-la, the Shangri-la being a position in the official museum hierarchy?

 Lu Jie: I think that has already set up some departing points not in this conference, so I want to question those points, the base of his question. One of the assumptions behind your remarks is perhaps that people in a cosmopolitan or urban environment would perhaps better understand and be able to get engaged with the art that we’re doing. Are you suggesting that the people outside the cities do not have a right, or have less of a right to such art? Even with your assumption that people in the city know art or need art more, do we have the right to assume that people outside the city have no right or no necessity to get in touch with art? The third question is that even if the ﬁrst two assumptions were true, then we have, I feel, an even greater responsibility to bring art to them. The sort of oppositional assumption, the assumption of them, and us also seems to imply that we somehow understand the art that is being done better than others might. So this would lead to the conclusion that Chinese necessarily understand Chinese art better than anyone else. I don’t subscribe to this and I don’t think it’s true. I agree with Per Boym’s concept that there are many contexts in China, I think it’s very complex. What’s interesting about each stop along the Long March that we make is the different reactions, the different degrees of success, and the different degrees of understanding that we achieve at each step. There are places at which we succeed, places where we fail, and other places where we can’t use the concepts of success and failure to talk about what we have done.

Gu Zhenqing: I can’t let Charles Merewether get away without responding to his question about to whom the Chinese avant-garde belongs. It’s interesting, the people in the Ministry of Culture have never laid claim to the title of avant-garde art. Recently, there have been changes whereby the Ministry of Culture is now trying to lay claim to avant-garde art. They found that when they were abroad and said that they dealt only in traditional art, they wouldn’t receive respect and attention. But no sooner than they had said they were involved in the avant-garde, the overseas curators and museum directors, taken to coffee and to see artists’ works, courted them. They found an enormous amount of attention. We can see this in the upcoming national art exhibition that’s about to take place: the government’s attitude toward avant-garde art has undergone a considerable change. They have taken the word avant-garde art and used it to replace “contemporary art.”And some institutes and art academies in China now have semester courses in avant-garde art. They teach how to make avant-garde art, everything from installations to video works. So it seems that everybody is trying to lay claim to avant-garde. But I think that ultimately the avant-garde “belongs” to a relatively small number of artists who are practicing, artists who are overflowing with creativity, energy, and sensitivity. Their approach is the opposite of the fifty-day course offered at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the rigidification of art. They seek to reach out beyond borders. And in reaching out, only over a period of time do they actually mature and develop their art. We’re seeing the sprouts, the emergence of this sort of artist in China today. I hope that in the next twenty or thirty years, China is able to produce and give home to avant-garde master artists. I think this is the real value of avant-garde art in China: ultimately, these artists will be something for both China and the rest of the world.

Wang Gongxin: Do we really need to repeat what other countries throughout modernism have done to promote certain masters? Is it just because our encounter with modernism is quite new and young, so we must promote certain masters? One view in this world nowadays is that we do not need masters anymore. Why is there this gesture or desire to promote Chinese masters? And the necessity of promoting Chinese masters seems like it is cutting China off from the world, as if China is totally isolated and is trying to build something itself. Are you saying that China needs master artists because the West had master artists when it was developing? Must we travel the same route?

 Wu Meichun: I’d like to respond as the representative of one of the only institutions in China devoted to new media art. I got the feeling that you were against which take up teaching new media, video skills, computer skills, and trying to introduce these into art. Only last year has new media actually become part of the curriculum in Chinese academies. So a lot of the talk of experimental art in the academies really grew out of these departments. I think that much of what is being done in these departments is new and innovative. It sounded as if Gu Zhenqing was implying that the universities do not have any right or claim to teaching new media art, that there is no value in teaching it. I don’t think we’re trying to lay claim to avant-garde art or to bring avant-garde art into institutions. The net effect is more of a kind of mutually stimulating dialogue, something that has an impact in both directions. Much of the experimental art that has been done in my view is not really experimental. It is done for a circle of like minds. By incorporating this into its curriculum, the academies are actually creating channels for more art and experimentation. I think this movement in the academy should actually be cause for reﬂection for many of the people practicing experimental art outside the academies.

Gu Zhenqing: My point was just that artists should follow their own urges and desires, and that by institutionalizing these practices; we somehow harm and prevent them. But of course the introduction of new media studies is something that I fully support. As to Wang Gongxin and his comments a minute ago, my response was directly aimed at answering the question posed by Charles Merewether, which was whose art is it. And so I had necessarily to begin in China. I do think that over a period of time the idea of the master – and by this I don’t mean the traditional toothless masters of the past – representative of the best the culture can put forward.

We’ve asked Mr. Edward Lucie-Smith to speak a little bit about the phenomenon of the YBA, the Young British Artist, as a way of exploring the relationship between the artist, curator, and power. I hope this will be a good reference for Chinese artists.

Edward Lucie-Smith: The YBA artists were associated with sex and violence, and also with a morbid interest in many cases in death and mutilation. Their sensibilities are not new. It derives from the attitudes and public gestures of the punk rock bands of the 1970s. But there is also in a broader sense a strain in British culture, which is obsessed with ideas of death. There is a very strong strain in classical British literature beginning with poet John Donne at the beginning of the seventeeth century which expresses exactly the sorts of ideas which you ﬁnd in Damien Hirst’s work. So it is absolutely understandable that this group of artists seized the British public imagination and afterwards have became internationally famous much quicker than has been the case with British artists in the past. The reason was that there were already elements in their work which were subliminally familiar and which were already embedded in British popular culture. Damien Hirst is the ﬁrst artist since Henry Moore to have become a staple of caricatures in the newspapers. So just as in the 1950s, British newspaper caricaturists used to make jokes about statues with holes in them, so, in the 1990s, they actually made drawings of sharks in tanks, and everybody knew what was being referred.

But there was another element as well. The YBA artists were largely backed with private money, not with ofﬁcial money. I think in particular, they were funded by the advertising tycoon Charles Saatchi, who had a private gallery in North London which he used to show their work, and he also used his advertising skills to publicize them as personalities…However, even though museums were not initially directly involved in the YBA phenomenon, the YBA phenomenon itself has had a great impact on museum practice. It imparted the idea that avant-garde artworks were no longer

 Jo-Anne Birnie-Danzker and Denise Oleksijczuk at the Zunyi International Symposium. Photo: Zheng Shengtian

simply artworks, but that they were also newsworthy events. And it also suggested to museum curators that a mode of directly theatrical presentation was the way in which to reach the public…Well this formula has proved extremely successful with the British public and with tourists who come to London, and the Tate Modern is now averaging something like ﬁve million visitors a year. In fact it is the biggest tourist attraction in Britain, next to the Blackpool amusement park and beach in the north of England. So to conclude, what one can say about the YBAs is that though the Tate possesses very few key works by these artists, they have transformed the way in which art is perceived in Britain. The only question is, what happens next?

Gu Zhenqing: Next I’d like to hear from Yao Jui-chung, a curator and an artist from Taiwan.

Lu Jie: I hope he can will talk about the his different perspectives in these two different roles

Yao Jui-chung: I’m going to talk about some exhibition experiences in the 1990s in Taiwan. Actually, Taiwan has been through its own struggle to get to where it is today. If you look at art as a free, concrete manifestation of truth, then many artists when they are making art look to and raise different voices. It would be the artist’s instrument to open up human minds and to bring in new knowledge. So similarly to what we are doing now with the Long March, in the early 1990s in Taiwan, artists and curators were starting to work together. Concretely speaking, this took four forms: to get organized; to create an informed curatorial practice; to build independent space; and to construct a discourse. In Taiwan, the task was to re-examine and re-construct the discourse that had been championed by the authorities, to make a real departure from there. At that time, it was a collected group, a collaboration. We did not have the word curator yet; the artists were doing the curatorial work. We did not have support from the government, so what we did was to have a strong presence in the news media. In this way we opened up a space. And now I want to talk about artists and curators in that context. I mostly work independently as an artist, and we normally do not have to work with the curatorial side on our suggestions. We tried to create new interpretations and provocative practice. The visual arts had always served the elite class, so what I do is more like cross-border, cross-disciplinary work. When they gain their power and actually achieve their goal and actually occupy a space, my works receive very strong support from the

 media. And at that point the government is not involved because what we’ve done is useful. They use the power of the structure to try to drive us out, but it’s not the same as in the Mainland. For us making art is not like a gesture or creating icons. For us it’s more important to look for possibilities throughout this making process…Curators are like artists, there are many different types. In Taiwan we have a saying that there are six different types of curators: commercial, academic, authoritative, trendy, emotional, and the artist-curator. We’ve discovered that in Taiwan there are many possibilities. It’s a quite open structure, and being a modern society, the roles are already clearly divided. So the question of whether the curator is more of a director or a producer is a big one. This kind of structure may have an impact on art making, especially when it gets commercial. Like the management of a business, the job of the curator can become to make a product, and to promote that product. In conclusion, the Long March project is taking meaningful art to contextualize history, collective memory and the current developments of society to make art useful and meaningful.

Gu Zhenqing: I’d like to ask Mr. Jiang Yuanlun to speak.

Jiang Yuanlun: I’ve been involved in the publishing of China Avant-garde, it’s a book, it has an ISBN, but it’s published on a monthly basis. The people around me are mostly involved in literature and literary criticism. In the beginning the magazine was focused on avant-garde literature, criticism, and other written forms of art. I asked Li Xianting to join our editorial advisory board to help on visual arts. After two or three years of publishing, I found that the impact of China avant-garde was actually much greater in the ﬁeld of visual arts than it was in literature. Why was this? There’s one reason which I consider quite obvious: literature, after its high tide of developments in the 1970s and 1980s, already began to decline. The visual arts, on the other hand, were just beginning to take off. Another reason is that avant-garde literature actually has gained a certain acceptance within society. Visual arts on the other hand were somewhat suppressed by the ofﬁcial cultural infrastructure.

Unlike literature, where it was really a form of technical control, in the art field, the officials were more concerned with questions of ideology. They put up a lot of hurdles for people in the visual arts and film. Of course there were technical issues also at play. But formally, when works were put down or refused exhibition, it was because of ideological concerns, very much unlike in literature. The outcome, interestingly enough, is that you’re seeing a lot more interesting things happening in the relatively ideologically controlled area of the visual arts, and literature, on the other hand, has somewhat gone down. So the most interesting things we’re seeing now are things that are grass- roots, things that are organic, that are almost oppositional in the visual arts. And I think that’s why we’re seeing so many interesting things happening both in film and in art. Most illustrative was in yesterday’s visual presentation by Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie was the repeated interference by local officials in what could be seen and what couldn’t be seen. Thank goodness for the Public Security Bureau and their intervention.

Gu Zhenqing: I want to thank everyone for the insightful comments, they were very much overview comments. Now I’m going to turn the microphone over to questions.

Guan Yuda: I’d like to respond again to the two curators of the Long March. They’ve emphasized over and over again that Chinese exhibitions must have Chinese characteristics. Ofﬁcial hierarchy in China now is much looser than it’s ever been before. I think that has reduced the binary qualities of our art. I do want to emphasize that we live in a fairly optimistic and free period.

 But for a history with such strong political forces at play, those forces often being used to stifle art, we are lucky now. I’d like to borrow a quotation from Mao Zedong, “The Long March’s manifesto is propaganda.”So we shouldn’t make compromises. I want to raise some doubts about the optimistic picture of Chinese contemporary art raised by the curators who just spoke. If their hopes come true, we’ll finish what we’re doing now, finish with biennials, finish the Long March, and be left with great masters exhibitions!

Wu Hong: The “you” and the “they” I just referred to, it was only a descriptive necessity. In actuality, contemporary art has all happened in a small circle. If we say that art has a connection with the larger population, it becomes a fashion, something to be consumed. As far as the media are concerned, I’d like to explain further, China perhaps doesn’t have pure, non-official formalism, and we can’t say that the media have no power, but its power is more a kind of governmental power. For example, last year several state-controlled media organizations ran reports about performance art, saying it was bad. I’m curious whether we can use our identity as people on the periphery of officialdom to go deeper. I’m certainly not saying that I want to consciously protest against officialdom.

Lu Jie: The topic just introduced by Gu Zhenqing is very interesting. As far as the “contrived nature” of the Chinese avant-garde is concerned, this is not to say that avant-garde art is the same as new media art. When we talk about contemporary art, talk about new media art, talk about avant-garde art, talk about experimental art, we often get a bit confused about how to use the term “avant-garde.”As to the question of where the Chinese avant-garde actually exists, how modern it is, I wonder how much have a negative or positive impact Chinese curators have had on the question. I sincerely hope that everyone can have a debate about these questions.

Zheng Shengtian: I’d like to introduce two simple points. First, the notion of “the power of the curator” sounds almost scary, it almost grates on the ears. But the point made by Zhang Qing about the curator as a “servant,”that also sounds a bit too modest. I think we’re ignoring the fact that a curator is to a very large extent a mediator, especially here in China. In this so-called “Chinese context,”if a curator wants to put his own ideas and the artists whose work he likes into an exhibition space, in the Chinese environment, he must use all sorts of knowledge to negotiate with the system. We don’t need to say “self;” I also ﬁnd this word grating on the ears, but it is nonetheless a form of mediation. Today we have spoken a lot, and people are very worried about being incorporated into the system. But we also can’t ignore the question of being incorporated into the market; that’s another danger. What we were just saying about why the Western avant-garde is no longer an avant-garde, it is actually a result of incorporation by the market and by the system, a result of both of these phenomena.

Feng Boyi: I think the Chinese context has a special situation. For example, we talk about the power of the curator. In 1994, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing and I did a book called Black Cover Book. At the time, after the ﬁrst volume was published, this impact of this book seemed to resemble that of an exhibition. Because back then, this sort of avant-garde art just couldn’t be displayed openly. If you say that the curator has power, this is the sort of thing that embodies that power. That’s to say, Black Cover Book was able to stimulate the artistic creation of a group of young artists working at that time. Now, like Zheng Shengtian just said, the curator is a negotiator, an intermediary, and a harmonizer. Most of the curator’s work is in this vein. Right now I feel that curators have no power at all, though when some artists hear that I’m curating an exhibition, they’ll call me up and

 Per Boym speaks at the Zunyi International Symposium. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation say “Feng Boyi, I want to take you out to dinner, I just did a new work that I’d love to show you.” This isn’t power; this is a kind of self-satisfaction. I’d also like to address the worries that the honorable Dr. Lucie-Smith expressed for curators of Chinese avant-garde art. I think he used two key phrases: one was “cherish,”the other was “be vigilant.”I agree very much with this. But China also has its own unique situation, and Chinese avant-garde art still exists in an atmosphere that is rather repressed. For example, right now I am collaborating with an ofﬁcial museum to curate an exhibition, The Guangzhou Triennial. In this triennial, the Guangdong Museum of Art is going to hold a large exhibition that lasts for two months, and that may have a great number of viewers, many of whom will come from outside of the art circle. This way, regular people will learn that art in China has already developed to this kind of a situation, that art is no longer just easel paintings or classical works. This will present a deﬁnite obstacle to these people’s habitual aesthetic views, it will be useful. I feel that avant-garde art in China still has a popularizing role to play. A lot of biennials and foreign museums have taken notice of Chinese contemporary art, and perhaps this puts some curators at ease already. But I believe that there will be a new generation of curators who rise to challenge us, and who create a new way of curating in the process.

Wang Gongxin: We’ve been bringing up the idea of avant-garde art over and over, and this seems to be a special characteristic in China right now. This morning, Edward Lucie-Smith spoke of the Chinese avant-garde, and in the end, he very passionately encouraged it. When I started to listen, I was very excited, but later I realized that what he was saying lacked flavor. avant-garde art in the West appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, and was in a role of absolute opposition to the government. Today, most countries outside of China no longer have an avant-garde, and I think there must definitely be an objective reason for this. Maybe in the end it was due to its excessive compromise with the government or integration into the culture, but for whatever reason, this notion of the avant-garde barely exists anymore. We still have an avant-garde in China, but I feel like even if the artists haven’t compromised themselves, officialdom is nonetheless realizing in its process of “globalization” and “democratization” that avant-garde art is necessary in international cultural exchange. And they have made a gesture to us that they are willing to accept contemporary art. So the question is whether we still need to maintain our independence, or keep up an attitude of protest. We have seen big changes in officialdom over the last two years.

 Qiu Zhijie: Returning to the question of the power of the curator, I want to ask Johnson Chang, do you have more power in your role as a gallery owner, or as a curator?

Johnson Chang: The only time you have power, as a gallery owner is when you’re paying the bills.

Qiu Zhijie: I also want to ask Ye Yongqing, is your power greater when you are an artist or when you are a curator?

Lu Jie: I want to jump in here. The kind of “power” I had in mind when I designed this forum was not the kind of power we’ve been talking about. I was thinking about the intellectual power of the curator, about their professional role, about the power of interpretation. Today we’ve been talking more about the power to get a free meal, and that’s not what I meant.

Gu Zhenqing: Thanks to all of the critics and curators who spoke today, and thanks to all of the artists in the audience as well. We’ll end today’s meeting right here.

Wim Delvoye’s Chapel Series (1 and 2) installed inside a local ritual space, Moxi, Sichuan province. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation

 :  , , :-: 

Lu Jie: Gu Zhenqing and I will chair this afternoon’s meeting. I would ﬁrst like to invite Ye Yongqing to speak about his space in Kunming.

Ye Yongqing: Good afternoon everyone. I’m glad that I can participate in a real Zunyi meeting. I want to talk about my own space in Kunming, which I have tried to make into a public space. In this way, I am able to allow artists and artistic resources in Kunming to exchange with each other, on a platform that exists right there in Kunming. That’s why I decided to turn an old house into a space. In an inland Chinese city like Kunming, it would be a bit crazy, and not realistic, to open a pure gallery or art space. My original notion was to make a space for consumption, which used art as something of a background. Art would be like a very low threshold, and ordinary folks would be able to come to this place. This space would ﬂoat on the water like a boat, a self-sustaining space. After doing this, I ran into another set of problems. First, I myself am an artist, not a gallery owner or a curator. But I need to occupy all sorts of different roles in order to get things done – otherwise we would just be a space that supported itself by selling tea and alcohol. At the same time, I wanted to get the real estate people to invest a portion of their proﬁts in art. This was a

 tough argument, and I couldn’t offer the right kind of proof, so it all came down to personal interest and preferences, which makes it difﬁcult to keep things going in the long-term.

I still remember what it was like during the first year. Lots of artists knew that I was running this space, and they supported me. Before, there was a group of contemporary artists in Kunming, somewhere in the neighborhood of ten people. This group has an exhibition every year, which feels kind of like a co-op. But the structure was very stable. They would have an exhibition one year, and then have one again the next year. It was always the same faces, and their interaction with the world beyond was basically though books and indirect contact. Once we had the Upriver Club, they had some opportunities to communicate with people from outside their circle, and these local artists began to have some opportunities to display their works outside of Kunming. At the same time, there were some artists from Beijing, Japan, New York, and Taiwan who slowly began to move to Dali to establish a second studio – for example, Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun. This all happened in 1998 and 1999. At that time the Upriver Club had some fundamental problems that I thought there was no way Wim Delvoye’s Chapel Series (3) installed inside a local to solve. We were constantly trying to build a system ritual space, Moxi, Sichuan province. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation for contemporary art, but this kind of a system is fundamentally a copy of Europe. And Kunming couldn’t support this sort of a system. The first space I worked on was actually a gallery. This gallery had some of the best art in China at the time, lots of famous artists sent their early works to this space to be sold. And because I wasn’t depending on sales of these works for my living, I did everything with the attitude that I was just helping them out. Business that first year was very good. It was all by chance, people would come to Kunming and discover that in this far-off city they could by artwork that wasn’t available in other cities. At the end of the year we did the calculations, and realized that not a single work had been purchased by a collector based in Kunming. This made us quite frustrated. I felt like I had only done things that I had imagined, and that I lacked a concrete connection with Kunming itself. The second year I spent a lot of time making contact with real estate brokers, bankers, and all sorts of potential art buyers and people who were interested in art. I would go talk to them, tell them my reasons, and convince them to believe in my insight. And there were some people who really got interested. I would tell them that it was very important to me that they bought the works in my gallery, because these works were valuable. In a year, I would do seven or eight exhibitions, including some pretty decent exhibitions. It got to the point where these bankers and local collectors believed me, and said “Ye Yongqing, we’ll go with you. Every time you hold an exhibition, we’ll buy a work. And in a year, our offices will look different.”After a year of this, I was even less happy than after the first year. I’m an artist, and things like this I can’t go hire a person to do. Throughout this whole process, I also began to have some opportunities to travel abroad and participate in some art happenings in Europe and America. I was curious how these countries developed their avant-garde, in the absence of museums, foundations, galleries, and collectors. I wondered what art means in these countries, where art fits into these societies, what kind of connection it has with the public. These questions stimulated me, and my impression was that in addition to the Western

 system we are familiar with took more than one hundred years to develop and mature, there is another way to work, which though not as stable as the system we know, may be more viable. This system doesn’t have limits, it is more creative. It does not exist amidst a dichotomy of professional and unprofessional, contemporary and modern; sometimes it is very confused. Looking back on the last few years in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, lots of artists have come out with their own spaces, but these spaces are all just for the use of the artists. Like Shanghai’s “Suzhou Creek” or the huge artists’ village at Tongxian in Beijing – these places are fundamentally aimed at resolving the artists’ own working situations.

At the end of 2000, we looked at a big abandoned factory in Kunming. I convinced a few Yunnan artists who didn’t have long-term studio arrangements. These artists needed a place to do their most basic work. I thought about this kind of space in an inland Chinese city, and I thought there must be another way to do things. I felt that it should be a space that was open to the public. I imagined this site as a workshop area for handiwork, and the fundamental characteristic of the area would be individuality. This includes some design companies, video studios, bars, restaurants, and places for leisure, but at the same time it has a gallery structure, it’s a multi-purpose alternative space. If you build this sort of a place inside a city, it will definitely become a cultural center for the city. These artists occupied this space, but to tell the truth, this space hadn’t been designed from scratch. Now it’s called The Loft, and it already has three or four galleries, two restaurants, four bars, and a big badminton area. One part belongs to the Swedish Cultural Foundation; they believe that the climate in Kunming and the layout of this space suits them well, so they set up shop here to publicize their native culture. There are now around thirty artists living here. My own situation is like this: I have a display room of my own, about two hundred square meters. I also have a studio that I share with a few other artists, about one hundred square meters. I’m always very excited to let artists who come from around the world use this studio. In the back, I also have a bar that doubles as an office. The idea to have a bar comes from my experience at the Upriver Club. I want the threshold to be as low as possible, and so everyone can see – as they drink a cup of coffee or tea – the works that we think are important for them to see. When we first started, we were able to control the rents very well, and to set the lengths of leases very long. We had low-rent eight-year leases, and so costs were very low. I run this place together with Zhang Xiaogang, and we have a deal that as long as this place doesn’t lose money, we’ll keep it open to the public. But if it loses a cent, then we’ll close it and make it our private studio, because we don’t have the need or the resources to run a place that loses money. But because the rents are so low, we have also put our own studios there, which has been quite inexpensive. From an operational point of view it’s going very well, but I’m constantly using money from the bar to pay rent. Finally I’d like to say that no matter whether it’s artists or Chinese society in general, I think we need to look at cultural problems as a process of opening up, and to use this opening up process to understand our culture, our ideology, to absorb all different kinds of experiences, and to look back on our own traditions, and come to know these traditions anew. So these are our goals, and our goal is still to build something new that can return to contemporary life, something that can return to having a connection with our personal experiences. How will what we do have any meaning if it can’t become part of real life; how will it create new power? Thank you.

Lu Jie: Although though what we were doing in Yunnan was a collaborative effort, and we accomplished a lot, it was Ye Yongqing who gave us a great deal of help. Before this we had also gone to investigate, but many of the things he just spoke about I had never heard of before. My own feeling is that he has been able to combine personal ideals and abilities, and that these have both very useful in this context. Because of this the cultural landscape in Kunming has gone from its

 earlier uneventful state to having a complete set of structures. Where artists in Kunming once had only their own studios in which to work, they now have a site of international and domestic cooperation, a place for interaction, a place to work together. At the same time it also has the environment of a place where art takes places, with galleries, good design, etc. And so this space has become special place in Kunming, a multi-purpose space. It is something of an emblem for Kunming, and it has a kind of charm. I’d like to point out where this signiﬁcance lies. It’s that this is an alternative space, but not the kind of alternative space we’re accustomed to seeing in Beijing or Shanghai, spaces where artists can do work or hold exhibitions that may be otherwise impossible in more public venues. These folks in Kunming are heroes, and they are heroes because their space is about opening art up to the public, about stimulating interest in issues. So I think this reﬂects a very distinctly Chinese experience; I daresay no space like this exists elsewhere in the world.

Now I’d like to invite Chairman Wong Shun-Kit of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council to speak. In this capacity, he serves as a bridge between artists and government resources.

Wong Shun-Kit: I want to introduce briefly the problems inherent in the sort of alternative spaces we were just talking about, because I also used to run this kind of a space. Right now in Hong Kong, most of the independent spaces receive support from the Arts Development Council, which started supporting such spaces back in 1997. At that time, the council would mainly support particular activities. In 1999, this changed to the practice of giving annual grants to support these spaces, with the hope that they would strengthen their own administrative capacities. The main support we provide is administrative, including their rent, and money to hire full-time administrative professionals, as well as support for an event here and there. In 2000, we supported seven of these spaces, but in 2001, three of these spaces disappeared, leaving four. This year, another one came about, bringing the total to five. In addition to these, the Council also keeps its eye out for new spaces, and provides Hong Kong artists with six studios and one exhibition space that are virtually rent-free. Supporting independent spaces is a significant portion of our overall program. Even in these financially difficult times, they still receive a significant portion of our funding, about one-fourth of our total visual arts allotment. Other funding programs are seriously decreasing, but we are committed to keeping this one as it was before. We assemble a committee of local arts professionals and critics to serve as our evaluation committee and read applications; it’s not a committee of government officials. We require that these independent spaces be listed as non-profit, limited liability corporations; this way we can bring them into the financial oversight framework of the Hong Kong government. Often, in addition to evaluating applications, the committee will evaluate what these spaces actually do. Our standard for giving new grants is based on the past performance of these spaces as well as their future plans. At the very least, an application must include plans for six public activities. In addition to that, we look at the space’s administrative competence, and the overall direction in which it is developing, as well as its strategy for future development. This strategy must fit into the needs of the overall arts environment and structure in Hong Kong. Looking at our past development, we hope that these independent spaces have plans not just for one year, but that we can review their plans once every three years, and that they have plans even longer ranging than that. This is even better for the development of the arts.

Now I’d like to speak about what I see as some problems now existing for these alternative spaces, and some problems that might become apparent in the future. The biggest problem facing these spaces is precisely the homogenization of their sources of funding. Most are dependent on us, some one hundred per cent. Even after a number of years, they are still unable to create a

 multivalent funding framework for themselves, so their existence is fundamentally weak. The moment the current situation changes, these spaces will be done with. Some spaces have disappeared as soon as we have revoked our funding. The first variable is the changes in the political structure of Hong Kong, including the future position of the Council over the next few years. Another is the worsening of the Hong Kong economy. The third is increased competition for funding; our money is after all limited and we have lots of applicants. Fourth, our council changes every three years. Many of our members are democratically elected, and each new council will have different tendencies in terms of policy and funding. Another problem is that of real estate in Hong Kong. Finding a place that is conveniently accessible in terms of transportation, that has a lot of passers-by, and that has rent that artists can afford is very, very difficult. I have organized this kind of space myself, first on an island, then in a factory, then finally in an amazing spot in the city with very good rent. It was a morgue, and we were quite happy to have found it. But because there are still a lot of very suspicious people in Hong Kong, many of our viewers weren’t so happy. For this reason we found some Daoist priests to perform some rites, a gesture we made in name in order to appease everyone, to make them feel safer. We also have a logo, which looks something like the logo of the People’s Republic. This logo has given rise to some murderous looks. The viewers were able to let go of their misgivings, and come in to partake of some of our activities. But after a year, this place was revoked by the government, who gave it to Li Ka-hsing, the richest man in Hong Kong, to build a mall, so of course they wanted us to move. In a year, this area had turned itself into a makeshift arts village, so we decided to try and fight, to negotiate with the government, saying that we wouldn’t move unless they gave us space elsewhere. Through many negotiations, through the noise the media helped us to make, the government finally agreed to give us space long-term to make into an artists’ village, to make up for the place they were going to tear down. And so we were forced to move into a former pig slaughterhouse, where – after a year of renovation by the government – we were able to establish a so-called arts village. Immediately a new problem arose: the government had spent millions of dollars renovating this place, so they wanted to manage the physical plant. As soon as we allowed them a chance to inspect, there were problems. First, they wouldn’t let us hang a signboard. They wouldn’t let us post any sort of posters or announcements on the exterior of the building. Every guest had to register upon arrival. Many of the large squares inside we weren’t allowed to use; we could only use our own rooms. People started saying that it was more like an “arts prison” than an “arts village.” And so some of the spaces that we have now began to arise; people weren’t satisfied with this arrangement. But the problem was that management was the responsibility of the Department of Industry, according to the management statutes of Hong Kong. We realized that the only way to solve the problem was to change the supervisory organ, and since the space has been under the management of the Department of Culture, many of the problems have been solved.

Lu Jie: There is a very subtle point here. They are dependent upon government money and support, and because of this dependence and support, he is an agent for change. I think this has led to some questions we need to consider about whether independent spaces and alternative spaces need to have a kind of consistency. This is a topic that has been under debate internationally.

Wong Shun-Kit: I feel that governmental support can only be an impulse, a catalyst, and after this catalysis, independent spaces should have an overall adjustment of their funding sources. Only in this way can we assure that these spaces continue in the long term.

Gu Zhenqing: Moving along, I’d like to ask Mr. Fram Kitagawa of Japan to speak about his space and the operational style behind his triennial.

 Sui Jianguo’s Marx in China and Jesus in China, Ruijin, Jiangxi province. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation

Lu Jie: Mr. Kitagawa is the founder and chairman of the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial in Japan. This is a very special exhibition, a public triennial that takes place in a remote location, far from a metropolitan locale. The ﬁrst triennial included artists who are relatively distinguished worldwide and everything from creating the exhibition, to choosing the artists, to curating the exhibition, to managing it – all are the work of this man. This is very signiﬁcant.

Fram Kitagawa: When I was a high school student, I read Red Star over China by Edgar Snow with great excitement. Those memories came back to me as I heard the presentation on the Long March project two nights ago, hearing names of places like Ruijin and Jingganshan. What moved me most about the Long March was the story of Zhu De. He, who starts out as an opium addict, manages to quit in order to join the march. He was someone I could relate to the most, as I was quite a hooligan myself. I would first like to talk briefly about Echigo-Tsumari Triennial. Six towns comprise the area of Echigo-Tsumari with a combined population of sixty-thousand. Those towns were clearly going downhill when we first came in contact. There were two reasons for this. First, more and more people in the countryside, especially the young ones, had moved to big cities in the process of modernization. Secondly, agriculture had been abandoned in Japan as reflected in its low agricultural self-sufficiency rate of forty-percent. The situation in Echigo-Tsumari was a result of political policies implemented by the Japanese government, which were simultaneously a consequence of the relationship Japan established with the United States after the Second World War. In the triennial we invite more than one hundred and forty artists from both within Japan and abroad to come and to make a discovery on a site. Its significance lies in discovering the innate power hidden in the site and then working together with the locals to create art on that very site. The reason why we invite many artists from abroad is because these artists can see the site in relation to their own hometown and also put it in perspective with the rest of the world. Artists have the power to discover memories from the past and to retrieve the unheard voices of the minority, and that is what we ask the artists to do. Echigo-Tsumari being one of the most deserted and conservative areas in Japan, nobody supported the proposal of making art on their own property in the beginning. Thus, the artists had to convince the locals of what they had discovered about the site. It was a constant process of confrontation, conflict, and negotiation, which

 Long March installation in the exhibition Made in Lijiang. Juxtaposed are Qiu Zhijie’s video work documenting the controversy over Huang Yongping’s work EP3 and the classic American movie Flying Tigers. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation ultimately led to mutual understanding. Out of the one hundred local congressmen representing these six villages, not a single one supported the triennial in the year two thousand when we ﬁrst started. But today, close to half of the two hundred villages comprising those six towns have offered to work together in the next triennial. This reﬂects how much the locals enjoyed the process of clash and collaboration last time.

I would now like to discuss the situation of art in Japan. Out of Japan’s population of one hundred and twenty million, the number of people who read a contemporary art magazine only numbers five thousand. It is also said that the number of people who are involved in contemporary art only comprises one percent of the whole population. Music, physical education and art are all part of the public school curriculum in Japan. While music and sports continue to be practiced even after graduation, art falls off from such a group. And while people respond to music and sports with “I like or dislike,”when art is under discussion, the question is always whether “I get it” or “I do not get it.”Art remains in a weak position, and a wide distance lies between it and the public. Under such circumstances, the only formidable approach to promoting art seemed to be through engagement with the local and the site. The twentieth-century was the age of the city. The ideal was to create a universal space connecting all cities of the world from New York, to Johannesburg, to Tokyo. Telecommunication has taken part in this process as well, creating a universal space on the realm of information. This move towards global unification has now reached not only information, but also world's financial market and into the everyday life of a citizen. However, as we hit the new century, various voices have begun to be raised against it. In another words, people have started acting against American standard becoming the international standard. There emerged a move towards re-evaluating the importance of local and its historical space. We can trace this back to the artists-initiated projects which placed emphasis on sites, such as the one involving local public in Munster from 1977 and the city renewal projects in England. What lied at the core of modernization was its faith in the city. However, cities have become aged and disoriented, as seen in the growing number of environmental issues. Thus, people have begun to rethink the importance of a particular site and locality. I would now like to introduce an interesting project in France which touches upon the theme of today's discussion on curators. The French Foundation has been carrying out a program called the mediator program in which they send out a mediator to a community who has submitted a request for help in rejuvenating their town. The mediator

 does not simply take in the requests of the locals and keep a certain degree of independence in making decisions. After the mediator invites artists from abroad, the mediator works together with the artists and the locals, as a link between the artists and the local public. The people who get appointed as mediators are museum workers, independent curators, and architects in some cases. While the pressure of global capitalist market and the wave of globalization continue to grow, there still exists a universal artistic expression, and how we link this with the local and the regional will continue to be an important issue for us. I perceive the Long March project as an extremely important undertaking in light of all this.

Lu Jie: Next we’d like to hear from Li Taihuan.

Li Taihuan: First I’d like to say a brief word about the situation at the China International Exhibition Agency; perhaps some artists aren’t too clear. CIEA is the highest government organ with jurisdiction over Chinese art. In the past, its exhibitions have all centered on our nation’s so-called mainstream art, and contemporary art has been a total blank. In the past, CIEA has also participated in things like the Venice Biennial, but because they don’t understand this concept, the exhibitions they prepare have been laughable. I don’t think this is solely the responsibility of the leaders of CIEA, who are very high-ranking. It’s also the people my age; forty- and fifty-some years old, their life experiences, educational backgrounds, and the changes in their thought are not so different from those of society at large. So they know that if they want to continue planning exhibitions for CIEA, they need to adapt to the preconditions of the international circle. But CIEA has discovered that it has no way to connect to the international sphere; that if you take Chinese “mainstream” art abroad, there is no way to create a dialogue. So they came upon a new consciousness, and the current situation has currently come about. I think the reasons for this current consciousness, as well as the reasons for its earlier absence are just as we talked about in yesterday’s meeting. The changes of thought in China are gradual and subtle as the structure loosens. I am originally a painter, I have a feeling of space, I try my hardest to find some peripheral things, and so now I’m making very few works. CIEA is very interesting. In that job, my role is to introduce the concept of avant-garde art to people there, but I still don’t think it’s possible to make people there truly understand or appreciate this art. I hope that as a consultant for CIEA, I can help to re-define what art means to that organization, because I think that would be very meaningful to artists in China. Right now the goal is to gradually expand this field, so that in the future CIEA will actively seek out large exhibitions like the Sao Paolo and Venice Biennials, will take a more active and less passive role. Every time Chinese contemporary art meets with an international audience, CIEA will have a different impression. Even if CIEA doesn’t have the ability to put together this sort of exhibition, they need to have someone like me, to act as an inside line, and with the participation of many CIEA personnel, it can find the most able curators, people like Pi Li and Fan Di’an. To speak from the heart, I believe that every curator has their own prejudices, but the CIEA shouldn’t have any prejudices. If you require that every curator have no prejudices toward art, this could become rather troubling. Every time China participates in an international exhibition, it goes through the Foreign Connection Department of the Ministry of Culture. When the Foreign Connection Department is arranging an exhibition, it goes through the Department of Art of the Ministry of Culture to take care of the required tasks, and so another layer of questions may present itself. CIEA may have good intentions, but going through such an intricate series of approval proceedings, problems are bound to arise. I should say, when it comes to avant-garde art, the struggles at the upper levels are comparatively many; there will inevitably be a great deal of troublesome tasks. But there is still participation; the door is already open. My feeling is that in terms of the works themselves, there are still a great number of requirements.

 I want to tell young artists, structure is this sort of a thing. After my time at CIEA, I still have a number of plans, so I hope that before we go our separate ways, I can get in touch with a number of artists. To put it simply, I have many different feelings about this meeting, and I’m sure that I will continue to discuss what we’ve talked about with my own friends. I imagine that many other people also feel this need to continue the discussion.

Lu Jie: My feeling is that if CIEA is unable to take care of the Venice Biennial, this isn’t the fault of CIEA, but rather the nature of the times. My personal feeling is that the things it exhibits are not problematic, but the proper way to exhibit them has changed; at that time China was completely isolated from the rest of the world. I believe that if the curators seated here today went to exhibit these things, they could create an interesting dialogue. I believe this topic has a particular meaning. Yesterday we talked about the power of the curator; today we’re talking about sharing resources. Actually there is not a single thing with absolute value; value is inseparable from use in a particular context. Next I’d like to ask Wang Gongxin to speak. There is now a new brand on the market: “Long March Lecture Series.”I’d like to thank Wang Gongxin, who has already hosted two of these lectures at The Loft in Beijing. The ﬁrst was the German artist living in New York, Ingo Gunther, the second was American feminist art, Judy Chicago. Thanks to him!

Wang Gongxin: Speaking of The Loft, I think my personal experience shares something with Ye Yongqing’s. I am first of all an artist, running this space at the same time. Perhaps most people are familiar with The Loft; perhaps they go there often. I just want to speak for a moment, first about the reasons for building this space. It may look like a very chance meeting, or perhaps like something that has to do with my personal experiences and those of my wife Lin Tianmiao. We spent seven years abroad and decided that there was room to develop this kind of space in China. Beijing is the capital, a political and cultural center. But in 1994 and 1995, spaces where one could exhibit contemporary art barely existed. At that time, when I held my Open Studio exhibition, I had no idea that so many artists would come to see, and I discovered that these artists had no place to call their own. Many works were realized abroad and never exhibited in China. This looked like a good thing in the beginning; it gave us that opportunity to go abroad. But little by little I realized it was becoming a serious problem, especially where young artists who had just started working were concerned. There was a sort of illusion, an understanding. They thought the point of doing works let foreigners see, to get their big break, to be selected for an international exhibition. Many of their works seemed to “choose the easy way out.”I had a hope that I could exert energy and put together a place like The Loft, because I especially wanted to create a place in China where artists could exchange ideas, and maybe in this way make people begin to accept contemporary art. If artists could have an opportunity to realize works, then everybody would have an opportunity to exchange ideas. So I think that if there were not this sort of physical place, that would be very bad. At that time, many artists were doubling as curators; this is a very abnormal state of affairs. When I was imagining the space, my thoughts were very innocent. Looking back on it, in certain places I may have been too idealistic or romantic. In New York, I discovered that alternative spaces were the most happening places to develop and discover rising artistic stars. I didn’t want artists to have to think commercially, but just to give young artists a place to exchange, a place to have exhibitions. My wife’s younger brother was able to find us a piece of land, and the location is fantastic – right in the center of town. My wife and I designed and decorated the place, spending a lot of energy. We said to her brother, we don’t want to be remunerated, we just want to have a trade: you give us a piece of land, we create an art space. So a chance opportunity turned into reality. Luckily, the place is still able to continue in relative stability. We don’t pay a cent of rent, and my wife’s brother even insisted on helping us to buy

 some of the equipment, which allows us to operate normally. He also helped us hire a secretary, which could be another reason for our relative stability. Although this place is quite different from what I had originally imagined, I can’t complain. Lin Tianmiao’s younger sister has more than ten years of gallery experience in Beijing, she has connections in the art world, and now it is basically she who runs the operations of the gallery there. I am just an “artistic director,”I help her ﬁnd the right general direction.

When the space just opened, I would invite people to hold very serious meetings there, on topics like “how do we continue to operate.”I see now that this was all very idealistic. But through this experience, I’ve discovered that there are some problems that arise in the course of planning an exhibition. The first of these is money. If you want to do a high-quality exhibition, there is always the question of budget. Another question is that of venue. Our space is not ideal for long-term display. But we can nonetheless make it very active, displaying many different works for relatively short periods of time, and holding meetings or conferences. This place has been around for nearly two years, and it has already hosted over eighty events. What I was just saying about being able to “go on in stability,”I was talking not only about the economy – which hopefully won’t have many bigger pressures – but also about the fact that Beijing is a very sensitive place. There have been spaces similar to The Loft before, but they’ve all encountered problems. We discovered that to put an art space under the rubric of a restaurant/bar is rather safe; the government’s attitude toward this is relatively relaxed, they think it’s a sort of entertainment. That is one factor. The other is that the activities are somewhat concealed. Also, when we were picking a name for the place, we were not incredibly idealistic or ambitious, and decided to call it a “new media art space.”I don’t like to imagine what might have happened by now if we had decided to call it an “experimental art space,”because that may well have been too sensitive. So when the space opened, the first thing we did was to hold a meeting and discuss very seriously the meaning of “new media.”One could define it narrowly or broadly, and I prefer to define it broadly.

Lu Jie: Between the lines, everyone seems to be talking about idealism and romanticism, and when we bring up these words, we always laugh to ourselves. But actually this isn’t a simple thing. Any independent space grows out of a kind of idealistic and romantic sentiment; I think it must be that way in any society. Wang Gongxin’s speech leaves me with the impression that there is a lot of meaning in both the place from which he started and in the existence of the space today. It seems that he wanted to get away from what Guan Yuda was saying yesterday about “assigning topics” for art. Every time someone goes to Wang Gongxin looking to use The Loft, he’ll say, “Do whatever you want to do.”He’s just like Ye Yongqing. But to get to the point where he can say this, he’s already done a massive amount of work in your favor. So the advantage of a space like this is that everyone is creating for himself or herself, not creating because they were assigned a topic. Another point: he still has a very obvious tendency. Even though Wang Gongxin has held debates trying to deconstruct the meaning of “new media,”the fact remains that this phrase is one of the coolest theories of art right now in China, and I wouldn’t have thought he would need to find an explanation. Still, “new media” still has special characteristics. The lectures he hosts become a platform for exchange between artists in China and abroad, artists working in different styles and media. This is one very meaningful thing about The Loft. Speaking of our topic for this afternoon, our thought was that in the process of talking about independent spaces and alternative spaces, we would also talk repeatedly about independent curating and the sharing of resources. But in actuality, all of the speeches this afternoon have been from the perspective of the independent spaces. I actually don’t think that there is a specific definition of what is a “space,”but rather that it is whatever we’re accustomed to. The way I see it, from the artistic perspective, space can’t be

 replaced, but it can be chosen. If we say “spaces that can be chosen,”that’s a bit long, and “alternative spaces” sounds too self-consciously hip, so we say “substitute spaces.”As we continue to discuss, I hope everyone can return to the idea of “spaces that can be chosen.”Next I’d like to invite Jiang Yue of the Guangdong Museum of Art to introduce the signiﬁcant work of that museum over the last several years.

Jiang Yue: I’ll briefly introduce the situation at our museum as it pertains to the topics of this conference. I think exhibition spaces for artists are very important. For many different reasons, these spaces have been limited in recent years; they have all been spaces that do not attract the attention of officials. In the last few years, owing to the loosening of some policies and adjustments within some of the government agencies, official museums have also begun to take notice of contemporary art. Guangdong Museum of Art was established very recently; it has been around for only five years, since 1997. Yesterday we talked about this, about how if the director of a museum has an interest in contemporary art, he might be able to support it. There are many state-run art museums in China, but only two of them do contemporary art: Shanghai Museum of Art and Guangdong Museum of Art. Our museum was founded in 1997, and before we got into contemporary art in 2000, the exhibitions we had held were Entering the Metropolis, Twenty Years of Experimental Chinese Ink and Wash Painting, New Metropolitanism, and Fake Future. These few exhibitions had a definite impact on society. And in November of this year, we will hold the first Guangzhou Triennial. This exhibition began preparations in 2000. The curator is Wu Hung from the University of Chicago, and the associate curators are Wang Huasheng, Huang Zhuan, and Feng Boyi. The goal of the triennial is to do a re-reading of the developments of Chinese art during the past decade, to look back on what happened between the years of 1990 and 2000. There are three main themes, which I’d like to introduce with very little detail. The first is “Memory and Reality,” the second is “Individual and Environment,”and the third is “Local and Global.”We’ve also added a fourth theme, “Continuing the Experiment.”The first three themes are a summary, filtration, and retrospection on the past decade; the fourth involves several artists we have chosen to create some new works. The exhibition will fill all thirteen exhibition rooms in our museum, as well as the outdoor courtyard, which will play home to some installations in the “Continuing the Experiment” section. In addition to this exhibition, we are also arranging an international curatorial conference, which has gained the support of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and which will be held partially in Hong Kong. The theme for the conference is “Place and Pattern: Thinking and Creation in Contemporary Art Exhibitions.”In this forum we have invited famous curators from China and abroad, as well as directors of top museums in China and abroad. In this way Guangzhou is going to become a very happening and ceremonious place come November. For this exhibition we are going to publish two catalogues, one in Chinese, the other in English. Feng Boyi is the man in charge of editing and producing these books. Contemporary art in China has just gotten very hot. Our museum director just went to Kassel a few days ago, where he met with some very important curators and shared some experiences with them, and introduced the situation of our triennial to them. Our director is planning to hold a major exhibition of contemporary art every year. The triennial is seasonal, but we also hope that the curators and artists gathered here would continue to be in contact with us. Our hardware and facilities are very good. In terms of capital, we may not be as strong as Shanghai, our government-allotted budget is around one million dollars annually, which is barely enough to keep the water and electricity on and pay our employees. If we want to hold an exhibition, we need external support. But in terms of our work preferences, we tend toward contemporary art, because it is our strength. In this respect we have a great deal of contact with the Shanghai Museum. In short, the Guangdong Museum of Art is willing to become a display space for contemporary artists, is willing to become

 Kunming-based artist Fu Liya’s work Water Asking carried out on the lakeshore by Lugu Lake. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation a place for the curators gathered here to work, is willing to join hands and work with everyone today and afterwards, in order to help Chinese contemporary art move forward.

Gu Zhenqing: The Guangdong Museum of Art has also made its main exhibition space into a training ground for China’s youngest curators. Next, I think we can see, regardless of whether it’s a mainstream space or an alternative space, there is always the question of how to expand resources, for example the Guangdong Museum of Art working with the Hong Kong Arts Development Council is actually a way of expanding and integrating resources. At today’s meeting, we not only want to debate the meaning of integrating resources, but also to suggest a direction for that sort of integration. For example, today Jiang Yue has made a call to us, and perhaps in 2003 there will be an exhibition of contemporary art at the Guangdong Museum of Art that is curated by one of the people sitting in this room.

Lu Jie: Last night I was talking with Johnson Chang, and I heard some very exciting news. At the Asia Art Archive, the resources that have been gathered are there for everyone to share. I think that this is a very good example. If anyone still has opinions or points to make, please contribute.

Chen Mo: I hear everyone giving all these examples of alternative spaces, and I think, we can look at today’s topic of alternative spaces from another perspective, which is the openness or public nature of contemporary art. If we think of space solely as a place where an artist can hold an exhibition, perhaps our definition is too narrow. The expansion of spaces has two sides; one is that the roles of artists, curators, and critics have already undergone significant changes. The second is that before 1989, the boundaries between these fields were rigidly drawn, and today it seems that have nearly disappeared. I am aware of several very important exhibition formats to come about in the years since 1989, which should also be in the scope of our discussion. In the event that exhibition space is hard to come by, you have exhibitions like the small ones that Chen Tong talked about holding at his bookstore, whose real value is textual and documentary. There are many artists who independently hold exhibitions in their own studios. And then there are exhibitions like Gu Zhenqing’s Man and Animal exhibition, which also used a fluid style. There are exhibitions like the ones curated by Guangxi artist Huang Shaopeng. So I want to explain that in utilizing space resources, we can’t just understand them as an environment for an exhibition.

 Long Marchers on the move. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation

I think that the idea of “alternative space” is a mixed-up, chaotic notion. If we want to talk about questions of art and accessibility to the public, I think we should use the term “public space” instead of “alternative space,”because just as Lu Jie said, space is something to which there is no alternative. I understand that this Long March is mainly happening through a network, not through one or another particular spaces or exhibitions.

Lu Jie: I agree totally with you. Actually we could say that Wu Hong and Jiang Yuanlun, along with several other media people who have come here today, are a kind of “space.”

Feng Boyi: I just heard Ye Yongqing speak, and it made me think of many years ago when Xu Bing came to visit, and he spoke of his so-called experimental art. He thought his own works were not as inﬂuential as those of Chen Yifei and others. I haven’t been to Ye Yongqing’s space, but hearing his introduction and description, I have an urge to go and see it for myself. I think it is not simply an exhibition space, but an integrated multi-purpose space. It provides a new lifestyle, a new kind of taste, and this is very useful. Perhaps many intellectuals in Kunming know about this place, and regular people might think it is a place to see some new and interesting stuff. Ye Yongqing, I think this is even more useful than when you do experimental painting. This approach is not limited only to an exhibition, but also includes things like The Long March, which came through your space just a few days ago. I was terribly moved by Xiao Xiong’s work that we just saw. He quietly kept on going (traveling the route of the Long March in reverse), without making a scene. It makes me think of the early 1990s, when there was a group of artists assembled in Beijing, working painstakingly, not at all sure in which direction their art was going to develop. Their attitude then was quite similar to the feeling I had just a moment ago, a sort of piety and passion about art. I think the most special thing about The Long March is that its spirit has attracted a great many people, and particularly many young people. So I think that in this exhibition, the works themselves are already not the most important thing, but rather that the kind of wake-up call The Long March brings to people’s hearts, perhaps that is the most important.

Qiu Zhijie: This has to do with the spirit of the artists. That day I was talking with Pan Dehai at The Loft about whether if we say that the Yuanmingyuan artists’ community was “undergraduate,” if today’s Tongzhou community is “graduate student level.”These attitudes have a huge difference.

 The goal of the artists who went to Yuanmingyuan was precisely to leave Yuanmingyuan as soon as they became famous. But the artists who came to The Loft that day, some of them are prepared to stay here for a lifetime. The Loft is a successful space, because it is not just an exhibition hall, not just a place to consume art, but also a place to produce art. I think that something like Yuanmingyuan didn’t have a way to go on, that as soon as something like The Loft came about, it immediately began to play a larger and more important role. The majority of ofﬁcial museums and commercial galleries are dismissive of contemporary art. And so artists adjust themselves, ﬁrst gaining a strong consciousness of how things work, and then hoping to enter the mainstream. One change that happened in the 1990s is that artists began to think more about the meaning of art in their everyday lives. As Wang Gongxin just said, he held an open studio exhibition in his own home. Then there is the phenomenon that the ranks of those who work in contemporary art are swelling, creating a half-underground, half-public circle. Actually, I believe that the mass appeal of a place like The Loft is still very limited, it is still a place for self-consumption by the art circle, and it is very obvious that those who come to The Loft are already part of the art scene. For this reason I think that the “alternative space” we have been talking about can already be divided into many different levels. There are places like The Loft, stable places that independent curators often use. But there are also temporary venues, and actually, the most important exhibitions of the late 90s took place in these sorts of spaces. Now we are using these temporary venues less and less, and we are more prone to gather in stable places like The Loft. I think this bespeaks a change in our attitudes, and that this diligent drive to build a connection with the society in which we exist is something that should happen.

Ye Yongqing: Actually the space in Kunming is separated into many units for purposes of operation, and each person’s ideas and understanding of the value of different things is not quite the same. Generally speaking, it should be richer and more complex. I feel that the place is rather appropriate for an inland city like Kunming. If we did something very specialized in Kunming, it would deﬁnitely have problems supporting itself, so this is also decided by the concrete situation. Because of these interactions among many different kinds of people, the space is constantly giving rise to conﬂicts with its locality. However, it certainly is able to attract a number of people. I have always thought of it as a scene, a place where things can happen.

Lu Jie: No matter what country, society, or culture, these so-called alternative spaces are constantly changing.

Wu Hong: I believe that art and commerce can influence each other, and that in this process, if the influence is good, it may help both parties. But we need to be careful in this process that art doesn’t become merely a fashionable product, that it doesn’t lose its experimental quality. There is another question, and that is the entry of government into contemporary art. I think that in any country, when the government gets involved in contemporary art, it will bring with it very strict limits. As soon as conflicts arise between a work and these limits, art may begin to go in a different direction. I think the example of the incident with Huang Yongping’s sculpture last year is a very good example. So we need to be careful that when the government gets involved in contemporary art, it may turn art into something that looks experimental only in form, but in actuality raises no questions.

Wang Gongxin: I think that regardless of the situation, artists have a yardstick of their own, a yardstick that allows them to determine who is a good artist.

 Gu Zhenqing: On this topic, we still have someone yet to speak who can share valuable experience. Chen Tong runs a bookstore in Guangzhou. The Borges Bookstore has become a meeting place for people involved in art and literature, as well as a venue for exhibitions. On the question of “integrating resources,”Chen Tong has relatively rich experience.

Chen Tong: When we started the bookstore we didn’t have any money. We didn’t have many books, and we certainly didn’t sell paintings. My real interest then was in publishing, and in understanding literature and movies. I thought that running a bookstore would be conducive to these goals, so in 1993 I began to cooperate with some other people to open a bookstore, first on a temporary basis. Some conflicts arose a few months later, and the cooperation ended. Borges opened formally in 1994, and has been running now for over eight years. Through 1997 business was very good, and at this time we began to organize activities, exhibitions, and lectures. I am after all an artist and a teacher of art at an art academy, not an ideal store manager. In these circumstances, planning activities was the only outlet for my creativity. Speaking globally, there are a number of bookstores that also organize activities. In the very beginning, my store was on the campus of the art academy, the rent was quite cheap, and there was not even a contract. The situation grew sensitive, perhaps because of some of the paintings we were selling, but perhaps also because of the sources of our books. Many of our goods were Taiwanese, purchased in Hong Kong, for example books by Foucault and Derrida which at that time, Sanlian had yet to publish in Mainland China. This attracted a great deal of attention, especially from the media, and even from abroad. I was then most interested in promoting French literature and theory, so there were often people from the French consulate and other diplomatic operations coming through. In this way the store became a base, and many people came to believe that we had lots of things going on. Around the time of the Hong Kong reversion, people from the News and Publishing Bureau came and told me that I could no longer sell books without ISBNs, but this did not scare me. Then about a month before the reversion, I ran into the assistant director of our college, and he said that if he saw my bookstore open the following day, he would be very upset. I thought he was quite rude, that he didn’t know how to deal with people, so my response was to immediately move the store. Once we moved, the situation immediately changed because our costs went up. We moved to the eighteenth floor of a building, becoming what must have been the world’s highest bookstore. Immediately the safety department, the college, and the publishing department all came to make trouble, taking away RMB thirty thousand worth of books for inspection. They inspected for four months, finding out that I was indeed just someone interested in art. Then they stopped searching me. We realized that having moved the space to the eighteenth floor, it was not going to be possible to attract people’s attention, so we quickly moved down again, to a relatively expensive building. In this location we did seven or eight exhibitions. You could say we successfully promoted the work of Yang Yong and Cao Fei – Cao Fei’s first work was displayed in our store. We also held some documentary exhibitions, including one of the diaries of Hu Yichuan. I thought this was a relatively “red” exhibition, so I gave announcements to the leaders of our college. Not one of them showed. Perhaps they thought they couldn’t come to a place like that. Even though they pay my salary and arrange my course roster, they still couldn’t come. Maybe this is because I have never been willing to play the guanxi game with them. If I did, maybe the situation would be better. After operating there for a nine months, the costs rose once again. I lost tens of thousands of RMB, so I had no choice but to move on. Altogether we have moved seven times, but never more than a few hundred meters away from the gate of the college. Why do we have this concern? In this space we find an echelon of artists not far from professional success. This is a population with potential to develop, quite unlike the broad masses. It is like I said yesterday, my degree of dissatisfaction with the leaders of China’s arts education system varies. Guangzhou Academy of

 Participants of the Zunyi International Symposium. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation

Fine Arts is a very old school, and indeed a very powerful school, especially in terms of fundamental pedagogy. But it has nothing to contribute to contemporary art; it never gets more radical than the pretty paintings of some modernist masters. They are absolutely opposed to avant-garde art. But art academy students still have this potential. Throughout its history, my bookstore has encouraged students’ desires to work in contemporary art; this includes writing and filmmaking. They need something like my store. If I didn’t do this, they would be drawn into the commercial society or confined by the education of the academy. I am driven by this responsibility; I feel I should be doing what I am doing. This touches back on what we have been saying about problems of exhibition space. And that in turn stems from the fact that there are not enough resources in Guangzhou. Contemporary artists in Guangzhou are poor; the rich artists are the ones who do Chinese painting. I know these people, but only as acquaintances. I’m not interested in sitting down to eat and drink with them. When I meet with friends we always go Dutch, we always go to the cheapest restaurants. I have discovered a problem in all the exhibitions I have held. (Because the venue is small, these exhibitions generally last for just two weeks at a time.) When one holds an exhibition in a bookstore, people think it is an appendix to the bookstore, a way to get people to buy books. I don’t mean it to be this way. The first time I let someone know about an exhibition, they are very happy. But the second time, it is like a kind of punishment. I am not able to use “modern” methods to spread the word; I can only call people on the phone and mail invitations. When I call people, I feel like I am burdening them, like they think I am calling them to come and buy books, and they think this is annoying. This is a problem of resources. In the same way, if I want to invite artists from beyond Guangzhou, there is the problem of expenses. Another problem is that people seem to think that Guangzhou’s economy is fully developed. In fact, it did develop relatively early, and there are a great number of people there with money, but getting support for the arts in Guangzhou is nonetheless impossibly difficult. The entire budget for the Guangzhou Triennial is RMB seven million. A friend of mine got Philips to invest twenty million French Francs in a less-than-ambitious film of his. These are not comparable. In addition to my role as an artist, I am also active in literary circles. Literature is a very low-cost activity, but the returns it can reap are correspondingly very low. No one would invest in literature. Accordingly, running this sort of alternative space in Guangzhou one faces several serious problems. But we are confident nonetheless. Recently I rearranged the space. I want the bookstore to keep on going, but how that will happen, I can’t say at the moment. I need to discuss things with more friends. Listening to Ye Yongqing and Wang Gongxin at this meeting, I feel quite excited already. I know their conditions are not like mine – that didn’t sound so great – Wang Gongxin is a rich man, Ye Yongqing is a hero. But my operating conditions are not fixed, and my power to support things is quite lacking. And needless to say, none of my friends has any money. But the situation in the arts in Guangzhou is

 Participants of the Zunyi International Symposium visit the Zunyi Meeting Museum. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation quite interesting, and sometimes we are able to do some quite unconventional things. Still I remain skeptical of how many more things we can do in such a limited atmosphere. Every time I go out, friends in the arts and literary circles ask me if I will keep running that bookstore. This is tough to answer. Judging from the looks in everyone’s eyes, of course I want to keep going. But the risk belongs to me, and not to everyone.

Lu Jie: Thank you so much, Chen Tong. Speaking of costs, Ye Yongqing and Wang Gongxin’s experiences are very precious. Only in a world without the pressures of costs can the sort of romanticism and idealism of which they spoke continue to exist. But I want to point out that there is actually something everyone in this room has that is very valuable – knowledge capital. If we could integrate resources well, then this knowledge could become a sort of infinite capital. Now we’d like to invite Wu Meichun to speak from her personal experience, first of being an independent curator and now of where she fits into this consolidation of resources. I believe that the New Media Arts Center that she runs at my alma mater, the China Academy of Fine Arts, is a new kind of possible space within the very conservative framework of that school. So I would like to ask her to speak from these two perspectives.

Wu Meichun: Every exhibition I have been involved with is unique; it is quite hard to use one experience to sum up my entire experience as a curator. The school chose to do new media because in the process of expanding, it wants to use this pedagogy to interact with countries abroad, and they chose me because I had some knowledge of new media from its earliest beginnings in China. As far as I am concerned, “new media” is just a way into the academy; it allows me to maintain a new media space within the academy. How this space will be operated, this is going to be a process of compromise and struggle. Listening just now to Wu Hong’s concerns about selling out, I believe that selling out is not a question of form. If one’s heart has sold out, that is of course a treacherous thing. In the academy, you have very clear-cut ideas about how to do a particular thing, and once you do it, it is visible for all, and at that point no one will care whether you are in the academy or an independent curator. So I have nothing else to say, save that I hope everyone will pay attention to what I do in the future.

 Lu Jie: We were talking after last night’s meeting, first about curating exhibitions, and then we returned to everyone’s experience of the market. We said that in curating and operating spaces, it doesn’t matter whether one’s contribution is to the theoretical discourse or to the progress of art itself. In the end, we kept returning to the question of our artistic educations. I think what Wu Meichun is doing, to enter the academy, to use it as a starting point, to bring in many of the things which have been outside the system until now, to build a base of support, to consolidate resources there, to plan some novel activities and expand the scope of scholarship – I think this is extraordinarily meaningful. Because of time concerns, today’s meeting must end here. Thanks to every participant. We can say with confidence that this is China’s first international curatorial conference. It has been very successful and I am quite satisfied. It has led to some very interesting topics, and to discourse based on these topics. I want to thank everyone for coming from so far away, and to those of you who came at your own expense. I especially want to thank Gu Zhenqing. He is an exceptionally busy curator in his own right, but he was able to find time to direct our conference, to make this conference happen. I would also like to say that the space we chose for today is itself particularly meaningful. Across the street is a Catholic church, but it has been Disneyfied – this is a special kind of space in China. Near the entrance there is an infant haircut studio, full of advertisements bearing pictures of foreign babies. This is the kind of space we as curators are particularly sensitive to. Next door is an old Red Army bank, a fundamental protector of resources during the historical Long March. Surely everyone understands our motives for choosing to hold this roundtable meeting across from these two landmarks in Zunyi. I’d like to thank the person who lent this space to us, the director of this school. She has allowed us to use this space without restrictions, and we have in turn filled it with our discourse. We are extremely grateful!

     

 

The notion of “China” as a homogeneous totality is restrictive when one considers the enormous diversity in contemporary Chinese art production that exists in spite of the fact that Mainland Chinese artists share a common socio-political background and experience. To me, Mainland China is an intense and fascinating place where homologation and extreme difference co-exist in the most incredible and spontaneous way.1 I am thinking of a number of things. I am thinking of how many minorities (shaosu minzu) are ruled by the same government, how cities such as Kashgar in Xinjiang stick to the Beijing time, how there is a disparate economic gap between the coastal areas and the countryside, and how the “peaks” of cultural reﬁnement reached by some “intellectuals” are counterbalanced by the low level of education of the majority of the people. China is a contradictory country where one might be persecuted for saying a word or where one can do things considered elsewhere to be the most sacred taboo – like using dead bodies in artworks.

I find it almost impossible to communicate with Western scholars, artists, and curators who do not have a specific knowledge and understanding of China. The level of generalization is far too great. There is an expression that those who have been to China for a week feel the urge to write a book. After a month, they can only think of an article. After a year, they no longer feel the ability to write anything on the subject. I myself have experienced a similar feeling. It is very difficult to talk about Chinese contemporary art in general. I am always surprised when I read articles by people who visit China for their very first time and think they understand what they have “seen.” I do not mean to suggest that people should not have their own opinions and be able to express them. Rather, I simply want to point out an attitude which seems to characterize the “Western” approach to China. This attitude consists of projecting a whole world of pre-constituted ideas and beliefs that dissimulate a deep fear of difference. Cata is a word no longer used but which refers to an imaginary China that retains a representation of China (even though the country has dramatically changed in recent years from a Communist identity to an identity associated with the economic boom) that is approximate and far too subjective.

What lies beneath all this is a Western lack of interest in getting to know its Eastern counterpart. It seems to me that we are in a world where economic prosperity enables those who are wealthy to make the rules as well as deem what is and is not correct. Art and culture are no exceptions. In the United States and Europe, a few determine what constitutes both “contemporary art” and a successful artist. A consequence of this is that an artist has to align him or herself with the West in order to become internationally successful.

In an era where one can quickly travel in the “global village,”we should be open to the multiplicity of artistic expressions. The reality, however, seems to be that we simply meet the same people and look at the same work wherever we go. The Venice, Shanghai, and Whitney biennials share a common background and yet none of them represent a particularly unique viewpoint. Implicit in this creeping homologation is the impact of the media in the form of television and computers. The effect has been the transformation of the world as an extended periphery.

 I would argue that China is facing a set of circumstances similar to those that took place at the beginning of the last century. Reacting to the widespread foreign inﬂuence in the art, one of the strategies was to promote local heritage and impose an autochthonous taste (zhongguohua). What remains of a Chinese tradition now is a generic Confucian/Socialist attitude that dictates how people should interact. There is not much understanding or respect for the great Daoist and Buddhist traditions which, in the past, made Chinese thought so unique and unparalleled.

In one of my recent lectures in a Chinese University, a student asked me whether the great tradition of the past was going to disappear in China since many Chinese artists are devoting themselves to oil painting and newer art forms such as video and performance. I responded with a question. I asked the students how many of them devote more time to calligraphy than studying English and spending time in front of the computer. It is easy to ﬁgure out the reply.

I feel that the Chinese have not been able to re-appropriate their tradition because they are choosing to conform to Western expectations in order to gain international recognition. While there is a great pride in being Chinese and having an impressive heritage, there is also the awareness of having been surpassed in the economic and technological ﬁelds. Instead of opposing the West and formulating an alternative game, China is learning the Western rules fast.

I recently came across the following statement:

The future world’s aesthetics should not be restrained to the artistic expression of one country or of one particular period, but it should unite the entire world’s artistic ideals, of the past and of the present, it shall synthesise them and then look for the aesthetics’ fundamental principles being careful to keep the individuality and peculiarity of each style.

This statement was made in 1934 by Zong Baihua, a professor of philosophy and aesthetics and founder of Chinese comparative aesthetics. He was one of the ﬁrst to make a link between Chinese aesthetics to the world aesthetics.

The idea of “making use of the West to develop the East” was embraced at the beginning of the republican era (1911) by many Chinese thinkers. It was adopted in order to ﬁll the gap caused by the “material superiority” of the West. Perhaps it was a mistake to think that China would be able to catch up merely through technical know-how. I wonder whether Zong Baihua ever thought that the world’s “artistic ideals” would be (seventy years later) so far from respecting national speciﬁcities. I am referring to the overwhelming power of materialistic considerations when evaluating an artwork and to the fact that this “value” is determined in a few “centres.”

Reading the writings of Zong Baihua’s and others, I have the feeling that those years at the beginning of the twentieth-century were much more prosperous and open in terms of freedom and depth of thought. What does all this mean in the present? It means that the Mainland China art market is mostly determined (at least in terms of contemporary art) by foreign buyers who are controlled by foreign galleries, with prices being established according to Western standards. It means that the works by those Chinese artists most recognized in the West are hardly known in China. (An exception to this would be the exhibition Towards a New Image which toured China last year and was curated by Weng Ling.) It also means that the most well-known artists (institutionally recognized) in Mainland China are ignored abroad since they do not ﬁt into the international trend.

 Local people in Ruijin encounter Sui Jianguo’s Marx in China. Courtesy of the Long March Foundation

The situation is contradictory and schizophrenic for Chinese artists who ﬁnd themselves suspended between the need for recognition and that of self-expression. I would say that the conditions for contemporary artists in China are similar to that of the gongting huajia (professional painters hired by the emperor for the court’s needs) than to that of the wenren (literati). More effort is put into anticipating the direction of international trends than into the investigation and comprehension of one’s own needs. It is not a phenomenon which affects only Chinese artists nor is it only a problem that exists today.

There have been a few reactions by the Chinese. There is Li Xianting’s theory about being treated as “spring rolls.”2 There are attempts to reject foreign co-operation – as was the case with the Chengdu Biennial. The tendency to close the doors to any foreign inﬂuence results in the formation of a sterile nationalism. Nevertheless, many Chinese curators can admit that they are at a loss for really independent theories and alternative viewpoints. Chinese curators and artists are deeply hybrid. There is no point in recalling a “golden age” in the distant past. It is far more productive to gain a full awareness of the present. I would suggest that these curators and artists avoid being too inﬂuenced by “market” considerations and the “global” trends governed exclusively by economic concerns.

How long will it take for the Chinese to ﬁgure out an alternative way? Will it only happen when China has achieved a stable economic power and after it has fully accepted an economic strategy imposed by those so-called wealthy countries? Will China rule in the same way as these countries – by monetary inﬂuence rather than by cultural or moral pre-eminence? This is the real challenge. This is the aim Chinese government and intellectuals should consider as the ultimate one.

Notes 1 The Italian term omologazione can be translated in English as “approval,” “approbation,” and even “conﬁrmation.” 2 Li Xianting’s “spring roll theory” is from the outline of his speech at the “Conference of the International Association of Art Critics” in Japan, published in Jiangsu Pictorial 1 (1999): 21.

  

The second issue has to do with Michael Hardt’s and :    Antonio Negri’s conception of Empire, deﬁned as a formation   of a homogenous political subject under a more global form of sovereignty. Empire, as a de-centering force, is always     exerting its territorial control over broader spatial and subjective domains in order to dictate a new totality. The notion of multitude, as the undercurrent for D11, is the key constituent that undermines the power of empire. As much as empire needs to absorb differences to move forward, it also embeds the potential for creating a new collective that can overturn empire altogether. D11 attempted to shed light on such a paradox. The mission is not to replace the centre with a new margin, but rather to hold onto this moment of anxiety by investigating notions of temporality, memory, history, and narration. Only by experiencing the instability of our identity are we prepared to face what is to come seriously.

Having established some of the parameters for D11, we need Figure 1: Meschac Gaba, Museum of Contemporary African Art: The Museum Library, 2002; installation view, Documenta Halle, Kassel to consider the relationship between discourse and exhibition practice. It is crucial to consider how the politics of With the United States threatening all out war with Iraq, subjectivity are being translated into the viewing experience the rhetoric over the protection of western values, freedom of art objects. Enwezor proclaims that the fifth platform was and democracy has once again surfaced. Only this time the not meant to illustrate the previous platforms. “Spectatorship” potential threats from a transparent enemy are inverted by in an exhibition stands on its own right as a viable ground the perpetual demonization of tyrants like Saddam Hussein. for political reflections, where the audience are asked to In the name of maintaining world peace, a war could soon navigate through predetermined “constellations of public be fought; and the differences in cultural values between spheres”, and art objects are proposed as “models of the West and the Islam will be emphasized to the point of representation and narratives of autonomous subjectivity.” absolutized differences. It is crucial to think for a moment Rather than pinpointing specific artworks to underscore what is really missing from such a master narrative, and Enwezor’s point, it is more pertinent to consider the moments how best to move forward in the constant reshuffling of a of conflicts staged inside the exhibition. It is important to new global order. consider the exhibition as an entity that is not completely Against this background of contested world ordering, Documenta 11, or D11, is a timely response to the role of politics in art by asserting the exhibition as an intellectual system for expressing the subtleties of inter-cultural subjectivities. There are two key issues that D11 is trying to confront. First, D11 challenges the exhibition form that says a collection of artworks produced in different times and spaces are essentially an exercise to homogenize a narrative for the sake of comprehension, i.e. the convention that the moment an artwork enters an exhibition, the expectation of a binding relationship with other artworks is duly established. D11 deliberates a break from such a systematic alignment. Okwui Enwezor, D11’s Director, wants to offer another trajectory between the disjuncture of temporalities (as embodied by the artworks) and the imposition of a totalizing Figure 2: On Kawara, One Million Years (Past and Future), 2002 narrative. By implementing four different platforms in installation view, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel Vienna, New Delhi, Berlin, St. Luca, and Lagos that address the topics of: “Unrealized Democracy,” “Transitional Justice,” limited within the confines of the museum or institutions, “Creolization,” and “Urbanization in Africa.” These platforms but to look at the exhibition as something not so stable broaden the physical boundaries for the exhibition by bringing and predictable. For example, dialogue that happened the issues to global communities. If the problem with the during workshops and screenings also constituted an “West” is to reassure its power base in order to acknowledge integral part of D11. its own limits, the curatorial team uses D11 as an opportunity to bring such an imbalanced power play down to a more I would like to share a few fragmentary moments within level ground through an investigation of the post-colonial the many and various constellations of D11. For the Museum order. Deviating from the emphasis of one’s ethnicity, the of Contemporary African Art, Meschau Gaba, an Amsterdam post-colonial is defined here as the state of living with based artist, installed a moving library, a museum shop, “temporal pluralities.” The post-colonial has more to do and a restaurant at various locations in Documenta (fig. 1). with the complex “regime of subjectivity” that calls for a The conscious positioning of MCA’s museum shop directly more open revision of history itself. opposite to the Museum Friedericianum, and a moving library

 Figure 3: Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument, 2002, TV Studio, Friedrich Wöhler-Siedlung, Kassel in the basement of Halle, offer a critique relating to the indulging in a fantastic sexual orgy. The grand tour liberated different scales of cultural production and the boundaries of the upper class gentleman from carrying any cultural baggage an institution. Upon entering the Museum Friedericianum, into a world of imagination, pleasure, and exploitations. we encounter an installation of personal objects created by the late Chohrey Feyzdjou. For Feyzdjou, a Jewish woman If a multitude can ever be realized physically, the lower who grew up and lived much of her life in Iran before moving level of Halle alludes to the potential of creating a new to Paris later in life, these sealed and labeled objects revealed social collective. This space foregrounded the importance of the complex relationship between the memories of a networking as a viable strategy against concepts of Empire. diasporic subject and material culture. Artist collectives working closely with community actions, such as the soon to realized Park Fiction project from On Kawara’s One Million Years was a voiced aloud reading Hamburg, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas from Lithuania, of the years from 1970 to 1,001,995 AD (fig. 2). Hearing a and Huit Facettes from Senegal, are shown side by side recitation of the years every few seconds, we are encouraged resembling the formation of a new collective or a social to think about our dependence on time to give substance laboratory. The Halle works expressed the very potential of to existence. Kawara’s piece has also given me another a museum space to function as a space of social activism. temporal dimension for looking at Hanne Darboven’s ambitious archival project in the neighboring atrium. An Estranged Undoubtedly, the return to an institutional space as the Paradise, a film by Beijing artist Yang Fudong, takes place at very ground for political changes reaffirms its dominance an imaginary city called Paradise in Hangzhou and has a for cultural production. Should the battle be fought only in protagonist who is suffering from an illusory illness. This film the inside only? D11 could have done more to engage a is a humanistic investigation of the contradiction between living community instead of proposing an imaginary nature and anxieties induced by rapid economic change. community to prove a theoretical position. In this context, At Binding-Brauerei, a former beer factory now converted Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument is a breath of fresh into a permanent venue for Documenta, I came upon a row air (fig. 3). To visit his project, viewers had to ride in a of monitors spaced down the length of a corridor showing specially designated car to the Turkish neighborhood where videos of Inuit life in the territories of Nunavut in Canada. In the Bataille Monument was sited. Even though Hirschhorn one video, the Inuit elders have reenacted their family lives defended his monument as a non-contextual work, his in order to give their future generations a sense of belonging, alternative community centre produced considerable a ritual necessary for the survival of a culture. French dialogue both within the art and non-art contexts. To architect Yona Friedman conceived an imaginative lattice of intervene effectively in real social experience, such a mega free floating architectural module that would be built over cultural enterprise needed to make the human experience an existing city, where citizens would have a direct control more tangible. over how the urban space could evolve. Blurring the realm between the real from the virtual, Feng Mengbo’s highly How is the discussion of unrealized democracy evident in the interactive computer games Q4U is modeled after the exhibition? What has been realized or unrealized? What is computer shooting game Quake 3 Arena. The highly really happening to the urban condition of Lagos? These are interactive game was designed to accommodate different questions left unanswered and are perhaps impossible to players from the Internet; the viewer-players are demanded answer. D11 is interesting in revealing its struggle with to engage in virtual killing rampages with powerful firearms. establishing the right distance between post-colonialism and Q4U dives into the core of our destructive nature, when the predicament of museum culture, discourse and contem- the roles of author/user or killer/victim become difficult to porary art. If empire calls for a complete revision of history differentiate. Alluding to the grand tour of the eighteenth itself, it is a burden that is borne not only from the post- century England, Gallantry and Criminal Conversation by colonial order. Ultimately, D11 is met with the impossible Yinka Shonibare showed miscegenated mannequins challenge of coming up with an alternative historical model.

   

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