Critical Writing from a Local Perspective the Curator Mansion

M a y / J u n e 2 0 1 1 V o l u m e 1 0 , N u m b e r 3 1 0 t h a n n i v e r s a r y y e a r

I n s i d e

Critical Writing from a Local Perspective The Curator Mansion: An Impossible Place of Infinite Possibilities Performance Art in Southwest China Features on Cui Xiuwen, Wen Fang, O Zhang, Leung Chi Wo, Lam Tung Pang, Morgan Wong, Lee Kit Reviews of Chen Chieh-jen, Michael Lin

US$12.00 NT$350.00 pt r i n e d i n Ta i wa n

http://yishu-online.com New Archive Web Site 22

VOLUME 10, NUMBER 3, May/J u ne 2 0 1 1

CONTENTS 2 Editor’s Note 36 4 Contributors

6 Critical Writing from a Local Perspective: First Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art Conference

22 The Curator Mansion: An Impossible Place of Infinite Possibilities Beatrice Leanza

55 36 Conceptual Archaeology: Performance Art in Southwest China Sophia Kidd

47 A Conversation Between Huang Du and Cui Xiuwen

55 Wen Fang: The Path of Art— From Observing to Getting Involved Alice Schmatzberger

63 63 O Zhang’s Recent Works Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky

72 Four Discussions with Hong Kong Artists: Leung Chi Wo, Lam Tung Pang, Morgan Wong, and Lee Kit Stephanie Bailey

87 A Time of Critical Reflection: Chen Chieh-jen’s Factory Revisited Milena Hoegsberg 87 94 Chen Chieh-jen: Empire’s Borders II–Western Enterprises Inc. Pamela Kember

101 Michael Lin: The Colour Is Bright, the Beauty Is Generous Katie Hill

107 Chinese Name Index

101 Cover: Cui Xiuwen, Emptiness in Non-emptiness & Being in Non-being No. 20 (detail), 2009, C-print, 95 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

We thank JNBY, Canadian Foundation of Asian Art, Mr. and Mrs. Eric Li, Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison for their generous contribution to the publication and distribution of Yishu.

Vol.10 No.3 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art president Katy Hsiu-chih Chien legal counsel Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C.C. Liu With Yishu 44, we are entering our tenth year   Ken Lum as one of the most important English language -in-chief Keith Wallace publications devoted to contemporary Chinese   Zheng Shengtian art. Over the past decade, we have published   Julie Grundvig more than 500 essays, interviews, conference Kate Steinmann proceedings, and reviews that together track editorial assistant Chunyee Li circulation manager Larisa Broyde the evolution of artists, events, and issues that  coordinator Ioulia Reynolds are central to China’s singular and complex web site  Chunyee Li contemporary art history. The staff at Yishu advisory  extends its thanks to all—artists, writers, Judy Andrews, Ohio State University subscribers, and sponsors—who have supported Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum us and contributed to our success. Special John Clark, University of Sydney thanks goes to Katy Hsiu-chih Chien, who has Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation Okwui Enwezor, Critic & Curator been unwavering in her belief in the importance Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator of disseminating writing on Chinese art to all Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China corners of the world. Fei Dawei, Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute Yishu 44 opens with a panel discussion on critical Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop art writing that was part of the conference Katie Hill, University of Westminster component of the First Yishu Awards for Critical Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art. This panel Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator addresses art writing from a Chinese perspective Lu Jie, Independent Curator and explores a number of crucial issues such Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore as critical autonomy, the difficulty of translating Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University Western terminology, and the lack of writing on Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Philip Tinari, Independent Critic & Curator contemporary art that is accessible to readers. Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago Beatrice Leanza offers a text about her own Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar curatorial practice in which she explores ways to  Art & Collection Group Ltd. maintain independence from market forces and 6F. No. 85, Section 1, institutionalization, as well as foster a creative Chungshan N. Road, space for critique, issues not unrelated to the Taipei, Taiwan 104 panel discussion on writing. Sophia Kidd takes Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 us to southwest China and identifies the distinct E-mail: [email protected] qualities that make the performance art scene there, especially in Chengdu, so strong. vice general manager Jenny Liu Alex Kao marketing manager Joyce Lin We have three texts on women artists— circulation executive Perry Hsu Cui Xiuwen, Wen Fang, and O Zhang—who Betty Hsieh endeavour to make their work more than just webmaster Website ARTCO, Taipei critical, and to actually have impact upon the  Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd., ways we think and perceive by provocatively questioning the function of art each in her own web site http://yishu-online.com way. Stephanie Bailey brings us four interviews web design Design Format  1683 - 3082 with Hong Kong artists who have emerged from the alternative gallery system and who offer Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited personal insights into the current Hong Kong art in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, scene. We end with three texts discussing two March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: of Taiwan’s most significant artists, two texts examine the films of Chen Chieh-jen, and one Yishu Office text that explores Michael Lin’s recent survey in 200–1311 Howe Street Prato, Italy. Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 Phone: 1.604.649.8187 As I write this, the arrest of artist Ai Weiwei on Fax: 1.604.591.6392 April 3 in Beijing has been met with shock and E-mail: [email protected] deep concern around the world. Our thoughts subscription rates are with him, and we hope that before you 1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) read this issue of Yishu 44, he will have been 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) exonerated and able to return to his multifaceted 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com) art making. There are numerous petitions in    Leap Creative Group circulation demanding his release, and we   Raymond Mah encourage you to add your voice to them. art Director Gavin Chow designer Philip Wong

Keith Wallace No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版創刊於 2002年5月1日

典藏國際版‧第10卷第3期‧2011年5–6月社長：簡秀枝法律顧問：思科技法律事務所劉承慶創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）

總策劃：鄭勝天 2 編者手記主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 副編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 4 作者小傳史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 編輯助理：黎俊儀行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 6 本地情境下的藝術評論— 廣告：雷幽雅（Ioulia Reynolds）網站編輯：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li) Yishu學刊中國當代藝評獎2010年主題論壇記錄顧問：王嘉驥田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 巫鴻 22 策展人領地—有限中的無限可能林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 范迪安 Beatrice Leanza 招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 胡昉 36 觀念考古學：中國西南地區的行為藝術侯瀚如徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) Sophia Kidd 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 倪再沁高名潞 47 崔岫聞與黃篤的對話費大爲楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 盧杰 55 文芳藝術之路: 從旁觀到參與 Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Alice Schmatzberger Katie Hill Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda

63 張鷗近作出版：典藏雜誌社 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky 副總經理：劉靜宜高世光行銷總監：林素珍發行專員：許銘文 72 與四位香港藝術家的談話：梁志和、謝宜蓉林東鵬、黃榮法和李傑社址：台灣臺北市中山北路一段85號6樓電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 Stephanie Bailey 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 電子信箱：[email protected]

87 批判思考的年代：重溫陳界仁的編輯部： Yishu Office 200-1311 Howe Street, 《加工廠》 Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 Milena Hoegsberg 傳真：(1) 604.591.6392 電子信箱: [email protected]

94 陳界仁：《帝國邊界II —西方公司》訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與編輯部聯系。

Pamela Kember 設計： Leap Creative Group, Vancouver 創意總監：馬偉培藝術總監：周繼宏 101 林明弘：《顏色是靚的，美是慷慨的》設計師：黃健斌印刷：臺北崎威彩藝有限公司 Katie Hill 本刊在溫哥華編輯設計，臺北印刷出版發行。一年6期。逢1、3、5、7、9、11月出版。

107 中英人名對照網址： http://yishu-online.com 管理： Design Format

國際刊號: 1683-3082

封面：崔岫聞，真空妙有，No, 20 （局部）, 2009，售價每本12美元。 C-相紙，300 x 95公分，藝術家提供訂閲：一年84美元，兩年158美元（含航空郵資）。

網上下載：一年49.95美元網上訂閱： http://yishu-online.com

Stephanie Bailey, who is of mixed Chinese and Katie Hill is a curator and lecturer specializing British descent, is originally from Hong Kong. in contemporary Chinese art with an interest in She studied in the United Kingdom and has been culture, politics, and criticality. She is currently living and working in Athens, Greece, for the co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Visual past four years. Her interests lie in contemporary Art Practice on contemporary art and criticality in art in relation to social, cultural, and political China. Her recent activities include Ai Weiwei in contexts, and she views her work as an ongoing Conversation, a public discussion which took place education. She is an arts editor of Athens Insider at Tate Modern during the exhibition of the artist’s and has contributed to international publications Unilever Series commission Sunflower Seeds. She including Art Papers, Art Lies, Naked Punch, and is Director of the Office of Contemporary Chinese Adbusters. She leads a foundation course in art Art (OCCA), an organization promoting artists and design at the Doukas Educational Centre, from China and exhibiting UK-based artists in Athens, where she also lectures on art history China. Over the past two years she has developed and recently took part in the China-Europa a research project on culture and corruption in Forum, held in Hong Kong and China, 2010, as a contemporary China, focusing on rural nianhua representative of culture and arts. production (New Year Prints). She curated English Lounge, a group exhibition of UK-based artists Bao Dong is an independent curator and art at Tang Contemporary, Beijing (2009), and One critic in Beijing. He was born in Wuhu, Anhui World One Dream: Cai Yuan and Xi Jian Jun (aka province, in 1979. After graduation from the Mad for Real) at Beijing Tokyo Art Projects (2009). Sichuan Fine Arts Institute with a master’s degree in art history in 2006, he worked at the Milena Hoegsberg is an independent curator and Institute of Movie and Media, Chongqing; writer based in New York. She earned her B.A. in Chongqing Normal University; Shanghai Duolun art history at Columbia University and her M.A. Museum of Modern Art; and Iberia Center for at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Contemporary Art, Beijing. As an art critic, he has Her curatorial work includes Nanna Debois Buhl: published reviews and articles in magazines and Looking for Donkeys (Southern Alberta Art publications such as Leap, Art Monthly, Art Time, Center, 2010), Another Time (Center for Curatorial Poetry Circle, and Du Shu. His curatorial work Studies, 2008), and Manifesting Emptiness (The includes Re-metaphorized Reality (Chongqing Betty Rymer Gallery, School of the Art Institute of Art Museum, 2006), Lu Xun Park Project Chicago, 2006). She worked closely with curator (Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Maria Lind on The Greenroom: Reconsidering 2008), Notes of Conception: A Local Narrative the Documentary and Contemporary Art (CCS of Chinese Contemporary Painting (Iberia Bard Galleries and the Hessel Museum, 2008). Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2008), She has contributed reviews and essays to various and Re-experimentation: A Reaffirmation of Will art publications, including Sculpture Magazine, and Enlightenment (Beijing 798 Art Festival, Manifesta Journal, Art Forum China, The Biennial 2009). He was also one of the curators for the 6th Reader (2010), and Bill Viola: Visions (2005). She is Lianzhou International Photo Festival (2010). currently working on a contemporary site-specific exhibition in the prehistoric collections at the Gao Minglu, Professor of Art History, University National Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, which of Pittsburgh, holds a Ph.D. from Harvard will open in June 2012. University. He was editor of Meishu (Fine Arts), China’s leading art journal in the 1980s and a Huang Du, Ph.D., is an artist, a curator, and key figure in reporting on the art explosion he critic. He was Editor of Meishu (Fine Arts), called the ’85 New Wave Movement. He has China’s leading art journal, from 1988 to 2001. since curated important projects such as China He has since curated important projects such Avant-Garde (National Art Museum, Beijing, as Open Mouth, Eyes Closed (Beijing, 1995), 1989), Inside Out: New Chinese Art (New York, The Space and the Visual (Beijing, 1998), The San Francisco, and other locations, 1998–2000), Manufacturing China (New York, 2002), The The Wall (Beijing and Buffalo, 2005), and Yi Pai Second Seoul International New Media Art (Barcelona, Madrid, and Beijing, 2008–09). Biennale, (2002), The 50th Venice Biennale—

4 Vol.10 No.3 Zhong Guo Guan (2003), and The 26th São Paulo Sheng Wei received his B.A. in art history from Biennale—Zhong Guo Guan (2004). the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, his M.A. in critical art history and theory from Tsinghua Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky holds the O. University, and his Ph.D. in Western modern Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at Bard College. art study from the Central Academy of Fine She has published several books, on subjects Arts in Beijing. Now he is engaged in the artistic such as the art of the Tang dynasty and Chinese study, criticism, and curatorship of modern/ Buddhist art, and she has served as Editor of contemporary art in both China and the West. He Journal of Chinese Religions. She has written many was the editor-in-chief of Art Exit and Muse Art, catalogues and has curated several shows on successively, and was awarded the Wang Senran contemporary Asian art. Art History Award in 2009.

Pamela Kember is an independent art historian Chia Chi Jason Wang lives and works in Taiwan and critic as well as a Ph.D. candidate at the as a curator and art critic. He received his M.A. University of the Arts London. Her research from the Institute of Fine Arts of Chinese focuses on the connections between home, Culture University in 1986 and the University memory, and identity within a spatial context for of California at Berkeley in 1991. He was the Hong Kong’s transnational artists. She lectures curator of the Taiwan Biennial (2008), the Taiwan widely and contributes to many art journals on Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), and the topic of contemporary art from Asia. the 9th International Architecture Exhibition of the Biennale of Venice (2004), and was co-curator Sophia Kidd has a B.A. in philosophy from the of the Taipei Biennial Great Theatre of the World University of California at Santa Cruz and is (2002). His other recent positions include Curator presently an M.A. candidate in classical Chinese of Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, and literature at Sichuan University. She has lived Executive Director of the Dimension Endowment in China for most of the past twelve years and of Art. He has contributed widely to various art has published arts writing, poetry, fiction, and translations internationally. She presently catalogues and Chinese and English magazines co-curates Frequency, a semi-annual experimental such as Contemporary (England), Modern Art live art exhibition, in China. (Taipei Fine Arts Museum), Artco (Taiwan), Artist Magazine (Taiwan), Chinese Art News Beatrice Leanza is a writer and curator who has (Taiwan), Art China (China), Art and Asia Pacific been based in Beijing since 2002. A former curator (New York), and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary at the China Art Archive and Warehouse (CAAW, Chinese Art (Taiwan/Canada). He also served on directed by artist Ai Weiwei), she co-founded the Academic Advisory Board of Asia Art Archive BAO Atelier, a creative studio for integrated from 2004 to 2009. Currently he teaches at the research in editorial, curatorial, and design National Hsinchu University of Education. practice. She has written extensively on art in China and contributed to different international Wang Chunchen, Ph.D., is an associate professor art publications, including Flash Art International, of art history and an art critic who now works Abitare, and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary as as a researcher and curator at the CAFA Art Chinese Art. She is currently working on the first Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, institutional exhibition dedicated to the work Beijing. His research interests include art history of the Xijing Men collective (Chen Shaoxiong, methodology, contemporary art theory, and Tsuyoshi Ozawa, and Gimhongsok), which will criticism. In 2009 he was granted the CCAA Art open at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa as Critic Award. His publications include After the part of the Venice Biennale 2011. End of Art (2007), The Abuse of Beauty (2007), Art Since 1940 (2005), The Phenomenology of Alice Schmatzberger, a natural scientist and an art Painting (2006), The Language of Art History historian, works as an independent writer on the (2008), Interpretation of Art (2008), and Theory in development and management of transdisciplinary Contemporary Art Since 1985 (2010). art projects. Her writing focuses on contemporary Chinese art, photography, and food in art.

Vol.10 No.3 5 Critical Art Writing from a Local Perspective Xi’an Art Museum, September 10, 2010

Moderator: Gao Minglu Panelists: Bao Dong, Sheng Wei, Wang Chunchen, Jason Chia Chi Wang

Gao Minglu: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the second part of our panel discussion hosted by Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art for its First Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art.

The questions that were raised at the panel earlier this morning are pertinent to every art critic. The topic of art criticism brings up a wide range of issues, and the first part of the panel focused on a critical issue concerning the contemporaneity of critical art writing. The present is what we should consider when we think of the state of contemporary art criticism. Who are the art critics? What are their roles and identities? How can an art critic involve him- or herself in the art system? What system is currently at play in the art world? How does it function? How does the system affect art writing? Certainly, as we all know, the art system, especially in China, cannot remain as it has been in light of globalization.

The goal of this second panel, titled Critical Art Writing from a Local Perspective, therefore, is to address critical art writing through deeper and more concrete angles. I want to ask what crises are being faced in regard to the production of critical art writing in China. This question has been widely discussed by art critics in the West. At the end of last year, there was a very important issue of the art journal, October, that featured texts by twenty- three critics and curators. The journal’s editor, Hal Foster, questioned what contemporary art is, as the concept is one that is difficult to define. Some say it is relevant to globalization, others propose that the discussion should steer away from colonialism, and the rest believe that it has to do with new technological advances. There are many interpretations; some even suggest that contemporary art is born of a challenge to the current art market and art institutions.

As for contemporary Chinese art, if we survey what problems we are currently facing in regards to art criticism, we can find an angle that allows us to describe the current state of our art world and become aware of what issues we should focus on and remain critical of. In the past one hundred years, the Western avant-garde movement has focused on resisting commercial institutions; thus it is an issue that has been discussed throughout the discourse of Western contemporary art. As for China, the predominant theme of our art production is how far one can exercise one’s artistic freedom and question the intellectual movement. Nowadays, there are more complicated issues arising in the Chinese art world, so one has to think about what possibilities and obligations art criticism has, regardless of whether it is written through an individual, an art institution, or from a social or regional perspective. Once you know who or what you are opposing, you can decide what angle and approach you can use in your writing. This issue involves the methodology of art criticism itself.

6 Vol.10 No.3 Panel discussion for I would like our panelists to address the current state of critical art Critical Writing from a Local Perspective, Xi’an writing in China. What roles should a critic play? What is the state of our Art Museum, September 10, 2010. Left to right: Gao current art system? And what are the functions of critical art writing Minglu, Sheng Wei, Wang within such a system? Chunchen, Bao Dong, Jason Chia Chi Wang. Photo: Zheng Shengtian. Bao Dong: China’s art system has long been incorporating infrastructure from the West, and its development is still far from being complete; for instance, our museum and art foundation systems are still evolving. Comparatively speaking, our academic art journals are not as established as those in the West. If the development of Western contemporary art is dependent on a well-established public art system, our problem is that we do not have such a system in place in China. As discussed in the first panel, China’s public art system has faced various forms of oppression in the past several years, specifically from the political sector as well as the business sector. So the question is not about how one can work within such a system, but how we can together build our own system that supports critical art writing. In the West, art criticism has more than one hundred years of history, and in China, about seventy or eighty years. In the early 1980s, art writing in China became an independent field and incorporated an academic approach following Western art development of the 1960s. Since then, art theory and art criticism have merged together.

To cite an example, an artist’s ultimate goal is to be exhibited in museums or galleries. But for a critic, what is his or her most important job? The answer is to stay in the library, which is to say, one has to regard critical art writing as a practice that is based upon intellectual autonomy. Art writing may at times reflect an endorsement for certain art practices, but this should not be the standard that one uses to evaluate the quality of an artwork. In fact, in China’s current art world, there are a large number of art critics focusing their writing on observing trends and the categorization of artworks. Without a critical approach, art writing becomes a vehicle for the art market to fast track an artist to stardom. Chinese art critics have been playing such a role for a very long time. Personally I think it’s time to establish art writing as an independent scholarly field because writing that aims at promoting art stars is no longer sufficient. At this stage, we are still far from being able to explore art writing as an autonomous, self-sustaining practice.

Vol.10 No.3 7 Wang Chunchen: I would like to talk about the question posed by Professor Gao regarding the state of Chinese contemporary art criticism. In fact, for the past few years, Chinese art has undergone multifaceted changes, giving rise to situations that are becoming increasingly complex. Nowadays, art writing is no longer limited to art professionals. There’s a new emerging phenomenon in which people from different disciplines are starting to write art criticism. For example, there’s a professor from Beijing University who specializes in French philosophy; he too has started to get into critical art writing. More artists are becoming willing to read scholarly criticism. And this new phenomenon has entailed other issues, such as writing that no longer focuses exclusively on art itself. This may have to do with the fact that there are many contexts one can use in approaching contemporary art and that contemporary art development is now determined by issues arising within, as well as beyond, the art world. Furthermore, with China’s greater exposure to the outside world and use of the Internet, the production of art criticism in the cyber world is growing at a rate that far surpasses the print industry, as print publishing has its own limitations. The Internet offers various channels for self-expression and allows many anonymous users to voice their criticism, some of which can be quite fierce and harsh.

As for the methodology and the type of discourse that we use, I think this area is still undergoing changes; for instance, there’s still an issue of how one can one employ traditional art terminology in contemporary Chinese art discourse. As a lot of art theory and terminology are imported from the West, some scholars are now focused on implementing a Chinese art discourse. Bao Dong mentioned earlier that there are many art critics in the West who have a background in the French School, postmodernism, feminism, poststructuralism, linguistics, and semiotics. Bao Dong himself has written critical analysis on semiotics. Therefore, the scope of critical writing is very diverse. We used to place too much emphasis on the sociological aspect of art, although it remains a very important subject matter in China as there are still many issues that are yet to be discussed, such as how one draws the line between art and life and what the function is of art in contemporary society. All these issues touch on the definition of art and the role of art criticism within the art world. There are still many topics worth discussing through this sociological angle.

Sheng Wei: This morning we discussed the general, fundamental principles of art criticism. What I noticed from that discussion is that the type of art writing that we talked about has a strong emphasis on individual artists. In the case of China, on the other hand, art writing begins with addressing one particular phenomenon or one specific issue. People in China are more accustomed and willing to read this type of analysis. Often times, the study of a particular artist is closely tied to the art market; that is one reason the legitimacy of this type of art writing is questioned. I think this is an important issue that needs to be addressed. Perhaps this issue is not as imperative in the Western art world; however, one cannot say it is entirely non-existent. A while ago I wrote a long essay on the crises that are being faced by art critics in the West, such as the proliferation of texts produced by the cultural industry. The overwhelming surge of texts is diminishing one’s interest in art writing, and this makes one question the purpose and value of art criticism. In what context can one revive an interest in reading and writing art criticism? I think these questions are becoming more and more pertinent. On the one hand, the development of

8 Vol.10 No.3 the art market has created a demand for promotional writing, as artists need people to write about their works and exhibitions so that they can become better known to their targeted audiences. Many art critics are willing to write promotional texts because of financial rewards, but do we really need these types of texts? There is also another kind of writing that focuses mainly on venting, which seems to generate a lot of attention as people are drawn to incendiary remarks. The Internet is filled with these seemingly critical and often excessively provocative commentaries, but, as a matter of fact, it is still subject to market control. In order to create more publicity, the media needs to generate something catchy, so much of the writing produced with this intention is prone to sensationalism. These are the phenomena that are emerging in the Chinese art world. So even if your writing is supported by thorough research, it will still be regarded as a rant or market-driven. This is the negative impact of promotional writing.

Earlier Bao Dong mentioned that we need to keep implementing the Chinese art system. This proposition is correct in principle. However, I do question what could come about after the implementation. Why? My reason is that what makes contemporary Chinese art interesting is the fact that it keeps evolving, as does the development of Chinese art criticism. In other words, it is the process itself that makes art meaningful. It is not my wish to see art being confined within a system; this also applies to art writing. Being a writer, one needs to keep a distance in order to question what constitutes the art system, its power structure and forms of discourse, who gets to speak and who doesn’t, and how the intellectual lineage of different generations affects critical art writing and employs different terminology. Some of the Western concepts and terminology, if applied to the Chinese contexts, will dramatically alter their original meaning. That’s why I think it’s important to study these different forms of discourse. And in the case of China, as I’ve just mentioned earlier, what makes our art writing distinctive is that the focus is not placed on the individual artists but on asking a series of questions. It is through these questions that one’s investigation begins.

Jason Chia Chi Wang: I’m from Taiwan, so I’m going to share some of my experiences from there. You may not be familiar with the current situation in Taiwan, so I will briefly outline the development of Taiwanese art writing. As you may all know, prior to 1987, there was little room for development in Taiwanese art criticism. The emergence of critical writing came in the early 1990s. The financial bubble of the late 1980s had created a temporary hype in the art market. With the surge of gallery spaces, many artists became able to exhibit their works for the first time, which created a great demand for exhibition catalogues. Starting in 1992, more and more critical art writing was published. Much of this writing was not market-oriented. It focused primarily on studying individual exhibitions, or the so-called intellectual exchange between the artist and the critic. Writing in this era had its ambiguity, partly because art critics at that time still had to meet the market demand, so when they had an intellectual exchange with an artist, the role they assumed was that of accompanist to the artist, not his or her equal. Ultimately, their writing still maintained this promotional purpose. The 1990s witnessed the rise of media arts, especially graphic arts. A few important art magazines also began publishing during this period; for example, the magazine that is now known as Art & Collection was published to encourage art collecting. During the mid 1990s, a non-governmental enterprise established its own foundation

Vol.10 No.3 9 to support artistic exchanges. Under its leadership, people began to compile and sort through critical writings that were published in periodicals and art catalogues. Starting in 1994, art critics began to conduct thorough research and actively gathered writings and arts coverage; part of this collection was used by cultural scholars as primary materials for their studies. And during the course of their discussions, many scholars also began to explore and question the definition, role, and function of art criticism and what makes a person qualified to write art criticism.

Another thing worth noting is that at that time many journalists did write about art, but their features were inclined more towards relaying information. So their writings cannot be considered critical. Other art writing produced at that time included discussions of how certain phenomena affected the art market and in-depth studies and analyses of individual artists’ works. This sort of in-depth analysis was still scarce as critics had little exposure to artists’ works. From the early to mid 1990s, art writing began to shift its focus from practical concerns to reaching consensus with artists and to receiving positive remarks from them. During these years, a lot of effort was put into promoting critical writing. Later someone proposed to organize an annual award for art criticism, inviting scholars to be jurors to select essays that demonstrated a high intellectual standard. By the end of the 1990s, art writing already had a marked impact on the academic field because in 1998 and 1999 many overseas Ph.D. graduates in art criticism returned to Taiwan. These graduates were instrumental in introducing art writing as an academic specialization to Taiwanese art institutions, an area of interest that now extends to the study of art history. This gradual development had its own obstacles because during that time many art historians did not consider art criticism a formal discipline, as it did not have its own established history and methodology. This new academic field later attracted a group of young scholars who had not received any formal training in arts, but in other disciplines such as foreign languages, sociology, and political science. That was how art criticism gradually emerged as a specialized field. To sum up, it was a field that drew only the interest of a very specific group of people, and it still is. This first wave of scholars are now actively writing critical analysis as journalists or editors of art journals.

Towards the end of the 1990s, this first wave of art critics (like myself) were invited to curate exhibitions. As far as I know, the majority of people who turned to curating had all begun their careers as art critics. So many of these critics/curators would use the approaches of art criticism as guidelines to select artists and artworks. And throughout these twenty years of development, it has been quite common to see critical writing being incorporated into curatorial practice.

In sum, critical art writing in Taiwan has undergone a long period of change and had its share of resistance to the art bubbles that happened not so long ago. Yet, its course of development is not totally exempt from the influence of the art market. We see how artworks are now being commodified, and I don’t know if this is the new mode of operation. But all in all, starting in the 1990s, critical art writing has always remained a fringe practice.

As for the art academies, ever since art criticism became a specialized discipline, many writings have started to display a tendency toward theorizing. This tendency has created a lot of reading blocks for readers and art collectors, especially when a writer makes extensive references to

10 Vol.10 No.3 cultural theory. Even though many art critics have a cross-disciplinary background such as philosophy and their input has greatly diversified the language of art interpretation, their tendency of over-theorizing has made critical writing inaccessible to many people. Another thing at issue is the problem of translation. And this problem is most evident when one has to translate some special terminology from French into Chinese. Another new phenomenon that I personally am not happy about is that young artists like to use very theorized language to describe their work; for instance, they often incorporate well-known theorists’ writings into their statements so that their works appear to have a lot to say. They believe that doing so will give them a better position in the art world. Currently, many scholars are overly immersed in displaying their knowledge of theory, yet their writings reveal little recognition of art creation itself.

These are phenomena that can be commonly observed in the Taiwanese art world.

Bao Dong: There are many overlaps in the development of critical writing in the 1990s and at present, including the industrialization of art, and, as Jason Chia Chi Wang has just mentioned, the problem of translation, which renders art criticism inaccessible. Another thing worth noting is that while the art market consists largely of galleries, auction houses, and art fairs, the art academies also play a role within the system. Many writings are specifically targeted at the scholarly market, for instance, to facilitate discussions of certain professors’ works and tenure evaluations. Certainly, one can say that these writings do offer an objective, neutral perspective on art. Yet, all forms of critical writing, including those rants published on the Internet, are in fact part of the product of the cultural industry.

Let’s assume that all critics are capable of offering independent and objective perspectives. We are constantly reminded that when we speak, we should try our best to remain objective. But is this something that we are capable of achieving? Even if we can remain objective in our writing, will we be able to influence the art market as we wish? Does the art industry operate within a dynamic, organic system? Or is the discourse being dominated by art critics only?

These are the questions that I propose.

Wang Chunchen: This is certainly the case in reality. There’s been an increasing demand for critical texts and art critics. Take Beijing as an example. Many of the critics receive their training from art academies, and they work in galleries and with the media. So they have lots of opportunities to write. Sometimes, in order to finish their writing quickly, they may not invest too much thought into it. Critics often have their own preferences for artists they tend to write about, those with whom they have frequent contact. That’s why some artists receive more recognition that others, because they have higher media exposure. The crisis writers are facing now is how to maintain intellectual autonomy. Are we subjected to the influence of the media, or of our training and academic institutions? A few years ago, we had discussions on whether artists and critics should have their own perspective. This is not simply a question of styles. It has to do with value judgement and stating your own ground.

Vol.10 No.3 11 Two days ago in Beijing, there was a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum of China followed by a small panel discussion. Some critics from the older generation said they believed the exhibition had brought contemporary Chinese art to a new phase; other literary scholars then commented that Chinese art had finally come out of the Middle Ages. Regardless of whether one wants to fulfill the market demand or simply wants to be flattering, these remarks seem to be a bit of an overstatement. If we intend to approach an artist’s work seriously and objectively, we shouldn’t embellish our judgement with scholarly pretense. One can always discern personal preferences in the writing; as we are all different, we produce different forms of criticism. Just like art. There are many modes of creation. Some people say that art criticism cannot ascertain anything, and this has much to do with our current society, which is still quite volatile. Therefore, much art writing reflects this uncertainty and ambiguity.

Sheng Wei: The issue of the theorization of art writing is an imperative concern. The reason art writing has become increasingly unreadable is that art academics and people from other disciplines such as philosophy have turned to art writing. The institutionalization of art criticism as an academic discipline also plays a role. I think this is an issue that has become more and more apparent since the 1980s and 1990s.

The intrinsic nature of art criticism and its purpose has gone through a great deal of transformation. For instance, in one of the earliest art writings by Clement Greenberg, there are passages describing narratives of artworks and his readings of visual symbols. These writings tend to be descriptive and impressionistic because many readers were unable to see the artworks in person. So art writing became their only medium to learn about art. I think contemporary art criticism is now serving a different purpose, particularly in the context of China. Art criticism before the New China era was also different. It had a mass appeal and was widely discussed in public forums. During the post-New China era, on the other hand, Mao Zedong outlined at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art that literary criticism should be one of the principal methods of struggle in the world of literature and art. Art writing was then turned into a politically charged endeavour. During the 1980s and 1990s, the production of art criticism was geared towards promoting the development of contemporary Chinese art by importing new theories from the West as a catalyst. This transplantation of ideas and theories has created a vast semantic discrepancy that makes reading a difficult experience. And the shifting of focus to the theoretical value of an artwork makes the art form seem to have no relevance in art writing. This is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Gao Minglu: I want to say that during the panel discussion, since this is a rare opportunity for our friends of Xi’an, I welcome you to put up your hand to share your thoughts and questions.

I have a question that I hope members of the panel can talk about. From your own experience, what are the issues that are most pertinent to the development of contemporary art writing in China? How do you approach and consider the subject that you choose to write about? And what do you wish to accomplish?

12 Vol.10 No.3 Bao Dong: Any forms of art criticism, including the choice of theoretical context, has its own specific concern and purpose. Throughout my writing experience, I’ve always felt that one of the first things we need to address is to eradicate the collective unconscious of modernism. Art education in China was essentially based upon the theory of Marxism, and, of course, with a vulgar modification. The fundamental premise is that art reflects, and is conditioned by, its period and reality, which oversimplifies and socializes the modernist theories of archetypes and reflection, as well as historical determinism. I often make the analogy that modernism is a ghost residing in everyone’s thinking, writing, and artistic endeavour. Some artworks may appear to be very contemporary, but in essence they are still rooted in the modern aesthetic. In this case, my point is to emphasize the importance of criticism, returning our focus to the essential nature of art, which is not to say we should return to ontology. What I’m more concerned about is that in addressing modernism, we should use textual approaches to understanding art and the relationship between the artist and the entire art system. The art system does not exist as an isolated entity because it is conditioned by its cultural background. Art criticism and artwork do not precede each other, as they are both interrelated.

Wang Chunchen: My definition of art criticism is that it has to propose questions, not only to point out certain phenomena, but to bring forth the underlying issues that give rise to such phenomena. Critical writing is also a descriptive task, like journalism, but one also has to make an independent judgement in one’s interpretation of art. The basis of judgement stems from contemporary culture and the context in which the artwork is situated. Yet, sometimes, when writers are given too many writing jobs, they end up applying the same approach and values to their interpretation, which creates a lot of homogenous writing that does not have any specific concerns. So critical analysis is the fundamental element in art criticism.

Sheng Wei: Starting in the 1980s, art criticism had always been expected to stand on a moral or academic high ground in approving or disapproving artists and art production. Yet the rise of the art market in 2000 made the aesthetic standard become market-driven. That was the time when people started to talk about the aphasia of art criticism. In order to avoid the discourse of power, many writings tended to be overly theorized and convoluted, and so they received little reception from people, as few could understand anything. Unlike art history, an established discipline that emerged from an organic development, art criticism is still evolving and yet prematurely being steered towards theorization. The implication is that obfuscation weakens the development of art as well as one’s incentive to consume/read art criticism. So I think the major issue is that critical art writing is starting to lose its legitimacy. To alter this situation, the first thing we need to do is to respect the reality of art creation, how artists create, and how their works influence everyday life. An art critic should take more initiative to understand these different aspects of reality.

The second point I wish to bring to your attention is that we should refrain from using Western art methodology too much. It’s been said that there’s a lack of scientific approach in Chinese art criticism. But the problem is we cannot use this approach to understand contemporary Chinese art because there is no support of an established system or critical tradition that enables

Vol.10 No.3 13 this. That’s why I believe art writing should be about initiating a more open and direct dialogue with the public and with the artists and their artworks.

Jason Chia Chi Wang: This morning we had a lot of discussions about the relationship between art and art criticism and about what can and cannot be said. As an art critic, I often wonder how artists can influence my writing.

In talking about the relationship between art and criticism, one can remain very objective. Yet it is very difficult to maintain such objectivity in reality. Sometimes both artists and critics may have their shared concerns, and sometimes they don’t, so it’s important for an art critic to know the artist’s perspective. This brings us to ponder whether an artist and art critic should become friends. If so, how close they can be? As intimate as a married couple? Sometimes I also ask my students these questions. An art critic can have an idealistic vision of what the artist is like. But once the critic gets to know the artist in person, they may part ways because the artist may not be the same person as the critic anticipates. So when I write, I prefer to use the contextual approach to study how an artist’s work is related to his or her background, why the work was created at a specific time, what it reveals, and whether it has any relevance within the context of contemporary society. This is my approach to art criticism, which also informs my curatorial decisions.

Wang Chunchen: The accelerated growth of the gallery industry has turned art criticism into publicity writing. But this also brings up a deeper question as to why our writing only aspires to reporting trends, focusing on an exclusive group of artists and promoting the so-called development of art. While art criticism is encumbered by market forces, artwork also relies heavily on interpretive texts in order to gain significance.

Recently I’ve been doing case studies on individual artists. Sometimes you need to know an artist to a certain degree in order to gain a fuller understanding of the artist’s work and perspective, even though one cannot say this results in an objective analysis. And it’s not too difficult to achieve critical objectivity. You have to put aside your subjective judgement and gather research materials as much as possible so that you can have a comprehensive understanding of what motivates an artist to produce certain work. So if we talk about the issue of case studies, the problem does not lie in how much this form of writing is influenced by galleries or the cultural industry. It has to do with the writer’s approach to research. To have a concrete understanding, you have to begin with studying the artist first. And this is how one should establish one’s evaluation standard.

Sheng Wei: Earlier we talked about the relationship between artists and critics. I didn’t mean that the relationship has to be like that of close friends. What I wanted to emphasize was that art historians and art critics have different approaches in their research. Art historians often have a comprehensive collection of historical references they can draw from. Yet, for art critics, since contemporary Chinese art is still at a stage of developing, there’s no complete collection of research materials they can base their writing on. That’s why they have to conduct interviews with artists to find out if there are any unpublished materials still hidden in their studios. This is all important information that tells you something about the creative process of an artist. So earlier, I wasn’t speaking about personal affiliation and worldly etiquette, even though it may

14 Vol.10 No.3 influence one’s writing. And it makes sense that if you really dislike an artist’s work, how can you become his or her friend? If you can be friends with an artist, that means you must somehow like his or her work.

In regards to Wang Chunchen’s case studies, even though I disagree with this form of writing, I’m not denying its value altogether. But there’s a kind of case study that I object to. It’s those writings that offer nothing substantial but simply information about what the artist is doing and what she or he did in the past. I think your case study approach to understanding an artwork is sensible, although what I’m concerned about is whether it has the purpose of addressing contemporary phenomena or offers a critical framework that allows for interpretation. After all, we should take charge of our writing instead of letting the artwork guide it.

Wang Chunchen: From the artist’s perspective, sometimes one may have anxiety about whether his or her influence on art will be lasting. And this is the time when the artist will look for affirmation from art historical writing. A critical writer will approach the subject by examining the evolution of the artworks and the influences the artist has had in the past several decades. However, let’s suppose that Fang Lijun’s work were to have no significant changes over the next thirty years—if this were the case, how could one offer a critical analysis through the case study approach? This is a limitation that we should take note of.

Gao Minglu: Our panelists have each presented a dilemma that art criticism is currently facing. Sheng Wei’s mention of the legitimacy of art criticism is an issue worth pondering. So what is the legitimacy of contemporary Chinese art criticism? When Mao Zedong laid out the cultural policy of serving the proletarian class, he insisted upon the legitimacy of art as a practice that should serve the masses. And after the 1980s, with the emergence of the contemporary art movement, we felt that we should use art writing to impart new ideas to the literate public. This literate public included university students and those who were interested in culture and knowledge. So under this premise of China’s modernization, and within the context of modernity, art writing as a form of propaganda began to lose its legitimacy. During that time, I gave lectures at different universities. There was one time at the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics where students came to my lecture on the introduction of the ’85 New Wave Movement. Many students from the audience had no knowledge of Western art history and the concept of contemporary art. I remember the hall was filled with students, including the stairways. After the lecture was over, I felt compelled to repeat it again. I sensed that art writing served not art itself, but the literate masses. At that time, in that circumstance, art writing and the cultural audience were inseparable. The question of legitimacy never came to our minds because we had a clear direction of how to employ art theories and criticism.

After the 1990s, with the emergence of the art market, globalization became a frequent topic of discussion. Contemporary Chinese art was no longer a concern limited to a specific group of people. Unlike in the 1980s, when Chinese art still had its autonomy from globalization and capitalization, artists were driven, or even compelled by, the spirit of self-sacrifice to contribute to the development of art. Between the 1980s and 1990s, even though we were confined by many restrictions in our lives, the act of pursuing freedom

Vol.10 No.3 15 was in itself a form of freedom. Earlier we also had discussions about the legitimacy of contemporary art, but I think the topic of pursuing legitimacy, in this instance, is based on a false premise because art cannot be legitimized. Contemporary art is an endeavour of pursuing truth and artistic vision; it has nothing to do with finding a niche or a legitimate position within the social system. Thus, the issue of legitimacy has no relevance in the discourse of contemporary art development.

But, today, when we talk about the legitimacy of art criticism, the discussion points us to the reality that critical art writing is now facing a predicament; when we have to defend the legitimacy of art writing, it means that its validity has already been questioned and denied. Why do people question art writing? Is it because our critical analysis can no longer solve any problems pertaining to the relationship between art and reality? If we focus on textual analysis, I think a lot of these writings make logical sense. But it is another issue if we talk about the objectivity of these writings. As mentioned by our panelists earlier, it is almost impossible to achieve this critical objectivity, even if one uses a theoretical approach to analyze an art phenomenon or an artwork. Why is it impossible? It’s because every critic has his or her own limitations, which makes his or her writing unable to achieve a complete correspondence with reality. So who is capable of judging whether an analysis is one hundred percent corresponding to reality? This is not a matter that can be evaluated by one single person or a critic. No one is capable of measuring objectivity, nor speaking on behalf of the entire society. No such person exists. That’s why in the end we have to let this question of legitimacy be determined by the masses, or members of the public who are receptive to art criticism. Even though every art critic aspires to achieve absolute objectivity, including myself and every critic in this hall, is this something that can be accomplished? This morning Maya Kóvskaya proposed a very radical approach, and that is to incorporate everyday life into art criticism. Actually, Maya’s proposal is a vision pursued by many generations of critics. Personally I think that being an art critic means you need to have a sense of distance, which is not to say you’re not allowed to have any interaction with artists; on the contrary, such interaction with artists is crucial. It’s just that once this interaction becomes too personal or emotional, it will influence your perspective and value judgement. So having a sense of distance does not mean that one has to resist or reject something; it just means that you can only gain a better view of an artist’s personality and life experience as well as the correlation between an artwork and the society if you observe from a more distant and elevated angle.

Also, if art criticism is to reflect reality, it has to be written from a neutral, distanced perspective and has to have an autonomous system of discourse, logic, and rhetoric that allows a critic to coherently and convincingly present an analysis within the context of social reality.

So, in conclusion, I think one can attribute the problem of art criticism to the absence of an independent system of discourse that allows critics to examine the complex nature of Chinese reality. What we have to confront is not simply the complicated, multi-layered reality of the Chinese art world and art system. Even I, as a seasoned critic, as well as these young critics on this panel, can hardly encapsulate what the art system is. Recently, the government appointed a few Chinese artists who are known for their mischievous, subversive art practices as honorary fellows of the Contemporary Art Academy of

16 Vol.10 No.3 China. In this instance, how can we analyze and decode the discourse of government officials? This is a complicated phenomenon. Institutionalization and commercialization have been a frequent topic of art criticism for many generations. And the dominating presence of the art market has undoubtedly brought about many negative impacts. Yet I’ve also met some very idealistic gallery owners who are interested only in showing works with little commercial value. And then in Beijing, there is an entrepreneur, also an art collector, who has funded several art projects and the production of art catalogues. So one cannot deny that there are gallery owners who are devoted to art philanthropy, even though some of them may not be entirely driven by art-related concerns. The art world in the United States has the financial support of national and private foundations as well as other non-profit organizations such as universities. But in China, we don’t have this type of assistance. Right now the Chinese government has also established its own arts foundation. It is another interesting topic for discussion. The way it operates is to use the funds to make investment and purchase artworks and then release the works through other channels. And this whole enterprise is being considered as an arts foundation, something that has a different connotation in the West. That’s why I find it difficult to offer any conclusive analysis on our cultural production or cultural industry, as it involves too many complicated issues. Take an example of this trip to Xi’an. I was surprised to see how fast the city is developing and was happy to see Xi’an Qujiang being developed into an art district. You can see art and cultural development everywhere. However, I have to ask whether the cultural software and hardware developments are keeping in step with each other. Perhaps this question is not specific only to Xi’an, but also to China as a nation. It’s hard for art writing to find its position in the face of these overwhelming changes and complications. What can you really say when an artwork is auctioned for more than ten million dollars? We are bound to lose our voice. This may sound bad, but being an art critic in China means that sometimes you have to sell your body and at the same time erect a monument to prove your chastity. Under these circumstances, Chinese art criticism is facing a major crisis.

As a university professor teaching in the West, to cite an example, every year one has to submit a curriculum vitae including all the research titles or publications to date, indicating which ones are published in an academic journal, gallery, or auction house catalogues. These writings cannot be mixed together. The tenure review is a multi-level procedure conducted under strict evaluation guidelines. In the West, like in the United States, academic publications, including art magazines, generally do not give you writing fees, and even if they do, the fee is nominal. Despite that, many professors are willing to submit their papers to these journals because they represent their scholarly pride. I don’t know what the situation is like in Xi’an. I stayed in Sichuan before and once witnessed an incident that involved a student whose scholarship application was under review. In order to get his application granted, he paid a journal to publish his paper. It seemed to him to be the only option because it involved his survival and personal welfare. An incident like this reveals how education development is being industrialized.

We are now living in an economic utopia where you see people singing, dancing, and feasting to extol the good times. Is it a good phenomenon? Yes, certainly, and Chinese people deserve this as we have long been suffering from this lack of economic prosperity. However, in spite of all these developments,

Vol.10 No.3 17 we need to remain lucid and vigilant in evaluating the market bubbles. This is the reason I think it is crucial to apply this attitude to art criticism.

And in regard to talking about the academic aspect of art writing, I think the problem is not that we don’t have intelligent and wise critics; the issue is we need to cultivate independent and critical thinking as well as to encourage writers who are driven by a sense of purpose.

So this is my brief closing remark. I would like to give this microphone to our audience who may want to share with us their thoughts and questions.

Question from the audience: Professor Gao, after the censorship in 2009 of your twentieth anniversary retrospective of the China/Avant-garde Exhibition, what reasoning did the government officials give you? And did the artists receive any compensation? How can a curator avoid the risk of being censored?

Gao Minglu: Generally speaking, it was a rare case, and it somehow happened to me. No explanation has been offered since the retrospective which was to be held in February of 2009. At that time I was really angered by their action and wrote a declaration of protest. I approached the Public Security Bureau, and their chief said it was simply because I didn’t report to them. And I said I had never had to report anything to the Security Bureau throughout my career of art curating. Besides, I had already submitted my proposal and rent, so what was the need to involve the Public Security Bureau? They had no grounds upon which to impose this censorship on me. The chief then said if I disagreed with them, I could sue them. At that time, I didn’t have the time and energy to deal with them publicly. And for health reasons, I couldn’t persist in my protest. Many students then persuaded me that this was a rare occasion that would not happen often.

Wang Chunchen: This is where the dilemma lies when one talks about contemporary Chinese art. For instance, in June 2010, there was an art event in Songzhuang, and the administration bureau approached us and said they didn’t want us to have any nudity in our work or performance art. Everyone knows that artists need to break boundaries, and yet the government still wants to impose restrictions. We all know what things can or cannot be done when you have an exhibition in Beijing. So gradually we’ve all been limited by our own self-censorship. And it is a subconscious thing that affects our critical writing, for example, there are certain vocabularies and terms that cannot be used in our writing. That’s why we have issues developing independent thinking.

Bao Dong: There are artists whose goal is to mainly break boundaries, like challenging certain terms that are banned on the Internet. I remember the Songzhuang incident where nude performances were prohibited. Artists knew about this and decided to go ahead. They believed that they had the freedom to take off their clothes. On the other hand, artistically speaking, their action didn’t seem to add any artistic value to their work because it was like doing a promotion; it was done for the sake of challenging the government instead of for art itself. This type of practice is a form of condoning rather than posing an antithetical action against government censorship.

18 Vol.10 No.3 Question: Professor Gao, could you please give us an objective analysis of how the ’85 New Wave Movement affected the development of contemporary Chinese art?

Gao Minglu: The emergence of the ’85 New Wave Movement marked the first time when Chinese artists came to be aware of contemporary art. And there is an issue that has not really been discussed, which is how we can posit this art movement within the context of international art development. In fact, the ’85 New Wave Movement was under three major influences: one was Western surrealism, the second was Zen Buddhism, and the third was a confluence of different trends of thought and philosophy. The surge of the ’85 New Wave and the awareness of contemporary art came to be manifested a decade after the Cultural Revolution, not because of a particular political incident, but through these ten years of cultural baptism. I think the most important thing during the art movement was that we proposed to use the slogan “art’s citizens” (yishu laobaixin). At that time, artists were not concerned about being an art star or a millionaire. Their main pressing concern was to introduce this awareness of art to the general public. So they were very mass conscious, thinking merely of how they could promote art to the university students and the public. During the China/Avant-garde Exhibition in Beijing, every day after its closing time, you could see people gathered in groups in the square talking about art. These people may not have known each other, and they were just regular folks. Unfortunately, this type of art movement happened only for a short while. In 1987, when China’s economy started booming, many artists turned to design and fashion. Actually some of the art phenomena of the early 1990s had already happened in 1987, for instance, at the China/Avant-garde Exhibition, the works of Fang Lijun and Liu Xiaodong already displayed a sense of sarcasm that was symptomatic of the mentality of the new generation. Although the ’85 New Wave lasted for only a short period of time, it set the parameters for the conceptual and intellectual development of contemporary Chinese art.

Question from the audience: During the morning panel, there was a discussion about the definition of contemporary art, which consists of a wide scope of practices, including fine art, dance, architecture, fashion, and culinary art. Since the field of contemporary art is so broad and varied, how can one analyze the relationship between fine art and other art forms? And what is the role of fine art?

My second question is that while the architecture of the Xi’an Art Museum is very elegant and impressive, as Professor Gao has just mentioned, one has to question whether our cultural evolution is keeping pace with this type of external development. And today our panelists have also talked about the challenges arising from incorporating Western art concepts and theories into the Chinese art discourse. So how can art critics transform these ideas from the West into something specific to Chinese art?

Gao Minglu: I wanted to clarify that I was not referring to the Xi’an Art Museum specifically. In fact, I know nothing about the operation of this museum. I was only pointing out a phenomenon that can be observed across China, like Chongqing, for example.

Vol.10 No.3 19 Wang Chunchen: This issue of cultural development is a responsibility that has to be shared by all members of the arts community. As for the question of Western influences, I think people in this generation are becoming more open and receptive to ideas coming not just from the West, but also from around the world. Certainly, one can detect the influences of the Han and Tang dynasties in Xi’an culture. But generally speaking, it is no longer easy to distinguish which ideas belong to the West, or the East, since we are all subjected to the influence of globalization. I think if an artwork is created in China or by a Chinese artist, then regardless of what mediums, materials, or concepts the artist employs, it can still be regarded as Chinese specific.

In terms of how one can digest Western theories, I don’t think there exists a contentious relationship between the East and the West. I adopt Western concepts as long as I think they may apply to my work, and I don’t blindly believe or oppose everything from the West.

Sheng Wei: This gentleman’s question is very interesting. I’ve also been thinking about the notion of the West: What is the West? What is it comprised of? The United States? France? And who else? And I still haven’t come up with an answer. I think the question of the West is not a conceptual inquiry, but a linguistic one. It doesn’t make any logical sense to say China vs. the South, or China vs. the North, so the notion of China vs. the West should also sound equally absurd. That’s why I think our focus should not be asking what the West is. On the other hand, Chinese critics seem to have displayed two tendencies in their writing: one is to regard the West as a utopia, whereby one should mould one’s society accordingly; another is to resist the West as a dystopia. Each of these approaches reflects an aspect of the Chinese reality. So in talking about the West, we are in fact talking about ourselves.

Question from the audience: It is now quite common to see Chinese cities hosting their own art biennials. Does this phenomenon reflect the state of contemporary Chinese art? Since many of these events are market driven, do they have a negative impact on our young people as well as university students?

Bao Dong: The problem of art biennials is not specific to China only. There are about one hundred biennials around the world, some of which just vanish after a few editions, and then new ones appear in other cities. Due to globalization, many new rising countries such as China and Russia have used these events to display their power and prosperity, like the Shanghai Expo. While many cities in China are hosting their own biennials, people should be more concerned about establishing their own art system instead of seeing these events as vogue parties attended by celebrities, which has no relevance to the development of Chinese art. We have our successes and failures in hosting these exhibitions, so we cannot generalize this phenomenon. The original intention was to hold an art exhibition once every two years; it does not have to be large scale or international. So this is a point that we should all consider.

As for your question regarding the negative impact of the biennials, I think the fact that you are asking this question indicates that you already have the capacity to reflect and not be influenced by them.

20 Vol.10 No.3 Jason Chia Chi Wang: I have curated several art biennials. In Europe, many art biennials are used as a cultural strategy to promote their cities’ images as well as to revitalize their regional industries and economies. Since the 1990s, especially after the year 2000, there has been a boom of art biennials throughout Asia, including the Singapore Biennale in 2002. I think part of this biennial phenomenon is propelled by the manifestation of Asian modernity.

Question from the audience: Being a contemporary artist means one has take a leading role in guiding the development of art. That’s why artists need to be positive, progressive, and uplifting. And as an art critic, one has to offer a neutral and objective analysis of an artwork. Some panelists spoke earlier about performance art and other more radical art approaches, so how can art critics offer any guidance to these artists?

Bao Dong: First of all, an artist’s mission is not to be a leader or a forerunner; every artist has his or her own logic, unique sensibility, and subjectivity. The legitimacy of contemporary art is based on the affirmation of the subjectivity of an artist and artwork. Secondly, I disagree with the assumption that artists should be positive or uplifting. What does it mean to be healthy, progressive, and positive? If we treat everyone as an equal, independent individual, then no one should have the authority to guide and direct anyone. The ideal that one should maintain one’s own autonomy was something that was pursued by the artists during the 1980s.

Sheng Wei: I also agree with Bao Dong. I’m also against the prevalent assumptions that the purpose of art criticism is to guide and direct art creation, or that it should be in service of art. The former assumption gives art writing too much prominence, the latter too little regard. But both assumptions are based on the ground that art writing and art creation should be in agreement with each other. Yet the fact is art creation and art criticism both have their own intellectual autonomy and particular concerns. Art does not preach, nor should it be didactic. The same rule applies to art writing as well. It is sufficient in itself; it does not need to direct and guide the creative process.

Wang Chunchen: In some cases, art writing can influence the creative process. We can even say that art cannot exist without art criticism. Art history has already demonstrated that this is a fact, even though there are times when they are both independent of each other. It really depends on what you want to do with your art, whether you want it to be influenced by art writing or not.

Jason Chia Chi Wang: Perhaps another way of saying this is that it is a mutually beneficial relationship.

Gao Minglu: I am really happy to have this opportunity to take part in this intellectual exchange. I believe our panelists are also thinking the same thing. I came to Xi’an twenty years ago, and today I am able to have this discourse with so many people here. I thank you all for joining this panel.

On behalf of our audience, I would like to extend our deepest thank you to Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and our overseas art critics, as well the organizer of this event, the Xi’an Art Museum. I hope in the future we will be able to hold more events such as this one in Xi’an. Thank you to you all.

Transcription provided by Xi’an Art Museum Translated by Chunyee Li

Vol.10 No.3 21 Beatrice Leanza The Curator Mansion: An Impossible Place of Infinite Possibilities

Make room. Look out the window. Look onto the street. Space out. Watch a building be. Take the time to eat your lunch. Take up time. Get a haircut. Take your time. Massage your soul. Sleep. Dream something up. Revel in this mood. Get lost in the empire of atmosphere. As in the unconscious, something always happens when nothing does.

–Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts1

n March 2002, just a few months before I moved to Beijing, the Piccolo Teatro in Milano debuted Infinities, an award-winning Idramaturgical wonder staged through the collaborative efforts of visionary director Luca Ronconi and John D. Barrow, a cosmologist and mathematician from the University of Cambridge. The project was initiated by the Sigma Tau Foundation, a philanthropic institution dedicated to promoting innovative encounters between science and the general public. With Barrow, the playwright, and Ronconi, the stage wizard, Infinities explored the mathematical concept of “infinity” through five separate scenarios, each of which functioned as a performative tableau focusing on one singular aspect of this “immediately appealing subject matter.”2 The play was hosted in the vacant spaces of Magazzini della Scala, a large hangar-like complex that once housed the laboratories of La Scala Opera House and is located in the city’s far northern industrial zone of Bovisa. On arrival, audiences were let inside in groups of seventy, which would sequentially move up through the five different scenarios so that five different groups were simultaneously inhabiting the space.Infinities took the city as the theatre, creating within it a “moment” through which different forms of intellectual, physical, and social movements came to be lived and collectively performed. Barrow continues: “Story-telling seemed to be the way to penetrate its [the concept of infinity] paradoxes so that they became familiar by the device of immersing the audience into other realities where the counter-intuitive features of the infinite loomed as large as life.”3

Amid many of the spectacular and modest contemporary art events I have experienced over the course of the past decade, Infinities is still the one that has left with me a deep and most memorable impression. The play embodies a masterful synthesis of what I envision art’s “doing”: viscerally reawakening both the senses and consciousness through the expanding of fields of knowledge and life in the present tense of culture. Infinities evoked and provoked an active engagement with what Giuliana Bruno calls “a radical refashioning of a politics of time”4 as we nowadays experience it

22 Vol.10 No.3 through the uneven spaces of our ordinary, built environments: a hyper- connected world in endless solution and dissolution, where notions of proximity and distance are constantly reconfigured.

The “question of space” has been central to the transdisciplinary turn of theoretical studies addressing the disembodied geographies of the postmodern condition since the 1980s. It was paramount in the consequent emergence of “oppositional cultural practices” that responded to changing notions of place-bound identity and site-bound knowledge, as well as in informing a variety of critical endeavours and artistic practices through which ever-expanding paradigms of “community” and “site-specificity” have been produced until today.5 The transformative nexus between space, place, and identity and its connection to the ongoing permutations between institutions and locations specific to the Asian context traverses much of the research at the basis of my own curatorial practice.

At the end of 2005, after I concluded my three-year collaboration as a curator at the CAAW (China Art Archives and Warehouse), directed by artist Ai Weiwei, I teamed up with architect and designer Li Naihan to found BAO Atelier, a hybrid studio for integrated research in curatorial, editorial, and design practices. This initiative reflected a desire to create an open-ended environment for critical activity and collaboration that would enable a cross-fertilization among different creative disciplines and communities that we perceived to be missing in the local context. By the mid 2000s, Chinese art and artists had indeed moved out of the “periphery” to embrace a period of progressive integration, and disproportioned success, within the international market place while enjoying the official endorsement of its very own institutions within the local one.

The sudden, unmediated proliferation of museums, galleries, perennial exhibitions (like biennials and triennials), and so-called creative clusters certainly accelerated the course of professionalization needed to meet the rapacious demands of the global cultural industry6 and allowed the mobilization of private and public capital in the development of a local system for the production and dissemination of art. Yet it also debased the thereof created institutions in what curator Carlos Basualdo defines as “the ability to communicate as discrete singularities”;7 that is, to retain the role and responsibility to speak with a degree of autonomy and independence outside of market logic and self-reflexive academicism, and, therefore, with and of their own identity.

One of the very first projects we embarked on resonated in a moment when the pre-Olympic construction frenzy was attracting to China unprecedented international attention—the sheer size and speed of the Chinese urban miracle was undeniably presenting new intellectual and social challenges to the envisioning of life in the cities of the twenty-first century. Our aim was to create a project whose spatio-temporal framework could accommodate both critical reflection and physical engagement with the experience of this change and therefore expand the outreach of artistic activity beyond the confines of galleries and “dedicated” districts. Realized

Vol.10 No.3 23 in 2006 and 2007, Borderline/Moving Images was a radically collaborative Opening event at Borderline/ Moving Images 2007, Michal venture aimed at creating a habitat for cooperation among different local Kosakowski and Paolo Marzocchi, Just Like the spaces and educational institutions as well as an international network Movies, video and live piano performance, 30 mins., 2006, of professionals and artists. Borderline was co-organized with Platform Soho Shangdu building complex, Beijing. China Contemporary Art Institute and then networked through a constellation of public, private, commercial, and institutional venues. As market and private-driven initiatives dominated the shaping of encounters between art and the public, our project ideally wished to promote alternative forms of communication and artistic expression beside those motivated by existing interests.

Since 2002, the Beijing artistic scene has grown incrementally into self-contained urban areas (art districts) where an exuberant variety of both commercial and non-profit venues are providing the artistic population and the general public with “a least” common territory. A phenomenology dictated by the city’s urban setting and historical development—one of coexisting flexibility and fragmentation, crescent seclusion of specialized urban zones, gated quarters, and multiple communities—it has so far resulted in a form of conceptual disconnection among the spaces themselves and a passive, non- directional artistic discourse.8

Borderline/Moving Images sought to engage with the existing geopolitical changes that were implicating the Asian region within an ever-growing international network, furthering the horizon of the global cultural sphere eastward. Our team worked with a flexible structure and saw itself as a participant in a continuous discursive process, one that we thought had been prevented in the region by the imperative methods of global cultural expediency geared to satisfy the fast consumption of “new” artistic products from emerging countries, and the economics of mainstream discourse in contemporary art.

Our project was an experimental platform unfolding over the course of

24 Vol.10 No.3 Borderline/Moving Images six days and nine days, in 2006 and 2007, respectively, and that took as its 2007, entrance of Platform China Contemporary Art area of investigation the interconnections between visual production and Institute, Beijing, 2007. urban culture with a focus on video art and its multidisciplinary accounts. It featured an international program of both exhibitions and public programs such as talks, workshops, screenings, and live performances bridging perspectives from installation, short film, documentary, animation, performance and music, sound art, and architecture and design. The overall project was divided into three sections. The first consisted of two main exhibitions; a second section was constituted by a six-day program articulated in what we dubbed the Mobile Lab, whose design we commissioned to architect Neville Mars from the Beijing based Dynamic City Foundation; and the third was a set of evening events that explored the interdisciplinary interfaces of new media, performance, dance, and music— that is, the interactive grounds of visual art and digital culture.9

Borderline/Moving Images Like Infinities, Borderline used 2007, view of Soho Shangdu building complex, Beijing. the city as a stage, and it quite literally explored by means of its projects the expression by Saskia Sassen “the global city is a border zone,” one of new urban spatialities and temporalities within whose “interplay of their difference, strategic openings have emerged.”10 In the 2007 edition, the festival moved each day to a new location, starting from the newly opened complex of Soho Shangdu in the growing Central Business District area to Platform China in Caochangdi (both were exhibitions) and 798, to later move every two days to the Film Academy, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and finally the park by the drive-in cinema near Liangmaqiao Road, one of the most active venues in the music and sound art scene of the time.

Vol.10 No.3 25 The opening event’s live performances took place amid the hollow Top: Seduction—A Theory- Fiction between the Real and blocks of the newly built Soho Shangdu, while in its underground the Possible, exhibition view, Soho Shangdu underground parking lot one of the two main shows was staged. Seduction—A parking, Beijing. Left: Claire Fontaine, A Fire Is a Fire Is Not Theory-Fiction between the Real and the Possible, which I curated, a Fire, 2006, video, no sound, 2 mins., 16 secs, letters. Photo: was inspired by the homonymous book by French philosopher Jean Xiao Weilun. Courtesy of BAO Baudrillard11 and featured diverse installation-based video works Atelier, Beijing. Bottom left: Seduction— by seventeen international artists displaying documentary and A Theory-Fiction between experimental video, with footage appropriated from personal and the Real and the Possible, exhibition view, Soho Shangdu public archival material, CCTVs, mass media, pop culture video-clips, underground parking, Beijing. Gao Shiqiang, Great Bridge, cinema repertory, and so on. The various installations were articulated 2007, video, 26 mins., 46 secs. Photo: Xiao Weilun. Courtesy in a design by my studio partner Li Naihan, who grouped them of BAO Atelier, Beijing. into three separate parking spaces, so cars were still allowed to drive Bottom right: Seduction— A Theory-Fiction between through. As an opening statement to the rest of the festival, the show the Real and the Possible, exhibition view, Soho Shangdu tackled the perpetual nature of the predominantly visual production in underground parking, Beijing. Photo: Xiao Weilun. Courtesy contemporary culture on the backdrop of the structural transformation of BAO Atelier, Beijing. of urban scale and the proliferation of information technologies in a modernizing China. In my introduction to the show I stated:

26 Vol.10 No.3 Indeed the synthesis of global connectivity is not only challenging our sense of space, but also that of human presence within; while displacing the time of history in a one- dimensional media flow, it further brings into question that of its immanent possibilities and invisible modes of existence.12

Conversely, Seduction sought to shorten the distance between the compounded narratives embedded in the various works and the living landscape they inhabited—the Beijing urban theatre, a spectacle that never stops reworking and rethinking itself in a universe of bustling neighbourhoods. Furthermore, the exhibition design heightened the desired experience of destabilizing the viewers’ and the works’ own relationship with conscious perception and illusionary simulation. The different installations were arranged in an abstract city scene built with wooden panels and drawn as an imaginary strip moving along three main moments—the “ruin,” the “park,” and the “suburbs”—merged together in a single continuum. The experience offered to the viewer was one of reconsidering the way the works exposed themselves to each other (as belonging to diverse critical/cultural/information systems and subjective spheres) while retaining the minimum distance necessary for the latent meaning of each image to remain while becoming a point of collective meeting and counter-representation.

What a curator realizes at the site of an exhibition through the selection and positioning of works is a paradoxical creative equation that never results in the sum of its parts. As forms of physical encounters with art, unlike those mediated by discursive or archival dispositives, exhibitions are conflict-ridden environments where the perceptual dimension of the works shares space with various, immaterial orders of interpretation. All forms of exhibition are spatial strategies of containment that struggle with the task of accommodating simultaneously the cognitive linearity of a master narrative and the unpredictable patterns of intuitive association experienced by their viewers. At its best, the exhibition represents a visual and discursive identification with a particular “moment” of a living aesthetic, a moment in culture that, as Irit Rogoff defines it, produces itself in the convergence of different modes of creative enunciation traversing its site, which comprises curators, artists, and audiences alike.

Debates about the position of the curator of contemporary art and the nature of his or her practice reach back to the 1960s and continue to abound today on the theoretical and educational platforms that are generally imbricated in a Western discourse. In his essay “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse,” Paul O’Neil offers a panoramic view of the evolving figure of the curator, the progressive establishment of “curatorial practice as a potential space for critique,”13 and the rise of the exhibition as a privileged mode for the communication and circulation of both art and art professionals. Performed via the persona of the austellungmacher, jet-set flaneur, mediator, agent, artist, or author, curatorial activity is today mostly understood as performing a connective function,

Vol.10 No.3 27 operating among the spaces of art and the power relations that administer them—from patrons, collectors, artists, galleries, and various institutions to the media, funding bodies, universities, and administrative offices. The so-called global curator wallows between the role of a hyper-connected service provider and that of the independent intellectual, designing his or her “place” on an uneven, cumulative geography of short-lived temporal productions (like exhibitions) and public appearances to navigate the hierarchical “institutional superstructure of art at the level of discourse.”14

The downside of this nomadic condition has made itself incrementally manifest in the past decade with the emergence of Asian economic powers like China, India, and the Middle East, which, eager to partake in the circulatory system of art capitalism, have short-circuited the effects of what O’Neil labels the “new reputational economies.”15 The wealth of financial investments available to local administrations boosting large- scale urban developments, and city marketing targeting global cultural tourism, has created a specific market of which both prestigious museums’ franchise and international curators’ circulation are an expression. Furthermore the structure of the perennial exhibition has proven particularly effective for the task of exposing the local while taking in the global, often a process mediated by the presence generally of a Western “master curator” and a subgroup of “minion curators” who are plugged into the local context, as John Clark aptly describes them. Clark argues that “the participation of contemporary Asian art at biennials inside and outside Asia has thrown into relief the crucial role of curator mediators”16 that operate at a transnational level.

The embracing of the “Asian perspective” has certainly favoured the widening of artistic horizons displayed on the stage of large-scale international events and markets and proved beneficial for the opening up of both discursive and productive channels of communication. But it has also removed vital energy from the local contexts, diverting the attention of artists and curators, as well as that of institutions, from their immediate environments and turning them towards the courting of the interests of their overseas counterparts.

I do not believe there to be a one-model job description for the contemporary curator, especially when the very confines of its time-and- space realm of action and investigation—that is, “the contemporary”— remain as open-ended and diachronic as they are today. If the “contemporary question,” as art historian Terry Smith would call it, is posed “with an interest in knowing how big-picture concepts tie to the particularities of existence,”17 then increasingly today, in the aftermath of the modern and postmodern projects, the curator’s challenge, like that of others inhabiting the archipelago of culture, remains that of continuing to roam through “the unattended,” “the punctual,” and “the subversive” that are located in the folds of everyday life, in the spaces where it is built and assimilated as a collective pursuit.

28 Vol.10 No.3 Can we curators make ourselves observers and insiders at the same time? And what would be the place for such an endeavour? To whom would we be talking? It is this ambivalent positioning that I have often found myself pondering while living and working in China—a privileged as much as endangered location, where culture loses fixed grounds, constantly retold and rewritten, and refracting the hopes and visions of others who enter into it.

Emporium—A New Common In 2009 I organized an exhibition in Milan, my hometown, which asked Sense of Space, exhibition view, 2009, Museo della those questions and tried to make itself available to this unspoken, open- Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milano. ended field of contamination. The project, which has been reviewed in Courtesy of BAO Atelier, Beijing. the pages of this publication, was called Emporium—A New Common Sense of Space; it included twenty-seven artists from China, Japan, and Korea and featured mostly installation-based works spanning a range of practices by artists who have backgrounds in visual and sound art, architecture, and design.18 Emporium attempted to communicate the extent to which selected practices from these three countries all connected through a not yet “discursively constructed” space. It was intended to encourage the experience of latent relationships between space, work, and objects as they collectively recall visual and aesthetic conventions that retreat “from the grand narratives of transnational critique, to rather migrate into the expedient contingency of the quotidian and its material expressions, by instituting a new logic of co-existence with its differential and perpetual character.”19 Emporium is part of a series of projects I am currently working on under the thematic umbrella of what I have dubbed States of Distraction. This is continuous with my research and interest

Vol.10 No.3 29 Emporium—A New Common Sense of Space exhibition view, 2009, Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milano. Foreground: Kim Gisoo, Primitive Arms, 2006, plaster objects and prints, dimensions variable. Background: Kim Gisoo, Recording, 2006, single channel video, 4 mins., 20 secs. Courtesy of BAO Atelier, Beijing.

Emporium—A New Common Sense of Space, exhibition view, 2009, Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milano. Left: Ni Haifeng/Arrow Factory Beijing, Vive la Difference, mixed media installation, 2008. Right: Taiyo Kimura, Big Mistake—Headturner, 2007, vacuum cleaner, timer, work cloth kit. Courtesy of BAO Atelier, Beijing.

in the implication of “spatiality” (or the production of space, in Henri Lefebvre’s terms) in processes of artistic production and representation that inform historically and conceptually specific cultural perceptions of the “contemporary.” The title Emporium is appropriated in anecdotal fashion from a text by Walter Benjamin and references the forms of spatial consumption that the hyper-designed urban environments of the modern city have made us accustomed to, with a comparative association to Asian cities. Emporium was literally designed as a dense floating cloud of plinths, walls, and hanging screens upon which video projections looped, so as to leave the viewers to determine the “whereabouts” of the works’ belonging. In this tightly arranged continuum, the works were left aloof, free to “walk” on the margins of the conceptual perimeter of the exhibition space, so that their tentative, incomplete quality—characterized by the mundane and functional quality of their stylistic languages and materials—would accommodate the audience to enter an ambiguous, non-deterministic territory. Particularly, this apparently incoherent amalgamation of works and practices aimed at communicating how new generations of artists operating across the east Asian region are formulating new ways to deal with the actual space of art and social action by assuming a position of open, dynamic marginality, a subjective sphere accommodated in an unstable, non-representational space that is enforced by a rhetoric of the unexpressed.

The essentially individualistic and self-contained nature of these types of works speaks to a newfound impulse towards the search for protection

30 Vol.10 No.3 against the totalizing, overwhelming force of master discourses and spectacular designs in present day culture. Writing in the pages of Harvard Design Magazine, Michael Meredith states:

Utopia isn’t nowhere, where it used to be. In its microform, it is temporary and localized. Younger artists, architects, and designers aren’t rewiring all of society through design. They are rewiring only bits. Everyone is fine with operating in smaller niches, networked enclaves, and ever more remote campsites. The specific is the new generic.20

It is no coincidence that we are witnessing a critical resurgence of collaborative models in artistic and curatorial practices, as well as a revamping of critiques of socially engaged or community-oriented projects, which Tom Holert argues is emerging as an alternative response “to the contemporary governmentality that wants the individual to be both the singular performer of a spectacular self and the obedient and functioning team player.”21

I am not prone to envisioning all collaborative ventures in the arts or culture as being predicated on critical resistance; I see them more as non- antagonistic, contradictory actions that inject moments of a not-totally- planned deviation from the status quo. To a certain extent, exhibitions can present themselves similarly as positive pronouncements and should not aim at becoming totalizing deeds. Regardless of their scale, the risk they might encounter in doing so is that of reinforcing the rules of visibility that aim at containing them rather than proposing alternative ones.

Having worked as a curator in alternative art spaces—first with CAAW in Beijing and later an independent one in my own studio—I’ve often struggled with the task of finding a “place” for such endeavours that could respond to the dominant trend of “the big and the new” by resorting to modest strategies of intervention that engage me and the artists in a sort of “game of association.” On a couple of occasions, one in Shanghai in 2009, and then another in Beijing just recently, between November 2010 and January 2011, I’ve attempted to test out the very model of the exhibition and the practice of exhibition making, taking them as subjects of the projects.

In the first case, the exhibition The Shape of Things to Come included four artists based in Beijing and took place at 140sqm Gallery located in an apartment of an early-twentieth-century building in Shanghai’s French Concession, which retains the architectural characteristics of its past. The exhibition was conceived in reminiscence of a Wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosity, to engage the task of exposing the status of artistic objects to scientific self-inspection in a time other than the present. Cabinets of curiosity are often regarded as ancestral prototypes of the modern museum in that they contain an objectified reservoir of history as seen through the eyes and experiences of their owners. Inspired by the cabinet’s spatial characteristics, wherein paraphernalia and a variety of cultural artifacts are arranged in a personified associative map of symbols and places of

Vol.10 No.3 31 confused and overlapping timelines, the exhibition asks itself: What if we were able to test-drive the deflagration of our contemporary aesthetic universe? What parcels of history, relics of the contemporary, would be left as a visual repository of our present times, and in what new semiotic order would they re-awaken so that by way of an exhilarating expansion, stretched between experience and premonition, they would frame the possibility of a hopeful artistic prophecy beyond its predictable end?

The show presented a series of interlocking installations and textual The Shape of Things to Come, exhibition view, 140sqm interventions that was extended even to the design of the invitation by Gallery, 2009. Foreground: Liang Shuo, I am fucking one of the artists. The exhibition played out the idea of art as a subgenre beautiful no. 4, 2009, mixed media installation. Courtesy of science fiction, as its title was taken from the eponymous novel by H. G. of the artist and C5 Gallery, Beijing. Background: Elaine W. Wells. Their inherent similarities, that is, the obsessive drive to jumpstart Ho, The Cover of the Society of the Spectacle, site-specific history and break into the visual repository of a possible future, were installation, colour film on window, 2009. Courtesy of suggested by means of the works’ seamless overlapping and aesthetic the artist and 140sqm Gallery, interconnectedness which were put into dialogue with the spatial quality of Shanghai. the gallery itself, as if the works were found from an unknown future past.

In the second case, I collaborated with Platform China, in Beijing, to realize a tripartite exhibition called The Third Party,22 the second in the States of Distraction series that was hosted in their project space. The three consecutive parts, each of which presented itself as a possible iteration of an imaginary infinite show, were installed in the same space over the course of three months. The Third Party in this sense signified that supplementary,

32 Vol.10 No.3 Left: Qiu Xiaofei, Golden Age, 2009, site-specific installation, door, double-sided mirror, sound. Courtesy of the artist and 140sqm Gallery, Shanghai.

Right: Sun Xun, Ceausescus, 2009, ink on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and 140sqm Gallery, Shanghai.

Left: The Third Party—An Exhibition in Three Acts (Act 1: How to Be Alone), 2010, exhibition view of video room, Platform China. Courtesy of Platform China, Beijing.

Right: The Third Party—An Exhibition in Three Acts (Act 1: How to Be Alone), 2010, entrance view with exhibition title and credits, Platform China. Li Naihan, The Beehive, 2010, hexagonal cardboard boxes. Courtesy of the artist and Platform China, Beijing.

iterative element that is constituted in all dialogical processes, between a party A and a party B, between the works, the artists, concepts, and exhibitions themselves. Each with its own title and subject matter, the three moments of this show explored overall the shaping of relationships between narrative and aesthetic objects to foreground an inquiry in the realm of the “ordinary” specific to the Chinese context. They did so by mobilizing overarching frames of reference and critique currently at play through three analytical environments tackling, respectively, issues of self- historicization, witnessing/archiving, and collaboration.

For each iteration of the project, the works were accommodated in a display system called The Beehive, which I realized in collaboration with my partner Li Naihan. Built in units of hexagonal cardboard boxes, this modular structure was meant to become continuous with the flexible discursive framework of the exhibition which was intended as a “field report,” one that escapes the structural preordering of objectifying analysis to disclose all possible conceptual and thematic associations embedded in it.

Curatorial activity might be seen as a spatio-temporal narration housing a very specific and subjective perception that should contribute with generosity and passion to whatever the contemporary offers itself to be—simultaneously an individual and a collective creation. In face of the current debates surrounding the demise of the traditional institutions of art, especially museums, as envisioned by the modern project, the role of curators—of individuals and not institutions—seems to be rightfully gaining momentum. There might not be an ultimate place or final destination for the curator to be, no ideal or finite abode to accommodate

Vol.10 No.3 33 The Third Party—An Exhibition in Three Acts (Act 1: How to Be Alone), 2010, exhibition view, Platform China. Left: Wang Wei, Samples, 2010, site-specific installation, ceramic tiles, black paint, 2010. Foreground: Jin Shi, TuMu No. 1 and TuMu No. 3, 2009, old table and stool, construction materials. Background: Jin Shi, Half Life, 2010, installation drawings. Archway: Li Naihan, The Beehive, hexagonal cardboard boxes. Courtesy of the artists and Platform China, Beijing.

Opposite page middle: The Third Party—An Exhibition in Three Acts (Act 2: The Stranger), 2010, Platform China. Yan Lei, Whomever you don’t know is art, 2010, installation, photographic print and text on wall. Courtesy of the artist and Platform China, Beijing.

Opposite page bottom: The Third Party—An Exhibition in Three Acts (Act 3: The Third Party—A Group Celebration!), 2011, exhibition view, Platform China. Courtesy of Platform China, Beijing.

Left: The Third Party—An Exhibition in Three Acts (Act 2: The Stranger), 2010, Platform China project space, Beijing. Chen Shaoxiong and Liu Ding, This Is Painting, 2010, installation detail, black, grey, and white acrylic and paint on wood, video loop, text. Courtesy of the artist and Platform China, Beijing.

Right: The Third Party—An Exhibition in Three Acts (Act 2: The Stranger), 2010, Platform China. Rania Ho, Fountain No. 4, 2010, installation, plastic buckets, colour lights. Courtesy of the artist and Platform China, Beijing.

34 Vol.10 No.3 The Third Party—An Exhibition his or her “wanderings” if these in Three Acts (Act 3: The Third Party—A Group Celebration!), wanderings are to remain faithful 2011, Platform China project space, Beijing. Left: Diaodui to the perpetual movement of a collective, Untitled, 2011, ink on rice paper and cardboard living culture and therefore allow box. Right: Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art, all forms of cultural institutions to documentation, T-shirt, 2011. Courtesy of the artists and become recipients of new modes of Platform China, Beijing. human encounter.

Notes 1 Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and The Visual Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007), 213. 2 John D. Barrow, “Where Things Happen That Don’t: Staging the Infinite,” paper on Infinities, last accessed at http://thalesandfriends.org/en/papers/pdf/barrow_paper. pdf?phpMyAdmin=rcOunTMVHvdSvjLzdNr45lZ-X09, 1. 3 Ibid. 4 Bruno, Public Intimacy, 212. 5 The “politics of place and, together with it, the abundance of spatial metaphors used to accommodate its transdisciplinary extensions, have come to dominate theoretical discourse as a mode to approach the intricate nature of new economic and social relations in the wake of postmodernism and its global expanse. The flexibility and complexity of the new configurations of politics, power, and ideology have therefore informed a whole new range of conceptions of space and place as no longer absolute, passive, and undialectical, but porous, dishomogeneous, and approximate. See, among others, Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space (London: Routledge, 2000), and Michael Keith and Steve Pile, eds., Place and the Politics of Identity (London: Routledge, 1993). 6 The development of the so-called cultural or creative industry in twenty-first-century China and its implication in the larger spatiopolitical program of the state would deserve a longer digression than is possible here. It shall suffice to say that the concomitant projects of internationalization in the fields of architecture and design, to name only two, are remarkably disregarded by contemporary art criticism, which fails to recognize the political and economic power of art, architecture, and design with growing common consumer audiences and their interconnectedness at the level of both practice and discourse. 7 Carlos Basualdo, “The Unstable Institution,” in Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Soveig Ovstebo, eds., The Biennale Reader: An Anthology of Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (Bergen: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 131. 8 Borderline/Moving Images, “Borderline Intro,” http://www.borderlinefestival.org/new/Borderline%20 Intro.htm. 9 For a full list of projects, contributing curators, and artists, see www.borderlinefestival.org. 10 Saskia Sassen, “Cities as frontier zones: Making informal politics,” 2007, http://www.16beavergroup. org/mtarchive/archives/002282.php. 11 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1991). 12 My introduction to the show was published in the free festival journal and is accessible at http:// www.borderlinefestival.org/new/SEDUCTION.htm. 13 Paul O’Neil, “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse,” in The Biennale Reader, 245. 14 Bejnamin Buchloh, quoted in ibid., 248. 15 In his lecture entitled “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault states that between utopias, “unreal spaces,” and heterotopias—“real sites” such as cemeteries, prisons, museums, theaters, libraries, brothels, ships (changeable in their forms, but more or less cohesive in their respective functions)—lies the mirror, a space of absence and presence, both utopic and heterotopic. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, spring 1986, 116–125. 16 John Clark, “Biennales as Structures for the Writing of Art History: The Asian Perspective” in The Biennale Reader, 175. 17 Terry Smith, “Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question,” in Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Duke University Press, 2008), 1. 18 Clara Galeazzi, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 9 no. 2 (March/April 2010), 96–103. 19 Beatrice Leanza, “Emporium: A New Common Sense of Space” in Emporium: A New Common Sense of Space, 2009, 29. 20 Michael Meredith, “Whatever Happened to ‘Whatever Happened to Total Design?’” originally published in Harvard Design Magazine no. 29, republished in a supplement to Abitare no. 508 (December 2010), 26. 21 Tom Holert “Joint Ventures” in Artforum, February 2011, accessible online at http://artforum.com/ inprint/issue=201102&id=27403&pagenum=2. 22 Complete texts and images of all three parts of the exhibition are available at the Platform China Contemporary Art Institute Web site, www.platformchina.org.

Vol.10 No.3 35 Sophia Kidd Conceptual Archaeology: Performance Art in Southwest China

erformance art in southwest China hasn’t been as sensational, Zhou Bin, Flesh Insect— Marketplace Scroll, 2007, directly confrontational, or ideological as it has in Beijing, where performance. Photo: Chen Ran. Courtesy of the Artist. Pwell known performances have seen pigs copulating (Xu Bing), artists drinking semen (Fen Ma Liuming), and blood dripping from the hanging body of the artist (Zhang Huan). In contrast, performance art here can come off as trivial, derivative, or unclear to the uninitiated. Western viewers in particular often find themselves required to do a certain amount of aesthetic legwork as well as research into the artist’s intentions and thought processes.

In 2007, the Chengdu artist Zhou Bin presented a series of performances called Flesh Insect. These actions illustrate the subtlety of performance art in China’s southwest by minimizing the role of the artist’s body in the performance itself, relying instead on a sense of place, both in urban and rural environments. Half of these actions happened at the site of the old Kuan Zhai Alleys (similar in urban function to hutong in Beijing) that were being demolished to make way for a new “ancient site”; that is, a polished commercial simulacrum of what was there already. The other half of Zhou Bin’s actions in this series took place outside of the city by a forested waterfall, river, and riverbed. In the city, the artist embedded his naked body in crevices and between walls, couched just beneath an eave, along the ground below a floorboard, or standing vertical against a telephone pole, and in each of these positionings his body was barely discernible. In the documentation of the project, camera shots are long and wide, emphasizing

36 Vol.10 No.3 Zhou Bin, Flesh Insect— the artist’s discreet role and Landscape Scroll, 2007, performance. Photo: Zhang Lu. placement within an effaced history. Courtesy of the artist. In nature, the artist’s naked body languidly hung from a tree branch, or along a bed of stones, each time in such a way that, even though the photographs are taken at medium range, the colours and composition in nature barely reveal the artist as subject in the piece.

Here, in this landlocked basin of Sichuan, Qiang, Tibetan, and other ethnic minority architectural styles mix with kitsch hyper-modern architectural elements, standing amongst widespread unadorned concrete slab buildings. Each of Sichuan’s fifty-five ethnic minorities celebrates its own historical trajectory and aesthesis, spinning their own specific identities into mainstream Han culture. Lamas roam the Tibetan quarter in robes and sandals, while downtown young hipsters have opened their own skate and streetwear shops. There is an ethos here, and it is one that does not translate easily for Western audiences, especially when it comes to performance art and new media. So when the artist looks for a fulcrum against which to lever an artwork, he or she is sometimes at a loss. But artists in southwest China have chosen to develop a personal or place-specific performance vocabulary at the risk of perhaps appearing obscure to Western audiences.

Liu Chengying, 31 Predictions for Performance Art, 2002, performance. Courtesy of the artist.

Liu Chengying, who started doing performance art in Chengdu during the mid 1990s, has a number of pieces that do speak to Western audiences. But he also at times works with visual vocabularies that are closely related to local rituals. 31 Predictions for Performance Art (2002) is an example of a deliberate and yet indirectly confrontational action. It was performed in a Chengdu bookstore and involved ritual objects and costume, as well as electronic music and masks. Liu Chengying designed the piece directly in response to a 2001 governmental prohibition of performance art in China. The artist created a dialogue with his audience through an interactive artwork that made its viewers complicit in the action. 31 Predictions for Performance Art used Daoist divination techniques to draw out debate and dialogue on the very subject of performance art. Ordinarily, this divination

Vol.10 No.3 37 technique involves approaching an altar upon which sits a container of long flat sticks, each of which has a number on it. The questioner draws a stick from the container and then receives an answer from a vault according to the number on the “oracle” stick. But in this case, the artist had prepared 31 questions, each on the nature, method, and phenomenon of performance art. So, rather than asking a question, the viewer of the action is given a question that he or she is expected to answer. Then, according to the answer he or she provided, the artist, robed as a Daoist sage and seated with his back to the audience, then turned around in wind-up doll-like motions, to the tune of electronic music, to face the questioner while wearing one of six masks. Liu chose each mask according to his evaluation of the answer given by the questioner-who-got-questioned. In this piece, Liu was both appropriating local visual vocabularies as well as engaging his audience in a dialogue, and, thus, challenged both traditional and contemporary values while characterizing the thoughtfulness and subtlety of performance art in southwest China.

Much of Liu Chengying’s work incorporates an element of irony or humour that makes it compelling to watch regardless of how much you know about local rituals. An example of Liu Chengying’s irony is a piece he is already well known for, Packaged Earth—Expressly Slow Delivery, carried out in 1997. Here, he packed up five large boxes of earth and addressed one to each of the “Big Five Continents.” As part of the work he transported the boxes to the EMS international express mail office. He then requested “Expressly Slow Delivery” in which the boxes would take exactly 139 years before reaching their destination. He wanted the soil to go through a slow process of change that was isolated from the land where it was extracted and in contrast to the rapid changes China was beginning to experience at the time. He requested the service in a deadpan manner, and the clerk, seeing photographers and other members of the press in the artist’s company, called in a manager. It took thirty minutes for the manager to muster enough legal-speak and documentation to officially refuse the artist’s request.

Six Dynasties Aesthetics, an Edict, and the New Need for Hanxu Above I said that performance art in southwest China can seem trivial, derivative, and unclear. This is not entirely fair, and such judgments can be mitigated by an understanding of traditional Chinese aesthetics. As Zong-Qi Cai has pointed out in the prologue to a compilation of writings he edited, Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature and the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties, “To determine whether we can speak of Chinese aesthetics depends largely on how one interprets the word “aesthetics” itself.”1 The editor goes on to point out that “aesthesis” was used first by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in the eighteenth century to talk about art and beauty in a systematic and scientific way. Zong-qi Cai states that this cannot be used to describe traditional Chinese discourses on art and further declares, “However, in addition to its historical designation of a modern, philosophy- related discipline, ‘aesthetics’ is now often used as a broad reference to all Western philosophies of art and beauty, including those developed in premodern times.”2 To speak, he then explains, of a Six Dynasties aesthetics requires broadening the term “aesthetics” even further to include non-

38 Vol.10 No.3 Western art, a step we will take here to discuss the development of a highly valued technique called hanxu in Chinese art production.

When the Han dynasty collapsed in 220 C.E., and General Cao’s Wei kingdom presided over China, a school of thought arose called xuan xue, or the “School of Abstruse Learning.” In this school of writing, Daoist texts such as the Zhuangzi, the Daode Jing, and the Yijing, already in circulation for six centuries, were given new precedence over Confucian texts and other classics studied by Han dynasty scholars before Cao’s Wei cultural paradigm came into prominence. It was at this time that a young scholar named Wang Bi wrote a new annotation of the Book of Changes (Yijing), emphasizing the natural mysticism, numerology, and a new hermeneutics contained in this classic book. Sixty years later, the Wei kingdom collapsed and gave way to the Jin dynasty, which was encumbered with break-away nations and internal politics. The Jin splintered into sixteen kingdoms, which later aggregated, through feudal wars, into the Liu Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen dynasties, successively.

This entire period, from the fall of the Han dynasty until the Sui dynasty, consolidation of power, in 581 C.E., was one of powerful and chaotic shifting forces. The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, in 3rd Century C.E., are a good illustration of the tact necessary for artists to survive in such times. These seven sages, exemplified by poet/musician, Ruan Ji (210-263) and poet/ Daoist philosopher, Ji Kang (223-262), met often in a bamboo grove in what is now Henan province to compose verse, play music, discuss ideas, and drink wine. They were adept in the School of Abstruse Learning that arose during the Cao Wei period, and when power changed over to the Jin Dynasty, the destinies of these poets, like other artists of the time depended on their ability to anticipate the needs and whims of the current ruler. Ruan Ji pretended to be a drunk, and too incoherent and eccentric to take office, while Ji Kang, who directly refused to serve the Jin rulers, was tortured and executed.

The School of Abstruse Learning had liberated minds more than any school of thought previously found in China, with individuality, freedom, and transcendence becoming over-riding values in Chinese aesthetics. After Jin conquered Cao Wei, and then throughout the Liu Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen dynasties, liberation grew into a self-conscious posturing, a mere simulacrum of what it once had been, when Daoist and Buddhist ideas were discussed by the subversive Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove and the young scholar, Wang Bi. Aesthetic theory (using the broadened definition of aesthetics suggested above by Zong-Qi Cai) was then codified in books such as Carving a Dragon at the Heart of Literature (Wen Xin Diao Long) at the end of the Qi Dynasty in 502 C.E. Works such as these are masterful discussions of control/transcendence, intention/spontaneity, and other binaries at play in the dialectics of early Chinese art production.

I digress into this discussion of Chinese aesthetics to create a stage of resonance for today’s performance artist in southwest China. Western principles of individuality, freedom, and transcendence infiltrate mainstream Han culture, and, in the southwest, mix with other discourses

Vol.10 No.3 39 such as those of the Tibetan, Buddhist, folk, and Daoist. However, despite all this hybridization, mainstream Han culture is still very much in control of legal, political, and economic mechanisms.

Because Han culture dominates the discourses of art production, artists, who in many cases are of non-Han ethnicity, in order to mimetically respond to their environment have had to develop hanxu, a term that doesn’t translate well into English but approximates as “tact” or “indirect communication.” Hanxu is not exclusive Six Dynasties aesthetics, and is commonly used even today; it is the ability to say something without overtly saying it. It is the ability to tell the king he is making mistakes without getting your head cut off. It is the ability to tell your wife her breath smells bad without her getting angry. The following anecdote is an example of hanxu and I briefly paraphrase from a story in the Book of Sea and Mountains (Shan Hai Jing). An emperor and his minister went hunting, and the emperor was surprised by a crouching tiger in the bush, which, oddly, did not attack him. The emperor, once the danger had passed, turned to ask the minister why he thought the tiger didn’t attack. The reply was that the emperor’s visage is so honourific that the tiger would not dare attack him. What the minister actually did was suggest a military tactic for a current conflict. The minister recommended not attacking the neighbouring kingdom, but to continue good diplomatic relations, which in themselves will keep the crouching tiger, that is, the other kingdom, from attacking. The minister, by using this hanxu method of suggesting strategy, would not be punished later if his advice turned out badly.

But I digress even further. Let’s return to the present. As mentioned Zhou Bin, N Bubble of Lies, 2003, performance. Photo: Liu earlier, the Central Ministry of Culture issued an edict in 2001 that there Cheng Ying. Courtesy of the Artist. be no performance art, or dissemination of it, in any form of media nationwide. The edict was issued in response to, and just after, the 2nd Open Performance Art Festival held in Chengdu. What seems to have happened, for the Ministry, was that the freedoms of individuality and transcendence

40 Vol.10 No.3 had advanced too far. Sensitive to ethnic and ideological unrest, China’s western frontier had an inhospitable aesthetic climate. Consequently, the only press performance artists received in papers or magazines up until 2008 was negative, focusing on the odd nudity, cruelty, or “irrational” expression. According to Zhou Bin, there were no conflicts between police and artists, although for a time he was detained for N Bubble of Lies in March 2003. In this performance, the artist wrapped himself up as a mummy and shot bubbles from a toy gun while standing below a statue of Mao while reciting Art of War, by Sunzi. He had a dog collar around his neck and was linked by chain to a very short-legged dog. As the site was Chengdu’s central Tianfu Square, it was crowded and well policed, who took him in, but later let him go. A special department had been created in 2001 to police performance art, but after 2005, it was no longer needed because artists had gone underground. Some artists stopped producing art, and others went abroad. For artists who chose to continue to perform actions publicly, hanxu required an increasing obscurity of meaning and visual language, and a new more complex semiotics of performance evolved, recalling aesthetic development during the Six Dynasties.

Dai Guangyu’s Departure and the End of Public Actions in Chengdu Media response in Chengdu to the 2001 Open was a surprise to most. Dai Guangyu, a driving force in Chengdu’s performance art scene, had a great relationship with both the media and the public. He and many other performance artists, including Zhou Bin and Liu Chengying, supported environmental protection and historical preservation; these efforts proved popular, and people and police began to accept the seemingly strange behaviour of performance artists in the name of public actions and interventions. Dai’s courage and strong sense of individual justice continued to inspire others to break the law and to continue to perform. Maya Kóvskaya has written of Dai Guangyu’s pioneering work and tells the story of public actions in Chengdu driven by his example and efforts. She also describes Dai Guangyu’s departure from Chengdu in 2004, thus: “An era of vibrant experimentation and collective public engagement gradually came to an end, but the achievements of their movement were formidable and their lessons instructive.”3

Wu Chengdian, Son of a Bitch, But there is another story to tell. 2008, performance. Photo: Li Bin. Courtesy of the Artist. Chen Mo, a long-time Chengdu- based critic once aligned with Dai Guangyu in the 7.19 Art Group, said in a recent interview with me, “that once Dai Guangyu left, artists were allowed to get their individual identity, momentum, and emphasis back.”4 Zhou Bin, also in a recent interview, told me, “There are pros and cons to everything. I think it [Dai Guangyu’s departure] created a void and passive artists stopped making art. Others continued, or were forced to get their own momentum.” He added, “I believe the scene is now more fulfilling.”5

Vol.10 No.3 41 The facts are that after 2004, most seriously motivated Chengdu artists, like Zhou Bin and Liu Chengying, for a time took their shows elsewhere. They continued to base their studios and operations in Chengdu but went abroad to Europe, North America, Japan, Korea, Singapore, or to other major Chinese cities to perform. But then, four years later, in 2008, something changed. Wu Chengdian, an artist trained in oil painting at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts who had been transitioning his practice for some years to installation, video, and performance photography, went through a final metamorphosis. He decided to do an epic, lyrical, and heavily layered performance art piece. Wu does not call himself a “performance” (xingwei) artist, but, rather, a “live” (xianchang) artist, and indeed Son of a Bitch (2008) brings spectacle into full attire, with colourful staging and multi- conceptual components. Done at Paname Café in Chengdu just one day before the May 12, 2008, Sichuan earthquake, this piece incorporated two Sichuan opera singers, karaoke singing, a text by Qu Yuan, and a plastic blowup doll. Dressed as a contemporary businessman with black lips and fake teeth, Wu Chengdian started out singing drunken, atonal, and frenetic karaoke, while classically trained, fully costumed Sichuan opera singers wailed a sad song. Then the lights went out on the audience, artist, singers and all, and after twenty minutes of darkness, the artist began to recite the ancient text by Qu Yuan, Invoking the Soul, in brutally single deep-throated syllables. After nearly an hour, the lights went down again, for only two minutes this time, after which they brightened again with the artist (while still reciting Qu Yuan) unpacking, inflating, and then incessantly molesting a blowup sex doll. When the earthquake happened the next day, killing tens of thousands of people nearby, Wu Chengdian felt guilty, as if he had awoken a wrathful “world soul” with his performance. He spent the next several months volunteering with survivor rescue efforts at the earthquake’s epicentre.

Zhou Bin was present at Son of a Bitch, and, after the show, according to Wu Chengdian approached him, saying, “I had no idea you were going to do something like this. Now that you’ve made performance art so complicated, what are the rest of us supposed to do?”6 Later that year, Liu Chengying and Zhou Bin curated the Up-On International Live Art festival, the first of its kind since the controversial Open Performance Art Festival in 2001. Forty artists from ten countries arrived in Chengdu and performed, and the media as well as the public were entirely supportive. It was as if the past seven years had not happened, and artists were free to explore performance art once again.

Zhou Bin’s Trajectory, by Way of Example Zhou Bin’s earliest performance work appeared in 1997, when he arrived in Chengdu and worked at times with Dai Guangyu, at times on his own. While his earliest actions were socially directed, targeting environment and historical preservation, they quickly took Zhou’s strong use of colour (he also was initially trained as an oil painter), juxtaposition, and physical presence in a more personal direction. In Communication (1999), Zhou Bin, wearing a trench coat, porkpie hat, and a long scarf, stood within a large glass box, painting what he saw outside of it until his view was completely

42 Vol.10 No.3 Zhou Bin, Communication, blocked. Then, with an expertly executed roundhouse kick, he brought the 1999, performance. Photo: Zhang Yingchuan. Courtesy of glass down around himself. I mention his outfit because it foregrounds the Artist. Zhou Bin’s emphasis upon “stage” presence and spectacle and his ability to hold the viewer’s attention. He said in a recent interview, “There is so much to think about before performing. Will the artist be naked? If naked, will he take his clothes off before he goes on-site? If he takes them off on-site, will he take his shirt off first, or his pants? These are all decisions, important ones.” He went on to add, “Why is it that when a good artist comes on site, the audience is silent? Why is that when a lesser artist appears, an

Vol.10 No.3 43 announcer or friend has to silence Zhou Bin, Smash the Wall, 2000, performance. Photo: Li 7 everyone first?” Considering Zhou Long. Courtesy of the Artist. Bin now works almost entirely with indeterminacy, this is an apparent contradiction. Is meaning (presence, that which holds the viewer’s attention) inherent in the artist’s intentionality, or is it really indeterminate? This underlines the study Zhou Bin is making of the control/transcendence and intention/spontaneity binaries focused on by Six Dynasties aesthetic discourse. Although he leaves a lot to chance in his work, what he is really looking for are the limits and horizons of meaning. In Smash the Wall (2000), we saw the artist “constantly hitting the ancient wall of Xi’an with male genitals (6 feet long) that were made of velour ‘until totally exhausted’.”8 This marked the beginning of his physical endurance pieces, which Zhou Bin turned to in 2005, just after Dai Guangyu left Chengdu. It was as if the hypocrisy and censorship he saw in society disgusted him. As an honest intellectual with a curious mind, Zhou began looking to his own body as a cipher for meaning. For some years, he did things like hold coins in his mouth until he vomited, or licked politically sensitive messages written in extra-strength wasabi mustard off glass walls again until he vomited or fell down. In 2007, he did Following the Sun, where he stood on a rooftop and stared at the sun from sunrise to sunset. The artist’s intention in the piece was to observe his own thoughts and physical sensations while the sun burnt his body and eyes. Through pieces like these, Zhou Bin began to realize that there was no meaning to physical suffering. He says, “My body’s reaction had no ultimate meaning.”9 Although empirical experience held a great deal of reality for the artist, it did not explain the world outside of his own body.

In 2010, Zhou Bin did an extended piece called 30 Days—The Zhou Bin Zhou Bin, Following the Sun, 2007, performance. Photo: Mai Project. This project had simple parameters: thirty days, thirty performances, Yongxi. Courtesy of the Artist. and no plan. For thirty days, the artist cut himself off from technological communications (that is, cell phone and email) and just experienced the rhythm of day and night, going out into the city each day to discover that day’s performance. The artist, in a recent interview, spoke of day eleven, titled Traveler, as a breakthrough. He found on a mountain a stretch of ridge that was about thirty meters long. The photographer who accompanied him first took a picture of the horizon line before the performance. Then the artist began walking from one end of the ridge to the other and back.

44 Vol.10 No.3 Zhou Bin, Traveler, from 30 Over the course of seventy minutes Days—The Zhou Bin Project, 2009, performance. Photo: the horizon line became visibly Guan Yizhuo. Courtesy of the artist. flattened. The artist’s experience of repetition through time was similar to what he had experienced over the past few years in his endurance pieces. His body grew tired, and his thoughts were at times chaotic, at times peaceful. But the difference this time was that the site was affected by his actions and had been transformed into another shape by the intervention of the artist. It was as if he had found an overlap between his body, art, and the world.

Zhou Bin, Wu Chengdian, Liu In 2008, Celebration—1/6 Chengyin, Li Kun, Li Daiguo, Mao Zhu, Celebration—1/6 Comment on Freedom debuted in Comments on Freedom, 2009, performance. Photo: Li Bin. Chengdu, at Re-C Art Space. In it Courtesy of Zhou Bin. Zhou Bin, as ongoing curator of Celebration, joined forces with Liu Chengying, Wu Chengdian, and three experimental musicians. The parameters of the performance included the space they were in and sixty minutes. Each artist’s plan was unknown to the others. The second version of Celebration, in Chongqing’s Organhaus, featured the same line-up, with even less planning on each artist’s part. The third and fourth shows, earlier this year in Changsha and then Macao, had a new set of artists except for the central core of Zhou Bin, Liu Chengying, and Wu Chengdian. In a recent interview, Wu said that his sole intention in these last two versions was first to interact with the audience, and, second, to interrupt other artists. In its most recent manifestation in March 2011, Celebration featured a whole new line-up with the exception of Zhou Bin and Li Kun, who, though he had been one of the original musicians in the first two performances of Celebration, this time orchestrated live projections for the show. Zhou Bin’s choice of three new generation Chengdu performance artists, and a new generation sound technician, reveals his interest in the future of performance art and new media in southwest China.

Chengdu’s New Generation Xing Xin and He Liping are the most active of Chengdu’s newer generation artists. Xing Xin started doing actions in 2006, just five years after graduation from Sichuan Fine Arts Academy, and by 2009 he had a body of work that was strong enough to take him to the Venice Biennale. Here, Xing Xin performed a piece titled Little Black Box in which he sailed for nine days around the outskirts of the Biennale in a boat onto which he had built a box in which he confined himself. His movements and doings inside the box were broadcast on the outside of the box via two television monitors, and the artist’s daily provisions were delivered through a hole into the box. Xing Xin specializes in performances that focus on confinement in a steel cage or wooden box, although Carefree Wandering (2008), an adaptation of master Zhuang’s Daoist allegory of freedom and transcendence, saw him

Vol.10 No.3 45 floating on a Chinese kang bed for one day along the Yangtze River. The Xing Xin, Carefree Wandering, 2008, performance. Photo: footage of this piece is compelling, with the artist at times standing up in Chen Ran. Courtesy of the his underwear, pensive and eager, at other times with a pillow over head, Artist. or slumped against the bedrails in the beating sun. Barges, bridges, and mountainous riverbanks float past, slowly. He Liping is a sculptor turned performance artist. He recently performed in the Macao performance of Celebration with Wu Chengdian, Liu Chengying, and Zhou Bin. In another recent performance, Style Is Key (2010), the artist filmed an evening out with his friends, later edited the footage into a five-minute segment, and re-enacted the segment with the same friends, at the same place, in slow motion over a period of one hour. He loves to be naked, and has a number of pieces, including the virally active @41, in which he and forty of his classmates formed the “@” symbol with their naked standing bodies, and then in domino effect knocked each other over.

In a recent interview, Zhou Bin He Liping, Style Is Key, 2010, performance. Photo: Liu Wei. expressed his approval of He Liping’s Courtesy of the Artist. experimental nature and diversity. Wu Chengdian, also in a recent, yet separate interview, said that he felt that younger artists should feel free to try out all the existing performance visual vocabularies before arriving at their own style. I propose that this pursuit and experimentation is a sort of artistic and conceptual archaeology. We may not consider performance art done as recently as the 1960s in the West or the 1980s in China as buried and needing to be excavated. The critical discourses that have provided interpretations of these works have indeed obscured them to some degree. In the praxis of performance art, these new generation artists are experiencing these visual vocabularies for themselves and giving them a new spin. What remains to be seen is to what extent artists will be allowed to express themselves, or, whether, like earlier southwest China performance artists, they’ll need to dig deeper into their own lives and traditional culture for hanxu techniques.

Notes 1 Zong-Qi Cai, Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties, ed. Zong-qi Cai (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 24. 2 Ibid. 3 Maya Kóvsakya, “Public Action Art, Performative Interventions, and the Transformation of the Chinese Public Sphere,” in Action—Camera: Beijing Performance Photography (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2009), 101. 4 Interview with the author, November 26, 2010. 5 Interview with the author, November 28, 2010. 6 Interview with the author, October 13, 2010. 7 Interview with the author, November 28, 2010. 8 Zhou Bin Retrospective Catalogue, (Chengdu: Upon Live Art Space, 2010), 22. 9 Interview with the author, November 28, 2010.

46 Vol.10 No.3 A Conversation Between Huang Du and Cui Xiuwen

January 9, 2011

Cui Xiuwen, Domain of God, Huang Du: At the end of October 2010, I visited your solo exhibition at 2010, video, 20 mins. Courtesy of the artist. Today Art Museum in Beijing, the title of which was Domain of God. It made me think a lot. To me, what the exhibition explores is not just the body itself, the one that we see, but also how the body is related to a person, one’s psyche, as well as how it allows one to perceive the world. What I want to ask is whether you have regarded the body as it is represented in your video, as a carrier that bears and holds all perceptions throughout one’s journey of life.

Cui Xiuwen: I think the way you are thinking about the body is quite interesting. I haven’t considered the idea of the body as a bearer of perceptions and observations. What I wanted to do in my work was to use the bodies, those of men and women, to explore parts of the human psyche that transcend the physical and material world and to uncover paths that previosuly had not been explored.

Huang Du: What was your starting point when you began the process of using the body as a medium to explore issues concerning the psychological and spiritual aspects of a person?

Cui Xiuwen: The starting point in my work has always been spiritual exploration. It all began with a spiritual inquiry that has been a guiding force in my creative process. I began to explore questions about the human

Vol.10 No.3 47 spirit early on when I started doing oil paintings, and my photographic phase represented a process of continuous progression into the spiritual. By the time I did the Emptiness in Non-emptiness & Being in Non-being series, I was able to enter this spiritual realm to explore issues concerning human relationships. However, Domain of God has expanded my intellectual and empirical judgment of the depth of human nature throughout the experimental process of photography. For an artist, such an experiment is not a goal, but a discovery of the unknown, as you cannot predict what a new discovery will be, or what will appear, but there will be a force pulling at you, a very abstract power. Acting basically on intuition, I shot the video Domain of God.

Huang Du: I found it difficult to categorize Domain of God because you employed elements of theatre, performance, and drama. As a viewer, I sensed that the main concept was one that cannot be interpreted simply through a visual, artistic angle, that the key to this work lies in its ambiguity.

Cui Xiuwen: Yes.

Huang Du: Well, in fact, what your work covers is relatively expansive, but, I think another point is also interesting. When we talk about artworks that focus on issues concerning the body, we have to involve in our discussion Western art theories as a reference and comparison; otherwise it is difficult to grasp and define our values, as one cannot talk about the body as a separate, isolated entity. We have to relate the body to something, such as art or artistic exploration. According to Western art theory, the issue of body has always been approached through a rational angle, and this rationalism has its own logic, spatial relation, and intellectual context. Empirically, the body can be defined clearly as a naturalist body, a scientific body, a social or moral body. Certainly, the body can also be viewed as an expression of art, but I sensed that this is not your approach to your work.

Cui Xiuwen: You are right.

Huang Du: Your work does not probe into what ethics is, nor what morality is, nor what science is, because the scientific body can be invented or modified. I think we can explore another issue; that is, can another interpretation of the body other than that from the West be reflected in your work? For example, in Domain of God, I do not know if your interpretation relates to the Chinese aesthetic sense of “blank space” that allows one to enter into this poetic, contemplative space where one can cultivate spiritual awareness and understanding; this poetic and existential awareness is difficult to describe in a logical language. So your work, as I just said, can be interpreted as performance and drama, can’t it? Is this your pursuit?

Cui Xiuwen: Yes, I think your understanding is particularly meaningful and precise. What you have just mentioned, especially regarding a poetic space and spiritual understanding, especially correspond and are relevant to the channels through which I feel things and express myself. For me, my

48 Vol.10 No.3 work has a stronger emphasis on spiritual awareness than poetic expression. And this emphasis on spiritual illumination is one of the characteristics of Chinese thinking and expression, which is utterly different from that of the West. The Western way of thinking is relatively more specific and logical, while the Eastern is more abstract. For example, Chinese people think and express themselves in the realm of Zen, while the West is at a loss in this case, so there is no exchange without a corresponding channel; for example, they are usually lost when we say jingjie (realm, state) or juewu (consciousness, awareness, enlightenment), because there are no such equivalent terms in their context. But, as a matter of fact, my overall artistic growth process is a process of constant juewu. That is what I constantly have been pursuing, and I feel that life’s juewu may be the most important thing in my whole course of artistic creation, while the artwork itself is simply presented as visual expression. Art for me is like a tool, a form of cultivating my being. Namely, my practice is in the form of art while I express and experience my perception of life. Like you said, my understanding of the body relative to the body interpreted within Western concepts is different. The body that I perceive is not defined by any concepts. I have never thought about what the body is or is not, because my focus is to express the space that exists beyond the body, juewu, and so the body serves as a carrier or a conduit that allows me to approach this space. And I have a constant standard when choosing the models for my artwork; they must have a capability to enter into this space.

Huang Du: Actually, in Domain of God, you managed to expel social regulations because the body is regulated by certain social experiences such as: women have to wear coloured, feminine clothing, and men must wear clothing that is linked to their careers, tied to their class, their rank, and also their age. In other words, the body as interpreted in your work is stripped of such social constraints and customs, so, in the end, what remains is an essence of human existence that is free from social conditions and hierarchy. And through an instantaneous moment of realization, one enters into the state of juewu.

Cui Xiuwen: While the body, visible to the human eye, is regarded as an embodiment of an individual self, my works intend to reveal the self that transcends the physical body. It is in the state of a spiritual journey. It is a state of mind that happens when you think deeply about something; it is as though the mind just wanders off.

Huang Du: So your work is is about the journey of the mind. Do you think that you have achieved this state in your work?

Cui Xiuwen: Basically, yes.

Huang Du: How can you prove that?

Cui Xiuwen: The only criterion for being a model in my work is that one should have the ability to enter into this contemplative state where one can

Vol.10 No.3 49 stay with one’s self for a while. And I can be in such a state, so I can judge Cui Xiuwen, Emptiness in Non-emptiness & Being in by my intuition whether the model is in this state or not. I will give him Non-being No. 18, 2009, C-print, 144 x 300 cm. or her information; then I can determine his or her state of mind. Then I Courtesy of the artist. usually choose perhaps twenty percent from more than one hundred model candidates. In my works, women tend to express their beauty through their body shapes, their confidence, and their willingness to open up to others, as opposed to the conventional definition of feminine beauty which presents women in a shy, passive, charming, or seductive manner. Women generally do not behave in such a way. Our knowledge of women in many respects is distorted and standardized by society. In fact, in the contemplative space that I look for, females do not express themselves in latter way. But why do we ask women to express themselves in that way, while men again . . .

Huang Du: It’s because of social restraints . . .

Cui Xiuwen: So if it wasn’t because of my work, I would not have the chance to reflect on my own self and to create a space that allows the mind to enter into that contemplative state.

Huang Du: Is there a great deal of difference between the final presentation of your work and the process of filming and experimentation?

Cui Xiuwen: What was particularly interesting was that initially I intended to create a video performance. Actually, I learned a lot through this filming experience. During the performance, I realized that the process itself was much more interesting and moving than the final visual presentation. I think it is particularly important for an artist to have the ability of finding the right visual medium for his or her own artistic expression.

Huang Du: Otherwise it would be a documentary?

Cui Xiuwen: Yes, it would be like a documentary. Without this ability of visual transference, I would not have been able to create Domain of God. It is an interesting and challenging task for an artist to transform a message into a visual language.

Huang Du: Your work also involves the issue of the “gaze.” The way you

50 Vol.10 No.3 present your work is not like an experience of viewing; rather, it functions more like the viewers are being watched by the performers. Do you agree with this?

Cui Xiuwen: This is a visual impact that I did not foresee. I think it has to do with how the exhibition was installed. The work was hung from a higher angle. It has to do with spatial and visual psychology. When a viewer enters into an exhibition hall, he or she will become the centre of a visual field. In Domain of God, as the viewer surveys the surroundings, he or she also becomes a person who is being viewed.

Huang Du: What kind of energy do you think the body implies in art?

Cui Xiuwen: The body is only a carrier of energy. This energy can be infinite. All things known and unknown can pass through this carrier— the body.

Huang Du: As human existence is the main subject of your work, and the body serves as its materialization, your work is also filled with a sense of “emptiness” that arises from the contemplative state before reaching the spiritual realm. Do you think your work has revealed this relationship between materialization and emptiness?

Cui Xiuwen: Yes, I think I have fully revealed this relationship in Domain of God, whereas in Emptiness in Non-emptiness & Being in Non-being this relationship is not fully presented. In Domain of God, the type of human relationship that I depicted is one that is abstract, in which each individual is presented as an isolated being. On the other hand, I deliberately created some form of a relationship between the characters in Emptiness in Non- emptiness & Being in Non-being, which is why this work does not fully express the emptiness that I was looking for. And this is the major difference between these two works.

Huang Du: If Domain of God explores the human spiritual dimension, then is Emptiness in Non-Emptiness & Being in Non-being actually a relationship with the external world?

Cui Xiuwen: Emptiness in Non-emptiness & Being in Non-being is a work about reaching the spiritual realm, but it is not fully there. And the human relationships that I portrayed in this work are still somehow attached to the material world. However, by the time I created Domain of God, all the characters involved and all my thinking processes were able to fully enter into this spiritual dimension.

Huang Du: Emptiness in Non-emptiness & Being in Non-being, I think, is also well photographed. The images are serene, succinct, and simple, as if we are entering into another world, into a new world away from the hustle and bustle of the material world.

Vol.10 No.3 51 Cui Xiuwen: Exactly. What I wanted to express is that of stepping into a Cui Xiuwen, Domain of God, 2010, video, 20 mins. realm that is more independent and abstract, and where human relations Courtesy of the artist. are not so concrete. I think with Emptiness in Non-emptiness & Being in Non-being, I go into that space you mentioned, but the relationship between people is still too concrete; that is, my intentions were not completely realized with this artwork.

Huang Du: Are you at the beginning or close to attaining your pursuit?

Cui Xiuwen: I thought I had completed the journey, but Emptiness in Non- emptiness & Being in Non-being has expanded my understanding . . .

Huang Du: Did you realize this afterwards? After the exhibition?

Cui Xiuwen: Yes, I am used to reviewing my work at the exhibition venue, which often gives me a refreshing angle from which to think about it. So basically it is a process of contemplating my own practice and finding areas for improvement.

Huang Du: I will ask you another question, that is, how do you look at the relationship between nature, people, or things?

Cui Xiuwen: I think nature, humans, and all physical objects are part of a life force that can be perceived by the mind. It will reveal itself to you depending on what level of understanding you have obtained.

Huang Du: I personally believe that the title Emptiness in Non-emptiness & Being in Non-being is cryptic. Is it difficult to find words to convey your visual ideas?

Cui Xiuwen: I generally do not want to title my work. I first have an image in my mind, and after the entire visual processs is over, I think about whether or not I should title this work for the convenience of an exhibition. The name Emptiness in Non-emptiness & Being in Non-being does sound good though. I think it is better to just code the work with 1, 2, 3, and so on, to begin labeling the works in sequence. A code is okay because a title tends to provide a framework for what you are wanting to express. People

52 Vol.10 No.3 may think that they have to understand the artwork from its title. In fact, that is not the case. I think it is better to enter the work directly from visual experience.

Huang Du: What about calling it Untitled?

Cui Xiuwen: No. Untitled is also a word, isn’t it? No words

Huang Du: What would you make Emptiness in Non-Emptiness & Being in Non-being—let us name it this for the time being—into if you were to do it another time? Would you try to improve it greatly, or just make an alteration on the basis of the existing piece?

Cui Xiuwen: I don’t know really. The relatively strong impression I have in my mind is that of an idea and program that is visual, though not yet completely determined, so I have not made it yet. Slow down, not so fast.

Huang Du: Do you think your works have experienced a wavelike progression that is developing by leaps and bounds?

Cui Xiuwen: No, my works are improving in a gradual and progressive way, one step at a time.

Huang Du: Is there an inherent link between them?

Cui Xiuwen: Yes, there is an intrinsic abstract line that is manifested in different forms. The level of thinking at each stage moves forward bit by bit. As long as there is a space opening up in my thinking, I can create something new. If, for example, I have come to a point in my work, where, temporarily, I remain at a level of thinking without any progress, I will take a break, have a rest, do some reading, or just do something else. At the point that I feel I have something to express, the image emerges inside my brain, as a black point at first—not literally a black point—but as if there were a point, and then it enlarges gradually, bit by bit, and slowly becomes clearer. Then it becomes so clear that I have to express it and to present it in the form of an artwork. It is at that point that I will make the work.

Huang Du: Will you go on with your series of Domain of God?

Cui Xiuwen: I think so.

Huang Du: What is the likely direction of its development?

Cui Xiuwen: I will again work on experiencing the space outside the material world, a world that is undiscovered.

Huang Du: The inner world is very complex because we cannot feel everything in one moment. People are complex because of their complex spiritual worlds, right? So I think this is an endless exploration.

Vol.10 No.3 53 Cui Xiuwen: Yes, I can feel that in this process I am gradually maturing, Cover: Cui Xiuwen, Emptiness in Non-emptiness & Being whether in terms of how I conduct myself, my perception of life, or in Non-being No. 20, 2009, C-print, 95 x 300 cm. Courtesy my expression through art. I find that I can improve myself bit by bit, of the artist. especially when I go inside my mind, a contemplative space that is especially interesting. The special attraction is that you must explore, you must search for the unknown space.

Huang Du: How long did it take you to shoot Domain of God?

Cui Xiuwen: It took two whole days to shoot Domain of God; one day for the men, one day for the women.

Huang Du: How about the preparation time?

Cui Xiuwen: Several months. I began to make preparations in April, shot it in July, and completed part of the edition by the end of October. So it took about half a year from shooting to completion.

Huang Du: Half a year is very long.

Cui Xiuwen: Very long. In fact, I spend a long period of time preparing for each work. Emptiness in Non-emptiness & Being in Non-being took two and a half years. I filmed in it 2008 and 2009, and it was only in April 2010 that it was exhibited for the first time.

Huang Du: Photography is a very complicated thing!

Cui Xiuwen: Particularly complex. To have your ideas fully realized is a meticulous and time-consuming jobÍ.

54 Vol.10 No.3 Alice Schmatzberger Wen Fang: The Path of Art—From Observing to Getting Involved September 2, 2010, Beijing

eijing-based artist Wen Fang has become especially famous for her works with bricks and the technique she developed to combine pho- Btography with bricks. One of her best-known works is the The Golden Brick, a series of six installations from 2008 focusing on various aspects of the social conditions of contemporary China. Topics covered include the fate of migrant workers, values in contemporary urban China, rapid changes in Beijing and their side effects, and inequalities within society. All can be viewed as personal comment. The works that make up another multi-part piece, Birth- day Present (2009), explore events that affected China in 2008, for example, the Olympic Games, the earthquake in Sichuan province, and the scandal of taint- ed milk, as well as questions about climate change, environmental pollution, and globalization. This critical approach can be found throughout her œuvre, but in a very subtle way. And she always refers to the culture she is rooted in.

Wen Fang has stated, “In my years studying photography abroad, I was always making surrealist photographs because I felt that what the eye sees is not necessarily what is real. I think that the truth is something that must be seen with the heart. Upon returning home, I would often see old ladies scavenging rotting vegetables in order to survive, and hear the sound of firecrackers set off by a real estate developer to clear out the bad air from a worker who had fallen to his death. That´s when I stopped taking surrealist photographs. I came to believe that nothing is more surreal than reality.”1

The work To Keep on Living, part of the above-mentioned series, Birthday Present, can be understood as a bridge to her latest project. To Keep on Liv- ing consists of thirty small classroom desks, each with a photographic por- trait of a child printed on it. Revenues from the sale of these desks are being donated to an association supporting orphans in northwest China. This artwork was made especially for the purpose of supporting this particular association.

In her most recent, very ambitious project, Poverty Alleviation Through Art, Wen Fang moves one step further with her art, relinquishing the perspective of an outsider who only observes and comments on situations and circumstances of daily life; instead, she gets directly involved with the life of people concerned.

Alice Schmatzberger: After graduating from the University of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1996, you worked as a Web site designer for six years. In 2002, you went to Paris for two years to study photography at the Ecole National

Vol.10 No.3 55 Supérieure Louis-Lumière. How did this interest in photography as a medium for art emerge?

Wen Fang: I started to learn about calligraphy when I was six years old. After I graduated, I decided to transfer my interest to photography as I had liked it from a very young age.

Alice Schmatzberger: Why photography? What do you see as the special quality of photography? What can you express with photography that you cannot with, for example, oil painting or other materials?

Wen Fang: When I was a Web site designer, I became connected with a lot of photographic material—all this network stuff, both Chinese and foreign. That work had a great impact upon me because I constantly was confronted with a lot of pictorial material. Much of it shocked me because of its spirit. Back then I didn´t have many chances to know other materials, other mediums of art, like painting. So I was content with photography at that time.

Alice Schmatzberger: What you are doing is not in the conventional format of art photography. You are using photography in a highly individual way, working your photographs into sculptures, into installations. How did this very personal style develop?

Wen Fang: When I was in France studying photography, I didn´t much like ordinary photo paper and all the conventional materials. I think as a pure photographer you print the photographs on paper, frame them, and hang them on the wall. This is very limiting of what a photo can be; it is more like a grave for the photograph. And because of these limits, I decided to combine my photography with something else, with people´s daily life, with everyday objects and other images, and show that these objects can exist together in an artwork.

Alice Schmatzberger: With this integration of objects and materials from everyday life, like bricks, knives, protection masks, packaging material or whatever—do you want to express something on a social level or is it just artistic expression? Do they represent just materials for your artworks?

Wen Fang: At first I used bricks as a medium because for me a brick reflects the lives of the migrant workers of China; the life of a brick is not unlike the life of a migrant worker. The migrant worker comes to the big city and lives in a very poor residential area. A brick is made of cement, and cement is derived from stones then combined to make a very condensed material. It is like the migrant workers from the countryside; many come to the big city, and many live together crammed into small homes, in a bad environment, so, like the bricks, they have been put together in a very condensed living situation. Moreover, in Chinese society there is a spirit of community; I mean, Chinese people don´t really admire freedom of the spirit. The government always tells you to contribute to something larger, like, for example, a brick contributes to the strength of a wall. So each individual is

56 Vol.10 No.3 a small part of something bigger. That is another interconnection between Top: Wen Fang, Terracotta Figures of Civilian Workers in bricks and the migrant workers. the Republic of China, from the series The Golden Brick (detail), 2008, installation of photographs printed on 300 Alice Schmatzberger: Let´s talk about some particular works, for example, cement bricks. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Paris-Beijing, The Golden Brick. This work consists of six different installations. Moreover, Beijing.

“golden brick” has a special meaning as far as I know. Bottom: Wen Fang, Terracotta Figures of Civilian Workers in the Republic of China, from the Wen Fang: Yes, it comes from the imperial times. The bricks used for series The Golden Brick, 2008, installation of photographs constructing the palaces and buildings of the emperor were made in a printed on 300 cement bricks. Courtesy of the artist and special way and of special material. It was said that the sound of such a brick Galerie Paris-Beijing, Beijing. should resemble that of gold. And the worker who produced a brick had to print his name and date on it. So if anything was wrong with it, one would know who actually modelled that particular brick.

Alice Schmatzberger: What was the overall concept of this work? Within it, there are, for example, various parts such as Terracotta Figures of Civilian Workers, Mahjong, and The Six Realms of Existence in Beijing. What is the idea of combining these different works under the heading of The Golden Brick?

Vol.10 No.3 57 Wen Fang: I was using bricks to Wen Fang, The Six Realms of Existence in Beijing, from the generate different series because series The Golden Brick, 2008, photographs printed on 70 I was considering all these social cement bricks. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Paris-Beijing, problems as an outsider; you know, Beijing. I positioned myself at a critical distance in order to observe the many social issues around me. I thought that bricks not only reflect the problems of migrant workers, like in the Terracotta Figures, but also some other social problems like in The Six Realms which reflects the situation of poor people and their housing problems—people who come to Beijing and have no real place to live, the homeless. So I photographed them directly in their daily life setting. Mahjong is more about discussing the relationship between individual people and dealing with the notions of wealth, food, and lust, whereas The Six Realms is concerned with general social problems. The Stairs of Our Generation is a stair made of bricks with pictures of people´s feet. Each step looks the same, but there is still no equality among them. So this becomes another point in discussing the relationship between each person and society. I think using a brick is most realistic as a medium, it can be easily found anywhere, and it is a very ordinary material, like the ordinary situations and problems that society faces.

Alice Schmatzberger: So you draw your inspiration for your artworks from your personal experience, your feelings, and from what you observe on the streets?

Wen Fang: I am Buddhist, so I now want to use art to change something, and art was always with me when I was growing up. At the beginning I wasn´t very interested in contemporary art because I thought contemporary artists were rather selfish and self-centred. I found that much of this art was not very mature, so I started trying to use art as a medium to reflect myself, my perspective on the world, and maybe to change something if I can. My inspiration just comes from my daily life, from what I see on the streets, and what touches me somehow.

Most of the time the concept comes first, then I have to think a lot about how to make a specific artwork, how to complete a piece. But now, with my most recent project, I plan to use many different kinds of materials to create an art piece, and in this case the concept comes afterwards.

Alice Schmatzberger: Is there already something you can tell us about your new project?

Wen Fang: I went to Ningxia province. The economy there is not very advanced; this region is poor and people are living under difficult conditions. Ningxia province was designated by the Food Programme of

58 Vol.10 No.3 Wen Fang, Mahjong, from the series The Golden Brick (detail), 2008, installation of photographs printed on 136 cement bricks. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Paris-Beijing, Beijng.

Wen Fang, Mahjong, from the series The Golden Brick, 2008, installation of photographs printed on 136 cement bricks. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Paris-Beijing, Beijng.

Wen Fang, The Stairs of Our Generation, from the series The Golden Brick, 2008, photographs printed on 200 cement bricks. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Paris-Beijing, Beijng.

Vol.10 No.3 59 the United Nations as one of the The artist and the women of Ningxia. Courtesy of the artist. most uninhabitable places of the world, and it is the third poorest rural region of China. It is a very dry land with unproductive agriculture; people there have to collect water from rain, and there is almost no local industry. There are many housewives who live alone in this province because their husbands have gone to big cities or somewhere else to work, and the women, children, and elderly are left behind. The women are economically totally dependent on their husbands, and there are also many cases of abuse of these women by their husbands.

I went many times to help these Ningxia women. I am working together with them to create some artworks because there is a strong tradition in handiwork; especially in embroidery, they do very beautiful craftwork. So I am planning to use their talent to help them, to make some artwork together—I supported them in developing an artisanal collective called The Hundred Flowers—and thereby also help them to make some profit for themselves and be able to afford medical care, better food, or an education.

Village in Ningxia province, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

Alice Schmatzberger: So there is a continuing strong social aspect within this new art project?

Wen Fang: The overall title is Poverty Alleviation Through Art. This is a huge project that will go on for quite some time, and within it I will be working on many sub-projects. It will take two to three years to work out the details of the project.

This project brings together the creativity of modern art and design with traditional handicraft from remote regions. Far from the needs of modern societies, I want to create with these local artisans a series of original products and artworks adapted for the high-end market. The project as a whole aims at maintaining traditions of embroidery, of working with fabric through new developments. We are also carrying out this long-term artistic project with the aim of alleviating poverty among local artisans. Besides the salary, the women get fifty percent of the profit from sales of the artworks, which will go towards a fund to support the medical welfare and training programmes for these local women.

60 Vol.10 No.3 The Hundred Flowers, Mother and Baby Artemisia Santonica, 2010, cotton. Courtesy of the artist.

The Hundred Flowers, Pregnant, 2010, cotton. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol.10 No.3 61 I am looking for a group of artists and designers who share the same ideal and who want to participate in this project. I also want to seek support from the government, and maybe from corporations. This project should turn into a true movement of artists who are involved in society and fighting against its problems. Artists committed to social progress are able not only to address problems indirectly through their artwork, but also to deal with them directly—they can contribute to the solution. Or, as the Chinese saying goes: Bring coal when it snows. I think this would improve the image of contemporary artists.

Alice Schmatzberger: Can you tell a little more about the intent of this art project against poverty?

Wen Fang: What is very important is the way I treat art. In the beginning, with my early works, I just wanted to question unfair societal conditions, just to criticize. But now, with my more recent works, like the schoolroom tables in To Keep On Living and my new ongoing project, I am trying to actually change something, not only to criticize or to point out problems, but to offer something, to offer help. For me, art is creation, to create something useful.

With To Keep on Living, for example, 20,000 euros have been donated to an association supporting orphans, offering them housing, clothing, and education. This is how art can really help. I will continue to work along this route.

Alice Schmatzberger: What are you planning to do next within this big project?

Wen Fang: I will go to Ningxia again in September 2010, and then again later for several weeks—in total up to two months before spring 2011—to prepare the next step of this project, which will be called Paradise. This second act of the overall project will be financed with, among other sources, proceeds from selling the pieces from Textile Dreams.2

For Paradise, I am working together with the women of an artisanal cooperative in Ningxia on very special embroidery pieces. These women from the countryside will create a installation that will be a kind of paradise for us. And an exhibition of these works will take place in Beijing, likely during 2011. The pieces in this voluminous installation will hang from the ceiling. They will create a sensational space, a utopian three-dimensional space between heaven and earth made of embroidery works. And these women will attend the opening of the exhibition. They will not be presented as “poor women”; they will be presented as artists.

That is what I think real art should be.

Notes 1 Wen Fang, Birthday Present, exhibition catalogue (Beijing: Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery, 2009). 2 A first exhibition of works from Wen Fang in collaboration with the women of Ningxia, Textile Dreams, took place between May and June 2010 at the Gallery Yishu 8 in Beijing. This was act one of the overall project, which is positioned between Chinese traditional handicraft and contemporary art. Fifty percent of the revenues from selling these artworks (twenty pieces in total) will go to the women and/or to developing new art projects.

62 Vol.10 No.3 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky O Zhang’s Recent Works

O Zhang, Horizon (Sky), 2009, Zhang’s early photographs, which were largely black-and-white, Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite installation, photographic dealt with issues of cultural identity and transplantation. Her images print on vinyl, series of 6, each 340 x 373 cm. Photo: often bore a resemblance to works in the genre of documentary Henri Robideau. Courtesy of O photography, and though she has since added lush and brilliant colour, she Vancouver Art Gallery. retains the quality of an observer’s record of human experience.

O Zhang also continues an exploration into the plight of young girls in China which she began in the series Horizon (2004) when she went back to a small town near where she grew up in the small village of Wunan, in Jishou, Hunan province, a place her parents were sent during the Cultural Revolution. She lived there until she was seven, after which she and her family were relocated to Guangzhou. For Horizon, O Zhang photographed young girls of a neighbouring rural village whose ages are between five and seven years old, and who look directly at the camera. Their response to the artist varies. Some are apprehensive, but mostly they seem somewhat frightened; none are relaxed or playful. One third of the girls are photographed from a low angle against the blue backdrop of the sky, the next third appear at eye level against the green grass of early spring, and

Vol.10 No.3 63 the last third are shot from a higher O Zhang, Horizon 24, 2004, C-type print, 111.7 x 101.6 cm. point of view looking down on the Courtesy of the artist.

girls seated on the ground. When O Zhang, Horizon 15, 2004, installed for exhibition, these tiers C-type print, 111.7 x 101.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist. represent the Chinese primordial O Zhang, Horizon 6, 2004, order of the world—heaven, C-type print, 111.7 x 101.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist. earth, and humankind. In these photographs, O Zhang contemplates the future of these young girls who will likely have limited education and little chance to climb the ladder to riches. The situation for girls in China, especially in rural China, is deplorable, a subject few artists ever consider. Many of the gains made for women’s rights under the Maoist imperative to treat women more equally (with its accompanying dictum, “Women hold up half the sky”) have been lost in China’s current quest to become a modern society in which the ideal woman is beautiful, fashionable, and wealthy. Yet social problems for unwanted female children abound: the one-child policy, which is in part responsible for the abortion of female fetuses and the resultant growing disparity in the male/ female population, ironically has not relieved the problems of sexual discrimination.

Beginning in 2005, O Zhang began another project in which she documented the lives of unwanted baby girls in China who were adopted and brought up in the United States. Since the one-child policy was instituted, 55,000, mostly female, babies have been adopted. She began the project by advertising for participants on the Web site and by traveling to areas with the densest population such as Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York where she photographed a number of the respondents. From the start, the project focused on the father and daughter as the subject, but, as O Zhang explains, it was often the mother who responded to the postings with the clear understanding that a copy of the photography would serve as compensation.

Zhang is dedicated to photography and prefers to work with film; for this reason, she used a Hasselblad 120 camera. The dynamic effects she gets are the result of her ingenuity in using traditional camera techniques rather than from digital manipulation, even though the images were subsequently digitally scanned for printing.

64 Vol.10 No.3 O Zhang, Daddy & I, 29, 2006, The resulting series, Daddy C-type print, 99.9 x 99.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist. and I (2005–06), is a group of photographs of girls who were adopted as babies and raised in the USA and here posed with their fathers. The children vary in age, as do their proud and happy fathers. The portraits, through setting, posture, dress, and expression, reveal the tender and complicated fabric of familial relations, particularly the affection and dynamics between father and daughter, and the extenuating circumstances of these special intercultural adoptive families. Situated in a lush summer garden under exuberantly flowering trees, the girls, for the most part in Western dress, are seated or standing near their fathers and often seem to strike a coquettish pose. Despite the idyllic setting and the happy and healthy appearance of the participants, there is something disturbing about these portraits, a suggestion of artificiality and stiffness in the poses. One can’t help but think of narratives like the Cinderella story or the hunger for a child of one’s own—an apparently fairy tale ending.

O Zhang, Daddy & I ,18, 2006, C-type print, 99.9 x 99.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The look on the girl’s faces seems to be one of fulfillment; they now have privileged lives, unlike those portrayed in Horizon, and yet despite their happy appearance there are the inevitable difficulties presented by impending adolescence—the awkward sexual and emotional transition from child to womanhood and the problems associated with achieving personal independence—complicated by a complex cultural identity and the potential difficulties of growing up in an alien culture as an adoptive child who no longer knows her real parents. On her Web site (www.ozhang. com), the artist describes her work thus: “By photographing adopted

Vol.10 No.3 65 Chinese girls and their Western fathers in America, I try to capture the affection between a female child and an adult male. What is the nature of this complex relationship, especially when different ethnic and cultural backgrounds are introduced? How do we look at multicultural families in a prejudicial society? Through the relationship of an emerging feminine power within the adolescent girl to the mature father, each image explores the unfathomable relation of the two inseparable, yet often divided cultures: East and West.”

In looking at these images of adopted children, we are brought back to the circumstances that led to their migration to the USA in the first place—the preference for male progeny that led to the practice of selective abortion of females, the adoption policy of unwanted females, and the unforeseen consequences of a society increasingly comprised of males. O Zhang maintains that the series is part of a more expanded consideration of East-West relations and her concern for China’s future, something that is represented by the relocation of the young girls and their dependence on their Western fathers.

In 2008, O Zhang returned to China from New York where she now lives and works, and photographed Chinese youth in hip teenage outfits obviously mugging for the camera at tourist sites. Titling the series The World Is Yours (But Also Ours), she captured children gazing directly at the camera; their smug but curious expressions seem to be asking viewers to account for their behaviour as caretakers of the future. The photos situate each subject against backdrops redolent of the new China—the arena for the Beijing Olympics; a variety of large, colourful sculptures of cartoon characters—and older tourist sites like the gate to the now-destroyed Imperial City near Tian’anmen Square with its large photo of Mao; a huge statue of Mao that during her youth was ubiquitous in public places; and a shiny gold fat Buddha, to mention just a few of the settings that present a startling juxtaposition of the past and present.

For O Zhang, these photos represent a record of the transformation of China. The project began two months before the Olympics at a high point of national pride, and the promotion of this spectacle made her think of the Cultural Revolution to which she has made several overt references. For example, the title of the series, The World Is Yours (But Also Ours), is an alteration of Mao’s slogan “The World Is Ours.” Aged eight to twenty, the kids wear T-shirts that she collected in anticipation of this project and that sport “Chinglish” expressions. Here, O Zhang reflects upon the fact that the Chinese government has outlawed the use of bad English, as it is a poor reflection on China; however, teenagers nevertheless still wear such garments in China’s larger urban centres.

What is more, she added actual slogans in Chinese from the Cultural Revolution written in red beneath each image. These dicta, combined with the skewed sentiments expressed on the T-shirts, function like Mao’s propaganda in which text and image are manipulated to create a national identity. The green shirt of the young man standing near the rocket proudly asks “What makes you so special?” and answers “orgasm,” while the text below the photo states, “Always be ready.” The shirt of a charming girl standing with her hip slung to the right, and holding onto a vinyl tourist bag emblazoned with the catchphrase “I Love China,” reads “Ever thing is

66 Vol.10 No.3 O Zhang, Always Ready, 2008, C-type print, 119.38 x 149.86 cm. Courtesy of the artist and CRG Gallery, New York.

Left: O Zhang, Poverty is not Socialism, 2008, C-type print, 119.38 x 149.86 cm. Courtesy of the artist and CRG Gallery, New York.

Right: O Zhang, The Most Spectacular Views Are Found At The Most Dangerous Summit, 2008, C-type print, 119.38 x 149.86 cm. Courtesy of the artist and CRG Gallery, New York.

shit”; the slogan written below states “Poverty is not Socialism.” Perhaps the most ironic of all is the photo of the young Tibetan-looking girl, standing in front of a Tibetan-style building, whose shirt threatens, “Don’t fuck with us, we play hard,” while written below is “The most spectacular views are found at the most dangerous summit.” These young people are emblematic of the new generation of Chinese growing up in the global world of Internet, Western movies, and TV shows—all of the superficial paraphernalia of daily life—and who perhaps lack grounding in traditional Chinese culture and thought. O Zhang, still living in New York City, admits that works like this one exemplify her feelings about being somewhat estranged from daily life in China, but it provides a distance that allows her to watch with curiosity and apprehension the rapid changes that are taking place in Chinese society and their dramatic effects on its youth.

In 2009, O Zhang was awarded a six-month residency at Queens Museum of Art, New York. During that time she was able to go through the archives of the museum’s collection that culminated in a solo show at the museum. Drawing upon the historical perspective provided by the archive she decided to commemorate the anniversary of the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40 whose theme was Building the World of Tomorrow. The resultant installation, entitled Cutting the Blaze to the New Frontiers, consisted of four parts. Inside the museum space, O Zhang had a tall, tented structure made of thirty-two-foot-tall wooden spears painted in the colours of the rainbow that were placed next to a large, hanging, illuminated globe suggestive of the two signature sculptures of the original fair—the Trylon and Perisphere. In an adjacent “tunnel,” which functioned as part of the exhibition space, she

Vol.10 No.3 67 projected an image of a rainbow. All images on this page: O Zhang, Cutting the Blaze Arranged within the installation was to the New Frontiers, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and the work of seventeen local first- Queens Museum of Art, generation immigrant children from New York. different countries who she selected and asked to create an exhibit of their parents’ homeland, a place they had never visited. It was her hope that this effort would lead the children to a better understanding of their cultural heritage and deepen a relationship with their parents. O Zhang used these imaginary recreations as though they were displays in a new national pavilion of a world’s fair in miniature. Along with their small-scale installations, the children also expressed their sentiments about their parents’ homeland on placards. A third component was a wall of photos of the participating children standing in front of the illuminated globe wearing T-shirts upon which their names, written in their parents’ native language, were printed. The final component of the exhibit, recalling the “futurama” theme of the 1939 fair consisted of a series of small coloured blocks of wood on which the children wrote what they did not want for the future and these were then piled in a corner of the exhibit behind a black door illuminated from behind by a yellow light. These blocks represented O Zhang’s own version of a time capsule, like the one buried fifty feet below the 1939 Worlds Fair that is to be opened in the year 6939, five thousand years later. The 1939 capsule contained several types of articles, those for common use in a variety of materials along with newsreels and microfilm. As she explained, “It is as if the future is behind the door where there is a yellow light shining. My version of the time capsule is to reverse the meaning of preserved time. We don’t want any of the bad things to pass on to future generations, we want them to stop in this century. Many of the children wrote War, Disease, Poverty, Capitalism, and more. At the close of the show, the wooden blocks symbolically were burned in order to destroy these negative visions.

68 Vol.10 No.3 This complex, multipartite exhibition also contrasts times past and future, monuments and transient structures, and foreign and native traditions. One of O Zhang’s intentions was to present the heterogeneity of the population of New York. Here, as in her later works, there is an expression of optimism for the future of young people who perhaps can escape the limitations of their parents’ experience of living as immigrants in NYC. She plays upon the promising utopian future promoted in the 1939 World’s Fair and contrasts it to the immigrant existence in New York City and elsewhere.

Leon and Rachela Jakubowicz, O Zhang’s contribution to the Lodz 1944, Lodz, Poland. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Poland Biennale of 2010 is another Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. illustration of how her work has evolved. Drawing upon the tragic history of this city, O Zhang created Dove of Lodz. Like other installations in the Biennale, O Zhang’s took place in the shopping area of the old shtetl, where she commemorated a local World War II-era Jewish shoemaker, Leon Jakubowicz, and his wife Rachela, with a 1944 photo of them posed behind a box he made that was an exact topographic replica of the Lodz ghetto. They appear happy despite the fact that they had just been transported and confined to the ghetto on their way to a concentration camp, where his wife soon perished. Leon buried the box and later rescued it after his liberation in 1945; the box is now in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. When open, the box’s silhouette resembled a dove with outstretched wings. O Zhang says she found inspiration in their expressions of “love and joy during a time of such extreme hardship and despair. Perhaps by making this box, Leon transformed his suffering into an enduring work of art. The image touches my heart. It tells everyone that the human spirit cannot be beaten.” (www. ozhang.com) In Dove of Lodz, O Zhang created a similar dove-shaped box with an interior that is a map of what was once the Lodz ghetto and how it looks today. For her installation, she transformed a local shop in the shtetl into a photo studio and asked passers-by to pose with the box so she could photograph them in a way that was resonant of the original photo of the Jakubowicz’s.

The passers-by who participated, both young and old, responded to the project in different ways. One couple standing behind the box and centred between its two wings, faced each other and kissed; a young woman posed behind it with her hat set jauntily on her head; a girl stood in front of the box stooping so that the wings of the box appeared as her wings; and a young man stood casually behind the box, resting his outstretched arms on its wings, a lit cigarette dangling from his hand. Before having their pictures taken, the subjects of the portraits were told of the circumstances of the shoemaker and his wife and shown the original photo so that they could understand the context. Afterward, as she had done with earlier series, O Zhang gave them a copy of their photograph to take home. Another copy of the photos were installed on a wall in the shape of a dove taking flight. As more and more people are photographed, the dove grows in form. Viewing the contemporary subjects in conjunction with the photo of the Jakubowiczs is a compelling reminder of the uncertainty of life and the transience of human existence. In this work, O Zhang once again created a

Vol.10 No.3 69 Left and right: O Zhang, The Dove of Lodz, 2010, photo installation. Courtesy of the artist.

bridge between times past and present while honouring the lives of those who lived in the ghetto during the Nazi onslaught of World War II. Here, as in other works, O Zhang’s overarching theme is a meditation on time. Notably, in Cutting the Blaze to the Future, she also suggests the course of the future perhaps beyond our lifespan.

In this same vein is the artist’s site- O Zhang, A Splendid Future for the Passed, 2010, installation. specific installation in New York’s Courtesy of the artist and Forever & Today Inc., New Chinatown entitled A Splendid York. Future for the Passed (2010) Which was pressented at Forever & Today Inc., a non-profit space on the Lower East Side. Inspired by the lives of Chinese immigrants in the three Chinatowns in New York—Lower Manhattan, Queens’s Flushing, and Brooklyn’s Sunset Park—this work occupied a tiny space yet was rich in connotation and symbolism. It enlisted the participation of the curators of Forever & Today Inc.,

Ingrid Chu and Savannah Gorton, O Zhang, A Splendid Future who helped assemble the news for the Passed (detail), 2010, installation. Courtesy of the clips from television and local artist and Forever & Today Inc., New York. newspapers that reported on crimes and accidents suffered by Chinese immigrants. From hundreds of news reports and death notices, they selected some from each borough, carefully including female and male victims and a diversity of crimes—murders by gunshot and stabbings, and deaths due to rapes, thefts, car accidents, and more. All took place within an eleven-month period, which, in combination with the month-long exhibition, encompassed a full calendar year. Stripping the news clips of some of their informative details, particularly the specifics of name and place, brought to the events a kind of universality. Distressingly, the victims’ brief existence and tragic deaths were reduced to a few cryptic phrases. Focusing on the language of criminal reporting, the curators explained in the printed hand-out, incited a curiosity about the way the living describe the dead. The work alluded to good and bad deeds,

70 Vol.10 No.3 crime, and, as all the victims were of Chinese descent, Chinese cultural values were also addressed.

Traditional Chinese ideas pertaining to the dead soul and methods of mourning are alluded to in some of the other elements in the work, including the rich red carpet laid on the floor for the duration of the exhibition, and a small cage placed against the rear wall that was home to two rabbits who, during the day, were allowed to freely run around the exhibition space. These details imbued the piece with symbolic content. For example, the rabbits most obviously allude to the Chinese New Year 2011, the year of the rabbit, which, according to the curators, is associated with “home and family, artistic pursuits, diplomacy, and keeping the peace.” And their number, two, conveys the double happiness of Chinese tradition. But more importantly, the rabbits elicited ideas of regeneration, of fecundity. Their white colour conveyed their purity, like that of white snow, yet it is also the colour of mourning in ancient China. Markedly, the bright red carpet suggested blood and how urban violence cut short the victims’ possibly splendid future. In Chinese tradition, people whose lives are cut off prematurely and by violent means become ghosts whose spirits cannot rest; O Zhang intended that as visitors to the exhibition walked upon the carpet, they spiritually completed the journey the dead once would have made, and in this way lay to rest the sorrow of the ghosts.

More to the point is the location of the exhibition space, which is situated in a part of New York that is home to a large Chinese immigrant populace and the institutions that their traditions keep alive. The storefront actually faces one of the shops that functions as a Chinese funeral parlour and another small store a few doors down serves as a temple, both of them common features in this neighbourhood. Here the viewer came full circle as a mourner of individuals whose identities have been eradicated but whose sad fate is revealed and offset by the optimism that the rabbits represent. In some way, experiencing the exhibition alleviated some of the horror suffered by the victims that is now made public, and O Zhang believes this would abate some of their postmortem suffering and allow them a “splendid future” as suggested in the title of the installation. The artist and the curators were hopeful that the rabbits would be adopted in honour of the year of the rabbit so that they too could have a splendid future, and they were, into loving homes.

In her work from the last decade, O Zhang has continued to document life in a variety of contexts and contrasting themes. In addition to photographing Chinese children raised in their native land as in Horizon and The Future is Yours, she also photographed Chinese children raised in the US in Daddy and I, which was to some extent also represented in Cutting the Blaze to the New Frontiers. In this way, the life of immigrants is set against those who never left their homeland. Her works conjoin the past and present, the lasting and the ephemeral, the remembered and commemorated, and the forgotten whose lives ended brutally. Moved by the tragedies of the past, Zhang commemorated specific individuals who suffered in the holocaust and the difficulties experienced during the Cultural Revolution. These she placed side by side with the present, represented by the youthful subjects of her photos, her time capsule, and A Splendid Future for the Passed, all of which express her hope for the future as well.

Vol.10 No.3 71 Stephanie Bailey Four Discussions with Hong Kong Artists: Leung Chi Wo, Lam Tung Pang, Morgan Wong, and Lee Kit

n 2010, Hong Kong artists Lam Tung Pang, Lee Kit, Leung Chi Wo, and Morgan Wong exhibited their work at No Soul For Sale: A Festival of IIndependents as part of Tate Modern’s tenth anniversary celebrations. The artists were showing with Para/Site, co-founded in 1996 by Leung Chi Wo with Lisa Cheung, Phoebe Man, Patrick Lee, Leung Mee Ping, Tsang Tak Ping, and Sara Wong. One of Hong Kong’s most prominent non-profit art spaces, Para/Site’s mission is to “to establish and maintain a platform for artists and other art practitioners to realize their vision, in relation with their immediate and extended communities, with the aim of nurturing a thoughtful and creative society.” An active artist and assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong, with a B.A. and M.F.A from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and having participated in numerous residencies worldwide, Leung Chi Wo is widely regarded as one of the driving forces behind Hong Kong’s burgeoning arts scene. In the following discussion, he provides insight into a city that Milton Friedman once hailed as the perfect capitalist society, has undergone a transition from a British colony to a Special Administrative Region of China, and will remain under the joint Basic Law until 2049. As an artist, Leung Chi Wo’s concerns extend beyond Hong Kong’s status as the third largest art market in the world in auction sales and the fact that ART HK has become the Art Basel of Asia.

Leung Chi Wo—Art and Expression

Stephanie Bailey: How did Para/Site begin?

Leung Chi Wo: In the beginning we needed an exhibition space, so we created Para/Site. After finding the space, we realized we wanted a forum for art, so we organized talks and lectures. Then we were encouraged to move into a curatorial practice, so we produced thematic shows, and when we found a need for a critical perspective, we organized publications. That’s how Para/Site evolved. The whole thing happened because it was something we needed for ourselves. Para/Site is also a reflection of my own character in that I am very adaptive. I respond to the situation and to reality. I’m a kind of pragmatist, not an idealist.

Stephanie Bailey: You left Para/Site in 2007. Why?

Leung Chi Wo: Para/Site should be independent and have its own life without depending on me or any other founding member. I have met people who founded their space thirty years ago, and they are still the

72 Vol.10 No.3 directors; there are other artist-run spaces that have problems because the founding members cannot let go. I didn’t want that.

Stephanie Bailey: How did Para/Site come to participate in No Soul For Sale?

Leung Chi Wo, Photojournalist Leung Chi Wo: In Asia there aren’t with Two Cameras, 2010, C-print, 100 x 150 cm. Courtesy many independent spaces still of the artist. running. There was growth in the early 2000s; then lots of them closed down. Before the arrival of the art market, mutual support between artists was important, but then if you received support from commercial galleries or were being presented in international galleries, you had the space to work independently. So the organizations had to move a step forward if they were to keep going, and Para/Site became more of an art centre. I supported this development because we don’t have any good non-collecting or collecting institutions in Hong Kong that take part in this international conversation. Now the issue is to find a bigger, more permanent space, but there is not much space left in the city.

Stephanie Bailey: Aside from space limiting the scale Hong Kong artists and curators can work in, how does Hong Kong influence you?

Leung Chi Wo, Sara Wong, Leung Chi Wo: I get inspiration Office Lady with a Red Umbrella, 2010, C-print, 100 x from friends and socio-political 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist. conditions—1989, the transitional period of the 1997 handover, the post-economic crisis, the post- birth of the bubble and the market, and the shifts in the art fair from mainland China to Hong Kong. Tian’anmen Square was a climax. Every Hong Konger was politicized by those events. People started organizing themselves or leaving. We all got involved as students, and for most people it was the first time they marched in a demonstration. I think I found myself in the middle of a historical moment.

Stephanie Bailey: Hong Kong experienced a kind of mass migration from the 1980s in the run-up to the Handover. An estimated total of one million people emigrated to other countries between 1984 and 1997 with huge numbers of mainland Chinese immigrating into the city.

Vol.10 No.3 73 Leung Chi Wo: The first wave was in the mid 1980s, during the Sino-British talks; it was a time we saw a lot of classmates leaving. The second wave was after Tian’anmen Square. Then around ‘95 and ‘96 you saw people coming back.

Stephanie Bailey: Post-Handover, Nan Sussman estimated that some 500,000 of those who emigrated have since returned. Why do you think people started to return before the Handover?

Leung Chi Wo: The economy was blooming, the property market went crazy, some people could not adjust to their adopted homes or saw more positive coverage of Hong Kong in the news. There are many reasons. It’s part of our history.

Stephanie Bailey: How would you compare Hong Kong and mainland Leung Chi Wo, My Name is Victoria, 2010, performance. China in terms of art development? Courtesy of the artist.

Leung Chi Wo: Art is part of Chinese cultural history and has had an important position in society for centuries, even during communism and its propaganda. The mid 1980s was the most liberal time. Looking at the 1980s Chinese avant-garde, you can sense the passion—it was genuine. Now art in China is a mass market. Take a company in China that only makes wooden hair combs and is now one of the biggest publicly listed companies—it’s all about concept. This is a big business for 1.4 billion people. In Hong Kong, art has always been a hobby. It’s so different. People here show a very different level of respect, and even until now still think it is something personal.

Stephanie Bailey: Could the increasing popularity of Hong Kong as the third largest art market in the world in terms of auction sales and the development of ART HK and the West Kowloon Cultural district affect local art production?

74 Vol.10 No.3 Leung Chi Wo, Sign Read, 2011, 29 sets of school desks, each desk has a digital photograph and engraved texts. Courtesy of the artist.

Leung Chi Wo: Hong Kong is an art centre because we are lucky. Geographically it has always been a hub, and what’s happening in and around it makes it interesting. When it comes to our generation, we like to make art; we even like making a living off art. But this is not taken for granted. To work hard is normal. Making art in a very humble way is also normal. Art HK has drawn people who are consuming art. But though commercial galleries provide opportunities for artists to survive, they do not always allow the artists to grow. The West Kowloon Cultural District will not come into existence for some time, so we really need things that create diversity now. You don’t want only blue chip galleries and very small grassroots artist-run spaces; this is not balanced. You want to have different possibilities. That’s how the arts can be more inclusive, and that’s why I want art to be as diverse as possible. Society should allow many different practices. This also applies to politics.

Stephanie Bailey: How has Hong Kong changed post-97?

Leung Chi Wo: Take “one country two systems.” I imagine Deng Xiao- ping gave fifty years to Hong Kong post-97 because he saw the distance between Hong Kong and Mainland China and believed fifty years was enough time for the two systems to merge. But Hong Kong is becoming more conservative, while mainland China is becoming more liberal. The whole world changed after the Cold War, so what do we mean by Left and Right? Do you think the communist party in China is Left? It’s a market economy—everything is translated in terms supply and demand. Artists are producing for the art market and universities are becoming corporate. That’s pretty scary. There are so many things one has to respect besides making money.

Stephanie Bailey: Has this market focus affected censorship?

Leung Chi Wo: There is censorship everywhere, and self-censorship is popular amongst people dealing with China. The market in Hong Kong is so small. If you publish a magazine, just take away two rows of possibly controversial text and you can be distributed to 1.4 billion people. But we

Vol.10 No.3 75 still have a relative amount of freedom of speech in Hong Kong, and it is a privilege, because at least we can be protected if we stand up against something. In mainland China, there is no protection. I think we have begun to see politics starting from ourselves. This is important because it didn’t happen before. Politics in Hong Kong is not only limited to grand narrative politics: We are still concerned with our civil rights, and we safeguard them.

Lam Tung Pang—Art and Situation

Lam Tung Pang was one of the original artists who came to Fotan, an industrial area in the New Territories that gained increasing popularity after a group of students from the Chinese University, Hong Kong—including Lam Tung Pang—came looking for a space in 2001 after a university studio was destroyed by fire. That year, they launched the first open studio event in Hong Kong, 318 Studio Opening Show, proving that students need not wait until graduation to present their work. Renamed The Fotanian in 2003, the annual open studio event has since bolstered a growing dialogue between Hong Kong artists and the public. While many attribute Fotan’s evolution into an arts district to the migration of industry to mainland China, the economic recession, and the SARS-induced property crash in 2003, Lam Tung Pang believes the real force was a generation of artists determined to create a future on their own terms. After moving to London to complete a Masters in Fine Arts from the Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, he returned to Hong Kong in 2006 and organized a group exhibition with Hong Kong artists Chow Chun Fai, Kwan Sheung Chi, Lee Kit, Ma Chi Hang, Pak Sheung Chuen, and himself entitled Inside Out: Art and Life, held at Osage Kwun Tong. The show travelled to Osage Beijing in the same year and Osage Singapore in 2008.

Opening reception for 318 Open Studio, Hong Kong, 2007. Courtesy of Lam Tung Pang.

Stephanie Bailey: What was it like studying art in Hong Kong?

Lam Tung Pang: Our professors taught us that art is your life partner; you keep it as a hobby and do something else or teach to make a living. Artists didn’t have the system or structure to support them say between the 70s and

76 Vol.10 No.3 Inside Looking Out: Art and 90s, and they didn’t have the mentality to be professional. That’s why I went Life, 2008, installation view of paintings by Lam Tung Pang at to London; it was my own critical statement. I applied for a scholarship, and Osage Singapore. Courtesy of the artist. that became my story. It’s really common in Western cultures for students to travel, to study abroad, but in Hong Kong they aren’t so interested; they aren’t even interested in Beijing. Art has a lot of linkages to the local context of Hong Kong.

Stephanie Bailey: You organized Inside Looking Out: Art and Life, held at the Osage Kwun Tong, both in Singapore and Beijing, presenting the work of fellow artists based in Fotan. How did your peers influence you?

Inside Looking Out: Art and Lam Tung Pang: When I was in secondary Life, 2008, installation view at Osage Singapore. Courtesy of school, I was already interested in painting Lam Tung Pang. and drawing, so I have this kind of difficult, romantic story of being young and falling in love. I project this idea of art. So from my friends I keep a very good balance. They influenced me because they live differently to me. For them it’s like art is nothing; life is more important. This actually reminds me of the literati painters hiding themselves in the mountains and keeping away from the society in late Ming China. I proposed Inside Looking Out with two very simple ideas: to do a group show with artists devoted and concentrated to their work who are also long term friends who can honestly communicate with each other. I don’t think the show had a curatorial statement; we just gathered the works and presented them, but the turnout was important for us.

Stephanie Bailey: The exhibition expressed observations of daily life in an incredibly complex city going through constant change; this is a curatorial statement in itself.

Lam Tung Pang: I always relate work to the mentality of how people deal with life. I have this sense around all of my friends who are artists. We try

Vol.10 No.3 77 not to connect with society. This is an interesting position, to be against society but not strictly protesting; artists hide themselves and make work with very significant social meaning. Some people say Lee Kit’s work has nothing to do with politics, but for me it is the most political art.

Stephanie Bailey: You were one of the generations who experienced the transition of colonial Hong Kong to mainland China in the ’97 handover. How do you relate to this?

Lam Tung Pang: Transition is Hong Kong’s main theme. You can see strong tensions between local and mainland cultures, but the boundaries are disappearing, and of course there are strong forces against it. That’s what makes this time interesting. Hong Kong is always in between; this is a good position to be in as an observer. And for now, at least, we still have freedom.

Stephanie Bailey: Will it last?

Lam Tung Pang: It depends on the people. I think Beijing is very smart. They don’t need to suppress anything. The people here in Hong Kong will change themselves.

Stephanie Bailey: Does your work have a political dimension?

Lam Tung Pang: I think being a full time artist is already a political statement in Hong Kong at that moment but I would rather put myself as an observer now. Most people in Hong Kong whose family came from the mainland are against communism because their families escaped it. My family came from Fujian, and we went to China at every opportunity when I was younger. My father was meant to study at university but because of the Cultural Revolution he could not, so he kept reading and worshipping Chinese heritage on his own. I think this is quite a common story in Hong Kong. I grew up in these social conditions but I keep my concern for social issues for my work. When I draw or paint I feel uncomfortable if I do it directly, so I involve a lot of indirect methods.

Stephanie Bailey: Does keeping this distance in your process feel somewhat safer?

Lam Tung Pang: I don’t know if it’s intentional. My work always comes from an understanding of my surroundings and my memories, but people interpret it with their own meaning. That’s why I’m careful about using iconic images; I’m not interested in making strong statements. I need that grey area.

Stephanie Bailey: Does this grey area relate to your experiences as an artist in a culturally mixed society?

Lam Tung Pang: In Hong Kong, they say my painting is Western, but in London they say my painting is Asian. Just by using chopsticks doesn’t mean you are Chinese! But actually, I feel closer to London than I do to

78 Vol.10 No.3 Lam Tung Pang’s studio in Beijing. When I went to Beijing, the culture shock was even stronger, which Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artist. is strange because it was supposed to be like going back to your roots. This is contemporary life. People keep moving around—it’s all mixed up, and I like that. When I look at visual landscapes, of course I learn most from traditional Chinese painting, but I also learn from other traditions. My questions are: What do traditions mean today from a contemporary perspective? What do they teach me? What meaning do they give to my life? Many of my friends say my works have a strong Asian feeling, especially a sense of literati painting from China but without ink and paper.

Stephanie Bailey: How would you define the influences behind your work?

Lam Tung Pang: I think situations change, but I don’t think my work does. It’s about relationships between two things, so it’s always consistent from that standpoint. In London my thesis investigated what shapes my perception: Is it culture? Society? The way I live? I tried to look at phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty for my questions about perception, but it never seemed right. I ended up drawing a lot; it’s the most minimal way to express what you are thinking, so you really concentrate on your response to your surroundings.

Stephanie Bailey: Do you relate more to Asian or Western art?

Lam Tung Pang: I think I used to relate more to Western art as I was studying Western art in Hong Kong, but I don’t believe that art is split into either “Asian” or “Western.” I am more interested in what they have in common now. I relate to Asian art because of its concern with existential problems. This is the most important level of learning: I learn, I know, but I don’t understand, or I understand but I do not feel. Talking about consumerism, I understand but can’t feel because the Chinese tradition is the opposite; the tradition is to save money. But Hong Kong has a whole other level of consumerism. I understand it, but I don’t really feel it. And if I don’t feel it, I can’t make artwork from it. So I ask myself what I can feel. It’s about finding a common ground.

Vol.10 No.3 79 Mora g n Wong—Art and Interaction

Morgan Wong was born in Hong Morgan Wong, Alliance, 2007, interactive installation, Kong and specializes in media art. computer with motion sensor, projector. Courtesy of the Sensitively investigating Chinese artist. culture in the twenty-first century, he exploits the language of technology and interactive media to encourage active engagement with the artist’s thoughts. Having studied Creative Media at City University, Hong Kong, were he was also taught by Leung Chi Wo, he has actively worked in a number of jobs, from Web editor to project assistant. Wong describes his journey toward becoming an artist with a sense of flow. One of his first interactive installations, Alliance (2007), was exhibited at Videotage, a non-profit Hong Kong space specializing in media and video art; it eventually won an award at the 13th Hong Kong Independent Short Film and Video Awards in 2008. Consisting of a large screen displaying Chinese characters that combine to make meaningful phrases, the viewer is involved through movement detection. Characters shift and form in accordance with viewer interaction, creating unexpected phrases with a sense of unpredictability that expresses an inherent order in the chaos of change, adaptation, and alteration.

Stephanie Bailey: Do you see yourself as a Chinese artist or a Hong Kong Chinese artist?

Morgan Wong: I see myself as an artist based in Hong Kong. Although I would love for people to understand from where my ideas might be generated, it’s more important to focus on the uniqueness of each artist. Giving titles positions people within a restricted framework that may not always be appropriate; this is a limitation for the audience and might also be for the artist himself.

Stephanie Bailey: How would you define interactive art?

Morgan Wong: It’s really about interaction between humans and how important it is to trigger the audience into thinking. Rafael Lozano- Hemmer is definitely one of the first artists to inspire me. The philosophy behind his work Standards and Double Standards is about human interaction in real life, a real phenomenon with an artistic representation.

Stephanie Bailey: You grew up in Hong Kong when it was a British colony. Did the mix of East and West there influence your work?

Morgan Wong: Yes. I was brought up in quite a traditional family, where my father emphasized a lot of Chinese traditions. I feel very glad I was brought up this way, instead of receiving a very monotonous flow of information. I think this crash of cultures helped build my critical point of view, since I have always needed to think about who is really “right,” who is really “wrong,” and whether a point of view truly reflects a situation objectively.

80 Vol.10 No.3 Stephanie Bailey: Do you feel part of an “in between” generation?

Morgan Wong: Yes. I think these ideas of “Western”–“Chinese” are sometimes a hidden agenda in my work since the world is becoming more “flattened,” and the differences between the life of an American, Chinese, European, or whoever else, are much less than before. The loss of cultural characteristics is almost impossible to avoid these days. A work like Alliance, about Chinese characters, actually has a similar hidden agenda about communication among people to my latest video, Untitled; they are both in a way preserving Chinese culture.

Stephanie Bailey: There seems to be less importance placed on the cultural past in Hong Kong and mainland China these days.

Top: Morgan Wong, Morgan Wong: Yes. There is not so much importance placed on the past, Demolishing Rumour, 2010, video installation, bricks, which is expressed in my work Once you were Here (2009). There is not so concrete, TV, DVD player. Courtesy of the artist. much interest in old buildings, referred to in Demolishing Rumour (2010),

Bottom: Morgan Wong, shown at the Tate. There is not so much interest in old people, which A Demolishing Rumour, 2010, video, 21 mins., 3 sec. Story of an Eel Chef (2010) and Untitled (2010) touch on. One motive Courtesy of the artist. behind Demolishing Rumour was the demolishment of heritage in Hong Kong and mainland China, especially in Beijing. But actually this is a global issue, so it’s good to use the work to reflect on ways of thinking and on values in the world. I’m not really demolishing the past—I’m demolishing the “rumour” of the past’s demolishment. This is a pessimistic way of acting, but I hope the fulfilment of the rumour can stop the real situation from happening.

Vol.10 No.3 81 Stephanie Bailey: As Alliance demonstrates, developments are often Morgan Wong, Once You Were Here (detail), interactive random yet retain an element of natural or inherent logic. So even though installation, charred wood, concrete, speakers, computer China is becoming increasingly flattened or Western, this is also a natural with motion sensor, 200 x 200 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the development in the context of a contemporary “globalized” world. Does this artist. relate to your interest in the “middle distance” as defined by George Trow, where individual experience is disconnected from collective mentality as a result of television and media?

Morgan Wong: I enjoy playing around the “middle distance,” as it gives me a lot of room to reflect. Mainland China is definitely a middle distance; even inside China there is a middle distance. I once heard an art professional in Beijing say that contemporary art is actually very Western: It hijacked the Chinese art world, and all of a sudden people are trying to adapt. The West provided the model for contemporary art in China during the 1980s, but now a lot of techniques have been learned and artists have received a lot international exposure. Now it’s time to be confident, unfold our own ideas, and investigate our culture.

Stephanie Bailey: The discourse in mainland China between “traditional” and “contemporary” is interesting because this rejection of “Western- linked” work from the 1980s and 90s somehow limits artistic discourse. Contemporary art is a universal visual language in that it attempts to dissect contemporary culture using influences that are not singularly nationalistic.

Morgan Wong: Yes, in this sense visual art is a universal language, but once contemporary art was “imported” to mainland China, Chinese artists implemented it as an “authority.” There is a huge gap between traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy and the Chinese contemporary art world. This is also a case of the middle distance.

82 Vol.10 No.3 Stephanie Bailey: Is there a sense that Hong Kong and mainland China are “in between” political, social, and cultural states right now?

Morgan Wong: Yes, but the funny thing is they are going in the opposite directions. Since after the Handover, Hong Kong is changing to be more like the previous China, not the upcoming one. As for the mainland, I can’t say China is undergoing Westernization, but it’s adopting more Western ways and thus losing its own character. This goes back to what I said about becoming a flattened world. But this state of “in-between” is always interesting. More critical points of view will be voiced since we are always thinking about what is “right” and what is “wrong.”

Lee Kit—Art and Life

For Lee Kit, art is a lifestyle, not an occupation. A graduate of the Chinese University with a B.A. and an M.A. in Fine Art, he was one of the first artists who set up studio in Fotan. In the same year that Lam Tung Pang took part in 318 Studio Opening Show, he hosted his first solo exhibition at Chinese University Professor Lui Chun Kwong’s studio nearby. An artist with an unending interest in daily life and what it means on both an individual and collective scale, Lee Kit exposes the constructed nature of reality within the larger context of society through the creation of situations within exhibition spaces using painting, drawing, video, and installation in a way that de-stabilizes the relationship between what is real and what is not. From painting un-stretched canvases to resemble tablecloths and using them in communal performances and documenting them photographically to creating sugar packets with song lyrics printed on them and placing them in a café, Lee Kit recontextualizes the everyday to reveal deeper meanings that lurk beneath oft-contrived surfaces. Preferring the audience to interpret his work from a personal standpoint, just as he has interpreted the world around him, Lee Kit invites viewers to partake in a kind of performance where the freedom to redefine life is more important than anything else.

Stephanie Bailey: Was it a difficult decision to become an artist?

Lee Kit: I knew how to make money from a young age, so my mum said I could study whatever I wanted in life. I probably made everything happen because of my working practices.

Stephanie Bailey: How did you start the idea of your fabric paintings?

Lee Kit: In 2001, when I was a student, I opened the closest, saw one of my shirts, and painted it. I was painting on a table and was too lazy to stretch the paintings afterwards, so I folded them and put them away. At that time I was thinking about the form of painting. One day I went for my first picnic with friends. I brought along a few paintings as tablecloths and my camera, which I normally wouldn’t do. From then on, I started to constantly find uses for the paintings, like when I ate with my parents. It took so long to paint them that I thought I might as well use them. It was like finding a solution to what art is.

Vol.10 No.3 83 Stephanie Bailey: Someone Singing and Calling Your Name at Osage Soho was a turning point in your artistic practice that investigates the constructed nature of reality. How so?

Lee Kit: The whole show had a few components—the videos, the paintings—and the inclination was is to put all of these different pieces together. I wanted to do a show about karaoke because I had a lot of heartbroken friends who would get drunk, cry, sing karaoke, and hold each other. I looked at karaoke videos on YouTube and found it was generally like this—so I started making my own pseudo-karaoke videos with lyrics purposefully repeated to reveal social issues. I have done this before with pillows that were printed with song lyrics taken out of context.

Stephanie Bailey: The show included some of your first cardboard paintings featuring brand names like Nivea. Does karaoke relate to branding?

Lee Kit: Of course. Personally I am very addicted Lee Kit, Nivea (Cream), 2010, acrylic, enamel paint, and these kind of products. I was even as a child. tape on cardboard, 59 x 77 cm. Photo: Lee Kit. Courtesy I would feel them, touch them, look at them; of the artist and Osage Soho, New York. then the names would come into my mind and keep appearing, becoming more like people than products. You can’t escape branding. But I don’t want to just criticize; there’s no point complaining. Everything is branded. Branding is how karaoke functions; when you sing the song it actually cleans your mind, and in the end you have only one song in your head. With respect to my friends, when they sing karaoke, it’s a sentimental, emotional moment—but the reaction is the same. Critically speaking, I would say everything is readymade.

Stephanie Bailey: Everything—from product packaging to a karaoke parlour to the way we react to the way we live—is readymade?

Lee Kit, Sing any of them or all of them, 2009, video, TV monitors, karaoke system. Photo: Max Choi. Courtesy of the artist and Osage Soho, New York.

84 Vol.10 No.3 Lee Kit: Yes. Even a song is a readymade. People have their favourite songs like they have favourite brands. Like popular Western songs—Chinese people listen to them, but they aren’t in Cantonese. I think: I’m in Hong Kong, why do I hear all of these songs? I randomly hear the Beatles all the time. I listen to Joy Division, and I don’t know why.

Lee Kit, Fragment (Love Songs), 2009, video, karaoke system, 7 mins., 55 secs. Photo: Max Choi. Courtesy of the artist and Osage Soho, New York.

Stephanie Bailey: Does it have to do with Hong Kong being a colony?

Lee Kit: It definitely has something to do with that, but when I started travelling outside of Hong Kong in my twenties, I understood it was like this everywhere. People don’t understand English, but they play English songs. But it’s probably the same as my friends listening to Japanese pop songs when we were younger.

Lee Kit, Smith & Nephew, Stephanie Bailey: And do your 2010, acrylic, emulsion paint, inkjet ink, and tape on cardboard paintings isolate brands cardboard, 76 x 100 cm. Photo: Lee Kit. Courtesy of the artist like you isolate lyrics to comment and Osage Soho, New York. on our relationships with them?

Lee Kit: The paintings are totally intuitive—just brand logos, but not critical at all. Technically, image transfer creates this fleeting effect, like the brands are fading, like they are a personal memory. It’s related to some emotion like hysteria or something in between happiness and sadness.

Stephanie Bailey: You once said Someone Singing and Calling Your Name wasn’t so much about Hong Kong as it is about cities in general.

Vol.10 No.3 85 Lee Kit: It’s about city life, but not only in Hong Kong. We are all globalized. It’s on two different levels: a particular city context and the question of why every city is becoming the same. It’s not about capitalism anymore. Globalization is just a massive number of companies controlling the world. But why can’t people respond? I wonder why there aren’t more alternatives, like not talking about art in the art scene—or talking about something more serious in a casual way, like politics, instead of singing karaoke in a bar. The main problem I think is how the system has brainwashed people.

Stephanie Bailey: And how that system is manifested in every aspect of daily life?

Lee Kit: Yes, and we are products too. I think this is a time to enhance individual practice, to change something within our daily lives.

Stephanie Bailey: You said being an artist in Hong Kong is a political act in itself, that how you live your life antagonizes the frantic pace and emphasis on efficiency in Hong Kong.

Lee Kit: I constructed my life through art, but I don’t think I can influence lots of people to be more concerned about political and social issues. But through some communication and participation, it’s possible. Before, I wasn’t political, and now I am. A political gesture in Hong Kong is to say that you want or don’t want something. In terms of life-style it is political, but not in terms of discussion. It’s very mild. Now I question whether my generation has been brainwashed, and I ask why. Even political issues have been “brainwashed.”.

Stephanie Bailey: How do you feel about the HK Art fair?

Lee Kit: I’m optimistic. Though the auction market and no taxes is the focus, it’s an opportunity to meet people and introduce something more. Relative to the number of artists in the city, we have all shown a lot. We should use the fair to promote younger artists, not for more opportunities, but for more experience in talking with people . . .

Stephanie Bailey: . . . and interacting with the market?

Lee Kit: It is always good to work outside of the system, but when it wants you, you can be part of it. Then you can leave again. That’s how to make the art scene sustainable from a practical perspective.

Stephanie Bailey: Is there such a thing as a Hong Kong identity?

Lee Kit: Hong Kong identity is a super-stupid notion. Historically, we know Hong Kong is a city with no personality. What can its identity be? An identity is an ongoing term. Hong Kong is all about individuals who create something—otherwise it’s nothing.

86 Vol.10 No.3 Milena Hoegsberg A Time of Critical Reflection: Chen Chieh-jen’s Factory Revisited

hen Chieh-jen’s practice can be located within the complex trajectory of Taiwanese history, from thirty-eight years of martial Claw (1950–87) and cold war through the transition into a global, neoliberalist economy.1 Born in 1960, Chen Chieh-jen grew up in Taipei under martial law, in a time of censorship, social and political oppression, and cultural and artistic deprivation. He received no formal art training, and his earliest artistic activities were actions staged in public places in Taipei in the early 1980s, when political dissidence, public discussion, and assembly were still suppressed by the national government.2 These performances—not defined as such at the time—emerged not out of an art context, but, as Chen Chieh-jen explains, from “an emotional impulse” for his body “to collide with the prevailing system.”3

In the period following the lifting of martial law in 1987, Chen Chieh- jen witnessed Taiwan struggling to come to terms with modernity and a new democracy, becoming what he defines as a forgetful, dehistoricizing consumer culture.4 As the country entered a post-authoritarian era and the globalized economy, actions became for Chen Chieh-jen inadequate responses to the political, economic, and social transitions he was experiencing. The work for which he is now known emerged out of his search for a critical position, which would allow him to make sense of his own role within the state of culture and history. As writer Jean-Francois Chevrier has suggested, it is perhaps “poetic language . . . [that] allows us to make the political visible, to produce it.”5 It is in the cinematic image that Chen Chieh-jen found a space of resistance, which enabled him to retain the critical spirit of political actions in his reflections on history and how it bears on the present.

Critical Poetics Chen Chieh-jen’s practice, as it has evolved over the past ten years, is driven by the desire to restore vision to areas of oversight, to focus on and make present what is displaced or disappearing from memory. Although all of his films to date were shot in Taiwan, each work bears witness to historic changes with larger global economic and political implications.6 Well-versed in the ideas proposed by recent theories that problematize Taiwan’s position within a global political and economic context, Chen Chieh-jen has consistently resisted didactic and deconstructive visual models.7 The visual language that he employs does not aim to “tell” or deliver critical information. Instead, his works operate through a careful visual withholding. His films propose “re-gazing” as a form of resistance

Vol.10 No.3 87 to dominant history, official accounts, and what they leave out.8 Rather Chen Chieh-jen, Bade Area, 2005, 16 mm film transferred than bearing witness through the documentary form used in various to DVD, colour, silent, 30 mins. Courtesy of the artist. ways by many contemporary artists, Chen Chieh-jen’s films attempt to get at the invisible—how years of domination and the current neoliberal discourse have in complex ways erased aspects of the historical context of Taiwan, disabling Taiwanese society’s ability to fully consider its present in the context of its fraught past.9 His works consistently probe the elusive connections between cultural amnesia and the less tangible forces of social and economic control that followed the lifting of martial law.10

The complex terrain of history and memory finds an apt expression in the imaginary space of Chen Chieh-jen’s poetic images. In all of his films—nine to date—the passing of time takes on an almost physical presence, achieved through very still images, long takes, and, in many cases, the absence of sound, or the presence of only ambient sound. His films are not narrative in the strict sense. Although he cuts between shots, the editing does not juxtapose images with the intention of progressing a story. Instead, the artist strings images together like a series of linked impressions—a strategy that allows the viewer to settle into the individual image before it gives way to the next. In the extended shot, time can, as curator Suzanne Gaensheimer has pointed out, “unfold in its innate poetry.”11 The slowness and stasis, qualities of the long take, foster a pensive spectator. Through their duration the images allow the viewer to experience time as a “realm of reflexivity.”12 In the imaginary space of the moving image, Chen Chieh-jen invites us to reflect on history and to reimagine reality.

The Silent Flow of Time: Factory (2003) Chen Chieh-jen’s 2003 film Factory is characterized by its silence, a feature it shares with other films the artist has made.13 Like Bade Area (2005) (image 1) and The Route (2006), (image 2) Factory is concerned with the consequences of global economies for local workers in the cycle of capital moving from one country to the next.14 The film focuses on a group of

88 Vol.10 No.3 Chen Chieh-jen, The Route, women, all of whom had worked for more than twenty years in the very 2006, 35 mm film transferred to DVD, colour and black-and- space in which Factory was shot, the Lien Fu factory. The workers had lost white, silent, 61 mins., 43 secs. Courtesy of the artist. their jobs seven years earlier, when the owner closed the plant and refused, under fierce protest, to pay retirement pensions and severance pay.15 The factory suffered the same fate as many others in the 1990s, when Taiwan’s manufacturing industry migrated to countries such as China that offered cheaper labour. In asking the women to return to the factory to demonstrate their work for the camera, Chen Chieh-jen counters the progress and the course of history through which they had been forgotten.

Factory unfolds over thirty minutes. Comprised almost entirely of long, static shots, its pace feels slowed, resistant to the speed of images and information to which a viewer in the twenty-first century has grown accustomed. A visual preface sets the tone for the rest of the film. Unhurried, the camera moves across rows of linked, worn plastic chairs in what looks to be an empty waiting area but is in fact a small Taiwanese stock exchange. Columns of moving green ciphers, indicating stocks decreasing in value, shift subtly on the screens of bulky black monitors, remaining, however, unintelligible from a distance. Unpopulated, the room seems haunted by the ghostly presence of the people who no longer fill it. Chen Chieh-jen moves with the same unhurried pace across the interior of an old factory that appears to be a relic of the past. A white megaphone with a red handle lies on one of many wooden folding chairs. As in the stock exchange, the empty seats evoke the absence of a human presence, of the workers who once sat in them. In the background, a large pile of carelessly stacked wooden tables towers against the stained and chipped ceiling with a monumental presence. Two elderly Taiwanese women appear, staring motionless with blank faces straight at us among the empty chairs. The evocative opening scene speaks to the way derelict buildings and discarded objects become, in Chen Chieh-jen’s films, aides-mémoire, triggers of the memory of past technological moments and past events.16 In Factory, the tower of chairs and the two women in front of them seem a monument to a fast forgotten history.

Vol.10 No.3 89 Relics of the Past

The slow pace and stillness of the opening sequence also characterizes Chen Chieh-jen, Factory, 16 mm film transferred to DVD, the remainder of the film. Through the artist’s attention and focus on the colour, silent, 31 mins., 9 secs. Courtesy of the artist. factory’s interior, the scene gains a distinct physical presence that allows the viewer to perceptually enter it as a “lived” space. Dwelling on the objects that constituted the women’s reality for over two decades—worktables, chairs, manufacturing equipment, and an electric fan—Chen Chieh-jen imbues these “relics” of the past with presence. While the film suggests the time frame of a workday, ending with the women leaving on a bus and the factory lying empty, the regulated “on-the-clock” time, tied to labour, appears suspended. Through the combination of long takes—uninterrupted shots or pans that extend the conventional editing pace—and short takes with very little movement, Chen Chieh-jen creates an elastic sense of time. While each image in Factory evokes the passage of time, time seems to be going nowhere. The frequent use of fade-outs between images also denies the sense of narrative progression: ceasing momentarily the flow of visual information, the image fades to black, granting a moment of stillness in which images can resonate in the mind’s eye.

The Past (archive) in the Present Mode Throughout the film, Chen Chieh-jen splices his images (the present) with official archival footage, which documents Taiwanese factories in the 1960s, creating a montage that suggests not a historical continuity, but “brush[es] history against the grain,” to borrow Walter Benjamin’s ubiquitous words.17 Read in the light of Benjamin’s understanding of material history, Factory is an attempt to recover the omissions of the official course of history, to rewrite it with “retroactive force.”18 Like repressed memories rising to the surface, the archival sequences appear interspersed as small ruptures in the film’s aesthetic flow. The first blends two different time periods, with images from around 1949, when the Kuomintang (KMT the Nationalist Party) withdrew to Taiwan from mainland China, and from the 1960s, when the

90 Vol.10 No.3 manufacturing industry of Taiwan took off. Several images depict young industrious women working side-by-side on sewing machines, on break in a lively cafeteria, and gathering and laughing together at the end of the day outside the factory gate or on bunk beds in their shared quarters.

Propagandist in nature, these images express a belief in the collective potential of the workers’ contributions to the country’s thriving export economy. While the images do little more than hint at Taiwan’s fraught political past, they make clear the discrepancy between a historical moment of optimism that frames the women factory workers’ youth and their present situation. The disconnect between the reality presented in the archival footage, made by the Taiwanese government to document the development of a blooming industry, and the reality expressed in Chen Chieh-jen’s own footage of the now aging women suggests a history of discontinuities.

Chen Chieh-jen, Factory, 16 Unlike the slowness and stillness that pervades in the artist’s vision of the mm film transferred to DVD, colour, silent, 31 mins., 9 secs. abandoned factory, the found footage moves abruptly from image to image of Courtesy of the artist. rotating machines and bodies that move efficiently and purposefully. When he cuts from the past to the present, time seems to speed ahead and come to a halt along with the machines. The images of young, able female workers stand in stark contrast to the solemn and melancholic images of aging women sitting by outdated sewing machines in the derelict factory space. The camera dwells on the tired faces and wrinkled and calloused hands of the women, who silently pick up their work. They seem themselves avatars of the passage of time. By inserting grainy black-and-white footage into the “presentness” of high-resolution colour images, Chen Chieh-jen deliberately disrupts a temporal flow, pointing to the oversights of official history and its collusion with the notion of societal progress. The juxtaposition of old and new images make clear the disconnect between the value placed on the able workers in the 1960s and their current status as unemployed. By re-contextualizing these images from the past, the artist questions the history they depict and the ideological vantage point from which it was written.

Vol.10 No.3 91 Silent Protest

The juxtaposition of images of the thriving factory and productive workers Chen Chieh-jen, Factory, 16 mm film transferred to DVD, with images of the derelict and abandoned factory interior and its former colour, silent, 31 mins., 9 secs. Courtesy of the artist. workers creates a powerful visual metaphor for the exploitation that lies at the core of society’s relentless strive for growth and profit through technological advancement and the perpetual search for cheaper labour. In this logic, the women have, like the machines they work on, become obsolete; reified and turned into commodities, the workers become invisible—green ciphers on the monitors of the stock exchange. While the appropriated footage seems driven by the movement of the able bodies and machines it depicts, Factory moves, however, at a pace that mirrors that of the bodies that inhabit the factory space. In an almost painfully slow close-up, the artist captures a woman who, with her hands marked by years of manual labour, attempts to thread a needle. Through its aesthetics, the film—with its many close-ups of individual faces or monumentalized shots of static bodies—defies the sense of the women as a nondescript body of devalued labour.

Like their request to remain silent, a silence that Chen Chieh-jen acknowledges by extending it to the whole film, the women’s immobility seems a statement of defiance. When they are not sitting, concentrating on their work on the sewing machines, the women stand still in pairs, either staring straight at the viewer or turning their heads almost imperceptibly. The artist repeats the theatrical image of the two women, who in demonstrative stillness hold a jacket, the product of their former labour, between them. The leitmotif of the red megaphone appears again in the end of the film, encapsulating the women’s muted protest. In a strange twist, it is silence and immobility, features of passivity, that become an act of resistance against the unrelenting forward movement of capitalism with its internalized social oppression and the accompanying erasure of memory.

92 Vol.10 No.3 Slowness: A Political Stance Factory intertwines the past and present, utilizing the “here-and-now-ness” of cinematic movement that makes the experience of the two temporalities equally present to viewers.19 As Laura Mulvey notes, stillness in the moving image references the photograph in which time has been arrested. By eliminating narrative and slowing the image down, the film engages both the photographic appearance of the past—its privileged relationship to personal and collective memory—and the filmic appearance of presence.20

It is through the strategic use of stillness and slowness that Factory (and to a large extent Chen Chieh-jen’s other films) counters the cultural readiness to move on, creating instead an aesthetic experience that compels viewers to reflect on history and how it bears on the present. When activating the photographic quality of “pastness,” Chen Chieh-jen does so in the present mode, underscoring in the slowness and stillness of his image that the past—history—is alive and pertinent to the work in the present.21

Notes 1 Parts of this article are taken from my M.A. thesis, submitted to the faculty of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, May 2008. 2 For a more in-depth discussion of the formation of social intervention art in Taiwan, see Amy Cheng, “Return to Society: The History and Politics of Art as Social Intervention—A Look at Taiwan’s Four Phases of Development Since the Fall of Martial Law,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 9, no. 5, (September/October 2010), 28–39. 3 Chema Gonzalez, “Chen Chieh-jen Talks About his Work,” ArteContexto no. 17 (2008), 65. 4 Ibid, 67. 5 Jean-Francois Chevrier, “Of Poetics and Politics,” in Documenta X: The Book (Ostifeldern: HatjeCantz Verlag, 1997), 767. 6 All of Chen Chieh-jen’s films to date are shot on 16mm or 35mm film, albeit always shown transferred to DVD (or in the case of Empire’s Border II, Blu-ray). I use the word “film” rather than video, as his visual expression is more closely linked to a cinematic tradition. 7 See, for example, Jon D. Solomon, “Taiwan Incorporated: A Survey of Biopolitics in the Sovereign Police’s Pacific Theater of Operations,” paper presented at “Alternative Modernities” conference, Seoul, September 2000. This text discussion of Taiwan’s relationship to the U.S. informs Chen’s more recent works Empire’s Borders I and II. Author’s conversation with the artist, Taipei, November 2010. 8 Chen Chieh-jen has used the term “re-gaze” to discuss various aspects of his works. E-mail interview with the author, December 2007–February 2008. 9 There are also notes in the small booklet, published on the occasion of Chen’s retrospective On the Empire’s Borders: Chen Chieh-jen 1996–2010 (Taipei: Taipei Fine Art Museum, 2010). 10 Milena Hoegsberg, “On the Empire’s Borders: Chen Chieh-jen 1996–2010,” Critic’s Pics, Artforum China (online), November, 2010. 11 Susanne Gaensheimer, “Moments in Time,” in The Cinematic: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. David Campany (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2007), 76. 12 I borrow Henri Bergson’s term. Daniel Birnbaum, Chronology (New York: Sternberg Press, 2007), 81. 13 I include in this also Lingchi (2002), which is for the most part silent. 14 As Chen Chieh-jen points out: “At exactly the same time we were jumping for joy because of our economic development, the local workers of Europe were experiencing the pain of unemployment due to industry relocating overseas.” Chen Chieh-jen, e-mail interview with the author, December 2007–February 2008. 15 Chen Chieh-jen, “Artist’s Statement: Factory,” trans. Brent Heinrich, provided by the artist, unpublished. 16 Jane Connarty, “Introduction,” in Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within Contemporary Artists’ Films and Video (Bristol: Picture This Moving Image, 2006), 9. 17 Walter Benjamin. “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 254. 18 Ibid., 257. 19 Laura Mulvey uses this term about cinematic presence and the “then-ness” of the photographic still. Laura Mulvey, “Stillness in the Moving Image: Ways of Visualizing Time and Its Passing,” in Saving the Image: Art After Film, eds. Tanya Leighton and Pavel Buchler (Glasgow: Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2003), 78–89. 20 Laura Mulvey. See, for example, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 21 David L. Eng and David Kazanjian’s notion of productive loss informs this reading. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Vol.10 No.3 93 Pamela Kember Chen Chieh-jen: Empire’s Borders II— Western Enterprises Inc. October 2–November 20, 2010 Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, England

“Without the files, our papers, we cannot go anywhere, I’ve looked everywhere in the building but I can’t find them. Did you come back for the files?” 1

A vast screen hovering in the central space of the Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester forms the centerpiece of Chen Chieh-jen’s latest installation of his film Empire’s Borders II—Western Enterprises Inc. Beyond this, is a second, smaller screen with an image that appears at first to duplicate the one in the foreground; only later does the viewer see that there is a time lapse and subtle differences emerging between the two videos on display. As viewers walk into the gallery’s dark cavernous space, it is not just the screen that forces their attention immediately toward the flickering light of the main screen’s surface over to the right-hand side the room, where it takes time for the eye to adjust, but a loud, constant low pitched humming, as if a generator is running, also emits from the air. Depending upon when you enter, the narrative on view painstakingly reveals itself through the slow- paced movement of a camera panning across what looks like a derelict, industrial building with abandoned machinery and shards of steel and wood heaped upon the floor. The black-and-white image on screen at the time I first encountered the video, was of an elderly male figure in profile, in an austere, seemingly derelict, industrial interior, speaking to a younger man. The figures are wearing army-type fatigues; thus we are led to believe that they may be military personnel, and their conversation, “Without the files, our papers, we cannot go anywhere, I’ve looked everywhere in the building but cannot find them,” suggests that they have misplaced confidential papers and further piques interest in what may have transpired. This worn-out looking duo appears stuck, or left in limbo, and seemingly not able to find a way out of their situation.

There is an air of futility in the slow-moving images as the camera pans cinematically to close-ups of the men’s unnerving, glazed-over expressions. It is as if they are staring into a void, as if there is no escaping their existence. They appear as ghostly souls, the kind of figures that tend to recur as a leitmotif in Chen Chieh-jen’s videos. “Spectres through time” is how novelist, Peter Ackroyd described ghosts that haunt the ruins of stately homes. The figures in Chen’s video, have no respite, no seeming nourishment, and are trapped in a continuous cycle of hell, or purgatory, where no solution presents itself to the problem of being trapped in the increasingly oppressive interior of this derelict space. Their predicament could also be perceived as a subtle allegory of Cold War politics, reflecting

94 Vol.10 No.3 Chen’s view of other borders and the ties that bound Taiwan to other “Empires”—China, Japan, and the USA.

Although many cinematic references have been made by a number of European and Asian filmmakers to themes of labour, poverty, and a society in chaos, the situation of the two men in Chen Chieh-jen’s Empire’s Borders II momentarily mirror for me Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the absurdist, bleak situation in which the two main protagonists, Pozzo and Dido, insignificant in their demeanor and size, find themselves as they wander aimlessly while locked in a large, indeterminate space. There is a distinctly Surrealist feel in Chen Chieh-jen’s film, towards repetition, to exaggeration, to Freud’s repression of the unconsciousness, and to Malraux’s 1933 novel, La Condition Humaine, (Man’s Fate) a work that, coincidently, links with the uprising of China’s Kuomintang’s Nationalist Party (KMT), who set up their exiled government in Taiwan in 1949. Chen Chieh-jen expects a lot from his viewers. I mean not that one has to endure hours of video; the demand is to give a good deal of time to think about the issues in the work and contemplate a society in turmoil. This film appears to deal with life as a vicious circle—an endless state of existence.

Chen Chieh-jen, Empire’s Chen Chieh-jen’s work is an ongoing dialogue with Taiwan’s turbulent Borders II—Western Enterprises Inc., 2010, video installation. sociopolitical upheaval, and past U.S./Taiwan relations, but it also explores Courtesy of the artist. a state of journeying to encounter what he calls, “the histories outside the history . . . the histories infiltrated into our language, body, desire, and taste.” The artist also refers to the jing xiang, a term Chen Chieh-jen takes from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which translates as, the “gaze of consciousness” which occurs during the process of transmutation between life and death. It is the gazing at these “excluded histories,” he suggests, that has “ the same significance as gazing at the other contemporaries that have been concealed in contemporary society.”2

Vol.10 No.3 95 Some of the artist’s previous films also engaged directly with memory; with derelict or abandoned places, and those marginalized workers oppressed by capitalism and the commodification of societies. These themes were developed in his earlier work, entitled, Empire’s Borders (2009), which deals mainly with issues of detention, humiliation, and isolation through interviews undertaken by the artist with both Chinese immigrants entering Taiwan and Taiwanese émigrés entering the US.

Empire’s Borders II—Western Enterprises Inc. is visually impressive and Chen Chieh-jen, Empire’s Borders II—Western Enterprises an intriguing follow-up video project, as well as a more personal one Inc., 2010, video installation. Courtesy of the artist. for the artist in that it relates to a part of his late father’s life in the Anti- Communist National Salvation Army, established in 1950. For a long time the army remained part of US-Taiwan Cold War secrecy activities, trained and supported by the Western Enterprises Inc., the paramilitary arm of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Taiwanese intelligence. Their activities became clearly evident once one understood that the objects placed in six framed vitrine-like cases mounted on the wall just outside of the main galleries, were some of Chen Chieh-jen’s father’s former possessions: a neatly folded military uniform; an empty photo album, and a list of the names of some of those members known to his father, who were killed by Communist security forces who wiped out 172 soldiers during a raid on the southeastern coast of China, as part of the army’s bid to retake the mainland.

Chen Chieh-jen was seemingly unaware of his father’s involvement with this army that operated out of the remote island of Tungyin, fifty miles off the coast of China. His father had even gone so far as to create a fictional, propagandist autobiography espousing his loyalty to the State in an effort to further distance any connection to his covert activities.

Empire’s Borders II in part reflects these real events that took place during numerous struggles and protests that have formed a long and protracted part of Taiwan’s hardships and struggles, both under Japanese colonial rule: the result of China readily ceding to Japan the island at the end of the Sino-Japanese War, and the political goals and rights of Taiwan’s growing marginalized population subsequently formed many of the continuing struggles and protests for social justice.

At any given point in time, when visitors entered the darkened space that contained Chen Chieh-jen’s double-screened video installation, the same

96 Vol.10 No.3 Chen Chieh-jen, Empire’s haunting sounds of a low frequency hum filled the room. The larger screen Borders II—Western Enterprises Inc., 2010, video installation. showed a slow, wide angled shot that revealed the inside of a vast derelict Courtesy of the artist. industrial or factory-type building and begins to pan onto a central brick wall with an open incinerator in the middle, ablaze and emitting blackened smoke. A sense of discomfort and uneasiness arises in the viewers. What is burning? Paper? Clothes? A body? Most people do not stay very long in the room. Some take a few seconds to glance at it; others linger for two or three minutes.

My first impression of this aspect of the video triggered a memory of seeing images of the kind of horrendous gas ovens used for cremating bodies in Germany’s concentration camps during World War II. In particular, this image of the incinerator, and what looks like a vast number of tied parcels or bundles of clothing and masses of loose paper strewn across the floor, produced the feeling that I would be witness to a dreadful, but as yet unknown, event.

The second screen visible beyond the main one again appears to replay the same sequence of images and events unfurling on the large screen, yet it begins to differ from the shot of the burning oven by showing photographs—at first profiles of individual men and then groups of them, together. We also see, interspersed from time to time in the frames of this fictional drama, footage taken from what appears to be newsreels or films of archival images: comedian Bob Hope, America’s “goodwill ambassador” who entertained US troops worldwide, riding a rickshaw; troops landing on a beach; KMT and American officers signing papers; a Western female dancer entertaining US troops; two broken flags representing those of the United States of America and the Republic of China.

Vol.10 No.3 97 The sound of shoes shuffling along the corridor is repeated incessantly, Chen Chieh-jen, Empire’s Borders II—Western Enterprises after which two, then later, three male figures appear, both younger, to one Inc. (archival images), 2010, video installation. Courtesy of older figure—Chen’s father? The elderly man seems to be either wounded, the artist. exhausted, or injured. They carry the weight not just of his body, but of the seeming misery, toil, and an eternity of hard labour with no visible means of escape, and reiterated throughout the dialogue is the phrase, “Without the files, our papers, we cannot go anywhere.” The image of the men, plodding repeatedly through a never ending chamber of rooms, echoed for me, the human drones in Fritz Lang’s 1926 film Metropolis—the unknown anonymous workers, who, daily and for eternity, march to work to perform menial repetitive tasks with no end to their plight.

We then encounter another scene, this time an industrial space, but one occupied by a number of what could be civilians, or laborers, or factory workers. Both men and women, dressed in drab clothing, all of whom stare ahead, except one female, who appears blindfolded, yet each motionless and holding a card or piece of cloth with what seem to be random numbers: 75, 783, 2062, 380, 4339, and so on.

Chen Chieh-jen, Empire’s Borders II—Western Enterprises Inc., 2010, video installation. Courtesy of the artist.

The male military figures move on, leaving the others behind, and come to rest, periodically propping themselves up against the now obsolete machinery, before the two younger men pick up the older one and supporting him on either side, they negotiate the debris, in order to drag the figure a short distance, before stopping, this time, in-between stairwells and

98 Vol.10 No.3 staircases. Then, the camera shows the younger man carrying the older one on his back, moving up the stairs, but this time, they appear to be floating along, the heavy burden seemingly somehow lifted, like souls having left their bodies, and they continue along this passage upwards as the image of them gradually fades.

Chen Chieh-jen, Empire’s In yet another scene, to emerge a little later, the two male figures that Borders II—Western Enterprises Inc., 2010, video installation. had earlier ascended the staircase walk slowly into what resembles a vast Courtesy of the artist. auditorium-like space with natural light falling from high on the wall. Perhaps we are now at the top of the building, whilst strewn over the floor and piled into corners are wooden file cabinets with half empty drawers, overturned chests, torn drapes on the walls, and broken chairs; there is a slightly raised platform at the end of the space and propped against the wall is a large, tilted, framed picture that appears to be a photo of a building, possibly the very headquarters of, Western Enterprises Inc. Other, smaller framed photographs are scattered across the floor, and show groups of soldiers or officials, Western and Asian males, smiling, peering at models, or papers on a table. Surrounded by all of these visual histories and memories of Taiwan’s past military and political events, the younger man in the video gently lowers the more senior figure down to the floor. He then stands and faces towards the entrance to the room while the camera focuses in towards his hands clenched into a fist, he gazes towards us yet also into the near distance, while the elderly figure bows his head, stares at the ground, and then again the image gradually fades.

Finally, the video turns to a view of the world outside as a lone male figure with his back to us, stands staring at the front of the entrance to what appears to be the same factory building represented in the large photograph that was in the auditorium. A length of tape crosses the door signifying no one can enter with the words “under construction” printed on it and the name Western Enterprises Inc. written above the overhead canopy.

Vol.10 No.3 99 The viewer is left wondering if he is wishing to go back inside for the files Chen Chieh-jen, Empire’s Borders II—Western Enterprises that the other men spoke of not finding earlier, or if he has managed to es- Inc., 2010, video installation. Courtesy of the artist. cape and is wondering about the others left behind, inside. For, like the prisoner in Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, who had spent time inside the darkness of a den with others chained to a wall deep inside, they only ever saw shadows of puppets, with themselves mere imitations of the real world.3 In Chen Chieh-jen’s video, we sense that the figures we see are also prison- ers of a kind, and also trapped in time. They have become spectres, shadows of those former soldiers of the Anti-Communist National Salvation Army, and yet there is no salvation for them now, nor more fighting, they are left wandering the corridors and empty ruins of Western Enterprises Inc.

In Empire’s Borders II, there is an Chen Chieh-jen, Empire’s Borders II—Western Enterprises impulse towards narrating historical Inc., 2010, video installation. Courtesy of the artist. events that touch upon human injustices, whether the collective traumas of Taiwan’s internal political struggles that Chen Chieh– jen brings to mind, or the prisoner- like scenario of those apprehended by as yet unknown assailants. There are enough ghostly shadows at play in Empire’s Borders II, accentuated through the half-lit and darkened recesses, overshadowing other shadows and almost floating through the rooms, as the camera follows the male figures along an arduous and seemingly never-ending journey through the corridors and passageways of the derelict space. Chen Chieh-jen’s plot draws heavily on the notion of trauma, of quiet fear, and through this compelling video that reveals the human psyche, he is also focused on making art about the complex histories of his family and of his own experiences as well as larger collective stories, many still hidden, and waiting to be told.

Notes 1 Chen Chieh-jen’s dialogue from Empire’s Borders II. 2 Chen Chieh-jen, “About the Form of My Work,” Art Service Association, no. 2, 1997. 3 Plato, “The Allegory of the Cave,” The Republic Book VII, trans. B. Jowlett (London: Vintage, 1991).

100 Vol.10 No.3 Katie Hill Michael Lin: The Colour Is Bright, the Beauty Is Generous

Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy October 16, 2010–February 13, 2011

o mount a retrospective exhibition of the work of Michael Lin, the Taiwanese/American artist known for his huge, sumptuous floral wall Tpaintings presented in public spaces, is perhaps to reverse the purpose of his work as an encounter. To what extent, after all, should an artist’s oeuvre be compartmentalized in a chronological or survey-style exhibition when his or her practice has developed as a resistance to such representation? The Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, known over the years for its interest in modernism mainly in the Western post-war tradition, has nevertheless put on a fine show of a selection of Michael Lin’s installations that display his well known and lesser known works that traverse the spheres of painting, installation, photography, and design.

Precisely because we have come to know Michael Lin in a particular context, this show serves to broaden our understanding of his work beyond the somewhat fetishistic repetition of his characteristic aesthetic. His brightly coloured Taiwanese floral patterns, extracted and enlarged into huge visual expressions of sensuous beauty that work across pure surface and architectural structure, are beyond doubt the artist’s “brand.” Yet this show enables us to take another look and see the breadth and variety of his practice and to understand him as a transnational artist who has successfully bridged the disciplines of art, design, and architecture as convergent, interdependent aspects of contemporary life. Drawing together key works that have been shown separately over a period of more than ten years, the exhibition succeeds in positioning Lin as an important artist who defies definition and who offers a hospitable aesthetic and a gentle cross- cultural politics. I had not up to this point imagined that he had a “politics” at all, but there are subtle pointers here, and it is perhaps as an observer of the politics of culture that Michael Lin can best be positioned.

Michael Lin, Please Take off Sensitively curated by Felix Your Shoes Before You Step onto the Carpet, 1996/2010, Schoeber (an expert on carpets, CDs, CD player, CD rack; pillow paintings, acrylic Taiwanese art who will be on canvas, 1998. Photo: Massimo Listri. Courtesy of the curating several exhibitions of artist and Centro Pecci, Prato. Taiwanese contemporary art at this year’s Venice Biennale) with Marco Bazzini, the show takes us through Michael Lin’s world in thoughtful steps, room by room, in a kind of guided tour. The first display, a room of his early paintings from the late 1990s and accompanied by richly coloured Asian carpets and a CD player with Lin’s own music selection—objects from his own home—already reveals Lin’s interest in aesthetics as “relational.” In a contemporary art

Vol.10 No.3 101 space such as the museum, this perhaps seems contrived, but the creation Atelier Bow-Wow, Skyscraper, (library for Michael Lin´s of such a setting for viewing Lin’s works suggests leisure, comfort, and a home), 2010, books from the collection of Michael Lin. holistic use of art within lived-in spaces that are necessarily interactive and Photo: Luca Ficini. Courtesy of the artist and Centro Pecci, social, and that cross the private with the communal or public experience. Prato.

The paintings in this room, small and slightly skewed yet painted with love and attentive detail, have an off-balance, handmade quality to them. They highlight the artist’s early interest in textures and textiles, transferring it to the medium of paint on canvas and acting in relation to other spaces and patterns such as those of rural vernacular textiles from Taiwan in the 1950s. As an artist whose more recent works have been displayed using commercial paint at the level of the spectacular in vast spaces such as airports and museum exteriors, this room is telling of the origins of his practice, just at the time Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics was developing and becoming of conscious curatorial interest.1

An unexpected element of the exhibition is the inclusion of Michael Lin’s library, designed for this exhibition by the Japanese architects of Atelier Bow-Wow and containing his personal collection of books. Transported from Belgium and set up in an installation of geometric white shelves visitors can browse through, the books in the library add a rich, intellectual layer to the exhibition. There are the predictable books on Chinese pattern and design but also insights into Lin’s reading of philosophy, literature, contemporary art, and Chinese history. The juxtaposition among books such as Why Asia? by the young scholar Alice Yang, alongside Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Interviews reveals his readings of contemporary art. On another shelf, one finds Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683– 1895 by Emma Jinhua Teng, Lu Xun’s Selected Works, and the Complete Works of Chuang Tzu; these provide insight into the artist’s intellectual scope and breadth and interest in Chinese culture, both modern and classical. That these books might resonate with one’s own collection is an added pleasure and offers another level of interactivity. Moving the artist’s library into the exhibition space provided another welcome layer to Michael Lin’s work, which is recognized primarily for its surface and decoration.

102 Vol.10 No.3 Top: Michael Lin, 520, 2008, A series of photographs in another photographs, and Unlimited, 2003/2010, wallpaper. Photo: room, entitled 520, set against Felix Schoeber. Courtesy of the artist and Felix Schoeber. patterned walls, is about absence

Bottom: Michael Lin, 520 and displacement and presents a (detail), 2008, photographs, and Unlimited, 2003/2010, wry comment on political exile wallpaper. Photo: Felix and the strange, simultaneous Schoeber. Courtesy of the artist and Felix Schoeber. proximity and distance that exist between Taiwan and China. In the photographs, Michael Lin shows newspaper booths on a Shanghai street with people passing by in scenes of everyday street life, near where he was living at the time. The date the photographs were taken, May 20, 2008 (thus the title 520), was the day of the inauguration of the president Ma Yingliu yet this is not evident in these images, and only hinted at through the newspapers sold at the booths. The photographs thus represent the artist’s own consciousness of being away at a time of an important moment for his nation, which nevertheless is denied its independent status by mainland China (which still treats Taiwan as a rogue province). The quiet irony of this work operates as what might be understood as Lin’s understated yet conscious politics at work. Taiwanese political identity is complex, and historically it has been trapped between Japanese colonialism in the early twentieth century, and the shadow of Chinese domination since 1949. These photographs mark an unusually personal intervention in Lin’s work even if they are about his invisibility as a (Taiwanese) subject.

A salon of design works presented by the Italian designer Moroso during the Milan Design Fair of 2003 is another striking and beautiful intervention into this exhibition. Here, Michael Lin’s use of floral patterns from 1950s Taiwan that he had printed onto pieces of 50s classic modernist Italian furniture fuses together two designs that represented “modern living.” The salon, set out as a design display, is satisfyingly retro in style, demonstrating how the design world can pull art into different visual discourses and vice versa. This fusion recalls an even earlier period of international modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, evoking cities such as Shanghai with its receptive fusion of Western and Eastern modernity. The painted design on the floor of the salon was derived from an Afghan carpet and made up of stylized symbols of war such as tanks and machine guns. The integration of signs

Vol.10 No.3 103 Foreground: Michael Lin, Spring 2003, installation, Moroso furniture, emulsion on wood, 2003. Collection of Moroso. Background: Michael Lin, Island Life, 2006, acrylic on canvas, collection of Eslite Gallery. Photo: Massimo Listri. Courtesy of the artist and Centro Pecci, Prato.

Michael Lin, Spring 2003, installation. Collection of Moroso. Photo: Felix Schoeber. Courtesy of the artist and Felix Schoeber.

104 Vol.10 No.3 of war add a decidedly unsettling contrast against the highly aestheticized salon of exquisite chaises longues patterned with Lin’s selection of orange and pink florals.

Michael Lin, Room, 2009, installation. Collection of Eslite Gallery. Photo: Felix Schoeber 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Felix Schoeber.

Japan, where Michael Lin was born (Tokyo, 1964), is also present in this exhibition, particularly in the last gallery with the installation titled Room which consists of a set of enclosures made up of sliding Japanese doors covered in fantastic geometric patterns played out in nostalgic purples, yellows, greys and browns. The overall space is divided into compartments so that the viewer can weave in and out of the enclosed spaces through the sliding doors and experience different vistas of the colliding door patterns.

Foreground: Michael Lin, Untitled Gathering, 2009, installation, emulsion on wood. Background: Michael Lin, What a Difference a Day Made, video, 2008. Photo: Felix Schoeber. Courtesy of the artist and Felix Schoeber.

This work was created for a solo show in Fukuoka in 2009. In it, as Schoeber observes in the exhibition brochure, “space becomes a private, intimate experience, and the passage, the act of choosing and interacting with space, becomes the work of art.”1 The colours and patterns in this work created by Lin are in contrast to the sumptuous rich colours of Lin’s floral wall paintings that suggest a strong, broadly “Chinese” identity, that relates arguably to both China and Taiwan. The Japanese doors and their decoration are of another aesthetic entirely and show an alternative side of Lin, whose interest in aesthetics and design is actually broader-reaching than we were perhaps previously aware.

Vol.10 No.3 105 Playfulness is a strong aspect of Michael Lin’s work, and this is most evident in the installation Untitled Gathering which consists of tiny stools that can be moved about like a jigsaw puzzle and neatly placed together in a particular order to make up a large single painting These works recall the work of another Taiwanese/Chinese artist, Li Yuan- chia, who lived in the UK for thirty years and who also made works that acted as toys or jigsaws. This openness about the function, use, and reception of art is important to the significance Lin’s practice as something that is flexible, mobile, and adaptable rather than static.

Michael Lin’s identity as Foreground: Michael Lin, Complementary, 1998/2010, an Asia Pacific artist can be installation, tatami mats on wood, pillows. Collection of seen fully in this exhibition, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Background: Michael Lin, where aspects of Taiwanese, Untitled, 2008, painting, acrylic on canvas. Photo: Felix Japanese, and Western Schoeber. Courtesy of the cultures collide and fuse, artist and Felix Schoeber. and where an apparently “global” transnationalism can still be traced to specific cultural locations. The aesthetic of Lin’s floral cushions shown on tatami mats in his work Complementary, originally produced in 1998, can be traced in the trajectory of Lin’s artistic development to a notionally idyllic domestic Taiwan of the 1950s. The patterns also cross over with a Chinese rural interior aesthetic, with the vibrant colours of his floral designs printed on thick, soft cotton. But Lin’s own aesthetic is hardly that of China itself; the grey, urban environments of mainland Chinese cities are at a far remove from the warm, welcoming interiors that he creates. Lin’s visual discourse seems to resonate more with the world of privileged global passage, airport lounges, and cafés, a world of travel and pauses between journeys. From a memory of Taiwan as a child, idealized, to a more upbeat culture of west coast America, and crossing into the nearby Asian centre of design, Japan, where Lin still appears to connect, his ability to extract, translate, and play with visual language can be appreciated in this exhibition, but his interests and thought processes can also be detected, showing that the visual is not just decorative and enjoyable but integral to meaning in contemporary life.

Notes 1 Nicolas Bourriaud, “Relational Aesthetics,” in Collection documents sur l’art (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002). 2 Felix Schoeber, Michael Lin, The Colour Is Bright, The Beauty Is Generous, Centro Per L’arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy.

106 Vol.10 No.3 Chinese Name Index

Ai Weiwei Ho, Elaine W. Liu Ding Wang Bi 艾未未何穎雅劉鼎王弼

Bao Dong Ho, Rania Liu Xiaodong Wang Chunchen 鮑棟何穎宜劉小東王春辰

Cai Zong-Qi Huang Du Lu Xun Wang Wei 蔡宗齊黃篤魯迅王衛

Chen Chieh-jen Ji Kang Lui Chun Kwong Wen Fang 陳界仁嵇康呂振光文芳

Chen Mo Jin Shi Ma Chi Hang Wong, Sara 陳默金石馬智恆黃志恆

Chen Shaoxiong Kwan Sheung Chi Ma Liuming Wong Wing Fat 陳劭雄關尚智馬六明黃榮法

Cheung, Lisa Lam Tung Pang Man, Phoebe Wu Chengdian 張思敏林東鵬文晶瑩吳承典

Chow Chun Fai Lee, Patrick Mao Zhu Xing Xin 周俊輝李志芳毛竹幸鑫

Chu, Ingrid Lee Kit Ni Haifeng Xu Bing 朱珮瑿李傑倪海峰徐冰

Chuang Tzu Leung Chi Wo Pak Sheung Chuen Yan Lei 莊子梁志和白雙全顏磊

Cui Xiuwen Leung Mee Ping Qiu Xiaofei Yang, Alice 崔岫聞梁美萍仇曉飛楊蕙如

Dai Guangyu Li Daiguo Qu Yuan Zhang Huan 戴光郁李帶果屈原張洹

Deng Xiaoping Li Kun Ruan Ji Zhang O 鄧小平李琨阮籍張鷗

Diaodui Collective Li Naihan Sheng Wei Zhou Bin 掉隊李鼐含盛葳周斌

Fang Lijun Li Yuan-chia Sunzi Zhuangzi 方力鈞李元佳孫子莊子

Gao Minglu Liang Shuo Teng, Emma Jinhua 高名潞梁碩鄧津華

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