Wild Shanghai Grass*

MOLLY NESBIT

In late April 1927 the writer Lu Xun sat as a refugee in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou and wrote a preface to his new group of prose poems, which he was calling Wild Grass . “When I am silent, I feel replete,” he began. “As I open my mouth to speak, I am conscious of emptiness.” Words came to him. Past life had died. Dead life had decayed. From its clay, no trees grew, only wild grass. “I love my wild grass,” he wrote, “but I detest the ground which decks itself with wild grass.” He pointed to the fires under - ground that would one day erupt red and devour it. At that point he would laugh out loud and sing, he claimed, and he repeated this laughing and singing, because this fierce turn of events was the fair proof that he had lived. 1 The poems that followed had been written to stand apart from the fray of the press . Pulled back and collected, they were a motley group. Freeform medita - tions rife with inversions, vicious observations, visions exploding; cackling, tart, wafting, they were his dreams, he said—his wild grass. These pieces were not uni - form. He shifted voices and cadences. He gave them titles that charted no path: “The Shadow’s Leave-taking,” “Snow,” “The Passer-By,” “Tremors of Degradation,” “The Wise Man, the Fool, and the Slave.”

* A version of this essay originally appeared in Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (Beijing: Office for Discourse Engineering, 2008), pp. 34 –61. The essay was, in effect, begun at Utopia Station in Venice in 2003, where my conversations with Yang Fudong started. It would not have been possible now but for the aid and counsel of many people but I would like to thank especially Phil Tinari, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Angie Baecker, and Andrew Watsky. The films that make up Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest were exhibited over the years in the ongoing series of exhibitions and semi - nars that is Utopia Station, broadly construed, but Yang Fudong has had many important, scholarly exhibitions in which they have been included. These catalogues of record deserve special mention: Yang Fudong (Kunsthalle Wien, 2005); Yang Fudong (Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2006); The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China , curated by Simon Groom, Karen Smith, Xu Zhen (Tate Liverpool, 2007). 1. Lu Xun, Wild Grass , trans. Xianyi Yang and Gladys Yang (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2003), pp. 3 –4. See also The Selected Works of Lu Xun , 4-vol. ed., trans. Xianyi Yang and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1985); Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990); Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity—China, 1900 –1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

OCTOBER 133, Summer 2010, pp. 75 –105. © 2010 Molly Nesbit.

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At the end of the collection he put “The Awakening.” That patch of wild grass began with Lu Xun sitting at his old writing desk at Peking University in April 1926; above him, bombers flew in to attack, and, mission accomplished, they departed; this had been his baseline reality. He had set himself to editing a pile of manuscripts by young writers, their words full of ambition, integrity, and anger— lovely words, he felt: “Their spirits are roughened by the onslaught of wind and dust, for theirs is the spirit I love. I would gladly kiss this roughness dripping in blood but formless and colorless.” He thought of Tolstoy and the thistle; he turned to the pages of the student journal The Sunken Bell . He quoted the stu - dents: Some people say our society is desolate. If this were really the case, though rather desolate it should give you a sense of tranquility, though rather lonely it should give you a sense of infinity. It should not be so chaotic, gloomy, and above all so changeful as it is.” China was being torn apart by civil war, and Lu Xun’s students were among those shot dead that year for demonstrating, but Lu Xun did not give those details. He wrote instead of the way events leave their mark. “The Awakening” had taken place in the depths of the night. It ended quietly: While I have been editing the sun has set, and I carry on by lamp - light. All kinds of youth flash past before my eyes, though around me is nothing but dusk. Tired, I take a cigarette, quietly close my eyes in indeterminate thought, and have a long, long dream. I wake with a start. All around is still nothing but dusk; cigarette smoke rises in the motionless air like tiny specks of cloud in the summer sky, to be slowly transformed into indefinable shapes. 2 Lu Xun resigned his post in Beijing and escaped to the South. Ultimately, he would settle in Shanghai. Wild Grass , along with his stories like the “Diary of a Madman” and “The True Story of Ah Q” marks the arrival of a modern Chinese literature. Mao Zedong would be one of his greatest admirers. The wild grass ran together in the shadow of fire, with echoes of Nietzsche, and Turgenev, and with the ongoing Chinese revolution, which is also to say, he let it run with the shifts in the ground we call history.

How Long Does Wild Grass Grow? In 1991 Yang Fudong went south to Hangzhou, the old imperial city Marco Polo praised to the skies for the beauty of its freshwater lake, its plea - sures, pavilions, and delights; centuries later, its reputation as a paradise remained intact. Yang Fudong went there to study oil painting at the Zhejiang

2. Lu Xun, “The Awakening,” Wild Grass , pp. 122–26.

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Yang Fudong. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Part One. 2003.

Academy of Fine Arts, which had already been renamed the China Academy of Art, but no one called it that yet. The time was auspicious. A decade before, the Academy had become an inspired center of new experiment. Removed from the political imperatives of the Central Academy in Beijing, the Academy in Hangzhou was a place to think, to paint, to talk, to read. The state culture of realism was opening further; underground and overground the avenues of translation and exchange that Lu Xun himself had done much to promote were being re-connected; at the Academy they were listening to everything that came. Texts circulated. The circles of reference were increasingly unpre - dictable, unstable, electric. They watched the video of Joseph Beuys’ 1974 performance in New York where he arrived in an ambulance and then, wrapped in felt, lived in an art gallery, confined with a coyote and working on co-existence, proclaiming I Like America and America Likes Me . On another day at the Academy, the students were shown a video of an actual airplane accident played over and over again to gauge the degrees of numbness that came with repetition. Then there were the books. 3 For example, there was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , fin - ished in the wake of the first World War, a book that draws a limit to the expres - sion of thoughts, as summed up in a sentence: “What can be said at all can be said

3. Zhang Yaxuan, “The Power from Behind,” interview with Yang Fudong, first published in Chinese in Contemporary Art and Investment (September 2007) and translated into English by Daniel Nieh for Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest , p. 170 ff.

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clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” 4 It was not unusual to have the echoes ricochet across history from every direction, so much so that the origin of the sound mattered hardly at all. Things were missing; silence was full. Scenes that no one could imagine yet were being set. Yang Fudong’s friends chose to live by the blue lake. He did not. He took an apartment by the train station because he liked the whistles and the noise. Someone gave him the Chinese translation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road . Yang Fudong took to the beat of the Beats and read without stopping about young Dean Moriarty, Sal Paradise, Carlo Marx and their friends in 1947, their desire to read and write everything, their fever, their need to make tracks. They were something more than characters; they seemed to live for real. Carlo Marx had the dark soul; Dean Moriarty had come to New York City, fresh out of jail and wanting Nietzsche and “all the wonderful intellectual things,” Sal Paradise remembered, saying he was possessed of visions like holy lightning. Sal Paradise extolled a new kind of intellectuality that he could only call intelligence—an intellectuality released to the outside. They would all head West. “Somewhere along the line,” Kerouac had Sal Paradise write, “I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.” 5 On the Road had an immediate effect on Yang Fudong. It upbraided him. He stopped going to school for a while. On his return, he picked up his brush and went to work. His painting gave way. Yang Fudong’s most notable project in art school involved a vow of silence. In 1994, he stopped speaking and only wrote messages to communicate, messages on his body if there was nothing else on hand. Initially, he was put on report at the Academy. 6 Five years later, the project would be included in the legendary underground Post-Sense Sensibility exhibition, put together for two days only in a Beijing basement. Post- Sense Sensibility came out of group discussions among the younger Hangzhou and Beijing artists, and had a substantial theoretical text written by Qiu Zhijie. Its subtitle would read Alien Bodies and Delusion , the post-sensibility being defined as “a blood trace in the breast made by [a] razor,” a possibility, a symp - tom, a kind of ability that embraced an aesthetic of violence, unfeeling and extreme bodily dysfunction. Form was being pierced to produce a direct effect, a short-circuiting of art and language alike. Yang Fudong’s Living in Another Space (1992) would be remembered in this context as “a factitious experience

4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , trans. C. K. Ogden (1922; London: Routledge, 1990), p. 27. 5. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957; New York: Viking, 1959) , p. 8. 6. See Yang Fudong’s own account of his years in Hangzhou and afterward in The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China , pp. 143 –49, and in the important cycle of interviews with Zhang Yaxuan, beginning in 2002 with “An Interview with Yang Fudong: The Uncertain Feeling. An Estranged Paradise ,” Yishu 3 (September 2004), pp. 81 –92, continuing with the July 2005 interview “A Chill Spreading Through the Air” and the 2007 interview “The Power from Behind.” The last two Zhang Yaxuan interviews have now been translated into English by Daniel Nieh and published in Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest , pp. 118 –41 and pp. 170 –88 respectively.

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designed to know ‘living in other where.’” 7 He launched his work in contexts like this one, group shows organized by artists and friends. In Shanghai, in 1999 they embedded one of these in a section of a supermarket, placing art on the shelves for sale and fitted into the supermarket’s price structure. Within lay a separate exhibition room displaying installations and videos. Yang Fudong showed his short video I Love My Motherland (1999) there and sold a little red flipbook of it. 8 Then there was Fuck Off! , organized by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi in the fall of 2000 to protest the first Shanghai Biennale. Yang Fudong sent the three photographs that make up The First Intellectual (2000). They show a scene unraveling, laced with black humor: a young office worker bleeding, hit by something that has wounded him, aims his brick weakly at something unseen, a phantom enemy on a deserted boulevard. No sign of a barricade, no Liberty leading any people. The First Intellectual seems to play a part in a cartoon. The ambiguity of his position left many questions hanging. 9 Yang Fudong did not mind. Coming and going, starting and stopping, talking with friends, moving their work through the cities; the polemics and the pressures—this was the ground for their art. They had ceased to be students. Yang Fudong moved to Shanghai in 1998. There, in late 2001, he began to contemplate a five-part black-and-white work in film, transferred to DVD, about a group of seven twenty-year-old intellectuals, not scholars exactly, but thinkers starting out. He planned to make one part of the cycle a year, very delib - erately not rushing the pace. He called it Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest .10

7. Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies and Delusion, ed. Wu Meichun and Qiu Zhije (private publi - cation, 1999), unpaged. The exhibition was held in the basement of Building No. 2, Shaoyaoju resi - dential district, Beijing, January 8 –9, 1999. The literature now surveying this past decade of Chinese art is growing rapidly. See especially Phil Tinari’s discussion of the exhibition and its context in his thesis, “Sensation to Legitimation: The Discourse of Experimental Art in China, 1998 –2004” (A. M. thesis in Regional Studies—East Asia, Harvard University, 2005); Pi Li, “Yang Fudong: Dream-like Reality,” ART iT 10 (Winter 2006), pp. 66 –67; Hou Hanrou’s collected writings, On the Mid-Ground: Selected Texts by Hou Hanru (Hong Kong: Timezone, 2002). Cities on the Move, curated by Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist, generated different catalogues at its various venues. See the first for the shows at the Vienna Secession and the CAPC at Bordeaux in 1997 (Ostfildren: Hatje Cantz, 1997) and the 1999 catalogue for the Hayward Gallery in London. 8. Supermarket, curated by Fei Pingguo, Xu Zhen, and Yang Zhengzong, at the Shanghai Square Shopping Center, 138 Huaihai Road, Shanghai (1999). 9. Yang Fudong’s interview with Charles Merewether, “Yang Fudong, Doubt and Hope: An Interview,” Art Press 290 (May 2003), p. 33. Invariably, in his interviews over the years, Yang Fudong is asked about this work. See also his interview with Gu Zhenquing in Chinese Artists: Texts and Interviews: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards 2004 , pp. 136 –138; his interview with Gerald Matt, “Film is Like Life,” in the Kunsthalle Wien catalogue (2005), pp. 6 –17; his interview with Yuko Hasegawa, “Yang Fudong: Beyond Reality,” Flash Art (March 2005), pp. 102 –107; and the discussion in Marcella Beccaria’s essay, “Yang Fudong: The Foreigner and the Search for Poetic Truth,” in Yang Fudong (Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2006), p. 21, which is based on extensive interviews in 2004 and 2005. On the exhibition Fuck Off! see Tinari, p. 36ff. The show was held for three days, November 6 –8, 2000, at the Eastlink Gallery in a Shanghai warehouse. The catalogue would be edited by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi. 10. The missing indefinite article “a” does not so much reflect an imperfect English translation as it denotes the remove between the real world and the other realm his characters would inhabit.

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When he finished the cycle in 2007, it was exhibited in its entirety at the Venice Biennale. The Biennale published an anthology of reading recommendations by the artists. Accordingly, Yang Fudong submitted the following lines—two pages straight from the middle of On the Road . He gave no explanation at all for them: It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey. I could see that it was all going to be one big saga of the mist. “Whooee!” yelled Dean. “Here we go!” And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, every - body could see that. We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move. And we moved! We flashed past the mysterious white signs in the night some - where in New Jersey that say SOUTH (with an arrow) and WEST (with an arrow) and took the south one. New Orleans! It burned in our brains. From the dirty snows of “frosty fagtown New York,” as Dean called it, all the way to the greeneries and river smells of old New Orleans at the washed-out bottom of America; then west. Ed was in the back seat; Marylou and Dean and I sat in front and had the warmest talk about the goodness and joy of life. Dean suddenly became tender. “Now dammit, look here, all of you, we all must admit that everything is fine and there’s no need in the world to worry, and in fact we should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND that we’re not REALLY worried about ANYTHING. Am I right?” We all agreed. “Here we go, we’re all together . . . What did we do in New York? Let’s forgive.” We all had our spats back there. “That’s behind us, merely by miles and inclinations. Now we’re heading down to New Orleans to dig Old Bull Lee and ain’t that going to be kicks and listen will you to this old tenorman blow his top”—he shot up the radio volume till the car shud - dered—“and listen to him till the story and put down true relaxation and knowledge.”

We all jumped to the music and agreed. The purity of the road. The white line in the middle of the highway unrolled and hugged our left front tire as if glued to our groove. Dean hunched his muscular neck, T-shirted in the winter night, and blasted the car along. He insisted I drive through Baltimore for traffic practice; that was all right except he and Marylou insisted on steering while they kissed and fooled around. It was crazy; the radio was on full blast. Dean beat drums on the dash board till a

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great sag developed in it; I did too. The poor Hudson—the slow boat to China—was receiving her beating. 11

*

The Seven Intellectuals could only have been made by slowing the boat way down; there would need to be time, hours, years, for the drift. What does the intel - lectual do now? Where do the words go? The dreams? The life? These questions had haunted the work of Yang Fudong ever since he heard the trains in Hangzhou. He had realized that his work would involve making movies, and in 1996, he wrote a script for the film that the next year became An Estranged Paradise . At the time, he told his friends that it was “a minor intellectual movie.” He had invented the term ( xiao wenren dianying ) and so had to explain it. “Minor intellec - tual movies are about walking in the rain on a rainy day,” he told them. “They are about your emotions and moods; about the dreams that you cannot make true but cannot let go. They are about each detail of your life; they are what you think your life should be; they are the books you have read; they may also be a cliché.” 12 The film was shot as a pure experiment on expired black-and-white 35-mil - limeter film. 13 The actors were non-professionals, in other words, friends. In the film, they barely spoke; they were shown submerged in everyday life; they walked through it, disengaged, trying for more. Yang Fudong chose settings that he knew, seeking the kind found on outmoded wall calendars of beautiful Hangzhou in the rainy season. The film began with a lecture on Chinese landscape painting. It began, in other words, with lessons from a distant past. As a painter makes a branch, a fig - ure leaning, a bridge, a mountain peak, a voice explains: Poetic mood is the life of painting and without it, painting just equals a living dead. But how can the poetic mood be achieved? The great poet Su Shi once wrote: ‘One fails to see what Lushan Mountain really looks like because one oneself is in the mountain,’ which suggests that we need to get inspiration from our life. After the lesson, a modern story of a man. He undergoes a breakdown, an illness crossed by three women, persistent dissatisfaction and a lethargy from which he finally recovers; he learns to compromise with life as it comes. He learns to enjoy life and love. The story ends inexplicably with a scene. A strange, half-mad man climbs up on a platform near the train tracks, does a dance, stripping, and lets out a string of yells toward infinity, or maybe toward the train. The landscape

11. Kerouac, On the Road , pp. 134 –135, quoted by Yang Fudong in Paper in the Wind: A Reader. Texts Chosen by the Artists of the 52nd International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, 2007 (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007), p. 89. 12. Zhang Yaxuan, “An Interview with Yang Fudong,” pp. 82 –83. 13. Beccaria, “Yang Fudong,” p. 22n6.

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painting had provided a prologue, but not this conclusion. On this point, Yang Fudong remarked, “Actually, well-known adages, to a certain degree, should be the conclusions after compromise. They are all correct . . . ”14 These things are inherited and carried on. The end is the beginning. The beginning was the end. One is oneself in the mountain. One is oneself at the West Lake. Another one is beside himself by the train track.

What Becomes of the Mountain? The funds to complete An Estranged Paradise came with Okwui Enwezor’s invitation to exhibit at Documenta 11 in 2002. At Documenta the film received a great deal of attention from abroad and a different conversation began. Invitations to exhibit outside China would now come one after the other. Comparisons to the older Shanghai cinema of the 1930s and ’40s were offered: Fei Mu’s Springtime in a Small Town , much admired, and in 2002 remade by Tian Zhuangzhuang, also fea - tured a troubled, sickly young man stuck in his troubles and caught in a love triangle. Any similarities were generic at best; the plot lines went in opposite directions. Yang Fudong volunteered that he had taken his title from Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise .15 But the foreign need to see national identities first overwhelmed the other dimensions. In China, he continued to exhibit in different independent group pro - jects, like The Long March: A Walking Visual Display , organized by Lu Jie in the summer of 2002, which put artists back onto the historic route of Mao Zedong’s Communists, the march that was the test of their strength and understood to be the road to their victory. Meantime, Yang Fudong began planning a new project about intellectuals. He began calling it Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest , and projected five parts. It would become another place to work and live.

The Boat Went Slow. It Had No Motor, It Slipped into the Shadows, the Dark. As he defined the “minor intellectual” in his long interview with Zhang Yaxuan in 2002, he was already sketching the future. [Minor intellectual] means that from the writer’s point of view, there is a group of special people, who may not do anything astonishing or remarkable. They may not create masterpieces but they have their own qualities. Maybe you do not notice them on a daily base [basis] and they will never be anything special, but when you suddenly dis - cover them they are very adorable. They can touch your heart. 16

With Zhang Yaxuan, the discussion of the definition of the intellectual

14. Zhang Yaxuan, “An Interview with Yang Fudong,” p. 87 15. Matt, “Film is Like Life,” p. 17. 16. Zhang Yaxuan, “An Interview with Yang Fudong,” p. 90.

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deep ened. Zhang Yaxuan asked Yang Fudong if he thought of himself as one. Maybe one-half, Yang Fudong replied, and went on to insist that the definition not be literal: The spirit of intellectuals is the dream you have for yourself and the sen - sation of chasing a dream in dreams. In other words, being an intellectual means imposing the status of being an intellectual upon oneself—that is the flavor. To assume oneself an intellectual—that is the spirit. Being an intellectual also includes the meaning imposed by others. Of course, an intellectual needs to have the spirit in himself and in his bones.

. . . Similarly, each plant will have its own beauty, such as a wildflower. When the rain drops on its petals, or when the sun touches it, the flower is always beautiful. Maybe the power of such beauty is not very strong, but it will somehow touch you one day. Such is the spirit of the intellectual.

The seasons are also this way. One day, when you get up and take your first breath, you know that spring is here. A warm spring is coming, but it is still a little chilly. Actually, I am not the only one who has this feel - ing. Everybody has it. I think the closer you are to being an intellectual, the more sensitive you are. 17 And so the seasons met. These words need to be heard against the back - drop, the surge and clamor of social and cultural change in China after 2001. A panorama with several horizons needs to be sketched. There is the horizon drawn by the rapid development of an overground contemporary art system of commercial galleries and markets in the cities; it is receiving intensified international attention and investment, especially with regard to painting and sculpture. There is a horizon being drawn by the transition to a colossal market economy, to huge new urban environments, a massive leap marked by China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 into a fast industrial economy and a century that many were already calling Chinese. The Beijing-based curator Karen Smith has summed up this new time-economy’s effect on art in China as [email protected]. 18 There is yet anoth - er horizon being drawn by the expansion of independent cinema, feature-length fic - tion, and documentary work that puts all the changes, all the speeds, both in front of the lens and in front of new audiences. 19 This was the stage onto which the minor intellectual was stepping. It was larger. It was growing. It was luminous. Its ends were unclear.

17. Ibid., pp. 90 –91. 18. Smith, “[email protected],” in The Real Thing , pp. 16 –23. 19. See Jia Zhangke, “Des films qu’on ne peut pas interdire. Le nouveau cinéma chinois” in Alors la Chine! (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2003). See also the important anthology of articles The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century , ed. Zhang Zhen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

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Fudong. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Part One. 2003.

Yang Fudong’s work on the Seven Intellectuals began by slowing art’s process down. This was the fundamental critical conceptual step from which all else followed. Forget the whirlwind. This would provide a formal condition as well, but at the begin - ning Yang Fudong hoped only to open the work itself to the real time of his own life, to let everyday time and experience seep invisibly into and out of the project. Time would be allowed to expand there, fracture, seep, and drain. By 2003, he had made several short pieces for video projection, and they were circulating through the art exhibition networks internationally. His films were being exhibited as installations; increasingly, he considered them to be determined by the dark room in which peo - ple could come and go, only sometimes seeing the entire work. This made it possible to increase the fragmentation of a story to the point where no story needed to be told. He was now absolved of the temporal conventions of cinema, and of the tighter controls the Chinese placed on commercial film. 20 Art-video exhibition, knowing no rules and no better, encouraged a chaos of time. More time, old, slow and real, poured in. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest , by virtue of its title, signals seven forebears:

20 . See Zhang Yaxuan, “A Chill Spreading Through the Air” and “The Power from Behind,” in Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest , pp. 118 –41 and pp. 170 –88 respectively.

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Ruan Ji, Ji Kang, Shan Tao, Liu Ling, Ruan Xian, Xiu Xiang, and Wang Rong. They are a group of unruly Taoists who withdrew from public life in the Wei and Jin dynas - ties (220 –420 AD), sang and drank together in the bamboo grove, and pursued a pure conversation and a passion for reckless liberty; their example became the stuff of legend and was taken repeatedly as a model by artists and writers in the centuries that followed. Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals revised the model to include two women but otherwise he let the type’s longevity outline his characters. They would function as a group of passionate, introspective individuals, lovely and earnest— friends, not a collective exactly; they were full of questions, trying to find a way to live as a group. It was all trial and error. These roles remained general. He added detail only in places, as if to emphasize these certain traits. First, he placed them in the half-generation born after his own; the intellectuals would be barely twenty, just out of school, and these questions would be specifically theirs, pointedly contemporary. He asked his younger friends to play these parts. None of them were professional actors and so they would appear on screen relatively unmasked. However, he then gave his intellectuals costumes, tailored, modern, stylish clothes that dated from mid- century, the kinds of clothes he had seen in photographs of authors like Sartre on the Chinese editions of their books. The setting of Part One —the crests of Huangshan, or the Yellow Mountain—set these few certain details into a deep antiq - uity. These were the mountains that had helped form the intervals of absence and presence in traditional Chinese landscape painting. He used this certain detail to combine the literary traditions and the mod - ern vernacular in ways reminiscent of writers like Lu Xun, where the combinations did not involve the layering of opposites, ancient versus modern, so much as the implication of one into the other through the use of a sharp accent or a tone. But other techniques were more visible, at least to him. He had techniques that he had intuited from movies he had not yet seen but read about; back in school, he had read as much as he could about Fellini in Chinese, so that long before seeing 8 1/2 , for example, he had an imaginary 8 1/2 in his head. 21 Were these providing detail too? Were the waters of an Italian spa, the promenade to its steam room, the stream of asides and deceptions being remembered as he framed his shots? Was this film too going to be a search for an idea for a film? Those movie dream sequences of his own would combine with the author photographs, the costumes, the fresh, nonprofes - sional faces and the mountain mist to make a movie begin. He drew the curtain of time backward into the twentieth century by shooting in black and white. His twenty- year old intellectuals arrive, the film opening gradually; there would be no one time, no one-point perspective; their thoughts would somehow have to contend with all these things that they had never lived and did not know yet. They try to grasp loss. They try to grasp death. Clouds and a soft rain hold them back.

21. See Michael Donohue, “Beyond Tomorrow,” W Magazine (November 2007), p. 208. Yang Fudong told Donohue, “Before I saw Fellini’s 8 1/2 , I had my own 8 1/2 in my head. See also the inter - views with Yuko Hasagawa, “Yang Fudong: Beyond Reality,” p. 106, and Beccaria, “Yang Fudong,” p. 19.

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The film was shot as a series of tableaux and activities. They went to the top of Yellow Mountain, like so many travelers before them, like so many tourists now, and set up scenes at celebrated lookout points. The film began at Monkey Watching the Sea; they lounge nude, then dress. Mists intrude. The film cuts away to the Seven Intellectuals’ descent, suspended above the eastern side of the moun - tain in cable cars blanketed by fog. A going-down, a going-under, someone like Lu Xun would have thought of Zarathustra but that would be too much surface refer - ence. The film cut back to take in the time spent on the crests. The film would take this rhythm of knowledge and immersion quietly into itself; it would flow in long, slow shots. The intellectuals would walk in and out of these long shots; they would climb the stepped paths along Songling Peak, Stone Figure Peak, Lotus Peak. The shots take the mountain’s side. They hold the opalescent close-ups open. The Intellectuals hold still. There would be no progress: the film marked its own end in silent tears. Once down from filming Yellow Mountain, Yang Fudong developed the script of thoughts by interviewing his young friends about Yellow Mountain itself, about attachments, about fate and the fragility inherent in life, about the need to believe. These thoughts give the film a documentary level, a realism. They become the interior monologues that float into the slow takes and scenes. Were they them - selves in the mountain? The gravity of the mountain overcame the Seven Intellectuals in different ways. They felt ideas concretely, personally. An archer took up his bow, aiming, shooting an arrow at the sky, the bow dissolving out of focus to become another cloud. They all threw the tourist padlocks out into the celestial sea. Here, there was a reason given. The locks came from the need for security, for belief. They remarked and they questioned belief as a mistake. They called out to nothing. The film did not register their calls as a sound. What lay beyond? Yang Fudong thought of Part One as a prologue, like a prologue to a book. 22 Something was miss - ing. The thing they did not know yet might just be Utopia.

*

Part One was shot in April 2003 with another end in mind. Yang Fudong had been invited to the Utopia Station being planned for the Venice Biennale that June, and Part One would be finished in time to be shown there. For many, this Utopia Station would always remain a conundrum. It did not look like an art exhibition, it behaved more like a dense village, a campground or an eccentric country fair; it grew so full of work, sound, and action that no single image could possibly summarize it. This was deliberate. Utopia Station had been designed to express the lived complexity of the spring of 2003: dogged by the reality of a stark

22. Statement written in 2003 and published, along with the interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist done at the time of the Camera exhibition in Paris in 2003, in No Snow On Broken Bridge: Film and Video Installations by Yang Fudong (London: Parasol Unit, Foundation for Contemporary Art, 2006) , pp. 119- 120. See also the 2005 interview with Zhang Yaxuan, “A Chill Spreading Through the Air,” pp. 118 –41.

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new war, heavy with the weight of the world, the cold machinations of finance, and the specter of the planet-to-come, it sought to create a way-station en route, not Utopia itself. Utopia Station would be a place to rest, reconsider the route, regain some exuberance, ask questions, breathe, eat, sleep, watch, listen, sing, and think about the next steps. Everything outside and inside became part of the exhi - bition; the exhibition extended into the fiber of everything and everybody pre - sent. It could get noisy. Nothing was fatally separated from anything else. Upon arrival, Yang Fudong’s immediate response to Utopia Station was to film it. He made a private documentary showing the artists and the visitors, the well-known and the unknown, milling together, working on the installation, set - ting up. He walked his camera down the wooden platform lined with artists’ posters; he filmed the door to the cinema room where Part One was being screened daily. He caught John Bock’s Theory House of Quasi-Me in the garden. He took no particular distance. But it was difficult to find distance in this place.

What Was a Station? Over three hundred artists, architects, writers, musicians, and performers from around the world were bringing something to Utopia Station, which became a tool, a way to self-organize, a set of options, a platform on which to meet. All this was nominally curated by a Swiss curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist, a Thai artist, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and an American writer, myself, but once set in motion, Utopia Station escaped organization. There were several Stations. They were sometimes large, as in Venice and in the exhibition the following year at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and sometimes very brief and small, but all of them were provisional, informal, and open. 23 As a project, it rose and slept according to the logic of opportunity. Yang Fudong’s work was a constant presence. When they were ready, he would send the new parts of the Seven Intellectuals there. Like the two previous Documentas, Utopia Station was part of a wider effort to produce new relations between theory and practice; works of art were being asked to follow reality, the arts were looking to enter the space outside themselves; the steps being taken were experiments, incremental, concrete responses to new conditions—call them the future—that no one could claim to completely understand or define. The group called “artists” therefore expanded. The ground was not confined to the mapping of markets. Matters crossed language boundaries as they could; positions were intuited, lectures and texts relayed. The legacy of work and debate that preceded Utopia Station was very much on the minds of those involved. The precedents of Brecht, Sir Thomas More, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Fourier, Michel Foucault, Sartre, Marx—every one had their own

23. Utopia Station began as an exhibition project for the Venice Biennale and then the Haus der Kunst, but it assumed different forms: virtual sites (www.e-flux.com), printed pages, gatherings, seminars, a set of interventions on the oblique at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2005, and a centerfold for Le Monde Diplomatique in August 2007.

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starting points. Existing Utopias were there to be used as catalysts. The level of reference and interval in Part One was already in tune with the intensification of perspectives on display that summer of 2003 in Venice well before it ever partici - pated in them. The catalysts burned off. Pasts without scenarios, presence without sce - nario; there was nonetheless much talk. The Venice catalogue recorded some of the early group discussions in preparation for this thing called a Station. One, as it happened, took place in February 2003 on the weekend of the worldwide peace marches. Starting points were put on the table. Lawrence Weiner reminded every - one present that the artist’s reality is no different from any other reality. Liam Gillick asked that Utopian mirage be avoided and asked for Utopia to become a functional step, moving beyond itself. Martha Rosler told the story of going to see the exhibition space in Venice, arriving as night fell. She saw nothing but darkness inside, there being no lights. But no matter: Utopia, she said, is really what moves. Jonas Mekas warned of obsessions with ideas, since the dream could only succeed if we forget them. Leon Golub was apocalyptic. Allan Sekula showed the first five minutes of the tape he had made the day before during the demonstration in New York. Anri Sala showed a tape of Tirana, where the mayor had painted apart - ment block walls into geometric colors of hope. Edouard Glissant came. He spoke his language of landscapes. Only by passing through the inextricable of the world, he said, can we save our imaginaire . Into that passage there would come a tremble - ment , the tremor being fundamental, something gained. 24 Glissant’s insistence on the creolité of our very existence, in language and without, would set islands of van - ishing points going. The going was thick with people’s words. Some of the artists had accepted the idea of writing statements. Many voices ran together there; it was as if Kerouac’s characters had found an afterlife. Taken together, the statements made trips around the world: My dear Tacitus, this you must know . . . . There is no ideal Rome. And no one is closer to this than the true believer. And no one is further from this than the true believer. That dream is not a map to your earthen paradise. It is instead a death of straightened pain and demand. A blank space. If existence were its destiny, its bounds would be more painful than life within the walls we know.

Yet so. In the sorrow of these truths is the key to the living Elysium. Your dying call for this just state, this true state. The hope which you

24. The Utopia Station exhibition at the 2003 Venice Biennale was part of the Biennale directed by Francesco Bonami. The catalogue for the Biennale included a section devoted to the Utopia Station and its projects. It includes the curators’ essay “What is a Station?” and contributions by Giancarlo De Carlo, Etienne Balibar, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Edouard Glissant. See Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer , ed. Francesco Bonami (Milan: Rizzoli, 2003), pp. 319 –415.

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carry in your chest and mind. The love for this . . . . That is your greatest salvation—That is your paradise.

For the true Rome is the fire above dark water. The true Rome is man’s hope for the true Rome. Your blood and brother, E.” (Trisha Donnelly)

. . . The settling of the American West at the end of the nineteenth century altered the narrative of the frontier. Exploration shifted from physical to perceptual dimensions. The romance of pioneer - ing, disengaged henceforth from constraints of latitude and longi - tude, became more exclusively its own point. The frontier was mapped onto itself. Journey and destination became one. The mod - ern wilderness—willed, created, chosen—became a renewable wilderness.

The idea of people specializing in pioneering has something intrin - sically, ascendantly comic about it. (David Robbins)

In Brasil they can pour concrete and build buildings between their lunch break, can we manage this in Chiang Mai? (Peter Fischli and David Weiss)

I do not want to see the same dead dog floating by again and again. (Thomas Bayrle) Speed boats, slow boats, dogs of all kinds were docking. Yang Fudong did not write a statement, but in Venice the soundtrack of Part One of his Seven Intellectuals mixed literally into the conversations, the pronouncements, the words and the work. The sounds of his film were heard all summer; every day, there were the Seven Intellectuals in Utopia Station speaking their pieces: Fate plays us at its own will . . . . I am nothing; I may vanish and am bound to vanish. But my dreams, remaining where they are, will last forever. Fate rebuilds me, but I can’t feel it. It is like the flowing clouds and water of Yellow Mountain. You can’t reach them but you know they are yours.

Having beliefs is a kind of mistake. Persistence backs up your goals in life. But it also leads you to confusion. Is this the life I want? Though it is vulnerable, filled with frustration and failure, I just want to follow my heart. I think there are times when I’m very far away from myself.

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Fudong. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Part Two. 2004.

Utopia Station gave Yang Fudong new panoramas, an expanse, new ground to use, a place to find friends, move, and move again toward the enigmas ahead. He plunged in. All their work seemed to be a work-in-progress. What the Seven Intellectuals did not know yet was now to be planted into a very large discus - sion. Their vision of the Yellow Mountain would be remembered in Utopia Station. Utopia now figured when Yang Fudong spoke about the Seven Intellectuals . He too used it as a catalyst. The next April, Yang Fudong began work on Part Two , keeping to his plan to take the scene to the city. He began shooting at three locations in older parts of central Shanghai and in its former French Concession; it was the Shanghai of imported plane trees and low, European, urban plan. But Yang Fudong was more interested in this Shanghai’s stairways and indoor light. He introduced two more characters, an arguing married couple; they offered flashes of contrast. The subse - quent parts of the Seven Intellectuals would all have secondary characters passing through like this to offset the inexperience, the bravado, and the awkwardness of the Seven Intellectuals themselves. The Seven Intellectuals would not be ready for marriage in Part Two ; they were still trying to understand the ways and means of their sex. They tried to grasp these things by talking about them. The work on Part Two therefore began with their words.

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Fudong. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Part Two. 2004.

These conversations were based, as before, on interviews. Sex was described, imagined, set out. Interviews of fantasy, interviews of lies, sincere inter - views, winsome and bragging, they gave the film its documentary spine; for the rest, the images, the costumes, the movements opened up to time as before. The script established, the lines rehearsed, on the set the words were further bandied, modified, and improvised. 25 Thinking was dialogue—or was it banter, taken to extremes, to tales of exploits, initiations, cruelty to animals, disappointment with people? Words lost their purchase in the mouths of the Seven Intellectuals. An intense montage of shots overrode them. Here too the film began by looking backward, this time from a motorcycle. Highway markings receded fast. As the montage of shots scrambled, the time into no-time and the place into no-place, it showed after-hours scenes of daily life, the times for pure co-exis - tence, doors opening and shutting, outside the close turns of a stair, noises trav - eling partly, the disarray left by long exchanges of aperitifs. The archer comes back as a dart thrower. The Seven Intellectuals inhabit a plotless film noir in Part Two . They live by night. No-place takes form as shadows. The film followed the dream of Utopia traveling down corridors of sexual intrigue. Intrigue did not lead the young intellectuals to answers or peace on earth. Life in town seemed

25. Zhang Yaxuan, “A Chill Spreading Through the Air,” pp. 125 –26.

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poor in comparison to what they had seen on the mountain, poor in compari - son to what lay beyond their ken. They seemed not to remember the mountain. Were there other ends in sight? That is the question of the song, written by Yang Fudong, sung just at the point of the end. It probed the path of the heart.

Waiting hopelessly No one comes back. Lingering, wandering, Though he never changes his way Flap your wings, Fall into dreaming Who am I expecting To consort with me? For romance, for love, Forget the bitterness, With you, I am myself In the lost paradise So long as I’m in your arms I feel I am flying in the sky

Then, just as dramatically, the montage breaks away from the soaring lament. The singer speaks. She complains about the advice coming from her mother, the per - son who brought her into the world, unbidden, through the hole in her abdomen. Birth is the last, dark, clinical thought in the mouth of this intellectual. It too is a no-place.

*

From this point on, scripts would be abandoned. The Seven Intellectuals would be separated off from words. The ever-broadening dialogues that were informing the project from the outside would have to exist in the films in other ways. What had been a contact between thoughts and words now became a con - tact between silences. The contact between all the dreams coming at the Seven Intellectuals from inside and outside remained. The dreams left a different taste of speechlessness.

What Happens When Two Dreams Touch? Such a contact between two dreams actually once produced a dog, Un Chien Andalou (1928), the first Surrealist film of Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel. In 2003, Yang Fudong had traveled to Paris on the occasion of his exhibition at the

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Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and there for the first time saw the film screened at the Centre Pompidou. Un Chien Andalou began with the scene of a woman’s eye being sliced through by a razor. A frantic movement of bizarre scenes took off afterward, a ticking, strange trail of upset that ran like a clock through an otherwise normal bourgeois day. The razored eye came from a dream that Buñuel had had about the moon being sliced like that by a cloud; Dali matched it with a dream about a hand crawling with ants. They rubbed these dreams together and made a blazing image that no history of cinema does without. 26 It is impossible not to think back to it when struck by the first scene of Part Three of the Seven Intellectuals , where a black ox is beheaded in a rice paddy. Part Three began with real, headless death. Dreams from Yellow Mountain, dreams from Utopia Station’s jostle and reverie, dreams of one true love, all these dreams in contact seemed to have ceded altogether to brute reality. This brute reality will be shown to be impossibly beautiful, lingering, even gorgeous, as the will of the animal, the existence of the animal, the labor of the animal mix out of order into the consciousness of the city intellectuals. In Part Three the Seven Intellectuals travel to the countryside and learn the labor of the peasant. Past, pre - sent, or future? There, modernity had made no dent; they learn to plough, to tend to the ox and the water buffalo, to seed and plant rice. Gone are the aperi - tifs. By night, they try to reflect. But silently. The film’s sounds now are ambient and natural; physical existence has broadened to include much more than sexual existence; the Intellectuals fall on their face in the mud of this life; it is more than they can know. They do not die. Part Three was shot in Jingning, Zhejiang province in April and May of 2005. Shooting without a script, starting with a set of scenes which onsite would develop through intuition, the Seven Intellectuals settled on a set of situations, edit - ed later into an order like before, no progress, no time, no story. This silence would be hard, broken only by the ploughman’s cries to the ox, the unsteady rhythm of water sloshing, the exquisite hush of nightfall, the chords made by the crickets, the frogs, the wind after dark. Existence, as André Breton had written as he announced the Surrealist Revolution in 1924, was elsewhere. 27 But where? Did the scarecrow have an existence? Was the archaic fire sacrifice of a painted paper bull proof that they too had lived? Encounters like these between the intellectual and the peasant had set the classical problem of practice—cast as the relations between theory and prac - tice—in political theory in the twentieth century, be it East or West. Lu Xun, Trotsky, Gramsci, Lenin, Mao, Brecht, Benjamin, Sartre. The century had begun with hard times—wars, revolution, economic disaster, in rough succession. Reality

26. Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel , trans. Abigail Israel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 92. First French edition 1982. First Chinese edition 1994. 27. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924), in Manifestoes of Surrealism , trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Land (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1969), p. 47.

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Fudong. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Part Three. 2005.

was obdurate; it overtook the academic problems of theory and practice, hit them repeatedly and set the problems back on their feet ever more roughly. The addi - tion of the industrial proletariat to the equation would only add severity, and the drought that came with increasing alienation. The thinkers of the late twentieth century built upon these foundations, hardly the sole province of the Cultural Revolution. No one felt that the modern problem of theory and practice had been solved, or could be solved, by language alone. Utopia Station had raised all of this up again, necessarily, for these were the problems inseparable from any dream of Utopia. Merely taking the city intellectuals to the rice fields in 2005 and asking them to learn invoked this century and more of cruel questions, stony and hard under the feet of the Seven Intellectuals too. The film is clear. The Seven Intellectuals can only understand labor by laboring. This physical reality resists them more completely than the mountain had. No wonder they fall silent. But they are, like all good intellectuals, not defeated. Retreating to their corners, they take their walks, tenderly, sheepishly, and keep thinking. Reality enters the mind in various ways that they do not know yet. What did the embers of the fire sacri - fice leave there? The film does not offer them formal conclusions or even an old adage. It ends with the first and fatal blow to the black ox. Death came to the ox

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in the rice paddy they had so recently ploughed together. “Film is like life,” he said to Gerald Matt, as he was putting together his plan for Part Three : Sometimes it’s like rain on the water, very beautiful and very quiet, the waves not necessarily very violent. I’d like to advocate a kind of abstract film, author film, without regular rules. The artist offers it a limit.

. . . No matter what kind of life, there will always be some ambiguity in it. It’s like experiencing a lot of the four seasons. No clear memory of them any more.

Sometimes life is contradictory in one’s heart. The heart goes forward, yet the body itself goes in another direction, further and further away, like a piece of cloud, one feels nothing by going through it. But it does flow beautifully there in the sky. 28 The Seven Intellectuals did not represent life itself; they were caught in its contra - dictions, its pulse, its amnesia. “What I shoot is the life of today’s youth and the life which is aloof from the true life,” he continued. “It [True life] is abstract, exist - ing in one’s heart. It doesn’t have a concrete concept of time. Sometimes I think that life today is changing more and more. Many people seem to have become nonbelievers. They have lost belief in everything.” He gave Matt a vision, as if to compensate. He was looking for antidotes. “The ideal, Utopia, and paradise are like the moon in the sky,” he said. “Some people let it hang up there in the sky; some pull it down and hold it in their hands.” 29 It is one thing to speak of death on the Yellow Mountain, or to dream, at the dinner table, of being mawed by a tiger; it is something else to see death in real time. In the three remaining parts of the Seven Intellectuals , the mounting complexity of reference, of knowledge, of dream would hit the wall of physical reality again and again, scattering. At the same time, in late 2004, Yang Fudong began to speak of the project in a new way. He saw it as an effort to define a new kind of film that he called, in his own way, “abstract.” Abstraction would become his new road. In 2005, during his second interview with Zhang Yaxuan, he said that this term he was now employing, this “abstract film,” was a stop-gap, just a temporary way of describing the experimental techniques now in play, their heterogeneity, their embrace of the alien element, their move closer to the imagination. He also explained that this abstract film followed from the imagined films of his schooldays, the imagined 8 1/2 or the imagined La Strada (1954). 30 Fellini too had worked on the

28. Matt, “Film is Like Life,” p. 15. 29. Ibid., p. 16. 30. Zhang Yaxuan, “A Chill Spreading Through the Air,” p. 137.

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Fudong. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Part Three. 2005.

mix of dream and reality, just as the Surrealists had before him. Was Yang Fudong reading about Fellini in the criticism of André Bazin? Yang Fudong was certainly reading Bazin’s classic essay of 1957 on the rules of “montage.” By montage, Bazin meant the assembly of a scene in a sequence of separate shots: “It is montage,” he declared, “that abstract creator of meaning, which preserves the state of unreality demanded by the spectacle.” 31 In his mind, this abstract creation did not detach. Through montage, one could pass from the imaginary to the real or, conversely, from the real to the imaginary, and the net effect, Bazin felt, would have to be called an imaginary documentary, or a documentary of the imagination. Bazin took his examples from films involving live animals. He remarked at one point that the spectator did not need to know that the horse appearing in the film was actually three or four horses, nor was it necessary to be told that someone needed to pull a cotton thread in order for the horse to turn its head on cue. 32 In Part Three there were in fact five or six animals playing the role of ox and doubtless many tricks were used to get them to play their part. Then there were the moments when illusions broke and bled and illusion became real. Montaged shots carried the

31. Bazin, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 45. 32. Ibid., pp. 41 –52.

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Fudong. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Part Four. 2007.

dreams forward, but at the same time it brought them up short in Part Three . Abstract film, or montage, was a means to an end, not an end in itself; it was the means to the moon, not the moon. Nothing was easy. The limit the artist offered in his edit was shown in a context of greater and lesser limits. Part Three was a weave of limit condi - tions that seemed to extend infinitely, floating on hills, looking out, at the point that comes just before looking up.

A New Moon, Standing Alone Part Four was shot over November and December 2006 at two different loca - tions by the sea, in Weihai in Shandong province and in Xiangshan in Zhejiang. The film would splice shots from both places into one another to fabricate a single fic - tional island, like the desert islands of the mythical historical Utopias. Which is to say it was a heightened reality being set up as a future. For Yang Fudong, this reality also held the dream of the legendary Island of Peach Blossoms known from The Condor Trilogy , the contemporary martial arts epic written by Jin Yong. 33

33. See Yang Fudong’s synopsis of the project in Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense: La Biennale di Venezia 2007, ed. Robert Storr (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007), p. 374

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Two, or three, at least, become one setting. The one becomes increasingly unsettled; the montage serves to heighten the effect. The place is awash with undercurrents, mysteries, and challenges that seem to go beyond the simple givens. This time the intellectuals go to the sea to learn the labor of the fisher - man. The film opens with a long tracking short showing each of them, one by one, dressed in fisher clothes, posed stiffly with a trophy. A catch takes the place of a thought. A curtain call without a curtain, an end again is used to begin. As in Part Three , they do not speak. The sounds here too are ambient and natural; noise alone tells a truth. It is broken only once—by sobs. Different actors have been stepping into the roles of the intellectuals, who are still operating as before, as a group whose internal dynamics keep turning away in time. There are small attempts at character definition in Part Four . In one of the first shots, the intellectual who never takes his glasses off, not for bed, not for bath, is shown face down on the beach, his head rising out of the sand in close- up; he turns—one of his lenses is broken. He seems not to notice. It is a shot that rings straight back to Battleship Potemkin (1925), to the moment on the Odessa Steps when Eisenstein makes a montage out of the face of an old woman, her glasses cracked and bloodied when she is shot in the face by the Cossacks’ guns. Such an echo makes the ensuing activity in Part Four all the more poignant. The Seven Intellectuals have come late to the beach, late to something mysterious in the form of a dead shark, in the harvest, in the place where they are alone, like Robinson Crusoe; no revolution is beginning in fits and starts. World events are elsewhere. The place seems abandoned, obsolete. The Seven Intellectuals hover around it and enter the slow rhythms of a fisher’s life. The man in the eyeglasses will have to work. Increasingly he seems unable; he combs the beach, wandering off into the state of the holy fool; he brandishes an old ladle covered in barnacles as if it were a scepter. The montage breaks into highly theatrical moments when the Seven Intellectuals seem to be inventing rituals, parading in bathtubs, bathing naked alongside a flock of cranes. But this is a place of water, not fire. They have not died. They bend themselves to the gutting of a great shark, to cleaning and drying the day’s haul. The shots are long, they let the real time of manual labor set the pace, they change like the waves, they ebb. Cutting across limits? Cutting into dreams? The montage clarifies nothing in this new variation on action and check. Yang Fudong planned for this part of the Seven Intellectuals to be set on an island of belief, like the legendary Island of Peach Blossoms. But the Island of Peach Blossoms is present in the same way that the Russian Revolution is present: as a reference that lies deep beneath the sur - face of what can be seen, like the knowledge of a tide. The Intellectuals have no access to the ocean floor, or to the initiation of the warrior, any more than they have access to the life of the fisherman or the peasant. The Seven Intellectuals are hamstrung by their limitations, their city ways, their untapped manual dexterity,

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Fudong. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Part Four. 2007.

their beginners’ luck, their beginners’ hopes, their sadness. No peach blossoms, no sages lead them out of their maze. They are left to live as they can. Bazin wrote an essay on the characters in Fellini’s early films, noting that they do not evolve. They ripen, he noted, or at the most become trans - formed vertically, not horizontally. Their time is purely internal. 34 He saw them as part of the new Italian aesthetic of reality, an aesthetic that took the depths of reality seriously and developed forms to convey them. These forms involve deep focus; they compose scenes via montages of detail; they imitate real time; they forego theatrical propping; they move close to the grain of the present. Against this ground, there are figures, with their vertical time registered in the changes on a face. The time of a character becomes measured in the events that map a consciousness in a film like La Strada , La Strada being the Italian idea of life on the road. Inside the ebb and flow of Part Four of the Seven Intellectuals , there with the promise of the wuxia and the waning glow from all the old Utopias, all the world’s voices. Time also goes down, registered vertically in eyes filling with tragedy, setting on a watchful face. In the end, the Intellectuals, who have come,

34. Bazin, “Cabiria: the Voyage to the End of Neo-Realism,” in What is Cinema?, vol. 2, p. 85.

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Fudong. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Part Four. 2007.

will go. The film ends as they mount a small boat which is then lifted into the air, over shore, over sea. They rise to the sky. Alas, the boat is the only island available now. The suspense is literal, beautiful, and awful. But this film has lived all along in the foreknowledge of its sequel. Part Five begins with a great cargo ship sound - ing its horn as it comes into port in Shanghai. The city now will rise to greet them. They will now be swallowed up by it. Part Three of the Seven Intellectuals was first shown in the fall of 2006 in London in the China Power Station exhibition organized by the Serpentine Gallery in the halls of the abandoned power station in Battersea. 35 It was being unveiled, in other words, just as Part Four was being shot on the coast of China. Part Four and Part Five were being made to be shown, along with the entire cycle, in June 2007 at the Venice Biennale curated by Robert Storr. Parts Four and Five , as a consequence, were made hard on the heels of one another. Part Five has its own water music. The Seven Intellectuals enter Shanghai underwater, at the sea bottom of the old city Aquarium, where they move, fully clothed, in scuba gear, unprotected, among schools of fish, sharks, and rays.

35. Co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Julia Peyton-Jones, and Gunnar Kvaran, China Power Station was an ongoing exhibition starting with Part One (Serpentine Gallery exhibition in the Battersea Power Station, London). The October 2006 issue of Fused Magazine served as the catalogue.

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Part Five was shot in April and May 2007 on a variety of locations in Shanghai. Compared to the other settings that the Seven Intellectuals had known, it was a bewildering range of extremes—luxurious galleries and bars at Three on the Bund, a now-demolished steel factory sprawled in the wastelands near the Huangpu River; clubs decorated to hark back to the days of colonial excess; a few differently appointed public baths; the old Aquarium; the old air - port; the sets available for hire on the movie lots of the Shanghai Film Studio. The Seven Intellectuals would try to navigate all of this at once, spreading them - selves thin. They would lounge, take back their cocktails, apprentice themselves as chefs, play an antic slapstick baseball game, dabble briefly in seductions, and try to dance. They fall into the city, fall again away from the present, as if sunk and drunk. Work and play, movie and wasteland and waste blur together. There is no sign of their experience from the other parts leading up to this last, grand finale of theirs. In 2005, Yang Fudong had imagined a plan for Part Five wherein the return to the city would be a return to a positive atmosphere, “in keeping with the free and open life that the protagonists will lead. Happy, the young people will have no memory of what happened before, over the course of the four other films. Theirs will be a life without memory; they will recall nothing of the experi - ences undergone in the four previous episodes.” 36 It is no surprise that when Yang Fudong read Luis Buñuel’s autobiography, My Last Sigh , he rejoiced at the first sentence, “During the last ten years of her life, my mother gradually lost her memory.” 37 Memory, Buñuel went on to say, is at the heart of life; only when it is lost, does one understand the role it plays. Memory is not the same as reality. “Our imagination, and our dreams,” Buñuel explained, “are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lies into truths. Of course, fantasy and reality are equally personal, and equally felt, so their confusion is a matter of only relative importance.” 38 The mix of dream and reality took another turn. One is born into memories that one has not yet had. One is faced with the knowledge that one does not know yet. These things are perennial. The Seven Intellectuals drifting in these memories foreign to them, this knowledge over their horizon, are no different from anyone anywhere. But in Part Five , Yang Fudong set them up differently: their life without memory was being drawn from the life he was seeing around him. It led him toward new definitions, new questions. “What an artist tries to do is to look within himself and work diligent - ly, carefully, even laboriously, so that his art might have some effect,” he said. To me, the great change that is happening today in society can be

36. Yang Fudong, in Beccaria, “Yang Fudong ,” p. 25. 37. Buñuel, My Last Sigh , p. 3. 38. Ibid., p. 5.

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Fudong. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Part Five. 2007.

seen and perceived in various forms. This transformation relates to people’s mental attitude, the many changes in their way of thinking and their ideology. Numerous factors come into play, which concern the loss of traditional values and even the concept of tradition. In this sense, there is a loss. At the same time, the arrival and assertion of the new sometimes creates a sort of selfish existence, an existence that doesn’t have much meaning. What is lost is the idea of living together, a collective search for a better way of life . . . . Many young people—I’m referring above all to the generation subsequent to mine—don’t take the past into consideration at all. They don’t even need to forget it, since they didn’t know it in the first place. 39

The life without memory being shown in Part Five would be part of the documentary spine of the entire project, as specific as the torch songs sung by Coco, the singer appearing there as himself. The life without memory is a contem - porary life, set within a film that loads memory of all kinds into the scenes around it: memories of the old Shanghai cinema, memories of Italian neo-realism, memo -

39. Yang Fudong, in Beccaria, “Yang Fudong ,” p. 25.

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Fudong. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Part Five. 2007.

ries of the Island of Peach Blossoms, of Utopian dreams and politics, East and West, memories of deception, memories of wild grass. The scenes in Part Five build a patchwork that ranges over the stages in Shanghai’s history in the twenti - eth century, with hints of the twenty-first. They demonstrate, through their mani - fold mixing of mixtures, the creole nature of the place, the creole nature that it always had had. The scenes come forward; their montage takes over as the Seven Intellectuals go under for the last time. The Seven Intellectuals are now swamped by the complexity, times mix - ing, the modern city dividing its labor into strata: cooks, steel workers, entertain - ers. They have been reduced to six, joined intermittently by a young woman, a nominal seventh, her uncoupling another index of loss. The complexity is given variously in the movie sets that splinter any hope of realist continuity. The mon - tage is cut like an old-fashioned thriller; it is interrupted and ultimately borne along by a dance, the insistent, dominating rhythm of a hyper-stylized cha-cha- cha. The dance becomes a way for the Seven Intellectuals to join the intricate rhythms of the montage, and the city. They have dance lessons; they learn to clap to Spanish dance; elsewhere they learn to applaud together en masse, an applause that accelerates, faster and faster, toward a total ovation. They begin to vacillate;

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they play and pass out with greater frequency. Their minds seem to be vacant. Their independence wanes. They smile. They must work to keep their cool. Is it reasonable to expect more, given the obstacles before them? The film itself is a different matter. In the end, it has separated itself from the Seven Intellectuals. Silent and beautiful, it is ripe with experience; it waits to be harvested, and to be planted. The question of what to do with the material being pre - sented, what to do with the contradictions charging through its time-heavy, stylized reality, what to do with the press of the outside, what to do with the heart, weighs as heavy as the shadows; the question need not be voiced. It is the old question of prac - tice, of Lu Xun, of Mao, of all those intellectuals who forged their ideas of themselves by plunging them, like hot steel, into the ice water of the events of their time, trying to forge new tools. It is the question asked long and hard by the man whose photo - graph had helped inspire the clothes the Seven Intellectuals wear. Sartre stands out - side these scenes in ways that he would have appreciated. Fudong saw the writer: Suspended between total ignorance and all-knowingness, he has a definite stock of knowledge which varies from moment to moment and which is enough to reveal his historicity. In actual fact, he is not an instantaneous consciousness, a pure timeless affirmation of freedom, nor does he soar above history; he is involved in it. 40 For the last time, the film ends. The last end is an awakening. It has come down to a large older restaurant, the dining room of Xian Qiang Fang, in a building that housed a Western-style department store back in Lu Xun’s day. The Seven Intellectuals have come for dinner, they will try to dance, they will begin to brawl. As they do, a huge corps of chefs in bright white uniforms, toques in place, file in to form a chorus and begin the acceleration of clapping that ends in a great, round of applause. All the slowness, the infinite variations on the dream, sought for so long heretofore, is being sacrificed to this new pace; the sound rushes to catch up with something ahead. The camera pulls away. The present has come. On the back wall, in the distance, two screens play a video: it is Part One of the Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest ; there they are, twice, seen descending Yellow Mountain, peering out of the cable car, floating into the mist. The scene turns the tables on each and every illusion: the shot reveals itself to be nothing more than a stage, a theatrical reality. The shot pours itself out. The applause reaches the view - er outside; the viewer now has a part to play, the part of the audience. All the materials, the questions, the irresolution have come, like a curse, or a gift of life, to us in our present. Who will be the next Intellectual? Behind the film credits plays the song of underground rock stars Zuoxiao Zuzhou and Shanni Chen. It is titled When I Left You . As Yang Fudong wrote his synopsis of the Seven Intellectuals for the Venice Biennale catalogue, he said this and only this about Part Five : “ Part Five is

40. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? , trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), p. 69.

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Fudong. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Part Five. 2007.

about the return to the city and to reality. We live in the city and belong to it. If any problem arises, we are able to solve it.” 41 We are there. Shanghai is here. We have assumed the burdens of the Seven Intellectuals, the singing, the dancing, the questions that lie on the hori - zons of the future. They burn the grass; they shake the Utopias. Smoke now rises into our skies and we wonder. It is drizzling and mysterious at the beginning. Perhaps it is time to go get the lines Mao so long ago held up for admiration. They come from Lu Xun’s couplet:

Fierce-browed, I coolly defy a thousand pointing fingers, Head-bowed, like a willing ox I serve the children. 42

41. Yang Fudong’s synopsis , Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind , p. 374. 42. Lu Xun, quoted by Mao Tsetung in “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art” (May 1942), in Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1971), p. 284.

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