SEPTEMBER/OCTO B E R 2 0 1 4 V O LUME 13, NUMBER 5

INSI DE

Private Museums in China: Long Museum, Yuz Museum, Xi’an Art Museum Exhibitions: Altenatives to Ritual, Moderation(s) Artist Features: Paul Wong, Shezad Dawood

US$12.00 NT$350.00 PRI NTED IN TA I WAN

6

VOLUME 13, NUMBER 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2014

CONTENTS 2 Editor’s Note 13 4 Contributors

6 The Construction of the Yuz Museum Shanghai: Budi Tek in Conversation with Wu Hung

13 Budi Tek, Yuz Fundation, in Conversation with Qiu Jiahe

20 The Inner Trappings of a Dragon: Long Museum, 43 Shanghai Julie Chun

29 A New Model Exemplifies the Art Museum Boom in China: Yang Chao in Conversation with Zheng Shengtian

43 A Reflective Turn in Exhibition-Making: On Alternatives to Ritual Julia Gwendolyn Schneider

58 53 Moderation(s): An Introduction Defne Ayas

58 Moderation(s): Speaking in Parentheses Christina Li

71 The Social Architecture of “Situations”: Heman Chong in Conversation with Lee Ambrozy

85 Pure Disruption: Sex, Death, and Postcolonial 85 Identity in Paul Wong’s Video Art Alex Quicho

93 Quantum Anthropology: Shezad Dawood in Conversation with Stephanie Bailey

106 Chinese Name Index

93 Cover: Xu Bing, Square Word Calligraphy, 1999, fabric banner, at Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai. Photo: Ruth Thompson.

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

Vol. 13 No. 5 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 Yishu 64 explores the phenomenon of private FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum museums in mainland China, propositions for EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace new ways of thinking about exhibition-making, MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian EDITORS Julie Grundvig and two artists who were not born in China Kate Steinmann but who have worked within and around its Chunyee Li contexts. CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Michelle Hsieh The museum system in China is distinct in that WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li most art museums are privately initiated and ADVISORY BOARD owned. The discussion between collector Budi Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Tek and Wu Hung took place in the Fall of 2012, Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum John Clark, University of Sydney eighteen months before Tek’s Yuz Museum Lynne Cooke, Museo Reina Sofia Shanghai opened, but it offers insights into Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator the curatorial process of imagining the future Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China exhibition space, how artworks will relate to Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh each other, and what purpose the museum Hou Hanru, MAXXI, Rome serves. This is followed by a discussion Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Katie Hill, University of Westminster between Budi Tek and Qiu Jiahe that focuses Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive more on the philosophical underpinnings of the Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian Yuz Collection and the Yuz Foundation that has Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator Lu Jie, Long March Space in consequence emerged. Julie Chun reports Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore on another private museum in Shanghai, the Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Long Museum West Bund, that also opened in Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art 2014. She acknowledges the worthy intentions Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago of collectors to make their collection public, but Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District is cautionary about the potential shortcomings PUBLISHER Art & Collection Group Ltd. of such ambitious projects. In the conversation 6F. No. 85, Section 1, between Zheng Shengtian and Yang Chao, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Director of the Xi’an Art Museum, a candid Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 overview of private museums in China makes Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 E-mail: [email protected] transparent the undefined relationship between the developer, government, and the public. VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu Alex Kao MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin Biljana Ciric’s Alternatives to Ritual and CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu Betty Hsieh Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and Spring Workshop’s collaboration, PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. Moderation(s), are two exhibition projects WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com that, in their exploration of inventive strategies WEB DESIGN Design Format ISSN 1683 - 3082 that animate a program or space, challenge traditional museum exhibition practices. The Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, artists in Ciric’s exhibition literally occupy the March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, German Consular office space in Shanghai, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: and Heman Chong, the moderator for Yishu Editorial Office Moderation(s), introduces a multidisciplinary 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada ethic that opens itself to the vulnerabilities of V6Z 2P3 unanticipated flexibility. Phone: 1.604.649.8187 Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: offi[email protected] The two concluding texts feature artists Paul SUBSCRIPTION RATES Wong and Shezad Dawood who represent 1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) different generations and come from different 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com) regions of the world, but they share an interest in postcolonial identity and its complex DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah relationships with popular and traditional ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow cultures through the means of new media. DESIGNER Philip Wong 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. Keith Wallace Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

2 4

6 (Chunyee Li) (Larisa Broyde)

13 (Philip Tinari) (Judy Andrews) (Britta Erickson) 20 Julie Chun (Melissa Chiu) (Sebastian Lopez) 29 (Claire Hsu) (John Clark) (Pauline J. Yao) (Martina Köppel-Yang) 43 Lynne Cooke Julia Gwendolyn Schneider Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill Charles Merewether 53 Moderation(s) Apinan Poshyananda Defne Ayas 58 Moderation(s) 856 : (886) 2.2560.2220 71 (886) 2.2542.0631 [email protected] Yishu Office 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 85 : (1) 604.649.8187 (1) 604.591.6392 Alex Quicho : offi[email protected]

93 Leap Creative Group, Vancouver

106 6

http://yishu-online.com Design Format

Contributors

Lee Ambrozy is a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese Stephanie Bailey is the Managing Editor for Art History and Archaeology at the Institute Ibraaz. She has an M.A. in contemporary art of Fine Arts, New York University; she has theory from Goldsmiths College, University an M.A. in Art History from the Central of London, and a B.A. in classical civilization Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and is a with English literature from King’s College, graduate of Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. London. She is currently on the editorial She was editor and translator of Ai Weiwei’s committee for Naked Punch, the editorial Blog (MIT Press, 2011) and from 2010 to 2012 team for South as a State of Mind, and a she was the editor of Artforum International’s correspondent for Ocula.com. Her writing Chinese language website Artforum.com.cn, has appeared in publications including ART where she is currently editor-at-large. She PAPERS, Aesthetica, ARTnews, Artforum, lives between New York and Beijing. Frieze, LEAP, Modern Painters, Notes on Metamodernism, and Yishu: Journal of Defne Ayas is Director of the Witte de Contemporary Chinese Art. With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. During her directorship, Witte Julie Chun is an independent art historian de With, together with Ullens Center for and lecturer who has resided in Shanghai Contemporary Art, co-commissioned Dai since 2011. She received her M.A. in Art Hanzhi: 5,000 Artists, a large platform History from San Jose State University, dedicated to the legacy of scholar, curator, California, and serves as the Convener of and dealer Hans van Dijk, which includes Art Focus for the Royal Asiatic Society two exhibitions, public programs, and a China, where she delivers monthly lectures publication. Other projects directed by Ayas on the topic of Asian art. Her writings have include Moderation(s), by artist and writer appeared in academic journals, and she is a Heman Chong, a two-year long programme contributing writer for Randian, a bilingual set up between Witte de With and Spring online journal dedicated to exploring Chinese Hong Kong; and the open archive and contemporary art within a global context. collection Tulkus 1880 to 2018 by Paola Pivi. She has been covering and following many of Ayas curated Blueprints by Chinese artist the new museums in Shanghai, including the and thinker Qiu Zhijie (2012), Line no. 2 China Art Museum and the Long Museum in (Holy Bible) by Turkish-Swedish artist Meric Pudong and West Bund. Algun Ringborg, and co-curated Surplus Authors with Phillippe Pirotte (2012). In Christina Li is an independent curator addition, Ayas launched Witte de With’s new and writer based in Hong Kong and the online platform WdW Review. Before moving Netherlands. She studied art history and to Rotterdam, Ayas co-founded Arthub Asia comparative literature at the University of in 2007, an Asia-wide active research and Hong Kong and participated in the de production initiative, where she remains a Appel Curatorial Program, Amsterdam, Director of Arthub Asia. Ayas has also been a in 2008 and 2009. She was curator at curator of PERFORMA, the biennial of visual Para/Site Art Space between 2005 and art performance of New York City, since its 2008 and was assistant curator of a solo inception in 2004. presentation of Making (Perfect) World: Harbour, Hong Kong, Alienated Cities, and

4 Vol. 13 No. 5 Dreams by Hong Kong artist Pak Sheung Wu Hung is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Chuen at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art Together with artist and curator Heman History and Director of the Center for the Art Chong, she is currently working on Stationary, of East Asia at the University of Chicago. An a collection of stories published by Spring elected member of American Academy of Arts Workshop to be launched in January 2015. and Sciences, he has published widely on both traditional and contemporary Chinese art and Qiu Jiahe is a senior reporter at the Shanghai has curated many influential contemporary art Securities News and has been covering issues exhibitions. His most recent and publications concerning the Chinese art market since 2004. on contemporary art include Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (MoMA, Alex M. F. Quicho is an artist and writer 2010) and Contemporary Chinese Art: A History focused on issues of postcolonial identity. She (Thames and Hudson, 2014). holds a B.F.A in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2013). Zheng Shengtian, an artist, scholar and independent curator, has lived and Julia Gwendolyn Schneider is an art critic worked in Vancouver since 1990. Before based in Berlin. She studied American Studies, his immigration, Zheng worked at China Cultural Sciences, and Aesthetics at Humbolt Academy of Art in Hangzhou as Professor and University, Berlin, and Cultural Studies at Department Chair for more than thirty years. Middlesex University, London. In 2001, she has He is the co-founder of the Chinese Canadian curated an exhibition on net art at Humbolt Artists Federation and Centre A in Vancouver. University, and in 2002 was assistant curator Currently Zheng is the Managing Editor for Urban Drift, an international collaborative of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese platform in Berlin for contemporary urban Art, a trustee of Vancouver Art Gallery, and strategies. In 2006, she worked in arts Senior Curator for Vancouver Biennale. He administration for the Biennale of Sydney has curated numerous exhibitions, including and the Australia Council for the Arts. Her the 4th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai Modern writing has appeared in art catalogues and art in Munich (2004–05), and Art and China’s magazines such as springerin, Mute, artnet, Revolution in New York (2008). He is a von hundert, Camera Austria, and in the daily frequent contributor to periodicals and taz. In 2008, she undertook a research trip to catalogues about contemporary Chinese and Kyrgyzstan and wrote about art production Asian art. Four volumes of his writing on art under post-Soviet conditions. Since 2006, the were published by the China Academy of Art Asia-Pacific region has been a focus in her Press in 2013. As an artist, Zheng has shown writing, including essays on numerous topics work in China, the United States, Canada, such as alternative art spaces, the survival of and Russia since 1960s. Zheng received an The Artists Village in Singapore, video art Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Emily and media activism in Indonesia, and the Carr University of Art and Design in 2013. documentary titled IPHONECHINA.

Vol. 13 No. 5 5 The Construction of the Yuz Museum Shanghai: Budi Tek in Conversation with Wu Hung

Construction of the Yuz Museum Shanghai. Photo: JJYPhoto. Courtesy of Yuz Museum Shanghai.

his discussion took place on October 12, 2012, eighteen months prior to the inaugural exhibition at the Yuz Museum Shanghai, Myth/ T History: Yuz Collection of Contemporary Art (May 18 to November 18, 2014). At that time, the construction of the museum had just started, while Budi Tek and Wu Hung also began to envision the museum’s general characteristics and the structure of the inaugural exhibition. This conversation reflects their thinking at that moment. The exhibition views in this text are of Myth/History.

Budi Tek: You have already been to our museum site where the Yuz Museum Shanghai is being built. Do you have any thoughts?

Wu Hung: I think that the display of artwork will take two forms. The first form is a permanent display. The second is a temporary display—after an exhibition closes, it will be removed to make room for the next exhibition. In general, I believe that the rooms used for displaying paintings should have lower ceilings; if they are too high, the paintings will disappear. I think that the rear section of this former airplane hangar is well suited for the display of paintings. The space is quite long, and not too tall if it is split into two levels.

Budi Tek: The second floor has a balcony four-metres-wide from which you can look directly over what will be the main exhibition hall. You will also be able to hang paintings on the wall behind the balcony.

Wu Hung: They told me about this balcony when I visited. It’s a great feature. You will be able to look down over the installations below, adding another angle of observation. Can the balcony wrap around both ends?

6 Vol. 13 No. 5 Xu Bing, Tobacco Project— Tobacco Invention, 2004, 660,000 cigarettes, in Myth/ History: Yuz Collection of Contemporary Art, Yuz Museum Shanghai. Photo: JJYPHOTO. Courtesy of Yuz Museum Shanghai.

Budi Tek: No, the roof isn’t strong enough.

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Wu Hung: Actually, this main Freedom, 2009, sheet metal, high pressure water pump, exhibition hall won’t be big enough water hose, and tap, in Myth/History: Yuz Collection to house your permanent collection. of Contemporary Art, Yuz Museum Shanghai. Photo: The warehouse across from the JJYPHOTO. Courtesy of Yuz hangar is also quite large. Are you Museum Shanghai. planning to rebuild this part, or will you maintain the old building?

Budi Tek: We could perhaps use it for a few years, placing some artworks in there such as Xu Bing’s Tobacco Project (2004) or others.

Wu Hung: You could also consider putting Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s water- spraying artwork Freedom (2009) on display.

Budi Tek: We might not be able to put Freedom in there. It would be best to make a small room for it when we build the new building. That would be better. Otherwise, if we do it now, it would be a waste to knock down the old building.

Wu Hung: After the inaugural exhibition, part of the collection could stay in the permanent exhibition hall; the other galleries could be used for temporary exhibitions.

Budi Tek: Adel Abdessemed’s airplane Telle mere tel fils (2008) will be hard to handle for a permanent exhibition. We might need to make a scaffold for it.

Wu Hung: I think that if you put this enormous “airplane” in the main exhibition hall, it may overpower other artworks. Is that how it felt in his solo exhibition at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris?

Budi Tek: It needs to be partitioned off. We need to make a separate space for it.

Wu Hung: If you partition the main exhibition hall, the space will become small. It won’t feel so expansive.

Vol. 13 No. 5 7 Budi Tek: You can’t have too big of a space, either. If the space is too big, Adel Abdessemed, Telle mère tel fils, 2008, airplanes, the plane will look small. It needs to have an oppressive feel. felt, aluminum, and metal, in Myth/History: Yuz Collection of Contemporary Art, Yuz Wu Hung: I have another question about the main exhibition hall. Is there Museum Shanghai. Photo: JJYPHOTO. Courtesy of Yuz a plan to partition it in the middle? It would be best if the partition—if Museum Shanghai. you do plan to build one—is a movable one and can be opened and closed. For instance, the entire exhibition space can be opened up for the inaugural exhibition, and the space can be divided later to hold two separate exhibitions. In other words, the wall in the centre should not be fixed.

Budi Tek: That’s right.

Wu Hung: Also, the audience’s movement in the museum doesn’t necessarily have to follow a single trail. We should provide a wide range of choices. Otherwise, people will be like flocks of sheep, marching instead of wandering. Art museums should allow people to disperse and wander, taking in artworks according to their own interests.

Budi Tek: A single line of motion makes it into an assembly line.

Wu Hung: And that makes seeing an exhibition a mindless activity. You have to provide visitors with freedom to observe and to respond according to their own needs. Sometimes people go to a museum just to see one particular artwork. Some exhibitions have good content, but the exhibition design forces everyone to look at the same things in the same order, without letting them follow their own paths. I would like to avoid that.

Also, the time for preparing the inaugural exhibition is not at all long. There is really a lot of work involved when planning such a large exhibition. We need to communicate constantly and to start the preparations as early as possible. We will be too busy to deal with the various practical issues before the exhibition opens. The key is to do it well, to create a model for a private art museum in China with personality.

8 Vol. 13 No. 5 Budi Tek: I feel that I have learned so much over the past few years, and I’ve paid a lot of “tuition” along the way. My approach to collecting has turned toward a simpler strategy. I still remember, when we were at the Bali Conversations,1 we talked a lot about such issues.

Wu Hung: Yes.

Huang Yongping, Tower Budi Tek: I’m pushing a particular Snake, 2009, aluminum, bamboo, and steel. Photo: idea right now, which is this: The JJYPHOTO. Courtesy of Yuz Museum Shanghai. golden age of contemporary Chinese art was from 1985 to 1995. If I am to become an important collector of contemporary art history and follow a historical trajectory in my collection and exploration, then I should collect a few works from before 1985, and some works from 1995 to today, but I believe the bulk of my collecting should focus on artworks made between 1985 and 1995. Why? Because before 1985, many artists were still students and still feeling out their own creative styles.

Wu Hung: And “contemporary art” had yet to take shape before 1985. Conceptually, art at that time was still at the level of “modern art.”

Budi Tek: Right, and I think of the artists who emerged during the later 1980s and early 1990s as the first batch, because the artists before them were more influenced by the West. After 1995, you have to start looking at the artworks themselves and not just the artists. Some artists began to just repeat their own works, which I think is unfortunate, and this included some of the top artists. I’ll collect a couple of their most important works, and that’s enough.

Wu Hung: I think that your collection focus is basically correct, but I would stretch it a bit further, from 1985 to the end of the 1990s.

Budi Tek: I’m pretty clear about 1995. I collect artworks after that, but I do so more carefully.

Wu Hung: I don’t think 1995 is the best marker; 2000 is. There’s a lot that is worth uncovering in the entire 1990s. Much of it are installations, the so-called experimental art. Actually painting was relatively weak at the time. Much of the interesting work was conceptual art. There were a lot of underground exhibitions in those days; those activities have not yet been studied properly. Overall, the level of thinking in the 1990s was much higher than it was in the 1980s; the 80s was a period of awakening. There is so much out there from the 1990s, but it is still floating just beneath the surface, and the market value is still undetermined in comparison with painting. Artists such as Gu Dexin made a lot of artwork in the 1990s, as well as Wang Luyan and Zhu Jinshi. They made many important artworks at that time, but their prices are far lower than those of the earlier group.

Vol. 13 No. 5 9 Budi Tek: We’re collecting that work, too, but in a less strategic manner.

Wu Hung: There is also a question of how to collect such artwork. If you want to collect artwork that is not painting, you have to have a direction and some basic ideas, and it is especially important to establish close contact with these artists.

Budi Tek: Sometimes people ask me how I collect Western art. I tell them that my approach to collecting is non-linear. I can’t collect the entire art history of the world. It wouldn’t be of any use. It is not my responsibility. Instead, I am very fortunate to have this opportunity to take these fifteen years of contemporary Chinese art and put it into a more complete narrative. although the collection can never be complete, one will see a thread developing there.

As for collecting artworks by foreign artists, my thread comprises a series of “nodes.” For instance, Adel Abdessemed is one point. He has been strongly influenced by the work of Chinese artists and critics such as Huang Yongping and Hou Hanru. Others, such as Anselm Kiefer and Maurizio Cattelan, influenced a generation of Chinese artists. These artists also have become nodes within the collection. This is my thinking in acquiring international artworks. I also collect works from other parts of Asia; we have artists from Korea and Japan, as well as some other countries.

In this way, our exhibitions can take on a fuller vision. We are not only Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 1998, olive tree, earth, presenting Chinese contemporary artists. Why? Because we want to influence wood, and steel, in Myth/ History: Yuz Collection of the way people in the West see Chinese art. We have to offer things that Contemporary Art, Yuz Museum Shanghai. Photo: interest them, to draw them in. If the inaugural exhibition included only JJYPHOTO. Courtesy of Yuz contemporary Chinese art, Westerners might not come. For instance, Museum Shanghai. when the airplane was exhibited at Adel Abdessemed’s exhibition at Centre Georges Pompidou, it got the French audience to reflect on why such a good artwork would end up in the hands of an Asian. I think that we can present Western artworks to draw audiences in, and then they can see my “real” collection—a collection that is mainly focused on contemporary Chinese art. I think that this is a good line of thinking. Here, I have drawn from my experiences from the Bali Conversations.

10 Vol. 13 No. 5 Wu Hung: The Chinese part of the collection follows a historical axis, while the foreign part mainly consists of artworks by selected artists. We could, however, describe these twin-focuses more theoretically: I think that in your mind there are interactions between these two tracks—a set of mutual relationships between foreign artworks and China, or with other artworks you have in your collection. So the two groups are not independent to each other. They are not independent nodes in your collection. When we think about the works of Maurizio Cattelan, for example, we always think about their connections to other things. These connections may be rooted in your own thinking, or they may be related to the exhibition space. Such interactions elevate your collection to a global level. Sometimes such interactions are rather serendipitous. They are not necessarily real historical influences, but can be artistic and intuitive dialogues in a general sense. It would be too narrow if all artistic interactions were to be defined historically.

Fred Sandback, Untitled (Sculptural Study, Seven- part Right-angled Triangular Construction), 1982/2010, black acrylic yarn. in Myth/ History: Yuz Collection of Contemporary Art, Yuz Museum Shanghai. Photo: JJYPHOTO. Courtesy of Yuz Museum Shanghai.

The part of the exhibition on contemporary Chinese art needs to be historical because it has a temporal and regional definition. But artistic perception can be more interactive. Sometimes there is no historical connection, but it is exciting when certain works are placed together. There is a sense of spontaneous visual communication. Such relationships can emerge from juxtaposing works of Chen Zhen and Anselm Kiefer, or Huang Yongping and Abdessemed. Is there a historical reality for this kind of correspondence? It is difficult to say. But it does generate visual power and interest. Another thing that can create a dialogue is the personalities of these artists themselves, the materials and artistic languages they use. A lot of the stuff you like has something powerful inside, but sometimes it can be spare and abstract, like Fred Sandback’s Untitled (1982/2010).

Budi Tek: Actually, when I bought that artwork, I had a kind of subconscious feeling toward it, and I still don’t quite understand it. After I bought it, it was time for the Bali Conversations. I met Wang Jianwei there, and we talked for a long time, and I was very happy. He drew connections between Sandback’s work and the Daoist concepts of emptiness and the void.

Wu Hung: I was also pleased to see that you like it, because such artworks will have a powerful impact in the exhibition, speaking with the other works. If displayed on its own, this work will appear quite lonely.

You are very good at absorbing things. I am often astonished by your keen Vol. 13 No. 5 11 Left to right: Zhang Zikang (Director, Today Art Museum, Beijing), Budi Tek, and Wu Hung at Bali Conversations, 2012. Photo: Jo Wei.

perception of artworks. You have been progressing quite rapidly. I think you’ve really absorbed a lot of what was said at the Bali Conversations. Your collecting activities in the past were nowhere near the level they are now.

Budi Tek: I can also sense the difference. I get sad when I look at the things I collected before. I don’t want to look at them.

Wu Hung: It’s of course safe to collect artworks that are already well-known, but this kind of work costs more and more these days. New works aren’t so safe. It’s always hard to tell how things will turn out, particularly about works by not-so-famous artists. In the end, it all comes down to the quality of the artwork. For instance, not all of Paul Cézanne’s works are equally original, so which one is truly great? For the past year, I have been writing a history of contemporary Chinese art for the British publisher Thames and Hudson.2 I have to do research on every artist with this kind of question in mind.

Budi Tek: That’s a lot of work.

Wu Hung: Yes, quite a lot. My previous work Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents,3 prepared me in terms of archival material. This current book is a narrative and interpretation. It is a written history, not just documents. It has to answer a series of historical questions: What were the main trends and representative works? When did important change take place? Some answers everyone knows, and some they don’t. I hope to provide something basic for everyone, particularly for Western readers, and I want to be more objective and comprehensive.

Budi Tek: I’ve also pulled myself away over the past two years, not attending too many gatherings, and have gotten more objective.

Wu Hung: That is good. It’s difficult to see things clearly without certain distance.

Notes 1 The Bali Conversations is an annual event that has been held in Bali since 2008. It involves artists, collectors, and scholars in conversation about many aspects of contemporary art. The conversations are transcribed and then published. So far these conversations have been published in five volumes over five years. 2 Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art: A History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014). 3 Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: MoMA, 2010).

12 Vol. 13 No. 5 Budi Tek, Yuz Foundation, in Conversation with Qiu Jiahe

November 30, 2012, Shanghai

Installation view of Myth/ Qiu Jiahe: You believe that contemporary Chinese art provides a backdrop History: Yuz Collection of Contemporary Art, Yuz that reflects the social transformation of China, particularly the drastic Museum Shanghai. Photo: JJYPHOTO. Courtesy of Yuz changes that have taken place over the past thirty years and that may bring Museum Shanghai. about a new kind of culture, and so is of great significance. Looking back over your collection now, do you have a new understanding of this?

Budi Tek: As a person of Chinese descent, I am quite familiar with Chinese culture. Also, I have lived in Shanghai for a long time and have become good friends with many Chinese contemporary artists. There is no avoiding the fact that there are emotional factors at play here. I have already determined that contemporary Chinese art will be the dominant thread in my collection, and I must complete this trajectory. This is in keeping with my not being able to collect contemporary Western art in such a comprehensive fashion. How much would I have to spend to accomplish that? Even though contemporary Chinese art is growing increasingly expensive, I still feel that I have the ability to build a full and comprehensive representation of it in my collection. Whether or not I complete it does not matter to me, because after I die, there is still my son, my grandson, and the generations that will continue my legacy. There will be other generations after me to complete it.

Qiu Jiahe: This brings us to another issue. Chinese artists, particularly when producing installation art, tend to use mass and scale to create visual impact.

Vol. 13 No. 5 13 Budi Tek: Right. But installation art gives me much more satisfaction than painting. This is because I feel that among all of the collectors in Asia, I am among the first to collect installation art; of course, Guan Yi was collecting before me.

In terms of current collecting capabilities and scope, I am rather broad because I do collect installations not just by Chinese contemporary artists, but also by foreign contemporary artists, and I have collected many installations by young artists whom I think are good. The satisfaction I get from installation art far surpasses that of painting.

Qiu Jiahe: Among your ideas regarding collecting, you have one driving spirit, which is that you want to cultivate a tradition of collecting in your family. Do you think you are learning from the European tradition of family collecting?

Installation view of Myth/ History: Yuz Collection of Contemporary Art, Yuz Museum Shanghai. Photo: JJYPHOTO. Courtesy of Yuz Museum Shanghai.

Budi Tek: Actually, this can’t be emulated; learned collecting requires practice and experience. I think that this Western tradition is a good one. China also has this tradition; it is known as the tradition of the “scholarly family.” When people say that you come from a scholarly family, it means that your ancestors were all well-read people and that you are carrying on this tradition of learning, that you are already quite the scholar yourself. My wife comes from a scholarly family. Her father was a doctor, her mother a nurse, her uncle a geologist, her grandfather a revolutionary martyr and a filmmaker, and her grandmother worked in the field of cinema. My father was an educated man. He came from Mei county, which has produced many scholars in its history. I have carried on this tradition, not by being an official or a teacher, but by being a collector.

Qiu Jiahe: When you were young, did you have your own hobbies and dreams?

Budi Tek: I began learning Chinese when I was thirteen. There was unrest in Indonesia at the time, where I was growing up, and so my father took me to Hong Kong and Macau. I didn’t come in contact with true literary Chinese until very late, but within three years, I was able to read wuxia novels (a genre of kung fu adventure literature). I would spend all three months of my summer vacation lying in bed reading wuxia novels. During the summer vacation, I didn’t go anywhere. Aside from eating, bathing, and going to the washroom, I would just be in bed reading. I still haven’t broken the habit of

14 Vol. 13 No. 5 reading wuxia novels, and I go back and read them every couple of years. It takes me back; it’s like seeing old acquaintances, familiar names, and stories. It makes me happy. So if you want to talk about my hobbies, that is one of my big hobbies. I did not study at a proper Chinese language school, and it was the same when I was in Singapore. We had a Chinese language class, and it was very good, but a lot of the time we used English. Later on, I went to the United States to study.

In America I studied marketing with a minor in finance. I never studied agriculture, but I ended up building my business in that profession. My collecting is also a continuation of our ancestors’ traditions, systematizing them in the field of collection. The Yuz Museum Shanghai itself also will have continuity. In this way, we can come out and announce that we are a big family of collectors, with an art museum, a foundation, my private collection, and a program of philanthropy designed to support visual art. If, as a first generation collector, I can pass this on to future generations, then I will have succeeded. The first generation is very important. Of course, it takes many generations for things to really become established.

The Yuz Foundation has three purposes or three core areas of activity: collecting contemporary Chinese art, supporting the art museum movement in China, and engaging in charitable activities. The Foundation has talked about these charitable activities many times, and artists previously said that they would like it if we had our own charitable foundation so that they would know whom they were supporting. They didn’t want me to work together with other charities and felt that the Yuz Foundation should stand on its own. That way, they know that their artwork is being given to the Yuz Foundation for its charitable projects.

How will the Yuz Foundation operate in the future? The activities of the Foundation can be split into several areas: first, we have a lot of old acquisitions that the museum no longer needs, and we can use this for charitable activities; second, artists can donate artworks to contribute to these charitable activities; third, it can support young artists in holding exhibitions; fourth, it can respond to emergencies or engage in charitable activities for children. We have been talking about this for a long time but have yet to establish a clear set of procedures.

Of course, this foundation is private; it won’t turn public when I die. A foundation requires the participation of members of society. It must have its own rules. Ours will have its own regulations about how to select a museum director and how to select a board. Once these rules are established, the museum’s operations will be sustainable, and if it wants to avoid influence by foreign forces, it can limit the museum to work solely with contemporary Chinese art.

Qiu Jiahe: How is the Yuz Museum in Shanghai progressing, specifically?

Budi Tek: It is progressing according to plan. It is going very smoothly.

Vol. 13 No. 5 15 Qiu Jiahe: Art museum operations touch on certain questions that everyone Installation view of Myth/ History: Yuz Collection of really cares about. For instance, how will it be run as a system, and how will Contemporary Art, Yuz Museum Shanghai. Photo: it be supported financially? JJYPHOTO. Courtesy of Yuz Museum Shanghai.

Budi Tek: First, our main focus is on collecting, so we cannot be like other museums holding ten or twenty exhibitions each year and using admission fees to support the museum. We discarded the idea of operating this way at the beginning. Our exhibitions will focus on my collection, but we will have a few temporary exhibitions each year, and construction of the museum will take place in two phases.

Qiu Jiahe: How many square metres are planned for in the first phase?

Budi Tek: The museum will be roughly 9,000 square metres, but the actual exhibition space will be only about 5,000 square metres.

The operating costs of the museum will temporarily rely on a few sources: first, me; second, there will perhaps be corporate sponsorship, as well as ticket receipts, of course; third, we will also have business operations such as a restaurant and art-related products. Also, I will frequently hold events, rather high-end events, and that can also serve as a source of income.

When the second phase is completed, the museum will be really big. For instance, the art shop can be expanded from the original two hundred square metres to two or three thousand square metres. In the end, we need

16 Vol. 13 No. 5 income to support the exhibitions so that we can hold more of them and hire more professional staff.

The second phase will also include artists’ studios. I guess the English term “residency” is a better word; these will be places to live rather than be only studios. If artists want, they can stay there for free, and when there are no artists, other people can stay there but will have to pay rent, so the artist’s residency space will be kind of like a hotel as well, which can be used to attract income. There will also be a lot of events, because we will have a lot of space.

Qiu Jiahe: What about your operating team? For instance, who will be your museum director?

Budi Tek: I have discussed this with Wu Hung. I don’t want to find just any director. I don’t want to find someone who is not up to par, or hire someone famous but then end up working behind the scenes as the director myself. Wu Hung agreed with this, so we are going to go ahead and open the museum with a collection exhibition that will run from May to November 2014, and for the next exhibition we can bring in an independent curator. While this inaugural exhibition is on, we can seek out a good museum director, because once the museum opens, there will be a lot of people applying to work there. A lot of people are already talking to me, but they haven’t seen my museum yet. I don’t want to have to promote it all by myself. It’s just too tiring. I want to talk this over with a lot of candidates and pick out a director that staff and board members of Yuz Museum

Vol. 13 No. 5 17 Shanghai will approve of. I already have enough of a reputation abroad. I want to be able to show people that this is my collection, this is the scope of the museum. This is just phase one, and I can attract competent people, including the best museum director.

My museum will not be your average museum. It will be quite influential, at least regionally. I need a highly proficient person who can grasp this museum to be its director, so I won’t choose the director before it opens.

Qiu Jiahe: So, before the museum opens, your main work is to plan out thoughtfully its inaugural exhibition?

Budi Tek: Right.

Qiu Jiahe: Have you already decided that Wu Hung will be the curator for the inaugural exhibition?

Budi Tek: Yes, because he understands me and my collection.

Qiu Jiahe: What about the curatorial team?

Budi Tek: They are already at work, and the team is growing all the time. They are growing faster than anything and can already stand on their own. Don’t just look at how young they are; they have already accomplished a lot and learned a lot. For instance, Wu Hung went to Shanghai a few days ago, and they accompanied him. They drew a lot of nourishment from him in those few days, and are very excited. They also attended the various Bali Conversations. They sat there as workers, as listeners, and also took part in compiling the publications. I hope that each of them can shine.

Qiu Jiahe: In the past, this was a private collection, but now it is going into a museum and becoming public. How did you make the leap?

Budi Tek: I can’t say that these artworks belong to the museum, because they actually belong to the Foundation. My idea is that I will always be a big collector, and the museum will be a place for exhibitions, a museum established by our family foundation, with our acquisitions exhibited here long-term or permanently. In Hong Kong, Pi Li from M+ in Hong Kong was telling me that we could do a lot together. He said I could donate my works, or loan them to him, but I would have to loan them for at least twenty years, or I could sell them to him for a very steep discount. He said these practices are all very widespread internationally. I said no, I have my own museum. Our idea is for the Foundation to lend these works to our museum for long-term exhibition. We might hand over the artworks one day, you never know. A lot of collectors in other countries do that, lending the artworks for a long time before giving them to the museum. I don’t know what will happen in the future, but I do know that I will move faster than everyone else. This is a private museum, meaning that it is independent. Maybe at some point in the future it could become a public museum. But we’ll take

18 Vol. 13 No. 5 things step by step, and I dare not guess how far I will take it. I do hope that it has the function of a public museum, but that it is operated as a private museum. There are a lot of so-called foundations in other countries where the founder donated all of the artwork, built a space, and donated the space to the foundation as well, while the foundation’s money is public money.

Qiu Jiahe: This is one side. On the other hand, it seems to me that when the art museum holds exhibitions, it will no longer collect works according to individual interests but according to the needs of the public, holding exhibitions for the public. Do you have an issue with this?

Installation view of Myth/ History: Yuz Collection of Contemporary Art, Yuz Museum Shanghai. Photo: JJYPHOTO. Courtesy of Yuz Museum Shanghai.

Budi Tek: I don’t really agree with this view of yours. If my museum followed the preferences of the public, it would turn into 798, which follows the whims of the masses. I don’t think an art museum should be like this. The art museum performs an educational function, a guiding function, presenting good artworks and leading trends. The masses like rather direct things, and every person has his or her own unique tastes. How do you establish public taste? You can’t. So it is right for the art museum to maintain elitism, but this is not elitism with myself as the elite, or the masses as the elite, but the professionals as the elite. So I will have Wu Hung select works from my collection for the inaugural exhibition. What is being presented by the museum is not my taste but my collection. It is the Budi Tek collection. I have 1,300 works in my collection, but Wu Hung may choose only 400 of them for the exhibition. This is a great test for me. He has to choose, and as for what to do with the remaining works, that is up to me.

Qiu Jiahe: You are saying that this inaugural exhibition is a test for you?

Budi Tek: Yes. There will be a percentage of works weeded out, and I’m nervous about that. The museum absolutely cannot follow the standards of mass preferences. The museum serves to guide and to educate, and this education of the masses must, I repeat, be done by the elite. That’s how it is.

Vol. 13 No. 5 19 Julie Chun The Inner Trappings of a Dragon: Long Museum, Shanghai

he culture of museum-building in China has reached Long Museum Pudong, exterior view. Photo: Ruth unprecedented heights in the last decade. In the period of eleven Thompson. years from 2000 to 2011, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics T 1 indicated that 1,198 museums were established in China. Compare that with the short span from 2011 to 2012, when 829 museums erupted onto the landscape.2 What is unusual about this exponential building phenomenon is that many museums in China are constructed before the formation of, and oftentimes even without, permanent collections. This may seem like putting the cart before the horse; yet, in an immense country filled with a large pool of established and emerging artists, the belief is that the cart will not only fill, but also overflow. The establishment of the Long Museum (), meaning dragon, is the embodiment of such confidence.3 As one of the few private museums in Shanghai founded by a mainland collector, the Long Museum aims to put on the global map not one but two world-class institutions on either side of the Huangpu River.

The Birth of a Dragon On December 18, 2012, the first Long Museum opened in the upscale area of Pudong, not far from the financial hub of Lujiazui. The inauguration was

20 Vol. 13 No. 5 Left: Long Museum Pudong, with Zhang Wang, Jiashanshi # 108, 2006, stainless steel, 200 x 140 x 64 cm. Photo: Ruth Thompson.

Right: Long Museum Pudong, reception area. Photo: Ruth Thompson.

pivotal because it marked the launching of the first private art museum in Shanghai with a permanent collection of art —ranging from antiquities, revolutionary, modern, and contemporary—that could be rotated. Serenely sheathed in white granite, the pristine rectangular complex was designed by the artist and architect Zhong Song. The sleek modernist exterior aptly references a minimalist-style reliquary for enshrining Chinese art accumulated since the early 1990s by billionaire “super collectors” Liu Yiqian and his wife, Wang Wei.4

Liu Yiqian’s biography, which included dropping out of school at the age of fourteen to work in his family’s handbag business, then driving cabs, and eventually investing his way into becoming one of the wealthiest tycoons in China, exemplifies the ultimate rags-to-riches dream.5 With Wang Wei, who serves as the co-founder and director of the museum, Liu Yiqian has gone to great lengths to acquire and repatriate historic and iconic works of Chinese art back to the country’s native soil. One has to admire the tenacious nationalism that lies at the heart of this monumental feat, because a love of art alone might not have been able to resolve all the challenges the couple has had to face.6

A recent controversy centred on the allegation that the Gong Fu Tie work of calligraphy by the Song dynasty poet Su Shi (1037–1101), which Liu Yiqian purchased in September 2013 for $8.2 million USD, is a “fake.”7 Liu Yiqian can afford to stand staunchly resolute, given that he possesses the means and the wealth to hire the best litigators and art experts and has the solid backing of Sotheby’s (where many of Liu Yiqian’s auction purchases were made) to defend his position. Indeed, two months after the allegation, the case came to a close after the authenticity of the calligraphy was confirmed by technical testing, appraisal by three authoritative experts, and published research by Sotheby’s.8

Establishing the Canon With their vast wealth of artifacts, Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei have claimed the rare collecting status that was historically reserved for imperial rulers of China. The provenance of many renowned classical works of art in museums around the world can be traced to royal or imperial collections. The core collection at the Louvre Museum in Paris belonged to King Louis XIV, and the nucleus of the masterpieces at the Museo del Prado in Madrid were commissioned on the orders of King Charles the V. Similarly, in China, the antiquities as well as other patronized art amassed by the Song dynasty Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126) grew and evolved to become the crux of the collection at the Palace Museum in Beijing.

Vol. 13 No. 5 21 The tradition of accumulating culture in China was thus perceived as reflecting the collector’s moral virtue. According to art historian Craig Clunas, “Possessions of ancient things stood for an equivalence with the wise rulers of ancient times.”9 The meritorious emperor, having received the mandate of heaven, took on the responsibility of being the arbiter of literary and artistic taste. Dictating discernment and stylistic judgment that was passed on from the royal house to those of the aristocrats, the imperial art collection came to establish the canon for later centuries, to which successive rulers and collectors hoped to aspire.

The founders of the Long Museum have been accruing notable cultural signifiers for over twenty years, making many of their acquisitions at international art auctions. They have also negotiated private purchases of contemporary art from renowned European collectors of Chinese art, such as the former Swiss diplomat Uli Sigg and the Belgian art patrons Guy and Miriam Ullens.10 The treasure trove at the Long Museum in Pudong functions as a carefully controlled artistic archive showcasing not only the state-authorized but also the market-endorsed version of an abridged Chinese art history that can be viewed in under two hours. The third floor offers an eminent, albeit eclectic, collection of antiquities ranging from ink paintings, fine porcelains, and even an imposing eighteenth century imperial throne from the Qing dynasty. The second floor is dedicated to one of the largest private collections of revolutionary art, the visual vehicle for party propaganda that became a potent force after Mao Zedong’s talk at Yan’an in May 1942 and was dominant during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).11 With a particular resonance by association, the Long Museum in Pudong effectively sustains the legacy of showcasing a meticulously selected version of elite and sovereign Chinese art history.

Long Museum West Bund, entrance. Photo: Ruth Thompson.

The Dragon Re-emerges As another site for production of meaning, the newly opened Long Museum West Bund attempts to set the institutional framework for a defining a new canon of twentieth and twenty-first century Chinese art. Competing tightly with the Yuz Museum, another ambitious private museum in the vicinity that has since been inaugurated, the Long Museum West Bund opened on March 28, 2014, in Shanghai’s riverside district of Xuhui, a site currently

22 Vol. 13 No. 5 devoted to major re-gentrification as the emerging West Bund Cultural Corridor.12 Almost three times larger than the Pudong branch, the West Bund museum boasts a total area of 33,000 square metres, with about 16,000 square metres dedicated for exhibition space. If the first branch embodies the cube, the second museum takes the form of a basilica. Designed by the Chinese architect Liu Yichun, the immense barrel-vaulted ceiling is constructed the same hue and materiality of the grey concrete to reflect the industrial aesthetics of the museum’s outer environs, which had formerly functioned as an air field. The visual link between the interior space and the exterior landscape appears as fluid as the water flowing in the harbour.

Long Museum West Bund, first floor gallery view. Photo: Ruth Thompson.

Long Museum West Within, the first floor of the Bund, first floor gallery with Xu Bing, Square museum constitutes radiating Word Calligraphy, 1999, fabric banner. Photo: Ruth galleries that open out onto Thompson. an expansive foyer where the crimson banner of Xu Bing’s 1999 Square Word Calligraphy swells from floor to ceiling, proclaiming, “Art for the People.” In this vast space, Xu Bing’s work is joined by that of a legion of Chinese artists who played a leading role in developing the lexicon of contemporary art since the 1980s. A large panel in oil Wang Guangyi’s Passport Series (1996) is displayed side-by-side with Zhang Peili’s melodically rendered early painting Silent Jazz (1995), which appears frozen in lyrical time. Representing the genre of “scar art,” Luo Zhongli’s vividly rendered naturalistic portrayal of a peasant woman in Spring Silkworms (1980) shares a wall with Zhang Xiaogang’s iconic haunting portrait of the Blood Line-Big Family series (1998). A few steps beyond, Yue Minjun’s forcefully smiling faces On the Lake (1994) open the vista for the disquieting grinning faces of the Mask Series (1996) by Zeng Fanzhi.

On the second floor, constructed like a spacious loft, the gallery features works by the artists of the New Painting—a term advanced by art historian (and one of many advisors to the Long Museums) Lu Peng to describe the generation of artists born after 1970 whose market-driven successes have granted them greater artistic liberties over the censors.13 Worth

Vol. 13 No. 5 23 Long Museum West Bund, first floor gallery view. Photo: Ruth Thompson.

Xiang Jing, The End, 2000, painted fiberglass, 165 x 65 x 55 cm each piece. Photo: Ruth Thompson.

24 Vol. 13 No. 5 noting is the abundance of sculptural works by Xiang Jing that together with pieces by Qu Guangci and Gao Weigang constitute what seems to be a sculpture gallery. At present, there is an absence of photography and video art, excepting the single-channel loop of Estranged Paradise (1997–2002) by Yang Fudong on the main floor and the animated projection of Qiu Anxiong’s The Classic of Mountains and Seas (2006) in the foyer of basement. Adjacent to Qiu Anxiong’s work once stood Xu Bing’s Background Story: The Mountain in the South Looked as a Green Screen, (2013), installed on site and made all the more mesmerizing by the mirror, which revealed the behind-the-scenes detritus of dried plants and assortment of construction material. About three months after its installation, Xu Bing’s piece was removed without any explanation that it was a loan returned to the Shanghai Museum, leaving only a hollow void with prominent nail holes indicating its former presence.

The conundrum of displaced artwork occurs as a recurrent theme in the dimly lit inner sanctums of the basement gallery entitled “Ancient- Contemporary: Conversation with and Observation on the Classics.” According to the wall text, the curatorial endeavor was to “decipher the ancient classics in a different and unconventional way . . . where communication is established between some ancient works and a few contemporary ones.” As such, works by contemporary artists such as Qiu Zhijie, Huang Yongping, and Xia Xiaowan are placed next to scrolls of ink paintings and calligraphy by Ming and Qing dynasty literati masters such as Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), Wang Shimin (1592–1680), and even Song dynasty emperor Huizong (1082–1135). While the represented contemporary artists are held in high regard, the direct placement of their work with those by venerated masters confers validity perhaps before its due time.

Long Museum West Bund, second floor gallery view. Photo: Ruth Thompson.

With the global eyes on China as the current epicentre of the art world, both financially and creatively, works by emerging artists seem to be inducted into the established canon in rapid-fire ascension. Generally, one would expect works of art to follow the trajectory of group and solo shows, and oftentimes travelling exhibitions, with much discussion and criticism generated en route, before they find their place in major public or private museum collections. In China, the course seems to be truncated, with works by talented graduates of prestigious art schools heading directly from the

Vol. 13 No. 5 25 artist’s studio to major “Chinese” Long Museum West Bund, first floor view with Wang 14 exhibitions and auction houses. Yuyang, Artificial Moon, 2007, light installation. As exemplified by the placement Photo: Ruth Thompson. of the relatively young artist’s work such as Wang Yuyang’s Artificial Moon (2007) as one of the centre- pieces in the first floor gallery of the Long Museum and the placement of Ouyang Chun and Li Qing’s paintings in the New Painting gallery endorses the validity of their place in the canon of contemporary Chinese art at the Long Museum West Bund even before their inclusion in art historical survey texts.

What Lies Within Long Museum West Bund, passage to basement. It is clearly evident upon initial Photo: Ruth Thompson. gaze that the macrocosm of the architecture and the collections at both locations of the Long Museum are strikingly impressive. Yet, like many new museums materializing in China, the microcosm governing the daily operations is still fraught with snags and requires much more attention for the long road ahead. The founders of the Long Museum have been wise in appointing a long list of eminent members of the Chinese art world as “academic advisors.”15 Because most of these members are affiliated with state museums and art academies, they are likely to uphold institutional authority rather than explore innovative exhibitions centred on progressive curatorial endeavors and pressing issues governing China and the world at large. The heavy presence of older Chinese members and the mistranslation of their writing have resulted in incomprehensible wall texts with superfluous jargon. Yet, credit is given for the identification labels that attempt to provide contextual information in Chinese and English. Unfortunately, the title plaques are made of either transparent tape offering a minimum of information or foam-backed paperboard that fail to stay affixed to the wall, eventually slipping precariously onto the floor. No audio guides are available, either in Chinese or English, and there is a dearth of docent or guided tours. In fact, there is not even a printed museum map to assist visitors in self-guided tours.

Membership is another vexing issue. A dual museum membership costing 600 RMB (about 100 USD) can be purchased, yet foresight was unfortunately lacking; meaning, when the Pudong Long Museum membership was established for 300 RMB, no thought was given to the logistics of merging the two memberships. It is not a simple process of purchasing the West Bund Membership for an additional 300 RMB since with the opening of the West Bund museum only dual membership is available for purchase. Moreover, according to the press release of the Long Museum West Bund, a two-museum adult admission costing RMB 80

26 Vol. 13 No. 5 (about 13 USD) allows entry to both branches if visited within a month. Yet, when one provides the ticket at the entrance of the other museum, none of the employees seem aware of such a policy, and a substantial wait is required while they telephone numerous in-house staff.

Long Museum West Bund, The issue of art education for the basement view. Photo: Ruth Thompson. public at the Long Museum appears conflicted as well. The museum website’s promotional statement states, “Long Museum is devoted not only to professional art exhibitions, researches [sic], and collections but also to the promotion of cultural education in public.”16 Some of the stated benefits of becoming a member include a “free newsletter of Long Museum” and “priority reservation on public programs, lectures, and educational events.”17 Ironically, as a paid member of the Pudong branch of the Long Museum, I have yet to receive any notifications about openings, new exhibitions, or seminars, whether via print or electronically, nor was I granted any priority reservation at public programs, lectures, or educational events.

Long Museum West Bund, The lack of access to information about basement reading room. Photo: Ruth Thompson. museum’s events also extends to art research and public art education. At the Long Museum in Pudong, cameras and pens are strictly prohibited. This mandate is understandable and is similar to many museum policies world wide. Yet, even a notebook and pencil are not allowed for taking notes or sketching within the inner sanctums of the Pudong museum. Conversely, at the Long Museum West Bund, blatant flash cameras are permissible and anyone is welcome to take notes and sketches in pen or pencil. Such inconsistent policies can confound the visitor especially since many of the artworks are transferred between the two sites. As for the reading rooms, at both museums they remain devoid of books and are closed to the general public even months and years after the museum’s grand opening.

As with many public and private museums in China, the grandeur of the hardware is in place, but the intricacies that enable the smooth operation of the software is desperately lacking. The further one enters the system, the more the deficiencies become apparent. On the cast fiberglass sculpture Mao Jacket (2004) by Sui Jianguo at the Long Museum West Bund, there is a thin crack revealing a flaw—not of artistic craftsmanship, but perhaps the inferior quality of its sculptural material and of improper maintenance. (Many of the paintings and sculptures are not encased in glass and the interior temperature of the museum remains frigid in winter and sweltering in summer.) Critique of poorly manufactured goods in China remains an ever-present topic in the foreign press as well as in daily conversation. Poor quality may be understandable in the mass production of inexpensive goods for quick profit, but inadequate standards in the quality of high-priced artworks and the museums housing them requires a thorough discussion.

Vol. 13 No. 5 27 A reputable Sui Jianguo, Mao Jacket, 2003, fiberglass, 60.9 x museum of world- 48.2 x 27.9 cm. Photo: Ruth Thompson. class distinction requires more than a monumental structure and notable permanent collection. It also requires a proper board that can provide thoughtful foresight and sustainable planning with an active focus on making its collection accessible and comprehensible to those walking through its doors. The institutional framework can no longer follow the archaic paradigm of a curio cabinet reflecting the social prestige and status of the collector. Rather, it should be a constantly evolving space dedicated to providing access, context, and imagination for the benefit of the public as well as those supporting its mission.

Notes 1 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 1973), 174. 2 According to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, by June 2012, there were about 3,400 museums in China. See Kevin Holden Platt, “Public or Private? The Culture Clash in China,” New York Times, June 12, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/arts/13iht-rartchina13.html/. 3 According to Wang Wei, the name, Long Museum, was chosen because its Chinese pictogram means long-lasting. See Michael Young, “Shanghai’s Private Museums,” Asian Art, July 2, 2014, http://www.asianartnewspaper.com/article/shanghai-s-private-museums-0/. 4 Vantage Shanghai, “Long Museum Opens its First Exhibition,” November 26, 2012, http://www. vantageshanghai.com/en/arts/2012/11/long-museum-presents-through-all-ages-series-exhibition. html/. 5 “China’s Tycoons,” Week in China, April 2011, 44, http://www.weekinchina.com/wp-content/ uploads/2011/04/Investment.pdf/. 6 Wang Wei believes that Chinese art should remain firmly in Chinese hands. See Michael Young, “Shanghai’s Private Museums,” Asian Art, July 2, 2014, http://www.asianartnewspaper.com/article/ shanghai-s-private-museums-0/. 7 Wang Zhenghua, “Sotheby’s denies $8.2 million calligraphy is fake,” China Daily, December 23, 2013, http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013-12/23/content_17189799.htm/. See also Jason Chow, “8.2 Million Chinese Scroll Branded a Fake,” Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2013, http://blogs.wsj. com/scene/2013/12/23/8-2-million-chinese-scroll-accused-of-being-fake/. 8 See “Authenticity of ‘Gong Fu Tie’ Calligraphy Confirmed,” Global Times, Feb. 18, 2014, http://www. globaltimes.cn/content/843276.shtml/. 9 Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 58. 10 Tom Lee, Celine Song, and Chase Bray, “The Collectors,” in That’s Shanghai, January 4, 2013. 11 An English translation of a full transcription of Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’An Forum on Literature and Art”, (lecture, Yan’An, China, May 2, 1942), can be accessed at http://www.marxists.org/ reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm/. 12 Budi Tek is the Chinese-Indonesian founder of the Yuz Foundation and a major collector of art by Chinese and international artists. With a collection of over 1,500 pieces, including large-scale objects, the Yuz Museum opened on May 17, 2014, in Xuhui District of Shanghai, near the Long Museum West Bund. “Budi Tek, Chinese-Indonesian collector, founder of the Yuz Foundation,” Art Review, http://artreview.com/power_100/budi_tek/. 13 Lu Peng, A History of Art in Twentieth-Century China (Milano: Charta, 2010), 1154–55. 14 Examples include Chi Peng, Hu Xiangqian, Liu Di, Lu Yagn, Ma Qiusha, and Song Kun. See Artists’ Biographies in Barbara Pollack, My Generation: Young Chinese Artists (London: Giles, 2014), 142–55. 15 Academic advisors to the Long Museum comprise Li Xianting (art critic), Shan Guolin (former Director of the Department of Calligraphy and Painting of the Shanghai Museum), Chen Lusheng (Vice Director of the National Museum of China), Wang Huangsheng (Director of the Art Museum of China Central Academy of Fine Arts), Lu Peng (art historian of Chinese contemporary art), and Zhao Li (professor of China Central Academy of Fine Arts). This list is taken from “About Long Museum,” museum website, http://thelongmuseum.org/en/page/detailed/038do/. 16 Ibid. 17 From the Long Museum website on member benefits, http://thelongmuseum.org/en/page/ detailed/02dco/.

28 Vol. 13 No. 5 A New Model Exemplifies the Art Museum Boom in China: Yang Chao in Conversation with Zheng Shengtian

February 20, 2014, Vancouver

Zheng Shengtian: There is a boom of new art museums in China, both state-owned and private, and as an observer from outside of China I notice development has accelerated very quickly over the past two years. Some highlights include large private museum projects such as the Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing, the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, the OTC Contemporary Art Terminal in Xi’an (OCAT), and many more in other cities. These museums are large in scale, with state-of-the-art design and facilities. According to some statistics, every month in China there are inaugurations of new museums, sometimes as frequently as every day. This pace stuns Western observers, and they want to know what has been driving these museum projects. You have been director of the Xi’an Art Museum since its inception in 2009, and you know all kinds of art museums inside and out. Moreover, you participated in the Museum Directors’ Dialogue at the U.S.–China Forum on Arts and Culture held in Beijing in 2012. Can you begin by giving an overview of art museums in China? I would like to hear your insights.

Yang Chao, Director, Xi’an Yang Chao: In fact, there are some Art Museum. Courtesy of Xi’an Art Museum. ongoing problems in the way these museums are developing. There is both positive and negative energy in it. Whichever it is, the building of art museums in China began only a few decades ago; the nation did not have an art museum until 1936. In the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese cultural leaders such as Cai Yuanpei, Lu Xun, and Xu Beihong advocated for the building of art museums. Xu Beihong urged the government to set up a fund to purchase well-known paintings from the West. It was good timing in those years because Western paintings were being sold at relatively low prices. Xu Beihong also proposed to build an art museum to house these works of Western art. In those days, very few people understood the value of an art museum except these few cultural leaders. Only they knew about the importance of art museums for a city and even for the whole nation. After 1958, a few art museums were built, including the National Art Museum of China. However, very few provinces had art museums at this time, and these early museums were exhibition halls that shared their space with other functions. The development of art museums in China lagged far behind

Vol. 13 No. 5 29 Western counterparts. The history of the art museum can be traced back to the third century BC, in Egypt, when the Musaeum (Temple of the Muses) at Alexandria, the prototype of museums, was first built. The early museums were used for research and for the display of art, and they did not serve the public in the same way that a modern museum does. Western art museums have gone through two thousand years to perfect their practices. Here, in China, we have condensed this long process into only a few decades. So this incredible fast-forwarding of new museums inevitably raises many issues. We are learning from the experiences of our predecessors, but we still have many problems.

The progressive history of museums includes a few phases. While the first was when the Musaeum at Alexandria was built, the second phase came much later. Many important museums were instituted in the late eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, including the British Museum and the Louvre. It was at this time that museums adopted the idea of catering to the public. However, we may think of them as “semi-public,” since access to these museums was possible only for those who were “respectable,” and not the general public. In 1759, the British Museum became the first public national museum in the world, opening its doors to those who were studious and curious.

The third phase of museum-building was the four decades between the 1860s and the 1900s, when America began its rapid economic growth. American tycoons built many art museums, purchased many artworks, and took the lead in museum-building in the nation. This was the time when museums truly became public. And from this time forward, until the mid 1980s, museum-building heated up around the world.

China started off the fourth phase. Beginning in the 1990s, China took the world by storm, leading in the volume of museums being built. This movement was driven by a couple of factors. The first was the Chinese government; many art museum projects were initiated by the government on the conviction that each city must have its own urban culture and discover its own cultural values, and the way to accomplish this was to build art museums, concert halls, opera houses, and public libraries. These public projects are considered important elements in showcasing the “soft power of culture” in Chinese cities. The second factor is in the private sector. Some collectors and entrepreneurs have joined this movement, with various intentions. Some come with a genuine passion for art and culture; others might have a hidden agenda that is self-serving. Nonetheless, all these factors have helped to push the art museum movement forward.

Zheng Shengtian: Are there policies or regulations from the government that propel this movement?

Yang Chao: No. The government does not have any regulations.

30 Vol. 13 No. 5 Zheng Shengtian: Is it true that some cities are ahead of the others in this process because of their leaders’ vision? Surely, some cities just follow suit, but which cities are leading this movement?

Entrance to Xi’an Art Museum. Courtesy of Xi’an Art Museum.

Yang Chao: At this time, not all the provincial capitals have art museums, not to mention smaller cities away from the major centres. I live in Xi’an, a city with a long history and cultural tradition. It is a well-known cultural city. However, the cultural past alone does not make Xi’an a true cultural city; it must also establish its modern and contemporary culture. The government of Xi’an presented a concept called “Museum City,” and the Qujiang New District Administration Committee in Xi’an was the leading advocate of this concept. They formulated a policy of providing free land for lease to private corporations and entrepreneurs who would invest in museum and gallery projects. The Administration Committee used government funds to build the Xi’an Art Museum, Xi’an Concert Hall, Shaanxi Grand Opera House Xi’an, and Xi’an Guanzhong Folk Art Museum.

These museums are complemented by dozens of other museums and art galleries built by the private sector. With all these cultural venues, an urban zone of contemporary culture is emerging. Xi’an is taking the lead across China in this regard. As far as I know, many cities are now planning their own museum projects. Some cities are proposing to build a Museum Zone. I do not know much about the details of this.

Zheng Shengtian: Since the municipal governments realized the necessity of building cultural projects, have they “legislated” in favour of these projects? Do they give support through funding? Do they systematically plan for projects in the cities? Or do you think these projects are carried out simply as a good idea? Do you think the decision makers in the government understand what it takes to build a museum?

Yang Chao: The municipal governments certainly support their own museum projects with funding. However, they generally do not have a policy for the private sector that wants to join in. They do not have a

Vol. 13 No. 5 31 20 Year Retrospective Exhibition of 1991 San Diego Chinese Artists Workshop. Courtesy of Xi'an Art Museum.

favourable policy for land use for the private sector; neither do they give tax incentives. However, when Xi’an presented the concept of Museum City, the Qujiang New District Administration Committee was the first one in China to formulate a favourable policy in land leasing and tax credit for museum builders from the private sector. These policies were announced and distributed as government documents, and they led the construction wave of many museum and art galleries across the city of Xi’an. The Chinese tend to follow trends blindly, and many other cities soon followed in the footsteps of Xi’an by presenting their own “concepts.” However, they often neglect important questions. For example, once the museum is built, who are the audiences? And how does one find funding to run the museum? From a strict point of view, many art museums in China do not have a fundamental understanding of museum culture; they are simply exhibition places. Research and collections are absent.

Group calligraphy exhibition at Xi’an Art Museum. Photo: Keith Wallace.

Zheng Shengtian: This goes back to my previous question, and based on what you have said, the governments seem not to have a comprehensive plan for building museums and art galleries—neither with funding nor with human resources—which leads to some problems. In the case of Xi’an, how many responses were there to the policy of free land leases?

32 Vol. 13 No. 5 Yang Chao: There were many. It was extremely important for the government to select the right candidates. Many applicants came, and with different intentions. The government had to support those who present a genuine passion and a feasible plan for their museum projects. Many investors from the private sector came with misguided intentions. They were seeking fulfillment of personal interests and profits from museum projects; they were not concerned with the city’s culture; and they had no intention of making the cultural resource available to the city residents and enhancing their aesthetic awareness.

In China, people who want to build art museums can be divided into several categories. First are large real estate developers. They build a museum within their real estate projects, and the museum is a cultural decoration to enhance the commercial value of the property. Museums of this kind are nothing but a marketing tool. Some speculators are even using the proposed museum projects to ask for more land and leasing privileges from the government.

Second is the “artist museum.” These are the museums built by some successful artists for themselves to celebrate their accomplishments. In recent years, the art market has thrived in China; in particular, traditional art is in high demand and benefits many artists who are accumulating massive wealth. The problem is that their work doesn’t necessarily have high artistic merit. They may be well received in their local communities but would be considered mediocre within a national context. Their names won’t be mentioned in art history. I have seen a growing number of “artist museums” in recent years all across China, and they exclusively exhibit the works of the founding artist.

The third kind of museum is built by investors who have genuine ambitions to nurture and encourage arts and culture. They believe in museums and intend to make a difference. I personally favour this kind of museum investor. The fourth kind of museum is an exhibition space for a personal collection. Most of these personal collections are historical artifacts and often very low in cultural value, and many of the objects in them are forgeries. These places are built in the name of a museum, while their real intention is to occupy land and to cheat for resources from the government. Recent media reports have revealed that some museum projects are actually a tool for money laundering.

What I have just mentioned is a summation of museums and art galleries in China. The commonality among them is the lack of long-term planning. Many museums in real estate projects have quickly been converted into a restaurant or a supermarket once the real estate project is completed. This phenomenon is not surprising. Many museums within the private sector are not supported by long-term funding, so they have to change their function in order to survive.

Vol. 13 No. 5 33 Zheng Shengtian: According to what you are saying, many of these so-called museums cannot be considered true museums. Some are building a museum for money laundering, and others are simply pursuing a marketing strategy or driven by personal interests. What I want to know is whether you think China has some public museums that are run by commonly recognized international standards.

Yang Chao: I personally believe that there are people who have a genuine passion for art and culture, and many have the financial capabilities to build a museum. However, it is difficult for them to actually carry it out. The bottleneck is that they neither have land nor support from policy-making officials. For the speculators, they have the land to build museums because they have already purchased it for their real estate projects. In the case of the “artist museum,” because some artists are well known in the region, their land application is often supported by the local government. However, for those who have genuine intentions to build an art museum for the city and care for the humanities, it is very difficult to acquire land from the government. This is because the government does not understand their passion or recognize their commitment to the public good.

Zheng Shengtian: How so? If the government genuinely supports art museums, can they not favour those who have the good intentions? They certainly do not want to support money laundering. Why is it so difficult for the government to support individuals who want to build a non-profit cultural institution?

The Transformation of Canadian Landscape Art: Inside and Outside of Being, 2014. Courtesy of Xi'an Art Museum.

Yang Chao: It is difficult because there is no adequate or systematic policy, either from the central government or from the local government, to support the building of art and culture facilities. Since an overarching policy is absent, government leaders find it difficult to provide support for these cultural projects even though they may recognize their social benefits. For example, if a government official were to give a free land lease to an

34 Vol. 13 No. 5 individual investor of a cultural project, he or she would immediately face questions and criticism. First of all, the state has no tax incentives policy for investment in a cultural project. Xi’an Art Museum has to pay tax. Our donors all have to pay tax. If the museum receives a donation of ten million yuan, it needs to pay several hundred of thousands yuan for the turnover tax. If the museum has a surplus, it needs to pay income tax on that too. Secondly, China has no regulations that favour building cultural projects. If you use your own money to build an art museum, you can certainly do that; but if you have a real passion for cultural projects and ask the government for resources, it is unlikely that you will succeed. As far as I know, there is no art museum in the private sector receiving its funding from the government.

Zheng Shengtian: This is pretty much the same in Western society. There are many people who have a passion for culture and a desire to contribute to the common good of society. I have dreamed of building a museum, but I cannot do it because I don’t have the financial capacity. Only entrepreneurs like the Guggenheims or business giants have been able to do it. People like them did not need a favourable policy from the government. They could buy land, build museums, and provide long-term funding. For example, the founder of Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Charles Frye, was an entrepreneur. With stable private funding, the museum has been able to operate for many decades without support from the government. This art museum offers free admission for everybody to its exhibitions and collection. Now, in China, there are many wealthy people. Are there entrepreneurs who have the capacity to do things like this?

Yang Chao: I believe that many wealthy people in China have this financial capacity. If all of them had been interested in museums, China would have tens of thousands of them by now. Unfortunately, most of these people would not do that, which has to do with the social reality in China. The Chinese are more pragmatic; Westerners are more spiritual. Westerners need a platform to house their soul. There were churches in the West in the Middle Ages, then there were many museums built in later years. Both churches and museums are a haven for soul-searching people. This is also true in Latin America. In Asia, things are different, especially in China. Investment in the social good is not part of the mainstream, and it will not gain support from society; it is not even understood by society. Hypothetically, I could build a non-profit art museum, but people around me would question why I was doing that. When I began to run the Xi’an Art Museum, an important government official asked me: “You are a business person; why would you do something that doesn’t make any profit?” Many people asked me questions like that.

This is to say that China is a materialistic society. Some people have not yet reached a certain high moral ground. Many people with the financial capacity are those who I have mentioned above. They have the financial capacity and need no favourable policies, but they use the lens of profit- making to evaluate non-profit projects, so they would not do it. Those who have genuine intentions generally do not have the financial capacity. Even

Vol. 13 No. 5 35 if a few of them have this capacity, they are not supported by favourable government policies.

Zheng Shengtian: Returning to the experience of Western society, both John D. Rockefeller and Solomon R. Guggenheim were businessmen. They had always sought profit. But when Rockefeller built the Asia Society Museum half a century ago, his intention was to give a portion of his wealth to repay society. He was not expecting any financial returns, although his donation did enhance the image of his business empire. There are now many people in China who have great financial power, but many of them have not seen the value of building culture for the public good, and they don’t have a philanthropic consciousness. How do you think we can motivate them to invest in non-profit projects?

Yang Chao: I am sure there will be Rockefellers in China in the future. Due to cultural differences, it is currently difficult for China to have important philanthropists as found in the West. On the contrary, Chinese culture has been characterized as a jiaguo (“family-state”) system. Jia means family; and guo refers to the state. The family and the state constitute the entire Chinese cultural thinking. There is no other public cultural space beyond that. One can notice the limitations of this way of thinking when considering the layout of Chinese cities. In ancient times, Chinese urban planning did not include a public square. As we know, the public square is an important space in Western tradition. The city square is not only a geographical space; it is also a cultural space. Along with the square there are often churches, art galleries, libraries, and other public cultural venues. China’s jiaguo culture is deeply rooted in its long tradition. Once someone becomes rich, the first thing considered is his or her own family. This person will not have an interest in public space beyond the family. This way of thinking is also popular among Chinese cultural elites. There were no public intellectuals in China’s past. The definition of a public intellectual is one who dares to rationally disseminate knowledge in public.

For the same reason, Chinese tycoons tend not to spread their wealth to public spaces or serve the public. This way of thinking has become a vicious cycle. If someone rises up to benefit public interest, people ask: What is the city government doing? In their view, all public good is the responsibility of the government, and all domestic investment is the responsibility of individuals. This mindset has prevented people from getting involved in the public good. Moreover, the city governments’ investment is not entirely at the service of the public. Their priority is to serve the bureaucratic system. In sum, the number of museums is large in China, but most of them are not functional. Many art museum projects in China today are focused on personal benefit rather than concern for public interest.

You have asked me how to push entrepreneurs to invest in the public interest. Again, all we need is a policy from the state. If the government set up a favourable policy for individuals who want to build a museum, I believe there would be an immediate and positive response. What I am

36 Vol. 13 No. 5 trying to say is that there are two obstacles: one is the cultural mindset, and the other is the lack of policy.

Zheng Shengtian: Do you think the boom of art museums in China in the past two years is in fact a bubble that may not be sustainable?

Yang Chao: It is a phase of the “Great Leap Forward.” The fact that so many museums are emerging within a short period of time is an anomaly. Culture develops very differently from economic growth. Cultural development is gradual. Both state-owned museums and private museums are facing two other perennial problems: one is the shortage of funding; the other is the shortage of professional staff. It is not easy to find a good solution to these problems. The shortage of funding is caused by an inadequate understanding of art museums by the decision makers. For example, investors might inject a billion yuan to build a museum, and once the construction is done, they think the mission is complete. What follows is that they have only a few million yuan to run the museum. This small amount is barely enough to cover the staff salary and hydro bills, not to mention the collections, research, public education, and international exchange programs. So the museum is reduced to a mere exhibition space. This is true in all state-owned museums as well. I can say for certain that none of these museums receives regular annual funding from the government to build their collections.

Zheng Shengtian: This is contrary to one’s expectations from a new museum project. If we are planning to build a new art museum in Vancouver, the first requirement is funding. The funding should not only cover the construction costs, but also the cost of human resources and program development. Without securing this funding, we would not embark on a new museum project, even though we have a sky-high ambitions. From what you are saying about private museums in China, they just build the house, but they do not plan for the finances to maintain it. This is why these museum projects are not sustainable.

Yang Chao: This is what’s happening now in China. There are many art museums opening up, and many fade away in a few years. Every year we see many museums closing down.

Zheng Shengtian: Is there a ratio between the numbers of museums opening up versus those closing down?

Yang Chao: More than one third of the museums are closing down, but there are more new ones being built. Some museums present only one or two exhibitions a year. These private art museums should consider the question of whether they can depend on the companies that built them in the first place, and whether they should prepare a self-sustaining model for themselves in case of possible bankruptcy of the parent companies. They have to find other sustainable funding sources.

Vol. 13 No. 5 37 Biennial projects in China have met the same fate. Some disappeared after holding only two consecutive events. Few of them have been able to last as long as three events. Of course there are the more successful ones, but the funding of these projects was subject to the personal leadership from the government. Although a government official today might be interested in supporting a biennial project, a few years later his successor might kill it because of personal lack of interest.

Another problem with art museums in China is the building of a collection. Many art collections are far from systematic. In other words, many collections are like random displays of produce in a grocery store and have no focus. Few collectors have collected artwork in a consistent way. Since there is no guaranteed revenue for management, collection, and research, many art museums are struggling to survive. This is why so many of them have closed. Had there been policies from the government, sincere investors would have come forth to solve these problems because they genuinely care about art museums and public culture. Three decades from now, many art museums will disappear, and only a few will be able to sustain themselves. These museums will be the long-lasting ones.

Zheng Shengtian: Yes. A city does not need many art museums. Three to five is an optimal number. In New York City, for example, there are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, MoMA, and a few others. They help establish the cultural life and the legacy of the city. Any time you visit the Met, you will see a huge crowd of visitors. I hope in ten or twenty years China will have better art museums.

Now, I would like you to talk about your personal experience. You are the founder of the Xi’an Art Museum. The museum is unique in its ownership. It is a state-owned museum but run by a businessman. Can you tell me your story? How was it built? How did you come up with this idea? Was there give-and-take with the government? Or was the idea purely yours?

Yang Chao: I often say I have an “art museum complex.” Since the early 1990s, I have extensively traveled to Europe and America. I noticed that developed countries had built great museums. Their museums have much better “hardware” and “software” than what Chinese museums have. Because I have this “art museum complex,” I was thinking to myself: If I were a museum director, I would devote myself to building a better museum for China. In 2003, the Qujiang New District Administration Committee came to me. They commissioned me to build the “Great Tang All-Day Mall” project—a large business zone in the city of Xi’an. This is an elongated and narrow strip, located south of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. We wanted to punctuate a one- and-a-half-kilometer strip by building a city square and a leisure zone. In planning this leisure zone, the first thing that came to mind was to build some cultural facilities to integrate local business with public culture.

We thought of a concert hall, an art museum, an opera house, a museum of literature, and a cinema complex. I got this idea because I regard Xi’an as a

38 Vol. 13 No. 5 Top: Great Tang All Day cultural city; Xi’an is the city in China with the strongest cultural heritage. Mall Project. Photo: Keith Wallace. The basic elements of the cultural city are its urban cultural facilities, and at

Bottom: Xi’an Leisure Zone. that time, there were few cultural facilities in Xi’an. Therefore, we planned Photo: Keith Wallace. to build the Xi’an Art Museum, the Xi’an Concert Hall, the Shaanxi Grand Opera House Xi’an, and the Xi’an Museum of Literature. Considering the commercial nature of this business zone, we changed the plan to build the Xi’an Museum of Literature, instead of planning for a cinema complex. The government of Qujiang New District invested in all these projects. I was responsible for all the planning.

Vol. 13 No. 5 39 When the projects were being built, the government of Qujiang New District asked me to be the director of Xi’an Art Museum. I was excited about the offer. However, there was a dilemma. I had a business for myself. I would need to leave my company if I accepted this opportunity. The state- owned art museum director must be a government employee with a rank. If you join the government, you cannot run your own business. I did not want to leave my company, and I talked to the officials about my conflict. Fortunately, they were open-minded. They created a “state-owned and private-run” model. In other words, the art museum is state-owned, but it is run by someone from the private sector. After a few years as an experiment, this system has been working well. Many other municipal governments have followed suit. Dozens of them came to Xi’an to learn from us. From what I understand, there are seven or eight art museums that are adopting this system. One of the advantages of this system is it combines the merits of both the state-owned system and private sector.

Zheng Shengtian: Does the government provide funding to the Xi’an Art Museum?

Yang Chao: All state-owned art museums are funded more or less by the government. In the case of Xi’an Art Museum, we don’t receive regular funding. However, we do sometimes receive grants from the government. The specific fund is the “Cultural Industry Supporting Fund,” designated for cultural enterprises, including non-profit cultural projects that serve the public interest. At other times, we get financial support from the government for projects that we co-operate on with the government. Overall, the funding we get from the government is much less than a typical state-owned art museum. On the other hand, we have better exhibitions than a typical state-owned art museum. It has been proven that art museums usually do not run well under the direct control of the government. Under the flexible management of the private sector, an art museum is better off. Every year we find corporate sponsors and, together with the “Cultural Industry Supporting Fund” from the government, we secure the revenue to run the museum. This has created a sustainable cycle. We are doing some studies on how to build capital and an industrial network within the “state-owned and private-run” museum model (including private art museums) for its future development.

Zheng Shengtian: You mentioned the sustainable cycle. Do you mean the revenue generated from all sources of income, such as a museum store? How much of this income accounts for your total budget?

Yang Chao: We first work out a schedule of the year-round exhibition program, and then we calculate the budget. If the exhibition plan is too ambitious and beyond the budget we have, we have to review the plan and make changes. These changes are to ensure there is funding for each exhibition. Then we decide where to find the funding for each exhibition. As I mentioned, sometimes it is through corporate sponsorship, sometimes from collaboration with the government, and sometimes we invest by

40 Vol. 13 No. 5 ourselves or we co-organize with other institutions. We have many ways to find funding. We accept the support of whomever wants to come forward to fund public cultural projects.

Museums in China don’t have an established system or regulation to run their business like that in advanced countries. This calls for a very capable museum director, especially with respect to fundraising. A Chinese director has to take care of everything. In contrast, many Western museum directors function like a chancellor of a university. A chancellor of a university does not need to oversee teaching. He or she uses his reputation to acquire resources for the university. I think the director of a museum in China should follow what is practiced in the West. He should use his own personal capacity to obtain resources for the art museum, including funding and collections. In the “state-owned and private-run” system, the museum director has to be very influential in society. Otherwise, it is difficult to move the museum forward.

Zheng Shengtian: What do you see as the future of Xi’an Art Museum? Do you have a specific direction you are developing?

Yang Chao: The first thing I would like to do is to get people to know about art museums. The average person in China is quite limited in his or her understanding of art museums. Therefore, first of all, I want people to understand the function of an art museum. More importantly, the government needs to take the lead. The Chinese government has lots of authority, so one must persuade it to provide more favourable policies. We also need to educate people about the public nature of art museums, the functionality of art museums. The more people understand art museums, the more likely they will support us. In the meantime, we are increasing the number of shareholders. We welcome more people who are capable, willing, and passionate to join in the building of art museums. The larger the number of shareholders we have, the more financial power our organization will gain.

Zheng Shengtian: You mention “shareholders.” Are they the same as the board of trustees in a typical Western non-profit organization?

Yang Chao: They are the same. In the “state-owned and private-run” system, we have our own board of directors. This is absolutely necessary.

Zheng Shengtian: In a business, shareholders take returns and are awarded a bonus. Do you give returns to the board of directors?

Yang Chao: Our requirements for shareholders are that they be passionate about art museums and financially capable of investing in public culture. I believe that investment in public culture should not ask for returns.

Zheng Shengtian: So they are not shareholders, but trustees?

Yang Chao: The “state-owned and private-run” museum system is a Chinese characteristic. The trustee must also be a shareholder. One must first make an

Vol. 13 No. 5 41 investment. The return is their enjoyment of contributing to public culture. This is the direction for our future. Many private enterprises are looking for a cultural identity after they become wealthy. I say we need to increase our shareholders and expand the board. A “state-owned and private-run” museum also needs to have a committee composed of art professionals, to share responsibilities with the museum director. Museum directors in China have the final say for everything; they act like dictators. This is not good for the long-term development of the museum, so there must be a professional committee to make the most important decisions for the museum. The museum also needs to set up a system for a curator and let the curatorial team decide the future exhibition projects. What is left for museum directors to do? They must oversee the running of the museum, with a priority on funding. Therefore, the director of the “state-owned and private-run” museum must work out a way to find a sustainable business structure to secure stable funding for the museum and must ensure that this funding grows annually. This is what I learned from my experiences after running for some years now an institution in the “state-owned and private- run” museum system.

Zheng Shengtian: As Xi’an Art Museum has now established itself, have you ever considered expanding its influence to other parts of China, or even overseas?

Yang Chao: We have talked about this before. Take Vancouver, for example: the Chinese population represents a large proportion of the city. The demographic is very diverse, and each ethnicity has its own strength. There are Chinese, South Asians, Koreans, Japanese, Middle Easterners, and so on. It is a place where diverse cultures are mixed together. As Chinese, we have the passion to invest here in building a non-profit, public-oriented art museum to represent Asia or China. I think this is a very good thing. I have been looking for investors.

Zheng Shengtian: Are you planning to build a branch of Xi’an Art Museum outside of China?

Yang Chao: A new art museum is needed in Vancouver. A while ago I was talking with some potential investors about this. Last night, I met some of them again. We hope to either build a new art museum or set up a new division within an existing museum in Vancouver. Either way, it is a very good thing.

Zheng Shengtian: I hope Xi’an Art Museum will further develop its “state- owned and private-run” museum model, and I hope you extend your influence to overseas cities that are populated with Chinese. Thank you.

42 Vol. 13 No. 5 Julia Gwendolyn Schneider A Reflective Turn in Exhibition-Making: On Alternatives to Ritual

hanghai-based independent curator Biljana Ciric has a distinguished record of curatorial work that she calls, borrowing a phrase Sfrom curator Maria Lind, “context-sensitive.”1 Before working independently, Ciric started her career inside an institution, the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, where between 2004 and 2007 she was the director of the Curatorial Department, a position she considers to be formative for her curatorial practice.2 Since leaving the museum, her engagement with institutional formats has remained a significant aspect of her work. This became clearly visible in 2011, when Ciric curated Institution for the Future—an exhibition conceived around artists from various Asian countries working with new institutional models—as part of the Asia Triennial Manchester. In the accompanying publication, Ciric cites curator Harald Szeemann’s Museum of Obsessions as the biggest inspiration for her current work as an independent curator.3 Szeemann’s "museum" was not so much a museum, but, rather, a curatorial approach to exhibition making that he developed in 1973 and only ever existed in his own imagination.4 For Ciric the fascination behind this approach lies in the idea of a museum in progress, something which is always becoming.5 Similar to Szeemann, when approaching her work as independent curator, Ciric acts from the position of someone working for an imaginary art institution. She calls for exhibitions as experimental platforms with a strong curatorial vision that generate further questions and exhibitions.6 Hers is an idealistic curatorial practice that attempts to take progressive routes—an open process she would like to find more readily in the operation of museums. According to her, “[the museums] need to abandon their rigid bureaucratic structure and start from a very honest question of what the institution could be and not be afraid to give a very subjective form to it.”7

Stemming from this belief, her recent exhibition and publication Alternatives to Ritual looks at the current crises in exhibition making and curatorial practice in China. Here, hundreds of museums are opening all across the country, but Ciric sees most of them “turning into empty boxes without any curatorial vision or distinctive voice, instead aiming for entertainment spectacle.”8 To circumvent this direction, she initiated an alternative exhibition project that provided possibilities for experimentation and reflection. This text will demonstrate how Alternatives to Ritual proposed to reconstruct the relationships among artist, institution, and curator and looked at individual artistic practices in reconsidering and reconfiguring the rituals of exhibition making in China.

Vol. 13 No. 5 43 The Artists’ Museum The exhibition Alternatives to Ritual, initiated by Ciric in September 2012, was a six-month-long undertaking9 in which she collaborated with the Goethe-Institut in Shanghai. With this exhibition, Ciric infiltrated the office spaces of the Department for Culture and Education of the General Consulate of the Federal Republic of Germany in Shanghai with a group show, and additionally set up an exhibition space in its former screening room. This second space, now called the Goethe Open Space, held a series of temporary solo shows by the artists who were also part of the group show on view in the offices. Not only did Ciric create an exceptional exhibition setting, she also chose a point of departure that was directly connected to the sort of questions she wanted to tackle. For the ongoing group show in the office spaces, she was inspired by Szeemann’s Artists’ Museum presented as part of documenta 5 in 1972. More specifically, she referred to a section within documenta that was as an early attempt to incorporate a discussion of institutional critique into a museum setting. Ciric invited six artists to each present their own Artists’ Museum in the office section of Alternatives to Ritual. Hu Xiangqian,10 Gao Mingyan, Hu Yun, Li Ran, Song Ta, and Lu Pingyuan are all Chinese artists from a younger generation, born in the 1980s, who, in Ciric’s words, “attempt to resist the machinery of art systems and provide new models of working within it as a form of critique.”11

While the exhibition took place Hu Yun, Dr. Claus Heimes Museum, My Favorite Pieces in a working office, some artists in A History of Western Art, 2012, book, label. intervened directly into this setting Courtesy of the artist and by creating site-specific pieces. For the Department of Culture and Education of the Federal Dr. Claus Heimes’s Museum (2012), Republic of Germany, Shanghai. Hu Yun reconnoitered the office of the director of the Goethe-Institut. The artist chose certain objects from his office, like an adjustable office chair, a plant on a small round table, a short plastic ruler, a Chinese- style porcelain mug, and two film archive cabinets, which he labeled as though they were artworks. Besides the titles, like An Unkown Plant or The wall which you could see through, that, due to their particular descriptiveness could trigger one’s imagination, Hu Yun added to each item a personal description written by Dr. Heimes that revealed the significance or non-significance of these objects for him and created a witty comment on what might be considered a generic office space.

Song Ta used basic computer drawings to depict, in a decidedly subjective way, art institutions, museums, not-for-profit spaces, biennials, and commercial galleries that he is aware of in China and abroad. His images

44 Vol. 13 No. 5 Hu Yun, Dr. Claus Heimes Museum, An Unknown Plant, 2012, plant, label. Courtesy of the artist and the Department of Culture and Education of the Federal Republic of Germany, Shanghai.

Song Ta, Artists’ Museum, 2012, computer drawings. Courtesy of the artist and the Department of Culture and Education of the Federal Republic of Germany, Shanghai.

often showed building silhouettes that, in their reduced form, appeared above all as fragments from his memory. In analyzing this artist’s portrait of the art system, it was easy to understand how fragmented and limited his view is, as the project featured European and North American institutions primarily, along with some local institutions and galleries, but the rest of the world was absent, mirroring, according to Ciric, “the knowledge and information availability of contemporary art in China for most of the artists.”12

Another highly imaginary piece is Xiangqian Art Museum (2010–ongoing), by Hu Xiangqian. In this project, the artist uses his own body movements and verbalizations to visualize a museum’s collection he has assembled in his mind—a series of artworks, some of which do exist in reality, others of which are invented, challenging the value system of established art museums. For Alternatives to Ritual, Hu Xiangqian showed a new version of his museum. This time actors as well as employees of the Department for Culture and Education were asked to perform the artworks in his collection according to a script. Hu Xiangqian’s proposal, Ciric writes, can be understood as “very utopian but at the same time a strong critique of art institutions today in China’s context.”13

Vol. 13 No. 5 45 Hu Xiangqian, Xiangqian Art Museum, 2010–ongoing, performance. Courtesy of the artist and the Department of Culture and Education of the Federal Republic of Germany, Shanghai.

Exhibition as a Medium in China14 Biljana Ciric’s essay “Re-establishing Relationships through Exhibition Making,” published in the exhibition catalogue she edited for Alternatives to Ritual—a rich documentation of the project with additional discursive texts by local critics and curators who work in similar directions—outlines the difficult situation of the art system in China and asks how curators can bring changes to this “crisis of exhibition making.”15 For Ciric, the problem starts with a fundamental lack within curatorial practice and its discourse: “Exhibition making in today’s [Chinese] art system has been taken as a dead format that merely cultivates material objects. . . . Interest in other aspects of exhibition making . . . has rarely been taken into account.”16 She gives a short overview of the emergence of the curator from the 1980s until today, arguing that the curator in China still holds a marginal role “when it comes to providing a clear direction for an institution’s programming; his/ her role is more as the coordinator of exhibitions hosted by institutions.”17 She names only the Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou and OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Shenzhen as museums “where curating means something in its own right.”18 The other problematic issue, she contends, is that this museum system was established with “protocols on a so called Western model, though with Chinese characteristics.”19 This system accepted the role of the state in contemporary art in the early 2000s and is strongly driven by the commercial value of art, while non-profit art institutions are almost non-existent. What is especially symptomatic of the situation in China is that “the art market is on top of the art system, which changes the focus and the inner dynamics of the field significantly.”20 In this market driven milieu, institutions are often indifferent to the actual practice of curating.

In stark contrast, Ciric works with strong curatorial concepts and asks for a reflective turn in exhibition making. Her approach can be seen as a proposal for a discursive curatorial practice dealing with art institutions in a way similar to what Andrea Fraser proposes in her famous 2005 essay “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique.”21 Therein, Fraser argues for the importance of creating critical institutions, what she terms “an institution of critique,” established through self-questioning and

46 Vol. 13 No. 5 self-reflection. In addition to this self-reflective mode, which is significant for the artists Ciric works with, her research-based process is vital in establishing productive relationships with the artists as well as with the institutions with which she collaborates. Unfortunately, the idea of the curator as researcher who has a long-lasting, open dialogue with artists has little grounding within the Chinese art system. In China, artists and curators are much more likely to be regarded as opponents, as Nikita Yingqian Cai, curator of Guangdong Times Museum, states: “The binary expression ‘artist-curator’ is associated more with direct contradiction between the two parties. . . . [A]n exhibition would not be regarded as a platform for knowledge exchange, but as a kind of power game.”22

Li Ran, I want to talk to you, but not all of you, 2012, installation. Courtesy of the artist and the Department of Culture and Education of the Federal Republic of Germany, Shanghai.

The Artist-Curator Relationship The basis for Li Ran’s solo work in the Goethe Open Space, I want to talk to you, but not to all of you, is a dialogue between artist and curator. Using a voice-dubbing strategy, the artist created a video that presented a conversation between himself and Ciric, the curator, in which he takes the role of a hallucinating patient and Ciric plays the doctor who tries to cure him. She offers medical advice and scientific explanation but fails to see the ghosts he is talking about. While the patient’s consultation addressed the issue of potential misunderstandings between artist and curator on a metaphorical level, it was even more telling to listen to the original, non- fiction, conversation between the artist and Ciric which was also made available as part of the piece.23

The point of departure for their original discussion (the doctor and patient version being highly fictionalized) was a series of photographs presented within the aforementioned Artists’ Museum—the part of Alternatives to Ritual that took place in the office spaces. The images document gatherings with friends by showing random details like people’s hands or snacks on a table. Without contextualization they remain somewhat opaque for the viewer, while for Li Ran they hold the ability to bring back memories about debates he had with artist friends about art and the art system.24 One of the topics discussed in the non-dubbed video version was the notion of “curator as creator,” a definition Li Ran said he sees in Ciric’s work for Alternatives to Ritual, where she, in his view, created a context for artists by presenting a selection of archival materials and documents25 from Szeemann’s Artists’ Museum and “[gave] the artists something that can be uttered, described, and followed.”26 While some artists remain skeptical of a creative approach to exhibition making, Li Ran was interested in discussing Ciric’s thoughts in their videotaped conversation. But during the discussion it became clear that Li Ran felt misunderstood as an artist, which made him think “that almost

Vol. 13 No. 5 47 only artists can understand each other.”27 To avoid this in further discussions, he decided to become picky when talking about his art—hence his choice for the title of his work, I want to talk to you, but not to all of you. Nevertheless, he did want to be understood, but couldn’t overcome his own doubts about most people’s ability to do so.28 For Ciric “the failure of gaining mutual understanding runs through the work and reflects the system [they both] operate in,”29 which this experimental piece allowed to surface.

The Artist Within Society Like Li Ran, Gao Mingyan addressed a personal concern and investigated his role as an artist in society. The starting point for his solo work, titled What Else Can I Do?, was his private situation. Shortly before the exhibition, he shut down his studio since he no longer had funding to pay rent on it. For that reason, he piled up his belongings neatly at the entrance to the white cube of the Goethe Open Space, using it as temporary storage. Close to this wall-like sculpture, in a video called Self-Introduction (2012), he talks in a confessional mode about his current circumstances, while in the background workers can be seen moving away his possessions. After giving up his workspace, he claims the city as his studio and remembers how, several years ago, he made another unconventional move in this direction when he played golf on Shanghai’s streets as an “opportunity to have an intimate date with the city . . . [he] lived in.”30 Gao Mingyan speaks about his hope to integrate his art into society, to truly make a contribution to soceity. In his view, the self-centredness of some of his peers has allowed them to disconnect from the world they live in. While he reflects on what artists should not be, he does not tell what art’s contribution to society can be. In her exhibition catalogue essay about Gao Mingyan, Xiaoyu Weng proposes that perhaps giving answers was not his intention in the first place. For her, the key of Gao Mingyan’s project “does not lie in the ‘what’ but in the process of how he brings up this question and his reflections on ‘possibilities’.”31

The main part of his exhibition consisted of several video works in which Gao Mingyan paired physical exercises with comments and questions he picked up during job interviews. For instance, he does push-ups and claims “there is no freedom here, not to mention ideals,” and he asks, while doing pull-ups, “How can you make a living through art?” In the videos he repeats these phrases in a mantra-like way while exercising until physically exhausted. For Xiaoyu Weng, the “literal meaning of these phrases extends to outline the reality of contemporary Chinese society.”32 Moreover, she sees the conflicting relation between the negative content of the phrases and the artist’s strenuous actions as constituting a metaphor for “probing into the possibility of confronting the social reality through an individual’s body and will, . . . to confront a mode of universal social value system shaped against the background of neoliberalism.”33

Playing with Expectations While Li Ran and Gao Mingyan both hinted at their vulnerability as artists, Lu Pingyuan’s solo show played it cool. Lu Pingyuan turned the exhibition space into a walk-in laundromat: Clothes from the artist were hung to dry, but during the opening hours a washing machine was constantly running,

48 Vol. 13 No. 5 Gao Mingyan, What Else Can I Do?, 2012, video installation. Courtesy of the artist and the Department of Culture and Education of the Federal Republic of Germany, Shanghai.

Left: Lu Pingyuan, Waiting for an Artist, 2013, installation. Courtesy of the artist and the Department of Culture and Education of the Federal Republic of Germany, Shanghai.

Right: Lu Pingyuan, Waiting for an Artist, 2013, installation. Courtesy of the artist and the Department of Culture and Education of the Federal Republic of Germany, Shanghai. making sure the displayed garments would be kept wet at all times. The artist hired two people to be in charge of this process. During the breaks, they could be spotted seemingly waiting for something or someone— considering the title of the show, Waiting for an Artist, this might have been the artist. It was difficult to attribute meaning to this scenario, but the poster advertising the exhibition helped provide some direction. It shows a shark, a predator with a reputation for attacking people. Does the shark represent the increasingly commercialized art system that is only interested in consumption, waiting for its prey, the artist? This seems somewhat far-fetched, but Ciric’s own interpretation points in this direction. In her reading of the artwork, “[it] not only reflects the individual anxiety of Lu Pingyuan but also a common concern that is rarely acknowledged publicly, where the artist is consumed by the system without any resisting strategy.”34 Nevertheless, it is important to address the negative effects of the pressure on artists by an art system dominated by market forces, and Lu Pingyuan’s installation does this to a certain extent. But Ciric herself seems critical of Lu Pingyuan’s approach. She points out that he very much focuses on revealing conditions within the art system through his practice, but Ciric would like to see “how he will continue to work within the system, but resist its protocols.”35 With its flamboyant and repetitive mise-en-scène, Waiting for an Artist does not really resist the art system’s protocols but oscillates between laying bare the system’s demands and actually fulfilling them.

A New Sense of History Leading into the history of how the rituals of museums came into being, Ciric and two other curators, Alex Hodby and Seng Yu Jin, initiated a research project called Art Worlds in the Making: From Utopia to Reality.36 Taking the visual form of a timeline, this project was displayed at the entrance of Goethe Open Space and is a work in progress. It particularly

Vol. 13 No. 5 49 focuses on events, exhibitions, publications, and activities that form connections and intersections with new institutional forms, exhibition models, and art-critical practices since the sixteenth century. While this timeline might be perceived as an aside to the overall approach of Alternatives to Ritual, it in fact contributes another important aspect— that awareness of history and of the complexity of contemporaneity is a crucial step toward overcoming the narrow conception of curating as solely preoccupied with contemporary art.37

Hu Yun is also concerned with the Hu Yun, Our Ancestors, 2012, installation. Courtesy of the question “How to relate to the past?” artist and the Department of Culture and Education of the He proposed reconnecting to points Federal Republic of Germany, in history—an interest that has more Shanghai. to do with a re-evaluation of the fundamentals of the present than with nostalgia. In Our Ancestors he combined fragments of personal history with those of historical events through the histories of two men, each standing in for a particular period in time, here looking at modernity and the way it came into being in China. In the first part of his installation he refers to the entrepreneur, educator, and politician Zhang Jian (Chang Chien), who founded the first public museum in Nantong in 1905. Embedded in the floor in Goethe Open Space is a gentleman’s hat, a pair of glasses, a folding fan, and two metal boxes. Using Berlin’s Bibliothek (1955) by Micha Ullmann—a memorial marking the Nazi book burnings—as a reference, the glass-covered underground space serves as a simulated burial chamber for Zhang Jian. Similar objects were found in Zhang Jian’s grave when it was opened during the Cultural Revolution.

In an adjacent room a collection Hu Yun, Everything is Possible in the Darkness, of ten photographs was shown, 2012, photographs, wall lamps. Courtesy of the displaying only their reverse sides, artist and the Department of Culture and Education with year and place noted in of the Federal Republic of handwriting. These personal images Germany, Shanghai. belong to Hu Yun’s grandfather, who was part of the generation that followed Zhang Jian. The chosen photos stand in for ten different phases in his grandfather’s life but can also be linked to certain epochs in the nation’s history, like the end of the Qing dynasty, or the second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Through the anonymity of the reversed photographs, Hu Yun’s grandfather becomes a representative of his generation. As in the other solo shows, the question of self-positioning also arises—Hu Yun found it difficult to take up a position for himself in the historical contexts he created.38 He therefore chose to display an image of himself that was projected at a specific point on every visitor who stepped into the installation; the rest of the time, his image remained invisible. In this way, the artist became a ghostly presence within his own installation. Through his research into the individual history of two men and the chosen modes of display, Hu Yun’s piece brought to the surface an idiosyncratic reading of China’s history.

50 Vol. 13 No. 5 Hu Yun, Everything is Rethinking Exhibition Rituals Possible in the Darkness, 2012, photographs, wall Alternatives to Ritual allowed for lamps. Courtesy of the artist and the Department the emergence of a critical discourse of Culture and Education of the Federal Republic of about curating and proposed an Germany, Shanghai. alternative approach to current rituals of exhibition making in China. Looking at the exhibition as a medium in itself, it explored medium-specific topics through five solo shows in the Goethe Open Space and six contributions to the ongoing group show of the Artists’ Museum. In the centre of Hu Yun, Untitled, 2012, this project stood relationships slide projector, colour slide transparency. Courtesy (between institution, curator, artist, of the artist and the Department of Culture and art system, society, modernity and Education of the Federal contemporaneity), which were Republic of Germany, Shanghai. questioned, looked upon and negotiated, and that, along with the publication Ciric edited in conjunction with the exhibition made for a complex contribution to an otherwise often “over-simplified understanding of curatorial practice”39 in China. As a future outcome of her project, Ciric hopes to find more attempts in artistic production to “resist the machinery of art systems and provide new models of working within it as a form of critique.”40 She would like to see the attempts of the artists that she presented in the exhibition as “possible activators, opening more constructive encounters within the field of art.”41 Moreover, she is adamant that this artistic approach does not become just another short lived trend; rather, she calls for “serious exploration of the constrictions of contemporary art, reflecting on its past”, which for her is “an important base for the further repositioning of artists, locally and globally, in the future.”42

Notes 1 “Returning to these questions over and over again has shaped my curatorial practice, which I would more or less describe, borrowing Maria Lind’s words, as context-sensitive.” Biljana Ciric, “Curating as Intervention,” Leap 18 (May 10, 2013), http://leapleapleap.com/2013/05/curating-as-intervention- biljana-ciric/. 2 “In 2004, I joined Shanghai Duolun MoMA, which was my first encounter with a state-funded institution in China. During 2004 to 2007, Duolun MoMA’s focus was embedded in the local art

Vol. 13 No. 5 51 context, in the Shanghai-based artists community, which was exploring new formats for exhibition- making. Running the curatorial department and being part of a team was one of the most important experiences for my understanding of “the institution.” It has been of great importance to my work as an independent curator, and to my thinking about the innovative institutional models that could have relevance in the local context.” Ibid. 3 From an ongoing e-mail conversation between Tino Sehgal and Biljana Ciric, in Biljana Ciric and Sally Lai, eds., Institution for the Future (Manchester: Chinese Art Centre, 2012), 25. 4 See Harald Szeemann, Museum der Obsessionen: von, über, zu, mit Harald Szeemann (Berlin: Merve, 1981). 5 Paraphrased by the author: Skype conversation with Biljana Ciric, May 27, 2014. 6 Ibid. 7 From an ongoing e-mail conversation between Tino Sehgal and Biljana Ciric, in Ciric and Lai, eds., Institution for the Future, 25. 8 Biljana Ciric, “Curating as Intervention.” http://leapleapleap.com/2013/05/curating-as-intervention- biljana-ciric/. 9 Alternatives to Ritual, Goethe Open Space, Shanghai, presented by the Department for Culture and Education (DCAE) of the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Shanghai, September 30, 2012–March 31, 2013. 10 Hu Xiangqian was the only artist not to have a solo exhibition at Goethe Open Space. 11 Biljana Ciric, “Re-establishing Relationships through Exhibition Making,” in Biljana Ciric, ed., Alternatives to Ritual: Exhibition as a Medium in China (Shanghai: Department for Culture and Education [DCAE] of the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, and Manchester: Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, 2013), 12. 12 Biljana Ciric, “The Goethe Open Space I Drew,” in Ciric, ed., Alternatives to Ritual, 256. 13 Ciric, “Re-establishing Relationships through Exhibition Making,” 10. 14 “Exhibition as a Medium in China” is also the subtitle of the publication Alternatives to Ritual. 15 Ciric, “Re-establishing Relationships through Exhibition Making,” 2. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 6. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 7. 21 See Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum 44, no. 1 (September 2005), 278–83. 22 Nikita Yingqian Cai, “The Multiplicity of Solos in the Framework of an Exhibition,” in Ciric, ed., Alternatives to Ritual, 29. 23 During the exhibition, the original conversation was made available on a small video monitor in the same space as the dubbed version and could be listened to with headsets. Scripts of both versions are reproduced in the publication Alternatives to Ritual (“Documentation of the conversation between Li Ran and Biljana Ciric,” in Ciric, ed., Alternatives to Ritual, 223–236). 24 See “Documentation of the conversation between Li Ran and Biljana Ciric,” in Ciric, ed., Alternatives to Ritual, 223–236. 25 “For the Artists’ Museum part of Alternatives to Ritual I borrowed archival material from documenta, from the exhibition that Szeemann curated in 1972. The archival materials I used for my exhibition were mostly what I could find during my research in Kassel regarding his exhibition and especially the Artists’ Museum section (images of the works from the Artists’ Museum section, the catalog, certain letters, newspaper clips).” E-mail exchange between Biljana Ciric and the author, July 27, 2014. 26 “Documentation of the conversation between Li Ran and Biljana Ciric,” 223. 27 Ibid., 230. 28 See ibid., 225. 29 Biljana Ciric, “I Want to Talk to You, But Not All of You,” in Ciric, ed., Alternatives to Ritual, 210. 30 Gao Mingyan, Self-Introduction (2012), script from the video in Ciric, ed., Alternatives to Ritual, 96. 31 Xiaoyu Weng, “What Else Can I Do?” in Ciric, ed., Alternatives to Ritual, 67. 32 Ibid., 68. 33 Ibid. 34 Biljana Ciric, “Waiting for an Artist,” in Ciric, ed., Alternatives to Ritual, 282. 35 Ibid. 36 Art Worlds in the Making: From Utopia to Reality is a work-in-progress timeline that was initiated by Alexandra Hodby, Seng Yujin, and Biljana Ciric in 2012. This ongoing dialogue about significant events that shape the history of art was included as a foldout map in the publication Alternatives to Ritual. 37 For this approach to curating, see in particular Terry Smith, “Curating Contemporaneity,” in Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), 141–175. 38 Asked about his position within the piece, Hu Yun pointed out: ”I found myself like a ghost, I am the generation after them, but I found a huge part missing between me and my grandfather, and between me and Zhang Jian.” E-mail exchange between Hu Yun and the author, May 23, 2014. 39 Ciric, “Re-establishing Relationships through Exhibition Making,” 2. 40 Ibid., 12. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid.

52 Vol. 13 No. 5 Defne Ayas Moderation(s): An Introduction

oderation(s) brought together an international group of artists, curators, and writers to participate in a two-year-long program Mof contemporary discourse and production between Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong. Singaporean artist, curator, and writer Heman Chong was invited by Witte de With Director Defne Ayas to moderate the program which included a conference, two exhibitions, three residencies, and a book of short stories, with the involvement of more than fifty artists. In speaking about this project in the press release for Moderation(s), Heman Chong proposed “to make ‘soft’ the practices of both artist and curator, so that one becomes easily soluble in the other, while retaining their unique forms and patterns of working. The participants are continuously encouraged to indulge in the pleasures of exchanging knowledge and tools without any pressure to collaborate.”

Moderation(s) set out to create both a time and a space that would allow for a specific kind of creative production in which, instead of rapid installation and short-term consumption, each project could embrace the need for long- term development and a slowing down of the artistic processes. The program took place from August 2012 through August 2014. It was initiated by Defne Ayas (Director, Witte de With) together with Mimi Brown (Founder, Spring Workshop), steered by Heman Chong, and developed together with Samuel Saelemakers (Associate Curator, Witte de With).

The following is a Q & A on the process of Moderation(s) and its progress.

Question: What was the urgency to set up a program such as Moderation(s)? What was the main motivation to do this?

Defne Ayas: When considering the explosion of interest and hype around Asia, I have, for a decade now—also having lived and worked in China— found it urgent to accelerate encounters between the younger generation of artists and peers between the two continents; between Asia and Northern Europe. Here at Witte de With, we decided to do this by creating a long-term programmatic oasis between our own base here in Rotterdam and the city of Hong Kong.

Also, late New Museum founder Marcia Tucker, who started the museum in her one-bedroom apartment in 1977, has always been a guiding spirit for me. She said it best with her motto: “Act first, think later—that way you have something to think about.”

Vol. 13 No. 5 53 Question: Tell us more about the set-up of this program, which took place over two years?

Defne Ayas: We decided to dedicate a long time-frame for the project punctuated by events and visits of varying durations by artists and writers from both continents in order to create first and foremost a spirit of generosity and sharing among curious minds. This was accompanied by an intellectually rigourous program that could function as an alternative or trigger to the many globalized mapping efforts that are out there, and of course there was a long-term learning curve on both an artistic and institutional front. To be able to deliver this properly, we had to reconcile the different operational modalities and nuanced desires and instincts of the two asymmetrically scaled organizations—Witte de With with its two- decade-old history embedded in visual art aesthetic discourse, and the newly born Spring Workshop with its fresh outlook and liberated take on the cross- section between art, music, and mercurial curiosities.

In the end, Moderation(s) provided a programmatic oasis for the art scene in Hong Kong without Witte de With having to leave its home base. It began unfolding in August 2012 through its different projects that included three residencies in Hong Kong, a workshop and a day-long program of performances and non-heroic gestures titled A Thing at A Time in Rotterdam, a two-week-long fiction-writing boot camp in Hong Kong that resulted in a book of short stories, and a rigorous conference in Rotterdam with members of the next generation—indeed, the youngest and brightest thinkers—titled Stories and Situations. A group exhibition titled The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part Of Something Else at the Witte de With featured forty-seven artists including the late Chen Zhen, Félix González-Torres, and On Kawara, as well as emerging talents such as Lee Kit, Nadim Abbas, and Chu Yun, which will be accompanied by a forthcoming publication. All of these projects developed independently from one another yet often naturally informed and shaped each other. The exhibition and the publication interposed the Moderation(s) process and marked a point of culmination in this long journey.

Question: Did you find that the process raised meaningful questions or created sustainable connections?

Defne Ayas: We kept asking the very crucial question: How can a thread be established among artists and institutional desires while deliberately avoiding the grand cultural paradigms between Asia and Europe. By paradigms, I mean the traditional binary of Asia versus Europe, which is not at all the concern of the current and younger generation. In order to see what is possible, we decided to license this narrative to an artist and writer with full confidence in his capability to weave, stitch, and crochet between these two nodes. Heman Chong accepted our invitation on the spot with no hesitation, and, rather spontaneously, when I met with him in Hong Kong in May 2012. He agreed to take it on, to steer the project, and, in his own words, to “moderate.” And to his brilliance, he was able to bring a group

54 Vol. 13 No. 5 of people together to create a feeling of community. And with his artistic program, he was able to communicate that the desired framework would be one of synchronicities, slippages, and quick transmissions rather than exoticizing economies of difference.

Question: Why Heman Chong and no one else?

Defne Ayas: Heman Chong is an alert and sensitive thinker with a keen eye for art and experiences all around the world including Berlin, where I first met him in 2005, New York, London, Hong Kong, and his hometown of Singapore, where I later met him again. His artistic interests include literature, graphic design, and choreography. He likes to break the mold in general. He has a deep commitment to whisk off prejudices. And throughout the process he proved over and over how he is capable of embracing each moment as an activator and is comfortable in moving into different fields, whether in a fiction-writing camp or curating an exhibition through inspiration from the American dance choreographer Steve Paxton’s Contact Improvisation, a method of producing movement in which two or more dancers enter a space and their bodies come into physical contact without any preconceived choreographed movements.

Question: What were the difficulties?

Defne Ayas: To juggle the longevity of the process with its unknown knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns all at the same time. In that regard, I am grateful to my team at Witte de With for believing in the open-endedness of the process as well as Spring Workshop in Hong Kong. Both teams were committed to putting artists back in the centre of the institutional conversations and to tune into their versatile minds and vision.

Naturally, every project in general at an institution has its own life, and every project remains a testing ground for how an institution can be an enabler for artists and help them to exceed their everyday life. In the case of Moderation(s), the focus was on instituting protocol and identifying effective nodes for improvisation, spontaneity, and arranged encounters while keeping art and its dance as the focal point.

Moderation(s): The Program

May 2012, Hong Kong Singaporean artist and writer Heman Chong was invited by Defne Ayas (Director, Witte de With) to moderate a program between Witte de With, Rotterdam and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong.

August 2012, Spring Workshop, Hong Kong Teaser: Guilty Pleasures The program kicked off with a performative teaser. Guilty Pleasures by artist Ang Song Ming who engaged the assembled audience as participants in the setting of a listening party.

Vol. 13 No. 5 55 January 2013, Spring Workshop, Hong Kong Incidents of Travel During its residency at Spring Workshop, the curatorial duo Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa) produced Incidents of Travel, in which the duo invited artists including Ho Sin Tung, Yuk King Tan, Nadim Abbas, and Samson Young to develop day-long tours articulating the city of Hong Kong and their respective artistic practices through routes and waypoints.

April 2013, Witte de With, Rotterdam A Thing at a Time Performances by artists including Mette Edvardsen, Anthony Marcellini, Eszter Salamon, Benjamin Seror, and Koki Tanaka took place in and around Witte de With during A Thing At A Time. Alongside the programmed performances Director of Performa, RoseLee Goldberg, gave a talk and writer Guy Mannes-Abbott was invited as a witness to reflect upon the two-day program.

June 2013, Spring Workshop, Hong Kong A Fictional Residency For A Fictional Residency, Dutch novelist Oscar van den Boogaard was invited to be writer-in-residence at Spring Workshop. During his stay in Hong Kong, Van den Boogaard together with artist Nadim Abbas, writer and director Enoch Cheng, journalist Doretta Lau, and MAP Office architectural duo Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix, all based in Hong Kong, wrote a short story exploring the role of fiction within their respective practices.

October 2013, Witte de With, Rotterdam Stories and Situations Stories and Situations was a day-long conference where discourse and objecthood were the core subject matter discussed from multiple angles ranging from linguistics, archeology, to philosophy. For this, invited curators Lee Ambrozy, Amira Gad, Christina Li, and Xiaoyu Weng worked in collaboration with moderator Heman Chong. Guest speakers included Brian Castriota (archeological conservator, New York), Chris Fitzpatrick (Director of Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp), Vincenzo Latronico (writer and critic, Berlin), Vincent Normand (writer and curator, Paris), Rosemary Orr (Senior Tutor and Lecturer Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences, University College Utrecht), and Arnisa Zeqo (art historian and co-founder of Rongwrong, Amsterdam).

October–December 2013, Spring Workshop, Hong Kong The Social Contract At Spring Workshop, the artist duo A Constructed World (Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva) produced The Social Contract, a work in which the audience is asked to sign a legal contract restraining them from speaking about what they saw inside the exhibition.

56 Vol. 13 No. 5 May–August 2014, Witte de With, Rotterdam The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part Of Something Else The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part Of Something Else was a group exhibition at Witte de With that dealt with the transmissive qualities of objects, situations, and storytelling, where one is soluble into the others. The formal relations between these three vehicles of mediation are rendered visible in the exhibition, which includes works by over forty artists. Artists included A Constructed World, Nadim Abbas, Allora & Calzadilla, Ang Song-ming, Iván Argote, Bik Van der Pol, Pierre Bismuth, John Cage, Chen Zhen, Chu Yun, Ceal Floyer, Aurélien Froment, Félix González-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Minja Gu, Sharon Hayes, Ho Rui An, Ho Sin Tung, Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat, On Kawara, Patrick Killoran, Kwan Sheung Chi, Nicolás Lamas, Lee Kit, Michael Lee, Lucas Lenglet, Gabriel Lester, Marysia Lewandowska, Charles Lim, Katarina Löfström, MAP Office, Anthony Marcellini, Ahmet Ögüt & Cevdet Erek, João Vasco Paiva, Patricia Reed, Willem de Rooij, Mor Shani, Praneet Soi, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, Koki Tanaka, Narcisse Tordoir, Freek Wambacq, Leung Chi Wo and Sara Wong, Magdalen Wong, Adrian Wong, Haegue Yang, Trevor Yeung, and Johan Zetterquist.

Ongoing, Witte de With, Rotterdam, and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong Bibliotheek (Library) Bibliotheek (Library) is a list of books that functions both as a bibliography for Moderation(s) and as a temporary physical library. All participants to Moderations(s) are invited to suggest books, creating an ever-expanding common library that can be replicated easily by any individual, community, or institution. One is welcome to download the latest version of Bibliotheek (Library) at http://www.wdw.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Bibliotheek- Library-02.pdf/. http://www.wdw.nl/event/moderations/

Vol. 13 No. 5 57 Christina Li Moderation(s): Speaking in Parentheses

wo years on, in the wake of an ambitious program in two different cities consisting of a listening party, a host of tours, a conference Tabout language, a series of performances, a book, a legal contract, a library, and an exhibition, only now have I been able to start taking hold of what was previously an almost impossible exercise: forming an account of the multifaceted project Moderation(s).

The project was initiated and hosted by Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, which invited Singaporean artist, curator, and writer Heman Chong to take the lead in devising a program that would unfold episodically, linking the two cities between August 2012 and August 2014. As the invited main “Witness” of an endeavor that traversed both time and distance, I was asked to chronicle the proceedings I experienced from the sidelines, while at times assuming different designated positions within the various components of the project.

In contrast to how witnesses function within court situations, where they can speak only when summoned or questioned to relay truths and facts of an occurrence, the multiple roles that I have adopted in the Moderation(s) project, such as that of covert author in A Fictional Residency and of co-curator of Stories and Situations, gave me space in which to manifest different presences, modes of address, and means of expression within the project’s two-year period. Keeping the role of the witness in mind, I refrained from contributing to processes as an active participant, like someone who held a backstage pass for the entirety of the project, closely shadowing and interacting with Heman Chong and the other participants. Though my role was not clearly outlined, I understood that in witnessing Moderation(s), I was to document and eventually discern and interpret the motivations and framework of the different elements of this open-ended venture on a blog linked to both Witte de With and Spring Workshop.1 In this essay, fragments of my witness accounts in the past two-years will be cited to trace a possible reading of the project at its tail end.

The Space Between You and Me Observed through multiple vantage points, Moderation(s) could be understood as an attempt to realize a mode of open-endedness, stretching the limitations of conventional institutional time and resources in the era of accelerated cultural production and consumption. Much of the basis

58 Vol. 13 No. 5 of the project rested on the manifold ways people come to speak to and encounter one another and the aftereffects that emerge as a result of such processes. The situations Heman Chong created allowed invited artists, curators, and writers to enter multiple, fragmented, yet highly concentrated moments of exchange spanning both cities. Early on in the project, in the autumn of 2012, core participants were brought together in Rotterdam for a brainstorming meeting to discuss the possible interpretations of the word “moderation” as a method of thinking, working, and relating to one another in engendering a reciprocal space.2 The collective questions and aspirations that eventually emerged from this two-day meeting became important pillars in defining the potential capacity of the cross-continental project:

How can we use the potential for misunderstanding as a productive space that is constantly being reformulated through the process of moderation and through the fractures that are intrinsic to language and communication? Can we picture Moderation(s) functioning like a third institution between two existing institutions, artists and curators? Additionally, could we think of it as an open- ended sentence where thoughts and objects could be generated out of this mode of working?3

In many ways, the inherent temporal and geographical gap among all the participants, alongside their diverse scopes of interests and intellectual concerns, became an opening rather than an obstacle in seeking out common interests and attitudes for rethinking the word “collaboration,” which has been popping up within the discourse of contemporary artistic and curatorial practice during the past decade. In light of new proposals concerning collective working and the proliferation of ambitious international projects that criss-cross the disciplines of literature, performance, exhibition making, and public programming, they fall, more often than not, into the trappings of false or sometimes forced collaboration or box ticking. With this in mind, Heman Chong’s decision to employ a tangential language and tone in presenting the project, and refusing straightforward explanation or contextualization of Moderation(s) as a whole, might be perceived as cryptic, resembling the idiosyncratic and enigmatic language that David Levine and Alix Rule argue has recently become pervasive in art communication.4 But it also could be seen as means to instil within the project a malleable approach that could pry open productive spaces of thought circulation beyond accepted categories or models.

Assuming the role of moderator, perhaps a defiant gesture against the role of curator, Heman Chong took on the responsibilities of various different positions. As a curator, he selected his collaborators, setting up the framework and necessary conditions for the project, as well as the parameters of each encounter; and as taciturn organizer, he gave free rein to invited artists and curators to develop their responses. Take, for example, the Barcelona-based curatorial duo Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna) and their project Incidents of Travel, at Spring Workshop,

Vol. 13 No. 5 59 Hong Kong, in January 2013.5 This was developed out of a month-long Nadim Abbas, underneath the Connaught Road residency in which they invited local artists to devise personalized tours West flyovers for Incidents to Travel, part of places and locations relevant to their artistic interests as a complement of Moderation(s), Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, to other commercially available tours that mediate one’s experience of January 19, 2013. Photo: Hong Kong. Initially thought of as an extended studio visit with an artist, Heman Chong. configured within a tourist tour format, the artist tours offered both the artists and Latitudes an opportunity to rethink how artistic practice and city experiences could meld together, be translated, and considered outside of professional art world relationships.

As in many of the other components of Moderation(s), the intention of Heman Chong and his collaborators was perhaps not to reinvent formats such as tours, conferences, or exhibitions per se, but, instead, to reclaim the space of hospitality and interaction, making the interpersonal connections and exchanges that developed out of the project profound ones that would lead to new collaborations beyond its initial framework.

Choreographing and configuring scenarios where such interactions could occur naturally was a delicate task. More often than not, the events at Spring Workshop revolved around inviting participants to act outside of their comfort zones to explore new ways of working beyond their usual, familiar disciplines or environments. With his invitation, Heman Chong offered collaborators a situation that was shaped by nominal curatorial interference, a defining mode of working within Moderation(s). The resulting public presentations and publications, the project’s concluding publication, to be launched in the Fall of 2014,6 were materializations of collaborative processes that would be otherwise barely perceptible to and accessible by the public. While not detrimental to the understanding or reading of the project itself, these offstage moments remained spectral and were made palpable through intentionally embedded traces in my witness account and story for A Fictional Residency:

The participants leave the provisional pocket of elastic time and fictional space bit by bit, emptying Spring of their own

60 Vol. 13 No. 5 A Fictional Residency part of Moderation(s), Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, June 17–30, 2013. Back row: Laurent Gutierrez of MAP Office, Enoch Cheng. Front row: Athena Wu, Mimi Brown, Oscar van den Boogaard, Doretta Lau, Samuel Saelemakers, Heman Chong, Nadim Abbas, Christina Li, and Valérie Portefaix of MAP Office.

personal effects. The rooms slowly return to their usual states, and what is left of this intensive experience will now find an afterlife in the readers’ minds.7

In response to Spring Workshop’s mission to provide residency opportunities that afforded moments of deep engagement with Hong Kong, as evidenced by Incidents of Travel, the subsequent Moderation(s) episode in Hong Kong, A Fictional Residency, in June 2013, saw local writers and artists congregate alongside invited Dutch playwright and writer Oscar van den Boogaard to write a book in four days.8 In A Fictional Residency, my role was was that of an unnamed ghostly writer working alongside the list of authors featured on the book cover. The final story in the book, “Salon de refuge,” is a meta-narrative of the four-day experience of the writing residency that fills in the gaps and connects the dots and places that surface in the other stories. My account registered various situations and highlights mutual influences that otherwise would remain concealed in the other stories, and at the same time forms a backdrop in which readers can contextualize the compiled stories within. As witness to various moments within Moderation(s), such as A Fictional Residency, I described the spaces of fluid time that escape representation via straightforward photographic or video documentation, yet appear to find some form of materialization through witness reports like mine hinged heavily on subjective interpretations from the sidelines.

Flows, Leakages, and Circulatory Systems As Moderation(s) stretched across two cities and spaces—Hong Kong and Rotterdam, Spring Workshop and Witte de With—the two nodes could almost be seen as bookends or brackets. Heman Chong’s programming for the respective spaces was conceived in consideration of the similarities and asymmetries within the institutions’ functions and the cities’ contexts. The series of activities that unfolded during the project operated in two different time zones, in (inter-)-dependent fragments. In a networked era, where time is easily synchronized and events instantly filmed and streamed, the project acknowledged and embraced the difficulties of transmitting experiences through time zones and geographies. In limiting the dissemination of the various project installments through institutional publicity, event documentation, commissioned texts,9 and witness accounts,

Vol. 13 No. 5 61 Moderation(s), on the one hand, privileged the participants’ involvement, and, on the other, looked at the way happenings could leave traces to be reactivated by encounters with readers, historians, and art professionals at a later date. It also posited questions about what the idea of presence means in this day and age, as well as whether one can speak of or create one’s own experience of a moment in history/time without being physically present. A particularly pertinent example could be traced from one event from the performance weekend at Witte de With, A Thing A Time, in which I wrote:

Last week in Venice, I saw Koki Tanaka’s presentation at the Japanese Pavilion, which willfully embraces the fragile potential that emerges within temporary communities. Among the videos documenting such moments which he calls “precarious tasks,” on recycled walls leftover from the last Venice Architecture Biennale, hung a series of images of his performance Precarious task #6 going up to a city building taller than 16.7m, which took place in Rotterdam’s Bilderberg Hotel as part of A Thing At A Time. Drawing from the 2011 catastrophe in Fukushima, Tanaka asked a group of audience members to share thoughts on this major event as experienced on varying scales, depths, and geographies. In choreographing a collective situation rather than re-enacting it, the audience was invited to take joint possession of other people’s experiences of one event, Tanaka establishes these moments as departure points where our experiences could intersect (across geographies, from Fukushima to Rotterdam to Venice, for instance) in re-imagining the possibility of seeing the world differently.10

As part of the series of performances, Koki Tanaka, Precarious task #6 going up to a city A Thing At A Time, Tanaka’s building taller than 16.7 m, performance for A Thing At A performative event in Rotterdam Time, part of Moderation(s), zoomed into a singular encounter Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, that touched upon the mediation of April 19–20, 2013. re-enacted presence and dedicated attention. His Precarious task #6 going up to a city building taller than 16.7m expanded further on this approach to time, production, as well as the consumption and dissemination of events, and the resulting work existed twofold. One was a concurrently individual and communal experience for those who were present in Rotterdam, while the resulting documentation, as a series of photographs of that moment, engages with audiences to invoke empathetic connections to what transpired during the event in Rotterdam and in Fukushima in other exhibition locations. The accompanying documentation for Tanaka’s event and other temporary events within Moderation(s) signals a conscious act of elongating time and compressing geographical bearings—an act in which participants can come into contact during and beyond Moderation(s). Working against the hastened communications that we have become accustomed to, Tanaka’s poetic work resonates with the project’s attempt to

62 Vol. 13 No. 5 reconsider human connections via the coexistence of, and possible mutual understanding that can be found in, individual experiences originating from nodes of shared references and events.

Bibliotheek (Library), Moderation(s), a as part of Moderation(s), Spring Workshop, Hong fragmentary two-year Kong, Witte de With Center for Contemporary undertaking, was grounded Art, Rotterdam. by Biblioteek (Library), which functions as a set of anchors in both locations. The idea of Biblioteek (Library) started as an exercise by Heman Chong in the initial brainstorm meeting, and the titles in the library’s collection consist of recommendations by an expanding list of writers, curators, and artists either participating in the project or who share affinities with the project, as well as books relating to Heman Chong’s own interests. And yet, the collection of books is not meant to serve as a set of straightforward footnotes or orientations to make intelligible, or provide explanations relating to the threads and concepts that emerged form Moderation(s), but, rather, as a space to gather and circulate disparate forms of knowledge and myriad interests, not unlike the loose company of participants brought together throughout the diverse components that comprise Moderation(s). Speaking of this library, Heman Chong explains:

What binds us all into this system (Biblioteek (Library) is the fact that we have all taken time to read through the list of books and have come up with a series of recommendations that are reactions to this list. There are some very surprising recommendations, which have already triggered off certain conversations amongst the contributors, which is already very telling of how this system can function both as a site and a tool.11

While the book list is jointly hosted on websites of both Spring and Witte de With,12 visitors to the physical libraries in both cities are encouraged to browse through the stacks as regular library users to potentially draw their own readings (or not) of the various components of Moderation(s) or to form conceptual links with the regular programming in both institutions. Continuing with the idea of creating a third institution that connects both art spaces, the library can be seen as a shadow that criss-crosses the various chapters of the overall project, and is activated by visitors and participants; for example, it was utilized as inspiration for the writers taking part in A Fictional Residency. Echoing Heman Chong’s intention to manufacture sites and interfaces of potential interactions, Biblioteek (Library), like other project elements, represents his continued investigation into utilizing existing configurations and formats as intermediaries for candid exchange, where the moderator enters into a dance of mediation and encouragement between the opposite poles of predictability and improvisation.

Vol. 13 No. 5 63 Speech Clouds Mid-way into Moderation(s), using the summer break as a moment to take stock of Moderation(s), the image of speech clouds became an apt analogy in discerning the project’s overall intention, as I wrote:

In comic books, speech clouds are repositories of thought and speech of characters, facilitating the story’s narrative over a succession of multiple frames. . . What can be said and how we can say things, and the ensuing meanings produced within these empty speech bubbles will offer us much thought in the various conditioned scenarios that Chong and the contributors will collate. In these instances, we all become characters, summoning manifold thoughts and speaking in countless tongues, and providing multiple possible storylines in this open sentence called Moderation(s).13

Left: Lecture by Christina Li and Vincenzo Latronico for the Stories and Situations conference, as part of Moderation(s), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, October 5, 2013. Photo: Aad Hoogendorn.

Right: Lecture by Lee Ambrozy and Brian Castriota for the Stories and Situations conference, Moderation(s), Witte de With If the core purpose of Moderation(s) lay in devising episodic opportunities Center for Contemporary for exchange and collaboration, the medium of language as transmitter for Art, Rotterdam, October 5, 2013. Photo: Aad points of departure took centre stage in Stories and Situations, a one-day Hoogendorn. symposium held at Witte de With.14 This was an occasion to call attention to various facets, elements, and processes that form and problematize the way language can transpose ideas and produce meanings. Aside from aspects of linguistic and cultural issues integral to influencing the way we express ourselves, the day’s proceedings also concentrated on decoding intentions behind speech acts that animate/activate otherwise mute artifacts, parasites, and museological displays. Lee Ambrozy’s curated session of presentations placed its focus on the perception of objects in which patina is regarded as a tell-tale trace of history, as well as an unwanted blemish on an artifact. Here, the role of the conservator, in his or her act of conservation, is the moderator of divergent approaches toward preservation or restoration, steering pluralistic testimonies in which the material witness will tell, and, in turn, form parts of historical or cultural narratives.

Almost like ventriloquists, the invited speakers, through their presentations, animated various objects and elicited conversations among the juxtaposition of animal specimens, bodily organs, parasites, and artworks, unconsciously furnishing various definitions of the word “moderation.” The tongue, as a motif of speech, appeared metaphorically as well as in visual cues multiple times throughout the day’s presentations, unveiling the pitfalls of the ability of language to adequately convey thought, meaning,

64 Vol. 13 No. 5 Left: Lecture by Arnisa Zeqo for the Stories and Situations conference, Moderation(s), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, October 5, 2013. Photo: Aad Hoogendoorn.

Right: Lecture by Chris Fitzpatrick for the Stories and Situations conference, Moderation(s), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, October and communication as well as its resulting subversions. Arnisa Zeqo’s talk in 5, 2013. Photo: Aad Hoogendoorn. the session A Mind of Two Tongues attended to the materiality of language and its influence upon thoughts and ideas, citing examples of word ingestion found in religious paintings, while relaying the schizophrenic autodidact Louis Wolfson’s peculiar relationship to words. Born in 1930 in New York, Wolfson developed a particular disaccord with English, his mother tongue, and in his process of ridding English from his daily life and surroundings, replaced with his own jumbled mélange of French, Hebrew, Russian, and German. Delving deeper into the spectrum of involuntary and imposed speech, the tongue in Chris Fitzpatrick’s presentation The Intestine or the Tapeworm? spoke through the form of a parasite, Cymothoa Exigua (a tongue-eating louse), functioning as the voice of subversion. Represented by an uncanny female voice, Fitzpatrick sat on stage as a mouthpiece, as the voice of the parasite, and recounted instances of infiltration into systems and art institutions, as I recalled on the blog:

In summoning a number of (un)invited artist interventions in various structures, such as Dexter Sinister’s interception in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, by means of expropriating its dissemination and circulation of discursive and promotional texts; the performance elicited the multiple ways in which one could still imagine the institution as a fertile site for interruption during a time where the term “institutional critique” has become threadbare in contemporary artistic practice. The covert parasitic act here becomes one of value and political aptitude in claiming autonomy, thus making available pockets of maneuvering outside the traps of systematic instrumentalization.15

Fitzpatrick’s performative lecture pried open the fraught space of reciprocity and abuse between the parasite and the host where, in either case, new meanings and interpretations are produced through this violent intervention. Seen within the context of the Moderation(s), it highlighted the potential disruption within the situation that Heman Chong, the Moderator, constructed for the entire project and his guests. Even with the sincerity and openness that pervaded Moderation(s), and marked the group of participants, there was a certain unpredictable risk implicit within his invitation for those to participate in and contribute to the project’s various components, which might precipitate a conflict between ideas, roles, and expectations throughout the collaborative process. Even though the strength of Moderation(s) lay in working with and manufacturing spaces to instigate communication, in the most positive sense, recognition still ought to be

Vol. 13 No. 5 65 given to those uncooperative acts that possess the power to disrupt the host-Moderator-guest relationship, in which critical commentary towards possible interpretations of an invitation, and the complex machinations which form it, could be generated.

Coming after the discussions in A Constructed World (Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva), Rotterdam around language and The Social Contract, part of Moderation(s), Spring communication one of the last Workshop, Hong Kong, October program segments to take place in 14–December 15, 2013. Hong Kong as part of Moderation(s) was the November 2013 installation The Social Contract, by resident Australian artist duo A Constructed World. Taking the prohibition of speech as a premise, the work reclaims the cogent space of silence and secrecy in the age of networked media and over-sharing via social media. In order to view the installation that was located behind constructed walls, the artists had visitors sign a legal contract of confidentiality in which they agreed to abide by the terms of non-disclosure over a period of time or risk being held liable for unspecified damages. The secrecy asked of the audience challenged their understanding of the embedded terms and conditions of the contract and the trust that is necessary beyond the artwork itself, and, by extension, the most basic human interactions. In my account of the evening, centred on my observations of the opening crowd, the work is seen as a device to understand our relationship to rules and laws that we inadvertently adhere to:

In this self-imposed, and somehow collectively respected code of silence, floating in the air that evening was a strange sense of being alone, yet being together as a community sharing knowledge of an unspeakable secret. . . . Not to be blindsided by the legalese constituting the project, in fact, the core of The Social Contract lies in the establishment of personal trust being made with the artists, a bond that most people are inclined to upkeep through good faith in a society that is otherwise governed by social codes, and state enforced discipline.16

A Constructed World regarded the contract itself as the work of art rather than what was on display in the installation. This collaborative effort produced a space of isolation shared by artists and participants and almost could be seen as an inversion of the space of speech; that is, it was a valorization of silence. On the surface it might seem like the artists’ concerns were to regulate speech, but, in fact, as a gesture, the contract could also be seen as redemptive of genuine interpersonal relationships built upon reciprocal trust in an increasingly mediated of superficial friendships and hollow connections. The Social Contract as a proxy and a thinking tool uncovered the attitudes and controlled conditions necessary in forming openings for collaboration founded on trust and mutual exchange. The lifespan and the culminating point of the work is ambiguous; that is, should the work be regarded as complete only when a participant

66 Vol. 13 No. 5 breaks his or her silence after the contract period? What could be made of the violators or, conversely, those who would rather keep this knowledge to themselves for an extended period beyond the contract time? Keeping in mind the various modes of mediation and dissemination built within Moderation(s), this specific project expounded on ideas of speech embargo and delayed documentation; what the work ultimately did was to address the untranslatable experiences that exist in the realm of private thoughts and outside of public archives or discourse.

Patricia Reed, Perfect Present, 2013, sculpture, in The Part in the Story Where A Part Becomes A Part of Something Else, as part of Moderation(s). Photo: Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk. Courtesy of the artist and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2014.

The Pleasure Principle The notion of parenthesis can be understood as the overarching structure behind Moderation(s), while the production of conversational space is its modus operandi. As one considers the various fleeting presentations that composed Moderation(s), the epilogue exhibition, The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part Of Something Else, at Witte de With, stood in sharp contrast to all the other components because it was the only one that was material-driven. Appearing almost as a gesture against the ubiquitousness of moving images and technology in contemporary art, all works on display in this exhibition encapsulated form and medium as a primary concern, creating asymmetrical echoes and disjointed associations within the exhibition space, and functioning as manifold brackets or anchor points. One example could be found in Patricia Reed’s piece Perfect Present (2013), made in homage to Félix González-Torres’s "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) (1987–90), both of which were displayed in different places in the exhibition. Reed’s frantic clock hands create a striking juxtaposition with González-Torres’s evocative rumination on death as a rupture in the notion of time and eternal love. The curators, Heman Chong and Samuel Saelemakers, created similar kinds of variations and repetition of shared motifs among other works that framed the viewing experience of an

Vol. 13 No. 5 67 exhibition that, in this case, proffered no central statement or thesis. It was as though the artworks at times became hushed objects dotting the lines of prospective conversations, awaiting activation by the audience, who were also informed by secondary materials presented in the exhibition guidebook and suggested readings.17 As compact vessels, these introverted objects were imbued with meanings and intentions shaped by the trace of time and experience and served as indications of past events or situations in which these works were created within and outside the context of Moderation(s). In a roundabout way, the exhibition brought forward a concentration of physical presence of works, but revealed the limitations of the transmission and transferral of histories and experiences, on par with the mode of thinking evident in the other components of Moderation(s). In face of the impossibility of possessing complete histories of the events that transpired within and prior to the project, The Part In The Story and other events required the wilful involvement of viewers entering the situations conceived by Heman Chong, thus precipitating a condition of multiple readings and interpretations.

If one thinks about the objects in Ang Song-ming, Guilty Pleasures, part of The Part In The Story as ghostly Moderation(s), Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, traces of what transpired prior August 18, 2012. to it, the teaser event by Ang Song-ming, Guilty Pleasures, the inaugural event of Moderation(s), in which he invited audience members to share their musical guilty pleasures, can be seen as one that put its focus upon the audience’s presence in the present. Such experiences came to fruition in Moderation(s) thanks to the choreography of various encounters straddling the poles between improvisation and design, and elements of pleasure and liveliness permeated throughout. Like a dotted line in which the invited collaborators, together with Heman Chong, drew out to connect each project episode over the two years, a delineated intimate space was established with informal moments—such as those of Guilty Pleasures, and A Fictional Residency— outside of our familiar art world machinations and rules. Resonating with the concerns of A Constructed World’s piece, which made clear the mechanisms of permissiveness at play within the art world, the Guilty Pleasures event by Ang Song-ming grappled with one’s understanding of what constitutes socially acceptable public display. In spite of this event having taken place prior to the public announcement of the expanded definition of what Moderation(s) might entail, looking in hindsight, Ang Song-ming’s listening party can be understood to have touched upon the overall project’s goal. What might have seemed a casual sharing of personal musical guilty pleasures, Ang Song-ming’s event in fact underlined Heman Chong’s aim to forge bonds and broadcast ideas among people within both the context of art and the format of an event and was continuously explored in the following programs for Moderation(s). To use the silence imposed by A Constructed World to visitors in The Social Contract as catalyst for reflection upon the entire project: within a built-in situation as such, what are the traces that are leftover and perceptible in a belated moment in

68 Vol. 13 No. 5 time beyond those who were in the room? As the Witness tasked with the responsibility to render online these experiences into words shortly after each event, it could be seen as Chong’s intention to institute such questions in instituting a record-keeper within the project itself. Soon after attending the opening of The Social Contract, I documented in my deliberations:

By barring the possibility of speaking of what one has seen, bound by the terms and timeframe of the agreement, what kind of utterances around this project could be traced and disseminated through time, especially in the cult of instant information consumption? Will the fortunate few who have witnessed the project, still be interested in talking about it, after the contract’s expiration date at 5pm (Hong Kong time), 15 December 2013? Or will it be old news, deemed uninteresting and banished to the black holes of art history, only to be excavated and re-discovered years later by curators and historians? Only time will tell.18

In writing an account of Moderation(s), I recalled my speaking with Hong Kong artist Nadim Abbas, who, like me, performed assorted albeit dissimilar roles in the different instalments of Moderation(s). As tour guide, fiction writer, and artist presenting a work in The Part In The Story, Abbas wore separate hats, shadowing and responding to Heman Chong as the moderator throughout the trajectory of Moderation(s):

Christina Li: . . . In this project, Heman calls himself the Moderator, but in a sense he’s the host, and you’re more like a guest that he extends the invitation to. As a guest, you need to evaluate or get a sense of the kind of freedom that could be put forward by this person.

Nadim Abbas: I think Heman is the one who brought all these people together in different situations. It’s like being in someone’s kitchen standing around doing something, but then not feeling like you’re obliged to do anything. It is pretty much a reflection of what I would be doing anyway but by myself. I think there is a lot to be said about engineering these kinds of situations that makes it easier for people to relax and put their guard down.19

By drawing parallels to the relaxed moments and convivial conversations that tend to take place in kitchens, one could think of Heman Chong as the host of a dinner party. The kitchen and the dinner table represent a mutable type of informality, familiarity, and engagement among the guests—a mix of Heman Chong’s friends both old and new. It is this attitude towards sociability and pleasure that runs through Moderation(s), bringing the guest artists, curators, and writers together to compose the scenarios and dialogues that were presented to the public in manifold ways and at different times during the project’s two-year journey across two cities. Perhaps as an apt addendum to the overall endeavour, with the exhibition

Vol. 13 No. 5 69 The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part Of Something Else, the return to objects shifted the focus away from the fleeting and inevitably ungraspable moment of the experience that had passed. Such instances are alluded to and made apparent only now, following the project’s completion, like the leftovers abandoned by guests who left the dinner table, which become traces of what happened, of what was said or remained unsaid, or for some, become pathways to other interpretations of stories and situations that merged within the parentheses of Moderation(s).

Notes 1 An archive of all the blog entries of my witness accounts can be found at http://www.wdw. nl/2013/05/02/moderations-the-witness-by-christina-li/ and http://witnessmoderations.tumblr.com/. 2 The participants in this informal meeting, which took place at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, October 19–20, 2012, included A Constructed World, Nadim Abbas, Defne Ayas, Mimi Brown, Heman Chong, Amira Gad, Latitudes, Michael Lee, Samuel Saelemakers, and me, along with guests Natasha Ginwala, Pages, and Vivian Sky Rehberg. 3 Christina Li, excerpted from the Moderation(s) blog The Witness, http://witnessmoderations.tumblr. com/post/50647655948/the-first-encounter-circulatory-thoughts/, blog entry entitled “The First Encounter: Circulatory Thoughts,” April 16, 2013. 4 This refers to the phrase “International Art English,” a brand of English that Alix Rule and David Levine argue has developed within contemporary art writing with a specific syntax and grammar structure; they discussed this phenomenon in a text of the same name in Triple Canopy in 2012, http:// canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english. One session of discussions was dedicated to this topic: “A Mind of Two Tongues,” in Stories and Situations, which took place at Witte de With, October 3, 2013. 5 For this project, Latitudes invited four Hong Kong-based artists—Nadim Abbas, Ho Sin Tung, Yuk King Tan, and Samson Young—to develop day-long tours, thus retelling the story of the city and presenting each participant’s artistic concerns through personal itineraries and waypoints. 6 With contributions by Nadim Abbas, Defne Ayas, Mimi Brown, Heman Chong, Chris Fitzpatrick, Amira Gad, Travis Jeppersen, Christina Li, Latitudes, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Samuel Saelemakers, Aaron Schuster, and Oscar van den Boogaard. 7 Christina Li, excerpted from the Moderation(s) blog The Witness, http://witnessmoderations.tumblr. com/post/53949010084/salon-de-refuge/, blog entry entitled “Salon de refuge,” June 26, 2013. 8 For A Fictional Residency, acclaimed Dutch novelist Oscar van den Boogaard was invited as writer-in-residence at Spring Workshop, Hong Kong. During his stay, van den Boogaard worked with a group of Hong Kong–based practitioners, including Nadim Abbas, Enoch Cheng, Doretta Lau, and Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix, of MAP Office. The PDF version of the book they wrote together—Nadim Abbas, Oscar van den Boogaard, Enoch Cheng, Heman Chong, Doretta Lau, Christina Li, and MAP Office, A Fictional Residency, (Hong Kong: Spring Workshop and Witte de With, 2013)—is available at https://wdw-nl.s3.amazonaws.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ AFictionalResidency.pdf/. 9 For The Social Contract, Heman Chong and A Constructed World commissioned short texts from Betti-Sue Hertz, Mia Jankowicz, Ruba Katrib, Alana Kushnir, and Venus Lau. The dossier is available at http://www.springworkshop.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/The-Social-Contract.pdf/. 10 A Thing At A Time was a series of five performances that took place April 19 and 20, 2013, in Rotterdam, and was spread out over two days and four different locations, featuring artists Mette Edvardsen, Anthony Marcellini, Koki Tanaka, Eszter Salamon, and Benjamin Seror. 11 Christina Li, excerpted from the Moderation(s) blog The Witness, http://witnessmoderations. tumblr.com/post/53343491814/interview-with-heman-chong-on-bibliotheek-library/, entry entitled, “Interview with Heman Chong on Bibliotheek (Library),” June 19, 2013. 12 The list of books in Bibliotheek (Library) is available at https://wdw-nl.s3.amazonaws.com/wp/ wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Bibliotheek-Library-02.pdf?461162/. 13 Christina Li, excerpted from the Moderation(s) blog The Witness, http://witnessmoderations.tumblr. com/post/60096630991/speech-clouds/, entry entitled “Speech Clouds,” September 2, 2013. 14 The symposium was organized by Lee Ambrozy, Amira Gad, Xiaoyu Weng, and me, with speakers Brian Castriota, Chris Fitzpatrick, Vincenzo Latronico, Vincent Normand, Rosemary Orr, and Arnisa Zeqo. 15 Christina Li, excerpted from the Moderation(s) blog The Witness, http://witnessmoderations.tumblr. com/post/65512734818/what-are-words-worth-words/, entry entitled “What Are Words Worth?— Words,” October 31, 2013. 16 Christina Li, excerpted from the Moderation(s) blog The Witness, http://witnessmoderations.tumblr. com/post/68071139581/word-of-mouth/, entry entitled “Word of Mouth,” November 25, 2013. 17 For the duration of The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part Of Something Else, Witte de With invited eight guest moderators to give “readings” or interpretative tours of the exhibition. Throughout summer 2014, moderated public tours of the exhibition were given by Lorenzo Benedetti, Oscar van den Boogaard Ann Demeester, Dessislava Dimova, Chris Fitzpatrick, Christina Li, Marnie Slater, and Steven ten Thije. 18 Christina Li, excerpted from the Moderation(s) blog The Witness, http://witnessmoderations.tumblr. com/post/65512734818/what-are-words-worth-words/, entry entitled “What Are Words Worth?— Words,” October 31, 2013. 19 Christina Li, excerpted from the Moderation(s) blog The Witness, http://witnessmoderations.tumblr. com/post/86987832387/pyramid-time-machine/, entry entitled “Pyramid Time Machine,” May 27, 2014.

70 Vol. 13 No. 5 The Social Architecture of “Situations”: Heman Chong in Conversation with Lee Ambrozy

Luca Lenglet, Soft Corners, 2014, sculpture, in The Part in the Story Where A Part Becomes A Part of Something Else, as part of Moderation(s), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. Photo: Aad Hoogendoorn.

eman Chong is an artist whose work dissolves boundaries among literature and the performing and visual arts. As the chief Harchitect of the Moderation(s) project, he expanded his role to include that of institutional curator, employing a range of collaborative methodologies to investigate new ways of refreshing modes of production.

In this conversation, through dialogue with Moderation(s) participant and art historian Lee Ambrozy, Heman Chong elaborates on the strategies this multi-platform project employed to expand what contemporary art production can be. He elaborates on the goals and methodologies embedded within the project, revealing how Singaporean art collectives of the 1990s, Contact Improvisation, and graphic design inspired the program for Moderation(s).

The collaborative frameworks that emerged over twenty-four months in Moderation(s) revealed the fragility of epistemological hierarchies within the art world and the permeable boundaries between the roles that have come to be established with it. The resulting situations expanded and blurred the roles of the participants, and, similarly, migration between two geographically and culturally divergent centres—Witte de With in Rotterdam and Spring Workshop in Hong Kong—lent Moderation(s) an ephemeral character that eluded conventional definition.

Heman Chong’s remarks below demonstrate how artists’ roles have adapted to overlapping cultural contexts and shifting geographies. Developing less

Vol. 13 No. 5 71 distinct roles for players within the art world is an issue of concern in the so-called Chinese art world, where roles overlap more frequently; that is, artist as curator, or gallerist as art critic.

Is Moderation(s) a potential alternative model for art production in a globalized context? Could similar methodologies such as those found in Moderation(s) displace linear models or provide a framework for multiple value systems to productively co-exist? Such questions have multidisciplinary implications well beyond the increasingly complex art world, namely: How can we create freedom within determined structures?

Heman Chong in conversation with Lee Ambrozy, November 8, 2013

Lee Ambrozy: What was your title within the Moderation(s) project? How can we describe your role? Are you the curator, the planner, the Wizard of Oz?

Heman Chong: Things somehow got out of control, and now everyone calls me the “moderator,” which I think is inaccurate. But most of my time is spent putting things together, and what is being produced is the result of this process; a lot of the work actually happens during the process of selecting who is involved in what. The entire Moderation(s) project hinges on this. It is about designing a structure in which people can do whatever they want. I don’t define the content within each of the programs with the overall project. People do that themselves, which can be messy at certain points because these are situations where everything could work, or totally fail. But for me it isn’t so important that everything is successful at a level that it is legible, or that it makes a coherent vehicle. More important is that there is a framework where people can build the social structures or relationships they need for use within the Moderation(s) programs, or for use outside of it.

Trevor Yeung, Mr. Butterflies, 2012, installation, in The Part in the Story Where A Part Becomes A Part of Something Else, as part of Moderation(s), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. Photo: Aad Hoogendoorn.

A lot of Moderation(s) happens between two institutions—Witte de With, Rotterdam, and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong—on different levels. For example, Spring Workshop, because of its location in Hong Kong, is a wonderful site for people to produce mental and creative space in their lives

72 Vol. 13 No. 5 and do what they want for a month. Witte de With is a different institution; it is almost twenty-five years old, and it functions more like a kunsthalle, so production there is more about engineering modes of seeing things, or ways of plugging into content that would otherwise be part of the exhibition- making processes. This is similar to taking the public programming part of an exhibition and folding it into the exhibition, of making it seamless. At the same time, a lot of the work there is about refreshing the networks of Witte de With, and a lot of the artists associated with it circulate around Europe. The Witte de With space is a pit stop between other institutions; it is also a co-producing institution. This is important, but it is equally important to refresh it and introduce new people into these networks.

Lee Ambrozy: I like the idea of a “refresh.”

Heman Chong: Yes. This makes sense for me on the level of what Moderation(s) does: getting people to define their own content at different points within the structure.

In a way, there are dual roles that I am playing—one is that of a producer, the other is that of a production manager.

Lee Ambrozy: I conceptualize your role as more of a facilitator, not a moderator. You were not moderating during the conference.

Latitudes (Max Andrews Heman Chong: This is something and Mariana Cánepa), for Incidents to Travel, as part I’ve been very interested in doing of Moderation(s), Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, from the very beginning of the February 7, 2013. project: to work with Defne Ayas at Witte de With and build up the team there, where there is a very conservative hierarchy of roles. It was a way of engaging with the curators within Witte de With: to utilize their capacities, knowledge, and time to develop Moderation(s). That is why I pushed the role of moderator to Amira Gad, who was then curator at Witte de With, so that she could take hold of the situation. And it is also the reason I decided that in the final exhibition that takes place in the spring of 2014, The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part Of Something Else, Samuel Saelemaekers, Witte de With's Associate Curator, will be a co-curator and not a mere administrator. It is important for people at Witte de With to take control of the various parts of Moderation(s) and to expand their roles within the institution.

Lee Ambrozy: So there is a certain freedom implied in your directives. It was very interesting to observe your working style because there is only one other person I know who works in this manner, Ai Weiwei. In my opinion this is a primary reason for his success, and a characteristic not much discussed. He uses individuals as resources. He trusts people and

Vol. 13 No. 5 73 gives them very few working constraints. The result is that people working with him develop a sense of responsibility and push projects in directions that he doesn’t always anticipate. He facilitates and enables these situations, but he doesn’t control them. One example of this in an artwork was Fragments (2009), when he gave general instructions to a team of traditional woodworkers to make something out of temple fragments, and they made a shape that resembled China. This management style is similar to what I observed at the Moderation(s) conference.

Mette Edvardsen, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, performance for A Thing at a Time, part of Moderation(s), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, April 19–20, 2013.

Heman Chong: More or less. I think in my case there is a lot of enabling, which really comes from a background of working as an artist in Singapore. In the 2000s, in Singapore, there was really no demarcation between a curator and an artist. Everyone performed these two roles as one, simply because there were no professional curators. For example, theatre directors were also directors of art spaces, and they would be programming for their art space while at the same time rehearsing their own work there.

For my entire generation of artists, like Ho Tzu Nyen and Ming Wong, the way we work is that at the beginning of the project we really function like curators. We are writing proposals, talking to funders and to the gallery itself, and there is very little ego involved in defining the role of the curator or artist.

Coming from that background taught me that in order for this professionalization to occur, it is actually more interesting to understand that the skins between these roles are porous, and that one can seep into the other. It’s also a way of producing ideas in a more fluid manner, without the involvement of the bureaucracy. It is much more interesting when people overlap their ideas.

Of course, there is also the fact that coming from Singapore, where there was no space for critical thinking, while we were producing we were also reflecting on our work with each other. We formed a critical circle, like a critique group. There were all kinds of feedback loops that existed inherently because the scene there was unprofessional, and we were still just doing things because we wanted to, and out of necessity.

74 Vol. 13 No. 5 Lee Ambrozy: You are speaking about a very specific historical moment. About how many people were involved? Ten? Fifteen?

Heman Chong: The group expands and shrinks. I can speak only about the people who I personally engaged with over a span of ten years, between 2000 and 2010. The artists would include Ho Tzu Nyen, Ming Wong, Matthew Ngui, Ang Song Ming, Genevieve Chua, Chun Kai Feng, Charles Lim, Ho Rui An, and Michael Lee. I have also managed to maintain a dialogue with the curator Ahmad Mashadi, whose advice has been invaluable to my work.

One of the reasons artists are very independent in Singapore has to do with administrative policies. Usually it is the artist who applies for grants, not the curators. It is an online process, and you can log on only with an account, and it is a government website. A curator can’t do this for you. Maybe they can for a group show, but for solo projects and presentations, the artists have to crunch it out themselves.

Anthony Marcellini, Slowly A lot of this generation surfaced Breathe in . . . and Out . . . Through the Object, around 1999—this was the year 2012, performance for A Thing at a Time, part of that we all met—during a series of Moderation(s), Witte de With Center for Contemporary exhibitions at The Substation, the Art, Rotterdam, April 19–20, first independent artist-run space in 2013. Singapore. Somehow at this point there were no freelance curators. Even people like Kuo Pao Kun or Vincent Leow who organized exhibitions did not call themselves curators. All the curators were institutional, and by that time the Singapore Museum was almost seen as the enemy. So we took on these roles, forming not so much a defined group, but a loose network of people who used the same space—The Substation.

RoseLee Goldberg, lecture Of course, there was a long history for A Thing at a Time, part of Moderation(s), Witte de With that came before us, such as the Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, April 19, evolution of different collectives 2013. that began in the 1980s in Singapore, such as Tang Da Wu and The Artist’s Village, but at a point it became evident that these collectives were tripping over themselves and that new models of collectivity needed to surface. In a way, Moderation(s) is an extension of these modes and attempts to stage similar projects in itinerant modes.

Lee Ambrozy: It is interesting to view Moderation(s) as an instantiation of activities happening in Singapore a decade ago. In a way, you’ve encapsulated that creative tension by building a framework that imitates the creative incubator you experienced there.

Vol. 13 No. 5 75 Heman Chong: It is clear if you look at most artists in Singapore that we all play multiple roles. There really isn’t one artist who is just a painter’s painter type of person. Even if there were, he or she would be doing something else, like running a lecture series or something in the public library.

There is always a duality to most artists in Singapore that I think is healthy for the scene as a whole, but the question remains whether or not this is a good thing for individual practices. I guess I’m talking about how we cope with our limited resources and time. One of the reasons we haven’t we encountered an internationally recognized artist from Singapore is that we spread ourselves so thin. Everyone is doing too much.

How thin can you spread yourself before your own work suffers? I have witnessed my art practice suffer as a result of my role in Moderation(s). I just didn’t have enough time to look at it. It is a rational equation. When you free up space for other people, you are taking up your own time.

Lee Ambrozy: If you want to look at it in a different way, the question I would put to you is: Do you consider your work with Moderation(s) to be an artwork?

Heman Chong: That is one of the main differences between me and how you discuss Ai Weiwei. His projects are consolidated back into Ai Weiwei’s own studio, but I don’t think that I do that with Moderation(s)––these projects are not consolidated back into my own practice. To answer your question, I consider the structure of Moderation(s) an artwork, but have refrained from appropriating the content.

Lee Ambrozy: So the structure itself is an artwork, but you do not claim authorship of whatever is transpiring within it.

Heman Chong: Correct. I do not claim authorship of what is inside this structure. Although in a way letting go of authorship is also part of the artwork for me. This is how I define it for myself.

Do you think there are similarities between Moderation(s) and MadeIn Company, for example?

Lee Ambrozy: No, I don’t. What I see as the major difference between these two projects is that MadeIn Company collective employs a quasi- corporatism. MadeIn models itself on corporate structures to such an extent that they even have time cards and have to punch in when they come into the office/studio. That type of activity––even though it is done somewhat in jest––clearly shows their model.

The fact that members of MadeIn refer to Xu Zhen as “Xu Zong” (similar in Chinese as to how one would address a CEO) makes it clear who is at the top of the hierarchy, whereas Moderation(s) is outstanding precisely because it lacks that clear power hierarchy. It allows for a certain type of

76 Vol. 13 No. 5 freedom that is often stifled by more common types of social structures, systems, and frameworks. In the act of interpretation, we tend to ignore the models that do not have a clear leadership. There is something inexplicable about Moderation(s) in this sense.

Heman Chong: Moderation(s) functions on this level, and I am a buffer zone between institution and artists. I don’t make the artists do the press release, etc., and I’m freeing up a lot of the constraints of the bureaucracy that come with working with this type of institution. I’ve become a curator! In a lot of the meetings they would refer to me as “the ghost,” so I take on the role of the specter and can be molded to do many different things within the project.

For example, with The Fictional Residency, because of time restraints I was also the book designer. To function as graphic designer when you are the director of a program is crazy. The only other person I know who does this is the guy who ran the Stedelijk Museum in the 1970s, Willem Sandberg. He was crazy enough to work on the catalogues and posters for his own shows.

Lee Ambrozy: Why do you choose to do such additional work? Why would you act as a book designer?

Benjamin Seror, Mime Radio, performance for A Thing at a Time, part of Moderation(s), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, April 20, 2013.

Heman Chong: Because it facilitates a process in which we can work up until the last minute. People have the chance to produce a short story right up until the last minute, where I am sitting with them. You can’t do that with graphic designers because they would go crazy, unless it was their own project; here graphic designers like David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey from Dexter Sinister come to mind. But I didn’t want to just hire a graphic designer and have him or her be a slave to the project. It defeats the idea of Moderation(s).

So, in order for the project to gain a certain traction that is not possible with other projects I appropriated myself as the graphic designer. This dual role enables a different way of writing.

Lee Ambrozy: I hesitate to use the word “ad-hocism,” but I think you could find a similar term for what you are doing.

Vol. 13 No. 5 77 Heman Chong: Moderation(s) grew out of another project that I did in 2006 with Mai Abu ElDahab, at Project Art Centre in Dublin in which we had seven days to write an entire novel. One of the writers, David Reinfurt, whom I mentioned before, was also the graphic designer for the book, and I saw how working with the graphic designer in-situ while writing a book changed everything. It is a totally different thing, because both the design and literary aspects become a visual experience, and this is then encrypted within the work as a part of text.

What David brought to the book was this notion of Post-Fordism, the idea of “just in time,” or print-on-demand—the idea that you are producing for a specific time and audience. It’s also a way of resisting modes of production that tend to fall into a kind of complacency.

There are certain steps to take to produce an exhibition. You begin with a proposal, the institution says yes or no, and then there is a process of negotiation. But I think that is where Moderation(s) works, because there is no actual linear trajectory that is applicable for all the projects, so each of the projects was negotiated and produced within their specific sets of value systems.

Lee Ambrozy: That is interesting, and I like that you frame things within each project’s own value systems and allow for their potential to develop on their own terms.

Heman Chong: Exactly, and that was what we talked about in the first meeting we had last October, at Witte de With, where it was really about using what people bring to the table rather than building something from scratch.

So I think a lot of what I do in Moderation(s) is to identify and encourage what people do best and when it is best to use their abilities. It’s a method that is close to what many contemporary dance choreographers use, to work with what dancers bring to the piece. So in this case, rather than going to an artist or a curator or a designer and saying, “I want this to be done,” it’s saying, “How about you do what you do and we see how it will all fit, and if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit, maybe we can use it another time, in another context.” In that sense, this has a lot of potential as a model for working in today’s context; one where artists are often pushed by market forces to develop a signature style or an iconic reference in their work, and, in turn, are only interested in consolidating everything for their work. I feel that I wanted a space that allows for active participatory roles within the art world, and, more importantly, to create spaces where a generous exchange of raw ideas and materials can occur.

What Moderation(s) actually taught me is that it is much more interesting to work with artists and have them work in a range of roles, rather than use assistants to produce one thing. I prefer this format because it is so much more social, and there is more you can learn from the other artists rather than constantly perform the genius mode of telling someone what to do.

78 Vol. 13 No. 5 Lee Ambrozy: After the Moderation(s) conference, I realized that personal interaction on the project was irreplaceable. The textual components leading up to the experience, or anything that might follow it in terms of videos, press releases, websites, etc.––nothing can recreate the importance of the inter-personal relationships. This highlighted for me the importance of human interaction, which is something increasingly precious in this digital social age.

Heman Chong: It is not new. There was a wave of French artists in the 1990s who already explored the significance of relationships. It centered on artists Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Pierre Bismuth, and is the core of relational aesthetics, more or less. In a way I don’t want to use that term, but that was their approach.

For example, Pierre Huyghes’s 2013 solo show at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris was really both a group show and a confluence of attitudes. You walked into the space and there was a library by Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, but Pierre Huyghe built the shelf, and Rirkrit Tiravanija did the labels. It is kind of like that with Moderation(s), not so much about confining it to making artworks but also moving away from a certain form of production that often results in a gesamtkunstwerk. I don’t know—I might be totally wrong to deny the surfacing of such productions—but my intuition tells me that there is a much larger format to be explored than having to consolidate things into one place.

Lee Ambrozy: But I feel that there is a distinction between this mode of working and what we call relational aesthetics. I would like you to elaborate on that. What might those be?

Heman Chong: Moderation(s) is not bound to the doctrine of relational aesthetics. Nicolas Bourriaud encountered that group of artists very early on, and he was very prolific in justifying what they were doing, and he translated that into a theory. But Moderation(s) doesn’t rely on those theories; it simply doesn’t have a master plan laid out at all. In a way, it locates itself closer to the progressive education and integrated, experience- based programs that the Black Mountain College in North Carolina exercised from the 1930s to 1950s.

Lee Ambrozy: Exactly.

Heman Chong: The projects functioning under Moderation(s) have a totally different lexicon. We are not imposing one model upon all the programs, which I think relational aesthetics does, where the mode of performance or exhibition becomes a method. There is little method involved in Moderation(s). Every time we come together, we reinvent what each project is. I think it is interesting at that level; again, I like the analogy of using what is on the table, rather than what is not on it. It’s kind of like avoiding reading between the lines, really.

Vol. 13 No. 5 79 Lee Ambrozy: This is a literal “what you see is what you get” experience. But I feel that you could define it further by making participation mandatory for an authentic understanding of the work.

Heman Chong: I guess so.

Lee Ambrozy: But when I say “participation,” I mean also that an observer or witness would be participating as well.

Heman Chong: There is another factor that contributed to how I designed Moderation(s), which was my involvement with dance choreographer Boris Charmatz, who has a project called Musée de la Dancs.

Boris’s project is interesting in that he is a choreographer and a dancer who has also taken on the role of directing a dance institute in Rennes, France. When he got the job he transformed the name from Centre de la Choreography into Musée de la Danse, which is a ridiculous name. How do you even begin to create a museum for something that is evolving every time it is being produced?

When I worked with him for Performa 2011, in New York, we had a workshop with choreographer Steve Paxton. Steve Paxton was part of the whole Judson Church movement in the 1970s, with Yvonne Rainer and Merce Cunningham. Steve Paxton introduced something very key to that whole group of people, the method of contact improvisation; he coined the term.

I think that a lot of Moderation(s) is contact improvisation, you know?

Lee Ambrozy: Yes, I can see that.

Heman Chong: So when I come Xiaoyu Weng, lecture for Stories and Situations into contact with you something conference, part of Moderation(s), Witte de With happens, which translates into Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, October 5, something that happens with you 2013. and Brian, and that feeds back to Amira Gad, which goes back to Witte de With, then transmits to Spring Workshop, and then comes back to me. And it is one movement, really, and I like the analogy to contact improvisation. Also, in the workshop that Boris Charmatz organized, Steve Paxton said something very interesting that convinced me of something that happens within Moderation(s): When they were performing in the 1970s, a lot of the audience for the works they were performing were artists themselves. And they were making a type of academy; they were forming a school with each other. They were teaching each other things, and the only people looking at the work were members of a close circle of people.

This is not what I’m working toward in Moderation(s), but I think this is a very important base value for me—that the initial audience for the work

80 Vol. 13 No. 5 is the artists themselves, involved in the work itself, that we are looking and re-looking at something we have made before it seeps into a larger framework of communicating with the world.

Stories and Situations Lee Ambrozy: Put in these conference, part of Moderation(s), Witte de With terms, I absolutely see the Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, October 5, comparison. But I think 2013. one way to frame what you are doing is to say that the outcomes hover between the plastic arts, graphic arts, and performative arts. This is an elusive way in which to discuss issues, but your definition of what you are doing with Moderation(s) is precisely why your work is not similar to relational aesthetics, something that has been a buzzword over the past few years. It is different, and it has to do with your experience in the 1990s in Singapore; working with people did not emerge within a context where roles within the “art system” are determined before one begins acting.

Heman Chong: The 1990s was a beautiful moment in Singapore because if you wanted to be an active player, you could be. There were no rules; you could do whatever you wanted to do. There were no gatekeepers. This is an important point to make about the scene in Singapore in the 1990s. It was ridiculous. You could make an exhibition and write the text about the show yourself, and no one would stop you. Whereas today it is no longer possible, you have to go through an application process for the space, and you have to think about the work in relationship to other spaces, and everyone is competitive with programming. Back in the nineties, there was just the one exhibition space for contemporary art.

Lee Ambrozy: In that sense, even though you are relying on models that are inspired by the performing arts and Steve Paxton, you are mobilizing them in a very different, expanded framework. New possibilities and potentials can emerge from this model that you are describing.

Heman Chong: In a way, we can more or less agree that it is not so interesting to produce every project in the same manner. It becomes repetitive and leads to a slow march into banality, to be honest. In a way, what I am trying to do in Moderation(s) is to somehow exhaust the resources that are given to me in order to continuously refresh these modes of production.

Lee Ambrozy: I like the idea of exhausting human resources, as opposed to conserving them.

Heman Chong: Exactly. Everyone goes crazy working on Moderation(s) because I’m 24/7 on their tail, e-mailing Witte de With and asking them to do something that they’ve never done before, or to do something that

Vol. 13 No. 5 81 sounds totally crazy. And I’m also telling Mimi Brown, the founder of Spring Workshop, with regard to Moderation(s) and Spring Workshop, that I’m transforming it into a space that is pretty similar to what The Substation was in the 1990s: a place where artists hung out.

Spring Workshop too is slowly becoming a space where artists come and hang out. That is really important to me, because the minute that you put five artists in a space and you tell them they don’t have to do anything, something wonderful happens, always. And I really like that: there is no protocol to make them work together, but you know that because of their energies something will surface.

In a recent interview between Nadim Abbas and Christina Li about Moderation(s), Nadim said something really insightful: “I think Heman is the one who brought all these people together in different situations. It’s like being in someone’s kitchen standing around doing something, but then not feeling like you are obliged to do anything. It is pretty much a reflection of what I would be doing anyway, but by myself. I think there is a lot to be said about engineering these kinds of situations that makes it easier for people to relax and put their guard down.”1

This is especially important for a context like Hong Kong, where there is literally nowhere for artists to come together do things. Sure, everyone has their studio where they pump out more stuff for Art Basel HK. Sure, you recently have all these new cool galleries for artists to show their work. But, really, there is no space where people come together and think about what they are doing, and I think that is something that we all have to start to actively construct.

Lee Ambrozy: So do you think that Spring Workshop is succeeding in filling this void? Are they stepping up to the task?

Heman Chong: It is happening slowly, but it is starting to happen. People come and spend five hours here just hanging out, which is ridiculous in this context. But I like that people come and use it for their own purposes.

Lee Ambrozy: What are people doing when they are hanging out at Spring?

Heman Chong: Well, Nadim comes, reads his books, and then leaves. He’ll come back with a Filet-O-Fish from McDonalds and eat it while talking to Christina. You know? We cook lunch together, sometimes dinner. It’s a lot about having a moment where things become slow.

But what I like about the situation is that the tempo can change within a second. Suddenly, we are in an intense discussion about our work, or we’ll just take out our computers and work. For example, I often use my colleagues as editing machines. I’ll show them something I’m working on, and they will say, “Come on, this part sucks.” We talk and work at the ground level of ideas. There is a lot of value in that, where people offer points of view that you wouldn’t necessarily consider.

82 Vol. 13 No. 5 Lee Ambrozy: It seems that many of your productions are ephemeral. The things I see you busy with these days aren’t the same kinds of things that I see in your catalogue raisonée.2 It is hard to assign a value to things that are ephemeral, but perhaps the greater need lies precisely in such a task, or perhaps their effect resonates deeper in society.

Heman Chong: I think that it is unproductive to attempt to describe the processes that occur within Moderation(s) when so many of them are transparent. Much of art history concerns description, but, having said that, a lot of its failings come from the inability to describe a work using the critical language available to the field.

Lee Ambrozy: But––just to defend my field here––I find that your most compelling work is that which is indescribable. To me, this type of work really elevates the bar in artistic production, and yet it is the work that you don’t feel comfortable talking about.

Heman Chong: I do feel more comfortable talking about Moderation(s) nowadays. But I still haven’t found a better way to document it.

Lee Ambrozy: Precisely. As you haven’t found a way to document it, it acquires a different layer of authenticity. I guess what I see in Moderation(s)––and you can tell me if I’m wrong––is a type of artwork unified by participation and a common goal. Within this framework of implied productivity, the product, or the outcome, as you said yourself, is unknown.

This is an unusual type of artistic productivity: a process working toward an undetermined end, collaborative but non-hierarchical. In the sense that the end is unknown, the process is exploratory. I don’t like the word “authentic,” but in a certain sense it is a more valid creativity because it has fewer predetermined outcomes. This creates a different type of space from artworks that would fall into the category of relational aesthetics because I feel that these establish a framework in which a specific type of interaction occurs, taking into account small variations, but the outcome is essentially known, whereas in Moderation(s), the production commences despite the lack of clear goals and with the outcome as an unknown variable. In that sense this project shares something with the working habits of Ai Weiwei. His model enables and facilitates people to produce, but they are producing under the workshop name of Ai Weiwei/Fake Studio.

Here, although you have a similar mode of working to Ai Weiwei, you do not invest in your personal identity as a brand name. I’m fascinated by the potential that can be unleashed with this mode of working and surprised that no one has discussed this aspect of his studio’s output and the corporatism that is alluded to by his name as a brand. But here we have something different, a dissimilar collaborative model.

Vol. 13 No. 5 83 Heman Chong: Since 2009 I’ve run a small group—I would hesitate to call it a collective—but a small group of artists who look at each other’s work. It is based in Singapore and is called PLURAL.

When I started the group, I wrote rules that the group would adhere to, with the first rule being that we will never rent a space as a group. So every time we needed a space we would gather in someone’s studio or home or we would ask an institution to give us a space to meet. The second rule is that we will never produce exhibitions as a group of artists, so nobody takes on that role and says, “oh, let’s do a group show”––it’s not allowed!

The third rule, which I think frees the group from any engagement with the state, is that we are not allowed to apply for funding as a group. We can apply for funding individually, and an individual may use that funding with another member of the group, but no one allowed to use the name PLURAL to apply.

Rule four: We are not allowed to register as an official society in Singapore. This is what a lot of groups do; they become an art society so that they can apply for funding. So PLURAL is a concise denial of the system that has been created to facilitate artistic production in Singapore and thereby controls it. And it has worked very well so far in that when we meet, we know that it is only about work. Meetings are not to talk rubbish about the art scene, or whatever; they are also not about consolidating resources in that we aren’t there to help each other get into documenta or something.

When we sit down we are taking each other’s works and breaking them down so that everyone can process it. It is more or less a model that reflects information moving through the Internet. There is no mainframe. Everyone crunches ideas according to his or her own capacities and then dumps it back into this pool. It is all very nebulous. This is very interesting for me, this analogy of the nebulous area as something that also exists in Moderation(s). Right at the centre is this very fluid concept that no one can use in a very direct manner, but when people do use it, it becomes concrete. I kind of like that. It becomes very hard to commodify.

I’m not resisting the market. I’m literally transferring what I earn from making paintings, a practice I define as my “day job,” into these projects. It is about sustaining a dual system for me—channeling one thing into something else. For example, I don’t expect payment when it comes to work I put into PLURAL, because the money I earn from my painting “day job” is enough to pay my rent. I want the cake, and I want ice cream and chocolate on top of it, and I want to eat it all in one go.

Notes 1 Nadim Abbas, interview with Christina Li, “Pyramid Time Machine,” Moderation(s)–A Witness blog by Christian Li, http://witness Moderations.tumblr.com/. 2 Heman Chong and Pauline J. Yao, eds., The Part in the Story Where We Lost Count of the Days (Hong Kong: ArtAsiaPacific, 2013).

84 Vol. 13 No. 5 Alex Quicho Pure Disruption: Sex, Death, and Postcolonial Identity in Paul Wong’s Video Art

ense, seductive, and anarchic, the virtual realm is the final frontier. Government-imposed firewalls, copyright lawsuits, Dand legislative acts do little to quell a perpetually self-generating onslaught of content. The beauty of the Internet is, after all, that you can always go deeper. If you go looking for something, you’ll be able to find it: it is just a matter of knowing exactly how to seek it out. In this way, the Internet—like its associated forms of new media—is an ideal site for the decentralized discourse of postcolonial identity. It is a rapid, slippery medium that grants the individual ultimate agency—the power to evade power, the right to (re)invention and (in)visibility.

The immediacy and propagation of new media has proven to be irresistible to Paul Wong, a Canadian artist who has earned his cachet through risky, radical, and often self-exposing video work. Since rising to national fame in the 1970s, Wong has played an indisputable role in making issues of identity visible within Canada’s cultural landscape. Awarded abundantly and collected worldwide, his formal experimentations with tactics of shock and disruption have also laid the groundwork for a new generation of media artists. Now, the question is no longer whether Paul Wong matters, but what he, having pushed himself far and his audience even farther, could possibly get up to next.

Paul Wong, 7 Day Activity, Video/video 1977–2008, video, 8 mins., 30 secs. Courtesy of the Released in 1967, the Portapak artist. camcorder consists of a hand-held camera and audio recording device that can be carried and operated by a single individual. It was the first of its kind in both price and portability: with its widespread distribution came the sudden ability for the general public to share and record their lives in an immediate way. Seemingly invented specifically for experimental use by artists, the Portapak has played a catalytic role in the history of video art. Armed with it, a new wave of creators documented and invented in a visual vernacular that had not previously existed outside of the prohibitively structured forms of film and television.

Wong first got his hands on a Portapak at the age of sixteen. After a lifetime of feeling misrepresented in popular culture as a Chinese-Canadian, he

Vol. 13 No. 5 85 finally felt able to legitimize his identity simply by turning his lens on himself. His first works were autobiographical—“selfies” that preceded the selfie as we know it today, in exposés of teenage life in his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia. One of his earliest, 7 Day Activity (1977), shows Wong examining his skin in a bathroom mirror. His daily grooming ritual is looped and scrutinized. It’s as much an expression of the anxiety of vanity as it is a celebration of one of the great changes brought about by the rise of the camcorder: from birthday parties to perfect days, no subject matter was too humble—or too taboo—to videotape.

The beginnings of video art mirror the current, heady nascence of Internet- based imaging practices. Video appeared as a consumer-targeted medium that, unlike painting or film, was relatively free from the burden of history. Its accessibility made the medium inherently democratic, radical in the sense that no expectations preceded it. From the mundane to the fantastic, one could videotape whatever one wanted with little concern about audience or budget. In this way, video became a medium of social and political resistance. Though video art definitely was not film, it was similar enough to be able to speak to the problems of film—and its kissing cousin, television—in a direct way.

Engagement with new media marks a deliberate turn away from dominant culture. Instead of following in the path of traditional hierarchical modes of communication, such as those of the television channel or the newspaper, new media thrives on multiplicity and participation. Its network is spatial and simultaneous; like a macrocosm of the culturally hybrid mind, it is constructed explicitly to simultaneously fuse together many opposing ideas.

What video art was then, and what new media are now, are perfect vehicles for postcolonial, feminist, queer, and other identity-based discourses that are founded on the idea that constant change is the default state. What better way to address the flux of contemporary life than through a medium that itself fluctuates, that itself has become the primary vessel for the generation and consumption of content, whether subversive or mass-produced?

“I was looking at interviews with transgendered people going through operations—no one had ever seen that before. There was a videotape of someone’s hippie home birth—no one had ever seen anything like that before,”1 Wong tells me from the dim, smoky comfort of his Main Street studio in Vancouver, a reconfigured walk-up that now holds the entirety of his artistic archives in shelves, boxes, and several continuously humming computer towers. He is describing the first days of the Satellite Video Exchange Society (SVES), a Vancouver collective established in 1973 by Wong and a group of like-minded peers who together undertook the finicky work of creating a wide-ranging network of experimental video artists. “There were a lot of conceptual artists, performance artists doing things with their bodies, feminist perspectives, queer perspectives, politically leftist perspectives, American Indian Movement (A.I.M.) materials. These things were outside of the mainstream.”2

86 Vol. 13 No. 5 During the late seventies and early eighties, networking was trusting but slow. Wong recalls with some fondness the early days of the society, where a circulating print catalogue would list SVES members by interest and location. One could book an exhibition or find accommodations by way of these listings. The only membership dues were to submit one of your own video pieces to the Satellite Video Exchange library, and to take one away (which Wong and his associates would dutifully copy for their archives).

Paul Wong, DisOriental, The success of the Satellite Video 2014, video, 1 min., 36 secs. Courtesy of the artist. Exchange Society preceded the online platforms used to connect people with similar interests across the world today. Ingrained in the structural network of the Internet are the sub-and micro-cultures that it sustains. People with similar niche interests are able to seek one another out beyond the restrictions of physical geography. Clicking and dragging himself through a new work crafted mostly of self-portraits and Google Street View images, Wong points out the ease with which he has been able to facilitate and participate in exhibitions across the world. This work, titled DisOriental (2014), is destined for a screening at a new media festival in the south of France. One of the stipulations was that the work would have to be specific to a site chosen for each artist by the festival’s curatorial team. Wong was able to meet this criterion without ever having set foot in the location to which he was assigned.

Paul Wong, Ordinary Having earlier defined himself as Shadows, Chinese Shade, 1988, video installation, being “militant” about the radical 89 mins., in Chinese with English subtitles. Courtesy potential of video art, Wong delights of the artist and National Gallery of Canada. in using his medium to subvert filmic expectations. Even something so subtle as subtitles can be a determining hermeneutical force, as he demonstrates in Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade (1988). For the duration of the video, most of which was shot on-site in China, the translated English subtitles are centred on-screen, directing viewers’ attention to the fact that, in Richard Fung’s words, “reality is mediated through the process of shooting and translation”.3 This tactic functions alongside other modes of filmic deconstruction—abrasive typographic titling, abrupt cuts, the disjointed characters and narrative—to jar viewers into not only reconsidering how we consume media, but also how we think of other, broader social structures such as those of race, sexuality, and identity.

Vol. 13 No. 5 87 Around the same time that Wong was working on Ordinary Shadows, postcolonial filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha was producing fragmentary, non-linear films whose purpose was to challenge the authority of the documentary narrative. A long visit to Senegal gave rise to her first film, Reassemblage (1982), about which she famously said that she wanted to “not speak about/just speak nearby” her subject.

Formally, the film is characterized by silence, both auditory and visual. There is a complete lack of narration, and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s strategic approach to composition effects a resistance to the centralized gaze of the colonizer. What isn’t a scene’s focal point becomes just as important as what is. By refusing to make work directly “about” a culture through which she is just passing, Trinh T. Minh-ha neutralizes any particular power attached to her role as filmmaker, anthropologist, and interested outsider.

Wong doesn’t go so far as to Paul Wong, Refugee Class of 2000, 2000, photograph. completely negate his position as Commissioned by Canadian Race Relations Foundation videographer, but his formal use for the Unite Against Racism Campaign. Courtesy of the of repetition and interruption artist. functions similarly in its rejection of dominant cultural, historical, and filmic narratives. His Refugee Class of 2000 (2000), an ad spot Paul Wong, Refugee Class of 2000, 2000, video, 4 mins. commissioned by the Canadian Courtesy of the artist. Race Relations Foundation for the Unite Against Racism Campaign, contextualized these methods against television—the vehicle for dominant culture that Refuege Class of 2000 intended to supersede. For the series, Wong interviewed a couple dozen students from Sir Charles Tupper Secondary, a public high school located in Mount Pleasant, one of Vancouver’s most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods. Each student looked into the camera and made a statement about who he or she was and would like to be. The footage of these acts—honest and hopeful—is interleaved with an alphabetized taxonomy of racism, which flashes up on the screen in lurid titling. Speaking with agency, the visible minority groups intruding upon the white landscape of television was jarring enough; Wong’s brash video aesthetic ensured that his message would not be missed. By addressing the issue of casual racism head on from within television, one of the very mediums that perpetuates it, Wong’s art leveraged realized experience as effective activism against insidious social tropes.

Paul Wong, Refugee Class of 2000, 2000, video, 4 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

88 Vol. 13 No. 5 Sex Vicious In their endless propagation, new media are libidinal. In them, sex and sexuality take on the quick-flashing texture of the impulse immediately satisfied and the darker depths of the Internet where no fetish is left unexplored. Of course, the constant cultural coursing of sexual undercurrents is nothing new. What is new are the ways in which it is presented and consumed: as rapid as it is casual, accessible to the point of being nearly demystified.

Paul Wong, Year of GIF, 2013, GIF video installation at Surrey Urban Screen, Surrey, B.C., 5 mins. Photo: Scott Massey. Courtesy of the artist.

Paul Wong, Year of GIF, Paul Wong hasn’t so much reacted 2013, GIF video installation, 5 mins. Photo: SD Holman. to this new mode of sexual Courtesy of the artist and Winsor Gallery, Vancouver. consumption as he has adopted it. In newer works such as Year of GIF (2013) and #LLL, Looking Listening Looping (2014), sexual images flash Paul Wong, #LLL, Looking up in a manner similar to how Listening Looping, 2014, GIF, video and photography on one would encounter them online: forty 10 x 12" digital video screens. Photo: SD Holman. surprising, in a certain sense, but Courtesy of the artist and never quite unexpected. Wilting Winsor Gallery, Vancouver. flowers, glass towers, and blow jobs are all given equal weight in the flickering sprawl of Wong’s consciousness- on-display: each installation is made up of a year's worth of images, taken serially and compounded into small GIF-and-video vignettes. Here, video is no longer its own discrete medium, but, instead, a vernacular of new media: it co-exists with the photographic images, GIFs, screengrabs, and in-phone manipulations that Wong is producing, constantly, on the fly.

But Wong was also making work at a time when certain modes of sexuality and desire were more invisible than they are today. Under these circumstances, Wong developed Confused: Sexual Views (1984), a video, photographic, and sculptural installation based on interviews that Wong conducted with twenty-seven individuals. As in Refugee Class of 2000, his subjects face the camera and speak directly about their ideas on love, sex, friendship, pornography, abortion, and experimentation. The result is a

Vol. 13 No. 5 89 spliced, multivalent documentary that was exhibited as a four-channel installation: a formal manifestation of the heterogeneity of those titular sexual views.

Though Confused presents itself Paul Wong, Confused: Sexual Views, 1984, video, as an extended interview, it is a 52 mins. Co-directed with Gary Bourgeois, Gina constructed work. As John Bentley Daniels, and Jeanette Reinhardt. Courtesy of the Mays noted in his review for the artist. Globe and Mail, we don’t see Wong’s subjects as being open and honest; for all the racy talk, their posturing is stiff, their responses contrived. “We watch them pretending to be risky and open, while they dodge nervously in and out of undergrowths of psychological cliche potted from movies, sex manuals, group therapy sessions, lonely hearts columns, and teen romance magazines.”4 Through Wong’s constructed reality, we are made acutely aware that even sex, our most basic of desires, is socially influenced and enacted.

In the year of its release, the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) censored the exhibition Confused: Sexual Views by refusing to show it just weeks prior to its opening on the grounds that it had “no relation to visual art.”5 The fact that it was video wasn’t the problem. Straightforward expository works by Lisa Steele, Colin Campbell, and John Watt previously had been lauded by the Canadian art community, and video in general had been seized thirstily by artists fed up with the impotency of the art object. So why the fracas over Confused? Simple: Confused was censored because of its sole focus on sexuality. Its censorship underlined the very reason Wong decided to make the work in the first place: that there were systems larger than ignorance that ensured the invisibility of certain narratives, and that, in turn, certain (formal, social) tactics could render them visible again. Regardless of whether or not it was exhibited—and it was, much later, when the Vancouver Art Gallery acquired it for its collection in 2002—Confused, and its ensuing legal battle, ensured that bias of sex lingered in the minds of more than a few Canadians.

Paul Wong’s aim to subvert the Kenneth Fletcher and Paul Wong, 60 Unit: Bruise, 1976, policing of desire and of the body video, 5 mins., 25 secs. Courtesy of the artist. has not been limited to frank sociological investigations. In 60 Unit: Bruise (1976), he syringes up blood from the arm of best friend and collaborator Kenneth Fletcher and injects it into himself. The video documents the slow bloom of foreign blood across Wong’s shoulder; it allows us to watch, disease-anxious and horrified, as both men—here, boys—become intravenous blood brothers. Though 60 Unit precedes the AIDS epidemic, there is no getting away from that connotation now. “The audacity of its play between youth and decadence, pleasure and danger becomes a document of irretrievable innocence,” Richard Fung writes. “It evokes nostalgia for a present no longer possible.”6

90 Vol. 13 No. 5 The Body Is a Politicized Area “Getting rid of the vicious part of libidinality would also get rid of its potential for creative fervor,” writes Keti Chukhrov.7 In talking about sex, we can’t leave out its closely linked opposite: death. After Fletcher’s suicide in 1978, Wong created a suite of work about the personal and cultural enactment of grief. 60 Unit itself became a profound memorial in retrospect: “This work remains long after the death of Kenneth Fletcher in 1978,” Wong said in an interview with Luis Jacob for Art Metropole in 2011. “Caught on tape, he lives on fresh, not just in my fading memory. He lives within my body.”8

Paul Wong, in ten sity, 1978, Within his work, Wong’s body is a politicized 5-channel video installation, 25 mins. Courtesy of the arena—a vessel used for certain statements artist. too powerful for enactment or language. The alacrity with which he can commit small acts of violence against himself shifts viewers quickly into a state of unease. in ten sity (1978), a performance staged at the Vancouver Art Gallery, saw Wong flinging himself against the padded walls of a small cell fitted with several CCTV cameras. It brought to mind the isolation of mental illness, but also the cathartic quality of the cultural act. The soundtrack to Wong’s self-destruction was punk, of course; to see him mosh, a type of violent slam-dance, alone, with no stage and no fellow concert-goers, summoned a strange conflagration of emotions. Friends and strangers at the gallery were disturbed to the point that they attempted to break the walls open and save Wong from himself.

Paul Wong, Perfect Day, This concurrent invocation of surprise, 2007, 7 mins., 30 secs. Courtesy of the artist. empathy, and aggression is not an isolated experience in the breadth of Wong’s work. In Perfect Day (2007), Wong doses himself with enough heroin, cocaine, nicotine, and ice cream to insert a nagging sense of discomfort alongside his visible euphoria. It’s exhibitionistic, but the shock value is dialed down by the fact that we’re in the new millennium: the arm’s length at which he holds the camera is familiar in the sense that we see it in the same online vernacular of bathroom selfies and bong-hit auto-portraits. For the duration of the video, Lou Reed’s own “Perfect Day” skips on the record player, turning Wong’s Perfect Day into a literal ode to the fallacy of self- construction.

Cultural Surveillance The fallacy is that for all the control that we attempt to exert on our own enactments of identity, the margin for error—for misrepresentation— remains great. Most of Paul Wong’s works assert the same basic theme: that identity, and our ideas about it, are in constant flux. Nothing is as it appears.

Vol. 13 No. 5 91 Solstice (2014) reflects the Paul Wong, Solstice, 2014, video, 24 mins.,18 secs. aforementioned Ordinary Shadows, Photo: SD Holman. Courtesy of the artist and Winsor Chinese Shade in its investigation of Gallery, Vancouver. a cultural enclave that has suffered from wide misrepresentation. Where Ordinary Shadows was a portrait of Wong’s personal China, a country hardly portrayed in North America beyond the “mystery, exotica, and politics”9 that pervaded popular thought at the time, Solstice (2014) is a stripped-down portrait of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side: a neighbourhood mostly known for its poverty, drug use, and prostitution rings. But unlike Ordinary Shadows, wherein aesthetic tricks are employed to negate filmic expectations, Solstice contains no assertions of authorial power whatsoever.

At the formal centre of Solstice is the use of time-lapse video, a video process that is made up of still frames taken at regular intervals that characteristically render movement jaggedly, as much can be missed between shots. This method is seen most as a storytelling device in nature documentaries—flowers bloom and wither, seasons change, clouds boil across the sky. The urban Wong, however, mounted a camera on a windowsill in the heart of the Downtown East Side to document all manner of activity both legal and illicit. He left it there for twenty-four hours, returned to collect the footage, and, besides running it through a program that filled in all those between-shot blanks, did nothing more to it.

What, in light of Wong’s bold career, does this step back from creative authority mean? Is Solstice, in its autonomy, new media’s symptomatic decentralization made manifest? Travelling in smeary, computer-generated blurs, the individuals in Solstice retain their anonymity—and, in a way, their right to self-determination.

“I’ve gone from constructing realities to more and more incessantly recording, [but] my strategy has not changed,” Wong tells me. “I’m still turning the camera on myself and my environment. I don’t go looking for content or stories. I’m riffing off of what’s immediately around me.”10

Notes 1 Paul Wong, interview with the author, December 10, 2013. 2 Ibid. 3 Richard Fung, “Everyday People,” Fuse Magazine, no. 13 (Fall 1989), http://www.richardfung.ca/ index.php?/articles/we/. 4 John Bentley Mays, “The Young and Restless Talk Sex,” Globe and Mail, April 1984, http://www. mercerunion.org/exhibitions/paul-wong-confusedsexual-views/. 5 Ibid. 6 Richard Fung, “Future Past,” in Magnetic North: Canadian Experimental Video, ed. Jenny Lion (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2000), 38. 7 Keti Chukhrov, “Sexuality in a Non-Libidinal Economy,” e-flux journal no. 54 (April 2014), http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/sexuality-in-a-non-libidinal-economy/. 8 Paul Wong, “60 Unit; Bruise,” Paul Wong Projects, http://paulwongprojects.com/ portfolio/60unitbruise/. 9 Fung, “Everyday People.” 10 Wong, interview with the author, December 10, 2013.

92 Vol. 13 No. 5 Quantum Anthropology: Shezad Dawood in Conversation with Stephanie Bailey

hezad Dawood, as J. J. Charlesworth once wrote, is an artist who, for the last decade or so, “has sought to bear witness to the complicated, unstable, rapidly evolving, multipoint perspective of art in an era S 1 of globalized cultural, ethnic and political dislocation.” Caught in the dynamics of a constantly evolving paradigm of globalization—one he views as a historical phenomenon rather than anything new—Dawood reflects what he sees through an aesthetics of compression: the act of distilling subjects and time frames through a variety of means, from paintings on antique textiles to films that employ allegorical narrative structures. And behind his artistic output is his research that engages with the philosophy of global space through a lens that views the world as a decentred map: a geography he constantly revises through his navigations into its constitution. In November 2014, Dawood will become the first international artist to show at the newly-opened OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT), in Xi’an, China, in an exhibition that acts as a mid-career retrospective of sorts, titled Anthropology of Chance (November 1, 2014– February 26, 2015). In my conversation with Dawood, he reflects on this exhibition while thinking about the themes in his work and how they have evolved through the years.

Stephanie Bailey: I want to begin with the title for your upcoming show at OCAT, in Xi’an: Anthropology of Chance. How does the title articulate a frame around which your works will be shown?

Shezad Dawood: I think an interesting place to start would be the discussions I had with the team in Xi’an around the translation of the exhibition title. It was interesting because I, not speaking Mandarin, but having been trained in Daoism and tai chi for around fourteen years, naively imagined that this title would communicate some of the methodologies in the work to a Chinese audience. But at OCAT, the director and curator, Karen Smith and Tantan Wang, were at a loss as to how to translate this title! They said there was no simple or easy way. Of course, from my very limited understanding of Mandarin, I understand that the very nature of meaning is much more mutable in comparison to English, so we ended up at the latest solution, which is ding shu (). As I was told, in Chinese the phrase ding shu has two meanings: the first meaning is mathematical, meaning “definite number,” and the second meaning, more commonly used, is “fate, destiny.”

Vol. 13 No. 5 93 I like this idea of mathematics coming together with destiny. For me, Anthropology of Chance is a title that conjures up a slight dichotomy or contradiction. Anthropology supposes a scientific method, with chance immediately undercutting or undermining that, which is very much how I approach my work. Rigorous research goes into the work, but once that is done, I put it aside and go into a much more intuitive process in which chance is allowed to take precedence, even in the way I approach my painting, in that I always paint on existing, found, vintage, or antique textile fragments. That way, I am negotiating with the world. I have always had a problem with the idea that the world is in absentia in artistic practice or of creating something ex nihilo. I am very interested in this idea of negotiating with the world as it is, which to me seems like a much more logical starting point for making work.

Stephanie Bailey: The title does Shezad Dawood, Piercing Brightness (film stills), 2013, reflect the way in which your Super 16mm transferred to HD, 75 mins. Courtesy of work feels to be very much about the artist. mediated zones where multiple narratives commingle or coexist, as if rooted in a kind of study of globalism. I’m thinking here of your first feature film, Piercing Brightness (2013), a science fiction story set in Preston, Lancashire, that incorporates the fact that Preston has the fastest-growing Chinese population in the United Kingdom, as a basis for a tale that explores notions of cultural othering and alienation.

Shezad Dawood: I think in my work differences are mediated, and nuances are understood in relationship to each other rather than in isolation. It is not just about cultural contexts but about discourse and the framing of discourse. I think the need to compartmentalize different contexts and discourses and the craving for linearity and rational narratives are somewhat myopic, which is perhaps felt more in the Western, post-Enlightenment context. What I want to see is a far more nuanced understanding that, without being reductive, occurs in different cultural contexts as a framing device, where there is both a greater emphasis on circularity and a much longer viewing point, in that time actually occurs philosophically at a different rate. With a longer viewpoint, there is a greater understanding that no single trope or intention exists except in relation to various constituent factors; it’s there in various systems of thought—from early Vedic thought to notions within Daoism—that relate chance to intention.

94 Vol. 13 No. 5 Stephanie Bailey: In thinking about your works presented together as a kind of representative whole, how do these ideas seep into the exhibition at Xi’an?

Shezad Dawood: I love the idea that with chance comes the potential for misunderstanding. So, in dialogue with the team at OCAT, we spent a long time discussing both the works we thought would be appropriate in mapping out the show and what we felt might work in the context of Xi’an. For example, the painting Video Avebury (2014), which was completed specifically for this show, brings the digital and the ancient together. And although it does this by articulating a digital composite of Avebury, an ancient stone circle in England, in paint, this is rendered on a patchwork surface of Saami textile patterns from Pakistan. We felt the juxtaposition and the tension between the stability and instability of the image and its ground—the composite of Avebury and the Saami textile patterns—reflects something about how mass media, and particularly digital circulation of images, continually reinscribes the past on the present, and were elements that might equally strike a chord in Xi’an. Xi’an, in both its historical and contemporary articulation, seems very much a living embodiment of the superimposition of the past on the present and vice-versa. This interface of the ancient and future-contemporary is also present in the video work Towards the Possible Film (2014), a clash of parallel constructs of the pre- modern and post-apocalyptic, all shot through the prism of the alien topography of Legzira beach, Sidi Ifni, in Southern Morocco.

Shezad Dawood,Towards the Possible Film (production stills), 2014, HD and Super 16mm transferred to HD, 20 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

But, also, when one is planning any exhibition, one is thinking about how a hermetic exhibition—where the entire mise-en-scene is an over-arching consideration—comes together, and to me this is really important. I enjoy solo exhibitions because that is when I feel I can do what I do best, which is to create a universe that allows the viewer to become immersed in the work immediately upon entering the gallery space. And, also, as I work with different media, having the expanse of a solo museum show allows for those different media to really speak to each other and for the spaces between works to become more articulated. This is always key in how I install or lay

Vol. 13 No. 5 95 out an exhibition: the space between the works is very important. So for me, there is as much a consideration of negative space as there is of positive space—that being the works themselves and the space that the works occupy—and, therefore, how the viewer actually moves around different works and makes particular connections that are either intended in the work or particular to the viewer. For me, there is always a need for an active viewer who is making his or her own connections as well as responding to the connections that I am proposing. That is also an anthropology of chance, and it is a very neat way to tease out the looping nature of my work while communicating something of the methodology that underscores it.

I use the term “underscore” quite Shezad Dawood, Elliptical Variations II, 2014, neon. purposefully, because there is a Photo: Stephen White. Courtesy of the artist and score—akin to a musical score—in Parasol Unit, London. all the work: the neon works have a particular oscillation, the paintings have a particular rhythm or kineticism to them, and of course the films have a particular sound, score, and choreography, even in how they are edited.

Stephanie Bailey: This importance you place on spaces or gaps is not only evident in your exhibitions in how you place works, but also can be seen in your films. Piercing Brightness is a case in point. Its gaps come from a kind of abstraction of the characters, who might interrogate or embody a kind of microcosm of global dynamics—from imagining Chinese immigrants in the UK as literal aliens to turning a Pakistani shopkeeper into a mystic with multiple past lives who also acts as a mediator between the Chinese aliens and the local population they find themselves embedded amongst.

Shezad Dawood: I often think about the fictions of culture, and as much as my work is about looking at a kind of evolving global paradigm, I am also drawing from particular contexts and histories. In a way, there is this sense in which speculative fiction really underlies the work. As with a lot of my film work, I embed myself in different contexts and spend time researching and collecting factual documentary research and transforming that into the magic of speculative fiction. In Piercing Brightness, the place where the film is set—Preston, in Lancashire—has, as you mentioned, the fastest-growing mainland Chinese population in Britain, and this became the basis for the fantasy. And in a way, what is interesting about this exhibition in Xi’an is that the exhibition itself becomes speculative fiction. I’m curious as to how audiences in Xi’an will react, because, obviously, in any country every city is different and has its particular character and voice, or voices. I also think that unless you are doing a show in your own backyard, you are always slightly out on a limb, and I’m interested in seeing how much the audiences understand the potential for free association among the works on show and in seeing those associations as a series of possible entry points to find ways into the exhibition.

Stephanie Bailey: And in the discussions between yourself and OCAT around this exhibition, an idea for a film project set in Xi’an was considered.

96 Vol. 13 No. 5 Shezad Dawood: Yes, one of the things I really wanted to do for this exhibition was to create a new film in Xi’an. I was so excited to come to Xi’an, because where it is situated in China fascinates me. It sits on various borders and confluences, and, given my practice, this is something that really interests me—the idea of where one thing leads to another. But the film wasn’t possible, and it has become something we might do subsequently. I think that through the dialogue around the exhibition, a continued relationship with Xi’an might emerge.

Stephanie Bailey: What was the idea behind the film?

Shezad Dawood: The idea as it stands is to think about X’ian’s past, present, and future, and to present a monologue performed by one female Chinese actress playing both the Tang dynasty empress Wu Zetian, a time traveller from the future in present day Xi’an, and a digital avatar of herself. Looking into this idea of time collapsing is an emerging thread that moves throughout my work.

Shezad Dawood,The Leader, Stephanie Bailey: This idea of time collapsing 2002, lightbox, 150 x 120 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the artist. is palpable in your latest film project, Towards the Possible Film (2014), which is a study of parallel universes that presents two extra- terrestrial beings encountering a landscape inhabited by what look like autochthonous savages (or the survivors of some kind of apocalyptic war). This film is interesting in the context of your practice as a whole, which has so often been grounded in cultural specificity, as in Piercing Brightness, or even more so in your earlier works dealing with Britain’s colonial legacy and your own Indian-Pakistani heritage, such as in The Leader (2002), in which you pose as British fascist leader Oswald Mosley in front of the Union Jack, or in Make it Big (2002–03), in which you restage the photo-shoot scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) in Karachi, taking on the role of David Hemmings. But in Towards the Possible Film, context has been removed, which is an interesting development.

Shezad Dawood: I have become more precise with my juxtapositions of image and text, and although Piercing Brightness is a bigger, more complex work, Towards the Possible Film feels like a real step forward in my practice. In developing the work I felt the confidence to take a more intuitive line with those juxtapositions, to trust the research I’ve done in the past, and to carry forward knowledge without needing to “know.”

Stephanie Bailey: Towards the Possible Film has the same dynamics as Piercing Brightness but rises above specificity and becomes more distilled in the symbolism embedded in its context-less context.

Shezad Dawood: For me it had a much more magical flow in its use and, as you say, distillation of image, text, sign and function. At the point where I

Vol. 13 No. 5 97 was editing it, I think I had found a new level of confidence in my choices of Shezad Dawood, Make It Big (Blow Up), 2002–03, colour juxtaposition, and was questioning myself less. photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

Stephanie Bailey: And like Piercing Brightness, it dealt with the concept of alienation. There is this great opening in Towards the Possible Film, when the camera focuses on the top of a building at Canary Wharf, in London’s financial district, while a narrator explains how “the old sense of alienation is no longer possible when individuals identify with a lifestyle imposed on them.” Further on, the narrator states: “Through experience, gratification, and satisfaction, their alienation is subsumed by their own alienated existence.” This conflates the notion of capitalist alienation with the kind of cultural alienation experienced by the visitors from outer space who appear in the film.

Shezad Dawood,Towards the Possible Film (production stills), 2014, HD and Super 16mm transferred to HD, 20 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

Shezad Dawood: The degree to which I am interested in capitalism is in viewing it almost like a magical formula. Capital has almost become mystical at this point in history. It bears all the hallmarks of religious ideology, in that popularly we neither question the underlying need for continual consumption, nor propose alternative systems when financial systems fail to

98 Vol. 13 No. 5 Shezad Dawood,Towards the Possible Film (production stills), 2014, HD and Super 16mm transferred to HD, 20 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

self-regulate, partly due to their opacity. Perhaps it is also due to the fact that derivatives and other such products have become so complex that they are not felt to be accessible except to those who have been properly initiated.

Stephanie Bailey: Or, when thinking about the title of your Xi’an exhibition, Ding Shu, the opening shot recalls how capitalism is like that mathematical equation through which globalization occurs, suggesting a kind of system that produces a certain kind of fate and destiny—perhaps globalization itself and the relations that occur within this frame—while allowing for a certain amount of chance, which brings up back to the English title of your Xi’an exhibition, The Anthropology of Chance.

Shezad Dawood: It’s interesting to think about capitalism as an active force undermining difference. It’s actually through the trade of money that cultures are forced to start to empathize with one another. You can’t gain a client in China, the UK, or anywhere else, without empathizing with their culture. I mean, the fact that call centres, wherever they are based, school their staff in the culture of whomever they’re responding to is an illustration of this. Then you get this frustrated person in whatever country calling someone in a call centre in another country trying to expose them for their lack of cultural specificity while, at the same time, not being aware of the fact that their own cultural specificity is also evident if not more visible, because they can’t see outside of it!

It’s funny how globalization is often lauded by businessmen and mainstream media as the high point of civilization, but I think it is actually an end point of an international form of capitalism. Its own structure breaks it down: for example as specific populations struggle to retain their identity in the face of growing multinational business, we are seeing the strongest resurgence of ethnic and religious tension, as well as nationalist sentiment, which for me refers once more to the title of the show, Anthropology of Chance—in a sense, the system is its own undoing. Whether this is a virtue or not, I don’t know: perhaps it’s just systemic, or a neutral function of systems, that they are their own undoing. I think that’s what really interests me: behind the various strategies and narratives, I’m interested in systems.

Vol. 13 No. 5 99 Stephanie Bailey: Thinking again about your early work, which focuses on ideas around the legacies of imperialism as predicated on trade, there is this feeling that your work is meant to disrupt these systems through the introduction of magic, surrealism, and fantasy. I’m thinking here of Feature (2007). In one scene in the film, you are dressed as a Krishna figure riding on a donkey into some cowboy enclave in the desert, reliving that moment when Christ entered Jerusalem on a donkey like a stealth bomb. This seems like the signal of an undoing by cultural infiltration.

Shezad Dawood, Feature (production stills), 2008. Super 16mm transferred to HD, 55 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

Shezad Dawood: And it also relates to the classic archetype of the trickster, whether thinking about how Joseph Campbell or Jean Fisher write about it. Campbell, in his Hero’s Journey, refers to the Trickster as one of seven key archetypes in storytelling—often related to Native American mythology, but equally present as a more general mythic archetype, the trickster disrupts the status quo, turning the world on its head to force through necessary change. Fisher takes the trickster archetype and relates it to the artist, and their ability to undermine the system of global capital, and the powerlessness it engenders from within, by playfully disrupting the given order and pointing the way to the truth that underlies the operation of power—by this I read an ability to understand the complex reality of systems and the signs behind which they operate.

Stephanie Bailey: Right, which again relates to the shared tropes in religious mythology and the shared existence of alienation you express in Towards the Possible Film, or this idea of capitalism as a mythic structure.

Shezad Dawood: Of global consumerism.

Stephanie Bailey: In thinking about that Marxist concept of alienation that comes with capitalism and consumerism, I wonder how these ideas link up between your earlier and later works through the figure of Krishna; he was presented more explicitly in previous pieces, from The Ages of Krishna

100 Vol. 13 No. 5 (2009), Sunday Morning (2002), or Feature (2008), while in Towards the Possible Film is signified only through the blue skin of the alien visitors: these creatures from another world, or time.

Shezad Dawwod, Sunday Shezad Dawood: It is interesting Morning (film stills), 2002. SD video, 12 mins. Courtesy to think about the quantum leaps of the artist. one makes as an artist: one could not make these quantum leaps without the previous steps. In a way, I needed to articulate a more binary understanding of my own “being in the world” before stepping out into a bigger sphere where I am dealing with archetypes in a looser and more expanded universe. And in that way, it will be interesting to see whether these archetypes resonate at all in Xi’an. Because for me, the use of blue skin for the alien visitors in Towards a Possible Film has as much to do with Krishna as it does with Osiris in Ancient Egypt or Quetzalcoatl among the Aztecs.

Shezad Dawood,Towards the Possible Film (production stills), 2014, HD and Super 16mm transferred to HD, 20 mins. Courtesy of the artist

Stephanie Bailey: So it relates to this shared experience as articulated through archetypes—such as the alien—that are, in many ways, universal.

Shezad Dawood: One interesting thing I’ve been looking at for a long time is a collection of objects in the British Museum from ancient India, Central America, and North Africa assembled by a group of aristocratic collectors in London at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These collectors proposed that all of the world’s religions emerged from a Bermuda triangle that linked those three points and their common archetypes. In a way, their proposal is like what Carl Jung rearticulated not much later as the “collective unconscious.” So whether or not there is a physical or archetypal link in consciousness, there is a degree of shared association, and there is the commonality of mythic structures across mankind. This idea represented a huge jump from my earlier work, which was a necessary step toward moving from something that was more specific and related to the particularities of my own cultural background to what

Vol. 13 No. 5 101 has always been my end goal: to move from something particular to something that spoke—and I’m hesitant to use the word universal—to the wider jigsaw puzzle that is, at times, the illusion of cultural difference and otherness. Hence my interest in looking at the radical otherness of alien visitors. It’s like what we said about how cultures view time—it’s relative and relates to the point of view of whoever is looking.

Stephanie Bailey: This reminds me of what J. J. Charlesworth wrote once in a piece for Art Review discussing your work: that “if something appears exotic, it’s because of where you’re standing.”2 In fact, with respect to something considered exotic—as Charlesworth puts it, “foreign, from elsewhere”—he says “there’s really no objective definition—it’s always defined from a partial vantage point.” This is an idea Piercing Brightness articulated: that we are all aliens to someone else.

Shezad Dawood: The acceptance of this exists from psychoanalysis to self-help: the shifting from this egotistical point of view to a multipolar perspective.

Stephanie Bailey: Which relates to how you are presenting your work in Xi’an, in a context that is in many ways alien, and in which you yourself become alien.

Shezad Dawood: For me, this is the anthropology of chance, because my work is so open and discursive in its framework that it allows for these possibilities to emerge, even retroactively. And before when I experienced this, I was pleasantly surprised by it. But now I just take pleasure in it because I’m not surprised anymore by retroactive synchronicities. I think this is also achieved in keeping a balance between conscious research and intuitive leeway, and this allows for unexpected juxtapositions. This is a conscious way for me to see the world, or, at least, approach it through the framing of things in relation to each other. And there is what you call a stealth bomb quality to my approach, but I don’t see it that way, as it is a totally rational way for me to see the world. I just find it hilarious that it seems so at odds with dominant ideology.

Stephanie Bailey: And what is that dominant ideology?

Shezad Dawood: I think of it as separatism, this need is very reactionary, and in this my intention is not to target reactionary politics or right wing structures. I think it is a universally reactionary human trait to pull back rather than to push forward. I am always looking at the possibility of reframing discourse at every step along the way, and sometimes I find it laughable how much parochialism still goes on and how much it is supported—even in the art world, which is supposed to be about avant-gardism but which fetishizes the avant-garde so that it becomes a cipher or a dead signifier rather than an act of principle. So artists who are genuinely engaged are constantly dismantling that apparatus of the avant-garde and how and by whom it is “managed,” and the apparatus of separatism that underlies it.

102 Vol. 13 No. 5 Stephanie Bailey: Thinking about apparatuses, how do you see art fairs in relation to this idea of a dominant ideology or conservatism within the art world, given that today the art fair has become a certain kind of global space with the potential to mediate between cultures.

Shezad Dawood: Let’s not kid ourselves with all the dressing. Even though there are some fair directors who are trying to use those platforms in radical and interesting ways, the very terms on which the art fair is built are specific. Underneath it all, the art fair model is a very canny economic model in that no matter what happens to the galleries, the fair always comes out on top—it is the casino of the art world, and the house always wins.

Stephanie Bailey: But this relates to the title of your show, and the idea of ding and shu co-existing: capitalism providing the foundations upon which lives—destinies—unfold somewhat intuitively.

Shezad Dawood: It becomes this kind of frontier of potentiality.

Stephanie Bailey: Yes, and that potentiality is about considering the question of how to negotiate globalism today. Like, how do you mediate difference and perhaps flatten, or equalize, the field?

Shezad Dawood: I don’t think it is so much about flattening, but I think it is about understanding how difference is, to some degree, illusory and relative. But it also relates to how such ideologies are hiding behind nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas around the nation state, which is interesting because such ideas can fall away in a heartbeat: the received wisdom of a hundred years can change in a moment. In fact, it always changes in a moment: that point when consciousness shifts, like that tipping point when everyone believed the world was flat and then shifted to people believing the world is round. When does that majority consciousness happen?

Stephanie Bailey: Do you think the art world effectively engages in the discourses around cultural hybridity?

Shezad Dawood: I think cultural hybridity is something the art world doesn’t deal with very well. It is often treated with wariness, because this idea can often threaten ridiculous but very commercially effective delineations in art, like “contemporary Chinese” or “contemporary Indian,” which are essentializing. How I see it, for example in the use of textiles in my work, is that the playing field always has been hybrid. These textiles I paint on map a global trade that has existed not just for hundreds but thousands of years, and that’s why I use them and not a blank canvas, because the idea of imposing myself ex nihilo on the world feels arbitrary.

The world has forever been informed by these structures, and you can see it if you are willing to recognize it. One thing I came across when researching Piercing Brightness in Preston was a pattern book at the Harris Museum that was brought back from India by an employee of the East India Trading

Vol. 13 No. 5 103 Company. It is a sample book, with samples of various fabrics, such as calicos and cottons, from all the different regions in what was then India— now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. This one book spurred the industrial revolution in Preston and brought great wealth to the city, because the new factories in Lancashire that sprung up in the eighteenth century appropriated these patterns, and ironically, British fabrics printed with these patterns were later resold to India. So this idea that we have only just entered into a stage of globalization now is laughable. Why do we even talk about it repeatedly?

Stephanie Bailey: Right. In many ways migration, displacement, and exchange have been part of the human experience for millennia, which relates again to your interest in collapsed time, this insistence on seeing history in the present, and this understanding past, present, and future.

Shezad Dawood: A continuum, and the idea that past, present, and future actually exist simultaneously. This is something that is articulated in Towards the Possible Film where I purposely shift the voice when speaking about existing on several different planes at once, so that the voice appears to be the astronaut, but actually it cuts to the lips of one of the indigenous people. Here I am interested in the idea that one is always other and that there is less separation than we think. Also, the idea that the astronauts might be from the past and the indigenous people might be from the future after a collapse of civilization was an idea I was trying to articulate. But equally, while exploring those familiar genre tropes, I wanted to then push the landscape to the front so that in the film the landscape in its eternal now is the central protagonist.

Stephanie Bailey: This timelessness in the landscape, or “eternal now,” recalls the treatment of the Pakistani shopkeeper character from Piercing Brightness, who was presented as a spiritual being who had lived many past lives, something you explored further in a recent work, 7669, (2013), which you presented on Channel 4 in the UK.

Shezad Dawood: I felt like he was too good a character, and I wasn’t done with him. I was thinking about the film and that whole rapture that takes place in the end. And what informed the film in large part were the Tibetan and Egyptian books of the dead, the idea out-of-body experience, and the idea that when you die your life flashes before your eyes. I thought about what would happen if all your past lives flashed before your eyes. I’m thinking of the idea of a homecoming or a return as a return to death or nothingness. I produced a short, three-minute version for Channel 4, and I’m presenting for the first time a fifteen-minute, three-screen installation in X’ian titled The Melancholy Departure of 7669. The work takes its cue from the key symbols in cuneiform that represent fish, sun, and god, and looks to mirror the passage upward through the elements between water, fire, and air. The idea is to project the work on to my Saami textiles. In this way I can combine pattern and structural filmmaking in a poetic interweaving of various degrees of archival material drawn from existing archives as well

104 Vol. 13 No. 5 Through Pierced Flesh and Skin of Dreams, 2014. Acrylic on vintage textile. Installation of five suspended paintings, each 180 x 144 cm. Photo: Stephen White. Courtesy of the artist and Parasol Unit, London.

as my own archives of film, video, and stills taken over several years, and in locations as diverse as Syria, Easter Island, Mexico, Morocco, and Hawaii.

Stephanie Bailey: The work sounds like Towards the Possible Film, a distilled thesis that is in fact incredibly layered, yet executed in such a way that the layering becomes compressed.

Shezad Dawood: Well, interestingly, for Towards the Possible Film we did two roundtable discussions to talk about the work before we went into production, the first one at Dar Al-Ma’mûn, in Marrakech, and the second at Witte De With, in Rotterdam, to explore the critical and philosophical territory before shooting. This seems like the cart before the horse, but it has informed how I intend to approach film projects from now on.

Stephanie Bailey: And in thinking back to past work it brings up the legacy of colonialism, imperialism, the idea of discovery, exploration, all of them bound up and abstracted in this kind of allegorical landscape populated by these archetypal beings.

Shezad Dawood: Well, one of the interesting things I looked at in my research was a pirate republic in Rabat-Salé in the seventeenth century, in what is present-day Morocco. This was an independent, democratic pirate republic based on free elections, and winning a seat on the ruling council usually depended on how much wealth you brought in as a pirate. But what was interesting was that this North African pirate republic took slaves from as far away as the coast of Ireland, and many of its leaders were Europeans who went ‘renegade’, and converted to Islam to escape the more repressive Christian cultures in Europe at the time. So as with the textiles, if you scratch beneath the surface of history, there is no pure or undiluted narrative. Given that we know this, why do we all play this silly game of cultural one-upsmanship—like: “My culture is older than your culture?” What if it’s just one culture?

Notes 1 J. J. CHarlesworth, “Dormant cultural histories, a pencil moustache, Pakistani models, hoodies on bikes, Acid Mothers Temple, Beat droupouts, Rothko, District 9, a Dream Machine, bursts of colour,” Art Review, no. 60 (Summer 2012), 120–23. 2 Ibid.

Vol. 13 No. 5 105 Chinese Name Index

Qiu Zhijie Chen Zhen Su Shi Gu Dexin Gu Minja Zhu Jinshi Qiu Jiahe

106 Vol. 13 No. 5 Vol. 13 No. 5 107 Vol. 13 No. 5 109 110 Vol. 13 No. 5 Limited edition prints Yishu and photographs by leading contemporary Art Editions Chinese artists.

No 1. No 2.

Xu Bing, Ding Yi, Book from the Ground Crosses 08 (not available) 2008, Serigraphy, 2007, Ink on paper, 297 X 178 mm, 210 X 295 mm, signed by the artist. signed by the artist. Produced by the artist. Produced by the artist. Edition of 200. Edition of 199.

No 3. No 4.

Wei Guangqing, Rong Rong & Inri, Made in China 2004 No. 2 2008, Seriograph on Caochangdi, Beijing paper, 175 x 296 mm. 2008, Digital photograph Produced by the artist. on Hahnemühle rag paper Edition of 198. Produced by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing. Edition of 200.

No 5. No 6. Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism — Hong Hao and Yan Lei, Wang Guangyi Invitation 2009, Serigraphy, 2010, Printed on paper, 210 X 295 mm, 295 x 205 mm, signed by the artist. Produced by the artist. Produced by A Space Art, Edition of 300. Beijing. Edition of 200.

No 7.

Zhong Biao, Dawn of Asia 2010, Serigraphy, 210 x 300 mm, Produced by the artist. Edition of 200.

Vol. 13 No. 5 111 112 Vol. 13 No. 5