DECEMBER 2005 WINTER ISSUE
INSIDE
Special Feature on Hong Kong by Tobias Berger, John Millichap, Lee Weng Choy, Eliza Patten, Norman Ford, Sean Chen Monumentality and Anti—Monumentality in Gu Wenda’s Forest of Stone Steles-A Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry Zhang Dali: The Face of China A Visual Koan: Xu Bing's Dynamic Desktop Interviews with Oscar Ho, Uli Sigg, Xu Bing About the Chinese Presentation at the 2005 Yokohama Triennale US$12.00 NT$350.00 US$10.00 NT$350.00 Art & Collection
Editor’s Note Contributors
Hong Kong SAR: Special Art Region Tobias Berger p. 16 The Problem with Politics: An Interview with Oscar Ho John Millichap Tomorrow’s Local Library: The Asia Art Archive in Context Lee Weng Choy
24 Report on “Re: Wanchai—Hong Kong International Artists’ Workshop” Eliza Patten Do “(Hong Kong) Chinese” Artists Dream of Electric Sheep? p. 29 Norman Ford When Art Clashes in the Public Sphere— Pan Xing Lei’s Strike of Freedom Knocking on the Door of Democracy in Hong Kong Shieh-wen Chen
Monumentality and Anti-Monumentality in Gu Wenda’s Forest of Stone Steles—A Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry Wu Hung From Glittering “Stars” to Shining El Dorado, or, the p. 54 “adequate attitude of art would be that with closed eyes and clenched teeth” Martina Köppel-Yang Zhang Dali: The Face of China Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky Collecting Elsewhere: An Interview with Uli Sigg Biljana Ciric
A Dialogue on Contemporary Chinese Art: The One-Day Workshop “Meaning, Image, and Word” Tsao Hsingyuan p. 71 An Interview with Xu Bing: Nonsensical Spaces and Cultural Tattoos April Liu A Visual Koan: Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop Christian Monks
About the Chinese Presentation at the 2005 Yokohama Triennale Lu Jie A Short Review of a Very, Very Long Book John Clark
Chinese Name Index p. 103 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Volume 4, Number 4, December 2005 This issue of Yishu presents several texts Katy Hsiu-chih Chien exploring the art scene in Hong Kong. Within the Ken Lum complexity of what constitutes China, Hong Kong holds a peculiar position, one that has, more than Keith Wallace Zheng Shengtian any other constituent in what is currently Julie Grundvig considered China, fully straddled the East and Kate Steinmann the West. The implications of this situation and Larisa Broyde its effect on art production and the art community Joyce Lin Chunyee Li have been put forward in various ways by the texts we are presenting. On some levels it appears that the cultural ecology in Hong Kong is fraught with struggles and contradictions, but this Judy Andrews, Ohio State University John Clark, University of Sydney can serve as a catalyst to spur an art community Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation into productive action. Okwui Enwezor, San Francisco Art Institute Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di'an, Central Academy of Fine Arts We are also pleased to present a number of other Fei Dawei, Guy & Mariam Ullens Foundation Gao Minglu, New York State University aspects of contemporary art in China. Martina Hou Hanru, Independent Curator & Critic Köppel-Yang offers a proposition about where art Katie Hill, University of Westminster Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian in China stands internationally by looking at the Sebastian Lopez, Daros-Latinamerica AG Lu Jie, Independent Curator opening of the China pavilion at the Venice Charles Merewether, Australian National University Biennale in comparison to the Stars group in the Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand 1980s. Wu Hung and Patricia Karetzky bring Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator updated perspectives on the work of two Wu Hung, University of Chicago prominent artists, Gu Wenda and Zhang Dali. Art & Collection Group Ltd. And Biljan Ciric interviews Uli Sigg, an influential Leap Creative Group collector of contemporary art from China who is Raymond Mah presenting it in exhibition form to both Eastern Gavin Chow and Western audiences. Xu Bing is featured with Jeremy Lee an interview, an overview of a one day symposium relaITconsulting, Vancouver on his work, and a discussion of his video work, Chong-yuan Image Ltd., Taipei Dynamic Desktop. - Yishu is published quarterly in Taipei, Taiwan and edited in In a gesture that is not the norm, our cover image Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates of Yishu are March, June, September and December. does not relate to any of the texts found inside. Editorial inquiries and manuscripts may be sent to the Instead, one week before we go to press, the Editorial Office: Beijing Suojiacun International Art Camp pictured Yishu on the cover, built in 2004 and home and/or 410-650 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC Canada V6B 4N8 studios for more than one hundred artists, is in Phone: 1.604.649.8187; Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: [email protected] the process of being demolished with many of [email protected] the studios still containing artwork and furniture. Subscription inquiries may be sent to either the Vancouver address Apparently, neither the developer nor the local or to Hawai’i: authority had proper permission and papers to Journals Department University of Hawai’i Press build the complex, so the central Government has 2840 Kolowalu Street, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA ordered them to be demolished. In light of China’s Phone: 1.808.956.8833; Fax: 1.808.988.6052 E-mail: [email protected] growing art community and its support of contemporary art, this action comes as a shock. The University of Hawai’i Press accepts payment by Visa or Mastercard, cheque, or money order (in U.S. dollars). Advertising inquiries may be sent to either Vancouver address Finally, on a brighter note, we are pleased to or Taiwan: announce that Yishu is entering its fifth year Art & Collection Ltd. of publishing. This has been achieved with the 6F. No.85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Phone: (886) 2.2560.2220; Fax: (886) 2.2542.0631 commitment and devotion of the publisher,Yishu E-mail: [email protected] staff, our subscribers, and especially the many www.yishujournal.com writers who have been so generous with their No part of this journal may be published without the written contributions. Yishu is highly respected interna- permission from the publisher. tionally and it is the writers who have made it so. Subscription rates: one year: US $48; two years: US $86 Subscription form may be downloaded from our Website We thank Mr. Milton Wong, Mr. Daoping Bao, Paystone Keith Wallace Technologies Corp., Raymond Mah, and the Leap Creative Group for their generous support.
Cover: Beijing Suojiacun, November 23, 2005. Photo: Wang Wei.
TOBIAS BERGER completed a Curatorial Training Programme in Amsterdam before working for three years at the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel. In 2002 he was the artistic director of the 8th Baltic Triennial of International Art in Vilnius and from 2003 until 2005 the director of ARTSPACE in Auckland. In 2004 he also was commissioner for New Zealand at the Sao Paulo Bienal. Since April 2005 he has been the executive director at Para/Site Art Space in Hong Kong.
SHIEH-WEN CHEN is currently a curator at the Chinese-American Arts Council in New York City. She received her M.A. in the John D. Draper Interdisciplinary Program of Humanities and Social Thought at New York University in 2003 and worked as Public Relations Representative and Assistant Researcher at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan, from 1990 through 1997.
LEE WENG CHOY is an art critic and artistic co-director of The Substation, an arts centre in Singapore. He has lectured on art and cultural studies and written widely on contemporary art and Singapore; his essays include “Authenticity, Reflexivity, and Spectacle; or, the Rise of New Asia is not the End of the World” (Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 2004) and “Just What Is it that Makes the Term Global–Local So Widely Cited, Yet So Annoying?” (Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture,The New Museum and The MIT Press, 2004).
BILJANA CIRIC received an M.A. from East China Normal University, Shanghai. She is Director of the Shanghai Duolun Musem of Modern Art's Curatorial Department and is a regular writer for Art China magazine.
JOHN CLARK FAHA, CIHA, is Professor in Art History at the University of Sydney. Among his books is Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998). His recent work includes two book drafts: Modernities of Chinese Art and Modernities Compared: Chinese and Thai Art in the 1980s and 1990s.From 2004 to 2006 he is working on the new Biennales in Asia under an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.
NORMAN JACKSON FORD is an artist, photographer, curator, writer, and educator resident in Hong Kong. He recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Hong Kong, where he focused on Hong Kong and mainland China’s lens-based media. In 2001–02, he curated Re-considered Crossings: Representation Beyond Hybridity,an arts and cultural exchange between Hong Kong and Vienna. His most recent work includes Con/deCon (2003–05) a photo/video/online project on the commodification of multiculturalism, and ICU,a curatorial strategy group working with networked and public art activities both online and in the city.
WU HUNG is the Harrie A.Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History in the Department of Art History and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is also the founder and Director of the Center for the Arts of East Asia and Consulting Curator at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago.
LU JIE is an artist, writer, and independent curator. He is founder of the Long March Foundation and co-curator of The Long March: A Walking Visual Art Display with Qiu Zhijie. His writing has appeared in several publications, and his book Jiang Guo Fang: The Forbidden City received the Best Produced Book Award from the Hong Kong Government in 1994.
PATRICIA EICHENBAUM KARETZKY holds the O. Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at Bard College. She has published several books on subjects such as the art of the Tang dynasty and Chinese Buddhist Art and has served as editor of Journal of Chinese Religions. She has written catalogues for and curated several shows on contemporary Asian art.
MARTINA KÖPPEL-YANG is an independent art critic and historian with a Ph.D. in East Asian Art History from the University of Heidelberg. She has studied in Heidelberg, Beijing, and Paris. She has written extensively on the subject of contemporary Chinese art and curated and co-curated exhibitions on the subject.
APRIL LIU is currently a doctoral student in Chinese art history at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Michigan State University and has exhibited and curated exhibitions in the United States, China, and Austria. Her research interests include contemporary Chinese art and Buddhist visual culture.
JOHN MILLICHAP is a freelance journalist based in Hong Kong and Shanghai. He has written on contemporary Asian art for more than ten years for a number of international journals and newspapers. He is also the founder of Eighth Press.
CHRISTIAN MONKS is a graduate student in the department of Art History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
ELIZA PATTEN is a writer and Exhibitions Coordinator and Contemporary Art Curator at Asia House, a London-based charity that promotes Asian business and culture in the United Kingdom.
HSINGYUAN TSAO teaches the history of Chinese art at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver. She received an M.A. from the Central Academy of Art in Beijing and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Tsao was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and taught at Reed College and the University of Hawaii before joining the faculty of UBC.
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International traffic from the art world through mainland China has, over the last few years, exploded. Curators fly in, visit Beijing and Shanghai, and then return home to mount a Chinese art exhibition. I took over as Director of Para/Site Art Space in Hong Kong at the beginning of 2005. Having worked in other countries for longer periods of time, I am aware that it can take a long time to understand the local artistic and administrative situation. Some things are quite obvious, but circumstances, histories, and, most importantly, artists, take longer to discover and understand. The following are some of the things I have realized so far and that I am currently researching.
Hong Kong, “Asia’s world city” as it is promoted by the city’s marketing agencies, is a Special Administration Region (SAR) with its own internal laws—part of China’s one country, two systems policy. The territory is one of the few places with a relatively open freedom of speech policy, but the Standing Committee of the People’s Republic of China rules out universal suffrage, that is, the ability to vote directly for the future Chief Executive and for all seats of the Legislative Council for the coming years. The local Chinese and English language press critically discuss political issues, yet the Beijing-appointed Chief Executive stated in one of his first speeches after his appointment that “Democracy can wait.”By referring to a public opinion poll to argue his case, he reminds us that people’s opinions can matter, and that things are sometimes quite complicated.
Hong Kong’s political demonstrations are legendary. Only three years ago more than 500,000 people demonstrated on the 1st of July, the day that marks Hong Kong’s return to China. With a population of only seven million citizens, that number is proportionally the same as seventeen million in the U.S., or, even more unbelievably, seventy million demonstrators in the People’s Republic of China. This year approximately 20,000 participated, which reveals how the times are now less politically charged. These annual demonstrations are very inclusive and draw people with all kinds of concerns. The range of different participants is amazing. Hong Kong’s gay community headed the march this year, followed by diverse unions covering domestic helpers, minimum wage activists, and a variety of groups calling for universal suffrage, democracy, and human rights. Free speech allowed dissenting voices with opposing points of view to meet on the march so that, following the gay rainbow coalition, church groups could be seen carrying signs against the legalization of homosexuality. To put things in perspective, on exactly the same day, another 20,000 people were “actively encouraged” to participate in the “Let’s celebrate the People’s Republic march,”and over 200,000 visited a heavily marketed exhibition of dinosaur skeletons in a shopping center.
Hong Kong’s art scene certainly believes strongly in democracy, universal suffrage, and freedom of speech. A legitimate democratic process is therefore important. The funding body of most of Hong Kong’s non-institutional art life, the Arts Development Council (ADC), has its members voted in by the art community. Hong Kong’s Biennale, now in its 15th year, is an open local art competition: every Hong Kong artist can apply. Local curators prejudge the applications. Sometimes this first round seems to eliminate the more exciting projects. The final selection is left to a team of local and international experts who then tend to complain about the limited choice of interesting works they can select from.
There are a number of good smaller independent spaces supported by the ADC in Hong Kong, including 1A Space, Artist Commune, Para/Site Art Space, Videotage, the Asian Art Archive, and Shanghai Street Art Space, a gallery space owned by the ADC that is given to individual art groups for a year at a time. Currently the Hong Kong Institute of Education is holding exhibitions at this space, which is situated in the middle of densely populated Mongkok.
It is unfortunate that there is no infrastructure to foster further professional artistic development. After ten years of activity in local grassroots spaces, there has been some great success for local artists and artist-run centres and national pavilions at three Venice Biennales, but there are still no plans for a real contemporary art institution. The Hong Kong Arts Centre is so tied up with the city’s bureaucracy that there seems to be little hope for any continuous contemporary art projects there. The Art Centre is an interesting gallery space dominated by the relatively new and quite successful Art School: the gallery curators will concentrate the next two years on public projects and comics. The planned West Kowloon Cultural District will include a new super-sized museum; unfortunately, its form, function, content, and finances are in permanent political discussion and re-negotiation. It appears to be another attempt by the Hong Kong government to have private real estate investors pay for the building and running of cultural institutions instead of themselves taking responsibility for the cultural life of the city. Other smaller supporting art projects are planned but are currently under “public consultation.”
So does Hong Kong art reflect this strange political situation? Do artists engage with these political questions and special circumstances? Is Hong Kong open to its neighbours, which it uses commercially as a huge production line?
It has been commented that the number of artists making political work has decreased in the last few years. The number of exhibitions in Hong Kong that exhibit political or socially engaged art doesn’t really reflect that fact. 1A Space showed Walk Don’t Run in July of this year, a local exhibition about photography of demonstrations that was followed by Collective Space, an aca- demic but solid show about Chinese art dealing with the notion of—guess what?—collective spaces. The John Batten Gallery displayed Coming Near You: The Destruction of Central Hong Kong, “informing” on the ongoing demolition of historic neighbourhoods. At the same time, the gallery encouraged viewers and recipients of the email invitations to take direct political action to stop this continuing demolition. Even the summer photo exhibition at Hong Kong University Museum could be seen in a political context—Almond Chu’s photographs, focusing on scenes of landfills and waste fields, are evidence of the environmental destruction from rapid urbanization, and Wong Wo Bik’s poignant pictures of empty amusement areas, shot just prior to their demolition, suggest the complex play between technology, community, and progress. Para/Site Art Space also opened Power/Plays,a video exhibition of ten artists who perform actions that interfere with politics and public space.
There are a few outstanding young artists working in the political scene. One of them is Tozer Pak Sheung-chuen, who just published an interesting book about his political interventions. Also, since he is a regular contributor to the artist page of Ming Pao,a major Chinese newspaper in Hong Kong, his works reach a wide audience. The video he exhibited in Power Plays,titled A present to the regime in Beijing, is a succinct example of his interdisciplinary work. The artist taped a strip of yellow fabric onto the street that was then walked upon by the demonstrators in the pro-democracy July 1 march. After 20,000 people walked over it, he cut the material into little
strips of ribbon, to be an accessory worn by demonstrators to remember the struggle for human rights in China. He then took these yellow ribbons to Beijing and tied them onto different objects circling Tian’anmen Square, marking the site of the June 4 massacre. Working with similar suggestive “tactics” is Luke Ching Chin Wai, known for his impressive over-scale pinhole camera installations the size of whole rooms, who also creates very interesting performances. In one of them he painted a footbridge a different colour every day of the week until he repainted the bridge back to its original colour.
This interest in the city and its context was very obvious in Hong Kong’s pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. While Chan Yuk-Keung deconstructed the city of Venice by turning it upside down, anothermountainman realized a Chinese tea house with the red, white, and blue plastic fabric that he claims to be notoriously representative of Hong Kong. The material, used for everything in Hong Kong from construction fencing to food packaging, was the topic of an exhibition he curated a few months earlier at the Heritage Museum. Different local artists each used the “redwhiteblue” material, or the context of that material, to produce new installations. The most lasting product of this ambitious show is a great catalogue that deconstructs the red, white, and blue material as a changing indicator of the city's identity and the savvy “colonization” of the material by the artist.
But how does the Hong Kong art scene interact with that of the surrounding cities? Commercially, Hong Kong is the center of the Pearl River Delta. Citizens of Hong Kong are free to travel to the mainland. Guangzhou and Shenzhen are exploding megacities. In Guangzhou, Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist are holding D-Lab as part of the Guangzhou Triennial. Its venue, the Guangdong Museum of Art, is a 20,000-square-metre building with a display area of over 8,000 square metres (whereas the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for example, has 11,600 square metres). The museum does not only consist of twelve large exhibition halls, but it also includes guest rooms, a gym with exercise equipment, an up-market restaurant, and a large section of unused balcony space. The museum’s program is diverse but dominated by foreign “dowry”exhibitions that are obviously organized to show goodwill and encourage political relationships with the future superpower.
It is fascinating to see how diverse these exhibitions are. During my first trip there, the French sent an interesting and contemporary Art from Lyon show, and the Croatians had put together a drawing exhibition that seemed to include all but today’s most interesting Croatian artists, while an Italian solo presentation was so unfortunate it defies description. The Guangdong Art Museum seems like another of those huge architectural shells that can be found throughout the world and increasingly so in Asia—ambitious political castles that appear to lack sufficient funds to sustain an adequate program, though inviting a curator like Hou Hanru, and giving him the freedom to realize D-Lab, proves that there is some degree of knowledge and support.
China and Hong Kong plan to build a great many new art museums in the near future. It will be interesting to see if they follow the glass castle idea, as in Korea and Japan, of many grand build- ings with little content, or if they find a more content-focused way of using these large spaces. In the Guangdong Museum of Art we can observe firsthand the struggles among limited funds, governmental geo-political interests, and artistic and curatorial ambition.
But Guangzhou is a region that is also home to the influential Big Tail Elephants group, one of the most important art collectives of the 1990s, as well as a good number of young, up-and-coming artists and designers. Cao Fei makes extraordinary films and photos, not only capturing the feelings of this time, but also giving the viewer a sense of overdosing on the environment, by creating some of the most intriguing works in contemporary art today.
The most interesting space in Guangzhou is Vitamin Creative Space. Located well behind a wet-market on the second floor of a generic office building, it surprises the viewer with its large gallery space. This artist-run space organized the important survey exhibition of Guangdong artist Zheng Guogu, and both the work and its installation were of museum standard. Even though Vitamin Creative Space organizes only a few exhibitions each year, it is a highly active, impressive institution that is well connected. with a very engaged international residency program.
In Hong Kong nobody really discusses the artists from Shenzhen and Guangzhou. In Guangzhou there is a certain excitement about the Shenzhen artists such as Yong Yang, photographer; Jiang Zhi, who works in video and multi-media; or the remarkable painter Qiu Shihua. There is even a very well-proportioned museum that finds itself in basically the same dilemma as the Guangzhou Museum. Shenzhen, though a very young city, has already grown to almost double the size of Hong Kong. Showing the most exciting architecture, it has become a huge amusement park for architecture lovers, yet it is already creating memorial ruins of great buildings. The incredible speed of development can make Chinese buildings quickly look old and eroded.
For artists from the Pearl River Delta Region, coming to work in Hong Kong is a bureaucratic challenge. They need to get permission, which is possible to achieve but requires time and money. Many artists, therefore, simply cannot come to Hong Kong. But even with these restrictions it is surprising that there is little artistic contact between the cities. Though there are cultural differences between these places, it is amazing that an upcoming artist like Cao Fei, whose work is influenced by her immediate environment yet functions in every international context, has never been exhibited in Hong Kong. In reverse, it is also strange that few Hong Kong artists have been exhibited across the border.
Recently I spoke to some of the most influential gallerists in Hong Kong, who admitted that they have not visited Guangzhou for twelve years. A correspondent working in Hong Kong for an important Asian art publication for the last ten years has never visited Guangzhou and Shenzhen—except to play golf in the countryside. It is inevitable that this attitude will have to change very soon.
Most artists agree that Hong Kong needs more possibilities for professional development; a professional art space or contemporary art centre that can exhibit Hong Kong and international artists and that is independently supported by the necessary resources. This may require a more cohesive shift in private engagement and government policy to promote the cultural sector of Hong Kong and the wider Pearl River Delta Region. What we in the cultural community must immediately do is boost traffic between the artistic scenes of Hong Kong and the surrounding cities. And it is all just starting.
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For more than twenty years, Oscar Ho Hing-kay has been intimately involved with the development of art in Hong Kong—for thirteen of them, as director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the city’s largest and most influential independent art space, and subsequently as senior research officer at the Home Affairs Bureau of the Hong Kong Government, where he advised on cultural policy. In 2004, to the horror of many in the city’s Art in Belgium exhibition, Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1993. Courtesy of Oscar Ho. art community, he left Hong Kong to become the inaugural Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai. Yet the relationship was short-lived, and after ten months he left Shanghai and returned to the city to which he has devoted his career. In this interview, he talks to John Millichap about the development of art policy in Hong Kong, its transition following the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to the People’s Republic of China, and prospects for its future. China’s New Art ‘89 exhibition, Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1992. Courtesy of Oscar Ho.
John Millichap: How well has the Hong Kong art scene fared post-1997?
Oscar Ho: Well, it’s certainly in a very worrying decline. During the 1990s, a lot of exhibitions came to Hong Kong because it had a lot of international attention. But in the years after 1997, I think it has lost a lot of its charm for the international media and the international community generally.
Today, the art scene is dominated by the government; it is operated by bureaucrats and by a system that leaves little space for anyone from outside this system, and outside of this way of thinking, from doing anything substantial.
John Millichap: What was the importance of 1997 for art in Hong Kong?
Oscar Ho: Leading up to 1997, everyone got their fifteen minutes. The whole world was looking at Hong Kong, and I think this helped a lot in terms of opportunities, discussion, and exposure.
That’s one aspect. Another is in terms of art making itself. The places where art really flourishes are those where there are urgent issues that art needs to deal with. And pre-’97 there were definite-
ly some very clear and strong issues that needed dealing with, ones having to do with the concept of identity: Hong Kong’s relationship with China, the colonial legacy, and how to position oneself with China and the British.
John Millichap: But did it produce good art?
Oscar Ho: Honestly speaking, not as much as I’d hoped. There were individual artists who produced some very interesting work, such as Phoebe Man (Man Ching-ying) and photographers like Ken Wong. But I think one of the distinctive qualities about Hong Kong is that the art community is very small. There’s not really a strong enough market to sustain too many full-time artists, which means the number of works is always very limited. For full-time practicing artists, I would say the number is not more than ten. Even talking about active, mature artists, you’re probably talking about less than fifty.
Consequently, as a curator, you’re always facing the problem of there not being enough work. This means that at the Arts Centre, inevitably, we had to have more and more thematic exhibitions or bring in more exhibitions from Taiwan or mainland China. Often, I ended up expanding the definition of art to include comics and pop culture, which is also an especially important part of Hong Kong culture.
John Millichap: Did the “1997 effect” raise expectations too high?
Oscar Ho: I have to say that we did not use our fifteen minutes too wisely. But, then, it’s difficult to take advantage of an opportunity like that if you don’t have the skills and the training. Suddenly, you have all this attention, but as soon as those fifteen minutes have passed, you find yourself very lost. There were some very good artists, but as a whole, we didn't take advantage of this exposure as much as we should have.
John Millichap: How far did that period stimulate the government to increase investment in the arts?
Oscar Ho: In terms of art education, yes, I think it did stir some kind of realization, but I’ve never really supported the idea of government getting too involved in the arts. One of the most suffocat- ing parts of the development of the arts in Hong Kong is precisely that the government is involved too much. But it’s a vicious circle, because, to be fair, as a whole Hong Kong society does not value art that much. This is very noticeable, particularly when you compare it with mainland China.
John Millichap: How much is this to do with the colonial legacy?
Oscar Ho: That’s definitely part of it. For example, during the 1960s there was a lot of local discussion about promoting arts education, but the colonial government decided that they would promote design instead, because design is about the practical use of creativity.
From its earliest stages, then, there was this idea that art was secondary, and it’s an idea that was accepted by educators. So, you have a situation where the credits a student receives from art classes do not count when they want to get into university. In Hong Kong, which has a very strong exami- nation culture, if you cannot get credits for university by doing art, what’s the point in taking it? Even today, this has not changed that much. Because of general pressure, universities have now
started to consider art in university admissions, but only on a case-by-case basis, and not as an overall subject.
What that has produced is the general idea that art is something for entertainment and not something that nurtures critical ability, which is an essential part of any creative society.
But another part has to do with the composition of the population in Hong Kong and the refugee culture that wants to just make a living. Hong Kong culture is basically Guangdong peasant culture. The literati culture belongs to only an extremely small group of people.
So, you see a very distinct difference in tradition. For example, if you look at Beijing, even now, it’s not enough just to be rich; there is a common idea that you have to have some culture too. Whether this is pretentious or not, there’s still the idea that culture is important in society. In Hong Kong, you don’t find that; if you’re rich, that’s good enough.
John Millichap: Hong Kong has evolved a lot since the 1960s. This attitude must have changed.
Oscar Ho: It’s obvious now that cultural tourism and the creative industries are important, so all this makes the government realize they do have to start thinking again about art. But you’re talking about a very complex infrastructure support and a very complex process that will take a long time before you see any real results.
One of the biggest problems is the complete lack of research on local art [in Hong Kong]. One of the fundamental things for teaching art in schools, first of all, is local art history, because this is the area that is most meaningful to local students. There were certainly early art movements in Hong Kong, but no one has done any serious research on them; there’s no documentation, no records, and no archive. Today, a lot of this information has disappeared already because it’s mostly oral history and has died with the artists. So, if I’m going to begin an art program on local art and artists, I have nothing to tell.
Another problem is that we’re talking about a very difficult conceptual adjustment. If you look at the 1990s in Hong Kong, probably the most interesting place was the Arts Centre. Here, you have the only independent space in Hong Kong that allows larger-scale exhibitions, with a very flexible system that allows it to do some really creative and challenging projects—the kind of major artistic projects that government museums don’t want to, or aren’t able to do.
So, what does that tell you? That the government should let go and there should be more places like the Arts Centre. Release creativity by allowing or giving resources to independent organizations. I’m quite sure that if you took just half of the money that’s being spent on public museums and gave it to private organizations, they would be able to do a lot more with it.
That’s one thing. Another issue is the lack of art professionals, and that’s not all the government’s fault. The Museum of Art and other big museums are really a branch of the civil service. To work there and learn museum or gallery work you have to start in the civil service and work up. An outsider would never get a chance to learn. Instead, you have to work in tiny spaces, like Para/Site Art Space, which means you never learn the full skills of a curator or resource management.
Mapping Identities: The Art and Curating of Oscar Ho, Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong, 2004. Courtesy of Oscar Ho.
But the problem here is that it’s not the people, it’s a system that suffocates individual skills and creativity. Civil servant culture is all about smooth, non-controversial decision-making, which is the complete opposite to art. For example, if a curator wants to write something for publication, he has to go and get approval from the boss first.
Also, in most museums you get promoted to a particular position because of your skills and experience, but in the civil service you get promoted because of seniority. So, you might have a specialist in Chinese ink painting, but because he's due for promotion he might get shifted to modern art.
The thing is it’s not that they don’t understand the problems here; it’s the price that must be paid to change the entire system. What this means is removing the art museum from the civil service system, and obviously there’s going to be a lot of resistance to an idea like that, not least because of job security.
John Millichap: So what is the solution?
Oscar Ho: Well, there are changes that should be made on several levels. First, there is the infras- tructure, which must be changed to adequately give the public more access, and you must create a more open, pluralistic system that allows creativity to be released.
Policy-wise, a different approach has to be found that gets away from this very product-oriented idea of putting up very big shows or projects, and instead starting to think about infrastructure and mechanisms like education, art criticism, or simply promotion—retuning sensibilities and recognition of achievements. More fundamental still is education. This is a long-term investment and there is really no other way. The prospects for this depend on how willing the government is and how much courage they have to do this.
John Millichap: What is the most likely future for art in Hong Kong?
Oscar Ho: Most likely they will continue this big show aesthetic, where they bring in large, ready-made productions, usually from out of town, which get momentary attention but are never really engaging.
West Kowloon [West Kowloon Cultural District Development] is an offshoot of this sort of thinking; the idea that if you put up something grand then culture will come. But the problem is a big lack of understanding about how culture devel- ops. If putting up some big buildings was all it took, any city could have a thriving Oscar Ho. Photo: John Millichap. cultural life.
John Millichap: You sound bitter about your experiences at the Home Affairs Bureau.
Oscar Ho: Yes, I was, mainly because they kept wasting all these opportunities. And it’s not because they don’t have the people, it’s because they have a failed system. I moved to the government and joined an internal cultural policy team, but I have to say, I didn’t like it at all. The government system is very conservative and involves a lot of people and a lot of negotiations, so that by the time a project is finished, it’s so compromised that it doesn't mean much any more.
John Millichap: As one of Hong Kong’s most experienced local art professionals, weren’t you worried that by leaving you were only helping to hasten the decline of art in the territory?
Oscar Ho: Someone actually said to me that my coming to Shanghai looked a bit like a betrayal. I was director of the Arts Centre for twelve years, and have been involved in the arts in Hong Kong for almost twenty years.
But as a curator, you always look for new challenges and new opportunities. For example, I had been trying to get the opening exhibition [at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai] of Pierre & Gilles to Hong Kong for five or six years. I tried twice, and each time I failed because we could not get the funding support. But really, it was more than funding. I need an engaging, devoted, and passionate space in which to present good art, and if that passion and devotion isn’t there, then there’s not much hope anymore.
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“Archiving the Contemporary” workshop, Hong Kong. Courtesy of the AAA.
Let’s start in the future. Somehow that seems appropriate. In April 2005, the Asia Art Archive (AAA) organized an international workshop whose title encapsulates, to a large extent, the institution’s purpose: “Archiving the Contemporary: Documenting Asian Art Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow.”1 Now, doesn’t the very idea of “archiving the contemporary” make one think of the future? Well, perhaps first of all, it reminds us that even the “contemporary” is at risk of being forgotten. Furthermore, it assumes the place of the future looking back at the present and prompts us to realize that there will be a time when this archive is no longer simply of the contemporary but has become historical as well.
Remember Johnny Mnemonic? The film was set in 2021, which, coincidentally, will be exactly two decades after the AAA commenced operations. I want to offer that date as a horizon to set our sights upon in thinking about the AAA. I want to argue that in thinking about the AAA, it is essential to think of the future—of the AAA itself, but also of the historiography of contemporary art in Asia and in general. Before discussing the AAA, however, I’d like to detour through this 1995 Robert Longo movie/William Gibson story. You may recall its premises: an underground resistance opposes the malevolent corporations that rule the world. Meanwhile, half the planet is suffering from the disease NAS—Nerve Attenuation Syndrome—caused by the overload of electronic signals in the environment. Johnny is a “mnemonic courier”: he downloads data directly into his brain. He’s hired by renegade scientists from Pharmacom to carry, unbeknownst to him,
View of the AAA from the street. Courtesy of the AAA. the cure for NAS. In retaliation, Pharmacom has dispatched the Yakuza to retrieve his head. And because Johnny has dangerously exceeded his capacity, he must deliver the information to the resistance within twenty-four hours or die.
The silliest thing about all this—for me, at any rate—is not (a) Keanu Reeves playing a character with really important content in his head, (b) the movie’s throwaway orientalism (besides the Yakuza chasing him around the world, to start with, it was Beijing where Johnny picked up the data),2 or (c) the entire plot. Rather, what I find most ill conceived about Johnny Mnemonic is its abysmal failure to anticipate the scale of information in the future.
Johnny had to relinquish his childhood memories in order to wet-wire his brain and courier what one presumes are enormous amounts of data—why else would anyone resort to that, if the result didn’t phenomenally exceed existing storage options? Instead, what Johnny downloads comes from a single DVD. Why not just carry the disk? If he had to lug around an entire room full of them, then it makes sense to have it all stuffed into his head. That’s a major plot oversight. But what is most embarrassing is that Johnny’s regular capacity is—get this—80 gigabytes. Last year’s laptops had as much storage. Can you imagine asking someone today to give up his childhood for a mere 80 gigs? To be accurate, Johnny upgraded his capacity to 160 gigs, although that still wasn’t enough to safely support the 320 gigs he got from the scientists. Is 320 gigabytes supposed to be impressive? In 2005, one can buy external hard disks of that size for less than three hundred USD. Imagine how relatively small that capacity would seem by 2021. One of the pleasures and challenges of science fiction is in anticipating the future. We can indulge the lapses and leaps of logic, but give us an inspired glimpse of what’s beyond tomorrow. Your run-of-the-mill sci-fi, unfortunately, doesn’t deliver on this, and for the most part, Johnny Mnemonic is forgettably run-of-the-mill. Still, the movie has been seared into my brain, and I suppose it’s because, ironically, while it argues
Entrance to the AAA. Courtesy of the AAA. that in the future the overload of information will be our doom, it cannot even begin to imagine how much there is out there.
I'm not entirely done with Johnny Mnemonic,but let’s step back from it and rewind, not to the present moment, but to the 1990s. At the time, Claire Hsu was at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London: “I studied Chinese art for two years, and there was just no central resource, either in London, Asia, or elsewhere, where I could access up-to-date and accu- rate information.”3 There is a lot of information out there, more than anyone knows; but for most writers, scholars, and students, the challenge is less in imagining its scale than in the practice of research—of accessing, collecting, and collating the material. When Hsu completed her M.A. in 2000 and returned to Hong Kong, she founded the AAA in collaboration with curator, art critic, and gallery owner Chang Tsong-zung and lawyer and business community leader Ronald Arculli. It is the first institution of its kind in Hong Kong, and, as far as I know, in the region: an indepen- dent, non-profit research centre dedicated to collecting documents of contemporary art from across Asia—reference books, monographs, exhibition catalogues, periodicals, invitations, leaflets, newspaper and magazine clippings, and audio and visual materials.
Hsu would like the AAA to become “the most comprehensive resource for Asian Art.”4 By many accounts, it is a success locally and internationally.Joan Kee, an art historian who has been based in the U.S., South Korea, and Hong Kong, says: “Initially I was skeptical of the project when a friend first told me about it. I’ve seen many well-meaning initiatives start up with plenty of fanfare, only to die off in a couple of months. But my general impression of the AAA has been one of positive astonishment. It gets people thinking about the historical position of ‘our’ field, and it establishes some kind of a center, based in Asia, that people can go to, rather than ‘us’ having to go to Europe or the United States.”5 Hong Kong-based Norman Jackson Ford, an artist, writer, and
Michael Sullivan visiting the AAA. Courtesy of the AAA. curator, feels that the AAA has “certainly gone to great lengths to be thorough and professional.” He says, “I have been a supporter since its inception. It is one of the most important art institu- tions in Hong Kong.”6 Tobias Berger, the new director of Para/Site Art Space, notes that among the positive effects of the AAA is that it encourages curators interested in Asia to stop over in Hong Kong to actually do research, rather than, for instance, just “going for three days to China to curate their big Chinese art exhibitions.”7
The AAA’s collection has grown to something substantial—as of September 2005, it has over fifteen thousand catalogued items—even if it hasn’t yet become “comprehensive.”Visiting the two-hundred-and-fifty-square-meter premises, it’s obvious that it’s not a full-fledged library. Going to a “country” section—Singapore, for instance, where I live and work—I can see that the AAA has only scratched the surface of what I know is there. And while their most substantial collections are from mainland China and Hong Kong, with over four thousand items each (compared to nearly nine hundred for Singapore), one expects that in those two cases, the same might well apply. By the staff's own admission, the AAA has a long way to go; the more they research and collect, the more they realize how much work needs to be done. Their activity and presence at events around the world (from an Asialink forum in Melbourne, to Art Basel in Switzerland, to D-Lab at the Guangzhou Triennale) belies the fact that the AAA has only five full-time staff, with part-time researchers in China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. They are indeed a small organization.
Angela Seng, the AAA's librarian, says:
In this age of “Google-ization,”people see the Website of a library as the library itself, and expect to find as much information from the Internet as they will from the physical library. There are a great deal more people who visit www.aaa.org.hk than come in person, so, naturally, we want to put more
information on our Website. That means digitizing our information, and offering more functions and flexibility in the retrieval of this information. We have been discussing the development of a portal, which hosts a number of Websites related to the field, and a meta-search engine, which offers a one- click search from other databases.8
Another crucial task for the AAA is to map other archives of Asian art. Phoebe Wong, the head researcher, notes: “Although it is very tempting to think about collecting everything under one roof, it is not only not possible, but repeating what has already been done by other archives is the last thing we want to do.”9
The AAA is certainly not a library in the traditional sense. It is as much a network as a collection. Explaining their participation in Art Basel 2005, Hsu argues that “in an age . . . where exhibitions and events are often spectacu- lar, and anything short of this will not attract an audience, archives must also change their strategy to draw attention and make use of their collections. For a ‘contemporary’ archive to exist, dynamism is vital.”10 John Batten, a Hong Kong- based art writer and gallery owner, believes this extra-collecting function of the AAA is especially significant: “What appears to be just a repository of materials will slowly evolve in time as an invaluable asset for anyone involved in or interested in contemporary art from Asia. In the The AAA library. Courtesy of the AAA. next few years the AAA will be more than a library of Asian art—it will be a meeting point both physically and socially: projects will be gestated, planned, and realized because of it.”11
While there has been a lot of praise for the AAA, there are also criticisms. Some have been unfair; for instance, when the AAA first opened its doors, there were complaints that the shelves were mostly empty. But the whole point was that they had just begun collecting materials, and the early phase of their opening was arguably more about establishing themselves in the arts community than providing materials for researchers. Then there are concerns about the “politics” of the AAA. Batten observes: “one challenge the AAA faces is countering any perceived Beijing-Hong Kong- Tokyo nexus, and this will require the AAA to be overtly sensitive in collecting all Asian art documentary material.”12 Kee, who, like Batten, serves as an academic advisor for the AAA, thinks there should be a focus on quality: “the AAA’s energies could be more usefully channeled, rather than collecting any and all written material that even remotely pertains to modern/contemporary art in Asia, or commissioning books on artists and exhibitions that are relatively minor. I would like to see the AAA move towards active documentation, by producing original, useful references, by sponsoring conferences, doing a series of interviews with major artists, publishing anthologies in collaboration with other organizations, and commissioning translations of key texts.”13 Ford cautions about the prospects of such interventions. He believes the AAA has not been self-reflexive enough. “I have no problem if they want to bend and challenge what archives do conventionally—I think that’s admirable. But if, through their unconventional approaches, they intend to act as curators, to liaise as ‘representatives’ of Hong Kong and Asian art—such as in Art Basel—shouldn’t there be public critical consideration as to why and how they do this? The AAA should be more transparent as to how they engage with the art world.”14
Lee Weng Choy speaking at the AAA. Courtesy of the AAA.
As someone who runs an independent arts centre, The Substation, I know very well the difficulties in navigating sensitivities within an arts community. Our own approach has been to declare our convictions and defend them, but even as we voice critical opinions, we are also perceived to be inclusive and open to different perspectives. This ability to have it both ways has a lot to do with the legacy of our founder, the late Kuo Pao Kun, who remains one of the most respected cultural figures in Singapore. The comparison between these two public institutions, The Substation and the AAA, can be useful in elucidating what’s at stake in the latter’s positioning of itself. On our side, we have a larger full-time staff of fourteen, organize about fifty events annually, and have been around longer, for fifteen years. We interact with diverse constituencies of audiences, artists, and other public intellectuals, we are well-connected internationally, and we’d like to think we successfully mediate the many disparate demands made on our space. But this does not come close to the whole range of interests that the AAA has to contend with—from Hong Kong to Beijing, Bangkok to Manila and beyond. The AAA is under constant pressure to be inclusive, and it bears emphasizing once more that they are a small, young organization.
The AAA is an unusual creature: it has the purview of a large regional museum, yet it operates like an independent arts centre. Jane DeBevoise, formerly with the Guggenheim Museum and now the new chair of the AAA’s board of directors, says: “Unlike most other art related centres in Asia, we are not exhibition driven. Yet not unlike curators and other art activists in the region, we share an interest in trying to make sense of what’s happening here. Through our archiving, we hope to create a platform for discussion and debate.”15 It’s not as if the AAA doesn’t take critical positions. But it's one thing for Hsu to be vocal against the Hong Kong government’s plans for the West Kowloon Cultural District,16 and it’s another thing for her to express strong preferences for specific artists. This is something curators can readily do at an arts centre where one doesn’t have to appear neutral; one just has to defend one’s choices. Yet, in being evangelical about contemporary Asian art, the AAA will ineluctably find itself promoting some artworks rather than others. And the staff cannot rely on existing models to justify their curation; they have to find their own form of legitimization.
It’s telling that the criticisms I’ve cited come from persons who believe in the AAA. For all the dis- agreements over specific issues or projects, the AAA continues to receive resounding support. This is because its core purpose addresses a glaring need, and it engages this need competently—an
accomplishment that should not be underestimated. Throughout Asia, despite the collective efforts of countless cultural workers over the years, many basic needs remain unfulfilled and issues unresolved. There are still not enough platforms for art writing, censorship persists, funding is lacking, the cultural policies of governments are unenlightened, and so on. Given that the last twenty years has seen the rise of contemporary Asian art in the international art world, the positive reception of the AAA is certainly due also to the timeliness of its emergence. The standard story of its inception, which I’ve rehearsed here,17 doesn’t adequately emphasize some of the crucial aspects of its coming into being. For this article, I interviewed Hsu over the telephone, trying to find out more about her motivations in founding the AAA; it’s not every day that someone in her mid-twenties goes and establishes a library out of frustration over the lack of a resource centre for Asian art. But Hsu didn’t have much more to reveal—except that if she knew then what she knows now, she might not have taken it on. I’d like to suggest that the founding of the AAA is a fortuitous accident, that it had a lot to do with a certain idealism in the face of a lack of experience. My point isn’t that they are a young organization staffed by young persons who are learning on the job.18 Rather, the point is that they are doing something that hasn’t been done before, even though for years, professionals in the field have been waiting for something like it to happen.
When Yishu approached me to write about the AAA for its feature on Hong Kong, from the onset I knew I didn’t want to write a short history of the short history of the institu- tion.19 The details of how the AAA has put its ideals into practice, an analysis of criticisms, and a defense of its deci- sions—that is for a proper history beyond the scope of this essay, and perhaps for a later date, when the AAA is not so “young” anymore. As a critic who writes about contempo- rary art from Asia, what I'm particularly interested in is imagining futures of Asian art histories that arise because of an institution like the AAA. Specifically, my question is: what happens when a critical density in the collection has been reached, and the distribution of information about contemporary Asian art has been achieved? The AAA will be instrumental in this regard; it will mediate tension over the next decades as this field called “contemporary Asian art” achieves a certain historical gravity, a canonical density. I’ve suggested the date 2021 as a horizon—that's just a fancy, not a calculated guess—but there is indeed such a horizon out there. Artist files at the AAA. Courtesy of the AAA.
One could be cynical and say that the dominant function of contemporary Asian art today is merely to be the fetish of choice for the global art machine, that the hypervisibility of this art will continue to increase, but as art in general has come to matter less and less to society at large, the possibility of real encounters with diversity and depth in culture will become less and less likely in our society of the spectacle, and that canons in art will be concerned less with universal values than trends in international power relations (is this why Chinese contemporary art is all the rage?). But I would prefer to be cautiously optimistic. I’ve used the word “local” in the essay title, rather than “regional”,and it's because the former, for me at least, summons the idea of density better than the latter. The local is constantly in our face, whereas the regional is somewhere out
Wu Shanzhuan Collection at the AAA. Courtesy of the AAA. there. Yes, the overload of information is a symptom of our doom in the future. Isn’t that part of Guy Debord’s point?20 It is a genuine problem that there is too much information out there—even about contemporary art from Asia—especially if it's just out there, fragmented. One of the most important challenges of the critical imagination is to anticipate, not so much the scale of this information and its fragmentation, but in the sense of precipitating a density of connections and meanings.
The “AAA in context” in my title refers to three arenas: first, historiography; second, the arts community; and third, geography. As an outsider to Hong Kong, it’s convenient for me to address this last item in comparison to Singapore, where I’m based. Let’s return to Johnny Mnemonic:at one point, Johnny mentions that he got his brain job done in Singapore. The theme of long-term memory loss is especially pertinent to this island-city-state, which has been theorized by a number of writers, including yours truly, as modernity’s idealized tabula rasa.21 Or, as the literary critic Janadas Devan once argued, “forgetting is the condition of Singapore.”22 This is a country where the government, against strong public resistance, demolished the National Library in order to build an underground tunnel. The Library was of course relocated to newer, brighter, and bigger premises. The journalist Tan Sai Siong, dismissing the sentiment over the old building, wrote: “Real creation to the 21st-century mind could well be deletion of the past, so that there is constantly more byte for the future.”23 In Singapore, it really does seem that we have given up our childhood memories for a mere 80 gigabytes. So, could the AAA have happened in Singapore— which, like Hong Kong and so many other cities in Asia, hankers to be a gateway to the region? The question, on second thought, is misleading. Sure, it would be ironic if the AAA were based in Singapore, but it's not as if it's a “natural” fit in Hong Kong either. That, at least, is Wong’s opinion:
Though Hong Kong is a film and TV production centre for the region, it doesn’t have much interest in Asian culture. There are no university courses on contemporary Asian art. Here, ‘international’ means Europe or North America, maybe Australia. Apart from the huge investments in the West Kowloon Cultural District, private funding for the arts is not well developed in Hong Kong. I think the presence of the AAA does a lot to reshape the cultural orientation in Hong Kong; it helps focus Hong Kong in a regional context.24
I remember several Hollywood films of the 1970s and earlier; their pace was much slower than today’s movies. There are all kinds of reasons for the acceleration of cinematic time—MTV is one culprit—but so is the late “discovery” by Hollywood of Hong Kong’s John Woo et al. If “speed” characterizes spectacle, along with fragmentation and forgetting, what can one do to slow down life, to make information denser, to make long-term thinking common instead of difficult and rare? Inventor, designer, and writer Stewart Brand got together with a few like-minded colleagues and proposed to build, literally and metaphorically, a clock, a very big and very slow one. They call it the “clock of the long now.”They realized that with the timepiece they would need a context, “a library of the deep future, for the deep future.”25 “In a world of hurry the Clock is a patience machine.”26 In a sense, all good libraries, including the Asia Art Archive, are patience machines.
Notes 1 See www.aaa.org.hk/newsletter_AAA.html for details about the workshop, which took place April 18–20, 2005. 2 “Asia”—both in terms of the development of its economies and the pronounced visibility of its contemporary arts and cultures—has indeed become a metonym of choice to represent globalization and globalization's fetish for Others. However, I don't think Longo and Gibson, whatever their intentions, have made that point in Johnny Mnemonic. What comes across is just the half-hearted use of East Asia as exotica. 3. Quoted in Suzanne Dennis, “Archive provides a lasting legacy for fans of Asian art,” South China Morning Post, January 30, 2004, C4. 4 Ibid. 5 From an e-mail interview with Joan Kee, September 13, 2005. 6 From an e-mail interview with Norman Jackson Ford, October 2, 2005. 7 From an e-mail interview with Tobias Berger, September 19, 2005. 8 From an e-mail interview with Angela Seng, September 29, 2005. 9 From an e-mail interview with Phoebe Wong, September 30, 2005. 10 Quoted in Kevin Kwong, “Swiss timing,” South China Morning Post, June 14, 2004, C6. 11 From an e-mail interview with John Batten, October 7, 2005. 12 Ibid. 13 E-mail interview with Joan Kee. 14 E-mail interview with Norman Jackson Ford. 15 From an e-mail interview with Jane DeBevoise, September 26, 2005. DeBevoise succeeds Chang Tsong-zung as chair of the board of directors. 16 See Hsu’s remarks in “Swiss timing.” 17 Most reports on the AAA reiterate this explanation; in addition to the South China Morning Post articles cited here, there is the June 2005 piece in Orientations,Volume 36, No. 5, “The Asia Art Archive: Keeping the Present for the Future,” by Hwang Yin, 69–71. 18 The AAA’s board or directors and academic advisors, who are not as “young” as the staff, have a wealth of experience and expertise; for the full list, see www.aaa.org.hk/about.html. (Disclosure: I happen to be an academic advisor, which must mean I'm getting old.) 19 For an outline of the many activities that the AAA has done, visit its Web site’s newsletter, www.aaa.org.hk/newsletter.html. 20 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994). 21 See, for instance, Lee Weng Choy, “Authenticity, Reflexivity & Spectacle: Or, the Rise of New Asia is not the End of the World,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critiques 12, no. 3, special issue ed. by Joan Kee (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 643–666. 22 Janadas Devan, “My Country and My People: Forgetting to Remember,” Our Place in Time (Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society, 1999), 21–33. 23 Tan Sai Siong, “Who needs History? It's Okay to Pass up the Past,” The Straits Times, April 9, 1999. Qouted in Kwok Kian Woon, et al., Memories and the National Library (Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society, 2000), 188–189. 24 E-mail interview with Wong. 25 Steward Brand, The Clock of the Long Now (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 3. 26 Ibid., 48.
“: - ’ ”
No. 245 Queen’s Road East, Wanchai, Hong Kong, before the project. Courtesy of Jaffa Lam.
In the cloying humidity of a Hong Kong April, twenty-four artists gathered at no. 245 Queen’s Road East, Wanchai. As with so many buildings in the city, the relentless tropical climate and lack of maintenance had taken their toll on no. 245. Its five floors were once considered stately, but now the cluttered shop units on the ground floor and the complex network of rooms above led to a roof where looming high-rises warned of an imminent takeover. The artists, some local, some from as far afield as Argentina, were to spend two weeks here for “Re: Wanchai—Hong Kong International Artists’ Workshop,”Hong Kong’s first Triangle Arts Trust workshop.
The Triangle Arts Trust initiates and facilitates an international network of artist-led workshops and residencies that engage audiences through public events and exhibitions. It is a labour of love founded by Robert Loder and Sir Anthony Caro in 1982 and now run by the recently appointed Alessio Antoniolli, Director of the Trust and the network’s London base, Gasworks. Over 2,500 artists have participated in and hosted workshops in North America, South America, Caribbean, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania.
The district of Wanchai is famous for its lively nightlife and buzzing local communities. It is a slice of Hong Kong that epitomizes the city’s reputation as a place where Eastern and Western cultures collide. For many years, the relentless development that seems central to Hong Kong life focused
on the harbourfront. The huge multinationals jostled side by side in glossy buildings, whilst the back streets of Wanchai were left pretty much untouched by modernization. Now that is changing, and controversy over redevelopment of the area is rife as communities that have lived cheek by
No. 245 Queen’s Road East, Wanchai, Hong Kong, during the workshop exhibition. Courtesy of Jaffa Lam.
jowl for well over one hundred years are being forced to relocate, and dilapidated buildings like no. 245 face demolition. One of the organizers of “Re: Wanchai,”Howard Chan, described parts of the neighbourhood as a war zone.
In this arena the artists gathered, with one air-con unit among them and (as one put it) “grim accommodation” in a local hotel. The idea to host a Triangle Arts Trust workshop in Hong Kong had been brewing for a few years. I was lucky enough to meet the founding organizer, Jaffa Lam, in 2003, when she had just come back from her first Triangle workshop in Hualien, Taiwan, and was buzzing with the positive effects of two weeks working with, eating with, and talking with a diverse group of international artists. She immediately wanted to share her experience with artists in Hong Kong and began to explore how she could pull it off.
Surviving as an artist in Hong Kong has always been hard, with high rents, little space, and a lack of non-commercial galleries to support early-career artists. In the late 1990s a few artist-run spaces such as Para/Site Art Space, Videotage, and 1A Space began to develop with some government help and plenty of initiative from the artists themselves. Now, businesses are moving to mainland China and freeing up warehouse units, which are being used as studios. Artists' communities are
organically developing in areas such as Fo Tan, an industrial suburb several miles north of Wanchai. Yet a certain proud attitude results in a lack of critical conversation among artists; there are few critics, and only recently has there been a call for debate. For Jaffa Lam, the opportunity to give Hong Kong artists an international workshop was key to starting to change this situation.
Organizing the workshop was a complicated task, fraught by the difficulties involved in getting funding and finding a space. The lone artist does not have the clout in Hong Kong to get large-scale funding. A core, six-person “Workshop Group” developed, calling itself AiR, now a registered charity. In a fitting testament to the nerve you need to survive the pace of Hong Kong life, the loan of no. 245 Queens Road East was secured just two weeks before the international artists arrived from Indonesia, Argentina, Russia, Australia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Britain, India, Lebanon, Kenya, Taiwan, and mainland China. Permission to reconnect the electricity and water was given five days before the the workshop was to begin. The building was borrowed for six weeks in total, allowing for the setup, the workshop, the open house (where people could see artists’ work), and visits by community groups and schools. It was condemned to be demolished three weeks after AiR cleared out. As the organizers explained in their opening statement: “Everything in “Re: Wanchai—Hong Kong International Artists’ Workshop” seems temporary. But it is exactly because of this temporality that we treasure the occasion so much.”
The Triangle model is tried and tested: a two-week residency with approximately eleven artists from the host country and the same number from around the world. The workshop is run by the local artists who help to organize the visiting artists. They are generally held in rural areas, where there is space for living, communal eating, and studios; usually the evening meal is preceded by one or two of the artists giving a presentation about their practice. The whole experience is intimate and intense. Since the first workshop in the 1980s, they have been a place of refuge, understanding, self-discovery, love affairs, and the forming of great international friendships.
This time the Wanchai organizers were determined to deviate to an urban setting for their location, unable to conceive of a Hong Kong workshop that was not immersed in the city life. This led to a huge change in dynamic, with local artists' returning to their homes each night and visiting artists staying in their very basic and tempo- rary accommodation. Until the eleventh hour, the organizers had not “Re: Wanchai” workshop participants. Courtesy of Jaffa Lam. had time to consider that huge amounts of personal time and energy were about to be called for by the human element of the workshop. With twenty-four people, language barriers, serious heat, jetlag, and differing expectations, there were bound to be difficulties.
And yet, when I visited the workshop on its last day, when the work created in the two weeks was opened to the public, it was clear that something important had been achieved. The lengthy speeches being made by various supporters and donors in an overcrowded and sweaty room gave me the opportunity to wander off on my own and begin to explore the building and the work. As
is common with these workshops, and often a cause of great conflict amongst participants, some artists had aspired to gallery-quality work, sometimes simply importing work made back home and transplanting it to the workshop space. Others explored the nature of being in a group, their new environment, reflecting on different perceptions, not only of life experience but of artistic practice. They came, they absorbed, they learned, Participants Wallace and Cynthia chatting. Courtesy of Jaffa Lam. and they created works that will never travel and may not enter their portfolios but have somehow changed the way they see their practice, and, to some extent, the world. It is always these artists who make the most out of such experiences, and it is not an easy thing to do.
Two artists who had clearly adapted their practice to this challenging space were Michael Samuels and Cynthia Zaven. Michael is a U.K.-based artist who has shown extensively in Britain. One series typical of his work uses light boxes and pinpricks on maps to mark each street lamp in areas of London. Wanchai was not the place for his normal meticulous approach, but his contribution at no. 245 clearly showed he had engaged in the process, the people, and the place. Deciding to “dress up” the building, he created a trail of red lights in plastic tubing that flashed and coiled through the stairwell and up onto the roof, culminating in a beacon that was reflected in the flooded roof and fondly crowned the condemned building. Another piece used light and holes drilled in a wall that were viewed through a hole in a door, creating a beautiful half-seen spectacle, like glimpsed scenes of the city. Michael later commented that the experience had made him think very differ- ently about his studio practice in London. Cynthia is a sound artist from Lebanon. She had quickly decided that extracting any one sound from the cacophony of noise from Wanchai that flooded in from the street would be fighting a losing battle. Instead she stayed silent and plotted to save one room of no. 245 from the advancing bulldozers by covering every surface in camouflage.
With a strong link to the St. James’ Settlement, which co-presented the workshop with Triangle Arts Trust and has been working with local communities in Hong Kong since 1949, many of the artists gained a real understanding of the local environment and residents. The St. James’ Settlement is a charitable organization that aims to respond to new challenges in the community and train students and social service workers. Annie Wan (Hong Kong) went into Wanchai making imprints of signs and reconstructed them in ceramic tiles as poetry for the area. Dinh Q. Le (Vietnam/United States) worked directly with elderly residents who wanted spaces to nurture and grow flowers— together they made an oasis on the condemned building’s roof. Like Dinh Q. Le and Michael Samuels, Tabitha wa Thuku (Kenya) also found inspiration on the roof, crowning no. 245 with bright, colourful painted motifs. Meanwhile Gabriel Baggio took on an old shop unit on the ground floor and documented his attempts to clean up and normalize the defunct and deserted space.
The work produced those two weeks in the claustrophobic humidity of Hong Kong was symbolic of a very important event for Hong Kong artists and those that were invited from around the world. It was the first relationship formed between an artists' workshop and a community settle- ment in this area and a rare chance for Hong Kong artists to talk about making work. Gradually
“Re: Wanchai” artists and volunteers. Courtesy of Jaffa Lam. the tide is turning for local artists, who are learning that a higher degree of criticality is essential to the production of well-conceived, strong work, and that such demands will be made on them if they desire a wider audience. Talks organized at Asia Art Archive and Para/Site Art Space are giving artists the chance to debate more openly and access a broader understanding of the international art world.
Exposure to artists from around the world made the Wanchai workshop another significant landmark in the professional development of local Hong Kong artists. It is hard to be part of a new venture with a group, and it is hard to make work, absorb a city, follow a full itinerary, and feel autonomous for two weeks during a bout of extreme weather. At the beginning of the opening there were no drinks, and little feeling of celebration, but rather a tense, tired bunch standing amongst their work. Robert Loder, the original founder of the Triangle Arts Trust and devout workshop believer, was there to support the opening, and, luckily, with his regular travelling companion, a good bottle of whiskey, the evening came together. “I don’t expect this workshop to change too much [in Hong Kong],”Jaffa reflected to me afterwards, “but at least it pushed the community and artists closer together. It's like putting a seed in the earth. Who knows what will happen in the future? But hope is always there because we experiment.” www.trianglearts.org www.hkair.org
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Judy Cheung, skyLink (plane), 2005, plastic cups, glue, Plexiglas. Courtesy of Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong.
I was thinking about this Philip K. Dick story the other day. I was struck by the way the author played the sentience of Decker, the detective cum mercenary hired to get rid of rogue replicants, off the fabricated existence and memories of his quarry. It was especially interesting how, in the end, it was unclear as to who was really “real” and how Dick positioned sentience, not in biology, but in images and memories, real or not. In this essay I want to draw a playful, and perhaps stretched, connection between this story and how Hong Kong-based artists fit into the overall scheme of Chinese art and its global dissemination. I am particularly interested in how Hong Kong is represented and how that process might connect to more general strategies for Chinese art (or even art from “Asia”) in regard to notions of the local, national identity, geography, emigration, and travel. Towards that goal I’ll consider four artists’ projects, positioning them as four tropes of representation I believe are both informative and useful in regard to art in Hong Kong and China.
Specifically, I want to look at certain image practices taking place in the SAR (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) to reveal trends that question a set of important and connected topics: the notion of the “Chinese artist,”the various strategies used to represent large urban centers in Asia, and the fluid or fixed definitions of the term “local artist.”2 The following projects will move around these questions but are not necessarily meant to be definitive of art in Hong Kong. These projects have instead been selected to play out particular geographic, ethnic, or cultural strategies relevant to the broader practices found in art and curatorial projects emanating from, or based on art in, “China.”
Judy Cheung, skyLink (Arrival/Departure), 2005, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
I’ve chosen to focus on Judy Cheung, Map Office, Hiram To, and Amy Cheung, because they connote four distinct, though not necessarily typical, relationships to Hong Kong—Amy Cheung and Hiram To representing the “local,”as they was born and raised in the city (yet received their university education overseas and have traveled extensively). In contrast, Canadian Judy Cheung was born in Hong Kong but moved to Canada at an early age. Her familial connections to Hong Kong link her to a diasporic image of the overseas Chinese artist. Lastly, the French architects and permanent Hong Kong residents Laurent Gutierrrez and Valerie Portefaix (Map Office) can be seen as internationals-in-residence, raising their children and producing work in direct relation to a city that is not their “home.”These positions are meant to set up a series of representational strategies and to take into account modes of production, travel, internationalism, and stereotypes- issues that I feel are in serious need of critique. It is in these complex, international relationships that we might find the most powerful representational strategies for places like Hong Kong.
--- Plastic cups transformed into an “unflyable,”dysfunctional plane? A mini-luggage conveyor filled with shampoo bottles? Judy Cheung’s project skyLink engages with the travel aspect of Hong Kong in a wonderfully indirect, meticulously constructed, and overtly symbolic way.3
The methodical production methods used by Cheung, like her ludicrous airplane composed of plastic cups, reveals much about how she sees the impact of travel on local and place specificities. With its focus on destabilizing perceptions of time, place, and homogenous non-places and objects, the work contains literal traces of the realities of global movement-and, specific to this installation, of travel between Canada and China. By gathering drinking cups from various Asian-connected airlines (China Eastern, Cathay Pacific, and Air Canada), Judy Cheung draws real-world objects into her installations. But these objects have no place of their own. They are mass-produced-they travel and they are disposed of in quick international cycles. When brought into Cheung’s installation they do not become so much decontextualized, since their original contexts were something like “multi-national-corporate specific” in the first place, but are abstracted in an odd way, with almost all direct references to place or brand made invisible. Yet, subtle details revealing that the cups come from Cathay Pacific or Dragon Air, for example, is in some perverse way very specific, albeit at once a cliché based on a dialogue between these Hong Kong-based companies and certain “oriental,”stereotypical imaging strategies.4 In this regard, the artist’s cups, bottles, and transit imagery make their reference, then cycle back and signify only more travel, such as in her video of a mini-luggage conveyor rotating little bottles of shampoo and soap, waiting endlessly for unseen mini-passengers.
Like Cheung herself, skyLink moves between spaces with an uncomfortable ease. Since she was born in Hong Kong and emigrated to Canada at an early age, Cheung’s connections, like those of many young émigrés, are contradictorily tinged with nostalgia, excitement, and discomfort with contemporary Hong Kong.5 Cheung’s personal background, then, expands the ways skyLink distances itself from any place whatsoever, at once reveling in its multiple connotations of very specific airports, airlines, terminals, transit routes, and hotels, while never seeming to point to any particular locale.
An example of skyLink’s connotative power: one of my earliest memories is of a flight to Hawaii and a small hotel there. Although I was only five years old, I distinctly remember the flight, especially the little salt and pepper shakers, silverware, cups, and the one-off soaps in the bath- room. I was utterly fascinated by these tiny, functional things—a fascination triggered by skyLink’s commonplace but evocative power. The “generic” plastic cups and tiny bottles of mobile hygienics can carry powerful, contradictory connotations, simultaneously nostalgic and filled with anticipation of the new that travel might bring. But Cheung’s intensive work method and dexterity at removing conventional place/brand cues also makes my sort of personal, very place-based experience less likely to click. It’s an uncanny series of connotations that moves through these objects and images, a representational process that relies on symbolic fragmentation and abstrac- tion to carry meaning—a process highly appropriate to transit, travel, and life in Hong Kong.
Ultimately, Cheung’s skyLink relishes in the “inbetweenness” of travel between Hong Kong and Canada, which can generally be applied to all international travel. It’s the particular objects used and their very specific connections to air travel routes between China and Canada that provide the materiality of the work, but they also ignite powerful memories, contribute to new relationships and, in this case, make real the project's exhibition in Hong Kong.
In fact, it’s possible to see skyLink as an exploration of how travel and local specificities respond to and constitute each other, and therefore, how they might constitute a city’s visuality. This sort of
Laurent Gutierrez and Valerie Portefaix (Map Office), installation of Territories, 2004, Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artists.
Laurent Gutierrez and Valerie Portefaix (Map Office), installation of Territories, 2004, Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artists.
fluid specificity signals but one approach to representing Hong Kong, one that neither directly images the city nor provides any conventional “local” images at all.
In 1998, Laurent Gutierrez and Valerie Portefaix founded the multidisciplinary studio Map Office in Hong Kong. Their organization publishes books, produces photographs and video, writes essays, creates artwork, and takes part in a variety of educational and network projects.6 Trained as architects in France and based in Hong Kong as educators since 1997, Gutierrez and Portefaix have devoted much of their time to a study of Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta region, focusing on the living conditions and modes of production in this urban space. Their first major work on and in Hong Kong was the text Mapping HK, published in 2000.7 This was followed by a number of articles and books, notably the series HK Lab,a trilogy of anthologies with essays, data, and photographs that look at Hong Kong (and the Pearl River Delta) as a site for experimentation and research.8 HK Lab I and II used tropes like “shipping and shopping” (I) and “lifts and corridors” (II) as bookend-style contexts for the various projects presented.
These are unusual texts for a number of reasons. First, although there have been numerous books on the architecture and urban spaces of Hong Kong, this was the first effort to bring into play a relatively interdisciplinary set of methodologies: architectural theory, urban space, art practice, sociology, and so on. Map Office’s texts use this variety of approaches, which overlap and intersect, to generate a broadly descriptive method that neither valorizes nor deprecates Hong Kong. As the authors state,
Hong Kong can only be comprehended in a collage of different perceptions, such as the search for synthesized relations, the nature of continuity and rupture, and the recuperation of the individual with the social group. A new classification develops in the form of a non-exhaustive inventory—a collection of human activities in relation to the technological revolution, economic globalization, and cultural change.
The kind of mapping that Gutierrez and Portefaix produce is not one of conventional cartography but—following Deleuze and Guattari, who are among their acknowledged influences—a process that attempts to re-invent the city through developing a “projected image of its inherent mutation.”9
Against red wall: Hiram To, The Corner of Luxury and Crime, 2001–2002, 3D lenticular photographs in lightboxes. Courtesy of the artist.
For me, this means efforts to chart the flows created by the city through different environments and under various conditions and pressures. The images themselves are often intentionally banal, direct, and indiscrete. It’s interesting to note the partnership makes no distinction as to who writes or makes what, and they often obtain detailed data on their subjects before they photograph them, producing sometimes thousands of images of one particular area. This kind of obsessive approach yields consistency in the images that tends to belie the extensive work existing behind the photo- graph. The direct methods they employ produce photographs that consciously sidestep the kinds of representations found in advertising, tourism, and business practices in the region. This is the power, and the problematic, of Map Office.
In 2004, Gutierrez and Portefaix held their first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, Territories,at Para/site Art Space.11 This exhibition can be seen as an interesting counterpoint to Judy Cheung’s skyLink project, since both were shown in the same gallery but approach their relationship to Hong Kong in very different ways. Territories was actually a collection of different projects related to Hong Kong, the Pearl River Delta (PRD), and mainland China. Consisting of a set of photographs, video projections, and single-channel videos on TVs, the show asked very direct questions: How do we map such unstable environments? In what ways can we embrace the constant mobility of people and merchandise found in the PRD? How do we respond to the “Made in China” phenomenon? Territories answered these questions in a perversely direct and obscure fashion.
Unlike skyLink’s symbolic efforts, Territories used more direct and apparently conventional methods of representation—medium- and large-format photography and digital video applied in a “documentary” style. The detachment with which Gutierrez and Portefaix approach their subjects is the primary difference here. Whereas Cheung collected her objects in a very personal way, Map Office employed detailed research and extensive, direct engagement with the spaces in Hong Kong and the PRD. Their work puts aside any sort of sentimentality or overt critique and instead focuses on the processes and conditions under which urban spaces are being transformed.
For example, China: Double Face—City of Consumption/City of Production,a video work shown on both sides of a double-sided screen, presents the complexities of a huge construction site in
Beijing in City of Production,while its opposite, City of Consumption,focuses not on the obvious notion of shopping but on the maintenance of a brand-new office complex under a constant state of servicing and cleaning. This odd contrast between production and consumption favours a rather atypical notion of these two processes. Here “production” simply produces objects that represent sites for more “consumption” of labour—even when that labour is the continuous and essentially pointless pursuit of upkeep. Though the office buildings were almost completely empty, an army of cleaners never stopped wiping, sweeping, or mopping every inch of the space, while on the opposite side, the screen shows a new structure ready to consume even more service-based labour.
Above the videos was a large, suspended, double-sided light box with a photograph taken from the deck of a container ship (from the project Back Home), backed by an image of the same construction site shown in City of Production.With “shipping” and “production” tagged as opposite sides of the same coin, Territories begins to reveal its constitutive/interdependent methodology. Back Home,a thirty-minute video documenting the journey from a nearby mainland China port to Hong Kong, is both a direct look at the processes of shipping containers as well as an allegorical journey. This co-dependent journey is not simply for the transport of goods but becomes visual evidence of the scale and intensity of such shipping practices, exposing through powerful images the literal processes by which our products are distributed to global destinations. It is this sort of fascination with the material aspects of production and consumption that underpins all of Territories.
Paradoxically, the artists do not see this interdependency as extending to the actual sites of production. Instead Gutierrez and Portefaix see these “territories” as islands or fragments (archipelago), independent of their surroundings yet reacting to forces spreading across the country. The construction sites, container ships, factories, and office blocks presented are at once direct images of current conditions and also more allegorical efforts to map the fluctuations of a territory under immense pressures of transformation, reeling from the effects of a massive floating population and reacting to new systems of production and distribution.
However, their flat, frontal orientation tends to leave social agency out of the picture. Here, the individual is nothing but one element within the scene, remaining undefined, disaffected, or useful only as labour. And this absence of subjectivity and agency in Gutierrez and Portefaix’s work is palpable. Under the conditions mapped out in Territories, the individual is simply a chip to be plugged in and used. With all its visual power and “objectivity,”Map Office positions “the people” as simply one of many fragments.
This position, though denying any sort of personal power, in turn reveals much about the efficacy of certain strategies of representation. And these strategies have been embraced by the art world recently, as evidenced by Map Office’s inclusion in the 2005 Guangzhou Triennial and next year’s Sydney Biennial. This suggests the question: In what ways do these French architects/permanent residents of Hong Kong actually represent the city, if at all? Their relationship to Hong Kong is complex and deep. With their children educated in local schools and speaking French, Cantonese, English, and Mandarin, their work as teachers in local universities and their dedication to understanding the region, Gutierrez and Portefaix are hardly typical “expatriates.”Perhaps they might be seen as prototypical, deeply engaged in a practitioner/observer structure with Hong Kong, the PRD, and China.12 This deep engagement is, however, generally overwhelmed by the
Hiram To, (hammer)The Corner of Luxury and Crime, 2001–2002, 3D lenticular photograph in lightbox. Courtesy of the artist.
direct, architectural imaging practices they employ. And, like Cheung in skyLink, they seem to revel in this contradiction, feeling no need to examine or question its possible perversity.
, In contrast, Hiram To, a Hong Kong-born, Australian-educated artist and writer, focuses more on the people and their relationships to popular culture, public space, societal pressures, and violence. In his project The Corner of Luxury and Crime 1–4 (2000–2002), four three-dimensional, lenticular photographs represent a series of individuals acting out odd moments of activity in relation to public sculpture. Critiquing a number issues simultaneously, the work looks at the politics of public sculpture and its lack of affectivity, the paradoxical public/private spaces of Hong Kong, and the societal pressures that can result in violence, sickness, and suicide.
The Corner of Luxury and Crime is able to play out these diverse concerns in part because of the artist's own complex relationship with Hong Kong and its art scene. To’s art background is rela- tively international but combines with several locally produced projects. Having taken part in solo and group shows in many countries, and having received his art training in Australia, To has an admittedly ambivalent relationship with Hong Kong. On the one hand this is his home, with his family and many friends here, yet, on the other, he feels stifled by the local art scene and its lack of opportunities.13 It is precisely this ambivalence that makes his work particularly relevant to issues of representation in Hong Kong. For Judy Cheung, skyLink refers to Hong Kong only symbolically, through international travel, while Map Office’s efforts tend to be about process and conditions, not identity or the personal politics of representation. Therefore, To’s work fulfills yet another approach to Hong Kong imagery, playing out personal identity politics in the context of public/private space and societal pressures.
The work takes place in a “public” park located between the Grand Hyatt, one of Hong Kong’s most expensive hotels, and the Hong Kong Arts Centre, a multipurpose space for exhibitions and arts education. This park is particularly important as a site for these “performances” since it is not actually public at all, but rather owned or leased by the Grand Hyatt. However, since its location is adjacent to a major street and pedestrian bridge, the hotel must allow public access. This ambiguity between public and private space is typical of a city where true public space is difficult to find and access. Layered over these concerns is the spatial/cultural disconnect To highlights between the Grand Hyatt and the Arts Centre, a kind of metonymic paradox that represents the lack of dialogue between “Art” and the symbols of luxury, business and success.
Adding more levels of meaning are the public sculptures and the references to pressures that push many Hong Kong people to suicide. The public sculptures are critiqued, from the artists’ perspec- tive, for their intent to positively intervene in public space only to end up being ignored, providing little but generic decoration. This lack of affectivity found in the sculptures is then echoed by the staged protagonists in his work, (over)acting out various stages of sickness, death, or suicide next to the sculptures. The work contains a rich set of connotations related to how an individual nego- tiates a sense of self and community in a city obsessed with the superficial trappings of wealth and power and the devastating effects on those who cannot “succeed” under these pressures.
⁄ , “ , ” Amy Cheung is another Hong Kong-based artist, born and raised in the SAR but university edu- cated in London. Cheung could be seen as the typical international artist in that she has spent much of her adult life away from her place of birth in artists’ residencies, jobs, and projects around
Amy Cheung, 1/36 Spatial Plan Series, 2002, Plexiglas, video, objects. Installation at Kwai Tsing Theatre, Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artist. the world. Yet in the last several years she has returned to Hong Kong more often, renewing connections with her family and their factory in southern Guangdong and taking a much more active role in the Hong Kong art scene.14 These shifts have affected the content of her work, though it remains apparently untethered to any specific place.
1/36 Runaway Spatial Plan Series,from 2002, for example, is a full-scale version of an actual container made entirely of machine-sculpted plexiglass. At one end of this transparent container is an interior video projection of various people somersaulting through a cloud-filled sky. These free-falling figures seem lost, especially when you see the outdoor installation from its most impressive viewpoint: on board Hong Kong’s MTR train as it enters the Kwai Fong station at night. The installation glows with light as it sits almost dead center in the plaza outside the Kwai Tsing Theatre.
The installation, at least on the surface, is making a clear reference to the fifty-eight Chinese immigrants who suffocated in the back of a container truck on the ferry passage between Zeebrugge and Dover in June 2000 and the many more who have died attempting to enter Europe and other first-world destinations. Yet the piece is far from a mournful memorial in that its imagery and structure also refer to concerns outside specific events and emigration.
It is important to note the use of the container as a repeating motif in exhibitions and artists’ projects in recent years.15 In fact, Amy Cheung and Gutierrez and Portefaix have all made numerous works related to these shipping objects. And Cheung herself has suggested that the work be read both as topical and in reference to broad issues of travel, consumption, and shipping.
More specifically, note the little black ram (from the Chinese horoscope) chained to the front of the container, as if ready to pull it away in some impossible feat of strength. Viewed from the front, the work appears more like a screen, showing the falling figures with the tiny black ram just below. From this vantage point, this version of Spatial Plan Series tends to generate a very different narrative, separate from its primary shape as a container. The “spiritual” connotations of movement, limbo, heaven, transfiguration, and so on, read in conflict with the violence suggested by a literal reading. The container can then be seen as referencing at once the degradation of people who are literally shipped around the world and the continuous, never-ending movement of goods, thereby
conflating the superficial desire for products with the many deaths that potentially can occur in this same object/space.
The power of 1/36 Runaway Spatial Plan Series comes from this precarious balance between aesthetics and its often tragic, globally relevant and disturbing content. And this is where Amy Cheung has more in common with To than with the other artists discussed above. For To and Amy Cheung, the surface aesthetic of the work is of great importance, where for Gutierrez and Portefaix and Judy Cheung, such conventional notions of “beauty” are of far less importance. In the case of Map Office the aesthetic is far more utilitarian, less concerned with the specifics of individuals and more with the larger processes that create the contexts in which we live.
From another perspective, Spatial Plan represents a very “local” work in harmony with its more expansive references. The concern for Chinese immigrants dying on their way to Europe strikes a particularly painful chord for many Hong Kong residents. Considering the fact that the majority of Hong Kong people may only be one, two, or three generations removed from these kinds of perilous emigrations, there could be powerful evocations. Added to this are the origins of the fifty- eight victims—all from China’s southern Fujian Province, Hong Kong’s closest coastal neighbour.
Map Office’s notion of Hong Kong as a site for “shipping and shopping” (from HK Lab II) takes on a somewhat different tenor in this context. That Territories from Map Office avoids any sense of social agency has been noted above, but it’s worthwhile to reemphasize the distinctions I’m making here. I’m not suggesting that Amy Cheung’s or Hiram To’s work are somehow more “accurate” or representative because they work from an individual/cultural conceptual platform. On the contrary, I’m suggesting that among Gutierrez and Portefaix, Judy Cheung, Hiram To, and Amy Cheung we have a highly fluent yet significantly diverse set of representational strategies that might summarily represent Hong Kong without delimiting that function.
Map Office’s propositions on the conditions and processes that inform the lives of people in the PRD is both useful and valid in part because it does not get bogged down in the minutiae of popular culture or identity construction. Because they take a highly problematic, detached position towards their subjects, Gutierrez and Portefaix are able to “map”—that is, to cover a much larger set of concerns than the approaches taken by To or Amy Cheung.
Judy Cheung is situated somewhere between, just like her cups and little bottles, never really originating from anywhere in particular but paradoxically able to reference something corporately or anecdotally specific. Unlike To, where the layers of public vs. private, public sculpture masquerading as “quality of life” objects vs. immense social pressures, all relate to specific realities of quotidian life in Hong Kong. For To, it is the aesthetics and the approach that are atypically Hong Kong. The use of lenticular photos and the fact that the project was shown, in various versions, in Australia, Hong Kong, and Canada, all add up to a context that, though perhaps embedded in “local” concerns, is always enacted from an outsider’s perspective.
— In their conflicting positions between the local and international, these artists neither succumb to hybridity and its discontents nor fall into a concrete notion of the local.16 This can boil down to a relatively straightforward question: How do we avoid representing Hong Kong in either a one-dimensional fashion or as a “purely” hybrid space lacking local specificities of any recognizable
nature? It is clear that representation itself is highly problematic, not only in one-off projects but even more so in cross-cultural exchanges of any kind. As Mari Carmen Ramirez reminds us,
‘Identity’ is not an ‘essence’ that can be translated into a particular set of conceptual or visual traits. It is, rather, a negotiated construct that results from the multiple positions of the subject vis-à-vis the social, cultural, and political conditions which contain it.
This leads to the question of how curatorial practice can represent diverse social, ethnic, or political groups without reductionism or stereotyping. Hong Kong, as a site of trade, as a “port” in the broadest sense of the word, is both a stereotype and a truism. As one of the busiest ports in the world, the SAR’s place as node in the global movement of goods and finances makes up a large part of its image. However, from this position it is not just goods or currencies that are exchanged, but also images and people in a fluid and disruptive state of flux, creating a mixed imagescape. More importantly, this imagescape is not neutral—the transmission and production of images in Hong Kong affects how those very images are read and exemplifies how our sense of place and local specificities and origins are complicated through such image traffic. Notions of local vs. non-local and nation vs. the individual and family are further problematized when travel, either physically or through the cultural imaginary created in the contemporary mediascape, becomes not remarkable but the norm. Strategies of resistance, like those proposed here, are then created to counter or complement this imagistic and physical movement. It is this context that can be seen as a foundation for Hong Kong’s visual culture.
More generally, this becomes about the efficacy of using national, political, and/or ethnic labels as markers for cultural exchange. In what ways is the image of Chinese art helped or hindered when diverse practices such as those found in Taiwan, Beijing, and Hong Kong are all grouped together in the same show? Or, conversely, when mainland Chinese artists are labeled simply “Chinese?” How does this represent what we might know as Chinese? Is this “multiculturalism”? Is this perhaps a flattened, homogenous image being presented in political support of a singular nationalist “Chinese” or a dispersed notion lost in the vagrancies of globalization and hybridity theory? More importantly, if this structure is faulty, what kind of strategies might be implemented to make intercultural exchanges more useful?
It is important to emphasize here that I am not making a distinction between good and bad cultural representations. Instead, I am suggesting that modes of representation based purely on national/ethnic grounds are increasingly invalid. The complications found in the “local” surely make terms like “Chinese Art” potentially useless for art historians, but even more so for those directly involved in producing and disseminating representations through curatorial practice. And this is not simply about better terminology—it is more a concern with reconfiguring the structures that empower such naming processes and offering alternatives for doing so.
It might not be too much to ask for the “real” Hong Kong to stand up and be identified, for Hong Kong art to more concretely position itself in regard to “Asia.”The problem is that we might never notice or acknowledge this act, and—like Decker in Philip K. Dick’s story—it may not be so important to distinguish who is real and who is pretending, or even who is telling the real story. The better question might be how and why they are telling this particular story of “Chinese” artists at all.
Amy Cheung, 1/36 Spatial Plan Series, 2002, Plexiglas, video, objects. Installation at Kwai Tsing Theatre, Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artist.
Notes 1 The title refers to the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York: Doubleday, 1968), adapted for Ridley Scott's film Bladerunner (1982). Note that portions of this essay are based on my recent Traversing HK: Strategies of Representation and Resistance in Lens-Based Media, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hong Kong, 2004. Thanks to Hiram To for the title suggestion. 2 The title “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region,” or HKSAR, is applied to Hong Kong after its “return” to China in 1997. It implies a paradoxical presence as a city inherently part of China but separated by a series of immigration points and strict rules as to who can come from the mainland to Hong Kong and vice versa. 3 skyLink was shown at Para/Site Art Space from April 28 to May 29, 2005, in the group show Curiosities: Post-art from the edge.A connected project was shown at the Fringe Club Fotogalerie, Hong Kong, with approximately the same dates. See note 11 below for other connections between the projects. 4 In fact, the dragon pops up again and again in Hong Kong governmental and private branding strategies. See the Brand Hong Kong Web site for a specific example (http://www.brandhk.gov.hk/brandhk/eindex.htm) and the Hong Kong Tourism Association website for similar imaging strategies (www.discoverhongkong.com). Also see chapter one in my Traversing HK: Strategies of Representation and Resistance in Lens- Based Media, 87-137. 5 Comments on Cheung's feelings towards Hong Kong come from e-mail interviews with the artist conducted from April to September 2005. Regarding her ambivalence towards the city, she says, “I have fond memories of Hong Kong—very British, sophisticated, and unique. Often, I dreamt about the peak and how serene and romantic it seemed to me. When I visited HK last, I specifically took a trip to the peak and found it very disappointing, full of concrete and tourists.” 6 See www.map-office.com for more. 7 Laurent Gutierrez and Valerie Portefaix, Mapping HK (Hong Kong: Map Book Publishers, 2000). 8 Laurent Gutierrez, Valerie Portefaix, and Ezio Manzini, eds., HK Lab (Hong Kong: Map Book Publishers, 2002) and Gutierrez, Portefaix, et. al., HK Lab II (Hong Kong: Map Book Publishers, 2004). I will be the editor of HK Lab III, to be published in the fall of 2006. 9 Gutierrez and Portefaix, 12. 10 Gutierrez and Portefaix, 15. It is useful to note other important influences for Mapping HK: Rem Koolhaus and Le Corbusier, with generous doses of Walter Benjamin, which go some way toward explicating both their writing style and methodology. 11 Territories ran from September 9 to October 3, 2004 at Para/Site Art Space, only a few months before Judy Cheung's show in the same gallery. Additionally, in February and March of 2004, Para/Site held an exchange exhibition at Centre A in Vancouver, where Judy Cheung now resides. 12 I am intentionally using the phrase “practitioner/observer” as opposed to “participant/observer” to point out the ways in which Map Office both describes and takes part in the processes they image in their work. For more on this structure see the introduction in my Traversing HK: Strategies of Representation and Resistance in Lens-Based Media, 1-26. 13 All discussions of To’s “attitude” towards Hong Kong come from personal interviews conducted from May to September 2005. For a more ‘op ed’ approach to the current state of the Hong Kong art scene see my recent article “Doer's Droop,” South China Morning Post, August 23, 2005, C6. 14 All biographical information on Cheung comes from interviews with the artist conducted in August and September 2005. 15 There have been dozens of container-related projects over the years. For example, the Kaohsiung Museum in Southern Taiwan has held the International Container Art Festival for several years. In 1996 the Container 96–Art Across Oceans project was held in Copenhagen. Art Basel Miami also housed twenty galleries in containers in their 2005 show. Also see the following Web site for related architectural projects using containers: http://fabprefab.com/fabfiles/containerbayhome.htm. 16 For more on critiques of hybridity as a useful construct for examining Hong Kong and Chinese art, see chapter four of my Traversing HK: Strategies of Representation and Resistance in Lens-Based Media, 181-237. Also see Joan Kee, “Art, Hong Kong, and Hybridity: A Task of Reconsideration,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, no. 2 (Summer/June 2003), 90-97, and David Clarke, "Varieties of Cultural Hybridity: Hong Kong Art in the Late Colonial Era," Public Culture 9, no. 3 (spring 1997). 17 Mari Carmen Ramirez, “Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics of Representation,” in Reesa Greenberg et. al., eds., Thinking About Exhibitions (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 23.
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As the beautiful scenery lasts no more today, please don’t put more sorrows on me. As the sunset emits its remaining glare, it will disappear in the foreseeable future. –Lyrics from “The Wonder of Red”1
On March 9, 2003, people around the world participated in a historical moment when they witnessed the statue of Saddam Hussein being tugged down from a high concrete pedestal in Baghdad in images that were broad- cast by international mass media. This scene was demon- strated as a moment of joyful “liberation” in Baghdad, especially when the broken head of Saddam Hussein’s statue was smashed by a group of Iraqis and then dragged down the road as a spectacle of procession. This televised outburst of vengeance and energy resem- bled that of the destruction of the monuments of Lenin as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The destruc- tion of monuments by citizens symbolizes the end of disfavoured political power that, in turn, receives welcome commentary from most of the mass media. However, the psychology of public response to such public spectacle is far more complex than a single interpretation. In 1996, an artist, Pan Xing Lei, defaced the Queen Victoria statue in Victoria Park in Hong Kong in response to the upcoming 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China. The event spawned a wide range of heated debates on various issues from art to politics and society. Laura Mulvey has analyzed the effects of disgracing monuments; she states that once the Pan destruction of monuments attracts the attention of the public, the meaning of the monuments destabilizes, and significance shifts “between the before and the after of their disgrace.”2 In other words, a monument has a silent existence that most people do not register before its destruction, but the disgrace provides stimulation and an outlet for people to release their desires.
Viewing Pan’s performance as a key to opening Pandora’s box, I will investigate the desires released during this event and its significance to society. It is phenomenal to see how such a small performance could prompt such heated debates in Hong Kong, not only among people in the art field but among government administrators, politicians, the media, and the general public as well. Reading the event in the context of Hong Kong history, it is evident that political transition and harsh cultural conflict created a stage for the people of Hong Kong to play out their struggle for survival. For as much as the survival of the individual or of the collective came into play, the people of Hong Kong portrayed their desires in various ways—through their worries, needs, or interests—via the destruction of a statue. The dialogues generated by the people of Hong Kong during Pan Xing Lei’s performance and its aftermath on issues such as the interpretation of art, cultural identity, the public sphere, and democracy and violence, serve as historical and sociopolit-
ical texts for us to understand not only a specific time period in Hong Kong and the unique post-colonial situation of East Asia, but also to reflect on current crises, wars, and demonstrations around the world.
On September 16, 1996, around noon, Pan Xing Lei arrived at Queen Victoria Park, went straight to the Queen Victoria Statue, climbed up a handmade ladder to the top of the statue, and attacked the nose of the statue with a hammer. He wanted to make the nose smaller, emulating the size and shape of a Chinese nose. A few high school girls witnessed the performance and took some pictures with a pocket camera; these became the only record of the moment. Ascending to the shoulder of the Queen, Pan Xing Lei then poured red paint first over the statue and then over his own body until it had evenly covered up every inch of both his flesh and the bronze of the statue. The attacker then threw down notices printed on red paper to passers-by, explaining his discontent with colonial culture in Hong Kong. At one o’clock, policemen and a park manager came to the scene, persuading the artist to come down to the ground. The police later took Pan to a precinct for further investigation, and at six o’clock in the evening he was transferred to a hospital for psychiatric observation. The artist was released from the hospital the next evening and put on trial on the third day.3
Pan Xing Lei’s intentionally drastic action drew immediate attention—and regulation—from the government, as well as intense and extensive responses from the mass media. Journalists from Hong Kong newspapers appeared at the spot of Pan’s performance no later than the policemen. During the aftermath, the action was covered in all major newspapers and magazines. For over a month, opinions pro and con were printed and distributed to people on the street in Hong Kong. However, the violent performance by Pan Xing Lei was generally viewed negatively by the public, including members of the local art community, insofar as it related to issues of identity, the distor- tion of Hong Kong culture, and public interests.4
1996 was a time of uncertainty in Hong Kong. Fear of censorship and political control over every- day life came hand in hand with the imminent transition of sovereignty to communist China. As exemplified by the bloodshed on June 4, 1989, in Tian’anmen Square, China’s record of strict social control cast a shadow over the people of Hong Kong, who enjoyed their greatest freedom during the period of British rule. During most of Hong Kong’s colonial history, the media was subject to political control by the British government with the enactment of laws such as the Control of Publications (Consolidation) Ordinance, in 1951, and the Film Censorship Guidelines, in 1973. At the end of British colonization, many such laws controlling the media were abolished.5 But the prospect of a new age under the communists, who maintain firm political control over the media in mainland China, worried the people of Hong Kong.6 Pan Xing Lei’s vandalism of the Queen Victoria Statue became entangled in those worries and fears, further inducing the anxiety of the public about the possibility of tighter political control by the Chinese authorities and the loss of democracy in the future. Pan’s passionate and harsh attacks on colonial culture further trig- gered the defence system of Hong Kong’s public to solidify a Hong Kong identity.
However, this anxiety was manifested in paradoxical ways in the case of Pan Xing Lei. Some critics condemned the “Big China” complex signified by the de-colonization implications of Pan’s work. In the article “The Ghost of a Red Army in Art Hovering Above Hong Kong,”art critic Liu Shuan Yang criticized Pan for narrow-mindedly seeing the Queen Victoria statue as a symbol of colonial
power that needed to be destroyed while ignoring the historical and cultural significance of the monument. Liu associated the colour of the red paint with that of the red army and the defacing of the statue with the tradition of destruction exercised by the Cultural Revolution in China. He questioned the validity of Pan’s work on the ground that the statue was already an obsolete symbol.7 For Liu, the passing of British colonization in Hong Kong was foreseeable and imminent, and Pan’s action was, therefore, redundant. Many people in the art field in Hong Kong, such as Oscar Ho,Director of the Hong Kong Art Centre at the time, shared this opinion.
Although Liu did not interpret the content of the art in relation to the identity of the artist, identi- ty did play an influential and suggestive role. Pan Xing Lei was educated and raised in mainland China, and his identity as a recent immigrant from China directed one Hong Kong art critic’s interpretation of Pan’s performance towards an emphasis on Chinese nationalism. In addition, Pan Xing Lei’s open critique of Hong Kong's lack of culture further provoked strong responses. While questioning Pan’s legitimacy to “speak for the people of Hong Kong,”Liu praised earlier immigrant artists’ attempts to stimulate Hong Kong society through the depiction of historical buildings and historical pictures of Hong Kong. Liu’s reading and comments revealed his defence and desire to locate and preserve a Hong Kong identity based on its own culture and history.
Ma Chien, a writer and cultural critic and another relatively recent immigrant from mainland China,8 also viewed the Queen Victoria statue as a representative of British colonialism. In contrast to Liu’s opinion, Ma gave a positive comment on Pan’s performance and claimed that it took merely five minutes to restructure the nose of Queen Victoria in Chinese form.9 In opposition to the anti-Chinese nationalism of Liu Shuan Yang, Ma favoured Chinese culture over British colonial culture in Hong Kong but emphasized that Chinese culture does not equal communist China. Ma Chien argued that whether Pan acted out of loyalty to red violence or just in parody was a debatable issue.10 In other words, Ma is pro-Chinese on the cultural level but against hegemony in terms of polity. He also used Paris as an example—that Parisian culture surpasses both the power of the Left and the Right. In this respect, Ma hoped that Hong Kong could develop its own cultural trends in order to keep its current lifestyle.11 However, according to Ma Chien, its own cultural trends were not supposed to be rooted in colonial culture.
Wu Mali, a Taiwanese artist, analyzed Pan’s performance in another article that explored the correlation between interpreting art and the viewer’s identities. From the point of view of an outsider, a non-mainlander or Hong Kong citizen, Wu argued that the colour red both implies violence and is the representative colour of Chinese communism.12 Wu further stated that when artists who recently emigrated from mainland China to Hong Kong evaluated Pan’s performance to be a successful work, they read Pan’s action as a denial of colonialism and ultimately a victory for the mainland Chinese. However, the Hong Kong artist’s overall negative responses towards Pan’s work, in contrast to that of the relatively recent mainland Chinese immigrants, revealed an equation between the violence of Pan’s performance and the imminent political control from mainland China over Hong Kong.13 Though some Hong Kong art critics disagreed with Wu’s opin- ion, her analysis, which was based upon identity, in effect de-neutralized art criticism and showed that identity does matter in the interpretation of artworks. Interpretation of an artwork reveals the “desire” of the reader rather than the intention of the artist. Consequently, contradictory readings of Pan’s performance, originating from oppositional desires and wishes—that is, Chinese nation- alism versus Hong Kong localism—created a dichotomy of dialogues centering on Pan’s action.
However, localism cannot be easily defined by a simplified discourse of either anti-Chinese nationalism or anti-British colonialism. As Rey Chow states in her article “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s,”“between Britain and China, Hong Kong’s postcoloniality is marked by a double impossibility—it will be as impossible to submit to Chinese nationalist/nativist repossession as it has been impossible to submit to British colonialism.”14 Chow points out the reality that Hong Kong could not gain its independence and hegemony after the end of the British colonization. Moreover, Hong Kong citizens have no say in Hong Kong’s political transformation from British to Chinese rule. Hong Kong is situated inbetween Chinese culture and English culture, and Chow argues that post-colonial reality does not allow it to reclaim a “native” culture.15 Therefore, a Hong Kong localism based on the “origin” or “roots” of a dominant culture proves to be impossible. In this respect, the contradictory readings of Pan Xing Lei's destruction of the Queen Victoria Statue precisely reflect the dilemma of a Hong Kong identity that neither English nor Chinese culture can satisfy the needs of the Hong Kong’s people as one community. However, the oppositional interpretations of Pan’s performance do reveal the openness of interpretations of an artwork. Besides anti-Chinese Nationalism, and anti-British Colonialism, can there be other interpretations of Pan’s performance that provide a universal claim?
In spite of his preference for Chinese culture, Ma Chien brought up a key point about the flux of an artwork’s meaning; that is, whether Pan’s “red” refers to loyalty to or is a parody of red violence.16 Another Hong Kong culture critic, Liang Wen Daw, argued that interpretation based on the parameter of simplified identity should be replaced by in-depth rumination, redirecting the discussion of Pan’s performance to a focus on collective memory and the political meaning of public monuments. Liang stated that it is worth thinking about why there are always monuments of the sovereign in public space and where they go after transitions of sovereignty.17
The geographical history of the Queen Victoria monument tells a story of the transition of political power in Hong Kong. During the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901), the United Kingdom reached its peak of imperial expansion. Among its colonies around the world, Hong Kong was metaphorically described as “the pearl on the crown of the queen.”The building of a statue of an enthroned Victoria and the installation of the statue in Hong Kong in the year of 1896 was initiated to commemorate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.18 It was initially “placed at a prominent location in Hong Kong facing out over the harbour and protected by an elaborate cupola.”19 The glory of the Queen and her victory of imperial expansion were manifested in support of British power. Later on, during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in the Second World War, the statue, along with other bronze sculptures in Hong Kong, were shipped to Japan in order to be melted down for the production of weapons.20
After the war, with the end of Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and the reinstating of British power, the statue was discovered in Japan. It was re-installed in Hong Kong in the 1950s, but in a less prominent site and with its face looking inland because “the inappropriateness of such overt imperial symbols to the new post-Second World War era of de-colonization” was recognized.21 Before Pan’s performance, there were already suggestions of removing current imperial symbols, including the Queen Victoria statue—as a reflection of the forthcoming transfer of political power.22 The movement of the statue through the years coincides with shifts of sovereignty in Hong Kong, symbolizing the rise and fall of political powers in Hong Kong. More importantly, the displacement and removal of the monument reveal the political and military power and violence hidden behind the scenes—the British having taken Hong Kong as their colony by military force, the Japanese having done the same with Britain. Furthermore, the material constituting the statue is itself an embodiment of power and violence, since the Japanese military once intended to use the Queen Victoria statue for weaponry production during World War II.23 Another example in
reverse is Saddam Hussein’s Victory Arch, which was cast from the steel of melted-down Iraqi weapons to “celebrate” the end of the Iraq-Iran war.24 The Queen Victoria statue, therefore, mani- fests the movement of power and violence through the history of Hong Kong.
From this perspective, Pan’s work can be read as a disclosure of the transferability of violence from the top down. His performance of violence echoes the political violence in Hong Kong’s history, for which Queen Victoria is adopted as a symbol. Always placed high above viewers’ eye level and cast in huge scale, the monument is a symbol of the overwhelming power of the Queen over her humble subjects.25 In order to interrupt and destroy its permanence, Pan Xing Lei used a hand-made ladder to climb up to the top of the statue and perform a “temporary” action of blasphemy— “blasphemy” in the sense that Pan Xing Lei did this performance during a period of public pro- British sentiment in Hong Kong.
Toward the end of British colonization, Chris Patten, the last Governor of Hong Kong, in 1992 replaced the British appeasement and acquiescence policy with democratic reforms and built the image of Hong Kong as an island of British legacies—“liberty, prosperity, the rule of law, and a clean and efficient civil service.”26 The democratization process initiated by Patten made the Sino-British relationship difficult and met with disapproval from the Beijing government.27 In the British mass media, Great Britain was portrayed as a guardian of Hong Kong’s freedom and a maker of Hong Kong’s success, while the history of the Opium War was largely neglected.28 In this atmosphere, Pan Xing Lei’s performance was politically incorrect in that it sent an anti-colonial message. For instance, there were no arguments that the sculptor Raggi’s work, the Queen Victoria statue, should be restored instead of the traces of Pan Xing Lei’s performance being maintained or documented. The absence of such opinion revealed the blasphemy of such an idea at the time, even though the placement of Raggi’s Queen Victoria statue in a public space symbolized and was made possible by British Colonial power gained by military force.
A symbol of political power from the top down was thus subverted by an individual and artistic revolution from the bottom up. Pan’s performance echoes his experience as a student demonstrator at Tian’anmen Square in the spring of 1989. At that time, he was one of the students who built the Goddess of Freedom statue at the square, and he joined the hunger strike until he was hospitalized. Pan’s performance shares the spirit of the Goddess of Freedom—a people’s art rather than the art of the authority. The Goddess was constructed with temporary and easily manageable materials— manageable in that common people could make them, in contrast to the difficulties associated with bronze as a material, whose use requires financial support from the government for labour and equipment. Just as the Goddess of Freedom represents the demonstrating students’ desire for democracy, the defacement of the Queen Victoria Statue shows Pan Xing Lei’s desire to stop political violence and let the voices of people be heard.
Pan’s destruction of a political monument with modest materials can be traced to Lenin’s idea of “monumental propaganda,”a so-called “people’s art” that emphasizes popularism rather than elitism, that can be part of everyday life, and that helps to shape a new revolutionary mass con- sciousness.29 Lenin insisted on a socialist art that no longer served the elite in society. For statues, Lenin encouraged modest production, quickly executed forms, and cheap materials, in contrast to conventional statues made of durable materials such as marble, bronze, or granite.30
Lenin’s “people’s art” called for a revolution in the form and production of art. In other words, Lenin intended to employ popular art to subvert high art or the traditional notion of a statue,
though after his death the fetishization of Lenin as an icon of communist order ironically super- seded his original revolutionary idea.31 Adopting the idea of a “people’s art,”Pan Xing Lei chose modest means of production to perform a political action. The temporary violence executed by Pan Xing Lei may symbolically signify a moment of individual liberation free from the violence of the powerful.
Pan’s act of violence exemplifies the burst of energy in a complex historical moment in Hong Kong. Rather than arousing sentiments of revenge toward prior regimes, as in Russia and Germany, Pan’s drastic action drew out complicated feelings and desires, such as nostalgia for British domination among the people of Hong Kong, their ambivalence about the Chinese take- over, and the search for and confirmation of Hong Kong identity.
However, it is hard to situate Pan’s work within Chinese cultural “traditions,”as his performance has closer links to the avant-garde art tradition and Lenin’s idea of “monumental propaganda” rather than the “traditions” of the Cultural Revolution in China; this paradoxically discloses the hybrid character of contemporary cultures. Viewing Pan’s performance as an act of resistance to violence and power and as a giving of voice to the powerless creates a third space that does not link Hong Kong’s identity to any dominant powers in its history. Rey Chow argues that a third space is one that falls “between the colonizer and the dominant native culture, a space that cannot simply be collapsed into the latter even as resistance to the former remains foremost.”32 After all, if the red paint of Pan Xing Lei’s performance symbolizes blood, whose blood would it be, that of victims or gun holders?
Regardless of the suggested message for democracy in Pan Xing Lei’s performance, the general public in Hong Kong scorned Pan’s action as a wrongful criminal act against public property. One citizen analyzed the performance in a juridical perspective, arguing that no one has the “right” to destroy public property even under the pretext of “art,”and each citizen shares the “responsibility” to respect others’ rights, especially within a community.33 This critic further argued that the case should remain a “public affair” since it concerned public rights “injured.”34 What goes public ends in the public. Pan Xing Lei was charged for damaging public property and sentenced to a twenty- eight-day imprisonment. His sentence coincided with the publishing of a newspaper article, “Destroying Public Property Should be Punished,”in Ming Pao,one of the most popular daily newspapers in Hong Kong.35 The article’s title represents the general public’s opinion that the common good overrides an individual’s freedom—that is, that respect for and maintenance of public property is valued above art in any destructive form. The people of Hong Kong take for granted that a society as one community should be governed under laws abided by all citizens.
In contrast to the public’s negative comments on the defacement of public property, there was individual support for Pan’s performance insofar as it related to the importance of freedom of speech. One article claimed that the artist should be released as soon as possible as a demonstra- tion to the world that the Hong Kong government is tolerant of artistic freedom.36 In that author’s view, freedom of artistic expression should be much more important to society than the mainte- nance of one piece of public property. The same author continued by asking the government to wisely use the case of Pan Xing Lei as an opportunity to show the world that it was different from authoritative countries that imprison dissenters in psychiatric hospitals.37 This article implies that freedom of speech is a priority to be protected in any society and that the range of tolerance of individual freedoms by the government is equal to the range of freedom of a nation-state.
Consequently, freedom of speech is used as a vital index to determine and evaluate freedom at large in a society. In this opinion, individual freedom should be protected against social control as freedom of speech is viewed as a fundamental human right.
The debates, pro and con, that centered on Pan’s performance both aimed at pursuing the com- mon good, but they revealed a conflict between the individual and the collective in the public sphere. The former looking for government tolerance towards Pan’s artistic action, emphasized individual freedom (here, freedom of speech) to benefit all, but the latter asking for legal justice for Pan's wrongdoing, put its focus on social control. On the one hand, the Hong Kong public, dis- pleased by violence enacted in the name of art, fought back with the power of public sanction in the forms of juridical sentence and negative responses in the mass media in order to defend public “justice.”In other words, a “common” good was valued above “individual” interests while the legit- imate violence of jurisdiction was regarded as a necessary means for the good of the majority. On the other hand, the pro-Pan opinion implied that the term “art” referred to the epitome of self- expression, with innovative ideas and actions challenging a conventional cultural framework that should be protected to prevent censorship.38 The common good became a double-edged discourse of legitimation that both sides employed. Although the negative opinions were much more popu- lar among the Hong Kong residents regarding Pan Xing Lei’s act of vandalism, people’s responses to the case became more complicated once the focus of public opinion shifted to censorship.
In early 1997, months after Pan’s sentence at court, Pan Xing Lei received a letter from the Urban Services Department of the Hong Kong Museum of Art informing him that his previously approved project, “Artists’ Residency Project 1996,”had been cancelled. The letter explained that Pan’s “attitude” towards art was incompatible with the city’s policy of promoting art and preserva- tion.39 The city organizes the Artists’ Residency Project, and application is open to all artists. Selected artists stay at the studios of the Hong Kong Art Centre for ten to twelve weeks and carry out corresponding responsibilities, such as a minimum twelve hours of work per week and a giv- ing a public lecture. In return, artists in the residency receive wages on an hourly basis. The cancel- lation of Pan Xing Lei’s project was therefore a sanction followed by material punishment.40 As this cancellation threatened censorship to art creation in general, people in the art field in Hong Kong changed their target of attack from Pan's wrongdoing to the administrative control of art.
The media coverage of Pan Xing Lei consequently shifted its focus to censorship. In one newspa- per report that juxtaposed divergent opinions on the event, the journalist stated that the govern- ment held a negative view towards Pan Xing Lei but denied the accusations of administrative con- trol over artistic creation.41 According to the report, a representative of the Urban Council said that the Council did not desire for the public to believe that it supported an artist who would commit a vandalistic kind of art, especially upon another's artwork. It is implied that the cancellation by the Council was intended to “prevent” and “dissuade” similar art forms and thus “protect” art works in general. The rhetoric of “public good” was employed as a legitimate defence in response to the accusation of governmental control of art.
However, a minority of city councillors, represented by Huang Ying Chi, questioned the legitimacy of a cancellation based on the criminal record of an applicant when there was no such clause of prohibition written in the application guidelines.42 In addition, these city councillors opined that the decision would bewilder other artists since Pan had already served his criminal sentence. As reported by the journalists, people in the art community who were previously against Pan’s perfor-
mance now supported Pan and reproached the Council for its “absurdity” and for being “unpro- fessional” and “unreasoning.”Although the art community accused the authority of a false admin- istrative process, it was in essence a protest against the right of interpreting law and art controlled and manipulated by the government.
The cancellation of Pan’s project by the government posed a threat to artistic freedom, a vital part of the survival and development of art. In other words, the question of who has the right to inter- pret a work of art determines the relationship between power and knowledge. If politics takes over professionalism in the art field, freedom of artistic expression will be smothered and art will be exploited as merely a service to the powerful. Consequently, dominant discourses marginalize the dissident while the devaluation of professionalism erases the autonomy of art. Therefore, the Hong Kong art community’s protest was a necessary struggle to protect its own survival. These interests, however, have universal value in that they represent freedom of speech at large, an essen- tial characteristic of democracy.
The Vice President of the Joint Committee of the Cultural Field further scolded the Council for smothering the opportunities of public debate and communication.43 The Joint Committee’s idea of public participation in public affairs and the art community’s accusation of the government’s not using “reason” originate from Jürgen Habermas’s “liberal model of the public sphere,”an ideal notion of a classical public realm in which reason, freedom, and discourse are valued. Habermas's public sphere is composed of privileged citizens participating in public discourse as disinterested members deliberating on policy regarding the general good, free from coercion and violence.44 As James Curran states in his “Rethinking Media and Democracy,”Habermas’s idea and the debates following have “given rise to a normative conception of the contemporary public sphere as a neu- tral space within society, free of both state or corporate control, in which the media should make available information affecting the public good, and facilitate a free, open, and reasoned public dialogue that guides the direction of society.”45 According to Curran, mass media plays an impor- tant role in providing different voices with a platform upon which to be heard, and the freedom of speech plays an essential role in the successful realization of the liberal public sphere.
However, since Habermas’ classic model of the public sphere is based on direct and individual par- ticipation, he ignores that modern democracy is moderated by a representative system rather than direct participation by all of its citizens. James Curran argues, “This approach does not take ade- quate account of the intermediary structures of modern democracy.”46 Habermas himself recog- nizes later that “the corporate organization of public life and the commodification of culture” restrict the function of the public sphere.47 In a representational democracy, minority voices are ignored or weakened by the mainstream while powerful interest groups can have a greater influ- ence on politics. A virtual equality upheld by the classical model of the public sphere merely romanticizes the public sphere. In other words, Habermas’s ideal notion of the public sphere com- posed of “equal” and “disinterested” parties veils the reality that a society is constituted by groups and individuals with differences—either of race, gender, age, education, financial status, or cultur- al background. Each group or individual is vested with specific interests, needs, and desires, and those of the powerless are easily ignored while those of powerful groups are heard.
In the case of Pan Xing Lei’s performance and the discussion in the media during the aftermath, two seemingly opposing discourses dominated the stage—Chinese nationalism symbolizing non- democracy and British colonization simplified as democracy. The indication of the shared imperi-
alist tendency of these two political powers was relatively ignored. For instance, the history of China after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China was erased from standard history courses in Hong Kong under British colonization,48 and the British thwarting of democracy during a large part of its colonization of Hong Kong through consensus between the Chinese government and the British rulers was also ignored. This may refer to Rey Chow’s point of view that building a Hong Kong identity following either the British imperialist or the Chinese nationalist models would only efface the reality of the struggle for survival by ordinary people. According to Rey Chow's interpretation of identity, the value of Pan Xing Lei’s performance is that it slowly revealed itself to be against political and cultural representation controlled by the powerful in the attempt to silence and/or manipulate the powerless. The protest by the Hong Kong art community also testified that it is imperative to conduct an epistemological investigation of the public sphere in order to disclose the relationship of knowledge and power and, therefore, to achieve true equality.
People desire their voices to be heard, and they want justice and transparency rather than decep- tion, manipulation, and silencing. For instance, the Hong Kong protest by a half a million middle- class citizens in July 2003 strongly demonstrates the will of the people. When information can be selected, disguised, and manipulated by the powerful, the right of interpretation will always stay in their hands, and justice based on equality will never be achieved.
Through the appropriation of an exiting work of art, Pan opened a space of free discussion in the public realm, not only on the significance of statue and on the meaning of his performance, but on issues of art, culture, and democracy. In Hong Kong Art—Culture and Decolonization,David Clarke puts it clearly that “(b)ecause of the difficulty of placing works with oppositional meanings in public space on a permanent basis, a strategy of appropriating existing sculptures was some- times adopted as a means of turning a predominantly monological public space into an arena for dialogue.”49 In this respect, Pan’s performance carved out a public sphere in which voices expressed themselves based on the speakers’ own desires, including the search for a Hong Kong identity and the need for a democratic system. The proliferation of voices reflected a time of liberation—the pre-1997 period—when the people of Hong Kong enjoyed an unprecedentedly high level of free- dom of speech.50 By revealing the violence embedded in the knowledge and power relationship, Pan’s performance provoked a re-thinking of the cultural identity of Hong Kong. However, the dichotomy of dominant discourses constrained the depth and openness of the discussion.
Pan’s performance helped open up the public sphere as theorized by Donna Adrendt, that is, “an arena in which members of the public meet to accommodate competing values and expectations and hence in which all goals are open to discussion and modification.”51 Even though the interpre- tation of art is in flux and transferable, its meanings can be ossified by the powerful into dominant discourses. The imagination and building of a Hong Kong identity would be confined in such a limited public sphere. As Pan Xing Lei’s performance attempted to disclose the essence of power in accordance with Rey Chow’s argument to deconstruct the knowledge formation from the center, it has always been, and will always be, an ongoing struggle to fight for autonomy, not only for Hong Kong citizens, but also for all people.
Special thanks to Dr. Jessica Sewell, who advised me with valuable comments and references, Ms. Erin Stratford, and Ms. Madeline Eydt; all contributed their time and intelligence to editing this article.
Notes 1 “The Wonder of Red,” a song that was popular in Hong Kong in 1983, is said to reflect the anxiety prevailing in Hong Kong society after the Sino-British negotiation about Hong Kong's future was published in the early 1980s. 2 Laura Mulvey, “Reflections on Disgraced Monuments,” in Architecture and Revolution, ed. Neil Leach (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 220. 3 Pan Xing Lei, Pan Xing Lei Art Files 1988–1998 (Hong Kong: 1998), self-published, 266-67. 4 David Clarke, Hong Kong Art—Culture and Decolonization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 119. 5 Lau Chi Kuen, Hong Kong's Colonial Legacy (Hong Kong : Chinese University Press, 1997), 157, 161–63. 6 Lau, 168. 7 Pan, 240–41. 8 Over one million Chinese left mainland China for Hong Kong following the Chinese Communist victory in 1949; see “Asia Pacific Migration Research Network, Migration Issues in the Asia Pacific, Issues Paper from Hong Kong,” available at http://unesco.org/most/apmrnwpu7,htm. 9 Pan, 240–41. 10 Pan, 241. 11 Pan, 252. 12 Pan, 253. The article was originally printed in Shin Pao on September 29, 1996. 13 Pan, 253. The article was originally printed in Shin Pao on September 29, 1996. 14 Rey Chow, “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s,” Diaspora 2.2 (Fall 1992): 151–70. 15 Ibid., 153-55. 16 Pan, 252. 17 Pan, 250. The original article by Liang Wen Daw was printed in Shin Pao on September 26, 1996. 18 Clarke, 116. 20 Clarke, 116. 21 Pan, 254. The article by Du Lin was originally printed in Shin Pao on October 22, 1997. 22 Clarke, 116. 23 Pan, 254. 24 Ibid. 25 Barbara Presnall, “Defining Sacred Spaces: The Politics of Public Monuments,” paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, August 30–September 2, 2001, 5. Ken Hollings, “Tokyo Must Be Destroyed,” available at http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=96; accessed April 10, 2003. 26 About the eternity of monuments, see “Lenin in Ruins” by Mark Lewis, in Ideology and Power in the Age of Lenin in Ruins, ed. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1991). 27 Chin-Chuan Lee, Joseph Man Chan, Zhongdan Pan, and Clement Y. K. So, “National Prisms of a Global 'Media Event',” in Mass Media and Society, ed. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (London: Arnold, 2000), 303. 28 Ralf Schwarzer, “Anticipating Stress in the Community: Worries about the Future of Hong Kong,” available at http://www.fu-berlin.de/gesund/gesu_engl/hong12.htm; accessed May 2004. 29 Lee, 303–04. 30 Mark Lewis, “What is to be Done?” in Ideology and Power in the Age of Lenin in Ruins, ed. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1991), 9. 31 Ibid. 32 Mark Lewis and Laura Mulvey, Disgraced Monument (New York: Cinema Guild, 1993). 33 Chow, 158. 34 Pan, 244. The article “Scaring You!” by Yuan Shuan Hsu was originally printed in Shin Pao. 35 Ibid., 244. Emphasis added. 36 Pan, 243. 37 Pan, 242. The article was originally printed in Ming Pao on September 21, 1996. 38 Ibid. 39 Barbara Hoffman, “Law for Art's Sake,” in Art and the Public Sphere, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 113. 40 Pan, 279. Emphasis added. 41 The decision to cancel was made first in a meeting by board members of the Museum Committee. Under the pressure of disproval from the art world in Hong Kong, the case was presented by the councillor Huang Ying Chi to the Urban Council for further discussion before a final decision was reached. 42 Pan, 176–277. The report was originally printed in Ming Pao on January 16, 1997. 43 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Art and the Public Sphere, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 35. 45 James Curran, “Rethinking Media and Democracy,” in Mass Media and Society (London: Arnold, 2000), 135. Emphasis added. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Yin Chi Huang, “Hong Kong Perspective: Confusing Identity,” available at http://news.chinatimes.com, accessed April 22, 2004. 49 Clark, 116. 50 About the issue of the freedom of speech in Hong Kong, please see “The Media and Communications Networks of Hong Kong” by George Shen in Whither Hong Kong? and “A Strictly Controlled 'Free Press',” in Hong Kong's Colonial Legacy. 51 Quoted in Hoffman, 114.
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What is monumentality? I wish to distinguish this notion from the term monumental in the way it is commonly used. The latter generally refers to those huge, enduring, solemn buildings or statues that are called monuments (or monumental) because of their physical size, symbolism, and form; anyone passing a marble obelisk or bronze statue habitu- ally refers to it as a “monument,”even if he or she has no knowledge about the meaning of these statues or buildings. Monumentality refers to an integral element that lends a building, statue, or any large-scale thing a common, commemorative meaning, or refers to the collective memory contained within these physical models. Early in the twentieth century, in his “Modern Worship of Monument: Its Nature and Orgins,”the famous Austrian art historian and theoretician Alois Riegl suggested that Gu Wenda, Characters of “Still” Written by Three Men and Three Women, 1985, per- monumentality is not just represented by formance with six people splashing ink on rice paper. Courtesy of the artist. buildings or statues of a celebrated type that are specifically intended to commemorate something, but that its range should also contain examples that were not deliberately conceived as such, as well as anything that accrues value through time, such as the remains of ancient civilizations or important dated historic documents. Viewed from another standpoint, John Brinckerhoff Jackson, an American architectural historian, noticed that after the Civil War, a request came from across the nation to pronounce the Gettysburg battlefield a national monument: “Never before has a glebe of many thousands [of] acres, across so much farmland and roads, been transformed into a monument to an historic event such as happened here.”This fact made Jackson decide that “a monument could be of any form.”It did not have to be a formidable building, nor an artifice; “a monument could be a rough stone or a log; it could be the relic of the ruined wall in Jerusalem; it could even be a tree or a cross.”
So what is anti-monumentality? This notion is linked closely with the anti-authority and anti-tra- dition of avant-garde art. As mentioned above, “monumentality” makes a building, a statue, or an object a carrier of collective memory, but traditionally monuments reflect the control and shaping of collective memory by political and religious authorities. The Latin root of monumen- tality means recalling and admonishing. In order to exercise the function of admonition, official
monuments always are awesome, majestic, and inhuman structures; their huge mass controls the pubic space in which they are placed. Therefore, French scholar Georges Bataille called such monuments dikes antagonizing humanity: “It is through the forms of cathedrals and palaces that the church and the state can admonish the common people, and keep them silenced.”So it is understandable that avant-garde artists, in their stance as rebels, treat the monument as a persis- tent object of attack. Actually, we can say that all types of avant-garde art have a tendency to topple official monuments and monumentality. An example of such an artist is Claes Oldenburg, a modern American artist who designed a series of anti-monuments, including a huge pair of scis- sors that imitated the Washington Monument. He explained this project thus: “Obviously, these scis- sors imitate the Washington Monument in form, but at the same time present some interesting differences, such as the difference between metal Gu Wenda, The Myths of Lost Dynasties—Form C: Pseudo–Seal Script in and stone, between urbane modern style and Ancient Wrap, 1985–1987, ink splashed on rice paper and seal, fifty exuberant archaism, as well as the confrontation works 59 x 33 in. each. Courtesy of the artist. between flexibility and rigidity.”
The linguistic system of this anti-monumentality thus depends on two factors. One is the corpo- rality of toppling the traditional monument, including size, quality, and shape, as well as the ideas of immortality, grandiosity, and stillness that these physical factors present. Another factor is overthrowing the monumentality of traditional monuments, principally their authority and public presence, and the social orders and political rules that converge within them. Within contemporary Chinese art, the pursuit of anti-monumentality became an important phenomenon of post-Cultural Revolution art, and its political and social causes speak for themselves. Analyzing closely their magnum opuses, we see that artists carry out this pursuit in two directions. One is to create counter-monuments, and the other is an attempt to achieve real anti-monuments. The former topples traditional monumentality by subverting official monuments, as a result of which there emerges a new form of personalized monument. The latter rejects any form of monument and archives a sense of absolute anti-monumentality through this rejection. The magnum opus of the former includes the many experimental art projects that have been sited on the Great Wall, and its cause clearly responds to the traditional symbolism of the Great Wall: as the principle symbol of China, this famous ancient building actually represents a political and historic identifi- cation with modern China. Relatively, the works that could be termed anti-monumental are few in number because such work must be entirely conceptual and the form itself becomes the object of deconstructive exercises.
Gu Wenda is one of the contemporary Chinese artists who first probed deeply into the realm of anti-monumentality and made an important contribution to the emergence and development of this trend. Early in the mid 1980s, he created the first series of word-formation work, deconstruct-
Gu Wenda with Mythos of Lost Dynasties—Form B: Pseudo–Script in Ancient Wrap, 1985–1987, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. Courtesy of the artist. ing traditional calligraphy. His skillful and powerful seal script retained its focus on calligraphy pursuant to the conventional form of beauty and traditional culture, but their specious and unreadable scripts spurned the function of traditional calligraphy to express meaning. This is important because calligraphy is esteemed on the basis of traditional writing and painting techniques, whilst seal script has been closely linked with inscription and is always treated as a special media for legal documents (such as inscriptions commissioned by the first emperor of the Qin dynasty). Gu Wenda’s series invokes a clear, implicit meaning of anti-authority and anti-monumentality, and thus it became one of the most influential forms of conceptual art in the 1985 New Wave Movement.
The United Nations Monuments,which Gu Wenda began to create at the beginning of the 1990s, reflected a new development of this tendency toward anti-authority. This series of huge installations challenges traditional monuments, meanwhile establishing a new type of antagonistic monument. Like Claes Oldenburg, Gu Wenda abandoned the corporality of traditional monu- ments and their overawing sense of the eternal, choosing instead the most meaningless relics from the human body, that is, hair, to create a series consecrated to different peoples and races. The difference from Oldenburg is that Gu Wenda was able to see his project through to the end, where- by,due to the magnificence of these monumental forms, people are encouraged to think not only of a specific fine idea or concept but also a variety of paradoxes in the nature of an antagonistic monument. One of these paradoxes is Gu Wenda’s obsession with visual spectacle. Like his early word-formation seal scripts, visuality and theatricality are the most convulsive factor of these works. We can say that this interest in visuality is common to all antagonistic monuments, but Gu Wenda’s visual spectacle makes the rejection of the eternal a precondition: the scripts and patterns formed of hair are like imprints of water and ink placed in a huge space, without weight and substantiality.
The second paradox is the perseverance of collective ideas of nation, race, and state; some projects, for example, the Hong Kong Monument, were created for the memory of an important historic
Gu Wenda, United Nations: Babel of the Millenium, 1999, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Courtesy of the artist. event (the Hong Kong handover of 1997). If it is said that traditional monuments present the expressions of political or religious authority on such collectives, Gu Wenda used the hair collected from local barbers to symbolize an endless collection of “individuals.”So much hair evoked a sense of tragedy for the viewers, as if the works were less about life than about death. It seems that what these “monuments” commemorated were not the heroic and epical histories of nations and states , but the self-devotion and sacrifices of many people to these histories. On this point, Gu Wenda’s United Nations is analagous to the Vietnam War Memorial designed by Maya Lin and erected before the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
We can think further about the logic and meanings of the Forest of Stone Steles—A Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry.Gu Wenda began to conceive of this project from 1993, and twelve years later, in 2004, it was finished. So its invention actually paralleled the United Nations project; both reflected the different aspects of artistic imagination and creativity, and their relationship, similarities, and differences could be understood clearly through comparative analysis. Firstly, these two projects required an epic production process. Both took on similar dimensions and visual convulsion. Both could be considered super-eminent, antagonistic monuments, the embod- iment of monumental expression at a time when traditional monuments were being challenged in a trend towards personalizing human culture. However, there are important differences between these two works. One of them lies in their corporality and visuality: if the United Nations were illusory, dimly discernible, and non-material, the Forest of Stone Steles—A Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry should be actual, stable, and heavy. These material and visual differences come from the different objects each seeks to commemorate—if the United Nations was framed with the world, in my opinion, the Forest of Stone Steles is a personalized monument that Gu Wenda has erected for Chinese culture. Because the artist is rooted in this culture and retains close links to it, this project's deconstruction of traditional monuments and construction of anti-monumentality is more difficult, zigzagging, absurd, and imbued with a depth, that, if it were sited within the United Nations,could be incomparable.
Two inspirations for this project—the Forest of Stone Steles and Tang poetry—are both linked with the monumentality of Chinese tradition. As we see in his own introduction to this project,
Gu Wenda supports this: “There are many important forests of stone steles in Chinese history. The Forest of Stone Steles is a splendid historic and epic fact of the Chinese nation. It is a fine, rich museum. It centralizes history, culture, art, and technology. And the Forest of Stone Steles in Xi’an is a splendid example of them.”Similarly, in his opinion, Tang poetry is a comparable relic of Chinese literature: “There are innumerable commentaries and explanations on Tang poetry from many generations.”Obviously, Gu Wenda positions the Forest of Stone Steles—A Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry as “contemporary forest of stone steles” and as a unique commentary and re-translation of Tang poetry, thus linking this project with the monumental tradition in Chinese culture.
But it would be a mistake to say that Gu’s project “belongs” to this tradition. There are three principal pieces of evidence present that suggest he inherited the tradition while criticizing and expanding it. Above all, his understanding of the Forest of Stone Steles doesn’t rest on traditional notions. The study and appreciation of steles in Chinese traditional culture focuses on the historic and artistic value of stele inscriptions; the production and rubbing of steles by common craftsmen are hardly considered. But in Gu’s concept, the importance of the Forest of Stone Steles depends upon it embodiment of cultural invention, creation, and inheritance. His project therefore includes a complete documentary video of the production and rubbings of the steles: from the quarry to the carving studio, from the ink to the rubbing, viewers discern the progression of this project. We can even say that it is the first time the complete document of production, carving, and rub- bing of such a stele has been produced, and as a result, the original Forest of Stone Steles has a new meaning within Gu’s project: it symbolizes not only the passing splendour of Chinese culture but also parts of contemporary Chinese culture, continuously linked with the life and work of the common people. It is not only a historic relic and museum, but also the source for an experimental artist’s inspiration, re-created as a personalized work of contemporary art. It is worth noting that, while many contemporary artworks are executed by common workers, until now the contributions of these persons were hardly mentioned. Gu’s videos record not only the production process, but also the relationship between the people involved in the process. Therefore, the Forest of Stone Steles has a communal and democratic feel that the traditional forest of stone steles lacks.
Secondly, while he calls his work the Forest of Stone Steles,Gu Wenda didn't imitate the form of the traditional steles. The standard form of the traditional stele was a heavy, vertically oriented stone block, erected upon a foundation. Inscriptions on both sides recorded Confucian classics, emperors’ dictums, and all kinds of legal and commemorative documents. These were erected in officially designated locations—in schools, temples, and cemeteries—and became instruments of propaganda. Famous stele inscriptions might be used to make repeated rubbings and copies; these became models for studying calligraphy and writing styles. But Gu’s Forest of Stone Steles is not made like typical steles. The project he designed includes stone slabs horizontally laid on the ground, carved with patterns, and incised with scripts on the upper faces. The prototype of this stele is the epitaph slab that emerged after the Han dynasty and became popular in the Sui and Tang. Different from vertical steles erected in public places, epitaph slabs were buried in tombs. The inscriptions carved upon them were never Confucian classics or government inscriptions, but only obituaries for the deceased. While Gu Wenda does not explain why he employed the form of epitaph slabs, in the eyes of viewers familiar with traditional Chinese sculpture, his steles have a physique and meaning different from traditional vertical steles. If we say that the Forest of Stone Steles in Xi’an pivots on a collection of those famous public steles sited overground, the Forest of Stone Steles—A Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry seems to evoke an impression of the underground, closed-in space, and death.
Thirdly, regardless of whether they were placed above or underground, on steles or epitaph slabs, and whether they were the classics, historical inscriptions, or epitaphs, these stone inscriptions in traditional culture were considered standard and conclusive evidence of history-carving in hard stone itself is an affirmation of the immutability of history. However, Gu Wenda’s carved inscriptions in each of the steles in this project have an opposite intention: to express not a historic con- clusion but the impossibility of conclud- ing. In his own words, one can experience “the absurd and ironic predicament of a new culture in the course of formation” from these steles, and recognize the phe- nomenon and results that the impreci- sion and the impossibility of being precise within cross-culture translations engen- ders. In my opinion, this is the strongest and clearest expression of anti-monu- mentality in the Forest of Stone Steles, and it most profoundly reveals the artist’s personal identity and his observation of the contemporary world. It is worthy of further analysis. Top: Stone Stele. Bottom: Forest of Stone Steles, Xi’an. Courtesy of the artist.
Forest of Stone Steles—A Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry consists of fifty steles with four different forms of Tang poetry carved on each of them, all achieved through three sequential translations of different types as outlined here.
1. Tang poems are translated into English texts based on their literal meanings and carved on the right sides of the steles. Gu employs the most popular and common versions of the Chinese and English texts of these poems devoid from abstruse scholarship. The original Tang poetry is written in the stan- dard Song-style script; the English translations are from Witter Bynner’s The Jade Mountain,a popular early English translation of Tang poetry.
2.The principal inscriptions carved in the centre of the steles consist of the Chinese text re-translated from Bynner’s English translation based on the sound of the English version. Gu calls this new text as poems made of “Chinese characters simulated from English sounds.”But this simulating procedure is not mechanical; rather, it is vulnerable to subjectivity. Gu Wenda has selected the Chinese characters that are close to English sounds but also convey some special meaning, thus providing a non-literary transliteration based on sound with potentials as a reading material. Meanwhile, he has invented the characters that he uses to writethese simulated Chinese characters. Therefore, the principal inscrip- tions manifest a quality of cutting both ways, and, in their speciousness, seem a mid-phase in the pro- cess of transformation, thus implying the possibility of further transformation.
Gu Wenda, Forest of Stone Steles—Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry, 1993–2005, forty-nine stone steles and fifty ink rubbings. Installation at He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.
3. The text carved in the left side is the English translation re-translated from the principal inscription based on the meaning. While there is still a strong chance for the illogical, the result of translating fur- ther is that the readability of the principal texts in the center of the steles is enhanced and transformed from being a puzzle or an absurd collection of single characters into literal writing with defined rules of grammar and literary sense.
According to Gu Wenda’s own introduction, this imprecision and untranslatablity have become for him a common puzzle in the course of modern world globalization. He wrote: “Creating a modern Forest of Stone Steles is an idea that came to me six years after I emigrated to the United States. During this time, different world cultures, particularly the American multi-culture, experi- enced a crisis of identification and re-identification from so-called Americanism to the era of Asia. With the changes of world political and economic modality we are experiencing a transformation and re-combination of culture-centralism and world brinksmanship.”Combined with the above discussion, we can see clearly the nature of monumentality and anti-monumentality in Gu Wenda’s Forest of Stone Steles—A Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry:This monumental work is imbued with a deep sense of history, agglomerating Gu’s traditional education with his respect for Chinese culture. On the other hand, this is a contemporary, deconstructive work, reflecting Gu’s deep suspicion of the broader complexities of narration and the forces of globaliza- tion. The result is a monumental integration of idealism with a sense of crisis. And just in this sense, Forest of Stone Steles—A Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry becomes exactly that, “a cultural document of a transforming age,”which is what Gu Wenda set out to achieve.
Notes 1 See Wu Hung, Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 4. 2 Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin” (1903), translated by K. W. Forster and D. Chirardo, in K. W. Foster, ed., Monument/Memory, Opposition (Special Edition) 25 (1982). For discussions of his theory, see Forster’s and A Colquhoun’s articles in the same issue. 3 J. B. Jackson, The Necessity of Ruins (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 91, 93. 4 Georges Bataille, “Architecture” (1929), in D. Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992), 47. 5 Barbara Haskell, Claes Oldenburg: Object into Moment (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971), 59. 6 My discussions on this problem are included in “Modernity of Contemporary Chinese Art,” see Wu Hung, Works and Exhibition Salons: Wu Hung’s Essays on the Modernity of Contemporary Chinese Art (Guangzhou: Lingnan Art Publishing House,2005).
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Protest march of the Stars to democracy wall, October 1, 1979. Courtesy of Wang Keping.
The premier pavilion will be a vehicle through which to explore or re-locate the influence of China’s political, economic and cultural establishment on the international contemporary art community. Secondly, the pavilion will present to the world a different face of Chinese contemporary art, address- ing and ultimately modifying prevailing stereotypes. Finally, the pavilion will shift the direction of La Biennale di Venezia itself.
This is a quote from the official statement for the first Chinese pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. As mentioned in this statement, the Chinese government’s aims for this pavilion were as follows: 1) The pavilion is a vehicle through which to broaden China’s political, economic, and cultural influence, 2) The pavilion represents an unexpected, new face of China’s art, and thus aims at redefining China’s cultural identity, and 3) This new identity will change the Venice Biennale, thus the Western art world itself.
Originally planned for the 50th Biennale in 2003—at that time the Chinese artists couldn’t participate because of SARS—a Chinese national pavilion could be realized for the first time only this year. The above-cited statement shows that this beginning is not at all a timid one. Therefore, the establishment of a Chinese pavilion at the Venice Biennale is first of all a successful political statement. Its artistic statement, however, is much less triumphant. I think the huge international success of contemporary Chinese art, as well as its new political status, are not simply a reason for cheerful enthusiasm, but rather an occasion for reflection and reconsideration as well as a
Press conference of the China pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2005. challenge for artists and curators. I want to retrace contemporary Chinese art’s way from an alternative form of art, early on, to assimilation and re-exploitation. What were and are the official policies, and what are the artists’ strategies? I mark the stations on this way under two headings: first, “The Glittering of the ‘Stars’,”and second, “Shining El Dorado.”The second title seems rather cynical. Nevertheless, the discrepancy evoked by the headings makes the development as well as the current situation of contemporary Chinese art strikingly explicit.
Twenty-five years ago, young Chinese artists realized their works and exhibitions within the gaps of the official Chinese art bureaucracy. They used cracks in the official “greyscale” ideology and in its woolly discourse to substantiate their work. Some had to emigrate to continue. Today, many of the then most controversial artists are featured in official exhibitions and biennials. The assimila- tion of alternative tendencies into the dominant discourse is a natural phenomenon and a catalyst for innovation. Adorno described the attitude and role modern art should take in capitalist coun- tries thus: “the adequate attitude of art would be that with closed eyes and clenched teeth,”1 indi- cating that to keep pace with the rapid development of the market and its endless reproduction and merchandising, art has to become even more radical and hermetic. According to him, art should refuse the ideological models offered by the market, and only art is able to disperse the contextual blindness brought about by the cultural industry (and by political assimilation). This rejection leads not only to the radicalization of art, but also makes art “the governor of the humane in an inhumane world.”2 But the social functions of art emphasized by Adorno are pri- marily intellectual functions rather than straightforward political or economic functions. Yet he considered politically engaged art as a partial corrective for art itself, for the aestheticism of many of the then mainstream works. The best and most politically effective art for him was that which worked out its own internal contradictions such that the hidden contradictions in society could no longer be ignored.3
Adorno’s theory had been developed vis-à-vis modern art and the rising economic development of postwar Europe. Nevertheless, I think his ideas are worth re-reading in light of the changes in China’s contemporary society and culture, a society that, like postwar Europe, is marked by rapid economic development and large-scale structural change. In this new emerging society, the market
and hyperconsumerism are major agents and part of official socialist policy. A new middle class is coming into being and the nouveaux riches are ready for new kinds of consumption. One kind of consumption is modern and contemporary art. Collecting contemporary art has become a fashionable pastime for this burgeoning class. Further, in this society the status of contemporary art has changed: it is now officially considered as part of the Three Represents, enhancing the fundamental interest of the majority of the Chinese people and taking part in the creation of a China with an advanced, pluralistic, democratic, and liberal society.4 Thus, contemporary art not only has become very fashionable, but it is nearly deemed a social and political necessity, as the abundance of art biennials and triennials in mainland China demonstrate. Also, on the level of foreign diplomacy the status of art has changed. It is now a major agent in China’s cultural ping-pong diplomacy, where it takes on the role of a kind of rhetoric. The establishment of a Chinese pavilion at the Venice Biennale, or China’s participation in the São Paolo Biennial, are ideal vehicles to let this rhetoric show China’s new cultural identity, as exemplified in the above- cited quote.5 Finally, assimilation and re-exploitation on the national level are complemented by large-scale acceptance and interest in contemporary Chinese art on the international level. Twenty-five years ago, the People’s Republic was only a potential market for the Western economic powers. Today, China is emerging as a leading global player. The development of contemporary Chinese art shows similarities. Early exhibitions in the West were mainly appreciated and organized by old “China hands” (people who have lived in China for long periods of time and are so-called “experts”), sinologists, or diplomats. Today Chinese artists take part in high-profile exhibitions around the globe and constitute a vital part of the contemporary art scene. This development is partly caused by the shift of paradigms in the Western art world since the late 1980s, as well as by the globalization of the art market since the mid 1990s. Other factors include the increasing production of contemporary Chinese art, its vitality, as well as its commercial success on the international art market. Last but not least is the above-mentioned reorientation of Chinese foreign diplomacy since the late 1990s and the change in the official status of contemporary art in China.
The Chinese avant-garde has never been an underground movement. It has always coexisted with the official discourse, but in the period of the “glittering Stars,”alternative tendencies had been assimilated into the official discourse only on a very limited scale. Stars was the name of one of the most well-known artists’ groups of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The name of the group, which consisted not only of professional artists but also autodidacts, such as Wang Keping and Ma Desheng, was taken from a frequently quoted title of a 1930s article by Mao Zedong: “A tiny spark can set the steppes ablaze.”6 This quote makes the group’s inflammatory attitude explicit, and its reference is based on the artists’ radical position rather than on their artworks. For the Stars, the radical refusal of official standards seemed to be the only way of avoiding the rigid system delineated by the dominant artistic canon of the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, however, their radical attitude characterized the Stars as children of the Cultural Revolution. Wang Keping’s regret that the younger generation's enthusiasm for rebellion had been abused during the Cultural Revolution, contributes to the definition of the exhibitions and events organized by the Stars— such as one exhibition in the park of the National Gallery Beijing in 1979 and one a year later in the National Gallery itself—as a differently channelled form of this enthusiasm. Art here is defined as active participation in the political and social life of the country. Linked to their radical attitude was the call for individual and artistic freedom, best exemplified in their protest march to the democracy wall at Xidan on October 1, 1979, and formulated in the introduction to the second exhibition of the Stars: “The world is getting smaller every day. Man has left his footsteps every-
where. No new continent is discovered. Today, our new continent is ourselves. We are embroiled into a fundamental revolution, changeable and fascinating. Without doubt, this is the subject of our art.”7 This impulse to agitate characterized the Stars as dissidents par excellence, making them a subject of great interest to the Western press as well as resulting in them being the first generation of Chinese artists to leave the country during the campaigns against bourgeois liberalism and spiritual pollution in 1981 and 1983–84.
To realize their projects, the Stars and their successors in the 1980s knew how to utilize niches in an official art bureaucracy that was still strongly centralized and divided into two parallel structures: an ideology-oriented organization responsible to the Communist Party and an administrative organization responsible to the civil government. On a conceptual level the artists’ and intellectuals’ utopian concepts, their humanist attitude, and the mythicization of the notion of modernity, situated them closely alongside the official ideology of modernization. This coexistence, however, was often a challenging one.8
The official guiding principle for the modern national culture was the so-called “modern con- sciousness” (xiandai yishi),a concept formulated at the Third Plenary Session of the XI Central Committee in 1978, which designated a self-reflective consciousness and a reform consciousness. Deng Xiaoping’s slogans “Let 100 flowers bloom” and “Free your thinking” invited Chinese intel- lectuals to participate in the project of modernization.
Facing mainland China’s opening up to the West and the Party’s program of modernization, artists and intellectuals—like those of the early twentieth century—again regarded the redefinition of the nature of modern Chinese cultural identity as their primary task. The notion “modern consciousness” had been integrated into art-theoretical discourse since 1980. For the artists, this notion meant a humanist attitude, the so-called “humanist enthusiasm” (renwen reqing),which aimed at the emancipation of the alienated individual. Indeed, it was the rethinking of the recent past, the Cultural Revolution, and a revision of its ideological foundation—Marxism Maoism— that had initiated the question of humanism. Further, the notion of the individual was raised, and, through the reception of Sartre, so was voluntarism and subjectivity. In literature, cinema, music, and the visual arts, the quest for a subjective and authentic representation of reality marked the beginning of an alternative art, broadening the meaning of “modern consciousness” by interpreting it in the context of self expression (ziwo biaoxian) and formal abstraction (xingshi mei). Self-expression and subjectivity were the major creative concepts of the Chinese avant-garde until 1984. The re-evaluation of the recent past in Scar art was carried out from the perspective of personal experience. Subjective perception is the standard for the reflection of reality in the paintings of new realism and the Sichuan school. The protest march of the Stars group was a direct expression of the quest for individual and artistic freedom. Related to self-expression was the quest for the beauty of form (xingshi mei) propagated by Wu Guanzhong in 1979. All these trends were in contradiction to the reflection theory of socialist realism that considered only an ideology-motivated reflection of reality as authentic and thus ideologically correct.
With time, the “modern consciousness” concept gained more significations, such as subjective consciousness, self-consciousness, and research into the unconscious. Liberalization progressed too quickly and the government launched rectification campaigns: the campaign against bourgeois liberalism in 1981 and against spiritual pollution in 1983–84. These campaigns slowed the course of the Chinese avant-garde and caused the first wave of emigrations by artists. Many members of the Stars left China for Europe and Japan.
Brochure of the exhibition China/Avant-Garde, February 1989.
In the meantime, the first generation of art academy graduates after the Cultural Revolution had matured. Since 1985, the so-called “conceptual innovation” was proclaimed by the New Wave Movement or Movement ‘85. The pinnacle of this movement was the exhibition China/Avant- Garde at the National Gallery in Beijing in 1989. These young artists had mainly been trained as propaganda painters during the Cultural Revolution, yet while studying in the art schools they concentrated more on the reception of Western and Chinese philosophy, Western literature, and art theory, than on learning their technical skills. The reception of Dada, Neo-Dada, structuralism, and post-structuralism along with the rediscovery of autochthonous Chinese philosophy such as Chan and Daoism resulted in the rejection of subjectivity-based creation and of humanist enthusiasm. These were now to be replaced by a new spiritual order, one that was intuitive or rational in character. The demystification of cultural symbols and the “liquidation of humanist enthusiasm” (as expressed by Wang Guangyi) were now major aims. Aiming at the demystification of the notion of modernity, this trend attempted to overcome aesthetic patterns and cultural norms, including those of the new wave itself. To deconstruct patterns and overcome the redun- dancy and subjectivity of artworks, other conceptually working artists, even more radically, employed the semantic emptiness of the signs—respectively of the Chinese script, the epitome of Chinese culture—and the objectification of the creative process through the application of chance and chaos. Semantic emptiness, chaos, and the anti-rational, which artists such as Huang Yongping, Wu Shanzhuan, Xu Bing, and Gu Wenda considered the basic characteristics of Chinese culture, are the values they posed as alternatives to the positivist ideology of communism and to the concepts of a modernization founded on values of Western modernism. Referring to autochthonous Chinese thought, notably Chan Buddhism and Daoism, as well as to trends of Western modernity and postmodernity that in their turn had assimilated those trends of Chinese philosophy, posed alternative models to the rational philosophy of Western modernity. Questioning normative value systems as they did, these works were highly controversial. The
official discourse classified them as anti-modern, subjective, absurd, pessimistic, and nihilist, and extensive campaigns of criticism were started.
Even though all of the above-mentioned artworks were controversial, some of them had been assimilated into the official canon rather quickly. Works of Scar art and the new realism gained official awards or had been collected by the National Gallery in Beijing by the early 1980s. These works helped shape the image of the new self-reflective and modern China that based itself on a reformed humanist Marxism. However, the official art critics inevitably concluded that anti-modern and nihilist tendencies were a hindrance to the development of a modern Chinese art and culture. These works and their creators have been compatible with the official discourse only since the late 1990s.
The artists and critics understood the volatile destiny of avant-garde art facing changing political campaigns and official guidelines. Therefore, very early on they planned a first and representative exhibition of the New Wave Movement. China/Avant-Garde was originally planned for 1987, but because of a new campaign against bourgeois liberalism in 1987, it could only be realized in 1989, in the National Gallery in Beijing. Planned as a summary of the avant-garde of the 1980s, it was that movement’s first and last large-scale exhibition. Of the many performances realized for the show, Pistol Shot Event was not only the most spectacular but also the most sensible reaction to the tense situation in early Cover of the exhibition catalogue China! Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, 1996. 1989. Xiao Lu and her boyfriend Tang Song fired two shots at Xiao’s installation Dialogue.Consequently, the exhibition was closed for several days. Many considered this performance to foreshadow the democratic movement of spring 1989 and of the Tian’anmen incident. The work undeniably expresses the general mood in the art scene in early 1989: After a second Campaign against Spiritual Pollution in 1987, intellectuals had realized that the productive dialogue between intellectuals and government had been only a farce and that they again were excluded from actual influence on the nation’s modernization. After Tian’anmen the utopias of humanist enthusiasm and the cultural euphoria of the mid-1980s gave way to a dystopian and cynical attitude.
There are two factors that mainly made contemporary Chinese art a promising El Dorado, not only for the Chinese government, but also for the Chinese and the Western art markets: its success in the international art world and in the international art market. Looking at its development during the past two years, the comparison with a gold rush atmosphere seems plausible. Recently, mainly American galleries and institutions have hired agents who buy the annual production of artists. The artists' studios are emptied, and the artists and their assistants are booked several years in advance, executing commissions. American investors are now planning to purchase contempo- rary Chinese art for an estimated amount of one hundred million USD,10 and Sotheby’s is plan- ning two annual auctions of contemporary Chinese art, projecting that the market and prices will grow as we reach 2008, the year of the Olympics in Beijing. But the promise of contemporary Chinese art is not only on the economic level, but also on the political.
The artistic creation of the early 1990s was impregnated by cynicism, which found its expression in so-called “hooligan literature,” in rock music, and in the painting styles of Cynical Realism and Political Pop, designa- tions coined by art critic Li Xianting. Cynical Realism and Political Pop were primarily practiced by a young generation of art school graduates—in particular graduates from the Central Fine Arts Academy in Beijing—and by some veterans of the New Wave Movement, such as Wang Guangyi and Shanghai-based Li Shan and Yu Youhan. The cultural climate following June 4, 1989, was tense. Nevertheless, throughout 1990 and 1991 several exhibitions by young artists of this so-called new generation were held in official institutions such as the Gallery of the Brochure for the Chinese pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2003. Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Chinese History Museum in Beijing.11 Obviously, the Chinese government voted for reconciliation with the intellectuals and admitted cynicism as an outlet for the prevailing mood and a superficial criticism of the government and the Communist Party. On March 1, 1991, Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin stated in a speech on the occasion of a meeting with forty leading cultural figures that “comradely and well-intentioned criticism and self-criticism” should be encouraged.12 Finally, the launching of new guidelines for the construction of a so-called Chinese-style socialism, a market- oriented socialist system, and Deng Xiaoping’s symbolic “Journey to the South” in 1992, marked the end of the period of extreme political conservatism. As in the late 1970s, the development of the country once again entailed its economic and political opening to the West, and the participa- tion of intellectuals in the official project was indispensable. The government continued its policy of détente, and its admittance of superficially critical styles such as Cynical Realism and Political Pop was a strategic step in the attempt to regain face. The numerous exhibitions abroad, organized by Western art galleries or museums, that presented these styles further helped the Chinese government to regain face internationally. These styles shaped the cultural image of mainland China in the 1990s to such an extent that the majority of the Western public considered them the embodiment of contemporary Chinese art. The propagation of these styles enhanced the Chinese government’s project of “joining the world,”evident in exhibitions such as China’s New Art, Post-1989,presented in Hong Kong in 1993, that improved the international status of Chinese contemporary art. Furthermore, thirteen artists from this show were invited to participate in the 45th Venice Biennale, also in 1993. In addition, the success of these trends in the international art market again brought official discourse and a portion of alternative art into line, as did the attempt to create an inner-Chinese art market. Cynical Realism and, in particular, Political Pop incorporated the signs of the new consumer society—as well as those of communist China—into their artistic repertory, and thus helped to reflect the identity of the new China characterized by a liberal and pluralist consumerism. While installation and performance art still posed problems on the official side until the mid 1990s, these painting styles seemed tolerable and manageable.
Even though censorship did and does still exist, official policy since the mid 1990s tends to incorporate “deviant” discourses on a large scale. While in the early 1990s cultural pluralism was a controversial concept, it became an official guiding principle by the end of the decade. Now, even artists whose works had been considered “nihilist” or “anti-modern” in the 1980s, as well as works that questioned the rapid social and political transformation of China during the 1990s and belong to what Hou Hanru calls the “urban guerrilla,”13 have been included in showcases of contemporary Chinese art, among them the Shanghai Biennial 2000,or Living in Time in Berlin in 2001. Chinese authorities no longer consider contemporary art—and in particular installation or performance art or new media—a threat; they have learned that the exploitation of contemporary art is not fundamentally different from that of socialist realism.
Since China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, her self-image has changed. She now considers herself playing an active and equal part in the international game. China’s government further realized that it has to meet WTO standards not only on an economic level, but also on a cultural one, and consequently reoriented its cultural policy. For the contempo- rary visual arts, this resulted in the above-mentioned change in its official status. Within China’s new set of diplomatic efforts, the function of contemporary art is twofold. Considered as part of the “Three Represents,”it helps to shape the cultural identity of China and it further takes on the role of diplomatic language. Contemporary art is to constitute cultural identity through the very expression of those values that are usually regarded as the result of a country’s cultural identity. The participation of China in major international exhibitions of contemporary art is therefore a political necessity, and it shows the country's intention to make new kinds of diplomatic relations an irrefutable reality.
The Chinese Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennial is entitled Virgin Garden: Emersion.The official interpretation of this title reads as follows:
The title of the China pavilion’s first exhibition Virgin Garden: Emersion, taken from the name of the pavilion site, represents the induction of China in the Venice Biennale with Romantic symbolism, and three curatorial themes. First, Emersion embodies the diverse zeitgeist rising from rapid change and development in Chinese society. Second, Emersion speaks to the displacement or re-location of China’s distinct political, economic, and cultural influences onto an international arena. Finally, Emersion is the process by which the evolving face of Chinese contemporary artistic practice will emerge from behind prevailing western stereotypes. In short, Virgin Garden: Emersion will probe both the contemporary conceptual and visual language of contemporary Chinese artists and the shifting landscape of a nation in the midst of a metamorphosis.14
Here, most importantly, commissioner Fan Di’an emphasizes the new cultural identity expressed by the Chinese pavilion. How, then, do the artworks express this new identity? The inaugural Chinese pavilion consists of two spaces—adjacent interior and exterior sites. The interior one, a former naval oil storage facility, featured Shout,a video installation by Xu Zhen, and Star,a light installation by Liu Wei. Xu Zhen’s Shout consists of video footage from forty sites in Shanghai that depicts the reactions of passers-by to the sudden outburst of a scream. According to official interpretation, “Shout explores the instinctive and universal human response to the unexpected, and acts—as the first work encountered upon entering the China pavilion—as an awakening.”15 Liu Wei’s Star is a motion-activated light installation that disturbs the spatial orientation and the perception of visitors by brief, rhythmic, and blinding flashes of light. Causing impulsiveness
and discomfort, the work attempts to capture the frenetic and overwhelming aspects of contemporary urban life. Both works reflect the influence of the rapid change of Chinese society upon the individual.
The outdoor site is connected to the enclosed gallery by architect Yung Ho Chang’s work Bamboo Shoots, an open bamboo shelter. The structure is fabricated with bamboo, a traditional Chinese material. Also alluding to traditional Chinese garden pavilions, it is obviously constructed by a contemporary architect, combining the traditional and the contemporary, thus re-evaluating traditional Chinese culture. Other works in the outdoor space are Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s installation, Farmer Du Wenda’s Flying Saucer and fengshui specialist Yan Lei, Songzhuang Artist Village (Beijing), 2004, oil on canvas. Painting shows the Wang Qiheng’s Fengshui Project for Venice road to Songzhuang with billboard that says “Welcome to Songzhuang, the contem- porary Chinese artist . . . .” Biennale.For Farmer Du Wenda’s Flying Saucer,Sun Yuan and Peng Yu exhibit a flying saucer developed by a Chinese peasant. According to the official interpretation, the work is “a dramatic experiment that parallels the unknowns in China’s open future” and is a reflection of the courage of Chinese people to realize their dreams.16 For curator Cai Guoqiang, the work is a symbol of how an originally insignificant element communicates with the greater universe, or, in other words, of the definitive entry of China into the cosmos of the inter- national art world. Fengshui Project analyzes the architectural forms and geographic locations of the national pavilions in the city of Venice. It further investigates potential locations for the permanent China pavilion. Fengshui Project recalls a site-specific work Cai Guoqiang realized together with Huang Yongping in Japan in 1997. There, exhibition visitors were examined and cured by a tradition- al Chinese healer. Similarly, Wang Qiheng discusses the energetic qualities of the different national pavilions and gives conclusions about their situation and destiny. His assumption for the Chinese pavilion reads as follows: “The temporary China pavilion is situated in the Virgin Garden, on the Eastern side of the Arsenale. Ideally, the future China pavilion should be moved further to the East to the entrance of the water meridian. This location of the China pavilion represents the placement of the dragon’s head, which will bring new vitality to the Venice Biennale, and help its role at the centre stage of world cultural exchange. According to my understanding of fengshui theories, the location of the China pavilion embodies openness. Openness is an extended meaning of East, which represents tolerance and peace.”17
Evidently, the works featured in the China pavilion reflect the new Chinese self-image and identity: future-oriented, optimistic, pluralist, open, and tolerant; a self-image that will, if one believes the official statement, cause a lasting change in the international art world. Chinese foreign diplomacy and cultural policy seem to have reached their target.But what about the artists? In the early 1990s, Huang Yongping described the role of art in China like this: “In China art is part of ideology. If one sees art as a metaphor of reality, then changing one’s attitude towards art means a change in thinking.”18 The Chinese government has not changed its attitude towards art—it just uses a different rhetoric.
Being caught in between assimilation, re-exploitation, and an increasingly demanding cultural industry—the national and international art market—the artists have to reposition themselves and their aims. Is their aim to fulfill commissions, or do they want to go further? One could question whether avant-garde is still an adequate concept in a globalized and pluralist world, and whether a society like China, where everything is allowed in the name of a growing economy and of pluralism—just as the blues singer Yang Yi put it: “Our world is already pluralist, so we can act like fools”19—needs an avant-garde. Or one could ask if artists need an obvious opponent to position themselves against, and to start refusing the ideological models offered by the cultural industry and cultural policy. If only art can disperse the contextual blindness brought about by the market and by political assimilation, as Adorno believed, then maybe art should really progress with closed eyes and clenched teeth to arrive where it wants to.
Notes 1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Aesthetische Theorie,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol.7, edited by R. Tiedemann (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 475. 2 See also Konrad P. Liessmann, Philosophie der Modernen Kunst (Wien: WUV-Universitätsverlag, 1993), 143. 3 Liessmann, 143. 4 The XVI Party Congress from November this year is still claiming Deng Xiaoping's theory and decided to carry out the so-called “Three Represents,” which call on the Communist Party of China to represent the development trend of China’s advanced productive forces, the orientation of China's advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. Contemporary art belongs to China's advanced culture. But there are still two kinds of contemporary art for the Chinese authorities: “right” and “wrong” contemporary art. 5 See also Martina Köppel-Yang, “The Ping Pong Policy of Contemporary Chinese Art,” in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, June 2004 (Summer Issue), 60–66. 6 Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), 396. 7 Hui Ching-shuen, ed., Xingxing shi nian (Hong Kong: HanArt 2, 1989), 8. 8 See also Wang Jing, High Culture Fever, Politics, Aesthetics and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996), 42. 9 See also Wang Jing, 140. 10 Interview with Jean-Marc Decrop, Paris, September 20, 2005, and Fei Dawei, Paris, September 2005. 11 See, for example, Lü Peng, Zhongguo dangdai yishu shi 1990–1999 (Hunan: Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2000), 64–109. 12 Cited in Geremie Barmé, In the Red, On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 35. 13 See Hou Hanru, “Barricades, 'Big Tail Elephants Working Group',” in Grossschwanzelefant (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1998): 54–59. 14 Fan Di’an, “Commisioner’s statement,” from: http://www.caiguoqiang.com/china_pavilion 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Interview, Jean-Hubert Martin and Huang Yongping, in Watari-Um, ed., Résistances (Tokyo: Ausstellungskatalog, 1992), 25 (and in English on p. 8). 19 From the song “Gaolao laogao” by Yang Yi.
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After the specter of Tian’anmen in 1989, Zhang Dali, accompanied by his Italian wife, moved to Bologna. Upon his return to China in 1995, he began his graffiti works, scrawling his profile with spray paint across the buildings of Beijing. Like the graffiti found in urban centres such as New York,Los Angeles, Paris, and elsewhere, Zhang’s interventions carry a complicated message.1 Firstly, they are acts of vandalism, highlighting urban ruin, in which he disfigures old buildings that are marked for demolition in order to make way for the erection of sterile modern commer- cial ventures. Secondly, they are social protest, acts of public expression as well as of self-affir- mation: Beijing has been populated with the artist's image. Proof of his effectiveness in irritat- ing the municipal powers is their failed efforts to find the author of these urban signatures. Having made two thousand works throughout the city, Zhang laughingly explains that they discovered Zhang Dali, Demolition and Dialogue, Forbidden City (Beijing), 1998. his identity but never caught him in the act. Courtesy of the artist.
As a street artist, Zhang Dali originally took the moniker of AK-47. His fascination with the Russian assault weapon of the same name—the choice of urban guerrillas and a symbol of the street violence of modern society—informed his work in 2000. In performances, Zhang and others under his direction dressed in military jump suits and gas masks, then acted out the violence of using assault weapons by spraying naked participants with red paint or black paint. In his paintings, Zhang created a continuous net consisting of the written expression “AK-47,” which he superimposed on large-scale, realistic portraits of migrant workers. Executed in black and white or red on red acrylic on vinyl, the Zhang Dali, AK-47 (16), 2001, acrylic on vinyl, 150 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist. paintings portray individual characters who are constrained or negated by violence. The staccato design of numbers and letters suggests the rat-tat-tat-tat of the weapon being fired. It is as if the workers' faces, impassive and wide-eyed, were being cancelled out or imprisoned by this symbolic phrase representing death and destruction.
Zhang Dali, Min Gong (Itinerant Worker), February 17, 2000, Chinese food in gel, metal plate, 30 x 25 x 25 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Social circumstances in Beijing have changed and have influenced Zhang’s art. Since 1999 he has been experimenting with figurative sculpture. Among his first efforts was a human head cast in animal glue and meat, rich in connotations. Like medieval death masks fashioned in Europe, this head served as a memorial portrait. But it is severed from the body and rests on a plate. In this context, the work seems to refer specifically to Western depictions of the decapitated head of St. John the Baptist, offered on a platter to satisfy the demanding temptress Salome. A morality tale such as this one, with its capitulation of virtue to whims of licentiousness is hardly unknown to the artist, as he has spent so much time in Bologna; in fact he has Italian citizenship. Partially made of meat, the severed head is also suggestive of animal slaughter, bringing to mind stockyards and cannibalism. Placed on a platter for presentation, it further alludes to a feature of great European banquets—the dressed pig.
Other layers of meaning are generated from the process of decomposition that the piece undergoes. Made from unstable materials, the head literally dissolves within 3 or 4 days, illustrating the transience of human existence and the inevitable disintegration of the corpse. Chaim Soutine’s Carcass of Beef inevitably comes to mind.2 But Zhang’s work, entitled Min Gong (Itinerant Worker), makes a poignant reference to the marginal existence of China's impoverished migrant workers who populate the outskirts of Beijing, a theme that becomes especially important in his later works.
For the most part these macabre associations are not present in the later series of portrait heads made from resin. This project of over one hundred cast heads took over two years to complete. The first nine were on exhibition in the winter of 2001 at Chinese Contemporary, a gallery in London and, in 2003, upon completion of the remaining ninety-one cast heads, One Hundred Chinese was exhibited and published in a catalogue in Beijing.3 Measuring 30 x 25 x 25 cm, each head replicates the Chinese physiognomy in all of its diversity and unity. These, like the works in the AK-47 series, are portraits of migrant workers, who were paid to participate in the project and who varied in age and physical attributes. Each head is thus unique in size and shape, in the angle at which the head is supported on the neck, and in its facial features. Unified by the closed eyes
necessary to complete each cast with the mould method (it takes about twenty minutes for the resin to harden), each face has a dreamy countenance. Yet the heads also convey individuality through the setting of the mouth, expressive eyes, and furrowed eyebrows that imbue the faces with a variety of moods—passivity, reflection, meditative calm, grim determination, or physical discomfort. Once the moulding process is completed, the surface is left unfinished. In effect, the castings are not immaculate: each head is roughly edged at the bottom, where the cloth is left fringed and ragged. Some heads have an irregularly shaped piece of cloth draped over the forehead. Bits of resin may cling to the eyes, lips, nose, and, especially, the eyebrows. That these sculptures are not polished or refined adds a dimension of time to the work—a feeling that the pieces are in continuous evolution.
When installed in a gallery, the horizontally aligned heads take on a linear rhythm derived from their idiosyncratic features. The installation conveys a contradiction: one perceives the mass population of China while at the same time noting the particularity of its people. Nearly monochromatic, these visually subdued forms are displayed like the archaeological finds of a lost society. Political and spiritual meanings also infuse the work. In an essay written for the 2003 catalogue, Zhang is very forthright in his articulation of the plight of a large part of the Chinese population that exists under the enormous strain of rapid and tumultuous commercialization. These migrant workers live on the fringe of society, having abandoned rural outposts for the unfulfilled promise of a good life in the city. Finding themselves disenfranchised and without heath or welfare benefits, they rent their bodies out for cheap labour. The casting process took place on the outskirts of Beijing, where the migrants come to wait for work, just like the millions of day workers without skills and proper work permits who exist throughout the world. As Zhang describes their situation:
These fellow countrymen of mine endure every kind of oppression, both physical and spiritual, on their bodies and their minds for their entire lives. They surely don't lack a certain vulgarity of feelings, yet nevertheless they have a kind of soul’s apathy. When they are in the face of power, they exhibit mean slyness that only fear can dictate. They have learnt how to humiliate themselves in order to sur- vive and procreate. With patience they endure discrimination, trying to sweeten the suffering of their bodies with minimal leisure and tiny consolations. They have no way to protect themselves with digni- ty....I know well that I have been looking for personality hidden behind faces without personality, hidden behind a plain and opaque story composed of personal compromises.4
Zhang Dali, One Hundred Chinese, 2002. Courtesy of the artist.
Zhang attributes their difficult circumstances to government policy, but this problem, the everlast- ing story of a have and have-not society, exists worldwide. Though universal, the problem seems particularly extreme in a society which only a few decades ago was dedicated to the proper and equitable distribution of life-sustaining social services to all its citizens. Zhang explains the current refusal of the Chinese government to address the situation:
Today the state self-confidently proclaims that the jobless people are those who cannot adapt them- selves to the type of knowledge and skills necessary to the new economy. No one dares to say that the impediments come directly from the problem of power. The state spends an enormous amount of time to transform the iniquity of politics in the progress of society. A false image is created that the political problem does not exist at the low levels of society, having already been infused by the atmosphere of the new economy.5
Continuing with the theme of the portrait of China in its unity and diversity, Zhang decided to extend the process to full-body casts, with a projected count of five hundred naked individuals, both male and female. This ambitious project illustrates how the invisible day workers of China depend on their bodies for survival by engaging in menial, mindless jobs that sap their strength. Nakedness is not acceptable in China and, exposing the body is traditionally considered a humiliation. Naked figures are entirely absent from Chinese art; even in pornography, the body is clothed. Thus Zhang’s pallid resin forms mirror these sad lives whose Zhang Dali, One Hundred Chinese, No. 34,resin, 30 x 25 x 25 cm. exposed bodies are commodities sold in the open Courtesy of the artist. market. Zhang is deeply disturbed by the difficulties facing this population existing on the fringe of the financially secure and complacent inhabitants of Beijing.
Casting One Hundred Chinese in the artist’s studio, August 18, 2003. Courtesy of the artist.
The women are prostitutes. Subject to physical demands as sex workers, they are also vulnerable to abuse of their bodies and spirits, to the whims and perversities of clients, pimps, and mafia hench- men, to sexually transmitted disease and addiction, to police rousting and imprisonment. These street-walkers, younger and older, cheaper, “less fresh meat,”(in Zhang’s words) are lined up as if in a police display of corpses.6 Entitled Race, the members of this quotidian portrait of Beijing society are, ironically, stamped, like manufactured commodities, with their names, the date, the title of the piece, and the artist’s signature.
Zhang Dali, Race,resin, 2003. Courtesy of the artist.
Another work, Chinese Offspring,which has been displayed in an industrial warehouse, presents the figures suspended upside-down from hooks; the similarity to butchered animals is alarming. Some figures, with traces of red, suggest violent acts. At the China Contemporary Gallery in London in 2004, a few of the figures were suspended from the ceiling, and along the wall was a crouching figure.7
These works function as a physical diary that documents aspects of the Chinese experience. On the most apparent level they record and display the hardships of disenfranchised members of Chinese society. Though the role of the artist as a representative of social conscience has deep roots in ancient Chinese culture, most notably in the poems of the beloved eighth-century Tang poet Du Fu, who chronicled the privations of life in the capital during political chaos, recording human suffering and destitution is largely unfamiliar in the Chinese pictorial arts. Exceptions may be cited, such as the outstanding example by Zhou Chen, Beggars and Street Characters,a group of album leaves dated 1516, which delineate the bedraggled, skeletal street people of Ming China.8 In contrast, socially conscious art is not without ample precedent in the West, for example, in the art of Goya, Daumier, and Picasso. Mention must also be made of China’s socialist works of art that document deprivations suffered under capitalism, such as the cast-clay sculptural tableau of the Rent Collection Courtyard of 1965, a collective work showing impoverished, emaciated, exhausted tenants offering their meagre rents to a blasé landlord.9
In looking at Zhang’s portraits, precedents in modern Western art come to mind. For example, Andy Warhol’s images that frame (to use Marshall McLuhan’s terms) “hot” or violent events in a “cool” medium are evoked. Warhol’s variegated silkscreen renderings treat the electric chair as if it were a neutral subject—a still life or a landscape. Like Warhol, Zhang presents his subjects in serial form. In addition, Zhang’s images may be viewed in the context of both performance art and media culture. His work comments on our complacency with the effects of modern media, where television and computer screens throughout the world project brutal scenes of human carnage while we idly sit and watch.
Zhang Dali, Chinese Offspring, 2003, resin. Courtesy of the artist.
In technique and content, George Segal’s oeuvre is also clearly an important precedent. Segal produced pristine, full-size plaster casts of individuals engaged in such daily activities as bathing, dressing, and working. Moreover, Segal included actual fragments of the environment in the works. In Man Leaving a Bus,of1961, a small section of the front of a bus is included in the instal- lation. In Bus Driver,of1962, the subject sits behind the steering wheel enclosed by the low metal partition. And in The Dinner Table, also of 1962, four of the six figures are seated at a round wood- en table on which sits is a plate.10 While Segal’s sculptures are a ghostly matte white, the props, which are found objects, are polychrome and made of a variety of materials. Later, Segal made his tableaux more complicated and began to colour his casts. Another sculptor, John Ahearn, similarly produced several series of plaster or fiberglass life-casts. Born in Binghamton, New York in 1951, Ahearn settled in the South Bronx, and it was there that he began his casts of his friends and neighbours.11 First exhibited in 1980, the sculptures record impoverished neighbourhood charac- ters on their street corners. With the assistance of Rigoberto Torres, the casts were actually made on the street. Unlike Zhang’s works, these works were meticulously finished with a great amount
of detail in the costumes and were often displayed as public art. Mention should also be made of the photorealist sculptor Duane Hanson, who made hyper-realistic sculptures of people from all walks of life, each detail of their person and clothing scrupulously recreated.12 His characters are startlingly realistic, and although the works ennoble the characters by selecting them for creation as art objects, the figures, shown “warts and all,”are most often sad portrayals of overweight, bald- ing, bloated individuals. In all of these Western examples the figures are shown dressed, with meticulous attention to portraying with exactitude the particularities of each of the figures’ appearance, pose, and setting.
Zhang claims none of these precedents came to mind in his execution of One Hundred Chinese, and his works do generate a different impression. Zhang’s portraits are infused with a strong essence of human struggle. Although low in social standing, his subjects are ennobled in his recording of their existence. The specificity and the vastness of the Chinese population, and, by extension, the world population, are evoked. Recreated here is the universal experience of urban life in which one may enjoy individuality in daily existence while at the same time forming part of a nameless crowd.
Zhang’s sensitive and nuanced portraits of China chronicle daily life. Intended as a portrayal of China, his work also encompasses the universal ills of urban life. Beyond its apparent social critique and cry for reform, Zhang’s work is a tender portrait of his neighbours and of the frailty of human existence.
Notes 1 Born in Harbin, China in 1963, Zhang graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Design, in Beijing where he now he lives and works. Zhang Dali’s works may be seen on the Web at www.chinesecontemporary.com. 2 Chaim Soutine, Carcass of Beef, 1926, in The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, inv. no 57.12, oil on canvas, 45.75 x 31.75 in. 3 Zhang Dali, One Hundred Chinese catalogue (Beijing: Beijing Jiaxin Dayishuyinshu you Liangongsi zhiban), 2003. 4 Ibid., 7. 5 Ibid., 10. 6 Interview with the artist in his apartment in Beijing, August 18, 2003. 7 Michael Gover, “Breaking down a Chinese wall,” Review Financial Times (London), Friday, June 25, 2004. 8 James Cahill, Parting at the Shore (New York: Weatherhill, 1978): 168, figs. 88–89. now in the Honolulu Academy of Arts. 9 Maria Galikowski, Art and Politics in China 1949–1984 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1998), fig 10, 122ff. Comprising 114 clay figures executed by members and students of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Art, the tableau was a reenactment of an event that transpired in Sichuan in 1949. 10 Phyllis Tuchman, Segal (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), figs. 16, 18, and 19. 11 http://www.alexanderandbonin.com/exhibitions/ahearn/2000/ahearn2.html. 12 http://artcyclopedia.com/artists/hanson_duane.html. See Katherine Plake Hough ed., Duane Hanson (Palm Springs Desert Museum, 2001).
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Installation view of Mahjong—Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, June 12–October 16, 2005. Photo: Dominique Uldry. Courtesy of the Sigg Collection.
Biljana Ciric: Could you tell me about your first experiences being involved with Chinese Art? How did you start your collection? What was the first piece that you bought?
Uli Sigg: I first came to China in 1979 to establish the first joint venture company between China and the West and from then on spent a lot of my time there. As I had been a collector of western art since my youth, it was natural for me to follow the art scene of my new environment. But I only started to collect substantially in the 1990s when I realized that no one was collecting con- temporary Chinese art in a systematic way. The first work I bought was a painting by a woman artist who has long since disappeared from the art scene.
Biljana Ciric: How do you buy art works? Directly from the artists?
Uli Sigg: I buy directly from the artist wherever possible. Since my ultimate object of study is China, and contemporary art is a fascinating way to approach it, I need to have a discourse with the artist. Also, I got involved with the artists earlier on than most gallerists. But I recommend new collectors go by way of the gallery.
Biljana Ciric: In China you are described as a collector and a businessman. How would you define your activities?
Uli Sigg: My passion is contemporary Chinese art. But to be able to purchase it I have to make a living like everyone else. I am involved in a number of projects in China, such as advising a variety
of institutions, be it a media enterprise, the architects of the Olympic stadium in Beijing, or a major Chinese bank.
Biljana Ciric: Your practice of buying Chinese art and having built the largest collection has a significant influence on western private collectors and public institutions. Could you elaborate on this issue?
Uli Sigg: Having been impressed by the depth of the Chinese art scene early on, but also realizing that it does not get the attention that it deserves from the art centres in the West, I have made efforts to change this. I invited important curators and collectors from the West to see my collection, I established an art award for Chinese artists to give them the opportunity to be seen by powerful art professionals from the West so that they would include Chinese artwork in their exhibitions, and I gave countless introductions to Chinese art—a lot of my time and effort has gone into all this. But Chinese art is gradually finding a prominent place.
Biljana Ciric: Do you listen to advice when buying art? If so, whose?
Uli Sigg: I maintain a whole network of knowledgeable people in the Chinese art world who are quite helpful in drawing my attention to works I might not have found myself. But the buying decision is my own—in the end I follow my own concept, expertise, and instinct.
Biljana Ciric: What do you look for when buying a work of art?
Uli Sigg: It has to fit my concept—which is to mirror the spectrum of Chinese art production, either representing a certain relevance in this production, or documenting something particularly well about China. It should also fit more subjective criteria: a standard of formal quality, energy, and density.
Installation view of Mahjong—Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, June 12–October 16, 2005. Photo: Dominique Uldry. Courtesy of the Sigg Collection. Shi Jinsong, Office Equipment—Prototype No. 1, 2004. Photo: Dominique Uldry. Courtesy of the Sigg Collection.
Biljana Ciric: Can you explain the concept behind the Mahjong exhibition; who was the initiator of the idea and where did idea come from?
Uli Sigg: The idea of the Mahjong exhibition is to give a thorough overview of the amazing breadth, depth, and vitality of the Chinese art scene and at the same time give access to under- standing more about China—and thus surprise a Western public, which it really does! It is less about single artists’ positions. These will be addressed in future exhibitions, as will be various specific topics or themes. With 1,200 works in the collection, there are many diverse subjects to explore. That is one reason for the Mahjong exhibition title: the works, like the stones in the game, can be arranged in many different ways. Also, mahjong dates back to the Ming dynasty and is played today on the internet: it has a rich past and allows a projection into the future.
Biljana Ciric: Since the Sigg collection covers the period from 1979 until today, what were the criteria for choosing the works in the exhibition?
Uli Sigg: The works had to be representative of the collection, to fit into a structure related to the chosen themes, and allow for sensuous pleasure and adventure when going through the exhibition. I objected to the idea of representing Chinese art history from A to Z. Still, many interesting and important works cannot be shown because they would not fit into one of the themes we decided to illustrate.
Biljana Ciric: In your opinion what is the difference between Mahjong and the other Chinese contemporary exhibitions that have been presented around the world?
Uli Sigg: The material to choose from has been accumulated over many years with a clear concept in collecting, not just selected through a few studio visits. This has allowed for a high standard throughout the whole exhibition. The problem with many Chinese shows is the uneven quality— bad works inevitably reflect upon the good works found in an exhibition, which then shapes the impression of the western public about Chinese art. With more than three hundred works by more than one hundred artists from 1979 until today, as well as important works and posters from the Cultural Revolution period as a resource for the contemporary artists, Mahjong provides a
Left: Qui Shi Hua, Untitled, 1992; middle: Ai Weiwei, Whitewash, 1995–2000; right: Qui Shi Hua, Untitled, 1992. Photo: Dominique Uldry. Courtesy of the Sigg Collection. cross section across time on the one hand, and across all media of Chinese art production on the other. I have not seen a comparable undertaking. And the many visiting experts have confirmed this enthusiasm.
Biljana Ciric: What was the role of the curators in the exhibition, and were there any differences in vision between you and the curators about the presentation of your collection?
Uli Sigg: We worked together as a very good team, and made joint decisions: Bernhard Fibicher as the museum curator who had already done significant exhibitions with Chinese artists in Bern, Ai Weiwei as co-curator with his thorough expertise on Chinese art and culture, and myself as the person knowing the collection in depth and having thought about the concept for a long time. The museum proved to be quite courageous in its approval of our common choices, and, in the end, we are all uniformly happy with the result.
Biljana Ciric: The Mahjong exhibition is a retrospective of Chinese art from the past thirty years. What kind of influence will it achieve with the general western public and their vision of Chinese art, and how will it influence the Chinese art market on the international scene?
Uli Sigg: Mahjong has already had a significant impact on the perception of Chinese art in the West. It has been covered in the most complimentary way by the most important media in Europe and the United States, and it has drawn a large international public. It generally leads to a reaction of surprise, even amazement, about the breadth and depth of contemporary Chinese art and the skillful and creative use of all media. When I walk through the exhibition, many people unknown to me speak to me and express their deep emotions and gratitude about the experiences they have gained. This really strikes me. For most people it is a completely new encounter with contemporary Chinese culture. Most experts feel that Chinese art has new contributions to bring to the global mainstream. But they have great difficulty articulating what those contributions may be. They definitely feel a freshness in an otherwise uncharted territory. Mahjong is generating new interest for Chinese art in the most sophisticated segment of the art market, that being the established collectors who only enter once they can see an authoritative overview of the field.
Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Civilization Pillar, 2001–2005. Photo: Dominique Uldry. Courtesy of the Sigg Collection.
Biljana Ciric: What are the possibilities of bringing the Mahjong exhibition to China?
Uli Sigg: I personally think it would be a great undertaking: there are many important works, old and new, that the Chinese public never had the opportunity to see. It would have a strong impact on a reassessment of what artists could contribute to contemporary Chinese contemporary culture. But the logistics for the many large or delicate works pose problems, as do some of the works that are still too critical according to today’s standards in China. But I am optimistic that one day all the obstacles will be overcome.
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Participants in “Meaning, Image, and Word,” University of British Columbia. Left to right: William Wood, Kazuko Kameda–Madar, April Liu, Jerome Silbergelt, Kuan–Hung Chan. Photo: Gary Wang.
Contemporary Chinese art is in a cultural dilemma; it is not exactly Chinese, even though it addresses Chinese experiences and issues. Yet it cannot deny being Chinese either, because only by labelling itself as Chinese can it gain a place in the international art arena. The idea of contem- porary art discourse is almost a synonym for the idea of Western contemporary art discourse. International contemporary art has been exercised under the Western assumption of modernity and postmodernity. Within this rather narrowly defined cultural space, the relative position of contemporary art from China has been an important issue for artists and art historians. Contemporary Chinese art is often challenged by the claim that it is either derivative of Western contemporary art or defined within the indigenous cultural identity of China and thus is the manifestation of contemporary China.
The one-day symposium1 “Meaning, Image, and Word: Resourcing ‘Word Play’ in Chinese Cultural Discourse” (March 2005) was conceived of and organized by me and my graduate students with Roger Ames. It aimed to further the discussion about the cultural position of contemporary Chinese art and, if there are dialogues carried on between China and the West, to decide how can one best describe them. As is articulated in the brochure:
The increasingly active dialogue between the local/China and global/Euro-American worlds has raised China’s new art to a high level since the conversation began in the early 1990s. But Homi Bhabha has an ominous warning about these Chinese artists: “Despite the claims to [what is] a spurious rhetoric of ‘internationalism’,”the relationship between Chinese artists and the post-modern art world is that “they live in ‘the nations of others.’” In our one-day workshop, we hope to investigate this issue of “otherness”: 1) Are these Chinese artists ideologically “imprisoned” as they depend on the Western social system and discourse for their life and art? 2) Does the use of Chinese-segmented visual and lin-
guistic marks and traditions “add to” the Anglo-American post-modern discourse “without adding up” (Bhabha) to anything itself? To put it simply, is Chinese contemporary art rooted in the tradition of Chinese culture, or is it yet another excellent example of cultural self-colonialization?
In order to investigate these questions, the participants in this workshop attempted to relate Chinese artistic expression to the structure and function of the Chinese language and to the unad- vertised assumptions of Chinese natural cosmology. Many of the world’s cosmologies associate language and cosmic creativity, from “in the beginning was the word” to aboriginal Australians who believe that order is created and sustained through song. A major theme in the Yijing or Book of Changes that grounds the evolution of Confucian and Daoist cosmology is the fertile and productive relationship that obtains among image, language, and meaning. Can we go beyond the more obvious political and social commentaries on contemporary Chinese art and find resonances between some these ideas and the primordial origins of Chinese cultural self-understanding?
This workshop was dedicated to an exploration of how Xu Bing and other artists have navigated between two different cultural sites and established a “third” place from which they are able to appropriate novel Western ideas and expressions to address centuries-old Chinese cultural issues and function within Chinese cultural discourse. There were three reasons for the choice of Xu Bing as a focus for this workshop. First and foremost was because of the nature of Xu Bing’s work. A Book from the Sky,for example, incorporates over four thousand characters that were fabricated using the theoretical principles of word-making in Chinese, but none of the words could be pro- nounced or possessed designated meanings. These words could be meaningful only when one read them outside of normal linguistic terms. As Bei Dao, a contemporary Chinese poet has said: “You are nothing but a pictograph that has lost its sound.”The second reason was that both Roger and I are very fond of A Book from the Sky, and we believe that we can come to a theoretical term through the study of this work in relationship to the traditional discourse of Chinese philosophy, history, art, and culture. The last, but equally important reason, was that this work allowed critics to expand their reading and examination of cultural significance, extending back into ancient Chinese culture and forward into China’s recent launch into the international contemporary art world. ABook from the Sky allowed us to investigate how contemporary Chinese art might be put into its cultural context, considering that this work was admittedly made under the invisible influ- ence of western postmodern culture, despite China’s efforts to prohibit its people from studying the issues of postmodernity until very recently.
The daring part of this workshop was to invite scholars, such as William Wood and Serge Guilbaut, from the field of modern and contemporary Western art to be discussants. It was not intended to reinforce the binary power structure of West vs. East, or to privilege the West as an authority, but this workshop was intended to make possible a more productive involvement of scholars who otherwise would not easily have the chance to offer an academic critique of contem- porary Chinese art. By putting Western art historians in the position of discussants, we expected them to contribute scholarly “persecution” and “offence.”By so doing, it was expected that a heat- ed dialogue or conversation might occur. This strategy created an asymmetry: while the “Western” discussants were modernists trained in Western art, not even one of the Chinese scholars special- ized in the contemporary period. They had backgrounds in history, philosophy, and the history of art from pre-modern China. Only in recent years, as Chinese artworks have come into the interna- tional spotlight, have some of the conscientious scholars begun to venture into the field of con- temporary Chinese art.2 Of course, the second source of asymmetry was that not only did we have
From top left, clockwise: April Liu; Richard Vinograd; Tsao Hsingyuan, Xu Bing; Alison Bailey, Christian Monks, Jerome Silbergelt, Tsao Hsingyuan; Xu Bing, Zheng Shengtian, Gu Xiong; Timothy Brook, Roger Ames. Photos: Gary Wang. to deal with contemporary Chinese art in the context of contemporary Western issues, but also the methodology, terminology, and theoretical approaches we would use had been defined and articu- lated by scholars of the contemporary or modern periods of Western art. The third source of asymmetry was the untranslatable nature of Chinese concepts that had been employed by Chinese artists and coded within their works. To put the situation in a simplified way: the significance of the visual signifiers, no matter how contemporary or how Chinese they were, had to be read from both the discourses of Western contemporary art and a Chinese culture that included traditional culture as well as contemporary politics.
The workshop included eight papers from a range of scholars and dealt with issues arising from the complexity of situating contemporary Chinese art within both Chinese and Western cultural parameters. These papers could be divided into three groups. Roger Ames (University of Hawaii) and others, such as April Liu (UBC), Kazuko Kameda-Madar (UBC), and Kuan-Hung Chen (University of Hawaii), attempted to examine ancient Chinese writings that might have inspired Xu Bing’s works, arguing for a culturally rooted reasoning that was Chinese. Although the work-
shop’s presentations were not arranged in the way I have presented them here, for the purpose of recapturing the workshop, I will introduce them as three distinct segments.
The first group was more linguistically and historically oriented. Roger Ames, the keynote speaker, argued in his “Meaning, Image, and Word” that the words in Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky functioned like the fish traps in Daoist writings. These words were meant to be abundant and to function outside of their own meaning. Once the meaning/fish was trapped, the traps were to be forgotten or abandoned. This is unlike other scripts that serve as the vehicle of meaning. I would add that by abandoning the vehicle, or the words, a sudden, outlandish, transformational shift of time and place occurs: the illegible scripts of the ancient forms begin to function in a manner promoted by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), who said that art should be more real than reality. In the case of Xu Bing’s ABook from the Sky,Ames believed that Xu invented a new world with a new kind of sensibility and that “language is not dogma but something that confronts us to invest it with our own lived historicity, our own participation played into the art. Xu Bing’s work forces us to appreciate our own rules in the making of meaning.”
In response to Ames’ argument, Timothy Brook, a historian at the University of British Columbia, questioned whether this work was political satire or whether it was intended as something else. What do we expect texts to do? In reading Xu Bing's work, those who are “Sino-illiterate,”or who have a way of “orientalizing” things, might respond, “wow, Asian people write in such an aesthetically pleasing and strange way.”The inability to identify the difference between a real script and a mocking script like Xu Bing’s challenges the validity of reading his work as having meaning outside of the words. The Chinese, historically, have the experience of living with multiple scripts. The Chinese language is not the only way to say things, and with meaning coded in so many different ways, Brook suggested that Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky was a humorous joke through the use of its script.
Both Ames and Brook dwelt within Chinese culture and history, but Kuan Hong Chen, coming from a similar position to that of Ames in his “Meanings in the Making: A Philosophical Reading of A Book from the Sky,” argues “A Book from the Sky is a religious text with the sophisticated com- plexity of both seriousness and playfulness.”Chan’s remarkably contextualized material offered historical roots and importance to this seminal work of Xu Bing’s.
In a departure from the other scholars, April Liu moved away from The Book from the Sky. Instead, she suggested that the ties between the contemporary West and ancient China are a way to contextualize contemporary artworks that employ a Chinese appearance or flavour. Her presenta- tion “Sudden Awakenings: Xu Bing’s use of 9-11 Dust and Huineng’s Chan (Zen) Philosophy” explored the depths of Chan Buddhism and how Xu Bing drew reference from it. Liu stated: “The value of Xu Bing’s creative contributions, as I see it, is the challenging of our very concept of space by pointing to the futility of trying to break down categories by making new ones, or the compul- sive need to grasp power through delineating separateness or sameness.”Using Homi Bhabha’s theory of “liminal space,”Liu challenged the validity of using the pre-modern binary division of contemporary cultures into Asian vs. non-Asian.
Timothy Brook’s idea of multiple scripts and different ways of saying the same thing is no surprise to China and, therefore, the humour of Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky was recast in Kazuko Kameda-Madar’s “A Digital Monkey Crossing Borders: A Study of Shen Wai Shen (2000) by Xu
Bing.”Using the famous Chinese story of the Monkey King, Xu Bing combined different versions of scripts, such as Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, to tell the same story, articulating the slippery nature of language and how different types of scripts have been used as political symbols in pre-modern Japan. Power was associated with a certain socially privileged form of the script, even when all the scripts delivered the same basic meaning. Kameda-Madar noted: “I will attempt to articulate the significance of cultural, ideological, and linguistic transgressions among those countries.”Finally, this paper suggests that these transgressions might “ultimately lead to the contemporary political reconciliation among East Asian countries.”
The second group consisted of artists, and their discussion focused on how language could be simultaneously meaningful and misleading. In his “Word Play as Cultural Statement,”Xu Bing powerfully mocked the narrative of commercial advertising, whereas Gu Xiong (University of British Columbia), in his “Meaning and Word,”articulated his experience as a new immigrant to Canada and the cultural misunderstandings and assumptions he experienced. Moderated by the Director of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A), Hank Bull, and including the discussant Zheng Shengtian, Managing Editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, this group was the least controversial but provided the most contextu- alized recourses to contemporary China.
The third group seemed to be more oriented towards art history. Jerome Silbergeld (Princeton University) broadened the scope of the main pursuit of the workshop by bringing to it an additional dimension. In his “Embracing the ‘Other’-than-What?: Cross-Cultural Run-Ins and Run-Ons,”Silbergeld discussed four artists and their works. These artists were Xu Bing, Lin Zhi, Zhang Hongtu, and Jiang Wen, who each work in different media. Through a reading of their artworks, and using Homi Bhabha’s theory of liminal space, Silbergeld proposed that all four artists “have developed signature styles based on borrowings from China and the West and transform them into something that is neither East nor West. Their art is a world of its own. Whether this will have any impact on the world of “others” is open to question. Art is shaped by society—that can be measured in the art itself. But how does one measure whether and how art, in turn, changes society?”
Before presenting his paper, Richard Vinograd (Stanford University) commented on the unusual situation of Xu Bing being present during a critique of his artwork. As a scholar of pre-modern Chinese culture and art, Vinograd pointed out: “My artists are unable to respond to what I say about them.”In his presentation “Translating Natural Languages in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Vinograd divided language into several types. In particular, between natural language and scientific language, codes and body as text are preformed but not discovered in language. He put emphasis on the untranslatable nature of some of the languages if not all of them. In his view, A Book from the Sky played between a familiar language form and defamiliarization, as many artists from this period have done. Their borrowing of some linguistic elements from the West played into the role of defamiliarizing language.
In my presentation “Reading and Misreading: Double-Play of Linguistic Logo,”I primarily investi- gated the issue of the audience for contemporary Chinese art, believing that the reason art from contemporary China has been called avant-garde was simply because it originated in China in the 1970s as a way of using the Western language of modern art to challenge political and authoritative control in China. But after 1989, audiences for contemporary Chinese art shifted from conducting
dialogues with the Chinese government to dialogues with a Western audience through the interna- tional commoditization of their work.
In her “Pigs, Pandas, and Books: Xu Bing’s Performance Art” Alice Ming Wai Jim (Centre A) discussed her discomfort about the issue of looking for a primordial origin. Jim suspected that there was an urge to define territories in an effort to find the Chinese origins in Xu Bing’s work. Jim’s paper addressed Xu Bing’s messages as delivered through his works using live animals and how these works fit into contemporary Chinese culture and remind us of human beings and the cultural situation of language and art.
The discussants’ notes and the discussion sessions were inserted at the end of each panel. Since I did not follow the sequence of the workshop proceedings, it only makes sense to insert the discussions at the end. William Wood (University of British Columbia), who described himself as a specialist in conceptual art, considered this workshop to be like old-style scholarship. In his discussion, this workshop appeared to be about Chinese cultural self-understanding and the discussion of the origin of self-understanding. Wood suggested that contemporary Chinese avant-garde art be called conceptual art, which, by and large, describes the distrust of the political power relations and visual conventions in art. To Wood’s eyes, Xu Bing’s art was based on the historical matrix of conceptual art. What we need to discuss is Chinese cultural disjunction, not continuity. Wood asserted that, for him, “contemporary Chinese art is spectacle and spectacular culture forms. Particularly, they are so spectacular and therefore worth looking at.”Wood spoke about Ilya Kabakov, a culturally relocated artist originally from Russia, and how his art deals with ideas behind the Western representation of what it is like to live in Russia—an issue that, at the same time it commented on the Western perspective, reinforced and perpetuated the Westerner’s view of Russia. Serge Guilbaut questioned the workshop as a place where we seemed to “worship” the artist. Guilbaut commented on and questioned the role of Chinese artists in the international market, suggesting contemporary Chinese artists were under the patronage and influence of this particular social issue.
Xu Bing commented, “the workshop is one of the most academically oriented events for contem- porary Chinese art that I have participated in.”His comment suggests that the discussion of contemporary Chinese art has a long way to go, but the day’s discussion brought out many impor- tant issues to consider when dealing with contemporary Chinese art. Maybe the workshop tried to achieve something that is premature in our cultural environment of the postmodernist period outside China. Even though people like Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and other scholars continue to study the relationship between the West and the Other, we have yet to change the binary intellectual perspectives that constantly undermine the efforts and the need for dialogue between the East and the West. Might we also think that the key point of Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky is situated in the very space where the language, word, or script cannot be claimed by any specific culture, particularly when language is one’s cultural being? Is it also located in the very space where the East and the West cannot be easily separated?
This situation was well discussed by Heidegger in his famous dialogue with a Japanese philoso- pher. In it, Heidegger said, “Some time ago I called language, clumsily enough, the house of Being. If man by virtue of his language dwells within the claim and call of Being, then we Europeans presumably dwell in an entirely different house than East Asian men.”3 This dialogue captured the fear of the Japanese and the fear that many Asians experience: “But I have a constant sense of
danger which Count Kuki [or the Others in the West], too, could obviously not overcome. [To be in the West] we will let ourselves be led astray by the wealth of concepts which the spirit of the European languages has in store, and will look down upon what claims our existence, as on something that is vague and amorphous.”But what Heidegger feared more was not that the Asians, the people of the East, might come to the West to participate its daily cultural practice, unable to speak through a language and ideology so unfamiliar to them. There was a greater danger: “the danger is threatening from a region where we do not suspect it, and which is yet precisely the region where we would have to experience it”4 (emphasis added).
Throughout this workshop, dialogues were attempted, and yet, most times, the situation remained a dialogue “from house to house,”as Heidegger puts it. By building a third, yet liminal space, the West may be able to engage in a dialogue with the East through means that would not be the communication which is carried out “from house to house” but a more direct one. Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky is one work that goes beyond, or breaches the limits of, the “house of Being,” and this work, representing the “Others’” presence in the West, made the Western world ever more present and ever more aware of the presence of the East.
What we did not want this workshop to be was an exercise in resisting Western culture. Lydia Liu’s words served as a caution to us: “I am struck by the irony that, in the very act of criticizing Western domination, one often ends up reifying the power of the dominator to a degree that the agency of non-Western cultures is reduced to a single possibility: resistance.”5 With the fear of reducing non-Western culture to be no more than resistance, this workshop chose to suspend dialogue between the East and the West through resourcing the present in China’s past.
I would like to thank the following people: Gary Wang for all photos, and Susan Chang and April Liu for the cam-recording of the workshop that are the main source materials for this essay, and Professor Michael Schoenhals, Lund University, Sweden, who moderated one of the sessions.
Notes 1 This symposium was sponsored by a Hampton Grant; by the University of British Columbia’s Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, Faculty of Arts, and St. John's College; Ms. Greta Ho; and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. 2 When I first began teaching, I held a temporary position at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and taught the first quarter in 1994. Because the job description required a modernist or someone who dealt with contemporary issues, and although I have been trained as a historical Chinese art history specialist, my close relationship with many cutting-edge artists from and within China inspired me to offer two courses on contemporary Chinese art. I believe this might have been the first time a course on contemporary Chinese art (avant-garde art, as I put it at the time) was ever offered in the United States. About two weeks before I began teaching, an influential essay by Andrew Solomon “Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China” was published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine 19 (1993), 42–72. This essay aroused later favour for Chinese contemporary art that challenged the Chinese communist government authority. This art movement, which included Cynical Realism and Political Pop art, was confrontational, provocative, and, in many ways, discrediting to the current Chinese government. It lasted for only a few years, but it paved the way for more contemporary Chinese artists to ascend to the world art arena. 3 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1982), 1. 4 Ibid., 2. 5 Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice, Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), xv.
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Xu Bing, A Book from the Sky, 1987–1991, artist books, scrolls. Installation view at the National Gallery of Canada, 1998. Courtesy of the artist.
April Liu: Starting from your earliest works, such as the creation of a nonsensical language in A Book from the Sky, the nonsensical theme has been prevalent in your work. How did you first conceive of this theme, and why were you interested in this notion of “meaninglessness?”
Xu Bing: Actually, these ideas arose from my personal experiences in China. For one, I felt a sense of boredom and cultural ennui, a feeling that culture was meaningless. This was at a time when mainland China was going through a period of “culture fever.”That was during the eighties, and the Cultural Revolution had just ended. Government policies were becoming more relaxed, and many new forms of culture were flourishing on the mainland. We were simultaneously flooded with new books and ideologies, from traditional Chinese thought to contemporary Western culture. This period produced a profound effect on the thinking of Chinese youth. I was a graduate student who participated in the many cultural debates and popular movements during those days. After attending so many events, I became tired of the process and felt quite disillusioned by culture. During the Cultural Revolution there was a starvation of knowledge and culture; once the Revolution ended, there was an overabundance of it. Somebody who overeats right after severe hunger will end up feeling very sick. There was a huge gap between our expectations for culture and what was received in the end. This resulted in a feeling of emptiness and powerlessness in the face of culture.
April Liu: When you were a student, what were your thoughts and feelings about the foreign ideologies coming into China?
Xu Bing: It was a very ambiguous experience because many of the new ideologies were presented in fragments, in little bits and pieces. The ideologies being discussed were very incomplete. There was no way to ground the ideas, nor was there a clear direction for the future. All we knew at the time was that we were coming out of our old ways of thinking and our old ways of art making. But we had no idea of how to proceed or where the new art would take us. It was a period of chaos and confusion. Speaking from my personal experience, it was very easy to feel bewildered and lost.
April Liu: Why did the Chinese government censor your works at that time?
Xu Bing: At the time, the Chinese government was still strict in its policies, especially after the events of Tian’anmen Square. Before Tian’anmen, the policies were more relaxed and therefore many young intellectuals and artists came onto the scene. A Book from the Sky also appeared at this time. Yet shortly after, the Tian’anmen protests broke out and the political crackdown caused an extreme reversal of the state's relaxed policies. Contemporary artists came under political critique. While a lot of contemporary art appears on the surface to be whimsical and transparent, A Book from the Sky was different because people could not figure out what it Xu Bing, A Book from the Sky, 1987–1991, detail of the frontispiece was saying, yet it was meticulous, rigorous, woodblock carving. Courtesy of the artist. and monumental in effect. Officials thus assumed that it embodied the most sinister elements of contemporary art and singled it out for public critique. The authorities branded it as one work that embodied all ten wrongdoings of New Wave art.
April Liu: Did you have a political message in mind when creating A Book from the Sky?
Xu Bing: Not in any direct sense. However, China is a very politically and socially minded environ- ment. Contemporary art is one of the most politically sensitive forms of public expression. Contemporary Chinese artists may not deal directly with politics, but their works will certainly reflect this kind of cultural and social milieu.
April Liu: After you came to the United States, were you interested in giving a Western audience a similar experience of A Book from the Sky? Were pieces such as Post-Testament or Square Word Calligraphy extensions of the ideas in A Book from the Sky?
Xu Bing: In my approach to art, wherever you live your life is wherever you confront conflict. Where there is conflict, there is art. A Book from the Sky first appeared in mainland China and reflects the specific life context of that time in history. If I had not come to the West, I would not
Xu Bing, Post–Testament, 1992–1993. Courtesy of the artist. have made a work like Square Word Calligraphy.In the case of Post-Testament,I had just arrived in the U.S. and started a period of experimentation. I wanted to try using the English language to make works because I was immersed in an English-speaking environment. I don’t feel that Post- Testament represents a final result of that process. I think Square Word Calligraphy is much more successful in that regard. Square Word Calligraphy is a real culmination of having worked and lived in the U.S. for many years.
April Liu: In many of your works, including A Book from the Sky and Post-Testament, there is a religious or mystical quality connected to your manipulation of the written language. Can you explain the connections you are making?
Xu Bing: Don’t you think language is mysterious? Where does it come from? What is our relation- ship to it? We are required to submit ourselves to it in a way that goes even deeper than religiosity. The scary part is that the more intelligent and cultured one becomes, the deeper one sinks into the abyss of language. That is also why I am interested in it. I like to use written language in my work because language is a most fundamental element of human culture. If you manipulate language, you are actually manipulating the most basic elements of human thought. Why did Chairman Mao base his revolution on the campaign to simplify Chinese characters? It’s because he understood this point. He wanted the revolution to burst forward from the depths of people’s souls. Within Chinese culture, there has been a unique reverence and mystical awe towards language. Since old times, there has been a practice or ritual in China where people go around collecting pieces of paper that have characters written on them. After collecting them, they are taken to the temple to be burnt as offerings. This reflects a profound respect or spiritual reverence towards language. Because they have dignity, these words on paper are not to be treated carelessly. In China, characters are considered a creation of tian, the realm of the divine or heavenly. They are not considered human creations. That is why there is the Chinese saying, “a righteous emperor’s leadership begins with his written code,”which emphasizes the importance of Chinese characters. They are not to be taken lightly or carelessly altered. Once characters are altered, the foundations of culture are disrupted and revolution is facilitated.
April Liu: Do you see such relationships to language within Chinese culture as different from those found in other cultures?
Xu Bing, American Silkworm Series: Computer Printouts, 1995. Courtesy of the artist.
Xu Bing: At a deep level, all cultures have a similar relationship with language. However, there are special characteristics in the way Chinese people understand and relate to the Chinese language. The origin of Chinese characters is attributed to when Cang Jie saw the patterned footprints of birds and animals in the earth. He was thus inspired to create written characters. The story describes how characters were given to the Chinese people as a divine gift. This ideographic form of Chinese has had a fundamental influence on Chinese thinking and behaviour. When we recite or write Chinese characters, the sound, meaning, and image are intimately linked in a way that is very different from the experience of a foreigner who reads and writes using a Romanized alphabet.
April Liu: Is this related to your use of silkworms in creating American Silkworm Series? Are you comparing patterns in nature to the written language of humans to suggest that there isn’t a differ- ence between the two?
Xu Bing: Well, I did not directly think of it this way, but you can interpret it as such. Actually, I like to use two types of media for my work. One type includes live animals. The other is written language. As we have already discussed, language is a most basic element of culture; it is itself a symbol of culture. Animals, on the other hand, symbolize that which lies outside of culture. I like to use these two types of media because of this contrast. I am not really interested in dealing with the issue of animals or the issue of language itself. Instead, I am interested in the relationship between the two, in the tension and ambiguity between the two.
April Liu: Why do you choose to work with animals that have been domesticated by humans, such as silkworms, pigs, or parrots? Is there a particular significance to these choices?
Xu Bing: It is because many of my works are discussing this notion of the “cultural tattoo,”which is the idea of having been marked or tattooed by culture. Let’s take the pigs, for example. Why did I choose to use them? Pigs give you a sense of ancient history and evolution. Pigs, I think, are animals that have one of the longest-standing relationships with humans. In the original plan for A Case Study of Transference,we intended to release the pigs after the performance. In the end, we realized this would not be possible because the police will not allow you to release live pigs into urban spaces such as Times Square or Tian'anmen Square. Although we speak of living together
Xu Bing raising silkworms at his studio in New York, 1995. Courtesy of the artist. with animals, it is actually not possible. It is also impossible to release the pigs into the mountains or forests because they have already lost their ability to survive in the wild. That is to say, before I tattooed the pigs with characters, they were already tattooed by human culture. Actually, my use of silkworms also embodies this idea. The relationship between animals and culture is thus exposed as a rich, subtle, and delicate relationship, one that is also strange and contradictory. This is one of the more interesting aspects of the work I do. Your question is also an interesting one, which is to ask why do these animals have a unique relationship to humans?
April Liu: You seem to be discussing the ambiguous relationship between nature and culture. In traditional Chinese thought, there is no separation between such concepts. For example, there is no distinct separation between self/environment, mind/heart, body/spirit. Do you see your works referencing such traditional notions in the form of contemporary art? What is your view on the relationship between form and content in your work?
Xu Bing: In my view, everything is a part of nature. I have no set intentions of using Western methods to express a Chinese story or Chinese mode of thought. I feel that such categories of “contemporary” vs. “traditional” or “Western” vs. “Eastern” are actually mutually inclusive. There are no clear distinctions between such categories. Likewise, I have not taken any special considera- tion of the difference between form and content in my work because I have never separated the two to begin with.
April Liu: Instead of exposing the formal structures of language through nonsensical characters, Square Word Calligraphy creates words with meaning and functional use. Can you comment on this departure from your earlier works?
Xu Bing: Actually, this work involves my artistic experimentation in the contemporary art scene of the West. I became troubled by the hierarchical relationship between contemporary art and its public audience. When people enter an art museum it is as if they have entered a place of worship. Too many audiences feel bewildered by the art they see and react with a feeling of guilt, as if their confusion reflected their own lack of education in art or culture. In fact, many works of contem- porary art are lacking in thought and creativity, although they present a shocking appearance to the audience. I hope that my works are clear and easily accessible to audiences. Once they are engaged in it, I hope that the audience can discover the deeper meanings in the work and become inspired in their own ways of thinking.
April Liu: How do you explain the hierarchical relationship that has been established between con- temporary art and its public audience?
Xu Bing: I think this relationship is a basic aspect of contemporary art. One can trace it to Duchamp, who levelled the relationship between art and life. This was a powerful revolution. However, in the process of levelling the relationship of art and life, he left the artist with a certain
Xu Bing, Case Study of Transference (detail), 1994, performance at Han Mo Art Center, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.
Xu Bing, Square Word Calligraphy Classroom, 1997, interactive installation, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, U.K. Courtesy of the artist. privileged status. Because I am an “artist,”anything I do is automatically given value and meaning. This notion actually caused the decline of creative thought within contemporary art. Since I have this status as “artist,”anything I do is valid. I’m making art if I sweep the floor as a performance artist, and this may be considered different from a regular sanitation worker who sweeps the floor. In reality, there isn’t a whole lot of difference.
April Liu: Are you dealing with this in Square Word Calligraphy,where you invite the audience to engage in the work by writing with brush and ink?
Xu Bing: Yes. I feel that for the audience, that is a wonderful experience because it is a natural way to enter the artwork. We are actually discussing the question of methodology in art. That is one aspect of it. Another point I’d like to make is that I don't really consider the problem of art itself. That is to say, I don’t necessarily consider whether or not what I am making is good or bad art, or whether or not it has a certain relationship to the current trends in contemporary art. I seldom consider such matters. I hope that my works have a creative and experimental quality, that they are of use to society, and that they require rigorous and conscientious effort in the process of creation. The work I did for Square Word Calligraphy, largely speaking, is the work of a graphic designer. I spent a lot of time on font design. Although you may not consider this work “art,”I think the project is worthwhile and meaningful.
April Liu: In traditional Chinese calligraphy, the notion of expressing one's inner qi and the notion of balancing discipline and spontaneity is very important. In having the audience write calligraphy, do you intend to bring about this kind of experience?
Xu Bing: Regardless of whether one discusses traditional Chinese art or Western art traditions, there is the aspect of practice in art. This is an important point. Craft is a fundamental aspect of artistic creation. With the rise of conceptual art, ideas and concepts have become very important. Concepts are very important, but artists’ ideas are also expressed through their skilled labour and perfected crafts. The basic aspect of craft cannot be replaced by anything else. In many of my works, the level of craft is very complicated and difficult. The works often require great amounts
Xu Bing, Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?, 2004, installation. Courtesy of the artist. of labour and time to complete. I am attracted to this approach because one can discover many things throughout this process of working.
April Liu: In your work Where Does the Dust Itself Collect? can you explain your use of a famous Chan Buddhist poem to comment on 9-11?
Xu Bing: This piece is not actually concerned with 9-11 itself, but is in fact dealing with the power of a mental or spiritual space and its relationship to physical space and materiality.
April Liu: Can you explain your symbolic use of the 9-11 dust?
Xu Bing: I collected the dust on September 11 in downtown Manhattan because I have a habit of collecting things. For example, I collected a bicycle that was flattened by a tank during the Tian’anmen Square protests. During 9-11, I collected the dust and ash but at the time I didn't know what to do with it. Afterwards, when I was reading some books on Chan philosophy, I came across the verse by the Sixth Patriarch Huineng, and I immediately thought of the 9-11 dust. However, this piece was designed for a biennial on architecture, which rejected the piece because they considered it to be too political. Since I am not an architect, I would not have submitted an architectural design for the exhibition. Yet I felt that this piece would have been well suited for such an exhibition because it is a unique recognition of space from my particular perspective as an artist. In the end they didn't take it, so it was submitted and accepted by the Wales National Gallery. What do I think is significant about the piece? It turned out that the American History Museum of California wrote me a letter expressing their interest in purchasing some of the dust I collected because they had a section on 9-11. They had collected many objects such as firefighter jackets, etc., but they just hadn't thought to collect the dust. This reflects a cultural difference in thinking. In the West, it is possible that dust is not considered a material object of significance. However, within a Chinese cultural context, dust is in itself an important material object imbued with great substance. Of all materials, dust is an elemental entity that is both consistent and stable. The sudden collapse of the Twin Towers can be understood as an accumulation of too much material tension. Yet if you look at it from the perspective of both Christians or Buddhists, both would agree that “everything comes from dust and goes back to dust.”
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Xu Bing’s work rests on the pillars of nature and culture. In his 1994 performance piece A Case of Transference,exhibited in Beijing, one male and one female pig are stamped, respectively, with unintelligible English and Chinese texts and are placed within an enclosure littered with books. While the pigs mated in front of an audience, the presence of cultural signifiers, such as the books being trampled under their hooves, or the text worn by each of the pigs, were insignificant in impeding the instinctual need to procreate. Whether culture is in the form of the East, as signified by Chinese characters, or in the form of the West, as signified by the Roman alphabet, it is being critiqued as a screen of false consciousness. Culture offers the perception that the instincts that condition animal and humans alike are somehow different when it concerns human beings. By nullifying this distinction through language, the work poses the question: what separates human nature from animal nature?
A similar line of questioning culture and nature appears in Xu Bing’s Can Series from 1995. During one stage in this work, silk worms were placed upon Chinese books and artifacts as well as on computers. As the larvae spun their silken weave across humanity's evidence of civilization, obscuring it with the evidence of passing of time, the question of whether culture is truly a pillar of substance equal to that of nature was suggested.
In both of these works, nature is presented as the negative equivalent to culture and civilization. Nature is framed either as something that represents a repository for humanity’s baser qualities or as something that will inevitably triumph over culture. Yet, in Xu Bing’s 2004 video work, Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop, the relationship between nature and culture shifted and became inverted. Nature was no longer represented by the instinctual animal but by the philosophy of Daoism, and
Xu Bing with Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.
culture was no longer represented by language but by the technology of the computer. Consequentially, nature ceased to be presented as adversarial to culture but, instead, was reframed as being instructive.
Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop is an installation piece done in collaboration with the designer Xiang Qing San. While there are three components to the installation—blueprint designs of the desktop hanging upon the wall and two working prototypes of the desktop situated in the centre of the room (one in which the audience can observe the mechanics responsible for the desktop’s ability to move and the other with a computer on top of it in which the audience can evaluate the desktop design as it was intended)—it is the video component of the installation that discloses the rhetoric of the work. The seven-minute-long video work mimics a promotional advertisement: soothing electronic music plays in the background while a narrator explains the benefits of this invention. The video piece advertises Xu Bing’s new product—the Dynamic Desktop.
The creation of a problem is one objective of the advertisement; the second is producing the solution. In this promotional video, the current climate is billed as the “Era of the Computer,” which is distinguished by the increasing amount of time people spend in front of that machine.
Stills from Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.
The video describes a litany of bodily ills caused by prolonged activity with the computer: shoulder joint aggravation, spinal distress, waist fatigue, and hand-joint discomfort that, according to the video, affect ninety-five percent of keyboard users. Poor design of computers is cited as the principal cause of these stresses upon the body. The solution offered by Xu Bing is to substitute the static design that generates the harmful fixed bodily positions with a design that simulates the changing laws of nature. Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop has placed the keyboard and screen on a station that has both components moving in “a random and constantly varying pattern.”While the station has both the keyboard and screen subtly moving left to right, the screen sits on an additional mechanism that has it rotating in a circular pattern. The result is that the user of the Dynamic Desktop “benefits from blood and qi circulation, focal length adjustment, and muscle activity all while still working.”
Guiding the design principles for the Dynamic Desktop is Daoism, a philosophy that rejects the institutions that govern society in favour of a practice disciplined by the laws of nature. Since nature is in a constant process of change, any design based on natural laws must continually change as well. Further, drawing on the derivative practice of Daoism, taiji, Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop proposes to facilitate the movement of qi throughout the entire body because, unlike the fixed desktop, the Dynamic Desktop employs a greater usage of muscles as the body adjusts
naturally to the constantly varying positions of the computer. As the video reminds its audience, “there is stillness at the centre of movement, and movement at the centre of stillness.” Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop is meant to aid the user in discovering a balanced state of finding stillness in motion, both mentally and physically, in a way identical to the practice of taiji.
Applying Daoist philosophy in order to produce a more harmonious relationship between the users and their interface does not inhibit one’s quest for enlightenment, because man-made instruments mediate between the way of the Dao and ordinary life. The Daoist sage Zhuangzi, of the Warring States Period (third century BCE), related a story about a cook and his prince. The prince observed his cook one day and noticed that when he carved meat from a bullock he appeared to be dancing. When the prince exclaimed to his cook that his art had become perfect, the cook replied that his practice was more advanced than that of an art because he was a servant of the Dao. Furthermore, unlike an ordinary cook who changes his chopper once a month because he hacks, or a good cook who changes his chopper once a year because he cuts, the prince’s cook had not changed his chopper in nineteen years because of his ability to be continually sponta- neous, meeting every situation with a clear mind unclouded by preconceptions. This story shows how the Way can be cultivated through the use of tools. As the butcher’s livelihood depended on the chopper, the office worker depends on the computer; thus, the Dao is as relevant a system of belief now as it was then. However, the philosophy of harmony that informs the design of the Dynamic Desktop is not cultivated solely to create a more positive computer experience for the user; it is also designed to create a more productive worker. As the video boasts, the Dynamic Desktop “will change what once was harmful work into work that is beneficial, prolonging the working day [and] improving work quality.”This conflict of employing a design based upon a spiritual practice that is meant to bring about the realization of freedom by enlightenment with an economic prac- tice that is premised on the subjugation of persons by the exploitation of their labour launches Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop into a more complex trajectory—a trajectory that asks more than it answers as freedom and bondage are made to offset each other and exist in an uneasy tension.
The presence of contradictions and the questions they foster in Xu Bing’s work can be attributed to the postmodern condition, which is acknowledged discretely in the video work. In Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop, the quest for the seated body to find the ideal sitting position parallels the relativist philosophy of postmodernism. According to the video, the pain of the user operating a typical computer is a result of the user adopting a static sitting position. The video presents a female operator slumped over the keyboard with her right arm propping up her head while her left arm is used to enter figures. As the female operator is filmed continually shifting her position, the video narrates that
the user changes position only to relieve the pain but changes into another static position. But the body does not have only one ideal position; instead it has a range of positions. We can say that the ideal position doesn’t exist. There is only a comparative or relative position. Any ideal position, is yet another static position.
Postmodernists recognize that there no longer exists an ideal position in which to locate a single, superior culture; instead, there is a series of relative positions in which to locate many cultures. Postmodernism is distinguished by a shift away from a temporal perspective that allows events to be rated and organized along a hierarchical, vertical axis, to a spatial perspective that observes culture along an equivalent, horizontal axis. To consider cultures as existing on a similar temporal plane demonstrates that they share similar experiences but acknowledges that there can be
different reactions to those experiences. For example, the ways democracy is viewed within different corners of the globe—from the United States to Iraq, from China to Taiwan—will be varied. Further, viewing cultures as existing on a similar temporal plane but occupying different points along a shared axis infers a greater co-dependency among cultures. What happens in one space reverberates and affects all the different spaces along the axis—“here” is increasingly also “there.”Or, looking at postmodernity through the philosophical lens of taiji,one could say, as expressed in Xu Bing’s video, “one touch of the hair will cause movement in the entire body.”The consequence of disavowing a static truth and opting instead for a series of dynamic truths is that difference can no longer be paved over; contradictions become impossible to ignore and it becomes increasingly difficult to discern what is universally true or false. To interrogate, rather than to state, is a characteristic of postmodernism.
While a postmodern condition validates the presence of contradictions, it is Xu Bing’s considera- tion of Chan (Zen) Buddhism that offers a mechanism in which to approach those contradictions and, for that matter, postmodernity. Although there are no specific references to Chan Buddhism in Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop,Chan has continually been referenced in connection to Xu's work throughout his career, in the comments that Xu makes about his work or in the work itself— implying that a Chan perspective is present in Xu’s practice even when it is not explicit. For instance, in 1989, with his A Book from the Sky, he likened the four years preceding the work’s debut, in which he carved four thousand Chinese “characters” of his own creation, to the practice of Chan meditation; one could speculate this was so because he was endlessly experiencing the fixed point of carving.1 In 2004, two decades later, Xu included part of a Chan poem from the Tang dynasty in the installation Where Does the Dust Itself Collect? The letters to the Chan verse, “As there is nothing from the first/Where does the dust itself collect?” were not drawn onto the floor. Instead, a layer of dust covered the floor and the letters appeared where the dust was not. The dust was gathered in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and the poem was a response uttered by the illiterate woodsman Hui-neng to a poem written by Shen-hsiu, a potential successor to the Fifth Patriarch of Chan Buddhism. The Fifth Patriarch sought a successor and offered the symbols of his title to the person who composed a verse that demonstrated insight into the nature of the mind. Shen-hsiu wrote a verse that likened the body to the tree of enlightenment and the mind to the clarity of a mirror stand and included the recommendation that practioners diligently polish the mirror of the mind in order to not let the dust gather. Hui-neng, who at that time was working at the monastery, rejected Shen-hsiu’s verse on the grounds that originally enlightenment had no tree and that a clear mirror is not a stand; therefore, there is nothing to which the dust can be attracted. The verse composed by Hui-neng demonstrated his realization of original mind and earned him the title of the Sixth Patriarch. With the juxtaposing of Eastern Philosophy with a Western event, Xu Bing’s Where Does the Dust Collect Itself? invokes an even more adversarial relationship than that found in Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop.Instead of a tension created by juxtaposing a philosophy of enlightenment with the advancement of capitalism, as is found in Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop, in Where Does the Dust Itself Collect? the “Eastern” Buddhist notion of impermanence is posited along with the “Western” desire to make the memory of 9-11 permanent.
The response of Hui-neng to Shen-hsiu’s verse is notable not only because it identifies the moment in which the Northern and Southern schools of Chan Buddhism divided on the question of gradual versus sudden enlightenment, but because it is also demonstrative of the pivotal role that koans play in Chan Buddhism. As T. Griffith Foulk writes, koans are “devices that are meant to focus the mind in meditation, to confound the discursive intellect, freezing it into a single ball
of doubt, and finally to trigger an awakening ...to an ineffable state beyond the reach of all ‘dualistic’ thinking.”2 Koans are often derived from other koans, as Hui-neng’s response to Shen-hsiu reflects. As well, koans are often paradoxical and, at times, seemingly impenetrable to the uniniti- ated; as they appear to defy logic and common sense, they require contemplation to become, in some way, comprehensible. However, built into koans is a key that produces sudden enlightenment. Koans offer the possibility of transcending a dualistic way of thinking that would otherwise discipline us to sacrifice one half for the other.
As a visual form of a koan, Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop proffers an element of doubt; two equally plausible scenarios are presented that can serve as the base upon which to erect the work’s interpretation. Daoist philosophy is placed upon the surface of capitalism in the video work, and it is uncertain whether Daoism is being employed to meet the needs of the market or whether the market becomes another environment in which Dao can be practiced. Soliciting Xu Bing’s opinion in order to clarify on which side of the ledger he sits is not productive, since he offers up more ambiguity than not; however, in an assessment of his work made after he exhibited A Book from the Sky,Xu Bing revealed his attitude towards his work and the meaning that gets mapped on to it. He stated,
Handing one’s work to society is just like driving living animals into a slaughterhouse. The work no longer belongs to me; it has become the property of all the people who have touched it. It is now con- crete and filthy. I hope to depart from it, looking for something different in a quiet place.3
Xu’s comment that “his” work becomes filthy when it enters the public should cause some concern as it seems to be a disparaging remark about the people for whom he professes to make art, yet the exhibited work versus the work in process is also characterized as becoming concrete when it is exposed to society. For a work to become concrete is for it to become certain and specific in its meaning and, due to the collective desire to assign a work definitive meaning, kills it from being anything other than that meaning. The signifier and the signified become locked in an unnaturally static alliance, and the work suffers from being made “concrete and filthy.”Whereas if the work is left within a domain of doubt it stays within a more fluid state, it takes on the appearance of being alive as it is continually made anew as no definitive answer can be mapped on to the work. In other words, the work shifts from the production of static meaning to a dynamic process in which meaning is produced.
Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop,however, is not a work that is a free-floating signifier. As much as Hui-neng’s koan was responsive to his situation, so is the visual koan of Xu Bing. If transcendence is to be found in Xu’s work, it will not come at the result of subjugating one side of the polemic for the other, for example, Daoism for capitalism. Rather, the work poses the question: under what conditions can Daoism and capitalism, philosophy and the material world, come into dialogue with each other and exist in harmony? Xu Bing’s Dynamic Desktop is one response to the current koan of postmodernity.
Notes 1 Jonathan Hay, “Ambivalent Icons,” Orientations 23, no. 7 (July 1992), 38. 2 T. Griffith Foulk, “The Form and Function of Koan Literature,” in The Koan, ed. Steve Heine and Dale S. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15. 3 Quoted in Wu Hung, “A ‘Ghost Rebellion’: Notes on Xu Bing’s ‘Nonsense Writing’ and Other Works,” Public Culture 6, no. 2 (1994), 418.
Entrance to the Long March—Chinatown project. Courtesy of the Long March.
Upon being invited to curate this year’s Chinese presentation at the Yokohama Triennale, I sought to provide a new perspective on Chinese contemporary art history whilst engaging with the Triennale’s theme of Art Circus—Jumping from the Ordinary.In addition to curating two indepen- dent artists from China and one from Taiwan, the Long March also produced an independent Long March project entitled Chinatown.This approach allowed for a presentation that begins to challenge the supposed uniformity of Chinese identity, as can be seen from the selection of artists as well as the works, and it represented a variety of responses to changes within China as well as larger geopolitical and historical contexts. The curatorial plan involved presenting works within the Yokohama Triennale site, as well as within public and private spaces in Yokohama’s Chinatown and the city of Yokohama itself. Through these artworks, audiences were invited to explore the cultural, geographical, and historical contexts that moved beyond the spaces of the exhibition, taking them both physically and metaphorically into different spaces. Similar to the intent of artistic director Tadashi Kawamata, the display intended to expose and challenge the limited frameworks and inadequacies of the international exhibition structure, not only in bringing international audiences to Yokohama to view the contemporary “Chinese art context” but in creating a new context through the works on site.
Since being initiated in 1999, the Long March project has continuously been marching along two parallel strands—one marching in China, and a second marching internationally. This year’s Yokohama Triennale will mark the formal launch of the Long March Project's international
component—Long March—Chinatown—and will be an ongoing process of development that will move across boundaries of different nations, regions, histories, geographies, and cultures around the world.
Yokohama’s Chinatown is unique as it is the largest Chinatown in Japan, welcoming over eighteen million visitors per year. First established in 1871 during China’s Ming Dynasty, Yokohama's Chinatown was a primary trading port with southern China, experiencing a segment of history that is vitally linked with the narrative of modernity in both countries. During its one-hundred- year history, the social system established by the Chinese has developed from its initial reliance on “three knives” (hair clippers, chef’s knives, and tailor’s scissors) to the established independent economic culture and social system that exists today. In this context, “nostalgia” has been converted into a reciprocal experience and strategy. Within this self-recognized world, how do we use the vision and method of culture to deconstruct and distinguish between those spiritual/psychological spaces that either exist or have been extinguished or completely altered and the space left between the individual cultural discrepancies and the collective subconscious memory? How is all of this being represented and symbolized in the “ordinary?” Because of the relationship the history of Yokohama has with today’s social and political-economic conditions in Chinatown, the Yokohama Triennale presented an ideal context in which to realize Long March—Chinatown.The artworks created a connection between the exhibition space and Chinatown, and, at the same time, a portion of the works were carried out in Chinatown spaces, creating a relationship with the art audience and the people on the streets of Chinatown that fell somewhere between art and the ordinary life. The five artists selected engaged with the “site” of Chinatown, both in its physical manifestation in Yokohama in its larger and more intangible modalities—its social and political- economic conditions, and its historical relationships.
Yao Jui–Chung, Public, installation, 1997–2005. Courtesy of the Long March.
Chen Xiaoyun, Several Moments Extending into a Night, 2004, video projection. Courtesy of the Long March.
The work Slowly Approaching by Qiu Zhijie was a major project that engaged with the Triennale theme. Qiu Zhijie creatively and playfully expanded the exhibition site by actively bringing art into the public realm through the use of a traditional Chinese lion dance costume remade and fitted with military camouflage. The work involved a performance where the “artistic” lion danced with a “traditional” lion from the Yokohama exhibition site to Chinatown. Using the ideas of “disguise” (camouflage), “game” (Lion Dance), “performance” (Chinatown), and “exhibition” (exhibition space), the work unveiled the conflict between national and peripheral cultures and dispelled the idea of a essentialist identity-issues inherently bound within all “Chinatowns.”
The forcefulness of Qiu Zhijie’s work was in contrast to the more subtle, anonymous project entitled 21 Go,which addressed the tripartite issue of China, Japan, and Taiwanese relations. 21 Go is a cultural proposal that looks to resolve the current geopolitical conflict by adding “another road” (the actual game of Go is composed of nineteen lines). As a shared cultural resource among the three regions, the game of Go has historically been the most peaceful and amiable way the three sides have conducted cultural exchange. The artist uses what appears to be a whimsical method—a game—to give form to an extremely sensitive and also seemingly hopeless political and economic conflict as well as to make possible the benefits of cooperation. With the cooperation of the local Yokohama Chinese School, three children (one from Japan, one from China, and one from Taiwan) were invited to play matches using this Go board installed at the Chinatown Parking Lot. The progress of the matches was then broadcast at the exhibition site.
Also working within Yokohama Chinatown was the Long March team, which installed a series of Art Survey Response boxes throughout the Chinatown area. Resident responses were published in a regularly scheduled newspaper that the Long March team produced and distributed for free to audiences at the exhibition site and to residents in Chinatown. The newspaper also printed infor- mation regarding the Long March team's other activities in Chinatown, including the latest progress of the Go matches.
Zhao Gang, Long March in Harlem, 2002–2005, video and oil painting. Courtesy of the Long March.
Within the triennale exhibition space, a separate understanding of site and context unfolded. Artist Guo Fengyi used spiritual energy to give form to her subject through drawing. For the exhibition, the artist presented drawings of Chinatown, a place with which she was completely unfamiliar. Guo Fengyi's works used an internal mode of understanding about the relationships and supposed differentiations between subjectivity and the outside world. Also examining the different social and cultural contexts behind “Chinatown” is the work Long March in Harlem, by Zhao Gang, from the United States. The work is a visual representation of a series of meetings that the artist held with African American artists at his home in New York to discuss the possibility of their participation in the Long March—A Walking Visual Display (2002). The topics discussed included periphery, colonization, revolution, globalization, and cultural characteristics and differences. Ultimately, the discussions ended in failure, revealing that behind a broad and sweeping globalization, there are ethnic and cultural differences and contradictions that cannot always be overcome.
In a presentation of different dialectics of modernity, Shanghai artist Hu Xiangcheng’s work, Building Code Violations,presented a social-architectural project conducted throughout southern China that examines different examples of illegal buildings in the region. The concept of Building Code Violations connotes “temporary,”“mobile,”“alterable,”and “passive.”It is a form of resistance by ordinary people to the “ordinary” regulations of the system. Beneath the surface of a well-established residential/commercial area lay the traces of a never-ending human battle with nature, society, politics, and community, which the artist attempts to uncover through the examples of building code violations.
Top left clockwise: Long March workstation at the Trienniale site; Long March response box in Chinatown; Hu Xiangcheng, Building Code Violations, 2005; Qiu Zhijie, Slowly Approaching, 2005; video of Xu Zhen and his team climbing Mt. Everest; Lion Dance being performed in Yokohama Chinatown; Jian Jie, Swimming Dragon, 2003–2005; Guo Fenyi, Chinatown, 2005. All photos courtesy of the Long March.
Expanding the Chinatown metaphor was the work by Shanghai artist Xu Zhen entitled 8848— 1.86. 8848 metres is the officially recognized height of the world’s tallest mountain, Mount Everest. For this work, the artist claims to have travelled to the peak of Mount Everest, cutting off 1.86 metres (the artist's height) of the top and then transporting it to the Yokohama Triennale site for display along with documentary video, photographs, and the equipment used for the sawing process. What is “fact,”and how is belief in these supposed “truths“ formed? This relationship between belief and doubt intersects with questions of standards, height, reality, and borders that Long March—Chinatown is interested in examining. Through such a “disruptive” work, the artist satirizes the blind and imaginary pursuits of humankind towards so common a characteristic as “height,”including the current chaos in world politics, economy, culture, and the historical discourse that arises from people’s ambitions, power, and personal desires.
The three independent projects selected were artist Jiang Jie’s site-specific installation, Chen Xiaoyun’s video installation, and a multimedia installation work by Taiwanese artist Yao Jiu- chung. Jiang Jie’s work, entitled Swimming Dragon,connects with the collective recognition of Chinese cultural identity through a long, snakelike installation capped with traditional Chinese roof tiles. Installed in a public park, the work is a metaphor for cultural change and translation, inviting audience members to permanently remove roof tiles, thus creating a slow process of dis- solution. Within this process of construction/destruction/re-construction, the artist does not strive for any preliminary judgment regarding good or bad in terms of the work’s final physical form; instead, the process of taking apart is actually the same as a new putting together.
Within a darkened room, four video projections run synchronously, juxtaposing an extraordinarily strong feeling of movement with scenes from daily life and connections to an unconscious world, thus creating an alternative feeling of displacement and visual imagination. Revealed in this video work, Several Moments Extending into a Night,by artist Chen Xiaoyun, is the anxiety of the condition of individual existence and the visual logic of the irrational. The artist carefully dissected the “beyond ordinary” psychology of humankind within quotidian life. As a collective experience of life, the work’s formulation also exhibits an extreme individualism. This work’s individualist narrative forms a strong contrast between questions of the individual and the collective as found in the work of other participating Chinese artists.
Taiwanese artist Yao Jui-chung’s photographic installation Public uses interaction with the audiences in Chinatown to emphasize Chinatown as a subject and to create contrasts and connections with other works in the area also made by Chinese people. This is part of an ongoing project the artist has conducted in Chinatowns around the world. Public, as a nation-building concept, is imbued with the strong idealism promoted by the founder of the new Chinese Republic revolution, Sun Yat-sen, which was used by the early residents of Chinatown as a strategy of political response. Chinatown, politics, and culture have all been sandwiched within their enclaves, and the artist finds himself inverted.
Whilst the Long March can be looked upon as upon as a collective, these individual projects involved the dissolution of a collectivized notion of “Chineseness.”Although for the Yokohama Triennale these works were organizationally separate, in actuality they presented the reverse side of the Long March—Chinatown metaphor, Chinatown as a fleeting land of China, a nation within the nation.
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Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Blois, Benjamin H. D. What is it that might account for this willed ignorance? One Buchloh. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, gets a hint of a reason in the introduction, which claims that Postmodernism. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004. 637 the approach is dialogical: “each speech act is structured by illustrations, 413 in color, 704 pages, ISBN 0-500-2318-9 the positions it confronts, as a response to other speakers whom it moves to oppose or attempts to persuade.” From This is the kind of book that has been generated by the this one may infer that if a position is judged not worth highest level of art historical analysis of modern and contem- confronting, or the speakers not worthy of response, then porary art by Euro-Americans-in this case specifically from they will not be dialogically engaged. They are not worth the United States. It renders accessible, in a compact and confronting because they are derivative. The old argument cross-referenced way, much of the most recent thought on found in Euro-American discourse since nineteenth-century what Euro-American modernism might have been and may diplomats observed with horror the advent of academy oil still mean. Unfortunately for readers interested in modern painting in distant Japan, but which is dressed up for and contemporary Chinese—and, more broadly, Asian—art, today’s reader, is to be found in the unfolding structure of a and in spite of the self-reflections in the roundtable discussion history that is only of a Euro-American genealogy and its among the authors at the end of the book, there is virtually vicissitudes. It is to be read in the notion of repeat, where no attempt to include artists, artworks, or critical positions non-Euro-American movements such as Neo-Concretism in “from outside” this particular discourse. Despite occasional Brazil or Gutai in Japan are discussed in reference to the genuflections to a limited range of Latin American and Soviet centres they supposedly follow. Crucially, none of the other or Russian artists and writers, there is an almost complete modernities of art in these countries—those that do not refer absence of Asians and Australasians, and there are only a to Paris or New York, whatever the genealogy of their stylis- very few Africans. The Asian figures who do appear are tics—are discussed as a counter or parallel case. those who have been consecrated by recognition in the Euro-American context, specifically, the New York art world. However emotionally attractive or cynically manipulable a The result is intellectual reinforcement of an extreme kind of peasant anger expressed through a latter-day Maoist Euro-American hegemony based on willed ignorance, all the encirclement of the cities might be in response to these more bewildering and depressing for the association of its Euro-American walls, those of us in the world outside can four writers with the October magazine group, whose radical only go on refusing to accept this hegemony. We are able to intentions and whose progressivist citation of high European construct our own histories of the antecedents to our own and usually Marxist-derived art theory might have led one to modernities and to find the hermeneutic legitimacies and expect more. One does not have to read right-wing cultural inter-linkages or parallels of our own artistic practices. In a critics like Samuel Huntingdon or Roger Scruton to find out global history of art, this book might join Vasari’s Lives of the about the clash of civilizations. It is also written here in this Artists as a period- and culture-specific survey of a regional ineluctably ignorant, eminent reference book, which has shut variety of practice, but I hope we don't have to wait another out most of the world and much of the history of modern art five hundred years for the perception to arise this time. in the twentieth century.
Huang Binhong, Liu Guosong, Xu Bing, Lee U-fan, Pak Seo-bo, Higashiyama Kai'i, Okamoto Tarô, Latif Mohideen, Montien Boonma, Ang Kiukok, Amrita Sher-gil, Nasreen Mohammedi, Gulam Mohammedsheikh, Robert Kippel, and Imants Tillers, to name but a few in Asia (including now, at last, Australasia) who have made significant contributions to twentieth century art, do not appear. Surely their contribu- tions were not “merely local”?
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