November/December 2015 Volume 14, Number 6 Inside

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015 V OLUME 14, NUMBER 6

INSI DE

Artist Features: Bingyi, Huang Rui, Ma Yanling, Zheng Chongbin Conversations: David Diao, Liang Kegang, Sun Yuan, Wei Jia, Zhang Hongtu

US$12.00 NT$350.00 P R I NTE D IN TA I WAN 6

VOLUME 14, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015

C ONTENTS 38 2 Editor’s Note

4 Contributors

6 Becoming Landscape: Diffractive Unfoldings of Light, Space, and Matter in the New Work of Zheng Chongbin Maya Kóvskaya

44 22 Seeing the Unseen World: The Art of Bingyi Amjad Majid

38 A Conversation with Wei Jia Daniel Chen

44 A Single Artwork: A Conversation with Zhang Hongtu De-nin Deanna Lee

58 Huang Rui: Painting with Words 66 Jonathan Goodman

66 This Actually Happened—On Objectivity Without Universality: A Conversation with David Diao David Xu Borgonjon

76 Tangled Up in Blue: Women in the Art of Ma Yanling Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky

76 87 The Traditional and the Contemporary— Musings About Art and Philosophy: A Conversation with Liang Kegang Alice Schmatzberger

94 Unlived by What Is Seen: A Conversation with Sun Yuan Anthony Yung

107 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Zhang Hongtu, Little Monkey (detail), 2013, ink and 94 oil on rice paper mounted on panel, 123.19 x 116.84 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

We thank JNBY Art Projects, D3E Art Limited, Chen Ping, Mr. and Mrs. Eric Li, and Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison for their generous contribution to the publication and distribution of Yishu.

1 Vol. 14 No. 6 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art PRESIDENT Katy Hsiu-chih Chien LEGAL COUNSEL Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C. C. Liu FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum Yishu 71 presents the work of a diversity of EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace artists, yet two central themes have made MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian EDITORS Julie Grundvig themselves evident in this issue—first, Kate Steinmann aesthetics and ideas that navigate between the Chunyee Li EDITORS (CHINESE VERSION) Yu Hsiao Hwei East and West, and, second, the relationship Chen Ping between the traditional and the contemporary Guo Yanlong CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde in visual art. The first is exemplified by WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li featured artists who were raised in mainland ADVISORY BOARD China—Zheng Chongbin, Wei Jia, and Zhang Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Melissa Chiu, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Hongtu—and who have either lived or spent John Clark, University of Sydney extended periods of time in the US, enabling Lynne Cooke, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. them to fuse considerations developed in the Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator West with those from the East in their artwork. Fan Di’an, Central Academy of Fine Arts Huang Rui, a seminal player in the evolution of Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh contemporary art in China, has, since early in Hou Hanru, MAXXI, Rome his career, employed a vast number of Western Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Katie Hill, University of Westminster styles in his work without relinquishing Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive concepts embedded in Chinese thought. David Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator Diao, on the other hand, has spent most of Lu Jie, Long March Space his life in the US and appropriates New York Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand school–style painting to explore his family’s Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art home in China before they took flight to the Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator West when he was a youth. What emerges is Wu Hung, University of Chicago Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District how the hybridity of integrating two cultures might affect our assumptions about how to PUBLISHER Art & Collection Group Ltd. interpret these artists’ works. 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 With respect to the traditional and the E-mail: [email protected] contemporary, Bingyi, Zheng Chongbin, VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu Wei Jia, and Ma Yanling each reference Alex Kao MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin the tradition of ink painting but have taken it CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu far beyond its governing rules through their Betty Hsieh innovative approaches. Bingyi creates large, PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com complex installations with ink on paper, Zheng WEB DESIGN Design Format Chongbin brings ink painting into the realm of ISSN 1683 - 3082 video, Wei Jia incorporates collage using torn Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited pieces of xuan paper, and Ma Yanling uses ink in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, painting brushes to create finely cross-hatched advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: images representing women film celebrities YISHU EDITORIAL OFFICE from 1930s Shanghai. Liang Kegang is an artist 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 Phone: 1.604.649.8187 who has taken on curatorial projects, and E-mail: offi[email protected] while his focus is not on ink painting, he has RETAIL RATES USD $12 / EUR 9 / TWD 350 embarked on a search to find contemporary (per copy) expressions in art that acknowledge traditional SUBSCRIPTION RATES Due to a significant increase in postage during the past 12 years, we Chinese philosophical and aesthetic thought. are obliged to adjust the postage charge accordingly for subscriptions starting in 2016. We close Yishu 71 with a conversation between 1 Year Print Copy (6 issues including air mail postage): Anthony Yung and artist Sun Yuan, which $94 USD (in Asia) / $104 USD (outside Asia) brings to light another instance in which artists 2 Years Print Copy (12 issues including air mail postage): $180 USD (in Asia) / $198 USD (outside Asia) are participating in the conceptualization and 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD organization of an exhibition. Sun Yuan leaves 1 Year Print Copy and PDF (6 issues including air mail postage): us with provocative thoughts on what it means $134 USD (in Asia) /$144 USD (outside Asia) to be an artist and how the presentation of art DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group can challenge traditional institutional norms CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow within an overpowering art industry. DESIGNER Philip Wong No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are Keith Wallace not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版(Yishu)創刊於 2002年5月1日

典藏國際版‧第14卷第6期‧2015年11–12月社長：簡秀枝法律顧問：思科技法律事務所劉承慶創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）

總策劃：鄭勝天 2 編者手記主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 4 作者小傳史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 黎俊儀

網站編輯：黎俊儀 6 化景：鄭重賓新作中光、物與空間中文編輯：余小蕙的衍展陳萍 Maya Kóvskaya 郭彥龍

行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 22 冰逸的藝術：探視不可見的世界顧問：王嘉驥 Amjad Majid 田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 巫鴻林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 38 韋佳訪談范迪安招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 陳兆倫（Daniel Chen）洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 胡昉侯瀚如 44 始终如一：與張宏圖的對話徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) De-nin Deanna Lee 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 高名潞 58 黃銳：以字作畫費大爲楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) Jonathan Goodman 盧杰 Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill 66 真有此事：客觀並非普遍 Charles Merewether 與刁德謙訪談 Apinan Poshyananda 許大衛（David Xu Borgonjon）出版：典藏藝術家庭股份有限公司副總經理：劉靜宜高世光 76 糾纏在鬱悶中：馬嬿泠作品中的女性行銷總監：林素珍發行專員：許銘文 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky 謝宜蓉社址：台灣台北市中山北路一段85號6樓電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 87 傳統與當代─ 關於藝術與哲學的思考：電子信箱：[email protected] 對話梁克剛 Alice Schmatzberger 國際版編輯部：Yishu Editorial Ofﬁce 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 94 不在圖像中行動：孫原訪談電子信箱: ofﬁ[email protected] 翁子健（Anthony Yung）訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與國際版編輯部聯系。

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封面：張宏圖，「小猴子」，2013，宣紙、一年網上下載： 49.95美元水墨和油，123.19 x 116.84 公分，藝術家提供一年6期加網上下載： 134美元（亞洲）/ 144美元（亞洲以外地區）感謝JNBY、陳萍、李世默夫婦、賀芳霓（Stephanie Holmquist）和Mark Allison 、版權所有，本刊內容非經本社同意不得翻譯和轉載。 D3E Art Limited對本刊出版與發行的慷慨支持本刊登載內容並不代表編輯部與出版社立場。 Contributors

Daniel Chen is the Associate Director of Maya Kóvskaya is a curator, writer, and Kwai Fung Hin, an established Hong Kong independent scholar who focuses on art gallery with a focus on modern and contemporary art. In 2009, she received her contemporary Asian art. Previously based in Ph.D. from the University of California, New York City, Chen has curated exhibitions in Berkeley. She moved to Beijing in 1996 and both New York and Hong Kong, with a focus in 2009 established a second home base in on contemporary Chinese ink artists. He has New Delhi. An award-winning independent also co-produced several large-scale public art scholar and the recipient of the inaugural projects in Foshan, China, and in Hong Kong Yishu Award for Critical Writing on through which artists engaged directly with Contemporary Chinese Art (2010), she has the local community. Previous to his work as authored, co-authored, edited, translated, a curator, he was a professional musician and and contributed to many books and articles composer. He holds a B.Mus. degree from on how contemporary art intersects with the Berklee College of Music, Boston. political, cultural, social, and ecological. She has worked on over thirty Asian contemporary Jonathan Goodman studied literature at art exhibitions and public art interventions Columbia University and the University of and has lectured internationally on art Pennsylvania before becoming an art writer in South and East Asia. She is Art Editor specializing in contemporary Chinese art. for Positions: Asia Critique (Duke University He teaches at Pratt Institute and the Parsons Press) and is working on a book on art and School of Design, both in New York, focusing the Anthropocene in Asia. She blogs on art, on art criticism and contemporary culture. ecology, political theory, and the philosophy of science at Mutual Entanglements: Diffractive Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky holds the Notes on Art and the Anthropocene, www. O. Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at Bard mutualentanglements.com. College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She has published several books, most recently De-nin Deanna Lee earned a doctorate in on subjects such as the Chinese religious art history from Stanford University in 2003. art. She is the co-author of Making sense of She is author of several articles on Chinese Buddhist Art and Architecture (May 2015, painting and a book, The Night Banquet: A Thames and Hudson). Karetzky has served Chinese Scroll through Time (University of many years as Editor for Journal of Chinese Washington Press, 2010). Her current research Religions. As a curator of contemporary examines the intersection of Chinese landscape Chinese art, she has written many catalogues painting and environmental concerns. She for a number of exhibitions, the most recent teaches art history at Emerson College in of which was Educated Youth by the Boston, Massachusetts. photographer Tang Desheng (Spéos Photographic Institute, Paris, 2014).

4 Vol. 14 No. 6 Amjad Majid, M.A., is a critic, writer, and IT exhibitions at Eyebeam Center for Art and consultant. As a 3D exhibition designer and Technology and was Curatorial Fellow at Wave IT consultant, he has worked with art venues Hill, New York. He received a Dual B.A.–B.F.A. such as the National Gallery of Modern Art from Brown University and the Rhode Island (Bangalore), the India Habitat Center (New School of Design, where he was trained as a Delhi), and the Ink Studio (Beijing) and with literary critic and painter. prominent artists such as Waswo X. Waswo, Sheba Chhachhi, Ravi Agarwal, Han Bing, and Anthony Yung is a senior researcher at Asia Fang Lu and curators such as Maya Kóvskaya Art Archive, specializing in China-related and Lina Vincent. He teaches English and archive and research projects. Yung is also Spanish language and literature in Beijing. the co-founder of Observation Society, an His research interests include postcoloniality, independent art space in Guangzhou. He is the globalization, transnationalism, digital awardee of the Fourth Yishu Award for Critical humanities, Spanish American literature, and Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art (2014) contemporary art. and co-curator of A Hundred Years of Shame— Songs of Resistance and Scenarios for Chinese Alice Schmatzberger is an independent writer, Nations (Para Site, Hong Kong, 2015). lecturer, researcher, and consultant. She is the co-founder of ChinaCultureDesk (www. chinaculturedesk.com), a platform that offers support for institutions and businesses in Austria and China in arranging intercultural cooperation in the scientiﬁc, academic, and cultural ﬁelds.

David Xu Borgonjon is based in New York, where he plans and analyzes contemporary art strategies and logistics. Recent projects include Really, Socialism? at Momenta Art, New York, an exhibition (with an online archive) dedicated to socialist history as speculative art, and the recently founded Admin Group, New York, which employs administration as the artful form of power. He is Managing Editor of SCREEN and a fellow at the Laundromat Project, New York. His writing is forthcoming in Randian, &&&, and Journal for Chinese Contemporary Art. Previously, he directed

Vol. 14 No. 6 5 Maya Kóvskaya Becoming Landscape: Diffractive Unfoldings of Light, Space, and Matter in the New Work of Zheng Chongbin

lack bleeds into white with a liquid grace. The surface of the paper becomes mountain ranges, valleys, and striated ground, shuddering Bas it swells with ink. Contemplative pauses punctuate languid ﬂowing ink rivers. Formless horizons sweep clean the frame, and reset the image stage, giving way to a hand holding an invisible brush, painting the shadow forms of mountains and water—shan-shui, the Chinese lexical rendering of landscape.

A static line can be rendered as motion. The curving arc of water forming waves in a painting can move without moving. Its movement is latent, implied, understated, understood. The stark dynamism of waves from a classical ink painting shares a secret language of form with dancing waves of neon that leap and surge as the current accelerates. Roiling white water offers an incantation of forms found in nature. Swirling bubbles emerge from water black as carbon. The fractal language of ink maps onto aerial views of mountains that stretch themselves outward, across space, at the lithic speed of geology, unfolding into ordered ranges of stolid persistency, yet moving—like the waves and the water—nonetheless.

In Zheng Chongbin’s seminal new Zheng Chongbin, Chimeric Landscape, environmental video installation, 2015, environmental video installation, 17 mins. 1 Chimeric Landscape (2015), an Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio. Courtesy of expanding inkblot recurs, opening the artist and Ink Studio, into time and space like the mouth Beijing. of a black hole, or the pupil of an eye, opening to consume light. It is both aperture and void. Out of the void and the chaos of entropy emerges a landscape of homologous topologies—geometric properties and spatial relations that share a common structural logic or formal ancestry. There is an immanent rhythm to its movement and a mysterious yet rigorous logic to its modes of transformation. Like the mythological creature, the Chimera, it is both hybrid and shape-shifting, and it bears the genealogies of multiplicities within itself.

Through the artwork, morphology in motion extends itself toward its viewers, opening a conversation about the self-organizing, emergent, phenomenal forms generated by the seeing eye, the perceiving mind, and the thinking self, together with the agential properties of the material

6 Vol. 14 No. 6 Zheng Chongbin, world, ordered by the grammar of nature, which spectacularly reveals itself Chimeric Landscape, 2015, environmental video through this piece. installation, 17 mins. Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, To explore the meaning and relevance of this major work, I will first Beijing. describe in detail the experience of viewing the artwork, showing the dynamics of the piece as it unfolds into the perceptual field of the viewer, introducing the ideas of “diffraction” and “intra-action,” borrowed from philosopher of science and physicist Karen Barad.2 Next I introduce the concept of the “chimeric” as it relates to Zheng Chongbin's work, unpacking the multiple valences of the title. Then I place the work in its genealogical, art historical context in relation to the California Light and Space Movement, which began in the 1960s and is best known through the works of artist such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell. Finally, I return to conceptual tools briefly mentioned at the beginning—“diffraction,” “intra- action”—regrounding the work in these rubrics in order to extract some of the larger philosophical implications of the work as it bears on new ways of thinking about enmeshed questions of ontology (the study of what is) and epistemology (the study of how we know and systems of knowledge), referred to as “onto-epistemology.” But first, experiencing the work must take center stage.

Chimeric Landscape To encounter Chimeric Landscape, you must take an active stance, positioning yourself in relation to the images that unfold before and around you, changing aspects of what you see depending on your location. You

Vol. 14 No. 6 7 may sit or stand in the darkened room. You may close your eyes and allow the soundscape to wash over you as it dilates and contracts on a changing temporal scale. First there is sound—a tremulous, deep, bubbling slowed to near distortion. It is the sound of what is called in Chinese cosmology hun dun, the primordial soup that is the ﬂux of all at the beginning of the universe, before form’s emergence.

When you open your eyes, you see that the off-kilter walls and ﬂoor and ceiling of the room are burnished to a high gloss and appear much like the surface of wet ink, such that they reﬂect the video from all sides, subtly distorting its imagery in the process.

You watch the undulating hun dun of a cosmos on the verge of becoming, its void shape-shifting towards nebulous form. It shimmers before you like water, at first concealing then briefly revealing the meta-self-reflexive image of the edge of a laptop keyboard and a pair of hands. State of mind is always embodied; states of being are instantiated matter. We are minds embodied, and we are marked bodies made of more than merely matter. The morphogenesis of the world calls emergent forms of order out of the entropic forces of chaos, in non-linear entanglements of myriad minds and multiplicities of matter unfolding across time and space.

You see and do not see the mesh scrim, hanging at a distance from the Zheng Chongbin, Chimeric Landscape, back wall, where the ever-changing yet ever-repeating imagery in the video 2015, environmental video installation, 17 mins. component of the work is projected. The scrim forms a grid diffracting Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio. Courtesy of light, making the projection ﬂoat and doubly ethereal. You see the scrim the artist and Ink Studio, by not seeing the scrim, which limns the frontier where the analog and Beijing.

8 Vol. 14 No. 6 digital worlds meet. Seeing it is a function of seeing the images that make it invisible, images made visible by their intra-action with the scrim, the intra-actions of light (of the projection) and darkness (of the room), combined with the dimmer lights bounced from the gleaming surfaces surrounding you. Seeing the scrim is also a function of the physics of diffraction that render it visible again; the morphing, multiple iridescent wakes thrown from the radiating interference patterns that emerge from the in-between space where the merging and parting of waves mark one another in their collisions.

Just as the world of phenomena that Chimeric Landscape explores is not limited to the material or the mental, this landscape, unfolding into the space you are sharing with it, is not primarily composed of images, even as the work invokes them. Instead, this landscape is a series of structures, ﬂows, and natural processes that give way to forms that discover their shared genealogies and homologies in your mind, as their interlocutor. You must perceive them to realize they are both multiple and singular at the same time. This landscape is also a landscape of one and at the same time of many. It morphs between topographies and topologies, between surfaces and spatial possibilities, between outward form and inner structure. Ink landscapes resemble the same aerial mountain topographies that they reassemble themselves into.

You are pulled into an algorithmic maze of neatly structured, anthromic, rectilinear lines that rearrange themselves into uncanny genealogies of roots and branch, a mutating garden of forking paths that fracture into rhizomatic root-scapes, before giving way to the vortex of rushing river currents that swirl and eddy in their precise, wild dance of mathematics and physics and topological transformation.

When ink pools and ﬂoods, it is not mimicking water, but enacting its watery being toward new topological forms of becoming. The roiling bubbles, the trickling stream of ink, the rivers cutting through mountain ranges do not merely bear formal resemblances to one another; they are related to each other through the grammar of a complex universe of which we are a participating part, and through physical “intensities”3— distinctive properties independent of the amount of material present in a given system that function to characterize all kinds of matter, concentrations of energy immanent in each form of being, that spill outward and into forms of becoming.

You watch swarming red blood cells merge and morph into vermilion ink moving in rivulets across rice paper, swollen with ﬂuid. The interior rivers of our bodies share intensive properties on the micro scale with the behaviour of ﬂowing water bodies of the earth on a macro scale.

Vol. 14 No. 6 9 Are we really so different, so separate from the physical world we inhabit and help shape? We are animal at the same time that we are human. We are composed of matter just as much as are the mountains and valleys, forests and streams. There are landscapes of neurons inside of us that share the same fractal logic of form with galaxies. Ecosystems of the planet and the microbiomes of our bodies at the bacterial levels share formal properties as well. The ordered chaos of motion and fractal geometries shared by these chimeric landscapes are periodically punctuated by a visual reset that offers a brief void for the mind in which to relocate itself, before re-entangling your senses.

The Chimeric What does it mean to call a landscape “chimeric?” Unlike the sister concept “chimerical,” chimeric does not imply the wildly improbable or unrealistically fantastical. Instead it refers to a creature called a Chimera and straddles the intersection of art, science, and popular culture that exists across historical and cultural epistemic contexts of knowledge making.

The Chimeras in Western mythology were various kinds of zoomorphic hybrids, with the ﬁrst known literary mention in Homer’s Illiad.4 Some argue that the mythological Chinese hybrid Qilin is a form of Chimera as well. In Medieval art, Chimeras stood for the deceptiveness of evil latent in forces of nature—a kind of maleﬁcent agency of nature, if you will—and this conception is echoed in Dante’s vision of Geryon in his classic Inferno.5

In contemporary popular culture, the Chimera is now most closely associated with the trope of the shape-shifter, which appears in popular science ﬁction television programs including Star Trek Deep Space 9, The X-Files, and games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Chimera is also a character that ﬁrst appears as one of the mutants in the X-Men series of Marvel comic books, in the Wolverine series.6

In scientiﬁc discourse, the Chimera has also offered a metaphorical tool for envisioning various kinds of hybridities. In paleontology, a Chimera is created by the reconstructing fossils using the parts of more than one different species (or genus). A genetic Chimera is a discrete individual organism in which at least two distinct sets of DNA can be found. These occur in both ﬂora and fauna. Chimera proteins are hybrids created by splicing genes, while Chimera viruses carry genetic material borrowed from other organisms. In all forms of the Chimera, multiplicities lurk within seeming singularities, folded tightly into their very nature.

Thus, Chimeric Landscape can be understood as a hybrid creature bearing what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “family resemblances” to the mythological, popular cultural, and genetic Chimeras. The artwork as a whole, then, is a shape-shifter composed of an assemblage of discrete parts grafted respectively from traditional Chinese ink painting, California Light and Space art, and Zheng Chongbin’s enduring phenomenological

10 Vol. 14 No. 6 Zheng Chongbin, preoccupation with fractal processes of morphogenesis and transformation Chimeric Landscape, 2015, environmental video found across a multiplicity of forms in the natural world. Creating a space installation, 17 mins. Photo: Jonathan Leijonhufvud. for the language of matter to speak, the artist deftly allows ink to emerge as Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing. its own protagonist, alongside other forms of matter (and moves of mind) that together constitute a rich “landscape” of hybrid yet kindred ﬂows.

New Materialist Concepts The New Materialist concepts of “diffraction” and “intra-action” developed by Karen Barad7 can help us to understand how Chimeric Landscape does its work on and with us. Diffraction is a term describing a certain behaviour of light or other matter that takes the form of waves. Light, water, and sound all behave as waves, and Chimeric Landscape is ﬁlled with wave behaviours and diffraction patterns. The installation itself features a diffraction grid through which the viewer becomes an intra-actional participant creating elements of the physical manifestations of aspects of the artwork itself.

Initially drawn from the physics of optics, the concept of diffraction offers a different way of reading various sets of ideas off of one another intra-actionally, in the search for newer and more rational modes of understanding the world we live in, modes that acknowledge the constructed nature of our reality alongside its objective materiality. Barad cites Donna Haraway’s classic formulation: “Diffraction does not produce ‘the same’ displaced, as reﬂection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reﬂection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but, rather, maps where the effects of differences appear.”8

Vol. 14 No. 6 11 Diffraction is also used as a metaphor in New Materialist thought for how Zheng Chongbin, Chimeric Landscape, processes of agency work in the world. This includes intra-actional agency 2015, environmental video installation, 17 mins. Photo: among human beings and intra-actions that take place between human Jonathan Leijonhufvud. Courtesy of the artist and Ink beings and the world of matter, of which we are a part. Thus intra-action Studio, Beijing. stands in contrast to the notion of interaction, where the "inter" involves an a priori assumption of an integral discreteness and constitutive completeness to the agents (selves/substances) engaging in interaction as the precondition to the possibility of that interaction. In other words, in an interaction, the selves and substances are assumed to already exist; they are preformed and are not fundamentally transformed through their engagement (interaction). But in an intra-action, the "intra" assumes the inverse—that the selves and substances or agents engaging one another are being constituted in part and in consequential ways through the very process of engaging. Intra-action, then, is by deﬁnition mutually constitutive.9

In Barad’s writings on philosophy of science, particle physics, and the ﬁndings of physicist Niels Bohr—who made inroads in quantum phyics and atomic structure and behavior—she explains that the research used to try to understand whether light is a wave or a particle, and when and under which conditions, actually determines whether the substance in question will be a wave or a particle at a given juncture. In other words, our modes of

12 Vol. 14 No. 6 observing, thinking, conceptualizing, knowing, and taking another agent as an interlocutor themselves change not only the grounds for the engagement between ourselves and another interlocutor or between two other interlocutors; it also changes the character of the interlocutors themselves in fundamental and consequential ways.10

Situating Zheng Chongbin’s Eclectic Practice Zheng Chongbin was born in Shanghai in 1961 and trained as a painter in the Department of Chinese Painting at the prestigious Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou (now the China National Academy of Art), where he taught for four years following his graduation. Since 1989, when he received a fellowship to do his Master’s at the San Francisco Art Institute, he has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. He is an accomplished and innovative artist known for his abstract and biomorphic ink paintings, and has recently branched out into video installations, returning to his early video practice after a decade of painting.

Fully bilingual and bicultural, Zheng Chongbin’s art practice cannot be narrowly defined as “Chinese”; extending many aspects of the California Light and Space Movement, it is ecumenical and humanist rather than nationalist and essentialist. Yet, simultaneously, his work is profoundly Chinese in the universal and pragmatist sense shared by Daoism and phenomenology. A rich fusion of elements and influences finds expression in Chimeric Landscape.

Zheng Chongbin’s painting practice involves absenting the brush and allowing the hand of the artist to recede so that ink can express its own agential qualities. The video installation extends this practice, allowing ink to manifest patterns homologous with those that occur in nature. In this way, Zheng Chongbin has created a work that speaks the intertwined languages of materiality, human and non-human agency. Articulating biomorphic imagery and non-representational formal language into heterogeneous assemblages redolent with the material agency of matter, the artwork animates the resonant tenets of these different systems of mental and material cultivation in ways that speak not merely to the universality of a panhuman condition, but, more significantly, to a more inclusive post-human way of thinking about the world of matter and the world of minds as “mutually entangled” and “intra-actionally” constituted. Here, the most innovative and enduring aspects of ancient Chinese cosmology find a new embodiment alongside surprisingly compatible contemporary theories of chaos, complexity, and emergence, quantum physics, and the performative “onto-epistemology” of the New Materialism, exemplified by the writings of Barad.11

For Zheng Chongbin, ink is more than a medium; it is a metonym for an order of intensive properties of material, linked to dynamic processes that are shared across the natural world and that function to distinguish different kinds of matter from one another.

Vol. 14 No. 6 13 Although it is a human creation, ink’s soot-derived carbon (usually from burned pinewood) and collagen-based (animal-derived) glue, combined with water (controlled by the artist’s hand and application methods), along with the ductility of the paper or surface to which it is applied, give it its distinctive material character. The intensive properties of its chemical and physical components, such as its colour, luster, saturation, density, viscosity, opacity, and ﬂuidity, enable ink to exhibit its distinctive materiality by behaving according to its own physical logic.

But ink, as a distinctive material being, is also a kind of Chimera—a genetic hybrid of nature-culture. It only truly becomes “ink” through the intra-action of natural and cultural forces, matter and mind. That is, the intensities of ink that are mobilized in ink painting require activation by the artist combining the intensive properties of water with the intensive properties of carbon and collagen. Thus, ink is a phenomenon that exists at the nexus of culture and nature and not prior to their diffractive intra- action, and this is what makes ink so distinctively appropriate to the purposes for which Zheng Chongbin uses it. While the forms conjured up by the artist using ink seem to be mysterious, alchemic transformations, the trajectory of movement from formless to fractal is shaped by larger forces at work in the universe that span the macro to the micro level of being and exhibit the transformational dynamics of “becoming” that scientists and philosophers have pondered and described at great length across disciplines.

For thousands of years, ink in Chinese painting has been used to capture, record, and preserve the indexical traces of the inner states of its painters. These traces are legible to those familiar with ink painting’s aesthetic traditions. But the ink work of Zheng Chongbin, having moved through these time-honored paces, long ago abandoned the gestural affect of painting and the modernist preoccupation with self-expression, in search of a different way of art-making.

The result, Chimeric Landcape, is a work—with ink at its conceptual centre—that is non-gestural, non-ﬁgurative, and, unlike traditional ink painting, requires no specialized cultural training to access and engage with because it speaks a language that spans the spatiotemporal boundaries of culture and history, rooted in materiality and agency itself. The extraordinary unleashing of the performative quality of ink in this piece allows the work to function as more than an index of the interior state of mind of the artist and more than the shared philosophical and cultural values transmitted through traditional ink painting. Here the “internal weather,” as the artist calls it, of our minds and shared cultures maps itself onto natural phenomena emergent from spreading entropic ﬂows of energy in the unfolding and shape-shifting of its material instantiations.

14 Vol. 14 No. 6 The Optical Poetry of Light and Space Zheng Chongbin’s work emerges from the intra-active, diffractive intersection of several strands in art history and draws on inﬂuences from Chinese ink painting traditions to Daoism, from the California Light and Space Art Movement to his own reading of phenomenology.12

In the aesthetic impetus of its “optical poetry” and combination of dynamic abstract images unfolding together with a soundscape, Zheng Chongbin’s work shares important elements with the early Raumlichtkunst (“space and light art”) of the German-American painter, film maker, and abstract animator Oskar Fischinger (1900–67), which has been explored in depth by film and animation scholar William Moritz.13 Fischinger’s experimental film combined the visual and auditory to create “abstract musical animation many decades before the appearance of computer graphics and music videos.” His patented Lumigraph (1955) is among the most relevant precursors to Light and Space Art. Called a “colour organ” in popular parlance, the Lumigraph produces a show of coloured light homologous to the variations on themes in music.14

Zheng Chongbin, Better known than Fischinger’s work is the California Light and Space Chimeric Landscape, 2015, environmental video Movement, which emerged from the disparate lineages of California installation, 17 mins. Photo: Ela Bialkowska, Impressionism—which explored the workings of light in the context of the OKNOstudio. Courtesy of 15 the artist and Ink Studio, California landscape during the ﬁrst part of the twentieth century —and Beijing. 1960s New York Minimalism,16 practiced by coevals such as Frank Stella, Robert Morris, and Donald Judd.

Vol. 14 No. 6 15 While the Minimalism practiced on the East Coast was already entrenched Zheng Chongbin, Chimeric Landscape, in the art world, artists in California (particularly Los Angeles) were 2015, environmental video installation, 17 mins. Photo: taking that spare aesthetic in a different direction. They toyed with the Jonathan Leijonhufvud. Courtesy of the artist and Ink perceptual tricks of Op Art and combined “geometric abstraction” with Studio, Beijing. “transcendentalist levity” and “boundary-dissolving luminescence.”17 They adopted new material strategies organic to the California experience—and began to make artwork in a spirit that eschewed the cold, stripped-down industrial sensibilities of New York. In this way, this new movement originating in Southern California came into focus around light and space, often in the form of site-speciﬁc installations of markedly minimalist character.

In spite of a genealogical connection, Light and Space Art and New York Minimalism were different in several crucial ways: “At a meta-level, the L.A. aesthetic may be characterized as ‘truth equals beauty’ as distinguished from the ‘truth to materials’ aesthetic prevailing in N.Y.” In practice, this meant that the California Light and Space artists experimented with “translucent and transparent materials” that had recently been developed, playing with processes and materials that could filter, reflect, or refract light to reference and replicate the radiant qualities of the natural environment in California, evoking, among other things, sunlight, water, and skies in their works.18 This offered a contrast to the use of “impermeable industrial materials” and attempts to eschew “shadows and reflections in favor of the concreteness and stability of the specific object” characteristic of much of that era’s New York Minimalism.19

16 Vol. 14 No. 6 The California Light and Space Movement reached a landmark in 1971 with the exhibition at UCLA University Art Gallery titled Transparency, Reﬂection, Light, Space. This exhibition included work by Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, John McCracken, and Craig Kauffman (who later showed together again in the 2011 exhibition Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego).

The challenges to ordinary perception created by the Light and Space artists “emerged from a peculiarly Californian mix of observational naturalism, psychedelic searching, and détourned military industrial-technology.”20 As a core site of technological development, California offered early exposure to the new materials and fabrication technologies emanating from the fields of high tech, aerospace, and engineering—which would also feed into “Silicon Valley’s techno-organicism, evident in the designs of companies like Apple since the 1980s.”21 This cohered organically with the fetish for the gleaming surfaces propagated by the auto industry and the sleekness of surfboards that brought a certain luminous aesthetic into play in California. Within this configuration of early Light and Space practitioners, some of the more prominent figures include James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Maria Nordman, Doug Wheeler, and Eric Orr, who have crafted various sorts of immersive environments. Wheeler’s works have been described as revealing “as much about inward vision as outward percepta, proceeding from the eye, and the mind’s eye in equal measure.”22

Other artists developed a long-term practice of making light-based work using materials such as glass, Plexiglas, fiberglass, plastics, polyester resin, and other such synthetic materials to create light effects in an array of combinations with other materials; these artists include Mary Corse and Larry Bell, and like De Wain Valentine, Peter Alexander, Helen Pashgian, Ron Cooper, John McCracken, and Craig Kauffman, they also played with sufaces and perception. Others, still, proved adept at deploying light in the context of performance, often offering an interactive experience for visitors; Bruce Nauman exemplifies this practice. This first wave of Light and Space artists would eventually influence the practices and aesthetic inquiries of artists all over the world, including prominent younger generation artists such as Kimsooja, Olafur Eliasson, and Zheng Chongbin. Both Zheng Chongbin’s use of ink in combination with acrylic—channeling the unique properties of this carbon, water, and adhesive-based material—and his recent addition of high-gloss, reflective PVC to form a luminous, mirror-like skin on the inside of the installation space in its Venice site-specific instantiation, echo the behavioural characteristics of the ink pooling and dispersing in the video itself. Like the ink in his paintings, the glossy PVC transforms the whole space, reflecting the various images floating across the scrim onto the walls, floor, and ceiling of the space and wrapping the visitors in an environment of optical poetry constituted by moving image, sound, and light.

Vol. 14 No. 6 17 In this way, Zheng Chongbin’s use of reflective surface functions in a way similar to California Light and Space, in which “[r]eflective or transparent epoxy, lacquer, and plastic materials not only provide lustrous, lucid surfaces; they also act as screens that mediate the experience of the exhibition space, rather than defining it.”23 Indeed, the creation of an environment that functions as a space of perceptual multiplicity, with the walls, floor, and ceiling each performing as screens onto which the movement of ink, currents of turbulent water, and other entropic flows in the video can be reflected and reduplicated, is Zheng Chongbin’s goal, rather than creating a tidy, bounded, aesthetic object from which the viewer automatically would experience distance and separation.

Confounding our conventional perceptions, Light and Space artists found ways to turn minimalist artist Frank Stella’s maxim “what you see is what you see” into a rhetorical question: is what you see really what you see? The visual conundrum and the viewers’ participation in activating the work became a hallmark of Light and Space, making the viewer “keenly aware that what you do affects what you see, and what you see affects what you do.” For example, in some Light and Space works, “colour, shape, and surface effects are contingent on the spatial/temporal positions of observers as they move across, walk around, or enter the piece.”24 Similarly, Zheng Chongbin explores processes structuring the experience and functioning of sensory perception, particularly in the realm of the visual, engineering an immersive experience.

Like Pashgian’s spheres and Bell’s boxes, elements of Zheng Chongbin’s Chimeric Landscape, too, change as the viewer moves. Like the works of Wheeler, Corse, and other Light and Space artists, Zheng Chongbin’s work transforms the viewer into a participant who is carried into an exploration of the boundaries conditions between order and disorder. The scrim, in particular, lends a sensory perceptual function to the piece that is akin to the effect that Corse’s wall paintings produce. Given that the scrim, like the paintings, is two-dimensional, its intra-active perceptual function is unexpected. Corse’s paintings change with the trajectory of the viewer’s movement, rendering multiplicity from singularity in the viewing experience of each. So is it also with the shifting physical optics of diffraction produced in the act of viewing Chimeric Landscape.

While in many video projections, the scrim is deployed as an invisible element, creating an ethereal surface ﬂoating in space, as the lights brighten, the viewer will notice a different kind of movement in Chimeric Landscape that does not come from within the video footage itself. This movement occurs as a result of the viewer’s own vision and embodied positioning in relation to the work.

The physics of light—the actual light spectrum thrown out differentially by the work—is directed by the structural characteristics of the scrim that forms

18 Vol. 14 No. 6 Zheng Chongbin, a matrix of tiny rectilinear holes, each of which offers itself simultaneously Chimeric Landscape, 2015, environmental video as an aperture for light and also as a part of a vast diffraction grid with the installation, 17 mins. Photo: Jonathan Leijonhufvud. capability of reﬂecting as well as diffracting the light projected upon it. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing. Much like the course of water will change to ﬂow around a stone and light waves radiate into new intra-active patterns after passing through the slits of the grid, diffractive patterns emerge from the encounter with obstacles. As the viewer’s eyes and body shift, subtle patterns of light diffraction dance across the surface of the scrim. They expand, contract, move in waves, both tight and loose. They undulate and pulsate in shimmering circles and bands of light that vary based on the intersecting intra-actional causality of light waves interfering with one another, mediated by the apertures of the mesh scrim, as well as calibrated according to varying degrees of light and motion emitting from both the video and the bodies and eyes of the viewers themselves. You can never purely be a passive viewer of this work, for it scintillates with a living dynamism, like that of ink itself, as you shift your vantage point, adjust your neck muscles, turn your head, shift from foot to foot, sit or slouch or stand up straight, or even breathe.

Vol. 14 No. 6 19 This landscape of entropic ﬂows of self-organizing and homologous forms Zheng Chongbin, Chimeric Landscape, in the artwork is a kind of “genetic chimera” itself, containing creative DNA 2015, environmental video installation, 17 mins. Photo: from both Chinese ink and California Light and Space, forming a novel, Jonathan Leijonhufvud. Courtesy of the artist and Ink hybrid offering that instantiates the powerful New Materialist concept of Studio, Beijing. “diffraction” in the way light and space, time and motion, and the eyes and embodied stances of the viewers come together “intra-actionally” to activate the work. The unique perceptual experience of this diffractive work resonates with some of the most compelling philosophical questions today, and yet speaks directly to the engaged senses of the viewer, who may know nothing or care naught about philosophy, chemistry, or physics, and can experience the work regardless.

Somewhere between nature and culture, at the interstices of their millions of multiple, situated intra-actions, lies the chimeric landscape of the real world phenomena that we inhabit. The world of phenomena is neither merely mute, passive matter, nor the playground of God-like beings, as our species sometimes imagines itself. The world has its own language, and like ours that language is inherently polyglot, its meanings irreducibly heterogloss, its nature diverse in expression.

Although we often speak as if nature were outside of us, while culture is inside, one can just as easily argue the opposite. Phenomena are not the

20 Vol. 14 No. 6 bedrock of “the real” existing outside of us, external to our minds, our sensory perceptual apparatuses, our languages and sign systems. Neither are phenomena mere phantoms of the mind projected onto meaningless and unknowable matter. Instead, as Zheng Chongbin’s Chimeric Landscape suggests, they exist in between our ways of knowing the world and our being in the world, and they are consequential for both.

Notes

1. Having worked closely with the artist, as his curatorial interlocutor, while he conceptualized and produced this work for its first site-specific iteration at the Palazzo Bembo, hosted by the European Cultural Center during the 56th Venice Biennale, I am able to offer a particularly close reading of the work. 2. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 3. While intensities are properties such as concentration, viscosity, temperature, and pressure, they are conceptual relatives to extensities, which do change when they are divided. These include properties such as length, weight, area (e.g., 80 centimeters in length divided in half becomes two parts of 40 centimeters each, suggesting an extensive property; yet a room that is 80 degrees in temperature does not become two rooms of 40 degrees when divided in half, displaying the characteristic nature of an intensive property). 4. A. T. Murray, trans., and William F. Wyatt, rev., Homer: Iliad, Volume 1, Books I–XII, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 179–82. 5. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Volume 1: Inferno, ed. Ronald L. Martinez, trans. Robert Durling. See Canto 17, note 97. 6. Wolverine 2, no. 92, (January 1996), Marvel Comics. http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Wolverine_ Vol_2_97. See also http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Chimera_(Earth-TRN220)/. 7. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003), 801–29. 8. Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cory Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 295–337, 300. See also Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. (New York: Routledge, 1991). 9. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matters." 10. Karen Barad, “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism Without Contradiction,” in L. H. Nelson and J. Nelson, eds., Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), 161–94. 11. Karen Barad, “Intra-actions,” an interview with Adam Kleinman, Mousse Magazine 34 (2012), 76–81. 12. Britta Erickson, Amjad Majid, Kenneth Wayne, Craig Yee, and. Zheng Chongbin, Zheng Chongbin: Impulse, Matter, Form (Beijing: Ink Studio and New York: D.A.P., 2014). 13. William Moritz, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger (London: John Libbey and Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004). 14. William Moritz, “The Dream of Color Music, and Machines That Made it Possible,” Animation World Magazine 2, no.1 (April 1997), 20–24. 15. Sascha Crasnow, “Wtf Is…Light and Space,” in Hyperallergic: Sensitive Art & Its Discontents, (October 21, 2011), http://hyperallergic.com/38827/wtf-is%E2%80%A6-light-and-space/. 16. Joan Boykoff Baron and Reuben M. Baron, “No Choice But To Trust The Senses: California Light and Space Revisited,” Art Critical: The Online Magazine of Art and Ideas, October 28, 2011, http://www. artcritical.com/2011/10/28/light-and-space-southern-california/. See also Joan Boykoff Baron, and Reuben M. Baron, “See First, Think Later: The Art of Doug Wheeler and Mary Corse,” Art Critical: The Online Magazine of Art and Ideas, February 26, 2012, http://www.artcritical.com/2012/02/26/ wheeler-and-corse/. 17. Ian Wallace, “How the Light and Space Movement Prefigured Today’s Merger of Art and Tech,” ArtSpace Magazine, April 30, 2014, 2. http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/light-and-space?. 18. Ibid. This is particularly the case with the Finish Fetish subgroup of Light and Space artists, including the likes of DeWain Valentine, who worked in a boat shop early on, and John McCracken, who borrowed techniques for making surfboard finishes for use in his work. 19. Baron and Baron, “No Choice But To Trust The Senses.” 20. Jeffrey Kastner, “Doug Wheeler,” Artforum (April 2014), 258. 21. Wallace, “How the Light and Space Movement Prefigured Today’s Merger of Art and Tech,” 6. 22. Kastner, "Doug Wheeler." 23. Wallace, “How the Light and Space Movement Prefigured Today’s Merger of Art and Tech,” 5. 24. Baron and Baron, “No Choice But To Trust The Senses.”

Vol. 14 No. 6 21 Amjad Majid Seeing the Unseen World: The Art of Bingyi

“Painting tells us that the material world is ﬁnite, and that the world Bingyi, Apocalypse, 2011– 15, ink on silk, 96 x 2000 cm. unseen by us is eternal. Painting is the most direct way to access this © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing. unseen world.”1 —Bingyi

ingyi, an artist who considers painting a means to make the eternal and unseen finite and known through a process of Bmaterialization and art-making, has created a body of work unified by preoccupations about the nature of the universe—its diverse systems, hierarchies, and forces operating in our natural, climatological, and geological world—of which we humans are but a tiny part. Exploring her anxieties about humanity and her enchantment with the secrets of an unknown universe, it is thus befitting that Bingyi’s varied artistic practice branches out from numerous interests in ecology, philosophy, history, aesthetics, and science, blossoming into a body of work that ranges from land art, environmental art, and installation to performance art, musical and literary improvisation, and ink painting.2 With a diverse set of interests and talents, aside from being an artist, Bingyi is also a scholar, cultural critic, curator, poet, and social activist.

One might anticipate a lack of continuity across such vast diversity, but an examination of her artwork reveals a deep connective tissue within her scope of inquiry. Works such as Wanwu: Metamorphosis (2013) explore the nature

22 Vol. 14 No. 6 Bingyi, Wanwu: Metamorphosis, 2013, ink on paper, six pieces, 2200 x 260 cm each. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing.

Bingyi, Luminaries, 2013–15, ink on paper, installation view, 49 x 49 cm each piece. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing.

of the material universe and the matter that composes it and that shapes its inner mechanisms. Other works such as the Luminaries (2013–15) and Fairies (2012–15) series explore the materialization of imagined life at a microcosmic level. Her deep concern for the state of humanity in its relation

Vol. 14 No. 6 23 Bingyi, Fairies, 2012–15, ink on paper, 100 pieces, 34 x 34 cm each. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing.

to the universe and the natural world is especially apparent in her new major work, ominously titled Apocalypse (2011–15), which considers the end of humankind along with the rebirth of the natural world.

Approaching works such as Luminaries involves exploring the creative impetus that joins poetry with imagined life forms in the sense that both are grounded in creation and both materialize from ﬁction. Similarly, the series Fairies presents metaphors for ideation and creation expressed through very ﬁne and detailed brushwork, with each fairy embodying the creative instinct that is transformed into concrete forms. Meanwhile, Wanwu: Metamorphosis represents the vastness of the material universe in a tangible manner, with the work itself serving as a trace or residue of natural (geological and climatological) processes that we would not otherwise see—processes that acquire agency in taking part in the production of the work. Other works such as Epoché (2014) capture the performance of creating art through a physical state of suspension that reminds of phenomenological bracketing (as the title of the work suggests), with the artist “bombarding” paper with ink from mid-air via a helicopter. Finally, Bingyi’s work also includes a series of interdisciplinary performances that combine improvisation with music, poetry, and dance.

24 Vol. 14 No. 6 Bingyi, Epoché, 2014, ink The Poetic Sense of Life Forms on canvas, 2200 x 2000 cm. Shenzhen Bao’an In Luminaries, Bingyi inverts the traditional relationship in ink painting International Airport. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist between the black of the foreground (ink) and the white of the background and Ink Studio, Beijing. (paper) by using a highly diluted white acrylic paint on black paper. This inversion emphasizes the interplay between light and darkness to reveal a luminous creature at the centre of each work. The works are shaped as perfect circles that evoke a sense of looking through the lens of a microscope, and one encounters imagined microbiotic life forms painted with refined brushwork, lines, and dots. While in traditional ink painting one is able to understand the way in which an artist paints a work by studying the brushstrokes, this is difficult to discern in Luminaries, given the microscopic scale of each brushstroke, and an inability to decipher the manner in which these creatures of light take shape might lead one to wonder if they have been produced by some natural process. From a distance, one sees flaming ethereal organic forms emerging from the black of the paper. Upon closer inspection, one notices the finesse and highly precise brushwork technique employed to achieve these biomorphic forms.

There are several hundred works in this series, and each work is accompanied by a poem written on the back. Bingyi wrote these poems within a poetry slam setting while interacting with an audience, with a poem written spontaneously for each audience member, which she then matched to the life forms depicted in each of the paintings. Furthermore,

Vol. 14 No. 6 25 26 Vol. 14 No. 6 Top: Bingyi, 澺 (Yi), 2015, each of these life forms has been given a title in Chinese—represented by a ink on paper, 49 x 49 cm. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist Chinese character—and each one of these characters has within it the water and Ink Studio, Beijing. radical (shui). While each work stands on its own, the entire series can be Middle: Bingyi, 漭 (Mang), 2015, ink on paper, 49 x 49 approached as a single work united by a long poem that ties each of them cm. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, together as a macro-assemblage. Beijing. Bottom: Bingyi, 濏 (Se), 2015, ink on paper, 49 x 49 Metaphors for Ideation and Creation cm. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, In Fairies, each of the paintings, depicted in a fan format, is a reﬂection of Beijing. imagined life forms that are sentient. Drawing upon a classical form of the fan format, Bingyi compiles an album or a catalogue in a contemporary manner, revitalizing both fan and album formats in the process. The series is broken into sets of one hundred, with a total of nine hundred to one thousand paintings, and serves as a metaphor for ideation and creation, with each idea presented in the work represented by a singular fairy resembling a multicellular creature. Among these are the Fairy of Adamancy, Fairy of Pupil, Fairy of Shadow, Fairy of Ink, Fairy of Abnormality, Fairy of Season, Fairy of Withering, Fairy of Fragrance, and hundreds more.

In the Fairies series, the intricate language of lines and dots offers viewers a dual perspective that changes with one’s physical proximity to each artwork. From afar one sees the creatures as organic wholes, but the forms are rendered with such reﬁnement that a new level of experience is made possible by using a magnifying glass made available to the viewer when the works are exhibited that allows one to see the inﬁnitesimally tiny yet decisive individual brushstrokes. Bingyi has explained that she can paint at such a microscopic level only by touch. Although she cannot necessarily see the minute details with precision by using only the naked eye, her brushwork becomes a bodily operation in which she explores a touch-based form of feedback in using the brush instead of the usual visual methods of assessment.

Fairies, apart from representing the shift from exploring the macro to the micro in Bingyi’s practice, also reﬂects the potential of new life to take a creative form. Even though these creatures are created in the artist’s imagination, they seem to be part of the microbiotic world. As viewers, we are introduced to the inner mechanics of these creatures as we get to see the many ways in which life can ﬁnd expression. It appears as if these creatures have been produced by some form of genetic encoding and cell division, yet they are named after abstract and concrete things such as a shadow, ink, fragrance, abnormality, season, and adamancy, which are not normally seen as biotic.

The Nature of the Material Universe Wanwu: Metamorphosis was made in Mount Longhu in 2013, and it is part of a series of works that Bingyi has been making since 2010. The concept of Wanwu in Chinese combines the number 10,000 and the character for matter. It denotes the uncountable, much like inﬁnity, and it represents the material universe and all the things and matter that are contained within it. Covering twenty-two metres, the work Wanwu: Metamorphosis stretches across the room.3 Viewers can walk around the work and above it on a clear glass

Vol. 14 No. 6 27 Top: Bingyi, Fairies (Fairy of Bead), 2012–15, ink on paper, 34 x 34 cm. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing. Middle: Bingyi, Fairies (Fairy of Pupil), 2012–15, ink on paper, 34 x 34 cm. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing. Bottom: Bingyi, Fairies (Fairy of Vortex), 2012–15, ink on paper, 34 x 34 cm. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing.

28 Vol. 14 No. 6 Bingyi, Wanwu: Metamorphosis, platform, allowing them to see patterns in the work that have emerged from 2013, ink on paper, six pieces, 2200 x 260 cm each. Installation various climatological and geological processes that it was exposed to. view at Ink Studio, Beijing. Photo: Jonathan Leijonhufvud. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing. To make this work, Bingyi went to Mount Longhu, a mountain located in Jiangxi province, which has traditionally been associated with Daoist spirituality. There she studied for months the geography and the weather conditions, recording precipitation, humidity, wind direction, the amount of solar exposure, and other variables that she then analyzed along with the topography of the landscape. Covering portions of the actual landscape with large lengths of paper that followed its topography, and using ink, water, and a secret ingredient, Bingyi optimized the interaction of these materials with the environment.

Ink is an amorphous agent that allows for layering and natural absorption of light. Sensitized to this quality, Bingyi worked with the ink at a molecular level, taking advantage of the natural attributes of the carbon that is found within it. In its interaction with various forces, ink leaves a record on paper through the movement of water that dissolves and dilutes the carbon, resulting in the gradations that we see in the work. The behaviour of this interaction of materials is modulated by geological and environmental forces. Factors such as gravity, wind direction, evaporation, humidity, air pressure, condensation, rain, sunlight, and the terrain of the landscape all shape the work. Thus, Wanwu is a work that represents a collaboration of the artist with natural forces and liquid systems, which are reﬂected in the traces of these processes and elements on the surface of the paper.

Through Wanwu, we are able to see intensive processes like ﬂow, speed, pressure and diffusion with differences in density, saturation, pressure, and temperature that drive our weather systems. These processes are present throughout the world but often seem invisible to us. We see only their

Vol. 14 No. 6 29 Bingyi, Wanwu: Metamorphosis (detail), 2013, ink on paper, six pieces, 2200 x 260 cm each. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing.

Left: Bingyi, Wanwu: Metamorphosis (detail), 2013, ink on paper, six pieces, 2200 x 260 cm each. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing. Right: Bingyi, Wanwu: Metamorphosis (detail), 2013, ink on paper, six pieces, 2200 x 260 cm each. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing. effects, especially when we consider factors such as wind, air pressure, and humidity. Regarding this invisibility of sorts, in Difference and Repetition Gilles Deleuze introduces the distinction between the scientiﬁc concepts of intensive and extensive properties. Extensive properties include “length, area, or volume,” which are “intrinsically divisible. A volume of matter divided into two equal halves produces two volumes, each having half the extent of the original one.”4 Intensive properties include indivisible, or invisible, properties such as temperature and pressure. For example, if a bucket of water boiling at one hundred degrees is divided in two equal halves, each half will not be at ﬁfty degrees but will be at the original one hundred degrees.5 In her work, Bingyi reveals the dynamics of intensive

30 Vol. 14 No. 6 properties, in liquid systems, by creating a situation in which ink interacts with the natural world in ways that the work of art becomes the intersection point for the expression of intensive and extensive properties.

Wanwu represents these intersections of intensive processes and systems as a metaphor for all the forms and matter in the universe that emerge from the intensive properties that we experience through the weather system, the Big Bang, entropy (in thermodynamics, the idea that energy in the universe moves from order to disorder, with entropy itself being a measurement of that shift), the ﬂow of energy (from one body to another), and through the cooling of the universe (since the Big Bang, as the universe expands, it cools as energy spreads out due to this expansion). While Luminaries reﬂects intensities leading to the extensive forms we see on the dark paper Bingyi employs for that series, Wanwu is directly about the intensities themselves and particularly about the traces they leave behind. According to Craig Yee, the work points to complexity theory, systems theory, chaos theory, entropy, the intensitive and extensive, all of which are made apparent and visible through the work itself.6 In that sense, the work makes these concepts tangible to the viewer, who can internalize these concepts through direct experience of the work.

The Death of Humankind / The Rebirth of Nature In Apocalypse, the artist emulates styles and techniques of representing landscape, mountains, water, and mist from the northern Song genre of monumental landscape painting. It seems as if climactic forces have taken their toll on the painting, and again we see the residue of the process of interaction between these climactic forces and the original work. The work is done on silk, and from the individualized expressive gestural kind of brushwork that Bingyi applies, one can ﬁnd in it afﬁnities with Song dynasty painting.

In this work, as the title suggests, the subject matter involves the demise of the human species. The painting depicts eight different scenes accompanied by eight short poems. Each scene and poem reflects a particular period and tells of a stage in the apocalypse. Most prominent in the work is the depiction of the flood, which can be understood through the perspective of biblical metaphor or Chinese myth. In the Chinese mythological sense, the work recalls Yu the Great, the mythical founder of the Xia dynasty (seventeenth–fifteenth century BCE) who controlled the floods that plagued mainland China, specifically the Yellow River valley. Yu the Great developed a massive project of dredging river channels that were to be employed as outlets for overflowing water; once this impediment to socioeconomic development was removed, Chinese society flourished. In Apocalypse we see a returning of the floods; they are threatening and have the power to destroy the very foundation of human civilization.

Another scene from Apocalypse is a mass grave where all souls come together and unite. This part of the painting shows the effects of the ﬂood,

Vol. 14 No. 6 31 Left: Bingyi, Apocalypse (detail), 2011–15, ink on silk, 96 x 2000 cm. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing.

Bingyi, Apocalypse (detail), 2011–15, ink on silk, 96 x 2000 cm. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing.

32 Vol. 14 No. 6 Bingyi, Apocalypse (detail), with debris and rubble ﬂoating on the water, reﬂecting the manner in which 2011–15, ink on silk, 96 x 2000 cm. © Bingyi. Courtesy nature has decimated our human-made structures. As such, the painting of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing. represents a meditation on our own demise. Although the majority of the painting is invested in documenting and representing the destruction of our human world through natural forces, one part also shows the rebirth of the natural world without human presence. While Luminaries and Fairies are primarily focused on life, Apocalypse is mainly about death.

Aside from showing the collective decay and disappearance of the human species on the planet, the work in its last scene shows a “secret garden” in which nature has taken over from the ruins of humanity. Apocalypse serves as a reﬂection of the momentous impact we as a species have had on the planet during the Anthropocene (the current geological age, which has resulted from extensive damage to the climate and environment because of human activity). It is apparent that the natural world has primarily been deﬁned by the effect humans have had on it. As a result, human extinction leads to the rise of the natural world and its re-encountered equilibrium. Another particularly interesting aspect of this painting is that Bingyi, in her study of natural disasters, painted parts of the work at these sites; for example, the secret garden scene is from Bingyi’s visit to sites following the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. One is able to detect the holes, wear, and tear on the silk of the painting that are the outcome of this process.

The Performance of Suspended Creation Epoché is a performance piece done in Shenzhen and commissioned by the Shenzhen International Airport. For this piece, Bingyi worked with

Vol. 14 No. 6 33 the owner of the airport, who is also the pilot of the helicopter she is Bingyi, Epoché, 2014, helicopter with bag of ink. performing from. Epoché derives its title from phenomenology, in which © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist. the French word epoché means the suspension of any assumptions that we have about the existence and reality of the external world we are a part of. The concept was made popular by Edmund Husserl in Ideas I, which refers to phenomenological epoché, also called bracketing or phenomenological reduction.7 In this work, Bingyi ascends in midair in a helicopter with ﬁve hundred kilograms of ink in twenty-kilogram bags, which she then, in collaboration with gravity, drops upon the paper laid out on the ground below. According to Yee, the work, like its title, “serves as a metaphor for the state of mind found in meditation especially in the Buddhist tradition that involves decoupling oneself from the habituated way of interacting with the world.”8 As soon as the video of this performance was posted on the Internet, viewers gave it the Chinese title modan, meaning ink bomb.

From Bingyi’s perspective in the helicopter, there is a feeling of detachment, and ultimately a feeling of epoché. In this work, she engages with the natural properties of ink in combination with the performative aspects of art making. As a result, she develops a connection between ink and performance in which ink is used to record phenomena in the natural world, which, like Wanwu, captures the behaviour of the natural world and its forces, in particular wind and gravity. Nowhere do we see the involvement of the brush, which in traditional Chinese ink painting creates the connection between body and mind through the physical recording of the calligraphic line. This becomes particularly important when we consider that the result of the performance is a record of its process and its residue, preserved as the ink lands on the paper.

34 Vol. 14 No. 6 Bingyi, Epoché, 2014, canvas on ground. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist.

Bingyi, Epoché, 2014, canvas on ground receiving ink. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist.

Bingyi, Epoché, 2014, artist with canvas on ground. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 14 No. 6 35 Bingyi, Epoché (detail), 2014, ink on canvas, 2200 x 2000 cm. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing.

Bingyi, Epoché (detail), 2014, ink on canvas, 2200 x 2000 cm. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist and Ink Studio, Beijing.

36 Vol. 14 No. 6 Interdisciplinary Performance In addition to her art practice, Bingyi is also an experimental performance artist. She works in a collaborative setting with classically trained musicians and performers, offering musical, literary, and theatrical themes around which multiple performers improvise. This kind of collaborative artistic creation resembles that of the Six Dynasties period, during which counter- cultural ﬁgures participated in calligraphic and musical performances and in painting and poetry recitation. In these performances there is a mutual and synesthetic appreciation of different forms of expression. She invokes a syncretic, performing art form in mixing music, poetic composition, dance, and artistic production. Through this aspect of her artwork, she ﬁnds further equilibrium between her contemporary experimental performing practice and a deep historical awareness.

Conclusion Bingyi’s art explores the properties that define our universe and that go beyond our immediate perception. She explores notions of time that are outside the traditional definitions with works that are read as events rather than just objects of aesthetic production. In this way, Bingyi’s art practice lends power to the intervention that nature, climate, and environment can have in the development of her work. The works themselves become residues of a spatial and temporal relationship, metonymically instantiating the existence of the universe and the processes and matter that compose it, serving as extensions of this universe. Moreover, the works create a shift in the perception of the viewer to accommodate an understanding of the multiplicity of the universe, which finds expression in macrocosms (galaxies, constellations, clusters) and microcosms (microbiotic organisms, cellular life forms, subatomic and molecular structures). By interacting with Bingyi’s body of work, one is reminded of the universe as living and breathing, an organism governed by its own forces, energy, and processes that give it life and momentum.

Notes

1. Bingyi, “Painting is a Flood and a Wild Beast,” Ink Studio website, http://www.inkstudio.com.cn/ press/17/. 2. Overview of Bingyi’s Intensive/Extensive exhibition, “INTENSIVE/EXTENSIVE—March 21–May 3, 2015,” Ink Studio website, http://www.inkstudio.com.cn/exhibitions/14/overview/.

3. As presented in Bingyi’s Intensive/Extensive exhibition at Ink Studio, Beijing, March 25–May 3, 2015. 4. “Gilles Deleuze,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/. 5. Ibid. 6. Craig Yee (Co-founder of Ink Studio), interview with the author, Ink Studio, Beijing, March 24, 2015. 7. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy—First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (1913; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982). 8. Craig Yee (Co-founder of Ink Studio), unpublished interview with the author, Ink Studio, Beijing, March 24, 2015.

Vol. 14 No. 6 37 Daniel Chen A Conversation with Wei Jia

ei Jia was born in 1957 in Beijing. He graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 1984 and received his WM.F.A. from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania in 1987. Wei Jia currently works and lives between New York and Beijing, where he teaches at CAFA.

In anticipation of his ﬁrst exhibition in Hong Kong, a duo show with his wife, artist Lin Yan (at Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery, November 17 to December 17, 2015), I sat down with Wei Jia at their home in Brooklyn on Wednesday, July 22, 2015, to discuss his process of art-making, the inspiration behind his work, and his thoughts on the evolution of traditional Chinese painting.

Daniel Chen: Could you explain a little bit about your creative process? How does a painting begin?

Wei Jia: Ever since I was very young, I have practiced traditional Chinese calligraphy every day, and I use this experience in my work. In my latest series, I reorder the calligraphy, or reinterpret it in my own way. I start by writing calligraphy in the old, traditional manner on layers of mounted xuan paper and then break up or tear apart the paper, reordering the layers as I remount them. I tear and remount over and over, moving many times back and forth between the two until I feel the piece is ﬁnished. I try to bring my life experiences into my process, as well as my artistic inﬂuences, whether they are from traditional Chinese art, Western abstraction, or Minimalism.

Daniel Chen: I have heard you mention that you are inspired by nature: the colours of changing seasons, layers of wood, the shapes of plants and ﬂowers. How do these elements make their way into your work?

Wei Jia: When I look at nature, I like to use the phrase chang jian chang xin (the more you look, the more you see). For example, when I look at traditional paintings from the Song and Yuan dynasties, I know some of them by heart, but still, whenever I see them again, I always discover something new. Nature is like this as well. Every morning I go to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, and every day I see something new. The leaves change their shape; the light changes from day to day.

38 Vol. 14 No. 6 Left: Wei Jia, No. 15174, 2015, gouache, ink, and xuan paper collage, 144.78 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Wei Jia, No. 14158, 2014, gouache, ink, and xuan paper collage, 144.78 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Daniel Chen: You mention traditional Chinese art, but in your work there are non-traditional materials such as gouache as well as methods such as collage. Do you still see yourself as part of this tradition?

Wei Jia: I often get this question: Is my work Chinese, or is it Western? I think it is both, or perhaps it is neither of them. Having spent twenty-eight years in China, and now thirty in the USA, I picture myself on my own narrow road, balanced between East and West. I am connected to my past, as I grew up with traditional Chinese art, and I continue to have love and respect for this tradition. In my own work, I want to develop what I believe are the best parts of Chinese art.

Daniel Chen: Can you elaborate on these “best parts”?

Wei Jia: I break them down into ﬁve areas: “the way of seeing,” “the suggestiveness of Chinese arts” (including poetry, music, gardens, etc.), “space and layers,” “control vs. non-control,” and “poetry and painting.” “The way of seeing” is about the way that traditional art originally was meant to be appreciated—paintings were on small scrolls that were viewed one at a time, by small groups of people, say, four or ﬁve friends. When viewing a scroll, you would start from the lower right, and slowly look from right to left, letting the painting take you on a journey. So traditional Chinese art required a close-up look, no more than an arm’s length. It was never meant to be exhibited the way you see paintings shown in museums today. I want to retain this “way of seeing” in my work—I would like to invite the viewer to take a journey in the same way they would in a traditional landscape painting. In my work the starting point no longer matters, but the movement matters. Your eye must move around the piece in order to discover it fully.

Vol. 14 No. 6 39 Daniel Chen: This seems connected to space in traditional Chinese painting as well. I know that in many traditional ink paintings, the artist leaves areas untouched by their brush in order to let the viewer’s imagination ﬁll the void—clouds, mist, water.

Wei Jia: Yes, actually this is key to the “suggestiveness” that I mentioned. I like to use this example: Picture a blank piece of paper, and upon it you draw a lone boat. All of a sudden the surrounding blank space becomes water. This water was not created out of perspective, nor was it drawn; it is wholly imagined. This is not only a traditional phenomenon—the contemporary artist Richard Serra is able to do the same thing with his steel sculptures. I recently saw one of his exhibitions—with tall sheets of steel that curved in and out, and you could walk between them—all of a sudden the space was transformed, just by placing a simple structure inside. I could feel a push, or pressure, as I walked through, as well as a pull, like being drawn toward the metal structure. He gave the space a meaning. This is close to the idea of suggestiveness in a traditional Chinese painting. This is just like the lone boat.

Daniel Chen: In your new series, the Wei Jia, No. 15176, 2015, gouache, ink, and xuan spaces that you leave seem very balanced, paper collage, 144.78 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist. so that from a distance the composition appears almost evenly measured across the entire painting.

Wei Jia: Yes, I pay very close attention to these spaces between the brushstrokes. In calligraphy, leaving more space is related to Zen. The space inspires me in the same way shapes that I see in nature inspire me. Of course, these individual characters each have a meaning, but for me they merely seem like beautiful forms; they no longer hold any meaning. They are abstract. So the brushstrokes and the spaces between each brushstroke are fascinating. In my new series, I try to create a certain rhythm using “space and layers.” I keep a constant beat, a uniform composition that in the West could be called “all-overness.” But when you look closely, you will see that actually there is a lot to discover and a lot of space left for the imagination.

Daniel Chen: I see. Now what about non-control?

Wei Jia: “Control vs. non-control” means the accidents that happen in traditional art—accidents that often become the most interesting part of a painting. With traditional ink art, you spend a lifetime reacting to the ink and learning how to control it, but there is an element of chance that I want to retain in my work. So rather than controlling it using a brush, I removed

40 Vol. 14 No. 6 Wei Jia, No. 0891 (detail), 2008, gouache, ink, and xuan paper on canvas, 178 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

the brush, and instead I tear apart layers of xuan paper. I never know what will happen. Sometimes the result is beautiful; sometimes it is disastrous. But this is what makes the process interesting to me—I must react to these accidents, and they lead me to new ways of creating.

Daniel Chen: I suppose this tearing process is a way of “de-skilling” your calligraphy.

Wei Jia: That is a good way to put it.

Daniel Chen: And ﬁnally, we are at “Painting and Poetry.”

Wei Jia: I like to use the phrase by Guo Xi, an eleventh-century Song dynasty artist: “A poem is an invisible painting; a painting is a visible poem.” I still read poetry every day, it helps me to sense the world. A poet writing about the moon one thousand years ago—I can look at the same moon and connect to this person through their words. I want to be able to connect with others in the same way.

Daniel Chen: It is enlightening to see how you are working to develop and further these traditions in your art. Although an important part of your process involves “removing the brush,” one key element that you have retained is xuan paper. In fact, you use a speciﬁc type of traditional handmade xuan paper, a material that carries with it a strong cultural connotation. In your earlier collage work, the paper is mounted onto canvas, and the areas of collage seem to form an image; in the new series, the fragments are more delicate, and now you work solely with full sheets of xuan paper. How has your manipulation of this material changed over time, and how, if at all, does your manipulation of it change its cultural context?

Vol. 14 No. 6 41 Left: Wei Jia, No. 15182, 2015, gouache, ink, and xuan paper collage, 144.78 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Wei Jia, No. 14166, 2014, gouache, ink, and xuan paper collage, 144.78 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Wei Jia: Xuan paper has always been with me. I started traditional painting as a teenager and have used this paper ever since. I am very aware of its history and meaning. I began my previous series in 1991, where I tore the pieces of xuan paper to make a composition—the pieces were fragments from my memory, from my experiences. In my new series, I decided to begin and end my work using entire sheets of xuan paper, instead of tearing them into pieces. These are handmade sheets with beautiful edges, and I wanted to leave them intact. I wanted to leave a space around the layers of collage as well, so that each piece has the look of a traditional Chinese scroll, and also to give the audience a break for their imagination.

Daniel Chen: So you see this object as sculptural, rather than just a painting?

Wei Jia: I don’t consider my work sculptural. Even though paper is translucent, there is a complexity to the surface of my work, and also there is a personality to the paper. Although the xuan paper is smooth and soft, there is weight and heaviness to it as well. I use this weight to give my work the feeling of a mural or stone surface from a distance. Together with the imagery, this makes an impact, something that will draw you to have a closer look.

Daniel Chen: You have explained the traditional development in your art; I wonder if you could discuss the non-traditional?

Wei Jia: There are actually ways in which my work challenges tradition, too, and colour is one of them. In traditional ink painting there are certain rules to applying colour that to me seemed outdated—it goes back to a time when paintings were meant to be viewed only by literati. I want to

42 Vol. 14 No. 6 Wei Jia, No. 0892 (detail), 2008, gouache, ink, and xuan paper collage, 178 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

go beyond this, so I mix and use colours that I see in nature around me. I like the colours that spark your own memories or recall past experiences. I don’t respond to ﬂashy colours like those in ﬁreworks or the sharp colours of advertisements. I like colours that invoke a mood that can stay with you, even for several days. Colour to me works like a candle—you light it, and your mood changes.

This is related to another way my work challenges Chinese tradition— what I call objecthood. I explained earlier about the "way of seeing," how traditional paintings are meant to be viewed close up and slowly discovered. Although I want to preserve this in my work, I also try to give my work a presence that will attract you from a distance. Perhaps this is influenced by my love for colour field painters such as Mark Rothko—from a distance, you can really feel his painting in the room. One of the ways I achieve this presence is through abstraction, and the other is the constant, uniform rhythm in my compositions. The difference in my work from the colour field paintings is that once I am able to invite you in, there is still more to discover. As you move closer to the work, your eye can move around the piece, and hopefully it will create or suggest a mood inside of you. The painting is just an object; it is something, but at the same time it is nothing. The viewer gives it meaning.

Daniel Chen: A truly Zen statement. I hope that people will continue to discover your work and make their own personal connections to it. Thank you so much for your time.

Vol. 14 No. 6 43 De-nin Deanna Lee A Single Artwork: A Conversation with Zhang Hongtu

rom October 18, 2015, to February 28, 2016, the Queens Museum, Zhang Hongtu, A Walking Man, 1985, acrylic on New York is exhibiting a retrospective of the work of Zhang Hongtu. canvas, 142.24 x 157.48 cm. FI spoke with Zhang Hongtu as he was preparing for the exhibition. Courtesy of the artist.

De-nin Deanna Lee: The Queens Museum exhibition will be the ﬁrst US survey of your work. How will it differ from your retrospective at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan last year?

Zhang Hongtu: The Queens Museum show will be smaller, but the artworks will be drawn from a larger timespan, from as early as 1959, before I began studying at the high school of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Another difference is that because the exhibition will take place in New York, it will feature more work from the 1980s and early 1990s. My artwork then was closely related to society, AIDS, and identity issues.

44 Vol. 14 No. 6 De-nin Deanna Lee: In working on this retrospective, have you found persistent themes or features in your artwork that surprised you?

Zhang Hongtu: There weren’t any surprises because many of these things were exhibited in Kaohsiung. I wouldn’t call it a “surprise,” but what seemed apparent was the sense of myself as an artist who over the past decades has been working on a single artwork. It might look like I have different styles and periods, or skills and materials, but when I look at all of my work together, I see a single artwork. In terms of attitude and content, since the very beginning, my artwork has been about the relationship between society and myself.

De-nin Deanna Lee: As you look back, do you have any regrets?

Zhang Hongtu: Now that I’m getting on in years, I cannot avoid looking back at the past, at old materials. I have discarded many things, and I have only myself to blame. When I began studying art, at the approach of every lunar new year I would give myself the task of reviewing all the artwork I had done in the past year, and I would refuse to allow any work that I did not like to remain. The ones I disliked, I would be sure to tear up and throw out.

De-nin Deanna Lee: Was it in 1960 that you began this yearly practice?

Zhang Hongtu: Yes. I can’t quite remember whether it was Qi Baishi or another Chinese painter, who had a saying, “Leave to this world no inferior paintings.” I agreed with that sentiment, so I set myself a high standard. In fact, I was quite immature at the time, and some of my earlier works may not have been very good, but they have value in that they represent how I was thinking at that time.

For example, there was the time I went to have my hair cut. At that time, I always had a sketchbook at my side. While I was having my hair cut, a white sheet covered my body, and my hands were underneath. I looked in the mirror and started to draw myself, and of course I could not see what I was drawing. After the haircut, I looked at my drawing and said to myself, “not good.” Of course it was not good. So I discarded it.

This kind of thing happened again when I was older. In the school library there were books that only teachers could borrow. If you wished to see the books, you ﬁrst needed to be friendly with your teacher. And then the teacher would invite you to his or her home, and there you could see them. I remember copying examples of painting in styles such as Pointillism, but I discarded all these. Later, some were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. These are my regrets.

On Living a Fully Human Life De-nin Deanna Lee: You left for America in 1982. Had you already made the decision to leave China permanently? If so, why?

Zhang Hongtu: I don’t want to return to China to live, and I don’t struggle with this question. One of the reasons I haven’t returned is not merely

Vol. 14 No. 6 45 about the artistic environment here, which gives me more freedom as an artist, but about being human. Life here has more dignity. In America, you can realize your potential and have autonomy, choosing how to live your life. I believe this is absolutely fundamental.

Without this, in later years many realize that their lives have been controlled. I think this is tragic. You don’t need so many achievements; the important thing is whether you have lived with integrity.

In America, this is possible. I don’t care what people think about my art, or how much it’s worth, or whether it’s in a prestigious collection. More important is the question of whether what I have done is what I wished to do. Is the relationship between my artwork and my life consistent? I don’t want to grow old and doubt my life, suspecting that I acted because of others or the market or the critics. Were that the case, I would believe that I had made a terriﬁc error.

Regardless of how much China has changed, so long as it is better to be human in America, I don’t think about returning.

De-nin Deanna Lee: Was there a precipitating event that led to your decision to leave China?

Zhang Hongtu: I had already lived in China for thirty, almost forty years, and I truly felt sick and tired of it. Were I to continue on in China, I felt, either I would have gone mad or given up my art.

Since I was a child, I loved art. But at the time in China, there was no such thing as freelance work. The government determined all jobs. There wasn’t such a thing as an independent artist, and there were no galleries.

You might fantasize about quitting your job. Well, there was no such thing as quitting your job unless you had committed a crime and your work unit had ejected you. If you didn’t work, then not only would you be jobless, you also would have no vouchers for food and no way to live. And if you had a family to raise, well, then you had no choice but to work.

The job that the government assigned to me was at a jewelry company as a jewelry design advisor. But at the time, no one in China wore jewelry. Still, we had to design jewelry, which would be exported to acquire foreign currency. Think about how meaningless this work was. I did not enjoy it. Only on Sundays, when my wife would bring my child to my parents’ home, would I have some time and space to make art. It was like this for years.

Several times I tried to change jobs, but none was successful, due to my own work unit. It’s like this: When the government assigns you to a work unit, then you belong to that work unit. They have your personal ﬁle, which they control. If they refuse to give you this ﬁle, then no other work unit can accept you. It’s very simple. After several failed attempts, I decided to leave China. I thought that only by leaving could I continue to make my art.

46 Vol. 14 No. 6 On Early Work De-nin Deanna Lee: Your sister found some of your early work among your mother’s belongings—is that right?

Zhang Hongtu, Sky is My Zhang Hongtu: After my mother Home, 1980, ink on paper, 34.29 x 29.8 cm. Courtesy of passed away, my younger sister the artist. found some of my drawings. When I went back to China, I picked them up. I ﬁnd this one especially interesting. I rarely make ink paintings: I’m not very good at it, and my calligraphy is poor. But here I wrote: “The sky is my home. Why do I have to stay at the bottom of the oil barrel? Open my eyes and wings. Outside everything is alive.” This small bird represents my hope and me. This painting isn’t a particularly important one, but it is an authentic expression, surpassing my ability with words.

On Artwork in the Queens Exhibition De-nin Deanna Lee: Could you tell me more about artwork that will be included in the Queens Museum exhibition?

Zhang Hongtu: In 1995, I had an exhibition at the Bronx Museum, and all of the works were of Mao Zedong. It was called Material Mao, a single- themed exhibition. After that, I decided to stop doing works on Mao. Why? First of all, I didn’t feel a need to do any more. When I ﬁrst starting making them I used it as psychological therapy.

Zhang Hongtu, Mesh Mao, When I ﬁrst started making 1992, wire mesh, 91.4 x 69.85 x 21.59 cm. Courtesy these works, I had the feeling of the artist. of committing a crime, doing something wrong. Still, I felt that I must continue. At the time, George H. W. Bush was the American president, and I asked myself, would I have this same feeling if I did portraits of Bush? No, but why would I have this guilty feeling with Mao portraits? Moreover, Mao had already been dead for some years. So I felt that I had to make them, because psychologically there was a question that needed to be resolved. Later I discovered many Chinese had similar issues: They can in their hearts criticize Mao, but if it came to voicing rigorous opposition, they would be cautious. A friend of mine told me that if I were to make something like my Last Banquet featuring twelve images of Mao in China, I would be shot at least three times. Once would not be enough.

Vol. 14 No. 6 47 Another reason for my decision to stop making the Mao works is that in the Top: Zhang Hongtu, Last Banquet, 1989, laser prints, mid-1990s, things like this became highly commercialized. Lots of people pages from the Red Book, acrylic on canvas, 152.4 were making similar works, and many Westerners liked them—it was the x 325.12. Courtesy of the time of the Mao craze. Many were making Mao icons, and I do think that artist. many of them were also good.

If you want to use Mao’s image and transform Zhang Hongtu, After Picasso (detail from Unity and it into a religious icon, that’s ﬁne, too. But Discord), 1998, oil, acrylic, ink, and soy sauce on there is no clear message or statement in terms canvas board, 76.2 x 60.96 of criticism. I believe that Mao was a political cm. Courtesy of the artist. animal. While I don’t think of myself as a political artist, still, politics has played a role in my life. I didn’t want my artworks to become merely a part of the commercial market, so I completely stopped making the Mao images.

De-nin Deanna Lee: At times your artwork can be quite witty and humorous. Are you using humour as a strategy to teach something to your viewers?

Zhang Hongtu: Not really. The humour arises naturally. For example, in 1989, while I was making the “acupuncture door,” Bilingual Chart of Acupuncture Points and Meridians, I didn’t think it was funny. It was my Chinese friends who said: “You say that your artwork is conceptual, but it’s quite funny and delightful.” Only then did I realize this was the case. I’m not using humour as a strategy, but I do ﬁnd that humour helps viewers

48 Vol. 14 No. 6 Zhang Hongtu, Ping-Pong to engage with the artwork. For Mao, 1995, mixed media installation, 76.2 x 152.4 x example, you might play ping-pong 274.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist. and ﬁnd it fun. And then in the work Ping-Pong Mao (1995), you see that when the ball touches the form of Mao Zedong, you lose. So, it’s easier to make my ideas known. But not all of my work involves humour. I don’t use it like a style or a “signature.” Sometimes it’s there, sometimes not.

De-nin Deanna Lee: After the Material Mao work, you have continued working in series, but you have also taken up other subject matter.

Zhang Hongtu: Yes. Over here (in the next gallery in the mock-up for the Queens exhibition) are examples from my Repaint Shanshui series. In this installation, I have arranged my version of the Song dynasty painting Early Spring in the style of Vincent Van Gogh on one wall and an ink painting of Van Gogh’s self-portrait in the guise of Bodhidharma on the opposite wall, thus forming a dialogue. One looks at the other, and vice versa.

My reason for doing this is that in recent years these paintings have been exhibited frequently; everyone is familiar with them, and they have been easily marketed. But I have realized that the reason people like them and my original concept for making them are not the same. Audiences ﬁnd the paintings attractive, but I am more interested in cultural questions:

Vol. 14 No. 6 49 Zhang Hongtu, Bilingual Chart of Acupuncture Points and Meridians, 1990, acrylic and ink on panel (double sided), 201.29 x 75.56 x 3.17 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhang Hongtu, Shitao— Van Gogh M, 2008, oil on canvas, 185.42 x 198.12 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

What deﬁnes Chinese painting? What deﬁnes Western painting? How do we think about different cultures, different styles, and different aesthetic standards? My motive for this series was to attempt to blur the boundaries. I put these two artworks together—mutually regarding one another—so that one crosses from the West to China and the other travels from China to the West. Van Gogh is still van Gogh, but in this artwork, the boundaries are blurred. Ink painting, Bodhidharma, and oil painting: What was ink painting is now oil painting, what was black-and-white now has colour.

De-nin Deanna Lee: I am also interested in your more recent Shanshui Today series. What is the meaning behind this title?

50 Vol. 14 No. 6 Zhang Hongtu, After Ni Zan, Zhang Hongtu: It’s because there are still mountains (shan), and there is 2009, oil on canvas, 167.64 x 137.16 cm. Courtesy of still water (shui), and there is still some of that visual sensibility of Chinese the artist. water and ink, but nature, the natural environment, has changed. In fact, nature has been so damaged and there is no way to return to a pristine past unless people disappear. If people disappear, then nature will return. So long as there are people, I am pessimistic. The damage that people have caused to the natural environment is frightening.

De-nin Deanna Lee: When did your interest in the environment begin?

Zhang Hongtu: In fact, I have always been interested, but not necessarily has it been from the point of view of art. For me the most catalytic event was in 1997, when I returned to China. I had not been back in ten years. I took a car north from Guangzhou, passing the Pearl River. The colour of the water resembled soy sauce. It was black, and it smelled foul.

Vol. 14 No. 6 51 But during the Cultural Revolution that spot had been a swimming area! I remember a marvelous moment, when I stood in the shallows, not moving. Small ﬁsh would come swim between my legs. I thought, this is extraordinarily beautiful and wonderful! The water was so clear, you could see through to the sand. But now, it’s not so.

De-nin Deanna Lee: These paintings make use of a grid. What is that about?

Zhang Hongtu: The grid pattern derives most directly from the wall tiles of New York subway stations. I have ridden the subway for over thirty years. For me, the grid transports viewers to the contemporary moment, to today. Traditional Chinese paintings do not use a grid. Also, the grid serves as a means of unifying the ink and oil I use in the Shanshui Today series.

De-nin Deanna Lee: The monkey is a new motif in your work. What is the source or reference for your monkey?

Zhang Hongtu: When I ﬁrst started this series, there were no monkeys. Then I tried different motifs in my sketches to generate a viewpoint that would create a relationship with nature. When I inserted the image of a monkey, I realized that among all animals, monkeys are closest to humans. But still they remain a part of nature. When I added the monkey, my painting shifted.

Many people ask me what the meaning of the monkey is in my work. Americans, especially, ask if it is related to Sun Wukong, the monkey hero from Journey to the West. After all, they see that I am Chinese, and the most famous monkey in Chinese culture is Sun Wukong. Many religions have different ways of understanding monkeys. For example, in India the monkey is a god. And there are American ﬁlms in which monkeys rule over humans, and they can be very wicked.

So I hesitate to explain. If I must explain, then I have only my subjective viewpoint. I cannot take my monkey and make it into a universal symbol. I don’t ﬁnd this necessary. Perhaps the viewpoint is shared, but perhaps not. That’s okay, too.

De-nin Deanna Lee: What about your monkey’s form and style? Did you ﬁnd inspiration in observing monkeys at the zoo? Or did you look to art historical precedents, as in Song dynasty painting?

Zhang Hongtu: I found inspiration in all of these sources. At ﬁrst I went to the zoo. I didn’t draw a lot, but I took photographs, which are easier. I have many books about monkeys, and I also downloaded many images from the Internet. Finally, when I started painting monkeys, I found at a collector’s home in Taipei a set of books with reproductions of Song Dynasty paintings. I opened a book from that set, and the ﬁrst page I turned to was a painting of a monkey.

52 Vol. 14 No. 6 Zhang Hongtu, Sleeping Monkey, 2013, ink and oil on rice paper mounted on panel, 123.19 x 116.84 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhang Hongtu, Little Monkey, 2013, ink and oil on rice paper mounted on panel, 123.19 x 116.84 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The artist was Mao Song. I had never before heard this name. And I had never known of his painting. But his monkey painting is particularly ﬁne. It made me think of Rodin’s sculpture, The Thinker. The resemblance was uncanny. So, I then made a painting of an old, sleeping monkey in blue, Sleeping Monkey (2013), surrounded by buildings.

After I spent a while drawing monkeys, it became very easy for me to render their actions and the structure of their bodies. But Little Monkey (2014) was done after my granddaughter was born. I have a photograph of her gazing out at the world, and the look in her eyes—the innocent, artless, naive quality—I found tremendously moving. Moreover, I know that when she grows up, it won’t be the same. When she enters society, she will change. Often I think all people inevitably undergo such changes. As you grow up, the question is: Are you able to remember the past? If you have such a thought, that’s good. But I think the majority of adults forget. After growing up, people think of themselves as adults, not children, and they think that children don’t know anything. I disagree. I think that children in their naturalness possess something valuable. When I painted the eyes of this monkey, it was according to what I saw in my granddaughter’s photograph.

For me, this monkey has many layers of signiﬁcance. I am drawing an innocent and artless being who opens its eyes to witness the world today. We are living in these high-rise buildings, and so we cannot see it so. It might not be by choice, but it is already so because of our excessive population.

De-nin Deanna Lee: In early February, you returned from China, where you took photographs of the Great Wall for a site-speciﬁc piece for the Queens exhibition. How is this piece related to your 2009 Great Wall with Gates?

Zhang Hongtu: The two are directly related. The basic idea is not very different. But while computer-based prints of the earlier work are up to eight

Vol. 14 No. 6 53 feet, this piece will be fourteen feet high and one hundred feet long. Given the Zhang Hongtu, Great Wall with Gates, 2009, pigment size and thinking about the Great Wall, this new one will be more powerful. print, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Still, from my perspective, the Queens audience shouldn’t think of it as the Chinese Great Wall, but just as a wall. I’ve always been interested in the idea of a wall. Today, people are building walls, physically and mentally, and I ﬁnd this is a problem for humanity. So, to “demolish the wall” is to have mutual understanding, mutual compassion between different religions and cultures. I want to emphasize that this wall is not merely Chinese, but it’s about all humanity.

On Censorship Zhang Hongtu: I had two art teachers who came to my studio while visiting America. They viewed my artwork. One said it was very good and liked it. The other said, “When we return to China, do not tell anyone that we came to Hongtu’s studio.”

In another incident, during my exhibition at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, there was a reception area where visitors could sign their names in a guest book. Two people came in and signed their names. On their way out, they crossed out their names so that they were completely obliterated. When the exhibition closed, a friend said that I must forgive them because they would be returning to China. This kind of incident happens all too often.

At yet another exhibition, friends had purchased flowers to congratulate me, as is the custom in Asia. Flower arrangements have ribbons where names may be written. They put the flowers there and then they stood there discussing I don’t know what. In the end, they decided not to write their names on the flower arrangement. They wrote only “Old Classmates of the Central Academy of Arts and Design.” We had been in the same department. This kind of incident I find very tragic.

On Religion De-nin Deanna Lee: In many publications that include a biography, they write about you, “He was born into a Muslim family.” What is your reaction to this?

54 Vol. 14 No. 6 Zhang Hongtu: When I was in China, this didn’t matter at all because China has close to ten million Muslims. Additionally, after 1949 in China, we were taught that religion is the opiate of the people. I was born into a traditional Muslim family. My father was very devout. He traveled to Egypt, studied the Koran, and learned Arabic. My mother was also devout, practicing daily, except during the Cultural Revolution.

After I left China, I realized that others’ interest in my Muslim background exceeded my own. But I later discovered that my background made an imperceptible impact on me. For example, take my father. My strongest impression of him was that he emphasized—regardless of what you choose to do, whether it is making art or studying science—that you must keep a religious attitude. By this he meant if you learn art, think of art not as a tool to reach another goal like making money or becoming famous. If you learn art, then learn it properly. Take art itself as most important.

As an artist, it isn’t possible to ignore the social and material aspects of society, especially if you want to become famous and have your artwork be well received. But I think to have faith, regardless of whether it is in a god—Allah or Buddha—to know a spiritual life beyond the material one is to have a better peace of mind. When others look at my Muslim background, I see this as a good reminder to myself, even though I am not a regular practitioner, having been to a mosque perhaps ten times in my life. Recently, I went to Istanbul on a visit, but not to worship. I’ve read the Chinese translation of the Koran twice, and I am interested in Arabian history and stories of Mohammed. I simply want to learn and understand. For me, this isn’t especially about religion, but about knowledge. It helps me to understand the world, to understand family, to understand myself.

On Art and Life De-nin Deanna Lee: Besides the example of drawing inspiration from your granddaughter’s expression for Little Monkey, are there other individuals in your life who have been sources of inspiration for your artwork?

Zhang Hongtu: There hasn’t been any particular artist who has been especially inﬂuential for me, but thinking more broadly I think of my parents, even though what they did work wise was entirely different from me. My father at ﬁrst was not supportive of my making art. But his views on how to go about being an artist made a strong impression on me.

My mother was not formally educated. But she held onto the ability to experience nature and beauty and life directly, with little inﬂuence from traditional culture or the surrounding social environment. When I was in school, I brought some of my work home to show my mother. The piece she liked best was the one my teacher disliked most. It was 1963, and I was using the pointillist technique and brighter colours. My teacher thought my piece was inﬂuenced by capitalist ideology and “decadent bourgeois art.” My mother did not know nor did she care about ideologies. But she knew beauty. I liked this picture, too.

Vol. 14 No. 6 55 Although I was quite young at the time, the effect this had on me was profound. Not being educated does not mean you have no aesthetic sense. And the opposite is true, too: You may be educated and have learned a lot about the newest things, but what you have forgotten far exceeds what you have learned.

De-nin Lee: Do you have some thoughts or concerns that you wish your audience were more aware of? Things that have been overlooked?

Zhang Hongtu: One of the things that is most important to me is the relationship between my artwork and society. Life brings me new inspiration or impressions, and my art changes accordingly.

De-nin Deanna Lee: Are there particular events or issues that have been Zhang Hongtu, Remake of Ma Yuan’s Water Album S especially provocative for you? (780 Years Later), 2008, oil on canvas, 127 x 182.88 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Zhang Hongtu: Let me start with an example. After I came to America, I wanted to forget about China. But in 1989, with the events of June 4, I realized that I was still Chinese. Why? Because I was still very concerned about Chinese matters. But my point of view now differed from when I was back in China. When I was in China, I lived during the Maoist era. I trusted Mao. I believed him. Now, I doubt him and criticize him. When I began using Mao’s image in my art, it wasn’t entirely to criticize Mao himself. More importantly, I used him as a symbol in order to deal with my prior worship of him.

The social environment, the multicultural quality of New York, of Queens— this background affects how I look at society. When I paint, using Van Gogh

56 Vol. 14 No. 6 to paint Chinese culture, in fact, I have the feeling of living in different eras. Today I might imagine I am Van Gogh; tomorrow I will pretend I am Claude Monet. And then I imagine I am a Chinese painter of the past, Dong Qichang or Shitao. Walking down the street, I might encounter someone from South America. He speaks to me. I might not understand his language, but I can still have some exchange with him, because we live in the same environment. This directly affects my Repaint Shanshui series.

How I see the environment that is in front of me is important. This relates to air pollution and water pollution in China. Food safety, too. The water problem is most severe. When I was sent to the countryside, you could dig a well ten or twenty metres deep, and there would be water. Later, even if you dug a well one hundred metres deep, there still would not be any water. This kind of phenomenon is reality. It is related to my life and my art and what I paint, such as the Shanshui Today series, the ﬁrst of which were based on Ma Yuan’s paintings of water. Ma Yuan’s paintings are twelve beautiful images of water. But those do not represent water today. I asked myself, were Ma Yuan alive today, would he paint that kind of water?

When I began depicting polluted water, it was extraordinarily difﬁcult because water can be any colour, and water reﬂects its surroundings. All colours are possible in water. People don’t really understand the horror of polluted water. I use a phrase “dangerous beauty.” I see the polluted water from factories that print textiles. That water is the most polluted, but it is incredibly beautiful: reds, deep blues, so beautiful! If you did not know that this was pollution, then you would easily say that this was beautiful.

Ma Yuan has a painting called Sunrise and Mountains. I also have a red sun at dawn, but with smoggy polluted air. After doing some research I understood that landscapes by Monet and J. M. W. Turner were related to the early Industrial Revolution and the kind of air that results from burning coal to produce steam power. Now when I see Turner’s paintings, which I have always loved, after learning about the pollution, I don’t see them in quite the same way.

I can always make connections between my artwork and art history, regardless of whether we are talking about Western art or Chinese art. But some of the most fundamental inspirations are drawn from my life experiences. Life might be the same or similar for many people, but I can use art as expression and share something with others. When people cannot express themselves, then they can look to me and what I have stated.

It’s just like singing. If others sing well, then we go to hear them. We can hum along, even if we hum badly, and there is something that is shared. From this viewpoint, even though I am pessimistic, I think that a good artwork still has the capacity to be moving when shared with others.

Vol. 14 No. 6 57 Jonathan Goodman Huang Rui: Painting with Words

uang Rui’s word paintings, shown at Zürcher Galleries in New Huang Rui, catalogue cover image for exhibition York this past spring and summer (May 26 to July 25, 2015), Language Color. Photo: Xu Wen. Courtesy of Zürcher recognize Western traditions but do not succumb to them. Galleries, New York and H Paris. Huang Rui, one of the founders in 1978 of the inﬂuential and oppositional Beijing literary magazine Today, has always maintained some distance from Chinese mainstream art. This has happened in part because his current work develops from a strong knowledge of American painterly and conceptual advances in the past forty years. Indeed, the technique he employs for some of his oils on canvas—materials that indicate of course a debt to Western culture—looks a lot like the style of Robert Ryman; moreover, his word paintings demonstrate a knowledge and internalization of conceptual art.

At the same time, for the cover of his show’s modest catalogue, Huang Rui has posed in traditional Chinese dress; with his long hair, moustache and goatee, and wire-rimmed glasses, the artist looks every inch the proponent of long-established Chinese culture, even though the painting shown behind him appears as though it might be inﬂuenced by the work of Piet Mondrian. This contrast between East and West suggests an unusual complexity in Huang Rui’s disposition, which acknowledges recent developments in world art even as he seeks a steady contact with his own past. Ever since the 1970s, when Chinese art began to incorporate lessons learned from the West’s avant-garde, artists from Beijing and other centres in China have kept their eyes posted on artistic inventions from America and Europe.

This has happened in other arts: the poet Bei Dao, with Huang Rui a co-founder of Today, writes a rhetoric-free verse that owes much to Western modernism (he spent many years teaching in America before authorities allowed him to move to Hong Kong, where he has been allowed to teach after his forced exile from mainland China, primarily for political reasons associated with the publication of Today). But it is easier to incorporate Western visual inﬂuences into Asian art than to do something similar with language—this is because the structures of Chinese and English linguistics are, from the start, so unalike. In Huang Rui’s case, it is important to note that for his generation of artists in China, the acceptance of Western avant- garde principles often has meant a turning away from their own history, at least to some extent. At the same time, within the past ﬁve to ten years, there has been a return to ink painting—surely the idiom considered most traditional and characteristic of China—by the Chinese as well as outsiders.

58 Vol. 14 No. 6 Vol. 14 No. 6 59 In addition to helping found Today, Huang Rui is perhaps even more famous for starting the Stars group, active from 1979 to 1983. This underground collective included Ai Weiwei, Wang Keping, and Ma Desheng, all of whom now enjoy fame and notoriety, and was best known for its counter-exhibition in 1979, mounted on a fence on the east side of the China Arts Gallery (now the National Art Museum of China). After three days, the show was shut down by the government, supposedly for security reasons. But the moment was decisive in that dissent in art reached the public for the ﬁrst time since the end of the Cultural Revolution—it is clear that Huang Rui has been consistently involved with dissenting from cultural convention in China. It would seem that the artist’s posing as a literati painter on the cover of his catalogue represents a further development in a career that is remarkable for both its idiosyncrasies and political resistance. It is also interesting to note that Huang Rui’s progressive art actions are aligned with historical awareness of Chinese history; perhaps the past enables him to work out a perspective that is free of dogma, in both a political and aesthetic sense.

Earlier art-making efforts by Huang Rui spanned a broad spectrum of influences from the West, including Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, and Abstract Expressionism. As part of his powerful show at Zürcher Galleries, he looks to appropriate, in a slightly ironic fashion, the painting of real language within his compositions. Recognizable words, mostly in English, are used as iconographical attributes while infusing the paintings with acuity. The irony comes from the position Huang Rui finds himself in: as a conceptual painter, he must feel compelled to invest his creativity with ideas, but at the same time he paints with a fluidity that withstands the notion of a purely intellectualized art. This contradiction does not weaken, but, actually, amplifies his ideas—in large part because he paints so well.

It is interesting to consider whether the notion of social dissidence, so important to the artist, is embodied in work that uses Western materials (oil on canvas) and English words as its constructs; Huang Rui’s choices, both physically and conceptually, have consequences. Certainly, Chinese painters have long been successful at internalizing the generally subversive values of the Western avant-garde. Perhaps, though, Huang Rui’s position is more complex, as he makes clear in the image of himself dressed in traditional clothing. Or is the pose another way of undermining authority, in this case the legacy of his own culture? It is hard to say. Clearly, his view represents more than one stance; Huang Rui’s most recent paintings, completed this year, consist of painterly treatments of Yijing (I Ching) hexagrams collected in a series called Dance of the I Ching. So the work shifts from Western involvements to iterations of Chinese culture, forming a vision that reverberates between the two.

I sense this is easier to achieve from a Chinese background than from an American one. One of the things I have noticed is just how often and long Chinese avant-garde artists have been looking at the art in New York created in the last forty years. It is true enough that American artists have been

60 Vol. 14 No. 6 inﬂuenced by Chinese culture; one can cite the Cold Mountain paintings of Brice Marden and the poetry of Gary Snyder. But for a couple generations advanced Chinese art has been in dialogue with Western models of innovation; they seem to assimilate more from us than we from them. One must take into account that modernism as the West knows it did not truly take place in China; abstract art has been explored only relatively recently, decades after its development in Europe. Consequently, Huang Rui’s paintings are positioned within a very recent framework, one in which the values of abstraction and conceptualism are made real and immediate due to their true newness within his culture.

In its entirety, Huang Rui’s exhibition, titled Language Color, spans more than three decades, from the SPACE STRUCTURE works done in 1984 to the Dance of I Ching paintings completed in 2015. The early pieces can be considered very much in tune with the American hard-edged, geometric abstraction of that time—for example, in the work of Peter Halley, Philip Taafe, Ross Bleckner, and Sherry Levine—and the artist consciously situates his art within this constructed framework. Inevitably, the New York art world will see this work in light of American geometric abstraction, but this may not be an accurate interpretation in light of other sources that are inflected in Huang Rui’s art. At the same time, these paintings, made by a Chinese contemporary artist, also must be re-seen and re-defined in the context of his history as opposed to our own. This gives both Huang Rui and his audience the chance to establish a point of view that eludes historical over- determination. One can accept Huang Rui’s work simply as it is, without devaluing it by seeing it only as heavily influenced by a differing culture.

Huang Rui, SPACE STRUCTURE 84–2, 1984, oil on canvas, 82.5 x 130 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Zürcher Galleries, New York and Paris.

If it is true that postmodern painting accepts the notion that anyone from any background is free to make use of any particular style in art, then why would it be necessary to pin someone down like Huang Rui? He should be free to do what he wants; an open regard for genres now spans time and geography. Given that Chinese artists have been painting in oil for more than one hundred years, it becomes clear that it now has a short history of its own in the medium. For those of us in the West, it is hard sometimes not to see the Chinese work as academic, the ﬁgurative oils especially, which might more look like studio exercises to Westerners. One of the strengths of Huang Rui’s art is that he infuses his paintings with an intelligence

Vol. 14 No. 6 61 that advances his efforts toward current thinking in the conceptual understanding of art, primarily occurring in Western venues.

Huang Rui’s creativity is seamless with the understanding that, at least as a Chinese artist who has disagreed with the art and politics of his own culture, abstraction can still represent an oppositional outlook—even if North Americans might see it only as a repetition of history. As a result, what looks like borrowing holds a different tenor and weight in China, even at this point in time, when abstraction has been practiced for more than a couple generations. Ironically, Huang Rui may be better appreciated in America than in China, although much of the Chinese art world he belongs to is highly knowledgeable and just as sophisticated as in America. Both cultures are likely in a place where the conscious continuance of a mostly historical style is given weight because modernism continues to inﬂuence artists’ imagination even though the modernist moment is over.

At least this is so in America. The paintings from Huang Rui’s SPACE STRUCTURE series, SPACE STRUCTURE 84–2, SPACE STRUCTURE 84–21, and SPACE STRUCTURE 84–25, all from 1984, can be understood as examples both of independence of mind (in China) and the borrowing of a tradition (in America). The origins of the series are in fact highly speciﬁc. In late 1983, Huang Rui began this series, creating painterly schemes based on divinations of the city’s environment. At the same time, the artist had traveled to Nanjing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou, where he encountered gardens and waterways, which he rendered in hexagrams (bagua), which were ﬁrst used in Daoist philosophy as a means of presenting physical reality in terms of spatial experience. The colours he used—dark browns, greens, blues, and also reds and greys—describe and connect with the experience of cities and urban life in post-revolutionary China. At the same time, Huang Rui’s use of abstraction, even if it is based on ancient divinatory tools from China, also looks to Western stylistic advances in painting.

SPACE STRUCTURE 84–2 feels like a grid that has been partially disassembled; on the left are four horizontal rows of squares of greenish- blue outlined in black, with the top right and bottom left squares missing. On the right there are four rows of single horizontal rectangles, outlined again in black with a dark brown interior. The entire composition, horizontal in nature, has a brown background. The piece is an example of painterly intelligence and seems to reference both the Yijing hexagram (which I discuss later with respect to his more recent paintings) and the legacy of Western geometric abstraction. But whatever its inﬂuences, it remains a self-reliant and forceful work of art. With these works it becomes evident that Huang Rui’s focus has incorporated Western art practice for at least three decades.

SPACE STRUCTURE 84–21 is even more rigorous in its presentation. A tall painting, 136 by 83 centimetres, it incorporates two medium- grey columns outlined in dark grey ﬂoating at the vertical edges of the composition, thus allowing a lighter grey to take over the centre space.

62 Vol. 14 No. 6 Huang Rui, SPACE There is sophistication in the shapes’ formal STRUCTURE 84–21, 1984, oil on canvas, 136 x 83 cm. arrangement, their schematic delivery potentially Courtesy of the artist and Zürcher Galleries, New York coming from Western abstraction. SPACE and Paris. STRUCTURE 84–25 repeats the idea of simple shapes arranged geometrically, this time on a burgundy background. Four long, narrow forms frame a circle at the centre of the painting; the rectangular forms are ﬁlled with a medium-grey and framed in dark grey, with the circle’s centre painted a slightly lighter grey. As their titles demonstrate, these pictures suggest purely visual exercises, with their interest being essentially Huang Rui, SPACE STRUCTURE 84–25, 1984, formal in nature. Huang Rui’s creativity mostly oil on canvas, 80 x 80 cm. has been intellectual and abstract in its terms, Courtesy of the artist and Zürcher Galleries, New York and so the above paintings can be seen in light and Paris. of modernism and its consequences—even if the works simultaneously slightly suggest a Chinese connection.

The dualities inherent in a much later painting, entitled White Tiger Black Dragon (2014), substitute Chinese characters for English words. The work consists of two corresponding forms in white and black: an L-shape placed upright in white, and the same L shape placed upside down in black. As a minimalist work of art, it is highly satisfying, but the simple scheme is rendered more complex by the inclusion of characters in each of the two parts, reading as “white tiger” in the white half and “black dragon” in the black. Why would Huang Rui do this? The painting would work quite well without the characters. It seems to me that he is incorporating literary meaning into what at ﬁrst looks like a purely painterly approach. We know from the fact that he is a co-founder of Today that he has an interest in language. And we know that Chinese characters are traditionally inscribed—often as poetry—on Chinese paintings, so there exists a precedent for what he has done.

Huang Rui, White Tiger Black Dragon, 2014, oil on canvas, 94.5 x 149.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Zürcher Galleries, New York and Paris.

As a result of his choice to incorporate characters into the two monochromatic ﬁelds of the painting, Huang Rui consciously turns to the

Vol. 14 No. 6 63 past. The structure and forms of White Tiger Black Dragon demonstrate his recognition of contemporary painting; however, the combination of words and image goes back a long way in Huang Rui’s culture. Thus the composition is again grounded in Chinese history. Even the title of the picture alludes to ancient, mythic beasts present in Chinese literature and art. By adding this legible meaning to his image, Huang Rui grounds the work in a context that, to some extent, frees it of its seemingly late arrival within the genre of abstract art. For someone in Huang Rui’s position— someone whose culture jumped from academic realism during the Cultural Revolution to postmodern practice without directly experiencing modernity—this painting is a smart strategy, bringing his art into the realm of the contemporary.

One problem with contemporary art today is its superﬁciality; the obsession with creating something new in art has resulted in work that indicates only what has just happened. One of the challenges facing Chinese art has to do with how it will—or will not—introduce its far-reaching past into today’s efforts. Contemporary art in fact needs an infusion of legacies it may not agree with formally but that will lend current applications of creativity a dignity popular culture cannot provide. Ever since Warhol, popular culture has won out in American painting; yet one can understand the impulse to appreciate, for example, Pop art without yielding to it as an aesthetic. In China, the situation is different. Given its history, art there has a potential depth that may not be possible in the United States, where traditions are so young. One of Huang Rui’s artistic contributions may well be bridging a gap between his experience as a contemporary artist and his awareness that the ideas and forms of his painterly inheritance are very old indeed.

In Black Joke White Joke (2014), Huang Rui, Black Joke White Huang Rui has painted a diptych, a Joke, oil on canvas, diptych, 62 x 62 cm each. Courtesy black canvas on the left and a white of the artist and Zürcher Galleries, New York and canvas on the right. The words “black Paris. joke” occur on the black canvas; “white joke” occurs on the white. Huang Rui’s position in Black Joke White Joke is postmodern; language is introduced into the picture plane only to have the words made intellectually meaningless by their inclusion within the painting as purely formal elements. But, interestingly enough, the delivery of the painting style is highly poetic, applied in a brushy manner reminiscent of the New York School; in this case, particularly Robert Ryman. So the composition is based on a highly imaginative reversal in which the words, usually the vehicle of meaning, become formal constituents and the painting style takes on the condition of poetry. This is an exercise in reversed dualisms, as seen in the title of the painting. Huang Rui’s intelligence plays against our expectations of mediums and meaningfulness. He does this to undermine our complacency just as he has stood up against the government’s own self-satisfaction in its political decision-making by publishing the dissident magazine Today.

The most recent works, Dance of I Ching—Bagua, are a group of paintings done in accordance with the eight trigrams of the Yijing, which is a divinatory

64 Vol. 14 No. 6 Huang Rui, Dance of text accompanying the I-Ching–Bagua (I), 2015, oil on canvas, 255 x 154 cm. different arrangements Courtesy of the artist and Zürcher Galleries, New York of the trigrams, put and Paris. into place by the use of yarrow stalks, whose linear signs were recorded in an interpretive manual, the text of which holds great importance in a philosophical and even religious sense in Chinese culture. In the ﬁrst example of the series, the trigrams, consisting of long and short horizontal bands, are collected in a group of eight. Alternately painted light and dark black, and then white and grey, the trigrams ﬁt perfectly within a later New York School schematic that employs grids— even as they quote deliberately from the Yijing structure. The individual trigrams are placed against a background of silver and grey, much like those trigrams painted white and grey. The contemporary sophistication of the painting remains notable, at least in part because of its context that goes back to the ancient Chinese manual.

Number II in the series is in fact highly similar to the composition discussed above. There is one difference: The individual trigrams are composed of both black as well as white and grey strips rather than one particular tone. Together the two paintings characterize a statement that is in keeping with Huang Rui’s current metaphysical bent, perhaps the result of a maturing career. But no matter the reason for Huang Rui’s present choices, the paintings are amazingly beautiful.

It should be said that Huang Rui’s political independence is mirrored by his aesthetic autonomy. Beginning in resistance to Chinese governmental authority, by setting up the alternative magazine Today, Huang Rui has always known the value of dissent. His career has moved in the direction of philosophical statement, reflecting the importance of inner realities— psychological and intellectual insights that come from within. Huang Rui has successfully quoted differing influences and brought them into play in a holistic manner. It seems fitting that he now addresses the Yijing, whose knowledge is intuitive and spiritual in the extreme. By addressing both literature and visual style in a way that incorporates influences outside his own culture, Huang Rui shows us a methodology that is neither presumptuous nor jaded. It is open, as all good art must be.

Vol. 14 No. 6 65 David Xu Borgonjon This Actually Happened—On Objectivity Without Universality: A Conversation with David Diao

o a student of art history, David Diao, I Lived There Until I Was 6 . . . (English David Diao’s career seems version), 2008, acrylic and vinyl on canvas, 91.5 x 71.5 almost like an art historical cm. Courtesy of Postmasters T Gallery, New York. summary of the trajectory of New York Painting since 1960. Though often in the thick of the scene, he has frequently been relegated to the margins of the textbook. The gestural abstractions with which he began soon gave way to sheetrock paintings that concerned themselves with their own materiality and single-stroke works that focused on artistic process. Now, his hard-edge paintings often derive from his art historical obsessions (with Barnett Newman, Russian Constructivism, and architecture) as well as more personal narratives—such as his Da Hen Li House cycle, focused on the site of his Sichuan home before his family ﬂed the newly established People’s Republic of China. The melancholy in these stories often has a bite to it, as in his reﬂections on his exclusion from the art history canon (Diao has painted invitations to a hypothetical MoMA retrospective), as well as in his incisive critiques of Orientalism.

His blend of the personal and the critical—as well as his good application of colour, humour, and deep respect for history in the present—are contributing to something akin to success. An upcoming major retrospective at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) follows on a 2013 symposium in France, and he is represented by galleries in Berlin, Brussels, and, of course, New York. But it is not the ﬁrst time he has come into good graces—throughout our interview in the Soho loft where he has been encamped since the 1970s, he radiated a gentle skepticism about this change in the air.

David Xu Borgonjon: You’ve been a painter for a long time, though you often work with architecture and text. Were there ever failed experiments in other mediums?

David Diao: Of course. I began working two dimensionally, but something changed. People used to be fairly proud to announce “I am a painter.” Nowadays, people will more likely say, “I am an artist” or “I make art.”

66 Vol. 14 No. 6 David Diao, 40 Years of His Art, 2013, acrylic and vinyl on canvas, 101.5 x 153 cm. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York.

The idea of medium speciﬁcity has been elided. I came on the scene at a moment when painting was still the most elevated medium within cultural production, on the heels of the triumph of American painting. As a young artist, if you were ambitious, you delved into painting.

David Xu Borgonjon: It’s been a long time since then, but you’ve stuck to your guns.

David Diao: I also had to live through many versions of the death of painting. One thing I try to do is to pay attention to immediate history, history that doesn’t just happen in the past. For example, in and around 1967 and ’68 people were newly conscious of the materials of art making. It was against illusion; it was postmodern. I created paintings with industrial materials. I would put up ﬁve sheets of sheetrock, but as a painting. Instead of dividing the space and standing on the ﬂoor, this wall was elevated onto the existing wall and framed by the wall it hung on.

David Xu Borgonjon: Are those paintings still around?

David Diao: They got destroyed. They were site-speciﬁc, in the sense of not being permanent. There are other ways to draw attention to the facture of putting the paint on. I worked with plastering, likening the act of spreading wet plaster to the act of smoothing paint. That carries over to my work now, because I’m quite insistent on having a honed, smooth surface. I work mostly with palette knives, which are a small version of the plasterer’s trowel. [Pauses.] So, what was the question?

David Xu Borgonjon: That was the answer. The question was, “Why did you keep painting?” You answered already: you did, but you didn’t.

David Diao: I did, and I didn’t.

David Xu Borgonjon: Were you interested in architecture from the beginning?

Vol. 14 No. 6 67 David Diao, Lying 1, 2000, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 200.66 x 292.1 cm. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York.

David Diao, Barnett Newman, The Paintings in Scale, 1991, acrylic on canvas, 200.66 x 322.58 cm. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York.

David Diao, Sichuan Daily, 2008, acrylic, marker, and paper on canvas, 91.5 x 198 cm. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York.

David Diao: [Sighs.] I don’t think anybody’s not interested in architecture. If you have to be housed, live within a shelter, enclosures, deal with the inside and the outside . . . if you are in any way attuned to your surroundings, you have to be interested in built environments. That’s architecture.

David Xu Borgonjon: Much of your work, from your cataloguing of Barnett Newman’s paintings to your records of Kazimir Malevich’s exhibitions—or even the Da Hen Li House series—relies on forms of measurement. There is an evident interest in standardization.

David Diao: The big struggle in art making is to avoid the subjective and to make something that is based not on my psychology or personal

68 Vol. 14 No. 6 David Diao, installation autobiography but something external. I’m interested in something that view of exhibition I Lived There Until I Was 6 . . ., is almost objective, to which I can point, and say, “Aha! There it is, the 2008, Postmasters Gallery, New York. Courtesy of evidence. The art.” It’s a legacy of a strand of formalism, which skews things Postmasters Gallery, New York. away from the irrational and the subjective.

David Xu Borgonjon: Just to dwell a moment longer on the Da Hen Li House series: that’s a moment when you chose to work with autobiography. Is it the emotional narrative of displacement from a childhood home that you focus on or the precision of the architectural measurements?

David Diao, Timeline, 2008, acrylic, marker, and spray on canvas, diptych, 107 x 396 cm. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York.

David Diao, Timeline (detail), David Diao: That was a quest to do 2008, acrylic, marker, and spray on canvas, diptych, the impossible and imagine a place 107 x 396 cm. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New that no longer existed but loomed York. large in my memory. The piece was in my head for ﬁfty years. Before my ﬁrst one-person show in China at Courtyard Gallery, Beijing, in 2008, I realized that all the work I had shown up to that point (in Taiwan, the Second Guangzhou Triennial, or with Johnson Chang in Hong Kong) was simply not seen. It was dismissed as simply “hard-edge painting,” as a set of references to the New York School or 1920s Russian Constructivism—blah, blah, blah. There’s a certain attitude in Chinese painting that privileges xiesheng, or the ability to copy from nature. I have never studied art formally, so I never learned it. The audience didn’t seem to care about or even perceive the subject matter I

Vol. 14 No. 6 69 was wrestling with. I thought now is the time to tackle this subject of a house, which, for whatever reason—actually, we know for what reason—has disappeared. A conﬂuence of events made this thing more than my private story. After demolition, the land was taken over by the Sichuan Daily. The editor-in-chief there was the father of Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, who went on to indict Mao in the most extreme of ways. I found my biography intersecting with someone else’s, and also with a whole epic that I lived through, too, though in America. That got me off my rear end.

David Xu Borgonjon: Why the tennis court?

David Diao: Well, as a six-year-old kid, your sense of scale is completely askew. All that is objective is the dimensions of the tennis court, which don’t change whether it’s 1949 or 2015. That is also why I felt able to insert actual documentation, like blow-ups of the deed or copies of the envelope with our address printed on it. The house may not exist anymore, but there is evidence left, breadcrumbs that tell you I didn’t just dream this up. This actually happened. Everyone I know has had a house that they lived in that disappeared. That added ballast to the project.

David Xu Borgonjon: As an adult, you have to recalibrate from being a child. That’s why the tennis court was so important. It’s like a Pantone swatch of colour, a ﬁngerprint, or some other reference point.

David Diao: It’s Sherlock Holmes. Real evidence. David Diao, Death on Tennis Court, 2008, acrylic and marker on canvas, 41.5 x 99 cm. Courtesy of Postmasters David Xu Borgonjon: That makes many things click for me. I hadn’t Gallery, New York. realized how dedicated you were to the idea of an objective art.

David Diao: You know, Sol Lewitt and Ad Reinhardt were important to me, but never Willem de Kooning. The New York School was by no means monolithic, and I’ve always gravitated toward what I refer to as its intellectual wing. Not Franz Kline, not de Kooning, but deﬁnitely Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, and even people like Clyfford Still.

70 Vol. 14 No. 6 David Xu Borgonjon: When you talk about objectivity, you mean a very rooted, local kind.

David Diao: I’m almost never interested in universals. I’m interested in particulars. And it’s usually right there. [Gestures.]

David Xu Borgonjon: People often talk about the objective and the universal as though they’re related or even the same.

David Diao: That’s annoying. I see a red ﬂag any time people try to universalize or generalize. If you take a common denominator that is big enough you can encompass everything, but to what end? You miss the speciﬁcity.

David Xu Borgonjon: It could be a really big tennis court, so to speak.

David Diao: It could be, but who would play on it? [Laughs.]

David Xu Borgonjon: Right. A tennis court is a certain size because that is the optimal proportion for a game. The limit on scale is play.

Left: David Diao, Demolish— Small, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 51 x 51 cm. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York. Right: David Diao, To Construct—Small, 2008, acrylic and marker on canvas, 41 x 46 cm. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York.

David Diao: I have always insisted on the idea of play. Not in the sense of games, but as a kind of elasticity. It’s not a tight belt. It’s a belt that gives you room. In a very obvious way, the tennis court is like a formalist painting writ large. I like that correspondence. Given a two-dimensional space, how do you demarcate it into different areas?

David Xu Borgonjon: All these exhibition opportunities in East Asia, like the upcoming UCCA exhibition, put you in a different context with yet another set of rules.

David Diao: It is yet to be seen how it’s going to be read. I’m not showing a linear development of works. It spans forty years. What artists do is to think against themselves and do what they couldn’t have done. My decision to stop making process-oriented paintings was an antagonistic critique of my earlier work. Luckily, when I delved into Constructivism and saw how my

Vol. 14 No. 6 71 David Diao, Tree, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 213 x 213 cm. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York.

heroes had no problem with words—though it was Russian, so I saw it as design—I found a way to let text creep into my work.

David Xu Borgonjon: Which brings us back to translation. You have shown pairs of paintings that say chai (demolish) and jian (construct).

David Diao: While I worked on the Da Hen Li House series, those two characters came up again and again. I made a timeline painting and had to write jian to locate the moment it was constructed, and chai for the year of demolition. So, those two characters became the bookends of the whole project. Everywhere you go in China, chai is on the doors because the country is so hell bent on destroying its own past.

David Xu Borgonjon: I was struck by the way you applied the paint.

David Diao: I did it many ways. I constructed jian much as a child would learn to write it out, stroke after stroke. I wrote chai more loosely. I’m trying to incorporate more at all times, and the fact that I have been so geometric and linear isn’t lost on me. The whole series, Suprematist Little Prisons, is a self-indictment.

David Xu Borgonjon: You also are invested in the display of data through graphs, charts, and diagrams. Your paintings of Barnett Newman’s corpus almost reduce them simply to information.

David Diao: Basically, by using diagrams I try to counter the highfalutin tone of most abstract painting. That skews it toward the universal and the spiritual. I wanted to go somewhere plain, ﬂat-footed, informational, and accessible instead. Transcendence is not a good word in my vocabulary.

72 Vol. 14 No. 6 David Xu Borgonjon: Should art not deal with the subjective?

David Diao: I can’t avoid it, as much as I probably want to. It comes creeping back. There’s a performative aspect to all art-making because there is a stratagem. It has to read, but in a fresh way—in the ﬁssures of things that haven’t been codiﬁed. At the same time, you are also going against the code. I very much believe that art is about critique, in every sense of the word. It is about saying, “What if something else were to be the case?”

David Xu Borgonjon: Critique and speculation.

David Diao: And being obtuse. Not saying yes.

David Xu Borgonjon: Including to yourself.

David Diao: Beginning with myself.

David Xu Borgonjon: Tell me about colour.

David Diao: That is still subjective. Although when I began this series of works about Newman, I was thinking of Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? In the case of my painting of the Afghan flag with the country names in Russian and English, well, that’s a flag. In other cases, I am thinking of a green blackboard. Usually, I assume a pre-existing convention to make the subject matter more conventional and less subjective. At the same time, colour is always metaphoric. Blue is the sky. Brown, the earth. The whole series of Da Hen Li House oscillated between the red clay of Roland-Garros and the green grass of Wimbledon. There is everything else in between, including concrete, but in my head it was very specific. This is where my insistence on the particular is very important. You begin with red, yellow, and blue. But which red? My big lesson in colour was Piet Mondrian’s 1971 retrospective in the Guggenheim. You know, the history books tell you Mondrian worked with a triad of red, yellow, and blue. Some of those yellows were pretty close to lime green. And there were blues that were almost black.

That old Greenbergian formalist idea that paintings have to be only about their formal concerns (colour, line, shape) without reference to the outside world became very constricting for me. After a certain point, in 1984, when I painted the Malevich photograph of his show in St. Petersburg, almost all my work began to involve a backstory. The designs, the texts, the colour, they all refer to something. They point beyond themselves to the world.

David Xu Borgonjon: Is the connection always personal?

David Diao: I’m sure it is; otherwise I wouldn’t make it. But not explicitly. For one painting, I was sent a .jpeg ﬁle of a Newman painting that had been cut up and pieced back together. He had told his wife that he wanted the painting destroyed. She did it after he died. But the same night she had a dream that he came back to her, and said, “You’re killing me!” In

Vol. 14 No. 6 73 remorse, she had the painting sewn back together. So those are not arbitrary lines I came up with. There is even more of a backstory. It resides at the conservation lab at Harvard, but the chief conservator doesn’t let most people know it exists or let images of it out of their ﬁefdom. But the cat’s out of the bag, the .jpeg’s on the Internet, and I have it. I would like to make it again with the lines sewn, to refer to Newman’s job as a men’s tailor.

David Xu Borgonjon: It says a lot about his precision.

David Diao: Maybe. He dressed very well. With a monocle. But at a certain age you need help with seeing. I’m not sending this to Beijing because I didn’t want the scandal-mongering of this painting to skew the rest of the show.

David Xu Borgonjon: Does your audience need to know all this backstory? How easy do you make it for them to know?

David Diao: I bend over backwards to make all the information accessible. I have no secrets. My last show in New York was called TMI (Too Much Information).

David Xu Borgonjon: So there is no mystic, hidden core.

David Diao: Even the way I paint is totally accessible. I don’t have a special touch or unique skills. Anyone working with the subject matter I work with would probably come up with something not unlike what I have. And that’s a democratizing notion I have always carried.

David Xu Borgonjon: What about the scale of your works? They are usually quite large.

David Diao: That’s a legacy of New York painting. I could chide myself for it, but I have done many small works. Usually, they have brothers and sisters that show together.

David Xu Borgonjon: The limit is the stairwell of your apartment, right?

David Diao: Ninety-one inches tall, before it has to be ﬂoated. It could be thirteen feet long, since it is a huge stairwell. One of the reasons I moved in here was because I had checked out the staircase!

David Xu Borgonjon: Do you draw, make sketches, or do other preparatory work?

David Diao: Hardly. Nothing prima facie. Or, rather, always prima facie. There is nothing planned. You approach whatever you do directly. Sometimes, though, I might make something graphic and smaller after the fact, rather than on the way.

David Xu Borgonjon: And all the research and archiving?

74 Vol. 14 No. 6 David Diao, What Ever Happened to Hedda Sterne?, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 91.5 x 198 cm. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York.

David Diao: A life in art is not just putting paint to canvas. Thinking, looking, reading, talking. . .

David Xu Borgonjon: What are you working on now?

David Diao: The Barnett Newman series is really strange. It started over twenty years ago, and now there are twenty-eight pieces. Now I’m working on his involvement in the 8th São Paulo Biennial in 1965. I am gathering all kinds of blueprints and all kinds of documentary information to ﬁgure out which works he showed. It was a moment of the consolidation of his reputation, but only after years of neglect.

David Xu Borgonjon: I can see why that would be interesting to you.

David Diao: Well, without saying so, I like to deal with people who did not get their due—until a certain point. For example, the Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov. And even people who get their due don’t think they get enough due.

David Xu Borgonjon: A lot of reputations are being recuperated right now.

David Diao: The Whitney just brought me back after forty years. I was in the ﬁrst biennial, and I was in the last one. The prize money is very small, so you enter the list, so to speak, and everyone is a competitor. There are many games out there, but I’m unfortunately stuck in this one.

David Xu Borgonjon: You are going to be in Beijing, too. That’s just to say that you are in more than just one arena now.

David Diao: I’m not! They came looking for me. It was [UCCA Chief Curator] Phil Tinari’s idea. I said, “Why? I don’t think they’ll get my work at all there.” He said that I would be surprised by the younger artists, who might be interested in abstract paintings that are conceptual.

Vol. 14 No. 6 75 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky Tangled Up in Blue: Women in the Art of Ma Yanling

a Yanling’s work is varied, and though much of it is self- reﬂective, it is also responsive to recent events in China. MMa Yanling is resolutely feminist in her outlook, and her performances, paintings, and photographs may be seen as a broad inquiry into the role of women in society. In a recent interview, Ma Yanling revealed she communicates in a secret language common in Hubei province called nüshu (literally, “women’s writing”), which contributes to the conceptual basis of her works. In one performance she and her daughter wrote on each other’s skin and then rubbed the messages away to keep them private.1 Her most recent paintings examine the emergence of the idea of the modern woman in the cosmopolitan culture of Shanghai in the 1930s, before the Communist victories a decade later. This era’s international lifestyle has become a recent focus of fascination in contemporary China.

Ma Yanling’s early pieces demonstrate the brashness and anger of her youth, when she was caught up in the turmoil of the Tian’anmen movement. Talking to the artist about her youth, she revealed her anger and passions during her college days.2 In 1989, she was living in Hubei, far from Beijing. She, along with the youth of Xiangfan City and others throughout the country, responded to the democracy movement by crowding the streets in great numbers, but, unlike the protesters in Beijing, they were personally spared a forceful martial reprisal. Yet the experience of the event wounded her, and the anguish projected in her early pieces is palpable. In 2001, Ma Yanling used her own naked body as the focus of her photographs. She had herself wrapped with silk ribbons, tightly constraining her soft ﬂesh, with the restraints shimmering against the matte of her skin. She is totally passive, resigned to her constraints.

By placing herself in a variety of situations, Ma Yanling added layers of narrative. In one, the woman, hidden in a dark closet, tosses her head backwards, defiantly or deferentially avoiding the viewer. In another, the figure is packed in a suitcase slightly opened to view, or falling out of it, or in the trunk of a car. A harsh light illuminates her body, which is otherwise surrounded by darkness. It is as if the viewer, entering the room with a flashlight, has found her. The artful wrapping of her body maximizes her sexual appeal. In one of her staged photos she walks through a barren landscape toward the Great Wall, contrasting the fragility of the human female form with this implacable ancient architecture. In another extraordinary photo, she peers out from a family portrait. With little

76 Vol. 14 No. 6 Left: Ma Yanling, Closet, 2002, C print. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Ma Yanling, Suitcase, 2003, black-and-white photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

Left: Ma Yanling, Great Wall, 2006, performance. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Ma Yanling, Gun 88, 2007, performance. Courtesy of the artist.

Hans Bellmer, Unica Tied effort, the image of the bound woman can be Up, 1958, black-and-white photograph. read as a commentary on familial and societal restrictions—obligations that dominate other personal considerations. Other murkier forms of violent association also come to mind—dark dramas of farmyard animals trussed for slaughter, or a murdered body tossed away as refuse. This bound ﬁgure is reminiscent of the Hans Bellmer photographic series done with Unica Zürn, titled Unica Tied Up, which was exhibited in 1959, but those wrappings brutally cut into Zürn’s breasts or the soft ﬂesh of her belly. Mention might also be made of the Chinese performance artist He Chengyao’s Public Broadcast Exercises from 2004 where she tightly binds her body with duct tape facing out: by marching about and performing calisthenics, she breaks free of her bonds.3 Ma Yanling’s images also allude to political repression. Political connotations are more directly elicited in another series of photographs from 2004–08. Standing in a crowded public space, Ma Yanling holds a gun to her head. Whether she is out-of-doors among the mass of tourists in Tian’anmen Square or on a crowded bus, it seems as if no one in the throng sees her. These images express anger and frustration with the docility and self-absorption of a public that seems too inured or frightened take notice, and not once did a bystander try to stop her apparent intent to commit suicide. The question that arises is whether they saw her or simply pretended not to. After all, a woman with a gun is a pretty dangerous situation. And in several photos there is the ironic presence of a soldier, standing at attention and unaware of her presence.

Vol. 14 No. 6 77 Ma Yanling’s change of backdrops add alternative meanings—standing before Mao’s portrait in Tian’anmen Square, she makes condemnation of his regime implicit, despite the danger in China of expressing political criticism.

Born in 1966, Ma Yanling comes from a privileged background. In the small city of Xiangfan, Hubei, far from the centre of the central government, her father was a party official and her mother an accountant in its business office. She met her husband, Wang Bin, in kindergarten and married him soon after college. Trained in design, she was drawn to the art world and after graduation was recruited to work in a private firm as its art director. For eight years she maintained this position, all the while continuing to make art in her spare time. Later she and her husband moved to Beijing, wanting to be part of the cultural activities in the capital. He achieved fame as the writer and researcher for the movie Tiananmen, which traced the transformation of the old palace into the architectural emblem of the party. After the birth of her daughter, over twenty years ago, she continued her artistic activities despite the pressures of maintaining both a career and motherhood. Living in a sumptuous house cum studio in Songchuan village, an hour’s drive outside of Beijing, she is now engaged in a new project.

At ﬁrst glance, Ma Yanling’s new work, intricately hand-painted portraits Ma Yanling, detail of painting. Courtesy of the of Shanghai movie stars of the 1930s, looks divorced from her early artist. endeavours. With her calligraphic brush she creates what appears like the warp and woof of gossamer-thin silk cloth over naturalistic renditions of headshots of the movie queens of the past. In an interview with me she tried to explain the allure of these women and the special quality of life in Shanghai in the 30s. Politically, Shanghai was the most advanced capitalist city in China, and as a result it was the focus of communist censure. Later,

78 Vol. 14 No. 6 during the Cultural Revolution, Mao considered Shanghai culture the epitome of evil and corruption.4 Nowadays, pre-Communist Shanghai has become a subject of fascination for many in the art world, and it represents more than just nostalgia for a romantic, Great Gatsby-like era. In fact, Shanghai has become important in modern discourse within both political and cultural realms. Some attribute this new fascination to the destruction of the old neighbourhoods in the 1990s, when the government ordered them to be demolished in order to make room for modern city planning. The old architecture represented the multicultural identity of the city where traditional Chinese and Western elements intermixed, a unique combination of tradition and Western modernity in the 30s that is now a key aspect of Shanghai’s charm.5 The allure of that era is evident in the popularity of a modern novel, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1996) by Wang Anyi, which characterizes that era in Shanghai, following the exploits of a beauty queen in the Miss Shanghai pageant.6 Widespread interest in the novel led to a movie and TV series.

Ma Yanling explains that the women featured in her new series, Ming Xing (or superstar; ming yan originally meant “beautiful eyes”), were movie stars, apogees of femininity in an era when people in Shanghai in particular were concerned with beauty and refinement. She talks at length about their elegant clothes and grooming, all of which were wiped away by the 1949 Communist victory and later by the Cultural Revolution. Asked about her seeming nostalgia for that era and the fewer opportunities women had at that time, she vehemently asserted that it was a time of freedom. Women could become educated and could choose any number of jobs and cultural pursuits. Asked if Shanghai suffered under a European colonial hegemony, she asserted that the period of European domination had ended, that the Guomingdang or nationalist government was not as restrictive as the present one, and that there was free speech. She spoke at length about the cosmopolitan environment of Shanghai in the 30s and about the many intellectuals and writers who gathered there for cultural activities, among them the revolutionary writer Lu Xun (1881–1936), a leading figure of modern Chinese literature.7 For her, this was the last flourishing of Chinese creativity and elegance.

The popular arts of the time, such as photogravure calendars, paintings, and photos, featured the great stars of the ﬁlm industry and annual competitions for a beauty queen. In a Western manner, they were posed alluringly, sometimes naked, in a style that is eschewed in China today. Ma Yanling sees her own paintings as an effort to restore what was lost—the style of art, the brush techniques, and the cosmopolitan atmosphere and glamour of that era—and one can see a relationship to her husband’s work as a screenwriter and researcher devoted to historical accuracy in his ﬁlms.

Before analyzing the works themselves, it is important to understand the circumstances surrounding the lives of the Shanghai beauties. In the 1930s, the city of Shanghai was synonymous with urban European culture: it was the Paris of the East. Women, who had largely been conﬁned to the home in traditional China, became the face of modernity in Shanghai. As

Vol. 14 No. 6 79 defined in literature and the cinema, "Miss Happiness” calendar ad, 1930s, Hang Xuying the modern woman comprised a Studio, Shanghai. number of tropes including refugees from the rural countryside, who along with the city natives found work in industry, arts and crafts, and the world of entertainment. Prominent in the popular arts was the courtesan, the prostitute, and the new entertainment industry that evolved as a by-product of the thriving economy and the relative shortage of women in the public realm.8 The ideal was in part conditioned by exposure to Western fashion, film, and popular art, emphasizing women as the focus of male desire. Samuel Liang described the flourishing of courtesan houses as places for their clients’ romantic liaisons, temporary lodgings, and venues for entertaining.9 Liang points out the play of gender reversal in these household situations in the courtesan establishments, with men entering as guests. It should also be said that then, as now, this lifestyle enabled some women to amass riches and achieve independence, something exceedingly rare in former times. In the courtesan household, he explained, being chic or modern was extremely important. Large lavish parties attested to the status of the patron host, the beauty of the women, and the appeal of the environment itself.10 As Meimei Rado has explained, the courtesan was perceived as the epitome of a city’s prosperity or decadence and the arbiter of fashion.11 In the cafes, theaters, dance halls, restaurants, and hotels of the city, women conspicuously displayed their hard-won luxuries and fashionable attire, and this too advertised their success in their occupations.

By the 1930s film stars gradually replaced the courtesans as the paragons of fashion in Shanghai society. As the protagonists of literature and the cinema, the glamorous actresses often represented more sexually liberated lives. For example, the new modern ideal appears in the popular short stories of Shi Zhecun,12 written in 1933. He presents three main stereotypes—prostitutes, madwomen, and virtuous women.13 But Western movies and literature, which were recognized as important, sometimes featured a new female ideal based on the women’s empowerment movement, exemplified by the suffragists. Movie actress Clara Bow (1905–1965) and Colleen Moore (1899–1988), and Henrik Ibsen’s (1828–1906) fictional heroine Nora, of A Doll’s House (1879), epitomized the new woman who was rational, individualistic, and active outside the home.14 But the new ideal in China, according to Christopher Rosenmeier, soon became an “icon of glamour and leisure.”15 Their style of dress featured form-fitting fashions such as the qipao, a slim dress with long slits up the sides to reveal the legs, and male- style jackets and trousers.16 Advertisements in newspapers and magazines, some devoted to ladies’ fashion, like Lin Loon Lady’s Magazine,17 promoted

80 Vol. 14 No. 6 the modern woman. Western-style department stores offered fashions and accessories for sale,18 and the grand old department stores on Nanjing Road remain today purveyors of Western style and luxury.

Ma Yanling, Ruan Lingyu, Movies, which began in Shanghai 2014, acrylic and Chinese ink on canvas, 120 x 150 cm. in 1908, bloomed in the 1930s with Courtesy of the artist. scripts featuring various kinds of modern women.19 Here again the Western influences were at first quite important. In China it was commonly held that the function of the medium was to morally instruct, and many of the movies presented unsung virtuous heroines who suffered the uncertainty and rootlessness of city life. Innocents coming to the city encountered any number of difficulties. Consider, for example, the film Goddess, of 1934: After her husband’s death and subsequent rejection by his family, a young mother played by Ruan Lingyu (1910–1935) becomes a streetwalker in order to nurture and educate her son. But this trope of the courtesan with a heart of gold cannot be considered new. It can be found in Tang dynasty short stories, a genre of literature that among other themes extolled courtesans like the early-ninth-century Miss Li, who protected her young male patron—himself newly arrived in the city and vilified the femmes fatale who ruined the prospects of young men from good families.20 One early movie about courtesans, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen, directed by Zhang Shichuan in 1931, was a kind of docu-drama that told of the rise, fall, and exultant return of a prostitute-turned-film actress in Shanghai. Zhang Zhen maintains the film was “an exemplary text about the makeup and transformation of early Chinese cinema and its reception.”21

The cinema also promoted a new ideal of woman put forward by literati politicos. The Life Movement, or Xinsheng huoyundong, of 1934, encouraged movie-makers to exhort women to reject their traditional passive and submissive behaviour and to become a constructive part of society. Women were now getting educated and worked as teachers or office workers in business and in the cultural realms. The transition to an ideal of a professional woman was part of the social consciousness of the time and the desire to improve society.22 The scripts contrasted the simpler but more mysterious rural life with the new city lifestyles. Some films portrayed the new urban ideal woman, like the Tang dynasty prototype, as dangerous and immoral; others presented the reverse.23 These female cinematic roles, with a range of characters from traditional to modern, rural and urban, virtuous and compromised, derived from literature. As Shuqin Cui observes, “As a gendered category and narrative trope, woman is defined as the embodiment of sociocultural meanings: the female figure appears as the victim of tradition, the self-sacrificing paragon of virtue, and the fallen angel with a heart of gold.”24 Shuqin Cui continues, “The call for women’s salvation did not emerge from female consciousness or as an independent

Vol. 14 No. 6 81 movement. . . . Reformers believed that by fusing the notions of gender and nation they could replace gender awareness with national consciousness, bring about women’s emancipation through national salvation and supplant gender difference with equal rights in humanity.”25 In this way, the “fallen Prostitute” and other urban symbols became emblems of a humiliated nation and oppressive society.

A case in point is one of the Pan Yuliang, Spring, 1930, oil on canvas. Reproduction most famous female artists in old from the 1934 catalogue Pan Yuliang Oil Painting China, Pan Yuliang (1895–1977), Collection. who trained, lived, and worked in Shanghai before moving to Paris in 1937. Her life exemplifies the city’s cosmopolitan atmosphere. Reportedly sold into prostitution as a child, Pan Yuliang found a kindly patron who paid for her education and first trip to Paris, and she was the first female student at the Shanghai Art Institute. When her works met with criticism because of their explicit nudity, she decided to settle abroad. Despite the honours she received, she died in penury. Now she is a cultural icon, and there are several movies celebrating her extraordinary life.

Ma Yanling’s Movie Stars Ma Yanling, Wang Renmei, 2010, acrylic and Chinese The subjects of Ma Yanling’s ink on canvas, 70 x 55 cm. paintings had lives as dramatic as Courtesy of the artist. the figures they represented on screen. As celebrities they enjoyed prominence and were the objects of desire and icons of fashion. But, though glamorous on the screen, they did not often enjoy the autonomous life of a new modern woman. Ruan Lingyu, who wrote the script and was featured in the film the New Woman, committed suicide in 1935 at the age of 25 because her husband divorced her for her scandalous love affairs. Teenage star Wang Renmei (1914–87), in her first film Wild Rose (1932), played an ingénue introduced into Shanghai society at a soirée, but being a newcomer she keeps falling in her modern high-heeled shoes, and her apparent awkwardness earns her humiliation among the swells of Shanghai society.26 Marriage spelled the end of Wang Renmei’s career: the studios, believing married women were undesirable, shunned her, and she played her last role in 1951. Hu Die (1907/08–89), or Butterfly Wu, was a prominent early star, but she suffered opprobrium during the Japanese Mukden Incident in 1931, when it was rumoured that the terrifying chief of the secret police, Dai Li, took her as his unwilling mistress. She later tried to resurrect her career, and in 1935 she toured Germany, France, England, Switzerland,

82 Vol. 14 No. 6 Ma Yanling, Hu Die, 1933, and Italy, where her films were well received.27 2011, acrylic and Chinese ink on canvas, 100 x 80 cm. Zhou Xuan (1918/20–57) was by the 1940s one Courtesy of the artist. of China’s seven great singing film stars. Having acted in over forty films, the “golden voice” who was the most famous and popular singer in China, suffered political vagaries following the Communist revolution; she was committed to an institution and eventually died of encephalitis Ma Yanling, Zhou Xuan, 2013, acrylic and Chinese at age thirty-seven. Jiang Qing (1914–91), the ink on canvas, 80 x 100 cm. fourth and last wife of Mao Zedong, was a film Courtesy of the artist. star when she met the Chairman; she had the ability to bewitch men with her beauty and sexual power.28 Later she was infamous for persecuting fellow actors and artists during the Cultural Revolution. After serving time in prison, she contracted cancer and finally hanged herself.

Ma Yanling, detail of Ma Yanling says that her fascination painting. Courtesy of the artist. with screen divas derives from her mother’s interest in movies. She paints photos of these beauties in a romantic way, working to recapture the allure they once had. The publicity shots she uses as her source remain unchanged; in those photos, imperfections are not recorded, their soft light blanching all physical flaws. Their subjects’ eyes are proportionally large and sparkling. The veils of lines that Ma Yanling delicately paints over the surface make the image more indistinct and idealized. What is not immediately apparent is the brushwork exhibited in these renderings. Working within the traditional vocabulary of Chinese painting, Ma Yanling employs a great variety of strokes, whose individual names are derived from the shapes the brush makes on the painting surface. The art critic Li Xianting observed the range of the fine strokes in her painting: “iron-wire, string, caoyimiao, elegant and simple gossamer lines, leisurely and smooth ones, rat tail, nail head, and others executed in a fine manner.” In a catalogue essay on Ma Yanling’s recent works, he points out a feminist aspect to her artistic process, which, like weaving and knitting— considered traditional women’s work—is a monotonous repetitious action that he calls the female way of expression.29

Nowadays, some Chinese artists discontented with government policies express a melancholy for this lost era. In the 1930s, the trajectory of modern political development that eventually transpired was not yet determined. The course of the newly emerging China in the twentieth century might have gone in an entirely different direction; its potential was inherent in the emergence of the new woman who tragically represented the abuses of past ages as well as the hope of progress for the future. Living in the city, women,

Vol. 14 No. 6 83 Ma Yanling, Audrey Hepburn, 2011, acrylic and Chinese ink on canvas, 80 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Ma Yanling, Marilyn Monroe, 2010, acrylic and Chinese ink on canvas, 100 x 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

84 Vol. 14 No. 6 for the first time, could freely engage with the new society. Moreover, looking back at Ma Yanling’s paintings of past movie stars as symbols of that era provides a contrast with the ensuing decades of abuse that occurred during the Cultural Revolution, when so much of Chinese culture was eradicated. Resurrecting images of the beauties is a way of reclaiming the past. But knowing Ma Yanling’s feminist concerns, the images also serve a greater purpose: they reveal the patriarchal values of the culture that determined the cinematic roles glamourizing women as sex workers and commodities. In the literature and film of China of the 30s, men fashioned the chic urbanite ideal, transforming her into a social plaything, crippled like Wang Renmei in Wild Rose in her new high-heeled shoes. Robbed of their natural dignity, women were largely left out of the leadership of social political revolution in the China that they ironically personified. The most prominent woman in Chinese Communist society was Jiang Qiang, who, like her fellow film stars, enjoyed her sexual power, but who, in her own words, “. . . was just Mao’s dog, who barked when he kicked me,” and in the end came to represent the crimes of the Communist era and died an ignominious death by her own hands. All of these women suffered humiliation, and not a few took their own lives.

Ma Yanling, Jiang Qing, Ma Yanling’s broader focus on 2010, acrylic and Chinese ink on canvas, 100 x 80 cm. feminist issues is evident in her Courtesy of the artist. portrait of Marilyn Monroe and to a lesser degree her portrait of Audrey Hepburn, done in the same style as her images of Chinese movie stars. She paints them in the same slightly out of focus, romanticized manner, with large, dark eyes and prominent, lip-sticked mouths. Marilyn Monroe’s universal sexual appeal, her vulnerability and seeming innocence on the screen, coupled with her mysterious and tragic end, make her a perfect foil for the Chinese movie stars. Her potency as a sexual icon is matched with her fragility in real life, and her public persona conveys a tale of corruption of innocence underscored by her real life role as a plaything of the government and maﬁa. In contrast is Audrey Hepburn, the good woman, an ingénue who lived a long, productive life and in the end was known for her devotion to charitable foundations. Ma Yanling’s presentation of movie stars East and West shows the ancient duality of the feminine persona—angel and devil— as an artiﬁce of male design: lionized, sexualized, criticized, demonized, and, in the end, ignored.

Vol. 14 No. 6 85 Notes

1. Luise Guest, “A Secret Script: The Painting and Performance Work of Ma Yanling,” Creative Asia, March 5, 2014, http://www.creative-asia.net/content/secret-script-painting-and-performance-work- ma-yanling/. 2. Much of the content of this article is the result of three unpublished private interviews with the artist—in 2012, 2013, and 2014—and e-mail exchanges with her. Ma Yanling graduated from Xiangfan University Institute of Fine Arts in 1989 and went on to study at the Beijing Film Academy. 3. Sasha Su-ling Welland, “On Curating Cruel/Loving Bodies,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 4, no. 1 ( March 2005), 27. 4. Lena Scheen, “Sensual, But No Clue of Politics, Shanghai’s Longtang Houses,” in Aspects of Urbanization in China: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, ed. Gregory Bracken (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 119. 5. Ibid., 124. 6. Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai, trans. Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan (New York: Columbia University Press 2010). See also “Wang Anyi, a Female Writer of Constant Innovations,” Confuscious Institute Online, December 23, 2009, http://people.chinesecio. com/en/article/2009-12/23/content_95876_3.htm/. 7. Lu Xun was a leading intellectual and reformer. He wrote of the tragic life of poor Chinese and was instrumental in setting up an art school to express the social inequities of his turbulent times. 8. Gail Hershatter, “The Hierarchy of Shanghai Prostitution 1870–1949,” Modern China 15, no. 4 (1989), 463–98. 9. Samuel Y. Liang, “Ephemeral Households, Marvelous Things Business, Gender and Material Culture in Flowers of Shanghai,” Modern China 33, no. 3 (July 2007), 377ff. 10. Ibid., 403–04. 11. Meimei Rado, “Feminine Archetypes and Dress,” in Shanghai Glamour: New Women 1910–40s (New York: Museum of Chinese in America, 2013), 14. 12. Yiyan Wang, “Venturing into Shanghai The Flâneur in Two of Shi Zhecun's Short Stories," Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19, no. 2, 34–70. 13. Christopher Rosenmeier, “Women Stereotypes in Shi Zhecun’s Stories,” Modern China 37 (2011), 44–68, identifies four types—enigmatic, prostitute, inhibited, and estranged wife—caught between modernity and traditional life; see 45. 14. Ibid., 48. 15. Ibid., 48. 16. Meimei Rado, “Shanghai Glamour: New Women and Fashion,” in Shanghai Glamour, 9ff. 17. Ibid., 11. 18. Rosenmeier, “Women Stereotypes,” 49. 19. Shuqin Cui, “Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema,” Women Through the Lens (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 4. By 1929 there were twenty-seven theaters in Shanghai. 20. Po Hsing Chien, “The Story of Miss Li,” in Anthology of Chinese Literature, ed. Cyril Birch (New York: Grove Press,1965), 300–13. 21. Zhang Zhen, “An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: The Actress As Vernacular Embodiment in Early Chinese Film Culture,” Camera Obscura 48 (2001), 228–63. 22. Shuqin Cui, “Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema,” 10. 23. Rosenmeier, “Women Stereotypes,” 49–50. 24. Shuqin Cui, “Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema,” 8. 25. Ibid., 14–15. 26. For a clip of the film, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYFsKT6bZN8/. For a biography, see Richard J. Meyer, The Wildcat of Shanghai: Wang Renmei (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press 2013). 27. Hu Die’s wedding in 1935 to Pan Yousheng was a major social event of the time; when the Japanese invaded she fled to Hong Kong and then went back to China, where she made anti-Japanese films. After the war, she returned to cinema; see Lily Xiao Hong Lee, A. D. Stefanowska, and Sue Wiles, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 236–41. 28. Ross Terrill, Madame Mao: The White-boned Demon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). See also “Erasing the Stains of the 1930s,” in Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution (Honolulu University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), 366–74. 29. Li Xianting, “Clouding the Passions of Yore,” in Ma Yanling: Timeless Elegance (Beijing Dialogue Space Gallery, 2011), 4.

86 Vol. 14 No. 6 Alice Schmatzberger The Traditional and the Contemporary— Musings About Art and Philosophy: A Conversation with Liang Kegang

“Chinese art is now facing the question of how to reconcile the traditional literati mindset of retreat into nature with the public appeal for social intervention and criticism of reality emphasized in contemporary art in order to complete an effective contemporary transition.” –Liang Kegang1

Liang Kegang. Photo: iang Kegang2 went to Da Xiong. Qingdao Technological LUniversity to study architectural design. There, he began creating artworks, consisting mainly of installations. Ever since 2005, when critic and curator Li Xianting involved him in the development of the Songzhuang artist village near Beijing, he has also been a curator.

In the exhibition Confronting Anitya,3 which was presented for the ﬁrst time during the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 and has since been touring Europe,4 Liang Kegang explores how contemporary art from China can develop new aesthetic qualities as well as new forms of expression— and thus become recognizable as an art that is both contemporary and distinctively Chinese.

Alice Schmatzberger: What was your starting point for developing the concept of the exhibition Confronting Anitya?

Liang Kegang: I have a great interest in researching all aspects of the traditional culture of China. Around 2006 I started looking for other artists who might share a similar interest or approach—artists who would also like to draw upon our traditional culture in order to ﬁnd inspiration for creating a new kind of contemporary art.

At that time many artists in China were still following movements such as Political Pop—artworks that seemed to have little difference from works from the US or the Soviet Union. Those artists did not develop a unique creative approach. And some of them never changed their way of producing art. The focus on those kinds of art movements was much too narrow; they represented only a short time period in Chinese visual art and culture. They were popular because Westerners liked them—often it was their ﬁrst

Vol. 14 No. 6 87 encounter with a modern China. And they all knew Chairman Mao, whose image was a common iconographical component of Political Pop.

I understand that this encounter also provided Chinese artists with the opportunity to be recognized in the West and in the international art world. Beginning with the ﬁrst big exhibition of contemporary art from China at the Venice Biennale in 1993, several such exhibitions took place in Europe. Westerners got curious about this country with a different culture and reality. After that, contemporary Chinese art became very hot.

But in China we have a very long Confronting Anitya, installation view, Palazzo tradition—and not only in the Michiel, 55th Venice Biennale, 2013. Courtesy of visual arts—that is totally different Liang Kegang. from that in the West and also is totally different from those styles with an orientation toward the international art scene that developed in China from the late 1980s on. China’s tradition offers a completely different aesthetic, learning, and philosophical source. In the end, the key point of difference is that Asian and Western philosophies lead to greatly differing world views. Chinese philosophy is mainly based on Daoism. The main perspective of viewing the world is change—life and nature are in constant change, all things are being born and destroyed, nothing is eternal—this is the concept of impermanence. And human beings should not act against that change; they should “go with the ﬂow,” so to speak. By contrast, within Western philosophies religion plays an important role because change is understood to happen mainly through the will of God or Jesus, or through mankind who has taken over from the Gods. Thus far, contemporary artworks that draw upon these resources have not really been accepted—not in the West, not in the art market, not by collectors, or galleries—they neither satisfy the demand of the contemporary nor that of the traditional. It is not at all easy for an artist working like that to not give up and to resist the temptations of money or the international art market.

So, from approximately 2006 or 2007 on, I slowly began to ﬁnd these kinds of artists, one by one. In 2010 we had our ﬁrst meeting together, on the occasion of an exhibition I curated back then titled Polar Tension, at Art Granary, in Chengdu.

From then on we joined our efforts to ﬁnd more artists sharing this speciﬁc approach toward tradition and its role in the contemporary. When the possibility emerged to organize an exhibition during the Venice Biennale in 2013, we discussed for almost a whole year the focus of the exhibition, the selection of artworks, the overall arrangement, and all kinds of organizational details including how to raise money. We had an exciting time together, eating and talking all the time. In developing this exhibition I conducted a lot of research into both Chinese and European art history and their respective differences.

88 Vol. 14 No. 6 Alice Schmatzberger: Could you give an example of the resulting consequences of these differences, especially for the visual arts?

Liang Kegang: Within the Chinese philosophies, that is, Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, the significance of the individual human being is rather minor. The central point of Daoism is nature. Confucianism in turn is based on Daoism. The emphasis of Confucianism is discipline. It defines the relationship of mankind to its environment, with nature again positioned first, then followed by a set of rules regulating affiliations between the heavens, the emperor, and society, and defining duties toward teachers and parents.

Traditional Chinese paintings do not depict reality as one literally sees it; it is not about drawing precisely or applying central perspective. Instead, the artist tries to cope with the above-mentioned impermanence and capture the essence of things. A rock or a tree is not just simply a rock or a tree. It is more than that because it possesses spirit. In old traditional Chinese homes, big landscape paintings were always put in a very prominent place near the main door. When entering the house your eyes immediately fall on this painting. These kinds of paintings still strongly inﬂuence contemporary artists, even if only in an unconscious way. Another point is that the artist does not overtly show inner feelings. Therefore, paintings and drawings never reveal, for example, any of an artist’s inner conﬂicts. Rather, art was a way to escape reality and to depict an idealized world. All traditional painters, especially the literati, were highly educated people.

Many Chinese artists nowadays have given up their own traditional concept of beauty. For a long time China isolated itself from the rest of the world. But since the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, other than the years of the New Culture Movement and the Cultural Revolution, it has oriented itself toward the West—sometimes by force of Western invaders, sometimes voluntarily. Conﬁdence in our own culture, philosophy, and aesthetics has been lost for a long time, and in the art world, this loss continues. But there has to be a shift now; we cannot successfully compete with the West in using only Western means and approaches. Although we have a different way of thinking, we will never completely close the gap toward Western thinking. Therefore, a kind of recollection is necessary, and by employing our own cultural resources, new and better forms of creativity can become possible.

Alice Schmatzberger: This is a very interesting approach. There are curators in China following a completely different direction. They might think that successful contemporary art from China should not look “Chinese”— should not be recognizable as being from China.

Liang Kegang: Everyone has a speciﬁc background and experience, like your native language, your childhood, your education, your cultural roots, etc. These inﬂuences are always there; you cannot just forget them. Art— Western or Asian—cannot exist without its cultural roots. And when people come together, they are often interested in each other as long as there are some kinds of differences. I believe that if we were not different from each other, we would neither be interested in nor attracted to each other.

Vol. 14 No. 6 89 Alice Schmatzberger: You also had an interesting conversation with Li Xianting about the necessity of linking Eastern traditional culture and contemporary art.5

Liang Kegang: That interview was especially important because the Western art world mostly thinks that Li Xianting is a curator or writer only with regard to Political Pop and art related to it. He considers this just a very small part of his overall work. He emphasizes that nowadays the link between Eastern traditional culture and contemporary art is not only possible, but also necessary and even perhaps inevitable.

Alice Schmatzberger: How does this speciﬁc concept inﬂuence your activities as an artist or curator respectively?

Liang Kegang: Nowadays, China Liang Kegang, Handcuffs, 2007, white marble, 25.4 is interesting for two reasons: on x 63.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. the one hand, social reality is very complex; urban development happens at an incredible speed; globalization has a very dynamic effect, etc. On the other hand, we have this culture and philosophy that is totally different from the West. Accordingly, I identify two groups of artists in China: those who focus on reality and those who focus on cultural tradition.

I did not like the Chinese contemporary art works that are popular in the international art world, like Political Pop. These works do not include many characteristics of the traditional Chinese culture and aesthetics. They represent only a small segment in Chinese history, that of the post-Mao period.

So I started to create some artworks Liang Kegang, Mortgage Slave, December 11, 2007, by myself. My oeuvre is twofold: performance. Courtesy of some works comment on reality, the artist. others focus on the inner self. Many of my works are performances, like, for example, Mortgage Slave (2007) or Air in Provence, France (2014), where I sealed a jar of clean Liang Kegang, Air in air from Forcalquier in Southern Provence, France, 2014, performance. Courtesy of France while on a business trip, then the artist. brought it back to China and sold it. Those works are a kind of critical comment on reality. Others, such as Tea Pot (2007), are rather quiet and not related to reality; they draw upon the Chinese traditional concepts of beauty and aesthetics.

Since I could very seldom ﬁnd these kinds of artworks in exhibitions or in the art market, my concern was very simple from the beginning: I wanted to ﬁnd artists who would share a similar approach. In recent years I have been looking intensely for artists with an interest in traditional Chinese culture

90 Vol. 14 No. 6 Confronting Anitya, and philosophy and in using installation view, Palazzo Michiel, 55th Venice contemporary art as a way of Biennale, 2013. Courtesy of Liang Kegang. transcribing the essence and resources of East Asian traditional culture. In the exhibition Confronting Anitya we included young artists as well as old masters (some are over seventy years old), and some of the works may not even be considered “contemporary.” For every edition of this touring exhibition I chose a slightly different collection of artists and artworks. We are a small group, but we share similar ways of thinking, similar approaches toward art. So far, we have not achieved very big results, but this on-going project together with the exhibition has been running only for approximately three years. Maybe I am correct now, but wrong in the future. But I am a believer. When we show parts of this exhibition in several provinces in China, more and more artists get to know us and want to join in. The key question is how to make full use of traditional culture, philosophy, and concepts of beauty for contemporary art in the twenty-ﬁrst century.

Alice Schmatzberger: How did you emerge as a curator from being an artist?

Liang Kegang: When I went to college to study architectural design in Beijing, I began to create artworks and also participated in some exhibitions. But after college I worked for several years as an architect for a company in Guangdong and then also as a consultant in architectural design for a real estate developer. But, ultimately, I returned to art.

In 2004, because of my experience as both an architect and artist, Li Xianting asked me to assist in developing the master plan for Songzhuang artist village near Beijing. We had a lot of meetings and discussions. I designed art studios—about twenty of them were set up—and a restaurant, among other things.

Together with a real estate developer we befriended, we founded the ﬁrst art centre there in Songzhuang in 2005, TS1 Contemporary Art Commune—a really big space with 5,000 square metres. It was Beijing’s largest privately operated contemporary art museum of that time.

Initially we invited other people to organize exhibitions, but that did not work so well. The situation pushed me forward to solve this problem. And slowly I became a curator. I ﬁnally organized many exhibitions referring to all kind of topics because of the complexity of China’s reality. Those exhibitions of course focused on different issues than Confronting Anitya, which I pursued with a completely different goal, as I mentioned already.

Vol. 14 No. 6 91 And after the birth of my second child, I stayed at home for almost Liang Kegang, Confronting Anitya, installation view, two years. NordArt Exhibition, Büdelsdorf, Germany, 2014. Courtesy of Liang Kegang. And for almost four years now, I have been the director of the Yuan Art Museum in Beijing, as well as other museums, which requires me to organize exhibitions as well as doing the conceptual aspects of curatorial work.

Alice Schmatzberger: How do you approach your curatorial work?

Liang Kegang: Being an artist deﬁnitely affects my curatorial work. It provides me with a much broader perspective. It requires a different attitude in comparison to working alone on your own pieces of art. To develop an exhibition that includes my own works—other than performances, of course—means to put them into a collective setting of our time and our reality and to experience their potential effect and value.

On the other hand, being a director of a museum led me to make use of the Internet as well as the mobile phone to spread information and images about my artworks. Maybe this constitutes some difference between me and other artists.

My education in architecture also exerts an inﬂuence in this context. Among other things, as a curator you also need to have a site-speciﬁc idea about the respective exhibition space and its given architectural conditions. I do not just simply put paintings on the walls or objects on a pedestal. Instead I actively integrate the artwork with the design of the space.

Within the exhibition Confronting Anitya one experiences the space and speciﬁc energies as one experiences a Chinese garden—no matter where it takes place, be it a Venetian Palazzo or a French gothic cathedral. For

92 Vol. 14 No. 6 Liang Kegang, Confronting example, sometimes it is possible to install an extra wall, sometimes not; Anitya, installation view, NordArt Exhibition, sometimes the ceilings are more than four metres high, sometimes not. Büdelsdorf, Germany, 2014. Courtesy of Liang Kegang. A Chinese garden is a very typical Chinese way of enjoying beauty. And it is closely related to architecture. It is created according to a set of speciﬁc rules. For example, the pathways are always winding, there is no direct line of sight from one spot in the garden to another, lookout points are deliberately created through windows or speciﬁc doors, etc. Thus, experiencing this exhibition is comparable to wandering in a garden. As I suggested earlier, in China we learn from nature, and this learning is the source of new ideas.

Already I have organized a number of exhibitions in order to carry further this idea of focusing more on traditional culture but within a contemporary art context. But for me, personally, I would prefer to express my considerations more directly through my artwork.

Alice Schmatzberger: Do you still ﬁnd time or have the energy to create artworks yourself?

Liang Kegang: Not enough.

Notes

1. Liang Kegang, “Art in Response to Anitya,“ in 无常之常-东方经验与当代艺术: Wiedergeburt der Unsterblichkeit (Thalheim/Wels, Austria: Museum Angerlehner and Beijing: Yuan Art Museum, 2015), 36. 2. Liang Kegang was born in 1968 in Batou, Inner Mongolia, and lives and works in Beijing. From 1985 to 1989, he was member of the ’85 New Wave Movement, an inﬂuential art movement in Chinese art history. Currently Liang Kegang is Director of the Yuan Art Museum (Beijing), of the Tiantai Art Museum (Qingdao), and the Horizon Art Museum (Hefei). 3. See the exhibition website at http://www.confrontinganitya.org/enindex.aspx/. 4. Museum MAGI900, Bologna, Italy, December 1, 2013–February 2, 2014; Villa Friede, Bonn, Germany, March 22, 2014–May 16, 2014; NordArt, Büdelsdorf, Germany; June 14–October 12, 2014); Museum Angerlehner, Wels, Austria, June 6–November 1, 2015.

Vol. 14 No. 6 93 Anthony Yung Unlived By What Is Seen: A Conversation with Sun Yuan

rom December 13, 2014 to April 30, 2015, the exhibition Unlived By Left to right: Sun Yuan, Cui Cancan, and Peng Yu, the What Is Seen was presented at three of the most important galleries three curators of Unlived By What Is Seen. Courtesy of in Beijing 798 Art District—Galleria Continua, Tang Contemporary Peng Yu. F 1 Art Center, and Pace Gallery. This exhibition was curated by artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu and independent curator Cui Cancan. Like ON/OFF: China’s Young Artists in Concept and Practice, a large-scale group exhibition, curated by Bao Dong and Sun Dongdong and held at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, in Spring 2013, Unlived By What Is Seen had been eagerly anticipated. Compared to ON|OFF, which offered a systematic survey of young artists in China according to their artistic mediums and methods, Unlived By What Is Seen included artists of different generations and did not aim at setting up a clear exhibition structure—its attention was directed not to categorizations but to individual practices. The one thing

94 Vol. 14 No. 6 that united different parts of the exhibition was video interviews with each of the participating artists who were on view (some artists did not even show works, contributing only interview clips).

Unlived By What Is Seen aimed at revealing an untamed and unorthodox aspect of artistic practice in today’s China. It started with an obvious critical standpoint—the three curators conveyed strong dissatisfaction with rigid and traditional methods of exhibition display and increasingly market- oriented and assimilative creative practices. Anthony Yung interviewed Sun Yuan, one of the three curators of the exhibition, about the motivations and curatorial strategies behind Unlived By What Is Seen.

Left and right: Documentation of Hunting Birds, 2009, T Space, Beijing. Courtesy of Peng Yu.

Left and right: Exhibition view of Seven Days, 2009, University of St. Thomas, Manila. Courtesy of Peng Yu.

Anthony Yung: I would like to ask you ﬁrst about how the three of you—Cui Cancan, Peng Yu, and Sun Yuan—came to work together. What contributed to this partnership?

Sun Yuan: This project was not a sudden idea. It went through a lot of considerations over a long period of time. The three of us have attempted to do something similar with this exhibition in the past, but those projects were of a smaller scale, such as Hunting Birds (T Space, Beijing, 2009)2 and Seven Days (University of St. Thomas, Manila, 2009)3. Since it was not possible to produce them at commercial venues, those projects ended up very marginal, and the art world did not pay much attention to them. In recent years, as the mechanisms of the art market have matured, many artists are now rethinking the relationship between art and its institutions. Artists are thinking about the relationship between immediate daily life, the bigger social environment, and art, and many questions have

Vol. 14 No. 6 95 unfolded. They have found that Top and left: Against GM Food, 2013, Tang their quiet and peaceful life is full Contemporary Art Center, Beijing. Courtesy of Peng of interferences, with issues as Yu. varied as the demolishing of artists’ studio districts hubs to genetically modiﬁed food. Therefore, it was a natural result that we would be interested in organizing projects like Heiqiao Night Away and Against GM Food. We began our collaborations with these projects—the three of us we worked together on Against GM Food,4 and Peng Yu and I took part in Heiqiao Night Away, which was curated by Cui Cancan. Through these collaborations, we discovered that we shared views on certain issues, and we were paying a lot of attention to certain new tendencies in the work of young artists. This led us to join hands in doing Unlived By What Is Seen.

Anthony Yung: An important criterion that deﬁnes the scope of Unlived By What Is Seen is that while the works and actions it presented were all about resisting existing forms or concepts of “art,” the people who have made or done these works would still identify themselves as “artists.” They may despise, doubt, or be critical of the traditional deﬁnition of “being an artist,” but their unusual understandings of artists’ identities are exactly the main theme of the exhibition. According to your observation, can you tell us how these artists address this issue?

Sun Yuan: The fact that artists pay close attention to daily life and consider daily living a way of creation leads to a key question: How does one differentiate the ways an artist lives and works from the way non-artists

96 Vol. 14 No. 6 Entrance to Unlived By live and work? Is identiﬁcation as an artist the only criterion for being an What Is Seen, 2015, Pace Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of artist? In art, this is hardly a new question, but it is always a question that Peng Yu. helps to break this deadlock. In every period, there have been artists who gave up their professional identity in order to obtain more creative freedom. They have wanted to relieve themselves of the burden of art history and work freely. By doing this, the artist aims at keeping up his or her creative vitality and breaking away from existing artistic languages to ﬁnd the new unknowns. To do so, some artists may claim that they are no longer artists or no longer make artwork. This kind of attitude gives artists expanded perspectives and fewer boundaries; they do not have to be accountable for whether their works are “artistic” or not. For artists, this is a huge release of pressure, giving them new oxygen and even resurrecting their creativity.

The reason an artist can be an artist is not related to the work or to professional certification. As is often said within the art world, “everyone can be an artist, everything can be an art piece.” But such a statement does not mean that artists are not different from other people or that art pieces are not different from other things. What it means is that the potential of art exists in all people and everything. When this potential is called upon and attained, art will be recognized. In this sense, whether something is artistic or not is determined by the condition of the person who makes it. And therefore, an artist’s prime mission is to vitalize his or her condition. Some artists do not deny their identity as artists, but they insist on handling artistic problems in their capacity of living persons. The capacity of a person is to live his or her life sincerely, and this capacity to live is fundamental to the capacity to create art. As a result, for these artists, the most important issue is not how they define their identities, but how they understand their relationship with art and how they define art in order to create more possibilities within their work.

Vol. 14 No. 6 97 Left: Exhibition view of Unlived By What Is Seen, 2015, Tang Contemporary Art Center, Beijing. Courtesy of Peng Yu. Right: Huang Yan, My Life, 2012–14, installation. Over the course of two years, Huang Yan documented and conducted a statistical analysis of all his daily activities. Courtesy of Peng Yu.

When an artist drops his or her identity as an artist, then, naturally, he or she no longer has to face art history. It can be problematic, because if you ignore the fact that what you do and what you think have already been done or thought through thoroughly in the past, there is a possibility that you will create “artwork” that is invalid from the perspective of art history. But, on the other hand, I don’t think we should be so utilitarian and work only according to art history. Artists should think without any technical (or habitual) premises. Artists should achieve breakthroughs by going back to instinctive and original motivations. To ﬁnd new paths, artists should set up for themselves a direction, but not with a speciﬁc goal. All results will be left for later judgment. The purpose is not to create art historical value, but to think about art historical value fundamentally. In order to escape from the limits of history, one should point to history. This is a purposeful aimlessness. The only way to escape is to wake up the real energy of art.

Jiang Bo, Persuading My Brother-in-law to Change Career, 2014, video installation. Jiang Bo successfully persuaded his brother-in-law to quit his civil servant job. He now runs an online shop that sells underwear, which the artist thinks is a better job than working for the government. Courtesy of Peng Yu.

Anthony Yung: One of the main features of this exhibition is that it invited artists who do not regularly appear in mainstream contemporary art exhibitions or, in a way, consciously reject being in the mainstream art circle. Can you tell us how you found these artists? How does one discover and work with those artists who do not work within the art world? This is an interesting question for many curators and researchers.

98 Vol. 14 No. 6 Zhang Mingxin, Jiangnan Sun Yuan: What kind of scenery you see depends on what perspective Leather Factory, 2014, installation. Zhang Mingxin you take. These artists do not come from nowhere. They are not hermits purchased from a few hawkers all of their mobile who live deep inside a mountain. We encounter them in daily life—we stalls and products. He then became a hawker and tried meet or hear about them. We did not neglect to include them as we were to sell the products at the not looking for popular artists. I knew some of them from before, and I original prices. Courtesy of Peng Yu. knew their attitude toward art, but they may not have shown up in the art world for many years or are active only outside the art circle. I learned about the younger artists by doing research or through other people’s recommendations. There are also those who make “proper” artworks and participate in “proper” exhibitions, but in private they are experimenting and thinking about something entirely different. What we picked for the exhibition are exactly those things they do in private.

Anthony Yung: In terms of the overall exhibition design (spatial and conceptual), how did you respond to these artists’ methods and ideas?

Sun Yuan: The key issue that this exhibition tried to deal with is: How to take the daily actions of artists and reveal them within the ﬁxed model of an institution? How to exhibit those actions and thoughts in a traditional art space and make them comprehensible to people’s habitual ways of seeing? If we made it a documentary exhibition, which is common nowadays, it would have been difﬁcult to represent some of the works or events that did not leave documents. We needed the artists to talk about both their artwork and their creative process. We wanted to convey what the artists told us when we were chatting casually. We simply wanted the audience for the exhibition to hear what the curators heard. What if we became like a camera when artists talk to us? This was also convenient for the artists, as they could express their ideas and tell their stories without putting effort into collecting, preserving, and displaying the artwork, the relics of their living process, for these relics are never their purpose to begin with. In this exhibition, the curators took up the responsibility of documentation, and the artists were liberated to do whatever they wanted. The best thing a curator can do

Vol. 14 No. 6 99 is to show art in the best way. In fact, for those excellent artists who have Left: Wei Bingqiang, Consummation, 2011–14, quit the art world—such as Li Yongbin, Gu Dexin, Wei Bingqiang, and sculpture. Wei Bingqiang has been searching in nature Zhao Bandi—they do not care about the way they are presented. They let for a perfectly circular stone. us present their contributions in whatever way we wanted, because to have Courtesy of Peng Yu. Right: He Chi, So Forget, their work seen is no longer a concern. 2014, video installation. After his father passed away, He Chi went back to Anthony Yung: One of the most exciting aspects of this exhibition is that it his hometown, a farming village in Gansu province, shows the untamed side of art—we see artists who are able to work without and tried to live the life his father used to live. Courtesy depending on the resources and opportunities offered by the institution. of Peng Yu. However, they are now brought together and shown in the exhibition spaces of three of the biggest commercial galleries in Beijing. What does that mean to you? The ecology of contemporary art practices in China is rich and complex, yet public museums and academic institutions for contemporary art are still far from sufﬁcient here. Commercial galleries have become increasingly dominant in the art world. Therefore, this exhibition can also be seen as an example of how to make use of the commercial institution to create non-commercial possibilities.

Sun Yuan: In my opinion, museums and commercial galleries in mainland China are the same. They are nothing but exhibition spaces. In this sense,

100 Vol. 14 No. 6 Opposite page, top: Wu Yuren, A Vanished Exhibition, 2014, video. From June 2010 to April 2011, Wu Yuren was kept in a jail in Beijing due to a prosecution that had not gone to trail. During this period, Wu Yuren used his limited materials and time to create some artworks and organized an “exhibition” that lasted for only one hour and was open only to his fellow prisoners. Later, after they were released, he interviewed these prisoners about the “exhibition,” but they had all forgotten about it, much as they had had to forget the painful memory of imprisonment. Courtesy of Peng Yu. Right: Wei Bingqiang, Wild Weeds, 2014, installation. Wei Bingqiang attempted to plant at home weeds that only grow in the wild. Courtesy of Peng Yu.

commercial galleries are not lesser than the museums. They are even better, for they don’t have the smugness of museums, which are like high- end graveyards. We enjoyed the ﬂexibility of working in the commercial galleries. In fact, we hope doing such an exhibition in these big name galleries will create some impact within the heavily commercialized art ﬁeld here. I should also say it’s remarkable that these three galleries were willing to accept this exhibition, as we didn’t expect anything would sell. It shows the vision and insight that these galleries have, and that’s exactly why they have become the most important galleries here in Beijing.

I can’t be sure whether the commercial system can develop more non-profit projects or not, because, after all, they are not non-profit organizations. In mainland China, non-profit organizations are playing an active role, but their survival is difficult because of an inadequate support system. There are still not enough art foundations here to support even small non-profit spaces in developing their vision, but I am happy to see that since last year, some of these spaces have started to receive funding to continue their projects. And the fact that big commercial galleries are willing to host an exhibition like Unlived By What Is Seen will also bring attention to similar non-profit or independent projects. Commercial and non-commercial

Vol. 14 No. 6 101 exhibitions have different values. The domination of either one of them is Project by HomeShop at Unlived By What Is not beneﬁcial to a healthy ecosystem of art. Seen, 2015. HomeShop (2008–2013) was located in an old hutong alleyway in the centre of Beijing and Anthony Yung: I assume that this exhibition will make some of its artists operated as a base for relays “famous” and thus be absorbed by the mainstream institutions. How do you between the public and private, the commercial and see this “success”? other forms of exchange. Artists, designers, and thinkers came together via an interwoven series Sun Yuan: It should be a great thing. For artists, the two most challenging of small-scale activities, interventions, and moments are when an artist can’t achieve success and when he or she does documentary gestures achieve it. A truly excellent artist does not have to remain unsuccessful in whereby daily life, work, and the community order to maintain his or her excellence, because success and excellence are served as explorations of micropolitical possibilities two completely different things. People tend to think that the former would and of working together. Courtesy of Peng Yu. ruin the latter. If an artist loses his or her self-consciousness and ability to think independently because of being successful and accepted by the institution, it simply means that this artist is not good enough. If a good artist can’t reach success, it must be the institution’s problem; if an artist becomes less good because of getting success, then it’s his or her problem, or the other people have made a wrong judgment about this artist.

Anthony Yung: The artists of this exhibition are of very different ages and generations. Are there some general differences in their attitude toward the institution and art and their own artistic mythologies?

Sun Yuan: Some older artists chose to quit the art world so as to fulﬁll their approach to making art. Younger artists do it differently. As Wei Binqiang, one of the participating artists, said, in order to do it, they stop doing it; and when they do it, they do it harder. I think what he meant by “stop doing it” is to stop doing it in the old way, but as young artists they also must think about how to carry on. Retiring, leaving the art world, living an everyday life for the rest of one’s life—this can become the art practice of a senior artist. And young artists face many more possibilities when they return to everyday life. They can look for a stronger vitality that serves as the fuel to move forward. There is also a more complex mentality in them, as we can see in things like their rebellion against institutions, their resistance to older generations, and their eagerness to succeed. Like the “Catﬁsh Effect,” such

102 Vol. 14 No. 6 a complex mentality can lead to actions that produce a revitalizing energy, that make them more determined, within a static system.

Anthony Yung: You and Peng Yu have repeatedly stressed that this exhibition is a response to the growing commercialized and gallery- dominated art scene in Beijing. It reminds me of the time when you two began your career, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the Beijing art scene was less connected to the globalized art world and less market- oriented. While it is of course impossible to achieve completely, were you hoping to recreate the condition of that time? If so, how do you think it should be done?

Li Binyuan, 2013131– 2014927, 2014, installation. Li Binyuan showed his WeChat posts from the last two years. Courtesy of Peng Yu.

Sun Yuan: Yes, this exhibition has produced an atmosphere similar to that time. As Qiu Zhijie has suggested, it feels like a people’s revolution. But time cannot be recreated. The general environment of that time was completely different than today, but I think that bringing vitality to creation is always the most important thing in art. Instead of finding the conditions of fifteen years ago, I would rather say an artist should always remain in the spirit of that condition in his or her career. Instead of recreating things that have already happened, we should always attempt to maintain our vitality and be cautious about repeating ourselves. This exhibition and some of the exhibitions from early 2000s are indeed similar in nature, except that the criticism back then did not point to the marketization of art, but, rather, to stereotypes of artistic forms. Anyway, no matter whether today or in the future, artists should always be conscious and prepared to fight against anything that makes art unvarying and institutionalized, whether through the market or any other kind of authority.

Vol. 14 No. 6 103 Anthony Yung: In the exhibition, Zhao Zhao, Slapping and Secret Love, Lethal there are not many works that Shoes and Families, 2014, colour photographs, video. directly talk about social and Documents of Zhao Zhao’s performance series, in political issues. Do you think artists which he found volunteers in China today have developed a who were willing to be slapped or stabbed with a more disguised way in handling knife, and he spent nights at the homes of strangers. sensitive social and political issues, Courtesy of Peng Yu. or have they simply given up talking about those issues in art because of the practical difﬁculties? Living in Beijing, how do you tackle these issues in your art practice and curatorial work?

Sun Yuan: In mainland China, there are certain things that can be talked about only in an obscure way or through insinuation. Even people’s views on non-political issues are affected by heavy political pressure. Political interference has been a problem for art for a long time, just like the problem of commercialization. From the perspective of the autonomy of art, deliberately working with political repression as subject matter can be an opportunistic act, as it will easily attract attention. Good artists should be cautious about this. But artistically speaking, just as commercially popular art is not necessarily kitsch, shallow, or insincere, art that deals with political issues is not always equivalent to populist sociology and opportunism. As long as an artist is sincere, he or she can make good work without any limitation. It doesn’t matter if the art can be sold or if it involves sensitive issues or not. An artwork should be judged by the internal logic of art and not by sociological standards.

To ensure a space for the existence of art, artists should neither exploit political topics nor be exploited by politics. Political means that serve to achieve artistic results can be acceptable, but not the pursuit of political purposes in the name of art. And it can be tricky to tell the difference, but an artist’s attitude and ability to perceive art are usually hard to hide. An artist may create a disguise, but his or her true attitude toward art will eventually become obvious.

Among the young artists that we have paid attention to, there are indeed not many who choose to work with sensitive political issues. I think this is the reality, and there are several reasons behind it: ﬁrst, they are disgusted with the excessive “political art”; second, bigger political issues are distant from their immediate living situation; third, they may purposefully avoid political issues in order not to distract from their artistic investigation; and fourth, they may simply want to avoid the trouble and use a disguised tone in order to sustain their work.

Curatorially speaking, we did not look for artists or works that directly refer to political issues. On one hand, so-called political art is excessive in mainland China, and not a lot of it is convincing. On the other hand, to make political art seems to be risk-taking, but such risk isn’t always about art because it actually creates a guarantee for getting attention. Therefore,

104 Vol. 14 No. 6 Exhibition view at Galleria Continua, Beijing, with video interviews of Zhao Bandi and Li Yongbin. The participation of Li Yongbin and Zhao Bandi was presented on the ﬁrst ﬂoor of Gallery Continua, but they did not show any artwork; they only showed video interviews, in which they talked about their careers and how they gave up making art. Courtesy of Peng Yu.

there is a methodology that has been developed about making political art. On the contrary, art practices that are close to the everyday and lack selling points like politics will probably be neglected because they are not particularly eye-catching, although they are the works that really point to new questions in art. These works are taking the risk of being ignored or even never being known—such as the work of Li Yongbin, He Chi, Wei Binqiang, and HomeShop.

Zhuang Hui, The Anxi Wind When selecting works, we observed Channel, 2014, photographs. This work was shown on artists from different perspectives the second ﬂoor of Gallery Continua. The artist placed and tried to get an in-depth a camera with the ability to remotely transmit MMS and understanding of them through e-mail messages at a certain interviews. We wanted to emphasize spot in the Anxi Wind Channel. The camera took their views on art, not their views pictures at pre-programmed times and sent the resulting on politics. But this doesn’t mean that we ﬁlter out all the works that involve photographs to the artist’s inbox. Courtesy of Peng Yu. sensitive issues—A Vanished Exhibition, a project that Wu Yuren did when

Vol. 14 No. 6 105 Still from Li Yongbin video interview at Gallery Continua. In the interview, he talked about his plan to move to a village in Hebei and become a farmer. Courtesy of Peng Yu.

he was in prison, and A Horror Film for the Mayor (2011) and Kids (2011) are examples of that. We included these works without any hesitation because for us they represent new artistic attempts.

In many of the works in Unlived By What Is Seen, although political issues are not the main theme, a political atmosphere is revealed. These include the collaborative project Rally Race on Chang’an Avenue (2013) by Bu Yunjun, Hu Yinping, Yao Wei, Jiang Bo and Cao Dongdong, Zhao Zhao’s Slap and Secret Love (2014, Lethal Shoes and Families (2014), and Zhao Bandi’s documentary on his “panda life” (2013). If an artist’s practice is truly intervening in life, the omnipresent inﬂuence of politics will naturally penetrate through the practice. This is realistic, inevitable, and unnecessary to avoid. We need to pay attention to what questions the artists are asking and what their focus is. We have to be self-conscious, but we should not refuse to do anything because of fear.

Notes

1. Tang Contemporary Art Center exhibited the work of He Chi, Huang Yan, Jiang Bo, Li Binyuan, Ma Yujiang, Wei Bingqiang, and Zhang Mingxin; Pace Gallery exhibited the work of Cai Dongdong, Hu Yinping, Jiang Bo, Chu Bingchao, Feng Lin, Hua Mao First Floor, HomeShop, Hua Weihua, Kang Jing, Jin Shan, Li Liao, Li Wei, No Survivors, Polit-Sheer-Form Office, Song Ta, The Research Project of a Painting, Wang Shuo, We Said, Let There Be Space and There Was Space, Wu Yuren, Xie Nanxing, Zhang Mingxin, Zhao Zhao, Zhou Yilun, Yao Wei, and Zhang Yue; Galleria Continua exhibited the work of Gu Dexin, Li Yongbin, Zhao Bandi, and Zhuang Hui. 2. Hunting Birds was a project that Sun Yuan and Peng Yu did to challenge the boundaries of art making. It was an exhibition that took place at T Space Beijing in 2008. The project involved a group of artists bird hunting in a rural area in Northern China. The exhibition included video, photography, and other documentation of the bird hunting trip and the related discussions. The exhibition catalogue was a hunting guidebook. 3. Seven Days was curated by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. The project was realized at University of St. Thomas, Manila. The site was a prison set up by the Japanese military during the World War II. Eleven participating artists were imprisoned individually for seven days. Each was given basic necessities and materials to finish their art projects in this seven-day period. 4. Against GM Food was a public event co-organized by Cui Cancan, Peng Yu, Sun Yuan, and Zhao Bandi. One hundred artists participated in the event and contributed paintings, graphic designs, video artwork, and band performances to respond to the theme. The project has also translated a US documentary film about genetically modified food into different Chinese dialects. The event took place at Tang Contemporary, Beijing.

106 Vol. 14 No. 6 Chinese Name Index

Ai Weiwei Hu Yinping Mao Song Xu, David 艾未未胡尹萍毛松 Borgonjon Bao Dong Huang Rui Pan Yuliang 許大衛鮑棟黃銳潘玉良 Yao Wei Bei Dao Huang Yan Peng Yu 姚薇北島黃彥彭禹 Yee, Craig Bingyi Jiang Bo Qi Baishi 余國樑冰逸姜波齊百石 Yu the Great Bu Yunjun Jiang Qing Ruan Lingyu 大禹卜雲軍江青阮玲玉 Yung, Anthony Cao Dongdong Jung Chang Shi Zhecun 翁子健蔡東東張戎施蟄存 Zhang Hongtu Chen, Daniel Lee De-nin Shitao 張宏圖陳兆倫李德寧石濤 Zhang Mingxin Cui Cancan Li Binyuan Sun Dongdong 張明信崔燦燦厲檳源孫冬冬 Zhang Shichuan Cui Shuqin Li Xianting Sun Wukong 張石川崔淑琴栗憲庭孫悟空 Zhao Bandi Dai Li Li Yongbin Sun Yuan 趙半狄戴笠李永斌孫原 Zhao Zhao Diao, David Liang Kegang Wang Anyi 趙趙刁德謙梁克剛王安憶 Zhen Zhang Dong Qichang Liang, Samuel Wang Bin 張真董其昌梁允翔王兵 Zheng Chongbin Gu Dexin Lin Yan Wang Keping 鄭重賓顧德新林延王克平 Zhou Xuan Guo Xi Lu Xun Wang Renmei 周璇郭熙魯迅王人美 He Chengyao Ma Desheng Wei Bingqiang 何成瑤馬德升衛秉強 He Chi Ma Yanling Wei Jia 何遲馬嬿泠韋佳 Hu Die Ma Yuan Wu Yuren 胡蝶馬遠吴玉仁

Vol. 14 No. 6 107 108 Vol. 14 No. 6 Vol. 14 No. 6 109 110 Vol. 14 No. 6 Vol. 14 No. 6 111 112 Vol. 14 No. 6 Limited edition prints Yishu and photographs by leading contemporary Art Editions Chinese artists.

No 1. No 2.

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

No 3. No 4.

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

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

No 7.

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