January/february 2011 Volume 10, Number 1

Inside

Reviews of Taipei Contemporary Chinese Biennial, Shanghai Art and the Waning of Biennale, Ai Weiwei, Criticality and Cui Fei Interviews with Chinese Art in Spaces RongRong, Asia Art and Places Archive, GraphicAirlines, and Start From Zero

US$12.00 NT$350.00 printed in Taiwan Long March Vol. 10 No. 1 1 www.yishu-online.com New Archive Web Site launched on August 15, 2010

2 Vol. 10 No. 1 8

VOLUME 10, NUMBER 1, January/febRuary 2011

CONTENTS 4 Editor’s Note 32 6 Contributors

8 What Goes Around Comes Around: Taking a Spin Around the 2010 Taipei Biennial Pauline J. Yao

21 The 8th Shanghai Biennale: Rehearsal Xhingyu Chen

32 Big, Small, and Potential: Chinese Art in 52 Spaces and Places Robin Peckham

52 GraphicAirlines: Going Back to Basics in the Twenty-first Century Metropolis Stephanie Bailey

56 Start From Zero: The Street Revolution in Hong Kong Stephanie Bailey

60 60 Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980 to 1990 An Interview with Asia Art Archive Chunyee Li

68 How Three Begets Many Things: RongRong & inri and the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre Alice Schmatzberger

78 Lost in Translation: Contemporary 84 Chinese Art and the Waning of Criticality Paul Gladston

84 The Harmonization of Ai Weiwei Voon Pow Bartlett

95 Cui Fei at The Warehouse Gallery, Syracuse University Jonathan Goodman

106 Chinese Name Index 95

Cover: Ai Weiwei, the making of Sunflower Seeds at Jingdezheng, 2010, photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 10 No. 1 3 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art president Katy Hsiu-chih Chien legal counsel Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C.C. Liu Since its inception in 2002, Yishu has been   Ken Lum consistent in its coverage of biennials and -in-chief Keith Wallace triennials in Asia and elsewhere. Issue 42   Zheng Shengtian opens with reviews of the Taipei Biennial by   Julie Grundvig Pauline J. Yao and the Shanghai Biennale by Kate Steinmann editorial assistant Chunyee Li Xhingyu Chen. Both 2010 editions of these circulation manager Larisa Broyde exhibitions embarked on new directions, with  coordinator Ioulia Reynolds varying degrees of success, proposing ways to web site  Chunyee Li challenge the traditional biennial format with advisory  their emphasis on artistic process over the Judy Andrews, Ohio State University final product. Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation Within this context, contemporary Chinese Okwui Enwezor, Critic & Curator art eludes definition as a singular entity, and Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China while Hong Kong and mainland China are Fei Dawei, Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation now theoretically the same nation, they don’t Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh share the same history, and Robin Peckham Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop explores some of the complexities that exist Katie Hill, University of Westminster between the two with respect to studio Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive practices, scale, and space. On a related Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator note within the particular circumstances Lu Jie, Independent Curator of Hong Kong, Stephanie Bailey interviews Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore two collectives representative of a younger Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University generation who cross the disciplines of visual Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Philip Tinari, Independent Critic & Curator art, street art, graphic design, and fashion Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator as a way of negotiating a fast-paced, highly Wu Hung, University of Chicago regulated, and expensive city. Paul Gladston, Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar who recently spent several years teaching in  Art & Collection Group Ltd. China, examines the crisis in critical thought 6F. No. 85, Section 1, as it pertains to mainland China and suggests Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 some of the reasons its advancement has Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 been stymied. Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 E-mail: [email protected]

In contrast, Yishu 42 also offers interviews vice general manager Jenny Liu with representatives of two important Alex Kao resource centres. Alice Schmatzberger marketing manager Joyce Lin circulation executive Perry Hsu speaks with RongRong about Three Shadows Betty Hsieh Photography Art Centre in Beijing, and Chunyee Li interviews Phoebe Wong and webmaster Website ARTCO, Taipei  Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd., Anthony Yung Tsz Kin about Asia Art Archive’s research into art in mainland China between web site www.yishu-online.com 1980 and 1990. Both of these organizations are web design Design Format conscientiously collecting documentation on  1683 - 3082 the history of contemporary art in China and, Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited significantly, making it accessible to the public in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, in their own creative ways. March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to:

We close Yishu 42 with two reviews of Yishu Office exhibitions that take different approaches 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada to referencing the presence of nature. V6Z 2P3 The “harmony” of the tens of thousands of Phone: 1.604.649.8187 porcelain sunflower seeds that populate Ai Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: [email protected] Weiwei’s major installation at Tate Modern is put into perspective with his other projects by subscription rates Voon Pow Bartlett, and Jonathan Goodman 1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) examines the vulnerable relationship 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (www.yishu-onlne.com) between nature and culture in the recent work of Cui Fei.    Leap Creative Group   Raymond Mah art Director Gavin Chow Keith Wallace designer Philip Wong

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

典藏國際版‧第10卷第1期‧2011年1–2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 4 編者手記 主 編： 華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 副 編 輯： 顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 6 作者小傳 史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 編輯助理： 黎俊儀 行 政： 藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 8 種瓜得瓜，種豆得豆：2010年臺北 廣 告： 雷幽雅（Ioulia Reynolds） 網站編輯： 黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li) 雙年展環顧 姚嘉善（Pauline J. Yao） 顧 問： 王嘉驥 田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 21 第八屆上海雙年展：「巡回排演」 巫 鴻 林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 陳幸宇（Xhingyu Chen） 范迪安 招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 32 大小與潛能：中國藝術的空間和地點 洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 胡 昉 岳鴻飛（Robin Peckham） 侯瀚如 徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 52 GraphicAirlines：在21世紀大都會中 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 返本歸真 倪再沁 Stephanie Bailey 高名潞 費大爲 楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 56 Start From Zero：香港街頭革命 盧 杰 Stephanie Bailey Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill 60 訪問亞洲藝術文獻庫：關於「未來的 Charles Merewether 材料：記錄1980－1990年中國當代藝術」 Apinan Poshyananda 研究計畫 出 版： 典藏雜誌社 副總經理： 劉靜宜 黎俊儀 高世光 行銷總監： 林素珍 68 「三生萬物」：榮榮、映里和三影堂 發行專員： 許銘文 謝宜蓉 攝影藝術中心 社 址： 台灣臺北市中山北路一段85號6樓 Alice Schmatzberger 電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 電子信箱：[email protected] 78 難以傳譯：當代中國藝術與批判的式微 Paul Gladston 編 輯 部： Yishu Office 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 84 艾未未的和諧 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 傳真：(1) 604.591.6392 Voon Pow Bartlett 電子信箱: [email protected]

訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與編輯部聯系。 95 西拉庫斯大學倉庫畫廊的崔斐個展 設 計： Leap Creative Group, Vancouver Jonathan Goodman 創意總監： 馬偉培 藝術總監： 周繼宏 設 計 師： 黃健斌 106 中英人名對照 印 刷： 臺北崎威彩藝有限公司

本刊在溫哥華編輯設計，臺北印刷出版發行。 一年6期。逢1、3、5、7、9、11月出版。

網 址： www.yishu-online.com 管 理： Design Format

國際刊號: 1683-3082

售價每本12美元。 訂 閲：一年84美元，兩年158美元（含航空郵資）。

網上下載： 一年49.95美元 封面：艾未未，景德镇製作葵瓜子，攝影，藝術家提供 網上訂閱： www.yishu-online.com

版權所有，本刊內容非經本社同意不得翻譯和轉載。 本刊登載內容並不代表編輯部與出版社立場。 Contributors

Stephanie Bailey, who is of mixed Chinese Xhingyu Chen is a Shanghai-based writer and British descent, is originally from Hong and contemporary art specialist. A longtime Kong. She studied in the United Kingdom insider in the local art scene, she has been and has been living and working in Athens, organizing and leading contemporary art Greece, for the past four years. Her interests tours for museum groups, curators, and lie in contemporary art in relation to social, collectors since 2005. She contributes to cultural, and political contexts, and she Art Asia Pacific, Sculpture Magazine, Nukta views her work as an ongoing education. She Art, ArtInfo, and the International Herald is an arts editor of Athens Insider and has Tribune, focusing on the contemporary contributed to international publications Chinese art scene. Her book Chinese Artists: including Art Papers, Art Lies, Naked Punch, New Media Mid-1980s to 2010 will be and Adbusters. She leads a foundation course released by Schiffer Publishing in December in art and design at the Doukas Educational 2010. She is currently an art editor at Time Centre, Athens, where she also lectures on Out Shanghai. art history and recently took part in the China-Europa Forum, held in Hong Kong Paul Gladston is Associate Professor of and China, 2010, as a representative of Critical Theory and Visual Culture in the culture and arts. Department of Film, Culture and Media at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, Voon Pow Bartlett is a London-based artist, China. Between 2005 and 2010, he was curator, lecturer and writer. Her Ph.D. seconded to the University of Nottingham dissertation, Spectacle as Myth: Guanxi, as the inaugural head of the Department the Relational and the Urban Quotidian in of International Communications and Contemporary Chinese Art, was awarded director of the Institute of Comparative by TrAIN, University of the Arts London. Cultural Studies. He has written extensively Bartlett has worked in creative industries, on the subject of contemporary Chinese including at the Victoria and Albert art and contemporary Chinese art criticism Museum. In October 2007, she co-curated for high-profile magazines and journals and participated in an exhibition at the 798 including Yishu, Art Review, Artworld, Dangdai Festival, Beijing. She has pursued Contemporary Art and Investment, and an interdisciplinary and transnational Eyeline. His recent book-length publications career, having taught fine art practice and include the monograph Art History after cultural studies at the B.A. and M.A. levels Deconstruction (Magnolia, 2005), and at Reading University, Croydon College, and an edited collection of essays, China and Central Saint Martins. Other Spaces (CCCP, 2009). He is currently

6 Vol. 10 No. 1 preparing a monograph on the theory and symposium on Taiwanese and Cantonese practice of contemporary Chinese art for sound art, a compilation of research into Reaktion as well as a collection of critical localized modes of reductive abstract conversations with contemporary Chinese painting, and an archival collection of data artists for Hong Kong University Press. on Hong Kong material culture.

Jonathan Goodman studied literature at Alice Schmatzberger is a Vienna-based Columbia University and the University of natural scientist and an art historian who Pennsylvania before becoming an art writer focuses on new and emerging technologies specializing in contemporary Chinese art. as well as contemporary Chinese art, He teaches at Pratt Institute and the Parsons photography, and food in art. School of Design, focusing on art criticism and contemporary culture. Pauline J. Yao is a curator and writer and Co-Director of Osage Gallery/Osage Art and Chunyee Li is a Web site editor and Ideas in Hong Kong. Based in Hong Kong translator and is an editorial assistant at and Beijing, she is co-founder of the Arrow Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Factory in Beijing and was the recipient of After her studies in literature at Queen’s the U.S. Fulbright Grant in 2006 and the University, Canada, she worked as a history inaugural CCAA Chinese Art Critic Award researcher at the B.C. Persons with AIDS in 2007. Her writings on contemporary Society and initiated her own interviewing art appear regularly in magazines, online project conversing with artists and journals, books, and exhibition catalogues. filmmakers, some of which were published She is the author of In Production Mode: online and in publications such as Ricepaper. Contemporary Art in China (Timezone 8 She is interested in how beauty is revealed Books, 2008). She served on the curatorial through everyday conversation. team of the Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in Robin Peckham is a writer affiliated with 2009 and teaches in the Arts Administration the Society for Experimental Cultural Department of the Central Academy of Fine Production, the curatorial office he founded Arts, Beijing. with Venus Lau in 2008. Recent projects include a forthcoming exhibition on cross-border production in the Pearl River Delta, a monograph on the architectural practice MAP Office, an exhibition of and

Vol. 10 No. 1 7 Pauline J. Yao What Goes Around Comes Around: Taking a Spin Around the 2010 Taipei Biennial September 7–November 14, 2010

Google Office 0.2, an interactive installation involving actors, different The Improvement League, Google Office 0.2, 2010, rooms, and a motorized moving platform, was one of the more enigmatic installation. Photo: Pauline J. Yao. pieces in this year’s Taipei Biennial. Situated at the entrance to the show, and often accompanied by a long line of visitors waiting to “interact” with it, it was also hard to miss. A long walkway gently slopes upward towards some plants and a desk positioned against a backlit wall covered with window blinds, resembling a generic corporate office set-up. The entire process of “interaction” is brief, well-scripted, and recurring. Behind the desk are two individuals who speak quietly with the visitor seated in the opposite chair for a few short minutes before the entire platform begins to rotate 180 degrees, revealing on the other side a closet-sized enclosed space with a door. The visitor is beckoned into the darkened room and emerges several minutes later free to share the fruits of his or her encounter with those eagerly awaiting at the end of the ramp. Meanwhile, the platform rotates back around to the desk side, and the entire process repeats itself with another visitor. Google Office 0.2 was an apt beginning for an exhibition that preferred cyclical movement over linearity, that repeatedly tried to upend or turn inside out the prescribed format of a biennial, and that relied upon a level of self-reflexivity bordering on narcissism. It was the

8 Vol. 10 No. 1 inaugural work by The Improvement League, a New-York based think-tank composed of artists, writers, and architects who perform “improvements” upon other works of art by singling out lines of thought and applying experimental methodologies in a form of conceptual dissection. The work under examination here was Olivia Plender’s Google Office, a neighboring multipurpose installation commissioned for the 2010 Taipei Biennial (TB10) that looked at the conflation of work, leisure, and knowledge production found in today’s high-tech office environments.

It goes without saying that the biennial, as a form, is one of the most readily criticized exhibition formats of the recent decade. Art critics and scholars continually decry the effects of “biennialization” upon contemporary art practices or lament the tendency towards “festivalism” in curatorial practice. Liked or disliked, the form not only persists but appears to be endlessly multiplying. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Asia, where economic success has left a string of biennials and triennials in its wake, most too short-lived and inconsistent to warrant substantive examination. Weighing in at just thirty-eight artworks by twenty-four artists and adopting an understated agenda of self-examination, the 2010 Taipei Biennial just might be the “anti-biennial” many of us were looking for. Eschewing any dictatorial theme and jettisoning a lengthy list of “star artists” haphazardly spread across makeshift additional venues, the 7th edition of the Taipei Biennial was a bold departure from standard international biennial fare. Introspective and self-reflective, it introduced a welcome air of restraint to an exhibition format too frequently obsessed with size, star power, and extroverted pronouncements on the current state of global art.

Taipei Biennial 2010 curators, Tirdad Zolghadr (left), Hongjohn Lin (right). Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Confining itself to just two floors of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the defining character of TB10 hinged upon a series of “structural proposals” put forward by the Biennial’s curators, Taipei-based Hongjohn Lin and Berlin-based Tirdad Zolghadr. Resoundingly self-reflexive and patently self- aware, each proposal seemed more destined than the next to invert accepted modes of biennial production and upend the conventional power dynamics that inform exhibition-making. Taken together, they formed TB10’s own

Vol. 10 No. 1 9 brand of “institutional critique.” The tradition of institutional critique, itself a contested arena of discourse and artistic practice once seen to fiercely critique the structures and logic associated with museums and art galleries, has now merged into something of a banality encompassing issues of site specificity and methodologies of art production as well as encircling socially engaged or participatory practices. Lin and Zolghadr’s TB10 applies the principles of institutional critique to the biennial system, in effect folding the logic of biennial-making in on itself, or turning the tables, so to speak. It is a curatorial strategy that, not unlike the disputed set of practices held under the logic of “institutional critique,” can work well on paper but is also prone to implode if excessively inward-looking.

TB10’s curatorial proposals ranged from the ingenious, such as the use of Sly Art, Biennial Office Swapping—Taipei Biennial “Sputniks”—peers from the local artistic community enlisted to help shape Monopoly, September 21, 2010. Taipei Biennial Monopoly the direction of the biennial by offering inside questions, critique, and is an oversized model of a Monopoly game that can advice during the curatorial process—to collaborations with alternative art be played according to the “art world” rules of Taiwan. spaces in Taipei that strained towards the pragmatic. The latter provided Courtesy of Sly Art and Taipei Fine Arts Museum. a useful way for the biennial to branch out from its home base of the museum while also serving as a way to boost much-needed visibility for those independently run and unsung art spaces.1 Participating spaces were given freedom to design their own program as they saw fit, and a few came up with innovative ways to bounce off the self-reflexive nature of TB10 itself, notably Sly Art’s Biennial Office Swapping, which moved the biennial offices into Sly Art and vice-versa for a two-day period, and VT Art Salon’s organization of life-drawing classes inside the exhibition space of TB10. However, anyone familiar with the highly contested nature of the Taipei arts scene could view the curatorial move to involve those art spaces in more cynical terms, since bringing these so-called alternative or independent spaces into the fold of the government-sponsored Taipei Biennial not only effectively mutes their independent voice but tactically dissuades those

10 Vol. 10 No. 1 VT Artsalon, Life Drawing Exam, September 11, 18, and 25, 2010. Courtesy of VT Art Salon and Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

organizations from launching their own criticisms against the biennial or the museum. It is not surprising, then, that in the political minefield that is the Taipei arts scene, there were some notable omissions. Chief among them was the Taipei Contemporary Art Center, which chose to retain its independence and distanced itself from the Biennial by mounting its own multi-layered Forum Biennial exhibition, featuring a strong roster of well- known and lesser-known Taiwanese artists.

The most radical of the curatorial proposals was perhaps the 2Y Project, arrived at by a group of artists working in close tandem with the curatorial team from the early stages of Biennial planning. This group of artists— those who first came aboard TB10—were also invited by Biennial curators to offer their own input on the overall scope, direction, and format of the exhibition through a series of discussions and meetings, the first of which occurred in March 2010. Recognizing that the largest obstacle facing biennial production is time—there is never enough of it for the curators who are saddled with putting the show together and even less for artists who are asked to produce new works, usually under extremely short notice—the group devised the 2Y Project, a plan that imposed a new timeline with projects by biennial artists being produced over a period of two years, scheduled to conclude in 2012. In partnership with two local venues, the National University of the Arts (TNUA), in Guandu, and The Cube Project Space, in Taipei city, 2Y included ten participating artists, Lara Almarcegui, Chris Evans, Christian Jankowski, Pak Sheung Chuen, Olivia Plender, Michael Portnoy, Jao Chia-En, Shi Jin-Hua, Carey Young, and Claude Wampler. Some of these artists plan to expand upon existing works for 2Y, making the entire enterprise a bit convoluted to the outsider. Treating the opening of the Taipei Biennial in 2010 not as ending point for displaying finished work but as a starting point for producing new projects, 2Y was an ambitious undertaking that aimed at no less than shifting the conceptions of time we normally associate with biennials and exhibition- making in general.

Vol. 10 No. 1 11 It is worth mentioning that, as far as biennials go, Taipei is not a typical example of the mega-exhibition. In fact, it has always been marked with a tenor of restraint—the artist list rarely tops sixty—and having been established in 1998, it reigns as the longest international biennial in the East Asian region after the Gwangju Biennale, which was founded in 1995.2 Yet despite consistent efforts to bring in top-notch international curators and address global themes, the success and visibility of the Taipei Biennial has waned, even as other biennials in the region have grown. Part of this can be attributed to its ill-conceived curatorial strategy based on the repeated pairing of a “local” Taiwanese curator with an “international” one (the so-called arranged marriage model);3 and, at least over the past two years, cold confrontations with the behemoth Flora Expo, a city-wide international floral exposition held in the parks and plazas adjacent to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. This much-anticipated exposition precipitated the early closure of at least one work in the final days of the 2008 Biennial, and in 2010 it encroached on the scheduled time period of TB10, overlapping by one week. Just as it would be unfair to see all biennials as operating mercilessly under the logic of grand visual spectacle, it is also unfair to assume they command the same importance beyond the art world as within; their status is often relatively low within the pecking order of other city sponsored civic-oriented events. Biennials might potentially represent machines of grandiose visibility, but they are notoriously under- funded and understaffed. To be fair, most biennials function as low-budget operations, especially when viewed alongside something like the Flora Expo, which reportedly commands a budget several times that of TB10.

No doubt intentionally, the introspective approach of TB10 actively shunned the overt and somewhat heavy-handed politics of its 2008 predecessor. That edition, curated by Manray Hsu and Vasif Kortun, offered searing critiques of the existing world social order by commissioning and exhibiting works that addressed a variety of social ills, from migration, labour, urban redevelopment, human trafficking, immigration, and environmental degradation to the increasingly porous nature of geopolitical boundaries. Spanning three floors of the museum and overflowing to additional off-site venues and various urban interventions, the 2008 Taipei Biennial was nothing if not invested in looking critically at neo-liberalist policies that have led to widespread global unrest. The spirited resistance adopted by TB10 curators Hongjohn Lin and Tirdad Zolghadr, however, takes a different tack. Willfully unconcerned with global politics and external social conditions, TB10 instead targets the internal workings of the biennial system itself. Taking aim at the institution of the biennial and its attendant discourses of exhibition making, TB10 is no less politically aware, just centered more along artistic lines than socially minded ones.

“One can easily imagine an exhibition of political art, but what about an exhibition on the politics of art?”4 This core question, articulated in the curatorial statement, drives TB10’s own brand of institutional critique, setting the stage for a total re-examination of the origin, function, size, and

12 Vol. 10 No. 1 scale of the biennial form. It continues: “By turning an exhibition inward and, in fact, against its grain—dissolving the supposed boundaries between artistic and curatorial practices, discourses, and reception—this exhibition unravels the conventionally discrete artistic presentation that is otherwise mystified.”5 But what exactly happens when a biennial turns in on itself? Is the desire to shed light upon the inner workings of curating an exhibition an exercise that can truly illustrate the social circumstances in which art is created and consumed? A critical evaluation of the system at hand is most certainly needed but whether or not such critiques have bearing upon the lives of most exhibition visitors is negligible at best. Herein lies the conundrum of the “institutional critique” model—open-eyed criticism towards the art system is commendable yet more often than not superfluous to those who occupy positions outside the system. It is an endeavour that risks fortifying rather than dissolving boundaries between art and the realities of daily life.

Pak Sheung Chuen, Going That said, the most worthwhile feature of TB10 was its bent towards the Home Projects, 2010, performance. Courtesy of critique of institutions, particularly successful being those that referenced the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum. the exhibition itself or challenged typified functions of the museum. Asserting a performative dimension was Pak Sheung Chuen’s Going Home Projects, in which the artist solicited conversation with biennial visitors and offered to accompany them on their commute home, followed by informal conversation and perhaps a shared meal in their private residences.6 Like most socially engaged practices, the project proposed a breakdown of the traditional artist/audience member divide. In Pak’s reversal, visitors to the museum accustomed to seeing and consuming art, became the content of the artwork, with the artist shifting from producer to facilitator. Another lighthearted approach included Christian Jankowski’s Director’s Cut, a newly commissioned work for TB10 that likened the process of searching for a new museum director to an American Idol-style TV program. Displayed in the vacant space of the director’s office in the basement of the museum,7 Director’s Cut was quintessential Jankowski—mainstream media tropes were borrowed and flipped around to comment on the awkward parallels between scripted TV and unscripted reality—and this time he convincingly poked fun at the seemingly arbitrary and utterly bureaucratic process of selecting a candidate to fill the post of museum director. Given Taiwan’s own proclivity towards high-stakes political drama (especially the televised variety), the work also resonated nicely with the local context.

Vol. 10 No. 1 13 Christian Jankowski, Director’s Cut, 2010, video installation, approx. 30 mins. Photo: Pauline J. Yao.

Being mindful of the past in the Christian Jankowski, poster for Director’s Cut, 2010, video world of biennials is all too rare. installation, approx. 30 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Most of us are conditioned to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. tabula rasa formula in which every two years an exhibition is born anew with little or only glancing reference to previous occurrences. We have become accustomed to a model that privileges newness and difference, that encourages curators to unearth and christen new talent, and that supports the “parachuting in” of itinerant artists ready and willing to engage with the local environment in one-off, temporary projects. Thus the decision to use up limited capital to invite back artists who took part in the 2008 edition can be seen as a somewhat radical gesture. TB08 Revisited, yet another curatorial proposal “branded” under TB10, brought back artists who participated in the previous biennial to revisit, elaborate upon, and/or build upon their earlier projects. While the effort to circumvent the dominating logic of the new is an admirable one—let’s face it, biennials are often woefully ignorant of their own pasts—it is unfortunate that this sentiment was not met with an equal eye towards deepening the engagements of previously visiting international artists. Since most of the artists invited back under TB08 Revisited were non-Taiwanese who undertook locally oriented projects the first time around, one might have expected that the very act of inviting them back to Taipei would have elicited interest to concretely re-revisit the ways their works were carried out two years earlier in that very place. Having seen the 2008 edition of the Taipei Biennial, I was looking forward to finding out how these artists might assess the local impact of the work two years after the fact or otherwise creatively build upon foundations laid earlier in Taipei. Sadly, the “revisitations” of TB10 never really succeeded in getting off the ground. The valuable relationships forged on a local level the first time around, in 2008, seemed strangely absent in 2010, and what one encountered in TB10 appeared only distantly related to the works’ original manifestation in Taipei. Slovenian group Irwin, for example, working together with NSKSTATE.COM, presented NSK Folk Art, a dry assortment of artworks and objects made by various

14 Vol. 10 No. 1 Irwin and NSKSTATE.COM, NSK Folk Art, 1992–ongoing, mixed media. Courtesy of the artists and Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Lara Almarcegui, Removing the Outside Wall of a Ruined House, Taipei, 2008, photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

citizens of the fictional utopian state NSK. Given that a variety of Taipei locals took part in the NSK project in 2008 through on-camera interviews, not having found a way to somehow involve those people this time around seemed a serious missed opportunity.8 Lara Almarcegui’s A Guide to Taipei Ruins comprising an in-depth research project and publication on ruined architecture in Taipei, was also a bit of a non-starter since it was simultaneously part of the 2Y Project that has yet to get underway. The free beer initiative undertaken by Danish collective Superflex in 2008 was smartly updated and expanded for TB10, including open-source production through Creative Commons Licensing and on-site beer-making workshops, but again the ties to the local context were weak and left one wondering how this work provoked any new relationship to its site in Taipei.

Vol. 10 No. 1 15 16 Vol. 10 No. 1 Opposite page top: Superflex, The exception was Turkish artist Burak Delier’s We Will Win Survey, which FREE BEER bottles, 2010. Courtesy of the artists and directly situated the original work in the context of the biennial institution Taipei Fine Arts Museum. itself. A critical rendition of Counter Attack: The Intervention Team, made Oppositie page bottom: Superflex, FREE BEER Factory, for the 2008 Taipei Biennial, Delier’s contribution to TB10 consisted of installation view at TFAM, 2010, mixed media installation information gleaned from a survey of 300 to 400 members of the Taipei art with platform, tables, brewing 9 kits, bottles. Photo: Pauline J. community about their opinions of the biennial. Questions ranged from Yao. Courtesy of the artists and Taipei Fine Arts Museum. the general (“Is it possible to provide critique at an art biennial?” or “Do you agree that art should be a critical power?”) to the specific (“Do you think the Taipei Biennial is an appropriate venue to discuss Shijhou Tribe’s housing problem?” “Do you think that the We Will Win project is able to create public awareness?”). Delier’s no-frills approach was not only highly informative but marked a substantive effort to return to the conception of the original work as well as to its effect and impact within the community in which it was situated.

Burak Delier, Chart analysis from the WE WILL WIN Survey questionnaire (The icons starting from the top to bottom represent art managers, artists and curators, audiences, and TFAM staff respectively), 2010. Graphic designer: Vahit Tuna. Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

One cannot help but wonder then, what exactly was being revisited in TB08 Revisited? Was the goal to revisit the ideological impetus of a given work or the materialization of such ideas within the real time and space of Taipei? In other words, was it the work that was being revisited or just the concept? The fact that biennials today increasingly depend upon site- specific projects aimed at producing dialogue with or otherwise engage with a “local” community, it seems highly revealing that this agenda, present in 2008 when these projects were spearheaded, did not manage to carry through to 2010. Since most of the original projects can be seen in the light of participation, or, at the very least, involved engagement with the citizens of Taipei, it is mystifying that this crucial component was left out the second time around. Perhaps the preoccupation with returning to works made two years earlier was so strong that artists unwillingly lost sight of the need to take into consideration where or why those projects took place to begin with. Nevertheless, the omission was a telling indicator of the introverted mentality that pervaded the rest of TB10.

Vol. 10 No. 1 17 Even in cases where artists were not Top: Mario Garcia-Torres, My Westphalia Days, 2008, 16mm consciously riffing off their own film, 15 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts work, the leitmotif of revisiting Museum.

existing artworks in the creation of Left: Can Altay, Normalization parts 1 and 2, 2010, installation. new ones was evident everywhere, Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum. from Mario Garcia-Torres’s film referencing the temporary disappearance of Michael Asher’s famed caravan in 2007 with My Westphalia Days, Can Altay’s installation, Normalization parts 1 and 2, reconfiguring two preexistent exhibitions into one (including one that took place in that very room just prior to the biennial), and Silvia Kolbowski’s newly commissioned video and photo series A Few Howls Again? (2010) which draws upon a famed news photo and subsequent Gerhard Richter painting depicting Ulrike Meinhof’s death; to Kolbowski’s earlier piece An Inadequate History of Conceptual Art (1998–99) which featured recordings of artists describing other conceptual artworks from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Self-conscious references to the exhibition or museum form came through in varying shades of subversiveness. Here, Jao Chia-En’s elegant response to the encroaching presence of the Flora Expo comes to mind (the artist proposed that TB10 change its hours in the final week to a nocturnal schedule and open only at night when the Expo was closed). Unfortunately Jao’s proposal was rejected by the museum, while other, more tame interventions, such as giving over precious exhibition space to a commercial gallery during the run of the exhibition, which Shi Jin-Hua did, proceeded without hesitation.

In our haste to dismiss the biennial form, it is easy to forget that they are not just containers of artworks but constitute something of a mass medium. They must strive to establish a sense of social space and yet within that space they must also struggle to carve out meaningful moments of

18 Vol. 10 No. 1 Top: Silvia Kolbowski, A Few interaction, communication, and Howls Again?, 2010, three inkjet on diebond panels, wall artistic inquiry. Yet, budget or no label, video loop, 7 mins., 25 secs. Photo consultant: budget, global art star curators or Carolina Palmgren. Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts domestic mainstays, biennials are Museum. inextricably bound to systems that Right: Silvia Kolbowski, An Inadequate History of extend beyond the concerns of art. Conceptual Art, 1998–99, video stills. Courtesy of the artist and As Carlos Basualdo puts it, in these Taipei Fine Arts Museum. periodic exhibitions, “diplomacy, politics, and commerce converge in a powerful movement, the purpose of which seems to be the appropriation and instrumentalization of the symbolic value of art.”10 But if all biennials in some way reflect the instrumentalization of art to serve needs supposedly outside the realm of art, TB10 presented an uncanny twist by instrumentalizing the biennial to prove a point about exhibition making to those already in the biennial community. The question remains as to whether such a well-intentioned endeavour—reflecting, uprooting, disrupting, or circumventing the usual systems of a biennial exhibition within the context of an exhibition—carried much weight for those viewers not indoctrinated to the concerns of art biennials, or even those who participated in the process. Can the project of transforming a biennial from a medium equated with authoritative power and spectacle-driven aesthetics to one conceived along more egalitarian, human-scaled lines really be achieved? And, if so, how would that achievement be made visible?

Vol. 10 No. 1 19 If the 2008 Taipei Biennial took its cue from the external realities seen to reflect our global condition, TB10’s focus ended up as not only unequivocally inward looking but disastrously restricted in its scope. The introspective nature of TB10 provided a welcome departure from more extroverted approaches, but it was a rather short-lived affair filled with schemes, plots, proposals, and approaches that appear better on paper than in real time. Rather than solving any questions, the tack of institutional critique only succeeds in raising new ones, namely, questions related to audience. With so much attention placed upon self-reflection and revisiting other existing artworks, how could the average museum-goer unfamiliar with contemporary art begin to gain a foothold? TB10 comes out ahead with its unconventional approach, but the endless circumlocution through gimmicky structural proposals edges towards the unnecessarily complex, and ultimately diverts valuable attention away from the artworks themselves and the questions they raise. In light of The Improvement League’s Google Office 0.2, we might step back and view the persistent self-referentiality and circularity of TB10 as two sides of a continually revolving platform—one side characterized by endless winding movements within a closed system, the other defined by more generative qualities that produce new forms and ideas. Where one decides to step on is up to them.

Notes 1 Participating art spaces included Open Contemporary Art Center, Bamboo Curtain Studio, VT Artsalon, Nanhai Gallery, Yao Jui-chung and LSD (Lost Society Documenta), Sly Art, and The Cube Project Space. 2 The Shanghai Biennale got its start in 1996 and is currently in its eighth edition, but the first two editions, 1996 and 1998, were nationally focused. It did not open itself to international participants (and curators) until 2000. 3 This curatorial structure has been in place since the 2000 Taipei Biennial, “The Sky is the Limit,” curated by Jerome Sans and Manray Hsu. The co-curators of following biennials have presented a united front to the public, despite strained relations behind closed doors. Conflict between the “local” and “international” curators came to a head in 2004 when curator Amy Cheng boycotted the event at the eleventh hour, citing disagreements with her European curatorial counterpart Barbara Vanderlinden. 4 Curatorial statement by Hongjohn Lin, 2010 Taipei Biennial Guidebook (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2010), 8. 5 Ibid. 6 Documentation of the project can be found on the artist’s blog: http://www.oneeyeman.com. 7 Part of the inspiration for Jankowski’s work was the fact that the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, organizer of the Biennial, was in the interim stage of filling the directorship post. Shortly after the Biennial opened, a new director was announced, and the video was relocated upstairs to the main exhibition area. 8 For the 2008 Taipei Biennial, Slovenian group Irwin set up a passport office for the virtual utopian state NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) and conducted video interviews with new Taipei-based citizens. The interviews were shown on large-scale video projections in a room together with footage documenting similar events in Nigeria, Bosnia, and Austria. 9 In 2008, the artist responded to controversial urban renewal plans to disperse the Shijhou indigenous tribe community living along the banks of the Sindian River, in Taipei. Together with a team of volunteers, students, and Shijhou tribe members, the artist led an intervention whereby a huge banner reading “WE WILL WIN” was mounted atop the houses for everyone in the area to see. 10 Carlos Basualdo, “The Unstable Institution,” Manifesta Journal no. 2 (winter 2003/spring 2004), 54.

20 Vol. 10 No. 1 Xhingyu Chen The 8th Shanghai Biennale: Rehearsal October 24, 2010–January 23, 2011

n the run-up to the opening of the 8th Shanghai Biennale, a sense of dread permeated the Shanghai art scene, as memories of 2008 were still Ifresh in mind. The 7th Shanghai Biennale was dominated by large-scale sculptures that were mostly short on content and made little impact in the overall dialogue of contemporary art. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Yue Minjun’s hall of dinosaurs—shiny rainbow-coloured monstrosities indicating an art scene that was stagnant and characterized by cynicism and vulgarity. The potential that arose with the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, when a team headed by Hou Hanru dared to exhibit new media works and changed the course of the exhibition, had diminished over the years as the market grew and eventually dominated the imagination. Chinese art had seemingly lost its edge.

Enter Gao Shiming, who, as executive curator, saw the need for a Biennale that put the focus back on art practices and innovative approaches to exhibiting and curating. “Rehearsal” refers not only to the theme of the Biennale, but also to the curatorial team redefining what this Biennale is. “We were dissatisfied with the reality,” explained Gao Shiming in a conversation with me, “and we wanted to redefine what contemporary art is, rediscover the potentiality of contemporary art. The Biennale itself should be seen as an academy, a knowledge lab, but it should also be a place for practical knowledge related to art production and exhibition.”

The idea that the Biennale be a site for academic research and exploring the intellectual potential of an exhibition is realized in the structure of the show. Rehearsal is separated into five “acts”: Act One is an expansion of Long March Space’s Long March Project that began in 2002 in Beijing; this most recent edition followed the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam; Act Two is A Guiding Light, a film by Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle produced for the biennale and PERFORMA, with the piece being acted out live in New York during the PERFORMA festival; Act Three is the exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum; Act Four takes place in Zagreb, Croatia concurrently at the Biennale and Nova Gallery, and features an ongoing performance by WHW as well as seminars; and Act Five takes the form of an adjunct exhibition of Indian and Chinese artists and corresponding lectures in the Shanghai Art Museum titled West Heavens: India-China Summit on Social Thought. This is the first time that any biennial has extended itself beyond the borders of the host city in an effort to build a bridge between diverse

Vol. 10 No. 1 21 artistic movements around the world and create a substantial dialogue on Top: Mou Boyan, Fat series, sculpture, installation view. artistic practices. The core curatorial team may be Chinese but the reach is Photo: Xhingyu Chen. intentionally international. Bottom: Ouka Leele, Menina Liberada, 2010, digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist, the Shanghai Biennale, However, in their efforts to prevent the Shanghai Biennale from being and the Shanghai Art Museum. what Gao calls “spectacles, like art fairs,” they have perhaps lost focus in the execution of the show. It is clear when viewing the exhibition different curators chose different artists. While the organizers are united in promoting Gao’s definition of the Biennale, the resulting show still lacked a cohesive vision. Despite efforts by Gao to present works that challenge conventions, the show cannot shake off the ghosts of years past.

Viewers are greeted on the second floor with Mou Boyan’s tired, grotesque sculptures of naked fat people, the latest from his ongoing Fat series, who are misshapen and pig-like and engaging with a spewing geyser of

22 Vol. 10 No. 1 milk-like substance. With his work, the artist has grown complacent in his stale reflection on the current state of Chinese society. It’s about time the artist put this series to rest. Equally problematic is a series from Spanish artist Ouka Leele, wherein the artist reimagines old masters paintings in staged photographic form. The question that immediately comes to mind is: Why? Known mainly for her painted photography work in the 1980s, here she restages paintings by artists such as Velasquez and Rubens with little thought as to how these masters are relevant to contemporary art. Having models don a wig and using modern pop culture references in her photographs does not do justice to the significance of the works she references. Furthermore, the notion of a photographer as a “director” and the resulting works as “dramas” as described in the exhibition catalogue is tenuous at best, and stretches thin the definition of the Biennale’s theme.

Inga Svala Thórsdóttir, BORG Elsewhere, this broad definition of “rehearsal” and experimentation IS ME, 2010, installation. Courtesy of the artist, the in art is used to an even more perplexing effect. Icelandic artist Inga Shanghai Biennale, and the Shanghai Art Museum. Svala Thórsdóttir’s BORG IS ME is a confounding piece of work. The artist fills the museum’s mezzanine space with spare blue paintings and little else. Near the entrance is a traditional Nordic-style bed with a bed spread featuring a hand stitched manifesto of sorts that reads like a the ramblings of a madwoman declaring the importance of sleep, how the lack of sleep leads to a greater desire to sleep, and that great ideas are produced while sleeping. “Borg” is translated as “town,” we are told in the artwork’s explanation, but it can be felt everywhere and encompasses many sentiments, if the viewer is open to its primal power, or something to that effect. It is this kind of ambiguity that characterized many conceptual works in general and only served to frustrate viewers and highlight the inadequacies of the work itself. Is the artist trying to convey this sense of “borg” with her bland blue paintings, and are we to be lifted into a state of “borg” by reading her ramblings? Ultimately, it is a conceptual piece that assumes only the slightest glimmer of the Biennale theme.

Vol. 10 No. 1 23 This discrepancy between concept and execution is glaring in the works of Hsia Yan. His sheet metal figure sculptures are ostensibly an extension of traditional paintings, but the effect is as if the works were pressed through a document shredder. To drive home the connection to traditional practices like ink painting, the sculptures are seated on opium beds and placed among Ming dynasty style furniture. Incredibly, one entire room on the fourth level is devoted to this “installation.” The artist was an early innovator, first bringing traditional ink painting into the modern age with abstract compositions, and later applying ink traditions to sculpture, but he has ridden the coattails of his own legend for too long.

Installation view of Hsia Yan’s copper sculptures, 2010. Courtesy of the artist, the Shanghai Biennale, and the Shanghai Art Museum.

It is these discouraging inclusions that underscore the issue of consensus among the curators. If not for the inclusion of such works that pervert the definition of experimentation and innovation, the show would be a profound reflection of where contemporary art is headed today. In particular, four video artists made significant contributions that considered the theme in clear, intelligent ways. Wang Jianwei, known for his highly choreographed theatrical staging, presented five stories told on five screens in Work on a Timeline, each video interspersed with one common story of a young man trying to make a life in the city after moving there from the countryside. On the flipside, Yang Fudong presented one story on seven screens in a work that shows the filming of this complex piece. Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen added to his repertoire of various historical events reconstructed on film with The Route. Director Tsai Ming-liang subverted the idea of film viewing with a piece titled It’s a Dream that has the viewer watching people watching a film, with the film in question never shown.

All four of these works reveal different elements that define art making. In particular, Wang, Yang, and Tsai explore the importance of audience engagement. Work on a Timeline is presented on five screens arranged in a circle, forcing the viewer to view each screen individually before the full scope of the young man’s story can be realized. No one screen is designated as the end or beginning, allowing the viewers to create their own narrative.

24 Vol. 10 No. 1 Yang Fudong, Fifth Night Yang Fudong’s Fifth Night II is a kind of behind-the-scenes, “rehearsal” II, video installation, 2010. Courtesy of the artist, the version shot at the same time as of the filming of Fifth Night, which was Shanghai Biennale, and the Shanghai Art Museum. concurrently showing at ShanghArt Gallery during the Biennale. The artist continues to question “What is film?” in a work that takes off where Dawn Mist Separation, from 2009, left off. In the earlier work, he presented separate sequences from one film on different screens, each scene playing on a continuous unedited loop. Like in Work on a Timeline, viewers had to walk from screen to screen to piece together a complete narrative. Similarly, Fifth Night II presents one film on seven screens; here, however, the artist shoots his film using multiple cameras, with each camera presenting a different perspective and tracks of movement but all occurring at the same time. The eye jumps from screen to screen to catch how each is connected to the others, requiring multiple viewings to complete the puzzle. In essence, the artist adds another layer to the already complex shooting of the film, doubling the number of cameras to document the shooting of each scene, creating a kind of filmic matryoshka. The whole piece becomes a film within a film, several layers deep. All the traditional elements of film—story, plot, character development—are incidental to the filming process itself, with endless narrative possibilities provided by the viewers themselves.

Known for his abstract reconstruction of historical events on film, Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen provides a fictional account of a demonstration from striking wharf workers in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in The Route. The piece was commissioned for the Liverpool Biennial and uses the real account of dock workers striking around the world in support of Liverpool’s longshoremen’s struggle against the privatization of their port. Chen Chieh-jen hired real dock workers in Kaohsiung and filmed them as they staged their own symbolic protest. As with Yang Fudong’s piece, which provided a glimpse into the filmmaking process, Chen Chieh-jen also highlights a process, the

Vol. 10 No. 1 25 Chen Chieh-jen, The Route, 2006, 35 mm film transferred to single-channel DVD, 16 mins., 45 secs. Courtesy of the artist, the Shanghai Biennale, and the Shanghai Art Museum.

process that the striking labours undertake to organize the demonstration. Every action is slow, deliberate, and focused, with the camera following faithfully and often in close up. The piece captures the tense emotions that accompany this kind of political theatre. More modest than Fifth Night, Chen Chieh-jen’s work questions film as a document of reality and addresses how film manipulates truth to present an agenda.

Tsai Ming-liang, It’s a Dream, video installation, 2007. Courtesy of the artist, the Shanghai Biennale, and the Shanghai Art Museum.

Of these four artists, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, born in Malaysia, produces the biggest impact with an extraordinarily simple idea. Installing thirty red seats from an old Malaysian movie theater, viewers are invited to watch a film depicting the director’s early movie going experience in the same cinema that is the provenance of the seats. He conveys time and mood even more palpably than Yang Fudong’s Fifth Night, never revealing what the subjects on the film are watching or indulging us with dialogue. A family sits transfixed, a man watches while smoking a cigarette, a couple watch from separate rows, all filmed as if they were the sole occupants— these intimate “scenes” are meant to be glimpses into the artist’s memories. The work attests to the power of film without actually showing a film.

26 Vol. 10 No. 1 Liu Wei, Merely a Mistake While video and film are natural II, 2010, installation. Photo: Xhingyu Chen. choices to explore the idea of rehearsal, the theme also refers to exhibition spaces as not only displayers of art but also an ever changing place that can engender creativity. Gao Shiming compares exhibitions to theatrical productions, that is, experiments and exercises that are constantly evolving. On the first floor, the large cathedral-like sculptures by Liu Wei, Merely a Mistake II, nicely reference the exhibition space, its intricate woodwork composed of old scraps collected from demolished buildings echoes the aging museum itself. The artist left the wood in the condition in which it was found, lending a distinct sense of history and memory to these newer structures. Left untreated, they will continue to age and allude to the ramifications of a culture abandoning the old and embracing the new.

MadeIn, Must Act, installation, In a work that nicely echoes The Route, MadeIn installed painted placards 2010. Courtesy of the artist, the Shanghai Biennale, and the throughout the first floor with the provocative title Must Act, as part of Shanghai Art Museum. their Spread series. MadeIn, and its brainchild Xu Zhen, continually explore how we process images in the current media age, and how our realities are no longer necessarily distinguishable from what is presented to us by the media. We are constantly using and re-using these corrupted images until we no longer possess individual thought. While the video artists revealed the power of moving images to affect us, MadeIn exposes another, more

Vol. 10 No. 1 27 cynical side. Images can manipulate and there is no better example of this than in politics, and here specifically, political protests. The painted signs all contain familiar images associated with political movements and the objects of their dissent: a Molotov cocktail, an armed soldier, a gas mask, a dollar bill, and so on. These images have been appropriated to the point where we as viewers can no longer view them in an objective way.

The cynicism of MadeIn is offset by a new series of paintings by Liu Left: Liu Xiaodong, Get Out of Beidchuan, 2010, oil on Xiaodong, focusing on the people of Beichuan, Sichuan, the scene of the canvas, documentary film. Right: Liu Xiaodong, Enter devastating earthquake in 2008 that had social and political consequences in Tai Lake, 2010, oil on canvas, documentary film. Courtesy addition to the destruction that occurred. His paintings have a documentary of the artist, the Shanghai Biennale, and the Shanghai Art feel that is unsentimental and unambiguous. They are objective portrayals Museum. of an affected people but the way they are viewed is anything but. The realities of the subjects are difficult to ignore, making the viewer a player in this carefully crafted dialogue created by the artist. Included with these new monumental works is photographic documentation of the process in which he paints, adding another dimension to the idea of rehearsal. It is a remarkable companion piece to Fifth Night II, another compelling look into how an artist works, and adds another layer of pathos to what is already a loaded topic.

Conceptual artist Qiu Zhijie makes a memorable appearance with an elaborate installation that remarks on how a festival develops from the annals of history. Qiu Zhijie’s Notes on Colorful Lanterns at Shangyuan Festival tracks the trajectory of a holiday through mural paintings, and an installation that include grinders, a mask painting station, and various miscellaneous props. It is ultimately a confusing clutter of information that

28 Vol. 10 No. 1 needed an editor. Viewers did better with a visit to the biennale’s satellite show, West Heavens, which features work from Qiu Zhijie that is arguably his most vital work to date. Railway from Lhasa to Katmandu takes its cue from the story of Nain Singh, an Indian spy employed by the British in 1865 to map out the territory that is now Tibet. Qiu Zhijie literally followed in Nain’s footsteps, controlling each step by thirty-three inches, as Nain had done, with custom-made shackles.

Qiu Zhijie, Qiu’s Notes on Colorful Lanterns at Shangyuan Festival, 2010, installation with ink wall murals and mixed-media sculptures. Courtesy of the artist, the Shanghai Biennale, and the Shanghai Art Museum.

Qiu Zhijie, Railway From Lhasa to Katmandu, 2010, installation. Photo: Thomas Fuesser. Courtesy of the artist and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong.

The installation included video and photographic documentation of his journey (which he took in 2006–07), a map marking his route, traditional Tibetan tanka paintings showing the history of India’s colonial and post- colonial life, and train rails that were made from everyday objects (some which had religious applications) the artist had collected on the way. Nain’s data from his mission was to be used in order to construct an accurate road map of the territory to expedite an imperial invasion. While the piece apparently speaks of India’s colonial history and the tensions between it and China, it is hard to ignore the implications of a Chinese person walking through Tibet in shackles and creating rails from religious objects. It is no secret the lengths the Chinese government have taken to flood Tibet with Han Chinese, thereby diluting the culture, and building a railway to the region (which was completed in 2007) in order to facilitate their designs on the province.

Vol. 10 No. 1 29 An exhibition that toys with the idea of rehearsal would not be complete Verdensteatret, And All the Question Marks Started to without performances. This presented some tricky practical problems; Sing, 2010, performance and installation. Photo: Xhingyu including performances in a four-month long exhibition would be difficult Chen. to carry out in any setting, much less the wholly ill-equipped Shanghai Art Museum. Norwegian collective Verdensteatret nonetheless made a valiant effort with And All the Question Marks Started to Sing. A dizzying combination of performance, installation, video, and animation, Question Marks attempts to bridge the gap between these disciplines. Upturned bicycles, stools, spotlights, loudspeakers, and various mechanical objects are placed on the exhibition floor, which seemingly have no practical purpose until the team begins their performance. Animated images are projected onto the walls and on various objects on the floor, with the projections determined by the music that was audible. Meanwhile, actors walk around the installation, occasionally turning wheels and tinkering with objects, which in turn seem to dictate the music. Spotlights project shadows of the installation on one end of the space, each shadow growing in size depending on the location of the light. There is an endless amount of activity and noise and sensations that is difficult to take in all at once. But it was an intoxicating blend that brought a welcome bit of chaos to its staid surroundings.

There were many works that took the term rehearsal at face value but none more cleverly than Guiding Light: A Rehearsal, a performance by Anton Vidokle and Liam Gillick, which was shown both in video form at the Shanghai Art Museum and live during PERFORMA in New York City. The title refers to the long running American soap opera that ended its seventy- two year run in 2009. The artists brought together a group of artists (with the inclusion of a curator and a critic) to read out a structural analysis of an episode from 1952 that was interspersed with a curatorial text from Gao Shiming. The piece acts as an in-joke juxtaposing the art world and soap operas; that a piece of popular culture would be given such a literal high-minded treatment is an absurd act, one that raises the question of

30 Vol. 10 No. 1 Anton Vidokle and Liam why artists would deign to use such low brow source material. But the Gillick, Guiding Light, 2010, performance. Courtesy of the longer one watches, the more one realizes the condescending nature of the artists, the Shanghai Biennale, and the Shanghai Art Museum. performance. The artists reveal the absurdity of their world through an absurd act; it is at once a self-deprecating joke and an obnoxious assertion.

Unfortunately, the poor presentation and disruption from other surrounding video works made for an unsatisfactory viewing experience of Guiding Light. This is not the fault of the artists but rather of the museum staff itself, which has consistently shown over the years its lack of experience and skill in putting together a coherent show. A majority of the first floor, dominated by artists like the Long March Project, MadeIn, Liu Wei, and Wang Jianwei, acts as one cohesive unit. But it is hard to ignore the monumental installation from Zhang Huan, who included the set piece from his opera Semele complete with the original furniture of its inhabitants. Likewise, Mou Boyan’s sculptures hijack the second floor. The result is a schizophrenic experience, not surprising for a show that wants to aim higher but reveals a curatorial team consistently at odds with itself. The artist Xu Zhen expressed his concern over this issue, saying in a conversation that although the focus this year is on intellectually probing project-based works, some of the curators “still choose artists which they have close relations with, rather than artists they feel contribute to the overall dialogue. As a result, some art may get overlooked because it is competing with flashier works.” Gao stated in a conversation with me the tantalizing idea that perhaps a museum, and specifically the Shanghai Art Museum, is not the ideal venue for a biennial, something that was also hinted at by Xu Zhen. This desire to expand beyond the boundaries of a traditional exhibition space is clear from his decision to hold several exhibitions and events concurrently, and in collaboration with the Biennale, to test different possibilities. Gao has organized the most intriguing Biennale in years but there is a palpable sense that so much more is being held back.

Vol. 10 No. 1 31 Robin Peckham Big, Small, and Potential: Chinese Art in Spaces and Places

t has become a truism: Chinese art is big not only in terms of physical scale, but also in the impressions it imparts to the observer. Chinese Iart, and not just that of the big, red, and shiny variety, tends toward the shocking and the monolithic, qualities established through a sense of illusion that accompanies the often extraordinary production values of fabrication and large-scale craft. Hong Kong art, on the other hand, is small—or so the story goes. Hong Kong critics write that local artists work on a small scale because of their environments: studios and galleries alike are diminutive, so the production of art is spatially constricted. Artists, on the other hand, prefer to believe that their work remains small because of a certain strategy of discursive resistance: having been left out of the mainland contemporary art boom, they now intentionally work in a rhetorical style that desists from the grandiose claims of the public sculpture fabricated in massive workshops just across the border to the north.

Both of these apparently logical statements, of course, contain only half- truths at best. Space itself rarely plays such a defining role in the production of culture; space, after all, is not place, which alludes more properly to the accumulated matrices of social interaction that populate the alternately physical and virtual worlds of spatial constitution. Although contemporary art in Hong Kong and mainland China would seem to have arrived at their current states relatively independently and through different routes, the shared history of development actually extends further back than advocates of colonial cosmopolitanism might care to admit. A porous border, at least for the intellectuals who found themselves so often labeled refugees over the course of the twentieth century, has assured that forms and ideas of modern culture have always found a way to keep the staggered trajectories of Chinese art more or less even across the region. Why, then, such a gulf when it comes to the contemporary? A comparative close reading of certain historical functions of studio practice will reveal that size and scale are not nearly the overdetermined properties of social space they may seem to be, and that notions of place and cultural placement play a much more significant role in the production of space in art.

Wu Hung has advanced a rather singular conception of monumentality that will be useful here. Having developed an art historical methodology for his classic account of the public and historic functions of art and artifact in ancient Chinese society, Wu later applied this same strategy to

32 Vol. 10 No. 1 his exegesis of the planning of Tian’anmen Square, and it is this possibility of an art history of architecture, or an architectural reading of art history, that I am interested in here. The defining properties of monumentality in classical scholarship, he relates, are almost self-evidently defined through empirical reference to the category of the monument: it is permanent, durable, hard, solemn, and still. We might add to this list that the classical monument bears an implication of the public and defines its own space in a sculptural sense despite its original integration with the architectural grid (indeed, it is this latter property that allows for the collapse of the sculpture-architecture category that proves so productive for Wu Hung in his analysis of contemporary planning). For Wu Hung, however, this set of attributes is competent only insofar as it refers to the intentional monument erected such that it might reflect the properties of monumentality. His work, however, is much more interested in the notion of unintentional monumentality, which occurs when an object—any object, it would seem— acquires the ability to memorialize or commemorate the past, and, most importantly, to bring structure to history. This definition, which I prefer to call weak monumentality in light of the fact that it subsumes a much more general set of objects bordering on the universal, almost unintentionally assigns to the project of Chinese art, from the classical to the contemporary, a project of remembering. Regardless of the historical validity of this application, it does indeed open a new set of readings for Chinese art that we, as external observers, might call monumental on the basis of size, form, location, context, and referent alone.

Liu Wei, Uprooted Obelisk, The best example here in terms 2008, sandstone, 9 x 1 x 1 m. Courtesy of the artist of a brutally explicit relationship and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. to the monument may be the installation Uprooted Obelisk (2008) presented by Liu Wei at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art on the occasion of the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards, which consists of a stone obelisk some eight meters tall seemingly balanced with its tip to the ground and suspended from the ceiling. As with the work of the classical monument, which almost always eschews subtlety in favour of accessibility, there are few questions left unanswered here. This is a monument, inverted. Though the conceptual act of approaching the monumental form in such a way within a work of art is highly symbolic, it also appears simplistic and petulant in many ways, depending on visual shock and perhaps a touch of fear (it was eventually exhibited laid out horizontally along the floor out of safety concerns) in order to produce a reaction ideally consisting first of awe that only later shifts to reflection. Armed with the deliberately emboldened definition of monumentality,

Vol. 10 No. 1 33 however, we are invited to inquire into the relationship of this architectural feature to history: which history is memorialized here, and how is this history structured? The first half of this query opens up space for imagination simply because no information is offered. Liu Wei refers, in his own statement about the work, to the origins of the obelisk in ancient Egyptian aesthetics, willfully oblivious to the play of power enacted through the public sites in which such structures stand across the world. The artist thus creates an imagined and engineered history, however ambiguous, that hovers just beyond the available space of the work proper. This gestures toward how history is structured through the act of exhibition—it is quite literally inverted, narrated, and made virtual—but also at how the work seems to be produced precisely in order to provide a scale and a monumental form for a history that would not otherwise exist. The same relationship is evident, though slightly less explicit, in the artist’s Energy Block (2008), a room-sized installation of machinery, buttons, lights, and sounds intended to synthesize the anxious sensations of a vaguely menacing piece of anonymous if misunderstood technology.

Liu Wei, Energy Block, 2008, mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and Bund 18 Creative Center, Shanghai.

Something similar happens in the work of Xu Zhen, whose Untitled (2007) appears particularly monumental in this context. This installation, positioned outside the exhibition galleries of Long March Space during the exhibition NONO, consists of two glass tanks several meters tall, each filled with one half of a bisected brontosaurus fabricated out of resin and preserved in a liquid-like formaldehyde (it was intended to be placed in the gallery, but was ultimately outwitted by its own aspirations to size and glory). The allusion to history here is two-fold: superficially, the reference is to a history even further removed, or, more properly, a prehistory, but the work is conceptually directed at a much more recent historical narrative in the form of the auction-topping taxidermy tank works of Damien Hirst. As art market satire, however, this installation is stunningly hollow and even sterile; here, the joke is on the repetition of form itself. Xu Zhen appears to accentuate and ultimately laugh along with certain tendencies in contemporary Chinese art to exaggerate the most glaringly vacuous aspects of global culture: the big is made bigger, the absurd even more preposterous. The scale is certainly monumental, but its reorganization of history in this work is incidental, serving primarily to position itself within

34 Vol. 10 No. 1 Xu Zhen, 8848–1.86, 2005, the recent developments of pseudo- colophony, glass, video, photographs, mountaineering conceptual contemporary art. In his equipment. Courtesy of the artist and Long March Space, project 8848-1.86 (2005), Xu Zhen Beijing. again fabricates an imagined history via the form of the monument. Through video, photography, and the installation of an artificial mountain top within a refrigerated glass vitrine, the artist constructs a narrative in which he ascends Mt. Everest and cuts off the top peak at a height roughly equivalent to his own. Historical truth is again doubled here, as the story itself offers a conceptual gesture of the subversion of the relationship between man and nature (not to mention the ambitions of the Chinese cultural elite), but, in another way, the obvious fallaciousness of the story also shifts its focus to the storytelling itself. As such, history is produced through the form of the monument—the piece of mountain that functions as a commemoration of the act of attaining it—as much as it is organized by it, and monumentality is allowed to fill in the gaps of history by virtue of the shock of scale.

Xu Zhen, Untitled, 2007, The third archetypal approach to the ordering and fabrication of history animal viscera, steel, glass. Courtesy of the artist and Long in mainland Chinese installation art is found in the work of Zheng March Space, Beijing. Guogu. Whereas both Liu Wei and Xu Zhen employ the literal strategies of monumentality in the form of public architecture and museum-style preservation, respectively, Zheng Guogu adopts a more oblique approach to the naturalization of history, though he too does touch upon the forms

Vol. 10 No. 1 35 and fetishes of natural history. In Hundred-Year-Old Tree Blooms Again Zheng Guogu, Hundred-Year Old-Tree Blooms Again, 2008, (2008) and several related installations, the artist uproots and transplants installation. Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art, an age-old (and possibly legally protected) hardwood tree, shipping it by Beijing. road across the country and replanting it in a new environment where its odds of survival are relatively slim—perhaps even worse than those of the upstart art district that surrounds it. Through a process of negotiation, purchasing, delivery, and publicity, the artist turns the tree into a spectacle of its own existence, suggesting, due not only to its age and stature but also to his own work, that this living organism is a monument in its own

36 Vol. 10 No. 1 right. He goes a step further in sculptures produced collaboratively with the Yangjiang Group like Waterfall (2003) or Garden of Pine Also Fierce Than Tiger II (2010), pouring liquid wax over smaller trees and other objects in order to capture their likenesses and make eternal the momentary positions of such living things. Resembling Xu Zhen’s process of embalming in some ways, this conceptual technique insists that there is something worthwhile, something long-lasting in the visual appearances of these objects, much like the tree that gains currency as contemporary art only when Zheng Guogu metaphorically packages it and releases it into the world. That is to say, monumentality is not here a goal or even an intention so much as it is a constellation of techniques by which the artist achieves legitimacy for his own practice, allowing installations constructed at scale to demand a certain historical precedent that becomes the aesthetic value of the work far more than its visual appearance.

Left: Yangjiang Group (Zheng In the face of work like Liu Wei’s Uprooted Obelisk, the critical viewer Guogu, Chen Zaiyan, Sun Chinglin), Waterfall, 2003, wax, might be tempted to write off such allusions to monumental forms as calligraphy, metal armature, 210 x 140 x 140 cm. Courtesy manifestations of the harmless ludic desire for humorous satire that marks of the artists and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. contemporary art. I would venture, however, that these artists are quite

Right: Yangjiang Group , serious when they demand that their works fabricate alternative histories— (Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan, Sun Chinglin), Garden of Pine that this is more facetious than it is playful. Size and scale are almost Also Fierce Than Tiger II, 2010, installation. Courtesy of the always intended as mockeries of their own pitfalls, but this strategy rarely artists and Tang Contemporary Art Center, Beijing. succeeds in desisting from its own seductions. No one, it should be said, actually believes that Xu Zhen’s Dinosaurs is a humble attempt to point out the absurdity of increasingly larger and ever more expensive pieces of art because it is itself an absurdly large and expensive installation. What makes this fact painfully clear is the extraordinarily high production value of such work, and it is production value that makes the pseudo-historical narratives offered by the monumentality of contemporary art believable or at least viable under the erasure of the exhibition. That is to say, illusion is itself a constituent component of the production process, which has recently come to depend on flawless sites of fabrication and manufacturing in the upper

Vol. 10 No. 1 37 reaches of global contemporary art from Jeff Koons to Zhang Huan. Within contemporary culture, art no longer plays the role of the amateur gadfly, gesturing toward larger phenomena, but rather has come to imitate such phenomena with amazing fidelity. And even as practice expands from the studio into the factory (or, often, the fabrication studio), studio spaces grow to include storage for objects fabricated, work space for assistant labourers, and so on. It is not so much that Chinese art is big because its studios and urban spaces are relatively large, but rather that such spaces of production adjust their own scale to contain the bloated discourse of contemporary Chinese art. The reasons for its affair with size are too complicated to discuss here, but I suspect that the foremost factors are an impatient desire to be noticed globally and a genuine interest in entering into dialogue with the scale of China, particularly as a global factory.

We should look again, then, at the notions of scale and space in Hong Kong art. It would be easy to point to factors exactly opposite to those affecting Chinese art discussed above, claiming that underground culture seeks to avoid attention (an obvious falsehood) and that, with its manufacturing industries relocated to the mainland, there is no inherent interest in examining the issues of production and circulation. But absence does not constitute a reason for disinterest any more than the traditional complaints hold: that space in Hong Kong is too expensive, leading to relatively small studios, galleries, trucks, and elevators. The latter is true, of course, but large-scale fabrication may be even cheaper and easier in Hong Kong than in Beijing. With a high concentration of skilled factories and workshops, many owned by local businessmen and management chains, located within several hours by container truck, it would actually be exceedingly simple for local artists to manipulate and take advantage of these systems of production. There is a reason that artists, working in formerly industrial spaces on the outskirts of the city, instead turn towards craft and work at the scale of the human hand, and I suspect this reason relates more or less to the rejection of the trading lifestyle of commercial Hong Kong business in the Pearl River Delta. That is to say, the ideology of art in Hong Kong insists on its difference from secular life, retaining an almost premodern attachment to the aura of studio practice long abandoned in the post-globalization ideologies prevalent on the mainland and elsewhere—a phenomenon of difference that owes more to the recent social history of the development of Hong Kong industry in the mainland and the ensuing political battles with the central government than to any imagined divergence in art historical trajectories. In many ways, studio practice in Hong Kong entails the creation of a single private space of the purely personal, a space for expression rather than for conceptual engineering, in response to crowded residential conditions and an ever diminishing quantity and quality of per capita public space. Although there is a nascent movement towards both community art, which here typically emphasizes the involvement of non-art participants with art world activities not necessarily taking the form of art practice, and street art, which inserts works of art edging closer to popular culture in public spaces, this movement remains far and away secondary in significance to the private culture of the studio.

38 Vol. 10 No. 1 Lee Kit, Story 8: Yoko went on Lee Kit is probably the clearest representative of this trend, turning his a picnic with her sister and daughter on a quiet sunny entire practice into an event showcasing the alternative lifestyles of the artist day, 2010, acrylic on fabric and cardboard, wooden panel, and using exhibitions as a platform to proselytize or at least demonstrate tape, re-shot found image. Courtesy of the artist. the seductions of studio practice. He is a consummate painter outside painting, with no interest whatsoever in the historical explorations of painting as a medium of image and process, but he does mark his hours by painting layer upon layer of lines and stripes on thin pieces of cloth draped over a table in the middle of his studio. In his most recent series, Stories (2010), Lee Kit downloads photographs involving cloth found through targeted keyword searches on the Internet, studying the resulting images of families picnicking or of linen tablecloths over dining tables in order to synthesize a narrative for each of the figures pictured and its background environment. He then reproduces the patterns of these textile objects, often pictured crumpled or folded, on a flat piece of blank cloth, typically painting patterns of stripes, plaids, and solids before hanging the piece, as if it were a canvas, on the exhibition wall. Projects like this one would appear to be fundamentally anti-monumental, not in the satirical mode of the mainland artists discussed above but in actual form; there is very little space for anything less substantial than pure sincerity in such work. Similarly, although this work does construct narratives for the figures it touches upon, it does not have anything to say on an historical level, or, more appropriately, it does not make any claim to history. Monumental form is unnecessary here, not because its presence would be impossible but because the actions of artistic practice function on a different register. For Lee Kit, stories exist on a human scale. His earlier work brings this mode of production into the public sphere, as with A perfect ending for a perfect day (2008–09), in which he built a bed for himself on the floor of the gallery space out of mattresses, sheets, and pillows on which he had painted phrases like “Pour yourself a hot bath, pour yourself a drink.” The artist then proceeded to live in this environment for the duration of the exhibition, attempting to demonstrate the possibility of a private, personal space even in public through the work of his own body.

Vol. 10 No. 1 39 One can note in the work of Nadim Top: Lee Kit, A perfect ending for a perfect day, 2008–09, Abbas a similar relationship to scale, acrylic on fabric, sewing, sound recording. Installation albeit one that functions beyond the view at Blue Lotus Gallery, Hong Kong. space of personal lifestyle. If Lee Kit’s Left: Nadim Abbas, The nest-like environment, developed in Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Again (Given: 1. A perfect ending . . . and elsewhere, is Pornography 2. Electricity 3. Water), 2007, audio concerned with the generation of a social installation. Courtesy of the place for interaction and comparative artist. Opposite page, top: Lee Kit, aesthetics, Abbas is more interested in studio view at Fotan, Hong Kong, with hand-painted cloth the essential properties of space as a used as window curtain and tablecloth, 2009–on-going. dimension in which such events unfold. Courtesy of the artist. Perspective Study (2001), for example, consists of a wheelchair parked on a Opposite page, bottom: Nadim black-and-white checkered floor within a semi-cylindrical warped mirror, Abbas, Perspective Study, 2001, installation. Courtesy of resulting in a range of diverse visual effects of perspective from different the artist. viewing positions inside the assemblage. Other installations of that period turn marks of degradation on old photographs into actual interventions in real space and replace mirrors with glass in order to test the ability of the eye to distinguish here from there, while more recent projects like The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Again (Given: 1. Pornography 2. Electricity 3. Water) (2007) tend toward less formal questions of assemblage. This latter work consists of a framed page from a pornographic magazine, two steel window frames enclosing a photograph of a waterfall, an accompanying soundtrack of falling water, and a wooden chair with its seat replaced by a tray of living cacti. As with the best of any contemporary art form, Abbas makes reference to a world beyond the immediate space of the exhibition experience—here, the reference is primarily of an art historical nature—but, without the techniques of either monumentality or documentary, it is difficult to actually construct a history, false or genuine. The artist is here

40 Vol. 10 No. 1 more fundamentally interested in how history functions within space, creating a situation and then drawing in a broader set of aesthetic elements intended to manipulate the aesthetic sensibility of the viewer. Nevertheless, Abbas continues to work at the scale of personal space, even if he does revel in games of perception and participation. Studio practice functions as an activity of scholarly craft, and issues of production—physical or historical—never come into play.

Somewhat uniquely among Hong Kong artists, Adrian Wong does step beyond the confines of the studio and into the territory of fabrication and production; fittingly enough, his work also deals with historical subject matter in a way that the work of Lee Kit and Nadim Abbas do

Vol. 10 No. 1 41 Top: Adrian Wong, From the Annals of the Harmony Jade Roast Meat Society, 2009, wood, laminate, glass, rubber, melamine, incense, animatronic ducks, 6 x 4 x 4 m. Courtesy of the artist.

Bottom: Adrian Wong, From the Annals of the Harmony Jade Roast Meat Society (detail), 2009, wood, laminate, glass, rubber, melamine, incense, animatronic ducks, 6 x 4 x 4 m. Courtesy of the artist.

not. Projects like From the Annals of the Harmony Jade Roast Meat Society (2009), for example, begin from a kernel of history: in this particular case, Wong attempts to reconstruct one of the first films ever shot in Hong Kong through anecdotal notes from those involved in its production or reception. The installation takes the form of two animatronic ducks engaged in a humorous conversation atop modernist Formica pedestals encasing restaurant plateware, a tableau that comes close to suggesting monumentality by virtue of its plinth-like treatment of historical figures and vitrine preparation of artifacts of the past. Here, however, the aspect of performance keeps the assembly as a whole active in a way that precludes it from offering a distinct organization of history; without the intention of permanence, sculpture is unable to make a serious claim for the shaping of the past. Wu Hung might disagree here, citing the capacity of even ancient parchment to function as monument, but I would argue, in that particular case, it is the mode of preservation of the object that allows it the properties of the monumental, not any intrinsic quality. In addition, Adrian Wong injects a measure of humour into his work that serves to redouble the vitality of performance, seemingly admitting that he has no designs over the rewriting of history (and functioning to subvert a quality of production values to rival the massive installations of the mainland). Instead, it is the reanimation of history that is expanded into spatial practice such that the artist implicates a readymade historical place (or referent of place) within

42 Vol. 10 No. 1 the architectural scene he constructs in the exhibition space. Wong has applied this strategy in other cases as well, as with pieces like Sang Yat Fai Lok (2008), in which the artist reenacts children’s television shows from the 1960s and 1970s, the original versions of which were hosted by a distant relative, and creates an appropriate theatrical set. In this case and elsewhere, however, Wong records and exhibits the project primarily through video (although the monitor is typically installed within a portion of its set), abstracting the performance and inserting another layer of the object or artifact within what might otherwise appear as a dangerously historicizing interpretive display.

Adrian Wong, Sang Yat Fai Lok, 2008, wood, Formica, carpeting, foam, felt, balloons, dried fish, digital video, 10 mins. View of set design. Courtesy of the artist.

In this body of work, Adrian Wong opens up for the viewer several possibilities of visual culture for Hong Kong. The artist mines the source material of historical and street culture in order to construct a relationship between the spaces created in his work and the actual social places of the site, but these new spaces of installation in turn transform the general cultural identity of Hong Kong, exploding it outward into a hybrid of globalized visual production. The general visual culture of Hong Kong is determinedly insular, naturally adopting elements of both Western design and Chinese tradition but adapting them into something new entirely. Now that this language of street culture has been codified through decades of film, fashion, theatre, comics, architectural preservation, and other facets of mass media, nostalgic cultural producers are loathe to allow its delicate balance to be disrupted by external factors (most typically in the form of immigration, investment, and intervention from the mainland). Hong Kong culture, this logic holds, is fundamentally Chinese but resides in an already internationalized form that must not be infiltrated by either base Chinese culture or purely global culture; unfortunately, this is a stagnant logic that bars cultural innovation from within as stringently as it blocks new influences from the outside. Of the many possible routes out of this situation, that which has so far proved most productive is the fabrication of spaces of potential and virtuality (that is to say, spaces that create potential

Vol. 10 No. 1 43 for an altered actual environment Top: Adrian Wong, Bless All Ye Who Enter Here, 2007, pine, through the virtual). Installations by bamboo, epoxy, latex, incense, tea, and performance with the artists discussed here represent Daoist exorcists, performance view. Courtesy of the artist. such a possibility: conceptual Bottom: Nadim Abbas, interventions in real space offer Cataract, 2010, ceramic tiles, aluminium window frames, visions of an alternative present that recycling shower system, nylon curtains, stainless stands within the range of reason, steel tubing, 45 mins., sound recording. Courtesy of the ready to be realized if the artist can artist. collapse the marked space of artistic discourse. While Liu Wei and Xu Zhen accomplish this collapse, or, more properly, its reverse, through high production values that create the illusion of semblance, Lee Kit does so by inserting himself into his work and by bringing his finished work back into his studio practice. In one infamous project, Adrian Wong invited Daoist priests to exorcise his studio to similar effect, drawing the actual space of the exhibition into the imagined places of superstition so as to deny any originary difference between the two—between contemporary art and belief. Nadim Abbas, in his latest work, Cataract (2010), turned a small gallery space into a shower, creating a scene of indefinite suspense that quoted horror films even as it gestured toward the artist’s own work with the psychoanalytical language of water. Importantly, no major renovation work was necessary to do so—production value was moderate, the illusion was marginal, and the potential place offered through the space of the work remained within the work rather than in the audience perception of the installation.

Whether or not they are related to actual structures or buildings, these are MAP Office (Gutierrez + Portefaix), stills from fundamentally projects of architecture, and the design of such spaces of Runscape, 2010, HD video, 24 mins.,18 secs., stereo sound. potential emerges particularly clearly in the work of architects influenced by Courtesy of the artists. the Hong Kong regime of urbanism. MAP Office, a conceptually oriented studio known for its explorations of the “lean planning” of the Pearl River Delta and the corridor-based component flows of the Hong Kong pedestrian environment, has created such a space in its latest video project, Runscape (2010). Accompanied by the solemn voice of a narrator holding forth on the theoretical implications of the imagery, the video follows young men running through public areas of the city: across pedestrian bridges and

44 Vol. 10 No. 1 Gary Chang, Transformer Apartment, 2000. Photo: EDGE Design Institute Limited, Hong Kong.

Gary Chang, project for Venice Biennale Architecture, 2000. Photo: EDGE Design Institute Limited, Hong Kong.

rooftops, up outdoor stairs, and down streets, attracting attention not for the novel nature of their antics (this is definitively not parcour) but rather for their sheer speed, for their willingness to activate the horizontal flows of the street without regard to its typical pace. The body is a “bullet that needs no gun,” creating within the urban environment new spaces of action characterized by the body as place.

Vol. 10 No. 1 45 The designs of Gary Chang, known for his renovation of a reconfigurable Douglas Young, Starbucks x G.O.D. Bing Sutt, 2009, apartment that squeezes several dozen possible room configurations into a redesigned Starbucks Coffee Shop. Courtesy of the artist. space of some 300 square feet, accomplish a similar feat. Such an approach to urban density quite literally compresses physical space into a set of layered virtual striations, assuring that the place of the home retains the capacity to expand outward into new territories at any given moment. For his participation in the 2000 Venice Architecture Biennale, Chang engineered a structure of cage houses (stacked metal cages rented by impoverished single senior citizens) and fluorescent lights (used to indicate the locations of prostitutes), using the intangible materials of light and context to build a mental architecture of the underground that comes to stand in place of the physical structure of the unit. In both cases design is a living entity that is constantly transforming, never allowed the opportunity of monumentality. Intriguingly, it is Douglas Young, a designer and the founder of lifestyle brand Goods of Desire, who applies this strategy most directly to the visual culture of Hong Kong discussed above. Young designed for the global coffee chain Starbucks a restaurant interior that mimics the canonical styles of the local cha chaan teng, a sort of diner characterized by very specific menu styles, flooring, booths, and other architectural features, embedding this new interior environment within a typical Starbucks branch. This explicit commodification of Hong Kong visual identity as novelty implies the packaging and virtualization of its archetypal architectural space, preparing this specific visual style for a global journey through the very products produced by Young’s own design firm (and, of course, film, fashion, and so on). Whatever our qualms, we cannot deny that the creation of a virtual space with the characteristics of actual Hong Kong—and within real Hong Kong—suggests its potential realization elsewhere.

46 Vol. 10 No. 1 Chu Yun, Constellation, 2006, installation. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

Such modes of production, of course, are far from unique to Hong Kong. The core figures of the short-lived Shenzhen art scene at the turn of the millennium engaged equally with such games of space, working in a mode with even lower production values. This makes sense: Shenzhen popular culture, too, was once strongly influenced by that of Hong Kong, and its forms of urbanization once resembled an understanding of international street life based on the visible features of Hong Kong film and television. Chu Yun’s Constellation (2006) has been previously interpreted from this formal angle: the indicator lights of various electric appliances, running silently in a dark room, appear like so many multi-colored stars until the lights turn on and the viewer sees the composition of the scene. Here it is imagination rather than history that fills the void of virtual space created through the formal arrangement of the work, but the effect is similar. In Unspeakable Happiness 2 (2003), again, the artist strung the multicolored flags typically used to announce a sale at a mall or car dealership over the space of an exhibition opening, both physically adding new elements to the space (and creating a new space with the triangular geometry of the pyramid) and drawing in new meaning to the event at hand. Key here is the fact that the intervention on the part of the artist was absolutely minimal, operating on the economy of the gesture rather than that of the illusion. Liu Chuang, another core artist of that Shenzhen circle, explored the systemic consequences of such virtual spaces in his installation Untitled (The History of Sweat) (2007), by which an air conditioner installed in the exhibition gallery drew out and collected the sweat of the audience in a pool on the floor. Viewers were here made aware not necessarily of another space but rather of an alternative dimension—something more corporeal than visual that might still best be described as the virtual. This minimal gesture on the part of the artist, manifested in the reversal of an air conditioner, called in to being an entirely new register of spatial perception suddenly no longer dependent on place, creating not an imagined or fabricated history but rather a new possibility of becoming for the present.

Left: Chu Yun, Unspeakable Happiness II, 2003, installation of coloured flags, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

Right: Liu Chuang, Untitled (The History of Sweat), 2007, installation. Courtesy of the artist and Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing.

Vol. 10 No. 1 47 48 Vol. 10 No. 1 Vol. 10 No. 1 49 It is tempting to find, in this striking confluence of work from Hong Kong Top: Cao Fei, RMB City Code, 2010, Second Life project. and Shenzhen, a quality of blandness perhaps native to the culture of South Courtesy of RMB City. RMB City Project is developed by China, a distinctly Cantonese property that somehow infects its art; it was, Cao Fei (Second Life: China Tracy) and Vitamin Creative after all, the misty landscapes of the south and their distance from political Space. Facilitator: Uli Sigg (Second Life: UliSigg Cisse). power that inspired the most minimal painting and poetry in past eras. In Public presenter: Serpentine Gallery, London. the scenario of the contemporary, however, distinctions of regional culture Previous page: Lin Yilin, are no longer able to exert such universal influence. Zheng Guogu, still based Target, 2008, installation, 570 x 320 x 450 cm, fiberglass. in his hometown of Yangjiang, just west of the Pearl River Delta, remains Courtesy of the artist and Tang Contemporary Art Center, within the sphere of cultural influence of Hong Kong but displays none Beijing. of the gestural subtlety found in Shenzhen. More strikingly, the artists of Guangzhou who once set the agenda for artistic practice oriented around the urbanism of the region work almost entirely in rather different modes— though this transition typically occurs after they have left the regional art circles and begun to exhibit nationally and internationally. Cao Fei, for example, has moved from scrappy videos researching the quasi-global youth culture that first infected Guangzhou via Hong Kong and theatrical stagings like PRD Anti-Heroes (2005), which resembles the dramatic adaptations pioneered in Hong Kong by Adrian Wong, to the polish and finish of RMB City (2009–11), a massively expensive engineered virtual platform for explorations of fictive Chinese urbanism. Lin Yilin, who came to global attention with the performance Safely Crossing Linhe Road (1995), in which he moved a brick wall from one side of a road to the other piece by piece, has most recently been crafting larger-than-life sculptures of Mao Zedong wielding an AK-47. Clearly, the spirit of intervention that characterized the bland economy of virtual spaces has given way to a need to finish, a desire for a very certain sort of illusion able to completely hoodwink the spectator into undying trust in a fictional history. Such monumental installation is a totalitarian art in many ways, refusing visual ambiguity even as it embraces the notion of unyielding belief in the invisible promise. This is a

50 Vol. 10 No. 1 Lin Yilin, Safely Manoeuvring transformation of rhetoric, though one that clearly requires something more Across Lin He Road, 1995, performance, 90 mins. than geography and space for its completion. Courtesy of artist and Tang Contemporary Art Center, Beijing. This essay offers no answers to this question; I seek only to trouble the notion that scale is a secondary factor in the production of contemporary art that depends entirely on environmental variables. Despite all this, Hong Kong art is small, and mainland Chinese art is big. That we feel the need to differentiate between these two modes of production, separated by far more than a border and a language gap, speaks volumes about the ongoing changes in the relationships of greater contemporary Chinese art. It is my hope that, understanding the problem of scale as it functions variously in space and place, the production of spaces of potential, a routine reflected in the practices of leading artists in Hong Kong but also in the work of several internationally minded and rarely bombastic mainland artists, might become something of a shared vocabulary able to explode the highly limited visual cultural identity of Hong Kong—and any other similarly situated environment. The notion of a potential monument is almost preposterous. While the artists discussed here have demonstrated the capacity of the monument to create a fabricated ideological and historical background, this equation does not flow in the opposite direction; spaces of potential do not produce monuments. If contemporary art can put aside the art historical pretensions of the avant-garde, engaging instead with the present moment in the constructed cultural environment that surrounds it, a form of potential space—a space that is not yet real and thus is neither virtual nor actual—can emerge in even the smallest studios, and in even the miniature galleries of downtown Hong Kong. This is meant as an infectious proposition, one poised to intervene in the currently overdetermined relationship of space to output. Potential awaits.

Vol. 10 No. 1 51 Stephanie Bailey GraphicAirlines: Going Back to Basics in the Twenty-first Century Metropolis

t is nearly impossible to be a street artist in Hong Kong. The buildings GraphicAirlines, Hambaoger, 2010, mixed media, 28 x 23 cm. in the commercial heart of the city are no place for anything other than Courtesy of the artists. Ishiny, marble surfaces, designer stores with incredibly intricate facades, and shop windows. Only when you venture into older sections of the city might you come across a sticker or two, those small tags used by clothing companies to advertise themselves in unofficial ways. And if you do, it is likely that one of them came from GraphicAirlines, otherwise known as Tat and Vi, an artist duo that has effectively blurred the lines between street art, commercial art, fashion, and graphic design in order to financially survive in a city where art for art’s sake seems to have little presence. Their diverse output represents a tactic that has served them well. Having taken part in group exhibitions, projects, competitions, and other endeavours in Europe, Asia, and the United States, the pair is apparently quite content existing in both the art and design worlds as they navigate a complex relationship between the limitations and possibilities of commerce, concept, and creativity. During their exhibition at Above Second, Hong Kong, with their show Primary (October 15–November­ 28, 2010), they answered a few questions about art, metropolitan life, and the joys of youth.

52 Vol. 10 No. 1 GraphicAirlines, What We Need is RMB¥, 2010, mixed media, 63 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the artists.

Stephanie Bailey: Do you see yourselves as artists?

Tat: We are, or we are not.

Vi: I think we would call ourselves artists rather than designers.

Tat: We are no different from other designers from other parts of the world, and we face the same problems. But one thing is that the art world in Hong Kong is small, and the classification of design is not as specific. This allows us to easily interact with people from different fields of specialization.

Stephanie Bailey: Why did you get involved in street art?

Vi: We started our street art project when we saw stickers appearing on walls in the streets. We thought it was an amazing opportunity and platform for us to show our works to the public. Everyone is equal in the streets; anyone can join in. It also provides us with a platform to compete against commercial advertisements.

Stephanie Bailey: What is the main concept behind GraphicAirlines?

Tat: Our aim is to create without boundaries. We are open to working in different media such as illustration, animation, graphic design, sculpture, comics, and so on. Our inspiration comes from two different sources: internal factors, including our dream world and the subconscious or images that we happen to come across in our daily lives; and current issues in society, which include politics or the way people live in cities.

Vol. 10 No. 1 53 Stephanie Bailey: How has Hong GraphicAirlines, Tin Sin Tak Tak Bee, 2010, mixed media, Kong influenced your work? 34 x 35 cm. Courtesy of the artists.

Tat: In the case of Hong Kong, the issues we are concerned with are manifested in urbanization, consumerism, democratic rights, freedom of speech, and all the problems that we are facing as a society. Some of our works reflect the policies of Hong Kong, like rapid urban renewal, long working hours, and a kind of mechanical way of life. Hong Kong’s fast-food-like culture designs our lives. All activities have to be quick, work has to be finished in a very short period of time, and everything is quickly forgotten.

Stephanie Bailey: Isn’t this fast-paced consumerist way of life an international reality?

Vi: Yes, I think most international cities are facing the same problems due to globalization. It is very easy for us to notice and express these changes caused by globalization because we are in the middle of it as well.

Stephanie Bailey: What are the major changes you have noticed in Hong Kong?

Vi: Since the Hong Kong handover in 1997, the most noticeable change in Hong Kong is continuously decreasing freedom of speech. Different departments and bureaus are now self-censored. With the increasing growth of the Chinese economy, different levels of our lives are also being controlled, but since Hong Kong has much more freedom compared to mainland China, we have the opportunity to voice our opinions more freely. It has also become increasingly difficult to live and work in Hong Kong with the rapidly rising residential prices, so artists cannot purely concentrate on creating and designing. The present policy to renew industrial buildings has made it even harder for artists to find a place to live and create in.

Stephanie Bailey: How does your gallery show at Above Second reflect your observations of metropolitan life?

Tat: The topic of the gallery show at Above Second is “Primary.” We came up with this idea because the world is now very technological. Kids start using computers at a very young age, and they start losing their natural imagination and creativity. Therefore, we wanted to approach this project with the mindset of a beginner. We used materials that would normally be used in primary school, like staplers, thumbtacks, ball point pens, etc., together with some props that we had collected and saved throughout our lives, as well as wooden blocks collected from the streets to create our artworks. This exhibition was really a very good chance for us to experience the feeling of creating as “beginners” once again.

54 Vol. 10 No. 1 GraphicAirlines, ¥icky, 2010, Stephanie Bailey: By going back to the “beginning,” what do you hope mixed media, 30 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the artists. people will get when they see the show?

Vi: Hong Kong is a technological city with a multitude of information that can be shared easily. Hong Kong people love to follow trends; it is very easy for something to become popular. There is a sense of materialism, short-sightedness, and the feeling of emptiness that is also common in the metropolis. I hope visitors are reminded of their childhoods and how they used to play as children; many interesting ideas actually come from our creative—and playful—imaginations.

For more information, see www.graphicairlines.com.

Vol. 10 No. 1 55 Stephanie Bailey Start From Zero: The Street Revolution in Hong Kong

or over a decade, the street art collective Start From Zero (SFZ) has Start From Zero, installation view at UFO Art Gallery, Hong been on a mission to create art that encourages people to enter into Kong, 2010. Courtesy of the artists. Fan overtly political discourse through any means possible. With an entrepreneurial spirit that feels distinctly “Hong Kong,” SFZ occupies a downtown studio with an impressive, independent working space in which intricately hand-cut stencils are hung next to clothing samples that make up the Start From Zero apparel line. Posters created by both SFZ and friends adorn the walls, as members of the collective tirelessly work away on laptops, linking SFZ and what is essentially a commercial brand to the wider world. Though very much part of street culture, Start From Zero had started to gain recognition for its work from the local art world with its first solo show in a gallery space, titled Brick the Wall (October 9–November 4, 2010), at UFO Art Gallery, which supports “lowbrow” and subcultural art production. Katol, who became a member of the collective in 2005 after seeking out its founder, Dom, and after having seen SFZ wall posters pasted

56 Vol. 10 No. 1 on city road signs, explains the concept behind the SFZ collective and how it relates to art, politics, and culture within the context of Hong Kong.

Stephanie Bailey: How did the Start From Zero concept begin?

Katol: We wanted to bring encouragement to people when they are unhappy, down, or miserable. Quality of life is always equal to how much money we can earn. We absolutely object to some businessmen who monopolize the market, and we are against the unequal political system in

Start From Zero, installation Hong Kong. Besides having the basic necessities of life, the most important view at UFO Art Gallery, Hong Kong, 2010. Courtesy of the thing we need to do is fight for a life of independence and freedom. We artists. want people to start from zero.

Stephanie Bailey: How would you define street art in Hong Kong through what you do?

Katol: Our work is inspired by all that we see and hear. Street art evolved from a tradition of graffiti and the universal printing technology. We are doing things like stencil art, huge posters, wheat-pasting and paper collage, and sticker art. Even starting up an apparel line is another way to spread our message; clothing is part of street culture. This kind of art making is a direct and easy way to express our feelings. We think that a city without street art has no energy or vitality. As Hong Kong people are always busy and living at a fast pace, we hope our artworks can awaken them to become more

Vol. 10 No. 1 57 Start From Zero, installation view at UFO Art Gallery, Hong Kong, 2010. Courtesy of the artists.

autonomous. Although not everyone can totally get the message from art, at least they can feel it.

Stephanie Bailey: Your work is quite political. Why?

Katol: It is something related to our life—censorship, democracy, collusion. We just want to get more people to become aware of the fact that our freedom is no longer free of charge. We are fighting for creative independence, and we are definitely not afraid of making mistakes in the process. There are many problems that our generation should be concerned with, such as the awareness of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech in China gradually affects Hong Kong. Many people see only the fact that China is enjoying good economic conditions, but, in reality, those enjoying the economic boom are comparatively few. People do not see decayed systems, and this directly affects Hong Kong and its people in that we cannot have democracy. However, at least there are some changes in thinking. Action is not as difficult as people think. When it comes to doing things such as street art, no one actually cares what you do on the streets. But laws, rules, and traditions have limited our minds. We are our own enemy.

Stephanie Bailey: How does it feel to have your work presented in a gallery?

58 Vol. 10 No. 1 Start From Zero, installation view at UFO Art Gallery, Hong Kong, 2010. Courtesy of the artists.

Katol: We don’t care how street art changes when inside the gallery. Since our current exhibition at the UFO Gallery opened, we have received a few comments from people who are not happy with how we have exhibited with a commercial gallery. We are happy to hear different opinions.

Stephanie Bailey: It is difficult being an artist in Hong Kong?

Katol: From the Hong Kong people’s point of view, artists are misinterpreted. People think that artists do not need to survive; they are just ignored. Currently the Hong Kong art market doesn’t really benefit Hong Kong artists. As the awareness of art in Hong Kong is low, buyers are only foreigners, and the sellers are also only foreigners.

Stephanie Bailey: Do you see yourselves as artists? Is your work art?

Katol: Art has many different purposes; it should not have any standards. Nowadays, all kinds of art can be linked. Being an artist is just a title. Our work records life.

For more information, see www.startfromzero.org.

Vol. 10 No. 1 59 Chunyee Li Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980 to 1990 An Interview with Asia Art Archive

n 2006, Asia Art Archive (AAA), a non-profit art organization based Asia Art Archive’s booth at ART HK 10, presenting an in Hong Kong, launched its four-year research project Materials of artist’s living-working space reminiscent of the 1980s in the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980 China, along with a display of I selected materials acquired to1990. This project consists of four components: the first is to collect through the Materials of the Future project. Courtesy of and preserve historical material from the 1980s; the second is to conduct Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. in-depth interviews with over seventy-five key individuals from the contemporary Chinese art world of the 1980s, including artists, critics, and curators; the third is to create a fifty-minute documentary film about Guangdong experimental art, entitled From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng: Cantonese Contemporary Art in the 1980s; and the fourth is to create a bilingual (English/Chinese) Web site presenting selected interviews and historical materials gathered for the project, which was launched in September 2010.

This interview was conducted with AAA’s Head of Research and Project Manager Phoebe Wong and Special Project Manager Anthony Yung Tsz Kin in June 2010, Hong Kong.

60 Vol. 10 No. 1 Chunyee Li: Collecting historical materials concerning the development of Chinese art from the 1980s was an ambitious undertaking. What propelled Asia Art Archive (AAA) to initiate this project, Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980 to 1990?

Phoebe Wong: The desire to create a comprehensive archiving platform was one of our main reasons for starting the project. AAA was established in 2000, but we didn’t conduct much research until October 2002. Our first focus was on China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; then our work extended to Southeast Asia and India. When we set up these research posts, they allow us to keep track of the development of art scenes in respective Asian countries, and our archive/collections during the 2000s is more thorough and developed as a result. The 1990s is an important period for contemporary Chinese art as it began to gain recognition internationally. What followed was that a lot of art publications began to emerge. And it had always been our intention to retrace these materials from previous decades, since 90% of our research work was done after 2000. Another reason is that this project was initiated by our researcher Carol Lu Yinghua in China. She is a friend of Pi Li, who at that time just set up a gallery space in Beijing called the Universal Studios. And it was during that time that discussions on contemporary Chinese art of the 1980s started happening in many regions, including Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Hunan. So when Lu proposed the Materials of the Future project at the end of 2006, we felt that it was worth pursuing. But we didn’t realize the scale of the project would be this immense. It has taken us four years to do the research and collate materials.

Chunyee Li: How did you set out the parameters for a project of this scale?

Phoebe Wong: I was more involved in planning and managing the project as well as the Guangdong research. The rest of the project was done by my colleague Anthony Yung Tsz Kin, who went to China and abroad to locate and collect documents. Initially, our goal was mainly collection driven. Our existing collection began with greater China, and our Executive Director Claire Hsu and Chairperson Jane Debevoise are very knowledgeable in this area. (Jane’s Ph.D. Thesis argues that the art market started to emerge in China in the 1980s.) Our staff is quite familiar with the history of contemporary Chinese art and contributed a lot during our group discussions. Interestingly, this team are not mainlanders, so in a way we approached this project as a semi-outsider. And of course, there are pros and cons within that. As a semi-outsider, we can only view history from a distance. It was only in the early 1990s that I began to read about Chinese art of the 1980s, and Anthony comes from the post-80s generation. Jane is the only person who has the firsthand experience, as she was an overseas student at that time and got to know artists like Gu Wenda.

There were two major types of materials we collected: periodicals and primary documents kept by artists, curators, and historians such as correspondence or invitation cards. So our starting point was to contact major historians and artists like Li Xianting, Lu Peng, and Zhang Xiaogang.

Vol. 10 No. 1 61 When we approached Lu Peng, he generously allowed us to take any Opposite page: Asia Art Archive’s booth at ART HK 10, 80s-related documents from his study. A lot of materials were also collected presenting an artist’s living- working space reminiscent of from curator Fei Daiwei. As for Mao Xuhui, we spent a long time scanning the 1980s in China, along with a display of selected materials his sketchbooks and notebooks since his collection spans a few decades. acquired through the Materials of the Future project. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive, Hong While we used established chronologies and methodologies as our guiding Kong. references, we did not rely on them exclusively but branched out to search for other historical details, traces that might yield new discourse and interpretation. That was one of the reasons we began our research in Guangzhou, instead of Beijing and Shanghai. Our initial plan was to divide our research by four different regions and to make regional documentaries. But once we started filming in Guangdong, we realized that the cost was too high, so we decided to conduct individual interviews in different regions. In the end, we conducted seventy-five interviews with artists, scholars, and curators, and produced one documentary on Guangdong titled From Jean- Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng.

A display of selected historical documents from the Materials of the Future project at ART HK 10. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.

Chunyee Li: The project in Guangdong does provide an interesting entry point to understanding Chinese intellectuals of different regions. It’s refreshing to hear Xu Tan talk about the impact of Hong Kong’s pop culture on southerners’ reception of existentialism in the documentary.

Phoebe Wong: Yes, I also found it inspiring when Xu Tan talks about the intellectual differences between southerners and northerners. When Guangdong artists talked about existentialism, they were able to relate it to their everyday life, in part due to the proximity of Hong Kong, where the influx of Western ideas and consumer culture allowed them to experience some degree of freedom, which, by Western standards, is still very limited. In contrast, artists in Beijing and Shanghai could only understand existentialism as a mere intellectual concept. Since it was harder for them to escape from government control, the concept of individual will or freedom was still remote to many northerners.

Chunyee Li: How did artists respond to the project? Were there any challenges during the process of collecting historical periodicals?

62 Vol. 10 No. 1 Vol. 10 No. 1 63 Phoebe Wong: Artists were generally welcoming since they recognized Exhibition view of Materials of the Future at AAA’s library, that we have been in operation since 2000 and that we have a developed Hong Kong. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. infrastructure. One of the challenges was that many artists are actively engaged in their work, so it was hard for them to set some time aside to organize their collection. For example, this year at the Hong Kong International Art Fair (ART HK), Ye Yongqing told us that the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts is going to celebrate their seventieth anniversary this year, inviting artists to take part in a series of solo exhibitions. So Ye Yongqing is returning to his studio to organize his archive, and he asked if we would be interested in joining him. This is a very positive sign, because artists are becoming aware of the work that we are doing.

As for the question concerning the process of collecting materials, perhaps my colleague Anthony would be the best person to answer.

Anthony Yung Tsz Kin: It’s not too difficult to locate a book because you can always contact the publisher. But for old magazines and periodicals, you have to search in old bookstores. It’s harder to collect magazines because it’s rare for a bookstore to own a complete series. But after awhile, I started to develop a network. There’s a bookstore in Beijing called China Bookstore where many periodicals are available. We were lucky that some artists donated books that were no longer in print. A lot of the primary materials came from artists whom we interviewed for the project. It was like piecing a puzzle together. Some artists didn’t just keep their own exhibition catalogues; if they were part of an artists’ group, they would have other members’ posters, exhibition flyers. For scholars and curators like Professor Zheng Shengtian and Lu Peng, they have a record of all sorts of materials from different artists. One person would refer you to another, so that was how this database was developed.

Preservation is important, especially when visiting some of the artists’ studios and noticing historically important documents that were produced in the 80s still in envelopes, covered in dust, or hidden underneath a pile

64 Vol. 10 No. 1 Exhibition view of Materials of books. Many artists were conscious that these materials are of great of the Future at AAA’s library, Hong Kong. Courtesy of Asia historical significance, and while they were kept in boxes, they never had the Art Archive, Hong Kong. time to organize them. But once they found that your intention was sincere, they were generally receptive and willing to help.

Chunyee Li: Phoebe mentioned earlier that your team deliberately searched for historical traces of topics that had not yet entered into the mainstream art discourse at the time. What was your experience in tracing the 80s era of Chinese art?

Anthony Yung Tsz Kin: When I started soliciting materials from artists, what struck me most was that there were many topics and issues that hadn’t been discussed before. In fact, there hasn’t been much serious scholarship dedicated to this era, except two major publications published in the early 1990s: Gao Minglu’s Chinese Contemporary Art Chronology, 1977–1986, and Lu Peng’s A History of China Modern Art, 1979–1989. Even though there’s been a lot of discussion in recent years about the ’85 New Wave Movement and seminal exhibitions such as Fei Daiwei’s ’85 New Wave—The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, much of the examination was done through the perspective of artists’ works. So we found it unique to approach the 1980s through the perspective of documentation and collection.

Historically speaking, Guangdong art has been generally overlooked. Some of the prominent historians at the time were based in Beijing, so they might not have a full understanding of the cultural happenings in Guangdong. The development of Guangdong art is very distinct from Hangzhou and the northern part of China. One of the topics we cover is “reading fever,” which is very fascinating. During the 1980s, philosophy and literature played a very important role. You can see the influences of Heidegger and Wittgenstein in many artists’ works. The Pond Society group in Hangzhou was influenced by Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre, a book that inspired Arte Povera in the 1960s and 1970s. They didn’t study the book

Vol. 10 No. 1 65 to understand Arte Povera; in fact, they were not aware of this movement. Back then, books on Eastern European art were available in China, but not many on Western art theory. So many Chinese artists would try to learn about Western contemporary art through the perspective of Russian writers critiquing postmodernism. It’s quite innovative that they came up with this method of reverse reading.

The topic of “reading fever” involves many issues such as translation, book circulation, and different editions published in Taiwan and Hong Kong. During the 1980s, books were scarce. Artists who managed to obtain a copy of a book would make photocopies and circulate them amongst themselves. The first time Huang Yongping read Pierre Carbonne’s Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp was a photocopy of the book published in Taiwan. Huang lived in Xiamen, but he obtained a copy from a Taiwanese friend. Duchamp’s nihilism combined with Wittgenstein’s philosophy and Chinese Daoism helped shape Huang’s unorthodox art practice.

Another interesting topic to cover is Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts and Professor Zheng Shengtian, who was one of the first scholars after the Open Door Policy who received government funding to go abroad as a visiting scholar. During that time, many artists who managed to go overseas were unwilling to return to China. Yet Professor Zheng was driven by a sense of duty that he had to bring all the knowledge, slides, and books back to China. At that time he was a professor in the oil painting department at the Zhejiang Academy. After his return, there was a foreign book fair in Beijing, so he and his colleagues went there and ordered several thousands of books for the library at the Zhejiang Academy. That first stock of art books was really important; many of them were about modern art history (and published in Japan). Many contemporary Chinese artists were graduates of the Zhejiang Academy—to name a few, Wang Guangyi, Zhang Peili, and Gu Wenda. When you mention those books to these artists, they all acknowledge how important they were. Another thing worth mentioning is that when Professor Zheng returned from America, he initiated and organized many international scholarly conferences and projects; one of the most notable ones was inviting Zhao Wuji in 1985. He even proposed to build in Zhejiang an artists’ village, like Greenwich Village in New York, although the plan fell through. His efforts were important because in those days, the most talented students tended to go to the oil painting department as they considered it to be the most radical discipline, and Professor Zheng was teaching in that department. The Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts is an outstanding institution, and many artists from the ’85 New Wave Movement graduated from this school.

Chunyee Li: So those books were important in provoking experimentations and radical changes?

Anthony Yung Tsz Kin: Absolutely. I know that the Zhejiang Academy’s library still holds many books from those days. And we have a copy of the book list from Professor Zheng that is now on display at AAA. And from this list, you can see how the confluence of radical ideas take

66 Vol. 10 No. 1 shape and how they broadened the intellectual scope of students, which makes an interesting contrast to artists in Beijing who were subject to a highly politically charged environment. Sichuan artists were known for their folk art. At the time Andrew Wyeth, an American painter, was very popular. Many artists emulated his style and produced large figurative and rural landscape paintings, but this didn’t happen at Zhejiang Academy. Each student had his or her individual interests, and students had many references and inspirations they could draw from. Take Wang Guangyi as an example. In the eighties, Wang employed a non-humanistic style, and many scholars tried to decipher the meanings of his Post-Classical series, in which human figures were drawn without facial features. Some may say there’s an influence of religious art, but it’s hard to clearly identify the origins of these influences since these artists drew from a highly eclectic source of references. Another example is Gu Wenda and the tapestry workshop organized by the academy. Back then tapestry was considered an ornament, and people often hung a piece of textile fabric in their office or home, or at a hotel. But when you look at the works Gu produced at the workshop, you can see strong elements of installation art. He incorporated tapestry and ink wash painting to produce something that we today recognize as installation art. While it remains unclear when exactly installation art began in China, the photographs and materials that we collected may provide new perspectives for research and critical writing.

Chunyee Li: It’s interesting to see other details being displayed at AAA, such as an English proficiency test devised for students at the Zhejiang Academy. It gives you a glimpse into what training these artists had.

Anthony Yung Tsz Kin: We deliberately wanted to display these materials, hoping that the general public could empathize with these artists’ experiences. Those tests were not easy! Zhejiang Academy placed a strong emphasis on international scholarly exchange, so they required their graduate students to be proficient in English, whereas the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing focused on training artists dedicated to serving the country. As for Sichuan Art Academy, they were immersed in cultivating techniques, while artists in Guangdong were more indifferent to politics. Their focus was on the everyday and urban spaces, as Guangdong was one the first cities opened for economic development after the Open Door Policy.

Chunyee Li: In September 2010, AAA is going to launch the Web site (http://www.china1980s.org) for this research project. Will all the materials be presented in digital format?

Anthony Yung Tsz Kin: We have accumulated 750,000 scanned images, and they are available on site at AAA’s library, but we won’t post everything online due to copyright issues. We’ll include video clips of selected interviews with artists, scholars, and an online exhibition of rare historical materials, including bibliographies and chronologies compiled by Gao Minglu and Britta Erickson. We hope this Web site will provide a platform for research and for the general public to understand the development of contemporary Chinese art, in particular of the 1980s.

Vol. 10 No. 1 67 Alice Schmatzberger How Three Begets Many Things: RongRong & inri and the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre August 31, 2010

Alice Schmatzberger: Where did the name Three Shadows come from? Top: RongRong & inri, Three Shadows No. 2-2, 2006, silver gelatin print, 135 x 135 cm. Courtesy of Three Shadows RongRong: Three Shadows comes from the Dao De Jing. The Dao, the way, Photography Art Centre, Beijing. begets one, one begets two, two begets three, three begets ten thousand things. Middle: RongRong & inri, So inri and I like the idea of three. Also, with regard to photography, there are Three Shadows No. 7-6, 2006, silver gelatin print, 135 many elements relating to three: black, white, grey, or red, green, blue, etc. It is x 135 cm. Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art also tied to the Western concept of the trinity, three forming one, representing Centre, Beijing. myself, inri, and Three Shadows. Three has limitless possibilities. Bottom: RongRong & inri, Three Shadows No. 9-1, 2006, silver gelatin print, 135 x 135 cm. Courtesy of Three Alice Schmatzberger: And where did the idea for the Centre come from? Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing.

RongRong: I learned a lot from books, but finding good material, like catalogues or books of any kind, was really tough. So when we were planning Three Shadows, we wanted a place where young people could gather and have access to this kind of material.

Alice Schmatzberger: This initial idea of a library, the desire to facilitate access to publications on photography, eventually developed into something very special. In June 2007 the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre opened in Caochangdi, an art district in the north east of Beijing. Did you think of it as something more ambitious than just a library?

RongRong: We started out with a very, very little dream, a small kernel of a library. And then it kind of mushroomed, it became much more, it included artists-in-residence apartments, darkrooms, exhibition spaces, etc. There wasn´t something like a real plan; it just came to be what it is.

Alice Schmatzberger: Three Shadows is the first institution in China solely dedicated to photography and video art.

RongRong: I have travelled abroad a number of times, and, for example, Vienna has a number of photography centres, so I wondered why China doesn´t have anything like this. There seemed to be a very big need for a photography institution.

Alice Schmatzberger: This situation may be due to the special history of photography in China during the twentieth century.

68 Vol. 10 No. 1 Vol. 10 No. 1 69 RongRong: I was born in 1968, so from that time until Reform and Top: Exterior view of Three Shadows Photography Art Opening, photography was just a task, like your news agency or Centre, Beijing. Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography your government gave you a task to photograph this or that. It was a Art Centre, Beijing. documentary approach and very politically motivated. There were no Bottom: Three Shadows’ first symposium in the multi- independent photographers who took photos of whatever they thought they purpose hall. Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography should. So for these political reasons the development of photography was Art Centre, Beijing. quite delayed.

70 Vol. 10 No. 1 Alice Schmatzberger: There was a climax in photography during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in Shanghai, with the photography artist Long Chin San and with a lot of fashion and celebrity magazines. But in the subsequent era of Mao Zedong, photography was, like every other art form, used as a tool for political propaganda, as a means for education of the people, and to serve the goals of the Communist Party. Because of this documentary and political past, fine art photography had been almost nonexistent until the 1990s and still is comparatively little represented. This circumstance is mirrored within the academic system. Only since the middle and the end of the nineties have art universities begun to offer a special photographic academic education or to set up photography departments. In looking at the biographies of contemporary photography artists, it can be observed that most of them have no specific education in photography. They started, for example, with oil painting and approached photography in individualistic and autodidactic ways. This historical topography, being one of the roots for the still rather limited academic discourse on the medium, still needs research. Consequently, do you think the art value of photography still has to be explained and brought forward?

RongRong: In China, a photograph was not a work of art; it was just a picture. It did not have the meaning of an artistic work. Even today, why doesn´t China have a photography museum, for example? It is because with this kind of history, people have been unable to understand the artistic value of photographs. When Chinese collectors buy photographs, the vast majority buy old photographs, from a hundred years ago. And the reason they buy is not because of artistic value, it is for its archival purpose. They see historical value in the photographs. This retains the idea of a documentary approach. There is no artistic argument.

Alice Schmatzberger: Therefore an initiative for stimulating professional discussions about photography seems to be all the more necessary.

RongRong: Part of what contributes to the overall underappreciation of photography in China is that there are very few critics and publications, and there is very little research being conducted. And because we don´t have this kind of general scholarly interest, it is very hard to gain any kind of support, to get people excited about photography. And, especially, Chinese translations of good foreign photography books are still lacking.

Alice Schmatzberger: All these facts and observations lay the ground for the multifaceted tasks of Three Shadows. The planning started in 2005; then what happened?

RongRong: In the beginning there were big warehouse buildings on this property, and the original intention was to refurbish them. But they were so disastrous that eventually we thought, why can´t we just knock them down and construct a space especially for photography? Of course there was a lot of discussion of how this should best be done, and we explored a variety

Vol. 10 No. 1 71 of suggestions. We went through a couple of different plans and more Composite view of Three Shadows Library. Courtesy of discussions. But in the end Ai Weiwei did the design. Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing.

The whole project has been financed on a private basis. With respect to the library, the core of the earliest considerations was that it be open to the public. It began with our own private collection. It has grown through donations, and it now consists of more than three thousand items, including books, catalogues, and journals related to photography and video art.

Alice Schmatzberger: The history of Opening reception at Three Shadows Photography Award photography is one of the concerns 2010. Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art of Three Shadows, and this is being Centre, Beijing. pursued inter alia through the collection in the library, where, for example, the hand-painted and copied issues of New Photo can be accessed and viewed. This magazine, edited by you and Liu Zheng and released only three times between 1996 and 1997, was a frontrunner in promoting contemporary photography in China. As mentioned above, Three Shadows has grown into something really big: it comprises a 4,600-square-metre site with exhibition spaces; technical infrastructure such as darkrooms; facilities for artists in residence; a lecture hall for all kinds of educational and cultural events; a permanent collection of artworks by more than twenty artists from China, Japan, and the West; and, last but not least, a bookshop and small café. Although financing is always an issue, when it comes to making a profit, how is the exhibition activity different from that of a traditional gallery?

72 Vol. 10 No. 1 RongRong: We do sell artworks, but we are a non-profit space. We are not a gallery in the traditional sense of a gallery that makes money for its owners. Selling artworks is one of three ways we fund ourselves. We also fund ourselves through space rental and through donations. So we are non- profit even if we do sell work. All the revenues from artworks go right into the operation of the centre. We don´t have any support from foundations or the government. In China, the concept of a non-profit organisation is an emerging one—it is a very unfamiliar idea. Applying for non-profit status in China is very difficult because it is a rather new concept.

Alice Schmatzberger: The mission of the activities of Three Shadows is basically two-fold. The Centre focuses not only on the present art and academic community, but also on stimulating discussion, criticism, publications, and research into the history of photography in China. All in all, and, I quote from your Web site, “The study of photography will be established as an academic endeavour in China, and photography positioned as an art. And Three Shadows will also function as a non- commercial platform for engaging in international scholarship, for exploring the work of emerging young photographers in China, for rediscovering important photographic works from the past, and to initiate a dialogue between China and the international art scene.”1 Such a platform also provides the possibility of showing photographers and unknown works that might otherwise remain undiscovered. In addition, Three Shadows pursues a kind of a broader societal mission as it also wants to introduce contemporary photography to the general public and get involved with education, for example, through children’s activities and independent

Vol. 10 No. 1 73 programs in collaboration with art schools. To further promote Chinese photography, a separate press department, Three Shadows Press, for publishing books on this topic has been established. And since 2010, the Three Shadows Photography Award for new Chinese artists is allocated on an annual basis. Is there a specific vision behind all these efforts?

RongRong: The ideal is a kind of three-dimensional space, not just a place like a museum where things hang on the wall and you come and look and that´s it. I really want people to understand what happens, to meet photographers, to have some sort of exchange. I want foreigners who come here to be able to become highly knowledgeable about the world of contemporary Chinese photography and for Chinese people to better understand what is going on in photography in their own country. So I hope for a more interactive space, not a place to look passively at artwork.

Alice Schmatzberger: This kind of dedication needs a lot of time, personal energy, and commitment. Is there room for your own artistic expression, for the further development of your own artwork?

RongRong: Of course it takes a lot of time and energy. But working with Three Shadows is very similar, and in some ways superior, to creating more artwork. If inri and I had not created Three Shadows, we would have created fantastic works in the meantime. But I think that even if we were able to do this, it would not necessarily reach the same audience or send the same message. So I think we are communicating more of what we want to say through Three Shadows. It is kind of making our own form of photography with Three Shadows. It is working towards the same goal, but there are certain things Three Shadows can do that a single work of art can´t.

Alice Schmatzberger: Then Three Shadows, therefore, has an impact different from that of a personal artwork, although the goals stay the same.

RongRong: When you take pictures, you end up bringing things into yourself; you are using your lens to grab things from the outside and bring them in. But that doesn´t have much to do with anybody else. You print those pictures and put them on the wall in your house, and you and your work don’t really interact with anybody. But Three Shadows is a way of sending things out to an audience, to better balance the inward and outward motion.

Alice Schmatzberger: Sending things out: this could also be taken as the motto for the most recent initiative. Again, Three Shadows has stepped out to further boost the dialogue between the Chinese and the international photography art scene. A three-year cooperation with the well-known festival Les Rencontres d´Arles has been established, and, as a result, local and international visitors experienced the first Caochangdi PhotoSpring in April 2010, developed jointly by Three Shadows and Thinking Hands (Bérénice Angremy) in cooperation with Les Rencontres d’Arles (François Hébel). How did this begin?

74 Vol. 10 No. 1 RongRong: The first discussion was in 2009, when I was in Arles. At that point, I went to Bérénice, and we started to talk about the possibility of doing a festival together. François was also very excited about the idea and originally wanted to do it at the 798 Art District. The first time he went there, he really liked it. But then he went back and saw that it has changed. Then, last year, in the winter, we decided to do it, and four months later it happened. And it was the first time that Les Rencontres d´Arles was presented outside of France.

Alice Schmatzberger: Within just a few months, PhotoSpring 2010 was put into action. It seems that everything, from arranging exhibitions, persuading galleries to participate, and scheduling night events to organizing financing, had to be done within a rather short time period.

RongRong: By the time we had the events set, there wasn’t very much time to find sponsors, to find funding. But we decided that it needed to be done anyway—so just do it, and figure out the rest along the way, and whatever happens, happens. PhotoSpring turned out to be very good for raising awareness of photography as well as the demolition of spaces in Caochangdi for new development.

The galleries were easy to get on board. They were all very enthusiastic. When they heard about the idea, they wanted to participate, and they changed their exhibition plans. It was a very good opportunity for them to join us and to promote themselves. So those were the easy ones. Sponsors were tougher. We looked for support, and we were very grateful for what we got, but there were still other possibilities. Part of the issue was timing. How much support can you achieve in four months’ time? The short notice was a problem, so we hope that this year it will be much easier.

Alice Schmatzberger: Is the overall idea is to use PhotoSpring as a new vehicle for promoting Chinese photography as well as for exploring and enhancing the position of photography as an art medium in China?

RongRong: Photography has a kind of international flair. There is no set tradition of country versus country; there is no specificity to photography like there is in language or in paintings. You see a photograph, and you get something like ninety per cent of what is going on in that picture, what the artist wants to express—regardless of whether you are from the same country or not. Because it is an independent kind of language that doesn´t need too much translation, it seems appropriate to use an international means to promote photography.

Alice Schmatzberger: Aside from the industrial and commercial sponsors, altogether more than twenty galleries and art spaces were involved. Remarkably, there was no unifying theme for all the activities; that is, the various exhibitions, the symposium, the presentations, and the like.

RongRong: I think that not establishing a theme is the best theme because there are a lot of biennials around the world, and there is always a theme.

Vol. 10 No. 1 75 This is the usual art model. But for contemporary Chinese art now, having a framework is too restrictive. We are more open and freer. It isn’t that you put everything in; you clearly seek quality but endeavour to have a variety of good quality works and mix them together. It is hard to say what is good, what will work and what won´t, but there are a lot of new possibilities that a theme may not allow for.

The overall concept was that of having a tightly packed opening week—from April 17 to April 22, 2010—with a great variety of events, for example, exhibition openings, book launches, film screenings, slide shows, guided visits to artists’ studios, music performances, and all kinds of cultural evening events. The festival itself lasted longer, meaning that all the exhibitions were open for another two months. Special activities within the context of contemporary photography also took place only during the opening week, for example, the Photo Folio Review, which was dedicated (but not restricted) to emerging artists and provided an opportunity for critical exchange with a series of international experts. The symposium Creativity versus the Market, with renowned national and international experts from the Museum of Modern Art and the International Centre for Photography from New York, the Chinese Academy of Arts, the Helmut Newton Foundation/Berlin, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, as well as artists, discussed prevailing questions concerning the position and value of photography within the art market, its impact upon artistic expression and production, and the increasing linkages among museums, festivals, galleries, and auction houses. This kind of opportunity for critical discussion is one of otherwise rather rare opportunities for international exchange.

PhotoSpring also features an intersection between the Les Rencontres Opening reception of Caochangdi PhotoSpring 2010. Courtesy of d´Arles Discovery Award which recognizes talented emerging artists, and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing. our Three Shadows Photography Award. Photographs from both prizes were exhibited at Three Shadows, allowing viewers to see emerging talent from China and abroad in the same space. The second annual Three Shadows Award was presented during the PhotoSpring Opening Ceremony.

76 Vol. 10 No. 1 Photo Folio Review at Caochangdi PhotoSpring 2010. Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing.

Apart from the monetary prize, photographs of the winner this year´s Three Shadows Award will be presented at Arles next year.

Alice Schmatzberger: Because of these encouraging experiences and the international media coverage, the next edition of the PhotoSpring is already being planned. The overall concept of an opening week accompanied by longer running special exhibitions will be kept. What will be its focus?

RongRong: There are a lot of artists who never come to China and Chinese audiences who haven´t had a chance to better understand photography. That is the focus: to bring new audiences and artists together.

Last but not least, the PhotoSpring initiative should also help to demonstrate to officials and authorities in Beijing the world-class quality and the value of the Caochangdi art district that is threatened with demolition. Hope for policy changes stems from the example of the 798 Art District, which used to be an industrial area. Once slated for demolition by the government, it is now becoming a protected area and internationally known art district thanks to private grassroots initiatives.

The city of Beijing is developing so fast. We didn´t used to be in the heart of the city, but we have been recently put in the Beijing Land Reserve Program, and so, in April, the day before the opening of PhotoSpring, we received a note saying we are to be demolished. It didn’t say when. It could be in five years, it could be never—who knows, it could be tomorrow. It is not clear at all. In conjunction with the director of Thinking Hands, our partner in PhotoSpring, we set up a petition, writing letters to allow people in the government to become aware of the value of Caochangdi and of what we could have in the future. They haven´t said yet if we are going to be demolished or not, but I believe that Three Shadows and Caochangdi have a future. I hope that everyone can see that and that PhotoSpring helps Caochangdi by attracting people who have never been here and to help them better understand its value, the high quality of the institutions, and the international focus that photography can have. So I think there is reason to be optimistic about the future of Caochangdi.

Notes 1 See “Mission” at http://www.threeshadows.cn/en/about_us.html.

Vol. 10 No. 1 77 Paul Gladston Lost in Translation: Contemporary Chinese Art and the Waning of Criticality

s Martina Köppel-Yang has indicated with reference to writings by the cultural historian and theorist Stuart Hall, “One has to think Aof cultural production of any kind” not as part of a historical continuity but as a “reworking . . . inadequate to its foundations” and, therefore, as “constituted by an infinite, incomplete series of translations,” all of which are in effect mistranslations “because a translation can never be a perfect rendering from one space or one language to another.”1 To which Köppel-Yang has added a further observation that in the particular case of contemporary Chinese art, those serially incomplete translations not only involve the reworking of images, attitudes, and techniques historically associated with Western modernism and postmodernism in relation to the localized demands and pressures of an autochthonous Chinese art world, but also, as an inescapable consequence, a suspension of the notion that contemporary Chinese art is simply a belated extension of Western modernism/postmodernism. In light of which it becomes possible to uphold contemporary Chinese art, like all other forms of culturally hybrid “Third Space” art, as a suitably indeterminate locus for the performative (that is to say, actively interventionist) deconstruction of established cultural, social, and political meanings.

Works of contemporary Chinese art that can be understood to deconstruct cultural, social, and political meanings in this way include the Great Criticism series of paintings by Wang Guangyi, whose formal juxtaposition of international brand names such as Nike and Coca-Cola with highly stylized images of workers, soldiers, and peasants adapted from the graphic socialist-realist poster art of China’s revolutionary period under Mao Zedong is open to interpretation as a knowing suspension of the categorical identity and authority of Western capitalist and Chinese communist ideologies.2 Also exemplary in this regard are the Cynical Realist paintings of Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun, which incorporate representations of disingenuous facial expressions as an insidiously ambiguous semiotic gesture of defiance to political authority, as well as video installations by Zhang Peili involving the endless repetition of scenes from Chinese propaganda films of the 1960s, which can be read as forms of citation or grafting that persistently recontextualize and therefore remotivate the scenes in question in such a way that their ideological significance is rendered profoundly uncertain.

78 Vol. 10 No. 1 In recent years, however, despite its potential standing as a site of deconstructivist intervention, major doubts have been raised about the continuing criticality of contemporary Chinese art. While a significant amount of the contemporary Chinese art of the last two decades of the twentieth century is characterized by a discernibly deconstructive (though, given the persistence of centralized restrictions on artistic production within China, understandably coded) counter-authoritarianism, that cannot be said so easily of a great deal of the contemporary Chinese art produced since the turn of the millennium. While contemporary Chinese art of the last decade has persisted in commingling Western and Chinese cultural influences, any readily identifiable deconstructivist critical intent is, in most cases, at something of a premium. Exemplary of this tendency is the work of young contemporary Chinese artists such as the Shanghai-based team of photographers Birdhead (Song Tao and Ji Weiyu) and the Beijing-based painter/collagist Song Kun, which would appear to involve a self-conscious eschewal of any obvious form of deconstructive criticality in favour of rather more oblique or poetic forms of aesthetic expression and/or the narrowly focused representation of localized circumstances, experiences, and identities—forms of expression and representation that can be understood to speak, to some extent at least, towards a resistance to the universalizing tendencies of Western Modernism/Orientalism but that can also be seen to foreclose any focused form of deconstructive critical engagement.

The question then arises as to why this apparent waning of criticality has come about. The first thing to say, perhaps, is that waning of this sort has not been confined simply to contemporary Chinese art. In recent years, there has been increasing evidence, particularly in the context of international survey shows, that artists have, to varying degrees, become dissatisfied with the now institutionalized modes of criticality associated with internationalized postmodernism; that is, deconstructivism and associated forms of identity politics. In the case of some contemporary artists this sense of dissatisfaction is undoubtedly symptomatic of a continuing belief in the importance of critical self-reflexivity and an associated drive to find new, non-institutionalized forms of artistic-critical practice (as witnessed in relation to the staging of the third Guangzhou Triennial, Farewell to Post-Colonialism).3 For others, however, there appears to have been a rather less considered shift towards an engagement with non-critical aesthetic affects of a sort all too easily arrived at by the use of modern digital/photographic technologies, especially in combination with the liminal white cube, black box, and post-industrial cathedral-like spaces of the contemporary art museum/exhibition space. Very much out is the virulently deconstructive anti-aestheticism of the post-Duchampian conceptuality of the late twentieth century and in its place an often highly aestheticized and technologically orientated art that in many cases persistently suggests meaning but without any significant elucidation— critical or otherwise.

Vol. 10 No. 1 79 To ascribe the apparent waning of criticality in relation to contemporary Chinese art simply to the shifting sensibilities or formalities of a wider internationalized contemporary art world would, however, be something of a mistake. In the context of early twenty-first century China, other, arguably more telling, factors are very much in play. Perhaps the most significant and far-reaching of these are continuing discursive and legal restrictions within China on any form of public expression that might be perceived to undermine the authority or integrity of the Chinese nation state. While there are growing signs of the emergence of a civil society within China (not least in relation to the country’s burgeoning blogosphere and nascent critical press), there is still a widespread aversion there to direct public criticism of mainstream social, cultural, and political values, one that persists both because of the abiding authoritarianism of China’s now highly nationalistic communist-socialist government and because of a state- supported return within mainstream Chinese society in recent years to a traditional Chinese Confucian belief in the importance of a harmonious society (that is to say, a social order rooted in filial piety and deference to hierarchical order). This combination of political authoritarianism and traditional belief serves to stymie not only public criticality in general, but also specifically embodied manifestations of criticality that stand in direct opposition to China’s historically established view of a harmonious social order, such as feminist acts of resistance to the durable patriarchalism of Chinese society (and this despite governmental claims of absolute gender equality within contemporary China).

Powerfully enmeshed with this combination of authoritarianism and tradition are major infrastructural/institutional blocks to artistic criticality in China. As anyone familiar with the art world in China knows, not only is official government support for contemporary art in China directed for the most part to politically conservative forms of academic history and genre painting as well as to variations on traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy otherwise known as guo hua (National Painting), galleries in the private sector are also subject to specifically directed legal and quasi- legal constraints on the exhibiting of art that can be interpreted as openly critical of the authority or the integrity of the Chinese nation state. What is more, while there is growing interest within China among government officials in the economic potential of creative industries—drawing heavily on the example set by New Labour in the U.K. during the 1990s—and while this has led to the emergence of numerous creative hubs and gallery spaces throughout China in recent years, there has been an accompanying, publicly stated, official repudiation of any form of creative activity that might undermine mainstream Chinese cultural values.

Alongside these cultural and governmental constraints, there is also little or no formal teaching within China’s art academies that seeks to draw attention to the deconstructive critical potential of artistic production. Unlike art academies in Europe and North America, there are within

80 Vol. 10 No. 1 Chinese art academies both an insufficiently supported knowledge base about the deconstructive critical potential of contemporary artistic practice and powerful institutional limits on critical thought and action—strongly enforced by the presence of party officials at the departmental and school levels—which in combination constrain pedagogical activity for the most part to the formalistic teaching of craft technique and art historical “fact” (all of which supports the perpetuation of what might be described as an unchallenging aestheticism).

While it should be acknowledged that there is a long-standing belief within China that art has the potential to fulfill a moral and political function as a form of constructive social commentary—one that can be traced back at least as far as the writings of the Chinese art historian Xie He, who was active during the early sixth century CE4—and that there have been persistent calls from within Chinese society during recent years for art to play a comparable role in relation to the specific social, cultural, and political conditions of the modern Chinese nation state, cultural commentary of this sort, as it is historically envisaged within China, can be understood to draw well short of the actively interventionist deconstructivist criticism characteristic of Western modernism/ postmodernism. Added to which there have been attempts by contemporary Chinese critics and historians, such as Gao Minglu, to develop localized, culturally essentialist, forms of “Chinese” textual interpretation that travel explicitly against the grain of deconstructivist uncertainty in a manner commensurate with the traditional Chinese view of art as a potential source of constructive social commentary.5 As a consequence, not only is the embracing of an actively interventionist criticality left over to the development of artists after they have left the confines of the academy, it is also not entirely clear that once outside, contemporary Chinese artists are always fully aware of the critically interventionist potential of the techniques that they deploy in the making of their work. Admittedly, continuing governmental constraints on freedom of critical thought and action within China make artists who live and work there highly reticent about discussing the critical function of their work in public; however, the widespread failure of many of those artists to enter into such discussions is almost certainly also due to a lack of relevant professional knowledge or competency.

The underlying reasons for these differences between the cultural landscapes of China and the West are, of course, not too far to seek. Although it would be invidious to oversimplify in this regard, China is, despite over a century of often turbulent modernization, still highly resistant to many of the basic tenets of Western secular-scientific modernism. While contemporary Western society and culture have been shaped to a large degree by the pervasive self-reflexivity that first emerged in the West during the eighteenth century as part of the European Enlightenment and that went on to underpin the progressive Western modernism of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as the more critical aspects of

Vol. 10 No. 1 81 internationalized postmodernism, such thinking has—not least because of persistent indigenous fears of cultural deracination within China—tended to merge strongly as part of the Chinese experience of modernity, with localized forms of thinking and practice markedly incommensurate with the Western post-Enlightenment world view. These localized forms of thinking and practice not only include the aforementioned resurgence within China of a traditional Chinese Confucian belief in deference to familial and governmental authority, as well as a durable faith in tradition, rather than in science, as a basis for the establishment of lasting social structures and cultural values (viz. Chinese medicine), but also the persistence of a traditional Chinese philosophical resistance to states of disharmony embodied by the metaphysical Daoist notion of a creative and dynamic complimentarity between the opposing forces of yin and yang. As a result, progressive modernization within China is now heavily tempered by discursive structures and attitudes that work against notions of critical reflection and that in some cases have been knowingly promoted by the central government in Beijing specifically to safeguard against the previous excesses of a century of revolutionary upheaval within China.

There are, of course, contemporary Chinese artists who have sought to go beyond these localized discursive restrictions on cultural expression by continuing to make and exhibit artworks that are discernibly critical in intent. Indeed, in the case of some, including the internationally celebrated figure of Ai Weiwei, that criticality is linked to an open involvement in political activism within mainland China. It is therefore possible to make a distinction between a conservative mainstream and a more radical fringe within the mainland Chinese art world. That said, it is not entirely clear that “radical” elements within the Chinese art world are, in terms of their role as cultural producers at least, as critically focused as they might first appear. Of key importance here, I would wish to argue, is a continuing inability among even the most critically engaged contemporary Chinese artists to fully exploit the potential of their work as a site of active deconstructivist intervention. Strongly indicative of this inability is not only Ai Weiwei’s installation Sunflower Seeds, recently opened at Tate Modern in London, but also Wang Guangyi’s previously discussed Great Criticism series, both of which are, in the final analysis, I would argue, just too generalizing or abstract in their engagement with questions of political authority to have any seriously disruptive critical impact either within or outside China. Indeed, one might go further in this regard by arguing that both of these works present images—in the case of Sunflower Seeds an extended field of dusty greyness reminiscent of the streets of Beijing and in the case of the Great Criticism series a combination of capitalist and communist iconography—that might be understood to point towards rather than deconstruct prevailing political and social conditions within China. Such works are therefore open to interpretation not as an effective site of deconstructivist intervention, but instead as subjective forms of realism commensurate with the politically acceptable notion of a constructive reciprocity between individual artistic creativity and the collectivist

82 Vol. 10 No. 1 demands of contemporary Chinese society (as upheld within China’s state- supported cultural institutions).

So what of the future? There has of course been a tendency in some quarters to view China as a prime candidate for political and social liberalization as a consequence of the country’s precipitous economic and social modernization in recent years. And it is demonstrably the case that ideological and social restrictions on freedom of speech and action have been greatly reduced within China over the last three decades as part of the adoption of Deng Xiaoping’s program of opening up and reform—even if they have been subject to intermittent retightening not least as a result of the anti-spiritual pollution campaigns of the 1980s and the pervasive political conservatism felt within China during the early 1990s. However, it is also possible to see a recent hardening of the core limits on freedom of speech within China over the last decade not simply, as in the past, through sharp governmental directives backed up by the threat and spectacular use of state violence, but more tellingly through the subtle imposition of ill-defined discursive limits, such as those associated with government-supported Confucianism as well as an increasingly widespread panopticism, both of which have engendered an increasingly heightened state of self-discipline/control in the Chinese populace. As a consequence, it is possible to see the assertion of a conspicuously (as well as culturally consistent) non-rationalist double way within Chinese public life on the question of criticality, one that points, on the one hand, in the direction of an increasing liberalization of Chinese society and culture at an everyday level, and, on the other, towards the prospect of ever-tighter restrictions on public criticism of the country’s officially supported (inescapably “non- enlightened”) core values.

From a Western(ized) perspective the confirmation of this double developmental way within Chinese public life may seem both remote and ineffectual, held at a distance from the “safe” European and North American homelands by a still durable post-Enlightenment desire to uphold the importance of criticality within the public sphere. However, this is almost certainly an illusion that serves to obscure the West’s own internalized historical double standards with regard to freedom of criticality (as revealed by the critical practices of deconstruction) as well as the increasingly pervasive influence of Chinese thought and action on the world stage, which has come about expressly as a consequence of China’s entry into globalization.

Notes 1 Stuart Hall cited in Martina Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare—The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979–1989. A Semiotic Analysis (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2003), 20. 2 Köppel-Yang has suggested the possibility of a deconstructive reading of Wang Guangyi’s Mao Zedong: Red and Black Grid paintings of the late 1980s, which precede and are stylistically linked to the artist’s Great Criticism series of the 1990s. See Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare,157. 3 See Gao Shiming, Sarat Maharaj, and Chang Tsong-zung, eds., Farewell to Post-Colonialism: The Third Guangzhou Triennial (Guangzhou: Guandong Museum of Art, 2008). 4 As discussed in Xie He’s classic The Record of the Classification of Old Painters (Ghuà Pnlù). 5 As set out in the forthcoming publication, Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth Century Chinese Art (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011).

Vol. 10 No. 1 83 Voon Pow Bartlett The Harmonization of Ai Weiwei The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, Tate Modern, London October 12, 2010–May 2, 2011

een from the upper levels of the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, 2010, porcelain. © Ai Weiwei. Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds appears to be a shoreline of pebbles, Photo: Tate Photography. Courtesy of the artist and Sharmonizing with the floor beneath in a unison of grey. The view Tate Modern, London. changes significantly as one approaches the end of the vast concrete floor at ground level, where it becomes evident that the pebbles are in fact sunflower seeds strewn through the exhibition space about two or three inches deep. On closer inspection, however, the “seeds” turn out to be individually hand crafted and hand painted porcelain pieces that resemble the real thing. The exhibition also includes two video pieces, screened side by side against an adjacent wall, that document the highly organized labours of producing, according to the artist, one hundred million seeds. An interactive component is that viewers may post him questions through online booths situated in the vicinity of the installation at the gallery. Ai’s initial intention was also for the audience to be able to walk on the bed of seeds.

Sunflower Seeds is a spectacle of Chinese proportions, forming part of the larger spectacularization of China’s iconic imagery over the past thirty years. The 2008 Olympic Games opening extravaganza in Beijing, for example, seemed to be the culmination of what I have described as a nation’s effort “to capture the world’s audience hungry for a Chinese spectacle.”1 The text that this quote comes from discusses the complex issues embedded within the sunflower seeds installation at the Tate, ones that are at the forefront of the contemporary art scene in China, among them, nostalgia for the past, the cynicism of Political Pop, and the interface with Euroamerican art through works of a relational and participatory nature.

Ai Weiwei’s frequent references in the video to Mao and the symbolic role of sunflowers not only reiterate the politics of his art but also recall the iconicization of Mao that has been ubiquitous in contemporary Chinese art, culminating into what became commonly known as Mao fever. The motif of sunflowers and other blossoms were often employed within a style of Chinese folk art that depicted Mao meeting people or surrounded by the masses, illustrating Mao’s statement that art should be “pleasant to hear and pleasant to look at.”2 This culture fever rose to its height in the 1990s after Mao’s death in 1976. Mao’s smiling face and blue jacket, happy peasants, sunrises, and flowers appeared in many works by artists who became representative of Cynical Realism and Political Pop.

84 Vol. 10 No. 1 Vol. 10 No. 1 85 The urban landscapes of contemporary Chinese art are not reproductions of reality, but rather a mix of memories and historical and spatial displacements that manifest a unique experience for artists of Ai Weiwei’s generation. Through nostalgic recollection, the Cultural Revolution has been viewed as a period of revolutionary zeal, and its paraphernalia has been commodified. Artistic works that reference this period became cultural fast food during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s; with the energy and zeitgeist of the time has been described as analogous to the effervescence of “a huge rock’n’roll party.”3

Some commentators have described China’s socialist market economy as having led to an ideological vacuum, a postpolitics situation of power struggle without revolutionary ideology.4 This has led to a revival of the literati tradition and Confucianism thought to be symptomatic of a return to history and a desire to counter disconnected urban ways of living and hedonistic consumerism.5 “There is a prevailing sense of discontinuity or a new beginning” as China’s revolutionary hegemony appears to have lost much of its grip and legitimacy during the 1990s.6

The culture industry in China has become a commodification process that serves to contain and dissolve the anxiety of everyday life. The revolutionary past and collective concerns are made profitable by being translated into consumer desires. The irony is that nostalgia, through the medium of a culture craze, has become the most marketable of cultural commodities despite resistance from intellectuals.7 Nostalgia is like “alluring commercial packaging . . . a fashionable culture.”8

Ai Weiwei’s references to Mao and sunflowers in the video recall the condition of this nostalgia that was suggestive of a collective anxiety as well as a remedy for the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, with Mao- re (Mao fever) as one symptom.9 Nostalgic representation can become a substitute for historical consciousness, not as a trend of thought or even a form of resistance to the destructive forces of modernization and commercialization, but as fashion. Many scholars of Chinese culture consider the nostalgia of the 70s–90s to have given rise to a return to the traditional discourse of the intellectual circles, such as the contemporary Confucian revival in the guise of Neoconfucianism.10

The sunflower seeds in his installation at the Tate can be described as bland in appearance as they are monochromatic and unglazed. This homogeneity created a spectacle of “blandness,” evoking a measure of the Confucian scholar living in an ancient Chinese society and the way people interacted among themselves.11 Francois Jullien writes eloquently in In Praise of Blandness of the idea of “bland” (dan), by describing Ni Zan’s painting style of rendering sparsity in pale ink. He also explains the meaning of “bland” through quoting the Daoist philosophy of reality that was understood as being bland and flavourless (dan hu qi wu wei). He further elucidated this with an old Daoist proverb, “Dealings with the gentleman are as bland as water, while dealings with the small man are as pleasing to the taste as new wine.”12

86 Vol. 10 No. 1 Ai Weiwei, 2010. Photo: Tate The Confucian intellectual elites, or wenren, were a select and self-selecting Photography. Courtesy of the artist and Tate Modern, group of scholar-painters, educated in calligraphy and often in painting. London. They lived by Confucian standards, guided by a code of conduct that is the epitome of a cultivated person. The character for ren, the Confucian virtue of “humanity” or “humaneness,” is written with the radical for “human” and the character for “two,” designating the primordial form of human-relatedness. The Confucian idea of humane is based on the plural, the connection between two or more people. Therefore, the focus of a Confucian society is not on the intrinsic rights of the individual, nor the good of society, but on the space between self and society.

Vol. 10 No. 1 87 This reading of blandness may be tinged with irony when, for some artists, making commercial and bespoke work are a necessary way of survival. Additionally, through the weight of historical responsibility, the imperative for Chinese artists is to seek to create a contemporary art that is of Chinese formulation, one that can reconcile their Chinese heritage with the global scene. This complex legacy, where the ideas of blandness and harmony in ancient scholars’ paintings developed with revolutionary fervour and cynicism into Political Pop and Cynical Realism, is almost antithetical to a search for a redemptive space where art is not necessarily predicated on social harmony. This provides the option of taking a route that maintains a relational antagonism in order to be able to expose that which is repressed in sustaining the semblance of this harmony—in other words, to establish mutually non-exclusive spheres between art and society.

Chinese literati artists today, such as Ai Weiwei, have to negotiate with Ai Weiwei, the making of Sunflower Seeds at the competitiveness of a global arena that often applauds individualism. Jingdezheng. Courtesy of the artist. This can sometimes lead to personal discord but, crucially, can also be interpreted as contradictory to the Confucian ethics of humaneness and harmony. Nonetheless, Ai Weiwei’s body of work that involves engaging with ordinary people appears to possess such a link to Confucian values. His original intention for Sunflower Seeds was that it should be interactive and be able to engage ordinary people. According to Ai Weiwei, “the basic concept behind the work is to create a condition which encourages self experience and extends people’s participation of art.”13 In response to Sunflower Seeds, Tate Modern posed the question, “What does it mean to be an individual in today’s society? Are we insignificant or powerless unless we act together?”14

88 Vol. 10 No. 1 Ai Weiwei, the making of Indeed, these are the questions posed by many Chinese artists—whether Sunflower Seeds, Jingdezheng. Courtesy of the artist. a relationship with a fragmented society can be improved by making art more accessible to the general public. These artists have made artwork that involved working in different ways with the audience, friends, family, and ordinary people, hoping to engender conviviality in so doing.15

Artwork of a relational nature represents a trend in contemporary Chinese art that reflects many artists in the global arena using the premise of a relational nature à la Nicolas Bourriaud.16 Chinese artists find themselves working against a backdrop of China’s totalitarian past and recent massive social change, and hope that making this type of work will encourage the audience to interact with it, so as to “highlight(s) the need for an exchange not based on institutions but on the individual.”17 Developing an idea of

Vol. 10 No. 1 89 modernity through work of this type is also a way of breaking free from Ai Weiwei, Fairytale, 2007, 1,001 Chinese visitors, traditional Chinese art. Moreover, it is also an attempt to “breathe life into Kassel, Germany. Sponsored by Leister Foundation and a cold, frigid, and emotionless industrial society made up of steel bars and Erlenmeyer Foundation, Switzerland. Photo: Julia concrete,”18 a reflection of the conditions in China’s urban cities. Zimmermann. © Ai Weiwei. Courtesy of the artist.

For Ai Weiwei, his intention behind the work may simply derive from his compassion for the less fortunate. The seeds’ finish may be poor imitations of the sophisticated glazes and vases of the Song and Ming dynasties, yet they have revived in no small way the livelihoods of the inhabitants of Jingdezhen. Ai Weiwei was shown in the video walking around proudly, passing the time of day with the workers involved in the massive undertaking of producing these ceramic seeds in his factory in Jingdezhen. This sense of pride derives from the fact that he has provided work for two thousand or so people in this now almost derelict historic town that was once prosperous and synonymous with China’s world-famous porcelain production.19

In 2007, Ai Weiwei was hailed a local hero when his contribution to documenta 12, Fairytale, gave many people the chance of a lifetime.20 He transported 1,001 farmers, laid-off workers, street vendors, minority people, students, rock singers, and white collar workers from their various hometowns in China to the German town of Kassel to experience their own “fairytale” for twenty-eight days. Fairytale was also made into a film that documents the whole process, beginning with the preparations for the project, through to the challenges that the participants had to face and the journey undertaken by them to Germany, as well as the artist’s ideas behind the work.21 As part of this piece of work, Ai Weiwei also conducted interviews with the audience, and even undertook some cooking and hairdressing.22

90 Vol. 10 No. 1 Ai Weiwei, Fairytale, 2007, Ai Weiwei has often been presented as an enigma, even an overgrown 1,001 Chinese visitors, Kassel, Germany. Sponsored punk.23 Controversy appears to follow him, whether it is to do with his by Leister Foundation and Erlenmeyer Foundation, outspoken critique of the Chinese government; his collaboration with Swiss Switzerland. Photo: Julia Zimmermann. © Ai Weiwei. architects Herzog and de Meuron on the acclaimed Bird’s Nest stadium for Courtesy of the artist. the 2008 Olympics in Beijing; renouncing his participation in the Games and charging that China was not using the Games creatively; the shut-down of his blog; or his beatings by the police during his investigation into the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008. The artwork arising from the earthquake, Remembering, included 5,000 school children’s bags to signify the number of children who died.24

Ai Weiwei, Brain Inflation, MRI Sunflower Seeds is similarly enigmatic, image showing Ai Weiwei’s cerebral hemorrhage as a exploiting and benefiting from the result of police brutality in Chengdu, China, August 12, interface between its simultaneity in 2009. Courtesy of the artist. participatory work, its spectacularity and location, and the unexpected dimensions and controversy that can come from such an installation. It was shut down by Tate Modern due to a health scare related to the possibly harmful ceramic dust that was created when stepped on. This unforeseen turn of events led the Tate to not allow visitors to walk on the seeds; after a week, visitors were allowed to handle the seeds instead of walking on them. Viewers on the upper levels could then witness the evolving nature of this

Vol. 10 No. 1 91 interactive installation, seeing it constantly change by the minute and day, as Opposite page, top: Ai Weiwei, Profile of Duchamp with visitors were able to make patterns and words with the seeds along a narrow Sunflower Seeds, Lorimer Avenue Apartment, Brooklyn, pathway that has been created by the gallery on one side of the installation. from Ai Weiwei’s New York Photographs, 1983–1995, silver gelatin print. © Ai Weiwei. Courtesy of the artist. Participatory art is considered for the most part antagonistic to the Opposite page, middle: Ai spectacular. Part of its premise is about being anti-establishment, resisting Weiwei, Remembering, 2009, back packs, and metal the call to spectacularization by art galleries brimming with glossy structure, approx. 920 x 10605 cm. Photo: Haus der Kunst, photographic prints and grandiose videos, by “spectacular museums that Munich. © Ai Weiwei. Courtesy of the artist. demand spectacular interventions.”25 Ai Weiwei achieved the outcome of Opposite page, bottom: not only privileging the public, but also of creating a controversial and Ai Weiwei’s new studio in Shanghai, that was slated for spectacular presentation on an international platform, minus anything demolition in November 2010. Courtesy of the artist. overtly commercial.

Ai Weiwei’s achievement at the Left: Ai Weiwei with musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou in an elevator Tate received a further boost being taken in custody by the police, Sichuan, China, August when he was arrested by the 2009. Courtesy of the artist. Chinese police in November 2010. In an Internet broadcast, “Chinese artist Ai Weiwei arrested in China,” it was reported that Ai Weiwei planned to serve ten thousand river crabs to all who came to witness the demolition, by government officials, of his Shanghai studio. River crabs are called hexie in Chinese. Hexie is also a homonym for the word “harmony,” which is the slogan of the current leadership and has become slang for censoring or deleting items on the Internet and elsewhere.26

Being placed under house arrest to mark the forcible demolition of his £750,000 Shanghai studio may be another publicity stunt for this bon viveur. His attempt to feed ten thousand crabs to visitors, by any standards, is more than bordering on profligacy. Sunflower Seeds, on the other hand, evokes a feeling of Confucian blandness through its bland colour, bland surroundings, and simplicity.

In the final analysis, the success of this exhibition must also derive from the questions that it elicits. Does political expression need to eulogize the taste of the privileged in order to be able to express the views of the disenfranchised? What do the contradictions between Confucian blandness and opulence, between spectacle and the relational, demonstrate or achieve?27

Ai Weiwei’s studio may have been “harmonized,” but the artist remains enigmatic.28 “Only when the obsession with fleeting fashions is replaced by a fascination with the individual, only when stylistic faddism gives way to an investigation of the human condition and the values of the spirit will art come to life. . . . This will necessarily be a slow and tortuous journey.”29

92 Vol. 10 No. 1 Vol. 10 No. 1 93 Notes 1 Voon Pow Bartlett, Spectacle as Myth: Guanxi, the Relational and the Urban Quotidian in Contemporary Chinese Art, TrAIN, University of the Arts, London, Ph.D. dissertation, 2008. 2 Gao Minglu, ed., The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art (New York: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, University at Buffalo Art Galleries, and Beijing: Millennium Art Museum, 2005), 102. For example, Wang Guangyi juxtaposed heroic characters from Cultural Revolution propaganda posters with logos of Coca-Cola and Kodak, and Yu Youhan painted flower patterns on the background of Mao meeting his people. 3 Claire Huot, “China Rock Roots in Mao’s Rebellious Permanent Revolutionary Ideology,” in China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes (London: Duke University Press, 2000), 144. 4 Jiehong Jiang, ed., Burden or Legacy: From the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 58–64. 5 This subject has been covered in many books, such as Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999 [first published in 1998]), 21, and Jiang, Burden or Legacy, 58–64. 6 Jiang, Burden or Legacy, 58-64. 7 An idea suggested by Dai Jinhua in Dirlik and Zhang Xudong, eds., Postmodernism and China, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000: 206. 8 Ibid. 9 Lingchei Letty Chen, Writing Chinese, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 32. 10 Chaohua Wang, “Mourning and Nostalgia,” in One China, Many Paths (London and New York: Verso, 2005 [first published in 2003]), and Zuo Jing and Sun Jianchun, Poetic Realism: A Reinterpretation of Jiangnan (Beijing: RCM Art Museum, 2006), 9–11. During the eighties, renewed interest in Confucianism was part of a wider quest for the cultural resources needed to assist in national modernization. 11 Each has three to four strokes of black ink painted on a life-sized pale ceramic form shaped in imitation of a sunflower seed. 12 François Jullien, In Praise of Blandness (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 55. 13 Ai Weiwei publicized the news for the recruitment of 1,001 participants for Fairytale on his blog, http://blog.sina.com.cn/aiweiwei. 14 Tate Modern’s interpretative text, “Explore—The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei Sunflower Seeds,” Tate Modern, October 12, 2010–May 2, 2011, http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/ unileverseries2010/room1.shtm. 15 See, for example, Song Dong’s Dancing with Farmer Workers (2001), and Waste Not (2000), a collaboration with his mother, and Xu Zhen’s Shout (2004). 16 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Lyon: Les presses du réel, 2002, [first published in 1998]). 17 Manuela Ammer on Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale performance in her essay “Ai Weiwei: Fairytale Performance,” in Roger M. Buergel, Documenta Kassel (Cologne: Taschen, 2007), 208. 18 Lightness of Reality, BANG exhibition catalogue (Beijing: Beijing Art Now Gallery, 2006), 8. This is the view of Huang Liangyuan, owner of Beijing ArtNow gallery. 19 S. J. Vainker, Chinese Pottery and Porcelain (London: British Museum, and New York: George Braziller, 1991). 20 Mu Qian, “Once upon a time,” May 29, 2007, www.chinadaily.webarchive. 21 The Fairytale project was funded through a successful negotiation by Ai Weiwei for 3.1 million Euros ($4.1 million USD) through two Swiss foundations—the Leister Foundation and the Erlenmeyer Foundation. See www.chinadaily.webarchive, February 17, 2008. 22 “Documenta 12 | Ai Weiwei | 1001 chairs | Fairytale | Aue-Pavillon,” http://flickr.com/photos/ architektur/2800769933/. 23 Maya Kóvskaya, “The Visual Roots of a Public Intellectual’s Social Conscience: Ai Weiwei’s New York Photographs,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 8, no. 5 (September/October 2009), 97. 24 “Chinese artist-activist to fete studio’s razing,” CBC news, November 5, 2010, 11:30 a.m., http://www. cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/story/2010/11/04/ai-weiwei-studio-shanghai.html. 25 Andrea Fraser, “Spectacle and Museum,” Rethinking Spectacle symposium, Tate Modern, March 3, 2007. Even major Chinese museums in Beijing such as the Today Art Museum, the Songzhuang Art Museum, and the traditional Agricultural Hall are trying to keep up with their Western counterparts such as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and the impending Herzog and de Meuron extension to Tate Modern. 26 “Chinese artist Ai Weiwei arrested in China,” http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/story/2010/11/04/ ai-weiwei-studio-shanghai.html#ixzz14PGs0gjT, November 5, 2010. 27 Martin J. Powers, Art and Political Expression in Early China (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991 [first published in 1987]), 4. Powers explains the meaning of the Confucian standards. 28 Ai Weiwei was planning to hold a farewell party at the studio “to celebrate its life and death,” prior to a demolition order from the government. Guests were to be treated to hundreds of river crabs—a much-loved Shanghai delicacy, but importantly a delicacy whose name is a homonym for “harmony.” The term is often used by the government to assert its own successes in the country, but it has been adopted by critics, who now use it to take a swipes at the regime. Tania Branigan in Beijing and Adam Gabbatt, Wednesday, November 3, 2010, 20:49 GMT, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ artanddesign/2010/nov/03/ai-weiwei-shanghai-art-studio. 29 Geremie R. Barme, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 363.

94 Vol. 10 No. 1 Jonathan Goodman Cui Fei at The Warehouse Gallery, Syracuse University September 17–November 6, 2010

Next page: Cui Fei, installation ui Fei is a Chinese-born artist who has lived in the U.S. for fourteen view at the Warehouse Gallery, Syracuse University, New York. years now. She has worked in New York City for ten years, and it is Photo: David Broda. Courtesy of the artist and Warehouse fair to say that she has assimilated the city’s art culture to the point Gallery. C where she might be better described as a New York artist. Yet her art remains resolutely Chinese and is even classical in its influences and implications. Is it possible to reconcile the surging, ahistorical, continuously intense energy of a major American metropolis with the muted nature and long tradition of Chinese classicism? Cui Fei’s work, with its close ties to nature and to manuscripts and calligraphy, conveys a love of the past. At the same time, it is clear that she remains aware of current art movements, which regularly make their presence known in New York. In her show at Syracuse University’s Warehouse Gallery, installed by Anya Chavez, the space’s curator, Cui Fei offers her audience works that are beautifully presented—to the point where the entire exhibition feels more like an installation than an exhibition of individual works. Composed of materials taken from nature— twigs, thorns, salt, and sand—her pieces straddle the gap between two and three dimensions and assume a poetic gracefulness.

Chavez, early on in her essay “Tracing the Origin” in The Warehouse Gallery’s brochure on Cui Fei, mentions the artist’s “modesty and humility.” The elegant lyricism of the artist’s works defines Cui Fei as a sensitive interpreter of nature, as exemplified in the work itself as well as in its titles, for example, Manuscript of Nature, the title of a series of works. Working intuitively, but also with rigour, Cui Fei creates art whose poetry exists as a statement of the imagination, in a matrix where Chinese characters, rendered in the form of curled sprigs, emulate a manuscript’s contents. We are asked, then, to read nature itself as hard copy whose meaning dwells in the metaphorical possibility of twigs developing into words: nature becomes inspired script, which attains a homely status as small branches and thorns. Among current mid-career Chinese artists, there are several who have worked with language; one can cite the installations of seal script by Gu Wenda and Tianshu, the outstanding installation of imaginary characters created by Xu Bing. Cui Fei’s own art exists within the context established by these and other artists; unlike Gu Wenda and Xu Bing, however, she has opted for a lyrical rather than epic style. There is an intimacy, and even a vulnerability, that arises from the fragile nature of her art.

The Chinese language is central to Cui Fei’s lyricism. As is often remarked, China maintains its literacy as an ink brush culture, in which reading and

Vol. 10 No. 1 95 96 Vol. 10 No. 1 Vol. 10 No. 1 97 calligraphy are closely intertwined. Indeed, Chinese writing is learned by Opposite page: Cui Fei, Manuscript of Nature V_ using a brush, whose elegant variants seen in the rendering of characters Syracuse (detail), 2010, tendrils and salt on floor. are as numerous as those who practice the writing. Because the Chinese Photo: David Broda. Courtesy of the artist language is partially visual—the American poet Ezra Pound claimed that and Warehouse Gallery. French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was so gifted visually he could read Chinese based upon his on-the-spot understanding of individual characters—it has lent itself to various projects in the arts, as noted above. In classical times, and even now, painting has stayed close to poetry; colophons written on paintings often take the form of poetry, in which a literary tradition asserts a tradition closely aligned to visual art. So when Cui Fei creates a piece such as Manuscript of Nature V_Syracuse (2010), in which the sprigs of wood are arranged in rows upon a long, narrow rectangle of salt placed on the floor, she is quoting the enduring history of Chinese writing, which began thousands of years ago as ideographs. At the same time, she is detailing the fertile relationship between writing and art, even if the connections in her case are abstract.

Cui Fei, Manuscript of Nature V_Syracuse, 2010, tendrils and salt on floor. Photo: Cui Fei. Courtesy of the artist and Warehouse Gallery.

Cui Fei plays on the wish to read the script but does not allow it to happen; the experience is oriented towards the visual and is, finally, nonlinguistic. Indeed, there is a desire to read the individual twigs, but they refuse to yield any literal meaning and demonstrate instead that the experience of writing in Cui Fei’s case remains inherently abstract and nonobjective. The general context may suggest a literary orientation; however, it exists purely as a conceptual framework for the visual experience of her art. As someone acutely aware of the implications of her representations, Cui Fei

98 Vol. 10 No. 1 Vol. 10 No. 1 99 gives the nod, for example, to other traditions, such as the Tibetan use of sand in the painting of Buddhist mandalas. Yet the deliberate inclusion of other cultural referents only strengthens the implications of her art, which resolutely support the abstract visual beauty of a written language divorced from any actual comprehension. Thus the tension between the legible and the illegible stems from Chinese characters that are reduced to pure form. This does not mean that the desire to make sense of the tendrils dissipates; in fact, there remains a tendency to see the lyrical shapes of thorns and tendrils, gracefully set on salt or photographed in a triptych of pigment prints, as verging on the legible.

Cui Fei, Manuscript of Nature VIII, 2010, thorns on panels, 144.7 x 83.8 cm each. Photo: David Broda. Courtesy of the artist and Warehouse Gallery.

Left: Cui Fei, Manuscript of Nature VIII (detail), 2010, thorns on panels, 144.7 x 83.8 cm. Photo: David Broda. Courtesy of the artist and Warehouse Gallery.

100 Vol. 10 No. 1 Top right:: Cui Fei, Tracing The three large wall mounted panels the Origin VI_I, 2008, pigment print, 193 x 88.9 cm. Courtesy in Manuscript of Nature VIII (2010) of the artist and Warehouse Gallery. consist of thorns taken from black Top middle: Cui Fei, Tracing locust trees that are laid out in vertical the Origin VI_II, 2008, pigment print, 193 x 88.9 cm. Courtesy lines meant to be read as a Chinese of the artist and Warehouse Gallery. book might, from right to left and top Top left: Cui Fei, Tracing the to bottom. Austerely beautiful, the Origin VI_III, 2008, pigment print, 193 x 88.9 cm. Courtesy panels continue Cui Fei’s ongoing dialogue between imagery and writing. of the artist and Warehouse Gallery. From a distance, the arrangement of the thorns mimics writing so closely, Bottom: Cui Fei, Tracing the the viewer might at first assume that actual pages from a large manuscript Origin VI_I–III, 2008, three pigment prints, 193 x 88.9 are being presented. Of course, one again quickly sees that the characters are cm each. Photo: David Broda. Courtesy of the artist and thorns that resist legibility; this brings no disappointment, but rather a sense Warehouse Gallery. of wonder in nature imitating culture. Perhaps this is the goal of the artist: to transform written meaning into visual surprise. The leap of comprehension is accomplished effortlessly, in a way that enables us to value all the more Cui Fe’s creativity. Indeed, the implication of Manuscript of Nature VIII raises the question: What if we were able to read the thorns as if they were a text? Or, approached from another perspective: What if a text’s individual characters and overall placement constitute a visual statement equivalent to an imagery deriving not from culture but from nature itself? The relationship between these two worlds, nature and culture, are deftly investigated in this work.

In Tracing the Origin VI_I-III (2008), Cui once again addresses the interstices between writing, a human endeavour, and twigs, a product of nature. The three vertical pigment prints form a poetic statement so perfectly realized that the photo-imaged twigs at first appear to be three-dimensional. Each panel is composed of five vertical rows of the twigs, whose loops and bends and forks and slight curves make for a visionary replication of nature—it is as if nature could be adequately expressed and experienced by a cultural

Vol. 10 No. 1 101 construction. Tracing the Origin VI_I-III serves as the first of an axis of three Cui Fei, Not Yet Titled, 2009, thorns and pins. Photo: David works, which is continued in Manuscript of Nature V_Syracuse (2010), placed Broda. Courtesy of the artist and Warehouse Gallery. on the floor, and by Tracing the Origin VIII (2010), installed in the gallery vault, and offers proof of Cui Fei’s meticulous craft. The seeming physicality of the twigs is intensified by the presence of shadows represented in the photos, which gives substance to the idea that a running script (a Chinese calligraphic style) has been actually realized.

What happens when art imitates nature to the point where the two appear to merge? If it is true that our experience of nature is a cultural construct, then we can accept the idea not only that the history of Chinese art is filtered through Cui Fei’s expressive works, but also that its tradition serves as the true explanation for their effectiveness as images; the tradition shows us how to see nature in light of centuries of viewing and rendering the landscape. Thus, the work cunningly makes its assertion that our reading of it tells us more about ourselves than nature itself, primarily because the works are art and therefore artifacts of the mind. It may be that we have arrived at a point where culture has crowded out nature so thoroughly we can rely only on past versions of nature, which are recorded in the history of Chinese painting, to make sense of what we see. But that is an argument after the fact; the universe existed before we made sense of it according to our imagination, and it will exist after humanity is gone. This is not to say that art is always or only descriptive of itself; in Cui Fei’s case, she wants to highlight nature’s beauty on its own terms as well as give it a human dimension.

In light of nature’s vulnerabilty, Cui’s effort appears all the more earnest in her attempt to facilitate an understanding between the innate beauty of nature and our increasingly distanced response to it. But her view is

102 Vol. 10 No. 1 not entirely imaginary; she also has chosen to make reference to actual occurrences—in Not Yet Titled (2009), Cui Fei uses the historical event of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) as the context of her piece. Not Yet Titled consists of groups of five thorns tied by twine and attached by pins to the gallery wall. According to Chavez’s brochure text, each thorn corresponds to a day, with each row of thorns representing a month. The columns—consisting of two partial ones, one at the beginning and the end of the piece, and seven in between—stand for the years of conflict. Row upon row of thorns, marking days as a prisoner would until his release, stand as symbols for the war’s actual duration. Here the large thorns, whose points would be clearly painful to touch, dramatize the tragic circumstances of the hostilities. Not Yet Titled particularly engages our interest by using nature to draw attention to human activity, not the other way around. Once we understand the context of the piece, we are moved for historical reasons, not natural ones.

Cui Fei, Not Yet Titled (detail), 2009, thorns and pins. Photo: Cui Fei. Courtesy of the artist and Warehouse Gallery.

Vol. 10 No. 1 103 Tracing the Origin VIII (2010) consists of eleven rows of twig forms Top: Cui Fei, Tracing the Origin VIII, 2010, sand. Photo: David rendered in sand on the floor. For this particular piece, Cui Fei worked Broda. Courtesy of the artist and Warehouse Gallery. with three Syracuse University students; in accordance with the artist’s directions, they traced the images of individual twigs (photographed by Cui Fei) from large-scale prints (printed at the school’s print lab), and laid them onto the floor. Then sand was used to fill in the shapes of the forms. Part of the impact of Cui Fei’s work is its connection to the ephemeral, with the result that the work is delicate and subject to change, and in Tracing the Origin VIII, the transience of both art and nature is literally written into the installation’s materials. Indeed, the fragility of much of her art intimates that our best efforts in memorializing culture will be swept like sand into oblivion. The artist is inclined to make metaphysical statements, yet the combined effect of her art supports a philosophical understanding of creativity in both a human and a natural sense.

Cui Fei’s art is imbued with a subtle beauty that is at some remove from contemporary art practice in America; her art is both poetic and graceful, rather than provocative, as evidenced in the artist’s new use of a throw-away methodology. Yet that is the strength of her art: its ability to take delight in the world, both as natural and manmade construct. In a time when

104 Vol. 10 No. 1 Cui Fei, Tracing the Origin VIII ecological awareness seems urgent, (detail), 2010, sand. Photo: David Broda. Courtesy of the Cui Fei makes work that gently artist and Warehouse Gallery. reminds us to remain alert in the face of environmental loss. As time goes on, and as this loss proliferates and becomes more permanent as a reality, her work will intensify in relevance. My only apprehension with Cui Fei’s art is that it is inspired by a single notion—the interpretation of nature via culture—to the point where some concern about repetition occurs; her style demonstrates a relatively narrow range. Yet the elegance of her sensibility remains true to her audience of new art viewers, who understand that the serial examination of an idea stands as an accepted practice in contemporary art. Additionally, the forms and conceptual basis of her art are quite accessible, in the sense that she makes beautiful works, as opposed to alienating ones, to express her vision. The transcendent beauty of her art exists as an elevated vision, one that establishes, quite literally, the book of nature as a version of the sublime.

Vol. 10 No. 1 105 Chinese Name Index

Ai Weiwei Hsu Manray Mou Boyan Xie He 艾未未 徐文瑞 牟柏岩 謝赫

Cao Fei Huang Yongping Ni Zan Xu Bing 曹斐 黃永砅 倪瓚 徐冰

Chang, Gary Jao Chia-En Pak Sheung Chuen Xu Tan 張智強 饒加恩 白雙全 徐坦

Chen Chieh-jen Ji Weiyu Pi Li Xu Zhen 陳界仁 季煒煜 皮力 徐震

Chen Xhingyu Lee Kit Qiu Zhijie Yang Fudong 陳幸宇 李傑 邱志杰 楊福東

Chen Zaiyan Li Chunyee RongRong Yao, Pauline J. 陳再炎 黎俊儀 榮榮 姚嘉善

Chu Yun Li Xianting Shi Jin-Hua Ye Yongqing 儲雲 栗憲庭 石晉華 葉永青

Cui Fei Lin Hongjohn Song Kun Yue Minjun 崔斐 林宏璋 宋琨 岳敏君

Deng Xiaoping Lin Yilin Song Tao Yung, Anthony Tsz Kin 鄧小平 林一林 宋濤 翁子健

Fang Lijun Liu Chuang Sun Chinglin Zhang Huan 方力鈞 劉窗 孫慶麟 張洹

Fei Dawei Liu Wei Teng, Teresa Zhang Peili 費大為 劉韡 鄧麗君 張培力

Gao Minglu Liu Xiaodong Tsai Ming-liang Zhang Xiaogang 高名潞 劉小東 蔡明亮 張曉剛

Gao Shiming Liu Zheng Wang Guangyi Zhao Wuji 高士明 劉錚 王廣義 趙無極

Gu Wenda Long Chin San Wang Jianwei Zheng Guogu 谷文達 郎靜山 汪建偉 鄭國谷

Hou Hanru Lu, Carol Yinghua Wong, Adrian Zheng Shengtian 侯瀚如 盧迎華 王浩然 鄭勝天

Hsia Yan Lu Peng Wong, Phoebe Zuoxiao Zuzhou 夏陽 呂鵬 黃小燕 左小祖咒

Hsu, Claire Mao Xuhui Wu Hung 徐文玠 毛旭輝 巫鴻

106 Vol. 10 No. 1 Vol. 10 No. 1 107 108 Vol. 10 No. 1 Vol. 10 No. 1 109 110 Vol. 10 No. 1 Vol. 10 No. 1 111 112 Vol. 10 No. 1 To purchase a Yishu edition print please send your request to [email protected] or call 1.604.649.8187 (Canada), or contact Katherne Don 86.158.1018.9440 (China). Each edition is commissioned by and produced exclusively for Yishu.

Zhong Biao

Title: Dawn of Asia (2010)

Media: Serigraph

Dimension: 210 x 300 mm

Edition Size: 200

Price: USD 300 plus shipping

y i s h u e d i t i o n n o . 7

Also available for Zhong Biao is certainly at the nucleus of the young generation of purchase: artists active in China’s dynamic contemporary art scene. He is

RongRong & inri, 2004 recognized for his compositions that address notions of time and Caochangdi, Beijing: RongRong & inri, 2008, space and depict the world around us, as well as question the photograph on Hahnemühle paper, 296 x 210 mm, nature of things everywhere and the influence of history. Zhong Biao produced by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, captures the art world’s attention through his visions of a new pictorial Beijing. Edition of 200. memory of this era. Using an urban metropolis as a backdrop for his Ding Yi, Crosses 08, 2008, own bizarre fantasy and illusion, Zhong Biao creates a unique set serigraph on paper, 297 x 178 mm, produced by of dramatized theatrical effects by adopting images of ancient and the artist. Edition of 200. modern, East and West, of different eras of people, scenes, and pop Xu Bing, Book from the Ground, 2007, ink on paper, culture. His images precisely capture the process of modernization 297 x 356 mm, produced by Xu Bing Studio, New York. and urbanization in China, as well as portray the artist’s exploration of Edition of 199. time and space. Wei Guangqing, Made in China, 2008, serigraph on paper, 175 x 296 mm, Dawn of Asia, a picture within a picture, is characteristic of produced by the artist. Edition of 196. Zhong Biao’s charcoal renderings, golden frames, and fine acrylic

Wang Guangyi, Great embellishments. The framed picture within the picture portrays a mass Criticism—Wang Guangyi, 2009, serigraph on paper, of expressionless men and women dressed 1980s-style, wheeling 295 x 210 mm, produced by A Space Art, Beijing. bicycles and walking away from the rays of light in the dawn sky; a Edition of 200. young and modern-looking girl peers into the gilded frame and sees Yan Lei & Hong Hao, herself hurtling above the crowd toward the light, as if she perceives Invitation, 2010, offset print on paper, 295 x 205 mm, hope in the distance. The contrasts of different times and spaces are Edition of 300. brought together and divulge a speechless dialogue.