March/April 2015 Volume 14, Number 2 Inside

MARCH/A P R I L 2 0 1 5 VOLUM E 14, NUM BER 2

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Panel Discussion: Going to the Country Why Do We Still Need Museums? 10th Shanghai Biennale Artist Features: FX Harnoso, Tintin Wulia, Wanxin Zhang Exhibitions: San Francisco, Ithica, Manchester

US$12.00 NT$350.00 P R INTED IN TAIWAN 6

VOLUME 14, NUMBER 2, MARCH/APRIL 2015

CONTENTS 2 Editor’s Note 37 4 Contributors

6 Going to the Country: Reconsidering Chinese Art Practices and Participation in the Rural Context Orianna Cacchione and Mia Yu

28 The Paradoxes of Autonomy: A Site of Critique Nikita Yingqian Cai

66 37 Why Do We Still Need Museums? An Interview with Hou Hanru, Artistic Director of MAXXI, National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome Yu Hsiao Hwei

51 Pursuing Subjectivity: The 10th Shanghai Biennale—Social Factory Julie Chun

66 Expressions of Chinese Ethnicity and Cultural Heritage in Contemporary Indonesian 82 Art: FX Harsono and Tintin Wulia Lisa Catt

82 New Boundaries of Contemporary Art from Taiwan Yu-chieh Li

95 Against Rigour in Art: Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible? Brian Karl

106 106 Wanxin Zhang: Totem Erica Mohar

112 Relics, Memory, and Nostalgia in Harmonious Society Alexandra Lily Mitchell

121 Chinese Name Index

112 Cover: Huang Yongping, Bâton de Serpent, 2014, aluminum. Photo: Musacchio and Lanniello. Courtesy of the artist, Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, and Fondazione MAXXI, Rome.

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

Vol. 14 No. 2 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art PRESIDENT Katy Hsiu-chih Chien LEGAL COUNSEL Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C. C. Liu FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum Museums and cultural institutions are subjects Yishu has explored in past issues. The first three EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian texts in Yishu 67 continue that exploration with a EDITORS Julie Grundvig panel discussion organized by Orianna Cacchione Kate Steinmann Chunyee Li and Mia Yu on projects that have taken place in EDITORS (CHINESE VERSION) Yu Hsiao Hwei non-urban contexts, a reflection by Nikita Yingqian Chen Ping Cai on institutional critique within mainland China, Guo Yanlong and an interview with Hou Hanru by Yu Hsiao Hwei CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde that provides one of the most succinct insights into WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li his curatorial practice as well as his perspective ADVISORY BOARD on the relevance of museums in terms of their Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Melissa Chiu, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden publicness. John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Museo Reina Sofia The Shanghai Biennale, now in its tenth year Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator and in its second manifestation at the massive Fan Di’an, Central Academy of Fine Arts Shanghai Power Station, is examined by Julie Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Chun not only with respect to the curatorial Hou Hanru, MAXXI, Rome premise and the artwork, but also, how this major Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Asian event and the institution that supports it Katie Hill, University of Westminster Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive might be wanting in its publicness. Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator Lu Jie, Long March Space Lisa Catt discusses two artists, FX Harsono Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore and Tintin Wulia, whose work addresses the Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand troubled historical context of people of Chinese Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator descent in Indonesia, an area within the vast Wu Hung, University of Chicago Chinese diaspora that until recently has been little Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District researched. Yu-Chieh Li reviews an exhibition PUBLISHER Art & Collection Group Ltd. at Cornell University, one of the few group 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, exhibitions of contemporary art from Taiwan to Taipei, Taiwan 104 be seen outside of Taiwan, and questions why Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 internationally, and compared to work from the Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 E-mail: [email protected] rest of greater China, so little attention is given to the distinct art that has emerged from VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu Alex Kao this island. MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu We close with three more exhibition reviews. Betty Hsieh Two of the exhibitions, one with Wanxin Zhang, PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. who makes large-scale ceramic sculpture, and WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com the other a group exhibition of international WEB DESIGN Design Format artists dealing with landscape, took place in ISSN 1683 - 3082 San Francisco, a city that has long been home Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited to Chinese artists and that has a distinguished in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, history of exhibiting their work. The third exhibition, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: Harmonious Society, was a component of the Asia Yishu Editorial Office Triennial Manchester, an event initiated in 2008 200–1311 Howe Street that with each iteration is gaining a greater profile Vancouver, BC, Canada within the growing list of biennials and triennials V6Z 2P3 Phone: 1.604.649.8187 focused on Asian art. Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: offi[email protected] Yishu mourns the passing away on February SUBSCRIPTION RATES 1, 2015, of Ni Tsai Chin (1955–2015), a highly 1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) respected artist and professor at Tunghai 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com) University, Taiwan, and one of our long standing Advisory Board members. DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow DESIGNER Philip Wong Keith Wallace 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(Yishu)創刊於 2002年5月1日

典藏國際版‧第14卷第2期‧2015年3–4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）

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

6 到農村去！—鄉村語境中的中國網站編輯：黎俊儀當代藝術實踐與參與中文編輯：余小蕙小歐 (Orianna Cacchione)∕于渺陳萍郭彥龍

行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 28 自治的悖論：一個批判的場域蔡影茜顧問：王嘉驥田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 37 我們為什麼還需要美術館？巫鴻林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 訪談羅馬二十一世紀美術館（MAXXI）范迪安藝術總監侯瀚如招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 余小蕙洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 胡昉侯瀚如 51 觀者的主體性：評第十屆上海雙年展— 徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 「社會工廠」姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) Julie Chun 高名潞費大爲楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 盧杰 66 當代印尼藝術中華人種族與文化傳統 Lynne Cooke 的表現：胡豐文與Tintin Wulia Okwui Enwezor Lisa Catt Katie Hill Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda 82 「界」: 台灣當代藝術展出版：典藏雜誌社李雨潔副總經理：劉靜宜高世光行銷總監：林素珍發行專員：許銘文 95 藝術不求嚴謹謝宜蓉 ─評展覽「風景：實像、幻像或心像？」社址：台灣台北市中山北路一段85號6樓 Brian Karl 電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 電子信箱：[email protected] 106 張萬新：「圖騰」國際版編輯部：Yishu Editorial Ofﬁce Erica Mohar 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 112 「天下無事」中的遺物、記憶與懷舊傳真：(1) 604.591.6392 電子信箱: ofﬁ[email protected] Alexandra Lily Mitchell 訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與國際版編輯部聯系。

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售價每本12美元。封面：黃永砯，蛇杖，2014，鋁，Musacchio 訂閲：一年84美元，兩年158美元和 Lanniello 攝影，藝術家、北京紅磚美術館和（含航空郵資）。羅馬二十一世紀美術館基金會提供。網上下載：一年49.95美元網上訂閱： http://yishu-online.com 感謝JNBY、D3E Art Limited、陳萍、李世默夫婦、Stephanie Holmquist 和Mark Allison 版權所有，本刊內容非經本社同意不得翻譯和轉載。對本刊出版與發行的慷慨支持本刊登載內容並不代表編輯部與出版社立場。 Contributors

Orianna Cacchione is currently Research Arts (Museums and Collections) from the Fellow for Contemporary East Asian Art at the Australian National University. Her ﬁnal Art Institute of Chicago. She is also completing research project explored expressions of her dissertation at the University of California, Chinese identity in contemporary Indonesian San Diego. Her current research analyzes the art. During her studies, Catt worked as an globalization of contemporary Chinese art assistant curator at the National Museum through the translation and circulation of of Australia and curatorial intern at the foreign art history in China after the Cultural National Gallery of Australia. Currently she is Revolution. Her writing has been published working at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. in The Journal of Art Historiography, Yishu, and FlashArt. Julie Chun is an independent art historian and lecturer who has been based in Shanghai Nikita Yingqian Cai lives and works in since 2011. She currently serves as the Art Guangzhou and is currently curator at Convener of the Royal Asiatic Society, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou. China, where she delivers monthly lectures The exhibitions she has curated there include at museums and galleries to widen public A Museum That is Not (2011), Jiang Zhi: If understanding of artistic objects, past and This is a Man (2012), and You Can only Think present. She holds an M.A. in art history about Something if You Think of Something from San Jose State University and B.A. in Else (2014); she is also editing a series of economics from the University of California publications based on the annual seminar at the at Irvine. She has also completed graduate Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, on studies in Asian history at Yonsei Graduate institutional and curatorial practice, including School of International Studies, Seoul, and Curating Subjects (Chinese edition) and No conducted research in modern art at UCLA. Ground Underneath: Curating on the Nexus She is a regular contributing writer to Yishu of Changes (co-edited with Carol Yinghua and Randian online. Lu, 2014), and Active Withdrawal: The Life and Death of Institutional Critique (co-edited Brian Karl has worked professionally with Biljana Ciric, 2014). In 2009/2010, she as a curator and director in support of co-curated I’m Not Here: An Exhibition without multidisciplinary creative work at Los Francis Alÿs with the other participants of the Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), de Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam. Harvestworks Media Arts, and Headlands Her writings have appeared in a number Center for the Arts. He has also worked as of publications and magazines, and she is a a curator, consultant, and guest speaker for contributing writer to LEAP, www.artforum. Art in General, Brooklyn Academy of Music, com.cn, Arttime, and Yishu. Creative Time, Composers Forum, the Kitchen (all in New York), and served as editor and Lisa Catt is fascinated by the ways cross- producer for Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine cultural exchange and layers of history in New York. He completed his doctoral are negotiated through art. She recently dissertation in music and anthropology graduated with a master’s degree in Liberal at Columbia University after conducting

4 Vol. 14 No. 2 research in Morocco, Spain, and the U.S. Art, San Francisco; Mexican Museum, San He has taught courses widely in art, music, Francisco; and the de Saisset Museum, Santa and cultural anthropology, including at New Clara, California. Currently, she is Director of School, Fordham University, Colby College, the Academic Administration for the California University of Michigan, California College of the College of Arts in Oakland and San Francisco. Arts, and San Francisco Art Institute. He has also As a writer, her interest lies in the artist’s conceived and independently produced multiple personal narrative and how this informs the experimental video projects, which have received process of art-making. awards when screened at festivals and have been purchased for collections and/or commissioned Yu Hsiao Hwei is an art writer and translator by museums and galleries internationally, based in France. She is a regular contributor including the Jewish Museum New York, the to several art magazines in Taiwan and China, Whitney Biennial, and the New York and San including CANS (Chinese Contemporary Art Francisco Film Festivals. News), ARTCO, ArtCo China, and Randian. Since the 1990s, she has been focusing on Li Yu-Chieh is a Ph.D. candidate in East the exploration of Chinese contemporary art Asian art history at Heidelberg University, within the global context. Germany. In 2013 she became an Andrew W. Mellon C-MAP Fellow at the Museum Mia Yu is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at of Modern Art, New York, where she is a McGill University. Her research examines the co-editor of post, a digital platform for ways in which Chinese contemporary artists collaborative research and artistic exchange, recuperate traditional practices of calligraphy, and organizes workshops and research activities literati painting, diagram-making, and rubbing on contemporary and modern art in Asia. Her as both visual tropes and work methods research interests include Dada, installation, in their attempts to reactivate the past and and multimedia art as well as modern and reframe a critical experience of the present. contemporary art. Her dissertation is about As an English-Chinese bilingual writer and conceptualism in the Post-Mao era in China. researcher, she regularly contributes to Leap, Artforum, and Randian. Based in Beijing, she Lily Alexandra Mitchell is a Ph.D. student organizes speaker series and panel discussions and curator based in the United Kingdom. at OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Xi’an. She works in collaboration with Birmingham City University and the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester. She studied at Liverpool John Moores University and has worked for the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, and the Liverpool Biennial 2012.

Erica Mohar has worked as a curator and on curatorial projects for the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia; Museum of Craft and Folk

Vol. 14 No. 2 5 Going to the Country: Reconsidering Chinese Art Practices and Participation in the Rural Context A Panel Discussion with Song Yongping, Jin Le, Li Mu, and Dai Zhuoqun Organized and Moderated by Orianna Cacchione and Mia Yu OCAT Xi’an, September 25, 2014

he concept of “going to the country” has played a varied role in Going to the Country panel discussion, OCAT shaping art practices in China throughout the twentieth and twenty- Xi’an, September 25, 2014. Left to right: Orianna ﬁrst centuries. In the late 1920s, a pioneer of popular education, Cacchione, Mia Yu, Li Mu, T Song Yongping, Jin Le, Dai Y. C. James Yen, joined other independent reformers to form the Rural Zhuoqun. Reconstruction Movement that aimed to create a new countryside as the basis for a new Chinese nation. He advocated for learning from the peasants and developing an educational platform that responded to the peasants’ needs. The concept “going to the country” as related to art practice later took on a decidedly political connotation with the introduction of Communist ideology in China. Beginning with the revolutionary Lu Xun Academy in Yan’an (founded in 1937), artists and students lived in the homes of rural residents, making New Year’s pictures and learning folk traditions from them.2 In the Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in 1942, Mao Zedong called on artists and authors to “learn from the peasants.” Unsurprisingly, this call echoes Yen’s educational model; Mao was a volunteer in the mass literacy movement in Changsha, although by 1926, he critically dismissed “popular education” in his speeches in favour of a more politically-driven approach to the countryside.3 After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the revolutionary tradition of artists “going to the country” became an institutionalized practice; artists were sent by art academies to the rural

6 Vol. 14 No. 2 areas and the nation’s borderland to sketch from life. This tradition took on a radical turn during the Cultural Revolution as urban youth were “sent down” to the countryside for re-education.

It is often assumed that contemporary art in China only takes place in major cities. However, in reality, Chinese artists have never ceased to engage the countryside as a critical ﬁeld of art practice. Beginning with the ’85 New Wave Movement, contemporary Chinese artists have appropriated, manipulated, and expanded the concept of “going to the country.” Their practices not only challenge the historical and political precedents of “going to the country,” but also simultaneously question the role of the artist in society, rural redevelopment and revitalization, and the institutional boundaries of contemporary art in China. This critical thread in the development of contemporary Chinese art has been signiﬁcantly understudied by critics and art historians. In the face of Xi Jinping’s renewed call for artists to “go to the country,”4 revisiting these practices could not be more pressing.

Mia Yu: Hello, everybody. Welcome to OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Xi’an (OCAT Xi’an). Today, we have invited three artists and one curator to discuss the concept of “going to the country” as it relates their own art practices and Chinese art practice at large from the 1980s to the present. Our ﬁrst speaker, Song Yongping, was a participant in the ’85 New Wave Movement. Between 1986 and 1993, he actively organized art projects in remote villages in Shanxi province. Jin Le, our second speaker, has experimented with bringing art to his hometown, Shijiezi, a small village in Gansu province. He is currently the village chief and has even founded an art museum there. The third artist we invited is Li Mu, a young artist who returned to his native village, Qiuzhuang in Jiangsu province, to create the reproductions of a number of Western masterpieces and exhibited them in and around the village. In addition, we are joined by curator Dai Zhuoqun who is currently working on a project entitled Civilization series. He invites artists to explore various small towns around China and produce works based on their research. The exhibition currently on view at OCAT Xi’an, Civilization Round II: Yulin, is the presentation of the most recent research trip to the Yulin region in northern Shannxi province.

By inviting these art practitioners to today’s panel, we will not only learn about their projects but also will seek to formulate critical questions about the phenomenon of artists going to the country. What are the contexts for these projects? What does the countryside mean to the artists in each case? How signiﬁcant is the participation of local villagers? What is the relationship between art and rural development? As China’s countryside rapidly urbanizes, how does the boundary between and the relationship with the country and city shift? We hope that today’s panel will serve as a springboard for the future research on this topic. Let’s welcome today’s ﬁrst speaker, artist Song Yongping. Song Yongping, could you please introduce your art activities from the 1980s and the background of your projects in the countryside?

Vol. 14 No. 2 7 Song Yongping: Good evening. It’s my pleasure to be here to talk about the art projects I organized in the countryside during the late 1980s and early ’90s. Many thanks to OCAT Xi’an’s Director, Karen Smith, and the researchers Mia Yu and Orianna Cacchione for organizing this panel and inviting me to participate. I believe Mia and Orianna are attempting to excavate a story that has largely been lost from the discourses around contemporary Chinese art.

Members of Three Steps Studio at the ﬁrst Shanxi Modern Art Exhibition, 1985. Left to right: Ma Jianzhong, Song Yongping, Zhao Shaobo, and Wang Yazhong. Courtesy of Song Yongping.

I was born and raised in a very Song Yongping, Untitled, 1985, installation view at small town in Shanxi province. the ﬁrst Shanxi Modern Art Exhibition. Courtesy of Song Ever since I was little, I liked to Yongping. draw, but the concept of “making art” never occurred to me. In 1979, I was eighteen and ready to apply for college. A teacher showed me the brochure for the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. The word “art” struck me like lightning. Without thinking twice, I applied. Much to my surprise, I was admitted to the Printmaking Department. I started my studies at the Academy in 1979 and spent the next four years there. While in Tianjin, I spent most of my time attending lectures on Western literature and philosophy. These lectures were more important for me than learning printmaking techniques. In 1983, after graduation, I returned to Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province, with a new mindset. I got a job as an art teacher at a local academy of broadcasting and television. Almost immediately, I felt that the conservative, provincial environment of Taiyuan was unbearably suffocating. I desperately searched for a space of artistic expression. Working with Wang Yazhong, we established the Three Step Studio (Sanbu huashi) in January 1985. We organized our ﬁrst exhibition in 1985, which was called the Shanxi Modern Art Exhibition. It included works by me; Wang Yazhong; my brother, Song Yonghong; and Wang Jiping. We exhibited mainly installations that were made from ordinary things used by peasants and other readymade objects. However, the local

8 Vol. 14 No. 2 government shut down the exhibition before it even opened. We continued working as a group and held a second exhibition in November 1986. The second exhibition was not censored, although my brother and I made a performance work called The Experience of a Certain Scene (Yige changjingde tiyan) that was heavily criticized afterward.

Orianna Cacchione: Criticized by whom? By the authorities or other artists?

Song Yongping: Mainly by what I call “art bureaucrats” who ran institutions like the Chinese Artists’ Association and the Painters’ Academy. They considered this kind of work “right-wing art,” a comment that was a remnant of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign (1983–1984). I think of this work as an early example of performance art in China in the 1980s. Prior to this, all I cared about was painting, the image, and the surface of painting. But my ideas changed after I attended a workshop for cinema set design. I asked myself how I could transcend painting and go beyond its surface. I wanted to ﬁnd a new spatial relationship with the viewer. Performance was an instinctive answer to this problem.

Song Yongping and Song Yonghong, The Experience of a Certain Scene, 1986, performance at the second Shanxi Modern Art Exhibition. Courtesy of Song Yongping.

Mia Yu: It is interesting that the intervention of your body into a staged scene was inspired by your training in ﬁlm set design and used as a solution to the crisis of painting. This intention is quite different from other performance-based works in the 1990s, which are by comparison more politically and socially-engaged.

Song Yongping: Yes, this is why we need to situate artworks into personal, social, and historical contexts.

Orianna Cacchione: On that note, can you tell us about the context of your art projects in the country? When did you ﬁrst begin to conceive of organizing such projects?

Song Yongping: My interest in practicing art in the countryside started in the mid-1980s. The cultural system in Shanxi province was rooted in

Vol. 14 No. 2 9 agriculture and seemed very conservative compared to other urban areas in China such as Beijing and Shanghai. It was so culturally backward that it seemed as if avant-garde art could never come to exist in a place city like Taiyuan. But for me, this irreconcilable conﬂict between contemporary art and the countryside was a source of creative energy. The countryside opened up a space for freedom. For me, the countryside is “elsewhere”—a relatively free space removed not only from the institutions in the cities but also from the suffocating environment of a provincial city. In 1986, with some friends, I planned an art carnival in a small village by the Yellow River. A French journalist from AFP volunteered to document the event. However, because he reported on a student movement in Xinjiang, he was declared “unwelcomed” by the Chinese government and was soon deported. Seeing the news on television, I was shocked. Because of that, our village art carnival was never realized. It was quite frustrating.

Mia Yu: Why didn’t you continue to pursue it? Why was a French journalist’s participation, or the absence of his participation, vital to a point that makes you abandon the project?

Song Yongping: His help was very important to us, perhaps more important than is understood today. At the time, artists didn’t have any source of funding and no media outlets would give us attention. Nobody in society even thought that what we did had any value. Moreover, to organize a large group event, we needed everybody to pull together as many resources as possible. A foreign journalist’s participation would have boosted our morale and more artists would have been interested in joining us. Another reason was the need for documentation. You see, only a few photos remain today of my performance The Experience of a Certain Scene in 1986. An English girl—her Chinese name is Bai Lan—took a video of the performance but never gave me a copy. In 1998, when Gao Minglu was preparing for the exhibition Inside Out: New Chinese Art, we contacted her for the footage. But she never gave it to us. When considering performance art, photo documentation is simply not enough. I think that is why my performance was not included in important retrospective exhibitions such as ’85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art curated by Fei Dawei at Ullens Contemporary Art Center in 2007. Back in 1986, getting hold of a video camera was extremely hard for artists. With the help of this French journalist, we could have actually left a trace of what we did, and that trace could be seen by the world. It is quite meaningful.

Mia Yu: Were you also afraid of the political consequence of collaborating with a French journalist deemed as “unwelcomed” by the Chinese government?

Song Yongping: Absolutely. One day, my friend Wang Yazhong received an anonymous phone call at work. The man asked if he was with the French journalist at a particular location on a particular day. Wang Yazhong asked who he was. The man said, “This is just a warning. Stay away from this Frenchman from now on.” There were surveillances everywhere back then,

10 Vol. 14 No. 2 which really discouraged us. Although the art carnival didn’t take place, we, the artists of the Three Step Studio, were able to organize a small activity in a country village in July 1986. We called this event the Countrylife Plan 1993 (Xiangcun jihua). For the project, we brought our sculptures and paintings to villages outside of Taiyuan and would exhibit our works while living and eating with the villagers.

Left and right: Exhibiting ceramic works in a farmer’s yard on the occasion of the ﬁlming of the CCTV documentary on the ’85 New Wave produced by Gao Minglu in 1987. Courtesy of Song Yongping.

Later, in 1987, Gao Minglu was producing a documentary about the ’85 New Wave for CCTV. He came to Shanxi to film our avant-garde art activities. For the documentary, we originally wanted to kill a pig in a farmer’s yard. We thought that it would be a dramatic scene for the camera, but Gao Minglu found it too cruel. Instead, we displayed some of my ceramic works in a farmer’s yard. It worked out quite well because the earthy ceramics seemed to mix in well with the surrounding environment and yet looked out of place at the same time. Gao Minglu and his crew filmed this exhibition. Unfortunately, the documentary was never finalized and was not shown on national TV.

Mia Yu: Your early conceptions for projects in the countryside often seem to be inﬂuenced by the presence of camera or the opportunity for video documentation.

The participating artists of Song Yongping: Well, killing a the Countrylife Plan 1993 in front of Huatuo Temple. pig was not at all intended for the Courtesy of Song Yongping. camera although I did think that something dramatic would suit television. I wanted to show the process of a countryside ritual, and pig-sacrifice is an important ritual associated with Chinese New Year. For these projects in the 1980s, I must say that I simply felt the need to do something in the country, but I didn’t have very specific and well- thought-out plans. However, these projects ignited my interest in doing something more serious in the countryside, which eventually led to the so-called Countrylife Plan 1993. This time, the project was better planned. In early 1992, I went to conduct research with a few artists and friends along the Yellow River between Shanxi and Shaanxi. The goal was to find a proper site for a group of artists to live and work for a period of time. With

Vol. 14 No. 2 11 the help of a few locals, we ﬁnally Participating artists of the Countrylife Plan 1993 having found a base in a tiny village called a dinner party at Huatuo Temple. Courtesy of Song Liujiashan in Liulin county, Shanxi. Yongping. In Liujiashan, there was an empty temple dedicated to the legendary folk doctor Huatuo. We were told that we could stay there for free. In January 1993, more than ten artists moved into the Huatuo Temple and stayed for almost ﬁfty days.

Orianna Cacchione: What kind of art activities did you do? Was there any participation from the local villagers?

Song Yongping painting in the courtyard of Huatuo Temple, 1993. Courtesy of Song Yongping.

Song Yongping: We mainly organized two kinds of activities—painting and group discussions about art. To involve the local people was not the primary goal of this project. Actually, what we painted back then had nothing to do with the countryside. In those days, contemporary art was not as important as it is today; there was very little institutional support for it and very few opportunities were given to artists like us. The intention of this project was to provide the artists with a secluded space where we could share ideas about art and, so to speak, encourage each other without being disturbed.

However, some of our activities did involve the local people. There was a rather well-known ink painter called Li Qi who taught at the Central Academy of Fine Arts at that time. He was one of the artists who worked under Mao during the Yan’an era. In 1992, he painted an ink portrait for Deng Xiaoping titled Our General Designer. One day we went to visit one of the artists who was participating in the Countrylife Plan 1993; he worked at the Shanxi People’s Publishing House at that time. We saw a stack of newly- printed New Year calendars in his ofﬁce. The central image on the calendars was a photo of Li Qi bringing his portrait of Deng Xiaoping to a peasant family at their rural home. The photo was titled Sending Our General Designer to the Country. We thought it was pertinent to our project. So we

12 Vol. 14 No. 2 asked our friend to get us a bunch of copies. When we arrived in the village, it was around Chinese New Year. We mounted the calendars on paperboards and handed them out as New Year gifts to the villagers. This way, we appropriated Li Qi’s act of sending out the poster to the country and turned it into a different kind of going-to-the-country. Later, I heard that Li Qi was quite upset about what we did. He even wrote an essay criticizing our work that was published in a newspaper.

Orianna Cacchione: Other than that example, was there any other interaction between the artists and the villagers?

The participating artists of Song Yongping: Of course there the Countrylife Plan 1993 with elderly villagers who were. The two eighty-year-old came to visit them every day. Courtesy of Song brothers living next to the temple Yongping. beneﬁted the most from our project. Prior to 1949, these brothers had been landowners and were educated in traditional private schools. During the land reform of the Communist Era, they were stripped of all their personal property. Driven away from their houses, they could only stay in a deserted cave dwelling outside the village. People living an ordinary life might not be as interested in art as these two men, who had neither property nor family to be with. Every morning after breakfast, they would arrive at the gates of the Huatuo Temple with the aid of walking sticks. They would just sit and look at us, never trying to communicate, but always seemed happy and relaxed. We, as outsiders, must have amused them so much. When we took photos, we asked them to pose with us. In this photo, the old man holding up the spring onions is one of the two brothers. I now regret not asking them how they felt about our paintings.

Orianna Cacchione: What does the countryside mean to you as a site of art production?

Song Yongping and Wang Song Yongping: In our art practice, Yazhong dancing with the villagers at Liujiashan, 1993. the countryside was considered Courtesy of Song Yongping. both a cultural resource and also a means of art making we adopted. To me, the countryside was a place beyond real life, somewhere that had nothing to do with our daily lives. We simply used the countryside as our studio. It allowed us to express our inner thoughts and feelings. But we were total outsiders without the intention to change or making any inﬂuence to the country. The practices of artists going to the countryside have changed with time, for example, the projects that Li Mu and Jin Le have undertaken. These artists have

Vol. 14 No. 2 13 experimented with and expanded upon the notion of “going to the country.” I think they have done a great job.

Mia Yu: Song Yongping, thanks for contextualizing your projects for us, and also providing us with an excellent segue into our next speaker, Jin Le, who is currently a professor in the Sculpture Department of Northwestern Normal University. Jin Le, since 2000, you have been working on a project in your hometown, Shijiezi, Gansu province. Since it is your hometown, your relationship with the countryside must be quite different from that of Song Yongping.

Aerial view of Shijiezi. Photo: Zhang Binning. Courtesy of Jin Le.

Jin Le: Yes, indeed. My work differs from Song Yongping’s in that I am working in a different period of time and within a very different social context. I want to start by showing a picture of my hometown, Shijiezi, a remote mountain village in Gansu. I was born and raised here. Currently the village has only sixty-five people from thirteen families. The land is incredibly dry and barren. There is a year-round water shortage. For thousands of years, art had never touched this land. I am actually the first person who left the village to study at art. From the moment I graduated from Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts, I knew I wanted to do something in my village. From 2000 to 2005, I made a series of site-specific installations in the village, but nobody seemed to care. There was no response from the villagers. In 2007, Ai Weiwei organized the Fairytale project, inviting 1,001 Chinese people to attend documenta 12. I signed up the entire village to go as part of Ai Weiwei’s project. Eventually, only a few villagers, those who dared to fly, traveled to Kassel, Germany. It was not only the first time that they went abroad, but also the first time they ever stepped outside of the village. When they came back, they were so elated and couldn’t stop talking about it. In January 2008, I invited Zhao Bandi’s Panda Art Troupe to perform a mini Spring Festival gala for the village. After going to Kassel and then seeing the Panda Art Troupe’s performance, the villagers started to believe that art could bring hope to their hard lives. They nominated me as the village chief. At the beginning, I thought it was a joke, but their decision was too serious to be turned down.

14 Vol. 14 No. 2 Top: Zhao Bandi’s Panda Orianna Cacchione: Are you still the village chief of Shijiezi today? Art Troupe performing at Shijiezi during the Spring Festival, 2008. Courtesy of Jin Le. Jin Le: Yes. I have been the Middle left and right: democratically elected village chief Villagers from Shijiezi visiting documenta 12, since 2008. It is a huge responsibility. Kassel, Germany, 2007. Courtesy of Jin Le. After being elected, I realized that Right: Shijiezi villagers I had no other resources except for electing Jin Le as village chief, 2008. Courtesy of art and artists. I decided to use art Jin Le. to open a window to the outside world for this tiny village. In 2009, I founded Shijiezi Village Art Museum. In fact, the museum does not have a physical building, but, instead, is housed in each of the thirteen families’ private homes. We can say that the museum has thirteen branches. The artworks are either presented outside or inside the private houses. To indicate the museum’s existence, the villagers elected my mother to write the characters of Shijiezi Art Museum on an earthen wall at the entrance to the village.

Mia Yu: Since the museum’s founding in 2009, what projects have you organized?

Jin Le: Essentially, I would like to give the villagers an opportunity to go outside the village. As a representative of the museum, I also invite artists and curators to the village to communicate with the people here. In 2008,

Vol. 14 No. 2 15 Left: The opening day of Shijiezi Art Museum, on February 3, 2009. Photo: Zhang Binning. Courtesy of Jin Le. Right: Jin Le making a speech at the opening ceremony of Shijiezi Art Museum, February 3, 2009. Photo: Zhang Binning. Courtesy of Jin Le.

Left: Shijiezi villagers visiting Beijing's Olympic site during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Courtesy of Jin Le. Right: Shiziezi villagers meeting with Ai Weiwei at his studio, Beijing, 2008. Courtesy of Jin Le.

Installing Jin Le’s sculpture Mama at the entrance to the village in June, 2009. Courtesy of Jin Le.

I organized a project called The Swiss collector Uli Sigg making a donation to Host. The villagers and I took Shijiezi village, 2010. Courtesy of Jin Le. some seeds and soil from Shijiezi to Beijing. After we toured the Olympic Stadium, we left the seeds and soil in a garden there. In June 2009, in order to pay homage to all the mothers of the village who have raised their children on such barren land, I made a sculpture titled Mama and placed it permanently at the entrance to the village. On January 28, 2010, I took four villagers, Li Yuansheng, Jin Xilin, Meng Keke, and Xu Fang to Beijing to witness the demonstrations against the demolition of the Changdian Art Zone. They understood that people could demonstrate when there is social injustice. In August that year, villager Sun Yingping, a migrant worker, suffered a severe injury after an accident at work. We held a fundraiser for him at the 798 Art District in Beijing and were able to raise more than 3,000 yuan. In 2011, I curated two solo exhibitions for Zhu Dianqiong and He Chi, two artists from Gansu province. Most recently in 2012, the Great Heart: International Theater, Environmental Awareness, and Educational Festival was held at multiple sites in the village.

16 Vol. 14 No. 2 Orianna Cacchione: You’ve been able to do a lot of projects so far. How did these art projects change life in the village?

Jin Le: The inaugural Shijiezi Film Festival was held in 2010. All of the ﬁlms were related to the countryside life. The festival toured from our village to other villages and eventually attracted the attention of the Gansu provincial television station. The television station did a report on our museum. It is through the television report that the people from the government suddenly realized our existence. Our village must have looked so shabby and backward on TV, which probably made the local government to lose face. So, soon after the report, the county government decided to install streetlights for us. They also issued us free cement. The villagers worked together for a whole month to pave the dirt road. It was never our intention to get the government’s attention through art; we preferred to focus on discussions about art and the connections between art and the villagers. However, when such things happen, the whole village thanks “art” for making them possible.

Mia Yu: Thanks, Jin Le. Like Jin Le, our next speaker, Li Mu, also returned to his hometown for to pursue his art practice. Li Mu, could you introduce your Qiuzhuang Project?

Li Mu: I was born in Qiuzhuang, a tiny village in the north of Jiangsu province. At the age of seventeen, I left home to attend art school. During the next twenty years, I returned to my hometown once a year and stayed there for no more than one week each time. I knew that I was quite estranged from the villagers because I had a totally different mindset from them. However, as I grew older, I wanted to ﬁnd a way to begin to improve our relationship through art.

Li Mu and Charles Esche, In August 2012, I participated in an Director, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in front of an exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum artwork by Andy Warhol. Courtesy of Li Mu. in the Netherlands. For the exhibition, instead of contributing a work of art, I decided to work at the museum. Every day, I would eat lunch in the museum’s cafeteria, and one day I started to talk with the museum’s director, Charles Esche, about the museum’s collection. From this discussion, I had an idea: What if I were to bring some of the artworks from the museum’s collection to my home town? I explained my idea to Charles, and together we decided to initiate the Qiuzhuang Project. For the next two weeks, I began to research thoroughly the Van Abbemuseum’s collection in order to select works to be reproduced in Qiuzhuang. Finally, I decided on ten artworks made by eight artists. I returned to Qiuzhuang in January 2013 and spent the next thirteen months reproducing and installing the artworks. During this time, I also started a library in the village so that both the children and villagers could learn

Vol. 14 No. 2 17 about art history and develop an appreciation of art. However, it was mainly children who visited the library.

Mia Yu: Thanks, Li Mu. Our last speaker, Dai Zhuoqun, is an independent curator who has been active in the contemporary art scene in China. He also curated our current exhibition at OCAT Xi’an, Civilization Round II: Yulin. Dai Zhuoqun, for this exhibition, you organized eighteen artists to do research in Yulin and its surrounding area. Yulin, like thousands of small Chinese cities, exists in an ambiguous zone between a modern urban centre and the real countryside. It is perhaps better understood as a contemporary variation of the Chinese countryside. Your project precisely explores the complexity of the urban-rural intersection in China today.

Installation view of a reproduction of Richard Long's Wood Circle by Li Mu in Qiuzhuang, 2013. Courtesy of Li Mu.

Dai Zhuoqun: Yes, that’s a good way to put it. The Yulin project exhibited at OCAT Xi’an is the second of a series of projects I am organizing called Civilization. For this exhibition, I invited eighteen artists to do ﬁeld research in Yulin, Shaanxi province, after which each artist made a work to be exhibited here at OCAT Xi’an.

However, I am not entirely sure if these projects should be categorized as a practice exclusively related to the countryside because I intentionally blurred some of the distinctions we commonly think of between the rural and the urban, the countryside and the city. Small cities in China, as you said, are often hard to deﬁne. Their identities are not as stable as major cities like Beijing and Shanghai. It is this kind of ambiguity that, I think, opens up new possibilities to artists.

But the actual point of departure for this project came from my observation that the way in which artists are working today is becoming similar to office workers in modern corporations—boring and tedious. The artists mainly live in first-tier cities that all look the same; they commute from their homes to their studios every day. The successful ones are busy flying between New York, Paris, London, and other art-world capitals, participating in exhibitions, socializing with curators and museum directors, and attending galas. These artists have become over professionalized, and they seem to

18 Vol. 14 No. 2 Civilization Round II: Yulin, know the art system too well. I ﬁnd their art has growing limitations. So, OCAT Xi’an, 2014, exhibition view. Courtesy of OCAT I wanted to offer the participating artists somewhere else to work, to see Xi’an. how traveling to small cities that nobody seems to care about could remove artists temporarily from their daily reality.

Mia Yu: On this level, your project seems to echo Song Yongping’s project, both of them aiming at creating an “elsewhere” of unknown realities, a new space of possibilities.

Dai Zhuoqun: Yes, you may say that. It is precisely this idea of “elsewhere” I search for. I hoped that this “elsewhere” could provide a space for dreaming an unknown reality that provides the artists with random possibilities and new creative motivations. The artists did not intend to change anything in each of the selected small towns or to interfere with the local people. The purpose of going to small cities was to seek creative energy through turning artists into total strangers. This makes my project closer to Song Yongping’s project than to Li Mu’s or Jin Le’s projects.

Mia Yu: Now we have heard all four projects. When considering these projects, we see that art becomes increasingly hard to deﬁne. In each project, the notion of art is conceived slightly differently, but so is the relationship between art and life—art and its participation with the community. The ways in which art is being produced and being exhibited take on different meanings in each case.

Li Mu: The comment that Mia just made is a great one. What is art, after all? For a long time, I thought that art only existed in art museums and

Vol. 14 No. 2 19 exhibition catalogues. But while doing the Qiuzhuang Project, I had to Participating artists of the Yulin project at a local work with a lot of people in the village, especially my father. We started to coal mine in Yulin, 2014. Courtesy of OCAT Xi’an. discuss a lot of art-related questions. Occasionally I would feel a sudden mutual understanding between our hearts, something I never felt before. This is what I gained from doing this project. I cherished it very much. But how can I document such feelings? They are very difﬁcult to present in art museums. If I talk about this feeling in a video and exhibit it in a museum space, it is already lost. This problem challenged how I thought about art.

Song Yongping: Li Mu just spoke about his working methods, and, actually, I ﬁnd a connection here to what we were doing in the 1980s. In fact, in the 1980s, going to the country was a way of looking for new possibilities for art practices, of ﬁnding new spaces for art, of breaking down the boundaries of art. But, in fact, this wasn’t just a concern for taking practices to the countryside in the 1980s, but of avant-garde art practice at large. The development of contemporary Chinese art in the 1980s was extremely important; it marked the move toward personal expression after the Cultural Revolution. Suddenly the art schools opened again, and people were open to new ideas. But there were still limitations—limitations that Li Mu has not experienced.

Dai Zhuoqun: It seems to me that one of the biggest catalysts behind the projects in the 1980s and the ’90s was the lack of social space and infrastructure for creating and exhibiting artworks. Unlike artists today, who have abundant resources, artists back then had to ﬁght for their freedom to make art and carve out a space beyond the control of the ofﬁcial culture system. When Song Yongping organized his countryside projects, there were no contemporary art museums and galleries in China. But since 2000, the exhibition infrastructure for contemporary art has improved

20 Vol. 14 No. 2 tremendously. By the time Jin Le worked on Shijiezi Art Museum, his primary concern was no longer the lack of space for making art, but, rather, to explore the boundaries, deﬁnitions, and new possibilities for art. It is a critique of the art system itself.

Orianna Cacchione: Dai Zhuoqun, I think what you said is really important when we consider different art practices in China that deal with the concept of going to the country. I wonder what the artists on the panel think of his comments?

Song Yongping: As an artist in the 1980s, we repeatedly came up against ofﬁcial cultural institutions and their ultra-conservative mindsets. We could get arrested for doing certain kinds of artworks. In 1987, I remember a writer said to me, “With avant-garde artists around, writers feel much safer.” However, I disagree that the lack of space was the only reason that motivated us to start the Countrylife Plan 1993. It was also because we, as artists, desired to break through and expand the boundaries and deﬁnitions of art. The country projects in the ’80s were precisely a search for new conceptual possibilities.

In the 1980s and the ’90s, the countryside, for me, was a relatively open and free ﬁeld where artists could go and make works. I never wanted to exert my inﬂuence on the locals or to make any changes to the village. Our idea of so-called “participation” was quite basic, or even naive. Before arriving in the village, we made plans to paint murals on the villagers’ kang (stove- beds) and turn the peasant’s houses into art studios. But in reality, all we did was have a cup of tea and a random conversation with the villagers. To do work on their kang, or even in their yards, would have been a huge interruption to their daily lives. We don’t have the right to that. The villagers herd goats, cook, farm, and raise their children. For the New Year, they make folk crafts like paper-cuts and door gods to decorate their homes, to worship deities, and to ward off evil spirits. This is their life. The kind of art we do has nothing to do with their lives. To indoctrinate or to enlighten the villagers with so-called contemporary art would have been ridiculous. We never intended to do that.

Orianna Cacchione: This brings up a good question about “participation”— how did the villagers participate in these projects? How did you as artists conceive of participation? And, more importantly, how did your relationships with the villagers change throughout the course of your projects?

Li Mu: To talk about public participation, I can’t avoid talking about the big gap between myself and the other villagers. When I returned to the village, I had a sincere hope to improve my relationship with everybody. This is one of the original motivations for my project. When I ﬁrst began the project, I founded a library with the intention of giving the village something useful and valuable. Before starting the project, I had a certain idea of “participation.” But I was constantly disappointed because many people didn’t understand the value of it. They would rather see me spend the money on repairing the country road or installing the street lamps

Vol. 14 No. 2 21 or sponsoring young people to go to university. When I give talks about Children in front of Qiuzhuang library founded the Qiuzhuang Project to the people in the art world, the project sounded by Li Mu, Qiuzhuang, 2013. Courtesy of Li Mu. signiﬁcant and meaningful. But when I returned to the village, it was like a pebble sinking into a pond. The effects had already gone.

Jin Le: I actually understand this feeling well. I know that in the countryside, most people don’t have much interest in art. More likely, they want streetlights, concrete roads, and modern toilets. They need useful things. If you give them one hundred yuan, they would be very nice to you instantly. I think there is a big gap between us—artists and the villagers— because of the different levels of education we have received. They never had a chance to be educated or even to step outside of the village. Finding a way to communicate with the villagers is a time-demanding process.

Mia Yu: Dai Zhuoqun, as a curator, you tried to discourage the artists in your project from using any planned means of participation and instead you emphasized the notion of chance. In reality, the artists often use new technologies, like WeChat, to seek out instantaneous ways of participating in a new place where they don’t know anyone. Can you talk more about this?

Dai Zhuoqun: Yes, for my project, I wanted to eliminate any restrictions or preconceived objectives. My work as a curator is to bring the artists to a totally new place, a place situated between the city and the country, a place with no stable identity. I hoped that the artists could take advantage of this new experience, make meaning out of it, and even appropriate the role of curator. This was actually the most intriguing part of the project, and it allowed for unexpected participation by the local communities.

One example of this sticks out in my mind. The ﬁrst night we arrived in Yulin, the artists had a group dinner. One of the artists, Xu Ruotao, left the table to smoke outside. He randomly turned on WeChat on his cell phone. You know that WeChat has a function called “shake it”—you shake your

22 Vol. 14 No. 2 Participating artists of the phone and anybody who shakes the phone at the same time appears on Yulin project in front of a local cave dwelling in your screen. This is a popular way of “hooking up.” So Xu Ruotao shook his Yulin, 2014. Courtesy of OCAT Xi’an. phone and a few names appeared on his screen. The closest was a girl, and he contacted her. When Xu Ruotao returned to the table, he brought the girl with him. She turned out to be a great folk singer with a high-pitched voice, and for the whole evening she kept singing folk songs from northern Shaanxi, one after another. Many of them were hybrids of revolutionary songs and folk songs, typical products of the Yan’an Era. She may not have understood the contexts and the meanings of the songs at all, but she sang them so well. We also learned that she was born and raised in a poor family in a village outside Yulin. Her dream was to become a pop star; she applied for television talent shows hoping to be discovered and leave Yulin for a more exciting life.

Xu Ruotao immediately decided to make a film about Yulin and cast the girl as the lead. The next morning, she boarded our bus and traveled with us for a week. Xu kept filming her for the entire journey. She did a wonderful job in the film, far exceeding anybody’s expectation. Artist Song Yuanyuan also painted her portrait. When the exhibition opened at OCAT Xi’an, she came and couldn’t believe her portrait was hung in a museum and everybody was watching her film on a big screen. She was finally a star!

Xu Ruotao, Yulin, 2014, Mia Yu: This girl’s participation ﬁlm, 60 mins. Courtesy of the artist. seems as if it was like a process of self-salvation. She wanted to participate because of her inner desire to ﬁnd “elsewhere,” which is different from the “elsewhere” encountered by the artists.

Dai Zhuoqun: Yes. I realize that participation is not a concept on paper. It is driven by people’s desire and the new possibilities it could bring to people.

Vol. 14 No. 2 23 Mia Yu: What will happen to her after the exhibition?

Dai Zhuoqun: We are not in touch anymore. Her portrait has already been sold by the artist’s gallery.

Orianna Cacchione: Recently, many art projects that emphasize rural development or reconstruction have been founded in China. I’m thinking speciﬁcally about Ou Ning’s Bishan Project, in which he uses art through artist residencies and events to help redevelop the economy and traditional art practices in this small town in Anhui province. How do you think about the role of art in rural reconstruction? Did it have a role in the way you think about your work as an artist?

Civilization Round ll: Yulin, at OCAT Xi’an, 2014, exhibition view. Courtesy of OCAT Xi’an.

Li Mu: This question of the relationship between an art project made in the countryside and the need for rural development seems to keep following me. From the beginning of this project, I kept reminding myself that the intention of this project was neither for rural reconstruction nor for charity. This was an art project. I was so afraid that the project would get sidetracked into something narrow and pragmatic.

When Jin Le said that his village had roads paved and street lamps installed, I had great respect for him. I know that he didn’t aspire to achieve this, but I think this is a great byproduct of an art project. When I returned to Qiuzhuang, I ﬁrst went to see the village chief. He said to me, “Don’t do this project. It is useless. Just give me all your money so that I can help the poor.” I responded, “It is not money that the villagers need, it’s spirit.” He said, “You don’t understand the reality here.” I didn’t listen to him, and insisted on doing what I planned to do. In Qiuzhuang, the main road is in a terrible condition. When it rains, it becomes a pool of mud. Cars get sunk in it one after another. After I started the project, the village chief went to my father and said, “Ask your son to spend a hundred-thousand yuan to ﬁx the road. Don’t waste money on art.” I was really embarrassed when my father told me the village chief came to speak to him. I couldn’t repair the village road, instead I spent a small fortune to make artworks in the village, because this was something that I, as an artist, could offer to the village, and not anybody else.

24 Vol. 14 No. 2 Li Mu’s father standing with his birdcages on a reproduction of Carl Andre's work by Li Mu, Qiuzhuang, 2013. Courtesy of Li Mu.

Jin Le: As for my project, whether or not it is art, I don’t really care. Whether or not I am taken seriously as an artist, I don’t care. Art, for me, is no longer about making a sculpture in a studio and selling it at an art fair. What matters is how art can concretely improve people’s lives and make real changes in this tiny village that I care about, whether the changes are to take the villagers to documenta or to have village road paved. My career as an artist and my career as the village chief are combined into one.

I also want to say to Li Mu that we are very different and our roles within the village are too. But I can understand what you just talked about. I am guessing your village is bigger than ours.

Li Mu: We have around two thousand people.

Jin Le: You see, we only have sixty-four people, and all the villagers have known me since I was little. They are my neighbours, my relatives, and my classmates in school. Also, I am the village chief. The villagers unanimously elected me and are willing to listen to me. In many ways, it is a lot easier in my situation than in yours. No matter what, you should keep in mind the fact that you’ve already helped the villagers. You have brought them something they have never seen before. You have broadened their minds, although they may not seem to understand the importance of this at this moment in their lives. Maybe they will realize it later; maybe their children will realize it sooner than them.

Li Mu: It is good to hear this from you. Do you have the feeling that even though you have done a lot, there is still no sense of gratitude from the villagers?

Jin Le: Yes. For instance, in 2009, I also planned to set up a library, but I couldn’t ﬁnd a public space big enough to put it in the village. Up to this point, the library was in a room in my parents’ house and in their yard. One day my father got really annoyed and said to me, “You are only attracted to these kinds of useless things. You are not content with just being a teacher. We are so old now, but you are still here to torture us day by day.” Although he said such harsh things, he has actually always been a big supporter of this project. But from time to time, he still complains to other villagers about

Vol. 14 No. 2 25 me for bringing in a lot of unnecessary trouble. But I try not to think too much about it.

Mia Yu: Li Mu and Jin Le, your projects have faced various criticisms related to participatory art practices. The biggest criticism is that only the artist has a real voice and a recognizable identity in the public presentations of these projects, whereas the villagers who participate are faceless, nameless, and even become homogenous “materials” for the artist’s projects. How do you respond to such criticism? What do you think the villagers have concretely gained from your projects? Also, how the villagers have inﬂuenced or even changed you as an artist and a human being?

Li Mu: From the very beginning, I faced the criticism like this. Here, I want to clarify that, ﬁrst and foremost, this is my art project, not a rural reconstruction project. I need to develop my career as an artist. This project will perhaps be the most important work in my entire career. As for the villagers, they are the participants. They have gained a lot from their participation. First, everybody received money for his or her time and involvement. Second, throughout the year, researchers, curators, and other artists kept coming to Qiuzhuang. They had substantial discussions with the villagers. From these interactions, the villagers established a connection to the outside world. They were exposed to different cultures, different ideas, and different sets of values. The most profound and far-reaching inﬂuence might be on the young people of Qiuzhuang. I think the villagers’ participation should not be understood from the theory of “participatory art.” It can only be understood within the context of the village and my relationship to it.

Jin Le: Mia, I am glad that you raised this question. But I think I have answered it already. I care about making concrete improvements in the villagers’ lives through art. The art project and the village’s development are not separate in my case, but integrated into one.

Mia Yu: What is the future plan for each of your projects?

Song Yongping: I would like to work on building the archive for all my countryside practices from the 1980s and the ’90s.

Dai Zhuoqun: My next project is called Jiangling. Eight artists I selected will travel to Jiangling, a small town by the Yangtze River. The artists will do research around Jiangling for a week. Their research will be presented in an exhibition, which opens in January 2015 at the art museum of Hubei Fine Arts Academy.

Li Mu: I have been working on a documentary film about my Qiuzhuang Project. The title is Qiuzhuang Log. I started shooting at the end of 2013. I have three-hundred-hours of footage. I am almost done with editing. Eventually the film will be five-hours-long and divided into four parts, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. I will present Qiuzhuang Project as my solo exhibition at Van Abbemuseum, which opens in September, 2015.

26 Vol. 14 No. 2 Mia Yu: What about the library you founded in Qiuzhuang? This could be your lasting legacy to the people over there.

Li Mu: The library project was discontinued, unfortunately. There is nobody to run it if I am not in the village. There are no new books coming into the library, and no new activities. Nowadays, editing the documentary ﬁlm and preparing for my solo exhibition take a lot of time.

Jin Le, Applying Gold, Jin Le: Shijiezi Art 2005, performance, Qiuzhuang, with gold leaf Museum is my life- and the tree that Jin Le’s father planted twenty long project. Currently, years ago. Courtesy of Jin Le. we are getting ready for the pepper harvest. I started a virtual store on WeChat. I encourage all of you to place orders on your cell phones. I guess this will make us the largest pepper supplier to China’s art world. The proﬁts will go to fund an art studio for the villagers. In 2015, I plan to invite more artists to make artworks with the villagers using local materials. The good news is that we ﬁnally got running water. For hundreds of years, we have been drinking rainwater, which caused a lot of health problems. Now with running water in place, we can teach the villagers to make ceramics and even paint watercolours. You are all welcome to visit us and help us out. The China Central Television just came and made a documentary on Shijiezi. It is titled Home from Faraway. It will be shown on CCTV Channel on January 4, 2015. I am committed to making changes to this tiny village. Will what I do be considered as art? It doesn’t matter. After all, life is art.

Notes 1. See Charles Wishart Hayford, To the People: James Yen and the Village China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 2. Maria Galikowski, Art and Politics in China, 1949–1984 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1998), 4. 3. Hayford, To the People: James Yen and the Village China , xiii. 4. “Xi echoes Mao’s era with plans to send artists to live in rural communities,” South China Morning Post, December 2, 2014.

Vol. 14 No. 2 27 Nikita Yingqian Cai The Paradoxes of Autonomy: A Site of Critique

“We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.” —Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopia and Heterotopias1

s part of the seminar Active Withdrawal: Weak Institutionalism and the Institutionalization of Art Practice, organized by Biljana ACiric and me, artist Zheng Guogu gave a presentation about his work and practice. At ﬁrst glance it might have seemed to be just another usual artist’s talk, but, in contrast to the conventions of the Western art academy, Zheng Guogu’s explanation of his artistic ideas was minimal. After the talk, Camiel van Winkel, an invited speaker from the Netherlands, put forward a question to the artist in which he claimed that he couldn’t recognize any of the work in Zheng Guogu’s talk as art. One would have thought that he might be aware of the unspoken rules of the global contemporary art scene, in which a scholar from the West should at least humbly admit insufﬁcient knowledge of other cultures, if not radically abandoning an intrinsic Western-centric bias. The “political incorrectness” of Winkel’s statement caught those in attendance by surprise.

An art historian, Winkel is the author of During the Exhibition the Gallery Will Be Closed: Contemporary Art and the Paradoxes of Conceptualism,2 a book that cites cases of English and American artists as well as exhibitions in northwest Europe. To simply negate his question by dwelling on the differences in the language of art between the East and the West would have done little to unsettle his biased attitude as a western scholar.

In his lecture, Zheng Guogu showed a picture of a poster hung on the outside wall of Yangjiang Group’s studio, which is an artist group that Zheng has been actively engaged in addition to his individual practice. The asymmetric, futuristic appearance of the studio gives the look of an eccentric museum building (how global it is!), on which the slogan “58 New Wave, Big Steel Making” was printed. He also mentioned the minor conﬂicts that they encountered with local residents while the building was being constructed, along with the private and public activities carried out by Yangjiang Group in the studio. One might need contextual knowledge of the modern history and art history of China in order to identify the double meanings of the years 1958 and 1985, aside from being able to identify the appropriated political aesthetic of the socialist regime. Presumably, the above factors should not have been major barriers to an art historian’s

28 Vol. 14 No. 2 Zheng Guogu in capability to read an artwork; the real obstruction for Winkel, rather, could collaboration with Yangjiang Group, ’58 New Wave, have been where the artist lives and works: the town of Yangjian. Big Steel Making, 2008, installation, scrap iron, displayed outside of the This poster has been presented on other occasions, including the exhibitions studio of Yangjiang Group. Courtesy of the artist. Guangdong Station at Guangdong Museum of Art in 2008, and Yangjiang Group: Fuck Off the Rules at Minsheng Art Museum of Shanghai in 2013. But Zheng Guogu has not tried to position his works in the contexts of museums and exhibitions; art is part of his everyday life, and every moment of his life can be art. If Zheng Guogu’s practice is interpreted as a kind of resistance against the museum, or an effort toward self-legitimization, Winkel would have easily recalled canonical cases of institutional critique in art history, such as MoMA Poll (1970) by Hans Haacke, realized at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or the gigantic twenty-by-ten-meter piece by Daniel Buren, Opposite (1971), that was eventually removed from the Guggenheim Museum that same year. As Simon Sheikh has summarized, “institutional critique was a practice mainly, if not exclusively, conducted by artists, and directed against the (art) institutions, as a critique of their ideological and representative social function(s).”3 Throughout the history of institutional critique, museums, art institutions, and the capitalist market have always been the main targets of attack; they are the biggest threats to the autonomy of art, while aspects of the following cases will shed light on how the legitimization of contemporary art in China has been primarily driven by marketization.

As a concept in Western art history, institutional critique was an important ramiﬁcation of conceptual art movements in the 1960s and 70s. It adopted essential ideas from conceptual art practices of the linguistic turn, the focus on process, the ordinary, and the immaterial. In his seminal essay “Conceptual Art 1962–1996: From the Aesthetic of

Vol. 14 No. 2 29 Administration to the Critique of Institutions,”4 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh discusses the interrelation between institutional critique and the aesthetic of administration. After World War II, the affluent, developed capitalist countries, exemplified mainly by the United States, foreshadowed the emergence of the aesthetic of administration, through which artists textualized, “documentized,” mediatized, and serialized their works by taking formal references from the establishment of methods of modern business management and institutional administration within an information society. The patronage system of modern museums; the commercial galleries and art market; the writing of art history and art criticism; biennials as major exhibition mechanisms—all of these things ripened and consolidated over the same period of time, and eventually became targets for critique as initiated by artists. As mentioned earlier, Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll adopted the process of a democratic forum within the capitalist system as both form and critique, with the intention of fighting back against the rules that very system had internalized. On the contrary, Zheng Guogu’s seemingly elusive works have nothing to do with the rigid aesthetic of administration. To claim that the act of building a museum in Yangjiang is a critique against contemporary art institutions is to recognize the institutions as having provided the rules and laws that govern his practice. Just as the title Fuck Off the Rules suggests, he is not trying to change the general rules of art production and distribution but to merge the two into one, to stay loyal to his locality while preserving the aesthetic and social autonomy of art.

Andy Hamilton provided a succinct definition of autonomy in his essay “Adorno and the Autonomy of Art”:5 “Autonomy is normally taken to mean that art is governed by its own rules and laws, and that artistic value makes no reference to social or political value.” For Adorno, as Hamilton explained, autonomy and commodification are “not two sides of one coin, but are irreconcilable,” and, furthermore: “Adorno’s picture is that as artists became free of church and aristocratic patronage towards the end of the eighteenth century, their work simultaneously became autonomous and commodified through entry into the capitalist market-place.”6

Only by way of the income earned through the exchange of artistic labour can the artist gain a certain social independence, and thus self-consciousness and critique might be created. Theodor Adorno’s interpretation and analysis of the autonomy of art also illustrates the trajectory of the development of contemporary art in China—from the ’85 New Wave Movement, through the beginning of the processes of internationalization and commodiﬁcation in the 1990s, to the take-over by commercial forces and the art market after 2000. The production and distribution of art in China, respectively, correspond to what Adorno described as aesthetic autonomy and social autonomy. Aesthetic autonomy stresses that art doesn’t directly commit itself to any social or political function; social autonomy designates art’s functionless circulation in society.

In November 1986, Xiamen Dada burned a number of works of art in front of the Xiamen Cultural Palace as a performance. In December of the same

30 Vol. 14 No. 2 year, they exhibited in the Fujian Museum of Art found junk. By creating paradoxes of what art can or cannot be, they challenged the ideology of the official art system. In 1998, Huang Yongping wrote a statement for the project Away from Art Museum,7 in which he expressed firmly that “the biggest limitation imposed on artists by art museums is that artists want to exhibit their intent and ambition in museums.”8 He also specifically pointed out that “to not bring the works to the exhibition is more a cost-effective decision than a special way to participate. The costly approach seems quite unrealistic nowadays due to the overall inflation in China. (There’s a general lack of funding for art.) The approach we adopt this time may turn out to be an effective way for Chinese avant-garde art to survive.”9 It seems that his allusion to “a general lack of funding for art” can also be regarded as a conjuring up of a modern patronage system, and he was absolutely conscious and self-explanatory of Xiamen Dada’s exhibition strategies: “It’s a gesture to oppose the exhibition-making format that directly transfers works made in the studio to the gallery space, which completely isolates the exhibits from their original context.”10 He even related the question of art’s authority to the rationale of its legitimization: “People tend to pay more attention to who gets the certificate, what art is and how they can get the same certificate as well. In the meantime, they forget to ask who issues the certificate and who authorizes art.”11 Wang Guangyi called the Zhuhai Art Conference in 1986 “a group show of slides,” since more than a thousand slides documenting artist works from all over the country were presented in this conference. The act of showing slides could be understood as a gesture “to not bring the works to the exhibition,” in Huang Yongping’s words, with the Conference signifying the local debut of a large-scale contemporary art exhibition. In fact, the Zhuhai Art Conference did lead to the birth and realization of the Modern Art Exhibition of China (China/Avant-garde) in 1989. Huang Yongping not only recognized the economic reasons for not being able to display the works, but also indicated the necessity of relating an artwork to its context, which was the studio, orthodoxically, instead of the socialpolitical background. In accordance with his ideas, if artists can create works but have no control over how the works are distributed, academically or commercially, or if they are forced to separate the relationship between production and distribution, then the autonomy of art is sabotaged.

It needs to be emphasized that there were quite a few other conferences aside from the Zhuhai Art Conference that functioned as selection processes for exhibitions and that copied the ofﬁcial socialist rituals of that time in China, such as the People’s Congress, the Communist manifestos and charters, the collectivist ethos, and the democratic centralism. It was challenging for artists to offer critique beyond their historical context as well as the dominating role of institutions, and in some cases their form of resistance adopted the intrinsic hierarchy of power that characterized the existing institutions. Other dispersed, small-scale, and self-initiated exhibitions were often held in the cultural palaces within different cities. They were part of the basic cultural infrastructure of the socialist country, which served to enrich the life and amusement of workers and youth

Vol. 14 No. 2 31 masses. Even after the Modern Art Exhibition of China at the National Gallery of China in 1989, cultural palaces remained the major venues for exhibiting avant-garde art.

The real changes took place after 2000. The critique that Huang Yongping posed against the authority of museum displays was not targeted at the established institutions of modern and contemporary art, but was a protest against the denial and refusal by the official art museums and institutions to accommodate contemporary art as well as a speculative gesture of conjuring up museums and institutions that will openly welcome works of contemporary art in the future. Huang Yongping was an individual artist struggling to support himself, and art (in the autonomous sense) was as vulnerable as his own professional life. The lack of art institutions and financial means was a problem and still is in many non-Western regions. Huang Yongping came to realize that even with the awakening of the artistic self (also known as the subjectivity of the artist), in a context in which contemporary art infrastructures were insufficient or even non-existent, it was almost impossible to talk about the autonomy of art. This early sensitivity of Huang Yongping was later shared by many other Chinese artists; they knew they could continue working in poverty and in an atmosphere of suppression, but whoever controlled art’s distribution—that is, those who had the resources for interpretation, display, and marketing— had the leverage of power.

Joseph Kosuth, the leading ﬁgure in the canon of conceptual art, claimed in his text “Art after Philosophy” that Duchamp’s readymade “changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to a question of function,” and thus “all art after Duchamp is conceptual (in nature).”12 What Kosuth called morphology can be interpreted in a socialist context as the formalist aesthetic; Kosuth was calling for the shift from art’s language to art’s content. The argument between form (some Chinese artists use the word “language” to represent “the form of the language”) and content was a frequent topic in the period of the ’85 New Wave Movement and is still present in ongoing conversations among Chinese artists. Shu Qun wrote an article in the Chinese Art Newspaper of November 23, 1985, titled “The Spirit of the Northern Art Group,” in which he manifested the idea of what the concept of art should be:

We are firmly against the so-call purified language of painting, and the autonomy dictated by the specificities of its material (medium). To our point of view, the primary standard of judging the value of a set of paintings is to see whether they have manifested the genuine concept, which means whether they have manifested human’s rational power of will, and the sublime quality and noble ideals of human beings.13

One can read clearly from the above that the interest in art’s content as evidenced in the ’85 New Wave Movement was not related to proposing

32 Vol. 14 No. 2 art’s social and political engagement—on the contrary, art was regarded as the materialization of certain abstract ideals. It revolved around the form of a language, but also the legitimacy of one language over the other, meaning the authority of one kind of art over another. Responding to Jean-Paul Sartre’s argument that “art should be committed,” Theodor Adorno insisted in his text “Commitment”: “This is not a time for political art, but politics has migrated into autonomous art, and nowhere more so than where it seems to be politically dead.”14

After 1990, there was a discursive turn in the cultural arena, and avant-garde art activities mostly went underground. The shrinking of art’s public sphere gave way to the emergence of the market, which provided a roundabout way for contemporary art to be legitimized, especially in the relatively developed and liberal southern China—the Guangzhou Biennial for Oil Painting, in 1992, being one of these examples. According to its main organizer, Lu Peng, the purpose of the Biennial was to open up a legal path for art by leading the art to the market, the market here taken as a critical force against the suppression of ideology. It served as a contradictory case of the current critical cliché of biennials looking more like art fairs, while art fairs are looking more like biennials. Since the public art foundations that support the production and exhibition of contemporary art still do not exist in mainland China, and there is no systematic programming and collecting of contemporary art in most state-owned museums, commodiﬁcation of art is (so far) the most immediate tool for Chinese artists to realize economic autonomy and resist ideological control, even within the status quo. To take a strong position against the market is unrealistic for most Chinese artists; they would have to give up any opportunity of being full-time professionals.

During an interview that I undertook with the artist Xu Tan, he talked about the reasons the several members of the Big Tail Elephant group got together to organize their own exhibitions. He said they were fed up with the ideological art charters and movements. Entering the 1990s, most artists realized that changes on a state level would not happen over night, and they turned their critique toward the nascent art system. Through the previous efforts of self-legitimization, which mostly took the form of collective movements in the 1980s, certain stakeholders were established within the art system, and the competitive environment around the development of discourse and exhibitions revolved around the evolution of these authorities. Decentralization, de-collectivization, and de-ideologicalization became the focus of art practice at that point, while the social visibility of art in a broader sense was still in question. In the 1990s, the market economy had taken hold early in Guangdong province, especially in the city of Guangzhou. Young artists like those from the Big Tail Elephant Group managed to gain legal income from other areas, such as interior decoration design, commercial photography, and custom-made sculptures to support their own art production and to organize exhibitions. According to Xu Tan, he would save up his teaching fee to buy the production materials for his own works, which could cost up to 8,000 to 10,000 RMB per project (about 1,000–1,200 USD), while around that time China’s GDP per capita was only

Vol. 14 No. 2 33 300 USD. One might notice that economic development in southern China provided the artists a certain level of economic autonomy. With the premise of de-ideologicalization, the Big Tail Elephant Group solved the problem of art production and distribution by self-organizing its own exhibitions. For the purposes of locating and securing possible venues for these exhibitions, they organized their activities in a way similar to those of a civil society by communicating and negotiating with property owners. The projects and activities of the Big Tail Elephant Group were not intended primarily to criticize, challenge, or intervene in the social, political, and economic context of the day, but they were naturally intertwined with those social relations.

In the aforementioned quote from Kosuth, the English word “function” was used in the original text. To directly interpret it as gongneng in Chinese, which means a designated role or action given to a person or a thing, would be misleading. What Kosuth might be emphasizing was that the content of art should be related or dependent upon other factors. Compared with socially engaged practices and activist art that evolved at a later stage, the early practice of institutional critique in the West was still more or less self- referential, but they valued the political and social meaning of art, namely the function of art in general. By relocating art and rethinking its legitimacy and constructive function within the sociopolitical context, these early practices of institutional critique aimed at making changes in art and in society in general. In reinvestigating certain aspects of art practice in China, the intuitive responses of Chinese artists within the totalitarian atmosphere could have been projected as a form of critique, which was not distancing from the modernist idea of autonomy but aspiring to it. The precondition of this critique was not the canons of the consolidated contemporary art institutions, nor the erosion of art’s commodiﬁcation, but the anxiety induced by ideological suppression and economic and institutional deﬁciency.

By taking control over art production and distribution, artists could thus construct sites of autonomy in a guerrilla-like manner; this was described by Adorno as a situation that is socially critical because of art’s apparent lack of practical and social functions. The critique of aforementioned artists and their projects was dispersed and subjective, yet constructive, and it was projected into the future; that is to say, the institutions of contemporary art to come. For the majority of young Chinese artists today, their priority is still the independence of the artist-subject, including economic and social independence. With the development of a civil society, where art production and circulation unavoidably become part of a larger social, political, and cultural landscape, art practices relate to other social activities (such as those on the everyday level, and in the public sphere, or even in the marketplace) by being engaged while not completely being ruled and regulated by them, the institutions of art and the mechanisms of society in general, thus can be deﬁned more as targets of artistic critique.

In 2013, the documentation of One Year Performance 1980–1981, by Tehching Hsieh, was presented in its complete form for the ﬁrst time in mainland China at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Thirty

34 Vol. 14 No. 2 Li Liao, Spring Breeze, 2011, years after this performance, punching the clock performance, single-channel digital video, 126 mins., 39 has become a routine obligation commonly secs. Courtesy of the artist. enforced on Chinese people, from officers in a government institution, to white collar workers in the central business districts, to waiters serving in small restaurants. The symbolic meaning of this action, which is a form of discipline and enforcement of capitalist labour relations, can thus be recognized by many as a shared experience. One day in 2011, artist Li Liao asked someone who worked in a commercial building in Wuhan to lock him up somewhere downstairs in the same building for a whole day; he was only to be released when that person got off work. The whole performance, documented as a video titled Spring Breeze (2011), runs for 126 minutes and 39 seconds and was presented for the first time in an exhibition titled Things are Changing in the K11 Space, Wuhan. Before this, Li Liao had barely participated in any exhibitions; neither did he create artworks as a full-time artist. Just two years after that exhibition, in August of 2013, Li Liao was nominated for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award, and his works were shown in the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Before this latter exhibition, he came into conflict with his girlfriend’s father, who had been strongly against his daughter’s relationship with Li Liao. According to the father, artists are morally and financially untrustworthy. In response, Li Liao applied for a production fee of 40,000 RMB from the museum and gave the money to his girlfriend’s father. This work, titled Art Is Vacuum (2013), documented a personal situation but touched upon a series of social relations related to the institutions of art, including the contemporary art museum, art awards, production fees, “artist” as a professional position, and so forth, all of which are developed mechanisms within the global contemporary art context and all of which have been instituted in China during the past decade. What was unique about Li Liao’s approach was that he established an end to the universal circle of art production and distribution within the context of his own private life and essentially closed off further possibilities for the consumption of his art. His acute critique was seemingly targeted at his own life instead of the other contexts, and in the process he challenged and enriched the earlier canonical concept of institutional critique. When the fight for legitimization exceeds the internal circus of art and its discourses and enters the realm of an ordinary family, we realize that our reflection on the relation between art and the everyday has really only just begun.

Again, partly because of the deﬁciency of institutional and economic means for China’s belated modernity, a mix of modern and contemporary aspirations can be found in institutional critique and the related practices and projects therein. Following three decades of avant-garde movements in China, the art market and the process of commodiﬁcation have completely taken over as dominant forces. Some artists therefore remain reluctant and suspicious in adopting the exhibition as a platform for art production and distribution, and dichotomies between the individual and the collective, private and public, art and non-art, and China and

Vol. 14 No. 2 35 the West still prevail. One cannot help but wonder whether these all have Li Liao, Art Is Vacuum, 2013, performance, sweater, to do with the anxiety of an unfulfilled autonomy for the artist and the remote control, audio, document, letter. Courtesy uncertainty of creative subjectivity. Over the past ten years, China has of the artist. finally reached a golden age in terms of art museums with the massive scale of spatial production motivated by capital, yet a lot of “counter” spaces have been created from which the agenda of capital might be deviated or ideological control inverted. These spaces can be understood as those Foucault called heterotopias. To apply the term institutional critique, which originated in the West, to a contradictory context doesn’t mean to map, to categorize, or to define art practice in another geographic locality, but to produce a different narrative according to different kinds of practice and to reinvestigate paradoxes of modernity and contemporaneity, such as the autonomy of art, through another set of lenses.

The Chinese edition of this essay was published in Active Withdrawals—Life and Death of Institutional Critique, eds. Nikita Yingqian Cai and Biljana Ciric (Shanghai: Shanghai Scientiﬁc and Technological Literature Press, 2014).

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984), 46–49. 2. Camiel van Winkel, During the Exhibition the Gallery Will be Closed—Contemporary Art and the Paradoxes of Conceptualism (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2012). 3. Simon Sheikh, Notes on Institutional Critique, January 2006, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/sheikh/ en/. 4. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Conceptual Art, 1962–69: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions," October 55 (1990), 105–43. 5. Andy Hamilton, “Adorno and the Autonomy of Art,” in Nostalgia for a Redeemed Future: Critical Theory, eds. Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi and G. Agostini Saavetra (Newark: University of Delaware, 2009), 251–66. 6. Ibid. 7. Away from Art Museum was a proposal for an unrealized act involving the dragging away of the National Art Museum of China. 8. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back—Us and Institution, Us as Institution, ed. Biljana Ciric (Guangzhou: Guangdong Times Museum, 2012), 74–76. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy, Part I,” Studio International (October 1969), 134–37. 13. The Dialectics of Image: Art of Shu Qun, ed. Huang Zhuan (Guangzhou: Lingnan Art Publishing House, 2009), 465. 14. Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 300–18.

36 Vol. 14 No. 2 Yu Hsiao Hwei Why Do We Still Need Museums? An Interview with Hou Hanru, Artistic Director of MAXXI, National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome

Hou Hanru, 2014. Photo: Musacchio and Lanniello. Courtesy of Fondazione MAXXI, Rome.

he internationally active and veteran biennial curator Hou Hanru took the position of artistic director of MAXXI, Museum of TXXI Century Arts, Rome in August 2013. Designed by Pritzker- winning architect Zaha Hadid and opened in 2010, Italy’s ﬁrst national contemporary art museum MAXXI has been plagued by a precarious ﬁnancial situation from the start, with the ministry of culture reducing its funding by forty percent. Yet, in December 2014, MAXXI stood out with unusual vitality, with no less then four large-scale and ambitious exhibitions spanning over ten thousand square meters of exhibition area (the total surface area of the museum is almost thirty thousand square meters!), including Unedited History: Iran 1960–2014, Architettura in Uniforme: Designing and Building for the Second World War, The Future is Now (on the Korean new media art scene) and Huang Yongping’s solo show Bâton de Serpent. The author interviewed Hou Hanru on the occasion of a visit to MAXXI in December regarding his vision and plans for its future.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: In moving from an independent curator to a museum’s artistic director, how do you see your role changing? Or do you consider it a continuation of your curatorial work?

Hou Hanru: Actually, both. Of course, it is a big change in terms of the type of work, because being in charge of a museum’s artistic programs also

Vol. 14 No. 2 37 involves its personnel and administrative affairs, which are very different from my independent curatorial practices in the past. However, in terms of thinking processes, it is in fact a continuation, or an extension, of my work of the past few years.

When I did an exhibition, I never thought about only the exhibition itself, but also what possibilities the exhibition could bring to our understanding of art or to the definitions of our practices and how these redefinitions would change or affect the institution—these are the issues that I have been grappling with for some time. In terms of institutions, I think an effective and coherent art institution should change as artistic languages change. In other words, rather than adjust art to the institution, the institution should change and diversify itself to respond to the constant shifts in art. Moreover, I have always considered this issue from a global perspective. In the 1990s, when there were still few official or large-scale art institutions in Asia, I always thought about how we could use this specific “non-Western” condition—that is, Asia still lacked a mature infrastructure for art, as in the West—to innovate without repeating the paths of others. For instance, with the Shanghai Biennale, in 2000, I envisaged creating a relevant institution for a China where there was still no contemporary art institution, an institution that was adapted to its own needs, its own culture, history, social change, and current situation. When I did the Gwangju Biennale, in 2002, one of my major efforts was to invite artist-run spaces to be an essential part of the Biennale.

At that time, many places in Asia were starting to talk about building new museums and new contemporary art institutions, but their models were mainly extant American or European institutions. For me, that was a huge waste. As a matter of fact, the reason that Asian art was so interesting, that much non-Western art was so dynamic, was because of the lack of infrastructure such as that which existed in the West. Artists had to work in direct contact with reality—for instance, on the streets, in the city—and they constructed their knowledge structures through self-organization. What we can learn from this is that we don’t necessarily need to build large- scale and new museums; instead, we can maintain vitality through a diverse, network-like, medium- and small-scaled infrastructure.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: In this case, the Rome-based MAXXI represents instead a wonderful opportunity for you, because, we normally don’t think about contemporary art when speaking of Rome.

Hou Hanru: It’s not true that there is no contemporary art in Rome, only that it has been relatively quiet over the past twenty years. Rome has had remarkable artistic achievements over the past ﬁfty years; for instance, Arte Povera in the 1960s and Transavanguardia in the 1970 and 80s.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Having said that, since its grand inauguration in May 2010, MAXXI has seemed to struggle with a precarious ﬁnancial situation and a lack of visibility on the international scene. So, in 2013, what made you decide to accept this position?

38 Vol. 14 No. 2 MAXXI, National Museum Hou Hanru: One of my considerations was that where there is a crisis, of the 21st Century, Rome, exterior view. Photo: there is an opportunity. First, it is easier to bring change when the Bernard Touillon. Courtesy of Fondazione MAXXI, framework is not yet mature enough. Moreover, there is a sense of urgency Rome. when there is no money; and the stronger the sense of urgency, the more freedom you have. When everyone—including those who work in the museum and in the political sphere—is trapped in an urgent state, you can bring up audacious ideas about the direction the museum can take, and everyone is likely to follow you to make the machine run. In this case, you normally have more freedom than when you are working in a mature institution with an established structure and order.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: What kind of institution is MAXXI?

Hou Hanru: MAXXI is an independent foundation, with fifty to sixty percent of its funding coming from the state, and for the rest we need to find all kinds of support and sponsorship. We have a board of five or six individuals, mainly Italians, and an advisory committee composed of international personalities. We have a staff of about sixty people, so it’s a relatively small institution, especially in comparison to the huge surface area it occupies.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: What about the operating budget?

Hou Hanru: It’s about 1.2 or 1.3 million Euros a year, including administrative and personnel costs, so it is far from being sufficient. On the other hand, our decision-making process is relatively fast, highly flexible, and without too much bureaucracy. Of course, we still need some statistical figures to show the results of our work, for instance, annual audience attendance, but I don’t consider these statistics the only measure of success. What I emphasize more is the direction and the quality of our work, as well as some of its effects that are intangible and difficult to translate into numbers, for instance, our dialogue and communication with Italian and international media.

Vol. 14 No. 2 39 Yu Hsiao Hwei: For you, is it necessary to understand the power structure of MAXXI and the reportedly rather complicated cultural and political contexts in Italy?

Hou Hanru: Of course it is necessary; however, I feel I am related but also not related to this complexity. As someone arriving from the outside, I don’t need to consider all these big and small power struggles, connections, interpersonal relationships, and so on. The only condition I set was to have freedom of action. It was they who asked me to come, so I had at least a few months to develop things, and as long as I can accomplish some valuable things during this period, I can earn more time.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: So what directions do you hope to pursue with MAXXI? Could you talk about some exhibitions you already have organized as examples?

Hou Hanru: The ﬁrst exhibition I made—Remembering Is Not Enough Remembering Is Not Enough (Non Basta (Non Basta Ricordare)—opened in 2013 and was focused on the permanent Ricordare), 2014, installation view. Courtesy of collection of MAXXI. I emphasized the necessity to embrace a more open Fondazione MAXXI, Rome. vision and dynamic approach by bringing architecture and art collections together. MAXXI has two museums, MAXXI Architecture and MAXXI Art, and my ultimate goal is to blend them together, not only because to do so is in tune with contemporary art-making—today, art can no longer be separated into categories—but also because if contemporary art still has the quality of being public, it must be conveyed through social spaces, and architecture and the city are appropriate places in this regard; therefore, this blending is inevitable. When I discussed this exhibition with our curatorial team, I told them that the architecture of MAXXI is very unique;

40 Vol. 14 No. 2 MAXXI, National Museum of the 21st Century, Rome, exterior view. Photo: Bernard Touillon. Courtesy of Fondazione MAXXI, Rome.

MAXXI, National Museum it looks like an airport terminal of the 21st Century, Rome, interior view. Photo: Bernard building, and I call it a typical space Touillon. Courtesy of Fondazione MAXXI, Rome. of neoliberalism, as it is also like a shopping mall. Inside, there is nowhere for people to pause, not a single space to make one feel a sort of intimacy or to allow the audience to develop an intimate relationship with artworks. Therefore, other than suggesting some themes, including the city, the social and political actions, the human dramas, etc., to organize the dialogues and interactions between architecture and art, I also created a small intimate space called “the genius room” to display architects’ and artists’ manuscripts, sketches, and models. Franz West’s sofas were also arranged in the space to allow people to sit down, to read and think quietly, to try to understand what was going on in an artist’s head the moment when ideas were generated, and to think about the meaning of the collection.

MAXXI, National Museum One of the major issues my of the 21st Century, Rome, interior view. Photo: Bernard curatorial work of the last ten Touillon. Courtesy of Fondazione MAXXI, Rome. years has tried to address is the “publicness” of art. Art is not only a particular language of expression, but also a process of creating spaces in society that are public. The relationship of art to politics, society, and so-called democracy has always been my central subject. All of the biennials and all kinds of large and small exhibitions that I have made—including the exhibition By Day, By Night: Some (Special) Things a Museum Can Do, which I curated at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai in 2010 or when I helped create the Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou a couple of years ago, or served over a long period of time as consultant and advisor for many institutions in different places, including the Walker

Vol. 14 No. 2 41 Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. All of these experiences provide enlightenment: What is the publicness of an art institution? In an era of so-called “privatization,” when the control or ownership of everything is becoming private, how can we maintain the publicness of art? In the many biennials I have curated, including Lyon, Istanbul, and Auckland, there are projects directly dealing with the public sphere, including doing projects in the suburbs, in the peripheries, or places where there is no art. In my curatorial practice, I don’t just consider whether the exhibition is beautiful; more importantly, I consider what inﬂuence will it exert on the public. What can it bring to the public? What role does the public play in the meaning-making process of art? For me, it seems quite natural to pass from curating to creating or re-creating the institution.

Justin Bennet, Untitled, 2014, collage and ink on paper, 28 x 42 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Another example is the 2014 exhibition Open Museum, Open City, which is also one of the several ideas I suggested on my arrival at MAXXI. Ultimately, it’s about dealing with this important question: How can a museum of the twenty-ﬁrst century maintain its publicness within a process of globalization and privatization? What does it mean to be public? I want to bring the concept of the ancient Roman forum into public view again. The Roman forum was a combination of market and political forum. It was the prototype of what a democratic society should be. However, today the Roman forum has basically become a tourist resort or a consumer product. How can MAXXI open a new “forum” to revitalize public life—a public life that revolves around pluralistic debates? Open Museum, Open City embodied MAXXI’s commitment to open a forum-like space.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Even if the content of the debates taking place in this forum may be different from, or even in opposition with, the ideas or the values you advocate?

Hou Hanru: But this is what a debate is about! After opening the museum, what can one do inside the entirely empty space? Other than responding to the public’s expectations, it is also about participation, about involving the public. The whole process should be engaged with criticality—that is, we

42 Vol. 14 No. 2 Cevdet Erek, A Room of Rhythms—Curva, 2014, installation view at MAXXI, Rome. Photo: Giorgia Romiti. Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI, Rome.

Philippe Rahm, Sublimated Music, 2014, installation view at MAXXI, Rome. Photo: Giorgia Romiti. Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI, Rome.

must go on with our critical thinking about contemporary society, culture, in particular the “society of the spectacle,” and do so by responding to the development of image technologies. For instance, Open Museum, Open City is a project without any images. For a period of six weeks, the museum was completely emptied out, and we invited artists to fill it with sounds. We also invited them to redefine the nature of each space within the museum in terms of its relationship with nature, city, intimate spaces, utopian ideas, music, architecture, and so on. What does sound work represent? First, it’s immaterial, and this immateriality is a critical response to artworks as commodities and consumer goods today. Second, it’s free and uncontrollable. As an art institution and a public space, MAXXI should be a laboratory that experiments freely. In this laboratory, the relationships between works, between works and people, between people, and between spaces should all be brought together, not kept apart. Anyway, the sounds are uncontrollable and will spread all around. A sound work might overlap with another in some places. This exhibition also deals with some of the questions that I always care about. What it disrupts is the modernist, false notion of the autonomy of art, or the “self-containment” or “selfishness” of an artwork or an artist— many artists do not want other artists next to them in an exhibition. A video

Vol. 14 No. 2 43 work must be displayed in a soundproof darkened room, and not disturbed by other works nearby—this is what I have always opposed.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: So it’s not simply about making a sound art exhibition, but it’s also about expressing a political statement?

Bill Fontana, Sonic Mappings, 2014, backstage, Trevi fountain, Rome. Courtesy of the artist.

Hou Hanru: In the exhibitions I curate, sounds always concur, mix, and blend together. It is not just about making formal experiments; it is actually the expression of views with political implications: Is an artist still only concerned with self-expression, as in the Romantic era? Cannot he or she allow the presence of other artists? Does art-making consist only of personal expression? There is, in fact, an expression of intersubjectivity in art, so how do we reflect this? And how do we redefine the so-called civil society, democracy, and publicness? We directly and critically addressed this series of questions in Open Museum, Open City. Another question is the temporariness of art. Art used to be regarded as something permanent and would never ever change once completed. I would argue, however, that an artwork starts a new life when it enters the public sphere. For instance, in Remembering Is Not Enough, I invited many artists in the collection to perform their original works again, or do a new performance based on our collection. During the nine months of the exhibition, we staged new performances every week. In Open Museum, Open City, various projects, including the projection of films, performances, theatre, and concerts were staged on Thursday afternoons and evenings; there was also a public forum. Referring to the Ancient Roman Forum and the Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, my goal was to bring all kinds of topics regarding politics, society, and culture back to the museum and discuss them as essential questions. Furthermore, we have a series of programs, including storytelling, that invite the public to participate. We also collaborate with an artist-run web radio to create radio programs, that are also streamed online, at MAXXI, thus integrating their programs into the museum. In addition, we have developed a new application for smartphones and tablets, and a new website, inviting the public to send their works to be broadcast on our web radio.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: In the past, as an independent curator, you only needed to focus on carrying out your own ideas in an exhibition; now it may be more about leading and coordinating the curatorial team. Could you talk about this?

44 Vol. 14 No. 2 Chiara Fumai, Shut Up, Actually Talk, performance, 2012–14, view of performance at Villa Medici, Rome, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.

Tahmineh Monzavi, Hou Hanru: I accepted the job Bridal Gown Studio, Mokhberodoleh, Tehran, in August 2013. My appointment 2007–11, silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the artist. was announced in late August, and I met the team and held our very first meeting in September. At that time, my idea was already to bring the whole museum—all of the departments from curatorial, education, communications, administration, marketing to financing—together. And I told them that from now on, all of the exhibition programs and curatorial work would be discussed and conducted collectively by the so-called “collective intelligence.” Our curatorial team is relatively young. Although they have experience working at MAXXI, they are still highly adaptable and are enthusiastic and open to new ways of working. I also shared with them my opinions regarding the orientation of the programs. The first step is, as I mentioned earlier, the dialogue or blending between architecture and art; the second step is to rediscover the cultural identity of Italy and that of Europe in the process of globalization. I regard Italy’s particular cultural and geographical position—as the European front in the Mediterranean region—as a key factor, so this year we have an exhibition on art from Iran, Unedited History: Iran 1960–2014, next year there will be an exhibition on Istanbul, and the year after we will have an exhibition on Beirut. All of these exhibitions are basically conceived as combining different perspectives of art, culture, city, architecture, etc.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Does this multicultural perspective also contribute to facilitating fund raising for the museum’s programs? Is it a solution to MAXXI’s shortage of funds?

Vol. 14 No. 2 45 Hou Hanru: I would never do an exhibition on Iran or Iraq because they have money. I am not that stupid! In fact, if you feel a subject is important, there is always a way to find money to do it, and the money doesn’t necessarily come from that place. Many people think that because I am Chinese, that China is so dynamic, that I can find a lot of money from China. This is not at all how I function, and I will definitely not do Chinese shows for this reason. Instead, I think in a reversed way. I would ask these questions: Why is China economically powerful? Why is China so dynamic? If the subject is really interesting, I will certainly do a show on it and try to find money for it. In fact, I often do things that, in the eyes of other people, are arduous yet thankless. For instance, I am currently doing a project called Independent, which consists of turning the entrance hall and the central staircase of the museum into a platform for the next four or five years. We will invite, each year, four or five Italian independent artists- run organizations to do projects in those spaces. We also announced an open call on our website for submissions of information on independent organizations in Italy to develop an archive, online mapping, and possible presentations at the museum—and, hopefully, in the near future we will expand this call to include independent organizations around the world. Why do we want to give these organizations an Internet platform, and why do we consider it one of the essential elements of MAXXI? Italy is a decentralized country, and dynamic and interesting phenomena do not necessarily occur only in big cities like Rome or Milan. As a national museum, we have the responsibility to reflect and present this situation, so the museum can become a platform for bringing these self-run artist organizations together to stress, on the one hand, the importance of art as independent expression—in fact, this independence and freedom is the core of any artistic expression—and, on the other, to change the definitions of the museum through doing so. What is a national museum? What is a museum located in the capital city of a country? Isn’t it our responsibility to create a platform that will bring challenges to the definition of a museum?

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Are you going to develop more co-productions with other museums?

Hou Hanru: Co-productions don’t necessarily save us a lot of money. The main function of co-productions is to build more relationships and make the exhibitions seen by more people in more places. Collaboration and mutual support among institutions is extremely important. From a long-term perspective, the reason that all museums and art institutions can survive today is that there is an international network, which is even more important than simply ﬁnancial collaborations. Therefore, co-producing an exhibition with many museums is more about building an international network of solidarity.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: The various exhibitions I saw at MAXXI today happen to share some characteristics: they all focus more or less on an extended period of time and show a sense of history, unlike most museums today that tend to only focus on “now” and “the present time.” For instance, even though

46 Vol. 14 No. 2 Huang Yongping, La carte du monde, 2000–01, wood, paper, metal, wall painting. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist.

Huang Yongping’s solo show is composed of relatively recent works, you try to trace his creative thinking over a much longer time span, through the display of manuscripts and drawings taken from his notebooks.

Left: Hunag Yongping, Lamb Plant, 2012, taxidermy animal, soil, bonsai, terracotta pot. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Right: Huang Yongping, Construction Site, 2007, view of installation at the 10th International Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul, 2007. ©Huang Yongping. Photo: DR. Courtesy of the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris.

Hou Hanru: Actually, Huang Yongping addresses in his works what’s happening today; besides, he always practices divination to see into the future. The terrorist attacks that took place recently in Paris and religious conﬂicts on the global scale were all forecast in his projects.1 Regarding the exhibitions that are on at the moment at MAXXI, some of them had been decided before my arrival and are mainly collaborative projects with other museums. The curators already set the tone for the exhibitions, which include historical materials and archives. However, the development that I envisage for MAXXI should imply a sense of time through a sense of process. It doesn’t just show what’s happening today; it also refers to what happened in the past as well as what will be in the future. It’s natural for an exhibition to show a sense of history or a sense of time because art in itself doesn’t simply consist of spectacular and static images, but, more importantly, it’s about something that has life, a process, life and death, rebirth, and death again—and, therefore, a historical perspective. This sense of history and historical dimension is increasingly rejected in today’s culture. For me, how to reintroduce the dimension of time into contemporaneity is extremely important. We need to use today’s

Vol. 14 No. 2 47 technologies, from the Internet to social media, because they are capable of immediately spreading information around the world, and at the same time we need to think about how to continue to ﬁnd a place for artistic practices within all of this. What is the distinction between the position of artistic practices and that of communication through social media? Do we need to continue to keep a historical reﬂection, to feel our life as a process instead of instant accumulations or collages? Our communication nowadays is basically an instant collage rather than a pluralized system with a dimension of time. What interests me is that as an art institution, MAXXI is not simply an imitation or extension of these contemporary communication technologies but uses this technological environment to build a living organism that resists and has another dimension. This is the reason I feel we still need museums. As a matter of fact, artists today can simply make art on the Internet, lead a comfortable life, and become famous by selling their works in the market; they don’t need to rely on any museum. So why do we still need to have museums? One of the key factors is that its dimension of time provides us a possibility, a possibility to live a truly lively life in a direct, instant, consumerist environment.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Regarding the publicness of art institutions, you have been the artistic director of MAXXI for almost one and half years. Does the museum’s interaction with the public now meet your expectations?

Hou Hanru: I don’t really have any clear expectations, but I do care about interaction with the local audience, and I hope that the public can actively take part in the museum’s activities, including the process of making meaning of artworks. For instance, I made an experiment with the education department when we organized the exhibition on our collection. I asked them to ﬁnd people from all levels of the society, including the museum’s neighbours, to voluntarily enroll in our projects. We provided them with information on the museum’s collection, let them study on their own, and then had them present the works to other members of the public in the museum. We also work with some schools in Rome. For instance, we collaborated with a school in the more remote, poorer suburbs, where there are many immigrants. We brought a group of students aged between thirteen and sixteen to visit exhibitions at MAXXI and let them make their own interpretations about the works they saw or use the artist’s language they saw in the exhibitions to tell their own stories. For me, some interpretations are even more interesting than the works in our collection.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Huang Yongping is the ﬁrst solo show you have done at MAXXI. Why this choice?

Hou Hanru: I have worked with Huang Yongping for more than thirty years. I also feel that his importance as an artist still needs to be stressed, that he deserves more international recognition. His works are very profound and philosophical, requiring a lot of effort to understand. He is not an artist who works with consumerist symbols. An artist like him

48 Vol. 14 No. 2 needs more support in our times from institutions like MAXXI. This also reflects why we need public art institutions, and why we are different from the market. Other than the importance of Huang Yongping’s works in themselves, I also feel this is a milestone. Given that I have an opportunity to lead a museum today, one of the things I want to do is to support and promote artists who, like Huang Yongping, address key issues in today’s world in a profound manner. This will bear witness to our role as a public art institution and show our fundamental differences to art fairs and other increasingly commercial art events—including many biennials, which are increasingly influenced by the market. Inevitably, we do entertain relationships of collaboration, communication, and mutual influences with the market, but, taking Huang Yongping’s exhibition as an example, this could only happen in an institution like MAXXI, and it’s difficult to see it take place in other places, even those that may look like a museum.

Yu Hsiao Hwei: Why?

Hou Hanru: As I mentioned before, I strive to position MAXXI as a public art institution in today’s social environment, as a laboratory to build or recover civil society in the era of privatization and capitalism. So for artists like Huang Yongping or others, with whom we are discussing collaborations, the conditions we provide them may not be possible in other places. For instance, many museums in the United States are more inﬂuenced by collectors or their board. Many new or old museums are constantly under expansion and renovation, only resulting in looking more and more like warehouses for rich people’s collections. For me, if my museum became like this, it would be a total failure!

Yu Hsiao Hwei: For many Italians and Europeans, you are a “Chinese” curator, and you happen to be showing a “Chinese” artist—although he lives in Paris and has French citizenship. In addition, the two institutions you are collaborating with on this exhibition are also Chinese museums. It seems that the “Chinese” characteristic is particularly evident in this exhibition. Why didn’t you try to ﬁnd a non-Chinese partner in the ﬁrst place, to attenuate or blur the “Chineseness” of the show?

Hou Hanru: All this actually unfolds in a quite natural way. First of all, institutions that support Huang Yongping’s work are, to a large extent, in China, because his work has been closely related to China over the last ten years. At the same time, his work addresses some world issues from a very personal yet particular position; that is, he has been profoundly inﬂuenced by Chinese culture and has witnessed ﬁrst-hand the cultural transformations that have accompanied dramatic social changes in China. Second, he doesn’t really represent China; but, instead, he represents values that are alternative, but still closely related, to so-called mainstream Western-centrism. It is, however, at the same time highly critical of this mainstream itself—and that is further strengthened because of his experience of living in the West as an immigrant. Whether he is Chinese

Vol. 14 No. 2 49 or not is of secondary importance, Top: Huang Yongping, The Prayer Chair, 2010, but if the inﬂuence of Chinese wood chair. Photo: Cecilia Fiorenza. Courtesy of the culture allows him to have this artist. particular perspective, this is a good Left: Huang Yongping, Bâton de Serpent, 2014, aluminum. thing. As to why the exhibition Photo: Musacchio and Lanniello. Courtesy of will tour to China later on, that’s the artist, Red Brick Art also a natural development. I Museum, Beijing, and Fondazione MAXXI, Rome. already was a consultant for the Redbrick Museum, in Beijing, before my appointment at MAXXI, and I gave them some advice on possible directions for the museum, including discussions of Huang Yongping’s works and the potential of working with him. Therefore, when I considered doing Huang Yongping’s solo show at MAXXI, I naturally thought of collaborating with Redbrick. I feel that although MAXXI and Redbrick are different institutions, they may have many things to discuss and explore together, and Huang Yongping’s exhibition offers such an opportunity. It’s also easier in terms of technical collaboration. Since the exhibition will tour to Beijing and I happen to be consultant for Power Station of Art in Shanghai, I thought it might be a good idea to have it tour to Shanghai afterwards (in 2016). But this doesn’t mean that the exhibition won’t go to other places. Besides, the show will change and evolve in each place it will be presented.

Notes 1. This interview was initially conducted in December 2014, then amended by Hou Hanru in January 2015 after a series of terrorist attacks in and around Paris that shook French and international society.

50 Vol. 14 No. 2 Julie Chun Pursuing Subjectivity: The 10th Shanghai Biennale—Social Factory

Li Xiaofei standing next to t was Thursday, November Assembly Line Projects— Unknown Facets, 2014, mixed 20, 2014, 2:00 p.m. With two media installation. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Private days remaining until the press Collection. I conference to launch the opening of the 10th Shanghai Biennale, the vast walls of the cavernous Power Station of Art (PSA) remained starkly empty except for the patch of brightly coloured Flags for Organizations (1978), by the London collective Art & Language. Large crates holding precious cargoes of artworks from across China and the world were being delivered and fork-lifted into the interior space. In the centre of the expansive ground level ﬂoor stood a lone grand piano, patiently waiting to be connected to a long paneled computer circuit board while the Chinese artist Li Xiaofei and his assistant calmly removed the bubble wrap and plastic encasing from his large fabricated sculpture Assembly Line Projects—Unknown Facets (2014). Alongside a retinue of sleep-deprived museum staff, a small army of Chinese labourers in hard hats was running about, shouting directions to each other as if working at a construction site rather than an art museum. On the third level, one vast gallery was strewn with grimy blankets, not as a work of art, but indicating that these workmen had been sleeping on the premises and would continue to do so in order to complete the installation of a major international biennial in exactly forty-eight hours.

Left: Power Station of Art, Shanghai, ground level, November 20, 2014. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Right: Li Xiaofei’s assistant removing the bubble wrap from his sculpture, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, ground level, November 20, 2014. Photo: Kerstin Brandes.

Left: Power Station of Art, Shanghai, ground level, November 20, 2014. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Right: Power Station of Art, Shanghai, ground level, November 20, 2014. Photo: Kerstin Brandes.

Vol. 14 No. 2 51 As I stood among the labourers on the expansive second-level gallery of Power Station of Art, Shanghai, second level the former thermal power plant, the scene before me resonated in visible entrance gallery, November 20, 2014. Photo: Kerstin form the title of the 2014 Shanghai Biennale, Social Factory, that asks us Brandes. “to conceive of ‘production’ in the widest possible sense.”1 Indeed, the production of a biennial, with its international artworks selected by the curator to convey the desired theme and exhibition intent itself qualiﬁes as a process of manufacturing—a discursive site with attendant meanings. The 10th Shanghai Biennale also rests on the premise of real and imagined modalities for the production and consumption of dialogic possibilities. Anselm Franke, the Berlin-based curator in charge of directing the Biennale, explains his concept:

Social Factory refers to the Anselm Franke, Chief Curator of the 10th Shanghai fabrication of society, and to Biennale, November 22, 2014. Photo: Kerstin forms of production Brandes. beyond the factory ﬂoor. . . . It addresses the ongoing and expanding processes of factorization, which have now reached aspects not only [of] the production of material goods, but of our most intimate lives. Digital proﬁling and the algorithms of social media turn our social life into a factory. I wanted to contrast this development with references to earlier modernist ideas of constructing society, simply to raise questions about our understanding of the way we create social reality today. Is the only force of social production that we still “trust” and believe

52 Vol. 14 No. 2 in today that of capital and technology? Where does this leave culture, and the power of ideas? Where does this leave individual subjects? Do we experience ourselves as produced, or as producers of reality?2

Yan Jun, Noise Hypnotizing, Since January 2013, Franke has 2014, sound installation, massage beds. Photo: been the head of Visual Arts and Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist. Film at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. He made his foray into the Asian contemporary art scene in 2012, when he curated the 8th Taipei Biennial. The announcement of his selection as the chief curator for the 10th Shanghai Biennale occurred in April of 2014, granting him only about seven months to perform what many art insiders would consider a miracle, given the challenges of operating within an intensely bureaucratic Chinese system. Possessed of an astute capacity for arguing his points and keenly articulating his thoughts, Franke comes with a strong background in theatre and ﬁlm, having previously worked as the assistant director under the experimental and controversial German director Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010), which likely accounts for the prodigious number of media-based installations within the core program of the Shanghai Biennale as well as the inclusion of music and ﬁlm as independent artistic categories.

Press conference to launch the 10th Shanghai Biennale, November 22, 2014. Photo: Kerstin Brandes.

When the Shanghai Biennale was first established, in 1996, it was centrally located in the heart of the city in People’s Square. Within the Shanghai Art Museum (currently vacant), the inaugural Biennale opened with a showcase of oil paintings by Chinese artists. Eventually gaining momentum and global attention through the years, in 2012, the 9th Shanghai Biennale found its new abode at the PSA, the site of the defunct Nanshi coal-powered thermal plant (in operation from 1955 to 2007) to become “mainland China’s first public museum of contemporary art” under the auspices of the Shanghai Municipal Government.3 The year 2014 also marks a few pivotal “firsts” in the history of the Shanghai Biennale. For the 10th edition, Gong Yan, director of the Power Station of Art, declared, “Anselm Franke is not only the youngest curator in the history of the Shanghai Biennale, but also the first foreign curator selected to be its Chief Curator.”4 While

Vol. 14 No. 2 53 Exterior view, Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Photo: Pat Remington.

collaborating closely with co-curators Freya Chou, Cosmin Costinas, and Liu Xiao, Franke nonetheless was granted greater liberties in his selection of the theme and artists, including in his appointment of Nicholas Bussman as the Music Program Curator and Hila Peleg as the Film Program Curator, which added a much-needed audio and digital dimension to the Biennale’s pre-existing format.

On the opening night of November 22, for invited VIP guests and members of the media, the ground level of the PSA did not appear vastly different from how it appeared two days earlier, with the exception that the work crew and forklifts had been cleared. Li Xiaofei’s sculptures replicating pre-fabricated anti-wave barriers (structures placed between the sea and land to prevent erosion of coastlines by waves and silt) were now removed from their wrappings and placed not far from where they were standing when I had left the premises forty-ﬁve hours ago. The ensemble of orange, blue, yellow, and green ﬂags by Art & Language was again the only splash of colour to be witnessed upon entering the immense interior of the museum. The piano in the middle of the room, dwarfed in the endlessly

54 Vol. 14 No. 2 soaring space, was ﬁnally hooked up to the computer circuit board and fully activated. Whenever a Chinese character was projected onto the screen behind the piano, the device emitted a jarringly intense sound akin to ﬁve three-year-olds pounding on the keyboard simultaneously.

Technician hooking up This sound installation by Peter Peter Ablinger’s The Truth Or: How to Teach Ablinger, entitled The Truth Or: The Piano Chinese, 2014, computer-controlled How to Teach The Piano Chinese piano and screened text. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. (2014), explores the artist’s interest in expanding the auditory space for the audience based on the German word Rauschen, an important term for which Ablinger believes no satisfactory equivalent translation exists in English. Voices and Pianos and Quadraturen are a series of compositions the artist has been developing since the 1990s that make use of voice recordings for an automated piano. For the site-specific commission at the Shanghai Biennale, Ablinger recorded the tonal pronunciations of 实事求是 (“seek truth from facts”) in spoken Mandarin, which he processed and plays back utilizing reverse digital technology. Thus, what our aural senses detect are not merely voices or even sound or noise, but signals. The chengyu that is invoked refers to the immortalized phrase first uttered in 1938 by Mao Zedong and later quoted in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping. According to Franke, “the very definition of a ‘fact’, to a certain degree, is equally contestable; facts too are social constructions, and the constructed nature of a fact calls upon the participation of multiple other-than-human factors and agencies.”5 By summoning the much-used and -abused phrase and then re-processing the signifier and the signified through an audible yet ambivalent entanglement, the power of spoken words concretized as a historical paragon is potently challenged. While the installation is far from visually appealing (it is, after all, a plain piano with keyboards hooked up to a circuit board and a laptop), the concept, when it is fully explored, is worth closer consideration if the viewer is able to withstand the assault on the aural sense.

Perhaps in keeping with the notion of people and commodities circulating within the structure of a factory, there is a reappearance of the same names of artists and even a few similar artworks from recent biennials and prominent exhibitions that have taken place in the past two years. On the long roster comprising the names of seventy-ﬁve individuals and groups of artists in the Shanghai Biennale, fourteen (accounting for a little more than 18%) are artists who had collaborated previously with Franke in the 2012 Taipei Biennale.6 Moreover, other artists represented in the Shanghai Biennale who had participated in recent biennials include Carlos Amorales and Li Xiaofei at the 8th Berlin Biennale in 2014, and Neil Beloufa and the late artists KP Brehmer and Harun Farocki at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. These numbers and names may seem irrelevant and even trivial, yet the recurrences nonetheless draw attention to an observation made by Pamela M. Lee, a critical theorist and a professor of Art History at Stanford University, who notes that biennials, as a globalized platform, “routinely suffer from a fatal bout of sameness: same high-proﬁle international

Vol. 14 No. 2 55 curators, same batch of artists, same jaded art world audience.”7 When asked for a response to this statement, Franke commented:

I would leave it up to the critical viewer to assess to what degree the Shanghai Biennale falls into this trap. I have decided early in my work biography that I would try to change structures and institutions from within. The question for me is not whether Pamela Lee is right—she is to a certain degree—the question [is] whether we have answers to this situation, whether we know how to transform it, and to use contemporary art to other ends than she describes. I believe that many of the works in this biennale do just that.8

Due to cultural dispositions and lack of access to the complex modalities governing contemporary art, I have to wonder how successfully structures and institutions can change from within when biennials tend to require relatively sophisticated audiences who are able to fully grasp the context, the nuances, and the intricacies of artistic discourse, which can often be opaque and frequently alienating to the general public. As in years past, there are no museum docents at the Biennale who can provide even a rudimentary introduction to the Biennale’s theme to the visitors.9 The wall text, inscribed in English and Chinese, that provides an entry to the Biennale on the main foyer is adorned with terms like “sociometric,” “diversification of subjectification,” and “social hieroglyph,” making the exhibition concept difficult to comprehend for even the native-language speaking audiences of either English or Mandarin.10 The audio guide for the Shanghai Biennale also is not very useful, since it is a direct articulation of the texts on the walls.

While Franke made it clear that he was not involved with the public art education aspect of the Shanghai Biennale, he did manage to produce a comprehensive exhibition catalogue, albeit a preliminary and thus “unofﬁcial” version that was available on opening night—a true anomaly in China, where most catalogues are usually published weeks or even months later. The compiled texts serve as a signiﬁcant compendium, with essays penned by Franke, Bussman, and Peleg, along with Tang Xiaobing, Yan Jun, Liu Xiao, Alexander Kluge, Chan Koonchung, Hans-Christian Dany, Zhang Yaxuan, and Ayako Saito, as well as brief statements by most of the represented artists about their work. Yet not every visitor to the Biennale will be purchasing the fairly expensive expository publication; thus the only available information resource for the audience are the wall labels, where partial texts from artists’ pages in the catalogue have been transcribed.

Such a supplementary context can assist as a point of entry to an artwork for the viewing public; yet PSA has been plagued this year, as it was two years ago, by its erratic practice in the way it disseminates informative material. Some wall labels are separated from the artwork and placed in completely different locations while some are completely absent. Accordingly, without any referent, the subtext for Adrian Melis’ installation,

56 Vol. 14 No. 2 Museum janitor clearing The Value of Absence—Excuses to trash placed on top of Erik Steinbrecher’s World be Absent from Your Work Center Ocean, 2014, on the opening night of the 10th Shanghai (2012), was altogether missed. This Biennale, November work, composed of a standard 22, 2014. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. wooden desk and chair with a small TV monitor, was irreverently shoved to one corner on the second level without any explanatory information. Many visitors, assuming the desk belonged to the museum security guards, began leaving trash and empty water bottles on top.11 This was also the fate of Erik Steinbrecher’s World Ocean (2014), a 1,000-litre tank representing a self-contained “global ocean” that the artist heavily seasoned with salt collected from various parts of the world. Without an identifying wall label (later added), the water container was used as a convenient receptacle for guests to dump empty Bacardi bottles served on opening night, keeping one museum janitor extremely busy the entire duration of the evening as she sorted the bottles to be thrown away from the canisters of salt that were part of the artwork. When asked how he intended to engage the local public—the Chinese audience who are interested in art but do not have the theoretical basis for understanding it— and engender discourse for museum audiences who are non-art-industry people, Franke replied:

I ﬁnd often that people have a much better understanding of complexity than we believe. Many people are much more happy to engage with something complex, if they feel that its concerns are real, than with something that is produced in order to communicate to the “general” audience. When professionals try to make exhibitions “for the general public” the result is often terrible, full of clichés, and it underestimates people. I try to be responsible in my language, and not to be arrogant (but of course I do not always succeed), but also never to underestimate the intelligence of the viewer. It is not primarily about what is written, but about how exhibitions are constructed and staged. People feel when there is something genuine at stake, when they can partake in the construction of meaning, when they can sense that the artist is part of a struggle over meaning that also concerns their lives.13

More and more, many curators (and exhibition makers) believe in placing greater emphasis on the immersive experience of exhibitions, some even dismissing wall texts altogether because they are believed to have didactic intent. This seemingly contemporary approach, however, has been debated since at least the early decades of the twentieth century. Modernists such as Kenneth Clark, former Director of National Gallery London, insisted in 1945: “The important thing is our direct response to them [works of art]. We do not value pictures as documents. We do not want to know about

Vol. 14 No. 2 57 them, we want to know them, and explanations may often interfere with our direct responses.”13 While displays of artwork can be as pluralistic as the works themselves, the failure of museums to provide a sociocultural context for understanding works of art to the general public has conversely been criticized by art scholars from John Cotton Dana to Meyer Schapiro.14 As Richard Sandell, professor of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, has written, “there is no neutral position, and exhibition makers face choices concerning the way they develop narratives.”15 If exhibitions are inherently imbibed with a certain curatorial intent, why should it be merely insinuated rather than clearly communicated?

For this exhibition, and for many biennials, attendant forms providing Stephen Willats, Diagram Wall, 2008, mixed media information such as proper audio guides, a descriptive museum map, installation based on exhibition at Casco, Utrecht, and forums for public education should not be mere adjuncts, but built Netherlands, Photo: Kerstin into the framework of the overall project as necessary mediations for Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lumen expansively opening the spectator’s field of subjectivity. The immense realm Travo, Amsterdam. of contemporary art, often shrouded in obtuse rhetoric and overladen with complicated theoretical references, can be a challenge to comprehend, even for those versed and working in the field. Thus, supplemental descriptors and basic context describing the work of art are required, not to offer pedagogic authority, but as assistive tools for rendering exhibitions accessible. Whether a visitor to the exhibition opts to engage with it or not is up to the individual, but even in a cosmopolitan city like Shanghai, many Chinese would not be able to readily make the cultural connections without interpretive support. Most viewers standing in front of Stephen Willats’s Diagram Wall (2008), even with the accompanying wall label, were unable to grasp the powerful critique the installation proposes about the polemical nature of the Social Sciences. To the viewer unfamiliar with the academic intent during the era of the Cold War to legitimate this field as a branch of the sciences by attempting to hypothesize human actions into predictable data and sequences, Willats’s artwork loses its potency. This is evinced in a response from Sophia Wu, a Chinese woman in her early twenties. When asked what she saw in the diagrams, she remarked, “I think it’s a very pretty design.” Even to a German student studying at East China Normal University in Shanghai, the wall rendering was “an interesting optical

58 Vol. 14 No. 2 illusion, but one that I don’t fully understand because I haven’t yet studied this ‘homeostat model’ the label is referring to.”16

Top panel: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, The Day Nobody Died—The Brothers’ Suicide, June 7, 2008, 2008, C-41 print. Bottom panel: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, The Day Nobody Died III, June 10, 2008, 2008, C-41 print. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artists.

Trevor Yeung, Maracujá Road, 2014, installation. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist.

Another example in which the context was not properly conveyed is a work comprising two large-format photographic panels, The Day Nobody Died (2008), by the London-based duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Placed one above the other in the dimly lit second-level hallway, this compelling work drew very few viewers.One major factor in its being overlooked was its poor placement. As people exited the second-level galleries and made their way along the dim corridor, all inquisitive eyes were fixed on the alluring blue-green glow of Trevor Yeung’s Maracujá Road (2014), a large conglomeration of invasive plants placed in pots and assembled beneath a suspended bamboo lattice. The considerable scale of Yeung’s display, with its mesmerizing light, had the effect of overshadowing the obscurely situated two-dimensional work by Broomberg and Chanarin. Further compounding the displacement of the photographic panels was the lack of any visible information pertaining to the work’s title, authorship, and date of creation, which all serve as integral identifiers for the viewer in locating the meaning of the artwork. Without a proper knowledge of the context, the image on the upper panel resembles the blurred outlines of a flame, while the lower panel appears as a Photoshopped collage of repetitive white clouds on a blue background edged with sharp contours.

Vol. 14 No. 2 59 During the first of the independently guided Biennale talks that I offered for the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) in China, I relayed the circumstances of the place Broomberg and Chanarin’s work was created (Afghanistan), its date (June 2008), and why it was entitled The Day Nobody Died. In June 2008, the two artists joined the British Army on the front line in Helmand province in Afghanistan. According to the artist statement in the exhibition catalogue, each day was met with casualties until the fifth day when “nobody died.”17 Rather than documenting the events with the use of conventional cameras, they created images on a roll of photographic paper using a simple lightproof cardboard box. Their responses to each day’s fatalities and mundane events were recorded, yet the “results den[ied] the viewer the cathartic effect offered up by the conventional language of photographic responses to conflict and suffering.”18 The RAS members are well-educated expats of the Shanghai community, yet they voiced that the meaning for much of the work in the Biennale would have been lost to them without the proper cues and background information that was provided them on this talk.

The group, which began with sixteen members, soon expanded to encompass an additional twenty-plus roaming Chinese viewers. This has been a common phenomenon each time I deliver guided talks at museums in Shanghai: The locals are just as interested in learning about foreign art as they are in learning about art from China. Cultural familiarity is of great beneﬁt but, as Raina Zhang, a young Shanghainese ofﬁce professional, commented, “there are so many aspects of Chinese contemporary art that are undeniably obscure for even a Chinese to understand.”

Chen Chieh-Jen, Transformation Text (Book of Bianwen), 2014, mixed media installation. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist.

Fortunately, not all works in the 10th Shanghai Biennale remained obdurately inaccessible. Artists such as Chen Chieh-jen attempted to abate the dislocation of meaning for his installation Transformation Text (Book of Bianwen) (2014) by providing as much visual and written contextualization for viewers to engage with in comprehending his artistic practice. Adapting the traditional format of bianwen, a vernacular literary form developed by monks during the Tang dynasty for the propagation of Buddhism, Chen Chieh-jen conveys the revelations arising from a series of personal investigations. According to the artist, to place the ancient

60 Vol. 14 No. 2 sages in a “contemporary society would be to re-imagine or redefine their significance. They would no longer be interpreters, translators, or re-writers, but crusaders for canonical theory, transformers of today’s complex political forms via demystification, or promoters of open ended stories and indefinite narrative forms.”19 Thus, Chen Chieh-jen creates a contemporary bianwen with audio-visual narratives to expose the plight of displaced factory workers and the marginalized segments of society who bear witness to injustices that have taken place in Taiwan—likely also alluding to similar places elsewhere in the world. Fully elaborated in a comprehensible text (Chen Chieh-jen consistently provides “Artwork Context and Introduction” for each project), the photographs and video installations are aesthetically fused to bring heightened awareness to events that demand public attention. When one dedicates substantial time to reading the texts and documents and evaluating the images that Chen Chieh-jen has rendered with great sensitivity, one cannot help but be drawn into the vortex of these marginalized lives and pause to question the hegemonic role of capitalist power structures that at times border on absurdity.

Willem De Rooij, Bouquet, As with Chen Chieh-jen’s 2014 (begun 2005), mixed media. Photo: Kerstin installation, a great many works of Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Daniel art in the 10th Shanghai Biennale, Buchholz, Cologne and Berlin. including lengthy videos, are dependent upon the viewer’s time for thoughtful engagement. A few installations are readily accessible Mona Vatamanu and Florin upon initial encounter such as Tudor, Dust, 2007/14, installation. Photo: Kerstin Willem De Rooij’s live sculptural Brandes. Courtesy of the artists. series Bouquet (2014, begun 2005), consisting of large arrays of fresh flowers in vases placed atop white pedestals of a type that are usually reserved for sculptures in museums. The touch of the real (indeed, many spectators did come up to touch the flowers) and the fleeting nature of the quotidian floral bouquets had the effect of subverting the eminence of objects usually placed on pedestals as signifiers of cultural authority. Likewise, the long row of cement bags suspended along the wall and leaking dirt onto the floor entitled Dust (2007/2014), by Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, disrupts the concept of art’s pristine and elite status by tainting the sacred inner sanctums of the museum. Flowers and dirt are objects and materials representative of our banal lives as lived outside the walls of the museums—yet here they are in their mundane and decaying glory, provocatively in full view. In this context they raise the seminal question: Why is this art?

Also readily engaging is Nicholas Bussman’s The News Blues (2014), in which a live group of Chinese a capella choir sings the headlines of the morning newspaper. The cold, aloof, and often tragic occurrences of China’s daily reality take on an odd sense of lyricism, like the lofty strains of a Gregorian

Vol. 14 No. 2 61 chant, thus creating a paradox between form and content. According to Nicholas Bussman, The News Blues, 2014, live Bussman, “the work is structured like a game in which the performers must performance by a Chinese a capella choir. Photo: take . . . turns to follow each other, relying on group dynamics and make- Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy believe.”20 Although the live performance forms a core part of the Shanghai of the artist. Biennale’s Signal to Noise program, (the Music Program that constitutes the category of sound art) the presence of voices that “links the Biennale to external events, ﬁltered through the channel of ofﬁcial journalism,” is not offered “almost daily” for the duration of the biennale, as promised in the exhibition catalogue, but only on average eight times per month, according to a set timetable.21 “That is because I negotiated for the choir ensemble to be paid well and not humiliating local wages,” Nicholas Bussman explains.22 Similar to Peter Ablinger’s installation The Truth Or: How To Teach The Piano Chinese (2014), Bussman’s The News Blues, reveals the constructed nature of “fact” in the production of society thus reinforcing and supporting the premise of Social Factory.

To celebrate the significance of the anniversary of the 10th edition of the Shanghai Biennale, PSA has mounted a tribute in the lower level showcasing the trajectory and history of the Biennale. One significant member of the Academic Committee who has been involved consistently since 1998 and has witnessed the evolution of the Shanghai Biennale is Zheng Shengtian. Serving as the Vice Director of the Artistic Committee in 1998, when the exhibition was still rooted to the legacy of Chinese ink and oil painting, Zheng Shengtian was instrumental in forging an international presence for the 2000 biennale through funding and mediation to foster the inclusion of international artists and curators, thereby positioning the Shanghai Biennale as a global exhibition. “That meeting we had in 1999 at St. Marco Square after witnessing the Venice Biennale was a pivotal turning point. For leaders like Hou Hanru and Fan Di’an, it helped them to have a broader vision. Despite the criticism and resistance by the Chinese authorities, both in and out of the museum, Hou Hanru was able to secure a solid list of international artists for the 3rd edition as well as funding from the French government to send a team of installers because no one in Shanghai had the technical know-how at the time,” comments Zheng Shengtian.23 With recognizable names of high-profile artists such as Tadao Ando, Mathew Barney, Anish Kapoor, Anselm Keifer, and China’s very own Cai Guo-Qiang, who received the Golden Lion Award at the 1999 Venice Biennale, the 2000

62 Vol. 14 No. 2 Shanghai Biennale was a resounding success. Why? It met the aim and the mission established by the founding organizers.

Edgar Arceneaux, The Although it was never formally Algorithm Doesn’t Love You: From Detroit to drafted, the underlying agenda Shanghai, 2010–14), mixed media installation. Photo: of the Shanghai Biennale has Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy been predicated on the simple of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles principles that it be contemporary Projects. and international. Regarding internationalism, each successive Edgar Arceneaux, The Algorithm Doesn’t Love edition has brought forth greater You: From Detroit to numbers of foreign curators and Shanghai, 2010–14, mixed media installation. artists desirous of participating in Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and Shanghai. A second commitment Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles Projects. of the Biennale has been to produce a contemporary exhibition grounded upon the concept of urban development through the visual arts and to continue examining the relationship of past and future as it relates to Shanghai’s growth. To this end, such explorations as the foreboding The Algorithm Doesn’t Love You: From Detroit to Shanghai (2010–14) by Edgar Arceneaux, are emblematic of the meteoric rise and the consequential decline of prosperous civilizations. According to the artist’s statement, Edgar Arceneaux’s investigation is an archeology of the repressed and hidden layers of present metropolises thriving with factories surging with modes of consumer production.

The detritus of cardboard boxes and remnants of a once-prosperous Detroit covered in crystalized sugar serves as an elegiac omen for Victoria Elegant, an Australian residing in Shanghai, who remarked, “The relationship of these two distant yet interconnecting sites is quite haunting and strikingly revealing.” By linking the former glory of one city’s past with the rising grandeur of another, the artist, like a modern-day soothsayer, presents an augury of the disturbing and erosive forces that have overtaken even the world’s greatest empires.

Fomenting awareness and engendering subjectivity stands as one of the deﬁning features in the complicated relationship between the artists who conceive disruptive or immersive displays and the public who is given the epistemological challenge of forming a perceptive response. The mediator and negotiator who bears the responsibilities and challenges of bridging the gulf between subjectivities of the artist and the viewer is the curator.

Perhaps Franke’s inclusion of artists for the 10th Shanghai Biennale with those he has worked with in the 2012 Taipei Biennale might be due to his unique method of curation, which hinges on a continuing exploration of overlapping and linking concepts that—not quite transparent to general viewers—proceed from one exhibition to the next. Thus, to better understand the ideological premise of the Social Factory, one needs to step back and examine Franke’s 2012 Taipei Biennale and his world-touring exhibition Animism (begun 2010).

Vol. 14 No. 2 63 In a provocative shift, Franke Harun Farocki, Parallel II, 2012–14, HD video, 9 mins. turned the attention from the art Photo: Kerstin Brandes. of material culture back to the realm of the spiritual beginning with his exhibition Animism. The spiritual encompasses the limitless boundaries of the metaphysical, with its embrace of magic, occult, rituals, and religion. Prior to the domination of the Enlightenment, which was pervasive throughout Europe and the rest of the world, mysticism prevailed through the tradition of oral narratives. Whether a chalice or a stone statue, ordinary objects were invested with extraordinary powers because they were touched with oratory and spiritual distinction. Moreover, engagement with holy relics or ritual vessels was bound to induce a subjective response precisely because the encounter affected the senses. Many of these mediating artifacts later became objects of curiosity to be collected, categorized, and canonized as art by the elite stratum of society and imprisoned in Wunderkammerer (cabinets of curiosities), thus giving birth to modern museums.24

To re-assess the way art and artifacts came to be privileged over human subjectivity in recent history, Franke began his exploration with the aforementioned exhibition Animism. According to Burkhard Meltzer, writing in Frieze Magazine online, “Anselm Franke’s curatorial concept tests the idea of a contemporary animism beyond its colonial, primitivist classification as a religious belief.”25 Franke continued this discourse of subject-object relations in the 2012 Taipei Biennale, which he entitled The Monster that is History. The trope of the supernatural is evoked once again as exemplified in his curatorial concept: “The figure of the monster is a fictive creation, an image of the intermediate state, a characterization of a reflective mirror, which reflects the relationship between nonfiction and fictional existences.”26

In his catalogue essay for the 10th Shanghai Biennale, Franke, again, conjures the forces of the supernatural. “Various kind of ‘animisms’ in various cultures show that it is relatively possible to be social with, and hence to perceive reciprocity and grant subjectivity to, the most remote kind of “things” in this world—from stars via spirits to stones.”27

If we follow Franke’s curatorial thread, it is a trajectory toward a return not to a primitive era or an exoticized past, but to a pre-existing mindset before the monolithic domination of the Enlightenment and Modernism, a time when greater emphasis was placed on one’s subjective responses to encounters with objects or artifacts—what we have come to venerate as a work of art. Despite institutional obstacles and shortcomings, which ought to be and can be ameliorated with each edition, this year’s Shanghai Biennale seeks to expose the problematic dialectics of modernism where the pursuit of viewer’s subjectivity through encounters with art is crucial for breaking free from the conﬁnes of the world’s Social Factories.

64 Vol. 14 No. 2 Notes 1. Anselm Franke, “Social Factory: The 10th Shanghai Biennale,” Social Factory: The 10th Shanghai Biennale (no imprint), 22. This citation is from an edition of 500 catalogues commissioned by the Shanghai Biennale from a private printer in advance of the state-endorsed catalogue, which is to be published at a later date. 2. Anselm Franke, unpublished e-mail interview with the author, December 2, 2014. 3. “About Power Station of Art,” ofﬁcial website of the Power Station of Art, http://www. powerstationofart.com/en/top/about_us.html/. 4. Gong Yan, "Forward," Social Factory: The 10th Shanghai Biennale (no imprint), 18. 5. Franke, “Social Factory: The 10th Shanghai Biennale,” 23. 6. The fourteen artists who were selected by Anselm Franke for the 2012 Taipei Biennale and the 2014 Shanghai Biennale are (in alphabetical order): Adam Avikainen, Ashish Avikunthak, Chen Chieh-jen, Harun Farocki, Peter Friedl, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Hou Chun-Ming, Ken Jacobs, Armin Linke, Liu Ding, Pak Sheung-Chuen, Sun Xun, Yin-ju Chen, and Anton Vidokle. Note: Pak Shueng-Chuen was banned from the Biennale just days before the opening after his name appeared on a blacklist of artists who had participated in the recent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. 7. Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2012), 10. 8. Anselm Franke, unpublished e-mail interview with the author, December 2, 2014. 9. In January 2015, about halfway through the duration of the 10th Shanghai Biennale, the PSA instituted a one-hour docent tour in Mandarin led by local college-aged students. The author was approached by the Educational Department of the PSA on January 8, 2015, to develop a docent program in English for the current Biennale, but was informed there was no budget available for this endeavour. 10. The curatorial theme for the 10th Shanghai Biennale is described at http://www.shanghaibiennale. org/en/page/detail/308cw.html/. 11. The displacement of Adrian Melis’s installation as well as the video work of Tibor Hajas, Self Fashion Show (1976), from their respective wall labels was corrected after the author had informed Franke on December 2, 2014, of the discrepancy. 12. Anselm Franke, unpublished e-mail interview with the author, December 2, 2014. 13. Kenneth Clark, cited in Andrew McClellan, ed., The Art Museums from Boulleé to Bilbao (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 26. 14. For an account of divergent views in the early twentieth century of the museum's role in the production of knowledge, see Claire Robins, "Shifting Priorities for Learning in the Museums," in Curious Lessons in the Museum: The Pedagogic Potential of Artists' Interventions (Farnham, Surrey, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 35–43. 15. Richard Sandell, Museums, Prejudice, and the Reframing of Difference (London: Routledge, 2007), 195. 16. Viewer comments collected by the author on weekly visits to the Shanghai Biennale from Nov. 22, 2014, to January 2, 2015. 17. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, “The Day Nobody Died,” Social Factory: The 10th Shanghai Biennale, (no imprint), 66. 18. Ibid. 19. Chen Chieh-Jen, Transformation Text (Book of Bianwen), artist-authored wall text, Power Station of Art, 10th Shanghai Biennale. 20. Nicholas Bussman, “The News Blues,” Social Factory: The 10th Shanghai Biennale, (no imprint), 238. 21. Ibid, 66. 22. Nicholas Bussman, conversation with the author, Shanghai, November 20, 2014. 23. Zheng Shengtian, unpublished interview with the author, Shanghai, November 23, 2014. 24. Patrick Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). 25. Burkhard Meltzer, translated by Amy Patton, "Animism," Frieze Magazine online, no. 134 (October 2010), http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/animism/. 26. Anselm Franke, Taipei Biennale 2012: Modern Monster/Death and Life of Fiction, http://www. biennialfoundation.org/2012/07/the-theme-of-the-taipei-biennial-2012-departs-from-the-crisis-of- the-imagination-within-the-global-capitalist-culture-the-need-for-collectively-shared-horizons-that- withstand-the-cliches-of-modernist/. 27. Franke, “Social Factory: The 10th Shanghai Biennale,” Social Factory: The 10th Shanghai Biennale (no imprint), 29.

Vol. 14 No. 2 65 Lisa Catt Expressions of Chinese Ethnicity and Cultural Heritage in Contemporary Indonesian Art: FX Harsono and Tintin Wulia

he devastation suffered by the ethnic Chinese as a result of the Jakarta riots in May 1998 compelled Indonesian artists FX Harsono Tand Tintin Wulia to explore their Chinese heritage and confront a lifelong, unshakeable feeling of difference. Their highly personal exploration into cultural heritage and identity, right from the onset, became inextricably connected to an interrogation of Indonesian nationhood and history. Drawing upon personal and ancestral memories, the work of Harsono and Wulia in the years preceding the riots expressed a deep cultural wrestling— their sense of self and community was completely uprooted by the outburst of racial targeting. Singled out as different with little understanding of why, these two artists began to uncover the history long silenced by their families, and so collided their own experience of difference with that of centuries of discrimination faced by generations of Chinese Indonesians. Negotiating personal narratives against that of the nation, these artists interrogated the very constructs determining belonging and identity in Indonesian society— ethnicity, politics, and historic legacies. While these themes still run true in their work today, looking over their individual bodies of work from the last ﬁfteen years, it becomes evident that the two have evolved in markedly different directions.

Growing Up In-between FX Harsono, born in 1949, epitomizes the artist activist. His ability to translate complex sociopolitical issues into works of striking visual simplicity that yet retain great conceptual depth has seen him become a leading figure in contemporary Indonesian art. In the 1970s, Harsono was among the first, and few, local artists who dared to break from the traditions of the Indonesian modern movement, introducing bold ideas and unprecedented creativity that served to disrupt the status quo and push the imagination. Ever since, Harsono has remained committed to making art that is engaging, progressive, and questioning, creating a dynamic body of work that today spans an impressive forty years. Growing up in a Catholic household, he was the son of ethnic Chinese parents who spoke fluent Bahasa and Dutch and only a little Mandarin. Up until he was a teenager, Harsono remembers practicing many Chinese customs, such as Chinese New Year and visiting the graves of his ancestors. He also attended a Chinese school for several years of his early education. Such lingual ties and integrated, mestizo lifestyle is characteristic of peranakan Chinese. This term traditionally refers to a Chinese person of mixed ancestry, but it is now used to signify members of the Chinese Indonesian community who were born in the archipelago

66 Vol. 14 No. 2 and have a long familial lineage in Indonesia, speak ﬂuent Bahasa or a local Indonesian dialect, and have largely adopted local cultures.1

During his formative years, Harsono was also exposed to Indonesian tradition and culture through his Javanese grandmother, with whom he lived between the ages of one and ten. In what could only be described as a great challenge to this bicultural upbringing, Harsono’s adolescent years were marked by a period of state-sponsored violence and discrimination against the Chinese in Indonesia. Between 1965 and ’66, as the government transitioned from the rule of socialist Independence leader Sukarno to the military-backed, authoritarian regime of Suharto, violent communist purges saw many ethnic Chinese killed, captured, or arrested based on their alleged political affiliations with mainland China.2 During this time, Harsono recalls his father burning family photographs that depicted any activities related to the Chinese community. These photographs could be used against the family as supposed evidence of intent to destabilize the nation. In his first year of high school, Harsono remembers being asked by government officials to attend a meeting where he could “prove his loyalty to Indonesia.” Fortunately, his father insisted he stay home: Those who did attend were forced to carry out brutal murders of suspected communists.3 A series of discriminatory policies and citizenship laws soon followed.

Under Suharto’s Assimilation Program (Program Pembauran), any sign or expression of Chineseness was outlawed, forcing Chinese Indonesians to give up their cultural identity and adopt “officially constructed local cultures.”4 Beginning in 1966, the use of Chinese characters was forbidden, Chinese media was shut down, the importing of Chinese- language publications was prohibited, Chinese schools and sociopolitical organizations were closed, and any use of the Chinese language was strongly discouraged. Members of the Chinese Indonesian community were also pressured to change their names to ones that sounded more Indonesian.5 This resulted in the artist born Oh Hong Boen change his name to FX Harsono. FX comes from Francisco Xavier, the name of the saint his mother chose when he was baptized—even identifiers of Dutch colonization were given precedence over those of Chineseness in postcolonial Indonesia. However, like many others, his name change alone was not considered sufficient proof of his loyalty. As part of the Assimilation Program, Harsono also had to officially “become” an Indonesian citizen. This entailed an arduous administrative process that required him to renounce a Chinese citizenship he did not have and never had.6

Considering these early experiences of state-sponsored violence and racial discrimination, there is little surprise that right from the beginning of art school, Harsono’s practice was marked by a strong sense of activism. He was not interested in using painting and sculpture to express deep individual emotions in a grandiose revelation of his soul, like the Indonesian modernist greats; nor was he interested in venerating historical, nationalistic narratives as encouraged by the academies and the State. He wanted his art to be a tool for social change, a voice for the people, and a champion

Vol. 14 No. 2 67 of human rights and equality. Considering the political climate during Suharto’s reign, this was an extremely deﬁant and dangerous path to pursue. Fear of imprisonment or physical punishment was used to depoliticize the arts, keeping many artists within the regiments of state-authorized academies.7 This extended from Suharto’s greater efforts to centralize control and neutralize all facets of Indonesian society—his ironclad grip could not be jeopardized by a voiceless and homogenized public. Yet Harsono resisted, remaining at the forefront of change, responsive to the forces shaping new social, political, and cultural contexts in Indonesia.

Tintin Wulia was born in 1972, and with training in both architecture and ﬁlm scoring, and extensive experience living and travelling abroad, works across installation, performance, and video. Her diverse background has undoubtedly contributed to her understanding of spatial relations and semiotics that result in works that are rich in metaphor and potently eloquent. Although born more than twenty years later, Wulia, like Harsono, comes from a peranakan Chinese family that was deeply affected by the policies and actions of the Suharto regime. In the communist purges of 1965, Wulia’s grandfather was taken away, his home in Bali looted and burnt. Her grandmother, left with nothing, was in fact already familiar with this scenario—her own father was taken away in similar circumstances in 1945. This lineage of discrimination bred fear amongst the family, and, so, they kept their traumatic experiences in a shroud of secrecy. This secrecy compounded into suppression under Suharto. Wulia’s father duly changed the family name—Liauw become Wulia—and also renounced a non- existent Chinese citizenship to ofﬁciate his status as an Indonesian. Despite the family having been in Indonesia for over one hundred years, their Chinese ethnicity still seemed to bring only trouble.

While Wulia’s immediate family stayed in Bali, many other members left for China, even though they spoke no Mandarin. This was true of many Chinese Indonesians who, feeling threatened and unsafe, ﬂed to a “homeland” that had never been their home. As part of the next generation, Tintin Wulia never lived through these events. Yet, as early as the age of six, she had a strong feeling that she was somehow different from other Indonesians.8 Throughout her childhood and adolescence, she did not question why she felt this way—her family’s silence over their past suggested that it was best not to ask. This unquestioning attitude deﬁnitively shaped Wulia’s early understanding of what it meant to be ethnic Chinese, and she subconsciously accepted that she was “born a guilty Chinese” and therefore was “deserving of the discrimination.”9 However, it was not until the May 1998 riots that she was able to begin deconstructing such feelings. Visual art became her way of exploring her family’s past and beginning to understand her feelings of difference. Fifteen years later, Wulia’s practice remains driven by her experiences of growing up as the Other.

The Flash Point: Jakarta Riots In the months leading up to the fall of Suharto on May 21, 1998, the momentum towards change in Indonesia was building at a compelling

68 Vol. 14 No. 2 rate. The government’s once ironclad grip started to unravel in the face of widespread displays of public disaffection that had been triggered by the 1997 Asian economic crisis. Prior to this, alongside fear, coercion, and force, Suharto managed to maintain control through the economic growth witnessed under the capitalist strategies of the New Order, his authoritarian regime. Such security and stability brought to a growing Indonesian middle class served as a justiﬁcation for Suharto’s authoritarianism and social conservatism, but when the economy crashed, such justiﬁcations were severely undermined.10 The corruption that riddled all echelons of government meant that recovery stalled, spelling prolonged economic instability for the country. And as the country’s economic woes deepened, so did public unrest. In Jakarta and Yogyakarta, the youth mobilized. Mass demonstrations across university campuses broke out as students protested against “corruption, collusion, and nepotism”—they demanded democratic reforms and an end to the New Order.11

As the student demonstrations gained greater momentum, the government’s response became increasingly violent. Instead of putting an end to the uprisings and reinstating “stability,” military violence fueled only further resistance.12 This increasingly precarious situation reached its apex on May 12, 1998, when soldiers shot at protesters in Jakarta, killing four students from Trisakti University. The shootings unleashed a wave of destructive riots across the capital that also spread to Surabaya, Solo, and Medan. Large areas of Jakarta were vandalized, and more than a thousand people, mostly looters, died after becoming trapped inside burning malls. While the student demonstrators had expressly directed their anger towards the government and the government only, the wider riots that erupted as a result became fueled by anti-Chinese sentiment, falling into historic patterns of racially-targeted violence.13 14 This brought grave repercussions for the Chinese Indonesian community. Chinese-owned shops and businesses were looted, houses were set alight in known-to-be Chinese areas, and many Chinese women were raped. In Bandung at the time, Tintin Wulia was not only hit by the collective sense of anxiety that consumed the Chinese Indonesian community, but also by a deep sense of nostalgia.

The fear and silence that marked Wulia’s childhood—what she refers to as her “memory of feelings”—suddenly collided with her own firsthand experience.15 The artist sees this moment of connection—between past and present, of feelings and facts—as definitive in beginning to understand her ethnicity in the context of Indonesian history, and in looking back she began to turn to visual art. Her video piece Violence against Fruits (2002) was her first response to the 1998 riots. Documenting a persimmon being chopped and eaten, the video features a soundtrack in which two people can be overheard discussing the persimmon: How it originated in China but is commonly misunderstood as coming from Japan. They make no mention of Indonesian politics or history; nonetheless, the dialogue is loaded and captures the insidious nature of being victimized by racism and discrimination. Upon making the piece, Wulia remarked:

Vol. 14 No. 2 69 Tintin Wulia, Violence Against Fruits, 2000, single- channel video, 3 mins., 4 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. Opposite page: FX Harnaso, Burned Victims, 1998, performance-installation, burned wood, metal frames, burned footwear, video. Courtesy of the artist.

If I’m Chinese and you don’t like me . . . you would think that you’re right, because you have every reason to hate Chinese. But if I’m one of your race or group and you don’t like me, you would think that it’s just me, personally.16

This conveys her burgeoning awareness of how historical social prejudices and (mis)perceptions about the Chinese in Indonesia have gained meaning over time. When unquestioned, these attitudes create a stigma of otherness and lead to discriminatory attitudes being normalized.

On the other hand, Harsono’s response to the May riots was immediate, a stark contrast to Wulia’s carefully scripted, metaphorical interpretation. Raw and confrontational, his performance-installation Burned Victims (1998) explicitly captures the sheer outpouring of anger and shock that emerged in the wake of the riots. Despite the great intensity of the piece—the artist sets ablaze nine wooden torsos—Harsono retains complete emotional resolve; his composure was at odds with the widespread anxieties of the time. A bold protest against the pattern of civil violence in Indonesia, Burned Victims encapsulated the critical streak that has long deﬁned Harsono’s artistic practice. However, change was imminent in Indonesia. A week after the riots broke out, Suharto succumbed to overwhelming pressure and resigned. The period of social and political reform that followed, known as reformasi, aimed at installing the democratic values and pluralism thwarted for the previous thirty-two years of authoritarian rule,17 and as the political climate shifted, so did Harsono’s art.

Reﬂection, Reassessment, and Reformasi Reformasi society, in all its optimism and promise, faced a very sobering reality. The iron-clad regime of Suharto that had established the veneer of control for thirty-two years was now dissipated, and deep fractures in the fabric of Indonesian society were revealed. As Harsono expressed in 2003:

70 Vol. 14 No. 2 Vol. 14 No. 2 71 In the time that followed, I felt that I had lost my footing and felt alienated among my own community. This was the community that I had once considered the marginalized people I had to ﬁght for through my art. I then felt alienated from the people I had considered to have a similar vision for change.18

Grappling with a sense of betrayal and disillusion—his “difference” acutely apparent—Harsono began to look inward. This shift in perspective from the sociopolitical to the personal was echoed within his art. The provocative streak that had long characterized his practice faded. His work became enigmatic and introspective, and his bold activist performances were replaced by the quietness and considered process of printmaking. And, perhaps most signiﬁcantly, self-portraiture appeared in his work for the ﬁrst time.

FX Harnoso, Tubuhku Adalah Lahan/My Body Is a Field, 2002, photo- etching on paper, 57 x 126 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Tubuhku Adalah Lahan (My Body is FX Harnoso, Thousand Times Pain, 2007, a Field) (2002) is a print that depicts installation with bees and needles, Harsono with his arms stretched dimensions variable. out, surrendering to a complex Courtesy of the artist. network of symbols and imagery— three saplings sprout from his arms, he is surrounded by floating signs of infinity, the earth, and a mandala. Compelling in its honesty and sensitivity, the work provides insight into the internal disquiet the artist was wrestling with at the time. As Harsono’s perspective continued to turn inward, however, he realized that his exploration of self was inextricable from its broader context; understanding one’s identity not only called for an exploration of self, but also of politics, society, culture, and history. Works such as Needle in My Consciousness (2003) and Kuteropong Luka (Watching the Wound) (2008), the latter a painting, speak of his personal experiences of pain and victimization—as represented through the needle and butterfly imagery—but also the inequality of power relations within the wider Indonesian society.19 Thousand Times Pain (2007) has a particularly strong cultural resonance. With its one thousand bees pinned to a wall in a grid formation, this installation explores individual and collective suffering. Alluding to the immense impact a single, seemingly minor incident can have when repeated and targeted, Harsono’s work resonates with the compounded pain felt by the Chinese community after centuries of marginalization.

72 Vol. 14 No. 2 Top: FX Harnoso, Needle in Around this time—some ten years after the fall of Suharto—Tintin Wulia My Consciousness, 2003, photo-etching on paper, was just coming to terms with the complete story of her family’s history. 160 x 500 cm. Courtesy of the artist. In 2005, she found out the full details of her grandfather’s disappearance, 20 Bottom: FX Harnoso, and then, in 2007, she ﬁnally revealed this family secret to her friends. Kuteropong Luka (Watching the Wound), Accordingly, Wulia’s art practice began to show a markedly bolder 2008, acrylic on canvas, 2 panels, each 150 x 150 cm. interaction with her family history. In her Great Wallpaper series (2007–10), Courtesy of the artist. Wulia painted wall murals of the legal documents her family members were once required to carry as proof of their citizenship and loyalty to Indonesia. Painted in a light blue watercolour, the murals confront the underwhelming materiality of the citizenship documents. The documents are but pieces of paper, yet they decided the lives of her whole family, and in recreating them as pale imprints, Wulia teases out the incongruence between the great import assigned to these ofﬁcial documents and the nominal import given to the family’s Indonesian lineage. As ghostly reminders of the bureaucratic discrimination her family endured, the murals bring to the fore the artifactual relation that was established between her family, as ethnic Chinese, and the State. Their belonging to Indonesia was not one of birthright; it was an administrative relation, authorized by those in power so that they could control, survey, and intimidate.

From the earliest years of Indonesia’s independence beginning in 1945, citizens who were not native to Indonesia, but naturalized through a legal process, were required to carry a Proof of Indonesian Citizenship Card (Kartu Bukti Warga Negara Indonesia). This was in accordance with the nationalist concept of asli (authentic, original) Indonesia. Underpinning the

Vol. 14 No. 2 73 country’s independence movement, Tintin Wulia, Great Wallpaper No. 2576/1961, this concept was designed to signal 2008, watercolour mural, dimensions variable. a break from Indonesia’s colonial Courtesy of the artist past and articulate a unique and Cementi Art House, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Indonesian identity. Essentially, it provided a framework for the new nation whereby belongingness was Tintin Wulia, Great afforded to all indigenous ethnic Wallpaper No. 211/1940, 2008, watercolour mural, groups, as their homelands lay dimensions variable. within the borders of the Indonesian Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. archipelago. Such consideration did not extend to Chinese Indonesians, as their homelands were considered outside the geographic boundaries of Indonesia, in mainland China.21 This territorialized notion of belongingness meant Chinese Indonesians were not considered legitimate Indonesians and were subsequently excluded from the founding framework of the Indonesian nation. And so were set the parameters according to which Indonesians began imagining their national community and deciding who belonged and who did not, although it was not until Suharto seized power, in 1966, that this divide between pribumi (native) Indonesians and Chinese Indonesians was completely and systematically entrenched.

In addition to the citizenship Tintin Wulia, Invasion, 2008, mixed media, dimensions card, the Suharto regime variable. Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery, required Chinese Indonesians to Hong Kong. acquire a Proof of Citizenship Letter (Surat Bukti Keterangan Kewarganegaraan) authorizing their Indonesian-sounding names, as well as documents proving that their parents, even if they were already naturalized, had formally renounced their Chinese nationality.22 This collation of evidence supposedly was intended to aid the assimilation of the Chinese community into local Indonesian culture and eradicate the stigma of difference. However, as this measure did not apply to other ethnic groups, it served only to exacerbate their “foreignness.” By framing ethnic Chinese as “other”—as communist menace, economic saboteurs, or traitors to the nation—Suharto played into the racial binary set out under asli Indonesia. As explained by Leo Suryadinata: “The basis of the assimilation program can be found in the concept of the Indonesian nation, which is based on the indigenous model.”23 Tapping into the historical illegitimacy of the Chinese Indonesians and reinforcing it through discriminatory policies and regulations, his regime pushed them further towards the margins of society. There, as outsiders, they served a crucial role to the State’s nation- building project, embodying all that Indonesia could deﬁne itself against.

74 Vol. 14 No. 2 Tintin Wulia’s kinetic installation Invasion (2008) can be seen to touch on this intrinsic—and indeed ironic—relationship, which evokes the tenuous balance between the powerful and powerless that underpinned Suharto’s system of absolute control. In Invasion, kites made from her family documents hang from the ceiling, rooted to ﬂowerpots by delicate threads, above which razor blades hover ominously.

FX Harnoso, Rewriting the Looking Back, Moving Forward Erased, 2009, performance- installation, wood and Still concentrating upon issues of identity, FX Harsono began to place his rattan chair, wood table with marble, Chinese ink on growing understanding of self within the context of his cultural heritage. paper, performance video, Reflecting Harsono’s growing interest in this overlapping space, his birth dimensions variable. Photo: Susannah Wimberley, name, Oh Hong Boen, emerges as a key feature in his work. Harsono’s Courtesy of the artist. performance piece Writing in the Rain (2011) depicts the artist using an ink brush to repeatedly write his name in Chinese characters—the only Chinese characters he knows24—until rain washes the ink away. The performance is a powerful meditation on the effects of cultural absence and memory in the development of personal identity. Writing in the Rain followed his earlier performance-installation Rewriting the Erased (2009). Here, the artist is seen seated at a desk, writing his name in Chinese on individual pieces of paper and placing them on the ground. Eventually the floor is transformed into a tiled pattern of Chinese characters. The level of concentration shown on Harsono’s face is hard to reconcile; not often is an adult seen struggling to write his name, like a young child might. While each performance piece has a similar premise—Harsono’s early efforts to re-engage with a past long suppressed—they reveal the artist at different stages of self-reflection and cultural understanding.

Rewriting the Erased speaks of a modest but nonetheless significant process of relearning. Harsono struggles and persists in his efforts to write his name, grappling with the question of whether his past still holds any significance for him. Do the characters of his name resonate, or are they simply “a series of empty and meaningless gestures”?25 With Writing in the Rain, on the other hand, Harsono appears to have developed a rather fluid command of writing in Chinese. His increased sense of ease and familiarity suggests a strengthened connection to his heritage. Even when the rain starts to fall, erasing his name, Harsono continues his strokes with rhythm and finesse.

Vol. 14 No. 2 75 Given this comparison, it can be said that Writing in the Rain reﬂects Top four: FX Harnoso, Writing in the Rain, 2011, Harsono’s growing understanding of a hybrid self: he is an Indonesian, but performance-installation, wood chair, desk, 24-inch with a Chinese background that also actively shapes his identity. Embracing television, single-channel such cultural synthesis, Harsono challenges the very core of how the video, 6 mins., 11 secs., dimensions variable. Indonesian nation has been traditionally imagined. In suggesting that his Courtesy of the artist. Bottom: FX Harnoso, identity is not an either/or construct, Harsono undercuts the view, upheld Pilgrimage to History, 2013, by the historic concept of asli Indonesia, that one is either Chinese (foreign) single-channel video, 13 mins., 40 secs. Courtesy of or Indonesian (native). the artist.

Although inherently inﬂected by his own experiences, Harsono’s most recent body of work steers away from the biographical to look broadly at the experiences of the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. Revisiting historic

76 Vol. 14 No. 2 events, his latest works seek to pull Chinese Indonesians into the narrative of the Indonesian nation, recognizing their experience and contribution. In his performance piece Pilgrimage to History (2013), Harsono visits various Chinese mass graves across Indonesia. It has been only in the last ten years that Chinese families have felt safe enough to visit the graves of their ancestors. Using red pastels, Harsono traces the names inscribed on the graves onto large strips of linen, so it is no longer just Harsono’s Chinese name that is rediscovered, but those of thousands of Chinese Indonesians. The events that led to the death of these Chinese Indonesians remain suppressed by the state, erased from ofﬁcial versions of history. Indonesian modern history, containing no Chinese-sounding names due to Suharto’s Assimilation Program, has effectively written out the ethnic Chinese,26 but Harsono’s performance reasserts the place of Chinese Indonesians in Indonesian history.

FX Harnoso, Journey to the Past/Migration, 2013, boat, electric candle, earthen ware, wood chair, lampshade, dimensions variable.

Harsono’s bold exploration into Indonesia’s forgotten past continues in his installation Journey to the Past/Migration (2013). This piece makes reference to the arrival of the Chinese in Indonesia and the cultural influences they brought with them—many of which have been assimilated into local Indonesian culture. By hinting at cultural borrowing and mixing that has long existed in Indonesia, Harsono calls attention to the difficultly in pinpointing the roots of an individual, or indeed a collective society, to a single “authenticated tradition.”27 Indeed, it seems Harsono has taken from his own experience: “re-reading history is understanding who we are.” However, while history has proved to be an ongoing and valuable resource for Harsono, his gaze is ever fixed on the future. He is driven by a firm belief that his art can help Indonesia move forward as a democratic, multicultural country: “A nation matures not because of the brilliant events and successes, but rather how the nation courageously recognizes its past mistakes and learns from them.”28

While Harsono has come to discover a tangible and meaningful connection to his Chinese heritage, Tintin Wulia has arrived at a very different positioning. She sees her ethnicity as a label of otherness that comes with a burdensome historic legacy. It is not a part of her own personal sense of self, but, rather, something that has been imposed on her by the state. For Wulia there simply is no connection to her Chineseness, no sense of cultural heritage: “It is not a Chineseness inherited from mainland China . . . It is not from anywhere outside of Indonesia, but from deep

Vol. 14 No. 2 77 beneath its scars.”29 Here she makes a critical distinction between cultural heritage and the notion of Chineseness. Aside from her appearance, Wulia carries no trace of Chinese heritage—she never had a Chinese name and never learned the language or practiced any cultural customs. Yet she remains associated with ﬁrst generation Chinese immigrants, trapped in an unbroken chain of Chineseness: “This is the Chineseness I grew up with—a taboo that always managed to get spotted, an identity constructed by fear, the origins of which the generation that preceded mine wishes to forget.”30

Looking into her family’s past has undoubtedly been important to Wulia; Tintin Wulia, Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, however, instead of being further drawn into that narrative, she has been Fort Ruigenhoek, 2011, 31 performance-installation. compelled to consider a broader experience of otherness. This has seen Courtesy of the artist and her art shift from her personal context to focus upon the universal issues Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. of border-crossing and global mobility. Nous ne notons pas les fleurs is an ongoing process-based piece that Wulia started in 2009 and has since been performing in several cities across the globe, from Singapore and Jakarta to Utrecht and Patna. On a large map, participants use flowers to trace a route from where they were born to where they have travelled since. The map is also made from flower petals, meticulously arranged in colour blocks by Wulia to delineate different states or regions. The choice of flowers, an ephemeral material, serves to evoke the fluidity of borders and transience of people. As people use the flowers to mark their “roots” and “routes,” the petals begin to mix, and the map breaks down as borders merge. Territorialized understanding of place fade amid an ever-changing pastiche of colour and texture. Although Wulia has no control over how these patterns of human movement will take shape, the actual process, which she has defined, brings attention to today’s unprecedentedly mobile world and the disruption this mobility causes to traditional understandings between origins and belonging, identity and nationhood.

78 Vol. 14 No. 2 This premise is also explored through her representation of the passport, which ﬁrst appeared in Wulia’s work in the (Re)Collection of Togetherness series. The transition from using her own family documents to using a collection of international passports points to her changing perspective.32 An ongoing project that began in 2007, the series started as an object-based installation where the artist collected passports and made fake versions of them, marking the pages with spots of fake blood. In 2011, the sixth iteration of the series included some 140 passports. The interplay of references embodied by the passports—bloodline and identiﬁcation, authority and belonging—speak to Wulia’s own understanding of her “state-imposed Chineseness.” However, by drawing upon the universal meaning carried by the passport, she places the personal into a global context. Pushing beyond the traditional notions of citizenship and nationhood she has long wrestled with, Wulia opens herself up to consider an entirely different framework of belonging. For Wulia, to be a citizen of the world and embrace a sense of transnationality, “the only thing feasible in the current passport system is to have as many passports as [she] can have.”33

Tintin Wulia, (Re)Collection of Togetherness—Stage 3, 2008, installation. Photo: Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong.

The diverse selection of passports also plays into Wulia’s contemplation of the accidental basis of citizenship. As the artist explains:

I am Indonesian because I happen to be born in a country that was, in the year that I was born, called the Republic of Indonesia. If I had been born one hundred years earlier, exactly at the same spot, I would have been a Dutch East Indian. . . . If I had been born thirty years earlier, in 1942, also exactly at the same spot, I might have been Japanese [with Indonesia under Japanese occupation during World War II].34

Her piece Lure (2009) takes a more explicit approach to positing such ideas by incorporating a claw skill tester machine ﬁlled with passports. As with Nous ne notons pas les ﬂeurs, interaction is central to the work—the audience is invited to play the skill tester and, if successful in using the claw, to see which nationality they end up with. By making the element of chance inherent to nationality unabashedly conspicuous, Wulia considers just how much of one’s life is determined by birthplace. Once again she challenges the traditional constructs of citizenship and nationhood: Why should a border dictate the freedoms people are afforded or refused?

Contemporary Perspectives A divergent position toward ethnicity is pronounced in the recent work of these artists. This is suggestive of a shifting sense of cultural identity among different generations of Chinese Indonesians. As academic Chan-Yau Hoon35

Vol. 14 No. 2 79 remarked: “Ethnic identity is not based Top and left: Tintin Wulia, Lure, 2009, installation. upon intrinsic characteristics such as Courtesy of the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. race, blood, tradition, and ancestry but varies from generation to generation and is shaped by local circumstances.”36 FX Harsono’s artistic explorations, backed by his extensive research, have led him to appreciate the rich contribution the Chinese community has made to the development of the Indonesian nation, even in the face of great adversity. Tintin Wulia’s preoccupation with mobility and borders, on the other hand, shows that her practice no longer looks exclusively to the experience of Chinese Indonesians but, instead, appeals to an alternative system of belonging—the transnational. Research into the practices of other contemporary Indonesian artists of Chinese descent would serve to further illuminate this generational shift, bringing greater context to the issues of identity, ethnicity, nation, and cultural heritage.

It is also important to recognize that Wulia and FX Harsono are both positioned within “a distinctive cosmopolitan milieu of contemporary international art practice that, at the same time, offers alternative deﬁnitions of Indonesian space, place, and subjectivity.”37 Contemporary artists in Indonesia have taken a leading role in calling attention to the changing dynamics of contemporary society, and their art often embodies a negotiation between the forces of past and present, local and global. How, and if, imaginings of the Indonesian nation change is yet to be decided, but one thing is for sure—a barometer of such developments can be found in the works of these two accomplished, ever-evolving artists.

80 Vol. 14 No. 2 Notes 1. Charles A. Coppel, “Historical Impediments to the Acceptance of Ethnic Chinese in a Multicultural Indonesia,” in Chinese Indonesians: State Policy, Monoculture and Multiculture, ed. Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004), 20. 2. Jemma Purdey, “Anti-Violence and Transitions in Indonesia: June 1998–October 1999,” in Chinese Indonesians: Remembering, Distorting, Forgetting, ed. Timothy Lindsey, and Helen Pausacker (Clayton: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005), 15. 3. H. G. Masters, “This Is History,” Art Asia Pacific 85 (September–October 2013), 117. 4. Chang Yau Hoon, “Assimilation, Multiculturalism, Hybridity: The Dilemmas of the Ethnic Chinese in Post-Suharto Indonesia,” in Asian Ethnicity, 7, no. 2 (2006), 152. 5. Leo Suryadinata, Chinese Indonesians: State Policy, Monoculture, and Multiculture (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004), 3. 6. Hendro Wiyanto, “Truth, Beauty, and Harsono’s Quest,” in What We Have Here Perceived as Truth, We Shall Someday Encounter as Beauty (Jakarta: Galeri Canna, 2013), 9. 7. Enin Supriyanto and FX Harsono, “Determinisms in Art Vocabularies and Interaction between Art and Politics in Specific Historical Conditions,” paper presented at Para Site International Hong Kong, April 13, 2013. 8. Clementine Wulia, “Violence against Fruits: The Intricacy of Racism in 3 Minutes,” http://violence. wulia.com/pr/vaf1.pdf/. 9. Tintin Wulia, “The Name Game,” Inside Indonesia 93 (2008), http://www.insideindonesia.org/weekly- articles/the-name-game/. 10. Iola Lenzi, “Art as Voice: Political Art in Southeast Asia at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century,” Diaaalogue (2011), http://www.aaa.org.hk/Diaaalogue/Details/1057/. 11. Karen Strassler, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 8. 12. Ibid. 13. After the shooting, rioters targeted Chinese businesses and communities, and this great burst of political tension (protest by the students) escalated into anti-Chinese violence. The charged atmosphere of the time saw the situation fall into familiar patterns—centuries of Chinese Indonesians being the scapegoat for all of Indonesia’s problems. 14. Charles A. Coppel, Studying Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia (Singapore: Singapore Society of Asian Studies, 2002), 17. 15. Wulia, “The Name Game.” 16. Wulia, “Violence against Fruits: The Intricacy of Racism in 3 Minutes.” 17. Suryadinata, Chinese Indonesians, 4. 18. FX Harsono, “The Transition: Artist Statement” in Displaced: F. X. Harsono, ed. Galeri Nasional Indonesia and Cemeti Art House (Jakarta and Yogyakarta: Multigraph Print, 2003), 47. 19. FX Harsono: Testimonies (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2010), 42. 20. Wulia, e-mail correspondence with the author, October 1, 2013. 21. Siew-Min Sai and Chang-Yau Hoon, Chinese Indonesians Reassessed: History, Religion, and Belonging (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 1. 22. Coppel, Studying Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, 16. 23. Suryadinata, Chinese Indonesians, 3. 24. Harsono, e-mail correspondence with author, September 23, 2013. 25. FX Harsono: Testimonies, 55. 26. FX Harsono, “Rewriting History,” in What We Have Here Perceived as Truth, We Shall Someday Encounter as Beauty (Jakarta: Galeri Canna, 2013), 93. 27. Hoon, “Assimilation, Multiculturalism, Hybridity: The Dilemmas of the Ethnic Chinese in Post-Suharto Indonesia.” 28. Harsono, “Rewriting History,” 95. 29. Wulia, e-mail correspondence with author, September 7, 2013. 30. Wulia, “The Name Game.” 31. Enoch Cheng, "Interview with Tintin Wulia," Diaaalogue," July 2011, http://www.aaa.org.hk/ Diaaalogue/Details/1046/. 32. Wulia, e-mail correspondence with the author, September 7, 2013. 33. Cheng, "Interview with Tintin Wulia.” 34. Transfigurations: Mythologies Indonesiennes (Paris: Espace Culturel Louis Vutton, 2011), 55. 35. Chang-Yau Hoon is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Sing Lun Fellow at the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University. He is also Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. 36. Chang-Yau Hoon, "How to Be Chinese: Ethnic Chinese Experience a ‘Reawakening’ of their Chinese Identity," http://www.insideindonesia.org/feature-editions/how-to-be-chinese/. 37. Michelle Antoinette, "Deterritorializing Aesthetics: International Art and Its New Cosmopolitanisms, from an Indonesian Perspective,” in Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race 16, no. 1 (2008), 205.

Vol. 14 No. 2 81 Yu-Chieh Li New Boundaries of Contemporary Art from Taiwan

he exhibition Jie (Boundaries): Contemporary Art From Taiwan, curated by Dr. An-yi Pan for the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, TCornell University (August 16–December 21, 2014), has achieved a pioneering survey of the art scene in Taiwan over the past ten years. An update to the 2004 exhibition Contemporary Taiwanese Art in the Era of Contention, the ﬁrst historical survey in North America of art in post-martial law Taiwan, also curated by An-yi Pan, Jie is again a collaboration between the Herbert F. Johnson Museum and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and includes more emerging artists than the 2004 exhibition did.

It is peculiar that, aside from these two examples, there have been so few art exhibitions in North America devoted to researching the current art scene in Taiwan; nor are there sufﬁcient art historical publications in English on this topic, despite the fact that work by Taiwanese artists has appeared in international art exhibitions since the 1990s.1 Although the Taiwanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was founded in 1995, and the ﬁrst international Taipei Biennale was inaugurated in 1998, Taiwanese art hasn’t achieved wide international recognition comparable to contemporary Chinese art or contemporary Indian art, and the lack of research on contemporary art from Taiwan in the West stands in sharp contrast to the high exposure of contemporary Chinese art both in art exhibitions and academia. In 2014 alone, there were three publications dedicated to contemporary Chinese Art after the Cultural Revolution: Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History, by Paul Gladston; Contemporary Chinese Art, by Wu Hung; and Between State and Market: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Post-Mao Era, by Jane DeBevoise. There are also multiple book projects about modern or contemporary Art from India and Korea currently in preparation. So how should Taiwan be positioned in this wave of the institutionalization of national contemporary and modern art histories?

The most complex and sensitive issue that needs to be identiﬁed before a narrative about art from Taiwan can unfold is how one deﬁnes Taiwan as a nation.2 The current Taiwanese government is often considered illegitimate in today’s world politics; it was established on the basis of the Chiang Kai- shek Nationalist (Kuomintang) regime that relocated to Taiwan in 1949, after the Communist Party took over mainland China. Taiwan’s economic and social condition is greatly determined by the political climate in East Asia and the particular tensions that exist between the USA and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). From the colonial periods to the post-martial

82 Vol. 14 No. 2 law era, Taiwanese were taught to be Japanese, then Chinese, and then Taiwanese. The identity of “New Taiwanese” today is constructed with Lee Teng-hui’s policy of “Two States,” which he announced in the late 1990s, proclaiming that Taiwan and China are two distinct countries, not two parted entities that should be reunited because of a shared historical past. Thus school curricula started to include narratives of multi-ethnicity and the immigration and colonial histories of Taiwan, instead of merely focusing on the grand narrative that covers ﬁve thousand years of greater China. These constantly shifting identities and personal and national boundaries strongly inﬂuenced the works selected for Jie.

Because the Taiwanese “nation-state” has never been successfully claimed under the pressure of mainland China, it can be said to exist largely in the world view and daily life of its inhabitants. An-yi Pan brings up Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” in his catalogue essay to illustrate how Taiwan’s social reality is imagined by Taiwanese people, just as it is imagined in each nation-state through certain constructed cultural roots that its people identify with. Jie goes beyond exploring the awkward status of Taiwan’s national identity on the world map, as well as its influence on the politics and economics of the Taiwanese, and, further, explores how this is experienced on a personal scale in reaction to the changing global world. The “boundaries” in the exhibition title, according to An-yi Pan, come from the Buddhist concept of the world that “the mind’s perception conceives the boundary through the rousing of the mind and the moving of thoughts.”3 This boundary determines both temporal and spatial spheres of nations and individuals— and, thus, also defines a person’s identity. Because of the country’s complex colonial past, boundaries of the Taiwanese and Taiwan keep shifting, and new boundaries keep forming while old ones are constantly challenged. Thus comments An-yi Pan, “An individual’s or society’s response to the global environment reflects the continuous emerging, consolidating, and vanishing of boundaries.”4 In this respect, Jie is about the self-positioning of Taiwanese artists in both the private and public spheres.

An-yi Pan frames this exhibition through proposing several themes within the framework of “boundaries,” including global warming and globalization, global community in the Internet age, anxiety, kuso (a Japanese word literally meaning “shitty,” and which in Taiwan is used to describe a funny, light form of pop cultural parody), animamix (animation + comics), and landscape. Those thematic concerns, through the diversity of the works, can be further expanded to issues such as mental landscapes, the domestic and international political situation, reinterpretations of Western classical and Chinese classical art, feminism, pop culture, and immigration. The actual installation of the artworks was based on consideration of the gallery space and different media requirements, instead of on thematic divisions.

The selection of themes and artists reveals not just the multiple identities of the Taiwanese, but, more importantly, it shows various approaches to the idea of territory and the personal boundaries imagined by different generations—in this case, in people ranging from the age of twenty-nine

Vol. 14 No. 2 83 to eighty-nine. Jie’s precursor, Contemporary Taiwanese Art in the Era of Contention, contained work directed more at seeking to construct a Taiwanese identity and reﬂecting upon its entanglement within the past and present. Although these kinds of works in Jie can be seen to arouse critical readings of the current political situation, they are framed in a humorous way and are open to multiple readings rather than contributing to grand narratives. Jie also reﬂects that there is a growing number of female and young artists in the current art scene: in Jie, ten out of thirty-three artists were female, and eleven out of thirty-three artists were born after 1980. There are no prints and few works on paper in Jie, while over one third of the works are moving images.

Mapping the Boundaries Because it is beyond the limited scope of this article to discuss each and every work, the following will be a comparison of approaches taken by different generations of artists toward the idea of boundaries—the earlier generation of artists in Taiwan experienced the White Terror,5 while the second generation, born in the late 1970s and 1980s, grew up in a rather liberated society, and has no clear memory about the period of single-party leadership under the Kuomintang. Jie was presented at the moment when the Taiwanese government was resuming conversations with PRC and the debate about national identity was again at a crossroads. Thus Jie reﬂected the multiple personal choices about boundaries: If Taiwan’s identity is still a question mark, how do the Taiwanese understand themselves?

How to Construct a National Identity? The exhibition started with Tu Wei-Cheng’s monument to a fictional Bu Nam civilization, and included a gate in wall relief with two guardians positioned in front of it. In looking closely at the details of the carvings, one finds modern elements such as television sets, video game controllers, cables, loud speakers, headsets—mostly electronic devices in prevalent use in the first decade of the 2000s—and, in addition, fake Chinese characters that are of no identifiable date. The Bu Nam culture looks like an anomaly within the history of world civilizations because it is a mixture of forms found in ancient cultures as well as in modern life and is brought together to claim a previously undiscovered Taiwanese civilization—a fabrication by the artist. Inspired by an eagerness in society to justify the legitimacy of the Taiwanese nation through rewriting its cultural history, when this piece was conceived, Tu Wei-Cheng attempted to “create a new mythology for my identity and fabricated ‘facts’ about the existence of this civilization.”6 The Bu Nam myth is constructed through a process familiar in the canonization of civilizations—its unearthing, display, knowledge production, and the design of museum shop goods—which determines the value of the cultural relics. And what matters is not how realistically the fiction is presented, but that people believe in those fictional myths of the nation because they serve in the satisfying and stabilizing of society.

The artistic languages for a new landscape are found in various art traditions, with several paintings, works on paper, and a video installation

84 Vol. 14 No. 2 Top: Tu Wei-Cheng, Stele in the show bound to the idea No. BM66: Gate of Fleeing Souls, 2007, artificial of classical landscape while also stone, 280 x 555 x 15 cm; Stone No. BM0805—1 and symbolizing the artists’ personal Stone No. BM0805—2, 2008, artificial stone, relationship with the outer world. In 156 x 65 x 100 cm each. Yuan Jai’s Tango II (2010), one can © Tu Wei-Cheng, 2015. Courtesy of National detect the forms of ancient bronzes, Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei. porcelains, and bird and flower Right: Yuan Jai, Tango II, paintings through the artist’s use 2010, ink and colour on silk, 150 x 95 cm. © Yuan of fine contour lines and ink-and- Jai, 2015. Courtesy of My Humble House Art Center, colour wash that are collaged into a Taipei. cubist portrait of a rock that seems to be dancing elegantly. Huang Chin-hua’s ink-on-paper Big Stone 1 (2008) depicts a piece of stone in soft brushwork that appears to be absorbing the outer world. The idea of illustrating a humble motif—a stone—comes from the Buddhist notion of finding one whole world in a grain of sand, which the artist read about in The Sutra of the Fundamental Vows of the Earth.7 The stone that occupies the entire pictorial space is a portrait of the artist’s mental status, in this case recording the anxiety and pain she experienced during pregnancy, the texture and rhythm of the brush strokes indicating the womb’s contractions. Lin Hsin-Yueh is widely recognized as a representative master of portraits and landscape who tells indigenous stories of the island. His expressionistic palette of bold contrasting colours reflects the diversity of his life experiences—perhaps here influenced by the Mediterranean colours of Spain, where he traveled in the 1970s, or a representation of the colours of Pacific islands that could be influenced by Japanese academic painting, which is continued by some artists trained at Taiwanese art schools. This

Vol. 14 No. 2 85 mixture results in a surreal rendering of the Taiwanese landscape, and is Top: Huang Chin-Hua, Big Stone I, 2008, ink on paper, often interpreted by art critics in Taiwan as possessing the true “Taiwanese” 97.6 x 216 cm. Collection of National Taiwan Museum colours. The traditions mentioned above, including Chinese ink as well as of Fine Arts. © Huang Chin- Japanese and Western oil painting, constitute the genealogy of twentieth- Hua, 2015. Courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of century Taiwanese art and are the most intuitively chosen art forms for Fine Arts, Taipei. Bottom: Lin Hsin-Yueh, young artists in attempting to map out their social and mental landscapes. Valley, 1991. Oil on canvas, 130.4 x 194 cm. © Lin Hsin- Yueh, 2015. Courtesy of the Mocking the “Empire” and Expanding National Identity National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei. In the past decade, many artists started to engage with stories about foreign brides from Southeast Asia and China who are married to Taiwanese men. With the increase of an educated population in Taiwan, a majority of women holding a graduate degree are becoming independent and devoted to their careers, and thus are unable to ﬁnd suitable spouses or have families. Consequently, more and more Taiwanese men marry foreign women. Immigration policy, however, hasn’t been revised to consider those who are becoming “New Taiwanese” through marriage. Chen Chieh-jen takes the topic of foreign brides to reﬂect upon an old-fashioned nationalism

86 Vol. 14 No. 2 that isn’t yet prepared to accept these new Taiwanese citizens, leaving the divisions among the different ethnicities on this island huge. Empire’s Borders I (2008–09) addresses the social reception and mistreatment that brides from mainland China encounter at immigration ofﬁces—comparing this with the difﬁculties Taiwanese women face when applying for a US tourist visa. The personal experiences of these brides reveal the still-rigid boundaries between Taiwan and other Asian countries—an ironic reality that is in contrast to the slogan “New Taiwanese” that has been propagated by the government since the 1990s.

Chen Chieh-Jen, Empire’s Border I, 2008–09, 35mm ﬁlm transferred to DVD, colour and black-and-white with sound, 26 mins., 50 secs., single-channel video. © Chen Chieh-jen, 2015. Photo courtesy National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.

Tu Pei-Shih’s take on the history of Taiwan is a more humourous one. Her video The Adventure of Mount Yu V—From Michel Foucault to Our Glorious Future (2011) offers a critical reading on the writing of history between different scenes of historical conﬂict that occurred with the change of regimes from the Dutch occupation and Japanese colonial period to the 228 incident.8 The animation in the video is a collage of images found in history books and on the Internet. In this presentation, the boundary between ﬁction and reality has become blurred. Michel Foucault even makes an appearance at the beginning, suggesting the role of power in knowledge production and propaganda.

Chen Ching-Yuan, NoWorld, Chen Ching-Yuan belongs to the 2011, three-channel video, 2 mins., 23 secs. © Chen generation growing up after the period of Ching-Yuan, 2015. Courtesy of National Taiwan Museum martial law. His sculptural video works of Fine Arts, Taipei. Input and Output and the one-channel video NoWorld parody the current power struggles in Taiwanese politics. Input depicts a man dressed in a blue shirt and red blazer inhaling the farts of another man standing to his right. The colours of the farts—white, red, blue, green—symbolize different political parties and ideologies. And as he absorbs too many farts, he eventually explodes and collapses into the island of Taiwan. In NoWorld, constituents representing different national flags are transformed into new flags, a pun on the instability of national territories; the work thus offers new interpretations of national flags in which they are revealed to have more in common with each

Vol. 14 No. 2 87 other than not. In March 2014, Chen Ching-Yuan was an active participant Tu Pei-Shih, The Adventure in Mount Yu V—From Michel in the 318 Sunﬂower Student Movement, a series of protests against the Foucault to Our Glorious Future, 2011, single-channel passing of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement that the Taiwanese video, 7 mins., 7 secs. © Tu government signed with the PRC and that was approved without careful Pei-Shih, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Project Fulﬁll review in parliament.9 During his participation in the movement, and the Art Space, Taipei, and the National Taiwan Museum of protestors’ occupation of the parliament building, he painted a series of Fine Arts, Taipei. portraits of activists. This series, which was a platform of communication between the activists and larger Taiwanese society, became controversial as they ended up at the TKG Gallery, and inevitably turned into commercial goods. Thus, some questioned whether Chen Ching-Yuan’s motivation in participating in the protests was in fact driven by a true sense of activism. In my view, Chen Ching-Yuan practices his political convictions both in life and in art, and beyond the political reasons for his being with the activists, making art while there made the passing of time more enjoyable.

Yu Cheng-Ta, Exploding Taiwan, 2011, four-channel video installation. © Yu Cheng-Ta, 2015. Courtesy of Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei.

Yu Cheng-Ta’s video work Exploding Taiwan (2011) is displayed in two camping tents, behind which are images of ﬁreworks projected on the wall. Two documentary videos, one in each tent, show different narrators making up various accounts of a story the artist provided them—hearsay about a government scheme to explode the island of Taiwan because its existence has for too long been an unresolved issue. And according to one of the narrators,

88 Vol. 14 No. 2 it is the artist Cai Guo-Qiang who is invited to design the ﬁreworks that will accompany the explosion. The destruction of Taiwan through ﬁctional narration is inspired by the faked media reports the artist has noticed in real life—news, she claims, is so often fabricated and manipulated by those who have power to speak and transmit messages. This work is also likely intended to be a testing ground, albeit an ironic one, for how the Taiwanese would deal with the non-existence of Taiwan.

Anxiety of the Strawberry Generation: Personal Boundaries A large number of the works are by artists who belong to the “Strawberry Generation”10—a neologism imposed by the previous generation upon those who were born in the 1980s. The analogy comes from the fact that strawberries are a delicacy and command a high price, suggesting that this generation, growing up in a wealthier environment, is less able to withstand pressure and endure hardship. The Strawberry Generation became the backbone of society, facing all the challenges that come with globalization.

However, this generation has also become the scapegoat for the sluggish economy and the deteriorating competitiveness of Taiwan within global markets. A common attack against the Strawberry Generation is that they grew up without experiencing poverty and have such easy access to information that they take everything for granted and remain incompetent or irresponsible when dealing with genuine tasks. Statistics show that this is a misconception—the Strawberry Generation does not enjoy a better life,11 but suffers from long work hours, low pay, and job insecurity under massive inflation rates. Some of the Strawberry Generation initiated sit-in protests against the Taiwanese government’s handling of an official’s visit from mainland China and became the leaders of the 318 Sunflower Student Movement—they called themselves Wild Strawberries.

Artists of the Strawberry Generation are no less political than their predecessors. But their artwork incorporates more humour when addressing current social issues. (For example, Chen Ching-Yuan, Yu Cheng-Ta, Tu Pei-Shih, discussed above, belong to this generation.) On the other hand, many from the Strawberry Generation ﬁnd inspiration through animation culture, life parodies, and kuso elements in dealing with personal anxiety relative to changes within society.

For example, in The Heroic Colors series, Agi Chen abstracts the contemporary world through forms and colours that are used in popular animation. At first glance the flattened, bright colour fields might remind one of Takashi Murakami’s computer-generated DOB and the many versions of Superflat Flowers, which are taken from motifs in the Japanese animation genre and reduced to flat, bright colours and a repetition of geometric forms. Animation culture is not a tradition in Taiwan, but arose as a visual influence when animation culture was imported from Japan and the US during the Strawberry Generation’s youth. Agi Chen’s animation “characters,” such as Spider Man, are divested of their original iconography, and what remains are minimal concentric circles—Spider Man, for

Vol. 14 No. 2 89 Agi Chen, The Heroic Color—Spider Man, 2005, mixed media, 158 x 103 cm. © Agi Chen, 2015. Collection of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei.

example, is reduced to abstract circles of red, blue, and yellow. Similar to Murakami’s abstracted animation ﬁgures, Agi Chen’s circles demonstrate an ambiguity among the ﬁelds of design, pop culture, and art—but in fact represent a nostalgia for childhood more than they do a celebration or critique of pop culture.

Hsu Wei-Hui’s pink girl troop for Hsu Wei-Hui, Guerrilla Girl—Girl War Era, 2012, Guerrilla Girl—Girl War Era (2012) installation, ﬁberglass, binoculars, facial mask. © consists of little pink ﬁgurines Hsu Wei-Hui, 2015. Courtesy taken from commercial products of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei. found in animation and a pink gun suspended above them made from facial mask sheets. Each of the pink soldiers holds a gun in one hand while grasping her skirt with the other, indicating both the strength and femininity of the courageous modern woman. They are supposed to be able to protect their creator— the artist Hsu Wei-Hui—against physical or verbal harassment and sexist

90 Vol. 14 No. 2 discrimination that targets women. Pink would seem to be a soft and feminine colour; however, it is used just as often by male artists whose work celebrates consumer culture, such as Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons. In this respect, the young female artist’s work is endowed with a symbol of power of speech that is normally reserved for men.

Lo Chan-Peng, Ashen Face— Aiko Fang, 2011, oil on canvas, 259 x 194 cm. © Lo Chan-Peng, 2015. Courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei.

Lo Chan-Peng represents young faces from different walks of life—the wild and untamed, the talented yet unsuccessful—in his realistic paintings based on a collaborative process of studio photography. The making of the paintings is very time-consuming: He commissions professional make-up and hair designers, lighting professionals, photographers, and models to produce what look like fashion photographs—which creates a platform for these talented, creative young people involved in the project to communicate with each other. After carefully editing the photograph with computer software, Lo Chan-Peng projects the photographic image onto the canvas and paints these haunting muses in fastidious detail, including the veins and pores on the models’ skin. This meticulous process and his obsession with technique and detail aims at illustrating the capability of the Strawberry Generation, and with this, claims that they deserve more recognition and opportunity within society. The series of paintings constitutes both portraits of the Strawberry Generation, as well as a documentation of, through the collaborative work process, of their collective effort and struggles.

Left and right: Yeh Yi-Li, Kuso—Pink in Monet’s Garden, 2008, single- channel video, 2 mins., 11 secs. © Yeh Yi-Li, 2015. Courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei.

Vol. 14 No. 2 91 Kuso and pop culture are inspiration for the performance by Yeh Yi-Li, Installation view of Jie (Boundaries): Contemporary and they require no deep readings. In Kuso—Little Pink in Monet’s Garden Art from Taiwan, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, (2008), shown through video and photographic documentation, the artist Cornell University. Photo: dresses herself as Little Pink, a ﬁctional character that she created who Yu-Chieh Li. interacts with nature in a nonsensical manner in a setting that is computer generated (modeled after Monet’s Impressionist paintings of the bridge in his garden at Giverny which overlooks a pond of water lilies). The artist’s own body and the surreal environment are the sole material of the performance, and the superficiality that lies beneath this fun-making arises from the anxiety and detachment of empty human relationships that are evident in real life as well as in virtual reality.

All of these works are visually stimulating and their inﬂection of humour makes them fun, too. But instead of merely revealing symptoms that typify the Strawberry Generation—pampered and immersed in their egoistic world—they actually go beyond that and show more nuanced suggestions of the conﬂicts within the current world and the complexities that this generation faces in order to thrive. The question and the challenge is how can all this be translated into a global language if the current art world, when lacking background information about these nuances, is still prone to judge works of art by a more formalist reading.

While attending to a variety of media and themes that complement the curatorial idea of boundaries, Jie achieved it through the harmonious

92 Vol. 14 No. 2 installation of the works. It successfully sketched a picture of the ways Taiwanese artists position themselves in this changing world through critical engagement with social reality, ﬁction, illusion, and disillusion. As an exhibition, Jie also has undoubtedly laid another foundation for research into contemporary art from Taiwan over the past ten years and further expanded the notion of Taiwanese art, its boundaries, and how it currently connects to the world.

But a phenomenon found among some works produced in the past ten years is that many emphasize art for art’s sake, and the presentation of artistic concepts appears to be too straightforward, perhaps even too clean and neat in aesthetics. In the 2004 show, works by the generation growing up with martial law, including Hou Chun-Ming, Wu Tien-Chang, Chen Chieh-Jen, possessed disturbing and visceral motifs and qualities that make the spectator feel nervous. They also included powerful political and sexual allusions that made use of the body in a highly erotic way. In contrast, some of the “clean” works in Jie are less able to instigate further discussion beyond this framework. For example, at Jie I observed that some interactive works were concerned with playing with technology or calling for the audience’s participation; they were enjoyable, but it was also difﬁcult to explore the content beyond their popular appeal. One explanation might be that the rather stable domestic art market favours such art forms. I hope the following decade will generate art that asks for audience participation or employs high-tech media that functions in meaningful new directions.

Perhaps now, thirty years after the lifting of martial law and in an atmosphere of overwhelming globalization, is the time when the old boundaries crash and more unpredictable boundaries form. As An-yi Pan’s earlier exhibition in 2004 already illustrated, the fate of Taiwan is reﬂected in the development of its art. Post-1980 artists who have emerged over the past ten years are no less political; however, the China/Taiwan relation is no longer the only political aspect of their work. In the ﬁnal passages of An-yi Pan’s essay, he discusses how the boundary changes have affected artistic creation, arguing that there has been a “gradual lessening of national identity” in the past ten years12 that seems to be in contradiction to some of the zealousness in protecting national identity that was observable during this year’s wave of student protests led by the Strawberry Generation. I wonder if this lessening of national identity is a phenomenon within the art world, and that the idea of national boundaries is currently an unfavourable theme for art production, or if such works appear less visible because their content could be too sensitive for some international art exhibitions. All in all, Jie is a strong art historical survey; however, it does not go beyond the conviction that art is an expression of the society in which it is produced, and thus has not posited a polemical question that will cause a ripple effect. This is, for sure, a task for the future.

Vol. 14 No. 2 93 Notes 1. In 2014, in addition to several biennials that featured works by Taiwanese artists, the exhibition Schizofrenia Taiwan 2.0, which toured from Ars Electronica Festival, in Linz, Austria, to Paris and Marseille, was devoted to media art in Taiwan. Also, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York opened Zero Boundaries, a group show of emerging Taiwanese artists based in North America and Taiwan. Jie, however, is the only exhibition of 2014 that has an art historical purview. 2. The Taiwanese are composed of aboriginals and Chinese immigrants who came to Taiwan beginning in the twelfth century. From the sixteenth century, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Japanese successively occupied the island. 3. An-yi Pan, “Jie (Boundaries): Contemporary Art From Taiwan,” in Jie (Boundaries): Contemporary Art From Taiwan (Ithaca, NY: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2014), 10. 4. Ibid. 5. White Terror refers to the period from 1949 to 1987 under the Kuomintang reign, when Taiwanese citizens did not have political freedom. 6. Jie (Boundaries): Contemporary Art From Taiwan, 118. 7. The artist mentioned this in her statement. See “Huang Chin-Hua,” in Jie (Boundaries): Contemporary Art From Taiwan, 136. The original quote could be “suppose that each grain of sand in each of those Ganges rivers were a world.” See Sutra of the Past Vows of Earth Store Bodhisattva, http://huntingtonarchive.osu.edu/resources/downloads/sutras/05bodhisattvaYana/Earth%20 Store%20Bodhisattva.doc.pdf/. 8. The 228 incident was an anti-Kuomintang uprising on February 28, 1947, two years after the Japanese gave Taiwan back to China. Following the incident was a series of massacres and suppression of the Taiwanese people by the Kuomintang government, caused by cultural and ethnic conflicts between the local people and government officials. 9. “Protesters occupy Taiwan parliament over China trade deal,” BBC, March 19, 2014, http://www.bbc. com/news/world-asia-26641525/. 10. This term was invented in the 1990s to describe the generation born in the 1980s. See Rachel, “The Strawberry Generation,” National Central University Center for the Study of Sexuality, http://sex.ncu. edu.tw/members/Ho/pr/looking/strawberry/rachel/html/. 11. Jenny Chou, “Experts: Strawberry Generation is Just a Myth, Statistics Say,” September 12, 2005, http.www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2005/09/12/2003271331/. 12. Pan, “Jie (Boundaries): Contemporary Art From Taiwan,” 41.

94 Vol. 14 No. 2 Brian Karl Against Rigour in Art A Review of Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible? Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco October 24, 2014–January 25, 2015

“A lady visited Matisse in his studio. Inspecting one of his latest works, she unwisely said, ‘But surely the arm of this woman is much too long.’ ‘Madame,’ the artist politely replied, ‘You are mistaken. This is not a woman, this is a picture.’” –Stelarc, “Prosthetic Head: Intelligence, Awareness and Agency,” interview with the Prosthetic Head, an artiﬁcial linguistic entity1

n the paragraph-long story “On Rigor in Science,” Jorge Luis Borges takes up a conceit from Lewis Carroll’s fnal novel, Sylvie and Bruno, Ifrst published in 1889: The proposal to expand the scale of map- making to align one-to-one to the areas that each map is meant to represent. In Carroll’s telling, some closer-to-the-earth farmers scuttle the project when they point out how such a map would kill all crops by blocking out the sun. In Borges’s telling, however, the fanciful notion went forward as the ne plus ultra or ad absurdum of representation, only to be abandoned after completion, left to decay through exposure, open to the elements by those next generations “not so fond of the study of Cartography” and who realized that the all-encompassing maps were “Useless” and “not without some Pitilessness.”2

The exhibition Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible? at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, featured work by a group of twenty-one artists working in a broad assortment of approaches and media and engaging with different thematics of representation, hovering around a focus—or, rather, foci—on different ideas of landscape, nature, and environment. Occupying conceptual terrain somewhere between the engaged pragmatics of Carroll’s farmers and the taken-to-the-extreme undertaking/undoing in Borges’s tale, the mostly contemporary works by the artists in the show illustrated, interrogated, and undermined a range of notions related to representation.

“Interrogate” and “undermine” would be the adjectives most compelling, it would seem, for the three curators of the exhibition—Betti-Sue Hertz (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), Ruijun Shen (Guangdong Times Museum,), and Xiaoyu Weng (Kadist Art Foundation)—who come from overlapping milieus in both the U.S. and China. This ambitious group show—drawing on somewhat divergent sources pivoting around the private collection of the Paris/San Francisco-based Kadist Art Foundation—aimed deep and landed

Vol. 14 No. 2 95 wide. The array of work exhibited, following a slightly different installation earlier last year in China, at the Guangdong Times Museum (May 27 to July 27, 2015), spread far in many directions conceptually but refused to cohere around any singular theme, much less resolve itself with any defnitive conclusion. In many ways, the installation of the show’s various artworks demonstrated, in its dense layout, the unruliness of the too many concepts that can be tracked through issues in representing landscape, as well as some of the challenges in using the limited physical environment of a gallery space in attempting to unfold the countervailing logics of expansiveness that can be associated with ideas of landscape.

One set of concerns stated by the curators involved those differences between Western versus Chinese precepts for both creating and relating to landscape representation. Another foregrounded interest pointed to questions that newer technologies imply for perception and cognition in contemporary understandings of landscape. Both these thematics remained elusive and mostly oblique, however, across the play of different pieces in the exhibition.

Special attention was also given in the curators’ statement to characteristics of the locations of California and China’s Pearl River Delta—for example, their relationship to technology: for Silicon Valley as a technology innovator/producer, and for the Pearl River Delta as a technology manufacturer/supplier. Attention was also given to the more historical utopian and romantic cultural ideologies that might characterize these locations’ relationship to nature, in contrast to their various urban and suburban development actualities. Such themes were not found explicitly addressed in the various artworks of the exhibition itself, however.

In their statement, the curators pointed to the notion of a new “Era of the Anthropocene” as an additional theoretical premise for the exhibition, with its unavoidable signs of the changes to actual landscapes that have been wrought by humans in the post-industrial era. This is the theme that perhaps allowed exhibition viewers the most traction with respect to some of the works themselves.

For instance, in Simone Pyle’s As Above So Below (2011), a small video monitor was half-buried in a low pile of dark earth on the gallery ﬂoor, and on its screen was footage of another monitor half-buried in a forest setting, itself playing images of nature. This work was the most direct, literalist evocation of a new Anthropocene era. Rather differently, Robert Zhao Renhui’s photographs Changi, Singapore (2010–12) and Expedition #46 (2012), each from a larger series, illustrate some of the effects of and responses to interventions resonant with the Anthropocene, including documentation of individual humans in the context of environmental science expeditions to the Arctic Circle and documentation of signs of a massive importation of soil to Singapore from abroad. More tangentially, Paul Kos’s conceptual piece Sound of Ice Melting from 1970—multiple twenty-ﬁve-pound blocks of ice, attended by audio gear from the same

96 Vol. 14 No. 2 Simon Pyle, As Above, period, that recalibrate awareness of the subliminal by “marking” in some So Below, 2011, video installation, dimensions way the sound of melting—though not originally intended to address variable. Photo: Phocasso. Courtesy of the artist and such issues, borrowed some value from the exhibition’s setting to imply Yerba Buena Center for the questions about the effects on landscape caused by global warming. Arts, San Francisco.

That part of the curators’ afore-mentioned theses that gave credit to Paul Kos, The Sound of Ice shifting technological bases for Melting, 1970, mixed media installation of two 25-pound perceiving landscapes that have blocks of ice, eight standing boom microphones, been implied by the “micro- amplifier, and speaker, dimensions variable. Photo: screens” of recent framing devices by Tommy Lau. Courtesy of such as smartphones and other the artist and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San computer screens—with all the Francisco. distortions, fractures, flattening, and hyper-accessibility that the digital basis can offer—is a tantalizing notion to consider. But that notion points beyond the almost entirely earlier-generation media technologies featured in the exhibition—that is, flat-screen video monitors, large-scale projection, an old-school film projector, and vintage, commercially manufactured audio gear. The actual technologies in the exhibition did not feature any of the newer technologies—such as satellite views, GPS, or small-screen personal devices—nor did it follow up in any direct way on a reference in the curators’ statement to The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Anne Friedberg’s 2009 book on changing perspectives on the landscape that arise from the proliferation, new framings, and fragmentation of images offered through the mediation of computers and their monitors.3

At the broadest conceptual scale, any connection to Félix Guattari’s theoretical framework of four ontologies—the virtual, the actual, the possible, the real—from which the exhibition’s subtitle, the virtual, the actual, the possible?, is derived were left for viewers/readers to determine on their own (as well as why one of those four terms of Guattari is absent from the exhibition title). Other theoretical explications of representation

Vol. 14 No. 2 97 in art practice that might have been invoked—from Plato and Aristotle’s Robert Zhao Renhui, Expedition #46, from the perspectives on the mimetic faculty of art through John Ruskin’s praxis of series The Glacier Study Group, 2012, digital pigment the sublime in landscape painting, and, especially, Walter Benjamin’s “The print, 120.6 x 85 cm. Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Jean Baudrillard’s Courtesy of the artist and Kadist Art Foundation. “Simulacra and Simulation”—were not mentioned.

Other cultural reads on the landscape that might have been productively deployed include David Gissen’s recent articulation of sub-nature; that is, those manifestations of “nature” found in humanly developed spaces, such as weeds growing through the cracks in sidewalks, or brush on the edge of a railroad bed. There is also Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which complicate ideas of “nature” beyond a simple false dichotomy of “natural” versus man-made and thus might have been particularly relevant to how many of the actual works in the show function.

The contention put forward in the show’s curatorial statement and catalogue essays suggesting something fundamentally “Chinese” as a value system that avoids imposing order on nature versus some implicitly singular and hegemonic “Western way” of approaching “nature” denotes a culturalist starting point that was not especially generative in relation to the works exhibited. In particular, the contention that Western art has put forward a praxis of presenting isolated objects—and, further, isolating humans from nature, even while depicting it—seemed an under-examined theme in the exhibition itself, as well as the curatorial statement attached to it.

Even brief recognition of Western attempts that do not align with the notion of simply objectifying nature insulated from human existence (for example, Impressionism or Fauvism) might have been productive in noting more nuanced divergence, as well as in recalling some prior reckonings of the malleability of perception and representation of landscape(s). Also

98 Vol. 14 No. 2 Robert Zhao Renhui, Changi, ignored even as passing references were more surreal and/or political Singapore, from the series As We Walked on Water, exercises (for instance, the body/land works of Ana Mendieta or Hélio 2010–12, digital pigment print, 120.6 x 85 cm. Oiticica, coming out of Latin America, or the long-term project of the Courtesy of the artist and Center for Land Use Interpretation in the northern hemisphere), or Kadist Art Foundation. monumental works in recent generations that have quite deliberately repositioned humans in relation to landscapes (land art from Michael Heizer to James Turrell; ecologically based work by the Harrisons, Patricia Johansen, and Future Farmers), and critical photographic approaches to representing landscape that are too diverse and numerous to mention (one thinks of Louis Baltz, John Chiara, Michael Light, David Maisel, Sean McFarland, Richard Misrach, and Christina Seely, just for starters).

Landscape: the virtual, Back in the physical realm of the the actual, the possible?, installation view, Yerba exhibition itself, the design of Buena Center for the Arts, 2014. Photo: Phocasso. the installation by Kyu Che was Courtesy of the artist and innovative and effective, a built Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. presence that shaped the experience of the show overall. One was faced even before entering the open doorway of the gallery with a portion of a large, somewhat imposing circular wall that was part of a broken ring with both entryways and visual slits creating a pavilion-like environment within the space of the larger conventional gallery (and with some reference to the walled-off setting of a Chinese scholars’ contemplative garden).

Vol. 14 No. 2 99 This design created not just multiple Top: Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible?, spaces but multiple types of spaces: installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, typical ﬂat walls for exhibition— 2014. Photo: Phocasso. some well-lit, others darkened Courtesy of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San and subdued—faced, on multiple Francisco. Left: Landscape: the virtual, sides, the exterior of the ceiling-less the actual, the possible?, pavilion building-within-a-building, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, along with a small group of 2014. Photo: Phocasso. Courtesy of Yerba Buena darkened alcove spaces in and around the pavilion, where most of the media Center for the Arts, San Francisco. work was installed. Around the ﬁrst large curve of the built wall in an outer, lit area, an open cutout window provided a foretaste of a video piece by Chen Xiaoyun, which was installed on the far side of another wall extension in the curvilinear space, at what was ostensibly the “end” of the exhibition’s larger installation trajectory.

On the near side of this cutout Zheng Guogu, Teleportation as Landscape, 2014, was a small, platform-like deck performance, installation. Photo: Tommy Lau. Courtesy on which sat two small cushions of the artist and Yerba and a tea set—the residue from Buena Center for the Arts. Teleportation as Landscape (2014), a performance piece commissioned for the exhibition from artist Zheng Guogu. Above the window cutout were a couple of pencil sketches depicting that same performance, a meta-piece in which a discussion between the artist and an interlocutor—in the context of the exhibition opening—verbally

100 Vol. 14 No. 2 Zheng Guogu, Teleportation transmitted “images” that were then as Landscape, 2014, performance, installation. interpreted by two visual artists. Photo: by Tommy Lau. Courtesy of the artist and The resulting paintings were then Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. hung in proximity to the round pavilion gallery, odd extensions to the core representation of the exhibition itself.

Large glass fragments in Marcelo Cidade’s Adição por subtração—4 (2010) created a perpendicular frame for a rectangular ﬁeld (in landscape orientation) and neatly played on lineages of both gallery-based two- dimensional visual art and conceptually based outdoor land art. Cidade’s use of the sharp-edged shards of glass—creating an ambiguous border of solid matter while remaining visually semi-transparent—also evoked the use of broken glass as an aggressive urban marker while acting as a prophylactic measure against would-be trespassers upon private property.

Marcelo Cidade, Adição por subtração—4, 2010, installation, broken glass on wall. 150.8 x 300.2 cm. Photo: Phocasso. Courtesy of the artist and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

A highlight of the show was Chen Xiaoyun’s Vanishing Point (2014), an understated tour-de-force that played out across five medium-scale video monitors laid out horizontally in a cul-de-sac space sandwiched between the darkened end of the last curve outside the circular pavilion and the gallery’s “regular” perpendicular wall. The piece presents a series of narrative and/or contemplative text fragments projected as supertitles across the images that pop up across the five screens. The pace and overlapping of the texts occur slightly too fast for one to completely take in, and the imagery that plays out on each screen creates an odd disjunctive continuum, from quasi-still-life portraits of lonely interior chairs with dust blown over them to evoke air pollution in Beijing to “ready-mades” of urban flotsam (a sand-bag, an abandoned backpack, a rubbish bin) found within a fifty-meter ring of the artist’s studio. There is also a sort of late noir cartrip along a post-midnight city highway that is illustrated entirely through the glare of refracted artificial streetlights and shadows. The text that accompanies this abstracted imagery speculates—sometimes morbidly,

Vol. 14 No. 2 101 sometimes sensually, sometimes amusingly—about what might go on inside those other sealed metal and glass capsules of strangers’ cars driving in parallel or passing nearby.

The implication of a sort of perverse ﬁgure-ground relationship is suggested in a section of the video in which the camera pans slowly and circularly (echoing the varied angles of the various still-life and outdoor moments in other “episodes” of the video) around the upper part of ﬁve individual bodies lying prone, each seemingly straddling a liminal state of dreaming and waking with phrases like “Then she cried” superimposed over the bodies.

The notion of human figures immersed in landscape and nature in Chen Xiaoyun, Vanishing Point, 2014, five-channel traditional Chinese painting could have been seen as newly updated here, video. Photo: Phocasso. courtesy of the artist and though its form and manifestation in this work might actually seem drawn Yerba Buena Center for the more from the Western lineage of video work by artists such as Vito Acconci, Arts, San Francisco. Bruce Nauman, and even Jean-Luc Godard. Variations on super-titles such as “Viva video art!” flash more than once as punctuation between and among episodes, perhaps speaking all the more to the medium of video in a self- conscious mode than to the regeneration of any traditionalist gestures.

Charlotte Moth, Absent Forms, 2010, black-and- white ﬁlm, 10 mins., 42 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Kadist Art Foundation.

Charlotte Moth’s black-and-white ﬁlm Absent Forms (2010) played on an interesting conceit in relation to the curators’ notion of complicated contemporary landscapes. In its depiction of a series of humble commercial potted plants found in the urban setting of Paris, the chain of modernist connections it takes off from—an historical text by art critic Francesco Pedraglio responding to a building by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens and a related ﬁlm by artist Man Ray—threatens to snap the already tentative connection to the landscape theme in this exhibition, and the oddball

102 Vol. 14 No. 2 appearance of Paris diverges from the show’s stated focus on California and the Pearl River Delta River as sites that represent new perspectives on landscape and nature.

A nice visual-conceptual echo occurred between a whorling layout of provocative vinyl-lettered texts—for example, “Blaming them for depressed wages and lack of jobs accusing them of being morally corrupted and $pying on you”—on ﬂoor and walls in We Must Draw the Line Somewhere, You Know (2014), by Tsang Kin-Wah, and Field Work (2010), a large- scale painting on cotton by Lois Weinberger. Tsang Kin-Wah’s enveloping “mindscape” sets up an immersive ﬁeld for viewers, implicating them through his texts in the critique of political and moral realities (and in some ways re-registering that notion of integration into the landscape attributed to traditionalist Chinese visual representation), while Weinberger’s large- scale work placed more elliptical poetic texts phrases onto, and as the topography of, a large-scale, blown-out, rudimentary map.

Left: Tsang Kin-Wah, Another lovely juxtaposition in the installation of the exhibition was We Must Draw the Line Somewhere, You Know, produced between the large-scale video wall projection, After Reality (2013), 2014, cut vinyl lettering. Photo: Phocasso. Courtesy by Zhou Tao, and, beneath it, to one side, the old-school boxy industrial of the artist and Yerba video monitor resting on the floor and featuring Anthony McCall’s 1972 Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. film/performance Landscape for Fire. McCall’s work records an enactment Right: Lois Weinberger, Field Work (detail), 2010, by half a dozen or so white coverall-suited men determinedly lighting oil-based paint marker on fiery lamps. They evoke a ritual with murky purpose in the twilight, and impregnated cotton, 305.8 x 560 cm. Photo: Phocasso. the close-miked sound of each explosively lighted firepot, along with the Courtesy and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San irregular counterpoint of sporadically wailing air-horn careening in the Francisco. near distance, combine to not only intensely define the environs of the landscape but auditorily claim much of the exhibition space itself.

The schematic of McCall’s accompanying drawings suggests some of that imposition upon the landscape the curators imply as Western “values,” while the ephemerality of tagging the landscape gives the impression of

Vol. 14 No. 2 103 either serving as a symbolic prototype of the greater interventions of Left: Zhou Tao, After Reality, 2013, video, the Anthropocene, or just, in contrast, the puniness of human cultural 14 mins., 21 secs. Right: Anthony McCall, gestures. The piece itself, of course, harks back to a period in Western art Landscape for Fire, 1972, practice when land and performance-based work converged intensely with 16 mm ﬁlm converted to DVD, 7 mins., 5 secs. a conceptual basis seldom seen before or since, and recalls the utopian/ Photo: Phocasso. Courtesy of the artists and Yerba dystopian dreamscapes of back-to-the-landers, communal farmers, and Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. other scions of alternative living in the 1960s and 70s—a California context the curatorial statement points toward (though McCall’s piece was actually shot in England).

A similarly casual sprawl across the stated borders of interest for the exhibition is found in Zhou Tao’s piece, which presents views of the rural edges of both Guangzhou and Paris—an oddly roundabout way to “connect the two distinct geographical and cultural contexts” of California and the Pearl River Delta, one of the defined aims of the exhibition. Intriguing and somewhat ironic in this video work is that it features a series of waterways that define and show how unstable landscapes themselves are, while also tracking a set of human movements around and adjacent to them. As with the human figures in McCall’s work, the half-mysterious, half-industrious gestures of workers, in Zhao Tao’s case maneuvering through and harvesting lush green growth in a highly rural and otherwise seemingly uncultivated setting of both land and water, offers another sense of embodiment within the landscape (the piece’s large rectangular projection itself seems to be floating).

The idea of demonstrating a Chinese approach to representing landscape and its relationship to contemporary attitudes in Western art-making, however, remains a bit of a ghost argument in this exhibition overall. And if those phantom traces of the exhibition’s purported overarching concepts aren’t entirely forced willfully through the busy sprawl of the show, it is a bit faint to be readily detected.

Similarly elusive in relation to another stated theme of the show: there were moments in some of the videos where the effects of technology are more apparent than in the majority of works: a brief freeze frame, a sped-up time lapse, etc., although the more radical shifts attributed to re-framings by

104 Vol. 14 No. 2 Tacita Dean, Baobab, 2001, “micro-screens” are less evident. In one of the most direct confrontations 16 mm film, 10 mins. Photo: Phocasso. Courtesy of Yerba for the viewer with physical and perceptual limits, the small pedestal and Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. projector cordoned off with a small, low rope in one of the handful of cul- de-sac spaces, Tacita Dean’s 16 mm film loop Baobab (2001) set a tangibly awkward limit on spectators’ viewing of the small projected black-and- white image. The apparatus of the projector was a particularly unavoidable presence, putting technology physically in a place that obstructed any viewer attempting to see the images of Dean’s lonely landscape on the island of Madagascar, populated most prominently by the plant species also known as Adansonia, or the monkey bread tree. The desolation of the setting and darkened obscurity of some of the images in Dean’s film itself played against conventional “types” of illuminating clarity in landscape art, although the four-meter distance that viewers were required to maintain added an even more contrary or ironic relationship to the landscape portrayed, whether intentionally or not.

As with so many moments throughout Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible?, the confrontation of such physical obstacles to the viewing of often dim, somewhat distant images of an even more distant place embody a fundamental complexity of representation in the contemporary spaces of art viewing themselves. This set of circumstances in many ways overwhelmed those more nuanced, intricate questions of representation embedded in everything from painterly techniques through deployment of newer technologies, in addition to current global ecological and ideological concerns. The collection of work in the exhibition certainly puts into play and highlights larger questions about the representation of landscape, while hinting at some of the particular intricacies of seeing and sharing the world at the present moment.

Notes 1. Stelarc, "Prosthetic Head: Intelligence, Awareness, and Agency," in 1,000 Days of Theory, October 19, 2005, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=490/. 2. Jorge Luis Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, trans. Norman Thomas de Giovanni (London: Penguin Books, 1975). 3. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

Vol. 14 No. 2 105 Erica Mohar Wanxin Zhang: Totem Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco November 8 to January 3, 2015

ver the past twenty years, San Francisco-based artist Wanxin Zhang has been creating his signature body of work entitled OPit #5, much of which consists of life-sized clay figures that combine the influences of Qin dynasty sculpture (221–206 B.C.), Abstract Expressionism, the American Clay Revolution, and shanshui hua (“mountain-water” painting). The result is a style distinctly his own. Drawing on a unique iconographic language and process of making, Wanxin Zhang charts a deeply personal journey of self-reflection while questioning the past, the present, and the future. Totem is Wanxin Zhang’s first solo show at the Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, and includes works dating from 2009 to 2014.

As the starting point for much of his work, Wanxin Zhang’s sculpture takes its cue, formally and informally, from historical references that include global political monuments, Greco-Roman and Renaissance sculpture, and Eastern religious icons. It is a journey that expands outward from his own cultural heritage to embrace collective and personal narratives that encourage us to re-examine ourselves, our history, and our place in the world.

Wanxin Zhang was born in Changchun, Jilin, China, where his work was informed by a childhood growing up in the 1960s and 70s under the dictatorship of Mao Zedong. Basic freedoms were violently suppressed, and propaganda pushed a political agenda designed to shape a “collective” world view. This upbringing led him to examine and become suspicious of political power and structures. After the Cultural Revolution ended, in 1976, Wanxin Zhang attended the sculpture program at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, Shenyang, as one of the ﬁrst generation of post-Cultural Revolution students to receive formal training in art. In sculpture, clay was the primary material for practicing both the foundational and technical skills of artistic expression. At the Academy, Wanxin Zhang became a consummate practitioner of the arts but had little or no opportunity for personal artistic expression, which was not encouraged even after the Cultural Revolution. After graduating in 1985, Wanxin Zhang joined the Young Artists Group in north China, which represented a form of revolution in art for many young artists. At this time he stopped working with clay and began experimenting with metal and mixed media.

Many of the sculptures in Totem draw attention to the inﬂuence of the terracotta warriors of the Qin Dynasty. The artist was ﬁrst exposed to the

106 Vol. 14 No. 2 warriors, which were discovered near Xi’an by farmers in 1974, decades ago during a school ﬁeld trip. He was immediately drawn to their scale and stature and questioned the implications of so monumental an exercise in the mass production of sculpture. In an interview with Richard Whittaker in 2012, Wanxin Zhang remarked that, “It’s easy to think that the emperor’s army was a glorious thing, but the power of that emperor, how was it used?” 1 Qin Shihuang (259–210 B.C.), China’s ﬁrst emperor, employed the labour of over 700,000 men in building a tomb complex that was organized among four large pits, that together contain thousands of life-sized terracotta warriors, chariots, and horses, all of which were deemed necessary to guard the emperor in the afterlife. The emperor destroyed those aspects of culture that threatened his authority, burning books and killing thinkers who did not share his point of view. Narratives such as this have resurfaced again and again across centuries and continents and have been fundamental in the formation of Wanxin Zhang’s view of the world.

Wanxin Zhang relocated from Changchun to San Francisco in 1992 to attend the Academy of Art University, earning an M.F.A. in sculpture. Upon moving to California, he returned to clay after being exposed to the American Clay Revolution and the work of the Bay Area Figurative and Funk art movements as represented by artists Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson, Stephen De Staebler, and Manuel Neri, among others. These movements emerged in the 1950s and 60s primarily in the northern California art scene and elevated work in clay from “craft” to “art.” Voulkos preached spontaneity and encouraged emphatic evidence of the artist’s hand in the work. Arneson’s work was more refined than that of Voulkos, which took the form of high-energy sculptures that often incorporated self- deprecating or self-reflective humour. De Staebler achieved monumentality of form with clay in his life-sized figures, while Neri, by contrast, dwelt on relatively fragile figuration. For Wanxin Zhang, at this point in his career, and given the powerful influences at work in the San Francisco Bay Area, the selection of clay as a primary medium was not a choice but a necessity. This was a material with unmatched expressive potential that could be physically, emotionally, and spiritually manipulated and transformed.

When one enters the Catharine Clark Gallery, one is met with a fairly minimal installation, yet there is little opportunity for visual rest as the viewer is immediately assaulted by a need for engagement, a powerful and alluring element present in Wanxin Zhang’s work. This is in part due to the scale of the sculptures, some of which are larger than life. Through the orientation of the ﬁgures, many of which face opposite directions, each piece competes for attention while operating independently of the others. The juxtaposition of opposing and contradictory forms and relationships among pieces is visually compelling and prompts the viewer to examine the work ever more closely. The title of the exhibition, Totem, suggests ambiguity in that it could be understood to allude to the totemic pole sculptures of the Paciﬁc Northwest. Animals, characters, and objects are assembled in Wanxin Zhang’s work to generate a larger narrative that may only be decipherable if one understands the symbolic meaning of each element.

Vol. 14 No. 2 107 Wanxin Zhang, Totem, installation view. Left to right: Warrior with Color Face, 2009; Solo Roamer, 2013; Special Ambassador, 2011, ﬁred clay with glaze. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

During an interview I conducted with Wanxin Zhang, the artist discussed the inﬂuence on his work of the aforementioned shanshui, a form of Chinese Expressionist landscape painting that rose to prominence during the Song Dynasty (960–1279 A.D.). This style of painting is composed via a two-dimensional technique of multiple vanishing points that Wanxin Zhang manages to capture in three-dimensional sculpture, thus stressing competing focal points and forcing the viewer’s focus to zig-zag from point to point within the room as well as within each piece.

From an initial drawing, Wanxin Zhang begins each work by creating a personal structural vocabulary that is used to build out surface details. The artist explores where and how to leave and create textures on the overall form, including hand marks such as fingertip impressions, traces of pinched and pushed clay, or marks left by various tools that carve, incise, and stamp. The texture on the figures maps the texture of the artist’s experience in the process of creation and instills a visceral connection with the viewer that permits one to trace the movement involved in the making of the work. Solo Roamer (2013), a towering figure that stands seven feet tall, is a strong example of how Wanxin Zhang builds surfaces in this way.

Special Ambassador (2011) is another impressive larger-than-life sculpture. Half panda, half man, this ominous figure fills the viewer with a sense of foreboding while at the same time conveying exhaustion and defeat. The figure’s mouth is a bloodied open gash, and its eyes are tightly swollen shut, yet they still seem to track the viewer’s presence and movement in the gallery. Wanxin Zhang is a master at creating figures that look simultaneously powerful and powerless; the intensity of this juxtaposition is again amplified by the surface treatment of the work. The size and structure of the pieces is domineering and strong, yet the texture—cracks, scarring, imperfections—suggests fragility. This speaks to the strength and vulnerability of human nature while reflecting the emotional intensity of the artist. Wanxin Zhang has alluded to some of his works as self-portraits. That being said, at times it is uncertain whether the artist is merely

108 Vol. 14 No. 2 Left and right: Wanxin Zhang, Special Ambassador, 2011, ﬁred clay with glaze, 198.1 x 60.9 x 53.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

commenting openly about himself or examining, in some personal way, larger issues such as the human condition in the context of globalization, politics, and culture.

The tension that is evident in his process is essential to the experience of Wanxin Zhang’s work. The surfaces are relentlessly manipulated, and the choice of colour for the glazes, the application of Chinese decals and characters, the grafﬁti and mark-making, and the adding or removing of layers of clay all produce a surface that makes palpable Wanxin Zhang’s memories and life experiences, as if he is charting a personal journey from East to West. Prior to his departure from China, Wanxin Zhang was asked by a major newspaper what kind of art he would create after arriving to the United States? He responded,”Wherever I go, whatever I end up working with, will be guided by my Chinese roots with the pure intention of expressing who I am.”2

Wanxin Zhang, Tomorrow There are moments throughout the will be fine!, 2012–13, fired clay with glaze, 134.6 x 43.1 exhibition that showcase Wanxin x 38.1 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Zhang’s humour. Tomorrow will be Gallery, San Francisco. fine! (2012–13), a white sculpture measuring over four feet tall and modeled after Guanyin, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, is rooted in history yet executed in a contemporary style. Her right hand gestures a sign of peace, while her other seeks a replacement, an exposed dowel hole highlighting her missing forearm. The figure’s face is brushed with muted tones of primary colours that cover a somber expression.

Vol. 14 No. 2 109 Spring Whistling (2014), slightly smaller in stature, is a white monochromatic figure with Chinese snowscape decal Wanxin Zhang, Spring Whistling, 2014, fired clay details that have been highlighted in with glaze, 121.9 x 38.1 x 45.7 cm. Courtesy of the shimmering silver paint and punctuated artist and Catharine Clark occasionally with bright colour. The Gallery, San Francisco. figure is male and at first glance looks quite normal, as if he is out for a walk. Upon closer inspection, however, the viewer notices a giant bulge in the crotch area that is shocking and humorous and alludes to a Chinese story about what really exists under monks’ robes. This sculpture, among others, gives the viewer a place for respite from the looming gravity of the other works.

Wanxin Zhang is skilled at employing glazes and textures that mimic metals, dripped wax, or hard candy. Often firing his figures half a dozen times, the artist uses underglazes as stains to emphasize the rich surface texture. He creates layers of colour and textures that drip, pour, and splash, and that connect his aesthetic to the spontaneity and gestural excitement of Abstract Expressionist and action painters of the 1950s and 60s such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline—an influence that became embedded in Wanxin Zhang’s work primarily through the examples of Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson.

In The Refluent Tide (2009), Wanxin Zhang recalls Michelangelo’s Pieta with surfaces that are, in contrast to the work of Michelangelo, informed by a heavy hand. Wanxin Zhang, The Refluent Tide (Pieta), 2009, fired clay In Michelangelo’s version, Mary cradles with glaze, 60.9 x 60.9 x 81.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist her son Christ as he lay dying in her arms. and Catharine Clark Gallery, In Wanxin Zhang’s version, the sculpture San Francisco. is heavily imbued with sensuality. The mother, representing the West, holds her son to her exposed bosom and provides a soft receptiveness and forgiving presence that could be seen as contrasting with Wanxin Zhang’s childhood experience in Mao’s China. The influence of the East is further exemplified by the blue-and-white patterned glaze that alludes to the Qinghua ci variety of Chinese porcelain, which originated in the Yuan dynasty during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Here, a landscape suggesting oceans and mountains melts into pools of patterns derived from dripping glaze, merging the second and third dimension into one powerful expression. The female figure cradles the male figure and offers comfort while the surface dissolves as if fading from memory.

Twin Peaks (2014) represents something of a departure from Wanxin Zhang’s earlier work. Colour preferences have shifted to ones that are

110 Vol. 14 No. 2 Wanxin Zhang, Twin Peaks heightened in tone, surfaces are covered (detail), 2014, fired clay with glaze and decals, 71.1 x 35.5 in painterly Chinese decals with images x 30.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark and calligraphy, and bodies have become Gallery, San Francisco. truncated. Two men stand intimately beside one another, largely occupying the same space and seemingly becoming one. The surface of their forms beams in a bright yellow glaze and intricate decals that, together, create forceful textures that compete with the flashes of bold primary colours. The title of the piece alludes to a scenic drive above San Francisco’s gay Castro district, where men meet. The surface is thoughtfully composed of crimson mountainous landscapes, bright foliage with summer blooms, butterflies, and rabbits, accompanied by deconstructed text from which only one legible word emerges—“hi.”

Wanxin Zhang, Pink Warrior, Pink Warrior (2013), cleverly installed 2013, fired clay with glaze, 144.7 x 53.3 x 58.4 cm, in proximity to the non-figurative work installed with Bricks, 2014, fired clay, dimensions Bricks (2013), is a life-sized sculpture variable. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark coated in shiny, bubble gum-pink glaze. Gallery, San Francisco. The colour of the figure is contemporary, yet the style of dress is traditional, with the hair tied in a topknot. Pink Warrior seems to be in a state of halting motion with his body largely in a state of decay. The figure is missing his hands while the entire surface area of the piece is again worn and textured with punctures, cracks, and graffiti. The head and face are only partially formed, suggesting uncertainty as to whether the figure is in a state of formation or losing its form. The heavy working of the clay and shiny glaze suggests a liquid state, and the figure overall seems to be melting away, taking with it its culture and traditions. At a recent interview at the Catharine Clark Gallery, Wanxin Zhang shared that Pink Warrior is a comment on contemporary culture and consumer attitudes. He sees global consumerism as a threat to culture and freedom of choice both now and in the future. It is not surprising then, that the elements of Bricks, some of which bear Western graffiti, lie strewn behind the figure’s feet like debris, remnants of monuments to a past of great consequence such as the Great Wall or the Berlin Wall, each for sale at a price. This paradox, offering for sale things that ought not to have been for sale in the first place, again showcases Wanxin Zhang’s sense of dark, ironic humour—an aspect of his work that helps make his more difficult narratives more digestible.

Notes

1. Richard Whittaker, “Portfolio: Wanxin Zhang,” Works and Conversations (December 2012), 42. 2. Wanxin Zhang, e-mail correspondence with the author, January 5, 2015.

Vol. 14 No. 2 111 Alexandra Lily Mitchell Relics, Memory, and Nostalgia in Harmonious Society

armonious Society (天下無事) was the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art’s (CFCCA) contribution to the Asia H Triennial Manchester 2014 (September 27–November 23, 2014). Co-curated by Jiang Jiehong, CFCCA curators Ying Tan and Ying Kwok, and assistant curator Yu-ling Chou, Harmonious Society was an ambitious exhibition of works by contemporary Chinese artists and is one of the largest group exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art ever to be presented in the UK. With the opening of the show coinciding with the 2014 Occupy Central “Umbrella Movement” protests in Hong Kong,1 as well as occurring shortly after the Scottish independence referendum on September 18, 2014, the context of political uncertainty both in China and the UK provided a relevant backdrop to the works on display. The overarching narrative of Harmonious Society is not an explicit political commentary but a more open discourse directed to the shifting and diverging social, cultural, and political dynamics of contemporary society, both in China and internationally.2 In this rapidly changing contemporary culture, the theme of the passage of time and collective memory and trauma is present throughout much of the exhibition.

The use of site-speciﬁc works in museums and public spaces around Manchester was key to the success of Harmonious Society, both as an exhibition in its own right and as a response to the broader theme of “conﬂict and compassion” within the Asia Triennial Manchester. In addition to the gallery settings of CFCCA and ArtWork, the exhibition presented works at the National Football Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester Cathedral, and the John Rylands Library. The works in these locations provided a series of subversive interventions within buildings that have been viewed as symbolically institutional spaces or sites of cultural importance. In this respect, a dialogue was created between the sites, the works, and the audience.

An example of this dialogue is Annie Lai-Kuen Wan’s Lost in Biliterate and Trilingual (2014), a set of eighteen ceramic books created by reproducing various English, Mandarin, and Cantonese dictionaries in white clay, exhibited in the John Rylands Library. When the books are ﬁred in a kiln, the paper and text they contain disintegrates, leaving only a delicate shell that retains the form of the book. The work renders the reading process inaccessible, thereby destroying the function of the book, and within the context of a library, this intervention of restricting access to a text raises questions not only of the limits of language and translation, but of the

112 Vol. 14 No. 2 presence of power structures surrounding access to material such as banned books and classified information held by public authorities. The treatment of books in her artwork reveals an interaction with the process of reading; in one of her previous works, Infinitive Horizon/Ruin (2013), the artist used different types of clay to replicate one hundred and eighty discarded books, painting wet clay over the text so that the gaps between the pages were systematically erased and the spaces between the pages were physically filled.

Left and right: Annie This ambiguity of translation is also present in Jin Feng’s Chinese Plates Lai-Kuen Wan, Lost in Biliterate and Trilingual, (2014), also exhibited in the John Rylands Library, as well as at ArtWork. 2014, installation with ceramic books. Photo: This work consists of a series of wood panels carved with passages on Tristan Poyser. Courtesy human rights taken from China’s constitution. The panels are carved of CFCCA, Manchester. in the style of a printing block in which the text is shown in reverse and complements the antique letterpress printing presses on display throughout the building. The obstacle of legibility created by the backwards text, like Annie Lai-Kuen Wan’s ceramic books, also presents an element of restriction and unintelligibility within the process of reading and access to information, as well as links to the recent petitions for constitutional reforms regarding freedom of speech, press, assembly, and peaceful demonstration. Through the presentation of the printing plates without any kind of printed document, the work highlights a separation between the concept of China’s constitution and its enforcement.

Also on display in the John Rylands Library was Wang Yuyang’s Breathing Books (2014), a site-speciﬁc installation located in the library’s Historic Reading Room. In this nineteenth-century Gothic revival building, Wang Yuyang responded to the site by using the Chinese books in the library’s collection. These books were meticulously copied as hand painted, hyper- realistic silicon sculptures; the artist also created exact replicas of the reading room’s tables and chairs for the installation. The sculptures are so realistic that, at ﬁrst glance, it seemed as though the books simply had been taken from their shelves and placed in random in piles on the desk.

Vol. 14 No. 2 113 Jin Feng, Chinese Plates, 2014, wood. Photo: Tristan Poyser. Courtesy of CFCCA, Manchester.

Wang Yuyang, Breathing Books, 2014, mixed media installation. Photo: Tristan Poyser. Courtesy of CFCCA, Manchester.

However, as the viewer approached Wang Yuyang, Breathing Books, 2014, mixed media the piece, the objects, including installation. Photo: Tristan Poyser. Courtesy of CFCCA, the table and chairs, slowly began Manchester. to give the impression that they were breathing, thanks to a series of sensors and small motors that activated the movement.

This installation is part of the Breathing series that the artist has been working on since 2005, in which inanimate objects—including whole ofﬁces stocked with computers, phones, ofﬁce equipment, and discarded coffee cups3—are given the illusion of being alive. As with Annie Lai- Kuen Wan’s ceramic dictionaries, here the basic purpose of a book is subverted—this centuries-old medium for the reading of text is rendered mute and transformed into a purely sculptural object. However, whereas Annie Lai-Kuen Wan’s work produces an motionless solid mass where the text should be, Wang Yuyang transforms the image of the book into a dynamic, animated entity. The movements of the breathing books lent a disconcerting, almost supernatural element to the work, as though the books themselves had come to life and transformed their role from a passive medium for text that is animated by the hands and mind of the reader to a performative actor within the library’s space through the movement and sound of its motors.

114 Vol. 14 No. 2 All three of these works reflected not only the context of the library through books, language, and its susceptibilities, but the transition of time as well. Chinese Plates refers to the invention of woodblock printing in China, which is estimated to have occurred during the third century A.D. The artist’s reference to such an ancient technique, in the absence of any printed result implies a disassociation between past and present. In Lost in Biliterate and Trilingual the books are rendered solid by the firing process and thus evoke a sense of fossilization or decay—and the languages contained within are transformed from pervasive international languages into ephemeral remnants of a lost era.4 The John Rylands Library holds an extensive collection of historical relics such as papyrus fragments, as well as a collection of five-hundred Chinese manuscripts dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; parallels can be drawn between the artworks on display and these permanent collections whereby the ceramic books and printing plates could be thought of as future relics. Wang Yuyang consciously employs the passing of time through the lifelike movements of his book sculptures that represent breathing seemingly drawn from the life force of the library’s visitors.

LuxuryLogico, Solar, Another example of the collective memory of relics and found objects are Manchester, 2014, light installation using recycled two light installation works, Solar, Manchester (2014), by the artist group street lamps, LED lights, scaffolding. Photo: Tristan LuxuryLogico, and It Is Forever Not (2014), by He An. LuxuryLogico is Poyser. Courtesy of CFCCA, Manchester. an art collective consisting of Che Chih-chien, Lin Kun-yong, Chang Keng-hau, and Chang Geng-hwa, who specialize in new-media works that combine multiple disciplines such as music, performing arts, and computer programming. Solar is an ongoing series of site-speciﬁc light installations that have previously been displayed in Taiwan and Hong Kong and made its European debut in this exhibition. The Solar installations are collaborative

Vol. 14 No. 2 115 projects in which the artists collect LuxuryLogico, Solar, Manchester, 2014, light unused and discarded domestic installation using recycled street lamps, LED lights, and industrial lamps from the local scaffolding. Photo: Tristan Poyser. Courtesy of CFCCA, communities hosting the displayed Manchester. work. Through this recycling process, the artists highlight collective and local memory by reassembling the lights into a giant outdoor sun-like arrangement that is illuminated at night; hence the origin of the project’s title, Solar. Solar, Manchester consists of an artificial sun made from 177 recycled street lamps, and each light bulb has been converted into an LED light that transforms the earlier use of incandescent light into a more modern and efficient light source. This outdoor installation becomes illuminated only after dark, when the brightness and pattern of the lights shift throughout the night. Work on the installation took place in Manchester for over a month. The artists, in collaboration with Salford City Council and Bury Council, collected outdated street lamps that once were the source of evening illumination and have long been a part of the collective memory of the city. Through the process of recycling found objects and converting them to LED, issues related to energy consumption and efficiency were also highlighted.

He An, It Is Forever Not, 2014, lighting installation using recycled signage. Photo: Tristan Poyser. Courtesy of CFCCA, Manchester.

The other work that explored the theme of urban memory through the reuse of light was It Is Forever Not (2014), by He An. By the 1980s, the period He An grew up in, after China adopted its Open Door Policy in 1978, a wave of imported Western culture resulted in rapid urban expansion, economic and industrial growth, and changing social and political circumstances. He An’s work deals largely with the physical evidence and social memory of China’s growing cities, and It is Forever Not is a sculpture constructed from Chinese characters from neon advertising signs which, according to the artist, were stolen by a group of people he hired from his hometown of Wuhan. He began to work with the characters from neon signs as far back as 2000 and has employed them to construct words, names, and phrases that comprise his artworks. For He An, the neon signs are given power and presence beyond their initial function as shop signs and advertisements, and within an enclosed exhibition space they become

116 Vol. 14 No. 2 monolithic. The use of found objects and light draws a direct parallel to Solar, where lights have been taken out of their original function within an urban environment and re-purosed as large-scale sculptural installations. However, while Solar implies a sense of optimistic regeneration through the act of recycling, He An’s light works reﬂect a more transient and psychologically poignant image of modernity, where signage that populates our everyday environment and is intended to be viewed from afar is now repositioned indoors and made more dynamic and intimate through his rearrangement of the characters to create personal messages and slogans.5

Pak Sheung Chuen, Resenting Hong Kong Series: Resenting My Own History, 2014, performance- installation. Photo: Tristan Poyser. Courtesy of CFCCA, Manchester.

The element of memory and the passage of time is also apparent in Resenting Hong Kong Series: Resenting My Own History (2014), by Pak Shueng Chuen, which was displayed at CFCCA. The Resenting Hong Kong Series can be read as playing on the idea of Hong Kong distancing itself from its colonial past as the notion of “collective memory” that accumulates with the passing of time and the denial of that memory is addressed by a literal act of erasure. As part of the work, British volunteers were invited to deface the Queen’s portrait on a series of $1 HKD coins collected and donated by Hong Kong residents by rubbing the coin against the ground until the portrait disappeared. The volunteers were asked to take photographs of both the defaced coin and the mark it created on the ground. The coins were then returned to the gallery and used to create a mirror installation piece. With the gradual degradation of the Queen’s image came a symbolic act of disassociation between Hong Kong and Britain. Up until 1981, it was illegal to deface coinage in the UK, and during the reign of Henry VIII, the act of defacing the image of the monarch was considered high treason.

Yang Zhenzhong’s installation at the National Football Museum, Long Live the Great Union (2013), plays with perspective through a fragmented vision of the Forbidden City viewed from Tian’amen Square, made from a series of nine painted wooden structures. The installation can be viewed as complete

Vol. 14 No. 2 117 only when observed from one angle through a viewﬁnder on a platform Top: Yang Zhenzhong, Long Live the Great Unity, 2013, opposite the installation. Today, Tian’amen Square is a popular yet heavily installation. Photo: Tristan Poyser. Courtesy of CFCCA, policed tourist destination where information regarding the protests of Manchester. 1989 is prohibited. In only allowing a single perspective from which to view Bottom: Yang Zhenzhong, Long Live the Great Unity, the installation as a whole, Yang Zhenzhong debates the implications of a 2013, installation. Photo: Tristan Poyser. Courtesy of single historical narrative. The work touches upon ideas of fragmented or CFCCA, Manchester. altered histories in which the concept of historical events and memories become unreliable through the inﬂuence of external political and social forces and thus lead to the problems of historical revisionism.6

The theme of social memory is revisited in the series of four video installations Realm of Reverberations (2014), by Chen Chieh-jen. The videos

118 Vol. 14 No. 2 Left and right: Chen Chieh-jen, Realm of Reverberations, 2014, video installation. Photo: Joel Chester-Fyldes. Courtesy of CFCCA, Manchester.

centre on the site of Losheng Sanatorium, in the Xinzuang District of Taipei, Taiwan’s first leprosy hospital, and the extensive fight for preservation of the site between 1994 and 2007 in response to its proposed demolition to make way for a depot for the Taipei Metro.7 Each of the four atmospherically filmed black-and-white video installations show a documentary-style recording of four women who were former residents or involved in the protests against the sanatorium’s demolition. Each subject recounts her experiences of the sanatorium in scenes that are inter-cut with other scenes of the demolished Losheng building complex. The installations explore both past traumas and uncertainty for the future since the hospital residents were displaced and relocated. Chen Chieh-jen’s work records and preserves details through these interviews that otherwise might have been lost.

Among other video installations displayed at the Museum of Science and Industry alongside Realm of Reverberations is a film installation by Kao Jun- honn titled Malan Girl (2014). Both Chen Chieh-jen and Kao Jun-honn explore the recent history of Taiwan and include themes of memory and conflict. Kao Jun-honn’s research-based artistic practice has resulted in a documentary-style video piece developed from a residency in cooperation with the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester, and the “Burning Issue” residency at the Taipei Contemporary Art Centre. The work is partially inspired by the location of Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry, was built on the site of the terminus for the world’s first passenger railway. In this work the development of railway systems during the process of industrialization is represented as being symbolic of the beginning of globalism in the modern world. Kao Jun-honn’s work also researches the history of Taiwan’s railways and its process of modernity. The title, Malan Girl, refers to a folk song of the Amis, one of Taiwan’s indigenous mountain cultures, in which an Amis girl threatens to commit suicide by lying across train tracks when her parents forbid her to marry a boy from the city.8 The reference to the song and the railway produce a link between the indigenous people and the city, as the song uses the symbol of the railway as a means of connecting the lovers as well as being the site of the girl’s conflict, highlighting class and racial conflicts. The song “Malan Girl” was one of the first aboriginal songs to cross over into Taiwanese popular music in the 1960s, remaining before that point almost completely unknown outside of the Amis communities.

For Malan Girl, Kao Jun-honn also brought in narratives about an incident in 1986 in which a young man named Tang Ying-shen from the Tsou tribe was sentenced to death at the age of eighteen for the murder

Vol. 14 No. 2 119 Kao Jun-honn, Malan Girl, 2014, video. Photo: Tristan Poyser. Courtesy of CFCCA, Manchester.

of his employers after suffering exploitation in his workplace. The film juxtaposes these two stories through its soundtrack, which uses excerpts of the son speaking and a voice-over reading Tang Ying-shen’s farewell letter written in prison, both subtitled in Chinese and English. The film itself is a collection of scenes of a railway filmed in part on the remains of the 1830 Manchester railway lines. Both works also draw upon the motif of industrialization and transport systems that is emphasized by the location of the works in the museum. Realm of Reverberations and Malan Girl both address the struggles of marginalized groups in contemporary Taiwan through documentary and archival film in an effort to preserve subjugated histories through personal recollection.

Through the collaboration of Asia Triennial Manchester 14 and CFCCA, Harmonious Society has, among many of its themes, been influenced by a reflection upon the past through political, industrial, and social histories both in relation to the exhibition sites and the experiences of the artists themselves. Through these various reflections, and within the context of the Triennial’s themes of “conflict and compassion” one can begin to raise questions about the future and the true meaning of a “harmonious society.”

This article is an expanded version of a winning entry for the Harmonious Society Award for Art Criticism.

Notes 1. Tania Branigan, “Hong Kong Activists Vow to Take Over Financial Centre in Election Protest,” Guardian, August 31, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/31/hong-kong-activists- open-elections-ruled-out-beijing/. 2. Dar-Kuen Wu, “The Artistic Activism of Asian Artists: The Asia Anarchy Alliance,” in Harmonious Society 天下無事 at Asia Triennial Manchester 2014 Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, ed. Jiang Jiehing (Manchester: Centre For Chinese Contemporary Art, 2014), 146–50. 3. Rodrigo Caula, “Wang Yuyang Breathing Series—Finance Department at Art Basel in Miami Beach,” Designboom.com, December 30, 2013, http://www.designboom.com/art/wang-yuyang- breathing-series-ﬁnance-department-at-art-basel-in-miami-beach-12-30-2013/. 4. Vivian Ting Wing Yan, “Time: The Future Archaeology of Annie Wan,” Leap: The International Art Magazine of Contemporary China, no. 22 (September 23, 2013), http://leapleapleap.com/2013/09/time- the-future-archaeology-of-annie-wan/. 5. Iona Whittaker, “He An: I am a curious blue I am a curious yellow,” ArtReview, no. 53 (October 2011), 153. 6. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 66. 7. Loa Lok-sin, “Thousands Back Saving Losheng Sanatorium,” Taipei Times, April 16, 2007. 8. Ho Wai-ching, “Music and Cultural Politics in Taiwan,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 4 (2007), 463–83.

120 Vol. 14 No. 2 Chinese Name Index

Ai Weiwei Gao Minglu Li Qi Tan Ying Yeh Yi-Li 艾未未高名潞李琦談穎葉怡利

Bai Lan (Caroline Gong Yan Li Xiaofei Tang Xiaobing Yen, Y. C. James Blundon) 龔彥李消非唐小兵晏陽初白蘭 Harsono, FX Li Yu-chieh Tang Ying-shen Yeung, Trevor Big Tail Elephant group (Hu Fung Wen) 李雨潔湯英伸楊沛鏗大尾象工作組胡豐文 Li Yuansheng Tsang Kin-Wah Yu Cheng-Ta Cacchione, Orianna He An 李原生曾建華余政達小歐何岸 Lin Hsin-Yueh Tu Pei-Shih Yu Hsiao Hwei Cai Guo-qiang He Chi 林惺嶽杜珮詩余小蕙蔡國強何遲 Lin Kun-yong Tu Wei-Cheng Yu, Mia Cai, Yingqian Nikita Hoon Chang-Yau 林昆穎涂維政于渺蔡影茜雲昌耀 Liu Xiao Wan, Annie Lai-Kuen Yuan Jai Chan Koonchung Hou Chun-Ming 劉瀟尹麗娟袁旃陳冠中侯俊明 Lo Chan-Peng Wang Guangyi Zhang Wanxin Chang Geng-hwa Hou Hanru 羅展鵬王廣義張萬新張耿華侯瀚如 Lu Peng Wang Jiping Zhang Yaxuan Chang Keng-hau Hsieh Tehching 呂澎王繼平張亞璇張耿豪謝德慶 Lu Xun Wang Yazhong Zhang, Raina Che Chih-chien Hsu Wei-Hui 魯迅王亞中張盈盈陳志建徐薇蕙 Ma Jianzhong Wang Yuyang Zhao Bandi Chen Chieh-jen Huang Chin-hua 馬建中王郁洋趙半狄陳界仁黃錦華 Meng Keke Weng Xiaoyu Zhao, Renhui Robert Chen Ching-Yuan Huang Yongping 孟可可翁笑雨趙仁輝陳敬元黄永砯 Ou Ning Wu Hung Zheng Guogu Chen Xiaoyun Huatuo 歐寧巫鴻鄭國谷陳曉雲華佗 Pak Shueng Chuen Wu Tien-Chang Zheng Shengtian Chen, Agi Jiang Jiehong 白雙全吳天章鄭勝天陳怡潔姜節泓 Pan An-yi Xi Jinping Zhou Tao Chiang Kai-shek Jin Feng 潘安儀習近平周滔蔣介石金鋒 Qin Shihuang Xiamen Dada Zhu Dianqiong Chou Yu-ling Jin Le 秦始皇廈門達達朱殿瓊周郁齡靳勒

Chou, Freya Jin Xilin Shen Ruijun Xu Fang 周安曼靳希林沈瑞筠徐方

Dai Zhuoqun Kao Jun-honn Shu Qun Xu Ruotao 戴卓群高俊宏舒群徐若濤

DeBevoise, Jane Kwok Ying Song Yonghong Xu Tan 杜柏貞郭瑛宋永红徐坦

Deng Xiaoping Lee Teng-hui Song Yongping Yan Jun 鄧小平李登輝宋永平颜峻

Fan Di'an Li Liao Song Yuanyuan Yang Zhenzhong 范迪安李燎宋元元楊振中

Fei Dawei Li Mu Sun Yingping Yangjiang Group 費大為李牧孫英平陽江組

Vol. 14 No. 2 121 The following text is the curatorial essay for the exhibition

MIND TRAVELING Lu Chuntao’s Ink Art

VISUAL ART CENTER CHINESE CULTURAL FOUNDATION OF SAN FRANCISCO MARCH 7 TO APRIL 11, 2015

SPONSOR: C AI FAMILY

WRITTEN BY SHEN KUIYI

How to develop and expand the pictorial and that is to say, the global and the historical. The technical language of ink painting has always been internal discursive system of Chinese art was still a challenge for Chinese artists. Particularly since locked into simplistic binary oppositions that had the beginning of the twentieth century, innovative developed in the framework of early twentieth artists who sought breakthroughs within century debates: tradition vs. modernity, east vs. traditional Chinese ink painting have constantly west, concrete vs. abstract, and national character explored new possibilities. The term “ink art” vs. universality. When Chinese art walked onto the entered the artistic discourse of mainland China international stage in the 1990s, however, it was in the 1980s, conceptually differentiating it from fully exposed to potential horizontal comparisons, the practices and traditions of “Chinese painting” and as one part of a pluralistic global culture, and linking it with the process of “modernization” its cultural identity naturally attracted attention. and “internationalization” then came underway. In Contemporary Chinese art inevitably was thrust the particular political and practical context of the into this process of constructing a Chinese cultural time, as China began its process of modernization identity. At the same time, however, in this open after decades of isolation, this had its necessity. conceptual space, transmission and inﬂuences If the trajectory of art were to be tracked by its across cultures also brought out the practical synchronic and diachronic coordinates, every issues of how to establish a national identity in moment would have a point in relationship to this pluralistic global culture. Rather than a vehicle the horizontal and vertical axes. For quite a long for passive expression or a text to be read, Chinese time, artistic developments in China, however, contemporary art is a cultural and economic carrier were shielded from necessary and possible that is actively engaged in creating history; it is longitudinal comparisons with the outside world, also a process of forming social and subjective and longitudinal comparisons with China’s own identity. After breaking the boundaries of medium history were manipulated or distorted. As a result, and genre, contemporary ink, like other forms of from its inception, the concept of “ink art” was art, becomes an important part of the process of faced with pressure on both axes of reference, constructing cultural consciousness.

122 Vol. 14 No. 2 Lu Chuntao, Lotus Pond No. 17, 2015, ink on paper, 95 x 95 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

In the more open discourse of the past few decades, many artists have experimented with the language of contemporary ink art to reveal their individual perceptions of the world, to manifest their humanistic attitudes, to express their concerns about life and to explore the spiritual world. Lu Chuntao is one of the most accomplished of the artists who thus expanded the language of ink painting in recent years.

With a remarkable mastery of traditional ink painting techniques and years of experience experimenting with contemporary ink art, Lu Chuntao breaks free of conventions and manifests an extraordinary degree of tolerance to new possibilities in terms of the choice of media, transformation of forms and evolution of styles. Lu Chuntao, The Lotus Pond series, one of his recent groups Lotus Pond of paintings, casts light on his unique personal No. 16, 2015, ink style and language. The lotus is a subject greatly on paper, 95 x 95 cm. Courtesy of the artist. admired by Chinese writers and painters. Known for the beauty of its blossoms emerging unsullied from the mud, the lotus has been hailed as the gentleman of all plants. Like plum blossoms in winter, the lotus of summer is a symbol of nobility and purity. Lu Guimeng, a reclusive Chinese poet of

Vol. 14 No. 2 123 the Tang Dynasty, used the image of lotuses seen in a moonlit pond as a metaphor of noble character. In the words of Zhu Ziqing (1898-1948), renowned Chinese poet and essayist, the image of moonlight over the lotus pond evokes the melancholy of the literatus. Moreover, many painters in Chinese history, such as Badashanren, of the Qing Dynasty, and Wang Yiting, Qi Baishi, Zhang Daqian and Pan Tianshou from modern times, depicted the lotus with distinctive personal touches. But instead of delineating specific lotus flowers and leaves, Lu Chuntao creates an image with greater intensity: the entire lotus pond, which connects this theme with contemporary life and society. Massive industrialization and urbanization have produced great changes in the Chinese environment, and for a society driven by the urge for instant profit and material desires, spiritual pursuit of loftiness and purity become a luxury.

Chuntao’s Lotus Pond brings to mind Monet’s water lilies. Nineteenth century French impressionist painters, who lived in a period of burgeoning capitalism, deployed their brushes and paints to sing hymns to the abundant colors of life. Monet, with his remarkably rich palette and brush textures, was able to capture the unpredictable effects of natural light. His water lilies are like exuberant symphonies of color. But Chuntao’s calm and quiet ink lotuses, on Lu Chuntao, Lotus Pond No. 22, 2015, ink on paper, the other hand, are pervaded with a sense of 262 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist. mystery. The misty and illusionary moonlight over the lotus pond spreads with the expansion of the intense and yet poetic ink color and lines, travelling is a way to access Dao with pure heart.” constituting images that are both dreamlike and Chuntao’s Lotus Pond creates a site for spiritual surreal. It seems that the artist manages to find wandering. The dream-like world functions as a moment of peace within the realm he creates, a source of his thinking, creative process and leaving behind the hustle and bustle of the real emotions. In his works, we can perceive the sense world and wandering freely in this dreamscape. of loneliness, solitude and longing found in real The notion of “mind travelling” in art may be life. The virtual space he creates in his painting traced back at least to the Six Dynasties period becomes his haven, harboring his memory of (220 - 589). In ancient times, people’s desire to his hometown, his childhood, his imagination travel was confined by limited transportation and expectation of the outside world. I paid a facilities. But they still wanted to experience the visit to the seaside in Chongming Island, where philosophical profundity inherent in gazing upon Chuntao grew up. Looking at the vast stretches of the landscape, so the literati came up with a way unpolluted reeds and listening to the rustling as to feel the beauty of nature by appreciating a they swayed in wind, I felt that I was more deeply landscape painting—mind travelling. In Zhong connected with the lotus ponds of his painting. Bing's (375-443) "Preface on Landscape Painting", Through hazy moonlight, starry sky, misty dawn, China’s first essay on the topic, he wrote “mind poignant twilight and vast lotus pools, Chuntao

124 Vol. 14 No. 2 spatial tension. The formal language of his painting obviously has transcended the paradigm of traditional literati painting and embodies a strong sense of modernity and expressionism.

Chuntao’s pursuit in terms of formal language may also be seen in his meticulousness about materials. To enhance the pictorial effect of the painting, he makes paper according to his own speciﬁcations. Its somewhat coarse texture gives the paper great suppleness. When combined with his densely applied textures and the gradated wash, it yields a feeling of rich moisture and complex substance that cannot be achieved on Lu Chuntao, Lotus Pond No. 69, 2013, ink on paper, conventional painting paper. 47 x 47 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

When you meet the artist, you'll be drawn to creates images brimming with a sense of mystery his bright eyes, lively and witty. Confidence and and illusion. They are a constant reminder of courage can be perceived in these eyes. It is our connection with the past, but at the same exactly such confidence that enables him to keep time, also an indication of our ephemerality. In a walking on his journey of exploration. world characterized by human desires, Chuntao manages to find his own perspective to observe and reflect, revealing his characteristic confident ease and unrestrained grace.

Chuntao is as deep a thinker as he is bold explorer. His skillful use of water and ink reveals his deep understanding of the classical practice of “substituting ink for color” but is simultaneously completely at home with the theoretical conceptions of modern abstract expression. Instead of limiting himself to the concrete characteristics of the lotus leaves and blossoms, he pursues a state that Huang Binhong (1865-1955) described as being Lu Chuntao was born in Chongming Island, Shanghai, “of absolute likeness and absolute unlikeness to in 1965. He studied professional ﬁne art at the the object”. Using his quasi-abstract calligraphic Shanghai International Studies University from 1984 to 1986. He is currently Vice Principle of the Shanghai ink language— dense lines, ink dots and ink Calligraphy and Painting Institute, Visiting Painter at strokes— along with dense gradations of wash, he the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy, member of creates images that are both hazy and lucid. Among the Chinese Artist Association and Executive Director the intense ink colors and intricate lines, the images of the Shanghai Artist Association. also glint with glimmers of light, the source of which may often be detected in reﬂections from the lotus pond or the distant horizon line. The mutual VISUAL ART CENTER penetration of ink and water, integrated with his Chinese Cultural Foundation of San Francisco layering of white pigment, creates intriguing effects 750 Kearny St., 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94108 of light that lure viewers into the tranquil, secretive and melancholy dream world he establishes. The contrasts between black and white, emptiness and concreteness, imbue the works with remarkable

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