JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2012 VOLUME 11, N UMBER 1 10TH ANNIV ERSARY YEAR
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Art Intervenes in Society: A Conversation With Wang Chunchen The Pursuit of Space: The Art and Artists of Hong Kong Artist Features: Xu Bing, Duan Jianghua, Lam Tung-pang Exhibition Reviews: Unofficial Chinese Art 1974–1985, Moving Image in China 1988–2011, Zhang Peili Retrospective Book Reviews: Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art, Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews and Digital Rants 2006–09
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VOLUME 11, NUMBER 1, JANUA R Y/FEBRUA R Y 2012
CONTENTS Editor’s Note 30 Contributors
6 Wu Street: Tracing Lineages of the Internationalization of the Art World Orianna Cacchione
16 Revolution and Power: The Paintings of Duan Jianghua Robert C. Morgan
37 30 The Best of Times: Lam Tung-pang’s Long View Under Scrutiny Abby Chen
37 A Conversation With Lam Tung-pang Abby Chen
52 The Pursuit of Space: The Art and Artists of Hong Kong Celine Y. Lai
66 66 Art Intervenes in Society: A Conversation with Wang Chunchen Marie Leduc
82 Blooming in the Shadows: Unofficial Chinese Art, 1974–1985 Jonathan Goodman
96 Moving Image in China: 1988–2011 and Certain Pleasures: Zhang Peili Retrospective Xhingyu Chen 82 102 Fictions of Nationhood Robert Linsley
109 Chinese Name Index
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Cover: Lam Tung-pang working on Past Continuous Tense, 2011, charcoal and image transfer on wood. Photo: Gordon Lo. Courtesy of the artist and Hong Kong Art Centre.
We thank JNBY Art Projects, Canadian Foundation of Asian Art, Mr. and Mrs. Eric Li, and Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison for their generous contribution to the publication and distribution of Yishu. Vol. 11 No. 1 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Katy Hsiu-chih Chien Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C.C. Liu The pages of Yishu have often served as a voice Ken Lum reflecting the need for the historical grounding of -- Keith Wallace contemporary Chinese art. However, with China’s Zheng Shengtian Julie Grundvig booming economy and art scene, the “immediate” Kate Steinmann seems to hold a more urgent role in securing an Chunyee Li international presence for that art. While the texts in Larisa Broyde Michelle Hsieh Yishu 48 are not devoted solely to the four-decade Chunyee Li history of China’s contemporary art history, it is something that resonates throughout this issue’s Judy Andrews, Ohio State University content. Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Museo Reina Sofia Orianna Cacchione discusses a 1993 work by Okwui Enwezor, Critic & Curator Xu Bing, Wu Street, and brings into question the Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China slippery veracity of cultural translation within what Fei Dawei, Independent Critic & Curator was termed at the time The New Internationalism. Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute Through the contemporary paintings of Duan Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Jianghua, Robert C. Morgan explores the ironic Katie Hill, University of Westminster dissonance between desire for revolution and the Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian hope for power in the US and China in the1960s and Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator seventies. Two texts by Abby Chen focus on Lam Lu Jie, Independent Curator Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore Tung-pang, a Hong Kong artist who is acutely aware Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University of the historical trajectory his city is experiencing Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand in its shift from a British colony to its apparent Philip Tinari, Independent Critic & Curator Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator absorption into the People’s Republic of China. And Wu Hung, University of Chicago in spite of what appears in this context to be an Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar unpredictable relationship with one’s identity, he Art & Collection Group Ltd. suggests the climate for artistic activity has improved. 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Celine Lai, on the other hand, identifies the lack of Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 viable studio space in Hong Kong as a problem in Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 creating a healthy, productive art scene. Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 E-mail: [email protected]
Marie Leduc interviews Wang Chunchen who Jenny Liu Alex Kao eloquently discusses the social role of art in China Joyce Lin both historically and in the context of today. This Perry Hsu leads into a review by Jonathan Goodman of the Betty Hsieh first exhibition in the US to explore the pioneering art Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd., associations in mainland China who saw themselves http://yishu-online.com as contemporary artists and not agents of the state. Design Format This is followed with a review by Xhingyu Chen of 1683 - 3082 two exhibitions in Shanghai that propose a history Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited of new media and video in China. Finally, we offer a in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, review by Robert Linsley of two recent books—one March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: by Gao Minglu and one by Ai Weiwei—that examine the ongoing problem of national identity in Yishu Editorial Office contemporary art. 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 One example of the complexity of defining this history: Phone: 1.604.649.8187 Fax: 1.604.591.6392 a number of the texts in Yishu 48 make reference to an E-mail: offi[email protected] early contemporary artists’ association in mainland China—Xing Xing Hua Hui—which is translated into 1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) either The Stars Group, The Star Society of Painting, 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) or the Stars-Stars Association. That there is no 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com) consensus upon the official name reiterates how Leap Creative Group potentially confusing this history can become. Raymond Mah Gavin Chow 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 2002 5 1
2 4 (Larisa Broyde) 6 (Chunyee Li) (Philip Tinari) 16 (Judy Andrews) (Britta Erickson) (Melissa Chiu) 30 (Sebastian Lopez) (Claire Hsu) (John Clark) 37 (Pauline J. Yao) (Martina Köppel-Yang) 52 Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill Charles Merewether 66 Apinan Poshyananda 82 85 6 : (886) 2.2560.2220 (886) 2.2542.0631 96 [email protected] Yishu Office 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada : (1) 604.649.8187 102 (1) 604.591.6392 : offi[email protected]
109 Leap Creative Group, Vancouver
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http://yishu-online.com Design Format
Contributors
Orianna Cacchione is a Ph.D. student Xhingyu Chen is a Shanghai-based writer in art history, theory, and criticism at and contemporary art specialist. A longtime the University of California, San Diego. observer of Shanghai’s art scene, she A former visiting scholar at the Central previously worked at the non-profit space Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, she is BizArt. A former art editor for Time Out currently based in San Diego and Beijing. Shanghai, she contributes to Art Asia Pacific, She received her master’s degree in Sculpture Magazine, Nukta Art, and the Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmith International Herald Tribune. Chen’s first University in 2008. She is a frequent book, Chinese Artists: New Media, gives a contributor to Flash Art International. wide overview of selected artists working in Her current research focuses on how new media (video, installation, and other transnational art practices shape critical related mediums). discourses about the internationalization of the contemporary art world. Jonathan Goodman studied literature at Columbia University and the University of Abby Chen is a curator, writer, lecturer, Pennsylvania before becoming an art writer and art administrator. A graduate of the specializing in contemporary Chinese art. California College of Arts, she is currently He teaches at Pratt Institute and the Parsons curator and deputy director at the Chinese School of Design, focusing on art criticism Culture Foundation of San Francisco. Her and contemporary culture. curatorial projects include San Francisco Public Art Initiative of Arts-in-Storefront Celine Y. Lai is teaching cultural and and Central Subway (Stockton), Gender heritage management at the City University Identity Symposium (Guangzhou), Yerba of Hong Kong. Her interests in modern and Buena Center For the Arts (San Francisco), contemporary Chinese arts are developed Museum of Chinese in America (New York), from her former postdoctoral research on Photo San Francisco, Pingyao International the Khoan & Michael Sullivan collection Photography Festival, and San Francisco as well as the Reyes collection of Chinese Arts Commission. Her writing focuses paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, on hybridity, photography, gender, and Oxford. With a background in archaeology, contemporary Chinese culture. she undertook several field trips in China
4 Vol. 11 No. 1 during the period 2004−2009 and witnessed Robert C. Morgan is an international administrative changes in museums and critic, writer, curator, and painter who lives other cultural sectors. Her recent research is in New York City. He holds an advanced concerned with the relationship of heritage degree in Sculpture (M.F.A.) and a Ph.D. in to arts and archaeology. China and Hong contemporary art history and is Professor Kong are her focus regions. Emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the author of Art into Marie Leduc is an interdisciplinary Ph.D. Ideas: Essays on Conceptual Art (Cambridge, candidate in art history and sociology and a 1996), The End of the Art World (Allworth, SSHRC scholar at the University of Alberta, 1998), Bruce Nauman (Johns Hopkins, Edmonton, where she is completing her 2002), and The Artist and Globalization dissertation on Chinese contemporary art (Miejska Galeria Sztuki w Lodzi, 2008). In in the global marketplace. In July 2010, she 1999, he received the first Arcale Award for completed a year of study and research at International Art Criticism in Salamanca. the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou In 2005 Professor Morgan was a Fulbright funded by the China-Canada Scholars’ Senior Scholar in the Republic of Korea. Exchange. She has written feature articles A collection of his essays on Chinese art and reviews on contemporary Canadian art will be published in translation in Beijing for Canadian Art and Artichoke Magazine. in early 2012. He is Consulting Editor to The Brooklyn Rail and Contributing Editor Robert Linsley is an artist who currently to Sculpture Magazine and in 2011 was lives in Kitchener, Ontario. He is widely inducted into the European Academy of published on modern and contemporary art, Sciences and Arts in Salzburg. most recently on Rodney Graham’s music. Linsley has exhibited his work in Barcelona, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Vancouver, Toronto, Los Angeles, and New York. His recent show at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery was accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Richard Shiff and Jan Verwoert. For more information about Linsley’s work and writing, see his Web site, robertlinsley.com, and blog, http://newabstraction.net.
Vol. 11 No. 1 5 Orianna Cacchione Wu Street: Tracing Lineages of the Internationalization of the Art World
his paper was presented as part of the First Songzhuang Xu Bing, Wu Street, 1993–94. Installation view from Xu International Academic Forum which was titled Criticism, Bing: Recent Work, The Bronx Museum, New York, 1994. T Translation, and Art Exchanges: The International Presentation Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. of Chinese Contemporary Art, and held during the Seventh Songzhuang Art Festival, Beijing, October 14 to 16, 2011. The Songzhuan International Academic Forum will be held annually to offer an opportunity for sustained, in-depth critical discussion of contemporary Chinese art by scholars, curators, and writers from around the world.
To begin my discussion about the linkages between contemporary Chinese art and the international, I want to discuss a work made by Xu Bing in 1993 called Wu Street. A joke, the work consists of a falsified Chinese translation of a review of the work of American abstract artist Jonathan Lasker. Replacing Lasker’s name with that of made-up artist, Jason Jones, and images of Lasker’s paintings with works Xu Bing found on a New York City sidewalk, the article, “Jason Jones: Planning Painting,” was published in 1994 in the Chinese art magazine Shijie Meishu (World Art). I have chosen Wu Street because it represents an early example of transnational art
6 Vol. 11 No. 1 practice. As is well known, Xu Bing is a Chinese artist who in the early 1990s lived and worked in New York and exhibited internationally. In 1993, his work was exhibited in the Venice Biennale; China’s New Art, Post-1989, in Hong Kong; China Avant-Garde, in Berlin; and Fragmented Memory: The Chinese Avant-Garde in Exile, at Ohio State University. What separates this work from the now ubiquitous characterizations of the contemporary artist as international nomad who lives abroad and exhibits around the world is how the work itself functions transnationally. Although originally created in New York, Wu Street was enacted in China, through the publication of the falsified text, and eventually exhibited in 1994 at Xu Bing’s solo exhibition Xu Bing: Recent Works, at the Bronx Museum. Because of the work’s movement between the time of its creation and exhibition in New York and its circulation as a magazine article in China, the work produces two distinct audiences, and each audience is implicated differently within the work’s joke.
Xu Bing, Wu Street, 1993–94. What is the joke? A play on words. The work’s title is taken from the Installation view from Xu Bing: Recent Work, The Bronx street where the paintings were supposedly found—Wu Street. Wu Museum, New York, 1994. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. Street’s Chinese transliteration, wujie, means both Wu Street and “misunderstanding.” However, the character for wu is never designated in the Chinese title, pointing to three possible characters and three possible meanings—to understand/become enlightened, to miss, and nothing. Despite their dissimilarity, the three characters all relate back to Chan Buddhism and the path to enlightenment. Following this play on words, what then is misunderstood? The text as it relates to the images it describes? Jonathan Lasker’s paintings? Abstract art? Or, possibly more profoundly, contemporary art? And who misunderstands? The Chinese audience reading the falsified text? Or the American audience when the work was eventually exhibited? Each question reveals a different misunderstanding. And when taken together, these questions can be more generally applied to the international art world at large, and, as such, the work produces a complex commentary on the state of not only contemporary art as it is influenced by the globalization of the art world, but also on the state of art criticism in the 1990s, when “New Internationalism” emerged as a dominant discourse in art theory and criticism.
Vol. 11 No. 1 7 Wu Street was made in 1993, the Xu Bing, Wu Street, 1993–94, Shijie Meishu (World Art) same year as the groundbreaking magazine article in Chinese. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. exhibitions of both the Venice Biennale and Whitney Biennial. Both exhibitions are now considered seminal events in the internationalization of the contemporary art world and the Xu Bing, Wu Street, 1993–94, “terms of critical debate in the preparatory documents. late 1980s and early 1990s.”1 The Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. Whitney Biennial, curated by Elizabeth Sussman, responded to calls by minority artists for better representation of their work within the art institution and was groundbreaking because it included more work by minority artists than white male artists. The selected artworks dealt mainly with identity politics. This particular biennial is frequently referred to as the “multicultural” biennial.
Discussions and criticism of the Whitney Biennial dominated discussions about contemporary art in New York and often bled into criticism of the 1993 Venice Biennale. The 1993 Venice Biennale, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, attempted to displace the exhibition’s emphasis on national art production for a more nuanced interpretation of internationalism. This was reflected in the Biennale’s themes “The Cardinal Points of Art” and “Cultural Nomadism” and also in a change of policy for the national pavilions. For the first time, national pavilions did not need to exhibit their own national artists. Instead, for example, Germany was represented by Hans Haacke, a German artist who had long lived in New York, and Nam June Paik, who had previously lived in Germany, also living in New York, whereas the American pavilion exhibited the work of Louise Bourgeois, a French national who lived in New York. Both Xu Bing and Jonathan Lasker exhibited work at the Venice Biennale. Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky (1987-1991) was exhibited in the Aperto exhibition, and Lasker exhibited a painting in the Guggenheim organized exhibition, Drawing the Line Against: AIDS. It is from this context that Xu Bing created Wu Street, and it must be considered when beginning to unpack what misunderstandings he illuminates.
Having established the context within which Xu Bing created Wu Street, I would like to return to the questions of misunderstanding that I posed earlier. First, what is misunderstood between the text and the images presented? Xu Bing’s exchange of images demonstrates the arbitrariness of contemporary art criticism—or, rather, a separation between the image and what is written about it. The text, no longer dependent on the image, allows Xu Bing’s substitution of real artwork for a found object. In “Jason Jones: Planning Painting,” the following description is matched to one of the images that is used to illustrate the text:
8 Vol. 11 No. 1 Obviously the artist intends to employ these elements through a shocking reconfiguration, it seems that the possibility of dialectic unity is infinite. The work, “Surface Plane” is constituted by monochromatic Xs, yet its perspective is disturbed by the dazzling silver background, unsettling and perpendicular yellow markings and the disproportionate black curves that occupy the foreground. The destruction of the spatial harmony by the gigantic curve is achieved through the Xs. Shining forth from under a layer of color, it proceeds to subvert it completely. The unity of the composition is further destroyed by the ring whose shape is reminiscent of a distorted chromosome.2
The formal description is startlingly accurate of the illustration that Xu Bing included with the text, rendering a divide between the formal elements used to compose the work and the criticism written about it. This formal analysis is buttressed by a critical reading of what is symbolized within the painting itself. In this instance, the author discusses contemporary science, communication technology, and American suburbia, while also relating the work to the history of Western abstraction. Here, if formal analysis is rendered arbitrary, so too is what is symbolized by the work itself. This points directly to Xu Bing’s own statement that “it [Wu Street] poses serious questions concerning the contemporary art system, the often arbitrary nature of critical language, and the basis for assessing the value of art.”3
Xu Bing’s appraisal of contemporary art criticism was paralleled in many of the debates that responded to the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Reading the Biennial as a consequence of structural changes in the art world as demonstrated by “multiculturalism,” Mary Jane Jacobs observed that the biennial “met with fierce objections because it threatened the existing power structure.”4 One of the most succinct criticisms of the Biennial was found in the pages of October. “The Politics of the Signifier” was a roundtable discussion between Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Silvia Kolbowski, and Miwon Kwon, published in October in 1993. The debate unpacked the theoretical arguments implied by the majority of negative criticism launched at the Biennial—such as how the value of these works of art can be assessed if the meaning of the artwork is no longer concretely linked to its formal aspects. Hal Foster commenced the roundtable discussion by stating:
I will offer a blunt proposition. In much contemporary art in this country there are two distinctive moves, two typical tropisms: a turn to a theoretical concept and/or a political position as content, as the message of the work. These messages are important; they concern the most essential aspects of our identities and our communities. But often, it seems, this very urgency deflects from full attention to work on the work, to work on its materials and forms, not in the sense of formalism but in the sense of signification:
Vol. 11 No. 1 9 how materials signify, in what ways meanings are informed Xu Bing, fake article “Jason Jones: Paintings in Planning,” 5 historically and delimited institutionally. by Xu Bing and Ai Weiwei. Published in Shijie Meishu (World Art), February 1994, pp. 28–31. Courtesy of Xu Bing As the meaning of contemporary art increasingly turns to theoretical Studio. or political content, what happens to the work of art itself? How do the materials of the work produce their own content? Do they need to? At stake in this discussion is how contemporary criticism must then be realigned to address these structural changes. For Foster, the “return to the signifier” means the positioning of the work’s content above the material used to signify that content. This created a reversal of formalism, the dominant
10 Vol. 11 No. 1 discourse of art criticism since Clement Greenberg. Krauss locates a problem within not only art practice but within the field of art criticism, arguing, “One of the things that I find symptomatic of the situation you are calling the return of the signified is the tendency of recent art criticism to avoid talking about the art itself and instead just to name a set of ideas that the art might invoke.”6 Krauss illustrates this point using the disparity between her own reading of Lorna Simpson’s Hypothetical and its reference in the Whitney’s catalogue, which presented a singular interpretation of the work, however did not actually relate the work’s meaning to specific aspects of the work itself.7 This arbitrary feature of contemporary criticism is precisely what Xu Bing critiques in Wu Street, which is particularly drawn out in the opening lines of the article “Jason Jones: Planning Painting.” The author begins the article with a discussion of a story recently published in the New York Times that states that the manner in which humans associated smell with different objects or meanings is socially constructed. But how does this association relate to the formal analysis of the work—how is smell related to the “monochromatic Xs” or the destruction of the “unity of the composition?” How do Lasker’s or Xu Bing’s found paintings invoke this possible meaning? Wu Street renders this relationship arbitrary, based on the critic’s own subjectivity.
If Xu Bing’s critique in Wu Street parallels so closely a contemporaneous debate in the art world, why did he choose abstract painting for his joke— his play on words of the misunderstanding of contemporary art? Especially if we consider that painting, and not just abstraction, was losing its privileged place within the art world—and that Xu Bing’s own practice was not abstraction or painting-based—his choice of abstraction is particularly confounding. His use of abstraction could allude to a misunderstanding of abstraction by the Chinese art world, which was slow to adopt abstraction in the first half of the twentieth century. However, abstraction was a dominant feature of neither Chinese modern nor contemporary art. In my opinion his choice of abstraction reveals the second misunderstanding—the role of abstract art within an international context. This reading is called for because of not only Wu Street’s transnational production but also Xu bing’s own position within the art world. Xu Bing was already an example of a new type contemporary artist considered within the New Internationalism. Abstract art formed the first wave of the internationalization of art and as such provides the historical background upon which the New Internationalism must be considered.
Abstraction was exported along with Western modernism predominantly to postcolonial countries in the middle of the twentieth century. Abstraction, as both universal and utopian, was commonly re-articulated within nationalist movements related to postcolonial struggles, which attempted to model themselves as “modern” nation states. However, it is precisely through postcolonial critique that Western-centric discourses of modernity began to be deconstructed by diminishing the centre-periphery power structure and also by emphaszing the agency non-Western countries exerted during the importation of modernism. The relationship between
Vol. 11 No. 1 11 universalism and abstraction in non-Western contexts is contested precisely Cover of Shijie Meishu (World Art), February 1994. Courtesy because of abstraction’s own re-articulation through the national, so, as of Xu Bing Studio. Geeta Kapur argues about India, the role of abstraction is always a “double discourse of the national and the modern,” and its emergence is inherently generative, merging the traditional with the abstract.8 However, Kapur’s critique also displaces the dominant role of the international in Indian art history. Thus she seeks to displace centre-periphery models of cultural dispersion by emphasizing the localization of abstraction instead of its universal, unmediated acceptance.
Additionally, in most cases abstraction was adopted first through stylistic means that were opposed to its theorization by Western art criticism, so that upon its reception, modernism was ripe to be filled with non-Western content and significance. This produces a first misunderstanding. However, a reciprocal misunderstanding is produced in the Western reception of non- Western modernism. Western modernist critics were only able to read non- Western abstraction within their own terminology and therefore commonly declared non-Western abstraction as derivative or belated when compared to Western abstraction. So there is a second divide between how abstraction is applied and what it actually means within a non-Western context, rendering abstraction’s universality false. This reciprocal misunderstanding leads to the final misunderstanding that I will discuss.
If reception and criticism are bound to particular locations, how can contemporary artworks be read as they move between contexts (locations)? Returning to Wu Street, this question is pertinent precisely because unless it is understood transnationally, the joke is always missed. In its American exhibition, wujie’s double meaning would not be understood by most viewers. But few readers of the magazine article in China would know the article had been falsified. The work must be considered within both contexts in order to get its joke, its play on words. As opposed to abstraction during internationalism, the work is always within two contexts. This leads us to the third misunderstanding—contemporary art within an international art world.
As the oldest international art biennial, the Venice Biennale presents an example of the international art world. If internationalism was predicated on a false universality, the New Internationalism was predicated on a tacit universality, through claims of the legibility of artworks as they change contexts; accordingly, any audience should be able to understand any work of art. Giorgio Verzotti described the theme of the 1993 Venice Biennale as “multiculturalism,”9 which in turn thematically connects both the 1993 Venice and Whitney Biennials. While the criticisms presented in “Politics of the Signifier” are implicated in the multiculturalism presented at Venice, the terms of the discussion are displaced into the international. As such, we must question how artworks move between international contexts and whether criticism can universally confront them, so that within an international context, questions about who has the right to represent a
12 Vol. 11 No. 1 Vol. 11 No. 1 13 nation’s artwork are brought to the forefront—who selects these works, and who writes about them. Thinking through Wu Street in this context, Xu Bing’s use of a translated text becomes pertinent, as it underscores the one- directionality of art criticism in the early 1990s. Wu Street not only concerns the movement of artworks across national borders but the translation of criticism as well: we thus become implicated in questions of not only the politics of the signifier but also the politics of representation.
This question is particularly relevant in the case of Chinese artwork presented at the 1993 Venice Biennale because it opened up a discourse within China about who has the right to represent Chinese art internationally. In addition to Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky, Oliva selected ten Chinese Political Pop artists to be presented in the Biennale’s Passage to the Orient exhibition. Chinese critic Wang Lin, in “Oliva is not the Savior of Chinese Art,” attributes the Chinese participation in the Venice Biennale as “the first ascent of avant- garde Chinese art to a large-scale international exhibition.” However, he criticizes Oliva’s choice of exhibiting only Political Pop, suggesting that this type of art caters to an already established Western reading of China after the Cultural Revolution: “Chinese artists (on principle) are all products of the Mao Zedong era; they are the bearers of ideological burdens and embody powers of resistance.”10 He argues that Chinese artists who do not demonstrate this predetermined significance were not included. This sentiment is shared by Hou Hanru, writing in Third Text:
All the political-cultural signs in the paintings are indeed the most evident and comfortable targets for the projection of a political reading that aims towards a feeling of ideological superiority. This is also suggested in the juxtaposition of these paintings with Russian works that inherit Socialist Realism.11
Both critics emphasize the one-dimensional perspective Western critics and curators use to select Chinese artwork and how that selection reproduces centre-periphery power structures. In Oliva’s negation of a Chinese art world beyond Political Pop, he pigeonholes Chinese artists within a singular means of representation. He also suppresses the multifaceted developments within the international art world.
I would like to return quickly to Wu Street, which is an original English text translated into Chinese, not a Chinese text translated into English. This translation from English to Chinese parallels the dominant movement of critical terms of contemporary art from the centre to the periphery. In an art world that was increasingly characterized by the exhibition of non-Western artists, it was mainly Western art critics and curators who wrote within the context of the international, despite the occurrence of contemporaneous debates about the New International in China and elsewhere. However, these debates were rarely if ever (until recently) translated outside of China. This turn expresses the Western
14 Vol. 11 No. 1 misunderstanding of contemporary Chinese art and its inability to analyze it within the context in which it is created.
The Venice Biennale and Whitney Biennial earnestly tried to correct the politics of representation within the international art world. Despite their attempts, each exhibition was heatedly criticized. Wu Street’s contemporaneous production with these two exhibitions draws out many of the misunderstandings of contemporary art criticism; it also critiques the state of art criticism, itself, which in the early 1990s was still dominated by Western critiques. And more profoundly, it pinpoints structural changes that were occurring in the art world—a reversal of the dominance of formalism, the beginnings of the constructions of global art history as seen through postcolonial critique, and finally how criticism is produced and circulated internationally. Throughout the 90s, the art world was increasingly globalized, more works were circulated internationally, especially due to a boom in large-scale international exhibitions and biennials, many of which were increasingly located in non- Western countries. These shifts seemed to increasingly weaken the role of criticism to establish “the basis for assessing the value of art,” as the curator produced the content from which these works would be understood. I do not know whether criticism’s misunderstandings of contemporary art led to these changes. However, Wu Street was adept at shedding light on these misunderstandings. One question remains: Is there even a Wu Street in New York City?
Notes 1 Elizabeth Sussman, “Then and Now,” Whitney Biennial 1993, Art Journal 64, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 75. 2 Harold Phillips, “Jason Jones: Planning Painting,” Shijie Meishu 62 (June 1994), trans. Ouyang Xiao, 29. 3 “Wu Street/Wu ,” http://www.xubing.com/index.php/site/projects/year/1993/wu_street, accessed September 8, 2011. 4 Mary Jane Jacobs, quoted in Jim Supangkat, “Multiculturalism/Multimodernism,” Contemporary Art in Asia, ed. M. Chiu and B. Genocchio (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011), 65. 5 Hal Foster, et al, “The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation on the Whitney Biennial,” October 66 (Autumn 1993), 3. 6 Ibid., 4. 7 Ibid., 4–6. 8 Geeta Kapur, “National/Modern: Preliminaries,” in Contemporary Art in Asia, 19. 9 Giorgio Verzotti, “Aperto 93: the Better Biennale,” ArtForum (October 1993), accessed November 26, 2011, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n2_v32/ai_14559558/. 10 Wang Lin, “Oliva is not the Savior of Chinese Art,” Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, ed. Wu Hung (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 366. 11 Hou Hanru, “Bi-Biennial: The Venice Biennale and the Biennale de Lyon,” Third Text 7, no. 24 (June 1993), 98.
Vol. 11 No. 1 15 Robert C. Morgan Revolution and Power: The Paintings of Duan Jianghua
ver the past three decades, certain avant-garde artists in China, including Wang Ziwei, Yu Youhan, Liu Wei, Wang Guangyi, Liu ODahong, and Li Shan, whose work is generically called “Political Pop,” chose to focus their attention on images of Mao and on satirical images related to the Cultural Revolution. The majority of artists involved with this subject are now in their fifties or sixties, which means that most were either very young or teenagers during the period of Mao’s insurgency to transform China into a totalitarian state. While some took an overtly critical perspective of Mao in their so-called mahjong art, others revealed a more neutral point of view in giving a historical perspective to “the great leader.” In either case, the contrasting positions between artists over the years have instigated a vital discourse in contemporary Chinese art, a discourse that has become enormously attractive to the West. While European critics, curators, and collectors have interpreted mahjong as a revival of the early avant-garde’s resistance to oppressive bourgeois values, the Americans appear less involved with the symbolic and political aspects of the work than with the artists’ talent for aesthetic innovation. The attraction has been all the more profound in that so little was known about China during the difficult years of the Cultural Revolution and that now is the time to move into a better understanding of contemporary art in China and the historical circumstances surrounding it. From a Western perspective, China was sealed off from the rest of the world, if not internally imploded as it struggled to come to terms with its cultural past and political present.
In America during the late 1960s, copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao, otherwise known as “the little red book,” had been translated into English and were being sold in bookstores in places such as Harvard Square, New York’s East Village, San Francisco, and Berkeley, among others. For those American students who purchased and read the little red book, there was an idealistic expectation that Mao would somehow provide an antidote to the multinational corporate hierarchy that they believed had incited the Vietnam War. Still, many felt conflicted in that the carefully controlled English translation of Mao’s aphoristic language seemed to equivocate between harsh militancy and a kind of loyalist sentimentality that appeared strange to readers in the United States. While many students and anti-war activists had a strong antipathy against the presence of the American military in South Vietnam under the pretext of defending the region against “Communism,” somehow the iron-fisted rhetoric of Mao
16 Vol. 11 No. 1 did not offer the kind of alternative that many wanted to hear. Liberal American readers were frustrated that the rhetoric of the little red book appeared equally as violent and problematic as the capitalist enterprise that Mao aspired to usurp. As reports of human rights violations in China during these years became more visible in the American press, a profound sense of bewilderment occurred among the war activists in the United States when they discovered that freethinking scholars, artists, and intellectuals were suffering in a way unacceptable from the perspective of a democratic world view. In spite of demonstrations in the United States mounted against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, organized in the streets of major cities, China was still regarded, for the most part, as a largely unknown factor in terms of its presence on the world stage. While Mao was clearly a charismatic leader, it was unclear from a distance exactly how his revolutionary campaign was going to benefit the ordinary working-class people under his command. Much to the dismay of those who rallied against American military involvement in Southeast Asia, it appeared that power was becoming more the issue for Mao than humanistic enlightenment or, of equal importance, the quality of human life.
In retrospect, it is more than ironic that while the Cultural Revolution was happening in China, another version of a “cultural” revolution was happening on the streets of major cities through the protest movements in the United States. The comparison, of course, is an absurd coincidence. It is more about language than the tragic and painful realities that extend beyond language. During the late 1960s and the early 70s, American periodicals, newspapers, small press magazines, including radio and TV talk shows, reported and occasionally discussed the political issues felt by these youthful protesters in the United States. It was a time of revolutionary ferment as the energy and commitment within the ranks of a new generation of Americans moved—perhaps, naively—in the direction of trying to make a better world. The term “revolution” was voiced among social activists in places like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco as they articulated their aspirations for change in confronting the political actualities of the times. The late 60s saw the rise of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Civil Rights movement, issues of women’s rights, awareness of sexuality as a political concern, ecological awareness, and an awareness of commercial media as a detrimental force in everyday life. The desire for change was heard in the lyrics of popular rock bands, such as the Jefferson Airplane, Santana, and the Grateful Dead, and signs of rebellion were seen in folk-rock singers, such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Tom Paxton, and Ritchie Havens. The writings of “revolutionary” writers, such as Abbie Hoffmann, Kate Millet, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Timothy Leary, and Tom Hayden, could be found regularly in various countercultural books, underground magazines, and pamphlets.
Even as the mainstream media disparagingly referred to anti-war activists as “hippies,” the growing interest in these new political ideas was having an impact on mainstream America. Many of the conformist values considered
Vol. 11 No. 1 17 18 Vol. 11 No. 1 Vol. 11 No. 1 19 sacrosanct in America during the 1950s were beginning to change as these Previous page: Duan Jianghua, 2011.3.7 Wall, 2011, oil on outworn social and political beliefs were vanishing. The year 1966 began canvas, 200 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist. a period of sustained ideological intervention in urban centers and on university campuses where hundreds of thousands of hopeful young people believed that democracy and free speech could actually work and that governance, fairness, justice, and equality could be restored to America, even though the manipulations of corporate power and media disinformation were still dominant. In essence, it was a period of unbridled hope in a new world on the verge of happening. This courageous and imaginary world was not contingent on a particular nation-state or on a centralized bureaucracy of power. Rather it was about people aspiring to see change and working toward a better life. This idealistic and romantic revolution in America offered an awareness of new ideas of hope that would overturn despair and bring the world into focus in an unprecedented way.
While these abbreviated Duan Jianghua, Pavilion No. 2, 2009, oil on canvas, 150 x 200 remarks cannot begin to tell the cm. Courtesy of the artist. whole story, it is interesting to compare and contrast the term “revolution” in China and in America in the late 1960s and early 70s. The differences appear vast as suggested in the paintings of Hunan-born artist Duan Jianghua, whose first New York exhibition was held at ChinaSquare Gallery four years ago in January 2008. After a glance at Duan’s technically masterful, expressionist paintings—the empty walls, deserted squares, and encrusted monuments, all drenched in an eerie metaphysical darkness—one might consider that the repercussions of the Cultural Revolution in China had a much harder historical impact on artists than the somewhat naive repercussions of what was happening in the United States.
In the United States, commercial media tends to manipulate the realities of everyday culture by transforming them into hyperrealities by way of popular entertainment. In addition to reaping a handsome profit margin, kitsch—or pseudo-culture—may also be given a political agenda for the purpose of dissuading interest in democratic activism and investigative reportage. By promoting sentimental slogans delivered by highly visible celebrities and news personalities, significant political changes are kept at a distance. This allows business to continue—as usual—at the expense of the same people who are being entertained. Undoubtedly some version of this occurs in China as well, despite the view that ordinary working people are more distant than Americans in relation to commercial media and that everyday culture and politics do not interact quite the same way as they do in America. Also, the organized standard by which ordinary Chinese people live, work, and interact would generally suggest a less overtly hostile or competitive, if not a less stressful social environment.
20 Vol. 11 No. 1 Duan Jianghua’s paintings of Tian’anmen Square appear as romantic embodiments of patriarchy, as if he is reasserting the historical position of Mao as a solution for the present. He has been defiant and critical of artist-colleagues whose paintings interpret the recent past in a much more disparaging way than his do. In a 2006 interview with the critic Zhang Yizhou, Duan asserted his concern for power as a form of identity, stating that he wanted his paintings to express the power and spirit that he believes is missing from contemporary art in China:
I find that a trend of weakness and softness prevails in today’s contemporary art, which lacks a masculine power, or a strong and holy feeling. I want to use my works to express that feeling. My creations have a strong focus on this aspect, which is an outstanding feeling, a powerful and pure thing. It’s the worship to power. I think this is right dealing with the present situation in contemporary art. I express the feeling from another perspective and want to inject a spirit in it.1
Duan Jianghua, Inscriptions While Duan Jianghua refers to “masculine power” as a somewhat personal No. 1, 2007, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the and spiritual issue, its symbolic meaning extends most convincingly in artist. paintings, such as Inscriptions No. 1 and No. 6 (2007), where the phallic reference is most direct. In addition, dark ominous skies over the ruins of a metropolis in a number of his paintings suggest visions of a future in which power has become dissipated into romanticism. Another statement from the interview with Zhang Yizhou is more direct in stating his unequivocal identification with power:
The feeling of my paintings and I myself [am] quite in contrast [with other painters]. I don’t look so strong or
Vol. 11 No. 1 21 Duan Jianghua, 2011.3.5 Figure, 2011, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
violent, nor have much heroism in me. But this kind of thing that lacks in my life is what I want to make up in my paintings. That is a mutual complement of characteristics. So when I first started my painting career, I set up this direction, the pursuit for and expression of power.2
The extreme differences between the artist’s projection of power into China’s recent past in comparison with the anti-war activism in America at roughly the same time period at the Cultural Revolution is somewhat daunting. While the casualties were confined to China during the late 1960s, in America the instigation of casualties happening outside reverberated inside as well. There can be no real comparison between the two other than speculation on the meaning of the words “revolution” and “power” at this particular time in history, almost as if it were a synchronic cut across a contradictory ideological morass.
During the protest movements in America of the 1960s, nothing could have been more opposite from the concept of revolution than the adoration of power, suggesting a semantic and ideological difference from Duan Jianghua’s vision as a Chinese painter. One cannot easily ignore his expressed aspirations to power as symptomatic of the Chinese youth movement in China at the time of Mao’s purge. This was a concept that many Westerners found ironic, if not contradictory. At the same time, it
22 Vol. 11 No. 1 Duan Jianghua, City No. 6, was also ironic that the 2008, oil on canvas, 180 x 220 cm. Courtesy of the artist. concept of revolution Next page: Duan Jianghua, Hall No. 7, 2008, oil on canvas, was intrinsically bound 300 x 500 cm. Courtesy of the artist. to power in America’s protest movement as well, but from the opposite end of the spectrum. Instead of protest in favour of power, the Americans protesters were against power. Given that power in Mao’s view emanated from culture, it would appear as one of the great contradictions of history that the will to destroy culture in China was his means by which to obtain the visibility of power. Yet the sentimental regard for power lurked beneath the substratum of this contradiction. This is to say that Mao’s desire for adoration required an embodiment of power exclusive of any external cultural reference other than his own narcissist image, a point that the American Pop artist Andy Warhol played upon when painting the monumental portraits of Mao after his death, which were later shown as a shrine in The Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979. Mao’s identification with power could only be united through cultural absence; thus, his obsession to destroy culture in order for power to exist as an embodiment of himself.
In contrast, the physical enforcement of power by American troops in Vietnam during the late 1960s and early 70s was transmitted in sentimental or patriotic terms, largely through television reportage, primarily controlled by commercial media. However, from the student protesters’ perspective, these terms could only be understood as fake. They believed the imposition of American imperialism in Vietnam was an excuse to maintain an economic advantage, essentially disguised by the repetition of political rhetoric as it was offered through commercial media. This contradiction was not missed. They saw sentimentality less as a cause for adoration and more as a cover for the exercise of brute force. Conversely, the troops also believed their image in Vietnam was being manipulated adversely and that their mission was understood neither by the politicians nor by the American press.
While the previously cited interview advocates a “worship to power” in Duan Jinghua’s paintings, it is difficult to know whether the artist is taking an ironic position or if he feels an actual nostalgia for something missing from the past, specifically in reference to the patriarchy of Mao. It is possible that his notion of injecting spirit into contemporary art might be interpreted or sublimated in a more positive way, as a means for giving his paintings a signifying presence through a certain degree of eloquence. This notion may have been something connoisseurs from the early nineteenth century French Salon—or, for that matter, the Ming dynasty—held in considerable esteem but today is given less credibility. Yet Duan Jinghua is quite consistent in this respect given the relatively recent transformation
Vol. 11 No. 1 23 24 Vol. 11 No. 1 Vol. 11 No. 1 25 of contemporary art into a commodity fetish that functions on the level of Duan Jianghua, Ruin No. 9, 2007, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 commercial logos ready for speculation and investment. From a Marxist cm. Courtesy of the artist. perspective, the commodity fetish represents a surrogate form of power.
This kind of surrogate power might further be identified with composers like Richard Wagner, or the Romantic paintings of Arnold Bochlin or the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. Power becomes a soothing ointment that mitigates frustration and despair, a way of controlling the temper and releasing aggression. Yet, it might also be said from a Western psychoanalytic point of view—specifically, that of Otto Rank—that significant art emanates from a deeply embedded conflict and that the artist’s role is to discover a resolution in order to overcome what is lacking in terms of a weakened self-image as expressed in his interview with Zhang Yizhou.3 One could speak of Picasso in this way, or even Goya. The trick then is to sublimate the conflict, to channel the energy away from the source toward the moment of creativity, toward the object of creation. It is conceivable, from a Chinese perspective, that what Duan Jianghua is seeking is less related to power in the political or conventional ideological sense than power as a renewed feeling of energy in terms of aesthetics, where the viewer encounters the spirit within his paintings, a concept embedded in Chinese art going back to the tenth century during the great brush painters of the northern Song dynasty.
Even so, a careful examination of these paintings will reveal the desire for sublimation. They reveal a considerable focus and concentration on the painterly field—their lyrical form embodies desire. The Historical Sites, the Pavilions, the Monuments, the Red Walls, the Tian’anmen Square paintings—all are resurrected from places in China’s political past and all places from Hunan and Beijing that the artist knows well. These paintings are visually articulated with calculated angles and vanishing points precisely
26 Vol. 11 No. 1 Duan Jianghua, City No. 6, placed on the horizon. They 2007, oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist. all contain the embodiment of desire—a quality introduced in his early visionary paintings from the Red Classics period. Duan Jianghua’s paintings reveal a fierce vision of reality expressed through a unified dark tonality. It is a ponderous, yet exalted vision where the artist seeks gratification through densely painted forms equivalent to acts of redemption. What he is lacking is what he desires to fulfill. The process of sublimation goes from the interior outward into an unknown world where all is empty and yet all is sacred in the sense that it exists as a total moment—a frozen interval of time—an emblematic power caught in the hidden, obsequious reign of light.
Duan Jianghua, 2011.3.19 Here once again we are confronted Figure, 2011, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist. with the spectacle of Debord, the lost society seeking its own revenge. Here in the midst, we sense this fierce conundrum of the self. Here again we are caught within the context of an imaginary social order. The canvas becomes the artist’s stage—in fact, a series of stages: a tragic stage, an heroic stage, a contemplative stage—all resonant with meaning and ultimately concealed within a romantic fable: the desire to see oneself personified in the ruins of the past, the old order giving way to the bright light that is only found within the darkness.
Duan Jianghua, 2010 Hall No. Of which revolution are we speaking 1, 2010, oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist. in these paintings? Is it arguing against oppression or searching for a cultural critique? According to the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, in his book The Revolt of the Masses (1932), the idea of a revolution begins with recognizing “the enormous disproportion between social strength and the strength of public power.”4 In other words, revolution is a matter of seeing the potential of what can be in relation to the less than satisfactory circumstances that currently exist. While a revolution may begin with the desire of people seeking change and, theoretically, having the power to do so, the organization and the timing may not necessarily be at hand. Thus, in the case of Mao, the Revolution was instigated from the top down, from an organized authority down to
Vol. 11 No. 1 27 the working classes. Consequently, the youthful adherents who largely Duan Jianghua, 2011.3.25 Garden, 2011, oil on canvas, comprised the Red Guard at the outset were filled with an emotional desire 300 x 1000 cm. Courtesy of the artist. for retribution from the chaotic remnants scattered throughout China. But blindness of desire would finally not improve China’s quality of life. Rather, the heinous actions and crimes of the Guard would only further distance the gaping mouth of power from the working classes and thus further increase distrust in any motive that promised significant social change.
As a painter, Duan Jianghua’s aspirations Duan Jianghua, 2011.4.11 Figure, 2011, oil on canvas, suggest that he is intent on redeeming 50 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist. power among the hidden vestiges of history. But he may falter in coming to terms with power through sentimentality, a blind adoration where reason is lost or disappears behind the adoration. Therefore, Duan Jianghua’s paintings struggle with a question that looms larger than history while, at the same time, history continues to move in its own direction. This suggests an equivocation between a critique of culture in which a representation of ideology sets the terms for how the future will exist and a resurgent form of expressionism that carries the seed for loss of selfhood. The questions posed by this kind of allegorical painting today would appear to reassert yet another revival of expressionism quite distinct from the ego involvement of abstract expressionism in the West. In a strange, perhaps ironic, way it is closer to the student protesters in Berkeley in the 1960s, where the shouting got louder as the demonstrators became less cognizant of their purpose. Generic styles of expressionism can become an excuse for a revolution where only power is served and nothing else—a blind adoration of power for the sake of power, which ultimately leads nowhere.
28 Vol. 11 No. 1 Similarly, if the terms of painting lose their signifying value, they risk the annihilation of meaning. The question of a revolution within culture is always a question of meaning. In some cases, the desire for meaning, whether in abstract expressionism or socialist realism, may hold a greater significance through the assertion of absence than by its overt enforcement.
In the practice of art, specifically in the work of Duan Jianghua, historical consensus may determine the context of meaning over time. While in the course of previous history, this would be a reasonable assumption, if not a plausible response to the art of painting. Even so, the reception to painting in the future may no longer be contingent on meaning as a human phenomenon that involves a sensory process of perception. Virtual transmission has already obscured the communication of meaning by giving it a “readymade” status, thus, making it more accessible, faster, safer, spatial, and compatible with the seemingly inflexible rules of power. But the future is unsteady, as power remains unsteady. This makes history, on some level, compatible with nature. Still, one may speculate as to whether any significance will be given to Duan Jianghua’s paintings other than a potential market value. If so, we might further inquire as to the meaning embedded within them: Will they continue to incite an intellectual process that involves perception, thought, and feeling?
This text is a revised and extended version of a catalogue essay originally published by ChinaSquare Gallery, New York, 2008.
Notes 1 Zhang Yizhou, “An Interview with Duan Jianghua,” in Emptiness: Duan Jianghua’s New Artwork, ed. Wei Xing (Beijing: Tang Contemporary Art, 2007), 81. 2 Ibid., 81. 3 Ibid., 81. 4 Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932), 119.
Vol. 11 No. 1 29 Abby Chen The Best of Times: Lam Tung-pang’s Long View Under Scrutiny
hat might be the subject of the exhibition Long View Under Lam Tung-pang, The Youngest and Oldest, 2011, acrylic, Scrutiny?1 For Hong Kong-based artist Lam Tung-pang, it is a pencil, charcoal, clay, plastic models, and image transfers fanciful landscape crossing over time and distance, filled with on plywood, 214 x 455 cm. W Courtesy of the artist and found images and objects on plywood accompanied by Lam Tung-pang’s Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong. own painting. His work is poetic, humorous, allegorical, and full of surprises.
Developed as an extension of the Diorama series presented in 2010, Long View Under Scrutiny exhibits new work that continues Lam Tung-pang’s reflection upon self and environment. Investigating a culturally acquired perception of memory in comparison to reality in this exhibition, Lam Tung-pang placed one of his most personal and iconic works, Folding (2006), a self-portrait within a hinged wood box created during his four years living in London, alongside his most recent creations, including The Youngest and Oldest (2011), a five-panel work on plywood completed in his Fo Tan Studio.
The juxtaposition of these two artworks illustrates the arc of the artist’s versatility and imagination, which is manifested within and beyond himself to society and its cultural context. The most intriguing aspect of this exhibition is witnessing how Lam Tung-pang illustrates this sense of identity through a conscious turn of mind and direction. If Folding exemplifies a curious but protective individual displaced from home, then The Youngest and Oldest represents a harmonic disjunction in form and substance that maps out his anxiety about the present. The gulf between these two bodies of work indicates Lam Tung-pang’s transformation from a
30 Vol. 11 No. 1 Lam Tung-pang, Folding, conceptual artist to a cultural translator who visualizes today’s Hong Kong 2006, charcoal and acrylic on plywood, 210 x 150 cm. in a post-1997 and pre-2047 era, the latter year marking fifty years after the Courtesy of the artist. handover of Hong Kong to China.
Demonstrating an affinity for how nature—its mountains and water—is painted within the realm of Chinese classical aesthetics, Lam Tung-pang foregrounds The Youngest and Oldest with images of bare, dormant trees; he directly photocopied and transferred images from books on ancient Chinese painting onto the plywood that served as his “canvas.” He tinted the sky in the background in varying shades of black, indicating nightfall or dusk, and dotted it with stars. Sporadically positioned across the image are small, three-dimensional appendages made of clay and miniature plastic trees. The fresh, green, artificial-looking colour against the more subdued tones of the painting might seem awkward to those not from Hong Kong, but these objects represent the last detritus left behind from Hong Kong’s long-gone manufacturing base of things like toys and plastic flowers. As a reminder of things precious and fun, objects such as these are embedded in the consciousness of Hong Kong residents, offering a homey and familiar invitation to a region’s history and the artist’s own childhood. Even at such a miniscule scale, these objects not only communicate a sense of the sublime experience of nature, they also inject playfulness and humour that balances
Vol. 11 No. 1 31 Lam Tung-pang, The Youngest and Oldest (detail), 2011, acrylic, pencil, charcoal, clay, plastic models, and image transfers on plywood, 214 x 455 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong.
the solemn ambience Lam Tung-pang has Lam Tung-pang, The Youngest and Oldest (detail), 2011, created in the overall painting. The paint is acrylic, pencil, charcoal, clay, plastic models, and image absorbed into the plywood, with its vertical transfers on plywood, 214 x 455 cm. Courtesy of the artist growth rings irregularly spreading out, some and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong strong and some weak, infusing the entire Kong. work with an ambiguous and hazy sense of uncertainty.
At the lower center of the artwork, tiny Lam Tung-pang, The Youngest and Oldest (detail), 2011, silhouettes of two people in contemporary acrylic, pencil, charcoal, clay, plastic models, and image dress are positioned in a small boat, which, transfers on plywood, 214 x 455 cm. Courtesy of the artist according to Lam Tung-pang, is also an image and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong that he copied from a magazine. While the Kong. people in the boat provide a focal point from which to visually wander through multiple elements in the work, what really draws one’s attention is the contrast of the ultra dense highrise buildings placed towards the top of the composition, which are painted in a way that resembles renditions of metropolises in comic books. Most striking are the vibrant colour and flickering lights applied to the highrises that juxtapose a bright area with the rest of the painting, which Lam Tung-pang has purposely left neutral-toned. This disparity of shapes and hues that Lam Tung-pang developed presents not only a style that has its own physical characteristics but an experience, a passage into an imagined land that is both ancient and present at the same time.
Born in 1978, Lam Tung-pang is part of a generation that grew up during the transition between two significant eras. He experienced the transition of Hong Kong from a colony of Britain to a postcolonial and supposedly autonomous region of China. Similar to how a generation of abstract artists emerged after World War II in America, the turmoil of Hong Kong after 1997 had a profound impact on Lam Tung-pang. His nationality shifted from British citizen to British National Overseas citizen to Chinese Special Administrative Region citizen, and, eventually, Chinese citizen. At least three
32 Vol. 11 No. 1 of these four identities existed in the short span of less than twenty years. Such a stretch of time dramatically carves out a sense of vicissitude that is portrayed in Lam Tung-pang’s work, which encapsulates the changing cultural complexion of Hong Kong. Just as the title The Youngest and the Oldest suggests, aging and rebirth happen simultaneously: The young and the old meet to generate a transcendental experience acquired from Lam Tung- pang’s combination of seemingly contradictory objects and images from various sources, resulting in the construction of an ambivalent environment.
This environment enunciates what one sees in Hong Kong from a distance: a booming city surrounded by water, stripped of noise, and transposed into a time tunnel with layers of memorable moments and fantasized escape. The brightly lit highrises in The Youngest and the Oldest, a signature component in this work, are also a signature of Hong Kong’s cityscape, of which the love of light is an integral part. The work pictures Hong Kong’s dreamy scenery at night as well as projecting a symbol of its prosperity, but the city here is muted and isolated in the ocean of a seemingly ancient time. This depiction of Hong Kong being trapped and cut off infuses a melancholic mood into Lam Tung-pang’s constructed reality: It all seems so far away but also so close that we can taste it, touch it, and live it.
Lam Tung-pang, Revenge of Lam Tung-pang once said that Long View Under Scrutiny Under is a dialogue Nature, 2010, charcoal and acrylic on plywood, 201 x 244 he has with himself in order to position himself within society. In fact, the cm. Courtesy of the artist and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong. idea of “self” has always been the center of Lam Tung-pang’s work, except this more recent representation of the “self” has gradually expanded with his changing perception of his environment. This includes the huge figure in Giant (2001) assembled from discarded cardboard when he was still a college
Vol. 11 No. 1 33 art student in Hong Kong; self-portraits on uneven surfaces such as unfolded Top: Lam Tung-pang, Giant, 2001, mixed media installation. writing paper, squeezed Coke cans, wooden window blinds, and beach sand, Courtesy of the artist. all constructed during his stay in London during the mid-90s; and the two- Bottom: Lam Tung-pang, A Letter, 2006, acrylic, charcoal, dimensional silhouettes appearing in The Youngest and Oldest with its tiny and postage stamp on paper, 59 x 87 cm. Courtesy of the toy figurines. Attempting to get close to a culture when it seems to be fading artist. away, Lam Tung-pang finds one part of himself becoming further removed from current society while the other part becomes more deeply engaged. As he tries to exist in both places, a tension in the work emerges that is both hopeful and pessimistic. The Youngest and Oldest might be considered a scene of a dream that can only end in complete silence and darkness. Observing the two people on the boat as they look at the highrises, one feels that those two people are indeed the self, looking at a world full of splendour. Where the self
34 Vol. 11 No. 1 Lam Tung-pang, Blinds, 2005, sits is like a fairyland, beautiful but withered, poetic but bare. The flickering charcoal on wood, 44 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist. buildings resemble a secular life, a life one desires from afar; yet why does that life seem so far away? The traces of this paradoxical state of being, of being neither withdrawn and alienated nor embracing and accepting, are the site for interpreting the distance between past and present for Lam Tung-pang.
2011 marks the tenth anniversary of Lam Tung-pang’s professional career as an artist. When he started, in 2001, there was no infrastructure in place to become a full time artist in Hong Kong. He left for London in 2003 to pursue a master’s degree and in hope of finding a new creative space. He finally returned to Hong Kong in 2007, and then he set up a temporary studio in Beijing for a short period of time. It had been exactly ten years
Vol. 11 No. 1 35 since the handover. It was also within those ten years that the contemporary Chinese art scene experienced tremendous change that affected Hong Kong’s art and art market. In the vacuum of its cultural identity between two eras, Hong Kong inevitably finds itself at both the birth and the loss of its own voice, and this shift is evident in Under Scrutiny From Afar. For Lam Tung-pang, the four years he spent in London and the time he later spent in Beijing enticed him to confront cultural dislocation and its resulting angst. This trajectory provides insight into Lam Tung-pang’s consciousness, as well as what invoked and redirected his later work on the choice of cultural context and the use of object, form, and material.
Hong Kong, now positioned in a new era beyond its colonial past of one hundred years, has again become a passive site of transition and synthesis, shifting interstitially from a marginalized colonial British-Hong Kong- Chinese multiplicity to a new marginalized postcolonial Hong Kong- Chinese multiplicity. Yet this direction seems more controlled by, and unified with, mainland China.
This changing cultural multiplicity is also metaphorically reflected in Lam Tung-pang’s work on plywood, solid within, but retaining breathing room to observe from a distance. A Hong Kong detached from its former colonial past is half floating before its total docking with mainland China. However, what could have been a prime example of a postcolonial state, one that could look forward to its independence from the reign of the British, is problematized by the handover and by mainland China’s precarious ideology. Hong Kong artists’ new milieu is becoming further complicated in the midst of a rapidly changing Asia and the global marketplace for art.
When closely examining Lam Tung-pang’s work and learning about his process, one has to wonder how he manages to synchronize all the different components. The magazine cutouts, image transfers from antique painting, and little sculpture-like toy models are taken out of their initial contexts and intertwined organically in his work like visual poetry. Things that used to be independently unrelated to each other now breathe together within one ecosystem, suggesting a coherent spirit of freedom and openness. What Lam Tung-pang wants most to offer is an invitation to play in his reimagined landscape, pieced together by different memories—some borrowed, some lived, some recreated. As he tries to converse with the self he sees in society, he still remains the ultimate witness, observing and creating at the same time. His thinking becomes the reality of his world—which is an imagined world in the best of times.
Notes 1 The exhibition was held between October 14 and November 30, 2011, at Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong.
36 Vol. 11 No. 1 Abby Chen A Conversation with Lam Tung-pang
Abby Chen: You seem to have a sense of cultural independence and a strong self-awareness.
Lam Tung-pang: I am aware of myself because of my own story. But my awareness right now also reaches to outside resources. It is a really big change. My artwork before was spontaneous, and it traversed multiple ideas. Now I have clearer idea of what I am targeting. I systematically filter such ideas through a process of research. In the past I wouldn’t spend months reading books to search for information.
Abby Chen: Before, when you were in the UK, you were retreating back to the body, the inner world, the self. Now it feels like you are projecting an imagined landscape, mountains and water, so where is your body now?
Lam Tung-pang: This question reminds me of another question I once answered unclearly, but now I understand it. Why did I put these small people in my landscape? I feel that I made an exit. Two drawings, Diorama (2010) and Looking Backward (2010), were made for the exhibition Diorama: Painting and Mixed Media, at Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, in 2010. These artworks truly distinguished the relationship between myself and my work—I am both the maker of the subject and the observer.
Abby Chen: How do you describe your recent 2011 exhibition Long View Under Scrutiny, also at Hanart TZ?
Lam Tung-pang: Writing because of observation. For me it means that if you are clear about something, you should be able to write it down.
Abby Chen: Is this an extension to the works in UK?
Lam Tung-pang: No, my previous work was about my position as an artist, which was as an observer who examines society. In recent years, however, my artwork has been in direct dialogue with society. It is a bit similar to the work about the self within, for example, Faith Moves Mountain (2008), but now I place myself within society so I can have a conversation with myself in that context. Actually I am attempting to talk to society. The series of paintings I did for the exhibition Where is the White Crow? conveys how society is according to the way I see it.
Vol. 11 No. 1 37 Abby Chen: I think your work Selling My Soul (2010) at the Tate Modern is Top and Left: Lam Tung-pang, Faith Moves Mountain, 2008, a very important piece. It directly fits into what you once said earlier about drawing on wood, Lamda print on dibond, text, drawing, 180 the way you feel you are consumed within the work, and with a process of x 840 cm, photo: 90 x 30 cm each. Collection of Hong Kong existence and disappearance. This work connected your previous work to Museum of Art. your current work.
Lam Tung-pang: Selling My Soul probably did have aspects of existence and disappearance, given the process of erasing the image of the drawing.
Abby Chen: It is really obvious. Selling My Soul (2010) is time based, like a performance. You started on site at the Tate Turbine Hall with charcoal, drawing on large pieces of paper, and then rubbed on the drawing with an eraser. The time that you were given to
38 Vol. 11 No. 1 Lam Tung-pang, Selling My Soul, 2010, charcoal and eraser on paper, four panels 2.4 x 1 m each. Performance at Tate Modern, London. Photo: Leung Chi-wo. Courtesy of the artist.
complete the piece was shortened by The Tate while you were working on it, which created pressure for you to finish in haste. It seems to me that you were trying to find and locate the uncapturable in the notion of deleting your drawings.
Lam Tung-pang: Yes, indeed, like a performance. The erasing process itself further enhances the notion of existence because of the marks left on the paper. I kept this technique of erasing and used it on other artwork.
Abby Chen: You recently have done many works inspired by ancient Chinese ink paintings. What do you think about the concept of white space in these paintings?
Lam Tung-pang: To me, it’s a space for breathing. In the beginning I used a lot of charcoal to draw the lines since lines are a major component of my painting. But in each piece I felt there needed to be breathing space. The quality I wanted, actually, can be achieved through a strong understanding of the history of Chinese painting. I discovered that there are the two aspects that I care about the most—the lines and the breathing space— so much so that I wanted to study it in order to deeply recognize the relationship or the method between my drawing and Chinese painting.
Vol. 11 No. 1 39 In traditional Chinese ink painting, I felt that both lines and breathing space existed inside of the paintings so I was searching to find how this was achieved. Through this whole process I was actually doing what I needed to do.
Abby Chen: You said before that you needed this breathing space in your work. Why could you not find it then, but now you can?
Lam Tung-pang: Because I was mainly following my instinct. I never directly connected it to a culture or knowledge. When I was in London, I felt that there were some things that I could not get in sync with in their culture. I think only when people become integrated can they use that culture as a genuine organic resource instead of it being something forced. In the meantime, I found what I have been searching for in classical Chinese painting.
Abby Chen: What do you wish for other than for this breathing space?
Lam Tung-pang, Travel and Leisure 25062010, 2010, acrylic, charcoal, ink, pen, clay, plastic models, 195 x 122 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong.
40 Vol. 11 No. 1 Lam Tung-pang: Serenity and distance—the distance that comes from being an observer. I was reading about how the life of an artist is segregated from society and community. What’s interesting to me is the distance between them. You know the concept of “escape” is a very important aspect of the Chinese literati. I want to study and research what happened to the literati at that time and how they created a distance from the everyday, especially in the late Ming dynasty to early Qing.
Abby Chen: This brings us to the consideration of the claim that Chinese culture originated from mainland China and is the source for all Chinese within and beyond China. People say that no matter how far you depart from your culture, you will eventually come back to find it.
Lam Tung-pang: The farther you go, the better it is when you return because culture and knowledge do not always stay the same; instead, they are constantly changing. They are always flowing. Because of this, things will always move forward. Just like ink. If one was to say that ink represents China, I would disagree because when you look at the rest of the world, well, think about how India has ink and India also has its own culture. So we cannot just say ink belongs to China. This is the perspective that arises when you look at things globally. The second thing is that even though the tradition is yours—take ink painting as an example—and you talk about the old times, yet without the ability to change, it’s meaningless. Creation is reinvention.
Abby Chen: The poet Bei Dao once said that if China were a traditional Chinese ink painting, Hong Kong would be the white space.
Lam Tung-pang: That does sounds like a poem.
Abby Chen: Although he is a poet, this makes a lot of sense with what you just said. If Chinese culture were indeed an ink painting, Hong Kong would be the space that provides the breathing room.
Lam Tung-pang: Hong Kong is not the only place. For me, anywhere other than mainland China provides that breathing room. I feel strongly about this. I remember looking at the magazine Art in America, whose cover read, “Made in China, Chinese Arts.” My question was why overseas Chinese, Taiwanese Chinese, and Hong Kong Chinese are not within this idea of “Chinese” as defined by the magazine.
Abby Chen: Why do you think some Chinese have this breathing room and some don’t? Why does it remain here in Hong Kong?
Lam Tung-pang: I can’t think of a reason other than the difference communist ideology can make to a society and its education. The New Asia College I attended was full of teachers who escaped from mainland China and migrated to Hong Kong. They brought the sinology before 1949 along with them. They were able to maintain and re-create the Chinese traditions in that kind of situation. In mainland China one would see only
Vol. 11 No. 1 41 the practices that came out of the art academies. The difference between the practices is not huge except in the case of the ’85 New Wave Movement. That group did something very unique, while the rest were in socialist styles learned from Soviet Union.
Abby Chen: That situation is similar to what we just talked about, that unique outcome that happened exactly at the time society in mainland China shifted after the Cultural Revolution. The economic factor had not kicked in, while the political pressure was lessening. This interstice created some breathing room.
Lam Tung-pang: Yes, for example Lam Tung-pang, Far Away, 2011, ink, acrylic, and charcoal The Stars Group in Beijing during on plywood, 87 x 116 cm. Courtesy of the artist and the late-1970s, and many others. Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong. But going back to your earlier question, if a lot of scholars had not migrated to a different society like Hong Kong, Hong Kong might not have been in the position of being the white space on the canvas. Mainland China itself exercises a very uniform control over its cultural system; the breathing room has no way to survive except on the outside. So that’s why that breathing room migrated to Hong Kong or Taiwan with them. There are also traces of tradition of rituals and customs that are even stronger than those in mainland China that remain in Hong Kong.
Abby Chen: Hong Kong as a colony is therefore always in between two countries, mainland China and England. It’s both connected to and detached from the mainstream. Hong Kong is a very prosperous economic entity without political sovereignty.
Lam Tung-pang: Funny you mention that. Your statement is correct in some ways, but according to what I know about Hong Kong, it is the opposite. Hong Kong thinks that it is mainstream and independent. It is not a nation or a city, but it has a strong sense of identity, as if it were a nation.
Abby Chen: This is the other half of what I wanted to discuss. Do you think it is because of this unique positioning that enables Hong Kong to gain the privilege of critiquing different cultures as both insiders and outsiders?
Lam Tung-pang: Yes. It’s definitely an advantage to be both an insider and an outsider, but I don’t think Hong Kong has ever used it to its advantage. This recognition of Hong Kong’s positioning is really important if I think of it in terms of culture. In 2007, ten years after 1997, I felt that Hong Kong was somewhat lost. What I mean by lost is that it continued to argue about whether it wanted to become China or not and to argue that Hong Kong is small and is not even an important city. What I know is that Hong Kong has not done a lot of things it should have. I don’t know if I would say that it wasted those ten years, but there have been a lot of arguments about it.
42 Vol. 11 No. 1 Abby Chen: How much of your work reflects that ability to critique other cultures?
Lam Tung-pang: I think I took a rather relaxed approach. The so-called tradition of materials or technique isn’t a heavy burden, as I always freely use any materials around me. What differs from my generation and my professor Chan Yuk Keung’s generation is that traditional Chinese culture was a really heavy burden for him. When he saw how we painted in our class, he felt a sense of lightness. The good thing was that we could pick up the traditions as we needed them and then let them go if we chose to.
Abby Chen: That’s why I find there is a sense of freedom and playfulness in your work.
Lam Tung-pang: Cultural inheritance is always the term used when referring to Chinese culture, but not for my work. I simply start with some senses, like harmony and contradiction, a willingness to escape from a dusty world, flatness, and immaturity, etc. It is all about how I view and react to the world. Thereafter, I look around at what kind of culture and knowledge exist in those kinds of senses. Actually, at the beginning, I started with medieval painting as a reference, but now that I am back in Hong Kong, it’s easier to look at actual traditional ink paintings rather than those you can find only printed in books.
Abby Chen: It is exactly because you don’t have the burden of traditional culture that you don’t need to feel you are attached to anything, and therefore it is easier for you to explore and identify what works for you.
Lam Tung-pang: Yes. The burden of cultural meaning is something that can make you suffer a lot once you begin to explore it. So when something like that does not mean everything to you, you are free to move around. I think this is the flexibility that I have.
Abby Chen: Once you begin to critique these different cultures, no matter if you are in Hong Kong or mainland China, or in disagreement with the contemporary or the past, do you feel that you might have a sense of superiority in culture then?
Lam Tung-pang: Actually, not superiority, but happiness and pride. Because a fifty-year guarantee on the “one country two systems” differentiates the 7.5 million people here in Hong Kong from the 1.6 billion Chinese from the mainland. There are some things we can do here but can’t in mainland China, and in some way I think we deserve to be proud of that.
Abby Chen: Absolutely.
Lam Tung-pang: To enjoy a certain level of freedom might not only just create pride but also make one think about how valuable it is.
Vol. 11 No. 1 43 Abby Chen: That is also a privilege that can turn into a state of happiness and enjoyment.
Lam Tung-pang: One should treasure such privilege. To some degree, the infrastructure for art in Hong Kong, for example, is quite good, too. The Hong Kong art market is booming, although that has never been the driving force for local artists. On the other hand, local artists can find ways to get government grants or private funding for their projects even when they do not support the government’s agendas or policies. Such an infrastructure allows freedom of artistic expression at a certain level. You also can find different kinds of audiences through partnering with businesses. These funders don’t necessarily have to be related to the arts, but they can somehow support the arts.
Abby Chen: In London, you talked about how a city is not remembered by how much money it spends on establishing spectacular buildings, but by its history and culture.
Lam Tung-pang: Yes, this is a very important statement. When I went to London, I cared only about doing my artwork. It is actually kind of dumb because when people go to other places they should be looking around and having fun. But when I went, I didn’t care about anything except my work.
Abby Chen: When people move to a different place, they can have two choices; they can integrate themselves into the new environment or they can re-create an environment to suit their own needs. You basically chose the latter.
Lam Tung-pang: Yes. While I was in London, there were a lot of things I didn’t need to adjust to. The systems are quite similar. Like the red and green lights. And the streets have yellow markings on the surface, just like Hong Kong. There were aspects that I was familiar with and others that I wasn’t.
Abby Chen: What was not familiar?
Lam Tung-pang: Surprisingly it was the change of four seasons. It inspired me in later works when dealing with the environment. It is really funny because I started to appreciate nature in London but I hadn’t in Hong Kong, which is a tropical city throughout the year. But the supermarket, traffic, the queen-silhouetted coins, and the post office were similar. In terms of lifestyle, the change was just less than what I had expected.
Abby Chen: Probably if you went to the US or Japan, it would have been a big change.
Lam Tung-pang: When I went to Beijing I felt more of a change there. In London, the change is not so big; therefore it was easier to accept. But when I went to Beijing, I thought it would be the same because I was in China, and even though it is a different dialect I was still speaking Chinese. It ended up being really different, and it made me feel quite uncomfortable.
44 Vol. 11 No. 1 Lam Tung-pang, Global Warming, 2007, acrylic, charcoal, and wax on plywood, 248 x 160 cm. Collection of Hong Kong Museum of Art.
Abby Chen: So which is the real “motherland?” [Laughter.]
Lam Tung-pang: When you buy something in Beijing, you have to bargain, and it is really tiring to do that. In Hong Kong and London, it is a set price and people will just pay it. When you have to bargain every day, you become fed up with it. When I came back to Hong Kong and then went to Beijing, I felt that Beijing was more foreign.
Abby Chen: What else was it about London that affected your work?
Lam Tung-pang: When I was in London, I was seriously thinking about why social issues were such an important matter in the UK. In Hong Kong arts education, social issues were never a focus. We were all under the same British education system. But in our schools here in Hong Kong, we only learned certain aspects of art, like the visual elements. We never learned about consumerism, political party differences, or what types of artwork can be created out of various kinds of discourse. Even in college, we never explored such perspectives.
Abby Chen: This is exactly why, as you said, Hong Kong is in a unique position that might have created a blind spot within its society—once it was a colony, and now it is a special district of China. It is somehow unable to project its voice because of a lack of sensitivity towards all social issues.
Lam Tung-pang: There is little direct relationship between my work and social issues. The change in Hong Kong from 1997 to 2007 is related to the new generation of young people. What I question is the education I had in high school and college. How many courses did we have for our generation that were actually about social issues?
Abby Chen: Yes, Hong Kong’s younger generation. I was quite moved by them when I saw their commitment to their city. They protested night after night to save the Star Ferry Station from being demolished. So now that more than a decade has passed since the handover, what does mainland China mean to you?
Vol. 11 No. 1 45 Lam Tung-pang: Funny, I have two very different impressions. One comes from my parents, where mainland China is a backward country with a lot of illegal bribery, and everything is fake but looks real. There is no freedom, and all the relatives in China are greedy. All of them will ask you for money, but when you have problems, no one will help you. Police will arrest you randomly; everything there for my parents is negative; they really hate going back to mainland China.
Abby Chen: That was the first perspective. What was the other perspective?
Lam Tung-pang: The second one is right now, when I go back to mainland China’s art scene and meet new people. What’s weird is that I always thought of China as a few thousand years old, but it is more like a newborn baby in that everything seems possible. I remembered how shocked I was when meeting a curator who was ten years younger than myself (I was born in 1978). I don’t know what terms I can use to describe it.
Abby Chen: I would compare it to the cowboys of America or the prospectors during the Gold Rush era.
Lam Tung-pang: Each year I go back to Beijing, there is always something different. What I found positive is that a lot of things are possible, such as the egg-shaped opera house in Beijing and the CCTV Building. In Hong Kong the situation is you that can’t build this or you can’t build that. This also makes me question whether freedom can provide the diversity or the possibilities. One assumes that there is more freedom in Hong Kong than in China. But in Hong Kong, in the middle of this freedom, there lie bureaucracy and a system that make a lot of things not possible.
Abby Chen: Well, the possibility is also accompanied by the danger of going to extremes. There are a lot of issues about the safety of many of these spectacular buildings. When you learn more facts about what goes on behind the scenes in mainland China, I’d rather not have such possibilities. Hong Kong has a democratic system to scrutinize the process; at the same time, its development and planning are sort of handicapped by the real estate industry. This brings us to the next question. How do you see the connection between an intellectual and an artist?
Lam Tung-pang: There is some connection. Being an artist is just one of the ways a person can be. An intellectual, to me, is closer in meaning to how you can be as a whole. You can be an artist without knowing how to be a person, but I think you should know how to be a person first, before you become an artist. This can relate to a lot of things. Last year I painted a bunch of black crows and titled it Where Is the White Crow? I got the idea from a Chinese proverb saying “all crows are black,” which means that something or someone (bad) is no different from all the others. This proverb could be understood as the collapse of one’s utopianism towards relationships or careers. That was exactly my experience in 2010. For example, why did I go teach art in college? When I graduated, one of my first statements was that I did not want to teach. I made this statement because in Hong Kong, if you want to be an artist, you have to become a teacher first in order to get paid and financially
46 Vol. 11 No. 1 Lam Tung-pang, Where is the survive. Between me, the gallery, and other people, I found out that there are White Crow?, 2009–10, acrylic on canvas, 365 paintings, 30 a lot of things I don’t understand or appreciate. Johnson Chang Tsong-zung x 30 cm each. Courtesy of the artist. at Hanart TZ gives me a secure income, which, compared to the rest of Hong Next page: Lam Tung-pang, Kong, is ideal because he doesn’t control what I do. It is really good because I Centuries of Hong Kong, 2011, acrylic, charcoal, and pencil get to follow my own interests, and it gives me a stable environment. on plywood, 425 x 717 cm. Commissioned by the Hong Kong Legislative Council. Courtesy of the artist. The reason I went to England was that if I couldn’t find people or institutions to support my work in Hong Kong, why not try other places? For example, I have done at least one hundred interviews during the past five years. Some of them just pissed me off, and others were meaningless. But I also hoped that I would meet someone like you one day, to discuss issues in an articulate way.
So to go back to the relationship between an intellectual and an artist, I would say the identity of an artist is important in the art scene of Hong Kong. Within these ten years, my striving to be a full-time artist in Hong Kong is already a kind of performance. And I consider it a political statement. It is against the general sentiment of “There are no full time artists in Hong Kong.” This is also the push and pull that one experiences in being an artist.
Vol. 11 No. 1 47 48 Vol. 11 No. 1 Vol. 11 No. 1 49 Abby Chen: Do you think such a statement is important?
Lam Tung-pang: This is indeed very important. Some of my classmates and I want to validate that being a full-time artist is actually possible. From that perspective, it is a political statement.
Abby Chen: Do you also feel privileged as a Hong Kong artist?
Lam Tung-pang: We have the privilege to approach a lot of things firsthand. No matter if it is resources or information.
Abby Chen: Based on your experience, is this the best time in terms of artistic development for Hong Kong artists?
Lam Tung-pang: Yes. It is the right timing for artists in Hong Kong, because the market is becoming mature, and, as you were saying, we have freedom.
Abby Chen: But you always have had freedom.
Lam Tung-pang: Not just the freedom; it is also the attention we are receiving, and the market contributes to that. The energy or power of these three—the freedom, the attention, the market—are balanced right now. It won’t suddenly explode with one having more influence than the other. It’s a good balance and the options you choose will depend on what type of artist you are. It is also based on what project you want to propose to the galleries and institutions in Hong Kong. The future of the art scene is also getting better, more positive, and brighter.
Abby Chen: Why are you so optimistic?
Lam Tung-pang: Because these three aspects are growing. I can feel it. You can be doing good artwork at home, but if you do not know how to expose or present it then the effort will just be wasted. You can’t say that Hong Kong’s market is really good, but it does exist, and even though it doesn’t result in a lavish life style, at least it is enough to live on. That is why this is a good balance.
Abby Chen: Have you ever experienced this kind of balance before?
Lam Tung-pang: Never. Before I went to the UK, Hong Kong didn’t have this type of market. And I never met curators and people who I could have a dialogue with like I am having with you. When I came back, I wondered whether it was the art scene or me that had changed. I couldn’t figure out the difference.
Abby Chen: While it was very difficult before, now you can be a full-time artist.
Lam Tung-pang: There is also more media coverage, like news or interviews with visual artists. These aspects of bringing attention to art are expanding, and it is affecting society. The change is very obvious for me and for some
50 Vol. 11 No. 1 people I know. From 1997 to 2007, Hong Kong had been searching for its identity. What’s funny is that Hong Kong does not belong to China. but at the same time, it does. I don’t know if this is like the 1.5 generation immigrant you talked about, a state of being that is not a native but no longer a foreigner. This does seem like us—those who are living here in Hong Kong.
Abby Chen: Absolutely.
Lam Tung-pang: Administratively, much of Hong Kong has returned to the way it was mandated by China, but its culture and lifestyle won’t return for at least fifty years. These fifty years are probably the most exciting. This environment is very unique; you can trace 2,000 years back and then predict 2,000 years into the future, and you might not find many moments like this. But these moments will exist in these fifty years, and already we have witnessed change with our own eyes. Those who were born after 1997 now go to school and sing mainland China’s national anthem, but when I was younger, we didn’t have it. We are exactly in the moment of the shift.
Abby Chen: But your generation is also ephemeral. Once it is gone, it’s gone.
Lam Tung-pang: That is why I said that this period is so interesting. It is a unique period that will appear only in this era. After one hundred years, if we become fully integrated into China, there may no longer be a Hong Kong dollar bill, and our identity will not be found anywhere. Perhaps that’s why so many possibilities could happen at this moment.
In these past few years, the feedback all the foreign curators I have talked with gives me hope for Hong Kong because they think that Hong Kong itself is amazing and interesting. It’s like your having such an interest in Hong Kong. It is starting to get easier to meet such people. It used to be very hard for me because many curators didn’t have the time to stay in Hong Kong for very long.
Abby Chen: It’s indeed interesting when I look at your work. I always say that you cannot know only how to fight, but you also need to know how to dream. It takes us to a different place, not just to reality, but to a level above it. After talking with you, I can see possibilities exist for Hong Kong’s artists. This period of Hong Kong provides opportunity for them to dream and play. Tsang Tsou Choi, the “King of Kowloon,” who was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2003, was one of those who has the ability to reimagine himself and the environment. Through his temporary occupation of making claims on the street of Kowloon, he ultimagely transformed the everyday environment. One thing you said was quite memorable to me: “Open up the possibility of communication and imagination to let people freely come and go.” I hope artists in Hong Kong can always achieve that by creating an in-between space that allows both sides to come in and play.
This interview was conducted in Cantonese and English in Lam’s Fo Tan Studio in Hong Kong on June 9, 2011. Transcribed and translated by Claudia Chau.
Vol. 11 No. 1 51 Celine Y. Lai The Pursuit of Space: The Art and Artists of Hong Kong
n 2007, Lam Tung-pang, a young artist born in Hong Kong, exhibited “MADE IN HONG KONG” and “MADE IN UK” components some of his work in Beijing under the support of Osage Gallery. He of Shaking China, neon light installation. The “IN” on took the opportunity to become involved in the Beijing art scene the floor belongs to “MADE IN CHINA,” a work now I 1 and established a studio there for a few months. He found this occasion dismantled. Courtesy of the artist. helpful in getting to know the concerns and approaches of his mainland counterparts. On the other hand, it also prompted him to reflect upon his profession as an artist based in Hong Kong. In a memoir of this period, Lam Tung-pang noted that mainland Chinese artists found it unbelievable that there were full-time artists in such a commercially vibrant city such as Hong Kong. In the minds of most mainland Chinese, Hong Kong residents are all engaged in the pursuit of wealth, which to some extent is true. Students, for example, are not encouraged to develop a career in the field of fine arts because most residents see little hope for promotion or money- making opportunities in the creative industries. It is ironic that students are, nonetheless, encouraged to participate in arts administration, because most people perceive that art agents will have more opportunities to gain wealth than do the artists.2 “Are you really from Hong Kong?” was a question Lam Tung-pang frequently encountered, but he did not feel surprised by it. In fact, he, too, agreed that it was rather difficult for artists to work in his native city, particularly considering the frustrations derived from a failing arts policy during the past decade that will be the focus of this text.3
In Shaking China, Lam Tung-pang presents three separate blocks of neon lights showing, respectively, the English phrases “Made in China,” “Made in Hong Kong,” and “Made in UK.” Lam Tung-pang himself describes this installation as a playful juxtaposition that aims to reflect on the shift in economic power that he has observed over the last decade. This artwork was produced for China Now, a large festival of Chinese culture launched in London in 2008, and, with it, the artist hoped to signfiy his artistic connection to these three locations, each of which has served as a base for his art making. Shaking China demonstrates as well the varying sizes of the artist’s studios in Hong Kong, Beijing, and London. The pitifully small size of “Made in Hong Kong” and “Made in UK” versus “Made in China” underscores the limited land resources and soaring rents that artists encounter when finding the right places to establish studios, as the artist has described elsewhere.4 The diminished scale of “Made in Hong Kong” suggests many uncertainties.5
52 Vol. 11 No. 1 Vol. 11 No. 1 53 In 1997, ten years before Lam Tung-pang worked in Beijing, most citizens of Hong Kong experienced the termination of the 150-year-long colonial era, when the government of Britain handed the sovereignty of Hong Kong over to the People’s Republic of China. The Hong Kong Special Adminstrative Region was thereby established and largely was kept separated from the mainland in political and social terms. As of 2011, the citizens of Hong Kong are, nonetheless, still having difficulties in getting used to the new Hong Kong-Chinese identity. Various kinds of connections with the Chinese culture and communities of the mainland exist, but psychologically those connections seem remote to most Hong Kong people.
In response, the government of Hong Kong has made great efforts during the past decade to preserve heritage sites and promote cultural events, aiming to cultivate a sense of active participation in the course of Chinese historical and cultural developments in both China and Hong Kong. Attention was also paid to the local artists. A number of critics have written extensively on the arts and cultural policies of Hong Kong, but only a few writings are concerned with events taking place after 1997. Here, I review some of those events and explore the reasons Hong Kong artists have difficulties in keeping viable a career. I would suggest that artists share a strong desire to engage the public with their work, but the fact that they lack any central organization or leadership has rendered them vulnerable to the challenges posed by the inflating rents in Hong Kong, and by the lack of public recognition or esteem for their profession as creative workers. The examples of the Cattle Depot and the Fo Tan studios will illustrate how these difficulties for artists came about.
The Cattle Depot Land supply has always been limited in Hong Kong. With a population of a little more than seven million living on a territory of 1,100 square kilometres, the city can hardly support generous housing or office spaces. For those artists whose work needs spacious areas for its making and storage, the factory spaces in the industrial districts left vacant when manufacturing in Hong Kong began to decline and moved to mainland China towards the end of the 1990s have provided a seemingly ideal option. However, the high rents are not affordable to all. Unlike established artists, amateurs and fresh graduates from arts schools usually must resort to leasing studios in groups in order to share costs.
The last decade, therefore, saw a growth in the number of art studios in the industrial areas. A large cluster is found among the factory buildings in Fo Tan in the New Territories district, some smaller ones in Kowloon Bay and Kwan Tong in Kowloon, and in Chai Wan on the Hong Kong Island. The studios are private establishments, and there is no central organization; nor is there any authoritative body in Hong Kong to connect artists with each other. Nonetheless, bonding among the artists has become more solid than ever, and many have begun to feel like comrades in both fighting high rents and the pursuit of art.6
54 Vol. 11 No. 1 The entrance of the Cattle But the Artist Village at To Kwa Wan is an establishment entirely different Depot. The workers are taking down the exhibition panels from those in the industrial districts. The Village is located in a quiet and the large doll called Fatina. They were part of the Hong quarter in downtown Kowloon, installed in a compound of buildings Kong Heritage Tourism Expo (2010–11) of the Development known as the Cattle Depot that was originally used as the livestock Bureau. Photo: Celine Y. Lai. quarantine point. Constructed in 1908, the site has an area of 15,000 square metres, made up of rows of one and two-story buildings enclosed by red- bricked walls. In 1994, the Antiquities and Monuments Office (AMO) had the site declared as a Grade III historical monument (the lowest on the three-grade assessment scheme), thus forbidding any destruction or alteration to the original architecture.7
Former Government Supplies Department. The site measures nearly 85,000 square feet with a nine-story building at the back, two-story buildings on the side, and a large open quarter in front. Currently the site is locked up. Photo: Celine Y. Lai.
Being spacious and historically significant, the Cattle Depot seemingly provides an ideal space for local artists. The tenants consisit of the most active and devoted local art groups, including 1a Space and Artist Commune. They moved into the Cattle Depot in 1999, when their leases
Vol. 11 No. 1 55 at the former Government Stationery Depot on Oil Street in North Point Top: A notice posted outside the Porter’s Office, Cattle 8 were terminated. The removal from Oil Street was initially involuntary; the Depot. The Development Bureau addresses the site artists’ studios there had already grown into an active corner for art events as Ex-Ma Tau Kok Animal Quarantine Depot and restricts between 1998 and 1999. Despite several appeals made at the legislative level entry hours to between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. Nowhere that caught the public’s attention, the Hong Kong government insisted on its on the site can one find the designation “artist’s village.” planned redevelopment of Oil Street. The artists were offered an alternative Photo: Celine Y. Lai. site in Kowloon—the Cattle Depot. The proposal was soon after accepted as Bottom: Cattle Depot. Artist tenants are not allowed to the new site appeared to be a promising location.9 Currently, artists rent their make use of the open grounds outside their rented areas. respective studios at the rate of three Hong Kong dollars per square foot, Photo: Celine Y. Lai. which is a relatively low price to pay in the district of Kowloon.
Nevertheless, the Cattle Depot has not become the vibrant artist village that was expected. As of the summer of 2011, twenty units were available for lease, but five of them remained vacant. The Government Property Agency (GPA), which is in charge of the management of the Cattle Depot, showed little or no intention to accept new leasing applications. The studios now occupy only one-third of the site, while the other two-thirds remain in need of substantial repair; those areas, according to the official report delivered in 2009, have remained deserted.10
Nowadays, inside the Cattle Depot, the artists have ongoing disputes with the managing company, the Home Affairs Bureau (HAB) as well as its commissioner, the GPA. The artists are disgruntled with the stipulation that they are allowed entry only between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. Moreover, their activities are strictly confined to the rented areas; display of finished or half- finished work along the pathways is prohibited. In private discussion forums on the Internet, one incident is widely cited: An artist who placed several pots of plants outside the studio received several warning letters stating that he had violated the lease terms. The most unbearable of all restrictions is that the site is strictly closed to the public. Visitors are admitted only by appointment with the tenants and have to be formally registered at the gate upon arrival.11 For any events that are to make use of the open space within the compound (including the hallways), the artists have to apply for a temporary license that authorizes public entertainment. All efforts to appeal for removing such restrictions have ended in vain.
The managing body of the Cattle Depot understands very little about the nature of the art profession and the concerns of artists. Its rules have limited the full use of open space inside the compound; in social terms, they have also created a discouraging atmosphere for the exchange of ideas and opinions among the artists. In addition, there is a large gap between the artists and the public. The artists have been complaining that their work has been hidden behind the tall red-bricked walls, separated from the neighbourhood.12 In all, the Cattle Depot neither makes a welcoming place for anyone who might want to come to enjoy art nor represents a respected work place for those engaged in the art profession.
As the management company, HAB has no plans to renovate the deserted sections inside the compound and there is no plan to promote the “artist
56 Vol. 11 No. 1 Vol. 11 No. 1 57 village” locally or overseas. Ten years have lapsed since the first batch of artist tenants moved onto the site, yet the overall aims of the artist village remain notoriously ambiguous.
Back in 2009, questions were raised in the Legislative Council regarding the role of the Cattle Depot in arts development in Hong Kong because that same year the building was reassessed and then upgraded to the second rank on the list of declared historical monuments. HAB responded that there were plans to incorporate the Cattle Depot into what the government called the Revitalization Project of the Great Kowloon City District. Such a project aimed to rejuvenate the aging residential and commercial quarters in the Kowloon City, and HAB proposed that it would promote the cultural industries in the area in doing so. The Arts Development Council (ADC) was charged to research other artists’ villages around the world and submit a long-term development proposal for the Cattle Depot. The Council did so in mid-2009, suggesting that the government should consider the option of turning the Cattle Depot into a centre for either contemporary or Hong Kong art.13 Meanwhile, the Kowloon City Council appointed the School of Architecture of Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) to research the redevelopment plans for the aging Kowloon City district and the former aiport area of Kai Tak, in which the Cattle Depot is located. The report proposes that the Kowloon City district contains many historical monuments and that the area could be turned a into a cultural hub, with the artist village at Cattle Depot made into one of the featured sites.14 While the government acknowledged the receipt of both reports, no further news has yet been heard.15 On March 31, 2011, nearly two years later, the Council members of Kowloon City District again demanded an action plan from the government concerning the Cattle Depot.16 But the case remains pending.
Indeed, while the site has been Ching Chin-wai and others, The Pass of the Cattle Depot, occupied by local artists since 2010, mixed media. Photo: The Cattle Depot Community 2001, the Cattle Depot Artist Concern Group. The words in black and the ox head were Village remains an unofficial painted on rows of funeral bank notes. name adopted only in news reports and magazines. In governmental records, the site retains its former name—The Ma Tau Kok Animal Qurantine Depot—as inscribed on the metal plaque at the entrance. The government has yet to commit to the establishment of an artist village. It does not value the cultural potential of the site and does not recognize the significance of promoting arts or supporting local artists. The establishment of the Cattle Depot was an immediate solution that emerged more than ten years ago in response to the outcry against the redevelopment plans in the Oil street, that is how it has remained.
The Fotanian Studio Opening In recent years, “Fo Tan” became a popular term connected to another arts community in Hong Kong. Fo Tan, which literally means “Fire and
58 Vol. 11 No. 1 Charcoal,” is also an industrial district, in this case one that was established in the New Territories in north Hong Kong. The district is developing into an area of overcrowded twenty-story-tall factory buildings, constructed along busy streets and lanes full of trucks and minivans. When the manufacturing sector began to retreat from Fo Tan towards the end of the 1990s, the local artists sought the opportunity to rent the vacant factory units at relatively low cost, and they did so without any official interference.17
Factory buildings on Sui But the community of artists at Fo Tan features something different from other Wo Road, Fo Tan. The artist studios and galleries are artist villages. Whereas most artists in Hong Kong have demonstrated little distributed on different levels in different blocks. Photo: Lam ability to organize themselves, those who work at Fo Tan have been developing Tung-pang. close social bonding as well as collaborative projects. The main reasons are that most of the artists at Fo Tan are teachers and students of the Department of Fine Arts of CUHK, which is located in the vicinity, and have been active in participating in exhibitions run by the local museums and commerical art galleries. As such, the Fo Tan artists receive considerable exposure and have become well-known in local art circles and even with the public.
There is now a Web page entitled The Fotanian.18 It is run by a group of volunteer artists who work at Fo Tan, and they provide updates about the work and exhibitions of their fellow artist friends. They added the suffix “people” to the word Fo, or fire, and thereby turned it into its Cantonese
Vol. 11 No. 1 59 synonym, fo, which in the Chinese language means partners, comrades, or Pamphlet promoting the Fotanian Studios Opening, companions who work together to achieve the same goal. The Fotanians 2011. thus ascribe a shared identity to those who work in the district.
The Fotanians include not only the artists, but also the owners of private art galleries and those who run the small craft shops. There is even a growing group of composers and pop music players. According to records updated in January 2011, the art studios, shops, and galleries are now scattered over ten factory buildings.
The Fotanian Studio Opening is a public event that takes places every year during two weekends before the Chinese New Year. Castaly Leung, who is a graduate of the CUHK, organized her fellow artist friends to launch an opening of their studios in 2001. According to Leung, her working- class neighbours, who had had little or no knowledge about the sphere of fine arts, were nonetheless curious about the young newcomers and their profession. To Leung and many Fotanian artists, it was essential to have a place where they could introduce art to people who did not have the habit of going to museums and even fewer opportunities to visit the private galleries. They hoped their studios could become an arena where the artist could speak to the visitor, discuss their work, and receive responses.19
Although Leung herself may not have come to realize the nature of event, what became known as the Opening was a rebellious act against the control of museum curatorship, and even more so against all the commercial elements connected to the art market. These young artists needed a neutral space to
60 Vol. 11 No. 1 inspire the public awareness for the local art work and its significance. They needed independence, and their studios, in this location, provided an option.
To Leung’s surprise, the Opening was better received than she anticipated. As this event reached its tenth anniversary in 2011, Leung withdrew from the frontline of the organization.20 A group of recent university graduates who specialized in fine arts and other relevant disciplines volunteered to take her place. They were able to obtain financial support from the the Hong Kong Art Development Council, which is a government office for managing art funding; the Sino Group, which is a giant in real estate; and various other commercial sponsors.21 Moreover, in recent years, the organizers of the Opening were able to supply a colour-printed catalogue that introduced the participating studios individually. Advertisements were put up at railroad stations; docent services in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English could be arranged by appointment; and artists and critics were invited to speak at seminars on local arts and cultural policies. The Opening became a central art event in Hong Kong. It even received lengthy reports in the media that gained it wide public popularity.
In many ways, the art environment at Fo Tan presented far more determination and passion than that found in the Cattle Depot. Nevertheless, in the long run it is now impossible to accept these former factory units as an alternative work area for artists, and even less so to rely on the voluntary opening of the artists’ studios to satisfy public curiosity about the arts of Hong Kong. Fo Tan provides temporary space for the artists to work in, but the industrial setting is far from being a suitable venue for exhibitions.
In particular, a wide variety of industrial production centres next to the studios are still operating and produce unbearable amounts of noise, smell, and waste. During the 2011 Opening, an exchange student from Korea who was studying the cultural policies of Hong Kong remarked that she had found the visit extremely wearisome. She had to spend considerable time walking from one studio to another and was forced to take great caution when using the industrial elevators and walking along the dim corridors and staircases. Moreover, visitors looked in vain to find a comfortable place to rest or a bookstore to satisfy further pursuits.
Ironically, some Fo Tan artists also began to feel disturbed by the annual Opening. Castaly Leung, for example, told reporters that she had been distressed by many visitors who tended to show little respect to the artists present and would joke among themselves about the artwork when wandering around her studio and pay little attention to the works on display. Moreover, she observed that there was an increasing presence of commercial elements at the Opening because of the organization’s new involvement with representatives of real estate firms who, to a certain extent, intended to promote the artwork as objects of investment rather than as articles of communication between the artists and the visitors. In
Vol. 11 No. 1 61 addition, there was an increasing number of commercial art galleries setting up shop in the factory buildings, and the artists began to feel defeated by commerical encroachment into a space they thought they had control of. Other artists were also tiring of the criticisms that their work was not commercial enough to be shown in a commercial gallery. In all, Leung admitted that she began to dislike the Opening, as increasingly most visitors mistakenly took the event as a kind of carnival or entertainment in which the artists appeared to play the part of the clowns.
The past ten years of relentless effort exercised by the artists at Fo Tan Street banners announcing Open Studio, 2007. Photo: Lam testified to the fact that the general public of Hong Kong did indeed Tung-pang. demonstrate intense interest in the local arts and culture.22 The past few years also witnessed some subtle changes in Hong Kong’s downtown areas. The real estate developers and the commercial galleries have collaborated to display work of arts in the luxurious shopping arcades, and the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, which is in charge of the local museums and art galleries, also commissioned the display of sculpture and installation work in public recreation areas. Although the impact of such display on the public is difficult to assess, it is made clear that there are artists in Hong Kong and their work do not necessarily belong to museums or commercial galleries.
Nonetheless, neither HAB nor the Hong Kong Arts Development Council has yet offered any proposal to assist the campaigns by local artists in reaching the
62 Vol. 11 No. 1 Visitors in the studio of Castaly public. Despite the initial success attained by the Fo Tan artists, it is beyond Leung and others during the Opening in 2007. Photo: Lam their capacity to implement a series of programmes that would satisfy interest Tung-pang. of the local residents or provide year-round activities. After all, the Opening has been operated on a private, voluntary basis in which the artists have not been able to involve other cultural sectors such as film-making groups, Cantonese opera houses, or bookstores—cultural elements indigeneous to Hong Kong. For how long the Opening at Fo Tan studios can sustain the interest of the general public in Hong Kong remains an open question.
Striving for space In 2009, as soon as Mr. Donald Tseng, the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Adminstrative Region, announced in his policy address to redevelop the old factory buildings over the whole of Hong Kong, the real estate market in the industrial districts became more vigorous than ever. Tsang introduced the term “revitalization” to define a new approach to urban redevelopment, emphasizing the potential to alter the industrial use of empty factory units to meet other social purposes. As a great deal of renovation and buying and selling would follow, speculators began to consider factory units a new investment category. One property agency estimated that the number of transactions for purchasing factory units had risen by twenty-five percent between 2009 and 2011. An increase in rents followed shortly.23 While the birth of an artist’s district centred around the Cattle Depot or Fo Tan is yet to mature, the challenges posed by high rents are evident. For most artists in Hong Kong, the pursuit for space is ongoing and is getting more difficult than ever.
Vol. 11 No. 1 63 This paper does not suggest solutions to the difficulties of local artists in Hong Kong; It is meant only to highlight the central problems. Currently, artists are working to lobby social support by promoting arts and culture, but they are not working in concert. In the examples of the Cattle Depot and Fo Tan, we do not even find unity among artists who work in these two different districts. As it will not be too long before Hong Kong artists are met with another wave of frustration, it is important for them to consider whether it is more productive to continue working in isolated groups. Although working collectively may not produce satisfactory results, still, as of the present, it is seemingly the alternative way to go.
Notes 1 The exhibition, Inside Looking Out, was held at the Osage Gallery (Beijing) from September 22 to October 22, 2007. There were also the works by Pak Sheungchuen, Chow Chun-fei, Ma Chihang, Kwan Sheungchi and Lee Kit; see Lam Tung-pang, “Conclusion: Some Sharing of Personal Experience,” Inside Looking Out (Hong Kong: Osage Gallery, 2007). 2 This phenomomen is reflected in the size of enrollment for the university programs in Hong Kong. The students registered in the divisions of Sciences and Business significantly outnumber those in Fine Arts or other disciplines of Humanities. From 2007 onwards, when the West Kowloon Cultural District Project was under planning at the top management level of the government, new undergraduate and graduate programs in cultural management began to appear in four of the eight local universities. In contrast, the number of pupils enrolled in the program of Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where Lam Tung-pang and most other young artists were trained, remains more or less the same. 3 Lam Tung-pang, “Hong Kong–China–Hong Kong: China as a Mirror on Hong Kong,” in Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook 2008, ed. Harold Mok and Chan Yuk-keung (Hong Kong: Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009), 105–13. 4 Ibid., 107–08. 5 Personal correspondence with the artist. For more details of Lam’s work in Beijing and London, see Lam Tung-pang, Studio: Hong Kong–London (Hong Kong: Niu Ji She, 2007). 6 Wei Wei, “Reflecting Together: Ten Years at Fo Tan,” Wen Wei Po, January 7, 2011, accessed March 1, 2011, Wise News Archive, http://libwisesearch.wisers.net/wortal/tool.do?wp_dispatch=confirm- view&federated=true&doc-ids=news:14kl^201101070050141(S:101582634)&menu-id=&on- what=selected&from-list&display-style=all&tooldisplay=true¤tsubdb=wisesearch.
64 Vol. 11 No. 1 7 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Antiquities and Monuments Office, Assessment of Historical Buildings, Grade II, no. 230, accessed March 1, 2011, http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/ce/Museum/ Monument/form/AAB-SM-chi.pdf. 8 As the site at Oil Street is located in the neighbourhood of five-star hotels on the harbour shore, the government retained it in its land reserve for auction. It was sold for about US 0.8 billion in August 2011; see Paggie Leung, “North Point Site Sells For HK 6.27 Below Estimates,” South China Morning Post, August 17, 2011, Wise News Archive, accessed November 23, 2011, http://libwisesearch.wisers. net/ws5/tool.do?wp_dispatch=confirm-view&doc-ids=news:15jk^201108260270022(S:101639455)&m enu-id=&on-what=selected&from-list&display-style=all&tooldisplay=true. Since the artists moved out in 1999, the whole compound has been left vacant and locked up for more than ten years. Oil Street is a perfect example in showing that the economic interests of the government of Hong Kong are always the priority. The Cattle Depot is a different site because it has been declared a historical monument, legally prohibiting any destruction or rebuilding. Nonetheless, whether the government will eventually turn the site into one for profit-making business remains an open question. 9 For details about the establishment of the Cattle Depot Artist Village, see Chan Pui-ho, “From Oil Street to Cattle Depot: The evolution of artist’s village in Hong Kong,” in Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook 2000, ed. Harold Mok and Chan Yuk-keung (Hong Kong: Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002), 78–84. For a different and positive view of the Cattle Depot, see Anthea Fan, “There is this Cattle Depot Artist Village in Hong Kong,” in Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook 2003, ed. Harold Mok and Chan Yuk-keung (Hong Kong: Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004), 94–100. 10 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Legislative Council, Cattle Depot Artist Village (LCQ15), April 22, 2009, accessed May 5, 2011, http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/200904/22/P200904220152_ print.htm. 11 Anonymous, “Artists in residence: hoping for less limitation, more space,” Ming Pao Daily News, May 3, 2009, accessed on March 1, 2011, Wise News Archive. http://libwisesearch.wisers.net/wortal/ tool.do?wp_dispatch=confirm-view&federated=true&doc-ids=news:251l^200905030040095(S:1015827 25)&menu-id=&on-what=selected&from-list&display-style=all&tooldisplay=true¤tsubdb=wise search. 12 Elaine Yau, “Artists Protest at Cattle Depot Clampdowns,” South China Morning Post, October 9, 2010, accessed on March 1, 2011, Wise News Archive; see also Adrian Wan, “Disgruntled Artists Plan Ghostly Campaign in Forbidden Zone,” South China Morning Post, October 19, 2010, accessed March 1, 2011, Wise News Archive. 13 Arts Development Council, Research on Future Development of Artist Village in Cattle Depot, July 2009, accessed November 22, 2011, http://www.heritage.gov.hk/en/doc/conserve/ HKADCResearchReportExecutiveSummary.pdf. 14 Centre for Architectural Heritage Research, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Historical Cum Social Study on Kowloon City District in Connection with Kai Tak Area, December 2009, accessed November 22, 2011, http://www.heritage.gov.hk/en/doc/conserve/CUHKResearchReportExecuticeSummary.pdf. 15 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, The Commissioner for Heritage, Panel on Development. Issues raised at the meeting between Legislative Council Members and Kowloon City District Council Members on July 2, 2009: Proposal to Revitalise Ma Tau Kok Cattle Depot Artist Village into a Cultural Development And Tourist Spot, response letter submitted to the Works Branch, Development Bureau, October 30, 2009, document no. CB(1)230/09-10(01), accessed on May 5, 2011, http://www.legco.gov. hk/yr09-10/english/panels/dev/papers/devcb1-230-1-e.pdf. 16 Kowloon City District Council, Formulation of Long-term Plan for Revitalising the Cattle Depot Artist Village, March 31, 2011, accessed November 22, 2011, http://www.districtcouncils.gov.hk/klc_d/pdf/ ldmfc/2011/KCLDFMC11_15cp.pdf. 17 According to an interview with Stephanie Bailey, Lam Tung-pang believed that the establishment of the many studios at Fo Tan was a joint effort made by students who had a strong will to create an independent sector where they could continue to produce art work and convince non-artists of the significance of arts and culture; see Stephanie Bailey, “Four discussions with Hong Kong artists: Leung Chi Wo, Lam Tung Pang, Morgan Wong, and Lee Kit,” Yishu 10, no. 3 (May/June 2011), 76−79. Undoubtedly, Lam Tung-pang and his artist friends have been working towards the goal of emphasizing the contribution of the work by artists in Hong Kong. The establishment of the shared studios in the industrial areas marked a departure from what previous generations of artists did, in which a circle of artists tended to centre themselves around individual masters. The change in the physical environment of the artists’ studios provided the impetus for the building of a communal sensibility among the artists in Hong Kong, particularly those who were born after the 1970s. For further discussion, see Celine Lai, “Reading the work by five artists in Hong Kong: a new page in the local art history,” forthcoming. 18 www.fotanian.com. 19 Conversation with the artist in her studio, October 10, 2009. 20 Lana Lam, “Fo Tan Art Event a Victim of its Own Success,” South China Morning Post, January 9, 2011, accessed on March 1, 2011, Wise News Archive, http://libwisesearch.wisers.net/ws5/tool. do?wp_dispatch=confirm-view&doc-ids=news:2627^201101090270002(S:101583007)&menu-id=&on- what=selected&from-list&display-style=all&tooldisplay=true. 21 For the organization of the Fotanian Studio Opening in recent years, see press release on the Fotanian web page, http://www.fotanian.com/pressRelease.php. 22 Recently, the Hong Kong Tourism Board included the Fotanian Studio Opening in the official tourist pamphlet, Art Village: A Travel Among Cultural Points, introducing it as one of the most featured art events of the city; accessed January 9, 2011, http://www.discoverhongkong.com/tc/things-to-do/ images/artvillage.pdf. 23 Na Kang-chung, “Factory Scheme Prices Us Out, Artists Say,” South China Morning Post, April 26, 2011, accessed May 17, 2011, Wise News Archive, http://libwisesearch.wisers.net/ws5/tool. do?wp_dispatch=confirm-view&doc-ids=news:25c1^201104260270016(S:101583106)&menu-id=&on- what=selected&from-list&display-style=all&tooldisplay=true.
Vol. 11 No. 1 65 Marie Leduc Art Intervenes in Society: A Conversation with Wang Chunchen
he question of artistic Wang Chunchen. Photo: Marie Leduc. practice and its T relationship to society foregrounded the development of the modern avant-garde. In the last two decades this question has re-emerged as artists, curators, and museums attempt to redefine their practices in an age dominated by neoliberal capitalism and globalization. As Claire Bishop has explained, relational art, socially engaged art, and interventionist art are just some of the names used to identify these contemporary artistic approaches that are designed to subvert traditional aesthetics and promote “social action and community participation.”1 It is this type of art and its relationship to a rapidly changing China that Wang Chunchen considers in his 2010 book Art Intervenes in Society: A New Artistic Relationship.2
Wang Chunchen is an art professor and curator at the Central Academy of Fine Art Museum (CAFAM), Beijing. In 2009, he was the recipient of the CCAA (Chinese Contemporary Art Award) Art Critic Award, founded by Swiss collector Uli Sigg, which provided him with the funding to complete his book.3 Wang Chunchen is also co-curator, along with Wang Huangsheng, Guo Xiaoyan, and Pi Li, of the inaugural CAFAM Biennale, Super-Organism, held in Beijing from September 20 to October 30, 2011. Marie Leduc met with Wang Chunchen at CAFAM on July 21, 2011, and began a correspondence with him in which they discussed the subject of Wang Chunchen’s book, the biennial, and the new relationship that he sees emerging between art and society in China.
Marie Leduc: Tell me about your proposal for the 2009 CCAA Art Critic Award and how that came about.
Wang Chunchen: My proposal was based on my experience in the past several years and how I was thinking about contemporary Chinese art. It was also because I had studied a lot of contemporary art theory. I noticed from my readings and from my encounters with many international
66 Vol. 11 No. 1 artists and critics that some artists do their art not just for the sake of art as art, but for another kind of purpose. We may say it is a kind of social responsibility or maybe a kind of demonstration of their ideas related to living, to existence. For example, participation: How can we as artists build a community and ask the general audience to participate in something? Sometimes we think this is not art but an activity organized by artists.
Marie Leduc: So art can also be a community effort?
Wang Chunchen: Yes. I find in the European or American context there are many books on this idea. Some critics, for example, Boris Groys, have addressed this idea. Also, Claire Bishop from Britain has written several articles; “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” and “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents.” She has also edited an anthology, called Participation.4 Social interference, social interventions, participation are all terms used in such books and articles.
Marie Leduc: Is this the type of reading that has influenced you?
Wang Chunchen: Yes. This is the background. When I wrote the proposal, I wondered whether this idea is common or just particular to only a few people. My readings suggested that it is not so particular. I cannot say that every artist is concerned with this idea, but I found there are many such artists. So from there I wanted to look for the reason, the purpose behind this artistic approach.
Marie Leduc: In your proposal and in the book that resulted from it, you discuss the idea of art intervening in society and the idea of art as a social responsibility. You address this subject from the perspective of contemporary Chinese art and its social context. Has no one in China written about this before?
Wang Chunchen: Of course this idea has been discussed by some Chinese critics, but they have never put it in the larger context. I looked back at contemporary Chinese art and I found we have such artists. We have things closely related to this idea that art plays a role in society. Today, in China, we often say that art is art, art cannot be an instrument—it cannot be a tool to be used by some government or by some organization for its own propaganda. During the Cultural Revolution art was used as a tool. We often said, “Art should serve people.” That was a slogan used by the Chinese government, by Chairman Mao. After the Cultural Revolution, when the “emancipation of ideology” was launched, in the early 1980s, people gave up that slogan. They really disliked art as propaganda. They just wanted to do abstract, pure art for themselves. By the 1980s and ’85 New Wave Movement, people wanted to be independent, to be pure artists and make pure art.
In 1980, Wu Guanzhong wrote an article saying we need to have this idea of abstract beauty in art, beauty of form, or a formal beauty. These few
Vol. 11 No. 1 67 words made a lot of people angry. How can you propose such a concept as abstract beauty? This is a Western, bourgeois idea. You know, when we said bourgeois at that time it meant that you were anti-revolutionary, you were not a good comrade in China. So it was very difficult, and it became a national debate. Of course, when you read that kind of article today you laugh and think it is ridiculous. But, at that time, people were surprised to read about this idea of abstract beauty and the beauty of form.
Marie Leduc: When you talk about “pure” art and “abstract beauty” you seem to be referring to an aesthetic formalism more typically associated with modernism in the West. How does pure art and formal beauty “intervene in society?”
Wang Chunchen: In China, when we say “pure” art, it refers to art that has no social reference. It sometimes refers to art where the artist is only concerned with line, colour, or composition. This type of “abstract beauty” may be the same thing as the “significant form” discussed by Clive Bell in his book Art. This book was translated into Chinese in 1984. Such “pure art” was a way of intervening in society because it rejected the official slogans and artistic propaganda that dominated almost all artistic practice in China before the end of the Cultural Revolution. When “pure” art was advocated just after the Cultural Revolution, it was like a bomb blast. How could an artist dare to do something so pure without any association to ideological propaganda? Such a position held by Chinese artists was an implicit protest against the mainstream official art of the time. This was why when the Star Society of Painting displayed their modernist artworks outside of the National Art Museum of China in 1979, it was so startling. Artists then advocated that pure art was freedom, independence, and a release of their soul—ideas that were not supported by the official art dogma of the time.
Marie Leduc: So the move to “pure” art was very revolutionary for the time.
Wang Chunchen: Yes. So thirty years have passed, and in these past three decades we can still find some people who are not making an absolute pure art, but also use art for their own expression. That is an art not promoted by the government but made just for the artist’s own existence as a human being. Chen Zizhuang was a Sichuan-based ink painter who painted only traditional themes such as birds, flowers, and trees. His work was so pure that you could not recognize any socialist background. He made all these paintings during the Cultural Revolution but did not follow any of the official slogans. He painted for his own expression. When his paintings were rediscovered in the late 1970s and early 1980s, people were surprised by his free expression and that he had not subjected himself to the requirements of art at the time.
Marie Leduc: But these are examples from the past. What were the contemporary artists’ reactions to being included in your book? For example, you write about artists like Ai Weiwei, Ye Yun, Xu Bing, He
68 Vol. 11 No. 1 Chengyao, Wang Jianwei. Were they happy to be written about in this context, as artists who intervene in society?
Wang Chunchen: Yeah, yeah. I even interviewed Ai Weiwei. I just called him and made an appointment. He agreed even though he didn’t know me. When I mentioned this award, he knew about it because he was one of the winners the year before. I had a one hour interview with him. I made a recording, and he also made a video recording because when anyone wants to interview Ai Weiwei, he records it. He is very careful. He likes to record everything because that is also his art method.
Marie Leduc: And what was the reaction to your book in China?
Wang Chunchen: In China lots of people talked about it. I had an idea to organize a small forum and invite some people to talk at that time but I was too busy. I couldn’t find time to ask a few friends or critics to sit down and talk about it.
Marie Leduc: But has anybody written about it and criticized or commented on it?
Wang Chunchen: Yes, but in China no. Sometimes people want to keep away from this sort of topic. Of course they talk about it but in other situations.
Marie Leduc: And what are they saying about it—saying to you about it?
Wang Chunchen: Artists such as He Jinwei and Zhang Xiaotao praised it highly. They thought that it outlined the true trajectory and significance of contemporary Chinese art and that it touched on some key points about the historical, cultural, and political reality in China. It demonstrates how art in China is much more than the commercialized artworks popular in the art market today.
Marie Leduc: What about other critics, international critics?
Wang Chunchen: There is an American writer, Mary Wiseman. She wrote about my book. She is an American professor who studies aesthetics and philosophy of art. I gave this book to her last year and to other professors from America. She liked it very much. She told me she wrote a book review for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.5 This is the first time a Chinese book, a book written by a Chinese scholar, will be reviewed in this journal. So it is a great honour.
Also, another reason I have not organized a forum as yet is that I haven’t written enough on this topic. It was too short a time for writing. And, another thing, I didn’t want to show off. Sometimes I am too modest. [Laughs.]
Vol. 11 No. 1 69 Marie Leduc: What is the general thesis of the book?
Wang Chunchen: We need to reconsider art, what art signifies for the contemporary social context, for human beings, for ourselves, and for our artists. I also wrote this because of the condition of the Chinese market. So many star artists today just sell their works for the purpose of business. That is why we need to consider art in its social context, not just as a commodity. Art as a commodity is good, but at the same time we need to consider a new relationship. A new relationship means we need to stay away from something too commercial. Rather, we need the artist, as a person involved with art, to be responsible. I say responsible because we have so many things happening in China. All of these things are not directly related to art, but they are directly related to us, directly influenced or interrelated to our own existence. For example, in the first few pages of the book, I talk about the demolition and tearing down of artists’ studios by the government. The government says that they need to develop a new area, to develop the city. But when you tear down property, you need to protect the people’s right of property. They don’t care; they just say, I will take this. I asked the artists involved, and they were not given much compensation. When the artists refused to leave, the developer organized some people who just crashed into their rooms at night and beat up the artists. It was February 22, 2010, and many people were beaten that night. This part of the story I did not put in my book.
Marie Leduc: Where was this? In Caochangdi?
Wang Chunchen: Not Caochangdi, but nearby, in the Zhengyang art zone. There were only eight artists there on guard. They were taking shifts to watch over the studios. They didn’t want people to take away their stuff. Most of the other artists were gone. There were just these eight artists who stayed there to protect their rights. Lots of people were beaten. There was a Japanese artist there that night, and he was beaten black and blue. His hair, body, and hands were all bleeding. One person said, he is Japanese, don’t beat him to death, otherwise there will be a problem, so they stopped beating him. Finally, the artists called the police. The police went there but did nothing. The next day, the artists discussed what they could do to protest. In the afternoon, they took two or three vans and stopped the vans on Chang’an Avenue, near Tian’anmen Square. They got out of the vans and held up banners. One artist had to sit in an armchair because he was wounded. The Japanese artist was in the hospital. Ai Weiwei was there, and he walked along the road and took some pictures. He then used his mobile to quickly send images to the Web. The parade did not last long, just a half an hour, but it was enough. Many foreign and Chinese reporters came. The police came and stopped them, but they walked for half an hour. It was enough for people to know about what happened.
The end of February and early March is the time when the Chinese government holds a national conference to discuss the policies adopted for China in the coming year. So there were a lot of representatives from
70 Vol. 11 No. 1 Wu Yiqiang, performance different provinces in Beijing at the time. When this sort of thing happens at the ruined studios of Zhengyang Art Zone, it makes the government very nervous. If so many people protest, it means December 29, 2009. Photo: Wang Chunchen. society is unstable. They tried to get the local government to deal with the problem in the art district. The secretary, the leader of the local government, went to the art area, and they arrested the organizer hired by the developer, the one who beat the artists. Finally, the developer repaid the artists for their loss. But the government still controls the artists. They took away their computers, and they had to cancel the images of the parade. Still, some images were already on the Web. Some people were also arrested because they just found another excuse. So this is the story.
Marie Leduc: You did not include this whole story in your book, but you still discuss the issue of property seizure and property rights.
Wang Chunchen: Most examples in my book, I should say, are acceptable for publication in China. In most cases, I try to select. I am very careful to select the examples for my writing. At the same time, this book is not officially published in mainland China; it is published in Hong Kong. It is printed in China, but it cannot be sold in Chinese bookstores, that is, in the national state-owned system. I use this kind of example to remind Chinese artists to think about some things we can do.
Vol. 11 No. 1 71 Marie Leduc: What do you think contemporary artists in China can do about this kind of situation, this control and silence imposed by the government?
Wang Chunchen: We can use other methods, even if they are not so aggressive, not so provocative. Artists can still find methods that are clever and intelligent to make art significant and to help people understand Chinese society today. Art can be used, not just for beauty, not just for visual pleasure, and not just for the market, auction, and high prices.
Marie Leduc: When you say “used,” I wonder how does this sort of political use of art really differ from how governments have used art for their political purposes? What is the difference between art as social intervention and art that promotes government propaganda?
Wang Chunchen: That is a good question. When I wrote my book, I kept this question in mind. On the surface, art is used both by government and private artists. But I have found that when artists use art for their own expression, they never think that what they do is absolute truth, and they do not force people to believe in it. Instead, they are just presenting their own judgment and attitude toward life and society. When art is used by government, however, things are very different. Art is aimed at imprinting something into people’s minds. Artists are told, this is true, this is what you should follow, you should do what we tell you to do. In fact, we can say contemporary art in China is a history of artists’ individual and private expression, not propaganda advocated by a government.
Marie Leduc: Are there many artists in China who want to use art in this way, who want to push the boundaries and intervene in society?
Wang Chunchen: Actually, we have many such contemporary artists. They want to keep away, keep a distance from state-advocated ideas. They are independent. They want to show their own understanding and interpretation of Chinese society. That is why we see so many images of things that are critical or even ugly or deformed. If we understand their feelings, their intention, we can understand why they like to do this. They are not just doing this art for the purpose of the market. They are saying, I feel angry, I don’t have a job to do, I don’t have enough survival material to support myself, why should I follow the slogans? They just want to be independent. This was the attitude of the artists who lived in Yuanmingyuan in mid-1990s and who are now in Songzhuang village. They are some of the many artists who quit their jobs to live in Beijing.
Marie Leduc: And do you think things have changed since the 1980s and 90s?
Wang Chunchen: Things have changed a little. In the 1980s, when China opened up to the world, we had more contact, more exchanges. For
72 Vol. 11 No. 1 example, foreign exhibitions came to China, and Chinese artists visited foreign countries again. The artists went to Western Europe and America, not just to the Eastern bloc. And we now translate many Western books, and we organize many conferences. So now people see many things differently. But the books that came into China back in the 1980s were not very contemporary at that time; for example, Nietzsche, Freud, and Sartre. All of these books are from more than half a century ago, but, still, for Chinese people they were fresh. After 1949, they were unable to read these books. It was forbidden. This was bourgeois, and these books were considered to be poison. So in the 1980s, people felt excited, felt a kind of liberation. It was a sense of emancipation.
Marie Leduc: Enlightenment, perhaps?
Wang Chunchen: Yes, it was like an enlightenment. We used this term at that time. But there were also campaigns to stop this liberalization. The government called it the anti-liberalization campaign. Another campaign was called the spiritual pollution campaign. What is spiritual pollution? It refers to being too liberal, too open-minded, like when you talk about democracy and multi-party elections. This is spiritual pollution, and they wanted to stop it.
Marie Leduc: It seems like there is still a concern about “spiritual pollution” today.
Wang Chunchen: Yes, still, for example, with the control of the Internet. It is still there. I should say that Chinese artists in their own minds want to be independent. They want to stay away from the popular, official propaganda slogans. Even if they don’t say it with their lips, they have that idea in their minds. Sometimes we need to make our own works to criticize our situation, our culture, our context. In the 1980s, we often used the words “reconsider” or “reflection.” Reflection is the central word. It is a neutral term. But, besides that, we need to critique, to criticize (this is from Nietzsche). We need to reconsider everything. We need to reconsider Chinese art.
Marie Leduc: In a number of places in your book, you draw a parallel between artistic freedom and democracy. Can you expand on this?
Wang Chunchen: We know that in this world there is no absolute freedom, even for art. The modern democracy, at least, guarantees that you have the right to express something in the form of art or as writing in a book. Democracy can tolerate most expressions made by the people. In China, however, you cannot say that artistic freedom is always ensured. For example, you cannot make fun of present state leaders, you cannot refer to any sensitive topics, you cannot doubt the state-written modern history, etc., and, in reality, many works will be censored for their content. When Chinese artworks are to be shown outside of China, they have to
Vol. 11 No. 1 73 be submitted to the government for approval. Similarly, when foreign artworks come to China for exhibition, they also have to be submitted to the government for approval, for customs clearance.
Marie Leduc: Is it possible then to promote a free expressive art in China? For example, you have two roles at CAFA. You are a professor, and you are a curator at the museum. As a professor in the academy, is it possible to teach a free, independent art, an art of free expression, under these circumstances?
Wang Chunchen: Today we can. As a teacher you can teach any ideas to your students. Of course, there are some words you cannot say. But still you can talk about some things. As for myself, I just talk about many things. No one has said you cannot say this, you cannot say that.
Marie Leduc: But the academy is structured around traditional practices like oil painting, ink painting, and sculpture; there is still a very traditional process for the students to go through. How do you feel about the academy system? Can it promote free expression and free thinking?
Wang Chunchen: The general Chinese society is much more open than before. Sometimes people even say Chinese society is so open you can say anything, sometimes things you cannot say or do in foreign countries. But the Academy is still state owned. There are still some things we cannot change. As teachers you can promote certain things and say things to the students. As for the system, you just cannot say we cancel the department or the division. We still keep the divisions, for example, the department of oil painting, printmaking, sculpture, and mural painting. We cannot change that. Of course, we have teachers there, and they need the jobs.
Marie Leduc: Can the student explore broader ideas within the traditional departments?
Wang Chunchen: It depends on the teachers and the students themselves. For example, some teachers say if you are studying ink painting, then you must paint with ink. You cannot use oil and you cannot make a video. But this depends on the teacher. Generally, students can do anything. For example, students studying in CAFA may choose sculpture as their major. The teachers in the sculpture department are very liberal, free thinking, and open minded. They just encourage the students. Some students only make videos but they are actually studying sculpture. Some students do performance for the video. So it really depends on the teacher. Generally, people become inventive. We have the traditional structure, and we cannot cancel it, so we also try to develop new specialties or subjects. For example, CAFA has set up departments of design, architecture, and even a department of experimental art. We call it experimental art because we try to incorporate new methodologies and new ideas from the art world.
Marie Leduc: China Academy of Art has a similar new program.
74 Vol. 11 No. 1 Next page: CAFAM Biennale Wang Chunchen: Yes, the same thing, but I think they call it multimedia. installation view, 2011. Photo: Wang Chunchen. They just have a different title; the basic idea is the same. So in CAFA some teachers are very academic or neutral. Some are very conservative, and they don’t like contemporary art. For myself, as a teacher, I just try to be open minded, try to be interested in everything.
Marie Leduc: As a curator, do you think there is a way you can promote this new artistic relationship with society by creating exhibits that intervene in society?
Wang Chunchen: Yes. It depends on the situation and from which context you curate the exhibit. For example, in our museum we try to include many different types of contemporary art. Still, if artists are controversial we don’t invite them. For example, Ai Weiwei—we cannot invite him to do a show.
Marie Leduc: So you still have to apply a certain amount of self-censorship?
Wang Chunchen: Yes, but this is not set down by the school or by the government. We make the decision ourselves.
Marie Leduc: You realize it is too controversial, so you don’t do it?
Wang Chunchen: Yes. But, because we have so many artists in China we can still choose others who are also very controversial. For example, for the biennial, we invited an artist from Taiwan, Chen Chieh-jen. He makes videos in order to record or re-create reality and historical moments. Some are very cruel and some explore Chinese identity in Taiwan or overseas. We also invited a group of artists called the East Lake Project. This project took place in Wuhan, not in Beijing. They were addressing the same thing, the protection of property rights. In Wuhan, East Lake is very famous, but developers wanted to fill in the lake in order to build houses. They didn’t care about the lake. The lake is natural and good for the city and for people’s lives. It was beautiful, but they didn’t care. They just wanted money. So the artists protested and did some activities as a kind of demonstration. In the end, they were unable to persuade the developers to stop their project. Eventually the lake was filled in, and it is now gone. We wanted to show this in the biennial. We included it under the super-urbanity theme.
Marie Leduc: Let’s talk about the biennial. It is called Super-Organism?
Wang Chunchen: Yes, we coined this term, and we are trying to explore some ideas. People have great expectations for our museum. In China, we don’t have many professional quality, first class, state-of-the-art museums. Most museums are state owned, and the director is appointed by the government. But CAFAM belongs to CAFA. CAFA is a school, and it is a good one. This means we still have some liberty, some freedom to do things the way we want, even if we still have to control it to some degree. So we want to use CAFAM as a platform for discussing some topics, some ideas that could not be discussed in another situation or context. If we talked
Vol. 11 No. 1 75 76 Vol. 11 No. 1 Vol. 11 No. 1 77 CAFAM Biennale installation view, 2011. Photo: Wang Chunchen.
about these things at 798, some people might say it is too commercial. If we talked about it at NAMOC (National Art Museum of China), they might say it is too official. CAFA, however, is an academic institution, and CAFAM is a place where we can talk about these ideas as academic topics. So for our first biennial we came up with Super-Organism. It is a good name because there is no such term. If we were to talk about democracy, for example, it would be just too sensitive. Since there really is no such term, people can think and imagine freely. In this way we have created a space and an opportunity for people to talk about anything. We have, however, limited the topics to four sub-topics; super-body, super-machine, super-urbanity, and bio-politics. These four areas link together in today’s world. For example, our bodies are controlled by us, by our flesh, but there are also certain types of power outside of ourselves that control us in different situations. In China we have many forms of this kind of controlling power. Some of it is from tradition, some from habit, some from ideology, and some from the government. Many different things. So we want to talk about these things as “super,” or beyond, linked into, and interactive with the body. The machine, for example, is technology, yet it seems we have become a machine, one part of a machine. For example, we use our mobiles everyday. It has become a part of our body as a machine. This kind of technology influences people and influences our lives today. We want to discuss these things. So we call this super-machine.
Marie Leduc: Who are some of the artists you have invited?
Wang Chunchen: Internationally we have invited Matthew Barney, Tony Cragg, and William Kentridge. We have also invited well-known artists from China such as Xu Bing, Wu Shanzhuan, and Zhou Tiehai. Finally, we are including many young Chinese artists who have not been presented in a biennial or international exhibit before. In addition to the exhibition, we are holding forums. At the forums we can talk directly about the four topics of the biennial, one by one.
Marie Leduc: You have also invited the artists to participate in forums?
Wang Chunchen: No. We have invited scholars for the forums. We have already held two forums. The first one was in May and the second in June. The third and fourth are in September.
78 Vol. 11 No. 1 Marie Leduc: Oh, I see—in the process of planning the show.
Wang Chunchen: Yes, in the process.
Marie Leduc: And who are the scholars?
Wang Chunchen: The first forum was on the subject of biopolitics. We included Chinese scholars such as novelist and writer Han Shaogong, who is very famous and very brave about discussing some of the problems in China. Internationally, we invited a French scholar, Jean-Louis Rocca, who has lived in Beijing for many years and teaches sociology at Tsinghua University. The second forum on super-urbanity included a German, Roland Winkler, from Shanghai. The city is Winkler’s area of study. He is researching the idea of the sustainable city. Sustainability is also a slogan used by the Chinese government. Rocca is a developer and a manager, but he also tries to discuss and promote the idea of urban sustainability to Chinese developers, city planners, and city officials.
The third and fourth forums are in September, one before the biennial and the other during. The forum on the super-body will include Scott Lash from Goldsmiths, in London, and Judith Farquhar, from the University of Chicago. Finally, the last forum, on the super-machine, will include scholars from Taiwan and China as well as Boyan Manchev from Sofia University, Bulgaria.
Marie Leduc: So these scholars, through the forums, have helped to develop the ideas that have shaped the biennial?
Wang Chunchen: No, no. They just discussed the ideas, not the exhibition. We wanted to extend our idea, our theme, beyond the exhibition so the audience will know that art is not just art but is linked to some ideas that go beyond the exhibition and the discussion.
Marie Leduc: What do you hope this biennial will achieve here in China?
Wang Chunchen: First, we hope to establish a professional biennial here in Beijing—a theme-based, research-type biennial.
Marie Leduc: But you have biennials already in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and even Beijing.
Wang Chunchen: In Beijing, of course, there is a biennial. It is called the Beijing Biennial, but it is supported and organized by the Beijing municipal government. It is not the same as the well-known biennials in other cities.
Marie Leduc: How do you think CAFAM’s biennial will compare to the recent Shanghai Biennial?
Wang Chunchen: CAFAM’s biennial is very small. We are focusing on some very current problems and theoretical projects. It is not huge. We are
Vol. 11 No. 1 79 80 Vol. 11 No. 1 CAFAM Biennale installation focusing on the theoretical questions discussed by people today. We have view, 2011. Photo: Wang Chunchen. tried to do something special. I mean we want to try something new. We want to use the biennial to explore some problems or questions. That is our purpose. We want to make it interdisciplinary. We want to use the biennial as a platform to promote some new artists, no matter if they are Chinese or from foreign countries.
Marie Leduc: What about the international art world? Contemporary Chinese art is now so much a part of this larger field. What do you hope this biennial will offer in the international context?
Wang Chunchen: Even though our museum is not big, we want to develop a professional biennial in Beijing. We want to use the biennial to attract international attention, not just to our museum, but to what is real and what is significant for our consideration. We think a biennial is not just a general exhibition but also a kind of platform or artwork itself. The biennial exhibition is an art form for people—different people from different cultures—to come together to discuss current issues that are talked about around the world, not just by artists but also by professors, scholars, and even statesmen. We want to make CAFA Art Museum an open platform for current knowledge and new theories.
For myself, I would like this museum to be a place for knowledge, for the production of a new knowledge. We often talk about that. Maybe we are too idealistic, but we still believe that if we can do this, we can do something for contemporary Chinese art. I would say that contemporary art in China should be a kind of criticism. It should be a kind of responsibility, or a kind of expression, for Chinese artists—or maybe not just artists but also Chinese people. How do they understand Chinese society today? What kind of problems do they meet with, do they have, and do they deal with? Even if the problems or issues cannot be resolved at the moment, what kind of problems do we need to record and respond to? Maybe we cannot respond directly, but we can indirectly. We can know, and we can understand. These kinds of things will be remembered by history, by the future. We don’t want to make something insignificant, too commercial, or too propagandistic.
Notes 1 Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” ArtForum (February 2006), 179–85. 2 Wang Chunchen, Art Intervenes in Society: A New Artistic Relationship (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2010). 3 See “Wang Chunchen Wins 2009 CCAA Critic Award Wang Chunchen Wins 2009 CCAA Critic Award,” December 4, 2009, http://ccaa-awards.org/news/wang-chunchen-wins-2009-ccaa-critic- award-2. 4 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004), 51–79; and Claire Bishop, ed., Participation (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Whitechapel and The MIT Press, 2006). 5 See Mary Bittner Wiseman, “Art Intervenes in Society: A New Artistic Relationship,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69, no. 4 (Fall 2011), 417–19.
Vol. 11 No. 1 81 Jonathan Goodman Blooming in the Shadows: Unofficial Chinese Art, 1974 –1985 China Institute, New York September 15–December 11, 2011
s a small but very good show, installed salon-style in the two small gallery spaces of the China Institute, Blooming in the A Shadows, 1974–1985 covers a short, mostly unrecognized period in the history of contemporary Chinese art. It begins towards the end of the Cultural Revolution and finishes in the mid 1980s, around the time new art became much bolder, due in large part to Western influences.The exhibition tells of the courage and determination of three underground groups of artists: the Wuming or No Name group, active from 1972 to 1982; the Xingxing or Star-Star association, mostly active from 1979 through 1983; and the Caocao She, the Grass Society, best known for its activities from 1975 through the mid 1980s. They can be considered culturally revolutionary simply because they wanted to paint with freedom at a time when doing so carried the risk of repression by overly zealous party officials. As a result, each of these groups was often shrouded in secrecy, painting at night or at the outskirts of cities, away from these constrictions.
Each of these associations concentrated on visual themes that challenged the political correctness in art that was part of both local and country- wide government mores. At that time, the need for secret association was genuine: nudity and abstraction, being bourgeois, were taboo; even small paintings of domestic scenes were suspect because they were apolitical. The standard of the time was the socialist realism many artists learned from Soviet art, but these three unofficial groups, whose participants were often stifled psychologically and creatively by dull industrial jobs, maintained an openness to art despite the burden of secrecy. Blooming in the Shadows is mostly a painting show, with the important exception of the sculptor Wang Keping. The paintings are small, in part because the canvases had to be hidden in satchels from prying eyes, and while the work is usually modest, it often evinces a moving tenacity and determination to keep the art of painting and sculpture alive despite the odds.
This is the first time such art has been gathered and exhibited in America, and it is the intention of Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, the show’s curators and catalogue essayists, to shed light on works that exemplify the beginning of contemporary Chinese art. As such, the exhibition is notably informative, providing the curious viewer and reader an historical overview of the art made between 1974 and 1985. Indeed, the works cited in this review, all of which were included in the show, illustrate the human
82 Vol. 11 No. 1 need for expression. Simply to paint without ideology was considered a political error; while the vestiges of socialist realism still exert an influence today, at that time the painting of contented workers and heroic peasants was considered the highest ideal to aspire to in painting. Thus the vision of the art addressed here can be understood as a kind of rebellion against the barbed rules of local government. While it is not, on the surface, bold, a certain heroism and tenacity does comes through even in the diminutive studies of daily life. I do not, however, want to imply that the art’s value is only political; there is visual interest as well as political dissidence to be found in the exhibition’s art. The pieces I have chosen to write about tend to be formally interesting if not aesthetically innovative while at the same time enacting what amounts to a silent protest against the militant regulation of the imagination.
In current Chinese culture, there is relative freedom despite the fact that political satire, especially of Mao, and nudity of a graphic sexual or pornographic kind continue to be prohibited. Otherwise, painters are more or less free to do what they want. So it is hard to imagine, even for most younger artists working in China today, what it meant to practice painting just a generation ago. In the mercantile democracies of the Western world, we can see a general malaise in art that seeks the literalism of the political sublime or is the mere illustration of theory; however, politically driven art in the West shows us how easy it is to ridicule a government for its imperial bent—and also how allowing such parody is a feature of social democracy. But in mainland China, during the period Blooming in the Shadows addresses, even a small figurative artwork was capable of bringing the government’s wrath down on the artist responsible for the image. A painter’s career could end in a moment if the wrong person saw the art.
The Wuming (No Name) Group, active from 1972 to 1982, came into being as a loose association of friends.1 Born in the 1950s, they were old enough to have lived through the grim times of the Cultural Revolution. The artists—Ma Kelu, Wei Hai, Zhang Wei, Li Shan, Zheng Ziyan, her brother Zheng Zigang, Shi Xixi, and Bao Le’an—were either classmates or resided in the same apartment compound in Beijing. At a certain point, around 1972, the several small independent groups that would eventually comprise the Wuming began to coalesce. Interestingly, in contrast to the relative obscurity of women artists in Chinese art earlier in the modernist period, women formed a strong alliance with the other artists in this small society, which was broader in age range than what one might at first think—from teenagers to those in their thirties. The older artists, many of whom were teachers, mentored the younger ones, some of whom were still in high school. Inevitably, the experience for the younger painters was formative, while the older artists won a momentary sense of dignity through teaching in this way when Chinese life was under tight government control.
At this time, the kinds of works that the Wuming were making were particularly small in size and personal in content, in opposition to the
Vol. 11 No. 1 83 mural-size, heavily politicized official imagery of the Chinese government. Zhang Wei, The Hall of Supreme Harmony, 1976, oil The Wuming rejected heavy-handed socialist realism in favour of often on paperboard, 18.7 x 25.6 cm. Courtesy of China Institute, simple studies depicting what they saw in front of them—landscapes New York. or cityscapes. As it turned out, in the absence of political and aesthetic freedom, the artists’ paintings were subversive merely in that they did not carry a message. It is perhaps difficult for a Westerner to imagine a contemporary life as constrained as that which the Chinese led in the final years of the Cultural Revolution and during the period that immediately followed it. As the exhibition catalogue documents, the suffering imposed upon them was terrible—people were displaced, harassed and humiliated, even murdered. Yet it remained possible, by means of determination, for the Wuming to practice their artistic skills.
The Wuming’s debt to Western cultural history was considerable. Even the materials that were often used—oil paint on paperboard—came from the West. At one point during the Cultural Revolution, the very young artists Shi Xixi and Zheng Zigang were left to fend for themselves because their parents had been sent to labour camp; they broke into a space holding many books intended for recycling, to be pulped and turned into paper. By reading what were then banned volumes that included art books, translated novels, and Western philosophy, they expanded their knowledge and interests, but this also meant taking the chance that their illegal activity might be discovered.2 The relations engendered by this association of individuals clearly formed a necessary psychological support system during a time when reactionary left-wing politics were in full swing: as Wang Aihe commented, “In a world where spiritual life was smothered, Wuming was the spiritual home we created.”3 The pursuit of this kind of art thus had
84 Vol. 11 No. 1 an inevitable political turn in the sense that their independent practice of exploring the imagination would have been judged solely on political grounds by local officials and even by their neighbours.
As for the art itself, many of the paintings are works that simply describe the reality the artist observed. Given the cultural rigidity of the times, this would be an achievement in itself; however, the quality of these small works is higher than one might think. For example, the earliest painting on exhibit, a 1965 oil on paperboard titled Yuyuantan Landscape, is a well- composed work made by Shi Zhenyu. The scene is of a rocky cove with a broad sky above it. It is noteworthy for its horizontal brush marks detailing rocks and sand as well as the slate-blue colour of the water. As a member
Shi Zhenyu, Yuyuantan of the Wuming, Shi Zhenyu participated in the underground exhibition Landscape, 1965, oil on paperboard, 15 x 20 cm. that took place in painter Zhang Wei’s home in 1974, and, after that, in Courtesy of China Institute, New York. later shows, in 1979 and 1981. With the greater freedom of the reform era that gradually followed the Cultural Revolution, Shi Zhenyu was able to participate more fully in the art scene and became a professor at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts and stayed on in the Department of Industrial Design after the school was integrated into Tsinghua University.4 The painting might easily be dismissed as an unassuming oil sketch depicting a conventional view, but there are a number of ways in which Shi Zhenyu’s landscape is original: first, working with oil constituted a decision to move away from the ink used traditionally for Chinese art; and second, the forms are compellingly handled, with a muted use of color— grey-blue for water and sky, browns for the land surrounding the water. It is not possible to effectively judge this work from a Western viewpoint, which would see it as belonging to a long, and mostly vitiated, narrative of landscape. Seen in its own right, the image becomes stirringly new.
Vol. 11 No. 1 85 86 Vol. 11 No. 1 Opposite top: Li Shan, Li Shan, the youngest of the Wuming group, and a woman, also made Dormitory, 1976, oil on paperboard, 19.5 x 27 cm. representational works. All members of the three different associations Courtesy of China Institute, New York. painted figuratively, with the exception of the ink painters who belonged Opposite bottom: Ma Kelu, Chrysanthemum and Blue to these groups. Li Shan has a particularly evocative study entitled In Pot, 1974, oil on paperboard, 39 x 31 cm. Courtesy of China the Rain (1974 –78), in which white flowers and a carton sit on top of a Institute, New York. table surrounded on the right by a dark green wall and on the left by a grey wall with an open entrance. The painting looks as if it could have been influenced by French post-impressionism or the early studies of Richard Diebenkorn. Merely 28 by 20.2 centimeters in size, the painting nevertheless skillfully conveys the moody atmosphere of a rainy day. Another work, Dormitory (1976), depicts a low building with a tiled roof; a line of laundry hangs from the building and a neighbouring tree, and roosters peck at food in front of the house. The treatment and theme are unpretentious—which is exactly the point, for the Wuming believed art was most effective when communicating personal messages. A painting as directly descriptive as Ma Kelu’s Chrysanthemum and Blue Pot (1974) might look purely academic to Western eyes, but the freedom taken in creating the image within the context of China at the time can be understood as having genuine consequence. Here, a chrysanthemum in a glass, a blue teapot, and a spoon on a saucer belong very much to the manner of Cézanne, whose early modern still-lifes were surely familiar to the artist.
Yan Li, Records, 1986, mixed As the catalogue presents it, the media, 77.4 x 62.2 cm. Courtesy of China Institute, Xingxing (Star-Star) association New York. was particularly daring in its creation of a viable avant-garde that intended to both elude and confront the arbiters of artistic taste at the time. Coming from art academies in Hangzhou and Beijing, the Xingxing group consisted of an inner circle of five young men who initiated the association: Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, Yan Li, Qu Leilei, and Wang Keping. Eventually, however, the association would include more than thirty artists. The movement also formed a loose alliance with the advances of the literary scene; writer Zhong Acheng, for example, took part in the Xingxing movement. Poets too lent their support; one of the most famous of them, Bei Dao, was familiar with the artists, and a friendly exchange developed between him and the association. Bei Dao was also founder of Today, an important literary publication of the avant-garde whose art editor was Huang Rui.5
It was in 1979 that Xingxing’s first exhibitions took place. Huang Rui and Ma Desheng initially tried to secure traditional venues such as the Huafangzhai Gallery, in Behai Park, but there was no room in the schedule
Vol. 11 No. 1 87 for their show. In July of the same year, the Wuming group mounted an Top: Wang Keping, Silent, 1978, wood, 48 x 24 x 23 cm. exhibition of its own work—an event that succeeded in stimulating the Courtesy of China Institute, New York. Xingxing group to show no matter what. Huang Rui and Ma Desheng Bottom: Wang Keping, Idol, 1979, wood, 57 x 40 x 15 cm. eventually found a small garden off to the side of the China National Art Courtesy of China Institute, Gallery, in Beijing, which became the site of the show; the opening took New York. place September 27, 1979. Some one hundred and twenty artworks were hung informally on the fence surrounding the garden. All kinds of work could be seen: oil paintings, ink paintings, woodblock prints, pen drawings, and sculptures. The exhibition was considered illegal by the officials; on the third day, posters promoting it were removed, and an official ban on the show was enacted. Both police and hired toughs harassed and intimidated the artists and those viewing the exhibition. Additionally, many paintings were confiscated. Eventually the art was returned, but the Xingxing took it upon themselves to hold a march protesting the behaviour of the officials and police, although they disbanded just minutes before the police would have arrested them. Finally, an officially sanctioned indoor show, at the Huafangzhai space, in Beijing, was installed on November 23. Eight thousand people visited on the first day.6
By the summer of 1980, the Xingxing Painting Society became official. Aside from the larger membership, more than a dozen artists now formed the core of the group.7 Later in that year the Xingxing mounted a second show at the Chinese National Art Gallery (August 20 to September 4), which consisted of one hundred works of art. This exhibition included sculptor Wang Keping’s notorious Idol (1979), a skillfully worked wood head of Mao with heavy jowls wearing a military cap with a star in its middle. Inscrutably shedding light upon the character of Mao, China’s last emperor, Idol gives us an unflattering view of the political leader. Because the work suggests parody, the portrait must have been a great shock for the show’s audience to see. This work was historically significant, being one of the first critical representations of Mao by a contemporary Chinese artist. Silent (1979) could not be more direct: A large wooden plug fills the mouth of a simply carved head. The sculpture’s title gives us a unambiguous clue to its meaning. Wang Keping showed more than casual bravery in tackling two taboo topics: Mao’s portrait and the persistence of political repression. Both of these sculptures show us that Wang Keping’s considerable skills served political protest, which perhaps enlarges their artistic impact. Caricature is always dangerous in a repressive society, and so Idol is still considered courageous in ways that the cultural scene in America today would not easily understand.
Huang Rui’s paintings reminded their viewers of a sense of place they most likely knew as children. One of the artist’s works is titled Childhood Memory (1981); it is a light-coloured painting, consisting of tans and browns. Towards the middle of the painting are two small figures and a bicycle. Buildings are indicated by simple rectangles for walls and triangles for roofs, and while the work is painted in oil, it has the quality of a
88 Vol. 11 No. 1 Vol. 11 No. 1 89 watercolour. The same is true for his Forbidden City (1979): a study of a Huang Rui, Childhood Memory, 1981, oil on canvas, pathway that begins inside one of the Forbidden City buildings, proceeds 89.5 x 78.5 cm. Courtesy of China Institute, New York. to move through to an outside courtyard, and then continues into another interior space. The walls and entranceways are painted a muted red; three figures in grey stand as sentinels. There is a sense of mystery in both of these works—with memory acting as a kind of provocateur. This moment of seeming cultural freedom, with its pluralism of artistic styles, was destined to be nullified by a reactionary period within government: In the fall of 1980, bureaucrats declared nudity in painting to be too sexual; unregistered publications such as Today were put out of business in 1981; and the major figures of the Xingxing association—Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, and Wang Keping—were denied the right to exhibit their art. Yet, in spite of this, the Xingxing members made great strides in the service of a more open cultural expression, an accomplishment all the more impressive for its lifespan of just two years.
Originating in Shanghai, the Caocao She (Grass Society) was created in order to justify the mounting of an exhibition in the fall of 1979. Initially conceived of as an artist’s association, like the Wuming and the Xingxing groups, the Caocao She emphasized new ink painting—clearly a dismissal of socialist realism but, also, as the catalogue essay on the group states, a refusal of “the use of Chinese ink as an empty gesture of nationalism.”8 Unlike Beijing, a city remade by party members in favour of socialism,
90 Vol. 11 No. 1 Shanghai’s art scene was shaped by older artists who kept alive the thought and skills of China’s pre-Cultural Revolution culture. Shanghai, often more sophisticated and culturally advanced than Beijing, maintained an interest in subjective experience, a sense of the artist as an individual who advanced the unfettered artistic gesture.9 These values also resulted in an ongoing interest in, if not an actual tie to, European modernist art. After the Cultural Revolution, when the Caocao She artists banded together, interest in art outside of Chinese culture made its way into the work of this new generation of artists. Just as Chinese artists traveled abroad in the 1920s and 30s, artists in the 80s, too, made their way out of China after the social tragedies of the Cultural Revolution.
This renewal of relatively liberal values reopened the door for older artists such as Guan Liang, Liu Haisu, Pan Sitong, Lei Yu, Fan Mingti, Zhu Ying, Zhu Qizhan, Li Yongsen, and Ran Xi, many of whom had not shown their work publicly in years. This resulted in an important show installed in 1977: a watercolour exhibition at the Xuhui District Cultural Center. Elder painters were exhibited alongside younger ones so that the audience could see the various styles of different generations. These artists, while not belonging to the Caocao She association, encouraged a creative space where independent styles and innovation could be nurtured. This show led to others: in 1978, the Wild Rose Exhibition, organized by students from the Shanghai Drama Academy, and in early 1979, The Twelve-Man Painting Exhibition, which took place at the Huangpu District Children’s Palace. Interested in stylistic individualism, the artists showed “landscapes, still life, and figures from traditional theatre in a range of modern styles from Impressionism to Cubism.”10 Grass was seen to be a force in nature, growing in arid places, and its persistence was prized by the members of the group: Qiu Deshu, Chen Jialing, Yuan Songmin, Jiang Depu, Guo Runlin, Dai Dunbang, and Chen Juyuan.
In February 1980, the Caocao She group organized another show, The Grass Society: Painting Exhibition for the 1980s, which took place at the Luwan District Cultural Palace, in Shanghai. Authorities removed a nude and several abstractions by Qiu Deshu even before the show opened. But after a tour of the show that Qiu Deshu gave to Joan Lebold Cohen, an American art writer, news of her visit came to the attention of the propaganda department of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee, which then placed tremendous pressure on the artist—he was under constant surveillance and public criticism was made of his character. At only thirty-two years old, he suffered a stroke, perhaps in response to the harassment, after which the exhibition itself closed within a few days. In response to the negative reaction by officials to the Caocao Shi, the group soon after disbanded.11 Because the works of the association emphasized autonomy and abstraction, the artists who made them were suspected of a bourgeois liberalism unacceptable to the government. The attacks on the artists and art at the time were truly tragic, and it is perhaps difficult for an
Vol. 11 No. 1 91 outsider to understand why government officials would put so much effort into defining what was an unacceptable painting.
Qiu Deshu, the artist subjected to forced confessions and constant scrutiny, was a skilled ink painter working with abstraction. Empty no. 1 (1982) consists of two columns, varying in darkness, that ascend towards the top of the paper. The larger column curls over and falls downward like a wave, ending in a spray of dots. Another work, 3–5 Times Shouting (1980), is a small forest of thick and thin strokes punctuated by dots large and small. In both paintings we see the independence of an artist at work, similar to that of Jackson Pollock or Franz Kline. In some ways, a Western audience familiar with the New York School would find little innovation in these ink works; however, we must again remember that for the Chinese, in the context of just having recovered from the Cultural Revolution, a work like this was bold not only artistically but also politically. Even so, Qiu Deshu paid a price for his independence—he censored himself at this time by destroying much of his work. In terms of this group’s acknowledgement of the tradition of Chinese ink painting, Chen Jialing’s art from the same period addresses the past, but in this case the work of the seventeenth- century painter Zhu Da, known for his individualist approach, the beauty of his art, and his dissatisfaction with the rulers of the new dynasty.12 Chen Jialing chose to approximate those values in his own art, and two works from 1980 consider the lotus leaf, a Buddhist emblem for purity. They feel contemporary, yet their historical allusion makes it clear that Chen Jialing’s point carried political undertones as well. The notion that a painter could protest government rule by choosing particular themes in nature was part of Chinese art early on in its history.
In Exploring Twilight from 1980, we see lotus flowers, an emblem of purity
in Buddhist thought. The colour of the flowers ranges from brownish red Qiu Deshu, 3–5 Times Shouting, 1980, ink on paper, to dark green to pink; the flowers cross the paper in daring angles that 129.5 x 269.2 cm. Courtesy of China Institute, New York. emphasize the blossoms and the long, thin stems. Much the same happens in Two Pink Lotuses, in which two black flowers, again on long stems, dominate the composition. Behind the blossom on the right is a pink flower, its colour contrasting sharply with the black form in front of it.
92 Vol. 11 No. 1 These paintings are sophisticated, sensitive, and educated works of art, and even in their reference to a pre-Cultural Revolution past, they assert the artist’s self-reliance and autonomy, both as a painter and as a person.
The modernism of the Caocao Shi movement’s theorist and writer, Chen Juyuan, resides in his acknowledgement of abstract expressionism. In fact, one work is simply named Abstract Expression I (1975); it is a dense and powerful composition done with ink and watercolour. Two white forms in the center of the painting hover over darker areas of colour; the feeling is slightly melancholic, with light- and dark-hued areas alternating, even competing with each other. Abstract Expression II (1975) has a white ring in the center, while areas of red, black, green, and yellow make up the rest of the space. It is a highly original work of art, one that looks to Western traditions of the last fifty years yet is not submissive to them.
Chen Jialing, Two Pink Although Blooming in the Shadows is installed in two small gallery Lotuses, 1980, ink and colour on rice paper, 66 x 91.4 cm. spaces, it presents a good deal of information. The three art associations Courtesy of China Institute, New York. represented proved prophetic in their rejection of socialist realism and their interest in painting that had no obviously discernible politics. While the work varies from group to group, the intentions behind the art appear unified in their attempt to make art purely for art’s sake. In their measured, highly informative essays, Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen draw a detailed scenario reflecting the dangers of making nonpolitical art at a time heavily dominated by ideology. The works themselves may be modest, but that is not the point; the artists’ aim was to establish an imaginative space worthy of nature, architecture, and pure abstraction. The curators make the most of their limited gallery spaces, crowding paintings and sculptures into tight configurations. As for the work itself, it is clear that, under the
Vol. 11 No. 1 93 94 Vol. 11 No. 1 Chen Juyuan, Abstract circumstances, remarkable steps were taken to allow painting to simply Expression lI, 1975, ink and watercolour on paper, 92 x remain painting, free of ideological constraint. Western viewers may well 66 cm. Courtesy of China Institute. see the exhibition’s works as slight, but they forget the courage it took these artists make them. At the same time, this historical moment was not without its aesthetic interest—the technical skill of much of the work is high, and the range of topics addressed shows an impassioned interest on the part of the artists.
Although most of the artists make no direct reference to politics, the psychic suffering of theorist and painter Qiu Deshu only underscores the terrible cost of independence in the years during and immediately following the Cultural Revolution. As a result, it is deeply moving to see these works of art, many of which represented a straightforward strategy of pure description. There is a paradox here in that when description by itself is sought, or, for that matter, when abstraction is claimed, the imagination can begin to lose the tendency to politicize art on a literal level—even when pursuing description and abstraction inherently carries the flag of independence in China’s regulated society. In current terms, these artists’ associations may seem quaint beside the gaudy work seen in many contemporary galleries today, whose money seems to have turned the heads of an entire generation of young artists. By comparison, then, the Wuming, the Xingxing, and the Caocao Shi groups start to look heroic in their efforts to remain autonomous. Their art bears witness to their courage and tenacity.
Notes 1 Kuiyi Shen and Julia F. Andrews, Blooming in the Shadows: Unofficial Chinese Art, 1974–1985 (New York: China Institute, 2011). The historical details recounted here and throughout this article are derived from the essays in the exhibition catalogue. 2 Kuiyi Shen and Julia F. Andrews, “Art Underground: The Wuming (No Name), 1972–1983,” in Blooming in the Shadows, 15. 3 Quoted in ibid., 17. 4 Ibid., 26. 5 Kuiyi Shen and Julia F. Andrews, “Art on the Fence: The Xingxing (Star-Star) Group,” in Blooming in the Shadows, 59–60. 6 Ibid., 63–66. 7 The core members included Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, Zhong Acheng, Li Youncun, Qu Leilei, Wang Keping, Ai Weiwei, Yan Li, Mao Lizi (Zhang Zhunli), Yang Yiping, Li Shuang, Shao Fei, Zhu Jinshi, Gan Shaocheng, Yin Guangzhong, and Zhao Gang. 8 Kuiyi Shen and Julia F. Andrews, “Outsider Art in Shanghai: The Caocao She (Grass Society),” in Blooming in the Shadows, 97. 9 Ibid., 97. 10 Ibid., 99. 11 Ibid., 102. 12 Ibid., 110.
Vol. 11 No. 1 95 Xhingyu Chen Moving Image in China: 1988–2011 September 9–November 27, 2011 Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai Certain Pleasures: Zhang Peili Retrospective July 16–August 14, 2011 Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai
he idea of contemporary art in China is a relatively recent phenomenon, and yet video art has already become an integral part Tof the scene. The Minsheng Art Museum’s survey of Chinese video art, Moving Image in China: 1988–2011, covers over twenty fruitful and active years of artists experimenting with the medium. Part of the museum’s commitment to document China’s recent art history, Moving Image is a followup to its exhaustive survey of contemporary Chinese painting, 30 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art 1979–2010, which was presented last year. The Moving Image in China exhibition adds another layer to the narrative of contemporary Chinese art.
The use of the term “moving image” Zhang Peili, 30x30, 1988, single-channel video, 32 rather than “video” speaks to the mins. Courtesy of the artist and Minsheng Art Museum, diversity of the medium itself. Shanghai. Video art is not just the poor cousin of film but encompasses a range of practices from performance to animation. Indeed, the show’s early examples are mostly documentation Qiu Zhijie, Work No. 1: A of performance-based works rather One Thousand Time Copy of Langting Xu, 1990–95, than narrative short films. Zhang video. Courtesy of the artist and Minsheng Art Museum, Peili’s pioneering work 30x30 Shanghai. (1988), considered by many to be the first work of video art in China, shows the artist methodically breaking a mirror and gluing the pieces back together over and over again. In Work No. 1: A One Thousand Time Copy of Langting Xu (1990–95), Qiu Zhijie set out to write a classical Chinese text in traditional calligraphy a thousand times on a single piece of paper until it was covered entirely in black ink. Later examples include Xu Zhen’s Shouting, which was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2005, and Ma Qiusha’s From No. 4 Pingyuanli to No. 4 Tianqiaobeili (2007), in which the artist is shown talking about her life with a small X-acto blade rolling around in her mouth.
The exhibition does not follow a chronological timeline; rather, the works are loosely grouped together under academic-sounding categories like “Media Criticism and Deliberation of Biopolitics” and “New Media Practice as Consciousness, Poetics, and Sensibility,” providing a brief explanation and analysis of the development of video as an art form. But in attempting
96 Vol. 11 No. 1 Top: Ma Qiusha, From to delineate distinctly different No. 4 Pingyuanli to No. 4 Tianqiaobeili, 2007, video. movements in video art, the show Courtesy of the artist and Minsheng Art Museum, only highlights the sameness of Shanghai. Bottom: Xu Zhen, Shouting, many of the works. This system was 1998, video, 4 mins. Courtesy of the artist and ShanghART used more successfully in the earlier Gallery, Shanghai. exhibition 30 Years of Chinese Right: Lu Chunsheng, History of Chemistry I, 2004, video. Contemporary Art as advances in painting drew upon many traditions. Courtesy of the artist and Minsheng Art Museum, But in the case of video art, the form is so new that there are only so many Shanghai. ways to differentiate “movements”; in the end, the exhibition articulated few distinctions between the categories. Whether advances were made courtesy of a video recorder or the coamputer, the results all seemed to upend the viewer’s preconceptions. The exhibition would have been benefited from a clearer classification of its chosen categories: body art/performance, animation, narrative film, 3D art, etc. Instead, these obscure categories, loosely assigned to certain periods with no clear chronology, made for a confusing viewing experience. Although the exhibition was ostensibly separated into such categories, the artworks themselves were for the most part shown in random order, with no clear indication of which category they belonged to. It was curious to see Xu Zhen’s Shouting installed across from Lu Chunsheng’s History of Chemistry I (2004)—two pieces that are intrinsically different in content, mood, and production values. It was only after perusing the catalogue that it became apparent that, indeed, these two works are considered part of different movements.
Vol. 11 No. 1 97 Left: Cui Xiuwen, Ladies, 2000, video, 6 mins., 12 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai. Right: Chen Chieh-jen, Factory, 2003, 16 mm film transferred to DVD, colour, silent, 31 mins., 9 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai.
As with the earlier painting survey, this exhibition includes major and minor works. In addition to the aforementioned 30x30, Zhang Peili makes another appearance with WATER—Standard Version from the Dictionary Ci Hai (1991), an astute critique of media that was made at a time when television was becoming more common in Chinese society. Cui Xiuwen’s Lady’s (2000), shot with a hidden camera in a lady’s restroom in one of Beijing’s largest nightclubs, is a provocative look into the role of women in a rapidly developing country. Taiwanese auteur Chen Chieh-jen (Chen Jieren) made a welcome appearance with Factory (2003), a silent film showing laid-off workers returning to their old factory and symbolically acting out their former duties. The inclusion of this work is all the more poignant in being shown in China, whose rise was at the expense of Taiwan, a one-time manufacturing giant.
Cao Fei, Cosplayers, 2004, video. Courtesy of the artist and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai.
Elsewhere, however, the choices were more perplexing. Miao Xiaochun is known for his elaborate 3D animation videos, and his Restart (2008–10) is a fine example of computer technology in art, yet it seemed gratuitous to include Paris-based artist Zhou Yi’s 3D work The Greatness (2010), which bears a strong resemblance to Restart and added little to the overall impact of the show. In fact, several works suffer from the aforementioned “sameness” exhibiting similar themes, techniques, and moods repeated throughout but not expanding on the works that came before them. Lei Benben’s Free Spirit (2010) and Zhou Tao’s South Stone (2011) share a documentary-style approach in capturing the everyday, but similarities in mood and technique result in works that are lacking a strong identity,
98 Vol. 11 No. 1 with neither leaving a lasting impression. Chen Qiulin’s Colour Line (2006) features children in various costumes forlornly occupying abandoned buildings in the Three Gorges area, but the sense of hopelessness in grappling with vast changes is only tenuously conveyed in a slow, laboured work in which nothing seems to happen. A piece that illustrates better the friction of a changing modern society was Cao Fei’s Cosplayers (2004), her seminal work that follows the lives of young people living out a fantasy life among a futuristic urban backdrop. While Chen Qiulin’s work deals more with nostalgia and loss, it is Cosplayers that has a better sense of narrative and pace, creating striking scenes that linger in the mind well after viewing. With over seventy artworks from fifty artists, the exhibition had broad ambitions of lending importance to a movement that has yet to reach maturity. While the show was the first of its kind and acknowledged the contributions made by new media artists to contemporary Chinese art, it suffered from a lack of insightful editing.
Zhang Peili, Uncertain Moving Image in China is a more Pleasures, 1996, 10-channel video, 30 mins. Courtesy of fitting testament to the work of the artist and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai. Zhang Peili, who the museum honoured with a retrospective earlier in the summer and who is credited with introducing Chinese artists to the possibilities of video in contemporary art practice. He is aptly known as the “father of Chinese video art,” but he is equally revered for his role at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he founded the New Media department in 2002. The title of the earlier exhibition, Certain Pleasures, is borrowed and altered from an early video piece called Uncertain Pleasures and attempted to encapsulate the career of a complex artist. The show was not arranged chronologically; in fact, it worked almost in reverse, starting with recent large video installations and ending on the second floor with evidence of the artist’s earliest work, even before he began experimenting with video.
Perhaps as a way to set up the video survey following Zhang Peili’s show, Certain Pleasures is largely focused on his video works, highlighting his influence on Chinese video art and experimental practices in contemporary art. Regrettably, only a few select pieces from early in his career, done while he was an active member of the Pond Society, are shown on the second floor. During this time, one can argue that he produced works that were just as groundbreaking as his experiments with video. He pioneered rational
Vol. 11 No. 1 99 painting, in which form, colour, and movement were reduced to create detached, somber works. He and his fellow Pond Society members also sought out ways to reconceptualize artwork and exhibit them in new ways, often through performances or public interventions. But the only example of this early period in the show is Brown Cover Document No. 1, shown without proper explanations, and X? an oil painting of a latex glove, that is the sole example of rational painting.
The Pond Society was part of a larger movement occurring throughout Zhang Peili, X?, 1986, oil an canvas, 105 x 174 cm. Courtesy the Chinese art scene, and their collective explorations into the state of art of the artist and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai. led to the seminal show China/Avant-garde, in 1989, where Zhang debuted his first video piece, 30x30. Although this piece was centrally placed in Moving Image in China, it is relegated in Certain Pleasures to the second floor, along with other early works. The main gallery is dedicated to large video installations like A Gust of Wind (2008) and Live Report: Evidence No. 1 (2009), both impressive in scale but lacking the sharp wit of his earlier works. An entire room is devoted to Standard Routine (2007), an overly elaborate multimedia installation of standard school gym uniforms and videos depicting students performing daily exercises.
Viewing these works, one wonders if the artist would be better served had the exhibition solely focused on the 1990s, arguably his most fruitful period, the impact of which could be felt in Moving Image in China. Perhaps the most important contribution of Zhang Peili is his continual desire to investigate the tenuous relationship between reality and the images we create from it. His artworks, and his videos especially, not only introduced a new visual language but constantly challenged viewers’ perceptions. This is evident in Focal Distance (1996), a multi-screen video of a scene that is taped, played, and retaped until the image becomes an abstract blur. Focal Distance is a natural progression from an earlier work, Photocopying Continuously 25 Times (1993), wherein the artist photographed an image from a 1970s era
100 Vol. 11 No. 1 magazine, developed it, photographed the developed image, and repeated this process until the image was entirely degraded and unrecognizable. So, too, over time, the power of an image fades as it is viewed again and again. Even something seemingly as permanent as a photograph or a video eventually loses its impact. These works also speak to our own perception of memory and viewing and question the reliability of our senses.
Zhang Peili, Last Words, 2003, single-channel video, 20 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai.
Some of the best examples of his manipulation of video, and his best known work outside of China, are his works incorporating appropriated Chinese propaganda film clips: Actor’s Lines (2002), Last Words (2003), and Happiness (2006). Actor’s Lines is taken from the 1964 film Sentinels Under Neon Lights, which relates the emotional struggles of a PLA soldier after liberation. The scene of two soldiers talking in confidence is played in a loop, with some lines repeated several times, the patriotic message blurring with each repetition. Last Words splices together heroic death scenes from several films, each scene as formulaic as the last, until they blur into one. Happiness, shown on split screens, plays with the 1974 film In the Shipyard about a small town’s valiant efforts to build a thousand-ton ship and the corrupt forces that come to stop them. The left screen shows the victorious speech after the ship is built; the right screen shows edited clips of the crowd clapping enthusiastically. As with Actor’s Lines and Last Words, repetition is used to distort the message of the source material and alter the traditional viewing experience.
It can be argued that the viewing of video requires a suspension of disbelief, which the artist alludes to in The Conjuring in the Circle (2002), one of his first forays into large video installations. Projected on a circular cloth screen is a video of a magician demonstrating several magic tricks. Each trick is played twice, once in normal speed, and a second time in slow motion, wherein the secret of the trick is revealed. Just as a magician relies on sleight of hand to deceive his audience, Zhang Peili forces us to reevaluate perceived notions of reality.
Vol. 11 No. 1 101 Robert Linsley Fictions of Nationhood Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art The MIT Press, 2011 Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006–2009, ed. and trans. Lee Ambrozy The MIT Press, 2011
comparison between the new compilation of writings by Ai Weiwei and the new survey of contemporary Chinese art by Gao AMinglu is revealing. First, even though Western luminaries such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Chris Dercon regard Ai Weiwei as perhaps the most important Chinese artist today, he barely registers in Gao Minglu’s history. One might be excused for concluding that this is another example of colonial perspectivizing and that the Chinese view has a “truth” in the face of Western arrogance. But according to Ai Weiwei’s editor, “Ai Weiwei began working on a series of underground publications known as the Red Flag books, released in succession from 1994 on. . . . [They] acquired an almost cult status and are perhaps the closest thing to a manifesto that China’s emerging avant-garde can claim.”1
Gao Minglu in fact supports this claim, in passing,2 but he reproduces not a single piece by Ai Weiwei in his book, and mentions his name only in various lists of artists as a kind of “also-ran.” His involvement with the Olympic stadium aside, it appears that Ai Weiwei does have an important place within Chinese art; he’s not just a favourite of the West. So is this a case of personal politics? It might be, but more important is what both Gao Minglu and Ai Weiwei can teach us about the problem of nationhood posing for art.
Gao Minglu is trying to define a Chinese difference to explain what sets the so-called new China avant-garde apart from the rest of global art. Here,
102 Vol. 11 No. 1 I find it important to take issue with a common view that “global” art is necessarily Western because it turns local and regional histories into flat schemas that play into Western misconstructions and ideologies. Although that kind of reduction can happen, I don’t believe it is widely enough appreciated—despite many well-intentioned critical efforts—that Western art is no longer the property of the West. To define “Chineseness” or any other racial, ethnic, or national quality in art is a provincial exercise.
The value of such efforts appears only if we ask what it means that an important critic thinks that they have to be made into a kind of meta- critique. When Gao Minglu, as a way of explaining Chinese difference, says, Chinese modern and contemporary art is fundamentally concerned with how to integrate art and social projects, and how to fuse the benefits of a modern environment with a deeper understanding of current living space, in order to create a totality: a totality that can merge culture, aesthetics, and life as a whole,3 one has to reply that that is exactly what the historical avant-garde tried to do. And when Gao Minglu suggests that Peter Bürger’s theory of the neo-avant-garde, the post-World War II remake of the heroic political and aesthetic initiatives of Russian revolutionary art and Dada, has absolutely no relevance to Chinese art, and, further, that the Chinese avant-garde context, in which to be avant-garde means neither to be radical nor compromised toward one’s system, but it is how to survive in between and still maintain intellectual and critical standards,4 he proposes a novel definition of that same neo-avant-garde. Gao Minglu is claiming a difference where there doesn’t truly appear to be one, and his need to do so is the most pertinent problem with his text; he inadvertently proves the state of the global art world, namely that art really is the same everywhere. In the context of aggressive Chinese nationalism, widespread claims that the Asian “tiger” economies have a social order superior to the decadent West, and the Chinese government’s intermittent strategic drumming up of resentment toward the West, his efforts take on a sinister tone, despite his intentions. Nevertheless, I do find Gao Minglu’s writing overall quite insightful, just not on this topic.
Gao is right when he notes that “Autonomous aesthetic tendencies . . . have rarely influenced contemporary Chinese art since the Chinese art world opened to the West in the late 1970s,”5 and this applies as much to Ai Weiwei as to anyone. What makes Ai Weiwei unique, on both sides of the world, is that he spontaneously, and without deference to critical commonplaces or to conventional art history, links together the ethical and political stance of the avant-garde with artistic modernism. He himself does not make autonomous art, or at least not art of a type that foregrounds its autonomy, and he explicitly sees art as social intervention. Interestingly enough, Gao Minglu feels that what contemporary Chinese art lacks is precisely that, autonomous art, and he devotes a lot of space to what he identifies as new tendencies that react against avant-gardist ideas of social utility. He even describes the avant-garde, more than once, as “corrupt.”6 In the concluding
Vol. 11 No. 1 103 chapter of his book, he discusses a number of artists grouped under his own rubric of “maximalism.” He says, “It [maximalism] is thus an ivory tower artistic modality, a newly developing phenomenon in the contemporary Chinese art world. You can say that it is a silent, low-key attack on the corruption of market forces and their distortions of avant-garde art and the vulgar numbness of the masses, or an attitude of resistance to authority.”7 For Gao Minglu, art for art’s sake has some inherent integrity, although he doesn’t put it in exactly those words. This seems to be a position that Gao Minglu likes—a kind of quiet resistance.
Ai Weiwei is nothing if not confrontational, but in an almost complementary way, and he sees social activism as a natural product of the integrity of modernism. To be true to itself, modernism has to be political. He agrees with Gao when he says “China still lacks a modernist movement of any magnitude,” yet he goes on to say that “the basis of such a movement would be the liberation of humanity and the illumination brought by the humanitarian spirit.”8
Yet Gao Minglu is not a conservative, and his inability to find a place for Ai Weiwei in his systematic treatment of Chinese avant-gardism seems, from this distance, to be due less to aesthetic differences than to a concern with the inherent “Chineseness” of Chinese art. Ai Weiwei’s work offers no nationalistic openings, even though he often works with stereotypical elements of Chinese culture. In this he is similar to many of his contemporaries such as Cai Guo-qiang and Huang Yongping, but his treatment of Chinese material is never celebratory, and he never uses it to mark out a difference; he is always aggressive and destructive. The source of Ai Weiwei’s passion is his rage with what he considers the “phoniness” and vacuity of Chinese society—its lack of truth. For Ai Weiwei, the truth of modernism is a condemnation of the entire society. His position statement is not completely without contradiction, but there is something about his passion and directness that speaks to people. They get it, even if they don’t understand all the philosophical ramifications. I think that ordinary people know in their guts that great autonomous art has an ethical, moral, and political stance, and they want that stance to be clear because they want art to be an affirmation of their beliefs. It looks like this is exactly what Gao Minglu finds uncomfortable to assert, but then so do most critics in the West.
Gao Minglu is well versed in the history and discourse of Western modernism, but I find it frustrating to notice how often he seems to misunderstand what he reads. For example, he cites a quote by Donald Judd, but his interpretation of it gets the artist exactly wrong.9 As a Western observer of Chinese art, I am always haunted by the thought that perhaps I really don’t get it, that I miss the nuance, and I just hope and trust that a creative misunderstanding will be more fruitful than a pedantic accuracy of description. When I see Gao Minglu’s repeated failure to realize that not everything he reads about Western art should be taken at face value, or what
104 Vol. 11 No. 1 perhaps may be his tendency to hear what he wants to hear, I begin to reflect on how wrong my own responses to Chinese art may be. But the impression is strong that Gao Minglu has a kind of willful blindness derived from his need to always find a Chinese difference. The irony is that each attempt to define that difference proves the opposite.
One of the more compelling examples concerns the work of Huang Yongping. Gao Minglu explains that Huang Yongping’s work of the late eighties, up to the now-notorious China Avant-garde exhibition, brought together tenets of Dada and Southern School Chan Buddhism. Fine, but many Western artists have also been influenced by Southern School Chan Buddhism,10 including some Dadaists. And allowing that a true comprehension of Chan (or Zen, as it is more commonly known) is reserved for the moment of enlightenment, I can’t see how a Chinese artist’s misunderstanding of Chan could necessarily be any better or worse than that of a Western artist. This point is important because for several thousands of years Buddhism has been a major agent of globalization. It posits a universal and transcendent system, independent of culture and history—in fact this is partly why it was suppressed in China during the late Tang dynasty—and its rationality makes it very modern. Christianity may have reached more people world wide in the twentieth century, but Buddhism is still going strong, and very strongly in America. The combination of Dada and Chan is a completely mainstream and cosmopolitan position in the globalized art world.
The fundamental problem, as Gao Minglu must evidently feel, is originality, and there is no stronger overarching demand in “global” art. It must be new or it doesn’t matter. To qualify that, it is not necessary that art be absolutely original, but that it transforms its sources in such a way as to render them irrelevant to any evaluation we may want to make. Even as the ideology of originality has been thoroughly critiqued in Western academies, originality itself remains the highest standard of judgment. Is Huang Yongping a better Chan Dadaist than the many other artists with the same aesthetic? He may be, but it would be better still if Huang Yongping had a position that wasn’t so common. To insist on the specificity of a local history is always going to seem a form of special pleading, a kind of excuse.
Gao Minglu has influenced me at least; he has shown me that contemporary Chinese art is much more interesting than I thought it was, and introduced me to some great examples. However, Chinese art has to face the same standards as art everywhere. To give a concrete example, some of the best art in his book was made by the New Mark Group, composed of three artists, Wang Luyan, Chen Shaoping, and Gu Dexin. In 1988 they made a series of graphic works in white ink on a black ground. Perversely called Tactile Art, these were phenomenological diagrams of the contact of two hands or the temperature of a breeze on one’s face. I find them humourous but very moving; they seem like the final negation of physical experience, even as
Vol. 11 No. 1 105 they invoke that very thing. This is text-based conceptualism standing in the place of both painting and sculpture and taking up the historical content of both those arts. If I stretch for sources I can find Lawrence Wiener’s textual descriptions of physical states and Joseph Kosuth’s white on black text paintings, but those resemblances don’t diminish my pleasure or my desire to give the New Mark Group their due. Of course, no art is absolutely original—everyone has to work with what they are given—but if I think back to 1988 in the West, I remember the heyday of painting in a range from Georg Baselitz to Peter Halley, and against that background, and with full awareness of everything that has happened since, the New Mark Group did not seem to be playing catch-up at all; instead, they appear to have been ahead of their time. But all such assessments of relative value ultimately depend upon the global context. Gao Minglu’s nationalism does a great disservice to the art he describes because he doesn’t allow it the dignity of its legitimate place in the larger world.
Ai Weiwei’s globalism is of a kind clearly incompatible with Gao Minglu’s need to build a Chinese artistic identity. He has the universal modernist scorn for any local context and is unrelenting in his contempt for the Chinese regime and its kept intellectuals, including many artists. But the sharper and more focused his critique of Chinese society, the more relevant he is to the West, and this is the dialectical turn that can move us beyond Gao Minglu’s nationalism. In one post Ai Weiwei says, “When creativity is so formulaically included in every official article and every advertising catch phrase, everyone knows we are living in precisely a despondent time that is deficient in—utterly lacking in—imagination.”11 This may refer to the China he knows and lives in, but isn’t it exactly the same here, where governments prate endlessly about “the knowledge economy” and “innovation” but fund only bureaucracies, where business is obsessed with “thinking outside the box” and “disruptive” technologies can only accomplish incremental developments in internet marketing?
The concept of creativity is no longer the property of art or artists, but Ai Weiwei is clear that those who have taken it over have no idea what it is—or was. But then, creativity is not the most important aspect of contemporary art. The search for the new has become entirely a concern of business, but what can’t be appropriated is the moral stance of modernism, because it is a challenge to the very basis of the system that has adopted innovation as its means of growth. Perhaps the most critical thing any artist can do today is repudiate creativity; that may be throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath water too soon, because there is still the possibility of a genuine rather than a market focus-group directed type of creativity, but Ai Weiwei has come to teach us that whatever our stance towards art is, the stance of art itself will have to be a critical, moral-political one if it is to take measure of the times.
106 Vol. 11 No. 1 But this is not to say that local histories and local perspectives don’t exist or that they don’t matter. Ai Weiwei, for example, in a description of Chinese society as a gigantic “ruin,” says,
These people’s behaviour, observation, perceptive ability, language, vision, or voices do not accidentally resonate with sentiment and attitude—we were born here, grew up here, and will die here. This is a special civilization, with its particular course; it’s like a plant grows only on high ground.12
Shared experience produces shared attitudes, and all experience is particular, specific, and rooted in a time, a place, and a history. So much is obvious, but what is less clear to many in the cultural field is how all local experience now includes an awareness of the rest of the world. The “global,” for want of a better word, is a perspective that liberates consciousness from its local confines. So Ai Weiwei can criticize the International Olympic Committee in words as harsh as any he uses for the Chinese government, in fact, in exactly the same words:
[S]omeone has sold you out, and you’re helping him or her count the money. About the sacred Olympic committee, why do they look and sound more like military arms dealers, or the mafia? And why is it they increasingly prevent other people from saying this is so, shielding themselves so enthusiastically and seeking justification while violating the truth with bigger, more ludicrous lies? This is not a brainteaser, the answer is simple, one word: profit.13
If conditions are increasingly the same everywhere, such that corruption also has a universal character, how foolish is it to insist that a national art has a distinctive character? Not at all if one recognizes that difference in art is measured by effective global position taking.
Don’t trust the internationalist hypocrites, who are even more frightening than the bare-toothed nationalists, and who would never truly concern themselves with the lives or the equity of their friends in neighbouring countries. They could speculate on the universe for profit. This is a more accurate diagram of the world.14
This comparison of Gao Minglu and Ai Weiwei—one concerned to define the uniqueness of Chinese culture in a globalized world, the other a dialectical critic who understands the nation as a fiction within that same globalized context—concludes with one last and somewhat strange quote from Total Modernity. Comparing two avant-garde groups of the 1970s, the No Name Group and the Stars, Gao Minglu sees a difference in their attitude towards art stemming from different social backgrounds:
Vol. 11 No. 1 107 Members of the Stars may have had a higher origin. Ai Weiwei’s father was Ai Qing (a renowned writer in China), and Wang Keping, Qu Leilei, and Bo Yun were all from families of high-ranking officials and revolutionary intellectuals. Although they were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, they were privileged afterwards. They were worlds apart from the pioneer youth who later rose up in the ’85 New Wave Movement. The latter were born in the 1960s, so they did not experience the Cultural Revolution as working artists; and they were commoners, and thus more rebellious in culture rather than in politics.15
The thought that Gao Minglu’s relative lack of interest in Ai Weiwei may have a class origin is fascinating and hints at how much is left out of Gao Minglu’s history—and how much can be read only between the lines.
Notes 1 Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews and Digital Rants 2006–2009, ed. and trans. Lee Ambrozy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001), xx. 2 Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011), 298. 3 Ibid., 3. 4 Ibid., 5. 5 Ibid., .5 6 In one example, Gao describes so-called “apartment art” as “a social critique against both the authorities and the corrupted avant-garde itself”; ibid., 5. 7 Ibid., 350. 8 Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei’s Blog, 25. 9 Gao Minglu approvingly cites Judd to the effect that early modernism had a false view “of what the world’s like,” but he misses the fact that Judd is thereby making the claim that his work does know what the world is like. Gao Minglu thinks that artworks as “objects in their own right” don’t offer any reflection on the world—exactly the opposite of what Judd believed. He asserts that the minimalists rejected subjecthood and spirituality, missing that in Judd’s version of critical modernism subjecthood and spirituality are objectified; the kind of spirituality Gao supports is exactly the mystified brand found in the early modernism he has just rejected. Gao Minglu, Total Modernity, 314 no. 3, 389. 10 Ibid., 204–06. 11 Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei’s Blog, 140. 12 Ibid., 101. 13 Ibid., 180. 14 Ibid., 181. 15 Gao Minglu, Total Modernity, 97.
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Wei Guangqing (b. 1962, Wuhan) is recognized as one of the earliest Chinese artists to explore the language of Pop Art, which became a mainstream trend in the 1980s and early 1990s. Yishu His works were labeled as “Cultural Pop” for its appropriation of traditional images juxtaposed Edition with cultural symbols. His use of the red brick wall has become his trademark ready-made image, one that symbolizes the background of Chinese culture and politics.
Wei Guangqing, Made in China, 2008, silkscreen print, 210 x 295 mm. Edition of 198.
To purchase a Yishu edition print This image is a unique seriograph of the 2004 please send your request to canvas painting titled Made in China, which offi[email protected] or call references the transition of contemporary 1.604.649.8187 (Canada), or contact Chinese art into a consumerist culture. As part Katherne Don 86.158.1018.9440 (China). of The Extended Virtuous Words series, named Each edition is commissioned by and after a Chinese classic with the same title, produced exclusively for Yishu. he adopts the visual format of popular folk woodblock prints that were widely disseminated to the masses in the early 20th century. Wei’s works are recognized for his subversion of tradition and culture as he replaces the virtuous words with a unifying red wall in hopes to “extend” the meaning of his ideas.