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“Untamed Histories” Surrounding the China Brand

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“Untamed Histories” Surrounding the China Brand Meiling Cheng Dappled China: “Untamed Histories” Surrounding the China Brand Grey China Grey: the colour of mourning and repentance; of humility, plainness, and punishment; of aging, despondency, and melancholy; of equivocality.1 From an Oral History Sitting across a table from me in his studio in Beijing, Yang Zhichao recounts his recent experience of enacting his performance piece A Hundred Days from May 12th (Bairi wu yi er) in Sichuan province one hundred days after the 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit on May12, 2008.2 Yang Zhichao and his wife, Zhang Lan, armed with two identification cards as professional reporters from Beijing, first travelled to Chengdu, where they heard about a disaster site that had received little coverage by the media. Local rumours alleged that officials in the little town of Muyu, Sichuan, had grossly underreported its number of earthquake victims: the regional government claimed ninety out of the probable three-hundred dead, with most of them school children. So the artists hired a veteran taxi driver to take them from Chengdu to Muyu’s only high school and, with the driver’s whole-hearted support, took pictures of the earthquake wreckage along the mountainous way. Devastation of the 2008 The calamity the artists witnessed earthquake in Muyu, a little town in Sichuan province. on the campus of Muyu High Photo: Yang Zhichao. School brought them to tears. A three-story-high student dormitory was completely flattened to the ground, burying all of its residents. Yang Zhichao felt especially A pencil among the earthquake debris of Muyu High School. emotional when he saw broken Photo: Yang Zhichao. pencils scattered amid the rubble. The sight inspired his immediate performance response. Trying to be inconspicuous, he set the action in a debris-covered corner between two half-crumpled classroom buildings. Having secured their camera on a tripod and asking their driver to press the shutter button, Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan each sat on a stool to begin their makeshift operation. Zhang Lan—who previously had worked in a hospital—placed a bit of pencil lead into a prepared silicone capsule, and then surgically inserted the capsule into Yang Zhichao’s abdomen. The artists finished the performance in twenty minutes without encountering any interference. Before they left Vol. 11 No. 4 43 the schoolyard, however, several Yang Zhichao and Yang Lan, Revelation IV: A Hundred undercover policemen stopped Days from May 12th, 2008, performance. Photo: them and, on the excuse that they anonymous taxi driver. Courtesy of the artists. had no approval letter from the local government’s Propaganda Department (Xuanchuan bu), ordered their taxi to follow the police car to the police station. The police interrogated Yang Zhichao, Zhang Lan, and their driver in separate rooms for an hour, accused the artists of illegal reporting, searched all their bags, and confiscated the film in their camera.3 Fortunately, the artists were not body-searched: they each had hidden a roll of film and a memory card from their digital camera in their underwear during the taxi ride to the police station. Moving Toward the Grey Yang Zhichao, Revelation I: Earth, 2004, performance A Hundred Days from May 12th is the at Jianwai SOHO, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist. fourth installment in Yang Zhichao’s performance series titled Book of Revelation (Qishi lu, 2004–), which refers to the well-known Biblical source. In Revelation I: Earth (Tu, July 14 2004), Yang Zhichao placed 1.6 grams of fine yellow earth taken Yang Zhichao, Revelation II: from the bank of the Yellow River Ashes, 2006, performance at a forest fire-incinerated site in his hometown, Lanzhou, Gansu on Huairou mountain, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist. province, into a silicone capsule and had a physician surgically implant the filled capsule into his belly.4 In Revelation II: Ashes (Jin, 2006), another capsule, filled with ashes from a forest fire-incinerated site, was surgically inserted into the Yang Zhichao, Revelation III: Night, 2006, performance at artist’s abdomen. In Revelation III: Tang Contemporary Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist. Night (Ye, 2006), a surgeon, wearing a pair of infrared glasses in an unlit windowless room inside the Tang Contemporary Gallery in Beijing, made a two-centimeter incision below Yang Zhichao’s navel to let the darkness sink into the slit before he sutured the artist’s wound. The corporeal conceit of having an object surgically embedded inside his body was not alien to Yang Zhichao’s performance oeuvre when he embarked on A Hundred Days from May 12th. This latest addition within his Revelation series was nonetheless distinct because Yang Zhichao framed his process of making the piece, with the assistance of his wife, as integral to the artwork. Like two independent reporters unaffiliated with any institution, Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan self-funded their inquiry into a disaster site 44 Vol. 11 No. 4 so as to directly collect from local residents hitherto untold stories, flyaway rumours, hushed recollections, and often unverifiable, if strongly claimed, evidence. The artists then devised a creative way to respond to, document, and transfer these stories to the public realm. Although visiting an earthquake site to stage a private memorial for the victims is not necessarily a political act, the troubles that Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan encountered in Sichuan circumstantially establishes the political relevance of A Hundred Days. The piece exposes the regional government corruption that resulted in the shoddy construction of public school buildings; it contradicts what the central government propagates as its official version of history, which touts the state’s triumphant mobilization of political resources in remedying natural disasters, while eliding its simultaneous coercion of the victims’ grieving parents into silence.5 If the traditional Chinese phrase zheng shi describes the version of history penned by the government-sanctioned agents—that is, the orthodox history—then the version of history privately composed by Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan’s action during A Hundred Days serves as a vernacular counterpart to the official history: ye shi, which means, literally, “wild histories”—the folk-generated compilations of hearsay, gossip, opinions, anecdotes, leaked secrets, dissenting remarks, covert images, furtive eyewitness accounts, embellished memoirs, and private investigation reports.6 Wild histories are parallel versions of history, consisting of orature and often anonymous or pseudonymic discursive documents that are untested, uncensored, and unsubstantiated. Like rhetorical infiltrators, wild histories insinuate themselves into the public memesphere and cultural memory without vetting by the institutional mechanisms that establish the country's officially authorized and disseminated history. Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan enacted their self-assigned ethical roles as artists-citizens to compile their wild histories. Their serious intent and the weightiness of their subject matter bestow a heroic import on their contribution. Yet wild histories could just as well be trivial, parodic, spurious, or far-fetched. Orthodox history tends to be highly regulated—"tamed"—in order to appear in harmony with the State's projection of a national self- image. Conversely, wild histories are, in their essence and politic, untamed histories, for they amass indiscriminately those accounts of putative happenings and alleged reminiscences that are untamed and largely untamable by the powers that be. Slyly subversive in intent, untamed histories are mixed in tone; they may by turn be accusatory, poignant, speculative, sentimental, hyperbolically facetious, even phantasmagoric. They may function as apocryphal archives, colloquial chronicles, or simply as unauthenticated and non-attributable addenda to orthodox history. Like narrative horses without bridles, these untamed histories gallop on the edge of official surveillance; they track the fence surrounding the center for their own merry-go-rounds, their quixotic chases after shadows, or their amateurish derby without the benefit of referees. When given the chance, these untamed histories may also risk jumping over the fence toward the center to perform their rider-less rodeos, generating sub/cultural forces through the sheer “horse-power” of their vocal energies and physical maneuvers. Vol. 11 No. 4 45 What Does the Grey Say? Unlike their mentor Ai Weiwei, who got into trouble with the State for his art activism on behalf of Sichuan earthquake victims, Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan had no desire to overtly challenge the political centre of power. Thus, does their memorial performance of A Hundred Days from May 12th merely add a paragraph to the ongoing chronicle of surreptitiously engaged untamed histories in the as yet authoritarian China? Does the dystopic performance piece serve only to supply a contrary footnote to the nation’s aggressive promotion of what Wang Jing calls “the country brand of China” following “the Saatchi & Saatchi vision of turning the nation into a brand?”7 By designating A Hundred Days as part of his Revelation series, Yang Zhichao seems to subsume the performance piece’s regional specificity under its potential global resonance. In this context, his body, with the sealed capsule, becomes an enfleshed archive, analogous to the prophetic or apocalyptic Book of Revelation, which is replete with cryptic messages and redemptive symbolism, waiting to be discovered by future initiates.8 Nevertheless, I suggest, there
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