Unscrolled in Vancouver

SEPTEMBER/OCTO B E R 2 0 1 5 V O LUME 14, NUMBER 5

INSI DE

The Chinese Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2015 Chinese Feminism in Contemporary Art Artist Features: Chen Wei, Cheng Ran, Mao Yan, Qiu Xiaofei, Liang Quan Interview with Paz Venturelli Baraona Unscrolled in Vancouver

US$12.00 NT$350.00 PRINTED IN TAIWAN 6

VOLUME 14, NUMBER 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015

C ONT ENTS 21 2 Editor’s Note

4 Contributors

6 On Civil Society and Colliding with Reality: The Chinese Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker

21 Context, Challenge, Conversion: 41 Chinese Feminism via Contemporary Art Taliesin Thomas

41 Mise-en-scène: Cinematheque Chen Wei and Cheng Ran Julie Chun

57 Interview with Paz Venturelli Baraona Zheng Shengtian

72 Mao Yan at Pace Gallery, New York 72 Jonathan Goodman

80 Qiu Xiaofei’s Struggle Danielle Shang

88 Amassing the Essence: A Preliminary Look at Liang Quan’s Thirty Years of Painting Chia Chi Jason Wang

104 Unscrolled: Reframing Tradition in Contemporary Chinese Art 80 Tianmo Zhang

111 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Liang Quan, Untitled (detail), 2006, ink, tea, colour, 104 rice paper, 120 x 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

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

1 Vol. 14 No. 5 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art PRESIDENT Katy Hsiu-chih Chien LEGAL COUNSEL Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C. C. Liu FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum Chinese film and video are not frequently featured in EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace the context of visual art exhibitions. Yishu 70 presents MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian EDITORS Julie Grundvig two texts that examine the presentation of these Kate Steinmann mediums within the exhibition format. Jo-Anne Birnie Chunyee Li EDITORS (CHINESE VERSION) Yu Hsiao Hwei Danzker discusses the Chinese Pavilion, designed by Chen Ping Rem Koolhaas, at the 2015 Venice Biennale, which Guo Yanlong CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde for the most part included seasoned filmmakers, WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li musicians, and dancers whose work focuses on ADVISORY BOARD the public realm and the engagement of all sectors Judy Andrews, Ohio State University of society in the formation of culture. Julie Chun Melissa Chiu, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden John Clark, University of Sydney presents an in-depth examination of Cinematheque, Lynne Cooke, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. an exhibition of the work of Chen Wei and Cheng Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator Ran, two artists whose interests resonate with the Fan Di’an, Central Academy of Fine Arts disquietudes of a younger generation. Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, MAXXI, Rome Taliesin Thomas offers an insightful consideration Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Katie Hill, University of Westminster of Chinese women artists whose work reflects Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive a feminist position and that exemplifies aspects Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator of Western feminist discourse while unveiling Lu Jie, Long March Space specificities that are characteristic of a Chinese Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand social and political psyche. Zheng Shengtian, in his Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art interview with Paz Venturelli Baraona, elaborates Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago upon his research into the extensive engagement Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District of Latin American artists, in this case Chilean PUBLISHER Art & Collection Group Ltd. artist José Venturelli, with Chinese culture and its 6F. No. 85, Section 1, government officials during the 1950s to the 1980s, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 contesting assumptions that Socialist Realism was Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 all that was evident at the time. Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 E-mail: [email protected]

The final four texts offer differing perspectives on the VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu Alex Kao role of painting within contemporary art. Jonathan MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin Goodman writes about Mao Yan and his commitment CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu Betty Hsieh to a tradition of painting that in its figurative and academic roots straddles the artistic histories of both PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com the West and the East. Danielle Shang’s essay on Qiu WEB DESIGN Design Format Xiaofei highlights a shift in the artist’s work that is the ISSN 1683 - 3082 result of his persistent questioning of the relevance Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, of painting today. Chia Chi Jason Wang pays homage March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, to an artist who has been working for thirty years advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: and traces the incremental shifts that have brought Yishu Editorial Office his painting into a dialogue with influences that 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada include the San Francisco’s Bay Area Figurative V6Z 2P3 Movement and the tradition of ink painting. Tianmo Phone: 1.604.649.8187 E-mail: offi[email protected] Zhang looks at an exhibition, Unscrolled, that also addresses ink painting but from a perspective that SUBSCRIPTION RATES 1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) acknowledges its tradition while taking it into bold 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) new contemporary realms. 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com) Please note: Owing to an significant increase in postage during the past 12 years, we are obliged to adjust accordingly the postage part of the subscription rate starting next year. For subscription rates of 2016, Keith Wallace please check on line at http://yishu-online.com DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow DESIGNER Philip Wong No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版(Yishu)創刊於 2002年5月1日

典藏國際版‧第14卷第5期‧2015年9–10月社長：簡秀枝法律顧問：思科技法律事務所劉承慶創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）

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

6 評2015威尼斯雙年展中國館：網站編輯：黎俊儀公民社會的理想與現實的踫撞中文編輯：余小蕙 Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker 陳萍郭彥龍

行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 21 當代藝術中的中國女性主義：語境、挑戰和轉換顧問：王嘉驥田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) Taliesin T. Thomas 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 巫鴻林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 41 陳維與程然的場面調度范迪安招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 田珠莉（Julie Chun）洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 胡昉侯瀚如 57 與智利畫家萬徒勒里女兒和平徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) （Paz Venturelli Baraona）的對話姜苦樂 (John Clark) 鄭勝天姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 高名潞費大爲 72 毛焰在紐約佩斯畫廊的展覽楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 盧杰 Jonathan Goodman Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill 仇曉飛的嘗試 Charles Merewether 80 Apinan Poshyananda 尚端（Danielle Shang）出版：典藏藝術家庭股份有限公司副總經理：劉靜宜高世光 88 蓄素守中：梁銓三十年繪畫歷程初探行銷總監：林素珍王嘉驥發行專員：許銘文謝宜蓉社址：台灣台北市中山北路一段85號6樓電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 104 開卷當代與傳統傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 張天墨電子信箱：[email protected]

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封面：梁铨，《無题》，2006，墨、茶、色、網上下載：一年49.95美元宣纸，120 x 90 公分，藝術家與北京蜂巢當代請注意：由於郵費在過去12年間大幅上漲，我們不得藝術中心提供不自明年起對訂費中的郵資部份做相應調整。2016年的訂閱費請上網查閱 http://yishu-online.com 感謝JNBY、陳萍、李世默夫婦、賀芳霓（Stephanie Holmquist）和Mark Allison 、版權所有，本刊內容非經本社同意不得翻譯和轉載。 D3E Art Limited對本刊出版與發行的慷慨支持本刊登載內容並不代表編輯部與出版社立場。 Contributors

Julie Chun is an independent art historian Dialogue of the US–China Forum on the and lecturer who has been based in Arts and Culture in Beijing. Shanghai since 2011. She currently serves as the Art Convener of the Royal Asiatic Jonathan Goodman studied literature at Society, China, where she delivers monthly Columbia University and the University lectures at museums and galleries to widen of Pennsylvania before becoming an art public understanding of artistic objects, past writer specializing in contemporary and present. She holds an M.A. in art history Chinese art. He teaches at Pratt Institute from San Jose State University and B.A. in and the Parsons School of Design, both in economics from the University of California New York, focusing on art criticism and at Irvine. She has also completed graduate contemporary culture. studies in Asian history at Yonsei Graduate School of International Studies, Seoul, and Danielle Shang is a Los Angeles-based conducted research in modern art at UCLA. curator, writer, and art historian. Her She is a regular contributing writer to Yishu research interests include artistic and and Randian online. intellectual developments since 1976 in Chinese contemporary art history. Her recent Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker is Director of focus is on the impact of globalization, the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, and former urban renewal, social change, and class director of the Museum Villa Stück, restructuring on art-making in China, Munich, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. where artists participate in the decentralized She has curated numerous exhibitions on informal economy to produce works to be both contemporary and historical art, with disseminated in the institutionalized formal a special emphasis on the history of the system of the global art world. modern. In 2001 Danzker was Exhibition Director of The Short Century (curated Taliesin Thomas is an artist-philosopher by Okwui Enwezor). She was curator who has worked in the ﬁeld of of Shanghai Modern: 1919–1945 (with Ken contemporary Chinese art since 2001, after Lum and Zheng Shengtian) in 2004–05 and living for two years in rural Hubei province, of Art of Tomorrow: Hilla von Rebay and China. She is the founding director of AW Solomon R. Guggenheim (with Karole Vail Asia, New York, a private organization and Brigitte Salmen) in 2005–06. She has that promotes contemporary Chinese art. participated in numerous academic forums Thomas earned her M.A. in East Asian in China, and in 2012 she was invited Studies from Columbia University, and to participate in the Museum Directors she is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Art

4 Vol. 14 No. 5 Theory and Philosophy at the Institute for Zheng Shengtian, an artist, scholar, and Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. She has independent curator, has lived and worked published articles on Chinese art in Journal in Vancouver since 1990. Before his of Contemporary Chinese Art (JCCA), Art immigration, Zheng worked at the China Asia Paciﬁc, and ARTPULSE magazine. Academy of Art, Hangzhou, as Professor and Department Chair for more than Chia Chi Jason Wang is based in Taipei, thirty years. He is the co-founder of the Taiwan. He began his career as an art Chinese Canadian Artists Federation and historian, translator, and educator. He has Centre A, Vancouver. Currently Zheng been an art critic since the 1990s and a is Managing Editor of Yishu: Journal of curator of contemporary art since 1998. Contemporary Chinese Art, a trustee of During the past decade, he has curated Vancouver Art Gallery, and Senior Curator various major exhibitions for the Taipei for the Vancouver Biennale. He has curated Biennial, Taiwan Exhibitions at La Biennale numerous exhibitions, including the 4th di Venezia, Taiwan Biennial, and MoCA Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai Modern, Taipei. The more recent exhibitions he has Munich (2004–05), and Art and China’s curated include Xu Bing: A Retrospective Revolution, New York (2008). He is a (2014) at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum frequent contributor to periodicals and and Amassing the Essence: Thirty Years of catalogues about contemporary Chinese Paintings by Liang Quan (2015) at Hive and Asian art. Four volumes of his writing Center For Contemporary Art, Beijing. on art were published by the China Academy of Art Press in 2013. As an artist, Tianmo Zhang is an M.A. candidate in art Zheng has shown work in China, the United history at Concordia University and holds States, Canada, and Russia since the 1960s. a B.A. in art history and communications Zheng received an Honorary Doctorate of from the University of Ottawa (2010–14). Letters from Emily Carr University of Art Her thesis focuses on the role of tradition and Design in 2013. and cultural signiﬁers in contemporary Chinese ink painting, with an emphasis on the exhibition Unscrolled at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2014–15). In 2013, she founded Z Art Space, Montreal, a curatorial project space dedicated to promoting contemporary Chinese art in Canada and supporting student initiatives.

Vol. 14 No. 5 5 Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker On Civil Society and Colliding with Reality: The Chinese Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale

n a hazy spring afernoon in March 2015, seven weeks before the opening of the 56th Venice Biennale, the Beijing art community gathered at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), in the 798O art district.1 Te occasion was a forum co-organized by UCCA and the American journal Artforum titled “Collective Acting: Te Chinese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2003–2015.” Discussants were Francesco Bonami, director of the 2003 Venice Biennale, and curators of the past four Chinese Pavilions: Hou Hanru, Lu Hao, Peng Feng, and Wang Chunchen.2 Te lively discussion, moderated by the director of UCCA, Philip Tinari, noted the importance of the Pavilion as a site for China to articulate a vision of itself to the wider world.3

A few weeks later, the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation (BCAF),4 which had been invited to curate the 2015 Chinese Pavilion, issued a press release outlining its curatorial intentions and announcing the participating artists. Te vision of China articulated by BCAF and its president, Cui Qiao, a former deputy director of UCCA,5 was focused on the public sphere and the “spirit of civil society.”6 Te selection of Rem Koolhaas as architect of the Pavilion was an auspicious measure of BCAF’s ambitions. Barbara Pollack, a seasoned observer of the art scene in China, was enthusiastic in her assessment of the Pavilion when it opened to the world on May 9:

China’s pavilion, located at the very end of the Arsenale, is the best since its entry to Venice. This year, the pavilion was turned over to the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation, the country’s only cultural NGO, with funding from the state-run China Arts and Entertainment Group, overseen by the Ministry of Cultural [sic]. As bureaucratic as this sounds, with full government support, the pavilion organizers were able to accomplish a lot, including soliciting the help of star architect Rem Koolhaas . . . to design the difﬁcult pavilion. The result was an excellent show of video art, plus the contribution of world-class composer Tan Dun, a welcome surprise after a number of years of quite mediocre results.7

Te forbidding architecture of the cavernous, historic warehouse that serves as the Chinese Pavilion had proved exceptionally challenging for previous curatorial teams, especially prior to the removal of massive, abandoned oil tanks that had divided the space into narrow passageways. In 2015,

6 Vol. 14 No. 5 Axiometric layout, Koolhaas’s architectural partnership, OMA, took advantage of the now open Chinese Pavilion, 2015 Venice Biennale. Courtesy space to create what they termed “a fuid environment” by dividing it into of OMA, Hong Kong. three zones to showcase installations and artworks that “vary in medium, scope and subject [while communicating] the curatorial narrative to Biennale visitors”:

The space becomes a backdrop and a stage for an immersive exhibit [titled Other Future]. Moving images and performances shine through, leaving the supporting exhibition design almost invisible. . . . A central space holds an enormous shallow reﬂective water pool . . . that anchors the exhibition around it and serves as a stage set for the performances of composer Tan Dun. . . . An exit point leads visitors to the exterior where the gardens hold an architectural installation, located next to a circle of pebbles that echoes the pool inside.8

As photographs of the 2015 Chinese Pavilion attest, the refecting pool did indeed provide an efective locus for performance and a living mirror for the moving images that surrounded it. Te decision of the curators to showcase music, dance, flm, and photography in the Pavilion, as installations and as performances, nestled comfortably within an international curatorial practice increasingly disposed to embrace all disciplines. In the context of the Chinese Pavilion, it also provided a natural bridge to historical Chinese culture in which music, poetry, and painting were entwined as were dance, music, and the sung and spoken word.

Vol. 14 No. 5 7 Entry to the exhibition Other Future, Chinese Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015. Courtesy of Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation.

Reﬂecting pool in the Chinese Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015. Courtesy of Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation.

Wu Wenguang Te frst zone of Other Future was dedicated to prominent flm director and producer Wu Wenguang. Born in Yunnan province in 1956, Wu Wenguang was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution as part of a youth-led rural re-education movement,9 where he worked as a farmer for a year and as an elementary school teacher for three years. Wu Wenguang later graduated from the Department of Chinese Literature at Yunnan University and was a television journalist before moving to Beijing in 1988. Tere he worked as an independent documentary flmmaker and, together with choreographer Wen Hui, co-founded the Living Dance Studio in 1994 and Caochangdi Workstation (CCD Workstation) in 2005.10

Internationally recognized for his documentary flms, Wu Wenguang is regarded as a founding fgure of independent flm in China. Among his best-known flms are Bumming in Beijing (1990), 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (1993), Dance with Farm Workers (2001), and Fuck Cinema (2005). In the Folk Memory Documentary Project that began in 2005, young flmmakers from the CCD Workstation were encouraged to return to their villages and interview their families about the devastating famine in China between 1958 and 1961 which some attribute to policies of the Great Leap Forward.11 In 2014, Wu Wenguang was interviewed by Time Out Beijing on the occasion of screenings of the Folk Memory Documentary Project at Zajia Lab in Beijing: 12

8 Vol. 14 No. 5 We’re talking about history, about memory, that’s not in official books. If we have no memory, we have no future. . . . You have to go back to the actual village, and, after one or two years, you have to try and find your own way into the life of the village. It’s not just about making a film, it’s about more than art; it’s about the process involved in making your own narrative. 13

At the 2015 Venice Biennale, Wu Wenguang was represented by the two- year long China Village Documentary Project completed in 2006. Tat year, flm historian Chris Berry14 reviewed an essay by Wu Wengugang titled DV: Individual Filmmaking. It addressed debates within the Chinese flm community on what documentary should be, what it means to be independent, and what the impact of the shif from analogue Betacam video recorders to DV (digital video) recording had been.”15

DV: Individual Filmmaking reveals that, around the turn of the millennium, Wu found DV as a positive way forward. . . . [He] developed a DV auteurism. The low costs and easy technology enabled him to wander where he will without worrying about investment or budget. The result is an organic form of ﬁlmmaking that becomes part of the life he ﬁlms. Little wonder, then, that his essay and others like it have become manifestoes for the DV movement, which has given a new lease on life to jishizhuyi—spontaneous realism in Chinese documentary.16

Left: Wu Wenguang, training villagers for Visual Documentary Project on China’s Village-Level Democracy, 2005–06. Courtesy of Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation. Right: Wu Wenguang, villagers using their cameras for Visual Documentary Project on China’s Village-Level Democracy, 2005–06. Courtesy of Beijing Contemporary Art Such spontaneous realism is clearly evident in the China Village Foundation. Documentary Project. In an interview with the German art journal Kunstforum International, Cui Qiao described the Project as one in which script and direction were very much in the hands of the villagers. Te resulting flms are clear demonstrations, she emphasized, of the critical nature of the villagers’ interviews, and the degree of the autonomy of the political reforms in the villages; it was also evident, she added, that each village had chosen its own political “policy.”17 When asked by Kunstforum International about the response of the European public to artists’ projects in the 2015 Chinese Pavilion, Cui Qiao replied that she anticipated that the China Village Documentary Project would probably be of greatest interest to such a public, especially with regard to the question as to whether such projects are capable of generating change.18

Vol. 14 No. 5 9 Asked to defne the distinguishing quality of artists in the 2015 Chinese Wu Wenguang, China Village Documentary Pavilion, Cui Qiao referred to their independence and their role as “change Project, 2005–06/2015, installation view, Chinese makers” in “going to their communities, living with them, and learning Pavilion, Venice Biennale 19 2015. Courtesy of Beijing from them,” sometimes over a period of twenty years. Cui Qiao noted that Contemporary Art this particular quality has drawn on Western artistic practices rather than Foundation. traditional Chinese culture. “It is this contradiction that I fnd especially interesting.”20 Other observers have noted the impact of transnational networks, the genealogy of participatory flmmaking, and what they refer to as an “NGO aesthetic” in early flmic and photographic documentary projects in China.21 Around the time of its completion, on March 27, 2006, the China Village Documentary Project was presented as a screening accompanied by a question and answer session at Yale University. On this occasion, it was titled Visual Documentary Project on China’s Village-Level Democracy, a joint project between the European Union and the Chinese Government and part of “public communication activities of the EU–China Training Program on Village Governance . . . headed by China’s premier documentary flmmaker Mr. Wu Wenguang and Mr. Jian Yi, communications expert of the EU-China program.” It was also noted that “a group of enthusiastic people mainly from Wu Wenguang’s art studio Caochangdi (the “land of grass”) are the main organizers of all the activities.”22

The result of this ambitious undertaking was ten Villager DV Documentary Film Projects, ten Young Documentary Film-Makers Projects, one hundred Villager Photographers Projects, a documentary ﬁlm on the villagers’ DV project, and one on the history of village self-governance in China.23

At the 2015 Venice Biennale, photographs taken during the Visual Documentary Project on China’s Village-Level Democracy (now the China

10 Vol. 14 No. 5 Village Documentary Project) lined the walls of the Chinese Pavilion and a number of the flms were projected on large screens. Tese included A Welfare Council by Nong Ke, a farmer in Guangxi province; Returning Home for the Election by Ni Lianghui, a barber shop owner from Hubei then living in Guangdong province; and Village Leader Wu Aiguo by Zhou Cengjia, a farmer from Hunan.24 Also on display were a number of the cameras used by the villagers25 and a flm by the coordinator of the project, Jian Yi, a flmmaker and photographer. His nearly one hour long documentary, Seen and Heard, told the story of how ten villagers became “DV story tellers.”

Wen Hui, Dance with Wen Hui Farm Workers, 2001, production still. Courtesy of Adjacent to the China Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation. Village Documentary Project were large-screen video projections produced by Te Living Dance Studio. Among them was Dance with Farm Workers, co-conceived in 2001 by Wen Hui, Wu Wenguang, and fellow artists Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen, a collaboration with thirty “immigrant” farm workers in Beijing, primarily from Sichuan.26 On the occasion of the Venice Biennale, Wen Hui refected on this work nearly ffeen years afer its conception. She recalled that its focus was on,

people who are not normally at the centre of things, people who are needed to modernize the city of Beijing and then quickly forgotten again. . . . Today the curtain has long fallen; the original production hall has since been converted into an amusement park for Beijing’s wealthy, modern inhabitants, and the farm labourers have returned to the building sites on which they earn their daily bread. An artwork created for a single performance can’t change their fate. My only consolation is that I will continue to follow them with my camera, and document their lives, work, hopes, and fates; so in the foreseeable future we will have another ﬁlm about these people.27

Dance with Tird Grandmother, Wen Hui’s most recent work, specially commissioned for the 2015 Chinese Pavilion, is perhaps her most personal endeavour to date and one of the most compelling works in the exhibition. Te subject is Su Meiling, an aunt on her father’s side, of whom Wen Hui had not known until 2011. Wen Hui travelled to Yunnan to trace her family history and meet Su Meiling:

Dance with Third Grandmother is about forgetting and being forgotten. People of my father’s generation mostly choose to forget. They keep silent and give up the right to a voice. Forgetting has even been evolved into habit. History broke off in their generation. In their time, it was acceptable

Vol. 14 No. 5 11 Wen Hui, Dance with Third Grandmother, 2015, video. Courtesy of Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation.

to [cast] away the shadow of history, to move away from the trouble and horror. However, Third Grandmother chooses to remember, shoulder responsibility, witness and spill out the truth of history.

Wen Hui, installation view, Chinese Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015. Courtesy of Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation.

She was eighty-four when I found her, energetic and agile in memory and mindset. Living in the kitchen, the yard and the village surrounded by mountains, she pours out to me in a way of modernism. We danced with each other. From the most important and breathtaking details of history reserved in her memory, I can see how the ever- rural girl is a snapshot of the magniﬁcent national political movement, which changed her life. Viewing our dilemma from the fate of third grandmother, history has been peeled off like skin.28

Te fnal video projection by Wen Hui in Other Future is Memories and Snatches of the Living Dance Studio, a survey of her distinguished career and “the creation of living dance” from 1994 to the present in three phases: Private Space, Report Series, and Memory Series. In this fnal phase, Wen Hui notes, “dance is not as important as before. What counts more is that one, with his or her own individual problems, can gain access to society, history, and memory, and explore how their individual body- memory has collided with reality. Teatre has become a door to true history and social practice.”29

12 Vol. 14 No. 5 Tan Dun, score for Living Tan Dun in Future (NU SHU: The Secret Songs of Women), Renowned Chinese artist, composer, 2011. Courtesy of Beijing Contemporary Art and conductor Tan Dun provided Foundation. the most spectacular work for the 2015 Chinese Pavilion. Titled Living in Future (NU SHU: Te Secret Songs of Women), it consists of a symphony for thirteen microflms, harp, and orchestra. A three-dimensional exploration of vanishing Nu Shu culture and its music in Hunan, where Tan Dun was born, Living in Future celebrates “an ancient language created by women for women [and] communicated solely amongst their own circle.”

The characters of Nu Shu are like ﬂowing water, like ﬂying mosquitoes, full of beauty, grace, and elegance. As it deviates from standard characters, men cannot read or understand the secret language. Nu Shu is also a musical language and is passed from mother to daughter secretly from the world of being a woman. Nu Shu has also been called the Book of Tears.30

Tan Dun, NU SHU: The Secret Songs of Women, 2011, video, installation view. Courtesy of Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation.

NU SHU: Te Secret Songs of Women was presented in two live performances in Venice. Te frst was at a free concert on the evening of March 6 in the Teatro Goldoni where Tan Dun, as UNESCO Global Goodwill Ambassador, conducted the Orchestra Regionale Filarmonica Veneta in a performance of his own compositions, Symphonic Poem on Tree Notes and Nu Shu: Te Secret Songs of Women, as well as 4’ 33, John Cage’s composition on “silence.” Te following day, at 3 pm on March 7, Tan Dun conducted a live music performance (which he refers to as Sound Visual) in and around the refecting pool of the China Pavilion against a backdrop of three large literati-style “scrolls” onto which video was projected in the place of ink painting.

Vol. 14 No. 5 13 Tan Dun, NU SHU: The Secret Songs of Women, 2011, installation view, Chinese Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015. Courtesy of Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation.

Te videos (which Tan Dun refers to as Visual Music) were of a mother teaching her daughter to sing Wisdom on Educating Daughters; Nu Shu calligraphy accompanied by Te Sound of Tears, a Nu Shu song; and a performance of “Water Rock and Roll” from a Nu Shu Village. During the live performance, the musicians entered the refecting pool, and moved across it very slowly—according to the score—“with swirling motions,” frst as individuals and then as an ensemble. Continuing to play any note of their choice, as sofly as possible,31 they walked and kneeled in the water before abandoning their instruments in the pool where they remained, suspended in the refections of the videos (Visual Music), for the duration of the Venice Biennale.

14 Vol. 14 No. 5 For Tan Dun, who had spent fve years preparing Living in Future— flming and researching in the feld, and composing the music—it was necessary to create a new conceptual manner in which to present live and static performances of the visual and sound compositions he recorded, both historical and contemporary, both borrowed and his own. He described the culmination of this work as a multimedia orchestra performing Visual Music, Visual Sound, and Sound Visual.32 In his artist statement for the Venice Biennale he refers to his desire to “fnd the soundscape of the future.”33

After completing these thirteen microﬁlms, I have come to regard rivers and lakes in a different light—they have become to me “seas of tears.” These drops of tears come together to form the nurturing Mother River, signiﬁcant to each human race, as each drop contains and carries our treasured cultures from one generation to the next. Nu Shu culture can be seen as a drop or a ripple in the Mother River, beautiful and dreamlike. 34

Co-commissioned by Japan’s NHK Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, NU SHU: Te Secret Songs of Women had its Japanese and American premieres in 2013.35 In the context of the Chinese Pavilion, Tan Dun was able to “perform these dreamlike Nu Shu chapters”36 at the 56th Venice Biennale.

Lu Yang Beyond the refecting pool, behind the “scrolls” and video projections of NU SHU: Te Secret Songs of Women, the third zone of Other Future showcased videos and installations by the youngest artist in the exhibition, Lu Yang. In her interview with Kunstforum International, Cui Qiao described Lu Yang’s 3-D animations of Tibetan deities as sensational in their investigations into the origins of anger.37 Similarly, Christopher Phillips of New York’s International Center of Photography described Lu Yang in the Chinese Pavilion catalogue as “one of the most adventurous and unpredictable young artists working anywhere in the world today.” Her project for the Pavilion, he argued, posed a deep and important question: “Is there a place in the contemporary world for the human yearning for wisdom and transcendence that was once found in the great religions?”38 As well, Barbara Pollack suggested in Artnews that Lu Yang’s depiction of a neuroscientist analyzing chemical imbalances in the brain of a particularly angry deity should not “overshadow the true strength of her work, which synthesizes the intricacy of ancient mandalas with the zeitgeist of science fction.”39

Despite such heady praise—the provenance of its inaugural presentation at UCCA in 2011 in an exhibition curated by renowned Chinese artist Zhang Peili40—and a text by the Karma Chakme Rinpoche in the Pavilion catalogue which describes it as an “outstanding work;” the inclusion of Lu Yang’s Wrathful King Kong Core and Walking Nimbus in China’s 2015 National Pavilion appears to me to be an unfortunate misstep among

Vol. 14 No. 5 15 Lu Yang, installation view, Chinese Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015. Courtesy of Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation.

Lu Yang, installation view, Chinese Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015. Courtesy of Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation.

projects that expressed great sensitivity to traditional culture in China and its place in contemporary life. For the artist herself, Wrathful King Kong Core refers to “Dharma-ending times,”

when all living things are unruly, afflicted with hubris, kindness and morality fade, evil and sin prevail, and none comprehend their true nature. The wrathful deities, beholden to their duty, shall vanquish all demons, and with their merciful fire, destroy all evil beings, leaving none behind. Though their wrathful visages may terrify, they are an expression of the Buddha’s infinite mercy. When the dead look upon them, they need not fear, for they are not corporeal, and no harm can befall them.

When the ﬁrst signs of anger reach the human brain, the information is ﬁrst transmitted to the hypothalamus. This activates the amygdalae to carry out certain processes, which in turn set off a chain reaction by activating a number of other structures in the brain. These structures are responsible for transforming nerve signals into visible expressions of anger.

16 Vol. 14 No. 5 Lu Yang, installation view, Chinese Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015. Courtesy of Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation.

This project is a foolhardy attempt to superimpose religious concepts of wrathful deities onto scientiﬁc theories of the brain’s anger response mechanisms.41

Liu Jiakun Between the second and third zone of the Chinese Pavilion, a door led to an adjacent historic garden, Giardino delle Vergini. Here, a large-scale outdoor gathering place, designed by architect Liu Jiakun,42 was located. Titled With the Wind 2015—It’s Your Call, the installation was constructed out of telescopic fberglass fshing rods fxed to tree logs, which were arched by hanging swords to form an arcade, a place of respite and exchange. Folding chairs and free Wi-Fi were provided for visitors who were invited to share their views by leaving messages attached to the swords with magnets. Te weight of the messages sometimes moved the structure.

In his artist statement, Liu Jiakun noted the symbolic meaning of each of the materials employed: the tree log evoked nature; the sword signifed the human state.

Besides using materials common to everyone and conveying my ideas and anxiety about the future through the hanging objects and subtle balance, I am also creating a public space, or a limited, yet open platform that explores and collects people’s ideas about the future. . . . The natural responses of visitors are spontaneous and more private. Embracing common participation and tolerating all attitudes; this is what I believe deﬁnes the future.

A butterfly can cause a hurricane by the flapping of her wings; likewise, an individual view can influence the future. The future is in your hands; it is your call.43

As the fnal work in the 2015 Chinese Pavilion, it was an appropriate location to refect on the Pavilion, its accomplishments, and the questions it raised.

Vol. 14 No. 5 17 Civil Future Liu Jiakun, With the Wind 2015—It’s Your At the opening of Other Future at the Chinese Pavilion on May 9, 2015, Call, 2015, installation. Lu Yang, installation view, China’s Ambassador to Italy, Li Ruiyu, noted that its theme was “civil Chinese Pavilion, Venice 44 Biennale 2015. Courtesy of future,” one that would ofer “freer space of demonstration for artists.” Beijing Contemporary Art In an interview with the Xinhua News Agency,45 Cui Qiao confrmed that Foundation. “the choices made for this exhibition point toward a civil future. It involves the existence of every individual social member who is unique and defes classifcation.” She explained further that “civil” implies “open-mindedness and tolerance, taking a rather challenging stance in modern China, one of spontaneity, non-mainstream pursuits and creativity, and the enjoyment of the freedom of creativity.”46

Te multidisciplinary projects presented in the exhibition navigated, to varying degrees of intensity and success, the freedoms and rights of the individual as defned within a civil society as well as forms of social practice which seek to recognize, and address, the needs of the collective or, to quote the Xinhua News Agency, the masses:

At the Chinese Pavilion, artists Liu Jiakun, Lu Yang, Tan Dun, Wen Hui, and Wu Wenguang all showcase a personal view on public subjects. Together, they show how the Chinese society has been shaped in recent history and how Chinese masses are publicly impacting the future of the country. The range of backgrounds and interests of the artists map a rich and complex past.

Despite my concerns regarding some of the works in Other Futures and my discomfort with the reduction of complex narratives to simplistic, ideologically charged phrases in some of the exhibition texts, the 2015 Chinese Pavilion provided the most complex articulation of China’s (future) vision of itself to the wider world in the frst decades of the twenty-frst century. It imagined a civil society, a civil future, a place of individual and collective acting where, in the words of Wen Hui, individuals can gain access to society, history, and memory, and can explore how their individual body-memory has collided with reality.47

18 Vol. 14 No. 5 Notes

1. The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) is an independent, not-for-profit art center, founded by Belgian collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens, that opened in November 2007 at 798 in three former factory chambers built in the early 1950s to Bauhaus-influenced designs. See http://ucca.org.cn/en/ about/index/. 2. Hou Hanru, Lu Hao, Peng Feng, and Wang Chunchen served as curators of the Chinese Pavilion respectively, in 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2013. 3. “Collective Acting: The Chinese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2003–2015,” March 19, 2015, 4:00– 6:00 pm, UCCA Auditorium, http://ucca.org.cn/en/program/collective-acting-the-chinese-pavilion-at- the-venice-biennale-2003-2015-2/. 4. According to its website, “the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation has been officially registered with Beijing Municipal Civil Affairs Bureau since 2008, and is governed by Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture. BCAF is the only publicly funded foundation dedicated to contemporary art and urban culture.” See http://bcaf.org.cn/en/about/. 5. Her appointment was from 2009 to 2012. Cui Qiao had also served as project manager of the 2005 Second Guangzhou Triennial, curated by Hou Hanru, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Guo Xiaoyan. 6. Press release issued through Aida Partners Ogilvy PR, April 2015. 7. Barbara Pollack, “East, West, Home’s Best: At China’s Pavilion, and the Collaboration Between India and Pakistan,” Artnews, May 8, 2015, http://www.artnews.com/2015/05/08/east-west-homes-best-at- chinas-pavilion-and-the-collaboration-between-india-and-pakistan/. Pollack wrote that Japanese architect Arata Isozaki had also worked on the design of the Chinese Pavilion, but this is not correct. 8. “Chinese Pavilion at Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2015,” OMA, http://www.oma.eu/projects/2015/ chinese-pavilion-at-the-56th-international-art-exhibition,-venice-biennale/. Partner in Charge: Michael Kokora; Director in Charge: Dongmei Yao; Project Architect: Wanyu He; Curatorial Consultant: Kayoko Ota; Team: Jack Kung, Long Yu. 9. Wu Wenguang, “Theater: Memory in Progress” in Jörg Huber, Zhao Chuan, eds., The Body at Stake: Experiments in Chinese Contemporary Art and Theater (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2014), 141. 10. Caochangdi Workstation (CCD Workstation) is an independent art space dedicated to performance art, documentary film/video, and video art. It was co-founded by filmmaker Wu Wenguang and choreographer Wen Hui in April 2005 and is located in Beijing’s Caochangdi district. The building was designed by Ai Weiwei, and the space was built by Beijing Storm. The Living Dance Studio and Wu Wenguang Documentary Studio are based there. In the words of its founders, ”CCD Workstation aims to develop contemporary performances, documentary and video art in China and is an open-minded, non-profit arts space open to the public free of charge. The Workstation organizes performance festivals, film screenings, as well as culture exchange programs, and invites performance and video artists/scholars/professionals from China and abroad to participate in ongoing interactive workshops and lectures. The Workstation has an Archival Library, the collection includes videos and DVDs of Chinese and international documentaries, video-art works, as well as contemporary dance and theater performances. The library also houses an archival collection of catalogues, programs, and magazines of performances and exhibitions, both Chinese and international.” See http://culture360.asef.org/organisation/caochangdi-workstationliving-dance- tudio/#sthash.KKKlpaHW.dpuf/. 11. “This significant oral history project raises questions about the reliability of memory, the tension between cultural memory and official history, and the value of remembering.” See “Documenting the Memory of China’s Great Famine: Wu Wenguang and the Folk Memory Project,” screenings and discussion presented by the Chinese Visual Festival, the Lau China Institute and the Departments of Film Studies and Comparative Literature King’s College London, and the Contemporary China Centre, University of Westminster, London, December 1–3, 2014, http://chinesevisualfestival.org/wp-content/ uploads/2014/11/Wu-Wenguang-event-info1.pdf/. 12. The mission of Zajia lab, which started in 2011, is “to create and support a cultural venue that can provide a proper environment to enhance appreciation of independent performing arts and film making inside Taoist Temple in Beijing city center.” See http://www.zajialab.org/. This mission is based on its name: 杂 zá (mixed / miscellaneous / to mix) and 家 jia (home / family / a person engaged in a certain art or profession). 13. Aaron Fox-Lerner, “Interview: Wu Wenguang,” Time Out Beijing, June 3, 2014, http://www. timeoutbeijing.com/features/Books__Film-Interviews__Features/30071/Interview-Wu-Wenguang. html/. 14. Chris Berry is professor of film studies at King’s College London and former professor of film and television studies at Goldsmiths, University of London (2004–12), associate professor in film studies at the University of California, Berkeley (2000–04), and consultant at the China Foreign Languages Press (1987–88) and China Film Corporation, Beijing (1985–87). 15. Chris Berry, “Wu Wenguang: An Introduction,” Cinema Journal 46, no. 1 (Fall 2006), 133–36, https:// muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/cinema_journal/v046/46.1berry.html/. 16. Ibid. 17. “Zudem waren die Fragen der Dorfbewohner aufgrund ihrer sehr genauen Kenntnis der Situation sehr kritisch. Der Dokumentarfilm über die Autonomie der politischen Reform verdeutlichet, dass jedes Dorf seine politische “policy” selber wählt. . . . In den Interviews mit insgesamt 800 Menschen in China ging es nicht nur um das gegenwärtige Leben, sondern auch um die heikle Periode nach 1945.” “Cui Qiao: Die andere Zukunft, Länderbeiträge: Arsenale: China,” Kunstforum International, June 2015, 492. 18. Ibid., 494. 19. Ibid., 490. 20. “Eigentlich ist dieses durch den Westen geprägt und nicht aus Chinas traditioneller Kultur hervorgegangen. Diesen Widerspruch finde ich spannend.” Ibid., 490.

Vol. 14 No. 5 19 21. Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Kiki Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds., China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 273. 22. See “Visual Documentary Project on China’s Village-Level Democracy,” The Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University, Henry R. Luce Hall Auditorium, Monday, March 27, 2006, 7pm, http://ceas. yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/events/past/20060327chinafilm_villagedigitalvideo.pdf/. 23. Ibid. Wu Wenguang is described as curator of the project and visual consultant for the EU–China Training Programme on Village Governance; Jian Yi is described as its coordinator. 24. The filmmakers were Nong Ke, Zhang Huancai, Zhou Cengjia, Shao Yuzhen, Ni Lianghui, Cili Zhuoma, Jia Zhitan, Fu Jiachong, Wang Wei, and Yi Chujian. Five of the ten filmmakers, who were between 24 and 59 years of age during the filming, subsequently completed twenty-four full-length films. See http://ceas.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/events/past/20060327chinafilm_villagedigitalvideo.pdf/. 25. On display in Venice were the DV cameras used by Zhang Huancai, Shao Yuzhen, Jia Zhitan, and Wang Wei. 26. According to Cui Qiao, Wu Wenguang questioned whether this project had instrumentalized the farm workers. This led him to invite workers in the future to have a more active role. See “Cui Qiao: Die andere Zukunft,” 492. Like German choreographer Pina Bausch, with whom Wen Hui had collaborated, she chose on this occasion to work with untrained dancers. In 1998, Pina Bausch restaged her seminal work Kontakthof with older, untrained people who had never appeared on the professional stage. See Judith Mackrell, “Breathing New Life into a Pina Bausch Classic,” Guardian, November, 27, 2002, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2002/nov/27/dance.artsfeatures/. 27. Wen Hui, “Dance with Farm Workers,” Other Future: 56th Annual Art Exhibition, China Pavilion (Beijing: China Art and Entertainment Group and The Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation, 2015), 136. 28. Wen Hui, “Dance with Third Grandmother,” Other Future: 56th Annual Art Exhibition, China Pavilion, 137. 29. Wen Hui, “Memories and Snatches of the Living Dance Studio,” Other Future: 56th Annual Art Exhibition, China Pavilion, 138. 30. Tan Dun, “Living in Future (Visual Music & Performance),” Other Future: 56th Annual Art Exhibition, China Pavilion, 92. 31. Scores of Tan Dun: Living in Future—Visual Music & Performance and Sound & Visual Sketch on NuShu’s Characters, reproduced in Other Future: 56th Annual Art Exhibition, China Pavilion, 106–07. 32. The term multimedia orchestra was used in press materials provided by the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation in June 2015, while the terms Visual Music, Visual Sound, and Sound Visual are employed in Tan Dun’s description of the project in the exhibition catalogue Other Future: 56th Annual Art Exhibition, China Pavilion, 92–93. 33. Interview with Playbill magazine reproduced in Other Future: 56th Annual Art Exhibition, China Pavilion, 115. 34. Tan Dun, “Living in Future (Visual Music & Performance),” 110. 35. NHK Symphony Orchestra, Risako Hayakawa, harp, Tan Dun, conductor (May 22, 2013), and Philadelphia Orchestra, Elizabeth Hainen, harp, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor (October, 30, 2013), http://tandun.com/composition/nu-shu-the-secret-songs-of-women/. 36. Tan Dun, “Living in Future (Visual Music & Performance),” 110. 37. “Cui Qiao: Die andere Zukunft,”, 492. 38. Christopher Phillips, “Lu Yang: Ideas in Motion,” Other Future: 56th Annual Art Exhibition, China Pavilion, 86–87. 39. Barbara Pollack, “East, West, Home’s Best: At China’s Pavilion, and the Collaboration Between India and Pakistan,” Artnews, May 8, 2015, http://www.artnews.com/2015/05/08/east-west-homes-best-at- chinas-pavilion-and-the-collaboration-between-india-and-pakistan/. 40. Lu Yang: The Anatomy of Rage, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), September 24– November 20, 2011, curated by Zhang Peili, http://luyang.asia/?p=527/. 41. Ibid. 42. The team that worked on the installation consisted of Liu Su, Wang Kailin, Liu Ying, Wen Lei, and Yang Lei. 43. Artist’s statement provided in press materials by the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation, June 2015. See also Liu Jaikun, “With the Wind 2015: It’s Your Call,” Other Future: 56th Annual Art Exhibition, China Pavilion, 65. 44. “China Pavilion reveals ‘Civil Future’ at Venice art biennale 2015,” Xinhua, english.news.cn., May 11, 2015, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-05/11/c_134226807.htm/. 45. Xinhuanet is sponsored by the Xinhua News Agency. It describes itself as “an important central news service-oriented website, an important information organ of the central government, and an important platform for building up China’s online international communication capacity.” See http:// news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/special/2011-11/28/c_131274495.htm/. 46. “China Pavilion reveals ‘Civil Future’ at Venice art biennale 2015.” 47. Wen Hui, “Memories and Snatches of the Living Dance Studio,” 138.

20 Vol. 14 No. 5 Taliesin Thomas Context, Challenge, Conversion: Chinese Feminism via Contemporary Art

She who is centered in the Tao can go where she wishes, without danger. She perceives the universal harmony, even amid great pain, because she has found peace in her heart. –Tao Te Ching 1

Introduction Can there be Chinese feminism in contemporary Chinese art? What kind of identity does the artist produce through aesthetic representation? As women around the globe address existing ideas about feminism, some Chinese artists are examining this multiplicity of concepts through artistic means, revealing both individual and collective responses to rising self-awareness among women and to shifts in modernity and globalization. This essay will argue that a detailed examination of select works of art by contemporary Chinese women artists reveals an ongoing deconstruction and reconstruction of feminist concepts in the twenty-ﬁrst century. Although a limited study, this analysis illustrates the continued questioning of the performance of gender, sex, and sexuality in the Chinese context and attempts to provide an artistic- cum-social iteration of feminist concepts as embodied through artistic praxis.

In recent years women in China have experienced a critical transformation through ﬂuctuations in China’s sociopolitical environment and through the emergence of feminist dialogues. Since the post-Mao or Reform period (1979 to the present), Chinese scholars, activists, and artists have been engaged in vigorous debates about the roots of female oppression, the nature of femininity, the deﬁnitions of woman and human, and the role of the West in Chinese articulations. Lydia H. Liu comments:

Being named as the “other” and marginalized, Western feminists can speak more or less from a politically enabling position against the centered capitalist ideology. By contrast, contemporary Chinese women ﬁnd their political identity so completely inscribed within ofﬁcial discourse on gender . . . that they cannot even claim “feminism” for themselves.2

Thus the notion of the self in feminist dialogue meets a curious dimension within the Chinese context—the collective aspect of Chinese culture dictates a certain perception of selfhood (or absence thereof) with regard to the mutual social composition predicated on China’s political past. In other

Vol. 14 No. 5 21 words, it could be argued that China lacks what Julia Kristeva would call a “tradition of individualism” 3 that has been crucial to the development of feminist discourse elsewhere. Over time, and especially during the rise of the Chinese Communist Party or CCP (founded in 1921 and responsible for the establishment the People’s Republic of China in 1949), individualism was equated with the “wretched consciousness”4 of a Western counterpart and was therefore detested and negated. As suggested by Kristeva, this presents a dubious caveat with regard to “the problem of China as a whole and underlines the difﬁculty in dealing with the problem of Chinese women in particular.”5 How, then, does the art of contemporary China reﬂect a modernized subjectivity for women?

While this essay includes artistic examples by several artists, work by two Cao Fei, China Tracy, Live in RMB City, 2009, video ﬁlm woman in particular—Lin Tianmiao (born 1961, Shanxi) and Cao Fei still. Courtesy of the artist and Lombard-Freid Gallery. (born 1978, Guangzhou)—demonstrates how a woman’s questioning of women’s roles via aesthetic means represents a strategic use of feminism to challenge and reconstitute feminist debates concerning femininity and womanhood within the Chinese context. The artists achieve this through a decisive engagement with essentialist and post-structural feminist theories. The essentialist position concedes that there is woman by way of the so-called feminine, thus reverting to the notion of woman identiﬁed. I argue that Cao Fei enacts an essentialist disposition through a conversion from human to post-human.6 The post-structural position proposes that woman is a construct by way of language and culture and that there is no essence of the feminine; I argue this challenge to the female form is embodied through Lin Tianmiao’s work. Both artists offer a critique of existing realities in China while establishing an expanded feminist position: where Lin Tianmiao’s 2008 body of work Mother’s!!! dissects the female form into fragmented parts, Cao Fei’s China Tracy (2009) recomposes

22 Vol. 14 No. 5 the female ﬁgure in the virtual realm. These artists employ the female to reclaim women’s experience and in doing so articulate a version of Chinese feminism through art, thereby becoming “makers of meaning, as opposed to being bearers of man’s meaning.”7

How do feminist ideas in the visual arts of China acknowledge a Chinese feminism, and what do these works of art divulge about social realities for women in China today? The intention of this examination is to interpret feminist dialogue with Chinese characteristics through the theoretical perspective of art. While contemporary Chinese art affords a certain kaleidoscopic understanding of Chinese society—a motley interpretation of modern times represented through a variety of artistic practices—the work of female artists in particular provides additional insight into the current situation for Chinese women. Like other women working in the ﬁeld of global contemporary art and advancing the feminist dialogue, Chinese artists are using “visual irony to depict . . . visions of feminist beauty, often involving mothering . . . and women’s spirituality”8 while simultaneously enacting them within conditions unique to China. While Lin Tianmiao’s Mothers!!! presents a certain radical aesthetic translation of the matriarchal archetype and the complexity of motherhood, Cao Fei’s use of the cyber sphere proposes an unencumbered reality for women, thus redeﬁning conditions of existence (and possibly spiritual essence) outside of ordinary living.

This essay aims to present a careful analysis of speciﬁc works of art that demonstrate Chinese feminism by way of context, challenge, and conversion. These terms will serve as the reference points for articulating feminist discussions in contemporary Chinese art, thereby conﬁrming women artists as distinct cultural creators. Recent artworks by Chinese women suggest an extant questioning of woman’s consciousness within society—both real and imagined—through diverse aesthetic mediums. Through their artistic praxes, Chinese women are partaking in the spirit of feminism through an exploration of the corporeal world here and now and the fabricated realm of the digital beyond, providing aesthetic expressions of feminist formulations in today’s world.

Context The continued challenge of feminism in its many formations over time and in different cultural contexts must be understood as a multiplicity: “Thus ‘feminisms’ refers to a variety of activism on behalf of social, political, economic, and personal justice.”9 The notion of multiple feminisms must also take into account differences in class, society, and culture, where even a single term such as "womanist" (as coined by American author Alice Walker) carries with it certain stereotypical “imperialist connotations” 10 to women both inside and outside the West. Within the Chinese context, issues of class have affected the feminist politics of the early twentieth century; such politics were seen “through the lens of European Marxism’s deep suspicion and disdain of ‘bourgeois feminists’,” and women who sought to promote greater sexual equality during that time were “frequently faced with the stern criticism that they were lapsing into ‘bourgeois feminism’.”11 Writing in 2008,

Vol. 14 No. 5 23 Louise Edwards notes the term “feminism” was still considered somewhat problematic in China “because of its assumed link with ‘Western’ values.”12

The questionable and protean terminology of feminism itself—words such as woman, feminine, gender, and identity—inspires a deeper mode of questioning into the complexities of culture and the unique social circumstances of being human. A historically situated deﬁnition of feminism suggests a philosophy that advocates for the dignity, intelligence, and basic human potential of women. As an area of philosophical inquiry, feminism aims to understand the nature of inequality by examining women’s lives through their social performance, cultural subjectivities, and distinctive physiological characteristics. In the West, for example, feminism emerges and is enunciated by key historical moments: the ﬁrst wave of Western feminism occurred in the 1920s in tandem with women’s suffrage and the right to vote. During the 1960s and 70s feminist movements were concerned with equality and essentialist articulations about motherhood and the female body. Issues of class, race, and sexuality (voices of lesbians and women of colour) were taken up globally during the 1980s and 90s— the African American feminist bell hooks is one example of an outspoken feminist thinker who rose to prominence during this era.

Each of these historical advances in feminist thinking further exposed problematic nuances within the feminist dialogue itself: how do monolithic notions of sexuality inﬂuence our understanding of the feminine? Within the Chinese context, the rise of feminism carries additional questions about cultural context. As expressed by Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers in Women and Chinese Patriarchy (1994):

Today, any attempt on the part of Western observers, including feminists, to impose ethnocentric notions of a “superior” understanding or a better moral solution is increasingly rebuffed by Asian feminists, academics and activists, who are battling not only their indigenous patriarchal institutions, but also the universalist assumptions of Western scholars claiming to represent women outside their own cultures.13

The discrepancy among Chinese, Japanese, and Korean feminists will not be addressed in this essay, however, it is further reason to proceed with caution regarding themes such as class, national identity, and culture. The problematic nature of sexuality has been systematically deconstructed by Western theorists to reveal that such issues are not only about “the abuse of women as a historical reality, but, equally important, the universality of moral constructs based on Western culture, and the legitimacy of Western agencies or individuals in Asian social practices.”14 Consequently, we are aware of a certain dissimilitude between feminism in the global context and feminism in the Chinese or Asian context.

The photograph Angel No. 3 (2006) by Cui Xiuwen (born 1970, Harbin) illustrates the nature of these complicated ideas in visual terms. The image

24 Vol. 14 No. 5 of a horde of pre-pubescent girls crossing a traditional Chinese bridge exhibits a tentative mood; they stumble toward the viewer with eyes closed, reaching forward as if to grasp something for support. Some of these girls are seen clutching their stomachs (the womb), suggesting a sense of anxiety. Remembering China’s modern past with regard to the sex of offspring, as recently as the 1970s girls were held in such low esteem that they were regularly put into orphanages, killed at birth, or aborted. The title Angel No. 3 implies these adolescents are not living beings, but, rather, departed heavenly spirits. This photo proposes that the individual lives of women in the Chinese context are socialized and depersonalized in light of the collective nature of Chinese society. While works of art offer an expanded understanding of feminist issues, they also reveal a host of controversies that concern basic deﬁnitions of human identity. According to feminist scholar Judith Butler:

The masculine/feminine binary constitutes not only [an] exclusive framework . . . but in every other way the “speciﬁcity” of the feminine is once again fully decontextualized and separated off analytically and politically from the constitution of class, race, ethnicity, and other axes of power relations that both constitute “identity” and make singular notion of identity a misnomer.15

While identity remains a fundamental problem for feminism, so is the very concept of woman. Simone Beauvoir writes, “If I want to define myself, I first have to say, ‘I am a woman’; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth. A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex: that he is a man is obvious.”16 By referring to man as encompassing the entire species, scholarship assumes a position rooted in the language of the masculine, therefore establishing a dual consciousness that consistently reinforces the allegory of this disparity. The difficulty of femininity itself as examined through critical theory has been tackled by diverse Western thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Jacqueline Rose, and Judith Butler.17 In her book About Chinese Women (1986), Kristeva points out that when truth is given form “as a woman, for example—the ‘truth’ of the unconscious passes into the symbolic order, it even over-shadows it, as fundamental fetish, phallus-substitute, support for all transcendental divinity.”18 She goes on to suggest that this is a:

crude but enormously effective trap for feminism: to acknowledge us, to make us into the truth of the temporal order, so as to keep us from functioning as its unconscious “truth,” formless beyond true, and false, beyond present- past-future.19

Essentially the female form is as much a selfhood as it is a falsehood for being, perpetuating a tautological inquiry into the fantasy of woman. As argued by Lacan, there is “no Other of the Other,” and anyone who claims to take up this place is an impostor (the Master and/or psychotic).”20 These

Vol. 14 No. 5 25 brief investigative insights into the basic nature of ontology and sexuality Cui Xiuwen, Angel No. 3, 2006, colour photograph. disclose the fundamental difﬁculty we face in describing identity altogether. Courtesy of the artist and Klein Sun Gallery, New York. As further argued by Butler:

Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pre-given sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.21

In other words, culture functions as the fabricator of sexual difference. Art has the capacity to dismantle the cultural paradigm through a nuanced reassembly of sex, sexuality, gender, and visual representation; within the realm of artistic creation the sign (body) and its meaning (inference) are re-contextualized and open to re-interpretation. Philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari intended to do away with the body as a

26 Vol. 14 No. 5 traditional sign altogether, opting for a rhizomatic logic that denaturalizes bodies of all kinds in addition to “denaturalizing sexuality and especially its polarized genders.”22 This allows for a more versatile vision of gender and identity. While basic anatomical differences between the sexes dictate a so-called fundamental disparity between men and women and propose individualism for the female being by way of her reproductive agency, the deﬁnition of female subjectivity becomes increasingly entangled as society at-large imposes certain gestures of conduct upon the “Other” that is woman. A prevailing phallocentric consciousness

. . . occurs whenever the two sexes are represented by a singular—or “human” (i.e. masculine)—model. The feminine is deﬁned only in some relation to the masculine, and never autonomously, in its own terms. It is represented either as the opposite or other; or as a complement; or as the same as masculinity.23

Feminists such as Luce Irigaray discuss the limitations of speech to describe femininity. She asks: “what is the status of the effects of sexualization on discourse? In other words, is sexual difference marked in the functioning of

Vol. 14 No. 5 27 language, and how?”24 [italics hers]. The conundrum of feminism is that it must rely on patriarchal terms to challenge the very notion of patriarchy (which in turn creates a certain contradiction for scholars attempting to elaborate on the subject). As contended by Butler, there still exists a marked difference concerning the fundamental relation between gender and so-called femininity. Sexists tend to claim: “a woman only exhibits her womanness in the act of heterosexual coitus in which her subordination becomes her pleasure,” in opposition to the idea that “gender should be overthrown, eliminated, or rendered fatally ambiguous precisely because it is always a sign of subordination for women.” 25 Arguably these contradictions are implied through works of art that revisit essentialist notions of body performativity and sexual distinctiveness.

Within the Chinese context the subject of feminism must be understood through a particular historical framework, one that confesses the hidden crisis of patriarchal principles and further failed attempts at deﬁnition. According to Western theorists such as Edwards, equality between men and women in China might be understood “as a series of loosely linked issues rather than as part of the broader problem of the resilience of patriarchal structures under socialism or the inadequacy of the CCP leadership.”26 China’s history divulges archetypes speciﬁc to Chinese culture that inform a modern Chinese feminist perspective, such as the notion of sameness inherent to socialism and its purported “non-difference of the two sexes.”27 The position of women in imperial China (understood as the time before 1911), however, was dictated by a dominant ideological mechanism born of cosmological foundations for an elaborate code of subordination going back millennia.28 Elisabeth Croll elaborates that this code:

held that the universe was composed of two interacting elements, “yin” the female and “yang” the male. The “yin” elements displayed dark, weak, and passive attributes in contact to the “yang” elements which were characterized by all that was bright, strong and active.29

While originally considered complementary oppositions, these features “were soon arranged in a hierarchical relationship juxtaposing superiority to inferiority,” and over time the yin elements “came to stand for all that was negative in the universe.”30 The ancient philosopher Confucius (551–479 BC) later incorporated these beliefs into his teachings, claiming an authority on feminine conduct that considered women to be in “a lower state than men [that] can never attain to full equality with them.”31 These ideas were handed down for generations, fostering unfortunate systems of segregation, seclusion, and physical control of women (among the most severe being the practice of foot binding and the regulation of the female body vis-à-vis limits put on the numbers and the sex of children). This superior attitude about the potential of yang to govern yin crept into every corner of Chinese consciousness and literary history, creating an ongoing complication concerning sexuality and submission. Sharon Hom writes: “the literature consistently points to the misogyny and authoritarianism of traditional

28 Vol. 14 No. 5 Confucian ideology and its primary institution of social control.”32 This illustrates a common binary that patriarchy shares in both the Chinese context and the west.

Arguably, the effort to conceptualize a Chinese feminism must take into account these distinct influences. Feminist scholars such as Kristeva point to the start of the Chinese feminist movement as concurrent with the founding of the bourgeois Republic in 1912: “Deeply influenced by western suffragettes, but coloured as well by the fight against a feudal patriarchal society, this movement call[ed] itself nüguan yundong—‘women’s rights movement’.”33 The rise of socialism in China is also of particular relevance to global feminist knowledge in recent decades. Croll further asserts: “In China the integration of feminism with socialism has demanded that in addition to improving the status of women, the women’s movement also arouses an awareness of class interests and responds to all forms of oppression.”34 Thus Chinese feminism takes part in global feminism while maintaining its own attributes.

China’s tumultuous twentieth century witnessed the demise of the dynastic social order and the subsequent installation of the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party which altered every segment of Chinese life. With the newly formed CCP in 1921 as the ruling hegemony, the latter half of the twentieth century experienced signiﬁcant sociopolitical upheavals in addition to sweeping economic transformations. The women’s movement in the context of China was closely intertwined with Chinese nationalism, which morphed socialism with communism. Under communism there arrived a novel concept concerning equality of the sexes, and women in China were suddenly “more visible than anywhere else in the world. Access to childcare and birth control added to communism’s appeal.”35 This so-called equality was used to implement new socialist/communist ideas about the subject (i.e. the collective subject) as opposed to the idea of the individual. While these momentous changes inspired increased awareness among Chinese women, certain limitations existed. Lin Chun comments: “The feminist thesis that ‘the personal is political’ was no novelty for the Chinese, yet it orientated psychological conﬂicts far away from what that slogan clearly implies in a different social context.”36 In other words, while Chinese women saw the possibilities for personal and political advancement under the burgeoning communist system, the actual milieu of Chinese society did not allow for the individualism of feminism to be expressed in the same way. Perhaps the contemporary feminist slogan for Chinese woman should read “the private is political.”

During the 1970s and 80s a lively debate broke out in China with regard to the CCP’s pronouncements and policies concerning women’s equal opportunity. Where some saw the famous Maoist-era slogan “women hold up half the sky” (funü neng ding ban bian tian) as an honest reference to the new found equalities experienced under the CCP, “there were those who argued that 1949 saw not the demolishing but simply refashioning of patriarchal patterns.”37 In the same timeframe, however, a prodigious swell

Vol. 14 No. 5 29 in the creative arts of China exposed new directions for the advancement of culture. Scholars of recent art in China point to 1979 as the genesis of contemporary Chinese art,38 and during the 80s artists were once again free to create their own style of art after the decade-long debacle of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Wenhua Dageming, 1966–76), a period in Chinese history when agitprop in the form of propaganda art trumped all forms of expression and artists were obliged to adhere to strict cultural norms of production.

Amid the post- Xiao Lu, Dialogue, 1989, mixed media installation Cultural Revolution and performance. Courtesy of the artist and Ethan period, Chinese artists Cohen Fine Arts, New York. felt a sincere optimism and responsibility for developing China’s artistic environment. This positive energy surged through the decade and became known as the ’85 New Wave Movement. The atmosphere of liberal thought and experimentation that existed at the time culminated in the China/Avant-Garde exhibition held in February 1989 under the slogan No U-Turn. Organized by two Chinese curators, Li Xianting and Gao Minglu, and held at the National Art Gallery in Beijing, this show of 293 works by 186 artists from around China presented the latest developments in Chinese art. This exhibit was signiﬁcant for many reasons, and notably for a certain performance act by female artist Xiao Lu (born 1962, Hangzhou), who, in the middle of the opening celebration:

took out a concealed firearm and shot two live bullets into her own [piece] in the show, an installation that involved phone booths. The performance earned her a brief jail stint and instant fame as a symbol of youthful defiance, particularly since it took place in the months leading up to the student demonstrations at Tian’anmen Square . . . [her piece] Dialogue could be called China’s first major feminist contemporary work of art.39

This early performative feminist gesture was a milestone moment in the field of contemporary Chinese art, and the title, Dialogue, aptly reflects Chinese feminism’s need to be heard within a new cultural context. The distinct elements of this work—two figures in two phone booths, related but separate—imply a conversation, but that very dialogue is interrupted by Xiao Lu’s violent action and then subsequently censored by the Chinese state. What does this say about feminist discourse at the time?

Recent artworks by Chinese women suggest a continuation of this dialogue. While Chinese feminism experiences a metamorphosis along intellectual and cultural lines, the complexity of China’s sociopolitical paradigm remains an ongoing issue. Some argue that “a lot of women fear feminism, that kind of

30 Vol. 14 No. 5 collective call” 40 associated with radical political movements that are suspect in the eyes of the CCP. This mindset fosters a continued sense of reticence among many Chinese women. The distinction among feminist movements, feminist discourse, and feminist art practice creates categorical yet related bodies of knowledge, and the cross-section of these ideas is ripe for additional investigation. Arguably among the boldest forms of provocation disturbing existing patriarchal norms in China is aesthetic praxis. Where previous waves of social movements within the Western context gave rise to a certain feminist history, the Chinese woman as individual is further expressing the feminist narrative through artistic articulation and action.

Challenge At the outset of the discourse concerning Chinese feminism via contemporary art one must recognize the difficulty that exists in establishing a universal or definitive claim to notions of sexuality and femininity itself. In China, the situation is further convoluted by certain cultural paradigms and sociopolitical histories that reveal injustices toward feminine proclivities. According to Chun, for example, the female part of the post-revolution generation was “trapped in their gender-laden conflicts between the required ‘class standing’ and their natural human compassion, simultaneously viewed as ‘feminine’ and politically unacceptable.”41 China must allow for a multiplicity of voices if it is willing to take part in global efforts toward egalitarianism; lamentably, the power of patriarchal rhetoric remains stalwart.

Feminist writers offer resistance to accepted descriptions or portrayals of women and existing tropes of patriarchal discourse. In her book Gynesis (1985), Alice Jardine addresses the conﬂicts between “woman as process and woman as sexual identity”42 [italics hers] while revealing further insights about the imaginary status of woman as the “symptom of man” and the “subjecthood” of woman who “must be released from her metaphysical bondage.”43 Speaking of sexual difference in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986), Rose furthers there is no sexual relationship because “woman does not exist,”44 thus her status as an absolute category is false. She goes on to say:

[a]s negative to the man, woman becomes a total object of fantasy (or an object of total fantasy), elevated into the place of the Other and made to stand for its truth. Since the place of the Other is also the place of God, this is the ultimate form of mystiﬁcation.45

Patriarchal cultures rely on this type of mystiﬁcation and the mythical construction of the category of woman (the feminine mystical) to maintain phallocentric power. In China, it is precisely the dichotomy between yin and yang, as discussed earlier, that has perpetuated woman’s so-called submissive role in society. Motherhood especially carries with it divine questions about the mysteries of conception and procreation; that woman comes into play in the sexual relation only as mother, or quoad matrem, “is inscribed in the entire philosophic tradition.”46 Thus mother is inherently

Vol. 14 No. 5 31 a body of signiﬁers, a veritable nonexistence, and mothers are therefore understood as reproductive instruments and are excluded from typical modes of exchange within the social order. Irigaray argues:

As both natural value and use value, mothers cannot circulate in the form of commodities without threatening the very existence of the social order. Mothers are essential to its (re)production (particularly inasmuch as they are [re]productive of children and of the labor force: through maternity, child-rearing, and domestic maintenance in general). Their responsibility is to maintain the social order without intervening so as to change it.47

If mothers are a threat to the normative, then do works of art that address motherhood suggest a disruption of existing beliefs? Notions of motherhood encompass complex issues about sex and the psyche. During the turn of the century, for example, Freudian psychoanalysis introduced a new pretext concerning the development of sexuality and separation from the mother. Jardine goes so far as to say that Freudian thought and “what is generally referred to as modernity is precisely the acutely interior, unabashedly incestuous exploration of these new female spaces: the perhaps historically unprecedented exploration of the female, differently maternal body.”48 Lin Tianmiao’s artwork Mother’s!!! not only explores the female space of the maternal body, it tears asunder the motherly form to reveal the latent power of maternity.

Since the beginning of her career the focus of Lin Tianmiao’s work has largely been the female body (and often her own body). While her art exhibits universal physical awareness, it is also imbued with gender specificity. Lin Tianmiao is well known for her thread-winding sculptural installations, which have also enabled her to address issues related to a gendered experience of the world through her use of supposedly traditional women’s craft materials such as fiber and weaving.49 Lin Tianmiao mixed media piece titled Mother’s!!! No. 12–1 (2008) is a work of art brimming with feminist connotation. This single sculpture is part of a large-scale installation titled Mother’s!!! (2008) that includes additional threaded objects and figurative constructions. Lin Tianmiao comments that as a multimedia work, Mother’s!!! allowed her to focus on inner expression “in a deep, careful, delicate and struggling way . . . [as part of] restoring [her] own self-awareness as a woman reaching middle age.”50 Considering the categorical aspects of this particular artwork—title, composition, and material—provides several possible translations of the feminist voice within contemporary Chinese art. Speaking of feminism, the artist comments:

It was at a rather vulnerable point in my life that I started to seriously think about the issue of feminism. And I did not know where to start. Because in China feminism is an imported idea. We never had the self-awareness to start a feminist movement. And we cannot simply borrow from

32 Vol. 14 No. 5 America, because we do not share the same history with American women.51

Lin Tianmiao, Mother's!!! Mother’s!!! demonstrates No. 12-1 (Cut-Off), 2008, Polyurea, silk, cotton a distinct challenge to threads, 49 x 32 x 16 cm. Courtesy of the artist and existing ideas about Galerie Lelong, New York. motherhood in China and the fundamental Chinese principle of ﬁlial piety. In the case of this sculpture the reverse is true: offspring serve as the cause of the progenitor’s dissolution rather than a reliable system of support. Guo Xiaoyan writes Mother’s!!! alludes to issues of “the female body in relationships of power, along with the relationship of body and time, woman as author, and antagonism toward the body.”52 While Lin Tianmiao and other female artists in China explore their inner lives to express subjectivity through art, feminism in the Chinese context gains an ampliﬁed perspective.

The title of the sculpture alone implores us to reconsider the meaning of language as both semiotic agent and definitional trap. By using the singular possessive of mother to indicate something that belongs her, the title Mother’s!!! suggests possession, ownership, and occupancy. Yet the implication of this title and the actuality of the artwork are in conflict. What does maternal ownership mean in contemporary China? Lin Tianmiao’s physical sculpture portrays a single disemboweled figure occupied by a profusion of threaded spheres. While the title announces some form of custody, the actual solitary female appears to be taken over by the abundance of orbs that emerge from her bisected body. This mother is an alienated simulacrum, alone and in pieces; what does she possess in this instance?

By issuing a possessive title for this sculpture, Lin Tianmiao seems to announce that this estranged mother represents a personiﬁcation of the mother submerged, a victim to a deluge beyond her power. The signiﬁcance of this sculpture relates to Rose’s notion that “woman does not exist.” In fact, “mother” does not exist either; rather, Mother’s!!! is an attempt to reclaim something for woman. Thus language by way of the title serves as a feminine operation that subverts, where the “attributes of writing are the attributes of ‘woman’—that which disturbs the Subject, Dialectic, and Truth is feminine in its essence.”53 The word Mother’s!!! is followed by three exclamation points. This emphasis is not happenstance; in China, as in

Vol. 14 No. 5 33 most societies, descendants frequently take the last name of the father. This cultural norm ensures paternal inﬂuence in the long run and the production of patriarchy and patriarchal ownership—my children—without taking into account the maternal obligation. Kristeva argues:

[P]atrilinear descent with transmission of the father’s name centralizes eroticism in the single goal of procreation, in the grip of an abstract symbolic authority which refuses to acknowledge the fact that the child grows and is carried in the mother’s body.54

By repeating the exclamation point, Lin Tianmiao conveys the impression that Mother’s!!! must be understood not only as a descriptive pronouncement but also felt as an emotional elation. Is it joy? Or rage? These exclamation points serve as both reminder and emphatic action—while they are open to interpretation, they cannot be ignored. The poesy of their presence claims multiple meanings: “[in] effect, poetic language is the recovery of the maternal body within the terms of language, one that has the potential to disrupt, subvert, and displace the paternal law.”55 With the title Mothers!!!, Lin Tianmiao consciously disrupts the patrilineal; as articulated by Cixous, “that of logocentric (Western) thinking, privileging the concept, presence, truth, and making possible our idea of paternity, the father/son relation, and the repression of woman.”56 Arguably, Lin Tianmiao’s work is a critique of motherhood in China, given the limits on childbirth (and abortion) as imposed by the Chinese state. The work appears to also comment on the general lack of citizens' rights and the self-governing of personal sexual practices.

In opposition to the traditional yin characteristic of darkness, Lin Tianmiao’s figure is a glowing white. The lower portion of her body emerges from a single piece of cloth while her upper torso has been completely cut off from the womb. Prima facie, the sight of this beheaded and gutted form is slightly horrific, but the image also transmits a sublime calm—the figure is unusually beautiful, almost angelic. Although motherhood is considered a sacred encumbrance, this frightful scene suggests a candid representation of the pain experienced at childbirth and the challenges of motherhood itself. The artist candidly admits: “Giving birth and raising a child is a very stressful and onerous process to me. For many years I did not have the courage to take on this responsibility. When I finally did, it still felt very difficult.”57 The mangled Mother’s!!! alludes to this trauma.

Cut-off, swallowed up; on the one hand, the aphasic pleasure of childbirth that images itself a participant in the cosmic cycles; on the other, jouissance under the symbolic weight of a law (paternal, familiar, social, divine) of which she is the sacriﬁced support, bursting with glory on the condition that she submit to the denial, if not the murder, of the body.58

Lin Tianmiao’s sculpture aptly portrays the burst of glory that is motherhood—the ﬁgure is literally exploding with spawn—while

34 Vol. 14 No. 5 simultaneously revealing the murder of the motherly form. Torn apart, the female carries forth the timeworn tradition of delivery, but only to meet her demise. In the case of this particular artwork, the delivered object (a jumble of spherical bodies but no actual human offspring) suggests a replication of the birthing process but without the ultimate jouissance59 of mothering. The metaphorical division and splitting of the maternal subject results in the extermination of her being: she is ﬂat on her back, bubbling but lifeless. In the Second Sex de Beauvoir writes: “It is through motherhood that woman fully achieves her physiological destiny; that is, her ‘natural’ vocation, since her whole organism is directed toward the perpetuation of the species.”60 While this statement asserts the essentialist position, Mother’s!!! and mother nature (in the form of progeny) appear to disﬁgure the very organism that perpetuates the cycle of life while revealing dependents that actually destroy woman’s life-force.

Conversion While Mother’s!!! invites our gaze toward a physically mangled female figure, Cao Fei’s digital avatar China Tracy takes our view out of actual existence and into the completely artificial: the virtual sphere of Second Life.61 Where Lin Tianmiao’s sculpture provides an exploration of the maternal body via concrete materials, Cao Fei’s female archetype—a product of human artistry and digital technology—further questions the versatile definitions of identity and female agency via conversion and reconstruction. China Tracy re-contextualizes the image of woman within the performed imagination and in doing so converts real female subjectivity into a manufactured simulacrum and vice-versa, demonstrating a conversion from the real into the imagined. Cao Fei’s fantasy counterpart suggests a novel realm of twenty-first-century intelligence and the possibility of a new branch of feminist conception: the virtual-female as feminist incarnation that can achieve sensual experience that the actual human female cannot within the constraints of her social context.

Cao Fei works in an array of multimedia, and she is one of the most active female artists of her time, among those born in the 1970s who follow in the wake of the first-wave, well-known names of Lin Tianmiao’s generation. Within the virtual realm, Cao Fei navigates the immaterial with a digitally rendered female figure that represents a cisgender post-human possibility. (Cisgendered describes a person whose gender identity corresponds with the biological sex assigned at birth). She experiences her cissexual nature vis-à-vis the gendered identity of her avatar. Cao Fei’s online participation reflects the imperfectability and disunity of our evident life; hence the Internet affords an alternate reality for the artist. Her use of the Internet to express and explore post-human subjectivity resonates with a new generation of (Chinese) netizens who escape to the Internet on a regular basis precisely to realize greater autonomy unrealized in the corporeal world. Cao Fei offers online visitors to her RMB City—a fully rendered urban space of her own design in Second Life (which harbours RMB City)—the ability to appropriate animal appearances and deity archetypes while navigating this fictional realm.

Vol. 14 No. 5 35 The demure China Tracy—a tall, slim, fair-skinned, and fairly Western looking female—embodies an idealized physical version of a woman China Tracy is a female avatar created for the digital sphere; she courts our gaze inside the abyss of the electronic realm. This alone creates an unusual paradigm with regard to feminist dialogue. As suggested by Irigaray:

Cao Fei, China Tracy, Live in RMB City, 2009, video ﬁlm still. Courtesy of the artist and Lombard-Freid Gallery.

Woman has no gaze, no discourse for her speciﬁc specularization that would allow her to identity with herself (as same)—to return into the self—or break free of the natural specular process that now holds her—to get out of the self. Hence, woman does not take an active part in the development of history, for she is never anything but the still undifferentiated opaqueness of sensible matter, the store (of) substance for the sublation of self, of being as what is, or what he is (or was) here and now.62

China Tracy, however, presents a curious dimension within the context of Chinese feminism: she exists out of the self (and out of China) while simultaneously confirming and contradicting the very nature of her being since she inhabits a virtual (i.e. non-substantiated) realm. She is a fictitious symbol who stands on her own footing; China Tracy does not inhabit a society controlled by men, where, as suggested by Xu Hong, women often find themselves suspended “in a state of confusion somewhere between person and object.”63 While the avatar China Tracy interacts with other avatars in Second Life, the avatar does not have to reveal its true identity; nor do the suitors. These bizarre encounters within virtual reality make sexual identity seem arbitrary and irrelevant and appear to be material (or virtual) articulations of Butler’s theories.

Considering one’s “second life” realized through the Internet as a co-production of existence with computers and digital technology, Cao Fei’s China Tracy proposes a curious version of Chinese feminism via aesthetic means. In a post-de Beauvoirian landscape she brings the ontological approach of becoming woman to the next level: “de Beauvoir had written

36 Vol. 14 No. 5 from the vantage point of an existentialist humanist: ‘on ne naît pas femme, on le deviant’ (one is not born woman, one becomes woman)”64 [italics hers]. While China Tracy remains unborn and exists in the digital sphere to partake in sensuous human experiences, she is simultaneously a virtual manipulation created by a female artist—her existence is a double illusion, a veritable Deleuzian “organless body” that abides within the schism of the formulation between human and automation.65 This notion of the unreal in sexuality as discussed by Irigaray suggests that women must enter into a “masquerade of femininity”66 [italics hers] in order to become woman and identify as woman. Does this explain in part the artist’s choice to remain cisgender in Second Life?

Where sexuality encompasses one area of feminist discourse, the dubious authenticity of identity seems to inhabit another. Speaking of embodiment, Jardine writes: “The process of representation, the sorting out of identity and difference, is the process of analysis: naming, controlling, remembering, understanding.”67 Through her animated avatar, Cao Fei examines all facets of this symbolic representation. By naming her digital avatar China Tracy—a possible play on language and sexuality as it relates to the American comic hero Dick Tracy—the artist has imparted an East-West dichotomy that suggests the contemporary neo-cultural paradigm of the Internet and the hybrid nationless realm of the virtual. Her title is also in English, which indicates that her primary audience lies beyond China’s cyber Great Firewall. By assigning existence to this female representation while navigating the dense environs of RMB City and Second Life, Cao Fei as China Tracy can exert control over her destiny within the beyond while the artist remains within the categorical conﬁnes of the non-virtual world. The symbolic and psychological exchange between the real (Cao Fei) and the unreal (China Tracy) yields a process of remembering; China Tracy can go outside the limits of the ordinary while the artist cannot. Within her virtual dimension, China Tracy is free to encounter and negotiate reality on her own terms; she can partake in intimate cyber love affairs, swim naked in a sublime digital ocean, or navigate the sky as a magical ﬂying mechanism, thus embodying a novel gender performativity unlike what can be encountered in the actual world.

China Tracy can be understood as a feminist intimation that reformulates the Lacanian organization of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. This affords a new understanding of Chinese feminism as demonstrated through aesthetic embodiment—through her conversion from human to virtual representation, woman is able to constitute independence outside the ordinary. Cao Fei’s China Tracy suggests that female participation in cyberspace has the potential to transform contemporary feminist theory in China: her virtual presence throws off the shackles of male supremacy preserved for centuries by the patriarchy; however, she is simultaneously a cisgender avatar that remains invested in the category of the feminine. China Tracy redeﬁnes presence within the here-and-now of representational forms and their carnal reception, and she stands as a powerful symbol of the re-ordering of existence and presence in today’s world.

Vol. 14 No. 5 37 Chinese feminism through the visual arts illustrates distinct considerations with regard to identity, sexuality, and the traditional yin agency. The ongoing effort to conceptualize Chinese feminism within the context of China’s past coupled with its latest artistic reverberations “resonates historically with many earlier struggles to ﬁgure out how to ﬁnd accord between imported and domestic beliefs relating to politics.”68 Women in China have been dealing with issues of equality and injustice for centuries; concern over women’s issues is not a novel development by any means, and, according to Kristeva, “the role of women and, consequently, that of the family, have a particular quality in China which is unknown in the monotheistic West.”69 The post-reform period in China presents its own set of issues with regard to values and ideologies found “within the matrix of nationalism.”70 As suggested by Edwards:

Chinese scholars explaining their reluctance to embrace the f-word usually frame their discussions around the importance of resisting hegemonic ‘western’ concepts and of the need to create an indigenous Chinese understanding of the women’s movement. Feminism is often described as being inappropriate for Chinese conditions.71

As the feminist dialectic Cao Fei with China Tracy reﬂected on a computer expands across class and screen. Courtesy of the artist culture into the twenty- and Art21, New York. ﬁrst century, women artists will continue to constitute their subjectivities through aesthetic praxis and performativity. The development of feminist ideas in contemporary Chinese art acknowledges a certain understanding of Chinese feminism as works of art by artists such as Lin Tianmiao and Cao Fei reveal relevant issues facing women in China now. Elaborating upon the global canon of critical feminist theory, Chinese feminism embodied via contemporary Chinese art suggests modern reverberations of feminist interests. Chinese women artists claim their agency through art—no longer viewed “as tools for China’s modernization and reform,”72 these women are crafting an original and rousing vision of feminism in the present day.

Feminism as a series of movements has been and continues to be established through the direction of critical thinkers, writers, and artists who produce this dialectical understanding through investigation and creativity. As argued by Elizabeth Grosz, “[f]eminist theory must exist as both critique and construct . . . [and] should consider itself a form of strategy.” 73 In this regard, contemporary artworks by Chinese women can be viewed as strategic constructions that provide an extended version of the feminism dialogue. What are the stakes of this claim when doubts about the very nature of feminism’s particuliary remain? Does the feminine always signify a bifurcation from the whole of phallocentric humanity, therefore perpetuating timeworn patriarchal difference with regard to gender, the very

38 Vol. 14 No. 5 fundamental gesture of patriarchy itself? Do existing feminist constructs accurately address the extensive mystiﬁcation of “Otherness” that is woman, and what does this mean for the “Other” that is the Chinese woman?

While many theoretical questions remain, contemporary art has the potential to address (and redress) these issues in uncommon ways, revealing a world of creativity and possibility for woman that surpasses the familiar tropes of language and timeworn patriarchal systems. Women artists will continue to use their art “as an expressive means of inﬂuencing the consciousness of everyone . . . to permeate the social construction of reality and to create a human reality.”74 By every account the complexity of feminist discourse and our collective human consciousness is further confronted through the diversity of aesthetic work being done by women artists in China today.

Notes

1. Stephen Mitchell, Tao te Ching (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 35. 2. Lydia H. Liu, “Invention and Intervention: The Making of a Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature,” in Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities, eds. Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 151. 3. Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women (London: Marion Boyars, 1974/2000), 108. 4. Ibid., 111. 5. Ibid. 6. The deﬁnition of post-human in the framework of this paper is that of postmodern philosophy and contemporary art’s reinterpretation of what it means to be a human being (not to be mistaken for a hypothetical "future being" who exceeds human capacities by our current standards). In contemporary critical theory, the post-human perspective seeks to reconceive the universal nature of human existence. 7. Joanna Frueh, “The Body Through Women’s Eyes,” in Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970’s History and Impact, eds. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (New York: Abrams, 1996), 190. 8. Bonnie Smith, ed. Global Feminisms Since 1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 8. 9. Ibid., 1. 10. Ibid., 2. 11. Louise Edwards, “Issue-based Politics: Feminism with Chinese Characteristics or the Return of Bourgeois Feminism?” in The New Rich in China, ed. David S. Goodman (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 204. 12. Ibid., 208. 13. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude, and Escape (London: Zed Books, 1994), 15. 14. Ibid. 15. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990/2006), 6. 16. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Vintage, 1949/2011), 5. 17. Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London and New York: Verso, 1986/2006), 51. 18. Kristeva, About Chinese Women, 36–37. 19. Ibid., 37. 20. Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, 56. 21. Butler, Gender Trouble, 10. 22. Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Conﬁgurations of Woman and Modernity (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 209–11. 23. Elizabeth Grosz, “Contemporary Theories of Power and Subjectivity,” in Feminist Knowledge, Critique and Construct, ed. Sneja Gunew (London: Routledge, 2014), 60. 24. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 168. 25. Butler, Gender Trouble, xiv. 26. Edwards, “Issue-based Politics: Feminism with Chinese Characteristics or the Return of Bourgeois Feminism?,” 203. 27. Tani E. Barlow, ed. Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993), 118.

Vol. 14 No. 5 39 28. Elisabeth J. Croll, Feminism and Socialism in China (New York: Routledge, 1978), 12. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 12–13. 32. Sharon K. Hom, “China: First the Problems of Rights and Law,” in Women’s Rights: A Global View, ed. Lynn Walter (New York: Greenwood Publishing, 2000), 31–32. 33. Kristeva, About Chinese Women, 102. 34. Croll, Feminism and Socialism in China, 3. 35. Smith, Global Feminisms Since 1945, 4. 36. Lin Chun, “Toward a Chinese Feminism: A Personal Story,” in Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches, ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (New York: Routledge, 2002), 74. 37. Ibid, 66. 38. For further reading on the birth and chronology of contemporary Chinese art see Wu Hung, Transcience (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999), 12–16, and Melissa Chiu, Chinese Contemporary Art 7 Things You Should Know (New York: AW Asia, 2008), 19–29. 39. Joyce Hor-Chung Lau, “Bringing a Woman’s Touch to Chinese Art Scene,” New York Times (2011), http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/arts/21iht-women21.html/. 40. Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “For China, a New Kind of Feminism,” New York Times (2013), http://www. nytimes.com/2013/09/18/world/asia/for-china-a-new-kind-of-feminism.html/. 41. Chun, “Toward a Chinese Feminism: A Personal Story,” 73. 42. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, 41. 43. Ibid., 183. 44. Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, 72. 45. Ibid., 74. 46. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 102. 47. Ibid., 185. 48. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, 33-34. 49. Lin Tianmiao: Bound Unbound (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2012), 13. 50. Ibid., 19. 51. Sun Yunfan, “Interview: Lin Tianmiao on Art, Influence, and ‘Bodily Reaction’ as Inspiration,” Asia Society (2012), http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/interview-lin-tianmiao-art-influence-and-bodily- reaction-inspiration/. 52. Guo Xiaoyan, “The Defiant Narratives of Lin Tianmiao,” in Lin Tianmiao: Bound Unbound (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2012), 21–22. 53. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, 183. 54. Kristeva, About Chinese Women, 20. 55. Butler, Gender Trouble, 108. 56. Hélène Cixous, Writing the Feminine (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 6–7. 57. Sun, “Interview: Lin Tianmiao on Art, Influence, and ‘Bodily Reaction’ as Inspiration.” 58. Kristeva, About Chinese Women, 15. 59. The French term jouissance means enjoyment in terms of rights, property, and sexual orgasm. Poststructuralist philosophy has developed the sexual sense of this term in complex ways, denoting an excessive kind of pleasure linked to the splitting of the subject involved. 60. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 524. 61. The online platform known as Second Life is at http://secondlife.com/. 62. Luce Irigaray, “The Eternal Irony of the Community (1974),” in Hegel and Contemporary Continental Philosophy, ed. Dennis King Keenan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 324. 63. Xu Hong, “Walking Out of the Abyss: My Feminist Critique (1994),” in Contemporary Chinese Art Primary Documents, ed. Wu Hung (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 193. 64. Cixous, Writing the Feminine, 6. 65. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 141. 66. Ibid., 134. 67. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, 118. 68. Chun, “Toward a Chinese Feminism: A Personal Story,” 67. 69. Kristeva, About Chinese Women, 13. 70. Edwards, “Issue-based Politics: Feminism with Chinese Characteristics or the Return of Bourgeois Feminism?,” 209. 71. Ibid. 72. Hom, “China: First the Problems of Rights and Law,” 32. 73. Grosz, “Contemporary Theories of Power and Subjectivity,” 59. 74. Valie Export, “Women’s Art (1972),” in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (New Edition), eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Cornwall: Blackwell, 2003), 928.

40 Vol. 14 No. 5 Julie Chun Mise-en-scène: Cinematheque Chen Wei and Cheng Ran

Preview Much attention has been given to studying and following the trends of China’s post-Cultural Revolution youth, especially the generation of sibling- free, hyper-mobile, and technology articulate balinghou, a term describing those born in the 1980s. This generation became the defining symbol of China’s aspirations for the twenty-first century as well as private dreams of parents for their children to realize the life they had been deprived of. Accordingly, various studies examining the thoughts and actions of balinghou, from their attitudes about sexual behaviour and shopping habits to increasing Internet addiction, have been topics of intrigue and critique by Chinese and Western scholars alike, as well as market researchers.1 Perhaps the ceaseless fascination with this segment of Chinese society helps to explain why the balinghou are still considered and referred to as qingnian, literally meaning “green years” and nianqing ren, a proverbial term for “youth, youngster, young person,” despite that fifty percent of them have now reached the age of thirty-five. This convention is also prevalent in art circles, where, despite their progression toward middle-age, the moniker of “youth” is still used widely to describe artists who are thirty years of age or older in exhibitions and “young artist” categories for awards.2

Yet, many of the balinghou, especially those who graduated from art academies and institutions, are hardly novices to the art scene. Due to the surge of interest in contemporary Chinese art within the last few decades, as both a phenomenon and investment in the global art world, more and more Chinese artists are surpassing their rookie status at earlier ages to take part in prominent group and solo exhibitions while still in their twenties.3 I would suggest many balinghou artists have surpassed their “emerging” position and have established their practices—Chen Wei and Cheng Ran are among them.

These two artists exemplify the next generation of media artists who are in hot demand, having stepped conﬁdently onto the path cleared by the pioneering video artists of the late 1980s and early 90s, notably Zhang Peili, Wang Gongxin, and Hu Jieming to name but a few. With access to the technical knowledge and sophisticated equipment that are available abroad, if not in China, Chen Wei and Cheng Ran have been able to withstand the test of time that has weeded out their balinghou colleagues who might have relinquished their hold on art. Extending their artistic practice to overtake divergent venues for play and exploration, Chen Wei and Cheng Ran continue to expand their repertoire as they rise to new levels of artistic maturity—while refusing to grow old.

Vol. 14 No. 5 41 Wrapped in the cinematic language of the French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague), the exhibition Cinematheque at chi K11 art museum, Shanghai, on view from March 16 to May 31, 2015, is composed of two distinct yet interrelated solo exhibitions that mark a shift from the pictorial to the cinematic. Composed of past creations and new site-speciﬁc installations, Chen Wei and Cheng Ran curated their own works in cooperation with Leo Xu Projects, Shanghai. Each display seeks, on its own terms, to embody the ﬁlmic intent that characterizes French New Wave artistry by heightening the viewer’s subjective reception through active emotional engagement.4

Chinese cinema had historically achieved a pivotal breakthrough into the platform of global visual culture post 1989 with the rise of the directors of the Fifth Generation and subsequently the Sixth Generation—a stylistic term rather than a genealogical sequence. The Fifth Generation directors represent graduates from the Beijing Film Academy such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Tian Zhuangzhuang.5 By using realism and embedding social critique into the narrative, they transformed Chinese film that once had been sustained as a propaganda instrument for reinforcing state ideology. The Sixth Generation is acknowledged with Zhang Yuan as the founder who, in 1989, began focusing his lens on urban life and its effects on China.6 Directors such as Wang Xiaoshuai, He Jianjun, Lu Xuechang, among others, gave voice to social issues that were unspeakable at the time—divorce, homosexuality, and criminal activities, such that, many of their films were banned in mainland China. While great strides have been made, contemporary commercial films are nonetheless bound by the use of conventional sets and scripted dialogue.

This is the starting point of Chen Wei and Cheng Ran’s investigation. Chen Wei aims to defamiliarize the staged set with an unexpected twist. Deftly exhibiting his trademark obsession with detail, Chen Wei’s segment of the exhibition is tightly held together by the theme of nightclub and disco culture that, as shall be revealed, offers insight into the ineffable angst of the balinghou generation. Cheng Ran’s exhibition space is the larger, perhaps to accommodate the sprawling ﬂow of his conceptual stream of consciousness. It features an eclectic mix of past works with more recent artistic output developed during his 2013–14 artist’s residency in Amsterdam. Throughout the mix, with its convergence of his signature leitmotifs of sound and dazzling visual effects, Cheng Ran carries out a relentless inquiry into the trope of the real and imagined, fact and ﬁction, and the question of authorship.

Act 1, Scene 1 Chen Wei: In the Waves Appropriately situated in the abyss of the third level basement within the inner sanctums of chi K11 art museum, Shanghai, the passage down the escalator takes a drastic turn from the bright offerings of candy-coloured shoes and dresses available in the upper precincts of the shopping mall to the dark “theatre” of the exhibition space. Stepping into Chen Wei’s exhibition is like stepping into the underground subculture of local clubbing and the discotheques that proliferate as spaces of pleasure and

42 Vol. 14 No. 5 Chen Wei, Entrance, 2013, transparency, light box. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art museum, Shanghai.

escapism in large and small cities throughout China. The ﬁrst visual encounter is a large rectangular photograph of a nondescript doorway encased in an illuminated light box that is paradoxically enveloped in darkness. The only visible source of light are the faint hues of pastel pink and purple emitting from a square-framed doorway to reveal the ﬁrst step of a descending staircase. The glow beckons one to enter as if enticing us to come closer and touch the beguiling shades of a disappearing rainbow. Simply titled Entrance (2013), this doorway serves as the point of entry as well as an allegorical portal into Chen Wei’s universe, in which elaborately constructed sets serve as a stage for revealing the psychological apprehensions of China’s transforming society.

Born in 1980 in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, Chen Wei attended Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, where he learned to control not only the television camera, but, more importantly, the intricacies of lighting, set design, and narrative construction. Beginning with his photographic series of still lifes from 2007, Chen Wei began garnering attention for his meticulously staged scenes of detritus. The careful ordering of decomposing chaos was too great to have gone unnoticed by the art world. Mariagrazia Costantino, Artistic Director of OCT Contemporary Art Terminal Shanghai, who included Chen Wei (and Cheng Ran) in the group exhibition Degeneration (December 22, 2013 to March 23, 2014), notes, “In my opinion, Chen Wei is one of the best Chinese artists working with the analog camera. His work is about the study of the medium that is based upon labour intensive research such that it exceeds presentation of an image. There is a profound transference in his work as he takes us from the exterior to the interior with his careful and thoughtful use of space. His shift from the external to the internal hints at how this subtle change of place and landscape can have a great impact on our state of mind and psychic conditions.”7

The soiled and corroded objects embedded in Chen Wei’s still lifes quietly hint at memento mori, underscoring the impermanence of life through space and time. Fragile ephemerality is further reiﬁed by the artist’s willful dismantling and, thus, complete erasure of his obsessively arranged scenes. After Chen Wei photographs the constructed set, he leaves no trace of it. He

Vol. 14 No. 5 43 does not even retain any of the time-intensive sketches he created by hand, Right: Chen Wei, Unprecedented Freedom, 2014, LED sign, 20 x 100 but discards them for fear that some curator may want to exhibit them in x 15 cm. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 the future. The only tangible evidence that remains of what once was real is art museum, Shanghai. the photograph, which, paradoxically, can be made permanent through the process of mechanical reproduction.

During our interview, as Chen Wei leads me through his segment of the Cinematheque exhibition, titled In the Waves, he discusses the turn his artistic practice recently took:

The work currently being exhibited is related to my previous series but it is also an opening to a brand new chapter. Throughout the years, my work has been influenced by the theater, because I am fascinated by how events that take place on the stage are theatrical. In my previous works, about four to five years ago, I was inspired by the process of story telling, but over the recent years, my interest in narratives waned. More often, I find myself captivated by events taking place in reality. They force me to reflect upon my artistic practice and methods of creation toward the direction my art should take. This may be triggered by events taking place around me, which I believe demand my attention.8

The most noticeable shift in Chen Wei’s recent photography is the turn from representations of banal objects to human ﬁgures as subject matter. People, mostly the artist’s friends, were assembled to reproduce and re-create with mock euphoria the delirium and ecstasy sought after in clubs and discos. Set aloft and projecting directly from the wall at a ninety-degree angle, slender light boxes reveal photographs of young male and female bodies held frozen in sensuous stances. The impression of cascading light within the images has the visual effect of pointillist tactility, so much that the elevated light boxes appear sculptural, defying their two-dimensional supports. The identities of the revelers in Float #0501, #0505, and #0815 (2013) are shrouded in the murky cigarette-smoke haze and psychedelic frenzy of self-absorption as they seem to be pumping to the thundering vibes that have evaporated into silence by the time the image reaches the viewer who witnesses these private reveries. Reinforcing the notion of opacity the scrolling LED text in Unprecedented Freedom (2014) can only be read vaguely through its blurred reﬂection on the aluminum siding of an adjacent wall.

Strangely, it is the silence and the empty space throughout Chen Wei’s exhibition that discomposes the observer. Despite the expansiveness of the exhibition space where these immense light boxes are presented, there is a stark contrast between the empty exhibition space and the space of real clubs, where wall-to-wall bodies comingle in search of hedonistic gratiﬁcation and escapism. In Chen Wei’s simulated site of nocturnal diversion, the tactile form of the negative space and overwhelming silence could perhaps be read as a work of art itself.

44 Vol. 14 No. 5 Left: Chen Wei, Float #0815, Silence from without echoes the silence that is suffused within. When 2013, transparency, light box, 100 x 75 cm. Photo: staging the photographs, Chen Wei’s friends were asked to dance without Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art the beneﬁt of music. Why would this main element so central to club museum, Shanghai. culture be removed? Chen Wei comments, “Because it is precisely in Middle: Chen Wei, Float #0501, 2013, transparency, clubs that we dance to music. Without music, my friends were given the light box, 100 x 75 cm. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. challenge of being forced to recall past experiences of intoxication and loss Courtesy of the artist and chi of self. Your dance movement would be reconsidered without music. This K11 art museum, Shanghai 9 Right: Chen Wei, Float is a psychological development.” Accordingly, there is also the absence #0505, 2013, transparency, light box, 100 x 75 cm. of pleasure in the faces of Chen Wei’s clubbers. Every dancer seems to be Photo: Kerstin Brandes. operating in neutral mode. This state of muted emotion further highlights Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art museum, Shanghai. the discomﬁting ambiance of restraint and reticence that pervades the dark exhibition space. Even the voices of the Chinese viewers who found their way down from the fanfare of the stores and restaurants above were

Vol. 14 No. 5 45 hushed, the sound of their footsteps muffled by the carpet beneath them. In the quietude, Chen Wei’s voice resonates as he speaks to me, “We need to break the conventional way of thinking, mostly about making preconceived judgments of people by their exterior expressions. We need to reflect upon many elements that are beyond the surface. The club culture is just such a place reflecting this aspect of our reality.”10

As if in defiance of not only gravity Chen Wei, Float series, 2014, transparency, light but also stasis, Chen Wei’s Float box, 100 x 75 cm. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy series (2014), propped on the of the artist and chi K11 art floor, collages overlapping images museum, Shanghai. of individuals as if simulating an under-the-influence hallucinatory stage when one has lost control of one’s own faculties. Providing context for his concept of the disco scenes, Chen Wei comments in The Guardian, “In China, nightclubs are the only places where large numbers of people are allowed to get together. Gatherings of people all doing the same thing would never be permitted anywhere else—certainly not on the street. It would make the government nervous. . . . [These images are] about dreams and reality: people in China go out clubbing to chase their dreams, but they can’t escape from what’s happening outside.”11 Chen Wei’s remark corresponds to the findings of scholar Alex Cockain, who observed and interviewed China’s urban youths (mostly aged between 16 and 24). Cockain notes that while venues of entertainment such as shopping malls, coffee shops, and karaoke bars prove to be pleasant alternative spaces for Chinese youth to withdraw from the stresses of life, “such retreats are, however, only temporary.”12

The inescapable reality of anxiety and aggravation that comes from home and work seems to be symbolically represented by the salient feature of the forceful light that washes over the immense scenes in In the Waves like a body of water, as if immersing those caught in the current to send them adrift. Chen Wei pauses before the large light box panels and remarks:

The reason I use the title In the Waves is that it is a condition or a state. Go swim in the ocean and you will know what it is like to be in the waves. When a terrifying wave from afar comes toward you, you are frightened even if you are on the beach. When the ocean is at peace, we are at ease swimming. We do not determine the condition. Our lives are related to greater forces that trigger our emotions. This explains why some people are extremely frightened by the sea while others dare to challenge it. The sea is not like a swimming pool. You have no control of it. This is like life in China. This is not a place for jokes. Many things are out of our hands.”13

46 Vol. 14 No. 5 Top: Chen Wei, In the Waves Chen Wei’s comment cannot be #5 and In the Waves #6, 2013, transparency, light closer to the truth in exposing box, each 180 x 225 cm. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. the public and private “faces” of Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art museum, Shanghai. China. Despite China’s claims to Left: Chen Wei, In the Waves reform—with the anti-corruption #1, 2013, transparency, light box, 180 x 225 cm. Photo: campaigns and the unstoppable Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art mass construction of luxury malls museum, Shanghai. boosting the perceived rise in living standards for urbanites—China remains an immensely fragmented society, overburdened with daily problems that go unreported, undiscussed, and unresolved.

One such indicator of the frustrations and angst experienced by the younger segment in Chinese society is the rise of a drug culture in China that, as elsewhere in the world, has become part of club culture. The Brookings East Asia reports a significant upsurge in the use of recreational drugs such as ATS (amphetamine-type of stimulants) with about seventy- five percent of registered drug addicts being under the age of thirty-five.14 Reasons for turning to synthetic solace are as varied as the individuals themselves. In China, with its accelerated rate of transitions in economy leading to disparity in wealth and frustration within society, the craving and the desire for oblivion can be pressing and acute. Chen Wei observes, “Every morning you see faces going to work on the streets and in the metro. Their expressions are all the same. You might ask, why are these people not happy? It is not your place to ask. Life and the greater environment are full of pressures. We wonder when the next wave will hit us and ponder how to face the unpredictable coming. The unknown is the most haunting.”15

The numbing sense of emptiness felt by the clubbing generation take concrete form in the glistening stainless-steel ruin, History of Enchantment (Cold Sculpture) (2014). A ﬂuted column rises like a phallic monument,

Vol. 14 No. 5 47 surrounded by circular platforms and blocks that once functioned as tabletops, seats, and furnishings in lounges of nightclubs, discos, and karaoke bars. The sleek mirrored surfaces throw back the image of the ambiguous environs, the viewer’s reﬂection embedded within. Chen Wei elaborates:

Chen Wei, History of Enchantment (Cold Sculpture), 2014, stainless steel installation. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art museum, Shanghai.

At initial glance, these sculptural works may not remind you of the dance clubs at all. They look like sculptures found in any contemporary museum. But all of these forms come from the dance clubs. This kind of reappropriation allows me to reinterpret what it is that allows people to seek the loss of self or pursuit of self at clubs. What is it that holds your emotion? If you actually go to a club and witness people in a state of ecstasy, it does not necessarily mean they are happy, because contradictions are invisible. Expression cannot alter a person’s condition. We can see our selves only through an external and different perspective.16

A different perspective is precisely what is encountered when we step into the pitch-black confines of The Drunken Dancehall (2015), which is lit primarily by ultraviolet lights. This site-specific simulacra of a discotheque is replete with a full bar, a cloak room in which a leather jacket has been checked in, a large mirrored disco orb suspended from the ceiling, a gleaming cylindrical rod ready for pole-dancing, and shards of beer bottles scattered on the dance floor. The scene seems to imply that the dance floor is not what it’s cracked up to be. In searching for elusive joy, you can get hurt and may find yourself bleeding. As we walk the length of this club, which is appropriately retrofitted to resemble a real prototype, we are again keenly aware that all traces of raucous noise have been muted to stillness, and dancing bodies are missing. In Chen Wei’s parallel universe, why is there the pressing need to stress the void and emptiness?

When this question is asked, the artist does not offer any answer but, rather, poses more questions:

Dance club is just a container. It is up to the artist to ﬁll in the content. But the artist can only offer a perspective. [This site] may allow you to see loneliness, which some

48 Vol. 14 No. 5 Top left: Chen Wei, The might not be able to see at all. This is not important. The Drunken Dancehall, 2015, installation. Photo: Kerstin artist can trigger all these and other perspectives . . . [which] Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art you must read for yourself. And reflect upon your own life. museum, Shanghai. And people around you. Why do people in clubs choose Top right: Chen Wei, The Drunken Dancehall, 2015, intoxication? Does intoxication [or oblivion] exist? They installation. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of seem like they want to forget about themselves to experience the artist and chi K11 art the loss of self, perhaps a goal that people can never achieve. museum, Shanghai. 17 Bottom: Chen Wei, The But why? How do you explain this phenomenon? Drunken Dancehall, 2015, installation. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of As we exit the The Drunken Dancehall, a flickering green light bids us the artist and chi K11 art museum, Shanghai. farewell. According to Chen Wei, this light’s pulsating sequence is in Morse Code, emitting the first few stanzas of the one-hundred-line verse poem The Drunken Boat, written in 1871 by French poet Arthur Rimbaud at the age of seventeen.18 In the studies by Wallace Rowlie, a Rimbaud scholar, this poem rests on the anguished tensions between indifference or disillusionment (evoking safety and security) and the desire to locate a sense of purpose (conscious responsibility) in this absurd and irrational world.19 The inquiry posited by the poet examines the choices that life offers. We all face this

Vol. 14 No. 5 49 duality of contending forces. The decision we must make is whether to be awakened and enlightened or continue to exist in an inebriated state and ﬂoat aimlessly with the crowd. Yet, will the outcome of the decision matter? This is the question asked by the young poet Rimbaud and rephrased 143 years later by Chen Wei. We know there is no easy answer. Rimbaud had to ﬁnd a way to navigate the suffocating biases of his society, just as Chen Wei also feels compelled. The Morse Code is a universal signal—oftentimes used as an appeal for assistance in time of duress—its advantage over voice is speed and the ability to bypass poor environmental conditions. Yet, the one singular and most crucial handicap of this powerful communicative tool is that the message is comprehensible only to those who are skilled at interpreting it.

Act 2, Scene 1 Cheng Ran: Music Is On, Band Is Gone As if in direct contrast to the quiet stillness presented by Chen Wei, Cheng Ran leashes out in full force an electrifying barrage of sounds channeled through music, voices, and random noise. Perhaps this is why even though the band is gone, the music obdurately remains “on,” as evinced by the title of his segment of the exhibition. With the sleek and dramatic aesthetics of a luxury brand advertisement or Hollywood movie trailer, the sounds and opulent visuals from the twenty-ﬁve-channel video Always I Trust (2014) quickly lures and enchants just about every passerby. The wall text notes, “This ﬁlm is developed from email spam Cheng Ran received last September from an unknown woman.” Starring Carina Lau, the Chinese- born Hong Kong actress who came to fame in the 1980s, there is a distinctly uneasy strain throughout the short six minute clip due to the disjunction in the mature appearance and voice of Carina Lau and the textual confession that reads as if it had been typed by a love-sick teenager. This piece tugs at the heartstrings and seems to be dedicated to anyone who has ever experienced a one-way crush or unrequited love. The plea is desperate, yet spoken with matter-of-fact nonchalance. The title in Chinese plays upon the multiple entendre of xin (信), which can mean true, real, trust, faith, believe, letter, mail, and message.

The words that roll as subtitles throughout the loop are laced with typos and improper grammar, not unlike the bad English translations that are a ﬁxture of pirated DVDs sold for less than $2 USD on almost every street corner of Shanghai. However, for Always I Trust, the spam e-mail in broken English was ﬁrst transcribed verbatim, and the Chinese translations added thereafter. Despite its apparent incoherence, we can follow the fragmented words that emerge one after another:

In case u dont know who this is its ME; anyways how u been?; we used to chat a bit; imkinda scared, are you still on, i cudn’t ﬁnd u, take me out, I actually need help; THATS NOT WHY IM CONTACTING U lol; but this dam laptop is such a piece of garbage; i think u deleted me :(

Displacement of original signiﬁcation through splicing disparate texts with unrelated images and/or sound has been a consistent feature of Cheng Ran’s

50 Vol. 14 No. 5 Cheng Ran, Always I Trust, 2014, 25-channel video installation. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art museum, Shanghai.

Cheng Ran, Always I Trust, 2014, 25-channel video installation. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art museum, Shanghai.

oeuvre since This Is the End (2008). He became fascinated with adaptations when he came across a pirated DVD in China where the ending was a sequence from a completely different movie. Since then, he became aware that many illegally copied versions of DVDs, CDs, and books have been “enriched” with alternate re-telling using modiﬁed covers, insertions of extra paragraphs or footage, and even complete omissions of entire chapters. Cheng Ran became beguiled by this expedient form of storytelling. “By extending some movies for a couple of minutes . . . the whole storyline can fall apart; comedy becomes tragedy, a hero might lose his life . . . all these things can happen in this extra one last minute,” Cheng Ran notes.20

His earlier work Existence Without Air, Food, or Water (2013), presented at Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne, probed the contents of a found diary. Cheng Ran took the entries and transformed them into a song. The identity of the love-sick woman remains anonymous, yet it was she—this nameless person—who authored the phrase “without air, food, or water.” Cheng Ran took full possession of her words, not only as the title of his installation, but also as the name for that solo exhibition. He seems to be asking, “Isn’t an ‘original author’ also a ﬁgment of the imagination or perhaps society’s construct?” Especially, in the twenty-ﬁrst century, in looking back through the course of the long trajectory of human history, how can most ideas and objects rightly claim the distinction of originality? By now, hasn’t just about everything that could be done, been done? Isn’t what might be perceived as “original” only a variation of what already exists?

Vol. 14 No. 5 51 In 1985, in her important text “The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths,” Rosalind Krauss questioned the preconceived notion surrounding not only the “cult of originality” but also the “culture of originality” advanced by the early twentieth century modernists.21 The basis of her critique of artistic authenticity went beyond the examination of formal aesthetic invention to questioning the self, the “avant-garde,” as the progenitor of originality.22 Whether Cheng Ran knowingly took his cue from Krauss or not, he continues her line of thought by exploiting the privileged status of authorship. Through intentional fracture and ambiguity, Cheng Ran asserts the postmodern condition of pastiche and underscores Krauss’s demythologizing criticism. Cheng Ran acknowledges, “I don’t think anything new can be really created. I’m not sure I could ever create completely new images, music, or sounds: all the information has been already covered in all possible directions. My approach is starting from some classical elements and rethinking their function as well as other possible connections with the surrounding environment.”23

Cheng Ran, Chewing Gum Paper, 2011, video, 5 mins. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art museum, Shanghai.

Chewing Gum Paper (2011) does just this. In the video, there are scattered crumpled silver balls of chewing gum wrapping paper atop the large expanse of a bass drum. As the surface of the drum begins vibrating due to the intensely loud sound waves coming from unseen speakers, the small crinkled orbs pulsate and jump erratically in random sequence. Accompanying the image is a soundtrack excerpted from a historic speech delivered on August 28, 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., by the African-American civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet we are denied the speech in its entirety—an oration that created a watershed moment in the history of American Civil Rights Movement. The only sentence we are forced to hear over and over again in the ﬁve-minute loop, which continues ad inﬁnitum like a broken record, is Martin Luther King, Jr’s repeated voiceover “I have a dream.” Many of the Chinese viewers whom I approached to ask about this installation found Chewing Gum Paper humorous and amusing, while an American viewer was outright offended due to its irreverent appropriation.24 The consolidation of an iconic phrase from a historical moment in history with the twitching wads of gum wrappers seems completely unrelated, but the words and image are linked through improvisation. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic phrase erupted as an impromptu departure from his scripted speech in response to a shout from a

52 Vol. 14 No. 5 member in the audience. On a comical level, the jolting gum wrappers, with their unpredictable and random movements are reimagined by the artist as serendipitous orbs ﬂoating in a “strange and lonely galaxy.”25 As a creator of new meanings, Cheng Ran indicates, “Through the movement of the little paper balls in the video, we can feel the presence of Martin Luther King’s sentence—not just a spiritual presence, but also one that becomes physical: you can see them beating . . . the transformation of words into substance.”26

One day during his 2013–14 artist’s residency at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, Cheng Ran took back to his studio a pile of discarded brochures and magazines from the 1970s and 80s that he found in a trash dump. Inspired by the Dutch texts in these papers, none of which he could read without the aid of an assistant, Cheng Ran began combining bits and pieces from what he had collected with lyrics from opera, poetry, and quotes from his earlier works, as well as musings about his dreams and fantasies, to form a novel. Taking on the pseudonym Wojtowircz Fog, Cheng Ran began writing his book, which eventually amassed 130,000 Chinese characters and was published as a work of ﬁction titled Circadian Rhythm. Conceived as a detective story, the novel, according to Cheng Ran, was so badly written that it was meant to be “read . . . on a toilet.”27 Which was why special excerpts and clues to the mystery were exhibited in public toilets during the 2013 opening held at Rijksakademie.

Left and right: Cheng Ran, Circadian Rhythm, 2014, installation. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art museum, Shanghai.

For the space of the chi K11 art museum, Shanghai, Cheng Ran expanded Circadian Rhythm (2014) into a site-specific reading room. Brightly illuminated black-and-white vortex-like diagrams enclose the viewer/reader like bookends on both sides of the wall. In the centre of the installation, on a circular dais covered with a soft grey rug, several copies of Cheng Ran’s novel were firmly attached to the platform with long tangles of fishing wire (as works of art, the books commanded a distinct commercial value and were not available to be taken freely by the public). Reality was suspended as readers at the exhibition followed the escapades of the fictional detective who attempts to answer unsolved questions that were posed by the author through the indiscriminate process of cut and paste.

Mariagrazia Costantino, who interviewed Cheng Ran for OCAT Shanghai’s 2015 Degeneration exhibition catalogue, claims, “Cheng Ran is not afraid to manipulate the existing reality because what he can get from this manipulation is a version much closer to his own idea of reality.”28 She continues, “Cheng looks for the mysterious life that can be dug out and discovered behind well-known cultural products. . . . It’s a semantic game of

Vol. 14 No. 5 53 mismatching, of intentional disappointment of expectations and curiosity [as well as a] sense of displacement.”29 Costantino further asserts that Cheng Ran is able to “expose the mythology of art and cinema due to his unique position as an outsider.”30 Born in 1981 in Inner Mongolia, Cheng Ran does not hail from China’s urban centres but from its outer provinces. He found his way to one of the artistic centres, Hangzhou, when he was accepted to the Chinese Academy of Art in Hangzhou, which has a highly regarded media department, with classes taught by some of China’s most prominent video artists, such as Zhang Peili and Qiu Zhijie. Upon graduation in 2004, Cheng Ran worked for ﬁve years under Yang Fudong. Despite his acceptance into the fold of Chinese media art, Cheng Ran chooses to remain a bit aloof, Costantino believes, because the aspect of distance gives him the space to evaluate what is taking place within. Such is the advantage of being a self- constructed outsider. Cheng Ran purposefully spends a signiﬁcant part of his time abroad each year. He states, “Life abroad is an adventure, you start everything from scratch; language, communication . . . you get deprived of all your previous experiences and comforts.”

The sensitivity that comes from Cheng Ran, Day and Night, The Stardust, being an outsider, even in his own 2015, 16-channel video installation. Photo: Julie country, is effectively achieved Chun. Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art museum, with his latest creation, Day and Shanghai. Night, The Stardust (2015). Like a parenthesis, the final installation of his exhibition equals in visual virtuosity with the first piece Always I Trust (2014). The concept of Day and Night, The Stardust is so alarmingly simple that one wonders why no one had thought of it before. Eight pairs of projectors are placed, not in the conventional frontal format toward a screen, but with four pairs facing each other and four facing away from each other at a slight angle, so that the projected images slide out elliptically to overlap with those coming from the other devices. The projections are of banal street scenes that unfurl like a colourful carpet, making tangibly visible the commonplace and outlandish features that define Shanghai life. A dog dressed in a puffy blue jacket returns an extended gaze to the viewer. An early morning commuter walking to work stares at his iPhone at an intersection. Another vignette shows the slow ambling of a pair of legs clad in pajama bottoms and indoor slippers walking through a busy street. A man has just fallen on the pavement and has dropped his phone. A white stray cat pounces on top of a garbage pile. Each sequence lasts mere seconds but is extended in intense slow motion, so the continuous loop creates a cycle of unbroken repetition that returns over and over, like an experience of déja vu. Any of these ordinary scenes could be taking place immediately outside the mall that hosts this exhibition, yet they take on a different meaning of heightened aesthetics in this context. Moreover, the unorthodox method of elongated distortions has the effect of saturating the often-overlooked quotidian sights with an inexplicable lyricism that resolutely refuses to be overlooked.

54 Vol. 14 No. 5 Cheng Ran, Day and Night, The Stardust, 2015, 16-channel video installation. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art museum, Shanghai.

Cheng Ran, Day and Night, The Stardust, 2015, 16-channel video installation. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and chi K11 art museum, Shanghai.

Final Credits Cinematheque marks a poignant turn in the expansive ﬁeld of Chinese contemporary media art, which has been evolving at an accelerated pace in the work of the balinghou artists and their successors, the jiulinghou (those born in the 1990s). These contemporary iterations are presented through photography and video, the media they are most familiar and comfortable with. Accessibility to text and image as inspiration is made constant and immediate through China’s ubiquitous platforms Wechat and Youku (China’s version of Instagram and youtube, respectively). It is in exploring and exploiting the production of cultural meaning derived from these very media that artists Chen Wei and Cheng Ran are able to provide distinctive testimonies about China’s polymorphous reality.

Framing each scene with a tight, concise touch of a stage director, Chen Wei unveils the stark interior glimpses of China’s young populace, which is carried on the waves of a drugged and intoxicated existence. Faced with the choice to drift aimlessly or to ﬁght the tide with a sense of purpose, the decision is not simply a matter of choosing to be helpless or to deviate from expected conformity, but, rather, to awaken to an awareness of the choices governing one’s life. Cheng Ran offers musings that are consolidated by his signature practice of intersecting sound with sight. There is often very little recognizable relationship between the aural and the visual, yet they co-exist, side-by-side or one on top of the other, like a symphonic cacophony, as it exists in both public and private corners of China and elsewhere. By next year, both artists will have crossed the threshold age of mid-thirties. They have established their own respective families as husbands and fathers. With the weight of maturity comes a sense of gravity, whether one wants it or not. Even though the curtain will fall at the close of this exhibition and each display will be taken down, certain memories of scenes will undoubtedly linger in our minds, prompting us to anticipate and await their sequel.

Vol. 14 No. 5 55 The author thankfully acknowledges Alvin Li for his professional translation of Chen Wei’s interview and for providing insight into the artistic intent of French New Wave Cinema.

Notes

1. For a sociological study that examines of changing sexual behaviors of Chinese youths in Shanghai from 1990 to 2000, see James Farrer, Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Treatises and texts that focus on Chinese youths and internet addiction abound, including numerous ongoing studies about this widespread phenomenon. See, for example, Trent Bax, Youth and Internet Addiction in China (New York: Routledge, 2014). 2. Even at the age of 33, Cheng Ran was nominated in the category “Best Young Artist of the Year” at the 8th AAC Awards (Award of Art China). See Cheng Ran’s website, “Biography,” http://www. chengranstudio.com/. 3. In the appendix describing twenty-five artist’s biographies in the exhibition My Generation: Young Chinese Artists, curated by Barbara Pollack, 88% (22 artists) were included in group exhibitions and 72% (18 artists) had a solo exhibition in their twenties. Out of this group, the median age of an artist when selected for group show was twenty-seven and the median age of an artist when selected for a solo show was twenty-eight. See My Generation: Young Chinese Artists, exhibition catalogue (London: D. Giles, 2014), 142–55. 4. For an introduction to French New Wave Cinema, see Simon Hitchman, “French New Wave: Where to Start,” 2008, http://www.newwavefilm.com/new-wave-cinema-guide/nouvelle-vague-where-to- start.shtml/. 5. For a brief introduction to the Fifth Generation in Chinese cinema, see Fifth Generation (film directors), in Encyclopedia of Chinese Contemporary Culture, http://contemporary_chinese_culture. academic.ru/254/Fifth_Generation__film_directors/. 6. About the Sixth Generation (film directors), see also Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture, http://contemporary_chinese_culture.academic.ru/710/Sixth_Generation_%28film_directors%29/. 7. Mariagrazia Costantino, unpublished interview with the author, Shanghai, April 13, 2015. 8. Chen Wei, unpublished interview with the author, Shanghai, April 18, 2015. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Karin Andreasson, “Chen Wei’s Best Photograph: a Chinese Nightclub Fantasy,” The Guardian, April 30, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/30/chen-wei-best-photograph-china- nightclub/. 12. Alex Cockain, Young Chinese in Urban China (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 43–44. 13. Chen Wei, unpublished interview with the author, Shanghai, April 18, 2015. 14. Zhang Yong-an, “Asia’s ATS Epidemic: The Challenges for China,” March 2014, SERIES: Brookings East Asia Commentary no. 76, http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2014/03/10-asia-ats- epidemic-zhang/. 15. Chen Wei, unpublished interview with the author, Shanghai, April 18, 2015. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. A full translation in English by Wallace Fowlie of Arthur Rimbaud’s French poem The Drunken Boat is available through the Poetry Foundation at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/242790/. 19. Translations and anthology of Rimbaud’s poetry abound, including those by Wallace Fowlie, who remains the foremost scholar of not only Rimbaud’s works but also French literature. Some critical translations of Rimbaud’s writings with accompanying introductions include Wallace Fowlie, Rimbaud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965) and Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 20. Cheng Ran, “This is the End (2008),” in Degeneration, exhibition pamphlet (Shanghai: OCT Contemporary Art Terminal Shanghai, 2014), 11. 21. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 155–56. 22. Ibid, 157. 23. Mariagrazia Costantino, Degeneration, exhibition catalogue (Shanghai: OCT Contemporary Art Terminal Shanghai, 2015), 65. 24. On May 18, 2015, the author spent two hours at the exhibition space asking randomly selected audience members about their responses to various artworks. 25. Cheng Ran, Chewing Gum Paper wall text at chi K11 art museum. It reads: “Some silver paper balls scatter on a drum surface. They are jumping and moving with the fragmented ‘I Have a Dream’,” the lecture record of Martin Luther king [sic]. They seem like forming a strange and lonely galaxy.” 26. Costantino, Degeneration, exhibition catalogue, 66. 27. Frederieke Beunk, “Meeting Cheng Ran in his studio,” Rijksakademie Inside Out, March 2014. http:// rijksakademie.tumblr.com/post/80168018888/meeting-cheng-ran-in-his-studio/. 28. Costantino, Degeneration, exhibition catalogue, 56. 29. Ibid, 57. 30. Costantino, unpublished interview with the author, Shanghai, April 13, 2015.

56 Vol. 14 No. 5 Zheng Shengtian Interview with Paz Venturelli Baraona December 23, 2013 José Venturelli Foundation, Santiago, Chile

José Venturelli (1924–1988). Courtesy of José Venturelli Foundation, Santiago, Chile.

Zheng Shengtian: I am very pleased to have this opportunity to interview you, the daughter of artist José Venturelli. For many years I have wanted to learn more about your father and your family’s story, and I hoped that one day I would have a chance to meet you. Finally we meet today. Can we start with the time when you ﬁrst went to China?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: I went to China in 1952 when I was only one and a half years old. I do not remember much about it.

Zheng Shengtian: I know you have a very beautiful Chinese name, Heping (和平, peace). Why were you given this name?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: This is not just my Chinese name; my Spanish name is Paz (peace). I was born in Germany. There was a World Youth Congress1 held in Berlin and my parents participated in the event. Delegates came from many countries. China’s Culture Minister Emi Siao was there, too,2 and he invited my father to go to China to understand China. I happened to be born at that time. Pablo Neruda3 said if I was born at the peace conference, I should be named Peace.

Vol. 14 No. 5 57 Zheng Shengtian: I read a report saying the name had something to do Top: José Venturelli, Flags of Peace, 1952, oil on canvas. with Picasso. Is that so? Courtesy of José Venturelli Foundation, Santiago, Chile. Bottom: José Venturelli, Paz Venturelli Baraona: It’s quite interesting. Picasso was also in Berlin. So Chinese poet Ai Qing, artist Qi Baishi, and poet Xiao was his wife Françoise Gilot, and she was pregnant, too. Neruda suggested San (Emi Siao), March 1954 (left to right). Courtesy of that if the newborns were all girls, the ﬁrst should be called Paloma (dove), José Venturelli Foundation, and the second should be named Peace. Picasso’s daughter was born ﬁrst. Santiago, Chile. Of course, I do not know Paloma Picasso, and she doesn’t know me, either.

Zheng Shengtian: So you were born later than her?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: Right. Because in Spanish, words are inverted—it’s not peace dove, but paloma de la paz (dove of peace)—the ﬁrst girl was called Paloma, the second Peace.

58 Vol. 14 No. 5 Zheng Shengtian: You said you came to Beijing at age one and a half. Had your father already worked for the Asia-Paciﬁc Peace Council?

José Venturelli, Portrait of Paz Venturelli Baraona: No. After Paz, 1954, oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm. Courtesy of I was born, my grandmother went José Venturelli Foundation, Santiago, Chile. to Europe to take me back to Chile. Then my parents went to China in order to familiarize themselves better with China’s revolution because it was such an enormous event in the world at that time. Their original plan was to stay three weeks then come back, bit it was extended to three months, then three years.

Zheng Shengtian: Until what age did you stay in Beijing after you arrived?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: Four. But we went back and forth. We were in China almost every year. I remember living in China for a total of sixteen years. A teacher was found to teach me Spanish when I was nine. Because many pronunciations in Chinese didn’t exist in Spanish, I had to start from scratch. I studied in the Dong Jiao Ming Xiang Elementary School, and it was not far from my home. It was an ordinary Chinese primary school. All the kids were Chinese. I stayed there for some time. Later, after I came back from Cuba, I attended Bei Fu (the High School afﬁliated with the Peking University).

Zheng Shengtian: And you studied there until when?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: It was not consecutive because my parents were often travelling. They participated in the World Peace Council. They went frequently to Asia and Latin America for their work. Sometimes I traveled with them. Sometimes I stayed in Beijing.

Zheng Shengtian: Were you alone?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: There was a very lovely old lady taking care of me. She didn’t do cleaning or cooking. Her job was just looking after me. I remember her singing Chinese opera, and she sang very well. She was with us for many years, a truly lovely person, and she taught me a lot of things.

Zheng Shengtian: Is she still alive?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: I guess she passed away. We had been in contact for many years. When my father died in Beijing she was with us, and at that time she was already more than ninety years old.

Vol. 14 No. 5 59 José Venturelli, Pu Pao (Cloth Bag), 1959, oil on canvas, 90 x 115 cm. Courtesy of José Venturelli Foundation, Santiago, Chile.

Zheng Shengtian: I have talked to some artists who met your father, attended his lectures, or saw his exhibitions in the 1960s. They all believed that your father had great impact in the Chinese art community when he was in Beijing. You were a teenager by then. Do you recall anything from that time?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: We lived in Cuba From 1960 to 1963.

Zheng Shengtian: Was that the time your father created the mural Camilo Cienfuegos?4

Paz Venturelli Baraona: Right. One day, while my father was working on his last large mural, he was up very high painting and I was below. Suddenly the door opened. Guess who was coming? Che Guevara. My dad said: This is my daughter. That was ﬁrst time I saw Che, and I thought I should pay great respect to him. So I gave him a big bow. He looked at me and wondered, what was this kid doing? Then he took my hand. His large hand held mine, and he said: “Friends should greet like this!”

Zheng Shengtian: He taught you how to shake hands.

60 Vol. 14 No. 5 Left and right: José Venturelli, Camilo Cienfuegos, 1961, mural, Retiro Medico Building, Havana, Cuba. Courtesy of José Venturelli Foundation, Santiago, Chile.

Paz Venturelli Baraona: Yeah! Because I only knew bowing, Chinese-style.

Zheng Shengtian: Two years ago I went to Havana, trying to ﬁnd the mural. But probably because the information was inaccurate—we asked at the Medical College auditorium and the Ministry of Health—nobody knew anything about it. Do you remember where the mural was located?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: It is on the second ﬂoor of the Health Ministry building. It is a very large mural. There is another one on the Latin American revolution in the Hilton Hotel (Now Hotel Habana Libre) at 23rd Street and M Street. It is on the second ﬂoor, next to a bar. There is a swimming pool, too.

Zheng Shengtian: Was your father invited by the Cuban government to make murals?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: No. It was Che who asked him. But he did represent the Cuban government.

Zheng Shengtian: Did they know each other before?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: They knew each other in Chile. When Che was young, he traveled throughout Latin America to get to know these countries. He went to Chile too. In Cuba, because of the working relationship, he often came to our house. He had asthma; so did my father. My father often got the most advanced medication for asthma from London. These two guys sat in our house, inhaling the puff together. When they ﬁnished, Che took out a box of long cigars, gave one to my father, and took one himself. They had just inhaled medication and then immediately smoked a cigar.

Zheng Shengtian: Do you have photos of these two?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: There are many. But a lot of our pictures, from Cuba, Beijing, and Santiago were burned.

Zheng Shengtian: Was this when the military coup happened in Chile? At that time, had your father already returned to Chile?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: We returned to Chile in 1968.

Vol. 14 No. 5 61 Zheng Shengtian: It was the third year since the Cultural Revolution started in China. What kind of impression did you have about the Cultural Revolution?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: I was once a Red Guard. Our school, afﬁliated with Peking University, was the ﬁrst one to organize Red Guards.5 I still have my Red Guard armband somewhere at home.

Zheng Shengtian: Was your father condemned in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: He was not Delia Baraona (artist's wife), José Venturelli, and in Beijing then, but a lot of material Mao Zedong (left to right). Courtesy of José Venturelli in our home, including many very Foundation, Santiago, Chile. important letters, were burned by Red Guards. They came while I was not at home. There was a large mural, but later we found it had disappeared. Nobody knew where it was. It used to hang between two walls in one building of the He Da (Peace Council) compound.6

Zheng Shengtian: I have been there, South of Wangfujing, on Chang’an Avenue. Later, the compound was occupied by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC). There is a gallery showcasing some gifts given to Chinese leaders by international friends. I asked if the staff there knew about a large painting Mexican artist Diego Rivera presented to Mao in the 1950s. They did not know. They were young people.

Paz Venturelli Baraona: I suppose they don’t even know about the Cultural Revolution.

Zheng Shengtian: Did your father ever return during the Cultural Revolution?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: We went back in 1973 and 1975. But we did not return to our home. We stayed at the Beijing Hotel. Our visits were very short.

Zheng Shengtian: So your father was not there on those most chaotic early days of the Cultural Revolution. There were some foreign friends in Beijing who had been condemned and attacked.

Paz Venturelli Baraona: I know.

Zheng Shengtian: What did your father do before he returned to Chile in 1968? Did he take any ofﬁcial position?

62 Vol. 14 No. 5 Paz Venturelli Baraona: All his life he was an artist. In addition, he participated in some political activities in Latin America, Asia, and other places. After he met Che in Cuba, he understood the Cuban revolution. He arrived at the idea that there was only one way to solve problems in Latin America. It was through revolution in each country. Generally, he spent most of his time painting. In Chile, he also frequently visited rural areas or mines outside of the city to look at the situation there, to understand the conditions of workers. He supported those movements.

José Venturelli, Helping the Fallen, 1976, acrylic on canvas, 110 x 91 cm. Courtesy of José Venturelli Foundation, Santiago, Chile.

Zheng Shengtian: He was a member of the Communist Party of Chile.

Paz Venturelli Baraona: He was. When he was very young he had participated in the activities of the Communist Party of Chile. After he visited Cuba, he expressed his opinion to the leaders of the Communist Party of Chile. It was the time when we were still in Cuba that the Communist Party of Chile expelled my father. Why? Because my father loved China, and he believed revolution was needed in Latin America. This was not the view of the Communist Party of Chile and the Soviet Union. So he was kicked out.

Zheng Shengtian: This happened in what year?

Vol. 14 No. 5 63 Paz Venturelli Baraona: It was in 1962, or in 1963. They did it without justiﬁcation. One day a small announcement was published in the newspaper of the Communist Party of Chile, that this person was expelled. But since then, until his death, my father was always a revolutionary.

Zheng Shengtian: In 1962, having completed the murals in Cuba, he returned to Beijing. An exhibition of photos was at the Gallery of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Shuaifuyuan. Were you there at that time?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: Yes. But I was at the Afﬁliated High School of Peking University and boarding there. Every Saturday or Sunday I left school to visit my parents. I remember I went to this show, but don’t have a profound memory of it.

Zheng Shengtian: The Chinese Artists Association in Beijing also organized a forum in that year. José Venturelli was invited to introduce his mural Camilo Cienfuegos (1962). The lecture was covered in detail by a local newspaper. He described the process of his work. He talked about why he divided the mural into three sections. The ﬁrst part of the screen was the mountain areas of Cuba. The second part was coming to the plains. And the third part was promoting revolution to Latin America. He depicted some people wearing Chilean and South American costumes to welcome a woman who symbolized revolution. The whole composition was consistent with the revolutionary idea you have just described. This painting had a great impact in Beijing. Many artists were very excited when they saw the image. They believed this was the example that Chinese artists should learn from and that this was the direction China’s art should follow.

Paz Venturelli Baraona: This was not just the history of Latin America, but also the history of China.

Zheng Shengtian: During that time was your father still working for the Peace Council?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: I don’t remember whether the Peace Council still existed. In 1966 we went to Chile. My relationship with Lao Wan7 was very close. He taught me a lot of things. Then he taught me how to start a revolution.

Zheng Shengtian: Did you call your father Lao Wan?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: Yes. Very interesting. My parents were married for forty years, and I was the only daughter.

Zheng Shengtian: Were you communicating in Spanish? Did he speak Chinese?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: He could understand Chinese generally. Sometimes when talking to people in Beijing, he took me with him. He didn’t trust

64 Vol. 14 No. 5 José Venturelli, Journey Towards Down (series), 1978, acrylic, 195 x 130 cm. Courtesy of José Venturelli Foundation, Santiago, Chile.

interpreters. I was still a child. But my dad said: You should make sure if the translation is correct.

Zheng Shengtian: It was reported that Premier Zhou Enlai was very concerned about your father. What do you remember about it?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: There was a photo showing my father and Premier Zhou embracing each other intimately, like brothers. In about 1973, the Chinese Ambassador to Santiago once said to me: “Heping, you almost got me in big trouble!” I had known him previously in Beijing. He said: “When the coup broke in Chile, Premier Zhou knew your parents were in the UK but didn’t know where you were. Someone said you were in Chile. The Premier asked us to go all over the places in Santiago to ﬁnd you. We must ﬁnd you.” Actually I was in Beijing at that time.

My father was involved in a very important undertaking in Chile. He organized and led the campaign to push the Chilean government into

Vol. 14 No. 5 65 establishing a diplomatic relationship with the People’s Republic of China. Chile was the first Latin American country to establish diplomatic ties with China. This was Lao Wan’s achievement. I remember the first Chinese delegation to Chile was led by Chu Tunan.8 My father was a friend of Salvador Allende. He once said to Allende: When you assume office as the President of Chile, the first thing you should do is to build a diplomatic relation with China. Before Allende took office, he came to our house on one occasion. My mother was not home. The three of us sat talking. Allende said to my father: I came here to ask you to be my first ambassador to Beijing. I was already eighteen years old then. My father asked me: Do you think this is okay? I said: I will never talk to you again if you become an ambassador of the government. [Laughs.]

Zheng Shengtian: Why?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: Allende also asked: Why is that? My father said: We are fully involved in your government’s goal, but I do not believe in the means you have taken, because the revolution cannot solve problems by negotiation. A coup was bound to happen. As a longtime friend, I can represent you anywhere you want me to go. But I cannot represent a government that I don’t believe in. Later Allende chose another person to take the job.

Zheng Shengtian: So your father had never taken an ofﬁcial post in the Chilean government?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: No. We participated in street activities, worked in factories and rural areas. But he did not join the Allende government. Later, I once accompanied the President of Chile on his China trip. There were more than ﬁfty people in the delegation, all staying in the State Guesthouse Diaoyutai. I stayed in another hotel. They asked me to join them, but I refused. It was because I was taking my father’s paintings to an exhibition at that time, and it was because of the relationship between Lao Wan and China. This was beyond the government’s relationship. I was not a member of the Chilean government.

Zheng Shengtian: When the Pinochet military coup took place in Chile [in September 1973], none of you were there?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: I was by coincidence. In July 1973, I went to Beijing. In August my parents arrived. They carried several big bags with them. It turned out these were paintings Lao Wan had made in the past twenty years. They were rolled up and brought to China with some art supplies. A large exhibition was held in Beijing and a catalogue was later published.

Zheng Shengtian: So they escaped the coup, and the works were not damaged.

66 Vol. 14 No. 5 Paz Venturelli Baraona: If they had stayed in Santiago, deﬁnitely the works would have been lost.

Zheng Shengtian: During the military coup, how was your home damaged?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: The army of the coup conﬁscated all home materials from those they believed were related to the Communist Party and to Cuba. They threw all of our belongings into the yard. My father was going to Beijing just for a month, then the coup took place.

Zheng Shengtian: After the coup, was your father wanted by the authorities? Could he only stay in exile?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: None of our family could go back. Later, my dad and mom felt it was too far away to live in Beijing. At that time, communications were unlike today. They decided to relocate to Europe. We went to Geneva because a close friend’s family was there, and they helped us a lot. They were from Colombia. They gave us a place to sleep, food to eat, and helped my parents to ﬁgure out what to do and how to arrange it.

Zheng Shengtian: Then you lived in Geneva for a while?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: Right. We also visited China several times, back and forth. But we couldn’t return to Chile.

Zheng Shengtian: Were your father and Pablo Neruda good friends?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: Not very close. Of course they were friends, but they had differences. Lao Wan was three or four years younger than Neruda. Neruda was a very complicated man. He had many girlfriends, and also wanted to introduce girls to his friends. He liked to have many people coming to his house for dinner. He was passionate in work, and he was a good speaker. He wrote fantastic poems. But he didn’t conduct himself very well. He loved the pursuit of fashion. However, Lao Wan and he always got along when they were working together.

Zheng Shengtian: When did you start to study medicine?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: In Chile. Then I learned acupuncture in China. Once at a dinner table I sat next to Premier Zhou. He asked what I was studying. I told him I was studying medicine. Later, I unexpectedly received a notice from the Chinese Embassy in Chile, inviting me to China to learn acupuncture. That was arranged by the Premier. Then I went back to Geneva to continue studying medicine. Finally I ﬁnished my study at the medical school in Havana.

I remember when I was working in Cuba in the 1980s and my daughter Malva was very little. One day I received a phone call from my cousin who was also a doctor. He said why haven’t you come back? Your father is dying.

Vol. 14 No. 5 67 A month ago I had just spent a week in Panama with my parents. My father said he was going to Ecuador. How come he suddenly got sick? I hastily ﬂew to Geneva with my daughter. My cousin told me they asked my father to wait for me to bid farewell. His body was all covered in tubes. My cousin took me to the hospital. I stood beside my father’s bed, looking at his body with ten tubes inserted, unable to speak. But I saw life in his eyes, and he didn’t look like a dying person. I began to shout at him. I could say all kinds of swearwords in Chinese and Spanish. In the end I said: You wanted me to take Malva from Cuba to say goodbye to you? Have you ever told me we must live no matter how and by whatever way? So I cannot come to bid farewell to you. Then he raised his hand showing a goodbye gesture with tears in his eyes. I said: Don’t cry! It is not the time for you to cry yet! You still have to wait some time before the moment to cry. I told him that these people had given you all the medications and treatments used in the West, but there is one method they haven’t tried—acupuncture. His eyes opened wide. I said I was going to rush to the Chinese Embassy to tell the Ambassador about your situation, and to ask if the Chinese government could send an acupuncture specialist. I quickly went home and told my mother, then immediately went to the Embassy and spoke to the Ambassador. I also contacted the Foreign Ministry of Switzerland. After eighteen hours, an acupuncture doctor arrived in Geneva and started the rescue. They stayed there for a month, and in this case, my father lived for another nine years.

Zheng Shengtian: What disease was he suffering from?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: He was infected by pulmonary disease when he was very young and went to Brazil to work on an exhibition. At that time, tuberculosis was not curable, just like cancer today. He was hospitalized for four years. They believed that fresh air and good food, and the lung removal would help him to control the disease. Lao Wan was a tall man, and his body needed extra oxygen. All his life he survived with only one lung. One day he called me from Geneva and said he got bronchitis. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know who was good or bad in the hospital. So I said he should go to Beijing for treatment first. In Beijing many doctors knew him. They had his medical history from the past forty years. He later went to Beijing. One month before he left for Beijing, I had a conversation with him. At that time my mother had just passed away, and I asked him where he wanted to put his paintings in the future. He said: You know whom I am painting for? I have painted for Chileans. You should take my paintings back to Santiago and let the people have a chance to see them. When I die you should dress me with nice clothes, put a lot of beautiful flowers on my white coffin, and bury me in Chile with my parents. He carefully told me all the little things I should do. So, after he passed away I was very clear about what I should do. Later, I accompanied him to the airport. This was the last time we were together. He said there was something very important: You have to wrap up the stuff in my studio and send it to Santiago. He whispered in my ear: Only of you can I make such a request. No one else can help me. I asked him, why? He said: Because I want to return to live in Chile. I told him: You go to Beijing first, and then go back to Chile from Beijing. This is the last time we saw each other.

68 Vol. 14 No. 5 Zheng Shengtian: That was in 1988, when he went to Beijing and died there.

Paz Venturelli Baraona: Peculiarly, he just left me several small notes. They were all numbered. There were several sheets of paper too. He left nothing for others. When he went to Beijing, these things were given to me. I thought: He wanted to live, but knew he might not live long. Why did he leave me those notes with a variety of names and numbers?

Zheng Shengtian: You had already moved back to Chile then?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: Right. He only lived a week after arriving Beijing. When I arrived in Beijing, he had already passed away.

Zheng Shengtian: Before your father passed away, Yu Feng9 helped to look for a place in Beijing for your father to paint a mural. This was a wish of your father. Yu Feng found a wall in the newly constructed Poly building near the Third Ring. The building owner was willing to invite your father to create a mural. This was a new cultural centre. Your father was very satisﬁed when Yu Feng took him aside and said he would invite some young artists as his assistants. But it was only a few days later when he passed away.

Paz Venturelli Baraona: I knew he wanted to paint a mural in Beijing. But I don’t know this story. I last saw Yu Feng when she was in an exhibition after the death of my father. Then she was on crutches.

Zheng Shengtian: She was my friend, too. In 1989, she relocated to Australia for some time. We had kept in touch. She asked me to visit her sister who was teaching at a university in upstate New York. Yu Feng has also passed away. She wrote an article about your father after he died. She recalled the last days your father spent in Beijing.

How were his paintings brought back after his passing away?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: His works were all in Switzerland. After he died, I went to Geneva. But there was one problem: Two men I knew stole many paintings. Later, I found other works and brought them back, and I established the Venturelli Foundation. The shipping costs to Chile were very expensive. In order to transport the paintings, I spent all the savings of my father and myself. The paintings that were left are all here now.

Zheng Shengtian: Is there a collection in some Chilean art museum?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: My dad said he was a Chilean all his life. His paintings were made for the people of Chile. Once I had a conversation with the daughter of David Siqueiros. She asked me: How are your father’s paintings now? I told her what my dad had told me. She said: “My father was crazier. He left his entire collection of paintings to the people of Mexico, and now I can’t take care of these paintings at all.” My dad is smarter than her dad. He also said that painting should be left to the Chilean people, but

Vol. 14 No. 5 69 he let me to decide who represented the Chilean people, instead of giving to this or that government. Since 1989, we have organized exhibitions of his work from the Foundation almost every year.

Zheng Shengtian: Was the exhibition held in Beijing in 2005 also organized by your foundation?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: Yes, it was. It was also supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from our country and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Zheng Shengtian: Did you meet the art community in Beijing when the exhibition was being held?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: No, because that was a very short trip. I stayed less than a week, only ﬁve or six days.

Zheng Shengtian: It must have been a great opportunity to introduce your father’s work to the younger generation in China, because many young people didn’t know your father’s name; neither did they know this part of the history. Although, some catalogues were published and some events were covered by media, the general understanding was pretty superﬁcial. At the beginning, we talked about your father’s inference on Chinese art. Many people still know nothing about it. I hope we can use exhibitions or documentary ﬁlms to further introduce this piece of history. Many scholars in the academic world now believe the cross-cultural dialogues are very important. History is written by people like your father.

Paz Venturelli Baraona: The culture of each country is its history.

Zheng Shengtian: How do you see China now?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: I don’t know the current China. My knowledge is only through newspapers and television. The China I know is a huge country. It was a great country, but a very poor one. I learned about it through my childhood, my classmates, and my courtyard. I don’t know what China looks like now. My last visit was in 2005. There are many things I don’t understand and need someone to explain to me.

Zheng Shengtian: Do you think your feelings about China are still very intimate?

Paz Venturelli Baraona: I tell you: A lot of Chinese and Chilean friends have said to me: You are half Chinese. My feelings for China can’t be changed.

Zheng Shengtian: You should write memoirs. This is not only your personal experience—it is about your country, about China, about the relations between the peoples and artists of the two countries. It is very important.

70 Vol. 14 No. 5 Paz Venturelli, Zheng Paz Venturelli Baraona: This is a big task. Because I know a lot of people Shengtian, and Paz's daughter Malva Castillo, and things, relations and circumstances, I can’t deceive myself. My dad Santiago, Chile, 2013. (left to right) Photo: Chen Aikang. took me to participate in the revolutionary movements in Latin America. Many people now are still alive, so I can’t mention any names. It doesn’t matter with those who died, but I can’t talk about those who are still alive. I can only talk about these things in general terms. Lately I read some texts written by Che, about how he organized the guerrillas, and how to ﬁght, and so on. I thought I could write down the stories of that time, but not point out the names.

Zheng Shengtian: You can write your memoirs ﬁrst but perhaps not publish it until later. Thank you for taking your time to answer my questions.

Paz Venturelli Baraona: You’re welcome. I am very happy.

Notes

1. In 1951, the World Festival of Youth and Students was held in Berlin. The World Peace Council (WPC) was held in 1952. Venturelli might have attended both events. 2. Emi Siao (Xiao San 蕭三), a famous Chinese poet and Mao’s schoolmate, was at that time the Head of the Bureau for External Cultural Relations, Ministry of Culture. 3. Pablo Neruda (1904–73) was a Chilean poet. 4. Camilo Cienfuegos (1932–59) was a leading figure of the Cuban Revolution. He disappeared after his flight crashed in October 1959 and is presumed to have died. 5. Beijing Daxue Fushu Zhongxue (北大附中) is a public high school affiliated with Peking University. After the launch of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the high school became the epicenter of the political storm. Motivated young students began to gather around another school that was affiliated with Tsinghua University, forming the very first groups of Red Guards. 6. This mural-sized painting was made in 1952 by José Venturelli for the office of the Asia Pacific Peace Council in Beijing. 7. Lao Wan (老万) was Venturelli’s Chinese nickname. 8. Chu Tunan (楚图南) was the first Chairman of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (1954–69). He was also the Vice Chairman of the 6th NPC Standing Committee in China. 9. Yu Feng (郁风) (1916–2007) was a Chinese artist, critic, and Deputy Secretary General of the Chinese Artists Association.

Vol. 14 No. 5 71 Jonathan Goodman Mao Yan at Pace Gallery March 6–April 4, 2015

he place of contemporary figurative painting in mainland China is, to the Western viewer, easy to regard as academic—often it is based Ton technical achievement and indebted to Western historical art. The training of painters in China’s art schools relies heavily on studies of the model, much in the manner of a nineteenth-century art academy. Unlike in America, where currently the conceptual is often valued at the expense of training and skill, the figurative movement in China reminds us that the occidental tradition of representation lives on—indeed, thrives—in the hands of young, ambitious artists. While there has been a patriotic return to ink art in China, the persistence of figurative art done in oils shows us that Chinese artists have built a legacy of their own by maintaining an interest in a medium that, to the Asian artist, must still seem fresh and relatively new, even after its existence in Chinese art for two or three generations. There is also a strong interest in figuration in the U.S., often to inform the artist’s audience of identity or political issues. In a similar way, representational art enables the Chinese artist to comment on social changes that have been happening since the 1970s, most especially the espousal of capitalism, which has brought to China wealth, but also the concomitant problems of materialism and an attachment to money alone.

Mao Yan’s solo show at Pace Gallery in New York’s Chelsea district, his first in the U.S., focused on portraits and nudes and not the landscape or cityscape. Born in 1968 in Hunan province, Mao Yan studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1991. Since then, he has become among the best-known and most critically acclaimed traditional figurative painters on the mainland and has won several major national prizes in China. The Chinese sensibility takes a strong interest in these evocative portraits of both Westerners and Chinese, which emphasize the character of the sitter while maintaining accuracy of detail. Some of the women appear overweight, inviting comparisons to the figures of Lucien Freud; although the likeness between the two artists is not strong, both men are eager to render flesh, its heft among the most striking visual attributes of their subjects. At the same time, reading Mao Yan’s visual focus makes us understand that the artist is also given to studies of character, in which eyes and facial expressions are accentuated.

In his essay for the catalogue, noted New York critic Donald Kuspit asserts that Mao Yan’s women “intensely stare at us, as though to confront, even intimidate us, accuse the gazing male of some guilty crime against them and all women.”1 But this seems to be something of an exaggeration; the women

72 Vol. 14 No. 5 don’t appear overtly angry, and the intensity of their gaze may mean that they simply feel vulnerable without clothes, or that Mao Yan has chosen individuals whose energy and personality tend toward a vehement intensity. While open to the portrayal of character in his sitters, Mao Yan doesn’t especially address psychological insight in his output. Rather, he seems to be searching for a way of seeing. The paintings are not so much surveys of personality as they are expressions of content, and my reading is that the artist wishes to convey the sense of the person, his or her authority as an individual. Mao Yan remains aware that each of us carries our own speciﬁc energies, which must be addressed if the painting is to communicate the sitter’s integrity. Painting this way brings the personality of the sitter into high relief; the character of each person is communicated by Mao Yan’s intention to capture the essential nature of what he sees in them. He sticks to a palette of blacks, whites, and greys, limiting it to both intensify and offset the character of the person he paints.

Left: Mao Yan, Leah with Glasses, 2014, oil on canvas. Right: Mao Yan, Leah, 2014, oil on canvas. Photo: Kerry Ryan McFate. © Mao Yan. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York.

Mathieu Borysevicz’s excellent essay on Mao Yan, written for a show at Pace Beijing in 2013,2 places him within a mostly Western sphere of influence, citing the artist’s visit to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1990s, in which a small Rembrandt portrait made a major impression upon him, as well as proposing Edvard Munch, Francisco de Goya, and Albrecht Dürer as Western forebears whose creativity Mao Yan found sympathy with. Certainly, Mao Yan’s style and materials reflect a genuine familiarity with Western painting; in addition, the drama in his work feels essentially psychological in a Western sense. Indeed, one wonders to what extent a tie can be made between his well-articulated painterly insights into the representation of individuals—including a long, continuing relationship with Thomas Rochenwald, a German man who developed a friendship with Mao Yan in China and has been a subject of his paintings for years—and a Chinese understanding of character. On one level, Mao Yan’s paintings could be considered purely formal studies, works that demonstrate an interest in physiognomy and flesh; on another, they are portraits of specific people whose physical characteristics differ from person to person. They project little beyond an internalization of themselves and convey no real

Vol. 14 No. 5 73 social awareness or issues that are reﬂective of Chinese society. In this sense, these pictures are distinct from the Cynical Realism and Political Pop that preceded him in the 1990s.

There is nothing wrong with steering clear of social commentary. But doing so tends to isolate Mao Yan’s work from previous demonstrations of social description in the visual arts in mainland China. It might be said that art of his kind takes refuge in pure reportage—yet the introductory quote, presumably Mao Yan’s, in Borysevicz’s essay, reads: “I am not a realist painter.” If we take the artist at his word, then what kind of artist is he? Is there a metaphysical underpinning to his work? Are these portraits renditions of mental states? It is hard to say. But it is clear that the artist is suggesting that his art accounts for more than mere description, and the question remains whether his renderings can be read as something fundamentally different from the traditions he borrows. As a portrait painter, his inclination is very clearly deﬁned. If the art is intended to encompass more than that, it must mean that the image is detailing something beyond mere representation; perhaps the image becomes a matter of spirituality, or a comment on character. Again, it is hard to say. Of course, there are excellent examples of portraiture in the history of Chinese art, most especially in the last two hundred years, but Mao Yan has made it clear that he wants distance between himself and the particular weight of that tradition.

Left: Mao Yan, Portrait of Thomas on a Black Background No. 2, oil on canvas. Right: Mao Yan, Oval Portrait of Thomas No. 1, oil on canvas. Photo: Kerry Ryan McFate. © Mao Yan. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York.

Perhaps it is more productive to place the work somewhere between the West and China. The choice to use Western materials is self-evident; the paint is handled in such a way as to bring up the memory of a painting style begun in Europe more than one hundred years ago. Thus, in addition to the immediate context of Chinese figurative art produced in the last forty years, beginning with the academic influences derived from Socialist Realism, there is also the recognition that Western influences come into play. This would explain the eccentric but deep focus, both formal and psychological, that Mao Yan brings to his faces and figures; it would also illuminate the fact that he balances his

74 Vol. 14 No. 5 context in order to paint something new, at least for Chinese portrait artists working today: the presentation of a self in portraits determined by, but greater than, the realism he uses. Graduating from Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1991, Mao Yan experienced the crushing of the democracy movement at that time. Likely this affected him, although we don’t know from his paintings’ content in what way that it did. Still, his denial of being a realist painter puts an emphasis on some other issue or theme. The realism conveyed in these paintings intimates a self-sufﬁciency and poise on Mao Yan’s part, which indicates a new version of self, adumbrated by the painter’s apparent wish to capture a new emotional reality in his art.

The real question facing a Western appreciation of and judgment on Mao Yan’s achievement in figurative art is skewed by the different historical timing of such a genre in America and in mainland China. Of course, Western figurative art goes back hundreds of years, being most profoundly realized during the Renaissance. But in China, the figurative tradition in oils extends only a bit more than one hundred years. This suggests that China has some catching up to do, but, more important, it means that a Chinese artist working figuratively can be seen as a truly contemporary artist, while in the West, figurative art is based within a more or less historical continuum that includes many different kinds of art. So when Westerners look at such work from mainland China, or when Western critics write their appraisal of its achievements, the context in which the Chinese imagery is appreciated is as something familiar, even traditional, rather than progressive or radical. Additionally, one must remember that figurative art in China is often used as a way of satirizing social realities in a way that doesn’t equate much with Westerners’ use of the genre. In any case, Mao Yan is not a satirical painter; he prefers to concentrate on the physiognomy and formal aspects of his sitters.

The practice of figuration in China carries a prestige that invests the genre with a social acceptability that is hard to fully understand today in the West. Mao Yan’s art does not seem very original by Western standards; indeed, he can be considered within a group of Chinese artists whose accomplishments are appraised primarily as social and political statements rather than for their formal aesthetic qualities. While he differs from those Political Pop and Cynical Realist painters—he is only slightly younger than they are—Mao Yan will inevitably be appraised as working within their influence. Mao Yan certainly has no discernible political stance in this show at Pace Gallery; as has been stated, his work consists of more or less conventional studies of people, in portraits and full-figure presentation. If anything, the exhibition supports the view that Chinese figurative art is a traditional re-exploration of pictorial values Westerners worked through many years ago. But this does not make it less important within the Chinese context, where the medium is still seen as essentially new and its potential not fully realized. In fact, even acknowledging the current interest in ink painting in China, we can see that its long history constrains the ink practitioner in both a formal and social sense. This is in contrast to figurative art, whose relative newness invests it with real topicality. Mao Yan may be a traditionalist in one way, but in another he is seen as someone at the progressive edge of contemporary painting.

Vol. 14 No. 5 75 Mao Yan, Xiao Dai, 2013–14, oil on canvas, 130 x 90 cm. Photo: Kerry Ryan McFate. © Mao Yan. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York.

Mao Yan, Plump Lady, 2013, oil on canvas, 330 x 200 cm. Photo: Kerry Ryan McFate. © Mao Yan. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York.

76 Vol. 14 No. 5 Mao Yan, Portrait of Thomas No. 2, 2014, oil on canvas, 70 x 55 cm. © Mao Yan. Photo: Kerry Ryan McFate. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York.

Vol. 14 No. 5 77 A waist-length, oil on canvas portrait that stands out for me is the study Xiao Dai (2013–14), which presents a young man in a dark T-shirt with crossed arms; his hands, with the exception of the thumbs, are stuck into his armpits. One of the strengths of Mao Yan’s art is its specificity—this is a real person we are meeting in the painting. Most of the painting is rendered in dark greys, with the exception of the area around the Xiao Dai’s head, which is lighter in tone. By far, the centre of visual interest rests on the young man’s countenance, which consists of a somber, steady gaze directed forcefully toward the viewer: he has a well-formed nose and narrow face; and a closed mouth that gives no suggestion of either happiness or discontent. Mao Yan has concentrated on the forceful expression of someone confident enough to convey dissatisfaction, although we do not know whether it is personal or political (the chances are that it is personal, given that Mao Yan doesn’t make openly political paintings). In comparison with his other paintings, I see this work as direct and emotionally immediate; the face is self-assured, and the body posture is self-contained, communicating an experience of tension, even of restrained anger. As a study of character, the particularities of Xiao Dai are inspired, moving in the direction of a specificity of personality and physiognomy that is memorable in any culture, let alone recent Chinese figurative art.

If Xiao Dai occupies an emotional space bordering on assertiveness, something similar can be said of another painting entitled Plump Lady (2013), whose dimensions are much larger than those of Xiao Dai. The size of the painting tends to emphasize the weight of the woman, whose voluminous naked body could be described as obese. A Western Caucasian female, she displays massive arms, breasts, and thighs that dwarf her head. Yet her gaze is deeply serious, composed, and directed at her audience. Her arms are folded across her upper torso; the general effect of her demeanor and bearing is that of prodigious dignity, in spite of her perhaps socially unacceptable weight. Like the young Xiao Dai, this woman commands the stage of her presentation; her pose is not theatrical, but the effect of the painting is. Plump Lady shows us that even in contemporary culture, which places value on being physically slim, individuals can both respect themselves and insist upon esteem from others. Indeed, the painting indicates that the woman pictured is someone of considerable force. This is a lot to achieve in a traditional nude portrait, and it points out that, at his best, Mao Yan can transform conventional ﬁgurative art into something demonstrative of ethical import.

The work entitled Portrait of Thomas No. 2 (2014) is a recent example of Mao Yan’s ongoing pictorial treatment of Thomas Rochenwald, mentioned earlier in this text. Rochenwald is light-haired, with deep-set eyes, a thin, protruding nose, and pronounced chin. Seen in proﬁle, his head is tilted sideways, adding to the quietly dramatic atmosphere of the picture. The head takes up the centre of the composition, and only the top part of his shirt is rendered. Here the greys, along with a white aura following the outline of his face, intensify the melancholic mysticism of the portrait. Most of the information that stands out in Mao Yan’s portraits arises from the

78 Vol. 14 No. 5 face; in the case of this portrait, the feeling is indirect, unlike the frank force of Xiao Dai. This feeling is, as happens in the other portraits, based on Mao Yan’s reading of the sitter’s character. Mao Yan is careful to differentiate dispositions; one of the strengths of his work, considered in its entirety, has to do with the different emotions that occur in each portrait. It is clear that Mao Yan’s interest is primarily in recording personality, and while it may not be true that he is a major artist, despite his fame and prominence in mainland Chinese painting circles, it is clear that he is a painter of some distinction, someone who rests on his ability to characterize the particular attributes—physical and psychological—of the people who sit for him.

Mao Yan, Faerie on a Chair, The other works do not quite live 2013, oil on canvas, 330 x 200 cm. Photo: Kerry up to the forcefulness found in the Ryan McFate. © Mao Yan. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, portraits just described. There is New York. one erotic picture, Faerie on a Chair (2014), which presents a young Caucasian woman, nude, with her hair up, wearing a waist-high, transparent stocking. Sitting on a chair, her eyes opened wide, she sits naked in a pose that is openly provocative. The painting shows a different side of Mao Yan, whose other work in this show does not convey this kind of sensuality. Other paintings are relatively pedestrian, being exercises in ﬁguration without much attention being paid to temperament or personality of the sitters. In a way, Mao Yan has restricted the range of his production, limiting to some extent the expansion of his themes and imagery, so that he does not command a full vision of human idiosyncrasies—something a more purposeful painter might take on. Mao Yan is an artist of unusual skill and emotional insight; perhaps he is right to stay close to what he does best, namely, the psychological study of the contemporary person. At the same time, he foregoes the chance to create an iconographic comment, with social implications, on the way people are, which is something that regularly happens in the portraits of an artist like Lucien Freud. So, in a sense, his work tends toward the reinterpretation of a tradition that has already scrutinized most of the terrain associated with the ﬁgurative outlook. This does not diminish him as a painter so much as it curbs a gift that could go further.

Notes

1. Donald Kuspit, You, Me, Us: Mao Yan’s Portraits (New York: Pace Gallery, 2015), 6. 2. Mathieu Borysevicz, Mao Yan (Bejing: Pace Gallery, 2013), unpaginated.

Vol. 14 No. 5 79 Danielle Shang Qiu Xiaofei’s Struggle

Qiu Xiaofei, Heilongjiang Box, 2006, installation view, China Blue Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.

iu Xiaofei, a virtuosic artist, used to create impastoed paintings and painted objects that made reference to his personal life. QThe subjects ranged from private diaries to family photographs, household items, and mises-en-scène derived from memories, dreams, and imagery from mass media. Painting was his vehicle for collecting and organizing fragmented memories of growing up, coming of age, and entering society. This self-conscious inquiry was evident in both of his early exhibitions, Heilongjiang Box (2006) and House of Recollected Fragments (2008), where, as a young artist, he made an attempt to capture human experience and discover himself. These autobiographically imbued works, however, should not be read as direct translation of reality; instead, they represent a cognitive residue of time and the artist’s conscious editing of the past. As Pi Li, the current Sigg Senior Curator of Visual Art at Hong Kong’s upcoming M+ Museum, argues:

Qiu Xiaofei’s paintings aim to challenge and revise our conceptions of “reality.” He attempts through [abandoning] established signiﬁers of materialism in order to attain another reality derived from his sensory system, emotions and memory. In the process of reaching this other shore of reality, Qiu Xiaofei’s work develops along these three aspects: knowledge, the sensation of substance and images. 1

Qiu Xiaofei’s 2010 exhibition Point of No Return at Boers-Li Gallery, however, attested to a subtle change in subject matter, from the personal to the collective. No longer focusing on reconstructing his own memories,

80 Vol. 14 No. 5 Qiu Xiaofei, Point of No Return, 2010, installation view, Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.

Qiu Xiaofei, Together Qiu Xiaofei insinuated his social Again, 2009, oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm. concern and deep interest in Courtesy of the artist. exploring psychological effects on the masses. After having spent time reading notes and highlighted texts by a mentally distressed patient in his family who had withdrawn into a tormented inner place due to sociopolitical circumstances, Qiu Xiaofei produced this body of paintings as his visual translation of feelings, sensations, and impressions of society as revealed in the patient’s literature. In this emotionally charged exhibition, he confronted the viewer with allegorical images of lonely individuals, socialist architecture, geometric models studied in art classes, and mysterious landscapes on large-scale canvases that titillated the eyes and the mind. The paintings, defying all spatial and perspectival logic, illustrated disturbed states of mind and evoked schizophrenic and enigmatic narratives, attributed not only to his painful family history but also a shaken collective consciousness at large. They can be read as Qiu Xiaofei’s struggle with both the psychological impact from his parents’ generation and the culture he inherited in the aftermath of the collapse of Chinese Socialism. The interplay between reality—what is experienced—and illusion—what is perceived—opened up a new space for Qiu Xiaofei to reﬂect upon the language of painting.

Qiu Xiaofei, during a 2013 interview with LeCode Project, mentioned his fondness for French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe- Grillet’s greatest cinematic contribution, as film historian Roy Armes points out, is his ability to “fragment experience, to play on two senses, the eye and the ear, simultaneously,” to weld “past and present into a single flow of dissolving time altogether,” and to “make the most banal reality seem magical and the most outrageous fiction real. . . Everything we see in a Robbe-Grillet film has been filtered through somebody’s mind and his work is an attempt to depict experience from within.”2 In Qiu Xiaofei’s paintings, the artist conflates an abyss of fragmented collective histories and personal stories into artificial, disconcerting, and illusionary montages to illustrate a personal take on repressed memory and mind. It makes sense to recognize in Qiu Xiaofei’s distorted landscape and upset architecture Robbe-Grillet’s literal and visual articulation of the unconscious meanings embedded

Vol. 14 No. 5 81 in banal reality. The works in Point of No Return are no longer about memory, but about the consequences of memory, and time and space that is depicted in his paintings are no longer ﬁxed, but ﬂuid. The viewer must act like an archeologist in order to piece together a narrative of collective consciousness from the evidence scattered on the artist’s pictorial surface.

For an artist who paints, the burden of the constant need to resurrect the validity of painting should not be overlooked. The survival of the medium has been at the centre of debate ever since French painter Paul Delaroche, upon seeing a daguerreotype for the ﬁrst time in 1839, allegedly pronounced the death of painting. In 1935, Kenneth Clark famously argued, out of frustration, “The art of painting has become not so much difﬁcult as impossible.”3 Today, not only have new media and interdisciplinary practices become emblematic of cutting edge art, but what it is that constitutes a painting is also being challenged.

It is worth mentioning that as Qiu Xiaofei, Reconciling With My Love, 2009, oil early as in 2009, Qiu Xiaofei on canvas, 240 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist. experimented with Internet data-mining. He began by typing a phrase—for example, “reconciling with my love”—in an Internet search engine to look for corresponding images, and then assembled the various screenshots into a composition that served as the draft for a painting that would appear to be absurd and strangely attractive. The Dadaistic exercise of chance and appropriation enabled Qiu Xiaofei, in deciding what to paint, to yield his subjectivity to the contingent search results ﬁltered by a machine.

His investigation into the contingency between painting and object culminates in his 2013 exhibition at Beijing Commune Gallery, entitled Rauschenberg Said, “The Walking Stick Is Longer than the Maulstick, After All,” an homage to Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg did not say anything like that; the “quote” was entirely made up by Qiu Xiaofei as a prank, and the work that bears the exhibition title is a maulstick leaning against the wall and a pair of steel balls in a net hanging next to Rauschenberg’s original 1997 Golden Boy-Anagrams (A Pun). Qiu Xiaofei mixed objects with paintings in this exhibition to articulate a relationship that included both interference and interdependence. Chicken Wood from 2013 (the title in Chinese, jimu, is a phonetic pun for toy building blocks), for example, consists of a painting of a shack standing on chicken feet, but to expand the artwork from two dimensions to three dimensions, Qiu Xiaofei leaned a wood panel next to the painting and placed two sets of steel frames supporting more wood panels in front of it. The picture and objects cancel out each other’s dominance as media while simultaneously depending upon each other for content. The device of integrating objects

82 Vol. 14 No. 5 Qiu Xiaofei, Chicken Wood, 2013, oil on canvas, wood, and steel, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

to challenge the restrictions of painting and sculpture is clearly, in this case, indebted to Rauschenberg’s famous “combines,” artworks that straddled the mediums of painting and sculpture.

This dialectical inclination has frequently emerged in Qiu Xiaofei’s works. Female Stick House (2012), which was included in his Shanghai exhibition Repetition, at the Minsheng Museum of Art, Shanghai, in 2013, is another example. The work comprises two separate paintings anchored together by the colour scheme. The colour and hues of the ﬂesh of the reclining nude female on the left complement the interior lighting sources of the buildings depicted in the right painting. The left depicts an indoor and private moment, the right an outdoor and public one. Interrupting the reciprocity between the two pictures, like an impulsive prank, is a stick attached to the frame of the ﬁgurative image. Qiu Xiaofei explains that attaching a distracting object to a picture is his intervention to abate “literal reference" in an attempt to disrupt the traditional reception of a painting, and command the viewer’s attention toward the artist’s intuition, raw emotions, the restrictive nature of materials, and elements of painting. Benjamin Buchloh once asked Gerhard Richter whether introducing contradiction and inconsistency into a work might be done in order to show the inadequacy or bankruptcy or painting, to which Richter replied: “Not bankruptcy, but always inadequacy.”4

The causality of subconsciousness in the art making and viewing experience has always been a concern for Qiu Xiaofei. In his talk at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, in 2014, Qiu Xiaofei elucidated the arational5 factors of raw emotion, spontaneity, and contingency as instruments he now employs to free himself from the repression of his self-analysis and inertia. It seems to me that he no longer endorses the notion of subject, a being with a unique self-consciousness that produces an individual or “I.” Instead, his recent works manifest Martin Heidegger’s idea of Dasein— being-in-the-world—that emphasizes a human being’s existence in relation to and engagement with his or her environment. Such engagement is open and unsettled. One cannot comport oneself toward a consciously preconceived plan; one must throw oneself into the world to gain an authentic perspective on existence by exploring the dilemma, the paradox, and the evolving nature of self.

Vol. 14 No. 5 83 Qiu Xiaofei continues to explore his engagement with the world by Qiu Xiaofei, Female Stick House, 2012, oil on board working against a perceived death of painting. He has transformed his with mixed media, 122 x 104 cm (left), 153 x 122 cm process from painting scripted imagery derived from memory with the (right). Courtesy of the artist. technique of impasto to submitting his painting to impulsiveness and contingency according to a self-imposed set of rules: for example, he does not allow himself to preconceive a draft before painting; and as soon as a painting is on the brink of evoking something concrete, he stops the process. Some compositions and topics respond directly to the irregular shapes of the frames, while others are dictated by the artist’s free association. Emotion plays a crucial role. The results are dreamlike and sometimes nearly abstract paintings.

In addition to paintbrushes, Qiu Xiaofei now opts for palette knives, spray guns, and various other tools in order to undermine the hand of the artist in the process of painting. He has also replaced his use of oil paint with acrylic and industrial paint to achieve a crisp and bright look. Water-based media dry much faster than oil, and this affords him the opportunity to approach the canvas in a reaction-formation manner. Each stroke or smear or drip or wash or scrape or spray is to negate or negotiate with the previous one at the spur of the moment, and Qiu Xiaofei’s recent paintings are the outcome of constant improvisation and arational action. They forge surreal spatial renderings, often denoting veiled landscapes and encrypted architecture. Freed from the rational control that is often required to produce representational forms, Qiu Xiaofei allows his subconscious to direct his mark making on the canvas. This is an act of transgression on the artist’s part, as he turns himself from source of cognition and intelligence to an agent of them. As a result of such push-and-pull, his works highlight the mechanisms of painting and heighten the tension of the pictorial surface.

There is a palpable musical quality to Qiu Xiaofei’s new works that is evident in, for example, Green and Ropes (2013). The aquamarine background, built up by multiple thin layers and ﬂattened to a single atmospheric plane, plays a bass line of lower register to counterbalance

84 Vol. 14 No. 5 the individually defined vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines that are dancing forward from the centre section. Drips run down from the lines to accentuate the effect of gravity. The lines are rendered in bold colours with big, agitated gestural strokes. They are intense and loud, but not without some sense of arrangement—like upper registers improvised by trumpets in free jazz. A pale ghostly rectangle, shaped like a modernist austere Le Corbusier building, a metaphor for China’s socialist past, is floating in between the foreground and the background to suggest an undertone of consciousness that threatens to disrupt the musicality. The image strikes me as if several paintings had collided into one. To add more visual noise, Qiu Xiaofei affixes to the surface of the painting a rope suspended from a hook. The deconstructed image evokes psychological instability and emotional vulnerability that haunt the viewer like a schizophrenic dream.

Qiu Xiaofei, Green and Ropes, 2013, acrylic and mixed media on canvas mounted on wood, 165 x 24 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Among the repertoire of motifs that is repeatedly superimposed on Qiu Xiaofei’s paintings are geometric forms resembling the three-dimensional models studied in art classrooms around the world. For Qiu Xiaofei, who went through diligent training at art schools for eight years, mundane geometry is a universal analogy of discipline, structure, and manipulation, which he now tries to resist. The forms of rectangle, cylinder, cone, sphere, and pyramid are not organic, but artiﬁcially constructed according to a rationalized human vision. Many artists have had to sketch and draw these forms on paper for years in order to competently perfect renderings of the three-dimensional objects and the lighting effects seen by the eyes and perceived by the mind. This repetitive exercise has left a persistent and perhaps acute imprint in Qiu Xiaofei’s psyche, yet it has, according to the artist, paradoxically become a source of solace or even temptation for him. In this sense, those motifs conjure up an anecdotal nuance in his paintings.

It is not unusual for Qiu Xiaofei to halt work on a painting for a couple of years before returning to it. His new spontaneous process of painting requires that his emotions stem from deeper psychological complexes and

Vol. 14 No. 5 85 that he refrain from reasoning, so that a visceral effect can be produced to challenge the idea of painting as the result of erudition or rational thought.

Qiu Xiaofei’s impulsive mode of assembling, reconstructing, and free association call to mind psychoanalysis, which has been a source of inspiration since the Surrealist movement when Freud’s theories played an undisputable role in the development of automatism as a means of expressing the unconscious through art. In 1924, André Breton wrote in the ﬁrst Surrealist manifesto:

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.6

Continuously occupying the overlapping terrains between the concrete and the abstract and between the conscious and the subconscious, Qiu Xiaofei’s paintings from 2015 intensify his personal exploration of reality versus perceived reality. In Pipe (2015), the multilayered background is rendered in muddled opaque colours to construct an inchoate space. Sporadic softly airbrushed areas are visible in contrast to the chunky and expressionistic vertical lines and reduced forms that spread across the foreground, hinting at barren forest. A pipe depicted almost photo-realistically thrusts up from the bottom of the frame to shatter the viewer’s perception of an abstracted landscape. A sphere and a cylinder are threading between lines and brushstrokes to connect the foreground with the background. The device of foreshortening conveys not only the illusion of depth, but also a strong sense of visual rhythm and choreography. It seems to bait us with a cryptic image of abstraction to the debate on how to re-contextualize painting in the discourse of the twenty-ﬁrst century.

Qiu Xiaofei, Pipe, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 250 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

86 Vol. 14 No. 5 Turning his back on nostalgic narratives and literal reference, Qiu Xiaofei revisits art history to interrogate painting in an attempt to tease out new potential from the medium’s function of—in the artist’s own words—“editing painting with painting.” Although his paintings no longer appear to be representational, he is still telling stories in an autobiographic context and informed by the history of painting. In this liminal stage of his career, his new “accidental” paintings, seemingly still trapped in the rhetoric of “what to paint and how to paint,”7 are not easy to comprehend. The diagonal lines, tapered shapes, manipulated scales, and foreshortened forms in his new paintings construct illusionistic images that are fraught with insider art gags and darker moods, even to the point of risking being formulaic. Perhaps this is why reactions from critics are uneven. But Qiu Xiaofei shrugs it off because he is convinced that his metamorphosis will lead to an eventual breakthrough in his own practice, and he is aware that it comes at a cost. When asked to comment on his evolution, Qiu Xiaofei stated, “Past experience is like a scar. I have no intention of dwelling forever on it. I look for healing, but at the same time I want to problematize it. For this purpose, painting is the best remedy.”8

Today, in a time described by Albert Oehlen as “post-non-representational age,” when painting is considered passé by many artists and curators, Qiu Xiaofei still believes in painting and its pictorial ability to communicate. At the crossroads of representation and abstraction, of logic and impulse, he is looking for ways to reinvigorate the medium and to push his corporeal and intellectual limits through the process of painting, so that painting can become something more than just painting. Meanwhile, his defection to the arational state of mind, whether in illusion or dream or insobriety, can be regarded as marking his cynicism toward postmodernism as an aesthetic movement. The automatic mechanisms in his painting process reveal not only his changing attitude toward the world, but also where the practice of painting could fall short and become self-contradictory. And he is asking a very big question: “Does painting have a future?”

Notes

1. Pi Li, “Deliverance from the Imprisonment of Reality,” in Heilongjiang Box (Hebei: Hebei Publishing House of Education, 2006), 192. 2. Roy Armes, “Alain Robbe-Grillet,” in French Film (New York: Dutton, 1970), 150–51. 3. Kenneth Clark, “The Future of Painting,” The Listener, October 14, 1935, 543. 4. Benjamin Buchloh, “An Interview with Gerhard Richter,” in Gerhard Richter (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1986), 17. 5. An arational action was ﬁrst deﬁned by Dr. Rosalind Hursthouse in 1991 as an intentional action that cannot be explained by reasons but the emotional state of the individual. Her article “Arational Actions” was published in Journal of Philosophy 88, no. 2 (February 1991), 57–68. 6. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 26. 7. Qiu Xiaofei, 2015, interview with the author through Wechat, March 2015. 8. Ibid.

Vol. 14 No. 5 87 Chia Chi Jason Wang Amassing the Essence: A Preliminary Look at Liang Quan’s Thirty Years of Painting

I. Liang Quan was born in Shanghai on March 10, 1948, to a family hailing Amassing the Essence: Thirty Years of Paintings 1 from Zhongshan City, Guangdong province. He began studying painting by Liang Quan, installation view, Hive Center for as a teenager and in 1964 he was admitted to the Affiliated High School of Contemporary Art, Beijing, the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art). According 2015. to the Academy’s official history, Chinese authorities began “sending down” both faculty and students to the countryside in 1963 as part of China’s socialist education campaign. By the following year, the movement had expanded in scale. According to Zhen Chao and Zhou Yunpeng, “Much of the Affiliated High School was moved to farming villages too, and only a few teachers were left to keep running classes.” Thus, “the pedagogical system that had only recently been set up was thrown into chaos, and the newly developed teaching programs were wiped out.”2 At this time, just when Liang Quan had enrolled, the state of the school and the quality of its education can be easily surmised.

Not long after, in May 1966, the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution was commencing—an overwhelming calamity that would last a decade. The Zhejiang Art Academy High School was maligned as a “garden cultivating the seedlings of revisionism,” and “a large number of teachers and cadres suffered ruthless sessions of struggle and merciless beatings.”3 In 1968, the Zhejiang Province Revolutionary Committee abolished the school entirely.4 That year, Liang Quan graduated from high school; later, he was assigned to a farming village to work in its cultural centre.5

88 Vol. 14 No. 5 In 1976, the Cultural Revolution came to an end. Having been suspended for a decade, China’s college entrance examination system resumed in 1977. Liang Quan intended to continue studying at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts at this time, but his application was rejected because of his status as an Affiliate High School student during the Cultural Revolution.6 With little recourse, he enrolled in the Academy’s continuing education program, studying oil painting for over a year.7 In 1977, Liang Quan collaborated with three other young painters from the Affiliate High School to produce a triptych of paintings, Red Grandad, Red Brigade Leader, and Red Child— some of the very few works he made during that period still extant today.8 Adhering to the aesthetic ideology of Socialist Realism, these paintings reflected the solid, heavy style first introduced to China from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army, the painters portrayed citizens in military service as heroic icons. Projecting a sense of moral courage and nobility in order to extol party loyalty and patriotism, the solemn subject matter also reflected a type of political propaganda that had been formulaic for quite some time.

In 1978 “The Scar,” a short story about the calamities of the Cultural Revolution, inadvertently launched the Scar Literature movement. Under its influence, Scar Art began percolating into Chinese academia and quickly came into vogue at the National Fine Arts Exhibition of 1979. Liang Quan, barred from official enrollment in the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, seems to have had a limited level of participation in this art movement that drew its emotive appeal from suffering and pain, and he did not leave behind any works responding to it. Instead, in an exercise painting of 1978 or 1979, he made a realistic image of a Western female figure, rendered in an academic mode and using ink as his medium. One can easily discern that modulating the techniques and vocabularies of Chinese and Western art was the basic subject matter Liang Quan hoped to explore in this period.

II. In 1981, Liang Quan chose to study abroad in California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where his aunt lived. At the end of December that year, he entered Berkeley Adult School to study English. A few months later he successfully gained admission to the master’s program at San Francisco’s Academy of Art College, on the strength of his portfolio.9 Liang Quan remarks that he concentrated on printmaking, so that when he returned to China he would have an area of expertise that could be practically applied at the educational level.10 Nonetheless, on his 1983 master’s diploma, his major was listed as Fine Art/Painting.11

Liang Quan did not stay in the United States for long—a mere two years— yet he recalls seeing a selection of works by the major German/American abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann at the Berkeley Art Museum, donated by Hofmann himself. He also gained a certain understanding of the prominent painters in the Bay Area Figurative Movement, such as Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and Joan Brown.12 It is worth noting that in the early 1970s Joan Brown taught for a few years at the Academy of Art

Vol. 14 No. 5 89 College, where Liang Quan would later study, before she eventually took a position at the University of California at Berkeley.13

Stylistically, Bay Area figurativism was in fact a form of semi-abstract figurative expressionism. Its major adherents, especially the three aforementioned artists, had all gone through periods of abstract expressionism before espousing the “figurative movement.”14 It was as a student in San Francisco that Liang Quan first encountered abstract expressionism and figurative expressionism and forged an inextricable bond with them in his art.

Salute to Tradition (1982) was a work Liang Liang Quan, Salute to Tradition, 1982, copper Quan completed for his master’s degree. It is plate collage, 55 x 39 cm. Courtesy of the not difficult to see that he intended to build artist and Hive Center for a bridge between a Chinese tradition and Contemporary Art, Beijing. Western modernity. He appropriated the image of the hero Zhang Shun (the “White Stripe in the Waves”) from the woodblock print series Illustrations of the Water Margin by the late Ming artist Chen Hongshou (1598–1652), pasting a fragment of a reproduction of it onto his own picture. He also incorporated copperplate etching, which has never been a traditional technique in Chinese art. The apparent hatching that results from the copperplate etching technique also produced intriguingly subjective lines with an abstract effect. Moreover, it featured a structure of colour fields formed by both tearing and dyeing paper. The work may be considered Liang Quan’s first experiment in abstraction. Yet the focus of Salute to Tradition was clearly more cultural in nature, an attempt to span the barriers of artistic language and technique between China and the West.

III. In January 1984, Liang Quan completed his studies and returned to China, later taking a teaching position in the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts printmaking department. In addition to teaching, Liang Quan resumed his personal creative explorations. Working mainly with paper, he still focused on collage and dyeing, filling his pictures with subjective, amorphous, seemingly half-abstract, half-figurative symbols, or even totem-like forms. His manner of scrawling manifested a naive playfulness, reminiscent of the whimsical, childlike atmosphere often seen in the paintings of Paul Klee. But in contrast to Klee’s style, which featured both heavy colours and a partiality for geometrical order, Liang Quan’s works from the mid-1980s to the 1990s seemed to have the strong character of freely flowing drawings, frequently peppered with primitive totemic or pictographic symbols.

In retrospect, Liang Quan acknowledges that two events that occurred in China in 1985 substantively inspired the form of his art. The ﬁrst, in May of that year, was a month-long master class in painting at his alma mater, the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, offered by the expatriate painter Zao Wou-ki (1921–2013) upon his return to China after living in France for thirty-seven years. Liang Quan was one of the participants in the class, gaining a close-up

90 Vol. 14 No. 5 understanding of Zao Wou-ki’s painting aesthetic and artistic experiences and a familiarity with his techniques.15 It is common knowledge that in his early period in France, Zao Wou-ki was inﬂuenced by Klee and had once drawn inspiration from the inscriptions on ancient Chinese oracle bones, bronze bells, and ritual vessels, transforming them into purely artistic formative symbols. The ungainly charm in Liang Quan’s works was clearly related to Klee; at times he was inspired by his son’s doodles.16 But while Zao Wou-ki transformed ancient cultural images into pure form, Liang Quan imitated rock paintings discovered in China—particularly in the Yin Mountains of Inner Mongolia—preserving the cultural implications of these totems and producing inexpressible mythical allusions and a sense of mystery.17

Another highly signiﬁcant event in the art world was an exhibition by the American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), in the name of the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI) in November of that year at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing.18 At the time the ’85 New Wave Movement was taking the Chinese art world by storm, and those young people, inside and outside the academy, who followed avant-garde and modern art felt enormous curiosity toward this prestigious Western contemporary artist and his works. Liang Quan journeyed from faraway Hangzhou for a glimpse. The exhibition’s silkscreen paintings made a deep impression on him, and Rauschenberg’s concept of “silkscreen collage” had an impact on his own creations.19

The year 1985 may well be seen as marking the inception of Liang Quan’s work following his return to China. He went through an obvious period of stylistic reﬁnement that continued until around 1992. The works of this period generally were not large, as if a small scale allowed him the leisure to experiment and probe in search of his own individual form. Presumably, these were works done for his own enjoyment outside of his pedagogical duties, and thus he had no time constraints or sense of urgency in completing them. These works convey a certain degree of secrecy, as if they were notes about daily life, sketches of his moods, or commentary on current events. With paper serving as his basic medium, tearing, dyeing, and pasting became the fundamental actions of his artistic labour. On top of this abstract imagery, attained through the application of multiple layers, Liang Quan painted a variety of calligraphic or symbolic brushstrokes, even free-spirited scribblings. To give his pictures a richer sense of layering, texture, and changes in form, he also tried a number of new techniques, especially appropriating woodblock print illustrations from literary classics, or even pasting, as he did with Salute to Tradition, old book illustrations or paintings onto his pictures as collage elements. Thus, he added a sense of history evoking the atmosphere of the past.

IV. In 1990, while he was in Britain, Liang Quan happened upon a catalogue of works by the American painter Cy Twombly (1928–2011). To Liang, Twombly’s style of graffiti-like scribbling evoked a strong feeling of elegant refinement. It was to his liking, confirming in his mind the feasibility of incorporating graffiti into his paintings.20 In addition, Liang Quan

Vol. 14 No. 5 91 Liang Quan, Mama, 1989, ink, colour, rice paper, 125 x 93 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

experimented with scorching paper to create a mottled quality. Some of his works, such as Mama and Son of 1989, also responded to current events in the real world. He used symbolic methods to convey his own apprehension regarding that special period in Chinese history. Overall, Liang Quan did not make the works of this period for the purpose of pure abstraction— quite the contrary. Through expressionist methods, incorporating collage with readymade printed materials along with scrawlings or painted symbols, he seemed, half consciously and half unconsciously, to signify psychological fragmentation caused by the mutilation of culture and tradition.

Around 1989, in addition to his originally weighty, constrained style employing heavy colours, he started to explore a new formal method and a new colour scheme. Tearing, dyeing, and pasting remained the core method for composing his pictures, but to this he added a new feature—the ﬂuid cadence of ink painting, yielding softness or a light absorbent effect, which gave his images fuller richness. And as a consequence, his abstract blocks of colour and compositions appeared more permeable and layered. Secondly, his scrawled brushstrokes, which not long before had been direct and forceful, suddenly became meticulous, soft, and delicate. Not only was this approach consciously restrained, but it also possessed a special poetic grace that almost magically brought his images to life. Lotus Rising from the Water (1992) and the Travel Journal series (1992) are two of his more representative works of this period.

92 Vol. 14 No. 5 Liang Quan, Travel Journal Chinese Painting Album, a single series, 1992, ink, colour, rice paper, 87 x 107 cm. Courtesy series in three parts consisting of of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, forty-two paintings, also began Beijing. gestating in Liang Quan’s mind in 1989, but he actually executed the series from 1990 to 1992. They were published as a single volume under the same name in 1993. In his foreword he wrote:

I really like painting albums, a form of expression as elegant as floating clouds and flowing water. Considerable noise and tumult lie beneath the surface of my works, in fractured spaces of clashing desires, but I hope to introduce restraint through the use of symbolic forms. Humanity must ultimately be rational, but only appropriate reason can lead to refinement.21

Liang Quan, Chinese Although the painting album Painting Album—Trouble, 1989–90, ink, colour, was just a format in which literati rice paper, 43 x 34.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist would traditionally present their and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. paintings, it implicitly represented idealism and the pursuit of a lofty and sophisticated sense of beauty. Adopting the title Chinese Painting Album was tantamount to declaring his personal aesthetic orientation. As seen in many of his works, Liang Quan deliberately mounted fragments of landscape paintings from Chinese art history, or excerpted fragments of passages from classical history books, or even imitated the styles of famous calligraphers, such as Yan Zhenqing (709- 785). As Liang Quan himself put it, these “symbolic forms” carry the force of reason and are evidence of elegance. Through a host of shattered and disjointed cultural fragments, he addressed the fractured or lost tradition of reﬁned cultivation, and by engaging in patching and mending, he expressed his own nostalgia and respect.22

V. In retrospect, 1992 was a year of bountiful creativity for Liang Quan. But by 1993 he had fallen into a slump. Today, few works can be seen from that era. In 1995 he resolutely left teaching to become a full-time painter at the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute in Guangdong. From the few currently extant works by him of that period, up until around 1998, Liang Quan seems to have been vacillating about how to move his style to a higher level. He had developed his original form of language to a stage of mastery; how was he to add new elements or a new vocabulary to his existing language system, even daring to betray himself, and strike off on a new path in pursuit of

Vol. 14 No. 5 93 Liang Quan, Untitled, 2006, ink, tea, colour, rice paper, 120 x 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

something different? Even as the year when he “discovered his destiny” was approaching, he was passing through an awkward phase in his career.

Moving from Hangzhou to Shenzhen and switching from educator to full- time painter, Liang Quan had more time to concentrate on his own life and art. While remaining loyal to his method of tearing, dyeing, and pasting paper, he tried blending in brushwork informed by ink painting. In Salute to Tradition of 1996, for example, he pasted in an ink painting of bamboo with his own distinctive ﬂair. He also added aureolas of ink, yielding a more powerful air of abstract expressionism. In one of his Untitled works of 1999, this use can be clearly observed. Furthermore, in a series of paintings from 1996 to 1998 currently titled Meteor Shower, he worked on a grander scale, directly absorbing ink of various colours into xuan paper of larger dimensions. Regardless of the methods an artist uses to control or restrict it, ink inevitably conforms to its own physical properties, permeating and spreading through the paper. Perhaps for this reason, the seven Meteor Shower paintings have a splashed, random effect more than any other works by Liang Quan, serving as a bridge for what was to come.

Quite demonstrably, beginning in 2000, Liang Quan gradually abandoned the heavy colours that he had used for fifteen years. Stressing the fluid flow of ink in single colours and changes transpiring among multiple layers,

94 Vol. 14 No. 5 he deliberately reduced the chromaticity of his pictures as a whole, which increased the sense of semi-transparency after the paper was dyed and pasted together. And following a different logic from his previous reliance on heavy colours, multicolour collages of partial pieces or small shapes actually served to illuminate and enliven his pictures. Red Wall (2000) and his Untitled series are all examples of this approach.

Liang Quan, Untitled, 2002, ink, tea, colour, rice paper, 90 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

Liang Quan, Ocean of Tea, 2014, ink, colour, rice paper, 120 x 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

Vol. 14 No. 5 95 Like 1985 and 1992, the year 2000 was unquestionably a transition point for Liang Quan. From tearing paper with no preset rules and composing pictures from colour ﬁelds of unspeciﬁed form, he turned to cutting out geometric shapes or even using custom-designed paper with holes pre- punched in it as new formal elements. And that year, Liang Quan had a sudden inspiration: a long-time connoisseur of tea who viewed tea as one of the important arts in life and culture, he decided to try incorporating tea stains into his paintings.

By its very nature, paper will become coloured when permeated by tea stains—this is no different from the ordinary concept of paper dyeing. Nonetheless, when exploring the possibilities of transforming tea into a formative medium, he focused on the irregular marks tea makes on white xuan paper. Thus, by controlling the water-like absorbency and fluidity of the tea and by altering its strength, Liang Quan set off down a fully original path, diverging from the traditional concept of the “five tones of ink” (thickness, lightness, dryness, wetness, and darkness) and instead determined the tone by the colour of the tea. Compared to ink, tea has much more subtle variations in light tones. From the perspective of connoisseurship, the appeal of ink is that it signifies erudition and culture, while tea carries associations with relaxation and nature, evoking a greater sense of leisure and beauty in culture and life.

In addition to employing tea as a pigment, Liang Quan also juxtaposed tea with coffee, wryly inviting comparisons between Chinese and Western cultures. Properly speaking, this is more like an aesthetic amalgamation. In his tetraptych Tea and a Little Coffee of 2001, it seems as if the artist is in the midst of an experiment. The material qualities of tea and coffee stains are different, their colours taking on an observable disparity in intensity as they spread outward. The work manifests a spirit of objectivity, not for the sake of celebrating the intrinsic differences in the substances as a means to harp on the same old stereotypical differences of cultures East and West. Quite the opposite—through the mediation of Liang Quan, tea and coffee coexist in tranquility, and each radiates its own artistic beauty according to nature. It is as if tea and coffee are facing off against each other, and the viewer is glimpsing an alternative game of Go.

VI. By incorporating tea into his paintings, subtly encompassing his own philosophical perspective and life aesthetics within his work, Liang Quan hoped to revive the spirit of artistic reﬁnement in the Chinese cultural tradition, pursuing profundity within the everyday and seeking to glimpse the innate beauty of nature. As he stated above, “Considerable noise and tumult lie beneath the surface of my works, in fractured spaces of clashing desires,” reﬂecting the turmoil of the real world and individual helplessness and perplexity. Now, returning from surface form to essence, returning from confusion and disorder to a calm, untroubled state, Liang Quan found creative belonging after coming to understand his destiny.

96 Vol. 14 No. 5 This mode of formative expression is reminiscent of the ancient Chinese aesthetics of porcelain production and the ritual of tea tasting, in which the hues of the tea blend with the soft tones of the porcelain cup. This small-scale aesthetic of the cadence of colour is purely East Asian, indeed unique to China. Forming a bridge with this traditional, distinctive aesthetic history through his art is Liang Quan’s most important contribution to contemporary Chinese ink painting and abstract art.

Liang Quan, Untitled, 2006, Prior to this, Liang Quan’s works seemed abstract while actually mixing in a ink, colour, rice paper, 236.2 x 90 x 120 cm. Courtesy of variety of cultural signiﬁers reﬂecting the phenomenal world, unavoidably the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. projecting or alluding to his own implicit feelings and thoughts about family, society, nation, history, and tradition. After 2000 he no longer focused on such phenomena in his art. Instead, he started putting in order his own states of mind and attitudes toward life. This, Liang Quan feels, was the true beginning of his abstract art. According to Liang Quan, sometime around 2000 he was tidying up his old family home when he stumbled upon a washboard his grandmother had used for many years. Water erosion, along with the traces of human labour and the friction of cloth, had been naturally written into the texture of the washboard so that the originally homogenous, geometrically undulating pattern manifested human memories in relation to time or the vicissitudes of life. Glimpsing meaning in material objects, Liang Quan had an epiphany that art is a vehicle of time and memory—that as things grow old, they show the signs of nature’s constant engraving.

Thereafter, chance collages of heterogeneous objects, such as the prints or rubbings that serve as cultural or symbolic signiﬁers, gradually absented

Vol. 14 No. 5 97 Liang Quan, Untitled, 2010– 11, ink, colour, rice paper, 120 x 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

themselves from his paintings. Returning to the purity of the materials themselves, he retained tearing, dyeing, and pasting as his fundamental techniques, but to these he added the act of cutting. At the same time, Liang Quan began to consciously pursue a colour aesthetic of plainness. This he achieved in a number of ways—by making his pigments light or thin, or by using the natural purity of a single colour of ink. He achieved intricacy through simplicity, with a complex texture of wrinkles and innumerable colours underneath a base of paper made of orderly layers that were seemingly cut or torn evenly. Charged with feeling, the works were achieved by a decidedly non-mechanistic sequence of duplication. Paintings composed in this manner appear at ﬁrst impression to be minimalist. Viewed more closely, they seem subdued. Carefully perused, they are imbued with lush variation.

VII. One note that is perhaps coincidental is that Richard Diebenkorn—a Bay Area ﬁgurative painter mentioned earlier for whom Liang Quan has expressed admiration—re-embraced abstract art beginning in 1967 and in the subsequent twenty years completed more than 130 works under the title Ocean Park. These wonderful masterpieces possess a geometrical sense and are full of sensitive brushwork and colour gradation. In these

98 Vol. 14 No. 5 Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean rational, placid, genteel, and Park No. 79, 1975, oil on canvas, 236.2 x 205.7 cm. lyrical compositions of abstract © The Estate of Richard Diebenkorn. Courtesy of the colour ﬁelds, Diebenkorn would Philadelphia Museum of Art. occasionally evoke a variety of weather, seasons, climate, even an ambient feeling of dense atmosphere. Notwithstanding the disparity in media—Diebenkorn painted with oil and Liang Quan pursued a composite mounting of paper on paper—the works these two artists ultimately completed were both geometric in form, and the atmospheres they engendered, even their colour aesthetics, truly suggest a relationship of distant kinship, each giving rise to a sense of deja vu in the other.

Liang Quan, Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers No. 4, 2014, ink, colour, rice paper, 90 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

Vol. 14 No. 5 99 Liang Quan, Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers No. 8, 2015, ink, colour, rice paper, 90 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

The key difference between Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series and the works of Liang Quan is that the former is grounded in a physical landscape while the latter conjures a mental landscape. The visual structure of Liang’s landscape is not founded on associations with images from the material world, but centres on the structural autonomy of the picture plane itself, and thus its abstraction has a higher degree of purity. In addition to naming his works after tea, Liang Quan often graces his titles with such references as springs, streams, rivers, the sea, even clouds and stars. Yet, while the titles are concrete and ﬁgurative, many are actually derived from famous landscape paintings from Chinese art history, and his pictures betray no intention to reproduce natural scenery. Put more precisely, although Liang Quan articulates a realm of the imagination and his sense of beauty is abstract, he still extracts them from life, and they still convey a natural sense of breathing. They are neither sterile nor otherworldly.

From 2010 to the present, Liang Quan has painted several different renditions of his Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, demonstrating a particular interest in this subject. In art history, the earliest paintings of views

100 Vol. 14 No. 5 Amassing the Essence: of the Xiao and Xiang rivers are said to have been made by the tenth-century Thirty Years of Paintings by Liang Quan, installation painter Dong Yuan, depicting the landscape of southern China. The late view, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, Northern Song dynasty calligrapher, painter, and connoisseur Mi Fu (1051– 2015. 1107) once described Dong Yuan’s painting as “plain and naive,” reﬂecting a perceived lack of verve in his Tang-era predecessors.23 But Liang Quan ﬁnds the “uniformity of the colour of the water and sky” in Dong Yuan’s Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers to be particularly moving and considers it an expression of an imagined “spiritual home.” He writes: “Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers is Dong Yuan’s home in his dreams . . . profound, remote, full of a sense of distance from everything.”24 By using the title Xiao Xiang, Liang Quan is in fact entering into a dialogue with this ancient master, not only paying him tribute, but also revealing his own “plain is beautiful” view of nature and his own spiritual yearning.

VIII. The traditional classics of literature, art, and philosophy are the sources in which Liang Quan frequently immerses himself, as the models of his own transformation. Amidst the realities of ordinary life can be found an abundance of timeless beauty, which can still serve as the subject matter for his creative imagination. In a recent statement, the artist invoked the words of the Buddhist master Shanneng of the Southern Song dynasty: “Everyone fears the heat, but I love the long summer days. The breeze arrives from the south, and the pavilion is cool.” Liang Quan offered his own interpretation of this comment: “When everyone is pursuing extremely intense beauty, it is just as

Vol. 14 No. 5 101 good an attitude to follow one’s own taste, and cleave to lightness.” He hopes to “abide with silence, anonymity and tranquility, and at moments remind myself that I do not have to get overly anxious about this complicated, noisy world.”25 A follower of Chan Buddhism, Liang Quan writes in recollection of the changes that took place in his style around 2000: “I no longer felt the need to make every single picture ‘full,’ but turned to the pursuit of ‘emptiness’.” This artistic state of “emptiness” can only be achieved through “the ‘irregularity’ of the artwork and the ‘non-action’ of the artist.” 26

For an artist, “non-action” is not doing nothing but doing without doing. Ultimately, the act of making art itself is a kind of action. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that in the process, art will not get bogged down in ﬁxed, standardized conventions, or stylized formalism, or even simply doing art for the sake of making a living. One might even say that the “emptiness” that abides in the heart of Liang Quan is not only the courage to be stylistically understated and minimal, but also an insistence on “purposiveness without purpose” (in the words of German philosopher Immanuel Kant). Only in this way can there be “richness” in “emptiness” and the possibility of unity between the two.27

The “emptiness” to which Liang Quan refers is not a vacuum in the physical world, but an ideal of the spiritual realm. Worth pondering is that the “emptiness” we see in his paintings is not “absence”; nor is it really “subtraction.” On the contrary, he employs the complicated techniques of cutting, shading, and collage on a blank background, gradually building a world of geometric abstraction on a foundation of simple colour. First, he cuts or tears paper into strips or pieces and dyes them with pigment, their edges standing out as crisp lines. Pasted layer upon layer, line-by-line, piece- by-piece, the edges form a world of geometrical colour ﬁelds. The borders overlap, interconnect, and extend into one another, ultimately stretching out to form a bountiful, boundless visual impression. At the same time, as the strips and pieces of paper build in layers, they amass a texture of folds and furrows, containing nuances of colour half hidden, half visible. In terms of both technique and form, what Liang Quan actually employs is addition. In the end, what he creates—a realm of the mind that transcends form, a spiritual world of blank space—is truly remarkable.

Liang Quan once humbly declared: “When I confront this mysterious world, I am powerless to prevail by strength, so all I can do is admit my weakness.”28 This statement serendipitously dovetails with the words of the Tang dynasty commentator Sikong Tu (837–908): “When one’s grasp is not strong, one receives in abundance.”29 “Drawing from the void to enter a state of wholeness,” returning to the root of things, Liang Quan persists in “amassing the essence,” affording us a glimpse of the mind as empty as the wind through a valley.30

English translation by Brent Heinrich,

102 Vol. 14 No. 5 Notes

1. This date of birth was provided by Liang Quan. 2. Zheng Chao and Zhou Yunpeng, “Zhongguo meishu xueyuan fushu zhongdeng meishu xuexiao xiaoshi” (History of the Art High School of China Academy of Art), Baidu Online Encyclopedia: http:// baike.baidu.com/view/2006168.htm/. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. According to Liang Quan’s own account. See Li Qiongbo and Xiao Xiao, eds., “Liang Quan: Zai danmo limian xunzhao kongbai de zhixu" (In Search of the Order of Whiteness within Light Ink), Hualang (Galaxy) no. 11 (2009), 30–35 (in Chinese). 6. From an interview I conducted with Liang Quan on the afternoon of October 1, 2014, at Wisteria teahouse in Taipei. Additionally, the aforementioned essay by Zheng Chao and Zhou Yunpeng notes that during the Cultural Revolution, “some people turned the childish ignorance of some of the Affiliated High School students into a highly destructive force. A few of the more prominent incidents at the school were that the president Pan Tianshou was publicly criticized and beaten, the teacher Wang Liuqiu was brutalized in all sorts of ways, and the librarian Fei Fen was maltreated to the point of death. All of this caused severe, irreparable harm.” (See Zheng Chao and Zhou Yunpeng, “Zhongguo meishu xueyuan fushu zhongdeng meishu xuexiao xiaoshi.”) Perhaps because of this, when admissions testing resumed at Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, a certain fear remained of those who were Affiliated High School students during the Cultural Revolution. 7. According to the artist’s own account. See Li Qiongbo and Xiao Xiao, eds., “Liang Quan: Zai danmo limian xunzhao kongbai de zhixu" (In Search of the Order of Whiteness within Light Ink). 8. The original works are not accessible for viewing; only reproductions are currently available. See Fan Deming, “Minbing chuantong / daidai xiangchuan—ping sanlian hua ‘hong yeye hong duizhang hong haizi’” (The Citizen Soldier Tradition through the Generations—A Critique of “Red Granddad, Red Brigade Leader, Red Child”), http://damingfan.lofter.com/post/1cc9c077_6e7d716/ (in Chinese). Red Granddad was made into a poster. See Chen Bo, “Liang Quan: Pintie xingyou / shijian shanggan” (Collage Roaming Freely, Melancholy of Time), Artron.net, http://huanan.artron. net/20140416/n592691.html/ (in Chinese). 9. Interview with Liang Quan, October 1, 2014. 10. Ibid. 11. Information regarding Liang Quan’s master’s diploma was provided by the artist himself. 12. Interview with Liang Quan, October 1, 2014. 13. See the official website of the Joan Brown Estate, http://joanbrownestate.org/biography/. 14. Susan Landauer, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press and Laguna Art Museum, 1996). 15. Interview with Liang Quan, October 1, 2014. Liang Quan stated that Zao Wou-ki’s words and demonstrations in the class and the process by which he helped the master class participants to improve their paintings directly presented a new possibility separate from Soviet-style painting. 16. Ibid. Examples of Liang imitating children’s drawings and inserting them in his paintings include his Untitled of 1991. 17. In my interview with the artist of October 1, 2014, Liang Quan noted that he had seen the Yin Mountain rock paintings while traveling in Inner Mongolia and included them in his works. 18. For more on this exhibition and its influence on China, see Hiroko Ikegami, “ROCI East: Rauschenberg’s Encounter in China,” in East-West Interchange in American Art: A Long and Tumultuous Relationship, eds. Cynthia Mills, Lee Glazer, and Amelia A. Goerlitz (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2012), 176–89. 19. Interview with Liang Quan, October 1, 2014. 20. Ibid. 21. Cited in Xia Jifeng, “Liang Quan: Xinzhi zhi he—Cong qu zhongxinhua de hou xiandai zhuyi dao dongfang shixue huihua de guitu” (River of the Mind—From Decentralized Postmodernism to a Return to the Poeticism of Eastern Painting), CAFA Art Info, http://www.cafa.com.cn/c/?t=836750/(in Chinese). 22. In my interview with the artist of October 1, 2014, Liang Quan noted that after the Cultural Revolution, many well-made old books were scattered, left in shreds, and later sold on the street. He purchased some of these and used them as material for his collages. 23. Chen Gaohua, ed., Song Liao Jin huajia shiliao (Painters of the Song, Liao and Jin Dynasties) (Beijing: Wenwu Publishing, 1984), 28 (in Chinese). 24. Liang Quan, “Xiao Xiang bajing” (Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers),” Ku Art no. 18 (2/2011), 51. 25. Liang Quan, “Liang Quan zishu” (Liang Quan’s Own Account), Fine Arts Literature no. 80 (June 2012), 22–25 (English title, text in Chinese). 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Zhan Youxin, Sikong Tu “Shipin” yanyi (An Explication of Si Kongtu’s Poetry) (Taipei: Wang Books, 1985), 5–11 (in Chinese). 30. The phrases fan xu ru hun (drawing from the void to enter a state of wholeness) and xu su shou zhong (amassing the essence) are both found in Sikong Tu’s Poetry.

Vol. 14 No. 5 103 Tianmo Zhang Unscrolled: Reframing Tradition in Chinese Contemporary Art Vancouver Art Gallery November 14, 2014–April 6, 2015

ontemporary Chinese artists of the twenty-ﬁrst century can arguably be categorized according to two general tendencies: those Cwho engage with traditional visual aesthetics and those who part ways with them in pursuit of global, non-ethnic forms of expression. With the growing number of Chinese artists exploring the theme of tradition today, one could wonder: What role does tradition play in contemporary Chinese art? What motivates artists to reinvent tradition? In other words, is tradition used to pay tribute to and celebrate the history of China, to accentuate its decaying presence in modern Chinese society during the country’s global expansion, to facilitate a visual dialogue with Western audiences, or to explore its convergence with modern approaches in search of emerging contradictions?

Recently, the Vancouver Art Gallery delved into this ongoing dialogue with a group exhibition entitled Unscrolled: Reframing Tradition in Chinese Contemporary Art, which included ten artists based in mainland China and the United States, including northern artists Ai Weiwei, Ji Yun-Fei, Sun Xun, and southern artists Zhang Enli, MadeIn Company (Xu Zhen), and Liu Jianhua. Jointly organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery’s assistant curator Diana Freundl and Beijing-based curator and art critic Carol Yinghua Lu, Unscrolled explored the reinvention of historical ﬁgurative traditions in Chinese visual culture, a subject that has garnered the unprecedented attention of Western art institutions in recent years with exhibitions such as Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2013; Fresh Ink, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in 2011; and Brush and Ink Reconsidered: Contemporary Chinese Landscapes, at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2011. By engaging in this dynamic discourse alongside its American counterparts, the Vancouver Art Gallery brings Canada into the vibrant circuit of contemporary critical exchanges on the topic against the backdrop of its own history of Chinese art exhibitions, such as the notable multi- venue group exhibition Jiangnan: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art from South of the Yangzi River, in Vancouver, in 1998.

For visitors of Unscrolled, their encounter with the artworks likely occurred ﬁrst through the smell of Chinese ink that emanated from Jennifer Wen Ma’s monumental live sculpture Inked Chandelier (2014). Consisting of more than seven hundred live plants—the majority of which were drenched in calligraphy ink—Inked Chandelier spread from the gallery’s ground ﬂoor rotunda like a domineering Christmas tree, occasionally revealing a

104 Vol. 14 No. 5 canopy of green buds amid its massive dark fauna. Upon subverting the two-dimensionality of traditional shanshui (mountain and water) landscape painting and magnifying its physical constituents of ink and nature, Inked Chandelier metaphorically revealed the repurposing of Chinese artistic traditions that is highlighted throughout the exhibition.

Jennifer Wen Ma, Inked Chandelier, 2014, 720 live plants, Chinese ink, aluminum structure, hydroponic system, 500 x 485 cm. Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist.

From beginning to end, Unscrolled offered one continuous path that both started and converged with Xu Bing’s landscape light box painting Background Story (2014), a re-enactment of the masterful shanshui handscroll of Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), Ten Thousand Li of Mountains and Rivers. Immersing the audience in sublimity, the ten- metre-long installation serenely asserted the legacy of literati painting in accentuating one’s experience of the natural world. As visitors moved around to the back of Xu Bing’s installation, attracted by the glow of its neon lighting, they realized that its constituent components could not be more unsettling: newspaper cutouts, consumption waste, dry straws, plastic bags, and natural debris of various kinds. What initially appeared as an iconic embodiment of East Asian heritage is reduced to shadows made of human detritus. Hence, by conﬂating literati tradition with daily consumer objects, Xu Bing questions the very foundation of Chinese visual aesthetics and its oft-fetishized status in modern artistic practices.

Vol. 14 No. 5 105 Of particular focus in Unscrolled Left: Xu Bing, Background Story: Ten Thousand Li was the reinvention of ink painting, of Mountains and Rivers, 2014, natural debris, plastic, whose conventional order was frosted glass panel, 92 x 932 x 70 cm. Photo: Rachel subverted by the addition of new Topham, Vancouver Art media and Western concepts. The Gallery. Courtesy of the artist. insertion of new media was featured Bottom: Sun Xun, Shan in Sun Xun’s site-specific installation Shui—Cosmos, 2014, film projections, audio, mural Shan Shui—Cosmos, an ongoing installation, hanging scrolls. Photo: Rachel Topham, series started in 2012. Consisting of Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist. graffiti-like calligraphic drawings applied directly to the walls of the white gallery, along with hanging scrolls and video projections, the work’s three distinct media amalgamated into a single plane that simultaneously highlighted the multiple dimensions of the image—moving yet still, flat yet raised. Meanwhile, the work offered an immersive environment led by the animation of colossal waves in the video projections, at times merging with the painted strokes on the walls, at times fading into the still figures on the scrolls. On the one hand, Sun Xun demonstrated the impact of the new age on artists working today by delineating the potential of technology to transform conventional artistic practices; on the other hand, his abundant use of traditional materials may signal an over-exploitation of cultural signifiers in modern Chinese art, as their crowded presence within the parameters of his allotted gallery space could lead one to feel slightly overwhelmed. While the implications of this effect was subject to the interpretation of each viewer, Sun Xun’s rendering of Chinese iconography in digital formats certainly provided an ingenious extension to traditional artistic pursuits in ink painting.

The exploration of digital forms within traditional aesthetics continued in Chen Shaoxiong’s Ink Things (2007), a series of seventy hand-drawn ink paintings on rice paper and a three-minute video sequence. In this work, the artist applied the tradition of ink art to create an unconventional depiction of personal household items characteristic of contemporary culture. In

106 Vol. 14 No. 5 Top: Xu Bing, Background doing so, Chen Shaoxiong conforms Story: Ten Thousand Li of Mountains and Rivers, to a degree of anachronism that 2014, natural debris, plastic, frosted glass panel, 92 x destabilizes the perception of the 932 x 70 cm. Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art viewer who must attempt to make Gallery. Courtesy of the sense of the painted objects in artist. Right: Chen Shaoxiong, Ink relation to the medium used. Here, Things, 2007, 71 drawings the familiarity one experienced upon in Chinese ink on rice paper, each 35 x 46 cm, single- seeing the drawn objects resonated channel video, 3 mins. Photo: Rachel Topham, with his or her own attachment to material goods while triggering one’s Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and decaying connection to intangible aspects of culture in modern-day society. Pékin Fine Arts, Beijing. In this light, Chen Shaoxiong’s use of ink acted as a means to reconnect with the past by uncovering the roots of our historical traditions.

MadeIn Company (Xu Zhen), The subversion of traditional forms Physique of Consciousness Museum, 2013–14, wood, was further invoked in Liu Jianhua’s glass, photos, acrylic glass. Photo: Rachel Topham, Traces (2011) and Container (2009), Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist. a large-scale porcelain installation that mimicked drops of Chinese ink caught in suspension. Occupying the three large walls in the room, these glazed shapes dominated the exhibition space through their magniﬁed repetition, echoing the effect found in Sun Xun’s video installation and in Ai Weiwei’s installation of stools, Bang (2007), which was situated at the opposite end of the gallery. Other works in the exhibition included Zhang Enli’s Space Painting series (2014), MadeIn Company’s Physique of Consciousness Museum (2013–14), and Ji Yun-Fei’s The Move of the Village Wen (2012).

If one had chosen to go in the opposite direction to view the exhibition after experiencing Xu Bing’s installation, one would have ﬁrst encountered Qiu Shihua’s minimalist painting series Untitled (2013). Upon ﬁrst impression, what looked to be blank canvases seemed easy to dismiss as they did not appear to reveal more than faint, obscure shapes; but then, with prolonged

Vol. 14 No. 5 107 observation, as if recovering from looking directly into the sun, silhouettes Liu Jianhua, Container, 2009, 33 porcelain pieces of mountainous landscapes started little by little to emerge and reveal (ﬂoor), and Traces, 2011, 108 porcelain pieces (wall). themselves. In this case, Qiu Shihua’s approach functions as a strategy to Photo: Rachel Topham, renew one’s interaction with literati landscape painting, which at times can Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy of the Artist and lose its immediate impact given the overt representation of nature and the Pace Gallery, Beijing. viewer’s exposure to the tradition of ink painting as a genre. By obscuring the concreteness of literati painting, Qiu Shihua subverts its standard conﬁguration in order to challenge one’s expectation of depicted reality, thereby encouraging audiences to actively decipher its content based on their own imaginings of shanshui scenery. Moreover, the display of these paintings at the Vancouver Art Gallery was strategically accompanied by a

108 Vol. 14 No. 5 Qiu Shihua, installation view, Vancouver Art Gallery. Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing- Lucerne.

documentary video showcasing Qiu Shihua’s recent solo exhibition at the Berlin National Gallery’s Hamburger Bahnof Museum, a didactic choice that added further layers to the viewers’ understanding of his work. In my experience, starting with Sun Xun’s video installation and concluding with Qiu Shihua’s painting series was a preferable way to tackle the exhibition, as the ﬁrst few bodies of work illustrated well the exhibition themes before the audience reached Qiu Shihua’s more subtle conceptual painting series.

Concurrently with Unscrolled, the Vancouver Art Gallery presented a historical exhibition entitled Forbidden City: Inside the Court of China’s Emperors (October 18, 2014 to January 11, 2015), which showcased artistic practices and traditional customs adopted during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The simultaneous presentation of the two exhibitions might be seen as an institutional strategy to enhance the viewers’ interest in the contemporary exhibition, as an understanding of classical Chinese art could serve to enrich their curiosity about how ancient traditions have been reimagined in Unscrolled. This intention was further emphasized throughout the exhibition with a rich supply of didactic material that underscored the legitimacy of Chinese culture by showcasing local artistic production centres, such as Rongbaozhai for woodblock printing in Beijing, and Jingdezhen for porcelain in Jiangxi. As such, these distinctions magniﬁed the appeal of Unscrolled as an anthropological proposition rather than solely a space of contemporary critique.

According to art historian Wu Hung, contemporary Chinese artists engage with tradition through one of three means: “distilling materiality” (breaking apart the physical materials of the medium), “translating visuality” (communicating Eastern forms of expression to Western audiences or vice-versa), and “reﬁgurating” (transforming everyday aspects into new forms).1 In Unscrolled, these strategies could certainly be noted through the artists’ own engagement with tradition, digital material, and Western conceptualism. By showcasing the latest tendencies and challenges within the contemporary artistic practices of China, Unscrolled successfully

Vol. 14 No. 5 109 presented myriad examples that demonstrate reinvented forms of a Ai Weiwei, Bang, 2010–14, 886 antique stools from traditional genre, although the choice of artists seemed somewhat inclined the Qing dynasty. Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver towards market prominence. While the question of uneven representation Art Gallery. Courtesy of the of gender in Unscrolled is notable (one female artist as opposed to nine artist. male artists), the larger issue for me is the unrelenting Western expectation that Chinese artists will provide ethnic markers in their work. Performance artist Zhang Huan once pointed out: “Whenever Chinese contemporary art is discussed in a Western cultural context, ‘Chinese’ always comes before ‘art’, which says a lot about its status in international forums.”2 Ironically, by reiterating traditional signifiers, as illustrated in the present exhibition, Chinese art may be conforming to an ideological deficiency that eventually comes back full circle. In parallel, independent art scholar David Carrier suggests in his review of Ink Art that “Chinese-style art can only be modernized by abandoning its traditions.”3 Amid mixed opinions on the modernization of tradition in contemporary Chinese art, perhaps the attitude taken by Unscrolled is exemplified by the circular layout of the exhibition itself, which, like Ai Weiwei’s sculpture Bang, offers no clear indication of beginning or end, right or wrong, thus leaving the viewers to navigate the exhibition through their own sense of order.

Notes

1. Wu Hung, “Negotiating with Tradition in Contemporary Chinese Art: Three Strategies,” paper presented at the public symposium Ink Art in the Framework of Contemporary Museum, organized by M+, Hong Kong, December 13–15, 2012). 2. Maxwell K. Hearn, “Ink Art: An Introduction,” in Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 15. 3. David Carrier, “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1, nos. 2 and 3 (2014), 316–19.

110 Vol. 14 No. 5 Chinese Name Index

Ai Weiwei Ji Yun-Fei MadeIn Company Tian Zhuangzhuang Zhang Enli 艾未未季雲飛沒頂公司田壯壯張恩利

Cao Fei Jian Yi Mao Yan Wang Chunchen Zhang Huan 曹斐簡藝毛焰王春辰張洹

Chen Hongshou Lao Wan Mi Fu Wang Gongxin Zhang Peili 陳洪綬老萬米芾王功新張培力

Chen Kaige Lau, Carina Ni Lianghui Wang Xiaoshuai Zhang Shun 陳凱歌劉嘉玲倪良輝王小帥張順

Chen Shaoxiong Li Ruiyu Nong Ke Wang, Chia Chi Zhang Tianmo 陳劭雄李瑞宇農科 Jason 張天墨王嘉驥 Chen Wei Li Xianting Peng Feng Zhang Yimou 陳維栗憲庭彭鋒 Wen Hui 張藝謀文慧 Cheng Ran Li, Alvin Jiahuan Pi Li Zhang Yuan 程然李佳桓皮力 Wu Hung 張苑巫鴻 Chu Tunan Liang Quan Qiu Shihua Zhen Chao 楚圖南梁銓邱世華 Wu Wenguang 鄭朝吳文光 Chun, Julie Lin Chun Qiu Xiaofei Zheng Shengtian 田珠莉林春仇曉飛 Xiao Lu 鄭勝天蕭魯 Qiu Zhijie Cui Qiao Lin Tianmiao Zhou Cengjia 邱志杰 Xu Bing 崔嶠林天苗周層佳徐冰 Shang, Danielle Cui Xiuwen Liu Jiakun Zhou Enlai 尚端 Xu Hong 崔岫聞劉家琨周恩來徐虹 Shanneng Dong Yuan Liu Jianhua Zhou Yunpeng 善能 Xu Zhen 董源劉建華周運鵬徐震 Siao, Emi Gao Minglu Liu, Lydia H. (Xiao San) Xu, Leo 劉禾高名潞蕭三許宇

Guo Xiaoyan Lu Hao Sikong Tu Yan Zhenqing 郭曉彥盧昊司空圖顏真卿

He Jianjun Lu Xuechang Song Dong Yang Fudong 何建軍路學長宋冬楊福東

Hom, Sharon Lu Yang Su Meiling Yin Xiuzhen 譚競嫦陸揚蘇美玲尹秀珍

Hou Hanru Lu, Carol Yinghua Sun Xun Yu Feng 侯瀚如盧迎華孫遜郁風

Hu Jieming Ma, Jennifer Wen Tan Dun Zao Wou-ki 胡介鳴馬文譚盾趙無極

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