JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2014 VOLUME 13, N UMBER 1

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The Fourth Yishu Awards for Critical Writing of Contemporary Chinese Art: Cui Cancan, Anthony Yung Interview with Slavs and Tatars Features: Hu Xiangqian, Li Mu, Zhang Enli, Li Songsong, Xu Bing

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VOLUME 13, NUMBER 1, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2014

CONTENTS 2 Editor’s Note 22 4 Contributors

6 The Fourth Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art

8 The Incident: Inciting a Revolution in Art Cui Cancan

14 Hu Xiangqian: Superfluous Knowledge 36 Anthony Yung

22 Village Collection: On Li Mu’s Qiuzhuang Project Jesse Birch

36 Syncretic Cartographies: A Conversation with Slavs and Tatars Stephanie Bailey

50 50 Zhang Enli’s Space Painting Victor Wang

60 Li Songsong: Conflicts of the In-Between Voon Pow Bartlett

76 Xu Bing’s Magical Mystery Tour Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky

93 Chinese Name Index 60

76 Cover: Hu Xiangqian, Xiangqian Museum, 2010, performance at Taikang Space, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.

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

Vol. 13 No. 1 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art PRESIDENT Katy Hsiu-chih Chien LEGAL COUNSEL Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C. C. Liu Yishu 60 opens with texts by recipients of the FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum Fourth Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace Contemporary Chinese Art. This year Yishu MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian EDITORS Julie Grundvig invited Li Xianting and Martina Köppel-Yang, both Kate Steinmann established as scholars, critics, and curators Chunyee Li within the field of contemporary Chinese Art, EDITORS ⁽CHINESE VERSION⁾ Carol Yinghua Lu to each choose a writer they believe worthy of Su Dongyue this recognition. Li Xianting selected Beijing- Chunyee Li Chen Ping based Cui Cancan, and Martina Köppel-Yang Debra Zhou selected Hong Kong-based Anthony Yung. CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde Each of this year’s recipients has contributed a ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Michelle Hsieh text to Yishu celebrating the idea of alternative WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li artistic practices that challenge the mainstream ADVISORY BOARD art system. Cui Cancan calls for a revolution Judy Andrews, Ohio State University in art-making that resists submission to Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum John Clark, University of Sydney institutionalization, and Anthony Yung explores the Lynne Cooke, Museo Reina Sofia intuitive and idiosyncratic performance work of Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator Hu Xiangqian. Following and complementing these Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China two texts is an account by Jesse Birch of artist Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Li Mu, who has carried out an ambitious project Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, Critic and Curator of re-creating works in the collection of the Van Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Katie Hill, University of Westminster Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive and recontexualizing them in his home village of Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian Qiuzhuang. Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator Lu Jie, Long March Space Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore Stephanie Bailey interviews Slavs and Tatars after Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University the collective's visit to Xinjiang, one of China’s Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art most westernmost territories and the apparent Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator birthplace of the Turkish language. This history Wu Hung, University of Chicago is relatively unknown, even in Xinjiang itself, and Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District the research by Slavs and Tatars emphasizes PUBLISHER Art & Collection Group Ltd. the historic fluidity of borders, language, and the 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, relationship among cultures that line the trade Taipei, Taiwan 104 routes between Turkey and China, a reminder Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 that cultural exchange and hybridity have been E-mail: [email protected] taking place for centuries and are not recent developments resulting from contemporary VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu Alex Kao globalization. MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu Betty Hsieh Painting's expansive field is the focus of texts by Victor Wang and Voon Pow Bartlett, who PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. discuss, respectively, the works of Zhang Enli WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com and Li Songsong, both of whom had their first WEB DESIGN Design Format UK exhibitions in 2013. The authors explore the ISSN 1683 - 3082 complex relationship between the physical Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited process of painting and the ways meaning arises in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, from it. Xu Bing’s recent outdoor installation, also advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: installed in the UK, at London's Victoria and Albert Yishu Editorial Office Museum, is the subject of Patricia Eichnbaum 200–1311 Howe Street Karetzky’s, essay in which she examines how Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 this work is consistent with the artist’s interest in Phone: 1.604.649.8187 translation, this time conveying the traditions of Fax: 1.604.591.6392 Chinese folkloric myths to western Europe. E-mail: offi[email protected] SUBSCRIPTION RATES Finally, the staff at Yishu thanks you, our readers, 1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) writers, subscribers, and donors, for your ongoing 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com) support, and we wish you the very best for the DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group New Year, whichever one you may celebrate. CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow DESIGNER Philip Wong Keith Wallace No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

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(Larisa Broyde) 14 (Chunyee Li) (Philip Tinari) (Judy Andrews) 22 (Britta Erickson) (Melissa Chiu) (Sebastian Lopez) 36 (Claire Hsu) (John Clark) (Pauline J. Yao) 50 (Martina Köppel-Yang) Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor 60 Katie Hill Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda

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Contributors

Stephanie Bailey has an M.A. in Jesse Birch is a Vancouver-based curator, contemporary art theory from Goldsmiths writer, and educator. Birch holds a B.A. in College, University of London, and a B.A. in Fine Arts (Photography) from Emily Carr classical civilization with English literature University of Art and Design, and an M.A. in from King’s College, London. Between 2006 Art History (Critical and Curatorial Studies) and 2012, she lived in Athens, Greece, where from the University of British Columbia. In she played a formative role in designing and 2007, Birch was a curatorial fellow at De managing the BTEC-accredited Foundation Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam. Birch has Diploma in Art and Design at Doukas written for numerous art publications, Education while writing on contemporary and is Vancouver Editorial Advisor for C art production and its discourses around Magazine. He was Co-Director/Curator the world as Art and Culture Editor of of Access Gallery from 2008 to 2010, and Insider Publications and as a freelance critic he is currently Exhibitions Curator at The and essayist. She is currently Managing Western Front. Birch has been teaching in Editor of Ibraaz. Her writing has appeared the Critical and Cultural Studies Faculty at in publications including ART PAPERS, Emily Carr University since 2009. In 2013 Aesthetica, ARTnews, Artforum, Frieze, Birch won the Ontario Association of Art LEAP, Modern Painters, Notes on Galleries Art Writing Award for his essay Metamodernism, and Yishu: Journal of Common Gravity: Kika Thorne’s Tension Contemporary Chinese Art. Sculptures.

Voon Pow Bar tlett, Ph.D., is an artist, curator, Cui Cancan was born in Xuzhou, Jiangsu, lecturer, and writer, as well as an associate China. He graduated in 2008 from the Art member of the Institute of Chartered Institute in Nanjing, China. He currently Accountants in England and Wales. She was works as an independent curator and critic born in Beijing and educated internationally. and is mainly engaged in research and Her focus is on exploring an expanded field writing on art history, art criticism, and in the study of the complex causal framework exhibition practices. In the past four years, he influencing global discourses on fine art. She has curated numerous exhibitions including currently works at Tate Research Centre: Asia The Move Ink Documenta at Nanjing Pacific, in London. Contemporary Art Centre (2009), Freedom

4 Vol. 13 No. 1 of the Term at Chengdu A4 Gallery (2010), catalogues as well as art publications such Uncooked Rice at Suzhou Amemura Art as Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Museum (2011), Public Body–Performance Art, Leap, and artforum.com.cn. Yung is also Art in China, FEIZI Gallery, Brussels (2012), co-founder and curator for the independent Total Shock: New Art from China, Italy art space Observation Society, which was Grand Palais, Milan (2012), You are the founded in 2009 in Guangzhou. World, Sixth Chengdu Biennale, Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art, Eastern Victor Wang is a London-based exhibition- Plaza, Blue Roof Art Museum (2013). maker and curator. He has organized exhibitions and projects with institutions Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky holds the such as the Institute of Contemporary O. Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at Bard Arts, London; Künstlerhauses Bethanien, College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Berlin; and Acme Studios, London, among She has published several books, on subjects others. In 2009 he co-founded the curatorial such as the art of the Tang dynasty and project Here Is Now, in 2010 he founded Chinese Buddhist art, and she has served as the cultural platform Make Art History, Editor of Journal of Chinese Religions. She and in 2012 he was an assistant curator has written many catalogues and has curated for the Vancouver Pavilion at the Shanghai several shows on contemporary Asian art. Biennale. Victor is an M.A. Candidate in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal Anthony Yung is a senior researcher at Asia College of Art, London. Art Archive (AAA), Hong Kong, as well as an independent writer and curator. He has specialized in research on mainland China at AAA, where he curated the exhibition Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980–1990. He was co-director of the documentary film From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Tang: Cantonese Contemporary Art in the 1980s. He has written for numerous exhibition

Vol. 13 No. 1 5 The Fourth Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art

ishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art is pleased to announce the recipients of the Fourth Yishu Awards for Critical Writing Y on Contemporary Chinese Art. Two jurors who have extensive experience in the field of contemporary Chinese art each were invited to make a recommendation: Martina Köppel-Yang, an independent scholar and curator with a Ph.D. in East Asian Art from the University of Heidelberg, selected Anthony Yung, and Li Xianting, an internationally renowned scholar, curator, and critic of contemporary Chinese art, selected Cui Cancan. Each award carries a value of $5,000 CAD. Past award recipients include Maya Kovskaya and Sheng Wei, in 2010; Zhu Qi and Huang Zhuan, in 2011; and Lu Peng and Yu-Ling Chou, in 2012.

The Yishu Awards for Critical Writing are important to the mandate of Yishu and were established to encourage and recognize writers who are making an outstanding contribution to exploring the history of and current issues in contemporary Chinese art.

Martina Köppel-Yang notes that Anthony Yung is at an early stage in his career. He has been working since 2007 as a senior researcher at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong where he has participated in and managed important archive projects such as Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980–1990 and the documentary film From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng: Cantonese Contemporary Art in the 1980s, of which he was a co-director.

In addition to his work as a researcher, Anthony Yung has curated exhibitions with a younger generation of Chinese and Hong Kong artists. He also co-founded the independent exhibition space Observation Society, located in Guangzhou. His writing in the field of contemporary Chinese art reflects his practical experience as a researcher and curator. He pays particular attention to crafting detailed descriptions of artworks as well as to terminology. Anthony Yung takes into account the local background yet does not forget to position the artwork in relation to contemporary concepts and philosophy. By trying to develop a terminology appropriate for the respective contexts he questions, he avoids being formulaic in his writing. This is particularly important in the field of Chinese art criticism, or criticism of contemporary Chinese art, in which the limits of the

6 Vol. 13 No. 1 Anthony Yung

Chinese language and the lack of an appropriate, sensitive, and meaningful indigenous terminologies and the consequent integration of foreign terminologies can pose problems. Anthony Yung’s experience as a curator further enables him to maintain a creative dialogue with artists and with local contexts. His writing is engaged, informed, and sensitive, and he will contribute even more significant and interesting writing in the future.

Li Xianting observes that in recent years Cui Cancan, based in Beijing, has explored the use of alternative spaces. Through a series of exhibitions including Heiqiao Night Away, A Dream, and Container Project, Cui Cancan has taken art out of the existing art system and placed it on the streets and in local communities. These exhibitions articulate his concerns about contemporary Chinese political issues, as well as about Internet communications investigating the most central and fundamental contradictions of the current era and the changes the new technologies have brought to art production and distribution.

For example, the exhibition Heiqiao Night Away lasted sixty days and included more than two hundred artists. This project was a rejection of mainstream systems. All artworks were placed in an abandoned space where there was no security, no fixed display mode, and no audience. The artworks quickly appeared and disappeared, confronted each other,

Vol. 13 No. 1 7 Cui Cancan

were undisciplined in their relationships, and avoided any efficient, pre- designed organizing format. This project also created a new means of communication, not only through word of mouth, but also through artists’ self-broadcasting on social media and by employing the networks Weibo and Wechat. The exhibition demonstrated that contemporary art is no longer a form itself but made up of its social attributes, taking into consideration how it is distributed and recognized in the society.

Cui Cancan places particular emphasis on individual action in order to confront the powerful systems, the absorption of individual cultural identity by arts institutions, the effect of totalitarian politics on individual rights and living environments, and consumer trends that are dominated by the cultural tastes and lifestyles of centralized capitalism.

Financial Support for the Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art Financial is made possible by Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison, Li Lin, and the Canadian Foundation of Asian Art.

8 Vol. 13 No. 1 Cui Cancan The Incident: Inciting a Revolution in Art

y the time an artistic “incident”—an event or spectacle with potentially significant implications or consequences—has entered Bthe canon of history, it is already a dead specimen. This specimen can no longer provide more information, and it is impossible to restore or reproduce the spontaneous environment from which it emerged. It is simply past history. It has reached the limits of its effectiveness. Such incidents are difficult for one party to imitate, manipulate, or completely control. They are intrinsically anti-traditional and must constantly be discarded.

But there is also a freshness, a vitality, to the incident that lies in its unpredictability; it is difficult to anticipate its outcome. In fact, there is no predetermined outcome—only response and counter-response. Thus the incident is the result of multiple reactions. And within China’s unique context, the formation of an incident is often fraught with danger. This danger faces both those who initiate the incident and those who involve themselves in it. When an incident takes shape, it inevitably has a particular focus. The decisions made about this area of focus often cause the resisting party to adjust its manner of counterattack. It is a process of reaction and re-reaction, resistance and re-resistance.

An effective incident is not something that an artist can complete through independent artistic creation alone. It must involve the shared effects of many participants. In the mediation and response between the various actors, the artist mobilizes his or her greatest resources and initiatives, using different media to elicit increased social involvement and reflection. When a particular incident is widely discussed and subsequently catalyzes additional action, the incident becomes effective, allowing for more people to share in the changes it can bring about.

In essence, the incident draws its strength and leveraging power from other forces. For an incident to be effective, it is important that the target of resistance be powerful enough and have enough public influence, so that it will take action against what it is resisting. The force of the action affects the resources, the persistence, and breadth of resistance that the other side is able to mobilize. When one weak group resists another, there is often failure before an incident forms, as both sides lack the ability to affect public opinion. For instance, when the contemporary artist is at odds with the exhibition system or the museum system, if the exhibition or institution

Vol. 13 No. 1 9 he is resisting lacks the traditional attributes of authority, then this resistance will not be able to truly change the exhibition or museum system through influencing public opinion. It amounts to nothing more than an ineffectual match of loser versus loser. If the objective of this resistance is powerful enough but ignores what it is resisting, then it will be difficult to sustain the act of resistance. It has become quite popular in recent years to refuse to take part in exhibitions (an act of boycott), but refusal when no invitation has been proffered is often just a self-flattering stance. It is also an ineffectual stance, one that cannot catalyze action and change. It is simply a unilateral individual action.

Effective resistance often follows on the heels of a paradox. Tino Seghal won a Golden Lion Award at the 55th Venice Biennale. On the one hand, we understand that Seghal’s longstanding disdain for the methods of presentation, documentation, and dissemination within the traditional exhibition system eventually forced that system to change and to affirm his example of resistance. On the other hand, this “legitimization” of his provocation allowed the traditional, capitalistic Venice Biennale to gain a new reputation of authority and innovation, stripping other exhibitions of their power of effective resistance, rendering those other exhibitions even more lost and empty.

When this form of “invited resistance” becomes the norm, then resistance has in essence been consumed, becoming a consciously designed “destructive performance” that further strengthens the concentration of capital and artistic authority. In the theme exhibition of the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, when curator Massimiliano Gioni gathered together unknown, marginalized, highly individual, and even pathological artworks from every corner of the globe and presented them in a refined and beautiful museum format, the artists’ “refusal to cooperate” stance with the art system, an “extremism” materialized in visual form, was forcibly extracted from their original contexts. Thus, was Gioni’s exhibition not turned into yet another special offering made to satisfy the capitalist system? This encyclopedic arrangement served to dissolve individual differences among the artists exhibited, forming instead a generalized, unified spectacle. Similarly, when the incident is unable to shake off the traditional system of the past through effective, radical means, then the incident can only satisfy the “vagabond complex”—A Chinese saying for authority that becomes entangled in excess as it searches for simplicity.

Impact through action and total subversion are at the core of the incident. Thus, the incident is difficult to exhibit. It demonstrates disdain toward refined appreciation and consumption and opposes the aesthetic service of so-called “exchange.” The incident’s progression into the museum, then, is its progression into death. Once an incident makes its way into the museum system, the museum can only provide one aspect of its totality, and its undiscovered values will be lost forever. By the time it has been analyzed by

10 Vol. 13 No. 1 the philosophical system with its iconography and linguistics, the incident no longer possesses flesh and blood, let alone hitherto undiscovered values.

The starting point of the incident is never absolutely rational, neutral, or objective. The values, orientation, and interests of a particular organization or entity define it. Any action that attempts to attain absolute rationality, neutrality, or objectivity can only provide a hint of itself from among the piles of papers in the office. Such an action has never existed in reality. The incident cannot be led by so-called textual experience, and it cannot rely on elitist theoretical dogma. In the early stages of an incident’s emergence, it is inevitably anti-intellectual, biased, crazed, and impulsive. This is the foundation that gives it the possibility of escaping past cognitive modes and practical methods, of escaping the fatalistic designs of historical experience. New historical incidents and cultural incidents often sprout from blind action and naivete, from belief in fantasies and infeasibilities, from emotional impulsiveness and idealism in the existential sense. Only in this way can the incident maintain an uncompromising force of will in the process of resistance.

As incidents can never be completely planned out, it is the very danger of loss of control, as well as the process of fearing this loss of control and attempting to maintain reason, that make up the incident’s unique mode of being. This self-endangering choice is artistic as well as philosophical and moral: It entails discarding repetition and security and always starting out with nothing.

The incident possesses flesh and blood. It is not an abstract discussion of soldiers fighting a fantasy war on paper. It is not directed at some precept, theory, or knowledge system in the textual sense. It is rooted in respect for one’s existence, in sincere emotions, and in a sense of responsibility toward society. Only when it is rooted can it possess living flesh and blood. If an incident is to take hold, it must take place in the real world. It must take a proactive, self-endangering stance. It opposes historical dogma, sees no hope in enduring reality, and is anti-violent in the face of violent control as it actively participates in social movements on a broad scale. This sincere outpouring of the heart and this need to justify the self are direct and corporeal. They speak of an existence within “man” beyond traditional knowledge, lofty rationality, and the sublime morality that all of mankind aspires to: an existence of the “self,” an existence of “social man” as a primary participant in society.

The greatest inheritance given to us by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Beuys is the knowledge that in fully participating in the systems of social organization, cognition, interaction, and implementation, one can become a legend. An incident can be a one-time affair, but human existence is not. The incident must possess continuity, must consist of many incidents large and small. Persistently participating in action through

Vol. 13 No. 1 11 incidents does not involve strategy. Instead, it involves maintaining constant absence—avoidance of social values, isolation from the mainstream, and refusal to compromise in discourse. To always maintain the reactionary position of the incident is to maintain an experimental spirit with respect to means and methods of action—an emphasis on the limitless possibilities of humankind’s means of existence.

An incident must also encompass an attitude. This attitude is not some act of expression through transformation using pictures and signs as would be understood by an artist who is a formalist. Such acts do not form a true attitude. Form is just a temporary, optional tool for the dissemination of an incident. Curator Harald Szeemann articulated the relationship between attitude and form back in 1969 in his exhibition When Attitude Becomes Form, although he was still enamored by the charms of form, and he clearly favoured the conditions and processes that take place within the production of form.

The attitude within the incident refers, rather, to the decision, in the face of predicted danger, to choose danger and to change the consequences of that danger. This decision requires use of effective strategies and methods of expression. It is hard to carry out the entirety of an incident with a single painting, an installation, a performance, or a photograph. In the process of dissemination, an incident may unfold with a certain image as its carrier. Art is merely one means within the operation of the incident. When an artist chooses to use the incident to engage in exchange, he or she should look beyond, even look down upon, the art of the past. When this disdain exists, the driver of the incident no longer concerns him- or herself with existing artistic dogmas (language and form, concepts and ideas), with so-called standards and determining elements.

The incident is not necessarily an artwork, but it can still change the art system in an effective and direct way. When the incident emerges as art, it is, in the majority of cases, in a state of pursuing acceptance. Art is merely a form left behind by the process, a piece of evidence from the incident that can be displayed or disseminated. In essence, this incident is anti-art. In the process of the incident’s emergence, those serendipitously or temporarily produced methods of exchange and forms of expression happen to be the best opportunity for producing new art.

The aim of the incident is neither to expand the boundaries of art nor to resolve art’s lingering problems. Any thought of using art to expand art is difficult to put into practice. Art has never performed single-cell reproduction, and it has never been virgin soil. Its process of development has always been one of being influenced and forced to interbreed. There is no independent, self-serving world for art, and art’s duty is not to protect or redeem itself. Art is a part of society. As a member of society, it changes

12 Vol. 13 No. 1 its understanding of self and adjusts its relationship to others in order to actively participate in and change society as a whole.

Art no longer discusses technical questions of expression and self- expression. Instead it has turned to the questions of effective dissemination. It has never been singular in its release or expression. It must be perceived, reacted to, and exchanged. The incident is undoubtedly the best tool for exchange with the public. Art is inevitably produced within exchange.

The material of the incident is not an object. The incident does not take place as some visual form, although it does sometimes take on a visual form in the process of dissemination—that is to say, it takes on an effective process for engaging in exchange. If a particular incident one day enters into the museum system for exhibition, it can be described textually and will perhaps be presented visually. But the true exchange of the incident must take place within the social system, within much greater public fields such as the Internet and newspapers. The classical museum system must be handed over to the masses and the larger social system.

The incident is the discarding of existing systems of artistic expression, exchange, dissemination, and practice. An incident can use any material and can take place in any space, be it the virtual realm of the Internet or the real environment. The incident does not need to consider the issues of site, logistics, exhibition, documentation, or sponsorship from the existing arts. The age of the Internet and other media has revealed the limitations of previous exhibition methods which can no longer meet the new comprehensive needs for rapidity, fragmentation, and synchronicity. New platforms for exchange can mobilize greater resources and achieve more exchange while truly effecting change. The incident can go beyond the use of objects (physical materials) to express its ideology and true emotions. Art is also an arrangement of events or things, an arrangement of resources and systems, a rearrangement and re-appropriation of organizational systems.

When the incident has been affirmed as artistic and correct, it has lost its true significance. The incident is no longer a question of philosophy or self; it is the method when there are no more methods, a revolutionary practice that in action constantly casts doubt on and provokes society’s means of existence—one that exploits and excites cognitive and organizational systems. The form of its values must touch upon the existence of the majority of groups and touch on shared questions within the public field. It is only in this way that the incident can, by gaining public dissemination and broad influence, form a temporary cultural force together with the public. This cultural force has the power to effect change. True existence is the only foundation of the incident. Today, rather than diligently pondering and creating so-called art or feeling hopeless about the state of art, we should provoke a revolution in art.

Vol. 13 No. 1 13 Anthony Yung Hu Xiangqian: Superfluous Knowledge

“Such playing contains at the outset all the elements proper to play: order, tension, movement, change, solemnity, rhythm, rapture. Only in a later phase of society is play associated with the idea of something to be expressed in and by it, namely, what we would call ‘life’ or ‘nature’. Then, what was wordless play assumes poetic form. In the form and function of play, itself an independent entity which is senseless and irrational, man’s consciousness that he is embedded in a sacred order of things finds its first, highest, and holiest expression.”1 –Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

ying to the southeast of the main urban area of Guangzhou, Guangzhou “University Town” is located on an island that is part of Lthe Pearl River Delta. The construction of this town began in early 2003, and by September 2004 it was already completed. Newly built, this University Town nevertheless seems to emanate an air of dilapidation and isolation, like that of the many industrial towns surrounding Guangzhou city.

One day, an art student2 attempted to tow this island by rowboat to the Pacific Ocean. Huang Xiaopeng (then Director of the 5th Studio in the Oil Painting Department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts) told me that the student was one of his own. An inexplicable excitement swept over me, because I sensed, though only vaguely, a special quality about this work that is titled I Will Surely Sail You into the Pacific Ocean (2005). The work’s creator—the student—is Hu Xiangqian. Although a performance piece, it no longer has any live elements. We can see it only in hindsight, in a low-resolution video showing the obscure scene of a young man standing at the shore and bending to the paddles. In such a depressing environment, he was imagining how to row on his own this nondescript island into the vast Pacific Ocean. Many people, including myself, who wish to engage in contemporary art cannot always differentiate between a challenging and introspective conceptual artwork and pure impulse, yet this work demonstrates a unique world view that distinguishes itself from petty tricks and silly mischiefs.

For a long time, most of the performance work that was seen in China incorporated startling or extreme elements in order to gain attention and provoke controversy. Such works competed with each other for their

14 Vol. 13 No. 1 Hu Xiangqian, I Will Surely Sail You into the Pacific Ocean, 2005, performance. Courtesy of the artist.

boldness and made people forget that performance art also has another aspect, one that is more restrained. It seemed that contemporary art should not only excite the spectators but also influence the performer through his or her personal, inner experience. The nature of such attitudes is related to a classic ideal that regards art as a means of self-improvement, but we’re talking about an artist who is so wild that we can also compare performance art to sports. High-level competitive sports require performances, but for the athlete, whether there is an audience or not, the sport follows a steadfast logic: the athlete’s body moves the same way and achieves the same result. It may seem that Hu Xiangqian’s performance is not skillfully or intricately conceived and does not contain anything shocking. But its concise directness serves to convince the audience of its pure motivation—an improvisation by the artist. Most of Hu Xiangqian’s artwork takes the form of performance in order for him to gain as directly as possible bodily and perceptual experience. The artwork might target us, the audience, but, more importantly, as a performance it is directed toward the artist himself. Hu Xiangqian once told me that he wants to know his own mind through art.

This was clearly affirmed in Hu Xiangqian’s work The Sun (2008),3 in which he suntanned himself for months until he turned “black.” When asked the reason for doing such a performance, the artist responded that upon noticing that there were many black people in Guangzhou, he wanted to make friends with them or even be considered part of their group. While such a motivation for a performance might sound ridiculous or surprising, this anticlimactic impetus meant in fact that his performance was not only full of absurdity, but impressive creativity as well. His state of mind can be best illustrated by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “savage mind” (la pensée sauvage), a logic of thinking that is out of order but by itself forms a system that creates another world for the audience and makes them ascribe that world to the artist’s special talent.

Although we cannot assume that Hu Xiangqian was not influenced by classic contemporary art—when he was a student, he showed great interest in Joseph Beuys and read numerous books about him—his works are, nevertheless, not at all technically refined, both in terms of conceiving their conceptual structure and his reckoning with the form of representation. His pieces are candid and unmasked, and the only rule that governs them is that

Vol. 13 No. 1 15 the works are always presented to us, the curious audience, in a form that is Hu Xiangqian,The Sun, 2008, performance. Courtesy of the as direct and vibrant as the content. artist.

If a performance originates merely from such an instinctive desire, why must it be art? First of all, it is because art gives people, both artists and audiences, the freedom of acting and experiencing. Furthermore, through art, performance is, as Bas Jan Ader would say, “not just a feeling, it’s a philosophy.”4 Some performance artists believe that in order to explore this philosophy, thoughts and language do not suffice. It is a philosophy that should be explored and developed through body, movement, experience, and performance itself. The target of this approach to performance art is less the audience than the performer himself. The artist might believe that assumption and imagination are not enough and that it is only through personal experience that the infinite, the unknown, and the hidden can be discovered.

16 Vol. 13 No. 1 Hu Xiangqian,The Sun Band, This further leads us to look into the nature of performance. In The Sun 2008, performance. Courtesy of the artist. Band (2008), Hu Xiangqian worked with a local music band in Indonesia, acting temporarily as its lead vocalist. Despite the fact that he neither knew the song that was being performed nor the local language, he threw himself into his role and acted it out in his own way. The Sun Band mimicked a real pop music concert, but it was not an artwork or performance in the traditional sense as it was presented to the audience for what it was— imperfect and lacking any training, rehearsing, or polish. It was full of uncertainty and chance, free from the regular rules of entertainment and enjoyment. And unlike works of relational aesthetics, it did not create a scenario for the audience to participate and become the content; for Hu Xiangqian, if art merely provides an opportunity for people to interact, then art is far from important. In his case, the artist/creator/actor can adopt an existing situation as the context for the performance and avoid falling

Vol. 13 No. 1 17 into the trap of a series of preset Top and left: Hu Xiangqian, Superfluous Knowledge, 2010, regulations and criteria. He does not performance. Courtesy of the artist. need to conform to a certain logic all the time or attempt to outperform his predecessors. In other words, it is possible a new paradigm can be created.

In 2009, dissatisfied with the infrequency and lifelessness of art activities in the surrounding environment of Guangzhou, Hu Xiangqian, several other artists, and I, a researcher and writer, thought of forming our own art space. Within the urban area of Guangzhou, we found a small space close to the Academy of Fine Arts that was once a hair salon. We later rented it and named it Observation Society, a space in which to hold solo exhibitions for artists from Hong Kong and Guangzhou. The first was Hu Xiangqian’s solo exhibition Knee Jerk Reaction; the name in Chinese, Yong Xi Gai Si Kao, literally means “think with the knee”—it was inspired by an expression in the Leizhou dialect that describes someone who is stupid or thinks without his mind, and, coincidentally, Beuys also said something similar in 1987—“I think with my knee.”5 Hu Xiangqian’s artistic process is to trust his instincts, and like the natural reactions of the body, it is primitive, quick, and powerful. Still, the question remains: What kind of mindset functions behind those natural desires and bodily reactions? Hu Xiangqian’s artistic practice is a pursuit of this answer, and, as suggested earlier, an experiment in getting to know his own mind through performance and art.

The most distinctive feature of his performances is their de-instrumentalism, their despising of functionality. Like other forms of art, performance is a game.

18 Vol. 13 No. 1 Hu Xiangqian, Xiangqian Museum, 2010, performance at Taikang Space, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 13 No. 1 19 As Johan Huizinga claims in his inspiring research, a game is in no sense insignificant: “Play . . . is not foolish. It lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly.6 It is intuitive and free; it is non-profit and therefore “useless.” Instead of being a weakness, this uselessness gives a particular strength to both knowledge and art, and the idea of games is posited in Superfluous Knowledge7 (2010), a piece that resembles popular TV survivor reality shows. Equipped only with a survival guidebook, Hu Xiangqian attempted to live in the wilderness for fifteen days by applying the traditional knowledge and methods recorded in the book and thus challenging his own survival skills. Although the wild environment exists naturally, it appears in this piece to be artificial, and even seems to be intentionally fenced in by the artist as a playground for his game. Putting himself in this environment, he acted according to the orders he set for himself but finally failed—he was not able to catch any fish or find any food in the wild, and resorted to eating the packaged biscuits that he brought with him.

As Hu Xiangqian’s reputation increased, some art organizations began to Hu Xiangqian, Diagram for Speed, 2011, performance. invite him to create new works, and this provided him with opportunities Courtesy of the artist. to engage with audiences more directly. In his recent works, he has probed further into the significance and possibilities of live performance. Xiangqian Art Museum8 (since 2010) is a performance approximately fifteen minutes in length in which he explains his “collections” to the audience through verbal and body language. Some of these “collections” are famous conceptual works, some the artist improvises on the spot, and others are from his memory and imagination combined. This performance is clear and informative

20 Vol. 13 No. 1 while conveying a full sense of the comedic. It recalls the myths of classic conceptual art: dematerialization, unlimited repetition, and transferability. Within this framework (the rules of the game), the artist can abandon all rules and precepts. Through his reinterpretation, conceptual art, which once hovered within the written word, is reinvigorated within verbal language. Another performative work, Diagram for Speed (a race between the artist and electricity, 2011), immediately reminded me of Bas Jan Ader’s Fall:9 both of them challenged overwhelming natural powers (electricity and gravity, respectively) with their own bodies; while they were doomed to fail, their acts were coloured with a kind of romanticism in their futile efforts and disregard of failure. This work echoes I Will Surely Sail You into the Pacific Ocean, the first impression that I had of Hu Xiangqian’s work: a unique conception of the world is embodied in performance. I believe that these distinctive and unexpected world views are the most meaningful things to be found in art. Such a variety of world views, in Huizingaf’s words, will find in art “its first, highest, and holiest expression.”10

This is a revised version of a text that was first published in Chinese in Art Times, May 2012.

Notes 1 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 1949), 17. 2 Undergraduate students of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts study at the campus of Guangzhou University Town. 3 Hu Xiangqian, The Sun, 2008, video, performance, 7 minutes, 59 seconds. 4 This is a line from one of Bas Jan Ader’s favourite songs. Originally quoted in “Quotations of Bas Jan Ader, Comments by Bill Leavitt,” www.basjanader.com/dp/Leavitt.pdf/. 5 Leizhou is a county of Zhanjiang City, the southernmost city in Guangdong province. It is Hu Xiangqian’s native town. Joseph Beuys said in 1987: “Anyway, I think with my knee”; see The Connected Body?: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Body and Performance, ed, Ric Allsopp and Scott de Lahunta (Amsterdam: Amsterdam School of the Arts, 1996). 6 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 6. 7 Superfluous Knowledge, 2010, video, performance, 26 minutes, 10 seconds, edition 2/5. 8 Xiangqian Art Museum, 2010, single-channel video, performance, 14 minutes, 31 seconds. 9 Fall I (Los Angeles), 1970, 16 mm film, 34 seconds, edition of 3, and Fall II (Amsterdam), 1970, 16 mm film, 25 seconds, edition of 3. 10 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 17.

Vol. 13 No. 1 21 Jesse Birch Village Collection: On Li Mu’s Qiuzhuang Project

n August 2012 the artists’ collective Zuzhi (Zhao Junyuan, Tao Yi, Xu Li Mu, My Father, 2012, sound installation in the exhibition Zhe, and Li Mu) presented the exhibition WOODsWORK at Shanghai’s 7"" U7",]Ê6Ê
ÀÌë>Vi]Ê Shanghai. Courtesy of Li Mu. IV Artspace. Each artist engaged with wood as both a medium and a theme, looking at the physical and cultural properties of the material from different points of view. While most of the works in the exhibition were actually made of wood, Li Mu’s contribution was a spoken narrative sound piece called My Father (2012), played from simple speakers mounted to the ceiling of the space.

Li Mu comes from a small Chinese Li Mu, My Father, 2012, sound installation in the exhibition woodworking village of about one thousand 7"" U7",]Ê6Ê
ÀÌë>Vi]Ê Shanghai. Courtesy of Li Mu. people in Jiangsu province, called Qiuzhuang, where his father worked as a carpenter. Through this sound work, Li Mu tells of the

22 Vol. 13 No. 1 disconnect he felt between himself, his father, and the village as a whole while he was growing up and becoming an artist. The material of wood weaves in and out of the story as the narrative unfolds.1 This work marks the beginning of Li Mu’s artistic engagement with his home village.

A year after the WOODsWORK exhibition, I visited V Artspace to see a different group exhibition, THE SUN, during the worst heat wave eastern China had seen in 140 years. THE SUN featured at least twenty-five artists, including three of the members of Zuzhi. Upon entering the exhibition space, I was dwarfed by a photographic wall mural by Li Mu titled Shanzai Van Abbemuseum, which depicted a dry dirt road running through a rural village in China. In the picture, two small industrial vehicles pass stacks of logs, piles of rubble, and a brick wall adorned with three painted images of Mao Zedong.

Li Mu, Shanzhai Van Abbemuseum, 2013, installation view in the iÝ ˆLˆÌˆœ˜Ê/ Ê-1 ]Ê6Ê Artspace, Shanghai. Courtesy of Li Mu.

Seeing the Chairman’s likeness on the walls of a village wasn’t surprising in itself, but these weren’t official Party images; they were versions of Andy Warhol’s colourful Mao, from 1972. Warhol’s massive retrospective, 15 Minutes Eternal, had recently closed in Shanghai and was about to open in Beijing, but state censorship had prevented Warhol’s Maos from being included in either show.

The images of Mao depicted in Shanzai Van Abbemuseum, however, are part of Li Mu’s Qiuzhuang Project: A Dispersed Museum (December 2012– ongoing), a long-term engagement with the artist’s home village. In this project, significant works from the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, are reproduced and installed in Qiuzhuang. This photomural of a scene from the Qiuzhuang Project, along with a descriptive text about the project sourced from an American blog,2 was Li Mu’s contribution to THE SUN.

The title of this mural suggests a questioning of authenticity. Shanzai Vol. 13 No. 1 23 means knockoff or imitation, but this hardly does justice to the layers of reproduction and reception happening in Li Mu’s Qiuzhuang Project. With the inclusion of the blog text, this work indexes multiple potential ways of experiencing the project and its three particular types of audience: the art community in Shanghai where Li Mu had been living and working until recently, the globally dispersed online audience, and the audience that Li Mu values most—the Qiuzhuang villagers themselves.

Two days later, and after three hours on the high-speed Harmony train plus Qiuzhuang Project, 2012– ongoing, with Andy Warhol's an hour in a taxicab operated by an old friend of Li Mu’s, I was standing in Mao paintings, 1972. Courtesy of Li Mu. the village of Qiuzhuang. It was even hotter there than in Shanghai, and I began to wonder if this was why Li Mu included an image of this place in THE SUN. The dirt road in the photomural is actually the village’s main road and, along with the Warhols, it now serves as a museum for numerous reproductions of works from the Van Abbemuseum’s collection. On display are pieces by Daniel Buren, Dan Flavin, John Körmeling, and Sol LeWitt, with videos of performances by Marina Abramović and Ulay on a permanent loop in the village’s rudimentary grocery store. At the time of writing, there are still plans in the works for Carl Andre and Richard Long pieces to be fabricated.

The artworks Li Mu chose to exhibit in Qiuzhuang are directly linked to a particular lineage in the trajectory of Western modern art, but contrary to the modernist notion of artistic autonomy, the Qiuzhuang Project

24 Vol. 13 No. 1 Qiuzhuang Project, 2012– ongoing, with Daniel Buren’s ÃÌÀˆ«iÃʈ˜ÊvÀœ˜ÌʜvÊ
Ê ,
,9°Ê Courtesy of Li Mu.

has its own particular engagement with external indexes and influences, complicated by problems of reproduction, reception, and translation. Each “original” artwork, as it made its way from its place and time of creation to its home in the permanent collection of the Van Abbemuseum was already transformed through numerous contextual shifts and through the passage of time, but what, if anything, is left of the work now that it has become part of the Qiuzhuang Project? Do the stripy Daniel Buren pieces that once followed the artist’s desires to take them out of the institution and onto the streets still speak the same language when they find their way, via a museum’s collection, through reproduction, to the front of a provisional garden of corn on a dirt road in a small Chinese village?

Walter Benjamin speaks of the changes that occur once an artwork is completed, in terms of “subject matter” and “truth content.” For Benjamin, when a great work is first made, the subject matter and the truth content are fully intertwined, but through the contingencies of context, and the passage of time, the two diverge, and the truth content becomes less and less perceptible. If one subscribes to the existence of a transcendental essence of truth (the most modernist of notions), can that essence be supplanted with a new one? In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production, Benjamin famously argues that through reproduction, the original artwork loses its essence, its aura. Boris Groys points out, however, that Benjamin, for all of his foresight, was mistaken when he wrote from a position that assumed a particular normative origin for each work. As Groys states:

There are no eternal copies, as there are no eternal originals. Reproduction is as much infected by originality as originality is infected by reproduction. In circulating through various contexts, a copy becomes a series of different originals. Every change of context, every change of medium, can be interpreted as a negation of the status of a copy as a copy—as an essential rupture, as a new start that opens a new future. In this sense, a copy is never really a copy but rather a new original, in a new context.3

Vol. 13 No. 1 25 In China, the production of “new originals” is a massive industry, and when considering the act of reproducing famous Western artworks, another village comes to mind: Danfen Village, where thousands of artists work producing countless imitations of renowned paintings and prints for domestic and international sale (including Andy Warhol’s Mao.)4 But Qiuzhuang is not Danfen, and while it would have been faster, cheaper, and easier to have much of the work made elsewhere in China, Li Mu made a clear decision to work directly with his community to create a decidedly local museum of reimagined Western Art. With presentations like Shanzai Van Abbemuseum, and on his Web site, Li Mu facilitates the reception of the project outside of Qiuzhuang, but the villagers are his primary audience.

In China, often known in the West as the global hub of cheap, alienated labour, Li Mu decided to produce these artworks in the most un-alienated way possible. He worked with the expertise of those around him to create the works and to respond to the contingencies of the local while fostering a kind of shared understanding. Rather than being revealed to the public once they were complete, a good portion of Li Mu’s local audience took part in the production of the work itself. Through the process of making and displaying these “new originals,” stories and relationships evolved.

While the Qiuzhuang Project is seen by some as an importation of Western values to a rural Chinese village through art, what Li Mu is doing is more subversive. Like most contemporary artists, Li Mu is using pre-existing ideas and aesthetics and radically transforming them by setting them in sharp relief against the conditions of reality. Li Mu is not indoctrinating the villagers into Western culture; he is allowing the village to be impressed onto the artworks. The villagers, while interested in what Li Mu is doing, come to these things in their lives on their own terms, and some don’t come to them at all.

The first art object from the Van Abbemuseum collection that was produced in the village was a zigzag, ladder-like sculpture called Untitled (Wall Structure) first made by Sol LeWitt in 1972. Li Mu didn’t just produce the artwork as it was when LeWitt first created it, he made it informed by Superflex’s Free Sol LeWitt project, in which the Danish collective fabricated versions of this artwork in the Van Abbemuseum and gave them to visitors free of charge. These works not only moved into unlikely contexts and acquired new narratives of their own, they infected the “original” work with the further potentiality of freedom.

Li Mu “borrowed” the Untitled (Wall Structure) already coloured by the Superflex intervention and worked with a small group of villagers to reproduce fifteen of them. They were then distributed to interested people in Qiuzhuang. Through the process of creating these sculptures, Li Mu began making new connections in his village and, producing these

26 Vol. 13 No. 1 Qiuzhuang Project, 2012– ongoing, with Sol LeWitt's Untitled (Wall Structure), 1972. Courtesy of Li Mu.

ostensibly useless art objects, created something useful: community ties. However, once these works started appearing in people’s houses they acquired other kinds of usefulness. Li Mu’s father installed the sculpture on the ceiling of his garage so it could be used to hang his bird cages; his neighbour installed his on an angle and used it to display his travel souvenirs and trinkets. Soon the wall sculptures became coveted. Having missed out on the original distribution, one young man made his own wooden version as a shelf in his living room. The first Untitled (Wall Structure), safe within the confines of the Van Abbemuseum’s collection, is now informed by the fact that it has siblings doing peculiar things, not only around Eindhoven, but also in Qiuzhuang, China.

Left: Qiuzhuang Project, 2012– ongoing, with Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing No. 480, 1986. Courtesy of Li Mu. ,ˆ} Ì\ÊQiuzhuang Project, 2012–ongoing, with Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing No. 256, 1975. Courtesy of Li Mu.

In addition to the distributed sculptures, Li Mu collaborated with a number of assistants to paint two other Sol LeWitt works: Wall Drawing No. 480 and Wall Drawing No. 256, on the outsides of buildings. Among Li Mu’s assistants was Lu Daode, a village elder and calligraphic painter. Li Mu became aware of this skilled painter when he was younger and wanted to become a painter himself, but had no particular reason to connect with him. When planning the Sol LeWitt wall murals, Li Mu attempted to hire Lu Daode to help paint. At first he was uninterested in participating, but Li Mu was persistent, and Lu Daode eventually agreed.

The village has no written history, so in order for stories of the past to be retained, they have to be told over and over again. The sharing of labour

Vol. 13 No. 1 27 28 Vol. 13 No. 1 Vol. 13 No. 1 29 is also conducive to sharing stories. As Benjamin observes “The more self- Previous page: Qiuzhuang Project, 2012–ongoing, with forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed Sol LeWitt's Untitled (Wall Structure), 1972. Courtesy upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to of Li Mu. the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself.”5 Lu Daode, who worked with his hands all of his life, was clearly a practiced storyteller. I heard stories from Lu Daode through Li Mu even before I met the painter. These stories as they circulate through word of mouth, Li Mu’s blog, and now this essay, become an important part of the Qiuzhuang Project.

The village has in many ways determined Lu Daode’s life and career. Early in his life, he was a painter specializing in flowers and birds, and as we sat under his shrine to Mao, eating grapes from his vine and listening to his songbirds, he told us that during the Cultural Revolution he was invited to a group exhibition, but the state decided that his paintings of natural things did not serve the advancement of Communism, and so he was forbidden to participate. Shortly thereafter, a theatre troupe asked him to join them as a set painter, but because of the hukou residency permit system, which determines where one can work, live, receive education, and raise a family, he was unable to leave the village. He eventually gave up painting for a living and, like many others in the village, became a woodworker and general handyman.

Since retiring he has begun painting full time again, specializing in Chinese folk goddesses. He has once again become renowned, and his new paintings are coveted by spiritual mediums who use them to facilitate communication with the gods. When I asked him what he thought of the Sol LeWitt wall drawings, one mustard-coloured with rainbow pyramids and the other a network of intersecting white lines, he said that while he enjoyed Li Mu’s company, he does not like painting things that are not useful.

For Lu Daode, useful meant pictorial, but, as suggested earlier, many of the works in the Qiuzhuang Project have become useful in different ways by virtue of necessity. It is said that when useful things enter a museum they become art, but the reverse is also true; when artworks are far enough from the museum, they can become useful again. Like the Sol LeWitt wall sculptures that have become shelves and hangers, the Dan Flavin and John Körmeling light works have become streetlights. In the evenings villagers linger nearby as these artworks provide the first nighttime illumination the dirt road had ever seen.

John Körmeling's HI HA (1992), which consists of the words HI HA repeated numerous times in red and yellow carnival lights, was installed directly across the street from the small general store. Thanks to the illuminated artwork, the shop has become a popular hang out at night. The store is owned by Li Mu’s uncle, Wang Guoqi, and on a single monitor perched atop a refrigerator next to the store shelves, the complete collection

30 Vol. 13 No. 1 Qiuzhuang Project, 2012 of Marina Abramović and Ulay's ongoing, with Marina Abramovic and Ulay's video performance documentation, up compilation in a Qiuzhuang grocery store. Courtesy to their farewell on the Great Wall of Li Mu. of China, plays on a loop. Li Mu’s uncle is a very outgoing guy, and the grocery store is a social place, so the video weaves its way into everyday conversations: sometimes out of interest and sometimes out of discomfort. Other than the Warhol portraits of Mao, which are deemed by some to be disrespectful, the only artwork in the Qiuzhuang Project that villagers really feel uncomfortable with is the famous Abramović and Ulay work, Imponderabilia (1977), in which the naked artists face each other in the entranceway to the museum forcing visitors who wish to enter to choose between facing one of them or the other as they squeeze through. Li Mu’s uncle acts as a spokesperson for the video explaining that it’s not meant to be sexual, but rather to show the natural form of the human body. While this might be itself a contestable position, it seems to have satisfied the local naysayers. Currently Li Mu’s uncle is reading an Abramović autobiography so that he can be a more informative host.

Qiuzhuang Project, These encounters with the contingencies of everyday life are what Li Mu 2012–ongoing, with John œÀ“iˆ˜}¿ÃÊHI HA, 1992. feels are the most important elements of his project. In a letter to Charles Courtesy of Li Mu. Esche, director of the Van Abbe Museum, Li Mu explains his thoughts around the encounters between the village and the artworks using the context of John Körmeling's, HI HA as an example:

Vol. 13 No. 1 31 The owner of the house planted beans in front of the installation. Soon the beans crawled over the whole rack and covered most of the installation. When the art is confronted with people’s practical interests, it gives way to the latter. Therefore they can coexist in a harmonious way and enrich the artworks. Because what I care about is the relationship between the art and its surrounding environment, not the art itself.6

The Van Abbemuseum has a sophisticated approach to sharing its collection. Other recent projects, like Picasso in Palestine and the aforementioned Free Sol LeWitt, also involved unconventional modes of distributing works from the institution’s collection. Picasso in Palestine was initiated by Khaled Hourani, artist and artistic director of the International Art Academy Palestine, and realized through collaboration between the Academy and the Van Abbemuseum. The complications that arose from attempting to ship and display a priceless artwork in occupied Palestine, became part of the work, and will be imbedded in the cultural understanding of the painting from now on. The painting, Buste de Femme (1943), depicts a woman with an almost mechanical cubist visage, what Slavoj Žižek calls an “occupied face,” showing that even a Picasso is not free from the influences of contextual shifts.7 Buste de Femme will return to the van Abbemuseum as an occupied face. What projects like Free Sol LeWitt, Picasso in Palestine, and Qiuzhuang Project show is that when artworks enter new territories, they forever carry those territories with them. Qiuzhuang Project is supported by the Van Abbemuseum, but, how and if the work will enter the museum (again) is still unclear, and perhaps the lives of these works are only beginning.

In considering this project and its institutional connection, it is important to remember that Li Mu is not working as some kind of adjunct curator for the Van Abbemuseum; he is working as an artist, and while the project still seems malleable, this is the norm for Li Mu, an artist whose work is process- based, socially-oriented, contingent, and difficult to pin down. For example, in 2009 he found a stranger’s name card in Shanghai, and for one year he sent this person a present every month without ever indentifying himself. For Double Infinity, an exhibition produced through a partnership between the Van Abbemuseum and Art Hub Asia and held at the Dutch Culture Centre in Shanghai parallel to the World Expo 2010, Li Mu simultaneously acquired cultural and monetary capital. For his contribution, the artist simply requested a job working for Van Abbemuseum as a general employee, being paid at the European standard (New Job, 2010). This tension between social and cultural expectations to make a tangible income, and the artists desire for creative sovereignty, is present in Qiuzhuang Project as well.

32 Vol. 13 No. 1 Recently Li Mu has instigated a number of projects involving books and libraries. For Public Knowledge (2008), he opened his personal library to the public, allowing visitors to borrow books on the honour system. Later, for Blued Books (2008–09), he worked with inmates at a juvenile prison facility to develop a library for them, and offered mentorship if they needed it. As curator Biljana Ciric says of this work, this approach moves beyond the productive role of the artist, affording him the more complex role as a friend or teacher, as someone who listens and is situated between the institutional system and its subjects.8 It is in this unanchored interstitial zone that Li Mu’s art happens.

Li Mu, Blued Books, 2008–09, juvenile prison library project. Courtesy of Li Mu.

Qiuzhuang Project, 2012– The Qiuzhuang Project began with ongoing, Children reading in
Ê ,
,9°Ê œÕÀÌiÃÞʜvÊˆÊ Õ°Ê a library too. Before Li Mu started producing the artworks, he opened a library, known as “A LIBRARY,” where adults and, especially, children could find information about the artworks if they wanted. Perhaps more importantly, library patrons could just spend time reading or watching a movie. Li Mu sees the library as a space to help reconnect him to his community, by providing something that he dreamt of but never had as a child: a place for exploring culture. As he explains “The library is a public space that connects local people with the outside world and helps [in] establishing a reciprocal understanding. Through the library, I can spread my knowledge and experience gradually, let the villagers understand me, and acknowledge the next steps of the project.”9 This slow process of development is central to the Qiuzhuang Project’s local success, but its reception elsewhere functions much differently.

Vol. 13 No. 1 33 Qiuzhuang Project, 2012–ongoing, with Dan Flavin's Untitled to a man, (George McGovern), 1972. Courtesy of Li Mu.

34 Vol. 13 No. 1 I first came to know about the project on the Van Abbemuseum’s Facebook page, but while I could have written this essay having never visited the village, and I didn’t know what more I expected to understand by visiting Qiuzhuang, I decided that if I didn’t go, the possibility of an impoverished understanding was too great. When speaking with villagers, however, I was confronted by the fact that understanding is dispersed there too. Qiuzhuang is rich in specificity, but at the same time it is prone to the contingencies that come with global networks of capital and communication. These contingencies will also impact the village in a tangible way: soon the dirt road will be widened and paved to connect two main roads, and most of the houses and workshops that are supporting the artworks in the Qiuzhuang Project will be expropriated and destroyed to make room for it. It’s unclear what kind of legacy the Qiuzhuang Project will have in the village, but while Li Mu is more concerned with the process than with the end result, for the duration of my time in Qiuzhuang, his assistant, Zhong Ming was documenting every conversation. Li Mu hopes that by the end of a year he will have a documentary that not only records the project, but also the passing of time.

Now that the Qiuzhuang Project has been in process for almost a year, at least one thing is certain, Li Mu’s connections with his father and the village have improved. As Li Mu relates in the sound work that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay (My Father, 2012), one day his father asked him “Like me seeing the birds that I raise, do you feel great when you see your works?” Li Mu answered, “Yes, the birds are your works.”10 Recently Li Mu uploaded two pictures onto his Web site under a post called Untitled. One was of his neighbour, who was one of the main builders of the Dan Flavin work, proudly holding up what looks like massive orchid, and the other image was of the artist’s father holding a cage with his prized canaries.11

Notes 1 Li Mu, “Carpentry,” I Am Li Mu, http://www.iamlimu.org/blogview.asp?logID=186/. 2 Greg Allen, “Shanzai van Abbemuseum by Li Mu,” 2013, Greg.org, 2012, http://greg.org/ archive/2013/06/07/shanzhai_van_abbemuseum_by_li_mu.html/. 3 Boris Groys, “Politics of Installation,” e-flux journal no. 2 (January 2009), http://www.e-flux.com/ issues/2-january-2009/. 4 John Seed, “The Ghosts of Chairman Mao and Andy Warhol Haunt a Hong Kong Auction,” Huffington Post, May 27, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/the-ghosts-of-chairman-ma_b_590907. html/. 5 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935–1938 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 143. 6 Emphasis mine. Li Mu, “Letter to Charles 6,” I Am Li Mu, May 27, 2013, http://www.iamlimu.org/ blogview.asp?logID=272/. 7 Slavoj Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek in Conversation About Picasso in Palestine,” Van Abbemuseum/Youtube, June 23, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3lvYqOVlv4/. 8 Biljana Ciric, “Back to the Basics: Li Mu’s Perception of Human Relations and Social Interactions,” I Am Li Mu, September 5, 2011, http://www.iamlimu.org/blogview.asp?logID=122/. 9 Li Mu, “About Qiuzhuang Project,” I Am Li Mu, March 11, 2013, http://www.iamlimu.org/blogview. asp?logID=214/. 10 Li Mu, “Carpentry,” I Am Li Mu, 2012, http://www.iamlimu.org/blogview.asp?logID=186/. 11 Special thanks to Gu Ling for acting as translator on my trip to Qiuzhuang.

Vol. 13 No. 1 35 Stephanie Bailey Syncretic Cartographies: A Conversation with Slavs and Tatars

lavs and Tatars is a collective of artists that describes itself as “a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as S 1 Eurasia.” The group is interested in the diverse, complicated region (or regions) that forms a middle ground where Asia meets Europe, what the collective describes as the “oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians, and Central Asians.”2 Initially, in 2006, the collective came together as a reading group and found an interest in the territories that were affected by the collapse of the Soviet Union and that, since this collapse, have experienced diverse tensions pertaining to identities, both political and cultural, that are essentially a mix of Eastern and Western influences. Their work has since evolved to include what they call “a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low).”3 As H. G. Masters once noted, Slavs and Tatars is concerned mainly with “building connections between seemingly disparate subjects—whether places, histories, or ideologies.”4 In this, its projects are like relational geographies, interlinking ideas around faith, politics, religion, and language so as to illuminate and further complexify our conceptions of the world. In this interview, Slavs and Tatars discusses a research trip they took to Xinjiang, China, within the remit of their third project cycle, The Faculty of Substitution, which focuses on the sacred and the syncretic within the context of the histories of the Turkic languages.

Stephanie Bailey: Can you talk a bit about the research you have been conducting?

Slavs and Tatars: We are doing research on language politics in the Turkic speaking world. We did field research in Istanbul and Xinjiang (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) since Uyghur is considered to be the oldest or “original” of the Turkic languages (probably because the Uyghurs were the first of the Turkic peoples to become sedentary), not to mention the only one still to be written with an Arabic script, even if only since the mid 1980s. So we are looking at the two extremes, geographically speaking, of the Turkic languages, as observed in the republic of Turkey itself, on the one hand, and in Xinjiang province, on the other. Turkey is an example of one of the most successful language conversions in the world, with its language having changed from the Arabic script of Ottoman Turkish to Latin script in 1928. Conducted under the guise of accommodating Turkish vowels

36 Vol. 13 No. 1 unable to find a home in Arabic script, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s Dil Devrimi or Language Revolution was the cornerstone of a larger nation-building project, one that aimed to cut Turks off from their Muslim Ottoman heritage and move them into (a Westernized) modernity. But, despite Turkey’s recent flirtation with its Ottoman legacy, we’re willing to bet that a return to the Arabic script doesn’t even factor into Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s current intentions for Turkey.

Stephanie Bailey: What led you to Xinjiang specifically?

Slavs and Tatars, Friendship of Slavs and Tatars: The two major texts of Turkic literature––the equivalent Nations: Polish Sh’ite Showbiz, 2011, installation view at 10th of Beowulf for English literature or The Iliad for Greek––are both Uyghur Sharjah Biennale. Courtesy of the artists. and date back to the eleventh century, during the Karakhanid dynasty. One is a dictionary written by Mahmud al-Kashgari, Dīwānu l-Luġat al-Turk (Compendium of the Languages of the Turks), which is basically a dictionary of Turkic terms written for the Caliphate in Baghdad, to explain who these millions of Muslims were who had spread all the way from China to Eastern Europe amidst a rising Seljuk power. In fact, even today there’s no consensus as to what exactly a “Turk” is. Turkey is the only large country in Eurasia that speaks a language that doesn’t originate in its own land, but, instead,

Vol. 13 No. 1 37 in Northern Mongolia, which is where most people agree the Turks came from. So that dictionary was the first for the Turkish language. It was a way to explain to the Caliphs––the Arabs––who these Turks were and what their language was. Kashgari cites a famous hadith, which are brief accounts of the Prophet’s sayings: “Learn the language of the Turks, for their reign will be long.”

The second major text is Yusuf Khass Hajib’s Kutadgu Bilig (Wisdom of Royal Glory), which is a work in the medieval “Mirrors for Princes” genre, a form of political writing or advice literature for future rulers. Basically, it did for the Turks what Ferdowsi’s classic book, Shahnameh (The Epic of Kings), did for Persia, which was to show the Muslim world how the Turks were on the same level in terms of cultural production with the Persians and Arabs. Kutadgu Bilig is an incredible text; most of these Mirrors for Princes are really dry, about jurisprudence, army tactics, or etiquette, but this one is an allegorical tale, written in beautiful verse. One character is named Highly Praised, and his brother is Wide Awake. There’s a remarkable Socratic dialogue between the two brothers about seclusion versus society and asceticism versus statehood. One serves the king and the other is a Sufi monk. This raises questions about what our responsibilities are vis-a-vis each other and society, but also the transcendent, God.

Slavs and Tatars, Friendship of Nations: Polish Sh’ite Showbiz, 2011, installation view at 10th Sharjah Biennale. Courtesy of the artists.

Why these Mirrors for Princes are so interesting is that they attempted to bring statecraft (dawla) to the same level of discourse as religion (din), which in a way is a reversal of what we see today: there is no shortage of political pundits, think-tanks, and commentators today but relatively little of interest or substance written on how to incorporate faith into private and public life. This is what we were thinking about when we went to Xinjiang. But the research was complicated by the fact that it was the first time we ever did research without speaking the first or second language of a given

38 Vol. 13 No. 1 Slavs and Tatars, Friendship of Nations: Polish Sh’ite Showbiz, 2011, installation view at 10th Sharjah Biennale. Courtesy of the artists.

region. It was also the first time we started looking at Turkic languages that were not part of the former Soviet Union—the two far ends of the language spectrum being both the republic of Turkey itself and Xinjiang.

Stephanie Bailey: So you were going in as outsiders . . .

Slavs and Tatars: To a large extent, linguistically, yes. And this was very difficult, especially given the importance of language in our practice. We did have an interpreter the entire time, but given the local tensions, we were not exactly outsiders. The situation is very reminiscent of Israel-Palestine, but in reverse in that the Uyghurs accuse the Han Chinese of demographically drowning them out. The Han in turn accuse the Uyghurs of being lazy, while the Uyghurs accuse the Han of discrimination in assigning top posts in local or regional government.

There’s the joke about Zhao Ziyang that conveys these recriminations quite well. It goes something like this: Late in the 1990s, Jiang Zemin visited Zhao Ziyang at his home in Zhongnanhai, full of false cheer, and said, “It’s now all these years after June Fourth, and we can use you again. What do you say?” Though long since resigned to ignominy, Zhao Ziyang still perks up at these words. Jiang Zemin continues: “How about we make you Vice Chairman?” Zhao Ziyang smiles, apparently pleased, and indicates to Jiang Zemin that he wants to whisper a message. When Jiang Zemin shifts his bulky body closer, Zhao Ziyang shouts at him, “I’m not Uyghur!”

Stephanie Bailey: How did your experience of Xinjiang relate to your research into language politics?

Slavs and Tatars: In terms of language politics, Uyghur is a fascinating case study. First of all, this is the only Turkic language that is still written

Vol. 13 No. 1 39 in Arabic. But this is only a Slavs and Tatars, Wheat Molla, 2011, wheat, cotton, recent phenomenon––in advance glue, brick, 45 x 35 x 25 cm, installation view at 10th of Glasnost and the fall of the Sharjah Biennale. Courtesy of the artists. Soviet Union, what the Chinese government did in the mid-1980s was switch Uyghur from Latin script back to Arabic. This was either prescient or coincidental, Slavs and Tatars, Pajak, 2011, but perhaps more of a pre-emptive materials variable, dimensions variable, installation view strike against the spectre of pan- at 10th Sharjah Biennale. Courtesy of the artists. Turkism: in 1991, all the Turkic republics switched to Latin. But this has been the story of the Soviet republics of Central Asia and their languages throughout history. The story of alphabet politics in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia has been one of devastating changes. The republics experienced their first language change to Latin in 1929: Lenin had defined the revolution of the East as the “Latinization” or Romanization of the Muslim peoples of the Soviet Union. Then, ten years later, Stalin changed the Turkic languages to Cyrillic for reasons very similar to why the Chinese government turned Uyghur script into Arabic. Between Lenin’s push for Latinization in the mid 1920s and Turkey’s switch in 1928 to Latin, you have Stalin, who was keen to stem any efforts to unite the Turkic peoples. In fact, in true divide-and-conquer fashion, each time the scripts were converted, both in 1929 and 1939, slightly different letters were ascribed to the same phoneme so that, say, Uzbek and Kazak and Azeri would not have the same alphabets. Like the Soviet or Russian Muslims, the Chinese Muslims have also been battered back and forth with these schizophrenic script changes.

At the same time, these two languages––Turkish of Turkey and the Uyghur of Xinjiang––are poles apart, geographically if not linguistically. They both make for a healthy macro overview and also micro dive into the thorny issue of language politics. While Turkey’s language has been self- determined and radical, Uyghur has been subjected the most to the wills of another. As we mentioned, Turkey’s script conversion is one of the most successful precedents of such a large-scale change of alphabet. But, of course, the conversion was problematic because it was accompanied by the rise of nationalism and this “defining down” of a diverse Ottoman Empire, composed of almost one hundred nationalities and ethnicities, to what we know today as the Turks. One of the reasons the Turks adopted Latin is that there was a relentless campaign to claim that nothing of signifigance happened under Turkey’s Islamic period. This kind of nationalism is almost

40 Vol. 13 No. 1 Slavs and Tatars, Not Moscow amnesiac or only forward-looking, and what happened was the defining Not Mecca, 2012, installation view at Secession. Photo: of a nation through a cherry picking of history. As Celal Nûri, the radical Oliver Ottenshläger. Courtesy of the artists and Secession, Romanizer, said in 1926: 6ˆi˜˜>°

Our libraries are empty, they are obsolete. . . . As a matter of fact, those antiquarian volumes had led us to this dead-end. . . . Had we possessed enormous treasures like the French [and] British libraries, this problem could have led us to think twice, and might have even bothered us. But what is it that we have in our hands? Three thousand archaic, inaccurate, deceptive volumes of books or pamphlets at most. To destroy them is more beneficial than keeping them.5

Stephanie Bailey: This relates to the fact that Xinjiang is actually an autonomous region of China, and the Uyghurs are a cultural minority. While in Xinjiang, you said you came across shrines honouring Shi’a Muslims, even though, as you noted, this is a completely Sunni culture. As you learned, there is a memory of the Shia’s being the first people to rise up in this battle between Muslims and Buddhists, which these shrines commemorate. You said even your guides and the locals did not know of some of these places, or these stories; this meant that you were engaged in a sort of way-finding both for yourselves, as “outsiders,” and the locals, who are themselves “outsiders” on many different levels.

Vol. 13 No. 1 41 42 Vol. 13 No. 1 Slavs and Tatars, Not Moscow Slavs and Tatars: Yes, and this is why we were not entirely outsiders. We see Not Mecca, 2012, installation view at Secession. Photo: our experience of going into Xinjiang as more of a kind of dive: like going Oliver Ottenshläger. Courtesy of the artists and Secession, deep into the ocean. Even to people in Central Asia, Xinjiang is extremely 6ˆi˜˜>° remote. Generally, it’s very hard to find scholarship on the region that looks beyond the purely political situation: Maybe a couple books here and there in English and the same in Russian. It’s easier to find information on minority rights, for example. But with regard to cultural production or linguistic policy, these issues were much harder to research. We were combing through students’ dissertations, chasing footnotes, and we found references to sites that aren’t listed, and when you ask locals about them even they don’t know they exist. Tucked away off the side of a village street, in the brush, or in the middle of the desert, they are as geographically and topographically remote as intellectually.

During our trip, we were joking with our guides because, as young Uyghurs, they were very interested themselves in our research. The trips they do, with the slow trickle of tourism they get, is for Westerners visiting the Silk Route, so it might be a visit to a Hotan ikat factory or some Buddhist caves. In the end, we teased our guides that they should have paid us because we were taking them to places they had never been before, allowing them to learn aspects of their own culture that would have otherwise been difficult if not impossible. At the end of each day, we would give them stuff to read in advance of the next day’s program, and the following morning they would come to us with notes to discuss. This was an interesting dynamic.

Stephanie Bailey: You have also talked about a clash of Islam and Communism in the region of Xinjiang and from a wider perspective, Central Asia itself.

Slavs and Tatars: Yes. For centuries this was the easternmost frontier of Islam, and the region’s proximity to other longstanding faiths––Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism––resulted in a certain conceptual flexibility and permissiveness. Meanwhile, the prohibition of faith altogether under Soviet rule inadvertently preserved its progressive, communitarian practice. As the westernmost frontier of China, Xinjiang provides a reversal of the conceptions we often consider east and west. For China, Islam comes from the West, not from the East as it does for much of the Western world. And it serves as an urgent precedent for pluralism in China’s rise to global eminence. Our interest lies in those cases where complexity reigns, where multiple identities come to form a compelling case for shades of grey eclipsed by the black-and-white of politics and received wisdom. Xinjiang offers one of the only examples where the two major ideological narratives of the past and present century––Communism and Islam, respectively–– collide without the mediation of the West.

Vol. 13 No. 1 43 Thinking about this in relation to Slavs and Tatars, How-less, 2012, silk and cotton needle- China, we are interested in the figure work, 200 x 120 cm. From Not Moscow Not Mecca, of Lu Xie, a sixteenth-century scholar installation view at Secession. Photo: Oliver Ottenshläger. Courtesy of the artists and whose book on Islam, a biography of -iViÃȜ˜]Ê6ˆi˜˜>° the prophet Mohamed, was on the list of imperial books for scholars during that century. This attempt at bringing Islam and Confucianism together is right up our alley. Most of the time when we talk about Islam in other languages, we use Arabic terms. We do not translate, for example, tawhid (the unicity of God) or sharia (the moral code or religious law). But in Chinese, there is no usage of Arabic, and the result is one of the first attempts at creating a viable liturgy in Islam in a wholly other language. Then there is also this relationship between the region and Russia; a lot of Uyghurs went over to the Soviet side during the Cultural Revolution and even before. There was cooperation between the Russians and Chinese until Mao and Stalin grew suspicious of each other. So you also find very strange pockets of Russian in Xinjiang, even in the signage.

Stephanie Bailey: So you really got a view of Xinjiang as a very specific and complex geographical—not to mention historical and political—space.

Slavs and Tatars: Absolutely, it was the only place I could see where there was no mediation, a kind of proxy of the West taking one side. But our challenge as artists rather than activists or policy makers is how to tell these stories without telling them frontally. Our job is not to tell the story of language politics through language politics, but to tell one thing through another. It is one thing to say the true Turks are Uyghurs and current citizens of China and another to tell the story of Xinjiang through parallels with other places in the Middle East or the West. It is a way to make the province seem less obscure.

Stephanie Bailey: In your upcoming 2014 curatorial project at Art Dubai, you will be curating Marker, a section in the fair devoted to a specific regional focus, with 2014’s edition focusing on Central Asia and the Caucasus. Could you talk a little bit about this project and what you have planned?

Slavs and Tatars: For Art Dubai’s Marker 2014, dedicated to the Caucasus and Central Asia, we aim to provide insight into the region through portraiture. From paintings to sculptures, portraiture will allow for an immediate familiarization––be it through physiognomy, culture, and rituals, essentially via representation––that we aim to activate through the very act

44 Vol. 13 No. 1 Slavs and Tatars, Beyonsense, of storytelling. That is, the works will act as agents, icons, thumbnails, or 2012, installation view at Projects 98, Museum of points of departure to tell larger stories touching upon notions of identity, Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artists and faith, or language. There will be stories or mini lectures that will take place MoMA, New York. several times throughout the day, revealing the complexity of the region in a compelling manner and providing a window onto how identity, faith, and nationhood are interiorized, masqueraded, ritualized, and ultimately, and most importantly, stretched and elasticized in such a manner as to move beyond the brittle politics imposed then as now surrounding what it means to be a Muslim, Christian, or Jew, or rather Abkhaz, Uzbek, or Armenian. Slavs and Tatars plans to present examples of modern and contemporary art from the Caucasus and Central Asia that address the issues of dissimulation and concealment as a means of resistance to the reductionist notions of identity and faith.

Stephanie Bailey: This Marker curatorial project is also timely given the interest in Central Asia and the Caucusus right now in the art world—the numerous shows seeking out and exploring art and contemporary culture from the old Silk Route. In your view, what makes this region, which falls directly within Slavs and Tatars’ remit, so important?

Slavs and Tatars: Coveted for its infamous trade routes, squeezed between empires––from the Great Game of the nineteenth century pitting Russia against the UK to the Cold War of the twentieth century, not to mention major ideologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from Communism to state capitalism and political Islam––the Caucasus and Central Asia offer a markedly different and urgent case for cosmopolitanism and heterodoxy in a world increasingly beholden to partisanship and orthodoxy.

Vol. 13 No. 1 45 Perhaps it’s understandable, if not exactly ideal, that the more westward Slavs and Tatars, Beyonsense, 2012, installation view at one travels, the more remote Central Asia becomes. In the USA, when you Projects 98, Museum of Modern Art, New York. speak of Uzbek or Uyghur you might as well be speaking of Klingon (from Courtesy of the artists and MoMA, New York. Star Trek). But it’s all the more jarring for the Muslim world to overlook the region. When the Muslim world is defined or imagined today—by the West or by Muslims themselves—it often includes countries from North Africa to South East Asia, strangely skipping a beat over the former Soviet sphere. Like a functionally planned highway, the newly minted acronym MENASA (Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia) takes a detour around what, until relatively recently, provided the pulse of the greater Muslim community. After all, as opposed to the present intellectual periphery, it could be argued that Central Asia or Mawara al-Nahr (Arabic for the “what lies beyond the river”) has played a central role in the Islamic renaissance as home to the founder of algebra, Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, not to mention the astrologer who discovered that the earth revolves around the sun, Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī, or the polymath, Ibn Sīnā, whose Canon of Medicine was the standard text in Europe and the Islamic world until the eighteenth century.

Bokhara, in Uzbekistan, is arguably the fourth holiest city in Islam, after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. Its name—Bokhara yeh Sharif (Holy Bukhara)—is renowned around the Muslim world. The founder of the Mughal Empire, Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483–1530), claimed that Mawara al-Nahr was home to more Islamic leaders than any other region. Among the most authentic hadiths, and second in importance only to the Qu’ran, are those collected by Muhammad al-Bukhari, a son of the eponymous city. The founder of the largest Sufi order, or tariqat, Baha-ud- Din Naqshbandi, also hails from Bukhara.

46 Vol. 13 No. 1 Stephanie Bailey: But where does the West fit into this? After all, the Silk Route essentially joined the eastern and western poles of the world.

Slavs and Tatars: Here the definition of terms is crucial. For Central Asia, during this Islamic renaissance, the “West” was the Middle East. In terms of the Silk Road, we often like to embrace such obvious clichés, “low- hanging fruit” as marketing people call it, and break them, subvert them. Unfortunately, it seems the Silk Road has only retained its transactional focus on consumption without the exchange of ideas and affinities that used to accompany the goods and spices.

Stephanie Bailey: I want to tie this discussion back to your project around language politics, within the Slavs and Tatars remit as a whole. Essentially, are you attempting to retrace, redraw, or at least revive these regional histories so as to recall a complexity that once was but is no more?

Slavs and Tatars, Beyonsense, 2012, installation view at Projects 98, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artists and MoMA, New York.

Slavs and Tatars, Beyonsense, Slavs and Tatars: Yes, but the 2012, installation view at Projects 98, Museum of complexity is twofold. One is Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artists and more polemic and one is more MoMA, New York. intimate and poetic. We are trying to liberate the sounds, phonemes, and letters that roll off the back of our collective throats, to really investigate the role of language as sensual, affective; a gnostic resistance to a more profane, instrumentalization. And, again, through the prism of another lens, in this case language, we want to allow for a more lineal discussion of what are often hot-button political issues.

Vol. 13 No. 1 47 48 Vol. 13 No. 1 Top left: Slavs and Tatars, Love Stephanie Bailey: Thinking back to your research trip to Xinjiang, you Letters, 2013, wool, yarn, 247 ÝÊÓ{ÇÊV“°Ê,ˆ} Ì\Ê->ÛÃÊ>˜`Ê said that you went straight from Xinjiang to Istanbul, just as the Gezi Park Tatars, Reverse Joy, 2012, installation. Photos: Orestis protests this summer in Taksim Square were taking place. I wanted to Argiropoulos. Courtesy of the artists and Art Space know how you relate your research into language politics to the growing Pythagorion, Samos Island, Greece. twenty-first century discussions and movements surrounding notions Middle: Slavs and Tatars, Madame MMMorphologie, of collectivity, pluralistic government, even direct democracy. Slavs and 2013, book, artificial eye, blinking mechanism, Tatars have long looked on language as a political force, and I wonder how movement sensor, 130 x 60 x ÈäÊV“°Ê* œÌœ\Êiۈ˜Ê >viÀÌ °Ê you might relate your experience of Central Asia and the Caucasus as a Courtesy of the artists and Art Space Pythagorion, Samos multipolar, pluralistic, and heterogeneous region, to the desire for a great Island, Greece. Bottom left: Slavs and Tatars, heterogeneity in nation states around the world today? River Bed, 2013, wood, canvas, kilim carpets, 225 x 270 x 160 cm. Photo: Orestis Argiropoulos. Courtesy of Slavs and Tatars: The trip from Xinjiang to Istanbul, at the very beginning the artists and Art Space Pythagorion, Samos Island, of the Gezi Park protests, reinforced the central issue of language politics Greece. shared by these two otherwise geographically apposite places. In some Bottom right: Slavs and Tatars, Öööööööps!, 2013, wall sense, the politics surrounding Gezi—from civic discourse to public space application with fluorescent paint, 2635 x 290 cm. Photo: and the very definition of participatory politics—are the logical result of Orestis Argiropoulos. Courtesy of the artists and Art Space Pythagorion, Samos Island, the establishment of the Turkish republic some eight decades earlier. The Greece. strictly secular, nationalist definition of identity in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse was a modernist project par excellence, brushing under the carpet thorny issues of faith, ethnicity, heterogeneity, not to mention preservation (of the literary and cultural heritage made largely inaccessible by the language reforms of 1928). So Gezi Park marks the return of the real in some sense, beyond the equally contentious issues of liberal, capitalist, populist Islam or public space. Central Asia in particular challenges our often lazy assumption that heterogeneity and civil society are the exclusive domains of the secular minded, the urban intellectuals, and so on. In fact, these attributes of heterogeneity and civil society are inscribed in any nuanced understanding of how faith and public life should commingle.

Stephanie Bailey: Thinking about this idea of faith commingling with public life, how do you factor in secularism?

Slavs and Tatars: Enough ink has been spilled, as it were, on secularism in recent years. Whether in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or other religions, it’s rather the radical, progressive impulse of faith––and that includes the cohabitation and commonality of the Abrahamic faith––and its potential for social, cultural and economic change, that is of interest to us. Whether in the West or Central Asia, secularism is the datum, or the ground, on which to pose these questions.

Notes 1 Slavs and Tatars online biography, http://www.slavsandtatars.com/bio.php/. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 H. G. Masters, “Collective Eclecticism,” Asia Art Pacific (September/October 2011), 75. 5 Ilker Aytürk, “Script Charisma in Hebrew and Turkish: A Comparative Framework for Explaining Success and Failure of Romanization,” Journal of World History 21, No. 1 (March 2010), 97–130.

Vol. 13 No. 1 49 Victor Wang Zhang Enli’s Space Painting

“Do not listen with the ears, listen with the mind . . . Emptiness is the fasting of the mind.” –Zhuangzi1

or his first UK commission of Space Painting—part of an ongoing Zhang Enli, Space Painting, 2013, watercolour on wall, series previously shown at Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012, Sixth installation at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Curitiba Biennale 2011, and the Gwangju Biennale 2010, with Photo: Mark Blower. © F Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the similar iterations occurring in between—Zhang Enli stretches London’s artist, Hauser & Wirth, and - >˜}
,/Ê>iÀÞ°Ê Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) theatre like a canvas and covers its walls with performative brush strokes that according to the artist evoke the city’s colours.2

Born in the province of Jilin, China, Zhang Enli creates paintings that reposition the prosaic that is found in the everyday. Often depicting objects

50 Vol. 13 No. 1 Left: Zhang Enli, Space Painting, 2012, watercolour, ˆ˜ÃÌ>>̈œ˜Ê>ÌÊÓä£ÓÊœV ˆ‡ ÕâˆÀˆÃÊ ˆi˜˜>i]ÊœÀÌÊœV ˆ]Ê India. © Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, >˜`Ê- >˜}
,/Ê>iÀÞ° ,ˆ} Ì\Ê< >˜}Ê ˜ˆ]ÊSpace Painting, 2010, watercolour, installation at 2010 Gwangju ˆi˜˜>i]ÊÜ>˜}Õ]ÊœÀi>°Ê^Ê Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and - >˜}
,/Ê>iÀÞ°

in his studio such as buckets, pans, light bulbs, or beds, Zhang Enli visually extracts the mundane aspects of the object and nudges it toward what Walter Benjamin describes as its aura. Through loose brushwork in thin washes of oil paint, Zhang Enli articulates the experience of the object, where each melancholic stroke seemingly characterizes its faint memories— suggestive, soft, and quickly fading.

Zhang Enli, Water Skip, 2009, oil on canvas, 218.5 x 148 x 4 cm. © Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and - >˜}
,/Ê>iÀÞ°

Vol. 13 No. 1 51 Although seemingly different at first glance from his previous paintings Zhang Enli, Old Leather Sofa, 2009, oil on canvas, 199 x 238 on canvas, Zhang Enli’s Space Painting continues to uncover the inherent x 4 cm. © Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, memory of structures through painting. Here, he works within a physical >˜`Ê- >˜}
,/Ê>iÀÞ° space and repositions its architectural framework by mapping its surfaces in a full gestural performance of watercolour. The artist spent several days transforming the space, and the work’s durational aspect is translated to the viewer by the sheer volume of paint.

Alluding to the flurry of brush strokes that leaves the entirety of the space covered in a newly crafted skin, Zhang Enli describes the work as returning to “the most primitive state of painting.”3 Its colours, running tangentially across the wall creates a cave-like atmosphere, the palette conjures up a prehistoric condition, a return to the wall as a recording device. Upon entering the theatre, the viewer is caught in a whirlwind of colour and motion. By creating an immersive environment of paint, the viewer is bound by no formal structure or recognizable object. The ICA theatre is now the corpus of the museum.

The viewer also enters into a visual conversation with the perspectival techniques used in painting. At first, Zhang Enli seems to decentre the viewer, repositioning the relation of his or her body to the painting, and he submerges the visual horizon into a sea of colour, confronting the traditional experience of viewing a painting. But further reflection upon semi-transparent layers of watercolour, Zhang Enli points to a network of

52 Vol. 13 No. 1 Zhang Enli, Space Painting, 2013, watercolour on wall, installation at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Photo: Mark Blower. © Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and - >˜}
,/Ê>iÀÞ°

Zhang Enli, Space Painting, continuities between the domains 2013, watercolour on wall, installation at Institute of of architecture, sculpture, space, Contemporary Arts, London. Photo: Mark Blower. © and painting. While Space Painting Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and - >˜}
,/Ê>iÀÞ° situates itself between painting and Next page: Zhang Enli, Space architecture, it is neither on canvas Painting, 2013, watercolour on wall, installation at Institute nor simply on the wall—Space of Contemporary Arts, London. Photo: Mark Blower. Painting occupies an area that © Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and embraces both. This deviation into fields of architecture and painting - >˜}
,/Ê>iÀÞ° also resonates with the artistic movements of the 1960s and 70s that saw sculpture move into an expanded field between architecture and land art.

Since Zhang Enli’s move from the small provincial town of Jilin City, in the north of China, to Shanghai, he has described himself as becoming more sensitive to his surroundings and the rapid development of cities and space through the context of their interiors.4 His awareness of internal structural change is exemplified by an exploration of gallery interiors, a space that is constantly in flux due to the tempo of changing exhibitions.

With each narrative brushstroke, Zhang Enli constructs a visual and psychological stage for the protagonist to perform in. The theatrics of the work are framed by the distinctive stage lighting in the ICA theatre. The visual impact of the work is not consistent; in some areas of the room it is luminous, bathed in a warm glow, and in other areas mute and darkened. Countless movements are embedded in the application of paint that fills the room with an abstract expressionist rhythm that blends with an almost traditional Chinese ink wash painting style. Motion, action, and presence build the foundations that support the viewer’s experience. Through a performativity that builds upon the existing architecture of the theatre, the room is orchestrated and outlined, thus creating an all-consuming structure that is activated upon the viewer entering the work. As in viewing a sculpture, one must physically move in relation to the piece, maneuvering around its borders and edges to gather a fuller perspective.

Vol. 13 No. 1 53 54 Vol. 13 No. 1 Vol. 13 No. 1 55 56 Vol. 13 No. 1 Top: Zhang Enli, Space The material physicality of the space is drawn out by every brushstroke, and Painting, 2013, watercolour on wall, installation at Institute Zhang Enli exposes the constructed traces of the building’s architecture that of Contemporary Arts, London. Photo: Mark Blower. is his canvas. Situated within the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which © Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and annually houses a number of contemporary art exhibitions, the work stands - >˜}
,/Ê>iÀÞ° Middle: Zhang Enli, Space in a paradoxical relationship to its host space as it calls for a moment of Painting, 2013, watercolour on wall, installation at Institute stillness by the application of paint in a venue that is constantly reshaping its of Contemporary Arts, London. Photo: Mark Blower. appearance in search of the contemporary. Thus a sense of impermanence © Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and comes into play, something the artist demonstrates keen awareness of when - >˜}
,/Ê>iÀÞ° Bottom: Zhang Enli, Space he states, “These works are painted over when the exhibition ends, and Painting, 2013, watercolour on 5 wall, installation at Institute the exhibition only becomes a memory.” Zhang Enli paints to mediate of Contemporary Arts, London. Photo: Mark Blower. the passing of time in space, seizing the interior in the present and, for a © Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and moment, pausing the continuous cycle of the theatre’s programming. - >˜}
,/Ê>iÀÞ°

Unlike Zhang Enli’s installation Circulez! Il n’y a rien à voir (2007), a collaboration with Moshekwa Langa, which saw a much more controlled mapping of an architectural space through the tracing of fictional elements of furniture through paint—electrical outlets, shelves, and other objects— Space Painting was created using a more open process, one that involved less restraint and concentrated focus, and it explores a different type of memory tracing. Moreover, Space Painting doesn’t seek to completely erase or overwrite the space—as is evident in the transparency of Zhang Enli’s thinly applied watercolour—whereas in Circulez! Il n’y a rien à voir, he highlights the shadowy outlines of the domestic objects that may have once occupied the space, providing the vestige of a human presence that lingers on the gallery walls.

Zhang Enli (with Moshekwa Langa), Circulez! Il n’y a rien à voir, 2007, installation at Objectif_exhibitions in Antwerp. © Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser EÊ7ˆÀÌ ]Ê>˜`Ê- >˜}
,/Ê Gallery.

Zhang Enli draws the viewer’s attention to the subtle structural elements that indicate an experience composed by the leveling of materials used to construct space, in which concrete, wood, and plaster are now all equalized

Vol. 13 No. 1 57 under the veil of the medium of paint. Contracted and expanded again, the depth of the theatre is altered with every step as the viewer moves through it. At times seemingly flattened, the once well-defined corners of walls are ironed out by the gravity of watercolour.

The concept of Space Painting allows the artist and viewer to explore the space together. The artist may not be physically present, but his hand is. Remnants of Zhang Enli’s presence in the process of making this work remain for the viewer to visually follow. An image-based mapping of his motions through the space, with each mark left by the artist acting as a secondary infrastructure, supports both the sub-narrative of the theatre and a self-determined sovereignty.

Zhang Enli, A Corner of Studio, 2011, oil on canvas, 250 x 300 cm. © Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and - >˜}
,/Ê>iÀÞ°Ê

This investigation of presence and absence also corresponds to past works such as A Corner of Studio (2011) or Art Museum (2006), where the underlying relationship between space and canvas is still haunted by the distinct lack of human presence. In these works the viewer’s presence is often absorbed into Zhang Enli’s intimate spaces of appreciation for the everyday. Unlike Space Painting, these canvases are mounted onto gallery walls, where we reexamine their relationship to the interior of the gallery, an act that seems to also double as a reflexive antidote to the spaces depicted. This mise en abyme-like experience is one that is further expanded upon within Space Painting. By contemplating the absence of any human presence in such works, one becomes susceptible to an expression that is space- oriented, in which space is given its own independence and autonomy, one that is beyond the perception of the viewer. Zhang Enli seems to identify elements of transformation in space by articulating the interior as an object in itself, an act that was also mentioned in Ikon Gallery’s 2009 press release: “The object becomes paint and the process of painting mediates the artist’s communion with the object. It is no longer a question of a ‘surrounding’ world; the object and the observer are the same.”6

58 Vol. 13 No. 1 Zhang Enli, Art Museum, 2006, Space Painting creates a static oil on canvas, 210 x 200 cm. © Zhang Enli. Courtesy of the space to contemplate the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and - >˜}
,/Ê>iÀÞ°Ê mass development of urban infrastructure, in both China and abroad. As cities overdevelop, and with each skyscraper that is constructed, a sense of the past is erased. Bringing this sense of loss to mind, Zhang Enli offers a comment that is temporary and will eventually be blacked out and painted over. Space Painting also reminds the viewer that it is not just a building’s exterior that is altered during urban renewal, but also its interior. Through experiencing Zhang Enli’s constructed interior, the audience is made aware of the rapid change and transformation that an institution such as the ICA goes through several times a year. Pointing to interiors as a measure of change, Zhang Enli utilizes a medium that remains constant, using painting to start a conversation about permanence and impermanence—not only of the interior but of painting itself. In our age of rapid image making and the sharing of software, where apps and social platforms are increasingly changing the way we interact with our physical interiors, one wonders how the passive reception of images affects a new generation of gallery goers as they interact with painting. Space Painting is a pictorial proposition for the perseverance of the medium of paint in the expanding field of contemporary art. In a time where the motionless image can lose its way in the labyrinth of the new media, permanence is perhaps an idea to be tested in a space that relies on an impermanent experience. Only when immersed in the environment that Zhang Enli has created is the viewer then aware that development and change is constant, and, like memories, exhibitions are there to be experienced, then wiped clean again with the passing of the new.

Notes 1 Harold Roth, “Zhuangzi,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/zhuagzi/. 2 Dr. Sook-Kyung Lee, Zhang Enli: Space Painting (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2013), 16. 3 E-mail exchange between Zhang Enli and the author, August 23, 2013. 4 Jennifer Lindblad, “AO On Site—New York: Zhang Enli at Hauser and Wirth,” The Biennale Foundation, http://artobserved.com/2011/09/ao-on-site-new-york-zhang-enli-at-hauser-and-wirth- through-october-29-2011/. 5 Zhang Enli, “Space Painting” (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2013), 16. 6 Zhang Enli, Exhibition Guide, Ikon Gallery, 2009, http://ikon-gallery.org/Repository/ events/273/8988f6aa-5623-4c1e-ab76-3f60813d3f8f.pdf/.

Vol. 13 No. 1 59 Voon Pow Bartlett Li Songsong: Conflicts of the In-Between

e Have Betrayed the Revolution is the first solo exhibition in London by Li Songsong. Twelve large-scale oil paintings Wmore than adequately occupy the palatial space of the recently opened flagship Pace Gallery, nestled directly north of the Royal Academy of Art’s Burlington House, in the prestigious Mayfair district. The gallery has described the exhibition as “New paintings that portray historical figures and events that play a part in the Chinese collective conscious.”1

This is a fairly good description as the trajectory of Li Songsong’s artistic development does appear to have followed major political events related to China and is thought to be “part of the debate on the process of socio- political change that has been taking place in China since the second half of the 1980s.”2 Li Songsong’s political agenda also appears to have received support from Ai Weiwei, whose article is one of two in Li Songsong’s exhibition catalogue. Ai Weiwei writes, “historical facts . . . disappear or are forgotten, either intentionally or unintentionally, never to be mentioned again.”3 Consummate in his strategies and famed for his widely publicized critique of the Chinese government, Ai Weiwei’s ubiquitous voice booms in the art circuit, where, recently at the Venice Biennale 2013, he denounced certain artists: “Creators who are apolitical . . . cannot be called true artists.”4 Li Songsong’s distinct, disjointed way of working with patchy brushworks and textured aluminum panels alludes to the similarly disjointed dissemination of history by the Chinese government, as well as the ambiguity and multiplicity of interpretations of that history. Narrative is often subsumed under a fragmented reality in Li Songsong’s work, like a jigsaw puzzle of Chinese life, where any missing pieces serve to recall memory of absent history.5

Li Songsong’s strategy is typical of the in-between generation that he belongs to. The artist was born in 1973 and was just three years old when Mao died. He was too young to have witnessed or remembered life under Mao, but old enough to remember the Tian’anmen massacre of 1989 (he was then an impressionable sixteen-year-old). His style of working, wavering “halfway between their photographic source images and pure painterly abstraction,” is perhaps indicative of the ambivalence of his generation.6 His work is characterized by the use of photographic pastiche to represent the fragmented manner in which his generation understands the history of

60 Vol. 13 No. 1 Li Songsong in front of Big its own country. He believes that meaning is constructed through the way a Girls, 2013, oil on aluminum panel, 280 x 250 x 14 cm. © Li story is presented: “Everyone knows the story. The important thing is the way Songsong. Courtesy of Pace London. that you tell it. The way depends on your attitude and attitude changes with time. As society changes, attitude changes accordingly.”7

Li Songsong is part of the generation of experimental artists that bases its work on documentary photographs of the Cultural Revolution. There is a deliberate ambiguity in his work to reflect a historical sensibility, one of selective memory that is the product of growing up in an era in which media is reality and tales are passed down from older generations. He is fully aware of the strong recall that these historical photographs can evoke and uses his painting skills to that end.8 The strong sense of nostalgia

Vol. 13 No. 1 61 felt by his parents’ generation and those who lived through the Cultural Li Songsong, The Square, 2001, oil on canvas, 180 x 320 Revolution, something lacking in his own memory bank, is translated cm. © Li Songsong. Courtesy of Pace Beijing. through an emotive stance that is palpable in The Square (2001). This painting was based on a photograph showing people mourning the death of Mao Zedong in Tian’anmen Square in 1976. The impressionistic work demonstrates the hallmark blurring effect made famous by Gerhard Richter. The omission of direct references to Tian’anmen and Mao serve only to heighten the acknowledgment of the passing of a historical milestone. Bowed heads and heavy hearts, white funereal garments painted sketchily and in a drip-like manner, convey solace. The monochromatic documentary reportage-style depiction evokes a universal expression of grief.

Li Songsong would have been Yang Yipang, The Square, 1987–88, oil on canvas. aware of the “old photo” craze (lao zhaopian re) in China in the 1990s. Wu Hung wrote on the work of Li Songsong and Han Lei that “because the original photos are familiar to millions of Chinese people, the paintings’ succinct brushwork has an indexical function to trigger the viewer’s memories of their photographic models while demonstrating the painters’ admirable skill in translating conventional documentary photographs into artistic, painterly images.”9 Li Songsong also would have been aware of another painting of the same name by the veteran avant-garde artist Yang Yiping, The Square, (1987 –8), in which the “spatial and temporal disjunction contrast Tian’anmen with the surrounding people, whose presences seems to be accidental and in a ‘startling state of disunity’.”10

Instead of showing a disconnection between the people and their past, Li Songsong’s The Square showed a nation united in grief. I find the success of the painting has much to do with its lack of context, its lack of indications

62 Vol. 13 No. 1 of Mao or the Square. The lao zhaopian, the actual old photographs themselves, probably plays a crucial part in this evocation. What Yang Yiping’s and Li Songsong’s paintings have in common is a reduction and homogenization through the use of black and white to achieve a surreal effect. Tian’anmen Square and Mao are strangely present, in different ways; in Yang Yiping’s painting, the heavy superstructure of the Imperial Palace and Mao’s portrait dominating the painting’s upper half is in stark contrast to the painting’s lower half, where mayhem appears to have broken loose, a historical and sacrosanct space has been turned into a marketplace, where everyone seems to be going about their own business, and no one in the crowd is paying the slightest attention to anybody else.11 In Li Songsong’s painting, you see only the back of the mourners, in their multitude, yet the “indexical” link to Mao and his funeral is so palpable you would have heard a pin drop. Although the context of the event has been completely removed, presumably signalling Mao’s absence as well through his death, his presence is profoundly felt through the powerful show of the people’s emotion.

Although a cloud hangs in ominous suspension over the ambiguity found in the present series of paintings, the titles lend themselves to political readings. This brings up Mao in another way, referring to his strategy of political rhetoric in establishing his revolutionary “power and persuasion” as the then-new aesthetic.12 Meaning elided by thick encrusted paint shares equivalence with Mao’s propaganda paintings, where happy smiling faces depict a country that in reality was destitute with physical and spiritual poverty. In other words, titles and image are imbued with a tension that arises from their incongruence. For Mao, the visual genres and the recurrent iconography were augmented with inspiring and emotive didactic slogans and captions, such as “Work hard for the electrification of agriculture” and “Make the great leader Chairman Mao proud, make the great socialist motherland proud.”

Li Songsong, Couple, 2011, oil Direct quotation of iconic on canvas, 360 x 300 cm. © Li Songsong. Courtesy of Pace photography and events Beijing. developed with more ambiguities. Gift (2003), based on media coverage of Chinese fighters parading a shot-down enemy airplane during the second Sino-Japanese war and Cuban Sugar (2006), referring to China’s crisis in domestic sugar production, would not have appeared representational in themselves. The image of a plane is one and a montage that looks like officials engaged in a congress meeting can have a number of interpretations. In Couple (2011), however, we see a return of the

Vol. 13 No. 1 63 Li Songsong, Gift, 2003, oil on canvas, 109 x 158 cm. © Li Songsong. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

Li Songsong, Cuban Sugar, 2006, oil on aluminum panel, 280 x 400 cm. © Li Songsong. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

sophistication of The Square, where just minimal content is used to evoke the strongest of emotions. Couple is based on a well-known photograph and is another reference to Tian’anmen Square, this time the 1989 incident, where once again we are confronted with the potent absence of this political monument, this “sacred space.”13 Viewers are left only with a hardly discernable image of two lovers sheltering with their bicycle under an overpass while tanks roll above them.

The series presented at Pace seems to have a stronger political overtone, although a certain level of ambiguity still resides in them. “Li Songsong is not alone in his veiled critique—literally veiled in layers of paint as if something is partially hidden under that . . . In a way, we can say that speaks to the way politics works in China.”14 The work at the exhibition has the ring of the battle cry that must have drowned out others during the Cultural Revolution, but with a heavy dose of derision through the use of irony and allegory. Guests Are All Welcomed (2013), a painting with an image of a man relaxing in an armchair, appears to be descriptive but in fact seems to mean the opposite of its title. This apparently innocuous portrait with a friendly title can be easily mistaken for a poster advertising a meeting place or a hotel. According to Pace Gallery, this image is of a Western gentleman seated

64 Vol. 13 No. 1 in a room is Neil Heywood, the Englishman murdered in 2011 by Gu Kailai, wife of the now-convicted Chinese politician Bo Xilai.15 Heywood is sitting in an armchair with his legs crossed. He is wearing a black suit and black shoes and a smile, ostensibly without any premonition of things to come. Political intrigue is disguised behind Li Songsong’s leitmotif of layers of oil paint, with delicious colours of greens, browns, reds, and lilac that render the face unrecognizable.

Li Songsong, Guests are We Have Betrayed the Revolution (2012) gives the show its title. Encumbered All Welcomed, 2013, oil on canvas, 120 x 120 x 11 cm. © by such words as “We,” “Betrayed,” and “Revolution,” this title is Li Songsong. Courtesy of Pace London. unquestionably an “indictment” writ large. The “We” in We Have Betrayed the Revolution is an overt criticism of the government if not also a punitive charge against the people. The painting, as the gallery personnel informed me, depicts a conversation between two infamous military officials, Wu Huawen (1904 –62) and Wang Jingwei (1883–1944). It looks similar to the iconic image of the meeting between Mao and Nixon in 1972. Presumably the discussion shown in Li Songsong’s painting refers to a revolution being betrayed. Interestingly, this title brings to mind Leon Trotsky’s 1937 The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?

Vol. 13 No. 1 65 Li Songsong, We Have Betrayed the Revolution, 2012, oil on canvas, 200 x 290 x 11 cm. © Li Songsong. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

In fact, the idea of revolution seems to have been topical during Li Songsong’s years growing up, and was found in political publications such as The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity by Wang Hui, Professor of Intellectual History at Tsinghua University in Beijing, on how to interpret modern China.16 Wang Hui’s essay entitled “Shunning the Sublime” was published in 1993, when Li Songsong was twenty, in which the author praised the cultural pluralism in contemporary China, which he thought was indicative of positive social and cultural progress.17

Politics directly affects peoples’ Li Songsong, It’s a Pity You Aren’t Interested in Anything everyday lives. Li Songsong’s Else, 2013, oil on canvas, 300 x 210 x 9 cm. © Li Songsong. painting It’s a Pity You Aren’t Courtesy of Pace Beijing. Interested in Anything Else (2013) references consumerist culture in China, and takes the form of a larger than life-sized Calvin Klein advertising billboard—a ubiquitous display of consumerist culture in urban Chinese cities—and depicts a young Caucasian male model clad only in Calvin Klein undergarments. Its title carries a scornful reproach to the rapid route taken by Chinese consumers from “Karl Marx to Karl Lagerfeld.”18 It reads as a strong admonishment of the Chinese government’s employment of an insidious tactic of soft power, effecting an aestheticization through the commercialization of culture and of everyday life for the masses. This work suggests that the government has succeeded in dumbing down the population through a conceptual undermining of intellectual standards. A communist country where we are led to believe that the government is aspiring to erase class, seems to be becoming more capitalist than most

66 Vol. 13 No. 1 capitalist countries, one in which rich consumers—the major spenders on designer goods—sit alongside their less fortunate comrades, who can only watch helplessly the growing gulf between the haves and the have-nots.

If these are Li Songsong’s sentiments, they are not unique among Chinese artists. A recent quote by Venice Biennale artist, Wang Qingsong, is equally acerbic if not more succinct: “Take a look at the urban people’s life. We dine at McDonald’s, KFC, and Pizza Hut. We drink Cola, Starbucks coffee and Lipton tea. We live in a Roman fantasy, Lincoln Park, Vancouver Forests, and East Provence. We drive Mercedes Benz, BMW, and Lamborghini. All these Western consumer products ‘modernize’ this originally agricultural country. However, such life in high fashion is so ridiculous, contradictory, and crazy. The Chinese traditions and elite culture fail to have energy and vigour, deserving to be trashed. This is the contemporary China in its massive scale.”19

Li Songsong, Watching a Play, 2004, oil on canvas, 130 x 190 cm. © Li Songsong. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

In mapping out Li Songsong’s progress as an artist, it would appear that there is an increasing tendency in his work toward an experimental approach that is privileging formalist qualities at the expense of legibility, with his more recent works approaching abstraction. When photographs are torn apart and presented in fragments in his work, it is, ostensibly, to maintain “some excitement over the unknown, like a game . . .’…this would make me more relaxed . . . It doesn’t give me any psychological pressure.”20 In so doing, Li Songsong seems to be seduced into exploring a formal relationship between textures and colours and probably considers the prettiness of the paintings useful in diverting attention from content. He once admitted to Pace Beijing president Leng Lin, “It’s like telling a story packed with violence and gore with a huge smile of your face.”21 He was also quoted as saying that he was unconcerned, when in portraying a famous meeting between President Nixon and Jiang Qing in Watching a Play (2004), whether the depiction of an arm was “Nixon’s arm or . . . Jiang Qing’s arm.”22

Vol. 13 No. 1 67 Zhong Nanhai (2011) seems to be carrying on this experimental approach, as it is made up of disparate segments that direct more attention to the paint than to content, more an exercise of chance than meaning. In fact, those familiar with Beijing would immediately recognize the scene depicted to be central Beijing. Rather than a mere pretext for an arrangement of mute albeit delicious-looking greens and browns, we are presented with the imperial garden adjacent to the Forbidden City, with its strong political significance.23 This work is based on an image from Google Earth, an aerial photograph that renders the scene a series of grey, low tonal values with red and white highlights.24 What looks like a mapping of abstract shapes shrouded with some uneven brushstrokes, a fusion of Sean Scully geometry with the neatly swept sands of Japanese gardens, has the capacity to depict another reality.

For Li Songsong, painting does not necessarily carry a purpose but may just provide an excuse to paint. The physicality of the paint, its thick gestural marks, are beyond impasto. They are “phenomenal techniques” equivalent to a plasterer dragging his float across the wet plaster.25 One can imagine the layers upon layers of paint that are applied to the canvas, a feat in itself considering its thickness. Before allowing time for the paint to dry, and unlike a plasterer whose craft is to achieve a perfectly smooth surface, Li Songsong draws on the wet paint with a trowel or stick-like instrument. It is a form of “action painting” except that the spontaneity of action painting is replaced with a carefully planned and executed set of activities. “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”26 For Li Songsong, it is an intuitive, perhaps even existential event, one in which he only “reacts to images that trigger his strongest and most intuitive artistic responses.”27

Political events are rendered as purely aesthetic experience and experimentation, supplanting historical connotation with the artist’s own legacy of artistic production. The charged images of the shot-down enemy airplane paraded by the Chinese fighters in Gift are viewed through the lens of experimentation in the formal techniques of painting. The scene becomes secondary to Li Songsong’s seductive brushwork, as “fact” and “truth” become “disembodied into a malleable network of fluid gestures.”28

To Western audiences unfamiliar with contemporary Chinese art or even Chinese history, some of these paintings might look like the impasto of Glenn Brown, Willem de Kooning, or Frank Auerbach, and, for others, even Van Gogh. The pastiche style is that of Hans Hofman and David Salle, and the photographic style that of Gerhard Richter. However, unlike Glenn Brown’s equally thick painting, which many viewers have expressed the sensation of wanting to lick or even eat,29 Li Songsong’s paint-encrusted canvases lack subtlety and raison d’etre, almost to the extent of being repellent, as one gallery owner must have felt, saying to one artist, “That’s enough, you don’t need any more paint!”30

68 Vol. 13 No. 1 Belonging to the in-between generation, Li Songsong seems to struggle with, on the one hand, a sense of social responsibility in which art needs to serve a function, rather than, on the other, relished for its own sake. The strategies of restraint, irony, or humour found in Cynical Realism and the Chinese avant-garde have dissipated into the zeitgeist of the last millennium. Li Songsong’s work may not be “terrifying to behold,” nor “capable of producing strong nausea and deep fear,”31 especially when positioned in relationship to the abjection so common in contemporary Chinese art, such as pissing, self-inflicted wounds, and the carnivorous. However, the profligate use of paint in Li Songsong’s work is almost a smack in the face of decorum, if there is such a thing in the etiquette of painting. The amount of paint used would have made Jackson Pollock look miserly, if not unsustainable. There is a grotesquery to do with the excessive oleaginousness and toxicity of oil paint. The power elicited by the sparing use of paint in earlier work such as The Square is sadly absent.

Lu Xun Was Dead (2012) could be a reference to early-twentieth-century writer Lu Xun’s use of allegorical devices to depict man-eaters and cruel inhuman methods as punishments for crime in A Madman’s Diary (1918). This resonates with an aesthetic of negativity.32 Beast (2012) bears an oblique connection to the programming at the Spoleto Festival, Charleston in 2012, where one of the Festival’s two opera productions was Feng Yi Ting, by Chinese composer Guo Wenjing, which propitiously tells a story of a seduction and murder that saves an empire.

At the turn of the last century, there was clearly a tradition of the macabre, grotesque, and the melancholic in the Chinese contemporary psyche, evident in contemporary artworks and literary circles. Wu Hung’s account of Liu Zheng’s portrayal of deformity, one hundred photographs of real people in My Countrymen (2001), was “dying, death and posthumous mutilation on the one hand and . . . fantastic or macabre figurations of the body on the other.”33 Liu Zheng was kept company by the likes of Gu Dexin’s Pinching the Flesh: Object as Living Life (1998)34 and Zhu Yu’s performance, Eating People, in 2000, of eating a human foetus. More recently, at the Chinese Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Wang Qingsong displayed abject images in Temporary Ward (2008), a gratuitously gory display of open wounds and other horrific injuries.35 The literary reference in Wang Qingsong’s work is equally dismal. Ba Jin’s novel Ward Four (1946) is a tale of abstract humanist ideals and allegory of the poor, where an unrequited lover drowns herself rather than become a concubine, amid prose describing the desperate conditions of a wartime hospital. Sartrean existentialism lies behind Zhang Xiaotiao’s lurid paintings. His “magnified pictures of our material life,” using festering decay, human waste, snakes, and rats, have been described as “grotesque.”36 He Yunchang has remained constant in this inclination; his incredible One Rib (2008 –09) involved having his eighth rib removed. In The Trusting Man Who Drowned

Vol. 13 No. 1 69 70 Vol. 13 No. 1 Vol. 13 No. 1 71 While Holding The Column (2003), He Yunchang cast his arm in a cement Previous page: Left: Li Songsong, Lu Xun Was Dead, 37 pillar and kept it there for twenty-four hours, and in Conversation with 2012, oil on canvas, 122.5 ÝÊ£ÓΰxÊÝʙ°xÊV“°Ê,ˆ} Ì\ÊˆÊ Water (1999), he hung from a chain over a river and lacerated his arm and Songsong, Zhong Nanhai, 2011, oil on canvas, 350 x let his blood run into the water, in commiseration with the homeless and 180 x 11 cm. © Li Songsong. Courtesy of Pace London. the plight of migrants.

This tradition of the grotesque and the melancholic could have arisen from the complexities of China’s entry into the global market place, where economic success did not seem to have alleviated a longstanding feeling of ignominy blamed on a hundred years of aggression from the west, starting with the Opium War (1839–42) which led to humiliating concessions with the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing.38 There are still constant gloomy references in current debates such as the lecture by Professor Yan Haiping to the “Century of Shame” and the “Sick Man of Asia.” 39

Ai Weiwei writes of working in an environment with a cultural deficit and of the history of China as a history of negation, where the importation of modern ideas and “craven pragmatism and opportunism” cannot make up for the lack of spiritual awareness in China.40 Ai Weiwei’s insight describes an aspect of the prevalent mood of despair and frustration, commonly known in China as minzu xuwuzhuyi, and which Geremie Barme refers to, in In the Red, as “national nihilism,” a form of “cultural deficit, a lack of self- awareness, social critique and creative independence.”41

Li Songsong’s way of painting may be just a symbol of human endurance. The application of paint, layer after layer, the smell of the oil, resin, and solvent must be overpowering. If it is not addictive, this activity certainly requires formidable endurance, one that is reflective of earlier performance works such as Zhang Huan’s Twelve Square Meters (1994), in which he sat in a public toilet naked and covered himself with honey to attract flies, or He Yunchang’s Golden Sunshine (1999), in which the artist covered himself in yellow oil paint and hung from the roof to paint the wall except where his shadow fell; he ultimately went into shock and fainted after ninety minutes.

Li Songsong’s stance may be one of resistance against authority rather than the cultural morass that Ai Weiwei referred to. The spade of morbidity has not escaped the eagle eye of the authorities who disapprove of any images of cynicism and violence, which in their eyes constitute a corrupt Western influence or a “proliferation of Western cultural crisis.”42 The issuing by the Ministry of Culture on April 3, 2001, of a notice entitled, “Forbidding Performing or Displaying Bloody, Cruel and Obscene Things in Public in the Name of Art,”43 seemed to have the opposite effect, and undoubtedly the right one for the artists, as for some “accepting amnesty and surrender” would be intolerable.44

There are those who see Li Sonsong’s motivation as purely aesthetic; for example, his selective painting of only the romantic figures of the lovers

72 Vol. 13 No. 1 in Couple, leaving out contextual, yet poignant, details of the historical source.45 Yet his method of distancing historical significance through the multicoloured patchwork of panels is also refreshing.46 It is a way to privilege the aesthetic qualities of an artwork that at times can be subsumed or denied by its socially and historically determined production, the reception and rhetoric surrounding it.47 In the process of sublimating any political content, Li Songsong is approaching an art with an immanent value rather than one that is relational to its context, even if the question of aesthetic can become another historically specific discipline, explicable in terms of ideology and political values.48

As discussed earlier, there are many analogies to be made about Li Songsong’s work with action painting, one of which is in the process of breaking down distinctions between art and life, where the act of painting becomes an indulgent, egotistical, and self-absorbed act—a performance representing his own life. This style may constitute a new aesthetic for Li Songsong, or about a liberating gesture—just to paint, or just to pile the paint on thickly. It is an incessant action, almost obsessive, almost as a form of erasure of the political, the aesthetic, and the moral. “The apples weren’t brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and colour. They had to go so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting.”49

Li Songsong’s painting style is a cross between a study of the aesthetic and the physical release of painting, with an almost existential quality. References are mostly discarded, although “a painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.”50 Judging by his historical roots of making art with social value, and the titling of his works, Li Songsong is “painting his own life.”51 On the other hand, it is tempting to suppose that Li Songsong perhaps is trying to escape his socialist past through an engagement with the pure aesthetics of painting. Ironically, in his gesture of excess, the aesthetic has been subordinated.

The irony is that there is a vulnerability and impermanence in a thick encrusted paint painstakingly laid on for perpetuity. The tension between the title and the painting reveals a sense of nostalgia. The idea of a “totalitarian nostalgia” is useful, where it is understood “primarily as an aesthetic nostalgia for the last grand style in the twentieth century . . . a nostalgia for world culture.” Another analogy is with Russia, where “totalitarian nostalgia” is sometimes understood as “the product of an environment in which culture had to survive a balancing act between the old . . . ideology and mentality, the demands of art, and new commercial imperatives.”52 This term expresses the need of the displaced literati in China, dissatisfied with merely occupying a market niche, longing for the past when there was a familiar way of thinking, of discourse, and of communication.

Li Songsong cannot escape his destiny. He lives in a society grieving for a private history. Dozens of essays are written on China’s recent past, on

Vol. 13 No. 1 73 nostalgia, from Wu Hung’s “The Old Photo Craze and Contemporary Chinese Art,”53 to Geremie R. Barme’s “Totalitarian Nostalgia,”54 to Chaohua Wang’s “Refusing to Forget.”55 Even as I write there is news of a reprint of Mao’s Little Red Book, the second most printed book ever, exceeded only by the Bible.56

There is no right way to discuss the work and life of the in-between generation. Their life, their drive to make work, are caught in a situation of ambivalence. Some are drawn to tell a story, perhaps to keep the possibility of the revolution alive, “at least in the imagination.”57 Some are also seduced by the paint and the act of painting.

Notes 1 Li Songsong, We Have Betrayed the Revolution, Pace London, September 19–November 9, 2013, http://www.pacegallery.com/london/exhibitions/12598/we-have-betrayed-the-revolution/. 2 Demetrio Paparoni, “Art and its Method: Li Songsong,” Li Songsong, We Have Betrayed the Revolution (London: Pace Gallery, 2013), 5. 3 Ai Weiwei, “That Person, Those Things,” Li Songsong, We Have Betrayed the Revolution (London: Pace Gallery, 2013), 9. 4 Kevin Holden Platt, "China’s Venetian Quandary: Chinese Artists," http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/ arts/Chinas-Venetian-Quandary-Chinese-Artists.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0/. 5 Gao Minglu, ed., The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art (Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, University of Buffalo Art Galleries, 2005), 115. 6 Richard Vine, “Dangling Man,” Art in America, May 27, 2011, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/ news-features/news/li-songsong-the-pace-galery/. 7 Pace Gallery press release, September 19, 2013, http://www.pacegallery.com/london/ exhibitions/12598/we-have-betrayed-the-revolution/. 8 Wu Hung, Making History: Wu Hung on Contemporary Art (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2008), 119. 9 Ibid., 145. 10 Ibid., 129. 11 Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing (London: Reaktion Books and University of Chicago Press, 2005), 196. 12 This borrows from the title of an exhibition curated by David Welch, Power and Persuasion, at the British Library, May 17–September 17, 2013. 13 These words were used by Wu Hung on the inside front cover flap of Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing. 14 This quote is from Mary Beth Heston, Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. See Adam Parker, “Spoleto Festival unveils ‘subtle, evocative’ 2012 poster,” Post and Courier, April 6, 2012, http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20120406/ UNKNOWN/120409462&slId=5/. 15 As alluded to in essays by Demetrio Paparoni and Ai Weiwei in the exhibition catalogue, Li Songsong, We Have Betrayed the Revolution. 16 Wang Hui is a leading member of China’s “new left” movement and a past editor of Dushu, one of China’s most influential literary journals. 17 Geremie R. Barme, In The Red (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 296. 18 This is a popular saying. 19 “Wang Qingsong: China Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale 2013," http://www.designboom.com/art/ wang-qingsong-china-pavilion-venice-artbiennale-2013/. 20 Gao Minglu, ed., The Wall, 116. 21 Vine, "Dangling Man." 22 Gao Minglu, ed., The Wall, 115. 23 It has a history of being the headquarters for political parties during the Republic of China era in 1911, The People’s Republic of China in 1949, and the current government. 24 Zhongnanhai is the complex of imperial gardens and lakes adjacent to the Forbidden City headquarters of the Communist Party of China and the State Council central government. Zhongnanhai is just west of the Forbidden City, opposite Tian’anmen Square. It is Mao’s onetime residence and the location of his death, and also that of the death of the last Emperor, Puyi. It is not accessible to the general public. Li Songsong said he used to go swimming there as a child and was provided access by a friend whose family worked there.

74 Vol. 13 No. 1 25 The comment “phenomenal techniques” was made by a member of the audience at the Li Songsong show at Pace Gallery New York, May 5, 2011. Robert Petrick interview with Li Songsong, “Li Songsong at Pace Gallery, NY, May 5, 2011http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0pmTCgOa2w/. 26 Charles Harrison and Paul J. Wood, Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Malden, USA, Oxford, UK, and Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Blackwell, 2002), 589. 27 Vine, “Dangling Man.” 28 Li Songsong artist’s profile, Saatchi Gallery, http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/li_songsong.htm/. 29 Jonathan Brown,“A real scene stealer: Glenn Brown’s ‘second-hand’ art is the subject of a Tate retrospective,” February 16, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/a- real-scene-stealer-glenn-browns-secondhand-art-is-the-subject-of-a-tate-retrospective-1622648. html/. 30 Judith Neilson, owner of the White Rabbit Collection, walked in on Zhu Jinshi when he was applying paint with shovels and wok spatulas and purportedly said this; see http://www.whiterabbitcollection. org/artists/zhu-jinshi/. 31 Laura Brook, "Damien Hirst and the Sensibility of Shock," Art and Design no. 40 (London: Academy Group Ltd., 1995), 55. 32 Lu Xun was a famous writer and leading figure of modern Chinese literature. His writings set the tone of the political landscape in art and literature early on in 1918. In the 1980s he was the main inspiration for a new generation of enlightenment intellectuals who called for a “return to Lu Xun.” After June 4, 1989, he suddenly fell out of favour and has now made yet another return. See Chaohua Wang, One China, Many Paths (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 205. 33 Wu Hung, Making History,139. 34 In this work, the artist pinched a piece of pork every day until it dried out. 35 The fact that Wang Qingsong’s Temporary Ward (2008) was perceived as a portrayal of the ailments of the West did not mean that it was redeemed in the Chinese psyche. The work was staged and photographed at the Northern Stage Theatre in Newcastle, UK, featuring a cast of locals posing as accident and emergency casualties. 36 “About Zhang Xiaotao,” http://artsy.net/artist/zhang-xiaotao/. 37 The title refers to a famous Chinese love story in which Wei Sheng was waiting for his girlfriend, who did not turn up; he died when the flood came. 38 While the West has a tendency to view its histories as a series of triumphant events such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the storming of the Bastille, and so on, China marks its history with events of ignominy, such as denoting that China’s modern history began on August 11, 1842, when the Qing dynasty, by signing the Treaty of Nanjing, capitulated to Great Britain in order to end the disastrous First Opium War (1839–42). 39 Lecture by Professor Yan Haiping at the Centre for Chinese Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, October 8, 2013. 40 Ai Weiwei, quoted in Barme, In The Red, 363. 41 Barme, In The Red, 363, 412, n. 8. 42 Wang Yuechuan, “Contemporary Art is the Proliferation of Western Cultural Crisis,” Art Observation Journal no. 12, (2007). Quoted in Wang Chunchen’s catalogue Transfiguration Exhibition (Venice: Maretti, 2013), 67. 43 Ibid., 67, n. 3. 44 Ibid. 45 Vine, “Dangling Man.” 46 Irina Makarova, “Recent Works: Li Songsong,” artasiapacific.com, http://artasiapacific.com/ Magazine/WebExclusives/RecentWorksLiSongsong/. 47 This is a question of aesthetic quality and aesthetic value, as Janet Wolff argues in Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (London, Boston, and Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), 31. 48 “The histories of ‘value’ are a sub-sector of the histories of literary-ideological receptive practices,” Wolff says, quoting Terry Eagleton, in Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, 32. 49 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, 1900–2000, 589–90. 50 Ibid., 590. 51 Gao Minglu, ed., The Wall, 114. 52 Svetlana Boym describes “totalitarian nostalgia” in Barme, In The Red, 316. 53 Wu Hung, Making History: Wu Hung on Contemporary Art (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2008), 119 –35. 54 Barme, In The Red, 316–44. 55 Qian Liqun in Chaohua Wang, One China, Many Paths, 292–312. 56 “The re-emergence of Quotations from Chairman Mao . . . comes amid an official revival of the era’s rhetoric. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has embraced Maoist terminology and concepts launching a ‘mass line rectification campaign’ and this week even presiding over a televised self-criticisms session.” Tania Branigan, “Mao’s Little Red Book to get revamp,” Guardian, September 27, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/27/mao-little-red-book-revamp/. 57 Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, 1900–2000, 589.

Vol. 13 No. 1 75 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky Xu Bing’s Magical Mystery Tour

u Bing’s recent installation Travelling to the Wonderland, which was on view in the John Madejski Garden Court of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is a marvel of good will X 1 ambassadorship. Distant from the bustling area of Knightsbridge, the constructed outdoor Chinese garden affords visitors a brief respite from the city’s noise and turmoil. The response of many of the viewers was one of delight: It’s a bit of China, isn’t it, here in the midst of London. But as a conceptual artist, Xu Bing has invested the work with multiple layers of meaning that may not have occurred to the occasional passersby. For one, as a contemporary literati artist, Xu Bing has chosen for his inspiration a prose poem, Peach Blossom Spring, written by Dao Qian in 421 A.D. that described the exploits of a fisherman who, passing a cove filled with peach trees in bloom, moored his boat and then followed a stream only to discover a hidden community living peacefully outside of the purview of

76 Vol. 13 No. 1 Xu Bing, Travelling to the Wonderland, 2013, site-specific ˆ˜ÃÌ>>̈œ˜Ê>ÌÊ6ˆV̜Àˆ>Ê>˜`Ê Albert Museum, London. Photo: Fang Chao. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

contemporary society. To further the viewer’s appreciation of the work, Xu Bing has written out the Dao Qian prose poem in his Square English calligraphy style and it hangs in a nearby gallery dedicated to Chinese art, reading as follows:

During the reign period T’ai yuan (326–97) of the Chin dynasty there lived in Wu-ling a certain fisherman. One day, as he followed the course of a stream, he became unconscious of the distance he had travelled. All at once he came upon a grove of blossoming peach trees which lined either bank for hundreds of paces. No tree of any other kind stood amongst them, but there were fragrant flowers, delicate and lovely to the eye, and the air was filled with drifting peach bloom.

The fisherman, marveling, passed on to discover where the grove would end. It ended at a spring; and then there came a hill. In the side of the hill was a small opening which seemed to promise a gleam of light. The fisherman left his boat and entered the opening. It was almost too cramped at first to afford him passage; but when he had taken a few dozen steps he emerged into the open light of day. He faced a spread of level land. Imposing buildings stood among rich fields and pleasant ponds all set with mulberry and willow. Linking paths led everywhere, and the fowls and dogs of one farm could be heard from the next. People were coming and going and working in the fields. Both the men and the women dressed in exactly the same manner as people outside; white haired elders and tufted children alike were cheerful and contented.

Some, noticing the fisherman, started in great surprise and asked him where he had come from. He told them his

Vol. 13 No. 1 77 story. Then they invited him to their home, where they set out wine and killed chickens for a feast. When news of his coming spread through the village, everyone came in to question him. For their part, they told how their forefathers, fleeing the troubles of the age of Ch’in, had come with their wives and neighbors to this isolated place, never to leave it. From that time on they had been cut off from the outside world. They asked what age this was this: they had never even heard of the Han, let alone it successors the Wei and Chin. The fisherman answered each of their questions in full, and they sighed and wondered at what he had to tell. The rest all invited him to their homes in turn and in each house food and wine were set before him. It was only after a stay of several days that he took his leave.

“Do not speak of us to the people outside” they said. But when he had regained his boat and was retracing his original route, he marked it at point after point; and on reaching the prefecture he sought audience of the prefect and told him of all these things. The prefect immediately dispatched officers to go back with the fisherman. He hunted for the marks he had made, but grew confused and never found the way again.

The learned and virtuous hermit Liu Tzu-chi heard the story and went off elated to find the place. But he had no success, and died at length of sickness. Since that time there have been no further “seekers of the ford.”2

On the most obvious level, Xu Bing’s garden installation re-creates this hidden land, providing Londoners with solace from the urban disorder outside. And in selecting this poem, Xu Bing engaged a topic that has enchanted literati and artists throughout China’s long history. Many painters rendered the Peach Blossom Spring in detailed and elaborate landscape settings using the ancient blue and green style, popular in the Tang dynasty, replete with small-scale narrative details. In these works, the viewer goes on a journey, following the boatman to the village past the peach blossoms.3 Xu Bing similarly re-creates the experience of the story and the destination, but in real time.

Creating the Illusion In accord with the poem’s narrative, Xu Bing built his utopia around a large fountain and encircled it with actual pieces of mountain transported from China. The scale and complexity of the project is mind-boggling: First, large slabs of rock were cut from the five major mountains of China and shipped to his workplace in Beijing. The stones, of various sizes, weigh as much

78 Vol. 13 No. 1 Picking stones for Travelling as two tons. Processing included to the Wonderland, 2013. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. cleaning and covering the rocks with varnish and then photographing, measuring, and cataloguing each one of them. There are six groups of stones, among them Taihu rocks from Lake Tai in Jiangsu province, Guwen (Morie) stone found around Suzhou, Taishan stones from Shandong, Ling Bi from Anhui, and rocks from Fangshan near Beijing. Acquiring such rocks was a pursuit once limited only to the emperor and the uppermost echelons of society. So prized were garden stones, sometimes called scholar’s rocks, that since the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) imperial emissaries were dispatched to search the nation in an effort to acquire excellent examples for the imperial gardens, where they carefully were placed in various settings—in courtyards and around bodies of water like those in the existing Ming gardens of Suzhou and Hangzhou.4 Catalogues written as early as the Song dynasty (960–1126 A.D.) extolled the virtues of famous stones. For Xu Bing, clearly the stones are the major component of the installation, and he has engaged in the same rock collecting endeavour as his precursors. In fact, the scale of his undertaking dwarfs historical precedent. But it should be noted that Xu Bing’s fascination with the theme of rocks is not unique among contemporary Chinese artists. The rock garden has captivated some of the most prominent artists working today, among them Cai Guoqiang,5 Zhan Wang,6 Sui Jianguo,7 Liu Dan,8 Hong Lei,9 and Wenda Gu.10

Details of stones for Travelling to the Wonderland, 2013. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. Next page: Stones for Travelling to the Wonderland being catalogued in a warehouse, 2013. Photo: Pan Hong. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

The conception of the installation was worked out in minute detail in Xu Bing’s studio during the summer of 2013. Once the stones were identified with painted numbers and catalogued, Xu Bing and his crew took small photos/prints of each of them and composed them into a small-scale rendering of the proposed site. The project was laden with innumerable logistical difficulties—especially procuring and transporting tons of rock overseas. During an interview in his studio this summer, Xu Bing explained the project to me, and he seemed both horrified and delighted with the challenge. Xu Bing re-created the approximate real geographical relationships of the different mountains in the placement of the rocks around the oval fountain. Each geographical area was represented by dozens

Vol. 13 No. 1 79 80 Vol. 13 No. 1 Vol. 13 No. 1 81 Maquette of Travelling to the Wonderland at Xu Bing Studio, 2013. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing, Travelling to the Wonderland (details), 2013, Photo: Fang Chao. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing, Travelling to the Wonderland (details), 2013, Photo: Fang Chao. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

of variously sized stones. For stability, in case of wind pressure, they were attached to the edge of the pool floor by steel bolts.

But this is just the framework of the final installation. Xu Bing further explained to me that he wanted to re-create a Chinese landscape painting, first by slicing the stones thinly, thereby reducing their sculptural attributes, and by embellishing them with narrative details. Thus Xu Bing populated the thin slivers of rock with anecdotal details: there are tiny clay houses, groups of buildings approximating a small village, mountain-top temples, forests, a waterfall, and both exotic and familiar animals and birds scattered about. There are even schools of tiny simulated fish in the pond, and in the centre of the pond sits an isolated group of buildings, like a lost empire; as the peach blossom spring was a rural community, the identity of this

82 Vol. 13 No. 1 element is somewhat enigmatic. These miniaturized elements make up a world resembling a fishbowl or bonsai composition articulated with human and architectural elements including pagoda, bridges, and fishermen. In accord with the poem, two areas have great sprays of plastic pink and white peach blossoms. In addition, Xu Bing sought to evoke the mist that rises from the mountains by employing complicated equipment and even producing a rainbow effect that was achieved through special lamps. Animated videos projected on the small clay houses show cartoon- like inhabitants.

Left and right: Xu Bing, Travelling to the Wonderland (details), 2013, Photo: Fang Chao. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing, Travelling to the Wonderland (details), 2013, Photo: Fang Chao. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing, Travelling to the Wonderland (details), 2013, Photo: Fang Chao. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Thus the viewer, when walking around the installation, experiences incidental scenes like the reader of a Chinese landscape painting does— moving in and out of perspectival depth and back and forth across the composition. This style of landscape painting reached its climax of representational skill in Song dynasty-period painting, where the size of

Vol. 13 No. 1 83 the human actors, houses, and temples, etc., was one-hundredth that of the mountains that were depicted. Although the size of the figures in Chinese painting grew over time in relation to the natural elements, they always remained considerably smaller, as they are in Xu Bing’s Travelling to the Wonderland. In a gallery nearby in the museum, there is a temporary exhibit of masterpieces of Chinese painting that allows the viewer to compare the experience of the garden installation with the experience of traditional painting.11

Xu Bing has succeeded in mimicking for the British audience the experience of viewing a Chinese landscape as well as in familiarizing them somewhat with China’s geography and culture. When visitors encircle the installation they encounter hidden grottos, Buddha sculptures, and the flora and fauna of each region from which the rocks have been extracted. In this way, a microcosm of China is experienced, which was the most ancient function of gardens. Scholars viewed stones as a microcosm of the universe: Du Wan (c. 1127–1132), in his catalogue of famous stones, Stone Compendium of Cloudy Forest (Yulin shipu), explained how they represented spiritual forces: the “purest essence of the energy of the heaven-earth coalesces into rock. . . . Within the size of a fist can be assembled the beauty of a thousand cliffs.12

The temporal element of experiencing the garden is enhanced with Xu Bing’s inclusion of the four seasons within Travelling to the Wonderland— each area has natural details common to a specific time of year, and for the viewer he has presented a fictive unfolding of the seasons. Time is also represented in the contrast between the present and this enchanted evocation of the past— the appreciation of antiquity is an essential feature of the literati’s experience of the arts. The work conveys a sense of the disjunction of time that is essential to the telling of the story of the peach blossom spring, where the people live cut off from contemporary society.

The Theme of the Peach Blossom Spring The poem Peach Blossom Spring embraces a number of themes associated with the life and work of its author, Dao Qian, who left the political arena to live as an impoverished recluse, surrounded by friends, family, and wine. Dao Qian’s rejection of official society was a result of his judgment against its turmoil, dishonesty, and corruption:

My instinct is all for freedom and will not brook discipline or restraint. Hunger and cold may be sharp, but this going against myself really sickens me. Whenever I have been involved in official life I was mortgaging myself to my mouth and my belly, and the realization of this greatly upset me. I was deeply ashamed that I had so compromised my principles.13

In his retirement he tended his garden, read, and wrote. Anticipating his death, he extolled the virtues of a simple life: 84 Vol. 13 No. 1 Raise me no mound, plant me no grove; time will pass with the revolving sun and moon. I never cared for praise in my lifetime and it matters not at all what eulogies are sung after my death. Man’s life is hard enough in truth; and death is not to be avoided.14

Dao Qian’s contempt for the double dealing of a society bent on greed and the worship of fame is also evident in his poem which describes how the inhabitants of the Peach Blossom Spring sought protection from the maniacal First Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi’s (259–210 BC) corruption and persecution, so much so that one hundred years after, they still feared discovery. What is more, their community is described in the poem as a Daoist utopia using terms found in the scripture of Daodejing, which asserts that when the government stays out of peoples’ affairs, they can achieve harmony and peace:

Live peacefully and delight in your own society; dwell within cock-crow of your neighbours. But maintain your independence from them.15

But the fisherman who accidentally discovers the community cannot tolerate it. More than that, despite their entreaties, he plans to uncover their location by leaving markers along the way to aid an official search party. This is a condemnation of the fisherman, and perhaps humanity, who could not tolerate harmony and tried to destroy it. It should also be considered that this complicated prose poem also suggests, as the author Lou Yueh (1137–1213) proposed, that this land may not actually exist, as it was never found by those who went to search for it.16 It may have been an illusion, thus maybe such peaceful places cannot be found on earth.

Because of its allusions to Daoism, since the Tang dynasty the poem was read as a description of a Daoist fairyland whose inhabitants were immortals, Susan Nelson explains,

The peach blossoms at the entrance of the secret land stir intimations of immortality, which is symbolized by the peach; the tunnel entrance suggests the grotto paradises, and the stream the nourishing “spirit fount” of Taoist lore; and the fact that the land was never seen again parallels the mystic disappearances of paradises of the fantasy genre.17

The Daoist scholar Stephen Bokemcamp found an early Daoist scripture that, predating the poem, narrated a similar story. He summarizes:

Both interlopers come upon a place of habitation, but, while the Recluse finds only footprints and cart tracks, the

Vol. 13 No. 1 85 fisherman of T’ao’s account meets the cavern residents. Both men report their finds to the proper authorities, though the cavern paradise is inaccessible to the less worthy, regardless of rank and status. This might explain why T’ao placed his wondrous peach trees outside the grotto. The peaches are easily obtainable and the secret of the cavern really nothing so mysterious at all.18

Bokemkamp goes on to suggest that “the poem was indeed critical of the single-minded pursuit of Daoist wonders, probably on the part of some acquaintance” of the poet.19 A rationalist stance was also taken by the Song literati Su Shi (1037–1101), who, challenging the religious connotations, proposed a more sensible approach: the people of the cove were not immortals but descendants of those who fled the Qin Emperor.20 In either case, as Nelson has pointed out, the vast majority of illustrations favour a mystical portrayal.21 There also is a reading which asserts that the land was utopian, but the boatman, representative of human nature, could not tolerate it. (Mark Twain’s preference for hell over heaven comes to mind.)

Xu Bing, American Silkworm Series, 1994, mixed media. Exposing the Illusion Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. Travelling to the Wonderland may be seen within the context of Xu Bing’s artistic career. Since his earliest projects he has worked with writing, language, and calligraphy, winning him the moniker of a modern literati.22 For example, his Book from the Sky consisted of him composing four thousand nonsensical characters printed as a book, which was later placed in a contemporary context with a large-scale installation of pages of printed texts.23 Living abroad at that time, Xu Bing sought to enhance the experience of Chinese writing for Westerners and designed New English Calligraphy (1994) transforming the letters of English words into square boxes that resemble Chinese script. Though the Book from the Sky transmitted a meaningless text, the works in New English Calligraphy were legible, though they required time and patience to comprehend. As a diasporic artist, many of his projects stressed strong identification with Chinese culture, like the American Silkworm Series (1994). Here, he also began to engage with Chinese landscape painting, and it became the subject of several of his artistic inventions, and Travelling to the Wonderland is surely an extension of this pursuit.

Like so many of Xu Bing’s works, Travelling to the Wonderland also has a strong didactic intention; that is, to familiarize Europeans with Chinese culture. In keeping with his career as an educator and Vice President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, several of his projects have a boldly educational tone. Square Calligraphy Classroom (1994) was a schoolroom

86 Vol. 13 No. 1 Xu Bing, Square Calligraphy Classroom, 1996, installation. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing, Your Surname Please, 1998, installation. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing, Book from the demonstration of writing the new Ground, 2003, installation. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. graphs, an audience interactive component activity later held in conjunction with a 2001 –02 solo exhibition of his art, Word Play, at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. Viewer participation also was required in Your Surname Please (1998) in which a computer translated the subject’s name into the new square calligraphy. First Readers (2003) is composed of small glass sculptures that emulate

Vol. 13 No. 1 87 children’s reading toys. Sandblasted on the surface of each ambiguous shape Xu Bing, Post Testament, 1992, installation. Courtesy of Xu is an English word and a Chinese word; and although both the English and Bing Studio. the Chinese definitions correspond with the form of the sculpture, their meanings humorously disagree with each other. Xu Bing has explained his recent project Book From the Ground (2003–12) on his Web site and in articles; it too requires instructions for the audience, who are asked to type on a computer messages using the new picture language he created from public signage.24

But as First Readers suggests, Xu Bing often has other agendas, one of which is to expose the falsity and limits of communication beginning with the pseudo characters of the Book From The Sky that look legible but in fact are gibberish. This is also evident in Post Testament (1992), where the books reproduced are either incorrectly titled or consist of strange hybrid texts. The contrast between expectation and actuality is fundamental to his landscape works that began in 1999 with Landscript in which he rendered a seemingly lifelike landscape, but closer inspection revealed that he used Chinese ciphers for the geographical elements: the characters for stone, tree, mountain, stream, etc., comprised the composition.25 In another series, Background Story, that was initiated in 2004 and is ongoing, Xu Bing re-created famous literati monochrome landscapes using materials from nature—clay, stones, trees, and leaves—that are placed behind an opaque piece of glass and illuminated from behind. From a distance these works look like large-scale handscroll landscape paintings, but walking around to the back exposes the raw materials that make up the composition. The work is a tour de force that surprises the viewer and challenges one to not only interpret the genre from which this work is derived, but its

88 Vol. 13 No. 1 Xu Bing, Background Story, modern re-creation as well. As in Travelling to the Wonderland, Xu Bing 2011, installation. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. has deconstructed the paintings and refashioned them as relief sculpture using natural materials. But, as Richard Harrist observes, the back of the hand scroll re-creation was executed in an intentionally sloppy manner to more emphatically expose the illusion.26 At the same time, Xu Bing created a “virtual landscape,” and in this way Harrist posits Xu Bing creates a historical dialogue between the actual object and the virtual re-creation of it in a different in scale and medium. The shock of discovery is explained as the insight of a Zen master:

Ultimately the filter that Xu Bing wishes us to understand probably is that of the mind itself—a filter woven from our cultures, languages and personal histories. The filter of the mind grants only limited access to the world, but it is through this imperfect screen, both opaque and translucent, receptive to some stimuli but oblivious to others, that art and reality are perceived”27

Travelling to the Wonderland also conveys the disparity between the ideal of the garden and its manufacture. A statement placed at the entrance to the garden explains that the artist fully intended that the mechanics of the construction of the garden and its magical effects be exposed to view:

This ethereal landscape created by the artist Xu Bing. Xu was inspired by the classic Chinese fable, Tao Hua Yuan, or Peach Blossom Spring. Written in 421, Peach Blossom Spring tells the story of a lost fisherman who discovers a land

Vol. 13 No. 1 89 90 Vol. 13 No. 1 Xu Bing, night view of behind a mountain where people lead an ideal existence in Travelling to the Wonderland, Óä£Î]Ê6ˆV̜Àˆ>Ê>˜`Ê
LiÀÌÊ harmony with nature, unaware of the outside world. Museum, London. Photo: Fang Chao. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. The installation was built up of finely cut stones collected from five different places in China. It is a feature of Xu Bing’s work to show us that everything is not as it may seem at first. In plain sight, behind and among the mountains are the machines, cables and LCD screens that create this utopian scene.

Electric lights, the fog machine, the tiny plastic animals, and fake plum blossoms are revealed for what they are—artless components of an installation. The effect is not unlike that of a scroll painting of the Peach Blossom Spring by the famous early Qing literati painter Shitao (Tao Qi), who uniquely begins his composition with a pleasant land of peace and prosperity and then, as the viewer unrolls the long scroll, finds at the end a composition that conveys a sense of loss and physical certitude.28 As Susan Nelson observes,

The political implications of T’ao Yuan-ming’s story, its pessimism and sense of involvement, made themselves felt in paintings such as these in a more urgent and human interpretation of the escapist theme; in many ways they seem close to the spirit in which T’ao, living through parallel historical events, must have conceived it.29

Perhaps the intent of the exposed mechanics of the installation is, as Xu Bing says in the plaque, to expose the viewer to the illusions of life, and, perhaps, in the context of the poem, to encourage the viewer to see that the pursuit of profit and fame is, as Dao Qian found, ultimately a vain delusion.

So too the viewer of the garden, aware of the mechanics, is expelled from utopia. I spoke with over a dozen visitors, asking how they found the experience. They replied that it was lovely to have this garden available to them and to have this chance to become familiar with Chinese culture. When asked how they felt about the obvious technical machinery, often poorly executed scenarios, and blatantly fake flowers, one man replied, “I tried to ignore it.” In fact, many thought the garden was unfinished, while others replied it would be better viewed at night when such unseemly details were less readily apparent. As I was told, however, the garden is closed at night.

Vol. 13 No. 1 91 Notes 1 On view November 1, 2013–March 2, 2014. 2 This version is translated by Cyril Byrch in Anthology of Chinese Literature, Volume I: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century, ed. Cyril Birch (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 167–68. 3 Richard M. Barnhart, Peach Blossom Spring (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), figure 41, 114–15, illustrates Peach Blossom Spring, by Yuan Chiang (active 1690–1746) comprising twelve hanging scrolls. To view a digital version of a scroll of Peach Blossom Spring, attributed to Qiu Ying (ca. 1494–1552) but executed in the seventeenth century, with ink and colour on paper, 33 x 472 cm, now in the Boston Museum of Art (accession number 56.494), see http://scrolls.uchicago.edu/scroll/ peach-blossom-spring/. 4 Yang Hongxun, Classical Chinese Gardens (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982), 59. 5 See Cai Guo-Qiang, Garden Within a Garden, and Cai Guo-Qiang: Flying Dragon in the Heavens, 1997, http://www.caiguoqiang.com/projects/garden-within-garden/. 6 See Zhan Wang’s polished stainless steel re-creations of garden rocks, http://www.saatchigallery. com/artists/zhan_wang.htm/. 7 For Sui Jianguo’s river rock series of 1990, see http://www.suijianguo.com/. 8 For Liu Dan’s installation Illusions of the Old Man Rock I–X, featuring nine rock paintings with a 30-foot-long hand-scroll of an imagined landscape wrapping the exterior of the circle at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, see http://www.mfa.org/media/detail/261/94/. 9 Hong Lei did several images of Garden rocks in Decay Series, 2006; see http://www.chinese- avantgarde.com/hong-lei.html/. 10 For example, Wenda Gu’s B/W rocks with characters, ink on paper, 83 x 152 cm; see http://www.mfa. org/collections/object/b-w-rocks-with-characters-378956/. 11 Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700–1900, Victoria and Albert Museum, October 26, 2013–January 19, 2014, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/masterpieces-of-chinese-painting/Exhibit/. 12 Stephen Little, Spirit Stones of China (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1999), 16. 13 James R. Hightower, The Poetry of T’ao Ch’ien (Oxford: Clarendon,1970), 5. 14 Ibid., 6. 15 The Daodejing compilation is attributed to Laozi; it was assembled as early as fourth century. For Verse 80, see http://www.sacred-texts.com/tao/ttx/ttx02.htm/: Let your community be small, with only a few people; Keep tools in abundance, but do not depend upon them; Appreciate your life and be content with your home; Sail boats and ride horses, but don’t go too far; Keep weapons and armour, but do not employ them; Let everyone read and write, Eat well and make beautiful things. Live peacefully and delight in your own society; Dwell within cockcrow of your neighbours, But maintain your independence from them. 16 Susan E. Nelson, “The Peach Blossom Spring as Paradise Source,” Archives of Asian Art 39 (1986), 23–47, 29, cites the author Lou Yueh’s (1137–1213) statement that the Peach Blossom Spring community did not actually exist. 17 Ibid., 25. 18 Stephen R. Bokenkamp, “The Peach Flower Font and the Grotto Passage,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 106, no. 1, Sinological Studies Dedicated to Edward H. Schafer (January–March 1986), 65–77. 19 Ibid., 22. 20 Nelson, “The Peach Blossom Spring as Paradise Source,” 28. 21 Ibid., 30. 22 Patricia Karetzky, “A Modern Literati: The Art of Xu Bing,” Oriental Art XLVII, no. 4 (2001), 47–62. 23 Xubing.com: “Mixed media installation / Hand-printed books and scrolls printed from blocks inscribed with ‘false’ characters. An installation that took Xu Bing over four years to complete, A Book from The Sky is comprised of printed volumes and scrolls containing four thousand ‘false’ Chinese characters invented by the artist and then painstakingly hand-cut onto wooden printing blocks.” The Web site also includes description of other works mentioned in the current text. 24 Xu Bing, “Regarding Book from the Ground,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 6, no. 2, June 2007. 25 Reiko Tomli, David Elliot, Robert E. Harrist, Jr., and Andrew Solomon, Xu Bing (London: Albion, 2011), 212. 26 Robert E.Harrist Jr. “Background Stories: Xu Bing’s Art of Transformation,” in Tomli et al., Xu Bing, 2011, 35, lists the several versions of Backstory. 27 Ibid., 42. 28 Copy of Yuanji (Shitao, 1641–1707), Peach Blossom Spring, ink and colour, height approximately 25 cm, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gift of C.C. Wang and family, F1982.26; see http://www. asia.si.edu/collections/singleObject.cfm?ObjectNumber=F1982.26/. 29 Nelson, “The Peach Blossom Spring as Paradise Source," 41.

92 Vol. 13 No. 1 Chinese Name Index

Vol. 13 No. 1 93 94 Vol. 13 No. 1 Vol. 13 No. 1 95

Since its inauguration in May 2002, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art has raised its profile internationally to become one of the most respected journals devoted to contemporary Chinese art. To further expand our platform for global dialogue and debate concerning issues in this field, Yishu launched its Chinese- language version in May 2012.

This edition is published quarterly—in March, June, September and December—and each issue features scholarly essays, interviews, conference proceedings, and critical commentary selected from Yishu’s English edition. With our English and Chinese editions, we endeavour to increase our efforts in promoting critical writing on, and contributing to the history of, contemporary Chinese art.

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Back issues available for order: October 2011, April 2012, August 2012, December 2012, March 2013 , June 2013, September 2013, and December 2013. Limited edition prints Yishu and photographs by leading contemporary Art Editions Chinese artists.

No 1. No 2.

Xu Bing, Ding Yi, Book from the Ground Crosses 08 (not available) 2008, Serigraphy, 2007, Ink on paper, 297 X 178 mm, 210 X 295 mm, signed by the artist. signed by the artist. Produced by the artist. Produced by the artist. Edition of 200. Edition of 199.

No 3. No 4.

Wei Guangqing, Rong Rong & Inri, Made in China 2004 No. 2 2008, Seriograph on Caochangdi, Beijing paper, 175 x 296 mm. 2008, Digital photograph Produced by the artist. on Hahnemühle rag paper Edition of 198. Produced by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing. Edition of 200.

No 5. No 6. Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism — Hong Hao and Yan Lei, Wang Guangyi Invitation 2009, Serigraphy, 2010, Printed on paper, 210 X 295 mm, 295 x 205 mm, signed by the artist. Produced by the artist. Produced by A Space Art, Edition of 300. Beijing. Edition of 200.

No 7.

Zhong Biao, Dawn of Asia 2010, Serigraphy, 210 x 300 mm, Produced by the artist. Edition of 200.