MARCH 2005 SPRING ISSUE
INSIDE
Dialogue with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Huo Hanru on the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial On Curating Cruel/Loving Bodies The Yellow Box: Thoughts on Art before the Age of Exhibitions Interviews with Michael Lin and Hu Jieming From Iconic to Symbolic: Ah Xian’s Semiotic Interface Between China and the West Place and Displace: Three Generations of Taiwanese Art US$12.00 NT$350.00 US$10.00 NT$350.00
Editor’s Note
Contributors
p. 16 Dialogue with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru on the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial Sun Xiaofeng
Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art Biljana Ciric
On Curating Cruel/Loving Bodies Sasha Su-Ling Welland
p. 31 Feminism Beyond the Female Body Anthony Leung Po Shan
The Yellow Box: Thoughts on Art before the Age of Exhibitions Chang Tsong-zung
An Interview with Michael Lin p. 47 Hou Hanru An Interview with Hu Jieming Shan Yingwen
Made by Tiande John Tancock
From Iconic to Symbolic: Ah Xian’s Semiotic Interface Between China and the West p. 75 Stefano Catalani
Dis/Placement: Yin Xiuzhen’s City Installations Peggy Wang
Place and Displace: Three Generations of Taiwanese Art Charles Liu
Exhibitions Listings
Chinese Name Index p. 82 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Volume 4, Number 1, March 2005 Contemporary art is redefining how exhibitions Katy Hsiu-chih Chien are now presented. Much new art has moved Ken Lum beyond the traditional wall and floor modes of Keith Wallace display, even beyond the museum itself, and Zheng Shengtian demands adaptive models for presentation and Julie Grundvig reception. New forms of media, non-traditional Kate Steinmann Larisa Broyde architectural spaces, public interaction with art Joyce Lin and artists, and cultural specificity are just some of the factors that curators think about when formu- Judy Andrews, Ohio State University lating an exhibition. John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation Okwui Enwezor, Art Institute of Chicago Yishu 12 brings together a number of texts that Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di'an, Central Academy of Fine Arts explore some of these new approaches to Fei Dawei, Guy & Mariam Ullens Foundation developing exhibitions in China. The relatively Gao Minglu, New York State University Hou Hanru, Independent Curator & Critic short engagement with contemporary art in Katie Hill, University of Westminster Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Chinese museums and galleries that Biljana Ciric Sebastian Lopez, Gate Foundation & Leiden University speaks of could perhaps have some advantages. Lu Jie, Independent Curator Charles Merewether, Australian National University The passive viewing habits of the public that have Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand existed in the West ever since the emergence of Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator museums often makes innovation and spontaneity Wu Hung, University of Chicago a difficult task. That the relationship between Art & Collection Group Ltd. contemporary art and the public in China carries Leap Creative Group a less established history is, for Hou Hanru and Raymond Mah Hans Ulrich Obrist, an opportunity for inventive Gavin Chow Jeremy Lee projects that are liberated from the confines of relaITconsulting, Vancouver traditional museum forms of display. Tsong-zung Chong-yuan Image Ltd., Taipei Chang also introduces a provocative challenge - to traditional museum presentation by redefining Yishu is published quarterly in Taipei, Taiwan and edited in how calligraphy and painting can be installed Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates of Yishu are 5th of in the contemporary gallery context. But the March, June, September and December. exhibition of contemporary art also has its Editorial inquiries and manuscripts may be sent to the Editorial Office: difficulties as the texts of Sasha Su-Ling Welland Yishu and Anthony Leung Po-shan make clear, especially 410-650 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC Canada V6B 4N8 when it is the content that is non-traditional or Phone: 1.604.649.8187; Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: [email protected] breaking barriers. Subscription inquiries may be sent to either Vancouver address or Hawaii: We are also presenting interviews and articles Journals Department University of Hawai’i Press with five important Chinese artists-Michael Lin, 2840 Kolowalu Street, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA Hu Jieming, Wang Tiande, Ah Xian, and Yin Phone: 1.808.956.8833; Fax: 1.808.988.6052 E-mail: [email protected] or Xiuzhen. Exploring a wide variety of media that [email protected] include calligraphy, video, installation, and The University of Hawai’i Press accepts payment by Visa or sculpture, the discussion of their work brings Mastercard, cheque or money order (in U.S. dollars). forth issues such as traditional techniques and Advertising inquiries may be sent to either Vancouver address or Taiwan: iconography in the contemporary context, and the Art & Collection Ltd. troubled relationship between the local and the 6F. No.85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Phone: (886) 2.2560.2220; Fax: (886) 2.2542.0631 global. In the closing article, curator Charles Liu E-mail: [email protected] provides an overview of the exhibition Place and www.yishujournal.com Displace, which includes three generations of No part of this journal may be published without the written Taiwanese art. permission from the publisher. Subscription rates: one year: US $48; two years: US $86 We thank Mr. Milton Wong, Mr. Daoping Bao, Paystone Technologies Corp., Raymond Mah, and the Leap Creative Group for their generous support. Keith Wallace Cover: Michael Lin, Three on the Bund 29.09-15.11.04-2004, skaters on emulsion on wood. Courtesy of Shanghai Gallery of Art.
STEFANO CATALANI is an independent curator and writer who lives in Seattle, Washington, and Rome, Italy. His recent projects have focused on the investigation of the dialectics of information/communication.
CHANG TSONG-ZUNG is a curator and writer and is curatorial director of Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong. Chang’s projects are aimed at reviving traditional customs and cultural practices. Recent exhibitions include A Strange Heaven: Contemporary Chinese Photography (2003), The Rudolfinum, Prague; Edges of the Earth: Migration of Asian and Regional Politics (2003), project team, China Art Academy, Hangzhou; Power of the Word (toured 1999-2002), Independent Curators International, New York; and Reckoning With the Past (1996), Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.
BILJANA CIRIC received an M.A. from East China Normal University Shanghai. She is Director of the Shanghai Duolun Musem of Modern Art’s Curatorial Department and is a regular writer for Art China magazine.
HOU HANRU lives and works in Paris as an independent critic and curator. He served as co-curator of Cities on the Move (1997-1999) and was a curator of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, the 2002 Gwangju Biennale, and the 2003 Venice Biennale (Zone of Urgency).
ANTHONY LEUNG PO SHAN was born in 1974 in Hong Kong. She is the General Manager of Para/Site Art Space in Hong Kong and the Chief Editor of PS magazine. She studied at the University of Leeds on a Hong Kong Arts Development Council Scholarship and has been involved in many major exhibitions in Hong Kong and overseas, including Love the Fucking Country (1997), Hong Kong Cultural Festival, Munich; The Devotion I (2001), Para/Site Art Space, Gwangju Biennale 2002. She is also the researcher/curator of The Red Twenty Years of Ricky Yeung Sau-churk.
CHARLES (CHANG-HAN) LIU was born in Shanghai in 1947 and received his art education at the Escuela de Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, and the National Taiwan Academy of Arts, Taipei. Currently living in Chicago, he is an artist, educator, writer, and curator. He has exhibited his work in the United States, Canada, Taiwan, China, and Spain.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST currently lives and works in Paris. He founded the Museum Robert Walser in 1993 and began the Migrateurs program at the Musee d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, where he now serves as a Curator for Contemporary Art. He is Editor in Chief of the hybrid artist pages Point d’ironie, published by agnes b and begun in collaboration with her in 1997. He has
been a frequent curator for museum in progress, Vienna, and lecturer at Facolta delle Arti, Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia. Obrist was recently appointed special correspon- dent of Domus magazine in Milan.
SHAN YINGWEN is a sophomore in the Journalism College at Shanghai Fudan University. She is Vice President of the Student Union and writes for two campus newspapers, Fudan Weekly and Fudan Youth.
SUN XIAOFENG was born in Chenghai, Guangdong, and lives and works in Guangzhou. Sun has exhibited at the Guangdong Museum of Art, South China Normal University, and the Museum of Sichuan Art Academy.
JOHN TANCOCK was educated at Downing College, Cambridge (M.A.), and Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (Ph.D.). From 1967 to 1973 he was Associate Curator at Philadelphia
Museum of Art. He has worked with Sotheby's since 1973 and is currently Senior Vice-President in the department of Impressionist and Modern Paintings and Sculpture, where his primary focus is on the Asian region.
PEGGY WANG lives in Chicago and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago specializing in contemporary Chinese Art.
SASHA SU-LING WELLAND will receive her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2005. She currently teaches at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her research examines the social role of visual art and competing ideas of aesthetic, cultural, and market value in reform-era China, with a particular focus on how gender shapes contemporary Chinese art worlds.
D-Lab 1 in session in gallery 9 of the Guangdong Museum of Art, November 29, 2004.
Sun Xiaofeng: Could you elaborate on the concept behind the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial, specifically the idea of “laboratory”?
Hans Ulrich Obrist: From Alexander Dorner in his Hannover Museum in the early twentieth century and the amazing experiments with El Lissitzky during the 1960s (plus Hulten in Stockholm, Sandberg in Amsterdam, Cladders in Moenchengladbach, etc.), the laboratory has been a crucial topic for museum and exhibition practice in the West. Galleries, universities, theatres, and many other kinds of spaces can be considered laboratories where processes can take place instead of just being sites of display for objects. Throughout the 1990s, this concept gained strength. “Laboratory” is no longer a simple formal expression, but it has penetrated our everyday, increasingly mobile lives, therefore re-determining the very importance of such a process. In essence, exhibitions entail an incremental development of experimental activities. Following this idea, exhibitions are not only a display, but must also generate a number of new activities. They can trigger a dynamic to stimulate other new or related events and relationships. The exhibition must foster dialogues and exchanges among artists and practitioners from different disciplines. It creates a momentum, like a kraftwerk, that initiates and renews itself simultaneously.
In the past, an exhibition required a homogeneous timeframe. From its opening to its closing, an exhibition may last for one to two months. The opening is usually surging with activities, and everything calms down after awhile. Our vision of the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial is that it will become a series of continuous events, something that is not limited by a predetermined time frame or demarcated by an opening or closing. Hence this project should be seen as a collective of diverse accumulative processes. It should not be static or even conclusive. From the standpoint of an artist, this triennial requires new and proactive learning and conscious revision of conventional creative processes. In short, the triennial becomes a form of “interior density.”Take Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters as an example: he built a house and continually added different layers to it. Similarly, this exhibition is a process of open learning for audiences, artists, and curators. Through this triennial, we want to create an opportunity for artists to meet with people from different communities, to absorb ideas from each other, and in turn to create new projects. This process is therefore extremely open and largely conditional on mutual learning and intellectual generosity towards each other. Generosity is extremely crucial here, as it generates more cooperation and new possibilities for individual counterparts. The attempt to let go of oneself is the truest form of exchange. A few years ago, I made an in-depth exploration of the laboratory with another curator, Barbara Vanderlinden. I was interested in the links between art and urban architecture. Recently, I have been interested in the relationship between art and science. Since the site of scientific discovery is mainly the laboratory, I began to question what “laboratory” could mean in science. We invited a hundred scientists and artists to propose projects to probe such an issue. Among them was the Chilean scientist Francisco Varela, who made a “subjective” portable laboratory. If science is objective in nature, what is science from a subjective point of view?
The spaces that many laboratories occupy are almost invisible in cities; they form an invisible city. If we were to ask how many laboratories there are in a city, a lot of people would not know how to answer. There is an enormous richness of visual culture in the city awaiting our exploration. In fact, cities are sites with many hidden phenomena, and only through thorough research can we begin to expose the many unknown “truths” inside such an invisible “city.”The question of art is inseparable from globalization, which is the reality we are facing right now. How do we propose models against homogenizing globalization? Edouard Glissant coined the term mondialité,which means a difference-enhancing globalization. What are the temporal and spatial strategies we can propose in order to resist an increasingly homogenized reality? In terms of the unique locality of the Pearl River Delta (PRD), the discrepancies between a sustainable culture and its temporal lapse could contribute a different understanding of the overall process of globalization. Under such conditions, we will invite international and Chinese artists to generate projects that are diverse and alternative in nature but also strong with regional interest as tools for confronting and negotiating globalization. Through this process, we can, hopefully, trigger another exhibition model.
Sun Xiaofeng: The concept of “laboratories” covers a lot of ground. Given that such experiments are sustainable and site specific in nature, can you elaborate on the temporal and spatial specificities of the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial in terms of your overall concept about the “laboratory”?
Hou Hanru: The 2nd Guangzhou Triennial has its own unique features. There are already many biennials and triennials everywhere, and many cities are using such events to reinvigorate their culture in a rather compressed time frame. For the 2nd Triennial, generally speaking, we are trying to avoid echoing other biennials and triennials elsewhere. It is our wish to create a new and different mode of thinking. But the important issue here is to prevent an appropriation of
Cityscape of Guangzhou. conventional biennial models. We must identify regional differences. We have seen many biennials and triennials before. Take Venice or Gwangju as instances; for their openings, a lot of artists will be in town, then for two months a lot of visitors will attend, but shortly afterward, nothing is left of the biennial. The city becomes a cultural desert, and, then, two years later, the same thing repeats itself again. What we hope to see is a flame that can be carried from one Triennial to the next, and not a one-time event presented in the name of cultural tourism that contributes little to the local art scene. We would very much like the Triennial be sustainable and about long-distance running, not just a short sprint. It is our wish that this Triennial will root itself in Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta region by building a long-term laboratory that will accumulate important archival materials. Also, I believe exhibitions are places to produce different realities, ones proposed by artists, be they a house or a garden, a skyscraper or a landscape.
Sun Xiaofeng: What impresses me in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s description of curation is its flexibility and its unexpectedness. Could you elaborate on this issue?
Hou Hanru: The laboratory described by Hans is actually what we are exploring all the time. In past exhibition projects we organized many process-oriented activities, which is in opposition to conventional institutional processes. Therefore, the process surrounding the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial, while incorporating great unexpectedness, requires prompt institutional response to meet different contingencies. Even though this approach is based on past experiences, it may lead us to a new situation altogether. As for the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial, we want to systematize this process by positioning it as a centre for the whole triennial program. In the past, we used the laboratory as a one-time theme; it was a rather stable entity with a fixed time frame in mind. As for the Triennial, which has a time frame of more than a year, there is tremendous latitude for change and experimentation. What is going to happen is often unpredictable; we have to be able to anticipate what to do next with viable actions. All these factors generate new meanings and
Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru in discussion with Wang Huangsheng. provide us with a new starting point. This will also be an interesting challenge for many artists. In the past, artists created works for exhibitions. But for the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial, we are opting for a research-based approach which will hopefully provoke new strategies for artistic production. The potential impact will be horizontal; the communications among artists will hopefully bridge a more fluid dialogue with other cultural circles. Speaking from this perspective, I personally want to create a rich and complex work structure. Undoubtedly, many huge challenges lie ahead of us. The infrastructure for financial support and human resources will need to be revamped in order to meet the demands of the project. In short, an art organization needs to reorganize itself to become more conducive to artistic production. We consider such experimentation within an insti- tutional structure an integral part of curation, as it helps us to gain insights to the peculiar cir- cumstances of a given context.
Sun Xiaofeng: Could you share with us the criteria for selecting artists?
Hou Hanru: The theme for the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial focuses mainly on issues of urbanization in the Pearl River Delta and uses existing structural changes of a city as a backdrop for artistic creation. Specifically, the issues surrounding artistic and cultural production can stimulate new reflections on the PRD’s modernization. What we want to achieve is to conduct research on the modernity of a particular region and to explore its relevance in a more global context. From the beginning, this issue centres on the discussion of globalization and reveals the relationships between external influences and the internal structural changes of a region. Therefore, we must provide artists and scholars [e.g., architects or researchers on urbanism] from abroad the possibili- ty to conduct research and to submit proposals based on this principle. There are quite a number of talented artists in the region. However, we hope to invite artists who are concerned with similar issues from other parts of China and to encourage them to develop a deeper understanding of Guangzhou and the surrounding region. In principle, for each laboratory, we will invite two or three Chinese artists who will be collaborating with two or three overseas artists. We hope our exchanges are continuous. We do not have to finalize the name list for the Triennial all at once. Instead, we can make our decisions in stages. Even though these stages will last about one year, we will select artists in an incremental manner.
Sun Xiaofeng: May I suggest that the selection of artists will be based on specific issues as they emerge from the different laboratories?
Hou Hanru: Yes. Since we started this process not so long ago, we do need time to identify several issues. We hope every lab will have a theme or at least an inclination. It does not need to be a clear theme, but we need a direction for research.
Sun Xiaofeng: Once the laboratory begins, overseas and local artists will stay for four weeks in the PRD. During their research, every artist will have a different entry point; therefore the interpreta- tions of modernization in the PRD will vary widely, which may lead to misreadings.
Hou Hanru: I believe correct interpretations are relative. I believe as artists, their freedom lies within the extent to which they can express their imagination. Naturally, misinterpretation is also a part of interpretation, and exchanges are necessary because of misinterpretations. What is important is dependent on an artist's ability to use his/her artistic language. I feel what we are doing is not purely a sociological or anthropological research. What is more important is the artist's imagination, something that will be more crucial than providing a correct interpretation.
Sun Xiaofeng: I have another question pertaining to the satellite exhibitions. With the inclusiveness of the laboratory in mind, the show should not have any rigid boundaries. Satellite exhibitions can also be considered as urban phenomena that reflect the region’s modernization. Do you think satellite shows will be in conflict with the overriding concept of the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial? Can we even view the satellite show as an organic part of the laboratory?
Hou Hanru: That is what we want to achieve. The origin of satellite exhibitions hinges on the relationship between existing institutions and the organizers of temporary exhibitions. In essence, it has to do with a power structure. It is not necessary to consider such an issue. I do not believe art embodies any forms of power. What we are investigating here are ways to transcend existing institutional boundaries by proposing different artistic experiments. This is done in hope of providing a just space for discussion on the very value of art itself. I trust the boundaries of this Triennial will be left flexible and the investigation of sustainability will be taking place in the long term.The challenges we will be facing will be organizational issues. What we can achieve will depend largely on the responses from the audiences and the extent to which we can help each other. We strive to achieve what we are capable of. If we are met with positive feedback, this will be beneficial to our overall project. Multifaceted partnerships will be the most ideal scenario.
Sun Xiaofeng: You mentioned that there has been a lot of unpredictability emerging from your own work. Therefore, unexpectedness is always inherent to curating. I feel this Triennial is full of suspense, which may be its biggest draw. Another point I would like to make is that for artists who immerse themselves in Guangzhou need to respect the intrinsic aspects of Guangzhou. Moreover, each artist’s work needs to be in one way or another sympathetic towards this region.
Hou Hanru: Judging from the current changes of the social structure, I believe we need to encourage different forms of “self-organization.” Like cells that are constantly regenerating during a life cycle, we are living in an increasingly regimented society dictated by economic means that are commanding greater control of our existence. We are trying our utmost to resist such a predicament. Art needs its own freedom, as our society needs to provide more openings for different value systems. Hence, the room for “self-organization” must be left to the individual.
What we have in mind is to propose a guiding principle for self-organization. In looking at the PRD from a cultural perspective, its industrialization is a good example of the process of self- organization. The industrialization of today’s PRD has gradually entered into a more systematic phase, yet its social structure remains rather open and flexible. The PRD's cultural situation is quite paradoxical. For such a financially well off region, it does not have a comprehensive policy for culture. Apart from a few museums, the region does little to provide infrastructural support for arts and culture. Truly experimental art is still under-represented. Therefore, local artists have to come up with many “self-organization” strategies for survival. It is necessary to facilitate their practices by providing an open platform for networking and communication. The introduction of international artists here may provoke an insightful understanding of the complexity of the PRD. Such an initiative should not be carried out in a hasty manner.
Sun Xiaofeng: The laboratory is conceived with an open mind. Its experimental quality is something the museum can learn from. The fact that we are following a trend can be healthy.
Hou Hanru: I hope so. But its results do not have to comply with a “trend.”The lab is designed to give ourselves more autonomy. It is crucial not to simulate something that is superficial, but the importance lies with knowing the value. Everyone must make his/her own value judgment and respect individual ways of doing things.
Sun Xiaofeng: It appears that many contemporary art exhibitions are becoming alike, and, given the limited resources for exhibition-making in China, it seems that such resources are channeled only towards selected individuals, thus causing a lot of waste. For D-lab, the plan is to investigate different processes within an exhibition, and, in particular, to encourage and foster a new generation of artists. This mission is extremely worthwhile.
Hou Hanru: We cannot say this because we are no better than anyone else. This is part and parcel of a process, for we cannot distribute resources to everybody evenly. Since the Guangzhou Triennial is not a one-time event, we need to have a longer-term perspective, in the hope of creating a new situation.
Sun Xiaofeng: This is a new way of thinking. It is not something one can achieve in a short time, but something that requires many sustainable efforts.
Hou Hanru: In this process, it is crucial not to copy others. In fact, we are seeking differences. The more different viewpoints we are able to stimulate, the richer the whole event will become.
Sun Xiaofeng: You mentioned previously that the Guangzhou Triennial would not be able to provide comprehensive viewpoints that are in full compliance with the notion of “self organization.” To take this project as an example, whether it is the process of selecting artists to participate in the Guangzhou Triennial or other aspects of decision making, can I say that they are conducted with the notion of “self organization” in mind?
Hou Hanru: We are all trying to come to terms with it. We have done something similar before. Take the 2002 Gwangju Biennale, where I also had a similar agenda. In light of various factors and conditions, I assembled a self-organized entity in a rather symbolic manner. The participants formed a network by themselves. After two years, I feel that this was a meaningful endeavour; the participants meet on a regular basis in many places across Asia. Every five to six months, I have
Wang Huangsheng, director of the Guangdong Museum of Art, with Hans Ulrich Obrist. been told, they went to Korea, Hong Kong, and Indonesia to participate in different forums. This is a form of exchange for “self organization.”But systematic discussions are still lacking, and this is the reason why I want to develop this idea further in the Pearl River Delta.
Sun Xiaofeng: I want to return to the issue of generosity as raised in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interview. Artists should use the region as the starting point of their imagination; they should also contribute. Their contribution may not last just one or two years, but for a longer time. This will be significant.
Hou Hanru: In our curation, we need to design a different platform for artists from a different perspective. We are delivering a service. “Generosity” is not a simple service; it is communication in culture and knowledge. You need to speak out, to let others respond and interact. This is the role of an art institution. Its objective is not power, but to provide space and conditions for different ways of thinking.
Sun Xiaofeng: What do you think of the Guangdong Museum of Art?
Hou Hanru: There are very few institutions in China like the Guangdong Museum of Art. The Guangdong Museum of Art did not start out with high expectations. In comparison to the Beijing Museum of Art or the Shanghai Art Museum, the Guangdong Museum of Art has a newer collection. During the past few years, we have witnessed a genuine openness on the part of the director, Wang Huangsheng. Every show carries its own voice.
Sun Xiaofeng: Actually, in the Guangdong Museum of Art, we have had a lot of discussion on how to work, how to cooperate with each other and exchange ideas with artists, and how to proceed with follow-up work, which we believe is very important.
Hou Hanru: Yes. Though we have done something similar before, this time we are doing it under a new context and on a different scale. I am confident that Wang and his team will be able to meet such a challenge.
Over the past ten years, Chinese contem- porary art has been defined mostly by foreign curators, critics, galleries, and museums. After the appearance of Chinese artists on the international scene, Western art museums established close cooperation with Chinese artists by curating Chinese contemporary art exhibitions, building collections, and promoting Chinese identity. Hence, throughout all these years Chinese contemporary art lived outside its own country. According to statistics, over the past ten years, approximately ninety percent of Chinese contemporary artwork went into the hands of Western collectors, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Zheng Shengtian. museums, and other institutions. The cause of this situation was to be found within Chinese art museums and their policies. From the outset, Chinese contemporary art was not officially accepted, and it existed underground for a long time, the result being that the museums themselves did little to bring the work of these artists forward or to further the collecting of Chinese contemporary art. Unfortunately, until now the majority of the museums across China collected only traditional forms of art: painting, prints, calligraphy and sculpture.
The situation began to change with the Chinese program towards modernization and China’s position within a global context. The dialogue with the rest of the world evolved not just as an economic issue, but equally as a cultural one, and the engagement of contemporary art became part of it. Therefore, during the last few years, we have witnessed China building of its own pavilion at the Venice Biennale and the Alors, La Chine? exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, presenting the Year of China in France. These and many more events made the emergent Chinese contemporary art a pioneer of the new culture of China and its presentation to the rest of the world. But what is going on in the mainland?
The art museum as institution is a creation of Western culture. The first knowledge of museums, including the art museum as an institution attending to the historical material of China, arrived in China relatively late in the nineteenth century. In 1886, the Qing dynasty sent its officials to visit European countries. Within the reports of these officials we find that their visits encompassed different kinds of museums throughout Europe, including art museums. (In their writings, they used the term huage,“painting pavilion,”for an art museum. The term used nowadays for an art museum is meishuguan.The etymology of this term is found in the Japanese language, and, according to many Chinese critics, it does not propose a complete meaning for the word “art museum.”The term meishuguan is frequently misinterpreted as referring to an exhibition space, one which does not possess the functions of a museum, aside from the organization of exhibitions. Today some critics suggest changing the name meishuguan to yishu bowuguan,which would be
the appropriate translation of “art museum” in Chinese in order to clarify the function of art museums within society.)
During the 1990s, art museums in mainland China came to be the new cultural icons of cities. The government funded the He Xiangning Art Museum, Guangdong Art Museum, Guangzhou Art Museum, and others, bringing the cultural community to the fore by gathering together leading Chinese curators and art critics. At the end of the 1990s appeared the new phenomenon of the private art museum; examples include the Chengdu Modern Art Museum, Shang He Art Museum (Upriver Gallery), Dong Yu Art Museum, and Nanjing Hongse Jingdian Art Museum. For the most part, these private institutions have held to one form of management—the investors were,for the most part, real estate companies (ninety-five percent), who used investment in art as a good advertising policy for their companies and for whom the collection of artwork was a primary goal. Most of these private art museums lacked a clear mission, whether it was in the field of academic and research work, long-term collection policies, educational programs, their own publications, stable fiscal policies, or professional museum personnel, and they concentrated mainly on mounting exhibitions. Due to budget restraints and non-standardized management practices, most of these institutions found it almost impossible to make any long-term goals and enhance the status of the museum as a cultural gatekeeper. They were short-lived enterprises.
Government-funded public museums, without the benefit of the specialized areas of expertise that should be their concern, worked instead in a more general way in the presentation of traditional, modern, and contemporary art. Aside from the duration of the biennials, triennials, and art festivals, one was not able to observe a very strong effort toward the promotion of contemporary art.
This situation forced Chinese mainland artists to be more active in the international sphere than in a local context. This created an embarrassing situation for Chinese museums, art critics, and curators, who found themselves in the midst of artists and the requests of foreign interests, but without a clear stance in the process of globalization and Chinese contemporary art.
Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Zheng Shengtian.
Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Zheng Shengtian.
: The Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, as the name says itself, is situated in the North end of Shanghai, in the Hongkou District along Duolun Road. Narrow and short, Duolun Road in the 1920s and 1930s was a major cultural center and the heart of modern literature in China. Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, and the “left-wing authors,”the leading intellectuals of that time, were the ones who made this street so famous. Until a few years ago, Duolun Road was nothing more than one of the tourist spots for local and foreign crowds refreshing their memory of important names in Chinese culture. The sole building at the end of the road, built about 1988 and intended to become a vegetable market, was not in the spirit of this street’s early twentieth-century history and architecture. The Hongkou government decided to renovate the building into a space where contemporary culture could be well presented, and so, in 2003, the vegetable market building became the first government-funded museum of modern art in China. The museum is housed in a seven-story building, about 5000 square meters in all, and the exhibition gallery covers approximately 2000 square meters.
The museum’s first exhibition, Open Sky, was held on December 28, 2003. The museum’s mission is to create a platform that embraces originality, academicism, and internationalism. Unlike most museums, the Shanghai Duolun Musem of Modern Art has curatorial, educational, research, and collection departments. But a common problem that the Chinese museum deals with is that of the budget. The annual budget given to this museum is 1,500,000 RMB, which encompasses acquisitions for the collection, salaries, and all exhibition and special projects costs. Obviously this amount is hardly enough to cover even the salaries, so the museum sought to try to raise funds and find both sponsors and supporters for different exhibitions and projects. For example, the Chinese Contemporary Art Archive Project (the first of its kind in mainland China) and the foreign artists residency program will begin in March 2005 with the support of the Zengdai Investment Group.
, , The Shanghai Duolun MoMA is the first museum in China to acquire for its collection Chinese and foreign contemporary art in diverse media including video, installation, and photography. A problem that appeared in this pioneering effort to collect different artistic forms of contemporary practice has been a lack of knowledge in the restoration of pieces such as installation or multimedia works, so the museum is seeking cooperation with foreign museums for the training of new staff for the Collection Department. The limited budget has made a representative collection near impossible, yet thanks to the support of the artistic community, many artists have donated works to the museum. The museum’s collection now holds over thirty works from China and abroad. Besides the obstacle of fiscal constraint in the development of a Chinese contemporary art collection, the museum faces the additional problem that most important works, especially representative works from 10 to 15 years ago, are in the hands of Western museums and private collectors. While these works for the most part originally were sold at a very low cost, the Chinese contemporary art price index has risen rapidly in the last few years. Chinese contemporary artworks that have left, and that still leave China, will sooner or later affect the problem of what future generations might see, or not see, in their art museums as the cultural heritage of this period.
As the central institution dealing with contemporary culture, the museum faces the primary task, aside from mounting exhibitions, of attempting to bring the local community and contemporary culture together, through such means as experimental music concerts and film projections, in order to erase the exclusivity of the cultural past.
The museum’s curatorial team creates three to four exhibitions and presents about fifteen exhibi- tions in a year. Although this sounds like quite a lot, Chinese museums have a tradition of making exhibitions of short duration. One reason is that most of the museums unfortunately must still ask the artists to pay rent to exhibit, and the majority of artists do not have sufficient funds to support an exhibition that would span a one- or two-month time period. This kind of policy brings forth the quality of the exhibitions as a separate issue, and an understanding of what the role of a non-profit institution such as an art museum should play. Shanghai Duolun MoMA is one of the first ICOM members that is an art museum (the majority of Chinese art museums have not sought membership for some time due to the substantial profit from the rental of gallery space), an initiative that allows the raising of funds for exhibition and performance months in advance.
The educational program in the museum includes lectures, symposia, and workshops. As the Chinese public in general still finds contemporary art alien and unfamiliar, the educational program is one of the museum’s most important endeavours. The lectures and symposia are intended for a more or less professional audience; they are meant to be forums where people from the art world may exchange their ideas. The workshop is meant to be more of a playground for a wider audience that enriches their approach to contemporary art. The museum’s workshop program MIND LAB, usually presented in both Chinese and English, accompanies all exhibitions, thereby giving the audience a chance to participate in the creation of artwork by working together with the artists, and through the artist talks, toward a better understanding of the artworks in the exhibition. All of this is very new to the Chinese public but has thus far been a success. In the future, with links to the museum’s educational programs, more detailed initiatives for children, teenagers, and families will begin in order to bring contemporary art to the Chinese public and to the school’s curriculum. Through this program, the museum’s main goal is to heighten public appreciation for contemporary art and to foster younger generations, who, it is hoped, will be future supporters of the museum as well as future collectors.
Shen Shaomin, Unknown Creature No. 10, 2003, at Open Sky exhibition. Courtesy Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art.
What the museum is now doing is a lot of basic groundwork that should have been done many years earlier. That is the sacrifice of being the first. Yet according to the specific Chinese cultural climate, perhaps now is the right time for such progressive changes in the cultural industry. These changes cannot be effected by one sole institution but may be effected by the whole institutional system in concert.
Shanghai, with its own special historical background, will attract more and more investment in building its new cultural character. This includes the arrival of foreign art museums that inevitably will change the Chinese art scene and raise the question of Chinese art museums and their status in the sphere of art. This important question will confront the Chinese art museum with the problem of whether it has or has not succeeded in fulfilling its mission as a cultural gatekeeper over the last decade or not.
Shen Qibin, Executive Director of the Shanghai Duolun MoMA, once said: “We are not heroes, but we are the path breakers. We are willing to sacrifice ourselves for making the path. Where we are coming from is not important. The really important thing is where are we going”.He also wrote: “What we need to do, what we are going to be, wait and see....”In these few sentences is expressed the struggle that lies between the dream and the reality in the making of the first professional museum of modern art in China. It is the beginning of what will provide equal and fair communi- cation with the rest of the world without being identified as the “Other.”
The metropolis of Shanghai finally has a modern art museum. The museum’s mandate serves to enhance the relationship between the public and visual art, bringing all forms of art before the viewer and all problems political and social through the same artwork, establishing new standards of the museum as an institution within Chinese society.This long-term goal has, of course, just begun with the museum recently opening, but each step brings us closer to our goal, and this is one of the reasons why the museum's work is as much that of a path breaker as that of a new cultural gatekeeper.
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Poster for the Cruel/Loving Bodies exhibition, June 2004, next to the front entrance of the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Neil Conroy.
The Cruel/Loving Bodies project grew out of an artists’ panel proposed for an international conference on “A Century of Chinese Feminist Thought” at Fudan University in Shanghai. The organizers of the event originally planned to hold it in 2003 as a centennial commemoration of The Women’s Bell,a tract on women’s rights first published in Shanghai in 1903. The outbreak of SARS in China caused the conference to be postponed for a year. This delay—brought about by a contagion that leaped borders—forced our exhibition project to mature and reminded us of the need for scholarly and artistic endeavours that cross boundaries with just as much alacrity. Disease and violence, as well as healing and hope, flout national limits as readily as they breach the porous layer of skin imagined to contain a singular self. Our bodies, when put on the sensuously laden line of experience, continue to beg the question of how love might transfigure cruelty.
As the instigating organizer of Cruel/Loving Bodies,I envisioned several goals for the project.1 I wanted to bring together a group of artists whose work explored, in various embodied ways, an intersection of Chinese and gendered identity. This framework disavowed any particular claims of what a man or woman is or should be, or of what it means to be Chinese. It aimed to elicit a dia- logue among artists dealing with these questions from different geographical positions: in the case of our exhibition, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Great Britain.2 This group of eight artists included He Chengyao, Anthony Leung Po Shan, susan pui san lok, Mayling To, and the two artis- tic teams of Bai Chongmin & Wu Weihe and Neil Conroy & Lesley Sanderson. Their work repre- sented a variety of media, including sculpture, photography, video, and performance. By staging an art exhibition linked to a conference on feminist thought, we also wanted to open up a dialogue among scholars of gender in China and Chinese artists working in the mainland and in the diaspora.
The main goal of the exhibition could be restated, then, as an exploration of boundary limits—of gender, Chinese identity, and different artistic media. Through this transnational effort to destabilize what are often deemed naturalized categories, we wanted to counteract the ghettoizing effect of survey shows that, whether explicitly or inadvertently, get labeled as “women’s art” or “Chinese art,”or the doubly restricted category of “Chinese women’s art.”At a time when contemporary Chinese art as defined by the international art market consisted of mostly male, mainland artists, Cruel/Loving Bodies adopted the covert strategy of including mostly female artists. However, while I aimed to give them greater exposure, there are two reasons I did not publicize the exhibition as one specifically of women artists. First, two male artists, Bai Chongmin and Neil Conroy, participated in the exhibit, proving that concerns with gender and feminism are not exclusive to women. Second, the constellation of formal, conceptual, and social issues opened up by the works in the show proves Rosalind Krauss's point that “art made by women needs no special pleading.”3
In her essay on surrealist photographers Claude Cahun and Dora Maar, Krauss makes a concluding remark in which she formulates a constellation of overlapping analytic terms—formless, declassing, alteration, blurring:
The categorical blurring initiated by the continual alteration of identity ...is precisely what Bataille means by formless.It is not just some kind of haze or vagueness in the field of definition, but the impossibility of definition itself due to a strategy of slippage within the very logic of categories, a logic that works according to self-identity—male, say, or female—stabilized by the opposition between self and other: male versus female, hard versus soft, inside versus outside, life versus death, vertical versus horizontal.4
In hindsight, Krauss’s conceptual thesis seems particularly compelling in relation to the Cruel/Loving Bodies project. She argues for an art in which the gender positions of artist, subject, and audience remain fluid and multiply occupied: a “field of the Imaginary that allows for its positions to be occupied by more than one gender at once.”5 This way of seeing disrupts any fixed notion of the male gaze, in which the eyes of a default male viewer fall upon a represented female body with the simple effect of fantasy fulfillment, manipulation, and control. While this type of gaze is all too common, if it becomes the only way of understanding artistic representations of the female body, we are left with an impoverished vision, which ultimately capitulates to the patriarchal system that such outraged charges of exploitation intend to dismantle. This concept of blurring seems important, however, for opening up not only the field of art criticism concerned with gender, but also the field of art criticism that addresses the always-related “other Other”defined by racial, ethnic, or cultural difference. Blurring,such that race and gender can be seen not as biological essence, but as interactive sociocultural constructs and modes of performance. This is not to suggest some abstract field of play, but one informed by the quite real social consequences of how race and gender get mapped onto bodies.
At the heart of blurring in the context of our exhibition was a desire to challenge rigid determinants of authentic Chineseness.6 In the “culture game” put into play by the relatively recent “discovery” of contemporary Chinese art by Western art museum, gallery, and market professionals, a binary of difference has emerged. Olu Oguibe coined the term “culture game” to describe the situation of contemporary African artists who participate in the global art arena: as non-Western artists, they often realize—through how Western culture brokers manage and promote them—that they are valued most for their difference, and in a way that perilously narrows what is recognized as African.7 In other words, cultural difference, visible and recognizable to Western viewers, determines both
the meaning and market value of their art, revealing a linkage to how the market attempts to fix cultural meaning and commodity values. As Western brokerage systems have demanded this difference, Chinese art critics have also attacked artists whom they see as pandering to the West by using identifiably Chinese referents in their work.8 Exemplary of this stance is Shanghai-based painter and critic Wang Nanming, who in a bold rhetorical performance at a 2002 British Museum conference, “Contemporary Chinese Arts in the International Arena,”declared:
I am opposed to standards placed upon Chinese contemporary art that are defined by the dominant ideology of the West, derived from a forced distinction between Eastern and Western art, as well as the class-like distinctions inherent therein....Chinese artists living abroad are a case in point. Their work conforms to the “Chinese characteristics” mandated by the West.9
The examples he gives of Chinese artists living abroad are all relatively recent and well-known émigrés, such as Gu Wenda, Huang Yongping, and Cai Guoqiang. However, by referring to what he views as Chinese art that has sold out to the West as “Chinatown culture,”he conflates different generations of Chinese immigrants, labeling them all traitors to (a singularly and nationally defined) Chinese culture and collapsing Chinatowns around the world into flat, ahistorical spaces of exploitation and kowtowing deference, which of course they are anything but. So to question held convictions around what constitutes authentic or inauthentic Chineseness is also to recognize the triangular, transnational relationship of signification always at play in the ongoing circulation of imagery between China, the West, and the Chinese diaspora, and in contending and nested markets based on difference that attempt to fix Chinese alterity in relation to the West.
The blur—a metaphoric smear of motion across evidentiary celluloid attempts to capture and contain—provides one way of breaching supposedly clear divisions: the slash between man/woman, authentic/fake, patriot/traitor, cruel/loving. This suggestion, however, does not intend to trivialize the disparate local conditions of Chinese-identified artists living and working in Beijing, Hong Kong, or London. Instead, the purpose has been to enter into conversation about these different contexts in order to understand and, one hopes, to alter the imprint of national political borders on artistic practices and interpretations, and, indeed, on the very social relations of the art worlds that enable these forms of cultural production. Wang Nanming might denounce Chinese artists in diaspora as cheapened by “Chinatown” culture, but Chinese British or Chinese American artists might respond that this claim is willfully misinformed and blind to the experience of minority artists living in the Western metropolis. And as cultural critic Rey Chow reminds us, artists working in territories like Taiwan or Hong Kong, caught between Eastern and Western geopolitical hegemons, might draw our attention to the powerful elision of their cultural position that results from the mirror idealization of China and the West in each other’s eyes. She signals the erasure of those who do not align themselves with either power through reference to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong:
For me, as for many who reside permanently in Hong Kong, the espousal of a nationalist idealism derived from the reinstatement of mainland Chinese sovereignty is impossible; the idea that China, simply because it is a communist, “third world” nation, should be exempt from the charges of colonial- ism, imperialism, and racism is impossible. My preoccupation with Hong Kong has to do with Hong Kong as what has been continually left out of “proper” discourses of power—“Britain,”“China,”or “postcolonial studies”—rather than with any simple desire to affirm Hong Kong’s “identity” as such.10
I wrote in the introduction to the Cruel/Loving Bodies exhibition catalogue that, just as contempo- rary art and feminism are fields that have evolved through international exchange, so too have their cultural productions been deeply influenced by local conditions. This statement further implied the question of how to theorize a blurring of the line between what is often presented as the either/or proposition of global/local. Beyond claiming contemporary art and feminism as con- stitutively transcultural fields, and thereby debunking notions of first- and third-world hierarchies that persist within them, Cruel/Loving Bodies hoped to foster conditions for an examination of how those of us working within these fields can be cruel in our attempts at loving: these, the extremes of our fumbling and mixed emotions in the quest for mutual visibility. I concluded my introduction by stating:
The collective work of these practitioners crossing borders represents social and historical cruelty inflicted upon the body—in the form of physical violence or social regimes of surveillance—but also counters cruelty with a simultaneous focus on the body as a sensual site of love and subversive possibility. They mix cruelty with cuteness, violence with humor, intrusion with intimacy, and suppressed histories with metaphors of healing.
The intent of this essay is not to simply rehearse the project’s theoretical underpinnings and good intentions, but to provide something more akin to an ethnographic account of how the exhibition transpired on the ground—a discussion of the challenges, tensions, and responses that arose in presenting the exhibition at venues in Shanghai and Beijing. I embarked upon the project as a graduate student in cultural anthropology who had done field research on contemporary Chinese art. I then proposed a conference panel and ended up as a culture broker myself, hesitantly asserting the identity of curator as an institutional necessity. After applying for and receiving funds to organize an exhibition linked to our panel—what gradually became the Cruel/Loving Bodies project—I still maintained the aim of developing the exhibition as an ongoing conversation rather than a group of individuals assembled by an authoritative curator. In a 2002 proposal, I wrote, “The exhibit will be as much about our process, to be documented by the coordinator, as it is about works of art as finished pieces.”In the two-plus years it took to organize and realize the exhibition, multiple compromises and conflicts not only forced a realization of the rewards but also posed incredible challenges to this type of collaborative process. With this essay, I attempt to make good on my promissory note to the artists. I offer a document of our exhilarating, exhaust- ing, and sometimes halting conversation. Folded within is an account of our encounters with two relatively new exhibition sites, the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art and 798 Space in Beijing, both exemplary in the development of art exhibition trends in China.
I first conceived of our exhibition as an intervention in the male and mainland dominated world of “avant-garde” Chinese art, a guerilla effort inspired by the masked antics of the Guerrilla Girls from New York. And indeed, we proceeded with a total budget of U.S. $7,000, an amount that threatened marginality. While we were extremely grateful for grants received from the Asian Cultural Council and the Association of Asian Studies, we stretched these funds precariously thin for an exhibition that brought together nine participants (including myself) based in four different regions of the world. We conducted all of our pre-exhibition communication and planning by email and occasional phone call, often with me or Hong Kong-based artist Leung Po Shan in the middle translating between Chinese and English. Several but not all of the artists managed to secure individual funds to travel to the exhibition sites. Those living in China, who greatly assisted with preliminary practicalities, and those eventually present to help install the exhibition in both cities, bore the greater burden of labour toward our putatively collective goal. He Chengyao negotiated for all of the final venues. Bai Chongmin and Wu Weihe designed and printed the catalogue.
The exhibition as originally planned for the summer of 2003 was scheduled to appear in three sites: the X-ray Art Center in Beijing, the Pottery Workshop in Shanghai, and Para/Site Art Space
in Hong Kong. In the fall and winter of 2002-03, Leung Po Shan and He Chengyao made separate trips to Shanghai to scout out an exhibition space in the city where the conference could take place. Their reports expressed a significant difference in attitude toward exhibition venues. Leung Po Shan preferred the intimate gallery space of the Pottery Workshop, recently established on Shanghai’s Taikang Road by one of her former teachers from Hong Kong. He Chengyao regarded this space as too small and feared it would cramp some of the larger pieces in the exhibition. She felt that one of the larger, converted warehouses in the developing community of art galleries and studios in Shanghai’s Moganshan Lu compound would be more appropriate. This divergence of opinion in respect to appropriate scale reflected individual but perhaps also regional aesthetics. Leung Po Shan works in the densely urban and vertical city of Hong Kong, where real estate costs limit the size of most exhibition venues. As a performance artist, she often explores the intimate relationship between human body and restricted architectural space—spaces sometimes as small as the interior of a refrigerator.11 He Chengyao works in Beijing, where a historical and political emphasis on monumentality pervades everyday life. This emphasis on projects worthy in size of capital status has influenced everything from urban planning for the 2008 Olympics to the size of large group art shows to a growing partiality for enormous warehouse-style galleries. In the end, we reached a compromise by negotiating with the Pottery Workshop to hold the exhibition both there and in the larger adjacent space of the Taikang Art Museum.
The rise and spread of SARS, however, forced a decision in the spring of 2003 to put everything on hold, especially after the organizers of the conference at Fudan University chose to postpone their event until June of the following year. When we began to plan for the summer of 2004, it became clear that none of our original venues could accommodate the postponed exhibit. In the aftermath of the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong, Para/Site no longer had available the funds originally com- mitted to supporting our project there. A staff turnover at the X-ray Art Center, one of several new exhibition spaces established and managed by real estate developers in Beijing, resulted in our exhibition being dropped from their schedule.12 Finally, a Hong Kong film company rented the additional space at the Taikang Art Museum that we had negotiated through the Pottery Workshop. With the exception of Para/Site—a non-profit art space founded in 1996, supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and run by independent artists—this situation reflects the highly flexible nature of art venues in the mainland. A growing number of new spaces have opened (and in some cases closed) in the last few years, meaning art directors often plan exhibits only months or sometimes even weeks in advance. With little to no public or non-profit foundation money available for these types of ventures in China, the various business strategies employed for managing them also frequently entail a certain amount of unpredictability. For our project, this situation resulted in us having to start over again.
I followed several leads for venues in Shanghai and Beijing that ended in frustration. For example, one new “warehouse” space expressed interest in the project but then expected that the curator (especially one based in the United States) could cover a proposed budget that exceeded our limited funds several times over. The financial figures the manager presented assumed we would pay for the gas, water, electricity, and gallery staff wages during the run of our show. Finally, through the persistent efforts of He Chengyao, who traveled from Beijing to Shanghai once again on our behalf, we managed in the spring of 2004 to secure space for the rapidly approaching summer months in two new venues, which had not even existed when we first began planning this exhibition in 2002. Cruel/Loving Bodies eventually showed at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art from June 15 to 25 and at the 798 Space in Beijing from July 23 to 29. These short exhibition runs indicate
Bai Chongmin & Wu Weihe, National Sacrifice: Exemplary Women, 2001, terracotta sculptures. Left: Detail of installation en masse at Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Neil Conroy. Right: Installation, crated and uncrated, at 798 Space in Beijing. Photo: Leung Po Shan. how we were fit into the schedules of these spaces at the last minute, but they also illustrate a trend in China of shows that often last only a few days, or a week or two at most. I speculate that this rapid turnover is a partial carryover from the recent past, when artists and curators strategized about how to elude official attention and possible censorship. However, as will become evident in the discussion below of our experience at the 798 Space, today it is often just as much the result of increased privatization within venues used for mixed profit and non-profit purposes.
The artists Lesley Sanderson and Neil Conroy, who work out of Sheffield, England, flew into Shanghai on June 11, 2004. I arrived from the United States later that same day. He Chengyao arrived from Beijing and Leung Po Shan from Hong Kong within the next two days. For several of the artists, this was their first time to meet in person. Neither Mayling To nor susan pui san lok could secure travel funds to join us. They mailed DVDs of their video pieces in advance to the Duolun staff. Bai Chongmin and Wu Weihe remained in Beijing because Wu was in the last month of a difficult pregnancy and complications had led to her early hospitalization. Of course, this last development was also something none of us had anticipated when initiating the project two years earlier. Those of us who had gathered in Shanghai worked with the Duolun Museum staff during three and a half days of intense activity and negotiation to install the exhibit.
The Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art opened its doors at the end of 2003. Its inaugural exhibit, Open Sky,featured thirty-six Chinese artists working in contemporary media and ran from December 28, 2003, to February 27, 2004. Although the museum has been a presence in the Shanghai art scene for less than a year, its staff has managed to provide a full and varied schedule of contemporary art exhibits and programs, featuring work by Chinese and foreign artists, to the city’s general public. While the Shanghai Art Museum in its recently renovated and expanded location on Nanjing Road frequently features contemporary art exhibits, most notably the Shanghai Biennale, the Duolun Museum of Modern Art is the first government-supported institu- tion in China solely devoted to promoting and exhibiting modern and contemporary art. As its director’s mission statement in the Open Sky catalogue states, Duolun “is a multi-functional and non-profit institution of culture and art, providing services to the development of the Chinese contemporary art and a platform for the international exchange of contemporary art.”
The museum is located in Hongkou District, north of the Bund and central to Shanghai’s main thoroughfare of Nanjing Street. As an undertaking supported by the Hongkou District Cultural Bureau, the museum stands as one point of attraction in a larger urban planning project, the Duolun Culture Street (wenhua jie). Duolun Road, previously called Doule’an Road, provided a
place of refuge for important cultural activity in the 1920s and 1930s, when Nationalist political crackdowns drove many leftist writers and activists into a semi-underground existence. Situated at that time between the city’s Chinese area and a cross-boundary road-building area, this small lane with mixed Chinese and colonial-style buildings represented something of a no-man’s land, safely removed from the eye of authorities. The fledgling Chinese Communist Party established its Chinese Arts University in a three-story building on the road, and it was here that on March 2, 1930, the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers held its inaugural meeting.13 Famous writers and cultural icons such as Lu Xun, Mao Dun, and Guo Moruo lived in nearby lodgings, and meetings of the League regularly drew other well-known literary figures, including Ding Ling, Ye Shengtao, and Feng Xuefeng. In 1999 the district municipal government announced their intent to establish a cultural area in this historic location. The resulting effort to gussy the street up with smooth pavement tiles laid in fan patterns and bronze statues of past literary luminaries resembles other recent urban makeovers and has attracted the predictable abundance of souvenir and “antique” shops, cafés, and bars. Still, Chinese tour groups and local residents alike regularly stroll down this pleasant, tree-lined pedestrian street where at its northern end the modernist architecture of the Duolun Museum of Modern Art presents a distinctive contrast to neighboring buildings that date back to the early twentieth century. Behind a bold grey slate facade and an imposing geometric black-and-red entryway, the museum houses seven floors of exhibition space, a bookstore special- izing in Chinese and foreign-language contemporary art publications, and administrative offices.
Upon our arrival we met with several museum administrators but found ourselves working most closely with Biljana Ciric, the staff member from the Academic Department assigned to oversee installation and publicity of our exhibit. Yugoslavian by birth, Ciric holds a master’s degree in Chinese art from Shanghai’s East China Normal University and regularly publishes art criticism in Chinese-language magazines and journals. We soon learned from her that our exhibition, originally scheduled for the museum’s high-ceilinged exhibition space on the first and second floors, had been moved to floors five, six, and seven. A two-man exhibition called Western Sunlight (Xibu yangguang), which consisted of painting and photography in the socialist representational tradition of romancing China's interior hinterlands and Tibet, had gained access through official channels to the museum's prime ground-floor space.
This rearrangement created several logistical difficulties for us, the most strenuous being the challenge of getting Bai & Wu’s forty terracotta sculptures up to the museum’s top two floors. The truck transporting the sculptures from Beijing arrived two days late and then, due to restrictions against large vehicles entering the city during high traffic hours, pulled up to the museum on the night before the exhibition opening. Together with museum workers who stayed late, we slowly moved the heavy crated sculptures upstairs in the Duolun’s single passenger-size elevator. We placed thirty-four of Bai & Wu’s National Sacrifice: Exemplary Women figures in a tightly grouped phalanx on the sixth floor. A sloping glass ceiling supported by bright red steel girders descends on a diagonal from the building’s roof to the foot of this floor, providing a dramatic backdrop for the piece. Through this glass curtain one can view a Shanghai cityscape of older two-story buildings clustered along small lanes and punctuated by highrise buildings and construction cranes. National Sacrifice memorializes pre-modern women as recorded in the Lienü Zhuan biographical anthology of exemplary, martyred women.14 Its monochromatic pottery forms resemble an archeological display of unearthed lives. This historical tableau stood in contrast with the vast urban scene unfolding behind it. And yet the vertical repetition and regimentation of the forms also found an echo in the verticality of the city’s new skyline. We placed the remaining six
terracotta figures in a widely spaced pyramid formation in a room with three full walls of windows on the seventh floor. Here, five willowy figures and a heavy kneeling one stood solitary sentry, presenting a formal rhythm resonant with the anonymous skyscrapers rising in the distance.
A balcony overhang from the seventh floor that cuts into the open vaulted space created by the glass curtain forms a low ceiling for a large section of the sixth floor. With its gray walls and carpeting, this more subdued, cave-like space provided an atmospheric setting for works by He Chengyao and Conroy & Sanderson. Arriving on the sixth floor by elevator, the first image the audience faced when the doors slid open was a large-scale colour photograph of He Chengyao’s performance piece 99 Needles. Larger than life size, the artist’s nude head and torso fill the frame of the image. The tilt of her head follows a downward glance, refusing to meet the viewer’s eyes, suggesting either shame or defiance. Pierced by dozens of fine silver acupuncture needles, her flesh becomes a field against which the inserted needles create a pattern of multidirectional lines. As He Chengyao wrote in her essay for the catalogue, this piece directly relates to her personal history as the daughter of a woman who suffers from mental illness.15 Her mother, who not infrequently challenges the “sane” world through public shows of nudity, once endured amateur village attempts to cure her illness with acupuncture. The artist re-performed this cruel “cure” as a coming to terms with troubled memories of childhood humiliation regarding her mother’s behavior. Her exploration of biography at the level of body memory and questions about maternal psychology grow more surreal in the photographic image of her performance in Korea of Fish-Woman. She stands nude, hip-deep in the ocean. The white spume of a wave rushes toward the wet sand. She holds a fish whose belly has been slit open and resembles female genitalia in front of her own. Hovering between suggestions of oceanic birth and sexual tides, the image unsettles with its mythological blurring of human/animal.
Conroy & Sanderson’s light boxes hung on the other side of a partition separating their work from He Chengyao’s. Their colour-saturated photographic transparences backlit by flourescent tubes provided a punchy but also vaguely disturbing set of images featuring the artists themselves. Victor and Victoria, in title alone suggesting a drag performance of royal proportion, frames the torsos of Neil Conroy and Lesley Sanderson posed in front of their brick flat in Sheffield, England. They have “traded” facial features; band-aids with simple line drawings of the other’s eyes and lips on them have been stuck onto their faces. The possibility of seeing through another’s eyes or speaking through another’s voice is blocked by the very bandages that blind and mute. The two reappear in Stretched with multicoloured rubber bands joining their two heads together in Siamese twin fashion and smashing their features like putty. This theme of desire to control and/or become the other (be that White British male or Chinese British female) through mutual distortion and manipulation continues in Would you like to be, in which they pull and stretch each other’s eyelids against a theatrical backdrop of yellow silk.
Office spaces, each with a full glass wall facing the interior corridors, line the fifth floor. The Duolun staff cleared three of these rooms and one hallway for the continuation of Cruel/Loving Bodies.We blacked out the glass walls of two of these rooms to create large projection spaces for a documentary video of He Chengyao’s past performance pieces and for susan pui san lok’s sound and video installation Notes on Return.Directly opposite lok’s video, Leung Po Shan prepared the third room for Spiderwoman—Red Thread Variation, which she would perform on the night of the opening reception. She left the glass wall of this room uncovered so that the audience could view her performance from the corridor without interfering with her movements. Mayling To’s video,
Anthony Leung Po Shan, Spiderwoman—Red Thread Variation, 2004, performance. Left: Detail of performance installation at Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. Right: Artist performing at 798 Space in Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.
The Stranger, was projected at the end of a long darkened hallway, in a tight, claustrophobic space that heightened the psychological intensity of the narrative enacted within it.
Before turning to the activities of the opening night, I will relate the following brief but telling anecdote, which details an incident of failed sponsorship for our exhibition. I became aware of this episode of failure only through a stack of discarded invitations that I inadvertently happened upon late one evening in the business office. The museum staff had apparently tried to secure additional funds for us in the spring, to help offset expenses for the exhibition catalogue and poster. Unbeknownst to me, they entered into preliminary discussions with the transnational cosmetics company L’Oréal, presumably on the assumption that a company targeting female consumers would want to sponsor an exhibition of female artists. For unknown reasons (I don’t believe I was ever meant to find out about this unsuccessful attempt at sponsorship), L’Oréal eventually withdrew whatever support they initially promised, and several hundred invitations printed with their advertisement had to be thrown away. The juxtaposition of the group image of Cruel/Loving Bodies artworks on one side of the invitation, with the “tits and ass” marketing images (and of a white woman no less) on the other, provided a kind of dark humor in its oxymoronic inappropriateness. The cropped shots of glossy female body parts perpetrate a gorgeous violence of a commercial type, presenting a piecework body as an alluring, standardized commodity. This corporate tie-in gone awry, however, reveals the symptoms of an art system in flux. As museums in China become increasingly recognizable entities to Western art observers, they also become gradually more entangled in the neoliberal “free” art market trends that have characterized American and British art enterprises in the last two decades.16
In my own research I have tried to track how money shapes art-world interactions, but now I found myself caught in the thick of it. Attempting to remain transparent to the group about our finances (and the personal sacrifices various artists made to participate), I created tensions among some about how equitably our resources had been distributed. In the end, I had to make decisions about how to divide the budget, and certain expenses—such as the transport of larger pieces or the construction of certain elements such as the light boxes, which would be cheaper to make on-site than to ship from overseas—were higher for some artists than others. As we worked through these and other differences, I found myself frustrated by how money worries could
Left: Mayling To, Untitled, 2001, color photograph, 42 x 59 cm. Photo: James Stafford. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Zhao Bandi’s “The Panda Man Film Party” performance at Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art on the night of the Cruel/Loving Bodies opening. Photo: Neil Conroy. govern interactions intended to be about visual and cultural communication. In my reflections then and later about what a curator’s job is, it became clear that entering the culture game entails wrestling with these marketplace dynamics. Artists depend on selling art to continue making it. The more they show in museum and gallery settings, the more likely the value of their work will rise. When the Chinese artists hinted that they hoped I would be able to find potential buyers for the work in the exhibition, they unexpectedly positioned me into a kind of curatorial role I was not prepared for. By mentioning this I do not mean to make them sound crass, since the artists from outside China certainly hoped that this international exhibition on their resume would help reap future rewards gained by greater visibility. For my part, I had originally envisioned this project as a way of “giving back” to some of the artists who’d allowed me into their lives during my research, and now I found myself trying to refrain from feeling like they owed me. Again, Oguibe reminds one that culture is never an autonomous sphere:
Despite the myth of civility usually associated with the arena of culture, contemporary art is nevertheless a theater for an elaborate game of maneuvers in which institutions, patrons, brokers, and promoters peddle not only art but the careers, loyalties, and fortunes of artists also. Between visibility/success and obscurity/failure, artists in turn struggle to find their place while seeking to maintain a level of control over their practice.17
Strains over relative visibility within the museum continued as we clashed with Zhao Bandi, well known for pop art photographs of himself posing in various dramatic situations with his toy panda bear. He had orchestrated a spectacular fête for the same night as our Duolun opening. “The Panda Man Film Party,”on the museum’s fourth floor, would include a screening of a new film featuring Zhao and panda in a court case over copyright violation involving their photographs, a live performance with musical accompaniment, and several banquet tables of food and drink for the audience.18 He and his film crew, as they shot extra footage in the museum one night, required us to stop our installation efforts for several hours. For a dramatic entrance to his party, Zhao also wanted to be lowered down on a wire from the seventh floor, through a spiraling column of space that cuts through the museum’s interior. This stunt required a large pulley to be set up in the middle of our exhibition, which would block the stairway to the top gallery space and have Zhao Bandi and his panda descending through all three floors of our exhibition during the opening reception. In the end, after several edgy staff meetings over this conflict of interest and potential safety issues, Zhao decided against the idea only a few hours before our opening. In the end, his promotion of the artist as celebrity with a cute fetishized symbol of China (anthropomorphized in his live performance by beautiful, silent female models clad in diaphanous black and white bodysuits) provided a surprising contrast with the hard-hitting panda love/hate expressed in Mayling To’s video, The Stranger,which explores feelings of displacement within a duality of
Left and center: He Chengyao, Public Broadcast Exercises, 2004, performance at Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Neil Conroy. Right: He Chengyao, 99 Needles, 2004, interactive performance with audience at 798 Space in Beijing. Photo: Leung Po Shan.
Britishness and Chineseness. Her narrative film opens with Panda, played by an actor in a mangy, ill-fitting panda costume, searching through London charity stores for miniature panda dolls to purchase. When Panda returns home, we see staged photographs of toy panda families hanging on the wall, as well as shelves of obsessively collected plush pandas. Panda selects and caresses one of the tiny stuffed animal likenesses, but then tenderness turns violent, and Panda begins to tear the toy apart, raging and stomping until the room is filled with synthetic fur and stuffing.
In spite of rain on the night of June 15, large numbers of people began arriving at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. Fudan University sent two buses of sixty some participants in the Chinese feminist conference to view Cruel/Loving Bodies.The start time for Zhao Bandi’s event had been postponed almost an hour due to technical difficulties, and overflow crowds who gathered for his party also wandered through our exhibition. Museum staff estimated as many as 600 visitors to the galleries that evening. At 7:00 p.m. both He Chengyao and Leung Po Shan began their performance pieces. He Chengyao’s offstage preparations for her Public Broadcast Exercises (Guangbo ticao) included wrapping her nude body in duct tape with the sticky side facing out.19 At the appointed time, she stepped out from behind a curtain into a spotlighted area on the sixth floor. She stood motionless, staring straight ahead, as her presence suddenly drew a throng of spectators. She began marching and then moved into a set of calisthenics familiar to many in the audience as school or work-unit exercises once done in requisite unison to music and counts broadcast on a public address system. The tape tightly bound around her limbs and torso created a pattern of horizontal ligatures in contrast with her vertical figure and caused indecent bulges of flesh to press outward between these constricting lines. Each time one part of her body came in contact with another—hand to thigh, for example—the tape stuck and pulled apart only with great effort and a loud ripping sound. After she completed the set pattern of exercises, she resumed marching and the spotlight went out.
He Chengyao’s exercises strained metaphorically against the restrictions of the individual subjugated to the mass and against norms, increasingly commodified in the Chinese context, of the smoothly surfaced female beauty. The implied collectivity of her “public broadcast” exercise routine created a dialogue with the rows of National Sacrifice sculptures placed diagonally opposite her performance space, each with an obscuring, textured veil of clay covering its face. The bandaged look of her wrapped body also formed a direct relation with the mummified figures in Conroy & Sanderson’s triptych light box piece, Here We Are.The piece’s title announces a kind of existential arrival, but the two images on either side of the open sky at the center convey a sense of alienation, with its figures bold and comic, yet still bandaged and blind. In counterbalance to the lone figure standing boldly against the sky is an interior image of two heads bound together in monstrous duplicity, a
diorama of wanting to be so close to someone, to merge as it were, that the love becomes mutually, obsessively wounding. Displayed together with their other light boxes, the nubs of noses and hollows of eyes accentuated by the white bandages imply the irrepressible masquerade of racial and gender positions that the artists continually play with in their collaborative self-representations.
Meanwhile, on the fifth floor, Leung Po Shan had simultaneously begun her Spiderwoman perfor- mance. In preparation, she nailed two straight lines of red fishhooks into opposite walls of a room empty except for a single bare-bulb lamp in one corner and a television in another corner playing 20 a video of an earlier performance piece done in Hong Kong, Itchy Itchy. Carefully rolled balls of red elastic cord rested on the evenly spaced fishhooks. Leung wore a simple red cotton sleeveless qipao.Along the hem of the dress, she had sewn the same red fishhooks, and for the performance she hung a row of ceramic Chinese soupspoons from these hooks. Slowly and deliberately, with the spoons clattering as she moved, Leung used her mouth to pick up a ball of elastic cord. Attaching one end to the hook, she then began moving across the room, with a line of thread unwinding from inside her mouth. She wove her way back and forth across the room for almost two hours, looping the thread with her mouth over hooks on either side of the room and leaving behind a taut red web as a record of her zig-zag trajectory. This suturing—eliciting sensations of taste and tactility as the artist made purposeful, almost painful contact with different points in the room by practically having to kiss the fishhooks—evokes an attempt to make connections between different places, like an itinerary of flight lines between Hong Kong and Shanghai, or the daily ferry trips
Conroy/Sanderson, Here we are, 2003, three-piece series, photographic transparencies, 89 x 157 cm each. Courtesy of the artists. the artist herself takes between the small fishing village where she lives and the metropolis of Hong Kong. The ceramic spoons, symbols of home cooking and sustenance, weighted her dress down, clanking and sometimes falling off and breaking. Leung posted signs outside of her space indicating that the performance as a kind of meditative practice that required intense focus and should not be disrupted by flash photography. Many in the crowd packed into the hallway to watch through the glass window grumbled about this restriction, highlighting the difference between the intent of her performance and the media spectacle that performance art often becomes when presented predominantly for a barrage of documenting camera lenses. After she completed the performance, the web of red lines remained behind, along with her red dress, hung on the wall.
The linear map of Leung’s performance circuit resonated, in turn, with susan pui san lok’s Notes on Return video, showing in the room opposite. Filmed during a return trip from London to her family's native home of Hong Kong, the video is rhythmically constructed, tracking back and forth along horizontals and verticals of the cityscape, creating a sense of being in limbo, trapped on a bus late at night, before a mirrored-glass building façade, observing a life—the haunting visual flashes of an elderly woman’s body lying alone in a room—that both is and is not one’s own. The audio track echoes with a layered recitation, spoken in several differently accented voices, of a poem by Bei Dao, “Folding Procedure.”A stanza near the end, before the chant begins again, tells
of how geographically defined dreams enable yet also circumscribe, exceeding their beginnings, for a moment.
dreams of good fortune grow into trees towering skyward like ink seeping into the map
meanings return to where they began21
Cruel/Loving Bodies revisited embodied histories, personal and collective, to reassess totalizing visions of identity and of progress caught up in a forward-motion-only tilt. The exhibition’s participants did so by exploring the conflict of feeling that resides in the body and that refuses easy resolution.
Cruel/Loving Bodies in Shanghai received several forms of media attention. A Shanghai television station came to film on the night of the opening. With almost all of the artists involved in or assisting with the performance pieces, only Neil Conroy was available for interview and spent several minutes on camera discussing the importance of feminism in relation to the project. A review in the Oriental Morning Post focused on how the exhibition brought attention to women artists; the writer also touched upon the exhibit’s theme of bodies, emphasizing in particular the fraught relationship between images of the female body and an inevitable sexualizing gaze. An article in the Shanghai Youth News made several factual errors but declared the exhibition’s distinction as being the first allowing female performance artists to present their work in a state-run art museum. Then on July 3, several days after the show closed in Shanghai, a biting editorial indicted the exhibit. Authored by Lin Tugen and presented in the satirical format of a “judging panel,”the following critique appeared in Shanghai’s Xinmin Evening Post.
Bodily Performance Not Lovable in the Slightest—Cruel/Loving Bodies Performance Art Exhibition Lacks Art
Opinion Panel of Judges
Xiao Xiaolan, Printmaker, Shanghai Museum of Art Academic Department: Endless artistic visualizations can be born to represent the beauty of the female body and the sensitivity of women toward the body. But after seeing Cruel/Loving Bodies,I only feel that the artists simply exposed bodies not worth exposing. Nudes can be a kind of artistic language, but what does this type of nudity demonstrate? Does it have artistic worth? Does it deepen people's understanding of the body? The value of contemporary art lies in bringing forth questions and in new creations. This so- called “female art performance” creates nothing new, has no wisdom, and has no artistic visual effect.
Speaking of that woman who performed naked public broadcast exercises, several years ago she attended an exhibition of installation art by a German artist on the Great Wall. During the opening ceremony, she suddenly exposed herself by taking off her shirt.22 She stole the artist's thunder and ruined the exhibit. She has continued to thus expose herself ever since. But this has nothing to do with art; just think, it is like an insane person who suddenly strips naked and runs about at the grand opening of a department store to attract the gaze of the audience.
Li Xu, Art Critic: To disrobe is her right, but to say that it is art, I want to know what she is disrobing for: is it that to strip is the only way to express her point; is it the best choice? After viewing her work, I just don’t know. With regard to this, it is said that the performer has many high and lofty explanations, but I remember what the American female philosopher and aesthetician Susan Sontag once said: that good artwork “resists interpretation.”
I pay attention to art, but I can’t understand what this exhibit actually wants to express.
Wu Liang, Writer: When children play hide-and-go-seek, one child often hides so well that nobody can find him. After waiting for a long time and not getting caught by the others, this child can’t help but run out to take a look, only to find that everyone has already dispersed. All he can do is go home crying.
Lin Tugen Words of commendation upon issuing a prize:
Not long ago, a “performance art” exhibit called Cruel/Loving Bodies was held in Shanghai. This event, which claimed to explore the theme of women and the female body, exceeded all others in exposing itself: a woman wrapped in packing tape with her pubic hair exposed performed public broadcast exercises; 99 gold needles piercing a nude [jade] body turned it into a porcupine; a woman with red thread in her mouth ran crazily as if to compete with Spiderwoman…
Many of our readers who are arts professionals have sent in letters about this topic. The exhibit attempted to achieve for women an equal dialogue with men in the field of avant-garde art. What is pitiable is that taking off one’s clothes does not provide an escape from authoritative art discourse on male-female equality. For this “performance art,”we present the award of a “red hot chili pepper.”23
The Xinmin Evening Post and other print publications in Shanghai declined to publish our responses to this “judgment,”but editors at the arts websites of Ionly.com and Arts.tom.com gladly offered us an opportunity to answer back. Biljana Ciric of the Duolun, who first drew our attention to Lin Tugen’s article, quickly posted an essay entitled “Does Performance Art Have to be Lovable?” She enumerated several errors in Lin's account. His assumption that the exhibition contained only performance art hinted that he wrote from hearsay alone. She then took him to task for penning a sensationalist attack rather than a responsibly reported critique.24 Writing from the standpoint of an institution trying to provide increased viewing access to contemporary art to a general Chinese public, she saw Lin’s article as putting up a blockade to open public discussions about art, rather than building a bridge of communication between artists and their audience. He Chengyao wrote “Where’s the Mouse?” a humorous response whose title riffs on Deng Xiaoping’s famous quote advocating economic liberalization and diverse ways of getting rich: “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”She inserted parenthetic barbs into Lin’s original text and, as a Sichuan native unafraid of a little spice, thanked him for the chili pepper prize. Neil Conroy & Lesley Sanderson wrote a short reflection on Lin’s article that opened up his critique to broader issues raised by the audience of our panel at the Fudan conference: what are the risks of representing the female body and sexuality in ways that make it available for possible misappropriation, and what constitute feminist forms of representation? I quote them at some length here because I was not able translate their essay into Chinese in time for the Web publication:
Early feminists castigated the use of the naked female body as they felt that it could never be untangled from the eroticizing and possessing male gaze. But these early feminists, like our current “panel of judges,”failed to allow female artists to explore the complexities of what it is to be a female subject and to explore sexuality from a female position. The panel’s blinkered approach to Cruel/Loving Bodies and their obsession with the pieces of work that used the naked body allowed for a disregard of the context and dialogues within the exhibition, which might have enlightened their understanding of current debates surrounding the female body.
Finally, I posted the following reply from my perspective as curator:
Installation of Cruel/Loving Bodies, July 2004, at 798 Space in Beijing. Left: View from east entrance of gallery. Right: View from west entrance of gallery. Photo: Leung Po Shan.
’ Amid the plethora of factual errors and unsubstantiated claims made by Lin Tugen in his Xinmin Wanbao “review” of the Cruel/Loving Bodies exhibit, the most revealing is his use of one performance piece to attack an exhibit containing eighteen works by eight artists. Although it is not clear from Lin’s reporting that he even bothered to descend from his lofty judging stand to view the exhibit in question, his narrow obsession with the nude female body emerges in stark relief. With so many art- works in different media by artists from Asia and Europe to consider, his gaze still fixates upon the body of a single artist, whose name he doesn’t even deign to mention.
As the curator of Cruel/Loving Bodies,I welcome his act of critical self-exposure as an example of what the exhibit aims to challenge: the manipulative use of female bodies to represent one-dimensional ideals of beauty, purity, morality, and paradoxically enough, availability for the male imagination. Lin gives himself away when he refers to the female nude as a “jade body.”This stereotype is exactly what Cruel/Loving Bodies attempts to pierce. The artists’ various approaches to the exhibit theme depict the human body and particularly the gendered body as a complex site of conflicting emotions, memories, and identities. As Lin Tugen and his esteemed colleagues make painfully clear, the female body remains a persistent and marked ideological battleground in a way the male body rarely is.
It’s sad in this day and age, after so much important work by feminist artists and critics, that I still have to ask the following question: When men depict female nudes, how often are they accused of inappro- priately exposing women’s bodies in the name of art? The Guerrilla Girls asked and answered a similar question in a 1989 notice they posted in New York City public buses: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the modern art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.”I risk suggesting that Lin’s singular fixation upon the nude body as a point of criticism would likely fall away were the exhibit to feature the use of nudes by male artists. Female artists who claim control of their bodies do so as a refusal of traditional male control of women as symbolic material at their ready disposal. They demand the right to act as producers of symbols, rather than just remaining pliant symbols in someone else’s hands.
Cruel/Loving Bodies puts artists from different cultural and gender positions in conversation with each other about how bodies are intensely felt sites of social production. It also presents performance art in dialogue with other modes of artistic representation to explore the limits of what each media can express. Collectively their art represents mundane forms of cruelty inflicted upon the body, but also counters cruelty with a simultaneous focus on the body as a sensual site of love and subversive possibility.
The acerbic reaction of Lin Tugen, self-appointed awarder of erotically tinged prizes, suggests that feminist artists who take control of their own bodies still pose a threat to those accustomed to setting authoritative aesthetic standards for art and women. I urge readers of this exchange to view the exhibit and come to their own conclusion. Cruel/Loving Bodies will be exhibited at the 798 Space gallery in Beijing from July 23-29, 2004.25
The 798 Space is one of many new warehouse-style exhibition spaces in what was once an industrial section of Beijing. In the past few years, a fast-growing crop of stylish cafés, restaurants, and book and clothing boutiques situated in an electronic components factory compound has transformed the site into a cultural attraction. Originally designed in the 1950s with the assistance of East German engineers and architects, the complex is located to the northeast of Beijing. It originally went by the name of the Joint 718 Factory, following the Chinese convention of giving military factories numbered designations starting with seven. In the 1960s, authorities split up the large 718 complex into several more manageable units, including 798, 797, 706, 707, etc.26 The distinctive Bauhaus design of the electronics factory workshops features a sawtooth roof pattern, which creates vaulting curved ceilings inter-cut with long rows of north-facing skylight windows. As early as 2000, a few artists began moving into the compound, renting empty spaces as studios. Before long, artists and other hipster entrepreneurs transformed the area into a culture destination known as the Dashanzi Art District, subsequently causing rents to soar and attracting official debates about whether to preserve the area as a cosmopolitan development attractive to foreign visitors or to raze it and build financially lucrative residential and office towers.
Many of the galleries and businesses in the 798 district cultivate an aesthetic that capitalizes on post-industrial, socialist nostalgia. Modernist interior decor is paired with exposed cement and brick walls and fading (sometimes touched up) big character slogans from decades ago to create a “staged authenticity” explicitly designed for the consumer gaze. “Chairman Mao is the red sun in our hearts,”painted in red, floats on the ceiling above the heads of well-heeled patrons sipping cocktails or examining exhibitions of contemporary art. A travel feature on Beijing in the San Francisco Chronicle,which recommends the art district as an off-the-beaten-track adventure, gives an example of this socialist Other mystique that now titillates foreign visitors and young Chinese urbanites alike. The journalist recounts his visit: “I entered a walled complex in front of a watchful cluster of police and soldiers, not entirely sure that the East Germans weren’t still running the place. Dormitory-like, working-class housing line an asphalt street, and the compound initially had a forbidding feel. But then I spied a glassy, trendy, two-level restaurant and an artsy little bookstore, and I knew the Stasi were gone.”27
The 798 Space, managed by photographer and culture-industry entrepreneur Xu Yong, covers almost 13,000 square feet, making it the largest designated exhibition space in the Dashanzi art district. The gallery runs lengthwise from east to west, with the eastern entrance opening into a glassed-in and air-conditioned café restaurant-bar and bookshop. In July, proceeding from this area into the large workshop-cum-exhibition space, a wave of humid heat overwhelms you. Industrial machinery remains bolted to the floor in one corner, preserved to give a flavour of the building's previous occupants. The strong character of the vast space, the overhead light, and the problem of water coming through the skylight windows during rainstorms all created challenges for our installation. To create darkened viewing spaces for the videos, we decided that the only affordable option was to build plain wood boxes on legs, mini-theaters that elevated the television screens to eye-level for viewers. We eventually placed these in a row running down the middle of the space to give the exhibition a three-dimensional presence and protect the power cords from dripping water, while still preserving the space’s long east-west sightlines.
While wrangling with many of the practical preparations for the Beijing installation, the 798 Space staff informed us that the original one-plus week exhibition run they had scheduled for us would
be cut to just four days. The budget for their operating expenses comes largely from renting the space out for commercial use, including advertising shoots, company parties, and trade-show exhibitions. Two lucrative contracts had been secured on either side of our exhibit, cutting into the days we could use the space. Having relied upon personal assurances rather than a written contract, we were left vulnerable. I had naively not anticipated any problems of this sort. In frustration, I lashed out at He Chengyao, who was caught in this dispute over dates Audience member at 798 Space in Beijing watching susan pui san lok’s between me and the 798 Space arts manager. I Notes on Return, 2003, sound and DV installation. Photo: Zha Ba. complained about what felt like so much wasted effort for such a short show, and I blamed the gallery for pushing us around when it seemed clear that the allure they used to sell their space commercially came from the cultural associations it could claim through non-profit efforts like ours. He Chengyao responded that I should not have such a high estimation of the power of art: business is business in China these days. In the end, we convinced them to postpone one of their commercial events until later in the month and drafted a contract that allowed us to exhibition Cruel/Loving Bodies for six and a half days. We installed the show on the heels of an automobile company extravaganza that left the space littered with trash and had a fashion shoot take place in our midst as we hung and arranged works.
The Beijing version of Cruel/Loving Bodies reflected many of the adjustments we had to make in order to accommodate the exhibition to the space as well as some changes in artists’ opinions toward their own work. Forbidden to nail into the columns of the building, Leung Po Shan discov- ered that small blocks of wood randomly embedded in the concrete pillars could serve as bases for her fishhooks. Bai Chongmin & Wu Weihe, who, since our exhibition in Shanghai, had become new parents, transported only twenty of their sculptures to 798. They chose to arrange them in a semi-circle and, after much debate, uncrated only half of them. Bai felt tired of the piece and thought leaving some of the sculptures in their crates created a stronger feeling of containment and had an industrial aesthetic that matched the space. He Chengyao included two new figure studies on canvas, colored-line sketches of nude female bodies contorted to fit into the rectangular frame. One consisted mainly of a yellow pair of legs, forming a triangle composition on the canvas, seen from behind as a woman bends forward. Her genitalia would be completely exposed except that the figure’s hands reach back to barely cover up this area. He Chengyao also chose not to perform the piece from Shanghai that had created all the controversy. Instead, she set up a table with photographs of the performance, a copy of Lin Tugen’s article, and three related questions posed to audience members. For the entire duration of the show, she sat at the table engaging viewers and asking them to write answers to the questions in her comment books.
( ) Artist Anthony Leung Po Shan has the habit of writing up short reflections she calls “afternotes” following each of her performance pieces. This essay represents my “afternotes” on the experience of curating Cruel/Loving Bodies.As I sat on a plane from Beijing back to the United States, I pulled the Air China inflight magazine out of my seat-front pocket. Flipping through it, I discovered a six-page spread in Chinese and English on the “factory chic” of the 798 Dashanzi art district. As I paged through the glossy photos, my mind hazed over as I wondered whether all the effort had
amounted to anything more than an elaborate promotion of elite cosmopolitan culture for a post- socialist city increasingly rife with inequality.
Weeks later, Leung Po Shan sent me her afternotes, which expressed a new attitude on her part toward the mainland art scene. Since sections of the 798 compound still house active factories, many workers and their family members, young and old, had wandered through our exhibit. This audience resulted from the mixed-use nature of the space, and Leung found their very existence, a viewership not dominated by the art community, refreshing. Understanding art objects as products that emerge from value-granting institutions provides one important approach to the study of art’s enchantments. Alfred Gell has argued that distinct from this framework common to art soci- ology, an anthropological theory of art must direct attention instead to artists and art objects as social agents and to the social relationships these actors make possible.28 I suggest that a blurring of the borders between these two approaches enables an analysis of the negotiations around value, meaning, and difference with which contemporary Chinese artists must contend, while not losing sight of art as an “affecting presence,”29 the index of a complex set of social relations, or, in Gell's words “a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it.”30 The questions and selected audience answers sent to me by He Chengyao from her Beijing performance piece embody this zone of limitation and possibility for visual art that resists easy resolution:
Under what conditions do you find the naked body shameful?
1) The naked body isn't naked; what is shameful is the person who has wicked ideas after seeing a naked body. 2) Nudity itself is beautiful; women shouldn’t have any feeling of shame toward their bodies. Shameful feelings come from people incapable of understanding beauty or reality. 3) Except being forced to be naked, there are no conditions under which naked bodies are shameful. 4) Shame is nothing more than a form of expression created by humanity to restrain human expression. I call into question this question itself. 5) The mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers is one kind of shameful behavior. However, those who should be ashamed are the American soldiers.
Under what conditions do you think women should not use their own bodies?
1) Only when women’s bodies are used by others should they not be. 2) When humanism deeply enters each person’s inner heart, people will naturally accept all of this. 3) Only what she herself believes are inappropriate uses of the body are inappropriate. 4) The only thing she should not use her body for is money. 5) Although I have relatively lenient standards for what bodies can be used for, I do think that bodily usage should have definite limits.
What qualities does your ideal woman possess?
1) Kindheartedness and indulgence. 2) She should have heart and brains. 3) Ideals are created by people; it can only be this case. 4) Only qualities that she should thinks are correct. 5) The body is a courageous person's battlefield.
Notes 1 I should give credit, however, to all of the project participants for helping to develop this focus for the exhibition. The title for the exhibition, Cruel/Loving Bodies, came out of several rounds of email discussion. 2 Hong Kong artist Leung Po Shan and I also discussed how the exhibition concept called for the inclusion of Taiwanese or Chinese American artists, for example, but we found ourselves limited by budget and administrative resources. Due to these constraints and the desire to foster meaningful dialogue among the project participants, we kept the project small. We would, however, like to consider possible future reconfigurations of the project, making this exhibition the first in a series, to see how other artists would approach the thematics it proposes. 3 Rosalind Krauss, “Claude Cahun and Dora Maar: By Way of Introduction,” in Bachelors (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999), 50. 4 Ibid., 7. 5 Ibid., 50. 6 For example, trying to understand when, how, and for whom artist Lesley Sanderson and I, both being of mixed Chinese heritage, count as Chinese presents one way of questioning the conventional limits of racial authenticity. 7 Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xi-xvi. 8 Some Chinese artists and critics have begun to label this kind of art as conforming to the principles of a trend they call dianzizhuyi, a term that might be literally translated as “key point-ism” but perhaps more accurately conveyed as “facade-ism.” 9 Wang was the only conference participant to give his paper in Chinese rather than English, and to deliver such a clearly polemical and powerfully enunciated statement. As he spoke from the podium, most of the people in the audience bowed their heads to read a sheet of paper that had been distributed with an English translation of his talk, entitled “Chinatown Culture: Chinese Contemporary Arts in the International Arena.” 10 Rey Chow, Ethics after Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), xx-xxi. 11 In Leung’s performance of So Cool (Wo hao dong) on January 25, 2003, at the Hong Kong Cattle Depot Art Village, she fit her nude body into a closed refrigerator, whose door could be opened and closed by audience members. Viewers/participants in the performance each received a cube of frozen milk to rub over her body until it completely melted. 12 The X-ray Art Center business model is not unique. Since the opening of the East Modern Art Center in 2001, several real estate developers in Beijing have designed art centers within new commercial residence complexes with the intent of using their cultural allure to attract hip young consumers to buy apartments there. See, for example, Zhang Zhaohui's English-language review of an exhibition at the Left Bank Gallery as indicative of this phenomenon: http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/English/e2004/e200404/p52.htm. I am also currently working on an essay that looks at the development of the East Modern Art Center (Yuanyang Yishu Zhongxin) as a project instigated by the marketing department of the Ocean Paradise real estate development, which in turn is one of many new commercial real estate subsidiaries of COSCO, the state-owned and operated China Ocean Shipping Company. 13 Wang-chi Wong, Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930-1936 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 59. 14 At least one participant in the Fudan University conference reacted negatively to this piece. She felt that its display of pre-modern Chinese women oppressed by feudal gender norms adopted a “Western feminist perspective” insistent upon showing Chinese backwardness. She ended her critique by asking, “Is this all we have after a hundred years of Chinese feminist thought?” For more on this piece and all of the artwork included in Cruel/Loving Bodies, see the special seven-article section on the exhibition with individual artist statements in the September 2003 (Fall) issue of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. 15 See He Chengyao, “Lift the Cover from Your Head,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2: 20-24. 16 For more, see Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (New York: Verso, 2003). 17 Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game, xi-xii. 18 See http://www.china.org.cn/english/NM-e/99327.htm and http://www.shanghartgallery.com/artists/zhaobandi/default.htm for more on Zhao Bandi and “The Panda Man Film Party.” 19 When she first performed this piece two years earlier in Japan, she used clear packing tape. The only “censoring” adjustment the Duolun staff required her to make for the Shanghai performance was to use some type of opaque tape. She chose red colored duct tape, but when reversed with the adhesive facing outward, it showed up as white. 20 For Itchy Itchy, performed on March 8, 2003, at the Cattle Depot Art Village in Hong Kong, Leung used metal sheeting to construct an intimate interior only 36 square feet in size. A large mirror covered one wall of the space, and the sound of a piano metronome beat time. She used a rope to bind her two big toes together, and, rotating on the floor through different positions, waited for audience members to enter. Each participant had received a small bottle of Pak Fa Yau anti-itch ointment. As part of the performance, they were instructed to apply the ointment to the artist’s body until they had used up their bottle. Leung later wrote: “Pak Fa Yau herbal ointment constitutes a prominent footnote to this performance. It recalls a pungent olfactory memory of local childhood. Its feminine associations can also be linked to a rumor that circulated in local entertainment gossip. According to the story, when Carina Lau (Lau Ka-ling) was kidnapped, methods used by her torturers included the sadistic splashing of Pak Fa Yau on her lower private parts.” 21 Bei Dao, At the Sky's Edge: Poems 1991-1996,translated by David Hinton (New York: New Directions Books, 1996), 73. 22 For more on this event, which became He Chengyao's first spontaneous performance piece in what has now become an ongoing series, see He Chengyao, “Lift the Cover from Your Head,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2: 20-24. 23 This English translation is my own. For the original in Chinese, follow the link for a full reprint of Lin Tugen’s Xinmin Wanbao text at either http://arts.tom.com/1004/2004/7/21-54102.html or http://www.ionly.com.cn/ionly/arts/artspecial/20040713150632.htm. 24 It should also be noted that one of the cited panelists, Li Xu, later published an open letter on the arts.tom.com website explaining how he felt Lin Tugen’s article had taken his comments out of context (http://arts.tom.com/1002/2004/8/16-54257.html). He explained that he had gone to the Duolun Museum to attend Zhao Bandi’s event, had not looked very carefully at the Cruel/Loving Bodies exhibit, and only had a very brief and hurried cell phone conversation with the reporter who later quoted him. Li Xu used this example of irresponsible journalism as a warning to other critics, artists, and curators to be careful in speaking to the press, so as not to be used publicly in a way ultimately damaging to cultural endeavors. 25 This essay has been published only in Chinese, in a translation by Ning Meng, to whom I am much indebted for her diligence and speed in helping me get an online response posted as quickly as possible. It also appeared at http://arts.tom.com/1004/2004/7/21-54102.html and http://www.ionly.com.cn/ionly/arts/artspecial/20040713150632.htm. 26 Eliot Kiang, “798 Five Glorious Decades,” in Huang Rui, ed., Beijing 798: Reflections on Art, Architecture, and Society in China (Beijing: Timezone 8 + Thinking Hands, 2004), 32-37. 27 David Armstrong, “Back streets open door to real Beijing,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 15, 2004, D6. 28 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 29 Robert Plant Armstrong, The Affecting Presence: An Essay in Humanistic Anthropology (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1971). 30 Gell, Art and Agency,6.
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Cruel/Loving Bodies Project Homepage (English) http://home.earthlink.net/~swelland/homepage/id1.html
Cruel/Loving Bodies Exhibition Photo Gallery (English) http://home.earthlink.net/~swelland/clbphotogallery
Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art (Chinese and English) http://www.duolunart.org
Beijing 798 Space (Chinese and English) http://www.798space.com
Oriental Morning Post (Dongfang Zaobao) Exhibition Review (Chinese) http://www.whb.com.cn/xwzx/whyyyl/t20040615_98990.htm
Arts Alliance (Meishu Tongmeng/tom.com) Exhibition Announcement and Photo Gallery (Chinese) http://arts.tom.com/1001/2004/6/25-40310.html
Arts Alliance (Meishu Tongmeng/tom.com) Exhibition Review (Chinese) http://arts.tom.com/1002/2004/6/17-36902.html
Arts Alliance (Meishu Tongmeng/tom.com) Publication of Responses to Lin Tugen’s review in the Xinmin Wanbao,with link to original article (Chinese) http://arts.tom.com/1004/2004/7/21-54102.html
Arts Alliance (Meishu Tongmeng/tom.com) Letter to the Editor by Li Xu on how Lin Tugen’s Xinmin Wanbao review twisted his words (Chinese) http://arts.tom.com/1002/2004/8/16-54257.html
Eastern Vision (Dongfang Shijue/ionly.com.cn) Exhibition Announcement and Photo Gallery (Chinese) http://www.ionly.com.cn/ionly/arts/artlive/20040713121404.htm
Eastern Vision (Dongfang Shijue/ionly.com.cn) Special Section on He Chengyao’s Performance at the Duolun Museum of Modern Art (Chinese) http://www.ionly.com.cn/ionly/arts/artlive/20040713121955.htm
Eastern Vision (Dongfang Shijue/ionly.com.cn) Special Criticism Section: “Does Performance Art Have to be Lovable?”/Publication of Responses to Lin Tugen’s review in the Xinmin Wanbao,with link to original article (Chinese) http://www.ionly.com.cn/ionly/arts/artspecial/20040713150632.htm
Southern Weekend (Nanfang Zhoumo) Review of Zhao Bandi’s “Panda Man Film Party” at the Duolun Museum, mentioning negotiations with Cruel/Loving Bodies artists during installation (Chinese) http://www.nanfangdaily.com.cn/zm/20040701/wh/dsys/200407010068.asp
China Daily article, “The avant-garde art goes too far?” mentioning He Chengyao’s Duolun Museum performance as an example of creative freedom limits tested (English) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-08/02/content_356928.htm
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Ricky Yeung Sau-churk, Man and Cage, performance, October 9 1987, at 15 Kennedy Road, Wan Chai, Hong Kong. Photo: Chan Fai-hin.
This paper was first presented at the “Feminism in China Since the Women’s Bell International Conference,”Fudan University, Shanghai, June 2004. It has gone through several revisions, and I have continually explored new frameworks for questioning.
My paper seeks to address the following question: When comparing artworks made by both male and female artists, we can see that femininity in artistic expression is not a quality exclusively processed by women. Therefore, in addition to focusing on the female body, should feminism also expand its concerns to include other sexualities and sexes, to invite these other groups to take part in our discussions, or even to help them emancipate themselves?
As Liao Wen, a Chinese female art critic, once commented, women’s art is gradually being digested and stereotyped by mainstream discourses in art history and criticism. Its subversiveness has therefore been steadily whittled away at, meaning that women’s art has “[gone] astray in the zones of differences from man cultivated by manual labor.”1 Furthermore, Yang Li proposed that women’s art has to “come out from under its shield”: women’s art in China after 1949 was first re-made as “asexual” (the “Iron-girls”), then “receded into the ‘womanish’ and ‘intelligent within, beautiful without’ ladies tradition; we need an escape.”2 Thus, feminism should not succumb to biological or sexual essentialism, but rather should embrace a method, a tactic that is subject to different cultural contexts, serving different needs at different stages, in order to provide not an orthodox feminism approaching the moralistic but rather a feminism that offers guidance. In Hong Kong, feminism and the status of women in the arts seem to be different from their counterparts in mainland China. After the early endeavours of a few pioneers (including Choi Yan-chi in installation, and May Fung and Ellen Pau in video and new media), a new generation of women artists, like myself, can avoid most of the problems in making oneself “visible” in the art scene under the “protective” label of “Women’s Art.”Because our predecessors prepared a safe playground for us, there is no longer an obligation for one to define or defend one’s gender position before making and exhibiting art. In installation and video, in particular—practices that
emerged in Hong Kong in the 1980s— as well as in recent experiments in multi-media work, women artists have often led the artmaking field. The younger generation in Hong Kong do not need to waste their energy protest- ing against the male-dominated art world. They can follow their artistic aspirations. This is different in main- land China and Taiwan.
In a comparatively tolerant society, the desire for the right to speak, to define women’s attributes, is relatively less urgent, releasing us from a limited concept of what feminism is, and allowing us space to expand our ideas and consider art as an expression of different gender and subject positions. Take,for example, Griselda Pollock, a British art historian whose vocation follows in the footsteps of Linda Nochlin in terms of excavating the “her-stories” of women who made art while also deconstructing the male canon and its genealogy3 (especially Ricky Yeung Sau-churk, Tragedy of an Old Prostitute, paper clay, tar, wood, in the realm of modernism, which 50 x 45 x 40 cm, 1987. prioritizes men and masculinity). Other scholars working in this area include Peggy Phelan (Unmarked: the Politics of Performance, 1993)4 and Amelia Jones (Body Art: Performing the Subject, 1998).5 Both start from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to investigate the ontology of performance, something especially problematic for male subjectivity. Their criticisms of gender positions are spoken in a feminist voice, which I find inspiring in theory and practice
To move our focus from the female body to the male is also a strategic necessity. As Pollock has written:
Starting at the heart of canonicity confronts the strategies of introducing difference into the canon so as to avoid two dangers. The first danger, the ghettoization of feminist studies in art history because of an exclusive focus on art made by women, underplays feminism as a comprehensive perspective from which to reconsider the very constitution of the study of all of art’s histories. The second danger is the corollary of the feminist adulation of its reclaimed “old mistresses”: namely, the unrelenting critique of masculine culture.6
This was the direction I followed in studying the work of two Hong Kong male artists, Ricky Yeung Sau-churk, and Kith Tsang Tak-ping, and examining the issue of troubled male subjectivity and performativity in their art during the political unrest sparked by the Sino-British Declaration.7
I would like to take one of these artists as an example. I curated a retrospective exhibition entitled The Red Twenty Years of Ricky Yeung Sau-churk.8 Man and Cage,which Ricky Yeung Sau-churk performed in 1987, is one of his most controversial pieces. Locking himself into a bamboo cage, the artist stripped half-naked and immersed himself in the role of a male animal. For forty-eight hours, he ate, toileted, and slept in the cage. At that time, the British and Chinese governments had just signed the Sino-British Declaration and the people of Hong Kong had failed to get all the seats of the legislative council returned to them by direct election. A strong sense of futility prevailed over Hong Kong. Looking back, Yeung explained:
At that time I didn’t have any knowledge of feminism. I did all those works with a male instinct, or more accurately, a male animal instinct: wild, straightforward, no cover-ups, a long repressed male desire. Don’t you remember, I was a pious Christian for five years. During this period of time I suppressed all my sex drives, not even thinking about the “idea” of masturbation.9
A direct reading of the artist’s performance would be a metaphor for the human condition of “rather a beast”.In retrospect, I wrote:
His repudiation of the Western religions, its suppression of sexual desire, need not be expressed as a non-Western manifestation, but it was necessarily a male one. Furthermore, it did not need to be sexual, but it did need to be macho. Thus he regained his male power and subjectivity through the highest form of masculinity. The performance is a passive resistance to socio-political oppression in the name of “Art.”10
To critique the canon within a gendered framework does not mean to degrade our “masters” of performance such as Ricky Yeung Sau-churk or to dismiss their artistic merits. What I want to emphasize here is: while we are reading works by women within a gendered framework, we very often forget that men can also be read within this same framework. The male is simply not on our gendered agenda. My experiences in studying “troubled masculinity” such as Yeung’s could perhaps help our male counterparts understand their own gendered situation and be more considerate when using other peoples’ bodies (most often, female bodies) in their artistic pursuits.
Working towards a similar goal, writers in Taiwan seem to be more progressive than on the Chinese mainland or in Hong Kong. For instance, critics like Chen Hsiang-chun, a student of Griselda Pollock, has published her re-readings of Taiwanese icons, especially in relation to historic trauma. The early works of Ricky Yeung Sau-churk were explicitly misogynous and directly expressed fears of castration: women were either represented by a wide, gaping, and bloody mouth (Oedipus-ed, 1984), or as an aged prostitute in decay (Tragedy of an Old Prostitute, 1987). But after learning more about feminism, he retracted his violence toward the female body and began using other means to continue his political confrontations. However, critics then denounced him, claiming that, tempted by academicism, Yeung had lost his instinctual energy that was manifested in Man and Cage.
Later I curated another project entitled Man-Made: A Project About Art and Masculinity.11 We rarely hear voices from male artists regarding their own situations and experiences as “gendered subjects,”and gender studies are too often identified as “women’s studies.”Perhaps one of the reasons for indifference on the part of male artists is that women monopolize the debate and leave no room for men to enter into it. When we subscribe to the terms and ideas of “women’s art,”could we also subscribe on equal terms to the idea of “male art?” Now that feminism is fast reaching the dead end of a self-inflicted ghettoization, would more investigations and experiments by “the other sex” help deconstruct or revitalize the once-radical orthodoxy.
I invited five artists to participate in Man-Made:Kam Man-fai (video), Pak Sheung-chuen (mixed-media), Steven Pang (installation), Tsang Tak-ping (performance and mixed media) and Sun Yung Hoi-sun (performance). Most of them are familiar with concepts of feminism: some have explored gender stereotyping in their art and lives, some have persistent concerns regarding gender issues, and some were strongly influenced by their female mentors and artists during their time in college. In short, they are not “typical” or “normal” male artists, and they have either worked on the margins or walked a fine line for some time.
Perhaps the questions I set out to unravel were too tangled to begin with. Or perhaps I put the shoe on the wrong foot. Regardless, I thank them for their trust and friendship. They lent their male Ricky Yeung Sau-churk, Oedipus-ed, ink and water color on paper, 50 x 75 cm, 1984. bodies for a feminist interrogation, but they tasted failure. When I invite women artists to talk about their experiences, very often conversations turn into a stimulating afternoon. But when I have tried the same with male artists, conversations turned to silence. It just isn’t part of the way they've been brought up. Although each addressed the question I put to them in their works, I failed to get them to verbally exchange ideas. Thus, Man-Made proved that we lack a proper methodology for dealing with gender issues specifically of masculinity rather than of femininity.
This past April, some Live Art practitioners came to Hong Kong; Kira O'Reilly was one of them. As expected, she did a one-on-one performance, inviting members of the audience, one at one time, to make a cut on her skin. At the forum, performance artist Ho Siu-kee12 asked: what if the audience comes to her performance just to look at her naked body? I brought the question back onto Ho: what if they came to his performance just to see him half naked while hammering a piece of gold? My question provoked an explosion of laughter in the auditorium. Ho answered that although he uses his body as his subject of investigation, he deliberately keeps a distance from issues like sexuality. But how can we avoid the sexual and racial emblems marked on our bodies? When we turn the tables, the real taboo is the male body.
Some years ago, Jia Fang-zhou was the editor for a special issue of Meishu wenxian that dealt with the topic of “male art.”He advocated a model for categorizing sexual attributes in artistic expression by defining “man art” as the opposite of “woman art,”while leaving a large unaccounted area of “art without sex” in between the two categories.13
A few months ago, I saw a video, The Gooey Gentleman,by Zhou Xiao-hu at the Hanart TZ Gallery’s Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition. A large majority of the audience was taken by his
humour in the video, but watching the man drawing out his sexual fantasy on his own torso, which, in the process, gradually was transformed into a woman, I felt frustrated and wondered whether I should be annoyed or just marvel at his frankness. It was an honest account of male nar- cissism, and it is not the only one among many other misogynous expressions, made consciously or unconsciously, common to the Chinese avant-garde. But suppose male artists in China were given the chance to learn more about feminism? I wonder if they would then be more conscious and sensitive about gender issues or if they would still indulge in these kinds of tricks? But am I talking nonsense as a “first world” feminist to a “third world” situation? How should we face these male chauvinists14 as feminists? Should we respect their freedom of speech, as if supporting the rights of a minority, preserving tradition, or respecting cultural relativism? As for feminism embodied in “Man,”I am still waiting for enlightenment.
Notes 1 Liao Wen, “A Few Things About Woman Art: Woman Art as Contemporary Art Issue Since the 1990s,” in The First Guangzhou Triennial Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000) (Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2002), 61-67. (Original text in Chinese.) 2 Yang Li, “Coming Out from Shadows: Woman Art,” Art Today 2 (2003), 6-9. 3 See, for example, Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 4 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 5 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 6 Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon, xiv. 7 Leung Po Shan, “Anxiety About Gender: Troubled Male Subjectivity in the Political Transition of Hong Kong,” M.A. dissertation, history of art, University of Leeds, 2002. 8 The exhibition was presented by and took place at Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong, in November 2002. 9 E-mail correspondence with author, January 24, 2002. 10 Leung Po Shan, The Red Twenty Years of Ricky Yeung Sau-churk (Hong Kong: Para/Site Art Space, 2003), 36. 11 The exhibition was held at Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong, March 2004. 12 Ho Siu-kee is a sculptor who investigates the relationship between the human body and perception. Ho is a leading figure in the Hong Kong art scene and was included in the 2001 Venice Biennale. His performance Golden Proportion (2000-01) was a live performance in which he was half-naked in the gallery, hammering a piece of gold into the shape and size of his body. Most of his body-sculptures were performed by the artist himself but mediated through video and photography. Golden Proportion was the first work he performed live. 13 Jia Fang-zhou, Meishu wen xian (special issue on “man art”), Hubei Meishu (Hubei Art Publishing), vol. 20, 2000. 14 Xiao nanren means “little man” if translated literally.
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Any form of art that has passed the test of time acquires its own set of artistic measures, develops its own particular culture of connoisseurship, and presumes the kind of physical context in which it will be viewed. Murals painted for cathedrals during the Renaissance produced a single-point perspective in order to merge the pictorial space with the architecture, while landscapes painted on screens during the Song dynasty sought multiple perspectives to refer to the natural world outdoors. Today, the museum provides a space where art meets the public. To gain recognition in a museum, art is forced to conform to the character of the modern exhibition space because the space itself generates a set of criteria for viewing the objects it contains. Thus, in seeking recognition, the new generation of ink painters and calligraphers are forced to adjust their work to the challenges posed by such spaces. The rise in ink painting installations in recent decades is a result of this changing culture of connoisseurship.Such an adjustment obliges Chinese shuhua (calligraphy painting) to shift its creative principles and accept a culture of aesthetic appraisal not entirely suitable to its native spirit.
In order for calligraphy painting to maintain its traditional nexus of aesthetic values, curators could consider seeking out an intermediate space within the modern exhibition hall that mediates favourably with this art. The concept of The Yellow Box: Contemporary Calligraphy and Painting in Taiwan,held at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, proposes a physical space for the presentation of literati art that preserves its spirit. In other words, The Yellow Box is a buffer zone, a filter made for a particular culture of connoisseurship.
The term Yellow Box is coined in recognition of the White Cube, which is a viewing space designed to display artworks of modern Western art. The White Cube is typified by a pure, well-lit, and neutral space. On account of this anonymity, the reference to scale is obscure, and objects may appear small and frail. Recognizing the situation in which their works will be viewed, artists have tended to create increasingly more monumental objects and installations, while within newer museums the space itself also continues to grow, resisting the walls and ceiling enclosing it.
Of course, this type of space is not suitable for every kind of art, even the art that it ostensibly serves and that it implicitly endorses. The White Cube can adjust itself to make allowances for various types of artwork. Light-based artworks, such as video art, which naturally resist the White Cube, have required Black Boxes to be used in exhibitions, and the public is now accus- tomed to encountering them. As the Black Box is now accepted as a legitimate feature within the White Cube, there is every reason for an art as radically different in its viewing practice as calligraphy painting to also find acceptance. The present exhibition, The Yellow Box, is therefore an attempt not only to showcase the artists, but also to discover configurations and rules for the Yellow Box, to propose theoretical parameters, and set out precautions against overly assertive curatorial interventions.
The White Cube evolved out of European and American public art museums of the nineteenth century; these were modified to exhibit modern art. Early public art museums were newly established cultural spaces for the general public, and they manifested the open spirit of new
nation-states and their rising middle classes. Not coincidentally, they were built during the age of colonial expansion. The collections in these new museums reflected consensual spiritual and cultural values and, as a corollary, illustrated communal aspirations. In the twentieth century, Western museums have become such respected spiritual and cultural spaces that they have even acquired some of the social functions that were traditionally the province of religious and educa- tional institutions. In its museums, the community seeks and finds progressive and sophisticated cultural standards. By entering the public space of a museum, artworks are endorsed, condoned, and legitimated. What makes the modern art museum in the West different from other museums of cultural history is that they are mediators for updated assessments of the state of culture. Cultural history museums, in contrast to art museums, embrace foreign cultures but compart- mentalize them under the lens of anthropological science so that what is foreign and exotic is kept separate. On the other hand, the modern art museum must be seen to represent the latest intellectual trends and new evolutions of the Western worldview, including its current position with regard to non-Western cultures. In other words, as the modern art museum defines new cultural history, it sometimes also creates it.
Here I propose The Yellow Box as an alternative viewing apparatus within the White Cube. The framework of the concept follows the precedent of the Black Box. The colour yellow typifies the colour of the earth, and in Chinese cosmology, it is the colour of the “centre,”representing the perfect colour. Black and white, one light and one dark, are both absolute states; the pure heavenly light of the White Cube produces a “space,”while the hollowness of the Black Box produces emptiness that makes room for the virtual reality of video images. Ideally the Yellow Box should be neither spacious nor hollow, neither real nor virtual. The Yellow Box is a temporal space that contains the potential for enjoyment of a special form, and as such it is a locus of energy.
But before elaborating further on the concept of the Yellow Box, perhaps it is best to first address the question of why the White Cube is dissonant with the literati ancestry of calligraphy painting. Apart from the fact that literati calligraphy painting belongs to a radically different system of art connoisseurship, it is damned as being not modern; it is believed to be incapable of defining the present or of providing the point from which future cultural trends can emerge. Therefore calligraphy painting cannot enter the White Cube without looking awkward. At present the only type of calligraphy painting that manages to pass through the filtering process and find a place on modern museum walls is ink-painting installation. It is obviously preposterous to claim that such work represents the highest achievements of the tradition. As a curator, I find that the problems faced by calligraphy painting in the White Cube are precisely the neutral purity and the unnatural yet spiritual lighting that defines the space. This type of space refers to a site of religious worship in the Western tradition. Here light is transcendent and space infinite. Here artworks are expected to be worshipped.
For calligraphy painting the relationship between viewer and artwork is markedly different. One of the most frequently used Chinese phrases to describe the appreciation of art is wan shang (play appreciation). Wan emphasizes intimacy and interaction, an empathy and closeness between the material object and man. To engage in wan shang,one lingers in space and time, gradually entering a realm of delight. Wan shang is not about inspiring awe and does not seek to impress. By comparison, the modern exhibition space immediately determines all relationships within it for all things within it. It is timeless and still, its space otherworldly and absolute.
To truly enjoy wan shang means to indulge and linger, to pass time delightfully, and to be rewarded with enlightenment and understanding. For such a benefit, it is only proper to leave a record of one’s experience, and it is such feelings that gave rise to the colophons that appear on Chinese works of art. One shares one’s insights with friends, and this contribution adds to their joys and understanding as well of those who will afterwards view the work. This way of sharing appreciation of calligraphy painting differs from public viewing in the White Cube, welcoming as it does all comers. The process of sharing appreciation of calligraphy painting is intimate and restricted to those who understand. To close the gap between these two types of appreciation, curators must develop a Yellow Box.
The practice of viewing in the modern exhibition space differs essentially from that of literati art culture and defines the viewer differently. The modern art space speaks to an abstract public who are assumed to be enlightened citizens, those who come to worship culture. Literati art is based on personal expressions by educated men of culture (wenren), and it is created for the benefit of like-minded individuals. Through his creation, a man of character reaches out to confer and touch other men of character. It follows that even when politics are a concern of literati artists, public issues rarely surface as the theme of their art. Literati calligraphy painting is created for the individual viewer, not as a means to affect the public.
The subject matter of calligraphy painting is the quickness of life and the regenerative moments of nature. This is perhaps the main reason it shies away from worldly affairs. In contrast, Western painting has traditionally placed the highest value on themes of mythology and grand moments of history, and these works, in the exhibition hall, are enhanced by the spotlight with its suggestion of the luminous heavens above. Calligraphy painting finds itself more comfortable in the shifting light of nature, in the context of mountains and brooks. It seeks the light and shade found in nature. In the traditional Chinese world, to be “situated in nature” was not an unreasonable prerequisite, as the viewing of art often took place in a well-to-do scholar’s garden. In the pre-exhibition (and pre-modern) age, even people of modest means would have a garden or at least a courtyard with plants and rockery, so to read art in an environment that originally produced that type of work was an expected condition. When the work inspired the viewer he would also feel free to write a poem or commentary directly on (or attached to) the artwork, as a colophon.
Writing colophons on artworks is a practice that could only have come about in the age before exhibitions. Colophon writing implies a personal relationship between the artwork and the viewer: he must either be the owner, or invited by the collector or directly by the artist himself. This tradition shows the importance literati connoisseurs attached to the history of how a work had been appreciated. It also implies a radically different attitude to the concept of completeness in an artwork. In the literati tradition, art is incomplete by itself and becomes whole only when it is appreciated. Connoisseurship changes over time, and the history of how an artwork has been appreciated becomes integral to the work. One should add that the recorded viewings (colophons) are not requested of just any viewer; they must be undertaken properly, only by connoisseurs— sympathetic souls. Art’s rarefied yi jing,or realm of understanding, is treasured by literati artists. Yi jing refers to the comprehension (yi hui) of the sensitive connoisseur. Literati appreciation does not speak about the absolute completeness of an artwork but about its liveliness, its moving spirit. By contrast, a work completed, a finished product independent of further engagements, can only be secluded in itself and adulated from afar; it may be worshipped, but will not generate offspring.
The shape of an object is determined by light and space. The purity of the White Cube makes a clear distinction between the positive space of the object and the negative space around it. It has been postulated that in Western art the creation of form depends critically on marking the negative space—hence the emphasis on depicting shadow. The concentration of light and the unblemished surface of the exhibition wall in the White Cube are ideal for displaying items with well-defined contours. The materiality of oil painting benefits from the stretched flatness of the canvas, as the painting is then clearly understood to be a two-dimensional surface. The hanging scroll of calligraphy painting, on the other hand, appears ill defined and frail against such a wall surface. The softness of the hanging scroll defines itself as an object rather than a surface. The scroll format works independently of the flat wall and focused lighting.As a first proposition of the Yellow Box, the scroll should be hung away from the wall.
As pointed out, calligraphy painting values the connoisseur’s “play appreciation,”and this can take place alone or in company. The Yellow Box might include space suitable for the added enjoyments of tea and incense. It might be designed for solitary viewing. When the host wishes to engage his guests, or the artist to meet his audience, space might be added to accommodate an intimate group. In addition to assisting in the appreciation of literati culture, the Yellow Box should go further and seek ways to include in modern exhibition institutions sites that enable the special activity of the literati gathering, where artists and connoisseurs inspire each other and create art together in a company of like-minded friends.
The above ruminations have been inspired by my own participation in and appreciation of the creativity of traditional literati art. Should there be objections that this type of art making and art appreciation are no longer at the core of contemporary artistic practice, I must respond that there is no need to restrict ourselves to one single definition and measure of contemporary. There are countless followers of traditional-style calligraphy and painting in China, Japan, and Korea who deplore the marginalization of literati practice in modern exhibition culture and who would applaud proposals for a new museum ecology that enables a fuller appreciation of art that emerges from the literati cultural tradition.
The Yellow Box is a viewing apparatus—a mediating space—conceived as a curatorial intervention designed to enhance understanding and enjoyment of a special cultural practice. As every curator intervenes between the artist and the viewing public, considerable care must be taken that the intervention is compatible with and, in fact, enhances the viewing practice. As there is no stock of Yellow Boxes accumulated from past exhibitions, each new exhibition that seeks to befriend and endorse literari art would of necessity be an experiment. Nor would it be possible to realize all possible designs in one exhibition. Proposals for Yellow Boxes have been solicited from friends and colleagues in order to open up discussion, and I have included them as part of this text to illustrate some hypothetical solutions in what is hoped to be an ongoing process.
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- Scrolls should be hung away from the wall; the bottoms of the scrolls may need to be secured to the ground to avoid swaying. Suspended hanging brings out the materiality and three-dimensionality of the scroll.
When a hanging scroll is placed up against the wall, the perfect flatness of the Installation view of The Yellow Box: Contemporary Calligraphy and Painting in Taiwan. Courtesy the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. exhibition wall inevitably exposes the suppleness of the paper scroll. This is the result of contrasting two different types of flat surfaces. To avoid this disadvantageous presentation of the scrolls, what one should instead emphasize are the comparative qualities between a flat two-dimensional wall and a three-dimensional scroll body. The scroll should be presented as an object, not a surface. A simple solution is to hang the scroll away from the wall, suspended freely. In a traditional wood-frame house, a scroll would often be similarly hung from a protruding beam for viewing. Another traditional approach is to view them in open air, usually in the garden, where an attendant can hold up the scroll from behind with a rod.
What the above two examples also establish is the occasion for viewing paintings. Pictures are not made to decorate a wall on a long-term basis, as we understand home decoration today. To appreciate a painting, one approaches it like one does a book; it has to be taken out and “read.” Hence the traditional term “reading a painting.”Furthermore, a painting is often “read” in natural settings to add to the pleasure of its content, which is usually a subject from nature.
Keeping in mind the European tradition of art as “re-presentation,”the Chinese tradition of viewing landscape painting in nature illustrates a fundamental difference between the two cultures. When a landscape painting is read within a landscape it naturally implies that art does not aim to “re-present,”because the viewer is already in its presence. What one seeks to establish in this situation are the “moving spirit” and “natural energy” that the art is intended to capture.
Care should be taken not to hang the scroll too far from the wall. Otherwise the scroll would need to command a space larger than it can manage and expose itself to being swallowed by the “white cube.”An alternative to suspended hanging can be found when a scroll is so long that it reaches the floor. When the foot of the scroll trails onto the floor, the display can also effectively suggest the materiality of the scroll.
Installation view of The Yellow Box: Contemporary Calligraphy and Painting in Taiwan. Courtesy the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
If the wall behind the scroll is too high, a lower wall proportionate to the scroll should be constructed. Behind the viewer it is preferable to have another back screen; it is better still if a set of chairs and tea table are provided so that one may sit down.
This design is “standard” because it includes several basic elements: one is suspending the scroll away from the wall, the wall now adjusted to the size of the painting; another is consideration for the sense of calm for the viewer, provided here by a back screen. It is better still if there is a window behind the viewer with a pleasant view; the point is to remove the threat of surprise from behind. Finally, to suggest the pleasure of sharing in art, a pair of chairs with a tea table in between completes the arrangement.
As suggested above, we may create a window behind the viewer with a hint of nature. The space beyond the window need only be a metre deep, and the view can be an arrangement as simple as a plant or a garden rock.
This design intends to hint at the association between calligraphy, or painting, and its creative surroundings. The main topic of literati art has been nature, ranging from majestic cliffs to birds and humble plants. A window opens up the enclosed exhibition space to the outside, and a simple arrangement of rock and bamboo suffices to remind the viewer of the spirit of nature.
“Scholars’ rocks,”both as large garden rocks and desk displays, are the traditional link between the art studio and a natural mountainscape. Well-selected rocks in the exhibition hall and outside the windows are ideal accessories for bringing to mind the scenery implied by the art.
: ( -) To avoid concrete representation as suggested by the “implied scenery,”this supplement proposes to exchange the objects outside the window for their projected shadows. Chiu suggests projecting the shadow of a bamboo or banana plant on the wall beyond the window. The shadow may even be arranged to shift slowly by rotating the light source. As all connoisseurship comes with a
personal perspective, there is no need for an assertive statement. It is best if background ambience carries mere hints rather than concrete description. This supplement is very much in the spirit of the Yellow Box.
The scroll table is designed for individual viewers’ reading of handscrolls. As one proceeds, one closes the previous section to reveal the next; each section opens no more than an arm’s length, which is a metre or less. One may go back and forth, each time “framing” the sections differently at will, like one would survey the scenery while strolling in the hills. For this table, the scroll is fully spread out, but covered by an opaque cloth that has a “window” of about a metre wide through which one sees the paintingunderneath. The opaque cloth may be rolled to the left or right, either end attached to a spring roller.
The format of the handscroll reveals most the character of literati connoisseurship of calligraphy, or painting. It is personal and intimate. The proposed design aims to protect the artwork from the public, while allowing for flexibility in viewing. An alternative design is the following supplement of “viewing frame.”
: “ ”( -) The scroll is spread out as in the description above. Instead of the opaque cloth with a cut window, there is a frame of the same size as the window. This frame may be moved freely by hand to help the viewer explore the painting.
( -) The painting is rolled around the large drum, which slowly turns. There is a screen encircling the drum with windows of various shapes; viewers look through the windows as the painting moves past.
While the design of the scroll table encourages the viewer to move, here the painting spins around as the viewer stays put, looking through the viewing windows. More than one viewer may take part, depending on the number of windows. The disadvantage of this design is the complexity of the structure.
“ ” This design compels the viewer to approach the artwork instead of requiring the art to make an impression from a distance. The viewing entails a change of body language.
To break the distance between audience and artwork in the exhibition hall, this design compels the audience to change its passive viewing habits by making each viewer climb onto a kang bed. Otherwise the work cannot be seen.
Another purpose of this design is to challenge the modern custom of allowing the artwork to overwhelm the viewer; this is now a common attitude among artists because artists need to compete for attention in an exhibition situation. However, the subtle effects of calligraphy painting function contrary to this modern custom; instead, the artwork intends to remain mute until the viewer grows accustomed to it. As a solution, this Yellow Box forces the viewer to take the initiative to spend time, to enjoy the work at leisure.
Installation view of The Yellow Box: Contemporary Calligraphy and Painting in Taiwan. Courtesy the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
( -) Leaning supports allow viewers to rest during viewing. The support can be used from either side so that it can be placed between two paintings.
This support encourages the viewer to linger; it also suggests the experience of enjoying a view, leaning against railings. Different designs, such as balustrades, may be created for the leaning support. The support serves a function comparable with the paired chairs and tea table.
: This is a traditional furniture arrangement in which two people sit at a tea table. The arrangement implies common appreciation of an artwork. What needs to be pointed out is the difference from European habits, where two people would sit facing each other rather than facing a common direction. The Chinese arrangement avoids the embarrassment of silence, and it encourages conversation about the world rather than each other. Perhaps this reflects the Chinese belief than indirect communication is sometimes more revealing of a person’s character, since it shows his views of the world.
An even more indirect manner of viewing is the traditional painted standing screen, which is either placed behind or to the side of the main kang bed or paired chairs. The viewer has his back or his side to the artwork. Since this type of painting is meant for long-term display, its purpose is atmosphere. Perhaps the design also underlines the understanding that enlightened appreciation sometimes arises from the most unexpected side glance.
( ) Artworks are displayed along a bending corridor. In such a corridor a narrative order is implied, while the artworks take on an intimate relation with each other; it is suitable for showing paint- ings that are a series as well as sets of album leaves. Windows and doors should punctuate the cor- ridor to create connections with the main hall.
An enclosed space is furnished with two seats separated by a painting desk, where the artist comes to meet visitors at appointed hours. Brush and paper are made available for visitors who wish to respond to the artwork on view. Each week the artist will select, based on the visitors’ writings, a guest whom he wishes to invite back to write colophons onto his artwork.
This system is designed to provide a filter for strangers to meet the artist. Traditionally, colophons are written by friends or people one knows by reputation, never strangers. This proposal allows the artist to get to know the visitor through his writing before deciding to invite the person back.
Yu Peng’s Common Room
Artist Yu Peng has set up his studio at the museum and, during the period of the exhibition, he continues to create paintings for his Paper Window Project by working directly on paper mounted on the window pane. The landscapes that emerge over the top of the window constitute views beyond this room projected by the creative mind.
Yu Peng welcomes any visitor to sit down and visit. Guests may also be invited to paint or write at the artist’s kang desk. The artist will then develop his own paintings based on the guests’ drawings. Works created from this process will be exhibited in this room.
The folding screen intends to break the dominance of the flat wall. The multiple screen surfaces are suitable for viewing a series of paintings. A special effect of this screen is the presence of the rest of the series peeping out from behind when one views the paintings face on. This design is also suitable for a long, narrow space. For our purposes the “folding screen” can be metaphoric, as a series of scrolls may form a parallel series of surfaces while the connecting blank screen surfaces facing the other direction are left out.
( -) Instead of describing the seasonal atmosphere implied by Chinese landscape art, this design tries to bring out this reference in a subtle way. The design proposes to break up a small patch of the floor where the poles of the display screens meet the ground, showing earth, pebbles, and water, so as to suggest contact with the earth.
: ( ) The design of this Yellow Box is a series of walls that form backdrops to artworks; they are made of materials varying from mud and ash to weed, pulverized brick, and corn husk. The materials used are determined by what is locally available at the site of the exhibition.
( ) Bu bi (filling the wall space) is a modest traditional phrase that refers to creating an artwork for a specific space; today this term has acquired new significance. As a result of standardization in all aspects of life, characteristics of traditional Chinese indigenous culture have rapidly blurred into anonymity; therefore the preservation of the wholeness of local cultures is an issue of far greater importance than the integrity of any individual artwork. An artwork often leaves an impression through the special local qualities of its environmental “field.”Environmental qualities here refer
Installation view of The Yellow Box: Contemporary Calligraphy and Painting in Taiwan. Courtesy the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. to the memory and layering of artwork and life experience as the viewers traverse through light and space. One may compare this experience to the physical layering of courtyard and corridor spaces in Chinese classical gardens. In appreciating ink painting, this memory of garden spaces is an important ingredient, but one’s personal cultivation and emotional attachments to the life of the agricultural earth are equally valuable. During an age when all these elements have been cut off from daily life, ink painting loses both its subject matter and its sense of measure; hence the importance of the environmental “field.”
When we speak about space, we often think of the three elements emphasized by Western architecture: sturdiness, practicality, and beauty. On these points Chinese traditional architecture adopts divergent views. European architecture builds with stone and sturdy materials to defend man against the elements, and buildings are intended to remain as a long-term defense. However, aware that all structures are destined for a finite existence, traditional Chinese architecture builds with wood and bamboo, mud and weed, so that the great earth surrounds human life. In this way architecture forms an organic whole with humans as part of the cycle of life and death. For permanence, Chinese architecture develops the concept of standardized building rules, so that the spirit and form of the structure, rather than its physical being, are preserved. In this way, even though the building materials are renewed, the form is maintained indefinitely. This understanding of permanence is reflected in Chinese painting in its pursuit of the “living spirit” in art. Take, for
Installation view of The Yellow Box: Contemporary Calligraphy and Painting in Taiwan. Courtesy the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. instance, the painting of birds and plants. Students in Western art study stuffed specimens to capture the correct form, while Chinese artists only try to capture the vivacity of the living being. To bring forward this tradition of capturing liveliness, Chinese artists today need to be able to create a “field” that suggests “living” situations in order to properly fulfill the function of bu bi .
The tools of calligraphy painting are xuan paper, ink, water, and soft brush. When we study a painting, our eyes actually caress the surface of the xuan paper with sight and constantly compare the paper surface with that of the walls surrounding it. Since xuan paper is made of wood, bark, bamboo, and weed, while traditional walls are made with materials of the earth, our viewing takes in both the difference and the common ground between paper and wall, so that our imagination spills over from wall and paper to the world beyond. Since the characteristics of art and earth differ with each geographical region, the geographical gap between walls and papers also vary according to region while remaining constantly related to each other.
( -) The diversity of Yellow Box designs requires coherent exhibition planning. Architect Liu Yu-yang imagines the grid-form corridors of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum galleries to be urban avenues, wherein the Yellow Boxes become architectural units that need to be intelligently placed. In this design special care has been taken to connect the several major spaces, so that each space will emphasize one or several types of Yellow Box while these boxes also flow into the adjoining space. The architect has also interpreted the design of the bending corridor by breaking it into identical units—L-shaped walls that embrace each other—vastly enhancing its flexibility.
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Michael Lin, Grind, 2004, emulsion on wood. Courtesy PS1 Contemporary Art Center.
Hou Hanru: You’re painting according to a painterly tradition. It is not so much a painting, as it is much more related to space and decoration, at least on the surface. How do you define this kind of work? Do you think that introducing Chinese motifs can bring the discussion further than the discussion between painting and decoration?
Michael Lin: Your question about decoration and Chinese motifs ...it’s difficult to talk about directly....Initially these decorative motifs came from objects in my home. I did not necessarily think of them as “Chinese.”They were objects in my home, the carpets that I walked on and the
pillows that I sat and slept on. I thought of it as a new vocabulary. For me this new vocabulary was a way to bridge the gap between the audience in Taipei, where I started my practice, and the contemporary art works that were being made at the time. I worked in a gallery in Taipei when I first moved back. The biggest problem that I faced, on a daily basis, was the inability of visitors to the gallery to recognize the artworks. I was in some ways looking for a common language to initiate a dialogue. It was also because I had just moved to Taiwan, and due to this shift of context I was more receptive to my new environment and more self-conscious about this not so familiar l anguage that I was learning to articulate. I would still have to call the work I do painting, but, as you said, it is not so much a painting. I would like to add that it is a Michael Lin, In Sickness and in Health, 2004, installation. change in attitude about painting. Courtesy of Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis.
Hou Hanru: It is really interesting that you mentioned that you started using this so-called Chinese motif in the context of Taipei. On the one hand, contemporary art is considered as something that is international, related to the conceptual and abstract. On the other hand, you reviewed the environment you lived in as a typical Chinese image. It is quite surprising for people who expect to see contemporary art as something separate or as a breakaway from the tradition. . .
Michael Lin: This geographical shift changed my relationship with tradition. I see the reinvest- ment in tradition as a form of resistance.
Hou Hanru: Is there a kind of provocation?
Michael Lin: In the context ...yes,it was provocation perhaps more for the other artists but less for the public. Most of the work from my peers during this period was modernist. It was very much formalist. I somehow challenged that. I started to move my furniture into the gallery to initiate a dialogue with the audience through a language that I thought they could engage in. I made paintings of the pillows that were being used in my house, filled one room of the gallery with carpets from my living room, set up my stereo, and made a selection from my CD collection to be played at will. It was in this first exhibition that I chanced upon these traditional floral patterns that were on my pillows, which provoked a reaction that I would later continue to explore. These traditional patterns, as I found out, were going out of style. They were associated with the recent past.
Hou Hanru: Maybe more exotic as well for this generation?
Michael Lin, Three on the Bund 29.09-15.11.04-2004, 2004, skaters on emulsion on wood. (Photograph, diptych.) Courtesy Shanghai Gallery of Art.
Michael Lin: I would have to say more nostalgic than exotic. At the time, there was a general nostalgia in the air that you could see in the Taiwanese New Wave cinema—works by Hou Hsiao Hsien and Yang Dechang (Edward Yang) and others.
Hou Hanru: It’s a kind of rediscovery of the historical root of the so-called Taiwan identity. It was directly related to a specific relationship with China as well.
Michael Lin: It was definitely a period when people in Taiwan started to reconsider Taiwanese history. I think it’s less directly due to the relationship with China and more to a democratization process that was taking place. Taiwan was under martial law from 1949 until 1987. Until very recently the history that was taught in schools completely left out anything that happened in Taiwan prior to 1949. It was as if history came to Taiwan in 1949 along with the new exiled KMT government that installed itself after the departure of the Japanese. At this time intellectuals, writers, and artists were able to voice their opinions freely and force the government to re-evaluate its views on its past history.
Hou Hanru: It was also interesting that you were considering the role of the audience, the public. Actually, it reminds me also that you are interested in Pop Art and in ways to re-appropriate kitsch or consumer goods. You take this kind of everyday environment into consideration. This also pushes you to create installation art that functions as a kind of atmosphere, context, environment; the effect does not only come from the images themselves. It has a close relationship with space or with creating spaces.
Michael Lin: As I had mentioned before, the audience became important for me because I was trying to develop a dialogue with them that I felt was lacking. With my work I was trying to open up the exhibition space, this hermetically sealed space of art, to allow for a dialogue with the audience by using a vernacular language that they could engage in, the language of the everyday that you associate with Pop Art.
The one point that is also important here is that the kind of textiles that I have appropriated cannot be considered as a consumer product in the same way as a Campbell soup can in the 1960s in America. These textiles were not representative of an industrialized and affluent society, but rather a tradition disappearing due to the process of modernization. At the time they were more easily recognizable in the collective memory of the people, rather than in the market place.
Hou Hanru: There is a rather interesting distinction. All your works are made by hand: hand-made, hand-painted. It is not a real reproduction as Pop Art is. That gives you a very interesting and rather traditional status as a painter.
Michael Lin: Yes, it is closer to Arts and Crafts except there is a team of painters rather than the individual. There is definitely no machine aesthetic here as there was with Pop and more so with Minimalism.
Hou Hanru: It is also related to the history of Taiwan itself, as there is a clear, distinct hybrid identity. How do you choose the different ornamentation or motifs for each project?
Michael Lin: These motifs definitely contain the traces of Taiwanese history. They have very distinct Chinese traditional motifs, such as phoenixes and peonies, but at the same time Japanese cherry blossoms and a colour palette closer to kimonos. This history is very specific to Taiwan, which was ceded to Japan in 1895 after the Sino-Japanese war. Taiwan was under Japanese rule until 1949. Thus this choice of motifs with its trace of history was the vehicle I used to initiate my dialogue with the public concerning culture, place, and tradition.
Hou Hanru: I remember you did a piece that was a very interesting project. The installation functions like a platform for everyday activities. It changes somehow because of the passage of people and their interaction with it. I remember an interesting documentation of the duration of the show over a period of thirty-six days or a month. Do you think that this element of time again gives your work a more conceptual articulation?
Michael Lin: Yes, my solo exhibition Complementary at Dimension Endowment of Art. This was a very important show for me. The idea for the exhibition was conceived with the documentation of it being a major component. There was an aspect of the installation that you don't see in the catalogue or that you would not realize unless you are familiar with the space. For my show I took out the wall that covered the glass curtain, which exposed the exhibition space to the street. I lit the gallery with the sun and made a point not to use any of the lighting from the exhibition space. I was trying to figure out a way to document the duration of the exhibition with a limited number of photographs, thirty-six, one for each day of the exhibition, staggered at 12-minute intervals. The one thing that I initially counted on to mark the passage of time was the successive dimming of the light source, that is, the movement of the sun across the sky from 10:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., the business hours of the gallery. What I did not foresee was that the platform/daybed with pillows on it that I placed in the center of the exhibition space would constantly change. In each photo the arrangements of the pillows were different due to the audience’s interaction with the work. By chance it became a social sculpture that I created with the audience.
Hou Hanru: From that, you went on to create the first really large-scale piece for the opening of the Taipei Biennale. It’s an interesting shift because of the scale. All the painted objects are integrated into the building itself or the site.
Michael Lin: After the exhibition at Dimension Endowment of Art I did two large-scale works, one in 1998 and the other in 1999. During this period I started to focus more on the importance of the work as a space. Objects started to disappear from the work and I started to paint the motifs directly on the architecture itself—entire walls or floors. Due to my invitation to participate in a large-scale group exhibition, the Taipei Biennial, I started to think more about the placement of the work within the architectural plan. The scale of the work was determined directly by the architecture. The criteria that I set for myself was that the work had to be big enough to be a space that can be occupied.
Hou Hanru: And then, your latest work, this year: this generic intervention into space is gradually shifting to a more specific function. Basically, it's a set for wedding, sports, and skateboards.... Why this shift?
Michael Lin: To continue what I started to bring up earlier, the placement of the work within the architectural plan became important for me. I took the architectural plan as my site and placed my works within the defined spaces of the plan that had a predetermined function. In the beginning, for example, for the Taipei Biennial, the work was placed in the entrance hall, a transition from the exterior of the building to the interior spaces of the exhibition, a function within the logic of the architectural plan. Rather than using the exhibition spaces proper that function more as non-sites, I wanted to place my works in relation to the specific plan of the building. Another example would be the work that I made for the stairway in the Institute of Contemporary Art, Taipei, in 2001. There was also my work for the bar in the Palais de Tokyo and the café at the Queensland Art Gallery for the Asia Pacific Triennial, both in 2002. The idea was to place the work on the periphery of the exhibition, away from the white cubes, and develop a complementary relationship to the actual, physical site. This all changed once I started to be invited to do solo shows in the exhibition space proper in museums. This new situation necessitated a shift in my thinking. I started to make propositions for different activities to take place in the exhibition spaces.
Hou Hanru: Is it sort of like re-institutionalizing a place that is supposed to be open to all possibilities?
Michael Lin: Re-institutionalizing is too strong a term. I would have to say they are more like temporary occupations. It is important to note that most of my works are temporary exhibitions, not permanent. If we talk more specifically, Grind, the skateboard ramp, the work that I presented at PS1, was a teenage fantasy. I grew up in southern California in the late 1970s, at a time when skateboarding became a huge phenomenon. The schools around Los Angeles have cement banks bordering the playgrounds, due to problems of mudslides, which make them ideal for skateboarding. Before skate parks, all the kids would skateboard in the school yards, after school, of course—this was not allowed during school hours. When I was invited by PS1, a former public school building, to propose a project in the café, I immediately fantasized about skating onto the walls. This exhibition will end in January 2005.
Hou Hanru: This also ended up in Shanghai at a very luxury place.
Michael Lin: (laughs) Very luxurious....It’s an old building on the Bund that has been renovated by Michael Graves. The gallery space is more like a five-star hotel than an exhibition space. The curator of the exhibition invited me specifically to make a work in the atrium of the building,
which occupies the centre of the gallery space: a shaft five floors high that cuts through the whole building, starting at the floor of the gallery and reaching to the glass ceiling on the top floor, with balconies looking down to the gallery from each floor. After the ramp at PS1, I began to think about the relationship between skateboarders and architecture. Between the two shows, while in San Francisco, I noticed that in the United States they are putting all kinds of anti-skateboarding hardware in public spaces. I realized that the skateboarders have developed a different rela- Tigers,Taipei. Courtesy of the artist. tionship to the urban landscape, drawing very different lines and applying themselves directly to the architecture. They had developed a very direct way to occupy and mark our public spaces.
Hou Hanru: You have been showing over the past few years internationally, almost all over the world. There are different readings of your work by different people of different cultures. Do you think that people would misunderstand your work by projecting certain cultural readings on the Chinese motifs?
Michael Lin: There is a lot more going on in the work and it would be a pity if people stopped with Chinese motifs.
Hou Hanru: Absolutely. How much would people really read into your work and consider it a “serious” painting?
Michael Lin: A serious painting. I don't know what that means. Painting for me is a vehicle that facilitates a communication between the artist and his public.
Hou Hanru: There is something quite funny. I don't know if you've seen it in China. There are some restaurants, some specific kind of restaurants, in northeast China [Dongbei], that have this scheme; the whole business is covered up with this pattern you appropriated. Of course, they are printed.
Michael Lin: Yes, I saw them while I was in Shanghai. It is a franchise.
Hou Hanru: It’s interesting that there is actually a very different quality between these two things even though they look very similar. There is sort of a joke. People say, “Oh, look, Michael Lin has just passed by here.”
Metro,Taipei. Courtesy of the artist.
Michael Lin: To begin with there is definitely a difference between the motifs and colours of the Dongbei print and the Taiwanese prints that I appropriate. If you look carefully the original fabrics were printed in very different ways and thus yield a very different quality of line and colour. Also, the important point here is that, as you mentioned, they are printed. There is definitely a difference between something that has been hand painted and something that has been printed, a difference in surface and a difference in its presence.
Hou Hanru: Many people have been inspired by your work. It is almost like a “Murakami” kind of thing. Can you imagine that your work will develop into a Murakami-esque production?
Michael Lin: Takashi Murakami’s work comes from a very different context. His work deals with Japanese pop culture, and in dealing with popular culture a part of his work is logically concerned with mass production and distribution. The bases of my work come more directly from a reflection on tradition. I am less involved with mass production.
Hou Hanru: So you would set a kind of borderline. You would prevent yourself from taking a step beyond.
Michael Lin: Again this question comes back to what we spoke about earlier, the question of audience. Now that I spend my time between Asia and Europe, I have come to realize that the audience is not a constant. Not only does the audience change with each context but also as time passes. For example, I am not sure how much my work played a part in this, but during the last few years the fabrics and patterns that I appropriate in my work have resurfaced into mainstream culture in Taiwan. In the metro in Taipei I passed by a light box advertisement for the Ministry of Culture with these motifs. In the department store in three different shops you find products made from these fabrics, from stuffed animals to lady’s handbags. The context is completely different now than when I first started my practice. The step beyond for me is perhaps too late. At this time I am more interested in making a study of it then actually taking part in it.
Hou Hanru: The influence of contemporary art and design is getting more and more obvious nowadays. How do you see this interrelation between fashion and contemporary art?
Michael Lin: My attitude has always been that I really disregard this kind of distinction. In whatever way I practice, I don't give myself any kind of limitations, I don’t ask myself questions like “Am I doing design or I am I making art?” The interrelation between fashion, design, and art has always been there. Donald Judd, for example. More currently, Jorge Pardo and Tom Sachs. There are many others. These fields share some of the same audiences, but mostly it is the art field that wants to keep itself exclusive. This has all changed. Artists and their work have always been featured in fashion, design, and architectural magazines, but since the 1990s you start to see fashion and design in art magazines.
Hou Hanru: Going back to what we were talking about just a while ago, you can see this chain of restaurants almost in every city in China now, from Dongbei onwards, with this motif. And, as you said, people in Taiwan have made it into decoration, for their shops and other purposes. What’s your impression of it, or reaction to it?
Michael Lin: I have to say that this particular thing you are talking about is quite kitsch. I think is it very interesting. It is important that ornamentation gets reintroduced back into architecture. I think that we need to reconsider our relationship with tradition and also—just as important—our relationship to pleasure rather than function.
Hou Hanru: There is a so-called King of Kowloon in Hong Kong, Tseng Tsou-Choi. In the past two years, his graphics have been appropriated into all sorts of designs—in spite of his own intention—which has actually nothing to do with artwork, the guy just does his own thing on the streets. His works have turned into symbols of Hong Kong. How much do you think people would consider your work in a similar way?
Michael Lin: I think they do. I am on my way to problematize that. We are talking now just before my show in Taipei. Now that the patterns that I use in my work are used everywhere in Taipei, I have to reconsider this new context and somehow problematize that in order to have a voice again.
Hou Hanru: What are you going to do? Murakami-esque mass production? Or shift to a completely different reference, another form?
Michael Lin: I would like to be more involved with architecture and fashion.
Shan Yingwen: As we know, you are one of the first artists in China to explore video art, or one of the pioneers in the development of video art in China. Can you tell us briefly what video installation is for you?
Hu Jieming: Video installation is, first of all, an art form, a contemporary medium of artistic expression.
Installation art is described by some Hu Jieming, Subjunctive Mood, 1996, video installation. Courtesy of the artist. people as an art form employed by artists to display the new richness of emotional and cultural experiences of individuals or groups. Within a specific spatial environment, installation artists effectively select, utilize, alter, and combine natural and industrial materials, or everyday items (readymades) that either have or have not been consumed. In other words, installation art is an integrated presentation art of “space + materials + ideas.”In 1917, when Marcel Duchamp directly transformed a readymade into a work of art entitled Fountain,he created new possibilities for artistic expression. He trans- formed ordinary items into works of art. Such readymades are more powerful conceptually and more intense visually. This form of artistic expression started to emerge markedly in the 1960s.
Like other art forms, video installation has been influenced by many single or multiple contempo- rary ideas and driven by experiences acquired in the course of its own evolution. Originating in the West in the late 1960s, video installation has evolved synchronously with the advancement of societal civilization and technology as a whole. If I remember correctly, the Korean-born Nam June Paik was the first artist to use TV sets as a means of artistic expression. In Germany he created the world's first series of video artworks using cathode ray tubes. His creation coincides with the era of what we now call the post-broadcast age, when video facilities, modes of expression, and so on, are no longer under state control. The devolution and dissemination of the power of discourse as well as social evolution have led to a trend toward mass popularization of the medium. As a result, this medium has further demonstrated its great vitality with a dramatic increase in its expressive capacity. Hence, by the 1970s, this art form began to gain ground and a great number of excellent works emerged, producing quite a few leading artists in the field. It is fair to say that these were all products of the times. Now, video installation is becoming increasingly diversified in terms of content, subject matter, art, value orientation, emotional direction, and handling techniques.
Shan Yingwen: Can you tell us what led you to pursue video installation? Are there any artists and art works that have had an exceptionally strong influence on your creative work?
Hu Jieming: I think video installation expresses itself primarily through video, with an expressive power so intense that no other forms of art can match it. It was between the early and mid-1990s that I realized this power and started to try my hand at it. I was somewhat puzzled at the time: in an age of information overload, we were distracted. We could hardly avoid being infected in
Hu Jieming, New Journey to the West, 1998, video. Courtesy of the artist. numerous ways, including intellect, personality, and emotion. There was a real problem as to how we could express ourselves and be accepted. I figured that it would be difficult to carry and handle such a great amount of information through some of the conventional artistic forms, and I was anxious to find a new medium that could handle all these. It was probably during this period that I became aware of the beauty of video installation.
Here I would like to mention three people who have had the biggest impact on my art. One of them is Nam June Paik, who is, as I mentioned earlier, the “father” of video installation art. Must be in his 70s by now. The other two are top American artists of the 1980s. One is Gary Hill from the East Coast, who won the Leone dí Oro Prize at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. The other is Bill Viola, from the West Coast. They came out of the same period—born in the early 1950s—and
became famous in the early 1980s. In fact, I got to know their works from the 45th Biennale catalogues and started following them ever since. Little by little, I was able to sort out the underlying thread of video installation art and came to discover its charm of expression. It is fair to say that Bill Viola’s exploration of the fundamental questions of life and Gary Hill's promotion of direct sensory experiences have had a huge impact on my work.
Shan Yingwen: Can you talk about your first creative work in detail?
Hu Jieming: My earliest work was done between 1995 and 1996. There were reasons for trying my hand at that particular type of art in that particular period of time. First, I thought that installation art, as a new art form, required a period of observation. Although it was trendy, with sensational audio and visual effects, how vital it was and how far it could go remained a question that needed consideration. It had to be analyzed with a forward-looking perspective. Second, how to approach it was also a problem due to the limited resources available at that time. Equipped with only VHS tapes and video recorders, and no video editing equipment, it was almost impossible to produce video works by ourselves. The third issue was mastery of technical skills. I taught myself video art. My specialty was advertising design, visual communications, and so on, focusing primarily on the print medium. There were fewer TV commercials in the 1980s when business or commerce was not as dominant as it is now. It was not until the early 1990s that TV commercials started to show signs of minor growth in numbers, and professionals started to pay attention to the technique of video editing and the necessary equipment. It was too expensive, and we simply could not afford it. We had to either lease it or borrow it. It was not until 1995-1996 that we had the possibility of producing works on our own.
Strictly speaking, my first creation consists of two works, which were done alternately during almost the same period of time. One is a four-minute piece entitled Related to the Physiological State and the other a five-minute work entitled Subjunctive Mood.Neither of them was created in non-linear editing. Rather, they were edited on two video recorders from materials shot by an analog camcorder for home use. Looking back, it was really quite primitive.
Related to the Physiological State presents, with music and a humane approach, the process of vanishing by focusing on human beings’ weakest physical state. It is quite unique and original. I shot the piece at the intensive care unit of a hospital, filming a patient’s cardiograms and the screen of a respirator. Then, using transparent paper, I made a sheet of music notation paper. I played back those images on a video recorder and attached the music paper to the TV screen, then filmed the TV screen. In this way I was able to “mix” curves (of the cardiograms and those shown on the respirator) with the overlaid sheet of music paper. I asked some composer friends from a music conservatory to play these “flowing scores” on the piano. In those days, this was really an unusual way of thinking. My friends first thought it would be totally impossible to compose a piece of music from this. But I begged them to give it a try, and the outcome was surprisingly musical. The piece of music truly describes a sense of fragility which came very close to my original conception. This work inspired many people to think in a way they had never thought before. Life can play a beautiful melody even as it fades away. This is actually quite compelling. It was later exhibited in Shanghai and Beijing, and was included in the Chinese Video Art Communication Exhibition held by the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1997. It won favourable comments from many viewers, including the media, who saw it as meaningful and valuable in some way. In general, the response to my earliest work was quite favourable.
My other attempt was Subjunctive Mood.This time I saved myself the trouble of filming by simply recording the preview of a CCTV program hosted by Sun Xiaomei. I erased her voice and dubbed it with lines from my own script. This work was done at Cable Channel V’s studio with the help of a friend. Dubbing was, in fact, the tough part, as you had to match the lip movement. I also needed to deal with the technical issue of cutting between scenes. But this was actually a pretty interesting attempt. In our mind, CCTV played the role of an authoritative public spokesman, but my lines were composed of selected quotes that had influenced China for many years, such as those from Marxism and Leninism, Mao Zedong’s thoughts, Jacques Derrida’s postmodern linguistics, Hegel’s and Freud’s theories. All those quotations were put together in an order determined by a draw. The overall impression was rather absurd—a bunch of pieces, composed of fragments of the truth, that seemed to be the truth. Subjunctive Mood has, to some extent, a realistic significance. It tries to express how, in the face of the information overflow and an author- itative media, the information accumulated in our time has reached so great a level that we can only gather each fragment with an unassuming attitude, losing a clear view of the information in its entirety and remaining totally confused. This work was exhibited in a number of cities in China and participated in the exhibition JIANGNAN: Modern and Contemporary Art from South of the Yangzi River,held in Vancouver, Canada, in 1998. That was the first time my video installation works were seen outside China. Before that, none of my works exhibited abroad were video installations. During my stay in Canada, I created two more pieces of this type using dubbing and special video effect techniques. One was titled New Journey to the West, the other Home.Both of these were done in non-linear editing. I made full use of the non-linear editing equipment at Vancouver’s Western Front Society. Increasingly I became aware that technological development was essential to turning ideas into reality. Back from Canada, I bought my first computer and have entered a period where I work as a scriptwriter, conductor, and even actor from time to time.
Shan Yingwen: From what you have said, I feel you have been exceptionally aggressive and original in your thinking, as you have been able to come up with quite a few primitive solutions.
Hu Jieming: Ah, really? Well, I think everything went just fine in my initial stage, and I sort of cared about the mode of narration in my works. In addition to the selection of subject matter and content, I focused on the ways to present my art. I wanted an intuitive presentation that everyone could understand. To be able to express the profound with simplicity, I believe, is an achievement. I like to include the unconventional in my works. As I said a while ago, I taught myself film theory and techniques. I often used some unconventional montage techniques. In many cases, available technical support could hardly meet my requirements, but I still wanted my works to be a little unique. This had significantly increased the difficulty of doing my job. I had to rely on alternative ways to bypass those high-tech barriers in order to get the job done. To coin a phrase, I was trying to get a cannon’s power from a rifle.
I am not sure if there is a term that can be used to define my approach, an approach that combines various simple techniques to create something that looks highly technical but still wins approval from the audience. I love this type of creation, though it was totally engendered by helplessness in the beginning. I don’t think I know exactly what artistic creation is. Perhaps it means making my own way by defying every existing rule, which could be seen as a swipe at the so-called “bookish- ness.”I always believe that as an artist you lose no face even when everything you have created turns out in the end to be a failure. I'll be fine as long as my understanding of art and my creative efforts are recognized. Besides, I think taking on a challenge is most of the fun.
Shan Yingwen: Among so many of your works, which one satisfies you the most or is your favourite?
Hu Jieming: I would say none of them has ever satisfied me. Each work has some defects, because there is always a gap between what we created and what we expected. For now my favourite work is From Architectural Immanence, made in 2002. I like it because it achieved some sort of balance between concept and expression. Hu Jieming, Home, 1998, video installation. Courtesy of the artist. It demonstrates a better use of technology. Overall, it looks finished and presentable. I brought this work to Milan, Italy, where, as throughout Europe, they have more advanced technology, just as I mentioned previously. But quite a few experts there had no clue as to how I did this when they saw my work. In fact, I had just used interchangeably three of the simplest and most basic software programs to create the special effects. When I told them how I did it, they first found it hard to believe, because it was simply incredible. Later I explained the production process in a more detailed way, and they were amazed. I essentially followed my old way of doing things, which probably also bore the mark of a “third-world” production. Quite interesting.
From Architectural Immanence is a video production employing some minor special effects. A very enjoyable means of expression. Some of the buildings captured in this video were modern structures in Shanghai and the rest were old buildings of the Ming and Qing dynasties found in Anhui province. Red and yellow colours were used separately to draw the outlines of those two types of buildings. Then, those outlines were placed on sheets of music paper for composition. Images taken in Shanghai were accompanied by music played on Western instruments like the piano, while images of Anhui were displayed with traditional-style Chinese instrumental music. The two sets of images were crushed into each other, and the cutting between the scenes was done randomly, creating a very interesting effect. It is basically a metaphor of the cultural conflict that characterizes our times. As a matter of fact, it is the conclusion of my music series. Starting with Related to the Physiological State,in 1995, I made four or five similar works in succession, and this one, in my view, could be considered the best in the series.
Shan Yingwen: What creative concepts were embodied in your subsequent works?
Hu Jieming: I suppose there were a few. I started thinking about artistic expression in a way that was more relevant to the high-tech age. Back in March 2001, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition that gathered works by over thirty artists from all over the world. However, only four of these were by Asian artists—one from Japan, one from Korea, one from Taiwan, and one from mainland China. This was one of the largest exhibitions I had ever attended. At the time, we were discussing how to create art in the high-tech age. From a historical perspective, works that survive in the viewer’s mind are always those more closely connected to their time. So we must have an accurate overall perception of our time.
Hu Jieming, From Architectural Immanence, 2002, video. Courtesy of the artist.
As we enter the digital age, we see remarkable changes taking place in people’s day-to-day routines. The core of the definition of digital is “interaction.”In the exhibition hall, I had the feeling that viewers wanted very much to be part of the presentation. This desire could be achieved through interactive artistic media. In early 2003, I began to map out a new direction for my artistic creation. Because of SARS, I stayed at home writing textbooks for the first half of the year, while looking out for information on the technical aspects of presenting interactive art. I went into action around June or July when my other bout of creative work began. My interactive work was first shown at Distance, an exhibition held at the Guangdong Art Museum. The piece was entitled It is right there, created with 3-D images, programs, and external controls. It was about a sleeping dog whose image was projected from behind onto a screen at the entrance of the exhibition hall. When viewers stepped into the hall, the dog rose and watched them vigilantly. As viewers moved closer, the dog dashed out aggressively and yapped. As viewers came even closer, the dog retreated and made a conciliatory gesture before going back to sleep in its original location. This work was done in collaboration with Jin Jiangbo because, at the time, I was not very proficient in software programs and things like that. In fact, it was not a success during the exhibition.
Shan Yingwen: I saw this work last year in Shanghai, at your solo exhibition entitled Connected to You,held at BizArt.
Hu Jieming: Yes. In November 2003, when I came back to Shanghai, I had a solo show at BizArt, on Moganshan Road. The exhibition was composed of four interactive pieces. I reproduced It is right there and renamed it as It is still there,which was placed at the entrance of the exhibition hall. The other three were On the Top of the Water, Underneath the Water,a three-channel interactive video; Aerobic,a multi-channel interactive video; and Sleeping Time,a single-channel interactive video.
Shan Yingwen: Can you talk a little about your motivation for organizing a solo exhibition such as this one?
Hu Jieming: It was, I think, because art pales in a context of interaction and audience participation. It is just like a decorative object, like an aphasiac who loses the ability to express himself. Only when viewers come closer to art and become connected to it does art start to express itself and reveal its meaning. From that perspective, this was an exhibition stressing audience participation. In the current reality, such participation is precisely the primary condition in which art breeds, multiplies, and generates impact. What I tried to express through this exhibition is that we need to use all our senses in appreciating art as well as the entire contemporary culture, without relying too much on brochures or catalogues. In reality, art only delivers its meaning and value in the presence of an audience. For both works of art and their viewers, I think it is essential to create a dynamic, interactive setting. When the Impressionists emphasized outdoor painting in their time, they were suggesting an interaction between the artist and nature.
Shan Yingwen: At this year’s Shanghai Biennale we saw your Go Up, Go Up,which, I believe, was supposed to be Hu Jieming, It is still there,video. Courtesy of the artist. another work focusing on audience interaction. Can you say something about it?
Hu Jieming: Okay. In early 2004, the Shanghai Art Museum decided on the theme for the Biennale to be Techniques of the Visible.Then they came to me for exhibit proposals. I submitted three proposals in February, and Go Up, Go Up was chosen by the curatorial team. This work was originally conceived as an indoor installation for the 2003 solo exhibition. Unfortunately it did not come off because of difficulties in arranging the equipment. At the Biennale, it was exhibited as an exterior scene at the Museum. Although it still was, by category, an interactive video production, its design had to be reconsidered because of the considerable differences between indoor and outdoor contexts. For an exterior situation, you had to think about its relationship with the surrounding buildings, and you had to take into account various environmental factors such as weather. Furthermore, the range of interaction was broadened as well. Technical requirements, such as those for electronics, were more demanding. The work started in June and was designed to use forty-five TV monitors with a stack height of thirty-five metres. With some alterations, this piece ended up being an outdoor interactive video installation displayed on the north exterior wall of the Shanghai Art Museum, using twenty-five TV monitors, twenty-six computers, two switches, and twenty-five VGA frequency dividers. More than fifty crew members, four actors, and a team of assistants and software developers were involved in the pre-production and filming. This was by far the largest group of people I had ever directed in my entire life.
What I’ve learned from this project is that your team must be well balanced. I was the primary creator as well as manager and negotiator. It was a multi-task job that allowed me many new experiences. The final, on-site installation went pretty smoothly, without any major glitches. Modification of software
programs proved to be a success. I felt that during the exhibition the work communicated with the audience quite nicely. In this video work, we saw four people who kept climbing up, up, and up. Their images were shown on the stack of TV screens. In fact, it attempted to show a paradox, as well as some antagonism. The climbers’ constant upward movements demonstrated a positive mentality as well as a kind of urban atti- tude expressing impetuosity, anxiety, and trendi- ness. Environmental noises or interferences, whether applauding or jeering, all had an impact on the climbers. The ups and downs were actually transitions between the positive and the negative. During the exhibition, I watched the interactive process as a spectator and witnessed how, just as some of the viewers were about to applaud for a climber approaching the top, he or she unexpect- edly slipped down. It was very interesting to see how these extreme scenarios in which things did not turn out as expected made people laugh.
There were some defects in the exhibition of this work, primarily in the way it was presented. During the day the light was too strong for the screens to properly showcase the video, and at night the Museum was not open to the public. Thus the presentation was to some extent adversely affected. It’s a pity that, through my Hu Jieming, Go Up, Go Up, 2004, site-specific interactive own negligence, I failed to take this into account video installation (study). Courtesy of the artist. while planning.
Shan Yingwen: Do you have any new plans for the near future?
Hu Jieming: I was in Germany taking part in an exhibition not long ago, which gave me lots of inspiration. I am thinking of creating some pieces based on these ideas. Next year, in 2005, I plan to hammer out a series, if circumstances permit. I have some ideas. My efforts will continue to focus on how to maximize communication with the public while further considering the contextual relationship between works of art and reality. To me, art should not be like “highbrow” music, Hu Jieming, Go Up, Go Up, 2004, site-specific interactive video which finds fewer listeners. Art needs more installation. Courtesy of the artist. people to become involved.
The use of brush and ink on paper or silk has been as closely associated with the history of Chinese art as painting in oil on canvas has been with the development of Western art since the Renaissance. As in Europe and the United States, however, where, since the birth of photography in the nineteenth century, the death of painting has been announced despite its never having disappeared entirely, the primacy of ink in China has also frequently been challenged. In the first decade of the last century,
Kang Youwei (1858-1927) returned Wang Tiande, Round Series No. 037, 1991, xuan paper, board, Chinese pigments. to China from Europe and published Collection of Shanghai Art Museum. a scathing denouncement of Chinese literati painting in his Travels in Eleven European Countries.“Four or five hundred years ago Chinese painting was the best. What a pity it has not developed since then.”1 He continued: “If we can correct the false painting doctrine of the past five hundred years, then Chinese painting will recover and even develop further. Today industry, commerce and everything else are related to art. Without art reform those fields cannot develop.... Chinese painting has declined terri- bly because its theory is ridiculous.”2 Wang Tiande, Chinese Fan, 1996, xuan paper, ink and bamboo, mounted on linen. Collection of J. P. Morgan Bank.
Over the tumultuous history of China in the twentieth century, the position of traditional Chinese painting in modern society and its relationship to the art of the West was never straightforward. As political situations changed, attempts were made to purify painting by returning to the original Chinese sources as well as to modify it by incorporating influences from the West, but there was never any question that ink painting was an integral part of Chinese civilization that need to be preserved by all means.
To observers of the current hyperactive world of contemporary art in China, these debates may seem to be irrelevant, since the Chinese art that has become most familiar in recent exhibitions is decidedly international in style, if not always in theme. In the large international exhibitions and biennales there has been little emphasis on contemporary ink-and-wash painting. Within China
itself, however, this is not the case, and even today there is still an active engagement with issues concerning the appropriate use of ink and wash as an expressive medium.
Wang Tiande, one of the foremost exponents of experimental ink painting in China today, titled one of his most recent exhibitions Wang Tiande: Ink for the 21st Century,3 and the exhibition Made by Tiande represents the development of ideas that have become increasingly important since his appointment as China’s youngest full art professor at the Fudan Art Education Center in Shanghai. Wang Tiande, A Menu in Ink and Wash, 1996, ink on paper, tableware, writing brushes, menu. Collection of Hong Kong Art Museum.
Wang Tiande was born in Shanghai in 1960, six years before the Cultural Revolution. Coinciding with the 1978 announcement of the Open Door policy—which called for liberalization in order to accomplish the “four modernizations,”in agriculture, industry, science and technology—he enrolled in the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts. After graduation in 1981, he entered the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art), Hangzhou. In China the official art academies are as important in the development of an artist's career as they were in nineteenth-century France. Although the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts has always been the most influential arts institution in the nation, other academies have developed their own distinctive profiles, particularly since the decentralization program that began in 1958. The director of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts was Pan Tianshou, a distinguished guohua (traditional Chinese painting) painter and calligrapher who exerted a considerable influence on the agenda of the school.
Wang Tiande has not said much about his experiences as a student, but, from a statement quoted in Variations of Ink: A Dialogue with Zhang Yanyuan, it may be assumed he felt his position to be an isolated one as many of his contemporaries turned to Western art for inspiration. “I was cut off for years from the west, and developed my craft in relative isolation. I struggled to find creative inspiration from deeply rooted traditions. While my friends turned to oil painting, I redefined ink painting and calligraphy, the most value-laden of China’s art forms. By sticking with ink, it was a tremendous effort not to drift conservatively backwards.”4
This position was not an easy one to adopt, particularly at a time when the topic of the validity of traditional Chinese painting was being challenged on many fronts with a passion that rivaled the aforementioned Kang Youwei’s assault over six decades earlier . In 1985, a young artist Li Xiaoshan published an explosive article entitled “My Views on Contemporary Chinese Painting.”Arguing that “Chinese art has already reached the end of its days,”he declared that “we must abandon old theoretical systems and our ossified understanding of art, and give priority to the question of modern painting concepts.”5 This was followed by a wide-ranging debate between supporters of Li’s position and defenders of a more moderate approach. Another voice was that of the influential critic Li Xianting, whose essay “Pure Abstraction is a Logical Development for Chinese Ink-and-wash Painting” was published in 1985. He hoped that from traditional Chinese art an authentic form of
Wang Tiande, Chinese Clothes, 1996, xuan paper, ink. Private collection. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art.
Chinese abstract art could develop, and he emphasized the significance of process in the execution of the work.
It is against this background of far-reaching theoretical discussions conducted in the academies and art periodicals of the time that Wang Tiande’s development as an artist must be seen. He came to maturity during the New Wave modern art movement in the mid-1980s, when many of the stylistic definitions that had hitherto characterized competing schools of artists were being challenged. While some artists turned to oil painting and the West, others preferred to “Make it New,”in the words that Ezra Pound borrowed from the Chinese. The New Literati developed ideas from the painting of the Song and Yuan dynasties while Wang Tiande and the group of younger artists he belonged to sought to develop ink-and-wash painting by developing its abstract potential.
Wang Tiande finds himself drawn not only to the medium of ink and wash but to forms that have considerable resonance in Chinese cultural history, notably the fan and the robe. Following a series of works in a circular format, which he believed corresponded more closely to the Asian understanding of the cosmos than the typical rectangular frame used in the West, Wang Tiande executed a series of works from the mid-1990s onwards based on the shape of the Chinese fan. Used frequently in Chinese painting since the Song dynasty, the fan shape has deeper associations for Chinese audiences than it does for Western ones. Wang Tiande's fans are large in scale and are characterized by rugged surfaces of remarkable beauty and suggestive power. The ink is applied to heavily textured surfaces that have been folded, creased, abraded, and rubbed so as to provide a ground quite unlike the smooth and absorbent surface favoured by more traditional artists. Damaged and made whole again by the ink it has absorbed, Wang Tiande’s xuan paper suggests nature and landscape without ever referring to them directly.
In a recent interview, Wang Tiande referred to his years as a student at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, when he lived on Yu Huang Hill and developed strong feelings for nature. It is instructive to compare his attitude towards the natural world and the means available to him in
Wang Tiande in his studio. Courtesy of the artist. expressing it to that of the distinguished landscape artist Li Huayi, who was born in Shanghai in 1948, thirteen years before Wang Tiande. Coming from a privileged background, Li trained as an artist and was exposed not only to great masterpieces of the Song dynasty but also to the more recent accomplishments of Zhang Daqian and the Abstract Expressionists. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, however, he knew he wanted to be a “good Chinese painter, a contemporary Chinese painter,”and in Some Thoughts on Painting he gave eloquent expression to the traditional viewpoint:
One very important aspect of the composition of a landscape painting is movement, what the Chinese call qi,a complex term that can be translated as energy or power. Qi is like taiji exercise—it is related to movement. A Chinese landscape should have qi and should be an expression of the qi of the artist. The artist’s qi starts in his heart and flows through his arm to the point of the brush. That qi should also flow through the landscape. If the composition is not well planned, the qi does not flow well; it does not look right.
Chinese painting can be divided into two interlocked elements: brush (bi) and ink (mo). While one or the other may be emphasized, they cannot be separated. Even if artists sometimes manipulate the ink without a brush, they must be thinking how to match it to the brushwork used in the following stages or in other areas of the painting. When they are thinking of the ink, they must also be thinking of the brush; when they are thinking of the brush, they must also be thinking of the ink. All the power of the painting is in the tip of the brush, the last hair; everything flows through the arm to the brush. If any blockage, any stiffness occurs along the way, the brush stroke will not be correct and the energy, the qi, of the artist will not be communicated in the painting.6
I think it is true to say that Wang Tiande also wants to be a “good Chinese painter,”in a way that aims to capture many of the qualities sought after by Li Huayi while jettisoning most of the traditional techniques that artist used to accomplish his aims. In his thoughtful introduction to Variations of Ink: A Dialogue with Zhang Yanyuan,Wu Hung associated Wang Tiande with a group of young artists whose works, “which largely affiliate themselves with abstract and conceptual art, demonstrate a tendency to separate “ink” from “brush.”Hence they also divorce themselves from traditional Chinese painting, which consistently emphasizes the joint importance of bi (brushwork) and mo (ink). In other words, one finds in these works the deliberate dominance of ink over other
Wang Tiande working with cigarette ash and paper. Courtesy of the artist. visual elements. By pushing the role of this traditional medium to such an extreme, the artists both substantiate an ancient art tradition and subvert it.”7
During the mid-1990s Wang Tiande believed that one way out of the impasse posed by the conundrum of how to respect the traditional importance of ink as a symbol of Chinese culture and make it contemporary was to move into three dimensions. Two outstanding installations, Menu in Ink and Wash (1996) and Sealed on October 23, 1998, date from this period. In the former a large banquet table surrounded by chairs and set for eight people was covered in ink and wash. Beside the plates there are brushes instead of chopsticks and the menu is an antique book of ancient Chinese poetry. It is possible to offer many different interpretations of this ambitious work, but it seems certain that questioning the role of Wang Tiande, Chinese Clothes No. 04-D02, silk cloth, burn marks. literati painting in the modern world was one Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art. of the primary motivations. In the latter work, a casket covered in ink and wash was placed in the imperial ancestral temple adjacent to the Palace Museum in Beijing. In this case Wang Tiande’s emotional attachment to traditional ink-and-wash painting was emphasized by its display in a site symbolic of traditional Chinese culture.
Since 1998, Wang Tiande’s two-dimensional works have used the form of a Chinese robe as a symbol of Chinese tradition on the one hand and as an unconventional container for fragmentary glimpses of un-idealized Chinese landscapes on the other. These works are simultaneously robes and landscapes, garments with a pronounced surface design and craggy isthmuses receding into
the distance. While some of the works from the series emphasize the ambiguity of the presentation by depicting the landscape elements in a relatively realistic manner, others are much more abstract and calligraphic in approach. Photographs of the artist at work show how he paints on the floor, “entering” the work in a way that recalls Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of Jackson Pollock painting in his studio at Springs, Long Island. Wang Tiande’s robes, hovering between abstraction and representation, contrast sharply with the polyvinyl chloride robes of Wang Jing, the first of which dates from 1997. A unifying thread in Wang Jin’s oeuvre is his concern with the side effects of China’s rapidly growing capitalist economy. His glittering but unwearable costumes from the Peking Opera may be seen as ironic comments on the commercial- Wang Tiande, models wearing Chinese Clothes. ization of tradition for the tourist industry. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art.
Unlike Wang Jin, who uses contemporary materials to express his dismay at social and cultural trends in contemporary China, Wang Tiande has recently seemed to bow to and accept the inevitable. Immersed as he is in the traditions of ink painting, he nonetheless lives in Shanghai, which has been physically transformed in the past decade from a rather run-down metropolis into a gleaming, sci-fi megalopolis. The world in which he lives is largely digitalized; he has explained how the method he evolved to convey his feelings about this situation came about by accident. Alone in his studio one day, he lit a cigarette and watched entranced as the ash fell on some rice paper. He felt that as the burning ash fell, it created a totally new space. Instead of burning CDs or DVDs, however, Wang Tiande burns characters into sheets of rice paper, using cigarettes rather than brushes. Needless to say, the characters that result from this unconventional approach are mostly illegible. Glimpsed through the irregular burn marks are calligraphic inscriptions executed in cursive script on a second sheet of rice paper that lies beneath. Recognizing that the art of calligraphy has become a frail presence at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Wang Tiande creates layered works that recall the great achievements of the past, yet conveys their meaning only fitfully. Perhaps there is a certain irony in his use of the word “digital” to describe this group of works, since there is nothing at all digital in their execution, although in English another meaning of that word is “of or pertaining to a digit or finger.”
This essay might suggest that Wang Tiande is in despair at the gap between the traditional means of expression to which he has devoted his life and trends in contemporary culture and society, but this is far from being the case. As already mentioned, he plays a significant role in the Fudan Art Education Center in Shanghai, and he is beginning to redefine his role as an artist in a much larger context than that of the art world in China as it exists today. No longer content to train future generations of fine artists, he is attempting to create an institution that is a center of creative thinking comparable to the Bauhaus in Germany. In its brief history, the Bauhaus (Weimar, 1919- 1925; Dessau, 1925-1933) had a profound effect on twentieth-century design in fields as diverse as architecture, theatre, typography, and industrial design. The design of a teapot was thought to be as important as the execution of a unique painting or sculpture, and artists as celebrated as Paul
Klee and Wassily Kandinsky taught students the fundamentals of artistic creativity.
Believing that academies in China have to be supplemented by more forward-looking institutions, Wang Tiande is trying to create an environment in which artists from many disciplines can work side by side to build a bridge between fine art and design. Last year he was curator of an exhibition at the museum of Fudan University—Dajia: Studying Design from Contemporary Art—in which works by artists and designers were hung side by side. In Chinese the word dajia means both “everybody” and “great master,”a succinct way of announcing the broad scope Wang Tiande, detail from the Digital series, xuan paper, Chinese ink on paper, of Wang Tiande’s ambitions. burn marks. Courtesy Chambers Fine Art.
Included in the exhibition were industrial designs by Masayuki Kurokawa and a series of works from the New Chinese Clothes by Wang Tiande that present the garments in a wearable form. Detached from their two-dimensional existence, these robes are individualized by Wang Tiande’s calligraphy and are poised to carry his message out of the study or museum and into the street. In less than twenty years, Wang Tiande has moved from a nostalgic embrace of the past to an optimistic acceptance of the present and, even more important, recognition of his role in enriching it through all the means available to him—his own creativity as well as his responsibility as an educator to encourage creativity in others. As noted earlier, nearly a hundred years ago, Yang Kouwei wrote that “today industry, commerce and everything else are related to art. Without art reform those fields cannot develop....”8 Wang Tiande intends to do something about this situation.
This text was originally published in the catalogue Made by Tiande,presented at Chambers Fine Art, September 8 to October 23, 2004.
Notes 1 From Yang Kouwei, Travels in Eleven European Countries, quoted in Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1996), 28. 2 Ibid. 3 Wang Tiande: Ink for the 21st Century (Hong Kong: Alisan Fine Arts, April 2003). 4 Variations of Ink: A Dialogue with Zhang Yanyuan (New York: Chambers Fine Art, 2002). 5 Li Xiaoshan, quoted in The Flowering Field: Contemporary Chinese Painting (New York and Hong Kong: Kaikodo and Luen Chai, 1997), 21. 6 Michael Knight and Li Huayi, The Monumental Landscapes of Li Huayi (San Francisco: Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2004), 42. 7 Wu Hung, “Variations of Ink: A Dialogue with Zhang Yanyuan,” Variations of Ink: A Dialogue with Zhang Yanyuan, 3-4. 8 See note 1.
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After the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989, and the unrest that continued into the early 1990s, some 25,000 Chinese students expatriated to Australia. Among these were a number of Chinese artists. Nearly fifteen years later, the works of these exiles have contributed a Chinese sensibility to Australian art, and their inclusion in national and international exhibitions has steadily increased over the years. According to Melissa Chiu, Museum Director of the Asia Society and the Society’s former Curator for Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art, “the ‘Asianisation’ of Australia is problematic insofar as it conceives of Australia and Asia as discrete, separate and rigid identities.”1 Within this framework, “the significance of Asian-Australian artists lies in their knowledge and understanding of an Asian culture, yet their location within an Australian context provides an entirely unique denial of the fixed notions of Australia and Asia.”2 Investigating issues of identity and belonging, the work of these artists represents a shift in the Australian cultural landscape, confronting the audience with the mediation between cultures of origin3 and contact situations while stimulating reflection about cultural creolization.
Ah Xian was among the artists who migrated to Australia in the wake of the Tiananmen Square incident. My first encounter with his work was in Berlin, in the fall of 2003, at Face Up: Contemporary Art from Australia, curated by Britta Schmitz, at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Ah Xian’s busts, exquisitely crafted in porcelain, lacquer, and cloisonné, conveyed a timeless atmosphere and a sense of impenetrable intimacy. Theirs was a hybrid nature infused with East and West, the result of a decade-long introspective journey in which the artist, physically dislocated and culturally displaced from his homeland, had sought to negotiate his cultural background with the prevailing and overriding values—philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural—of the West. One of my goals in writing this article is to investigate how, in the making of the China China and Human Human portrait busts, Ah Xian has created a complex of semiotic relationships that tap directly into both Chinese and Western visual languages and cultures.
Ah Xian was born Liu Ji Xian in Beijing in 1960. Ah Xian is the name he adopted in 1983. “Ah” is generally used as a prefix for a nickname, and “Xian” means immortal. Used together, they become both an “art name” and nickname. Self-taught, Ah Xian started his career in art during the early 1980s. Between 1985 and 1990, his work was featured in several group exhibitions at Beijing University, the National Art Gallery of China in Beijing, the Beijing Central Drama Institute, and the Jin-An Culture Centre in Shanghai, as well as in Paris, New York, Boston, and Hobart. In 1986 his first solo exhibition was held at the Old Observatory in Beijing.
These exhibitions followed the years of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, launched by fac- tions in the Chinese Communist Party Leadership, who feared the spread of Western liberal ideas brought about by the Open Door policy,4 and the campaign against “bourgeois liberalism” that was begun in response to the 1986 student demonstrations and intended to weaken the activity of experimental artists. These years saw the emergence of unofficial artistic groups championing freedom of expression and a critical examination of the official academy prescriptions for art. Their manifestos and movement names united references to both Chinese art, such as traditional ink painting, Socialist Realism, and Western modern and postmodern styles, such as Dada, Surrealism, Pop, and Conceptual.
During this time, despite continually practic- ing art, Ah Xian was never really a part of any formal artists’ group,5 mostly because of his natural solitude and quiet personality, although discussions with friends who were involved more closely in the movements were part of his daily life. The artist describes himself as interested in Modigliani, Magritte, and Delvaux. The works from these early Chinese years already reveal the figurative element as primary, whether in painted nudes or in wall rubbings on city surfaces (see fig. 1). “Part of my practice then was just intuitive, and part of it was just rebellion,” Figure 1. Ah Xian, The Wall Series #36, 1987, ink on rice paper, 110 x 110 cm. the artist has said.6 His work is permeated Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. by an implicit sense of intolerance towards the official academy and its intellectual constrictions, reflecting the controlled and controlling Chinese cultural context.
In early 1989, Ah Xian went to Australia as an artist in residence at the Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart, returning to China a few weeks before the beginning of the stu- dents’ pro-democracy protests.7 In 1990, invited to participate in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Ah Xian then sought political asylum in Australia.
Ah Xian’s early work made in Australia con- stitutes a sort of psychological laboratory, a cathartic locus for attempting to metabolize Figure 2. Ah Xian, The Heavy Wounds Series #1, 1991, oil on canvas, 110 x 90 cm. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. and overcome the horror of the Tiananmen massacre. The Heavy Wounds series of 1991 (fig. 2)—oil paintings executed on canvas in a Socialist Realist style that show how to bandage wounds—and the Pervasive Spirit series of 1992 (fig. 3)— installations made of plaster casts of body parts (mainly feet and hands) displayed in ammunition boxes on tables or pinned to the wall—are pervaded by a hovering sense of violence. The titles reveal the delicate passage of the artist's spirit, caught in the oscillation between the offenses of the body and the wounds of the soul.
Since early 1994, following the Mao Goes Pop exhibition in Sydney, Ah Xian has been investigating the idea of making porcelain figures. In 1995 he was put in contact with Zou Xiao Song, who later became Vice Director of the art college of Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, located in Jiangxi Province, southwest of Shanghai.
For a thousand years, Jingdezhen has been considered China’s most important center for porcelain production. Ceramics were produced there as far back as the Han dynasty (206-220 B.C.).8 The
production of porcelain objects and vessels for the imperial courts and ware for domestic use flourished during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Today, Jingdezhen remains a national and international center for porcelain production. Workshops, often specialized in specific traditional porcelain designs, keep alive the tradition of producing hand-manufactured replicas of vases and other vessels for the demands of a global market. Ah Xian traveled to Jingdezhen to learn more about the possibilities of the porcelain medium and to establish relationships with the local workshops.
Figure 3. Ah Xian, Pervasive Spirit No. 2, 1992, plaster, lead, steel nails, Back in Australia, Ah Xian was the recipient of a wax, ink, cotton, bandages, and ammunition boxes, 72 x 56 x 59 cm. year-long residency at Sydney College of Arts, Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. where he had access to studio space, materials, and kilns. The China China series was started at that time. In a brilliant synthesis, the artist’s homeland and the material with which the country is closely identified are inseparably connected in the series title.9
In 1998-99, Ah Xian made the first busts and other body parts, including legs and heads, which he molded, fired, and hand-painted by himself (fig. 4). The models for the castings were chosen from among friends and family members, both Chinese and non-Chinese. During the process, vaseline is rubbed on the model's face, skin, ears, and hair. The models must keep their eyes and mouths firmly closed and breathe through straws placed in their noses while multiple layers of plas- ter-soaked cloth are applied over the head, neck and shoulder. “It is not easy to find an ideal model and [equally] not easy to find someone who can physically and psychologically endure it,”the artist claims,10 and because of this, the Figure 4. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 1, 1998, porcelain, underglaze same mold is often used for more than one bust. cobalt-blue with landscape design. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist.
The decorative styles applied to the busts were carefully selected from traditional porcelain designs found in Chinese pattern books and catalogues of antique Chinese bowls, platters, and vases. It mainly consists of a cobalt blue underglaze, reduction-fired red copper glaze, iron red glaze, and clear glaze.
In China China—Bust No. 3 (fig. 5)—porcelain with hand-painted cobalt underglaze, reduction- fired red copper glaze, and clear glaze—a bamboo grove is painted across the right temple of a young woman, the myriad of small pointed leaves rendered in different shades of blue. From the temple, the leaves delineate the rounded arch of the eyebrow, and on the left side a tree branches out across the side of her face, blooming with blurry red dots. A few isolated dots mark the
sensuality of her face as beauty spots, and delicate lines run across the cheek like blood capillaries. Her eyes are shut, the features of the face relaxed, her posture upright. This woman seems caught in a moment of inward reflection and presence of mind, as if weighing the emotions that are condensing and clouding on her skin.
These early China China sculptures, of which a selection was first featured in the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, held in Brisbane (1999) and later acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery, already feature the peculiar elements that recur in successive works: a decisive engagement between the sculptural form and the painted motifs. This is an engagement I would call sensual for the way Figure 5. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 3, 1998, porcelain, the decoration entices and is enticed by the bust in a underglaze cobalt blue with reduction-fired red copper glaze and clear glaze. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. union that generates a new place for the viewer: a place of surprise, attraction, and semiotic associations. “The reason why people are so seduced ...is not the body itself, but that place where it joins traditional decorative arts, and it is exactly there where the work has its appeal and where it actually succeeds—you pull it apart and it means nothing.”11 The way the patterns interact with the symmetry of the face, following, accentuating, smothering, or obliterating the features, urges the viewer to interpret the mood of the model, since we all have the tendency to read and deduce information about a person from the face. A sense of calm, inward reflection, but also imprisonment and asphyxiation, are just some of the terms that have been used to describe the sensation the viewer is confronted with.
It has been said that the China China series of busts recall the “quietness of death,”12 the imagery of prematurely formed “death masks,”13 the stillness of “mortuary sculptures.”14 This is due to the fact that the eyes remain shut, the shoulders droop, and the facial features relax, delivering a sense of serenity and restfulness. Such countenances remain unchanged in later works: the stillness of the Human Human series, for example, is disturbing. The feature of closed eyes “confirms both the natural process of molding from life and my conscious decision, since it creates a much wider spiritual space to be living in....”15
In 1999, having been awarded a grant from the Australia Council of the Arts, Ah Xian was able to travel to Jingdezhen, where he started working collaboratively with local workshops and artisans. The artist describes his experience thus: Along the production process,
I was mainly in charge of molding, forming, and revamping, and left the decoration to the artisans. I selected the artisans and briefly advised them about which motif to decorate where, and trusted that they would perform to their best ability in porcelain making. There was some concern initially as to how the patterns, which were usually reserved for circular, functional ceramics, would relate to the shape of the human figure. The artisans are trained to be good in a specified narrow field such as throughing or turning, underglaze landscape decoration or overglaze, underglaze motives or overglaze, flower and bird decoration and figure, drawing or filling out colours. They are fixed in one particular position for the whole of their careers. There were around ten people in the workshop where I made my works.16
Sometimes the process of completing a bust requires up to five firings, and polychrome enamels, pierced-through porcelain, low relief, ying qing or shadowy blue glaze, are only some of the techniques featured in the busts created in Jingdezhen. The spectrum of the designs broadened to include applied “antique objects”—urns, jars, and lanterns in relief (see fig. 6)—flowers of the four seasons (see fig. 7), lotus scrolls, and traditional Chinese erotica (see fig. 8).
China China—Bust No. 36 (fig. 9)—porcelain with overglaze, iron-red, and a cobalt-blue dragon- and-ocean design—presents the long body of a red dragon coiling around the head of a man. His head is leaning slightly forward, and the coils Figure 6. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 34, 1999, porcelain with follow the facial features, moving around the ears overglaze iron-red, “antique objects” design. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. so as to avoid obstacles to their full embrace of the head. The supernatural creature extends its body over the mouth, clasps the nose with one of its claws, and stands out on the man’s forehead with spirited eyes. Below, the man’s chest and back are painted with a stylized motif of ocean waves. Because of his posture, he seems weary and resigned.
The collaboration with the Jingdezhen workshop ultimately produced its fruit: thirty-five vividly decorated busts were exhibited at the Teacher’s College in Beijing in April 2000 and at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney in 2001. Since then the artist has been traveling back and forth between China and Australia. This ongoing China China series now consists of eighty porcelain sculptures (see figs. 10-12). In 2003, China Refigured: The Art of Ah Xian,held at the Asia Society and Museum in New York City, showcased thirty-seven of the new busts, including, for the first time, works from the more recent Human Human series.
The body of work included in Human Human was conceived of between 1999 and 2000, while Ah Xian was in Beijing:
“When you are in Beijing you see cloisonné and carved lacquer all the time, and, on the other hand it is not so simple to think about how to use these materials.”17 Ah Xian felt he was exhausting his possibilities with porcelain and wanted to broaden his investigations into traditional Chinese crafts, appropriating and reinventing a use for materials such as cloisonné, lacquer, jade, ox bone, and bronze. Twelve Human Human busts have been created so far: five of carved lacquerware, five of cloisonné, and two inlaid— one ox bone and one jade. More recently, the artist has been considering the use of wood carving.18
In the series Human Human,fiberglass resin casts are used as base. The human figure remains central in these works, as the title emphatically suggests. As the artist stated, the works “‘would not make sense’ if they were not based on a human cast.”19 The reiteration of the word “human” in the series title recalls and plays with the title of China China,with the difference that “human human” transcends the immediate logic intrinsic in China China-meaning porcelain of China for the historical, cultural, and geographical associations the word “china” carries. Rather, Human Human, with its playful excess—human is by definition “human”—evokes a poetic logic that escapes geo-political reference and brings the Human Human works to an expanded, more universal plane.
Cloisonné was first introduced in China during the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) and has become one of the traditional arts and crafts used in China to produce tables, screens, and vessels. It is actually called the “blue of Jingtai” (Jingtai lan), since blue is the dominant colour adopted for enameling. Cloisonné, which became prevalent during the reign of Jingtai (1450-1456) in the Ming dynasty, involves elaborate processes: base hammering, soldering, enamel filling, enamel firing, polishing, and gilding.
In the making of cloisonné busts, Ah Xian first Figure 7. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 60, 2002, porcelain pierced makes a negative plaster cast. This is sent to a through with four-season-flowers design. Photo: Liu Xiao Xian. Courtesy of the artist. workshop where it is transformed into a fiberglass positive, and, at this stage, the artist can still make changes on the fiberglass. The fiberglass model is then passed to a panel-beating workshop where a zinc mold is formed before the final copper positive can be created by beating copper sections into shape within the negative mold and then welding them together to form the copper body. In the next phase, cloisonné craftsmen adhere copper strips to the copper body. Small filigree copper strips (cloisons) are shaped according to the artist’s design and then applied and welded onto the copper to completely cover the body. During the enamel filling, ores are ground into fine powder and applied to little compartments separated by filigrees.20 The subsequent firing fuses the enamel pastes into Figure 8. Ah Xian, China China —Bust No. 25 (left view), 1999, porcelain glass. Refilling with enamel pastes and re-firing is with overglaze polychrome enamels. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. required, as the enamel in the little compartments will shrink a little from the heat. Once the compartments are completely filled, the busts are polished to make the surface level, re-fired and re-polished. and finally gilded.21
Human Human—Lotus Cloisonné Figure 1 (fig. 13) is Ah Xian’s first free-standing complete figure cast from life, and its completion took twelve months, including several failed attempts. Its craft excellence is stunning. Long stems climb sinuously from the legs, embracing the female nude with rounded leaves, blossoms, and flowers. From vibrating emerald to saturated yellow, green nuances speak of the bravura of enamel artisans, and the liquid fluctuations of colours and the naturalistic movements of the ornamental motif contrast with the awkward stillness of the pose. A lotus flower blooms on the left breast, the drum-shaped seedpod sensually—or provocatively?—positioned on the nipple. Another flower covers the right cheek, the magenta petals centrifugally spreading across the face. In Chinese iconography, the lotus symbolizes purity because of the way it emerged unblemished from the mud in which it grew.22 Lotus Cloisonné Figure 1 was made at the Jingdong Cloisonné Factory in Hebei province, east of Beijing, during 2000-01. The sculpture won the inaugural National Sculpture Prize held at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Among the other ornamental techniques that Ah Xian has been revitalizing in the Human Human series is lacquer, not only one of the most ancient23 but also one of the most time-consum- ing processes. Made from the sap of the lacquer tree, lacquer can be used as a top layer for objects ranging from simple bowls to deeply carved chests and tables and ornately painted wardrobes. When colour is not added, the natural state of lacquer gives the object a transparent, rich brown hue. Once dried and polished, the lacquerware has heat-, acid-, and alkali-resistant properties while Figure 9. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 36, 1999, porcelain with imparting to the object it protects a sturdy and overglaze iron red and cobalt blue dragon, and ocean design. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. glossy shine. Carved lacquer requires the applica- tion of hundreds of layers of varnish, depending on the depth of the desired design to be engraved.
Human Human—Carved Lacquer Bust 1: Dragon (fig. 14) is one of the five finished busts. It features the motif of the dragon carved into red lacquer: the scales, the sinuous whiskers of the mythological creatures in the foreground, and the undulating, evenly striped carving in the background cover the entire surface and convey a sense of sumptuous preciousness.
***
In the China China and Human Human series, the decorations seem indelibly to mark the busts like tattoos. Such re-marking of a cultural heritage is an element that recurs in the work of other Chinese artists either transplanted abroad or living in China. In the series of photographs Self- Portrait as a Part of the Porcelain Export History,Ni Haifeng, who has lived in the Netherlands since 1990, addresses his Chineseness—and the history of the mercantile relationships between the Low Countries and China—by showing parts of his own body painted with traditional Chinese porcelain blue motifs. Similarly, Huang Yan, who works and lives in Jilin, China, recovers tradition by painting calligraphy and ornamental motifs over porcelain busts of Mao, pork cuts, bones, and his own body. In the making of the Family Tree series of photographs, Zhang Huan, who lives and works in New York, invited three calligraphers to write texts on his face beginning in the early morning and continuing into the night.24 As the Chinese characters cover more and more of the artist’s face, they evoke the artist’s Chineseness, while the black ink progressively obliterates his features and physical identity.
However, it seems to me that looking at Ah Xian’s works in the context of the literal metaphor of the tattoo means reducing the reading of it to his cultural heritage and failing to see the artist’s broader proposition to engage the Western audience with a visual language derived from traditional Chinese materials, craftsmanship, and decorative designs, which are signifiers of Chinese cultural identity.
In the article “Self Exile of the Soul,”Ah Xian raises this question in respect to the body of works China China:
The dilemma can in part be expressed as a question: how can artists brought up in a Chinese cultural context retain their values and traditions, while at the same time entering into a contemporary world dominated by the language and values of the West? But this is just the beginning of the question
because there is a deeper issue to grapple with and that is, in my view, how to negotiate the Chinese culture, which in a sense is being devalued from within?25
The China China and Human Human busts are visually faithful records of the sitters. They are portraits and yet they escape the mimetic and iconic classification of portraiture and extend the significance of the word “portrait.”If the portrait is the representation of a subject’s interiority Figure 10. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 11, 1999, porcelain, brought to a manifest exteriority—what has been overglaze iron red with lion playing silk-strips-ball design. Photo: Liu Xiao Xian. Courtesy of the artist. described as the likeness of the soul, or of the interior truth of the subject—then the portrait shows a person rather than just the physical fea- tures of a model. Indeed the portrait “looks,”its look staring back at the gaze thrown at it, looking for the possibility of attention, for the chance of an encounter.26 Through the look, a subjectivity imposes its presence on us. In Ah Xian’s busts the eyes are shut, the look absent, the possibility of an encounter postponed to an indefinite time.
The efflorescence of designs on the “skin” of the busts has the colours and forms of peonies and dragons, phoenixes, plum-blossom and lotus Figure 11. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 45 (right view), 1999, scrolls, ocean waves, and idealized landscapes. porcelain low relief with low-temperature yellow glaze. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. Despite the fact that sometimes the same mold is used as base for several sculptures, we hardly notice it, our attention being diverted from the human features to the skin, from the form to the mere surface. From the abyss of inward serenity in which the men and women of the busts seem to be submerged, there is a different, striking likeness surfacing here between portrait and original: a likeness that transcends the mimesis of the single subject. Through the decoration— through its intrinsic reference to China— Chineseness is the “presence” that our eyes actually meet, the “soul” that reveals itself to us.
Figure 12. Ah Xian, China China—Bust No. 76, 2004, porcelain with overglaze polychrome enamel ten-thousand-flowers design. Photo: In the China China works, through the graphic Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist. rite,Ah Xian invents therefore a place, which attenuates or annuls the face of the specific model as the place of his or her own personal subjec- tivity, to evoke—and at the same time preserve while remembering—another face, both private and collective, the face of Chineseness. If one of the functions of the portrait is to represent the image in the absence of the person, whether that person is distant or dead, Ah Xian’s works are many figurations of one absence. Painting, enameling, carving, and piercing the porcelain or
lacquer of the busts assume the significance of a rite that—for that singular sense of solemn communion with the Chinese tradition—brings to surface the absence that ten years of physical displacement and cultural relocation have generated in the artist’s spiritual landscape.
These busts radiate the artist’s soul; they bear the imprint of his Chineseness, blurred with the individuality of the sitters—no matter whether they are Chinese or not. Each bust negotiates the space between the singular individuality of the models and a collective Chinese cultural identity. The consistency of the closed eyes seems to prevent the multiplication of singular subjectivities in order to facilitate the emergence of a super-identity.
Ah Xian’s fascination with the human body can be said to be crucial in interpreting his work. “There are many things one can do as an artist—look at the environment, look at society, at politics—there’s quite a lot of room to play in all of those fields, but the human body is absolutely inexhaustible as a subject. I have never lost interest in the figure....”27 Whether or not the starting point is the conscious embrace of Western mimesis—the logic of an iconic figuration haunted by the dichotomy of absence/presence that spans the centuries from the classical Greece to today—China China and Human Figure 13. Ah Xian, Human Human—Lotus Cloisonné Figure 1, Human go beyond such interpretation to introduce a 2000-01, hand-beaten copper, finely enameled in the cloisonné technique. Courtesy of the artist and the National new figuration of absence/presence. Gallery of Australia.
Ah Xian effects a semiotic shift from iconic to symbolic in the status of the busts as portraits-from an iconic similarity to the model to the symbolic mode of being Chinese as it is coded and epitomized by the tradition of China’s decorative motifs. By superimposing a system of signs on the sculpture’s features (what one can consider the original system of signs, since we tend to “read” a person through his/her facial expression), the symbolic status of the mask is achieved. While hiding the individual face, masks construct the “actor” as a “face” that exists only within the cultural context. As in Chinese opera masks, where the main colour in the facial makeup symbolizes the disposition of the character,28 in Ah Xian's busts traditional ornamental motifs are not meant to literally disguise the face. Rather, they introduce a coded system of signs and symbols which, like mask colours, are immediately intelligible to the audience for their intrinsic associations with a specific cultural context.
Ah Xian is undoubtedly fascinated with the symbolism of traditional Chinese motifs. Peonies, symbols of wealth, spring, and female beauty, are used by the artist to decorate female busts. The recurrent association of the dragon with busts of men evokes the tradition of associating the supernatural creature with the emperor of China (the son of heaven). The dragon is also a symbol of male characteristics such as vigor, fertility, vigilance, and safety. By analogy, the fenghuang or phoenix, the mythical bird most often associated with the empress of China, is utilized by Ah Xian for female busts.
And yet in Ah Xian’s work, the traditional motifs are not meant literally and didactically to dis- close to the Western public the meanings of symbols in Chinese mythology. For the viewer, being seduced by such a blend of ornamental design and human form, Chinese symbolism and Western mimesis, is being enticed into a semiotic interface between East and West, a place which is both
and neither of the two. It is this place where traditional Chinese decorative patterns are invested with the role of signifying Chineseness—for, after five hundred years of mercantilism and import/export of porce- lains, lacquers and textiles,29 they create in a Western audience immediate associations with China, in the same way the colours in the Chinese opera masks are immediately intelligible for a Chinese audience. As semiotic interface, the busts carry symbolic meaning directly, communicating to a Western audience the sense of a quintessen- tially Chinese culture through a quintessen- tially Chinese visual language, without fully disclosing its syntax of metaphors and Figure 14. Ah Xian, Human Human—Carved Lacquer Bust 1: Dragon, 2000-01, lacquer-carved relief on resin fiberglass with dragon design. iconography, i.e., the symbolic meanings. Photo: Ah Xian. Courtesy of the artist.
It is likely that Ah Xian’s sculptures reveal to a Chinese audience aspects of cultural alienness, which is intrinsic in the statues’ hybridity: “The artisans not only in Jingdezhen but wherever I went to, they were all surprised, not really interested but curious. Some of them even laughed at my idea and thought that I was crazy to do some useless thing. It was something too far from what they used to know and do.”30 Interestingly, the cultural hybridity of the busts is reflected in their blend of art and craft, tradition and contemporaneity. The opposition of art and craft, so strongly marked on a conceptual plane in the West, is less important—if not fictitious—when one comes in contact with the Oriental tradition. What from a Western perspective could be praised as mediation between art and craft indeed lacks persuasiveness, if not substance, when considered in the light of the Chinese “values” of craft perfection and timelessness.
In Ah Xian’s China China and Human Human series, meaning is not necessarily fully delivered and shared by the two cultures. However it seems to me that their beauty and power reside in the richness of associations the sculptures elicit and the cultural curiosity that their hybrid semiotic nature spawns. Such a curiosity—a natural intellectual movement towards something different, extraneous, or new—is the best result of the cultural mediation Ah Xian has been weaving, conscious, however, of the collective imagery and cultural fantasies reciprocally existing between East and West and of the fact that different audiences from different cultural contexts tend to read different significances.31
Ah Xian’s busts finally not only negotiate between individual and collective identities and articulate the binary relationship between China and West, but also express a broader contemporary global experience of hybridity, of a dialectic between “contact situations” and cultures of origin, of fusion and transformation in a postcolonial, post-communist, and rapidly interconnecting world.
Notes 1. Melissa Chiu, “Asian-Australian Artists: Recent Cultural Shifts in Australia,” paper presented at the apexart conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2001; see http://www.apexart.org/conference/Chiu.htm (accessed January 30, 2005). 2 Ibid. 3 The Chinese community in Australia is in itself diverse in origin. Many of its members were originally from the People's Republic of China, but others have emigrated to Australia from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Some have been in Australia for generations, others are new arrivals. 4 The campaign lasted from October 1983 to February 1984, attacking such social problems as crime, corruption, and pornography. See Christopher Hudson, The China Handbook: Regional Handbooks of Economic Development—Prospects onto the 21st Century (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997). 5 Ah Xian, e-mail message to the author, October 29, 2004. 6 Dana Devenport and Linda Jaivin, “Dualism and Solitary Journeys: An Interview with Ah Xian,” in Ah Xian (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2003), 22. 7 On April 16, 1989, people started gathering in Tiananmen Square after the death of Hu Yaobang the night before due to illness. Former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Hu Yaobang, was ousted in February 1987. Hu had been seen as a liberal and his ousting in response to student protests in 1987 was widely seen to be unfair. 8 The most famous types of porcelain from Jingdezhen are the blue-and-white porcelain, which has been produced since the Yuan dynasty (1280-1368), and the rice-patterned porcelain that was introduced in the Song dynasty (960-1279). 9 Our term “china” for porcelain or ceramic ware is a shortening of “chinaware” and, probably, “china dishes.” Although the word “china” is identical in spelling to the name of the country, there are 16th- and 17th-century spellings such as “chiney,” “cheny,” and “cheney” that reflect the borrowing into English of the Persian term for this porcelain, chn. The Persian word and the Sanskrit word cn, “Chinese people,” which gave us the English name for the country, go back to the Chinese word Qín, the name of the dynasty that ruled China from 221 to 206 B.C. See The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), entry “china.” 10 Dana Devenport and Linda Jaivin, “Dualism and Solitary Journeys,” 18. 11 Ibid., 22. 12 Claire Roberts, “Fishes and Dragons: Ah Xian's China China series,” Art AsiaPacific, no. 26 (2000): 55. 13 Both Rhana Devenport and Irene Levin employ the reference to death masks. See Rhana Devenport, “Ah Xian’s China: An Artistic Journey through a Lost Art-Form,” Object (2000), 50, and Irene Levin, “‘China China: Recent Works in Porcelain by Ah Xian,’ Powerhouse Museum, 14 March-16 September 2001,” Artwrite (2002), http://www.artwrite.cofa.unsw.edu.au/0122/IssuesatLarge/Levin_AhXian/Levin_China.html (accessed January 30, 2005). 14 Suhanya Raffel and Lynne Seear, “Human Human,” in Ah Xian (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2003), 12. 15 Ibid., 11. 16 From an interview, November 2000, as reported at the VCEART Web site: http://www.vceart.com/artists/xian/page.2.html (accessed January 30, 2005). 17 Rhana Devenport and Linda Jaivin, “Dualism and Solitary Journeys,” 18. 18 Ah Xian, e-mail message to the author, October 29, 2004: “The only predictable ‘problematic’ point would be that I will not be able to do ‘body cast’ in this way. However, the result will be great, I am sure. (Can you imagine a hollow-carved wooden figure full of decorative design? Incredible!! Whether [I] do it or not will only depend on my decision. There is no technique barrier.)” 19 Ben Divall, “Ah Xian: Circles in Time,” Craft Arts International no. 56 (2002-03). 20. Due to the different minerals added, cloisonné varies in colour. Usually one with much iron will turn gray; with uranium, yellow; with chromium, green; with bronze, blue; with zinc, white; with gold or iodine, red. 21 For a detailed description of the cloisonné process and a brief history of the technique, refer to Ian Were, “Revitalizing Tradition: Ah Xian’s Cloisonné, Jade, and Lacquer Figures,” in Ah Xian (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2003), 27-31. 22 John E. Vollmer, Five Colours of the Universe: Symbolism in Clothes and Fabrics of the Ch'ing Dynasty (1644-1911), (Edmonton: Edmonton Art Gallery, 1980). 23 A lacquer-coated bowl, 10.6 x 9.2 cm of opening diameter, 5.7 cm of height and 7.6-7.2 cm of bottom diameter, was dug out of Stratum III (dates back to 6,141 years ago on the average) in Hemudu, Yuyao, Zhejiang. Wood stuffed, it was ellipse shaped with a loop of support at the bottom. The external surface was coated with a layer of hues of red, adding luster to it as a whole. From www.ningbo.gov.cn (People’s Government of NingBo) (accessed January 5, 2005). 24 “I told them what they should write and to always keep a serious attitude when writing the texts even when my face turns to dark. My face followed the daylight till it slowly darkened. I cannot tell who I am. My identity has disappeared.” From the official Zhang Huan web site, http://www.zhanghuan.com/ZiJia.htm. 25 Ah Xian, “Self Exile of the Soul,” TAASA Journal: The Journal of the Asian Arts Society of Australia 8, no.1 (March 1999): 8-9. 26 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Il Ritratto,” in Il Volto, Il Ritratto, La Maschera, I Quaderni (Siena: Palazzo delle Papesse-Centro Arte Contemporanea, 2000). 27 Rhana Devenport and Linda Jaivin, “Dualism and Solitary Journeys,” 22. 28 For example, white suggests treacherousness, suspiciousness, and craftiness; red indicates devotion, courage, bravery, uprightness, and loyalty; and yellow signifies fierceness, ambition, and cool-headedness. Gold and silver colours are usually used for gods and spirits. 29 The beginning of modern Sino-European mercantile and political relationships can be dated back to the 1508 Diego Lopes de Siqueira's expedition, the first attempt by the Portuguese at trading with China, which was followed by the Portuguese settlement of Macao at the delta of Pearl River. The subtle thread that connects Europe to China dates back much further; Pliny the Younger (62-114) apparently “complained that the fashion for silk clothing among Roman nobles caused a constant drain of gold and silver bullion eastward along the famed Silk Road,” according to John E. Vollmer, in “A Chinese Universe of Textiles”, Clothed to Rule the Universe: Ming and Qing Dynasty Textiles at The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Studies 26, no. 2 (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2000). 30 Ah Xian, e-mail message to the author, January 3, 2005. 31 For some Australian reviewers, for example, the busts' decorations recall Maori facial tattooing and traditional scarification practiced by some aboriginal nations.
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I feel like a small seedling that has sprouted but has not yet emerged above the ground....When the seedling grows it must press the earth surrounding it and the earth must also press the seedling back. I feel that this is just like my relationship with my surroundings-a relationship of squeezing and pressing. – Yin Xiuzhen1
Constructed against the framework of her own experiences, Yin Xiuzhen’s installations Ruined City (1996), Peking Opera (2000), and the ongoing series Portable Cities each begin with and return to a distinctive notion of the city. Having lived her entire life in Beijing, Yin Xiuzhen has reacted to the massive changes in the city’s architecture and infrastructure from the mid-1990s onward, her work serving as an index of the evolving life of the city and the life of the artist, with each piece highlighting the intersection between the two. Since the late 1990s, her increased interactions with cities beyond Beijing have also motivated reconceptions of urban space and comparative studies of different locales. Her works not only reveal a constant shift in the perceived space of the city, but also speak to transformations of her own role in relation to her environment.
In her works, the independent identities of the “city” and the “individual” fluctuate as much as the relationship between the two. In fact, it is in Yin Xiuzhen’s works that we are made to realize that each has the potential to both displace itself and be displaced by the other. Applying as much to the site as to the self, this notion of displacement can be understood as the process of taking and/or the state of being out of context. For example, displacement in the humanitarian sense can refer to the forcible movement of persons within their own country. While Yin Xiuzhen explores this humanitarian definition of displacement as it is applied to Beijing, she also uses it as a point of departure for further examinations of the term itself. In particular, she interrogates the relation- ship between the city and the individual and the presupposition of the existence of an appropriate place for one inside the other.
In tracing the complex and divergent interpretations of the language of displacement present in her three installations, it is possible to outline the conditions of existence that led to the produc- tion of each work. Through the treatment of each installation as a separate event, a biographical reconstruction of Yin Xiuzhen’s life since 1996 can be pieced together. The resulting portrait, how- ever, is not a single narrative, not a simple monographic identity. Rather, a historicization of the language employed in each installation reveals that each event led to the emergence of a new and discrete identity. Through a study of how Yin Xiuzhen constructs her works, I intend to seek an understanding of how they can be used to construct and position the changing identities of the artist in relation to her living environment.
Yin Xiuzhen’s use of installation art as a spatial medium can be rooted first within the historical context of 1990s experimental art in China. While her studies in the fine arts earned her a degree in oil painting from Capital Normal University in 1989, her turn to installation art in 1994 marked the beginning of her explorations in modes of spatial representation. On the introduction of installation art into China, critic Yin Shuangxi has noted, “In the mid-1980s, young [Chinese] artists did not understand the concept, connotations, or origins of installation art. They did not employ the term ‘installation’ comprehensively even as they adopted it.”2 Although installation art
Figure 1. Yin Xiuzhen, Ruined City, 1996, installation of furniture and cement, Art Museum of Capital Normal University, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist. was initially used primarily for its anti-mainstream status, the mid-1990s saw a conscious turn away from collective efforts addressing reflections on and reconciliations with historical ideology.3 A new interest in examining the vast transformations within the present landscape emerged dur- ing this new era of experimentation that moved beyond indiscriminately adopting installation art as a mere tool. It is in this address of the contemporary that I will examine Yin Xiuzhen’s investi- gations of both representations of the city as a space and the space of the city itself.
Ranging from explorations of the city as her home to the notion of the “global city,”4 Yin Xiuzhen treats the city as a place that never ceases to shift and undergo transformation. In one respect, with the destruction and construction of an ever-changing cityscape, these shifts can be under- stood in the strictly physical sense. Functioning in the logic of measurable and rational space, this re-diagramming of the topology of a place is perhaps the most visually noticeable phenomenon affecting the city. But it is also the modification of spatial practices, the clearing away of traditional codes, and the introduction of a new logic within that are causing shifts in value systems as well as social, economic, and cultural frameworks. Transformations in the artist’s roles as both observer and participant in the spatial practices of the city can thus be traced according to her understanding of the city as a site of movement, dynamism, and a place for the ongoing dialectic between displacement and placement.
This essay is organized around three installations—Ruined City, Peking Opera, and Portable Cities. However, this chronological ordering is not meant to render the works as phases in a linear trajectory of a historical narrative. Rather, as the evidence will indicate, the process of making visible the artist's identities and experiences within the city reveals quite the opposite. It is precisely the complexities and, at times, contradictory notions of the city that defy a simple linear path for understanding the artist and her imagined cities. It is the unstable identity of the artist, as constructed by her equally volatile environment, that gains our attention as viewers and readers.
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Sometimes when I would ride my bike to work I would hear a sound, look around to see a house fall down. Everywhere you looked you could see the character chai (tear down) written on buildings. Sometimes you would go out in the morning and see the character on a house, and come back in the evening to find the house already gone. – Yin Xiuzhen5
Exhibited in 1996, Ruined City was created in response to Yin Xiuzhen's negotiations with and internalization of the specific living conditions in Beijing at that time. The overall structure, individual elements, and material components of the piece all speak to a language of displacement as seen through a lens of ruin, as suggested in the title.
This installation originally occupied its own three-hundred-square-metre exhibition hall within the Art Museum of the Chinese Normal University in Beijing (fig. 1). The focus of the installation is an expanse of grey roof tiles that stretches diagonally from one corner of the room to the other. Each ceramic tile, rectangular and slightly curved, measures 22 x 25 cm. Arranged in an orderly manner, the ceramic tiles are placed side-by-side into neatly formed rows that increase in length as the mass of tiles reaches the opposite corner. Consisting of 1,400 ceramic tiles, the tile formation widens and leads to a heavy bed frame (fig. 2). The bed itself is covered haphazardly by a sizeable mound of cement powder, with the same material sprinkled beneath. The tiles surrounding the bed are sparsely dispersed and appear arbitrarily scattered in contrast to the dense weave of tiles at the other end.
At the center of this expanse of tiles is a set of four wooden chairs. As a collection, the identical chairs have been placed evenly, side-by-side, to echo the repetition and rhythm of the neighbouring tiles. The four chairs appear solid and fixed in a horizontal row. A small mountain of cement powder on each seat further accentuates the weighty nature of each chair and simultaneously denies their function as a means of providing respite. Refuting the notion of social engagement, the chairs all face the corner of the room, where the path of tiles tapers off towards the wall.
The room is divided into three large sections with six islands of individual furniture pieces dispersed evenly throughout. On the left of the tile formation are a wire stand with a wash basin
Yin Xiuzhen, Ruined City, 1996, installation of furniture and cement, Art Museum of Capital Normal University, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.
and a vanity with a mirror. The aforementioned bed lies among the tiles, while a chair, an armoire, and a table are to the right. Although they are all oriented towards the interior of the room, there is no sense of engagement among them. With each sitting in its own pile of cement powder and discrete space, they are unified only by a shared sense of isolation. The overall static feeling is reinforced by the combination of heavy, inert objects with a definitive division of the space by the mass of tiles.
As objects, the furniture and tiles in this installation can be classified into two categories: found objects and personal objects. The category “found object” refers to the manner in which the objects were procured. In the work, these include the roof tiles and all of the furniture items with the exception of the central set of chairs. The action of finding invokes a sense of discovery and exposure, but implicit in the acquisition of the found object are the attendant notions of salvaging and collection for the purpose of either reuse or archiving. The very idea that the object is found brings to light the conditions surrounding its process of appropriation. Significantly, the artist procured all of the pieces of found object furniture in alleyways near her home. Neighbours had discarded these items in favour of newer models.
The personal objects in the exhibition include the set of four chairs in the center, which were among the first possessions that Yin Xiuzhen and her husband and fellow artist, Song Dong, owned after they were married.6 The placement of the artist's own set of chairs at the center of the installation addresses what is at stake for her. Through the deliberate removal of possessions from her own home, the placement of them in the gallery, and the treatment of them in the same manner as the found objects, she is also taking part in processes of disposal and abandonment.
The practices of recovering found objects and forsaking personal possessions suggest an ongoing dialectic between displacement and placement. Displacement, the act of taking something out of context, removing or even banishing something from a place, occurs on two levels here. The first is the displacement of the object—whether it be a tile or an item of furniture-from the original residence from which it came. The second act of displacement is carried out by the artist who retrieves the object from its site of abandonment and gives it a place in the exhibition hall. Displacement suggests a sense of instability, while its opposite, placement, implies a feeling of rootedness. Placement can be understood as the positioning of a thing into an appropriate and suitable context. The original context of displacement of these objects and the artist’s placement of them into a new locale suggests that these are objects representing two sides of the same coin. The rescuing and rearrangement of found roof tiles into what one scholar has argued to be an aerial view of courtyard houses, seems to suggest a nostalgic reminder of the thing’s original purpose.7 At the same time, however, the purpose for a roof collapses when it lies futilely on the ground. Yin Xiuzhen’s interrogation of this binary opposition in her installation opens up questions about the terms by which placement is established and the means by which it can be eradicated.
Embedded within these processes of displacement is an emphasis on fragmentation. As displaced objects, the roof tiles and furniture pieces represent fragments of the context from which they were taken. The roof tiles once served as external architectural fixtures, while the different pieces of furniture once occupied the interior of a house. Together, they allude to residences and families. In particular, roof tiles derive their functionality from their ability to provide shelter. Similarly, a furnished house is one that suggests stability and permanence. Roof tiles lying on the ground and furniture covered with piles of cement powder not only point towards their state of disrepair and decay, but, more immediately, to their disuse. Moreover, in the case of the found object furniture, these items were discarded because the owners replaced them with newer, recently purchased pieces. These two models of disuse, one enforced, the other voluntary, are both instigated by a desire for the new.
Indeed, the most significant force influencing the materialization of this language was the city’s large-scale urban renewal project, which displaced numerous families and left the rubble of their destroyed residences in its wake. In 1990, the Old and Dilapidated Housing Renewal Program was implemented under the auspices of the Beijing municipal government. Ostensibly, the objective was to better the living standards of those inhabiting the run-down residential housing. The con- centration of dilapidated houses fell within the 62 square kilometres of the old city of Beijing. The traditional architectural layout of the Old City consisted of blocks of siheyuan,or courtyard hous- es, divided by a network of narrow alleys called hutong.Until 1989, about 30% of the land was occupied by traditional buildings, including courtyard houses, which totalled about eleven million square metres and housed some 1.2 million people.8 Of the families that were displaced, most would be required to resettle in suburban dwellings. Although the new housing on the city’s periphery was often larger and equipped with more modern conveniences, this process of dis- placement had severe social implications. The tearing down of houses is more than a physical act of destruction; it affects the homes and families within. Yin Xiuzhen collected all of the roof tiles for Ruined City from demolition sites near her home. Her scattering of these tiles and aging furni- ture in the exhibition alludes to the torn social fabric of contemporary Beijing.
The swiftness and scale of this program of physical restructuring created an urgency for transfor- mation, and, subsequently, disruption within the artist’s own neighbourhood. After her marriage, she moved into a siheyuan.As residents of a courtyard house, she and her husband were also at risk of having their home torn down and being displaced themselves. Given the risk of being uprooted as a result of these transformations, it was only natural for her to question what would become of her life in the midst of these destructive activities.
The artist’s incorporation of cement powder as a unifying element in the installation is integral to her language of destruction. The presence of cement powder in her everyday environment, in its use as a common material for new construction, implied the inevitable destruction that would ensue. The transformative quality of the cement powder itself refers to this process of destruction. Hydration, the chemical reaction that takes place between cement powder and water, occurs as soon as the two make contact. Even the piles of cement powder in the exhibit will undergo this exothermic reaction as the moisture in the air starts to set. When the surface hardens, it becomes as hard as stone. Impossible to reverse, the cement has become concrete. There is irony in that, though it may resemble the dust left by time, it cannot be wiped away so that one can revive what is beneath.
This slow, silent process of obliteration instills a very particular view of the city. We see the conditions of her existence in the numerous forms of destruction that she has presented in her installation. This soundless destruction points not so much to the extreme violence of demolition as it occurs in her physical environment, but to the silent, insidious violence done to the social environment. The slow paving over of displaced remnants and fragmented traces of life indeed shows a city in ruins. The artist’s own role here is as an inhabitant of a city undergoing hyper- modernization and, subsequently, as a resident within a neighbourhood undergoing demolition. She is both an observer and a victim within her ruined city.
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Nobody can avoid life. Life is no more than self experience. – Yin Xiuzhen9
Figure 3. Yin Xiuzhen, Peking Opera, 2001, print on silk, 145 x 210 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
From 1996 to 2000, Beijing saw vast changes, both from the outside in and the inside out, most notably through the rapid expansion of transnational corporations, a remapping of its physical terrain, and the continuation of capitalist-inspired economic reforms. Created in 2000, Peking Opera can be understood as a materialization of the artist's response to the changes in the city during a time of movement and transition.
First exhibited in 2000, Peking Opera was shown at several different international venues. Two particular incarnations of the work will be examined here: the first is Fuori Uso 2000, The Bridges, which took place in Pescara, Italy. The second is Living in Time,which took place in the Hamburger Bahnhof Contemporary Art Museum in Berlin, Germany, in 2001. The treatment of each exhibition as a separate event leading to its own construction reveals the artist's own rethinking of her vision and conception of this work in relation to its changing location.
Peking Opera consists of three basic materials: life-size colour photographs, small wooden stools, and sound recordings. Fuori Uso 2000 included three life-size photographs. While Living in Time expanded upon these images, I will first focus on the original three.
The first of these three photographs (fig. 3) attends to a group of elderly people performing Peking opera music in public spaces in the Houhai district of Beijing. In the foreground, a man is singing and standing with arms theatrically outstretched. Meanwhile, accompanying him on traditional Chinese instruments are two men seated on small stools and one man squatting on the curb. Six men can be seen standing or sitting in the background, openly watching and enjoying the performance.
The second photograph (fig. 4) portrays two men, one facing us and the other with his back to us, playing Chinese chess in a hutong.In this narrow alley, bordered by courtyard houses, the two men have set their chessboard onto a simple wooden table. Seated on small stools, pushed all the way to the right hand side of the alley, they intently play their game while a bicyclist exits in the background.
The third photograph (fig. 5) focuses on a group of people gathered around a table. The group clusters in the center of the middle ground of the photograph, each member visible either in
profile or with his back to us. The numerous circular cages hanging from the trees in the foreground refer to a leisure activity, common among the elderly, called liu niao.Early in the morning, individuals bring their birds in cages into parks or small streets, hang the cages in Figure 4. Yin Xiuzhen, Peking Opera installation view, 2000, including photographs, the trees, and then sit and chat. stools, and sound recordings. Fuori Uso 2000, Pescara, Italy. Courtesy of the artist.
As a set of three, the photographs capture elderly Beijingers in the midst of daily activities. These ordinary scenes from their lives offer an intimate view of one pocket of the Beijing community. It is critical to note that the focus of each of these photographs, in content and positioning, is a grouping of individuals. In the first image, there is both a central music group and a scattering of peripheral bystanders. In the second photograph, two men are absorbed in a game. And in the third photograph, a tightly knit group is gathered in the middle of the image. These different forms of interaction are brought together by their status as everyday activity. Each individual’s inward-looking stance, close proximity to another individual, and thorough absorption in the activity at hand, serves to magnify a sense of intimacy and interaction.
Accompanying this language of interaction is the notion of engagement, understood as a sustained connection to both people and place. Indeed, the figures are all engaged with each other through a shared activity. Underscoring their interactions, however, is also their apparent fixity to their location. In the first photograph, seated musicians play instruments while the central singer, with Figure 5. Yin Xiuzhen, Peking Opera installation view, 2000, including photographs, gestures deliberate and timed, enacts a stools, and sound recordings. Fuori Uso 2000, Pescara, Italy. Courtesy of the artist. performance to the accompaniment. In the second image, we see a game of thought and strategy as it is being carried out; the pair’s concentration on the activity at hand captures a stillness that is emphasized when placed in contrast with the bicyclist speeding out of the picture plane. And in the final photograph, an informal gathering shows no indication of dispersion. Here, we are shown the dynamics between performing an activity with others and being at rest.
The critical feature in each photograph that activates and epitomizes this dynamic is seatedness. In each image, the seats ground people to their location. The seats themselves reassure us that these people are rooted and engaged, rather than itinerant and rushed. This notion of seatedness is most readily apparent in the artist’s inclusion of small stools in the exhibition. The acts of simultaneously being seated and being active are manifested in this physically interactive element of the installation. The artist’s incorporation of wooden stools refers both to the activities being carried out in the images and to the viewer’s awareness of her own role as participant and observer. Most of the stools stand no more than a foot off the ground and, as pieces of traditional Beijing furniture, they represent pieces of the everyday.
The sound element, which consists of recordings of elderly people performing Peking opera in the park, further enhances this sense of interaction. Through the visual and the aural, the visitor
is given the opportunity to involve herself in the installation. Particularly in reference to the first image, the act of sitting, watching, and listening to the scene presented seems to be an attempt, on the artist’s part, at recreating a particular experience. In fact, this language of engagement and interaction, as displayed in the actual images and between the image and the viewer, speaks directly to the artist’s own experiences in Beijing.
While the artist, herself, does not fit into the demographic of elderly people, their inclusion in her living environment afforded her the opportunity to observe their activities and lifestyles. Her documentation of elderly people addresses issues that confront this particular segment of the population. The urban renewal projects detailed in Ruined City saw the displacement of entire families, including the relocation of elderly family members who often faced particular difficultly in adjusting to life away from the siheyuan and hutong network. With the removal of their social infrastructure, elderly people needed to adapt physically and psychologically to a quickly changing environment. The artist's capturing of their daily activities suggests the continuity of place that exists despite initiatives towards displacement.
In contrast to Ruined City,displacement in Peking Opera does not lead directly to disuse and decay. Rather, we find evidence of the survival of habitual activities. These habits are part of a slower pace of life, one based on themes of community and leisure, and seemingly at odds with the high-speed, mobile, and commercially driven lifestyle promoted by the global city. Yet, the elderly have managed to find their own place even within this newly modernized Beijing. The artist’s language of engagement and interaction reinforces these notions of placement, rootedness, and survival. The incorporation of stools into the exhibit is an attempt to further provide ground- ing and placement for the viewer to observe this process. Seen in contrast to the set of four chairs in Ruined City, the stools here are inviting, accessible, and functional. They speak to the continual use and reuse of objects, the placement of such objects into a specific environment, and a deliber- ate purpose for doing so. In contrast to the complete destruction and displacement of life as dis- played in Ruined City, Peking Opera invites, incorporates, and depicts the continuity of the living.
As viewers, we are made to identify with the artist’s position as a witness to the survival of tradi- tional narratives of Beijing, as represented by both the elderly and the local traditions they carry on. In Ruined City,we saw the artist as a potential victim of programs of displacement. The signif- icance of Peking Opera extends beyond a concern for the elderly in Beijing to a concern for the continuity of all local traditions, practices, and memories.
The artist interrogates the effects of globalization on local communities. Fredric Jameson points to two opposing, though interrelated, interpretations of this globalization:
If you insist on the cultural contents of this new communicational form [i.e., globalization], I think you will slowly emerge into a postmodern celebration of difference and differentiation...[as well as] a falling away of those structures that condemned whole segments of the population to silence and to subalternity....If,on the other hand, your thoughts turn economic ...[then] globalization is a picture of standardization on an unparalleled new scale; of forced integration as well, into a world-system from which “delinking” ...is henceforth impossible and even unthinkable and inconceivable.10
In examining the incongruity between globalization’s instigation of plurality versus standardized universality, it is possible to uncover the conditions and terms surrounding the artist’s questioning of these different interpretations of globalization and its implications for notions of displacement.
Yin Xiuzhen’s interrogation of the city as the site of contestation for a global/local duality can be seen in Peking Opera when we consider each incarnation of it within its particular site of installation. The installation of the work in foreign cities demonstrates a further questioning of the survival of the local when moved into the global. While the materials and content of
Peking Opera address the persistence of Figure 6. Yin Xiuzhen, Peking Opera installation view, 2000, including photographs, stools, and sound recordings. Fuori Uso 2000, Pescara, Italy. Courtesy of the artist. tradition when faced with the entry of global forces into China’s borders, the installation of the piece in a foreign city takes this represen- tation of the local and deliberately places, or rather displaces, it into that city. The artist’s emphasis on interaction and engagement must be analyzed with careful consideration of the location of the installation, its physical composition within the site, and the audience of each exhibition. As demonstrated by the two distinct installations of the work considered here, these factors all have direct implications on the artist’s articulation of displacement and placement, and, in turn, notions of exclusivity and inclusivity.
Fuori Uso 2000 took place beneath highway bridges in Pescara, Italy (fig. 6). Fuori uso, meaning “out of use,”refers to the exhibit's annual theme of choosing a place in Pescara that can be temporarily converted into an exhibition space. The installation of Peking Opera into such a transformed space reinforced this very question of the survival and loss of the activities that come to occupy a location. Figure 7. Yin Xiuzhen, Peking Opera installation view, 2001, including photo Installed under the highway, each element wallpaper, stools, and sound recordings. Living in Time, Berlin. Courtesy of the artist. of the piece—the photographs, stools, and audio recording—appeared extremely out of place. Against a backdrop of large concrete structural supports, metal fences, and tall buildings, the stools appeared disproportionately small and awkward. The recording of Peking opera sung in a park clashed against the ambient noise of activity beneath the bridge. Placed in this surrounding urban environment, the slow pace of life pictured in Yin Xiuzhen's images was made even more palpable.
The bright white border surrounding each photograph further served as a visual barrier between the space within the image and the place in which the image was installed. The white border as a framing device placed the image within its own discrete space while emphasizing its two-dimensionality. Its denial of any real sense of interactivity distanced the viewer from the subject matter and emphasized the difference between the represented image and the environment in which it was presented.
For the 2001 Berlin exhibit, Living in Time, the work was installed in its own gallery within the museum rather than in an outdoor, urban space. Again, small stools were placed in front of images of the elderly in Beijing engaged in quotidian activities, while a sound recording played in the background. This time, however, the large photographs were replaced with wallpaper images
Figure 8. Yin Xiuzhen, Portable City—Beijing, 2001, installation. Courtesy of the artist.
(fig. 7). Through this entire visual and aural immersion, the viewer was encouraged to pause and enter the scene. The compositional design of each image, placed within the installation space, communicated the work’s language of interaction and engagement. In each case, the ground portrayed in the picture plane appeared not only unobstructed, but also altogether inviting. While the previous installation saw the solid white border as the line of demarcation, the erasure of that line here attempted to blur the idea of discrete spaces. Regardless of whether it is the viewer entering the photograph’s space or the photograph spilling into the viewer's space, the composition speaks to a notion of crossing boundaries.
This institutional venue allowed the artist to remove the distracting noises and visual diversions that were present in Fuori Uso 2000.These two distinctive installation sites provided an opportunity for the artist to investigate variations in the conveyance and reception of local traditions. Initially confronted with these questions of displacement in her own home city, the artist took her documentation of these local narratives abroad to examine how they would fare when doubly displaced in a foreign environment. Through her experimentations with and explorations of installation sites, we see her own rethinking of how local traditions can be translated and transmitted across borders.
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When I began this series, I was constantly traveling. I saw the baggage conveyer at the baggage claim every time I traveled. Many people waited there. I was one of them. Since I always traveled with a huge suitcase, it felt like I was traveling with my home. – Yin Xiuzhen11
Figure 9. Yin Xiuzhen, Portable City—Shanghai, 2002, installation. Courtesy of the artist.
In 2001, Yin Xiuzhen began a new series entitled Portable Cities.In addition to the construction of an identity based solely on the conditions of existence in Beijing, the series also includes the artist's first attempts at visually representing foreign cities. In 2002, one year after the making of Portable City—Beijing (fig. 8), she created Portable City—Shanghai (fig. 9) and Portable City— Berlin (fig. 10). The series is ongoing, and the artist has since added thirteen cities, ranging from Lhasa to Vancouver. The thread that connects all of these apparently disparate places is the artist’s personal connections with each location, whether as an inhabitant, temporary resident, or tourist. Located within the conceptual framework of the global city, this series examines the artist’s self- positioning as both an insider and an outsider. By endowing each piece with the potential for portability, she raises a question of whether a thing is perpetually in or out of place, thereby prob- lematizing the very notion of displacement.
An investigation of both disparate and unifying elements in the first three portable cities, Beijing, Shanghai, and Berlin, will evidence how the artist distinguishes between representations of the cities according to varying levels of familiarity with them. Situated against the historical backdrop of time, these notions of sameness and difference in urban spaces speak to the shifting relationship between the city and the individual in the face of globalization.
Portable City—Beijing,which takes a suitcase as its physical framework, measures 30.5 x 91.4 x 61 cm. Within the interior, a ring of little colourful cloth buildings and a television tower line the perimeter of the suitcase. A light green shirt has been stretched out across the interior to create a surface on which the cloth buildings have been sewn. The space within the frame of buildings is bare except near the center where the green base has been stretched into a circular opening. Within this hole, the artist has affixed a macro lens through which one can see a map of Beijing lining the bottom of the suitcase. Along the bottom of the suitcase, beneath the stretched green base, she has installed a light and a set of speakers. Emanating from the speakers is a sound record- ing of noises from Shichahai, the public district just north of Beihai Park. In addition to the noises of people chatting, one can also hear elderly Beijingers performing Peking opera.
Constructed and exhibited in 2001, Portable City—Beijing ostensibly served as the template for subsequent works in the series. However, given Beijing’s position as her home, Yin Xiuzhen’s perception of this place is markedly different from that of the other cities. The four essential recurring elements of these works are the suitcase, the map, the clothing, and the sound recording. While the three installations appear visually uniform in their inclusion of these materials, each installation’s particular use and synthesis of these common materials reveals divergent interpretations of the city based on the artist’s own relationship with the represented place.
It is striking that when looking at Portable City—Beijing, the viewer cannot discern any distinctive features in this constructed cityscape that speak to its identity as Figure 10. Yin Xiuzhen, Portable City—Berlin, 2002, installation. Courtesy of the artist. Beijing. It is only by peering through the magnifying lens that one can receive any real confirmation of the city’s identity. Simultaneously concealed and magnified, the map at the base of the suitcase seems to anticipate the viewer’s deference to the objective interpretation of a diagrammed place as an authoritative tool. The map here offers a particular interpretation of the city as a space rendered through lines, landmarks, and text. It is the city as a diagram, reduced to its most technical, mathematical, and geometric terms. A testament to the results of urban planning, the map is a powerful instrument used to record the supposed spatial and geographic order of a place.
This static and stringent two-dimensional representation of the city serves as a base for the three- dimensional cityscape of buildings above. Rather than adopting the map's method of reporting recognizable features of Beijing’s geography, the line of anonymous, simplified structures denies the notion of a simulacral representation. Each cloth building is a small, colourful rectangular block devoid of distinguishing characteristics. The composition of these buildings, which follows the contour of the suitcase, also lacks any sense of specificity. This is not a place one could point to on a map, nor one that anyone other than the artist herself could identify with certainty as being Beijing. It is the artist’s own familiarity with Beijing that shapes her imagination of the place. While these buildings remain anonymous to the viewer, to the artist they mark an intimacy that extends beyond the need for mapped sites.
In contrast to this seemingly anonymous rendering of Beijing, Portable City—Shanghai and Portable City—Berlin each display recognizable features. Portable City—Shanghai, measuring 129.5 x 80 x 40 cm, has a blue-green shirt stretched across its surface. The back cover of the suit- case, covered with a piece of red cloth, is decorated with a circle of lights. A pair of nylon stockings have been stretched from the left side of the back cover to the front right corner of the suitcase. The legs of the stockings form two parallel curves, which swoop diagonally over the surface and
divide the blue fabric base into two triangular regions. While the front, lower left triangular region remains bare, small rectangular cloth buildings and a television tower are clustered in the back, right-hand corner of the suitcase. Again, a magnifying lens has been set into a central circular opening through which one can see a map, this time of Shanghai. A light and a set of speakers have also been placed in the bottom of the suitcase. The light can be seen shining through the blue cloth, while a recording of the Shanghai soundscape is emitted from the work.
Portable City—Berlin, also 129.5 x 80 x 40 cm, uses a brown-and-orange-striped shirt as the cloth surface on which are attached the cluster of buildings. Most of the buildings are centered towards the back of the suitcase, while some, including a television tower, are placed on the interior of the suitcase cover. Architectural features such as columns and pediments can be detected on two of the buildings. Two sleeves extend parallel out of the front of the suitcase, onto which the artist has sewn four small, cloth rectangular vehicles. The circular opening with a magnifying loupe is also included in this work, through which one can see a Berlin map illuminated by a light bulb. Again, an audio recording of sounds from the city plays from the bottom of the suitcase.
Prominent architectural features of both cityscapes feature significantly in the artist’s two renderings. Her depiction of Shanghai, for example, is anchored by the presence of the Oriental Pearl Television tower. Similarly, the Fernsehturm, Berlin’s television tower, looms large on the city’s horizon. The detail of the architectural structures in the image of Berlin stands in sharp contrast to the anonymity of Beijing’s buildings in Portable City—Beijing.Brandenburg Gate, for example, is easily identifiable in the artist’s rendition of Berlin. This movement away from the anonymous cityscape can be explained by the artist's own rapport with and understanding of each place.
Through Portable City—Beijing, the conditions of existence are understood as affecting the artist as an inhabitant experiencing and observing the everyday changes occurring within her home. Her relationships with Shanghai and Berlin, meanwhile, are far less intimate. While she did spend one year abroad in a residency in Berlin, from 1999-2000, a sense of identification with the city is not evident in her depiction of it. The display of recognizable attractions and renowned sites conveys the understanding of place of a sightseer. It is the identification with the tourist-oriented sites, rather than the intimate knowledge of its daily practices, that marks the artist’s role as a visitor. These two separate identities, as insider and outsider, account for the differences in perception and construction of the cities.
Portable City—Beijing includes both visual and non-visual references to the city as a lived space. For this work, the artist collected old clothing from her own wardrobe and her family to build the structures and base within her city. Once personal possessions, each item of clothing retains a peculiar sentimental significance. These items have their own stories in how they were procured, the occasions for which they were worn, and the value that they had for the wearer. For the rendition of Beijing, the artist’s inclusion of her own clothing speaks to the place as her home. For the other works in the series, the artist collected used clothing from the residents of the represented place. The actual integration of residents’ old belongings lends each separate installation its own significance as a work possessing the remnants of that place's living memories and experiences.
Adding to this notion of the city as a social space of activity, the audio recording in this installation broadcasts voices and noises that occupy the represented place. While the audio component of Peking Opera was used to help recreate the experience of actually being in a space, the acoustic element of Portable Cities serves more as an allusion to such an experience. For example, the
sounds of the Beijing park remind the viewer that this place is a home to its inhabitants. In partic- ular, the inclusion of the sounds of Peking Opera in the park speaks to the continuity of tradition.
In her construction of the different portable cities, from the perspective of either the resident or the tourist, the artist interrogates the city as a site of contestation, especially of the binary opposition between the global and the local. In her standardization of the same basic physical structure of the different portable cities, she questions the gradual uniformity of all global cities. Perhaps the most telling example of this returns to the repetition of the television tower motif. Evidence of the growth of high-speed communication and mass media, the television tower has become a ubiquitous element of the global city. Dissolving boundaries through broadcasts, the television tower seems to be the fundamental sign for the technically based, high-speed, boundary-free interpretation of space and practice.
It is this notion of crossing borders that speaks most directly to the rise of tourist culture and the artist's place within it. Rather than being rooted to one place, accessibility to the world has allowed the individual to move freely throughout. Implicit in this mobility, however, is also a sense of root- lessness. The artist’s representations of Shanghai and Berlin both reify this notion of the tourist as displaced individual. The artist’s employment of a recognizable cityscape emphasizes the map beneath, which provides an authoritative tool for determining one’s place within the terrain. In its identification of “you are here,”the map serves as a tool for placement. The language of placement here is ironic, however, given the traveler’s implicit displacement within a foreign environment.
These references to mobility and displacement apply just as much to the place as to the person in the age of globalization. This is demonstrated by the artist’s use of the suitcase as the framework for each piece. Maintaining its original function, the suitcase can be shut, sealed, and transported with all of its contents intact. By representing the city as a packageable and mobile entity, the artist has not only stripped it of its rootedness, but has also effectively conferred it with the ability to cross borders and boundaries. In its mobility, the movement of the city from one place to another suggests a constant displacement of place.
The continued transformation of Beijing into a global city certainly contributed to the artist’s interrogation of the effects of globalization. But it was also the artist’s own travels outside of her home that served as the source of many of these questions about the sameness and difference of place. While changes in Beijing seemed to signify a movement towards the displacement of its inhabitants, when travelling abroad, the artist was again made to question her position as an individual out of context. Unable to avoid questions of displacement within an increasingly mobile world, the artist's self-positioning moves constantly into, out of, and between cities.
Through examinations of these three works by Yin Xiuzhen, I have reviewed a series of events that shaped the artist’s life from 1996 onwards. These works, all created in response to the conditions underscoring and controlling her living environment, reflect constant change in the artist’s conception of herself. As evidenced by additions to her Portable Cities series, her concern with the relationship between the individual and the city has continued to shape her life and her work. Initially, as reflections upon the volatility and transformation within the city itself, her own definitions of the city have altered as she has repositioned herself with regard to changing perceptions of place.
Since 1996, she has continually encountered the effects of displacement, particularly through the lens of globalization, which has become an increasingly influential force in her environment. In 1996, the notion of the global city appeared on her horizon as a threat to entire communities, including the danger of displacement in her own. Her construction of Ruined City saw these initiatives towards “renewal” as catalysts for destruction and loss. A persistent concern for the possible loss of local tradition, as brought about by Beijing’s drive towards hyper-modernization, led the artist to examine the conditions of displacement and the possibilities for survival in these circumstances. In Peking Opera,her juxtaposition of surviving local traditions with foreign sites helped her to realize her own role as an artist with international renown capable of communicating the concerns of a local Beijinger. Her travels to other global cities have led to a questioning of the possession, occupation, and connection that people have to places.
Each of her installations begins with and returns to her concern for Beijing. Its changes in physical appearance, social fabric, and local traditions all evidence its transformation into a global city. In accordance with the growing power of global forces, Yin Xiuzhen has also experienced great changes in her own identity. While she began as someone who necessarily saw the city solely from the inside, she has since been able to gain an outsider's perspective.
The opening up of the artist’s own world through effects of globalization should not be overlooked. Audience participation and involvement in Yin Xiuzhen’s works has also been facilitated through global channels. Through such means as the distribution of materials, digital media, international exhibitions, and travelling exhibitions, the artist has been able to communicate her recreations of local experiences, questionings of global forces, and continual studies of sameness and difference. Understood in post-industrial terms, exhibitions of her work represent occasions for information exchange. This possibility for greater diversity and plurality through the uncovering of more voices and languages represents another facet of globalization. Not only have her works opened up the very nature of the city as a site of contestation, she herself represents the complexities inherent in an understanding of globalization and its effects on the individual. Ultimately, it is the emergence of the diversity of Yin Xiuzhen's identities that speaks most clearly to the contradictory negotiations of displacement between the local and the global.
Notes 1 Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 1999), 125. 2 Yin Shuangxi, “The Periphery and Cultural Concerns: Making and Exhibiting Installation and Experimental Sculpture in the 1990s,” in Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000) (Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2002), 67. 3 For more on this turn to addressing the “contemporary” in the 1990s, see Wu Hung, “Introduction: A Decade of Chinese Experimental Art (1990-2000) in Reinterpretation, 10-19. 4 The term “global city” here refers to the interpretation put forth by Saskia Sassen in Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: The New Press, 1998), which suggests the city as a strategic site for the “new politics made possible by globalization in a detailed understanding of the economics of globalization, and specifically in the centrality of place against a rhetorical and policy context where place is seen as neutralized by global communications and the hypermobility of capital.” (21) 5 Ai Weiwei, ed., Chinese Artists, Texts and Interviews: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) 1998-2002 (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2002), 130-31. 6 Wu Hung, Transience, 123. 7 Lin Xiaoping, “Beijing: Yin Xiuzhen's The Ruined City,” Third Text 48 (Autumn 1999): 46. 8 Zheng Lian, “Housing Renewal in Beijing-Observation and Analysis” master’s thesis, McGill University, 1995, http://www.mchg.mcgill.ca/mchg/lia/lianch3.htm (accessed September 27, 2004). 9 Half of the Sky: Contemporary Chinese Women Artists (Bonn: Frauen Museum, 1998), 70. 10 Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 56-57. 11 Christophe W. Mao, ed., Chopsticks (New York: Chambers Fine Art, 2002), 70.
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Exhibition view of Art Gallery of Allen R. Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville, Kentucky. Courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
The recorded history of Taiwan covers about four hundred years. The country’s background is singular: it carries thousands of years of Chinese heritage, as well as a Japanese legacy, and, more recently, European and American influences. As a result, Taiwanese art and culture show the pioneering spirit of a marine civilization, yet Taiwan also possesses the depth and conservatism of a continental civilization. This conflict has created a bipolar extremism for Taiwanese art. Taiwan eagerly attempts to keep in touch with international developments while simultaneously maintaining its opposition to assimilation.
The advancement of transportation and information systems has made the global village a reality. Consequently, establishing a sense of cultural identity must be either a conscious or subconscious choice, and the vitality and tension characteristic of Taiwanese artists are expressed in these multicultural choices. Thus, the phrase “place and displace” evokes the dual nature of Taiwanese art, its perseverance and changeability. These co-exist, and this is the uniqueness of Taiwanese art.
Twenty-four Taiwanese artists are presented in Place and Displace: Three Generations of Taiwanese Art.Their artworks, which include calligraphy, ink painting, color-glue painting, oil painting, installation, and video, provide an opportunity to review Taiwan’s art history. The most senior artist represented is more than ninety years old, while the youngest is only in his twenties.
Exhibition view of Art Gallery of Allen R. Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville, Kentucky. Courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
: ⁄ , , Taiwanese artists cannot help being influenced by Taiwan’s history. The postcolonial arts of the third world experienced similar cultural burdens, but, for them, the dichotomy of colonizer and colonized is comprehended differently. Taiwan inherited a legacy that has been internalized and that is difficult to cleanly sever. Psychological hesitation lingers, and for Taiwanese artists, establishing an identity is an especially difficult task. This difficulty brings out reflection and diversity that are simultaneously positive and negative.
High resolution to come
Chen Houei-Kuen, Kuanyinshan, Eastern gouache, 1965. Courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
In art history, there is no consensus on what defines a generation. Twenty or thirty years could constitute a generation. Yet three or five years difference can create a generation gap. High resolution to Twenty-four artists are included in this come exhibition, and the subtitle Three Generations suggests we take more time to observe and interpret cultural phenomena and to acknowledge changes that have taken place Y. J. Cho, 20022, oil on canvas, 2002. in Taiwanese art. Courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
The first generation of post-World War II artists, such as Liao Chi-Chun (1902-1976), Li Mei-Shu (1902-1983),Yang San-Lang High resolution to (1907-1995), Chen Chin (1907-1998), Lee come Shih-Chiao (1908-1995), and Hung Jui-Lin (1912-1996) have already passed away. Their humanist reflections were illustrated in their life drawingsofscenic spots and people’s daily lives. They experienced the cultural impact Lin Shu-Min, Transmigration II, video. Courtesy of the National Taiwan of both pre-war Japan and post-war China. Museum of Fine Arts. Regardless of their chosen medium, their artwork during the period of martial law was different from that of the recently arrived mainland artists, who drew upon their recollection of the mother country. The first generation’s topics were centered instead on Taiwan itself.
Chen Chieh-Jen, A Way Going to an Insane City, computer-aided printout, 1999. Courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
Liao Shiou-Ping, Seasonal Chat, mixed media, 1996. Courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
High resolution to come
Ni Tsai-Chin, Ni's Fable: Which One Enjoys Most?, ink on paper, 1992–93. Courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
Generally speaking, the first generation searched for its identity within a restricted environment. As a result, whether intentionally or unintentionally, they grasped an abstract Taiwanese humanist sensibility. This humanism became a refuge that protected them from the instability of political upheavals, and they appeared to be diligently quiet artists.
Most second-generation artists were born between the 1930s and 1950s. Many immigrated to the West, where the environment for growth and artistic perspective was more accommodating. Because of the Cold War, as well as the U.S. armed forces’ defense of Taiwan, those at home were also exposed to massive amounts of information from the West, and they could no longer be content with works that ignored the outside world. Tradition or modernity, East or West, which way to go? These kinds of questions occupied their thinking. They had to determine their identity within contradictory options. Thus, artistic directions were diversified, and arguments about pro-national and pro-Western frequently recurred. The direction of creative work was determined
Ho Huai-Shuo, Alley in the Rain, ink on paper, 1961. Courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. by ideology, and, after 1980, Nativist Realism became the leading style for many artists. They desired a return to their native land after being exiled spiritually. This generation constructed a stronger ideological appeal than the previous generation, and many artists organized art clubs and formed their own factions. Compared to the first generation, they appeared noisy and turbulent.
The third generation evolved under more stable conditions. Its artists are well educated, with lots of resources and information, and problems of nationality, identity, and ideology no longer confine them so much. It is easier for them to participate in the larger world. Regulation means nothing, and freedom reigns. While they seem to have no theoretical beliefs, they care about the underprivileged and the marginal. And art museums and galleries in Taiwan are getting better. This helps. Artists are easy-going, highly adaptable, energetic, and individualistic, and these qualities are reflected in their artwork. Yet artists are still evolving, and the time has not yet come to fully evaluate their work.
The differences among the three generations of Taiwanese art can be summed up as follows: arising from the opening up of society and the deepening of democracy, there has been a process of deconstruction and rebirth from the holistic, to the collectivistic, to the individualistic.
The story of Taiwanese art is one shaped by the unique history of Taiwan. Over the course of pioneering endeavours, growth, upheaval, and rebirth, an enduring adaptability has proven itself. Chen Fan-Ming, a renowned man of letters, described a river in Taiwan in the following words:
Lin Hsin-Yueh, Overview of Fire Bum Island, oil on canvas, 1996. Courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
“As the season changes, both the angry currents and smooth flowing waters can be seen in Choshui River. During the summertime, unstoppable currents are coming down, sweeping every inch of riverbanks. After fall, when the drought season comes, those rocks on the river bed are helplessly looking up to the sky.”1 I think these words can be applied to Taiwanese art. “Place” and “displace” represent both the unchangeable insistence and the ever-adaptable surface of Taiwanese art. Big waves, falling rapids, zigzags and mirror-like quiet waters are all there.
The exhibition has its limits, but art has no limits. Even so, the exhibition can also give us knowledge and thought and allow us rediscovery. Although contemporary art can be used to emphasize the purity of art, advocating meaning that is separate from reality, art cannot ever really be detached from human life. Directly or indirectly, art will reflect and reflect on history and the human condition. Observed through this perspective, Taiwanese art is both divisive and inclusive. Of course, Place and Displace: Three Generations of Taiwanese Art offers only a limited interpretation of modern Taiwanese art. But this limitation can be an integral part of an unlimited future.
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Notes 1 Chen Fan-Ming, "Preface to the Rocks of Angry River," in To Tide Over A Chopping Environment of Art in Taiwan (Taipei: The Artist Publishing Co., 1997).
EXHIBITIONS LISTINGS
SHANGHAI COOL LONG MARCH SPACE INAUGURAL EXHIBITION Curated by Gu Zhenqing 30 January to 20 March, 2005 2 March to 3 April 2005 Long March Foundation Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art 1-3F & 6F 25000 Cultural Transmission Center 27 Duolun Road Beijing Shanghai www.longmarchfoundation.org www.duolunart.com
SHI ZHONGYING’S SOLO EXHIBITION THE SECOND GUANGZHOU TRIENNIAL 26 March to 17 April 2005 November 2004 to January 2006 Red Gate Gallery Guangdong Museum of Art Dongbianmen Watchtower Ersha Island Chongwenmen, Beijing Guangzhou www.redgategallery.com www.gztriennial.org
IMPERIAL ELEGANCE: CHINESE CERAMICS FROM XUE JIYE SOLO EXHIBITION THE ASIA SOCIETY'S ROCKEFELLER COLLECTION 3 March to 23 March 2005 Curated by Adriana Proser Art Scene Warehouse 25 January to 1 May 2005 50 Moganshan Road, Building 4, 2F Asia Society and Museum Shanghai 725 Park Ave www.artscenewarehouse.com New York, New York www.asiasociety.org
TIANYUAN SPACE STATION: RECENT PAINTINGS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY LI TIANYUAN TRAFFIC: NEW WORKS BY CHEN WENBO, LIU WEI, 25 February to 26 March 2005 YANG YONG AND ZHU JIA Plum Blossoms Gallery 14 January to 6 March 2005 555 West 25th Street, Ground Floor CourtYard Gallery New York, New York 95 Donghuamen Dajie www.plumblossoms.com Beijing, China www.courtyard-gallery.com
FLOOD: PAINTINGS BY RICHARD TSAO 24 February to 9 April, 2005 Chambers Fine Art 210 Eleventh Avenue, 2F New York, New York www.chambersfineart.com
TAKE A ST/ROLL: DONUT FANTASIES Curated by Linda Lai 4 March to 10 April 2005 Parasite Art Space Number 2 Po Yan Street, Ground Floor Sheung Wan, Hong Kong www.para-site.org.hk
INOPPORTUNE: WORKS BY CAI GUOQIANG 11 December 2004 to November 2005 MASS MoCA 1040 MASS MoCA Way North Adams, Mass. http://www.massmoca.org http://www.caiquoqiang.com