Contemporary Chinese Art in Vancouver Introduction to Yellow Signal: New Media in China

Zheng Shengtian Contemporary Chinese Art in Vancouver Introduction to Yellow Signal: New Media in China

Jiangnan In 1996, Vancouver-based artist Hank Bull came back from his first trip to Top: Jiangnan exhibition opening, 1998. Left to right: China and was extremely excited about what he saw there. At that time I was Hu Jieming, Zhang Peili, Gu Wenda, Liang Shaoji, Hank working for the newly established Annie Wong Art Foundation that had a Bull, Scott Watson, Cate Rimmer, Greg Bellerby, Xia mandate to promote contemporary Chinese art internationally. Joined by Wei, and Zheng Shengtian. Xia Wei, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, and an Photo: Yishu archive. Middle: Gu Wenda, Confucius advocate of Chinese art, the three of us had several discussions and came Diary, 1998, performance at Jiangnan exhibition up with an idea to launch a citywide project that would bring emerging (with Daina Augaitis at the Vancouver Art Gallery). Photo: contemporary Chinese art to North America. Yishu archive. Bottom: Xu Bing, Introduction to New English Calligraphy, Our initiative received an overwhelming response from the local art 1998, installation view as part of Jiangnan exhibition, Art community. In the spring of 1998, Jiangnan: Modern and Contemporary Art Beatus, Vancouver. from South of Yangzi River took place in Vancouver with the participation of twelve major public and commercial galleries, artist-run centres, universities, and cultural organizations. In the catalogue essay, Hank wrote that the purpose of the Jiangnan project was “to draw the shifting parameters of an ‘organic space’ wherein the meaning of place no longer holds any fixed truth. Works by artists included in the project exhibit different tensions within this 1 constantly evolving, multi-dimensional space.”

The thirteen exhibitions introduced works by Chinese artists who were beginning to gain recognition in the international arena during the 1990s, among them Huang Yongping, Xu Bing, Chen Zhen, Gu Wenda, Zhang Peili, Zhou Tiehai, Geng Jianyi, and Ding Yi, as well as twentieth-century masters of Chinese modern art Pan Tianshou and Qiu Ti. Artists of Chinese descent in Vancouver—Ken Lum, Paul Wong, and Gu Xiong— also exhibited in the participating venues. The event wrapped up with an international symposium that brought leading critics and professionals to Vancouver, among them Li Xianting, Gao Minglu, Fan Di’an, Zhang Qing, and Liao Wen, from China, along with renowned international scholars such as Michael Sullivan, James Caswell, Chu-tsing Li, Julia Andrews, Kuiyi Shen, Ellen Johnston-Laing, Richard Vinograd, Hou Hanru, and others.

The success of the Jiangnan project was of great encouragement to us. One day, Hank and I were sitting in a coffee shop on the corner of Davie and Granville. We both felt that this city, with more than one third of its population originating from Asia, needed a permanent platform to represent art and culture from the other side of the Pacific. In our neighbouring cities on the West Coast—Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Victoria—there are Asian art museums or at least a collection of Asian art. But our city had none, a fact that professor Jan Walls described

6 7 as “a humiliation.” Our idea to set up a not-for-profit institution was enthusiastically supported by art patrons Stephanie Holmquist, Milton Wong, and many others. In 1999 the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A) was established and soon after opened its first gallery space on Homer Street in downtown Vancouver.

Curators’ Trip to China In 2000 Ken Lum was invited to teach a workshop at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He asked Okwui Enwezor, then the curator of Documenta XI, to give a talk to his class. They were to take a trip together to other cities after the lecture in Hangzhou, and Enwezor suggested that he could come with his colleagues, philosopher Sarat Maharaj, Renaissance Society executive director Susanne Ghez, and Dia Foundation director Lynne Cooke. I liked the idea and got permission from Annie Wong for our Foundation to sponsor and organize the trip. Later, other curators also joined us, including Gate Foundation director Sebastian Lopez, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen director Chris Dercon, and Art Gallery of Ontario curator Jessica Bradley. In a recent text on this historical tour by Philip Tinari, we were described as Virgil guiding the collective Dante on their pilgrimage through China.2

During the three weeks and six cities in China, we visited many artists’ Centre A on Homer Street, Vancouver, 2004. Photo: Alice studios, in most cases, in their humble walkup apartments, where we often Ming Wai Jim. had to climb staircases to the fifth or sixth floors. In some cities we were directed to alternative, and, at times, odd places such as a communist card holder’s meeting hall, a trendy bar, a luxury garden-like tea house, and even a pole dancing night club where artists would show their slides or videos. All these visits were unforgettable, and some paved the road for later collaborations between curators and Chinese artists.

Ding Yi lived in the west of Shanghai where many plain apartment buildings for the working class were built after the Cultural Revolution. Curator

8 Left to right: Ken Lum, Okwui Zhang Qing arranged about a Enwezor, Chris Dercon, 2000. Photo: Yishu archive. dozen artists to come with their portfolios. Just before leaving for lunch, we found Yang Fudong quietly sitting on a step of the staircase alone. I asked if he had anything to show the curators, and he hesitantly handed over a VHS tape to me. As soon as the black-and-white film started to play, everyone turned their heads to the monitor. During that evening Enwezor and two other curators asked me to arrange a meeting with Yang Fudong. In 2002, the artist’s video An Estranged Paradise was shown at the Documenta XI.

In Hangzhou we were hardly able to squeeze into Zhang Peili’s tiny den in his dormitory suite to look at his video projects on a small desktop computer screen. Today, he is considered “the father of Chinese new media.” In 1988 he had borrowed a video camera for a day from a local TV station. He recorded his performance which consisted of a repeated action of breaking a piece of mirror and gluing the broken parts back together. This three-hour recording (he ran out of tape) became the first video work ever made by a Chinese artist. I remember we watched the video at the legendary Huangshan conference3 in 1988, and after ten minutes the audience lost patience and the organizer forced an end to the screening. Zhang Peili’s experimental spirit was not demonstrated only in his studio; he also took the curators to a food stall on a noisy, dark street where locals enjoyed fresh, inexpensive dishes. The hot pot and beer certainly added heat to the debate on the differences between Chinese and Western modern art.

On the first evening in Beijing we were led to a theatre to watch artist Wang Jianwei’s new play Paravent (Ping Feng). This was a multi-media production that included stage performance, video projection, music, and installation, and was inspired by a famous painting, Han Xizai’s Night Banquet, made in the tenth century by Gu Hongzhong of the southern Tang dynasty. Wang used the paravent, a traditional partition in a living space, as a metaphor to convey the fear of being peeped at by others and the contradictory identities of human beings. The play lasted for more than two hours, and all the visitors became exhausted, especially with jet lag still in effect. But the surreal theoretical quality of the presentation left a strong impression on the curators, especially Wang’s intellectual, philosophical approach to his multidimensional art practice. A few months later, Paravent was chosen as the premiere piece at the Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels and won high acclaim.

The year 2000 marked a major shift in dialogues between Chinese artists and the outside art world. Co-organized by Annie Wong Art Foundation, the third edition of Shanghai Biennale opened its doors to international artists for the first time, a gesture in which co-curators Hou Hanru and Toshio Shimizu played a significant role.

9 Yishu In 2001, Mrs. Katy Chien, an Inaugural issue of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary important publisher from Taipei, Chinese Art, May 2002. was determined to support our idea of publishing an English- language periodical to meet the increasing need for information and critique on contemporary Chinese art. Ken Lum and I started to make a plan and recruited a team in Vancouver. We cudgeled our brains, trying to properly name the upcoming magazine, and eventually decided to call it Yishu, the phonetic transcription for a Chinese word that refers to art. What inspired us was Nka, a journal on African contemporary art founded in 1994 by Professor Salah Hassan of Cornell University and Okwui Enwezor. Nka is a word in Ibo from Western Africa. According to the late scholar of African culture Ben Enwonwu, art is defined in the English dictionary as “human skill as opposed to nature.” Nka does not share this definition, but bears a traditional significance as an art handed down from generation to generation.4 Similarly, “art” does not equate to yishu, and since what we discuss here is contemporary art within a Chinese context, we thought it would be meaningful to bring forth this new foreign term to the English vocabulary. In the editorial of the inaugural issue, published in May 2002, Ken Lum cited Regis Debray’s argument with other French intellectuals who suffered from the misrecognition of China. Ken asked: “Is it possible that both sides are too quick to jump to conclusions regarding the so-called ‘basic understanding’ of one to the other?” 5

Ten years have passed since the launch of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, thanks to the enduring support from Art & Collection Group Ltd., and the tremendous efforts of the editorial team, led by Keith Wallace, who took the position of Editor-in-Chief in 2004. Based in Vancouver, Yishu has closely followed every step of the progress and changes within contemporary Chinese art over the past decade. This geographical and cultural distance actually allows us to become more objective in our observation of the diverse and complex nature of contemporary culture and life in Chinese society. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Yishu, we decided to devote the whole fiftieth issue to new media art from China, based on a multi-venue exhibition, Yellow Signal: New Media in China, that is taking place in Vancouver over the coming months.

Yellow Signal On June 19, 2010, participants in the Long March-Ho Chi Minh Trail project held a six-hour public discussion at the Himiko Café in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. During the conversation, Vietnamese curator

10 Dinh Q Le said: “Many of the artists in Vietnam look at government policy towards contemporary art as a yellow signal, unsure as to whether it will let art proceed or make it stop completely.” In response, Wang Jianwei proposed defining “yellow signal commonwealth” as a communal state of ambiguity, heeding neither to red signals nor green signals from systems of authority in Asian countries.6 Wang believed uncertainty evoked a feeling of caution and awareness, and that artists always had to make their own choices. In the following year Wang presented an ambitious solo exhibition with four chapters at the Ullens Center for Contemporary art in Beijing. He thought Yellow Signal would be a perfect name to describe his attempt to establish a contradictory and confusing setting of “a physically impossible space.”

At about the same time, Centre A invited me to curate an exhibition that would reflect current development in Chinese art. My first instinct was to focus on new media, especially photographic and digital works, not only because new media in China had rapidly escalated to a much higher level during past two decades, but also because Vancouver has been one of the major hubs of contemporary photography and video work internationally, with works by Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace, Ken Lum, and Stan Douglas having an impact on the growth of young artists in China. I thought it would be momentous for well-trained art lovers of Greater Vancouver to have a chance to see the new and exciting images created by artists in China.

While I was making this proposal to Centre A, I realized that the expanse of Chinese artists’ work had become so massive that it wouldn’t be possible to fit all the work I wanted to show in one or two venues. We called a meeting with gallery directors and curators in the city as we had done for Jiangnan fifteen years earlier. As we did then, we received a very encouraging response, and ultimately six exhibitions were scheduled. These shows will open between March and June 2012 at Centre A, Vancouver Art Gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and Republic Gallery, and will introduce works by fifteen artists of different generations. Two documentary film screenings—Hometown Boy (on Liu Xiaodong), produced by well-known Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Never Sorry (on Ai Weiwei), by Alison Clayman—are also included in the program. Vancouverites are awaiting another Jiangnan.

Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, and Wang Jianwei, all from Hangzhou, belonged to the pioneer movement of contemporary Chinese art, the ’85 New Wave Movement.” They are also considered the most important figures of conceptual and experimental art from China. RongRong was actively involved in early performance and photography practice in Beijing’s East Village. Later he married Japanese artist inri, with whom he co-produced incredible images, mostly derived from the course of their personal life. Yang Fudong, Kan Xuan, and Cao Fei gained attention at major international stages like documenta and the Venice Biennale during the 1990s. Both Yang Fudong and Cao Fei were selected for the short list of the Hugo Boss Prize in 2004 and 2010 respectively. Huang Ran, the youngest artist in the show, made his name in Europe, where he studied before coming back to Beijing. His work demonstrates the new approach and

11 attitude of his age group towards life and their inner worlds. For Charles H. Scott Gallery, we invited a number of young artists from Shanghai and Beijing including Lu Yang, Zhang Lehua, Remon Wang, Lin Zhen, Ge Fei, and the Forget Art Collective. Their new work, much of it made specifically for Yellow Signal, reflects the tremendous impact of social media on daily life and social transformation in China.

To decide upon a title for this collective event I couldn’t help but of the metaphor of “yellow signal.” Yellow signal is not only a political circumstance faced by many Asian artists; it also exemplifies a challenge artists elsewhere may run into with their creative practice. Wang Jianwei noted: “When the yellow light comes face to face with its two rightful opponents, red and green, it signals the termination of the given right of green, and the negation of the given right of red. It is only when the other two lose their monopoly on dominance that the yellow signal can gain its rightful place as a legitimate state of “in-between.” In its dual role of obstacle and intermediary, the yellow signal transforms restriction and delay into a tangible, recognizable ‘object’.”7 Yellow signal is about limitation and possibility, choice and chance, confusion and self-confidence—a dilemma we come across all the time.

Working with Chinese artists has been an exciting and thought-provoking journey. My close ties with them give me the privilege, as well as a responsibility, to help build a better understanding of Chinese art. As a multicultural landscape and gateway to Asia, Vancouver has been a perfect platform to initiate and further these dialogues. I would like to thank the seven participating institutions for their contributions and collaborations; I am grateful especially to the curators, Makiko Hara, Scott Watson, Keith Wallace, Daina Augaitis, Jordan Strom, Greg Bellerby, Pantea Haghighi, and Diana Freundl, and to the many staff and volunteers involved. My ultimate thanks must be given to our public, corporate and individual sponsors, without their vision and generous support this project wouldn’t be possible.

Notes 1 Hank Bull, “Fish and Rise,” in Jiangnan: Modern and Contemporary Art from South of the Yangzi River (Vancouver: Annie Wong Art Foudation, 1998), 9. 2 Philip Tinari, “Ten-day Tour,” Leap, October 2011. 3 In December 1988, a conference on contemporary Chinese art was held in Shexian, Anhui Province. The main issue discussed in the meeting was plans for the first China Avant-garde Exhibition in 1989 in Beijing. 4 Ben Enwonwu, The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist, first printed in Paris (Editions Presence Africaine, 1968); see http://africanartists.blogspot.ca/2009/07/african-view- of-art-and-some-problems_24.html. 5 Ken Lum, “Editorial,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (May 2002), 5. 6 See the transcription of the discussion “Building a Yellow Light Commonwealth,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (March 2011), 20. 7 Wang Jianwei, “Artist Statement,” January 18, 2011, unpublished manuscript.

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