Kao Tzu-chin Xiaodong vs. Hou Hsiao-hsien: An Interview

Kao Tzu-chin: You once called painting from life “farmers’ work.” Please Still from Hometown Boy, 2011, with and Liu tell me whether painting from life has other implications in addition to the Xiaodong’s painting Li Wu Works the Night Shift and method of your creative practice, which has attempted to capture the daily Still Can’t Sleep by Day,colour HDCAM, in Mandarin with reality of the working class. Has painting from life helped you to reach the English subtitles, 72 mins. Courtesy of 3H Productions consistent nature of your creative approach and the content of your work? Ltd., Taipei.

Liu Xiaodong: If everything about the painting were arranged in advance, it seems the painting already would have been finished at that moment. To paint from life, on site, reflects an old-fashioned attitude towards painting. It makes this “old” job even more appealing, and it is particularly a most luxurious way for a painter to paint face to face. Nothing can be more of a luxury. Such a huge canvas, such beautiful sunlight, and such a lively soul standing in front of you—that is all you need. This is the advantage of being an artist. I was born for this. [Laughs] I have no choice.

Kao Tzu-chin: Your first painting in the Hometown Boy series is Li Wu Works the Night Shift and Still Can’t Sleep by Day. You said that you went home to Jincheng to paint your friends “with a mood of unease and

66 Still from Hometown Boy, instability.” You were a little nervous and couldn’t curb it. What did your 2011, colour HDCAM, in Mandarin with English friends feel when they saw your paintings? Is this one of the reasons you subtitles, 72 mins. Courtesy of 3H Productions Ltd., Taipei. decided to keep these twenty-six paintings in your own collection?

Liu Xiaodong: In the early 1990s I also painted my friends. But it was simple at that time. I didn’t think too much, and I painted whoever was available. But one day I found that all these paintings were sold. It had a counter effect; I felt that I had sold these friends’ faces to make money. It was a very uncomfortable feeling. I am afraid that if the paintings of my friends become a commercial commodity, they would suspect their lives were being used by me for my own benefit. There is of course, some profit in art practice: to show your work to others, to exhibit, and to sell. That is where the contradiction lies. I would suffer a burden on my shoulders if I painted someone based only on our pure youthful bonds of friendship. But they didn’t mind this. They didn’t even think about it. Often it was I who was irritable and worried too much. Therefore I had to give up my worries. Life cannot go in reverse, but the friendship and loyalty of several decades are beautiful. I believe my work had a certain impact on their life. When they came to Beijing and saw their portraits in a massive exhibition hall, they didn’t necessarily express themselves in words, like we thought, but their body language showed evidence of what they wanted to say—that their life had never been so seriously noticed.

Hou Hsiao-hsien: It is always like this. Liu Xiaodong, you became famous and went back home and realized the way everyone looked at you was different. So you knew that you should be very careful about how you handle this circumstance. I told Hong-i, the director of the film Hometown Boy, “You have to listen to Liu Xiaodong because knows well when to draw a line. There is nothing you can do in this kind of situation. You only need to stop thinking too much.” Liu Xiaodong treated his friends like brothers, with an easy and straightforward attitude. That opened everything. After one or two paintings, the awkwardness faded away—so Liu Xiaodong could concentrate on painting wholeheartedly.

67 Liu Xiaodong, Shu-Jun with His Chubby Son, 2010, oil on canvas, 140 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Eslite Gallery.

Kao Tzu-chin: How did you choose the objects that appeared in your painting? Do they have special meaning for you? Or do you want to give clues about a story through them?

Liu Xiaodong: This time I went home and spent a much longer time because of this particular art project. Therefore, I was able to think about many things from the past. For example, when I painted My Egypt, I was walking on the site and kicked a skull by chance. I immediately decided I would paint it; this was a cemetery when I was a kid. When people died they would be buried casually in this abandoned place, surrounded by sand dunes. But in a child’s eye, it looked like Egypt, with a kind of pyramid. This time when I went there, I found only a few piles of dirt. There was not only the contrast between memory and reality, but also the marks of my childish experience of death. Death became something you saw everywhere and always ran into.

Kao Tzu-chin: Liu Xiaodong, you said, “In my current life situation those brothers are forgotten.” Can you talk about the state of being forgotten? Does your encounter with these friends now reflect in a microscopic way the meeting between big cities and remote industrial towns under globalization?

Liu Xiaodong: Owing to my background and my understanding of the world, I believe the working class is the foremost power that leads society. The factories are huge, tall, and magnificent. In the farm field there are situated large tracts of lower single-story dormitory buildings. The labour of the working class can be seen everywhere. We all used to be the children of proletarians, of the working class. However, we never thought society would undergo such enormous change between our childhood and today. The high-rise buildings are overwhelming. We will all become middle-class

68 Hou Hsiao-hsien and Liu Xiaodong in Jincheng. Courtesy of 3H Productions Ltd., Taipei.

Liu Xiaodong, My Egypt, 2010, oil on canvas, 300 x 400 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Eslite Gallery.

and advance in the direction of a consumer society, a commercial society. Even though I went to my homeland, my village, it was not the homeland it used to be. Development has changed my homeland. My homeland was just an impression left in my memory.

The titles of the Hometown Boy series are all very explicit, like telling a story. I think this makes it much closer to real life. For instance, Li Wu Works the Night Shift and Still Can’t Sleep by Day—does this sound like the title of a painting to you? But I want to pass on a little more information through the title. A worker has to change three shifts in turn. If one week is on day shift, then the next week will be night shift. An intellectual must take sleeping pills all the time. I am curious how those workers survived in their lifetime. But my parents lived in the same way. Why are they mentally so strong? When we need to adjust from jet lag, we take all kinds of medication. It was from these details that I suddenly and instinctively found a lot of my respect and admiration for these workers.

69 Kao Tzu-chin: Why did you choose Director Hou Hsiao-hsien and his team to collaborate in the making of a documentary in the first place? What aspect of his work do you appreciate in his films?

Liu Xiaodong: The Director of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art is a foreigner. His request was simple. He wanted to find the biggest of “big shots.” I said that would be Hou Hsiao-hsien because his understanding of life, of the relationships among people, is very humanized. Especially, he has the attitude of equally looking at lives, both individuals and the vast majority. The Chinese have little confidence in movie-making and contemporary art, for these forms came from outside. But the emergence of Hou Hsiao-hsien has shown us a special door to enter. He has paved a way that is parallel with the development of the rest of the world. Today he is a filmmaker with camera in hand. But he surely would be at the same level if he were a writer, philosopher, or painter. I am not his fan or a scholar of his work. By just looking at a few shots from his films, I knew our choice would be right; for instance, imagine the illusion created by the words “Boys from Fengkuei”—that is enough.

Kao Tzu-chin: What did you think when you saw the final result of the documentary? During the process of making it were there discussions and adjustments in terms of the direction?

Liu Xiaodong: At that time I didn’t know that they were going to focus on me. I thought I was just painting, and the documentary would extend and complement that activity in many ways to bring a much wider context. The first time I saw the film was with the audience at the Ullens Center. The film had already been shown to the public. I was terribly moved when I watched it the first time. I felt that I had fallen in love with myself again. [Laughs.] The approach of Yao Hong-i was excellent. He contemplated and observed completely each soul, without being judgmental. He found the poetry, humour, and the indescribable sadness of ordinary life and delivered on them precisely.

Hou Hsiao-hsien: When the film was screened for the first time in Beijing, people wondered how it could have demonstrated such strong foresight. I haven’t watched many documentaries made in . What exactly is the difference between those films and Hometown Boy? Maybe others can tell us more, but I know for sure they are different. Maybe it is because Yao Hong-I went to Jincheng, a great distance from Taiwan. He was not shooting in Taiwan. This distance made him shoot whatever he saw with instinct. In addition, he used a Bolex; this is a camera with spring-wound clockwork and can work about twenty-five to thirty seconds when fully operated at a speed of twenty-four frames per second. It has a small viewfinder, so the cameraman has almost no time to react and must capture immediately when the character appears. Thus every time it is very fresh. Then he selects and cuts. I think this is very unique. Yao Hong-i has worked almost twenty years in our company. He started with art, but he wanted to learn cinematography, and he did. His screenwriting has won an award. We didn’t

70 Liu Xiaodong, Bent Rib, 2010, oil on canvas, 150 x 140 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Eslite Gallery.

have a fixed format for filmmaking. I described a situation to the actors and actresses and let them carry it out naturally. Yao Hong-i may have been influenced by this for a time and gradually developed his own style without being self-conscious. I believe Hometown Boy represents the current status of Yao Hong-i. Chinese people on the other side of the Strait were astonished to see this film and called it “a viewpoint from Taiwan.”

Liu Xiaodong: To my understanding, the distinctiveness of the so-called “viewpoint from Taiwan” is that it contemplates things equally. The director has no intention of stepping over others, and this is the most delightful aspect of Taiwanese culture. People are calm and contented. They have their viewpoint but don’t want to force you to accept it. I am a person from outside, and Taiwan made a keen impression on me. In mainland China, because of the various political struggles, competition within the living environment is harsher. So when someone wins an opportunity, he often feels superior to others. Of course, there are positive and negative aspects. I think compared to the Chinese documentaries I have seen, the viewpoint and approach from Taiwan is the freshest one.

Kao Tzu-chin: You have mentioned that “you only can choose one angle for a painting and cannot include other parts, but a movie is able to record from all angles comprehensively.” Do you worry that the documentary can tell audiences more than a painting? Or does painting have some characteristics that a film cannot depict?

Liu Xiaodong: In the field of straight documentary, photographs and movies are enough; you don’t need paintings. Although if one faces life with

71 Liu Xiaodong, Xuzi at Home, 2010, oil on canvas, 140 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Eslite Gallery.

an artistic approach, one will realize that no artistic manner can re-create real life. Yet all art forms are for reproducing life, only because life is rather important and will pass in a flash. We appreciate every piece of grass and every tree, everything we see with our eyes. We try our best to get close and restore them. Many feelings that cannot be expressed by painting may be expressed by writing. If you cannot express yourself properly in writing, you can use film images. Those ideas that cannot be expressed in film might be done in painting. I believe painting is the way you work from one angle repeatedly. It takes a time to gaze and deliver the message of the subject. To record whole surroundings and their changes is very difficult; while the film medium is much more efficient with multiple angles, painting can offer an expansion and complement to it.

Kao Tzu-chin: When you went to his home and visited the schoolmates of his past, their identity as “the schoolmate of Liu Xiaodong” slowly faded away as the film progressed and was replaced by scenes of their real life and the passage of time over the past thirty years. For the central figure, Liu Xiaodong, who brought his schoolmates together, the film doesn’t provide enough elaboration of his detailed reality aside from his being a successful artist mentioned in conversations. Was this a special consideration?

Hou Hsiao-hsien: I think the reason is simple. It is like before Impressionism, the painting might be started and finished in studios, but Impressionists worked en plein air, outside, in the , and tried to capture the relation between sunlight and colour. Liu Xiaodong’s case is the same. No artist in Jincheng treats the reality of the present like him. Although the film may not touch too much on his details, he is indeed everywhere. A man cannot exist without other people. We shot his brothers, his parents, and the paper mill built by the Manchurians. Once the scenes of the related environment, people, and their life were portrayed, I think his paintings were responsive.

72 Liu Xiaodong painting at his Kao Tzu-chin: You said that life home, Jincheng. Courtesy of the artist and 3H Productions painting represents a primitive Ltd., Taipei. attitude. How do you see the transformation of this old process in our current time? Is it necessary to remind ourselves again and again to return to original, basic positions?

Liu Xiaodong: I think all media are equivalent. Take whatever is closer to your heart and use it. You don’t need to evaluate whether this medium is advanced or backward. For example, a poet will write a poem out of the blue. Will it be more classic if it is written on paper? Or is it more advanced if typed on a computer? We don’t pay attention to the material upon which the poem is written. It is the words the poet wrote that are important, and it has to be really good. It is important what the poet wants to say, the approach and viewpoint toward the world. People are influenced by all kinds of things. Currently, art exhibitions are multifarious, and they influence the judgment of young artists. We have to remember that the generation that controls the power in art establishments today went to university after World War II. That education definitely changed their point of view. I feel this kind of painting is the closest art form to me as an individual.

Kao Tzu-chin: Were there any unexpected incidents during the progress of your painting? Or was there any situation that occurred that made it difficult to keep going?

Liu Xiaodong, Qiang at His Karaoke Club, 2010, oil on canvas, 150 x 140 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Eslite Gallery.

73 Liu Xiaodong: LIu Xiaodong, Dou Hanging Out at the Pool Hall, Actually, I feel good if 2010, oil on canvas, 150 x 140 cm. Courtesy of the artist and things are just natural Eslite Gallery. and spontaneous. Sometimes I wanted to make the work stiff and awkward on purpose. For example, Xiao Dou has never been in a pool hall, but my impression of her is that she has been a trendy girl. She may not play pool—it may not be her real life— but that is what I felt. So I situated her in a pool hall, making her look a little provocative. The interesting story is that she had already been ordered to retire, and when I invited the head of the factory where I was working to visit my show in Beijing, he was surprised to find out the woman he let retire was such a celebrity (the painting Xiao Dou Hanging Out at the Pool Hall is the major image in the promotional campaign at Ullens Center). That is not right! So he asked her to go back to work. I never thought my art could “save” someone’s life. That is funny! [Laughs.]

In another case, Guo Qiang at His Karaoke Club was executed in a context that was almost impossible for making paintings. The lights in the karaoke club KTV were either blue or pink; it was entirely bizarre. So I had to paint like a blind man. But I was happy that disturbed me, and I also painted with the music, which kept irritating people. In the end, the painting looked good though.

Kao Tzu-chin: What is the plan for your next creative work?

Liu Xiaodong: I will continue to try my best, bit by bit. In fact I don’t really know what I might do next. Expectations always end up weak compared to reality. I believe Hometown Boy has reached a level that I didn’t expect. It truly has something very touching but hard to explain. I don’t know where it came from. So the next step is that I should change direction. You can’t keep taking advantage of people in this way: after painting my father’s home I then go to paint my grandfather’s home. [Laughs.]

Hometown Boy is presented by Pacific Cinémathèque.

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