Yishu 50.Pdf

M a y / J u n e 2 0 1 2 V o l u m e 1 1 , N u m b e r 3 1 0 t h a n n i v ersary year

I n s i d e

Special Issue: Yellow Signal: New Media in China

US$12.00 NT$350.00 p r i nt e d i n Ta i wa n

VOLUME 11, NUMBER 3, M ay / J une 2 0 1 2

CONTENTS 2 Editor’s Note 48 4 Contributors

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

13 China: Then and Now Barbara London

58 30 Interview with Wang Jianwei on Yellow Signal Zheng Shengtian

42 Kan Xuan: Performing the Imagination Joni Low

48 Wind, Life Stilled, and Wild, Lissome Things: The Work of Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, and Huang Ran Karen Smith

58 Fifth Night: Interview with Yang Fudong 66 Daina Augaitis

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

75 RongRong & inri: More Photographs in the River of Time Britta Erickson

82 The Different Worlds of Cao Fei 75 Alice Ming Wai Jim

91 The Formative Years: Social Media and Art in China Diana Freundl

102 Question and Answer with An Xiao Mina Diana Freundl

105 List of Galleries and Acknowledments

91 106 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Wang Jianwei, Position, 2012, 4-channel video installation. Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist.

We thank JNBY Art Projects, Canadian Foundation of Asian Art, Mr. and Mrs. Eric Li, and Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison for their generous contribution to the publication and distribution of Yishu. Vol. 11 No. 3 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art president Katy Hsiu-chih Chien legal counsel Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C.C. Liu This edition of Yishu marks both the fiftieth issue and   Ken Lum the close of our tenth year of publishing. The staff at -in-chief Keith Wallace Yishu would like to thank all our supporters including   Zheng Shengtian   Julie Grundvig our funders, subscribers, and writers. It is you who Kate Steinmann make this journal a success. editorial assistant Chunyee Li circulation manager Larisa Broyde  coordinator Michelle Hsieh On this occasion we present a special issue devoted web site  Chunyee Li to the multi-gallery exhibition Yellow Signal: New advisory  Media in China, initiated and curated by Yishu Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Managing Editor Zheng Shengtian and a project Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum of Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Museo Reina Sofia Contemporary Asian Art. The participating galleries Okwui Enwezor, Critic & Curator include Centre A, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China Vancouver Art Gallery, Pacific Cinémathèque, Fei Dawei, Independent Critic & Curator Republic Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, and Charles H. Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute Scott Gallery. Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Katie Hill, University of Westminster The notion of “yellow signal” forms the thematic of Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian this exhibition and implies entry into an intersection Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator at a critical moment when there is the need to make Lu Jie, Independent Curator Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore a decision either to be cautious and hold back or to Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University take a chance and proceed forward—a situation Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand that Zheng Shengtian suggests exists for artists in Philip Tinari, Independent Critic & Curator Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator mainland China as well as in many other regions. The Wu Hung, University of Chicago rapid growth of new media and its impact, especially Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar in the virtual world, makes the idea of “yellow signal”  Art & Collection Group Ltd. even more compelling. 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Yishu 50 includes eleven essays and interviews by Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 nine authors covering the early development of new Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 E-mail: [email protected] media in mainland China through to the present. In mainland China, the idea of new media has a different vice general manager Jenny Liu Alex Kao resonance than in other parts of the world, including marketing manager Joyce Lin Hong Kong and Taiwan. For decades, art training circulation executive Perry Hsu was the purview of academies that concentrated on Betty Hsieh the traditions of painting, sculpture, and printmaking,  Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. and it is only recently that photography has earned web site http://yishu-online.com a respected place within the field of fine art. In their web design Design Format introductory texts, both Zheng Shengtian and MoMA/  1683 - 3082 NY Video and Media Curator Barbara London offer Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited very personal perspectives; the first follows the in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, fifteen-year history of presenting contemporary March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: Chinese art in Vancouver, and the second tracks London’s encounters with new media during her early Yishu Editorial Office travels to mainland China. 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 The artists included in Yellow Signal are Cao Fei, Phone: 1.604.649.8187 Fax: 1.604.591.6392 Forget Art Collective, Ge Fei, Lin Zhen, Geng Jianyi, E-mail: [email protected] Huang Ran, Kan Xuan, Liu Xiaodong, Lu Yang, Remon subscription rates Wang, RongRong & inri, Wang Jianwei, Yang Fudong, 1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) Zhang Lehua, and Zhang Peili. This extraordinary 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) range of artists represents some of the pioneers of 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com) new media in China as well as a younger generation    Leap Creative Group whose work ranges from photography to video to   Raymond Mah art director Gavin Chow virtual reality. designer Philip Wong

No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are Keith Wallace not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版創刊於 2002年5月1日

典藏國際版‧第11卷第3期‧2012年5–6月社長：簡秀枝法律顧問：思科技法律事務所劉承慶創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）

2 編者手記總策劃：鄭勝天主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 4 作者小傳副編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 編輯助理：黎俊儀行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 6 當代中國藝術在溫哥華廣告：謝盈盈 — 介紹《黃燈：中國新影像藝術》網站編輯：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li) 鄭勝天顧問：王嘉驥田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 13 中國：撫昔論今安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) Barbara London 巫鴻林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 范迪安招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 30 汪建偉談《黃燈》洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 鄭勝天胡昉侯瀚如徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 42 闞萱：發揮想像姜苦樂 (John Clark) 劉植紅（Joni Low）姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 倪再沁高名潞費大爲 48 風、静、狂：評張培力、耿建翌、楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 黃然的作品盧杰 Karen Smith Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill 58 《第五夜》：楊福東訪談 Charles Merewether Daina Augaitis Apinan Poshyananda

出版：典藏雜誌社副總經理：劉靜宜 66 對話劉小東與侯孝賢高世光高子衿行銷總監：林素珍發行專員：許銘文謝宜蓉 75 榮榮和映里：時間長河中的攝影社址：台灣臺北市中山北路一段85號6樓林似竹（Britta Erickson）電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 電子信箱：[email protected] 82 曹斐的不同世界編輯部： Yishu Office 詹明慧（Alice Ming Wai Jim） 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 91 成長年代：中國的社交媒體與藝術傳真：(1) 604.591.6392 Diana Freundl 電子信箱: [email protected]

訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與編輯部聯系。 102 與安小的問答設計： Leap Creative Group, Vancouver Diana Freundl 創意總監：馬偉培藝術總監：周繼宏設計師：黃健斌 105 展覽機構與贊助者一覽表印刷：臺北崎威彩藝有限公司

本刊在溫哥華編輯設計，臺北印刷出版發行。 106 中英人名對照一年6期。逢1、3、5、7、9、11月出版。

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售價每本12美元。訂閲：一年84美元，兩年158美元（含航空郵資）。封面：汪建偉：《位置》（局部），四屏錄像裝置。2012年，溫哥華亞洲當代藝術國際中心。網上下載：一年49.95美元網上訂閱： http://yishu-online.com 藝術家提供感謝JNBY、加拿大亞洲藝術基金會、李世默夫版權所有，本刊內容非經本社同意不得翻譯和轉載。婦、Stephanie Holmquist 和 Mark Allison 對本刊本刊登載內容並不代表編輯部與出版社立場。出版與發行的慷慨支持 Contributors

Daina Augaitis has been Chief Curator Stanford, and she co-curated the 2007 and Associate Director at the Vancouver Chengdu Biennial. In addition, she has Art Gallery in Canada since 1996. She was authored three books as well as numerous formerly the director of the Visual Arts articles and essays on contemporary Chinese Program at The Banff Centre for the Arts art practice, collecting, and criticism. Her (1992–95) and has held curatorial positions current major project is to produce a series at Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff (1986–92); of short films about ink painting, which will Western Front, Vancouver (1983–86); be accompanied by a book. Convertible Showroom, Vancouver (1984–86); and Franklin Furnace, New Diana Freundl has a B.A. in comparative York (1982). Over the past decade, she has religion and philosophy with graduate organized numerous solo exhibitions of studies in journalism. She was a staff artists such as Rebecca Belmore (co-curated reporter in Taipei, Taiwan, covering arts and with Kathleen Ritter), Song Dong, Stan features from 2002 to 2005 before moving Douglas, Brian Jungen, Muntadas, Gillian to Beijing to study at the Tsinghua Academy Wearing, and Paul Wong. Many of her group of Arts and Design. In 2006 she joined the exhibitions have explored socially based curatorial department of the Museum of ideas, including Visceral Bodies (2010) and Contemporary Art (MoCA), Shanghai, the collaborative project Baja to Vancouver: where she worked until 2009. She is currently The West Coast and Contemporary Art the art director of Art + Shanghai Gallery. (2004). She has curated spoken word, pirate radio, and performance art projects Alice Ming Wai Jim is an associate and has organized thematic residencies for professor of contemporary art at Concordia artists and curators. Augaitis was Canadian University, Montreal. She was Curator of Commissioner for the Bienal de São Paulo the Vancouver International Centre for (2002), the Sydney Biennial (2000), and the Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A) from Johannesburg Biennale (1995). She has edited 2003 to 2006. Her main fields of research anthologies and written numerous catalogue are in contemporary Asian art and Asian essays and has participated in national art Canadian art with a particular interest in juries and made presentations internationally. recent media art, theories of representation, and the relationship between remix culture Britta Erickson, Ph.D., is an independent and place identity. scholar and curator living in Palo Alto, California. She has curated major Kao Tzu-chin holds an M.A. in art history exhibitions including Word Play: and art criticism from the Tainan National Contemporary Art by Xu Bing (2001–02), at College of the Arts, Taiwan, and an M.A. the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, in contemporary art, criticism, and D.C., and On the Edge: Contemporary philosophy from the University of Essex, Chinese Artists Encounter the West (2005), United Kingdom. She was an editor of at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, ArTop Magazine, Taiwan, in 1999; Main-

4 Vol. 11 No. 3 Trend Magazine, Taiwan, in 2001; and ArtCo Karen Smith has been based in Beijing and Monthly, Taiwan, in 2008. She became the working within the field of contemporary chief editor of ArtCo in 2010 and is now the art since 1992. Her first book wasNine Lives: executive editor-in-chief. Kao received an The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China award for art criticism from the Dimensions (2006). Recent publications include Ai Weiwei Art Foundation, Taiwan, in 2001. (2009). She is currently completing Bang to Boom: Chinese Art in the 1990s, a study Barbara London is the founder of the of the forces at work in a historic decade of Museum of Modern Art’s video exhibition contemporary art in China. Smith is an active program in New York and has guided it curator. Recent exhibitions include the group over a long career. She has organized many show Hive and a solo exhibition, Penetrate important video exhibitions, including for Shi Jinsong, both at Today Art Museum, Looking at Music 3.0 (2011), which explores Beijing, 2011. She is also the founder-director the influence of music on contemporary of Intelligent Alternative, which supports art practices with a focus on New York in young artists through a diverse range of the 1980s and 1990s; Mirage (2010), an independent projects. installation by Joan Jonas; Looking at Music: Side 2 (2009), featuring the 1970s and artists Zheng Shengtian, Managing Editor of Yishu, such as Patti Smith, Jean-Michel Basquiat, is a scholar, artist, and independent curator. Jenny Holzer, and Blondie; and Automatic For more than thirty years he worked at Update (2007), with installations by Cory China Academy of Art as Professor and Arcangel, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jennifer Chair of the Oil Painting Department. and Kevin McCoy, Paul Pfeiffer, and Xu He was a founder and board member of Bing. In addition, she organized a series the Vancouver International Centre for of Web projects entitled Stir-fry (1997), Contemporary Asian from 1999 to 2011. InterNyet (1998), and dot.jp (2000). She has He has been a board member of Asia Art written and lectured widely. Archive in North America since 2009 and a Trustee of the Vancouver Art Gallery Joni Low is a freelance writer currently since 2011. As an independent curator, he working at the Vancouver Art Gallery. has co-organized numerous exhibitions Her writing has appeared in exhibition including the Shanghai Modern at Museum catalogues and in publications such as Yishu, Villa Stuck in Munich and Art and China’s Ricepaper, Fillip, and C Magazine. She is Revolution at Asia Society in New York. He interested in the relationships between visual is currently the Senior Curator for Asia with art and language and art that exists outside the Vancouver Biennale. He contributes the context of conventional exhibition frequently to periodicals and catalogues spaces—art that continues to destabilize about contemporary and Asian art. and create new understandings of the contemporary experience.

Vol. 11 No. 3 5 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 Vol. 11 No. 3 Vol. 11 No. 3 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 Vol. 11 No. 3 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.

Vol. 11 No. 3 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 Vol. 11 No. 3 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

Vol. 11 No. 3 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.

12 Vol. 11 No. 3 Barbara London China: Then and Now

hen I embarked on my curatorial career in the 1970s, video attracted me because it was on the cutting edge. I discovered Wa dynamic counter culture (offspring of the Beats and Woodstock) flourishing in Manhattan’s desolate Soho district, in rural upstate communes, and in alternative art centres across Canada. Art from this ad hoc context found itself more on the fringes of prevailing conceptual and minimal art. Technically, this was still the dark ages, before faxes and Web pages. Pioneering media artists shared their clunky portable video cameras (weighing twenty pounds) and the crudest on-the-fly editing systems for “open-reel” half-inch tape. Denizens like me climbed dank staircases and congregated in dusty lofts for impromptu screenings of the latest black-and-white videos and for inter-disciplinary performative experimentations. A joint passed around eased viewers into unhurried events that stretched far into the night. Process took precedence over saleable product. With travel and long distance phone calls being expensive and therefore infrequent, information from the hardcore reached more out-of-the-way practitioners through publications such as Radical Software, a grass-roots, sophisticated how-to; Avalanche, an in-depth interview magazine that captured the grit of downtown New York; and the Satellite Video Exchange Directory that came out of Vancouver.

My fascination with Asia began in the 1970s with Japan, the video technology leader known for its well-designed gear. Motivated to discover how Japanese artists used the new consumer tools, I made several research expeditions while organizing the survey exhibition Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto. On a later foray in 1981, I made it to Seoul on an expedition set in motion by the perspicaciously global Nam June Paik. Gradually my horizon expanded to include China.

At the American Film Institute’s 1989 Video Festival in Los Angeles, the Taiwanese-born artist Shulea Cheang presented her own videos, along with several recent documentaries from mainland China, and I wanted to learn more about the discourse that was taking place among these previously isolated artists. I heard that dog-eared copies of ArtForum and Art Press circulated widely among friends. The handful of artists who were able to travel abroad became influential conduits, returning with catalogues, postcard-sized reproductions, and vivid impressions of museum exhibitions. Young artists idolized the triumvirate of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Beuys because of the maverick stand these three artists took against established art forms.

Vol. 11 No. 3 13 Wu Wenguang and his documentary Bumming in Beijing–The Last Dreamers (1990), now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, opened my eyes. In 1988 Wu Wenguang began recording five struggling avant-garde artists. Each had illegally moved to Beijing from the provinces to pursue their own artistic dreams. Wu Wenguang adroitly used a small camcorder to shoot with an unbiased vérité methodology. (Wu had trained as a newspaper journalist prior to becoming a newsroom editor.) Without music or voice-over narration, Wu Wenguang punctuated his subjects’ candid ruminations about life, art, and the future, interspersed with shots of them scrounging for food, and doing everyday tasks in minuscule apartments and squalid back alleys. As the documentary concludes, only one of the five artists remained in Beijing. The other four had moved to Europe or the United States after the Tian’anmen Square incident of June 4, 1989.

Upon completing a four-month sabbatical in Tokyo, I met Cai Guo-qiang at his 1993 show in P3 Gallery, an alternative exhibition and performance space conjoined to a Buddhist temple. I entered from a busy street and came face-to-face with the head of a menacing dragon. The mythological beast’s vast neck descended a flight of stairs to a large subterranean gallery, where its torso wound round and round and transformed the space into a maze.

A dank scent wafted through the air. The aroma came from a small room off to one side, where earthy brews steeped in dozens of clay pots set on clay braziers. Cai Guo-qiang handed me his mysterious infusion in a tiny cup. It felt very Alice in Wonderland but healing, a recurrent theme in Cai Guo-qiang’s work. Eschewing China Pop, which was becoming very popular in mainland China, Cai Guo-qiang used techniques that were closer to the methods of a shaman, bringing together dissimilar entities on the basis of their similitude.

Back in New York I became friendly with a group of expatriate Chinese painters, and they supplied contacts when I set off for Hong Kong to give a lecture. Investigating the media art scene there, I met Ellen Pau and her Videotage associates. They all held various day jobs but tirelessly organized video workshops, screenings, and an annual international festival.

Before the handover to mainland China, the Hong Kong art scene had a harsh disconnect between Chinese and British cultural systems. Artists seemed trapped by the divide between traditional and contemporary, unsure about their own identity and aesthetic direction. At artist run alternative spaces I encountered energy, openness, and provocative installations. Brush and ink artists could not fathom why MoMA never showed their work, to which I responded, “Have you ever approached the Chinese department of the Metropolitan Museum?” Conversations with Johnson Tzang at Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong (founded in 1983) helped to shed light on the incumbent tensions and differences.

From Hong Kong I set off by train for the mainland. I met Guangzhou art school faculty and students, who graciously opened their studios. The paintings and sculpture felt staid, unlike the school’s design department

14 Vol. 11 No. 3 that hummed with state-of-the-art activity. Mandated to be entrepreneurial and therefore current, professors with students were designing full on commercial advertising work. This gave them financial independence and access to the latest computer hardware and software.

Stir-fry Now hooked on China, from home I sought the most up-to-date reports, and my German, French, and Italian colleagues shared information about what they were uncovering in China’s increasingly dynamic art scene. Ready to tackle media in the Middle Kingdom, I received a modest travel grant from the Asian Cultural Council. Two weeks before departure, the MoMA administration agreed to put my research on line as daily “curatorial on-line dispatches” on a site entitled Stir-fry. (This was pre-blog, in the early days of the Internet.) In September of 1997, I set off lugging a backpack stuffed with a computer, camera, tape recorder, and cables. I also brought someone along who could make it all work, to put something on the Web.

I doubted whether I would actually be able to get the information out to New York, and indeed, using the Internet in China in 1997 proved to be an adventure. While not always fun, still I managed to send data to New York nearly every night from the business centre of my hotel, painstakingly using dial-up. Back then MoMA had only a pilot Web site, so a crew at the art Web site äda’web assembled my content into an engaging form. There are many ways of characterizing this China site—one might call it an “Artalogue” or “Art Travelogue.” Everything I wrote consisted of my impressions and opinions, as I recognized that politics were complex, and I did not want to create a bad situation for anyone.

Beijing I arrived in Beijing with a short list of artists’ names and a general sense of my itinerary. On the first day, artists Wang Gongxin and Lin Tianmiao hosted a welcoming dinner with ten promising Beijing artists, the critic Li Xianting, and a young art historian who translated for me. Over the next few days I made studio visits.

Wang Gongxin, born in 1960, epitomizes a generation that grappled with new avenues of expression in a rapidly evolving nation. Trained as a realist painter, he received a B.A. from Beijing’s Capital Normal University in 1982, and continued his painting studies at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Cortland and in Albany. Spending additional time in Manhattan, he made ends meet by making portraits of art aficionados outside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, working on the sidewalk, he met other dislocated Chinese artists in need of cash, including Ai Weiwei. Living in Williamsburg, Wang Gongxin and his wife Lin Tianmiao—also an artist who supported them in New York by designing children’s clothes—stayed for seven years. Numerous installation ideas gestated during this incubation phase. Wang Gongxin was particularly struck by the precision and craft in how Bill Viola devised his metaphorical work, which he saw in a 1987 show I organized at The Museum of Modern Art. Viola’s meticulous attention to every detail that went into the construction of his immersive “tuned environments,” which adroitly sublimated the technologies, made a lasting impression on Wang Gongxin.

Vol. 11 No. 3 15 Wang Gongxin, The Old Bench, 1996, single-channel video installation. Courtesy of the artist.

Wang Gongxin, The Sky of Brooklyn, 1995, single-channel video installation. Courtesy of the artist.

Wang Gongxin’s The Old Bench (1996) consists of a small LCD screen inserted into the surface of a weathered Ming-style workbench—an object as iconically “Chinese” as a blue Mao jacket. The flat screen depicts life-sized fingers meditatively moving back and forth over the craggy surface of the bench as splinters lodge into the fingertips. By its oblique reference to a discomfort with long-held traditions, this disquieting scene addresses the anxieties that accompany progress. The Old Bench might also be read as a metaphor for Wang Gongxin’s own trajectory as an artist.

16 Vol. 11 No. 3 Responsible for an early example of installation art in China, The Sky of Brooklyn (1995) linked his former home in Williamsburg to his new one in Beijing. Wang Gongxin was one of the first artists to experiment with video in a non-documentary manner. To install The Sky of Brooklyn, he had workers dig a ten-foot-deep hole in a small room just inside his front door. At the bottom of the abyss Wang Gongxin placed a video monitor, which glowed with footage of the Brooklyn sky that was recorded from the roof of his former apartment. Reversing the American childhood fantasy of “digging a hole to China,” Wang Gongxin combined this notion with the Chinese saying “look at the world from a well” (an aphorism encouraging introspection). Informal invitations were sent out to friends and colleagues, and, famously, more than one thousand inquisitive people stopped by their modest home to see this novel art form and gaze at a piece of New York sky. With an innate curiosity and openness, Wang Gongxin and Lin Tianmiao became cross-cultural mediators between China and the West.

Lin Tianmiao, Bound and Unbound, 1995–97, eight hundred household objects, video, cotton thread, installation. Courtesy of the artist.

Lucky for me, Lin Tianmiao set up her installation Bound and Unbound (1995–97). She had painstakingly enshrouded nearly a hundred household utensils, such as a tea kettle, with thread. At the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts, Wang Gongxin invited many artists, including Li Yongbin and Qiu Zhijie, to come and show me their latest video work.

Vol. 11 No. 3 17 I also caught up with the conceptual artist Song Dong, who was sharing his tiny flat in one of Beijing’s courtyard compounds with his artist-wife, Yin Xiuzhen. Internationally recognized today as innovators, the two balance challenging demands of active careers with day-to-day interactions among their local community. Entrenched within their old-fashioned neighborhood has instilled both Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen’s work with an element of candor. The couple’s discrete art practices revolve around installation, and combine aspects of performance, video, photography, sculpture, and in his case, painting. Both work with the humblest of materials. For Song Dong this might include an inexpensive mirror, or an enormous traditional writing brush with which he deftly writes in Chinese on sidewalks with quickly evaporating water. In such public thoroughfares as Tian’anmen Square, he has repeated simple actions, including jumping, with earnest purposefulness. In the process he explores notions of transience and change, not surprising for an artist based in a city undergoing radical transformation.

In the 1980s, when Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen started out, contemporary art in China was just getting off the ground as the country set its sights on modernization. Deng Xiaoping’s emphasis on entrepreneurialism brought access to new technologies and a wider range of information. Song Dong carried out subtle performative actions, making video works that early on tended to be technically straightforward. He would set up a fixed camera, and the action (performed by himself) unfolded in the space in front of the lens. With minimal editing, his videos generally lasted as long as the event, and were organized within a conceptual framework. At the start, with few video examples to follow, Song Dong (like his slightly older peers Zhang Peili, Wang Gongxin, Li Yongbin, and Wu Wenguang) devised his own media and performance techniques. Encouraged as a calligrapher since childhood, he was liberated from art school curriculum once he stepped outside of conventional art and television and narrative film forms. He manipulates time and memory in personal ways.

A good example is Broken Mirror (1999). Crouched down on one of Beijing’s busy side streets, Song Dong aimed a video camera at an unframed glass mirror. He inconspicuously recorded the mirror’s display of pedestrians and bicyclists tranquilly happening by, behind him. As soon as the artist started pounding a hammer against the mirror’s surface, heads of passersby whipped around to stare. Mild curiosity morphed into incredulity when the mirror noisily broke into shards and shattered, revealing the street scene behind the glass. The cleverly mediated view of street action was exposed. With the mirror gone, the ebb and flow of foot traffic returned to “normal” and the video came to a close.

During my Stir-fry trip, Feng Mengbo was the only artist in China with a computer. (I used his equipment to send several of my Beijing dispatches to New York.) In addition to producing interactive CD-ROMs, Mengbo was outputting his digital images as iris prints, on scrolls, and silk screened on aluminum panels. He had just participated in Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, and the Gwangju Biennal in Korea. His Taking Mountain DOOM by Strategy (1997) is a modern story of what happens when the heroes

18 Vol. 11 No. 3 Song Dong, Broken Mirror, 1999, single-channel video, 4 mins. Courtesy of Beijing Commune.

of the Beijing Opera meet the masters of the video game Doom. A live event, an historic battle in the Chinese revolution of the late 1940s, Mao’s revolutionary forces defeated the Nationalist armies at Tiger Mountain. In the 1950s, reality segued to the novel, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. Then the tale took the form of a Beijing opera, and in the late 1960s, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy blossomed as a major motion picture, one of a handful made during the Cultural Revolution.

In Mengbo’s CD-ROM, players are unsure which side will triumph, the young Doom sharp-shooters or the leaping, twirling footwork of Yang Zirong, the hero of the old guard. Yang Zirong’s impressive moves would soon exhaust and trash Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plodding Terminator. But is anyone fast enough to escape the cross-hairs of Doom: “Taking Mountain Doom By Strategy”?

Shanghai Moving on to Shanghai, I met Lorenz Helbling. His then new ShanghART gallery occupied a small area of a mezzanine in the Portman Hotel. Indicative of how emergent the art scene was back then, Helbling gradually transitioned from his miniscule space to multiple warehouse-sized galleries, and a roster that includes the best contemporary artists in China.

Vol. 11 No. 3 19 I visited Zhou Tiehai, who had just completed his sardonic Joe Camel series of large tableaux, painted mainly on newspaper. In his drawing Joe Camel, Are You Lonely? (1997), Joe, with his gargantuan proboscis, really has it made. He wears a halo of words—Glory, Splendor, Wealth, Rank— confirming that he has everything an artist could possibly want. Despite the realization of the ultimate dream—his face on the cover of Art in America— he is lonely.

Zhou Tiehai’s work documents the buffeting that idealism has endured Zhou Tiehai, Fake Cover: Art in America, 1997, print, 27.5 x 23 in an increasingly materialistic age. Born at the onset of the Cultural cm. Courtesy of the artist. Revolution in 1966, Zhou Tiehai believed the party line that exhorted Chinese youth to save the world, to come to the aid of starving people everywhere. The Cultural Revolution promoted a great idealism. The opening to the West in 1978 destroyed Zhou Tiehai’s ardor for service to humanity. Not only were the capitalist countries well-fed, they were rich. In the subsequent battle for the soul of the Chinese people, everyone agrees

20 Vol. 11 No. 3 that money has overwhelmed idealism. Nevertheless, Zhou Tiehai reminds viewers that material acquisition can never be as joyful as people coming together for a cause. “Money is all that anybody cares about,” he scornfully declared, a mantra of modern China.

Zhou Tiehai hosted a Yunnan-style dinner in his home with me, Helbling, the collector Uli Sigg, the painter Ding Yi, and Harold Szeeman. As commissioner of the Italian pavilion of the 1999 Venice biennial, Szeeman was on the prowl.

I took a two-hour train ride to Hangzhou and visited the National Academy of Art, where Western art was introduced into China. (The Academy was founded in 1928 and its first director believed that traditional Chinese art would be enriched by admixing Western art. The second director thought otherwise. Chinese art is very different, he advised, and a gap should be maintained between Chinese and Western art. The issue is still unresolved.) I spent a day with Zhang Peili, who went on to become founder and Dean of the media department at the Academy. Committed to ideas, Peili (who had also spent time in New York) felt that art should disturb old ways of thinking yet, at the same time, remain relevant to a changing society. Peili’s first video works were made with rudimentary gear and revolved around concise actions performed largely by him. Without a tradition in China to follow, video offered a clean slate. He made videos as bare bones as Bruce Nauman’s. Peili stepped outside of narrative forms, recording what appears to be “reality” but are pithy conundrums to unravel. Simple, poetic actions act as metaphors for incisive political and social critique, including reckoning with the pain of the country’s recent history and a rapidly shifting national identity.

Zhang Peili explained how he made his first video to present at a small, elite conference in Huangshan, and questioned how anyone in China could be avant-garde given the circumstances of their then closed environment. Rather than making the requested presentation on Hangzhou’s creative environment, Zhang Peili challenged powwow attendees—fellow “experimental” artists from across the country—with his new video.

Zhang Peili, 30 x 30, 1988, 30 x 30 (1988) depicts the artist’s video, 120 mins., 30 secs. Courtesy of the artist. hands in close-up. Wearing a pair of latex gloves—a reference to the country’s filthy standards of communal living and the then rampant hepatitis, which the artist recently had caught—he holds a thrity-by-thrity centimeter mirror. This is a standard size in China, roughly twelve inches square. He drops the mirror and meticulously glues the shards back together. After dropping the mirror a second time, reassembly is more difficult. The entire procedure takes about three hours.

He again used a stationary camera to record himself seated on a chair in Document on Hygiene (1991). (His straightforward production techniques have to do with philosophical as well as practical reasons.) Dressed in prison uniform-like clothes, he solemnly and slowly washes a chicken in a basin

Vol. 11 No. 3 21 of water set on the floor in front of Left: Zhang Peili, Document on Hygiene, 1991, single-channel him. The camera dispassionately video, 24 mins., 45 secs. Courtesy of the artist. records as he lathers up and rinses Bottom and opposite page: the disgruntled chicken. At the Zhang Peili, Eating, 1997, 3-channel video installation, start, the bird flaps and fidgets in 28 mins. Courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Modern resistance but gradually succumbs to Art, New York. the unpleasantness, and resembles a water-logged feather duster.

Zhang Peili’s concept came from a childhood experience: “Then, life was simple and hard. Most households kept chickens and I took care of ours. They weren’t pets—they were raised to be eaten—but they were the closest thing I had to a pet, so I played with them and in doing so observed their habits. Chickens avoid water, preferring to bathe in dust; it would never occur to anyone to wash them.”1

Zhang Peili leaves it ambiguous about the issues of power and control. Who is imprisoned—the chicken, the artist in his prison uniform, or both? Washing should be pleasant, but it is impossible to know how a chicken feels about contact with water—whether joy or anguish.2

With the word “document” in its title, the video also evokes a dry, analytical, almost government-issued lesson on cleanliness. While bathing can be sensual, the implication here has more to do with coercion than pleasure.

Another reference is even more obscure to non-Chinese. The simple silhouette of a bird resembles the geographical spread of China’s borders. Taken further, the allusion could refer to the ideology in which Mao bathed the people, subduing the masses with his own brand of soap (i.e., ideology).3 And so he subtly critiques the social, political, and authoritarian environment.

Zhang Peili also showed me his just completed Eating (1997), a video sculpture with three synced monitors stacked one on top of the other. (In 1998, the Museum acquired and exhibited Eating.) Each details a different point of view of the same concise and modest action. The top monitor focuses on ear movement during chewing, and the base monitor shows a knife and fork attacking a piece of cake. These composed, fairly static shots are in colour. Separating them is a black and white action view of the cake traveling from plate to mouth. Shot with a camera taped to the eater’s wrist, the disorienting perspective turns eating into a weird event. The delivery of morsels to a gaping mouth is surreal.

In the same way that many non-Asians are adept at handling chopsticks, the Chinese fellow in Eating devours Western foods—cake, tomato, and

22 Vol. 11 No. 3 Vol. 11 No. 3 23 hard-boiled eggs set on European-style ceramics—with knife and fork. It is as if a sentence is parsed into subject, object, and verb. In this humble but insightful work Peili was confronting the effects of unrestrained modernization and the impact of the global on the local, especially in terms of daily life. The humble citizen, as in J. Alfred Prufrock, is measuring out life, bite by bite.

Guangzhou Once I reached Guangzhou, I sought out Big Tail Elephant, a four- member group of artists. Co-founded by Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui, and Lin Yilin, and later joined by Xu Tan, they became known for aggressive social criticism and their underground exhibitions at the entrances to bars, in parking lots, abandoned houses, and construction sites were seen only by a small audience of friends. Big Tail Elephant never had a manifesto or declaration of any kind because they believed creation to be a process, and fixing their principles would allow limited space for change and self- criticism. They had weekly conversations, and didn’t feel that production had to be their only format for dialogue and exchange. Big Tail Elephant was both a method for considering the issues they were interested in, and a democratic attitude towards life. The role of its members was non- hierarchical, a rare example of peck-less order. People in China know their place and their link in a chain that stretches from peasant to Emperor (Chairman), and the absence of a personal power structure in Big Tail Elephant was as revolutionary as their work.

Big Tail Elephant presented their work to me at Libreria Borges, a bookstore that engulfed owner Chen Tong’s modest apartment. On the wall were framed photos of Alan Ginsburg, Umberto Eco, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges. Books were stacked everywhere—art books about Francis Bacon, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Miro, in addition to translations of Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, E. L. Doctorow, and a few Shakespeare plays. The French luminaries Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Derrida were represented in depth. The French cultural attaché steadfastly supported this bookstore by helping them import publications (along with Beaujolais Nouveau), bringing world literature to Guangzhou’s writers and artists.

Most recent Big Tail Elephant member Xu Tan arrived with a slide projector and slides. An easy-going bear of a man with a ready laugh, he did not have the air of a determined faultfinder. He presented an installation, and at first glance, “let it all hang out” seemed to sum up his critical position. I learned there was method in his madcap methodology. He lumped together lobster and crab from an upscale Guangzhou restaurant (Arc de Triomphe), Renaissance paintings (his copies), tacky neon lights, a plastic Schwarzenegger, a taxi’s rearview mirror with a dangling Mao, and lots of other street junk that he was happy to identify. The theme of the installation was disharmony in society.

“Long live Chairman Mao,” “Down with U.S. imperialism,” “Down with Soviet revisionism”—these were the first English words that Xu Tan learned, and in that order. His exuberance and humour is an important part of his message. Art should not always be serious or heavy handed; obedient to the nostrums old guard artists learned from Soviet Russian teachers.

24 Vol. 11 No. 3 Lin Yilin, Standard Series Lin Yilin’s Standard Series of Ideal Residence (1991) appeared in the of Ideal Residence, 1991, installation, brick, iron, wood. first exhibition of Big Tail Elephant held in a hall the group rented in Courtesy of the artist and DSL Collection. Guangzhou’s Workers’ Palace. At the time, Lin Yilin scarcely understood the meaning of “installation.” The 1980s had opened China to a flood of Western art, but Lin Yilin’s quick scan of twentieth century art left him confused, and he resolved to begin with a concept—the wall—and develop it.

The power of a wall comes from the physical effort to build it. Lin Yilin put together the architectural structure of Standard Series of Ideal Residence without any help from construction workers. He hauled all the bricks to the exhibition space himself, rescuing them from the rubble of demolished buildings.

“Wall” as a concept holds special significance in China—there is the Great Wall and the wall around the Forbidden City where the dynasts lived. But walls are everywhere and in all forms—walls of silence, walled up emotions, the Berlin wall, government and bureaucratic walls.

After feeling the power in the wall he built, Lin Yilin applied his energy to moving walls, to physically transporting them. As an action at a busy intersection, Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road, Lin Yilin moved a wall, brick by brick, at a snail’s pace across the street For a foreigner unaccustomed to the chaos of bicycle, motorcycle, and automobile traffic, Lin Yilin’s way of crossing the street seemed like a practical idea.

The power of a wall is founded on its stability. If a wall moves, the power resides in the mover, not the wall. In a continuing series of these wall performances, Lin Yilin showed the power a person can acquire by moving a wall. In Hong Kong, during the nervous run-up to the transfer of the territory back to China, the authorities rejected his demonstration and forced him to curtail his planned performance.

Vol. 11 No. 3 25 Later that evening on the climb to the top floor of his nine story walk- Lin Yilin, Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road, 1995, up apartment, Lin Yilin explained that he lived on a mountain peak. His performance. Courtesy of the artist. apartment was well appointed, with a balcony and a view. He denied that he is middle class—aside from the apartment fixtures, he had few possessions. The apartment belonged to his then employer, an interior design company, but he anticipated buying it soon. Until then, all dwellings were owned by companies and leased to employees at a nominal rent. Trouble with a boss could mean loss of salary and home. Lin Yilin noted that apparently over fifty percent of homes had been bought by the people living in them, and this was a giant step in unleashing China’s labour force.

At that time, Chen Shaoxiong was focusing on ink drawing, photography, and installation (his stop action animation came later). He explained that he saw Fluxus artists as a complementary inverse of his work. Whereas Fluxus had a global network, his was local. He exchanged ideas with peers but worked alone. Living in Guangzhou in the 1990s, in every minute of every day, it was possible to sense drastic changes in the social environment wrought by the process of urbanization. These changes in the structure of Chinese society have also been accompanied by a shift in its value systems. His middle school textbooks had Mao Zedong’s political theory of three worlds, but after graduating he had Karl Popper’s concept of World 3, that of objective knowledge. These two totally opposed worldviews are a classic example of the confusion of theories and values artists were facing at that time. It’s like taking all of these things that are mixed up in one’s memory— the Cultural Revolution, the educated youth, economic reform, and the opening up to the West—and bringing them all together in a short period of time, but with the narrative destroyed, much like a movie preview.

26 Vol. 11 No. 3 Chen Shaoxiong, Ink History Recently MoMA acquired Chen Shaoxiong‘s Ink History (2010). In this (detail), 2008–10, ink on rice paper and animation, 3 mins. three-minute animation, he encapsulates the chronicle of modern China, Courtesy of the artist. from the fall of the Qing dynasty to the present, through an advancing sequence of images. Viewers are able to scrutinize not only key moments of the past, but reflect upon how representations are used to construct the historical record. Composed of carefully edited and sequenced still shots of Chen Shaoxiong’s ink and brush paintings—based on well-known photographs of events ranging from the May 4th demonstrations of 1919 to the 2008 Olympic games—Ink History reinterprets familiar images, juxtaposing them against a dense sound-scape of patriotic anthems, military marches, and explosions, all heard against the steady ticking of a stopwatch. He explores how images shape public memory and national identity, and, in his hands, the intimate process of ink drawing personalizes the grand narrative of China.

Conclusion After Stir-fry, I organized the exhibition China Now (2004), out of which the Museum acquired a dozen videos. Returning to Guangzhou in 2003, I caught up with the young artist Cao Fei and her then partner, Ou Ning, a graphic designer and activist. Ou Ning had founded U-thèque, an independent organization that screened international films and videos— procured via Hong Kong distributors—in bars and cafes, and published independent film magazines. U-thèque had eight hundred members living in Guangzhou and nearby Shenzhen.

Cao Fei, Ou Ning, and ten others were just completing a video, San Yuan Li, for the Zone of Urgency section of the 2003 Venice Biennial. Curator

Vol. 11 No. 3 27 Hou Hanru’s focus was on social problems in Asian cities, and, interested Ou Ning, Cao Fei, U-thèque, stills from the film San Yuan Li, in the idea of “alternative spaces,” he commissioned U-thèque to make 2003. Courtesy of Ou Ning and the Museum of Modern Art, the documentary. New York.

Acquired by MoMA, San Yuan Li is an eloquent portrait of a densely populated, “traditional village” within Guangzhou and under siege by China’s urban sprawl. Long considered an eyesore by the government, San Yuan Li inhabitants tended to have complicated backgrounds, including a high rate of criminal records and heavy drug use (ironically San Yuan Li was the site of the opium wars in the mid-nineteenth century). Through interviews and research, the U-thèque group came to understand the beauty of this community, and their video captured the complexity of the area’s twenty-four hour rhythm and the social networks that provided a safety net and organically eased up potential conflicts that resulted from the chasm between its poor inhabitants and rich developers from outside (uncomfortable with the group’s accurate portrayal of the area, the local government ultimately banned U-thèque as an illegal organization).

28 Vol. 11 No. 3 Cao Fei, Ou Ning, as well as Yang Fudong in Shanghai, belong to the first generation of Chinese artists born in a digital age with easy access to foreign culture. They are the polar opposite of fifth generation filmmakers, who, during the 1980s received official training at sanctioned film schools. In the late 1990s young artists knew everything about international film history, having studied on their own by pouring over inexpensive pirate DVDs. By 2000, this younger generation was well-versed and using digital cameras to make their films. They were able to bypass China’s mainstream state censors and conventional film distribution networks, and they used underground channels (and FedEx) to send and exhibit their work abroad. They cleared the way for the new streams of independent cinema and media art that followed.

Artists everywhere are benefiting from media art being better understood, with new technologies now ubiquitous and easier to handle. Regularly included in contemporary exhibitions, artists’ media work is being acquired both privately and institutionally, now that preservation issues are becoming resolved.

China has younger thinkers who are looking to their historic roots and are astutely wrestling with local aesthetics on a global stage. Intellectuals such as Gao Shiming and Qiu Zhijie in Hangzhou, CAFA museum director Wang Huangsheng in Beijing, and Zhang Ga in New York are making strong contributions to the theoretical discourse within China.

Since my first research trip in Asia more than thirty years ago, I have traveled far and wide seeking out talented artists, working hard to understand the new contexts and younger voices. I have visited their studios, gathered documentation, and slotted the information in file folders now accessible in MoMA’s library. Over the years, I have followed the work of many artists as they matured. Today, the new kid on the block is boundary breaking media art, and I still have the urge to be on the cutting edge. And China remains very much on my mind.

Notes 1 Karen Smith, Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Are in New China (Zurich: Scalo, 2005), 388, 390. 2 Ibid., 390. 3 Ibid.

Vol. 11 No. 3 29 Zheng Shengtian Interview with Wang Jianwei on Yellow Signal Beijing, February 18, 2012

Zheng Shengtian: How did the notion of “yellow signal” come to be Wang Jianwei, Position, 2012, 4-channel video installation. discussed? Photo: Hua Jin. Courtesy of the artist and Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Wang Jianwei: It may trace back to the books I have read during the past few years. Some friends and I had been talking about commonwealth before, but the greatest misunderstanding about what commonwealth means was that we were always looking for someone who had shared our collective memories. To some extent, the solution to this problem actually came from the books of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, which I read a few years ago. Somehow I felt there might be a way to transcend a particular experience and particular memory.

Most artists of our generation, who came of age at the end of the Cultural Revolution, are in a global context of postcolonialism. Many of our works and much of our thinking, were effective only within this context, such as

30 Vol. 11 No. 3 regionalism, identity, specificity, the connection between regional problems and globalism, and so on. So at that time we had similar concerns about the idea of commonwealth. We thought a regional issue shouldn’t be shared only on the basis of bilateral understanding. In fact, that was a major issue because behind it was a very large power system, and it seems like the same way of thinking when we had to oppose the power system in the first place. I think when Jacques Rancière from France talked about the political edges, he believed there was a very important concept about the idea of commonwealth, and it was not for sharing nostalgia. In light of this, we have to re-think the value of contemporary art, in a way that stands for de-identification and de-Chineseness.

Two years ago I went along the Ho Chi Minh trail as part of an initiative of the Long March Project in Beijing. We experienced two extremely important changes in the first week. Before the trip, we anticipated what topics we would discuss while there. We asked participants in the projects to write down: “What are you going to talk about? What are your questions? What might be involved in these discussions?” In my notebook I wrote about why we needed a long checklist. This list included the questions we constructed as well as the weather conditions, food, and hygiene in the places we were to visit. Some people even asked whether we needed a vaccination because of the horrible mosquito situation, and so on. So before anything started, a long checklist had been established. Today, we know the reason we always make a list is to have effective control of the result. It became of a way of thinking. A list makes you feel all your actions are believable; the goal of your action is attainable. In fact, your action becomes a part of your cause. Whether it is the real cause seems of no importance any more.

When we arrived in Vietnam and Cambodia, we found our conversation, especially the conversation among ourselves, became very vigorous The participants had never been together like this: talking, arguing, and questioning each other over such a long period and with such intensity. We were architects, curators, and artists.

The first feeling for me was involvement. I was very impressed with this word. What does it mean to get involved? During the discussion I said that what I understood about getting involved was something completely out of your consciousness. One does not have the ability to determine what should be brought to other people. “All involved” means how one could deal with the external world while a large part of the issues were unknown or ones you were not prepared for. That was something suddenly brought up, like what Zygmunt Bauman wrote in his Society Under Siege, that the world cannot defined by its frontiers any more.1 It is like in a war, you can’t predetermine the strategies or tactics. A reconnaissance squad may have known there were enemies but did not know from where they would emerge. Everyday you were fighting with encounters, and the experience of encountering was very powerful.

The second feeling was when we tried to communicate with local artists and there was always a big debate. We were eager to reach a kind of dialogue,

Vol. 11 No. 3 31 but we found they were not always ready for what we would have liked to discuss, and we were not ready for what they would have liked to discuss. We were always in the situation of “encountering.”

Zheng Shengtian: Were they somehow confrontational and defensive?

Wang Jianwei: Their confrontation and defensiveness was far from anything we had imagined. For example, they didn’t think that this was their problem but ours, and there was no reason to talk about a problem that related only to one side. We always wanted to find something both sides could agree upon and discuss. It was only after two years that I finally realized that this was the exact purpose for taking the trip—even in our long checklist we didn’t include the actual purpose of our travel.

Zheng Shengtian: What prompted you to use traffic lights as a metaphor at that time?

Wang Jianwei: I remembered clearly that during the two weeks we were in Vietnam, a Vietnamese artist asked directly in a meeting, “Can we discuss if it is possible for us to communicate?” He said, “Nobody told us yes, but nobody told us no either.” So we were able to work only within this ambiguous situation. This was the first time I came across the concept of yellow signal. I immediately thought of traffic and how one passed through an intersection, and I followed up with him immediately and asked if we could set up a system of yellow signals in terms of discussion. For instance, we know that a red signal means no or not permitted; a green signal means yes or permitted. Things that were permitted might not attract our attention. But for the red signal, I don’t think the things that were forbidden would always be worth trying. On that day I asked if we could take the concept of a yellow signal to create a commonwealth of dialogue. It could be called “yellow signal commonwealth.” I hadn’t realized that it could actually produce something of value without having shared memories or a shared nostalgia.

We didn’t have to have shared experience in order to establish communication. Some Vietnamese said they were occupied in 1975, and some said they were liberated. This demonstrated that even the Vietnamese themselves couldn’t establish a commonwealth. Did that mean we could continue our discussion only if we had first reached an agreement on “occupied?” Under this circumstance, we could never have started communicating with each other.

Afterwards, we visited some local artists’ studios. Then I suddenly realized that a localized experience could only display an identity that speaks in the context of globalization. One evening in Phnom Penh, we had a very lively discussion and I mentioned the above thoughts. Among the participants there were a lot of Cambodian artists, even some representatives of a local NGO. One thing that is absurd about globalization is that the distinction among different places starts to disappear in terms of product distribution. Your cell phone may be an American product, while your television set is made in China. At this moment, globalization seems to be everywhere,

32 Vol. 11 No. 3 and each location has its special place in the world. However, we realized there’s also something absurd about it on the cultural level. For example, as a Chinese or Vietnamese artist in the context of postcolonial globalization, his or her national identity is respected, and because the national identity is intact, it brings the possibility of communication. However, this logic can also be very brutal in other ways—a Chinese artist can be only a Chinese artist, focusing on Chinese problems and speaking on behalf of Chinese people. How can you think like a philosopher? You can only think like a Chinese philosopher. I call this “legitimate violence.” This was before yellow signal commonwealth, but perhaps now we can bypass these clichés. That was my first experience of yellow signal commonwealth.

That trip was followed by one to the Shanghai Biennale. The concept of yellow signal was good, but how could it translate into an artwork? My gut feeling told me it was too early because it was just my way of understanding the situation. It was only a way of constructing dialogue, and by “early” I meant it would be too mechanical to use yellow signal as an artistic expression. After talking with Lu Jie from the Long March Project, I decided to present an excerpt of my theatre piece, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, at the Shanghai Biennale and to show it as an installation for the overall theme of Ho Chi Minh Trail. The beginning of Yellow Signal as an artwork was triggered by my solo exhibition last year. During the brainstorming stage, I formed a new relationship with my work every day, but I still couldn’t find a title for my exhibition. At first, I wanted to combine a pure theatre structure with an exhibition, then to use video as a medium to connect exhibition and film. That was by far my most ambitious proposal—establishing a new reality through video and theatre. With time, this reality would gradually become materialized. Jérôme Sans, Director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing liked it a lot, but he faced a big problem—it would be impossible for the Ullens Center to manage such a project.

Now, looking back, it would be quite scary if the proposal had been actually executed. It would have been in every aspect a challenge for the operation of any art centre. It meant that I would continuously make videos during the three-month exhibition period, and I would have had to replace the new reality I created with something else. In the end, I adopted a theatrical element, and came up with four chapters to illustrate my concept. Two things were unchanged. First, the production of artwork by me and the display of artwork in the Ullens Center progressed in a parallel fashion, and they crossed paths during the so-called intermission, and then moved forward in parallel again. That was the final structure we chose. Through negotiation between the curator and my production crew, I wanted to try a new working method. Our generation of artists used to work in a particular way—we had our proposals, but often they were never realized. We didn’t have opportunities or the space. At that time, there was no legal art space for you to do such a thing in China. We had no funding. Curators from all over the world came to China to talk with artists. Afterwards they would say, I like your idea, give me a proposal. Usually due to time and funding, the curators would ask artists to change the proposal more or less. In this way, our way of thinking and mode of production became very typical. The Yellow Signal

Vol. 11 No. 3 33 exhibition gave me an opportunity to change this typical working method. Wang Jianwei, Position, 2012, 4-channel video installation. Now no one would ask for your proposal. All you had was an opening date, Photo: Hua Jin. Courtesy of the artist, Long March and you had to fill a twelve hundred square meter space. What would you like Space, Beijing, and Centre A: Vancouver International Centre to show? No one would read your proposal, but you had to make something. for Contemporary Asian Art.

Second, with such a large-scale exhibition that took such a long time to install, we usually could take a day off after the opening, which was on April 1, 2012. However, I remember clearly, I started working as soon as I woke up on April 2. We only had one day, April 21, to replace everything I had in the current exhibition with my new work that I made between April 2 and April 21. That was a Monday and the only day the Art Centre could give me. From 6:00 pm Sunday to 10:00 am Tuesday; I call it the intermission. These hours in between exhibitions completely changed my way of working. I was searching for a word to understand and describe this new way of working under this new condition. In China, there are traditional sayings such as “careful consideration, sufficient deliberation” and “spur with long accumulation,” which all refer to quality and value of production. However, I think “encounter” or “involvement” is the opposite of careful consideration. Careful consideration means the long checklist. It’s safe but not challenging. Are decisions made under uncertain circumstances really meaningless? Is only a confident judgment the right judgment? A confident decision may be a dead judgment, because it is a decision based on existing knowledge and under controllable conditions. How do you name an immediate action that doesn’t have a clear purpose? With those questions in mind, I thought of yellow signal again.

34 Vol. 11 No. 3 Zheng Shengtian: So you first thought of a new exhibition format, then named it Yellow Signal, instead of trying to make an installation to describe yellow signal?

Wang Jianwei: That’s right. Yellow Signal came up for the purpose of publicity and promotion of the exhibition. At the beginning, there were a few exhibition titles. One of them was “why are decisions always made in a hurry?” Another one was “always in the process of making decisions.” I was searching for such a word, and then it suddenly came to me “isn’t it yellow signal?”

Zheng Shengtian: So we have a transformation of a concept here. When you were in Vietnam, yellow signal was a description for the status quo of society for you and for the Vietnamese artists. To go or not to go; it’s a reflection of Vietnamese artists on their current situation, or a space that puts artists from different places within the same condition. It was a social or sociological term. When it came to the exhibition, yellow signal became a concept of artistic creation.

Wang Jianwei: When I first got involved in theatre work, I especially appreciated Bertolt Brecht. He believes that politics and aesthetics are in fact the same. We are educated to look for expression for political aesthetics, or to look for political attitudes in aesthetics. Through his practices in the theatre, Brecht concludes that these two words cannot be separated. At that time, I was simply admiring his ideas, but didn’t have a deep understanding. Like you said, in Vietnam we employed yellow signal as a way to generate meaningful discourse on postcolonial identities and their specificities. But

Vol. 11 No. 3 35 how do I find relevance for yellow signal as an exhibition format and work attitude? I suddenly understood the point through Brecht’s statement on politics and aesthetics. What is politics? In fact, contemporary art is political due to its aggressive and radical nature. For a long time, this aggression has been misinterpreted as aggression towards things that had happened in the past, but it is not. The other day, I was talking with an American. I said this painting was my politics, because it was skeptical about all the existing knowledge and rules. This is precisely its political nature. It is radical because it challenges all of the established orders that have been accepted. Isn’t this contemporary art? This is yellow signal. We shouldn’t be concerned with “to be” or “not to be.” We shouldn’t be the enemy of positivity, but we shouldn’t be friends with negativity either. Doesn’t the world make sense if something can’t be determined by existing values? What happens here is directly against the established order. I suddenly understood the meaning of yellow signal on a political level. As an artist, I don’t need to speak with a political undertone, or take myself out of the context in order to talk about social problems. I am already part of my society and my reality. In this sense, I began to understand all of the above while I was working on Yellow Signal.

We had two large public discussions. The people at Ullens are also very Wang Jianwei, Position, 2012, 4-channel video installation. committed. They thought the concept of yellow signal wasn’t only Photo: Hua Jin. Courtesy of the artist, Long March limited to art, so they found people from outside of the art world to have Space, Beijing, and Centre A: Vancouver International Centre discussions with me. They first invited Shu Kewen, the Deputy Chief Editor for Contemporary Asian Art. of Sanlian Lifeweek, and during the discussion, we talked about border resources, yellow signal, even the history of Christianity. We mentioned that China had five thousand years of history, but the time we are in right

36 Vol. 11 No. 3 now has nothing to do with those five thousand years because the history of the Chinese Communist Party is a history of Marxism which is also the history of communism. However, the communism came from Marx's materialist conception of history, and the Marxist view of history was from Hegel. Hegel came out from the history of Christianity. That was a very long process of accumulation. We have a very typical saying “fight for the cause of communism.” Our work must have a goal, and things make sense only when they’re a result of a long-term accumulation. Therefore, we established a non-nostalgic commonwealth based on our values in our conversation. Shu Kewen’s husband Zhao Tingyang was a philosopher who wrote a book called No World View of the World in which he questioned whether it is wrong to not have an attitude. We talked about so many things through the yellow signal commonwealth. Prior to that day, I had never talked with Shu Kewen, never shared our experience, such as “how many kids do you have?” or “oh, you were also in the military,” or if we had shared any similar painful history. Can’t we separate history and time? We discovered knowledge from other fields, so we encountered each other in such a time and space. I thought that this was probably the yellow signal commonwealth.

The second discussion was with Hong Huang, who’s an active media persona. She has a sharp and straightforward personal style. I was wondering if it was possible to have a discourse with her about the yellow signal. That day, we started with the topic of “legitimate violence.” This concept by Alain Badiou is about how the most severe form of violence today takes place in the battle for legitimacy. Through these two discussions, I realized that perhaps we started gradually to build such a commonwealth on the Ho Chi Minh Trail a year ago. This commonwealth simply means not to share nostalgia. Now, coming back to the idea of the exhibition, isn’t the audience of contemporary art also such a commonwealth? Ninety percent of the audiences who paid to come see my solo exhibition were strangers. I didn’t know them. Why do they come to this place at such a time? They didn’t know each other, and of course they wouldn’t talk about the shared experience of looking at the same exhibition. However, the meaning of this commonwealth, either we call it yellow signal commonwealth or value-based commonwealth, is something I can tell you only today, after I completed the Yellow Signal exhibition. I couldn’t have told you this half a year ago because I hadn’t had the experience. Working on Yellow Signal has made me realize many things that I didn’t take into account on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The problems that I encountered during Ho Chi Minh Trail could not have been solved by my earlier readings either.

We always say the word “entanglement” sounds bad. We always think that things should be clear, and the goals should be set, and you must have meaning in order to do something. All of the above refers to the concept of green signal. However, if you really have the capacity and the knowledge to determine and do something that you only think is meaningful, something has probably gone wrong. We must go beyond this limited attitude. Can one

Vol. 11 No. 3 37 make a decision without utilizing existing knowledge? This decision may not have any guarantee, so can you still make such a decision? I must emphasize this is not simply a cheap thrill. It’s not sentimental. It’s an adventure, a kind of skepticism about existing experience, a sensible “mistake,” and perhaps “being entangled” is a reality that you must accept. You can talk about your problems in this reality. I joked that maybe yellow signal commonwealth could also be called entangled commonwealth. You take action when there’s no clear purpose and no guarantee of a long checklist.

Last December, the organizers of New Star Art Festival invited me to write a foreword for the exhibition. Another artist had already written a foreword before me, and the writing was full of reflections of the past. During my discussion with the organizers, I noticed that the most frequently occurring word was “new”—we must discover new talent, present new talent, present new art. However, the truth is a lot of the new things are in fact very old and corrupted. So I decided, well, my article was going to be about the new, with the title “The New Metaphor.” From another perspective, it is actually the notion of yellow signal. We are living in fear because of the new. The new has brought us an unprecedented amount of anxiety. None of us wants to become the enemy of the new, which is the old. Therefore, we must play the part of the new and dress ourselves up like the new. New is the lipstick we wear when we get on the stage, a prop that we use when people are staring at us. In fact, the last sentence in my writing is exactly about Yellow Signal— what I understand as “the new” is something that may not responsible for the past or the future, but rather a sudden unauthorized action. This sums up the new way of thinking and methodology that Yellow Signal brought to me.

Zheng Shengtian: Is there a narrative in the four chapters of your exhibition Yellow Signal? There is an order in terms of the numbers, or is it in terms of time?

Wang Jianwei: The concept of the four chapters and numbers was not my initial intention, but a result of modification over time. The exhibition has a scheduled time period, and the initial concept gradually morphed into something else. You might not see any change in ten days, but, after one month, even two months, change appeared. Eventually, you find that each day is meaningful, but a conceivable moment in time makes you forget about the everyday changes. That’s my original exhibition structure. However, it was very difficult to realize financially and technically, so I had to change it to the existing structure. How to avoid making something superficial? Some artists say I will place some new object in the exhibition every day to reflect the change of time by adding or subtracting. That is not what I am concerned with. Another way is to have an object that’s constantly changing in the exhibition to reflect time. That’s not my concern either. Yellow Signal doesn’t hold accountable for the past or the future. I don’t want to be in charge of past experience, and I don’t want to provide a so-called new form of exhibition either. So what is this exhibition then? The time is the time of entangling, so we need to only show an indeterminate

38 Vol. 11 No. 3 theatrical structure and an indeterminate exhibition schedule, which formed the basis of the four chapters.

In the last ten days of the exhibition, I decided to include a fifth chapter Encore. Three months of exhibition, my studio crew, the Ullens Center staff, and the media crew seemed to wish that Yellow Signal could continue indefinitely. People wished there was a chapter five, a chapter six. I said Yellow Signal does not necessarily end here, hence the encore—the closing reception as a performance. The last few days were particularly interesting. Three days before the closing, the exhibition was still open to the public, but my theatre crew has already moved in. Technicians were setting up the lights and wiring while the audience was still allowed admission. Then the sound equipment came. We started the rehearsal the day before the closing. The audience saw two sets of scenes at once which were quietly infiltrating each other. The structure of theatre started to penetrate the structure of the exhibition. In the last day, the exhibition was supposed to close at 6:00 pm, and the audience showed up at 5:30 pm. All the installation still occupied five spaces at that point. The performers moved from the first space, to the second, the third, the fourth, and then the theatrical lighting replaced the exhibition lighting. The lighting on the wall was gradually replaced by the stage lighting. By the end of the fifth chapter, the stage light, the exhibition, and the technical system all came to a stop.

Wang Jianwei, Position, 2012, Zheng Shengtian: We are going to show part of the Yellow Signal project in 4-channel video installation. Photo: Hua Jin. Courtesy Vancouver. You decided to present Chapter Four. You visited Centre A and of the artist, Long March Space, Beijing, and Centre A: came up with an idea after looking at the space. You were interested in using Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. this space for a specific work. Why do you feel that Chapter Four would be more applicable to this space?

Vol. 11 No. 3 39 Wang Jianwei: I decided to make two changes to Chapter Four. The first is to turn off the audio track completely. The second is how the projection is used. I visited Centre A and we examined the floor plan. Something weird and extraordinary about the relationship between the glass window and the neighbourhood outside stayed in my mind. This relationship is not the same as with the original installation Go to the Conference Room on the 13th Floor for Free Films, but it is in a spirit of commonwealth. It is not about national identity or culture, but issues that we all face. Finally, I decided to move away from all previous manifestations of Chapter Four, and let a new relationship occur between the video images and the space.

For example, I plan to cover the huge glass window and only leave a specific area to project the video of the voyeurs. The voyeur thinks he is peeping at others. But the video shot from our side makes it so that it is the voyeur who is being watched. Can he really see outside through the glass window? Or do we want to know what is behind him while looking at him? This is very much like the “truth behind the real” as expressed by Slavoj Žižek. The ideology tried to find the truth. Žižek assumed the truth hidden behind the real is in fact an ideology. That’s why I am projecting this act of the video onto the window.

Another act has six beggars on the ground. I want Centre A to build a wall to create a partition. The visitors will see six life-sized persons. But the scene looks like they are in a theatre. The beggars will be shot one-by-one by bullets that come from somewhere unknown. As visitors watch this video, they are also within its space. So the threat could come from any angle in the space.

Wang Jianwei, Yellow Signal, 2011, installation view at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.

The third act is a man and a woman standing side by side. They look at the camera as if facing a mirror. They believe that in the world you constantly face a mirror. As point of fact, when we look at others we are always gazing. As Jacques Lacan said, the gaze is the object, not the subject. He said if a person notices he or she is being viewed, there must be a gaze. When I shot the scene, I supposed there was a mirror. The mirror was the video camera. But when the visitors watch the video, they are the mirrors. This projection

40 Vol. 11 No. 3 should be hanging in the space, on a surface that is not solid but floating, like fabric. The image will not be steady and will become out of focus while visitors walk around it.

The last act has thirteen people sitting around a long meeting table. There is one person on the far side. Everyone takes an odd item. It is something not only he or she believes in, but also wants others to judge as evidence. For instance, one person takes a plate carefully, moving extremely slowly, and carries the item as if it is a treasure. With each one proceeding in the same way, this eighteen-minute film becomes very boring. This act will be projected the highest at Centre A, so high the viewers may not be able to see it clearly; but that doesn’t matter. The audience only needs to be aware that something is going on above them.

Through this reconstruction of the piece, my imagination of this space and its surrounding areas was satisfied. Yet, at the same time, I removed other things that attached to this chapter of the Yellow Signal, so that it could be transformed. But the significance of the work doesn’t lose anything even if some particularities are removed after being presented in another context. I tried to reconstruct all four chapters of Yellow Signal and realized that only this chapter had found its most appropriate position. Finally, I gave it a new name, Position.

Zheng Shengtian: So you think that Position is a more appropriate title for the version at Centre A?

Wang Jianwei: Yes. Go to the Conference Room on the 13th Floor for Free Films originally included furniture and four installations, shipping crates that were piled up, and thirteen staircases. It also had six photos. All of these aspects are now eliminated. I think the implications within this project do not expand or reduce just because the space has changed. I don’t want to say the significance is not as great by being transformed in another space, or to say it is more applicable. I am still looking for something like the yellow signal— should there be a value in commonwealth despite that the fact that there is nothing in common between us? As a Chinese artist with experience living in China, surely I have my own way of thinking. But we can have a dialogue at this level. It is not a dialogue on Chinese symbols or Chinese particularities; I am willing to have a much deeper dialogue in this new context.

Translated by Debra Zhou and Zheng Shengtian Wang Jianwei is presented by Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

Notes 1 Zygmunt Bauman, Society Under Siege (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).

Vol. 11 No. 3 41 Joni Low Kan Xuan: Performing the Imagination

first experienced Kan Xuan’s Kan Xuan, Nothing!, 2005, single-channel video, 1 video work at the Venice min., 56 secs. Photo: Hua Jin. Courtesy of the artist Biennale in 2007 and I and Centre A: Vancouver I International Centre for distinctly remember its sounds Contemporary Asian Art. echoing throughout the former petrol warehouse that now housed the China Pavilion. In this particular video, 100 Times (2003), ceramic cups were thrown repeatedly by the artist into the corner of a room, breaking with a sharp, dry sound while their shards amassed into a messy, colourful pile. This work, one of several of hers in the pavilion, was discreetly nestled between gigantic oil drums and other unexpected locations. In contrast to Yin Xiuzhen’s Arsenale, an overhead installation of one hundred cloth-covered weapons also situated in the warehouse, Kan Xuan’s videos were not always easy to find, but they could be located throughout the exhibition space by their traces of sound and light.

What remained with me was an appreciation of Kan Xuan’s unique aesthetic sensibility and her skill at conveying everyday experiences in a light, poetic, and humourous way. Recognized internationally as one of the most interesting artists working in China and abroad, she creates video vignettes that bring a heightened awareness to small, ephemeral moments and sensations that are often overlooked. Positioning the camera as a surrogate for her curious and intelligent eye, she produces whimsical experiences that embody the spirit of a child’s delight or the Zen idea of beginner’s mind— of experiencing everything fully, as if for the first time.

In the exhibition at Centre A that launched the Yellow Signal project, Kan Xuan’s videos are again juxtaposed with more spatially dominant works. Wang Jianwei’s four-channel video installation Position (2011–12), which explores complex philosophical questions in a series of dramatic acts, occupies the centre of the gallery. Whereas the scale of Wang’s projections imparts a cinematic quality to the installation, suggesting its high production value, Kan Xuan’s two video works, Nothing! (2002) and One by One (2005), installed at the perimeters of the gallery, use much more modest technology; her work forgoes grand gestures and epic narrative statements to communicate her sense of the world.

The contrast of these approaches to new media raises interesting questions about artistic methodology and the resulting affect. Whether one artist’s approach is more resonant than the other would depend, of course, on the

42 Vol. 11 No. 3 inclinations of the viewer. I have a habitual attraction to the peripheral— the bug that creeps across the side of the screen in an old film; the garbage or treasure left on the side of the road; anomalies that rupture the smooth narratives of our regulated, often highly mediated culture. These provide glimpses of process and in-between moments—the unscripted texture of life. While Kan Xuan’s works may appear here as simpler, “smaller” statements, the unfolding layers of her videos reveal their conceptual depth in unexpected ways.

Nothing! playfully charts a frenetic search into drain holes, concrete pipes, and cylinders, scanning urban territory and occasional scenes of forest foliage. This single-channel video is accompanied by a comical, cartoon- like narration with intonations of continual surprise that are re-sampled throughout: “Hmmm . . . nothing! Wow, geez, nothing! JE-sus! SHIT! Nothing!! Hmmm . . . okay . . . Again!” The frequent, rhythmic cuts—a distinctive aspect of Kan’s videos—are abundantly presently here and create a view of life from the perspective of another creature, perhaps lower in the supposed hierarchy of species than our own. The creature is animated through the camera’s erratic gestures, which also mimic the pace of contemporary urban activity in our hyper-capitalist society—with its internet-fused attention-spans that flit from one tab, video, and social media portal to another and from one source of consumption to the next.

The circular, repetitive narrative structure of Nothing! creates an aimlessness that allows the mind to wander. What the protagonist is in search of remains open and unspecified; as Kan Xuan hints in her statement: “Searching for it, crazy about it, and troubled by it, but ultimately as we often see, there’s ‘nothing’.” Yet the human mind cannot handle meaninglessness; we are inclined to interpret, to draw connections among memories, experiences, and present circumstances. So what is one to make of this comical yet frustrating search that produces no results? What is the purpose of creating a video about nothing? Do the incessant proclamations of nothing somehow saturate nothingness into something? Kan Xuan has constructed a riddle, a seemingly empty container that is filled with our own projected desires and illusions.

One by One has a similarly meandering narrative structure, though with a notably different presentation. Here, Kan Xuan explores a row of uniformed guards on a sunny day in Beijing. Zooming past each body at chest height, the camera abstracts khaki greens and leather belts into a homogeneous blur. Occasionally, it suddenly and unexpectedly pauses to inspect little details—the stars on silver buttons, a slightly enlarged belly—before resuming its curious, child-like adventure. Meanwhile, the ambient city noises of birds chirping and the occasional sound of drilling create an ironic contrast to this display of military presence.

As Kan Xuan has explained, it was important to show One by One as a larger video projection, so that the repetitive imagery would resemble a wall.1 The stationary row of bodies can indeed be read as a sort of psychological blockade; bland and impenetrable, it provides no sign of human sentiment. Scanning from left to right, then left again, the camera cannot see beyond this apparently endless obstruction. One by One can be interpreted as a

Vol. 11 No. 3 43 44 Vol. 11 No. 3 Kan Xuan, One by One, 2005, form of reverse-surveillance, Kan Xuan’s imaginative way of turning the single-channel video, 6 mins. Photo: Hua Jin. Courtesy of the gaze back upon those who seek to enforce and control behaviour through artist and Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for their very presence in public space. The camera’s gaze, which streams by the Contemporary Asian Art. uniformed bodies and then pauses like a slot machine, suggests that a sort of game is being played, and that there are certain stakes involved.

By presenting this mundane, repetitive view in a casual, open-ended manner, Kan Xuan leaves the production of meaning to the audience, turning our attention again to the chatter of our own minds and to the act of perception itself. While social critique is not explicit, connections can be drawn between the guards’ performance of political authority and a country that continues to be run as a police state, and perhaps too, the growing rifts worldwide between governments’ displays of political force against their increasingly discontented citizens. There is an eerie disconnect between the nonchalance of the background noise and the visual subject matter, perhaps not so dissimilar to the gap between China’s media propaganda and the many realities that are censored. Kan Xuan also presents an edited view of reality— deliberately framed fragments that require sustained contemplation to grasp the complexity of their associations. What might the title suggest, beyond the literal—the depersonalization and loss of individual rights, one by one?

Kan Xuan now works almost exclusively in video, although she initially studied oil painting at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou from 1993 to 1997. During her studies, she met Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, and Yang Zhenzhong, participated in the 4 x 100 m2 group organized by Yang Zhengzong and Geng Jianyi and saw one of the first video art exhibitions featuring work by Chinese artists, Image and Phenomena: An exhibition of video works by fifteen artists.2 Her move to Beijing in 1998 brought her in contact with a new environment, new technologies, and new artistic communities; she also worked at a post- production film company to become familiar with the technical aspects of video production.3 It was then that she switched to video as the primary medium to express her ideas, a form that allowed her to find the space between memory and reality.4 As she describes it, “videos . . . are neither as real as what we see, nor as fictitious as what we assume. [Their] realistic and virtual aspects create a far-reaching and versatile space.”5 Early works, such as Kan Xuan! Ai! (1999)—an existential chase where she runs through a tunnel anxiously calling and responding to her own name—and A persimmon (1999)—a short study of the fruit being repeatedly smashed to a pulp—evidence her fascination and experimentation with video as a means of capturing everyday experiences and as a tool to shape perception.

Artists inevitably respond to and are influenced by their environments, and this is reflected in their work. In 2002 Kan Xuan moved to Amsterdam for a two-year artist residency at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, where she was able to further hone her practice. Since then, she has divided her time between Beijing and Amsterdam. The artist says that while life in Amsterdam allowed her to become more free, independent, and brave,6 Beijing is a city that provides her with a lot of energy and inspiration; often she will shoot video in China and then edit the material in the Netherlands.7 It is interesting to envision her capturing China’s rapid modernization and transporting this material across the world and to consider how these

Vol. 11 No. 3 45 very contrasting experiences manifest aesthetically in her work. Curator Marie Terrieux has read the minimalist aesthetic of Kan Xuan’s work as an effect of her living in Northern Europe—a cooler, quieter environment that allows space for contemplation.8 I see Kan Xuan’s experiences of living in several different places (Anhui, Hangzhou, Beijing and Amsterdam) as forming an autobiographical hybridity that is not always possible to locate geographically but is nevertheless present in her work.

China’s rapid modernization has had a profound impact on contemporary art, and the use of new media technologies by Chinese artists over the past twenty-five years has paralleled these dramatic social upheavals. Considering Kan Xuan’s work within this history, it is clear that she is part of what might loosely be termed the second generation of artists working with video. Hou Hanru has pointed out that while early video artists in the late 1980s and early 90s were more concerned with presenting reality in an objective, if empirical way, this younger generation is using video to create independent narrative structures as a medium with a language of its own.9 The emergence of digital media and computer editing software has also influenced ways of thinking and working with video; through frequent cuts and the use of repetition—a strategy that appears in several artists’ works—artists can sculpt time and space with even greater flexibility, assembling multiple images and perspectives to convey their ideas. Working with video in these ways, artists such as Kan Xuan, Lu Chunsheng, Xu Zhen, and Yang Zhenzhong are constructing narratives and social experiments to propose spiritual and philosophical questions about human behaviour in contemporary society. While their approaches and visual syntax are quite varied, they share an interest in expressing the subjective, private realms of their imaginations to convey alternative experiences.10

Yet, this focus on the inner world of the artist’s mind is neither an escape from reality into a space of idealized fantasy, nor an indication that these artists are no longer concerned with the political. Writing on contemporary Chinese video art in 2004, Adele Tan observed that “politics appears to be repressed rather than erased. Politics and ideological constrictions are returned and then repackaged into somewhat less menacing forms. They are de-fanged.”11 Videos such as Kan Xuan’s often begin with a simple concept, accessed easily through perception or sensation; gradually they unravel deeper meditations on the relationship between the individual and society. As illustrated in the above works by Kan Xuan, social and political critiques are subtly embedded within the narratives of everyday experience. On the surface, these videos certainly reflect contemporary realities in China, but they also question these realities. By adopting this approach, artists like Kan Xuan are drawing upon a long tradition of the artist-intellectual in the history of Chinese art, who maintained a distance from the state and conveyed critiques through symbolism, calligraphy, poetry, and other artistic strategies. It was not always wise to speak one’s mind directly.

As mentioned earlier, Kan Xuan was formally trained in Chinese painting, a practice that rests on the foundation of traditional Chinese aesthetics, principles that themselves have been documented as early as the Tang dynasty (618–907).12 In closing here, I would like to consider a few of these

46 Vol. 11 No. 3 principles that resonate strongly in her work. The first is the belief that the artist is required to convey spiritual meaning through visual forms. The second is the intensive observation of an object’s principles. The third is the artist’s selfless immersion with the object, or subject, of study.13 Using the camera as her eye, Kan Xuan invites us to experience this aesthetic process with her in seemingly real time; she takes as her subject the expression of emotions through various objects and conveys the spiritual energy that she sees. Object (2003), a minimal black-and-white video showing various quotidian items—coins, hair, milk, honey—sinking slowly in a basin of water, illustrates this practice of sustained looking and of following an object’s form to reveal its mystic beauty. Through the mesmerizing aesthetic of the video, the artist also reveals her emotions towards the subject. Whether the spiritual energy emanates from the objects or from her own perspective is perhaps irrelevant, for she seems to have reached that point of immersion—the harmony between individual and world—that acknowledges the interconnectedness of things.

One of the most appealing aspects of the moving image as art form is its ability to evoke an immediate visceral response through the realistic representation and manipulation of form, expression, movement, and sound. As viewers of Kan Xuan’s work, we feel our way to an understanding; we intuit meaning through the senses, not just the mind. Few words are uttered, few explanations necessary. Through the medium of video, Kan Xuan has created a remarkable intimacy, a sense that there is but a thin, barely visible membrane separating the audience from the experience itself. Ultimately, her practice is about the pursuit of truth, happiness, and freedom—as she says, “the kind of freedom that exists close to thinking and feeling.”14 Experiencing her work transports us to precisely that state of mind.

Kan Xuan is presented by Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

Notes 1 E-mail conversation between the author and Kan Xuan, March 28, 2012. 2 See Marie Terrieux’s “Kan Xuan: Looking for Something Precious,” see http://www.muscreen. uts.edu.au/Kan_Xuan_intreview.htm for her more extended biography of the artist. The exhibition mentioned above was curated by Wu Meichun and Qiu Zhijie and presented in 1996 at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou. 3 Carol (Yinghua) Lu, “Kan Xuan im Interview,” Jahresring 53 (2006), 158–65. Many thanks to Verena Dreikauss for the English translation. 4 E-mail conversation between the author and Kan Xuan, March 28, 2012. 5 Kan Xuan, in Carol (Yinghua) Lu, “Kan Xuan im Interview,” 161. 6 Ibid., 159. 7 E-mail conversation between author and Kan Xuan, March 28, 2012. 8 Terrieux’s “Kan Xuan: Looking for Something Precious” was written for the exhibition Mu: Screen— Three Generations of Chinese Video Art, presented June 1–July 9, 2010, at the UTS Gallery in Sydney, Australia. 9 Michael Zheng, “Objectivity, Absurdity, and Social Critique: A Conversation with Hou Hanru,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, September/October 2009, 47–61. 10 For a more detailed discussion of particular works by these artists, see Hou Hanru, “China Today: Negotiating with the Real, Longing for Paradise,” Flash Art International 38 (March/April 2005), 96–101. 11 Adele Tan, “Génération Vidéo,” Third Text 18, no. 5 (September 2004), 519. 12 Hsieh-Ho, a fifth-century portrait painter, is believed to have been the first to document these principles of image making. See Rudolf Arnheim, “Traditional Chinese Aesthetics and its Modernity,” British Journal of Aesthetics 37, no. 2 (April 1997), 155–57. 13 Ibid. In his summary, Arnheim draws from two key texts, Osvald Sirén’s The Chinese on the Art of Painting (New York: Shocken, 1963) and Susan Bush’s The Chinese Literati on Painting (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971). 14 Kan Xuan, in Carol (Yinghua) Lu, “Kan Xuan im Interview,” 162.

Vol. 11 No. 3 47 Karen Smith Wind, Life Stilled, and Wild, Lissome Things The Work of Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, and Huang Ran

n titling the video work A Gust Zhang Peili, A Gust of Wind, 2008, 5-channel video of Wind (2008), Zhang Peili’s installation, 13 mins., 14 secs. Courtesy of the artist. Ichoice of words contains a measure of understatement. A “gust of wind” sounds feisty but brief; a single hearty puff of air, released and then, like a guffaw of laughter, it dissipates. An approaching gust anticipates more than a breeze, that gentle wave of calming constancy, but less than a gale that conjures fears of buffeting winds and the inevitable damage it can leave in its wake. A gust of wind sounds harmless enough, especially in the singular; it sounds far from uprooted trees, upturned cars, felled billboards and telegraph wires, and caved-in roofs. Yet Zhang Peili’s title in no way prepares the viewer for the destruction that greets them as they enter the world he presents. At that moment, the modest measure of his understatement is unmistakable.

Even prior to Zhang Peili’s first Zhang Peili, 30 x 30, 1988, video, 120 mins., 30 secs. video work in 1988, which was the Courtesy of the artist. efficiently titled 30 x 30—a single three-hour sequence of the repeated breaking of a piece of mirrored glass and its attempted repair— understatement was a defining characteristic of his art. There were paintings signified by the combination of “X?,” and the functional Jazz or Yellow, Blue, and Red. But the titles Zhang Peili accorded his video works have also been succinct: Document on Hygiene No.3: Children’s Playground; Standard Pronunciation; Focal Point; Uncertain Pleasure; Just for You; Dancing; Eating; Magic Circle; Broadcast News; Last Words, and here, A Gust

48 Vol. 11 No. 3 Top: Zhang Peili, No Jazz of Wind. There is little in this collection of words and simple phrases to set Tonight, 1997, oil on canvas, 142 x 180 cm. Courtesy of the the pulse racing and, indeed, the content of the majority of Zhang Peili’s artist. works appeals primarily to cerebral workings, especially to that part of the Bottom: Zhang Peili, Yellow, Blue, Red, 1993, oil on canvas, brain that delights in resolving the cryptic nature of crossword puzzles, 150 x 330 cm. Courtesy of the artist. for there is a degree of similarity between the nature of the constructs of Zhang Peili’s videos with the patterns of thought that they prompt. And, like the best crossword puzzles, one doesn’t have to wrestle with cryptic clues to determine the narratives that underscore the works: simple, intuitive alternatives suffice, reaching the same end, and providing the same enjoyment and satisfaction.

The majority of Zhang Peili’s works invoke images or actions intended to provoke an emotional response from the viewer. It is that engagement Zhang Peili seeks; the emotive quality they possess further circumvents any one correct answer or any single interpretation. There is humour, and there is irony—always plenty of that—but never any personal reference or hidden cultural or sociopolitical back story to alienate a viewer. There is not one

Vol. 11 No. 3 49 amongst his works that requires Zhang Peili, Water—Standard Version from the Dictionary viewers to command a specific Ci Hai, 1991, single-channel video, 9 mins., 35 secs. spoken language or knowledge Courtesy of the artist. of a particular culture—not even Zhang Peili’s native Chinese—to understand the content and the comment embedded in them. We don’t have to know the ins and outs of the way language has been Zhang Peili, Last Words, 2003 single-channel video, 20 mins. unified, organized, and directed in Courtesy of the artist. China since 1949 and under the umbrella of communicating the ideology to the multitude of dialect- speaking masses, to grasp the topic under investigation in The Standard Pronunciation. We don’t have to have experienced life under a Communist regime to grasp the responses in Happiness, Actor’s Lines, or Last Words, that each invoke a fragment of speech or a gesture extracted from a typical scene in a propaganda film which is used to make a play of the way in which human emotions are fixed and stereotyped as succeeding generations, like Pavlov’s dog, absorb, imitate and repeat the expressions that surround us. Our own histories tell us so.

50 Vol. 11 No. 3 Zhang Peili, A Gust of Wind, So it is not just the titles of Zhang Peili’s works that are typically understated: 2008, 5-channel video installation, 13 mins., 14 secs. the visual language too consistently affirms his preference for filmed Courtesy of the artist. sequences of a simple activity—as indicated in the titles—and which, to the viewer, is clear from the first frame. Zhang Peili also frequently shoots using a fixed point of view, at times from multiple camera angles as inA Gust of Wind. The understated approach to titling a work that explores a universally familiar subject matter is, in fact, exemplified inA Gust of Wind.

In its form and content, A Gust of Wind is astonishing; a disturbing yet moving, thrilling yet upsetting vision of the anxiety pervading the contemporary world that is achieved in a combination of five-channel video projection and large-scale installation. The physical installation in the gallery—which is also the original set used to film A Gust of Wind—is a life- sized recreation of a modern living room, complete with soft furnishings, a coffee table with a full complement of books and ornaments, an aquarium with brilliant orange koi, and many other accessories typifying an ideal lifestyle. But all is in a state of utter destruction. The video captures the passage of the wind for the audience to relive and, in so doing, to unravel the manner of that destruction with a sense of déjà vu that is gripping. From the first tremor as the wind approaches, the gentle rocking motion of the lighting fixtures as the air flows through an open window, to the full impact as this calm world, the sanctuary of this home, is shattered, nothing is left untouched. Especially not the viewer, for it is a stultifying experience: to encounter A Gust of Wind unprepared is the visual equivalent of coming home to find that your home has been caught in the path of a hurricane and all that remains is debris.

Sadly, today, this is an experience with which a great number of people can identify. In recent years natural disasters have hit worldwide with disquieting regularity; although attempts are made to placate us with claims that today, courtesy of the media, we are merely better informed than was possible for victims of disasters in the past. Thus, Zhang Peili has no need to dramatize the content through the title, or to theatrically advertize what viewers might find when viewing A Gust of Wind in an exhibition. But while he is not one to sensationalize his art, the production process and the scale of the destruction here inevitably have a theatrical aspect. That is because the titular gust of wind was simulated upon a real environment. In 2008, when A Gust of Wind was made, the entire mise-en-scène was constructed within the cavernous space which was the former location for the Boers-Li Gallery, the building itself a candidate for a film set. Through his thirty- year career, Zhang Peili’s work has evolved and expanded, but A Gust of Wind presented the greatest challenge technically and in terms of the team required to pull it off in what was necessarily a single take.

In 2008, the ghostly echo of that activity, the resonance of the destruction, remained hanging, invisibly, in the air for the exhibition for which A Gust of Wind was created. When it was shown again in Shanghai in 2011—as part of Zhang Peili’s retrospective exhibition Certain Pleasures—that aftershock had dissipated. Simulating destruction is much easier than recreating that chaos. But this is not an aspect of producing a work like A Gust of Wind that

Vol. 11 No. 3 51 concerns Zhang Peili. His intention captures something of Baudrillard’s prognosis on the postmodern condition, which he defined in terms of “simulacra”; meaning that human experience is of a simulation of reality not reality itself, a phenomenon that causes the distinction between reality and representation to vanish as the simulated copy supersedes the original. As a result, Baudrillard declared, we have lost all ability to make sense of the distinction between nature and artifice. Our brain no longer reliably informs us that one is real and the other constructed. In terms of Zhang Peili’s work here that feels true. No matter how many times we watch A Gust of Wind, it is hard to dispel the awe we feel at such destruction. We know it is simulated but we also feel we know what extreme elemental forces can do; the emotional conflict this engenders is profound.

Zhang Peili has always been careful to avoid precise explanations of his impulses or to entertain discussions of the “result,” both of which he sees as irrelevant to the work that an artist does. And yet, what an artist does, in terms of absorbing and processing the atmosphere both in his immediate environs and the wider world, is perfectly expressed through A Gust of Wind. We call it zeitgeist, and it is here as a glimpse of the instability and the uncertainty we live under within even the most stable regimes and locations. So, yes, destruction is devastating, but all life is transient, nothing lasts forever. Material aspirations are empty and come to nothing. We are not wrong to want them but we would be wrong to value them above the qualities that make us human. To wit, the ideal home that existed before the gust of wind hit it contained all manner of desirable attributes but little to suggest the meaning of being human.

Geng Jianyi, Sunk for Five Seconds, 1997–98, manipilated book. Photo: Yishu archive.

Geng Jianyi has been a close associate and friend to Zhang Peili since their student days at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in the early to mid- 1980s, and they share a similar mindset and interests despite their differing approaches to art. Geng Jianyi’s use of materials and forms is particularly experimental in that he employs documents, activities, and objects which, in themselves, have no obvious or immediate relationship to art. But they are

52 Vol. 11 No. 3 key props in an approach to art that pivots on an exploration of the viewer’s psychological response to the experience of viewing art, as well as testing their skills of observation and reading of the signals that the artist provides as exercises in expression. While Geng Jianyi’s art is not purely a pursuit of sensorial qualities he does make a play with visual effect. In his paintings, both on canvas and on paper, in his “rubbing” drawings, and in the many deconstructive versions of “books” he has created, to name a few examples, he has proved to be a marvelous colourist who is extraordinarily sensitive to texture, to nuance, and to the details that might not be noticeably obvious in the final work, but without which it would definitely lose a degree of richness. The 2008 series he titled Guodu (bottleneck) is a fine example of these attributes, as well as of his approach to the photographic image; or to the image in the form of a photograph, for not all of Geng Jianyi’s “photographs” were achieved using a camera—quite the contrary. The wide-ranging work he has achieved with photography through what is now almost two decades is not about capturing extraordinary moments or instants of beauty. His photographs are beautiful, but incidentally so; because he has an eye for precision and for perfection. But here again with Guodu, Geng Jianyi did not start out to create a thing of beauty. What appears to be a series of portraits of humble bottlenecks is but one example of the visual images he presents as triggers for thinking about the nature of seeing or perceiving; about what we as viewers are actually looking at when we confront his work. In these images, the function of the bottleneck, Geng Jianyi’s questioning of our cognitive response, is both obvious and, yet, not.

The Guodu images arose specifically from Geng Jianyi’s ongoing exploration of the essence of photography, or what happens when light is captured as a form and on photo sensitive paper. While the bottlenecks were initially photographed in the conventional sense by using film, Geng Jianyi has also experimented with imposing forms directly onto light sensitive paper. One example is Water (2001), a series of watery surfaces that looked simply like photographed images of pools disturbed by rain, but that were in fact achieved in a similar fashion to marbling paper.

All of the above describe or reference processes that are all but obsolete today in the age of digital imaging, but that was not the case when Geng Jianyi began in 1990 with the photographic series titled Building No.5, which documented a conceptual, or installation work (shoes laid out in the manner of footsteps throughout a building slated for demolition). In 1995, he began the first of an extensive group of experiments with chemical, reactive qualities that distinguish photography as a medium. He used developing chemicals to create drawings directly onto the photo paper and, on occasion, sent them to the site of an exhibition in a semi-developed state having been exposed to light and chemical developer in the darkroom— but not “stopped”—and then sealed directly in an envelope. In the umbra of their packaging and during a journey of ten days or so that the parcel took to arrive at its destination, the images remained in limbo, a delicate suspension of slowed change until the envelope was opened and they were brought out into the light. At this point, from the moment they went on

Vol. 11 No. 3 53 Left: Geng Jianyi, Guodu (bottleneck 2), 2008, silver gelatin print, 106 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and ShanghART, Shanghai. Right: Geng Jianyi, Guodu (bottleneck 3), 2008, silver gelatin print, 106 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and ShanghART, Shanghai.

Left: Geng Jianyi, Guodu (bottleneck 4), 2008, silver gelatin print, 106 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and ShanghART, Shanghai. Right: Geng Jianyi, Guodu (bottleneck 6), 2008, silver gelatin print, 106 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and ShanghART, Shanghai.

Left: Geng Jianyi, Guodu (bottleneck 7), 2008, silver gelatin print, 106 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and ShanghART, Shanghai. Right: Geng Jianyi, Guodu (bottleneck 8), 2008, silver gelatin print, 106 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and ShanghART, Shanghai.

Left: Geng Jianyi, Guodu (bottleneck 1), 2008, silver gelatin print, 106 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and ShanghART, Shanghai.

display, the images continued to develop and there was no way to predict the moment when that process of development would be usurped by the process of deterioration. The test, here, was to see if visitors would spot the changes taking place.

Following the nature of the process undertaken to produce the photographs of the bottlenecks, the title Geng Jianyi accords them is also itself an explanation. Guodu is translated as “excessive transition,” perhaps better expressed as “over-done,” for the reference is to an excess of time used for the exposure of the image onto the photo paper in the dark room and of the brightness of the light used to etch the image onto the paper. This use of excess might equally apply to the length of time the photograph remained immersed in any of the requisite developing chemicals, the dilutions of which were excessively strengthened to achieve the results we see here. Geng Jianyi experimented with multiple permutations. As can be seen from the works in the series, the results are far from the destruction of the individual images that it sounds from the description above. The bottlenecks are, unwittingly or not, extraordinarily beautiful. In texture they are a powdery, smoky swirl of soft inky tones; others delicate layers of

54 Vol. 11 No. 3 charcoal grey as if produced by precision hatching with lead pencils at the “B” end of the spectrum. These shades and shadows, the resulting effect of looking through one layer to another as through the nearest face of the glass bottle to its far side and to other layers of glass windows beyond, achieves a meditative beauty and, in terms of the impulses that inspired the works, possibly an overly alluring distraction from we might presume to be Geng Jianyi’s original purpose. After all, the bottlenecks are intended to function as a vehicle for Geng Jianyi’s questioning of what art is, or can be, and how the presentation or display of objects or images and in the spaces we title galleries or museums which transform those things—most obviously the “readymade”—into works of art. It is said that in the hands of the artist everything becomes art, but this is not a statement with which Geng Jianyi would necessarily concur. As he would rightly point out, that concept is responsible for so much of the mediocre work that passes for art in the international arena today. The repeated image of the bottleneck from variant angles, of various shapes and thicknesses of the glass form, moots subtle references to great masters: Georgio Morandi and his “bowl”; Cezanne and his apples; Giacometti’s elongated anatomical forms, and even Jackson Pollock’s drips. We know from the histories of these masters that the objects they placed under their microscope were also merely conduits for thought processes about the world and its workings. In this sense, the Guodu series is a fine ambassador for Geng Jianyi’s practice.

The combination of works from the three artists exhibiting at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery embraces the entire breath of art in China from the post-Mao years through to the present. As the nation transitioned from being inward-looking to becoming international so did its artists. Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi were two of the most influential artists of the first generation, of the “movement” known as the ’85 New Wave. As the 1980s became the 1990s, Zhang Peili had emerged as China’s leading video artist, first a pioneer of its language within the local context and then of its technology when, in 2001, he became inaugural head of the New Media Department at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Geng Jianyi created the prototype of the large laughing head, the cynical expression that came to dominate the “face” of China’s new art in the 1990s. By that time, Geng Jianyi had largely moved away from painting, but continued to produce the occasional series in tandem with his conceptual, highly experimental projects. His use of techniques and media remains one of the most diverse in China. While the phrase new media has become primarily associated with moving images and technology in art today, in his own work, Geng Jianyi has demonstrated multiple new ways of putting various media to use. He reminds us that art is the experience of the work and that we should not become distracted by superficial extremities.

Together, at the China Academy of Art, which Geng Jianyi joined in support of its leader, Zhang Peili, they nurtured the new generation of new media artists to which Huang Ran belongs. Born in 1982, Huang Ran is a perfect, although not perfectly typical, example of this new world of artistic creativity in China. Where he is not entirely typical is because he is one of

Vol. 11 No. 3 55 a small minority who completed their art studies abroad, in this case in England—Huang Ran graduated from Birmingham Institute of Art and Design in 2004, and then gained an MFA at Goldsmiths College in 2007. He continues to split his time between Beijing and London and appears to be equally at home in either location. This generation cannot be described as children of ideology but, instead, of technology: not of politicized slogans but popular advertizing catch-phrases; not of mass meetings but social networks; not of nationalist posturing but of online communities that have no national boundaries. They, especially Huang Ran, speak English almost as naturally as they speak contemporary international culture, from the music they listen to, to the films they watch and the topics that demand their attention and response as the great number of Weibo (China Twitter) aficionados and fans attests.

Huang Ran’s work is part of the world of international art, pure and simple. He has long ago shrugged off any relevance to the issue of cultural relativism, or of the “Chineseness” that plagued the elder generations’ practice in the 1990s. If anything, the traits of Huang Ran’s training place his art more firmly in the realm of “British” culture—his film work Blithe Tragedy pays greater homage to British filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway or Derek Jarman than to any discernable Chinese master. But such a discussion of influence in terms of national characteristics is not a question that would even occur to Huang Ran. His age, his experience, the education he gained, and his sexual orientation, are very far removed from that of either Zhang Peili or Geng Jianyi, but the language he speaks through art is still part of a possibility that they helped to create.

Blithe Tragedy is a film work rather than a video for its vision and scale, approach and “narrative,” it is consciously cinematic. It has no obvious plot, which the artist describes as intentional, but its very construction and all the elements brought to its “Dangerous Liaisons-style” surface speak of multiple underlying narratives with which Huang Ran seems to grapple, or wrestle with, but has not yet dared embrace in their pure and direct form. One senses, in a similar fashion to the era of Oscar Wilde, the “love which cannot speak its name.” The choice of “blithe” in the title, a somewhat antiquated poetic expression for the contemporary vernacular, suggests as much, especially where it is used in conjunction with “tragedy.” Although, as an adjective, it perfectly evokes the core visual attribute of the film; the lithesome creatures that perform for Huang Ran’s camera are very blithe indeed. The “plot,” then, follows these two creatures, one enslaved to an equally ethereal captor, whose dress and demeanor inject a delicate oriental twist to what one might describe as an air of Victorian austerity and control. The costumes are lavish with no other purpose than to delight and titillate the eye, the heart, the mind. Captor leads Captive through a wooded landscape that is neither dense nor threatening—surprisingly neutral, in fact—and into strange buildings; strange because that is the inference and not because they are out of the ordinary per se. That is really about all that happens. There is little tangible message beneath this richly decorated surface. While the cinematic references may play a part, at least on a

56 Vol. 11 No. 3 Huang Ran, Blithe Tragedy, subconscious level, in keeping with the cultural trends of our day, Huang 2010, video, 14 mins., 56 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Long Ran allows himself to indulge in, and to celebrate, a love of beauty. That’s March Space, Beijing. all. Blithe Tragedy is like a documentary video of a Vogue fashion shoot—it puts the work in the same arena as that of fashion photographer Kai Z Feng, another Chinese of Huang Ran’s generation who has adopted London as his home and with whom Huang Ran’s work shares certain commonalities. How interesting it is, then, to see these three works in juxtaposition. To return to Baudrillard, in these very different forms of expression there can be no better illustration of the concept, the problem, and the effect of the process that he describes as simulacra: that in Zhang Peili’s approach sought to bring art to life by which life is turned into art; where, in Geng Jianyi’s conceptual endeavour, symbols of reality reference concepts of art; until, finally, in Huang Ran’s practice, art is nothing more than a symbol we can no longer connect to reality.

Geng Jianyi, Huang Ran, and Zhang Peili are presented by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.

Vol. 11 No. 3 57 Daina Augaitis Fifth Night: An Interview with Yang Fudong

n Yang Fudong’s latest work, Fifth Night, installed in a darkened Yang Fudong, Fifth Night, 2010, 7-channel video gallery, the viewer is faced with seven large, lush, black-and-white installation, 10 mins., 37 secs. Courtesy of the artist, projections. Each screen presents various actions in a scene that is ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, I and Marian Goodman Gallery, spatially connected and feels strangely both indoors and outdoors. A laboratory New York. experiment appears set up on a table in the middle of an old city square. Two well-dressed men sit squarely on an ornate settee, returning their gaze to the camera. A stylish young woman walks leisurely down a set of spiral stairs, staring longingly into the distance. Two young men are hurled out of a car, while nearby, a horse pulls a cart. Several men are endlessly hammering, welding, fixing something. A banquet table has been prepared but there is neither food nor guests. Two youths with suitcases wander aimlessly about the plaza. While the deliberate movements of each actor are unhurried, the cumulative action on all seven screens leaves much for the viewer’s mind to consolidate as one desperately tries to connect the events of an elusive narrative. The story, if there is one, lies somewhere between the boredom, desperation, and loss evoked by these individuals who keep seeking but never find, keep travelling but never arrive, keep waiting, but for what? In this work, one searches for a reconciliation between the past and present, whether in China where this scene is set, or in any part of the world where a steady course of history has been ruptured and citizens struggle to keep up with change and its ensuing displacements. Wherever we find ourselves, where do we fit in, how do we connect to the past and with others, what constitutes life—these are the

58 Vol. 11 No. 3 philosophical questions that emerge in Yang Fudong’s installation, which he discusses in the interview that follows.

Daina Augaitis: Can you describe what occurs in this single scene? Who are the characters? What are they motivated by?

Yang Fudong: Fifth Night can be seen as a midnight theatre for an audience of one. The characters in the work are young men and women who are wandering the street in the depth of night. Each of them has a purpose, whether clear or vague. We can say that their youthful hearts beat together with the rhythms of the night.

The installation illustrates a real-time scenario consisting of seven film screens: in the silence of the night, the only things around are architecture, lighting, passers-by. Everything is like poetry that cannot be described. It is also like someone in a state of deep sleep, we don’t know what appears in his/her dreams but we can clearly see the chest move and the heart beat. Sometimes we try our hardest to contemplate but our minds reach a state of blankness.

Daina Augaitis: How does your approach to narrative in this work relate to previous works such as Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, or Ye Jiang (The night man cometh), that engage epic stories and cultural legends?

Yang Fudong: I hope that Fifth Night is more of a personal epic with a tight focus at close range. It contains much greater and more detailed psychological aspects compared to the usual epic stories. I want to capture those fleeting moments of a melancholic state of mind that sometimes occurs in young people’s dreams and to present these on screen.

Daina Augaitis: This work feels like a chain of epic moments perhaps? Is your construction of narrative more like one would find it in a book rather than in a film? Do you take inspiration for your work from reading?

Yang Fudong: There is no obvious narrative in this piece as my intention is not to ask questions such as “where do we come from, and where are we going.” This piece is more like a personal journey that sets out in the middle of the night. This epic moment belongs only to one individual. It’s like the moment when the hidden poem in your heart is being read out loud to the world at midnight. The structure of this story is a bit similar to a literary movie, but it is different from literature. Perhaps it is suitable for reading, but it’s an inner process; it’s reading through a medium that’s projected inside your head.

Daina Augaitis: You have described Fifth Night as a “relief,” as in an architectural carving, as well as, a “long painting.” Do these references produce different results and approaches to filmmaking—different than moving image or time-based media references?

Vol. 11 No. 3 59 Yang Fudong: The initial idea for Fifth Night originated in 2009 while I Yang Fudong, Fifth Night, 2010, 7-channel video was making the nine-channel film Dawn Mist, Separation Faith. For me the installation, 10 mins., 37 secs. Courtesy of the artist, question was: how can an artist create a film for a specific space, in an art ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, and Marian Goodman Gallery, gallery where the audience can walk through the space, take their time, pace New York. around, and slowly construct a film in their thoughts?

I consider Fifth Night to be the second example in my work of what I call “spatialized film.” It is a bit like buildings constructed in the space of my mind. The work is presented across seven screens, shot simultaneously by seven cameras. It is a live performance in which the audience and actors are free to walk around and contemplate. All the characters are strangers and they only exist during this particular night, and they are only able to see themselves and speak with themselves. This piece is shot in the style of a scroll, similar to a classical painting. The solidified moments in this space are captured with various set decorations and lenses. It is hard for me to say if this piece will form its own language, but I hope, as I’ve emphasized in the past, to place the images in the audience’s peripheral vision and to present the film in a way that leads to a genuine interaction between the work and the audience. If a spatialized film resembles any aspect of a standard film, I hope it is multi- faceted (compound), peripheral (subconscious) and on-going. The audience re-directs the film while wandering through its installation.

Daina Augaitis: Fifth Night has been described as a “maze.” Can you expand?

Yang Fudong: There are two versions of Fifth Night in terms of its installation. The first is a “standard version” which follows standard film sequencing using seven cameras to capture seven different scenes in real time. I see it as an intimate version for an audience of one. In reality, everyone is in fact lonely. In the middle of the night, a man may sit on a balcony, smoke a cigarette, look at the city, imagine, desire, and even remember. The so-called “maze” is in fact more like the hidden and complicated maze of people’s minds.

There is another version of this piece that I call the “preview version.” During the shooting, seven cameras also documented the rehearsal scenes,

60 Vol. 11 No. 3 including all the footage while the cameras were rolling, such as the film crew’s discussion, bloopers, etc. from beginning to end. This version of intertwined rehearsals, final action, and artistic creation presents the audience with another type of vague “maze.”

Daina Augaitis: Does the set refer to a real or imagined place? Can you speak to the importance of Shanghai as the overall setting in this work and also the historical period that you reference?

Yang Fudong: The set refers simultaneously to something real and imagined, and it is actually the most interesting aspect of this film. The film is shot inside the Shanghai Film Studio where a lot of movie props are on display. The set mimics old buildings from 1930s and 40s Shanghai, but it also functions as office space for the film studio staff, serving the departments of costume design, prop rentals, equipment storage and so on. Therefore, it is the actual work environment for filmmakers but also a virtual world made for movies where the real merges with the fictional.

In the meantime, Shanghai has morphed from the “modern Oriental” of the 1920s and 30s to the metropolis of today. For me, Shanghai is not just a city in the usual sense. I have deep emotional attachments to this city that I regard as home.

Daina Augaitis: Fragmented editing and multiple-channel installations are typical of your work. Have you found the single-view perspective of film limiting? Or is it a deliberate attempt to challenge the conventions of film making and viewing? The results certainly produce a more open and immersive process for the viewer.

Yang Fudong: Based on the straightforward and emotional ideas in my heart, I make films that reflect my understanding and imagination, with the help of cameras, films, and my crew. In fact, many people may have similar thoughts as mine, but I choose the medium of film to express my ideas. What I explore are the additional possibilities of moving images within an art space, an exhibition gallery or museum. My work is not just video art in

Vol. 11 No. 3 61 the conventional sense, but it is something that triggers people’s thoughts Yang Fudong, Fifth Night, 2010 (detail), 7-channel video and emotions in a space that people can enter into. In such a spatialized installation, 10 mins., 37 secs. Courtesy of the artist, film, the audience becomes both the subject and the director. In terms ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, and Marian Goodman Gallery, of the execution of my ideas, I apply standard movie making or editing New York. techniques only if they are useful, not just to follow procedure. In fact, standard procedures don’t really exist. Some production techniques may seem traditional, but I believe there is a different overall purpose and intent behind my works that is very different than the film industry model that’s like a factory producing consumer products for entertainment purposes.

Daina Augaitis: Much has been made of the presence of beauty in your work. Does it open up a space for imagination?

Yang Fudong: For me, beauty is a flavour, a quality. In traditional Chinese painting, there are many things that can only be understood through the senses. For example, the painter illustrates orchids through a few leaves on paper. However, the viewer not only sees the leaves and the flowers, but also understands the spiritual quality expressed through the brush strokes. My earlier work Tonight Moon was my first attempt to make a large-scale multi-channel video installation. It was shot in the classical Chinese gardens in Suzhou, referring to the popular aesthetics of the general public. During their day off, people typically choose to relax in the park, have a cup of tea, and take a stroll. In the public opinion, the park is considered both popular and almost a bit vulgar. However, once people enter the park and begin to enjoy the views—nicely designed rock gardens, the beautifully decorated teahouse—their moods are elevated. This is what I call a “realistic fantasy world,” where you put your heart into your life, taste every moment, and life is actually good.

62 Vol. 11 No. 3 Although most people have difficulties describing the aesthetics or the beauty in what they do, they can feel it. Perhaps aesthetics emphasizes more of the spiritual quality and that’s why artists have to be persistent, standing by their artistic ideals. It’s very important to understand the mood or temperament that the artwork carries. Feeling is worth pondering in Eastern aesthetics.

Daina Augaitis: You have often expressed the importance of emotions and even wrote that Fifth Night was “unified by maneuvering [its] inner and external feelings.” Can you elaborate?

Yang Fudong: Fifth Night reminds me of the days when I had just graduated from university. During that period, I worked as an assistant art director for a TV drama because I was hoping some day to make my own films. One of the scenes was shot in an elementary school which for that show was decorated in the style of a 1940s church. My job was to restore the appearance of this 40s style building. One day, I remember very clearly, shooting was cancelled due to heavy rain and the rest of the crew took the day off. I was the only one left behind to make some repairs to the set. When I was walking alone in this school building, I realized that it was impossible to tell whether it was a real location or not. Was I in the 1940s, or the 1980s, or the present? This illusion brought on many mixed emotions and I wondered about the passing of time in relation to the present. When I was filming Fifth Night, all of these feelings rushed back as I watched the actors pace around the studio. It was a real urban night scene, but it was also a constructed set in a film studio. The contrast and fusion between the real and the fictional touched me deeply. I thought I was back in the old school building, but in fact I seemed to be lost—I was particularly moved by this inner collision.

Daina Augaitis: Beyond feelings, is there a spiritual element that you aspire to? Do you want the work to be transformative for the viewer, to change their state of being?

Yang Fudong: I think everyone has his/her own feelings, whether it’s about life or art. So when an audience looks at my artistic creation, they watch with their own taste. It’s not necessary for me to change anything for an audience and I don’t intend to change anything about them either. When they see artworks in museums and appreciate what they may consider to be beautiful, they are the ones in absolute control and have their own unique experiences and reflections. They also have their own spiritual quest which may not be visible to others, but this quest occurs in everyone.

Daina Augaitis: Your work often contains symbolism that is specific to China. Do you think that the experience of it by a Western viewer is incomplete or just different? Is there an inside and an outside audience— who do you make your work for?

Vol. 11 No. 3 63 Yang Fudong: My works—and not only Fifth Night—are never intended for a specific audience group, Chinese or non-Chinese. What I value most is my own understanding of the work and the context that I want to present which is not specific to anyone. I am largely concerned with the actual realization of my ideas through production, so that audiences have an opportunity to see the finished works, to enjoy them, and I hope each one comes up with their own unique understandings and opinions. Audiences from different countries have different backgrounds, so they naturally understand artworks differently and make their own judgements. Nothing should be imposed on an audience.

Daina Augaitis: Your films are highly visual with little dialogue, which can facilitate broader audiences.

Yang Fudong: There are different types of expression in the language of images. Dialogue is just one way to speak within the language of images. There is no need for verbal communication when the scene is filled with intense emotion. The characters’ actions, behaviours, details of their movements, as well as the sound occurring in their space, are part of the language of images. For example, in a scene where snow falls quietly on a remote path, the snowflakes are speaking their own language, as well as the path itself, and beauty surrounds such an image. Using dialogue is not the only way to be expressive.

Daina Augaitis: Your works often deal with themes of idealism, decay, and decline, in effect a rejection of society’s values that are replaced by those of an alternative community. This notion of withdrawal is common to your work: you did an early performance where you chose to not speak for several months, and, similarly, characters in your films are often withdrawn. Can you speak to this?

Yang Fudong: When I made Seven Intellectuals in the Bamboo Forest from 2003–2007, I wanted to present a young generation’s desires, pursuits, and understandings of the future through this group of seven young people. This work is also an expression of the ideals and beliefs that can lead to withdrawal. In my first performance piece, I did not speak a word for a period of three months. The title was At That Place, which refers to “life is elsewhere.” For me, there are two types of withdrawals: first, a withdrawal from daily activity, or, secondly, a withdrawal in order to discover spirituality. I’ve learned about persistence, which also relates to the notion of hermitage. My performance work gave me the inspiration to be persistent, to remain hopeful and honest, which are also important elements in our daily lives. As for the spiritual hermitage, it should in itself be a positive and productive experience rather than an escape from reality.

Daina Augaitis: In a recent work exhibited in Vancouver (at Centre A in 2011), Korean artists Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries posed the question, “Are we the wise men of society?” Do you believe that artists are expected to act as society’s wise men?

64 Vol. 11 No. 3 Yang Fudong, Fifth Night, Yang Fudong: In my opinion, not only artists, but also different people 2010 (detail), 7-channel video installation, 10 mins., 37 working in various fields, all have their moments of wisdom. It would be secs. Courtesy of the artist, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, impossible to pinpoint an absolute wise man. In our society, many people and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. make contributions in their own unique ways.

Daina Augaitis: Internationally there is a strong emphasis on China as a rising economic power; however, you have consistently proposed a view of China where the intellectual class is occupied with the pursuit of “inner spiritual values.” Is this a kind of political gesture?

Yang Fudong: Whether it’s in China or any other country in the world, citizens can’t be satisfied solely with a rich material life if there’s a lack of spirituality. Anyone with a sense of individuality would hope for an ideal spiritual life. At the same time, intellectuals should always maintain a sense of social responsibility in their social lives.

As the camera makes its final slow sweep across the square, none of the tableaux are conclusive, and the actors, still speechless, remain in their solitary worlds. Eventually, however, the dream state of night will be taken over by the clarity of dawn, and perhaps these individuals will find ways to negotiate between themselves and others, to move from abstraction to actualization, and to somehow shape a community that propels society.

I am grateful for research assistance by Mandy Ginson, translation by Debra Zhou, and connections/introductions made by Zheng Shengtian. DA

Yang Fudong is presented by the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Vol. 11 No. 3 65 Kao Tzu-chin Liu 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 Li Wu 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 Vol. 11 No. 3 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 Yao Hong-i, the director of the film Hometown Boy, “You have to listen to Liu Xiaodong because he 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.

Vol. 11 No. 3 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 Vol. 11 No. 3 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.

Vol. 11 No. 3 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 Taiwan. 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 Vol. 11 No. 3 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

Vol. 11 No. 3 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 long 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 sun, 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 Vol. 11 No. 3 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, Guo Qiang at His Karaoke Club, 2010, oil on canvas, 150 x 140 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Eslite Gallery.

Vol. 11 No. 3 73 Liu Xiaodong: LIu Xiaodong, Xiao 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.

74 Vol. 11 No. 3 Britta Erickson RongRong & inri: More Photographs in the River of Time1

RongRong, East Village, n the long river of time, we are Beijing (detail), (Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan performing always blank, but the photos are Third Contact), 1995, silver gelatin print, 50.8 x 61 cm. pieces of evidence, memories, Courtesy of the artist. I 2 and everything.” Chinese photographer RongRong wrote this in reference to his Liulitun series, a large group of photographs taken around his former home in the neighborhood of Liulitun in Beijing. The statement is significant beyond its application to a single body of work; however, it expresses a world view founded in photography—a lens through which we can consider RongRong’s oeuvre, from his early works documenting the 1990s Chinese avant-garde art movement to his collaborations with his Japanese photographer-wife inri. The collaborations include their joint artistic career, which began when inri moved to Beijing, as well as their growing family, and their creation of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing. If individuals inevitably fade into nothingness in the face of the flow of time, then the power of photography is to create evidence of a moment— any moment, from a cat basking in the sun to RongRong and inri as subjects bearing witness to the destruction of their home, from milestones in their children’s lives to stages in the building of Three Shadows, a major brick edifice that may or may not outlast the photographs as a mark of the artists’ fleeting existence.

Born in Fujian province, RongRong originally aspired to be a painter. Denied admission to the local art academy, he decided instead to take up photography. When he had mastered the rudiments and saved enough money, he went to Beijing where he enrolled in photography classes at the Central Academy of Art and Design supported himself by working at a

Vol. 11 No. 3 75 commercial photography studio. In 1993 he moved to the decrepit artists’ village referred to by its inhabitants with great irony as the East Village— partly because it lay on the eastern outskirts of Beijing, partly with New York’s East Village in mind. This move launched RongRong’s career: in the East Village he found not only kindred spirits but also the inspiration of his first important subjects, China’s first generation of performance artists. Without RongRong’s edgy photographs, iconic early performances of such subsequently acclaimed artists as Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan would not be so well remembered. Police closed down the East Village in June 1994.

In contrast to those highly symbolic and at times carefully orchestrated performances, from 1994 RongRong began taking casual photographs of his living environment in Liulitun, an older neighborhood of Beijing where he dwelt for many years before it was demolished as part of the city’s massive ongoing urban redevelopment program. Assembled as Liulitun 1994–2000, this series consists of paired black-and-white images representative of daily life in the courtyard house he shared with four other artists, including Ma Liuming. Cats lounge in the sun; friends eat together; they assemble issues of New Photography, the short-lived journal through which RongRong and Liu Zheng sought to nurture new Chinese photography; a cat nurses her kittens (the great matriarch, Dami, mysteriously gives birth to a final litter even after being spayed); a soft snow blankets the courtyard; rabbits investigate the leftovers of a feast: the wealth of imagery portrays the textures of existence in a remembrance of a lost era not so distant in time but nevertheless long lost in the rapidly changing environment of Beijing and its art scene. The fast-disappearing old-style courtyard houses, with their series of rooms joining together around an enclosed yard, which in turn fronted a small lane outside the gate, encouraged casual encounters between residents in a way impossible in a modern apartment building, and also provided a private outdoor area where plants, birds, and cats could lead a peaceful existence.

RongRong met inri in Tokyo in 1999, when she attended an exhibition at the Tachikawa Art Festival, in which he was participating. Ten months later she traveled to Beijing to further their acquaintance, found the change of scene liberating, and moved there permanently in 2002. Formally trained as a photographer at the Nippon Photography Institute, she had initially developed a successful commercial career as a portrait photographer for the major daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun, where she was employed from 1994 to 1997. By the time she met RongRong, she had left Asahi Shimbun to pursue freelance photography, searching for deeper meaning in part by working at length with two individuals to produce portraits that probed deeper into her subjects’ psyches than she had previously attempted. Her 2000 visit to Beijing revealed to her the possibility of a mode of creation that was more natural and less exhausting, and the long-lasting partnership between inri and RongRong established the course it was to maintain, as a spiritual journey expressed and nurtured through shared creation—creation of a home, of children, of a joint oeuvre. Both artists have commented on the change in their artistic vision that coalesced when they came together in

76 Vol. 11 No. 3 RongRong & inri, Liulitun 2003 No. 9, 2003, hand-dyed silver gelatin print, 100 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artists.

the nurturing environment of RongRong’s home in Liulitun. Inri wrote in an artist’s statement:

Formerly, when I lived in Tokyo, I was afraid of trouble, and merely sought a simple way, but the simplicity brought about numbness. I was changed after I came to Liulitun. It is not busy here in Liulitun, and I took shots, developed, enlarged, then shot again; it is all my life, time passed so fast, it is a natural feeling. It was a world of just the two of us, taking photos everyday. . . . I had no opportunity to look through the positives taken at that time. Afterward, I would weep every time I looked at them—I don’t know why but my tears kept falling. Actually they are just common photos. . . . It’s a feeling of youth, earnestness, searching for light . . . with the instinctive hope of life, like our two-year-old child who devotes himself 100% no matter what he’s doing, not a slight cloud in his mind. . . . I see hope of life in every second I spent in Liulitun. As in wars or any situation full of hardship and danger, one can keenly feel that grasp of hope in common life and the inspiration within it. In those days, I found a special moment for the first time of my life. . . . Apples, teacups and leaves, all these were not just the things I photographed, but a ray of light in my eyes that came from my mental experiences. I seemed to have owned a new pair of eyes at that time. Now, when I look at my former works, I found that I was searching, searching for myself, but just in the act of searching itself, things were bent by my own concept at the sight of seeing them. After I arrived

Vol. 11 No. 3 77 at Liulitun, it was unnecessary to look for things, it was just here, and my eyes shut up, but the eyes inside me opened. I saw a world, a world in common life. I would search for a world different from common life before, but now I see the world is right here.3

In his own statement, RongRong wrote:

Before inri came, I was confronted with difficulties in my art, and I hardly touched my camera. After her arriving, my life changed dramatically. I held my camera almost every day. Although we are photographers, we preferred to spend more time in front of the camera and left our third eye behind the camera. It was a short cut at that time, and a natural way. I want to keep something of it, no matter if the yard was to be hammered down to pieces or not: I want to say that she really existed in my life. Photography has a magic power; the days you lived and passed through are just an image in your hand, but the feel, the air, the smell, all will emerge at once. You remember everything along with the details of the image, and there’s no way of finding the right feel without the image. In the long river of time, we are always blank, but the photos are pieces of evidence, memories, and everything.4

When RongRong & inri first met, they did not share a spoken language: he spoke Chinese, and she spoke Japanese. While they gradually learned how to speak to one another, they came together because of a shared visual understanding and spiritual affinity. In 2001, they traveled together to dramatic and pristine locales such as Mt. Fuji, Bad Goisern, and Yu Long Xue Mountain to photograph themselves as joyful and innocent participants in the natural realm. As the couple posed and wandered nude within range of the camera’s lens, the automatic timer contributed to the sense of an unstaged moment, freeing the artists from the need to exert control. Inri has described these works as integrating their visual points of view to create a single realm, which then becomes available to others.

RongRong & inri, In Bad Goisern, Austria 2001 No.1, 2001, hand-dyed silver gelatin print, 64 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artists.

78 Vol. 11 No. 3 This mode of production—the creation of a single, shared realm— continues in the artists’ later works, including Liulitun 2000–03, and Caochangdi, Beijing 2004–11. RongRong had long been fascinated by ruins, and created a series of ruins photographs from 1996 to 1998, when Liulitun was being demolished. He and inri memorialized the formative role Liulitun had played in their life together and bore witness to its destruction in Liulitun 2000–03, posing singly or together in many of the images. The poignant and romantic drama that runs as a thread through much of their oeuvre finds a somber and elegant expression in this series that signifies the end of an era.

RongRong & inri, Liulitun 2003 No. 5, 2003, hand-dyed silver gelatin print, 61 x 50.8 cm. Courtesy of the artists.

RongRong & inri, Caochangdi, Caochangdi, Beijing 2004-2011 Beijing 2004 No. 1, 2004, hand-dyed silver gelatin print, represents a new era, that of life 61 x 50.8 cm. Courtesy of the artists. in a new home in the area of Caochangdi, which was once the north-eastern edge of Beijing, marked by milestone events in the family’s growth. According to the artists, when they created the first image in this series (Caochangdi, Beijing 2004 No. 1), they held in their minds the final image of the two of them in Liulitun, posed atop a flower-bedecked gate surrounded by destruction (Liulitun 2003 No. 1).5 Inri, pregnant with their first child, wears the Chinese-style dress that RongRong had made for her when she first came to stay with him. RongRong too dresses formally, donning a long wisp of a beard to heighten the sense of antiquity created by the photograph’s hand tinting and format of dark corners delimiting a central roundel. (They had accidentally discovered this effect when by mistake they used a 4 x 5 view camera lens with an 8 x10

Vol. 11 No. 3 79 RongRong & inri, Liulitun 2003 No. 1, 2003, hand-dyed silver gelatin print, 100 x 127 cm. Courtesy of the artists.

view camera.)6 Such indicators of the RongRong & inri, Caochangdi, Beijing 2011 No. 6, 2011, past join to convey a strong overtone of hand-dyed silver gelatin print, 61 x 50.8 cm. Courtesy of the nostalgia. Subsequent photographs from artists. the series all are taken from close to the same vantage point, underscoring such small changes as plant growth, seasonal variations and, of course, focusing the eye on the figures occupying the photograph’s center. The couple’s three children appear one by one as they are born, posed on a chair. Two images from the series mark moments poignant for reasons reaching beyond the confines of their home and garden. Caochangdi, Beijing 2011 No. 1 was created in April, a month that Japanese generally welcome as a period of renewal, with cherry trees blooming and children beginning a new school year. In 2011, however, April followed soon after the terrible disasters wrought by the earthquake and tidal wave. With this in mind, when RongRong & inri developed the photograph they placed cherry petals directly on the paper, like tears. Later that year when they posed for a family portrait, Caochangdi, Beijing 2011 No. 6, the summer sunshine leaked into the camera. Rather than remaking it they chose to retain the partially faded image: it resonated strongly with the damaged photographs that survivors of the Japanese disaster had been finding among the dross and preserving as particular treasures from their past.

As inri remarked, it is impossible to guess how long the Caochangdi series will continue. Caochangdi is an area developed by artists and gallerists as a new arts district, but was recently slated to be demolished. While this fate was averted, the possibility could recur at any time, threatening not only RongRong & inri’s home, but also the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, which they founded, built, and now run—a uniquely idealistic and bold venture designed to support photography in China through exhibitions, lectures, a library, and visiting artist facilities, national competitions, and international liaisons.

80 Vol. 11 No. 3 RongRong & inri, Liulitun 2003 No. 2, 2003, hand-dyed silver gelatin print, 50.8 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the artists.

RongRong & inri, Caochangdi, These three long-lived series of Beijing 2009 No. 1, 2009, hand-dyed silver gelatin print, photographs, Liulitun 1994–2000, Liulitun 61 x 58.1 cm. Courtesy of the artists. 2000–2003, and Caochangdi, Beijing 2004–2011, record the artist couple’s first shared home—demolished along with old Beijing’s hutong way of life—and their second home, whose continued existence now is marked as tenuous. The images capture the future’s uncertainty as experienced by particular individuals, and also the frailty of human lives joined with the desire to create something permanent, whether it be a family, a home, or a body of works. Did the fate of Liulitun, following on the destruction of the East Village, lead RongRong & inri to bathe the Caochangdi series with nostalgic overtones? The catalyst for Caochangdi’s nostalgic point of view could equally be the birth of their children: children’s rapid growth is a universal reminder to parents of the fleeting nature of existence. Finally, the constant reinvention and redevelopment of Beijing undermines any sense of permanence that a solid home or familiar neighborhood might bring. In such circumstances, it seems only reasonable to surround the disappearing present with a mist of nostalgia in anticipation of, in the future, viewing the past through these images. RongRong’s metaphorical river of time washes ceaselessly through life, and can only be stilled for those moments when one stands before the camera.

RongRong & inri are presented by Republic Gallery.

Notes 1 This text is based on a previously published article: Britta Erickson, “RongRong & inri: Photographs in the River of Time,” Camerawork, vol. 35, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2008), 16–21. 2 RongRong, unpublished artist’s statement, no date. 3 Wu Hung, Rong Rong’s East Village, 1993–1998 (Chicago: Art Media Resources, 2003), 129. 4 inri, unpublished artist’s statement, no date. 5 Details concerning the Caochangdi series are based on an interview with RongRong and inri by the author at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing, February 24, 2012. 6 E-mail exchange between the author and Leise Hook of Three Shadows, March 19, 2012.

Vol. 11 No. 3 81 Alice Ming Wai Jim The Different Worlds of Cao Fei

Cao Fei/China Tracy, RMB CITY: A Second Life City Planning, 2007, video, 6 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

here is an advantage to having visited RMB City (2007-2011), the online fantasy world created in Second Life (SL) by Beijing- Tbased artist Cao Fei, when appreciating her “slightly different version” of it as a one-person game art installation grimly titled Apocalypse Tomorrow: Surf in RMB City (2011). The title screen invites audiences to step on a bright orange skimboard (a surfboard without fins) to guide the on-screen avatar, “an intrepid meditating monk,” through a post-disaster floodscape filled with obstacles that turn out to be the remnants of the submerged once-famous RMB City sometime in the future. Marking the culmination of the RMB City project, Apocalypse Tomorrow premiered in the group exhibition Real Virtuality at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image in January 2011, about the same time Cao Fei announced intentions to power down RMB City’s operations. While both are stand alone works, experiencing RMB City and Apocalypse Tomorrow in the same time-space cosmos of a gallery fortuitously exults both as perfect bookends for the numerous artworks, interactive exhibitions, and events Cao Fei’s art in Second Life has spawned over the last three years. From platform to surfing game, the incredible scope of the project has brought critical attention to an expanding cultural brokerage between the art world, the Internet and its virtual economies, and the role gaming and social media can play in questioning these developments as well as its own.

Over the last decade, Cao Fei has gained a prominent place at the forefront of a generation of artists interested in combining game modding with

82 Vol. 11 No. 3 the latest display, social networking, and Web 2.0-enabled technologies to create online participatory media projects. Second Life, launched in 2003 by Linden Lab, is the three-dimensional virtual universe of different user- created worlds, with its own money exchange (the Lindex) and currency, inhabited by over twenty million self-customized user-avatars called “residents” who communicate through instant messaging. Membership is free to the public common spaces, but with Linden dollars converted from real US dollars, residents can purchase land and the goods and services to build up and privatize their virtual homes and businesses. Opened to the public in 2009, Cao Fei’s whimsical RMB City is arguably the most widely acclaimed SLart (art in Second Life) project in both SL and RL (Real Life) art worlds.

RMB City is an online art community, platform, and concept piece designed as “an experiment exploring the creative relationship between real and virtual space, and is a reflection of China’s urban and cultural explosion.”1 Seen from a bird’s eye view (as all avatars in SL have the ability to fly and teleport), RMB City is a chaotic themeparkization of overabundant socialist, communist, and capitalist icons and architectural landmarks associated with Chinese cities then and now, along with every fathomable aspect of material culture extolling the excesses of capitalism that, according to Cao Fei, “made China, my country, such a syncretic experimental place.”2 Indeed, a literal translation of its title, drawing from the abbreviation of the Chinese unit of currency, Renminbi (“people’s money”), could read simply as “money town.” Now deserted by the online art community that used to inhabit and maintain it, RMB City still exists on the Creative Commons’ Kula Island in SL.

Cao Fei’s first explorations of the SL community began in 2006, when she, as her avatar, China Tracy, then an armour-clad platinum-blond cyberpunk approaching Barbie-Doll proportions, directed a three-part machinima about her in-world experiences over a period of six months. Machinima is filmmaking in a virtual environment using interactive three-dimensional video-game engines to render computer-generated imagery (CGI) in real time. Interactive screen spaces of the virtual worlds in SL act as portals enabling one to become a part of the media image rather than just its watchers. Yet the desire to control the generative outcomes of platforms is a constant factor when producing machinima in synthetic worlds. As Cao Fei put it, “I was directly recording myself as I moved through Second Life, but as I’m watching myself, I’m also controlling myself; I’m simultaneously director and actor. But I enjoy exploring everything and not knowing what will happen in the next step. A lot of the process is waiting for something to happen, and I didn’t try to make something fake.” Edited down to twenty-eight minutes, the resulting cyber epic, i-Mirror (2007), premiered at the 52nd Venice Biennale as part of the Chinese Pavilion exhibition but in its own temporary China Tracy Pavilion on-site and in SL.3 The virtual documentary chronicles Cao Fei’s encounters (“part real, part role playing”) with SL’s surreal terrains, subcultures, and players, including her love affair with a young blond Chinese avatar that she later discovers is actually a sixty- five year old American in real life.

Vol. 11 No. 3 83 Role-playing (or taking on a pretend persona), urban youth culture, and Top: Cao Fei/China Tracy, i-Mirror: A Second Life dreamscapes are subjects that Cao Fei, as part of a new younger generation Machinima, 2007, Internet project, 28 mins. Courtesy of the media has coined “New New Human Beings (Xin Xin Ren Lei),” has the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. long explored through her own exposure to not only the rapid urbanization Bottom: Cao Fei, Whose of Guangzhou where she was born and raised, but also pop culture from Utopia?, 2006, DVD, 20 mins. Courtesy of the artist and manga and anime to American rap and breakdancing, Chinese TV dramas, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou. and digital entertainment downloads.4 Illustrious examples include Hip Hop (2003), an upbeat video of regular city people, such as a clerk, a construction worker, and a police officer in Guangzhou, Fukuoka, and New York performing hip hop scenes, and COSPlayers (2004) a video and photographic series starring real-life Chinese “costume players,” fantasy realm-obsessed youth who dress up as their favourite manga, anime, or game characters. With signs of Guangzhou’s high-speed urbanism and the socio-economic upheavals associated with post-planning as their backdrop,

84 Vol. 11 No. 3 the teenagers theatrically roam the city by day as urban superheroes but by night, at home in small working-class living quarters and with their aging parents, they brood under a heavy cloud of depression, self-alienation, and ennui. Less morose, Whose Utopia (2006–07), produced during the Sieman’s Art Program, where she conducted a six-month residency called What are you doing here? is a surreal three-part video of employees at the Osram light bulb factory in Foshan, Guangdong province, acting out their hopes and aspirations in their workplace as ballet dancers and rock stars.

In the virtual realm, however, the body images that users create for their avatars, Christine Liao writes, “usually do not mirror their physical body but are accumulations of imagination and desires. . . . Because avatars carry information about personal desires and cultural experiences, avatars do not represent the dream of cyberspace as a space without stereotype of human and discrimination.”5 While SL as a cultural interface offers abundant possibilities for identity play, “the visual culture of avatars has certain limitations and adheres to particular aesthetics, especially Western aesthetics.”6 Cao Fei also notes a further distinction: “For cosplayers, they put on different costumes in their real life, but they’re conscious of playing a game. When you’re online in a totally new world, your physical self is more invisible, and it’s your inner self that’s revealed.”7

The initial melancholic urban drifting of China Tracy during the making of i-Mirror in the great number of Western-style contexts that tend to dominate in SL (HiPiHi, the Chinese version of SL was not released until 2008) led Cao Fei to create RMB City as her “own city utopia” which would virtually reflect her cultural gaze back at herself and to which she could feel a sense of belonging. RMB City, Cao Fei states, “is a Chinese city, but it mixes the different elements of China. I’m very interested in the city as an organism and have done a lot of research on cities in the Pearl River Delta, and I’m hoping I can use my knowledge to build a Second Life version of my vision of the Chinese city today.”8 The resulting monuments and signature high-rises in Cao Fei’s new “virtopia” (Virtual Utopia) clearly call up the major cities of Beijing, Shanghai (especially Pudong New Area, a designated Special Economic Zone), and Hong Kong, one of China’s two Special Administrative Regions.9

With Cao Fei’s “Slebrity” avatar China Tracy (now with long black hair twisted into small Princess Leia buns) as participant-observer, resident- tourist, and philosopher-guide, RMB City has hosted over a dozen in-world activities, in all seriousness to the absurd, that have ranged from the 2009 opening live performance piece, Master Q’s Guide to Virtual Feng Shui, by Guangzhou-based artist Huang He to the machinima Live in RMB City (2009) on the first steps and existential questions in SL of China Tracy’s newborn son China Sun (as in real life), and the unveiling of the Guggenheim Museum in RMB City to a Naked Idol in RMB City beauty contest in 2010 for SL avatars and five mayoral inauguration ceremonies inducting well-known figures in the art world such as long-time collector and patron of contemporary Chinese art, Uli Sigg (SL: UliSigg Cisse), Jerome Sans (SL: SuperConcierge Cristole), Director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing from 200811; and the

Vol. 11 No. 3 85 Guggenheim Museum’s Senior Cao Fei/China Tracy, Live in RMB City, 2009, single- Curator of Asian Art, Alexandra channel video, 24 mins., 49 secs Courtesy of the artist Munroe (SL: Supernova Sibilant). and Vitamin Creative Space, As a laboratory, RMB City has Guangzhou. also experimented with hybrid productions that combine SL and RL performances, such as the post–Hurricane Katrina project NO Lab in RMB City (2008), in collaboration with Hong Kong-based MAP OFFICE (Gutierrez + Portefaix), which premiered at Prospect.1 New Orleans. In the live mixed reality performance RMB City Opera (2009) for Artissima 16 in Turin, Italy, virtual and real performers interact with each other in real time inspired by the revolutionary propaganda model operas, or Yang Ban Xi, developed during China’s Cultural Revolution (traditional operas were banned by Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing).

Developed by Cao Fei and Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou, RMB City is not just an Asian island city in SL, it is also a product of the international art world network that sees a primary investment in contemporary Chinese art. The virtual realm had been under construction for almost two years between 2006 and 2008 before it found an institutional partner in the Serpentine Gallery. From its City Planning stage to the involvement of investors and institutions as collaborators to purchase usage of the buildings in SL and programme events and activities in them, RMB City mimicked the structures of real-world real estate, urban planning, and art ecologies. Indeed its “advanced preview and sale” at Lombard-Fried Projects in New York in 2007 emphatically corroborated the art world’s interest and readiness in staking out virtual real-estate developments in a most spectacular way: basically by the buying and selling of virtual gallery space in RMB City, payable in real-world cash. The Chelsea gallery had provided China Tracy, as “Chief Developer,” with real-life retail space for a RMB City leasing office and showroom complete with neon signs, futuristic scale models, and a billing slogan: “My City is Yours, Your City is Mine.” According to the press release, the public was “invited to view an RMB City model, preview videos, promotional materials, and detailed RMB City photographs and go online via laptops providing real-time links to the city under construction in Second Life.” RMB City, packaged as a real-estate agency, was restaged for the 10th Istanbul Biennial in 2007. At its “Investors’ World Premiere” at Art Basel Miami Beach, earlier in 2007, available for purchase in addition to the promotional aerial survey video RMB City: A Second Life City Planning (2007), were RMB City hardhats and booklets explaining that special “units of RMB City will be sold to collectors and investors, and all sales profits will contribute to the RMB City Foundation for further construction, operation and development of the City in the coming two years.” The marketing campaign obviously worked. For an artwork that’s nowhere, this cyber art island allegedly fetched USD 100,000 from an unidentified collector at the art fair for one particularly pricey virtual plot.10

Envisioned from the onset as a two-year residency in virtual space for the artist and her peers and collaborators, what became clear over time was that

86 Vol. 11 No. 3 Cao Fei/China Tracy, RMB CITY: A Second Life City Planning, 2007, video, 6 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

Cao Fei/China Tracy, RMB CITY: A Second Life City Planning, 2007, video, 6 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.

what began as an fictional witnessing of China’s feverish rate of urbanization became a contradictory site of political contestation regarding the city’s futurities. Writing in reference to RMB City, Ceren Erdem observes: “Living in a Chinese city today, it is impossible to escape and become isolated from the forceful production of urban fiction. The best way to negotiate a space of personal freedom within it is perhaps to appropriate this as a given condition and exaggeratedly utilize it to an excessive degree, exposing its overabundance and even absurdity to the public gaze.”11 RMB City’s virtual skyline is crowded with the cantilevered prow and perforated metal skin of Bernard Tschumi’s West Diaoyutai Tower and Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren’s CCTV building, both from Beijing, suspended in mid-air from construction cranes that compete for vertical footprints. On the end of one of them, a giant floating panda (the city’s “love centre”) is dangerously close to getting spiked by Jiang Huan Cheng’s Oriental Pearl TV Tower from Shanghai that shoots up from the central business district and amongst dream factory chimneys spouting fiery, black smoke. None of this seems however to deter the airy meanderings of the national flag held up, if not led, by its stars. Lower down, rotating a gigantic Ferris wheel like a parasol,

Vol. 11 No. 3 87 the Monument to the People’s Heroes overlooks Tian’anmen Square which has become one of the many infinity pools in Shanghai hotels but is public here and possibly filled by the water from the Three Gorges reservoir, which gushes into huge toilets on the container piers of the Pearl River Delta below only to be flushed as sewage into an ocean of floating Red Army soldiers and Mao statues. Low-flying planes glide over super malls as well as dilapidated houses and street markets, a marooned Feilan Temple, the Grand National Theatre in Beijing, and the rusted steel structure of Beijing’s Olympic Stadium, a.k.a. Bird’s Nest. The slick animation of this 3D world is “very colourful and very perfect” but beyond that, already signs of the dystopic underbelly of a future China in late capitalist development seep up through the stand-in world and in real life.12

In fact it is precisely the luxury goods and properties of RMB City alongside the relics of its hubristic downfall bobbing up and down between ocean swells that the avatar monk in Apocalypse Tomorrow has to circumnavigate. Surfing free-style, the monk in fact seems to glide just as easily through giant designer handbags by Louis Vuitton and Mark Jacobs playfully occupied by marine life, pseudo trademark logos of multinationals, a menacing Mecha super robot, seated Buddha sculptures, and the Statue of Liberty, as he does passing motley survivors waiting it out on raft-sized Mac Books and iPads (Panda has hitched a bicycle ride) and a boat full of dynastic characters brandishing a “Fair Pay for Deity!!!” sign. The monk dodges falling RMB factories, shopping carts and UFOs only be taken by a swirling maelstrom to the bottom of the ocean where I.M. Pei’s Bank of China from Hong Kong lies next to KTV among the ruins. A wheel- propelled net, a gravity-defying upward flowing water slide, and the national flag cum magic carpet gently pulled along by cranes come to the rescue at highly auspicious moments.

Compared to the bright, colour-saturated qualities of the RMB City virtual utopia, the animated game world of Apocalypse Tomorrow: Surf in RMB City, despite its title, is relatively restrained and decidedly low-tech and retro in feel with its pastel palette combination of free-hand drawings and Flash

88 Vol. 11 No. 3 animation. In contrast to the former’s light-hearted yet punchy electronic music, the latter’s surf “journey of self-cultivation” is to two serene fifteen century compositions (Chunxiao Yin, “Spring Dawn” and He Wu Dongtian, “Cranes Dance”, both “in a Grotto-Heaven”) performed by a Chinese silk string zither (guqin), interrupted only by coin sound effects each time the monk successfully avoids collision which is almost always. The technological downsizing, however, is only on the surface.

Designed in Flash Surf, Apocalypse Tomorrow is a video game projected onto a curved screen with a custom body board Wii remote interface. If machinima is an example of not only emergent gameplay but also game art modding, this specially-designed Flash Surf game operates more like a mind-surf simulator that induces a state of meditation to free the mind of worldly desires rather than to improve reflexes and reaction time in riding the waves. Typical video surfing games demand a lot more physical athleticism. In billowing white robes and a topknot, the practically armless monk, who is seen only from the back, doesn’t attempt any sort of fancy maneuvers or ever wipes out even when caught in a maelstrom, rather he just seems to drift. Although there is a point counter, as with most artist- made video game mods, gameplay isn’t really the point: the avatar at no time perishes, there are no levels, and the game never really ends. As the game description indicates, “the monk-avatar, his heart at ease, constantly overcomes the obstacles but never reaches anything resembling a final destination.” In effect, the monk, much like a white chess bishop, and by extension Surf in RMB City, is intended to guide the player through “a fully conscious drama where each player picks her own paths,” revealing more about the player than the game. Unlike China Tracy’s excursion through Second Life, the solitary monk is not interested in staking out territory and picks up neither company nor things, perhaps adding credence to how one that is divested of desire and expectancy, (technically) never dies.

Cao Fei’s SL art emphasized the roles played by various stakeholders—as art collectors, art institutions, and land developers, as not only observers but denizen-participants in the formation of RMB City as a new transnational urban space. It is, however, only a microcosmic portion of the possibilities as well as the ironies of the introduction of virtual worlds to real-life populations where the economic disparity is so great that concepts such as soft capital and virtual goods, marketed brands, and property traded by only those with excess income are simply irrational to citizens save for the most imaginative. Yet this wide-ranging new media artwork has crucially enabled the possibility of a counter-worlding to China’s ostensibly over-zealous and unsustainable industrialization in real-life, precisely by playing up and ultimately washing away cumulative consumerist practices. Considering the efficacious advances in technology-enabled media art to inculcate new publics into patterns and practices of its own consumption, this endeavour seems all the more pressing in the present as well as the future. “Contemporary consumer society created people who live for consumer products, who spend money on consumer products, or those who are the products,” Cao Fei states, “whereas contemporary art focuses more on overlooking, epitomising, reflecting, and judging consumerism, making us reflect on questions like where we come from and where we will go.”13

Vol. 11 No. 3 89 In the wake of natural disasters Cao Fei, Apocalypse Tomorrow, 2011, Flash game from tsunamis to earthquakes installation, 26 scenes, 10 mins. Courtesy of RMB City© and ongoing worldwide conflicts 2011. RMB City Project is developed by Cao Fei and and wars, Apocalypse Tomorrow Vitamin Creative Space, seems a critically apt ending Guangzhou. for RMB City, sunk under the weight of its own excess. It can be understood to emerge out of the broader contradictions of gaming, user-created content and social media that would parody relationships between China’s state capitalism and free market economies, global capitalism and media democracy, civic politics and human rights, and the art market’s relationship to the virtual economies of an art world online. One of the most poignant yet disturbing animated sequences in Apocalypse Tomorrow is of line drawings of the WTC twin towers cut in half by a plane-shaped bird to topple over in such a way as to resemble Beijing’s CCTV tower. If there is a further haunting to account for, it is the trauma of reactive world wars of counterterrorism, terror, and extreme fundamentalisms in late global capitalism.

From beginning to end, Cao Fei’s RMB City has been both “a process of continuous ‘remaking’ to allow constant inventions and participations of other people” and a site of “collective sharing and creation,” according to curator Hou Hanru.14 The city platform prompted if not compelled audiences to play a role (or as many and in as many different ways as possible) in the characterization and production of “virtual” ‘world spaces’ (from online gaming to social media) as generative resources for political engagement in real life and vice-versa. The endgame is not the point. Rather the revelation is, like the post-apocalyptic monk, as virtual avatars and in real life: either steer in the direction you want to go, or end up adrift in the current.

Cao Fei is presented by the Surrey Art Gallery

Notes 1 RMB City Web site, http://rmbcity.com. 2 Davide Quadrio, “A Dramatic ‘Second Life’ for Cao Fei,”Flash Art 63, no. 270 (January/February 2010), 38. 3 Cao Fei exhibited with Shen Yuan, Yin Xiuzhen, and Kan Xuan in “Everyday Miracles: Four Woman Artists in the Chinese Pavilion” (2007), curated by Hou Hanru, as the youngest member of the group. 4 Hou Hanru, “Cao Fei: A Cosplayer Recounts Alternative Histories,” Art iT 15 (Spring/Summer 2007), 59–62. 5 Christine L. Liao, “Avatars, Second Life, and New Media Art: The Challenge for Contemporary Art Education,” Art Education 61, no. 2 (March 2008), 89. 6 Ibid. 7 Samantha Culp, “Interview with Cao Fei,” Artkrush (February 2008), http://artkrush.com/160442 (now defunct); http://samanthaculp.com/2008/02/interview-cao-fei-artkrush-feb-2008/ (March 12, 2012). 8 Ibid. 9 Zhang Anding (SL: Zafka), “Here Comes Metaverse: A New Existential Manifesto,” RMB City: Cao Fei/ SL Avatar: China Tracy, ed. Hu Fang and Cao Fei (Guangzhou: Vitamin Creative Space, 2008). 10 Chin-Chin Yap, “The Virtual Muse and Her Taxman,” Art Asia Pacific 58 (March/April 2008), 87. 11 Ceren Erdem, “RMB City: Spectatorship on the Boundaries of the Virtual and the Real,” Interventions Journal 2 (January 2012), http://interventionsjournal.net/2012/01/26/rmb-city-spectatorship-on-the- boundaries-of-the-virtual-and-the-real/ (March 12, 2012). 12 Ibid. 13 Christina Ko, “Patron Taint,” Prestige 29 (May 2011), 261. 14 Hou Hanru, “Notes on Cao Feis’ RMB City,” February 27, 2011, http://www.caofei.com/texts.aspx (March 12, 2012); Hou Hanru, “Politics of Intimacy: On Cao Fei’s Work,” in Cao Fei: Journey (Frac Ile- de-France: Le Plateau & Vitamin Creative Space, 2008), 50.

90 Vol. 11 No. 3 Diana Freundl The Formative Years: Social Media and Art in China

he evolution of technology and digital awareness has capitalized in the past thirty years with the introduction of personal computers, Tmobile phones, and the Internet. The combination of these three forms of media has restructured our public and personal spaces and affected the way we work, communicate, and live.

Early stages of the World Wide Web, often referred to as Web 1.0, allowed users to view and read content on Web sites and blogs, but Web 2.0 witnessed the emergence of sites designed to allow users to generate content and interact with one another. Social media and microblogging transformed communications further with the introduction of the News Feed application1 in which users are besieged by every action, location, and thought of their online community. The explosion of social media onto our lives has revolutionized advertising and marketing strategies, but it has also proven to have a critical role in organizing political activism and rallying dissidence.

Restrictions on foreign Web sites in China have resulted in a strong domestic market in which more than four hundred million Internet users are actively engaging in state-approved social media networks.2 Launched in 2009, Sina Weibo, a Chinese social networking service, allows users to post 140-character messages, along with photos and videos, making this the most popular network for commercial and personal activity. Nearly half of Weibo’s posts are sent via mobile phone, which also suggests the growth of mobile Internet in China.3

While the consumer industry embraced social media early on as a powerful and necessary marketing tool, artistic explorations are used more in the research and promotion, rather than the making, of art in China. In September 2010 the new media arts department at the China Academy of Art (CAA) in Hangzhou offered the first (in mainland China) Social Media Arts course. Initiated by professors Shen Ligong and Yao Dajun the program focused on the study of online social media and the use of such networks to make art.

One of twelve students in the class, new media arts major, Li Shun collected the top one-hundred posts from his Weibo account during a one month period. The posts were then reformatted and printed using a traditional hand-thread book binding technique. The work, titled Weiyu, was to draw attention to the spectacle of social media communication. “These books use a particular traditional method that you only expect to find for published

Vol. 11 No. 3 91 academic or scientific research. Li Shun, Weiyu, 2011, 3 sets of 4 thread-bound Chinese books. When you look through Weiyu, all Courtesy of the artist. you see and read are the mundane activities and thoughts of Chinese celebrities,” explained Li Shun, in referencing posts by popular personalities like Wang Leehong.

Li Shun, Weiyu, 2011, printed Two years earlier and across the posts from Li Suan’s Weibo page on thread-bound Chinese world an artist made a similar books, 3 sets of 4 books. commentary regarding new media Courtesy of the artist. forms of communication with an artwork commissioned on @1stfans, a Twitter art feed on Brooklyn Museum’s socially networked membership site. An Xiao Mina, an Li Shun, Weiyu, 2011, printed American design strategist and new posts from Li Suan’s Weibo page on thread-bound Chinese media artist was invited to launch books, 3 sets of 4 books. the world’s first socially networked Courtesy of the artist. museum membership newsfeed, which encourages social interaction both online and during museum- sponsored events.

Each month an artist is selected by a team headed by the Twitter feed curator Eugenie Tsai to create a work utilizing Twitter as art. An Xiao Mina tweeted for two months in Morse code, communicating trivial messages such as “An Xiao Sleepy,” that followers would translate into English via an online translator provided by the artist. She commented:

Such inane usage of telegraph technology would have been inconceivable in its heyday, and such an opaque use of Twitter, known for its ease of access, is hardly logical today. But in doing so, I wanted to encourage viewers to examine the evolution of instant communication and what purpose, exactly, is served by sharing such minor details of one’s life.4

The work of both An Xiao Mina and Li Shun comments on the evolution and triviality of microblog broadcasting, but only An Xiao Mina’s project necessitated the participation of the public who were encouraged to design their own replies in Morse code. The result was a range of creative responses, from handwritten messages to sculptures, which were photographed and posted on the Twitter feed. Without audience participation there would have been no art.

An Xiao Mina is a major advocate for social media as both a medium and art genre. Her project on @1stfans, at a respected institution, was a major mark for exploring the role of art in social media and the first of several social media art projects now formed in the US. The New York City–based nonprofit arts organization Creative Time launched Creative Time Tweets,

92 Vol. 11 No. 3 Nina Meledandri, A visual response to an An Xiao Mina tweet during her project for @1stfans art project, 2009, mixed materials. Courtesy of Nina Meledandri.

commissioning artists to make Twitter performances that promote exchange between the artist and the online audience. Curator of the Creative Time Tweets Project, Shand Brennan explained it this way:

The resulting Twitter streams, produced by the artists in collaboration with their audiences, constitute not only the performances but also their documentation. While the commissions in this series necessarily respond to Twitter’s specific technological and social conditions, they also speak to larger concerns about our networked culture, as well as how this relatively new medium is changing the way we define and inhabit public space.5

Man Bartlett, one of three Creative Time Tweets participating artists, spent twenty-four hours in New York City’s Union Square Best Buy tweeting under a designated hashtag. The audience would follow his Twitter feed engaging with replies of encouragement or with suggestions of actions.

According to CAA new media arts professor Cui Luhai, a major distinction between art that uses social media in China with that in the US, is a lack of audience participation. In his course, Fundamentals of the Internet, the focus is on the impact of social media within society more than utilizing it to make artworks. Cui Luhai commented that relinquishing control to the online public is only one reason social media art has yet to establish itself, and, “The reality of restrictions and censorship on media in China creates a difficult environment for self expression, whether it is in the virtual or real world.”6

Points of Reference and Limitation Before analyzing further the appearance (or not) of social media art in China, it’s important to look at some of the terms and definitions that have taken form in the last few years. In an article that appeared on Artnet.com nearly two years ago, art critic Ben Davis outlined the initial boundaries for art that uses social networks by applying the Semiotic Square.7 Categorizing “art” and “social” media as primary opposites and “non-art” and “non-social media” as their secondary counter-opposites, he was able to graph a variety of possible relationships between two cumbersome fields.8

The four classifications of social media art defined by Davis included, “art that uses social networks,” “new media art,” “social art collaboration,” and “art mods,” the latter of which refers to art video games and art in Second

Vol. 11 No. 3 93 Life. His scrutinizing square did more to prove social media art as a trendy new phenomenon than to clarify a new practice. But even Davis himself is aware of the limitations of his methodologies.

For the purposes of real analysis, such a structure does not by any means exhaust the meaning of a given creative gesture, which may well draw on all kinds of other material . . . our square is not a map of absolute possibilities. It is a chart of different possibilities to be explored and exhausted. It’s not a frame to think within. It’s a box that needs to be escaped.9

In a roundtable discussion held on Facebook in spring 2011, An Xiao Mina and fellow social media artists and practitioners carved out four general guidelines defining social media art in its formative years:

1) The Internet is used for marketing, sourcing and expressing the art. 2) The audience is involved. 3) The art is conceptually wealthy but open to those beyond the confines of the art world. 4) It’s adaptable to other platforms, pending the artist’s intent.10

In a Q & A following the article, An Xiao Mina discussed her own methodologies in addition to whether the parameters and rules for evaluating this emerging art practice in the US could (and should) be applied in mainland China.

The reality of social media is omnipresent in China but it has yet to make its mark as an artistic expression. Dismissing it, however, ignores opportunities for artists, and, more so, overlooks the potential of a public space where nearly half a billion viewers converge. After interviewing several artists as well as graduates and professors from new media art departments in Shanghai and Hangzhou, several noted a lack of opportunity for social media art exploration from art institutions and organizations. There has yet to be social media artwork commissioned or generated by public or private institutions similar to that initiated by the Brooklyn Museum or Creative Time in the US, which could help to merge the gap between physical and virtual public space.

An Xiao Mina, Caochangdi 404, 2011, view of students at Sydney’s 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art speaking to students in the migrant village of Caochangdi using social media network set up in An Xiao’s project. Courtesy of Phu Tang.

94 Vol. 11 No. 3 An Xiao Mina, Caochangdi 404, 2011, view of young students in the migrant village of Caochangdi using social media network to communicate simultaneously with students at Sydney’s 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of An Xiao Mina.

Approaching Social Media and Art in China: A Group Exhibition Originally a conversation on how new technology influences art participation and social media in China, Zheng Shengtian and myself discussed the initial basis for an exhibition exploring artwork made with or about online social networks. Following wider confines than those defined by An Xiao Mina and Ben Davis, we looked for possibilities of art engaged with social media in mainland China. The conclusion is Approaching Social Media and Art, a group exhibition opening in June 2012 at the Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver. The exhibition brings together works from five Chinese artists and collectives each utilizing social media as a concept, or an art form.

Ge Fei and Lin Zhen Beijing-based artists, Ge Fei and Lin Zhen adapt an older artwork, Sunbathing, for the exhibition by making it available to visitors via an online music sharing application. In early 2010, Ge Fei and Lin Zhen commissioned two Beijing independent bands to compose the music and lyrics to a song that would simulate the experience of sunbathing through music, just as a particular smell or song can trigger a memory.

Gei Fei and Lin Zhen, Sunbathing, 2009, recording session with the musicians for the commission project by Ge Fei and Lin Zhen. Courtesy of the artists.

Vol. 11 No. 3 95 The artists bought the copyright to the songs and produced an unlimited edition of CDs that they gave away at the exhibition so visitors could recreate the sensation at home. Following the exhibition they placed the CD in public spaces, cafes, and subway stations for passers-by to collect.

In Vancouver they continue to promote the idea that art is not present in the object in front of you but in the experience of the participant by recreating the work with new recordings uploaded directly by the musicians to an online distribution platform, SoundCloud. SoundCloud allows musicians and fans to easily share recordings via an URL and a handful of integrated Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter, among others. The public sharing of music files, and thus their artwork, applies both online social interaction and public ownership.

Forget Art Collective The Beijing collective Forget Art Forget Art Collective, Youth Apartment Exchange Program, likewise uses social networking to 2011, logo for Web site project. Courtesy of Forget Art, Beijing. publicly promote their alternative living project, Guerrilla Living Syndrome. Initiated by Ma Yongfeng, Yang Xinguang, and Wu Xiaojun, the collective established a series of programs to challenge both social and spatial constructions in China. One of the actions includes the Youth Apartment Exchange Program (YAEP), a project launched through its own social Web site and Weibo hashtag to encourage the temporary swapping of residencies.

Promoting their artwork through a social network allows it to spread outside the confines of the art community, and even China. Ma Yongfeng explained that although the project is activated online, the emphasis is on physical interaction in the “real world.” Ideally, once participants meet online they will eventually meet in person to exchange living spaces. Later they are asked to document their experience on Weibo. By incorporating an online social community and physical participation, the emphasis of YAEP is on the convergence of the on and off line worlds.

Remon Wang A superficial look at Twitter or Weibo might lead to the conclusions that microblogs provide nothing more than trivial content without relevance to useful information. But what happens in the “real world,” like that of YAEP, is the essence of Remon Wang’s artwork. With 100,000 followers on his Weibo account, Wang is the example that proves memes, ideas that are transmitted and spread via the Internet, are a popular outlet for mainstream social commentary in China. In addition to their accessibility via viral transmission, the use of humour to disarm political sensitivity makes a meme easier to transmit via social media.11

An undergraduate of fine arts, Remon Wang works as a freelance illustrator. While he has always been drawing his own views on national and local politics, it wasn’t until last year that he started posting his work on Weibo that he gained fame and his comics spread quickly with followers re-posting them on additional Web sites.

96 Vol. 11 No. 3 Forget Art Collective, Youth Apartment Exchange Program, 2011, Zhang Xiaomin’s apartment advertisement for exchange on YAEP. Courtesy of Zhang Xiaomin and Forget Art, Beijing.

Forget Art Collective, Youth Apartment Exchange Program, 2011, Wang Zheng’s apartment advertisement for exchange on YAEP. Courtesy of Wang Zheng and Forget Art, Beijing.

Remon Wang, untitled political A likewise outspoken critic of the cartoon, posted on Weibo, March 2012, digital illustration. Chinese government, Ai Weiwei is often Courtesy of the artist. also posting humourous memes. One of his more famous, an image of himself naked with a stuffed llama covering his crotch provides a visual play on words. A llama (literally: grass mud horse) covering his centre would be read as “Grass mud horse covers the centre” which sounds like “F*** your mother, Central Party Committee”.12

Remon Wang, untitled political Among the most provocative social media cartoon, posted on Weibo, March 2012, digital illustration. activists in China, Ai Weiwei is reported to Courtesy of the artist. spend up to eight hours a day on Twitter. The Beijing-based artist has 40,000 Chinese followers on his Twitter account, and a self- appointed team of volunteers in the US translating his tweets into English.13 Remon Wang also drew several comics to rally support among netizens to help pay the tax penalty following Ai Weiwei’s arrest and detention in April 2011.

Strict regulators have closed Remon Wang’s Weibo account more than one hundred times since he joined, but it doesn’t stop him from re-inventing

Vol. 11 No. 3 97 Remon Wang, untitled political cartoon, posted on Weibo, 2011, digital illustration. Courtesy of the artist.

Remon Wang, untitled political cartoon, posted on Weibo, 2011, digital illustration. Courtesy of the artist.

Left: Remon Wang, untitled political cartoon, posted on Weibo, 2011, digital illustration. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Remon Wang, untitled political cartoon, posted on Weibo, 2011, digital illustration. Courtesy of the artist.

98 Vol. 11 No. 3 new ways to get his meaning across. A detailed article in the New York Times looked at clever attempts by dissident bloggers to disguise political commentary. “Beyond its comic value, this humour shows where netizens are pushing against the boundaries of the state. Nothing else gives us a clearer view of the pressure points in Chinese society.” Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was quoted:14

To illustrate Remon Wang’s repertoire of work, the Hunan-based artist selected ten of his most popular illustration posts on Weibo from the last year to exhibit, accompanied by Chinese-to-English translations and brief descriptions of the news related events.

Remon Wang, untitled political cartoon, posted on Weibo, 2011, digital illustration. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhang Lehua Shanghai-based artist Zhang Lehua has developed a series of memes around discussions on social media Web sites. Drawing on the tone and visual aesthetics of pubic service announcements, his satirical paintings have looked at everything from teenage sex to the education of children from mixed racial marriages in China.

A graduate from the Hangzhou new media arts department in 2008, Zhang Lehua has been actively exploring various mediums focusing on installation, performance, painting, and, in the last two years, video. Facebook is the focus of his latest work, a nine-minute video similar in style to a high- school science class documentary. The story unveils as a narration by an animated portal of Friedrich Engels instructing students how to create a flipbook of faces filled with their classmates. The end result is a government approved and endorsed “Facebook.”15

Lu Yang Lu Yang is among one of the most prolific (and possibly controversial) young artists in China. Her investigation of bio-art and behaviour psychology challenges humanist theories and pushes limits of experimentation in new media art in China. Graduating from CAA with

Vol. 11 No. 3 99 Zhang Lehua, Teenager Dissemination Series—The Rules For Taking Care of Foreign Classmates, 2011, acrylic on paper, 110 x 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhang Lehua, Teenager Dissemination Series—The 3 Do’s and 3 Don’t’s For Raising Mixed-race Children, 2011, acrylic on paper, 110 x 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

her master’s degree in new media arts two years ago, Lu Yang’s projects are like an ongoing laboratory study in which the artist controls, probes, and mutates subjects to execute her theories.

The role of social media in the new work of Lu Yang, work in progress, 2012, human spine, computer Lu Yang is an examination of communication cables, and wires. Courtesy of the artist. technology in its formative years. Web sites generating and exchanging information with other web sites allows data to grow and machines to become faster. Eventually machine learning will evolve and lead to artificial intelligence according to research explored and executed in Lu Yang’s latest work. The installation consists of a hospital-operating table with faux-human organs connected by computer wires and cables. The semi-replacement of a spinal cord and nerves with machine wires connected to human body parts acknowledges the emergence of artificial intelligence, while probing a deeper metaphysical question that exceeds the dilemma of social media: what is the nature of our future reality?

100 Vol. 11 No. 3 Lu Yang, work in progress, 2012, human spine, computer cables, and wires. Courtesy of the artist.

Frequently checking their mobiles for updates and posting on Weibo, it’s easy to see how social media is embedded in the lives of mainland Chinese. Although censorship, technical barriers, and the absence of any organizational support create limitations for social media as a genre of art right now, they haven’t stopped artists from exploring its mounting presence in everyday life.

Lu Yang, Zhang Lehua, Remon Wang, Lin Zhen, Ge Fei, and the Forget Art Collective are presented by the Charles H. Scott Gallery.

Notes 1 Thomas, Clive. “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy,” New York Times, online edition, December 16, 2011. A News Feed automatically sends compiled information on the activities and updates from a user directly to his/her contacts. Networks are now integrated so that users can even access happenings from various social sites and stream at one location. 2 Thomas Crampton, “Social Media in China: The Same, but Different,” China Business Review, online edition, January–March, 2011. 3 Ibid. A number of social media Web sites in China are designed for particular interests, but Sina Weibo is now the most popular. A detailed guide in Crampton’s article identifies them in more detail. They include Douban, focusing on books, cinema, culture, and music; Kaixin001, a platform designed for a more mature audience of young professionals, QZone (QQ), the first social networking site in China, attracting youth to age 25; and RenRen, similar to Facebook and used mostly by university students. 4 An Xiao Mina, “@1stfans,” www.anxiaostudio.com, January 2008. 5 Shane Brennan, “Introduction to Creative Time Tweets,” www.creativetime.org/programs/ archive/2011/tweets, May 2011. 6 From an interview at the China Academy of Art, new media arts professor Cui Luhai, Hangzhou, March 6, 2011. 7 Ben Davis, “‘Social Media Art’ In the Expanded Field,” ArtNet.com, August 2010. Invented by French semiotician A. J. Greimas, the Semiotic Square was used by Davis as a way to visualize the debate of social media art by creating a matrix of possible relationships between art and social media, generated by their counter opposites. 8 Ben Davis, “‘Social Media Art’ In the Expanded Field.” 9 Ibid. 10 Kevin Holms, “The Creators Project Creativity Bytes: A Brief Guide To Social Media Art,” The Creators Project official Web site (www.thecreatorsproject.com), June 08, 2011. 11 Steven Jiang, “Pandaman’ Creator Finds Political Cartoon a Risky Business in China,” CNN.com, January 23, 2012. Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of Chinese media-monitoring Web site danwei.org and a leading commentator on China’s social media, was quoted on CNN saying that people in China feel more comfortable using humor rather than directly criticizing a situation. 12 An Xiao Mina, China Meme Report,” 88 Bar Group Blog Web site (www.88-bar.com/category/china- meme-report), February, 2012. This particular Ai Weiwei meme example is from an interview with An Xiao in March 2012. 13 Brook Larmer, “Where an Internet Joke Is Not Just a Joke,” New York Times, online edition, October 26, 2011. 14 Ibid. 15 The direct Chinese to English translation of lian shu is “Facebook,” meaning, literally, a book of many faces. The artist’s intention is to create a two-dimensional flipbook of everyday citizens, in other words, a satirical yet government-approved Facebook.

Vol. 11 No. 3 101 Diana Freundl Question and Answer with An Xiao Mina March 12, 2012

n Xiao Mina is an American artist and designer with roots in Manila and China. She was listed in the Guardian’s “Who’s Who of the ATwitter Art World” in 2009 and in the same year launched Brooklyn Museum’s Twitter commission platform @1stfans and founded @Platea, a global social media art collective. An advocate of social media art as both an art medium and genre, she has written on the subject for numerous art and design publications including, Hyperallergic Huffington Post, and Core 77.

An Xiao Mina spent a one-year residency in Beijing from 2011 to 2012. During her stay she initiated and participated in several projects and talks on social media art. She continues to analyze and report on Chinese political memes in addition to using Tumblr to translate the tweets of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Given her wealth of expertise in the field of social media art and interest in Chinese artists’ engagement with social media, I consulted her regularly on the Vancouver exhibition for Yellow Signal, Virtual Voices: Approaching Social Media and Art, and the previous article.

Diana Freundl: During your one-year residency in China, what were your experiences or expectations regarding social media art in China at the time?

An Xiao Mina: I wasn’t sure when I first moved there. It was my first time to live in China, and I’d not heard anything about social media art practices outside of the US. The only news I’d heard about Chinese social media concerned censorship. As I peered further into leading domestic social media like Sina Weibo and Tencent QQ, however, I came to discover that it’s a highly creative and expressive space. People host all kinds of discussions, from trivial to political, and they often use rich imagery to illustrate their messages. I’ve come to realize that viral memes, which evade censorship and are easily remixed, play an important role in fostering frank discussion online.

Social media art has a different character in China. In the West, we have institutions like the Brooklyn Museum, Rhizome, and Eyebeam that actively support new media practices. This is less common in China, and so the artists engaging in the work are doing so of their own accord and are not necessarily operating under the mantle of social media art. As a result, it’s more difficult to locate interesting practices. But that doesn’t mean they’re not out there.

Diana Freundl: What were some of the projects you worked on while in China?

102 Vol. 11 No. 3 An Xiao Mina: I developed a piece called Caochangdi 404. Set simultaneously in the art and migrant village of Caochangdi and in Sydney’s 4A Center for Contemporary Asian Art, I looked at the barriers to social media usage online. The piece was done for a larger social media art exhibition called Portal that was organized by Janis Ferberg and Stephen Truax.

In a small corner in Caochangdi, I set up a net-book and monitor as a portal to Sydney. The location I chose had no Internet ports, so my project manager set us up with a wireless 3G connection. On the other side, my curator Janis Ferberg created a similar setup with a projection and cabled Internet connection. We invited members of our respective communities to participate in a conceptual conversation for one hour following basic instructions, and we had live tweet/Weibo updates posted on a Web site by Andrew Newman and Yang Jian respectively.

There were a number of difficulties with the project—all of them expected. The wireless 3G connection caused the Skype audio and video to stutter and at one point failed. Most participants didn’t have a shared language, and interpretation proved difficult. Cultural references and jokes flew across the portal but were not understood. Most of my work before moving to China was focused on how social media bring us together; this piece looked at how there are so many technical, cultural, and linguistic barriers still keeping us apart. There are hundreds of millions of people on Chinese social media and hundreds of millions of people on Western social media, and few of us are talking to each other.

Diana Freundl: Based on your roundtable discussion with art practitioners on Facebook and the four proposed guidelines listed in the previous text for classifying social media art, are there any defining characteristics that would exist specifically for art that uses social media in China, which would be different or in addition to your four rules?

An Xiao Mina: I think Chinese nationals use social media in the same way. All of us share stories, connect with others, play games, and find funny cat videos. And as artists, we’re all trying to find ways to bring our art practice online.

The biggest difference in China is the greater presence of censorship, which runs counter to the artist’s goal, which is self-expression. In that sense, much social media art practice in China that I’ve seen revolves around subterfuge and allusion. And humour, too—it’s easier to talk about difficult political issues if there’s a touch of humour.

Diana Freundl: Ben Davis’s article on Artnet (January 2010) was critical of the classification of social media as a new art category. Although the article is now two years old, and possibly dated, do you feel some of the classifications he made are correct?

An Xiao Mina: I think so much has changed in social media generally since Davis’s article that much of what he wrote is dated. I think he brought up good concerns, but in the two years since his article came out we’ve had a

Vol. 11 No. 3 103 number of pivotal events, like the Arab Spring and Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present, [Marina Abramovic used live video and Flickr to create a social media component to her performance; in turn, those tools were seized upon by fans to create interactive blogs and art projects inspired by Abramovic’s piece]. The ways we perceive social media and art practices embedded with social media has changed.

Diana Freundl: Technology dates. Blogs and net art have evolved into microblogging and social media art. Is there staying power for art practices using social media or will they become categorized under the umbrella of new media and Internet art?

An Xiao Mina: I think we’ll see social media art being brought into broader art practices. Rather than new media art, social media will be unselfconsciously attached to any practice. Again, this reflects broader trends. With so many people using Facebook and Twitter, it’s no longer remarkable to think of social media as separate from our lives. They’re just part of the landscape of our social interactions, as the telephone and email have become.

Diana Freundl: When an artist uses social media as an outlet, he or she relinquishes control of the work to the public. You favour this audience engagement as a form of performance-based public art. I have heard comments from curators and artists in Shanghai that the same public aspect and lack of “control” impedes their decision to use it.

An Xiao Mina: I think it’s extremely difficult in practice for an artist to make their work public online. And a basic truth is that there’s very little way to control what happens when you put your work out there. But that’s the beauty of social media art, I think. It’s no longer about a single artist. When I launched my Morse code project for the Brooklyn Museum, I was so excited—I thought it would be a great way to showcase my work to a broader audience. Instead, other people took the project and ran with it. They replied to me in Morse code, they used shells and crayons to create Morse code-like shapes. And then they started talking to each other in Morse code, without involving me. The project was no longer in my hands.

This reflects a broader trend in society. From co-working spaces to car sharing programs to Airbnb (which lets you rent out your apartment to others) to Netflix (which lets you borrow DVDs for a short period of time rather than own them), ideas of single-person ownership are giving way to a more collective sense of ownership and engagement.

Placing art on social media reduces barriers to access and encourages all of us to exercise our creativity. It encourages us not just to participate in art, but to co-create work. But it has to be done right, and the artist has to be comfortable with the loss of individual control. This is scary, but ultimately I think it deepens our practice as artists.

104 Vol. 11 No. 3 Yellow Signal: New Media in China List of Galleries and Acknowledgments

Centre A: Vancouver Pacific Cinémathèque International Centre for Hou Hsiao-hsien, Yao Hung-i Contemporary Asian Art March 30, 2012 Wang Jianwei, Kan Xuan www.cinematheque.bc.ca March 17–April 28, 2012 www.centrea.org Republic Gallery Centre A gratefully acknowledges RongRong & inri the lead donor Yu Yu, Urbanova April 6–May 11, 2012 Centre of Art & Design, the support www.republicgallery.com circle of Jack and Maryon Adelaar, Karen Coflin, Karen Gelmon, Roger Surrey Art Gallery Holland, Richard Mew, Michael Cao Fei O’Brian Family Foundation, April 7–June 10, 2012 Bernard Wolfe, and the Canada www.surrey.ca/arts Council for the Arts, British The Surrey Art Gallery gratefully Columbia Arts Council, and the acknowledges the Canada Council City of Vancouver. for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and the City of Surrey. Charles H. Scott Gallery Zhang Lehua, Lu Yang, Ge Fei, Lin Vancouver Art Gallery Zhen, Remon Wang, and the Forget Yang Fudong Art Collective May 12–September 3, 2012 June 5–July 8, 2012 www.vanartgallery.bc.ca www.chscott.ecuad.ca Yang Fudong: Fifth Night is the Charles H. Scott Gallery gratefully thirteenth installment of NEXT: A acknowledges the Canada Council Series of Artist Projects from the for the Arts and the Emily Carr Pacific Rim, presented by TD Bank University of Art and Design Group. This project has received additional support from the Xi’an Morris and Helen Belkin Art Museum in Shaanxi, China. Art Gallery The Vancouver Art Gallery is a not- Geng Jianyi, Huang Ran, for-profit organization supported Zhang Peili by its members, individual donors, April 27–August 19, 2012 corporate funders, foundations, www.belkin.ubc.ca the City of Vancouver, the Province The Morris and Helen Belkin Art of British Columbia through the Gallery gratefully acknowledges British Columbia Arts Council and the generous support of JNBY Art the Canada Council for the Arts. Projects, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Belkin Curator’s Forum.

Vol. 11 No. 3 105 Chinese Name Index

Ai Weiwei Hou Hanru Lu Chunsheng Wong, Milton 艾未未侯瀚如陸春生黃光遠 An Xiao Mina Hou Hsiao-hsien Lu Jie Wong, Paul 安小侯孝賢盧杰黃柏武 Cai Guo-qiang Hu Jieming Lu Yang Wu Wenguang 蔡國強胡介鳴陸揚吳文光 Cao Fei Huang He Lum, Ken Wu Xiaojun 曹斐黃河林蔭庭吳小軍 Chang Tsong-zung, Johnson Huang Ran Ma Liuming Xia Wei 張頌仁黃然馬六明夏蔚 Cheang Shulea Huang Yongping Ma Yongfeng Xiao Qiang 鄭淑麗黃永砯馬永峰蕭強 Chen Shaoxiong Jiang Huan Cheng Ou Ning Xu Bing 陳劭雄江歡成歐寧徐冰 Chen Tong Jiang Qing Pan Tianshou Xu Tan 陳侗江青潘天壽徐坦 Chen Zhen Jim, Alice Ming Wai Pau, Ellen Xu Zhen 陳箴詹明慧鮑藹倫徐震 Chien, Katy Jin Hua Pei, I.M. Yang Fudong 簡秀枝靳華貝聿銘楊福東 Cui Luhai Kan Xuan Qiu Ti Yang Xinguang 崔魯海闞萱丘堤楊心廣 Deng Xiaoping Kao Tzu-chin Qiu Zhijie Yang Zhenzhong 鄧小平高子衿邱志杰楊振忠 Ding Yi Li Chu-tsing RongRong Yang Zirong 丁乙李鑄晉榮榮楊子榮 Fan Di’an Li Shun Shen Kuiyi Yao Dajun 范迪安李舜沈揆一姚大鈞 Feng Kai Z Li Wu Shen Ligong Yao Hung-i 馮志凱力五沈立功姚宏易 Feng Mengbo Li Xianting Shu Jun Yin Xiuzhen 馮夢波栗憲庭樹軍尹秀珍 Gao Minglu Li Yongbin Shu Kewen Zhang Ga 高名潞李永斌舒可文張尕 Song Dong Gao Shiming Liang Juhui Zhang Huan 宋冬高士明梁鉅輝張洹 Tan, Adele Ge Fei Liao, Christine Zhang Lehua 陳韋純葛非廖翎吟張樂華 Wang Gongxin Geng Jianyi Liao Wen Zhang Peili 王功新耿建翌廖雯張培力 Wang Huangsheng Gu Hongzhong Lin Tianmiao Zhang Qing 王璜生顧閎中林天苗張晴 Wang Jianwei Gu Wenda Lin Yilin 汪建偉 Zhang Xiaomin 谷文達林一林張小敏 Wang Leehong Gu Xiong Lin Zhen 王力宏 Zhao Tingyang 顧雄林縝趙汀陽 Wang, Remon Guo Qiang Liu Xiaodong 王立銘 Zheng Shengtian 郭強劉小東鄭勝天 Wang Zheng Han Xizai Liu Zheng 王掙 Zhou, Debra 韓熙載劉錚周曉鳴 Wong, Annie Hong Huang Low, Joni Kit Wah Leung Zhou Tiehai 洪晃劉植紅王梁潔華周鐵海

106 Vol. 11 No. 3 Vol. 11 No. 3 107 108 Vol. 11 No. 3 Vol. 11 No. 3 109 110 Vol. 11 No. 3 Vol. 11 No. 3 111 Wei Guangqing (b. 1962, Wuhan) is recognized as one of the earliest Chinese artists to explore the language of Pop Art, which became a mainstream trend in the 1980s and early 1990s. Yishu His works were labeled as “Cultural Pop” for its appropriation of traditional images juxtaposed Edition with cultural symbols. His use of the red brick wall has become his trademark ready-made image, one that symbolizes the background of Chinese culture and politics.

Wei Guangqing, Made in China, 2008, silkscreen print, 210 x 295 mm. Edition of 198.

To purchase a Yishu edition print This image is a unique seriograph of the 2004 please send your request to canvas painting titled Made in China, which [email protected] or call references the transition of contemporary 1.604.649.8187 (Canada), or contact Chinese art into a consumerist culture. As part Zhang Chaoxuan 134.6655.9126 (China). of The Extended Virtuous Words series, named Each edition is commissioned by and after a Chinese classic with the same title, produced exclusively for Yishu. he adopts the visual format of popular folk woodblock prints that were widely disseminated to the masses in the early 20th century. Wei’s works are recognized for his subversion of tradition and culture as he replaces the virtuous words with a unifying red wall in hopes to “extend” the meaning of his ideas.

Yishu 10 year anniversary 2002-2012