December 2006 Winter issue

INSIDE Singapore and Shanghai Biennales Documenta 12 Magazines Special Feature on Education Interviews with Fumio Nanjo, Liu Dahong, Samuel Kung, Cao Fei Features on Hang Rui, Liu Ding, Cao Fei, Xu Jiang US$12.00 NT$350.00

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 Editor’s Note

4 Contributors

singapore and shanghai biennales

7 A Tale of Two Biennales: Singapore and Shanghai p. 10 Joe Martin Hill 18 Interview with Fumio Nanjo, Artistic Director of the Singapore Biennale Susan Kendzulak

21 The Undesignable Zhang Qing

documenta 12 magazines special feature on education 28 Who is the Next Freshman in Art and Culture? The New Trend in Graduate Programs in Art and Culture in Taiwan Wu Yin-Hui and Yu Wie p. 25 38 Dialogue: Dispute over the “Dumped” Graduation Theses of Twelve Students in the Oil Painting Class of Art Institute of Shanghai Normal University Ma Jun

feature articles

48 Interview with Samuel Kung, Chairman and Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai Zheng Shengtian

56 Mao, Money, and Censorship After the “Domestic Turn” in Beijing’s Art World Ling-yun Tang

69 Eager Paintings, Empathetic Products: Liu Ding’s Critical p. 44 Complicity David Spalding

73 Realities and Other Absurdities: A Conversation with Cao Fei Joni Low

82 Heroes of the Mundane: The Syncretic Imagination of Cao Fei Maya Kóvskaya 86 Crossing the East/West Divide: On the Art of Xu Jiang Edward Lucie-Smith

reviews p. 82 89 No Matter from Which Side, It Is Still Possible To See: A Review of Karen Smith’s Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant- Garde Art in New China Paul Gladston

94 Symphony of Riddles: Wu Shanzhuan: Red Humour International Joni Low

98 A Short Review of From Reality to Fantasy: The Art of Luis Chan Lai Mei- Lin

103 Hong Lei at Chambers Fine Art Jonathan Goodman p. 96 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Volume 5, Number 4, December 2006 With biennales and triennales becoming so  Katy Hsiu-chih Chien pervasive, in Asia as much as anywhere else,   Ken Lum the challenge to debut a new entry into the  Keith Wallace arena is no easy task. Singapore introduced its   Zheng Shengtian first biennale in September 2006, and following   Julie Grundvig it within days were the Shanghai and Gwangju Kate Steinmann   Larisa Broyde Biennales, each in their sixth edition. In this issue,   Joyce Lin we are presenting a report on the Singapore and intern Chunyee Li Shanghai Biennales, an interview with Fumio   Nanjo, Artistic Director of the first Singapore Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Biennale, and a reprint of one of the catalogue John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation essays for the Shanghai Biennale. Okwui Enwezor, San Francisco Art Institute Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di'an, Central Academy of Fine Arts Yishu 19 also includes our second contribution Fei Dawei, Guy & Mariam Ullens Foundation Gao Minglu, New York State University to the documenta 12 magazines project with Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute two special features on art education that each Katie Hill, University of Westminster Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian address very different topics. In the first article, Sebastian Lopez, Daros-Latinamerica AG Lu Jie, Independent Curator Wu Yin-Hui and Yu Wie examine some of the Charles Merewether, Australian National University shifts that have taken place in Taiwan’s university Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand and college curricula in recent years. Anticipating Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator a growing future for the cultural and creative Wu Hung, University of Chicago industries, Taiwan is investing in media design,  Art & Collection Group Ltd. digital manipulation, and arts management    Leap Creative Group courses for their growing art programs. We also   Raymond Mah   Gavin Chow present an extensive interview with Liu Dahong  Karmen Lee addressing the public scandal that arose over a   relaITconsulting, Vancouver conflict between his teaching methodology and  Chong-yuan Image Ltd., Taipei the expectations of the art institution where he  - holds a professorship. Yishu is published quarterly in Taipei, Taiwan and edited in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates of Yishu are 5th of Speaking about institutions from another March, June, September and December. perspective is Samuel Kung, Director of the Editorial inquiries and manuscripts may be sent to the Editorial Office: Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai. Our Yishu interview with him reveals how he positions 410-650 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC Canada V6B 4N8 his institution after its first year of operation as Phone: 1.604.649.8187; Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: [email protected] a privately funded museum, a relatively new [email protected] phenomenon in China. Subscription inquiries may be sent to either the Vancouver address or to Hawai’i: Artist features are always an important Journals Department University of Hawai’i Press component of Yishu. The four in this issue include 2840 Kolowalu Street, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA Phone: 1.808.956.8833; Fax: 1.808.988.6052 a discussion of censorship in an exhibition E-mail: [email protected] of work by Huang Rui, Liu Ding's ambitious The University of Hawai’i Press accepts payment by Visa or conceptual project Products, the most recent Mastercard, cheque or money order (in U.S. dollars). work of Cao Fei, and the cross-cultural paintings Advertising inquiries may be sent to either Vancouver or Taiwan address: of Xu Jiang. Finally, we have included three book Art & Collection Ltd. reviews, two of them by a new and ambitious 3F. No.85, Section 1, Zhongshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Phone: (886) 2.2560.2220; Fax: (886) 2.2542.0631 publisher, the Asia Art Archive, based in Hong E-mail: [email protected] Kong. www.yishujournal.com No part of this journal may be published without the written We close 2006 with our nineteenth issue of Yishu, permission from the publisher. and I want to take this opportunity to thank the Subscription rates: one year: US $48; two years: US $86 many contributors who make this journal possible. Subscription form may be downloaded from our Website You are what make Yishu an important voice in We thank Mr. Milton Wong, Mr. Daoping Bao, Paystone Technologies Corp., for their generous support. the evolution of contemporary Chinese art. Cover: Zhan Wang, Buddhist Pharmacy: Western Medicine, installation (detail), 2006,. Courtesy of the Shanghai Art Museum. Keith Wallace   

Jonathan Goodman is a poet and writer who is currently teaching at Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design. He has been writing about contemporary Chinese art for ten years, authoring reviews and articles for such magazines as Art in America, Sculpture, and Art Asia Pacific. His essays have covered the work of such artists as Xu Bing, Cai Jin, and Tseng Kwong Chi.

Paul Gladston is Senior Lecturer in critical theory and cultural studies and Director of the Institute of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China. He studied fine art at Edinburgh College of Art and Yale University before receiving an M.A. and a Ph.D. in critical theory from the University of Nottingham. His recent publications include Art History After Deconstruction (2005) and “Sublime Ruins—Monumental Follies: The Photo(historio)graphy of Erasmus Schroeter,” in Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation (2006).

Joe Martin Hill is the founder of Vision Connect, a management and curatorial consulting firm based in New York. An active writer and lecturer, he is also on the team assisting Robert Storr in the preparation of the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Maya Kóvskaya is an art critic, independent curator, writer, and anthropologist. She is currently writing a book on Chinese contemporary art and revising her novel Broken Shoes, which won a best novella award on Zoetrope Virtual Studios (2004), for publication. Her writing has appeared in numerous art catalogues, books, journals, and magazines, including ChinaNow, Beijing Scene, and positions: east asia cultures critique. Her Chinese language column in Art Map introduces Western literary fiction to China.

Susan Kendzulak is an artist and writer based in Taipei. Her M.A. thesis focused on Chinese conceptual art, and she writes extensively about contemporary art in Taiwan for local and international publications.

Lai Mei-Lin holds a B.A. and M.Phil. in art history from the University of Hong Kong. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in modern Hong Kong ink painting at the University of Sydney. Since 2000, she has been teaching Western art history at Hong Kong Art School of the Hong Kong Arts Centre. Her articles on twentieth-century Chinese and Hong Kong art can be found in various Hong Kong art magazines and exhibition catalogues.

Joni Low is a freelance writer based in Vancouver and a volunteer at the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, also known as Centre A.

Edward Lucie-Smith is an internationally known art critic and historian as well as a published poet (member of the Académie Européenne de Poésie, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), anthologist, and practicing photographer. A number of his art books, among them Movements in Art since 1945, Visual Arts of the Twentieth Century, and A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today, are used as standard texts throughout the world.

Ma Jun is an editor and a journalist for Y Weekend. He has a Master's degree in Chinese Literature at Beijing Normal University and a Bachelor's degree in History at Northwest University (China).

David Spalding is an art critic, independent curator, and educator from San Francisco now based in Beijing. He is a correspondent or contributing editor for Contemporary (London),

 Art Papers (US) and Flash Art (Venice), and the China correspondent for Artforum, as well as the author of numerous catalogue essays. In 2005, he was awarded an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship to research experimental Chinese art. Spalding’s recent projects include efforts to build flexible platforms for productive exchanges between contemporary Chinese artists and their counterparts in other parts of the world.

Tang Ling-Yun is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department at Yale University. She has just completed two years of fieldwork in Beijing and is writing her dissertation on contemporary art galleries, spatial culture, and symbolic boundaries in China’s contemporary art scene. From 2005 to 2006, she worked at the Chinese Contemporary Gallery in Beijing, where she curated the exhibition RePlacement.

Wu Yin-Hui is a journalist for ARTCO Monthly. Wu graduated from the Graduate Institute of Art Theory, National Taipei University of Education, in 2004, and is the author of Taiwan Contemporary Art Series: Technology and Digital Art, published by the Council for Cultural Affairs, Taipei.

Yu Wei is a journalist for ARTCO Monthly specializing in art criticism and contemporary art research. Yu graduated from the Graduate Institute of Art History and Art Criticism, Tainan National University of the Arts, in 2003.

Zhang Qing is Deputy Director of Shanghai Art Museum and Director of the Shanghai Biennale Office, member of CIMA, and an Editorial Board member of Art China. He has been a regular contributor to magazines including Art Monthly, Dushu, Avant-Garde Today, and Shanghai Culture, as well as editor-in-chief of the book Chinese Art of the 1990s: 1990–1992. In 2000, he was named one of the best curators in China by CCTV.

Zheng Shengtian, Managing Editor of Yishu, is a scholar, artist, and independent curator. For more than thirty years, he worked at China Academy of Art as Professor and Chair of the Oil Painting Department. He is a founding Board member of Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and a trustee of Long March Foundation. He has organized numerous exhibitions and is currently working on a major exhibition of twentieth-century Chinese art that is scheduled to open in New York in 2008. He contributes frequently to periodicals and catalogues about contemporary Chinese and Asian art. He has been a member of the Academic Committee for the Shanghai Biennale since 1998 and was a curator of the 4th Shanghai Biennale (2004).

  a tale of two biennales: singapore and shanghai joe martin hill

The art historian’s methodology of “compare and contrast” often makes too much of the differences between what, in the end, remain similar objects. With respect to biennial exhibitions, future historians are likely to find the richest story in the similarities, with the differences we now readily identify between one and the next diminishing in significance as we look back upon the present period as a whole.

Such a disclaimer may seem unwarranted as prelude to a discussion of the Singapore and Shanghai Biennales of 2006—Singapore’s first and Shanghai’s sixth. Were the differences between these two events not so apparent, we might launch right in without acknowledging that “compare and contrast” also tends toward qualitative value judgments; the one suffering by comparison might shine at the expense of an unexamined third. That said, the Singapore Biennale 2006 (SB2006) was remarkably successful in this particular match, and remarkable for at least three reasons.

First, SB2006 was a top-down affair, initiated and administered by state bureaucracies. In this respect, it differed from the Shanghai Biennale, which began as anything but a government- sponsored promo package and still lacks substantial financial support. Second, although related, SB2006 was official window dressing for an IMF and World Bank conference attended by some 20,000 participants over eight days, for which Singapore’s total bill was reportedly in excess of U.S. $80 million.1 SB2006 itself, by contrast, had a total budget of U.S. $5 million and had hosted 200,000 visitors by September 20th with more than seven weeks of its run still to go.2 A com- parative cost-per-visitor calculation clearly indicates that not all visitors are created equal. And Singapore knows how to spend its money. Whatever the intrinsic benefits to local audiences of SB2006, the “instrumental benefits” of this timely investment in contemporary art—that is, repre- senting Singapore to well-heeled investors as an open, harmonious, multicultural society and an art-interested, cosmopolitan populace—made SB2006 a comparative bargain.

In light of Singapore’s use of the exhibition to project an idealized image of the city-state, SB2006’s theme, Belief, would seem to have little chance of success. If that didn’t kill all hope, certainly the country’s censors would, particularly in this sensitive context of servitude to the greater cause of finance. Fundamentally, such a theme is risky to begin with: grandiose if taken seriously, cloying from the seasoned cynic’s vantage point. That such a theme succeeded here, in this context, is the third item of remark.

The diversity of the city’s assets formed the basis for both thematic decisions and exhibition layout. And the aforementioned benefits would not have accrued without a high quality exhibition that successfully conveyed the city’s positive attributes. With nineteen venues ranging from the National Museum and the old City Hall to seven houses of worship to Tanglin Camp, a decommissioned facility long used by the British Army and subsequently by the Singapore military, the exhibition benefited from a high degree of site-specificity, the price for which was that only devoted locals would likely see all of the almost two hundred works on view. Given the success of many of those works in relation to their spaces, this was a small price to pay.

Jane Alexander, (top left) Verity, Faith and Justice, 2006, mixed media installation. Courtesy of the National Arts Council of Singapore. Jason Wee (middle left) 1987, 2006, multimedia installation. Courtesy of the National Arts Council of Singapore. Drik Picture Library Ltd. (bottom left), Belief, and Practices: Justice for Noorjahan, 2006, photographic installation. Courtesy of the National Arts Council of Singapore.  Yayoi Kusama’s Ladder to Heaven (2006), for example, installed in a dark room on the top floor of the Hindu Sri Krishan Temple on Waterloo Street, was wonderful to experience. Wonder is underrated these days. We deserve more of it, and particularly from an exhibition entitled Belief. Kusama’s ladder of spindly, spiralling metallic rods wrapped in illuminated fibre-optic cables

Yayoi Kusama, Ladder to Heaven, 2006. Photo: stretched between circular mirrors on the floor and ceiling gave ©Haupt & Binder. new expression to her longstanding interest in infinity as a motif. Whichever afterlife one looked toward, the delicate ladder’s infinite repetition was as perfect for the site as the site was for the exhibition theme.

Just down Waterloo Street at the Buddhist Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple, Charwei Tsai’s poetic intervention Lotus Mantra (2006) covered a living lotus plant and decaying altar offerings with tiny mantra texts. Jennifer Wen Ma’s three single-channel videos that comprised Alms (2006) were installed in Waterloo Street’s Maghain Aboth Synagogue, at the Masjid Sultan, and at Saint Joseph’s (Catholic) Church, the latter two just around the corner from the Waterloo Street location. With individual soundtracks reflecting each faith and the recurring motif of the artist’s hand opening and closing to reveal the offering within, the trilogy sought to give visual expression to common ground while recognizing individual religious practices.

The diversity of functioning houses of worship in such close proximity to each other, with their faithful living in seeming harmony among one another—it’s a fine model for the way the world should be. And this is certainly the identity Singapore wishes to project, one the exhibition generally supports, and one to which even the most sceptical viewer is likely to warm up to.

Tsai Charwei, Lotus Mantra, 2006, mixed media installation. Courtesy of the National Arts Council of Singapore.

 But as a concept and exhibition, Belief is not all aesthetically engaging, metaphysically inflected visual poetry. At the main sites of the exhibition— the City Hall and Tanglin Camp—a variety of hard-hitting works demonstrate a sociopolitical openness that even this left-leaning American liberal found surprising. Take for example Jane Alexander’s powerful installation entitled Verity, Faith, and Justice (2006) at the City Hall, which, in the words of the short guide to the exhibition, “depicts the proceedings of Jennifer Wen Ma. Alms, 2006, single channel video installation at Masjid Sultan. Courtesy of the National Arts Council of Singapore. a surrealistic courtroom in the absence of the judge, which has descended into chaos and mayhem, invoking viewers to reflect upon their beliefs in notions of justice and truth.” That such a macabre fantasy should be realized in the courtroom of a land where chaos, much less overt dissent, is not greeted with the same smile that welcomed the IMF/World Bank delegates at the airport, also invites visitors to reflect upon how these works would fare in a similar context in their own country.

Or, take Jason Wee’s 1987 (2006), a complicated mixed media installation in another City Hall chamber, which included texts neatly chalked onto the surface of the judge’s bench regarding that year’s Operation Spectrum, in which the Singapore Government’s Internal Security Department detained for an extended period a group accused of being members of a Marxist conspiracy to overthrow the government. Or Erika Tan’s becoming (2006), an equally dense site-specific installation reflecting upon the physical, social, and political parameters within which personal identity and selfhood are negotiated or adjudicated by others. It’s worth noting these two overtly political works were created by Singaporean-born artists (Wee now lives in New York, Tan in London). On the whole, Singapore-born artists gave quite a strong showing in Belief, and many, like Donna Ong, whose engaging, obsessive installations were installed in the furthest four corners of City Hall, continue to live and work on the island.

Other sensitive issues were equally evident in the curation at City Hall. Tomás Ochoa's two- channel video installation The Myth of Sisyphus (2006) presented the responses of randomly chosen people in Marrakech and Zurich who were asked the probable last thoughts of a suicide bomber before detonation. Belief, and Practices: Justice for Noorjahan (2006) by the Drik Picture Library Ltd, an activist photography collective based in Bangladesh, details the sad fate of a rural widow at the hands of patriarchal rural “justice” systems and the subsequent bringing to justice of her judges.

At the opening press conference Q&A, and before those assembled had had a chance to see the exhibition, a reporter from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was quick to probe biennale curators and managers on the topic of censorship. While curator Roger McDonald helpfully directed the writer to Wee’s work, his response was as sagaciously restrained as the comments of his colleague Sharmini Pereira were affectingly eloquent about the biennale as a whole. Only later did one understand why: calling too much attention to a good thing posed the risk of ruining

 Donna Ong, secret, interiors: chrysalis (19–22), 2006, mixed media installation. Courtesy of the National Arts Council of Singapore. it. Frankly, I cannot imagine many of the aforementioned works basking in the all-embracing illumination of a United States courtroom, although surely the obstacle would only be of a benign, bureaucratic nature.

However it was managed, Artistic Director Fumio Nanjo and his curatorial team, which also included Eugene Tan, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Singapore, achieved here what would likely be compromised in more developed, democratic environments. This was nowhere more evident than with the National Museum exhibition of Bigert and Bergström's The Last Supper (2005), a riveting 58-minute single channel video on the subject of death row inmates’ final meals, in which a former death row chef at Huntsville State Prison in Texas plays a leading role while recreating one of his two hundred “last suppers.” The film’s exploration of this grotesque ritual practiced by societies around the world isn’t an explicit condemnation of capital punishment. Still, in Singapore, where an Australian national’s execution quite recently drew international attention, such a work seems particularly charged. Nearby, carefully selected works by Makoto Aida (Harakiri School Girls, 2006), Mark Wallinger (Angel, 1997), Hiroshi Sugimoto (The Last Supper, 2000), and others, supported the thematic thrust in this section of the biennale. Like the best works in Belief, of which this is unquestionably one, Bigert and Bergström's The Last Supper asks us to reflect upon our beliefs—and our beliefs about art’s possibilities—with new information and from different perspectives.

The curatorial tone of Belief was suggestive but unpretentious, sincere but understated, creating a consistently contemplative environment within the variety of sites and across a wide range of creative expression. Humorous works, of which there were many Erika Tan, Becoming, 2006, mixed media installation. Courtesy of the National Arts Council of Singapore.

 Bigert & Bergström, The Last Supper, 2006, single channel video installation. Courtesy of the National Arts Council of Singapore. at Tanglin Camp, could therefore be both serious and seriously funny. Makoto Aida’s The video of a man calling himself Bin Laden staying in Japan (2005) shows the artist satirizing Osama Bin Laden’s occasional hide-out tapes (and the media interest in them), with the artist himself playing Bin Laden on a sake binge. Bani Abidi’s Shan Pipe Band Learns Star-Spangled Banner (2004) documents a Lahore-based marching band of brass, winds, and bagpipe not quite learning but trying real hard, their amusing failure a poignant allegory of wider import whether considered from the perspective of post-colonialism or of present Empire.

Australian artist Philip Brophy’s Fluorescent (2006), an over-the-top throwback to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona was a pulsating glam rock video only slightly less mind-blowing for me than for the transfixed, jaw-dropped four-year-old who shared my chuckles. And who, particularly those of substantially longer New York schooling, wouldn’t love Scott Bowe’s Painting as a Zombie (2005), the art-historical perambulations of which take us from Russian Constructivism to the much-ballyhooed Dana Schutz by way of George Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead and Michael Jackson’s 1983 Thriller video, with numerous art historical cameos in between? Belief could even laugh at itself, as revealed by one of the first installations encountered at Tanglin Camp, Brian Gothong Tan’s overstuffed We Live in a Dangerous World (2006). With videos of a drag queen playing a bouncing Annabel Chong rising to ecstasy while repeating what Bigert & Bengström didn't say—"Death penalty is immoral"—Tan's precisely stenciled wall text gushed about this wonderful new Singaporean import, the biennale, as a small, dissected Merlion statue lay nearby.

SB2006 was a treasure trove of lesser known artists, unexpected insights, and interesting venues—a remarkable success story against the odds and instrumental oddities. That SB2008 will seem an equally worthwhile investment one can only hope, although the word on the street is that things look promising. Belief will be a hard act to follow, and it’s a tough standard to set for comparison. The sixth Shanghai Biennale, entitled HyperDesign, was notable mostly for its individual works. Housed exclusively in the Shanghai Art Museum and its immediate environs, HyperDesign included work by ninety-three artists and collectives (similar to Singapore’s ninety-five) and was perhaps the next logical step in this biennale’s evolution. Top to bottom: Bani Abidi, Shan Pipe Band Learns Star- Spangled Banner, 2004, two channel video. Courtesy of the The national exhibitions of 1996 and 1998 focused National Arts Council of Singapore. Philip Brophy, Fluorescent, 2006, three channel video installation. Courtesy of the on oil painting and ink painting, respectively; the first National Arts Council of Singapore. Tomás Ochoa, The Myth of Sisyphus, 2006, two channel video installation. Courtesy international and cross-disciplinary exhibition of of the National Arts Council of Singapore.

 Brian Gothong Tan, Overstuffed, We Live in a Dangerous World, 2006, mixed media installation. Courtesy of the National Arts Council of Singapore.

 2000 was inflected toward sculpture and installation; 2002’s emphasis was on architecture and urbanisms; and if one could still identify a dominant medium in the engrossing fifth of 2004, it would be video.

Granted, design—hyper or otherwise—may be profound, and its physical complexities may be of greater metaphorical depth than, say, the literal superficialities of painting. But in this case, the theme somehow didn’t provide the coherence one wished for—and this despite many fitting artworks. Organized around three thematic categories in the five hundred-page exhibition catalogue—“Design and Imagination,” “Practice of Everyday Life,” and “Future Constructions of History”—HyperDesign contained such a wide variety of works, one wondered how they were selected. The bulky catalogue’s taxonomic allocations provide insights into a thematic organization that wasn’t present in the exhibition layout itself. Or if it was, perhaps I just didn’t get it.

What I did get was an overwhelming sense of large-scale, interactive, colourful, illuminated, techy or faux techy endeavours, and the “oohs” and “ahhs” of a shiny, crowd-pleasing spectacle. In this respect, the Shanghai Biennale must be deemed an unassailable success. After the mid-week opening festivities and the professional caravan’s packing off to Gwangju,3 a line of eager locals extending well into the hundreds snaked around the museum’s periphery, and thousands packed inside. They marvelled, as did I, at Choe-U-Ram’s fantastical metallic organisms (Urbanus Male and Urbanus Female) suspended in animation in a stairwell, and they delighted in their shadows’ play with the those of Shilpa Gupta’s untitled interactive video projection. They were eager to try their stamina— as I was not—on Marnix de Nijs’ impressive Run Motherfucker Run, a vast, virtual reality-like video projection controlled by a giant viewer-activated treadmill. And their transfixed pleasure watching the amusing pictographic narratives of Naoto Fukasawa’s inconspicuous Emergency Exit sign come to life was both instructive and inspiring.

In that respect, Ding Yi’s Time-Space Post Office, an interactive sculptural installation upon which viewers could post their hopes for the future, was also a big hit. Observed but underutilized by the professional crowd that attended the opening (admittedly a much smaller group), the public flocked to fill in the forms and fix them to whatever space remained as the thousands of wishes Top to bottom: Choe-U-Ram, Urban Male, installation. Courtesy of overwhelmed the immediate installation space. the Shanghai Art Museum. Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, interactive video projection. Courtesy of the Shanghai Art Museum. Marnix de Nijs, Run Regardless of whether Ding Yi is “the foremost Motherfucker Run, multimedia installation. Courtesy of the Shanghai Art Museum. contemporary artist in China,” as claimed in the

 Ding Yi, Time-Space Post Office, installation, Courtesy of the Shanghai Art Museum. catalogue by Zhang Qing, Artistic Director of the exhibition, Ding’s work was certainly among the most popular and was a genuinely interesting departure from his painterly practice.

What’s unfortunate about such a heterogeneous array of interactive and otherwise dazzling work—whether of high artistic quality or not—is that the tone is set for a quick-fix mode of engagement in which the wonder that inspires reflection is superseded by the browser’s quest for the next high. Formally subtle, thought-provoking works may suffer the most in such a context, but even the spectacular ones that reward the viewer’s close attention can have a hard time conveying much beyond a superficial “wow.” If I recognized Shen Fan’s stunning five-by-ten- meter neon installation, Landscape: A Tribute to Huang Binhong, as a hyper-designed homage to traditional ink painting, surely those more familiar with that tradition did, too. But how many actually paused to see the neon “strokes” change in time with the minimal, slow-paced zither music, or to contemplate the weight of history and its contemporary reformulation in this elegant, ingenious work?

How many noticed the suggestive “Super Power” brand emblazoned on Lee Kyung-Ho’s army of Lilliputian electric toy excavators in his Moonlight Sonata 2006—Paysage & Traveller, which also features a giant, two-channel projection on the walls adjacent to their real-time work on the gallery floor? And in their quick walk through the gallery housing this multi-part installation, how many wondered what all the fans blowing into the opposite brightly illuminated corner were about when the exhibition’s stewards failed to replace the plastic bags whose wind-swept swirling in the light created a beautiful kaleidoscopic effect that was essential to the overall impact of Lee’s work? Perhaps the museum was overwhelmed by the opening weekend crowds, but it is a pity these thousands didn’t get to experience this particular work’s full resonance, which was strangely affecting, even haunting.

But again, the subtler works had the most difficulty finding their voice, and none more so than those working with vestiges of the Naoto Fukasawa, Personal Skies, installation. Courtesy of the Shanghai Art Museum.

 Shen Fan, Landscape: A Tribute to Huang Binhong, neon light installation. Courtesy of the Shanghai Art Museum. past in historical materials. I have in mind Li Lihong’s intervention of ceramic tiles in the central stairwell entitled The China Road-Ladder, Guan Huaibin’s tightly-knit installation of hundreds of historic wooden doors in City of Labyrinth, and Liang Shaoji’s Essence of Wood, a mixed-media installation reflecting upon the decay and conservation of this fundamental building material. One could also mention the complicated but subtle formal innovations of Oh Yong-Seok’s fascinating video collage Drama, in which the projected image is composed of scores of separately filmed images; this work was sensitively installed between galleries featuring works with related video collage aesthetics by Lev Manovich and Patrick Tuttofuoco.

With respect to the exhibition theme, Liu Jianhua’s Yiwu Investigation did for me here what Yayoi Kusama’s Ladder to Heaven did in Singapore. As though it had crashed through from the exterior of the museum, a pristine section of a bright red shipping container protruded from the gallery wall and spilled a mountainous cornucopia of diverse, colourful consumer products from its open doors. A text in Chinese and English on the side of the container described Yiwu as a model of China’s economic development and a signifier of China’s position in the global economy. As curator Huang Du elaborates in the catalogue, “The small goods manufactured and consolidated in Yiwu are shipped to 212 countries around the world. Each day, there are between 6,000 and 8,000 foreign businessmen conducting commerce Lee Kyung-Ho, Moonlight Sonata, 2006, video installation. Courtesy of the Shanghai Art Museum.

 there. Over 1,000 containers full of goods are exported daily” (295). Aesthetically impressive, critically engaged with contemporary culture, and thought provoking on many levels, Yiwu Investigation is a very potent work.

Liu Jianhua seemed to be everywhere this season, and it was both reassuring and refreshing to see his large-scale work. Perhaps the most exquisite work included in Singapore’s Belief was the artist’s Dream (2005), shown in Sculpture Square, originally a Baba Malay Methodist Church built in 1870. Composed of six thousand plus pieces of broken white porcelain casts representing all sorts of everyday objects (from electric guitars and computer keyboards to shoes, light bulbs, tires, and toilets), the fragments were loosely arranged in the form of a space shuttle running the length of the nave toward the building’s apse. Again, a copious conglomeration of bits and pieces, here monochromatic rather than Technicolor, the whole was formally powerful and deeply resonant. Dream was marred only by the accompanying, superfluous video work that narrated the space quest and shuttle disaster as a metaphor for the endurance and resilience of mankind’s aspirations. Why Dream needed to be illustrated in the catalogue for HyperDesign—where many exhibited works were not included and numerous unexhibited ones simply added to the book’s heft—is a mystery, but I suppose we’ve all become accustomed to the biennale catalogue as overweight baggage rather than accurate exhibition record.

Less is indeed sometimes more, whether it is a work of art, a catalogue, or an exhibition. Near the Shanghai Art Museum in Renmin Park, MoCA Shanghai presented Entry Gate: Chinese Aesthetics of Heterogeneity, its first Envisage exhibition, scheduled to be a biennial affair focusing specifically on developments in contemporary Chinese art. Liu’s installation there, Can you tell me?, which consists of aluminum books pondering Shanghai’s place in histories yet to be written, would also have fared better without its accompanying video but was nevertheless another fine example of the artist’s versatility. With fifty-nine artists and collectives (five of them also presented in HyperDesign), a lot less floor

Top to bottom: Li Lihong, China Road—Ladder, installation. Courtesy of the Shanghai Art space, and an aesthetic range Museum. Guan Huaibin, City of Labyrinth, installation (detail). Photo: Zheng Shengtian. Oh Yong-Seok, Drama, double screen video. Courtesy of the Shanghai Art Museum. matching the nearby biennale,

 Liang Shaoji (top), Essence of Wood, multimedia installation. Photo: Zheng Shengtian. Liu Jianhua (bottom left), Dream, installation. Photo: Keith Wallace. Liu Jianhua (bottom right), Yiwu Investigation, installation. Courtesy of the Shanghai Art Museum.

Entry Gate neatly conveyed its points about the eclecticism of contemporary production, and one looks forward to the next focused update two years hence. As the biennial model continues to proliferate in competing latecomer destinations from Singapore to Athens, Envisage provides at least one useful paradigm for ensuring the aesthetic diversity of the present—and what it offers the viewing public—isn’t overwhelmed by the spectacularity of this seductive exhibition format.

Notes 1 Figures of Singapore $130 and $135 million Singapore dollars are quoted in the Blogsphere and various Web sites report U.S. $80 million. Singapore government Web sites do not provide this information, and e-mail messages from the author seeking verification received no reply. 2 In a press conference of September 20 posted on the finance event’s Web site (www.Singapore2006.org), Mrs. Lim Hwee Hua, Minister of State (Finance and Transport) noted that the Singapore Biennale had by then hosted 200,000 visitors. The total budget of $8 million Singapore dollars included $3.4 million from the government and $4.6 million in private sponsorship, encouraged by a two-to-one tax incentive (personal communication with the curators). 3 In a welcome and prudent spirit of conviviality, Singapore, Shanghai, and Gwangju coordinated their opening dates this fall and also collaborated to offer tour packages. One hopes such collaboration will continue in this region—next time including Busan—and will also be taken up elsewhere.

 interview with fumio nanjo, artistic director of the singapore biennale susan kendzulak

Yishu interviewed Fumio Nanjo, the Artistic Director of the Singapore Biennale, at the opening of this premier event for Singapore. At the press conference, Nanjo stated that once his appointment as Artistic Director was announced, he quickly formed a team of four curators and forty-one networking curators. Under the theme of Belief, the team focused on many emerging Asian artists, while they also planned community outreach programs and sought to make contemporary art accessible to the local people of Singapore. The curating team was well aware that biennials are important to a locality, but they cannot change everything, especially if an infrastructure for art such as galleries, art fairs, and auctions is not already in place.

Susan Kendzulak: How do you first conceive of such a big exhibition—with a theme in mind, imagery, mood, and conversation among the artworks?

Fumio Nanjo: Originally we started with sixty artists, but we expanded. I think Gwangju and Shanghai have more than one hundred artists each. So this exhibition is not really as big as the others among the three Asian biennials opening this September.

Susan Kendzulak: Do you start with a picture in mind? Do you begin with literary or visual thinking?

Fumio Nanjo: We’re always watching, looking, always reaching. We were trying to understand what the geographical feature of this place is. At the beginning we talked about the idea of one degree north of the equator. We thought One Degree North was a nice title, but then we shifted our thinking to the content of the art.

Susan Kendzulak: How has your biennial thinking shifted since 1998? Have you noticed a shift in art making? What things do you consider more important now regarding biennials compared to 1998 when you were Curator of the first Taipei Biennial?

Fumio Nanjo: Shift in my thinking? Yes, my understanding is different each time because it is related to the place and time. I consider what the appropriate approach is in making an exhibition in each city, so I don’t know if my thinking is developing or shifting, as my thinking is always focused on the here and now.

Susan Kendzulak: How do you position this biennial in relation to others in Asia?

Fumio Nanjo: Biennales in Asia are a good phenomenon. It’s a good thing. I look at it positively because it’s mostly for the local people living in that city, in that country. Not many people from Asia visit the Venice Biennale. Many people have never seen such a big art event like this. If it’s a big event like this, then many people will come for the first time. Biennales have a good influence on people. From this point of view, each city has its own reason for having a biennale.

 Here in Singapore it is linked to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) meetings. They had the motivation to show the exhibition to foreign visitors. But we really paid attention to showing the art to the local audience.

Susan Kendzulak: What do you say to your detractors about the Singapore Biennale being co- opted by the International Monetary Fund?

Fumio Nanjo: Actually we didn’t pay so much attention to the IMF meeting. We’re more interested in making a good exhibition. However, some artists are slightly linked to the concerns that the IMF represent, such as Korean artist Jeon Joonho, via his animation about the U.S. dollar bill. But this work was made a year ago and not made for this exhibition. We thought it was quite interesting to include it. Also the gold bar work by Hossein Golba. The artists are presenting different values about monetary values.

Susan Kendzulak: Since you have been working on biennials, do you consider them more important now than in the past? Do you think of them in terms of global thinking?

Fumio Nanjo: I think art is always changing and shifting, like fashion. Sometimes this is not good. Sometimes there are reasons for it as reality goes faster. Art reflects that. Of course art now is actually different from ten years ago. If you look at the last twenty to thirty years, so many things have changed, because before, the conflict was between two ideologies: between East and West, between socialist, communist, and democratic, capitalistic ideas—but now we’re dealing with different structures.

Today global markets use computers. Markets use hedge funds. Even business is changing from before. There is free software. Strategies are different from before. Before, someone who was making something special, a precious thing, they would hold on to it and say it is of high quality so that they could sell it for a high price. I see this in human relationships. Before, if you knew lots of things, you withheld the information, and you had to be asked for it and then paid for it. I know some curators who now just give out the information to everyone. Everyone comes to them. If one is very selective, people go away. Gradually all these things are changing. Strategies and structures change. The mind of the people is changing. And art is also reflecting this situation. Fumio Nanjo. Courtesy of the National Arts Council of Singapore.

 Susan Kendzulak: Do you see a universal theme in art?

Fumio Nanjo: Artists are not always thinking of universal things. I think many artists are looking at society. Before, art was more abstract and more ideological. Now, today, daily life, people’s life— this is more of an issue and a subject for artists.

Susan Kendzulak: Do the current trends of art make you feel hopeful for the future, for the next generation?

Fumio Nanjo: Of course. The passing generation always becomes pessimistic, while the young generation doesn’t know the kind of failures of the past, the problems. They think that they can try something new, that they can solve something. Basically young people are a positive force. If you go to Japan maybe it’s different. That feeling of optimism is gone. With development, this kind of feeling is lost.

Susan Kendzulak: How did you choose the Chinese artists for the Biennale?

Fumio Nanjo: Originally we wanted to go to Chinese artists near the south, so we were looking at the Guangzhou or Shanghai area. Liu Jian-hua’s space shuttle image is quite strong. The image of the space shuttle exploding shows that dream and hope, that trust in science, the hope for the future, is exploding in front of our eyes. It’s a problem. Liu made this with ceramics; the real shuttle is covered in ceramics. There are many layers of meaning.

Susan Kendzulak: Since you initiated the Taipei Biennial in 1998, what are your thoughts on its current direction? Is the system of having a well-known Western curator paired up with a less experienced Taiwanese curator a good system?

Fumio Nanjo: They had a problem last time, didn’t they? I think it’s still quite an interesting system. The Taipei Biennial has the collaborative structure of Western and Eastern curators to exchange information, so there is always collaboration. The structure is not bad, but whether they should have the Taiwanese curator choose the Western curator first, perhaps this could change the results.

Susan Kendzulak: Will you do any follow-up on the Singapore Biennale? Do you feel any ownership of these biennales, or can you let go easily?

Fumio Nanjo: I’ll watch it from afar. The effort to reach the general public must not be done just one time, but must be done every time. A continuous effort must be made to do this.

 the undesignable zhang qing translated by yiyou wang

2,211 years ago, the powerful warlord Xiang Yu invited his rival, Liu Bang, to a banquet in Hongmen. The banquet, conceived as a trap to kill Liu Bang, started in a tense atmosphere. The hosts and guests took their seats. Xiang Yu faced east, and his consultant, Fan Zheng, south. Liu Bang’s consultant Zhang Liang chose to face Xiang Yu so that Liu Bang faced Fan Zheng instead of Xiang Yu, hinting that Liu Bang had no intention to act against Xiang Yu. At that moment, Xiang Yu was leading 400,000 soldiers, and Liu Bang only 100,000. The two armies were only about forty miles apart. In order to avoid direct conflict with Xiang Yu and survive the banquet, Liu Bang needed to sheji (devise some strategies). During the meeting, Fan Zeng raised a piece of circular jade three times to signal Xiang Yu to take action, but Xiang Yu did not respond. Fan Zeng then summoned Xiang Zhuang to perform a sword dance with the intent to kill Liu Bang. At this pivotal point, the banquet was interrupted by Fan Kuai, whose arrival was arranged by Zhang Liang to distract Xiang Yu. When Fan Kuai impressed all the attendees with his bold manner of consuming the wine and pork, Liu Bang fled under the pretext of going to the toilet. At the banquet, Zhang Liang, on behalf of Liu Bang who was reportedly “drunk and left early” presented a jade disc to Xiang Yu, and a jade square ruler to Fan Zeng, who furiously broke the jade disc and predicted, “This mean fellow (Xiang Yu) is not worthy of my service. It should be Peigong (Liu Bang) who defeats Xiang Yu and conquers the country.”

This story shows the importance of sheji (design)1 in political and military conflicts. Thanks to Liu Bang’s chao sheji (hyper strategy),2 a strategy that allows him to outsmart his enemies, Xiang Yu loses the opportunity to kill Liu Bang, who later becomes the emperor of the Han dynasty.

Sheji refers to something planned or intended in the Chinese context. Han Feizi, a third-century B.C. Chinese thinker, explained the meaning of the character she in relation to shi as follows: “If shi is something determined by nature, it is not shi. By shi, I mean something planned by humans.” Ji designates plans or strategies, as expressed in Guanzi Quanxiu: “A one-year plan is for growing crops; a ten-year plan, planting trees; a lifetime plan, cultivating men.” According to Emperor Gaodi’s Main Record in the Book of Han, the prime minister Chen Ping devised a miji (secret strategy), which helped the emperor break the siege of the Huns.

Sheji (design) has played a critical role in history. It manifests human desires, as well as intellect and spirituality. The stories of the "Trojan Horse" and "Borrowing the Enemy’s Arrow"3 have always been associated with the winner’s ingenuous design. Inventions such as the compass and the steam engine illustrate design’s contribution to material culture.

Intellectual and spiritual activities are often multidimensional. It is significant that more than 2,000 years after the Hongmen banquet, we bring together a variety of contemporary cutting- edge works under the title HyperDesign at this Biennale. It is necessary to examine design from a philosophical and spiritual perspective.

It is noteworthy that design has brought about both self-realization and self-restraint. We need to envision another kind of design, a going beyond and a return.

 2006 Shanghai Biennale: HyperDesign. Courtesy of the Shanghai Art Museum.

 I want to name it wufa sheji (the undesignable), something that cannot be designed. Li Zhi, the renowned sixteenth-century writer, remarks,

The truly talented writer does not intend to write in the beginning. He has something strange, indescribable in his mind. He wants to utter something in his throat, but dares not. He often holds many words in his mouth but cannot find a place where he can speak out. Over time, these things accumulate to the point where they cannot be held anymore. As a result, when things touch his eyes and heart, he will chant expressively. He will grab anothers’ cup and drink to soothe his troubled mind. He will express his frustration. The extraordinary things he expresses will last for a thousand years. 4

Li Zhi suggests that marvelous writings are not something that can be designed. Similarly, the undesignable elements can also be found in other arts, as the saying indicates, “Without a touch of madness, one cannot create good artworks.”

Wufa sheji, which is made up of wu (no), fa (principle), she (plan or arrange), and ji (measure), refers to something that cannot be measured by set standards. Fa designates measures or standards. Guanzi, a seventh-century B.C. thinker, for example, mentions a set of measures: chicun (for measuring length), mosheng (for drawing straight lines), guiju (for drawing circles and squares), hengshi (for weighing), douhu (for measuring volume), and jiaoliang (for measuring angles). The concept of the undesignable implies that design is essentially a spiritual activity, which cannot be made or evaluated by the above-mentioned tools. The notion of the undesignable expresses our aspiration for a realm of freedom and new possibilities.

Ji Kang is an accomplished third-century writer and musician known for his love of personal freedom and spiritual cultivation. One day, he traveled to a place named Huangyang near Luoyang and decided to spend the night in a pavilion there. Ji Kang started to play the zither at night, ignoring the fact that the pavilion had been associated with many murders. Suddenly, he heard “Bravo, bravo.” Ji Kang continued playing the zither and asked, “Who is it?” Ji Kang learned from the response that it was a ghost who had been wandering for several thousands of years. The ghost told him, “I heard you playing the zither. The music is very refreshing and beautiful. Since I was a zither music lover, I come over to listen.” The ghost further explained that since he had been killed and mutilated, it would be inappropriate for him to meet Ji Kang in person. But he asked Ji Kang to forgive his terrible appearance because he loved Ji Kang’s music so dearly. Undisturbed, Ji Kang responded, “It is already late at night. Why don’t you appear? Our bodies do not matter that much. They are only appearance and skeleton.” The apparition came up to Ji Kang, carrying his head in the hand, and said, “Your music is so refreshing and enlightening that I feel as if I have come back to life.” Ji Kang and the ghost started to talk about music. The ghost even used Ji Kang’s zither to play a few pieces. He taught Ji Kang the best piece, “Guang Ling San.” But the ghost asked Ji Kang to keep his name and this piece a secret. When the morning came, the ghost said farewell to Ji Kang, “Our encounter occurred in just one night. We could be together for a thousand years. How can I not feel melancholy about this long separation.”5

The piece “Guang Ling San” did not survive. But the strange tale of Ji Kang’s encounter with the ghost sheds light on the idea of the undesignable element in art making. Words are no longer adequate to express the thoughts and feelings the story evokes. Perhaps, the door to the undesignable opens at the moment when language fails.

If the story about the sage and ghost seems to be a rather remote and bizarre example of the undesignable, let us take a look at one of the most common ingredients of our life, qing (emotion).

 Tang Xianzu, a famous dramatist of the Ming dynasty, wrote: “Humans are born with feelings. Pensiveness, happiness, anger, and sadness are triggered by small things. They (emotions) can be expressed in powerful singing and movement. They can be released and extinguished in a minute, or last for several days. . . .”6 On a similar note, the well-known play Palace of Eternal Youth by Hong Sheng begins with, “[Something] moves metal and stone, responds to heaven and earth, shines in the day, and makes history. We can see the strong emotive elements in stories about faithful court officials and filial sons. The sage [Confucius] did not delete songs from the Zheng and Wei states in the Book of Poetry.7 I borrow the ideas and compose the music. I create new lyrics based on Tai Zhen Wai Zhuan. Everything comes from emotion.” 8

Another play, The Peony Pavilion, by Tang Xianzu, is known as one of the most classic love stories in the history of Chinese drama. The playwright, observes, however, “The most difficult thing to express in the world is emotion.” He seems to suggest that emotions, when not conveyed enough in real life, find their expressions in the mad and the fantastic in theatre.9

The Peony Pavilion defies the line between reality and dream, yang jian (world of the living) and yin jian (world of the deceased). The main character, Du Liniang, is not dead. She is only temporarily hidden in a yin jian (room) by the playwright, who constructs several touching love scenes in the absence of one of the characters in love. The device he employs is to place the main characters in different rooms. One character can only observe his/her lover, who is in the other room, through a kind of monitor, such as the portrait of Du Liniang. The play conveys the idea that love is something that won’t be affected by changes such as yin and yang, life and death, separation and reunion. In my view, the idea in the play suggests the essence of chao sheji (HyperDesign).

Tang Xianzu states, “Emotion grows out of nowhere. It is so powerful that the living can die for it and the dead can be revived for it. Strong emotions make the realms of life and death interchangeable. Why do people see emotions in dreams as something unreal? Aren’t there many people living in dreams in this world?10 HyperDesign, the theme of the Biennale, aims to explore the realm of dream in history and reality.

The renowned Tang Dynasty poet Li Po writes, “Heaven and earth is a guesthouse for all things; time is a passing traveler throughout a hundred ages.”11 From a cosmological perspective like what Li Po envisions, how can we set a rule or standard to design?

Like human emotion, the classical Chinese landscape is something undesignable. The scenery of Xiao Shi Tan (Little Rock Pond) described by the Tang Dynasty writer Liu Zongyuan is a good example: “Over a hundred fish swim freely in the pond as if they were in the air. The sunlight penetrates the clear water. Shadows of the fish appear on rocks without moving. Sometimes, the fish disappear or move back and forth quickly, as if they were playing with visitors.”12 Isn’t this landscape a “hyperdesign?” Man and undesignable nature encounter each other here, as Liu Zongyuan remarks, “The clear water meets the eyes. The sound of the water meets our ears. The sense of freedom, ease, and emptiness reaches the spirit. And the sense of profundity and serenity reaches the mind.”13

The concepts of design, hyperdesign, and the undesignable come together at the 2006 Shanghai Biennale. Four Chinese traditional architecture models, for instance, illustrate similar ideas of

 Xu Yongfu and Xu Hesheng, The Palace of Lingyan Temple in Suzhou, architecture model. Courtesy of the Shanghai Art Museum.

 “the undesignable” that one finds in nature. Though they have the look of typical design products, they embody human dignity and spirituality as well as the idea of the union between humans and nature.

The four models were made by a master and disciple team, Xu Yongfu and Xu Hesheng.14 In 1952, Chen Congzhou, the foremost expert of Chinese architecture, met Xu Yongfu, the overseer of the Xuan Miaoguan Taoist monastery restoration project in Suzhou. Impressed by Xu’s marvelous skills, Chen Congzhou invited him to make models of ancient architecture for the wooden architecture model studio at Tongji University. Four years later, Master Xu’s student, Xu Hesheng, joined the studio. During the Cultural Revolution, Xu Hesheng was interrogated and insulted because of his refusal to use nails to build classical Chinese architecture models. One night, alone in a room, he killed himself by sticking a bamboo rod into his throat.

The Chinese artisan-architect ended his life in a highly symbolic way. The transient encounter of the throat and the rod strongly recalls the mortise and tenon joint, the basic component in Chinese traditional architecture. To the man who devoted his whole life to architecture, the rod had its life. The powerful meeting of the two beings leaves much to be considered. Wufa sheji (the undesignable) is probably all that I can say.

Written on the Seventh Day of the Seventh Month in the Year of Bingxu at the Shanghai Art Museum.

Notes: 1 Translator’s note: The term “design” in English has been translated as sheji in Chinese. 2 Translator's note: HyperDesign, the theme of the 2006 Shanghai Biennale, has been translated as chao sheji. 3 Translator's note: The wise prime minister Zhuge Liang (third century) was asked to produce 100,000 arrows in ten days. He had twenty boats lined with straw scarecrows and sailed toward his enemy’s camp on a foggy day. Taking this gesture as a surprise attack, 3,000 bowmen from the enemy camp started to shoot. Zhuge Liang easily gathered more than 100,000 arrows with the straw scarecrows. 4 Li Zhi (Ming dynasty), Zashu Zashuo (Miscellaneous Narration, Miscellaneous Talk), vol. 3, Fen Shu. 5 Record of the Strange Narratives, a compilation composed of strange tales in the Wei and Jin dynasties. 6 Xu Shuofang, ed., Tang Xianzu (Ming dynasty), Record of the Temple for the God of Theatre, Xingyuan Master, Yihuang Prefecture, Selection of works by Tang Xianzu, vol. 2 (Beijing: Beijing National Press, 1999), 1, 188. 7 Translator’s note: Songs from the Zheng and Wei states were known for their bold love themes. 8 Hong Sheng (Qing dynasty), Palace of Eternal Youth (Shenyang: Liaoning Education Press, 1997), 1.

 9 The play revolves around the love story of Liu Mengmei, a young scholar, and Du Liniang, the daughter of Du Bao, the governor of Nan’an in the Southern Song dynasty. In her visit to the family garden, Du Liniang falls asleep and dreams of falling in love with a young scholar, Liu Mengmei. Having awakened from her dream, she becomes lovesick. Unable to find her love, she finally dies of a broken heart. Before she dies, she buries a portrait of herself under a stone in a garden near the Peony Pavilion. Liu Mengmei stays at the summer house in the Du family garden on his way from the South to the imperial examination in Hangzhou. His discovery of the girl’s portrait leads to many hours of gazing at her lovely image. One night she appears before him and they consummate their relationship. At her bidding, he unearths her coffin and she comes back to life, as fresh and beautiful as ever. The couple leaves for Hangzhou, where Liu Mengmei takes an examination, but there is a delay in announcing his test results due to the war. Liu Mengmei finds Du Liniang’s father, Du Bao, and tells him what had happened. Instead of recognizing Liu Mengmei as his son-in-law, Du Bao has him arrested for unlawful disruption of a corpse. Liu isn’t released until an official comes in search of him because he scored the highest on the imperial examination. Finally, in an audience before the throne, Liu Mengmei proves successively his claims, with the help of his resurrected wife. The story ends with the reunion of Liu Mengmei and Du Liniang. 10 Preface to the Peony Pavilion. 11 Li Po, Prologue on a Spring Evening Spent with Cousins in a Peach and Plum Blossom Garden. 12 Liu Zongyuan, Record of the Little Rock Pond. 13 Liu Zongyuan, Record of the Little Hill West of Gumu Pond. 14 I saw eight Chinese traditional architecture models for the first time in the red building at Tongji University when I was working with the faculty for the 2002 Shanghai Biennale. The models include a Suzhou-style hall (double-layer xie shan roof) with scaffolding for the restoration project, the Palace of Lingyan Temple in Suzhou style (single-layer xie shan roof), Shizi Linyanyu Hall (ying shan roof), Suzhou Lingyan Temple’s Main Hall (double-layer xie shan roof), and a Northern Palace-Style Hall (with double-layer arched roof) of the Qing dynasty. Ever since then, the eight models have fascinated me. Whenever I revisit the university, they always invite me to look carefully and quietly contemplate them. Why was I so drawn to these architectural models? The theme of this Biennale, chao sheji (or HyperDesign), gives me a better understanding of my preoccupation. What does the term “hyper” mean? Does it merely mean “to go beyond or to transcend something?” Does it imply that tomorrow will be better than today? Does it direct our attention only to the future? In my view, “hyper” has another dimension. When looking back, one can find the notion of hyper and its manifestations in traditional Chinese culture. The architecture models included in the current exhibition show that the HyperDesign elements in ancient China can inspire designers today. By displaying these seemingly old things in a contemporary art venue such as the HyperDesign exhibition, I aim to not only demonstrate generations of Chinese artisans’ marvelous skills, but also to illuminate the time-honored idea of the union between hand and mind. It took me more than two months to find out the identity of the two artisans who created these models. At noon on July 12, 2006, my assistant Xiang Liping and I went to Tongji University despite the hot weather. Professor Yin Zhengsheng and an associate professor, Lou Yongqi, introduced us to Professor Ruan Yishan. In the early 1950s, Ruan Yishan, a student of Chen Congzhou, worked closely with the artisans. Yuan told us, “The two artisans are father and son. Xu Hesheng is the name of the son. I cannot remember his father’s name. In 1956 or so, I worked with Xu Hesheng on several projects, including the Kuala Lumpur Triumph Memorial, Warsaw Heroes Memorial, and Moscow southwest district. Dai Fudong was the person responsible for the master plan and other design work. Xu Hesheng was supposed to make models based on Dai Fudong's plan. Sometimes, Xu Hesheng finished the model even before Dai Fudong completed his design drawing. Dai Fudong was amazed by the fact that the model perfectly corresponded to his own design concept. The eight models you see were made at the request of Chen Congzhou. The two artisans created more than just eight models. I remember they made a fantastic model showing the intersection of Bei Si (Northern Temple) Pagoda in Suzhou. But the rest of the models they made were lost during the Cultural Revolution. Even these surviving models were in danger. In order to protect them, Chen Congzhou came up with a plan. He and some students secretly moved the models to room 223 and 226 in the Wenyuan building. In my recent visit to room 223, I found a piece of golden-thread phoebe wood we left in the room. Xu Hesheng has worked on traditional Chinese architecture models at the studio since he came to Tongji University. Later, he also made geometric teaching models. His superb skills were widely known. The most amazing thing is, he visited Yonghe Palace (a lama monastery) in Beijing for just half an hour. When he came back from the trip, he made a model of the palace! In the afternoon of July 18, 2006, associate professor Lou Yongqi introduced us to Dai Fudong, a member of the Chinese Academy of Science. Dai reminded us of an ancient sage. He closed his eyes for a moment and talked about his experiences fifty years ago, “I came to Tongji University after graduating from Nanjing Technology Institute. From 1952 to 1953, I was Chen Congzhou’s teaching assistant. I remember that the older artisan was very short and thin. The younger person, Xu Hesheng, was tall and strong. I am quite sure that their relationship is that of master and disciple and not of father and son. The master wasn’t in good health, so he would give oral instructions to Xu Hesheng who then made models according to his master’s ideas. Xu Hesheng not only had great manual skills, but also an exceptional sense of space. Architects are persons who create something in an empty space. Xu Hesheng was highly gifted in understanding the essence of architecture. The models he built are treasures of Tongji University.” Unable to recall the name of the older artisan, Dai Fudong phoned Tang Yunxiang, the then party secretary of the architecture department. Tang Yunxiang could not remember the name either. But he confirmed that they were master and disciple. Dai Fudong insisted that we should visit his home because he kept an old photo of him and Xu Heshang studying models together in the studio. He searched his home for an hour and finally found the photo. He made a replica of it before our eyes. I think, this is an example of Techniques of the Visible (Translator’s note: Techniques of the Visible was the theme of the 2004 Shanghai Biennale. The transliteration of the Chinese ying xiang sheng cun can be “image existence.”) Though we obtained a rare image, we still can’t locate the name and biographical information of the master because people who once worked with him are either in their 80s or 90s or have passed away. We did, however, learn that he and Xu Hesheng were master and disciple. Furthermore, the disciple, Xu Hesheng, died from unnatural causes during the Cultural Revolution. In the afternoon of July 28, 2006, Wei Meizhu and Jin Dian, volunteers working for the Shanghai Biennale, visited the archive of Tongji University with a letter from the Shanghai Art Museum. Fortunately, they found Xu Hesheng’s file, which contains the master’s information. The file indicates that Xu Yongfu is the person who can verify Xu Hesheng’s experiences from 1934 to 1954. We concluded that Xu Yongfu was the person whom we were tirelessly looking for, based on the following reasons: The reason professor Ruan Yishan thought they were father and son is probably that they had the same family name and came from the same town. 2. Dai Fudong and Tang Yunxiang thought they were master and disciple. They recalled that Professor Chen Congzhou met the older artisan, who was working on the Xuanmiao Taoist monastery restoration project in Suzhou in 1952. Impressed by his superb skills, Chen Congzhou invited him to work at Tongji University. In 1954, Chen Congzhou invited the disciple, Xu Heshseng, to Tongji University to help him when he was not in good health. 3. According to the archival information, Xu Hesheng was born on November 10, 1918. In 1934, he was 16 years old, the average age a boy begins to take apprenticeship under a master. It was probably in 1934 that Xu Hesheng became Xu Yongfu’s disciple. In order to make a living, master and the disciple were often as close as father and son. It is in 1954 that Xu Hesheng arrived at Tongji University. Xu Yongfu, listed in the file as the person who knew Xu Hesheng well between 1934 and 1954, is presumably the master. Our search for the artists was concluded just before 3 p.m., July 28, 2006, when a complete list of participating artists in the 2006 Shanghai Biennale was officially released. The master’s name came at just the right moment, which is probably a blessing from generations of Chinese craftsman and artists for the HyperDesign exhibition.

 documenta 12 magazines special feature who is the next freshman in art and culture? the new trend in graduate programs in art and culture in taiwan wu yin-hui and yu wei

The Graduate School of Toy and Game Design of the National Taipei University of Education held an exhibition at the NanHai Gallery in 2005. Courtesy of the National Taipei University of Education. the design industry is on the move

The creative design industry used to receive little attention in national policies, but it has now become, in the face of Taiwan’s transforming economic structure, the object of attention for the government in promoting the growth of cultural and creative industries. To complement the Executive Yuan’s “Cultural and Creative Industry Development Plan”1 which is part of the “Challenge 2008—National Development Plan,” the Ministry of Education helped university art and design departments create a better education for their students. The Ministry drafted the “Cultivation Plan for University Art and Design Talent” and was given a budget from 2003 to 2007 to carry out collaborations with the industry and provide services such as job matching.

The university departments in design that emphasize a hands-on experience and tend to frequently interact with the industry are also beginning to take theoretical or research aspects into account. Since 1990, graduate institutes of design increasingly have been established to cultivate advanced talent in the academic field. For example, in 1992, Chung Yuan Christian University, which already had several design-related departments, placed all relevant departments under its College of Design. In 1993, 1999, and 2001, the master’s programs in interior design, commercial

 design, and cultural assets were established, respectively. In 2004, the doctoral program in design was established; this was the second doctoral program in design nationwide. (The Doctoral Graduate School of Design of National Yunlin University of Science and Technology was established in 2000.)

According to Hu Bao-Lin, Dean of the College of Design, the total graduate student quota for the doctoral program set by the Ministry of Education is limited to four annually. Currently, there are seven doctoral students in the program. Contemporary design aesthetics entails much more than studying visual aesthetics. Chung Yuan’s program is oriented to the concept of “endless caring,” which expands design to include the meaning of existence, community consciousness, and public space. The program also enhances the students’ ability to express humanity and philosophy in their work. Presently, most of the doctoral students have several years of relevant work experience. Either they had publication or grant-writing experience before entering the program, or they had jobs in culture-related public organizations or the private sector, or had been faculty members in related departments in colleges. The superiority of the College of Design lies in the students’ ability to link up with the industry and other outside resources. The fact that the students returned to graduate school to further their study after accumulating some hands-on experience, which allows both theory and implementation to come together, is, according to Hu Bao-Lin, a perfect model for learning.

Those universities of science and technology whose primary goal is to cultivate science and technical talent and to provide the advantage of solid technical training have begun to include creative courses as well. For instance, the students in the Department of Industrial Design and the Graduate Institute of Innovation and Design at the National Taipei University of Technology actively participated in several off-campus competitions with excellent results. Many teachers in universities and colleges where the primary goal is to cultivate talent in the field of art education have also followed the trend to launch new departments and institutes in the area of design. Examples are the Graduate Institute of Design of National Taiwan Normal University, the Department of Art and Design of National Hsinchu University of Education, the Graduate School of Visual Design of National Kaohsiung Normal University, and the Department of Arts and Design of National Hualien University of Education.

At the National Taipei University of Education, in addition to the Department of Plastic Design, the Graduate School of Toy and Game Design is the only domestic graduate program in the field of the game and toy production industry. The program was launched three years ago and no one has yet graduated from it. According to the Director, Chang Shih-Jhong, the National Taipei University of Education has an advantage in pedagogy. To explore the mechanisms of human/toy interactions through the perspective of pedagogy is the main feature of the program. The idea is that the toys and games are suitable for anyone between 0 and 99 years of age, or the so-called children of any age. In particular, such broadly defined education can be "edu-tainment" in order to cope with the facts of a low birth rate and an increasingly elderly population in society. Chang thought that we should not neglect the needs of the “silver population” and their potential for consumerism. However, he also pointed out, due to a lack of examples of like departments domestically, the program has tried to collaborate with outside resources. For example, the exhibition in NanHai gallery last year was a collaboration with the Northern Center for Assisting Tools of National Taiwan University, with the attempt to make assisting tools for the handicapped more toy-like.

 Under the demand for globalization and the pressure for industrial expansion, design takes on an important role in reforming the enterprise’s image and in promoting the product’s quality for Taiwanese enterprises. In 1999, Ming Chuan University launched the Graduate School of Design Management with the goal of making the best use of design through enhancement of the aspect of management. Then in 2002, the Graduate School of Creative Design was formed as a “three-in-one” program consisting of commercial design, commodity design, and digital media design. Having a keen eye for The 2005 SIGGRAPH Taipei & Computer Graphics Workshop sponsored by National Taiwan University of Arts. Courtesy of the National Taiwan University immediate market needs and a capacity to of Arts. make quick adjustments in the curriculum accordingly are of best advantage for the colleges of design. Lately, fashion has been a hot topic in Taiwan. In 1999, Hsih Chien University launched the Graduate Institute of Fashion Design, the first university department of fashion design in Taiwan. In 2004, the program changed its name to the Graduate Institute of Fashion and Communications Design, which contains two divisions: fashion design and digital media design. The former focused on creative work in fashion design and the latter on digital media design work such as animation and games. The combination of the two will predict the fashion industry in the future. the inevitable new trend of technology

To cope with the impact of technology on the arts, the government has integrated the cultivation of technological and artistic talent through support for a digital art gallery and the promotion of the Cultural and Creative Industry Development Plan. From 2003 to 2007, the plan has committed 1.15 billion in funding to support manufacturers of technology to collaborate with computer science departments in researching and developing new software.

Concurrently, in response to such a trend, many universities created new courses on digital media to improve the students’ ability to compete in the job market. Some even launched new departments in digital media at an undergraduate level. Quite a few private universities strategically selected the department of digital media as the highlight in their development plans, investing a substantial amount of funding in the purchase of equipment to help the students fully acquire professional skills and techniques. For example, the College of Creative Media at Kun Shan University of Technology Taiwan is an integrated institute that is capable of leading the students through the whole process—from formulating ideas, design techniques, different media, and production, all the way to marketing. In 2002, the Graduate School of Visual Communication Design was founded and had exceptionally advanced equipment, far above any other similar institute. The equipment included the first Hologram Photograph Laboratory in Taiwan, the self-? claimed biggest and best Illumination Formation Laboratory, as well as a three-dimensional digital movie studio that incorporates the processes of image taking, post-editing and synthesis, the recording of sound effects and sound tracks, and so on. With such extraordinary equipment, Kun Shan has cultivated many talented individuals in the industry.

 Overall, the undergraduate curriculum emphasizes media design or digital manipulation, which is oriented toward the design industry. As for the curriculum that focuses on artistic creativities, it is mostly offered by the graduate programs in the universities with arts programs. In recent years, there has been a steady growth in the number of applicants for the graduate schools. In 2001, Taipei National University of the Arts (formerly the National College of the Arts) launched the Graduate School of Art and Technology, which is one of few programs that emphasize the integration of art and technology. The students come from either a science and technology background or a fine arts background; some of them are truly gifted, showing outstanding artwork.

However, relevant software and computer accessories are necessary for the development of art and technology. Due to a lack of funding, the Graduate School of Art and Technology of Taipei National University of the Arts has serious limitations in being able to appoint faculty members and purchase equipment. It is painful The 2005 SIGGRAPH Taipei & Computer Graphics Workshop sponsored by National Taiwan University of Arts. Courtesy of the National Taiwan to not have the necessary money, which is a University of Arts. common problem also faced by other programs of art. Regarding this, collaboration between the institutes and the related industry or laboratories off-campus might overcome the problem of insufficient equipment on campus. Besides, to make up for the lack of prerequisite knowledge in art and technology for the graduate students, the Graduate School of Art and Technology has appealed for many years to launch an undergraduate program, but, unfortunately, the appeal has been once again rejected by the Ministry of Education. The Director, Chen Shih-Ming, regretfully pointed out that the ruling from the Ministry of Education considerably affected the development of art and technology, making it difficult to either do the groundwork for the program or to expand it.

In contrast, the Graduate Institute of Multimedia and Animation Arts (founded in 2000) of the National Taiwan University of Arts seems to have had better luck; they were able to launch an undergraduate program in 2003 (the Department of Multimedia and Animation Arts). The program director, Shih Chang-Jie, pointed out that having an undergraduate program can help to fill the gap in the graduate students’ prerequisite knowledge. Furthermore, it is much easier to promote various activities when you have both the graduate and the undergraduate programs in one department. For instance, the 2005 SIGGRAPH Taipei & Computer Graphics Workshop was sponsored by the graduate program. Compared to the Graduate Institute of Animation of the Taiwan National University of Arts, in which they emphasize 2D and experimental work in animation, the Graduate Institute of Multimedia and Animation Arts (founded

In November 2005, the Graduate Institute of Museum Studies of Fu-Jen Catholic in 2000) of the National Taiwan University University invited Peter Davis, Dean of the College of Culture Heritage Research at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, to give lectures. Courtesy of the Graduate of Arts focuses exclusively on 3D. The Institute of Museum Studies of Fu-Jen Catholic University.

 Students of the Graduate School of Museum Studies of Taipei National University of the Arts visiting the Antarctic Dinosaur Exhibition for a class in natural history. Courtesy of the Taipei National University of the Arts. faculty is comprehensive and covers three divisions: multimedia design, digital art creation, and animation. The graduate students came from various departments such as fine arts, visual communications, art and craft, sculpture, or even film studies. The program stresses a learning environment that offers students both hands-on and research opportunities.

Overall, there are also universities that offer art and technology programs in the Northern, the Central (e.g., Department of Digital Media Design at the National Yunlin University of Science and Technology), and the Southern areas of Taiwan. In the Eastern area, the National Hualien University of Education launched the Graduate School of Arts and Technology in 2006 and has enrolled new students for the first year. Based on the content in the enrollment pamphlet, the program seems to emphasize cultivating educational and industrial talent. Nevertheless, the program is only one-year-old, and whether its direction will be adjusted in the future or not is worthy of attention. new art, new attempt

The National Kaohsiung Normal University launched the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Art this year and has recruited its first class of students. Lu Ming-De, the Dean of College of Arts, suggested that given the university already has established departments and graduate programs in music, fine arts, and visual communications, the integration of resources, courses, space, and media among them is its unique feature. Interdisciplinary work is the new trend. The integration among several art fields or domains is now a common model for collaboration. For example, the crossover between art and science has great potential. By extending the classroom to the outside world, the program hopes to experiment with new possibilities that go beyond mainstream education. Therefore, the graduate school plans to recruit students who have many years of working experience in their own professional fields and who are enthusiastic about art—or who are artists—with the intent of creating a new spirit of integration among various professional resources through the courses that are developed in the program.

 programs of arts management & museum studies grow steadily

In the last decade, the division of labour in art has become increasingly specialized in Taiwan, and it is now a trend that the subjects of arts administration and management and museum management have become specialized studies in the universities and graduate schools. Tainan National College of the Arts (now Tainan National University of the Arts) was established in 1996, and, at that time, the first graduate program in museology in the nation (i.e., museum studies) was launched. Compared to the other programs, museum studies covers a broad spectrum of topics such as collection, presentation, education, management, and marketing, so that the program stresses even more the integration between academia and industry. Therefore, the program is directed toward incorporating solid training in both theory and implementation and toward having active collaboration with museums off-campus. Among fifteen graduate students in the annual enrollment, five of them are professionals who hold a job. However, the Director, Zhang Yu-Teng, expressed that the program still has more emphasis on theoretical training, “because, after all, a graduate school is not a vocational school; it is a place for training the students’ critical thinking. Once they have graduated and have a job in the museum, they will have their whole lives to accumulate hands-on experiences,” said Zhang.

In 2002, Fu-Jen Catholic University launched the Graduate Institute of Museum Studies. In addition to continuing its two main features, “the integration of theory and application” and the “collaboration with museums off-campus,” the program claimed that Fu-Jen, as a comprehensive university, can support museums studies with multidisciplinary knowledge and resources. It is worth mentioning that the program offered third-year graduate students a four-month internship in museums abroad, which is a great opportunity for students to acquire cross-cultural, hands-on experiences in museum studies. Similarly, the Taipei National University of the Arts also launched the Graduate School of Museum Studies last year. Since the program was co-founded by the National Museum of Natural Science, the students can do their internship directly in the museum. In fact, the graduate students take their courses in the institute during the first semester and then fulfill their internship requirements in the museum during the second. In hoping to cultivate experts in the interpretation, communication, research, and application of art and sciences in museum studies, the many on-campus public squares and performance halls also became nearby resources for the program.

It is true that, increasingly, more graduate schools of museum studies are being established; but it may not be true, according to Zhang Yu-Teng, that this will lead to malicious competition. First, there are many kinds of museums, and, second, the spectrum of subjects that museum studies can cover is extensive. Therefore, Zhang thinks that it is important for the graduate programs to discover what those differences are. He said, ”Each graduate school of museum studies shall make slight adjustments in their goals and directions, in order to find their own uniquenesses, strategies, and professional orientations, which will allow particular niches for each program and clear boundaries between different programs.”

Although the subject of arts administration and management became a specialized study quite early on, the study was often offered as a subdivision within the department or graduate programs of fine arts. For example, in 1992 the Graduate Institute of Fine Arts of the National Taiwan Normal University divided into four subdivisions: arts administration; fine arts education; the history of the fine arts in China; and the history of the fine arts in the West. In 1995, the arts administration and management subdivision of the Graduate School of Fine Arts of Tunghai

 University was changed to the “art planning and commentary” subdivision. In 1998, the Graduate School of Aesthetics and Arts management of Nanhua University was established; the program lay down arts management, aesthetics, and history of art as the three main subjects.

The idea of separating arts management into a specialized graduate program happened in 1999 at the Graduate School of Visual Arts Management of Yuan Ze University. Although it is the first graduate program bearing the “arts management” title, the Director, Wang De-Yu, said: “in order to make the program go a long way in the field of arts management, it is crucial for the students to appreciate the history of art.” Thus, history courses take up a large percentage of the curriculum. Moreover, “art and law” was also included as one of the core courses. As for implementation, the Graduate School of Visual Arts Management and the University Art Center developed a close relationship in that the six main annual exhibitions that the Art Center presented are in full charge of the first-year graduate students. The second-year graduate students are otherwise responsible for planning the annual “community art festival” which has now happened six times since 2001. In 2000, the Taipei National University of the Arts and National Sun Yat-Sen University also launched graduate programs in arts management. As compared to the program of Yuan Ze University, where the students are mostly full-time, half of the students in the above-mentioned two programs are professionals or part-time (i.e., the ratio of full-time vs. part-time is about 1: 1). In particular, the program faculty at the Taipei National University of the Arts includes quite a number of experts in industry, government, and academia. Up to now, the program has produced twenty-one graduates; about one third of them continued on to further studies while most of the others now hold positions either in cultural departments of governmental institutions, non-profit organizations, or in the cultural and creative industries.

The study of arts administration and management is known to emphasize the aspect of implementation. Thus, interaction with the industries is getting more active following the specialized graduate programs that were established. In the recent years, it is worth noticing that

“The Green Feet” (2006) activity at the Sixth Yuan Ze Community Art Festival, planned by the second-year graduate students and sponsored by the Graduate School of Visual Arts Management of Yuan Ze University. Courtesy of Yuan Ze University.

 The Graduate School of Arts Administration and Management at the Taipei National University of Arts co-sponsored the 2005 Asia-Pacific Arts Forum. These photos show one of the activities in the series Visual Arts Forum–—he Masking and Identification. Left: Uniform by Zanny Begg. Right: 2004 Kuso–Orange Flowers by Ye Yi-Li. Photo: Chin Ya-Jun. the doctoral programs in arts management have also been established. For instance, the National Taiwan Normal University launched the Doctoral Programs in Fine Arts Education and Fine Arts Administration in 2002. This year, the National Taiwan University of Arts also launched the doctoral program in the Graduate School of Art—Culture Policy and Management. The directions and scope of the aforementioned doctoral programs were thought to cultivate decision-makers in the government, or intellects who can provide suggestions to art and cultural policy making. However, what the outlook would be in the future, or how the programs would affect the ecology of art and culture remains unclear at this point. is the management of art and cultural industries in fashion?

Besides the fact that graduate programs in museum studies and arts management are growing steadily as the field of art becomes increasingly specialized, the subject of management of the “art and cultural industries” is also beginning to gain in popularity. The concept that “culture” is considered a type of “industry” that has a value, has issues of supply and demand, and has a need for effective management, can, according to the government, be dated back to the idea of “developing cultural industries and bringing culture into industry” put forth by the Council for Cultural Affairs, Executive Yuan, in 1995. Lately, because the government has been widely promoting the cultural and creative industries, the “creativity support and peripheral creativity industries” became one of the areas of focus. Consequently, the administration of higher education also put more effort in cultivating relevant talent such as in the aforementioned graduate programs. Although the programs mainly center on arts management, the scope of these programs is broad, such that visual art, the performance art, presentation and facilities, film studies, publishing, pop music, and advertisement design are all included.

At the undergraduate level, examples of programs in cultural and creative industries can be found at the Department of Cultural Development of the National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences (founded in 2001) and the Department of Taiwan Cultural Industries Management of

 the National Pingtung University of Education (founded in 2004). At the graduate level, the National Taipei University of Education just launched the Graduate School of Art, Culture, Industry, Design, and Management last year (2005) with the intent to develop the future of the market in the cultural and creative industries. The curriculum covers planning and design as well as management to cultivate art and cultural Syu-Wang, laureate of the Torch Award, giving a speech to the Graduate Institute of Folk Arts of National Taipei University. Courtesy of the Graduate Institute of Folk Arts of National Taipei University. talent in innovation and design as well as in sales, management, and research. The majority of the faculty members are off-campus experts who have offices in the Council for Cultural Affairs or the National Museum of History. Like most other newly established programs, under restrictions for the total quota of university faculty members by the Ministry of Education, it is difficult for the program to expand the number of full-time faculty (they have been trying hard to get one additional full-time faculty position). There were forty applicants for the program last year, and the number doubled this year. Director Lin Yan- Dan said: “Whoever understands the fundamental concepts about culture, has an innovative approach, and is enthusiastic about the local culture will be a good candidate for us.” With regard to the trend that more programs in cultural (and creative) industries were created, Lin thought that the talent with specialized expertise is still lacking even though it may appear that the talent in the cultural and creative industries is already saturated.

Huang Guang-Nan, the new President who was just hired last year, stated, “Currently, there are about five thousand students in the National Taiwan University of Arts. Is it possible that each of the students will be able to enter the industry after graduation and find a job in his or her specialty?” He then stated that “it is true that art and culture as an industry has a potential market in Taiwan. Indeed there is a lot happening in the cultural and creative industries nationwide, but how much have we really achieved? For a long time, our ideas about culture and creativity always followed other countries; the policies made by our government are unclear, so that it was problematic to execute those policies.” Because of that, the National Taiwan University of Arts launched the Graduate School of Art—Culture Policy and Management (to compensate for the weakness in policy making), in which the master’s program focuses on arts management, while the doctoral program focuses on cultural industries and policies. President Huang, who is also director of the program, hopes that the students can truly contribute to policy making in the cultural and creative industries. “Then we can end the embarrassment that we once had no real experts in cultural policies,” he said. In this year’s enrollment, more than a hundred students applied for the master’s program. In the near future, he plans to launch three to four new doctoral programs, including social art education, multimedia and animation arts, and so forth, that can interact with each other and support each another.

 make shine the good old things

From arts management to art and culture industry management, the themes in general reflect what is important presently. Research into and preservation of cultural assets that focus on the past also have gradually developed into a specialized field of study in the last decade. In 1997, the National Palace Museum required many experts in the fields of cultural relics recovery, preservation, and research, and it urged the Ministry of Education to push the universities at all levels to add new departments in cultural assets or other related fields.

The Department and Graduate Institute of Cultural Heritage Conservation of National Yunlin University of Science and Technology was established seven years ago (1999). Besides regular teaching, the program emphasizes collaboration with industry and interaction with the local community. For example, the students have helped to promote the Old Jail of Chia-Yi County as a historical site and assisted with the recovery of the windmill A scene taken in one of the classes offered by the Graduate School of Art and Technology of the and waterwheel of Yan-Tien city. Taipei National University of the Arts. Courtesy of the Taipei National University of the Arts. Another example is the Graduate School of Cultural Heritage of Chung Yuan Christian University (2001). That program has attempted to serve as a center for servicing and promoting cultural heritage in Tao Yuan, Hsinchu, and Miaoli areas. Close to that subject are programs that cultivate technical expertise in cultural assets and relics preservation such as are found at the Graduate Institute of Conservation of Cultural Relics of Tainan National University of the Arts (1999) and the Graduate School of Architecture and Historic Preservation of Taipei National University of the Arts (2002). Programs in historical studies of traditional folk arts are also relevant; these can be found at the Graduate School of Traditional Arts of Taipei National University of the Arts (1993) and the Graduate Institute of Folk Arts of National Taipei University, which was established in 2001. The latter program was divided into three sections: historical sites, literature dramas, and arts and crafts. In addition to this, cultural administration will soon be added as a new section in the program.

As a new emerging domain, cultural assets have attracted students from various backgrounds to join in the program, and this reflects the so-called interdisciplinary characteristics of the program. Along with a new amendment in Cultural Heritage Preservation Law, the market demand for cultural assets and conservation should still exist in the future.

Notes 1 The Cultural and Creative Industry Development Plan has funding for the cultivation and exchange of art and design talent and for the appointment of foreign faculty, respectively. In addition, commercial design, creative furniture, the creative life, textiles and fashion, digital art creation, traditional art and crafts, and so forth, are the highlighted industries in the development plan.

 documenta 12 magazines special feature dialogue: dispute over the "dumped" graduation theses of twelve students in the oil painting class of the art institute of shanghai normal university interview by ma jun translated by liu xianfeng

An open letter on a Web site has caught much public attention by revealing an event in which twelve university students’ graduation theses were denied a passing grade. Under the title “An Open Letter to University Leaders from all Students in the Grade Twelve Oil Painting Class of the Art Institute of Shanghai Normal University,” the document was posted on the New Thread Web site on June 9, 2006, together with an explanation by Professor Liu Dahong, the class instructor.

All twelve students in the oil painting class encountered unexpected problems upon their graduation. Though the students had all passed their oral defenses, their graduation theses were declared failed days later at a meeting specially summoned by Xu Mangyao, Director of the Art Institute of Shanghai Normal University, who claimed that the theses had “no academic value.”

The jointly signed letter does contain some radical remarks. “Those in power at the Institute abuse their power by failing the graduation theses in an effort to punish without justice the people who do not belong to their coterie. The students who have been denied graduation, in fact, include winners of national scholarships, Model Graduate of Shanghai and Excellent Student Party members, and those who, upon graduation, have enrolled in graduate school. Half of the twelve students had their work selected for a national fine arts exhibition for youth, etc.”

The university management quickly became involved in

Liu Dahong, My Dream, performance. Courtesy of mediation in the open dispute between Institute Director Xu the artist. Mangyao and Professor Liu Dahong and held another oral defense for all the students’ theses. One of the theses, by graduate Guo Shengliang, was subject to much criticism for its content concerning his acquaintances and the reasons for his not having found a girlfriend at university.

The Institute director, Professor Liu Dahong, and Guo Shengliang, all representing three different generations at the Art Institute of Shanghai Normal University, got involved in the dispute. Central to the investigation of the dispute were the following questions: Was the dispute between the professor and the Institute director truly about “different concepts of academic and teaching practice,” or did it involve some hidden personal conflict? To what extent can graduation theses be completed independently by the students. Are there any criteria to improve those dissertations under the current system of education?

 from professor liu dahong:

“There shall be not a fixed model for graduation theses. It is awful to impose a national requirement of a minimum of 5,000 words on graduation theses. We do make an effort to eradicate plagiaristic theses . This event has been caused by the growing resentment towards us from the Institute director and factional strife within the Institute, all of which the students have fallen victim to.” from director xu mangyao:

“We stick to the rules of the China Academy of Fine Arts rather than the nonsense of Liu Dahong. The Ministry of Education has issued detailed regulations regarding this concern that you are obliged to follow.” from student guo shengliang:

“It seems dangerous to express one's own point of view in the graduation thesis. Why should I attend the second oral defense for my thesis if there was nothing wrong with it? I have resorted to the help of Mr. Chen Danqing.” interview with liu dahong

Youth Weekend reporter (referred to as YW): On Web sites, I found your supporters and opponents were split fifty-fifty. Some Netizens puzzled over why oil painters should write a thesis to graduate, not to mention one with a strange title like “My Acquaintances in University.”

Liu Dahong: The title was not dictated by me but was a subtitle in Guo Shengliang’s thesis. My requirement for his thesis was for him to write down his feelings and experiences after four years’ at the university, and to include activities, daily life, or the process of learning oil painting.

YW: Isn’t Guo Shengliang’s thesis like a simple record of daily life?

Liu Dahong: An artist shall have creativity in his work and should not be restrained in this creativ- ity in the writing of the thesis. A strict framework imposed upon graduation theses would only result in fixed styles of dissertation that would be full of clichés.

YW: Should some specific criteria or lowest standard be applied to it?

Liu Dahong: The bottom line of judging graduation theses is whether they tell the truth. In fact, there are rich experiences and acceptable viewpoints presented in Guo’s thesis covering his personal feelings and life in the four years of study in the university.

It is his comments in the thesis about some teachers at this university that annoyed the party secretary of our Institute. The point is: why could he not evaluate those teachers? No one can find a regulation about whether such judgments on teachers are allowed or not in writing a thesis. As a specialist in chemistry, the secretary does not understand the artists’ standpoint on this matter.

YW: But I read his opinion about finding a girlfriend in the thesis. Is it appropriate to include that kind of content in a graduation thesis?

 Liu Dahong: I find nothing wrong with it. His thesis is interesting to read, well organized, and full of creative ideas. The theme of his thesis clearly points out some problems existing at the university. What he wants to say is that the education system needs to be renovated and improved. In his opinion, the current university admittance examination results in the enrollment of low quality students.

YW: I still don’t understand your point. A thesis on the operating system of a university should be from a graduate in education rather than one from oil painting class. Don’t you think so?

Liu Dahong: Oil painting is a division of art and a part of Liu Dahong in his studio. Courtesy of the Artist. culture. Without artistic culture, an artist could not achieve anything, an artwork is only bestowed with meaning when it connects closely with social reality.

YW: I understand your attention to social reality and that it can be traced to instruction through some artistic masterpieces. But we are talking about a graduation thesis. As the Institute management explained, there should be reasoning, argument, and demonstration in a student’s graduation thesis. In keeping with this standard, they call Guo’s writing a personal summary and not a thesis.

Liu Dahong: Isn’t that a real thesis? He argues about the problems in university and demonstrates many facts to support his point of view. His thesis contains clear arguments and proof, unlike those other stereotyped writing styles.

YW: Then why do the Institute Director and some Netizens still disagree with it?

Liu Dahong: When one is used to being framed within a fixed model, one has no way out. The key point in this hot dispute is that many have narrow minds when it comes to writing graduation theses and can accept only a fixed model of writing.

YW: But this is an established practice at the Art Institute of Shanghai Normal University and all the other higher education institutions. As long as you are working under the current system of education, you should follow the basic rules of the system. Right?

Liu Dahong: I think the current system leaves much to be improved. It has caused many untruth- ful graduation theses.

YW: Though you have your own understanding about teaching, you are also obliged to comply with the rules of the higher education system. Right?

Liu Dahong: Art students have to learn politics and foreign languages, and there is nothing I can do about it. To receive their degree, they have no choice but to take such lessons. I can only say that I do my best to minimize the impact of unreasonable practices. That is it.

 YW: So you think your affirmation of those theses falls within your responsibilities and violates no rules of the university?

Liu Dahong: I thought I could make some improvement on the system in respect to graduation theses. But I found there are strictly imposed rules that could easily make students fail. I know there have long been complaints about my way of teaching. This time some just took the graduation theses as undeniable evidence to challenge me.

YW: Then why did you take the risk?

Liu Dahong: I didn’t expect such a severe outcome. The university management used to pay little attention to graduation theses and did not impose a strict review of most of those papers. Because there are not enough courses on artistic theory for students in their four years of study, it is not realistic to expect very high theoretical proficiency from them. Anyway, you cannot ask too much from university students on academic achievement.

Due to the loose controls, cheating in the writing of a thesis is quite popular now. It is common for some students to download articles from the Internet for their graduation thesis. My approach to a thesis mainly aims at avoiding those cheating behaviors.

YW: Have you succeeded in avoiding plagiarized fake theses in the class?

Liu Dahong: Yes, all twelve students in the class prepared their papers by themselves. I don’t think there should be a national unified standard on the writing of a thesis by university students, neither should there be the minimum word number of 5000 for each thesis. Those stereotyped rules are really unacceptable.

YW: Has this event been caused only by different opinions on thesis standards?

Liu Dahong: It is much more complicated than that. There has long been a divergence on teaching methods between Mr. Xu, the director, and me. He had gradually become discontented with the work from our art studio. Teachers in our studio try to make improvements on some traditional concepts of oil painting in order to give creative training to the students. Without those necessary reforms, we would not be able to find our position in reality anymore.

YW: What is the traditional concept of oil painting you just mentioned?

Liu Dahong: Those old rules of artistic training that emphasize imitation, colour value, and setting out to make oil paintings look like photographs. Like all fans of academic painting, Mr. Xu is in favour of that kind of painting style.

YW: Aren’t those the basic skills required by art students?

Liu Dahong: They are, but we are not limited to them. Art students should do much more than that. If they only knew the basic skills, it would be very difficult for them to achieve much after graduation. Those who can only paint a well rendered portrait and know nothing more will find little acceptance from employers.

 In my point of view, one can be an excellent artist without those basic skills. Looking at some masters of traditional painting in Chinese history, you will find they achieved success not only because of their ability to depict objects through pure resemblance.

YW: But your specialty is in oil painting, not Chinese traditional painting. Right?

Liu Dahong: I think there are interconnections between different school of painting. No fixed approach should be applied to the creation of an oil painting. We have made some reforms in teaching and let students draw inspiration from society and not only the models found in uni- versity. To catch up with the rapid social development, we encourage students to walk out of the university and see the real world.

YW: Is Director Xu against your teaching methods?

Liu Dahong: Diverse teaching methods should be tolerated in university. It is very common for one teacher’s method to be different from another’s, whether Mr. Xu’s or mine or any other teacher’s. In fact, we can learn from each other to make enhance achievements for both of us. Unfortunately, the Institute director does not tolerate me and my way of teaching with an open mind. To make things worse, some people have spared no effort to show hatred between us. Our difference in concepts has gradually led to discord and finally the current situation.

YW: Are there people behind the scenes who are stirring up the controversy about the thesis?

Liu Dahong: Of course there are. Some just want to use him to destroy me.

YW: It sounds evil. The public used to think that the university was like an ivory tower of serenity.

Liu Dahong: The atmosphere in the university is very bad. Personal struggle is fierce in our Institute, similar to the turmoil in the Cultural Revolution. None of the teachers in the first oral defense attended the second one on the theses. Those who escaped the second oral defense are surely my supporters, but they are not willing to challenge the Institute openly.

YW: Have you ever thought to have a face-to-face exchange of ideas with Mr. Xu, the director?

Liu Dahong: Since the dispute, no Institute leaders have talked with me about it. Some time ago, I did try to exchange ideas with him. But our communication always evolved into a heated argument. I must acknowledge that it is very difficult for me to exchange views with him.

YW: Why is the idea of exchange so difficult between the two of you? Do you really think these problems of yours cannot be solved?

Liu Dahong: The old way of teaching can really push our graduates into a dilemma upon graduation. Some of the graduates choose to be employed by the university and teach the same old rules to the younger students. Without any reform of this incestuous system, our university issue degrees in a way that is totally against the interests of society.

 When we conducted reform of approaches to teaching, he tried to obey his own ways of instruction. Everything is okay for him as long as we follow his way of teaching; otherwise he thinks we are denying his authority.

YW: Could those students become victims of this dispute?

Liu Dahong: You could say he would do anything to give vent to his resentment, such as failing all the graduating students. If he showed some restraint and failed half of the students in the oral defense, it would be hard for us to make clear our intentions. But as he has denied all students their graduation, his scheme is now self-evident.

There has never been such a thing as all students in a class failing their graduation test in the university. You always get good students and those that are not so proficient. By denying the graduation of those winners of Model Graduate of Shanghai as well as national scholarships in the class, he is just ruining his reputation.

YW: Such behavior will in fact win you more support. Am I right?

Liu Dahong: It benefits me partly in terms of social commentary on the event, but it puts me in a more adversarial position in terms of my future here. The university management will surely punish me in some way later on to safeguard the director’s interest. According to established rules, the Institute director has full control of the department and I will be labeled only as his opponent.

YW: On which side of the argument are the three deputy directors of the Institute?

Liu Dahong: Their absence from the second oral defense clarified their positions. It was not convenient for them as deputy directors to take a stand. Anyway, who is willing to offend the director?

YW: As revealed on the Web site, the dispute was caused by factional strife in your Institute. Is that true?

Liu Dahong: There is some connection to it. Factions do exist in the Institute, partly due to the director’s inability to control himself and partly to increasing resentment from us.

YW: Do you belong to one of those factions?

Liu Dahong: I have no choice. As I have a different opinion from the director, I have surely been excluded by him and am considered to be the opposition.

YW: What do you know about the faction that is against you?

Liu Dahong: Excuse me for my frankness. They are just losers who surround, coax, and flatter Mr. Xu. He himself is a good artist, but falls into the trap set by them. This in turn greatly damages the academic atmosphere of the whole Institute.

 Liu Dahong, Institute, 2007, oil on canvas, 100 cm x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

When I designated those titles for the students, I got approval from the department director and the deputy director of the Institute. Why then should the Institute director give instruction to fail the oral defense of these theses? It is not at all a normal practice.

This time, an extremely high standard was placed on the graduation theses under his direct instruction. He even asked many students to make lots of revisions on their papers. As he has not taken me on as the instructor of the class, I refused to give my appraisals of the students yesterday.

There were also several students who failed to pass the second oral defense held yesterday. One of them was, as mentioned, Guo Shengliang. Another student, Zhu Zhenbo, did attend the oral defense but got into a hot argument with some of the teachers as he thinks that one of the teachers in attendance had no qualifications for academic activity. We should have varied teaching methods for different students. We have to do it this way. interview with xu mangyao

YW: What is your response to those who criticize your pedagogy as being too conservative? What is your principle of teaching?

Xu Mangyao: My principle is the same as that of the China Academy of Fine Arts. I moved to Shanghai more than seven years ago and my approach to teaching is similar to that of Jin Shangyi, President of Central Academy of Fine Arts.  YW: Mr. Jin Shangyi from this famous academy belongs to an academicism which puts much emphasis on strict basic training. Right?

Xu Mangyao: Yes, I am strict too. I share the same view and use the same methods with instructors at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

YW: You left the academy many years ago. It may have undergone some changes.

Xu Mangyao: I accept changes and tolerate difference, much like the old saying that we shall let a hundred flowers blossom.

YW: But Mr. Liu Dahong . . .

Xu Mangyao: (in a sudden anger) Liu Dahong always talks nonsense! Nonsense! Do you believe him?

I know you came for this. What is the real purpose of your interview? What kind of information are you going to publish about it? You can call the Information Department of Shanghai Normal University. I have come to an agreement with the university director that all interviews about the graduation theses should be given by the department.

YW: But the event has been reported by media.

Xu Mangyao: You would not understand the true story even if I told you, which it would make me very tired to do.

YW: I think I would understand. I once took lessons on artistic theory and the history of art.

Xu Mangyao: Knowledge of art history would not help you. I am talking about something very specific in art. Shall we stop here?

YW: Do you mean you have a difference of opinion with Liu Dahong on some specific subject?

Xu Mangyao: No comment, no comment, no comment. I don’t want newspapers getting involved in the event. We have our own principles and rules for teaching, which are none of your business. Think about whether I am right and you may have whatever opinion on it. You should have your own judgment on Liu Dahong. The Ministry of Education sets rules on everything here. You should take into consideration all those rules.

YW: Is the event only about a dispute on teaching? According to the students’ open letter, they say you have personal discord with Liu Dahong. interview with guo shengliang

YW: Your thesis seems strange to me.

Guo Shengliang: Yes, but you read only part of it. I can send you a whole copy of my thesis. I want to make clear here that I don’t think my thesis a good one. I could write a better paper but dare not to do so.  One student in a sculpture class wrote his thesis on contemporary art. In his oral defense, one teacher said that his thesis did not relate to his specialty, sculpture, and he did not accept it. . By simply using the “replace” function on Microsoft Word and changing the words “contemporary art” to “contemporary sculpture,” he successfully passed the second oral defense of his thesis.

All students in my class write their theses independently. Three in the sculpture class who submit- ted plagiarized papers all passed their oral defense without any problem. It seems dangerous to express one’s own point of view in a graduation thesis.

YW: You wrote something about finding a girlfriend in your thesis. Why did you do that?

Guo Shengliang: That is only a small part of my thesis, a part that was not fully explained in the reports by the media. My instructor Liu gave me many themes on which to write. Originally, I wanted to write about my understanding of art but had no courage to do so. If I had done that, I would have been doomed to fail, as I know quite well the position of those teachers in the Institute. So Mr. Liu instructed me to write about my acquaintances in the university, and I did so accordingly.

YW: Some people think that your thesis is a personal summary. Do you agree with that?

Guo Shengliang: They can say that.

YW: Then it is not a real thesis, right?

Guo Shengliang: Why should we care so much about the form that a thesis takes? I consider a thesis as a kind of artwork. For an artist, artwork is everything. What is the necessity of a thesis? To be frank, I really don’t know what a thesis is. (Laugh)

YW: Is there any course in your fourth year that teaches you to write a thesis as an art student in the Institute?

Guo Shengliang: No. The key to this event is not the thesis but mainly their power struggles.

YW: What do you think of the teaching methods of Mr. Liu? Have you learned a lot from him?

Guo Shengliang: Yes. Without his instruction, I would need at least ten years to gather experience in art, and I would not be guaranteed success in this process of mine.

YW: Have you got enough experience in art already?

Guo Shengliang: At least I will have my solo art exhibition next month. That fact tells a lot. I am invited to have an exhibition at Gallery 55, a branch of the Thailand Gallery at Shanghai.

YW: Why didn’t you concede to receive your graduation certificate by attending the second oral defense like some of your classmates did?

Guo Shengliang: I think we have done nothing wrong. As we had passed the first oral defense, why

 should we attend the second? Others in my class also thought they were right but made revisions to their thesis with the aim to receiving the certification of graduation.

YW: Is the certificate useful to you? What will be the effect on you of not having the certificate?

Guo Shengliang: I have talent in art, and the certificate wouldn’t help me too much. But I do ask for an explanation on why I was not issued such a certificate. They can’t refuse to issue me the certificate only because of discord among teachers. That is not right. I have left a message on the blog of Chen Danqing and resorted to requesting help from academic leaders in the fine arts in China. event of chen danqing's resignation

Beginning in February of 2000, Chen Danqing served as the leader of Fourth Studio in the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University and submitted his resignation at the end of 2004. In his resignation application, he wrote as follows:

“I apply to resign not because of my remuneration or because of being bothered by personal strife around me, but because of my disagreement with the current system of artistic education. According to my deeper understanding of the situation in the field, I think my resignation is the best way to get rid of it.

I know clearly that I am unwilling to adapt myself to the system. Our country has made much progress in providing more personal freedom and tolerating different positions on certain subjects. My resignation will at least halt the waste of teaching.”

In this incident, Chen Danqing called for more reflection on questionable practices in the current higher education system in order to promote its healthy development.

 interview with samuel kung, chairman and director, museum of contemporary art, shanghai zheng shengtian

Zheng Shengtian: Let us start with the speech you gave at the press conference on September 6. You talked about the first year of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Shanghai. I met you a year ago while the museum was still under construction. After one year, you are having a major exhibition of an impressive size and of international standards. What was your personal experience during this year?

Samuel Kung: What impressed me the most is that I have a very good team. We are making things happen together. I am especially grateful to Victoria Lu (Creative Director) for her selfless contribution and diligent work. To me, this is totally different from what I have been doing in my own business. The concept is entirely dissimilar. I was working hard but I felt happy. I have very much enjoyed the process of curating and installing shows. I really have.

Zheng Shengtian: Private sponsorship is new phenomenon in China. In the mid-1990s we saw some privately sponsored art activities and museums emerge, but there were many ups and downs. People outside of China are very curious and interested in the sector of private philanthropy in this country. The establishment of MoCA Shanghai generated a lot of attention. Could you please tell us about your background? How and what made you become involved in the field of art and culture?

The opening of Shanghai MoCA’s first Envisage, Entry Gate: Chinese Aesthetics of Heterogeneity. Photo: Zheng Shengtian.

 Samuel Kung: I am a jeweler. First I was in sales and then I began to design. I specialize in jadeite, a traditional category of jewelry in China. In the 1920s and 1930s Shanghai was the centre of jadeite production. Although I was born in Shanghai, my business has been in Hong Kong for long time. About five years ago, I came to Shanghai to look for business opportunities and to set up my own company as well as a workshop. I also opened two shops. Three years ago I had a chance to see this building that became Shanghai MoCA. My first impression was wow! This is such a beauty! It is located in the centre of People’s Park. From the roof you could see all the surrounding tree tops. At the time this glass building was a green house for the park. In one of the accidental meetings I was talking about it with the officials from the Samuel Kung, Chairman and Director, MoCA Shanghai. Photo: Don Huangpu District government. Eventually both Li-Leger. sides shared the same inclination that this building could be an exhibition venue for my jewelry. It also could be a location for my workshop. I then signed a lease contract with the government. Later on I met some friends as well as artists. All of them believed it was a pity to use this building only for exhibiting jewelry. Someone suggested that it should showcase contemporary art. In fact, at the time I didn’t know much about contemporary art. I am still studying.

Zheng Shengtian: It was quite an interesting transformation. You first planned to have a jewelry shop, then listening to some friends’ advice, you decided to make a venue for contemporary art. What factors urged you to reach this important decision?

Samuel Kung: As I said, I didn’t really understand very well the concept of a museum of contemporary art. But as a jeweler and designer, I knew we had to change traditional forms and bring the production into our current time. So, for me, to exhibit contemporary art was not a bad idea. Of course what we are doing now is not exactly what I imagined at that time. In the early stages I had already received much good advice from people like you, from Victoria Lu, Jane DeBevoise, and Lung Yingtai. They told me: Samuel, you have to be very careful on various ideas, on spending. Money shouldn’t be spent recklessly.

Zheng Shengtian: You said you became aware later that to establish a museum was not what you at first imagined . When you realized this, were you hesitant, or did you still want to continue in a direction unfamiliar to you?

Samuel Kung: At the beginning we thought we would soon get some sponsorship. But when we sat down and talked, I realized that we shouldn’t be too eager in looking for sponsorships. We had no background or history. How could we approach people and introduce ourselves? We had to establish the museum first. After one year, having held eight exhibitions, we can now talk to people about the achievements we have made. This exhibition, Envisage, is the first one where we succeeded in getting sponsors. I am quite confident about future sponsorships.

 Zheng Shengtian: In other countries, the sponsorship mainly goes to the programs and not the daily operations. Where does the operations funding for MoCA Shanghai come from?

Samuel Kung: I am funding it myself.

Zheng Shengtian: Have you set up a foundation to support the museum?

Samuel Kung: Yes, I created a fund for the museum. I made a budget myself. The lease for the building is currently for ten years, it is rented from the Park. I have to pay the rent.

Zheng Shengtian: Is the rent very high or did you get a favourable rate from the government?

Samuel Kung: It was the market price at that time. Now the amount is a little bit lower than the current market, but not too much.

Zheng Shengtian: The government should encourage a non-profit cultural institution like this. In what way has it shown its support?

Samuel Kung: Government support and coordination came in various forms. You know it can be troublesome if you do something in Shanghai without the government’s support. For every exhibition we followed the official procedure of applying for permission and received it each time. After eight shows they now know what we are doing. I always told my staff as well as the government leaders that the museum is located in the People’s Park, so we should make it a museum for the people. Victoria shares the same view with me that we should exhibit what is acceptable for the majority of the people.

Zheng Shengtian: Can you repeat the three guiding principles you identified in the press conference?

Samuel Kung interviewed by Yishu. Photo: Don Li-Leger.

 Samuel Kung: The first is “Face the masses.” The second is “Have a local footing.”

Zheng Shengtian: What do you mean “locally?” Are you talking about China, or the city of Shanghai?

Samuel Kung: I mean to have a footing in Shanghai. We are a small museum and cannot represent the whole of China. The third is “Looking for and bringing forth the new.” We are not the conventional “white box” type of museum or gallery. When you come here you will find the place does not look solemn. As Victoria pointed out, art today is not only appreciated by the elite at the top of a pyramid. We hope that more and more people will come and visit the museum. Unlike in Canada, the visitor rate per capita in Shanghai and Hong Kong is very low. We aim to serve the masses. For example, we have set up a “Kids’ Corner.” Every Saturday or Sunday we invite kids from the schools and kindergartens or the children of museum members. Our educators introduce the artwork to them.

Zheng Shengtian: You mentioned that MoCA Shanghai is willing to exhibit what is acceptable to the majority of people. As a matter of fact, even in developed countries, the audience for contemporary art is relatively small. The majority of the population is more familiar with traditional art. In this respect, how can you achieve your goal of opening up the museum to the masses? Why do you identify the museum as one for contemporary art?

Samuel Kung: Take for example the bamboo installation in front of the building. It is a very contemporary piece. But the people relate to it. Another work is the lotus pond installation by Ye Fang, which is also a conceptual work, but it looks good in the environment. It would be nice to let it stay there. We would like to show contemporary art that interacts with the audience.

Zheng Shengtian: Having held eight exhibitions, do you think the general audience in Shanghai can accept and identify with the works shown? Are they just curious, or is there a certain depth of understanding? How do you measure the level at which contemporary art is received by audiences in Shanghai?

Samuel Kung: Some forms are more favourable to the Shanghai audience, such as photography and design. There were more visitors to those types of shows. Victoria Lu curated a show named Fiction@Love and it was also very popular.

Zheng Shengtian: I visited your past exhibition “Italy Made in Art: Now,” curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. How many people visited that exhibition?

Samuel Kung: About twenty thousand visitors. The response to the show was great.

Zheng Shengtian: Who composed the majority of the audience?

Samuel Kung: A large part of the audience was students. It is probably because Italian contemporary art is closely tied with design. Also Professor Oliva has been famous in China. Compared the previous show from the Pecci Collection, Oliva’s exhibition attracted many more visitors.

 Ye Fang, Untitled, 2006, installation. Photo: Zheng Shengtian.

Zheng Shengtian: What percentage of your time is spent running the museum?

Samuel Kung: I had a plan to spend half of my time at the museum, and half for my business. But now almost three quarters of my time is spent working at the museum. The staff at my company are always asking: where is our boss?

Zheng Shengtian: I heard that you personally participate in almost everything in the museum, taking care of details. Is that necessary?

Samuel Kung: I have been learning. To be a qualified Director, I have to know the complete process from the very beginning. And as I said, I really enjoy it.

Zheng Shengtian: The exhibitions you have had were not small in scope. To gather the resources needed for this is not an easy job, even for Western museums. You just revealed that the budget for your current exhibition is around RMB three million Yuan (approximately 380,000 USD). What are your annual expenses including salaries?

Samuel Kung: I think it is around a neighborhood of fifteen to eighteen million Yuan (approximately 1.9 million to 2.3 million USD), including program expenses. But some exhibitions don’t cost us, such the Oliva’s exhibition. The convenience is we don’t have a fixed budget. Once we see a potentially good exhibition, we would just take it. We don’t need to go through a process of applying for funds or approval. If we think we can make it, we will try our best.

Zheng Shengtian: How much are administration costs within the total budget?

Samuel Kung: About a million Yuan a month—ten to twelve million Yuan annually. The program expenses are about five million Yuan.

Zheng Shengtian: Does the ten to twelve million Yuan all come from your pocket?

 Huang Zhiyang, Peach Blossom Garden, 2006, installation. Photo: Zheng Shengtian.

Samuel Kung: Yes, the other five million Yuan is from me as well.

Zheng Shengtian: How do you see the possibility of sustaining financial support of this scale in the long term?

Samuel Kung: We have a restaurant on the top level of the museum that generates some income. As I mentioned, this exhibition received sponsorship from corporations such as BMW, Hugo Boss, DBS, Hong Kong Bank, Yageo Foundation, etc. You probably noticed that our sponsors this time are all from outside of China or Taiwan. Of course, there are also companies in China which have the ability to sponsor us. We are working on that, but it will take time and effort, especially because the government in China and Shanghai doesn’t have a tax deduction policy to encourage sponsorship. However, if we do our job well, I believe Chinese companies will give us support. We know that in other countries an international brand must have its culture and its history, it must connect itself with art activities, and then it will gain international recognition. Otherwise, no matter how much you invest in advertising, your name cannot become deeply imprinted in people’s minds, it cannot last long. I think Chinese brands will realize that in order to achieve an international reputation they must pay more attention to culture and art, and give more support to culture and art. I believe those giant companies in China have the same ability to make profit as their foreign counterparts. They do return their gain to the society by giving donations to charities, to education programs, or to the vast Northwest area. But it will have greater and longer impact if they build their name by supporting art and culture, like what Cartier or Hugo Boss has done.

Zheng Shengtian: Do you have the ambition to become a major corporate sponsor for art in China?

Samuel Kung: I am just a small potato. I don’t have a large sum of money to spend. But in China there are many large enterprises that are able to do so. The rapid economic growth in Shanghai only took place in the past two decades. If the government in Shanghai is willing to give a small portion of its resource to art and culture, I think it would benefit all museums and the art community.

 Zheng Shengtian: As a private business man, providing twelve million Yuan every year to maintain a museum of this size is a very impressive number and rarely seen in China. But to a government, twelve million Yuan is not a big sum. Have you ever felt this to be unfair?

Samuel Kung: Not at all. What I am doing is out of my own free will.

Zheng Shengtian: What kind of return do you expect from your generous donation? In some countries there is a tax incentive. Or, some businesses, like Hugo Boss, support art in order to raise its profile. I haven’t seen you doing anything with the museum to promote your jewelry brand. Do you anticipate any gain from this? What gives you satisfaction?

Samuel Kung: During this exhibition, I put some examples of my jewelry line in the museum store. Many friends have asked me: why don’t you display your own merchandise? We have just started our little museum store. It carries limited number of commodities. But to sell jewelry in the museum is not my intention. The greatest return for me is the many acquaintances I have made through the museum. I have gotten to know numerous new friends. Another satisfaction for me, as I told you at the beginning, is that I have a wonderful working team. They help me and we work well together. Everyone on the team is excellent. I must admit that the salary I pay them is not very attractive. But they are all voluntarily devoted to their job.

Zheng Shengtian: How was the team selected?

Samuel Kung: Victoria Lu helped me to recruit staff. We have people from all over: two from Germany, some from Singapore, an intern from the United States, Diana from Canada. . . . They are various of nationalities. We feel good having the flexibility in hiring. For official institutions, hiring a foreigner is not easy. There are many restrictions.

Zheng Shengtian: What is the official status of MoCA Shanghai? Is it a Chinese cultural institution or a foreign financed entity? If it is the latter, does it enjoy the privilege and policy that the Chinese government gives to other foreign-funded enterprises?

Samuel Kung: Yes, it is a foreign-funded entity.

Zheng Shengtian: Many friends overseas would like to know: does the Chinese government allow using foreign capital to establish a cultural institution in China? Is the cultural field open to foreign involvement now?

Samuel Kung: As far as I know, it is still not possible to set up a non-profit cultural entity financed from outside.

Zheng Shengtian: In China it is not legally permitted for a foreigner to solely run a cultural institution such as a school, a publishing house, or a museum. How did you manage to avoid this restriction?

Samuel Kung: MoCA Shanghai was registered with the Bureau of Industry and Commerce. Officially it is a commercial enterprise. We do let them know what we are doing. But we don’t get any preferential treatment for doing non-profit activities.

 Zheng Shengtian: In this case, was there any resistance from the cultural section of the government? A Chinese proverb says: “If the names are not right, the argument will not be tenable.” As the legal status of MoCA is a commercial enterprise, yet it is operated as a cultural institution, has there been any conflict?

Samuel Kung: No. We have reported to the Bureau of Culture of the District government. For every exhibition, no matter how brief or small it is, we have always reported to the government in advance and applied for permission. They have understood perfectly the limitations of the policy and have been flexible in terms of procedure.

Zheng Shengtian: My last question is what is your plan for the future? You said you didn’t really know what would be involved to build a museum when you started. After one year, you probably have pretty good idea of how much money, time, and energy is required in such a major undertaking. How do you foresee the future of MoCA Shanghai?

Samuel Kung: First we have to make good exhibitions. We planned to present six to eight exhibitions in the first year. Now we have accomplished that and have our eighth exhibition opening today. In the future we will keep up this pace. Half of the exhibitions will be taken from foreign countries and we will curate the other half, providing a platform for Chinese artists. If we are doing a good job I am quite confident that we will find the support we need.

Zheng Shengtian: Do you have a time table?

Samuel Kung: I think we won’t have problem in ten years. Some friends said to me: Samuel, are you afraid the government would take the building from you after ten years? My answer is: If I am doing a good job, I think the government would be very happy to let me continue running it. If I am doing a poor job, then it makes no sense for me to keep it going. Don’t you agree?

Zheng Shengtian: So your deadline is the term of the lease. After ten years, the fate of the museum will depend on the achievement you have reached and the attitude of the government.

Samuel Kung: That’s correct.

Zheng Shengtian: For us, people at home and overseas, we all hope that your museum will be a long lasting one. You are a forerunner in setting up the first privately owned museum of contemporary art in China at this level. We wish you great success.

Samuel Kung: Thank you.

 mao, money, and censorship after the "domestic turn" in beijing's art world ling-yun tang

Huang Rui, Chairman Mao 10,000 RMB, 2006, 128 cm x 88 cm x 4.6 cm (6 pieces), Chinese RMB notes and acrylic. Courtesy of Chinese Contemporary, Beijing.

To observers of the contemporary Chinese art world, it is a familiar script: government officials threaten to close down an exhibition by an experimental artist on the eve of the show’s opening because of its politically provocative depictions of Mao Zedong. On April 8, 2006, the solo exhibition Chairman Mao 10,000 RMB by artist-entrepreneur and pioneer of Beijing’s Dashanzi art district, Huang Rui, was launched as planned, but only after the removal of the central work of art in the show.1 The offending artwork—consisting of six bright red acrylic panels inscribed with the characters “Long Live Chairman Mao!” backed with sheets of paper currency in descending denominations of one-hundred, fifty, twenty, ten, five, and one renminbi bills imprinted with Mao’s visage—was promptly removed and replaced by the artist with a ceremonial red curtain to cover the blank wall in its absence. The work juxtaposes the ideological mantra of the Cultural Revolution with hard currency to mock the contradictions of an age that worships Mao incarnated as banknotes rather than as a political and spiritual cult leader. Where money was once almost abolished under Mao, capitalist modernity since the rise of Deng Xiaoping has effectively overturned the values of the socialist revolution,2 leading Huang to comment, “This represents China today.”3

The renovated Dashanzi Factory 798 arts district, a factory-turned-gallery zone in Northeast Beijing, has become a popular destination for Beijingers and outsiders alike since its creation in 2001. State intervention has not generally posed a serious problem for the production and display of art, and new galleries and businesses continue to open up at a brisk rate. However, the forced removal of Chairman Mao 10,000 RMB was not an isolated incident of art censorship in Dashanzi. Two other galleries had to take down works for casting Mao in a negative light, and one artist had to remove his sculptures from an exhibition during the October 1 National Day in 2005 for similar reasons.4

The explicit reasons for the government’s decision to force the removal of Chairman Mao 10,000 RMB are unclear, although the mixture of Mao and money could have been one major source of agitation. Officials rarely go so far as to explain or justify their decisions to censor artworks; indeed, history has shown repeatedly that arts censorship in China is neither transparent in terms of which governing bureaucracy is issuing the decree nor clearly intelligible in its underlying motives. Since the start of the reform period, attempts by the state to regulate an arts sector that has begun to thrive independently of official sanction have typically been disjointed and unfocused, amounting to little more than episodic spurts of coercion.5 During interactions with officials that took place between March and April 2006, I learned that the Beijing Cultural Ministry, the Public Security Bureau, Party officials, and the facilities management at Factory 798

 had each played a part, either individually or in concert, in overseeing the confiscation of various sculptures, paintings, and installations that had apparently crossed the perplexingly ill-defined boundary between artistic experimentalism and political correctness.

The story of state control of the visual arts is further complicated by the relationship of artists to an increasingly autonomous art market. The expansion of the contemporary art world is sustained by an economic boom that has enlarged the market for culture and entertainment in China’s urban centres and created a moneyed and taste-conscious class that has the interest, time, and resources to participate in art viewing and, increasingly, collecting. The West continues to figure prominently within the economic and social pipelines that circulate throughout the Chinese contemporary art world, but the anxiety associated with catering to the demands of a foreign curators and critics has diminished, and this sphere of art is now forging confidently toward a new level of commercial success and international recognition. Early works that could only have been shown in the seclusion of private living room studios or furtive corners of the city to avoid police shutdown are openly displayed in art spaces defined by an intrepid combination of artistic experimentation and commercial enterprise. The studios and galleries in Factory 798 and other art districts in Beijing bear witness to a contemporary art scene that has learned how to move adeptly in sync with the expansion of China’s culture industries as a whole, and to profit handsomely from doing so. With greater freedom from the state’s monitoring gaze and a lower threshold for what is considered to be taboo, artists have seen their positions as public personae non grata lifted, and many have entered into the pop cultural mainstream.

The recent incidents of state censorship at Dashanzi suggest that an attitude of cautious optimism might best define the future of creative freedom in the near term. While there is no question that the state’s censorship of artists has come a long way from the coordinated mass campaigns against artists and intellectuals of earlier decades,6 the conflicts that have erupted over the manipulation of Mao iconography thirty years after the end of the Cultural Revolution suggest that constraints on cultural life are still ongoing. On the one hand, as contemporary art from China continues to attract a wide international following, and as the market for this genre makes a “domestic turn”7 toward buyers from China, the state cannot afford to ignore what is happening in its own backyard. The sheer rise in the number of new galleries and buyers provides evidence of the expansion of the domestic market for art: by the first half of 2006, there were more than three hundred art galleries in Beijing, at least eighty percent of which were established since the creation of Dashanzi as an arts district in 2001. About half of these are Chinese-owned, and at least forty percent of buyers are Chinese, in contrast with almost none just a few years ago.8 Government officials have responded to the widening scope of contemporary art through a combination of overt censorship and more co- Huang Rui, curtain that replaced Chairman Mao 10,000 RMB, 2006. Photo: Ling-Yun Tang.

 optive measures, such as its sponsorship of experimental art exhibitions like the Beijing Biennial. By combining these two strategies of censorship and co-optation, the state seeks to keep an upper hand in the developments of the art world.9

At the same time, even though contemporary artists have gained greater leeway in expressing themselves with less direct state intervention, and while the public surely has significantly greater access to more plural forms of culture than ever before, the marketplace has come to put heavy demands on artists who seek to pursue art as a means of critical introspection rather than just a way to earn a living. The case of the exhibition Chairman Mao 10,000 RMB demonstrates that artists like Huang Rui and other art world actors have responded to declining levels of state censorship and the rise of the market by creating alternative art forms, content, and means of display that seek to test—but not entirely upset—the social order. I propose that with greater commercialism, the power relations between the state and artists, once defined primarily by direct confrontation, has been tempered by the parties’ mutual interests in succeeding within the marketplace.

attacking "art for art's sake"

Visual arts censorship is generally understood to be an unequivocal affront to the intellectual integrity and creative practice of artists. In the mythologized Western romantic view, the artist is held up as someone with a gifted “eye,” a source of creative inspiration whose talents are fundamental to the nurturing of a society’s aesthetic values. This definition holds that conflicts over interpretations of the style and content of disputed objects tamper with the sacredness of works and threaten to arrest the fulfilment of the principle of “art for art’s sake.”10 By extension, to judge a work for reasons external to the creative process implies an assault on the sanctity of the entire aesthetic system.11

Debates about censorship reveal the range of diverse and often arbitrary reasons censors see fit to attack certain works. In the United States, battles over the right to exhibit controversial works have usually been fought on terrain privileging the discourse of “freedom of speech,” a catch-all phrase that has had particular appeal for marginalized groups looking to establish greater social representation and legitimacy of voice in the mainstream. The American “culture wars” between the political Left and Right at the end of the twentieth century, fought out by “moral entrepreneurs”12 over National Endowment for the Arts funding for controversial pieces, remind us of the underlying power dynamics between the censor and the censored. The activist rhetoric employed by defenders of censorship, i.e., “movements,” “campaigns,” and “crusades,” demonstrates that cultural symbols can strike at the most basic notions of what is considered to be normal and good. As Howard Becker explains: “An attack on a convention becomes an attack on the aesthetic related to it. But people do not experience their aesthetic beliefs as merely arbitrary and conventional; they feel that they are natural, proper, and moral. An attack on a convention and an aesthetic is also an attack on a morality.”13 Theoretically speaking, censorship stems from conflicts over “who gets to speak”14 and questions about which community is being spoken for. In practice, censorship seeks to excise the impure, and by doing so, to restore the social order, an inherently problematic proposition given the challenge of identifying the sources of pleasure or aversion among different individuals, and hence establishing the normative.

Because of the different political, moral, or social grounds that may motivate attacks on a works of art, what gets labelled censorship is often obscured. When everything from the arrest of artists to

 the confiscation of artworks, and even self-censorship by curators and writers, is classified under a common rubric of “censorship,” the term becomes reductive and ceases to describe more than an indiscriminate menace to artistic freedom.15 My goal here is to build on existing definitions of censorship in both the Western and Chinese contexts to suggest a working paradigm that can accommodate the particular political-economic circumstances at this juncture of China’s post- socialist history, and explore how individual actors within the Beijing art circuit have responded to these conditions. As this story demonstrates, although the techniques of visual arts censorship vary in cross-cultural perspective, fundamental issues concerning symbolic boundaries, social control, and contests over the limits of the field of art remain the same.

censorship: a porous "firewall"

In spite of unprecedented reforms over the past twenty-eight years, socialist-style censorship in China is not entirely a thing of the past. Under Hu Jintao, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has increased monitoring of individual reporters and oversight of news and other media content. Reporting on sensitive topics such as human rights, SARS, government corruption, and ethno-religious separatism can lead to severe legal and criminal repercussions such as the revocation of professional licenses, closure of media outlets, and even arrest and imprisonment.16 Starting in January 2006, the American company Google launched a China-specific Internet site that automatically filters out objectionable content, suggesting that the power of the state to restrict information flows can actually be bolstered by the compliance of foreign corporations.17 Censorship in its “strong” form thus encompasses both top-down directives used to silence opposition to Party control and co-optive practices that enhance the government’s efforts to assert its dominance over the intellectual and cultural spheres.18 Judging by recent reports in the Chinese and Western press, there is little to suggest that the state will voluntarily give up this control in the foreseeable future.19

Yet bureaucratic reforms within the CCP, technological change, and increased professionalism among the Chinese media have led to inevitable ruptures in the Chinese state’s capacity to act as the guardian of political propriety that it served as in the pre-reform period.20 Clichés of an iron-fisted state seem increasingly inaccurate upon close inspection of what is happening on the ground in the art community. Richard Kraus observes: “Most Western publicists and art critics are driven to try to characterize all of the paintings as banned, even misrepresenting the facts to present each painter as a tormented rebel. . . . ‘Come and see art that the Chinese government has denounced as dangerous’ seems Huang Rui, Mao Zedong’s Selected Works (volume five), 2006, 90 cm x 65 cm, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Chinese Contemporary, Beijing.

 to capture the odd mix of hype and outraged liberalism that Americans so often adopt when speaking of contemporary Chinese culture.”21 Content analysis of media and ethnographic studies show that the relationship of the state to the art world is better characterized by erratic cycles of constraint and relaxation, within which artists and art-world actors must strike a creative balance.22

As the reform era has progressed, the state’s attitude toward the visual arts has evolved from a top-down supervisory role to a more “gentle and subtle” attitude.23 The great “firewall” around Chinese publishing and Internet media has not been extended directly to the art world, where the government’s presence is more spotty and diffuse. Thus it is worth asking: to what extent do the state’s interventions in the activities of the Dashanzi art community represent a renewed campaign against the polluting effects of new forms of cultural consciousness? And are these activities anything more than temporary crackdowns, or are they just the sporadic reflexes of a reforming Chinese state against the activities of a community that has become more liberal (or incautious) in the kinds of content that it chooses to create and display? In answering these questions, I focus on the aspect of censorship that represents “a struggle over the meaning of cultural objects,”24 a battle site where identity and self-image are constructed, articulated, and contested. The hybrid experimental and commercial visual art world in China is still in its infancy, and debates over the meaning of art will continue to be fought out for years to come. As the rules keep changing, so do the people who are subject to those rules.

Contemporary artists who are censored are rarely victims, and in most cases they do not see themselves as such. In the immediate aftermath of being censored, artists are often able to manipulate the situation to their personal or professional advantage, riding a crest of popularity derived from the media buzz created by the act of censorship. Many artists have thereby built up reputations as “outlaws,” marketing their reputations for edginess through the dealer system and watching demand for their works go up as a result. Others have profited by tapping into their experiences for inspiration, fashioning new, perhaps even more provocative works. The circumstances surrounding Huang Rui’s exhibition Chairman Mao 10,000 RMB followed a dramaturgical progression in which the artist and gallery workers worked with constraints before them to invent a repertoire of new strategies, devising a revised sales pitch to serious potential buyers that highlighted Huang’s “troublemaker” image and replacing the censored work with a bright red curtain to draw attention to and critique the act of censorship itself.25 At least from the perspective of sales, the improvisation had the desired effect: as one journalist suggested after the successful sale of Huang’s banned work, “The censorship paid off.”26

How artists, art dealers, the media, and other players deal with the censorship event beyond its occurrence can have a lasting impact on art production and consumption. The marketization of the Chinese economy has eroded the boundaries between the Chinese state and the art world, and as this process has progressed, old roles have been reassigned and new interests have emerged. On the one hand, the state as a whole has become interested in building up China’s cultural industries as a way to create new jobs and fuel tourism and interest in Chinese culture, with certain government agencies at times exhibiting a supportive attitude toward experimental art.27 On the other hand, as the monetary rewards for artists have increased, many have discovered that they enjoy the material trappings of success that their work can afford them, and some may find it more practical to comply with the state in order to avoid being cut off from displaying their works in the marketplace. The complexities of these considerations are best understood by employing

 a sociological view of censorship, which sees censorship as a process by which the boundaries of the art world’s collective affiliations are tested and defined.28 Such a position facilitates an analysis of how individual actors engage with state intervention by manipulating the content and form of their artworks and by maintaining control over media representation, the terms of gallery or dealer representation, the organization of exhibition space, and the conditions of sale. from the stars to the red curtain

By the end of the 1970s, changing currents in economic and political life under Deng Xiaoping ushered in a new spirit of experimentation in the arts. It was during this time that Huang Rui launched his career as one of the founders and spokespersons of the Stars Group in 1979. The Stars were an anti-establishment group of mostly self-taught artists who came together in informal salon meetings to show works and discuss the topics of democracy, artistic freedom, and individual expression. The Stars borrowed liberally from Western modern art traditions to satirize the ideas and images of the Cultural Revolution, using their works to flaunt the conventional political wisdom that the purpose of art was to serve the masses. In the first Stars exhibition in 1979, dozens of artists appropriated the space outside of the National Art Museum of China to hang their works as a public declaration against the official Socialist Realist style. However, these were still dangerous times to be so openly outspoken—after the second Stars exhibition was held in 1980 inside the National Art Museum, the group disbanded under political pressure and most of the members, including Huang, sought exile abroad. But by then the artists had already given the public audience a feel for the expanding boundaries of the art world and inspired the beginnings of the New Wave Movement of the 1980s.29

Nearly thirty years after the first Stars exhibition was held, and after spending over a decade in Japan, Huang returned to Beijing in 2002 to begin a career as a community activist, entrepreneur, and designer. Upon his return he set up a private studio and, with several other pioneers, helped transform the electronics manufacturing zone in Dashanzi from a cluster of failing state-owned factories into a community of commercially viable art warehouses, studio spaces, galleries, restaurants, and small businesses.

The art world has evolved significantly since Huang left in 1989. At that time there was no safe place for non-traditional artists to show their work in public. Now, artists and business owners have come in to set up new studios, galleries, and a bookstore, and buyers from abroad court young firebrand artists, many of whom are living out rags-to-riches stories. Key markers indicating that Chinese contemporary art had entered the world stage included the representation of twenty Chinese artists at the Venice Biennale for the first time in 1999. Their inclusion in this “Olympics of the art scene” demonstrated that the outside world was curious to see what experimental artists were producing after the trauma of Tiananmen. In the broader milieu, China had become a place where entrepreneurs could enroll to be Party members and real estate developers were transformed into the high priests of urban culture. Professions that were once denounced as enemies of the people were within one generation rehabilitated, and, in turn, promoted as the leading lights of China’s national quest for modernity. The significance of Huang Rui’s personal history is that it offers us insight into the precariousness of political and economic policy shifts in the post-Mao era and the impacts these can have on the members of Beijing’s art community, as well as how the participants in that community have responded to the complexities of a rapidly changing society where multiple, contradictory norms are simultaneously in evidence.

 Huang has received ample press in recent years for his work as a community spokesperson for the Dashanzi Arts District, and as a result, his identity as an artist has been eclipsed by his community promotion activities, such as organizing the Dashanzi International Arts Festival (DIAF), which largely benefits other artists. 30 His first solo show in China, Chairman Mao 10,000 RMB, was a declaration of his intent to place his art back into the center of his career.

On April 7, 2006, seven well- groomed, middle-aged men and women entered the Chinese Contemporary Gallery in Dashanzi to inquire about the details of Huang’s Huang Rui, Mao Zedong’s Selected Works (volume six), 2006, 90 cm x 65 cm, oil show and ordered that the main on canvas. Courtesy of Chinese Contemporary, Beijing. piece, featuring Mao and money, be removed from the show. Given his background in political activism and involvement with the Stars and the DIAF, Huang had anticipated difficulties from government authorities as soon as he decided to do a solo show. Their arrival was also foreshadowed by censorship of the printed results of a pre-exhibition interview that I had conducted with the artist several weeks earlier.31 Their demands seemed rather incongruous given the countless number of studios and galleries in the Dashanzi complex that had been showing politically themed works for years and had never been forced to shut down.32 At a time when gallery survival has come to depend more on to profitability rather than on political correctness, this particular case of censorship appears to have had more to do with Huang’s reputation as a leader of the Stars art movement. If not handled correctly, he feared, the DIAF could also risk serious interference from the state.

After identifying themselves as members of the Beijing Cultural Ministry, one man in the group interrogated me about the show while other members of the group spread out with digital cameras to document each of the works on view. The work they sought to suppress had been widely advertised in postcards and posters already, though it is not clear if this is how the officials had first learned of the show and its content, or why they chose only to censor that individual piece. Authoritative yet polite, the visiting officials required that the gallery owners agree not to show the offending work, which was declared illegal, nor to distribute any catalogues or images accompanying the show. Refusal to comply could result in the entire exhibition being shut down, or worse, the revocation of the gallery’s license.

In the end, compliance with the government took the form of a large red curtain that the artist had prepared in case such an event arose. The act of mounting the curtain was both a reactive and a creative measure that signalled Huang’s willingness to engage the act of censorship as an indispensable facet of his art, integrating it into his rapport with the audience as a winking gesture

 and giving the artist the last word. Part symbol of opposition, part strategy to placate the State, the curtain became an expression of the struggle to expand official tolerance of experimental art within a private commercial sphere.

From the initial interactions with government authorities until the final sale of the work, the artist and those working with him exhibited a willingness to comply with the law, but also a playful attitude toward the obstacles imposed by the censors. This means of coping with the state proposes a progressive but not radical approach to the social order, i.e., to make satirical work, remove it if necessary, and show it in private. This strategy seems to exemplify the general attitude among Chinese artists, whose foremost interest is to continue to produce and show their work while minimizing outside disruption, so as to be able to share their creations with as wide an audience as possible that can understand and appreciate the meaning of their art. The following section explores the significance of some representative works that did appear in the exhibition Chairman Mao 10,000 RMB and of the installation that was replaced by the red curtain. mao and money

The use of Mao Zedong in contemporary Chinese art has been well documented.33 Judging by how prominently artists have depicted the Chairman since the reform period, the widespread manipulation of Mao’s image as a fusion of political, consumerist, and aesthetic icon has been a tremendous success. Perhaps the earliest example of the recycling of the Mao motif in art is Stars member Wang Keping’s Idol (1980), a wood sculpture based on Mao’s likeness, notable for its exaggeration of his sagging jowls and detached gaze. More recently, the works of the Political Pop artists have recovered popular visual imagery from the Cultural Revolution to criticize the sociocultural circumstances of the present era. These works share an “ironic dimension attached to the re-presentation of the Chairman, a liberating experience vis-à-vis the dark psychological mood of coercion and regulation of the previous totalitarian period.”34 The “Maocraze” in contemporary art has thus provided artists with a “personalized” vehicle for public outcry against the paralysis that impeded creative individuality in the past.35

For the paintings and installations in Chairman Mao 10,000 RMB, Huang Rui followed in the “Maocraze” tradition by appropriating Mao as a discursive site to explore the inconsistencies of the transition from revolutionary socialism to global capitalism. While the eleven sets of works in the show were produced over the span of more than a decade, a textual theme, primary colour palette, formal symmetry, and geometric balance visually unify them. In these works, the image of Mao is effaced. His identity is flattened and abstracted into two-dimensional words culled from his most famous published writings, from the founding of the CCP through the Cultural Revolution.36 Huang depicts, on painted canvas and in sculpted acrylic form, direct quotes from Mao’s central political thought and writings, as well as slogans from the Deng era, to engage with hot-button current events issues—migrant labour, Taiwan, terrorism, and the global economy—as well as more theoretical matters concerning the erosion of the state’s ideological commitment to the tenets of socialism. These visual techniques juxtapose clean modernist lines with the chaos of the material processes that these works represent. The elimination of Mao’s figure removes any direct emotive references to Mao as an individual by focusing attention on the words themselves as image and suggests that their meaning is little more than a mirage. The disembodied texts comment on Mao’s role as a superhuman being whose sayings have been imprinted in the psyches of generations of Chinese, but which ring hollow as the promises of a utopian socialist society that was never achieved.

 One example of the use of wordplay from Huang’s earlier period is the series Selected Works of Mao Zedong (volumes 1–4) (1996), four enlarged copies of the covers of the state-endorsed collections of Mao Zedong’s Thought distributed in his lifetime. The paintings are viewed in sequence with volumes 5 and 6 (2006), which are mock-ups of books that were never officially published. These books have only face value, and their shallowness is ridiculed by the artist, who transforms himself into the “author” of the “Selected Works.” Viewed in the context of a state that still claims to have sole legitimate rights over the use of Mao’s words and images,37 this act of usurpation amounts to a sacrilegious attempt to steal power from the top.

In the three-part series titled Huang Rui, Deng Xiaoping’s Woman, 2006, oil on canvas, 255 cm x 145 cm. Courtesy of Chinese Contemporary, Beijing. Deng Xiaoping’s Woman (2006), Huang takes a famous slogan from the reform period and shapes the characters into the contours of a highly abstract female figure. “One center, two foundations: connect the two ends, reach for the center” captures the ethos of the Deng era, which Huang suggestively equates with raw sexual desire. The strategic placement of key words on the woman’s anatomy turns political content into a visceral allegory about the desperation associated with trying to succeed in a system where the rules are never quite as clear as they sound. Similarly, a vertical golden plaque (2006) carved with the catchphrase “socialist market economy” links past to present through the marriage of a modern political slogan rendered using the form of a traditional wall hanging suspended with a lattice hook. The gold leaf that covers the plaque alludes to bourgeois elements in China’s feudal past that have edged back into prominence in recent times. Like China’s elaborate but vacant villa complexes, the gilt surface of the work speaks to the ascendance of shine over substance and the rise of pop cultural kitsch.

The most important work in the exhibition was the confiscated installation piece, Chairman Mao 10,000 RMB. This work explores the collision between old and new ideologies by using Chinese banknotes to form the words of the mass chant “Long Live Chairman Mao!” The red acrylic panels in the installation are reminiscent of big character posters once used to propagate Party pronouncements or to denounce enemies of the people. The newly minted bills that line

 each of the carved-out acrylic characters distort the original reverential significance of the phrase. As Mao’s face is circulated on printed currency, his relevance to the everyday is transformed at the most elemental level into the symbol of a wealth-oriented economy. This turnaround is all the more remarkable in light of the attempt at one point during the Cultural Revolution to eliminate the use of money altogether.38

At first glance, Huang’s paintings and installations appear deceptively simple, but full comprehension demands from viewers a high level of Chinese language literacy and a background in Chinese traditional culture and modern socialist history. The building blocks of his art are hidden layers of meaning and words taken out of their original context. The artist creates an opening for viewers to respond personally to the works and to consider the significance of the text in the present day context, which in turn leads to questions about the relevance of Mao as a once romanticized revolutionary leader versus his current incarnation as the face of money in modern society. experimental fatigue?

Throughout the 1990s, contemporary artists who were marginalized from the mainstream cultural sphere sought to establish their professional legitimacy by setting up their own art exhibitions in non-official spaces outside of the state-sponsored museums and galleries or central academic systems.39 They depended heavily on the support of foreign collectors, who were almost solely responsible for putting Chinese artists on the international art map. Art critics have accused much of the work produced by artists from this period of pandering to Western tastes and sensationalizing the facts of Chinese history while simultaneously objectifying Chinese artists and their artworks abroad. Critic Hou Hanru observes that the packaging of Chinese works for foreign consumption depleted the innovative and critical functions of the artistic process by turning the artists themselves into “consumer goods in the ‘international consumer/spectacle’ culture,” leading artists to become aware of their marginal status as Chinese in the global world order.40

Today the development of the domestic market for Huang Rui, Socialist Market Economy, 2006, 190 cm x contemporary art has followed from a real estate boom, 36 cm, gold leaf paper on wood. Courtesy of Chinese Contemporary, Beijing. which has created a wealthy domestic client base with an

 interest in collecting art produced by contemporary Chinese artists. The expansion of the local art market suggests that artists are less anxious than they used to about the need to find the right foreign curator, dealer, or collector in order to enjoy commercial and professional success. Material wealth has generated measurable benefits for many individuals: contemporary artists can produce art more freely now because there are more patrons to support their work, and they also have a much wider range of opportunities to produce, show, or sell their art in galleries and auctions than ever before. These developments mean that artists have more autonomy to push the conceptual boundaries of their work and to experiment openly in new spaces devoted to just such practices. Overall, the “domestic turn” has meant that members of the contemporary art world can enjoy a greater degree of creative freedom as the monopoly power of the central government’s control over venues for displaying art continues to erode under the pressure of marketization, and as the rise of the culture industry as a source of economic growth continues to redefine the state’s interests vis-à-vis artists and art markets.

This is by no means to say that the previous views of art held by Chinese government officials and public intellectuals have been completely abandoned or wholly revised. The challenges and constraints that confronted artists prior to the domestic turn continue to play a role in shaping the form and content of art. As art world observers have noted, the market for art is neither inherently democratic nor transparent,41 and it creates value by propping up systems of social, financial, and intellectual privilege.42 The incentives for artists to profit from these new opportunities in order to make a living can lead to accusations of artists “selling out” to the market. However, my observations lead me to conclude that the boundary between commerce and experimentalism in the arts has perhaps been overstated,43 and that artists, particularly the generation that grew up after the Cultural Revolution, are increasingly comfortable dealing simultaneously with the values of making money and making work that is personally meaningful or socially relevant. The present juncture in the development of contemporary Chinese art thus serves as an opportunity to take up the matter of how artists can use their work to engage in critical dialogues about social issues within the framework of an evolving commercial infrastructure.

The aforementioned instances of censorship in Dashanzi in spring 2006 demonstrate that the state has a continued interest in preserving its leadership role in the area of visual arts, even if such leadership must be exercised through direct intervention. At the height of the “Maocraze” in the 1990s, Chinese hardliners “did not realize that the signifier can be freely divorced from the signified” when artists liberally used the state’s own depiction of Mao as a site of social and political critique. 44 Evidently, as the censorship of Chairman Mao 10,000 RMB demonstrates, the state is still sensitive to overt Mao references and is willing to relinquish only partial but not total control over the manipulation of Mao as an icon of state power, nationalism, and modernity. The erratic nature of the state’s desire to balance ideological imperatives and profit-seeking motives means that the burden is on artists to find a way to establish the worth of art without having to attend to political and economic considerations first. In a society where the state has become adept at defending socialist ideological commitments while pursuing commercial interests, artists can no longer rely exclusively on the appropriation of the state’s symbols, or call upon the old trope of a monolithic state, to challenge the status quo.

 Notes 1 The show was held at Chinese Contemporary Gallery in Dashanzi. 2 Liu Kang, “Popular Culture and the Culture of the Masses in Contemporary China,” boundary 2, 24, no. 3 (1997), 99–122. 3 Interview with Huang Rui, March 8, 2006, conducted by the author. 4 See Robert Marquand, “China strikes back as modern artists push boundaries,” Christian Science Monitor (April 27, 2006), and Jonathan Watts, “Chinese Artists Cross the Red Line,” Guardian (April 22, 2006). 5 See John Clark, “Official Reactions to Modern Art in China since the Beijing Massacre,” Pacific Affairs, 65, no. 3 (1992), 334–352, and Richard Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 37-72. 6 John Clark elaborates on some of these campaigns since 1989, including official opposition against “bourgeois liberalization” in May 1990 and the Artists’ Association’s attacks against advocates of the New Art movement in December 1990. See John Clark, “Official Reactions to Modern Art in China since the Beijing Massacre,” Pacific Affairs 65, no. 3 (1992), 334–352. 7 Wu Hung uses this term to describe Chinese artists who flocked to Beijing in the 1990s and used their art to critique contemporary social issues and as a means of exploring their personal identities. He points out that during the earlier part of this period, artists “were preoccupied with . . . their participation in the international art scene and the ‘normalization’ of experimental art in China.” I suggest that the “domestic turn” also encompasses recent developments in the expansion of the art world to include a broader Chinese consumer base. See Wu Hung, “A ‘Domestic Turn’: Chinese Experimental Art in the 1990s.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1, no. 3 (November, 2002), 3–17. 8 These statistics were compiled in preparation for the Dashanzi International Arts Festival 2006. Interview with Huang Rui, August 22, 2006, conducted by Leon Lee. 9 Geremie Barme, “CCPtm & ADCULT PRC,” The China Journal, no. 41 (1999), 1–123. 10 See Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Darbel, and Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991); Peter Burger, “On the Problem of Autonomy of Art in Bourgeois Society,” Francis Fascina and Jonathan Harris, eds., Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts. (London: Phaidon Press, in association with the Open University, 1992); David Carrier, “The Display of Art: an Historical Perspective,” Leonardo 20, no. 1 (1987), 83–86. Richard E. Caves, “Contracts between Art and Commerce,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 17, no. 2 (1996), 73–84; Stuart Plattner, High Art Down Home: An Economic Anthropology of a Local Art Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 11 On an attempt to construct a sociology of art and aesthetics, see Janet Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993). Wolff argues that while the appreciation of art cannot be separated from the “practical,” or non-aesthetic factors of existence, art need not be collapsed into the categories of politics or morality. She suggests starting with the “specific social and historical conditions” that determine aesthetic hierarchies but also recognizing the pleasure involved in the experience of confronting a work of art (109). 12 These are private individuals who take it upon themselves to act as the public guardians of artistic norms, sexual mores, and religious principles against works they deem to be salacious or objectionable for any number of reasons. See Robert Atkins, “A Censorship Timeline,” Art Journal 50, no. 3 (1991), 33–37; Nicola Beisel, “Morals Versus Art: Censorship, the Politics of Interpretation, and the Victorian Nude,” American Sociological Review 58, no. 1 (1993), 145–62; and Steven C. Dubin, Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions (New York: Routledge, 1992). 13 Howard Becker, “Art as Collective Action,” American Sociological Review 39, no. 6 (1974), 767–776. 14 This is the central organizing question of Atkins’ short essay, which advances a broadened definition of censorship that can accommodate initiatives led by individuals, e.g., Anthony Comstock’s anti-obscenity campaign in post-Civil War America, or “institutional or systemic” censorship such as government withdrawal of funding of works labeled offensive. See Robert Atkins, “A Censorship Timeline,” Art Journal 50, no. 3 (1991), 33–37. 15 In the American censorship debate, relevant government agencies are typically depicted as being captive to their constituents. This explains the tendency of American culture critics to cast the censorship net wider than one would find in socialist or authoritarian societies. Taking this position to an extreme, one critic argues for a broader definition of censorship in order to accommodate systemic practices that “are so pervasive that they often appear to be invisible.” Such institutional biases would “include the difficulty women have in acquiring major gallery representation; the problems people of color face in gaining admission to—and finding financing for—art schools; and the marginalization of overtly lesbian and gay art.” Ibid., 33. I side with Dubin, who has argued that the term “censorship” is overloaded and should be viewed as a process and not a static phenomenon. Steven C. Dubin, Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions (New York: Routledge, 1992). 16 Ashley Esarey, “Speak No Evil: Mass Media Control in Contemporary China,” Freedom at Issue: A Freedom House Special Report, Washington, DC and New York (February 2006), www.freedomhouse.org. 17 Euichul Jung and Eunsung Kim, “More Democracy or More Restriction: Global Internet Information Flows and Censorship in the Public Sphere on Cyberspace in China” (paper presented at the Cultural Space and Public Sphere in Asia conference, Seoul, Korea, March 15–16, 2006). 18 Liu Kang describes how Jiang Zemin’s effort to promote commercial popular cultural activities such as ballroom dancing and karaoke, combined with the invocation of nationalism, has enabled the government to destabilize the intellectual elite’s stronghold over culture and thereby challenge the cultural sphere as a place of critique against the contradictions of the socialist market system. Liu Kang, “Popular culture and the culture of the masses in contemporary China,” boundary 2, 24, no. 3 (1997), 99–122. 19 The state also continues to target politically sensitive content in the popular culture, but most of the recent debate has revolved around online censorship and how foreign companies in China have either refused to comply with or agreed to obey the law. See “China sure to retain control over Internet: Alibaba.com founder,” in Japan Economic Newswire, September 21, 2006; “Microsoft says censorship of China MSN Spaces in line with law,” in Xinhua Financial Network News, January 5, 2006; Lee, Min, “China’s rejection of ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ latest example of censorship,” in Associated Press Worldstream, February 5, 2006; Ma, Raymond. “Wikipedia Chief Says No to Censorship,” in South China Morning Post, August 27, 2004. 20 Richard Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture, (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); Andrew Nathan, “China’s Changing of the Guard: Authoritarian Resistance,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 1 (January, 2003); 6–17; Michael Sullivan, “Art in China since 1949,” The China Quarterly 159, Special Issue (1999), 712–722. 21 Richard Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004),133. 22 Ibid. 23 Interview with Huang Rui, August 22, 2006, conducted by Leon Lee. 24 Nicola Beisel, “Morals Versus Art: Censorship, the Politics of Interpretation, and the Victorian Nude,” American Sociological Review 58, no. 1 (1993), 145–62. 25 Wu Hung describes how the “news value” becomes a part of avant-garde art and gives it a sense of “happening.” Wu Hung, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China. (Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2000). Wu Hung, “A ‘Domestic Turn’: Chinese Experimental Art in the 1990s.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1, no. 3 (November, 2002), 3–17. 26 Interview by author with Jocelyn Ford, Bureau Chief of Marketplace Beijing Bureau, July 25, 2006. 27 For example, in 2004, the Chaoyang District government of Beijing commissioned a report by Culture and Creative Clusters, Inc., based in

 Hong Kong University, on the creative industry sector, which includes the contemporary visual arts. See also 2006 Report on Development of China’s Cultural Industry (Zhongguo wenhua chanye fazhan baogao), edited by Zhang Xiaoming, Huilin Hu, and Jianggang Zhang, (Shanghai, China: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2006). 28 See, for example Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Nicola Beisel, “Morals Versus Art: Censorship, the Politics of Interpretation, and the Victorian Nude,” American Sociological Review 58, no. 1 (1993), 145–62. 29 For more details regarding the history of the Stars, see the catalogues The Stars: 10 Years (Hong Kong, Taipei, New York: Hanart 2, 1989). Huang Rui: Mao Zedong’s Selected Works, (volume six) (Mao Zedong xuanji, di liu juan), Beijing: Timezone 8 Limited and Thinking Hands, 2006). See also: Sullivan, Michael, “Art in China since 1949,” The China Quarterly 159 (1999), 712–22. 30The first annual Dashanzi International Arts Festival was held in 2004. 31 Internal censors at That’s Beijing, a monthly English-language entertainment guide, refused to print the text from the interview and the images from the show for the April 2006 issue of the magazine. I owe thanks to Leon Lee, managing editor at That’s Beijing, for his assistance in trying to push the article through. 32 This is not to suggest that censorship never takes place, but that its negative impact has not been significant. Brian Wallace of the Red Gate Gallery, which is located outside of Dashanzi, says that the censorship of works by artist Sheng Qi, who cut off his left pinky after Tiananmen, actually raised the value of the work and proved to be good for business. Jonathan Watts, “Chinese Artists Cross the Red Line,” in Guardian, (April 22, 2006). 33 Francesca Dal Lago, “Personal Mao: Reshaping an Icon in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Art Journal 58, no. 2 (1999), 46–59; Xiaoping Lin, “Those Parodic Images: a Glimpse of Contemporary Chinese art,” Leonardo 30, no. 2 (1997), 113–22. 34 Francesca Dal Lago, “Personal Mao: Reshaping an Icon in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Art Journal 58, no. 2 (1999), 50. 35 Francesca Dal Lago, “Personal Mao: Reshaping an Icon in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Art Journal 58, no. 2 (1999), 46–59. 36 Huang Rui states: “Words have high symbolic value—they leave a deep impression. They are very moving visually, but also contradictory, and when they are left intact they can still communicate meaning.” Interview, March 8, 2006, conducted with the author. 37 Francesca Dal Lago, “Personal Mao: Reshaping an Icon in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Art Journal 58, no. 2 (1999), 46–59. 38 Liu Kang, “Popular Culture and the Culture of the Masses in Contemporary China,” in boundary 2 24, no. 3 (1997), 99–122. 39 See Wu, Hung, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China (Chicago: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2000). 40 Hou also notes, “In exhibitions like the Venice Biennale, their paintings tended to be hung in indifferent, mediocre corners to become merely decorations of the “international art banquets.” This situation has now caused some very special and understandable reactions among the artists: an almost fanatical sentiment of cultural nationalism.” Hanru Hou, “Towards an ‘Un-unofficial Art’: De-ideologicalisation of China’s Contemporary Art in the 1990s,” Third Text, 34, Spring (1996), 37–52. 41 Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Jing Wang, “The Global Reach of a New Discourse: How Far Can ‘Creative Industries’ Travel?” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7, no. 1 (2004), 9–19. 42 Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Darbel, and Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 179–180; Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 65–86; Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 85–86. 43 Velthuis argues that prices are cultural entities that embody moral significance, and that it is impossible to completely separate the aesthetic and economic components of an artwork. See Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 11. 44 Lin, Xiaoping, “Those Parodic Images: A Glimpse of Contemporary Chinese Art, “ Leonardo, 30, no. 2 (1997), 114.

 eager paintings, empathetic products: liu ding's critical complicity david spalding

If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle. . . . The commodity whispers to a poor wretch who passes a shop window containing beautiful and expensive things. These objects are not interested in this person; they do not empathize with him.

–Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, 1938

A Manhattan collector who has been buying Chinese contemporary art since 1990 said that yesterday she watched her holdings appreciate by 10,000 percent. “And it’s just going to keep going,” she added.

– Carol Vogel, “China: The New Contemporary-Art Frontier,” New York Times, April 1, 20061

Liu Ding is an archaeologist of the present. The artist excavates everyday objects, embellishing and arranging them in ways that amplify the cultural desires they embody and foster. His evolving series of related installations, Samples from the Transition, confronts viewers with artefacts that point to the absurd contradictions produced by China’s frenzied capitalism. For Fantasies of Small Potatoes (2005), Liu used items associated with power—including a gun, a globe, a banknote, and a notebook computer—completely covering them with one of his signature materials: glittering, artificial gemstones. Displayed in spot-lit vitrines that evoke department store windows, the tacky opulence of the installation is unnerving, precisely because it is so seductive. Ultimately, Fantasies produces narratives of violence, greed, and domination that have the amorality of a child’s cartoon, in which graphic acts of destruction are spectacular but ethically inconsequential. Casting a spell of luxurious agency, Liu Ding’s jewelled objects make the pain of others seem insignificant. In this equation, power and empathy are inversely proportional. One has only to pick up a

Liu Ding, Samples from the Transition C Products Part 1, 2005, 40 paintings, oil on canvas, 60 x 90 cm each. Painted by 13 painters from Dafencun Village, Shenzheng, China, at the 2nd Guangzhou Triennale, Guangzhou Museum, November 18, 2005, from 3 to 7 p.m.

 Liu Ding, Samples from the Transition C Products Part 1, 2005, 40 paintings, oil on canvas, 60 x 90 cm each. Painted by 13 painters from Dafencun Village, Shenzheng, China, at the 2nd Guangzhou Triennal, Guangzhou Museum. newspaper to see such scenarios realized outside the gallery’s walls. If, as Liu’s projects suggest, the Chinese economy is characterized by a Vesuvian explosion, it has buried its residents in the ashen spectacle of consumer culture. Through his artworks, Liu Ding is not just offering evidence of this “transition.” He is trying to dig us out. But art, as Liu Ding reminds us, is not immune from the effects of capitalism’s newest incarnation. With his latest installment of the Samples series, Products (2005–06), Liu demonstrates the ambivalent space that art occupies in discussions of our commodity culture—fashioning a Möbius strip of critique and complicity that refuses easy resolution.

Originally commissioned for the Second Guangzhou Triennial, Products invited a group of thirteen professional artists from the nearby village of Dafancun—China’s famed “painting factory” village where workers produce thousands of paintings daily, fuelling a giant export business—to perform their assembly-line painting process during the opening of what is arguably China’s most important international art exhibition. Working in an ancillary site temporarily annexed by the Guangdong Museum of Art, the painters were assembled on a pyramid of platforms during the exhibition’s opening, where they moved from canvas to canvas as they added their contributions (one artists paints only a tree, another a stork, and so on) to a series of identical landscape paintings. The painters were paid their standard factory wage for their work. The resulting paintings remained on view for the duration of the exhibition and have been presented in Frankfurt alongside a garish domestic interior well suited for their display.

Site is central to Products’s various entanglements. Integral to the work’s staging in Guangzhou is the Guangdong Museum of Art’s location in the Pearl River Delta, or PRD, a cluster of southern Chinese cities, including Shenzhen and Guangzhou, that have experienced a surreal growth since the 1970s, when the area began to mushroom into a network of congested urban sprawl that beckons with opportunity and repulses with an underbelly of decadence. As such, Guangzhou is a nadir of advanced capitalism, a perfect site for Liu’s ongoing explorations.

Regardless of curatorial attempts to create a platform for ongoing exchange, the recent Guangzhou Triennial, like the triennials and biennials that continuously operate worldwide, is also another node in the art market, a site where the status and value of works is affirmed and heightened

 Liu Ding, Samples from the Transition C Products Part 2, 2005–06, 40 paintings in gilded frames, 69 x 99.5 cm each, living room furniture. Courtesy of L. A. Galerie, Frankfurt. through their selection (presumably by a team of experts) and presentation within the exhibition context. In addition, the catalogue and related press coverage are just two of many related affirmations that can elevate the careers of participating artists. Through his staging ofProducts , Liu called in question the authority of the Triennial to confer merit on the artists and the ability of the art market to determine a work’s worth. After all, the quality and value of the artworks made in Dafencun is anything but arbitrary: paintings that accurately resemble their models are approved by quality control agents, and those that do not are revised or destroyed. The value of the works is equally clear-cut. As one company, called Eager Art, explains to potential customers on their Web site, “The price of paintings is decided [by] whether they are easy or hard to paint.”

For consumers, the use value of art—its essence—is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation which they mistake for the merit of works of art—becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy. Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself.

Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947

Just as Guangzhou and the surrounding Pearl River Delta have spawned one of today’s most advanced forms of capitalism—and its Triennial is a locus for the christening of artworks with a stamp of artworld currency—the July 2006 exhibition of Products at Frankfurt’s L.A. Lothar Albrecht gallery proved an ideal place to activate another aspect of the installation’s reflexive criticality.

Working at Frankfurt’s Institut fur Sozialforschung during the late 1920s and early 1930s (and exiled to the United States thereafter), theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T. W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm—in dialogue with Walter Benjamin—formulated a sophisticated, interdisciplinary set of tools for the analysis of what they dubbed “the cultural industry.” The neo-Marxist approach of the so-called Frankfurt School of critical theory saw capitalist ideology as the generator behind mass-mediated cultural forms (from soap operas and radio broadcasts to popular art and visual culture); their writings attempted to awaken readers and alter their paths toward the consumption of these poisoned pleasures. As Douglas Kellner has pointed out,

 “Mass culture for the Frankfurt School produced desires, dreams, hopes, fears, and longings, as well as unending desire for consumer products.”2 If Liu Ding has taken “Samples” of material culture and used them to diagnose the bizarre contradictions and collective fantasies arising from China’s warp-speed economic growth, it was the Frankfurt School that first developed a methodology that Liu’s projects depend on.

Liu’s Products is linked to a number of important art historical precedents, but he ups the ante. During the 1980s, American artists drew from the Frankfurt school

Jeff Koons, New Shelton Wet/Dry Doubledecker, 1981, two to produce artworks that worked both against and within Shelton Wet/Drys, Plexiglas, fluorescent lights, 82 x 28 x 28 inches. © Jeff Koons an increasingly hyperbolic art market, making their efficacy difficult to gauge. In a strange series of dialogical turns, artworks produced with an air of self-criticality were often subsumed back into the very market they attempted to censure. Some of these works, such as the early sculptures of Jeff Koons (Wet/Dry Double Decker, from 1981, remains emblematic), substituted commodities—in this case, vacuum cleaners—for art objects, suggesting an interchangeability between the two. This may seem to parallel Liu’s presentation of Products in a Triennial setting—a gesture which immediately calls into question the value of all of the works in the show. Yet in the gallery, encased in a custom Plexiglas vitrine and ensconced in a nimbus of Flavinesque fluorescence, Koons’ vacuums assumed the status and the value of an art object—its critical stance reduced to a knowing smirk. Others works, like Allan McCullum’s Surrogates (1982) and Perfect Vehicles (1986) deployed the forms of paintings and sculpture (respectively) to create works that were only signs for artworks, pure commodities deliberately void of any “content” or meaning.

Chosen by Liu Ding for its banality, the source painting reproduced in Guangzhou and presented in Frankfurt—a fanciful, distant cousin to more traditional Chinese landscapes—is also a cipher. In Liu’s installation, the painting is transformed into a series of inverted readymades, and while the artist is indebted to these earlier practices of commodity critique, he takes things much further. In Products, the painting’ status as commodities is both laid bare and undone by Liu’s insistence that the labour (indeed, the labourers) required for their production be visible. Further, his sensitivity to site ensures that even while the paintings are empty referents, they illuminate cultural and historical conditions in the locations where they are created and displayed.

Samples of the Transition—Products is reminiscent of one of Liu’s gemstones: magnetic and multifaceted, it reflects and critiques the status of the art object from a dizzying array of angles. Products and the other works that comprise the Samples series are much more than material evidence of a culture in flux. As the projects begin to coalesce, they promise to compromise the very foundations that form the basis of their display and circulation. In doing so, Liu Ding’s works are creating a complex web of dialogues, opening new possibilities for artists to simultaneously resist and participate in the culture they are helping to create.

Notes 1 See http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/04/01/arts/design/01auct.html. 2 Douglas Kellner, “The Frankfurt School,” http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/fs.htm. 3 I am drawing here from Hal Foster’s excellent essay “The Art of Cynical Reason,” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996).

 realities and other absurdities: a conversation with cao fei interview by joni low translation assistance by stephen tong

Cao Fei, Father, 2005, DVD. Courtesy of B.T.A.P./Tokyo Gallery.

Cao Fei is a very outspoken artist of her generation who has captured the world’s attention through her films and her portrayal of the realities of Southern China today. She has chosen to speak specifically from the local context—about her home and place of origin—in her art. Her interdisciplinary art practice, a blending of theatre and performance art, video, and photography, satirizes the fascinating phenomenon of the way realities are “mediated” through interpretation and technologies and conspicuously presented today in China and throughout the world.

This past summer, Cao Fei’s work had considerable presence in Vancouver, with three videos showing in Territory, an exhibition co-organized by Artspeak Artist Run Centre and Presentation House Gallery; she also contributed a piece to the travelling group exhibition The Emergency Biennale in Chechnya, on view at Centre A. This interview took place during Cao Fei’s recent stopover in Vancouver, where she screened her documentary, Father, for the first time in North America.

Joni Low: You travel a lot nowadays. What do you think of the world outside of Guangzhou?

Cao Fei: Sometimes it’s the same, sometimes totally different. When I travel to different cities, often the jet lag makes reality confusing. Also, there is very little time to be focused and observant. But when I come back to my house and home, I’m more refreshed. On my Chinese blog, I’m

 always saying, “This city is not good, something about that city is not good.” So my friends say I must really love Guangzhou.

Joni Low: How do you feel about the international art market? What are your impressions, for example, of the way art is presented at these huge fairs, the sheer number of people?

Cao Fei: My gallery participates in some fairs, but I’m not interested in the fair. The collector, the buyer, the dealer—sometimes they’re not interested in the artwork, what happens inside the art. They just think about what is more interesting in the short-term. So I think this fair is just a fair. It can be quite different from a serious exhibition.

Joni Low: You’ve been at several biennials—most recently the Sydney Biennale, this year, and the 1st Moscow Biennale in 2005. Can you talk a bit about your experiences and the differences between the two?

Cao Fei: For me, Moscow was more interesting than Sydney. Sydney—the city for me is more boring. I think Moscow has had a lot of contact with China; the October Revolution directly affected China’s revolution. This is why I made the Father documentary for my participation in the Moscow Biennale—not just to make an installation, make a complete artwork, but because I think it’s important to have a dialogue with this country. My father’s education was in Russia. He was trained in the traditional art education of Socialist Realism.

Also, my father made the sculpture to honour the leader, Deng Xiaoping, who learned a lot from the Russian Revolution, and helped construct a Soviet government in China, a revolutionary base. So Deng Xiaoping had a direct relationship with Russia and its revolutionary past.

Deng is also like a father to the Chinese, like Mao Zedong. So I think this film is not just about my father. I want to go through my father to say more about what happened in China, and how Deng Xiaoping’s revolutionary ideas are still alive in China today. China today is undergoing big changes. It’s like the government has built Cao Fei, Father, 2005, DVD. Courtesy of B.T.A.P./Tokyo Gallery. a stage—a huge stage—to keep the communist party going, to maintain the strength of the revolution. But some things have gone in the opposite direction.

Joni Low: Do you think China has a father figure today?

Cao Fei: I think for me, the new father is not coming. And also, I think, what does father mean? The concept is something you hate and you love. Cao Fei, Father, 2005, DVD. Courtesy of B.T.A.P./Tokyo Gallery. Not only good things come from a father figure.

 Joni Low: Let’s talk more about the film Father. I was intrigued by the topic and you’ve spoken a bit about why you chose the topic. Can you talk a bit about why you chose this narrative style and to do a longer film?

Cao Fei: Recently I have been doing a longer documentary format. Before, with CosPlayers and Hip Hop, the format was totally different. For me, it’s not really a big deal. I think the style and the format is not important. One needs to find a good way to explain the idea. So, for Father, I needed a documentary style to show the whole story, to show the idea.

Also, I’m interested in documentary form and theatre. I watch lots of local Chinese documentaries and find that sometimes the real is more powerful than the fake.

Joni Low: There’s one moment in the film where your father is describing how eventually he’ll stop making sculptures for other people—that when he makes enough money, he’ll make his own art. Yet throughout the film, people continue to approach him to make sculptures for their cities. Do you think he’ll ever stop making work for people and make the art he wants to make?

Cao Fei: I think he’d love to make more sculpture, accept more jobs. For me, I don’t know what his theory is, what makes his work . . . art. If he makes sculptures for rich people, that is for money.

Joni Low: It’s not from the heart.

Cao Fei: Yeah. For me, whether he makes sculptures for leaders or for rich people, it’s the same. But for him it’s different. If you are a political leader, there’s much more artistic significance involved in producing a sculpture for them. If you’re rich and you have political connections, of course it’s still significant. But if you’re just plain rich, the sculpture doesn’t have much artistic significance. So in the film, when he is showing his catalogue, you can see that there are not many commissions made for wealthy people except if they were connected somehow to the Party.

Joni Low: So for him artistic significance and political significance are not separate.

Cao Fei: Yes.

Joni Low: What about the sculptures he makes on his own time? Like when he was saying he would like to make his own art after he makes a lot of money, he was working on this small sculpture of a man and woman.

Cao Fei: Yeah, sometimes he will make some sculptures of a nurse, his sister, his brother—or me, his children. That is his nature. He wants to take care of his family. Because he comes from a small village—a poor area—I think he is much more aware of the poor and the underprivileged. You can see in the film that when he lives in the village or in the city, he still dresses very dirty shabbily. He doesn’t care about his style—he’s a very interesting guy.

Joni Low: To continue with this topic of making the art that one wants to make, you mentioned in an earlier interview that art is “independent thinking.” How do you think your art can remain independent when different forces become involved—like market forces, political interests, or money?

 Cao Fei, Milkman, 2005, DVD. Courtesy of B.T.A.P./Tokyo Gallery.

Cao Fei: I think different countries have different stories, different pressures. For China, most of the pressure is political. When my director saw the film Father, he said he thought it was impossible to show this film in China.

Joni Low: So it hasn’t been shown in China?

Cao Fei: Not yet. But I’m showing it in some underground film festivals, some independent art spaces. That is okay. It won’t be a big deal. However, there is a scene in the documentary when the worker is hitting the sculpture of Deng Xiaoping as part of the process of removing the plaster that some people will find quite shocking. For the foreigner, they’re just making a sculpture. But when the Chinese see the image—or the image of the statue of Deng Xiaoping with a cloth tied around his neck to transport the statue to the site—for the Chinese, they will feel things a foreigner can’t feel. They will read into it, they’ll feel very . . . kind of hurt, because these are people who they see as being leaders, and there “he” is being tied up by the neck.

I shot the film before I saw the film Goodbye Lenin, where they break the Lenin sculpture. I filmed my father building more and more sculptures. Both societies are really progressing, moving forward, but they’re moving in different directions. Like in Post-Soviet Russia, they’re destroying as many of these sculptures as possible, but in China, they’re making as many as possible. But they’re both heading towards capitalism.

So, how can art remain independent? You need to keep your way. You have to tell the truth and really not cave in under pressure. A lot of my friends make difficult, underground documentaries, and actually experience a lot of outside pressure in China. So I think artists, directors—we need to be brave. And record the alternative history.

Also, my gallery, when they saw the Father documentary, they weren’t interested. They didn’t think of it as an artwork. They thought of it as a documentary, so they weren’t interested. But I think that for artists, you can’t let the market lead you. You just lead your work. You can’t let the market lead you. I

 know a lot of artists in Beijing copy a certain style of art that they see the market is interested in. If you’re a successful artist, a lot of artists will copy you, create the same look, for the market. I think this work is not very interesting.

Joni Low: You mention the recording of “alternative histories.” In China’s long past, there’s been a longstanding relationship between culture and power—specifically, the appropriation of everyday culture to bring people together under a meta-historical narrative. How do you see the situation in China today? Especially the region where you live—the Pearl River Delta (PRD)?

Cao Fei: Let me talk about the Pearl River Delta. During the Qing and Ming dynasties, this was the place where [the government] would send the criminals, the convicts. So it was not a place of actual governance. It was a place for the barbarians, for the outlaws. Also, political exiles—those who failed to cause revolution, who failed in the struggle for power—they would be sent to Guangzhou and the PRD.

During the Qing dynasty, because there was such a convenient confluence of criminals and unsuccessful bureaucrats in the PRD, it became a haven for corrupt activities. Opium smuggling allowed it to become a major economic and market centre as well as a major harbour, a point of entry. But the factors that actually brought about this point of entry can be traced back to the previous dynasty, the Ming dynasty, and its decision to exile all the failed revolutionaries to the South.

So in history, this area is far from the power centre, and they’re more focused on business activities. Also, people are more . . . wild, more natural, and much more focused on daily life and everyday concerns. They are less concerned with the struggle for political power—because so

Cao Fei, Milkman, 2005, DVD. Courtesy of B.T.A.P./Tokyo Gallery.

 many of them were political exiles, they see through the whole struggle for power, and realize it’s not crucial to their life and existence.

But Sun Yat-sen and his political movement were based in Guangzhou, and also the Communist party under Mao Zedong had underground secret meetings in Guangzhou. It was a very important place for revolution, for the Communist party, and the Guomindang also. So because this area is far from the power centre, it’s good for the new revolution.

So the PRD, in history, is an interesting area. And today, one can see many international factories based there, around the PRD. Shenzhen, Dongguan, Foshan—everywhere, because they’re near the mouth of the river, and the cost of labour is quite low. This is why everybody says China is like the world’s factory. So I think the PRD is a very important area for China.

Joni Low: Do you think the capital-political power in the north sees the PRD—its value—in economic terms, or also in cultural terms?

Cao Fei: Mostly they see the South as important economically. There’s a very important story in contemporary Chinese history where Deng Xiaoping goes to Shenzhen and the Southern areas of China and speaks in Southern local dialect. When he went to Shenzhen his message was: “Development is important. Progress for modernization is the new rule, the hard rule—the bottom line.” This rule became integral to the rapid economic development in the PRD during the 1980s and 90s—it supported the influx of business and the building of factories. The Chinese came to depend on this rule, in order to to rise collectively.

But this story contains a secret story, because at the time of his speech, Deng Xiaoping had already stepped down, and it was Jiang Zemin who was in charge. Jiang didn’t really listen to Deng’s recommendations, even though he had already stepped down. There was still some expectation that Jiang would take some direction, some orders, from him. Deng Xiaoping was not very happy, and he went to the south himself to speak about economic development.

So, as you can see, the South has always been about business and about revolution. Outside the main power centre, Beijing, one can have a more objective view.

Joni Low: It seems to me that your recent work is more embedded in reality, whereas your earlier work possessed this sort of camp, this carnival, fantasy space that is separate from reality. What led to those changes in your work?

Cao Fei: Early on, when you are young, you know, just graduated from university, just getting to know this world a little bit, you find your way and use your personal feelings to describe the world. So, when you are more and more in touch with this society, and you know your city more—also when you do a project—you need to understand your city’s history, your country’s history. In our schoolbooks, it was always the official history. When you know more, you can understand what is real, what is important.

Joni Low: In some ways, the work you are doing can be seen as being a non-official cultural ambassador for China, or for your region of China—this independent voice. How do you feel about that?

 Cao Fei, Milkman, 2005, DVD. Courtesy of B.T.A.P./Tokyo Gallery.

Cao Fei: Yes, I think at this time, we need more and more of this voice. Not just from contemporary art. Because, you know, sometimes art is not useful for the real—for practical reality. So we need this voice to come from different areas—like film directing, documentary, theatre. . . . These are just cultural things. But I think it will affect the people, to make them think more. To think more about how to use their independent voice.

Joni Low: Also, another thing I find fascinating about your work is that, though it has this documentary feel, it’s actually fiction masquerading as documentary. Like in the filmMilkman , you were saying he’s not an actual milkman. Why are you interested in blurring these lines?

Cao Fei: This is my history. Because I like theatre, I like drama—I did a lot of theatre before I began making videos. So the theatre also uses artifice to create a reality on the stage. So this follows my art thinking, to always mix fiction with reality. Also my father’s documentary is very real, but you can see lots of drama within reality. My father is a very dramatic person and he’ll really ham it up. Also, the work he’s doing is sort of about the dramatic narrative of China: the “larger-than- life” project of building these sculptures, who are themselves larger than life.

So I think this kind of blurring the lines between reality and fantasy is my favourite style and has never really disappeared from my work. It’s a part of my character, a part of my drive.

Joni Low: I’m interested in how you find people to be in your film. You approach everyday people rather than professional actors. For instance, the man in Milkman was an escargot street vendor.

Cao Fei: I know that guy from long ago, when I was very young, before I made art. I would always go to the restaurant on the street, and he would always bring his bicycle with his escargot. He would dance very well and sing very well. Whenever he sold escargot, he would sing a song for the guests.

 I always like the singing and dancing—it has a lot of emotion and energy. Like my father—it’s the same kind of person. The street vendor’s energy touched me in this very strong way. This was maybe ten years ago, a long time ago.

Joni Low: So he wasn’t a stranger.

Cao Fei: Yeah. So when I began working on the video, I thought about him. When I wrote the script for Milkman, I thought, maybe he is a fit for the story. So one day I talked with him, and he gave me his address—it was outside of Guangzhou, in Panyu. I went to his home and talked with him, talked about the idea, and also offered him a small salary from the sponsorship I got from my friends.

Joni Low: Does it take “everyday people” awhile to warm up in front of the camera?

Cao Fei: No. He doesn’t need to, because he dances and sings on the street all the time. He doesn’t care—drama is his real, real nature. You don’t need to say anything to him. That’s why I’m interested in him, because he’s so natural.

Also, for the Yunnan film project, I found the two actors, two boys—one is a Yunnan rapper, interested in music, the other is Cantonese rapper—and they’re very natural. They have powerful personalities and very great stamina. I need actors whose nature is drama, not just acting.

Joni Low: Can you talk a bit more about the Yunnan Film Project?

Cao Fei: I think we will begin shooting the film at the beginning of next year. This project is sponsored by the Yunnan government. Yunnan is a very big tourist attraction in China. Many people—young families, foreigners—when they have a vacation, they love to go to Yunan. It is like a paradise.

The story for the film is about some young people who connect through a Web site. They don’t know each other from before. They just want to find a friend and go there together to have fun— to hike, to backpack. This is a very popular activity in Yunnan province.

So these two young guys—perhaps they didn’t graduate, they didn’t want to find work. . . . Or they feel bored in the city—they want to go to Yunnan. For whatever reason, they want to leave the city, because the city is moving so fast, and sometimes it doesn’t take care of their emotions. So they want to go to the landscape, go to nature. They are like the new hippies.

In the film, I also want to talk about how urbanization—the speed at which it is happening—is alienating a lot of the youth in China, causing them to want to leave the cities altogether. Also, they are too young, they don’t have enough power to affect society. They can’t find their place. They just want to escape. So they go to Yunnan.

The film’s location is in the Nujiang River—nu meaning angry—where the government wants to build a big dam, partly because the area is very poor. Within Yunnan province, this is one of the least visited areas. A lot of backpackers will go there because the terrain is difficult, very mountainous. Young guys like to pursue the difficult journey, but the area is very poor.

 If successful, this dam will raise the water levels up to two hundred metres, eliminating the plants and forcing people to relocate. Because of these circumstances, a lot of ethnic minorities have already been forced to move from this area. In terms of environmentalism, it’s a very big issue. So for several years one could not talk about this dam problem in any Chinese newspapers because it is government supported. But the environmentalists oppose this. During the building of the Three Gorges dam, many intellectuals and writers came to really think about the implications of the dam. So now, after having gone through that experience, they have much stronger opposition to this new dam in the Nujiang River.

Joni Low: So this Yunnan film project has an environmental angle?

Cao Fei: I think there are many things to focus on—the environmental problem, the realities of the younger generation, and their problems with urbanization. The film takes place in western China, where there has been considerable tourist development, but it is connected to eastern China—Guangzhou and Shanghai—where rapid urbanization is taking place. I feel that the tourist development is as environmentally damaging as industrial development.

Also, I want to talk about globalization in the film. Globalization will impact every place on this earth, including Yunnan, even small villages. The young generation, they want to find their paradise, so they go to Yunnan. But they cannot find paradise. They are travelling aimlessly—not necessarily searching for a real place, but for an idea. So the film is about many different problems and complexities.

However, the film is commissioned by the government, so I cannot say the government is doing bad things. I want to see through the young generation’s eyes, to present an objective and honest view of what’s happening in Yunnan, in China. It’s interesting how these guys will improvise on the road—one guy will freestyle in Yunnan dialect. They have tattoos everywhere. They are born in 1980, so they’re younger than me. This is a glimpse of the younger generation’s thinking. This is their journey to the West—the west in China.

Joni Low: I notice this theme you have in your work, where people desire another life beyond their everyday life, or as an escape—as you say, they are looking for an idea. What would you say is your fantasy? All this urbanization, it’s not meeting your emotional needs. How do you escape?

Cao Fei: My fantasy. . . . What is my fantasy? This is a big question. My fantasy is that kind of blend—the mixing and blending of fantasy and reality. Reality is often more absurd than our imaginations anticipate it will be.

 heroes of the mundane: the syncretic imagination of cao fei maya kovskaya

The gifted Guangzhou artist Cao Fei extends the explorations of her seminal video and photography series COSPlayers in a new set of works completed in 2006. Shifting her focus from alternative youth culture, she embraces the ways a kind of syncretic imagination can belong to people across the social spectrum. In this new series, photographed in Beijing, Cao Fei collaborated with an assortment of local people she encountered in the various sites she selected for the shoots.

Her work stands out for many reasons, but the most salient aspect of this series is the wonderfully ludic manner in which she introduces this syncretic imagination into quotidian scenes saturated with elements from the changing face of urban China. While role-playing was a prominent theme in her COSPlayers works, it was the contrast between the young costumed players’ fantasy worlds and their mundane lives that gave that series its conceptual kick.

Particularly powerful in the new work is the way Cao Fei makes the appearance of superheroes and fantasy characters in everyday life seem thoroughly normal. Instead of looking out of place, these heroes and their fantasy roles are integrally connected to scenes of ordinary life, even though their outward appearances are clearly not of this world. Each set-up is crafted to conceptually characterize typical elements of life in China’s rapidly changing social landscape—construction sites, alleyway dwellings, small-time merchants, garbage collectors, migrant labourers, construction workers, etc.

Cao Fei, Hello! Kitty, 2006, photograph, 129 cm x 90 cm. Courtesy of B.T.A.P./Tokyo Gallery.

 While the rise of globalized cultural forms is seen by some as a sign of an insidious form of colonization, Cao Fei presents foreign icons (figures from Star Wars, Kill Bill, Japanese cartoons, and more) in a way that integrates them and that bespeaks a dynamic of local appropriation rather than symbolic occupation. In Cao Fei’s works, the meaning of icons such as Darth Vader have little to do with the Cold War and U.S.-Soviet relations, as they were once interpreted within the Western context. Meaning is now indexically tied to the context in which these symbols appear, and the localized positioning of these icons indigenizes them, subordinating their previous significations to the meanings embedded in their new environment. A closer look at the everyday stories in contemporary Chinese life that are encoded in this series reveals some of the ways Cao Fei achieves this effect.

Hello! Kitty features a character from Kill Bill with a ferocious, cartoon tiger body, replete with spikes and a vacant-eyed, swollen, pink Hello Kitty head. The character is dancing in what is a typical Chinese construction site covered with black mesh—a vain attempt to keep the dirt tilled up from the previous demolition from flying all over the city. A construction worker stands aimlessly, hands stuffed in his pockets, while next to him a rural migrant woman carries a washbasin on her hip. A three-wheeled auto-rickshaw hopelessly cruises the desolate site in search of fares. In this bizarre stage that is contemporary Beijing, where enormous landscaped high- rise complexes contrast with vacant tracts of land, and where everyone is going about his or her business, the fantasy figure of the Kill Bill Hello Kitty oddly does not seem out of place.

In Super-Junkman, a busty Spiderman (woman?) perches on the roof of a ramshackle Beijing house, hand outstretched, as if ready to take flight on some heroic mission. In the doorway below, an elderly woman, whose age is betrayed by her small, previously bound feet, leans on her cane. The yard is strewn with heaps of cardboard boxes, and bags of bottles, cans, and other potentially recyclable material that might appear to the casual viewer as nothing but a pile of garbage. In fact, for the junkman, whose livelihood is sustained by scavenging, this trash is part of his everyday life. Super–Junkman, dressed in loose-fitting Spiderman garb, slings a sack of refuse over his shoulder like a postmodern, syncretic Santa of the urban poor.

Outside the communal toilet in a Beijing hutong alleyway, a war is going on. A Hutong War is a war of make-believe, for fun and release from the tedium of life’s mundane routines. A guy in casual office attire wears a Stormtrooper mask. His gun is cocked and ready to take out the bad guys. But the vegetable seller hawking her wares at the entrance of the toilet pays him no mind. She wears

Cao Fei, Super-Junkman, 2006, photograph, 129 cm x 90 cm. Courtesy of B.T.A.P./Tokyo Cao Fei, A Hutong War, 2006, photograph, 129 cm x 90 cm. Gallery. Courtesy of B.T.A.P./Tokyo Gallery.

 Cao Fei, Old Wukong, 2006, photograph, 129 cm x 90 cm. Courtesy of B.T.A.P./Tokyo Gallery. a Darth Vader mask as if it were no different from wearing a hat or any other kind of attire. She minds her flatbed veggie cart, laden with Chinese cabbages and a scale that is probably wildly inaccurate (in her favour).

In Old Wukong, the elderly man in a Sun Wukong costume appears giddy with excitement as he enacts the Monkey King from the tale Journey to the West. He stands at attention in the yard of a rundown building with makeshift corrugated roofing typical of the temporary nature of many of the older buildings in Beijing. He is grinning, oblivious to the danger closing in behind him. A Stormtrooper is pointing a gun at him while Spiderman crawls out of the mouth of a plaster fish. In all of these images, in spite of the inclusion of characters that are normally not part of such scenes, no one takes notice, and life goes on as usual.

On the surface, Bunny’s World appears to be the most romantic image of the series, but it is also conveys the most pathos. A typical emaciated beauty stands atop a mound of black mesh-covered dirt in a construction site, gazing out over the world before her. She is dressed in a bunny costume and see-through mesh (visually echoing the mesh in the construction site), like someone’s fantasy of an erotic dancer. She’s found a way to make the world her oyster, playing the role beloved by so many men in this society of changing gender roles. We can almost hear her simpering in a faux baby voice to her “lao gong,” who must surely be a big bellied boss-man with oodles of money to keep her well-kept. This is where the picture’s incisive juxtaposition comes into sharp focus. Seated on the dirt mound in front of her is a young man who also looks out to the horizon. Relying on a shared store of local knowledge, Cao Fei must know that those familiar with the popular dynamics of Chinese romance will understand immediately that this young man, as confident as he may

 Cao Fei, Bunny’s World, 2006, photograph, 129 cm x 90 cm. Courtesy of B.T.A.P./Tokyo Gallery. appear, could never be her match. In an age where money is the matchmaker par excellence, a migrant construction worker—with his gruelling work schedule, minute income, and grubby, spartan, dormitory digs—is not even in the race to win this modern woman’s hand. In the forest of cranes behind the site, men like this labourer are building a new world for women like Bunny to live in.

Cao Fei emphasizes the problem of shifting and constraining social roles that have been brought to the forefront by China’s attempts at “modernization.” Perhaps now, more than ever, people need to tap into the power of their imagination in order to lift themselves out of the well-worn ruts of their lives—lives in which they often feel trapped, limited, disengaged, or bored. If role- playing is a part of life, and not its alternative, perhaps people can find new ways to imagine their own identities and expand the horizons that delimit their sense of self. Nowadays, “COSplay culture,” Cao Fei writes, “is not only a form of pop culture, but is also no longer the preserve of young people’s rebellion.” She expresses the hope that her works—the live performances she directs, the videos, and the photography—might stimulate new ways to discover forms of identity that reach beyond everyday reality.

 crossing the east west divide: on the art of xu jiang edward lucie-smith

We currently live in an age of active cross-cultural fertilization. Chinese culture learns from the West. Western culture learns from China. As westerners like myself learn more and more about the vigorous new contemporary art that has arisen in China during the past few decades, they are often puzzled about how they ought to interpret it. They see things in it that are already familiar— or that at least seem familiar—from the tradition with which they are already acquainted. They also see things that seem rooted in a completely different set of artistic values.

Among the artists who have recently made excellent reputations for themselves in the Chinese art world, Xu Jiang appears to be one of those who is most comfortable with this very fluid and rapidly developing situation. He is a painter who uses western materials—oil paint on canvas— and who makes artworks in western formats. He is also a creator who is intimately linked to the age-old Chinese tradition of landscape imagery and who, like so many of the great Chinese artists of the past, is as much a poet as he is a painter. His creativity passes easily and seamlessly from the purely visual to a language of signs. The fact that the Chinese language records itself in ideographs rather than in an alphabetic script helps him to make this transition more swiftly and surely than any western artist would be able to.

When westerners look at Xu Jiang’s work, they do of course find parallels with artworks that are already known to them. This is especially true of British critics like myself. The landscape tradition counts for a great deal in English art. To me, these paintings and drawings recall a wide a spectrum of art that belongs to my own tradition. His drawings of the ruined Old Summer Palace situated just outside Beijing, burned and looted by European troops during the Second Opium War in 1860, are a good example. The buildings that best survived the destruction were a group of stone- built structures in the baroque style created for the Qianlong Emperor by two European Jesuit

Artist Xu Jiang. Courtesy of China Academy of Art.

 Xu Jiang, Great Shanghai: Old Nanjing Road, oil painting, 180 cm ×180 cm, 2000. Courtesy of the China Academy of Art. priests, Giuseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoist. To an English Western eye, Xu Jiang’s images look very much like the romantic watercolours of ruins made by the British artist John Piper (1903–1992). To a Chinese spectator, however, they are undoubtedly much more specific than this comparison might suggest—they recall an episode of national humiliation, and as such have a very specific moral content that a non-Chinese observer might be inclined to miss. Another layer of meaning is, however, added by the fact that the ruins depicted have unmistakably European architectural forms. If one didn’t already know what they are, one might conjecture that they were the ruins of some grandiose schloss on the outskirts of Dresden, ruined during the bombings of World War II. This means, in turn, that they have a broader meaning in addition to the Chinese historical reference—they are meditations on the whole history of cultural barbarism.

Many of Xu Jiang’s works hold complex cultural meanings of this kind. Sometimes the symbolism is overt, as with a panoramic painting of Beijing’s Forbidden City on which are superimposed images of hands holding coins, emblematic of the threat of commercial greed to China’s past. Sometimes it is only hinted at, as in his panoramic views of the new Shanghai, with its towering skyscrapers. The Shanghai paintings also suggest a European comparison, in this case with the paintings produced by the Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka during his first visit to London in the 1920s. In both cases the artist adopts a high viewpoint so as to stress the immensity of the city that is the subject of his painting. Yet here one also has to remember that a similar viewpoint is used in large official paintings produced by court artists for the Qing emperors, where the aim was

 to produce an image that was a hybrid between a landscape painting and a map—something that gave precise topographical information. Xu Jiang’s Shanghai is an exciting place, but also a slightly threatening one—the city seems inhuman in its vastness. Yet at the same time it speaks of human ambition and human potential.

This panoramic viewpoint is also used in a triptych featuring the Great Wall that is perhaps the nearest Xu Jiang gets to the traditional Chinese treatment of landscape, with its blurred, gestural use of paint and its forms that appear, then disappear, as one looks at them. What is admirable here is the way the Chinese calligraphic gesture has been adapted to the needs of the Western medium of oil paint on canvas.

Another series of paintings is devoted to a very different subject—the fields used for the commercial cultivation of sunflowers in Turkey. Westerners tend to immediately associate images of sunflowers with the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. These sunflowers are depicted in a very different way—not in a vase, but still rooted in the soil. Xu Jiang has chosen to show them at the moment when the plants are beginning to die, just before their seeds are harvested to make oil. For him, each of these withering stems has a separate and distinct personality. The general effect of the composition, however, depends on a rhythmic repetition of forms, marching across the entire width of the composition. In this case one sees a relationship to certain varieties of Western abstraction, in particular to Abstract Expressionism, where painterly forms float in an indeterminate but shallow space.

It is Xu Jiang’s drawings that offer a clue about how to look at these “sunflower” paintings. The drawings are made in series. Each series is a meditation on a single visual incident—for example, reflection in a pool or lake. Each drawing extends and varies observations made in the other images in the group, so that the whole group becomes a complete narrative about the artist’s relationship to nature.The drawings are perhaps the place where Xu Jiang’s art is most specifically Chinese. But in these too, as in the rest of his work, there is also an ongoing dialogue between two cultures.

Xu Jiang, Twelve Views of a Sunflower Field IX, oil painting, 2005. Courtesy of the China Academy of Art.

 no matter from which side, it is still possible to see: a review of karen smith's nine lives: the birth of avant-garde art in new china paul gladston

As Norman Bryson has recently indicated,1 knowledge of the history of Chinese avant-garde visual art is marked by a significant imbalance: while contemporary Chinese art has secured an increasingly high international profile in recent years—not least through academic and curatorial invocations of “third space” (or, as Rasheed Araeen has described it, the “promotion . . . of post- colonial exotica”2)—the precise circumstances of its inception and early development within China have not, as yet, been comprehensively revealed.

There are numerous interrelated reasons for this imbalance. First, Chinese avant-garde visual art began to emerge in China during the late 1970s and 1980s against the background of a longstanding official repression of Western forms of modernist and postmodernist artistic expression and, therefore, in the absence of a dedicated, indigenous cultural infrastructure. As a result, artifacts and information relating to China’s nascent avant-garde were not systematically collected or always formally recorded. Second, despite the rapid expansion of contemporary art museums and exhibition spaces within China in recent years, there are still no major collections or archives of primary and secondary sources relating to the early development of Chinese avant- garde visual art. Such sources are still widely dispersed and relatively difficult to access, often

Geng Jianyi, The Second State, 1987, oil on canvas (detail of the four-panel work). Courtesy of the Sigg Collection, Switzerland.

 residing solely in the memories and personal collections of those who were directly involved or took a contemporaneous interest in the work of the early Chinese avant-garde. Third, the first wave of Chinese avant-garde artists often had little choice other than to use inexpensive, low-quality materials, which meant that in many cases their work either proved to be fugitive or was simply recycled in pursuit of new artistic visions. Fourth, early Chinese avant-garde artists, unaware of the hyperbole that would subsequently surround their activities, often placed a greater emphasis on experimentation and process than on the longevity of the finished artifact. Accordingly, a great deal of their work was either self-consciously ephemeral or was destroyed with little or no record ever having been made of its appearance and/or significance. And fifth, the necessity for a close and sustained scholarly engagement (of an almost anthropological kind), which follows from the circumstances described above, has proven incompatible not only with the Chinese government’s continuing emphasis on economic and social reform, and a consonant marginalization of interests in avant-garde art both within China’s academic community and Chinese society as a whole, but also persistent restrictions on long-term work and residency opportunities in China for non-Chinese scholars. A fundamental consequence is that scholarly research has been forced to focus more on the presentation of Chinese avant-garde visual art as an extension of transnational postmodernism—a de- territorializing form of display shared by many high-profile exhibitions of contemporary visual art in China—rather than on the circumstances surrounding its initial production and reception within a specifically Chinese sociocultural context. Although these two aspects of the history of Chinese avant-garde visual art—one inward-looking, the other relating outwardly to China’s now burgeoning internationalism and an associated Chinese diaspora—do overlap, a relative distinction between the two is nevertheless inescapable.

The publication of Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China, by Karen Smith, a British-born art critic and a longtime resident of China with extensive firsthand knowledge of the contemporary Chinese art world, is, therefore, an extremely welcome addition to the existing literature on the subject of Chinese avant-garde visual art. Nine Lives is a highly ambitious account of the inception and early development of avant-garde visual art in China narrated through detailed biographical studies of nine of its most notable figures. These studies are accompanied by a general introduction and subsidiary introductions to each of the book’s three thematic sections as well as a glossary and a timeline that together provide much valuable information about the changing material and ideological circumstances surrounding the emergence of avant-garde visual art in Wang Jianwei, still from Spider, 2004, video. Courtesy of the artist.180 x 270 cm.  Zhang Peili, 30 x 30, 1986, video. Courtesy of the artist.

China during the late 1970s and 1980s. Here, throughout, Smith offers insights that will no doubt broaden the understanding of many readers. The only significant criticism that might be offered in this regard is that the general introduction and the subsidiary introductions are tantalizingly too short and that extended, more detailed versions with a clearer setting-out of Smith’s methodological position and more extensive footnoting would have added to the credibility and force of her work.

Another notable aspect of Nine Lives is Smith’s conspicuous eschewal of contemporary Western academic theory in favour of a largely unembellished narrative emphasizing the pressing actuality of everyday experience in contemporary China. Through this one gains a renewed and often compelling insight into the social and ideological conditions against whose background the struggle for personal artistic expression in China after the Cultural Revolution acquired its incisive—though now, in the context of an increasingly spectacular Chinese society, somewhat dissipated—political immediacy. Indeed, while Smith ascribes to the artistic development of many of her chosen subjects an almost Nietzschean will to power, at the same time she evokes a crucial sense that under the prevailing circumstances of mid- to late-twentieth-century China, each of their lives could easily have turned out very differently. Of particular interest here is Smith’s foregrounding not only of direct and indirect political repression, but also of social connection, education, geographical location, disease, and Chinese culture’s persistently ternary3 habit of thinking as significant formative/disruptive influences.

Also worthy of note in Nine Lives are the passages where Smith advances interpretations of individual works of art. These are for the most part lucid, concise, and stylish pieces of writing

 that focus directly on the significance of Chinese avant-garde visual art as a critical response to the material and ideological pressures of contemporary Chinese life. One of the points that Smith makes consistently throughout these readings is that while Chinese avant- garde visual art is no less open to (deconstructive) re-contextualization and re-interpretation than its Western counterpart, it can also be understood to have an abiding significance in relation Chinese culture and society often overlooked or effaced by Western(ized) approaches to its presentation and reception.

It is therefore possible to view Nine Lives as an indirect contribution to recent debates on the applicability of Western thinking to the reading of Chinese avant-garde art, although Smith does not explicitly argue the position, it is therefore possible Zhang Xiaogang, Comrades, 1995. Courtesy Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong. to view Nine Lives as an indirect contribution to recent debates on the applicability of Western thinking of the reading of Chinese avant-garde art. One of the persistent problems surrounding contemporary Western theory is that while it habitually espouses notions of heterogeneity and difference as a critical foil to the foundationalism of traditional Western philosophical discourse, this is often invoked in relation to cultural contexts, such as those found in China, whose conceptual development has followed a very different historical trajectory from that of the West. Smith’s marginalization of the concerns of contemporary Western theory—for whatever reason—is therefore potentially incisive in that it allows her (as suggested previously) to draw out and to foreground the significance of Chinese avant-garde visual art as a critical intervention taking place in relation to a specifically Chinese or East Asian discursive context.

That said, the way in which Smith frames her narrative involves a problematic reversal of such culturally sensitive positionings. The format of Nine Lives—that of the Vasarian, biographical history of art—is a conspicuously Western one whose traditional association with humanist assumptions about the heroic agency of the artist is notably at odds with the lack of inevitability that Smith otherwise imputes to the lives of her chosen subjects. Indeed, this format is open to further criticism not only because of the mythical connotation that China is now undergoing some sort of social and cultural renaissance—an idealization of events whose conspicuous fallaciousness Smith would seem to recognize throughout much of her writing in Nine Lives— but also because of its implied imposition of a Judaeo-Christian sense of history as a cyclical manifestation of divine law in relation to a non-Western cultural phenomenon that has, to

 complicate matters still further, drawn heavily on the deconstructive theories and practices of the Western avant-garde.

Furthermore, Smith’s choice of the Vasarian biographical history of art is open to further criticism because of its structural tendency to emphasize the contribution of individual artists over a wider set of art-world relations. With respect to this, Smith’s decision to omit biographies of Chinese women artists and of Chinese artists who have chosen to base themselves outside China—on the grounds that there are simply no significant examples of the former belonging to the generation under discussion and that she wishes to draw a structural, and to some extent moral, distinction in her work between those artists who left and those who remained in China—places unnecessary and somewhat misleading restrictions on our understanding of the subject at hand. To which one might add the supplementary observation that, because of her chosen format, Smith is also unable to pay sufficient attention to the crucial role played by numerous groups and associations in the development of Chinese avant-garde art from the late 1970s through to the late 1980s. A more flexible study of the relationships between contributors to the early development of the Chinese avant-garde than is given by her biographical separation of the lives of the artists in question would have made it possible for Smith to enter rather more easily into discussions of these supposedly aberrant categories.

The discursive outlook of Nine Lives is, therefore, a conspicuously bifurcated one. Smith is clearly at pains to ground her narrative in the actuality of contemporary Chinese society and culture and, in doing so, to capture something of the “Chineseness” of Chinese contemporary art—a move which, it has to be said, runs the risk of an unjustifiable appeal to some form of essentialism. At the same time, however, Nine Lives also carries with it indelible traces of traditional Western art- historical thinking—traces that undoubtedly skew the way in which Smith presents her subject by drawing it within the ambit of an unduly limiting and somewhat inapposite conceptual order.

Ultimately, however, the value of Smith’s writing should not be judged simply in relation to current theoretical debates about the reading of contemporary Chinese art. Whatever one might say about the strategic possibilities of her evident dismissal of Western theory, or her continuing and somewhat problematic indebtedness to Western art-historical thinking, Smith’s book presents much-needed historical information on the everydayness of the Chinese avant-garde, something missing from more rarified academic and curatorial debates. Indeed, Smith’s book not only traces the lives of nine Chinese avant-garde artists, but also, in an indirect sense, that of its author as a member of the British diaspora in twenty-first century China. No doubt, future researchers will find much within the pages of Nine Lives to enrich their understanding of early Chinese avant- garde art and of this tenth life, caught, as it is, intriguingly, between cultural perspectives.

Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China is published by Scalo.

Notes 1 See Norman Bryson’s afterword in Martina Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979–1989: A Semiotic Analysis (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2003) 238–45. 2 Rasheed Araeen, quoted in Brandon Taylor, Art Today (London: Laurence King, 2005), 188. 3 In The Order of Things (Routledge: London, 2002), Michel Foucault uses the term ‘ternary’ to refer to the mode of signification that preceded ‘classical’, dialectical rationalism in the West. According to Foucault, ternary signification sees meaning as arising out of an extended network of resemblances. For example, a plant which resembles a particular part of the human body might be thought to signify its usefulness as a cure for disease in that area of the anatomy. Dialectical rationalism, on the other hand, can be understood to question the universal veracity of such resemblances and to seek scientific proofs of the connection between signifiers and signifieds. Despite the increasing assimilation of a ‘Western’ rationalist episteme during the last century or so, China arguably remains conspicuously (and proudly) indebted to a ternary way of thinking; viz. The parallel use of traditional Chinese and Western scientific medicine in contemporary China.

 symphony of riddles: wu shanzhuan: red humour international review by joni low

In Wu Shanzhuan’s installation Red Humour Series: Big Character Posters/Dazibao, a room is filled with the chaos of handmade signs and bold “character posters” reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. The apparent absence of rhyme and reason feels like a glimpse into the artist’s clever mind: within this "room" exists an indiscriminate collection of information, an overload of meaning disconnected from the realities of daily life. This was the situation that many people in China, growing up during the Cultural Revolution and then living in a climate of social and political relaxation during the 1980s, tried to make sense of.

Or make non-sense. I think Wu Shanzhuan accepted this chaos, and out of this acceptance emerged an artistic journey, the details of which are now published in a large monograph titled Wu Shanzhuan: Red Humour International. This is a treatise focusing on his solo work plus nearly ten years of collaboration with Icelandic artist Inga Svala Thórsdóttir.

Opening the book is, figuratively and literally, like lifting the lid of an archivist’s treasure chest. Inside one discovers a whole collection of artists’ writings, reproductions of crumpled sketches, photographs, nude photographs (I’m sure that got your attention), and a range of essays from Chinese and Euroamerican perspectives. The smaller booklet-sized artist writings, nestled between pages of the larger volume, lend an informal accessibility to the work, and the visual essays provide breaks between discussions of art while illustrating the art being discussed. The format is wonderful—as each segment acts as a stand-alone piece, one can approach it with one’s own style of reading; taken as a whole, it is a comprehensive and thoughtful compilation, if not slightly overwhelming in size and scope.

For me, the strength of this book resides in the stories it tells of how Wu Shanzhuan left China after 1989 and developed his artistic practice as a Chinese artist living abroad. Furthermore, it tells an amazing story of collaboration—of how two people from different regions of the world can meet, connect on a shared idea, and develop an art practice that enhances everyday life, both for themselves and for those who encounter their work. Each art project that Wu and Inga embark on is fluidly

Cover of Red Humour International.180 x 270 cm. continuous with previous ones,

 deconstructing concepts in order to rebuild their own; together, the projects crescendo into a symphony of delightful riddles for the reader to experience vicariously.

Wu Shanzhuan is interested in unveiling the nature of art and reality and in bringing art back into conversation with the everyday. One senses this in his Red Humour Series (1986), where Chinese characters, so overloaded by ideological excess, are freed from this confusion and allowed to exist as forms in their own right. In Selling Shrimps (1989), a performance at the National Gallery in Beijing, Wu sold shrimp brought from his hometown, Zhoushan, and let a consumer frenzy unleash itself in the gallery, exposing the beginnings of a capitalist market system that was encroaching on art making in China. What Wu discovered through these artistic processes was that the meaning of art resides not in the art object, or the artist, but in the context and the experience itself.

After 1989, Wu left China for an artist’s residency in Iceland, where he developed the concept of Red Humour International, thereby extending his playful critique of ideologies in the East to those of the West. Wu’s first exposure to a fully capitalist market economy further reinforced his observations about how humans place meaning onto ‘things’—art, words, consumer products – and how designating a fixed meaning limits the possibilities of existence for that ‘thing’. Wu found a prime example of this in the concept of the supermarket, where ‘things’ only become useful once they are purchased. In the art world, Duchamp’s declaration of the ready-made as art transformed urinal to art-object, and robbed this ‘thing’ of its utilitarian value. When Wu met Inga, the two converged on the idea that art since Duchamp had become too far removed from everyday life. Inga—whose art practice involved the pulverization of things in order to free them from the burden of meaning— was eager to deconstruct Duchamp’s Modernist myth. Wu, who was engaged in bringing conceptual art back to the realm of the everyday, and who described himself as “a rebel within the art circle” — wanted to resolve this separation of art from everyday life. So together they traveled to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, where he urinated in Duchamp’s Fountain This performance, entitled An Appreciation (1992), became Wu’s and Inga’s

Wu + Thórsdóttir, Pouring Bottled Water Back into the Victoria Harbour, 1993, action, Hong Kong. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive.

 Wu + Thórsdóttir, Posing for Swimming, 1994, Cibachrome. Photo: Peter Meyer. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive. first artistic collaboration. As Wu recalled in an interview with Martina Köppel-Yang, “Sometimes Duchamp-talking can be a way to fall in love."

Together, Wu and Inga developed a manifesto for things entitled Things' Right(s) (1995). Modeled after the UN Declaration of Human Rights, this passport-sized document proposed the idea of equality between all things without the assumption that man is the centre of the world’s activity. The concept of Things' Right(s) led to a series of collaborative artistic experiments, all of which utilize everyday materials, spontaneity, and humour to subvert the logic of a global market economy and reveal the fictions of capitalist ideology. Their art shapes our thinking and understanding of the world and invites us to envision our realities in different and creative ways. For example, in Second Hand Water—Second Hand Reality, Wu and Inga use the analogy of water distribution to examine the over-processed nature of contemporary existence. Though the distance between users and sources of water has increased—we can drink water readily from taps, or buy a bottle of water at the store. As Wu and Inga observe, water is packaged for us and delivered to us in the same way that news is, and too often we accept this second-hand reality without questioning the source.

To reveal the absurdities of this distribution cycle and bring experience back to the source, Inga performed Pouring Bottled Water Back into the Victoria Harbour (1993) which was filmed by Wu. It is forbidden by law to dump anything into Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour but what is

 criminal about dumping water into water? By opening up this loophole in a mischievous way and juxtaposing "processed" water with its "natural" source, the action reveals a contemporary paradox: our "natural" water is not natural, but in fact so dirty from human pollution that one wouldn’t dare swim in it. Appropriately, in a subsequent performance, Posing for Swimming (1994), Wu and Inga are posed in bathing gear, ready to dive into these same murky waters. The effect is hilarious and at the same time sobering: we accept the ways things are handed to us through human interpretation and production, but our environment is suffering from human abuse. Without being prescriptive or dogmatic, Wu and Inga reveal the urgent need for a reconceptualization of society’s relationship with nature, and it is here that the concept of Thing’s Right(s) becomes more relevant than ever.

These are but a sampling of the many projects in this book that illustrate Wu and Inga’s approach to art making. Aesthetically their art comes across as light, playful, and unassuming – no different than anything we encounter in our everyday lives. However, their art rest on a very clear artistic philosophy that is evident in Wu’s earlier art and developed further through collaboration with Inga. This philosophy is interpreted in imaginative ways throughout the book’s accompanying essays. I found the essays by Chinese authors particularly interesting as they help to explain the Chinese wordplay inherent in Wu’s concepts and the Chinese traditions his practice draws upon. As curator Gao Minglu notes, “Wu’s discussion happens in a very Chinese way, where analogy is employed as method . . . [and] poetic, intuitive, random, imaginative, and ambiguous approaches appear to be crucial factors in his methodology.” What I enjoy most about Wu’s approach is the very Daoist idea that art is merely a container to hold the concepts. Once we’ve grasped the concept, we can forget about the art—just as, in the famous Zhuangzi riddle: “Words exist because of meaning—once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.” For me, this is the beauty of something that is both simple and profound—and perhaps refreshingly so in today’s contemporary art world—profound because its so simple.

It may be because Wu’s "containers" appear so ordinary and everyday and because his approach is so indirect and casual that his brilliant conceptual art has been largely unrecognized and often misunderstood in the Chinese art scene. This is a point that several authors raise in their essays, and perhaps it is the motivation for the book itself. Yet such a fate may be not so much a tragedy as it is a necessary element of being truly avant-garde. Wu and Inga’s art making sits at the crux of the art world’s debates about relational aesthetics and the capacity for art to have social impact.

Wu Shanzhuan: Red Humour International Published by Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong, 2005) With essays by Norman Bryson, Qiu Zhijie, Gao Minglu, Ursula Panhans-Bühler, Gao Shiming, and an interview by Martina Köppel-Yang In English and Chinese, with illustrations

 a short review of from reality to fantasy: the art of luis chan lai mei-lin

Luis Chan (1905–1995) has long been regarded by Hong Kong art critics and art historians alike as one of the most acclaimed painting masters of that city in the twentieth century. Learning to paint through a correspondence course, Chan initially emerged on the art scene as a watercolour landscape painter specializing in depicting Hong Kong scenery in a realist manner. By the late 1930s, his brilliant paintings had earned him the name “The Watercolour King” among his fellow artists. Despite this recognition and his continued success for almost three decades, he decisively dropped the realist mode in the face of challenges from a new generation of modern-style artists in the 1960s and immersed himself in a long period of intense stylistic experimentation. In less than a decade, he tried his hand at a great variety of materials and techniques representing a broad spectrum of modern art styles including Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstraction, Hard-Edge, and Colour Field painting. His eventual choice was to turn to the suggestive marks produced through the monotype printing technique that helped him enter the “modern” phase of his career and that accommodated the creation of a world of fantasy in which figures, beasts, fish, and demons magically co-exist. In the late 1970s, Chan concentrated on a form of figure painting that wryly commented on man’s follies and foibles; later in the 1980s, he employed a splash-paint method to produce pure abstract canvases that displayed a whole new world of vibrant colours and dynamic lines. Yet, whichever style he adopted, his gaze was always fixed on the life and people of Hong Kong. Apart from painting, Chan was also active as an art teacher, art critic, art writer, exhibition organizer, art club convener, and art adviser. Such multiple roles allowed him to enjoy an engagement with different artistic domains throughout his career. Though a loner in his artistic experimentation, Chan is hailed as an original practitioner who has

Luis Chan sketching in the street at Shaukiwan during the 1940s. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.

 succeeded in forging a modern style tinged with a strong Hong Kong flavour.

To celebrate the centenary of his birth in 2005, the Luis Chan Trust joined hands with the Asia Art Archive to launch a book project to commemorate his lifelong artistic pursuit. The result came out in August 2006 with the publication of a 228-page volume entitled From Book Cover of From Reality to Fantasy: The Art of Luis Chan. Reality to Fantasy: The Art of Luis Chan. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part is a chronology of Chan compiled by the editor, Jack Lee; the second part, entitled “The Watercolour King,” consists of eight articles addressing Chan’s life, teaching, and early watercolours; the third part is likewise made up of eight articles, all grouped under the heading “The World of Fantasy,” which explores Chan’s stylistic transition in the second phase of his career. Among the sixteen pieces of writing, four are by Chan himself and four are reviews by the artists and art critics of his day, including E. M. Barrett, Pau Shiu Yau, Nigel Cameron, and Lui Shou Kwan. While Chan’s own writings allow us a glimpse into his private life and his ideas about artistic expression and evolution, the others help inform us of the degree of respect he had acquired in the eye of his contemporaries.

The authors of the remaining articles include Laurence Tam, Chan’s former pupil and ex-curator of the Hong Kong Museum of Art; Clara Chan, Chan’s daughter; Chang Tsong Zung, Chan’s art dealer who has been representing him since the early 1980s; David Clarke, an art historian based in Hong Kong; and two outside scholars, John Clark from Australia and Lu Peng from mainland China. Although each of their articles is illustrated, a total of 208 paintings from the Trust’s collection, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, as well as some private galleries and collections are also included as documentation of the artist’s extensive artistic endeavours. They span 1929 to 1987—that is, from the time Chan started to emerge on the art scene until the year he declared that his creative powers were exhausted and he would cease painting altogether. The illustrations consist of watercolours, oils, and collages, among them a number of watercolours chosen from the three thousand paintings in the family collection are published in this book for the first time. The images, which constitute the bulk of the book, serve as a visual testimony to Chan’s prolific career and to the great diversity of his artistic creativity. Together with the written texts, they create an unfolding picture of the artist’s life, the sources and processes of his artistic creation, and his exhibiting and writing activities. The visual and written information thus provide us with important clues in the study of the internal, as well as external, factors that influenced Chan’s artistic bearings in different periods of his career. The provision of a Chinese/English translation in the book also makes it easy for readers of both languages to gain access to the information, although not all of the texts are translated in full.

Among the articles on Chan’s early artistic career, the one by Laurence Tam entitled “Luis Chan: My Teacher and Art Adviser,” is no doubt the most informative. In it the author outlines Chan’s teaching method, the tools he used, and the ways he conducted his outdoor sketching and illusionistic monotypes. Aside from that, Tam also shows us some of the pencil drawings and watercolour sketches he completed at Chan’s studio in the early 1960s, as well as six Christmas cards he received from Chan in the 1980s. The Christmas cards, which are all hand-made by the artist and hitherto have rarely been seen, are essential documents for exploring his move from realism to surrealism at a later stage. Toward the end of his article, Tam speaks of Chan’s

 contributions to the promotion of art in Hong Kong during his 27-year tenure as Honorary Adviser to the then City Hall Museum and Art Gallery (renamed the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 1975). Anyone who is interested in probing the development of modern art in this former British colony and its connection with the curatorial vision of its official museum would find this piece valuable for his or her studies. Jack Lee has contributed an article, entitled “Besides Painting: Luis Chan’s Early Activities in Art,” that covers Chan’s early artistic career, including his involvement in art critiques and art club organizations. These two pieces of writing tie in with each other to offer us a better picture of the artist’s participation and influence in the early Hong Kong art world.

Of all articles that examine Chan’s stylistic changes, Chang Tsong Zung’s “Luis Chan: A World Within Worlds” presents the most perceptive discussion. Chang is the director of the Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong, which has been representing Chan’s work since 1983. Throughout all these years, he has published many articles about the artist in the gallery’s exhibition catalogues and in some newspapers and art magazines published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Because of their close relationship, Chang was able to gather a lot of first-hand information concerning Chan’s art and life, from which he has created a distinctive psychoanalytical interpretation of his work. The article appearing in the present volume can be viewed as an agglomeration of his past writings, in which he surveys Chan’s oeuvre by interweaving works of different periods in an examination of their formal similarities and differences. One thing that distinguishes Chang’s writing from that of the other authors is that while he has not neglected the social and cultural factors that might have affected Chan’s creative path, he goes directly to Luis Chan, Untitled (Landscape), 1953. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. the core of his paintings and discusses in great length their iconographical transformations. According to Chang, the early watercolours by Chan are a realistic portrayal of the physical world, whereas his subsequent dreamscapes and figure paintings symbolize an emotional landscape, an allegorical portrayal of the human heart. Indeed, Chang is the one who has invested the greatest effort in carving a niche for Chan in the history of modern Hong Kong art. Without his incessant promotion, Chan might not have secured the high position he now has in the artistic context of Hong Kong. That said, we could not deny that Chang’s Luis Chan, Untitled, 1969. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. argument for the modernity of Chan’s

 Luis Chan, Untitled, 1978. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. work sounds generally convincing, despite some exaggeration at times. Chang’s convincing interpretation sits in sharp contrast with Lu Peng’s rather flimsy argument. In his article, entitled “Melancholic Fantasies: The Art and Style of Luis Chan’s Painting,” Lu analyzes some of Chan’s watercolour and oil paintings from a similar psychoanalytical perspective and uses the examples he has chosen to argue that there is a dominant sense of gloom running through Chan’s work. Lu’s assertion, however, appears untenable as his interpretation stems merely from an utterance by Chan at one point and is grounded neither in an overview of the artist’s artistic development nor in an examination of the specific environment in which he worked. Consequently, his conclusion that the artist tended not to express jubilant subjects, even though he was a cheerful person in real life, inevitably appears to be a sweeping statement, and is contrary to the general view about Chan’s work as being deceptively childlike and aesthetically charming, though occasionally sarcastic.

David Clarke’s “Towards Psychic Decolonisation: The Development of Luis Chan’s Painting,” is a slightly modified version of his previous article published inArt Asia Pacific.1 In this short piece of writing, Clarke accounts with lucidity and concision Chan’s impasse in his artistic career and how his encounter with modernism in Hong Kong in the 1960s spurred him to develop his individual idiom. Although ten years have passed since it was first published, the article presents useful information throughout, and Clarke’s discussion, particularly of Chan’s idiosyncratic reception of high art and popular culture, is thoughtful. In retrospect, we may find certain parts of his discussion inadequate in accounting for the artist’s sudden stylistic change. The missing gaps, however, are now filled by the information provided by other articles in the same volume. John Clark, who interviewed Chan in 1981, also touches on the issue of modernism in his short article, “Luis Chan: A Hong Kong Modernist.” Despite its brevity, its mention of Chan’s acquaintance

 with Lui Shou Kwan (1919–1975), another modern-minded leading artist of Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s, provokes us to think more deeply about Chan’s dramatic shift. Perhaps Chan’s encounter with Lui’s new ink painting and the work of other modern-style artists of the time exerted a far greater impact on his determined search for a modern idiom than has been discussed. Chan’s interaction with artists and art critics contemporaneous with him is an interesting subject that calls for further exploration.

The chronology compiled by Jack Lee, which is placed at the beginning of the book, affords us the as yet most detailed year-by-year record of Chan’s activities and should be of much use for future study of his art. A glance at it reveals that the information on the period before the mid-1960s is far more detailed than that concerning the following years. One plausible reason for this is that Lee’s own research interest is focused more on the first half of the twentieth century. Another reason may be that the artist’s artistic output decreased as his age advanced. This imbalance notwithstanding, it is obvious that Lee spent a great deal of time gathering the information. In regard to Chan’s own writings, however, Lee could have specified their sources more clearly. Instead of indicating that a particular article was published in a Chinese- or English-language newspaper, he could have told us if it appeared specifically in Wah Kiu Yat Po, or The China Mail, for example, since it would save us the trouble of cross-checking every name from the bibliography. Curiously, some of the articles that appear in the chronology are omitted from the bibliography, and vice versa, and all post-1966 newspaper articles listed in the chronology are absent from the bibliography. Moreover, certain details recorded in the chronology are different from those in the bibliography. An example is the year of publication for Chan’s Evolution of Twentieth-Century Painting, which is said to be 1965 in the chronology and 1962 in the bibliography (the photocopy I have in hand shows that the book was published in 1962). Rectification of the above problems would enhance the scholarly value of the chronology.

On the whole, From Reality to Fantasy is a volume of potential interest to both casual readers and serious scholars who are interested in Hong Kong visual culture. With the publication of this book, a wealth of information is made available for art historians to embark on the study of Luis Chan or any other related topics. A prominent figure in the former colonial art circle of Hong Kong, Chan stands as a singular case for exploring Chinese artists’ confrontation with modernism in the twentieth century.

From Reality to Fantasy: The Art of Luis Chan Published by Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong: 2006) With essays by Laurence Tam, Clara Chan, Luis Chan, E.M. Barrett, Pan Shiu Yau, John Clark, Johnson Chang Tsong Zung, Lui Shou Kwan, Jack Lee, David Calrke, Nigel Cameron, Lu Peng In English and Chinese, with illustrations

Notes 1 David Clarke, “Psychic Decolonisation,” Art Asia Pacific vol. 3, no.4 (October 1996), 39–41.

 hong lei at chambers fine art jonathan goodman

Hong Lei, Speak, Memory of Five-Needle Pine, 2005, colour photograph, 37 1/8” x 47 1/8.” Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art, New York.

The pursuit of the classical, in both Asia and the West, carries with it baggage of a considerable scale. Charges of elitism often put the viewer who wants to engage with the past in a difficult position. Art is seen by the opponents of certain kinds of traditionalism as something political or technologically complex and new, while imagery connecting with the beauty of historical references tends to be marginalized as speaking of too small a cross-section of the public—or as anachronistically developing a place in which the past plays a bigger role than it should. Much of my own writing has focused on Asian, particularly Chinese, artworks that use the classical background as a stepping-off point, often presenting a certain esoteric approach that is experienced as something extremely modern. Perhaps the most famous example in Chinese art is Tianshu, or The Book from the Sky, by Xu Bing, who carved some 4,000 nonexistent yet seemingly real characters in woodblocks and printed them as wall texts, hanging scrolls, and four-volume books. In the case of Tianshu, the extreme pessimism, indeed nihilism, we associate with the meaninglessness of the characters is set off by the remarkable technical skill of the artist whose installation manages to look classical and utterly contemporary at the same time.

Unfortunately, Chinese cultural officials, who hardly liked what they saw, especially in the times immediately following the tragedy of Tian’anmen Square, charged that Tianshu was decadent, or at the very least irrelevant, and as a result Xu made his way to America, where he has become

 one of the leading Chinese artists of his generation. Even so, and despite the fact that Xu’s art has consistently referenced Chinese art and thought, he is often counted as an international artist rather than a specifically Chinese one; this reading of his work is most likely based on the fact that Xu has resided in New York for a long time, which has distanced him physically and metaphysically from his own culture. So Xu has been placed in an interesting position, one in which he represents Chinese art within the Western art industry, while he is also considered an international art star by many living in China. The discrepancy between the content in Xu’s art and his residence in living in the West has had no small impact on the way he is perceived. Interestingly, Xu and other artists such as Cai Guo-Qiang have refused to completely assimilate; their art remains, at least to themselves and Western art viewers, resolutely Chinese. At the same time, their conceptual and performative methodologies indicate their highly sophisticated understanding and awareness of Western art strategies from the 1960s and 1970s. So, as happens so often in American culture, a truly hybrid environment flies in the face of the notion of a pure background, in which classical longing is subsumed by the recognition that such purity may be rhetorically important but is, in fact, a myth of integrity in a culture devoted to assimilating, if not actually accepting, as many foreign influences as possible.

The Chinese photographer Hong Lei comes into this dialogue by giving his decidedly classical imagery the feeling of failure, or more specifically decadence, vis-à-vis the artist’s relationship to the historical past. Indeed, the feeling of nostalgia for, and loss of, a worthwhile past is central to Hong’s art, which implies that the theme of yearning for tradition can tell us much about the Chinese, who, after all, have been part of a continuous civilization that goes back 3,000 years. The emotional tenor of Hong’s art is clearly a deliberate choice, an aesthetic of longing that resulted in previous work closely imitating the scenes of Song Dynasty paintings; his earlier show, which took place at Chambers Fine Art in 2003, offered images that were striking in their own way, even as they imitated the art of a dynasty hundreds of years in the past. Hong is an artist of a decidedly classical bent, as his recent show’s title, Transmitting the Ancient, implies. His vocabulary of historical imagery, including a pine branch, a bit of bamboo, and plum Hong Lei, Taihu Stones, 2006, digital print on Xuan paper, 37 1/2” x 25 1/2.” Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art.

 blossoms, suggests that the Chinese art of ink painting still has much to say, despite the fact that Hong’s medium is the photograph. Still, the artist stays true to his culture—his series on Taihu stones, or scholar’s rocks, is powerfully meditative about the imagistic strengths of the past, which Hong clearly respects.

At the same time, however, Hong’s historicist position merges with an attitude that is far more complex and modern in its treatment of traditions. Ersatz flies, hung by thread, transform a pomegranate Hong Lei, Pomegranate, 2002, gelatin silver print on Xuan paper, 19 3/4” x 23 3/4.” branch into something disturbingly Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art. corrupt, while a fake snake is found coiled within a pine tree branch—a bit of mortal danger lurking in the beauty of the landscape. Like Hong’s versions of the great paintings of China, his landscape series both embraces the ancients and distances us from them, as if to say that no reading of tradition can rise free of decay at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As a result, Hong’s aesthetic seems impartially decadent, and not so much a travesty of classical values as the deliberately objective recording of a failed language of images undercut by the passing of time. Part of the power of Hong’s work results from the care he takes in creating it—for example, for his earlier imitations of classical art, he travelled to the places where the landscapes were made and reproduced exactly the views of the paintings— as if it were possible to inhabit the past in a way that began with duplication but then transcended the original to become distinguished art in its own right.

Yet, inevitably, the reality of Hong’s project sets in: we cannot renew an aesthetic or imitate its examples without losing, to some extent, the energy that first animated the original. Here is where the complex charge of decadence sets in, for Hong makes little effort to transcend the noisy, often awful reality that faces us today. As a result, his classicism is reinvented within a postmodern framework, which nods to the grandeur of the past but also implies a grim truth, namely, that we are distanced from the circumstances and the spirit that resulted in the great history of traditional Chinese art. I do not believe that Hong set out to make a derivative art, but I do think that his neoclassicism can inherently be characterized as damaged goods, primarily because time itself has become part of his aesthetic and has so much to do with the atmosphere of decay that pervades his photographs. Nevertheless, Hong’s projects do not only describe the hopelessness of entropy; they also exemplify a genuine attempt at an objectivity suggestive of historical classicism. In his recent show of photographs, he has tended to isolate the images he shoots, creating an awareness of isolation that points out our distance from nature and the landscape, but that also, in Hong’s quiet portrayal of the object, looks to restraint in the reception of his images. This mute but powerful recognition of the objects’ selfhood competes with whatever kind of aesthetic despair is being communicated.

The description of the prints themselves tends to underscore the difficulty Hong faces in creating images that are so close to a historically determinist reading of classical aesthetics. In the four-

 image suite of scholar’s rocks, created in 2006, we can see how the bald treatment of the stones creates an isolation that is deeply postmodern in nature; the confidence we associate with the production of the classical image is gone in favour of a bleakness that underscores the difficulty of pursuing the ideal. Even so, as an audience we are moved by what we can only call the memory of classical power, the accomplishments of historical Chinese art. The odd forms, hollows, and open holes of the Taihu stones are marvellously idiosyncratic; one of them is framed by trees on either side in a way that recalls the subtleties of Chinese painting. As grim as these images may seem at first glance, they remind us that the pursuit of classical distance is not only an imitation of imagery but also a privileged activity, one in which Hong Lei, Taihu Stones, 2006, digital print on Xuan paper, 37 1/2” x 25 1/2.” Courtesy of form takes the place of emotions that Chambers Fine Art. we recognize as involving nostalgia, yearning, and regret. Indeed, these emotions by themselves are so powerful that they cannot be easily caricatured. If anything, Hong’s work supports the notion that the classical, as damaged as it is, remains capable of aesthetic strength, even should that power be unable to compete with what currently animates art.

The other examples of Hong’s art in the show reiterate his obsessive treatment of form, as well as his revisionist treatment of the classical idea. Refinement is present in all his photographs, but their physical isolation as images comes across as a melancholic recognition of its emotional limitations. In Hong’s black-and-white works, we see a small fish whose mouth points to the dead centre of the gelatin silver print; we see a bird perched on a twig with a square, that is to say a manmade, base; we see a group of pomegranates arranged in a rough horizontal line. A small sprig taken from a tree calls our attention to its fragility, a point that earlier examples of classicism might well have rejected in favour of a more vigorous treatment of the branch. And in the Speak, Memory series, scattered collections of artificial botany—sprigs of flowers, bits of foliage—point out the inherent disarray, in fact, the extraordinary randomness, of nature. Here the series again describes fragmented imagery, but the use of colour gives the experience a greater lightness of spirit and mood than the sombre black-and-white views of the other works. At the same time, the images conflate the artificial with the actual experience of nature. Hong is very clearly an artist of classical persuasion, yet he is too smart to take refuge in a language entirely beholden to the past. He makes us wish for a time when his art might take on the appearance of confidence rather than the striking but melancholic energy his photos are invested with.

   

   National Museum of Taiwan

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  Art & Collection

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