A Conversation with Charles Esche Defne Ayas

november/december 2010 Volume 9, Number 6

Inside

Yishu Award for Interviews with Critical Writing on Charles Esche, Cai Contemporary Chinese Guo-Qiang, Gao Art Recipients Shiming Expo 2010 and Reviews from Sydney, Contemporary Art Athens, Beijing Panel Discussion: Global Claims, Local Effects

US$12.00 NT$350.00 printed in Taiwan

VOLUME 9, NUMBER 6, November/december 2010

CONTENTS 2 Editor’s Note 25 4 Contributors

6 A Cry from the Narrow Between: Eros and Thanatos in the Works of Tejal Shah and Han Bing Maya Kóvskaya, Recipient, Inaugural Yishu Award for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art

20 Defending Criticism 44 Sheng Wei, Recipient, Inaugural Yishu Award for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art

25 Better City, Better Art? An Overview of Art at the World Expo 2010 Xhingyu Chen

35 Deconstructing an Encounter during the World Expo 2010: A Conversation with Charles Esche Defne Ayas

69 44 Global Claims, Local Effects Panel Discussion, Shanghai

69 Peasant Da Vincis: A Conversation with Cai Guo-Qiang Mathieu Borysevicz

76 From the Edges of the Earth to Rehearsal: A Conversation with Gao Shiming Marie Leduc

87 87 Recontextualizing Revolution: Yang Fudong and Kostis Velonis at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens Stephanie Bailey

94 The Beauty of Distance: Global Art in the Context of the 17th Sydney Biennale James Donald

102 Mo Yi at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing Jonathan Goodman 94 109 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Du Wenda, Flying Saucer D, no date, aluminum, propeller blades, LED lights, engine, 180 x 400 x 400 cm. Photo: Lin Yi. Cai Guo-Qiang Collection. Courtesy of Cai Studio, New York.

1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art president Katy Hsiu-chih Chien legal counsel Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C.C. Liu Yishu 41 begins with essays by the two   Ken Lum recipients of the Inaugural Yishu Award for -in-chief Keith Wallace Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art,   Zheng Shengtian Maya Kóvskaya and Sheng Wei. Kóvskaya’s   Julie Grundvig text focuses on the work of Han Bing, from Kate Steinmann editorial assistant Chunyee Li Beijing, and Tejal Shah, from Mumbai, and circulation manager Larisa Broyde proposes that an expanded notion of the  coordinator Ioulia Reynolds erotic can productively challenge “normative” web site  Chunyee Li social and political order and embrace what it advisory  means to be truly human. Sheng Wei examines Judy Andrews, Ohio State University what he sees as critical writing’s ever- Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum John Clark, University of Sydney increasing loss of voice, a condition which he Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation believes began in the 1980s, and argues for Okwui Enwezor, Critic & Curator responsibility to history and scholarship rather Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China than to a desire for power in the determination Fei Dawei, Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation of history. Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop In discussing two artists from China and India, Katie Hill, University of Westminster Kóvskaya’s text anticipates issues posed by Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive other texts and by Expo 2010 in Shanghai, Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator namely, international exchange and China’s Lu Jie, Independent Curator cultural and political positioning with respect Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore to other parts of the world. Xhingyu Chen Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University reviews a selection of exhibitions coinciding Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Philip Tinari, Independent Critic & Curator with Expo 2010, an event intended to showcase Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator China to the world. Defne Ayas and Charles Wu Hung, University of Chicago Esche deliberate on some of the challenges of Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar making exchange projects meaningful, in this  Art & Collection Group Ltd. case focusing on China and the Netherlands in 6F. No. 85, Section 1, the exhibition Double Infinity. Affiliated with the Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Double Infinity project is a panel discussion Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 with Hyunjin Kim, Georg Schöllhammer, and Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 Defne Ayas, exploring historical precedents in E-mail: [email protected] our understanding of China relative to parallel vice general manager Jenny Liu conditions in Korea, the former Soviet Union, Alex Kao and Turkey. In the past, such discussions have marketing manager Joyce Lin circulation executive Perry Hsu primarily concentrated on China’s associations Betty Hsieh with the West, but those discussions are now shifting to other parts of the world, including webmaster Website ARTCO, Taipei  Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd., its bordering neighbours. web site www.yishujournal.com Continuing with our coverage of Shanghai, www.yishu-online.com Mathieu Borysevicz interviews Cai Guo-Qiang,  1683 - 3082 who curated the exhibition Peasant Da Vincis. Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited Here, a celebration of DIY inventiveness is also in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, a statement about the lack of value placed on March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: the role of peasants and their contribution to Chinese society. Marie Leduc’s interview with Yishu Office Gao Shiming tracks his decade-long curatorial 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada trajectory, leading up to his conceptual V6Z 2P3 approach for the 8th Shanghai Biennale as its Phone: 1.604.649.8187 Executive Curator. Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: [email protected]

To conclude, we have three reviews: James subscription rates Donald examines the curatorial premise of the 1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) 17th Sydney Biennale, Stephanie Bailey makes an astute comparison between exhibitions    Leap Creative Group of Yang Fudong and Kostis Velonis in Athens,   Raymond Mah art Director Gavin Chow and Jonathan Goodman explores an important designer Philip Wong survey of photographs by Mo Yi in Beijing. No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are Keith Wallace not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版創刊於 2002年5月1日

典藏國際版‧第9卷第6期‧2010年11–12月社長：簡秀枝法律顧問：思科技法律事務所劉承慶創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）

總策劃：鄭勝天 2 編者手記主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 副編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 4 作者小傳史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 編輯助理：黎俊儀行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 6 在生死夾縫中呼號：評韓冰與廣告：雷幽雅（Ioulia Reynolds）網站編輯：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li) Tejal Shah的創作邁雅（Maya Kóvskaya）顧問：王嘉驥田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 首屆Yishu學刊中國當代藝評獎獲獎人安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 巫鴻林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 20 捍衛批評范迪安盛葳招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 首屆Yishu學刊中國當代藝評獎獲獎人胡昉侯瀚如 25 城市，讓藝術更美好嗎？－徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 2010世博會藝術作品評述姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 陳幸宇倪再沁高名潞費大爲 35 解析世博會期間的一次交流活動：楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 與Charles Esche對談盧杰 Lynne Cooke Defne Ayas Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill 44 全球需求，本土影響 Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda 專題討論記錄出版：典藏雜誌社農民達芬奇：蔡國強訪談副總經理：劉靜宜 69 高世光 Mathieu Borysevicz 行銷總監：林素珍發行專員：許銘文謝宜蓉 76 從「地之緣」到「巡逥排演」：社址：台灣臺北市中山北路一段85號6樓與高士明的對話電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 Marie Leduc 電子信箱：[email protected]

87 重構革命語境：楊福東和Kostis Velonis在編輯部： Yishu Office 200-1311 Howe Street, 雅典國立當代美術館 Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada Stephanie Bailey 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 傳真：(1) 604.591.6392 電子信箱: [email protected] 距離之美：第十七屆悉尼雙年展背景下 94 訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與編輯部聯系。的全球藝術設計： Leap Creative Group, Vancouver James Donald 創意總監：馬偉培藝術總監：周繼宏設計師：黃健斌 102 北京三影堂攝影藝術中心莫毅個展印刷：臺北崎威彩藝有限公司 Jonathan Goodman 本刊在溫哥華編輯設計，臺北印刷出版發行。一年6期。逢1、3、5、7、9、11月出版。中英人名對照 109 網址： www.yishujournal.com www.yishu-online.com 管理：典藏雜誌社

國際刊號: 1683-3082

售價每本12美元。訂閲：一年84美元，兩年158美元（含航空郵資）。

Defne Ayas has been based in Shanghai a photographic case study that examines since 2006. She works as a director of the relationship between architecture programs at Arthub Asia (Shanghai) and and signage in Hangzhou, was chosen by as an art history instructor at New York the New York Times as one of the “Best University (Shanghai). Ayas has also been Architectural Books of 2009.” Borysevicz has a curator of PERFORMA since 2004, the also curated and consulted for numerous biennial of visual art performance based venues including Asia Society, MoMA, in New York City. Ayas is serving as an Aperture, Walker Art Center, Mass MoCA, academic advisor to the 8th Shanghai Jack Tilton Gallery, and DDM Warehouse, Biennale, titled Rehearsal, which opens in Shanghai. He has recently been appointed October 2010. the new director of the Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai. Stephanie Bailey, who is of mixed Chinese and British descent, is originally from Hong Xhingyu Chen is a Shanghai-based writer Kong. She studied in the United Kingdom and contemporary art specialist. A longtime and has been living and working in Athens, insider in the local art scene, she has been Greece, for the past four years. Her interests organizing and leading contemporary art lie in contemporary art in relation to social, tours for museum groups, curators, and cultural, and political contexts, and she collectors since 2005. She contributes to views her work as an ongoing education. She Art Asia Pacific, Sculpture Magazine, Nukta is an arts editor of Athens Insider and has Art, ArtInfo, and the International Herald contributed to international publications Tribune, focusing on the contemporary including Art Papers, Art Lies, Naked Punch, Chinese art scene. Her book Chinese Artists: and Adbusters. She leads a foundation course New Media Mid-1980s to 2010 will be in art and design at the Doukas Educational released by Schiffer Publishing in December Centre, Athens, where she also lectures on 2010. She is currently an art editor of Time art history and recently took part in the Out Shanghai. China-Europa Forum, held in Hong Kong and China, 2010, as a representative of James Donald is a freelance curator and culture and arts. an associate editor of Platform Journal of Media and Communications. He has recently Mathieu Borysevicz is an artist, critic, and been published in a range of magazines and curator based in New York and Shanghai. catalogues such as Frieze, Asian Art News, He has been involved with contemporary art and C-Arts, writing on contemporary Asian in China since 1994 and was an editor for art. Donald is also an aspiring fiction writer Artforum in Shanghai from 2007 to 2010. and is currently embarking on his first His writing has appeared in publications novel, which explores the anthropological such as Art in America, Tema Celeste, Art interaction of art and dream. Review, Art Asia Pacific, Modern Painters, World Art, and Yishu. His photography and Charles Esche was born in England and is a video work has been shown internationally well-known curator and writer. Since 2004, at the Tribeca Film Festival; the Institute he has been director of Van Abbemuseum, of Contemporary Art, London; the Eindhoven. He is co-founder and co-editor Bauhaus; the Today Art Museum, Beijing; of Afterall Journal and Afterall Books with the Bronx Museum; and the Israeli Center Mark Lewis. In 2007 and 2009 he was for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. His co-curator of the 2nd RIWAQ Biennials, book project, Learning from Hangzhou, Ramallah; in 2005 he was co-curator of the

4 9th Istanbul Biennial with Vasif Kortun Marie Leduc is an interdisciplinary Ph.D. and in 2002 co-curator with Hou Hanru candidate in art history and sociology and Song Wan Kyung of the Gwangju and SSHRC scholar at the University of Biennale, Korea. Between 2000 and 2004 Alberta, Edmonton, where she is completing he was Director of Rooseum Center for her dissertation research on the topic of Contemporary Art, Malmo. Chinese contemporary art in the global marketplace. In July 2010, she completed Jonathan Goodman studied literature at a year of study and research at the China Columbia University and the University of Academy of Art in Hangzhou funded by Pennsylvania before becoming an art writer the China-Canada Scholars’ Exchange. She specializing in contemporary Chinese art. has written feature articles and reviews on He teaches at Pratt Institute and the Parsons contemporary Canadian art for Canadian School of Design, focusing on art criticism Art and Artichoke. and contemporary culture. Georg Schöllhammer is an author and Hyunjin Kim is a curator and a writer based curator and is editor-in-chief of the in Seoul. She was a co-curator of the 7th magazine Springerin, which he co-founded Gwangju Biennale (2008) and has worked in 1995. From 1988 to 1994, he was visual as a curator for a number of institutions, arts editor for the newspaper Der Standard. including the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Since 1992 Schöllhammer has been Visiting and the Artsonje Center, Seoul, as well Professor of Theory and Contemporary Art as the Insa Art Space. She has written at the Kunstuniversität, Linz. From 2005 to for numerous catalogues and has also 2007, he was the editor-in-chief and head of contributed writings and reviews to the documenta 12 magazines project. He has various Korean art magazines including given lectures and held seminars at various Wolganmisool, ArtinCulture, and Vmspace. universities and colleges around the world, Her most recent publications include and he was a curator for the international Movement, Contingency and Community cooperative project translocation new (Seoul: Darun Books, 2008), Jewyo Rhii media_art. He co-curated the festival du (Seoul: Samuso/Darun Books, 2008), Haegue bist die welt of the annual Vienna Festival Yang (Berlin: Wien Verlag, 2007), and in 2001, as well as exhibitions in Yerevan, Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan (Bilbao: Bucharest, and Sofia. Sala Rekalde, 2007). Sheng Wei received his B.A. in art history Maya Kóvskaya is a curator, writer, and from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, independent scholar who focuses on his M.A. in critical art history and theory contemporary art. In 2009, she received her from Tsinghua University, and his Ph.D. in Ph.D. from the University of California, Western modern art study from the Central Berkeley. She moved to Beijing in 1996 and Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Now he in 2009 established a second home base in is engaged in the artistic study, criticism, New Delhi. She has curated exhibitions of and curatorship of modern/contemporary contemporary Chinese art in Beijing, New art in both China and the West. He was the Delhi, Houston, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and editor-in-chief of Art Exit and Muse Art, Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Art successively, and was awarded the Wang Review, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Senran Art History Award in 2009. Chinese Art, Art iT, Flash Art, Eyemazing, and positions: east asia cultures critique.

5 Maya Kóvskaya, Recipient, Inaugural Yishu Award for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art A Cry from the Narrow Between: Eros and Thanatos in the Works of Tejal Shah and Han Bing

“I am neither living nor dead and cry From the narrow between.” –Sappho1

ros has been a critical concept in social, cultural, and political theory since the time of the Greeks, and Thanatos—the demonic Epersonification of Death in Greek mythology—figures as its antithesis. If Thanatos is seen as the underlying impulse of destruction that drives many aspects of human behaviour, Eros is the countervailing life force that is thought to drive human generativity and creativity. Sigmund Freud analyzed the relationship between these two impulses, or “drives,” and explored their larger sociopolitical implications in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930),2 which investigates what he sees as the fundamental tension between the antinomies within the Libido (Eros), and the Death Drive (Thanatos). He suggested that the relationship between the chaos- producing libidinal drives intrinsic to Eros and the destructive energies of Thanatos necessitate the order-inducing logic of social arrangements that lead to repression as a major leitmotif of human history. Herbert Marcuse, in his 1955 classic, Eros and Civilization,3 critiqued Freud’s rendering of this tension, arguing for the construction of a non-repressive society that is uplifted by the liberation of Eros rather than endangered by it.

In the works of Bombay-based artist Tejal Shah and Beijing-based artist Han Bing, this potent power of the erotic and the paradoxical tension between generativity and destructivity—between Eros and Thanatos—are central themes that permeate each of their engaging, provocative bodies of work. While assumptions of a bedrock “human nature” are no longer epistemologically tenable, one can nevertheless take these categories as heuristic analytics useful in exploring opposing dynamics that arise from the existential conditions of human social and political order.

The feminist poet Audre Lorde explored the theme of “the erotic as power” from a different perspective in her seminal 1984 essay “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”4 She describes how Eros transcends the libidinal and becomes an affirmative embrace of life. “The very word erotic,” she reminds us, “comes from the Greek word Eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power. . . .” Lorde forcefully dissociates the erotic from the pornographic or merely sexual, arguing that Eros is nothing less than “an enactment of life force” and the embodiment “of that creative energy empowered.”5 By engaging life with Eros-laden mindfulness, she writes, we reclaim our world, and our own

6 agency and power in the process, because we own everything we do, and thus even the most infinitesimal acts serve to inscribe our presence into the world: “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings,”6 and “our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence.”7 By engaging others in this manner, we treat them as ends in themselves—as genuine interlocutors capable of sharing our joy—rather than as instrumental means used to fulfil selfish ends.

While Lorde does not speak explicitly in terms of Thanatos-like violence, she discusses the ways in which contemporary societies are threatened by the spectre of an unleashed Eros, saying “of course, women so empowered are dangerous.”8 Although her focus is specifically on female empowerment, her insights are relevant to us all. When she argues that “the principle horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need . . . is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal, and fulfilment,” she echoes aspects of Sigmund Freud and Herbert Marcuse: Freud in the sense that there is an impulse towards repression that is built into the order of things (though she would not go so far as to argue that this is intrinsic to the psychological structure of human civilization, as he did), and Marcuse in the sense that a greater good can be attained through the unleashing of the erotic. For Lorde, a world in which human beings affirm their own powers and celebrate them is a world where the possibility of healing the wounds inflicted by the disciplinary ordering principles of our societies is accessible to us. “We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves,”9 she writes, elaborating this idea as such:

When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only, rather than from our internal knowledge and needs . . . we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense.10

The two person exhibition, A Cry from the Narrow Between (March 12–April 3, 2010, Gallery Espace, New Delhi), featuring Tejal Shan and Han Bing is an exhibition that I curated. It is a visual, aural, and conceptual exploration of this tension between Eros and Thanatos that finds expression in the sometimes transgressive and socially constructed practices of self- making and nation-building. Taking its title from a line in Greek poet Sappho’s The Arbour, the concept of “narrow between” directs our gaze toward the liminal spaces between creation and destruction, the erotic and the violent, the autonomous and the determined, and, in the context of this exhibition, against the backdrop of India and China’s changing societies.

For Sappho, that “narrow between” was the space between life and death, wrought by the emotional purgatory of forbidden, transgressive love.

7 For both Tejal Shah and Han Bing, the “narrow between” transcends the personal and touches on interlocked questions of gender, sexuality, desire, power, self-making, and nation-making.

In spite of major challenges mounted against the invidiously heteronormative dominant ideologies of societies worldwide, gender roles and sexual norms continue to circumscribe the limits of socially-accepted sexuality and gendered selfhood for most people. Moreover, the dominant society in many places continues to negate and abject homosexual desire and gender ambiguity as a subversive, “unnatural,” or dangerous perversion. In this light, for both artists gender functions as a “narrow between”—a site of agonal struggles for self-determination in an often punitive social and discursive context that denies the legitimacy of identities that transgress the normative boundaries policed by the dominant society. As such, gender operates in their semiotic systems as much a metonym for the vicissitudes and challenges of self-making, and a metaphor for an array of exclusionary, socially-constructed divisions, such as class or caste, as it is an empirical referent for “biological states,” or a category of ascribed identity. Gender, then, offers a point of entry into larger, homologous questions about power and marginalization, disciplinary regulation, and autonomy, more generally.

While Tejal Shah’s work deals more directly with gender in relation to selfhood and nation-making—the place, roles, and rights of people who do not conform to the dominant paradigms of gender and sexuality, their resultant marginalization, and the other costs of their difference—Han Bing’s work deals more explicitly with class and changing material culture against the backdrop of China’s juggernaut campaign of urbanized “modernization.” Gender emerges in his work indirectly, and he uses gender ambiguity and erotic engagement as mimetic metonymical spaces prised open at the interstices of self/other, human/animal, nature/civilization, East/ West, and other binary constructions that serve to delimit and divide us from both ourselves and each other.

Instantiations of Thanatos—violence, destructivity, hate—figure in a Tejal Shah, installation view of Untitled (on violence), 2010, number of both artists’ works. In Tejal Shah’s Untitled (on violence) (2010), single-channel video, digital photograph, and LED text she consciously blurs the fictive and the factual, using staged photography panel. Courtesy of the artist as well as documentary video footage and statements of hate-driven and Project 88, Mumbai. violence against hijras. Within the practices of the hijra community, gender is embodied across a spectrum that includes transvestite, transsexual, transgender, intersex, gender ambiguity, and androgynous identities. Likewise, sexual preferences are equally varied. References to a “third gender” date back as far as the historical record goes on the

8 Top: Tejal Shah, Untitled subcontinent. Like transgender people (on violence) (detail), 2010, single-channel video, digital everywhere, hijra identities are surrounded photograph, and LED text panel. Courtesy of the artist by stereotypes and misconceptions. and Project 88, Mumbai. Hijras frequently join together to form Right: Tejal Shah, Untitled (on violence) (detail), 2010, “families” that offer acceptance and nurturing single-channel video, digital that their biological families often refuse photograph, and LED text panel. Courtesy of the artist to give. Many undergo a training and and Project 88, Mumbai. socialization process and offer a variety of services at religious ceremonies involving good fortune and fertility, song and dance at weddings, and blessings for newborn children. In spite of these widely accepted ritualized functions performed by hijras for members of the dominant society, both individuals and the community are stigmatized, subjected to widespread discrimination and abuse, and its members often have few viable professional options beyond these ritualized ceremonies, begging, or sex trade work. That members of the hijra community come predominantly from lower class and caste backgrounds only serves to compound their marginalization and amplify their disenfranchisement.

Tejal Shah’s large, staged photography work depicts a scene that is both aesthetically meticulous and deeply unsettling, tinted with the faint aura of almost pornographic glamour. A beautiful hijra woman, dressed in an elegant sari, lies beaten on the ground. It is unclear whether she is even conscious, and the tableau is so painful to look upon that perhaps the viewer will hope she is not. To the side, we see the lower body of a police officer from the waist down. His posture suggests that his pants are unzipped, and a pale amber arc of his urine streams down on the woman he has presumably had sex with and then beaten with the long stick in his hand—his other “phallus.”

9 Across the gallery room from this photograph is a stark, single-channel Top: Han Bing, Love in the Age of Big Construction II, 2006, “video portrait,” in which we see the face of a brutally battered hijra. performance installation and video. Courtesy of the artist. Her gaze meets that of the viewer and then turns away. There is nothing Bottom: Han Bing, Love in the glamorous or erotic here, only victimization and pain. A testimony, which Age of Big Construction III, 2006, relates in uneuphemistic terms to the violence and degradation a sex performance installation and video. Courtesy of the artist. worker has been subjected to, streams by in glowing red on an LED panel that accompanies the video and photograph. Although the account is horrific—police abuse, gang rape, and vicious beatings—and in spite of her clear exhaustion, she refuses to accept the subject position of agentless victim. She ends her statement defiantly, stating: “I have moved on now. I now help other kothis and hijras by teaching them and giving them all the information I have learnt. I don’t believe in any god any more (Hindu or Muslim). They have never helped me at all. Now I have my own hands and I do sex work and fend for myself.”

Indeed, the violence—both symbolic and physical—often suffered by hijras is a brutal manifestation of the Thanatos-like hatred of a deeply repressed society directed at visible transgression and an expression of outrage at the embodiment of “the erotic as power” in the quotidian lives and selves of these people. It is perhaps precisely through the mutual aid and “sharing of joy” (of the sort that Lorde describes) among hijras that they have managed to survive and continue to persist in living out inner visions of their “authentic selves” in their everyday lives, particularly given the exacting price that hijras often pay simply for being who they are.

In Han Bing’s series Love in the Age of Big Construction (2006–ongoing), violence is less overt, but the tension between Eros and Thanatos is nonetheless pervasive. In Love in the Age of Big Construction II (2006), both a performance and a video of the performance, Han Bing’s erotic affections are directed at a machine of demolition and construction. His hands glide down the muscular metal arm of the enormous earthmover as he caresses it like a lover, and his lush lips brush across the paint and rust-flecked surface of the machine, lingering, then pulling back before moving on to anoint the metal with more languid kisses that accompany the seduction of this hulking steel claw. His skin is slick with sweat, and his nude-silk stockings are ripped and smeared with machine oil. Under a gauzy white canopy, on a “wedding bed” of billowing cotton-like clouds, Han Bing seduces the claw of the earthmover for three trembling hours.

In his performance Love in the Age of Big Construction III (2006), the wedding canopy has been replaced by iron girders, the sort used in the construction of simple brick dwellings. They form the four posters around the cement platform that is both bed and the frame of a home. Again, cotton, this time ripped from bedding and resembling insulation material, is strewn across the platform, creating a nest for the enormous steel claw of the earthmover. While Han Bing uses his erotic ministrations to tame this machine that smashes homes and tears up fields, a crew of migrant labourers in their hard hats and work clothes lie as if dreaming near the “bed/construction site” installation. Each migrant is curled around a mound of bricks, and iridescent bubbles waft through the air, full of beautiful promises of progress and prosperity that burst as they descend to

10 11 earth. The never-ending labour of building a new world—heavy machinery crushing homes, bulldozing away rubble, and legions of workers engaged in backbreaking labour—loops on a screen behind the performance in the accompanying video work, Under Construction. In the name of these so-called “dirty, low-class, uncivilized” masses of labouring people—a common way of describing them in Chinese society—who construct the cities that have no place for them, this performative intervention offers up a sort of secular prayer.

In this series of multimedia performance installations, Han Bing has employed a “dialectic of antinomies,” like that which exists between Eros and Thanatos, to create space for overcoming. Using his vulnerable, flesh- and-blood body, he warms the metal claw; using the lightness of the cottony clouds, he holds up a ton of cold steel. With erotic caresses, he tries to animate the unresponsive machine, perhaps hoping that the will of the sensual body can overcome the numbed quality of the contemporary age; seeking succour for the wounds of the world, he uses his fragile, mortal body to enact a love of that flawed, human world. In this way, he uses Eros to tame Thanatos, seduction to overcome violation, and generativity to overcome destructivity in a perhaps quixotic attempt to ameliorate the destruction and violence of China’s process of “modernization.” Here the huge steel claw of an earthmover functions as a multimodal sign (which is to say that it signals meaning through various modes of relations between signified and signifier)—at once iconic, indexical, and conventionally symbolic—for the destruction and violence that has accompanied China’s attempts to construct an urbanized modernity by State fiat.

In both artists’ works, class and gender share a homologous relationship, and those marginalized by the dominant order are asymmetrically subject to violence. The social category of hijra is discursively constituted by the gaze of the dominant society as profane, “untouchable,” yet simultaneously called upon to perform the ritualized work of dispensing blessings, as well as perform spectacles of glamour and sexual gratification to members of the same society that abjects them. Likewise, the beleaguered and marginalized rural migrant labourers in Han Bing’s work—those constructors of the new, “modern” China—who work obscene hours in unsafe conditions for unreliable pay; their bodies used as the altar upon which to offer the nation its fantasy of urbanized modernity—while they build a gleaming, brave new world that has nothing but contempt for them and their sacrifices.

Yet violence is not the only story in either artist’s work. With an erotic ethos that echoes Lorde’s invocation, Han Bing also celebrates the generative power, beauty, and dignity of labour, labouring people, and the ordinary objects that sustain their quotidian existences. In his ongoing Mating Season series (2001–present), which consists of live performative interventions, performance photography, and video, Han Bing investigates the shifting values and power relations within Chinese society and explores the boundaries between profane and sacred, and platonic and erotic in relation to material culture. In particular, he interrogates the paradigm shift that has repudiated the worth of ordinary objects that nevertheless still sustain the lives of working class and rural people for whom this era’s orgy

12 Han Bing, Sleeping Together: Mating Season, No. 4, 2001, performance photography, Tongxian, 150 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Left: Han Bing, Common Ground: Mating Season, No. 3, 2001, performance photography, BCLU Foreign Students’ Dorm, Beijing, 150 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Right: Han Bing, My Intimate Past with a Shovel: Mating Season, No. 7, 2005, performance photography, Beijing, 120 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

of consumptive excess is out of reach. Mating Season eroticizes everyday objects—especially tools of manual labour, construction, and sources of sustenance. Han Bing animates these objects with Eros, investing them with a subtle sense of the sacred. In doing so, the artist reminds us of the power of the quotidian, of the mundane things that make, shape, and in many ways structure our relationships to the lived world. Like Hannah Arendt, with her invocation of amor mundi—to love the world, our world—he reminds us that a reverence for the world that we have made is the first step in taking responsibility for it.

In a similar move, Tejal Shah celebrates the transformative beauty and generative power of people who have the self-knowledge and courage to “become who they really are” in a veritably Nietzschean act of self- overcoming. In dramatic contrast to the derogatory and pejorative tropes often presented in the mainstream media, transgender people show themselves to be ordinary people seeking to live their lives and be themselves in the face of enormous obstacles. The hijra protagonists in the artist’s two-channel video installation What are You? (2006) are rendered not as stereotyped “drag queens” or “ladyboys” acting out

13 Tejal Shah, What are You?, 2006, two-channel video installation, 11 min. Courtesy of the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.

Bottom: Tejal Shah, The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne/Burned on the water, from the Hijra Fantasy series, 2006, digital photograph, 96.5 x 147 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.

hyperbolic performances or parodies of mainstream “femaleness,” but rather a diverse population of people boldly going about their lives and embracing and enacting the identities they know to be their true selves. They wear saris, dresses, jeans. They gaze at the camera with a disarming candour that commands respect and invites dialogue. In the video, we follow the gender reassignment surgery of one of the participants, Sneha, interspersed with images of popular notions of masculinity that seem cartoonish next to the complex, real person relating her transformation. The unfurling red rose that appears in the video is both symbolic of the glorious flowering of their inner selves externalized and realized, and a metaphor offered by one of the participants, who described herself as a white rose amidst red who must prick herself with her own thorns and bleed into order to become a red rose herself.

In her Hijra Fantasy series (2006), the artist worked closely with three of

14 Tejal Shah, You too can her protagonists from the video touch the moon—Yashoda with Krishna, from the Hijra installation to create the staged Fantasy series, 2006, digital photograph, 147 x 96.5 cm. tableaux in which they enact Courtesy of the artist and Project 88, Mumbai. their own personal fantasies of themselves. In The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne/burned on the water, celebrated transgender activist Laxmi poses as Cleopatra, reclining seductively on the ground, draped in white while her consort stands above, her power over his desire resplendently respresented through his erect gold lamé codpiece. In You too can touch the moon—Yashoda with Krishna, Malini’s desire to be a mother is enacted through a transgressive, “queered” restaging of Raja Ravi Varma’s painting Yashoda with Krishna. In Southern Siren—Maheshwari, the protagonist envisions herself as a classic heroine from South Indian cinema in the throes of a passionate romantic encounter with a typical male hero.

Tejal Shah, Southern Siren— What is most striking about Maheshwari, from the Hirja Fantasy series, 2006, digital these scenes, however, is not photograph, 147 x 96.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and their glamour or drama, or even Project 88, Mumbai. the fact that the women posing are transgendered. Rather, it is the commonness of their fantasies that is most poignant and perhaps also telling—they dream of the things many dream about: being beautiful, glamourous, and powerful, having a family, giving love and being loved in return. On the one hand, the commonplace nature of these fantasies reunites them with the dominant society that abjects them as untouchable Others, but, on the other hand, it underscores the profound extent to which—even for radical representatives of the marginalized—the horizons of the conceivable and desirable are bounded by the hegemonic ideology of the dominant society.

It is noteworthy that the artistic practice expressed in making this work embodies a form of power-sharing in the project of constructing an alternative gaze, and in doing so offers to bridge the divide in a different way: by engaging in an equal creative partnership with participants in the conceptualization and making of images, Tejal Shah offers a space within the work for the agency and creative powers of the individuals participating in the project to unfurl social misconceptions, inviting them to represent themselves in their own images and on their own terms.

The sound installation from the What are You? series reiterates this sentiment and grounds it in the real, specific experiences and desires of

15 individuals. The looped and textured interweaving of hijra voices describing their experiences, with sound effects and music, provides the aural accompaniment to the viewers’ own experience of gazing at themselves in the huge gilded mirror that is part of the piece. Rather than seeing images of hijras, as in the other works, viewers are confronted with their own images while listening to hijras share their thoughts on identity, community, family, the violence of alienation, love and belonging.

Tejal Shah, What are You?, 2006, sound installation with mirror in gilded frame, vinyl text. Courtesy of the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.

The “hijra community,” relates one of the voices, is “just a reflection of what is there outside.” At this moment, viewers staring at their own reflections are provoked to consider that “narrow between” dividing self and Other, refracted through the dialogical interplay of their own corporeal images, the hijra voices in their ears, and the substantive content of their statements, against the backdrop of the accompanying text-based work.

“We are also human beings,” says one of the speakers. “We need a place; recognition…I need some place in our society.” The power of this work, and indeed its holistic fulfilment as a complete piece takes place in the new semeiotic sign generated in the mind of the viewer who is listening and watching and challenged to consider how very narrow this socially constructed division between self and this putative “Other” really is. The speaker tells the listener that (hijra) “gender is different, that’s all, but we are not different. We are a human being. We have also same blood, same colour, same eyes, same everything. Yeah, same heart also.”

The abstract notion of alienation and abjection by dominant society is rendered poignantly, personal, and intimately close as viewers watch themselves while listening to statements such as: “We just want to be a woman. But the pressure constantly says that you need to be this kind of woman.” The speaker describes pressure from the family to conform to heteronormative roles, to be “a man,” to wear men’s clothes, and to submerge one’s genuine self in the gender role prescribed by society. When the speaker frankly says, “I don’t like this heterosexual family. It’s very horrible. This is some kind of power. . . . I don’t like that power at all,” the lived pain of this pressure is no longer something abstract and distant, no longer something that is easy to turn away from as “someone else’s suffering.” The dialogical interplay of mirrored images of ourselves interpolated with the voices of these “Others”

16 Han Bing, Under Construction, demands an acknowledgement of the humanness, and commonness of 2006, video stills. Courtesy of the artist. these experiences, de-Othering the hijra in the process and offering a site within ourselves for the mending of this socially-constructed rupture—this artificial division between ourselves and these people who have been abjected by society. The joyful brio of the accompanying text work is simply brilliant and requires no explanation: “I am often seen by people as a ‘What’s that?’ to which I usually respond ‘Isn’t beautiful enough’?”

Indeed, this body of work invites the viewer to share in celebration of selfhood and the joy enacted in these scenes. And as Lorde puts it, “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”11

Like Tejal Shah, Han Bing also invites his subjects to perform as themselves and integrates documentary and fictive elements into his oeuvre. In Love in the Age of Big Construction, the video work that provides the background to his carnal coupling with heavy machinery—Under Construction—integrates documentary footage of the arduous manual labour, demolition, and construction work that is transforming China brick by brick, cement catacomb by catacomb. The tension between the labouring body with its naked corporeal need and the machine of

17 “modernization” that is fed by human desire and capital accumulation is pervasive in Han Bing’s work, as it is in the process of building a nation. With nation building comes the attempt by the State to create citizens with particular sorts of subjectivities—standardized, interchangeable, and governable subjects. In a similar fashion, the regulatory discourses of the dominant society militates against identities that transgress the limited range of roles deemed socially acceptable. Class and gender are both cogs in the machinery of governmentality, which seeks to render human beings uniformly governable. Both state and society make claims on citizens, and the existence of government demands a transfer of individual authority to that “Leviathan”—in Hobbesian terms—in a tacit “contract” that promises to order the chaos of human relations and protect people from one another.

Yet even as the State demands regulable, standardized citizens, it invariably fails to extend its guarantees to all citizens uniformly in ways that frequently break along class and gender lines. In Han Bing’s work, we are reminded that rural people and the working poor are not equally protected under China’s regime of “modernization.” Labouring peoples are expected to bear the enormous human costs of the “Chinese Dream,” but reap few of its fruits. Similarly, in Tejal Shah’s works, we see how transgressors of gender “norms” are denied many basic protections under law.

One of the most powerful moments in the What are You? video installation takes place as the hijra participants recite from the constitution a litany of rights they should enjoy but rarely do. In particular, they recite extensively from Article 19, which states that “all citizens” have the right: “(a) to freedom of speech and expression; (b) to assemble peaceably and without arms; (c) to form associations or unions; (d) to move freely throughout the territory of India; (e) to reside and settle in any part of the territory of India; and (f) to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business.”12 Yet as the Untitled (on violence) work so painfully demonstrates, representatives of the State, such as policemen, are all too frequently the perpetrators of harassment, abuse, and bodily harm against transgendered people and rarely their protectors, making a travesty of the laws and the “social contract” that purports to protect them. Control over geographic and social mobility are tightly linked, and the resurgence of divisive right-wing fundamentalist politics in regions such as Maharashtra focuses its discriminatory policies along regional, linguistic lines that compound the marginalization of many groups.

Like the migrant labourers in Han Bing’s work, hijras, and indeed most people from lower-class, lower-caste backgrounds are more often disciplined by the law than protected by it. Indeed, the problems of marginalization that they face are not even unique to developing countries like China and India, but are at their most basic level represent pervasive problems of power and powerlessness confronted by the disenfranchised everywhere. Although we live in a world where universalist claims have lost their persuasive purchase, it is still possible to talk about existential realities of power asymmetries and worthwhile to consider how alienated human agency can be reconstituted and enacted on this profoundly uneven playing field.

18 While Lorde’s discussion of Eros can fall into rather essentializing traps of treating the erotic as a specifically feminine quantity (and one assumes by contrast that violence is treated as masculine), examination of the gendered identity of the hijras confounds these tropes and problematizes them. The “narrow between” that divides the “male” and the “female” is performatively annihilated by transgendered people and shows the limited efficacy of such binaries in understanding the human condition. For many transgendered people, the issue is less a desire to conform to socially constructed norms of a gender opposite, that of the subject’s bio-body, but rather to be allowed to be a person unconstrained by the narrow confines of social conceptions of what it conventionally means to be a “man” or a “woman,” some overlap of common desires notwithstanding.

For Han Bing, the embodied gendered subject performed in both Mating Season and Love in the Age of Big Construction is pandrogynous—it is a body that resists the rigid ascription of one gender or another and insists on the expansive beauty of spanning both, while celebrating the actual porousness of those boundaries. Indeed, were those boundaries less porous and subject to fewer border crossings, there would be no perceived need to police them in the first place.

In other words, it is precisely from that “narrow between” separating the boundaries of the categories that are meant to constrain us that something like liberation can release its erotic potency and in doing so embrace a larger, more beautiful, more whole conception of the human being—an unruly, glorious creature whose agency is expressed, in part, through the power of the erotic. While society is still fraught with impulses to regulate, discipline, and do violence to those who are different or transgress social and cultural norms, the potent possibilities of Eros belong to all of us, and, as Lourde writes, “recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.”13

Notes 1 Sappho (612 BC), “The Arbor,” trans. Guy Davenport, http://judithpordon.tripod.com/poetry/sappho_ the_arbor.html. 2 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002; originally published 1930). 3 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). 4 Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007; originally published in 1984). 5 Ibid., 55. 6 Ibid., 54. 7 Ibid., 57. 8 Ibid., 55. 9 Ibid., 57. 10 Ibid., 58. 11 Ibid., 56. 12 From the Constitution of India, available at http://www.constitution.org/cons/india/p03019.html. 13 Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 59.

19 Sheng Wei, Recipient, Inaugural Yishu Award for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art Defending Criticism

decade ago, critical aphasia, or criticism’s loss of voice, began to become an issue of concern in the art world, and it has Asubsequently become a frequent topic of discussion, even occasioning anxiety and fear. However, this concern did not originally arise from any theoretical crisis intrinsic to criticism, but more from a loss of personal authority. Beginning in the 1980s, art criticism had become important in the development of modern Chinese art, and at that time those critics who had become theorists were the unwitting leading elders within the ’85 New Wave art movement. However, most of those critics and artists were employed by government bodies engaged in education, creative art, exhibiting, and administration, and the New Wave was in fact intimately connected with the traditional art system and its organizations. The situation was similar to those prevailing in all social organizations at the outset of China’s reform and opening up to the world. It was the use of the public and social resources by critics that intensified the ’85 New Wave art so that it became a nationwide modern art movement. Highlighting this phenomenon, albeit by way of contrast, we can see that all unofficial art groups (e.g., The Stars, No Name Painting Society, April Photo Society) that were initiated before 1983 eventually broke up and dispersed. On the one hand, these artists lacked adequate long-term support from within the system, and on the other, they had almost no clear theoretical basis or organizational support from critics.

As a result, the first-generation critics from the 1980s described themselves as the creators of history and not as critics of artistic creativity or as documenters of art history. When we look today at the writings of that time from the perspective of the history of criticism, it is not difficult to realize that they were far more engaged in praxis than they were theory. The work of these “creators of history” was not at all like that of art historians who objectively research what previously transpired; instead, they promoted current art. This mission stemmed from the idealism and sense of responsibility of that generation; yet it was that sense of responsibility and unique social context that gave them great power, resulting in art critics and criticism being successfully positioned in a role of leadership in the field of modern art. From the time of the re-emergence of modern Chinese art in the late 1970s, art critics intervened in the development of modern art as art event organizers, thus their authority was not manifested only in their studio-style critical writings.

20 The connection between art criticism and authority persisted throughout the 1980s, and even into the 1990s, and played a leading role in the creation, development, and exhibition of art. Beginning with the formulation of the Critics Accord at the 1992 Guangzhou Biennale, critics became increasingly conscious that their authority was weakening and that they were powerless to avoid the billowing tide of the market economy. The initial formation and development of the art market was supported by art criticism and the collective efforts of art critics, but the ongoing consolidation and strengthening of the art market, especially after the year 2000, without a doubt gradually diminished the authority of critics. The linear model of evolution within the art system had been broken, and the scene was split into two distinctly different directions, so that the art field now consisted of the largely unaccommodating state system as well as the new burgeoning market system, with both systems gradually moving further apart from each other. Seen against the background of overall reforms within the Chinese economy, it is not difficult to appreciate that there were qualitative changes in the way resources of the media, museums, and art organizations were allocated. During the last decade, the role of the critic began to undergo a transformation as curators, heads of art organizations, and even entrepreneurs were all changing the direction of art because it was only those intimately involved with art capital who could continue to maintain genuinely influential power. At the same time, contemporary art that was increasingly dependent on interpretation for its meaning was no longer the focus of critics’ attention and discussion.

Today, the aphasia afflicting criticism has ceased to be a fresh topic of discussion, and even art-critical circles themselves have complacently accepted this state of affairs. From the perspective of history, the role of art criticism within the entire art system is far from being definitive and understood. In different times and places, the nature, types, and functions of art criticism have diverged quite widely. The art criticism of the eighteenth-century French critic Denis Diderot was published within the limited circulation of literary letters read by aristocrats who defined a new public space. In the twentieth century, the close relationship between art criticism, art critics, intellectual trends in art, and art movements was one of the salient features in the development of modern art. The rise of art movements such as Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, and Abstract Expressionism was inextricably connected to the role of art critics and art criticism. It encompassed not only critique and theory by art critics, but their social links and associations as well. The collective and editorial critique presented by Chinese critics in the 1980s served on a practical level to strongly promote the development of modern art. Compared with artists, art critics stood even closer to the leading edge of the era and influenced the advancement of art. The role of the critic and the effective results of art criticism evolved in tandem with the changes in art and the times. Even into the modern period, however, art criticism did not succeed in becoming a self-sufficient discipline like art history did. As a consequence, the aphasia that afflicted criticism was to a certain extent a problem of a different order: the transformation of the very nature of art criticism.

21 The habitual thinking of people in the art world meant that people’s understanding of art criticism tended to belong mostly to an earlier period. As described above, from the situation we are confronted with today, we can see that art criticism is gradually losing its function within the practice of art and has been replaced by an art industry that is increasingly becoming associated with what defines contemporary art, with curators, businessmen, galleries, foundations, and the various organizations shouldering the practical functions that had previously fallen to critics. Thus, critics have reverted to the position of being critical writers, and as a consequence, when viewed from the perspective of modern Chinese art’s original agenda, critics seem to have lost their voice.

It must be said that the study of new art by critics and the subsequent distanced critical assessments of the artwork can be described as “normal,” but given the unique context of the 1980s, in which critics also served as participants in art events, the work of critics was then “abnormal,” and it is for this reason that we now happen to define criticism as aphasic. But the key question should not be about what art criticism has lost, but what it retains, and in which direction it is going. On the one hand, some critics have already become players in the art market, such as professional curators, and to define them as “critics” is obviously possible only in describing their former positions. On the other hand, to consider curatorial statements and art advertising as art criticism is mostly a case of using “scholarly” pretence to mask what is in fact business.

In the current contemporary art world, the impact of the market on criticism is no less than its impact on the creation of art, and so it is necessary that different categories be established between art criticism and art critics. This will be of advantage when differentiating critical texts and defending critical purity. As I see it, it is essential that criticism becomes academic because it can best represent the independent spirit of art and, at the same time, critics engaged in this form of criticism will also require more lengthy and rigourous training specific to it because only in this way can their work qualify as “scholarship.” From another perspective, in line with modal changes in culture and art, criticism in mass media also has its value. Especially today, we can readily discover that among the forces leading the development of contemporary art, the “market” and the “media” both play an important role. For criticism, the next important theme of discussion should be art criticism as it exists under the conditions of contemporary society and culture. Therefore, we must consider the commercial value of academic criticism or use academic criteria to examine the criticism of the mass media, though both are in their own ways biased.

In fact, in accordance with the logic of capital itself, there is nothing problematic in elevating the quality and quantity of commercial and mass media criticism because the logic of the market continues to exist and is gradually being perfected, so it should spontaneously mature. Yet, at the same time, self-sustaining and more specialized criticism is not determined by the market place, and it possibly requires the calm and solitude of the

22 ivory tower because the greatest impediments to academic scholarship are its commercialization and transformation by the media. This point seems to be a reversal of the main trends in values in contemporary Chinese society: if education itself moves in the direction of becoming increasingly commodified, then the notion of an ivory tower is itself illusory. Thus, the idea of defending criticism is not directed at general commercial or mass media criticism, nor is it directed at those critics who discuss art events. Academic criticism is not necessarily directly connected with artists’ creative work, and the logic of its origins and development is better able to be embodied in its own self-contained and self-sustaining texts. As a consequence, we discover that the essays of some art historians who have a deep and solid grounding in their discipline are more accurate and perspicacious than those of critics who devote a great deal of time and effort to piling up technical terms.

The establishment of an emphasis on purely theoretical methods is also not the best path for the development of criticism. For example, the “formalist” critical approach was something that we decried twenty years previously for its narrowness, and now that a rich corpus of such writings in Chinese has accrued over the years there remain few critics who are adopting such an approach in their critical writing. The reason for this is simple. This method does not appropriately reflect the artistic practices that have taken place in China during the past three decades. Thus, only when the present situation and the development of art are combined with a specific, real context can theory emerge or evolve within the body of Chinese art history, and if the resulting evolution is in harmony with the real context, then better critical practices and critical methods can arise.

From the situation in which we find criticism functioning today, we can say that its actual influence on the art world is definitely diminishing, but that may not be an entirely bad thing. What is lamentable though, is embodied in the following two points: First, many of today’s art critics still pursue the basic theoretical work of the generation of critics of the 1980s, and hope that critical writing can intervene in art practice and even alter hierarchies in the art world, ultimately resulting in their seizure of “authority”; second, some critics have effected a theoretical translation of Western works, but what is the point of this if we are simply satisfied by a complete introduction to and understanding of their work? The ancient adage that “in the rocks of other mountains we can find jade” has much to recommend it, but if the rock belongs to the other mountain while the jade belongs to this mountain, it would seem difficult to apply such theorizing to every aspect of Chinese art. Moreover, Western art theory has its own threads of development, and if we persistently and constantly follow its latest developments, our translations will present us with an unlimited ocean with no shores, and ultimately what use will all of this translation have?

The most active critics today are (mostly) those of the generation born in the 1970s and early 1980s, those who enthusiastically threw themselves into the field of contemporary art criticism when many arts organizations were

23 actively promoting the development of new criticism and the emergence of new critics. Yet many young critics are at times highly volatile in their reflection on certain existing issues. Some of them inherited “denunciatory” traditions and sounded rather fierce in their criticism. We can view this phenomenon from two different perspectives. First, they expressed a dynamic and highly critical, even destructive, force, which revealed criticism to be indispensable. Secondly, such criticism occasionally was excessively provocative, and it is not surprising that older critics regarded these young critics as attempting to steal their thunder. Moreover, in terms of its effects, such criticism also had two other aspects. Firstly, there was the dynamism of youth. Today, we might feel that when compared to the previous century contemporary art in some respects appears desolate and also lacks creative energy of a younger generation. Now, many people focus on their own professional operations, taking self-congratulatory delight in keeping on good terms with everyone in the art world, attending every opening and conference. Against this background, more passionate criticism would in fact be more stimulating. Second, fire-and-brimstone critique is at times dictated by reputation and capital, and some critique is possibly dictated by the critic’s desire to make a name for him or herself, concealing the media and economies that operate behind him. As a consequence, this phenomenon of relying on celebrity, and the desire for acquiring overnight fame, should be given careful consideration. The logic of the emergence and development of this type of art criticism is fairly close to that of the art criticism of the 1980s: the intervention in and transformation of art practices and the taking control of the power of discourse (including real authority, reputation, and the so-called “sense of responsibility”).

Aphasia is not necessarily a bad thing, but true criticism must be defended. Of course it is difficult to defend criticism in instances where power has taken control over logic. Nor can we wholly translate Western theoretical criticism, and even less can we defend commercial and mass media criticism. What we must defend is criticism that fulfills its responsibility towards history and that qualifies as genuine internal national scholarship. Thus critics should increasingly reject the image of authority and return to the position of being writers. In this sense, aphasia is a necessary precondition for purity of art criticism and its subsequent development. If critics continue to cling to actual authoritative power and become merely another link in the chain of art production, then it will be almost impossible for them to clearly discern the true face of art. As a consequence, if art criticism can establish itself within a domestic logic, then the history of criticism will advance and it will be of value. Even though such criticism will be comparatively rare, it will be essential, as well as being worth defending.

24 Xhingyu Chen Better City, Better Art? An Overview of Art at the World Expo 2010

ike the Olympics before it, the World Expo 2010 offered a chance for China, and specifically Shanghai, to preen its feathers and show the Lworld what it is capable of. Expo 2010 also offered the art scene in Shanghai many opportunities to flex its cultural muscle. Local galleries and museums mounted blockbuster shows, and various consulates, knowing the value of cultural diplomacy, supported exhibitions that highlighted their national agendas.

Dan Graham, Curve for E.S., Kicking off this onslaught of events was the World Expo’s official public 2005, installation view at Expo 2010. Photo: Tony Metaxas. exhibition, Art for the World, organized by JGM Galerie with an Expo Courtesy of JGM Galerie, Paris. committee and curated by Ami Barak. Situated on the Expo Boulevard, a covered walking area next to the massive China Pavilion, the exhibition featured twenty artists that were chosen out of hundreds of submissions from an open call process that started in 2008. It is an impressive group of artists—it is unlikely that American icon Dan Graham will be shown alongside a Chinese superstar like Zhang Huan again—but it is for the most part a squandered opportunity. Chinese sculptor Xiang Jing’s Infinite Polar is a bronze, totem-like structure depicting ten female acrobats stacked on top of each other, yet it shows little of the insight into the female psyche that her previous works have done. In a similar vein, Chen Changwei’s Pillar of the Twelve Symbolic Animals depicts twelve stacked animal heads in painted

25 stainless steel that seems to be nothing more than a decorative reference Top: Zhang Huan, Hehe, Xiexie, 2009, installation view to Chinese mythology. Neither of these works takes into account the at Expo 2010. Photo: Tony Metaxas. Courtesy of JGM surrounding context of Shanghai or Expo 2010, and they do not illuminate Galerie, Paris. anything about their subject matter. Bottom: Chen Changwei, The Pillar of Twelve Symbolic Animals, 2009, installation The most perplexing piece in the show is a large pair of stainless-steel view at Expo 2010. Photo: Tony Metaxas. Courtesy of pandas by Zhang Huan. Hehe, Xiexie (which translates to “great peace, JGN Galerie, Paris. great harmony”) were commissioned by the Tomson Group, a Taiwanese real estate development company, and sit between the China and Taiwan pavilions. There are many issues at play here, not just the resonance of Taiwan straits relations, but also the use of a potent Chinese mascot in soft diplomacy and the hidden agendas behind these seemingly innocuous

26 Xiang Jing, Infinite Polar, 2009, pandas. Some art-world insiders installation view at Expo 2010. Photo: Tony Metaxas. Courtesy have walked away wondering where of JGM Galerie, Paris. the Zhang Huan that they had become familiar with is heading. Gone are any traces of the thoughtful reflection that characterizes his ash paintings or the innovative command of materials in his recent cowhide series. The artist has seemingly completed the transformation from groundbreaking avant-garde artist to mere manufacturer. In the context of the event, which was visited mostly by ordinary Chinese and international tourists, this sculptural piece served its purpose, but perhaps in a compromising way. This is art for the laobaixing (common people), something Zhang professes to achieve, but here it is expressed through the lowest common denominator.

Installation view of Double Viewers fared better with Expo-related exhibitions that did not have Infinity, a collaborative encounter between Arthub Asia and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Photo: Ma Dou. Courtesy of Arthub Asia, Shanghai.

to contend with Expo regulations or appeal to a mass audience. The Dutch Pavilion opened the Dutch Cultural Center, which was separate from the official Dutch pavilion located on the Expo grounds, and temporarily occupied a newly renovated warehouse complex. It was host to exhibitions, events, and performances throughout the duration of the Expo. Most notable was Double Infinity, an exhibition organized by the Van Abbemuseum and Shanghai’s Arthub Asia. In addition to showing works for the first time from the museum’s collection in China, artists living and working in China were also asked to provide, through the making of new artworks, their own interpretation of works from the collection, only some of which were exhibited here. “The original idea was to have a cultural exchange of some sort with a Chinese museum,” Arthub co-director Defne Ayas recounted to me, “but Van Abbemuseum could not find a suitable host.” They instead decided on a more abstract approach to this idea,

27 with the show highlighting an exchange of ideas and practices through Top: Liu Gang, Paper Dream Series—Dutchtown, 2008, the new artworks. “Artists in China, such as Comfortable Collective’s Jin digital print. Courtesy of the artist and Arthub Asia. Shan, Li Mu, and Gao Mingyan, chose what they liked in the collection and Bottom: Speedism, IAHGNAHS responded accordingly.” ONHCET (Techno Shanghai), 2009, video, 5 mins. Courtesy of the artists and Arthub Asia, This cross cultural dialogue extended beyond the works to the exhibition Shanghai. space itself, which was designed by Chinese architects Wang Zhenfei + Wang Luming, a contrast to the current trend in China of hiring big-name international designers. Wang’s design for the show was roughly based on the infinity symbol, connecting the artworks in grand loops. Unfortunately, his design of the exhibition space is the strongest work of the show. While the concept for the show is intriguing, it is unclear how certain works fit in it. In particular, Belgian duo Speedism’s animated video, IAHGNAHS ONHCET (Techno Shanghai) (2009), a meditation on twenty-first century cities with Shanghai as the focal point, is a crowd-pleasing visual feast, a hip, techno-inspired work. But the overall effect is like that of cotton candy, spun beautifully but melting immediately upon hitting the tongue; the piece leaves no lingering thoughts and does not raise any questions for the viewer to contemplate. Young Chinese artist Liu Gang fares better with the photos from his Paper Dream Series (2008), in which he documented the real estate

28 Installation view of Peasant advertisements that are now ubiquitous throughout urban areas in China. Da Vincis at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Courtesy Included in the show are his images of Dutchtown, in the Pudong area of of Cai Studio, New York. Shanghai, which highlight the cultural misunderstandings inherent in these developments that sell an ideal version of life outside of China. Dutchtown attempts to replicate a typical Dutch city, but with its windmills and other stereotypical Dutch architectural elements, it instead exposes what Chinese people now desire and covet from this outside culture rather than what this culture can provide them. It is a potent antidote to the Expo’s theme of Better City, Better Life.

Opening at the same time as Art for the World and the Expo 2010 was the new Rockbund Art Museum’s debut exhibition, Peasant da Vincis, curated by gunpowder and firework artist Cai Guo-qiang and featuring mechanical and robotic creations by impoverished peasants from rural China. Cai, after reading of one such inventor in a Chinese newspaper in 2004, began collecting creations by other peasants, although he has admitted in public statements that he entertained the idea of exhibiting these pieces only after the 2005 Venice Biennale, when Sun Yuan and Peng Yu displayed a “UFO” created by peasant inventor Du Wenda (said UFO made an appearance at this show as well).

29 Cai intended the show as an homage to a group of inventors who have no thought for the practical uses of these creations, and in the exhibition statement he compared their passion and dedication to artists such as himself. It was a pleasure to see these often haphazard creations and marvel at the ingenuity of a group of people who often lack access to the sophisticated equipment, materials, and money that an artist like Cai has. There are robots and flying machines of all kinds, including several UFOs. More than anything, Cai hoped to highlight the paradoxical of an event like the Expo that touts “Better City, Better Life” but fails to honour the very people who helped make this city better, namely, migrant workers from rural areas.

Placing these objects in a museum setting allows viewers to view them as they would view any work of art, but one wonders if these inventions are properly presented. In a museum they become static and lose the dynamism that such machines innately possess. Airplanes, helicopters, submarines, and boats are hung on wires, floating in mid-air, but are begging to be used, regardless of whether they are properly built or not, or even can be used. The small video projections on the second floor showing the machines in action fail to fully show each object’s potential. A room devoted to a family of robot makers is more successful, and viewers can see the creations in action. One robot, commissioned by Cai and designed to paint, playfully makes copy after copy of Damien Hirst’s dot paintings; as well, robot mice scurry along the floor, and robot cars move along walls. If only the other creations in the exhibition were allowed to exhibit themselves like these ones. What the exhibition does achieve is to raise the question of what defines an artist. Again, the exhibition statement notes that Cai wants to widen the perception of who artists are and he has done this with his own innovative use of gunpowder and fireworks in his experimental works—but it’s not clear whether the inventors themselves share in this dialogue or even see themselves as artists.

The Rockbund followed this blockbuster show with another, giving Zeng Zeng Fanzhi, This Land Is So Rich in Beauty, No. 2, 2010, Fanzhi his first solo show in Shanghai since 2003. While conceptually not as oil on canvas, 250 x 1050 cm. Courtesy of the artist profound as Peasant Da Vincis, the Zeng Fanzhi exhibition seals his reputation and Rockbund Art Museum, as one of the most significant contemporary painters in China. There is Shanghai. nary a reference to his ubiquitous Mask Series, save for the opening painting that greets viewers on the ground floor; here, a slaughtered bull flayed and butchered is composed on a bare linen canvas. Elsewhere, landscape paintings feature thickets of branches in sombre palettes. Most notable are a pair of ten- metre paintings of landscapes that are aflame, his largest works to date, where the vibrant movement of his brush-strokes perfectly replicates the violent flicker of flames. In addition to these monumental paintings, the exhibition features sculptural works, the first by the artist in this medium. These pieces have a religious tone and allude to traditions in Western art history and its relationship to the Church; Covered Lamb (2009), for example, which depicts

30 Zeng Fanzhi, Mammoth’s a headless lamb placed on an altar and covered with a sheet, brings to mind Tusks, 2010, wood. Courtesy of the artist and Rockbund Art biblical themes of sacrifice, redemption, and Christ, something that local Museum, Shanghai. audiences may not entirely comprehend.

But knowledge of Western religion is not required to admire Mammoth’s Tusks (2010). Originally conceived as a true-to-life reproduction of the extinct animal itself, the artist opted instead to focus on the creature’s most distinguished feature, here scaled larger than the actual tusk. The immense tusks pointed directly at the viewer upon entering the gallery, creating both intimidation and wonder, and a religious symphony piped into the exhibition added to the reverential tone. It made for an impressive contrast with his paintings and seemed a step in the right direction for an artist attempting to expand the range of his practice. A stained-glass-like installation of his paintings, in which the paintings were printed on plastic and then pasted on glass, was mounted in a disused church at the end of the new Rockbund development that the museum occupies and further emphasized the connection between religion and art and art as religion.

Another museum had its official opening at the same time. The Minsheng Art Museum was not entirely new to the scene, having had a “trial-run” exhibition in the fall of 2009, but it saved the main event for the premier show, a retrospective of contemporary Chinese painting. Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art: Painting is the first in a series of retrospectives that the museum is planning (photography and new media are to follow in 2011 and 2012). It started with the late 1970s, when the art academies

31 re-opened in China at the end of the Cultural Revolution, and continued through the present day. It was the first time that such a diverse group of painters were assembled together, giving young viewers their first look at the early works of Zhou Chunya and Zhang Xiaogang. A highlight of the exhibition, and the strongest section of the show, was the room dedicated to artists of the 1980s. Here, early pioneers such as Wang Guangyi, Zhang Peili, and Geng Jianyi were given a spotlight. Works by Zhang and Geng occupied a large wall, allowing viewers to see the connection between their “rational” paintings and the later works of artists such as Zhang Xiaogang. The show, however, lost momentum once it reached the 2000s. The inclusion of Zheng Guogu and Liu Wei were welcome, but the inclusion of works such as Feng Zhengjie’s frighteningly gaudy pop paintings and Chen Ke’s insipid portraits of alienated female subjects serve perhaps only to make it a more complete survey of Chinese painting. This says more about the current state of Chinese painting compared to the halcyon days of the 1980s than it does about the tastes of the curatorial team. In the early days of Chinese contemporary painting, there was more impetus to experiment and innovate; it seems that these days, artists are looking more towards popular art market trends. Still, the exhibition was a rare treat for art lovers in the city and piqued the audience’s curiosity about their future retrospectives.

Museums were not the only venues with big name attractions. The Shanghai Yue Minjun, Mao Zedong at the Jinggang Mountains, 2006, Gallery of Art, which seemed to lose a little focus after the departure of its oil on canvas, 376 x 257.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and director, David Chan, hit back this year with a strong program of major Shanghai Gallery of Art, shows. The first of them was an exhibition of new works from Yue Minjun, Shanghai. who showed a completely different side of himself with The Spirit Scenes From Time Past, which featured paintings from his Landscapes with No One series (2007–present). The artist copied iconic paintings and removed any traces of human life. The works were a welcome change for an artist who hasn’t seemed able to escape his own bright pink visage, but these landscapes, devoid of subject matter, do not make enough of an impact to help audiences forget his maniacal smile.

32 Another was a show curated by Toshio Shimizu, who last came to Shanghai to co-curate with Hou Hanru the groundbreaking 2000 Biennale. This current exhibition, INBETWEEN, featured British artist Anish Kapoor, designer Shiro Kuramata, and architect Kengo Kuma, three artists from distinctly different disciplines who meditate on an artist’s relation to space. This show found the gallery returning, briefly and successfully, to its old tradition of integrating the unique gallery space with the artworks. In particular, the late Kuramata’s Bon Appetit (1989) glass and aluminum kitchen prototype placed in the gallery atrium nicely alludes to the restaurants above the gallery.

Shiro Kuramata, Bon Appétit, 2010, glass and aluminum, 1350 x 5350 x 1170 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai.

Shanghai’s gallery linchpin ShanghArt chose this year to grant a solo show to a foreign artist for the first time in its history. In keeping with its tradition of promoting new media artists, it invited British avant-garde filmmaker and video artist Isaac Julien to show Ten Thousand Waves (2010), a multi-channel film installation that was filmed largely in China. It is an ambitious work that attempts to identify and examine the myriad issues facing China today. The film begins compellingly with archival news footage of the drowning of migrant workers from China when their boat capsized in Morecambe Bay in northern England. The panicked voices of rescue teams and grainy documentary footage create a picture of tragedy, but this poignant scene is then replaced by a sentimental and clichéd journey through China; the artist utilizes bird’s eye view shots of the country’s highways, depictions of hectic urban areas, and nostalgic scenes of mist covered countrysides. The artist collaborated with the poet Wang Ping—it is her work that is narrated throughout the film—and called on the talents of actresses Maggie Cheung and Zhao Tao as well as Chinese artist Yang Fudong. Yang has the dubious role of the lover; he looks unsure in his new position in front of the camera. Likewise, many viewers I spoke with were unsure of what to make of the film; is Julien commenting on stereotypes or perpetuating them? Is Maggie Cheung, as a floating spirit in traditional Chinese costume, parodying her period martial arts films? On the other hand, brief sequences where the camera is present in the frame, and especially in a scene where the audience is given a glimpse into the filming process, raise intriguing issues concerning film as a staged medium and the reliability of the medium to convey truths. These are questions Julien visits often in his work; fictional elaboration is his tool for digging deep into a

33 subject. One senses that Julien is sincere in his intentions, but perhaps that Isaac Julien, Ten Thousand Waves, 2010, nine-screen is the problem. He has replaced insight with his own reconstruction of video installation, 49 mins. Courtesy of the artist and the issues through less rigourous means than usual for him, leaving only a ShanghArt, Shanghai. beautiful but somewhat empty shell.

Xu Zhifeng, Kiosk/Xiaomaibu, 2010, weekly Internet transmissions. Courtesy of the artist.

In spite of these blockbuster showings, there was still a feeling of languor within the art scene. Like preparations for the World Expo, the art scene was polished and cleaned up, but the same issues lurked underneath. One Expo project did manage to capture the essence of what it means for Shanghai to become part of the global community. Kiosk/Xiaomaibu, a project that links a small convenience store in Cologne with one in Shanghai, was part of the cultural programming for the German pavilion and organized by curator Petra Johnson and artist Xu Zhifeng. Weekly live transmissions between the two kiosks included performances from local artists, discussions, and lectures, creating a lively dialogue not only between the respective city’s art players but also regular community members. Here was a project that captured the heart of what art is—a communicator of thoughts and ideas. Kiosk did not provide any answers, but it did lay the groundwork for dialogue in a vibrant global art community.

34 Defne Ayas Deconstructing an Encounter during the World Expo 2010: A Conversation with Charles Esche

ouble Infinity, a collaborative encounter between the Van Abbemuseum and Arthub Asia, took place at the Dutch Culture DCentre in Shanghai as a parallel event to Expo 2010. Consisting of an exhibition, a performance series, a lecture program, and a publication, Double Infinity marked the first time that a museum has opened itself and its permanent collection up to the dynamic responses and contributions of artists and artist collectives in China, where usually exhibitions and collections are moved in and out of the country without much regard for the needs of the local scene. Could this be considered a significant gesture? Could the collaborative planning and discussion that took place over the last two years in planning this project provide a template for an innovative way to work in China? Arthub Asia co-director Defne Ayas posed questions to Van Abbemuseum Director Charles Esche about working in China for the first time, and for a reflection on the process of developing Double Infinity.

Defne Ayas: What was your perception of China at large prior to your arrival? Perhaps you can answer this question within the context of the Former West project you are working on, a long-term international research project that engages in rethinking the global histories of the last two decades in dialogue with postcommunist and postcolonial thought?

Charles Esche: That is a big question. Clearly, the economic boom of the past twenty years has been attributed to the release of resources, energy, and human creativity onto the capitalist market since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the consequences of Tian’amen Square, both of which took place in 1989. All this talk of technological transformation and paradigm change in capitalism is, to me, so much hyperbole. The fundamentals of natural and human capital remain the determining factor. As if it needed to be said again, the Chinese system proves that free men and women are not a product of free markets (as the U.S. government defines it), though there are perhaps certain more complex relationships between the economy and liberty. For me, the most interesting question for the coming decades in China, but also outside of it, is the extent to which we are prepared as a globe to question free market exchange systems if they don’t fit into other human desires. In that sense we have a lot in common around the world.

At the moment, and despite the financial crisis, the direction of travel away from complexity and towards the simplicity of “if it sells it is good” has been dramatic. Experimentation in forms of political and cultural representation in Europe has dried up. Democracy appears to be an endgame, as the neo- cons have it, “the end of history.” Will this lethargy continue, or will new floodgates open for new forms of being together? And will those potential

35 new forms question the nation-state as the basic building block of the current global consensus? That would be a challenge for China just as for everywhere else, as well as for our core identity as individuals and groups. But it is a challenge I feel we need to accept. These questions all belong within the research around Former West as a topic that deals with art and contemporary history. How artists answer them, and what possibilities they create in understanding the world around us in different ways, seem to me of crucial interest in trying to find out where we go next. I believe China has a big role to play in this, but it is not alone—which I sometimes sense is a bit of a surprise to the Chinese themselves!

Defne Ayas: I could not agree more with the potential role of Chinese intellectuals and artists, but then I find it quite ironic, especially when we are in a constant position of articulating what Arthub Asia does in China in terms of building up a network, what the initiative and its organic constellation of artists and thinkers are eager to do in regards to knowledge-production and dissemination in the face of a heat-seeking-missile market economy. You mentioned earlier that the collaboration between Arthub and the Van Abbemuseum has turned around your slightly cynical thinking on the possibilities of working in China? Can you tell me more about this?

Charles Esche: Well, it is hard for me to make sweeping generalizations about a situation I know only partially, but I have to admit that I did use my initial prejudice against commercial art as a basis to decide to stay away from China during the days of hot sales to rich collectors. My early skepticism was based on perceiving art in China as largely being produced for a very select band of wealthy collectors, and those collectors, especially the European ones, had specific financial entanglements with China for which collecting art was beneficial.

Defne Ayas: This is quite the universal perception for Chinese contemporary art, whose soft, yet-to-be-agreed-upon history mostly spins around Beijing but not Shanghai or elsewhere. Such a superficial view seems the Achilles’ heel of the art scene in China.

Charles Esche: This self-interest is part of the art system everywhere, and I don’t want to oppose it as such. But I don’t want to waste my time on situations that mostly affirm how good it is to be a master of the free market instead of searching for something socially and politically more interesting or productive. With my limited access, that seemed very hard to find in China. So I simply stood aside since first coming here in 2001 with Hou Hanru. I engaged instead with other geographies such as the former socialist Europe and the Middle East, where the market was less dominant. Double Infinity brought me back to China, and meeting you and Davide Quadrio here made me more curious.

My experience with Double Infinity, and especially with meeting some of the artists and attending our two-day seminar, was that the financial crash seems to have increased the appetite for some kind of reflection on the possibilities for art and how we might use them. It was also fascinating to talk with students at the China Art Academy about feminism and to realize there is a similar confusion about politics as in the West. Feminism

36 is perceived as a kind of optional choice for trouble making girls rather than a simple and direct response to the denial of opportunities in life. This denial is, it seems to me, where politics begins, but we have forgotten that everywhere. To talk about it with Chinese students was very refreshing because I think they were able to also reflect differently on issues of ideology or politics while experiencing a similar vacuum or loss of political horizon, as elsewhere in the world.

Also, I greatly enjoyed talking with Xu Zhen about his MadeIn project, which seems, as Gao Shiming said, a way to challenge authorship and market expectations in a smart manner. There was also a rather beautiful moment when I saw Yang Zhenzhong’s I Will Die video on a small screen in his studio. Immediately, the intimacy of the work came shining through, something I had never perceived in the exhibited versions, which were large- scale, multi-screen installations. This work was now about the vulnerability of each individual and not about the sameness of our destiny. For me, this was an example of where modesty works, which is something that you don’t associate with a lot of recent Chinese art. Recently, there have also been a number of historical surveys of Chinese art both in Beijing and Shanghai that point to a more reflective internal engagement. And our own artists in Double Infinity reacted intelligently and irreverently to the historical artworks in our collection. To me, this means that contemporary art is finding a more substantial historical ground on which it can build a social commitment. If the works are then sold or commodified by rich collectors, that is less of an issue than if they are rooted in a non-elitist reality and ask a more widely relevant series of questions. So yes, my interest in Chinese art, or at least the art from Shanghai and Hangzhou, is restored.

Defne Ayas: The prospect of creating critical momentum with you and your institution in Shanghai, as well as a sustainable multiple-phased project, not only for production but also conversation and internal healing of Shanghai’s frail and fractured art scene, was certainly appealing to Arthub. But what was it that really motivated you to accept working on this cross-cultural project, which was presented under the auspices of Shanghai Expo 2010?

Charles Esche: I think I have to explain the background a bit. If you remember, we came to Shanghai for the first time in late 2008. The idea was to find out what might be possible and what would fit within our ways of working in the museum. One of our most enthusiastic advisors was Paul Brouwer, a former Dutch ambassador to China who has since died, and who first suggested the idea to work in Shanghai during Expo 2010. He wanted us to be involved at the Dutch national level to increase the profile of the Van Abbemuseum with the Netherlands government. He saw the connection to John Körmeling as a good point of entry. Generally, all “national” projects are limited to institutions based in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and the Dutch cultural elite has difficulty recognizing the achievements of the whole country. Given our own sense at the museum that we lacked a Dutch sensibility and a firm connection to national politics, this seemed like a good idea. We also wanted to support Körmeling, who is a good friend of the museum and is well represented in the collection. But it could only work if we also found a motivation beyond the tactical and the

37 local that was aligned with our own way of working and thinking about art. Both Ulrike Erbslöh (Van Abbemuseum’s deputy director) and I wanted to come early to Shanghai to see if the combination of good tactics and good art might be possible.

We met a lot of museum directors, curators, and educators from private and state institutions on our visit to Shanghai. To cut a long story short, it was relatively difficult to imagine working with any of them. Remember, this was before the financial crisis and art market crash. Money spoke to the institutions above all, and everywhere we went there was the understandable reaction: “Why would we want to make a show with a Dutch museum when we want to showcase our own artists during the Expo?” We understood and respected this, but the fact was that what we were interested in—an exchange and process of learning from each other—didn’t seem interesting to our Chinese colleagues.

Then we met you in Shanghai, and I asked you, can you tell me what is going on here? Can we meet some artists? That meeting, the dinner and the subsequent meeting at BizArt were the absolute highlights of the trip. For the first time, we were able to speak with people who understood us, even if none of us had a clue how to make the ideas happen. Nevertheless, a plan very quickly emerged between us.

We were thinking from the beginning of how to connect the interests of the Van Abbemuseum with Shanghai, and it became obvious that we should ask three or four China-based artists and curators on your advice to come to Eindhoven and work with the collection and the institution and to produce new work for a show in China based on Eindhoven, John Körmeling, and the Netherlands in some ill-defined but potentially poetic way. It was simple, it could work, and it would be a way of getting Chinese cultural players to react/accept/reject a European cultural heritage as well as entangle stories that are usually unconnected.

Anyway, we went back to the Netherlands and started to work on raising money and planning the project. Yang Fudong and Jian Jun Zhang even came to the museum and things started to develop. We then heard about the Netherlands China Art Foundation and some still unclear plans to open a Dutch pavilion outside the Expo site. This seemed like an opportunity. We had also come to the conclusion with your help that it would be cheaper to open our own temporary venue than to hire galleries in one or other of the Shanghai institutions, and it would be more fun and give us more independence as well. So we went to meet the directors of the Netherlands China Arts Foundation to see what they thought and whether there would be a possibility of working together.

Defne Ayas: How was the initial idea that China-based artists come to visit your museum and select pieces from the museum collection for interpretation and exhibition received? Can you share more on how you envisioned the involvement of Shanghainese artists in a re-reading of your collection?

38 Charles Esche: At the meeting with the Netherlands China Arts Foundation, our idea was ridiculed. Exchange such as this was not the issue, and the important thing would be to make a John Körmeling presentation in the development of the Dutch Cultural Centre. I have to say, I took this dismissal rather hard at the time, and it continues to sour my feelings a bit, but soon afterwards it seems things changed because we were contacted and told that, while the original idea was not possible for them, they would be interested in something that had elements of exchange within a Körmeling- based exhibition.

This triggered our enthusiasm again. Partly we saw the tactical opportunity, but now there was a chance to work with you (you have since become Arthub Asia and no longer BizArt) and to try and achieve at least some of our initial objectives with financial assistance from the Dutch state. It was also clear that we would need to compromise and listen to the Netherlands China Arts Foundation, but I was especially excited by the opportunity to lay the groundwork for a longer-term connection that could prosper. This was and remains absolutely the core motivation to do the project, alongside the desire to recognize Körmeling as a significant international artist.

Defne Ayas: Körmeling’s playful ideas in relation to architecture and the city were certainly welcome in a place where there is barely any urban activism; however, a focus on his work only was a far cry from what we wanted to really achieve together. To go back to the dynamics of the collaboration, how has the process been so far, in your opinion? Our decision to work with the Van Abbemuseum in the context of this exhibition proved to be rewarding, though we thought we made a strange pair: an established museum and a very simply structured three-person operation—Davide Quadrio, Qiu Zhijie, and myself. These two curatorial teams aimed to actualize a static “transportation” of cultural objects from the Van Abbemuseum collection into a dynamic process where the locality (artists and thinkers not only “ethnically” Chinese but working in Shanghai and China) would re-contextualize, interpret, and critique the core idea of “exchange,” and reveal how this very word is most often misused or is the tool of an imperialist agenda. The process has been one of constant negotiation: Was it at all possible for both parties to be involved in a cross- cultural artistic and institutional production of some substance that goes beyond the simplicity of the occasion, Expo 2010?

Charles Esche: Inevitably, the full ambition of what we would like to do is going to take time and patience. What we should aim for is a kind of porous and multilayered collaboration over time where artists you work with feel the museum, as a European base, is a place to turn to when they want to reach out beyond China. At the same time, we can try to secure funding to send artists and artworks from the museum to Shanghai on an irregular basis. I am interested in seeing the Van Abbemuseum dispersed across more sites and situations. I want to shift the idea of the museum from an architectural base (Louvre, Guggenheim, Tate Modern) to something more mobile and productive. This rhymes with the historic experience of Eindhoven, which is interesting only because it produced products and knowledge that traveled the world. It would fit into this plan to see

39 Shanghai as a point of presence for the museum and vice versa. In that way, the museum is transformed through its experiences with an outside. It goes back to an old wish of Allan Kaprow for the museum to be “a force of innovation lying outside of its physical limits.” He said that in 1967, but maybe only now we are ready to realize it.

In view of this ambition, I was happiest when I learned that we could send several people from the Van Abbemuseum, including the registrar, conservators, technicians, and others to Shanghai. This collaboration can only work well if it is linked on different levels, and we have made a good start towards achieving this. For instance, I was very pleased when a number of my colleagues said they would really like Li Mu from the ShuFu Collective to come back and visit Eindhoven. That warmed my heart because it meant that we as a museum were thinking together about the future. I am now working on making it happen, and Li Mu has already prepared an initial proposal.

I still love the original idea of having artists visiting the museum here in Eindhoven and using it as the basis for a project. Not realizing the challenge and complexity of that idea for EXPO 2010 remains a disappointment, but with Li Mu we can make a new start.

Defne Ayas: What have the challenges been for you professionally within the context of the exhibition Double Infinity?

Charles Esche: The challenges were initially in meeting the expectations of the Netherlands China Art Foundation for recognition, funding, and promotion. Raising the necessary cash has taken longer and has been much more fraught than we expected. On the one hand, the majority of the money has come from the Dutch state for a project outside the country, which is typically generous of the Dutch funding system. However, I have seen the hoops that Ulrike Erbslöh, deputy director, has had to jump through to get the various funding bodies not to cancel each other out or to feel content with each other’s contributions. More recently, the rather high degree of sensitivity of the Chinese authorities towards some of the proposed works has been revealing. I think Ulrike would see challenges also in the attempt to keep many competitive partners happy who all have certain expectations of the project that we cannot always satisfy. The patchwork of funding that we have brought together has been difficult to manage.

The financial sources for this project are much more diverse than usual, and it stretches one’s negotiating skills or room for maneuvering. Personally, I have been in despair at times with the elaborateness of the Dutch funding system and sometimes withdrew myself from the process or tried to steer it through my staff. I regret this a bit, but it was probably the only option to keep all on track.

On the positive side, it was the first external project that involved so many people in the Van Abbemuseum, and that is promising for the future—for example, when we head to Ramallah with one of the Picasso canvases.

I think Van Abbemuseum and Arthub Asia now have a good basis on which to build further.

40 Defne Ayas: Any surprises that have made you think differently about it now versus when you first started working on this project?

Charles Esche: I didn’t really expect the censorship problems. I suppose I imagined the stories of censorship were mostly a question of mistranslation and over-reaction by Westerners. I think that is still partly true. It was sobering to hear Alexander Brandt talking about censorship in the 1990s as feeling like a failure for the artists who had not addressed the right authorities in the right ways. That was a surprising reaction to me, but one with which I could really identify. How different is that from failing to get funding from the Dutch state authorities? In principle artists in Western Europe are free; in reality they depend on state or private patronage almost entirely.

Defne Ayas: Censorship was quite a negotiation process for Double Infinity. We ourselves were also surprised by what happened in the process for the approval of certain works that were acceptable to show in Beijing and Guangzhou but not in Shanghai, as in the case of Xijing Men’s video or Cao Fei’s Making of RMB City.

What do you think the exhibition’s curatorial premise promises to contribute to the field?

Charles Esche: I have been recently very struck by something that Sarat Maharaj said to me. He was speaking about Eurocentrism and how we have to avoid throwing out the baby of European political and artistic experimentation with the bathwater of racism and white superiority. He didn’t put it like that, but he meant something like it, I think. For me, what he said has a lot to do with how we in western Europe can perform a function as a region in a globalized context. It means not forgetting the emancipatory, radical, challenging elements of our past in an urge to apologize for our exploitation of the rest of the world. The fact that most if not all of Europe’s noble experiments have failed in one form or another does not mean that we cannot pass on the knowledge and experience gained from them, nor that we should cease trying to develop them in our own way alongside other continents. It is also undeniable that Europe has touched every corner of this planet for better or worse and cannot simply fade into provincial obscurity without facing up to the responsibilities and potentialities this creates.

Now, I think the curatorial premise of Double Infinity, by taking objects from one site as the starting point for new work in another, has something of these aspects of revaluing European experimentation through the eyes of artists who have received them up to now as, in some ways, revealed truths. The attempt needs to be made, both in China and in Europe or elsewhere, to transform the common understanding of modernist European artistic heritage over the last one hundred years. Whereas many museums present the “masterpieces” of modernism as completed, externally determined truths, it is possible to present them as much more propositional and responsive to their own time and place. This needs to be done because there is much of great value in these modernist artistic proposals if their potency can be released again today. As Sarat’s observation suggests, that also means that they are not condemned only to communicate fully with their own origin and generation. Instead they can reach out beyond that, not to a rigid

41 form of universal human experience but through the awkward processes of time and space translation that force them (the artworks and positions of the artists themselves) to take different stances, to reveal other nuances and possibilities while remaining fundamentally themselves. Observing these aspects of weak, or slight change as a result of objects and ideas crossing continents seems to me partly what we are doing in Double Infinity, and I see that as a potentially significant contribution. What I hope for the future is that we can develop these thoughts together and move on to ideas of entanglement, and even abandonment, of the obsession with cultural origins in the production of new work and positions.

Defne Ayas: Please tell me more about the ideas in terms of sameness rather than only in terms of the exceptionalism, of China being of some interest. How can one tie this more to the region and rest of the world? Could we potentially connect Chinese and other non-Western situations in cultural production and presentation for a new kind of nonaligned cultural movement? How would that work, if at all?

Charles Esche: It is nice that you use the term nonaligned here.

Defne Ayas: Well, you are the one who reminded me, on our way to the academy in Hangzhou, of the significance of the Bandung conference (held in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955) for an alternative reading of the history of the Leftist movement.

Charles Esche: I think looking again at the Nonaligned Movement (NAM) of the 1950s to the 1980s would be quite smart not only in terms of its geographic spread but also its current economic and political power. China was, of course, crucial to the NAM, but it extended far further. This might be one route to escape the feeling that China always has to answer to or reject models that emerge in the core West of, above all, the U.S.A. How might China start to see its relations to the rest of the world, not in terms of old imperial exploitation (which is a danger) but in terms of exchange of common experiences and mutual trust? This might be much easier to do with Brazil or Indonesia than with the U.S.A. or the Netherlands at a cultural level. The former doesn’t contain so much prejudgment, and that might help speak about sameness. It is also interesting as a Dutch resident to see in China how much the “West” is seen as the U.S.A. I think this makes a project like Former West even more significant as a way to think about how desirable such a condition might be for the current West and for the rest. If it is possible, we should bring Chinese artists and intellectuals into this project to help us.

I also like the idea that a nonaligned cultural movement would today be neither commercial nor state run but somewhere else. Using this term as a kind of search engine to find like-minded people and communities might produce surprising alliances that could replace the stagnation of the old Left. In all these ways, sameness can be the tool to unlock what we have in common rather than emphasize what is different between us.

Defne Ayas: Only very recently, intellectuals and scholars started dissecting Chineseness with a geographic approach (vs Japan, vs India, vs Vietnam, vs Central Asia, vs Indonesia, vs Russia, etc.) or with an intellectual stab, as

42 in the case of the most recent Guangzhou Triennial. Otherwise, China is usually read within the context of its economic tails (“Tails of the Dragon”) and its diasporic outreach.

But, then, using an exhibition as a format to do this can be quite tricky, as it can be a relatively closed or insular system. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to change the format into a process in which the idea of culture, as something that exists in and through dialogue, could be fully actualized? Did we fail to do this with Double Infinity? Did we manage to get somewhere? Can we really represent a larger, more diverse vision of culture, asking what it can be, where is it in China vis-à-vis the rest of the world, and how is it being constituted?

Charles Esche: I think this is the whole project of advanced art and culture at the moment. To understand that understanding itself is a process with infinite possibilities for refinement and misunderstanding. Can we get to the point where a museum is neither treasure chest nor entertainment centre but a site where the imagination can be loaded up for use in the world outside? In this sense, the experience of art is an applied experience, something that can be taken and made use of later. Did Double Infinity help this process? Yes, in a small way, I think it did. But it is the combination of a million small steps that take far longer than politicians or media are prepared to allow. Remember, it took twenty-nine years for Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon to be recognized fully as the start of modern painting. What happened in those twenty-nine years? Was it seen as worthwhile to have painted it in that period? I think we know the answers to that question today, but for contemporary art we are still waiting and working. Such timescales should find more friendly ground in China than in the West these days, so I think that’s another reason to keep working here.

Defne Ayas: Could the whole process have been any different for all parties involved, especially the artists from China?

Charles Esche: We could have done it at another time without Expo 2010. Then funding would have been much harder to secure, for sure, but the discussions between us would have been much more focused on the why and what questions rather than the who and how. Why does such a joint project make sense? What do we want to do for the artists and the scene here and there? For the Chinese artists, I would have liked to have had them much more present in Eindhoven and in the museum. I think that would have produced unknown results and effects for both us and for them. But, nevertheless, I think we are about to achieve something important in showing that a kind of collective curating can take place across such a distance and that setting up channels of direct influence can be productive. Double Infinity is an important first step and marker for such kinds of projects between us in the future, when we need to go further. If I may say so, I hope that for Arthub itself, this model of institutional collaboration may offer a way of working in the future, hopefully with us but also with others. That nonaligned idea is special. We could start with that.

43 Global Claims, Local Effects Panel Discussion, Shanghai May 16, 2010

ccompanying the Double Infinity exhibition was a two-day event, Double Infinity: The Last Two Decades Revisited (Shanghai, May A15–16, 2010), which included a keynote address on the history of World Expos and their immediate impact, panel discussions, film screenings, and performances. The panel discussions explored several areas such as looking at the forgotten or omitted stories within conteporary Chinese art, localism and social engagement in the city, collectivism among Shanghainese artists, and the reception of Chinese art as shaped abroad. The panel discussion, Global Claims, Local Effects, published below, featuring presentations by Hyunjin Kim, Georg Schöllhammer, Defne Ayas, and introduced by Charles Esche, identifies points of encounters between China and other parts of Asia, including Armenia, Korea, and Turkey. Although their talks take a historical perspective, they resonate in the present.

Charles Esche: Yesterday we looked at China and thought about the histories we might write in the 1980s and 90s and the last decade. Now we are looking at the histories from the 70s onwards and how they might have affiliations with certain histories elsewhere in the world by discussing particular nations or particular groups of nations through a number of speakers. The first speaker is Hyunjin Kim, who is a curator and writer based in Seoul, Korea but who is also quite active on the European stage, having worked in Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, and various other places in Western Europe. But I think Hyunjin Kim will be talking mainly about the Korean situation as a parallel or as a relationship, so the idea of these talks is to think about the Chinese situation through other conditions or to think about those other conditions through what we know of China.

Hyunjin Kim: I was originally planning to offer something about one of my recent exhibitions, but I changed my mind after attending yesterday’s session. So, I will present a portion of the statement I had written for the 2008 Gwangju Biennale because it is a brief outline about what happened in the last twenty-five years in Korea as well as globalization in the Eastern Asian situation. I’m going to read and then I’ll add some explanation later on.

The current contemporary art scene is rather complex, with many different practices, so one is not able to summarize it as just one or two significant movements or discourses. This current moment reminds me of the ancient Chinese Warring States period (approximately 426–221 B.C.), when many different factions competed for political and philosophical supremacy in China, an era dominated not by a single, unified power, but, rather, by dozens of relatively equal but competing small countries.

44 Within this situation, the 7th Gwangju Biennale assembles the diverse activities and practices of contemporary art, without any particular theme, under the title Annual Report. The years 2007 and 2008 symbolize our “present,” where we now stand, although one cannot yet tell whether these two years represent grand movements or not. Hence, Annual Report is again a report on our obscure but continually bustling present; it begins with the belief that an artistic vision will arise from this tenacious project about our very present. As always, we concentrate on what lies dormant within the present, substituting our skepticism about the present with the optimistic prediction and certainty that a more powerful affect of art will overflow from this biennale.

This exhibition is achieved through three components— On the Road, Position Papers, and Insertions. Through this composition, we pursue the continuous diversification and the new potentiality of the key elements of contemporary art—exhibition, curator, artist, artwork. Also, by breaking away from a particular exhibition theme, we avoid homogeneity in the search for a stratified discourse and distinctive, complicated, heterogeneous, and layered aesthetic languages and attitudes. Not imparting a unified exhibition theme or even one or two directional categories while attempting to describe and bring about this kind of artistic present can appear as obscure or as aimless wandering. However, this rather open-ended approach also provides an oblique critique of curatorial customs that attempt to present a vision to the art world through a series of defined exhibition themes. Such thematic exhibitions narrow the diverse possibility of approaches toward the artworks being presented by limiting the viewers’ experience of the works within certain predetermined angles or by reducing the autonomy and richness of the works to mere illustrations of the exhibition’s themes. Therefore, the 7th Gwangju Biennale is not integrated into a single narrative. Instead, the forecast and contour of the present and coming artistic stream will be displayed through the persistent research and careful invitation of artists and artworks, exhibitions, Position Papers curators, and the intensive experience of the exhibition space where all these elements harmonize and compete.

The structure of the present situation is achieved through the dynamics of tension and innovation in its continuous relationship with the past. Playing a leading role in the formation of the non-Western biennale in the early 1990s, the Gwangju Biennale acquired another presence in succeeding to the ethos of the uprising of Gwangju citizens on May 18, 1980; this radical and democratic ethos was inherited and expanded once again to a universal ethos of global civil society through international art events. This is why the point of departure for the first Gwangju Biennale in 1995 was a theme that highlighted the influence and social significance of May 18’s democratization struggle and the emergence of civil society.

45 The rise in NGO (nongovernmental organization) activity in the mid to late 1990s, when the Gwangju Biennale was established, can be seen as a symptom of the progress toward civil society through the political force of the progressive camp, by way of the fomentation of the June 1987 people’s struggle for democratization. In 2008, we are witnessing the further evolution of civil society in search of what might be called the “politics of value.” Having first emerged in 2000, the candlelight vigil as a form of peaceful demonstration set the whole nation ablaze once again during May and June of 2008.

You might know about the huge demonstration in 2008 in which people held candles against the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the United States and Korea. The main issue was concern about importing American beef; this became a national health and welfare issue. While controversy was aroused around this issue, it was, in a way, also evidence that political engagement had broadly proliferated, as a lot of ordinary people like mothers, teenagers, and students were involved in the street protests against the FTA. To continue with my statement:

These recent candlelight vigils do not merely signal a change in demonstration culture but contain the substantive shift in micro- and participatory politics and digital forms of political participation that are included in the protests’ environmental, human rights, and national health issues of a post-class society. Namely, if in the past Korean social movements sought to build the foundation for a democratic government, then today we see the demand for change of the current government, which has thrown its lot in with neoliberalism and has ignored the democratic process of governance of civil society. In addition to these demands, recent rallies show the spontaneous, proactive political participation of citizens in substitution for a limited and malfunctioning parliamentary system and the conquest of a more robust civil society.

South Korea’s past and present can be felt in an analogous yet temporally differentiated relationship to many Asian countries that have gone through the process of democratization from military government dictatorships. Korea’s efforts are also similar to postmodern global civil societies that are trying to restrain the speed of global neoliberalism. People living in many other Asian countries, however, still live in fear of state power. And so, when anxiety and fear grip people in moments of national crisis or natural disasters, those emotions can be used as a means of further strengthening state power.

We can see one example of this in the 2008 earthquake in China. I was visiting Beijing right after the disaster. I found that most CCTV channels in China were presenting only this huge disaster every day, almost all day. So one became overwhelmed with these images, and there was no other reliable information source. It was a way of controlling people through using catastrophic images, and it was definitely a means to strengthen state power.

46 People in East Asian countries are also concerned about the crisis of the nation state’s privileged position in the face of free mobility across fortified walls of modern state borders, a shift that has occurred with deterritorialization of globalism. Following from this, signs of strengthened nationalism are visible in the recent tense relationships among China, South Korea, and Japan.

By the way, within the global economic era there arises a trilemma (a difficult choice among three options; this refers to the trilemma theory of Dani Rodrik, professor of political economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government) in these three countries; that is, economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation state are mutually irreconcilable, and one can have at most two at one time. It means one can restrict democracy if one wants globalization together with the nation state, but if one wants democracy to go together with globalization, then the nation state will have to loosen up. Again, from my Gwangju statement:

Just as democratization and the development of civil society took place at different times in different Asian countries, the arrival of modernist and contemporary or international art and its various modalities are observable either as stratified or as regional models of development. This can be seen in the unusual hybrid gallery or alternative space model in the current Chinese art scene, where commercialism and alternative spaces coexist under one roof, as exemplified in one exhibition from Patrick D. Flores’s Position Paper, where the artist-curator model established the avant-garde discourse of Southeast Asia in the 1970s and 1980s.

Also, in the same way that the Olympic Games in Seoul (1988) and Beijing (2008) and other international sports events were the first steps towards contemporary transformation and globalization for states like South Korea and China, the biennales that have expanded in the last ten years in Asian countries have been invested with expectations for the role of acting as a main bridgehead for bringing the Asian art scene into sync with the current global art world.

I am going to explain a little bit about Korean history. Korea achieved significant economic progress within a short period, and its development was rapidly achieved alongside the 1988 Olympic games, as well as the Daejon Expo in 1993, the Busan Asian Games in 2002, and the World Cup also in 2002. I think that Japan also experienced this, and China is following the same route today. And in the 1990s in Korea, we had just inaugurated a democratic government following the long military dictatorship of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. For us, the 1990s was a period when everything was booming, including the artistic cultural scene. And the 1995 Gwangju Biennale was the moment we began to become part of globalization and the international art scene. But one interesting thing in Seoul from the mid 1990s to early 2000s—I entered the university in 1994—was that huge humanitarian research and studies were taking place within the universities. The 1980s were more about the student movement in achieving democracy, but in the 90s we celebrated the arts and culture: women’s studies, curatorial

47 studies, cultural studies, and contemporary philosophy. On one hand, because of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) financial crisis and the economic crisis around 1998, lots of students who were studying abroad began returning home to Korea; they brought back all kinds of experiences they learned in Western countries and continued these practices within the local situation. Therefore, in 1999, three important alternative spaces—Loop, Pool, and Sarubia Project Space—were initiated. Together with these three alternative spaces, new art institutions like the Artsonje Center emerged with the support of government funds that assisted this scene of change.

Although we have achieved much during the past ten years, we are again facing regression in political and cultural justice under the current conservative government in South Korea. Because of the President’s special agenda on construction development, the country is increasingly under construction, bringing ruin to a lot of environments and communities. I started thinking about what sort of cultural and artistic response we can make to this situation. I am going to introduce a recently curated project titled Perspective Strikes Back, at the Doosan Gallery in Seoul, and here is a portion of my curatorial statement:

The exhibition reconstitutes the modern, contemporary scene through the eye of others inside our society, critically reconsidering the developer growth myth that has continued in Korean society until today. The curation was inspired by artist Minouk Lim’s S.O.S. performance, which helped rediscover the constructed landscape on the banks of the Han River and the modern version of vanities, as well as Okwui Enwezor’s notion of andromodernity defining the developmental modernity of East Asian countries.

The history of Korean-style development, often referred to as “the Miracle on the Han River,” constitutes the strong foundations of the current mainstream of Korean society.

Here I introduce the short version of the video piece S.O.S.—Adoptive Dissensus by Minouk Lim, which was part of the exhibition. Throughout this forty-six minute, single-channel video, which documents a performance that took the form of a night time cruise down the Han River with the boat’s searchlights scanning the banks of the river, the audience listens to the captain’s descriptions of various landmarks constituting the Han River Renaissance, a construction project of the Mayor’s during the past two years, and finally comes upon three different groups of people along the riverbank. At first one sees young people who are demonstrating against construction development and reflecting back the boat’s lights with mirrors. And then the second shows disturbed and vocal young lovers who are running along the banks of Nodeul Island. They complain that they are losing their discreet places for meeting and dating because of all the construction taking place, and they are now uncertain where they can go. And the last one shows a long-term ex-political prisoner who was a victim of the final security monitoring under the North-South ideological conflict. In Lim’s work, we encounter not only a contemporary scene produced by modern Korea, but also the vanity of the myth of growth through the flickering lights from two of the apartment buildings along the riverside, recognizing that these persistent desires for development and growth never disappear, but instead appear with endlessly changing faces. Those who served and operated during

48 Minouk Lim, S.O.S.—Adoptive the period of national reconstruction in the 1970s and 80s have become Dissensus, 2009, video, 46 mins. Courtesy of the artist. representative of the current social and political mainstream and continue today in pursuit of a developer’s drive. My curatorial statement continues:

According to curator Okwui Enwezor in his article “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence,” for the 2009 Tate Modern catalogue Altermodern, Korean modernization is a typical example of developing modernity through adoption of the Western model of modernization (supermodernity), which is considered by many to be the sole category of the developed and advanced. He designates this developing modernity as andromodernity, meaning a hybrid form of modernity found especially in countries like China, India, and South Korea. Such modernity is achieved through a kind of accelerated development while also devising alternative models of development. It is understood to embody very masculine traits, since its principal emphasis is on development or modernization. In most East Asian countries, it has been reinforced through the incorporation of the deep-rooted patriarchal tradition. Thus, it is noted, the main discourse of the state is centred on heterosexuality, masculinity, and familism.

49 South Korean society is again rushing from the condensed growth model of the past to today’s paradoxical “Green Growth” plan, a more evolved form. It is simultaneously and constantly reproducing various invisible beings in society who have been alienated by the developer’s propulsive force. Perspective Strikes Back pays attention to certain kinds of social derelicts or “undoers” who are not operating according to the masculine narrative of the state but who are attempting to reinterpret their struggles as new possibilities. The exhibition not only aims to report the problems of the present national situation under the new Korean government, but also deals with the marginalized narratives that constantly deviate from those of the solid Korean mainstream epic. In particular, by applying feminist perspectives to these issues, it explores the complex constitution of gender inside society and the ramifications of its representations, showing the perspectives of younger generations of women who try to re-establish themselves outside of patriarchal conflicts and violence.

The works in this exhibition reveal the reflective areas that can be drawn out of drifting lives in society and provide an opportunity to consider the ambivalent and contradictory attributes of contemporary modernity that are still under formation through the tensions of different regional conditions in our global era. They also achieve an interesting complexity of gender formation that sublates the traditional gender hierarchy that is influenced by domestic civil progress. Accordingly, this exhibition attempts to shed light on how our present society will be able to become reorganized and what complex processes of modernity or contemporaneity are found in the manifestation of now-invisible subjects. . . . The position of excluded individuals and their different viewpoints strike back to the recent rebooting of the monotonous legacy of development and growth. Now we meet the hidden adversaries who produce antagonistic narratives against the monstrosities of our society. The value of inoperativeness resonates here, while irregular perspectives reconstitute another modernity to come.

For this exhibition I invited mostly women artists, and some of them offer different representations of women. For example, siren eun young jung’s three videos, The Masquerading Moments (2009), The Unexpected Response (2009), and The Rehearsal (2009), feature performers from Korea’s women’s theatre, Yeosung Gukgeuk, which was started in 1940 during the Japanese occupation. This is like traditional theatre except that women play all roles and all genders. Therefore they have a strong understanding in their representation of men, especially patriarchal gestures and modes of behaviour characteristic of the early modern period of Korea. Through this kind of interwoven representation, they are interesting in terms of representation of the complexities and complications of gender identity. Ikjung Cho is a very young artist who is from one of the upper class families in South Korea. Her father is among those who accrued a lot of money since the 1970s, so in her video, Four Refrigerators (2009), she reveals problems with her father because of serious familial patriarchy, and while she wants

50 siren eun young jung, The Unexpected Response, 2009, single-channel video, 4 mins., 35 secs. Courtesy of the artist.

siren eun young jung, The Rehearsal, 2009, single- channel video,1 hr., 33 mins., 13 secs. Courtesy of the artist.

to escape from her pressured life, ironically, she also operates within it. Her second video, Room For Two (2009), is a fictional documentary that tells a story about a woman involved in an awkward relationship with an old man who is living alone and uses the relationship for the purpose of having a place where she would be able to spend time together with her financially inadequate boyfriend. This girl borrowed a room from the lonely old man, became a friend, and let him share his property in exchange for her love.

This exhibition was not just describing an instance of modernity in South Korea, but was also presenting a reconsideration of how we can intervene and revisit today’s plans for urban growth as it exists under the masculinity of the state, and attempting to reinterpret these struggles as new possibilities. The performance video by the young collective Part-time Suite shows them facing their struggles in life by dangerously walking along the edges of rooftops, one after the other. Their solidarity and strong poeticism create an irresistible presence that emerges from the vacuous urban scenery.

When we think about the problem of the kind of development that is highly involved with systematic government pressure to suppress progressive cultures, the current governmental green growth plan in South Korea seems to offer some hope. But the force of the current government recalls the former suppression of progressive voices and people’s political engagement. Although ideally modernism has been a movement in which to look for utopia, this

51 aspect of andromodernity and its developer’s dogmatism results in dystopian images, not only in South Korea but also in other Asian countries, especially sacrificint the realm of democracy. Thank you for listening.

Charles Esche: Thank you very much, Hyunjin. I am going to move to Georg Part-time Suite, Loop the Loop, 2009, video, 7 mins, 32 secs. Schöllhammer, who has come to us from Vienna and is the founder and Courtesy of the artists. editor-in-chief of Springerin, which is an important art magazine published in Vienna. In the last ten to fifteen years or so, he has been interested particularly in the development of post-Soviet space since 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And we anticipate that Georg will be able to talk about post-Soviet conditions and developments during the Soviet Union itself in certain places outside of the Russian homeland. Again, we can think about this in relationship to developments here in China and how the timeline of activities in the former and post-Soviet Union might match or might differ from those we are familiar within the Chinese context.

Georg Schöllhammer: Thanks, Charles. Actually, I just flew in today over what one once called the Soviet Union, and it took eight and a half hours. It’s a huge space I’m expected to cover here. But, nevertheless, Charles, I think that what you requested me to do here, namely to talk about a condition that has been, so to speak, invented after the decline of the Soviet empire in 1989, and mainly by some Moscow intellectuals, is a rather peculiar thing because there actually has been something like a unifying attitude or unifying force in the late Soviet Union that developed from Tallin to Almaty, and it was linked to the notion of modernity or strange paraphrases of modernity. And I’m very happy that you already touched on this issue before, because Soviet modernity and that which we would call a post-Soviet condition are very much intertwined. And they are intertwined even in an ideological way. To compare this to the situation here in China could be rather complicated, but we might find some similarities, not specific similarities but ones within a broader narrative.

The Soviet Union was an empire. It was an empire that had its colonies and a history that began even before Czar Peter the Great had changed the

52 name of his realm to the Russian Empire in 1721. And in 1917, it became an empire onto which a political ideology was superimposed that tried to reformulate society, and in this way we are close to China, because it was socialism and communism that brought about the unifying force of an empire. But the Soviet Union was also a colonial space that arose out of this enterprise: the eastern extension of the Russian reign that had started already in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and, later, the Russification of the conquered lands and cultures, a colonization that was newly formulated and that achieved its greatest power in the revolutionary 1920s and 30s and that declined—not to reiterate the whole story here—after the Second World War. And what caused it to decline was not so much its formation of space or formation of ideology, like any other empire, but the peripheries that it had governed within its dependency on a colonial system—peripheries that created their own idea of autonomy, which was, again, embedded in something one could call Soviet modernity.

It might sound strange and antagonistic, but I would like to further suggest that this decline started under the guise of a seemingly international and universalist rhetoric of modernization and modernity in one or two small but self-conscious regions like the Caucasus or the Baltics, and similarly in the Central Asian regions that were formulated in the Stalin period as a single cultural space, even though they consist of many cultures. Why was the Soviet Stalinist empire, for instance, almost ineffective as a unifying power in a place like the republic of Kazakhstan?

This unification and the self-recognition of the Republic as a specific cultural entity began in the late 1950s and early 60s, which brought about an air of modernism. We have to go that far back if we wish to understand what the present of that post-Soviet landscape is. Khrushchev had lifted the Stalinist centralist dictatorship, and the idea of the modern as a style re-entered the visual cultures of the empire and created symbolic effects. And with that power, the Stalinist doctrine of having something like a dialectics within the culture of the Soviet realm—namely of being ideologically, socially, and administratively unified, as well as international but culturally specific—was so that socialist content and nationalist form would be taken seriously by certain local milieus, one could say even local avant-gardes. In the Khrushchev period, this fundamentally changed the inner relations between the peripheries and the centre within the Soviet system.

It was the newly rediscovered language of modernism that started to modify cities architecture-wise, and the cities suddenly really started to grow—they grew immensely, in a way that Western cities did not.

Architecture was conceived as a symbolic act, as monumental sculpture illustrating future Communist lifestyles. The idea was to create celebratory spaces that would at the same time underpin the unity of People and the Party. Even though the emotionalism of the Stalinist era was “deconstructed” by Khrushchev, the State and Party leadership continued to set its sights on mega-projects and grandiose edifices. The mission of urban planning was to lend clear physical expression to social hierarchies.

For instance, let us think about the city I’m going to talk more about later, Yerevan, which grew from a population of 350,000 in 1949 to 1.2 million in 1984—that’s an explosion of inhabitants that was possible only

53 because of the modernization policies of town planning. What happened with those modernization policies was somehow that the Soviet space, order, and modernist architecture that had been brought in by different Western sources was too difficult to talk about, that it now actually created something like cityscapes where certain intellectual milieus genuinely began to think about their own representation.

The grand prestige projects and monumental buildings thus ultimately remained imposing gestures whose symbolic integrational power was not enough to lastingly secure the legitimacy of the system. The insoluble contradiction between the imaginary space of power dramatization and the real space of everyday life likewise contributed to sounding the death knell of the Soviet empire. In the various Soviet republics, particularly in the Cauca- sus and in Central Asia, the national traditions gave rise to more individualistic architecture styles. Unlike what happened in the Stalin era, however, this time the recourse to a retrospective building style was made based on a modern architectural vocabulary and industrial construction methods. Architects chose to draw on “historical roots” not only as a (postmodern) critique of monotonous functionalism, but also due to the influence of burgeoning nationalist ideologies in the republics.

Built into this architectural system within the Soviet Union were local planning initiatives with “local hero” architects, master architects who could plan the local towns. And suddenly these master architects reflected something of their own cultural heritage. So, for instance, in the Baltics an architecture developed that was pure Scandinavian because there had always been ties between the Estonians, the Lithuanians, and the Finnish, the Swedish. And this was a near hybrid architecture of national modernism that, on the other hand, also had its great housing projects that were designed by architects from Moscow, the centre of power in the Soviet Union. So small cultural buildings, small-scale representational housing, and big-scale projects that represented the State were cohabitating in the peripheral parts of the nation.

Estonia is a paradigmatic case: In the course of the 1970s, there was a paradigmatic change that was also connected with a generational conflict within the discipline. The then leading urbanists continued to build in the modernist International Style and bore the responsibility for monotonous giant housing developments such as the Estonian Mustamäe, or Lasnamäe, where most residents were Russian immigrants. The industrialization policies that were heavily promoted by the economic planners resulted in far-reaching social consequences for Estonia. The influx of Russians increased owing to the fact that Moscow needed reliable political cadres both for political and administrative institutions, as well as for the communications and trans- port sector. Megalomaniac urban expansion projects built on the models of Moscow Soviet modernism were built for these immigrant workers. Both versions of modernism—the Estonian-Scandinavian and the Soviet- hybrid—reflected the two modern lifestyles or were amalgamated into one in petit-bourgeois urban milieus.

This Soviet planning monoculture was now opposed by a group of young artists and architects who were later canonized as the “School of Tallinn,” the Tallinn Ten, and achieved international repute. At the end of the 1970s,

54 Leonhard Lapin was to write the Russian word for “end” in the Cyrillic alphabet under a black triangle on a white background as a double symbol of the yearned-for end of the Soviet narrative that was imagined and realized in the group’s architectural and artistic works.

What made the Tallinn School special was not only its attack on the prevailing, often heavy-handed and oversized repetitive style that emerged from the central planning offices for the large-scale Soviet projects; similar kinds of aesthetic revolts were occurring at the same time in the centripetal aesthetic attempts at autonomy in the local building cultures in Armenia, the Turk republics, and in Kazakhstan. It was also that many of the Soviet-Es- tonian projects, as they were developed in the run-up to the 1980 Olympic Games, displayed considerable individuality in their planning, as well as architectural quality. But what was really special about the Estonian revolt was, instead, the artistic means that it used and the latently anti-urban, provincial, bourgeois, individualistic attitude of the school—which was presented as an aesthetic repertoire that was informed by concrete abstraction and trends in pop art, op art, and the neo-avant-garde of Western art, which had already been evident since the start of the 1970s in exhibitions and happenings. And this was in local recourse: it dared to draw on Estonian architecture of the period between the wars and use it as a motif against So- viet architecture in an exhibition that was the first critical exhibition dealing with Soviet mass architecture.

Tendencies of emancipation from the centralist and colonial power of the empire happened not only in places like Estonia or Lithuania, but also elsewhere in the Caucasus, for instance, in Armenia. In Armenia there was a certain long tradition of self-determination and strategies in dealing with the Russian Empire. Armenia owes a lot to the Soviet system because it somehow was made into a state by Stalin after the tragedies it had faced at the beginning of the twentieth century, namely in what would be called a war by the Turkish and a genocide by the Armenians. So these different narratives of nation-building within the Soviet Union were reflected in the architecture as well, be it in Kazakhstan, for instance, consisting of a nomadic people who became literate, a change from the previous empire rulers who did not integrate the nomadic population into the process of nation-building. But suddenly under the Soviets this happened. There was this idea of modern literacy; nevertheless, there have remained these traditions as well as the Soviet modernism. So how was a town planner able to cope with this in the mid to late 1970s?

Sakan Narynov, Mobile How does one reconcile the self- Space Residential Unit, 1981. Courtesy of Studio of Saken perception of the many nomadic people Narynov, Almaty, Kazakhstan. and that of a modernist Soviet republic? Well, perhaps in projects like futurist utopias, or in the project of creating national housing. There was one futurist housing proposition in Kazakhstan by Saken Narynov: In the winter, people would live in relatively close quarters, with pod-like homes attached to a high- rise tower containing all the necessary infrastructure. And then, in the summer,

55 the house would be detached from the tower by a stationary crane installed on the roof and the nomadic people would take their homes, like a yurt, to the steppes where they would live their non-state nomadic lives. This is something one has to keep in mind if one is going to talk about the decline of the Soviet condition. While there is this condition, there are also dialectics within this condition, and the empire breaks away from its own inner cultural diversities, which somehow create both liberal and emancipatory movements, nationalisms, and conflicts.

The Caucasus, for instance, is highly affected by different representations of nationalisms that came after the decline of the Soviet empire. These always have been somehow existing and have been there because of the colonial regulation of space. It was a regulation that created republics around certain cultural narratives, but it did not really balance their interrelations. So suddenly they stood alone. And all those somehow normalizing ideas of a flat administration, of a centre-periphery conflict, had been brought back to the peripheries themselves.

Armenia, a republic that I now Anonymous, Look-out at Sevan, Armenia. Photo: want to talk about in more detail, Markus Weisbeck. Courtesy was in such a situation. Armenia is of Lokale Modernen. a very peculiar small state that was historically always in a complicated situation. It became an independent republic in 1990 and immediately in 1991 fell into the pitfalls of nationalism within the region. The army was still there—it had a Russian garrison shielding their sovereignty against Turkey—but there was a territorial conflict with another former Soviet Republic and its non-Christian neighbour Aserbajdsjan.

Armenia used to be something like the Switzerland of the Soviet system, where one would go for holidays, from where Churchill would get his cognac, and so on. But in the 1960s a strange thing happened. There had been a remigration, the only big remigration to the Soviet Union ever. Iranians and Turkish Armenians were allowed into the Soviet Union, so suddenly this country not only was a recipient of Soviet modernization but also got Westernized modernization via the elites who came in from Iran, Turkey, and elsewhere.

So it was a peculiar situation, and that is why the first-ever existing museum of contemporary—not modern, but contemporary—art in the Soviet Union was founded in Armenia already by 1972. And there is the famous Georgian filmmaker who produced something like an avant-garde film that “Caucasized” the Soviet paradigm. The filmmaker was Sergej Parajanov, a homosexual who had a lawsuit against him in the Ukraine, because of his sexual orientation, where he lived and where he was then a national hero. You have to imagine a national hero who was practicing an avant- garde film production developed around the theme of the Caucasus—the Caucasianness, so to speak—and bringing forth a many-hued perspective

56 Sergei Parajanov, film still from Colour of Pomegranates, 1968.

from the peripheries of the empire, and he actually thematized homosexuality as a visible issue in his films. This was a scandal whereby the cultural forces of the peripheries were able to display their alternatives to the unifying modernism of the period by making use of the structural openness of this modernist paradigm.

The avant-garde of the late 1980s celebrated the birthday of Parajanov in a public park in Yerevan, and one of the founders of the museum, Alexander Iskarian, performed at the event. This was counter to a nationalist avant- garde and was part of the next generation of those who worked in the late 1970s and the 80s, forming around a group called the 3rd Floor Group— The 3rd Floor Group with Armen Grigoryan, another homosexual who was a hero in this perestroika milieu that gathered in Armenia. The 3rd Floor Group made the transition from a “nonconformist-cultural dissident epoch” to an alternative artistic situation in Armenia. So there was a state organization of museums that allowed the artists to stage counter-actions, to criticize the institution, to form their own practices, and to make a type of very significant action as well a reaction not only to the local avant-garde but

3rd Floor Group, Hail to the Union of Artists from the Other World! Or, Formal Art Has Died, 1986, performance.

57 to the avant-garde that was under Moscow governance. Because all of these Alexander Melkonian, Supermobile, 1993, installation, collective actions had been actions against the other new avant-gardes that Gyumri, Armenia. had developed in the Soviet Union in Moscow, they had become notorious.

But that was just a short moment; it was a post-perestroika moment early in 1990 and 91. The appearance of new alternative artistic scenes coincided with the country’s intensifying sociopolitical changes and the centrifugal tendencies that one also could find in other peripheries of the Union and that had been connected with social movements for democratization and independence. Then the old Moscow-guarded institutions such as the Artists’ Union sensed the upcoming crisis and decided to concentrate on new art trends, but still was considering them as a secondary phenomenon.

The same happened in the field of architecture. Despite the fact that official ideology proclaimed its territorial concept of unifying the nation, it never succeeded in producing sufficient synergy effects to set into motion a self-supporting development throughout the republics, and the national traditions gave rise to individualistic architecture styles. At the end of the 1970s this was followed by a turn towards international appellative postmodernism, in which the tendency towards bourgeois national counter- affirmation—also a dissociation from the megalomaniac, extremely late modernism of Soviet architecture, which was felt very much as a colonial gesture—now liberated and in direct reference to the bourgeois consumer hopes that were denied in the real everyday life of the late Soviet period.

This is certainly in contrast to China, for instance, where you saw somehow that your famous post-Maoist leader understood that consumerism and the creation of individualities would need to develop a society in a way that held it together, a way that the Soviets could not handle. There was always a lack in the Soviet production systems of refined goods, and there still is. The economy is based on the exploitation and export of natural resources and the profit used for filling up the voids of fiscal policy and financial politics, and not so much for the production of services. So there was a decline of the Soviet system because there was a need of individualization of self- expression, even of consumerism, of reiterating stories of otherness that couldn’t have been homogenized by the most brilliant new youth palaces, cinemas, avenues, and parade grounds that were built in all Soviet cities until

58 Act Group, Art Demonstration, the late 1980s, just when the republics started to re-nationalize. After the Yerevan, Armenia. two historical attempts of dissent (Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968), the next decade experienced a growing tension in that direction. This is mirrored in the large projects with national morphology promoted in all Southern republics: first in Uzbekistan, with the reconstruction of Tashkent after the big earthquake, but then also in Armenia, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, etc.

I always wondered: Why did all that enormous activity of constructing public buildings go on in the USSR during the 70s and mid 80s? I think that this was a metabolic manifestation of a conflict existing in the society. The Soviet society also was experiencing, despite its isolation, an acute growth of consumerist needs and its manifestations. The political power answered to that crisis with representations of public forums and stages, but the society was deprived of the consumer goods that would allow people to individualize their very lives. What was given to the populations hungry for leisure were theme parks, but without the possibility to consume.

So what happened is like a cancer, really—you see palaces of sport, houses of the pioneers, you see national monuments in all these cities that were developed from 1979 to ’86. But the system itself could not create a space for the needs of the people, and the people wanted to express themselves and find their own inspirations, and this was the case for the Armenian collectives as well. Consumerism was another aspect, and that is why, for instance, Pop Art emerged in the republics more than it did in Moscow, and that is where Erik Bulatov and others began a criticism of the system through their artwork.

Local architecture arrived as a criticism of the lack of consumerism in some of the republics. But, on the other hand, there is a manifestation of the tragic, almost existentialist, loneliness of the artist of the older generation that is related to the consequences of the nationalism that now has lost its emancipatory power and turned to an essentialist identity politics—and a war, the Nagorno-Karabakh war (1988–1994) between Armenia and Azerbaijan. You can really see it in a famous installation, Supermobile, by Alexander Melkonian (who unfortunately died a few years ago) from 1993, which was created in the midst of the war. And during the wartime, there

59 had been a lot of rallies in the streets, and people formed collectives and demonstrated. There was a group composed just of artists, and suddenly there was a strange, almost surrealist presence. They said, “Art, it’s an Art demonstration,” so it was something totally beyond any means—it was just creating a familiar known space that was free from the heavy load of post-socialist or corrupt new nationalist development within a new liberal economic system. These artists walked through the old/new Soviet avenues and urban landscapes in their demonstrations, and they even made fake art elections to show that even elections can be exposed—and, as well, consumerism. Thank you very much for your attention.

Charles Esche: Thank you very much, Georg. I think that was wonderful and instructive about the relationships we find ourselves in today. I would like to introduce Defne Ayas, who is co-director of Arthub Asia and curator of Performa in New York City and has been living in Shanghai since 2006. She is originally from Istanbul, Turkey, and will combine some information about the Turkish situation that coincides with the situation here in China as well. Thanks, Defne.

Defne Ayas: Hi, everyone. I’m here to make an analysis of the relationship between China and Turkey for this session, and this is quite an uncharted territory. I should mention that I will venture into lost or forgotten connections, on mainly historical details over the last one hundred and fifty years—not quite the range of contemporary art production—and on points of encounters for both Chinese art and Ottoman art vis-a-vis the “West” as well as the various ruptures and continuations that resulted from it. In this case we will be looking at the legacy of the Ottoman empire and, the Qing dynasty, as well as China’s speculative impact across Asia, both current and historical.

So let me start with the historical Iznik tile, Rustem Pasha Mosque, Istanbul. Courtesy of links between Turkey (with Defne Ayas. substantial Central Asian history and the ambitious strategy in that part of the world) and China (with a strong Tang dynasty legacy) by showing you an example of this Iznik tile featuring a cluster of stylized tulips. I find it very interesting that we can actually look at a traditional tile as a starting point in my presentation. This tile was transported along the Silk Road trade routes between Turkey and China and was painted in the Iznik tradition that started around the fifteenth century from the desire to imitate Chinese porcelain for the decoration of Turkish palaces. The tile is telling example not only of the historical relationship between these two countries, but also the nature of consumer demand for cultural artifacts along this geographical axis. The cultural production routes between these countries go back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which is only part of its history. The high demand for tiles, on the other hand, as well as the import-export matrix, are quite similar and can be compared to the high demand for Chinese and Turkish contemporary art abroad today. The chances of a tile—originally a Chinese invention but now with a Turkish stylistic improvisation featuring the tulip flower, actually a Turkish flower

60 with roots in Mongolia—eventually ending up in the kilns of Holland, then being exported to the rest of the world, whether it was England, Italy, the U.S., or elsewhere, is quite remarkable and maybe something that is happening right now in our exhibition Double Infinity. As you know, although tulips are associated with the Netherlands, the commercial cultivation of the flower actually began on Turkish lands during the Ottoman Empire. The Consular General of the Netherlands remarked the other day: “We took the tulip from the Turks, we took the porcelain from the Chinese, and now we’re giving it back to all of you as gifts from the Netherlands.”

Taking a more current perspective regarding the Silk Roads, Shanghai has recently signed an economic pact called “Shanghai Five” with some of the Central Asian countries that carry a post-Soviet legacy. The nations involved are China, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, as well as Russia, all committing to regional cooperation in the fields of economy and trade, as well as military affairs. Once this pact is implemented and the “dragon” widens its tails across the region, I imagine that culture will eventually follow commerce, a process that Arthub Asia had been exploring extensively during the past three years.

If we continue with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between Turkey and China, there are also notable “foreign-led” historical connections, some certainly on good terms, but others at the other end of the spectrum, such as incidents caused by the Elgin Family. James Bruce, Eighth Earl of Elgin, was a British colonial diplomat—he was the High Commissioner in charge of opening trade between China and Japan and was also the Viceroy of India. But most notably, in China, he ordered the burning and complete destruction of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing during the second Opium War in 1860, which is a huge loss of heritage for the Chinese and is a big wound in Chinese history, as this site is where the emperors of the Qing dynasty resided and handled government affairs. An alternative account men- tions that Elgin had initially considered the destruction of the Forbidden City, but he opted for the destruction of the Old Summer Palace instead.

His father, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, did a similar thing to the Otto- man Empire in the case of the marbles of the Acropolis. The Elgin Marbles are a famous collection of classical Greek marble sculptures, inscriptions, and architectural artifacts that originally were part of the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis of Athens. Thomas Bruce was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803. From 1801 to 1812, Elgin’s agents removed about half of the surviving sculptures of the Parthe- non of the Acropolis. In Britain, while the acquisition of the collection was supported by most of the public, some compared Elgin’s acts to vandalism or looting, which has always been the sentiment in the Ottoman Empire. The legality of the removal has been questioned and the debate continues as to whether the Marbles should remain in the British Museum or be returned to Athens, which gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821.

Elgin’s actions point to parallels between both the Qing dynasty and the Ot- toman empire in the nineteenth century, that is, the weakened authority in both empires and the taking over of foreign powers. This might explain the respective nationalism, guardedness, and paranoia in both of these countries today, especially when it comes to dealing with the foreigners. Conces- sions in China had been granted due to the first “unequal treaties” under the

61 Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. Concessions were made by the Chinese in some cities, such as certain enclaves in Shanghai that became governed and occupied by European powers and their law for its citizens. The concessions were given to the British, French, Japanese, and, as few would know, to Belgians and even Austro-Hungarians. Capitulations of the Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, were of a similar nature, with contracts struck between the empire and European powers. They consisted of grants made by successive Sultans to Christian nations, conferring rights and privileges in favour of their resident subjects or trading in the Ottoman dominion. It is because of these series of treaties of capitulation that the Ottoman Empire gradually lost its economic independence.

China’s experience took place at an extreme extent—concessions are frequently associated with colonialism as well as with the spread of Christianity. The pace of missionary activity in China stepped up considerably after the First Opium War in 1842. Christian missionaries and their schools, under the protection of Western powers, went on to play a major role in the Westernization of China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and certainly affected art education. The Jesuit missionaries were the first ones to teach Western art history in China. We made a timeline for the exhibition in the back for our book for Double Infinity, so if you take a look, you will see that we tried to capture all these connections that were taking place between China and the rest of the world. (You can also add your own tweaks on arthubasia.org/archives/points-of-encounter-a- timeline-to-be-completed.)

In Turkey, the experience of the Ottoman empire was on more of a financial level, but it eventually led up to the dissolution of the empire. Christianity has had a long history in Anatolia, which is the birthplace of numerous Christian Apostles such as Apostle Paul of Tarsus, but in the nineteenth century we are mainly talking about the status of Christian minorities within the empire such as the Greeks and Armenians and their relationship with the Christian missionaries who began their work in Turkey in 1819. Artists who contributed and formed the nineteenth-century art milieu in Istanbul were often Christian and “Levantine” artists, foreign painters who lived in Istanbul, as well as those from the military schools who had gone abroad, mostly in France, for training—the latter, one can argue, as a result of capitulation. The young Turkish artists sent to Europe in 1920s came back inspired by contemporary trends such as Fauvism, Cubism, and even Expressionism, which were still very influential in Europe.

All of which brings me to the subject of Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s. On the commercial front, the film Shanghai Express, starring Marlene Dietrich as the notorious Shanghai Lily, a passenger on the express train from Beijing to Shanghai, was screened here in early 1930s, and that was shortly after Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, which was related to Istanbul, was published in 1934. So you can see the populist aesthetics of modernization arriving in the form of film and literature, in Orientalist fashion, by way of exotification, regardless of whether the focus was on Turkey or China.

During the modernization of China in the 1920s and 30s, we have China’s very important modern writer, Lu Xun. He started a whole movement that was not only directed to language and literature but also to art and graphic design; he was known to devour foreign literature and collaborated

62 Sergei Tretyakov, Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht, black-and-white photograph.

with German artists such as Kathe Kollowitz, as well as with a number of Japanese wood-block masters. He designed the logo of the Beijing University and most notably argued for a switch to the Latin alphabet in China, which did not happen. However, this change did happen in Turkey and had an extensive impact upon Turkish literature. The law was enacted in 1928 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who initiated the creation and dissemination of a modified version of the Latin alphabet to replace the Ottoman script following the Ottoman empire’s defeat in the First World War and founding of modern Turkey in 1923.

Although the comparison between China and Turkey is the focus of my presentation, I also believe that Shanghai’s 1920s and 1930s are full of lost and forgotten regional and global connections, which need some highlighting—again refer to our timeline. It’s important for instance to look at Sergei Tretyakov, who was a Russian Constructivist writer, playwright, and special correspondent for Pravda, and who was known for his involvement with the Siberian futurist movement known as Creation along with artists such as David Burlyuk. In 1924 Sergei Tretyakov made a lengthy visit to China, where he taught Russian literature and collected materials for some of his later publications. Tretyakov also wrote the controversial play I Want a Baby (I Want a Child) (1926), which has seen recent performances staged in Europe and America. In my correspondences with David Elliott in 2007, I discovered that Sergei Tretyakov himself was sent to China as Head of the Communist International—the international communist organization founded in Moscow in 1919 to teach China about the Bolshevik revolution. Perhaps his most famous play at the time was Roar China! which attacked Western imperialism. There is also a photograph by Tretyakov of Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht, which suggests there were connections between the Russian Constructivists, the Cubo-Futurists, Brecht, and Europe, as well as Vladivostok at that time—something that is not always recognized in our contemporary art world when making connections between Russia and China. Roar China! was staged first in Guangzhou, then it was taken to Moscow, where Vsevolod Meyerhold, an important Russian theatre director, did a massive production of it, and then, I believe, it was brought to Europe where it was continually staged—a subject I believe the 2010 Shanghai Biennial, which I am advising within my capacity as a curator for Performa, will explore. Tretyakov had quite an impact upon the art scenes of the Soviet republics, not only his hometown in Siberia, but also

63 that of Armenia, something for Georg Book cover design showing Futurist influences. to consider in his research, though it could also be something for me to look at through the work of Karen Andreassian, as in the past five years I have been working on a cultural project with artists from Turkey and Armenia in relation to the rupture of the Ottoman empire and its impact on cultural systems.

Here is a Chinese book design cover that was influenced by a series of Futurist manifestos—a development that both scholar Lynn Pan and I explored during Performa’s 2009 Futurism- related seminars, and it is a subject we would like to inquire into further. This 1945 book cover titled Advance Not Retreat, and included in Pan’s publication, Shanghai Style: Art and Design Between the Wars, suggests this forward movement, and is conveyed by the varied size of the characters according to vanishing perspectives and angling them across the layout. As Futurism deeply influenced Shanghai’s 1920s and 30s aesthetics as it reached China through Japan, the U.S., and Russia, I must say that the performance biennial PERFORMA was the first to bring forward this historical material, highlighting its significance during the early years of the twentieth century, when the Futurist Manifesto, published in Shanghai in 1921, had enormous influence on the artists and musicians of the period and shows its ongoing significance today. Sergei Tretyakov himself was also a Cubist Futurist, and eventually a Constructivist, and there is a very good example of constructivism by El Lissitzky that you can see in the Double Infinity exhibition next door.

The period in which Shanghai embraced Left: Yang Taiyang, Reflection on the Cosmos, 1934, oil influences from Europe and Japan— on canvas (black-and-white whether it was the Futurist manifesto reproduction). or wood-block prints or influences that arrived by way of Russia—was a very fertile one that needs to be revisited and further understood. Moreover, when we look at that period, we see that maybe only twenty or thirty people were active as artists at that time. It is small islands that end up creating art histories or art movements. Eventually Chinese painters came back from France with the tools of Impressionism or Surrealism—exemplified in works such as Yang Taiyang’s painting Reflection on the Cosmos (1934)— and, following that, the influence of Soviet Socialist Realism in China began. Between 1949 and 1979 is when we really see the increase of Soviet Socialist Realism, and then the art schools were shut down, yet there were interesting different formations taking place within that particular genre that could have been treated more extensively at Asia Society’s Art and China’s Revolution exhibition.

I would like to introduce a small parenthesis here. Yesterday, when the question arose with Chen Tong as to whether China has ever affected the West, I was astounded when he suggested that it had not. I think it is important to continually revisit the impact of the Cultural Revolution, not

64 Memed Erdener (Extrrastruggle), The Angel Atatürk or If Rodin Were a Kemalist, 2010, car paint on polyester, 45 x 95 x 95 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

only in China, but also in the rest of the world, especially the “Third” world. The idea that culture can be eradicated and then reconstructed took the world by storm at that time, especially countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. If you look at the intellectuals in Turkey, Chile, South Africa, Armenia, Lebanon, or even the Philippines, they mostly reflect a Maoist trajectory with Marxist underpinnings, so the legacies and crumbs of the Cultural Revolution should really be deconstructed on a global level, not only within the Chinese context but maybe through the global art world.

Following the Cultural Revolution, Xing Xing’s (The Stars) first exhibition, in September 1979, was a provocative display of work hung without official permission on the fence outside the National Gallery, Beijing, and one can recognize the continuation of the early 1920s and 30s Shanghai Surrealist tradition in the work, which, after Deng Xiaoping’s opening up of China in 1979, became even more evident. So during the Cultural Revolution period there was an internal redefinition of what culture is, and this shifted as soon as texts and books from the outside started flowing into China—the minute

65 we had Sartre and Kant in China, we had a resuscitation of Surrealism. The Stars exhibition is considered the ursprung for avant-garde exhibitions in China, especially for those who cannot create alternative timelines. For those who have not yet looked at our timeline, 1979 was when one clearly can see how contemporary Chinese art rebounded after it was suspended in 1949.

With the leadership shift from Mao to Deng Xiaopeng, painters in China, among them Wang Guangyi, You Youhan, and Li Shan, began to deconstruct Mao as a visual, cultural, and ideological icon, especially during the late 1980s and early 90s. This is something artists are never allowed to do in Turkey, where we are also not allowed to critique Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—the ulti- mate modernizer of the failing Ottoman empire. If we do so, we can be con- victed under the infamous Article 301, a Turkish criminal code preventing “insulting Turkishness” that has been cause for many imprisonments and as- sassinations of intellectuals in Turkey. This is also one of the reasons Youtube and now Vimeo are banned in Turkey, as it is in China—to deter any political repercussions. Something I find striking is that on the one side, the top-down modernism that came with Atatürk can be challenged (with limits), and it has always been part of the discussion of Turkish modern and contemporary art. But Atatürk as an icon cannot be examined artistically (and publicly) except maybe for what graphic designer Memed Erdener has done with his Extrastruggle project that dissects early visual and material culture of the Turkish nation-project, and includes the iconography of Atatürk.

Mao Zedong AO (1988), a provocative painting by Wang Guangyi, received Wang Guangyi, Mao Zedong AO, 1988, oil on canvas, 120 considerable attention in China, for instance, and it was barred from being x 150 x 3 cm. Courtesy of the shown by Chinese authorities until the artist supplied a written statement artist. promising that his work was a rational analysis of the late Chairman. If you ask Chinese artists and peers what the AO means, they are generally unable to say unless they had Christian Biblical training, or some Greek or Roman knowledge, because the notion of Alpha to Omega is something that is not widely understood or studied in China. This brings me to my other point today, that the Christian paradigm, or the more Western paradigms residing in the high modernism of the mid-80s, need to be re-examined because the relationship between art and religion have yet to be analyzed.

There are many strategies that Chinese artists adopted in the mid 80s, and there were a lot of new artistic experiments, many of them in the south of

66 China, like in Xiamen and Guangzhou. These were more an appropriation of artistic “encounters” with foreign strategies such as Dada, not verbatim, but definitely one can see the influences. This is a time when ideas were more important than material manifestations. And in the work of Huang Yongping, for example, the legacy of Marcel Duchamp keeps resonating. This work The Saint Learned from a Spider to Weave a Cobweb (1994) is composed of a lamp, a large live spider, and a table with a photocopy of Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp on it. (This photocopy was from a Taiwan-published Chinese translation of the book, and was the only material on Duchamp in Chinese that Huang could find in Xiamen around 1985.) Light from the lamp projects the spider’s shadow onto the book about Duchamp. This installation was first realized in Duchamp’s hometown. Another example is when Huang tossed two important textbooks on art history—one Chinese, one Western—into a washing machine for two minutes and then presented the resulting pile of pulp on a table, suggesting that the pulp was far more interesting than trying to make separate analyses of two art histories.

So we have 1989 as a critical point with the Berlin Wall coming down, and here in China there was the student movement and the Tian’anmen Square incident, after which many artists left; therefore, there was increasing activity by Chinese artists taking place abroad. There was definitely a factor of external legitimization of Chinese art, and one can now see more clearly how the external gaze affected internal production. They shaped pretty much what we are seeing today, but that is not to be dismissive of the many significant developments that were taking place within China at that time.

Contemporary art as a potentially imported concept was something that really became apparent in the Fuck Off exhibition in 2000, a parallel project to the Shanghai Biennale, and for those who know Chinese art history, this is maybe the usual suspect in China’s contemporary art evolution, but it remains as important as ever. This was an exhibition organized by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi, with the point of exposing the Biennale as a foreign construct, and with the local artists metaphorically or literally saying we are from here, but those who collaborate with the foreigners, or those who lived abroad and came back, you guys are not from here, you don’t know exactly. Resistance to contemporary art on an international level was still alive in Shanghai in 2000 because the first and second editions of the Shanghai Biennale were primarily focused on Shanghai painters. If you were here yesterday you would have witnessed that Li Zhenhua, Qiu Zhijie, and Hu Jieming were accused by a provocateur audience member of not being from here because they are inter- acting abroad. The argument was that these contemporary artists speak an imported power language and, therefore, it is justified that they receive and bear the reaction of those who claim to be the authentic agents of “local.”

Halil Altindere, Fuck the Sartreification, or the flow of French Curator, 2001, photograph. Courtesy of the artist. existentialist texts into China, which was exemplified in the Asia Art Archive documentary, From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng: Contemporary Cantonese Art in the 1980s, we screened about the Guangzhou art scene yesterday, also occurred in Turkey. The Turkish art scene experienced similar sentiments with contemporary art as a “foreign UFO,” and the transition from modern to contemporary art has not been smooth. Halil Altindere, a critical artist and thinker whose work was

67 perceived to exhibit glaring allegories of the state of politics in Turkey, and thus received very well abroad, has a work titled Fuck the Curator (2001), so you see similar sorts of divisions. Who is a curator, another foreign import? Various factions within the Turkish art scene have also opposed the Istan- bul Biennial since its inception. Modernist painters and galleries have often criticized the biennial and its ambitions to be visible only at the international level. So there’s always this ongoing back and forth that you see at large.

When Georg mentioned a possible comparison between Yerevan and Shang- hai, I thought it was right on, because the rachitic, uneven infrastructure of Shanghai’s art world is very similar to the ecology of what I saw in Yerevan this year, and many parallels can be drawn to various countries’ experiences. So all is not that unique in China, and such similarities were experienced throughout the world, especially in parts of the world with rather minimal exposure to globalized and institutionalized art world aesthetics.

Currently, the relationships among art world practitioners, the politics of making art history, the inclusivity of the interactions among different factions over certain exhibitions attempting to make history, and certain small histories and smaller exhibitions being left out—these are all in the air in Shanghai and urgently need to be constantly questioned. Considerable institutionalization is also taking place in the city. Two museums just opened in the past few months, which is encouraging—one backed by a real estate company, the other by a national bank. But non-profit or civic spaces are pretty much non-existent in Shanghai, except for the former BizArt (now MadeIn), the recent Mommy Foundation experiment (with aspirations similar to that of earlier Bizart’s in its support of younger artists), and the Bund18 Arthouse potentiality under writer Mian Mian’s artistic direction, but now unfortunately defunct. The notion of professional exhibition-making has intensified in the past few years, but it has caused a tense, and rather unproductive artistic constellation for the city and has not helped new ones to form. The presence of this institutionalized mode of professionalism combined with the high global demand for consumable art has led some artists to retreat to their personal pursuits within their personal space, and they respond to invitations only from trusted art institutions or friends, rather than turning artistic practice into a corporate profession. Sometimes they even agree to rent museums for their own shows. Whereas the lack of infrastructure in the 1990s until the early 2000s in Shanghai had a dimension of facilitating artistic productivity, now the mood is somewhat more grim.

In Istanbul we see also a combination of what I just mentioned. There are few non-profit spaces, few established galleries, and many young, new ones, but the museums are mostly developed by banks or second or third generation corporate wealth who are releasing some of their funds so their corporations can have better public relations and promote a better image of themselves. Thank you.

Charles Esche: Thank you very much, Defne.

68 Mathieu Borysevicz Peasant Da Vincis: A Conversation with Cai Guo-Qiang

Installation view with Du “ hat good is art?” began Cai Guo-Qiang at a press conference Wenda’s Flying Saucer No. 2 (left) and Wu Shuzai’s for his latest exhibition, Peasant Da Vincis, which inaugurated Wooden Helicopter (right). Photo: Lin Yi. Cai Guo-Qiang the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. For an internationally Collection. Courtesy of Cai W renowned Chinese artist—whose fame was hard won while living abroad, Studio, New York. first in Japan then New York, and who is now revered throughout China for his epic firework displays that blasted both the Shanghai 2001 APEC summit and the 2008 Beijing Olympic games into the global spotlight—this query seemed somewhat self-deprecating. Cai, however, modest as he is, is also very conscious that his role in the global dynamic is not that of saviour, but provocateur. In this new installation, timed to coincide with the World Expo 2010 and located along the historically charged North Bund, this role is even further emphasized.

Peasant Da Vincis is a collection of machines that were invented and fabricated by farmers—flying saucers, submarines, airplanes, even China’s first aircraft carrier. Through Cai’s curatorial efforts these crafty contraptions have been packaged together with their authors’ stories and video documentation as metaphors for human will, imagination, and

69 China’s momentous but often-precarious development. The works, some now mere fragments from failed flight attempts, were installed throughout Rockbund Art Museum’s newly refurbished interior rooms and spacious courtyard. On one floor there is even an entirely active robot workshop. The beautiful futility of these objects echo that of art itself, “merely a bridge back to your childhood,” as Cai postulated later in the conference. This sentiment is embodied in Wu Shuzai’s wooden helicopter, which has the looks and charm of an extra large, hand-made toy. But Cao’s fetishization of these funky clunkers isn’t entirely for their naïve folk charm.

In the process of negotiating Du Wenda, Flying Saucer D, no date, aluminum, Duchampian found-art tactics propeller blades, LED lights, engine, 180 x 400 x 400 cm. with anthropological investigation, Photo: Lin Yi. Cai Guo-Qiang Cai has cleverly staged a standoff Collection. Courtesy of Cai Studio, New York. between art and science, ideology and practice, and between the individual and the collective. Cai’s interest is not in masquerading these works as “art” but in illuminating the spirit that gave rise to them in the first place, especially in the context of a nation bent on trying to do too much too fast. Du Wenda, a peasant inventor whose flying saucer is poised atop the roof of the museum as if ready for takeoff, was quite frank when asked about his objective in making these creations: “It has nothing to do with art; I’m interested in mass producing these.” The opportunistic reality of China is what lends this exhibition its hauntingly prophetic air. The myth of Icarus comes immediately to mind, reminding us that, like everything, the sky too has its limits.

Mathieu Borysevicz: The exhibition Peasant Da Vincis has its own artistic resonance—bringing “non-art” into an art institution—but can you tell us about the implications of this project in the larger framework of the 2010 World Expo?

Cai Guo-Qiang: It was very meaningful to do this exhibition. On one hand, it brings so-called rustic peasant objects to cosmopolitan cities, through the Bund or Shanghai. On the other hand, this exhibition showcases the peasants’ spirit of ingenuity and is conceived specifically as a counterpoint to the World Expo. The current expo is essentially a display of a nation’s power. Each nation brings in its own team and corporations, such as Sony, for example, to build its own pavilion. But Peasant Da Vincis is a form of collective power. The exhibition that we presented offers a different perspective: Can we place our focus on individual Chinese persons? They all have their own individual voices, stories, and creative power. The burgeoning strength of China’s economic power and welfare made it relatively easy for the country to host the Olympic Games and the World Expo, but it was not easy to see individual lives. A truly remarkable prospect does not lie in what a nation is capable of but what an individual person thinks and what his or her capabilities are. This is what truly is meaningful.

70 Cai Guo-Qiang, Monument, Mathieu Borysevicz: You can say that this folk invention phenomenon 2010, salvaged airplane parts and video projection on marble was already part of the greater Chinese consciousness. The Chinese press panels, dimensions variable. Photo: Lin Yi. Collection of the has been actively reporting on it for some time, and you also mention artist. Courtesy of Cai Studio, that this is how you initially became interested. So your show isn’t exactly New York. “news.” What are you doing as an artist that illuminates this phenomenon differently than, for example, China Post?

Cai Guo-Qiang: The whole conception of this exhibition was to create two spiritual spaces within a city; to conceive of a city artistically, wherein the artistic value and the charm of the folk inventions are featured. I am an artist, so curating this entire exhibition was intended to make their concepts more thoughtful and artistic. For instance, Tan Chengnian was a peasant in Shandong who died after his homemade plane crashed. I treated the remains of the plane as if they were shooting meteorites and projected his name and picture as video stills on two pieces of marble that resembled memorial stones. His project becomes art, and his action becomes poetic, moving, and emotional. But I’m also very cautious in how I handle these things because I don’t want people to forget these peasants, or their planes and submarines, after the exhibition. I placed these objects at the very

71 Installation view of Wu Yulu’s Robot Factory, which includes robots of Damien Hirst, Bruce Nauman, and Jackson Pollock, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2010. Photo by Justin Jin, courtesy Cai Studio.

centre of this exhibition and created an artistic context for them. The most important thing is the spiritual pursuit and expression. One more thing: My goal was to relate the creations of these peasants to social issues by presenting their roles and identities within the entire Chinese social history, their contributions towards the country’s modernization, and how their efforts bring forth other considerations in what it means to be Chinese. For instance, is it possible for this country and its people to pursue a more liberal and democratic future? Perhaps through these peasants one can see that it is possible.

Mathieu Borysevicz: Did you consult with these inventors about the display and context of the exhibition? Was there any collaboration on their part?

Cai Guo-Qiang: For people such as Wu Yulu, I discussed with him how he could position his robots and how viewers might interpret them. And so we would discuss and work together to explore how the objects could be displayed. As for the other people I collaborated with, there was one person who had come to install the airplanes, as I couldn’t do it by myself. When he came to assist, he would also participate in the discussion. I also spent time with the person who made the aircraft carrier. We discussed together how things should be done.

Mathieu Borysevicz: When you collected these inventions from the peasants, did they feel strange that their products were to be displayed as art objects?

Cai Guo-Qiang: In the beginning I didn’t tell them that I am an artist. They just felt I was an entrepreneur or someone who supported them. But eventually they went online and found out who I am. [Laughs.] So they became very aware that they were cooperating with an artist. Nevertheless, they followed their own vision, and it didn’t matter if their approaches were different from mine. I didn’t want them to think, “Alright, I’m now assisting an artist to do an exhibition.” Doing so would narrow and essentialize the scope of our thoughts. If we approach everything as art, it would limit the scope of things. Is art really that important? Of course, I do think that ultimately we need to employ art methodology to bring out the artistic values of these peasants’ works. That’s why I believe that questions posed by art cannot always be resolved by art.

72 Wu Yulu, Yves Klein’s Living Brush, 2010, commissioned by Cai Guo-Qiang and created by Wu Yulu, metal, electronics, secondhand materials, wood, sand, cobalt blue powder, mannequin, 190 x 96 x 87 cm, circular sand pit 405 cm diameter. Photo: Lin Yi. Cai Guo-Qiang Collection. Courtesy of Cai Studio, New York.

Mathieu Borysevicz: According to a press clipping, the submarine creator, Tao Xiangli, who now lives in Beijing, has a fifth grade education and never goes online, but has managed to create this submarine. Unlike some of the other peasants, who do not live in big cities, he lives in a hyper-modern environment but chooses to build an outdated submarine. Some might consider this completely naïve, that there is no innovation. Where do you think his inspiration comes from?

Cai Guo-Qiang: Tao Xiangli’s submarine and Du Wenda’s flying saucer are very different from each other. Tao didn’t want to continue his studies after he finished fifth grade as he saw no value in Chinese education, whereas for Du, he really wanted to continue his education and did well, but he didn’t have the money to continue his studies. When Tao came to Beijing, he didn’t stay in high-rises or enjoy the benefits of modernization. He lived in slums where the streets were covered with holes. So he came from a ghetto, the lowest class within a capital, modern city. And this is the status of his life. But why did he create this submarine? Undoubtedly he has many explanations, just like when people ask me about my gunpowder projects, I will offer them many viewpoints. But for me, these peasants have a spirit of innovation, even though their works may not yield ingenuity. This spirit of ingenuity is very important; this creative attitude is essential in building an innovative society. It really doesn’t matter whether or not they have won a Nobel prize. That’s why I’m not that willing to speak or defend these peasants, saying something like, “You see, this aircraft carrier carries a submarine underneath. This has never been done before.” Is it really that significant to invent things that the world has not seen before? What’s the point in doing so? Right? What’s more important is to have the freedom to celebrate individuals.

Mathieu Borysevicz: China is now in the throes of a debate and crisis between “made in China” and “created in China.” How does this exhibition fit into this argument?

Cai Guo-Qiang: With regard to “creating in China,” perhaps we could start by having our country allocate more funds to universities and science academies to conduct research on things that the world has not seen before. But if you step back and think about it, these peasants don’t really care what

73 is being created or made in China. What matters is that they are creating Cai Guo-Qiang, Complex, 2010, aircraft carrier, submarine and through their own individual perspective. airplane commissioned by Cai Guo-Qiang and created by Tao Xiangli, galvanized steel sheets, Mathieu Borysevicz: As an international artist living in New York for L-shaped steel rods, stainless steel sheets; viewing platform, the past fifteen years, you have also become a national artistic hero for wood composite board, scaffolding; cinema, 20 wooden China, participating in the 2008 Olympic opening ceremonies. At a time of benches, video projection and rear projection screen, DVD continued tension between China and the West, your position as a bilateral (Our Century by Artavazd Pelechian), 3.5 x 3.5 x 20 m. artist must have affected your work. It seems that this is an exhibition that Photo: Lin Yi. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Cai Studio, a Chinese artist living in China wouldn’t make. How has your experience of New York. living and working abroad shaped this project?

Cai Guo-Qiang: People may think this exhibition poses a question that is particular only to China and is irrelevant to the rest of the world. But to me it is relevant, especially since China is experiencing such accelerated growth and people’s lives are gradually improving. At a time when the U.S. economy is slowing to a stall and the country is in the midst of a financial crisis, people are questioning what the American Dream is. Beyond this dream, is it possible for China to have a Chinese Dream? Or what is a Chinese Dream? Does such a thing exist? All these questions can be found in this exhibition.

Mathieu Borysevicz: You are sort of an honourary Shanghainese—you were educated here and have returned over the years for different projects. Since your first days in the early eighties, Shanghai has changed tremendously. How do the slogans you created for this exhibition and mounted publicly on the museum and on Pudong’s video screens reflect the city’s rapid development?

74 Cai Guo-Qiang: The slogan “Never Learned How to Land” is intended to leave behind some traces of this current era. Everyone thinks, great, let the economy develop, modernize our economy and enjoy material well-being. Of course there’s courage in pursuing a good life, and it’s good to have this dream, to have our society striving upward. But it’s also worthwhile to think how we can land or whether we land or fall. [Laughs.] Another important work in the exhibition, which is my own slogan, is “What’s Important Isn’t Whether You Can Fly.” Because we want everything, anything; we want things to be simple and nice, efficient, and cheap. We don’t have any ideals, nor the time or spirit to pursue anything. Yet another I want to point out is “Peasants— Making A Better City, A Better Life.” It brings out a huge question regarding our country’s development and points out the correlation between modernization and cheap labour. Who has provided the cheap labour for modernization up to this day? We have impressive, modernized cities, one after another, but who built them? These peasants and issues have always been covered up, even to this day. And it is precisely at this moment, at this Expo, when people are talking about urbanization, that we want to present this exhibition and “Peasants—Making A Better City, A Better Life.” These three slogans are my efforts to contribute something as an artist. People say, “Old Cai, there’s no work by you in this exhibition.” But these three slogans are my work.

Mathieu Borysevicz: Chairman Mao declared in 1942 that art must serve the people. This concept of “art for the people” still resonates in your work. In this exhibition you pay tribute to a demographic that makes up the backbone of China, the rural class. You have also received awards in Japan for contributions to world peace, organized shows in Taiwanese war bunkers, and used feng shui to help New Yorkers live better. What is your view of “art for the people”?

Cai Guo-Qiang: I think art is of no use. We certainly need to establish this premise in order to create something that is less contrived and forced. If you ask us to state what 9/11 is, everything that can be said has already been said by the press. Art is not about making statements such as “9/11 is worse than Bin Laden”; nor does it serve to express sympathy for those who are afflicted or who reveal their emotions. It shouldn’t be done this way. Art is not about stating who’s right or wrong. Most of the time art does not resolve conflicts or analyze antagonism. The powerful thing about art is to reveal conflicts and the relationships between humans and the universe. Once we are born, we have to face mortality. Art reveals this oscillation between polarities through varied perspectives. It’s better not to know. Hosting the Olympic Games as a collective effort was not the most remarkable achievement. The most impressive thing is when every individual Chinese has his/her own point of view. Art is most genuine when it reveals contradictions. As for myself, there’s no reason for me to say I will always be like this after being involved in the Olympics or that I’m forever concerned about individuals when my work is about peasants. It is you who is thinking, who is looking at the world. If you recognize the conflicts, you can bring them to the table and display them as something that constitutes our generation. And I am also a contradictory entity produced by our time.

75 Marie Leduc From the Edges of the Earth to Rehearsal: A Conversation with Gao Shiming

ao Shiming has emerged Gao Shiming. Photo: Marie Leduc. as a significant figure in G the contemporary art world, where his projects and exhibits have contributed to an important international dialogue on curatorial practice. Edges of the Earth: Migration of Contemporary Asian Art and Regional Politics (2002–03) questioned the concept of Asia in an art world divided by East and West; the Third Guangzhou Biennale, Farewell to Post-Colonialism (2008) tackled the significance and divisiveness of postcolonial discourse; and the Yellow Box project (2005–present) explores and experiments with different modes of viewing and appreciating art. Now, as Executive Curator of the 8th Shanghai Biennale, Gao Shiming, along with Fan Di’an and Li Lei, is introducing a new curatorial theme, Rehearsal.

In an interview at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou on May 26, 2010, and in subsequent e-mail correspondence, Marie Leduc and Gao Shiming discussed the upcoming Shanghai Biennale and the ideas that have guided Gao’s curatorial practice.

Marie Leduc: I would like to start by reviewing your different projects, starting with Edges of the Earth in 2002 and ending with Rehearsal, the 2010 Shanghai Biennale.

Gao Shiming: Maybe we can start from the year 2000, because I think from there we can find a link to my curatorial practice—that of rediscovering the local. I think it is an intellectual project for me as a curator. Edges of the Earth and Farewell to Post-Colonialism actually have their roots in the year 2000.

Marie Leduc: Was Edges of the Earth your very first big curatorial project?

Gao Shiming: My very first! I was working on my Ph.D. at that time.

Marie Leduc: Was it part of your Ph.D. research?

Gao Shiming: No, my Ph.D. research was on “visual studies on the real and realities” and titled Mirror and Mask. It is quite different.

76 In April of 2000, the curatorial team of documenta 11 came to China. Their first stop was Hangzhou. They stayed here for four days and we had three long conversations. There were many debates between the documenta team and the staff at the China Academy of Art. Also, the curatorial team of documenta 11 had many discussions on how to understand Chinese reality within the framework of the academy. In China, the academy plays an extremely significant role in the development of contemporary art. It is quite different from Europe and the U.S. In China, almost all of the contemporary art stars are from the academies.

So one of the focuses of these debates was “globalism.” The main idea, postcolonial constellations, was put forward by Okwui Enwezor, who was the artistic director of documenta 11. During these rich conversations, we also talked about the global concept, its unfinished postcolonialism, and its aftermath in China. The debates were one of the starting points of my work since 2000.

Marie Leduc: It sounds like these discussions introduced a number of key ideas: local, global, postcolonial.

Gao Shiming: Yes. The first question Okwui Enwezor asked is, “what is the West?” At that time, Sarat Maharaj was the intellectual corner of the curatorial team. It was the first time I met Sarat, and I think it was the first time in the Chinese art world where there was a collective encounter and questioning of postcolonialism.

The curatorial team of documenta 11 was not a Western team. Okwui is from Nigeria, and Sarat is Indian, from South Africa. They were not from the so-called nautical West. So they asked: What is the West?

According to Okwui, the significance of the West is always changing; it is a metaphor that is always being coded and recoded. We talked about many things, but the main topic was: What is the West, and how can we rediscover the silent voice that is covered by the Western and non-Western, or West- East framework? As a response to this dialogue, I wrote an essay titled “Globalization and the Condition of Chinese Contemporary Art.” This was the start.

One year later, in 2001, at the Singapore National Art Gallery, Okwui and professor Xu Jiang, the director of China Academy of Art, had a dialogue on the consequences of globalization and the postcolonial subject. Xu Jiang launched an issue; how can we imagine “cultural Asia” through the contemporary? It was the first time the idea of cultural Asia emerged as an imaginary community within Chinese contemporary art writing.

After that dialogue, I planned and organized a research project called Edges of the Earth: Migration of Contemporary Art and Regional Politics in Asia, which was conducted in 2002 as a pilot study project by the China Academy of Art. As an intercultural curatorial project, Edges of the Earth was based on a series of journeys focusing on artistic exchange and investigation of visual culture within an Asian context. It was an attempt to create links between different practices of contemporary Asian art and visual thinking. We wanted to question what kind of relations emerge between art and

77 the traditions of visual culture in each region. In the wake of Asia’s leap into modernity, we asked: How does art as a form of cultural production construct and integrate with Asian culture?

Beginning in February 2003, we carried out phase one of our field-work. We chose cities that serve as classic examples of the development of Asian contemporary visual culture: Istanbul, Tehran, Tokyo, Kyoto, Bangkok, and Hangzhou. Through communication with artists and staff who run museums, art galleries, and academies, we tried to examine how the contemporary art of these cities would identify with each other as well as diverge from each other. During the course of the project, we assigned specific themes to each city. For Bangkok, the theme of “Crossed Parallels” explored both mundane society and the spiritual imagination of Thailand. The theme for Tokyo and Kyoto was “Renaissance of Wares,” a study of the craft of everyday wares and contemporary art objects in these totally different cities. The theme for Tehran was “Superimposition of Traditions,” a study of how memories of Persia and the Islamic Revolution inform modern Iranian society and how these histories are rekindled in art. In Istanbul, under the theme of “Entry/Exit,” we tried to penetrate the identity and self-imagination of this bridge between Asia and Europe. We observed how Istanbul—located at the crossroads of international and regional politics and poised between Asian and European history—forges its own myths and identity. Located “west of the East” and “east of the West,” it is the site where we can examine the systems of viewing between Europe and Asia, Oriental and Occidental, and how the East, as an Other to Western languages and desires, projects itself. The final stop was the city of Hangzhou. The theme was “Invisible Life,” which explored the historical memory and visual consumption of the city: How does the scholar’s experience of the landscape construct the invisible life of the city? What internal resonance does the city have in the traditional life of the Chinese literati, and what meaning does Hangzhou hold for classical and contemporary culture?

So we tried to find an approach with which to understand and misunderstand each other. In the long trip we made for the project, we tried to find the differences in different regions of Asia. We tried to find the differences between the Chinese curator and the so-called Western curator. When we had discussions with local artists, we would tell them we were also local. This is local to local—we share the global but we have a local perception of the global. So the global is globals.

Marie Leduc: So every place has a local?

Gao Shiming: Of course, even London is local. The Venice Biennale is also “local international.” So many conversations started from this point, from this identification that we are all local. So we shared ideas about what we imagined about the global, all of our different globals.

At the same time, one of the main ideas of my curatorial practice is to unpack the symptom of the international. In today’s China, “international” is no longer the “international” of days past; it is no longer closely related to the revolutionary ideal of liberating all of mankind, but rather to an idea and desire of development—from the “Window of the World” in Shenzhen

78 to the Small Commodities Market in Yiwu, from the landscape along the Bund in Shanghai to the Olympic theme “One World, One Dream” in Beijing. In the lives of contemporary Chinese people, “international” holds different meanings and exists in different versions.

Marie Leduc: You followed Edges of the Earth with the Yellow Box project. How does that project fit into the ideas you outline here?

Gao Shiming: In addition to Edges of the Earth and other projects that consider issues of deglobalization, I try to do other projects that revive the experience covered by the concept “traditional,” for example, the Yellow Box project. The Yellow Box is, in fact, not finished. It has just started.

Poster for the exhibition A Yellow Box in Qingpu, 2006.

Marie Leduc: It began in 2006?

Gao Shiming: In 2005. The last step was in the Qingpu district of Shanghai in 2006, but in 2005 we had the first Yellow Box exhibition in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. This exhibition inquired into display strategies for Chinese calligraphy and painting. We wanted to build a space of negotiation between the shuzhai (the literati’s studio) and the white cube. But it is not just a strategy for creating or curating a site; rather, it is a situation for the development and interpretation of art. It is therefore important to ask questions such as: Will the traditional culture of intimate appreciation still retain its charm in the museum system? What is the significance of the classical experience in art appreciation to the configuration of space in contemporary architecture? These are the kinds of questions that the Yellow Box hopes to illuminate.

79 Then, in 2007, when the director of Guangzhou Art Museum invited me to curate the third Guangzhou Triennial, I tried to focus on the topic Farewell to Post-Colonialism. Of course it was a risk, not in the non-Western world but in the Western world. It was totally politically incorrect. But, it changed some of the so-called postcolonial artists; for example, Isaac Julien, Zarina Bhimji, and Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Marie Leduc: You mean it changed these artists’ thinking about this issue after the exhibition?

Gao Shiming: Yes. For example, after the exhibition, Zarina Bhimji wrote an e-mail to me and asked for more essays on the topic. She organized a small team around her to discuss the topic of the Triennial. Of course artists want to refresh themselves.

Farewell to Post-Colonialism was the critical curatorial departure point for the Triennial, and a difficult problem for me to address. The curatorial team received critiques from various circles prior to putting forth the topic. For artists in China, it would be difficult to engage in depth in this topic given that China has no painful colonial history, no experience of being colonized. Without colonialism, how can we talk about postcolonialism, let alone bid farewell to postcolonialism? For many international artists, this obviously touches on issues of “political incorrectness” and the rise of the right wing. For multi-culturalists, this represented a regression to colonialism, or a new kind of “super-power chauvinism.”

Therefore, the idea of a simple correspondence between postcolonialism and colonial history and a politicized argument with clear positions are the very things we were attempting to reject. In today’s world, where postcolonialism and its discursive practices are well guarded by “political correctness,” its ideological features are thoroughly exposed. I do not intend to argue against the theories and politics of postcolonialism, but to express dissatisfaction over the obvious harm politics and politicization have upon art.

Marie Leduc: So how did you approach “farewell” to postcolonialism as a curatorial problem?

Gao Shiming: First, I wanted to classify the different identities of postcolonialism. Postcolonialism is not only an experience, but a discourse; not only a view, but a perspective; not only a discourse, but also an epistemological system and a form of spectatorship. As a system, it operates like a net; it grasps what it can and wants. Sometimes, it even becomes a creative system, infiltrating artists’ minds.

“Postcolonialism” is a discourse at the curatorial level, but as a context, it belongs to everyone. However, this context is not the so-called “postcolonial reality” or historical experience of postcolonialism, but rather an institutional and ideological experience. Meanwhile, it is neither a personal theory, idea, or identity trait, but a system of spectatorship. Regardless of whether an artist is familiar with postcolonialism, she or he has already been included within its context through visiting or taking part in international exhibitions, cooperating with or confronting curators, and experiencing the process of being read, watched, and explained. In this sense, there is no specific postcolonial artist; all artists exist in a postcolonial context.

80 The proposal for Farewell to Post-Colonialism originated from a strong sense of fatigue. The Triennial attempted to present those things the postcolonial net failed to enmesh, the lucky survivors who managed to escape the postcolonial grasp, and the area where popular discourses on postcolonialism and multiculturalism cannot reach.

Marie Leduc: How was Farewell to Post-Colonialism received by Western critics?

Gao Shiming: I think in the Western world the response was more positive. In China, the first response from many Chinese artists was: “We are not colonial, so how should we say farewell to postcolonialism?” This is why I wrote “Observations and Presentiments on After Post-Colonialism,” the essay for the catalogue.

During the opening of the Triennial, all of the international journalists and some of the scholars said the theme reminded them of the spectacle of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, which had just finished at the time. In China, if you want to say farewell to postcolonialism, what will you do? If we go back to the colonial, does it mean building an empire, a new empire? And we all know that in Africa and in Southern Asia, the Chinese government does a lot of things like the colonizers.

Marie Leduc: So they wanted you to address the issue of China’s colonizing practices?

Gao Shiming: Yes, of course, they were all talking about the “new colonizing” by China.

Marie Leduc: What did you say?

Gao Shiming: I responded by reminding them of the closing ceremonies at the Olympics. There was an eight-minute show presented by the London government. There was a sightseeing bus filled with people of different ethnicities that presented a multicultural spectacle to the world. London showed that it is a capital of postcolonialism and multiculturalism, but, don’t forget, it was a sightseeing bus! Twenty or thirty years ago, multiculturalism and postcolonialism were very challenging to the ideology of everyday life in the Western world. But now many years have passed and they have become part of a propaganda strategy.

Marie Leduc: So now artists have to address postcolonialism as a propaganda strategy?

Gao Shiming: Yes, because even if the West has updated itself, refreshed itself into a condition we can call post-West, a post-Western society, it is not only in China and Africa, but also in London and New York. So in the updated post-West world, postcolonialism and multiculturalism become one of the ploys of propaganda and ideology. They are ideological and institutionalized.

Marie Leduc: Manifested in the art world as much as in general society?

81 Poster for the 2010 Shanghai Biennale.

Gao Shiming: I think particularly in the art world because the art world is full of pseudo-representative politics.

Marie Leduc: So how do we move past postcolonialism, past these pseudo- representative politics?

Gao Shiming: This is one question I am always asked. In the exhibition, we presented a mix of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial, and also pre- postcolonial. We tried to mix them together to show the contradictions and complexities of the issue. We tried to find a way to unpack the process, unpack the secret of contemporary art production.

Marie Leduc: The secret? What is the secret?

Gao Shiming: It is the secret we have to unpack because contemporary art, today, is kidnapped by the ideology of mass media and discourses of academia.

Marie Leduc: But don’t curators contribute a lot to this discourse?

Gao Shiming: Of course!

Marie Leduc: More than artists?

Gao Shiming: I think today many artists are also curators. I mean, in their minds, they are curating the making of the work.

82 Marie Leduc: Well before we digress on the topic of curators, perhaps we could use this point to lead into a discussion of your work on the Shanghai Biennale. It seems to me that all of your curatorial work has been about trying to create a new type of dialogue between the East and West, to find ways beyond the pseudo-representative regimes, as you call them.

Gao Shiming: Yes, now I think we can go beyond the framework of intercultural politics.

Marie Leduc: The Shanghai Biennale is an opportunity to do a new show. Is this your first opportunity since the Triennial to explore a new framework?

Gao Shiming: Not at all. Now I try to forget all about the framework!

Marie Leduc: Thus your theme and title, Rehearsal?

Gao Shiming: Rehearsal is not the theme of the exhibition, it is a definition of the Biennale.

Marie Leduc: The definition?

Gao Shiming: The Biennale defined as Rehearsal is identified as a productive performance space, or, in the opposite, a performative production space. As Brecht pointed out, “Those who rehearse do not want to ‘realize’ a thought. His task is to arouse and organize the creativity of the other. Rehearsal is an experiment to see the many possibilities at that specific time. Those who rehearse are responsible to prosecute all solutions of the model-oriented, the clichés, and the routine.”

In recent discussions in Chinese art circles, artists such as Yang Fudong, Qiu Zhijie, and Xu Zhen showed their anxieties about the fact that the productivity of the art system is far greater than that of the individual. Artists are shadowed by the art production system, which employs and processes them into customized fractions. Simulacra and cosplay are everywhere. The artist’s creation is kidnapped and institutionalized while he or she dances with the practice of curators. Even the so-called institutional critique has been roped in during the last decade. The problem is how to open the deadlock in artistic creation. Art is a territory where the group confronts the masses, neighbourhood confronts propaganda, and the ever-changing everyday life confronts a popular culture that has been customized, ordered, and ideologized by the media and institutional system. Is the art exhibition the site of such confrontation? Or, quite the opposite, is the exhibition the autonomous realm of art? Has art become an unnecessary playground embedded into a broader, more real space of daily interactions? Exhibitions, as the territory of so-called art autonomy and an enclave in the public sphere, have become a distributing hub of global capital production, display, and consumption. How can we find the inner frontiers in an art world captured by global capitalism? Is it possible to develop a new type of production relations in contemporary art curatorial practice after the common use of institutional critique and social engagement (or, participation)?

This is why I attempt to define the Biennale as “rehearsal.” Today, the stage of representation is broken, and the representation of experience becomes

83 representation as experience. With the methodology of rehearsal, maybe we can try to look for a way to break the institutional rituals of biennales.

Marie Leduc: But, how are artists expected to approach this methodology of rehearsal?

Gao Shiming: “Rehearsal” is, for the Biennale, an intention to or strategy of self-renewal that might sound more or less abstract and beyond comprehension for a single participant. Nevertheless, as for a real artist who is always undergoing self-renewal, the first question that comes to mind, upon receiving the Biennale invitation, is how to participate in the rehearsal. To this question, my answer is: let us start with clarifying our contexts and problematics. What makes us dissatisfied? What inhibits the power of our soul? What obstructs the steps towards emancipation? Is it the “invisible hand” of the ever-present art system? Or the “market quotes” of the international art world? Or, perhaps, the repetitious global exhibitions, mass culture; or the bourgeois temperament deeply set in us; or the capitalism that is busy shuttling between crisis and revival?

This Shanghai Biennale of Rehearsal starts from the following question: What does capitalism mean to artists today? With this clue, we wish to reflect on our historical situation beyond the discourses of “post-Cold War,” “postrevolution,” and “postcolonization,” etc. Nowadays, the coordinator of art history has failed; artists are swept into the system of artistic exhibition market, social art practices are kidnapped by identity politics and discourse politics, and contemporary art is becoming increasingly routine. We have to ask whether everyone is doing his or her work according to the logic of free market economy. All these are political questions. Since the politics of today’s world are highly mediated and spectacularized and politics have become propaganda, advertising, and even soap operas, what kind of politics can and should an artist confront and practice? Should he or she confront the politics of life in an aesthetic way, or, on the contrary, face the aesthetics of life in a political way?

We cannot simply pose empty questions; can today’s art and critical thinking imagine a new political space? To address this, we need to explore politics within our sense, the sensible politics, not the “the given politics as ready-made.” We should use our own bodies and memories to measure history and politics and to depict upcoming politics. Based on this thinking, Raqs Media Collective of Delhi is working with Chinese intellectuals and artists on Communist Latento, which features collective writing. Chinese scholar Lu Xinghua will discuss “an upcoming Chinese Left” in the journey of Ho Chi Minh Road, which is one of the projects of Rehearsal in collaboration with the Long March Project.

Marie Leduc: How do you think these subjects—capitalism and “latent Communism”—will go over with the Chinese government?

Gao Shiming: That is a big problem. In the Ho Chi Minh Trail project, we also have many topics and issues that concern capitalism today. Capitalism, today, means a lot. I mean much more for China than before. This is the reason I ask my students to read a short essay by Slavoj Žižek from the New York Times, on twenty years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The essay reminded them of China.

84 Marie Leduc: In what way?

Gao Shiming: Žižek wrote that the Chinese want to develop their own form of capitalism, but they have changed capitalism itself. We all know capitalism connects with the free market system, which is always concerned with democracy. The Chinese practice of capitalism shows a different way.

So, what capitalism means to artists, to contemporary art today, is the first concern of the Biennale; the second is how we can get to formlessness.

Marie Leduc: What do you mean by that?

Gao Shiming: The word “formlessness” might not be accurate, but I am willing to try to express myself through it. Art, under control and consumption by the capitalist apparatus of economy-culture-media, produces “work” as a commodity “body.” As for this body, form is the most important quality, and it is locked in as exchange value. This is a fact we cannot ignore. In the past decade, works by Superflex, The Yes Men, and many other artists manifest a nonterritorial, nonwork quality, which interests me. In the framework of the Biennale, I intend to use Rehearsal to redefine not just the exhibition but participant artists’ working processes themselves. The turn from exhibition to rehearsal, from artwork to rehearsal, may exactly emphasize the importance of work as an art “labour.”

Marie Leduc: But isn’t formlessness, getting rid of form, something that conceptual art has been all about?

Gao Shiming: No. Conceptual art is also form because attitude can be a form. Formlessness is a desire.

Marie Leduc: That seems like a very Buddhist concept.

Gao Shiming: It is not about nothing. It is not nothingness. It is only a condition that cannot be defined. It is undefined.

Marie Leduc: Similar to Jacques Rancière’s idea of the sensible, perhaps?

Gao Shiming: Something like that. For Rehearsal, the most important thing is not what the exhibition or art looks like but what happens. Rehearsal is not a performance. It is not a form of theatre; it is just a rehearsal. We are all in the theatre of the art world. We are all kidnapped by our own identities and covered by our own roles. The role is a mask. I am a curator, you are a scholar. There are also the artists, the audience, the collectors, the directors, and all of us have roles in the theatre. We want to refresh ourselves.

Marie Leduc: You are talking about a very different type of art show. You are proposing a show that is not a finished work. But isn’t an artwork always just a rehearsal for the next work?

Gao Shiming: There is no next work, ideally. Rehearsal, for me, takes the place of the idea of the work. Rehearsal is not only a new definition, it is a redefined conception of exhibition. I want to use Rehearsal to change our focus from the artwork.

85 Marie Leduc: Change the focus from the finished artwork to what happens before and after?

Gao Shiming: Yes, because the work itself is the key of the capitalist art game.

Marie Leduc: But is that not denying the spectator the experience of the artwork, the aesthetic experience?

Gao Shiming: Aesthetics is a big problem after relational aesthetics. I prefer “art activities.” That is, actions but not acting, not artworks but art activities. Can art activities and practices exist without the guarantee of “the artwork?” It aims not only to escape the commodity fetishism of capitalism, but to cherish the more valuable thing hidden in all art activities. That is, can the three areas divided by Kant—the intellectual, the ethical, and the aesthetic—be reunited in art activities today? To kritik is not only to critique, but also to interpret and decide. Turning from exhibition to rehearsal, from artifact to art activity, from acting to action, is an attempt to put “aesthetic-political-ethical” into practice in art activities. But now maybe it is time to mix them together. In the framework of Rehearsal we try to do such things together with artists and scholars.

Marie Leduc: But doesn’t that just become an exercise for the scholars and the artists? Where does the audience come in?

Gao Shiming: For Rehearsal there is no audience. All the people should be participants.

Marie Leduc: It seems to me that there is still a dividing line between those who create art and the exhibition and those who look at art. The only division I see disappearing is between the artist and the curator. I find myself wondering: When does a curator become an artist?

Gao Shiming: I used to be an artist before I became a curator! But I know what you mean, because today a curator has some power. Today they have opportunities to show work, and they draw the discourse.

Marie Leduc: And they become the new stars of the art world.

Gao Shiming: Yes, but most important is how curators can learn from the artists. For me, I learn many things from Wu Shanzhuan. For the curator, for young curators especially, what is most important is how they can involve the artist in the curatorial situation. As a curator I don’t know what the shape of the exhibition will be. The curator does not have the final answer. The curator and the artist work together to look for the key, to co-imagine the shape of the final event. Curating is a collective work.

And, of course, as I already said, almost all of the artists themselves are curators. Curating has now become a practice of creation, but in a different sense from the artist’s creation. At the same time, both curators and artists are all in the same apparatus of the art world. What shapes the spectator is the apparatus. I believe, through Rehearsal, if we bring together thinkers, artists, and curators, we can attempt to accentuate the convergence of discourse and visual production. We can change the apparatus of the art world.

86 Stephanie Bailey Recontextualizing Revolution: Yang Fudong and Kostis Velonis at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens May 11–September 15, 2010

here was something incredibly timely about the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens’s decision to present Tthe complete, five-part video cycle of Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (2003–07), curated by Anna Kafetsi, along with other select video works in parallel with Greek artist Kostis Velonis’s solo exhibition Loneliness on Common Ground: How Can Society Do What Each Person Dreams, curated by Daphne Vitali. Considering events that took place in Greece prior to the exhibition opening, the pairing of a Chinese and Greek artist created space to contemplate the trials and tribulations of a fast-changing world.

When these two exhibitions opened, Greece’s economic crisis had reached a climax; amidst sensationalized media coverage, the country’s debt was downgraded to junk status, triggering the euro’s worst-ever decline while fears of defaulting circulated amongst hearsay rumours that drachma notes were being printed again. Growing resentment over a corrupt political system left an entire population either politically apathetic or leaning towards extreme forms of right and left. Increasing numbers of strikes and protests against proposed IMF austerity measures took place and culminated in the May 5 riots, when three bank workers were killed after their building was set on fire in downtown Athens and an angry mob was filmed apparently attempting to storm parliament. Meanwhile, China was basking in the recent revelation that it had become the second largest economy in the world after the United States.

Yang Fudong, Close to the As the twenty-first century rounds off its first decade, it is becoming ever Sea, 2004, video installation. Courtesy of the artist and clearer that major changes concerning global political and economic the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens. systems are afoot. Installed within an unfinished section of the Athens Conservatory, the Museum’s temporary home, Yang Fudong and Velonis’s

87 Kostis Velonis, Endless Construction (Victory Over the Sun), 2009, wood and acrylic, 4 m x 10 m x 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens.

individual shows evoked this sense of flux through their interaction. The sound of trumpets from Close to the Sea (2004), the sad song of a village girl in Liu Lan (2003), and the symphony of a multitude of sounds and voices that accompany the black-and-white aesthetic of Seven Intellectuals seeps into Velonis’s sculptural ode to Russian Constructivist avant-garde movements. The atmosphere felt at once static, irreconcilable, and decidedly retro, and it evoked a sense of opposing, repeated histories and unstoppable cycles.

With both artists looking at idealism, decline, and decay within society and societal structures, Yang and Velonis revisit the past in order to hold a mirror up to the present, making it somewhat easier to contemplate the sweeping ramifications of history on current times. In doing so, they implore viewers to contemplate the language of control and freedom and what it means within the contexts of history, politics, and society. Seven Intellectuals is an amalgamation of highly controlled images woven together to tell a story that exists only because it has been told before. The third century A.D. legend Seven Sages in Bamboo Grove, the story of Daoist intellectuals who retreat from the corruption of urban life and government service to a bamboo grove for conversation, singing, and drinking, is an important thematic reference for this piece. The concept of young intellectuals escaping an oppressive or corrupt society is a recurrent theme in history.

Today, economic and political migrants are circulating around the globe, searching for something better than what they left behind. At the same time, the very concept of exile can also apply to the exile of the mind. In a world with shifting populations and power centres, where one person’s capitalism could easily be another’s communism and one person’s democracy might look like another’s fascist regime, it is easy to disconnect from any kind of political discussion and action, or to connect to a discourse that does not work in practice. But is anything ever right when it comes to politics? Is apathy better than over-zealousness?

From Velonis’s perspective, dreams of the future, let alone political ideologies, are never what they seem, nor do they turn out quite as one would have hoped. How to Build Democracy while Making Rhetorical Comments (After Klucis’ Design for Propaganda Kiosk, Screen and Loudspeaker Platform, 1922) (2009) is a tower Velonis designed and built

88 Kostis Velonis, How to Build after a drawing by Latvian artist Democracy while Making Rhetorical Comments (After Gustav Klucis, a loyal socialist Klucis’ Design for Propaganda Kiosk, Screen and Loudspeaker involved in socialist revolutionary Platform, 1922), 2009, wood, plywood, acrylic, spray, pencil, and Stalinist propaganda. Ironically, oil pastel, marker, paper, glue, 450 x 660 x 776 cm, installation having taken part in a period of view at the Kunstverein creativity driven by the afterglow Hamburg, Germany. Photo: © Fred Dott. of the Russian Revolution and the construction of a new beginning, Klucis was jailed and executed in 1938 for his efforts. But as the tragic figure of Klucis suggests, political ideology naturally born from an earnest need to create a better future is too often betrayed when utopia is ultimately realized.

Yang Fudong, Seven In Seven Intellectuals Part One, voices of the young characters describe the Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest Part One, 2004, 35 mm black- first destination of their self-induced exile, Yellow Mountain. They talk and-white film transferred to DVD, 29 mins., 30 secs. about their preconceived “postcard” images of the mountain and then Courtesy of the artist and their experiences after visiting it. Somewhat youthful thoughts on love, Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création, Paris. death, family, duty, and existence itself mingle with images that evoke the ink wash paintings of Northern Song dynasty landscapes, harkening back to the words of Guo Xi: “The din of the dusty world and the locked-in- ness of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors; on the contrary, haze, mist, and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what human nature seeks, and yet can rarely find.”1 The drive for utopia is synonymous with the intense longings of youth that inevitably subside as age gives way to disappointment and failed dreams.

As Velonis once noted, utopias can cause confusion “since they signify a refusal to face the particular conditions of the present, but mainly because in many cases they represent a kind of an inversed nostalgia for the future, which is an apotheosis of an idyllic past.”2 Perfection, like the idealized image of Yellow Mountain is unattainable. As such, it is no surprise that by retreating from the world to pursue their own utopian vision of nature—or paradise—the seven intellectuals find themselves entering into a number of different hierarchies in their self-created paradises, always unable to settle down. As one character in Part One points out: “Sometimes

89 Yang Fudong, Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest Part Three, 2006, 35 mm black- and-white film transferred to DVD, 50 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création, Paris.

Yang Fudong, Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest Part Five, 2007, 35 mm black- and-white film transferred to DVD, 90 mins. Courtesy of of the artist and Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création, Paris.

having belief is a mistake; your persistence backs up your goals in life, but it also leads to confusion filled with frustration and failure. I am distant from my existence.” This honest admittance might explain why the seven intellectuals, though constantly in each other’s company, become progressively distant from each other as the cycle evolves.

From Part Three, the intellectuals stop speaking as they embark deeper into their journey through rural China. With no time to think as they attempt to work the land, farm kelp, and make life on an island, their collective journey leads them back to the city with nothing left to say; they drink, dance, run, and play rounds of baseball with no one actually hitting the ball. When a fight breaks out between two male intellectuals over a woman in Part Five’s final scene, one man falls and the other resumes his dance as an army of chefs clap in support of him. It is as if clapping hands force his body to contort to the rhythm. There is a sense that he, like the rest of the intellectuals, has become trapped in an inescapable cycle that leads to nowhere and expresses nothing.

Yet even when the characters are at their most vocal, what they say is not necessarily what they mean. They languish in a city house in Part Two, consumed by sexual tension, and the claustrophobic setting provides voyeuristic insight into individual and collective relationships. Sexual

90 relations centring around one female character touch on power plays, ownership, and fixation. A cold, lithe creature harbouring the apathy only an objectified woman is capable of, she claims that her “grown-up” expectations are to be perfect and not a waste of time—the true aspects of aestheticism and realism. Her heavily made-up appearance, wanton attitude, and overt sexuality is accompanied by a tragic, underlying sense of vulnerability and suppression. Who is she trying to be perfect for, and why? For Yang, the pressure cooker situation in the house presents an image within the bustling cities, where nobody is willing to reveal anything. As such, the discussion of sex becomes a cover-up for deeper issues lurking below the surface.

Yang Fudong, Seven For both Velonis and Yang Fudong, the passions of revolution are Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest Part Two, 2004, 35 mm black- synonymous with sexual passions, which Velonis addresses in Gaining and-white film transferred to DVD, 46 mins., 15 sec. Socialism while Losing Your Wife (After Popova’s Set Construction for “Le Courtesy of the artist and Cocu Magnifique,” 1922), 2009. A complete replica of Russian constructivist Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création, Paris. Liubov Popova’s set for a theatrical production of Fernand Crommelynck’s story of Bruno, who is so desperately in love with his wife, Stella, that he pre-empts adultery by forcing her to sleep with all the men of the village, the sculpture takes on the concepts of possession, jealousy, and paranoia. Of course, Bruno’s crude pre-emptive strike fails, and Stella is ruined. An example of how love can transform into a dark and maniacal obsession driven by fear of losing possession; for Stella, her unquestioning love for

91 Bruno compels her to obey his Kostis Velonis, Gaining Socialism while Losing Your gruesome orders. A metaphor Wife (After Popova’s Set Construction for “Le Coçu for control and its consequences, Magnifique,” 1922), 2009, Velonis’s homage to Popova’s wood, acrylic, iron, plywood, spray, fabric, 450 x 170 x mechanized set is, like Part Two of 92 cm, installation view at the Kunstverein Hamburg, Seven Intellectuals, an investigation Germany. Photo: © Fred Dott. into the industrialization of domestic life and the extent to which this desensitizes the relationships and lives of the people.

Kostis Velonis, Life without Tragedy, 2009, ceramics, wood, acrylic, 34 x 34 x 27 cm. Private collection.

With austerity measures creeping into the Greek reality and massive social changes taking place in China as a result of some thirty years of uninterrupted growth, the two exhibitions bear a contemporary weight transformed by external events. The contexts of the works are continuing to evolve, and as the world continues to develop, meanings will develop with it. Seven Intellectuals is an epic film for good reason. Layers and layers of meaning can be extracted from it, and there is always a feeling that one has only really scratched the surface. The superficial elements of cinematography, dress, and stylized direction need time and incredible dissection to truly decipher all that is being said, but not being voiced. As the intellectuals continue on their journey, moving from one failed ideology to the next, they end up looking confused, naïve, and incredibly shallow, existing only to highlight the pointlessness of a world without substantial discourse. The specific references and carefully constructed titles of Velonis’s work do something similar. Inspired by ancient theatre design, Life Without Tragedy (2009) and Life Without Democracy (2009) touch on the darkness of a world that provides no outlet for expression.

But while Yang Fudong focuses on inaction, Velonis shows the consequences of doing too much. Like abandoned relics, Velonis’s larger sculptures appear oversized and cramped within the museum space, creating an oppressive

92 Kostis Velonis, Life without Democracy, 2009, wood, plywood, acrylic, spray, 190 x 390 x 42 cm, installation view at the Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany. Photo: © Fred Dott,.

aura that is difficult to shake. Out of place, unwelcome, and almost grotesque—the gaudy colours dripping from the Klucis-inspired tower make the piece look like a tattered prop from the travelling circuses and theatres of the early twentieth century. The contrast between the kitsch and tragic elements of the work compares perfectly to the aesthetics of Socialist Realism, propaganda, and the transmission of revolutionary ideas. Theatrical in nature, Velonis’s stagnant sculptures highlight the forceful facade that masks the absurdity of political aesthetics, while the highly stylized imagery of Seven Intellectuals creates the opposite effect. Yang Fudong contains his characters within the constraints of immaculate cinematography, making what is ultimately a repeated charade of anti-revolutionary, apathetic complacency look like a solemn pursuit of noble ambitions.

At this point between the two exhibitions, it is difficult to decide which side is better to stand on. Like the impassioned love affairs of youth, or even the more contemporary drama of economy and crisis, the desperate search for utopia can leave people deaf, dumb, and blind. After all, the more you see, or the more you desire, the less you are really aware of. This is where the work of Yang Fudong and Velonis meets—somewhere in the middle. While Velonis implores people to critically assess the political constructs of our time within the contexts of recent fascist histories, Yang Fudong reminds viewers that before they enter into contemporary debate, they should consider who, or what, is directing their words. At the same time, the limitations of action and inaction highlight a question to consider: should people both talk about and react to the changes occurring in the political structures that defined the twentieth century, especially when those changes appear to cater more to the economy than to civil liberty, sustainable progress, and equal representation? It feels like the right time to ask.

Notes 1 Wang Yao-Ting, Looking at Chinese Painting: A Comprehensive Guide to the Philosophy, History, and Technique of Chinese Painting (Tokyo: Nigensha, 1996), 56. 2 “Between Direct Democracy and Socialist Politics: An Interview with Kostis Velonis,” Art Pulse Magazine 1, no. 4 (summer 2010), www.artpulsemagazine.com.

93 James Donald The Beauty of Distance: Global Art in the Context of the 17th Sydney Biennale May 12–August 1, 2010

“I am like a piece of land that itself is dry and barren, but if you scatter manure over it and cultivate it, it will bear good fruit. By this I mean that your Grace’s conversation is the manure that has been cast upon the barren land of my dry wit.”1 Sancho Panza, Don Quixote

he 2010 Sydney Biennale, The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, unveiled what was dubbed one of the art world’s Tlargest and most ambitious undertakings to date, filling kilometers of Sydney Harbor real estate—both public and private—with 440 works from 166 local and international artists. Artistic director David Elliott said the biennale spoke to what he called the “condition of contemporary art today.” 2 Yet above and beyond the works, it is the sheer magnitude of his egalitarian world vision that invigorates the show’s potential.

This unprecedented display was geared at reorienting a global perspective on the biennale, projecting art into a new paradigm of internationalism, where the absurdity of notions such as East and West are sacrificed at the alter of a postmodern dynamism. Elliott posits that “this biennale will not ‘tell’ you anything”;3 rather, it downplays the topic of the “other” as less worthy of attention than the nature of the actual distance between peoples.4 In this case, The Beauty of Distance was a success, not so much for artists who are on the periphery in the broadest sense of the term, many who still remain nameless to an international audience yet might be well known at home, but, rather, as an abstract statement about the industry’s grasp of global art awareness. Yet while the Sydney Biennale makes a bold statement, its intentions do not parallel the curatorial effect of the endeavour. Instead of directly addressing artists on the periphery, Elliott’s curatorial strategy stressed broad international coverage of various demographics.

With the immense reciprocal pressures of financial obligations and relationships that power such international events, this contradiction was inevitable from the start; in spite of this, Elliott has shown the necessary determination to pursue his vision. Regardless of his intentions, Elliott’s role is that of an auteur, and his contribution should hence be taken in the context of a larger discourse on the state of “global art” as a gradual departure from an Occident-centred paradigm. On the other hand, Elliott’s show not only distanced itself from this larger discourse, for the most part it neglected to represent peripheral art.

Instead, the vast majority of works in the Sydney Biennale can be traced to a sparse group of epicentres forced to straddle the prevailing Occident- centred context we call the art scene. This approach was partly for the

94 sake of simplicity and accessibility, but also for convenience, as it is this context that undermines his championing the underdog by saluting former peripheral-turned-mainstream artists. In this sense, little scrutiny was given by the audience to which artworks he selected, and although he was criticized as being nepotistic because of his longstanding relationship with many of the artists in the biennale, his message as an auteur unfortunately received the least direct attention from its critics.

“The Enlightenment is Over!”5 The resonance of this proclamation by David Elliott was to summarize the drive of the biennale, taking aim at the grand unifying theories harking back to the Enlightenment that have prevailed in Western civilization over the past centuries. Here they are emphatically rejected, along with today’s flailing discourse of the modernist ideal, undermined by the antithesis embodied in globalism. In turn, we make introductions between the prevailing dimension of contemporary art and its alter-ego of “global art.”6

Top: Shen Shaomin, Summit, Setting the scene, we find ourselves 2010, silica gel simulation, acrylic, fabric, installation view in the popular arena of this eclectic at Sydney Biennale. Photo: Sebastian Kriete. Courtesy global awakening. Here is where of the artist. Presentation made possible with support of Osage The Beauty of Distance narrates Art Foundation, Hong Kong. the story of contemporary art’s Right: Shen Shaomin, Summit (detail), 2010, silica reconciliation with an estranged and gel simulation, acrylic, fabric, installation view at Sydney obscure relative, known by some Biennale. Photo: Sebastian Kriete. Courtesy of the artist. as “global art.” In the search for Presentation made possible with support of Osage Art our own individual voice, we find once again that its essence can live and Foundation, Hong Kong. thrive only within the broader context of dissent, and more so within a din of contradictory voices. This was not the goal of modernists; theirs was a

95 striving to relieve the world of chaos, bringing to fruition a harmonious and uninterrupted soliloquy of their rationally justified world order.

The demise of this unifying world theory is a regular subject of both departure and arrival for these biennale artists. Heilongjiang artist Shen Shaomin’s installation work Summit (2010) plays out a brooding satire where deceased communist leaders stage a final meeting of minds. Shen recreates models in the likeness of Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-Sung, Ho Chi Minh, and an ailing Fidel Castro who is hooked up to a respirator, hanging on to his final animated breaths.

Dispensing with any funerary rites, we have eventually recognized Left: Kin-Wah Tsang, The First 7 Seal—It Would Be Better If You contemporary art as synonymous with global art, yet as simple as this Have Never Been Born . . ., 2009, digital video projection, assertion may appear, we have yet to agree definitively on what either of sound, 6 mins., 41 secs. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: these two so-called “terms-in-progress” mean. Therefore, in asking the Sebastian Kriete. Presentation question of one, we are inevitably drawn to inquire into the nature of the made possible with the support of the Annie Wong other. Our notions of global art—those one reads about in books, not to Foundation. mention contemporary art journals—finds its rationality displaced by the Right: Kin-Wah Tsang, The First Seal—It Would Be Better chaotic flux inherent in the layers of discourse global art demands. Indeed, If You Have Never Been Born . . . (detail), 2009, digital video rather than attempting to categorically nail down either of these points, projection, 6mins., 41 secs. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: the 17th Biennale of Sydney blurs the lines further by means of gross Sebastian Kriete. Presentation made possible with the elaboration, teasing, and jerking at the loose threads of our sensibilities. support of the Annie Wong Foundation. Hong Kong-based artist Tsang Kin-Wah’s text-based animated light mural The First Seal—It Would Be Better If You Have Never Been Born. . . (2009) literally projects this intertextuality. We watch it flow between the layers of ascribed symbols and morality, where simple phrases such as “The Dark,” “The Kiss,” “The Sin,” progress into complicated and emotionally charged expletives, such as “The violence and the banditry” and “Your last fucking night.”

The Sydney Biennale strives to invoke a feeling of pervasive worldliness, glossed with today’s preeminent generation of artists from each continent. For China this includes artists such as Shen Shaomin, Cai Guo-qiang, Wang Qingsong, Gonkar Gyatso, Jennifer Wenma, and Liu Jianhua, who populate

96 the upper echelons of the Chinese art world and reside mainly in the U.S. This is anything but the periphery Elliott seeks to address. Yet it is in this spirit of accommodating diversity that Elliott attempts to stretch his roster of artists across widespread demographics—spanning geography, age, ethnicity, gender, and residence abroad and at home, as well as artistic media.

Jennifer Wen Ma, New This point of peripheral art, which opposes its corresponding epicentres, is Adventures of Havoc in Heaven III, 2010, smoke, projector, and made sorely obvious in the face of the logistical magnitude of curating such animation, installation view at the Sydney Opera House. Photo: a biennale. It is not only among its Chinese contingency that Elliott’s vision Michael Corridore. Courtesy of the artist. is fulfilled by the most established artists from within the region. In this respect, geographical distance provides the illusion of equal representation. Like most biennale curators, he includes old friends and favourites, and the final selection reflects the weight of managerial pressure to ascribe to both the accessible and sensational. This ultimately detracts from the chaotic, multifarious nature of the biennale’s initial message.

Ideals and Realities as Rungs of a Ladder In theory, the liberation of a multivariate discourse was realized through the shift away from modernism.8 Yet practical evidence of such a paradigm shift falls short of all the rhetoric. Until now, prototypes of a more globally accommodating consciousness have largely been state fostered. Many Western democracies have been led through the gradual progression of such perceived frameworks as the “ethnic arts” and “cultural diversity,” on to more sociopolitically robust applications like “multiculturalism,” which matured in the Post-Cold War buzz of the 1990s.9

Guangzhou’s young sensation Cao Fei contributed the work Untitled (People’s Limbo) (2009), which is part of the larger online project RMB City, constructed in Second Life by the artist’s own Wharhol-like “factory.” In a less unilateral meeting of minds than Shen Shaomin’s Summit, Cao’s new media work juxtaposes thinkers and leaders from vastly divergent backgrounds, each of whom have influenced the China of today: Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Laozi, and the Lehman Brothers argue over money, power, and ideology.

A great deal of emphasis is laid on this connection between our notion of contemporary art and pluralism, and global art still hasn’t been appropriated on the dynamic terms that such a revelation of equality demands. During his time in Istanbul late in 2009, we see in one of Elliott’s earliest interviews on the biennale, where he explained his view that the conflict of interest with current power cliques and Western dominated

97 10 the “aesthetic agenda of contemporary art,” continue to undermine the Cao Fei, Untitled (People’s Limbo), 2009, single-channel process of coming to terms with the sheer complexity facing global art. video, 20 mins. Courtesy of RMB City © 2009. RMB City Project is developed by Cao Fei (SL: China Tracy) and Vitamin Indeed, many ask why there has been so little practical headway in Creative Space. Facilitator: Uli pursuing a more global awareness of the affairs and interests of the Other Sigg (SL: UliSigg Cisse). in comparison to the technological leaps and bounds of the past decades. Edward Said disturbs the assumption that globalization and advances in technology among the global media imply “progress” in inter-cultural relations, and suggests the opposite—that they in fact reinforce fundamental cultural stereotypes.11 This leads to the question of whether or not globalization is in fact the postcolonization of the remaining corners of the world by the West. By directing the biennial the way he has, Elliott offers to loosely and open-endedly address this both as a potentiality and as a reality.

Cartography of a Precarious Age Like the discrepancy between ideals and reality, the Sydney Biennale reflects many of our misconceptions about what we call “globalization,” which could be more realistically conveyed as a web of epicentres. Thus we are introduced to the proposed framework of a global art system.

Addressing the peripheral “other” has been the original aim of many past large art events, most particularly documenta, initiated when Germany lay dismembered in the wake of the Second World War. documenta was one of the first substantive champions of an antithesis to a rigid hierarchy determined by pedigree. Even more akin to Sydney, we see in 1989 the advent of curator Jean-Hubert Martin’s Magiciens de la Terre, which, despite the controversy aroused by juxtaposing contemporary and “ethnic arts,” was received as a groundbreaking rebuttal of dominant ethnocentric practices. Though Elliott prefers we see his show as standing alone as an epic statement, the pedigree of “global art,” biennials, and international events clearly has its precedents.

Indeed, there is a long history of progress over the past century that can be directly linked to the current discourse. Sandy Nairne explains how the

98 first biennials (such as Venice, beginning in 1895) grew indirectly from the world’s fairs, or universal exhibitions, of the nineteenth century:

In [world’s fairs], the ideology of modernity, manifested through displays of design and manufacture, went hand in hand with imperialist ambitions and racist assumptions; the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889, for example, was notable not only for the building of the Eiffel Tower, but also for its displays of African and other “primitive” dwellings complete with living residents.12

These traces are visible in the use of national spaces and ambassadorial artists at biennials. Later expositions such as documenta stood out in binary opposition as embracing a more “humanist ideal.” Yet despite this history of rebellion, global art scholars remind us that global art now inevitably remains the domain of commercial galleries and dealers.

Thus it is not through the open defiance of the art market that artists and curators succeed through subversion of the system; rather, they do so by leading discourse, visible in the emergence of a new class of globally oriented curators like David Elliott, who Paul O’Neill describes as the “jet- set flaneurs” of the art world.13 Now, unlike in the age of the museums, these curators are increasingly seen as leaders of discourse, providing the narratives that influence the direction of global art, in much the same way as film directors began to fulfill the role of auteur.

The Tyranny of Beauty Cockatoo Island encapsulates the heart of the Sydney Biennale as its chief monument and a testament to the distance between it and the world’s fairs a hundred years earlier. Nominated for World Heritage listing, the largest island in Sydney Harbour has served as a convict prison and shipyard and maintains traces of its past, having become a significant feature since first being used for the previous Sydney Biennale of 2008. Yet where the previous curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev overpowered her public in 2006 within the cavernous space of the island’s post-industrial-colonial complexes, Elliott felt determined to realize the potential inherent within the emptiness and chart the chaotic blueprints within the beauty of distance.

This pressure to fill space as though fulfilling potential is a symbolic gesture that runs parallel to the Biennale’s intentions. Its unofficial centerpiece was undoubtedly Cai Guoqiang’s Inopportune (2008), a set of six cars suspended from the ceiling of the enormous shipyard warehouse in a motionless panoramic sequence that rehearses the car’s explosion, spinning through the air, and safe landing on its wheels again.

Elliott’s choice of the globally acclaimed work, Inopportune, is argued by Katherine Grube to hint at the recognition of contemporary Chinese art within the community of international exhibitions.14 As a key work, however, it also plays a central role in Elliott’s treatment of space. Inopportune uses visual effect to invoke the sense of explosions, filling a space that was once used to house some of the world’s largest hulking

99 vessels. Other works on the island clutter the warehouses in similar fashion, each work demanding its own space in a quest for recognition.

Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, 2004, installation at Cockatoo Island, Sydney. Photo: Ben Symons. Collection of Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Robert M. Arnold in honour of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2006. Presentation in Sydney made possible with the support of Shiseido.

The use of clutter is also evident in Gonkar Gyasto, Wheel of Modern Life, 2010, pencil, Gonkar Gyatso’s Wheel of Modern India ink, collage and stickers on paper, 154 x 154 cm. Life (2008), which incorporates Courtesy of the artist and traditional Tibetan iconography, Rossi & Rossi, London. corporate logos, cartoon characters, and Buddhist motifs with all the poetic tragedy inherent in the symbolism of the Buddhist Wheel of Life. Likewise, Elliott’s statement takes on new meaning in the selection of Jiangxi artist Liu Jianhua’s Container Series (2009) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, made up of a range of white monochrome porcelain vessels arranged on the ground, the blood-red interior glaze tainting the contents of each urn and dish, which are filled to the brim with liquid. We see this again, as not simply a filling up of space, but manifesting a certain revisionism, a clutter that cannot be accommodated by any sense of rationally defined “common decency” that Elliott sees as one of the neuroses that were symptomatic of Enlightenment and Modernist thinking.

100 Liu Jianhua, Container Series, In the end, compromise has undermined Elliott’s original claim that 2009, porcelain and glaze, installation view at Art Gallery the Sydney Biennale exhibited art that was previously marginalized of New South Wales. Photo: Carley Wright. Courtesy of the or discounted by modernity. Instead, we see only a clear reflection of artist and Beijing Commune, Beijing. Presentation made the underlying framework we use to understand the phenomenon of possible by Beijing Commune, Beijing. globalization. On the other hand, Elliott’s vision cannot be judged as a success or failure, as it holds fast to no fundamental criterion other than that of contributing to the global discourse surrounding the future paradigm of global contemporary art.

Notes 1 Miguel de Saavedra Cervantes, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. S. Putnam, vol. 2, part 2, chapter 12 (New York: Viking, 1949), 580. 2 Interview of David Elliott by Vernissage TV, Istanbul, September 9, 2009, available online at http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yianrxHfqI&feature=fvst (last accessed September 9, 2010). 3 Quoted from David Elliott’s speech on the advent of the opening ceremony of the Biennale of Sydney, 2010, May 10. 4 Conversation between the author and David Elliott during the opening ceremony of the Biennale of Sydney, 2010, May 10. 5 Quoted from David Elliott’s speech on the advent of the opening ceremony of the Biennale of Sydney, 2010, May 10. 6 For comprehensive inquiry into modernism and the rise of “global art,” see Hans Belting, Art History After Modernism, trans. Caroline Saltzwedel and Mitch Cohen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2003). 7 Jean Fisher, ed., Global Visions: Toward a New Internationalism in The Visual Arts (London: Kala Press, 1994). 8 David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). 9 For further discussion of the institutionalization of globalization and its associated discontents, see Hou Hanru, “Entropy—Chinese Artists, Western Institutions: A New Internationalism,” in Global Visions, 79–88. 10 Interview of David Elliott by Vernissage TV, Istanbul, September 9, 2009. 11 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 12 Sandy Nairne, “Case Study 4: Exhibitions of Contemporary Art,” in Emma Barker, ed., Contemporary Cultures of Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 105–26. 13 Paul O’Neill, “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse,” in Judith Rugg, ed., Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance (Chicago: Intellect, 2007), 13–28. 14 Katherine Grube. “17th Biennale of Sydney, The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age,” http://www.c-artsmag.com/articles/detail.php?Title=17th%20Biennale%20 of%20Sydney%20The%20Beauty%20of%20Distance:%20Songs%20of%20Survival%20in%20a%20 Precarious%20Age&articleID=124.

101 Jonathan Goodman Mo Yi at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing July 3–August 20, 2010

Opening reception of Mo Yi: Me and My Surroundings –80, 90, 2000, June 19, 2010 (artist second to right). Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing.

o Yi, a mid-career artist living in Beijing, has taken that city as the centre of his focus for thirty years now. His show at Mthe Three Shadows Photography Centre, entitled Me in My Surroundings—80, 90, 2000, looks at both Beijing and Tianjian from an engaged point of view. Consisting of black-and-white photographs, the images are installed on the walls in the Three Shadows space as well on tables and beds. The overall effect is somewhat museum-like, as if the artist had decided to preserve for us the physical artifacts, however simple they may be, of city culture itself. Mo Yi knows full well that he is recording the remnants of continuity in urban conditions that are changing with a rapidity that boggles the mind. As he says,

In nearly thirty years of creation, I have always confronted the big city. I definitely have an emotional tie to the city because there is not another example of such a large and varied body of work created over such a long period in Chinese photography.1

Like other artists of his generation, Mo Yi has seen the physical changes of a great metropolis utterly transform his experience of the urban. His images not only record the demolition and reconstruction of Tianjin and Beijing, they also express one individual’s unwavering affection for these two cities during a time when, as he says, he focused on “the moment that China began to reform its political system and to urbanize.”

102 China’s urban transformation has not been subtle, and more than a few artists’ recently built studios have been destroyed by government decree. The hutong are mostly gone; those that remain are kept for tourists as quaint reminders of China’s past. Even so, Mo Yi has kept his finger on the pulse of his chosen cities and understands that their alterations reflect change in the politics of the country. Looking at the show, with its highly similar bed frames, sequentially numbered by the manufacturer’s that made them, one has the sense that Mo Yi is pointing to the conventions of a formerly communal China. At the same time, the bed frames signify the time during which Mo Yi came of age, both as a person and as an artist. They lend historical specificity to the installation. In regard to stylistic integrity, the roughness of the prints’ imagery and, to some extent, their print quality declares that he prefers honesty over finish. Many of the images include Mo Yi himself, and the consistency of his presence suggests that it is he and not the city that is stable. His generation, which includes such celebrated artists as Xu Bing, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Zhang Huan, has demonstrated a technical and imaginative prowess fully in keeping with its outsized ambition. But Mo Yi has taken a different path, one that is more aligned with a subtle critique of Chinese society rather than an attempt to mythologize its culture. His project is vast and demands that viewers contemplate a vision of change in China’s major urban centres.

Mo Yi, Street Face No. 1, It is an undertaking, then, of unusual breadth and insight, and, in spite of 1988–1990, silver gelatin print, 50.8 x 61 cm. Courtesy Mo Yi’s modesty as a person, it does not lack its own brand of ambition. As of the artist and Three Shadows Photography Art I moved in and around the images, I sensed a resonance of Robert Frank, Centre, Beijing. who also unflinchingly documented society in his famous project The Americans. Although Mo Yi is far removed both in time and geography from the Beat generation, his photographs look as if he could have been part of it. Long-haired and bearded, he has a place among his generation

103 of disaffected intellectuals, many of whom have been intent on witnessing and recording the troubling inequalities of their society. His series from the late 1980s entitled Street Face focused on capturing groups of people, unposed, as they make their way through city streets. The mood of these photographs, similar to the mood in his later works, is heavy with a solemnity born of idiosyncratic witness. One might argue that the gravitas of Mo Yi’s imagery stems from the roots of his own personality; however, the pictures do in fact demonstrate the anomie of living in an authoritarian, one-party system.

Mo Yi never describes his photographs Mo Yi, My Illusory Beijing No. 6, Qianmen, 2008, silver as criticizing the social limitations gelatin print, 50.8 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the artist and within which he lives. Instead, the Three Shadows Photography images speak for themselves: there is a Art Centre, Beijing. recent view from 2008 of the entrance to Beijing’s Forbidden City, My Illusory Beijing No. 6, Qianmen, shot in soft focus. The small passageway leading through to a monumental court building emphasizes the vastness of the court in dynastic times, as well as its impersonal grandeur. But the atmosphere is particularly inhospitable, with the soft focus conveying an air of unidentifiable but palpable menace. Mo Yi is excellent at communicating a mood, but he refuses to particularize it in a political sense. Yet it is difficult for viewers to ignore the photographer’s suggestion of alienation. There is another picture of him from 1997 standing in a narrow corridor between two buildings in Tianjin, Me in My Surroundings (Tianjin) No. 4, that projects a sense of the claustrophobic; the walls are dark with shadow, while behind his figure the corridor opens to light. He looks unperturbed, despite the narrow enclosure and dark surroundings. There is just enough light to reveal his forehead, cheeks, and nose; his grave demeanor matches the atmosphere of the photo. Mo Yi himself seems fixated on a point behind the viewer, as if witnessing something beyond the reach of the audience. In this image it is, I think, not too far-fetched to imagine the artist in a kind of prison, caught up by a vision of society that suspects creative idiosyncrasy to be a mask for social deviance.

Mo Yi, Me in My Surroundings (Tianjin) No. 4, 1997, silver gelatin print, 50.8 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing.

104 Perhaps it makes most sense to see Mo Yi’s career as an extended study in integrity—he has brilliantly investigated both the image and the circumstances that surround it. Idiosyncrasy of manner and vision remains a powerful way of evading the depredations of the state. Whether or not China is totalitarian is almost beside the point; Mo Yi’s imagery shows us that the problems of individual existence remain tied to one’s surroundings and that political ideology remains a topic best investigated in ways that express the integrity of the individual. We know that Mo Yi is old enough to have experienced the Cultural Revolution and the tragedy of Tian’anmen Square. Those experiences politicize his art even though he has made no work that overtly comments on the two events. While it is mistaken to see politics alone underscoring Mo Yi’s photos, there remains a charged undercurrent that ties together his work from different decades and suggests that the outward cohesiveness of Chinese society is more complex, and more troubled, than it at first appears. Mo Yi’s achievement is his portrayal of the vulnerabilities of personal life through the seemingly objective recording by his camera lens. His pictures of the urban landscape evoke loss without directly doing so. Art isn’t the only means for dissent, but it is an important outlet for truths that many would prefer to keep hidden away.

The relationship of art to politics in totalitarian societies has always been difficult—it is hard to make convincing art that supports an abstract, yet all powerful state. It is perhaps easier, although far more dangerous, to criticize the government directly. Mo Yi evades the thorny problems of direct rebelliousness by preferring to imply his dissent. This of course makes good practical sense in a country where criticism of the government is often harshly punished. The strength of Mo Yi’s art derives from his willingness to see things as they are, rather than as they should be. Indeed, the prints, which are sometimes hard to read because of their visual complexity, proclaim the artist’s political and creative independence by emphasizing a dissident view that maintains its integrity through an unrefined presentation. The unusual installation of the prints—on chairs and beds—underscores the independence of his vision in this show. Even so, it proves hard to say just exactly how he conveys his critical perspective on the social processes he captures on film. Calling his photos allegorical or symbolic doesn’t work. Instead of symbolizing experience, his photos embody experience—hence their uncanny ability to affect an audience by emphasizing the experience the images convey as much as their formal expressiveness.

In a way, Mo Yi’s art represents a triumph of pure content. By refusing the deliberately beautiful in favour of the rawness of the real, he shows us how to navigate a path of independence at a time when the government is cracking down on protests or demonstrations of dissidence. The idea of witnessing has always been a strength of courageous artists—in photography especially. Mo Yi’s particular achievement has been to resist cultural uniformity in ways that escape the state’s scrutiny. The depth of experience his images suggest turns on the notion that even celebrated icons like the Forbidden City carry with them a weight that is culturally clichéd, creating a false experience about life in China. Mo Yi pushes in favour of honesty when conveying cultural icons; he overemphasizes very little. For example, the image of the CCTV television building is curiously out of focus,

105 with other images imposed upon it that prove difficult to visually register— surely this is an ironic (if unconscious) comment on the vague truisms of government media.

Mo Yi, My Illusory Beijing No. 4, 2008, silver gelatin print, 50.8 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing.

The series Inages Through a Dog’s Mo Yi, Images Through a Dog’s Mind No. 8, 1995, silver Mind (1995) portrays a city filled gelatin print, 50.8 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the artist and with bicycles before Tianjin Three Shadows Photography transformed itself into the modern Art Centre, Beijing. city it has become. No. 8 of this series shows a man, dressed in a hat and coat, directing traffic. In front of him stand more than a few people on bicycles, still the main means of transportation at the time. The overall look of the image is grim; it is hard not to read it as a comment on the more or less inevitable alienation of urban life. The lack of colour in the photograph intensifies the feeling that it portrays the internal uncertainty one often feels while experiencing a city’s social terrain. The intensity of Mo Yi’s art results from the intensity of Tianjin itself, at a time when the gloss of capitalism had not yet set in. Perhaps a reason one is melancholically affected by his art is that the pictures are all in black and white, a format usually employed for documentary work. To document reality in China is to record its quality of life, both physical and spiritual. Mo Yi does this extremely well.

106 Mo Yi, My Illusory City No. Street Face No. 1 (1989), another 11, 1987, silver gelatin print, 50.8 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the photograph taken in Tianjin, artist and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, shows three young men wearing Beijing. winter overcoats as they stand in the middle of a street. The faces of two of the men can be seen; the third one looks off to the side. The man in the middle seems particularly disaffected; his hip haircut frames a face that looks bored or frustrated. Once again, the image slyly eludes direct political commentary, yet one senses that not all is right. It proves that the job of the critic is to open up the implied communication of the photographer; one reason criticism remains weak in China is because it is difficult to be truthful about the artist’s alienation from the state. Because Mo Yi’s documentation of society does not include images specifically associated with the Chinese government, it isn’t easy to make the case for a deliberate witnessing of repression. The viewer has to rely on intuition to perceive it as that.

Mo Yi, Dancing Streets No. 1, Some of the artist’s most powerful 1989, silver gelatin print, 50.8 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the artist and images regarding the rebuilding Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing. of Tianjin occur in scenes that overlap each other within individual photos resulting in a kind of visual confusion. Technically, the images are accomplished notwithstanding their rough treatment; they feel coherent despite the multiple perspectives and reflections from glass within separate images. My Illusory City No. 11 is a composite of four separate scenes: that of a glass ceiling, an outdoor shot of a crowd, a picture of the front of a building, and a blank image in white that is very hard to visually discern. The blank image takes up the lower right quadrant, cutting into and obscuring the other three images that comprise the photo. The word “illusory” in the title seems key to the photograph. This particular photograph by Mo Yi is both real and surreal, and the illusion created by the artist reflects the reality of the city itself (one is reminded of T. S. Eliot’s phrase “unreal city” in The Wasteland). Mo Yi is not so much a flâneur as he is a stalker of meaning, finding truth in the depths of the city’s transformed architecture and urban debris. A later image, from 2008, shows a man, likely the artist himself, standing in front of what looks like an office building. The man appears to be transparent—one can see the building through his body—and the windows once more create numerous reflected surfaces. It is a melancholic and poetic transmission of the quality of city life, intuitive but correct in its anonymity and isolation.

The city of Tianjin is not without its erotic charms. Dancing Streets No. 1 (1998) takes a close look at the shapely legs of a young woman in stockings; the view continues up to her mid-thigh before her skirt stops the probing eye of the camera (and audience). As a picture, it is both lyrical and sexual, and

107 somehow symbolizes the new China that was emerging at the time. Usually, Mo Yi, Tossing Bus China 1989 No. 6, 1989, silver gelatin print, Mo Yi’s photographs are only suggestive of an attitude towards Chinese 50.8 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Three Shadows mores; but this image is direct, it is erotic without being crass. Another Photography Art Centre, Beijing. photograph, harsher in its realism, is Tossing Bus China No. 6 (1989). Two people are standing in a bus and facing the camera; one has partially covered his eyes with his hands, while the other, wearing sunglasses, looks back at Mo Yi. The image is dark, even though there is light coming in through the windows of the bus. Like many of Mo Yi’s images, this work shows us a gritty urban scenario, one without charm or beauty. The movement back and forth between the city’s infrequent moments of transcendence and its more frequent rough reality remains central to Mo Yi’s methodology. Indeed, he finds inspiration in communicating the complicated architecture and social structure of major cities and, in turn, of China.

Mo Yi’s images demand serious consideration. His work shows us that while Beijing and Tianjin may well lack hope in a political sense, the act of capturing their realities demonstrates courage. Mo Yi is both passive witness and active participant in these two cities whose size, ambition, and energies are well on their way to becoming epic—if they are not so already. In the stark lyricism of his imagery, we find a realism that is affecting because it is true to the city and the spirit of the time. If he needs to, Mo Yi can effectively deny that his art is a treatise on politics; as with all art, interpretations of it can be varied. In a time when political fundamentalism on both the left and the right seems to be taking over much of the world, the artist’s photographs argue for a realism that is based on actual observations. To see Mo Yi’s art as a critique of China’s sociopolitical certainties requires an imagination that can be read by his intuitive signs of distress, a stance that is different from interpreting according to an explicit agenda. Mo Yi’s photographs make a strong case for individual independence and integrity. One can’t ask for more in art.

Notes 1 All quotes are from the artist’s statement in the exhibition press release.

108 Chinese Name Index

Ai Weiwei Huang Yongping Sun Yuan Yang Taiyang 艾未未黃永砅孫原楊太陽 Cai Guo-Qiang Laozi Tan Chengnian Yang Zhenzhong 蔡國強老子譚成年楊振忠 Cao Fei Li Lei Tao Xiangli Yu Youhan 曹斐李磊陶相禮余友涵 Chen Changwei Li Mu Teng, Teresa Yue Minjun 陳長偉李牧鄧麗君岳敏君 Chen Ke Li Shan Tsang Kin-Wah Zeng Fanzhi 陳可李山曾建華曾梵志 Chen Tong Li Zhenhua Wang Guangyi Zhang Huan 陳侗李振華王廣義張洹 Chen Xhingyu Liu Gang Wang Ping Zhang Jianjun 陳幸宇劉鋼王屏張建君 David Chan Liu Jianhua Wang Qingsong Zhang Peili 陳浩揚劉建華王慶松張培力 Deng Xiaopeng Liu Wei Wang Zhenfei Zhang Xiaogang 鄧小平劉韡王振飛張曉剛 Du Wenda Lu Xinghua Wu Shanzhuan Zhao Tao 杜文達陸興華吳山專趙濤 Fan Di’an Lu Xun Wu Shuzai Zheng Guogu 范迪安魯迅吳書仔鄭國谷 Feng Boyi Ma, Jennifer Wen Wu Yulu Zhou Chunya 馮博一馬文吳玉祿周春芽 Feng Zhengjie Maggie Cheung Xiang Jing 俸正杰張曼玉向京 Gao Shiming Mian Mian Xijing Men 高士明棉棉西京人 Geng Jianyi Mo Yi Xu Bing 耿建翌莫毅徐冰 Guo Xi Peng Yu Xu Jiang 郭熙彭禹許江 Han Bing Qiu Zhijie Xu Zhen 韓冰邱志杰徐震 Hou Hanru Shen Shaomin Xu Zhifeng 侯瀚如沈少民許志鋒 Hu Jieming Sheng Wei Yang Fudong 胡介鳴盛葳楊褔東

109 110 111 112 www.yishu-online.com New Archive Web Site launched on August 15, 2010