A Retrospective of a Demolition

J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 1 2 VOLUME 11, NUMBER 4

INSI D E

Between Dubai and Sharjah: Charting Global Discourse(s) A Retrospective of a Demolition: Meishi Street Six Years Later To Demolish: Thinking About Urbanization in China Through a Collaborative Art Project in the Countryside

Dappled China: “Untamed Histories” Surrounding the China Brand Zhang Huan’s Big Buddha Ten Years Later Interviews with Yan Lei, Herb Tam

Reviews of Birdhead, Michael Lin, Sarah Sze, Caochangdi PhotoSpring

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VOLUME 11, NUMBER 4, J ULY/AU G U ST 2012

CONTENTS  Editor’s Note 30  Contributors

6 Between Dubai and Sharjah: Charting Global Discourse(s) Stephanie Bailey

21 A Retrospective of a Demolition: Meishi Street Six Years Later Clara Galeazzi

56 30 To Demolish: Thinking About Urbanization in China Through a Collaborative Art Project in the Countryside Meiqin Wang

43 Dappled China: “Untamed Histories” Surrounding the China Brand Meiling Cheng

56 Zhang Huan’s Big Buddha Ten Years Later Amelia Mariani

71 63 What I Like to Do: Interview with Yan Lei Li Zhenhua

71 East of Burden: Herb Tam and Ingrid Chu in Conversation Ingrid Chu

79 Welcome to the Birdhead World Again, London Voon Pow Bartlett

88 Michael Lin: Model Home/Model Museum 88 David Ho Yeung Chan

93 Sarah Sze: Close Up and Far Away Jonathan Goodman

98 Caochangdi PhotoSpring—Arles in Beijing John Millichap

108 Chinese Name Index

98 Cover: Yan Lei at Limited Art Project Room, documenta 13, Kassel, 2012. Photo: Zheng Shengtian.

We thank JNBY Art Projects, Canadian Foundation of Asian Art, Mr. and Mrs. Eric Li, and Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison for their generous contribution to the publication and distribution of Yishu. Vol. 11 No. 4 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art  Katy Hsiu-chih Chien   Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C.C. Liu Yishu 51 opens with an extensive report by   Ken Lum Stephanie Bailey on the Sharjah Art Foundation’s -- Keith Wallace March Meeting and Art Dubai. While the United   Zheng Shengtian   Julie Grundvig Arab Emirates at first may seem to have few Kate Steinmann affinities with China, Chinese curators and galleries   Chunyee Li   Larisa Broyde were represented in both events and the evolving   Michelle Hsieh issues of culture and politics within globalization    Chunyee Li that Bailey addresses are as relevant to China as   they are to any other nation. Moreover, the Middle Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum East is a current “hot spot” for artistic attention that John Clark, University of Sydney brings a new perspective to regions such as China Lynne Cooke, Museo Reina Sofia Okwui Enwezor, Critic & Curator and India, which also experienced the “hot spot” Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator phenomenon and which are now transitioning into Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China Fei Dawei, Independent Critic & Curator more sustainable positions internationally. Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute The massive ongoing process of demolition and Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Katie Hill, University of Westminster reconstruction in China is a subject that has been Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive much discussed. Clara Galeazzi and Meiqin Wang Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator approach two very different aspects of it, one Lu Jie, Independent Curator revisiting consequences of the “revitalization” Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University of a popular neighbourhood in Beijing. the other Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand discussing the threat of urbanization that is now Philip Tinari, Independent Critic & Curator Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator encroaching upon rural areas and how artists are Wu Hung, University of Chicago bringing notice to it. Meiling Cheng examines what Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar she calls “untamed histories,” the reciting of actions  Art & Collection Group Ltd. and events that are outside of officially sanctioned 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, reports, and how the work of artists can render Taipei, Taiwan 104 interpretations of history in unconventional but Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 powerful ways. Like Clara Galeazzi, Amelia Mariani E-mail: [email protected] also looks retrospectively, in her case to ten years    Jenny Liu ago, to reconsider a turning point in the career of Alex Kao Zhang Huan through a reading of the influence of   Joyce Lin Buddhism on his work.   Perry Hsu Betty Hsieh

Interviews have always been an important format  Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. in Yishu for voices to be heard in a more personal   http://yishu-online.com way, and in this issue we feature Li Zhenhua   Design Format  1683 - 3082 speaking with Yan Lei, who will be one of two Chinese artists participating in the 2012 documenta, Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, in Kassel (the other is Song Dong). As well, Ingrid March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, Chu talks with Herb Tam, recently appointed advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: Curator and Director of Exhibitions at the Museum Yishu Editorial Ofﬁce of Chinese in America, about its new building and 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada how contemporary art is being incorporated into the V6Z 2P3 programs of what was primarily a historical museum. Phone: 1.604.649.8187 Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: ofﬁ[email protected] Yishu 51 wraps up with reviews by Voon Pow Bartlett, David Ho Yeung Chan, Jonathan Goodman,   1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) and John Millichap that take us to London, Shanghai, 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) New York, and Beijing. 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com)    Leap Creative Group   Raymond Mah   Gavin Chow Keith Wallace  Philip Wong

No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 200251

2 4 (Larisa Broyde) 6 (Chunyee Li)

21 (Philip Tinari) (Judy Andrews) (Britta Erickson) (Melissa Chiu) 30 (Sebastian Lopez) (Claire Hsu) (John Clark) (Pauline J. Yao) 43 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 56 Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill Charles Merewether 63 Apinan Poshyananda

71 856 : (886) 2.2560.2220 (886) 2.2542.0631 79 [email protected] Yishu Ofﬁce 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 88 : (1) 604.649.8187 (1) 604.591.6392 : ofﬁ[email protected]

93 Leap Creative Group, Vancouver 98 6 108 http://yishu-online.com Design Format

Contributors

Stephanie Bailey’s interests stem from her and subsequently the director of Osage mixed Chinese and British descent, her Gallery until 2011. Chan has curated many upbringing in Hong Kong, her education in exhibition projects in the past with artists the United Kingdom, and her experience of including Chen Shaoxiong, Gu Dexin, Lee living in Greece for five years. Between 2008 Kit, Lin Yilin, Michael Lin, Wang Jianwei, and 2011, she served as Art and Culture Yan Lei, and others. He holds an M.A. from editor for Insider Publications, and she has the Center for Curatorial Studies from Bard written extensively on art for publications College, New York. Chan will be curating a including Aesthetica, Artforum, Art Papers, new solo exhibition with Hong Kong artist Art Lies, Frieze, Leap, Naked Punch, and Tsang Kin-wah in July, in Hong Kong. Odyssey. As a theorist and an educator, she played a key role in designing one of the Meiling Cheng is the author of In Other only BTEC-accredited Foundation Diploma Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art courses in Art and Design offered in Greece, (2002) and Beijing Xingwei: Contemporary at Doukas School, where she now works as Chinese Time-Based Art (2012), which an external supervisor and visiting lecturer received the support of a 2006 Zumberge in Critical and Contextual Studies while Individual Research Grant and a 2008 undertaking an M.A. in Contemporary Art Guggenheim Fellowship. With Gabrielle Theory at Goldsmiths College, London. Cody, Cheng is currently coediting a critical anthology entitled Reading Contemporary Voon Pow Bartlett is a London-based Performance: Theatricality Across Genres, artist, curator, lecturer and writer. Her forthcoming in 2015. Ph.D. thesis, Spectacle as Myth: Guanxi, the Relational and the Urban Quotidian in Ingrid Chu is a Canadian curator and writer Contemporary Chinese Art, was completed living in New York. Prior to co-founding at TrAIN, Chelsea College of Art and the non-profit commissioning organization Design, University of the Arts, London. Forever & Today, Inc. (2008) in New York’s She has pursued an interdisciplinary and Chinatown/Lower East Side, Chu curated transnational career, having taught fine art exhibitions and public projects for over a practice and cultural studies at the B.A. and decade and founded RED-I Projects (2004), M.A. levels at Central St. Martins; Central an independent initiative producing roving Academy of Fine Art, Beijing; Reading artists’ projects in the public realm. She University; and Croydon College. received an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard David Ho Yeung Chan is a curator based College ( , 2003) and has worked at non- in Hong Kong and Shanghai. He was the profit cultural organizations including the director of the Shanghai Gallery of Art Power Plant and the Noguchi Museum. She at Three on the Bund from 2007 to 2009 regularly serves as a visiting curator and

4 Vol. 11 No. 4 guest critic for numerous educational and visual communication. Originally from non-profit organizations, and her critical France, she currently lives in Los Angeles. writing has been featured in Afterall, Fillip, Frieze, Kaleidoscope, Parachute, and TimeOut John Millichap is a writer, curator and the New York, among other international founder of 3030 Press publishing. He has publications. lived in China since 1995 and has written about Asian contemporary art and culture Clara Galeazzi is a freelance art writer for numerous publications, including the currently based in Milan. She studied at International Herald Tribune and the South the School of Oriental and African Studies China Morning Post. In 2012 he is co-editor (SOAS), University of London, where she of the forthcoming book New Photography worked on the topic of contemporary in China (3030 Press). Chinese art, documentary, and film. She is now focusing specifically on Meiqin Wang is an associate professor of Chinese new media. art history at California State University Northridge with a specialization in Jonathan Goodman studied literature at modern and contemporary Chinese art. Columbia University and the University of She received her Ph.D. in contemporary Pennsylvania before becoming an art writer Chinese art history from the State specializing in contemporary Chinese art. University of New York at Binghamton He teaches at Pratt Institute and the Parsons and M.A. in art history from the Chinese School of Design, focusing on art criticism Academy of Arts in Beijing. She received and contemporary culture. her B.F.A. in art education and painting from the Fujian Teacher’s University in Li Zhenhua is a multimedia artist, curator, Fuzhou. Her dissertation and published producer and writer. His work has addressed materials focus on the recent developments issues concerning Chinese as well as of contemporary art from China and international contemporary art and culture their social, political, economic, and since 1996. institutional implications in the context of commercialization, urbanization and Amelia Mariani recently completed her globalization of the Chinese world. Her M.A. in Art History from the University research interests also include contemporary of California, Los Angeles. She graduated art of the Asian world and international summa cum laude from UCLA with a double exhibitions. Her teaching covers historical B.A. in Art History and in French. She and contemporary arts from Asia and her received Departmental Honors in courses emphasize the cultural and political both academic departments. She has also context of artistic production. worked for cultural institutions and in

Vol. 11 No. 4 5 Stephanie Bailey Between Dubai and Sharjah: Charting Global Discourse(s)

In present usage and understanding, “culture’” is a good, warming, humane sort of word, and “politics” bleak and unaccommodating. –Fred Inglis1

alking about culture or politics has never been easy. In discussing either, one risks entering a minefield where words teeter Tdangerously between weighted definitions and lofty, abstract notions that often get lost in social and geopolitical translation. Such were the problems in the Persian Gulf this March at major annual events in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—the fifth Sharjah March Meeting, the sixth edition of Art Dubai, and the second manifestation of the Global Art Forum—that coincided with three major exhibitions also on show in Doha, the Qatari capital: Louise Bourgeois at QMA Gallery at the Katara Cultural Village, Cai Guo-Qiang’s Saraab at Mathaf: Museum of Arab Art, and Takashi Murakami coupled with an eighty-foot public sculpture by Richard Serra at the Museum of Islamic Art (the first solo presentation in the Middle East for each artist), affirming a drive to establish the Persian Gulf region as a focal point in “the Menasa”—an informal cultural union incorporating the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.

Aside from strengthening regional ties, the UAE and Qatar are building intellectual and cultural economies funded by the revenues from oil exports the region has been enjoying since the discovery of that lucrative resource in the 1950s2 and, later, natural gas.3 And though Sharjah established its biennial in 1993 and has worked extensively to develop contemporary art within the region, focus on contemporary art has intensiﬁed further in recent years with the Qatar Museums Authority sponsoring the Murakami show at Versailles in 2010, which was on view at the Museum of Islamic Art through to June 2012, and the Damien Hirst exhibition, currently on show at Tate Modern, which is expected to travel to Doha next year. Coupled with Art Dubai’s own six-year evolution, critics have judged such developments as mere actions of wealth, evidenced in the emphasis on big, international artists at the cost of local production and the artiﬁciality of a seemingly forced local art scene heavily sponsored by ruling elites and subject to censorship.

These well-worn debates—exempliﬁed by the above mentioned critiques against the relationship between art, wealth, and power—naturally enter artistic discourses that traverse the cultural-political equation, evident at Art Dubai, where Cartier’s Naturellement exhibition was adjacent to the Abraaj

6 Vol. 11 No. 4 Capital Art Prize exhibition—sponsored by one of the leading private equity management ﬁrms in the Menasa. Viewing the local art audience against the UAE’s population demographics—the Emirati population is roughly 11.5% of the UAE’s total population,4 with the remainder comprising expatriates and migrants5—a clear distinction between a ruling minority and a multi- ethnic, migrant worker class explicitly evokes the age-old “us” and “them” binary,6 which is further fueled by controversial workers’ conditions in Abu Dhabi’s high-proﬁle $27 billion project on Saadiyat Island, where branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre along with a national museum and a campus of New York University, among other projects, are expected to open by 2017.7

The visible distinction between a ruling class and migrant worker population in the UAE is problematic as illustrated in Emirati collector and writer Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi’s response to a scathing British newspaper profile depicting Dubai as a city built on slave labour.8 “It’s easy to generalize about a country when figures are manipulated to sensationalize and sell papers,”9 he wrote, listing Britain’s own humanitarian—namely, colonial—offences. Ultimately, when powers that once enjoyed progress off the backs of others chastize societies without recognizing local responses, such as a 2007 Sharjah performance by Ebtisam Abdulaziz, who reacted to economically-induced social divisions by dressing in a suit printed with bank statements while enacting the daily life of South Asian workers, they appear hypocritical. And given that similar accusations could be leveled at other nations, too, we see that black and white judgments do not suffice.10 If we are to critique one country on its economic and political elites, its issues with censorship, and its human rights offenses, are we not to critique them all?

These issues often find focus in the cultural economy post-2008 crash, after which world “centres” have noticeably shifted. These shifts are well charted in art market trends, from China surpassing the US as the world’s largest art market to Art HK’s rise (and its acquisition by Art Basel), and the establishment of Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Gagosian, White Cube, and Galerie Perrotin in the ex-colonial outpost, to the focus on the Persian Gulf—a comparatively young market. As a region, the Gulf is notable in how it geographically expands the literal gulf between the two traditional regional poles of East and West, allowing for wider cultural, social, and political debates that find an immediate focal point in Art Dubai, the largest art fair in the Menasa region. This year, seventy-five galleries from thirty-two countries participated, from Africa, Argentina to Russia to Switzerland, including four galleries from China—Connoisseur Contemporary, Galleria Continua, Pace, and Platform China—resulting in a global gathering from which a multitude of issues emerged.

Here, Keller Easterling’s notion of “spatial products”—deﬁned as commercial infrastructures that cut through borders, territories, even politics, and exempt from normative jurisdictions and constituencies— proves useful.11 Imbued with myths, desires, and symbolic capital, art fairs could easily fall into the category of the spatial product where culture is the commodity. Like apparatuses regulating milieus by “making possible, guaranteeing and ensuring circulations: the circulation of people

Vol. 11 No. 4 7 [and] merchandise”12 through disciplined spaces overseen by territorial Raed Yassin, China, 2012, porcelain vases. Courtesy of 13 sovereigns, spatial products could also be seen as objects of contention. the artist and Art Dubai. Following Michel Foucault’s idea that power is not homogenous and is in fact deﬁned by the particular points through which it passes,14 Art Dubai is one such point.

Raed Yassin, one of the recipients of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize this year, exposes this with seven Chinese-made porcelain vases depicting key battles from the Lebanese Civil War entitled, China (2012), exhibited in the Prize’s Art Dubai exhibition, Spectral Imprints.15 Evoking Lebanon’s historical ties to Greece through medium (pottery) and form (the amphora) while linking China and the Middle East through a royal blue colour created from cobalt pigments mined in Iran, Yassin retraces a geo-cultural history via the Silk Road from which notions of commodity, trade, war, and globalization are reunited within a twenty-ﬁrst century context. Depicting important battles in modern Lebanese history on a mass-produced object—speciﬁcally made in China—Yassin inserts the politics of war into an economic apparatus that indirectly facilitates such violence, perhaps even institutionalizes it, thus turning Art Dubai into a point of confrontation with the potential to invert power relations.16 Just as Henri Lefebvre wrote in Production of Space, that “the aim of this book is meant to detonate this state of affairs,”17 so Yassin explains of his work: “It’s like planting a virus in the system. It’s an inverted logic, but it’s a logic; that’s why it gets in.”18

This practice of exposing deep-rooted issues through art provides the basis for exchanges that would not otherwise have happened.19 Such a view is shared by both Qatar and the UAE, as expressed by Sheikha Al Mayassa Bint Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Chairperson of the Qatar Museum Authority,20 and Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi,21 Founder and President of the Sharjah Art Foundation. These encounters create often unpredictable political negotiations, like Carlos Celdran’s performances at Art Dubai, Livin’ La Vida Imelda, in which Celdran led an audience through the fair charting the rise and fall of the ostentatiously extravagant Imelda Marcos. Celdran explained the impact of Marcos as First Lady: “It was Imelda’s idea

8 Vol. 11 No. 4 Carlos Celdran, Livin’ La Vida Imelda, 2012, performance at Art Dubai. Courtesy of the artist and Art Dubai.

to tell the world what we were about through our art and culture,” Celdran spat sardonically, explaining how she turned herself and the Philippines into a joke. As a result: “The Philippines no longer uses art and culture to identify itself and because of that, has fallen into the control of market forces.” Celdran implored the Filipinas in the audience: “Now is the time to go out and say how amazing you are. Because no one is going to do it for you anymore.”

Curator Alia Swastika. Background: Iswanto Hartono, Celdran expressed a desire for autonomous self-representation, something GoudGold, 2010, at Galeri Canna, Art Dubai 2012. Courtesy of Art Dubai.

Riyas Komu reiterated when explaining how the Kochi Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India, was initiated in part for Kerala “to become part of a global conversation on our own terms.”22 Similar sentiments were expressed at Art Dubai’s curated section, Marker, showcasing galleries from Jakarta thematically selected under the title Self/Faith by Alia Swastika, one of the six artistic directors of the upcoming Gwanju Biennale alongside Nancy Adajania, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Mami Kataoka, Sunjung Kim, and Carol Yinghua Lu. Describing the fair as contemporary yet distinctly Middle Eastern, Indira Estiyanti Nurjadin of D Galerie, Jakarta, found a form of “Muslim contemporary” in Art Dubai liberating: “Contemporary art in Indonesia looks westward. Here, Muslim art is contemporary. When I look back at my own country, with the largest Muslim population in the world, I think how no one has been looking at that Islamic inﬂuence or even exploring it in a contemporary way.”23

Vol. 11 No. 4 9 But when Celdran’s performance was shut down because of a moment Photographs by Jim Allen Abel at D Galerie, Art Dubai 2012. Celdran imagined between Imelda Marcos and Muammar Gaddaﬁ that Courtesy of Art Dubai. included a discussion on Islam, war, peace, and evidently, hypocrisy, boundaries, thus tested, hardened. Borrowing the words of Gilles Deleuze:

It is here, then, that we see the great dualities: between different classes, or the governing and the governed, or the public and the private. But, more than this, it is here that two forms of realization diverge or become differentiated: a form of expression and a form of content, a discursive and a non- discursive form, the form of the visible and the articulable.24

The incident of Celdran’s censorship was indicative of how far things could go, and how much could be said in the UAE, for now, operating as a rupture in which the divide between what is visible and what can be said, is made clear. Like a game of sorts, Celdran’s was an incident in which cultural agents might test the limits of their own discourses, including those that include politics, history, autonomy, and power.25

Inviting such encounters outside formal political, economic, and even cultural prerequisites, Art Dubai could be read as what Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mortenbock class as informal economies—markets or bazaars— creating conditions that produce “a volatile body of knowledge which passes between informal global structures and the subject emerging from them.”26 Referencing Foucault, Mooshammer and Mortenbock explain how power flows through people and can be seized and redirected,”27 reading informal economies not as spatial products but as social praxis. It is fitting, then, that the Emirati artist, curator, and founder of Dubai gallery space Traffic, Rami Farook, staged a group exhibition at Traffic concurrent with Art Dubai— Domination, Hegemony and the Panopticon—based on the writings of

10 Vol. 11 No. 4 Foucault and Jean Baudrillard. The exhibition formed an ongoing discourse that extended into a publication, The State,28 which was launched during Art Dubai and was indicative of a developing political discussion built upon the economic terrain of commercial art production.

Yet, as James Westcott observed in 2011, although art fairs “can respond faster to current events . . . with less intellectual burden,”29 biennials give space to reflect on the multitude of compromised motives that exist behind both exhibition formats. As Robert Storr once noted: “the people who make [biennials] cannot operate with compromised motives, and in fact one of their principal tasks is to disentangle the compromises to the greatest extent possible in order that the viewer does not hear all the noise in the background, but can actually have an experience of what is in the foreground.”30 But to disentangle such complexities, some must entangle themselves first, which best describes the function of the March Meeting, an extraordinary annual symposium organized by the Sharjah Art Foundation that brings together an impressive mix of art world figures.

Sharjah Art Foundation’s 2012 This entanglement of issues as March Meeting. Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. wide-ranging as compromised motives, political pressure, economic interests, and freedom of speech, have been heightened since the 2011 Sharjah Biennial, when, in solidarity with the Arab Spring, protestors Sharjah Art Foundation’s 2012 March Meeting. Courtesy of distributed leaflets with the names of Sharjah Art Foundation. those killed in the Bahrain protests for which Saudi Arabia and the UAE both sent troops.31 That same year, Jack Persekian, then-Director of the Sharjah Foundation, was dismissed for exhibiting a work in a public square at the Biennial by Mustapha Benfodil that was deemed offensive; the work was ironically entitled It Has No Importance (2011). Both incidents were problematic because the Arab Spring holds a curious position within the arts in that it pertains to a specific region and the question of who is able to participate in such discussions directly related to such incidents as the Arab Spring is a contentious one. Should such sensitive political discussions be left to those for whom such events are directly related regionally, historically, and politically? Should art position itself so politically? For many, the global interest in—even intervention into—the Arab Spring is equal to criticisms of instances of local censorship, which, as Manal Ataya, Director of the Sharjah Museums Department, noted during the March Meeting, often occurs against the needs of a specific, and local audience.

This is a predicament. From the outside looking in, to what extent should views—religious, political, or intellectual—be imposed upon others? How far should cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism undermine notions of human rights?32 This is reiterated in Wang Hui’s observation that if we do not demand all human rights be protected, the

Vol. 11 No. 4 11 position that individual rights should be protected deteriorates as well.33 Yet, in invoking “human rights”—a Western notion—the problem of critiquing one culture, or one society from outside arises again. But, still, though Frederic Sicre of Abraaj Capital called the Arab Spring “last year’s news,”34 how are we, in a global sense, meant to read or interpret our relationship to or readings of the conditions from which the Arab Spring arose— conditions, which, although particular, also contain, as with art, elements of the universal? At the crux of the matter, as Xiaorong Li suggested in a 2007 paper “A Cultural Critique if Cultural Relativism,” is culture. “Just as basic human rights principles protect freedom of expression and thought,” she writes, “they must also allow for cultural diversity and promote pluralism. Thus, the culture factor cannot be ignored or put on the back burner in any serious ethical thinking.”35

March Meeting keynote speaker Dr. Youssef Aidabi. Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation.

Perhaps this is why Salah Hassan opened the 2012 March Meeting with a keynote speech calling for an end to hierarchies of legitimation in which the West is central, rendering art movements outside as peripheral or derivative, often believed, in Western-centric discourses, “to aspire to establish worlds of global regimes—domains of logic that are given franchise to expand their territory with non-national sovereignty.”36 Themed under the title “Working with Audiences and Artists on Commissions and Residencies,” Hassan’s proposition was to read the universal as global and the global as a sum of the particular was an invitation to re-read the spatial conﬁguration of the global in contemporary art practices from a comparative perspective incorporating “both sides of the divide”: theory/practice, West/non- West, global/local, centre/periphery. It was a rejection of simplistic binary perspectives of globalization, divisions that fail to account for the complexities of globalization in practice.

Such thoughts were reiterated in concurrent exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Foundation, each a geopolitical reading of being-in-the-world, from the horizon of an unknown expanse viewed from the UAE’s coastline in Ziad Antar’s Portrait of a Territory to the internal experience of geopolitical shifts as subjective moments in Basma Alsharif’s As Far as the Eye Can See, an amalgamation of photography, video, and sound. In both exhibitions,

12 Vol. 11 No. 4 the subjective body is a ﬁgure within a totality—a global, interconnected, yet fragmented world. This fragmentation highlights the impossibility of comprehending the realities of globalization while underlining the importance of communication between people as a way to exist within such totalities as narrated in the group show What Should I Do to Live in Your Life? Curated by the Sharjah Art Foundation’s Chief Curator, Claudia Pestana, who brought together artists either from or based in Hong Kong or Seoul into the Bait Al Serkal building, an old family home close to the Sharjah harbour, linking Sharjah, Hong Kong, and Seoul as port cities.

Lee Kit, A perfect ending for For both those who operate within the global as mobile “citizens of the a perfect day, 2009, acrylic on fabric, 110 x 145 cm. Photo: world,” to those for whom the global travels to them—either via travelers who Louie Dela Torre. Courtesy of the artist, Sharjah Art pass through “localities,” to the increasingly internationalization of popular Foundation, and Lombard Freid Projects, New York. culture facilitated by Internet communication, or the globalized consumer culture built on the circulation of goods from one place to another—What Should I Do to Live in Your Life? is an earnest portrayal of a global world in ﬂux. Lee Kit’s conceptual installations tackle the impact of commoditization on art and life by treating the exhibition space as a home for brands recontextualized into cardboard paintings, karaoke videos, and painted sheets, ﬁtting into the cabinet-style curatorial where Minouk Lim, João Vasco Paiva, Part-Time Suite, and Yuk King Tan also inhabit this ex-domestic space. And where Lee Kit personalized the global circulation of goods, Yuk King Tan’s Island Portrait (2004) spatialized the global movement of people in the documentation of sixty-one Chinese migrant workers building the Cook Islands’ National Courthouse. Against Minouk Lim’s Wrong Question (2006), a video of a taxi driver describing Korea’s recovery after the Korean War, including a gastarbeiter agreement (a foreign guest worker program)with the FGR (Federal Republic of Germany) and a Korean workers’ exchange, such circulations are framed by the effects of colonization, still fresh, although

Vol. 11 No. 4 13 João Vasco Paiva, Sea of Mountains, 2010, video installation, 7 mins. Photo: Alfredo Rubio. Courtesy of the artist, Sharjah Art Foundation, and Saamlung.

Yuk King Tan, Island Portrait, 2004, video, photo, and text, 8 mins. Photo: Alfredo Rubio. Courtesy of the artist.

Part-time Suite, Drop by Then: Pieces of the Scenery, 2010, 72 A4-sized drawings, one A1-sized poster, one 10 x 15 cm. Photo: Alfredo Rubio. Courtesy of the artists and supported by Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, 2010.

14 Vol. 11 No. 4 somehow lost under the relentless pace of modernization, which, in Korea’s case, was initiated during its post-war recovery.

Reading the exhibition against Sharjah and Dubai, cities with their own historical ghosts and focused on modernization and marketization, the complexities of the global—its history, politics, and economics—become evident. Such complexities were heightened through the visual remains of the 2011 Biennial-commisioned, site specific installation by Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi, Blessings Upon the Land of My Love (2011). Qureshi painted the Bait Al Serkal courtyard (one of the Biennial locations) with red flower petal motifs to resemble the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Lahore, Pakistan’s capital—a city that is battling its own phantoms, similar to those that hung over the March Meeting like specters of revolutions past and present. The March Meeting felt very much like Pestana’s Bait Al Serkal exhibition—foreigners crowded into a strange place, making sense of each other against issues much larger than themselves. James Lingwood, Co-Director of Artangel, which commissioned Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala’s collaborative film production 1395 Days Without Red (2012), humbly professed his ignorance of such issues as the post-colonial, the impact of globalization on cultures across the East-West divide, describing the experience at Sharjah as valuable, albeit overwhelming.37

Yet, in its form, 1395 Days Without Red highlights a key question for the twenty-first century. Composed of two roughly hour-long films depicting the siege of Sarajevo created using the same film footage but edited in different ways by each artist, the double film raised a number of questions. For one, is it possible to produce a single image of an experience, a historical moment, an idea, maybe even a vision or a moment in time? Or was the double film a performance of compromise, even conflict, of multiple views requiring multiple productions? This question of multiplicity was expressed in Lu Jie’s Meeting presentation on the importance of site, in which he described the Long March Space as a meeting point for the ideological, social, historical, and political terrain upon which China is built—a continuation of the historical Long March itself. A project rooted in art and society, Long March Space is a response to what Lu Jie described as “our perspective of history that has been stabilized or standardized for too long.”38

Lu Jie, Yusaku Imamura, Adam Sutherland, Khalil Abdulwahid, and Anne Barlow at the March Meeting. Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation.

Vol. 11 No. 4 15 For Lu Jie, site contains the potential to chart multiple histories and identities caught in what Long March Space has described as “the soap opera of the ‘global-local’ ploy of capitalism” and “the comedy of the post- cold war ideological narrative.”39 This breaking of standardized narratives is reactionary to a global space that, as Fred Inglis has written,

Reads like a palimpsest; beneath the politics one can plainly see the crisscrossing network of old communities and their cultures, the originary formation frequently deepening and overspreading the ﬂags that have been painted on top.40

Beneath ﬂags, names, and borders lie physical paths and networks—from the Installation view of Spectral Imprints at Maraya Art Silk Road to the Trans-Siberian railway—representing relationships that shape Centre. Foreground: Erbossyn Meldibekov, Peak a global space-as-commons, a global terrain over which conﬂicts of ownership, of Communism, 2008–11; Background left: Galim governance, and management unfold. This was most evident in Erbossyn Madanov and Zauresh Terekbay, Transgression, 2007– Meldibekov’s sculpture Peak of Communism (2008–10), shown in the Maraya 11; background right: Farhad Ahrarnia, On the Road, the Silk Art Centre’s group exhibition Migrasophia, presented concurrently with the Road no 1–3, 2010–11. Photo: group exhibition Alienation at the Barjeel Art Foundation located in the same Hadeel Al Alami. building in Sharjah. Composed of six white metal pots hammered to resemble mountain peaks, Peak of Communism references the Pamir Mountain range, once a point on the Northern Silk Road positioned at the crossroads of China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kyrgyzstan,41 with a history in which “Cimmerian and Scythian tribes, several Persian dynasties, Macedonian/Greek armies under Alexander the Great, Parthians, Kushan Chinese, Huns, Hephtalites, Mongol hordes, Nestorian Christians, Arabs, Russian, even the British” have all left their mark.42

Meldibekov’s sculpture refers to the highest peak in Tajikistan, which has undergone numerous name changes. In the twentieth century, it was named Garmo Peak until 1933, when it became Stalin Peak, which it remained until 1962, when Nikita Kruschev changed it to Communism Peak; it was renamed after the founder of the original Tajik state—Ismail Somoni—in

16 Vol. 11 No. 4 1998. Communism Peak is the identiﬁcation of a truly global point of passage, evocative of circulation across boundaries and the intermingling of cultural, historical, and political contexts, making the focus on artist residences and commissions both at Sharjah and Dubai in 2012 a pertinent one. Aside from enlarging the scope within which to participate in what Lu Jie described as the “so-called visual economy, which is stabilizing the ofﬁcial narrative of aesthetic value,” it increased the visibility of vast geographical routes and timelines that run deep below physical surfaces.

Within this scope, that art should build greater links across the local-global was reﬂected in the general view at the March Meeting that residency programs should focus on creating dialogues and relationships with local communities while maintaining a global presence. As Lu Jie noted on developments within the Emirates art scene:

In the ofﬁcial narrative of policy makers, they want the Emirates to be a cultural hub. But in this global situation, what does it mean to be hub? To have your own content is too little. To have a hub is to have a network within this entire political, geographical domain. It’s a way to share certain kinds of resources or experiences.43

This sense of exchange challenges the notion of division, thus allowing for an entirely different global platform to emerge. Continued Lu Jie: “We are separating things that used to be one. A new production needs to be born that brings galleries, artist spaces, and institutions together—education, curatorial, the market, everything.”44 This is an invitation to evolve from the postmodern paradigm of diversity, multiplicity, and multiculturalism toward a metamodern acceptance of the existence of both modern and postmodern thinking in contemporary practices. It might even be as simple as accepting Easterling’s observation that “there is no one world—only many worlds,”45 and the challenge is learning how to navigate and mediate them.

Therefore, it was timely that, during the Meeting, 2013 Sharjah Biennial curator Yuko Hasegawa and Creative Director of Vitamin Creative Space Hu Fang both discussed the garden as a spatial metaphor useful for reading artistic practice and production.46 Along with Long March Space, these natural metaphors work twofold. For one, Long March invokes physical networks and timelines through which history visually imprints itself on the earth through the physical routes carved out by social, political, economic, and even conﬂicting relationships as explored in a more recent Long March Space project, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which charts a shared narrative between China, the US, and Vietnam. Thinking of how networks facilitate the ﬂow of people and goods (and in the case of Foucault’s analogy, power), the garden, against the notion of such networks, works as spatial product— an infrastructure of sorts. Aside from being a site where the memory of local culture resides, it is a point through which people, goods, knowledge, and culture are exchanged over a disciplined space.

Vol. 11 No. 4 17 Yuko Hasegawa, Curator of the 2013 Sharjah Biennial. Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation.

Hasegawa’s reading of the Islamic courtyard garden as the place where the owner of the house invites people from outside to discuss, meditate, exchange, and produce new knowledge,47 the garden-as-metaphor provides a reading of globalization that allows for a certain dialectical relationship to emerge between such binaries as public and private, people and power. Reconﬁguring our reading of the global as a garden in which culture, politics, and economics might be read in common is an invitation to contemplate how we are to live and work together spatially, something the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012), entitled Roundtable, and the 2013 Sharjah Biennial will no doubt investigate. And, within this garden-as-spatial system through which such complexities as politics, history, and culture are mediated, let us not forget that, as Hasegawa noted: “The market is also part of this system. So how can we use that system to contribute?”

But in thinking about this question, do we find ourselves at a similar impasse described by Aimé Césaire—quoted by Salah Hassan at the March Meeting—in his resignation letter to the General Secretary of the French Communist Party in 1956? In the letter, Cesaire identified the impasse as one “characterized by a double failure: one which has been evident for a long time, that of capitalism. But also another: the dreadful failure of that which for too long we took to be socialism, when it was nothing but Stalinism.” Thinking about the notion of “socialism” today, in a world many might call “neoliberal” (in that market law is king), the notion of the impasse is perhaps slightly too pessimistic. Rather, perhaps we are at a crossroads; one where art, culture, politics and economics converge at the centre—a space that might well define how the global will meet and evolve not as a singular entity, but as a multiplicity. Quoting Césaire:

What else can be the result of this but that our paths toward the future—all our paths, political as well as cultural—are not yet charted? That they are yet to be discovered, and that the responsibility for this discovery belongs to no one but us?48

If we might call this charting of new paths, this conceptualizing of new spaces, and the very act of reshaping the world we live in, “gardening,” so let it continue.

18 Vol. 11 No. 4 Notes 1 Fred Inglis, “Universalism and Difference: the Separation of Culture and Politics,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 19, no. 2. 2 Gerald Butt, “Oil and Gas in the UAE,” United Arab Emirates: A New Perspective, ed. Ibrahim Abed and Peter Hellyer (London: Trident, 2001), 240. 3 In December 1988, a conference on contemporary Chinese art was held in Shexian, Anhui province. The main issue discussed in the meeting was plans for the first China Avant-garde Exhibition in 1989 in Beijing. 4 According to the UAE Statistics Bureau population estimates for 2010, as published in “Population Estimates 2006–2010,” viewable online at www.uaestatistics.gov.ae. 5 “Most residents of the UAE are not immigrants in the normal sense of the word (meaning those wishing to move to a country, settle there, and obtain citizenship of that country), but resident expatriates with a UAE residence visa (or permit) that allows them to live in the UAE for a period of time (usually 3 years between renewals, sometimes 1 year).” Dubai Faqs Information Guide, http:// www.dubaifaqs.com/immigration-uae.php. 6 Qatar is no different, with a population that is 15% Qatari; figure courtesy of the U.S. Department of State, www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/5437.htm. Qatar was even dubbed “Land of the 1%” by Alexandra Peers, in “Qatar Purchases Cézanne’s The Card Players for More Than $250 Million, Highest Price Ever for a Work of Art,” Vanity Fair, February 2, 2012, www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/02/qatar-buys- cezanne-card-players-201202. 7 Anthony Shadid, “An Ambitious Arab Capital Reaffirms Its Grand Cultural Vision” New York Times, January 24, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/world/middleeast/abu-dhabi-reaffirms-its-grand- plan-for-museums.html. 8 Johann Hari, “The Dark Side of Dubai,” The Independent, April 7, 2009. www.independent.co.uk/ opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html. 9 Al-Qassemi continued: “I could have written all that, but out of respect for Britain, I decided not to. Because when you stitch together a collection of unconnected facts taken out of context, you end up with a distorted and inaccurate picture: something that Britain’s Dubai-bashers would do well to learn.” Interestingly enough, Hari, who wrote the article, was later accused of plagiarism and suspended from The Independent, perhaps adding weight to Al-Qassemi’s critique. Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, “If you think Dubai is bad, just look at your own country,” The Independent, April 9, 2009, www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/sultan-sooud-al-qassemi-if-you-think-dubai-is-bad- just-look-at-your-own-country-1666748.html. 10 In an interview with Arts.21 during the 10th Sharjah Biennial, Abdulaziz noted of the performance: “I was pretending I was one of those very poor people sitting outside in the garbage eating anything so in a way I was doing and practicing their life . . . they feel that someone is sharing their problem.” On work touching on female constraints within Sharjah, Abdulaziz noted: “Those things affects us, and I think it’s the time to talk about those issues in our work, whether me talking about woman’s rights or political things.” Revolution in the Arab Art Scene? The 10th Sharjah Biennial,” Arts.21, Deutsche Welle, www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EL55zaCE5IE. 11 Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2005), 1. 12 Michel Foucault, “18 January 1978,” in Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France, 1977–78, ed. Michael Senellart, tr. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 29. 13 Easterling, Enduring Innocence, 1. 14 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault: A New Cartographer (Discipline and Punish) (Continuum: New York: 1999), 25. 15 Technically, the prize is awarded to five artists, but one was awarded to a pair of artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. The Abraaj Capital Art Prize 2012 displayed the winning artworks, China, by Raed Yassin (Lebanon); The Seven Seas, by Risham Syed (Pakistan); To My Brother, by Taysir Batniji (Palestine); A Glimpse of Clean History, by Wael Shawky (Egypt); and A Letter Can Always Reach its Destination, by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (Lebanon). 16 In a description of Foucault’s functional analysis, Deleuze quotes Foucault: “We are shown innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations.” Deleuze, Foucault, 25. 17 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 24. 18 As expressed by Yassin in conversation with the author at Art Dubai, March 22, 2012. 19 Paraphrased from Robert Storr recounting an instance between clergymen and Y. Z. Kami’s controversial painting series For Jerusalem, 2005–06, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2007, in Robert Storr, “Exhibitions and fairs in a shape-shifting art world,” presented by the Monash Museum of Art and the Melbourne Art Foundation at Fitzroy Town Hall, August 2010. Courtesy of The Monthly, www.themonthly.com.au/robert-storr-biennales-art-fairs-and-notion-dialogue-part-3-mca-1101. 20 “In her foreword to the catalogue for Hirst’s current show, the Sheikha, who studied political science and literature at Duke University in North Carolina, writes that her organization has been “laying the ground for Qatar to become a leader in making, showing and debating the visual arts. . . . Art—even controversial art—can unlock communication between diverse nations.” David Batty, “The Rise of the Gulf Art Scene,” The Guardian, April 16, 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/apr/16/ rise-of-gulf-art-scene. 21 “I would like to first of all address the issue of censorship in Sharjah. Since I took over as Director of the Biennial in 2002 we have taken pride in acting as a platform for discussion, debate and dialogue. This has sometimes proved to be challenging, but over the years we have shown a range of controversial work that addressed often difficult political, social and cultural issues.” A statement from Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi, Founder and President of the Sharjah Art Foundation, April 14, 2011, www.sharjahart.org/press1/current-releases/statement-from-sheikha-hoor-al-qasimi/2780. 22 As expressed by Komu in conversation with the author at the Sharjah March Meeting, March 18, 2012.

Vol. 11 No. 4 19 23 As expressed by Nurjadin in conversation with the author at Art Dubai on March 22, 2012. 24 Deleuze, Foucault, 38. 25 For many, the shutdown of Celdran’s performance was the story that confirmed criticisms against censorship in the UAE that are well documented and highly criticized. Works had already been removed from stands for content—on the first day alone, Dubai authorities were said to have ordered the removal of at least four works, including an image of a woman being beaten by soliders in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. But again, such critiques against censorship so often disregard the wider issues at stake when such moments of censorship take place, from how long it takes societies to come to terms with contemporary art, to the acknowledgement that such instances of censorship happen everywhere. In the West, recent incidents include the Smithsonian’s removal of a video by late-artist David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly (1986–8), from the exhibition Hide/Seek in 2010, depicting, amongst other Christ-related images, a crucifix swarmed by ants, removed as a result of pressure from conservative politicians and the Catholic League (Wojnarowicz was a homosexual who died of AIDS). In that same year, Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, removed a commissioned mural by street artist Blu, showing coffins covered by one dollar bills that was painted on a wall facing the Veterans Administration healthcare centre. 26 Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mortenbock, “Trading Places,” Networked Cultures, (Rotterdam: NAi, 2008), 156. 27 Ibid. 28 “THE STATE is a print journal and sociohistorical forum. It investigates the space between print and audio-visual experiences and their transition to mediated online forms; transgressive cultural criticism and the sensuous architecture of this ‘printernet’.” 29 James Westcott, “Art Dubai and the Sharjah Biennial: Talking about a revolution,” The Guardian, March 23, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/23/art-dubai-sharjah-biennial. 30 Robert Storr, “Exhibitions and fairs in a shape-shifting art world,” presented by the Monash Museum of Art and the Melbourne Art Foundation at Fitzroy Town Hall, August 2010. Courtesy of The Monthly, www.themonthly.com.au/robert-storr-biennales-art-fairs-and-notion-dialogue-part-3-mca-1101. 31 Frank Kane and Jonathan Lessware, “UAE and Saudi Arabia send forces to Bahrain,” The National, March 15, 2011, www.thenational.ae/news/world/middle-east/uae-and-saudi-arabia-send-forces-to- bahrain. 32 As Elizabeth M. Zechenter wrote in 1997: “This growing debate about the validity of the universalist assumptions underlying the human rights regime is, to some degree, inevitable in a world with ever- increasing interconnectedness and globalization. Human rights institutions are increasingly exposed to a growing variety of norms, values, and beliefs, and to competing claims of legitimacy from various cultures and subcultures.” Elizabeth M. Zechenter, “In the Name of Culture: Cultural Relativism and the Abuse of the Individual,” Journal of Anthropological Research 53, no. 3 (Autumn, 1997), 319–47. 33 Wang Hui, “An Interview with Modernity,” The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (London: Verso, 2009), 101. 34 Expressed at the Art Dubai press conference, held at Madinat Jumeirah on March 20, 2012. 35 Xiaorong Li, “7 A Cultural Critique of Cultural Relativism,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 66, no. 1 (2007). 36 Quoted from Salah Hassan’s opening keynote speech delivered at the Sharjah March Meeting on March 17, 2012. 37 Expressed by Lingwood in conversation with the author during the Sharjah March Meeting, March 18, 2012. 38 Taken from Lu Jie’s presentation at the Sharjah March Meeting, delivered on March 18, 2012. 39 Taken from the press release for Act 1: The Long March Project: Ho Chi Minh Trail (Beijing), September 4, 2010–November 14, 2010: www.longmarchspace.com/exhibition/list_59_newsdetail. html?locale=en_US. 40 Fred Inglis, “Universalism and Difference: the Separation of Culture and Politics,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 19, no. 2 (2006). 41 The Tajik Pamirs, eds. Thomas Breu, Hans Humi, and Andrea Stucki (Berne: Geographic Bernensia, 2003), 8. 42 Robert Middleton, “A Rich Historical Heritage,” in The Tajik Pamirs, 14. 43 Expressed by Hasagawa in conversation with the author at the March Meeting, March 18, 2012. 44 Ibid. 45 Easterling, Enduring Innocence, 4. 46 Hu Fang expressed the concept of the garden in his presentation at the March Meeting delivered on March 17, 2012, while Hasegawa’s garden metaphor was expressed during a private interview regarding themes for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial at the Sharjah Art Foundation on March 18, 2012. 47 Expressed in Hu Fang’s presentation delivered at the March Meeting, March 17, 2012. 48 Aimé Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” Paris, October 24, 1956, trans. Chike Jeffers, Hydrarchy, May 24, 2010, www.hydrarchy.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/letter-to-maurice-thorez.html.

20 Vol. 11 No. 4 Clara Galeazzi A Retrospective of a Demolition: Meishi Street Six Years Later A Conversation With Ou Ning

Before, history only had one version—by the Chinese Communist Party. . . . Now with digital technology, history has different versions. –Ou Ning

eishi Street is the title of an 85-minute documentary that witnesses and questions the practice of re-urbanization the M Chinese government carried out in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In the following conversation with the ﬁlm’s director, Ou Ning, the consequences of Meishi Street’s demolition will be discussed on several levels. By “reading” the events that happened in Meishi Street back in 2006–07, Ou Ning aims to re-map the phenomenon from a contemporary perspective. The interview analyzes the results of the urbanization policies from an urbanistic, social, and economic point of view. Although the documentary mainly focuses on the experience of a single person, it embraces a plethora of “meanings.”

Meishi Street is located at the southwest corner of Tian’anmen Square, in the Da Zha Lan district. This area, characterized by a typical layout of diagonal streets, was, starting from the Tang dynasty until today, considered the heart of Beijing. Unlike the neat and orderly design of hutong in the inner city, Da Zha Lan had an unregulated, grassroots style of development. The ﬁlm Meishi Street takes the point of view of Zhang Jinli, a former Meishi Street resident, and offers a reﬂection upon a street that was an important part of his family’s life.

Ou Ning decided to work on this project just after the advent of preparation for the Olympics Games in 2004, the year when the Beijing Municipal Government launched a project to widen Meishi Street to twenty-ﬁve meters from its original eight metres. After giving notice to the residents, a local demolition company tore down, one by one, all the old buildings, including houses and shops. Zhang Jinli’s restaurant and home were the last buildings in the district to be destroyed.

Clara Galeazzi: A peculiar aspect of the documentary Meishi Street is that many clips were directly taken by Zhang Jinli. The images he recorded convey strength and passion, giving a normal urban place new meaning. Could you please explain your choice to include clips of the ﬁlms he made himself and also comment on the documentary’s techniques and aesthetic aspects?

Vol. 11 No. 4 21 Ou Ning: The principal aim of the documentary was to bring domestic Panorama of Meishi Street, 2005. Courtesy of Ou Ning. and international attention to this dramatic event. The urge to keep people informed prevailed over the stylistic and aesthetic embellishments. The film was partly recorded by Zhang Jinli, who became both the “camera” and the direct interlocutor at the same time. By literally giving the camera to Mr. Zhang, I wanted to capture the residents’ feelings about a collective approach to this issue. Although non-professional filmmakers might care less about “the performance,” the work reflects the people’s points of view and their attitude by avoiding any intermediary intervention, thereby transforming Mr. Zhang into an unexpected reporter (citizen-journalist). One prominent aspect of the documentary was to “empower” ordinary citizens—giving them the opportunity to freely express their opinions without feeling judged. Even if in some scenes the spectators can visually attest to the presence of police officials, none of them were asked to take part in the documentary. On the contrary, only “anonymous” people were interviewed. Meishi Street definitely was one of the few means that counterbalanced the several channels the government had at its disposal to “spread” its version of the facts. Although the project involves some residents of the area, Meishi Street mainly focuses on Zhang Jinli himself, on him as an individual. A important part of the documentary is the ending when there is a close-up on the tears Mr. Zhang is shedding upon the demolition of his restaurant, the deepest connection he had to his family, and it was not easy to get the right focus. The editing of the work was very difficult because Mr. Zhang recorded more than sixty hours of raw footage.

Clara Galeazzi: How did the demolition process develop around Meishi Street, and in what ways did it affect the inhabitants of the district? Could you please explain how the district has changed in terms of lifestyle, architecture, business, and tourism?

Ou Ning: Since Meishi Street has always been considered a focal place for people living in Beijing, as well as for the government, its demolition and

22 Vol. 11 No. 4 later reconstruction was highly debated among residents and intellectuals. From the Ming dynasty all the way through the Qing dynasty, the Republic of China, and Post-Liberation, the Da Zha Lan district has always represented the commercial hub of Beijing. It has undergone many shifts, from Chinese handicraft industry to capitalist free trade and socialist market economy; therefore, it can even be regarded as the paradigm for Chinese commercial culture. In the course of history, Meishi Street became a sort of popular emblem in Beijing. Many shops and brands were launched there and existed for hundreds of years.

However, taking into account the urban development and the expansion that Chinese cities have been experiencing in the past decades, the People’s Republic of China government thought that old infrastructures such as those in the Forbidden City needed to be “restored.” Moreover, restrictions concerning the height of architecture in this district prohibited property developers from proceeding with any construction; this resulted in less investment and uncertainty around the property rights of many old houses, which made them impossible to trade.

Consequently, the elite class moved to more “modern” areas, and the risk of the district becoming vacant ran high, but a consistent number of low-income immigrants started to become attracted to it. According to Investigation of Urban Corners in Beijing, published in July 2005 by the Beijing Social Science Institute, Meishi Street was too crowded, living standards were too poor, and there was an inadequate supply of water and electricity and not enough public security. The Party decided that severe measures needed to be taken.

After Meishi Street and other parts of the district were cleaned up, China Daily described the new area, reporting that “a new look replaces some of the chaos, but the atmosphere of the district remains. Cinemas, video halls, karaoke bars and clubs vie with long-established traditional Chinese stores

Vol. 11 No. 4 23 for space and attention in this intriguing little area of the capital.”1 During Demolition of Meishi Street, March 14, 2006. Courtesy of an interview, Professor Wu Bihu, the director of the Tourism Research Ou Ning. and Development Centre associated with Peking University, said that the Da Zha Lan area maintain its overall pattern, cultural relics, and valuable compounds despite the renovations, and predicted that heritage-themed tourism would become the major industry for the renovated area.

I personally disagree with Professor Wu’s assertion. Without doubt Meishi Street is still a very popular area that attracts many tourists, but it has lost its original beauty and character. It has become now a “must pass by” street, an urban holiday destination crammed with souvenir shops. Once a pedestrian lane, its current size allows cars to go through the street causing bottlenecks and other trafﬁc problems.

Clara Galeazzi: What are the consequences of the reallocation process former residents are now facing?

Ou Ning: At the beginning, the news about the enlargement of Meishi Street caused mayhem, rage, and discontent among the residents. The compensation plan implemented by the government and developers was not satisfactory. The solutions proposed by the state were inadequate and disrespectful of human and property rights.

The people living in Meishi Street whose houses had to be demolished received meager reimbursement that was insufﬁcient to buy even a modest apartment on the outskirts of Beijing. To buy other accommodations they obviously had to combine the State compensation with a substantial bank loan. For the most part, the locations where former Meishi Street residents went to live were not so popular and business-oriented as Da Zha Lan district was—this had an important impact on their lifestyle as it became very difﬁcult to make a living.

24 Vol. 11 No. 4 Moreover, it is important to consider that the compensation offered by the government did not take into account price ﬂuctuations in the housing market. Although the demolition started in 2006, the “state reward” was based on the ﬁxed standard market value of 2000.

Clara Galeazzi: As we can see in the documentary, Zhang Jinli was the most resistant opponent of the severe actions taken by the government to redeﬁne the area. Where is Zhang Jinli now living? Is he in some ways continuing the protest? Recently new methods, especially social media, have allowed people to share their opinions to be considerably incisive and penetrating. Has Zhang Jinli ever thought to use such tools to reach a larger number of “followers?”

Demolition of Meishi Street, March 14, 2006. Courtesy of Ou Ning.

Ou Ning: Since his house was destroyed, Zhang Jinli has spent the last three years living at his sister’s home. A few months ago, thanks to the savings he had from his former restaurant business in Meishi Street, he managed to buy a new apartment in Chaoyang. And although the demolition process in Da Zha Lan area terminated in late 2006, he was able to secure another property only this year.

Since Mr. Zhang and his family were particularly involved in this issue, he was invited along with me to some of the festivals and documentary screenings held in Beijing. During the discussions at the end of the screenings, the audience interacted quite enthusiastically and the debates were always very passionate. Mr. Zhang’s experience and intervention have certainly provided educational value to the spectators and interlocutors.

At the time of Meishi Street’s demolition, social networks were not as popular as they are today. In 2008, Zhang Jinli documented his “personal campaign” through blogs that unfortunately were shut down by the blog companies themselves—respectively, Sohu, Xinlan, Wangyi. Some clips of the documentary are now available on Youku and Tudou, the Chinese equivalents of Youtube for sharing videos. Zhang Jinli opened a Weibo account that is now regularly running.

Vol. 11 No. 4 25 Clara Galeazzi: In the case of Meishi Street, we witnessed an invasive action taken by the government that involved and touched a large number of people. At ﬁrst, some residents tried to react, but many of them desisted after a while. What to do you think about the voice of a solitary individual being left to talk about and deal with political issues?

Ou Ning: The attitude and the approach of the community toward Development plan for Meishi Street, May 3, 2007. Courtesy unfairness and biases have changed substantially over the last decade. of Ou Ning. Nowadays, people are particularly concerned with issues linked to land rights or “reallocation practices,” and a lot of individual disputes are taking place. Since protests in countries like China are a very controversial matter, the community is now distancing itself from the original meaning of national movements and developing a new model. All the actions taken and promoted by the citizens are still labelled by the state as a political slight against the establishment, while, generally speaking, people do not want to put their objections on a political level. On the contrary, they would like their opinions just to be classiﬁed as questions of justice and rights. Although collective measures are sometimes considered discouraging by the protesters themselves, as the government tends to judge them as acts to be eradicated, Chinese citizens are nowadays developing a new sense of belonging to the territory, a new public spirit that is individual and unique. At present, the Chinese population is using different methods: by showing their disagreement they are trying to shift the meaning of freedom from an abstract concept to a more concrete notion, so it does not remain as a substrata belief. This signals a very big change compared to the Cultural Revolution, where the state asked the community to take part in initiatives aimed at enforcing the idea of a “homogeneous plurality.”

26 Vol. 11 No. 4 Clara Galeazzi: Could you please tell me more about government propaganda versus the substrata [people] propaganda, or propaganda from the bottom?

Ou Ning: Government propaganda strives to depict Chinese society as a “harmonious society.” Obviously, all the ofﬁcial apparatuses are supporting the Party in this “mission.” Needless to say, nonconformist views and reports hardly have the chance to reach public opinion on a large scale.

Meishi Street after widening Focusing especially on Meishi Street, project, May 3, 2007. Courtesy of Ou Ning. we can classify Mr. Zhang Jinli’s way of expressing his disapproval as an attempt of propaganda from the bottom; he considered the State demolition campaign in Da Zha Lan district as an occasion to try to mobilize people on an issue that was changing the lives of many people and families. From November 2006 to December 2007, Mr. Zhang planned on an individual level a very creative protest. With the intent to capture the local community’s attention, next to the character (chai), which means dismantle, Mr. Zhang wrote on the walls of his restaurant long sections taken from Mao Zedong’s discourses. He used the image of the “Chairman” from a funny and ironic point of view, mocking the fact that even Mao’s beliefs concerning the “glorification” of communality safeguarded the property land rights more than what the actual government now was doing. Since the use of Mao images for “unofficial” purposes is an offense punishable by law, the police had to remove Mr. Zhang’s banners, and they forced him to clean up what he wrote on the wall. Actually, writing was not the only tool he used; he also sang popular songs and amplified the sound using megaphones.

The local community did not support him very strongly; their interactions were limited to watching his protests and his interactions with the security forces. However, Mr. Zhang’s public performances made people ﬁll Meishi Street. His protests never implied violence; on the contrary, his goal was to insist on a better conversation with the authorities, to try and educate them to listen to citizens’ objections. In a way, Mr. Zhang Jinli’s temperament served as an educative boost to “urban awareness.”

Clara Galeazzi: In the last decade, China hosted two of the most important venues on a global scale: the Beijing Olympics, in 2008, and the Shanghai Expo, in 2010. Has the ofﬁcial propaganda campaign adopted two different strategies to promote these events? Do you see any difference?

Ou Ning: I think there are significant differences between the propaganda campaign that accompanied the Beijing Olympics and the promotion concerning the Shanghai Expo. First of all, we should consider the slogans. The 2008 Olympics motto was “One World, One Dream” (tong yige shijie, tong yige meng xian). It encapsulated the fierce desire China had to affirm

Vol. 11 No. 4 27 itself as supreme within the international panorama. For instance, the graphs composing the characters shijie (world) mean “generation, era, lifetime” and “boundary,” as to symbolize the end of one epoch and the beginning of a new and different one.

The Olympic games represented a unique opportunity for the country to spruce itself up. Even the slogan that was used when China put its bid for the 2008 Olympics, “New Beijing, Great Olympics,” (xin Beijing, xin aoyun) implied the urge to reinvent the city, stressing the connotations of “new” as modern, with a political assertion.

Zhang Jinli revisiting No. 176 Meishi Street, July 15, 2008. Courtesy of Ou Ning.

The policy and guiding principles around the 2010 Shanghai Expo were deﬁnitely less political and more based on improving living standards. The “Better City, Better Life” motto (chengshi, rang shenghuo geng mei hao) reﬂected the desire to enrich the city from a stylistic and environmental point of view. Many events concerning technical innovations, renewable energy, and design proposals took place before the opening of the Expo and during the event. Residents, urbanites, and sociologists welcomed the initiatives and interpreted them as an “opening’” towards more caring measures.

Clara Galeazzi: Apart from the international venues mentioned before, what do you think about the urbanization plans that the government has recently launched? Since the time you worked on Meishi Street are government policies on demolition and reallocation still very strict? How is the current situation for other developing Chinese cities?

Ou Ning: Unfortunately, urbanization practices including house demolition and reallocation are still very common in several areas of the country. The central government started to adopt these measures a few years after the dash for modernization in the late 1990s. I am particularly concerned about this matter, and I tried to tackle this issue by mapping the state’s demolition trends. Actually, the Meishi Street and Da Zha Lan projects are an extension of San Yuan Li (the village-in-city in Guangzhou, a piece that was featured in the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003), and the work Caoyang Xincun on Caoyang Xincun in Putuo District in Shanghai explored the

28 Vol. 11 No. 4 living conditions of a workers’ community back in 2006. Nowadays the areas closest to Guangzhou are the most affected.

Fortunately, I am not the only person working on this topic. Over the last years, many Chinese intellectuals, sociologists, and artists have been very committed in attempting to sensitize the government about this matter and about the consequent invasive impact they were having on environmental balance and social stability. Our actions aimed to give voice to the communities, and the majority of the campaigns we undertook were addressed to the leadership. Actually, in March 2007 the 10th National People’s Congress of the PRC adopted a new property rights law, but it is too multifaceted to be executed in complicated circumstances.

The situation in other developing cities is quite dramatic. Recently, in Wukan and other villages in Guangdong, many protests have been going on. They accuse the government of leasing out the villages’ collectively owned land to private developers without even offering due compensations. The demonstrations in the Guangdong area represent a driving force that is guiding a new political movement involving a large number of people. This is the reason the local and central government fear of such disapprovals are leading to an uncontrollable conﬂict.

Clara Galeazzi: Another problem linked to land property rights the PRC in now dealing with is the “housing market boom.” In the meantime, the Chinese government is pushing “social housing.” What is your opinion on this matter? Can you see any relationship between the reallocation practices that took place in Meishi Street and these problems?

Ou Ning: The “house market boom” is actually the result of the over- urbanization of China. The central government promoted urbanization as a main policy during the past thirty years, and, consequently, many local governments started to “grab” the lands from suburban and rural areas for urban development. At the same time, they also tried to get more allotments through demolitions and reallocations in the name of “City Generation.” Getting plots of land at a very low price and selling them to the real estate developers became one of the main driving forces behind the local economy. Since all cities in China have expanded at an impressive pace, the undeveloped areas became scarce resources. As a result, the local governments are “hunting lands” in the faraway countryside, causing damage to agriculture and rural development. My documentary, Meishi Street, mainly focuses on the “city generation” issue, while my ﬁlm San Yuan Li focuses on the relationship between the urban and rural development. After these two documentaries, I recognized over-urbanization as the biggest problem in China, so I decided to start my rural reconstruction and anti-urbanization campaign by planning and working on the Bishan Project.

Notes 1 Li Shujian, “Dashilan Deadline,” China Daily, March 23, 2006.

Vol. 11 No. 4 29 Meiqin Wang To Demolish: Thinking about Urbanization in China through a Collaborative Art Project in the Countryside1

Free Territory II, June 21, 2010, Tongguling Mountain, Hainan. Photo: Weng Fen.

One-Day Trip with Chaile Travel as a Visitor and Participant It is necessary to begin this text by describing a one-day trip and, simultaneously, an art making process that took place on June 18, 2011 in the Wenchang region of Hainan, the southernmost province of China. The trip was organized by Chaile Travel a concept-based art project and non- proﬁt organization headquartered in a remote rural village, Taishan, located in the southeastern end of Dongjiao town in Wenchang. The organizers, also the founders of Chaile Travel, were a small group of university art professors and independent artists from Hainan, consisting of Weng Fen, Liu Jun, Ma Jie, Lu Yunzhang, and Huang Xuebin. Visitors on the trip were from a wide range of professional backgrounds including an architect, artist, art historian (myself), designer, government administrator, lawyer, media reporter, and poet. The night before the scheduled trip, all non-local visitors arrived at Haikou, the provincial capital of Hainan, where we met with the organizers and local participants for a preparatory meeting and some socializing.

Early the next day, we took a one-hour ride eastward to the rural outskirts of Wenchang region and disembarked right in front of Tongguling National Natural Reserve. There we began hiking along small paths through the hills that bordered the sea. About one hour later, we reached the top of a hill

30 Vol. 11 No. 4 Free Territory III, June 18, 2011, known as Beijianshan, where the Tongguling Mountain, Hainan. Photo: Weng Fen. organizers introduced us to a site- speciﬁc artwork. It was a simple timber bench with its two legs buried in the ground and served as a viewpoint where hikers could take a rest to enjoy the beautiful scenery. Visitors from a previous trip organized by Chaile Travel chose this spot to install the bench, which was titled Free Territory II, suggesting that there already existed a Free Territory I. Indeed, the organizers told us that Free Territory I was placed on top of a hill on the other side of Beijianshan. After contemplating the view from the bench, we hiked to the top of another hill nearby, where we worked on our premeditated task: choosing a spot to install a third bench that we brought all along with us. The bench had been inscribed beforehand with the theme of this trip, “The Psychological Impact of Rapid Geographic Change and Urban Development on Life and Culture in the Countryside,” and the date of the visit. This spot was named Free Territory III. We then took photos of each other sitting on the bench, wanting to be the ﬁrst to enjoy this piece of art and to appreciate the stunning scenery the site had to offer.

A new socialist countryside in Wenchang, Hainan. Photo: Meiqin Wang.

Leaving the bench behind, we walked down from the hill and along the beach and then back up mountainous paths towards the Tongguling National Natural Reserve. From there we drove to the next two points of interest on the agenda of that day’s plan. The ﬁrst was a brand new residential complex, which consisted of rows of three story townhouses standing along a main road. On the other side of the road stood a newly built elementary school, which consisted of several medium and high-rise buildings. This was a new village built from the ground up to accommodate farmers who were relocated from remote rural villages after the local government requisitioned their land. Similar new villages had been built in some other locations of this region for the same purpose, all having convenient access to public transportation, educational institutions, and other facilities. They are the product of a nationwide movement called “New Socialist Countryside,” initiated by the Chinese central government in 2005

Vol. 11 No. 4 31 to develop China’s rural regions.2 The satellite-launching centre under initial construction, The second point of interest was Hainan. Photo: Meiqin Wang. a massive construction site—the original home of many relocated farmers and a future satellite launching pad whose plan was also approved by the government in 2005. The completed satellite centre will be the fourth of its kind in China. According to the plan, this space centre will occupy three thousand acres of land, while a space-themed amusement park of some one thousand acres will be constructed nearby. We also explored the neighbouring areas that were left desolate after residents left and buildings were demolished.

In the afternoon the trip further unfolded in Taishan village, which is the ancestral hometown of Weng Fen, a well known contemporary artist and the practical leader of Chaile Travel, which is headquartered in this village. Upon arrival, we wandered around the village, walking along winding paths amid farming ﬁelds and forests of coconut trees. We walked through narrow alleys framed by rural houses built in various types of architectural styles that had been developed at different times over the past centuries. Finally we reached the ancestral house of Weng Fen; it was a typical courtyard house of the region, with white walls and a red-brown roof, but time had taken its toll, so the wall was no longer white, and the roof had turned greyish. When we arrived, several of Weng Fen’s relatives were busy preparing food and drinks in an open area outside of the house and shaded from the sun under tall coconut trees. It was a temporary outdoor kitchen and dining room and living room, brought together for that one day.

Weng Family Wenchang chicken dish, consisting mainly of chicken and rice. Photo: Meiqin Wang.

We were offered fresh coconut water from coconuts that the hosts picked directly from the trees, a wonderful refreshment after a half-day’s trip in hot summer weather. Following this customary drink that every traveler is expected to have when visiting Hainan province, we savoured the “Weng Family Wenchang chicken dish,” vegetables, coffee, and milk tea. In casual conversation, the hosts informed us of the complex history of the food and drinks we were enjoying, which involved transnational exchanges over the past centuries between the Hainan people and their counterparts in the neighbouring East Asian countries. The Weng Family Wenchang chicken dish was based on the famous Wenchang chicken dish, in which the chicken is boiled then served with salt and ginger, but was modiﬁed by Weng Fen’s grandfather when he worked as a cook in Malaysia and catered to a complex clientele that included both native Malaysians and Westerners. He later

32 Vol. 11 No. 4 returned to his hometown and passed on the modiﬁed recipe as a family legacy to his children. Coffee and milk tea are also two popular local drinks; long ago they both were brought in by travelers from Southeast Asian countries. This sampling of a famous local dish and popular drinks not only served to feed those who came all the way to this remote countryside where there are no restaurants or grocery stores, it also exposed them to some of the history and traditions of this region.

Chaile Travel symposium, June 18, 2011. Taishan village, Hainan. Photo: Meiqin Wang.

Chaile Travel symposium, June 18, 2011. Taishan village, Hainan. Photo: Meiqing Wang.

After the lunch break, we rested in hammocks under the coconut trees, as many locals do everyday, engaging in casual conversations with the hosts and among ourselves. We had one ﬁnal agenda to complete in the afternoon, a symposium exploring the impact of urbanization on rural traditions and the problems and opportunities that the vast countryside in China is encountering. The symposium began in the hall of the house with the organizers introducing the history, mission, and past events of Chaile Travel. The symposium then moved outside under the coconut trees and continued with each visitor speaking about the implementation of urbanization in the countryside, including what was happening or would happen at this particular village. Issues brought up included opportunities and challenges the countryside is facing as it is now under pressure of development, complicated legal and cultural issues related to transforming farm land into

Vol. 11 No. 4 33 commercial land, distribution of newly accumulated social wealth coming from this process of redefinition and reuse, peasant migration, the future of rural society under the impact of a new economic structure, and the role of intellectuals, including artists, in the process of rural urbanization. It was a symposium of multilayered exchanges reflecting the wide range of professional backgrounds of the participants that included not only the visitors, but a farmer and a retired government official as well, who were from the very village under examination. This two-and-a-half-hour symposium concluded the one-day trip.

This trip was an integral part of Chaile Travel, which is conceived by the organizers as a continuous and collaborative art making process. And it was not a passive tourist experience. Instead, the trip, or art visit, as it was referred to, is the content and methodology of Chaile Travel as an ongoing conceptual artwork envisioned by a group of contemporary artists. The art visit incorporated a number of activities combining the ordinary with the extraordinary, premeditation with spontaneity, and the physical with the cultural and intellectual. The morning expedition allowed us to explore the natural environment and broad social fabric of this region; the afternoon activities provided immediate contact with the people, their living environment, and the food of Taishan village, as well as a forum for intellectuals. At the end of the trip, the visitors left the village and went back to their respective lives and work. However, the results of their visit, participation, and contribution remained with Chaile Travel and became part of its growing activities and expanding archive. The organizers videotaped the whole visit and transcribed the remarks made by everyone at the symposium. The participation of these visitors resulted in photos, video clips, texts, and the benches that sustain interaction with nature in a quiet way and that mark the three territories. In each of its one-day trips, Chaile Travel provided a site-speciﬁc environment for visitors to discover and reﬂect upon urbanization and how it is affecting the countryside. In return, it anticipates the contribution of its visitors, who bring their prior knowledge and different perspectives to the discussion, and thus turns them into collaborators.

To Demolish: The Logic of Chinese Urbanization and Its Resonance in Contemporary Art As a concept-based art project, Chaile Travel embodies some key elements that have been characteristic of global contemporary art since the 1990s. Its approach is interdisciplinary, multi-media, socially oriented, collaborative, open-ended, and, ﬁnally, grounded in the current reality of China. It is this combination that makes this art project a case of interest. Initiated in 2007, Chaile Travel was ofﬁcially founded in March 2010. Before exploring how Chaile Travel as an organization operates or manifests itself as an artwork, it is worthwhile to ponder upon the title of the project, which makes explicit reference to China’s recent sociopolitical and art history.

The Chinese term chaile consists of two characters: chai and le. Chai is a verb, meaning to demolish. Le is an auxiliary word, used to indicate that the action of demolition must happen or to suggest the completion of

34 Vol. 11 No. 4 Doug Lewis, Super Bar Street, 2008, digital prints on dibond, installation, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.

the action. Chaile means to demolish or having been demolished, here referring to urbanization in China—demolition and redevelopment. The pronunciation of chaile is also close to the word “China” as it is spoken in English, and by using it as the project title, the artists imply that one can equate demolition with China. Indeed, since the 1990s, the Chinese character chai has been omnipresent in cities across China; it is a character that is written or painted on buildings that are to be demolished. It is a prominent visual presence of everyday life among millions of people who reside in major cities, and it constituted a collective memory of the city environment in the 1990s until skyscrapers appeared one after another to replace that unique piece of memory.3

The visual aspect of this once unsettling aspect of urban life in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai has been preserved in the art of some well- known contemporary Chinese artists. Beijing Artist Wang Jinsong’s work One Hundred Signs of the Demolition, completed in 1999, might be the ﬁrst signiﬁcant artwork that addresses this dramatic history of an urbanizing China. Using photography, the artist documented hundreds of buildings that had been imprinted with the big Chinese character chai on their walls. Written in red or white on numerous buildings, it announces the fate of these buildings. The practice of writing big characters on walls can be associated with what happened during the Cultural Revolution in China when it was a well-known political tactic used by politicians and public alike against their rivals or alleged “people’s enemies.” However, there is a long tradition of this in dynastic China as well, when the government would use big characters in public spaces, with or without a circle, to make important announcements, usually listing criminals at large or convicts to be executed. Today, big chai on a building unmistakably speak of a similar kind of government authority. Some of these buildings could be illegal structures that did not acquire a construction permit from the city authority; others

Vol. 11 No. 4 35 could involve safety issues. Most, however, belonged to old neighbourhoods that were designated to be demolished so that new buildings could be erected to accommodate the demands of a rapidly growing Chinese economy and urban population. Another artist, Zhang Dali, is also well known for work related to the demolition of old communities that he produced in the 1990s. In his Dialogue series (1995–98), he spray-painted more than two thousand giant bold-headed profiles of himself on the walls of half- dismantled buildings which he often photographed against a distant high- rise. Interpreted as street graffiti, site-specific installation, or performance by different writers, his work provides clear evidence of what has happened to these buildings that were marked with a chai character by city authorities.

Since the beginning of the Anonymous, painted on a wall near a bus station in Xi’an. twenty-first century, a wave Photo: Meiqin Wang. of urbanization, together with its problems, expanded and reached inland cities across China. Recently, an unknown person exploited the omnipresent character chai in Xi’an, a second-tier city in central China, by adding new words to the encircled chai, thus transforming a government order into an acerbic comment. The two Chinese characters in the centre pronounced chai na, even more like the pronunciation of “China” in English, which is also spelled out underneath. With a question mark at the end of the Chinese characters it asks the question: Where to demolish? With an exclamatory mark behind the word “China,” it points to the location of the problem. China has demolished much in the past two decades, so where will it happen next? Most Chinese people would not know because they have no say in the decision-making process as to which community will be chosen to make way for new development. The process has never been transparent. The question “where to demolish?” is both literal and symbolic, pointing to the unending demolition process in China since the beginning of its reform and opening up. The circle is no longer a simple boundary that is seen on numerous buildings. Rather, it is painted in the shape of the outer rim of an old-fashioned Chinese coin, suggesting the monetary drive behind this nationwide movement of demolition and construction. It is a revealing image if one thinks of the fact that only a small portion of the population, including real estate developers and officials who collaborate with them, have profited greatly from this demolition and redevelopment movement, while the rest pay for it in dislocation, rising housing costs, inflation, and other social problems.

With demolition, there is corresponding construction, and, as many have pointed out, China has turned itself into one massive construction site. Cities build higher and higher skyscrapers to house the dream of modern urbanites and to meet the growing needs of a comfortable life. Xi’an artist Wang Fenghua’s paintings illustrate the phenomenon of this construction

36 Vol. 11 No. 4 Wang Fenghua, Li Gan Jian Ying No. 26, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 50 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

frenzy and its underlying problems—cities are becoming more and more alike. His series Li Gan Jian Ying (2008) depicts, in a super realistic manner, a middle section of the mirrored glass surface of a modern skyscraper accompanied by a telegraph pole. The repetitive patterns of the shining glass surface confirm the sense of mindless replication and a lifeless coldness. The sleek and undistinguished surface of skyscrapers, devoid of any history, emotion, locality, or personality, becomes the metaphorical reflection of an increasingly alienated society under the pressure of urbanization. The title and content respond to each other, illustrating the Chinese idiom li gan jian ying, which literally means to put up a pole and see the shadow. The actual meaning, as used in both written and spoken Chinese language, is to expect instant results. This literal but witty visualization of the well-known saying acerbically comments on the motivation behind so much urban development in China. Many urbanizing projects are designed to achieve short-term outcomes so that government officials can obtain political capital for their career advancement and investors can bring back rapid profits.

At ﬁrst, this typical Chinese mode of development seemed to have only happened in cities and their immediate perimeters where rapid economic development rendered the old urban setting inadequate and outmoded. The vast countryside remained intact, continuing centuries-old living environments while major cities experienced unprecedented social and physical transformations. A turning point in the direction of Chinese urbanization came at the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century, when the central government initiated new policies and programs to develop rural China. These new initiatives were launched to address a number of problems and issues that were believed to have their source in low productivity and income levels among the rural population. According to some researchers, a better-developed countryside is likely to alleviate many urban problems such as migration, unemployment, the gap between rich and poor, overdevelopment, pollution, and crime.4 In particular, it has been widely acknowledged that even though China has achieved enormous

Vol. 11 No. 4 37 progress in the national economy and its citizens’ incomes, the urban- Top: Weng Fen, Sitting on the Wall—Shenzhen 1, 2002, rural gap, one of China’s major social problems, has worsened to such a photograph, 125 x 160 cm. Courtesy of the artist. disturbing level that the stability of Chinese society is under threat.5 Some Middle: Weng Fen, scholars have argued that efforts to decrease the urban-rural gap belong Accumulating the Eggs Project—Weng Peijun’s Terrific to the unfinished business of China’s modernization.6 Furthermore, some New World, 2005, installation, 400 x 800 x 90 cm. Courtesy of have predicted that if China slows its urbanization, the rapid economic the artist. growth that it has achieved in the past two decades will not be sustained Bottom: Poster being installed for the exhibition Alors, and social problems will only intensify.7 Simply put, China has to keep la chine, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2003. Bottom developing. Expanding urbanization into the countryside has been defined right: Poster for the exhibition New Chinese Photography, as a government priority, and decision makers in Beijing have launched the International Center of Photography, New York, 2004. urban-rural integration movement in order to decrease the growing gap Courtesy of the artist. between urban and rural societies and to further economic growth.8

In light of this new-found emphasis on developing the countryside, different levels of government in China have designed various programs to grow the rural economy and enhance the rural quality of life. The vast countryside has now been drawn into the movement of demolition and construction under the master plan to build a “New Socialist Countryside,” a slogan that ﬁrst appeared in a formal government document in 2005. Construction programs are taking place in different provinces, and rural populations from remote regions are being relocated to new and standardized housing complexes that are conveniently adjacent to main roads and modern facilities. With the nationwide effort to urbanize, China is making big strides to transform itself from a rural and agricultural society into an urban and commercial one. Hainan province is no exception to this new wave of urbanization, and like many villages, Taishan has been put on the map of rural redevelopment.

Be there Before it Disappears: The Birth of Chaile Travel and Its Evolution Taishan village landed on the map of contemporary art because of Chaile Travel’s leader and coordinator Weng Fen. Using photography, he has been documenting urban expansion across China, which began with major cities along the southeastern coast and moved towards northern and then central China. His Sitting on the Wall series that he began in 2001 is an iconic representation of a rapidly developing China; one work in this series was used as the poster image for several major exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art staged in the power cities of the international art world, including Paris and New York. Most of Weng Fen’s art responds to the changing living environment and the larger socio-political and economic climate that underlie these changes. Concerned with the potential danger of an overdeveloped Chinese economy in a globalized world and the literal overbuilding of China, he has constructed miniature cities using intact eggshells as the primary material. In the series Accumulating Eggs Project— Weng Peijun’s Terriﬁc New World, a Chinese idiom, wei ru lei luan (“as precarious as piling up eggs”) is literally visualized with buildings made of eggs that may collapse at anytime.

In 2007, Weng Fen discovered that the force of rural redevelopment was reaching his ancestral hometown, Taishan village, where many of his relatives

38 Vol. 11 No. 4 Vol. 11 No. 4 39 still live. Villagers in this remote countryside were notiﬁed that a considerable portion of the village was to be requisitioned for redevelopment programs and they were to be relocated from their hometown, where generations of families had lived for centuries. There were mixed feelings among the villagers; some were happy with the compensation paid for their move and eager to start a new life in a location that was more convenient and closer to the urban centres, while others disliked having to leave a familiar community and were unhappy with the low price paid to requisition their land as well as with the process that unfolded with doing this. Weng Fen turned his camera to his ancestral hometown, a place he himself had neglected for years. Issues related to the conﬂict between the legacy of rural tradition and the force of urbanization became a main concern of his intellectual inquiry as he set off to photograph local villagers, their soon-to-be demolished homes, and the natural scenery of this region. At the beginning, his effort to photograph this region probably arose from an instinctive need to record his birthplace before its inevitable disappearance. Nonetheless, his initial observation and investigation of the region familiarized Weng Fen with a concrete and problem-driven situation against which Chaile Travel would take shape shortly thereafter.

In 2008, artist Liu Jun, Weng Fen’s colleague at Hainan University, joined him in the effort to investigate and call attention to a place that was to change significantly. A professor who teaches architecture and urban design, Liu Jun also researches how urbanization is unfolding, how it is reshaping the relationship between residents and their living environment, and how to read the difference between official rhetoric of the local government and the actual experience of people who are affected. Together, they organized the very first trip that would later become the signature of Chaile Travel.

It is important to note that the founders of Chaile Travel are not a group of artists who are hopelessly nostalgic and utterly against any development or changes. On the contrary, the artists realize the necessity of development as a part of human society that will bring change.9 However, they wish to create a forum where people are urged to think about the best ways to achieve the desired progress and how to maintain a balance between development and tradition, between natural evolution and human intervention. In an introduction to Chaile Travel, the artists state that their goal of founding this interactive art project is to “think over, from the perspective of art, problems and changes that rural tradition is facing in the process of modernization and urbanization.”10

A forum that encourages personal experience and intellectual exchange is at the heart of Chaile Travel as a contemporary art project. In this undertaking, art is at once a form of communication and a collective endeavour. The art project can be seen both as an indicator of urbanization and an attempt to intervene into its very process. By the spirit of its founding mission, which emphasizes a “thinking process” as an integral component, Chaile Travel plans to continue to develop and reinvent itself.11 It is a ﬂexible project, and any direction seems possible since each time the participants will be

40 Vol. 11 No. 4 Free Territory I, March 13, 2010, Tongguling Mountain, Hainan. Photo: Weng Fen.

different as will be the focus of discussion and reflection as well as the physical interventions (such as the benches) left behind. A possible new development in the near future, according to the organizers, is to build small wooden huts on top of these hills. They will be just huts in primitive conditions without any modern technology, and will be placed far away from each other. These huts will serve as temporary shelter for hikers to stay overnight in solitude, accompanied by nothing but nature, and they will provide an interaction with nature in a friendly way just like the benches. The purpose, like that of Chaile Travel, is to create a space where one can experience first hand a rural environment and reflect upon the process of urbanization and its impact upon the future of that location.12

Fundamentally, Chaile Travel is a project that accentuates the experimental and participative nature of contemporary art and simultaneously inquires into a speciﬁc local reality that is part of a massive nationwide movement. As a collaborative artwork, Chaile Travel has employed a number of media and approaches, including photography, video, installation, casual conversations, organized discussions, and spontaneous interactions. Its subject matter crosses over different professions and disciplines, according to the broad backgrounds of visitors who participate in the project. The art- making process is carried out as visitors hike along the mountainous paths, install or sit on a bench, take photos, observe the newly constructed rural village, examine different types of local architecture, walk under coconut trees, drink and eat local specialties, and converse with local people and among themselves. The one-day art visit is like a staged performance, only that its actors are themselves performers and audience at the same time.

It is this effort to invent a communal experience and to share reﬂective thinking among a changing body of participants/audiences, who so far have been predominantly non-art professionals, that gives Chaile Travel a unique edge. The desire to incorporate non-specialists in the process of deﬁning meaning and shaping the cause of the artwork more or less counteracts the dominant tendency of the contemporary Chinese art practice in which much project-based concept art seems to concern mostly the response of a small circle of specialists, even though a lot of outsiders could be included

Vol. 11 No. 4 41 as part of the art making process. Being a self-funded project, it is hard to tell how long Chaile Travel will sustain itself or how much impact it could actually bring to the reality of the local. Nonetheless, it has been able to do what it set out to do: to provide a forum for intellectual conversations that are local speciﬁc and to employ art as a critical tool for social investigation.

Moreover, to stage such a project in a remote rural village in the southern end of China, far away from the fanfare of the contemporary art headquarters of Beijing, suggests a fresh perspective and points to attractive possibilities. As the political power centre of China, Beijing has all along dominated the ﬂow, both physical and mental, of cultural and artistic currency, and this Beijing-centric mode of cultural interaction has largely shaped the making, thinking, and writing of artistic production in China. Beijing has maximized the best social resources available in China and acquired tremendous symbolic power, all of which only enhance its prestige as the undisputed center of Chinese culture and art where artists want to be.13 In a contemporary world where the Euro-American centric point of view has long been challenged, one wonders whether this Beijing centrism can possibly one day be surpassed so that a more diverse landscape of cultural and artistic interactions can be encouraged. Chaile Travel, in its effort to bring in people from other parts of China to engage in an artistic discourse that is local speciﬁc and away from the center, seems to shed light on the possibility of initiating such a direction.

Notes 1 This research was partially funded by a Faculty Development Grant from the China Institute at California State University, Northridge, in summer 2011. It was presented at the 100th College Art Association Annual Conference in 2012, and the author wishes to thank those who provided comments during the presentation. 2 In the 11th Five-Year Plan, passed by the 5th Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2005, China proposed to build a new socialist countryside according to the requirements of advanced production, improved livelihood, a civilized social atmosphere, clean and tidy villages, and democratic administration. For more relevant discussions, see “The New Socialist Countryside,” China Daily, October 10, 2012, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ china/2010-10/20/content_11436582.htm. 3 The character chai is no longer conspicuous in major cities, with the completion of massive reconstruction, but it is still prominent in the so-called secondary cities and rural areas that are chosen for urban-rural integration programs. 4 Shenghe Liu et al, “Scenario Analysis on Urbanization and Rural-Urban Migration in China,” interim report IR-03-036 (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Vienna, Austria , 2003), www. iiasa.ac.at/Publications/Documents/IR-03-036.pdf. 5 Ibid. 6 Xingqing Ye, “China’s Urban-Rural Integration Policies,” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 38, no. 4, 117–43. 7 Shenghe Liu et al, “Scenario Analysis.” 8 The Sixteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, in 2002, marked the turning point. For the ﬁrst time it was declared that socioeconomic development must incorporate urban and rural areas alike. Following this, successive government documents have laid out a series of goals intended to promote urban-rural integration in China. 9 This statement is drawn from conversations the author had with these artists during the one-day art trip in and around Taishan vilalge on June 18, 2011. 10 Chaile Travel blog: “Introduction to Chaile Travel,” http://chailetravel.blog.163.com/blog/ static/189233039201152385010226. 11 Ibid. 12 Based on conversations with the Chaile Travel artists on June 18, 2011. 13 Artist migration, which accounted for the emergence of artist villages and contemprary art communities in China and which characterized the development of contemporary Chinese art, has been predominantly Beijing-ward.

42 Vol. 11 No. 4 Meiling Cheng Dappled China: “Untamed Histories” Surrounding the China Brand

Grey China Grey: the colour of mourning and repentance; of humility, plainness, and punishment; of aging, despondency, and melancholy; of equivocality.1

From an Oral History Sitting across a table from me in his studio in Beijing, Yang Zhichao recounts his recent experience of enacting his performance piece A Hundred Days from May 12th (Bairi wu yi er) in Sichuan province one hundred days after the 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit on May12, 2008.2 Yang Zhichao and his wife, Zhang Lan, armed with two identification cards as professional reporters from Beijing, first travelled to Chengdu, where they heard about a disaster site that had received little coverage by the media. Local rumours alleged that officials in the little town of Muyu, Sichuan, had grossly underreported its number of earthquake victims: the regional government claimed ninety out of the probable three-hundred dead, with most of them school children. So the artists hired a veteran taxi driver to take them from Chengdu to Muyu’s only high school and, with the driver’s whole-hearted support, took pictures of the earthquake wreckage along the mountainous way.

Devastation of the 2008 The calamity the artists witnessed earthquake in Muyu, a little town in Sichuan province. on the campus of Muyu High Photo: Yang Zhichao. School brought them to tears. A three-story-high student dormitory was completely ﬂattened to the ground, burying all of its residents. Yang Zhichao felt especially A pencil among the earthquake debris of Muyu High School. emotional when he saw broken Photo: Yang Zhichao. pencils scattered amid the rubble. The sight inspired his immediate performance response. Trying to be inconspicuous, he set the action in a debris-covered corner between two half-crumpled classroom buildings. Having secured their camera on a tripod and asking their driver to press the shutter button, Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan each sat on a stool to begin their makeshift operation. Zhang Lan—who previously had worked in a hospital—placed a bit of pencil lead into a prepared silicone capsule, and then surgically inserted the capsule into Yang Zhichao’s abdomen. The artists ﬁnished the performance in twenty minutes without encountering any interference. Before they left

Vol. 11 No. 4 43 the schoolyard, however, several Yang Zhichao and Yang Lan, Revelation IV: A Hundred undercover policemen stopped Days from May 12th, 2008, performance. Photo: them and, on the excuse that they anonymous taxi driver. Courtesy of the artists. had no approval letter from the local government’s Propaganda Department (Xuanchuan bu), ordered their taxi to follow the police car to the police station. The police interrogated Yang Zhichao, Zhang Lan, and their driver in separate rooms for an hour, accused the artists of illegal reporting, searched all their bags, and confiscated the film in their camera.3 Fortunately, the artists were not body-searched: they each had hidden a roll of film and a memory card from their digital camera in their underwear during the taxi ride to the police station.

Moving Toward the Grey Yang Zhichao, Revelation I: Earth, 2004, performance A Hundred Days from May 12th is the at Jianwai SOHO, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist. fourth installment in Yang Zhichao’s performance series titled Book of Revelation (Qishi lu, 2004–), which refers to the well-known Biblical source. In Revelation I: Earth (Tu, July 14 2004), Yang Zhichao placed 1.6 grams of fine yellow earth taken Yang Zhichao, Revelation II: from the bank of the Yellow River Ashes, 2006, performance at a forest fire-incinerated site in his hometown, Lanzhou, Gansu on Huairou mountain, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist. province, into a silicone capsule and had a physician surgically implant the filled capsule into his belly.4 In Revelation II: Ashes (Jin, 2006), another capsule, filled with ashes from a forest fire-incinerated site,

was surgically inserted into the Yang Zhichao, Revelation III: Night, 2006, performance at artist’s abdomen. In Revelation III: Tang Contemporary Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist. Night (Ye, 2006), a surgeon, wearing a pair of infrared glasses in an unlit windowless room inside the Tang Contemporary Gallery in Beijing, made a two-centimeter incision below Yang Zhichao’s navel to let the darkness sink into the slit before he sutured the artist’s wound.

The corporeal conceit of having an object surgically embedded inside his body was not alien to Yang Zhichao’s performance oeuvre when he embarked on A Hundred Days from May 12th. This latest addition within his Revelation series was nonetheless distinct because Yang Zhichao framed his process of making the piece, with the assistance of his wife, as integral to the artwork. Like two independent reporters unafﬁliated with any institution, Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan self-funded their inquiry into a disaster site

44 Vol. 11 No. 4 so as to directly collect from local residents hitherto untold stories, flyaway rumours, hushed recollections, and often unverifiable, if strongly claimed, evidence. The artists then devised a creative way to respond to, document, and transfer these stories to the public realm. Although visiting an earthquake site to stage a private memorial for the victims is not necessarily a political act, the troubles that Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan encountered in Sichuan circumstantially establishes the political relevance of A Hundred Days. The piece exposes the regional government corruption that resulted in the shoddy construction of public school buildings; it contradicts what the central government propagates as its official version of history, which touts the state’s triumphant mobilization of political resources in remedying natural disasters, while eliding its simultaneous coercion of the victims’ grieving parents into silence.5

If the traditional Chinese phrase zheng shi describes the version of history penned by the government-sanctioned agents—that is, the orthodox history—then the version of history privately composed by Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan’s action during A Hundred Days serves as a vernacular counterpart to the official history: ye shi, which means, literally, “wild histories”—the folk-generated compilations of hearsay, gossip, opinions, anecdotes, leaked secrets, dissenting remarks, covert images, furtive eyewitness accounts, embellished memoirs, and private investigation reports.6 Wild histories are parallel versions of history, consisting of orature and often anonymous or pseudonymic discursive documents that are untested, uncensored, and unsubstantiated. Like rhetorical infiltrators, wild histories insinuate themselves into the public memesphere and cultural memory without vetting by the institutional mechanisms that establish the country's officially authorized and disseminated history.

Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan enacted their self-assigned ethical roles as artists-citizens to compile their wild histories. Their serious intent and the weightiness of their subject matter bestow a heroic import on their contribution. Yet wild histories could just as well be trivial, parodic, spurious, or far-fetched. Orthodox history tends to be highly regulated—"tamed"—in order to appear in harmony with the State's projection of a national self- image. Conversely, wild histories are, in their essence and politic, untamed histories, for they amass indiscriminately those accounts of putative happenings and alleged reminiscences that are untamed and largely untamable by the powers that be. Slyly subversive in intent, untamed histories are mixed in tone; they may by turn be accusatory, poignant, speculative, sentimental, hyperbolically facetious, even phantasmagoric. They may function as apocryphal archives, colloquial chronicles, or simply as unauthenticated and non-attributable addenda to orthodox history. Like narrative horses without bridles, these untamed histories gallop on the edge of ofﬁcial surveillance; they track the fence surrounding the center for their own merry-go-rounds, their quixotic chases after shadows, or their amateurish derby without the beneﬁt of referees. When given the chance, these untamed histories may also risk jumping over the fence toward the center to perform their rider-less rodeos, generating sub/cultural forces through the sheer “horse-power” of their vocal energies and physical maneuvers.

Vol. 11 No. 4 45 What Does the Grey Say? Unlike their mentor Ai Weiwei, who got into trouble with the State for his art activism on behalf of Sichuan earthquake victims, Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan had no desire to overtly challenge the political centre of power. Thus, does their memorial performance of A Hundred Days from May 12th merely add a paragraph to the ongoing chronicle of surreptitiously engaged untamed histories in the as yet authoritarian China? Does the dystopic performance piece serve only to supply a contrary footnote to the nation’s aggressive promotion of what Wang Jing calls “the country brand of China” following “the Saatchi & Saatchi vision of turning the nation into a brand?”7

By designating A Hundred Days as part of his Revelation series, Yang Zhichao seems to subsume the performance piece’s regional specificity under its potential global resonance. In this context, his body, with the sealed capsule, becomes an enfleshed archive, analogous to the prophetic or apocalyptic Book of Revelation, which is replete with cryptic messages and redemptive symbolism, waiting to be discovered by future initiates.8 Nevertheless, I suggest, there is no contradiction between the regional and global references in A Hundred Days; rather, their joining amplifies the multivalence that underscores Yang Zhichao performance, turning the artist’s body into simultaneously a mourner’s mnemonic sanctuary that symbolically recollects the dead Chinese schoolchildren and a mystic’s corporeal temple of riddles for current and future humans. The same juxtaposition of glocal semiotic allusions characterizes the three earlier installments in the Revelation series, rendering the entire series a demonstration of Yang Zhichao’s commitment to his live art’s civic efficacy as untamed historical narratives.

Yang Zhichao’s Revelation series reﬂects the transforming subject position for contemporary Chinese experimental artists, who are remodeling their aspirations as creative contributors to their own country and to the globalized international community. We may understand this ongoing transformation of what being an artist means in post-Deng China as a process initiated by two indigenous circumstances: one, the professionalization of Chinese artists, and, two, the two-decade-plus lineage of “Chinese experimental art.”9

As Richard Kraus observes, the gradual professionalization of Chinese artists started during the Mao regime, which employed a vast number of artists as bureaucratic cultural workers to produce utopian communist propaganda and monolithic artworks in the style of socialist realism. In the reformist China, "the greatest force for change has been the introduction of a market for culture, operating alongside the older state system for reproducing and distributing art."10 The prospect of a potentially sustainable professional practice has encouraged many artists since the late 1980s to pursue independent—unofﬁcial—careers; their exodus from permanent state employment has in turn allowed them to develop a more multifaceted relationship with the government.

46 Vol. 11 No. 4 Professionalism, however, often compels a professional without the institutional subsidy to heed the dictates of the market. Therefore, following ideological and stylistic uniformity, commercialism—expressed through an exclusive interest in profit-making—has emerged as the most pervasive source of constraint on artists’ continuous quest for creative experiments, even though it has also offered the self-employed art professional the possibility of financial success and social recognition. This scenario of commercialism's potential threat to spontaneous art making is familiar to most independent artists in late-capitalist countries such as the United States. What makes it different for Chinese artists is their relatively shorter, but also more intense, exposure to the force of commercialism, which, since the drastically depoliticized post-Tian’anmen 1990s, has risen as the safest, most practical, and officially least problematic route for "private" professional pursuits.

With the arrival of the China brand, which announced itself most grandiosely in the globally telecast opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, producing contemporary artworks has proved (by several international record-setting auctions in the past decade) to be a rewarding means of cultural production and career advancement for Chinese artists. Yet the same cultural and economic circumstances made available by the China brand—with its mixture of rampant commercialism, the elevated international stature of China, and China’s access to the international art world via globalization—also functions as an impetus for some artists to choose an alternative path, such as practicing non-commercially oriented experimental art.

According to Wu Hung's analysis, "self-positioning" oneself as an "experimental artist" in today's China is to aver a sense of mission to expand creative territories for Chinese art from a decidedly marginal stance against "various kinds of cultural hegemony."11 I propose, however, that an experimental artist's self-positioned marginality does not have to always stand in opposition to the political status quo, nor does it over- determine an artist's professional practice. Experimental artists like Yang Zhichao, for instance, avoid direct confrontation with the government whenever possible. His professional portfolio, too, includes multiple components, combining commercial output in various media and genres, occasional overseas commissions, and exhibition opportunities with less commodiﬁable experimental projects such as the self-produced A Hundred Days from May 12th.

A Hundred Days bears witness to the human cost of ofﬁcial corruption exposed by a natural disaster. As such, its occurrence disturbs the master historical narratives, those woven in support of the China brand. By subsuming A Hundred Days within his ongoing body art series, Yang Zhichao effectively superimposes a biblical/metaphysical hermeneutic frame on this performance artwork about a speciﬁc local calamity. Who exactly is the target audience for Yang Zhichao’s untamed histories? Before attempting to answer the question, I would like to consider a few more examples from the same genre.

Vol. 11 No. 4 47 Red China Red: the colour of traditional and revolutionary China; the colour of festivity, auspiciousness, loyalty, and devotion; the colour of blood, passion, sacriﬁce, and martyrdom; of ﬁre, rage, and impatience; of aborted vitality latent in prosperity.

From A Cut Finger Wang Chuyu, Reading the Constitution, 2002, On June 4, 2002, Wang Chuyu performance, June 4, 2002, Beijing. enacted a solo performance piece entitled Reading the Constitution (Xianfa yuedu, 2002) in his own apartment in Tongzhou, Beijing, without an invited audience. The artist slit his right index ﬁnger with a razor and began reading a popular edition of People’s Republic of China Constitution (Zhongguo renmin gongheguo xianfa). His blood oozed out profusely, staining the booklet.12

On the thirteenth anniversary Wang Chuyu, Reading the Constitution, 2002, of the June 4th Tian’anmen performance, June 4, 2002, Square massacre, Wang Chuyu Beijing. commemorated the untimely deaths by miming the clash between flesh and steel. His blood, a sacrificial libation, paid homage to those unexpectedly martyred in the Wang Chuyu, Reading the Constitution, 2002, crossfire between youthful naivete performance, June 4, 2002, Beijing. and wrangling political wills. The front cover of the PRC Constitution booklet displays a logo, a red round stamp comprising the outline of the Imperial Palace Museum, located to the north of Tian’anmen Square, and the five-star symbol from the Chinese National Flag. As a visual prop, the booklet’s cover soaked in Wang Chuyu’s blood restages the trauma of a national tragedy. In Chapter II of the PRC Constitution, Article 35 reads, “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.”13 Cited as a legal text, the booklet, with its blood-lined pages, spells out its own contradiction: Does this document record a nation’s legitimizing principles, which deserve patriotic bloodshed to protect its integrity? Or does it inventory mere bureaucratic verbiage, mocking its reader’s earnest folly?

Wang Chuyu first linked his cut finger with the PRC Constitution in a public performance that took place in Hong Kong in April 2002, in a little theatre inside the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. The artist slashed his finger with a razor and then distributed twenty-five copies of the PRC Constitution among his audience, which comprised mostly Hong Kong residents somewhat

48 Vol. 11 No. 4 Wang Chuyu, Constitution familiar with performance Excerpt, 2002, an audience member participating in the art. Inviting the twenty-one artist’s performance at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. audience members who had Courtesy of the artist. accepted his bloodstained booklets to come on stage one by one, the artist urged each participant to improvise a response to the Constitution booklet. Most read a section or two in Cantonese through an open microphone on stage. A few diverged from this common pattern: One mumbled through all the lines; one alternated the recitation between Cantonese and Mandarin; one burst out crying; one read the Constitution booklet upside down. Wang Chuyu entitled this interactive performance Constitution Excerpts (Xianfa zhaiyao, 2002), which inaugurated Reading (Yuedu, 2002), an ongoing performance series revolving around the artist’s conceptual modiﬁcation of the PRC Constitution.

To date, the most combustible event in Wang Chuyu’s Reading series occurred across the Taiwan Strait during his participation in the Taiwan International Performance Art Festival in August 2007. Wang Chuyu had specially prepared a fake document for the occasion: a pamphlet entitled The People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China, Constitution (Unification Edition) (Zhongguo renmin gongheguo, Zhonghua minguo, Xianfa [tongyi ban], 2007), in which he compiled the entire constitutions from both governments, reproducing one chapter from the mainland, followed by another from the island, alternating from one to the other chapter by chapter until the end. Considering the political tension between China (PRC) and the portion of Taiwanese citizens who lean toward Taiwanese Independence (ROC), Wang Chuyu’s choice of the word “unification” on his pamphlet’s cover is nothing short of incendiary, even though his intention remains ambiguous. By recognizing the ROC and aligning its constitution with that of the PRC, Wang Chuyu seemed to satirize China’s official policy in eventually “unifying” Taiwan under the mainland’s sovereignty. Yet his pamphlet also appears to have symbolically unified the mainland and the island in one volume. Given the political context, however, the artist’s conceptual subtlety and political ambivalence failed to amuse his Taiwanese audience.

Wang Chuyu staged his public art event Constitution, Uniﬁcation Edition (Tongyi ban xianfa, 2007) on a busy street in Taipei, near National Taiwan Normal University. Distributing his pamphlets among some performance

Vol. 11 No. 4 49 festival viewers as well as random Top: Wang Chuyu, The People’s Republic of China, passersby, Wang invited these the Republic of China, Constitution (Unification participants to respond to the Edition), 2007, performance as part of the Taiwan International document. Within minutes, a Performance Festival. Courtesy of the artist. young man set fire to his copy of Left: Wang Shuyu, The the pamphlet; all other participants People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China, soon followed suit by throwing Constitution (Unification Edition), 2007, performance as their copies into the fire. When the fire subsided, the artist bent over the part of the Taiwan International Performance Festival. Courtesy debris and covered his face with the ashes from the burned pamphlets. This of the artist. interactive street performance ended with the artist’s improvised response to his audience-participants’ impromptu act of arson, provoked precisely by a politically loaded artifact, one made for and consumed by a collective action in Taipei.

Is Wang’s gesture of smearing his face with ashes a lamentation over futile yet irreconcilable human differences? Has the artist foreseen potential bloodshed from the cause of uniﬁcation—hence, his ad hoc requiem for the future dead?

Black China Black: the colour of ink and historicity; of power and formality; of darkness, mystery, and depth; of erasure and forgetfulness; of loss.

From a Calligrapher’s Archaeology Bilingually published in both Chinese and English, the hardbound catalogue for Qiu Zhijie’s solo exhibition Archaeology of Memory (Jiyi kaogu, 2007) evokes a classical Chinese book, with folio-style pages and an exposed spine, sewn on the right by black threads. The catalogue’s thick grey covers resemble concrete surfaces; its Chinese title, printed as hollowed characters within a vertical black rectangle, looks like a piece of ink rubbing

50 Vol. 11 No. 4 A scene from Qiu Zhijie’s from an ancient stele.14 The design Beijing Studio with the construction of Cenotaphs in for this square-set (28 x 28 x 2.5 cm) progress, 2006–07. Courtesy of the artist. catalogue echoes that of the individual component for Qiu Zhijie’s large-scale installation featured in the exhibition, which took place at the Long March Space inside Beijing’s 798 art district, a chic international tourist attraction.

Qiu Zhijie, Cenotaphs, Entitled Cenotaphs (Jinianbei, 2006–07), 2006–07, concrete-and-cement cube, 16 framed calligraphic Qiu’s installation consisted of eight solid citations. Courtesy of the artist and Long March Space, concrete-and-cement cubes (80 x 80 x 80 Beijing. cm), which took the artist and his team of masonry artisans a year of incessant labour to make. The similar appearance of the eight concrete cubes reﬂects the routine process of making them. Each cube is composed of seventeen concrete slabs layered together; these layers remain visible from the side view, but they reveal nothing about what’s enclosed in them. Except for the top layer (the seventeenth slab), each of the rest of the sixteen slabs bore imprints of Qiu Zhijie’s calligraphic practice, including his “archaeology” of China’s long calligraphic, ideological, and social histories and of his own personal life. He searched for phrases, sentences, and codes that resonated with his current memory; he then wrote down a given selection in a calligraphic style that either imitated its original source or ﬁt its thematic message. Afterward, his assistants hand-carved the artist’s inscription into the concrete slab for Qiu Zhijie to make limited editions of ink rubbings from his calligraphic exercise before they covered up the carved and rubbed slab with another concrete slab. Qiu Zhijie and his team repeated the same process layer by layer until they sealed the concrete cube with a blank top slab.

Qiu Zhijie creating a rubbing of calligraphic script from his Cenotaphs series in his Beijing studio, 2006–07. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 11 No. 4 51 Thus, the look-alike concrete cubes from Cenotaphs series are actually Qiu Zhijie’s Beijing Studio showing the calligraphic eight different giant tomes with all their pages sealed. Each tome includes rubbings, 2006–07. Courtesy of the artist. sixteen different texts assembled, recalled, or composed by Qiu Zhijie. The ﬁrst tome collects revolutionary slogans of successive Chinese dynasties; the second, pithy statements from Chinese intelligentsia on international politics; the third, newspaper headlines from China’s republic and communist national histories; the fourth, a list of songs from the karaoke inventory; the ﬁfth, individual statements that had become part of public memories; the sixth, fragments of personal letters and casual notes Qiu Zhijie received from friends; the seventh, his diaries written onto the computer and turned into illegible codes by computer viruses; the eighth, e-mail messages received in scrambled codes. They progress from

52 Vol. 11 No. 4 Top: Qiu Zhijie, Cenotaphs, collective cultural inheritance to arbitrary individual keepsakes to random 2006–07, concrete and paper rubbing. Courtesy of the artist. codification by intelligent machines. If the first three tomes represent what Middle: Qiu Zhijie, Cenotaphs, the artist gathered from China’s orthodox history, then the remaining 2006–07, concrete and paper rubbing. Courtesy of the artist. majority are his own compilations of untamed histories. Nevertheless, Bottom: Qiu Zhijie, Cenotaphs, his attitude to both official and vernacular histories appears the same: 2006–07, concrete and paper rubbing. Courtesy of the artist. no matter how black his ink was and how white the calligraphic scripts contoured by his ink rubbings were, they eventually all turned grey, like dust settling on concrete cubes.

Vol. 11 No. 4 53 In this light, the catalogue for the Archaeology of Memory becomes a self- reﬂexive comment on the elusiveness of memory, for the document both provides an indispensable supplement to Cenotaphs and joins the ranks of the eight unreadable tomes to which it refers as yet another transient human gesture toward the semblance of permanence. The main catalogue essay, a Chinese manuscript written in a brush pen by Qiu Zhijie himself, is reproduced in a slightly reduced scale, with its calligraphic text laid out in the traditional Chinese way, going vertically from the right to the left. The essay’s translated English version follows, its text printed in the usual horizontal typeset, from the left to right and the top to bottom, yet its page order follows the Chinese style in going from recto to verso on each spread. The essay both begins and ends with an unrhymed couplet, which reads, according to the catalogue’s English version, “The Emperor Decomposed Long Ago, Only the Scent of the Nanmu Tree Remains” (Diwang zaoyi fulan, zhiyou nanmu xiang ru gu, 2007).15 The couplet sums up Qiu Zhijie’s Daoism and Buddhism-inspired syncretic philosophy regarding human history: Despite the great power that an emperor may attain, his political ambition, like his mortal body, cannot last forever. In contrast, nature’s effortless vitality ever sustains itself through perpetual renewal, like the fragrance from the Nanmu tree.

The fragrant Nanmu tree, known as Phoebe zhennan in its Latin name, is a plant species endemic to China.16 Ironically, the plant is becoming endangered in China because of the loss of its habitat. Therefore, even Qiu Zhijie’s chosen symbol for nature’s self-sustainable, long-lasting scent might one day disappear.

The Scent of Untamed Histories As my brief narrative recounting of the performative artworks by Yang Zhichao, Wang Chuyu, and Qiu Zhijie shows, Chinese experimental artists both operate in complicity with and maintain a critical distance from the China brand. In general, these artists appreciate the opportunities for enhanced international exposure of their work facilitated by the current global fascination with China because, despite their nationalistic pride, the international exhibition, circulation, and evaluation system for art remains their most desirable source of professional recognition and rewards.17 The fact that Yang Zhichao would overlay a biblical reference onto his performance series, that Wang Chuyu would adjust his interactive public artworks for various geopolitical contexts, and that Qiu Zhijie would incorporate English translations in a catalogue profoundly rooted in Chinese histories and philosophies all indicate these artists’ interest and sense of obligation in addressing a larger-than-domestic constituency.

The same awareness of accessibility to the international art historical and cultural production systems, however, may also encourage these Chinese artists to shape a creative praxis more complex than the task of securing individual professional advancement. They may try simultaneously to generate more opportunities for work, to exercise creative agency, to express cultural subjectivity, to fulﬁll socio-ethical responsibility, and, within the

54 Vol. 11 No. 4 limits of self-preservation, to register a political voice. Indeed, why should these artists choose only one position—either for or against the China brand, for or against rampant commercialism, for or against the orthodox history—when they can play with multiple positions at various moments?

Monochromatic routines are the negatives of untamed histories. When exposed to light, these narrative horses shock, dazzle, amuse, critique, contradict, survey, and augment the ever-expanding global chronicles by being colourful, malleable, agile, and tactically peripheral. Dappled as dappled goes, in China and beyond.

Notes 1 I presented an earlier, abridged version of this paper in “Shenzhen + China, Utopias + Dystopias,” an interdisciplinary conference at MIT’s, History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art Program on March 12, 2011. I’d like to thank the organizer, Winnie Wong, for inviting me to the conference. In noting the colour symbolism in this essay, I combine various popular, literary, and associative sources. My choice is inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum: “The medium is the message.” See Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967). The model of my “medium” here is “untamed histories.” The Web sites I consulted for colour symbolisms include Color Symbolism and Culture, incredibleart. org, http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/middle/color2.htm, and The Color Gray, in Elizabethan Era, http://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/color-gray.htm. 2 Author’s interview with Yang Zhichao, March 25, 2009, Songzhuang, Beijing. I paraphrased and translated the subsequent citations based on this interview. I also consulted the unpublished text Yang wrote on this event: Yang Zhichao, “Qishilu Si—Bairi wu yier” (Revelation 4—A Hundred Days from May 12), September 8, 2008. Yang emailed this as-yet unpublished text to me on October 25, 2010. In this text, Yang mentions that the official report gave out “200” as the number of the dead. 3 The police also asked Yang about the missing memory card from his digital camera. Yang lied and said that he only used the digital camera “to test the light,” because “for us professionals, a digital camera’s film quality is not good enough.” 4 My retelling of the Revelation series is based on my interview with Yang on March 25, 2009, in Beijing See also Eastlink Gallery, Yang Zhichao zuopin 1999-2008/Yang Zhichao Works, bilingual exhibition catalogue (Shanghai: Eastlink Gallery, 2008), 068–081. 5 See, for instance, “Sichuan Earthquake,” New York Times, (May 6, 2009), http://topics.nytimes.com/ topics/news/science/topics/earthquakes/sichuan_province_china/index.html . 6 For a distinction between zheng shi and ye shi, see Xie Qian, “Zheng shi’ yu ye’ shi’,” in Sichuan xinwenwang-Chengdu ribao, (September 13, 2010), http://cd.qq.com/a/20100913/000084.hym. I offer an extended theory of untamed histories here. 7 Wang Jing, Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008), 32, 293. 8 See L. Michael White, “Understanding the Book of Revelation,” Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/revelation/white.html. 9 I adopt this designation from Wu Hung, “A Decade of Chinese Experimental Art, 1900–2000,” in Making History: Wu Hung on Contemporary Art (Hong Kong, China: Timezone 8, 2008), 31. 10 Richard Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 12. 11 Wu, “A Decade,” in Making History, 31–32. 12 My descriptions of Wang’s performances in his series Reading are based on my interviews with Wang Chuyu on July 7, 2006, July 15, 2008, and March 25, 2009, in Beijing; a phone interview with Wang Chuyu on March 1, 2011, Los Angeles to Beijing; and on my study of the photographic documents. 13 “Constitution of the People’s Republic of China” (Aaopted on December 4, 1982), People’s Daily Online, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html. 14 My description of Cenotaphs is based on my interviews with Qiu Zhijie on July 8, 2006, and July 12, 2008, in Beijing; on the information posted on his Web site, Qiuzhijie.com, and on his exhibition catalogue Qiu Zhijie, Jiyi kaogu/Archaeology of Memory, curated Lu Jie, ed. David Tung, trans. Lauren Allhusen (Beijing: Long March Space, 2007). I saw Cenotaphs in progress during my 2006 visit to Qiu Zhijie’s studio. 15 Qiu Zhijie, “Diwang zaoyi fulan, zhiyou nanmu xiang ru gu,” and “The Emperor Decomposed Long Ago, Only the Scent of the Nanmu Tree Remains,” in Qiu Zhijie, Archaeology of Memory, 6–21 and 22–25. 16 S. Lee and F. N. Wei, “Phoebe zhennan,” in South China Botanical Garden Checklist, http://www. efloras.org/florataxon.aspx?flora_id=610&taxon_id=200009083. 17 This observation is based on my extensive interviews with Chinese artists in Beijing conducted between 2004 and 2009.

Vol. 11 No. 4 55 Amélia Mariani Zhang Huan’s Big Buddha: Ten Years Later

t has already been a decade Zhang Huan, Big Buddha, 2002, wood, steel, stone, 590 since Zhang Huan presented x 400 x 300 cm. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio. Ihis sculpture Big Buddha in Europe, in 2002. Only recently did I become familiar with this work, when Big Buddha appeared to me at the turn of a page, in a chance encounter.1 That the image represented a Buddha was made evident by the caption next to it: Zhang Huan, Big Buddha, 2002. The full-page photograph of a human skeleton rendered in wood and sitting in a birdcage conveyed both innocence and drama—innocence perhaps because of the unconcerned live doves encaged with the sculpture or the awkwardness of the figure’s pose, drama perhaps due to the display of a human skeleton and to its monumentality, discernable when scaled against the doves as well as the large bird’s claw that looms overhead. But why was it named “Buddha”? The essays accompanying the photograph made no reference to this specific work, leaving its meaning in a state of suspension. A prominent artist, Zhang Huan is the subject of several monographs, and within this literature it seemed likely that I would be able to find some indication of the significance of this work. Surprisingly, none of the references I consulted on Zhang Huan’s work provided an explanation. To decipher Zhang Huan’s mysterious and ambiguous work, I decided to turn in another direction and venture into scholarship focusing on the way the body of the Buddha is depicted in Buddhist art.

Before doing so, I will provide some background information about the artist. Born in 1965 to a modest family in rural Henan province, Zhang Huan first distinguished himself as a talented oil painter. As a student in the Oil Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China’s most prominent art school, he was trained in the European classical tradition and became an admirer of Jean-François Millet, his “first big influence,” for his respectful portrayal of humble people.2 His work changed abruptly when, in 1992, he started staging performances in which he submitted his own (most often nude) body to intensive and extreme tests of endurance. Not everyone was seduced, but nudity may not have been as much the cause for reprobation as his self-inflicted mistreatment. Admittedly, as Chinese scholar Sheldon H. Lu observes, human beings appear nude more often in Western art than in Chinese art, attesting to the

56 Vol. 11 No. 4 Zhang Huan, My New York, 2002, performance, Whitney Museum, New York. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio.

disapprobation of the depiction of the nude body in the Chinese tradition. Lu remarks that since Liu Haisu introduced nude painting to China in the 1910s, however, and especially since the 1990s, nudity has been largely integrated into visual art in China, where it is tolerated—“no longer a novelty” and even commodified.3 Nevertheless, Lu Haisu writes that Zhang’s body art was perceived by the authorities and the general public as “ghastly, perverse, and grotesque,”4 perhaps demonstrating the difference between looking at a representation of a nude body and facing a nude person in real life. Furthermore, Zhang Huan inflicted mortifying treatments to his own body. The display of these gruesome experiences brought him the attention that opened the door to his commercial success. In 1998, Gao Minglu invited him to participate in the landmark exhibition Inside Out: New Chinese Art, at the Asia Society in New York City, after which Zhang Huan moved from Beijing to New York, a city more hospitable to the pursuit of his performance works. Nudity, blood, and violence were typically part of the acts he performed, and these theatrical events have benefited, predictably, from wide exposure in the international media. Despite the fact that Zhang Huan’s work has increasingly moved away from body art, the “performance artist” label sticks to him. Although in 2005 he completely ceased to make performances, numerous publications bypass his subsequent artistic production. As a result, only limited literature exists about object- based works such as Big Buddha, a piece that I find represents a turning point for him but remains under-evaluated. Several commentators have recognized references to Buddhism in Zhang Huan’s earlier work and have pointed to concepts such as compassion and impermanence, but it was only in 2002, in this work, that Zhang Huan began to explicitly explore sculptural representations of the body of the Buddha. The lack of art historical analysis is due in part, perhaps, to the fact that among art critics there is a tendency to comment on Zhang Huan’s work first as the work of a Chinese artist. Zhang Huan himself seems disappointed by this tendency, which he finds symptomatic of the state of contemporary Chinese art in the world: “When Westerners discuss contemporary art in China, they talk about ‘China’ first and ‘art’ later.”5 So to better understand Big Buddha, I started by wondering about the significance of the skeleton, the big claw, and the doves.

Vol. 11 No. 4 57 Nearly twenty feet tall, the size and Zhang Huan, Peace, 2003, performance, Creative Time, name of Big Buddha could conceivably Inc., New York. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio. point to the colossal fifth-century stone sculptures of the Buddha in the caves at Yungang (Shanxi province, China) or to the Longmen Caves near Luoyang. Not only are these caves awe-inspiring cultural treasures, they are also located in the culturally rich Henan province, where Zhang Huan was born. Carved into the rock, they convey a sense of permanence that contrasts with the state of decomposition suggested in Zhang Huan’s Big Buddha. The centuries-old images are as solid and imposing as the new one, with its skeletal structure, appears fragile and ethereal. Zhang Huan’s sculpture is contained in a wood-frame cage with chicken wire panels, and Big Buddha is represented as a skeleton seated on a cube, in the so-called “European style” pose (pralambapadasana). A profile view shows his tailbone. The sculpture is made of the wood of a pear tree cut down by farmers in Shandong and was hand-sculpted by ten workers over a nine- month period. The large Buddha holds a standing human figure in stone about three feet tall, and by his own account, this figure signifies the artist himself.6 The connection between the artist and the Buddha is emphasized by this proximity. The living material (wood) is used for the dead, and the dead material (stone) for the living being. After the death and life duality, the large and small, Zhang Huan addresses war and peace. On one upper corner of the cage hangs the menacing oversized claw of a bird of prey. The dozens of black and white doves fly inside the cage. Zhang Huan explains that in traditional Buddhism, releasing doves is an act of mercy and refers to the Buddhist tradition of setting live animals free to accumulate merit. Several of his performances, such as Peace (2003), conclude with releasing doves.

Big Buddha also makes me think of the Indian story of the hawk and the dove. This story is one of the Jātakas, the tales recounting the previous lives of the Buddha. King Śibi was a previous incarnation of the Buddha. According to this Jātaka, King Śibi sacrificed the flesh of his own body to protect the dove from being eaten by the hawk. Zhang Huan may be familiar with the Jātaka of King Śibi, as it was shown on the walls of Mogao Cave 254 (dated 386 –534) and Cave 275 (ca. 420) near Dunhuang, in China’s Gansu province. The Mogao Caves constitute one of China’s cultural treasures, and the paintings in the mentioned caves depict one of Buddhism’s most well known stories of compassion. Given that he is a Buddhist, it seems probable to me that Zhang Huan knows the tale. Several of these paintings portray King Śibi sacrificing his flesh to save the dove from the hawk .7 He did so to look after the dove that had asked him for protection as the hawk was about to devour it. Recognizing that the hawk had to satisfy his hunger, King Śibi offered him some of his own flesh, in equal amount to the dove’s weight. Visitors to the Mogao Caves familiar with the popular story would have known that in fact the two birds represented deities testing the king’s compassion. As he left no doubt about his character, the deities rewarded King Śibi by insufflating him with even

58 Vol. 11 No. 4 greater strength. Buddhism scholar Etienne Lamotte has written that these stories of altruism parallel the emergence of Mahāyāna Buddhism, which is less concerned with acceding to Nirvāna than with providing for the welfare of other living beings.8 Could the sacriﬁcing aspect of the narrative have resonated with Zhang Huan? As summed up by Wu Hung, at this point of Zhang Huan’s career: “[M]asochism is a trademark of Zhang Huan’s art: almost every performance he undertook involved self-mutilation and simulated self-sacriﬁce.”9 This was for example the case with 65 Kilograms (1994), where the artist was chained horizontally to the ceiling, his blood dripping down into a pan placed on a white cloth.

Zhang Huan, 65 Kilograms, With Big Buddha, the dove, commonly associated with peace, contrasts with 1994, performance, Beijing. Courtesy of Zhang Huan the predatory bird signiﬁed by the menacing claw at the top right corner Studio. of the cage. The installation is for Zhang Huan a way to question religious practice. Acknowledging that “Big Buddha can make things happen for humans,” Zhang Huan wonders about the large Buddha images: “Are they still working for us or not? How are they working? Can they help people? Can people help? Maybe they can get stronger. I hope to work to make things better. That is the idea of Big Buddha.” 10 Zhang Huan’s reﬂections on the effect of size are not limited to the large Buddha images. He questions the trend in oversized homes as well as bodies, noticing the problems and unhappiness large homes bring to family life and the detrimental health effects of over-enthusiastic bodybuilding. Three years after Big Buddha, as Zhang Huan became a Ju Shi Buddhist (that is, a lay devotee), is it possible that he found an answer to his philosophical questions?

Another title for the work later came to his mind: Lost Body.11 This is no surprise if we recall the artist’s preoccupation with the body’s endurance in most of his earlier performances. Looking at this Big Buddha sculpture, images of Emaciated Buddha resurface. Although relatively rare, images of the emaciated Buddha are unforgettable, since, like Big Buddha, they differ drastically from the mainstream representation of a healthy Buddha. The emaciated Buddha sits cross-legged; his skin clings to his skeleton, and

Vol. 11 No. 4 59 he presents all the signs of physical starvation. Anonymous, Emaciated Buddha (Fasting Siddhartha— As Robert L. Brown points out, these images Sakyamuni Buddha), Sikri, India, Kushana period AD, are found principally in the Gandhāran region grey schist, H: 84 cm, Lahore Museum, Lahore. Courtesy of and were produced in “the first four centuries The Huntington Archive. C.E.”12 They speak of the ascetic life the Buddha observed during the six years preceding Enlightenment. Sākyamuni, Brown explains, understood that this rigorous discipline was ineffectual in helping him to achieve his spiritual goals. Indeed, once Sākyamuni started nurturing his body again, he finally reached Enlightenment. As Brown suggests, this narrative may be revealing a rejection of rival sects such as the Jains and the Ajivikas, which advocated similar intense conditioning. David White discusses, for example, the probable Jain practice of meditation that involved extreme fasting and breath control.13 After testing this regimen, the Buddha offered his method, the Four Jhānas, which rejected asceticism and self-mortification. This trajectory seems to parallel Zhang Huan’s experimentations, his practice and later abandonment of severe self-inflicted treatments. The Buddha remained for six years under the nigrodha tree, submitting his body to an extreme test of endurance. He then turned to the Middle Way, a path of moderation leading to Nirvāna. Brown suggests that if the images of the emaciated Buddha are rare, it is probably because they depict a behaviour the Buddha ultimately rejected. Furthermore, images of the emaciated Buddha, Brown indicates, represent suffering and death, which the Buddha is said to have overcome. The parallel between Zhang Huan’s artistic trajectory and Sākyamuni’s journey should not be overlooked. It took Zhang Huan nearly a decade to renounce performances involving physical austerities, and Big Buddha coincides precisely with the shift in his approach. Yet this is another coincidence that has not previously been observed: after 2002, the year Big Buddha was produced, Zhang Huan never again subjected his body to mistreatment. Seeds of Hamburg, performed in November of 2002, is the last performance in which the artist tested his endurance and tolerance for discomfort in this way. In this work, simply covered with honey and sunflower seeds, Zhang Huan shared a chicken-wired cage with a few dozen doves. The artist moved around the cage, lay on the floor, or sat under a leafless tree, and thus as bare as himself, in a pose similar to that of his seated Big Buddha. Although the conceptual similarities with Big Buddha are striking, the two works have never been analyzed side-by-side. Both are staged in a cage, similar in proportions, arranged around a central seat, amongst birds. Big Buddha holds a small being; Zhang Huan is covered with sunflower seeds. Coincidentally, the two works were conceived shortly after the artist became a father. Zhang Huan did not take his new responsibility lightly: “My little boy is seven months old now. I feed him, bathe him, clean up for him. I feel so happy as a father. . . . Sometimes I dream that we are in my hometown, where he is a Buddhist monk in the He Nan Shao Lin Temple.”14 And Zhang Huan wondered: “Will he appreciate me? I don’t know. These pressures stifle me. I just want to live lighter.”15 The responsibilities that came with the experience of fatherhood seem to have contributed to Zhang Huan ceasing to inflict pain and suffering to his body, bringing him closer to the teachings of the Buddha. The Indian tale discussed earlier provides a new

60 Vol. 11 No. 4 Zhang Huan, Seeds of Hamburg, 2002, performance, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio.

layer of meaning for Big Buddha. With Seeds of Hamburg, Zhang Huan appears to offer his body to the doves as nourishment, as in a Tibetan sky burial, the ultimate sacriﬁce, which he claims he would opt for if he could choose a way of dying.16 This notion is pursued with Big Buddha, which as we have seen can be understood to also speak of self-sacriﬁce to appease a bird’s hunger. To prevent the doves from pecking his body would only put an end to Zhang Huan’s physical suffering, but his psychological state was aching, too.17 Three years later, he ended his self-imposed exile in the US and returned with his family to China. Since then, he has been working with dozens of assistants in his vast studio in Shanghai, producing a large and diverse body of works in which Buddhism, tradition, and cultural history have taken centre stage.

Big Buddha has been for the most part ignored by critics and is quasi- absent from the literature about Zhang Huan. This paper began with an image of Big Buddha found in a 2004 collection of essays, Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, a rare—if not the only known printed—reproduction of this sculpture. In this publication, Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob observe that contemporary commentators have refrained from providing much analysis about artworks inspired by Buddhist practice. Baas and Jacob note that “in recent years, religion and art have been a contentious mix” and suggest that “modern art criticism has been less than hospitable to aspects of the spiritual in art,” even if many artists from Laurie Anderson to Bill Viola to John Cage have been said to incorporate Buddhist teachings in their work. In On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art,

Vol. 11 No. 4 61 also published in 2004, James Elkins engages in a conversation about why religiosity and spirituality have been absent from most of contemporary art criticism, a situation he ﬁnds all the more paradoxical given that art, for a long time, was religious. He observes that when art and religion are present in contemporary art, “the interpretive discourse that supports that art often excludes any serious discussion of those themes.”18

In the past decade, Zhang Huan has not only incorporated a Buddhist philosophy into his practice but has also brought into his work the image of the Buddha. Big Buddha, identified here as the first of these works, has been overlooked. Perhaps this results from a critical reception tending to focus more, as Zhang Huan commented, on “China first” than on the artworks, but also, as suggested by Baas, Jacob and Elkins, because of the uncomfortable relationship between religion and contemporary art. More research will be necessary to fully grapple with this issue. Thus far, the literature devoted to Zhang Huan’s artistic production has not approached his work from an art historical perspective, leaving aside a wealth of analysis and research in a field that can provide possible interpretations and enrich our understanding of his oeuvre. Ten years after the presentation of Big Buddha, as I have shown here, Buddhist art history can inform us of the significance of Big Buddha. Since Zhang Huan is a Buddhist, this path of inquiry appears as an obvious choice. As I venture into this field, the tale of King Śibi and the emaciated Buddha appear to bridge the enigma emanating from Big Buddha. Zhang Huan, who is increasingly turning to tradition and history for inspiration, invites this kind of exploration, and a revisiting of the importance of Big Buddha on its ten-year anniversary seems timely.

Notes 1 See Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob, eds., Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 112. 2 Wu Hung, “Speaking the Unspeakable,” in Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: TheDavid and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, 1999), 104. See also Jérôme Sans, interview with Zhang Huan, September 8, 2008, in China Talks, Interviews with 32 Contemporary Artists (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2009), 181. 3 Sheldon H. Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 75. 4 Ibid. 5 Zhang Huan, “A Piece of Nothing,” in Zhang Huan: Altered States (New York: Charta and Asia Society, 2007), 74. 6 Zhang Huan, interview by Mary Jane Jacob, “Zhang Huan,” in Buddha Mind, 246. 7 Junjie Huang, Chün-chieh Huang, and Erik Zürcher, Time and Space in Chinese Culture (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 249. 8 Etienne Lamotte, “Religious Suicide in Early Buddhism,” in Buddhism: Buddhist Origins and the Early History of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia, ed. Paul Williams (Oxon: Routledge, 2005), 219. 9 Wu Hung, Making History: Wu Hung on Contemporary Art (China: Timezone 8, 2008), 54. 10 Baas and Jacobs, eds., Buddha Mind, 246. 11 Ibid. 12 Robert L. Brown, “The Emaciated Gandhran Buddha Images: Asceticism, Health, and the Body,” in Natasha Eilenberg, M. C. Subhadradis Diskul, and Robert L. Brown, eds., Living a Life in Accord with Dhamma: Papers in Honor of Professor Jean Boisselier (Bangkok: Silpakorn University, 1997), 105–15. 13 David Gordon White, Sinister Yogis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 55. 14 Zhang Huan, Statement, artist’s Web site, http://www.zhanghuan.com/ShowWorkContent. asp?id=28&iParentID=18&mid=1 15 Ibid. 16 Zhang Huan, “Statement 2008,” in Zhang Huan (London: Phaidon, 2009), 132. 17 Zhang Huan, A Piece of Nothing, 74. 18 James Elkins, “Liquid Thoughts on the Body and Religion,” in Barbara Baert, Esther Rosser, Alexander Streitberger, and Hilde Van Gelder, eds., Fluid Flesh: The Body, Religion and the Visual Arts (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), xiii.

62 Vol. 11 No. 4 Li Zhenhua What I Like to Do: Interview with Yan Lei There’s documenta on Earth

Yan Lei, Hong Hao, Invitation Li Zhenhua: Since your 1997 Letter, 1997, 100 invitation letters to exhibit in documenta. project Invitation Letter, in Courtesy of the artists. which you and Hong Hao sent a number of Chinese artists a fake invitation to documenta, this major international exhibition has been at the core of your many artworks. Of course, 1997 coincided with the tenth edition of documenta, and even though you were not officially invited to participate, you cleverly seized this opportunity, one that comes around only once every five years, and turned it into a work that connected this international art event with the local contemporary art scene. Exactly fifteen years have passed since then, and you are now participating in documenta for a second time (the first was in 2007). How do you look at your earlier works such as Invitation Letter (1997), From Here to Kassel (1998) and the Sparkling: Aspen series (2006), as well as the Landing series (2007)? What are the connections between these works?

Yan Lei: Artists consider participation in documenta to be the most honourable event. Back in 1997, documenta felt like an opportunity far beyond my reach; therefore, when I thought about the issue of art, I felt rather lonely and powerless. None of the progression I made in my work was predictable, yet there was one difﬁculty and question that I was confronted with as an artist that never left my mind.

Li Zhenhua: What was it that troubled you? What were you confronted with? Was it a question that changed over the course of time? Did this difﬁculty fade away or did it grow larger?

Yan Lei: What troubled me was that I had difﬁculty communicating with people, so I was faced with loneliness. And I often ﬁnd myself alone in front of an empty white canvas and I don’t know how to start. I don’t even know what I should do tomorrow.

Li Zhenhua: Are ﬁnancial constraints troubling you?

Yan Lei: I believe that the more money one has, the more freedom one gets. But the question of how to ﬁnd an outlet through art cannot be solved with money.

Vol. 11 No. 4 63 Yan Lei, Sparkling— documenta, 2007, oil on canvas, 182 x 138 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Yan Lei, Sparkling— documenta, 2007, oil on canvas, 182 x 138 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Yan Lei, Sparkling—Curators, 2007, oil on canvas, 100 x 66 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Li Zhenhua: Your answer reminds me of the emergence of contemporary art: its development and transformation has placed a strong emphasis on the constant changing of an artist’s identity. I am very interested in whom you think an artwork is created for, and, also, where the artist’s identity is positioned today?

64 Vol. 11 No. 4 Yan Lei: A work is certainly created for one’s own purposes as well as for anyone interested in it. To obtain more freedom, you have to disregard whether you are an artist or not.

Migration Is the Way to Discover

Li Zhenhua: By 1997, you had already moved to Hong Kong. During your time there, you created mula ditto papuntiang Kassel (This Way to Kassel) (1998), Red Light District (1998), and Second Hand Shop (1999). Apparently, mula ditto papuntiang is like a metaphorical transition between Kassel and the environment you lived in, and Second Hand Shop leads your work again to the ambiguous margins of contemporary art. Your relocation from Beijing to Hong Kong caused a fundamental change in your process of creation, which is to say, you started to become aware of the differences in the contexts of everyday life and culture, and soon began to catch up with the inﬂux of information within the contexts of Hong Kong culture and of the globalized contemporary art world. How do you see this transformation—from the changes in your identity to the shift in your art making, from the distant to the close—corresponding to changes in your issues with documenta to Red Light District and Second Hand Shop?

Yan Lei: In dealing with the despair induced by my loneliness, I wondered how I could continue with my own artistic path. At that time, I wanted to alter the state I was in and examine my identity, so I made those works. In Second Hand Shop (also called Hallelujah) I used art to relieve my own burdens and loosen my constraints, to manage my state of mind. Hong Kong’s art scene is very enthusiastic about political strategies, and no one can go beyond the kinds of rules involved in them. I felt rather incompetent making art there.

Li Zhenhua: You left China’s cultural and political situation and fell into Hong Kong’s cultural and political labyrinth. If you compare the cultural and political states back then, what are the differences between mainland China and Hong Kong? What kind of state and identity did you need to keep going as an artist within that kind of transition?

Yan Lei: Mainland China is very big, and Hong Kong is very small. Hong Kong is cleaner than Beijing. You only need to know how to be in the ﬂow of life; that is the best state.

Li Zhenhua: What do you see as the connection between creation and the environment you live in? If one can predict the formal changes in your art by looking at its previous transitions, one can observe that they relate to your continued relocations, like the pessimism you mentioned that was caused by learning about life and the art scene in Hong Kong. Did that come from the desolation that you felt after alleviating your burdens, or, rather, through a sense of disappointment with the art system? Also, were your frequent journeys to France related to all this? Were the changes in your artwork also connected to your periods of emigration to France?

Vol. 11 No. 4 65 Yan Lei: My concepts of time and space were basically formed in mainland China. I used to want to go abroad, but when that finally happened, I couldn’t find any sense in it beyond the learning of a new language; it was a barrier. What is important to me now is to find the place that suits me the best. If you cannot get accustomed to the customs and culture of a place, then you will not be able to consider questions of art. This is the connection that exists between me, my artwork, and the environment.

Li Zhenhua: The question discussed above can be seen as affecting the direction and transformation of your artwork before 2000, which is also when the main subjects, such as culture and identity, started to appear in your work. This was somehow different from your earlier video and photography work, which dealt with inﬂicting physical harm to your own body. What drew your attention and interest to documenta, which is a kind of centre of culture, and how did you let go of the issues that you emphasized so much in your work for a certain period after your arrival in Hong Kong?

Yan Lei: I think an artist’s motivation to create is mainly to free oneself from inner loneliness. Thus, the means and methods are not the most important. What matters is that the artist has to feel a stimulus. Fresh out of school, I really hoped that my identity as an artist would be recognized. Later, I felt indifferent about that.

Li Zhenhua: If changes in medium do not matter to you, where do the stimuli come from? What causes their emergence? Your works convey a special sense of calmness and isolation—are the stimuli you are talking about rational or emotional ones? And in terms of media, you ﬁnally chose painting as the medium in which to express yourself. There must be a reason for that.

Yan Lei: The stimulus I was talking about is derived from having autonomous control over one’s work, and being able to precisely accomplish one’s goals; it is a stimulus that comes with power. Every work is like a theatre play in my head. I imagine it as a stage, and when all the questions are gathered together, it will become a statement conveyed by the artist.

Li Zhenhua: Previously, you have emphasized statements conveyed by the body, but in your work, you try to participate as little as possible; how do you explain this contradiction? How do you decide whether an artist should be present or not? The body that you focus on, should it be perceived as a speciﬁc “body of work” referred to speciﬁcally in art, or do you mean the presence of your own body?

Yan Lei: What I am trying to say is that an artist’s bodily exterior is indeed a psychological manifestation. My attitude toward my artwork is to minimize my participation in the production of the work.

Li Zhenhua: I can deeply relate to what you said about art history, work concepts, and our understanding of them. Current interpretative systems and forms of cultural criticism, such as cultural studies, can hardly meet the requirements of advanced contemporary art; historical studies often

66 Vol. 11 No. 4 Yan Lei, 1998 This Way to allow us only to look backward and Kassel, 1998, installation. Courtesy of the artist. consider merely the question of the origin of today’s art. Even so, we are still confronted with a growing amount of tension in the course of contemporary art, which is caused by considering (interdisciplinary) knowledge, geo-cultural contextual relations, and bodily experiences as obstacles that are moving and colliding between aesthetics and other realms. Of course, there is still the area of psychology that you mentioned. How is the artist’s own image (that you point out) related to his or her work here?

Yan Lei: I believe that art exists beyond the language of an artwork (object and presentation). Therefore, the less I (the artist) make or intervene in it, the more the artwork can remain in a pure state; the artist’s existence is only to provide some spiritual illusions for the “objects” that are representing the work.

Yan Lei, Climbing Space— Art, The Fifth Element, UAP (Unlimited Art Project), and Pompidou, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 50 x 200 cm. Courtesy A Present from Beijing of the artist.

Li Zhenhua: After 1998, you seemed to have become even more inclined toward painting. Within the outstanding projects at that time painting was, besides being a concept, always present in your work—examples being International Yeast (2004), the Centre Pompidou project (2002–03), the Nice project (2004), and The Fifth Element (2004). How do you think painting is related to your concepts? Why can’t it be replaced by another medium or be completely erased? I have noticed that your projects from 2004 were increasingly based on invitations by, and residencies within, the museum system. How do you perceive the effect of your integration into the art system on your art, and are your creations now following a particular standard or type? The Fifth Element, presented in Shenzhen, can be viewed as an expression of attention to the rise of land ownership in China. Does this

Vol. 11 No. 4 67 work, which is detached from the museum system by being placed outdoors, The Fifth Element, 2004, public art installation, Shenzhen. contain some differences in its conceptual approach? Courtesy of the artist.

Yan Lei: Painting has always been on my mind. I devoted myself a lot to it and gained a lot of experience in return. Painting is sometimes an opportunity to express one’s attitude towards art. If I paint some images related to my own experience, even without the content and logic of traditional painting, how can that not become art today?

Li Zhenhua: Indeed, within contemporay art and culture, what hasn’t been turned into art today? I want to return to the starting point of the contemporary, which is also how we consider the ﬁeld of art in the context of contemporary existentialism. Of course, this question can also be applied to what is not the political or the economical today. So, what do you think would be the result, if politics, the economy, and art were interchangable? What would art be? Would it be an environmental issue, a protection of rights, or, instead, something else?

Yan Lei: Why can’t we exchange “art” for “what I like to do”?

Li Zhenhua: Real estate and the economy—these factors that exist outside of art—were also drawn into the creative process of The Fifth Element, as well as the question of how politics manifests itself within the economy. This project was transformed into a painting (or a parallel between concept and painting). How do you see their relationship with each other? Usually a project is documented through photos or videos, but painting is the oldest method of recording events. Do you see painting as a mere tool of documentation? And the order of the manifestation of this work—the conceptual aspect of the project, the photography, and then the painting— how are they related?

Yan Lei: I often use archival material as a resource for my paintings. Any material in the form of a photograph can be used, and many photographs have becomethe content of my paintings. At the same time, because of this method, once again my participation in the production of the painting has been reduced.

Li Zhenhua: Today, any event or object can be art. What is the core of art creation for you? Here, we don’t have to talk about what the mainstream of the current art world is or what the core meaning is because this would indicate that art is still dependent on the axis of politics and the economy.

68 Vol. 11 No. 4 What I want to know is not how you perceive the world but how you see your own approach moving forward towards making art.

Yan Lei: Anyone can say that they make “contemporary art.” As contemporary art has already been commercialized, art has no standards anymore, and neither do I. My motive to make art is just because I like to. I don’t think more reasons are necessary, but whether my sentiment will change, I cannot say.

Li Zhenhua: Your installation for the Edicola Notte Gallery in Rome in 2007 was talked about a lot, as was your work, Appetizer (2002), for the Gwangju Biennale. Can you tell us more about these two works? The Gwangju piece must have appeared during the time of your UAP (Unlimited Art Project) painting project. How is the Rome project related to documenta and A Present from Beijing?

Yan Lei: In 2002 I participated in the São Paulo, Shanghai, and Gwangju biennials. Working a whole year for biennials felt like a drug addiction! For that reason I created the work called Appetizer for Gwangju. I like Rome’s Edicola Notte Gallery because the space is extremely small, so small that whatever you do, it feels like too much, and there I tried to keep doing nothing at all.

In 2001, after an exhibition at the China Art Archives & Warehouse, I began to have some money. I thought I could ofﬁcially establish my own production line in the form of UAP.

Li Zhenhua: In 2002 you participated in many biennials; did that create a more international perspective for you, and did you start to reﬂect on the origins of this cultural relationship in being involved in biennials? Did that trigger the initiation of UAP?

Yan Lei: UAP exists within the market. Its desire for freedom and inﬁnity coexists with the paradox of the market’s limitations.

Li Zhenhua: In addition to accepting documenta’s invitation in 2007, you also created A Present from Beijing (2007). Was the documenta project in Kassel a rapprochement or challenge to the art system and power? Where do you see the connection between A Present from Beijing and the documenta project in terms of the creation of the art system’s characteristics?

Yan Lei: At documenta in 2007, my older works were shown. During the exhibition period, my participation was rather insigniﬁcant. In the same year, on the invitation of Hou Hanru and the Istanbul Biennale, I brought Beijing’s punk rock band Brain Failure with me for a concert (party) as my contribution to that biennial exhibition. This art project was completely absorbed within Istanbul—that is the ideal state of art creation.

Li Zhenhua: Can you talk about the exhibitions from 2007 and the real circumstances of those exhibitions? What was the reason the curators of

Vol. 11 No. 4 69 documenta chose to display your older works? The Yan Lei, Poster for A Present from Beijing, 2007. Courtesy of last documenta was rather controversial, mostly the artist. because of where the sources of money came from, the pressure on and manipulation of documenta by the gallery industry. What was the reality that you experienced and saw there? Did this experience determine your approach for Istanbul? Or was it because your older works were exhibited and so you had more time to prepare the project for Istanbul? What did Hou Hanru (who curated the Istanbul Biennale) think about this work, and what was the reason that it was ﬁnally accepted?

Yan Lei: I am not sure what every curator thinks, but I know that Hou Hanru really respects artists’ ideas. At the same time, he has a very high standard for what makes an artwork “absolute and pure.” He responded (and agreed) to my concept very quickly. We all felt that A Present from Beijing exceeded the existing museum and gallery market system’s understanding of art.

Li Zhenhua: Here you had a museum or gallery system as a reference for your work to respond to. Did the understanding of this project, especially in the moment when A Present from Beijing was accepted by the existing contemporary art system, demonstrate the art system’s openness and tolerance? Of course, this is a different issue from the one of presentation. The “artwork-ization” caused by the limits of presentation and expectations towards art was completely dissolved (or reconstructed) by A Present from Beijing.

Yan Lei: In my eyes, this is not openness, but the question of contemporary art’s values.

Li Zhenhua: What does the ideal situation for art, such as the Istanbul Biennale, look like? What is it that you see as your own work? Is it in your own actions or in Brain Failure’s performance? How is your art achieved? In their performance, nothing speciﬁc was used as an “object” to be presented visually, and there was also no reliance on an art space (museum), so can one say that the performance was completely void from the beginning to the end?

Yan Lei: I believe the highest form of art cannot be represented by objects, and that exists beyond language. Thus, I consider an artist’s overall approach toward his or her work as art. I see whatever the project is , it is the artist’s interpretation of art.

Li Zhenhua: Your concept of the overall approach is wonderful. This must be already your art—or is it a response to contemporary art’s existing concepts?

Yan Lei: Contemporary art is just like a stone, it can be anything, so it can be only dealt with according to one’s own understanding.

Interviews conducted on March 27, April 1, and April 23, 2012

70 Vol. 11 No. 4 East of Burden: Herb Tam and Ingrid Chu in Conversation

Museum of Chinese in he following conversation America, exterior view of 215 Centre Street building. took place on April 30, 2012 Courtesy of Museum of Chinese in America, New York. T at the Museum of Chinese in America in New York on occasion of America through a Chinese Lens and June 4, 1989: Media and Mobilization Beyond Tiananmen Square (April 26 to September 10, 2012).

Ingrid Chu: How did you ﬁrst come to know about the Museum of Chinese in America?

Herb Tam: I’m not too sure how exactly I found out about it, but I think a friend had told me about a show that was opening here, that I should really know about this place, probably back in 2000 or 2001, something like that. So I came to the museum when it was at its old location at 70 Mulberry Street, deep in the heart of Chinatown. I think there wasn’t a temporary exhibition up but a permanent exhibition.1

You know, I liked it, I understood what it was trying to do, and I remember appreciating that there was some place like that for the culture I grew up with. Then, over the years, I went back to see shows if I found them interesting, kept in touch, and just kind of knew what was going on. I also met some staff and knew the previous curator, Cynthia Lee. So, the museum was always a part of my cultural world here in New York.

Ingrid Chu: Why is it important for you to work at this museum, and why now?

Herb Tam: Well, I always thought that the museum could do a lot more. I don’t want to imply that the museum wasn’t doing enough, but I just felt there was a part of my experience that wasn’t totally being captured by the museum. Obviously, that’s because it was and still is a museum rooted in the history of a people. Therefore, it spans two hundred and ﬁfty years of this history.

For me, even though I was interested in all that, the museum also wasn’t talking to me very directly about what I experienced growing up as a Chinese American. There was a lot that was untouched, and I thought this museum could be a place where some of those experiences get brought up, processed, interpreted, and then presented to the broader public.

Vol. 11 No. 4 71 So, that’s why I really wanted to work here, because it had potential, especially now that it has moved to this new location with a bigger space that is more on the outskirts of Chinatown, but also in SoHo, that touches all different kinds of communities and neighbourhoods here in New York. So, I felt if there’s any time when Chinese American or Chinese culture can really have an impact on how New Yorkers and people all over America who visit New York experience and understand Chinese culture, that this would be the time—especially now that China itself, the country, the People’s Republic, has taken on a bigger international role, a global role as an eminent power, and a power that already rivals America.

I think that a) there is a deep interest in China itself and Chinese people and culture, and that b) there is a sort of xenophobia that exists also along with that interest that needs counterbalance. I think the museum can start a dialogue that deepens a conversation about who Chinese people are, what we do, and how we do things.

Ingrid Chu: What role do you see the museum having, if any, in responding to the growth of contemporary Chinese art within China, as well as a part of the international art market, at art fairs, and in exhibitions and publications? And how does this impact the Museum’s founding mission to represent “Chinese in America”?2

Herb Tam: Well, as far as the global art market and what our impact on art fairs and the value of contemporary art made by Chinese people is, I don’t really care that much. I don’t really worry about that. The museum is only a part of the market in the sense that we may show artists who ultimately wind up being in the market—and I’m sure that many of the people we show will be.

I’m interested in artists only because they can deepen and complicate the narrative of Chinese people in America. I think a lot of artists are doing that. A lot of Chinese American artists are doing that. A lot of Chinese artists from China are doing that. A lot of artists who aren’t Chinese are doing that. So, how it plays into the greater visibility of Chinese American artists—I think that’s maybe more important for me as an outcome.

The fact that we’re able to give Chinese artists a platform that is interesting— a context to show in and not that we’re just any old museum—but we have a very speciﬁc thing that we are trying to do that artists who show here can tap into, add onto, and enriching that kind of dialogue is very important for me.

Hopefully, because of that platform, their work can be seen in a way that is not just like, “Oh, you know, that’s a Chinese artist,” and that it’s easy to read because China’s easy to read. Or, because we don’t know that much about it we just kind of put it into this one corner. It would be great if the museum could be a place where work by Chinese artists becomes more complex than more simplistic.

Ingrid Chu: Speaking of making things more complex, I’ve been wondering if you see a difference between Chinese American art and art from China,

72 Vol. 11 No. 4 With A Single Step, installation and if this is reﬂected in the view of permanent collection exhibition. Courtesy of museum’s collection, exhibitions, Museum of Chinese in America, New York. and programs? I ask you this because among your many duties and responsibilities as the museum’s recently appointed Curator and Director of Exhibitions, not only are you charged with the historic preservation of art, but also of other objects and items of historical record like signage, textiles, furniture, print ephemera, and recorded oral histories, not to mention the personal effects of Chinatown residents that have been donated and/or willed to the museum.3 Some of these are even featured as part of the current exhibitions.4 Do you foresee changing the museum’s accession policies given the rise of the local/ international valuation of contemporary Chinese art but also as reﬂected by the views you’ve just expressed?

Herb Tam: I never want to say never in regards to collecting art, but we haven’t done it. We currently do not do it, and we don’t have a plan to do it. That’s for a variety of reasons, some of them logistical, and some of them admission-oriented. So I can’t foresee right now a path that would lead us into collecting contemporary Chinese art.

One interesting thing that was written about the photography show America through a Chinese Lens: someone wrote that the contemporary art in it was imagined as historical document and the historical documents, the amateur photographs, were imagined as contemporary art. So there is an interesting way in which art can come into a museum and function like ephemera or as pieces of a larger puzzle that talk about a speciﬁc culture or an aspect of history.

Arthur Ou, Untitled (Mirror If you look at it that way, then I think Lake #2), 2008, archival pigment print, 101.6 x 127 it might make sense to collect some cm. Courtesy of the artist and Museum of Chinese in contemporary art that deals with certain America, New York. key moments in history that we’re trying to explore more deeply. But to collect contemporary art purely to collect contemporary art of this moment by Chinese American or Chinese artists, I don’t really see that as falling within our mission.

Ingrid Chu: Let’s talk about the new venue since the museum recently moved its exhibition and ofﬁce spaces into a renovated building situated on the cusp, rather than in the heart, of Manhattan’s Chinatown.5 Is there a tie to the prior location and how do both serve the museum’s stated objectives as “a national home for the precious narratives of diverse Chinese American communities, and . . . a model among interactive museums”?6

Herb Tam: We still have the old 70 Mulberry Street space; it’s where our collections and archives live and the museum, the new space, opened three years ago.

Vol. 11 No. 4 73 It’s a complicated question because we are Jiajia Zhang, Untitled (Bubble K), 2009, C print, 68.5 x 43.1 in this category of “heritage museum” or cm. Courtesy of the artist and Museum of Chinese in “ethnographic museum,” and that sounds America, New York. very conservative. It sounds like we’re just showing the history of something, and it feels like we are not connecting with the contemporary. At the same time, I see us as being able to adapt and be ﬂexible with what we do. Because we’re not just a museum that shows art, we can bring a lot of our other material in and do shows or do programs in a way that bigger museums may have difﬁculty with because of their vast constituency and what’s expected of them.

Though we do have a signiﬁcant following, and people know us for one thing, I think that because we now have a very unusual building (it’s not a very conventional museum building—Maya Lin designed something very unique in the world of museum buildings), what it says to me is that we don’t have to do what other museums are doing.

We can play around and we can be experimental. We can defy certain rules and codes, certain niceties. At the same time, we have to think about the kinds of ideas that we’re putting out about who Chinese people are. That’s the one thing that we have to be concerned about all the time—what is the image that we are offering about who we are?

Ingrid Chu: And this is directed to what appears to be a very diverse but also a changing public with the common thread of being of Chinese descent or interested in Chinese and Chinese American culture.

Herb Tam: Yes.

Ingrid Chu: Even this very building that was conceived by artist and designer Maya Lin affects the current program, since this context must necessarily change your curatorial strategy in relationship to temporary exhibitions and to the works that are shown yet not accessioned or collected. But also through the permanent collection exhibit of items that could be seen as having a dialogue with contemporary art. You have already answered that question for me, but I want to go back to the fact that you have expressed the desire to avoid the term “heritage.” Can you explain a little bit more why this is problematic for you? How else would you describe your vision for the museum?

Herb Tam: Well, with respect to the specific word “heritage,” I don’t have a problem with what it means. I just don’t like being affiliated with, or having the museum being seen as just a place that deals with the past of Chinese experience in America. You know, the railroads, the exclusion acts, and the kind of racism that existed throughout the history of immigration. All of that is very important because it’s a big piece of the American history. But “heritage” to me really implies a fixed story—a fixed set of cultural, historic markers that you can look at and point to, and use to define Chinese experience or any kind of

74 Vol. 11 No. 4 experience in a given time and in a given location. That is ﬁne but there’s much more to it than what the word “heritage” implies.

The other thing that it implies that I don’t particularly like is a sort of positivist reading, like a feel-good kind of picture of what has happened, including all the terrible things and how we have persevered and so on. Of course, that’s a very important narrative to reinforce because it’s all true. But to me there’s a darkness to the experience I’ve come to know about America. There’s an edge to who we are as a people. There’s a complexity and the word “heritage” just doesn’t say all that, doesn’t talk about complexity, or darkness, or sadness. Those are the kinds of things that I think we should face up to— those things in our history that aren’t pretty, or that didn’t turn out so well, or that still aren’t great, that are a product of both our making and our doing.

Ingrid Chu: This leads me to my next question. You have, again, answered this in part, but maybe you can say a little bit more about why you chose America through a Chinese Lens to be your inaugural exhibition as curator? This, along with June 4, 1989: Media and Mobilization Beyond Tiananmen Square, the coinciding exhibition of permanent collection ephemera documenting such a contested political moment in Chinese and Chinese American culture as the Tian’anmen Square protest and subsequent massacre. How do these exhibitions announce your tenure in terms of your vision for the museum?

Herb Tam: When I first came on, I knew that we needed to do a show very quickly after the one that was being planned ahead of it, which was Lee Mingwei’s show.7 So I knew I had to fill that void. The first thing I did was look at our collection and I just tried to get to know it and see what was there. What I noticed first was just how unusual and beautiful some of the photographs are. They are all pretty much amateur—the kinds of photographs that everybody knows, everybody has taken, and everybody’s parents have taken. I felt like there was something possible here but I didn’t really come to the idea of doing a show about photography until I talked to a colleague of mine who talked about a specific photographer, Tseng Kwong Chi. Before I started the job, this person recommended that I look into his photographs. I was already aware of him but was told that there was a lot more to this artist and that I should look into him further. When I did, it just kind of clicked to do a show about photography, and the more I thought about it the more I thought about how photography is used by so many immigrants to try to understand where they are and who they are in this space.

Every time I see those photographs from our collection, those amateur ones, I feel like they’re trying to photograph parts of the “American Dream” as it sort of crops up now and then. For instance, when someone buys a new home, there’s always a photograph of the family taken outside with their new car.

Ingrid Chu: [Laughs.] Yes, I remember being in pictures like that.

Herb Tam: Those are the things that represent the “American Dream,” especially for immigrants who come here. Many of them—like my

Vol. 11 No. 4 75 parents—come looking for substantive stuff that they were denied back in China. Like the car, the newness of the car for the family, and so the photograph becomes the realization of that moment where the “American Dream” becomes palpable.

Ingrid Chu: It’s true. It’s also something you can send back home.

Herb Tam: Right, right. That’s the other thing. It’s a very social medium. I mean, photography is an image-making tool for the masses. So when people got cameras, of course they took pictures of each other and sent them to other people in exchange for other photographs. They showed loved ones what the son and daughter looked like, all those kinds of things.

Also, this show was a way to include contemporary art, not as contemporary art so much, but as part of something larger that Chinese people do, which is photography, which is the photographing of America.

My whole mantra, which I don’t say all the time and which is not in our mission statement, is for me: “Who are Chinese people today?” Basically, “Who are we?” That is what I’m trying to express with these shows. To dig a little bit deeper into that question through a show that is very speciﬁcally about how Chinese people have perceived America. In doing that, I think it reveals a lot about who Chinese people are.

The other show, June 4, 1989—obviously it’s Jiajia Zhang, Untitled (VIM), 2009, C print, 60.9 x 78.7 about this one speciﬁc moment in China that cm. Courtesy of the artist and Museum of Chinese in a lot of people remember. The reason why it is America, New York. important to do, ﬁrst of all, is that a lot of the newspaper pieces are from our collection. And so that is another show that comes from what we already have in the collection. It’s also a way to connect China, the People’s Republic, with Chinese people here, given that it’s a show that basically is about how that event was articulated in the press here in America. But again, given how important and present China is now, I thought it was really important to do something right away that connected these two countries with an event.

Obviously, that was about a social movement, a political movement, an activist movement, one that arose from the people and that resonates today with the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and it was a way to touch on those different issues.8 At the same time, it also, especially for a certain generation of people, really resonates because they remember that moment. I’m talking about people like my parent’s generation, and even my generation, who sat there and watched TV as it was happening. It became a really important moment of cultural identity, of seeing your people rise up against a government that for so long had suppressed their voices and was the reason why a lot of people moved out of China to the United States or wherever else they went. So, I’m very pleased with how the shows turned out for those various reasons.

Ingrid Chu: Following up on the idea of mediation and impact, it seems like there’s always a rise and fall in terms of the art world’s fascination with

76 Vol. 11 No. 4 the representation of cultures, be it through the art market, academia, or the various biennials, and so on. But I am curious about whom you feel the museum speaks to and if there is actually any particular strategy that you employ to encourage diverse audiences to attend. What do you hope to get out of the exhibitions, educational programs, and the like, but also now through social media, for example?

Herb Tam: Do you mean what are the things that we’re doing to reach out to broader audiences?

Ingrid Chu: Well, we have talked about how there’s been a shift in terms of your interest in how you are exhibiting contemporary art in relation to, let’s say, the permanent collection. So, are there new strategies that you are employing and what do you hope to achieve in terms of what audiences might get out of these changes?

Herb Tam: Well, the most important thing in terms of audience is that we have to keep up the pace of doing temporary exhibitions that are dynamic and interesting to what we deﬁne as our core audiences, and to be faithful, as well as experiment and play with that. It’s a balancing act in terms of programming that I’m sure you are very aware of. The main thing is that the programming has to be good. No amount of publicity, no amount of money poured into communications, and no amount of social media will cover mediocre exhibitions.

Another important thing is to understand whom it is we are trying to speak to. The most important audience for me is . . . you know, I’m not going to do a great show unless I’m deeply interested in a subject, and so I’m always aware of that, and I’m always aware of this small circle of people who I think might be interested in the shows that the museum could be doing. I don’t try to think about the tourists, or the people who are in Park Slope, or the people who are in the Upper East Side. I think about this very small circle that starts with myself and who could be interested in what we do.

Ingrid Chu: And yet, I know you have, from what I’ve seen in the past, had programs with a very dedicated and large following. So, regardless of perhaps your personal objectives, it seems like the museum has reached out to a larger audience. Also, the fact that, for example, in your current exhibition you have an artist [An Xiao] who is documenting her journeys online through Tumblr, and making note of the fact that you mentioned thinking about “Who are we?”—you are deﬁnitely touching upon how people have a different way of living even though they all have a commonality in being Chinese.

Herb Tam: Right.

Ingrid Chu: And being Chinese American.

Herb Tam: Right.

Ingrid Chu: Although in my case, being Chinese Canadian living in America. [laughs.] Anyway, I like what you said, that it starts from you.

Vol. 11 No. 4 77 This relates to my ﬁnal question, and that is, how do you see your personal narrative reﬂected in the museum and its activities?

Herb Tam: I do, and, obviously, more and more so, because I am here now. I really didn’t see this reﬂected in the museum before I started. That’s not to say that what was happening here in any way was bad—it just wasn’t my kind of museum.

Ingrid Chu: Well, this museum is about stories, and also about narrative and storytelling.

Herb Tam: Sure.

Ingrid Chu: And identifying with one’s own narrative within a broader culture. So my interest is how you, in wanting to identify as Chinese American in relation to the museum before you worked here, are ﬁnding ways to do so now. I do not mean in terms of outlining your personal journey but how you parlay that into wider questions of self-representation and presenting this to larger audiences.

Herb Tam: That’s the most important thing. I felt Yan Deng, TWO ARTISTS, 2010, digital C print, 63.5 x like there needed to be a museum, an institution, 50.8 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Museum of Chinese in a cultural space that could deﬁne what and America, New York. who we are—not just to ourselves, that’s less important—but to the larger public. Because, like you said, you have one experience that’s very unique. I have one that’s very unique and plenty of others have their own stories. While there are overlaps and ways that we see eye to eye, there are also many perspectives that don’t overlap within our community, and I think the broader public has to see that. They also have to see that what we produce as artists, as designers, as critics, as intellectuals is unique and really important, and perhaps uniquely American, too. In the same way that other museums present speciﬁc cultures in a way that’s very rich, and dense, and complex, there hasn’t really been one for contemporary Chinese/Asian American culture on that same level, and I think that this could be the place. Hopefully, that’s somewhere we will get to at some point.

Notes 1 The Museum of Chinese in America was located at 70 Mulberry Street beginning in 1984. The museum’s archives remain in this still active location, although the exhibition and primary ofﬁce spaces moved when the museum relocated to its current location at 215 Centre Street in Manhattan. 2 Founded in 1980 as the New York Chinatown History Project by historian John Kuo Wei Tchen and Chinatown resident and activist Charles Lai, the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) is “dedicated to preserving and presenting the history, heritage, culture and diverse experiences of people of Chinese descent in the United States.” See http://www.mocanyc.org/about/. 3 This practice has been held since the museum’s inception. 4 America through a Chinese Lens, curated by Herb Tam, and June 4, 1989: Media and Mobilization Beyond Tiananmen Square, curated by Ryan Lee Wong, April 26–September 10, 2012. 5 There are three Chinatown districts throughout New York City: one in Manhattan, one in Flushing, in Queens, and one in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. 6 As stated in the America through a Chinese Lens exhibition brochure. 7 Lee Mingwei: The Travelers, October 20, 2011–March 26, 2012. 8 The Arab Spring was a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests occurring in the Arab world that began on December 18, 2010. Occupy Wall Street began on September 17, 2011, in New York’s Zuccotti Park, and has since sparked an international movement aimed at redressing economic inequality both through protest and other activities.

78 Vol. 11 No. 4 Voon Pow Bartlett Welcome to the Birdhead World Again, London Paradise Row Gallery, London March 9–April 7, 2012

nframed black-and-white photographs abounded on the walls of Paradise Row Gallery; some two hundred photographs Uwere neatly pinned up in groups of six, eight, and more. The conﬁguration appeared to be dictated by the space itself rather than by style or content, and a cursory glance revealed a somewhat disparate record of seemingly randomly shot everyday activities in and around the Birdhead artists’ hometown of Shanghai.

Their style recalled the genre of documentary street photography with what appeared to be a diverse range of approaches to picture making—from simple snapshots akin to Facebook photos to large-scale photographs taken with more sophisticated equipment such as a large format camera, perhaps further supported by lighting gear. Some were created using throwaway cameras, and others appeared to be old found photographs. This assortment of images and techniques led one into thinking that all these photographs had been collected over an extended period of time—days, weeks, or even years.

The monochromatic reportage style lacks any obvious theme or reference to class, creed, or politics, except perhaps one of the quotidian. It could be a challenge to accumulate as many images as possible, to capture the everyday life of the people in the street, a sort of discipline without discipline. There are pictures of young boys and girls loaﬁng about, young men and women in a lighthearted leisurely mode of eating, dancing, and going about their day-to-day activities; of parks, lakes, and garden sculptures; of crowds, couples, singles, and families; of pretty girls, plain girls, ordinary looking guys, and a couple of men kissing. Indeed, Katie Hill’s essay on the exhibition was entitled “The World of Birdhead: Loaﬁng and Laughing.”1

It would perhaps be more revealing to note what is absent instead of identifying what is present within these photographs. One might ask: What do we expect from images of Shanghai—an international metropolis, the most inﬂuential centre for ﬁnance, international trade, culture, science, and technology in East China? Shanghai is a popular tourist destination, with a pulsating urban development that preceded even what we all have come to know of modern China today. Palpably absent from these photographs are the touristy images, the perfect blend of modern and traditional cultures. Click onto any website about visiting the “Paris of the Orient,” or “Pearl of China,” one will come across a typical offer to include Jade Buddha Temple, Fresh Water Pearl Gallery, the Shanghai Museum and the Silk Factory.

Vol. 11 No. 4 79 Also visibly absent are any recognizable images of the iconic skyscrapers Birdhead, installation view of Welcome to Birdhead of the Pudong New Area and the World Financial centre, the old colonial World Again, London, 2012. © Birdhead. Courtesy of the buildings that line the Bund, the French Concession District, the traditional artists and Paradise Row, peace and tranquility of Yuyuan gardens, the shops and crowds of Nanjing London. area, and the leisurely activity of the tourists and the nouveau riche having coffee on Xin Tian Di. Western customs and Chinese traditions intertwine to form an indelible and memorable impression that most visitors to Shanghai have come to expect.

Birdhead, Untitled, 2011, cellulose black-and-white prints, 100 x 121 cm. © Birdhead. Courtesy of Paradise Row Gallery, London.

The photographs do not overwhelm by their glossy, lustrous, or technically refined qualities, and to quote Keats, the description “A Thing of Beauty” does not leap to attention. The simplicity may be a ploy to compensate with content, which conveys an endearing sense of freedom, reflecting an undercurrent of post-Cultural Revolution elation and a gratification of the status quo. The exhibition as a whole communicates a harmonious missive, much as did the opening of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. On the whole, this collection of photographs evokes an air of candid and personal optimism, much like snapshots of a teenager on a school outing. However, there is a distinct tinge of nostalgia created by these isolated, seemingly unconnected events. The effect is more self-indulgent than didactic,

80 Vol. 11 No. 4 Birdhead, installation view although also open and vulnerable. Is the picture of a pretty girl a cover of of Welcome to Birdhead World Again, London, 2012. a Canto–pop CD or a wistful recall of a ﬁrst girlfriend? Are the pictures of © Birdhead. Courtesy of the artists and Paradise Row, nightclub life and two men kissing a record of a drunken evening out or London. social commentary on youth culture in Shanghai?

Birdhead comprises the duo Song Tao and Ji Weiyu, who were born in the late 1970s, during the post–Cultural Revolution period. Many artists of their generation show a nostalgic recall for the revolutionary zeal that seems absent in today’s youth; some of these artists lament that it has been replaced by contemporary bourgeois values. Others believe that capitalism has enslaved the Chinese masses and that the revolutionary spirit of the past has dissipated. Thus any representations of liberty and the revolutionary appear to be infused with signiﬁcance, with value—“values are that which is worth being wanted.”2 With its indexical and symbolic nature, the camera becomes a tool to penetrate into a greater level of truth, to reveal this complex web of vigour that China is experiencing, or perhaps of a new form of relationship with it. Birdhead has a basic visual vocabulary that is akin to recurring Facebook themes, of friends and family communicating with each other, operating on a personal level that touches upon the universal quotidian, an ostensibly classless naive observation of a routine, a fabric of the familial, or the ties of guanxi, an established mode of relationships and networking within a Chinese society.3 The age-old guanxi are still valued today as the threads that bind together the fabric of society. These glimpses of truth and sincerity encapsulated in the photographs appear to act as salvation from the loss of any revolutionary ideals but nonetheless fuel a sense of nostalgia and sometimes of alienation that is endemic to urban life.

The monochromatic quality of Birdhead’s work may also seem anachronistic in relation to the colourful artworks of the post–Cultural Revolution period, whose commodiﬁcation has become cultural fast food. Nevertheless, there is an intellectual tendency in China for nostalgic representation to substitute historical consciousness, not as a trend of thought or even a form of resistance to the destructive forces of modernization and commercialization, but as fashion. As the most marketable of commodities, culture is commodiﬁed “to contain and dissolve the anxiety of everyday life.”4

Vol. 11 No. 4 81 Imbued within these photographs is a perspicacity that demonstrates that all day long we are bombarded by a barrage of narratives from the visual and textual world—from journalism, advertising, and television. Today’s media have replaced the traditional roles of the theologians and soothsayers and even teachers, village elders, or other role models of bygone days. A philosophical view is that our society has become one deﬁned by stories, by citations of stories, and by the interminable recitation of stories. These stories appear to have a providential and predestined function, to have a sort of control over our lives. The narrations that we see on a daily basis in social media such as Facebook, and in China, Weibo, now seem to constitute our orthodoxy and constantly tell us what we should believe. Some scholars consider that “this establishment of the real is the most visible form of our contemporary dogmas.”5

The mere simplicity of Birdhead’s photographs solicits the possibility of some hidden depth. Are these photographs representations of the truth or a simulacrum of the truth? Are they theatre or farce? Are they ineffable or mystical constituents of the photographic language? There may be no visible tension within each photograph, but what was central in the exhibition was the tension between each photograph in the way they were installed on the gallery walls, which forced one to think about the events that surround the click of the camera—that is, the before and the after.

Jeff Wall’s Mimic (1982) is a good Jeff Wall, Mimic, 1982, transparency in lightbox, 198 illustration of the recording of x 228.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. an event that brings to mind the preceding and succeeding events that happen within seconds of the click. The impenetrability of Wall’s visual language forces the viewer to work harder and to look longer for obscure details that might offer us a clue to some hidden meaning. The sense of opaqueness educates viewers not to jump to the conclusion that there might be something missing in the photograph, but, rather, to consider what they themselves might be lacking.

Is Birdhead trying to emulate a “painter of modern life,” a designation that the nineteenth century art critic Charles Baudelaire once used in describing Eduard Manet? In presenting a courtesan as a modern Venus, a prostitute as a modern nude, and whilst quoting Renaissance artists such as Raphael and Titian, Manet made painting modern. Like Manet, Birdhead’s casual snapshots, unframed and pinned to the wall, may constitute a nod towards a photographic antitheses of traditionally accepted notions of “good” drawing or “ﬁnish,” whether in Western or Chinese canons.

It may also be useful to consider Baudelaire’s use of the term flâneur to describe Birdhead in the context of this exhibition. Baudelaire referred to the flâneur as the “passionate spectator,” someone who fades into the crowd, unnoticed, using Constantin Guys as the example, a bohemian hero, an outsider, the “observer, philosopher, flâneur,” “the painter of the passing

82 Vol. 11 No. 4 moment and. . . a man of the crowd.”6 Baudelaire added, “the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electric energy.” “Monsieur Guys,” he writes, due to the necessary haste to record what he saw, “drew like a barbarian, or a child . . . producing primitive scribbles.”7 Would Baudelaire declare Birdhead to be artists or men “of the world,” passionate and curious about life?8 Does Birdhead’s casual picture- taking come into the realm of the “modern painter,” capturing life in and of an instant, almost without recourse to planning, reﬂection, and subjectivity? This “modern” way of working in the nineteenth century was very different from earlier traditional methods in which an artist would look, see, notate, and, then, using his memory, complete his thought later, in a sketch-like record—in other words, going through a process of subjectivization. Although the brief encounters presented in Birdhead’s photographs at ﬁrst glance reveal little about what took place at the moment of their taking, they are indeed an imitation of life, revealing a passion and a curiosity that are based on resemblances, expressions, and inferences.

Photography has been popular with Chinese contemporary artists as an alternative medium to traditional ink or Western-style oil painting. It possesses an inherent contradiction in its ability to simultaneously embody the symbolic, literal, and metonymic, making art part of an exciting global technological revolution, providing an alternative progression from what many Chinese artists consider the shackles of a thousand-year-old painting tradition. Birdhead is using this relatively new language to describe scenes that are local for them, to try to give the local sense a glocal feel, to translate human experience onto material light-sensitive surfaces.

If indeed these black-and-white photographs are following in the footsteps of contemporary photography, then, once again, useful comparisons can be made with Jeff Wall. Indeed, Wall considers his own work to echo the “painting of modern life.” Wall’s artistic investigation also rests on the analysis of the technical possibilities offered by photography, attributing to it a function that is not merely a passing record of reality.9

Birdhead’s photographs do not manifest any form of intervention or collaboration with the subjects. No micro-gestures are discernably exposed to reveal any notion of sociological, racial, or national typologies. However, that is not to say they do not exist, perhaps as in Wall’s work, there is an invisibility of theatre or artiﬁce that is occluded by a cultural miasma that one might be able to peer into more closely if one were more familiar with the local culture of Shanghai.

Birdhead, Untitled, 2011, In Birdhead’s work, people are not bodies swept cellulose black-and-white print, 100 x 121 cm. © Birdhead. along by grand narratives, as in Song Tao’s Courtesy of Paradise Row Gallery, London. earlier work Pride (2004), which recalls history painting such as Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix (1830) or even the historical photographic Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (1945) by Joe Rosenthal. Take, for example, some of Birdhead’s images of schoolboys. These appear to be ordinary boy-next-door

Vol. 11 No. 4 83 type that you might imagine encountering Birdhead, Untitled, 2011, cellulose black-and-white print, on any urban street. One image features 100 x 121 cm. © Birdhead. Courtesy of Paradise Row two schoolboys placed centre stage against a Gallery, London. background of a pedestrian crossing with a skewed alignment. The boy on the right looks as if he has been caught as a truant, while the other is nonchalantly texting away. Another photo shows two younger boys fooling around in a carefree manner playing with toy guns and aiming them at the photographer.

Jeff Wall, Boy Falls From Tree, 2010, colour photograph, 305.3 x 226 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Not only are any traces of grand narrative absent from these photographs, all indications of drama are carefully abstained from, leaving behind only the banal. This can be seen by examining the stark differences between Birdhead’s and Jeff Wall’s portrayals of boys. Wall’s Boy Falls From Tree (2010) captures misadventure in motion. Once acquainted with Wall’s work, it is as if a veil has been pulled from our eyes with the boy’s dramatically twisted body falling past a garden shed raising the question of its reality. Everything about the photograph now appears stage-managed, down to the boy’s whole body; his arms, legs, and head—which, upon closer inspection, seem to be positioned in a most unnatural fashion. Even the garden shed, although looking suitably weathered, is set next to an idealized middle class suburban house as well as a lawn, tree, and fence, all of which look as if they could belong on a stage. It is as though Wall has used photography to sanitize real life.

Wall’s well-documented methods contain a wealth of witty theatricality that we are unable, from just visiting this particular Birdhead exhibition, to discern. This could be derived from the ostensibly absent-minded way in which their photographs are taken, neither composed nor cropped to any exactitude. Skylines are skewed, walls and pillars tilt, and roadside curbs are shot at an angle. They represent almost serendipitous moments of everyday life that the artists captured around them as they move through the city. Although Wall is also making a comment on everyday life, his is a heightened image of a misadventure that will become lodged forever into

84 Vol. 11 No. 4 the fabric of the boys’ identity, whereas the boys in Birdhead’s images will likely only marvel at the carefree naivete of their youth, with possibly little of it remaining a lasting memory for them.

Comparison with Jeff Wall further elucidates the distinctions between serendipity and stage-managing. Birdhead’s photographs appear to lack the intense stimulation of the gaze and an unremitting interrogation that characterizes Wall’s approach. They project more of a casual glance, as if restrained by the guilt of voyeurism, displaying a respect for privacy that is perhaps culturally speciﬁc to the Chinese and likely a comment on local culture.

This exhibition could be read as an experiment with language, much like the way the medieval and Renaissance painters ﬁrst represented a visual perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed in art. Whereas face-to-face conversations and letter writing were common in past generations, images of life such as found in social media Web sites represent a contemporary manner of communication, leading to amateur photography taking on a major role that is replacing the traditions of speaking and writing. Web sites such as Facebook and Weibo have now become a mode of practice, and of popular expression, that almost transcend age and social status. Birdhead’s style recalls this popular language to communicate life in their hometown as they experience it, to reveal a little bit of the history, people, and space, as well as the good and bad of the everyday—like the confession of a voyeur.

Does Birdhead see itself as an ordinary participant in the city, living “below the thresholds at which visibility begins?”10 Are they walking through the city, being “wandersmanner, following the thick and thin of an urban ‘text’ as they write,” having an intimate knowledge like that of “lovers in each other’s arms?”11 The result of this strategy, if it is a strategy, is a network of observations of local life that assembles a story of Shanghai that is neither spectacle nor panoptic, neither composed nor manipulated, but fragmented, weaving the cursory snippets of life into a whole that is the quotidian. These photographs deploy and decontextualize an imagery of cosmopolitan Shanghai commonly, or previously, known to visitors and those from the commercial world to become part of an “opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city.”12

Birdhead’s subjects are not social outcasts, Wang Shuo-type characters such as mangliu (tramps) or liumang (hooligans), but are in fact “gentile [sic] latter-day drop outs or leisure seekers,” local ﬂavoured ﬂâneurs.13 Wall’s depictions of hobos and deviants elicit an unease, alienation, or even a mild fear. Birdhead’s images appear to evoke an outward appearance of overall ease of existence, security, and belonging, but somehow also manage to echo Wall’s disquietude. Is theirs an act of detached documentation, as Christopher Isherwood would say, ‘‘I am a camera, simply an instrument that dispassionately documents the world ?”14 Does its everydayness extend beyond its content to denote the very act of photography, to amplify the allure of the action of opening and closing the camera lens, to highlight the instantaneity that persists in photography?

Vol. 11 No. 4 85 By its association with a historically circumscribed interdisciplinary discourse that comments on social, political, and ethnological issues, photography is an ideal tool for the interrogation of its captured images. However, Birdhead’s photographs do not impose, like a “cancerous growth of vision,” where society is characterized by a visual journey, a sort of “epic of the eye.”15 Instead, they speak softly or even mutely, inviting their audience to make of their layers of visual text what they will, to merely provide the raw material of silent histories, histories that perhaps they consider to have been unacknowledged or uncharted in order to be transformed into the memorable. Looking at these modestly sized prints—none are larger than sixty-one centimeters in dimension— one is overwhelmed by the overall aura of impassivity instilled in their contemporary world, with the effect of shifting the focus from the meaning of the photographs to the self.

Furthermore, Birdhead may have adopted a strategy to expose the exhibition viewer as the voyeur, introducing an art that is anything but passive. It is possible to imagine that a different world (the viewer’s) slips into the artist’s place, rendering the “work of art” habitable, like a rented apartment. The analogy is in the way a tenant can transform another person’s property into a space borrowed for the transient moment.

Again, as with Facebook, this process of borrowing is imbricated within the strategies of modernity; the procedures of contemporary consumption appear to constitute a subtle art of residential tenants who know how to insinuate their countless differences into the original habitat. Faces on Facebook become friends, even unwittingly, by merely being on screen for a long enough period. Strangers insinuate themselves into your life. Cultural works are created from a whole array of personal languages, not necessarily referential as traditional works of art and writing, but by a whole community that leads to a compilation of their generation into a book.16

Birdhead is part of the generation after the Cultural Revolution to have been exposed to the massive global changes wrought by a phenomenal technological revolution. There is a sense that Song Tao and Ji Weiyu have become like foreigners at home, in the midst of their local culture, intertwined in the complexity of the urban quotidian. Under the inﬂuences of the digital global village, are they trying to recapture and come to terms with their recent history, perhaps gripped in a nostalgic fervour, of the Cultural Revolution days and before, made more poignant as theirs is a generation on the edge of a chasm separating them from their parents? This kind of nostalgia might be felt by Birdhead—acutely and imaginatively—but it is not an era they can return to as they have neither experienced nor lived through it.

These photographs make a contribution to the understanding of contemporary Chinese art that is perhaps based upon Western rather than Chinese historical and cultural theories from the point of view of Chinese artists from the mainland.17 The images exult a song of resistance, perhaps to question the validity of imposing a Western modernity upon a Chinese context. Ultimately they serve to identify a more complex causal framework inﬂuencing ﬁne art discourses globally.

86 Vol. 11 No. 4 An example of another Chinese artist borrowing from the Western canon is Song Dong, who uses the tactics of Marcel Duchamp and the Situationists by displaying everyday items as art. His exhibition Waste Not, which consists of his deceased mother’s innumerable domestic objects, has travelled thousands of miles around the world.18 Jenny Gilbert of The Independent writes, “A life told in stuff. Most of it useless and unlovely, and yet strangely affecting.”19 This “unlovely” stuff represents marks of active and labouring hands for which these things composed the daily routines, the fascinating presence of absences, reminding Song Dong and members of his family of past members whose traces were everywhere in the exhibition. Birdhead’s photos are equally full of everyday images, even abandoned, salvaged objects, and, through them, the ordered murmurs of a hundred past or possible villages. By means of these imbricated traces, one begins to dream of a countless combination of existences.

Every picture in the Birdhead exhibition constitutes only part of a picture, and not the Shanghai that one might expect. Birdhead has left out the ubiquitous tourist elements, taking viewers out of their comfort zone. To quote Andreas Gursky, the viewer is “not invited to consider a speciﬁc place along the river, but, rather, an almost ‘platonic’ ideal of the body of water as it navigates the landscape.”20 So perhaps Birdhead is showing the platonic ideal of Shanghai or simply of a universal city, and instead of digital manipulation, they just left out the elements that bothered them. It is also a way of redrawing the world in terms of informational communities instead of territorial groups, with artistic thinking where the setting of informational problems takes priority over the territorial appearance.21

Notes 1 Katie Hill, Welcome to Birdhead World Again (London: Paradise Row Gallery, 2012), unpaginated. 2 Henri Lefebvre, Key Writings, ed. Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas and Eleonore Kofman (New York and London: Continuum, 1971), 76. 3 Guanxi can be defined as a system of social classification and fiduciary morality in which can be found “the mutual dependence of person on person in a network of dyadic reciprocities.” Meyer Fortes, “Kinship and the axiom of amity,” in Kinship and the Social Order (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). 4 A. Dirlik and Zhang Xudong, eds., Postmodernism and China (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 206–09. 5 Michel de Certeau, “The Establishment of the Real,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 185–86. 6 Jeanne S. M. Willette, Baudelaire and the Painter of Modern Life, Art History Unstuffed, Friday, August 27th, 2010, http://www.arthistoryunstuffed.com/baudelaire-the-painter-of-modern-life/. 28.4.12. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Digital Museum of Naples City of Art, The Donnaregina Foundation, Palazzo Donnaregina, The Thinker, 1986, http://www.museomadre.it/opere.cfm?id=449. 22.4.12. 10 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Hill, “Welcome to Birdhead World Again,” unpaginated. 14 Christopher Townsend, “On Drawing,” Art Monthly April 2012, 5. 15 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xxi. 16 Ibid., xxii. 17 Ibid., 18. 18 Song Dong: Waste Not, The Curve, Barbican, London. February 15–June 12, 2012. 19 Ibid. 20 “Andreas Gursky’s Rhein II sets photo record,” BBC News Entertainment and Arts, quoting the auctioneer Christie’s, November 11, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15689652,. 21 “Infography vs Geography,” an exploration by Luis Camnitzer, Uruguayan artist, Professor Emeritus of Art, State University of New York. E-mail invitation to a Train lecture, University of the Arts, London, June 6, 2012.

Vol. 11 No. 4 87 David Ho Yeung Chan Michael Lin: Model Home/Model Museum Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai March 10–June 3, 2012

Michael Lin, Kiasma Day Bed, 200, emulsion on wood, pillows. Courtesy of the artist and Kiasma Museum, Helsinki.

ichael Lin’s body of work includes sound, design, painting, and architecture. Known for his large-scale installations using decorative patterns, Lin creates, in his own words, “an M 1 unremarkable place of respite” a temporary yet pleasurable dwelling. For Lin, space is generic, but place possesses its own specificity and necessitates a physical experience. While the audiences are often captivated by the artwork’s remarkable colour patterns, this appreciation can come at the expense of taking advantage of the potential for social interaction within a site-specific environment. For example, upon first viewing his Kiasma Day Bed (2001), shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma at 2001, one might have considered it a minimalist sculpture, but, in fact, the object was a communal bed on which museum visitors are invited to take a brief nap. At a group exhibition titled Odyssey(s) (2004) held at the Shanghai Gallery of Art, Lin transformed an atrium into a half pipe for skateboarders. The shuttling movement of the skateboarders alluded to another form of travel, one that ties in nicely with the exhibition concept of looking at how artists who are living in the diaspora negotiate their own displacement. Putting the spectacular quality of both interventions aside, they convey Lin’s genuine desire to pry open a new social sphere that is playful and steeped in the language of aesthetics.

88 Vol. 11 No. 4 Michael Lin, There on the Bund 29.09–15.11.04, 2000, skaters on emulsion on wood. Photo: Vittorio Motedo. Courtesy of the artist and Shanghai Gallery of Art.

Since moving to Shanghai in 2006, Lin has taken an ongoing interest in exploring the many vernacular nuances of the city. Model Home at the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) was Lin’s ﬁrst major solo exhibition at a museum in mainland China, a watershed project that allowed the artist to re-examine his own creative lineage. Model Home, was not a conventional exhibition per se, but a proposition that reconsidered modes of artistic production. Mindful of the RAM’s history of active public programming, the artist proposed a new project that makes the whole process of producing an artwork and its labour transparent for the public to assess and to question the museum as a viable and responsive cultural platform. With the hype surrounding many ambitious artworks by Chinese artists during the past two decades, the role of labour in a fast-moving art world is often taken for granted. And so Lin relates two art historical references to the context of contemporary China, the Bauhaus, which coincides with the founding of the RAM building in 1933, and the Russian Constructivist movement, as a means of critiquing current artistic production and society. Lin claims:

The basic concepts for this exhibition refer to Russian Constructivism and Bauhaus theories, because the artists during this period in history were facing great changes in the world from industrialization to the creating of a socialist society. At this juncture in history artist sought out ways in which they could position themselves contribute and question these changes. 2

Model Home revolves around a large-scale wall painting that covers the interior walls of the entire museum in a pattern taken from a quilt owned by a worker who is employed by the artist. The focus here is not on the wall painting itself; the painting project is an impetus to uncover and examine the process of producing an artwork and to study how it affects our perception.

To realize this interdisciplinary project, Lin recruited a number of partners to collaborate. Tokyo-based architect Atelier Bow-Wow designed new

Vol. 11 No. 4 89 Michael Lin, installation view of Model Home/ Model Museum. Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

living quarters for the workers who Michael Lin, workers’ housing during installation of Model were hired for the wall painting Home/Model Museum, Rockbund Art Museum, project; Chinese video artist Cheng Shanghai. Ran documented the process of installation and the daily lives of the hired workers; Lou Nanli, a local sound artist, used a computer to translate the painted patterns into Michael Lin, Michael Lin, installation view of Model sound that was played throughout Home/Model Museum. Courtesy of Rockbund Art the exhibition venue and during Museum, Shanghai. the duration of the exhibition; and Li Xiangning, a professor of theory and criticism from Shanghai’s Tongji University, invited students to conduct an urban analysis of Shanghai. During the preparation for and process of wall painting, the workers were offered accommodation at newly designed living quarters located just outside of the museum speciﬁcally built for this project. These temporary structures were then relocated to the exhibition hall of the museum and also on the balcony for display before the exhibition opened. When I visited the empty living quarters on the balcony, in the absence of the workers and with the Pudong skyline as the backdrop, I was reminded that not a single part of this city has been left untouched by migrant workers, and behind the mirage of economic progress lies their human labour. Progressing to a lower ﬂoor of the museum, I saw two workers’ quarters placed side by side in the exhibition hall, one of them containing objects left by the workers, the other left empty with one of its facades now completely open. The design of these semi-permanent structures reiterates the emphasis on form and function that was synonymous with the Bauhaus.

90 Vol. 11 No. 4 Michael Lin, installation Within a museum context, these dwelling view of Model Home/ Model Museum. Courtesy units appeared to be out of place, yet they of Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. were made coherent based on their linear and structural qualities in relationship to the wall painting which bore Suprematist colour patterns. Lin intervened with such a visual accord by the use of ambient sound to disorient the audience and to question the site and its meaning. Inspired by Alexander Rodchenko’s workers’ club presented in Paris in 1925, Lin converted the second floor of the museum into a workers’ club, with cabinets showcasing research findings by university students on Shanghai and video documentation on the project. Inside the same room was a custom-made dining table and chairs designed by Lin for hosting a series of discussions and film screenings. Lin stages a total art environment, a kind of backdrop that bridges art, design, video under one roof to host a series of social gatherings and events and to encourage the public to active engage with a cultural institution.

Michael Lin, installation view of Model Home/ Model Museum. Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

Vol. 11 No. 4 91 Model Home was a courageous project for RAM to undertake as it critiqued the role and function of an institution. A parallel title for this exhibition could be Model Museum; could it be an aspiring model for a contemporary art museum now? Lin, while conscious of relational aesthetics, an approach that focuses on the engagement with a community to give art its meaning, decided to push this discussion further. He did this by, first, using the exhibition to create an open platform in order to facilitate a broader discussion on the relevance of museums and contemporary art practices; second, to downplay the role of the artist from a creator to one of provocateur; and, third, to actively engage the audiences and stakeholders from a specific locality through debate and discussion. This project was not about arriving at a unified meaning on the issue of artistic production; rather, it operated as a subtext to enable a discussion on a more adaptable institutional model that answers to the creative needs of artists and addresses the contingent quality of contemporary art that is so relevant to today’s world. The collaborative components of this project are well conceived, with precise orchestrations, it may be difficult for the audience to understand the work’s many subtitles in one go. That the artist has disclosed the process of production to the public through an interdisciplinary platform does not mean the audience will necessarily grasp the full, self- reflexive nature of this project. While not interested in launching an institutional critique or exposing the process of consecrating the cultural value of an art object, Lin and his collaborators expose the unbridgeable gap between the expected agencies of an institution and the interests of the common people. In light of the many new museums that will surely be built in China in the near future, Lin’s proposition is visionary and pertinent, and it invites museum directors and cultural bureaucrats to ponder the very spirit behind their grand plans before their museums open.

Notes 1 Michael Lin and Gerald Matt, “ The Body as a Site of Culture: Michael Lin in Conversation with Gerald Matt,” in Michael Lin: Kunsthalle Wien project space 20.4–29.5.2005, eds. Sabine Folie and Gerald Matt (Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 2005), 60. 2 Michael Lin, “Model Home, A proposition by Michael Lin Exhibition Guide” (Shanghai: Rockbund Art Museum, 2012), 11.

92 Vol. 11 No. 4 Jonathan Goodman Sarah Sze: Close Up and Far Away

arah Sze’s exhibition takes up just two rooms on the second ﬂoor of the Asia Society in New York City, but it manages to feel quite Scomprehensive spanning a good part of her already distinguished career. Even though she is only in her early forties, her relatively unknown pencil drawings, many of them in scroll format, and her justly celebrated three-dimensional works, whose quirky collections of objects and materials reﬂect an overall improvisatory intelligence, Sze demonstrates that she possesses a masterful maturity. Her work concerns the long-studied problem of perspective, and her sensibility appears to occupy two physical orientations: close up and far away, positions in relationship to the object or sheet of paper that seem to side-step the middle distance. Sze brilliantly builds her objects out of all manner of throwaway materials—bits of paper, small lamps, plants, painted wires, water bottles, spare change, collapsible tables, clamps, paper towels, yarn, and so on. This lends her art an ad hoc, improvised feeling and calls the viewer’s attention to the particulars of space in her work, which, in its complexity, possesses anarchic implications even when the overall form of the work maintains its sense of integrity.

Sarah Sze, Random Walk Entropy, then, may be seen as a Drawing (Water), 2011, mixed media. Photo: Tom Powel. component of Sze’s conception Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New of space and postmodern artifice, York. and this enables her to make free associations between objects that have little in relation to each other; there is the sense that the “order” in her work is a momentary stay against the onset of confusion, and the extent of information becomes close to overwhelming with the massive conglomeration of bits and pieces of objects that confront us. Sze, whose background is Chinese and American and who has spent time in Japan, explores the relationship between the viewer and the scroll within traditional Asian painting, finding a precedent in its treatment of near and far points of view. Her dismissal of the usual relationships between the audience and the object, which is generally meant to be minutely studied and then deliver an overall gestalt experience, creates a disorienting effect for the viewer. Her sculptures pose some very basic questions about form and signification—primarily queries about the autonomy of the smaller objects that are used to build the larger structures;

Vol. 11 No. 4 93 the tension between the independence of the smaller things and their participation in a larger work serves to make Sze’s sculptures complex and intriguing. Also, if the idea of the Chinese scroll painting is taken further— to include the notion of a long walk—the entire presentation of all seven sculptures in one of the Asia Society’s galleries can be seen as conforming to a path that leads visitors around the room just as one might take a stroll alongside the painted ﬁgures in the horizontal scrolls in Asian art. In addition, the modes of seeing prompted by Sze’s art admit of her analytic intelligence, brought forth by a historical awareness of art and architecture, both of which Sze studied while she was an undergraduate at Yale University and then as a graduate student in ﬁne arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

The drawing Pile (2009) demonstrates a similarity to Sze’s sculptural works, which are better known despite her ongoing production of two-dimensional work; while her drawings maintain an autonomous integrity they also expand the dialogue between the two- and three-dimensional forms in her art. Pile is representative of Sze’s working method, one that is composed of finely detailed, often very small forms that culminate in structures that relate to architecture, city grids, and a complicated array of shapes that are both ordered and on the edge of disarray. Seeming to float in the air, the composition in Pile shows us a remarkable accumulation of vaguely architectural objects—wires, structural supports, stabilizing bars, a group of table lamps, etc. These architectural references not only invoke Sze’s college studies, but their technical complexity also fits in with the artist’s love for intricately articulated structures. As happens with most of the art Sze makes, it is the detail that demands close study, but the gestalt of the drawing’s overall design also can be appreciated when seen from a distance. The imagery in this drawing doesn’t really have a base, that is, a floor to support the intricacies of its seemingly functional form; the objects look as if they are suspended in space, even if they represent something so basic as plumbing. The result is that the entire picture appears to be floating away from us. If entropy can be considered a philosophical trope, it is surely present in Pile, whose parts are free falling within the design of the picture. And while we may not know the exact meaning of the pipes and recipient boxes, the overall impression is one of meaningful usefulness, without which the drawing would seem far more fanciful and unorganized than it actually is.

Sze’s First Scroll Drawing (1997) represents a more conscious effort on the part of the artist to connect with the tradition of Asian painting. Applied to long, somewhat narrow strips of paper, the scroll drawings represent small figures busy at tasks that prove difficult to delineate, given the small size of the drawings, and that take place inside and outside of what appears to be a generally urban environment. The figures in the details of the drawing are seemingly purposeful, if anonymous (because of their small size) in their activities. Unlike the natural landscapes that occur within some of Sze’s drawings, the ambience within this piece is rooted in the physical structures and places that characterize modern municipal space—perhaps a nod on the artist’s part to the metropolitan existence she has lived in Boston and New York City, where she now works. The density of detail does not overwhelm; instead, it communicates some of the random complexity we experience in contemporary life and urban life in particular.

94 Vol. 11 No. 4 Sarah Sze, Untitled, 2005, For the portrait drawings, perhaps the work that lithograph and silkscreen on rice paper, 116.8 x 40.6 cm. most of Sze’s admirers are less familiar with, she Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist. asked different individuals to relate twelve events that changed their lives. She then did drawings of these events that resulted in a composite portrait of the individuals involved. The project extends our knowledge of the artist, who so easily jumps from architecture to traditional Chinese and Japanese painting to an understanding of the events that can make up or alter a life. Indeed, here it is possible to imagine that some of life’s random, seemingly impersonal experiences are found in the form of a site-speciﬁc installation, reprised in Sze’s visual intelligence and sensibility. The sculptures are so complicated that they come close to making the task of description impossible; no single photograph of the work can do justice to the vast array of objects that seem to have been deliberately placed and yet possess no discernible pattern. But it is not confusion that the work conveys; her entropy, drawn as if caught in the middle of a moment of lost cohesion, cannot be entirely understood as falling apart. What Sze is really doing is investigating the notion of place—the space around us that she has for so long been fascinated with—and our relation to it. As she says, “With many installations you have this feeling that you’re entering an installation and then exiting an installation; there’s the real world and then the installation world. I wanted instead for this to be blurred for viewers to discover themselves at the center of the work without remembering how they got there.”1 This suggests that we, her audience, have our own responsibilities in understanding how we are meant to interact with the work that she presents us. To Sze’s credit, her work never places the viewer in a position of feeling inadequate or deeply confused; instead, it is a sense of wonder that leads us from one work to the next.

As for the sculptures, they are inspired collections of inconsequential objects that some might consider to be an anarchic mess if it were not for the tension between large and small, near and far, entertainment and profundity. Sze’s works demonstrate just how carefully she places the myriad pieces together—rather like a three-dimensional puzzle whose final appearance counter-intuitively denies a plan. But despite their randomly positioned components, the works feel both coherent and cohesive. A lot of these works are site specific—in the case of the Asia Society, Sze went so far as to place specific items—rocks and credit cards— on the top of the roof of the museum’s entrance. These objects are barely visible at night, but, at the same time, they hold a dialogue with the intricate placement of materials that make up the seven works inside the gallery.

In Sze’s wonderful paper and wood artwork that hangs on the wall, entitled Notepad (2008), lined paper is cut open and ﬁlled with a delicate, fragile architectural structure in which the pages, supported by exquisitely thin,

Vol. 11 No. 4 95 miniature struts, fold over each other. At the Top: Sarah Sze, Random Walk Drawing (Window), 2011, bottom, the structure pushes the paper forward mixed media. Photo: Tom Powel. Courtesy of the artist toward the viewer. Several sheets of paper are and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, curled under each other. Filling the opening in New York. Left: Sarah Sze, Notepad, one of the curling papers is a neatly constructed 2008, offset lithograph, laser engraved paper, 57.1 x 78.7 miniature ladder and stairs, which reminds the cm. Photo: LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, viewer of the delicacy of architectural models. Columbia University. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya As a work of art, technically, Notepad is a tour Bonakdar Gallery, New York. de force. Like all of Sze’s sculptures, the actual representation—the overall gestalt—is matched by the brilliant use of individual materials. This work reveals the presence of a skill that turns ordinary objects into magical components by an imagination oriented toward contemporary exploration of form and, at the same time, a near archeological willingness to suggest the past. Although Notepad is relatively simple if placed within the spectrum of Sze’s more complex constructions with small objects, it demonstrates her talent for building quirky works of art that merge the structure of buildings with sculpture. In contrast to Frank Gehry, who creates buildings that look like sculpture, Sze constructs sculptures that look at least partially architectural. The slippage between genres results in very compelling art, in part because the work embraces two categories we don’t necessarily recognize as being so closely related.

In another work, Real Time (2010), wooden dowels form a widening, opening structure that seems to be a thoughtful illustration of the single- point perspective as it increases its compass, while a nest of painted wire and wood occurs at a distance on an adjacent wall, suggesting the presence of a bird. Perusing the different works in the gallery, and noticing just how improvisatory the environment is, one has the sense that the pieces have just been installed and that their recent creation is a comment on the informal, but also highly predetermined, nature of Sze’s creativity. As Sze explains in an interview with the show’s curator and gallery director, Melissa Chiu, “One of the things that I have come to is the idea of something being experienced in the moment—that it has this quality of being experienced life, like live music or a live sports event.”2

Yet Sze’s work does much more than occur in the moment; its seeming fragility makes that moment exquisite—and time sensitive—to the point

96 Vol. 11 No. 4 of being breath-taking. The lyric beauty of her art is undeniable and is communicated through explorations that highlight the material usefulness of the objects she employs for her sculptures. In general, the arrangement of the myriad elements that comprise Sze’s art are site speciﬁc; the artist considered carefully the particular positioning of her sculptures in the gallery space. Just as the arrangement of the sculptures was consciously placed, so too were the particular elements of each individual piece. And the individual components make her art incredibly complex, offering ruminations about problems concerning the nature of an improvised, but also constructed, reality, which gives the work its aura of precarious, momentary balance. In some cases, the sculptures incorporate fans and lights that keep the elements moving and singled out for close inspection; Sze’s art gives the impression that equilibrium in life as well as in art is a matter of practical decisions that lead to a harmonious design.

Sarah Sze, Checks and Sze’s art implies as well a more expansive, Balances, 2011, stone, string, and ink on archival paper, generous acknowledgment of entities whose 190.5 x 45.7 x 5 cm. Photo: Jean Vong. Collection of Stuart individual dimensions may be small but whose and Sherry Christhilf. accumulation into large objects make for an construction far greater than the sum of its parts. In their complexity, her sculptures consist of systems in which the viewer must search for cohesion that at times can be difficult to apprehend, but they also reflect her particular aesthetic. In Checks and Balances (2011), Sze has Sarah Sze, Checks and Balances (detail), 2011, stone, produced a detailed black drawing that hangs string, and ink on archival paper, 190.5 x 45.7 x 5 cm. on the wall and that implies three-dimensional Photo: Jean Vong. Collection objects such as chairs, complicated spiraling of Stuart and Sherry Christhilf. circles and other geometric forms, and even the Roman Coliseum. Like the Chinese scroll paintings that have influenced her, in Checks and Balances the artist makes work that is both realist, in the sense that the components are actual objects, and dreamily imaginative, contributing to a paradox that reminds the viewer how the elements in the piece reveal themselves to sharp scrutiny both near to and far from the object or drawing. Sze is an artist of remarkable interior innovation, as well as being a formalist capable of juxtaposing images that connect with ancient history and up-to-the-moment architecture, among other genres. Her aesthetic is not so much a matter of contradiction, although it is a quality that plays a role in both the description and understanding of her art. Instead, it leans toward the synthesis of a dialectic of materials that suggests all manner of influence. Her art sums up the charged chaos of experience today, the massive number of objects that form the texture of our lives. Sze provides us with a mirror that not only reflects experience but also becomes part of the experience it describes. This is the extent of her achievement.

Notes 1 “The Line between Drawing and Sculpture: An Interview with Sarah Sze,” in Melissa Chiu, ed., Sarah Sze: Inﬁnite Line (New York: Asia Society Museum, 2011), 17. 2 “The Line between Drawing and Sculpture,” 19.

Vol. 11 No. 4 97 John Millichap Caochangdi PhotoSpring—Arles in Beijing

he Caochangdi PhotoSpring–Arles in Beijing festival returned to the Chinese capital on April 21, 2012, for its third annual Tedition. As in previous years, the festival took place as part of the Croisements Festival of French culture organized by the French Embassy in Beijing and was co-presented by Les Rencontres d’Arles, arguably one of the world’s leading photography festivals. It is the distinction of these partnerships that has allowed this event to continue as the only independent among more than ﬁfty photo summits that regularly take place in China— and the only one at all within the Chinese capital. This alone makes it important, as commented upon by Christopher Phillips, curator at the International Centre of Photography in New York City, who attended this year’s edition to present the Tierney Foundation Prize at the Three Shadows Photography Awards, the festival’s centerpiece.

Phillips’ comment is prescient. The curatorial independence of PhotoSpring is something to be championed. This fact, before all else distinguishes PhotoSpring as an essential platform for contemporary Chinese art. Yet, after three years—and four years of the Three Shadows Photography Award Exhibition—it is time to pause and reﬂect. Even as the market for Chinese photography has surged and the opportunity for exhibitions and dialogues has increased, it is legitimate to ask: Where do we go from here?

Not surprisingly for a festival that takes place under the aegis of the French Embassy, there was a strong Gallic ﬂavor to this year’s program, which included more than thirty exhibitions, screenings, talks, and workshops concentrated within the art districts of 798 and Caochangdi village located in the northeast of the city. Added to this were contributions by artists from the Americas, Asia, and other parts of Europe, which made this the most international of all editions of the festival so far.

A happy result of this was some genuine standout moments, and the organizers, led by Berenice Angremy of the Beijing-based art agency Thinking Hands, deserve credit for pulling together an event of such impressive range with limited resources. Moreover, the ofﬁcial selection of The Black Country by the British photographer Brian Grifﬁn as the headline exhibition was an elegant way to overcome cultural barriers and engage local audiences more deeply than merely presenting foreign artworks as objects of curiosity.

The Black Country, curated by François Hébel, director of Les Rencontres d’Arles and this year’s guest curator at PhotoSpring, explored the Brian

98 Vol. 11 No. 4 Grifﬁn’s upbringing in the tough, soot-blackened industrial towns of the English midlands by layering folk tradition, local history, and childhood memories in carefully arranged portraits and large-scale tableaus. The collection debuted in 2011 at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, but, in Beijing, these works found new resonance in the faded neighbourhood of Caochangdi, which has deep roots in heavy manufacturing but has struggled since the factories moved elsewhere.

In the full-length, life-sized image Jane Meets Davy Crockett (2010) Grifﬁn explores childhood memories of the 1950s television program and an early fanaticism for speedway motorcycle racing. The photograph shows a central ﬁgure holding a musket, poised for action. He is dressed in motorcycle leathers and wears a trapper’s fur hat; behind his left shoulder a woman looks on with hands clasped as in prayer. Tools and heavy equipment are visible in the background. The dramatic pose and epic scale of the work recalls classical religious painting, yet the surreal mix of details poignantly mimic the action of memory in its deliberate blurring of weekend heroes from a working-class childhood.

Similar references inform his picture Chainmakers (2010), in which a team of four men are shown poised to hammer a red-hot chain link. The subjects of the photograph are real-life chainmakers at a local factory still operating in the Black Country. In this image, Griffin arranges the group in exaggerated attitudes that lend an epic sense of drama and scale to the scene. Although clearly based upon Griffin’s own background and Western art history tradition, the transformation of the factory worker into heroic protagonist bears connections both to the characters portrayed in Chinese revolutionary propaganda posters and to modern –day Chinese factory workers in what is now the workshop of the world. Griffin may not be a headline-grabbing artist celebrity in China, yet this is an intelligent intelligent series to bring to PhotoSpring.

Hisaji Hara, A Study of the Other keynote exhibitions included “Because Cathy Taught Him What She Learnt,” 2010, inkjet Jean-Christian Bourcart’s often- print, dimensions variable. Courtesy of +3 Gallery, Beijing. traumatic photo essay Camden at C-Space Gallery, which Boucart describes as the United States’ most dangerous city. His series of photo portraits, video interviews, and journal entries show a population shattered by poverty, crime and violence and perhaps conﬁrmed perceptions held by some members of the audience, lately encouraged by the local media, of the US as a nation in vertiginous decline. Another exhibition, just around the corner from Three Shadows at the China Art and Archives Warehouse (CAAW), presented a diverse selection of photography and video installations from the collection of the Pays de la Loire Regional Fund for Contemporary Art, and PhotoSpring 2012 was dedicated to CAAW’s co-founder Frank Uytterhaegen, who passed away in December 2011. Meanwhile, across

Vol. 11 No. 4 99 Hisaji Hara, A Study of “Katia Reading,” 2009, inkjet print, dimensions variable. Courtesy of +3 Gallery, Beijing.

the courtyard from Three Shadows at +3 Gallery, Hisaji Hara from Japan and the Chinese academic Cai Meng examined the relationship between painting and photography in Hisaji’s exhibition of exquisite black-and- white photographs that meticulously re-create some of the best-known works by the French painter Balthus. Hara avoided some of the painter’s more explicit works. The photos also contained less of the sinister tones that inhabit the paintings of Balthus, and, instead, conjured up an impression of serene tranquility. Impressively, in a world now dominated by Photoshop and other photo re-touching techniques, Hara still favours the more labour- Intensive methods in the creation of his works. The presentation by Cai Meng and Hisaji Hara was one of the best attended of all those held on the opening weekend.

One of the problems for PhotoSpring has been its inability to persuade city authorities in Beijing to lend official endorsement. Taking this as their cue, local businesses have boycotted the event. In the past three years PhotoSpring has been unable to attract a single local company to participate as sponsor and this year was no different. The festival’s main sponsor was once again the French carmaker Peugeot. China’s only independent photo festival, therefore, walks a financial tightrope, and one expression of this is the peculiarly large part that commercial art galleries play in filling out the program.

The result was a diverse, albeit sometimes uneven, patchwork of exhibits in which one often came up short against very different levels of scale

100 Vol. 11 No. 4 and ambition. A concise sense of this variety could be found within a short walking distance from Three Shadows at Pekin Fine Arts, where the group exhibition I See China presented works by fourteen emerging photographers who all work in China.

The selection included both Western and mainland Chinese artists whose photography spanned a variety of themes and approach, from over- population and rampant materialism in Su Shen’s portraits of pampered mainland Chinese children to Martin Parr’s wry documentary series on Chinese holidaymakers at the beach. Occupying one entire wall of the gallery, however, Chen Changfen’s billboard-sized pig dominated the exhibition with its vast pink ﬂeshiness.

Chen Changfen, A Healthy Boar, 2009, C print, 566 x 866 cm. Courtesy of Pekin Fine Arts, Beijing.

An alternative approach could be found in the eclectic Photographic Oddities from the Archive of Modern Conflict at Chambers Fine Art, curated by the independent publishing house Archive of Modern Conflict. Here, visitors were invited to explore unlikely similarities and serendipitous convergences contained in a jumble of photo albums, artifacts, books, and videos—from pictures of shrapnel wounds in a medical textbook and fairground-style passé-tetes to a catalogue of fabric swatches for Palestinian Liberation Army uniforms. Here, divergence and incongruity was a deliberate strategy that yielded some surprising synergies. Books were also the inspiration for one of the most low-budget but more revealing successes of the festival in the exhibition of self-published photography catalogues at the Fodder Factory cafe, organized by the Beijing-based independent publisher Jia Zazhi. In a country where the publishing industry is tightly controlled, this selection of more than fifty independently produced titles demonstrated a thriving underground culture in Beijing that for the most part is entirely unknown beyond a small group of artists and amateur publishers.

Existing at the opposite extreme of the scale was Chen Xiaoyun’s solo exhibition Zhuiku Tablet Annotation, at ShanghART Beijing, which was confounding at the same time as it was fascinating. The celebrated Hangzhou-based artist is best known for his esoteric video works but more recently has turned to two-dimensional image making. At the gallery’s capacious Beijing space, he presented twelve large-format pictures that

Vol. 11 No. 4 101 were produced as both photography and Chen Xiaoyun, Zhuiku Tablet, Annotation (Give My Future to paintings. Each consisted, in different a Snake), 2012, C print, 120 x 80 cm. Courtesy of ShanghART configurations, of recurring elements— Gallery, Shanghai. bundles of twigs, pieces of clothing, and assorted props. In one image the viewer sees only the exposed backside and legs of a figure from between whose buttocks sprouts a large bundle of branches and twigs. In another, the twigs burst from the mouth of a startled-looking figure, as if caught in mid-shout.

Performance clearly still exerts an Chen Xiaoyun, Zhuiku Tablet, Annotation (State Terrorism important hold on Chen Xiaoyun’s in Ultimate Form of Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood), 2012, imagination, and these works very often C print, 120 x 80 cm. Courtesy of ShanghART Gallery, suggested highly polished video captures. Shanghai. Yet, free of any time-based structure, they succeed each other apparently at random, with no clear beginning or end. Maddeningly, Chen Xiaoyun’s surreal imagery stubbornly refuses any clear narrative, nor sense of logical progression. Instead, each image is composed of recurring motifs that are constantly re-presented and re-conﬁgured, like phrases in a piece of music.

Such works require time and perseverance. Yet, while there is no reason why an artist should not make works that are difﬁcult, now and again it felt as if Chen Xiaoyun was reveling in obfuscation simply for its own sake. The inclusion of paintings in the exhibition was also incongruous, particularly in the midst of a photography festival, and for these reasons it can be said that Zhuiku Tablet Annotation was not the success it might have been. Nevertheless, it was refreshing to ﬁnd an artist who is not afraid of risk and experimentation.

For most visitors, however, the main event of PhotoSpring was the Three Shadows Photography Award Exhibition. Work by twenty-three finalists was presented by a panel of international judges, selected from a field of more than three hundred and fifty entries. Entries were received from all over China and even overseas by photographers aged from sixteen to sixty.

Since its launch in 2009, the award has provided a unique indicator of current photographic practice in China as well as a valuable networking opportunity. This year’s theme, Crossover, was intended to highlight an emphatic change from the past, as increasing numbers of photographers engage with issues beyond those that might be narrowly deﬁned as “China-centric.”

Writing in the exhibition catalogue, Michiko Kasahara, curator at the Tokyo Museum of Photography, pointed to the triumph of globalization as a catalyst for this transformation. The evidence for this appeared in the tremor of anxiety that seemed to animate many of the works here, expressed in a series that addressed issues ranging from environmental degradation and economic uncertainty to the fate of individuals and communities caught in an increasingly homogenized, corporate world.

102 Vol. 11 No. 4 Zhu Feng’s Shanghai Zero Degree (2011) highlighted many of these issues and featured a series of studies of decorated hoardings as a metaphor for what Zhu Feng describes as “the separation of social classes.” These huge banners are often used to screen construction sites and typically display panoramas of vast forests, cascading waterfalls, or verdant gardens in full bloom. In Zhu Feng’s pictures, however, these vistas of cheerful optimism are punctured by the intrusion of everyday street detritus—a heap of garbage, a patch of weeds, or piles of construction debris. Zhu draws the viewer’s attention from imagined urban utopias to a reality in which living space is described by ownership and division.

Zhu Feng, Shanghai Zero Degree #4, 2004–11, C print, 35 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhu Feng, Shanghai Zero Degree 06-1105-14, 2004–11, C print, 35 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhu Feng, Shanghai Zero Degree 12-0478-20, 2004–11, C print, 35 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhu Feng, Shanghai Zero Degree 18-1003-04, 2004–11, C-print, 35 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Similar ideas informed Jia Xincheng’s series about the Uighur people of Xinjiang, China’s most westerly province. The Uighur are of Turkic descent, and ethnic and economic divisions have led to clashes between Uighur and Han Chinese communities, most recently in 2009, when riots in the provincial capital of Urumqi left one hundred and ﬁfty people dead. Discussion of the region is therefore a sensitive topic in China, and Jia Xincheng’s series was a bold attempt to document a community that is regarded by many Chinese with some degree of suspicion. Writing in the exhibition catalogue, Jia

Vol. 11 No. 4 103 Xincheng describes her own alarming experience of these tensions during the course of the project: “[C]ultural and linguistic barriers resulted in . . . confusion, and many times ended in clashes, sometimes attacks.”

Jia Xincheng began this series four years ago, and the images at Three Shadows represented only a fraction of the pictures she has made. They mainly consisted of informal portraits of mothers and children, entitled Balamez (2009), or “our children” in Uighur. Although selected to avoid overt political comment, the pictures’ loose, candid style eloquently describe the harsh conditions of day-to-day life while simultaneously offering a stark portrait of some of the losers in China’s race to riches. One image in particular powerfully captured this in its depiction of a child of three or four years old, struggling along a litter-strewn, mud-choked road between lines of sagging, rundown houses. Such images tell a harrowing story and highlight an uncomfortable dilemma; for if globalization is the undisputed orthodoxy of the early twenty-ﬁrst century, what fate awaits communities that are unable or even unwilling to compete? Today, this is a question as pressing for the Uighur as it is for middle-class European taxpayers or North African revolutionaries.

But, if globalization can be deﬁned in terms of division and fragmentation, it is also the incubator for some particularly assertive expressions of individuality. On the one hand, this could be seen in a number of “image diaries” on show. The low cost of digital technology and the popularity of social media sites has ensured that the online photo blog format retains huge popularity. Yet such ubiquity also begs the question of whether the simple act of recording an event necessarily makes it art worthy of hanging in an art gallery.

In a twist on this format, Zhu Mo offered selections from a series of 796 photos, comprising landscapes, still lifes, portraits and chance events that he took over the past couple of years. Each image represents one day during that period and is selected from dozens of images he took on each day. Meanwhile, Yan Yibo showed elements from his Undercurrents (2009-2011) series of several hundred pictures taken using a Lomo camera of urban details and detritus in Guangzhou and Beijing.

More satisfying and ambitious, however, was Geng Yi’s over-life-sized portraits of tattooed Chinese twenty-somethings entitled Embroidered Bodies (2010-2011). Body modification in China has grown in popularity over the past decade as international pop culture trends have replaced the cultural norms and codes of behaviour of an older generation. Geng Yi presented examples of some of its most committed adherents whose bodies are entirely covered by elaborate designs and patterns. Coming upon these pictures was a genuine thrill of scale and colour. According to the artist, such practices are symbolic of the transformations that have seen the “us” in Chinese society increasingly give way to the “I.” It was, however, the everyday details at the periphery of the images—the overflowing ashtray, the yellowing potted plant, or the plastic shopping bag doubling as a bin liner—in which Geng Yi showed his talent as a portraitist, providing a poignant human dimension to what atfirst sight appeared like a carnival exotic beasts and birds of paradise.

104 Vol. 11 No. 4 Geng Yi, Embroidered Bodies (Anarchism and the Nine Words), 2011, C print, 120 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Geng Yi, Embroidered Bodies (Dracula), 2011, C print, 120 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 11 No. 4 105 By contrast, Yang Yuanyuan’s A Zhang Jin, A Season on the Silk Road (Entries), 2010, silver Study of Childhood (2010-2011) was gelatin print, 50.8 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist. one of the few series to experiment with conventional narrative structure. Each work suggested a case study in which handwritten text and images were combined to describe secret childhood memories—intimations of sexual curiosity and the threat of violence provided unsettling undercurrents Zhang Jin, A Season on the Silk Road (Steles), 2010, silver in the series that resulted in it being gelatin print, 50.8 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist. awarded the Tierney Fellowship, presented by the Tierney Family Foundation to support emerging artists in the ﬁeld of photography. The Fellowship, which was founded in 2003, provides ﬁnancial support for one year plus mentoring and technical assistance.

In the face of these anxieties and Zhang Jin, A Season on the Silk Road (Essence of Epitaph), the swirling currents of change, 2011, silver gelatin print, 50.8 x several photographers looked for 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist. escape in fantasy and aesthetics, such as Zhou Shouying’s double exposures of people and animals and Luo Bin’s exquisite silver gelatin still-lifes of ingredients from Chinese medicine. Elsewhere, others sought permanence and continuity in tradition and history. Yang Xueguang’s series of dreamy landscapes, entitled Silent Shuodugang River (2010), paid homage to his home county of Shangri-la, in Yunnan province, while Zhang Jin’s Buddhist-inspired desert pilgrimage along a section of the Silk Road between the ancient city of Chang’an (present-day Xi’an) and the Yangguan Pass, or “Southern Pass,” in Gansu province, entitled Season on the Silk Road (2011), received this year’s New Photography Award. Another standout was Zhang Kechun, who was unlucky to come away empty-handed for his series inspired by the Yellow River entitled The River Rushes North (2010-2011), which managed to convey an epic sense of history even as it documented the industrial and environmental horrors that today crowd the banks of this ancient waterway. Wang Lin won this year’s Shiseido prize for her black-and-white documentary series entitled A Tulip in the Clouds (2005- 2010) about Chinese ﬂight attendants.

Speaking after the awards ceremony, François Hébel conﬁrmed that Arles had agreed to extend its original three-year agreement with PhotoSpring and will once again be its partner in 2013, all but guaranteeing at least one more

106 Vol. 11 No. 4 Zhang Kechun, The River edition of the festival next year. The news is to be welcomed, for at present Rushes North (The Buddha in the Coal Yard, Ningxia no alternative exists. As well as offering the opportunity to see a diversity Province), 2010, inkjet print, 120 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the of work, Chinese and foreign, PhotoSpring is a unique point of contact for artist. local and overseas curators and artists, increasing numbers of whom are now venturing off the beaten path to Caochangdi. More important still, however, is the opportunity it offers to reﬂect on and debate the trajectory of photography in China. And while much has changed in the past three or four years, it was clear from this year’s edition that much has not.

The volume of entries to this year’s Three Shadows Award underlined the huge popularity of the medium, not only in first- and second-tier cities, but also right across the country. Yet, too often, the viewer was left with a sense of déjà vu. These are certainly risk-averse times, and perhaps PhotoSpring is a reflection of this. But without the willingness to challenge conventional views and tackle difficult issues, the danger for Chinese photography is endless repetition and an uncritical fascination with its own reflection. This is by no means an inevitable fate. But in the absence of PhotoSpring it becomes a lot more likely.

Vol. 11 No. 4 107 Chinese Name Index

108 Vol. 11 No. 4 Vol. 11 No. 4 109 Vol. 11 No. 4 110 111 Vol. 11 No. 4 Wei Guangqing (b. 1962, Wuhan) is recognized as one of the earliest Chinese artists to explore the language of Pop Art, which became a mainstream trend in the 1980s and early 1990s. Yishu His works were labeled as “Cultural Pop” for its appropriation of traditional images juxtaposed Edition with cultural symbols. His use of the red brick wall has become his trademark ready-made image, one that symbolizes the background of Chinese culture and politics.

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

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