Chinese Name Index

:      july / august 9 July/August 2009 | Volume 8, Number 4

Inside Observing Chinese Art through Writing

Artist Features: Yan Pei-Ming, Cui Guotai, Xi Xiaoze, Xing Danwen, Dong Wensheng

Reviews of The Third Mind, Outside In, and Super China!

US$12.00 NT$350.00

VOLUME 8, NUMBER 4, JULY/AUGUST 2009

CONTENTS 2 Editor’s Note 41 4 Contributors

6 Observing Contemporary Chinese Art through Writing Fiona He

18 The Transcendental Blandness of Yan Pei-Ming’s International Landscapes Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

32 Cui Guotai: Rust Never Sleeps 51 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky

41 China Urban: An Interview with Xie Xiaoze Lisa Claypool

51 Xing Danwen: Revealing the Masquerade of Modernity Madeline Eschenburg

67 Dong Wensheng: Archaeologies of Corporeality Mathieu Borysevicz

67 74 The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, and Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art Michael Hatch

88 Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art Sohl Lee

98 Navin Rawanchaikul, Super China! Ellen Pearlman 88 110 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Yan Pei-Ming, Homme le plus fier, père de l’artiste, 1996, oil on canvas, 235 x 200 cm. Photo: André Morin. © Yan Pei-Ming, ADAGP, 2008, Paris, France.

Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art president Katy Hsiu-chih Chien Yishu 33 continues its exploration into   Ken Lum cultural issues that have assumed increasing prominence following the Beijing Olympics and  Keith Wallace   Zheng Shengtian the post-market boom. Yishu 32 brought into   Julie Grundvig focus the social role of the artist now that the Kate Steinmann market is exerting less influence, and inYishu editorial assistant Chunyee Li 33, Fiona He brings into the discussion the state circulation manager Larisa Broyde of critical writing on art as well as the evolution   Joyce Lin of alternative exhibition venues that have web site  Chunyee Li recently emerged in various cities throughout China. advisory  Judy Andrews, Ohio State University We also offer three texts featuring artists— Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum Yan Pei-Ming, Cui Guotai, and Xie Xiaoze— John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation whose paintings appear to have similarities Okwui Enwezor, San Francisco Art Institute in that they are representational and share Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator subdued palettes, but, in fact, prove to be Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China Fei Dawei, Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation surprisingly different in their conceptual Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh underpinnings. In addition, two articles examine Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute the different ways photographers Xing Danwen Katie Hill, University of Westminster Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive and Dong Wensheng address the abandonment Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian of cultural traditions and social interaction in Sebastian Lopez, Critic & Curator the face of the all-consuming modernization of Lu Jie, Independent Curator Charles Merewether, Critic & Curator urban China. Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Yishu has continously exercised flexibility Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago about what might constitute the “Chineseness” Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar in contemporary Chinese art. To begin with, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China are all  Art & Collection Group Ltd. considered China culturally, even though they 6F. No. 85, Section 1, have very different modern histories and social Chungshan N. Road, structures. Added to this is the vast Chinese Taipei, Taiwan 104 diaspora, making for an even more complex Phone: (886)2.2560.2220; Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 and sometimes problematic understanding of E-mail: [email protected] Chinese art. With this in mind, we are featuring reviews of two exhibitions, The Third Mind    Leap Creative Group at the Guggenheim New York, and Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary at   Raymond Mah art Director Gavin Chow the Princeton University Art Museum. These designer Philip Wong reviews examine the influence of Asia on American art as well as provoke questions webmaster Website ARTCO, Taipei about what “Chinese” art might be. Finally,  Chong-yuan Image Ltd., Taipei we have a review of Navin Rawanchaikul’s exhibition Super China! at the Ullens Center  - for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Rawanchaikul, an innovator of alternative strategies for Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited in presenting art, is neither ethnic Chinese nor a Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, March, resident of China, but his ambitious exhibition May, July, September, and November. offers an insightful and humourous meditation on the current Chinese art system. All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to:

Yishu Office Keith Wallace 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 Phone: 1.604.649.8187; Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.yishujournal.com

YISHU EDITIONS Subscription rates: Now available: Five limited-edition prints by 1 year (six issues): $84 USD (includes $24 for airmail postage); some of the most important Chinese artists. in Asia $78 USD (includes $18 for airmail postage). 2 years (twelve issues): $158 USD (includes $48 for airmail Please see back cover for images and postage); in Asia $146 USD (including $36 for airmail postage). contact information. No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher.

Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版‧第8卷第4期‧2009年7 - 8月

典藏國際版創刊於 2002年5月1日 2 編者手記社長：簡秀枝總策劃：鄭勝天 4 作者小傳創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）

主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 副編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 6 從著述中觀察當代中國藝術史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 賀瀟（Fiona He）編輯助理：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li)

行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 18 嚴培明國際風景中的超凡境界網站編輯：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li) Thorsten Botz-Bornstein 廣告：林素珍

顧問：王嘉驥 32 崔國泰：不動則銹安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky 巫鴻林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 范迪安 41 中國都市：與謝曉澤的訪談招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) Lisa Claypool 洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 侯瀚如徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 51 邢丹文：揭開現代性的假面姜苦樂 (John Clark) Madeline Eschenburg 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 倪再沁高名潞 67 董文勝考古學費大爲 Mathieu Borysevicz 楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 盧杰 Lynne Cooke 74 『第三思路：美國藝術家凝注亞洲， Okwui Enwezor 1860 -1989』和『內轉外×外轉內： Katie Hill Charles Merewether 中國×美國×當代藝術』 Apinan Poshyananda Michael Hatch 出版：典藏雜誌社台灣臺北市中山北路一段85號6樓 88 評『內轉外×外轉內：電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 中國美國當代藝術』傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 × × 電子信箱：[email protected] Sohl Lee 編輯部： Yishu Office 200-1311 Howe Street, 98 評Navin Rawanchaikul 在尤倫斯 Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 當代藝術中心的展覽『超級中國』電話: (1) 604.649.8187 傳真： Ellen Pearlman (1) 604.591.6392 電子信箱: [email protected]

訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與編輯部聯系。 110 中英人名對照設計： Leap Creative Group 印刷：中原造像股份有限公司

網址： www.yishujournal.com 管理：典藏雜誌社

國際刊號: 683-3082

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

售價每本12美元。訂閲：一年84美元，兩年158美元（含航空郵資）。亞洲地區一年78美元，兩年146美元（含航空郵資）。

訂閱單可從本刊網址下載。

Contributors

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein studied Contemporary Art, London; the Bauhaus; philosophy in Paris and received the Today Art Museum, Beijing; the his Ph.D. from Oxford University. Bronx Museum; and the Israeli Center for As a postdoctoral researcher based Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. His current in Finland, he undertook extensive book project, Learning from Hangzhou, research on Russian formalism and a photographic case study that examines semiotics in Russia and the Baltic the relationship between architecture and countries. He has also conducted signage in Hangzhou, will be released by research in Japan, in particular on the Timezone 8 in early 2009. Kyoto School and on the philosophy of Nishida Kitaro. Since 1999 he has Lisa Claypool teaches the history of been Associate Researcher at the École Chinese art and visual culture at Reed des hautes études en sciences sociales, College, Portland, Oregon. She is a Paris, from which he received his founder of the China Urban Collective, Habilitation. He has been working as a and she co-curated the China Urban consultant for the Center of Cognition exhibition with Stephanie Snyder, at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, Director of the Cooley Gallery, Old China, and as Assistant Professor at Lym, Connecticut, and with the twenty- Tuskegee University, Alabama, and three students in her course, Art in will soon begin an appointment Contemporary China. She is the author, as Assistant Professor at the Gulf most recently, of “Ways of Seeing the University for Science and Technology Nation: Chinese Painting in the National in Kuwait. Essence Journal (1905–11) and Exhibition Culture,” forthcoming in positions: east Mathieu Borysevicz is an artist, critic, asia cultures critique. and curator based in New York and Shanghai. He has been involved with Madeline Eschenburg is an art historian contemporary art in China since 1994, living in Roanoke, Virginia. She has and is currently Editor for Artforum an M.A. from the State University of in Shanghai. His writing has appeared New York at Buffalo with a focus on in publications such as Art in America, contemporary Chinese art. She will begin Art Asia Pacific, tema celeste, and Yishu teaching at Virginia Western Community Dangdai. His photography and video College in the fall of 2009. work has been shown internationally at the Tribeca Film Festival; the Institute of

Michael Hatch has just begun a Ph.D. many catalogues and has curated several program in art history at Princeton shows on contemporary Asian art. University. Prior to his move to the United States, he spent three years in Sohl Lee is a Ph.D. student in the Visual Beijing as an independent arts writer and and Cultural Studies Program at the international client relations officer for University of Rochester. Before joining the Beijing-based auction house China the program, she worked at a New York- Guardian. His reviews have appeared in based arts management consulting firm, Yishu, Artforum, and Orientations. as well as various cultural organizations in Seoul, New York, and Paris. In the Fiona He graduated with a B.A. from summer of 2008, Lee coordinated the McGill University majoring in Asian Global Institute, an educational and Studies and Art History in 2004. academic program as part of the 7th Upon her graduation, she received the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. Canada-China Scholar Exchange Grant Her current research interests include for enrollment in a one-year program institutional critique, contemporary focusing on Chinese art history at the art of East Asia, globalization, and Central Academy of Fine Art. Since 2004, feminist theory. she has been working as a freelance translator for major galleries in Beijing Ellen Pearlman is a writer, curator, specializing in contemporary Chinese filmmaker, and professor based in art. She joined Asia Art Archive in the Brooklyn and Beijing. She is Artistic summer of 2008 with the intent to Director of YuanFen Gallery, the first proactively seek out dialogues within gallery of new media art in Beijing, the Chinese art scene and to explore and Editor-at-large for The Brooklyn emerging artists, alternative art forms, Rail. Most recently she was in Ulan spaces, and exhibitions. Bator, Mongolia, on a Prince Claus Trust Grant working with the Blue Sun Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky holds Artist Group to create a site-specific the O. Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at performance that featured a campaign Bard College. She has published several for presidency under the banner of the books on subjects such as the art of the fictitious Art Party. Tang dynasty and Chinese Buddhist art, and she has served as Editor of Journal of Chinese Religions. She has written for

Fiona He Observing Contemporary Chinese Art through Writing

This text was first written for the 2009 Annual Researchers Meeting at Asia Art Archive (AAA) in Hong Kong. Each researcher was given the choice of either sharing their research project or their observations of the contemporary art scene in their region, as well as providing a list of ten to fifteen writings considered to be critical, influential, or controversial within their respective regions. With an attempt to combine the latter two in hope of best portraying a comprehensive image of the current state of contemporary Chinese art, issues such as artistic production, critical writing, emerging alternative art spaces, public art projects, media reports on the art scene emerged through the writings—they are key, not only for deciphering the current status of contemporary Chinese art, but perhaps also for shedding light on the direction in which it is headed.

Art Production On the cusp of the economic downturn, Pauline J. Yao’s In Production Mode—Contemporary Art in China 1 presented critical perspectives about Chinese art production in the context of the economic boom. As the inaugural recipient of the 2007 CCAA art critic award, Yao, who conducts independent research on artistic production in China, sheds light on an art practice that is becoming less of an individual endeavour by the artist and more of a project dependent upon collaboration. The phenomena of large sprawling art spaces, monumental artworks, frequent yet short exhibition periods, and the pressure for artists to produce artwork to fill them, prompts Yao to ask: Whose labour is encoded in this artwork? Whose labour is valued, who does the valuing, and why? And what is the level of participation by the artist in this process? Yao looked into the artistic production of many contemporary Chinese artists working with different mediums, where the role of the artist no longer implies a hands-on studio practice, but a managerial role of delegating between contractors, production companies, labourers, and studio managers. Often, the artists insource and outsource the tasks of each individual step of the process, leaving the touch of the artist’s hand minimal. In Production Mode veers our attention away from only appreciating the final product of an artwork and interpreting its iconographical and societal values to also obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the process through which the artwork is produced. This is a shift that dissolves our immunity from the contingencies of art making and moves us toward an understanding of its artistic value from political, social, and economic perspectives.

In the few months preceding the Beijing Olympics, Pace Wildenstein, Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, and SZ space opened, as did many other art spaces, with exhibition venues that exceed in grandeur other

world-renowned galleries, while some other galleries in Beijing unofficially disclosed production costs of astronomical numbers for exhibitions that lasted less than a month. In retrospect, such a phenomenon can be accounted for only by its short-lived financial favour, although the Beijing municipal government is infusing funds into the “cultural industry,” benefiting, for example, state-endorsed events such as the Art Beijing art fair in hope of stimulating the economy. While this might seem to be positive input from the government, at the grassroots level it has very little impact on artists. Instead, artists have begun to look into alternative ways to counter financial conditions.

Alternative Art Spaces An excess of one thing often calls for something different, especially when conditions are favourable; as the commercialization of the Chinese art scene overpowered creativity, a number of alternative spaces began to germinate in the past year—Arrow Factory and HomeShop in Beijing, and Small Production in Hangzhou, just to name a few. As alternative spaces, they are non-commercial compared to private galleries, or even museums and other art institutions. These spaces provide an alternative to the gargantuan exhibition spaces, lavish exhibition opening banquets, and high production costs, and are often located far away from the popular enclaves of art districts in the hope of creating a new channel of dialogue about the art that is shown, created, and viewed.

2 Sun Huiyuan, a work Zhang Liaoyuan’s manifesto “Don’t Stop,” written for the fifth event at created for Small Production, Guangzhou. Visitors opening the Shopping Gallery in Shanghai (a venue initiated by a group of artists gold and silver sachets. in the art hub of 50 Mogangshan), serves as the impetus for a series of events calling upon artists to show their work in makeshift venues for brief exhibition time periods. Zhang, along with artist Shao Yi, who both live in

Hangzhou, a city known for its leisurely lifestyle tucked away far from the Public screening of the Olympic games at commercial art traffic of Beijing and Shanghai, have noticed a decrease in HomeShop, Beijing. communication and dialogue among artists. Many artists are preoccupied Courtesy of Elaine W. Ho. with selling ideas to commercial galleries for projects that require production costs beyond their own means, or with preparing for already scheduled solo exhibitions for commercial purposes. Also, at the China Academy of Art, many young artists and students crave for opportunities to show their work. Zhang Liaoyuan, inspired by his predecessor Zhang Peili, who helped initiate the Pond Society in 1984, an artist collective that performed and installed works in public spaces in Hangzhou, has, through Small Production, embarked on finding alternative ways to create dialogue and discourse among local artists: engaging artists and students to make and show works that require very little production costs, to experiment and realize their ideas without being restricted by any theoretical or thematic umbrella, and to avoid pressure from vested interests of commercial gain. Although some might consider their work to be premature, juvenile, or somewhat clever, the aims set by Small Production are accomplished by providing interactions through this process, and its outcome, at least for the artists, far exceeds what its organizer claims as “fooling around” to fulfill everyone’s restlessness.

In Beijing, Arrow Factory, located in a hutong inside the second ring road, provides another alternative model. As one of its founders, Pauline J. Yao, writes in a recent issue of Contemporary Art and Investment, “It is a storefront space that presents a model of an art space whose approach to exhibition making and display is uniquely defined by its physical location and immediate social setting. Our modestly sized space (15 square meters) provides an alternative scale to the ever-expanding commercial gallery spaces and art districts.”3 Furthermore, unlike commercial art spaces, Arrow Factory does not employ any staff to be at the venue on any given day. The artwork is displayed behind the storefront window, attracting the local community to linger in front a window they might usually ignore. The operative manifesto

Collecting clothing at of Arrow Factory indicates that it is not only non-profit, but also self-funded. HomeShop, Beijing, for Inga Svala Thorsdottir’s artwork The three founding artists and curators, all based in Beijing, are committed Borg, presented at the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial. to carrying on the spirit of experimentation through their programming. Courtesy of Elaine W. Ho.

Last, but not least, is HomeShop. The Chinese-American artist Elaine W. Ho opened her private home to the general public, as well as to an array of architects, curators, scholars, and friends, to participate in a series of events during the Olympic Games in Beijing. Located in the heart of a hutong in old Beijing, where people from all walks of life criss-cross, HomeShop was a site for interdisciplinary discourse to converge. Ho’s attempt to bring the local community together by setting up a large screen and projector to watch the Games reached far beyond its mere attributes. Events at HomeShop varied from a theoretical discussion on Doina Petrescu’s text, “The Indetermined Mapping of the Common,” that continued late into the night, to contemplating on an exhibition space, to a five-minute open discussion with a curator on the issue of speaking, to collecting used clothes for an artist’s work in the upcoming Guangzhou Triennial, to movie screenings and much more. Does HomeShop then qualify as an alternative art space? Perhaps this program of events shies away from being everything artistic, or perhaps its all-encompassing nature was at the core of its artistic manifestations of ideas. Furthermore, this body of ideas prompted Ho to document this series of events as a publication, Wear: The Journal of HomeShop.4

Despite low budgets and lack of funding for these alternative spaces and organizations, they thrive on the artists’ freedom to experiment with ideas that may not be otherwise realized, as well as providing accessibility to the general public. In turn, the public’s participation in these events enriches its own understanding of contemporary art.

Top: SUITCASE Art Projects, blue cocktails based on the recipe used for cocktails served at The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void, Yves Klein’s solo exhibition at Galerie Iris Clert in April 1958, 2009, cocktail. Courtesy of SUITCASE Art Projects.

Middle: Zhu Jia, Repeat on Purpose, 1997, video installation. Photo: Du Yong. Courtesy of SUITCASE Art Projects.

Bottom: Liu Ding, The Curvature of Matter (detail), 2009, installation. Photo: Du Yong. Courtesy of SUITCASE Art Projects.

10 Top: Tiffany Chung, Another Day Another World, August 2008, performance for Intrude: Art and Life 366. Courtesy of Biljana Ciric and Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art.

Middle: Ise, My Story, collage workshop for Intrude: Art and Life 366, December 11, 2008, Shanghai You You Primary School. Courtesy of Biljana Ciric and Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art.

Bottom: Li Mu, Blue Book, November 2008–May 2009, interactive installation for Intrude: Art and Life 366, Shanghai Juvenile Reformatory. Courtesy of Biljana Ciric and Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art.

11 Public Art Projects Timezone 8 bookstore, Factory 798, Beijing. Public art projects are not confined to alternative spaces. Private museums Courtesy of Timezone 8. like Shanghai Zendai MoCA, and Today Art Museum in Beijing, are actively engaged in this kind of practice. Although the goal, scale, and audiences for such projects at these museums differ, the projects are nevertheless admirable initiatives for young private museums in China. SUITCASE Art Projects, initiated by independent curator and writer Carol Lu and artist Liu Ding, in collaboration with Today Art Museum, showcases contemporary art beyond institutional confinements. The very concept of the suitcase suggests movement, shifting locales, and venturing into unknown territory. Their first exhibition was installed within the display windows amongst the latest fashions by Dolce & Gabbana and watches by Cartier at Yintai Center—a mall selling luxury goods attached to an office building located in the heart of Beijing’s Central Business District. At the opening ceremony of SUITCASE Art Projects, blue cocktails were served, a tribute to Yves

12 Klein’s Empty Gallery at Galerie Iris Clert in, Paris, in 1958, exemplifying Klein’s metaphysical belief in the ephemeral and transient.

Intrude: Art and Life 366,5 organized by Shanghai Zendai MoCA, was an ambitious interdisciplinary and cross-cultural public art project that took place from January 1 to December 31, 2008, in which one art project was presented each day in the city of Shanghai. This ambitious project engaged local and international artists in presenting a global perspective on art and its proximity to everyday life. In conjunction, a monthly journal of the same title was published to document these one-day “shows.”

Art Criticism Initially, compiling a list of writings reflexive of the current Chinese art world seemed easy enough given the number of magazines, exhibition catalogues, and brick-sized hardcover publications on contemporary Chinese art by Chinese and foreign writers alike, and, as the market hype climaxed, more were to be found. While one is likely to find an exhibition catalogue with extensive writings on an artist or a group exhibition at the opening of a show, some artists were also self-producing catalogues of their artwork to coincide with the Beijing Olympic Games, even if they did not have an exhibition planned. Contrary to the scarcity of critical writing observed by Lee Weng Choy in his article “In Search of Discursive Density,”6 the amount of verbiage in China can be overwhelming, and I, like many others, must confess to a lack of interest in reading through much of it. Having previously worked as a freelance translator focusing on contemporary Chinese art, I am more than aware of the type of writing generated for these catalogues. They serve the purpose of legitimizing and validating the works of art, in other words, what some refer to as “academic packaging,” in which certain writers are used as the signature of academic validation. What seems to be at stake is a reassessment of what constitutes that which is influential/critical/controversial, or even critically informative, and who the audience is for these critiques. Is the instrumentality of these writings conducive to generating dialogue among the main players of contemporary Chinese art and their audience?

The financial market crashed during the autumn of 2008, when over a dozen biennials and art fairs opened in Asia, and the now hot topic of speculating upon the impact of the market had not yet taken place. Of course, it is easy to become caught up in hearsay about the repercussions the economic downturn has had on the Chinese art market and its ripple effects within every aspect of its ecosystem. But let’s remind ourselves that talk about the art market did not begin with the crash. An interview between Richard Vine, Barbara Pollock, and Christopher Philips, titled “Money Talks Mandarin: China has suddenly become the world’s hottest contemporary art market. What are the effects on artists of this massive influx of cash?”7 was translated into Chinese from Art in America and published in World Art at the beginning of 2008. These three observers offered views on the many facets of contemporary Chinese art, from the circulation of artworks, to the shifting

13 identities of its main players, to its infrastructure, and to artistic production. Indeed, as the commercial interest for Chinese art grew, the way in which we view art in China had to be challenged and required reassessment.

With all this art happening around us, and with all the writings/texts we find in publications or academic panel discussions, we still come back to the question of criticality. Unlike Lee Weng Choy’s concern about locating criticality in Asia, Pauline J. Yao offers, in her examination of art criticism in China entitled “Critical Horizon—On art criticism in China”8 and published in the Asia Art Archive’s December 2008 newsletter, reasons why criticality is so lacking in China. In response to Lee’s quest for “discourse density,” Yao proposed three possible observations of her own: one, that there is a lack of qualified individuals writing on art; two, that current writing is insufficiently critical; and three, the lack of visibility of a certain kind of discursive criticality. Unfortunately, much of what is considered criticism in China consists in fact of articles or reports on art. The reasons behind such a phenomenon, Yao suggests, are that it is a source of income for many and there is an increasing level of self interest and a desire to reach a position of authority, if not also an avoidance of the complex entanglement of personal politics. Admitting that contemporary Chinese art has been run by the art market, Yao boldly points out that many art critics and writers in China accept money or artworks in exchange for writing with their names as a sign of academic validation, the aforementioned “academic packaging,” that reveals a socio-economic context of cashing in on contemporary art. Furthermore, Yao also proposes that the Chinese language itself might be a hindrance to producing independent art criticism due to the utilization of transplanted Western theories and methodologies and the lack of a domestic critical vocabulary. Having laid out a critical perspective on contemporary Chinese art criticism, Yao proposes that a better standard for critical analysis of art should direct writers not only to rely on descriptive analysis but to provide an articulation of the cultural complexities that exist within the artwork and to develop a sophisticated awareness of theories and ideas that either precede or follow it. In spite of this grim account of art criticism in China, “Critical Horizon” ended on an optimistic note. With the economic downturn, it is becoming increasingly necessary to reassess and revisit the Chinese art world from a critical perspective and to hold on to a hopeful spirit through time and effort.

Indeed, the three reasons provided by Yao for the weak conditions of criticality in the contemporary Chinese art scene are predominately true. Furthermore, what might even constitute critical writing for Chinese scholars is often ineffectively disseminated to the local art scene. As I rummaged for materials at the Chinese Modern Art Archive located at Peking University, I stumbled upon a compilation of critical writing under the title Collection of Writings of Chinese Art Critics 2008,9 edited by Wang Lin. Flipping through the table of contents, I realized that more than half of the writers are unheard of to most people within the contemporary art world. One can’t help but question who these writers are and who their

14 readership is. How are these texts circulating, and are they conducive to the advancement of artistic thinking, production, or understanding?

Yet, it might be unfair to make sweeping generalizations about art criticism in China. While perhaps not living up to the hopeful criteria set in “Critical Horizon,” a number of notable writings by Chinese scholars/critics produced over the last year were indeed outstanding.

One text, published in Zhang Peili’s catalogue Artistic Working Manual,10 is “Zhang Peili—Art as a kind of work,” written by Huang Zhuan. Huang provides a chronological account of the artist’s development through different phases vis-à-vis the mainstream of contemporary Chinese art, but his understanding of the artist also allows him to recognize Zhang’s skepticism of the mainstream and the ways he constantly challenges existing artistic languages and approaches. It is a text that illustrates Huang’s understanding of not only the artist’s body of work, but the development of contemporary Chinese art, upon both of which he makes incisive observations.

Chen Tong’s “An Analysis of the Guangdong Contemporary Art Environment from a Spatial Perspective”11 analyzes the artistic ecosystem in Guangzhou and the conditions in which art has been produced in that city from the 1990s to the present. Chen Tong, a writer, artist, and professor at Guangzhou Academy of Art, and founder of Liberia Borges Institute for Contemporary Art, embarked on accounting for the art made, exhibited, or related to Guangzhou in association with the concept of space. Chen’s article explored four aspects of the Guangzhou art scene: first, the development of exhibition venues ranging from unfixed public spaces to galleries and museums, and the differentiation of them to the artist’s studio space, which is in most cases much smaller than their Beijing counterparts; two, the operative institution for art, with Chen providing particular attention to the example of Vitamin Creative Space, a commercial gallery that is also devoted to generating genuine cultural dialogue in the region; three, the awareness of the concept of space within an artwork, specifically in that of artists Lin Yilin and Xu Tan; and, lastly, the compounded spatial concepts that puts Guangzhou contemporary art at an advantage, using the example of Zheng Guogu’s artistic development from Planting Geese (an installation work on an open field) to his utopian Imperial Time (an immense construction based on a video game and located in Yangjiang, a city outside of Guangzhou where the artist lives), projects that place the work of art beyond the confines of its physical space. Chen’s article not only provides in a critically informative manner a comprehensive overview of the infrastructure within the art world of Guangzhou, both historically and currently, but also of the artists and artworks that are produced in this ecosystem and their mutual influences.

In another text, criticality is described from the perspective of the artist. In a seminar at Leiden University titled “China on Display,” Zhang Peili presented a talk titled Chinese Artists in the Chinese Scene.12 In Zhang’s

15 opinion, the contemporary Chinese art world has developed into a unique scene, in that it is not only the artworks, but the artists themselves, that have become the object of display in that they are not just seen as artists, but “Chinese” artists, a view that has arisen from the relationship of the West to China. This is manifested predominately by four aspects, namely, political symbolism (the iconography of Mao, Tian’anmen, and the Cultural Revolution), oriental objects (the dragon, panda, Chinese medicine, Chinese landscape, Chinese characters, etc.), the artist’s “state of being” (which in Zhang’s view is often distorted), and, last, the merging of Chinese and Western symbolism. Each of these is tailored to Western stereotypes of oriental symbolism found in Chinese art. To account for this stereotypical understanding of Chinese art, Zhang suggests there are differences in history and culture between the East and West, but, more importantly, that the genesis of contemporary Chinese art is induced neither by Western traditions, nor by Chinese traditions, nor by the mainstream official culture. Moreover, the identity of Chinese artists has always been seen as that of a collective—in other words, the suffix of “Chinese” distinguishes them from other artists. Furthermore, this adjective prompts Zhang to ponder, “Who is the audience for contemporary Chinese art?” and the answer he offers is none other than Westerners and the Chinese themselves. Following this train of thought, Zhang asks, rhetorically, “Are there any Western artists who are concerned with their relationship to Asia?” In other words, the Chinese concern with how the West perceives China far exceeds the West’s concern with how it is viewed by Asia. In conclusion, Zhang believes that the China that predominates is not only fabricated by the West in the West, but by Chinese artists themselves, who cater to the perceived needs of its Western audience. This introspective examination of the position of Chinese art and artists vis-à-vis its audience provokes us to examine the perspective from which we view art from China—to question whether our interest in it is based on its artistic qualities and the broader issues it taps into, or on our interest in the exotic other.

General Media Coverage of Contemporary Chinese Art Unfortunately, most reports on contemporary Chinese art by the Western mass media have not shown interest beyond a focus on the art market. Of course, the news value of art market stories provides readers with gossip gratification about astronomical auction prices or the expensive cars some Chinese artists drive, and it is undeniable that some of what is happening within the art scene in China is absurd. Sadly, many Westerners’ access to this art world is through the eyes and words of such reporters. Are the consequences of presenting an impartial or even distorted image of the art scene really meeting the requirement of making news? What if Western media audiences want more than mere face value or shock effects? David Barboza, a New York Times correspondent, recently wrote a report titled, “China’s Art Market: Cold or Hibernating?”13 Without getting into the details of this article and the misinformation it presented, I would like to ask the same question, “New York (London, or any major city) Art Market: Cold or Hibernating?” Why should the standard be different for China’s

16 art market compared to any other? The general media on Chinese art can often be cancerous: it magnifies the negatives and spins them for the sake of a story while ignoring the efforts of those artists who are determined and persistent in making art for the sake of art.

Obviously, writing on art in China is not only an issue of depth in analysis and meaning, and this text does not even account for a mere fraction of what is happening within China’s art scene. Associating these writings with the ever-changing and evolving contemporary art scene in China, the critical discourse generated seems insufficient in providing a comprehensive understanding of it, let alone being instrumental in the discourse of artistic production. Moreover, those who attempt to generate discourse with artists and their work are often left unheard. Yet one must remain hopeful, especially in a time like the present, when conditions are changing and the focus is shifting from market hype to creativity—which is what interests us in the first place.

This is a revised version of a text written for Research Log in the Asia Art Archive May 2009 Newsletter.

Notes 1 Pauline J. Yao, In Production Mode—Contemporary Art in China, (Beijing: Timezone 8, 2008). 2 Zhang Liaoyuan, Don’t Stop (written for Small Production), exhibitions at Shopping Gallery, at http://www.shoppinggallery.cn/en/news.asp?caseg=xzz2. 3 Pauline J. Yao, “Small is the New Big: Arrow Factory,” Contemporary Art and Investment, no. 28 (April, 2009), 53–55. 4 Elaine W. Ho, Wear: The Journal of HomeShop, (Beijing: HomeShop, 2008). 5 Intrude: Art and Life 366, 2008. 6 Lee Weng Choy, “In Search for Discursive Density,” ART iT (no. 21), 2008, 95. 7 Richard Vine, Christopher Philips, and Barbara Pollock, “Money Talks Mandarin: China has suddenly become the world’s hottest contemporary art market. What are the effects on artists of this massive influx of cash?”Art in America, March 2007. 8 Pauline J. Yao, “Critical Horizon—On Art Criticism in China,” Asia Art Archive Newsletter, December 2008. 9 Wang Lin, Collection of Writings of Chinese Art Critics 2008 (Shijiazhuang: Hebei Art Publisher, 2009). 10 Huang Zhuan, ed., Artistic Working Manual of Zhang Peili (Guangzhou: Lingnan Art Publisher, 2008). 11 Chen Tong, “An Analysis of the Guangdong Contemporary Art Environment from a Spatial Perspective,” Art Gallery Magazine (April 2008), 49–54. 12 Zhou Tao, ed., “Chinese Artists in the Chinese Scene—Zhang Peili’s lecture in the China on Display seminar at Leiden University,” Art Today (no.1), 2008, 28–29. 13 David Barboza, “China’s Art Market: Cold or Hibernating?” New York Times, March 10, 2009.

17 Thorsten Botz-Bornstein The Transcendental Blandness of Yan Pei-Ming’s International Landscapes

he Franco-Chinese painter Yan Pei-Ming is well known for his large Yan Pei-Ming, Paysage international peint à Trièves, bichromal portraits of people like Mao Zedong, Bruce Lee, and, 1998, triptych, oil on canvas, 250 x 1500 cm. Photo: André more recently, Barack Obama. His realistic, though at the same Morin. © Yan Pei-Ming, T ADAGP, 2008, Paris, France. time abstract, style is characterized by the use of thick black, white, and sometimes red paint and violent brush strokes. Ming has painted human faces almost exclusively, though his choice of characters is very diverse: South African children, serial killers, his father, Buddha, female prisoners, prostitutes, his own skull painted from a scanned image, or simply anonymous portraits. Since 2000 he has also done self-portraits.

Earlier on, Yan Pei-Ming announced that he would like to paint only “heads” but decided, in 1996, to paint some landscapes that as an overall body of work he called International Landscapes, a subject he repeatedly returned to, especially in 1998, when he created a huge triptych entitled Landscape Painted in Trièves, but also in 2005 and in 2006.1 These landscapes are among the few motifs employed by Ming other than the usual heads. Two intriguing questions arise: One, why does the landscape constitute such a crucial theme, and why is it pursued with such consistency by a painter specializing in portraits? Two, why does this painter, who has resided for almost thirty years in France, call all his landscapes, without a single exception, International Landscapes?

Ming’s landscapes are special, to say the least: rural landscapes painted at night, depressing, without the slightest trace of character or personality. François Lyotard’s statement “landscapes are without destiny”2 comes to mind when looking at these cold and unwelcoming places. There are fields, bushes, and groups of trees, sometimes small schematic peasant houses, a pond, or a stream mysteriously illuminated by a fluorescent light. These landscapes are obviously “international” inasmuch as we encounter such objects everywhere in the world. Even with Landscape Painted in Trièves, nothing refers to the particularity of the geographical place. The lugubrious effect of these stereotypical places is sometimes (though not always) reinforced by a strange treatment of spatial depth that can be found also in some of Ming’s portraits. One is surprised to find among these

18 Yan Pei-Ming, International “international landscapes” a view of Pudong-Lujiazui, Shanghai’s business Landscape, Shanghai, 2004, oil on canvas, 180 x 300 cm. quarter, which Ming paints in the same fashion: somber and enigmatic. Photo: André Morin. © Yan Pei-Ming, ADAGP, 2008, The morose atmosphere of this painted cityscape obviously goes against the Paris, France. grain of Shanghai’s splendor as an ultramodern city dominated by a Pearl Tower endowed with features that come dangerously close to kitsch. The painted cityscape acquires an “international” dimension because the view of Shanghai is entirely unoriginal, a little in the style of a postcard, and it looks like a hackneyed cliché without symbolic force.

Landscapes and Faces Let us first explore some more fundamental reflections on the similarities between the landscapes and faces, since Ming himself seems to perceive an essential link here. First, landscapes are not geological masses, just as faces are not anatomical masses. Both can express temperate or communicative psychological conditions. At the same time, landscapes and faces possess a disquieting quality because they contain not only those signs that have been voluntarily put into them, but also those that have been accumulated for years. This is why faces cannot be reduced to “mental landscapes” that directly symbolize a certain psychological content.

The same is true for Ming’s International Landscapes. If his landscapes were “mental landscapes” symbolizing something, they would instill curiosity and not a sort of worry mixed with surprise. Landscapes and faces are “cemeteries of signs” in which are buried signs of the past; this is the reason why they are embarrassing: looking at landscapes and faces, we never cling to details, but instead we employ a meandering look that permits us to unify the entirety of the signs in the form of a system without worrying about details.

Ming bases his approach on this particularity of faces and landscapes by avoiding any reference to the concrete. This effect seems to be inherent, as Fabian Stech has noted, in the artist’s way of painting: “The images seem to float on the canvases’ surface. . . . The image refers to nothing but itself.”3 Ming’s paintings show no personal details that could refer us to some exterior quality; they are purely general, which makes them autonomous.

19 The Individual and the General Ming explains that when he painted the Pope, he did not have the intention to paint a certain pope but the Pope in general. The same is true for the way he paints dictators, criminals, victims, etc. This does not mean that Ming applies to these people a symbolic language leading us from the concrete fact towards a more general meaning. On the contrary, for Ming the aesthetic truth does not reside in a rich symbolism underlining some significant characteristics but, paradoxically, in the negation of all that is personal. This is what produces a “general” aesthetic truth.

This system applies even to very personal themes. When Ming paints his father, which he has done more than forty times, he expands his father’s individuality by multiplying at random the adjectives that describe him, attaching to every portrait a personal quality expressed in the superlative: the most powerful man, the strictest man, the shyest man, the weakest man . . . . It is clear that no single person can accommodate all these qualities. At the same time, this universal father does not represent the fiction of an ideal father imagined by the artist, but, instead, it represents the real and concrete father. In other words, Ming attempts to paint the general directly and as such, but not as the sum (and potential flattening) of individual values. When Valérie Dupont says that Ming’s characters are “without expression, without nationality or race, hybrid beings looking like each other but like nobody in particular,” one has the impression that his paintings are reduced to such a compromise suggesting not more than the “average man,” while the contrary is the case.4 The “general father” is not the indistinct sum of all the world’s fathers, but the model of a universal father that Ming wants to see in his own father.

Yan Pei-Ming, Pape, May 2005, oil on canvas, 250 x 220 cm. Photo: André Morin. © Yan Pei-Ming, ADAGP, 2008, Paris, France.

20 Yan Pei-Ming, Pour l’amour As I will show, Ming sees no reason to apply aesthetic schemes of the du père de l’artiste, October 25, 2007, oil on canvas, 350 x absolute or of the ideal. He expresses beauty rather—in the Chinese way— 350 cm. Photo: André Morin. © Yan Pei-Ming, ADAGP, on a virtual level. Christian Besson is still right when saying that “there is 2008, Paris, France. some ideality in the International Landscape,” but this ideality is not reached through an abstraction from the concrete; rather, it is reached through a concrete identity searched for on an abstract level.5 Alain Coulange expresses this contradiction more clearly by saying that any identity “is, in brief, abstract.” The metaphor of the “photo booth” that Coulange evokes when speaking of Ming’s portraits is also useful because it suggests a direct passage from perception to presentation.6 For Ming, this passage necessitates a negation of all individual values in order to prevent them from obstructing the presentation of those aesthetic values searched for.

This is why Ming designs the paradoxical formula of the Portrait of an Unknown (The Artist’s Father). The subject painted is the artist’s father, but this father is grasped in the form of a “general father” and of an “unknown” (which does not mean that he is unknown to the painter). For Ming the general is not contrary to the individual. He believes that the reality of this individual who is his father can be better grasped through the revelation of his “negativity,” of his unmeasurable non-positivist qualities, that is, through the revelation of the general sense of his father’s individuality.

Ming grasps identity by negating, which becomes clearer in the following example. For the painting Chinese Quarter, Saigon, February 1st 1968, Ming has adopted the much-publicized photo of a Vietnamese man being executed by a national police chief. We know the details of the place, which establishes an authenticity that can serve as a concrete reference for a historic event. However, Ming does not want to paint this event, nor does he want

21 to transform it into a generalized icon without individuality. His aesthetic Yan Pei-Ming, Quartier chinois de Saigon, 2004, approach negates the concrete references in order to show us colonial oil on canvas, 130 x 200 cm. Photo: André Morin. © Yan cruelty in general. At the same time, it is clear that this generality can only Pei-Ming, ADAGP, 2008, be established by also affirming the individual. If the photo were not so well Paris, France. known, the painting would be aesthetically less powerful.

The universal does not estrange us from the individual; instead, they overlap. Ming neither tries to re-establish the photo’s dramatic reality nor to elevate evil to an absolute or religious level, but he shows us colonial cruelty in the form of a virtual moment (if one perceives the virtual as the opposite of the dramatic). Even if Ming was impressed by the fact that the crime took place in the Chinese quarter of Saigon, the place of the crime is neither a real nor imagined place. Nor is the crime “a pathology to be exhibited”;7 rather, it is a universal that needs to be evoked through a presentation of the individual whose individual quality has been denied. Aesthetic truth resides thus—in the form of a virtuality—in a banalized reality.

22 Concerning Mao’s portraits, Ming has said that he “locates himself of course at the opposite end of Andy Warhol whose works are sublime but who treats Mao like an advertisement. But I really like Mao.”8 The constellation comes close to what could be observed in China regarding the Mao Cult or the Mao Fever at the beginning of the 1990s, though the comparison has its limits.9 About four years after the Tian’anmen massacre, Mao’s face would appear on badges worn by masses of young Chinese, but his portrait no longer had the same symbolic signification. The new generation negated the largest part of this icon’s sense, which brought about the generalization of the Mao phenomenon until it became a purely decorative object acceptable for almost everybody. In spite of this, it is certain that Mao still inspired a considerable degree of nationalism and even affection, which reflects Ming’s statement “I really like him.” This is the difference between Ming’s Mao and Warhol’s Mao, who is full of sense, and who, as a national and international celebrity, abounds with connotations. This abundance of connotations will hide the intimate sense of Mao that Ming tries to put forward and that he reveals by negating all mundane significations. Paradoxically, it is through this procedure that Mao becomes more “international” because he becomes a universal phenomenon, not just an icon advertizing “Mao.”

International Landscapes Ming says that he wants to paint a “non-place,” but what does that mean? A non-place is the contrary of an international place in which we would find united, in a postmodern fashion, all the world’s styles. At this point we can better understand the consonances between Ming the portraitist and Ming the landscapist. Ming’s aim is to show the universal in the form of a concept, and the production of International Landscapes is part of this project. All of Ming’s art is conceptually simple because it aspires to be universal. Fabian Stech claims that Ming “follows the spirit of conceptual art by limiting himself to the bichromal.”10 Thus, what kind of concept is the “international?”

Normally, internationalization or globalization have negative connotations because they imply the loss of individual experiences and values that are present in local cultures. Ming himself affirms that today “all subjectshave been internationalized to some degree; individual experience has become generalized.”11 One possible approach would be to retrieve the lost authenticity

23 by integrating concrete cultural elements into one’s works. This is where Ming surprises us because he looks for authenticity in the international.

It is wrong to suppose, as does Florens Deuchler, that Ming attempts to paint the uniform aspect of globalization (perhaps in order to criticize it). According to Deuchler, “[Ming] does not show the other as a unique, honoured, person, who incites you to engage in a meditative or instructive tête-à-tête, but he shows the other in a rather pessimistic fashion, like a random member of mass society, in a metropolis totally out of control. This society, where necessarily everything is synchronized, standardizes the collective bad consciences and sanctions them.”12 I believe that there is no pessimism in Ming’s works, but only a negativity of the sense that permits us to grasp the universal. The characters do not appear “as testimonies of a dehumanized and disindividualized world” either.13

One has to recognize that the perception of the international or the global as the opposite of the local represents an intellectual construction that we

Yan Pei-Ming, Mao, October 1st, 2000, oil on canvas, 1800 x 200 cm. Photo: André Morin. © Yan Pei-Ming, ADAGP, 2008, Paris, France.

Yan Pei-Ming, Paysage international, lieu du crime (lieu de naissance du père de l’artiste), 1996, oil on canvas, 235 x 400 cm. Photo: André Morin. © Yan Pei-Ming, ADAGP, 2008, Paris, France.

24 have produced ourselves by following a logic of modernization that links the international to ideas of modernity such as the functional, liberty, etc. Within this logic, the regional is often conceived as the contrary of the modern—that is, as a notion of the individual incompatible with the general values of modernity. “Since the high period of modernism in the 1950s, ‘regional’ has been a pejorative term,” writes Powell.14 According to this model, an “internationalization” of landscapes amounts to their modernization. It is obvious that Ming’s method goes rather in the opposite direction. Ming intends neither to globalize the landscapes nor to use them as a showcase for a dehumanized world. He simply wants to reveal to us what is universal in them. Ming listens to the individual landscape, but subsequently applies a sort of “magic internationalism” that transcends the regional and the universal by using a paradoxical approach that reproduces the personal in the form of a general expression.

Several of Ming’s International Landscapes receive the subtitle Place of Crime; however, one from 1996 also receives a second subtitle Place of Birth of the Artist’s Father. Judging by the title, few landscapes could be more personal, but Ming also empties all concrete sense from this landscape in order to universalize the particular. The fact that the image represents the artist’s father’s place of birth does not instill a local (familiar, folkloric) momentum into the global, but permits us to conceive of the individual on a universal scale.

The same is true for the “aquatic emptiness” of all the International Landscapes.15 It is a metaphysical emptiness inasmuch as the negation of all concrete sense produces a multiplication of senses until one “no longer knows where one is.”16 The impersonal is simply larger than the personal because it also contains all that is not said and permits us to invent stories sparked by an intriguing negativity. When we look at the portrait of “the victim” Juliette C., for example, we speculate about how the girl is a victim. And the “places of crime” landscapes plunge us into the semantic emptiness of the landscape itself because the range of possible significations is simply too vast. This is all contrary to symbolization and depends entirely on the instilling of a negativity into the painting.

The relationship between the “local” and the “international” follows the same scheme by establishing a paradoxical relation between the “given fact” and the “general universe,” which is not an imagined universe. When painting the serial killer Emile Louis, Ming explains that Louis is a French problem while “killing is an international problem.”17 This does not mean that we should imagine all the world’s possible murders in order to grasp this painting’s sense of the “international.” On the contrary, there is no imagination involved at all.

The Aesthetics of Negation Art manages to alter the signifying power of objects by performing an act of symbolization or a semantic displacement of the sense of alienation (the Verfremdung). Art can also invest its truth in an aura or try to transform the presented object into a universal icon (no matter whether the icon is Russian or Warholian). Ming’s landscapes are not strange; they have no aura, they

25 Yan Pei-Ming, Homme le plus fier, père de l’artiste, 1996, oil on canvas, 235 x 200 cm. Photo: André Morin. © Yan Pei-Ming, ADAGP, 2008, Paris, France.

are not icons, and symbolize nothing. Instead Ming chooses negation as a device. The negation of colour, which represents for him a “heavy cultural heritage” certainly represents the most fundamental negation within this process.18 Ming removes sense from the landscapes in order to invest in them an absolutely general meaning. He suggests that “any international landscape is a place of crime in which we are always victims,” or “on an international level we are all victims.” Then he paints The Most Intelligent Man (1995) without making the slightest effort to “paint” intelligence. According to Ming, “It is more like a sort of image passing by. I say: this one, the intelligent man. Even without seeing the image. But I make a painting, I stick a random title to it because otherwise it will have no meaning.”19

The choice of macabre motifs is part of the same strategy. A series of fifteen skulls lying on flowers spread over a panel is called Artificial Landscape (2006). It is only by seeing the landscape as a non-place constituted by an emptiness of signification that we understand the landscape in general. The morbid aspect of dead landscapes represents an aesthetic necessity whose aim is the establishment of a neutral degree of signification that approaches the virtual. In the Western tradition, landscape painting is often identified with the idyllic (that is, with an abundance of pleasant significations). Ming also calls this landscape a “place of crime,” which invests evil connotations into the work. However, because the significations are vague and linked to nothing concrete, the effect is rather that of neutrality and of emptiness, and this is exactly what Ming aspires to.20 Though mysterious, the crime of the “place of crime” has no dramatic dimension.

26 Yan Pei-Ming, Artificial Landscape, 2006, polyptych, watercolor on paper, 250 x 154 cm/sheet (5 sheets). Photo: André Morin. © Yan Pei-Ming, ADAGP, 2008, Paris, France.

Western Landscapes For centuries Western painters have tried to derive the aesthetic value of landscapes from historical and mythical associations. The baroque painter Claude Lorrain painted a pastoral world often featuring castles in the background. His landscapes are lyrical, noble, idyllic, and peopled with allegorical subjects such as demi-gods and saints, creating an aestheticized landscape as if it were a separate reality.21 In Claude’s works, as in Nicolas Poussin’s, nature is formalized, idealized, and often dramatic because these landscapes can function as illustrations of classical narratives.

In the eighteenth century, Western landscape painting became more “conceptual” because the “geometrical regularity, orderliness and neatness, characteristic of cultivated land such as farms and orchards, were considered more beautiful than disorderly, chaotic, messy wilderness.”22 Still, Western landscapes continued to include classical architectural structures, and symbolism remained dominant, even in Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic landscapes, which evoked subjective and religious experiences. Compared to these paintings, Dutch landscapes of the seventeenth century are more similar to Ming’s, though they contain many more traces of civilization.

Still, in the nineteenth century, rich, poetic, and intellectual associations were considered to make landscapes more enjoyable and even potentially useful as objects of national identification able to contribute to the construction of political identities.23 Their lack of historical associations made American landscapes, for example, inferior in the eyes of nineteenth- century aestheticians. The aim of landscape aesthetization was to escape banality even if “banality” signified “too beautiful.” It was not sufficient to paint a beautiful landscape. The painter had to look for a certain surplus of sophistication provided by historical or mythical references.

Chinese Landscapes There are differences between Western and Chinese landscapes that can be recognized straightaway. In Western art, the landscape “is merely a backdrop for human activity, while here the reverse is the case, and man is subordinate to the immensity of nature,” writes Munsterberg.24 In spite of this difference, it would be exaggerated to say that Western and Chinese landscapes are opposed to each other on all levels. Both are, for example, not only interested in representations of reality. To both a reflection on nature determines the way in which the landscape will be painted. Apart from that, “escapism” is a theme common to both, which, for the Chinese, is driven by a “yearning for the spiritual, the remote, the golden past, the homeland, or the unattainable.”25 This can appear in a similar way in Western painting.

27 In Chinese paintings the transgression of the literal—no matter whether based upon Confucian, Daoist, or Zen Buddhist reflections—guides the spectator towards a permanent validity that will not leave him in the middle of what is fragmentary and momentary. The aforementioned Western landscapists, like perhaps most other Western landscapists, would not be diametrically opposed to this approach, but it appears that Chinese painters pursue this route towards the essential with more consistency and by using a more conceptual approach.

Munsterberg claims that “while Western artists were usually content with an exterior likeness, the Chinese painter wished to portray the very essence of the tree.”26 Let us stay with this model even if it oversimplifies the state of affairs by saying that Western painters limit themselves to outer resemblance. After having absorbed all of the tree’s characteristics, the Chinese painter paints—what exactly? He paints the tree with all its individuality and particular expressivity, but still he does not paint the individual tree because this tree does not exist in the real world. The painted tree is an imagined tree; it is the general tree, which still impresses us through its individual and particular expression. More generally speaking, Chinese painters do not paint a well-defined subject but, according to François Jullien, “the world itself” by reproducing its ceaseless process.27

The “internationalism” that aims to reproduce the world itself reveals Ming’s Chinese aesthetic input. He contends that “I could make a landscape of Shanghai that one would call ‘painted in Shanghai’ but which does not show a Shanghai landscape—though it can be a landscape ‘of Shanghai.’ It is an imaginary world.”28 Like Ming, the classical Chinese painter also “prefers to rely on his own imagination, and arranges the elements as though he were building a model. From his mind-heart (xin) he selects mountains.”29 “Aesthetic experience is an experience of the highest state of mind-heart,” writes Li Zehou, and the aesthetic essence is more important than the exterior appearance.30

François Jullien tells us of the fourteenth-century painter Ni Zan, who painted the same landscape over and over all his life. He did not do so because he was attached to certain motifs, but to show how much he was detached from this particular landscape. Ni Zan’s landscapes were “monotonous and monochrome,” embracing “all landscapes—where all landscapes mix and become similar.”31 The point to which Ming follows the Chinese tradition becomes clear. Thus, it remains even more amazing that he would call his landscapes International Landscapes.

The Chinese painter negates reality in order to find a Reality with a capital R, which transcends the actual forms and represents a Reality in a state that precedes its actualization. For Ming this Reality is international. The international is not a “beyond,” it is not a Platonic ideal form, but simply a process; it is the process of the world, which is exactly how the Chinese conceive the world. The world is a “course” or a way (dao) that needs to be reproduced through painting.32

In the fourth century, Tsung Ping suggested “that landscape painting might be just as good a way of apprehending the order of things as meditating upon the Tao.”33 For Ming, the order of things is the universal state of the world, which is opposed to both an idyllic regionalization and a global, depersonalized order. What Ming finds in his mind-heart is the universal order, which he expresses through the negation of individual characteristics and which becomes for him “international.”

28 It is important to note in this context that the distinction between nature and civilization (the latter overcoming the former) does not exist in Chinese thought because the real sense of “apprehending the order of things” cannot be explained with the help of this model. “In the West, the literary work appears more and more as competing with nature. Nature is lost,” says Jullien.34 This represents one of the largest differences between China and the West in the domain of aesthetics. Hegel explains on the first pages of hisLectures on Aesthetics that artistic beauty is superior to natural beauty, which “is born from spirit.”35 The essence of the beautiful appears only in art and never in nature.

In China, on the other hand, painting is not opposed to nature, but captures its essence. Art is nature inasmuch as the artist transmits the natural pattern of things, the wen.36 It follows that any artistic creation is not really a creation but rather an imitation: The sages imitated “the patterns [wen] of Heaven; and the process of transmission, overseen by Heaven, was achieved through the replication of these patterns,” explains Michael Puett.37 The artist only transmits the order of things; he does not invent it, and “poetry flows forth as a part of the phenomenon of nature.”38

Jullien concludes that “the aesthetic value of the natural landscape manifests itself spontaneously without art’s ‘revelation,’ and in the realm of Beauty it is impossible to distinguish between the beauty of nature and that of art.”39 This is how Ming paints a canon of nature that becomes art and essential through the simple negation of all that is accidental.

It has been said above that the impersonal permits us to invent stories proceeding from an intriguing negativity. Jullien identifies this negativity as blandness (dan), which he finds concentrated in traditional Chinese painting.40 Dan (which signifies also detachment or simplicity)41 is always richer than a more pronounced taste because through limpidity and blandness “the smallest traits and signs breathe at the bottom of themselves the presence of Emptiness (wu, xu), which transcends their phenomenal character and opens them towards the absolute.”42

The bland is linked to the concepts of emptiness of Daoism and Chan Buddhism.43 As an aesthetic ideal it is primordial for landscape painting because it “bathes the landscapes in absence.”44 According to Jullien, the bland is opposed to the mediocre as much as to the Aristotelian “medium” (mesotès)45 but represents a sublime neutrality signalling a virtuality that exists before any actualization.46 The character dan actually represents fire and water, which expresses neutrality. The reality of these paintings is virtual because it “excludes no other possibilities: it is caught in the suspense between the ‘there is’ and the ‘there is not,’ forming/de-forming—‘alive’—but not formed.”47

Ming’s paintings are bland, but this is only a first sensation. Behind the blandness we suspect “potentialities of taste richer and more varied than those that are first confused during one sensation—potentialities which existed first as virtualities.” The presence-absence of things provoked by the lack of flavormakes Ming’s landscapes interesting.48

Ming’s International Landscapes are universal and not globalized. Blandness, as it has been stated above, negates any particular point of view and leads

29 towards a universalization. Universalization signifies the negation of all Yan Pei-Ming, Les Funérailles de Mona particular traits (prejudices, ready-made ideas) that obstruct our view of the Lisa, installed in the Salon Denon, Musée du Louvre, broader generality of phenomena. This is what opposes universalization to Paris, December 2008, polyptych, oil on canvas, globalization. The universal aspect of the world suggests, for example, that five canvases (two canvases 400 x 400 cm, humanity is not only a biological entity, but a unified whole revealing the two canvases 280 x 500 universality of human rights. Here the rational knowledge of the whole is not cm, and one canvas 280 x 280 cm). Photo: André founded on the social and cultural conditions of diverse citizenships, but is Morin. © Yan Pei-Ming; ADAGP, Paris, 2009. recognized straightaway as a universal. At the same time it is clear that there is no universal without particular differences. If everything is the same, the “universal” has no meaning.

Ming’s International Landscapes are universal and not global because they get stuck neither in an idyllic regionalism nor in a technical generalization of the particular (which is globalization). According to a Daoist principle that Ming applies in his landscapes, “The greatest image is without form.” Ming shows us that all landscapes are international, but that our prejudices prevent us from seeing them as such. Instead of recognizing their universal character, we globalize, unify, and standardize them.

Yan Pei-Ming, Un dollar avec autoportrait en crâne F56789604 H, May 2009, watercolour on paper, 127 x 248 cm. Photo: André Morin. © Yan Pei-Ming; ADAGP, 2009, Paris, France.

30 Notes 1 Yan Pei-Ming, Exécution, exh. cat. (Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2006), 133. 2 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 183. 3 Fabian Stech, “Le Grand Sommeil: Considérations autour du motif de la mort dans la peinture de Yan Pei-Ming,” in Exécution, 32. 4 Valérie Dupont, “Juste de la peinture,” in Exécution, 165. 5 Christian Besson, Yan Pei-Ming (Paris: Hazan, 1999), 50. 6 Alain Coulange, “Là où le visage disparaît, commence la peinture,” in Exécution, 141. 7 Bernard Marcadé, “La peinture comme lieu de crime,” in Exécution, 69. 8 “Conversation with C. Allemand-Cossneau and H.U. Obrist,” in Exécution, 168. 9 See Michael Dutton, “Mapping Mao: From Cult to Commodity” in Dutton ed., Streetlife China. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 232–37. 10 Stech, “Le Grand Sommeil,” in Exécution, 39. 11 Rolf Lauter, Yan Pei-Ming: The Way of the Dragon (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2005), 105. 12 Florens Deuchler, “Le brigand collectif, la galerie de portraits de Yan Pei-Ming,” in Exécution, 153. 13 Dupont, “Juste de la peinture,” in Exécution, 165. 14 Douglas Reichert Powell, Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 19. 15 Besson, Yan Pei-Ming, 50. 16 Yan Pei-Ming quoted by Hou Hanru’ “Entre peinture et humanité,” in Exécution, 82. 17 “Interview with Stech,” Exécution, 58. 18 “Interview with Stech,” Exécution, 40. 19 La Prisonnière, exh. cat. (Rennes: Musée des beaux arts, 1997), 29. 20 “All old women who started liking my work saw the title Place of Crime and said: Oh, how dramatic!” (La Prisonnière, 31). 21 When Lorrain paints more freely, however, and especially when he paints in chalk, his landscapes come amazingly close to those of Yan Pei-Ming—for example, the chalk wash entitled Rochers près du torrent, which is immediate and direct. 22 Yuriko Saito, “Scenic National Landscapes: Common Themes in Japan and the US,” in Mazhar Hussain and Robert Wilkinson, eds., The Pursuit of Comparative Aesthetics: An Interface between East and West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 211. 23 Especially in the United States and in Japan, landscape painting is strongly linked to the formation of a national identity with the objective to “overcom[e] . . . cultural indebtedness to China and to Europe respectively” (Saito, “Scenic National Landscapes,” 205). 24 Hugo Munsterberg, The Landscape Painting of China and Japan (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1955), 7. 25 Wucius Wong, The Tao of Chinese Landscape Painting: Principles and Methods (New York: Design Press, 1991), 108. 26 Munsterberg, The Landscape Painting of China and Japan, 5. 27 François Jullien, The Impossible Nude: Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago; Paris: Seuil, 2007), 52. 28 Yan Pei-Ming, “Studio Discussion,” in The Way of the Dragon (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2005), 109. 29 Wong, The Tao of Chinese Landscape Painting, 29. 30 Li Zehou, Four Essays on Aesthetics: Toward a Global View (Lanham: Lexington, 2006), 24. 31 François Jullien, Eloge de la fadeur: A partir de la pensée et de l’esthétique de la Chine (Paris: Livre Poche, 1991), 36. 32 Jullien, The Impossible Nude, 88. 33 Michael Sullivan, Chinese Landscape Painting: The Sui and T’ang Dynasties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 83. 34 François Jullien, La valeur allusive (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), 55. 35 G. W. F Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik I (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1971), 20. 36 Concerning wen and its possible signification “gene,” see my article “Genes, Memes, and the Chinese Concept of Wen: Towards A Nature/Culture Model of Genetics,” forthcoming in Philosophy East and West 60, no. 2 (April 2010). 37 Michael Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001), 48. 38 Victor Mair, “The Narrative Revolution,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles and Reviews 5, no. 1 (1983): 2–3. 39 Jullien, La valeur allusive, 46. 40 Jullien, Eloge de la fadeur, 115. 41 Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting: Su Shih (1037–1101) to Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555–1636) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 5. 42 Jullien, La valeur allusive, 108. 43 James F. Cahill, “Confucian Elements in the Theory of Painting,” in Arthur F. Wright, ed., Confucianism and Chinese Civilization (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1964), 97. 44 Jullien, Eloge de la fadeur, 132. 45 Ibid., 49. 46 Ibid., 141. 47 Jullien, The Impossible Nude, 77. 48 Jullien, La valeur allusive, 145, 147.

31 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky Cui Guotai: Rust Never Sleeps1

ver the course of sixty years, China experienced the disruption of its traditional culture and the eradication of religious ideologies; in their Oplace were introduced strict communist political, economic, and cultural agendas, which in turn were replaced by a capitalist program of rapid commercialization. The impact of these changes has been complex and varied. There is a palpable nostalgia for some aspects of the era of Cultural Revolution, and many of today’s artists who grew up in the sixties and seventies look back at that time with mixed sentiments. The disparities between that way of life and the present one are great: the Spartan ethos demanded of the people to build a strong nation has been replaced by unrestrained consumerism and selfish individualism, and a once seemingly egalitarian society is now replaced by a growing majority of have-nots.

Cui Guotai2 grew up in the 1960s, just after China’s Great Leap Forward, with its all-out impetus to create an industrial and military infrastructure for the new nation, when everyone was urged to make steel for the mills and factories. His work reflects the events of that time, when numerous large- scale manufacturing plants, factories, and other such structures blanketed the country. His paintings represent an awed appreciation of the massive size and power of those enterprises. But Cui has also witnessed their demise as modernization and the need to meet the growing demands of new corporations uprooted these mid-twentieth century industrial edifices and replaced them with tasteless and poorly constructed Western-style apartment tower villages, shopping malls, and office complexes. Many of Cui’s paintings document the decrepit state of the earlier, now outmoded, structures and yet simultaneously allude to their former might. In rendering their decrepitude, Cui conveys the transience of the material realm. The structures that seemed great and everlasting to Cui as a child no longer possess such attributes, and all of Cui’s subjects appear like artifacts of a lost culture.

Cui’s paintings are huge, as if to invoke the monumentality and former importance of the things he has chosen to depict. His canvases exhibit a limited, subdued, nearly monochromatic palette, recalling the austere Chinese black-and-white photos of the era of the 1950s to the 1970s. For example, one work, Big Red Workshop (2004), recreates a full-scale view of an old factory in a state of disrepair. By making the structure fill the entire surface of the canvas, Cui successfully evokes its massiveness. Located in his home city of Shenyang, this building was part of an industrial complex that, according to Chen Danqing, was constructed and occupied first by the Japanese, and then by the Soviet Union, until it was finally nationalized by the Chinese in 1949. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when it was closed, hundreds of thousands of workers became unemployed, and millions of tons of equipment were turned into scrap iron and steel.3 Familiar with the site since childhood,

32 Cui Guotai, Big Red Cui painted the building in its final stage of deterioration, just before it was Workshop, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 290 cm. leveled for the establishment of a glitzy Korean joint venture car showroom. Photo: Gu Xiaobo. Courtesy of the artist and ChinaSquare Gallery, The multiple horizontal stories and large square industrial windows form a New York. grid-like composition. The windows, broken and with pieces of iron beam

Next Page: Cui Guotai, hanging from their supports, metaphorically suggest the fragility of life. Liberation Engine, 2006, acrylic on canvas,180 x Though this building is portrayed in all its monumentality, narrative details 290 cm. Photo: Cui Guotai. Courtesy of the artist and such as the slate grey sky, the accretion of many of years of grime on the ChinaSquare Gallery, roof, broken windows and other signs of disrepair, suggest a somber and New York. deathly atmosphere. The impact of the closing of the factory on the region

Next Page: Cui Guotai, and its populace can easily be imagined. National Celebration, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 330 x 600 cm. Photo: Cui The application of the paint itself conveys a process of destruction. Tones Guotai. Courtesy of the artist and ChinaSquare of grey, black, red, and brown pigment are applied in a number of ways: Gallery, New York. broad brushstrokes in overlapping layers create irregular low relief patches, and an overloaded brush allows the paint to drip heavily down the facade. In these areas of the canvas, dense horizontal strokes are negated by the vertical drips of thin paint, while, elsewhere, peach, red and yellow pigment is dripped and flung to create delicate lines. Over this, Cui applies thin black paint in the manner of flung ink that recalls the dramatic spontaneous calligraphic style of Zen painting, and light grey paint seeps down from the roof to render the evidence of a polluted environment. This image of industrial decay seems nostalgic: this once huge factory, which employed so many people, has now become an empty, lifeless shell, and the efforts of the past have been negated by new priorities.

Cui has mentioned in a series of interviews that the most popular of his works are his series of trains.4 A single steam engine locomotive occupies the entire area of the large canvas titled Liberation Engine (2006). Compositionally placed on a diagonal, the train appears to be in rapid motion, and a swiftly executed application of pigment on the wheels further emphasizes the velocity of the locomotive. Closer examination reveals small areas of delicate arabesques consisting of a surprising variety of flung and

33 dripped pigment. Here, too, the theme and technique of the painting are in opposition: though the subject is shown in monumental scale and painted in such a manner as to suggest its power and speed, the brilliant abstract expressionist ink work deconstructs the three- dimensional form of the subject; moreover, the play of paint suggests corrosion and, by extension, the short- lived nature of man and machine. So too, the word Liberation in the title is ironic, as it was a term once associated with the communist liberation movement— itself now, like the train, a discarded effort.

The subject of the locomotives takes on even greater monumentality in the triptych entitled National Celebration (2007). Larger in scale than Liberation Engine—covering three panels measuring 330 x 600 centimetres—this painting is so overwhelming in magnitude that it seems nearly life-sized. The brushstrokes, applied in a circular fashion, convincingly construct the cylindrical shape of the train’s body, yet there is less emphasis on the locomotive’s wheels and more on its mass and visual power. Concomitantly, there is a decrease in the sense of impending motion: the train is at a full stop. In addition, the vigorous modeling of the cylindrical form through the insistent application of paint instills the machine with a visceral quality—it seems palpable, hot, and sweaty. As in the previous two works cited, there is a dynamic confrontation between the forcefulness of the application of paint and the representational qualities of the work. Though the iconic portrayal of the train is readily evident, the paint work—its dashes, encrustations of pigment, layers of colour, splashing, and dripping—challenges the legibility of the image, which now appears as a survivor of tumultuous times.

More recent works allude to historical events and a military agenda. In the painting Debris of U2 (2006), Cui commemorated the shooting down of a U.S. spy plane in 1969 by Chinese security forces armed with weapons received from the U.S.S.R. The jet had been flying over the site of a nuclear installation at Zhouchen. Now housed in the Beijing Army Museum, the relic symbolizes a past hostility between America’s ally Taiwan and the Peoples’ Republic of China. Painted in black-and-white and reminiscent of a news photo, the plane is set on a slight diagonal in the foreground, and, as in the other paintings, seems to occupy the majority of the surface of the canvas. Here, the monochromatic palette is applied more freely and spontaneously; the jet looks as if it were melting.

34 35 Addressing a similar subject, Cui recreated the prop plane carrying Cui Guotai, Debris of U2, 2006, acrylic on canvas, Communist military leader Lin Biao that crashed in Mongolia in 1971. 180 x 290 cm. Photo: Cui Guotai. Courtesy of the Again, a violent application of paint with swirling masses of thick pigment artist and ChinaSquare suggests the violence both man and machine suffered. Despite the charged Gallery, New York. political events of Lin’s putative coup that preceded and perhaps caused the crash, Cui denies any political intent behind this work, claiming he doesn’t know the circumstances concerning Lin’s suspicious death or whether Lin was a good or bad man.5 But clearly the subject alludes to the historical circumstances of the crash, the longstanding enigma of Lin’s ambitions, and Mao’s role in his demise. With respect to the grand ambitions of the former, and the political dominance of the latter, Cui is hesitant to make his intentions evident. Rather, he maintains that his works are like those of Gerhard Richter, who used photos of political events to make ironic yet ambiguous comments on the Cold War. These works address the multivalent consequences—historical, political, and emotional—associated with a violent and chaotic past. In part, they are an act of expiation for the powerful and contradictory feelings of awe these objects instilled in Cui as a youth, of the threat of civil war, and of political uncertainty.

The subject of another work, Yalu River Bridges (2006), represents the destroyed bridge crossing the Yalu River, which links Korea and China. During the Korean War, the United States dropped bombs on the bridge, reducing it to a mountain of twisted steel. Cui says he visited the site and was struck by the formidable wreck of the old bridge, which was left in place, and the contrast it provided with the new one. The subject of the twin bridges is redolent of the passage of time, historical events, and past ideologies. As a large landscape panorama of the Yalu River, this painting is far more complex than a single figure iconic study. Cui renders the remains of the old bridge piled up in the foreground, and, to the right, in much smaller scale, the new one built to replace it. Dark thick lines define the bent steel beams of the old bridge that form a huge hobbled pyramid, while splashes of light ink recreate the gleam of muted sunlight reflecting off its metallic surfaces. The velocity of the thick strokes suggests the results of swift and damaging destruction. Splashes of black ink impart the feeling of shattered steel. In

36 Cui Guotai, Yalu River his manipulation of tonality in the upper half of the painting, Cui recreates Bridge, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 290 cm. the impression of a deeply overcast day and how hazy sunlight reflects off Photo: Gu Xiaobo.Courtesy of the artist and ChinaSquare the crumpled forms of the beams in the foreground and shimmers on the Gallery, New York. surface of the river. Broad swirls of varying shades of grey paint render the turgid dark water of the Yalu River. By emphasizing the large scale of the bridge in the foreground in combination with a radical decrease in the size of the buildings on the distant shore at the left, as well as the placement of the new bridge on a sharp diagonal at the right, Cui constructs a sense of rapid and deep visual recession. The strong horizontals of the water and shore line of the landscape are a counter point to the broken mass of metal in the foreground. Ironically the broken bridge—larger, closer to the viewer, and more vividly rendered with broad swathes of grey paint—conveys more mass than its replacement. Like Debris of U2, the old bridge is a dramatic reminder of past hostilities with the West, yet one is left wondering why the old structure was left in place, and what this says about the new Chinese agenda.

An urban landscape dominates the work Pagoda Mountain in Yan’an (2006). Although the site is primarily known as the birthplace of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party, evocations of a history that goes further into the past are inescapable. This painting shows a bird’s-eye view of the city, and prominently situated on the left side of the composition is the city’s pagoda. This decrepit structure, which still maintains a kind of ghostly majesty, achieves a multivalent symbolism: the pagoda is a relic of Buddhism, which survived the anti-religious rages of Mao’s reign, and now is once again the focus of popular prayers for wealth and prosperity. Bifurcating the canvas is the river that emerges from the distant background and forcefully makes its way into the foreground, alluding to time implacably moving on. This, one of Cui’s more recent works, is more abstract, and the block-like arrangement of rectangles of grey pigment impart weight and solemnity to the old buildings. The monochromatic palette is dark and gloomy, enlivened only by rectangles of lighter grey ink used to render facets of the architectural structures. Yet, applied in a rough manner, this build up of pigment seem to tear at the solidity of the edifices. Once again the forceful manner of Cui’s application of the pigment takes on a metaphorical

37 Top: Cui Guotai, Liberation, 2008, acrylic on canvas,180 x 240 cm. Photo: Cui Guotai. Courtesy of the artist and ChinaSquare Gallery, New York.

Bottom: Cui Guotai, Pagoda Mountain in Yan’an, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 290 cm. Photo: Gu Xiaobo. Courtesy of the artist and ChinaSquare Gallery, New York.

function that not only conveys the decayed state of the town’s old buildings, whose dates span thousands of years, but it also suggests the destructive force of time on man-made structures. Moreover, the patches of light defy Western conventions of using a single source of light that consistently illuminates all of the elements in the landscape. These lighter areas are unpredictably applied and create a restless and staccato abstract pattern of darks and lights. For the river, Cui mixed various tones of grey on a broad flat brush, and by applying the thick mottled paint in a forceful horizontal direction, he rendered the energy of the water as it enters the foreground. Conflicts are many in this work: the solid forms of the architectural elements are compromised by the expressionistic application of pigment; the sense of deep space accomplished by the artful perspectival depiction of the river is countered by the helter-skelter application of areas of light that deny pictorial illusionism; and the representational image of the landscape is defied by abstract arrangements of thick monochromatic impasto.

Here, as elsewhere, Cui chose charged images that reference the past and rendered them in an emotional way. His images elicit a symbolic reading in that they metaphorically represent Buddhism and Communism, both of which have been subject to the ever-changing circumstances within Chinese society. These once so important religious and political beliefs are presented as a set of ephemeral ideologies. Ravaged by Cui’s brush, these icons reveal

38 the artist’s unspoken conviction that Buddhist and Communist systems of thought were the cause of a great deal of destruction and pain.

A new series of works from 2008 entitled Liberation concerns old trucks. Once again, the subject is viewed large and close up. Here, drawing upon the basic principles of representational painting, Cui models the forms with dramatic highlights and shadows that replicate the three-dimensionality of the subject. The background, created by the application of pigment with a large palette knife, remains indistinct, and nothing detracts from the iconic view of the vehicle, which stands as a tribute to the importance of trucks in industry, agriculture, and the military. The images in this series can be appreciated in a number of ways: as somewhat romantic recreations of machinery of the past, as the residue of a kinetic performance through the artist’s application of paint, and, finally, as beautiful abstract arrangements of shapes, semicircles, arcs, and rectangles.

Cui’s piece de résistance is his painting Little Nest (2008). Little Nest is not little; it measures 200 x 300 centimetres, and the diagonal brush strokes, which are applied with great force and conviction, imitate the structure of a bird’s nest. As Dao Zi has observed, here the calligraphic qualities of Cui’s brush strokes are most perceptible.6 Like most artists in China, Cui was trained in both modern and traditional styles of painting, and, like many Chinese artists, he deeply admires the distinct beauty of calligraphy. Passages of calligraphic play are discernible in his early works, where strands of ink loop across the surface, turning and overlapping each other; but here, the energetic slashing lines that chaotically interweave with each other are more emphatic, larger, and bolder. For the Chinese, such monochromatic works, devoid of ornamentation and narrative, have long been the vehicle for Daoist and Zen painting, for as the Daodejing states, “The five colors blind the eye.”7

In a more contemporary frame of reference, Robert Morgan wrote in the catalogue to the most recent exhibition of Cui’s works at ChinaSquare Gallery, New York City, that the painting references the construction of the National Stadium in Beijing, which is popularly called the Bird’s Nest.8 The five-hundred-million dollar construction built under the direction of Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and the outspoken artist Ai Weiwei was intended as a tour de force to signal the great progress, wealth, and power of

Cui Guotai, Little Nest, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 300 cm. Photo: Cui Guotai. Courtesy of the artist and ChinaSquare Gallery, New York.

39 modern China to the hundreds of millions of viewers of the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing. In the end, Ai Weiwei refused to participate in the opening ceremonies, blatantly criticizing the government’s policies.9 Sadly, now the Nest is no longer home to athletic events and is being transformed into a shopping and entertainment mall. Thus the great monument to the Beijing Olympics, which once symbolized China’s progress, is stripped of its intended function and has become the focus of heated political criticism. The Nest has been now relegated to a status similar to that of the deserted factories and haunting locomotives. Dao Zi, in an essay from 2008, explained that Cui’s painting conveys . . . ”the authenticity of history and reality. . . . The inexpressible things in ‘The Portraits of Industry’ are neither any facsimile of ideas for reality, state, or symbols in themselves, nor the ‘generally absolute’ thing in itself which the sublime aesthetics of Kant opens for abstract arts, but a huge object, and a wreckage of the planning economy given up by historical rules.”10 Dao Zi also points out that these scenes, devoid of human presence, also represent a waste of natural resources.

In conclusion, although Cui denies any intentional political commentary in his work and chooses to see himself as an artist without an agenda, as an observer of the great changes that have taken place in Chinese society, he has chosen subjects that have suffered neglect and destruction; this, along with the emotional tenor of his brush work, reveals that he is not a detached observer. The paintings record his impressions as a witness to the transformation of Chinese society from the 1950s to the present, from a society so bent on modernization that comrades were enjoined to uphold social values and make communal sacrifices to one that saw the demise of those efforts. Despite his apparent attitude of neutrality, Cui’s subjects reflect an inexorable political agenda—the closing of factories, the vestiges of locomotives and trucks, landscapes that bear the marks of a turbulent history, and the State’s current efforts to extirpate vestiges of the past. Moreover, his feelings for these subjects are clearly expressed in his dramatic style of applying paint. Cui takes icons of the past and subjects them to modernist sensibilities in his distortions of scale and his vandalizing abstract expressionist technique. In the end, these paintings not only document the relics of the past, they are an admonition to the future.

Notes 1 The title of this article is taken from Neil Young’s album Rust Never Sleeps (1979). 2 For more information about the artist, see “Cui Guotai” at http://www.chinasquareny.com/gallery/ index.php/artists/56-artistscuiguotai. 3 Chen Danqing,“The Great Remains,” in Cui Guotai 2003–2005 (Berlin: Alexander Ochs Gallery, 2005), 8. 4 The artist was interviewed in Beijing in 2005 and 2006, see Patricia Karetzky, Beijing Boogie Woogie (New York: Chinese American Arts Council, 2007), 8. 5 Ibid. 6 Dao Zi, “Spiritual Wandering in Social Contextuality,” in Cui Guotai 2003–2005 (Berlin: Alexander Ochs Gallery 2005), 6. 7 See Hans Georg Muller, Daodejing (Chicago: Open Court, 2007), verse 12, 29: The five colors make one’s eye blind. Galloping horses and hunting in the field make one’s heart mad. Goods that are difficult to obtain obstruct one’s ways. The five tastes make one’s palate obtuse. The five tones make one’s ears deaf. Therefore the sage orders like this: He cares for the belly, not for the eye. Thus he gets rid of that and chooses this. 8 Robert C. Morgan, Evidence of a Lost Era: Cui Guotai (New York: China Square, 2008), 1. 9 See interview by Rachel Cooke, “Cultural Revolutionary: Ai Weiwei,” Observer, Sunday, July 6, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jul/06/art.china. 10 Dao Zi, “The Social-Cultural Interpretation of the Portraits of Industry,” in Evidence of a Lost Era: Cui Guotai (New York: China Square, 2008),15.

40 Lisa Claypool China Urban: An Interview with Xie Xiaoze

s cities in China expand at a rate and to a size practically beyond belief, the language that we use to describe and define them is Ashifting. Words such as “metropolis,” “cosmopolis,” and even “urban” seem inadequate, not grand enough or encompassing enough to represent the enormity of this new intersection of rice fields and skyscrapers. They are being supplanted by the new language of polylocality, the “glocal,” and terms such as “translocalmotion,” the theme of the 2008 Shanghai Biennial, a word that evokes the powerful machinery of train locomotion, movement across space, and locality. It is rendered kuaicheng kuaike in Chinese, literally, “speedy city, speedy guest.” In some cases, words that seem new in fact are being resuscitated from long disuse. They draw us back into the nineteenth century, another era of vast construction, migrations of people, and rapid circulation of commodities and capital. The nineteenth century gave birth to the megalopolis, a city without a centre, a space of endless urban sprawl, an inchoate architectural form. If London was the embodiment of the nineteenth-century megalopolis, the Pearl River Delta is its new embodiment in the twenty-first century.

The city in China, in short, is so big and is moving so fast that it seems almost able to escape language. And so we find ourselves grasping for words to speak of it.

Visual art begins to fill the gap. As an artist whose visual work limns the line between architectural and pictorial space and whose process as a painter and photographer is heavily informed by training in architecture and craft design, Xie Xiaoze is especially well situated to address the problem of the Chinese city. Photographs of his recent installation, Last Days, composed with collaborator Chen Zhong in Kaixian, Sichuan, were on view from April 7 to June 7, 2009, at the China Urban show in the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon. The following interview of Xie by Lisa Claypool, founder of the China Urban Collective and co-curator of China Urban, took place in April 2009.

Xie Xiaoze and Chen Zhong, installation view of Last Days, 2007–2009. Photo: Dan Kvita. Courtesy of Reed College, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Portland, Oregon.

41 Lisa Claypool: Why did you decide to pursue a B.F.A. degree in architecture?

Xie Xiaoze: I was actually on the science and technology side [in high school]. At that time I wasn’t really sure what to do. I was interested in physics and I had been interested in painting and drawing since I was a child. But I never considered pursuing a career in the arts. To study architecture seemed a good compromise between science and art.

Lisa Claypool: But there were not that many Chinese architects working at the time?

Xie Xiaoze: In the early 1980s, rapid urbanization had not started yet. But people already had an idea about what professional fields would be popular. And architecture was definitely one of them. And, of course, the architecture department at Qinghua is one of the best in the country. At that time I was seventeen years old, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.

But I didn’t find myself very happy there, particularly the first couple of years. The training was very rigorous. We were supposed to draw in a way that doesn’t reveal the trace of the human hand at all. And, in general, I found myself aspiring for something freer, less practical, less compromising . . . because, you know, in architectural design you have to take different elements into consideration and come up with a solution, and you’re limited by circumstances.

On weekends and holidays I would go to the Yuanmingyuan gardens to enjoy and paint landscapes. The paintings were expressionistic, even though I didn’t know what expressionism was at the time. They weren’t very realistic.

Lisa Claypool: Did you see the Robert Rauschenberg show in Beijing [at the National Art Museum in 1985]?

Xie Xiaoze: I do remember it—it was a big deal. I was quite startled by the show. It was very exciting, striking, fluid, powerful. I didn’t quite understand it yet, but that excitement and freedom left a deep impression on me.

Lisa Claypool: You graduated in 1988. What did you decide to do next?

Xie Xiaoze: I wanted to get as close to pure art or fine art as much as possible. I went to see the well-known muralist Yuan Yuanfu. I showed him my work and he was very encouraging. After two entrance exams, I got into the graduate program at the Central Academy of Arts and Design, which at the time was kind of a big deal, because no one from an architecture background could get into a major graduate program that emphasized painting.

Lisa Claypool: Were you working in oils at the time?

Xie Xiaoze: At architecture school we studied drawing, which was mostly academic drawing: full-value drawing using cross-hatching, very time consuming and intensive. We also drew landscapes and buildings outdoors. We studied watercolour painting. But at that time I was interested in gouache—as a medium it seemed to me to have a little more weight. I studied it on my own. I tried my first oil painting in a friend’s dorm room with his

42 materials. When I went to the academy, oil painting wasn’t encouraged so much by the professor; he encouraged us to work on design, on public art, on art that relates to architecture and space. But I always wanted to do oil painting. It seemed like the thing to do as a real artist.

Lisa Claypool: Were you expected to do sustained object studies?

Xie Xiaoze: My advising professor, Yuan Yuanfu, was more of a modernist than the average art professor. He emphasized formal qualities of design, composition, simplification, rhythm, and he paid a lot of attention to space, all of these formalist issues. We did not do a lot of those long-term studies based on observation (which is what we were supposed to have done as undergraduates, anyway). There was a lot to enjoy in the program. We had the opportunity to design tapestries, which were then fabricated in a factory in southern China. We went to rural areas in Shanxi province to make lacquerware, mostly lacquer screens. And we worked on mural commissions. So from that experience I became very comfortable handling things on large scale. Some of my installations are mural sized.

Lisa Claypool: I am very interested in your early study of the object. Now you paint books and newspapers, and your work is still engaged very much with issues of objectivity. I want to talk about this aspect of your work. But first, can we continue the discussion of your education? What made you decide to continue on to pursue a second M.F.A. in the United States?

Xie Xiaoze: In the 1980s there was an influx of ideas and art from the West. At that time college students were reading authors who previously had been banned—people like Sartre, Nietzsche, and Freud. Among intellectuals there was constant discussion and criticism of traditional Chinese culture. So there was this idea of wanting to know more about the West and going abroad. The opportunity came when my wife got a scholarship to study physics at the University of North Texas. I went to the art school at the same university for the experience of a completely different system. The graduate program was more of a shelter for artists who had not yet found a place in the art world or artistic direction.

I was rethinking my ideas about art. After studying postmodernism I felt that those early ideas I had about the autonomy of art seemed dated. So I was looking at the potential of figurative art and how to combine realistic skills with ideas, with issues that related to contemporary art. Perhaps not to tell stories, but to use stories to deal with critical issues.

In 1995, I had my first solo show. Then things picked up quickly. And I moved to Bucknell University in 1999, and soon after started to show in New York.

Lisa Claypool: What kinds of things were you painting?

Xie Xiaoze: At the very beginning, in 1992–93, my work responded to the sudden change of living environment. I painted things that were very American. I painted the junkyard. I climbed into abandoned cars and took photographs of the sky through the cracked windshields and did a series of black-and-white photorealistic paintings of these images. And I did very colourful, very expressive paintings of grocery stores—in the States they’re

43 so big, a scene of abundance. But then, soon, I focused on a new series of works called The Library Series. I painted rows of books, sleeping books, on the shelves of the library (based on photographs I took in the library). I usually painted them up close, so that you are confronted with this wall of spines of books with numbers and labels, usually without titles—either the title and author is cropped out of the picture or they’re obscured. So more like an abstract kind of containment.

I was also very interested in the Xie Xiaoze, Flags and Banners: A Century of interpretation of history. In 1994 Student Movements in China, 1994, oil and acrylic I started to make works based on wood, 297.2 x 358.1 x on historical or news photos. 88 cm. Courtesy of the artist. I started to make installations that dealt with the interpretation of historical events. My first installation was about the history of student movements in China in the twentieth century, called Flags and Banners. And I also did a piece about the burning of books by the Nazis, and another work about the destruction of books by the Red Guards. The theme of the library—my interest in time, and history, and memory—these have always been present in my work.

Lisa Claypool: How are your paintings different from traditional still lifes?

Xie Xiaoze: First of all, instead of setting up the objects the way you want, instead of composing, I prefer to find something that is existing, and to rely on however librarians leave things or organize things. To use only the viewfinder of the camera to decide upon my composition. Second, I am very deliberate about my palette. Some of the early paintings are purely black and white, very neutral, and cold, and the Chinese library paintings are always dominated by either a warm brownish-yellowish tone, or, later on, a greenish tone with an almost toxic feel. And I think the third thing has to do with the scale. We think of traditional still life paintings being small, perhaps somehow closer in size to the actual objects they depict—you think of paintings of apples, and glasses, things like that. My book paintings are dramatically bigger than life size, so that they have a kind of architectural presence.

Lisa Claypool: I completely agree. I’m wondering about the notion of finding the books in a particular order—or finding them out of order. It seems to me that what you paint often is the disorder or the trace of a hand that has been touching the book and casually leaves it in one place. Is there something about order and disorder in the library that you find appealing?

Xie Xiaoze: Yes, I think that the question of order or disorder is an important one. Many of these library paintings—how the books are organized or how the newspapers are stacked—do reflect an order. For the stack of newspapers, maybe it’s a chronology of time, from one particular month or weeks. And librarians usually stack them from earlier to later or later to earlier, although they appear to be casually stacked. And I would keep them the way librarians stack them, because it reflects an order.

Lisa Claypool: Yet your paintings suggest that there is a potential for disorder, that things which we think can be contained within structures of

44 Xie Xiaoze, The MoMA order may actually escape them somehow. Even the newspaper stacks are a Library (O-P), 2005, oil on canvas, 101.6 x 152.4 cm. bit precarious. Courtesy of the artist.

Xie Xiaoze: Well yes, they’re never perfectly horizontal and static. When you stack newspapers casually, inevitably you’re getting some tilting lines. And that gives it a sense of movement. Everything is sliding away. The composition is dynamic.

In the MoMA Library Series the books are placed on horizontal metal shelves in order to emphasize the architectural space and a cold kind of analytical look. I wanted the lines to be straight, to be perfectly uniform. The proportion between the space the books occupied and the empty space they left has to be exactly the way I wanted. Order suggests the trace of the human hand and human mind. If we can categorize, we can organize things around certain themes or subjects; we get to have control over things. We categorize them, classify them, and label them in order to have control over them. Originally, this was more of a Western way of thinking.

Lisa Claypool: It’s a late-nineteenth-century science, something I have been thinking about in my own research on colonial and domestic libraries and museums in the Shanghai area.

Xie Xiaoze, Order (or the Xie Xiaoze: Those terms (order/ Red Guards), 1999, acrylic on paper, steel plates, 317.5 disorder) are definitely relevant x 541 x 74.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist. now. Nothing is perfectly, comfortably contained or classified. In the paintings, there’s a label falling off, the order of the books is switched, and sometimes you’re reading the letters on the spine upside down. It’s a decision to be

45 true to real life. In my 1999 installation called Order (or the Red Guards), there was a deliberate superimposition of order and chaos to suggest the destructive nature of radical revolution.

Lisa Claypool: Can you say more about your own process?

Xie Xiaoze: I start with a theme or an idea. I work intensively on it for a while, and then maybe I get distracted. And then I start something else, work on it for a while, and I may revisit older themes or ideas or do something related, or deal with the same idea in a different way. What I am hoping is that I am not recognized by a particular subject or a particular style, but, rather, that over the years all these bodies of work grow into a related system, kind of like a tree, in their common conceptual stress.

Lisa Claypool: I see a conceptual link between your paintings and the Kaixian installations entitled Last Days. Can we discuss this recent work? First, how did you decide to work in Kaixian with Chen Zhong?

Xie Xiaoze: We always shared the same attitude of not serving the right profession. I moved from architecture to painting; he moved from engineering to cinematography. When I moved to Pennsylvania, Chen Zhong was studying cinematography at Temple University in Philadelphia. He taught me how to use the camcorder, basic editing. We stayed in contact.

Chen Zhong is from Sichuan, so he is very familiar with the Three Gorges Dam project, though he lives in Beijing. In January 2007, he traveled to Kaixian just when the new city was being built and the old city being taken down (200,000 people were relocated to the new city just twenty minutes up the hill). People were going about their everyday life, and because it was before the spring festival, it was really busy, lots of colours, the markets were so full of people. Chen Zhong showed me some of those photographs, and I really liked them; he also showed me photographs he did in the summer of 2007. He wasn’t very happy about the documentary approach to photography and wanted to do a project, something that would intervene in the environment. And so we decided to visit Kaixian together in winter 2007.

The first few days each of us took pictures, and in the evening we talked and talked about a variety of ideas. For example, I was thinking of doing an installation of thousands of boats made of folded newspaper and to have them piled and scattered in the ruins. Chen was talking about the use of some bright colours in this grey environment, and having this colour, maybe a bright red, reflected in the water in some way. We talked about covering the lower walls of a conference hall in the city with newspaper, a miniature version of the Great Hall of the People, but it’s a sensitive place, even though it’s in an area in which the surrounding buildings have been taken down. We talked about covering open fields with newspapers and taking photographs of this dense field of newspaper on the ground surrounded by buildings that are half demolished. So after a lot of brainstorming, drinking, sketching, we said, okay, we will mount paper flat on existing walls and make it some kind of temporary monument. We were interested in newspaper as a metaphor for the transition of media and life, particularly in this dynamic moment; we were aware of the role of propaganda and of the media in the realization of the project in local newspapers; and we also knew newspaper has been used as a cheap decoration in a lot of people’s homes. To mount the outside walls with newspaper was to turn something inside out.

46 Xie Xiaoze and Chen Zhong, detail of Last Days, 2007–2009. Photo: Dan Kvita. Courtesy of Reed College Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Portland, Oregon.

Lisa Claypool: How did you choose your structures?

Xie Xiaoze: We looked for sites with extraordinary contrast between “monument” and ruins. We hired a driver, looked around, and we would work quickly. I remember the first installation we did. It was getting dark in the late afternoon and we barely had time to finish it. The next morning we worried that the pictures were not good enough, that they didn’t have enough light, and we went back right away and were very happy to find that most everything was intact.

It was such an extraordinary experience to work there. You can imagine: the dust in the air, the toxic smell, noise. . . . How can people live in such an environment? For two years while the demolition was going on slowly and painstakingly, we would spend the day there, and in the afternoon we would start to get headaches because of the air, and our clothes would become filthy, the white sneakers becoming grey and brown. At the end of the day, when it was too dark to work, and we were exhausted, hungry, and all with headaches, then we would go to the new city, which was decorated with lights and advertising. And it was like heaven.

Lisa Claypool: Who did you hire to help you?

Xie Xiaoze: This young guy who had a bun bus (mianbao che). We asked him to take us to a hotel the first day and then to help us. We found him to be a nice guy to work with. He’d know all these places in town. We’d ask: Where is the recycling place that sells newspapers? And he would say: Oh there are a couple of them, and take us around. He’s a local guy, so he could help us hire more people.

Lisa Claypool: What did he think of your conceptualization of this project?

Xie Xiaoze: He intuitively could sense something unusual and exciting was going on. He had fun; he wasn’t so skeptical about it. His contribution was most significant. The others were just making some money. Chen Zhong was the real hero of the project, but this guy helped a lot.

Lisa Claypool: There’s one photograph of a wall plastered over with newspaper in front of a kindergarten. A round hole in it echoes the shapes of the windows in the school. Was that hole there when you found the site? Or did you punch the hole into the wall?

Xie Xiaoze: We pretty much utilized only the existing structures; newspapers were the only elements we added to the structures. If there was a hole or a crack we left it alone. We pasted only on flat surfaces to give the impression that this was a complete wall, and the surface decoration fragmented as the wall collapsed. As a filmmaker, Chen was very aware of the mise-en-scène. He used certain tricks to make the contrast of dark and

47 light more effective . . . . He would spray water on the gaps and shadows to Xie Xiaoze, March–April 2003, P.P.G, 2004, oil on make them appear darker and give the composition stronger contrast. canvas, 152.4 x 25.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Xie Xiaoze, 2001–2002, Lisa Claypool: And speaking of propaganda, is there a connection between the Guangzhou, 2003, oil on installations and the newspaper display windows common in Chinese cities? canvas, 209.6 x 162.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Xie Xiaoze: I did a project on those! I made a time-based, constantly changing installation for my 2003 show at the CAAW (China Art Archives and Warehouse); it displayed current local newspapers in transparent compartments—not unlike those display windows.

Lisa Claypool: In regard to architectural space, you discuss your earlier paintings conceptually as architectural, and at Kaixian you actually began to construct real spaces in the same bricolage manner. Would you elaborate on the ways in which that architectural impulse connects the newspaper paintings, in particular, to the installations?

Xie Xiaoze: Fragmentary Views is a series of paintings depicting a close- up of stacked newspapers, with fragmented little bits and pieces of information collaged together, more of a condensed version of history. This idea of fragmentation—you’re never getting the full picture—relates to the configuration of the wall in the Kaixian project. The fragments of newspapers in the Kaixian installations cover fragments of the walls. Wherever the wall stops, the newspaper is chopped off. We never tried to include a full page; everything followed the natural shapes of the walls.

After doing the paintings of stacks of newspapers, I also did a group of paintings called Both Sides Now in which it appears that the text and images on the back side of a newspaper page have bled over to the front, so what you are seeing is the overlapping of the back and the front images. They’re all based on a given newspaper with a specific date. I wanted to focus on something that was found, to give a sense of layers of information, complexity, confusion, and conflict of information. In those paintings the newspapers are opened up, and not only opened up, but seen through. So I think that with the Kaixian installations, the method of presenting the newspapers, to flatten them, to have them overlap, is very much related to those paintings.

What is essential to the paintings I just mentioned and to the installations is the idea of fragmentation, of conflicts, of the bombardment of dense of layers of information, and how it affects the way we see the world.

Lisa Claypool: One of the interesting things about the Kaixian installations is that you cannot read the characters. Sometimes you can just make out some of the newspaper headlines, but they’re just too far in the distance to read. In your paintings it is exactly the opposite. You’re so close that you almost feel the texture of the newspaper pages, but because you’re so close, that sense of fragmentation and incompleteness is enhanced. The text is beyond legibility in both cases.

Xie Xiaoze: It’s this idea of this dense information, sometimes not so much content specific.

Lisa Claypool: Could you talk a little about how history plays out in these almost lushly beautiful scenes of compete demolition and destruction? How does the aesthetic of the sublime speak to history in Last Days?

48 49 Xie Xiaoze: This particular project is the most dramatic. It is about the temporality and transitory nature of life, because it is such an extraordinary scene when the city is being flattened. That kind of urgency, that kind of scale—it was quite exciting for us.

I hope the images are beautiful. Beauty is always important—even, sometimes, when it comes almost as a by-product of an idea. To me, it could be a persuasive thing. You want someone to think about the work, to live with it in the sense of letting it linger in your mind. I think it has to have some visual quality, and that is beauty. But I think a lot has been done to create picturesque scenes of ruins. There’s that whole tradition of paintings of ruins in nineteenth-century Europe, perhaps earlier, but I think what we’re doing is quite different. This beauty has to do with artificiality, so much to do with the constructedness of the media. It’s not just being nostalgic about old things (of course there is a sense of the work as a memorial to something that is quickly vanishing), but we also wanted to communicate something urgent.

Lisa Claypool: About the real human costs of living in a hyperreal world?

Xie Xiaoze: Human tragedies, political struggles, power: these are things that are major concerns in my work, that compel me to make work.

Xie Xiaoze, August 8, 2006, N.Y.T., 2007, oil and acrylic on canvas, 167.6 x 121.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

50 Madeline Eschenburg Xing Danwen: Revealing the Masquerade of Modernity

rom the moment Beijing was awarded the honour of hosting the Olympic Games in 2001, city officials set about improving the Fcapital city through a series of modernization projects in order to gain positive recognition from a global audience. Leading planners for the Games sought to overcome criticism regarding China’s communist history, human rights violations, and international exploits by spending over forty billion dollars on pre-Olympic development and at least one hundred million dollars on the opening ceremonies alone. This is more than twice what was spent for the opening ceremony at Athens. Renovation of the city is hardly new. Indeed, since the end of the Mao era, the city has been in a perpetual state of change. As China enters the socioeconomic global capitalist playing field, what is referred to as the modern “transnational space,”1 its self-consciousness is revealed through radical transformations and costly renovations throughout its metropolitan centers.

These transformations are at once awe-inspiring and treacherous. Over the past decades, as China has become a key player in the global economy, and as Beijing has prepared for the international coverage brought on by the Games, thousands of inhabitants have been displaced. Traditional courtyard houses have been demolished in favour of modern high-rise condominiums, shopping centers, and office buildings. Many who once lived within the city limits have been forced to relocate to nearby suburbs. Many have lost jobs in the process as the commute has became too difficult and time consuming. While some see the process of globalization as a catalyst for the creation of new spaces of identity, others simply see it as a sacrilegious burial of a shared historical identity. The complexities of this issue were examined extensively by Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist in their exhibition and accompanying catalogue Cities on the Move. Twelve years ago they summarized the problem as follows:

Modernization in many Asian countries, which has been considered as a process of re-enforcement of national identities, sometimes even religious and ideological identities, is ironically accompanied by a general deconstruction and disintegration of established values and cultural modes. . . . Uncertainty, along with the disintegration and liquification of the Self hence become the main issues that Asian people are about to cope with.2

More than a decade later their predictions ring true. What this exhibition sought to examine and what I seek to question is the result of what Hou and Obrist refer to as the “implicit double-binds”3 that the clash of modernization and a long-established cultural identity create. My primary concern is not the physical destruction and reconstruction of Chinese cities

51 resulting from globalization and urbanization. It is, rather, the psychological Xing Danwen, installation view of disCONNEXION at the implications of identity, the “disintegration and liquification of the Self” Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Biennale, 2004. that Hou and Obrist argue for, that is of particular significance. The Courtesy of the artist. instability of the structural fabric of the city is a reflection of or precursor to the instability the individual feels in identifying with his or her own city.

The ideological shift from the Mao era to the era of global capitalism has led to a visible shift in the urban landscape. City planners and architects have abandoned the horizontal layout favoured during the Cultural Revolution for the vertical. The myth behind major metropolitan renovation projects is that such endeavours are representative of the wishes of those living and working within them, when, in reality, it may only represent the values of a select privileged few. In her article “Architecture of the Evicted,” Rosalyn Deutsche outlines the redevelopment projects in New York City in recent decades under the auspices of returning to tradition, preserving identity, or augmenting the arts. Such projects result in homogenization of the city through exclusionary tactics, and, for Deutsche, these “procedures consolidate the city as territory, constructing a domain over which power is exercised by controlling relations of inclusion/exclusion and presence/ absence.”4 Her story of the misplaced victims of gentrification is very similar to that of the victimization of citizens in Beijing’s recent history, and it is also applicable to that of the misfortunes of thousands of people in dozens of growing cities throughout the world. To those watching the Olympic Games, the ever-changing face of Beijing coincides remarkably with Western capitalist values. Those misplaced protestors who occasionally appeared in the international media, however, did not fit in with the carefully choreographed Olympic production, and they represent those who are slowly being edited out of the media coverage.

Just as China has recently become an influential global economic power, so have contemporary Chinese artists recently become increasingly popular to an international audience. Interestingly, practicing Chinese artists have gained more recognition from abroad than they have in their native land. Because of this, their works tend to be financially and ideologically autonomous from the governmental concerns of China, and this freedom provides them the opportunity to raise critical questions about the state of

52 the Chinese city, the state of China, and its place within a global framework. These artists therefore occupy a highly critical ideological space for questioning the effects of modernization.

One such artist, Xing Danwen, seeks to understand the repercussions of such vast and rapid changes on the psyche of the human subject. Rather than focusing on the moment of destruction or the process of new construction like other artists such as Zhang Dali, Zhan Wang, and RongRong, Xing’s work focuses on the final stage of the process of urbanization, after the new building has been erected, after the transnational, global space is complete. In the catalogue made to accompany the exhibition Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, Wu Hung asserts that while in theory a demolition project “promises renewal, numerous demolition sites in Beijing have been left in a demolished state for several years. These places lie outside normal life, not only spatially, but also in a temporal sense: time simply vanishes in these black holes.”5 Interestingly, Xing’s works reveal that the modern spaces—the visual landscapes—that come into being after the urbanization projects are complete similarly lie outside normal life, spatially and temporally. In these spaces, too, time vanishes into black holes.

Xing’s photographic series disCONNEXION draws the viewer into what appears to be an abstract painting, a complex layering of colours and textures. The truth behind the works, however, is a harsh reality in conceptual opposition to their beautiful composition. In her Duplication series, Xing photographed piles of children’s toys. Shot at a toy factory, each composition is filled with a different type of doll. At first glance, the viewer is transported to memories of childhood games and expectations for the future. In the end, her photographs raise questions applicable to humans of all ages. In her series Urban Fiction, Xing makes a close examination of the effects of urbanization on modern people. Using photographs of architectural maquettes as her backdrop, she focuses on the incongruity of the organic person acting within very inorganic and modern architectural spaces. In her most recent series, Wall House, Xing closely explores the sense of isolation that comes with modernization. She examines the psychological and physical boundaries that act as social barriers in a

53 metropolitan environment, giving the viewer an intimate look into the every day life of a young woman in the city. In all four series, the artist uses her medium to create a microcosm for the modern global society. The viewer is initially attracted to the large scale, bright colours, and interesting patterns of the compositions. But further exploration of the works uncovers a disconcerting truth behind the shiny veneer.

DisCONNEXION (2002–03) Left: Xing Danwen, disCONNEXION, Number 6, In her series disCONNEXION, Xing presents a group of photographs 2002–03, chromogenic color print, 148 x 120 cm. Courtesy compositionally reminiscent of abstract expressionist paintings. And of the artist. like abstract expressionist paintings, they are artistically strong because of their aesthetic appeal. Initially the viewer is taken in by swirling white Middle: Xing Danwen, disCONNEXION, Number 11, loops infinitely overlapping one another, cream-colored honeycombs 2002–03, chromogenic color print, 148 x 120 cm. Courtesy overflowing with undulating black snakes, or piles of golden hair-like of the artist. strands weaving in upon themselves. Further inspection, however, reveals the white loops and golden strands to be electronic wires, the honeycombs Right: Xing Danwen, disCONNEXION, Number 9, to be burlap sacks, and the black snakes to be cords capped off by computer 2002–03, chromogenic color print, 148 x 120 cm. Courtesy or cell phone chargers. These photographs were taken in southern China’s of the artist. Guangdong province. They capture just a small portion of the electronic waste transported from industrialized countries, such as Japan, South Korea, and the United States, to the processing centres on the Chinese coast. Hundreds of people make their living by recycling the large piles of e- waste that have been discarded by transnational corporations. The physical and psychological conditions under which these workers labour are often dangerous and oppressive. For Xing, this is just one effect of the global modernization project:

Modernization and globalization shape urban development. In my country, I have experienced and witnessed the changes that have taken place under the influence of Western modernity. These changes have contributed to a strong and powerful push for development in China, but at the same time they have led to a big environmental and social nightmare in remote corners of China.”6

In this series, Xing has created a beautiful fantasy out of a hopeless situation. In his discussion of disCONNEXION, Gao Minglu asserts that “Xing Danwen uses aesthetic modernity to represent or reproduce the global industrial modernity. She uses the modernist aesthetic of ‘beneficial beautification’ to offset the harmful nature of her subject. In the end, she is able to unify the initial dislocation between the beautified form of the

54 electronic trash and its harmful nature.”7 While Gao argues that Xing unifies beauty and harm in these works, I argue that rather than unifying, she intelligently highlights the contradiction.

In this series Xing does not only comment on the effects of the e-waste in southern China. Her works are indicative of the realities of all aspects of

Left: Xing Danwen, modernization throughout China. In terms of urbanization, the aesthetics Duplication, Number 1, 2003, chromogenic color print, 148 x of modernity are enticing in their smooth efficiency. Humans are complex 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist. creatures who are drawn to beautiful and simple facades in hopes that they might help to sort out their own complicated lives. The modern architecture Middle: Xing Danwen, Duplication, Number 2, 2003, in growing Chinese cities offers hopes of a new beginning, an easier chromogenic color print, 148 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist. existence, and a more beautiful lifestyle. While this may be true to a certain extent, for the most part it is a false promise. Modernity comes with a price Right: Xing Danwen, that its aesthetics attempt to disguise. By imitating the promises set forth by Duplication, Number 4, 2003, chromogenic color print, 148 x modernity’s aesthetics, Xing reveals its inherent illusion. 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Duplication (2003) Employing the same aesthetic strategies, Xing explores another side effect of modernization in her 2003 series Duplication. Consisting of six images, this series captures thousands of identical or almost identical portions of children’s dolls. As in disCONNEXION, the entire composition is filled with layers of plastic scrap, rendered useless in their dismembered state. In Duplication 1, for instance, the viewer is faced with a pile of bald, chubby- cheeked, peach-coloured dolls’ heads. Some stare vacantly ahead while others lie with closed eyes. The heads vary in size and shape but all are Caucasian and bald. Duplication, Number 2 captures the heads of hundreds of stern-browed men, all with the same close-cropped hair cut. Every head has identical black hair, pale skin, and set jaw, with the exception of one blonde head located almost in the center of the composition. Perhaps the most eerie photograph of the series, Duplication, Number 4, focuses on the heads of young female dolls that seem to be drowning in a sea of their own long blonde hair. Despite their decapitated state, the dolls’ expressions remain blank, feigning animation with black eyelashes and rosy cheeks.

Children’s dolls act as more than mere entertainment. They provide humans with their first exposure to an ideal. They are the socially constructed prototype for the ideal child, the ideal man, the ideal woman. In this series, Xing Danwen explores the notion of the ideal in contemporary culture. In our current global society the prototype for the ideal human transgresses

55 national boundaries. Her artist’s statement about the series suggests the Xing Danwen, installation view of Urban Fiction in existence of global ideals is stifling to Chinese societies and by extension the exhibition China Show, Urbis, Manchester, U.K., 2006. to all humans: Courtesy of the artist.

Today, no longer solely a population of naturally conceived humans, we are experiencing an accelerated era of development with a defined goal of modernizing our systems and our lifestyle. People study and struggle to achieve a standardized excellence in both their personal and professional life. We see fashion and beauty in advertising and media, and we find that the aesthetics used promote a universal model and that distinctiveness is not encouraged. Educational and job requirements lead people to train themselves to become a specific “type” and learn specific functions in order to succeed. Individuality decreases. In order to improve ourselves as human beings, we think we must follow, rather than lead, and that we must copy to fit into specific and accepted classifications. There is a point at which this process can be viewed as another form of cloning.8

Are the photographed dolls representations of an ideal mold we must fit into in order to have a place within our global society? Rather than opening the doors to new ways of being, does the new global market act as a greater catalyst for homogenization?

This crisis of personal identity parallels the effects urbanization has had on the built environment. Like the dolls, cities around the world are becoming less and less differentiated. Chinese cities are looking to already industrialized cities in places like Japan and the United States as models for modernization. In this light, the sentiments of international architects like Rem Koolhaas, architect of the new China Central Television Tower in Beijing, seem somewhat reasonable. Rather than focusing on the nation’s past, Koolhaas calls for a new perspective on Chinese cities. He embraces the aesthetics of globalization, and instead of lamenting the past, he

56 celebrates what he considers to be a clean slate, a land of new architectural opportunities. In his words, “Instead of resisting this globalization, we should theorize about it. . . . Perhaps we have to shed our identities. Perhaps identity is constricting us.” He suggests that the situation should be looked at as “ . . . a blank page for us to work with” or even as a “liberation.”9 While his view is controversial in its callous disregard for historical space, it could be an answer to Xing’s critique. The new architecture being erected in Beijing alone lends itself to anything but homogenization. Koolhaas’s Central Chinese Television Tower looks like a skyscraper that has been folded into fourths and stood on end, the new opera house looks like a futuristic silver egg, and the design for the Beijing Olympic Stadium resembles a birds’ nest. Although they may be displacing hundreds of old residences, they are new and original. This type of innovation supports Wu Hung’s assertion that this kind of “destabilizing process can be enormously energizing, because instability is often a necessary condition for a self- examination devoid of the confidence and optimism attached to a ‘self imposed ideology.’”10 This architecture could, therefore, provide new alternatives for a seemingly fixed ideal.

Xing Danwen’s art revolves around the effects the modern visual environment has on humans. According to Wu, the influence is obvious: “The rapid development of a market economy has not only altered the shape of the city but has brought about fundamental changes in social structure, ideology, and morality; even more striking are the shifts in people’s identities and relationships.”11 Just as the market economy has affected the face of the city, Xing’s Duplication series points out the homogenizing effects global society has had on global citizens. It is perhaps telling of her intentions that this series is so aesthetically similar to disCONNEXION. Both series capture the excesses of modernity using the same formal language.

Urban Fiction (2004–08) The focus of Xing Danwen’s photographic series Urban Fiction is the final stage of the process of urbanization: the erection of modern buildings and

57 their subsequent inhabitation. In this ongoing series Xing photographs maquettes of real estate development projects as displayed in the offices of their developers. She then superimposes photographs of people (usually herself) acting out personal dramas to the scale of the model so as to predict the way humans might interact with the space. The result is an almost comical discord between the new architecture and human behaviour. While one is tightly controlled and regulated, the other is unpredictable.

The idea for this project came to her while she was traveling on a train through Europe. She knew that she wanted to comment on urbanization, but she wanted to take an original point of view. In an interview with Britta Erickson she discusses other artists working with the same topic:

In the past few years, I have seen many photo-artists working on the subject of urbanization. Some of them have expressed their concepts well about how modernization and globalization have made cities similar everywhere, but mostly their work is based on straight shots of real cities, of very similar places. It makes me very conscious and alert that I should definitely not repeat the same, but instead create something new, fresh, different and original in my own way . . . . I wanted to do the complete opposite, starting from a fake landscape to talk about its reality.12

Initially, Xing had the idea that she would build her own real estate maquettes. She realized, however, that while the maquettes represented a fictionalized reality, a maquette that she created would be even further from the truth. Indeed, as Xing herself recalls:

At the beginning, with the difficulty of access to the real estate maquette, I even thought maybe I should build a maquette by myself. After succeeding with more shots, I no longer continued with this thought because the real estate maquette is completely different from the maquette I would have built by myself. It has an essential difference. The real estate project is the real [thing]. A maquette built by me would be totally a personal design and fantasy of buildings and urban architecture landscape.13

Part of the disorientation of urbanization is the result of the individual’s lack of agency in the face of such a change. People are often ordered to move from their homes and eventually forced out if they refuse. The new apartments are very different from the old homes, and lack familiar architectural and personal details. If Xing had created her own maquette and subsequently inserted pictures of herself inside it, she would not be acknowledging this psychological upheaval. Creating her own space and then picturing herself within it, is very different from the forced transition of an individual into a completely new and alien environment.

The models appear almost like toys, like Barbie mansions complete with plastic trees and Matchbox-like cars. Xing uses only the lighting available to her in the architectural offices, thus further emphasizing the artificial nature of the scene. It is therefore slightly unsettling to find a photograph of a real person standing behind the squeaky clean window of an empty high-rise or sunning herself on an empty, sunless patio. As hinted at by Xing in the quote

58 above, perhaps these works are not as far from reality as they initially appear. Xing herself used to dream of living in a modern city, and her dreams have come true: “Given the circumstances of when and how I grew up, I could only imagine the modern city and its high-rises through film clips or magazine photographs—everything seemed unreachable, distant, the image of the West. But suddenly I realized that today I am completely living my teenage dream of what life should be.”14 In this way it is as if Xing feels that she has somehow been cut from the reality of her past and pasted into the present.

But as Andrew Maerkle asserts in his article “Xing Danwen’s Chinese Fantasy,” “Urbanity itself has always been a fiction, a construct of imperial or, in some cases, bureaucratic wills to power. The traffic of daily life— public squares, commemorative roundabouts and grand parks—reminds us that we are not who we think we are, or that we are not who we should be.”15 The urban environment itself may be as steeped in fantasy as the maquettes. Maerkle’s comments underscore the truth that the physical manifestation of a city rarely reflects the values and ideals of all of its citizens. Especially in the case of China, where urbanism is occurring rapidly without much consideration, the metropolis is a deviation from many (perhaps most) realities.

Another urban fiction is revealed in this series. It is the fiction of the promises of modernity, the promises that the maquettes represent. They are sleek and simplified, enticing under the calming lights and quiet atmosphere of the office. One could almost lose oneself in dreams of the way such an efficient, pristine building could improve one’s life. In such a setting, the buildings presented are idealized, lacking the cacophony of traffic and detritus of daily life. Wu Hung argues that that the problem of urbanization is a matter of theory versus reality: “In theory, demolition and relocation were conditions for the capital’s modernization. In actuality, these conditions brought about a growing alienation between the city and its residents: they no longer belonged to one another.”16 But, as Xing’s series reveal, human problems still occur in even the most sterile of environments. While the dream of modernity becomes a reality, the dream that modernity brings happiness is revealed as false. One fundamental aspect that is omitted from these real estate maquettes is the place of the human. Xing reveals that the true impact of the architectural models will only be revealed once the human is incorporated.

All of the photographs in the series invoke a sense of the uncanny. One photograph in the series, for example, captures the uppermost portion of a model of an apartment complex. Three figures are visible: one woman appears to be exercising on the roof, another stands at her window, talking on a phone, and the third, visible in profile, applies makeup two floors below. The windows are lit from behind with a uniform blue glow. The time of day is unclear—the bright light from within indicates night time, but the well-lit roof and exercising woman hint at the presence of daylight. Although the women appear to be content, a certain melancholy pervades the work. They live close to one another and yet are alone, completely unaware of each other’s presence.

Another photograph, Urban Fiction, Number 18, depicts a modern shopping center with various advertisements for clothing and makeup. Three cars drive past on the glossy grey street, across which two diminutive women walk together, one with a shopping bag and the other with flowers. The

59 ridiculousness of the scene lies in its emptiness. It is reminiscent of a post- Top: Xing Danwen, Urban Fiction, Number 19, 2006, apocalyptic movie in which two survivors walk in a city where nothing chromogenic color print, 218.5 x 170 cm. Courtesy living remains. The only reminders of society are the advertisements in the of the artist. window of the shopping centre. Or perhaps it is a comment on the realities Xing Danwen, Urban Fiction, Number 19 (detail), 2006. of a capitalist society, where the number one goal is to sell and to buy. In Courtesy of the artist. such a society nothing is important if it cannot be made into a commodity. Middle: Xing Danwen, Urban Therefore, the relationship between human beings is downplayed while the Fiction, Number 18, 2004, relationship between consumer and product is emphasized. chromogenic color print, 272 x 170 cm. Courtesy of the artist. A similar sense of isolation, though this time infused with despair, is Xing Danwen, Urban Fiction, Number 18 (detail), 2004. present in another photograph, Urban Fiction, Number 17, containing Courtesy of the artist. just one human figure. Amid a forest of white high-rise office buildings, a Bottom: Xing Danwen, Urban woman stands on the top of a building. Barely visible amid the seemingly Fiction, Number 17, 2004, chromogenic color print, gigantic skyscrapers, the woman appears to be on the brink of jumping. 213.3 x 170 cm. Courtesy of Her psychological agitation is reinforced by her physical isolation. She is the artist. Xing Danwen, Urban Fiction, the only figure in sight. Although she stands atop a huge building meant Number 17 (detail), 2004. to hold thousands of people, it is empty. In fact, the viewer can actually see Courtesy of the artist. through the windows of the buildings, revealing that these shells are void of human life. What is striking about these works is how small in scale the humans appear in comparison to the large, imposing architecture that surrounds them. The dramas of the figures in Xing’s series are voyeuristically followed to the most private of spaces by the all-seeing eye of the artist. Rather than being among family and friends (one characteristic typical of the old courtyard homes), individuals are separated into tidy compartments. They are cut off from each other and from reminders of their past. More than the eerie lighting and cut-and-paste effect of Xing’s method, it is this separation that makes this series so unsettling. The urban environment, old and new, therefore, represents something immense for Chinese citizens. It is not simply the view one sees from a window—it is a way of life, a stimulation of memories, a reflection of belief systems. In his article about contemporary Chinese artists’ responses to the transforming of Chinese cities, David Spalding recalls the presence of hutong (siheyuan), courtyard housing meant for the inhabitation of three generations of a single family. According to Spalding, “No less important than the earthbound residents of a siheyuan, ancestor’s tablets and family shrines played an integral role in the division of space: traditionally, these living pieces of the past were carefully positioned to receive the first rays of morning light that pierce thesiheyuan’s southeast entrance.”17 Since the 1980s, these siheyuan and ancestor’s tablets and family shrines have virtually vanished. Xing knows that such a transition is a double-edged sword:

When people who live in old, very crowded courtyard houses suddenly have to move to high-rise buildings, they feel happy to have a toilet, a kitchen and all the basic conveniences. At the same time, they are no longer living as a big family with their neighbours. In the new, massive residential buildings, people might never even bump into their neighbours in the elevator, people might have a bigger space to themselves—and yet feel very isolated and lonely in their heavenly cubes.18

Indeed, the new face of the city encourages a disconnection, a separation. Even in public spaces, as seen in Urban Fiction, Number 18 of the series, a sense of community has been lost.

60 61 A further interpretation can be made when comparing this series to a similar series of urban ruins by the artist RongRong. Both series are examples of what RongRong refers to as “meta-pictures,”19 photographs framed within a photograph. In RongRong’s series of three untitled photographs he captured the ruins found in Beijing’s demolition sites between 1996 and 1997. Rather than digitally superimposing another photograph over the original (like Xing Danwen), RongRong hung posters of famous entertainers or advertisements on the dilapidated ruins and framed images of the entire scenes. One of the works, for instance, features a partially standing wall plastered with posters and what appears to be a calendar. The wall hangings, presumably leftover decorations from a recent exodus, immediately lead the viewer to reflect upon the identities of the original owners. Much of the image’s power lies in the sense it conveys of a violent transition from the private to the public. Wall decorations that once served as entertainment for the enjoyment of the home’s inhabitants are now exposed to all. The three primary posters feature glamorous women posing in luxurious settings. Two of the posters are only partially preserved, their bottom halves having been ripped from the wall. One remains wholly intact. The beautiful women in elegant gowns gaze alluringly at the viewer amid an ancient bust, lit candles, and an extravagant bouquet. The opulence and luxury of the posters stand in stark contrast to their dismal surroundings.

This photograph, like Xing’s Urban Fiction, invites the viewer to contemplate the distinction between reality and marketable fiction. As I have discussed above, in Xing’s work the maquettes represent fiction while the dramas superimposed within could stand for human reality. In RongRong’s photograph, the advertisements represent a fiction while the surrounding ruins are reality. The only real aspect of either artist’s works are the ruins in RongRong’s photograph. He has manipulated a real space within a real city into a fictitious space that encourages daydreams of a fictitious inhabitant who once lived there. The posters of the staged models in an elegant setting are revealed to be a false reality because of their location within the ruins and their tattered condition. The fantasy behind them proves to be ridiculous once their surroundings have collapsed. Comparing this to Urban Fiction, however, I am forced to acknowledge the similarities between the women in the posters and Xing posed as different characters. While my argument above places the “reality” of the superimposed models in contrast with their fictitious surroundings, this comparison suggests a more complicated relationship. Like the models in RongRong’s posters, Xing herself wears makeup and poses theatrically, acting out make-believe scenarios for the sole purpose of being integrated into photographs of the maquettes. Therefore, the human actions taking place within the maquettes in Xing’s works are revealed to be just as fictitious as the promises of happiness associated with the new real estate.

The difference between Xing’s figures and the models on the posters is the absence of idealism. The models in RongRong’s posters represent wealth, beauty, and happiness. Xing’s models act out everyday activities such as exercising, applying makeup, talking on the phone, and walking with friends. It is not their poses or expressions that infuse the images with a sense of isolation or discontentedness, but their placement within the composition. In some ways, Urban Fiction represents a completely valid reality: the reality of Xing’s imagination. When people look at maquettes they automatically imagine what their life would be like if they lived in the perspective

62 environment. In this series Xing simply reveals her own predictions. The knowledge that some of the maquettes have already been constructed while others will perhaps never leave the office, or that all of the figures are Xing herself posing, further complicates the question of reality. In this way, these “meta-pictures” balance on the cusp of reality and fiction. She is a real person acting out real actions superimposed onto a real photograph of a real maquette that might represent a building that has already been built in the city. In the same way, the posters in RongRong’s work might now, twelve years after the photographs were taken, be closer to the reality of the site than the ruins themselves. Perhaps the message behind Xing’s series is that when a space changes so rapidly from old to new, the distinction between reality and fantasy fades slightly. A person’s identity and self-concept is based upon the living and working environments to which they are accustomed, as well as upon corresponding human interactions with friends, family, and co-workers. Radical change in built environments, then, inevitably leads to changes in patterns of human interaction, which can lead to crisis and collapse in individual and collective identities. Xing uses Urban Fiction to suggest that modernity’s impersonal architectural spaces impose a human penalty: rebuilding lost personal identity, and by implication, lost collective identity, may prove to be a greater challenge than rebuilding a demolished architectural environment.

Wall House (2007) In her most recent photographic series, Wall House, Xing provides an intimate look at the isolated individual living within the modern metropolis. As in Urban Fiction, she uses a cut-and-paste method to create a narrative within a staged setting. This series consists of four photographic images and one digital video that examine the everyday reality of actually living in a modern space like those represented by the maquettes. In 2007, Xing took part in the Wall House Foundation Residency Program in Northern Holland where she lived alone in the Wall House for two weeks. The Wall House was designed by architect John Hejduk and built in 2001, one year after his death. It is an innovative modern design that separates living spaces and working spaces. One half is made up of three stories, consisting of living room, kitchen, dining room, and bedroom. The other half houses more public and professional spaces, such as an office, corridor, and stairs. These two halves are divided by a large cement wall. From the exterior, the sense of division is enhanced by the physical separation of one room from another, with each painted a different colour from the next. Inside, the visitor is forced to consider this separation as he or she moves back and forth between the cement wall to explore each room. The Wall House, like many of Hejduk’s other architectural plans, is a highly theoretical space in which he wished to address the concepts of space and time. In this case, the wall represents a threshold between the past and the present. In Xing’s words, “In the case of the Wall House, the occupant always feels detached from what happens on the other side of the wall and, at the same time, that person will always have the feeling of being a stranger within the interior—essentially creating a sense of isolation on both sides of the wall.”20

In the context of Chinese urbanization, one is hard pressed to imagine a better foil to the traditional courtyard house. In this house, Xing found the perfect setting to physically examine the interaction of the human and the modern living space. In Urban Fiction, Xing acted as a voyeur spying from afar into her staged human dramas. In Wall House, on the other hand, because of the close range of the photographs as well as their large size, the viewer becomes

63 part of the drama. This concept is taken further within the gallery space where Xing displays the photographs on white plaster walls adjoining at right angles to signify multiple apartments. In these works, rather than looking in, Xing explores the idea of looking out. Although the actual house is located in Holland, she has digitally inserted images of Chinese cityscapes that are now seen through the windows. In one of the photographs, for instance, the figure of the artist is seen from behind. She sits in a chair in front of a large square window through which appears an eight-lane highway congested with traffic. The room is bare, the walls are white, and the only visible furnishings are two plastic chairs and a round table. A coffee cup and a cell phone rest on the table. It is as though the young woman in the photograph is watching a drama unfold in front of her that she longs to enter. The presence of the cell phone further intensifies this sense of longing, symbolizing a key link to the outside world, and yet no one is calling.

In another photograph, a woman sits alone on a couch. Across from her sits a glass coffee table adorned with a small bouquet of flowers. A television is tuned in to what appears to be a news report. The room is entirely lined with horizontal windows through which a metropolitan skyline can be seen, teeming with high rises. The woman stares out the windows, entirely disinterested in the television program. If this scene represents and actual apartment in Beijing, the view that distracts the woman so thoroughly could be a mirror image of her apartment building and its surroundings. This further invokes the cyclic concept that is present in Xing’s artistic progression from Urban Fiction to Wall House. In a modern urban setting where people virtually live on top of each other there is both a desire to be private and have a space of one’s own, but also to see what others are doing, to breach the barrier of the reflective glass. For Xing, this series was highly motivated by a sense of loneliness:

In Wall House, I use Hedjuk’s problematic physical space as a starting point and continue to explore themes of contemporary loneliness and detachment in urban life. I project the idea of emotion and physical displacement through the use of a solitary figure: “I” live alone without a choice and “I” am obligated to accept this loneliness. Confronted with this reality, I am searching for truth and an answer to the question, “how does one live alone?” I intend to raise awareness about living alone, where “you” are your only companion.21

Xing Danwen, installation views of Wall House in the exhibition Another Voice, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

64 In yet another photograph is Xing’s visual articulation of being one’s only companion. Here again, a woman is seen from behind. She wears only black underpants and her long, black, curly hair spills freely down her back. This could be a scene of any woman preparing for work in the morning in the privacy of her own bathroom. On the counter next to her lie a hair brush and numerous bottled cosmetics. A roll of toilet paper sits on the window sill. The reflection in the mirror, however, does not coincide with the woman in the foreground. She gazes back into the eyes of the partially nude woman, applying makeup in imitation of her double. She, however, wears a silvery-blue shoulder-length wig with blunt bangs and a pink shirt. To the left of the mirror and slightly smaller, is a square window through which the base of a skyscraper can be viewed directly behind a wide street. What is evidenced here is the juxtaposition of interior, domestic space, with exterior, public space, thus paralleling John Hejduk’s original intentions. The woman’s reflection is not an exact reflection of the woman who is looking in the mirror because she has been altered for public display. Although the woman in the mirror may at once appear to be someone else, she is, however, the same woman, exhibiting just another aspect of her complicated identity. Like the building seen through the window, she possesses a contemporary, hip appearance. Here, Xing makes a connection between living within a city that is in a constant state of change and the duality of private and public that is found within us all.

Xing Danwen, Wall House, Image 4, 2007, C-print, video animation. Courtesy of the artist.

The setting of the final photograph is a starkly decorated bedroom. A negligee lies casually across the empty bed, the sheets of the bed still wrinkled from a recent inhabitant. Shoes are strewn about the room. The eye is immediately drawn to the window occupying most of the right wall. It has been partially covered by a curtain, but a portion of the amorphous opening is left uncovered, again revealing city buildings—again from street level—as the bedroom of the Wall House is located on the first floor. An intriguing aspect of the image is that it has been overexposed to the light filtering in through the window, leaving a ghostly streak across an inner supportive column, as if the city is beginning to bleed into the space of the bedroom. An animated one-minute video loop is projected over the photograph featuring a girl in a simple nightgown (very different from the negligee on the bed) mechanically and repetitiously pacing back and forth. The animated woman possesses no features that would identify her as being from any specific time or location. By projecting an illusory layer over the actual photograph, Xing simulates the process of the displacement of humans into non-descript, cellular architecture, as it occurs during the process of urbanization. Because the bedroom is located on the first floor, the woman is very close to the excitement of the city, and yet she remains isolated behind the wall of her home. The first paragraph of her artist’s statement provides a good narrative to this composition:

65 Looking out the window is a view of a city—a large city, populated by people, buildings, cars, and roads. In this scale and from this perspective, distance and time are no longer simple realities of everyday life. People commute from one place to another, passing within centimeters and seconds of each other. We can be so close but at the same time so far away from each other physically and emotionally. This is [how] I picture big cities. As the material quality of life has improved, less intimacy remains; the more a city develops and expands, the further we are alienated from one another. Loneliness becomes a fact, which envelops our everyday life and feelings.22

In her series disCONNEXION, Duplication, Urban Fiction, and Wall House, Xing Danwen explores the parameters of reality in modern society. The photographs that make up disCONNEXION and Duplication fulfill the modern viewer’s expectation of beauty. The truth behind the mesmerizing pictures, however, reveals the depressing side-effects of modernization and all that comes with it. These works prove that even the most unjust realities can be disguised as beautiful compositions when the aesthetics of modernity are applied. While these photographs reveal the clear dichotomies of the ugly and the beautiful and the wrong and the right, the photographs that constitute Urban Fiction suggest that such a stark distinction is not always possible. These works assert that what was once fiction may now be a reality, and that what was once certain may now be questionable.

Notes 1 Anthony D. King and Abidin Kusno, “On Be(ij)ing in the World: ‘Postmodernism,’ ‘Globalization,’ and the making of Transnational Space in China,” in Postmodernism in China, ed. Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 64. 2 Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Cities on the Move (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997), 2. 3 Hou and Obrist, Cities on the Move, 2. 4 Rosalyn Deutsche, “Architecture of the Evicted,” in Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 159. 5 Wu Hung, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 112–13. 6 Xing Danwen, “disCONNEXION,” http://danwen.com/works/dis/statement.htm (accessed December 12, 2008). 7 Gao Minglu, “Displacement and Transmutation: Reality and the Spectacle of Urban Life,” in The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, ed. Gao Minglu (Buffalo: Albright Knox Gallery, 2005), 230. 8 Xing Danwen, “Duplication,” http://danwen.com/works/dup/statement.htm (accessed December 12, 2008). 9 Clifford A. Pearson, “Asian Cities: Is ‘Generic’ the Wave of the Future?” Architectural Record, March 1996, 19. 10 Wu, Transcience, 128. 11 Ibid. 12 Britta Erickson, “Interview with Xing Danwen: Talk about Urban Fiction” (Toronto: Gallery TPW, 2006), 1. 13 Ibid., 2. 14 Ibid. 15 Andrew Maerkle, “Xing Danwen’s Chinese Fantasy,” Art Asia Pacific no. 49 (2006), 23. 16 Wu, Transcience, 112. 17 David Spalding, “Ghosts among the Ruins: Urban Transformation in Contemporary Chinese Art,” sites. cca.edu/currents/sightlines/pdfs/02dspalding.pdf (accessed December 12, 2008). 18 Erickson, “Interview with Xing Danwen,” 2. 19 Wu, Transcience, 119. 20 Xing Danwen, “Wall House,” http://danwen.com/works/wallhouse/statement.html (accessed May 11, 2009). 21 Xing Danwen, “Wall House,”http://danwen.com/works/wallhouse/statement.html (accessed May 11, 2009). 22 Xing Danwen, “Wall House,”http://danwen.com/works/wallhouse/statement.html (accessed May 11, 2009).

66 Mathieu Borysevicz Dong Wensheng: Archaeologies of Corporeality

67 n artist’s body of work is like an ongoing conversation between Previous Page: Dong Wensheng, I.D. Verification the artist and himself, his interests, and the world. Each piece is an Needed, 2009, plaster, paint. utterance in a sequence of descriptive allusions. As time goes on Courtesy of Iberia Center for A Contemporary Art, Beijing. and the conversation evolves, old territory is retraced and rendered new. Dong Wensheng’s conversation is continually expanding and retracting like a chest cavity sucking in and exhaling the air of life. Yet the gist of the conversation is one that the eavesdropper can deduce only from subtle and evasive clues. The conversation wavers between the poles of local tradition and universality, between nature and man’s desire to possess it, between past and future. His speech is borrowed from a myriad of periods and places: the idiosyncrasies of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its biological experimentation, shares metaphorical space with medieval alchemy, an imaginary future, and the profound rift between southern Song dynasty and contemporary China, poised at the brink of globalized hypermodernity. It is Dong’s dubious relationship with the past—at once sentimental and resentful—that gives vitality to this conversation, to his work. Whether he chooses to set his work in a time long ago or in an apocalyptic future, Dong’s works, with their enigmatic arrangements and characters, carry a sense of prophecy, posing unsolvable riddles for the viewer like soberly reconfigured Tarot cards.

Time In the sculptural work ID Verification Needed (2009), a headless figure, part plaster and part skin, is sitting with his arms resting on his knees. The suggestion seems to be that an archaeological dig in the future unearthed twenty-first century man and his body has been recomposed based on its shattered remains. It is an allegory that imagines post-historical humanity reassembling its own recently exhumed swatches of skin. This work is positioned far ahead on the timeline, in the future looking back towards the present, as if it were an omen, inevitability, or anticipated sense of déjà vu. Entwined in Dong’s elliptical sense of history is a decelerated, suspended notion of time. All of his works are moments, fragments in a long, perhaps infinite, narrative. Figures sit turned away from us as if they are in a state of eternal deliberation; a crocodile is suspended in a booby trap that will never be lowered; skulls doubling as planters grow fresh weeds, little by painfully little. The works are like meditations, zones in which the viewer is invited to enter, contemplate, and cease contemplating. Perhaps this sense of slow motion is born out of the southern somnolence that is particular to the Jiangnan region Dong calls home. Perhaps it is the artist’s way of making us pay attention, a way of distracting us from our exceedingly information- saturated environments and getting us to ruminate on the prospect that time itself may no longer be a viable system.

Writing Yet throughout Dong’s work the mark of time is inscribed as a way to remind us that life is inclusive; it is not always about the new and now but equally about the past. Our hopes and dreams indiscriminately mix with memories and experiences. Dong’s recurring motif of the tattooed man is one means through which time becomes figuratively written in his works. Perched on boats in rivers, ruminating in ancient gardens, and sitting together in conference, the illustrated backs of these stout men stare out at the viewer as illegible, iconographic maps. These men are not only

68 Dong Wensheng, The Last emblazoned with marks of social identification—the misfit, the derelict, the Gangster From Jianghu, 2008, photograph. Courtesy criminal—but their bodies are tablets inscribed with forgotten historical of Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. legacies. Just as in his earliest photographic experimentations, the artist photographed the limbs of teenagers, self-afflicted with scars, here, body writing is used as a carefully conceived nuance that expresses both personal psychology and communal myth. In Ray Bradbury’s science fiction classic Illustrated Man, one man’s tattoos metamorphose into stories that probe the psychological effects of technology. In Dong’s world, the tattoo is an added subtext to an already perplexing story, often pitching forgotten but still- relevant legends to a modern audience.

Stone The Taihu stone is another reoccurring motif in Dong’s oeuvre, and, like the tattoo, manifests time’s imprint upon an object. Long exposure to Lake Taihu (Jiangsu province) currents has sculpted an infinite maze of tunnels and indentations onto these solid masses of stone. The resulting beautiful and complex forms have made them a muse to many throughout history. The Taihu stone is also Dong’s muse. Held in a skeletal hand, enclosing a meditative man in a garden, floating abandoned on a boat or on the back of a tortoise, the stone makes appearances in Dong’s images like a character in a play. Seen straightforwardly, the stones symbolize traditional Chinese culture with its artistic aspirations fixated on the intricate beauty of nature. However, in Dong’s compositions the implication is unclear. Rather than celebrate the aesthetics of this rich heritage, they seem to bemoan its historical weight, even accuse it of hampering ideological advancements. In a Lonely Rock (2006), a vast lake frames the Taihu stone as it floats aimlessly Dong Wensheng, Lonely Rock, 2006, photograph. Courtesy of aboard a wooden boat. It is a dream space anchored by the traditional Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. connotations of this cultural icon. But look again far into the distance, and

69 Dong Wensheng, A Day of No Significance, 2008, photograph. Courtesy of Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

Dong Wensheng, Turtle’s Road to Homeland, 2009, video, 8 mins. 20 secs. Courtesy of Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

modern civilization, in the form of a telephone transmission tower, pokes gently into the clouds. In a similar composition based on the Hieronymous Bosch drawing Ship of Fools, a head surrounded by rocks floats on an ancient boat. In this composition the ship drifts forward, seemingly lost, without a sense of purpose. Aboard the ship the bodiless passenger is impotent, incapable of exercising control over his destiny. Bosch’s Ship of Fools was a playful work, showing the ship’s oblivious passengers en route to the “paradise of fools,” but Dong’s ship seems to have taken equal inspiration from Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, which claims that these ships were used as primitive concentration camps to dispose of people with mental disorders. Dong’s vessel floats endlessly from port to port, a human head locked out at sea with the confines of tradition and his own confounded expectations.

70 Throughout Dong’s series of Taihu stone images, an internal narrative emerges whereby the stone’s cyclical trajectory—wrested from nature and returned back again—is traced. In the image A Day of No Significance (2008), hands thrust a rock above the surface of a lake as if it were a sacrificial offering to humanity. Elsewhere the rocks are objects of human fascination, study, obsession; they even become surrogates for the human mind as in Allergy Patient (2009), where they emerge from the top of the skull in place of cranium and grey matter. In Dong’s video, The Moment of Stone Sinking (2007), the Taihu stone travels aboard a boat, in which the weight of it eventually sinks both the boat and stone. The stone plummets to the bed of the lake, returning to the natural surroundings from which it was taken, like a caged animal released into the forest.

Dong’s latest video, Turtle’s Road to Homeland (2009) seems as if it is a sequel to The Moment of Stone Sinking. In this mesmerizing video the stone reemerges from the depths of the water, this time carried on the back of a small turtle. The turtle struggles out of the water and onto the shore as if at the end of a long journey. Yet the journey isn’t over and perhaps never will be. The turtle looks in vain for a place to rest its weary legs, passing through countryside and then the constructs of civilization, all along

Dong Wensheng, The bearing the weight of the stone. The video recalls Sisyphus, the Greek Moment of Stone Sinking, 2007, video, 27 mins. god condemned to a lifetime of carrying a stone up a hill, only to have it Courtesy of Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. roll back down again. In Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, the futile, endlessly repeated task symbolizes modern man’s search for meaning in the face of an unintelligible, mechanized world. Dong’s video evokes a similar connotation. As the turtle passes through the grim, almost apocalyptic, surroundings, it stops to rest against the backdrop of the space shuttle taking off in the distance. Here, the space shuttle represents an accelerated future while the turtle, bearing the weight of traditional culture, can no longer move. This juxtaposition, perhaps a cryptic nod to the folktale “The Turtle and the Hare,” pronounces both disillusionment with the state of the world and reckless abandonment of tradition.

71 Garden/Grave Dong Wensheng, Allergy Patient, 2009, installation. Dong’s ambiguous relationship with classical culture was established early Courtesy of Iberia Center for on in his photographic works, which often saw figures situated in the Contemporary Art, Beijing. Ming dynasty gardens of Changzhou. He used these gardens, customarily considered miniaturized and idealized universes, as backdrops for his surrealist narratives. In the current work, Dong abandons his role as director and directly enters that of gardener, cultivating his own small patch out of human remains. Part biological experimentation, part mysticism, these works speak to a time long ago when the pursuit of scientific knowledge employed methods that were at once magical, horrific, and barbarian. In the

72 Dong Wensheng, A Study photographic works Yidam (2007) and A Study of The Phenomenology of Spirit of the Phenomenology of Spirit, 2008, photograph. (2008), unearthed skeletons are reburied by fresh overgrowth. Here the artist Courtesy of Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. directly shows us evidence of corporeal inevitability while simultaneously pointing at life’s cyclical nature. Just as Yorick’s skull, accidentally dug up in the graveyard, arouses memories and a morbid preoccupation with death in Hamlet, the skull in Dong’s work frequently prompts the eternal question of life after biological death.

In another work the artist, taking inspiration from an antique death mask found in a flea market, sculpted a “death face.” Traditionally, the mask is meant to immortalize the appearance of its owner as the body decomposes, yet Dong’s frighteningly realistic depiction is served on a platter and overgrown with weeds. Allusion to John the Baptist’s severed head and a preoccupation with metaphysics are combined in this almost gothic presentation. John the Baptist’s head is referenced frequently throughout Western classical art, signifying his martyrdom and the absurd abuse of power that killed him. But in The Face Without a World View (2008) the head is anonymous, the signification unknown, prompting the viewer to construct an independent narrative that inevitably mirrors his/her own mortality.

This mirroring is something that Dong exceeds at. Each work acts as a mirror intended for the viewer to examine. Like Ophelia in Hamlet watching flowers drop into the water in which she will drown herself (or Dong’s video Jingzhe, 2003, where a noose of flowers is delicately constructed for the same purpose), the mirror, like the conversation, has many elliptical connotations.

This text was first published in the catalogue for Dong Wensheng’s solo exhition The Face Without a World View, Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

Dong Wensheng, The Face Without a World View, 2008, photograph. Courtesy of Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

73 Michael Hatch The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum January 30–April 19, 2009 Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art Princeton University Art Museum March 7–June 7, 2009

wo exhibitions of the past year indicate a trend in the American display of Asian art. The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate TAsia, 1860–1989, at the Guggenheim in New York City, and Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art, at the Princeton University Art Museum, each have different central theses, but they overlap in their motivation to re-examine the ways in which Asian themes are approached within exhibitions of contemporary and modern artists. These two shows often succeed in, but occasionally fall short of, redefining narratives, genres, and acceptable exhibition formats for Asian art. They also stand in contrast to the accepted narratives of modernism and contemporary Chinese art that have previously been exhibited.

The Third Mind The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, was organized by Guggenheim Senior Curator of Asian Art Alexandra Munroe with assistance from Vivien Greene, Curator of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Art. The exhibition challenges the accepted story that American modernists were only looking to Europe, and instead shows that American artists also drew from Asian art, literature, music, and philosophy.

This is a bold move for such a large-scale exhibition, and one that was necessary. While it is generally understood and often foot-noted that artists from James McNeill Whistler to Yoko Ono had deep and sustained relationships with artistic, religious, and philosophical traditions from Asia, until now there has been no broad attempt to describe the nature of these relationships over the span of American pre-modernism through to post-modernism. Simply by virtue of its super-sized scale, this exhibition convincingly drives home its point. The work of 111 artists and writers appears in the exhibition, and mediums vary from a sculpture by Augustus Saint- Gaudens to a sound installation with a live musical performance by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. There are photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn of early twentieth-century Noh plays and texts such as Jack Kerouac’s copy of the 1938 Buddhist Bible by Dwight Goddard—a striking diversity of American artists and writers affected by the particulars of their own experience with Asian art and thought.

Aside from teaser installations such as Paul Kos’s Sound of Ice Melting (1970) on the ground floor, the first artwork in the show was a small, fifteenth-century Tibetan sutra painting, Four Mandalas of the Vajravali Cycle. Wall text informs us that Carl Jung thought of mandalas as an archetype of wholeness. I took this inclusion of actual Asian artwork to represent a touchstone idea as a good

74 Paul Kos, Sound of Ice Melting, sign that the dialogues between American artists and Asian materials would 1970, two twenty-five-pound blocks of ice, eight boom undergo some scrutiny in the rest of the exhibition. But this was followed microphone stands, eight microphones, mixer, amplifier, by a drastic transition to works by James Lee Byars, beginning with The two large speakers, and cables, dimensions variable. Death of James Lee Byars (1982/94). In this massive, room-sized installation Installation view: Museum furnished with a bench, all surfaces are coated with loosely applied gold of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, 1970. © Paul Kos. leaf that flutters with variations in air currents. The effect is mesmerizing, but what this has to do with archetypes of wholeness I’m not sure. Why are these works juxtaposed?

75 James Lee Byars, The Death of James Lee Byars, 1982/1994, gold leaf, crystals, and Plexiglas, dimensions variable. Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels. Courtesy of Marie- Puck Broodthaers, Brussels. Photo: Courtesy of Michael Werner Gallery, New York and Cologne, and the Estate of James Lee Byars. © Estate of James Lee Byars.

The exhibition then moves suddenly back in time from the 1980s to the 1860s, to a sideroom removed from the main rotunda where the first section of the exhibition’s chronological sequence, curated by Vivien Greene and titled Aestheticism and Japan: The Cult of the Orient, begins. The selection of artworks in this sideroom could exist as a separate exhibition. In both its conceptual and physical relationship to the rest of the artworks in the exhibition, which are placed along the walls of the central rotunda space, it seems disconnected. Awkwardly sharing the space of this room is the second section of the exhibition, titled Landscapes of the Mind: New Conceptions of Nature. Here, one can’t help but feel that the nineteenth century Aestheticism of John La Farge and Mary Cassatt in the first section doesn’t relate especially well to the early and mid-twentieth century mind-landscapes of Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove in the second. More than sixty years separate many of these artworks, and their creators’ reactions to Asia were affected by very different conditions and perceptions of what Asia was. What’s more, it is in this room that we find our only experience of anything representational in the exhibition. This leaves the impression that these artists were less interesting forbearers to those who make up the thrust of the show’s content, the modernism of abstract expressionism and beyond. In addition, while this section constitutes the majority of the time period laid out in the title, it accounts for only about ten percent of the exhibition floor space.

76 Mary Cassatt, The Letter, 1890–91, drypoint and aquatint on cream laid paper, 34.4 x 21.1 cm. S. P. Avery Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Arthur Dove, Fog Horns, 1929, oil on canvas, 54.6 x 72.4 cm. Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, anonymous gift. © The Estate of Arthur G. Dove.

Once we move back to the rotunda’s spiral, we encounter the bulk of the show, which generally reflects the ways in which Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism from Japan, was received by American artists in the mid- twentieth century. But does it tell us anything about what Zen is or what kind of Zen it was that Americans were responding to? We start with

77 calligraphic canvasses by Mark Mark Tobey, Crystallizations, 1944, tempera on board, 45.7 Tobey and spiral up through x 33 cm. Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts Jackson Pollock, Jack Kerouac, at Stanford University, Mabel Ashley Kizer Fund, gift of Allen Ginsberg, Jasper Johns, Dan Melitta and Rex Vaughan, and Modern and Contemporary Flavin, Linda Montano, and Bill Acquisitions Fund. Photo: M. Lee Fatherree Photography. Viola, and end with Tehching © Mark Tobey Estate/Seattle Hsieh. The works are grouped in Art Museum. this progression into conceptual categories that also follow each other chronologically: from Ezra Pound, Modern Poetry and Dance Theatre; to Abstract Art, Calligraphy and Metaphysics; to Buddhism and the Neo-Avant-Garde; then Art of Perceptual Experience: Pure Abstraction and Ecstatic Minimalism; and, lastly, Experiential Performance Art: The Aesthetics of Time. Moving from the central spiral, side galleries present Fluxus, John Cage, and Yoko Ono, as well as the sound installation room by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. But, increasingly, as we ascend, there is less of a sense of why we’re progressing in this way. The conceptual categories and the chronological sequence merge in such a way that the viewer is uncertain about the relevance of either time or theme as organizing mechanism.

One of the key points found in the wall texts is that modernist understandings of Asia were “selective,” meaning that what American artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries considered Asian, or Japanese, or Chinese, or Indian, was influenced by their biases. To illustrate this point, there are a small number of images on wall texts that show actual moments of contact between the artists and things Asian. There are pictures of Allen Ginsberg and company bumming through Japan, from which we can assume, but are not told, the primary experience of Japan made an impact upon the writers. Alongside Cassatt prints and Whistler paintings are placed a few Japanese prints, from which it is well known both artists appropriated compositional and textural tricks such as elevated perspective or foreshortening of space. But in most cases, the actual points of connectivity, be they translated texts, essays, artworks, or even people, are mentioned only briefly in the wall texts and are rarely fully explained. This creates a problem, because if these are the means of “selective” understanding by which the artworks of this exhibition were influenced, why do they seem so silent in the exhibition? When a wall panel for Jasper Johns’s Dancer on a Plane (1980–81) shows a fifteenth-century Tantric Tibetan painting,Chakra Samra and Vajravaki Embracing, and tells us that this homage to Merce Cunningham is a reinvented system of Tantric imagery, I would like to know how, not simply that there is a connection.

At times the show also slips dangerously close to an essentializing of the Asia its artists indulged in. For example, in the opening to a section on the influences of Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, we are told, “Calligraphy is the ancient art of writing ideographs.” Not quite. While the writing systems

78 Allen Ginsberg, Sea of Japan, of China and Japan were developed over 5,000 years ago from pictographic 1963, gelatin silver print, with inscription in ink by Allen symbols, in the following millennia the art of calligraphy, done with ink and Ginsberg, 27.9 x 35.6 cm. Howard Greenberg Gallery, brush, rarely had any direct relationship to these origins. For instance, the New York, Courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Trust, New calligraphic traditions developed over millennia in China and Japan to write York. © Allen Ginsberg Estate 2008. the word “dog” are not based on an image of a floppy-eared companion. They are based on the ways in which past calligraphers had composed this already-abstracted sign. An English approximation to this argument may be to argue that every time the name “Peter” is written, it is a reference to “stone”-like qualities. This is the same type of wilful (“selective”) misunderstanding that writers like Ezra Pound indulged in. To serve that indulgence back to audiences of today rather than explaining the means by which that indulgence operated is not productive.

Such confusions are due to that fact that in this exhibition it is precisely the diversity and number of interesting moments within American-Asian artistic and literary dialogue that sometimes cripples the show and prevents it from a clear presentation of the narratives it sets out to create—or, rather, it is the difficulty of making sense of these interactions between American and Asian materials. For instance, if David Smith’s reverence for the Japanese “power stroke” was something he absorbed through the translated writings of Chinese painters found in The Spirit of the Brush (Shio Sakanishi, 1939), it is those layers of translating and essentializing that are exactly what is interesting, but these are not expanded upon. This is largely a problem of organization.

79 Each of these artworks is conditioned by its place in the broader histories John Cage, New River Watercolor Series I, #5, of interaction with Asia, and, particularly, by access to what might be 1988, watercolor on parchment paper, 45.7 x termed liminal texts or nodal texts—those works in translation (Goddard’s 91.4 cm. Collection of Ray Kass. Photo: The Mountain Buddhist Bible) or works based on works in translation (Ezra Pound’s Lake Workshop, Virginia Tech Photographic Service. Cathay) or people who translated (D. T. Suzuki’s classes on Zen held at © The John Cage Trust at Columbia of the 1950s) from which artists absorbed Asian concepts. It is Bard College. these texts that directly informed most of the artwork presented, but the functional role they played is the least emphasized part of the exhibition.

Ann Hamilton’s commissioned installation, human carriage (2009), makes a gesture towards these connecting liminal texts. The work comprises a small gauze-shrouded carriage put on a track to spiral downwards through the rotunda. The metallic carriage box, carrying a payload of shredded texts, whirrs along, and as it hits programmed bumps along the way, a set of chimes in the carriage sounds. When the carriage reaches the base

80 floor, it drops the text and is reset to the top by a pulley system. Whereas the intention is to remind viewers of the unifying nature of texts, the machine mainly serves to draw viewers away from the rest of the exhibition. The overly regularized chiming sounds do not create epiphanies, and the selected shredded texts, meant in this context to represent texts that facilitate interaction, are largely irrelevant pulp fiction romance and sci-fi novels. In short, it is a distraction.

While thus far this has been a critical review, I think that only points to the fact that there is a wealth of material here to be sorted through, perhaps too much, and that in presenting this material, Munroe has opened a trove of potential. The show does many things very well. The Fluxus room is beautifully curated, particularly the installation of John Cage drawings, which are arranged on the wall according to Cage’s computer-generated chance formula, which, in turn, is based on the Book of Changes (I Ching).

81 The rhythm of these high and low, densely and widely spaced drawings Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1980–1981, and prints forces the viewer to adjust their viewing height and stride April 11, 1980–April 11, 1981, installation of documentary accordingly, creating a very interactive viewing program, and one with photographs and original relevance to the rhythms of Cage’s compositions. In this same room are performance relics, including poster, documents, 366 time Dick Higgens’s A Thousand Symphonies, sheet music punctuated by bullet cards, 366 24-hour images, 16mm film, time clock, 16mm holes and spray paint, and Nam Jun Paik’s Zen for Film (1964), about movie camera, uniform, shoes, and footprints. Photo: Michael which Paik said, “I react to Zen the same way I react to Johann Sebastian Shen. © 1981 Tehching Hsieh, Bach.” Such moments of genre and classification bending within the overall New York. program of modernist canon reformation add depth to the show.

The plentiful incorporation of non-mainstream modern artists is a fantastic opportunity for the viewer to expand their notion of the American canon as well. Natvar Bhavsar’s sieve painting Delwara (1982), Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins’s The Mechanism of Meaning (1963–71), and Teching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980–1981 were all delightful new material, at least to my viewing experience, and ones that succeeded in drawing out worthwhile connections to modernist narratives in general and to the Asian thesis that The Third Mind presented.

To some degree the exhibition’s faults are the result of the constraints of the Guggenheim space itself. Although the continuous wall of the Guggenheim New York is ideal for a show of chronological structure, it does not serve a non-linear show well at all. The teleological implications of the continuously rising, progressing exhibition space are difficult to counteract. Whereas Fenollosian ideas of the Orient in the twentieth century did come before New York encounters with Zen Buddhism in the 1950s via Suzuki, and thus one understanding of Asian thought precedes a later one, perhaps conditioning it slightly, the implication that one is a progression from the other is misleading.

The confusion that permeates this show could have been curtailed by editing out the nineteenth-century content and a renaming of the show something along the lines of American Modernism and Zen. A different venue would also have helped, one that facilitated a “nodes of interaction” layout. Instead this show ends up adopting the chronological progression of modernism, so that Abstract Expressionism turns to Minimalism turns to Pop, just with Asian influences. Such a story is a good one, but the artworks shown here illustrate only a subordinate narrative of Asian contacts within modernist movements. It rarely elucidates these interactions.

Outside In Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art was curated by Jerome Silbergeld, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, with Cary Y. Liu, Curator of Asian Art at the Princeton Museum, and Dora C. Y. Ching, Associate Director of Princeton’s P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center. It asks a very different question from the Guggenheim exhibition, one that could be paraphrased as: Is what is currently exhibited under the banner contemporary Chinese art adequately categorized as such? If not (and it is assumed not), how do we describe this art?

The exhibition includes the work of six contemporary artists who are American citizens but who might also be categorized as Chinese— ethnically, nationally, or by other tangential affiliation. They work in diverse styles and mediums and were certainly chosen because of their inability

82 83 Zhang Hongtu, Ping-pong Mao, 1995, mixed media installation, 76 cm. x 274 cm. x 152 cm. Collection of Ethan Cohen Fine Arts and the artist. Photo: Bruce M. White.

to appear homogenous. In contrast to many of the artists in Third Mind, these artists are not household names, nor are they names canonical to “contemporary Chinese art” as it has been defined recently in larger blockbuster shows or by auction house prices.

As an example, Arnold Chang, who has been called a contemporary classicist, paints landscapes in “Chinese” ink on “Chinese” paper in a “Chinese” manner, but he was born and raised an American. To place the delicate drawing of his landscape works such as Landscape after Dong Yuan (2007) tangential to Zhang Hongtu’s Ping-Ping Mao (1995), a Ping- Pong table made dysfunctional by two Mao silhouette-sized holes, creates questions of connectivity. What can one possibly have to do with the other? Such juxtapositions are statements by the curators about the differences that separate work called “contemporary Chinese” and are meant to call into question the commonalities that “contemporary Chinese” exhibitions of the past have implied.

Michael Cherney, The Northern Song Spirit Road, S2, from the series Bounded by Mountains, 2005, photographic album, open: 26 x 415.8 cm, edition of 18. Princeton University Art Museum, gift of the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art. Photo: Bruce M. White.

The other four artists are equally diverse in medium and intent. Michael Cherney is a landscape photographer based in China. His photographs are cropped in evocative ways and are then blown up to the point of pixelization, after which they are printed onto “Chinese” paper in a folding album style that is also the distinct cultural property of China.

Zhi Lin and Liu Dan appear the most similar to one another. The former draws and paints meticulously planned scenes of social history on an epic scale and with a certain baroque attention to the gestures and dimensions

84 Top: Installation view of human interaction. The latter of Outside In, Zhi Lin, Starvation, from the series is equally meticulous in his ink Five Capital Punishments in China, 1999. Photo: Bruce M. paintings, but he prefers finely White. Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum, drawn objects and rhythmic Princeton, New Jersey. formalist landscapes to the world of social narratives. Middle: Liu Dan, Ink Handscroll (detail), 1990, handscroll; ink and color on paper, 95.6 cm x 1700.8 cm. With this selection of artists, Courtesy of the San Diego Museum of Art. one sometimes wonders if their intentionally contrarian appearance Bottom: Installation view in relation to one another isn’t a of Vannessa Tran, Untitled, 2004, oil on canvas, 26.7 x little forced. The last artist, Vannessa 15.2 cm. Photo: Bruce M. White. Courtesy of Princeton Tran, as an American of Vietnamese University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey. descent who paints in oils, does not fit into the rest of the group presented in this show as far as medium or ethnicity are concerned. At best, the curators can say she has a Zen-inspired approach, one in which form and ground dissolve into one another in a process of defining and erasing. But is this Zen-like quality an appropriate one for contemporary Chinese art? If not, how far off are the other artists from being similarly excluded because they do not belong materially or contextually? The only one who lives in China is Cherney, a non-Chinese photographer who grew up in Queens.

85 However, this weakness is also the show’s greatest strength. Being driven to ask what these artworks have to do with one another naturally leads the viewer to question the category “contemporary Chinese art” as well as “contemporary American art.” How and why do we separate things based on national or cultural or even temporal bases, and what does that do to the artworks? What narratives are these objects forced into, and which ones are they then excluded from? There is the impression that any artwork can be put into a variety of stories successfully, whether it be the story of American- born Chinese artists, or of Chinese émigré artists, or even of contemporary art. This exhibition doesn’t tell a grand narrative or a sub-narrative, but it encourages the questioning of every narrative as subject to a purpose.

In an interesting counterpoint to the issue of exhibition installation in The Third Mind, Outside In’s pluralist goal is carried out principally in the layout of the exhibition. The first room presents a conventional arrangement of artworks under the heading of Diversity, with wall texts that describe each artist’s background. This conservative biographical approach tells the viewer an artwork is related to who the artist is. As such, it is like any group show at any gallery, and despite their lack of relation to one another in style, the works appear not to be in conflict in this first room.

Installation view of Outside In, (from left to right) Claude Monet, Meadow at Giverney, 1894; Zhang Hongtu, Ni Zan- Monet, 2000; Ni Zan, Twin Trees by the South, 1353; Arnold Chang, Landscape After Ni Zan 2000.8, 2000. Photo: Bruce M. White. Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey.

But in the second room, the seeming order of this multi-artist show turns in another direction. Organized under the wall text header Stylistic Influences, works of classical Chinese painting, Impressionist art, and Baroque drawing are juxtaposed with contemporary artworks to create new narratives. These are no longer works that tell us something about the artist, but works that tell us something about the history of art and style and the anachronistic manipulation of these elements to the advantage of contemporary artists. One particularly nice grouping of artworks is Arnold Chang’s ink on paper Landscape After Ni Zan 2000.8 (2000), alongside an authentic Ni Zan painting in ink on paper, Twin Trees by the South (1353), followed by Zhang Hongtu’s oil painting of a Ni Zan composition in the colours and brushwork of Claude Monet, Ni Zan-Monet (2000), and lastly by Monet’s Meadow at Giverny (1894). This game of “three degrees of separation” (from Ni Zan to Monet, or “four degrees,” from Chang to Monet) is at once unifying and diversifying.

The same effect is achieved when the bronze sculptures by Zhang Hongtu, Mai Dang Lao (McDonald’s) (2002), take-out boxes and utensils decorated with Zhou dynasty ornament, sit in a vitrine kitty-corner to Zhi Lin’s epic mixed-media hanging scroll Starvation (1999). In these contrasts, the generic labelling of this work or that as “contemporary Chinese art” seems arbitrary.

86 While Outside In is successful in its needling of the viewer to be more critical of genres and in its presentation of lesser-known contemporary artists, it would fall apart as an exhibition on the scale of the Guggenheim’s. Fortunately, its aims are not historical, and the questions it inspires are the kind of questions that are portable.

Both of these exhibitions stand in strong contrast to the types of shows that have represented contemporary Asian art in America up to this point. Such recent shows of Chinese art, in particular Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection (Peabody Essex Museum, 2009, Berkeley Art Museum, 2009, Kunstmuseum Bern, 2005), Half-Life of a Dream (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2008), to name just two, have shown a type of contemporary Chinese art dominated by installations and Cynical Realist school painting, a type of art that has also dominated the market in contemporary Chinese art. Such shows tend to carry the same roster of about a dozen artists from mainland China whose work is palatable to American ideas of what Chinese Contemporary ought to be—“red”, political, sensational, exotic, and illustrative of a certain American understanding of the contemporary Chinese condition. The other type of show has been the solo artist show (Cai Guo-qiang, Huang Yong-Ping), which is in many ways an equally conservative take on presenting art of Asia—conservative because they elevate already well-known artists into canonical figures.

This tried and true method of presenting contemporary Chinese (and perhaps Asian) art, and the roster of artists that accompanied it, was set by the then path-breaking Inside Out: New Chinese Art (Asia Society, 1998, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1999, National Gallery of Australia, 2000), the show that introduced to American and Australian audiences what would become the canon of contemporary Chinese art. Outside In is obviously is a response to this touchstone show, and it asks us to be critical of the now-established genre of contemporary Chinese art. The Third Mind is less directly a response to this now typical presentation of contemporary Chinese art, but it is equally symbolic of a will among forward-minded curators to diversify entrenched narratives of modern and Asian art.

In many ways, Outside In and The Third Mind are searching out the same thing: a new way to talk about issues of the hybridity and Asian influences that are included in and inherent to American art by now. But the two exhibitions stand in strong counterpoint to one another in terms of style and method of presentation. By grafting itself to the overall narrative of American modernism, The Third Mind loses track of the moments that are most intriguing in the wonderful array of material it brings together. By presenting a deliberately definition-defying group of “Chinese x American x Contemporary Art,” Outside In may appear difficult for viewers to connect with because of its questioning of comfortable narratives, but all the better that viewers should realize the discomfort these narratives can cause.

These exhibitions both make it part of their aim to show audiences that for each narrative into which an artwork can be placed, there are just as many alternative stories. Artists rarely create with a clear mission to insert their work into a single narrative or genre. The Third Mind and Outside In show that when it comes to modern and contemporary Asian art, such diversification of narratives is finally occurring in the register of public exhibitions.

87 Sohl Lee Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art Princeton University Art Museum March 7–June 7, 2009

utside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art at the Princeton OUniversity Art Museum (PUAM) is a vocal, ambitious, and visually cohesive exhibition that undertakes the theoretical challenge of disrupting preconceived notions of “contemporaneity” and “Chineseness” in contemporary Chinese art. Continuing the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center’s support for East Asian art at Princeton, curators Jerome Silbergeld (Professor of Chinese art history at Princeton), Cary Y. Liu (curator of Asian art at the PUAM), and Dora C. Y. Ching (associate director of the Tang Center) have chosen six artists of diverse artistic styles, mediums, ages, and career trajectories. In exhibiting over forty works by Arnold Chang, Vanessa Tran, Michael Cherney, Zhi Lin, Liu Dan, and Zhang Hongtu, the curators begin to unravel the ways in which this diversity reflects today’s cultural exchange across borders.

The exhibition re-examines the position of contemporary Chinese art in America in 2009, more than a decade after the premiere of Inside Out: New Chinese Art, an exhibition curated by Gao Minglu in 1998 that is famously known as the first comprehensive show to introduce American audiences to the subject matter.1 Outside In’s reference to Inside Out is not only apparent in the exhibition’s title but also explicitly stated in the scholarly essays included in the catalogue.2 While acknowledging Inside Out’s contribution to the field, Silbergeld refutes the dominance of “experimental art” and “new wave” in the current discourse surrounding contemporary Chinese art, which, in Silbergeld’s term, “marginalizes” more “historically and culturally Chinese” art created today. This philosophy explains why the exhibition is riddled with an unambiguously obvious avoidance of video and multimedia art, mediums that he considers as belonging to the category of “newness.”

88 89 “Chineseness” in contemporary Chinese art, Silbergeld writes, “can no Previous page: Installation view of Outside In. Photo: longer be regarded as a simple matter of geography, ethnicity, style, subject Bruce M. White. Courtesy of Princeton University Art matter, reference, or intent, but must be understood as relating to any Museum, Princeton, New Jersey. number of these connections including, especially, a conscious artistic engagement with that which is historically and culturally Chinese, wherever made and whoever it is made by.”3 In other words, for Silbergeld, artists who demonstrate either one or a combination of the signifiers of “Chineseness” can be regarded as Chinese, and, likewise, their work seen as Chinese art. Whereas other scholar-curators like Gao Minglu and Wu Hung privilege contemporary art that is situated within and responds to contemporary social realities in China, the art that Silbergeld attempts to render visible therefore demonstrates adherence to history and traditional forms of practice.4

In this context, Arnold Chang’s Arnold Chang, Bridge to Heaven 2006.2, 2006, ink self-proclaimed lineage to on paper, 142 x 74 cm. Photo: Bruce M. White. Chinese literati painting plays Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum, an important role of picturing Princeton, New Jersey. today’s revitalization of Chinese culture from the past. Chang was born in 1954 in New York City and obtained his knowledge of composition from a renowned American scholar in Chinese painting, James Cahill, and his mastery of brushstroke from Chinese-American collector and painter C. C. Wang. Although Chang is three-quarters ethnic Chinese, he did not speak Chinese growing up; Chang acquired his knowledge of Chinese language and culture through courses in college and his time spent in Taiwan. He is inspired by paintings from the Song and Yuan dynasties, and the nature of his medium and techniques—monochrome ink painting on traditional hand scrolls—obligates viewers to read his works much as they would traditional paintings, the movement of their eyes following the internal logic of mountains and streams.

Similarly, Vannessa Tran seems to represent a contemporary reincarnation of the “Chinese artist-in-solitude” manifested in Gong Xian (ca. 1618–89) and Shitao (1642–ca. 1707). According to Silbergeld, Vietnamese-American artist Tran, born in 1975 in Tacoma, Washington, is “a model of artistic independence” who exemplifies the long tradition of the scholar-recluse figure in China.5 It is Tran’s intent to look for inspiration in nature rather than in other artists that makes her a unique voice in today’s contemporary Chinese art. Her untitled rose paintings portray a single rose on modest-scale canvas; the single layer of seemingly monochrome oil paint renders the silhouette

90 ghostly and melancholic. Whether emerging from the picture plane or receding into infinity, the rose seems content to leave the viewers uncertain; it is as unconcerned with trying to please its audience as its maker is with striving to win over her public. The viewers are informed that Tran has no gallery representation, sells no paintings, and does not exhibit her works publicly. If her independence from the market identifies her most strongly as “Chinese” (according to Silbergeld), and if her fate changes as a result of this exhibition, the question remains: would she still be considered a “Chinese” artist?

Michael Cherney, The Northern Calligrapher, photographer, and book artist Michael Cherney is “Chinese” Song Spirit Road, S2, from the series Bounded by Mountains, for a different reason. Although born in 1969 to a Jewish American family 2005, photographic album, open: 26 x 415.8 cm, edition in Queens, New York, Cherney now lives in Beijing, and his work constantly of 18. Princeton University Art Museum, gift of the P. Y. and engages with Chinese historical modes of textual reproduction such as Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art. Photo: Bruce the folded album. The works on display retain a consistent format and M. White. production method: Cherney takes photographs in China, enlarges them enough to blur the contours, dissects the resulting image and mounts the parts onto album leaves that constitute an accordion-style handscroll, and places the album in a wooden box. The process of editing and enlarging the image disturbs the indexical nature of photography, for the extreme zoom-in on the figures de-contextualizes the order in which they stand in situ. Once it is acknowledged that the artist is consciously playing with his authority to maneuver the original material (photograph), the film strip-like visual presentation (Chinese album) can no longer be analyzed as naively replicating the book-making tradition of the past: Cherney both inherits and reinvents the tradition.

If Chang, Tran, and Cherney were all born in America yet manifest in different ways a certain “Chineseness,” Zhi Lin (b. 1959), Liu Dan (b. 1953), and Zhang Hongtu (b. 1943) are Chinese-born American artists whose visual hybridity, as the curators argue, complicates our understanding of cultures from China and America. After all, Silbergeld says, “Assimilation and diversity have watered the roots of both cultures.”6 Zhi Lin’s artistic influence, as discernible in his spectacularization of capital punishment in China, include dramatic compositions of Northern Renaissance religious paintings and bird’s-eye-view perspectives of Chinese traditional paintings.7 Liu Dan’s art demonstrates an incredible ability to transgress geography and the temporality of artistic traditions: from ink handscrolls drawn with the technique of centered brush-tip (zhong feng) to portraits in red chalk that are highly reminiscent of Renaissance drawings and pencil drawings of American bikers rendered in a realistic fashion.8 In the context of the exhibition, Liu is a figure who transcends the binary of either/or (Chinese or American) by effectively being both.9 In the case of Zhang Hongtu, the

91 92 Opposite Page: Zhi Lin, artist layers his work with hypervisible cultural signifiers: forQuaker Oats Drawing and Quartering, from the series Five Capital Mao (1987), Zhang swiftly adds a few strokes onto the cereal box to turn the Punishments in China, 2003, hanging scroll mounted American commercial icon into the Chinese political icon, and for Ni Zan- as a thangka; charcoal on canvas, screenprinting on Monet (2000) and Shitao (Ten Thousand Ugly Inkblots)—van Gogh (2007), ribbons, image 269.2 × 188 Zhang paints some of the most well-known Chinese ink paintings in the cm, with mount 365.8 x 213.4 cm. Photo: Bruce M. style of Western masters. White. Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey. To a New York Times art critic, these diverse manifestations of “Chineseness,” bookended by Arnold Chang and Zhang Hongtu, are “idiosyncratic and somewhat strange.”10 The critic himself seems preoccupied with the Chinese ethnic identity of the artists, or the lack thereof, as his position oscillates between whether to believe that these artworks “exemplify contemporary Chinese art, or . . . ‘Chineseness.’”11 About Michael Cherney and Vannessa Tran, the critic notes, “their presence can be confusing, given that neither of them is Chinese.”12 Aside from the fact that the critic’s comment reveals his inability to understand the exhibition’s theoretical undertone, I think that the show’s epistemological concern encourages the viewers to acknowledge a broader definition of “contemporary Chinese art” and to actively see the newly accepted “Chineseness” in these selected artworks. However, when the viewers—certainly this Times critic—fail to see it, the exhibition risks unintentionally of perpetuating a classificatory binary system of “Chineseness” versus “non-Chineseness” that obscures the artworks rather than fostering possible interpretations of them.

Outside In’s ontological quest—what is contemporary Chinese art?—calls for a critical analysis of the exhibition as an object of study in itself. The exhibition fully engages with the act of curating as a self-reflexive gesture that forms a specific discourse; as a result, it becomes imperative to examine how the curators organize the gallery space to create a particular narrative. Eleven years after Gao Minglu’s pioneer survey of contemporary Chinese art in North America, what kind of narrative can another survey exhibition contribute to the field? What would an exhibition of and about contemporary Chinese art look like in 2009?

The first gallery, with a selection of one or two works from each artist, portrays an image of “diversity” in styles and subjects: Arnold Chang’s

Zhang Hongtu, Quaker Oats Mao, 1987, oil on cardboard cereal boxes, two boxes, each 24 x 13 cm. Photo: Bruce M. White. Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey.

93 visually compelling ink painting Bridge to Heaven (2006) may seem at first antithetical to the word “contemporary” in the exhibition title; Zhi Lin’s large-scale landscape oil painting, Names of the Unremembered: Transcontinental (2008), is a figureless portrait of thousands of absent Chinese migrant workers whose labour catalyzed the cross-continental exchange; across the hall, Liu Dan’s trompe l’oeil Bamboo Cabinet (2002), in rich amber, shows a striking realism in contrast with imaginative landscapes of Arnold Chang and Zhi Lin; and in the corner leading to the second gallery, one of Vannessa Tran’s single-rose paintings stands alone quietly, as if it were silenced by her male colleagues’ distinct, heterogeneous artistic personalities that vociferously claim the gallery space.

The second gallery seeks to demonstrate “stylistic origins,” in which the artists’ relationship to the past is primarily that of artistic inspiration in the continuum of art history. First, the viewers are welcomed by Zhi Lin’s monumental tableau Starvation (1999) from the Five Capital Punishments in China series, juxtaposed with Giovanni Battista Gaulli’s modest-scale oil sketch Triumph of the Name of Jesus (ca. 1676–79). This juxtaposition allows the viewers to see formal similarities between the two spectacular compositions, but this helpful art historical lesson can, in an alarming way, restrict interpretations to the level of visual allusion and resemblance. The ostensibly uncomplicated placement of visual comparisons continues, for example, in a relatively narrow pathway leading the viewers to the next wall, on which hang, from right to left, Arnold Chang’s ink painting Landscape after Ni Zan 2000.8 (2000), Ni Zan’s ink painting Twin Trees by the South Bank from the fourteenth century, Zhang Hongtu’s oil painting Ni Zan- Monet (2000), and Claude Monet’s Meadow at Giverny (1894). The repeated vignettes of juxtapositions between “old/original” and “new/ appropriation” confirm how the artists respect, reinvent, and reconstruct the past.

Vannessa Tran, Untitled, 2005, oil on canvas, 29.3 x 26 cm. Princeton University Art Museum, gift of the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art. Photo: Bruce M. White.

94 Zhang Hongtu, Shitao (Ten Thousand Ugly Inkblots)— Van Gogh (detail), 2007, three panels, oil on canvas, 135 x 610 cm. Courtesy of the Lin and Keng Gallery.

Liu Dan, Bamboo Cabinet, 2002, ink on paper, 148 x 91.5 cm. Debby and Marcus Flacks Collection, London, U.K. Courtesy of Debby and Marcus Flacks.

95 The exhibition’s third and last section, under the theme of “outside in,” is Installation view of Outside In, (left to right) Zhang Hongtu, enclosed by a spiral-shaped temporary wall. From a practical perspective, Shi Tao (Ten Thousand Ugly Ink Blots)—Van Gogh, 2007, the spiral provides an exterior wall long enough to exhibit Liu Dan’s Liu Dan, Ink Handscroll, 1990. Photo: Bruce M. eighteen meter-long handscroll. In terms of the viewing effect within the White. Courtesy of Princeton spiral, the artworks’ proximity to each other and to the viewers disallows a University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey. privileged vantage point from which to digest the entirety of the space. This fragmented and more intimate viewing position compels the viewers to find connections and conversations among the works, fostering an experience substantially different from that in the first gallery. But what kind of conversation can Zhang Hongtu’s Quaker Oats Mao have with Liu Dan’s sketch of American bikers? Or Arnold’s Chang’s ink painting with another of Vannessa Tran’s rose paintings? Is the third gallery promoting another version of the diversity and heterogeneity previously presented, in the first gallery? The visualization of the concept “outside in” in the last gallery space requires closer attention, as it reflects a larger curatorial belief in relation to the notions of inclusivity and diversity.

In his catalogue essay, “In the Mischievous Role of Naturalist: Classifying the Chineseness in Contemporary Art,” Cary Y. Liu refers to cultural critic Homi Bhabha’s notion of “third space,” in order to remark that Bhabha’s theory is helpful in explaining the influence of Chinese contemporary art (“outside”) in America (“in”) and the subsequent expansion of American contemporary art.13 Bhabha’s conceptualization of “third space,” however, strongly counters the institutionalized form of American multiculturalism, with which the current exhibition dangerously flirts (the language of curatorial statements is imbued with the terms such as diversity, marginality, visibility, and cultural identity). Cautioning against the danger of containing cultures in the name of cultural diversity, Bhabha seeks cultural difference from a position of liminality and alterity.14 In other words, the spirit of cultural globalization manifested in the search

96 for cultural origins and individualistic pluralism, Bhabha would say, undermines the dynamic processes of misrecognition and mistranslation in cultural transformation.

Although Outside In uncomfortably sits between its dual aim to represent “diversity” in both contemporary Chinese art and contemporary American art, it is nonetheless a remarkable contribution to the study and curating of contemporary Chinese art from a location outside of China. Indeed, the exhibition reflects the academic and curatorial dilemma in North America about what methodological approaches are most appropriate for the interpretation of artworks in the relatively new field of contemporary Chinese art—a field that, in the regimented discipline of art history and the departmentalized structure in museums, is located awkwardly between its geographical affiliation (China/Asia) and its temporal categorization (contemporary). Then the question is neither about where to put contemporary Chinese art nor about who can claim authority to this constructed category. Rather, the issue at stake is how to break the boundaries of our own ways of thinking so that we can critically engage with the artistic production that composes—and drives as a dynamic force—the aesthetics of today’s rapidly changing social, cultural, and political conditions.

Notes 1 Inside Out: New Chinese Art (1998) was organized by the Asia Society, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It toured from New York to San Francisco, Tacoma/Seattle, Hong Kong, and Monterrey, Mexico. See Gao Minglu, ed., Inside Out: New Chinese Art (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New York: Asia Society Galleries; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). 2 In addition to the over three-hundred-page catalogue with color illustrations, the curators organized a day-long symposium on March 7, 2009, with invited scholars—Michael Sullivan, Richard Kraus, Kuiyi Shen, Zheng Shengtian, Britta Erickson, and Rachael DeLue—and all six of the artists. Curators Jerome Silbergeld and Cary Y. Liu also presented papers that manifest their curatorial statements. Although the catalogue does not include symposium papers, it includes curatorial essays as well as extensive biographical information of each artist in essay form. 3 Jerome Silbergeld, “Chinese Art, Made-in-America: An Encounter with Geography, Ethnicity, Contemporaneity, and Cultural Chineseness,” in Outside In: Chinese × American × Contemporary Art (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 133. 4 Gao Minglu writes, “to define what Chineseness is in modern and contemporary art history is to define Chinese modernity and avant-garde.” See Gao Minglu, “Who is Pounding The Wall? A Response to Paul Gladston’s ‘Writing on The Wall (and Entry Gage),’” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 6, no. 2 (June 2007), 107. Similarly, for Wu Hung, “Contemporaneity . . . does not simply pertain to what is here and now, but must be understood as an intentional artistic/theoretical construct, which asserts a particular historicity for itself. . . .” This phrase is quoted by Jerome Silbergeld in the exhibition catalogue. See Wu Hung, “Contemporaneity in Contemporary Chinese Art,” in John Rosenfield, Shih Shou-chien, and Takeda Tsuneo, eds.,The History of Painting in East Asia: Essays on Scholarly Method (Taipei: Rock Publishing International, 2008). 5 Silbergeld, “The Art of Seclusion,” in Outside In, 185. 6 Silbergeld, “Chinese Art, Made-in-America,” in Outside In, 116. 7 Gregory Seiffert, “Violence Unsceen,” in Outside In, 225–36. 8 Michelle Lim, “Portrait of an Artist,” in Outside In, 247–54. 9 Silbergeld, “What Realism, Which Beauty?” in Outside In, 246. 10 Benjamin Genocchio, “Examining Chinese Identity,” New York Times, March 29, 2009. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Gao Minglu, in his catalogue essay for Inside Out, “Toward a Transnational Modernity: An Overview of Inside Out,” uses Bhabha’s term “third space” to designate Chinese diasporic artists as residing in the in-between space. See Gao, Inside Out, 33–35. On a related note on the notion of “third space,” I am compelled to link Outside In to the concurrently held exhibition, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, curated by Alexandra Munroe, the senior curator of Asian art at Guggenheim Museum in New York. Although the Guggenheim show is substantially larger in scale, the two shows share similarities as they are both an attempt by renowned Asian art scholars to deal with the confluence of cultural interactions on the American terrain. While Outside In emphasizes the duality of “Americanness” and “Chineseness” in its artists, Third Mind seeks “Asian influences” in art created by artists who are already known as important American artists such as John Cage, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. 14 Jonathan Rutherford, “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 209.

97 Ellen Pearlman Navin Rawanchaikul: Super China! Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing April 18–June 12, 2009

98 99 avin Rawanchaikul, an ethnic East Asian Indian artist born Previous page: Navin Rawanchaikul, installation in Thailand, is the creator of an exhibition titled Super China! view of Super China!. Photo: Oak Taylor-Smith. at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing that Courtesy of Ullens Center for N Contemporary Art, Beijing. humorously critiques and dissects the formerly white-hot Chinese art world. The Ullens Center is a private enterprise owned by Belgian art collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens, and is staffed by curators from France, the United States, Bulgaria, and China. As a born-and-bred New Yorker who lives between Beijing and Bushwick, Brooklyn, I too am part of a melange of floating cultures.

First I will briefly highlight Rawanchaikul’s background and art practice, and then I will discuss Super China! in light of the rise of the Chinese art world. Finally, I want to discuss why this show is so relevant at this time and what it bodes for the future.

The Artist Navin Rawanchaikul was born in 1971 in Chiang Mai, Thailand, of parents from the Hindu-Punjabi communities of present day Pakistan. He describes himself as the “lonesome son of [the] diaspora and [the] product of a globalized world,”1 and his main art practice engages the public in non- traditional ways through presenting documentary and fictitious aspects of himself. He is a cross between a systems analyst, a huckster, a country boy, a movie producer, and an international buffoon, one who is so savvy with the manipulation of his image that he runs his own production company, Navin Productions, to manage it. He has direct experience of how one’s origins get diluted in this new world culture—he is married to a Japanese woman and splits his time among Thailand, Japan, and the rest of the world. In his position as the consummate pan-Asian outsider, he has analysed the base of power in the art world and who the key players are in any given national situation. At the same time, he has managed to engage a new, non-art community with his work by creating site-specific projects outside of galleries and museums through the use of taxi cabs, billboards, comic books, and outdoor pavilions. He provides a fresh perspective on the role of the artist in rapidly developing countries, and some of the questions his projects raise are: In learning a new language, do you adopt its values and customs? Or, in adopting new techniques and methodologies, do you become more like the customs you are adopting? In an increasingly globalized art world of art fairs, auctions, biennials, and triennials, these are serious questions. Rawanchaikul answers them by working both sides of the game of success in the art world and by critiquing the art system, while at the same time retaining complete creative control of his contemporary critical products.

Fly With Me to Another World In the early 1960s, few Thai artists studied and lived abroad. In 1962 Inson Wongsam, a recent art school graduate from Lamphun, took his Lambretta scooter and rode from Thailand to Europe bartering his woodcut prints for room and board, and eventually making it all the way, minus scooter, to New York City. Thirteen years later, he returned home a local legend saying, “I left with nothing and I returned with nothing.” However, he began using his newfound knowledge of Western art practices for art projects within

100 Navin Rawanchaikul, his own community. In 1999, Rawanchaikul produced a series of billboard installation view of Fly with Me to Another World, 2004- paintings and gathered interviews, news clippings, and old photos to make 05, Hariphunchai National Museum, Lamphun. Photo: a scrapbook about Inson’s life, in honour of a pioneer who had become so Suwat Supachavinswad. Courtesy of the artist. important to the fledgling Thai art world. The exhibit, which also included a replica fibreglass sculpture of Inson riding his famed scooter around the world, travelled to different countries, ending up in Inson’s hometown in 2005. Invited to the Art Statement section for emerging artists of the 31st Art Basel, Rawanchaikul also included his now signature billboard painting of Inson’s journey, titled Fly With Me To Another World, along with the fibreglass sculpture and scrapbook.

The use of the billboard, a familiar Indian Bollywood device of hyper- dramatic promotion and occasional propaganda, and also popular in Thailand, is one of the most direct forms of advertising and communication yet is consistently relegated to the level of “low” art. Yet, for many semi- literate and illiterate people, it is one of the most accessible and engaging forms of receiving information. As the art world became increasingly theoretical and distanced from the general public, Rawanchaikul considered the telling of any one individual’s story through the format of a billboard an act of resistance.

Taxi Gallery In 1995 Rawanchaikul initiated Navin Gallery Bangkok, transforming a common Bangkok taxi into a mobile art gallery. The project was expanded for various exhibitions in Birmingham, Bonn, and Mexico City. Turning a keen eye towards the worlds of communications and advertising, Rawanchaikul brought art into the lives of ordinary people by inserting into

101 Yutaka Sone, At the End of All the Journeys, 1998, video. Installation view at Navin Gallery Bangkok (Taxi Gallery), Bangkok.

the taxi projects by artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Yutaka Sone. The idea of the traditional art audience was challenged because there was no way of guaranteeing any one particular location for viewing the artwork at any one particular time. The difficulty of obtaining a glimpse of the art added to the appeal and mystery of the project, but also made it a space where those fortunate enough to hail that particular taxi would find themselves encircled by art at a level that was impossible to ignore, either from the surround- sound aspect of the images or the fact that the viewer might be stuck inside the cab in rush hour traffic. Another way in which Rawanchaikul worked on deconstructing the contemporary art power structure was to produce a series of highly accessible comic books about the lives of different taxi drivers. By using the taxis as a venue for art, he was mounting what he called in his book, Navin’s Sala (an elaborate, multifaceted textual and visual survey of his many projects), a continuous “Taxi Evernnale” with the slogan of “Any Where, Any Time, Any Taxi.” This project entails both participatory art and cultural politics, and is subversive in that it challenges the primacy of the museum, the expert, the scholar, and the entire art hierarchy—an arena that Rawanchaikul probes in depth.

Sala and the Super(M)art Rawanchaikul also focuses on the concept of the ubiquitous Sala, a Thai open-air pavilion with a basic wooden frame that is used as a place for everyone in the village to congregate. It often fills in as a space for important functions. This idea of a community gathering led to his exhibit Super(M)art, at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2002, where he demonstrated his burgeoning criticism of the role of the curator in promoting the overt and blatant commodification of art. Within this context, Rawanchaikul fabricated a sculpture of himself in the form of Old Navin, eighty-three years old, wondering if his work will ever be on permanent display, and

102 Navin Rawanchaikul, Art or (M)art?, 2002, acrylic on wood, 488 x 732 cm. Installation view at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Collection of Pinkchuk Art Center, Kiev. Photo: Marc Domage. Courtesy of Navin Production and Air de Paris.

negotiating with Young Curator Man about this problem. Set in 2052, Young Curator Man is slick; he understands the value of creating distraction and promotes a model for biennial franchising. Super Curator, who has ultimate power, represents all Young Curator Men with promises to make anyone into a Super(M)Artistic Guru, because art is over and it is time for Art-to(M)art. In the advertising literature Navin produces for Navin’s Sala, he promotes the training course Super(M)art 101, which will “take you from being a starving painter to a mass producer of wealth and fame in no time.” He also has an ad in the book selling a version of Super(M)artistic Curator, Super(M)artistic Gallerist, Super(M)artistic Critic, or his pretend best-selling product, Super(M)artistic CEO which you can purchase at www.super(M)art101.com.

Rawanchaikul’s work continually explores the complex interrelations among artists, media, curators, collectors, gallery owners, museums, real estate moguls, and politics. He produced large billboard-sized paintings of Western and Eastern Feasts of Super(M)art, each populated with up to two hundred art world luminaries such as Art or (M)art? (2002) and Super(m)art—Bangkok Survivors, 2004. These theatrical scenarios are a cross between the Last Supper of Christ and the children’s book Where’s Waldo? The Byzantine-like paintings highlight the dynamics of the art world game as played out in different localities. In the West, it’s all about competition and rising to the top of a canonical list. In Thailand, where they are still struggling to create an art infrastructure, it’s more about who benefits and who does not. Rawanchaikul also developed these relationships into board games, building upon his reworking of the art world game and showing the necessary and complex relationships among all the players.

In China Rawanchaikul started his own mock political Navin Party because despite his success as an artist he felt there was still no place for him in a globalized world. He was particularly devastated and fell into a state of depression— in Navin’s Sala, Rawanchaikul describes how he broke up with his dealer, went into debt, and started drinking—when in May, 2001 the New York

103 City Taxi and Limousine Commission decided to cancel his New York based Taxi Gallery project because they deemed his proposal to alter the taxi interiors inappropriate.

In 2006, Rawanchaikul found a letter in his studio from someone living in Mumbai who shared his name of Navin. He then found another Navin, Guru Navin Mahaprabhu, who told him to find the Navins of the past and bring them together with the Navins of the future, and this would make him whole again. He became inspired and founded the Navin Party. In June 2006, Mumbai director Naren Mojidra was commissioned to direct a short musical film,Navins of Bollywood, and he opened a Web site devoted to the Navin Party (www.navinparty.com). To commemorate the founding of “Friends of the Navin Party,” the Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art,

Navin Rawanchaikul, Young Curator Man, 2002, painted fiberglass. Photo: Ellen Pearlman. Courtesy of the artist.

104 Tokyo, Yuko Hasegawa, and the Thai Ministry of Culture Director-General, Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, Apinan Poshyananda, signed a Thai-Japanese joint statement of support for the Navin Party. Beijing was chosen as the site of the Navin Party’s Ninth Congress. Special propaganda prints were released saying “Let the Navins of the World Unite Humanity and Bring Hope for the Future,” which was based upon the work of Dalian artist Yu Zhenli. In addition, Rawanchaikul distributed the small red book, Quotations from Chairman Navin, near Wan Fu Jing market, where he was stopped and arrested by the police on August 1, 2007, only to be released after five hours of questioning. Later that month he showed a video of quotations from “Comrade Navin” at Tang Contemporary Gallery titled All Navins Are Comrades, All Non-Navins Are Friends.

Super China! Rawanchaikul’s current show at the Ullens Center is not a retrospective and mainly focuses on his views of the art world in China, with the addition of other pieces to present a more balanced presentation of his oeuvre. The Ullens Center is broadening its scope by incorporating Asians who comment on Asia instead of presenting the typical Western commentaries

Chairman Navin and the manager of Tang Contemporary Art in the back seat of a Beijing police car, 2007. Courtesy of Navin Production and Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing.

on Asian art or, conversely, solely presenting Western artists. Art institutions have become de facto sites for the promotion and values of a society’s ideas; therefore, public venues, particularly a European based arts centre in China, have a lot of responsibility for what and how they present work. Some may feel that only the Chinese are qualified to comment on and critique the Chinese art world, but in the current globalized environment this is not true. I have met Chinese artists in Beijing and two weeks later bumped into them at exhibitions at PS1 in New York, so strict localization is no longer relevant. What Rawanchaikul has undertaken is to excoriate the art world, and, in this instance, the Chinese art world. Part of the way he has done this in the Ullens Center exhibition is through a participatory game, also titled SUPER CHINA!, which is loosely based on the board game Monopoly. Another way is through a Bollywood-style billboard painting portraying power players within the Chinese art world.

I played the board game SUPER CHINA! along with three Chinese participants. As an individual reasonably knowledgeable about the Chinese art world, I was occasionally stymied by the questions, but no more so than

105 Navin Rawanchaikul, Quotations from Comrade Navin, 2008, ceramic and book set. Produced in collaboration with Galerie Enrico Navarra in celebration of the Navin Party’s second anniversary, 2008. Photo: Suwat Supachavinswad. Courtesy of Navin Production and Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris.

anyone else who was playing. The purpose of the game is to survive within the art world and make the most money. Just as in the traditional game of Monopoly, you can buy property but you have the choice to turn it into, for instance, an art gallery or a palace, represented by little chess-like pieces you place on your section of the board. There are tax traps and rent collections if someone else lands on your property. If you are unfortunate enough to draw a card that says “A Super Gallerist hates you,” you have to pay all the other players one thousand dollars in order to continue playing the game. The cards include “Super Press,” where you don’t pay when landing on a media space; “Super Gallerist,” where you take a fifty percent cut of every player’s salary each time he or she collects a fee; “Super Contractor,” who helps you buy a gallery at a fifty percent discount; and “Super Artist,” who places a token on your property and doubles your revenue fee. One example of the type of questions asked on the cards to gain extra credits or money is:

“Who wrote an article entitled ‘Do Westerners Really Understand the Chinese Avant Garde Art’”?

A) Pi Li B) Li Xianting C) Zhu Qi

How many of you reading this article know that the answer is “C”? This is esoteric stuff to put out to a typical museum-going public, and playing the game for an hour at a time makes for a considerable amount of participatory leisure. Still, I was surprised by how engaging it was and how thrilled I was when I could avoid paying taxes, paying rent for temporarily residing on other people’s property, and, best of all, collecting rent whenever someone landed on my property. At the end of the game, I even received an Olympic-sized medal to wear around my neck from the Ullens Center and Navin Productions that stated I had joined the Super China “Survival Art Corp.” But what does this have to do with the art world? It teaches and

106 Navin Rawanchaikul, highlights the skills, cunningness, and tactical moves you require in order to installation view of SUPER CHINA!. Photo: Oak Taylor- get ahead in the art world. Smith. Courtesy of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Rawanchaikul’s painting, also titled SUPER CHINA!, includes larger-than- life portraits that make up an insider’s who’s who of the contemporary Chinese art world according to a loosely polled opinion of what is likely “Friends of Navin’s” and important but unnamed others. Seven panels long with approximately thirty persons per panel, it is compositionally similar to the other billboards he has produced in the past, such as the one of the members of his own Navin Party. I could recognize, among many others, Huang Rui, Uli Sigg, Fan Li Jun, Melissa Chiu, Guy and Myriam Ullens, Zhuan Huang, Jérôme Sans, Cai Guo-Qiang, Xu Bing, and Ai Weiwei. There were also the fibreglass statues of both “Curator Man,” with his cell phone glued to his ear, and “Old Navin,” as well as the painted fibreglass sculpture of Rawanchaikul on Inson Wongsam’s Lambretta scooter. I especially appreciated a wall cartoon of the appropriately named little Italian/Chinese “Super Mafia” guy wearing a chocolate brown fedora hat and looking quite sinister, saying, inside a cartoon bubble, “In the art world, who you know is just as important as what you know. We are the Super China! Network. You’ll need our help to win.” Rawanchaikul certainly got that right.

This exhibition also asks what the purpose of art is in a local community as opposed to that of the anonymous super sales engine behind a capitalist society that buys and sells precious works of art. Society in the SUPER CHINA! painting represents local or legendary heroes and preserves a specific typeo f knowledge, one that immortalizes these local heroes through its visual display. Especially now, the artist in society is elevated to an almost holy status, and this power works in tandem with the art world’s financial engine. In the art world, the race is always on to see which curator or critic discovers an art movement or a new artist first and then makes sure

107 that the discovery is the next new sensation, thereby winning the “real” art Navin Rawanchaikul, SUPER CHINA!, 2009, acrylic on world game. This is also the logic behind cannibalizing and consuming each canvas, 270 x 1260 cm. Photo: Oak Taylor-Smith. year’s crop of freshly minted M.F.A. students from top art schools around Courtesy of Ullens Center for the globe by giving them exhibitions and wooing them with deals. But are Contemporary Art. artists just cash cows, or do they contribute to the life and vigour of society? Does anyone care anymore? The new, challenging financial times that are facing us just might rewrite the rules.

The benign way of looking at this is to consider art as a social platform for meeting, sharing, and learning. It records the history and sociology of the moment. It’s true that gallerists need to be friends with collectors, sponsors, city officers, and even the “Super Mafia.” They also have to have luck, savvy, networking skills, money, and, it is hoped, something worth selling. Ultimately the skill of how to play the game successfully is the difference between connecting to a small group of people and connecting with a community.

A Line in the Sand The mounting of the exhibition Super China! comes at an especially delicate time in both the Chinese and the broader art world. The boom is over, the market is off, sales are down, galleries are closing, and there is general retrenchment. The “Art Mafia” has been enervated, and though “Super Curator Man” still works, he does so on a strict economy class budget, forgoing his customary first class seats during his curtailed schedule of international jaunts and parties.

There has been a growing critical chorus or backlash against the Chinese art world in the Western media. Part of this is justified, and part of it comes from lack of exposure to the full scope of what is actually going on in contemporary Chinese art. Most of the criticism has focused on the big players in the art and auction markets and the ability of artists to actually buy favourable critical reviews, museum shows, and, if necessary, to re-purchase their own works to drive up auction prices. This is where media coverage gets the most bang for its buck. In the West, no matter how knowledgeable the viewer, Chinese art tends to be considered a subset of art from “other” worlds, like Russian, Indian, or even Scandinavian art, despite the whopping success of the Cai Guo-Qiang show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. America, Great Britain, Germany, and Japan are still critical main players, and I have heard curators and editors of major art publications say that there is nothing interesting in Chinese art—it’s all a copy of the West, and what is the big deal, anyway? It is impossible for me to explain how varied and even experimental Chinese art is to them, and I typically reply that only by taking a trip to China could they even begin to get an idea.

Rawanchaikul’s Super China! is a full-blown, albeit humorous, look at the mythmakers and masters behind the meteoric rise of the Chinese art

108 Navin Rawanchaikul, SUPER CHINA! (detail), 2009, acrylic on canvas, 270 x 1260 cm. Photo: Oak Taylor-Smith. Courtesy of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

market over the past decade. It is not a commentary on the value and worth of any particular artist or trend. Rawanchaikul trades on common insider knowledge and, like a research social scientist, maps the connectivity and hierarchical curve of the years he examines. The topic of dismantling the art hierarchy has particularly sensitive reverberations in China, which is still recuperating from the evisceration of any allowable art world or hierarchy, including any type of art criticism or production of images that were not approved by the State during the turbulent 1960s and 70s. Art disrupts and subverts the monotony of our daily routines, but, apparently, so did the State at that time, and in ways that no artist could have expected. But once a movement is analyzed and categorized, it composes its own swan song. The recent boom phase of the Chinese art world is over. A line in the sand has been drawn. Cynical Realism, Political Pop, gigantic blockbuster installations, painted fibreglass, McDonald’s, Disney, Mao, fibreglass pigs with multiple teats, wide-eyed little girls, Communist Party uniforms, puffy clouds and angel wings, women tied up bound and teary-eyed, and Olympic fervour are all finished. Over.

What is emerging is the big question on everyone’s mind. In the post- apocalyptic market hiatus, fresh insights and new horizons are peering out from behind the rubble of the decimated markets—but what are they? Stay tuned.

Notes 1 Navin’s Sala (Chiang Mai: Navin Production Co., Ltd./ Paris: Galerie Enrico Navarra, 2008).

109 Chinese Name Index

Ai Weiwei Ho, Elaine W. Liu Ding Yan Pei-Ming 艾未未何穎雅劉鼎嚴培明

Cai Guo-qiang Hou Hanru Lu, Carol Yao, Pauline J. 蔡國強侯瀚如盧迎華姚嘉善

Chang, Arnold Hsieh, Tehching Ni Zan Yu Zhenli 張洪謝德慶倪贊于振立

Chen Danqing Huang Rui Pi Li Yuan Yuanfu 陳丹青黃銳皮力袁運甫

Chen Tong Huang Yong-Ping Rong Rong Zhan Wang 陳侗黃永砅榮榮展望

Chen Zhong Huang Zhuan Shao Yi Zhang Dali 陳忠黃專邵一張大力

Ching, Dora C. Y. Lee, Bruce Shitao Zhang Hongtu 經崇儀李小龍石濤張宏圖

Chiu, Melissa Lee Weng Choy Tsung Ping Zhang Liaoyuan 招颖思李永財宗炳張遼源

Cui Guotai Li Xianting Wang, C. C. Zhang Peili 崔國泰栗憲庭王季遷（己千）張培力

Dao Zi Li Zehou Wang Lin Zheng Guogu 島子李澤厚王林鄭國谷

Dong Wensheng Lin Biao Wu Hung Zhu Qi 董文勝林彪巫鴻朱其

Fan Lijun Lin Yilin Xie Xiaoze 方力鈞林一林謝曉澤

Gao Minglu Lin Zhi Xing Danwen 高名潞林志邢丹文

Gong Xian Liu, Cary Y. Xu Bing 龔賢劉怡瑋徐冰

He, Fiona Liu Dan Xu Tan 賀瀟劉丹徐坦

110

W a n g G u a n g y i (b. 1957) is a central figure of Yishu the Political Pop movement and recognized as a leader of the New Art Movement in China established in the 1980s. He is most recognized for Edition the socio-political paintings and prints from his Great Criticism series begun in 1998. Through his use of No. 5 the Chinese political icons and symbols of Western commercialism, his images respond to the deeply engrained legacy of propaganda experienced in To purchase a Yishu edition China during the Cultural Revolution. Originally print please send your request painted in 2005, in this work the artist uses his own to [email protected] or call 1.604.649.8187 (Canada), name as a substitute for luxury brand names common or contact Katherine Don to his Great Criticism series. By calling attention to 86.158.1018.9440 (China). the consumer legacy of his own commercial success, Wang provides cheeky commentary on the experience Each edition is commissioned of China’s changing society. by and produced exclusively for Yishu. A r t w ork description

Artist ------Wang Guangyi Title ------Great Criticism — Wang Guangyi (2009) Media ------Serigraph Dimension ------210 x 295 mm Edition Size ------200 Price ------US $300 plus shipping

Signed by the artist; produced by A Space Art, Beijing.