MAY 2002 SPRING ISSUE Views on Contemporary Chinese Art International Curators’ Tour China Resting with Lee Mingwei The Life and Art of Cai Guoqiang Interview with Song Dong Qian Zhongshu and the Late, Late Modern YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Volume 1, Number 1, Spring/May 2002 I would like to welcome readers to this Katy Hsiu-chih Chien Ken Lum premiere issue of Yishu: Journal of Chinese Shengtian Zheng Julie Grundvig Contemporary Art. As the publisher of Paloma Campbell Larisa Broyde Ar t and Collection ov er the past ten years, Yipeng Lu Joyce Lin I have witnessed a developing interest in Kaven Lu Chinese contemporary art worldwide. It Jud y Andrews, Ohio State University is exciting to see a growing number of John Clark, University of Sydney Lynn Cooke, Dia Foundation exhibitions with a focus on Chinese art Okwui Enwezor, Documenta X1; Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di An, Central Academy of Fine Arts and culture. So far, however, there has Fei Dawei, Independent Curator Gao Minglu, New York State University been little theoretical writing devoted to Hou Hanru, Independent Curator & Critic Katie Hill, Independent Critic & Curator Martina Koeppel -Yang, Independent Critic & Historian the discussion of Chinese contemporary Sebastian Lopez, Gate Foundation and Leiden University Lu Jie, Independent Curator art in an intellectual context. Yishu hopes Ni Tsai Chin, Tunghai University Apinan Poshyananda, Chulalongkorn University Chia-chi Jason Wang, Dimension Endowment of Art to fill this lack. Wu Hung, University of Chicago Binghui Huangfu is Director of Earl Lu Gallery, The mandate of Yishu is to offer a La Salle SIA College of the Arts, Singapore David Chan is a graduate student in Curatorial Studies, platform for dialogue amongst scholars Bard College, Rheinbeck, New York Joan Kee is working on a Post-Doctoral in contemporary and artists around the world. It will Asian art at Harvard University Robert Linsley is an artist who teaches at the introduce the latest studies and research University of Waterloo, Canada Monica Mak is a Doctoral student in Asian Art, in Chinese contemporary art in the McGill University, Montreal Melanie O’Brian is Assistant to the Director, international academic community, and Vancouver Art Gallery discuss the current situation and outlook Zhang Qing is Curator of Art, Shanghai Art Museum Special thanks to translators Johnson Chang and of contemporary art in the globalized age. Amy Cheng I hope our effort will help to create a wider Art & Collection Group, Ltd. international space for the development Leap Creative Group of Chinese contemporary art. Chong-yuan Image Ltd. Taipei - In this first issue academics, artists, Yishu is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall and winter) in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited in Vancouver, Canada. critics and historians all share their views Subscription and advertising inquiries may be sent to either addresses: on contemporary art relating to Chinese Taipei: Art & Collection, Ltd. 2F, No. 6, Alley 6, Lane 13, Section 1, Nanking East Road, Taipei 104, Taiwan. identity and issues. They represent a Phone: (886) 2-2560-2219, 2560-2237 Fax: (886) 2-2542-0631 variety of perspectives and critical interests. e-mail: [email protected] Vancouver: Yishu It is my wish that Yishu will provide a 1008-808 Nelson Street Vancouver, B.C. V6Z 2H2 Canada Phone: (1) 604-488-2563 necessary forum for intellectual dialogue Fax: (1) 604-591-6392 e-mail: [email protected] between artists and scholars of Chinese Editorial inquiries and manuscripts may be sent to the Editorial Office in Vancouver art from all over the world. No part of this journal may be published without the written permission from Katy Hsiu-chih Chien the publisher. President Subscription rates: One year: US $48; NT $1500; Two years: US $90; NT $2800, international airmail. We thank Mr. Milton Wong, Mrs. Elaine Bao and Paystone Technologies Corp. for their generous support. Cover: Cai Guoqiang, Dreams, 2001, mixed media. Installation view, Shanghai Art Museum. Editorial Statement Views on Contemporary Chinese Art by: John Clark Britta Erickson p. 18 F ei Dawei Huang Yongping Barbara London J ean-Hubert Martin Chia Chi Jason Wang Wang Jianwei Xu Bing p. 55 X u Jiang Resting with Mingwei: Subversive Cosmopolitanism in the Conceptual Project of Lee Mingwei by Joan Kee Curators’ Trip to China Panel discussion in Hangzhou p. 83 Panel discussion in Guangzhou History Challenges Reality: The Life and Art of Cai Guoqiang by Zhang Qing Qian Zhongshu and the Late, Late Modern by Robert Linsley East West Movie Magic: Shadow Magic as Hybrid Art with Third Space p. 92 by Monica Mak I nterview with Song Dong by Huangfu Binghui Reviews: Huang Yongping, New York, 2002 by David Chan Gu Xiong, Montreal Project, 2001 by Melanie O’Brian p. 94 For over thousands of years, knowledge issued from and cultivated by the Chinese has propagated outwards from China to the benefit of the entire world. Epistemes of Chinese thought and practice have disseminated throughout the sea routes of East Asia transforming the cultures that they touched. Chinese ingenuity crossed into the great territories of Central Asia and beyond, including Europe, by way of the famous Silk Road. Today, once again, China is an ascending global force in commodity production from high technology goods to throwaway trinkets. More profoundly perhaps, Chinese voices are being recognized worldwide for their contributions to the arts, in particular, the domains of film and visual art. The list of notable Chinese inventions that have impacted the course of world history is extensive; the effects of these inventions remain in abiding terms. Chinese ingenuity has also played an ineffaceable role in the shaping of the condition of modernity. Western Modernism, that quintessentially European ideology of commitment to the contents of the ontology of the present, is itself a conglomeration of many non-Western ideas, including Chinese ones. From Sinclair Lewis to Voltaire, from French Chinoiserie to tea drinking in England, from the Confucian sensibilities of Ezra Pound to the paintings of Mark Tobey, Chineseness as an idea, as a perspective and as a way of being has consistently infected the definition of Modernism. Just as it is important to note the contributions of Chinese culture on world culture, so much of China’s cultural constitution, including many of its most traditional attributes, have also been shaped by China’s long history of contact with other peoples and cultures. To cite one obvious example is Buddhism, which was decisively introduced to China from India during the reign of Han Emperor Ming Di. Three points should be made here regarding Buddhism. The first is that as Buddhism consolidated into China, it was both transformed and preempted by Daoism, which saw Buddhism as a challenge to its identity. For example, Daoism included many accommodations to Indo-generated Buddhist ideas, including reincarnation. The second point is that the entry of Buddhism into China was not an entirely passive process, but at times a violent one marked by the persecution of its adherents. The third and most important point is that Buddhism is but one of many important and enduring markers of intercultural exchange within the development of Chinese civilization. Beginning with the 16th century, when European missionaries began to assert themselves as an important presence within proselytizing outposts along the southern shores of China, much of the contact with the West has also been of a terrible nature. China’s complex admixture of fear and resentment towards the West on the one hand and admiration and emulation on the other hand, is a sentiment that has characterized and often transcended China’s perspective on Europe since the advent of the industrial revolution on the European continent. In the name of Western civilization, the whole of Chinese society, comprised of its cultural, political and scientific systems of functioning, has been shaken severely and subjected to the dismantling and often ridiculing gaze of the West. The launch of the Opium Wars in 1840 marks a particularly ignominious moment of painful debut with the Western imperium. Although the ignominity was exacerbated by China’s complacency in terms of its own ancient achievements in culture and science, the effect of 1840 was decisive and exposed China to a new global economic and political situation dominated by the West. The year 1840 represented as much an awakening from a dream as it did an awakening into a nightmare in which the West saw the world in increasingly providential terms, as an artifact to be shaped and determined as the West saw fit. As Edward Said has argued in Orientalism and which bears repeating once more, the West increasingly saw itself as the only legitimate culture and on this basis of belief attempted to install itself as the singular civilization of reference the world over. It did so by the power accrued from the diagnosis of the Other through an ideology of Orientalism by which European civilizations can be defined in relation to a constructed Eastern Other and through which Europe always held the dominant hand. The launch of the so-called Opium Wars introduced a distress to the Chinese psyche hitherto unknown to the Chinese for its discursive trappings in areas such as judicial and trade language. In my many visits to China, the view has been frequently put to me that China’s confrontation with Western Modernity resulted in a modernity quite different from that of other nations. The insistence on China’s differences with the rest of the world deserves to be problematized, not simply accepted. Differences should not be absolutized and fixed in their authority to the point of deflecting from the greater common ground that China shares with Africa, the rest of Asia and the cultures of the non-European Americas.