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   Judy 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  Fei 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

 Interview 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. What is that common ground? It is an historical and cultural territory of a shared problematic relationship to the primacy of the Western narrative. In particular, the insistence to distantiate China from poorer parts of the world is to carry the idea of China’s autonomy from the West to history itself. To do so ignores the fact that much of the world experienced a shared, albeit differently marked out, relationship to Western imperial history. In this regard, China’s 1960s engagement with much of the world’s formerly colonized peoples, particularly in Africa, is a shining example of a truly progressive and purposeful Chinese perspective. Why set China apart from the formerly colonized peoples of, say, Africa based on China’s quantitative differences regarding degrees of colonization? Often, it seems, it is the non-Western world that maintains the aegis of the West, but then this is also one of the salient features of the ideology of Said’s Orientalism.

The historic phenomenon of colonialism casts a huge and painful shadow over much of the world; it gave rise to a diversity of material effects over much of the world that it conquered. The

 important point not to lose sight of is the fact that Post-Colonial theory has been produced in all societies into which the imperial force of the West has intruded. From this perspective, China has much in common with not only the many nations of Africa, Asia and the Americas, but the minoritarian and diasporic populations that also know of racism and oppression from within the territory of Western nations themselves. Thus, there is truth to the statement that the West is nowhere and yet everywhere.

“What is that which has been obscured and repressed since the start of China’s engagement with the Western art world?” Professor and author Sarat Maharaj asked of Chinese artists and scholars during his visit to China in 2000. The politically understandable response from many Chinese scholars is that local voices of Chinese culture have been lost under the perceived monolith of international contemporary art. Such a response should include a deeper inquiry, more salient to an understanding of the reasons why the start of the 1980s now represents an Edenic point of beginning for the narrative of contemporary Chinese art. In other words, what happened by the end of the 1970s to cause the eruption of so much art and engagement? How can we understand the historical and cultural process by which so many art objects, which seemed to spring out of nowhere at the start of the 1980s, came into being? For an initial inquiry, the anteceding decades of the 1960s and 1970s, that is, the period of the so-called Cultural Revolution, can offer valuable insights.

Lord Elgin, the British Commander who ordered the razing and ransacking of the Summer Palace during the Second Opium War, was reported to have felt a momentary regret over the senseless ruination of its magnificent edifices. This was but one tiny fissure in the then impregnable face of the West that was projected into China. Prior to the advent of the First Opium War, British Captain Charles Elliot incurred the ire of his countrymen when he posted a public notice citing the danger to the regular trade of the illegal trafficking of opium by British merchants which he claimed “was rapidly staining the British character with deep disgrace.”This was another tiny fissure. Since those contemptible days of the 19th century, the fissures have grown into rhizomes and many of the rhizomes have amalgamated into valleys that course through the monolithic term known as the West.

It is true that the Modernist narrative of Western art is propelled by the contradictory condition of artistic practice within a capital fueled marketplace. Wariness in the face of the marketplace is necessary not only to Chinese artists but also to non-Chinese artists. The potential uprooting and loss of the many collective identities and traditional cultures of the world in the name of a unified aesthetic sensibility is another legitimate concern. However, this does not necessarily mean that there may not be any effective resistance to this homogenizing phenomenon by any particular or local sources.

Today, the productive and destabilizing forces of revolutionary cultural exchange are all bearers of hybridized identities, including Chinese identities. As Homi Bhabha argues in The Location of

 Culture, “claims to inherent originality or purity of cultures is untenable, even before we resort to empirical historical instances that demonstrate their hybridity.”

In Regis Debray’s A Modest Contribution to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Tenth Anniversary, a reflection of the events of May 1968 in France, Debray put forward the view that leading French artists and intellectuals, including Julia Kristeva and Jean-Luc Godard, have suffered from the cultural misrecognition of China. Debray criticized the French obsession with the thoughts of Mao Zedong as the obsession of adventurers, “all the Columbuses of modernity thought that behind Godard they were discovering China in Paris, when in fact they were landing in California.” Is it possible that misrecognition goes both ways, from the West as well as from China? Is it possible that both sides are too quick to jump to conclusions regarding the so-called ‘basic understanding’ of one to the other?

As the art world becomes increasingly open to the voices and perspectives of alterity and different communities from around the world, alterity becomes not simply an accommodative term within the discursive logic of an hypostatized contemporary art world transfixed to the marketplace. To believe so would be to foreclose on the possibility that there can ever be a world of art in which genuine dialogue between different communities can take place and have an effect on one another.

A genuine openness to cultural difference cannot begin so long as the signifiers of cultural diversity continue to hold authority over any notion of cultural exchange. Once claims to cultural fixity and statism are dislodged, only then can a mutual interrogation of traditions and alternative modes of conduct be possible and only then can a dialogic democracy be developed, one which is based on the recognition of the authenticity of the other. Unless such claims are questioned, the idea of China and the idea of the West will remain totemic terms mutually exotic to one another. As history has repeatedly demonstrated, exoticism is a term soaked in the irreconcilable and the tragic.

With this introduction, Yishu begins its life as a publication. On behalf of the board and staff of Yishu, welcome. The aim of Yishu is not only to reflect on discourses on Chinese art but also to produce and lead discourses on Chinese art. Yishu represents a platform for serious discussions on Chinese art in the context of globalization and increasing multiculturalism. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art is a quarterly publication. The publisher is Katy Chien, also publisher of Art and Collection magazine of Taipei, Taiwan. Shengtian Zheng, former Professor of Art at China National Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China, directs Yishu. The editors are Ken Lum, Canadian artist and Professor of Art, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; Julie Grundvig, graduate student in Asian Studies; and Paloma Campbell, graduate student in Visual Studies, both at the University of British Columbia.

Ken Lum Editor

     

In a 1974 published interview, the French semiotician and feminist Julia Kristeva was asked the question: “Where is your China?” Kristeva replied, “I have returned from China after a three-week trip to Peking, Shanghai, Luoyang, Xian, and back to Peking where I met many men and women: workers, peasants, schoolchildren, teachers, artists – but with all this, and regardless of my own studies in Chinese, there is nothing less certain than having been in China, in its space and time.”

Today, China remains a state very much in flux, no area more so than that of Chinese contemporary culture. For this premiere issue of Yishu, three key questions have been posed to a number of leading scholars and artists, all specialists in Chinese contemporary art and culture. In effect, we have split the question of “Where is your China?” into three. The questions are:

Question 1 What are your thoughts regarding the situation of art and culture in China today?

Question 2 What does Chinese art and culture mean to you? Or should we even be thinking in such terms?

Question 3 Given the fact of globalization, both in terms of capital markets and culture, and the increasing importance of Chinese participants in this fact, what are your thoughts regarding the implications of this?  

John Clark is Chair of the Department of Art History & Theory and Acting Director of the Power Institute for Art & Visual Culture at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is editor of Modernity in Asian Art.

What are your thoughts regarding the situation of art and culture in China today?

On the institutional level, China is fast approaching a situation where it has a fairly broad art-school system in most cities and some state, municipal, and private art museums, as well as an increasing number of commercial galleries. However, earlier attempts to have the law on organizations reformed so that some kind of foundation funding structure would allow tax relief to art foundations, art galleries, and non-state art educational structures has not taken place, and it is well-known that the only art organizations permitted under the law are those sanctioned by the state. There will be increasing pressure on all these fronts for the support system and legal standing of arts organization to be changed, simply by the pressure of numbers of those entering or wishing to enter tertiary art education and then have an artistic career thereafter. Close examination of the statistics, which can be derived from various sources, indicates that art making and consumption is an even more highly elite activity than in other parts of the Chinese world and that investment on a per capita income, whilst outstanding in some urban concentrations, is actually still very low on a per capita basis.

On the level of art practice, clearly a change in discourse is required which restricts state intervention in art practice and frees up both the domain of expression and the domain of educational standards and curricula. Both suffer from antiquated notions of intervention or appraisal at the moment. For example, the use of human body parts in art works, which I have myself criticized in print, saw regulations being handed down by the Ministry of Culture on art practice. In many European countries the same practices would have been subject to the application of more than three hundred year-old laws on medical practice, and would not require cultural censorship. The need for secondary and tertiary art educational reform is self-evident: the appraisal of achievement in order to enter tertiary art education is based on an 1890s Russian system transmitted via the Soviet Union in the 1950s whose models are also deployed during the tertiary art education process itself. China is a now a society unlike either 19th century Tsarist Russia or the mid-1950s Stalinist Soviet Union. Some other kind of understanding of art education in a modern Chinese context needs to be achieved because such standards and concepts feed back through art exhibitions and the increasing purchasing power of many elements in the Chinese governmental and commercial elite into a generalized aesthetic taste. The current situation has created the rather silly dichotomy of official and unofficial, but also the really unfortunate distance of a good deal of official art from the realities of Chinese lived experience.

 What does Chinese art and culture mean to you? Or should we be thinking in such terms?

The distinction between ‘Chinese-style’ and ‘Western-style’ should be long gone. ‘Conservative’ and ‘modernist’ in a ‘Chinese idiom’ would be enough of a distinction to apply to many practices, so we would have ‘Chinese Painting’ and not a guohua/xihua split. ‘Chinese art and culture’ is the inheritance of all the values of the Chinese pasts – many of which are only seen as ‘Chinese’ through the illusory hegemony of the ‘Chinese’ script – as well as all the presents and futures which ‘Chinese art and culture’ is able to incorporate and transform for its own needs, whatever their current and ‘non-Chinese’ geographical or historical location. ‘Chinese’ can be a highly excluding term when considering a regionally and ethnically diverse continuum on the scale of the current and future ‘Chinese’ population. If we use ‘Chinese’ to mean a space of discourse which allows some kinds of difference and ipso facto deprivileges others, then the term may yet have a pragmatic use, otherwise continuous parentheses are required.

Given the fact of globalization, both in terms of capital markets and culture, and the increasing importance of Chinese participants in this fact, what are your thoughts regarding the implications of this?

I do not really have too many thoughts on this issue, since it clearly places problems in China beyond the scope of exclusively ‘Chinese’ resolution. In art, it would help if Chinese artists and art intellectuals got over their obsession with Europe and North America, which is really only a kind of inverted snobbery seeking a trivial kind of reciprocal dominance, and tried to understand other theorizations of these phenomena from ‘the margins.’Whatever their differences in approach or conclusions, these issues have been well understood for a long time by chiefly Latin American theorists, such as, for example, Néstor García Canclini and Mari Carmen Ramírez, and there is a lively understanding in South Asia, such as Aijaz Ahmad, among many others in India. I suppose they sum up as ‘know what to do because your culture is special,’ but also ‘stop thinking that your culture is all that special,’ because it is just a culture which you already have. The first allows you to do something about a marginal situation, the second can very easily prevent you from doing so.

  

Britta Erickson is an independent scholar and curator whose work focuses on contemporary Chinese art. Her recent projects include curating the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery’s first major exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing.

Chaos. Right now in China, an artist can do anything. An artist trained in any medium can become a conceptual photographer or can hire skilled laborers to convert ideas into three dimensions, in fiberglass or stainless steel or porcelain. There are no limits on what can be a viable material: living animals, used clothing, oil on canvas, cadavers, cement, demolished buildings, fruit, Chinese ink, billboards, daily life. When there are no limits there is heady freedom, but then also lack of direc- tion. The freedom is a strange freedom, with the possibility of reprisals lurking in the background. It is freedom, but a risky freedom. There is excitement in that, too.

Globalism is also chaos and an illusion of freedom. Anything is possible, everything will flow together, we will all become one. But of course neither globalism nor the illusion of limitless artistic possibility play out in real life as they do in theory. Because at the basis of both is the individual. The individual is both the ultimate front for limitless possibility and the bottom line source of limitations. This is why I believe in examining works of art first as products of individuals, rather than as the output of a particular culture. We refer to the culture because of its influence on the individual, who is the source of the work of art. The culture does not itself produce the art.

What is Chinese art? Let us put as few limits on this as possible. Why not be generous and inclusive? Chinese art can embrace all artistic production by anyone Chinese, from Mainland China, Taiwan, Macao, or the Chinese diaspora. Perhaps it should also include art produced by anyone who has lived and worked in China for an extended period.

Outstanding artists have worked their way through the maze of possibilities to forge exceptional careers. There is now rightfully a desire to become integrated into the international art scene, and this is gradually occurring. Meanwhile, both Chinese and non-Chinese art workers must share responsibility for the barriers that have been erected to a wider understanding of contemporary Chinese art. There is a tendency in the West to look for ‘Chinese characteristics’ and to exoticize Chinese art. And there is a tendency in China to jealously guard the ‘rights’ to understanding Chinese art, saying that foreigners cannot understand Chinese art. Both of these are shallow points of view. Surely one lesson we shall all learn in the era of globalization is that while general- izations can be helpful, they can also be utterly counterproductive.

  

Fei Dawei graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. In 1989, he moved to France. He has curated exhibitions such as China Avant-Garde, La Chine Demain pour Hier and Passage Exceptionnel. He was the recipient of the Garde de Chevalier de l’Òrdre des Arts et des Lettres in 1999.

What are your thoughts regarding the situation of art and culture in China today?

In China, there are two important phenomena happening in regard to contemporary art. First, contemporary art is on the path of being legitimized. Second, it is becoming more and more a part of the corruption in society. These two phenomena do not run parallel. But it is the relation between these two that plays a key role in determining how contemporary art will develop in China. Art always needs to establish its value in a space that cannot be measured by social mechanisms. Once the spiritual search stops, then what is being ‘legitimized’ will only be an empty shell.

What does Chinese art and culture mean to you? Or should we even be thinking in such terms?

It is part of my subconsciousness. Sometime it is a resource but sometimes it is a limitation.

Given the fact of globalization, both in terms of capital markets and culture, and the increasing importance of Chinese participants in this fact, what are your thoughts regarding the implications of this?

The development of economy does not guarantee the development of culture. ‘China fever’ occurred in the international market and art museums and is only a superficial phenomenon. I do not believe it can bear out the real value of contemporary Chinese art.

  

Based in France, Huang Yongping has exhibited his work internationally. In 1998, he was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize. He co-represented France at the 48th Venice Biennale.

I am in China at the moment. However, does it make me more qualified to discuss the situation here? Everyone who lives here can tell you what I can say. There is not much worth discussing here, including ‘art’ and ‘culture.’ On the other hand, however, we can talk about the weather here. Today it is overcast to partially cloudy. This is not a metaphor. But if you like, it can be considered one. Partially cloudy to overcast is far better than being overcast to partially cloudy. But overcast to partially cloudy is far better than being sunny. Yin is a somber force. Yin is ambiguity.

What is ‘China?’ It is not as clear-cut and transparent as people think, especially when it is mingled with ‘art’ and ‘culture.’ For me, the most significant part of it is the Chinese language. I use the language to think, to work, to investigate and to answer questions, even though it can also be misleading.

‘Globalization’ is not a large scale integration. It is, in fact, a process of greater alienation. The question is: what alienates what and who alienates whom? What is more important depends on whether you are part of the alienating process or a member of a force resisting alienation, not whether you are a participant or a part of the globalizing process.

 

Barbara London is a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, concentrating on video and new media art. She pioneered the video program at MoMA.

I follow art and culture in China at a distance, from my curatorial vantage point in New York. The youngest generation of artists appear to be mavericks, creating distinctive work with strong voices.

I focus on individual artists and the distinctiveness of their work. I stay away from issues of nationalism, and see traditional culture as a context. Of course, individuals are shaped by the culture they grew up with and live within. This is what makes each of us distinct.

I prefer the term modernization, not modernism, to globalization. All cultures are changing at breakneck speed. All cultures remain connected to their own history. This space between past and future is what makes contemporary art and practice so remarkably vital and thought-provoking.

 - 

Jean-Hubert Martin is the General Director of the Stiftung museum kunst palast in Dusseldorf, Germany. From 1994 to 1999, he served as Director of the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie, Paris. In 2000, he was the Artistic Director of the Lyon Biennial.

What are your thoughts regarding the situation of art and culture in China today?

In China today there is a very lively situation with many artists exploring new areas. This liveliness is so important that now more and more artists are becoming known outside of China and Chinese contemporary art has become a trademark. There is a great interest in what is happening there. I have not been to China since 1987. I was absolutely struck by the incredible energy that I saw among the young artists I met during my trip. I was absolutely sure at that time that something would come out of it. I could feel the energy and desire for free expression was so big that things had to change.

What does Chinese art and culture mean to you? Or should we even be thinking in such terms?

I agree with the second part of the question. I do not like to think in terms of national art. Nevertheless, Chinese culture and art has a very important historical tradition. What it means to me is that today Chinese art represents an ability to cope with the past and to integrate historical references as well as to demonstrate its capacity for innovation.

Given the fact of globalization, both in terms of capital markets and culture, and the increasing importance of Chinese participants in this fact, what are your thoughts regarding the implications of this?

I can only warn that this increasing implication of Chinese participants in the art world could also be something temporary. The Western art market has a tendency to create short-lived fashions that exist for only one or two seasons before being dropped as quickly as they were taken up. I have experienced this phenomenon very well with Russian art, which became very fashionable in Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s and had very strong impact on the art market. I hope that we reach a state beyond art market fashion because a real global art world means equal chances for participants from all over the world.

    

Chia Chi Jason Wang is an art critic and curator in Taiwan. He is currently the Executive Director of the Dimension Endowment of Art in Taipei and also teaches at the Department of Art and Art Education in the National Taipei Teachers College.

As a critic and curator based in Taipei, I would naturally see myself as part of the significant other – Taiwan – as opposed to Mainland China across the Taiwan Strait and cross-interrogate the definition of what Chinese means and could mean in a contemporary context, especially in the dawn of the twenty-first century. Do we prefer to view Chinese from the perspective of diaspora or simply to restrict Chinese to its homestead, that is, Mainland China proper? If we mean contemporary Chinese art in the sense of what is happening within the geographical territory of the People’s Republic of China, contemporary Chinese art would prove to be much less interesting, less dynamic, and less pluralistic as witnessed today.

In fact, what makes the idea or notion of contemporary Chinese art alluring and enchanting is mainly because the word Chinese has been read and situated in terms of Chinese diasporas, rather than limited to the narrow definition of what is happening within Mainland China.

Since the 1990s, numerous Chinese artists have emigrated or have been exiled to the Western world. Many of them even chose to be naturalized as citizens of those countries. As seen in the international art scene today, so-called contemporary Chinese art is still represented by those overseas contemporary Chinese artists to a great percentage. Over the years, it has been those immigrants and exiles who have brought attention to contemporary Chinese art, especially those in the Western world.

It is the confluence of the native artists in Mainland China and the overseas Chinese artists in general, including artists from Taiwan, that makes contemporary Chinese art dynamic, rich, diverse, pluralistic and, sometimes, controversial. In this context, the word Chinese is used more as a cultural compound and complex, ideally involving anyone who is ethnically, and no matter how remotely, related to China as a culture, rather than seeing China as a mere political regime, namely the People’s Republic of China ruled by the Chinese Communists.

It is my view that the meaning of Chinese should maintain its openness and always tolerate differences. And only such a state of polyphony can provide and promise contemporary Chinese art a competitive, prosperous and bright future in an increasingly globalized world.

Given the growing fact that globalization is becoming a new world order, it is time for us to re-define, deconstruct and expand contemporary Chinese art. Above all, we should liberate contemporary Chinese art by breaking its current geographical boundary. That is, contemporary Chinese art is not the exclusive privilege of the Chinese artists living in the People’s Republic of China. After all, the representation of Chinese art is too important to be monopolized by Mainland Chinese artists.

  

Wang Jianwei is a video and installation artist. In 1997, he was the first Chinese artist to participate in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. In 2001, his exhibitions included My Home is Yours in Tokyo and Living in Time in Berlin.

For me, cultural identity is an issue repeated on different occasions, in different locations and usually emerges in relative, subtle, and absent ways. To the best of my memory, my presence has usually been considered in national rather than individual terms.

Are we presuming an authentic past in order to legitimate our ‘present’ behavior and the terms of discourse? We are over-optimistic about what we believe since the cultural continuity constructed by certain historical evidences is difficult to interrogate. This cultural continuity, however, is presented as a reliable background and one of the only ways of expression. Taking a macroscopic view of cultural identity signifies an approach that merely implements a gesture rather than a critique that would enable interrogation. The aftereffects of this view appear extensively and cultural identity is represented as a given and fixed entity – as in ‘Oriental’ or ‘Chinese.’ Many times, this representation has been ideologically protected and has benefited from its anti-West attitude at home, while gaining acclaim from the West as a voice of the ‘Other’ in the intellectual community. A culture without the abilities of critique and interrogation increasingly renders itself victim to cultural strategies.

My personal attitude is not only generated from an appointed position. Should I speak with a voice of Asia or China? My attitude is internalized within my daily life and within cultural experiences and is not merely a presupposition of an issue since cultural issues are always beyond geographic boundaries and physical space. Nowadays, in an era of globalization, sharing and overlapping has diminished the meaning of certainty. We do not have sufficient evidence to prove the legitimacy of certain criteria. On the one hand, the motivations and sources for setting those criteria are ambiguous. On the other hand, cross-disciplinarity has made simply established criteria meaningless.

I hope to establish my working relationship with the outside through a microscopic mode in order to avoid a prescriptive interpretation and to extend the space of my voice. This space will not be dominated by a sole interpretation of certain rationales or fixed gestures. An emphasis on difference does not allow for an excuse to close the door, although we know that emphasizing difference produces new cultural oligarchies. The real danger lies in the monopolization of words about difference by a minor group for the purposes of confrontation.

Today, we all share terms such as platform, transcendence, exchange, etc. What is needed now is how to establish the cultural capital flow in the process of exchange. Can cultural capital flow? How? It only can be done on the premise of openness and uninterrupted inter-flow.

  

Xu Bing received an M.F.A. from the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing in 1987. He has lived in New York City since 1990. His work was recently shown at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington D.C.

In addition to its heritage from the past, Chinese culture includes certain components deriving from the Mao era and what has been brought in from the West since the Open Door policy that was implemented in the late 1970s. All of these parts form the ‘Chinese culture’ we have today. To Mainland Chinese, we are all born into an Eastern traditional culture and live in it everyday. We do not obtain our cultural heritage through our education system. What we do obtain from the education system is an output of the Maoist transfor- mation of our cultural traditions. Strictly speaking, Maoist culture is a peculiar product of its own ideology that is neither from the Eastern traditions nor from the West. Given these cultural characteristics, Chinese culture, at the moment, is a multi-leveled and undefined cultural complex that offers us a platform for future developments.

Based on its own unique characteristics, Chinese culture will be a crucial cultural reference for the future of worldwide civilizations. For a large and complex country such as China, the meaning of its future prosperity should not be simple economic advancement, which has been achieved by some smaller nations, thanks to an accommodating political system, large and strong trading partners or a discovery of certain natural resources. China’s future prosperity should also produce a new culture to the world because a prosperous China is only made possible by her acceptance of new forms of civilization and social structure, which are also the base of future developments of Chinese culture.

Contemporary art, as an acute and sensitive reflection of ideologies, is often under international intellectual scrutiny. The complexity of China’s current society and the instability of its cultural inclinations are a hotbed for contemporary art or avant-gardism. In fact, Chinese contemporary art has demonstrated a unique creative force that is not bound by pre-established perceptions both in terms of art and knowledge.

For contemporary Chinese artists, their artistic strength lies in two aspects. The Chan wisdom [Chinese Zen] that is innate in Chinese culture is widely adopted by numerous masters of Western contemporary art. There is the urge to break away from traditions in the developmental course of contemporary art. The life experience of many Mainland Chinese artists enables them to go much further in cultural transformation. A part of their experience is the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, upon which lies the uniqueness of Chinese contemporary art. This is something all Mainland Chinese artists have to face. The challenge for us is how to dig through it and take what we can employ to make our own art.

As a Chinese artist who is active in the international arena, Chinese culture is a fundamental part of my artistic voice. It is not something I emphasize or attempt to disguise. It exists in my consciousness and subconsciousness. It is an inalienable part of myself.

  

Xu Jiang is a painter and installation artist. He has exhibited internationally and his work was included in the 1st Shanghai Biennale and the 1998 Sao Paulo Bienal. He was appointed President of the China National Academy of Arts in Hangzhou in 2001.

At the beginning of this year, an American friend of mine, an art historian, attended a symposium at Sussex University on the subject of “Value Judgement and Artistic Subtext in European, Chinese and Indian Art.”He told me that during the symposium, the two neigh- bouring countries of India and China appeared to understand each other's culture less than they respectively understood that of Europe’s. Significantly, the tripartite dialogue designed for the symposium became a bipartite one, wherein Western culture acted as both the intermediary and the reference point for exchanges between China and India. Not only was the language of exchange in English, references on the level of historical time-frame and value judgement were also Western.

The point of this anecdote is that cultural Asia is far more complicated than geographical Asia. Not only is ‘Asia’ an ill-defined concept that is both complex and fluctuating, it has also continually fallen prey to the ‘Western versus non-Western’ mode of dialectics in modern times. As a result, this has reinforced a one-way dialogue with the West, creating a situation of ‘fraternity with distant friends but estrangement from neighbours.’ The fact that the several major cultural domains of Asia, including Confucianism, Buddhism and Islam, are more distant from each other than each is from the West, causes many difficulties and misunderstandings when negotiating the issue of ‘cultural Asia.’

In 1999, Shanghai organized an international biennial for the first time and officially invited over- seas curators, thereby drawing a great deal of attention to itself. Another friend of mine, an active scholar and curator living overseas for many years, has long been concerned with the predicament of Asian cultures and the ‘West versus non-West’ mode of thought. He felt that even though the Shanghai Biennale was heading toward an international platform, it had not extricated itself from the established mode. His suggestion was to pay attention to cultural dialogues between Asia and the rest of the world. The significance of these non-Western dialogues is not just to establish regional differences, but to dismantle the Western-cum-international perspective in order to recover the vitality of non-Western cultures. He presented a proposal for the upcoming Shanghai Biennial. In this creative proposal he emphasized the distinction between ‘Western versus non-Western’ dialogue and that of ‘non-Western versus Western.’

When I associate these issues with that of ‘cultural Asia,’ I feel even more perplexed by the complexity of this topic. On the one hand, a ‘cultural Asia’ must build itself upon an emphasis on regional communication and create its own mode of dialogue in order to balance the global dominance of the ‘Western versus non-Western’ model. On the other hand, a ‘cultural Asia’ must necessarily position Asian cultural phenomenon within that of a global background and try to build an

 alternative structure based on variance from that of the West. The first approach attempts to discard the simple ‘West versus non-West’ model in order to disengage itself from the dominant gaze of ‘the West’ and ‘the International.’ The latter positions itself within the context of difference and, by stressing its distance from the West, creates its own path. In either case, whether it is the strategy of alliance or the strategy of difference, neither can pull itself away from comparing with the ‘West versus non-West’ model. To resolve this dilemma we have a long road ahead of us.

Today, with the threatening advance of globalization, both the West and the non-West are starting to be alarmed by the dangers posed to cultural autonomy and are aware of damages inflicted on the plurality of cultures under a homogeneous globalism. The enlightened ones want to shake off the emblem of partisan interest aligned with power groups in an attempt to build a global narrative fair to all parties concerned. Within this new narrative there is often a common episte- mological foundation that consciously distances itself from evolutionary theories of culture, while simultaneously proposing a totally liberal individual creative space within a democratic environment. And yet, it is precisely such a common epistemological foundation within a global narrative that has created the homogenizing tendency for the creative arts in distinct cultures. Furthermore, the interest in a free and personalized creative space takes global issues such as cultural identity and humanist concern to a private realm, reducing them to the level of personal aesthetic judgement.

Therefore, while we urge cultural exchanges between Asian countries in order to discover multiple modes of dialogue, we should stress the effect on the development of contemporary art played by differences in heritage and cumulative historical experience. It should be apparent that the guarantee of a diversity of 'modernity' comes from the regional diversity of daily experience. From such diversity of daily experience can different rational structures quietly emerge, formed by deeply rooted cultural traits and historical experiences. Of course, the historical experience referred to here is not an imitation of a faded past imagined by the contemporary mind, and certainly not a cultural identity achieved by isolation. A sense of national history created by a nostalgic return to the past is in fact a sign of failure in coping creatively with present experience. At the same time, we should be wary of the dangers hidden behind the apparently universal claims of a global narrative, because such narratives paint a world that removes man from the source of his action, and only serve to provide an ahistorical field of action, flat and devoid of sense of time and space, for the so-called ‘global citizen.’

What a ‘cultural Asia’ calls for is a living sense of history that continuously blends into present experience and serves the present. It carries within it a deeply rooted sense of geography and its past but is shaped by the flux of current phenomena. At the same time, it should carry within it both the concern and respect for spiritual traits of varied cultural traditions. Confucius said: “The gentlemen harmonize but beg to differ, the uncouth seek to be the same and yet discordant.” The state of harmony that ‘begs to differ’ is exactly the foundation required for a ‘cultural Asia.’ Given the interaction of multiple modes of dialogue, contemporary art can be the major field in which a ‘cultural Asia’ may be envisaged and constructed. Like the geographical constitution of each of its countries, Asian art is varied and yet nourished by the same monsoons and continental shifts, common waters and tributaries. What manifests as a ‘geographical dimension’ of artistic identity will be a nexus of multicultural knowledge, a field rich in historical feeling and a ground on which diverse experiences may interact and grow. In harmony and yet different, these varied grounds will then constitute a feasible blueprint for a ‘cultural Asia.’

   :         

  

Lee Mingwei, The Shrine Project, 2000, mixed media installation. Detail from the 2000 Taipei Biennial at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

At first glance, the works of Taiwan-born, New York-based Lee Mingwei do not readily lend themselves to the notion of resistance. Indeed, the notion of resistance, with all of its implied baggage of politicized refutations and ideological confrontations, appears antithetical to the understated elegance evident in Lee’s audience-centric works or, more accurately, projects. These include Letter Writing Project (1998), where the artist invited viewers to write letters to a recipient of their choice; The Dining Project (1998), in which a member of the audience is randomly selected to dine with the artist; The Sleeping Project (2000), where the viewer was invited to sleep with the artist; or most recently, The Tourist Project (2002), in which randomly selected audience members guided Lee to various sites of their own choice. Generally consisting of a daily activity such as eating or sleeping, his projects operate as a neutral forum in which different kinds of people may gather together in temporary communion. They are absolutely transparent, having no other stated intention but to function as mini-plazas for one-on-one gatherings between the artist and a member of the audience who becomes transformed from viewer into a collaborator. Paradoxically enough, however, it is this very transparency which becomes the raw material for a kind of resistance against preset expectations implicit in common theorizations of work defined as ‘contemporary Asian art.’ The transparency of the works simultaneously resist the workings of the neo-colonial as well as the misuses or excesses of the post-colonial mindsets, presenting instead a subversive cosmopolitanism that denies the contentions of both.

Given that Lee’s projects are intended to facilitate communication, it may strike the reader as odd that his projects can even be considered as sites of resistance. Trained in sculpture at the Yale School of Art, Lee possesses impeccable design sense and uses it to great advantage in projects such as The Dining Project, where he prepares exquisite dishes on equally exquisite flatware. The meal is ceremoniously presented upon a blond wood table hovering over a bed of black pebbles, a veritable mimesis of the lifestyle-as-commodity images which have permeated capitalist societies through global, or soon-to-be global brands such as IKEA and Martha Stewart. Formally speaking, the simplicity is highly stylized and the work seems almost too calculated to

 appeal to a sophisticated urban audience. Taken further, The Dining Project may come across as complicit with the neo-colonial project, particularly to those sensitive to racial codings and the politics of contextualization. In this context, the neo-colonial project refers to a set of rationaliza- tions and propositions which trace their genealogy to episodes of imperialism as they have occurred throughout modern and pre-modern history. These codes and rationales were originally calculated to maintain the hierarchy which locates the colonizer as the possessor of power at the expense of those territorially and politically subject to its (and their) maneuverings. Although the neo-colonial project may no longer be a monopoly of power based on geopolitical advances, its effects and workings are clearly felt in the way formerly colonized subjects are positioned, framed and referenced. While issues of complicity and resistance may be far removed from the artist’s intentions, such concerns are not inappropriate when we consider the problematic critical reception to which Lee, by virtue of his close alignment with Western conceptions of ‘Asian’ minimalism, has been especially subject.

Consider the following examples:

Lee’s approach to making art is similar to Buddhism in that he makes no distinction between art and life.1

Here, a generalized trope of Buddhism as inscrutable mark of otherness is employed as a catch-all explanation for Lee’s projects. I use this brief example since it is a typical way that Western critics have positioned his art. Frequently, Lee is seen as inextricable to Buddhism, which is not wholly accurate given his early training in Chan Buddhism in Taiwan. Yet the constant reiteration of the artist as Buddhist, or Buddhist-informed, is troubling in its insinuating that Lee can be defined in no other way. This is demonstrated by one critic’s review of The Sleeping Project, held at Lombard- Freid Fine Arts in New York in which the artist invited random gallery-goers to sleep next to him from nine pm to nine am the next morning:

Stuffing pillows under one arm, Mr. Lee stretched out on the bed in the gallery. I sat cross-legged, not at ease enough to lie down. The critic and the artist let go of roles and began excavating common ground. We discovered mutual interests in Ch’an, the Chinese version of Zen (Mr. Lee was born in Taiwan); in Empress Wu, the only woman to rule China; in the noblewomen who created the Japanese novel; and in family histories.2

The article is bylined “Kay Larson is a critic who practices Zen.”The insinuation is that Lee, as an artist of Asian descent, cannot possibly share anything else in common with a Western other than that which can be identified and located within the archive of Lee’s ‘Chineseness’ or ‘Asianness.’ Certainly Lee contributes to his own coding as an ‘Asian’ artist since he is often photographed wearing the austere gray robes of a Buddhist monk. Likewise, Lee makes continued reference to his personal history and thus indirectly to national history. He does so by using pictures of his grandmother, one of the first women in Taiwan to practice Western medicine, in projects such as The Sleeping Project. While the pictures link Lee to his family past, they also link him to the modernist impulse and an expanded historical narrative. Such self-identification with the historical space of Asia is to be expected. After all, Lee is Asian. He is penalized, however, for his self-identifi- cation because the West insists on equating his Asianness with strangeness. This positioning is disturbing in the way it obscures the peculiar position of Lee and an increasing number of artists who live in the United States but constantly shuttle between the U.S. and Asia. These artists pose a distinct hindrance to the geopolitically-based worldview of the West, for they occupy an intermediate space between what has been conventionally regarded in curatorial and critical parlance as ‘Asia’ and ‘Asian America.’ In occupying this intermediate realm, these artists effectively interrogate the validity of these descriptors as they have been used in exhibitions, in theory and in everyday consciousness.

 The positioning of Asianness as strangeness is also dangerous in that it clearly states the continued otherness of the Chinese artist. Lee is trapped by Western perceptions of his Chineseness or, given the quasi-anthropological approach employed by Western critics in discussing contemporary Chinese art, ‘Chinespecificity.’ By ‘Chinespecificity,’ I am attempting to emphasize the Western critical tendency to focus upon and even fetishize references to what appears to be particular, iconic and insurmountably local with regards to the imagined notion of China. To be sure, the romanticization of ‘Chinespecificity’ by the West assures that the cage of imprisonment is a gilded one.3 Nevertheless, the restrictive scope of critical reception wrongfully strips Lee of his credibility as a narrator of anything other than his ‘Chinespecificity.’ I am not trying to condemn Larson and others from the West with such familiarity, but I am deeply suspicious of instant identification by the West with what is perceived as Chineseness as illustrated by The New York Times choice of byline.

If these critical narratives of the West illustrate one kind of theorization that is decidedly neo- colonial in tone, Lee resists its framings. As effective as these rebuttals have been in highlighting the insidiousness of colonial sentiments that have informed the neo-colonial project, these rebuttals are also accountable for the current proliferation of unproductive versus-isms that verge on a collapse into the kind of binarisms that plague interpretations of contemporary Asian art. It would, moreover, confirm what many theorists have already pointed out: the reiteration of colonial history and the figure of the colonizer as the crux of critical discussion.

Lee has opted to convey an ethos of cosmopolitanism which is overtly idealistic but arguably more resilient to the presumptions that underwrite the neo-colonial and post-colonial projects. His projects remind us that the ethos of cosmopolitanism is premised upon the free participation of and between others. They also emphasize how this ethos must be one which allows for joint ownership so that all may have a stake in its rich harvest. No one should be the other – we are all in this macro-project of exploration together. As the artist observes with regards to Letter Writing Project: “I’m trying to create a void for people to come in and put their own personal history inside that space, therefore making it their own project.”4

In Letter Writing Project, shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Lee acts as a conduit and provides a means of building connections where none previously existed. The attention is redirected from the artist to the viewer, who becomes a participant. Lee only assists the viewer in making connections. By inviting the viewer to write to a long-lost friend, relative, or merely a long-neglected acquaintance, the project liberates the viewer from the burden of obligation and guilt. The translucent letter-writing stations, reminiscent of incubators or cocoons, seal the viewer in a private world of memory and recollection. Each letter is carefully stored on a rack that lines each station and, taken together, they resemble eggs laid by a prolific arachnid, waiting to be ‘hatched’ or sent. The artist denies that these cocoons are somehow similar to the Catholic confessional since he states that the work is not intended to be “motivated by guilt, nor are the viewers supposed to consider me as their priest.”5 Lee is with the viewer-participants in their search but their letters are never addressed, nor are they supposed to be addressed to Lee.

The same sense of release associated with the confessional is nevertheless intertwined with the purpose of the work, but it is an expression of communal cosmopolitanism without the hauteur and exclusivity of the global jet-set. The work is tied to a very public and familiar expression of self. Despite the ostensibly private nature of written communication via the now old-fashioned medium of the letter, there is no real expectation of privacy. Viewers readily walk into the space of the letter-writer, take down the letters and read their contents. The conventional idea of privacy is further subverted since these letters rarely divulge details that might identify the author. Rather, these letters dwell on what is private but deeply collective – they invoke feelings of longing, reconciliation and affection. Granted, some sealed epistles exist (writers may seal the letters at their discretion) but the letters, for the most part, remain open for any to read. Hence, the project

 Lee Mingwei, The Sleeping Project, 2000, interactive performance, Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, New York. enables lines to be drawn from letter-writer to curious reader to recipient and then to another interested reader. New connections have been made, however tangential or transient. Work made in cooperation with the viewers calls up a more perfect kind of cosmopolitanism unhampered by the assumptions, parochialism and violence inherent in the neo-colonial project and, occasionally, a post-colonial resistance to the neo-colonial project.

To be cosmopolitan is to be enmeshed in the matrix of human interactions. Thus, it is not surprising that many of Lee’s projects are situated in large cities like New York (where both Letter Writing Project and The Sleeping Project took place), Houston, Taipei and San Francisco. In The Tourist Project, which was at the Rice University Art Gallery in Houston, Lee plays the role of tourist with various urban dwellers as his guide. Selected audience members lead the artist to sites of personal significance and collect objects from that site for display in the space of the museum. This project differs somewhat from Letter Writing Project in that it is the artist who becomes the porous site rather than the work. Able to easily relate to others, Lee evokes cosmopolitanism in his ability to shift between contexts, hence mimicking his own vascillations as he wanders from one exhibition venue to another and between Taiwan and his current physical residence in New York. His cosmopolitanism is also thrown into relief by the viewer-participant’s performance of their own localness. It is interesting that The Tourist Project takes place in Texas, a state which takes pride in its own localness.

The Tourist Project appears ripe for the machinations of the neo-colonial project since Lee has voluntarily situated himself in the role of tourist, subsequently triggering archetypes of the Asian tourist, a key repository into which infinite variations of foreignness have been inserted. Yet, Lee’s talent for building personal relationships muddies the clarity of this neo-colonial tableau. In recordings and photographs of the dialogues that take place, Lee resists the seductive dichotomy (made seductive by the fact that it is easier to acquiesce to its reasoning than formulate our own) between Asian foreigner and ‘native’ Houstoner by his manner of ease: he may be the tourist, but his comfort implies that he is also the host. Rephrased, the artist operates in a space of simultaneity in which his feeling of being at home is easily reproduced and extremely mobile. This circumvents the psuedo-rationality which puts art that is not ‘of’ the West in a perpetual double bind of alienation and exile.

Cultural critic Nikos Papastergiadis, among others, has worked on the premise that home is somehow fixed and that any escape from home is important.6 Papastergiadis is right in noting that home is not a ‘promiscuous’ site, instantly defined by wherever you lay your hat.7 Somewhat differently, art historian Miwon Kwon is correct in observing that it is very possible that one may never feel at home.8 But for Lee, home is not a settlement imposed or transported onto a passive

 Lee Mingwei, The Shrine Project, 2000, mixed media installation. Detail from the 2000 Taipei Biennial at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. body. It is subject to one’s level of agency. The Tourist Project demonstrates the highest level of the artist’s agency since he firmly rejects the role of the subservient colonial subject easily shoehorned into the role of the tourist/other. The parochialism of the neo-colonial project, which firmly believes in its own centredness and insists upon condemning all who are perceived as non-Western into the pit labeled as ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ is discarded, albeit in the friendliest and most non-confrontational manner.

The agency of Lee, which transforms him from tourist to host, frees him from the tyranny of physical place as well as the corporatized binary of global and the local. One might say that he represents the global as opposed to his local audience. Yet, the kind of cosmopolitanism he represents entails a high level of engagement with his audience. While his viewers show him around various sites in Houston, Lee asks them questions, thus drawing them out, and inadver- tently compelling them to consider new approaches to what was once familiar and even banal. Often, the result is deeply cathartic, as in Letter Writing Project, and Lee notes that the project acted as “a legitimate vehicle or excuse for the guides to visit places, emotional and physical, that they did not want to visit before.”9 The agency of the guides is not for the artist’s benefit alone; it is a shared capital which the artist disperses and elicits from others. While he plays the role of the tourist to be guided by a native host, the tourist role is only a masquerade for Lee’s real position as a meta-host, someone who invites the viewer-collaborator to accompany him on a journey of local and worldly connectivities.

More subversively, The Tourist Project as well as The Sleeping Project and The Dining Project, all of which revolve around Lee’s dialogues with the audience, evade those post-colonial debates which too frequently disintegrate into a kind of us-versus-them binary that often marshals works of art into acting as bit players in epic strategies against the West. While the neo-colonialism of what passes for ‘global’ art criticism must be swiftly countered, it could contribute more towards the purposes of the neo-colonial if we were to focus only upon the significance of their relation- ship within the fray of ideological struggles. Resisting ways that do not adhere to the guidelines of defiance and opposition set forth by other artists does not warrant a lesser achievement. In fact, we can argue that it is the subtle, if unconscious resistance posited by Lee’s conceptual projects that is urgently needed in this episode of contemporaneity, when neo-colonial thought is becoming increasingly nuanced, functioning as it does under the stealth of flimsy social liberalism that has long been in vogue in the West.

This said, it is important to point out that Lee’s projects are irrefutably temporary. Their impact is ephemeral and unsustainable given the plethora of unresolved conflicts that mar the ideals of globalization. If we were to critique Lee’s projects as being too idealistic in execution, it would not

 be far off the mark. During his projects, those who were once strangers become partners, neighbors and friends. The projects are nearly alchemic in their ability to sever the impersonal alienation and distance which can be unbearable when experienced within the context of a massive metropolis. But the magic is short-lived. Only in the rarefied vacuum created by the artist in the already privileged sanctum of the gallery or museum, may the magic be ignited. Once the project ends at nine am, when dinner is finished or the tour is over, the magic ceases. The turgid and sometimes sordid truths of daily reality will again resurface. As literary scholar Lisa Lowe observes, most people do not have the luxury of “free oscillation between or among chosen identities.”10 When we step outside Lee’s sanctified bubble, there is the possibility that we will be even more displaced and depressed than before when we inevitably compare the brief respite f rom reality offered by the artist to the struggles of everyday living.

To the extent that Lee’s magic world is temporary and exclusive to only those fortunate enough to partake in his projects, his resistance against neo-colonial and post-colonial expectations is perhaps less realized than other, more polemical forms of artistic practice. But therein lies the value of his resistance. He points out that the zero-sum conceptions so rampant in current neo-colonial and post-colonial thinking are incorrect. Nothing is ever as extreme or completely manifest as such thinking might otherwise contend. Lee’s projects, however simple and incomplete as tactics of resistance, hope for a day when productive dialogues will not stop at the stroke of midnight but will continue in an asymptotic trajectory towards endless tomorrows of a more luminous kind.

Endnotes:

1 From the introduction of Lee Mingwei during his residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in California. The entire introduction may be found at its website at .

2 Kay Larson, “Mingwei Lee: To Take Part in the Art, You Sleep With the Artist,” The New York Times, November 5, 2000.

3 Alice Yang incisively critiques this romanticization with regard to Chinese brush painting in “Modernism and the Chinese Other in Twentieth Century Art Criticism,” Why Asia? (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998). Among the examples she cites is well-known art historian Norman Bryson who enthusiastically describes brush painting as “a liberating alternative to the totality of Western European art.” p. 145.

4 Judith Hoos Fox, interview with the artist, February 24 - June 14, 2000. Fox was the curator of Lee’s exhibition, Empathic Economies, at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College.

5 Conversation with the author, January 23, 1999, Brooklyn, New York.

6 Nikos Papastergiadis, “The Home in Modernity,” My Home is Yours/Your Home is Mine, (Seoul: Rodin Gallery, 2000), p. 54. First printed in the introduction of Dialogues in the Diasporas: Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity , (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1998). I use this citation to denote an example in which Western theories of the home have been implicitly used to interpret works produced by contemporary Asian artists. My Home is Yours/Your Home is Mine was a group exhibition co-curated by Hou Hanru and Jérôme Sans. First held at the Rodin Gallery from November 24, 2000 to January 28, 2001 in Seoul, it predominantly consisted of artists of Asian descent.

7 Ibid., p. 54.

8 Kwon discusses the alienating effects of the contemporary situation where nomadism is being lauded as a symptom of progressive artistic practice. See Miwon Kwon, “The Wrong Place,” Art Journal, vol. 59, no. 1, Spring 2000, pp. 33-44.

9 Electronic communication with the author, March 7, 2002.

10 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 82.

    

In April 2000, a group of European and North American based curators were invited to acquaint themselves with the burgeoning contemporary art scene of China. The fifteen-day tour began in Hong Kong, and then travelled to Hangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Taipei, ending again in Hong Kong.

At each city visited, the curators were met by many local artists and scholars. In what became known as ‘The International Curators Tour of China,’ much information was exchanged in the form of lively colloquia that were organized for each city. The following transcripts are from colloquia held in the important cultural city of Hangzhou, home of the highly regarded China National Academy of Arts and the Cantonese capital of Guangzhou, an important southern city within the orbit of the Special Economic Zone city of Shenzhen.

Members of the tour group included Okwui Enwezor, Director of Documenta XI and adjunct curator, Art Institute of Chicago; Suzanne Ghez, Director of The Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago and co-curator of Documenta XI; Lynne Cooke, curator of Dia Art Center, New York; Dr. Sebastian Lopez, Director of the Gate Foundation, Amsterdam; Chris Dercon, Director of the Museum Boijmans Van-Beuningen, Rotterdam; Jessica Bradley, curator, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and Dr. Sarat Maharaj, Professor, Goldsmith College of Art and Design, London and co-curator of Documenta XI.

The tour was sponsored and organized by the Annie Wong Art Foundation. Other sponsors include the Fubon Art Foundation in Taipei; the China National Academy of Arts in Hangzhou; and the Artist Store House in Beijing. The Chair of the Annie Wong Art Foundation, Mrs. Annie Wong, and three board members, Ken Lum, Shengtian Zheng and Richard Yiu, accompanied the tour, along with an interpreter, Chaos Chen.

These panels were recorded and transcribed in each of the speaker’s native language and later translated by Yu Hsiao-hwei with the help of Tessara Thomson. The transcriptions published here are revised both from on-the- spot oral translations and from the subsequent written transcriptions based on taped recordings. The general approach to the transcriptions was to leave the original course of the conversations with minimal editing. This meant leaving intact the colloquial turns in the conversations. A few supplementary precisions have also been provided within square brackets, mostly as markers to indicate whom the speaker is addressing. Most of the transcripts have been reviewed by the participants themselves. We were unable to contact many other participants who contributed to the conversations.

  

   -

The following panel took place in the amphitheater of the China National Academy of Arts in Hangzhou on the evening of April 14, 2000. After a round of brief presentations by the visiting curators to the audience, Zheng Shengtian passed the microphone to Okwui Enwezor.

Okwui Enwezor: Thank you, Sheng. I would also like to thank this marvelous audience and our host in this school, who has given us this opportunity to talk to you this evening. I would also like to thank the Annie Wong Foundation, which made this trip possible. During these discussions, it might be interesting to find a way to see the foundation of all these practices. We can then begin to reconstruct and construct the notion of what contemporary Chinese art is in relation to our own individual practices here. We can explore this question of conflict – I don’t mean it in a bad sense – and the common interest that we share, in varying degrees of difference, from which our practices emerge. We need constructive road maps by which we can think about the question of what the West is, and the place contemporary artists’ work holds in so many different fields and places within that particular understanding. I speak from the position of the confounding nature of our own individual maps and itineraries – and how we have arrived where we are today. Through the exploration of those maps and itineraries we can have a much more productive discussion with the audience, like we had this afternoon with the students. I would like to begin by going back to a persistent question: that of the curator. In this case, it is us as agents, as UNESCO officials, as viruses and so on. So many of these confrontations are about the ways in which we can construct different practices in contemporary art, literature, music and film.

I would like to tell you a very short story about a head ethnographer who seemed to be completely displaced within his own discipline. James Clifford connects this to the prologue of a book entitled Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. It involves an Indian-born Oxford- educated anthropologist called Amitav Ghosh. He was doing fieldwork in the Upper Nile Valley in Egypt and went to a place where he expected to find a restful and settled people who could be studied in terms of peaceful globalization. However, to his astonishment, he found that the people in this village in the Upper Nile Valley were not in the least settled, nor were they interested in where they were supposed to be from. They had been travelers all along – their parents and grand- parents had migrated to this place in Egypt. Some of the residents of this village had even traveled to different parts of the world and then returned. This explains the astonishment of the ethnogra- pher when he found that his quarry didn't exist, this image of the authentic native. While Ghosh was having an argument with a villager about the nature of each other’s identity, the villager told him, “You come from a very different culture because you worship cows and burn your women on funeral pyres.”The moral of this story is very simple: the struggle between Ghosh and the natives centred on whose culture was more important. Each of them believed that their culture was more important because it was close to the West and the importance of a culture is, therefore, to be like the West. The reason I picked this story is that there is still constant inquiry in all fields and a constant struggle about the notion of tradition and modernity. This is central to some of the issues that were raised this afternoon: how to live between or across cultures and how to live

 within one’s culture even in a period of transformation and transition. It is not only the Chinese who are experiencing this, but people all over the world. It confronts us with the question of what contemporary art means in terms of origins, issues of authenticity and globalization, and issues around the travel and research we are doing now. Varying degrees of danger come with living and working across cultures. Part of the danger is the possibility of mistranslation and misinterpretation. However, the cases of mistranslation or misinterpretation of our individual positions and the historical processes, which our references, origins and paths contain, also provide a possibility of going beyond these restrictions. I don’t want to see contemporary art appear as an emerging eye strictly bound to the Western model of representation or to modes of simplifying very complex issues that have their roots and references in other traditions. Before we can embark on dealing with what contemporary art is, we need to start a much more profound dialogue about some of these issues; not only the issue of misrepresentation, but of what Chinese art is doing and, the apprehension on your part, of what our role as curators traveling to China may be.

Lynne Cooke: I’ll follow your example, Okwui, and also begin with a story, which I hope will have pertinent consequences. I was recently asked to write an essay for an exhibition catalogue for a young artist who lives in Amsterdam. Her name is Fiona Tan and although she is what we would call an emerging artist and is just beginning to be shown in larger international exhibitions, three or four of my colleagues here know her. In a conversation yesterday, her name came up and one of my colleagues referred to her as a Dutch artist. She was born in Indonesia, grew up in Australia, and has lived in Amsterdam for about ten years. She recently made a work commissioned by Dutch Television in which she went out to explore how Chinese she was. I was struck by this a number of times because I identify with her since we both grew up in Australia, albeit at different times. In the making of this program, she has been very involved with her extended family, some of whom live in Indonesia and some in Australia. One uncle runs a restaurant in Cologne and another an acupuncture business in Amsterdam. During research for this work, she found herself looking for family roots in a very small village in the southwest of Indonesia where the Tan family is originally from. She filmed her visits to this village but couldn’t speak directly with anyone because she knew no Chinese. The most recent work she made uses two kinds of ethnographic archival film footage that she got from the film museum in Holland, which shows some unidentified place in southeast Asia. There is a narrative made up of extracts from Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities .This book is a kind of rewriting of Marco Polo’s travels in China. It is more like a fable and is beloved by many artists because it is magical and fabulous as a recounting of Polo’s extraordinary tales. In Tan’s work, which consists of a short film to be shown in a museum setting, you hear two persistent questions that Kublai Khan asked Marco Polo: Why do you always go forward looking backwards? Why do you travel into the future looking at the past? Although he doesn’t quite answer these questions, Marco Polo says at one point that he thinks elsewhere is a negative mirror. I told this rather long story for a couple of reasons: one, because I think Tan is, in some sense, quite exemplary of contemporary artists who are practicing and working anywhere today, contemporary in terms of how complex and unanswerable the question of identity is. I think these two questions about how we know about the present and the future by looking at the past and how we understand something about somewhere else by understanding ourselves better are very important. It is perhaps something we could think about here.

Sarat Maharaj: I should like to thank Annie Wong, who so graciously invited us to China. More importantly, I want to tell you that I saw her engaged in a little event at the hotel coffee shop this afternoon, which deeply impressed on me the complexity of the relationship between tradition and modernity. I began to think of this relationship as we walked into the coffee shop, originally to buy

 an espresso or cappuccino. However, when we got there, we came across a most beautiful tea ceremonial set and asked whether we could have some tea. In the way that Annie Wong is able to organize anything, she organized a tea ceremony for us. What amazed me was how the young man, who was the buyer for the hotel, performed the tea ceremony, explaining to us in detail the various stages. We found Annie Wong, who is from another generation, taking detailed notes from a young man from a highly modern communist state – that of China – as he recalled a very traditional past told to him by some contact at a bar, who had gained this knowledge from some ancient and weathered monk living in the hills. The point I want to make is that there is no straight connection down the ages, or linear dynamic between tradition and modernity. We have circular, straight, and side movements, we have returns and recalls, and we go back to the past by going forwards. An artist like Fiona Tan is doing this – going into the future while looking at the past. How do we journey into the future without some recall to the past? There is a very complex shuttle between tradition and modernity.

The first point I want to make is that we should not set up a straightforward opposition between the old and modern world. The history of Western art is normally written in a very male-centred way. One of the many fathers of Western art is Pablo Picasso. What I want to know is whether there is a Picasso in modern Chinese art. We can easily get into trouble looking for one pure origin of anything. We have to find many sources from which a journey into invention and creation begins. Between 1948 and 1950, the great Chinese father of modern Chinese art, Zhang Daqian, left China on a journey to India in order to pay homage to the great Buddhist temple of Ajampa in Western India. At this moment Picasso wanted to go to China to meet Mao Zedong. The moment when Zhang Daqian is leaving China on his journey into exile, he is called the Picasso of China. Of course, Picasso is not called the Zhang Daqian of Europe. Think about the period from 1948 and 1950, when this powerful and potent set of meetings and departures is taking place, where the modernity of China is being established in a moment of exile, and where homage is being paid to ancient traditions of Buddhism in India through the artist of modernity. Just as the great modernizing figure of the West arrives in China, I ask you to think of the circular and convoluted connection as a reminder that we should not think of tradition and modernity in some straightforward and oppositional way. In this complicated process between the past, present and future and the avant-garde and archaic, there is no simple or straightforward connection. They produce a tremendous possibility, as Okwui has pointed out, for misinterpretation and mistranslation. We have to acknowledge this and be sensitive to it at every moment of thinking about the relation between tradition and modernity. But I have a question: are there moments of mistranslation that can be quite creative and produce new lines of thinking and invention and new forms of culture?

Here are two examples of creative mistranslation. The first is the example of Marcel Duchamp. His work was really narrowed down to produce what was called ‘conceptual art’ in the West, a very dry, forbidding kind of work. However, when conceptual art moves out of the West, there are always resonances in other parts of the world, where they widen the notion of conceptual art and produce what we call ‘conceptualism’ in the visual art practices. This has produced a whole range of commentaries, some of which we saw in the academy. The so-called ‘mistranslation’ between conceptual art and conceptualism, as an approach of strategies in visual art practices, is a kind of mistranslation. But it is a highly fruitful and productive one in which a range of possibilities open up. People who would otherwise have felt excluded from participation in the languages of modernity find a way of constructing a syntax and grammar which allows them to articulate their own experiences of the world and everyday life. The other example is that if we take Song Dynasty

 painting, which is partly from this region of China, we find major disputes over the interpretations. Is it a highly metaphysical mode of painting which speaks about the insubstantiality of the real world. Or, is it a type of painting that is located in the grim climate and geography of the region? Shengtian made some interesting points about how we might interpret Song painting but I wanted to ask whether it was a true interpretation or a misinterpretation? The history of thoughts has benefited tremendously from our understanding of Song paintings as a way of thinking about the relationship between identity and non-identity: identity itself as non-identity, of thinking, of ways of representing which are not anchored forever. This way of thinking about, reading or misreading, and translating or mistranslating Song painting provides a kind of philosophical background that led to thinkers such as Jacques Derrida or, much earlier, to the phenomenological school of thinking in the West. What is creative misreading, if it is in fact a misreading? Let’s keep things open, let's see tradition and modernity in opposition to one another, let’s see how they can journey into each other to produce a new notion, a new model of being in the modern world. This is something that requires openness on our part, where we are prepared to believe that mistranslation can either be a genuine mistake or a springboard to new kinds of creativity.

Chris Dercon: I find this notion of misreading and creative misreading or mistranslation so exciting and I would like to tell you about a personal experience. I still don’t know if this example of misreading was really productive or not. In the mid-1980s, I was invited to work for PS1 in New York, which was then an alternative institution. It has now become a community universe of the Museum of Modern Art. PS1 was invited by a private foundation in Sao Paulo to organize an exhibition in New York called Brazil Projects. Three or four American curators and myself, a Belgian curator, went to discover different modernities and post-modernities of Brazil. In Sao Paulo, the foundation lined up many artists for us, including many official artists with thick catalogues. We said that we didn’t want to meet these artists but wanted to see the work of Hélio Oiticica, who used to do many things, including working in the shantytowns with objets trouvés. He worked with cans, old clothes, and participated in many collaborations in Rio. Some people in Sao Paulo said that we shouldn’t see the work because Oiticica was dead, he was from Rio, and his work had gotten old and dirty. We persisted anyway and went to the Projeto Oiticica in Rio where we saw his incredibly rich work. It was an amazing visit for me and many others.

We became friends with Oiticica’s family and friends and asked them to introduce us to the art of the indigenous people living in the heart of the Amazon. We asked them to take us to the so-called Ministry of Indians, the FUNAI. The radicals surrounding the work of the late Oiticica said that we shouldn't do that because it wasn’t art, it was popular culture. So they had the same reaction to our questions as the people in Sao Paulo when we asked about the work of Oiticica. We persisted, much against the will of many, because we were told that such artifacts were not to be seen in the same context as Oiticica’s art. We finally succeeded in bringing all kinds of works to New York for Brazil Projects. Then, we told the collectors of the Amazon objects that we would like a European artist, Lothar Baumgarten, to install the pieces. Baumgarten has made photographic work based on those objects and their creators. He generally presents his work as a kind of visual anthropology. We thought such a collaboration with Baumgarten could lead to an interesting translation. However, the people who had helped us find wonderful crowns of bird-feathers, great collectors and anthro- pologists, said they didn’t want Baumgarten’s involvement because his work about the Amazon Indians was too ‘distanced.’ So, in our quest for translating we only made mistakes and enemies. We became, in the eyes of many, the official artists, the radical artists, the circle of Oiticica, the representatives of the Indians, just silly. Now I’ll come to the end of the story. It got even sillier.

 When we asked Baumgarten to help and advise us in the installation of the objects, he said, in a very polite manner, that he didn’t want us to use his ideas because we were presenting applied art along with autonomous works of art. So, we had made another mistake. I wanted to tell you the story as an example of a chain of creative misreadings.

My story is perhaps similar to the foundations of the first museums of modern art. The foundation of modern art was itself also based on a chain of creative misreadings. I will not get into many details. I will just talk about what happened in the early years of modern art. The official Salon opened somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth-century. Ten years later, we see the creation of the Salon des Refusés. About twenty years later, we see the creation of the Salon des Independants, an exhibition of artists who were excluded by the Salon des Refusés. Then the circle gets completed with the exclusion of Marcel Duchamp. He presented his famous painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the jury of Salon des Independants. His brother was also present. Similar to our Brazil story, the jury told Duchamp that he could not present the painting because it was not cubist enough. So, Duchamp’s painting was put on a boat and ended up as a major piece in one of the first real alternative shows ever: The Armory Show in New York. The happy end of the story is that Nude Descending a Staircase formed the base of the first foundation of MoMA in 1928. In a way, MoMA was founded on some sort of creative misreading. This is what the art theoretician Thierry de Duve calls “the relevance of an esthetic history of art institutions.”

Jessica Bradley: Listening to my colleagues I was reminded of stories of my own. Perhaps those stories are a wonderful way of opening our minds. Earlier today, I was thinking that both Chris and Sarat, in different ways, referred to the problem of casting the rela- tionship between the East and the West as oppositional, and Western art as being mono- lithic, when in fact it is very much in crisis. Media saturation is at such a point that we can ask ourselves: how can artistic expression have significance? One significance it can have is that knowledge produced through art is knowledge of itself. I think the other crisis we are facing is that Western practice is becoming less and less monolithic. I think about my own experience in a country, which is a very young country made up almost entirely of immigrants. I did studio visits in a local art school last week with six young students. Four of them were not born in Canada; two of them, the ones that were born in Canada, were of foreign origin. The other three were from Macao, the Philippines and Korea. The questions of interpretation and translation are incredibly complex at home as well as abroad. I will only talk about my experience with the student from Macao, although each visit was an extremely rich and challenging experience for me. I was only given twenty minutes to give them some kind of feedback and interpretation of their work. The first thing the student from Macao showed me was a series of photographs that seemed, at first, very unrelated. On the one hand, there were photographs of the streets of her hometown – she had recently gone back to Macao to visit her family – and, on the other hand, there were interior shots where one saw the television screen and the feet of the person watching. I looked very carefully and then asked her, “Well, what’s going on between the inside and the outside?” It turned out that once I really began to look carefully at the photographs, these views of her hometown were those of a tourist. She said, “Well, of course, when I go back there, I am in a dreamy state where what I'm looking at is no longer mine. So, in a sense, I am a tourist.”With the photographs of herself watching television, the student found a kind of safe place where she could acknowledge that she was only watching her former life, as we would watch a film, with that kind of distance. So, what she was trying to deal with in the work was that ‘home’ was neither in Macao nor Canada, but in some space in between. She resolved this in the second work I looked at by her,

 which was a poetic video representing ducks landing on a pond. In front of the windows where she lived at university, there was a pond covered in snow and ice, completely unlike the water that she was surrounded by in her home country. For two years, this student had watched that pond and one day she decided to go out and make a video. It was the ducks that were the connection with her homeland. The point of the story is that, more and more, I think we are all, as curators and as critics, trying to interpret and deal with the spaces in between tradition and modernity, in between past and present and the space of displacement. My second story is very brief – Chris reminded me of it in speaking of the German artist Baumgarten, who came to the museum where I worked in 1985 to be in a large exhibition of avant-garde European art. Baumgarten’s project was similar to other ones he had done in the past. It involved permanently inscribing, after permission, the names of various Canadian First Nations groups around a very impressive central courtyard in the museum. What ensued seven years later was a sign of an enormous shift amongst First Nations artists in Canada, the indigenous artists who, as in many colonized countries, have suffered enormously historically, have been wiped out, put on reserves, and denied citizenship and expression. In 1992, a Canadian First Nations artist, Robert Houle, was invited by the museum to create a work in the same space. His proposal was accepted and the piece involved the use of some archival photographs from the museum and a rewriting of the same names of indigenous groups. So, Houle entwined the museum’s history with the history of the indigenous names of these groups. He strongly under- mined and critiqued the supposed homage that Baumgarten was making to these people in the way he pointed out how a number of indigenous groups that were named no longer existed. They had been completely wiped out in a historical period. So, it was the ‘Dead Indian’ that was being celebrated. Secondly, Houle undermined still further by correcting the names that were written on the wall with the new names which have been given by the First Nations group in Canada. I tell this story in reference to these questions of translation and interpretation, and in this case, misinterpretation, mistranslation, re-interpretation and re-translation. I think that this is another process we’re in right now.

Okwui Enwezor: We’ve told a lot of stories and I hope it isn’t beginning to be like a package that we are unbundling before you. However, I think it is important to understand that being a curator and making exhibitions is a process and part of that process is intellectual reflection. Some of these stories may seem very mundane to you, but they have very serious consequences. The ways in which you unpack an exhibition, and the ways in which you make it, not only reflect the content of the art and the integrity of the work of the artist but also produce something extra inside that, which is a discourse. Before I give the microphone to Sheng, I want to add that we must go through this process and have a basic understanding before being able to open a more profound dialogue.

Zheng Shengtian: We have just heard what Okwui and the other curators said. They talked about the problem of understanding and misunderstanding. Since they have been here, these curators have come across quite a lot of this and this question is often raised in discussions. They have used personal stories to illustrate this vividly. In fact, cultural understanding and misunderstanding, and even re-understanding, exist everywhere. Today, for example, the curators who have come from abroad are facing something they have never come across before: the contemporary Chinese art education system. In fact, their own experiences, including their meetings with other curators and other Chinese artists who go abroad, are all full of understanding, misunderstanding and re-understanding. This is a very normal phenomenon. As we enter the twenty-first century and the process of globalization continues, this will probably become increasingly common because we will have more and more opportunities to get everyone together, meeting people we have never met before. Today, for example, so many people from so many countries – South Africa, Argentina,

 Belgium, Holland, Nigeria – are all here together on the same day. We probably wouldn’t have had this kind of opportunity ten or even five years ago. Now that they have all spoken about this question, I would like to know what reaction you have to it. What doubts do you have about what they said? Let’s first listen to everyone, then ask the other curators to continue.

Gao Tianming: I would like to ask two questions. At the moment, there are several important exhibitions on in the world, such as Documenta in Kassel, the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. I would like to ask the two curators who are in charge of Documenta XI in Kassel [Okwui Enwezor and Sarat Maharaj] what significance and value you put on these exhibitions as far as contemporary art is concerned?

Okwui Enwezor: I could give a whole lecture on this! It is a very pertinent question because recently there has been a lot of critique on different types of international exhibitions. Even if the names are repeated in different places, it’s very important to see them as completely different events. However, one of the things that binds these events together is that they all see the urgency of constructing new models of exhibitions, representation and artistic intervention. I would like to point out the degree to which these events – in their ideological and political construction – are still very clearly models within the context of the relationship between the West and the rest of the world. The stories we are telling are not being told in order for your country to reconstitute the idea of new identities, new maps and so on, but to reconstitute the idea of modern subjectivity, the idea that we live not within modernity but within modernities. The analogies are not just stories demonstrating where this discourse of identity and displacement takes place. The stories that raise the questions of modernity and issues of modern subjectivity clearly show that we live not within one single modernity but within modernities.

Lynne Cooke: I would like to say that they [Documenta and biennials] do not constitute one kind of exhibition, although they fall under the same title. We know that cities and regions are now beginning to implement their own exhibitions around the world for economic reasons, cultural tourism, cultural status, and so on. If you read critical reviews or catalogues, they tend to look structurally similar from one biennial to the next. However, if you look at the individual examples within their context, they seem to be radically different. If you think of Venice, for example, which is amongst the oldest biennials, we could say that notions of nationalism and national representation are prioritized. The place, a city which is a mecca for tourists and visited by tourists in the international art world, contrasts with Kwangju, the city known as the seat of the democracy movement in southern Korea, where a biennial was recently founded to bring art to that region. It now has probably the biggest audience of any biennial of its kind anywhere in the world. Not only is its audience not primarily an audience who cares much for contemporary art, but it is not founded on ideas of national representation. I think we should think about the specifics of the cultural context each time we talk about shows like this, and not be misled by the re-use of a title or a word again and again for what is simply a large international anthology exhibition.

Chris Dercon: I would like to add something to what Okwui and Lynne have said. You don’t have to make comparisons between all of these exhibitions. Nevertheless, you cannot avoid to comparing because there are major differences. Okwui said that recent critique is a good starting point for rethinking events. At the same time, the museum itself is up for re-thinking. I think that the museum model, which is only two hundred years old, is completely bankrupt. I think that it’s not enough to establish new museum ideas just by imitating innovative methods of exhibition making. Museums have to totally re-think what they want to get at and what they are doing. The

 same goes for art schools and, I would add, the most important work now should be done in the art schools. Your reactions this afternoon were a clear illustration of this.

Zheng Shengtian: Chris is not just putting forward his personal opinion. I have heard other curators getting very excited about the discussions we have had since yesterday evening. They are very happy to listen to some frequently raised controversial questions because that is what they have come to China for. They want to listen to different opinions and it is highly unlikely that having come here, everyone will agree on everything and have the same viewpoint. What Chris just mentioned is very important. How can we make major exhibitions such as biennials serve a better purpose? How can we change the traditional system of the museum and art centres? He feels, however, that art schools are a very important factor in this since they train new artistic talent. These curators are very excited to visit our academy and be able to see a good school like this where we are constantly training new talent, new artists, and where artists are very dynamic. We will continue this discussion. Please take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions about the system in the West and Western art.

Gao Tianming: I would like to ask my second question. After the end of the Cold War, everyone in the world faced the question of globalization. But because of uneven historical development, developed and developing countries are not running on the same track. I would still like to address my question to you two [the curators of Documenta XI]. How do you see the problem of the relationship between positions of globalization and national culture? To put it another way, how do you regard the question of globalization versus national and individual identity? Can I link another question to this? How are you dealing with this question of organizing the 2002 Documenta?

Okwui Enwezor: I really hope that my other colleagues will get to speak! I don’t see my job as being about solving problems. Far from that. I think that ultimately, whatever Documenta XI turns out to be, the nature of the project has to exceed what it has been in the last fifty years. The purpose of the curator, in terms of curatorial activities, research and travel, where you see works, bring them together and make an exhibition in Kassel, has to be re-thought. I see the problems that exhibitions like Documenta face in terms of post-Cold War issues and the crisis in artistic practice. These issues and crises cannot be articulated by trying to find solutions for them. We have to build a critical context in which we can understand what the processes are that help develop new cultural ideas and languages in order to work with some of these strongly suggestive issues. I think that one of the jobs we’re doing now is trying to understand some of those issues, debating about them in public, finding a context for the exhibition which we can put in a broader framework, rather than sticking to the guidelines of art alone. Basically, Documenta is not just the exhibition in Kassel. What happens in Kassel, or what happens in 2002, could be seen as the exhibition of Documenta XI. The idea is not to see the 2002 exhibition in Kassel as Documenta, but to see it as the exhibition of Documenta XI. My hope is that we can create a discursive framework through which other discourses can, like a virus, infiltrate our own. I hope to find new contexts in already existing spaces through which different strategies can meet ours in a productive relationship. Today is one such context and could be seen as a Documenta event, even though it is not an official one.

Zheng Shengtian: What Okwui said is that an event like today’s can be considered as a part of Documenta. Even though it is not officially a Documenta event, the whole process of Documenta is about gathering people together to learn about each other and understand culture and art

 from different countries. From the question just posed, I think everyone would like to know what you curators think about Chinese art. So, I would like to put this question to the curators who haven’t yet spoken.

Chris Dercon: I would like to respond to two things. First, Okwui’s underlying ideas for Documenta XI have already indirectly created political trouble in my home city of Rotterdam. This has to do with the problem of tradition and modernity in general. Of course, there are many other reasons too, such as major changes in the local demographics given the great influx of immigrants in Rotterdam in recent years. The Museum of Ethnography in Rotterdam recently re-named itself and is now called the World Museum. Those who supported the new name also want to show contemporary non-Western art. As a result, the World Museum is getting into a kind of competition with our museums and other art centres. This is perfect. But this also brings me back to your initial question. Today, we saw fantastic art by your teachers. It came to me that we really do not understand enough about calligraphy and the implications of it, for instance, on our Western museums of modern art. If we looked more carefully, maybe we could convince ourselves that it is important to juxtapose Western paintings by Polke or Penck with contemporary expressions of calligraphy. Another way to better understand the works of young Chinese artists is to consider Chinese avant-garde art films, of which we are well-acquainted with thanks to film festivals. My answer is probably as ambiguous as some of the art you’re making. That’s how it should be because, at the same time, these are two examples of constructive creative misreadings. I think our trip is a way to try and clarify these things for ourselves.

Sebastian Lopez: I imagine that you thought about this because I curated an exhibition last year. The exhibition was called Not a Chinese Show. It was a very small exhibition, held in a small room we have at the Gate Foundation. I worked with four artists. I think you will know of them, Ding Yi and Hong Hao. The other two were Thiong Ang, an artist of Chinese Indonesian Dutch origin, and a Dutch artist called Roy Villevoye. When I started, the idea for the show was to focus on two different present phenomena. The first one was a comment, a reaction and a critique of exhibitions based on country presentations. It was, at the same time, a comment on the question of the nation. For the last fifteen years we have had the phenomenon of exhibitions based on country presentations. This started in the mid-1980s, with the presentation of artists from Russia, and went on and on. Every two or three years, a new country was picked by European and later American institutions to introduce new artists and new works. The result of these phenomena was that every two or three years, a new country was presented. One of the last ones was South Africa. When South Africa was going down, China came up. My experience in Europe was that these countries were being used as a product that you could use for two or three years and then throw away. Even though it was a consumer market, I hoped that some people would be interested in some of the artists, in some of the expressions found in these different countries. Apart from this vain hope, the fact is – and this is what we were reacting against – it was fashionable for European culture to take other cultures as a way of consumption, classifying them through national presentation. That was one idea of the show. The second one, which was equally important for me, was to ask, what does it really mean to have a nationality? What does it mean to say “I am Chinese?” What does it mean to say, “I am Dutch?” What does it mean to say, “I am Argentinean?” I was born in Argentina but I have a Dutch passport, so what does it mean to say that you are from such-and-such a place? What are you looking for when you say, “I am Chinese?” How do you or I negotiate every single moment? Today, would I say I am Argentinean because I am now in China? A couple of days ago I would have said I was Dutch because I was in Holland. The question of nationality is being discussed a great deal at the

 moment in Europe. Today and yesterday, we have heard you referring many times to the West, or to Western countries. It made me think that when you say ‘the West’ you mean Europe, even though yesterday evening someone said that Japan was also the West. With these kinds of considerations in mind, it is important for me to tell you that Europe has changed enormously. The north of Europe, where I live, has changed enormously. Ethnically, they are no longer the countries of blond people with blue eyes. Many black people live in the north and south. Migration affects a place in a very considerable way – not only among the faces of Europeans, but also in terms of European culture. In that sense, in the Netherlands, where I’m living, what does it mean to be Chinese? Going still further, what does it mean to say somebody’s Dutch? In Holland, there was already a very large Chinese community at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is for all these reasons that it is impossible for me to tell you what I think about Chinese art.

Suzanne Ghez: l leave you with two lingering impressions of my day. The first was the visit to the calligraphy studio where I came to the realization that it is not essential that I read or speak the language. I saw works which spoke to me of power, control and vulnerability. The second impression was the work of a young woman in Ken’s class. Through her voice and her work, she took a place in that space, she took a place in my head and in my heart. Works by young women like this will take their place with Chinese women in the world.

Ken Lum: I want to say that sitting up here and looking at my colleagues, at first I felt closer to Sarat and Okwui because they are both people of color. Then I thought, “Oh, I feel closer to Jessica because she is Canadian.”Then I thought, “Oh, I actually feel closer to Lynne because she is Australian, and from Melbourne, which is not a capital city, just like Vancouver.”Then I thought, “Oh, I actually feel much closer to Suzanne,”because, for one thing, I’ve known Suzanne for quite a long time – not terribly well, but she’s always struck me as a very gracious, kind and intelligent person. Then after the beautiful speech that Sebastian gave, I thought I could really identify with that, so I felt close to him. Then I realized that actually I felt closer to the person I’ve known the longest here: Chris. But then I looked out in front of me, and I saw all these Chinese faces. I’ve been very fortunate to identify personally with this idea of exploiting ancestors, so I felt closer to those people. Then I looked at Madame Wong and I realized that she is from Guangdong Province, and I actually have relatives in Guangdong Province, so I felt closer to her. I just want to finish by saying that the problem of identification is as strong a problem as the problem of not being able to identify with another.

  

    

The following discussions took place in Guangzhou on the afternoon of April 23, 2001 with Ken Lum as moderator.

Ken Lum: This is, in part, a recognition of the developments in Chinese contemporary art but also a way of re-addressing our relative lack of knowledge of Chinese contemporary art in the last few years. We started the trip in Hangzhou, then we went to Shanghai and Beijing and now we’re in Guangzhou. I think it’s fair to say that in all four cities we’ve visited, certain key issues came up for debate, including a very vital one: whether it’s even useful to continue this understanding and reading of Chinese art in the context of an opposition between East and West. Of course, this binary has been confused by globalization, which has actually broken down the logic of this opposition. What’s interesting is how that opposition still carries an almost mythical weight in all of our minds. The other important issue we discussed was the issue of how to accommodate traditional Chinese values in art with this new globalized, more modern set of terms for under- standing contemporary art. To give an example, even in following the development of the calligraphic form, we’ve learned to appreciate that there is actually a very sophisticated development in that form, which we probably would have been a little dismissive of earlier on in the trip. The third issue is about conceptualism. It seems to have become a pandemic term for a lot of what we see here, not just in China but in many parts of the world. This brings up interesting questions such as, if that is the case, and you do have a bridging language through the discourse of conceptualism all over the world, then is there now such a thing as a kind of world language of art? Of course, the answer would have to be partly yes and partly no, but the partly yes would certainly have significant implications for how we define identity and other issues that represent traditional values in art. With that, I would like to open up the discussion. Perhaps we could have a round of introductions first.

Sebastian Lopez: The only thing that I want to stress is that many of us on this trip have already seen many works of Chinese artists living and working in China. There have been many exhibitions in the United States and Europe and we in Holland have already had the privilege of seeing three very large exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art. Before we came here, we already had some information about what is going on at the moment in different Chinese regions. Therefore, the kind of meeting that we hope to have with you is one where we can interchange ideas, not only about what we have seen this morning, but also about our previous experience of looking at not only Chinese art and the issues related to Chinese art but also contemporary art in other countries in the world.

[Huang Zhuan, the Guangzhou-based critic, introduces the following: Lu Peng (critic), Pi Daojian (Professor of the Art Department, Hua Nan Normal University), Yan Shanchun (Shenzhen Painting Academy), Shi Lei (artist), Yang Guoxin (artist), Li Bangyao (artist), Fang Shaohua (artist), and people from the fields of music and architecture.]

Ken Lum: I will start by asking a question about Guangzhou and Guangdong Province in particular. Even though my parents are from Guangzhou city, I grew up in Canada, so my under- standing of the situation is a little distant. My question is this: can one say that there is a kind of

 Guangdong or southern Chinese type of contemporary art? Are there issues that occupy artists here more so because of this region than in other parts? I ask this because of several factors which we all know well. One is the proximity to Hong Kong and the historical access to the so-called ‘West.’ Secondly, there is the strong presence of this region in the minds of overseas Chinese, which constitute the vast majority of the Chinese diaspora around the world. Are those two factors alone discussed and do they modulate a specific set of concerns that are more particular to this region than other areas such as Beijing?

Sebastian Lopez: Anybody can answer this question, but could you [Huang Zhuan] start answering the question because you said in Art News that there is a fundamental difference between this province and Beijing. You used the example of how some artists here and in Beijing use the body differently. He is the one who should begin a discussion about the differences in China, because it seems that he has been thinking about it already.

Huang Zhuan: When the journalist from Art News came to do a story, he asked a similar question. Wherever you go in the world it seems that, other than questions of a political nature, people always ask this question about China: is there a difference between the North and the South? Of course there are things that are different in the North and the South and I can give you a summary of some of them. But firstly, where do you put the dividing line between the North and the South? Generally, people see the demarcation as the Yellow River and the areas which have the Yangtze going through them, including Sichuan, Hubei, Zhejiang and Shanghai. They are considered as parts of the South. However, I am really talking about the differences between Guangzhou and Shenzhen compared to Beijing. I grew up in Hubei and moved to Guangzhou. As far as works of art are concerned, the biggest difference between these two regions is that, in Beijing, cultural and political questions are addressed quite a lot and in Guangzhou, the questions addressed are more social or economical in nature. An example I have given before – that is maybe not very accurate – is that if the South is a little like British and American philosophy and is relatively more empirically oriented than the North is somewhat similar to continental philosophy and stresses the interpretations of a system of thought. There are probably very complicated ideological reasons for this because, in China, Beijing is seen as a political and cultural city, whereas, since modern times, trade and popular culture have been fairly advanced in commercial cities in the South such as Guangzhou and Wuhan.

If we look at the development of contemporary Chinese art, we see that contemporary art of the 1980s was part of an ideological movement. During that period, apart from cities such as Wuhan and Nanjing, there were no signs of life from artists in the South, despite there being a few groups interested in art. Then there was a great change in the 1990s. During this time, Chinese contemporary art split into two very distinct phases: before and after 1995. Comparatively speaking, the period before 1995 was one of iconography. Everyone is familiar with ‘Political Pop’ and ‘Cynical Realism.’ While these iconographic movements had very strong overtones of the 1980s movement,they also incorporated conceptual art practices. I personally think that these iconographic movements were a transition from the abstract cultural ideological movement of the 1980s to the conceptual art movement after the mid-1990s. One very important factor in this is that the commercial system started influencing contemporary art and from this time on the South started becoming more important. The landmark of this was the 1992 Guangzhou Biennial, organized by Lu Peng. From that point on, a substantial change took place within contemporary Chinese art, one of opening up. Two factors contributed to this: one was the commercial system and the other was that the West started taking notice of China. This was happening around the period of the Venice

 Biennale in 1993. Commercial power and the power of the West started having an effect on contemporary Chinese art. I think that the differences between North and South only started having any meaning at this stage. Putting it simply, works of art by southern artists are much more related to their cities, lives and practical experiences.

Chris Dercon: Might the exhibition Cities on the Move be another landmark?

Huang Zhuan: I think that this exhibition has been the most important one regarding the Third World in the past few years because it tackled a major issue. It managed to transcend the Cold War or post-Cold War Western way of seeing China that still existed until the mid-1990s. If before this exhibition Western curators and art establishments saw China in terms of post-Cold War, then this exhibition challenged to this way of thinking.

Chris Dercon: But it also seems that a lot of artists in southern China are now looking to the Chinese artists included in Cities on the Move and the ways in which they have influenced contemporary art production.

Huang Zhuan: Everyone feels very strongly that works by southern artists are very international, which is perhaps different than in the North. For instance, in the South you see very little of what I call ‘gaudy art’ or art that has a purely folk background. In comparison, no matter what materials are used or whether it is conceptual or realistic, art in the South remains very international. Maybe some artists themselves could talk about this.

Okwui Enwezor: I have a question about Cities on the Move . I saw the exhibition in several places and think that it could be seen as a landmark in terms of Chinese art because it seems to have reproduced a sensibility that puts China in the centre of Asia and other Asian countries on the periphery. Do you get that viewpoint when you think of Cities on the Move in terms of China’s relationship with the rest of Asia?

Huang Zhuan: As far as I understand, contemporary Chinese art has a completely different ideological background from that of other countries in Asia. For instance, countries such as South Korea and Japan simply cannot have the same ideological background. In addition, contemporary Chinese art has developed without any support from the state system whatsoever and is therefore of a very strong, non-governmental nature. This makes it different from what we can see from the biennials such as those in Kwangju, Fukuoka and Taipei. However, I think that the dynamism of Chinese art comes from the fact that it is facing a society that is opening up quite a lot. Society in China is neither the traditionally closed society nor is it a completely open society as in Korea, Japan or Taiwan. It is in the middle. I think that it is because of this half-open society that contemporary Chinese art is more dynamic than art from neighboring countries. I have always thought that the half-open society of China is the reason for the vitality of contemporary Chinese art. This is because it hasn’t become part of a system, so there are no constraints imposed. Of course, within the Western art system, contemporary Chinese art has come across restrictions. However, these restrictions don’t exist within China. Now we are attempting to create a non- governmental art system, which includes the involvement of the private museum in contemporary art. I always think that contemporary Chinese art is heavily constricted by three violent oppressions: the first is oppression by the traditional system, the second is that of the commercial system, and the third is that of the Western power centres. I think that the latter two have a more important effect on contemporary Chinese art.

 Sebastian Lopez: I would like to ask a question in relation to Cities on the Move. Huang Zhuan pointed out that there are problems with the marketplace and Westerners. But there is another phenomenon: the activity of critics and curators from China who live in Europe or the United States. Some of them are historians who explain what China is today through their activities, critical, curatorial or historical. Therefore, it is not only the West that is a problem since there are Chinese people operating in the West. Cities on the Move is a good example which needs to be considered. Within the West, there are components that make us aware that the West is not this monolithic thing.

Huang Zhuan: In fact, contemporary Chinese art is composed of two parts: one is contemporary art in China and the other is contemporary art abroad. I think that this is a very interesting topic and when I was abroad I discussed this with Cai Guoqiang and Xu Bing. An interesting phenomenon is that a lot of very good artists use culture as a resource once they are abroad. I do agree that they are very good artists but sometimes when we see their works of art, they are too conceptualized, too superficial, sometimes to a laughable extent. However, there is also a very positive aspect to this in that these artists can face Western power systems and use their identity to challenge these systems directly. For the moment, artists in China cannot yet do this.

Sebastian Lopez: My question was not about the artists themselves. Chinese art, just like European or American art, is not made up solely of artists. It involves artists, institutions, critics and curators. This forms what we call Chinese, European or American art. That is the reason I was referring to historians, curators and critics from China in the West, some of whom are doing excellent work on Chinese art.

Ken Lum: Could we open the floor to other members who have comments about this?

Lynne Cooke: I would like to go back to the subject of Cities on the Move, which I saw at several different sites. I thought one of the striking things to come out of it and where it was most successful was in London. Part of its effectiveness seemed to depend on the involvement of the architect Rem Koolhaas in the mise-en-scène, the display of objects, and the whole feeling and sensibility of the show. The other important factor for me was the involvement of architectural work, and not just work by visual artists. There was work done by architects from a number of generations, from Singapore-based Kay Ngee Tan, to much younger architects. There was an effort to intermingle these in such a way that there was practically no distinction or categorization between architectural and fine art exhibitions. When you were characterizing practice here in the South earlier you spoke about social issues. In some of the work we saw earlier today there was obviously the appearance of urbanism, the look of the city, and the feel of the urban environment. But we didn’t see artists who draw specifically on urban planning theory and architectural practices or who collaborate with architects and build hypothetical models. Is there this kind of practice here? Have there been cross-disciplinary collaborations or exhibitions?

Huang Zhuan: I can give an example of how the North and South see ‘the city.’ Southern artists are quite interested in cities but this doesn’t mean that artists in Beijing are not. I will try give to an example of this but it is possibly not a very fitting one. Both Zhang Dali from Beijing and Lin Yilin from Guangzhou have used elements from cities in their art. However, you see two completely different positions in what they produce.

 Lynne Cooke: But even in the case of the artist who built the walls in different places in the city, the work doesn’t really draw on urban theory. It’s a wall but it is not architectural practice in any extensive sense. I can think of several artists in Eastern Europe whose iconography does not involve architecture despite the fact that they build walls.

Chris Dercon: We should remember that this is the problem with Cities on the Move as well. It does not present any viewpoint. It’s dozens of viewpoints together. It’s not an analysis, it’s a spectacularization and it touches only on the superficiality of urban structures.

Ken Lum: We have an architect here, maybe she can say something.

Liu Heng: I have come back from the West myself. I was a graduate of Berkeley in 1994 and came back to practice in the Pearl River Delta. I’m the closest follower of Rem Koolhaas and am translating his book. We keep asking a very interesting question about the Pearl River Delta. Starting from the beginning, how can we relate local people’s mentality and the political mentality with Western urban planning? This is my interest. I try to challenge Chinese political and urban policies with my practice over here. Last year, I finished a project at the Nansha Museum. It was a personal statement to build up my interest. Now, several installation artists are working with me on this project and have come up with some interesting results. Surprisingly, a lot of local people have become interested in this project, even though it’s so different from the rest of the buildings in the area. I think that people can slowly get used to new ideas but it takes a long time.

Lynne Cooke: Did you invite these artists on your project?

Liu Heng: The people working on it are very good friends of mine. I think it’s an interesting process to work with artists. The result is that people who are not in this field can become very interested in it as well.

Lynne Cooke: Has the converse happened? Have you participated in exhibitions?

Liu Heng: Not yet. But I have a very close contact in Rem Koolhaas’ office in Hong Kong. I haven’t yet had the chance.

Chris Dercon: Are you working especially on the Pearl River Delta project in Shenzhen [SEZ or Special Economic Zone]?

Liu Heng: No, I’m working on a site in a small town, invested in by a Hong Kong company trying to create another delta satellite city. It’s being started from scratch.

Chr is Dercon: Who are you working with?

Liu Heng: We have two in-house architects, one is a Canadian architect, and the other one is me. We are working with a local design institute to set up the program. I work for the Hong Kong developer located in Nansha. We work on site.

Chris Dercon: In terms of a satellite city, what is the alternative to the rest of the commercial urbanism going on in the rest of the SEZ?

 Liu Heng: You have to know that architects in this country are not as powerful as those in the Western world. Politics always have a say in our plans. This is a very common problem in relation to urban planning in the Pearl River Delta.

Chris Dercon: Political and also economical. Don’t private companies have a say too?

Liu Heng: Yes. I think that if people have the money and the political power they can change things overnight. This is the major difference. This is not a long process, like doing the feasibility studies about town planning and what the future of a town is. Everything is overnight. As an architect on site, we have difficulty making any changes. It’s a big challenge to make things move. A certain level of consistency is required.

Sebastian Lopez: I would like to mention that the financial and political power is enormous in the United States and Europe in the development of architecture, so I don’t think that this is a good comparison.

Liu Heng: I think there’s more respect for people and traditions in the West, especially in Europe. I think there’s a tradition between artists and political power and that a certain kind of respect exists between them. They can work together very closely and make things happen. I think this country [China] is the worst.

Okwui Enwezor: A number of issues have been raised and only partly answered. We drifted away from one of them, which is Lynne’s question about drawing on the theory of architecture, and I think that your contribution so far is really quite crucial in helping us think through what it means to practice urbanism or to work with artists. You think this tradition is already in Europe and the United States, that there is shared respect with our architects and artists of creative space. Given the range of things we’ve seen about urban- ism and going back to Chris’ idea that Cities on the Move has had a large impact on artists’ reflec- tions on urbanism, I think there is now an attempt to confront the issues of transition. The ques- tion asked is, how are we to treat urbanism when it is put into other landscapes or moved from an agricultural economy into this market economy? And yet, looking at the subject of urbanism, what is not clear to me is a reflexive attitude in terms of the ways in which architects have handled it. You talked a bit about this project you’re working on and what it involves. It seems that you’re putting to the test, through your model of inviting artists to work with you, what you are looking at and struggling towards.

Liu Heng: I think the first question has something to do with self-image, about the role you play, and the work you are doing. I think that the artist and the architect have different roles in society. Artists mostly represent themselves while architects do not. The architect has to work with a group of people and the position has to be very closely related to society and the government. This is a different kind of role because the transition is not as easy as that for an artist in China. For me, artists in China have already caught up with the transition because they represent themselves in their work. In the past, Chinese architects were always a tool of society, working for the government and for the people who needed them. But it was not viewed on the same level as art. I think this is the biggest difference. Now, a lot of people go to the West, like me, to study. I finished my bachelor’s degree here and did graduate studies overseas. What I learned was to try to raise the level of architecture to that of art, try to bring the ideas back home, and work with the society. However,

 I found that the society here is not mature enough to fulfill the dream of what I want. I think this is the biggest contradiction between myself as an architect and what this society can offer me.

Lynne Cooke: When I was talking about the relationship between artists and architects here and looking at the comparison or conjunction of art, artists and architects in Cities on the Move,I wasn’t really asking about architects wanting to become more like artists. The heart of the question is something about theory. It’s about whether artists have become interested in certain kinds of architecture and urban theory. To take an example in the West, there have been many architects in the last two generations who haven’t been primarily concerned with building but rather with theory. While there are many young architects who go and work for big companies, there have been others, like Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio for example, who have spent a great deal of their time working through theoretical questions, sometimes anticipated in the art world, and architectural discipline, crossing backwards and forwards. I was wondering how much of that is beginning to emerge here, particularly from a generation like yours, who have studied abroad and have come back?

Hong Kong Artist: You mentioned something about the theory of architecture. Are you talking about the elements they use or the fact that they build structures? What kind of things happen in society? What kind of elements do they see in their architecture? What kind of theory are you talking about?

Lynne Cooke: The primary concern is not the building as such. It is about what ‘public space’ is, for example, and how space can be theorized in relation to social space, sexual space and what the quality of each of these spaces is.

Ken Lum: I thought she answered that question in a very interesting and pointed way, which is that in architecture here is much more circumscribed by political and other factors.

Lynne Cooke: I understand those factors but I’m talking about what is happening when conceptu- alizing the site. Is there some other kind of thinking and working? Are there hypothetical projects?

Okwui Enwezor: This brings me back to the other points that we have not fully developed in our discussion. I think that there is often a tendency to think of urbanism as structures, as buildings. We also think about the ways in which urbanism means more than physical things, such as the people moving through a particular space and landscape. I would like to go back to this question of the diaspora. One of the key things that strikes me is that when you leave your country – because I come from Nigeria – you are not just leaving to get an education. You are going to acquire specific skills, which you will bring back. This will affect the ways in which the ideas of societies develop and the impact those ideas you bring back will have on the place which is being built. I know that in the late 1960s and 1970s, the new capital of Nigeria, Abuja, was designed. It is the largest public project in the twentieth century because it was designed for four million people. Nothing comparable has happened. It was very political in the ways in which it tried to work with this Utopian idea of unifying the country by moving the capital from Lagos to Abuja, which is situated in the centre of the country. We’ve not talked about the ways in which local knowledge is brought back and used in theorizing or moving architecture to the next level of international thinking. How are the new models that you bring back modulated through what is already in place in the given specifications? In this theory of space, how do you consider this movement back

 and forth, of bringing knowledge back, and the idea of circulation and people moving from different provinces? We have the example of the resettlement of several million people along the Yangtze River with the building of the dam. There are so many different processes in which the environ- ment is being transformed. How are some of these more difficult questions, that are not centred around these structures, being addressed from the point of view of your own practice?

Liu Heng: I think we have to look at this from two points. One is actually working on this project. I’m young and age is very important in China, so in order to get my voice heard, I have to use other people’s voices to speak out and try to make a little room. That’s what I’ve felt for the past four years. As a result, I organized some symposia with famous Chinese architects to say something about the future of my city using their words. I pushed my ideas together and I pushed the political side to see whether they would accept it or not, because that’s the other problem. From my position, I found that I could reach it. But, on the other hand, the political power has control over the area in which you are working and the government you are working with. So the mentality of the locals in the Pearl River Delta, especially that of the Panyu Government locals, is far behind that of Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou. They are not willing to accept Western ideas, even when they come from famous architects. This makes the work more difficult than in other regions.

Chris Dercon: Who appointed you? Who is your client?

Liu Heng: My boss is my client. We are client-architect. But we have to work with the Chinese government. It’s a 51:49 split in terms of our interests. But in Shanghai, Beijing and even Guangzhou now, they are organizing some international competitions and drawing competitions, trying to introduce some famous Western firms. They try to use this kind of concept to introduce Western ideas, to push Chinese urbanization. This is a good sign and we’re just starting here in Guangzhou.

Ken Lum: It’s interesting that Guangzhou has been mentioned several times. It seems like it’s the exemplar in Hong Kong. You had an office there. It seems to me that Guangzhou has had a particularly peculiar position when you compare it to Shanghai and Beijing, which are very far away from the Western world. Is that true? How much of an influence does Hong Kong have in manifesting these things in the entire Pearl River Delta region? Nothing?

Liu Heng: Not nothing.

Richard Liu: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that her boss is a very powerful man. In fact, the project is a joint project between Panyu and her boss in that they have to work together. I visited the site. There is a problem with China. You really have to play politics with the local governments and her boss is high up in the central government, so they still have to play games.

Chris Dercon: I would like to add something to Ken’s question. In the very recent issues of a Singapore architectural journal, MIMAR, Hong Kong has been criticized for the character of its sociological analysis in terms of the Pearl River Delta Project.

Liu Heng: I haven’t seen the issue but I know that a lot of people have intervened in the Pearl River Delta project. I think this has something to do with regional politics. A lot of significant and internationally known scholars are carrying out a lot of research in the Pearl River Delta, including Rem Koolhaas. He has written something about the Pearl River Delta. Hong Kong

 University is doing a lot of research on the area. They all have something to do with urban development. I think the fact that all these internationally known scholars are getting heard in this area has something to do with the regional government. Shenzhen and Zhuhai are more open so they can easily accept Western or other people’s ideas and try to involve them in their urban policies. But in terms of places like Panyu or Dongguan, it’s not that open. It’s the most closed society I have seen after all these years of Chinese reform. Everything is done to save the face of the government. The government buildings are the most expensive and magnificent buildings in the area and everything is built up around them. All the roads are like the Beijing boulevards. This doesn’t make sense, but this has something to do with the regional government.

Ken Lum: Okwui, maybe we could bring in Yan Shanchun of Shenzhen, who teaches in Shenzhen. But first, Okwui’s question.

Okwui Enwezor: I still want to hear about your project with the artists.

Chris Dercon: Also, what is the interest of your boss in being so experimental?

Okwui Enwezor: I think we should try to think in terms not only of whether this society is closed or open, but also the ways through which the ideas are received in a local context. I know, for example, that the massive final project of Abuja was built for four million people. But even before it was built, in anticipation that it was going to be an important centre, an entire shantytown developed around the planned city. The plan that existed, which was left in the hands of Nigerian architects and others to execute, had to be suddenly transformed into a really huge plan to try to accommodate these new people. The other part of this is the resis- tance of local architects who are trying to develop their own local theory outside of the massive plan. This brings a different problem to the problem that the government already has. These are very complex issues, especially when you think about planned cities and environments. It is never so cut and dry in terms of whether the plan is really the best one can possibly make.

Liu Heng: Firstly, I think my boss is not that experimental in terms of urban planning. He told me that he wants to make his city a very beautiful resort. That’s the only goal he has. He doesn’t care what kind of architect he gets. I have another partner, a Canadian architect in his fifties, and our ideas are totally different. He wants to do something very conservative and safe while I want to do something experimental. But we work well together and turn out results, even though we are different, so my boss can accept this. That’s the complete freedom I have – to be able to do something at my level. He gives me a budget and I work within the budget along with several installation artists.

Chr is Dercon: What do you do with them? What do you do physically? Are you going to build houses for people?

Liu Heng: No, I’m working on a museum project. I’ll bring in some of the work on that project to show you later. For the entrance, I felt I needed something that has some movement. It has to be installation art; it had to be permanent. I talked with Lin Yilin about the project and he submitted some sketches. We worked together for half a year on this. Finally, we reached a scheme that we both liked. The artist Zheng Guogu is working on the furniture for a coffee shop. I have a goal to reach but I cannot do everything by myself. So, I have invited some artists to work with me. Being

 an architect here, I have found that my role is one where I draw the architecture, the plan, and the ambition. I have ideas. I enjoy the process of working with the artists too, since they give me feedback. This can push my architecture ahead more than if I just do it by myself. This is one change I have found. In the architecture industry here you can work with a planner, you can work with politicians, you can work together with artists.

Ken Lum: Maybe we should bring in Yan Shanchun now. I’d like to address it a bit, because I went to Shenzhen in 1984 and I know that in 1978 there were only about twenty-five thousand people living there. By the time of my visit in 1984, it had just passed three-hundred thousand, and now it’s just under three million. So, within twenty years, it basically went from a village to a large city with a population actually closer to five million. The art scene there is apparently equal to or more exciting than it is in Guangzhou, with the opera houses, museums, and so on. Can we discuss what’s going on in Shenzhen in this kind of environment?

Zheng Shengtian: I just want to add something about Mr. Yan. He is an art historian and is now working with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to curate a show about the Cultural Revolution.

Yan Shanchun: Shenzhen’s history is rather special because the development of the city has not been based on social or cultural factors. As Liu Heng just said, it became a modern city as a result of the central government’s reaction as the date of the Hong Kong hand-over approached. The main aim was to tell capitalists that under socialism, it was also possible to produce an advanced industrialized society like that of Hong Kong or other developed countries. The central government did not promote a very concrete urban plan of what the city was to be. They simply used it as a model for the policy of ‘one country, two systems.’At the time, they had envisaged a small city of two-hundred thousand people!

Ken Lum: So they failed there!

Ho ng Kong Artist: I would like to mention something here. So far, the whole conversation has just been based on the outlook of the city rather than the problem between the city we’ve built and the people living there. They have to jump from one system to another. What about the psychology of how this affects society, how people want to live? There is no urban planning at all here, just like in Hong Kong. I think the most important thing that we have to do is not forget society. It’s easy to say it looks marvelous and to pay a marvelous architect to build buildings. But for what? That’s not the only thing we’re looking for. We’re looking for the right way to combine new technology from the Western world with historic technology from the Chinese. Both sides of knowledge are so vast and there’s so much to learn from them. But the problem I see is in combining them. What should we look like? Everything is based on the image of society and that is a part of the problem, as I see it, for the development of Shenzhen, Guangzhou or Hong Kong. I think it’s much more important to think about what the artists and architects are faced with in terms of the government rather than saying, “My boss pays a lot of money.”I know that’s important, but if you have a marvelous amount of money, I’m sure you have a marvelous boss as well. The shame is that statements such as, “We should look like this,”or “We should look like that,”or “That’s what we look like,”or just “What should we look like now?” is just fantasy and not real. We have to provide something that has substance rather than artificiality. That’s the problem I found when I was living in Hong Kong – exactly the same psychological effect. In Hong Kong, everything’s based on money and image, but there’s nothing there. The people who live there have nothing to say. They often say, “It’s because of the British

 government.”No, sorry, they [the British] are human beings too and you can talk to them. But no one’s standing up to speak to them. I’m sure Western people have the same knowledge and under- standing as us. No one is really facing the problem. That’s the problem as I see it.

Yan Shanchun: The hardware infrastructures of Shenzhen, or the infrastructural requirements of the city, such as buildings and transport systems, have attained a modern standard. However, the cultural development is no doubt behind that of places like Shanghai and Guangzhou. What I mean by a standard of cultural development is the vitality, the spirit of a city’s own culture, and not the cultural facilities. If you go to Shenzhen you will see that the cultural facilities are better than those in Guangzhou, Shanghai, or even Beijing. In this small city of two million people, there are three museums and a very modern painting academy. However, the art facilities have not got the participation of the people of Shenzhen in terms of art exhibitions.

Ken Lum: Can I ask how Yan ended up in Shenzhen, in this compartmentalized part of China known as a Special Economic Zone?

Yan Shanchun: This is very complicated.

Zheng Shengtian: He was trained in Hangzhou as a printmaker and after graduation, he went to Wuhan to work as an editor and critic. With other scholars, like Pi Daojian, he started publishing the first contemporary art magazine in China, Yishu Sichao Art Currents, which lasted about three years. That was during the mid-1980s. This magazine had a very strong impact on the avant-garde movement in the 1980s. But in 1989, the magazine was closed by the government. The scholars moved out from Wuhan. Mr. Pi came to Guangzhou to teach in the university and Mr. Yan went to Shenzhen to work at the painting institute.

Okwui Enwezor: Following on from Hu Yang, a Hong Kong artist, I would say that just beyond the rim of urbanism and architecture, there has recently been a move around the world to re-think some of the policies in terms of the ways the issues of development are applied in Third World places. We know that it’s not just the impact on the economy, the life expectancy, the educa- tion, and so on. In Africa, because of political structural adjustments, roughly about twenty mil- lion people have died, not including those who have died of AIDS, which is ravaging many of these places. These diseases do not allow many of these economies to be stable enough to respond. Therefore, AIDS organizations, the IMF or World Bank, whether in terms of their expertise, business, etc., are beginning to re-think that everything packaged and brought from the West may not fit in perfectly everywhere. However radical the ideas may be, we still need to sort out what the needs are of these local communities. We need to see how what you leave, especially those things that you leave permanently, affect not only the environment but also the quality of life and culture, and the ability of those cultures to grow productively, not simply to modernize for the sake of modernization. This is a very crucial issue with regards to urbanism. We’ve had examples like Chandigarh in India, Algiers in Algeria, and we know the ideology the French used to build these places. We’ve had colonial examples. In India, they call it the ‘Civil Line’ and in Nigeria it’s called ‘GRA’[government reserve areas]. We do have experience of how urbanism sometimes works, not only in studies of this progressive idealism and whether architects build marvelous cities or not, but we can see that it does have impact on real lives and spaces. And sometimes, rather than help those spaces move to the next level, governments inhibit them from getting to the next level because of a blockage that is created. I don’t know if the situation in China can be transposed upon what has happened in India or in northern parts of Africa, but it is still a very important

 issue. One of the things we’ve talked about a lot here is transcending the local and becoming international. There needs to be an analysis of what is happening in this country because what we see are only outer aspects. But even in Beijing, you travel five miles and you go back to the 1930s. You’re in almost pre-industrial spaces. I think that to create the ideal country we must not only think about what is happening in the cities, but should also think about how some of this has a ripple-effect in other areas. This is starting to happen in development and aid agencies. They are thinking about spaces in other parts of the world.

Liu Heng: This is a very interesting question. Recently I wrote an article comparing Le Corbusier’s international style and Rem Koolhaas’ generic city. China has experienced two phases already. It has experienced Le Corbusier’s international styles before, in the 1950s, but now it has moved up to another level with the generic city. I think Le Corbusier’s international style, the colonial concept, is very aggressive. It doesn’t work well with local problems. I found that with Rem Koolhaas’ generic city you can, from a different point of view, try to understand the open concept. I still haven’t found the answer or how to make it fit the Pearl River Delta city development. It will take more years to understand.

Chris Dercon: Is the concept of the generic city more than a slogan? The generic city is based on figures, figures that are important on some sort of global scale, but the meaning of which might get lost in a local context.

Liu Heng: It is a reality. I think the importance of this concept is the acceptance of this reality. In Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta, the first time we came across the DVD, the PC system, the dot.com system, we welcomed them without any hesitation. For architects of our level, how can we accept this reality and transform it into our design? Then there is still this problem with transition. I think the problem with Le Corbusier is that while he tried to impose his ideas on society, he did not accept society. I think this is a big difference between the two periods.

Chris Dercon: That’s also the difference between Chandigarh and the generic city.

Liu Heng: Rem Koolhaas made a generic city but he didn’t really package it. I think this is the concept in the Pearl River Delta Project.

Okwui Enwezor: We can debate the value of each and every city all we want but when it’s put into practice it is always different. If we made a model where people worked with bits and pieces as it was being made then, of course, in places that have a very clear relationship with certain management styles it would work. But taken to very fragile spaces, it might not create the kind of dynamism that one is hoping for.

Chris Dercon: Do you think that the Shenzhen area doesn’t have the fragility of other spaces and therefore it could work?

Okwui Enwezor: It [Shenzhen] already shows the limitations of planned cities, because it was planned for two-hundred thousand and there are three million people there. The people coming to the Pearl River Delta are economic vultures, so to speak, but it is not the vultures who have already set up the camps around it because they are not allowed to be citizens of this new society. There are so many different models to look at but maybe the generic city is a good model for this

 part of the world, where density issues are quite different from those of other places. One of the things I’ve heard him talk about is the ecological nature of these places and how to maintain the balance of the ecology. With rapid urbanization all over the world, we seem to make our planned cities very fragile. Maybe one can find creative ways of dealing with it, knowing that they are needed. This is part of the reality that Liu Heng was talking about, moving people up to the next level of this transition.

Huang Zhuan: I would like to ask a question because up until now, the exhibition that Okwui is organizing has not been mentioned. If it is not a secret, I would like to ask whether Documenta XI will have anything to do with urbanism?

Okwui Enwezor: It always comes down to Documenta wherever we are. I think the question is not about what is going to be a part of Documenta. There are so many different ways in which the world of contemporary art is heading today that we need to have the capacity to look at them in very careful ways. I don’t think that one should make a fashion of urbanism in art. Lynne spoke very clearly about what made Cities on the Move special. It was the very dynamic and interesting ways in which the exhibition created overlaps between different models and practices and still allowed you to see something in the exhibition, not something you can automatically call ‘art.’We are coming to a point in the planning of Documenta where we need to consider the implications of so many different ways of being and thinking in societal structures. It allows us the opportunity to rethink the model of artistic practice in places where it is located, especially for an international exhibition like Documenta XI. What has made the discussion this afternoon rich is that it has given us an opportunity to step out of this constant return to the art world and instead, deal with the relationships created in different contexts through which art can be under- stood. As you said, in the case of Shenzhen, the museums and the hardware are there, but the software needed to run the hardware is not. These are really difficult questions. I’m much more interested in learning first-hand where the places of urbanism and the work of these artists come from than just looking at a visual image on its own. I saw that there is urbanism in Guangzhou, but there’s nothing beneath that urbanism. If it turns out that we reach a practice that can create a relationship with Documenta, that would be very good.

Chr is Dercon: I want to stress that for me, Cit ies on the Move was definitely a landmark exhibition in terms of China as well. However, the exhibition also felt like a process of sheer spectacularization and showed a real lack of analysis, reminding me of 19th century world fairs.

Huang Zhuan: I think that urbanism does not have the same meaning for every country. The pattern and globalization processes are not the same. There are two main points about urbanism in China. The first is that the importance of cities is slowly turning away from being only those in the political centre. Before, everyone saw Beijing and Shanghai as the most important cities because they were political centres. This viewpoint has already started to disappear. Cities in Guangdong are slowly but surely moving up. The second point is that Chinese people originally had a public consciousness. As Liu Heng just said, when building this science city, it is possible that the motives of the bosses and the investors were completely different and yet there could still be a kind of public system in place. This public system is neither limited by the traditional system nor by the Western system. It has grown naturally in the local context of China and may be related to private investment by individual bosses. This public consciousness has become a major question since urbanism started in China. Since the 1990s, I have been doing a lot of work trying to get all different types of public resources in China together for supporting contemporary art. In 1999, I

 put on a sculpture exhibition in Shenzhen with the hopes of bringing contemporary art into the public space. I used the spaces of art museums in places like the Upriver Art Museum in Chengdu, which was created with private funding by the head of a real estate company, somebody with a lot money to promote contemporary art. These things were not possible under the old system. So, in putting on these exhibitions, my main motive was to use this new system. In China, urbanism is most significant in the setting up of a variety of different public systems, and thus this gives us more spaces in which to do contemporary art. Of course, there is probably more of this happening in southern cities. It is harder to do this in Beijing.

Sarat Maharaj: I would like to build on the point that was made about reminding ourselves that we should look more carefully at the relationship between the artist and the architect. This has been a very powerful relationship since the 1950s. If you take our recent history and look at a group of figures in Britain, such as Henson, Richard Hamilton, Cedric Price, Alison and Peter Smithson and Paolozzi, you find that they produced a constellation of ideas that were going to feed their critique of space on the part of artists and architects wherein they could respond to these critiques in developing new concepts of space. Artists can often play a leading and resistant role in this and this was proved, above all, in Chandigarh. I feel we had a very imposed modernist model over India at that time. Later on, artists came and messed up the whole city and made it far more livable in the old terms. This is what is particularly interesting about Chandigarh: that it has deviated from its original, imposed model of what should be the life, discipline and regime according to which Indians should live their lives.

My point is that Cities on the Move shouldn’t forget that cities also come to a halt quite abruptly. No sooner was New Delhi made than the British imperial period was over and independence came to India, and messed up the city in a new way. The same happened with Chandigarh. What I’m interested in is what forms of resistance exist in the Pearl River Delta here in Shenzhen which will muddy this notion of the generic city which is now being offered. I think this is the dangerous side of the logic of the generic city. It is part of the whole drive towards standardization of life forms across the world. Anything that’s applicable in Shenzhen should be applicable in Lagos, in South India, in Brazil, and just minor deviations or diversities are introduced to suggest local color. There is no substantial retention of the difference of the life forms of these particular regions. I think we should bear that in mind. I want to connect with the fact that, in all the slides and videos I saw today, it seemed that artists were trying very vigorously to comment on and critique the conditions and implications of constructing a city life. Although we might see them reacting to city life, the critique is already the beginning of the biggest contribution that artists have to make here, that is to project models of life forms and living forms. Whether they are realizable or not is beside the point. This is what I call the resistant logic to the one that is deeply there in the notion of the generic city, the logic that is universally applicable, only with minor adaptations to local color. I’m a great fan of all those people involved. Rem Koolhaas himself was deeply inspired by Richard Hamilton, the Smithsons and Cedric Price, and he continues to acknowledge them. But there are problems. They make art a point of view, a continuing critique, and do not offer a universal generic solution. It is this resistance which I feel is the answer.

Ken Lum: Can I ask Lu Peng to comment, because I know he did the Guangzhou Biennial in 1992. Was that the only biennial?

Zheng Shengtian: Yes, it was the only one in Guangzhou.

 Ken Lum: Why was it done? Was it something to do with new urbanism and development in Guangzhou?

Lu Peng: The origins of this exhibition stem from the period between 1989 and 1992, before Deng Xiaoping’s visit to Shenzhen. The art world at that time was very quiet, but people were starting to take an interest in the art market. The exhibition really came about by chance – a few businessmen were interested in art, and they wanted to support some exhibitions. At the time, some art critics and artists wanted to put on a large-scale, nationwide contemporary art exhibition, which at that time they called a modern art exhibition, but the conditions were not right. One problem was legal the other was economic. During the period around the time of Deng Xiaoping’s visit to Shenzhen, one basis for the legitimization was the market. The main aim of this exhibition was to put on a show of contemporary art. If people could discuss contemporary art openly, this would most probably start off a rather strange debate about ideology and if people talked about the market then contemporary art would be getting general acknowledgement. Once the idea of this exhibition was acknowledged, then it had a possibility to be realized. This is why this exhibition is so tightly connected with the idea of market economy of the 1990s in China.

Ken Lum: I would like to direct a question to Professor Pi Daojian, who is nodding his head and who started up the first magazine. I think when you start up a magazine, you always open up a forum for possible criticism.

Pi Daojian: I think that the Guangzhou Biennial Lu Peng was just talking about and the question of urbanism are closely connected. I very much agree with his view. I think that the most significant thing about the 1992 Biennial was that it was a turning point in the modern art movement in China. The modern art movement in China in the 1980s had its own particular cultural background. At the end of the 1980s, due to the political factors that everyone knows about, modern Chinese art was at a low ebb. Once into the 1990s, the Chinese economic environment went through great changes and it was under these conditions that the Biennial appeared. The Biennial opened a new period in the Chinese contemporary art movement and was thus very important. Contemporary art in China exists outside the system and does not get support from it. In order for contemporary art to develop, it must have economic and social support. The Biennial was trying to find a way to head in this direction so, at the time, it looked to the market and sought the support of some businessmen. However, our dreams quickly evaporated. Thinking that we were trying to get away from politics, a much stronger hand came up, which had a much more terrible effect on art. Continuing from then, there were two factors that affected contemporary art in China: one was the market factor that I just mentioned, the other was the way some Western art critics saw Chinese art. Western art critics used their vision to come to China and select works. These works very quickly brought success to the artists, bringing a success that they had never before imagined. This influenced many artists. Economic power made a lot of weak-willed artists turn from trying to produce true art to trying to please the market. Why was the effect of Western critics and curators on Chinese art like this? Because for a certain time artists in China tried to cater to the tastes of Western critics and curators. Critics in Guangzhou in 1992 and 1993 saw this happening. I remember discussing this at a meeting with several other people at that time, and the Taiwanese magazine, Ar t Trend ( Yishu Sichao),d publishe an article about it too. Didn’t you ask whether there was a difference between southern and northern art at that time? I think that back then, a few southern critics were the first to become conscious of this problem. Beijing, on the other hand, is now regretting that the North was not able to emerge from under this shadow for such a long time.

 Ken Lum: I’ll give one personal example. I find this idea of modernity pertaining to the calligraphic form very interesting. Since my arrival here, I have developed a deeper appreciation of it. I would like to know more about that kind of evolution. Let me give one more example. I was looking at The International Herald Tribune, which is the paper of record for many Europeans and Americans when traveling in the rest of the world. They had a gallery and museum section of what was going on. In Lisbon, Portugal it had a show of fifty years of post-war German art; in a Swiss gallery there was a show of well-known American and European artists. All of them are very good artists, but I was struck by the fact that I had seen all of these shows before. In fact, such shows form a kind of familiar repertoire. I think one of the great insights you have is that you reaffirm how diverse and complex the totality of visual art and artistic production is. I just want to add that this cuts both ways. I’ve come to China enough times and have seen enough shows here to know that the same kind of limitation exists here too, in terms of knowledge of other types of work.

Okwui Enwezor: The point I wanted to make about this trip is not so much what an epiphany one has had in coming to China, but what a constant the relationship between China and the West has been throughout these discussions and, more specifically, the success of Chinese artists being picked by curators from the West who then made them famous. I think that part of that analysis is wrong-headed because the first wave of this integration happened with Russian artists. Part of the fascination of the success of the Chinese artists came not so much because of Western curators picking these people, but simply because for so many years there was a lack of contact and information. There was a paucity of knowledge about what was happening elsewhere. So the opportunity to be able to have contact with these new spheres of production created a new sphere for many of the Western curators. It’s not that the Chinese artists were grabbed and then made famous, it was just that a new level of information was inserted into the interna- tional art context. That is one point. The second point is that we can say that what is happening to Chinese artists now is similar to the shift that began in the late 1960s in the United States and Europe with the civil rights movement and the reformation of the academic curriculum, which lead to the development of new subjects, new histories and other ways of thinking about the history of art and artistic practice. This is what artists from China, Russia, Eastern Europe and Africa are entering into now. We should not see these interconnections in terms of the formation a new consciousness of what it means to be modern. With these new exhibitions, new subjects are introduced at universities, and then there are possibilities for students to take up courses in contemporary African art history, for instance.

The first Ph.D. in this area was written in the early 1980s. These are the kind of new things that enter, and as more information has become available, the introduction of some of these artists has opened up discourses into other directions and are not always directed at the market. It doesn’t always end up in a gallery or a museum. New discourses, conferences, and symposia take place. This is something that has added a new wrinkle to these different things. What I was trying to grasp when we talked about Cit ies on the Move being important and when Ken talked about the diaspora was the awareness of Chinese artists about these changes and transformations that are going on worldwide now, not only for people in China, but for people in other places. For me, the conclusion isn’t really how I’m so surprised that there are artists working in very serious and critical ways here, but that the level at which these transformations, transitions and dislocations have not produced any kind of serious theory with which to handle this material. What I have found surprising is not whether there’s an epiphany in terms of development or not, but that there hasn’t been an adequate theorization in terms of texts or books. That is my one impression about this trip so far.

 Ken Lum: We have to conclude, so can I ask Pi Daojian to conclude by addressing that?

Pi Daojian: I think that the discussion today has been very interesting. I think everyone is interested in the question of urbanism, but in fact it is more modernization than urbanism. However, I think that modernization and modern construction are questions on two different levels. Yan Shanchun has referred to one of them as hardware construction, referring to the essential units of infrastructure required of any city. I think it would be better for us to focus on modern cultural development, namely that people should carry out modern transformations psychologically speaking. This would then include the use of your own cultural resources. There is a problem in China these days – cities such as Suzhou, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Wuhan all look fairly similar. In the past, each city had its own particular enchantment. Such cultural enchantment is slowly being lost and this is a problem. In addition, modernization has brought with it the desertification of the soul, the drifting apart of human relations, and the separation of man from nature. If we don’t try to solve these problems from the mental level, I think that the modernization of Shenzhen will be a disaster. Therefore I think we need to discuss this problem. If we can bring these two aspects together, it will help art see how it can shoulder its responsibility to society, culture and criticism.

   :       

  

Cai Guoqiang, celebratory event in Shanghai, 2001. Site-specific performance.

 Cai Guoqiang’s first solo exhibition in China, since receiving international renown, took place at the Shanghai Art Museum in 2001. His exhibition represented an important occasion for Chinese audiences to view a large number of his works for the first time.

My first personal experience with Cai Guoqiang’s art came at the Lyon Biennial, curated by the French curator Jean-Hubert Martin in 2000. In the spare and labyrinthine spaces furnished by the Lyon Biennial, Cai presented a work veiled by a diaphanous curtain. Through the curtain, one could espy rocks from Lake Taihu, birds, and tree roots, all centred by an unlikely bathtub. The rocks reminded me of my native Suzhou, a city famous for its classic Chinese gardens. In this engaging work entitled Cultural Melting Bath, the artist’s thoughtful arrangement of each component, especially the rocks and the birds, revealed his investigation of Chinese culture and the elements constituting traditional Chinese art. My collaboration with Cai started at the Shanghai Biennial later that same year. Since then, I have developed a close personal regard for him. What impressed me most about working with Cai is not only his complex approaches to art and life, but also his energy and intellectual acuity. Indeed, what Fei Dawei had said throws light on our friendship: “For an art critic, meeting a good artist is almost like getting a gift from heaven. Throughout the artist’s life, we are inspired by him and never stop learning from him.”1

Cai Guoqiang’s art is greatly shaped by his life experiences before he left China, in particular, growing up in Quanzhou, Fujian Province. His family pedigree goes back to the Jin Dynasty when his ancestors moved from Henan to a village near the sea in Quanzhou. By the 1950s the

 household had settled in Quanzhou, a city characterized by a climate of cultural openness. In the Yuan dynasty, it was where the sea borne Silk Road started and was called “the greatest port in the East.”It was a hive of multifaceted activities, a veritable cultural and commercial ‘melting port,’ where people of different professions, faiths, origins and cultures converged. Taking religion as an example, the city was home to worshippers of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Islam, Brahmanism, Nestorian Christianity and Manicheanism. Cai’s experience with the city nourished his versatility and proved to be a constant source of reference to his art. The young Cai lived a full and active life. As an elementary school boy, he played leading roles in exemplary revolutionary operas, studied under several local painters, and took painting trips throughout the city. The city offered him many treasures to explore. After graduation, he entered the Quanzhou Arts and Culture Promotion Team where he performed and made stage design. The early 1980s saw his performance in Chinese kungfu films such as Xiaocheng Chunqiu (Story of A Small Town) and Renwukeren (Unbearable). With so many artistic talents, this young man in his tidy white shirt and then fashionable green military uniform, appeared smart and admirable. From 1981 to 1985, he studied in the Department of Stage Design at the Shanghai Drama Institute. He travelled extensively and went on study trips to Tibet, the Yellow River and many other places throughout China.

In Shanghai, Cai Guoqiang presented two large-scale installations entitled On the Net and Dreams. On the Net consisted of the skeleton of a boat taken from Quanzhou which was turned upside down and hung in the neo-classically contoured museum hall. Underneath the overhead boat an internet-ready computer permitted visitors to surf the net at will. In the atrium hung a Longhua pagoda-shaped birdcage that contained one hundred live canaries. Reminiscent of a bird snare, a rope linked the birdcage with the ship’s mast. Cai’s installation suggested the idea that humans and animals, history and reality, modernity and tradition are all intertwined in some metaphoric net, be it a birdcage, a boat, or a computer terminal linked to the World Wide Web. The work also suggested a playful irony on the relationship between birds and humans, with the birds playing the role of the capturer who controls the ‘boat trap’ while it is we humans who are imprisoned unconsciously by our ingenious inventions like the Internet.

Boats, as emblems for communication and interaction, appear in many of Cai’s works. He seems to have an extraordinary capacity to imbue his boats with a rich amalgam of cultural, historical and geographical references. At the 1995 Venice Biennale, in the exhibition entitled TransCulture curated by Nanjo Fumio and Dana Friis-Hansen, Cai presented Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot. In this work, he transported one hundred kilograms of ginseng, which arrived in Venice by Chinese junk from Quanzhou. It was an appropriate way to commemorate Marco Polo’s return to Venice seven hundreds years ago. This deeply poetic work functioned not merely as an artwork but as an art event that broke down the space-time boundaries.

In the installation work named Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: the Ark of Genghis Khan shown during the Hugo Boss Prize exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Cai employed an ancient military boat. He paid reference to the idea of the supreme, all-conquering ruler who swept over vast regions and expanded westward into Europe. To ferry themselves across rivers, soldiers used a special raft made of sheepskin bags filled with air and then fastened to rectan- gular wooden frames. Such a raft form was a highly effective and versatile mode of transportation in the military history of ancient China. Moreover, when the sheepskin air bags were loosened from the raft and then fastened together, they could also serve as a floating bridge. They were also used to store water. Cai, therefore, used this raft as a symbol for the possible revival of Chinese culture. However, he complicates any notion of a pure revival by attaching Japanese Toyota engines to the

 raft. The bold yet provocative combination of Japanese outboard motors with ancient Chinese ingenuity invited many interpretations. By resorting to history, his work became immediately relevant to the current political situation. Far from being an illustration of nationalism and exoticism, it reworked an ancient theme by triggering a lively dialogue between history and the current situation of Asia and the ambiguous regard of the world towards an ascending China.

It is apparent that an enormous amount of Cai’s work has revolved around boat or ship motifs. He dug out ships from shipwrecks, fixed, suspended or inverted them, put arrows or engines in them, and then moved them over great distances. The meaning of the ship is, therefore, ever- changing and accommodative of multiple meanings. The ship also suggests the idea of Cai as an artist who identifies with the figure of the nomad.

The other large installation realized in Shanghai was Dreams, a work comprised of a sea of red silk ten by twenty metres in size. Five industrial fans were used to produce the effect of ‘waves.’ Hung over the cloth was a profusion of paper icons symbolizing high-tech and fashion objects – cars, steamboats, airliners, high-speed trains, rockets, combat jets, washing machines, pianos, satellites, spaceships, the McDonald’s logo – that represent to ordinary Chinese the symbols of an improved life in a modernizing socialist country. It is interesting that these paper figures derive from a Quanzhou tradition. During the lantern festival, lanterns can be seen everywhere in the city. Each household makes lanterns and displays them in the street. Annually, citywide competitions are held and Cai Guoqiang learned the art of lantern making as a boy. Like boats, lanterns are a recurring motif in his work. The billowing red sea produced an environment in the gallery that was constantly in flux, dreamlike and filled with anxious uncertainty.

In early 2001, Cai Guoqiang and I planned an outdoor explosion project called Heave nly Ladder. Cai intended to place it against the background of Pudong, the new financial district across from old Shanghai that has come to symbolize China’s emergence in the world. Cai’s proposal, which had to go through several site changes finally rested on a fireworks display taking place from a ship on the Huangpu river. A half kilometer, two hundreds and fifty kilogram ladder made of gunpowder and fuses would be sent up in the sky with the aid of a helicopter. A fuse would be lit at its base, propelling this ladder of light and fire upwards into the skies at a speed of forty meters per second. The spectacle would last for fifteen seconds and in order to have a better effect, Cai suggested that all the lights along the Huangpu River be turned off for sixty seconds.

Cai Guoqiang is seen by many as “the man who makes explosions.”The September 11th incident problematized his situation. People have raised such questions as “Now, how can he reach beyond explosion in his art?” After the disaster, this has become a quite sensitive topic and this attitude is understandable. A survey of the artist’s experiment with explosions, however, may give us a better understanding of his art. From the 1980s onwards, Cai gradually abandoned the painterly medium in favor of natural forces. Among his new tools, dynamite possesses a unique creative potential since the powerful substance is always capable of creating something unexpected. Cai’s long-time experimentation with explosives allowed him to contemplate the relationship between chance and destiny, finity and infinity, construction and destruction. It was through explosions that he found intensity, creative urge and a feeling of freedom – a process close to what Zen philosophy has called ‘sudden realization.’

Cai’s explosion projects fall into two categories and he appears to want to create works for communicating with extraterrestrials. His contribution to the exhibition China Tomorrow for

 Cai Guoqiang, On the Net, 2001, mixed media. Installation view, Shanghai Art Museum.

Yesterday, entitled Project for Extraterrestrial No. 3 , consisted of a gigantic explosion covering a surface area of more than ten thousand square meters. Looking at his work, Cai said, “I feel the universe and I becoming one. What is art and what is civilization seem so unimportant at such a moment!”3 In his opinion, when viewed from the perspective of the vast universe, the Earth seems miniscule. The smallness of the Earth implies the inconsequential conflicts between the East and the West and all the anxieties of humanity. It seems to Cai that what is more urgent is to explore the vast unknown that is the universe. The explosions also function as metaphors of the ephemeral nature of life and the fragility of all human relationships.

Restrained Violence: Rainbow, a work Cai realized for the 1995 Johannesburg Biennial, was inspired by the artist’s reading of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. The work paid homage to Mandela’s declaration of ‘restrained violence,’ which was made just before coming into power, and his goal of building a ‘rainbow nation.’ In the inauguration event, gunpowder and fuses, affixed to the exterior wall of a power station, were detonated, knocking a series of holes in windows of Cai’s designated exhibition room, forming a pattern of holes that resembled a rainbow’s arc. The ‘rainbow’ stood for the people’s longing for lasting peace and also suggested the idea that explosives can be a regenerating force as well as a destructive force.

Cai Guoqiang’s 2001 Shanghai project reflected a Chinese tradition of displaying fireworks on happy and auspicious occasions. During the APEC meeting held in Pudong, he designed a pyrotechnic display entitled Tonight is so Beautiful, consisting of six scenes: Salute from Heaven,

 Cai Guoqiang, Dreams, 2001, mixed media. Installation view, Shanghai Art Museum.

Celestial Beauty, Flying Dragon in the Heaven, Imagine the Universe, Best Wishes, and Shining Pearl in the East. Cai’s goal was to present the idea of the beautiful city and, moreover, to express people’s love for peace. As he put it, “This is not an artist’s own work but a work for his country. The design is the fruit of our wisdom and collaboration. This is a country’s work named This is China. This is the first time I have come back and done something for my country. I want to use my artistic ideas and experience to fulfill our beautiful dreams.”4 While the works involving explosions differ greatly from each other in scale and scope, what underlies them is Cai’s steadfast referencing of cultural, political and social concerns and the insistence on the intersection of art and everyday life.

As a result of September 11th, several projects produced for the APEC celebratory event, including Heavenly Ladder, had to be cancelled. After finishing his work in Shanghai, Cai Guoqiang went back to his hometown, where he used gunpowder to present his original APEC proposal on rice paper. In his studio he held a long rope and with the movement of his arm and wrist, the rope was laid out naturally in the shape of a ‘flying dragon.’After adding some gunpowder to it and covering it with paper and stone, Cai detonated the fuse, creating a soaring dragon. His dynamite painting entitled Ode to Joy was miraculous. Vigorous lines suggested the contour of the twenty-three landmark waterfront buildings of the Shanghai Bund. The ‘painted’ fireworks strongly recalled the broad and bold brushstrokes in ink painting. Indeed, painting brings him a sense of fulfillment. As a boy, he often felt a desire to become a painter. Painting, in a way, allows him to ‘realize’ his unrealized projects. These explosion sketches are different from what he had previously done for the proposal and can be seen as records of a process, a mood and an ideal. Certain points in life and art sometimes meet. Ten years ago, he started with gunpowder painting on paper and then embarked on more ambitious outdoor explosion projects throughout the world. With Heavenly Ladder, gunpowder now returns in the form of painting.

The Russian painter Konstantin Maksimov had a formative influence on Chinese contemporary oil painting. The 1950s saw the flowering of the training program in his style and technique. In art

 academies, Maksimov’s work was held as the paradigm of painting. Even in art classes for elementary school students, instructors often taught his drawing techniques. For he was almost like a god in art. His influence can be felt by generations of Chinese artists. His art, therefore, offers an interesting case in our investigation of Chinese contemporary art history. In the exhibition Cai realized for the Shanghai Art Museum, the artist also curated a show featuring his collection of Maksimov drawings, watercolors and oil paintings. A revisit to these works is both moving emotionally and intellectually and offers an opportunity to reflect on a variety of problems concerning art institutions and the role of Maksimov in Chinese contemporary art and art history.

The exhibition revealed Cai to be an artist of many functions, including that of collector and curator. Cai’s works have been collected by many prestigious museums and, at the same time, he makes great efforts to collect other artists’ work. His intention may be to subvert the conventional art institutions and, more specifically, to blur the boundaries between the collector and the curator on the one hand and the artist on the other. Cai adopted a similar strategy when he invited Ni Tsai-chin, director of the Taiwan Museum of Art to act as artist, while he himself played the role of museum director and curator. His strategy serves as a reminder of the complexity of identity we experience in changing societies. Cai’s display of his Maksimov collection also invites a comment on history. How to deal with our past experiences? We can change the historical records but we cannot erase our memory or feelings towards Maksimov and his works. His works offer a point for re-examination of Chinese contemporary art history. In Cai’s opinion, using the Confucian approach of treating those who taught you like your father is admirable. While Maksimov’s popularity has decreased and his status of a great master can hardly be foreseen in the future, the point is that Maksimov has had an undeniable influence on art production in China.

Cai’s exhibition is a clear illustration of his approaches to art. For artists, to decide on their position is not always as simple as just to say yes or no. A good artist should be open. Sometimes it is worthwhile to look back on history and tradition as well as to break confinements, since theme and style in art have their roots and growth in history. The exhibition calls our attention to the influence of realistic style on Chinese contemporary art and the possibility of making intelligent use of this tradition. Cai’s contribution to the 48th Venice Biennale Rent Collection Courtyard testified to his openness in dealing with contemporary art. Elements in history, when properly drawn upon, can serve to broaden the concept of contemporary art. Such categories as tradition and modernity, the East and West, and the local and global do not necessarily stand still and in absolute separation. Instead, communication and interaction between them can be nurtured, opening up new possibilities in art. In this sense Cai Guoqiang’s ideas and art are indeed inspiring for the artistic milieu in China.

Cai is presenting thirteen oil paintings entitled Impressionistic Drawings that depict explosions. His way of painting deserves our special attention. He does not paint from his direct experience but from what he sees on the screen of video monitors. This method operates as a critique on the influence of media and the relationship between reality and representation. Traditionally, artists painted from life, drawing inspiration from nature. Nowadays, televisions have brought into our homes what happens thousands of miles away. For instance, without being in Manhattan, we can witness September 11th on our televisions. Direct contact with nature and the world has almost become an obsolete practice. Electronic media records, especially documentaries, are increasingly replacing our memory. These help to explain why TV programs have an overwhelming influence on our way of life. The latest developments in science and technology have given rise to problems concerning the relationship between humans and computers. Indeed, those media are redefining

 our relationship with nature and society. New media has also fundamentally altered our artistic perceptions and practices. With the aid of satellite live broadcasting, artists can stay at home to paint Mount Everest and the battle scenes in Afghanistan. Cai’s interesting works encourage contemplation on these issues. They also give the artist and the audience a better understanding of explosions. In the museum setting, these works seem to intentionally mock the artist, human beings and art history.

At the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, I met the director of the Naoshima Museum of Contemporary Art. He was looking at Cai Guoqiang’s entry, Self-Promotion for the People, which included a photo of Cult ural Melting Bath. I told him that the Shanghai Art Museum would appreciate his sponsorship of Cai’s show in 2002. Unexpectedly, he said, “It would be the first time that Cai Guoqiang would hold a solo exhibition in his homeland. Chinese entrepreneurs and sponsors should take advantage of this opportunity to help him. You need to treat the artist as a hero. This is the honor of your nation and your country. It is not a matter of sponsorship.”5 His words made me reflect on the role of those accomplished overseas Chinese art practitioners and their potential to contribute to Chinese arts and culture. Indeed, they have a wealth of experiences from which we should benefit in our search for a new cultural spirit. In the process of globalization, we are confronted with problems relating to national culture and tradition. If we are not capable of

Cai Guoqiang, detail of celebratory event in Shanghai, 2001. Site-specific performance.

 respecting and adding to our tradition, the rich fountain will run dry. On the other hand, blind borrowing of Western culture can rarely result in any really good art works. An impressive array of non-Western curators, including Okwui Enwezor, Nanjo Fumio, Hou Hanru and Yuko Hasegawa are giving new directions to international intellectual and artistic endeavors. They are injecting dynamism into the international art community in two ways. On the one hand, they introduce fresh cultural elements from the non-Western world. Similarly, artists such as Cai Guoqiang, Bodys Isek Kingelez from Congo, Shirin Neshat from Iran, and William Kentridge from South Africa are injecting new perspectives and producing new artistic meanings for a world cultural scene. Distinguished by an inventive combining of national and local subject matter within an internationalist context, these artists and many others are energizing the world of art. They are known and respected throughout the world. People in their country of origin are welcoming them home.

Ancient art and culture are indeed great. A richer and more diverse contemporary art scenario is unfolding in front of us. The goal of our current exhibition is to generate lively discussion on Cai Guoqiang’s artistic ideas and practice and to shed light on the future movement of Chinese.

Endnotes:

1 Fei Dawei, “Amateur Recklessness,” Avant-Garde Today,Tianjin: Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences Press, vol. 9, p. 66.

2 Zhang Qing, Interview with Cai Guoqiang, January 2002, unpublished.

3 “Tomorrow’s Chinese Art: Fei Dawei vs. Hou Hanru,” Yishujia, Taiwan, vol. 184, September 1990, p. 174.

4 Zhang Qing, “Dragon is Coming Home: Cai Guo-qiang and the Pyrotechnic Display for 2001 APEC Meeting,” Art Contemporary, Shanghai: Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Press, vol. 1, p. 70.

5 Zhang Qing, Interview with the director of the Naoshima Museum of Contemporary Art, November 2000, unpublished.

     ,  

  

It is extremely difficult to talk about Chinese art in a general way without descending to clichés. In fact, to the outsider, even serious art theory in China over the centuries seems to be mostly that – the repetition of profound generalities to the point of cliché. It is difficult to recover the nuance in the topics of Chinese aesthetics, not to mention their importance. But with respect to contemporary art, one suggestive point to start with is the fact that a preponderance of China’s best-known artists were educated in the traditional painting section of the Hangchow Academy; that is to say their grounding is in Chinese art, not in Western oil painting. I maintain that the current generation of Chinese artists can borrow techniques, styles and postures from the West but that their thinking reflects the furthest development of art theory in their own culture, not in the West, and that this is not just an accident of the educational process, but an important historical truth. To prove this point I will have to risk a few generalities.

For my first true cliché, I bring up the long-standing close relation between poetry and painting, and my first example is a piece by the Southern Song Dynasty artist Ma Yuan. The piece is not ancient, but it is an early surviving example of painting in the Chinese tradition, and it is exemplary of a complementary and balanced relation between picture and inscription. The poem written onto the upper right corner tells how the rustling of branches pushed apart by a scholar as he moves along a mountain trail has frightened away some birds, which have also stopped singing. When we notice that the servant following behind is carrying a musical instrument, it is clear that we have a meditation on the elusiveness of art, of how the efforts of the artist or musician are themselves obstacles to the attainment of the ideal. The poem complements the silent and still picture with a description of sounds and movements, but in principle either could stand alone, for the theme is the inadequacy of the work itself, and the way that it can nevertheless point toward the very realm that it is unable to represent. But though the poem does not require an illustration, and neither does the picture need a caption, together the poem and the picture do make a larger whole. They each describe the same moment, but they do not exactly coincide; each portion has its own intrinsic qualities that offer experiences beyond the needs of the narrative – the poem sound, rhythm and allusiveness, the picture a graceful and expressive composition – and they complement each other well. This is one superior example of the interweaving of text and image, but though it might be a case where adding more really gives more, long before Ma Yuan’s time writers and artists had theorized exactly the opposite.

Qian Zhongshu, in his critical masterwork Guanzhui bian, cites the 8th century calligrapher Zhang Xu’s statement that “to diminish means to have a surplus,”and further comments: “Calligraphy and painting criticism as early as the T’ang dynasty had endorsed the same principle [that less is more], which suggests itself as a link between all the arts by that period.”1 In both poetry and painting, the value of not spelling everything out, of leaving an empty space for the viewer or reader’s imagination to work in, has been canonical for a long time, and this, of course, is another cliché. Qian gives a number of examples from painting. On the theme “Bamboo encircles a wine shop beside a bridge” what was painted was simply a “wineshop banner flying above bamboo growing beside a bridge.”And on the theme “After trotting over fallen blossoms, the horse’s hoofs are fragrant” the painter simply drew “several butterflies following a horse.”These are all instances of conveying meaning beyond the image.1 But what is striking about these examples is precisely how nothing is really left out. If less is more, then in all cases the added poem or picture is clearly

 not strictly necessary. Yet, in the examples given, the caption seems to be present before the picture is even painted. The suggestiveness of the image is utterly formulaic, and does not open up beyond already determined limits. Where there is supposed to be less picture there is in fact too much literature, and so expressive restraint loses its power.

Despite the antiquity of my examples, they seem like relevant background for the ‘New China Avant-Garde.’ The work of Gu Wenda, Xu Bing, Huang Yongping, Zhou Teihai, Cai Guoqiang and the other usual suspects are loaded with such stereotypical elements of Chinese culture as calligraphs, rice paper, crickets in cages and fireworks, and it is clear that they are made for an international audience in the same way that the pictures Qian mentions were made for theirs – we are invited to fill in the blanks with what we already know. There is always a caption – it is likely in our head to begin with, but a ‘critical’ essay will spell it out any case. The task of Chinese artists in an international group show is, of course, to display their ethnic ‘identity,’ to represent their culture and their nation in the modern world, and so the artists cannot be faulted for meeting expectations. But it is also clear that Chinese artists have centuries of training to prepare them for success in the contemporary art world; there is nothing new about current versions of ‘conceptual art’ or ‘installation’ for them – it is just a matter of providing the object or picture to fit the caption. Art world audiences presumably do not resent their loss because they do not realize it.

Nevertheless, the history of Chinese art could be written as a succession of very effective gestures of withdrawal into repletion, of pulling back that gives more. The common term for this in Chinese aesthetics is ‘resonance.’With respect to both painting and poetry Qian Zhongshu again has made the most exhaustive and illuminating study of the term:

What the viewer or reader gets beyond the image or apprehends beyond the words (to overhear the understood), this is what is meant by ‘resonance.’

What is not painted or put into words thus conveys what cannot be painted or put into words (to evoke the inexpressible by the unexpressed)...

To use concealment to convey profundity, or to proceed via simplicity to what is remote and obscure – these are ancient formulas and common maxims for poets.

The italicized phrases in Qian’s text were printed in English in the original – an example of his strong interest in drawing comparisons across the cultural divide – and he goes on to cite Schopenhauer, Voltaire, Diderot, Leopardi and other Western writers in the same vein. I take Qian as my touchstone for the kind of criticism I am attempting, noting that he does not follow the common Chinese pattern of citing Western sources in order to prove the priority of China and thereby prove that nothing need ever change. The concept of ‘resonance’ implies that there is something outside the work to resonate with, an intended idea or feeling, yet great art usually defines itself by refusing to be limited in this way. Chinese artists have practiced reduction, abbreviation, failure, de-skilling, and imitation for a very long time, and the result of such curtailing gestures has been new ways of looking at art – an opening up of possibilities rather than a solvable mystery. The history of these developments is the modernity of Chinese painting, and precisely the place where East and West are joined in their mutual incomprehension.

It is often shocking for a Westerner to realize how modern Chinese painting was at a very early date. By the Yuan Dynasty, Chinese artists had already learned to stage a conscious and historically

 knowing individuality as a way of breaking with realist conventions. But, more importantly, they had also learned how to empty their work of narrative in order to foreground expression, and then, almost immediately, also learned how to empty their work of expressiveness in order to foreground the intellectuality of its process. In Chinese art the classic example of negation, of exquisite style spun around a core of highly cerebral emptiness, is found in the works of Ni Zan, but they are only an early moment in a rich tradition.

But Ni Zan could be studied and imitated, and so his manner was transformed into an historically self-conscious formalism. Creative negation turned into a detached contemplation and appreciation of painterly beauty and the claim that art’s value lies in form for its own sake. Aesthetic pleasures became private experiences, in other words a kind of personal property of the viewer. This history of alienation has been well rehearsed in the West, and once again we may be surprised at how precociously modern Chinese art was, in this case through the pivotal Ming Dynasty figure of Dong Qichang, the great codifier of painting languages.

Nevertheless, Chinese artists were able to turn their losses into gains. During the 16th and 17th centuries, they took up the close copying of earlier works as a creative strategy in itself, and blandness, lack of innovation and inexpressivity became positive values – a new kind of negation. Yet the tradition did have further resources of technical and formal innovation. At the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, in the early 1700s, Shitao accomplished a rigorous analysis of the elements of painting that anticipated Picasso. He objectified the various brushstrokes and washes and used them in combination and permutation as elements in his own freely invented idioms. This was a positive development; through total mastery of convention taken to an elemental level, Shitao turned the historicism common in the late Ming into a fresh and vigorous modern style. But the history I have been tracing out was all along shadowed by emerging techniques of mass reproduction – illustrated books, printed posters, handbills and even printed instructional manuals for painting in which different brushstrokes were named and catalogued. Shitao’s free formal combinations have to be seen in the context of a ‘ready-made’ and mass-reproduced stroke.

Even though he is widely admired to this day, Shitao’s work has proven to be an end rather than a beginning. His contemporary, Bada Shanren, moved in another direction, toward greater casual- ness and mannerism, and this became the more influential model, perhaps because it continued the tradition of negation. The subjectivity that underwrote Bada’s ‘ink splashes’ was mad. During the later Qing, a knowing use of ‘bad’ technique, and forms of de-skilling such as painting with fingers and hair, were common strategies of negation. Again, in a parallel to later developments in the West, it became more and more difficult to sustain ‘bad’ painting as a space of freedom within a tradition overloaded with achievement. Increasingly, art comes to be understood as a system of formal devices, and painters find that the repertoire of moves can only be extended through increasing reliance on anecdote. Images become symbols. This can be clearly seen in the work of later Qing painters and the Shanghai school, where even still-lifes often have a narrative subtext and figure paintings become increasingly important.

China went through its own ‘post-modern’ period long before the term became current. Before the revolution, in Shanghai, precisely at the nexus of the newly emerging global economic/cultural system, there were many co-existing styles of Chinese and Western art, and many attempts to hybridize them. But further, artists such as Wu Changshi, while making slick and conventional pictures for a growing market, were also very knowledgeable antiquarians. Wu even invented a modern version of the most ancient calligraphic form, the seal script. A highly developed historical

 awareness, eclecticism, a very knowing, even ironic use of conventions, a degree of cynicism about a situation in which a more anonymous patronage had rendered the readability of those conventions unsure – does it not all sound familiar? Even contemporary? China is the ‘Other’ of the West, and its only now, when ‘we’ have caught up with the East, that we can see the parallel paths of these two great modern traditions.

I have tried to describe Chinese art by suggesting its similarity to the art of the West today but although I cannot convey the enormous richness of this tradition in such a cursory overview, I do hope to give an indication of how difficult it is to work within it at such a late date. For serious Chinese artists it sometimes must seem impossible, and therefore the turn to Western ideas and methods a necessity. Another way of putting this might be that the ink painting tradition is in crisis, that the later twentieth century masters do not offer any proof otherwise, and that the adoption of new ‘post-modern’ forms such as installation and performance is a natural response to this exhaustion of possibilities. But Chinese artists do not, and cannot, go beyond the point reached by their own history. The reason for this is again because Chinese art and theory have their own characteristic modernity; both China and the West have arrived at the present together, by different routes. The Chinese path took longer, so it is more heavily weighted with time, but also more replete with evasive strategies, ways of bearing the load. But the legacy of historic art cannot really be evaded because the problems of meaning and innovation lie on a more fundamental level than choice of medium. As in the West, these problems reduce to the formation and then necessary negation of an artistic identity in and through the work. It is the quality of those gestures of invention and negation that matter, not the tools used.

As my all-too-brief survey should suggest, the downward path of Chinese art up through the centuries is an inevitable formalizing and literalizing of the beauties of ‘resonance.’ The suggestive- ness of silence and absence inevitably gives way to a flat factuality. The following passage, from Qian Zhongshu’s 1947 novel Wei cheng (Fortress Besieged), is much more than a satire of a corrupt intelligentsia, although as such it is still very apposite. It is also an allegory of a fall from the sublime to the banal that is in fact the trajectory of the history of art:2

Slow-witted honesty was Han Hsüeh-yü’s specialty. Modern man has two popular myths: first, that homeliness in a girl is a virtue, so that pretty girls do not have half as much intelligence or honor as ugly girls; and second, that if a man lacks eloquence, he must be virtuous, making deaf-mutes the most sincere and honest people. Perhaps because he has been taken in too often by speeches and propaganda, modern man has overreacted to the point where he thinks only those who never talk speak the truth upon opening their mouths, prompting all newly appointed officials to say in their homily, “Statesmanship does not lie in excessive talk,”wishing they could just point to their mouths, their heart, and heaven and settle it all with these three gestures. Though Han Hsüeh-yü was not a deaf-mute, he did have a slight stutter. In order to cover his stuttering, he spoke little, slowly and with great effort, as though each word carried with it the whole weight of his personality. People who don’t talk readily are apt to give others the impression that they are packed with wisdom, just as a locked, tightly sealed chest is assumed to be crammed with treasure.

Irony is the natural mode of a high intelligence restricted by the richness of tradition, but then irony itself is subject to time, and withers away, leaving a real rather than a resonant emptiness.

 Here we must bear in mind that all art, and art criticism, is role playing, and the Chinese have long experience with the most sophisticated of critical masks – those of incomprehension, naivete, rusticity and simplicity. The repetition of clichés is a way of cleverly negating one’s own sophistication that succeeds precisely in putting off those unsophisticated enough to take critical banalities at face value. The staging of the inadequacy of the critic in the face of the work, which in the West we would recognize as a way of figuring the sublime, is a long established strategy, and Chinese culture is old enough to recognize it as such even while still affirming the plenitude it so ironically invokes. Yet time has a way of effacing the most important distinctions; the mask of dumbness becomes fixed, and those who don’t know it is a mask take it for the reflection of their own beautiful face – but then there is no escaping from the determinations of circumstance, which we call the economy:

When Kao Sung-nien saw Han in Kunming for the first time, Kao felt Han to be sincere and serene like a gentleman. Moreover, it was obvious from Han’s premature baldness that his brain was so filled with knowledge it was bursting forth and crowding out his hair. When Kao took a look at Han’s vitae and saw beside his doctoral degree the item: “Articles have appeared in such major American journals as The Journal of History and The Saturday Review of Literature,”Kao could not help but give Han respect. Several people coming to Kao with letters of introduction had resumés stating that they had “lectured” abroad many times. Having studied in a small European country himself, Kao knew that often when one thought one was lecturing [literally, speaking on learning], the audience assumed he was learning to speak – a good chance to practice the foreign language. But to publish articles in major journals abroad – that took real talent and scholarship. When he asked Han if he could take a look at his works, the latter replied calmly that the journals had been left at his old home in the occupied area, that any Chinese university should subscribe to these two journals, and that Kao should be able to find them easily nearby, unless some of the old issues in the library had been lost during the escape. Kao Sung-nien never thought a liar could be so calm and unruffled. The books of all universities were in disarray, and he wouldn’t necessarily be able to find the particular issues. But there didn’t seem to be any doubt that they did contain Han Hsüeh-yü’s articles. Han Hsüeh-yü had in fact submitted articles to these journals, but Kao Sung-nien did not know that his articles had been published in the ‘Personals’ column of the Saturday Review of Literature: “Well-educated Chinese youth wishes to assist Sinologists. Low rates”; and in the ‘Correspondence’ column of The Journal of History: “Han Hsüeh-yü is seeking back issues of this journal from twenty years ago. Anyone wishing to sell please write to such and such an address.”

Chinese nationalists, as literal minded as their equivalents anywhere, would probably take this passage as an illustration of a humiliating servility toward foreign culture, yet it is actually a prophetic description of daily ironies to come. That the novel is set during the Japanese occupation in the late thirties, means it is readable as a critique of a decadent, pre-communist social order, but it was not on the party’s list of recommended books, and in fact virtually disappeared from view in China until the 1980s. But the tendentiously ideological art and literature of communism was itself only a brief interruption in the continuity of Chinese culture, a passing madness, and in fact a ready-made irony. It must have been perfectly clear to almost everyone that the official philosophy was hollow. The important thing is to get along in life, and to get along one must go along.

The maneuverings of Qian’s academics are simple pragmatism, the same historically trained realism that has enabled the ‘New China Avant-Garde’ to succeed so quickly. The new artists recognize

 the conventionality of the critical language exchanged by curators, artists and critics in the endless process of strategic dealmaking that produces careers for everyone. They also recognize that international art exhibitions have a political and economic context, and that the new visibility of Chinese artists is one result of the Western interest in the economic liberalization of China. Of course they are not interested in reflecting on this state of affairs in their work, preferring to stick to generalities about culture, which succeed very well in an international tourism and art circuit where all national cultures are trademarks. In a way, they have already made their accommodation with the regime; one might almost suggest that the ‘New China Avant-Garde’ are the overseas counterparts of the new economic opportunists on the Mainland. But, as I have tried to suggest, if it doesn’t make a significant intervention in the Western discourse it doesn’t mark any step forward in the Chinese tradition either, or vice versa. In saying this I am not overlooking China’s unique historical experience, I am talking about a development internal to art in both East and West – the literalization and banalization of ‘resonance.’ Professional strategy is what remains, but professional strategy is not enough.

Qian Zhongshu’s method involves extensive quotation of quotation; he traces strings of quotations through history, demonstrating how each period constructs itself through reference to the debates of earlier periods, and this is implicitly how he aims to intervene in the present. The following Song dynasty quote is a document of a conflict between schools of interpretation:3

The Qin burned the Songs and Documents and buried the scholars, intending to stupefy its people, and thought its method was a good one. But later ages came up with an even more effective method. A single interpretation was devised for the Songs and Documents and passed on to all who studied. Scholars were honored or humiliated according to their handling of this interpretation. Those who mastered it were elevated, in order to feed the flames of its popularity. For those in the political faction that supported it, fame and high rank became hereditary. Thus men of talent were made to be narrow and crude, and men of wisdom became inflexible and stupid.

Qian goes on to show how over time the notion that scholarship itself works to blind and stupefy becomes a convention; he quotes another scholar from the end of the Qing, in the late 19th century, who observes that “The Founding Emperor of the Ming began selecting officials on the basis of the ‘current style’ in writing...the strategy was like that of the Tang emperor, who said ‘all the great men have fallen into my trap,’ and the real intent was like that of the First Emperor, who burned the books and buried the Confucians.”Historical perspective becomes steep and vertiginous – distant times recede and then move toward us in a queasy and disorienting rhythm as a Qing dynasty critique is mounted through reference to Ming dynasty debates, in conscious reference to an earlier Song dynasty critique built on a reference to the still earlier Tang and Qin – and it is left up to us to make a connection with the simplification of the written language undertaken by the communists, or any other relevant contemporary matter. This hypertrophy of historical self- awareness is exactly what makes Qian an important contemporary critic, the more so as he takes on the role of a scholar of long-lost nuances and remote particularities. At stake is freedom of interpretation against ossified official norms, but irony cannot survive the multiplication of perspectives, it fades away like an echo in a canyon of quotations. But the failure of irony also means that there is no way to determine, in the current context, if the nihilistic violence of Xu Bing’s nonsense characters, in his piece The Book from the Sky , is a liberating gesture or just contemporary barbarism; in other words whether we should see him in the long perspective of the critique of culture as obfuscation mounted by its most sophisticated members or as a product

 of the communist present and its assault on scholarly privilege and tradition. And though Westerners may appreciate the humour of his New English Calligraphy – the joke on us, in other words – we will likely miss the savagery of its indictment of China’s failure, although again it may not be defensible as such but simply a buffoonish acknowledgement of the dominance of the West. These undecidabilities might be evidence of the work’s acuity, or then again might not; today such judgments give way before the brutal facts of art world success or failure.

Chinese intellectuals must face the same facts as intellectuals and artists in the West – that explicit meaning is always banal, and that it is increasingly difficult to be oblique in a significant way. Another way to put this might be that in a mass culture even the profoundest truths are banalities, and that this banality has to be recognized and accepted before anything productive and new can emerge. Here I think that the West has something to teach, but again, the only way to explain how is to examine a specific case. Abstraction has had a difficult reception in China. During the Maoist period abstraction was officially prescribed, it therefore had the lure of the forbidden and for many Chinese represented the ultra modern, yet most revealing is the specific difficulty that Chinese artists had in comprehending what abstract art was trying to do. An understanding of this incomprehension can open up for us the future of an art of negation that might have global currency and relevance.

It is important to recognize that it is quite possible for a representational work to be more ‘abstract’ than a purely non-objective painting. A still life or a Saint Victoire landscape by Cézanne is, oddly enough, much less referential than a classic Mondrian; actually this fact is the cause of many problems in the interpretation of both artists. The problem is that it is too easy for an abstract painting to become symbolic of something or other. If it is only concerned with its own processes it becomes formalism and hence falls below the level of what we expect art to accomplish while any other intention on the artist’s part can be enough to make it descriptive or illustrational and hence betray the desire to let the work speak for itself. A representational work, on the other hand, in certain historical circumstances, can acquire meaning out of a denial of meaning. The pictorial references that it inherits from the past and its visible stance toward lived reality together form a given structure of meaning that can then be emptied from within, and, as I have indicated, Chinese artists know this well.

But in China, Western abstraction has been understood largely in formalist terms, and as such it cannot add anything new to the local context. Chinese painters have spent a lot of time trying to work out hybrid forms of symbolic abstraction that are bound to fail as abstractions because they are too loaded with anecdote and literary intentions. The meaning of non-meaning, the expressiveness of emptiness, and the social, historical, psychological and artistic drama of abstraction is not recognized.

Today, reduction does not give us pure form but rather takes art down to the level of the banal materiality of everyday life; neither does it give us pure spirit but rather a voiding of spirit from the work, which is the modern equivalent of the radical emptiness found in historical art that we nowadays read as full of meaning. If the value of a work is found in its materiality, then the abstract painter is not required to have any intelligence, or even any ideas about his or her work; like Qian’s academic, if the artist keeps their mouth shut no one will know that they have nothing to say—in any event, the meaning of the work is in the mind and senses of the beholder. Western artists are much more willing to make work that seems to mean nothing; and Western viewers are much more

 comfortable with the idea that there may be no criteria of evaluation, or that the the relation between the artist and viewer might be entirely a mistake – that one may never know what the artist is really doing. Actually, it is more of an attitude of wait-and-see, a trust that time will provide the answer. Chinese artists showing in the West benefit from this openness toward the future, but I doubt if they know how to take advantage of it. I have yet to see a single work by an emigré Chinese artist that poses a genuine enigma.

But China and the West have to learn from each other – this is simply unavoidable. For Westerners the activities of the ‘New China Avant-Garde’ reveal the dimensions of an emerging crisis. This crisis has two interconnected aspects: the crisis of professionalism within the newly global art system, and the ossification of conceptual art. On the other hand, the power of negation is still stronger in the West, and Chinese artists have to tap that power to renovate their own practice. They have to dig deep into western art history and aesthetics, and above all they have to learn to see Western art without the intervening screen of their own very literary expectations about meaning.

A renewed address to abstraction by Chinese artists could have a global relevance. Or perhaps it is better just to admit that the situation is really the same everywhere. Modern nihilism is a universally experienced anxiety riven reality. Chinese or African peasants migrating to the cities, or Iranian intellectuals in a crisis of faith, or Serbians caught between tribal loyalty and universal values are all living their own modernity, and like modern people everywhere have to make sense of their disintegrating world not only in political, or moral, or communitarian terms but also personally. Every culture contains collective structures that give meaning to life but every modern person also knows things that cannot be expressed, or even understood, through the traditional forms. The construction of emptiness in abstract painting is an attempt to make a space that might hold that emerging knowledge. Blindness is the condition for action that produces the modern person as an autonomous entity; in other words, self-creation through art is now one universal option and world historical necessity. This does not mean the global triumph of Western culture even though the kind of person I am talking about is indeed the subject of commodity capitalism, the ‘universal’ consumer. I am convinced that artists somewhere will soon find Western forms that produce subjectivity in the act of negation useful to their own needs and purposes, and perhaps will make better use of the abstract tradition than is currently apparent in the West. At least that is one possibility before us as the ‘post-modern’ period comes to an end at the new millennium.

Endnotes:

1 The following quotes on the topic of ‘resonance’ are all from Qian Zhongshu, Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters, selected and translated by Ronald Egan, Harvard, 1998, pp. 30-31, 106.

2 The following quotes are from Ch’ien Chung-shu (Qian Zhongshu) Fortress Beseiged, translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and London, 1979.

3 Qian Zhongshu, Limited Views, p. 364.

 -  :         

  



In my opinion, what is crucial for overseas Chinese artists is not the presentation of Chinese characteristics but rather to act effectively in the third space. This causes a kind of metamorphosis: a shift from dichotomous ideas about East and West to the practice of cultural strategies.1

Gao Minglu on the art production of certain artists who were born and educated in China but who now reside in the West.

The film provided me with great opportunities to tell a story to people of both worlds. I am Chinese and American. We (East and West) are really very much alike. The film gives me a chance to get that message across. Cinema…has the cross-cultural appeal.2

Chinese-American filmmaker Ann Hu on the inspiration for making her film Shadow Magic (2001).

By relating Gao Minglu’s statement to Ann Hu’s remarks, I immediately want to draw attention to two telling factors. First, Ann Hu epitomizes the hua qiao (overseas Chinese) artist who, according to Gao, can act effectively in the third space. In fact, Hou Hanru, Gao’s colleague, provides a profile of certain individuals like Hu who are endowed with such a capability:

They have moved to the West and begun working within the mainstream of Western contemporary art. They no longer see themselves as simply Chinese artists but as independent individual artists. At the same time, they bring their experiences of Chinese culture, in particular those of a generation who went through changes ranging from the Cultural Revolution to the Reform and the Opening of Doors.3

Hao’s description recounts Hu’s biography perfectly. Born in 1955, Hu grew up and studied in China. At the age of eleven, she participated in the Red Guard Movement and, like such non-diasporic filmmaking contemporaries as Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang, experienced the tumultuous decade of the Cultural Revolution as a teenager. In 1979, she left China to study business administration in New York City where she has since resided. Eventually Hu enrolled in film school in New York University. At the age of thirty-six she directed her first 16mm film short entitled Dream and Memory (1992). Choosing to work within a predominantly white American independent film industry, Hu has imbued her first two films with the theme of cross-cultural interaction. In Dream and Memory, she does not merely focus on the coming together of Chinese and Western cultures but more fittingly on the story of an overseas Chinese painter living with his African-American girlfriend in the Big Apple.

This cross-cultural interaction in the work of a hua qiao artist like Hu points to the second telling factor to which I want to allude. Through the coupling of the two aforementioned passages, the former by Gao, the latter by Hu, I wish to show that Hu’s first large-scale, professional artistic endeavor, the period drama Shadow Magic (2001), sets out to represent art of the third space. In

 my paper, I therefore attempt to demonstrate that Shadow Magic is Hu’s cultural strategy for replacing the notion of a dichotomy dividing Chinese artistic practices from their Western counterparts. In short, I want to argue that Shadow Magic as a cultural strategy is about, by, and for a hybrid visual culture created by a Chinese-Western convergence, collaboration and/or crowd.

I divide this essay into three sections dealing with the about, the by, and the for, respectively. The about section shows how Shadow Magic is about a hybrid visual culture created by a Sino-Western convergence. I focus on the narrative’s reference to two influential Western visual forms, cinema and photography, in turn-of-the-century China, resulting in two hybrid cultural forms: early silent Chinese cinema and Chinese portraiture photography. I also reveal how the film’s set design, in both concrete and abstract ways, reinforces the narrative’s East-West flavour. Throughout this section, I argue that Shadow Magic is illustrative, to a certain extent, of a nostalgia film since it privileges historicism. Dealing with Shadow Magic as a hybrid visual form created by a Sino-Western collaboration, my by section, in three ways, focuses on the film’s function as a hybrid meta-film. My for section theorizes why Shadow Magic has been successful in both Western and Chinese film festivals, at which, Western and Chinese spectators, the film’s target audiences, have been present. My essay concludes with a short analysis of possible motivations for Hu’s creation of third space art, in relation to her intended East-West crowd.

:   - 

Hu’s Historicism Cultural critic Frederic Jameson hypothesizes that nostalgia films (e.g. George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Il Conformista (1970)) invariably succumb to historicism. Having been created in a postmodern world, they lack a sense of history and are imprisoned in the perpetual present.4 While this line of reasoning may be relevant in the deconstruction of certain other nostalgia films, it is inappropriate for an analysis on Shadow Magic ’s nostalgic narrative. Although Hu deliberately downplays historical accuracy, she does not suffer from ‘historical amnesia.’ In this section, I show that Hu forsakes history for historicism, in relation to early silent Chinese cinema, Chinese portraiture photography, and set design in order to accomplish the relatively simple goal of reflecting an artistic visual hybridity created by East-West contact.

Film Summary The main plot focuses on the arrival of Raymond Wallace, an English filmmaker and projectionist, to Beijing in 1902. He is determined to earn a profit by introducing silent cinema – also known as Xi yang ying xi (Weste rn shadow play) – to a Chinese audience. Initially the Chinese people ignore his sales pitch. Their coldness originates from an overall distrust of Westerners, a distrust deepened by the recent violent suppression of the Boxer Rebellion (1900-1901) by the hands of foreign powers.5 Wallace’s business remains non-existent until he meets Liu Jinglun, a photographer from the Feng Tai Photography Shop, historically an actual photo studio in Beijing.6 Being Chinese, Liu is able to draw his fellow countrymen to Wallace’s ‘shadow magic’ show. In exchange for his promotional services, Liu works as Wallace’s paid apprentice. This arrangement delights Liu since he is eager to learn the secrets behind silent motion picture. As a team, Wallace and Liu begin to fascinate Chinese audiences by showing them an eclectic montage of silent moving images. Featuring turn-of-the-century Westerners, such diverse images range from acrobats performing circus routines to parents feeding a baby.

 As Liu gradually learns the Western art of silent filmmaking (which, in the story, encompasses filming, editing, and projection), he convinces Wallace that the Chinese people would benefit from seeing themselves and their country on film. As a result, Liu and Wallace spend a day shooting ‘Chinese culture.’ Roaming across Bejing, the pair films an outdoor traditional wedding procession, ordinary market sellers and customers, and sunset at the Great Wall (Fig. 1). After Wallace is suddenly forced to leave China, Liu, on his own, delights the Chinese spectators by screening a short film montage ‘starring’ themselves. Consisting of footage featuring Chinese culture, this montage is a crowd-pleaser. It ultimately earns Liu the respect of his Feng Tai peers, who previously despised him for partnering with Wallace, a foreigner. Shadow Magic ends in 1905 when Liu and Ren Jingfeng, the head of Feng Tai studio, together produce the motion picture, Ding Jun Shan (Ding Jun Mountain), based on an episode from the Chinese literary work The Three Kingdoms. Reputed to be China’s first dramatic motion picture, this film starred the well-known Chinese opera singer Tan Xinpei.7

Early Silent Chinese Cinema Supplanting historical accuracy with historicism, the nostalgia film, according to Jameson, does not recapture the ‘real’ past; instead, it recreates the atmosphere and the stylistic features suggestive of the look or ethos of the past.8 As Hu wants to present an artistic visual hybridity created by an East-West convergence, she allows historicism to dictate Shadow Magic’s narrative. Within the storyline, the character of Wallace manifests Hu’s conscious misuse of historical facts in relation to the subject of early silent cinema. It is true that a foreign projectionist/showman – whose name is unknown – visited Beijing in 1902.9 It is factual that during the late 1890s a handful of foreign

      projectionists screened silent motion pictures in China.10 It is also extremely possible that Liu Jinglun and Ren Jingfeng at the Feng Tai Photography Shop created China’s first feature film Ding Jun Shan.11 However, no clear record about how Liu or the Feng Tai photo studio actually learned filmmaking exists.

For this reason, Hu relies on the supposition that the foreigner of 1902, whom she christens Raymond Wallace, may have been the person to teach Liu filmmaking. In this way, Wallace serves as the catalyst leading to the emergence of the Chinese film industry three years later. Hu admits that Shadow Magic’s screenplay was written based on very sparse historical facts, and that little is known about the foreigner who visited Beijing in 1902.12 Through this disclosure, Hu indirectly alludes to her use of fiction – in the form of Wallace – to account for how the Chinese filmmaking industry may have started. For Hu, the partnership between Wallace, the Western artist, and Liu, the Eastern artist, personifies, rather than historically or accurately proves, this East-West artistic convergence. For the filmmaker, what is therefore vital to demonstrate is that a Sino-Western union is responsible for the birth of the hybrid visual art form of Chinese cinema, a birth symbolized by the creation of China’s first motion picture.

Hu’s use of historicism in relation to Wallace is apparent in two film scenes. The first consists of the opening scene. When Wallace enters Beijing for the first time, he is sitting on a carriage loaded to the brim with his film equipment (Figs. 2 & 3). Wallace’s carriage passes through a pai fang

 (memorial archway) clearly reminiscent of the one featured in Donald Mennie’s 1902 photograph of old Bejing’s Hatamen Street (Fig.4). What this scene presents is the arrival of a historically dubious Western character and his filmic technology in old Beijing, whose antiquated look is emblematized by the pai fang. Through this scene, Hu relies on the visual appearance of ‘the past’ rather than on historical factuality, in order to link the origins of early Chinese cinema to the confluence between the East (i.e. old Bejing) and Western influence (i.e. Wallace and his film gear).

The other scene where Hu overtly employs historicism in relation to Wallace occurs midway through the film. In this scene, Wallace shows Liu how to edit film by splicing together fictional early 20th century footage featuring himself. Wallace’s pseudo-archival footage contains the same scratch lines, overexposed monochromatic hues, and frenzied tempo typical of Lumière silent documentary shorts called les actualités, some of which are present throughout the film. Such pseudo-archival footage moreover features Wallace spontaneously engaging in daily life activities, such as picnicking with his family, à la Lumière Brothers (Figs. 5 & 6). This scene is historicist since it blurs actual turn-of-the-century events, which are featured in the shadow magic show’s first and second public screening in Beijing, with Wallace’s montage which was filmed in the 1990s but which imitates the look, themes, and idiosyncrasies of the Lumière les actualités.13

Were Hu interested in historical accuracy, Wallace and Liu would simply be joining together reels of original silent film footage. Through the montage’s usage of pseudo-archival footage that Wallace shot/directed and starred in, Hu reveals that she is more interested in two factors, one affecting the other. First, Hu purposely makes her pseudo-actualités monochromatic, frenzied, and

      scratchy since these traits are associated with silent film; as well, these characteristics constitute the style that audiences, of any generation or culture, expect to view – and are accustomed to viewing – early Western silent cinema. Second, Hu deliberately inserts Wallace into the pseudo-actualités to allude to agency. If Wallace, like Liu, is supposed to be an actor in the creation of the Sino-Western art form of early silent Chinese cinema, Hu must prove that Wallace was an ‘active’ producer of silent films in the West. Therefore Wallace’s appearance in footage that he filmed and directed, and that mimics early Western silent cinema and viewing patterns associated with it, ostensibly attests to his previous involvement in the Western silent film industry.

   Undoubtedly, Shadow Magic gives primary attention to the advent of early silent Chinese cinema. Nonetheless, the film addresses more indirectly an even earlier hybrid visual cultural form created by an East-West interaction: Chinese portraiture photography. Just as Hu privileges artistic license over factuality to illustrate the birth of early Chinese cinema, so does she, in the case of commenting on early Chinese portraiture photography, eclipse history with historicism.

Prior to the induction of photography in Hong Kong and China by Westerners in the later 19th century, one well-known traditional Chinese visual form was ancestral portraits. Painted usually by anonymous artisans, ancestral portraits were used for commemorative purposes or for the rites of ancestral worship.14 When photography became an acceptable substitute for the painted

 portrait at the turn of the century, this new medium appropriated conventions of ancestral portraits such as the static frontal pose and the use of formal attire.15 Taken in the 1860s by an anonymous photographer, the portrait photograph of the wife of Huang Tsantang, governor of Guangdong, alludes to the adaptation of such traditional conventions into the new visual form (Fig. 7).

Within Shadow Magic ,Hu’s historicist display of portraiture photography is present three-quarters into the narrative. Having heard of Wallace and Liu’s success in drawing crowds to their shadow magic show, the Empress Dowager invites them to the Forbidden City to show it to her for her birthday. Upon arrival, the pair realizes that Ci Xi has also invited members of Feng Tai photo studio led by Ren Jingfeng, as well as the cast of Tan Xinpei’s Beijing Opera troupe to display their respective talents. Competing with Wallace and Liu for the Empress’s affections, the Feng Tai photo studio, which specializes in portraiture photography, takes her portrait while she is dressed as the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy or Guanyin (Figs. 8 & 9). This scene stylistically recreates the image of the actual 1903 photograph in which Ci Xi masquerades as Guanyin (Fig. 10). In reality, the Feng Tai Photography Shop never took that photograph. Commissioned in 1903, the well- known photo is attributed to the Empress’ daughter Der Ling, who most probably bestowed upon the Imperial Court’s private photographer Xun Ling the honour of doing the deed.16 The purpose of this scene is not to promote historical factuality but to present historical features reminiscent of the Qing Dynasty (e.g. the figure of the Empress Dowager; the Empress’s famous 1903 photograph), and of portraiture photography (e.g. Ci Xi’s regal direct-to-camera pose). Most importantly, this scene creates a visual hierarchy placing the Western art of cinema above Chinese

      portraiture photography, a hybrid visual art form, and placing both over Beijing Opera, a traditional Chinese visual art form. This hierarchy is apparent since out of the three sets of visual spectacle to which she is treated – ranging from the film montage, to Feng Tai’s photo session, to Lord Tan’s opera piece – the Empress Dowager is ultimately most impressed by cinema. She shows her admiration by applauding only Wallace and Liu, and none of her other invited guests.

When Liu’s apprenticeship with Wallace bears the hybrid art of Chinese cinema, another visual hierarchy appears; this new hierarchy privileges Chinese cinema over Chinese portraiture photog- raphy and Bejing Opera.17 In fact, a combination of the previous scene and the film’s closing scene attests to the latter two visual art forms’ recognition of Chinese cinema’s superiority over them. Just as the Empress Dowager is impressed by Wallace and Liu’s shadow magic show, so are Ren Jingfeng and Tan Xinpei amazed by it. Within the Empress Dowager birthday scene, Ren and Tan’s stunned expressions reveal their astonishment of this technological marvel. Such sentiments also register their sense of defeat within the competition to present the most spectacular visual art form. That both Ren and Tan, in the last scene, participate in the creation of Ding Jun Shan – the former by co-producing it with Liu, the latter by starring in it – is telling, for two reasons. First, the scene confirms Ren and Tan’s perception of Chinese cinema as an art form surpassing their own respective disciplines in innovation and potential. Second, it also illustrates early Chinese cinema’s unabashed appropriation of these two art forms. By utilizing Feng Tai photo studio for

 its background setting, Ding Jun Shan shows that it is recapturing the appearance of Chinese portraiture photography. By employing famed opera actor Tan Xinpei as the film’s star and by filming a story that, as an opera, has met with public acclaim, China’s seminal film, at the textual level, demonstrates that it is paying dramatic homage to Beijing Opera. At the subtextual level, the film more importantly reveals that it is poaching two ‘showbiz’ concepts from the world of traditional opera. The first is that the use of a star performer increases the probability that a production, be it opera or film, will draw audiences. The second is that the operatic or filmic adaptation of a well-known story (such as the canonical work The Three Kingdoms) may increase the chances that spectators would pay to see the artistic production.

Concrete and Symbolical Uses of Set Design Hu does not limit her use of historicism to historically fictional references to cinema and photography. In concrete and symbolical ways, Hu conveys cross-cultural visual hybridity. To do so, she makes her cinematic mise-en-scène reveal a past that lucidly merges Western and Eastern motifs.

One example of a concrete visual form blending East and West is the Feng Tai Photographic Shop’s backdrop, a prop historically used as background filler within portraiture photographs.18 Were Hu a true historian, the Feng Tai photo studio could have used a backdrop clearly suggestive of Chinese traditionalism. C.H. Graves’ 1902 photograph of a Manchu woman and her servant provides one type of a traditional Chinese backdrop, a lattice frame door (Fig. 11). Conversely the

      photo shop could have employed a ‘sideprop’ such as a column or balustrade. While these Western-style architectural props were typically employed in portrait photographs of Westerners, they did, nonetheless, seep into some works by Chinese photographers. For instance, late 19th century Cantonese photographer Pun Lun includes a Western-style column in his portrait photo of a Chinese artist (Fig. 12).

In the long run, Hu chooses a backdrop that fuses ambiguous, uncertain allusions to modern Western and traditional Chinese art, rather than to actual, historically precise forms of either culture’s aesthetic. This prop appears in the scene where Ling, Liu’s love interest, sits for a portrait photograph at the Feng Tai photo studio (Figs. 13 & 14). Vaguely hinting at Chinese traditionalism through its use of black and white, the backdrop, shaped like a threshold, pays loose homage to Western modernity through an abstract geometrical shape. Commenting on Hu’s desire for an East-West mise-en-scène, Hou Yi, Shadow Magic’s prop master, points to the filmmaker’s historicist inclinations:

She [Ann Hu] would give us back something that totally shocked us [set designers, prop masters]. We could see traces of our past in her designs but she broke away from our past. As we completed the first few props and sets that were made per the director’s instruction, we saw the West and East coming together in front of our own eyes.19

 The Feng Tai backdrop represents a concrete object through which Hu conveys Sino-Western hybridity in Shadow Magic; in contrast, the film’s symbolic interplay between the colours red and blue metaphorically evokes this cross-cultural connection. Attributing blue to the ocean civilization of the West and red to China’s earth civilization, Hu admits to juxtaposing the two colours throughout her entire narrative.20 Hu clearly displays the two hues’ coexistence in the same scene where Wallace and Liu show silent cinema to the Chinese public for the first time. The moment that Wallace winds up his film projector, a blue shaft of light, representative of Western civilization, beams from the mouth of a European clown mask, whose purpose is to conceal the projector, the source of the shadow magic show, from the spectators (Figs. 15 & 16).21 Beaming over the heads of mesmerized Chinese spectators, this blue light indicative of Western Enlightenment hits the screen and releases an Occidental world oceans away (Figs. 17-23). To strengthen the visual association of the West to the colour blue, Liu also plays Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube on a Victrola phonograph during the screening.

Thus, the blueness of the moving cinematic images, in combination with Austrian waltz music redolent of beautiful blue waters, contrasts with the redness analogous to old Bejing, a redness shown midway through the scene. When the film projector breaks down, Liu dashes out of the movie theater in search of a mirror to help fix the problem (Fig. 24). As Liu runs outside, a red camera filter intensifies the earth tones inherent in old Bejing’s dusty, unpaved roads and market district. When Liu re-enters the movie theater, the film regains its blue demeanor. Through the coupling of blue and red in this scene, Hu, via colour, allegorizes the coming together of Eastern

      and Western civilizations. The East symbolically consists of Bejing’s earthy outdoor environment (and more indirectly of the sunburned Chinese patrons within the cinema), while the West symbolically incarnates the moving blue images (and more indirectly the music serenading Europe’s famed river).

:  - 

Hybrid Meta-film Reminiscing about Shadow Magic’s East-West co-production, American producer Sandra Schulberg says:

I feel not only that our experience of making the movie informed the film subliminally – in and out of the sprocket holes in ways you cannot put your finger on – but somehow the chemistry of the co-production infiltrated the chemistry of the film itself…and in this case, the story itself is about the fusion of two cultures.22

To deal with Shadow Magic as a hybrid visual form created by a Sino-Western collaboration, this section focuses on the film’s function as a hybrid meta-film. According to theorist Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernism signals the emergence of pluralistic meta-narratives that promote diverse voices.23 I hesitate to limit Shadow Magic to the categorization of a postmodern film. Postmodern

 films (e.g. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), Milos Forman’s Ragtime (1981) often present historically fictional styles as historically accurate truths, in order to reference viewers’ inability to view history outside of the present tense. In contrast, Shadow Magic privileges historicism over historical factu- ality in order to convey an East-West hybridity to its audience, rather than to mock this crowd. Substituting the concept meta-narrative with the term meta-film and the multicultural modifier pluralistic with the adjective hybrid, I, however, propose that Shadow Magic is a hybrid meta-film replacing a homogeneous Eurocentric or Sinocentric narrative voice with a Sino-Western one.

Shadow Magic achieves cross-cultural narrative voice since it emerges from an impressive East- West co-production made up of production companies from China, Taiwan, the United States, and Germany.24 According to Hu, the film ultimately fulfills the interests of all the production teams involved.25 Some theorists may assume that this refers to the film’s perpetuation of a multinational narrative voice. Nevertheless, the fact that the principal producers, cast, and crew are either Chinese or Caucasian impels me to perceive the film’s cinematic voice as one that is more generalized. As a result, I view this voice as a merger between Chinese and Western perspec- tives. This hybrid meta-filmic narrative voice informs the film visually by infusing elements of the behind-the-scenes East-West collaboration into Liu and Wallace’s on-screen East-West partnership. I will focus on two of such elements, which Schulberg labels ‘chemistry’: phantas- magoria and the cast and crew cross-cultural dynamics. Within the latter category, I specifically examine the themes of language barrier and filmmaking language’s universality.

     

Phantasmagoria Possessing a hybrid narrative voice, Shadow Magic qua meta-film is not simply a film about a film. It is a meta-film about, among other things, phantasmagoria. This term refers to the appearance of reality that tricks the visual sense through technological manipulation.26 Dealing with Liu and Wallace’s creation of cinematic phantasmagoria, Shadow Magic reflects its own Sino-Western production crew’s use of optical illusion to tell a story.27

Paraphrasing Marx, Susan Buck-Morss theorizes that the term phantasmagoria describes “the world of commodities, that in their mere visible presence, conceal every trace of the labour that produced them. They veil the production process and encourage their beholders to identify with subjective fantasies and dreams.”28 Such a definition exemplifies the purpose of Wallace and Liu’s moving picture show. In the scene where they screen their first shadow magic show before a Chinese crowd, Wallace and Liu, like all other magicians, present an optical illusion (i.e. the fantasy that still images can move on a screen). Like all other illusionists, this Sino-Western team conceals the labour of its trade. By hiding the film projector behind the European clown mask, they not only conceal the source of the moving images but also the amount of work needed to produce the effect. For instance, Wallace has to wind manually the film projector to advance the film reel. For this reason, when the film projector’s light source breaks down, Liu, in an attempt not to lose the spectators’ suspension of disbelief, refrains from informing them of the technical problem. Instead, Liu dashes out of the theater and returns with a mirror to generate a light

 source for the projector’s lens. Passing sunlight from the mirror into the film projector, Wallace and Liu are able to complete the rest of their magic show.

Marx’s description of phantasmagoria simultaneously manifests the objective of Shadow Magic’s production crew. Within the same scene, Hu’s Sino-Western cinematographic and editing personnel creates the optical illusion that Liu’s mirror can reflect an intense amount of sunlight, which, in fact, is not the case. For instance, Hu’s editors group a shot of the mirror with shots of light that bounces from the projector to the film screen but that, in reality, is created by a different light source. Nonetheless, the linking of such shots produces the illusion that Liu’s mirror can indeed produce much light (Figs. 25-27).

That the on-screen use of phantasmagoria mirrors the off-screen use of optical illusion (and vice versa) is significant since, in each case, the creation of ‘movie magic’ depends on the cooperation between Western and Chinese individuals. Within the scene, Wallace’s expertise alone is not enough to revive the projector. Liu’s skills are therefore needed. For this reason, the film screening would be unable to resume without a combination of Liu’s ingenuous use of optics and Wallace’s dexterity in film projection. In similar manner, this scene’s mirror-as-light-source illusion would be unable to work without Hu’s directorial input (and extensive knowledge in early 20th century film projections), and the skills of American cinematographer Nancy Schreiber and editors John Gilroy and Keith Reamer.

     

   - 

The Language Barrier Made up of a Sino-Western cast and crew, Shadow Magic was destined during production to face one problem inevitable with any collaboration between members of two different cultural groups: a linguistic barrier. What however makes the hybrid meta-filmic aspect of Shadow Magic particularly intriguing is that Hu consciously did not conceal any cross-cultural communicational problems arising amongst cast members; rather, she incorporated such behind-the-scenes problems into the film.

For instance, during the film shoot in Bejing, British actor Jared Harris and Mainland Chinese actor Xia Yu, the actors playing Wallace and Liu respectively, initially faced problems conversing with each other about their characters’ relationship. While the former did not speak any Mandarin, the latter spoke broken English. Nonetheless, the two actors began to get their points across to each other by improvising.29 Ultimately Hu encouraged the two actors to give their language problem to their roles; for this reason, they improvised most of their on-screen lines. Through this decision, Hu aimed to show, within the film, that members of two different cultures can sustain a harmonious partnership despite the language barrier. More importantly, Hu wanted her two principal actors’ actual off-screen experience in creating and maintaining a cross-cultural dialogue to inform the way that they presented their characters’ on-screen friendship.

      Rather than privilege Chinese culture over Western culture, or vice versa, filmmaking (i.e. the purely technical skills involved in film production) is inherently transcultural and defies all language barriers. Recalling her time spent at the Beijing Film Studio, Shadow Magic’s main shooting location, Sandra Schulberg notes:

When I went to the Studio, I immediately felt at home. As we went from department to department, I realized once again that movies are a completely universal medium. That was extremely reassuring as I couldn’t understand a word that anyone was saying.30

In all probability, Hu must have been aware of Schulberg’s sentiment. The filmmaker must have also known that what helped her two crews – one being American, the other being Chinese – overcome their linguistic and cultural differences was a mutual familiarity with and affinity for the art and craft of filmmaking. For this reason, I argue that Hu reinforced Shadow Magic’s function as a hybrid meta-film by integrating, into the film’s storyline, Schulberg’s off-screen notion that a shared understanding of and appreciation for film production can function as a point of familiarity between members of two different cultures. The same scene where Liu helps Wallace fix the broken film projector manifests this self-reflexive theme. When Liu returns to the projector room with a mirror in his hand, he grabs the film projector from Wallace and brings it closer to the window. At first, Wallace is surprised and demands to know what Liu is doing. Liu, possessing a limited English vocabulary, can only verbally express his action with a feeble

     

“help…help you.”However, as soon as Liu bounces sunlight from the mirror into the projector’s lens, Wallace instinctively comprehends that Liu is providing a new light source for the film projector and consequently begins to help him.

:  -  Seen only or mainly in the West, works by contemporary Chinese artists exist in a ‘non-space.’31 As the Western public is generally ignorant of Chinese culture, these non-spatial works create a discourse that does not acquire any specific and clear meaning in the West, much less in China.32 In contrast, Shadow Magic posits the possibility of its existence in the third space, since Hu deliberately sets out to target both mainland Chinese and Western audiences and to promote relatively pristine artistic messages. In this last section, I explore how the film is for a hybrid culture made up of spectators from the East and West. First I illustrate the likely reasons for the film’s success in both the West and the Far East, despite Hu’s conscious use of Chinese exotica. Second, I briefly reflect on probable motives behind Hu’s creations of Shadow Magic as art in the third space.

Cross-Cultural Film Festival Success Shadow Magic has met with great critical success in Asia. In the year 2000, the film won China’s Golden Rooster and Hua Biao Awards for Best Picture, as well as the Taiwan Film Festival’s Best Screenplay Prize. That the film has been shown, over the last two years, at the prestigious Sundance

 and Toronto Film Festivals, as well as at film festivals in Boston, Seattle, Deauville, and Moscow, is also evidence to its successful widespread distribution in the Western film festival circuit. Certainly Shadow Magic’s many official accolades cannot prove that the film has been successful with the general, movie-going public in mainland China and Taiwan. Nevertheless, the film’s critical acclamation may point to the fact that it has been warmly received at least by Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese film critics, film scholars, and/or motion picture industry members – who are all the probable judges/attendees at film competitions and film festivals.

Shadow Magic’s critical success in Asia represents an interesting study if we consider that Hu, like many other overseas Chinese artists, indulges in what Gao Minglu calls ‘post-Orientalism.’33 Like her contemporaries, Hu is aware that presenting visually exotic elements of Chinese culture will make her film more interesting and lucrative to Western distribution markets, media, and audiences. Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and Ju Dou (1990), two films by Mainland Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, have been criticized by a few Chinese critics for their inaccurate or exaggerated depiction of Chinese culture.34 Although these films are criticized for their free-flow of Oriental exoticism by Chinese theorists, they are the ones that ironically garner critical acclaim in the West.35

How is it that Shadow Magic, given its unabashed promotion of post-Orientalist exotica, was so successful in both Western and Chinese film festivals? Even though certain overseas Chinese artists rely on post-orientalism to survive in the Western art scene, Hou theorizes that it is still possible

     

for them to challenge the Western patterns of viewing the Orient.36 The challenge rests in finding ways to challenge. The secret behind Shadow Magic’s cross-cultural success is that Hu deals with the challenge in two concurrent ways: through the initial exoticization of both Chinese and Western cultures and through the consequent resolution of both cultures’ Otherness with a sense of commonality between the two.

Cross-Cultural Exotica & Commonality Where Hu overtly exoticizes Chinese culture is in her criteria for casting the roles of the Shadow Magic show’s Chinese patrons. During pre-production, Hu consciously hired Chinese people who exuded ‘the past’ on their faces; who, in other words, were reminiscent of turn-of-the-century Qing China. In retrospect, Hu confesses, “It was very hard to find people who still bear that old look, that primitive look, not be too smart, not too shrewd. There’s got to be this old traditional flavour bearing on their face.”37 Hu’s vision that dwellers of Beijing past are unsophisticated, naïve ‘city bumpkins’ is Orientally exotic since such individuals – if they ever existed – are unlike the urbane cynical, sly residents of Beijing present, or of any contemporary Western metropolis.

While Hu initially equates early 20th century Chinese public with ignorant folk, she, at the same time, presents Westerners in an equally unflattering light. More precisely, Hu introduces them as the uncouth Other, instead of the more conventional other way around. Two examples reinforce

 this hypothesis. The first consists of the scene where the Chinese public, for the second time, observes the Westerners onscreen, and, in such a case, casts an exotic gaze onto the Western Other. Rather than be impressed by the lifestyle or mannerisms of the ‘foreigners,’ the Chinese spectators’ first impressions are that they are coarse. A Chinese cook criticizes Westerners on their coarse food, as he watches the Lumière actualité No 88: Repas de bébé (1898), in which a Caucasian child suckles on a large piece of bread (Fig. 28). Boasting about his more civil relation to food, he explains that, for a meal, he cuts his carrots so finely that “they melt on your tongue.”Western protagonist Wallace embodies the second example of Hu’s uncouth Western Other. Rather than be a snobbish, upper class, prim and proper English gentleman, Wallace is an unshaven, rugged, working class Cockney entrepreneur, whose idea of sealing a business deal is spitting into his hand prior to shaking hands. By exoticizing both the Chinese and Western characters in her film, Hu initially projects a cross-cultural Other to the Western and Chinese spectator’s eye.38 By painting 19th century people of both cultures as initially exotic to a contemporary East-West audience, Hu avoids privileging one culture’s past as socially superior to that of the other. In this way, she avoids offending spectators’ of either group.

Nonetheless, we must bear in mind that the key word is ‘initial.’Although Hu initially exoticizes both Westerners and the Chinese in her film, she ultimately replaces any aura of Otherness with cross-cultural commonality. In the same scene cited above, the Chinese crowd initially appears exotically primitive for being enthralled by motion picture, a technology taken for granted in today’s world. Over the course of the scene, these same spectators gradually begin to project the

      familiar traits of any civilized community, such as familial respect and a sense of humour. The shot of a Chinese female spectator’s approval of the on-screen Western parents’ affection to their child indirectly points to the universal trait of family values. Also, a few Chinese moviegoers’ glee over the silliness of the Lumière actualité No. 101 – Bataille de neige (1897), which focuses on an on-screen snowball fight, subtly refers to the universal understanding of situational comedy. Although the Chinese patrons initially view the on-screen Westerners as alien, they eventually see, within the same scene, some similarities between the two cultures. Alluding to the common trait of family values, another Chinese female who witnesses the Western parents feed their child on celluloid, expresses her surprise over the fact that Occidental soldiers have families. Her realization of a commonality between Westerners and herself positions Westerners, vis-à-vis the Chinese, in the role of familiar allies rather than in that of unfamiliar enemies.

Hu’s Personal Motivation Although Hu introduces Wallace as a boorish and unrefined character, she progressively reveals him to be a nice guy. Upon accepting Liu as his apprentice, Wallace, throughout the film, regards Liu as his equal and friend, rather than as an inferior (Figs. 29 & 30). Although the Western- mentor-Chinese-apprentice relationship is based on one actual way that China’s early portraiture photographers learned their craft, what makes Wallace and Liu’s relationship unusual is its anti- hierarchical nature.39 Historically the Western mentor’s tendency to refer to his Chinese apprentice

 as ‘boy’ or ‘assistant’ illustrated the power dynamics positioning the Westerner in the dominant role; the Chinese in the secondary and/or subservient one.40 Nevertheless, Hu purposely forgoes a more historically common master-servant relationship between Wallace qua mentor and Liu qua apprentice since she equates it with imperialism: “You want the relationship to build on equal basis instead of one superior, one inferior, which had been a colonial civilization kind of thing. So I wanted to present a new kind of relationship.”41 Hu most clearly manifests this new relationship in the scene where Wallace hires Liu. When Wallace tells Liu to address him as ‘Wallace,’ Liu, out of respect, calls him ‘Master Raymond.’ However, Wallace again insists that Liu refer to him simply by his first name.

Wallace and Liu’s non-hierarchical relationship thematically showcases the first two possible reasons for Hu’s support for a cultural strategy about, for, and by a hybrid visual artwork (i.e. film) forging an East-West interaction. First, Hu, as an overseas Chinese artist, sees it as more productive to go beyond the idea of Orientalism. In this case, her artistic position contrasts with that of many Chinese intellectuals in the mainland, who according to Geremie Barmé, still relish equating themselves with victims of the East qua Inferior/West qua Superior divide.42 Shadow Magic anchors Wallace and Liu’s anti-imperialistic relationship to the beginning of the 20th century. Nonetheless, the film anachronistically exemplifies the type of amicable cross-cultural dialogue that Hu wishes her Chinese and Western audiences to have with one another in the 21st century. For Hu, this desired dialogue would resonate with the cross-cultural dynamics that, in Shadow Magic, sparks the beginning of filmmaking in China.

     

Second, Hu wishes her artwork to show the inevitability of a transcultural interaction between China and the West in the present age of globalization. As a result of this indisputability, both cultures must, like Wallace and Liu, learn to get along. The way to such harmony is by going beyond each other’s Otherness to see commonality between the two worlds. Although somewhat idealistic, this is a message that either one of Hu’s primary target audience – Westerners and Chinese – would view positively. Wallace’s anti-colonial attitude towards Liu would resonate well with politically correct Western Caucasian crowds. Well aware of their historically based white privilege, such audience members would find it refreshing to see a turn-of-the-century white person depicted as someone other than imperialistic and exploitative by a Chinese filmmaker. Albeit historically inaccurate, Wallace’s anti-racist character would be someone with whom racially conscious, white movie crowds of today’s increasingly multicultural Western cities worldwide could identify. The film’s espousal of an anti-imperialistic, peaceful cross-cultural relationship would also resonate well in China. Since at least the 19th century, China has been sensitive about being seen as inferior to the West or about being bullied by Western nations.43

Two vital questions that I have yet to answer but that I may explore in a future study are the following: What does the general public in China and the West think about Shado w Magic ? What do Mainland Chinese and Western artists think of Hu’s endorsement of a cultural strategy about,

 for, and by a hybrid visual artwork involving a Sino-Western convergence, collaboration, and crowd? Regardless of whatever criticism or praise these individuals may lather over Hu and Shadow Magic, it is important to reflect on the third, if not last, reason for Hu’s personal motiva- tion to create art in the third space. Perhaps Hu promotes artistic hybridity because it speaks to her own experienced reality as a Chinese artist living in the West. Perhaps for Hu, Shadow Magic, despite its abundance of historical inaccuracies and bouts of idealism teetering on naiveté, speaks to the possibility for visual production by hua qiao artists living in this in-between space.

Endnotes: 1 Hou Hanru & Gao Minglu, “Strategies of Survival in the Third Space: A Conversation on the Situation of Overseas Chinese Artists in the 1990s,” in Inside/Out New Chinese Art (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 184. 2 Production Notes for Shadow Magic (2001), Sony Pictures Classic, November 28, 2001, . 3 Hou Hanru & Gao Minglu, “Strategies of Survival” p. 183. 4 Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 76. 5 At this time, Beijing is under the surveillance of allied forces made up of over a dozen nations, including England, who suppressed the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion. See Face of China as Seen By Photographers and Travelers: 1860-1912 (The) (New York: Aperture Books, 1978), p. 149; Patricia Ebrey, “Manchu and Imperialism,” The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 255. 6 Chris Berry, “Chronology,” Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1991), p. 203; Jay Leyda, Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Cambridge (Mass.): The MIT Press, 1972) p.10; Régis Bergeron, Le cinéma chinois: 1905-1949 (I) (Lausanne: Alfred Eibel, 1977), p. 33. 7 Leyda, Dianying, p. 6.; Bergeron, Le cinéma chinois, p. 33. 8 Jameson, “Postmodernism,” p. 75. 9 “Peking saw its first films in January 1902. ‘A foreigner’ hired Fu Sho Hall in the ‘Chinese City’s’ theater district, and showed a program that sounded like the American Mutoscope catalog of 1897: a beautiful woman turning her head to us and smiling, a Negro eating watermelon, a bicycle race, a horse scaling a wall and climbing to a roof.” Leyda, Dianying, p. 7. 10 See Poshek Fu, “Selling Fantasies at War: Production and Promotion Practices of the Shanghai Cinema, 1937-1941” in Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945 (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series #103, 1999), p. 187; Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 6; and Zhen Zhang, “Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage: ‘Laborer’s Love’ and the Question of Early Chinese Cinema” in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 32. 11 Shadow Magic, both in its storyline and Production Notes (2001), specifically gives photographer Liu Jinglun and Feng Tai manager Ren Jingfeng credit for being Ding Jun Shan’s actual creators. Considering that Hu extensively researched the early period of Chinese film history prior to filming Shadow Magic, I value her insight. At the same time, I am still wary of Hu’s theory since a number of influential Chinese film scholars (i.e. Berry (1991), Zhang (1999), Clark (1984), Bergeron (1977), and Leyda (1972)) have not mentioned by name the film’s makers. Within this essay, I therefore want to treat Hu’s theory that Liu and Ren were the creators of China’s first film, as a very good possibility rather than absolute fact. 12 Director’s Commentary provided by Ann Hu (2001), Shadow Magic DVD Special Features, Sony Picture Classics. 13 This particular sequence is reminiscent of the Lumière Brothers’ actualité No. 88 – Repas d’un bébé (1898) which I discuss on pages 21 and 22. 14 Roberta Wue, Picturing Hong Kong: Photography 1855-1910 (New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1997), p. 38. 15 Ibid., p. 38. 16 For additional information on Xun Ling, see Hu Zhichuan and Chen Shen (compilers), A Collection of Pictures of Early Period Chinese Photography (1840-1919) (Beijing: The China Photography Publishing House, 1987), pp. 78-81. 17 In general, the narrative conveys this new hierarchy by the fact that Liu, who eventually finds his true calling as a filmmaker, allows himself to be disowned by the Feng Tai photo studio and to form a partnership with Wallace. 18 For an elaborate account of the types of props used in Chinese portraiture photography, see Wue, Picturing Hong Kong,p.39. 19 Production Notes for Shadow Magic (2001). 20 Director’s Commentary provided by Ann Hu (2001). 21 The clown’s face becomes a visual pun signifying a foreigner’s face, during the post-screening conversation amongst Liu and a few patrons. Their verbal exchange is rich in double meaning: Man A: How did you get those foreigners [double entendre: Westerners on the screen/ Wallace ] to come here? Liu: Behind that funny face [double entendre: clown’s face/Wallace] is a magic lens. When we shine light through it, another world [i.e. the West] is revealed. 22 Production Notes for Shadow Magic (2001). 23 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. xxiv. 24 From Asia, production teams include China’s Beijing Film Studios and China Film, as well as Taiwan’s Central Motion Picture Corporation. In the West, C & A Productions, Schulberg Productions, and Post-Production Playground comprise the American production units, while Road Movies Vierte Produktionen, founded by acclaimed filmmaker Wim Wenders, is Germany’s production contribution.

 Incidentally Shadow Magic is the first official China-Taiwan co-production in film history. 25 Director’s Commentary provided by Ann Hu (2001). 26 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October. 62. Fall (1992). p. 22. 27 Shadow Magic’ s narrative does not only reflect the Sino-Western production crew’s use of visuals to tell a story. Within the narrative, Hu also makes use of a cross-cultural musical soundtrack created by a Sino-Western partnership (i.e. the collaboration between Chinese composer Zhang Lida and U.S.-based Canadian music consultant Howard Shore). What makes this musical soundtrack particularly interesting is that it is reminiscent of the kind heard in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Italian film C inema Paradiso (1988). Cinema Paradiso, like S hadow Magic, is a meta-film since it focuses on a filmmaker, as well as on a film projectionist working in a movie theater. Therefore I hypothesize that S hadow Magic’ s ‘meta-soundtrack’ is music associated with music for films about the making and projection of films. 28 Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” p. 25. 29 Director’s Commentary provided by Ann Hu (2001). 30 Production Notes for Shadow Magic (2001). 31 Francesca Dal Lago, “Chinese Art at the Venice Biennale: The Virtual Reality of Chinese Contemporary Art,” in Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium, ed. John Clark (Hong Kong: ChineseArt.com, 1998-99) p. 158. 32 Ibid., p. 158. 33 Hou Hanru and Gao Minglu, “Strategies of Survival,” p. 184. 34 See Jane Ying Zha, “Excerpts from Lore Segal, Red Lantern, and Exoticism.” Public Culture . 5. (1993). pp. 333-7; and Dai Qing, “Raised Eyebrows for Raise the Red Lantern,” Public Culture, 5 (1993), pp. 329-32. 35 Raise the Red Lantern, for instance, went so far as to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film in the 1993 Academy Awards. See Yuejin Wang, “The Cinematic Other and the Cultural Self? Decentering the Cultural Identity on Cinema.” Wide Angle 1 1(2):1989. p. 36. 36 Hou Hanru and Gao Minglu, “Strategies of Survival,” p. 185. 37 Director’s Commentary provided by Ann Hu (2001). 38 My concept of a cross-cultural Other to a Western and Chinese spectator’s eye derives from Yuejin Wang’s concept of the Cultural Other. See Wang, “The Cinematic Other,” p. 35. According to Wang, Chinese films by Chinese filmmakers which promote oriental exoticism are not simply catering to Western audiences. To average, urban Chinese city dwellers, primitive Chinese peasants who inhabit the barren landscapes of Chen Kaige’s The Yellow Earth (1984) and the snowy mountainous regions of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Horse Thief (1985) are as alien and Other-looking as they presumably appear to a Western eye. As he notes: “On the one hand, there’s clearly an awareness of the Western Other with its overwhelming power and attraction and its material influence and opulence which chart a future that China may follow. On the other hand, the Chinese sensibility is also seeking in itself a more primitive Other within its own geographical realm…,” p. 35. However, Wang’s theory of a Chinese Cultural Other for the Western and Chinese eye acquires new meaning in relation to Shadow Magic. The reason is that Hu presents the film’s turn-of-the-century Chinese and Western people as exotic characters for a contemporary Chinese and Western crowd. 39 The other two ways were by learning the trade abroad and by learning through schools for Chinese students set up by Western missionaries. See Wue, Picturing Hong Kong , p. 34. 40 Ibid., p. 34 41 Director’s Commentary provided by Ann Hu (2001). 42 Geremie Barmé, In the Red on Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 263. 43 Ibid p. 255; pp. 267-269.

ILLUSTRATIONS I

Figs. 1-3, 5-6, 8-9, 13-14, 15-30: Ann Hu, film stills from Shadow Magic, 2001, colour film in 35mm., 119 minutes. Fig. 4: Donald Mennie, Hatamen Street, Bejing, photograph, c. 1902. Fig. 7: Anonymous, Portrait of the Wife of Huang Tsantang, photograph, 1862. Fig. 10: Anonymous, Portrait of the Empress Dowager, photograph, 1903. Fig. 11: C. H. Graves, Portrait of a Manchu woman with Servant, photograph, 1902. Fig. 12: Pun Lun, Chinese Artist, photograph, c. 1870s-80s.

    

  

Song Dong, Shot in the Face, 2000, video projection. Installation view, Earl Lu Gallery, La Salle SIA College of the Arts, Singapore.

Huangfu: You have dealt with many different subjects in your artwork. Please describe your work.

Song Dong: Touching My Father (1998) and Wate r Diary (1995 - present) are two works that have, in some ways, changed my attitude towards life. As you know, in China the relationship between father and son is not that simple. This relationship not only contains a bloodline connection, it is also coloured by the traditional idea of father as the emperor and son as the subject of that feudal ruler. When I was small, I admired my father a great deal. He meant many things to me. It seemed to me that he could do anything. In my mind he was a god. I had the greatest admiration for him but at the same time I feared him. When I was a teenager the distance between us increased. I know that is called daigou or the generation gap. I felt everything I did was right. I felt his thinking was too traditional. I did not like to be restrained by anyone either mentally or physically. I was sticking to my own way of doing things.

As time goes by and I grow older I have begun to understand the importance of emotional bonds between family members. I think about my parents and family members. I desire to touch my father but in Chinese custom this is very difficult for me to do. For Touching My Father, I deployed the medium of video to realize this. At the beginning, my father did not agree with this idea. Later on, he allowed me to do this purely out of support for my art practice. When I projected ‘my hand’ or video image onto his body, he looked at it and followed the video image of my hand. He was quiet and said nothing. I kept touching my father in this way and expressed my feelings, in a way that could not be expressed in language. We never talked about this but knew we were closer then before. We felt the love from each other. Since then our relationship has been different. This work has changed my life. Water Diary is a work that has been part of my life since 1995. It involves using a brush dipped in water to write my diary on a stone. This year is the seventh year. This stone is the only thing that belongs to me apart from my body. I can write anything without hesitation.

 Song Dong, Shot in the Face, 2000, video projection. Installation view, Earl Lu Gallery, La Salle SIA College of the Arts, Singapore.

Huangfu: You have explored many different media in your artwork, such as installation, performance art, video, drawing, etc. Could you tell me how you balance them?

Song Dong: I have thought a lot about how people express themselves. For example, when a person gets angry he might say a few bad words unconsciously. This is a way to release anger. But this might not release enough anger. He might throw or break things or he might bang his fist on the table. This is a language-transferring process of the verbal to the physical language since verbal expression has its limits. People have been trying to express themselves in many different ways since time began.

It is the same in art. When I felt that the medium of painting could not express what I wanted to, I tried to find other ways to express my ideas. I desire to express what I feel from my heart and am always searching for a more relevant medium to express that. Contemporary art has provided me with this open environment to deploy artistic language and a free space to imagine. There are many possibilities for me to create and use different media.

Huangfu: In many of your works, the subject matter relates to Beijing. Your work is concerned with the general situation around you.

Song Dong: I feel that ‘attitude’ is a very important element in contemporary art. This includes an attitude towards everyday life and an attitude towards art in general. You might see one of my works in one format and then one in another. Superficially, they look very different but when you link the works together a thread appears. This thread is like a person’s taste, which always involves opinions. Many of my friends have suggested that I produce one type of work only. They believe that this will let the world know me. I know my friends have good intentions with these suggestions but I choose to keep my own ‘prejudices.’ I felt that there are people fond of different things depending on individual enjoyment in different areas. This individual love is subconsciously

 expressed. When I am making art, I use many methods to make connections with particular concerns. My work expresses concern about Beijing because I live there.

Huangfu: Do you think concern about the living situation around you is the same as concern about your own life experience?

Song Dong: When I was in school, my teacher always encouraged me to experience life. What he was suggesting was to go and experience situations not necessarily in my immediate environment. For example, since I had not been to Xinjiang, my teacher wanted me to go and experience and paint the life of the Xinjiang people. You might be able to see yourself through other people’s life but the real expression is through your own life experience. That is the most relevant. You have to experience your own life deeply.

Huangfu: Water Diary is a unique series in your work. It’s experience and deconstruction of life is expressed through Di Shui Mo Zhen [slow water rubbing the needle].

Song Dong: I think that because everyone has different sensibilities and ways of expression are very different. I always like to experiment with new ways of expressing myself. These forms of expression have unique characteristics of personal and non-commercial language. Water Diary not only acts as a performance piece but also emphasizes the process and experience of its production. The ideas in a multi-media artwork are presented through many elements and the artist relies on the representation of objects, space, sound, touching, taste, time, temperature, experience and emotion. However, if a work is to be presented solely by video and photography, it will definitely lose some of its own power of language.

Huangfu: This kind of documentation is the recording of the moment rather then the reality of the moment.

Song Dong: Yes. That is why I felt this kind of art has a very little opportunity to be presented to the audience. Even when you present the work to an audience it is, by definition, not the actual work. I think that is why there are so many photographic artists around at the moment. The photographic medium does very little damage to the original idea.

Huangfu: During our conversation I felt that you seem to really value your role as a teacher. When you graduated from the Art Academy you started teaching at a high school in Beijing. You have held this teaching position for quite a long time. You are an artist as well as teacher. How do you balance these two roles and how is your relationship with the students? Does this experience have any effect on your art production?

Song Dong: I like teaching as a career. When I was a student I didn’t meet a teacher like me. I always wondered what I would have turned out to be if I had met a teacher like me.

It is very difficult to exhibit contemporary art in China at the moment. There are many restrictions on exhibition spaces, particularly in relation to presenting contemporary art. I wonder if there would be much of an audience if the restrictions were lifted and artists were allowed to show all kinds of contemporary art work? Would this audience understand contemporary art and what artists are trying to express? At the moment, there are many people who scoff at ‘performance art.’ In fact, they do not understand what performance art is. Professional artists always laugh at the dismissal of performance art. I feel this problem is related to education. It seems like a small issue but, in fact, it is a big one. The high school students who I teach were all born in the 1980s. In ten years time they will be the audience for contemporary art.

 The education system in China is still conducted in a relatively traditional way. I have a teaching position and do not want to waste the opportunity to influence my students’ way of thinking. I always take some of the art works produced by my friends and works that I feel have something interesting to offer and bring them to the class to show my students. Communication with students of this age is important to me. Of course, they do not really understand some of the art works that I show them but this does not discourage me. I think this first exposure to contemporary art evokes a curiosity and interest. At least they know that this kind of art is being produced in the world.

During more then ten years of teaching I have built very deep emotional ties with my students. On one hand, the students and I communicate like friends. On the other hand, I feel that the students are my teachers too because they are full of youthfulness. It seems I am always growing old but they never change. I teach students who are all the same age. The group changes every three years.

This job gives me an advantage in my art practice, since I do not have to do things I don’t like for the sake of survival. Teaching does not carry a very high salary but it is enough for my everyday living. This is enough for me. I do not need to think too hard about becoming famous. In addition, I have always taken on an attitude of the amateur artist.

Huangfu: Is this your standpoint?

Song Dong: When artists need to earn a living from their artwork in order to survive, it means their standard of living is based on their art production. When these artists express themselves in their art, there is something else at work since they may not say what they want to. If one wants to become a career artist this issue is a very difficult one to avoid.

Huangfu: Is this the current situation in Beijing artistic circles?

Song Dong: I like to participate in the creation of art from an amateur’s standpoint. If I lost my job, I would find another rather then use my art production to satisfy my basic needs in life. Even now, I sometimes do design jobs for magazines or advertising companies. This does not require a lot of my energy. I am not against the idea of art becoming a commodity but I do not like the idea of art becoming a commodity.

Huangfu: Many of your works, such as Water Diary, relate to your body and use bodily acts. Why?

So ng Dong: There is a quite simple reason for this. When I was child my family was quite poor. I wanted to practice calligraphy but the family had little paper so my father encouraged me to use water and write on stone. With calligraphy, my focus is not on the structure of the character or on the brush. Rather, I see it like a game. After I finish writing the character, the water slowly evaporates and the character disappears. To me, this game is better then practicing calligraphy, especially during the summer when the stones are very hot and the written text disappears very quickly. I used to repeat the action again and again. It is really fun.

Huang fu: Do you write on the floor?

Song Dong: Sometimes I write on a floor, sometimes I write on a brick, sometimes I even write on a stone normally used for pressing preserved vegetables. This relates to a childhood memory. I had a habit of writing a daily diary. But later on I heard from my classmates that some students might peek into this diary and the teacher might read it out loud. Also, I saw on a TV drama series that a

 criminal was discovered and caught by the police as a result of his diary. A diary should be a place where you can say things you really want to say. Later on, I discovered that a diary was not private reading material. It had the potential of being read by others. When you discover this, there is always the thought that others might read it someday. Since considering this, I stopped writing a traditional diary. This took place when I was child.

Sometimes when I was feeling sad, happy or disgusted by something that I did not want to tell other people, I asked myself: what should I do? In 1995, I started writing on water. It certainly connects my childhood memories with my current way of producing artwork. I write my diary on water in order release my emotions and let them float away. There is no danger. In the beginning, I would write one concrete idea or one quick thought. After a while this stone slowly become a part of me, which means I could say anything to it and be unscrupulous. This act became a part of life and made me more relaxed.

Huangfu: This stone has become your good friend in some way?

Song Dong: Yes. Many people have expressed suspicion of the process. They ask, “Are you sure that you write everyday?” They find it hard to believe a process that has no record.

Huangfu: This stone cannot testify. Did you deliberately not allow this to be testified?

Song Dong: It did not need to testify. I only took four images when I began the Water Diary writing.

Huangfu: You have been writing a water diary everyday? Obviously, it has become a part of your life. Do you enjoy this?

Song Dong: Yes, I really enjoy it. I have to tell myself, however, not to impose upon myself. If today there is nothing to write then I will just write that today there is nothing to write about. The diary is not written for other people. This writing of a diary has a great impact on me. Since 1995, all my actions may be linked to this.

Huangfu: Is the content different everyday in Water Diary?

Song Dong: It is different because everyday I do different things. But I could not say everyday is different. If two days in a row occur with nothing to write about, this means that the content of the diary will be the same. I do not want this process to become a pre-programmed procedure. Rather, I would like it to be free and spontaneous. I don’t want to be restricted by it.

Huang fu: As an artist, you are quite rational and your artwork seems have a very clear continuity. At the same time, you do not seem to force yourself to follow one direction.

Song Dong: The most frightening thing in the world is being boxed in. This is even more frightening if it is by your own doing. It is like you made a cage then locked yourself inside and threw the key away forever. Basically, people have many selves. Why strangle one of those selves?

Huangfu: Did City Walking consist of you walking the second ring road of Beijing, Water City in Korea and Berlin in Germany?

Song Dong: Yes. People saw me as just an ordinary person walking on the street. They did not see this as an artwork.

 Huangfu: The fact that you walk for the sake of walking raises issues around the ‘attitude’ of an artist. It also touches on a basic issue in contemporary art which is the relationship between art and life. Is this related to the influence of Zen on you?

Song Dong: Roughly, yes. For example in City Walking, three cities are linked together through the act of my body. The work creates a connection between three unrelated cities. I deployed my body and my steps to redraw a new city. There are relationships between culture and history that people do not normally think about. I like borders and borders between dark and light. In relation to drawing, it is regarded as the darkest section. I like to stay on top of this border between dark and light. It might mean the end of both the dark and the light. It might be the beginning of both dark and light. It is between both. I like the ambiguity of this section and the fact that the border has already been broken.

Huangfu: From the perspective of the general public, do you think there exists a true level of communication between the public and artists?

Song Dong: I think there exists a real communication and a kind of understanding between artists and the general public. I pay special attention to this relationship with my neighbors. I also attach importance to this relationship with my colleagues. There is nobody doing what I do amongst these people but they respect and understand me. They also tell me the things that they do not understand. When they need my explanation, I always give it. However, in art circles, I basically never explain my artwork.

Huangfu: Your video work showing a hand touching a viewing audience is being exhibited in Shanghai. Have you considered the feelings of the audience?

Song Dong: Even though the video work consists only of one set of lights, it has a sense of invasion, a legal invasion of a kind. The audience and the artist seem to sign a contract. The audience comes to see the exhibition and I, as an artist, produce the artwork. You come to see me and this act becomes one of the elements in my artwork. If you feel irritated then you can choose to avoid it. This relationship is not as simple as I have described it. This relationship forms the indescribable nature between others and myself, allowing the artwork to carry a sense of ambiguity.

It is really interesting to see the reaction of the audiences. In reality, if you touch someone they definitely feel it but in this situation I use the medium of video to touch people. They cannot feel it physically but can feel the touch through other people’s reaction. So, the audience indirectly gains a sense of touch. I like this way of presenting ideas. At the exhibition, many people would say to me, “Hi! Song Dong, where is your work?” Many people didn’t notice it. Once they did, they immediately laughed!

Huangfu: In recent years, you have traveled quite extensively to produce art work in Europe and the United States. You must have seen many artists and art works. Please describe what has impressed you.

Song Dong: I like art work that has a creative spirit and is non-mainstream. These works always expand the existing boundaries of art. The younger generation of artists has questioned the definition of art. For example, German artist Andreas Slominski planned to stick a stamp on an

 Song Dong, Shot in the Face, 2000, video projection. Installation view, Earl Lu Gallery, La Salle SIA College of the Arts, Singapore. envelope and send it. However, he did not stick the stamp on himself but rather found someone in the zoo to play with a deer and let the deer use its wet tongue to lick the stamp. The stamp was then stuck to the envelope. This work impressed me. It provided me with a thinking process that related to result and process. I also like Bill Viola’s work. There are many more art works and artists I like and which influence me imperceptibly.

Huangfu: The source of your creativity is Beijing but your artwork is mainly exhibited in international exhibitions around the world. What do you think of this?

Song Dong: My artwork can be roughly divided into two types. One concerns larger social and cultural issues. The other concerns the personal experience of survival. Sometimes these two issues interrelate. I am not producing work for the sake of having an exhibition. I have focused on issues I have been examining for long periods of time. For example, how should the relationship between the internal and external me be treated? I am living and growing in Beijing. It is my home. For a number of years I have often participated in international exhibitions. This is like the Chinese saying: “when you walk a million miles away, you will gain the experience of a million of books.”

Huangfu: Are issues of Chinese identity very important in your art creation?

Song Dong: They are not important. I believe that I come mainly from an individual perspective to experience and express the world. Chinese identity is not a prerequisite but you should under- stand that Chinese identity is something running in your blood. It doesn’t matter what you do, it will naturally come from you. The way you are educated, nurtured and brought up plays a very important role in forming your sense of identity. You may see identity issues represented through some of my art works, but I am not making a concentrated effort to produce work from the perspective of identity. It is like being invited to many international exhibitions: curators select you not because of your identity as a Chinese artist but because of what you produce as an artist.

Huangfu: You produce a large number of video works. Please describe why.

 Song Dong: The medium of video is elemental. It produces a moving and sound image that cannot be touched. It has no shape but provides a strong light and can project onto any object. It is these characteristics that draw me to video.

Huangfu: Could you describe what unique approach you have in making video art?

Song Dong: I like combining video and mirroring. These two things have many characteristics in common, one being that you can see it but you can’t touch it. The combination of these elements reinforces the special character of the medium. It is kind of like a city floating on top of a sea of clouds. For example, the title of this exhibition is Shot in the Face. Since 1997, I have been creating a series of Shot in the Face art works. Many images involve shots on my face, my father’s face, my mother’s face, my wife’s face, my friend’s face, an artist’s face, a computer’s face, etc. In time, I want to present a series of work in which every piece is related to Shot in the Face but can stand on its own as well. This series of work will have the effect of an interchange/exchange in terms of mean- ing and text. All the pieces in this series will relate to the subject of my family and myself, but the issues extending from this will hopefully transcend the personal subject matter. It will be related to people and history, people and the experience of growing up, people and their similarities and differences within the human condition.

Huangfu: Have other artists influenced you in relation to this concept?

Song Dong: Nobody lives in a vacuum. Things happening around me have a strong influence on my work, particularly in the Internet Age with everyone having access to information. I feel that my experience of growing and aging, my education from when I was child as well as eastern philosophy have all have influenced how I conceptualize things. I think that the combination of different cultures and ideas are characteristics of life today. The two sides of the cultural contra- diction co-exist and are sometimes interchangeable. The idea that what is not white must be black will lead people to an invisible single-plank bridge. The question of how to cross the river leads only to one choice and will lead many people to fall into the water. I am interested in how the two sides of the East/West contradiction become one. It is this and it is that and it is not this and not that. Judgement based on past experience sometimes tends to hinder understanding.

Huangfu: What is your future direction?

Song Dong: I am not sure. I will keep the amateur attitude in relation to my artwork and contemplate cross disciplinarity.

  

  six-syllable mantra. The action of spinning the wheel in a clockwise direction replaces reciting the mantra in the   pursuit of compassion and peace.  Huang dissembles the prayer wheel into its constituent parts      (cover, handle and wheel) and scatters them throughout the gallery space. Not being able to discern the cultural origin of It is impossible not to pay attention to the unique title of such an object, the conical cover looks like a cross between Huang Yongping’s recent solo exhibition at the Barbara a Chinese shield (dun) and a lotus flower. Directly behind Gladstone Gallery in New York. Titled after a Tibetan Buddhist the cover is a massive wooden handle, twenty-seven feet mantra as Om Mani Padme Hum, each syllable takes on a in length. By laying the handle on the floor along the corridor profound meaning. According to the Dalai Lama, this mantra connecting the entry gallery to the rear one, Huang deliber- encapsulates the entire Buddhist teaching. Om symbolizes the path to get rid of our impure body, speech and mind. Mani, as jewel, refers to the ‘altruistic mind of enlightenment’ that would remove poverty and sufferings. Padme, as lotus, signifies the wisdom to acknowledge the emptiness of our inherent existence. Hum suggests the seamless unity of wisdom and method needed to attain Buddhahood. Put together, the mantra proposes a vehicle to free us from the reality of speech and sound in life by using our enlightened awareness to experience life’s emptiness. By co-opting Buddhist belief, Huang’s interest is to scrutinize the empti- ness of the inherent contradictions as a result of cultural hybridization and to question our mediations between different cultures. Huang Yongping, Om Mani Padme Hum, 2001, mixed media. Installation view, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York. Best known as the founder of the Xiamen Dada group in

China in 1985, Huang used anti-art strategies to critique the ately obstructs the viewing traffic in order to invite a physical ideological value of art in a conformist society and to subvert response. A large circular bronze plate, slightly smaller than the legitimacy of institutional discourses within Buddhism, a satellite TV dish, is attached to the handle. A rod holding Wittgenstein and Daoism. After his arrival to Paris in 1989 the wheel in place also extends outward from the centre of in order to participate in the controversial exhibition Les the plate resembling a Chinese weapon called mao. The Magiciens de la Terre, Huang has since broadened the term maodun means a contradiction. geographic scope for investigating new internationalism as a conscious way to counter Western hegemony. Huang’s provocation hinges on two characteristics. First, by greatly exaggerating the scale of a functional prayer wheel, Included in this exhibition are a number of art objects. From almost thirty times the actual size of a conventional hand a greatly oversized Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheel to a held one, Huang spectacularizes the object to the point of replica of a Chinese south-pointing chariot and a model for being ridiculous and invites the gaze towards a specimen an unrealized project for La Chapelle St. Louis Salpétrière in from the imaginary ‘East.’ There is a subliminal delight in Paris to an elegant scroll ink drawing, Huang is proficient in looking at something foreign, yet our initial awe quickly turns working in diverse scales and mediums. His use of materials into discomfort. After a while, the prayer wheel looks almost is economical, just enough to get the concept across but mundane. Huang leaves the viewers with a muted and without overtly sanctifying the objects. A contemplative unsettling feeling largely out of an inability to translate why element is always lurking behind what is being presented. someone would take the time and effort to build such a The centrepiece for the exhibition is a fully dismembered thing. Second, the action of taking the prayer wheel apart prayer or mani wheel. The prayer wheel, mounted onto a deserves deeper consideration. Even though we know that wooden handle, is a common device used by Buddhists to these parts can be reassembled to form a functional prayer disseminate spiritual well-being. Housed inside a covered wheel, these disparate parts do not conjure up a collective circular compartment and attached to a vertical axle is meaning. They are merely parts of a whole, that do not make a rolled up scroll with repetitious inscriptions of the sense individually, even when they are put together. Huang

 the fortune stick and the reality of the future are all happening in a common time frame.” Huang attempts to mediate the disjuncture between one’s fate and one’s reality. What is installed in one’s subjectivity and what is actually presented in real life is always different. The negotiations between these poles become the very subject for his inquiry. Instead of being tied down by identity politics, imagination becomes a necessary strategy for resolving differences. Huang has not able to realize the project titled 543-622 at La Chapelle St. Louis Salpétrière in Paris, where a large scale rotating prayer wheel will be installed in the choir of the church and the floor will be covered with Persian carpet. The concept behind such a project is to provoke a dialogue. Huang states: “In this project, I am trying to reunite the spirits of three different regions by integrating their symbols in the same Huang Yongping, Chariot du cycle des 60 ans, 1999, mixed media. Installation, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York. space.” The spinning prayer wheel represents a Buddhist tree inside a Christian chapel, where worshippers will have is less inclined to make the prayer wheel dysfunctional. to observe the Islamic tradition of removing their shoes Rather, the gesture of disjointing a religious symbol is to before entering such a religious site. It is our humanistic show the incoherence during the process of translation. We miss the point when we direct all our energy to only study ideal to reconcile cultural and religious differences in the the constituent parts of one culture without acknowledging hopes of attaining stability. Huang’s reconciliation is to stage its mutability. One may even discount Huang’s work as such a conflict and to subject us in different ways of being in ‘Oriental,’ but this is precisely the ground where he muddles the world. We do not really know what to do other than easy categorization and refutes a confined reading of his patiently observe the unfolding conflict. artwork. New internationalism does not happen in a vacuum. Its vitality is dependent on a conscious negotiation with cultural differences from the standpoint of the personal. Huang is engaging in such a constructive dialogue to charter new terrains for deconstructing his own context in an attempt to propose another model for mutual co-existence.

The other significant artwork in the exhibition is a replica of the south-pointing chariot titled Chariot du cycle des 60 ans. Invented in China in the 3rd century B.C. for notating time and direction, the traditional chariot is composed of a Huang Yongping, 543-622, mixed media. Installation model for an unrealized project at La Chapelle St. Louis Salpétrière, Paris. complex gearing mechanism connected to a human figure. Huang’s prototype does not have the exact gearing. He Endnotes: has transformed the chariot into an immobile vehicle with 1 Evelyne Jouanno and Huang Yongping, “Cultural Differences and wheels of varying diameters. Different combinations of a Negotiation,” Flash Art, summer 1999, pp. 114-115. lunar calendar are marked on individual wheels that hint at the non-linear nature of time. A segment from the exhibited scroll drawing holds the key for Huang’s notion of time. In particular, the scene that depicts Huang in the middle of a circle holding onto a few fortune sticks and phrases written on the periphery that capture different episodes in his life. Fragmented phases like “the revolution is coming” and “the people are all happy together” are all pointing towards the centre. In the subsequent scene, the kneeling Huang is in the midst of figuring out the placement of the sticks on the floor. Huang writes: “A phenomenon is encapsulated; the reality of

  

   :         

Gu Xiong’s installation for Montréal’s 2001 Le Mois de la Photo entitled I Am Who I Am, raises questions around language and translation within the context of the processes Gu Xiong, I Am Who I Am, 2001, site-specific installation for Le Mois de la Photo, Montréal. of immigration. Gu’s site-specific work, made for the main street of Montréal’s Chinatown, approaches a Chinese- The banner texts were structured specifically for a Chinese Québecois-Canadian experience. The project consisted of immigrant readership, but reveal the layers of readings rows of banners that stretched between Chinatown’s defining viewers might have of this public installation. For example, gates, carrying images and texts meant to instigate a I read only English and French, so that any specificity of the dialogue between the individual and the community, Chinese text is lost on me. Other viewers may have both past and present. Incorporating historic and recent imbalances or weaknesses in other fluencies and every photographs of Chinatown’s residents with overlaid subjective viewer is further informed by their cultural backgrounds. sentences in Chinese, French and English, the banners Specificity of language both shapes and is shaped by culture. assumed a celebratory position in the street. While the Gu’s simplified language in I Am Who I Am seems to try to individual portraits engage a visual documentary history, the avoid the problems of translation through straightforward texts narrate that history through a combination of facts and statements, but lingual nuances effect each translation, platitudes regarding the construction of identity: “I built the exposing a problem with pretenses of multitudinous or railway. I opened a laundry and a restaurant. I paid the head translingual understanding. tax. I am part of society. I am more than my face. I am like anyone in this land. I am who I am. This is my home.” The textualization of experience is itself a fiction. The trans- lation of a living process into text is not only inadequate, but

Reading these texts, one must necessarily consider the it in fact writes that experience into something else. This has shaping of identity through language, and more specifically been a long-standing debate regarding visual arts criticism, through translation. The experiences of immigration can be in which visual practices get written as text and in doing so characterized as translocal, not simply bicultural, and often assume new meaning. The predicament of translation has require multiple cultural and lingual translations in the been given insightful consideration by James Clifford who ongoing processes of identifying and remaking a sense of writes, “Comparative concepts – translation terms – are self and home. The banner texts approach some of the approximations, privileging certain ‘originals’ and made for linguistic subtleties in the textualization of identity. Je suis specific audiences.” As Clifford has pointed out, translation chez moi ici, one of the French texts, does not translate only resembles the original, and inherent in the approximation directly into its English counterpart, “This is my home.” A of translation is a hierarchy of authenticity. Thus one must straight translation of the French into English would read “I ask, what constitutes the ‘original’ in Gu’s banner texts, the am at home here,” which has different connotations regarding Chinese experiences in Montréal or the artist’s texts? the meaning of home and how one locates oneself in a place. Je suis chez moi ici presents possible variations in I Am Who I Am raises issues around triculturality, the interpreting a citywide photographic art festival sense of translocal experience, the straddling of languages and the comfort or belonging – here not necessarily meaning home role of language in forming a multifaceted identity. The in the definitive sense. Johannesburg artist Santu Mofokeng Chinese immigrant arriving in Montréal has to find a place has observed that “Home is an appropriated space; it does in a city that is dominated by its bilingual and bicultural not exist objectively in reality. The notion of ‘home’ is a character. Gu’s work approaches the complications in the fiction we create out of a need to belong.” hierarchy of a Chinese-Québecois-Canadian identity but does little to locate the spaces between cultural and lingual

 translations that, it global in the use of the subjective texts. The rhetoric of seems to me, immigrants making the local global appears to be a modus operandi of necessarily inhabit since Gu’s. The artist often uses his own immigrant story (from language fails to translate China to Canada post-Tiananmen Square) in an attempt to experience. Unlike artist speak to a more universal experience of immigration. Xu Bing, whose conceptual Allowing his story to stand in as meaning for his work, Gu’s practice seeks out new autobiographical and anti-theoretical approach raises further spaces brought forth questions around the use of language in I Am Who I Am. through the ideas of If Gu’s work is very much about a personal psychological Gu Xiong, I Raised a Family, translation (Xu’s project landscape, it instead falls into ideological designs of 2001, photograph. From the series I Am Who I Am. New English Calligraphy is consumption that make a story recognizable to every a hybrid language system individual, particularly through the use of platitudinous in which an estrangement of one language is achieved by a titles such as I Am Who I Am, You and I or Here, There, fictional structural transposition into another), Gu did not Everywhere, which are consumably vague in order to be structure this project within the discursive realm of fiction absorbed by a general audience. and reality. I Am Who I Am is presented as a personalized historical account yet is complicated by its installation. The interest in engaging the viewer in projects that deal with Given Québec’s battles over French and English signage, difficult local histories is to make the viewer aware of the certain lingual hierarchies become implicit in the work’s fictional qualities of history and the inadequate translation site specificity. The banners flew alongside Chinatown’s of experience into visual or textual representation. Does commercial signage, in the only place in Montréal where I Am Who I Am give breadth to the complexity of displaced another language supercedes French. and remade identities? It has been argued that the most successful recent work in contemporary art finds form in a Like the Québecois’ conceptually based realism that engages the viewer and co-opting of the deliberately works with art’s slippage between reality and Americanized term fiction. The open-ended narratives that occur more easily in le parking lot, words and visual imagery allow for the subsequent suspension of phrases can immigrate absolutes, while text often fixes narrative. When textualization and fertilize cross-cultural is approached with less fixity it can disturb the illusion of exchange. This came to a common language and common understanding. Individual my attention in relation histories, when speaking only for themselves, can function to Gu’s use of the term beyond a reinforcement of universalized cultural convergence Gu Xiong, I Am a Chinese- avant-garde to describe to point to the pitfalls in trying to find universal principles in Québecer-Canadian, 2001, photograph. From the series the work of his Beijing personal stories. In reading I Am Who I Am one must be aware I Am Who I Am. contemporaries in the of the fictionalized quality of textualization, the complexities 1980s. The adopted French term is used in English language of translation and suspend narrative closure. As Paul de Man texts as a main stratagem in the description of Western noted, “the writer’s language is, to some degree, the product modern art. Gu maps this Western term onto Chinese cultural of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of history, replacing an approximated meaning with a localized his own language.” and specific definition that refers to Beijing’s contemporary art and artists. Gu did not reference a vanguard group of I Am Who I Am’s attempt to incite dialogue between past and artists in China, but specifically a Chinese avant-garde. The present in Montréal’s Chinatown, to mark the unstable and traveling of the term avant-garde can be equated with changeable identities of the city’s Chinese immigrants and to translocal immigration processes in which concepts and call attention to a notion of triculturality, perhaps hinges on identities are translated, remapped and sometimes carried the fictional idea of home. “If the tourist travels, for the most back to their point of origin and imbued with new meaning. part, backwards in time, then the immigrant, the exile and the diasporic travel forward with no promises of a restored I Am Who I Am is meant to speak to historical specificity, home.” Gu’s project, through translation and textualization, to the particular circumstances surrounding the Chinese in makes the Montréal Chinese immigrant a tourist of his or Montréal. While the project addresses the people of her own experience. Chinatown, I Am Who I Am attempts to make this specificity

 March 22 – May 26, 2002

Co-curated by Scott Watson, Yan Shan Chen, and Zheng Shengtian

MORRIS AND HELEN BELKIN ART GALLERY

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