Inside March/April 2018 Volume 17, Number 2

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 8 VOLUME 17, NUMBER 2

INSIDE

Artist Features: Yang Jiechang, Xu Bing When Contemporary Art Practices Meet Ethnographic Research in Chinese Sociery Sourthern Port of Call: Guangzhou’s Current Galleries Reviews: 7th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/ Architecture, Spectrosynthesis, 5th Chengdu Up-On International Live Art Festival

US$12.00 NT$350.00 PRINTED IN TAIWAN 6 Vol. 17 No. 2 12

VOLUME 17, NUMBER 2, MARCH/APRIL 2018

CONTENTS 29 8 Editor’s Note

10 Contributors

12 Yang Jiechang: 100 Layers of Ink, 100 Layers of Action Susanna Ferrell and Britta Erickson

29 The Doubleness of Sight/Site: Xu Bing’s Phoenix as an Intended Public Art Project 46 Junjie Jiang 46 Art, Making Cities: The Existence and Future of Urban Villages Yu Hsiao Hwei

61 When Contemporary Art Practices Meet Ethnographic Research in Chinese Society Yuling Zhong

76 Southern Port of Call: Guangzhou’s Current Galleries 61 Julie Chun 85 Inside/Outside—Black & White: 5th Chengdu Up-On International Live Art Festival Sophia Kidd

99 Spectrosynthesis: Incomplete Rainbow? Shih-yu Hsu

104 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Wang Yanxin, Hidden, 2017, performance, 20 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Up-On, Chengdu.

Vol. 17 No. 2 7 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art PRESIDENT Katy Hsiu-chih Chien LEGAL COUNSEL Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C. C. Liu Yishu 85 opens with an essay by Susanna Ferrell FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum and Britta Erickson on the early work of Yang EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace Jiechang, one of contemporary Chinese art’s MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian EDITORS Julie Grundvig most important artists and among the first to Kate Steinmann exhibit outside of China. The multi-year series of Chunyee Li CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde nearly all-black paintings, titled 100 Layers of Ink, WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li embodies a complex deliberation of the artist’s ADVERTISING Sen Wong Michelle Hsieh social, political, and spiritual life journey. Junjie Jiang writes about Xu Bing, who, since the 1980s INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL Junjun Liu also has made an instrumental contribution to Chris Mao contemporary Chinese art. Her essay focuses Bing Yang Vivian Jianhui Zhang on Xu Bing’s major public art project Phoenix, in which she addresses the tension between his ADVISORY BOARD Judy Andrews, Ohio State University dependence as an artist upon both capital and Melissa Chiu, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden the labour of those who fabricated his artwork, John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. as well as the workers whose labour also drives Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator China's urban development. Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator Fan Di’an, Central Academy of Fine Arts Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator This idea of social consciousness is extended Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh in essays by Yu Hsiao Hwei on the 7th Bi-City Hou Hanru, MAXXI, Rome Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Shenzhen, Katie Hill, University of Westminster and by Yuling Zhong on recent ethnographic Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian practices within the art making process. Both of Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator these texts address artists working directly with Lu Jie, Long March Space Charles Merewether, Critic and Curator local communities; in the case of Shenzhen, in Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand the ways that art can animate an older part of Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art the city while attempting to maintain its social Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago character and economic ecology, and in the case Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District of ethnographic methodologies, how engagement ART & COLLECTION GROUP LTD. with various communities generates forms of 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 knowledge that expand the parameters of what Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 might constitute a work of art. E-mail: [email protected] VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu Yishu has on a regular basis presented MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin perspectives examining various urban and rural CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu art scenes in China. Julie Chun explores some of Yishu is produced bi-monthly in Vancouver, Canada, and published in Taipei, Taiwan. The publishing dates are January, March, May, July, the current galleries operating in Guangzhou and September, and November. All subscription, advertising, and submission identifies what makes them so distinctive relative inquiries may be sent to: to other cities in China. Sophia Kidd updates us YISHU INITIATIVE OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART SOCIETY on Chengdu’s dynamic performance art scene 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 Phone: 1.604.649.8187 through a review of the fifth iteration of the Up/ E-mail: offi[email protected] On International Live Art Festival. On a different DIRECTOR Zheng Shengtian note, Shih-yu Hsu reviews Spectrosynthesis, SECRETARY GENERAL Yin Qing one of the first exhibitions in Asia to highlight RETAIL RATES USD $12 / EUR 9 / TWD 350 art from the LGBTQ community, and considers (per copy) the challenge of what it means to attempt to SUBSCRIPTION RATES represent Asia within this context. 1 Year Print Copy (6 issues including air mail postage): Asia $94 USD/Outside Asia $104 USD 2 Years Print Copy (12 issues including air mail postage): In conclusion, Yishu is honoured to announce Asia $180 USD/Outside Asia $198 USD the recipients of the Seventh Yishu Awards for 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art. 1 Year Print Copy and PDF (6 issues including air mail postage): Asia $134 USD/Outside Asia $144 USD Recommender Kuiyi Shen has selected Mia Yu and Zhu Qinsheng has selected Wang Nanming. DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah The awards will be presented on March 28 in ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow Hong Kong. Yishu 86 (May/June 2018) will carry DESIGNER Philip Wong PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. an extended profile of the recipients as well as WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com publish a text by each of them. WEB DESIGN Design Format ISSN 1683 - 3082 Keith Wallace No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版(Yishu)創刊於 2002年5月1日典藏國際版‧第17卷第2期‧2018年3–4月社長：簡秀枝法律顧問：思科技法律事務所劉承慶創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）總策劃：鄭勝天 8 編者手記主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 10 作者小傳黎俊儀網站編輯：黎俊儀 12 楊詰蒼：千層墨，百重行行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 廣告：謝盈盈 Susanna Ferrell 、林似竹（Britta Erickson）黃晨國際委員會：劉珺珺茅為清 29 視 · 域的雙重性：徐冰的《鳳凰》— 楊濱一個公共藝術設想張建暉蔣俊潔顧問：王嘉驥田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 巫鴻 46 藝術造城：城中村的存在與未來林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 余小蕙范迪安招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 胡昉 61 當代藝術實踐與民族誌研究在華人侯瀚如徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 社會的交集姜苦樂 (John Clark) 鍾玉玲姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 高名潞費大爲楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 76 南行記：今日廣州畫廊盧杰 Julie Chun Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill Charles Merewether 85 內外與黑白：評第五屆Up-On向上 Apinan Poshyananda 國際現場藝術節出版：典藏藝術家庭有限公司 Sophia Kidd 副總經理：劉靜宜高世光行銷總監：林素珍發行專員：許銘文 99 光·合作用：不夠完整的彩虹？謝宜蓉地址：台灣台北市中山北路一段85號6樓徐詩雨電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 電子信箱：[email protected] 104 中英人名對照編輯製作： Yishu Initiative of Contemporary Chinese Art Society 加中當代藝術協會

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Julie Chun is an independent art historian and Ink, in 2013. She is also on the boards of lecturer who has been based in Shanghai since Three Shadows Photography Art Centre 2011. She serves as the Art Convener of the (Beijing), Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai, where Chinese Art, and ArtAsiaPacific. In 2006 she delivers monthly lectures at museums and she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to galleries to widen the public’s understanding of conduct research in Beijing on the Chinese artistic objects, past and present. She lectures contemporary art market. Since 2013 she has frequently on art for the various foreign been Artistic Director at INKStudio, a gallery Consulate General offices in Shanghai and as an based in Beijing. adjunct for the Alliance for Global Education at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Susanna Ferrell is a scholar of contemporary She is a regular contributor to Yishu Journal of art history living and working in Los Angeles, Contemporary Chinese Art and Honorary Editor California. She received her B.A. in Art of the Journal Royal Asiatic Society, one of the History and Fine Art from Scripps College in longest running English-language publications 2015, with theses on the art of Yayoi Kusama on Chinese Studies, founded in 1858. and obsessive compulsive disorder, and the exhibiting of Chinese contemporary ink Britta Erickson, Ph.D., is an independent art in major Western institutions. Ferrell scholar and curator living in Palo Alto, received her master’s degree in the History California. Since the late 1980s her work has of Art from The Courtauld Institute in 2016, focused on contemporary Chinese art, with a with a focus on contemporary Chinese art special interest in ink painting. Erickson has history. Her dissertation explored the use curated major exhibitions at the Arthur M. of alter-egos by artists Chen Lingyang and Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Word Play: Cao Fei, as both masks and agents for their Contemporary Art by Xu Bing), and the Cantor own feminisms. Following her graduation in Center for Visual Arts, Stanford (On the Edge: 2016, Ferrell joined the Chinese and Korean Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the Art Department at the Los Angeles County West). In 2007 she co-curated the Chengdu Museum of Art, where she is a curatorial Biennial, which focused on ink art, and in 2010 assistant focusing on the museum’s collection she was a contributing curator for Shanghai: of contemporary Chinese art. Ferrell’s research Art of the City (Asian Art Museum, San interests include phenomenology, pattern and Francisco). She produced a series of short films disorder, mental and physical health, women’s about ink painting, The Enduring Passion for rights, and the digital multiverse.

10 Vol. 17 No. 2 Shih-yu Hsu studied Communication in Chinese arts criticism, and at the University of Engineering and Visual Art Administration Goettingen, where she taught the class Chinese at National Central University in Taiwan and Culture Paves the One Belt One Road. New York University. Her research interests include image, memory, and space. She Yu Hsiao Hwei is an art writer and translator cofounded the bilingual online media art based in France. She is a regular contributor platform SCREEN in 2015 and joined the to several art magazines in Taiwan and China, curatorial team of the Taiwan Pavilion at the including CANS (Chinese Contemporary Art 2017 Venice Biennale. Her art writing has been News), ARTCO, ArtCo China, and Randian. published in several publications including Since the 1990s, she has been focusing on Artist Magazine and Art Investment. the exploration of Chinese contemporary art within the global context. Junjie Jiang is an M.A. candidate in Regional Studies—East Asia, Harvard University. Yuling Zhong holds a master’s degree in visual She received her B.A. from Columbia anthropology, with a special interest in the University, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. bodily experience of urban life, publishing Her contribution to this issue of Yishu is as an artistic practice, and the ethnographic developed from her undergraduate thesis. turn in contemporary art. Her research is based in the southern Chinese cities, and her Sophia Kidd, PhD., is a research-based curator writing engages with Chinese and Western working in the Southwest U.S. and Southwest aesthetics, anthropology, and popular culture. China. Her upcoming Bad Exhibition at Art She co-curated The Light of Independence: City Gallery in Ventura, California, will examine 2012 Guangzhou Independent Publication value structures in art, featuring art by both Exhibition (Guangdong Times Museum, 2012), Chinese and U.S. artists that performs what the which explores various forms of independent Chinese call chugui, meaning to “go off track,” publications and the experimental ways artists, or “skip orbit.” Kidd has an M.A. and Ph.D. designers, and publishers pursue editing, in Classical Chinese Literature from Sichuan image making, and printing. In 2015, she was University, and a B.A. in Philosophy from the recipient of the Crossing Borders from University of California, Santa Cruz. In the past China Grant, a program of the Robert Bosch year she has been a visiting lecturer in Germany, Stiftung, conducted in cooperation with at Ruhr-Universitaat Bochum, where she taught Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. She currently a translation class focusing on political semiotics works at a museum in Hong Kong.

Vol. 17 No. 2 11 Susanna Ferrell and Britta Erickson Yang Jiechang: 100 Layers of Ink, 100 Layers of Action

Yang Jiechang sitting on the ﬂoor at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1989, surrounded by his installation at Magiciens de la Terre. Courtesy of Fei Dawei.

ayering is one of nature’s most powerful tools of creation, the cumulative result of a repetitive action over time. We see this in Lthe rings of a tree, denoting annual layers of growth, and in rock strata, as evidence of millions of years of geological change. In the realm of human activity, in an individual’s psyche, and in art, layers create powerful presences. Life experiences compound to form the current state of an individual; multiple layers of music come together in a symphony; the majesty of an ancient city such as Rome derives from the millennia of layering new construction atop past ruins. Peeling back layers in search of the kernel at the heart of an individual, or work of art, or natural construct can reveal its structure and its history.

In the case of Yang Jiechang’s long-lived painting series 100 Layers of Ink (c. 1987–2000), core information is missing or inadequately understood. So we can begin to approach this work with a most basic question: how are these beautiful and compelling things made? The titles mention layers of ink, but, obviously, there is much more to the works. Next comes the crucial question of the nascence of the series: how did it begin, and what catalyzed Yang Jiechang’s sudden production of many large 100 Layers of Ink works, followed by an ongoing interest in producing the works in a range of sizes? Why did 100 Layers of Ink become such an important part of the artist’s oeuvre? Finally, we can understand the meaning of the series in a broader sense if we peel back the layers to get at the meaning beneath their mesmeric surfaces. Much of this essay relies on interviews conducted between author Susanna Ferrell, Yang Jiechang, and art historian Martina Köppel-Yang, in the Yangs’s Paris studio, on January 24, 2017.1

12 Vol. 17 No. 2 Yang Jiechang, 100 Layers of Process and Concept Behind the Ink: Self-Portrait, 1990–95, ink, glue, alum, gauze, and xuan 100 Layers of Ink Series paper, triptych, each piece 50 x 48 cm. Yang Jiechang Yang Jiechang is “a terrible artist created a number of works that layer three 100 Layers of for an art historian. . . . He does Ink paintings; among them is this self-portrait. Courtesy of not only change the painting itself, the artist. but he also changes the name of the painting,” Köppel-Yang says regarding the difference between the Chinese title of the series, 千层墨 qian ceng mo, which translates literally to 1,000 Layers of Ink, and the English title, 100 Layers of Ink. The disparity between the meanings of the Chinese and English titles does not reflect a disparity in the paintings themselves—the works, when shown in China, do not have ten times as many layers. The Chinese name is more of a fantasy, whereas the English name is more literal. “In Chinese, they say 百层墨不好听 Bai ceng mo bu hao ting (‘One hundred layers of ink does not sound good’). They say one thousand is much more rich, more cultural, more traditional. . . . the Chinese language is more fantastic,” counters Yang Jiechang. In reality, the paintings in the series have even fewer layers of ink than is reflected in their English title. After some discussion, Yang Jiechang breaks down some of the mystique behind the paintings, saying that usually there are thirty or forty layers of ink in each of the works. While he reflects that a mere ten layers would not create an adequate depth of blackness, one thousand layers, due to material costs, would not have been a financially viable option for him when he first began painting the 100 Layers of Ink series in the early 1980s, especially given the immense scale of many of the early works.

A close-up of one of Yang The materials that go into the Jiechang’s works drying at Parc de la Vilette, Paris, 1989. making of the 100 Layers of Ink Courtesy of Fei Dawei. series also have, historically, been unclear. In different texts, they are described in different ways, from the incomplete “ink on xuan paper and gauze” to the more inaccurate “ink and acrylic on paper laid down on canvas.” During my interview with him, Yang Jiechang describes the materials thus: primarily ink on xuan paper (often called rice paper) and gauze, later mounted on canvas; and, secondarily, glue, alum, dirty water, earth, and other unclean, natural elements for colour.

Because of the complexity and variability of the effects it creates, the alum—a salt employed by Song and Yuan dynasty painters to distort the appearance of wet ink—is an important element in Yang Jiechang’s paintings despite being left out of every list of materials associated with the works. Alum is a desiccant: depending upon the wetness of the ink and paper, the alum absorbs different amounts of ink and thus creates varied visual effects. On works with alum, Yang Jiechang says, “you cannot copy them because usually you don’t know” if the alum is added “when they are dry or when they are wet.” This understanding of alum and the unpredictability of such materials helped him to understand a quality he felt was missing when he

Vol. 17 No. 2 13 The carvings on Mt. Tai and a copy book based on the carved characters.

The carvings on Mt. Tai and a copy book based on the carved characters.

attempted to copy the works of China's old masters, who utilized the 三番九染 san fan jiu ran technique—a laying down of layers of colour repetitively to achieve a unique aesthetic. Even in his most skillful attempts, Yang Jiechang did not have the capacity to recreate these historical works with perfect accuracy. “It’s because of the time that has passed. A thousand or six hundred years may have passed since the making of those historical works, so I use alum to make new paintings that have the appearance that many centuries have passed. The passage of time obscures the use of materials, but also physically changes a painting itself. Referring perhaps to the ﬁrst calligraphy model he chose to study, the Diamond Sutra carved into Mt. Tai in the sixth century,2 Yang Jiechang relates:

After two thousand years, the calligraphy is changed—it is not like it was before. Before, there was just the brush writing carved on the stone—not like now. A thousand years after, the stone has experienced degradation due to rain, sun, sometimes causing the stone to break. Now you copy the calligraphy and you mount it again. The calligraphy is changing, it’s not looking like the original. My painting is also like this.

14 Vol. 17 No. 2 Yang Jiechang may not be able to control the passing of time, but he does bring to his paintings a synthesized quality of aging. Ink, as a medium, is stable—it does not fade or distort—and thus fresh ink can have the same appearance as thousand-year-old ink. Paper, however, can discolour, degrade, tear, or become stained by water, all adding to the variability and unpredictability of an ink painting’s appearance over time. Yang Jiechang is careful to use materials that will preserve his works over time. His many layered washes of ink carry in them the suggestion of the wetting and drying of a century of rains; his use of earth as pigment alludes to the dirt and wear of a historical painting. However, Yang Jiechang seeks to freeze his paintings in time, and he prevents further signs of aging by carefully strengthening and stabilizing the works using the layers of glue and gauze.

Yang Jiechang’s awareness of the changeability of his materials is important to consider in the context of the works themselves. In the majority of his 100 Layers of Ink paintings, he covers the entirety of his paper with ink, the unfading, unchanging element of historical paintings. However, the mystique—the quality of being impossible to copy—comes not from the ink, but from the other materials he uses in his layering—the glue, paper, and gauze that he folds, ﬂattens, stretches, crumples, clumps, turns, and opens, that are then obscured by the top layers of ink. Xuan paper is the perfect ground for ink; its absorptive qualities capture every nuance of the brush. This is the medium that Yang Jiechang mastered over many years of rigourous training. Part of this training included learning traditional mounting processes: due to xuan paper’s essential fragility, paintings on this ground were mounted on a strong base of paper or of silk and paper, to create a stable work of art that could be displayed as a hanging scroll, handscroll, or album leaf.

Left: Yang Jiechang, Ink Square, 1987, ink on xuan paper, 67.5 x 67.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Yang Jiechang, Ink Square, 1987, ink on xuan paper, 67.5 x 67.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Because the xuan paper in 100 Layers of Ink paintings becomes thin and fragile after being painted over many times, Yang Jiechang employed two methods in stabilizing these works of art. First, he used the silk or paper backing typical of traditional ink paintings. Second, following his move to Europe, he began to employ linen as an even stronger backing. When he found himself faced with creating a new set of works for the Magiciens de la terre exhibition in Paris in 1989, he realized that a dramatically larger scale than he had previously worked with was required by the setting of Centre Pompidou: thus he produced his ﬁrst set of site-speciﬁc works (more on this below). For this new group of works, and for subsequent pieces,

Vol. 17 No. 2 15 he employed gauze to back his xuan paper; he then backed this layered assemblage onto a linen canvas, the ground historically used by European painters. His impromptu fabrication of this backing, created for Magiciens de la terre, is a novel hybridization of traditional Chinese and traditional European materials that afforded him the absorptive properties of xuan paper and the durability of stretched linen canvas. Through his novel combination of backing materials, Yang Jiechang prevented many signs of aging in his paintings, and thus created around them a sense of constant contemporaneity.

Telling the Stories Yang Jiechang recalls the first pieces Yang Jiechang, Untitled, 1983–85, ink on xuan paper, of the 100 Layers of Ink series as 67.5 x 67.5 cm. Courtesy of Ink Studio, Beijing. much more modest in scale and materials than the glossy, textured, monumental paintings for which the series is now known. In fact, the series began with just one layer of ink upon his paper. He created Ink Square in 1987 using a single brush stroke, and for the artist this sufficed to make the painting complete. Although at first he was unsure of how to continue, he would later go on to make dozens more iterations of the ink square. At first, the paintings were all very similar, starting with inky black squares on white xuan paper; later, he added grey washes to infiltrate the purity of the white ground. Yang Jiechang thinks of his later 100 Layers of Ink pieces as a variation on the original squares, realized through the repetitive layering of Ink Square forms, one atop the other. To understand his technique, and how it came to be, requires an understanding of Yang Jiechang’s academic and independent education.

Yang Jiechang has been critical of his education at Guangzhou Fine Art Academy; he says that “to learn art in the academy was just to make portraits.” A subversive character by nature, he had different plans for his career as an artist. For his graduate exhibition, Yang Jiechang initially submitted a pair of works, Massacre (1982) and Fire (1982), the former depicting piles of corpses, the latter raging ﬂames. Following the diptych’s summary rejection by the academy, he quickly produced a painting with an acceptable—and deceptive—pastoral title, Tibetan Earth, Sky, and People No. 1 (1982), to take its place. This new, eight-panel work was populated by a surging and mystical mass of aggressive yaks, but it was the title that allowed him to graduate. “Simple beauty”—like Tibetan Earth—“every artist can do,” said Yang Jiechang. Although Massacre and Fire were rejected by the academy, it marked the beginning of an ongoing effort by the artist to create a beauty that is difﬁcult, with richness, liveliness, and an array of emotions that favour dark over bucolic aesthetics.

Following his graduation, Yang Jiechang removed himself for a time from the stiﬂing art world of academia by studying Daoism under Master Huang Tao at Mount Luofu and Chan Buddhism at the Guangxiao Temple, both

16 Vol. 17 No. 2 Left: Yang Jiechang, Massacre, 1982, ink and mineral colours on xuan paper, 330 x 320 cm. Photo: Marc Domage. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Yang Jiechang, Fire, 1982, ink and mineral colours on xuan paper, 330 x 320 cm. Photo: Marc Domage. Courtesy of the artist.

in Guangzhou. During this period he did not paint (except for some decorative paintings the Guangxiao Temple had requested), seeking to clear his mind and ﬁnd a way back to simplicity, with the trust that this would catalyze within himself a new kind of artistic expression. Following this period of study, he returned to Guangzhou Fine Art Academy as an instructor of Chinese painting, a position that he held from 1982 until 1989.

Other early experiments and precursors to the 100 Layers of Ink series drew from Yang Jiechang’s art history education, returning to traditional ink painting and calligraphic practices. Throughout Chinese history, artists have copied works of important ink painters and calligraphers in order to understand their techniques and to train their hands in the way of the brush. In the early 1980s, Yang Jiechang was inspired by a Xu Wei (1521– 1593) painting of a lotus ﬂower, and enlarged a detail of the painting to create a new, seemingly abstract work. This piece marked the beginning of a continuous theme in Yang Jiechang’s artistic process—contemplation of what it means to create an abstract work of art.

Now, almost twenty years after the last 100 Layers of Ink piece was created, Yang Jiechang is uncertain whether his works should be called abstract, even when they do not directly copy sections of other works. The artist remains elusive on the subject, saying at different times that abstraction is over, that his works are abstract once mounted, that his calligraphy is abstract, that he does not know how to make abstract paintings, and that his paintings merely look abstract.

The seminal exhibition for Yang Jiechang’s 100 Layers of Ink works was Magiciens de la terre, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, which launched the series at the international level. Here, the ﬁrst 100 Layers of Ink pieces were born through stress and happenstance, and the result was eye opening for the artist. Martin selected the works to be included in Magiciens de la terre during a visit to Yang Jiechang’s Guangzhou studio in 1987.3 While bringing the selected paintings with him to Paris, Yang Jiechang was stopped at Shenzhen customs—he assumed it was due to the large size of the paintings. In 1989, international travel by those living in China was uncommon, and the invitation to participate in a Western exhibition was even more rare. These special circumstances for shipping such large works were not something the customs agents would have been familiar with, but, equally, Yang Jiechang could not miss the opportunity to continue on to Paris. Thus, he was forced to leave his works at customs and travel to Paris empty-handed.4

Vol. 17 No. 2 17 Jean-Hubert Martin’s visit to Yang Jiechang’s Guangzhou studio in 1987. Courtesy of Fei Dawei.

This unfortunate incident, in addition to a shift Yang Jiechang, Untitled, 1989– 1993, ink, glue, alum, gauze, in space—visiting Paris—were pivotal to the and xuan paper, 420 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist. future development of Yang Jiechang’s career. While recalling this time in his life, around 1989, Yang Jiechang brought up powerful themes of creation and redemption, emerging out of nothingness. He remembers having nothing during the Cultural Revolution—nothing to eat and nothing to study. In 1989, after building up a body of works in Guangzhou, he again had nothing when he moved to Europe, after leaving his artwork behind. Upon his arrival in Paris, however, he experienced, instead, excess. At the Centre Pompidou, the artist was given all the materials he required and, in addition, space to work in situ to create a new series of paintings for Magiciens de la terre. Still an up-and-coming artist who had received an exceedingly low salary as a teacher, Yang Jiechang was accustomed to conserving materials—for example, recycled xuan paper was incorporated into his crumpled paintings. In Paris, he was able to create works without frugally husbanding his materials, and the result was a series of approximately twenty paintings. “I put all the plastic on the ﬂoor . . .

18 Vol. 17 No. 2 and then I used all my paper.” Of the twenty paintings, he exhibited four of them in Magiciens de la terre and kept ten more for his own collection; what happened to the other six paintings is undetermined.

Yang Jiechang explored Magiciens de la terre as a space of excess—excess paper for excess paintings, excess ink for excess layering, excess space for painting actively. This was the ﬁrst time that Yang Jiechang thoroughly explored the creation of texture through excess layering, and, thus, the ﬁrst time his works garnered the title 100 Layers of Ink.

Yang Jiechang in Paris, applying layers of paste to a painting in preparation for mounting at Magiciens de la Terre, Paris, 1989. Courtesy of Fei Dawei.

After arriving at Centre Pompidou, surrounded by the contemporary art of international superstars—Anselm Kiefer, Ilya Kabakov, Sigma Polke, Jeff Wall, Alighiero Boetti, and Nam Jun Paik—Yang Jiechang knew that he needed to create a powerful installation. He understood that he needed to rethink his approach and that the paintings he left behind at Shenzhen customs would not have made the impact he so desired. “I thought if I went ahead with the work I did in China, a dialogue with these artists would be impossible. I therefore returned to the basic elements I had distilled during my process of deconstruction in China.”5 Black ink, the most essential element of Chinese painting, became the focus for Yang Jiechang’s work. Installed in a small room in Magiciens de la terre, four of his large, black paintings were suspended from the ceiling, allowing visitors an immersive experience, pulling them away from the multiplicity of different aesthetics and perspectives just outside the walls of his space.

This experience not only marked a pivotal moment in his artistic career; it was life changing. The exhibition introduced him to his contemporaries in the art world and also afforded him greater understanding of the art market, the gallery system, and what it meant to be a contemporary artist. Yang Jiechang and his paintings were somewhat of a novelty to many of the artists and guests of the exhibition—Chinese art was generally understood in the West as historical ink painting. “After the Magiciens de la terre . . . they knew China’s art was contemporary art. So it changed my life, and I decided to stay in Paris,” he says.

Magiciens de la terre occurred at a particularly tumultuous time in Chinese political and cultural history. The exhibition opened in May; just one month later, on June fourth, the Tian’anmen Square Massacre would take place.

Vol. 17 No. 2 19 Yang Jiechang resting between long bouts of work at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1989. Courtesy of Fei Dawei.

It’s not only China that was changing, the whole world was changing. . . . my way is very simple. I don’t change. I don’t move. I’m just waiting for change. . . . But if at that time, I had followed to Tian’anmen Square, or followed to demonstrations, or if I had gone on to ﬁght for the political issues, I feel I would have lost everything.

Martina Köppel-Yang reﬂected upon this as well:

You know, it’s very difﬁcult to imagine the situation at the time, because when the student demonstrations started they really thought they could change China. All the artists here in Europe, all the Chinese artists, they thought, “wow, great, ﬁnally we change something,” and then when they started killing the students they all really were so shocked that they couldn’t go home. You know, Huang Yongping, for example, his mother passed away, and he couldn’t go back home. For him, this was one of the worst experiences ever. For Yang Jiechang too, you know, he knew “I can’t go back home.”

. . . You know, the Chinese artists, they really thought that the Chinese government in the 1980s believed them and wanted them to be part of the modernization of the country, and so they felt completely betrayed.

Surrounded by excess, by fantastic art, by the prospect of international success, Yang Jiechang was haunted by the chaos and restrictions within his homeland. For Yang Jiechang, Huang Yongping, and Gu Dexin—the second, third, and ﬁnal Chinese artists invited to exhibit at Magiciens de la terre— being in Paris at this time held a unique meaning; the contrast of crushing turmoil and the bittersweet silver lining of a chance to escape it.

In the next exhibition Yang Jiechang participated in, Chine demain pour hier (China Tomorrow for Yesterday), curated by Fei Dawei in Pourrières, France, in 1990, 100 Layers of Ink was an outlet for his emotions.

20 Vol. 17 No. 2 I wrote about the history of yesterday. Many, many layers of my calligraphy, of my ink. I was so powerful, so angry, and I don’t know how to send the energy out, so everything just . . . hate and love, together.

This combination of hate and love reﬂects Yang Jiechang’s conﬂicted state, being at once accepted by the Western art world and rejected by the Chinese government. For this exhibition, Yang Jiechang again worked in situ to create a layered work entitled Pour Hier, but the piece showed that his mind was elsewhere: “Because [it was] after the Tian’anmen Massacre, my feeling was to just make like . . . a monument or cemetery stone,” representative of the loss China had experienced. Thus, the dark mass centred in Yang Jiechang’s layered ink painting for the exhibition evokes the image of a gravestone.6

Yang Jiechang, Pour Hier, Following Magiciens de la terre, Yang 1990, ink, glue, alum, gauze, and xuan paper, 500 x 300 cm. Jiechang was approached by designer Courtesy of the artist. Jean-Paul Goude to create a piece for the 1989 celebration of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. In a parade down the Champs Elysée, named “Marseillaise” after France’s national anthem, groups of young artists and students from different countries shouted and played music as they made their way to Place de la Concorde. Yang Jiechang played an integral part for the Chinese team, not only by creating one of the central features of their section of the parade, but by moving seamlessly into the sections of other nationalities. For the Chinese team, he painted calligraphy depicting ziyou—freedom—onto a white ﬂag. He describes the Chinese section: “Very good, very powerful . . . there was a very big drum, a red drum, very huge. Much bigger than my room [at Magiciens de la terre].” The artist made a notable impact on the Italian team, as well, who came to him excited and enthusiastic, asking for him to paint calligraphy on their bodies. “This is action,” Yang Jiechang said of the calligraphy. “The Italian team was ﬁrst [in the parade], and our team was second. When our team passed the Champs Elysée, [we] had no voice. Every team had music, the Chinese had only the drummer, the ‘ding ding ding ding,’ [of bicycle bells] and then the wind.” Not all of the political actions, however, were so subtle as the dinging of a bicycle bell:

It’s a pity, during the demonstration, some students— they’re very crazy, and this time they don’t make art—they opened [some banners] and then they said “dadao Li Peng, dadao gongchandang” (down with Li Peng, down with the Communist Party), something like this. . . . It’s really a political problem; it’s not art.

These student activists were diverted so they would not be seen by the politicians attending the march. “There were presidents from Germany, from Japan, from America; there were many powerful chairmen there.” Although wanting to avoid making direct political statements, Yang Jiechang

Vol. 17 No. 2 21 inadvertently assisted other artists in making bold political statements. “The problem is, I gave [the materials] to them. . . . we had about four hours to be waiting, preparing. So I gave them the cardboard, I gave them the ink, I gave them the brush, and then they wrote something about politics.” Köppel- Yang eloquently summed up a theme in Yang Jiechang’s work reﬂected in the actions of the march: “even though his works, the 100 Layers of Ink, are supposedly abstract or concrete paintings, they are always linked to politics.”

Although Yang Jiechang clearly wants Yang Jiechang, Ladder of Knives, 1992–96, ink, glue, to distinguish his motivations from alum, gauze, and xuan paper, 200 x 175 cm. Courtesy of the the political motivations of the other artist. Each knife in Ladder of Knives is a specific type: butter participants in the parade, on the surface, knife, fruit knife, bread knife, razor, kitchen knife, butcher his actions are distinctly political. knife, sickle, chopper, folded How can one claim that the writing of chopper, axe, broadsword, or guillotine. “freedom,” in a march for the political leaders of so many different nations, is without political intentions? In one sense, it inherently cannot, because the need to ask for, to demand, to even bring up the issue of freedom in the presence of these figures will be either lauding, condemning, or, at the very least, bringing the political statement into the same conceptual space as the politics of the attendant government leaders. If the politicians attending the march did not support freedom, or specifically Chinese freedom, then, in a way, these individuals become targets, dissenters toward a statement so publically represented in the celebration of the Parisian masses. However, the calligraphic characters written on Yang Jiechang’s flag are in a language very few in the Western world would understand. Thus, the message becomes cryptic to non- Chinese speakers, and the message of freedom was not communicated to most attendees, including the politicians.

Although Yang Jiechang was clearly a participant in what would be seen by Chinese-speaking onlookers as a political statement, and although he surely knew how his work would be interpreted, the artist focused on his personal feelings: “My process of creation is not based on philosophical theories. I react in a very instinctual and personal manner to the international political situation.”7 Therefore, rather than seeking to make a strong political statement, he merely felt the need to express his personal feelings toward China at the time—that the country should value and celebrate freedom. The simplicity of Yang Jiechang’s personal statement leaves room for others to interpret his work in their own way.

The meaning of the 100 Layers of Ink series, equally, is open to such individual interpretation. These paintings act as a political gesture, a personal expression, a record, and an act of deceit (neither one ﬂat layer as they appear, nor one hundred as the title of the series indicates). Thus, as much as one individual painting may have a speciﬁc meaning about, for example, the Tian’anmen Square Massacre, it acts in part as a chronicle of the artist’s life during an eventful and tumultuous decade. Nonetheless, Yang Jiechang insists it was a relatively happy decade in comparison to the catastrophe he experienced during the Cultural Revolution. “Happy

22 Vol. 17 No. 2 life can be beautiful art. Catastrophic life also can be beautiful art. So art is everything, art can make the human more powerful . . . my art is from the local. It’s really from [death].” This personal philosophy, in addition to Yang Jiechang’s focus on individual understanding, is mirrored and manifested in a stele encountered in his youth.

Yang Jiechang, Underground While telling one of his tangential stories, Yang Flowers, 1994–96, ink, glue, alum, gauze, and xuan paper, Jiechang recalls a trip to Xi’an as a student. When 200 x 95.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. The title of this he was young, the artist visited the Qianling work refers to bones, and in the painting we see the idea Mausoleum, the final resting place of the Empress of a ribcage. Yang Jiechang Wu Zetian (624–705 CE), a ruthless Tang dynasty developed a practice of commemorating every five leader who would later become a fascination for years those killed in the 1989 Tian’anmen Square massacre, him. What was most inspiring about this trip and Underground Flowers is a frequent theme. was the “Blank Tablet” or “Wordless Stele” (无字碑 wu zi bei) situated in the front grounds of the mausoleum. To Yang Jiechang, the blankness of the stele was an invitation for viewers to impart their own meaning. For him it was “Very conceptual. I visited so many stone writings [calligraphic inscriptions carved into cliff sides, as well as engraved stone stelae], and none except this one still influences to me today.” In its original form, the “Wordless Stele”—as it sounds—bore no inscription such as would be seen on a typical stele.8 “Just the stone, very dark stone. . . . The most powerful thing is nothing, you know.” When asked if 100 Layers of Ink had the same nothingness, a vehicle onto which viewers can project their own meanings, Yang Jiechang brought up a comparison.9

For me, calligraphy is my action, so my painting is also action. It’s because my calligraphy is very active. So you cannot say that I have copied the blank stele in front of Wu Zetian’s mausoleum . . . but in the end the painting is still only black.

Wordless Stele (wu zi bei), It is clear that Yang Jiechang’s paintings Shaanxi, 7.53 m high. Photo: Maomao De Rijiben. are a record of his actions, but they do not appear calligraphic in the traditional sense—the combination of action and writing. The missing element—the writing—is cultivated through repetitive action, often a daily practice of painting characters. Though they feature no characters, Yang Jiechang’s paintings in the 100 Layers of Ink series can in this way be seen as calligraphic, as his layers of ink are both repeated actions and repeated marks—a record of these actions. He brings up Qiu Zhijie’s Writing the Lanting Xu One Thousand Times (1992), a work of calligraphy in which Qiu Zhijie wrote Preface to the Orchid Pavilion (as it was written by Wang Xizhi, 303–361) 1,000 times on top of itself. Yang Jiechang says that his work is not a copy of Qiu Zhijie’s in its repetitiveness, nor of Wu Zetian’s, in its blankness, but, instead, his works gain their meaning from their repeated and recorded actions.

Vol. 17 No. 2 23 While Yang Jiechang lists his traditional Yang Jiechang, Bada Stone, 1996, ink, glue, alum, gauze, Chinese inﬂuences—calligraphy, Xu Wei’s and xuan paper, 167.5 x 92.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. paintings, Wu Zetian’s stone stele—it is difﬁcult not to think of the similarities between his works and those that are more contemporary to his practice. When Western artists Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935, Russian) and Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967, American) were brought up in an interview with Yang Jiechang, it was clear that he had discussed these comparisons many times before. He recalls the time a journalist in Oxford asked him if he was imitating Malevich:

I didn’t even know who Malevich was . . . [Mark] Tobey [1890–1976, American] and [Jackson] Pollock [1912–1956, American] got their inspiration from East Asian art, adding some romanticism to it. When there is an artist from East Asia doing something similar, it is interpreted as imitation. This is wrong. Why not say those artists imitated me?10

Yang Jiechang’s question poses further questions: Where did he stand in relation to these Western artists? Where did his Chineseness situate him?

Yang Jiechang calls himself the “religious one;” not in the sense of being an artistic “god” like Tobey or Malevich, but in the instinctual, prayer-like repetition that he finds a personal necessity. His interest in repetitive, focused, and perhaps even compulsive action is in a way similar to that of prayer. These artistic “gods,” in their time, “used Asian art, they used Japanese art, and they used Chinese art to influence the mystery” of their work, whereas Yang Jiechang’s work was the mystery, a more direct channeling of the self. While Western artists were at this time incorporating historical Asian motifs and techniques into their work—in order to introduce an element of the exotic— contemporary Chinese art was, during the lifetimes of artists like Reinhardt and Tobey, more accessible than ever. Although to Yang Jiechang, his own works were clearly Chinese due to the very presence of ink, the exoticness of the works may not have been as apparent to Western viewers, who might have easily and superficially drawn connections between 100 Layers of Ink and aesthetically similar all-black works by Western artists in which there was no obvious influence from Asia. Although no longer the “exotic” Asian aesthetic to which those Western artists like Tobey and Reinhardt were attracted, it is still clear that Yang Jiechang brought a unique technique and philosophy to Magiciens de la terre, ready to inspire his Western contemporaries.

Yang Jiechang recalls that at the time, in the 1980s and 90s, European artists garnered Asian philosophy only from texts and historical paintings, but a contemporary Asian life philosophy was still present in China. For Yang Jiechang, this contemporary Chinese philosophy was to be joyous in spite of hardships such as the Cultural Revolution. “The Chinese are alive, huh?” he teased. “Come on, we are really alive. That’s why we can be together.” For Yang Jiechang, the Cultural Revolution was a time of suffering, but he insists that his joyful liveliness does not arise from historical Chinese philosophy.

24 Vol. 17 No. 2 “I bring this to America, I bring this to Europe, this very important philosophy.” Although he does not directly bring it up in reference to the 100 Layers of Ink series, suffering, and the deﬁance of suffering, is clearly persistent in Yang Jiechang’s mind.

His personal philosophy is aligned with that of Gilles Deleuze, who looked at the vigor of life as defiance of death—“the key lies in the possibility of extracting from this suffering the force of life it always, despite itself, also affirms.”11 It is clear that Yang Jiechang’s 100 Layers of Ink series draws upon this suffering—he says that his art comes from death; yet, despite this, the act of painting itself affirms his aliveness. Deleuze describes this as experiential painting or la contre-effectuation (counter-actualization): “to live actual suffering in such a way as to defy its deadening assault.”12 As each of his many layers can be seen as at least one action, Yang’s 100 Layers of Ink pieces can be seen as a compilation of defiances against death and suffering. In creating in this way, the artist seeks out “the moment of disorientation, the moment that ushers in disorder and chaos.”13

In their 1991 book Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (What Is Philosophy?), Deleuze and Félix Guattari write that art is composed of “chaos, producing sensations that have something of its intensity and so help us not to fall into its abyss.”14 Although the darkness of Yang Jiechang’s 100 Layers of Ink series may appear as an abyss itself, this is an interpretation of the colour black that is rooted deep in Western culture. At an international scale, a field of black is open to wide interpretation: the viewer can project freely. In 1998, when his 100 Layers of Ink works were receiving increased international exposure, Yang Jiechang wryly commented that, “In France, people think it is ‘Oriental Black’ representing Nothingness and Nihilism. While in Japan, some critics judge this kind of painting as ‘very romantic.’ When my work was showing in the Kunstverein, Heidelberg, Germany, it was attacked as ‘full of Fascist violence’!”15 In China, instead of representing darkness, chaos, and nihilism, the blackness of ink represents the creation of a firm and lasting mark upon paper. Although these works are infinitely black— they are made of black—under certain light conditions their appearance flips to white, due to reflections. The 100 Layers of Ink works’ high reflectivity renders them animated; they seem to shift unpredictably, like a part of nature. The sudden flip from deepest black to bright white renders inadequate interpretations founded in a view of the paintings as pure black.

The many implications of the color black raise the question: what exactly is Deleuze’s dark abyss? It is not merely the deep blackness of ink, or a state of nihilism without hope for return; to understand Deleuze’s abyss, we must ﬁrst understand his deﬁnition of chaos. Deleuze’s chaos is a chaos of non-conformity, of interrupting an expected trajectory or way of being that differs from the norm.

In this context, chaos is not deﬁned simply by how it contains (or complicates) differences, but by its inﬁnite speed, such that the particles, forms, and entities that populate it emerge only to disappear immediately, leaving behind no consistency, reference, or any determinate consequences.16

Vol. 17 No. 2 25 Yang Jiechang’s technique of layering paper, gauze, glue, alum, and natural materials embodies this disorderly chaos, defying an abyss that we might understand as inactive conformity. The artist works quickly to create each new layer of his 100 Layers of Ink pieces, the shine of wet ink drying and disappearing, only to be replaced soon after by fresh ink. Yang Jiechang’s chaos thus animates his life, and each layer of ink represents a new, active image telling his story.

In the moment prior to each instance of Yang Jiechang’s layering of materials, he is allowed the chance to break from the pattern established in the previous layers to create a new layer entirely different from the others. Though he does create difference by adding a new layer, as each inherently cannot be exactly the same, Yang Jiechang’s repetition shows a continuous focus on the technique, idea, and aesthetic that spanned the decade of his painting 100 Layers. In a way, each painting is not, in itself, complete— after he ceases to paint on one piece, he progresses to another, continuing his repetition of layering black ink—continuing the same actions used to create every one of the 100 Layers of Ink paintings, but merely in a different location and thus on a separate piece. As discussed previously, Yang Jiechang believes that the act of layering is in itself a work of art. Though his thoughts shift as he moves from one image plane to the next, his physical act of painting layers remains much the same. Clearly, the ﬁrst few 100 Layers of Ink works did not satisfy his desire to explore these actions, and thus he continued to return to or reiterate his layering for years afterward.

This exploration of the layering action can be seen as “pure experience” as proposed by Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). Nishida defines pure experience as a “body-based analysis of experience.”17 Through his definition of pure experience, Nishida explicates some aspects of his understanding of consciousness: first, that consciousness is equivalent to the experience of fact, and not the mental or emotional reaction to this fact; second, that the recollection of the past is itself a part of consciousness, but is not equal to the consciousness experienced during that moment in the past; third, that reflections upon pure past experiences may be tainted with judgment and meaning; fourth, that through reflection upon the past, consciousness is both instantaneous and non-instantaneous, and contingent upon the purity of the recollection of a memory. For example, if the recollector is able to return to a memory without imparting judgment upon it, this may reflect a non-instantaneous consciousness that can transcend linear time. Though Nishida seems hesitant throughout his text to believe that this is anything more than a theoretical possibility, one could suggest that Yang Jiechang embodies this principle throughout his work, returning to and re-experiencing the layering of ink with the creation of a new 100 Layers of Ink painting.

Nishida poignantly differentiates perceiving and judging through the example of experiencing blue: judging the colour blue does not change anything about it, and purely experiencing blue can be separated from any meaning that it may imply (associations with masculinity, sadness, nature, etc.). Its existence and one’s experience of its existence is the only concrete facet of blue. Equally, Yang Jiechang’s layering is the only deﬁnite facet of

26 Vol. 17 No. 2 his works: the interpretations and aesthetics of them vary. “The ﬁrst one I did in China, before I left, what I made is not abstract painting—I made the painting look abstract.” Despite at times referring to the works as abstract, Yang Jiechang later corrected himself: “It’s not only the form, they are not abstract. They are action. Calligraphy is action, my painting is action.” He emphasized at multiple points throughout our conversations that the paintings created in China were for him, and not his instructors or peers, and that he did not learn to paint abstraction.

I don’t know how to make abstract art. Everything, for me, like this, is not abstract. It’s calligraphy, it’s my spirituality. . . . It’s not abstract, because for more than ﬁve years, every day, all I did was to make a portrait for the people. To learn art in the academy is just to make portraits.

Thus Yang Jiechang differentiates between the appearance of his paintings— abstract—and his experiential interpretation—that they must be calligraphic because that is how he learned to paint. In addition, without stating this outright, perhaps because it might seem too obvious to him, he makes it clear that to learn painting at the academy is, essentially, to practice repetition. In considering his work, we can think about how his actions and the energy that he puts into his works reﬂect his history, his education, and his chaos.

Left: Yang Jiechang, Ladder to the Sky, 1992, ink, glue, alum, gauze, and xuan paper, 190.5 x 127.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Yang Jiechang, Ghost Chair, 1989, ink, glue, alum, gauze, and xuan paper, 96.5 x 178 cm. Courtesy of the artist. The 100 Layers of Ink series is punctuated occasionally by images that are abstract and poetic, such as Ghost Chair. There is a dark tone, a mystique, underlying these pieces. Ghost Chair, although painted in 1989, has taken on an association with a ghost that lives in a four-hundred- year-old mill that the Yangs have refurbished.

Since reaching middle age, Yang Jiechang has been engaged in painting a series of dramatic gongbi (fine line) self-portraits, for example, a many- paneled painting of himself falling through space, a portrait of himself as the Dalai Lama, and an image of himself as a Buddhist figure ensconced in a cave and bursting into conflagration. But we can look at the series of 100 Layers of Ink works as a more subtle parade of unselfconsciously created self-portraits. Their changes follow the changes in his life. The crumpling, folding, and cutting of materials that began in 1989 and continued as a necessary and underlying part of the 100 Layers of Ink series throughout the next ten years

Vol. 17 No. 2 27 is a kind of violence inflicted upon the materials in the act of creation. Of course, they evolved over time, their technique becoming ever more refined, and the visual content changing as the artist’s psyche developed over the course of his life. While he speaks of the important positive aspects of his life during this decade of painting, notably moving to Europe, meeting his life partner Martina Köppel-Yang, and exhibiting at Magiciens de la terre, there were horrific and sad experiences that strongly shaped his way of performing his life, both at this time and during his youth.

While it becomes difﬁcult to see the chaos of crumpled gauze and paper layered under Yang Jiechang’s many coats of ink, it is clear that this chaos exists. By covering these materials in ink, he does not erase these chaotic actions—instead, the shine of his ink highlights the textural changes created by these layered materials, mirroring the changes in his own life that brought him to where he is today. Yang Jiechang is a recollector, a repeater, an inappropriate and chaotic ink artist who paints with experiences. His topology of chaos began in 1989, and, through layers and layers of ink, it is preserved in perpetuity as his legacy.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this essay are taken from the interview of January 24, 2017. 2. Because it is impossible to study calligraphy from a giant rock carving, scholars rely on books based on rubbings of the carved text, reduced in size and arranged in book format. 3. After visiting Yang Jiechang’s studio, Jean-Hubert Martin wanted to see the artist’s living space. “Martin noticed that I had a whole pile of stele rubbings, and he looked through them and asked me if my artwork had evolved from these. At the time I understood a little bit of English and I told him he was very observant. He realized that my paintings had come from the rubbings, and it was really weird because I didn’t even realize that my paintings had anything to do with rubbings.” “Yang Jiechang 2007-10-25, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts,” Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980–1990, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, http://www.aaa.org.hk/ Collection/CollectionOnline/SpecialCollectionItem/12263/. 4. Luckily, Yang Jiechang was able to recover these paintings just two years later and bring them back to Guangdong with the help of a friend. Returning to these works after two years of growth, experience, and developing his technique, he was convinced they needed to be changed. Driven to create something new from the old works, he cut, crumpled, and glued them between many layers of ink, creating a dramatically new composition. 5. Fritz Hansel and Yang Jiechang, “Republic of Fritz Hansel—A Dialogue,” in No-Shadow Kick (Shanghai: Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, 2008). 6. This work is at times entitled Pour Hier or Chine demain pour hier, though M+, an art museum in Hong Kong that later collected the work, entitles it Hundred Layers of Ink. 7. Larys Frogier, “Eros . . . Global . . . Chaos,” in Nam June Paik’s Belt (Guangzhou: Liberia Borges Institute for Contemporary Art, 2011), 84. 8. The stele now features a number of inscriptions. Image sourced from https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Qianling_Mausoleum_38_2013-08.JPG/. 9. This is in dialogue with Roland Barthes’s “Reader Response Theory,” the death of the author and celebration of the viewer’s interpretation. More on this theory can be found in Barthes’s seminal essay “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). 10. Li, Yu-Chieh, “Action Painting Is Not Calligraphy: A Conversation with Yang Jiechang,” Museum of Modern Art, http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/707-action-painting-is-not-calligraphy-a- conversation-with-yang-jiechang/. 11. This is as described by Martin Crowley, in “Deleuze on Painting,” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 67, no. 3 (July 2013), 374. 12. Ibid. 13. Frogier, “Eros . . . Global . . . Chaos,” 84. 14. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991), 190–91. Martin Crowley, trans., “Deleuze on Painting,” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 67, no. 3 (July 2013), 374. 15. “Yang Jiechang Artist Statement,” Art Beatus, http://www.artbeatus.com/english.html/. 16. Alberto Toscano, “Chaos,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, rev. ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 48. 17. Ibid.

28 Vol. 17 No. 2 Junjie Jiang The Doubleness of Sight/Site: Xu Bing’s Phoenix as an Intended Public Art Project

magine yourself walking among the glamorous skyscrapers in Beijing’s Central Business District, known as the CBD, an area designed to compete with other global financial centres around the world such as I 1 those in London, New York, and Tokyo. You pass by two glass facade towers with the name Caifu dasha (Fortune Towers), a commercial development among many in the CBD that are designed by world-renowned architecture firms and that signify wealth with their luxurious appearances. You glance over the glass atrium that connects the twin Fortune Towers and suddenly catch sight of, hanging from the ceiling of the atrium (which itself looks like a crystal cage), a magnificent view of two giant phoenixes in flight. As you approach the atrium, you discover, perhaps to your unexpected delight, that the pair of birds is assembled from heavy pieces of industrial debris whose traces of prior use are left visible and uncamouflaged. If it happens to be nighttime, when the lights in the atrium are dimmed, you see instead two constellations in the pattern of phoenixes, formed by shining fairy lights that trace the contours of the birds.

The preceding description may very well convey how Xu Bing envisioned the public encounter with this work, which he entitled Phoenix, had it ultimately been accepted by the commissioning client and installed in Fortune Towers’ atrium, the space the artist originally designed it for.

How would Phoenix—which was ultimately constructed, although not for the Fortune Towers atrium—if installed as a public art piece following this original design, intervene in the space of its display? By reintroducing construction waste with heavy traces of production history back into the glamorous buildings and putting labour on grand display, what would Phoenix tell us about labour and capital? How does the labour-intensive process of making Phoenix itself comment on the relationship between art and labour? How does Phoenix’s own entanglement with capital—created upon the request of capital, abandoned by capital, and eventually salvaged by capital—reveal the complicated relationship between art and capital? And as an artwork that has now travelled the globe, how does Phoenix communicate across cultures? It is through Xu Bing’s signature trick—what I call the doubleness of sight—achieved with pronounced materiality of the work up close on one hand, and the creation of an illusion from afar on the other, that Phoenix intervenes in the politics of space, exposes the doubleness of site, and examines the relations among art, labour, and capital.

A Brief Story of Phoenix Phoenix was originally commissioned by Lee Shau-kee, a Hong Kong-based real estate tycoon, through Ravenel Art Group, to adorn the atrium of

Vol. 17 No. 2 29 2 Fortune Towers, a new business complex. Xu Bing, however, intended to Xu Bing, Phoenix, 2008–10, installation view at Mass use this work as a platform for social critique. The finished product is two MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, 2012–13. © Xu giant phoenixes, each approximately six metres wide, twenty-eight metres Bing Studio. long, and weighing twelve tons, assembled with the discarded industrial materials and tools that had been used to construct the modern buildings these two birds were intended to ornament.3 Little by little, Xu Bing and his team convinced the commissioners to accept this “junk”; yet, after the 2008 financial crisis, the commissioning party grew intolerant of the critical and ironic dimension of the work and demanded that the birds be beautified.4 Having refused the demand because it would defeat his purpose, Xu Bing lost the commission, and ownership of the artwork went into limbo.5 Later, Barry Lam, a billionaire and one of the foremost art patrons in Taiwan, bought the piece.6 Phoenix was presented to the public twice in China—outside the Today Art Museum in Beijing and during the World Expo in Shanghai, both in 2010.7 Phoenix then made its debut abroad at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) with a complementary exhibition that traced the evolution of the project at Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C. in 2013, and then was on view at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, New York, in 2014.8

30 Vol. 17 No. 2 Xu Bing, Phoenix, 2008–10, Translatio: Transfer and installation view at the World Expo, Shanghai, 2010. © Xu Translation Bing Studio. “Phoenix” is a common translation and mistranslation for the Chinese word fenghuang. The (mis) translation is attributed to James Legge, a noted Scottish Sinologist and one of the earliest translators of Chinese classics.9 According to the chapter “Shi’niao” (To Explain Birds) in Erya, the oldest surviving Chinese encyclopedia known, fenghuang is made up of the head of a rooster, the jaw of a swallow, the neck of a snake, the back pattern of a tortoise, and the tail of a ﬁsh.10 Fenghuang is basically an assemblage of heterogeneous animal parts. Xu Bing translated the organic components of the bird into industrial ones, and while reinventing the bird’s design, he followed carefully the logic of each part. The hardhats form the comb because they are red and worn on top. The concrete mixer is the stomach because the two share a function of stirring and blending. “The heads of both the male feng and the female huang are made from the nose of industrial jackhammers, a contemporary translation of their strength and ferocity (historical images of the phoenix often show the powerful bird with a snake in its talons or beak).”11 The shovels apparently make good claws. A spade becomes a piece of feather because the handle’s function resembles that of the quill. The impellers are on the long tail feathers due to their relation to aerodynamics. Thus the phoenixes are by no means a haphazard assemblage of used materials; rather, the design is careful and thoughtful, and the logic of assemblage follows the anatomical structure of a bird and makes the piece a well-integrated whole.

Xu Bing, Phoenix, 2008–10, detail of hard hats as the comb of Phoenix. © Xu Bing Studio.

Bearing the name of the fenghuang, and having been transferred physically from China to the U.S., Phoenix can be seen as a paradigm of translation. Although Erya also reads “feng is the essence of ﬁre,” fenghuang does not share the legend of rebirth from ashes associated with the phoenix.12 The phoenix, “in ancient Egypt and in Classical antiquity,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Vol. 17 No. 2 31 is a fabulous bird associated with the worship of the sun. . . . Only one phoenix existed at any time, and it was very long- lived—no ancient authority gave it a life span of less than 500 years. As its end approached, the phoenix fashioned a nest of aromatic boughs and spices, set it on ﬁre, and was consumed in the ﬂames. From the pyre miraculously sprang a new phoenix.13

Although Xu Bing’s phoenixes easily Xu Bing, Phoenix, 2008–10, detail of shovels as the can be read as reborn from ashes feathers of Phoenix. © Xu Bing Studio. and waste, the fire extinguishers bundled on their feathers seem at the same time to be a playful reversal of the fire motif and acknowledge the tension in the doubleness of translation. Nevertheless, Phoenix allows for the coexistence of both, as a conglomerate of fenghuang-phoenix, with their similarities and differences. Phoenix thus signifies heterogeneity and multiplicity.

Xu Bing commented on Phoenix’s exhibition at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine that “The birds have different meanings in different places. This cathedral is monumental and very lofty, and the phoenixes now have a sacred quality.”14 Xu Bing underscored the work’s interaction with the space of its exhibition and the site speciﬁcity of Phoenix as an intended public art piece. Unable to be installed in Fortune Towers, the site it was initially conceived for, Phoenix is now constantly on the move. Therefore, the meaning of Phoenix is not ﬁxed, but open to interpretation, and new meaning can be accrued and generated by each new, changing context.

The Materiality of the Phoenixes “Background Story would, in fact, be an apt title for almost any of Xu Bing’s works, indeed his practice as a whole,” the 2012 MASS MoCA booklet reads, “which consistently reminds us to question what we see and investigate what we are told; that is, to ﬁnd a deeper reality, which is often messier than the seeming beauty of a story’s surface.”15 The deeper, messier reality is revealed through the pronounced materiality of Xu Bing’s work. Xu Bing’s belief that God invented us with dust, hence the divinity of materials, may help explain his interest in the materiality of things.16 How are we to understand what Xu Bing means by divinity? The contemporary Chinese poet Ouyang Jianghe remarked in his article “Xu Bing Fenghuang de yiyi chongdie” (The Overlap of Meanings in Xu Bing’s Phoenix),

Those rusty traces of use on the materials the phoenixes are made of, those hardhats once worn, which make one wonder where the heads once underneath those hats have gone and what they are thinking, and those working tools touched by the workers and left with their warmth and sweat, which have transformed into rust over time: the existence and transformations of all these tinctures of life along with the experience of life accumulated in the process

32 Vol. 17 No. 2 that makes tools and materials into waste become what Xu Bing calls “divinity.”17

We may therefore understand “divinity” as a repository of possibilities rooted in the creation myth for connections and transformations between the material and the human and the power for the material itself to invoke and speak for the human condition. The most telling example may be another of Xu Bing’s works, Where Does the Dust Itself Collect? (2004), which uses dust collected from the streets of New York, blown from the debris of the World Trade Center on the day it was destroyed in 2001. According to Xu Bing’s own article “Guanyu Hechu re chen’ai” (On Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?), a museum contacted him hoping to purchase some of the dust he collected; the museum had collected many things related to the 9/11 attacks but not the dust.18 During the phoenixes’ making, Xu Bing kept “emphasiz[ing] the need to increase the use of materials with the authentic feeling of real buildings,” namely, such materials that readily invoke a construction site, because, presumably, the materials are the strongest pieces of evidence that remind the viewer of the building’s past.19

Xu Bing, Phoenix, 2008–10, In Capital, Karl Marx wrote, “The mysterious character of the commodity- detail of the tail of Phoenix. © Xu Bing Studio. form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reﬂects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.”20 According to Marx, value, measured by labour, appears to be determined by seemingly intrinsic use value, rendering labour irrelevant. The pieces of construction waste and tools that Phoenix is made up of bore the marks left by prior use; therefore, they are indexical signs that point directly to labour, thus making the obscured labour—as theorized by Marx—visible again.

Every part of Phoenix has been touched twice—ﬁrst by the construction workers who used the tools and shaped the materials, and then by the art

Vol. 17 No. 2 33 workers who built the sculpture. Unlike most modern buildings where any visible marks left by their builders have been wiped clean, Phoenix retains heavy traces that reveal the production history of both their component parts and the process of their assemblage. Here, the workers’ hands—the hired hands of wage labour—replace the artist’s hand. The tricolour-striped plastic sheets, hard hats, spades, bamboo scaffolds, excavators, impellers, green pipes, and the belly of the concrete mixer are readily recognizable yet not necessarily namable or articulable signs that are closely associated with a construction site. Unlike real estate moguls, who are each known by a proper name, workers are designated by metonymy, synecdoche, generality, and collectivity.

Xu Bing, Phoenix, 2008–10, installation view at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, 2014. © Xu Bing Studio.

In the poem “Fenghuang” (Phoenixes) inspired by Xu Bing’s Phoenix, Ouyang Jianghe wrote, “ID photos: a collective face, /Signatures: an anonymity.”21 Despite the fact that every worker has an ID with their photo and signs their name on a labour contract, ID photos and signatures are merely tools for surveillance, control, and exploitation rather than signiﬁers of individuality or subjectivity. Workers remain faceless nonpersons. When the metonym “hard hat” has replaced the actual labourer, it indicates what Wang Hui calls quzhutihua de laodong (de-subjectiﬁed labour), labour minus the labourer.22 The MASS MoCA booklet Xu Bing: Phoenix reads, “In this way his mythical phoenixes can perhaps be seen as stand-ins for the labourers who made them—disposable like the waste materials they used—yet ultimately the source of power and prosperity the creature historically symbolizes.”23 However, I argue that the phoenixes do not merely seek to serve as “stand-ins” for the labourers—if so, the phoenixes would have violated the workers again by replacing them and therefore violently removing them once more from the scene. Rather, the relationship is more complex and multilayered.

There is indeed an analogy between the phoenixes—or more precisely the materials that make the phoenixes—and the workers, as interpreted in the booklet. Zhai Yongming even called the waste materials the “excrement” of the building—used, taken advantage of, necessary, but ultimately to be purged, analogous to the excluded workers after their exploitation.24 The

34 Vol. 17 No. 2 Xu Bing, Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?, 2004, installation view at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2014. © Xu Bing Studio.

paradoxical union of cheapness and beauty is symbolic. Zhai Yongming quotes Xu Bing, “I hope that the methods behind this work resemble those of Chinese folk art, that they possess a strong quality of the people. Folk practices tend to use the least expensive materials to express a strong sense of hope about the future.”25 Adorned with the most beautiful, albeit mundane, materials available, the two phoenixes are analogous to the people, not the business elite. The red hard hats as the comb of one phoenix, according to Ouyang Jianghe, remind the viewer of the heads that used to wear them and make the viewer wonder where the heads are now and what they might be thinking.26 The emphasis on traces and on the workers’ hands, as the workers are known by the synecdoche “hired hands” in English, counters the de-subjectifying power of commodity, brings back the history of the phoenixes, and makes the product of labour personal again.

Therefore, by transporting dumped construction waste and used tools back onto the site, Phoenix salvages the sunken history of the building. “[T]he existence of the things qua commodities,” wrote Karl Marx in Capital:

[A]nd the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a deﬁnite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. . . . I call this the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so as soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.27

The relation between the construction waste and the shining building as the finished product signifies a social relationship between those who construct the building and those who enjoy it, and by juxtaposing the rawness of the materials that constitute the phoenixes and the fineness of the grand building, Phoenix highlights the jarring conflict between the two as well as the forgotten exploitation and hidden exclusion of the former.

Vol. 17 No. 2 35 Doubleness of Sight: Between Reality and Illusion When Xu Bing ﬁrst visited the construction site of Fortune Towers, he was shocked by the stark contrast between the almost primitive way of working and the modernity of the skyscraper:

The working and living conditions of the construction workers were basic and humble. The contrast between the modern buildings and the rudimentary conditions of the construction work came as a shock to Xu Bing, who had never set foot on a Chinese construction site. The construction site was entirely debris at that time. So Xu Bing decided to use the architectural excrement of this skyscraper—along with tools and daily necessities of migrant workers—to create a work that would be hung in the atrium of the grand building in all its sparkling magniﬁcence.28

The making of this work was a process of discovery for Xu Bing. How to impart his experience of shock and revelation and replicate such a moment of contemplation to a viewer who may have never seriously observed or pondered the working and living conditions of construction workers became Xu Bing’s primary question, and this revelation could not be presented in a didactic manner; it would have to be a process of discovery for the viewer as well.

To create an educational and Phoenix being constructed in a factory in Beijing, 2008. © thought-provoking visual Xu Bing Studio. experience for the viewer, Xu Bing created a play between near and far and between light and dark, such that the phoenixes would embody a paradoxical doubleness—the familiar and the unfamiliar—a sight of Freudian uncanny that exemplifies conflicting social relations. According to his original design, during daytime and from afar, the viewer would first be moved by the beauty and magnificence of the two phoenixes that were in harmony with the grandeur of the skyscrapers they adorned. Upon closer examination, however, the viewer would experience surprise, finding out that the objects were constructed of construction waste, at odds with everything such a modern, luxury building represents. Phoenix appears somewhat familiar at night, like Chinese festive lanterns with a common motif of longfeng chengxiang (the appearance of phoenixes is considered to bring a good fortune), yet turns out to be something strange and unfamiliar, a readymade assemblage of industrial debris typical of Western avant-garde art.29 The phoenixes were to appear beautiful, even elegant, in the dark yet become disconcertingly rough in the daylight.

The paradoxes embedded in Phoenix reproduce the conditions of modernity and capitalism. While one might have the impression that modernity is all about technological advancement and automatized production, only upon closer examination does one begin to realize that manual labour is still the basis of many production processes. Phoenix can

36 Vol. 17 No. 2 Xu Bing, Phoenix, 2008–10, installation view (night) at the Today Art Museum, Beijing, 2010. © Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing, Phoenix, 2008–10, thus be seen as a combination of installation view (day) at the Today Art Museum, Beijing, two sides of Chinese society—the 2010. © Xu Bing Studio. harsh realities of cheap labour and environmental pollution as well as the miraculous economic prosperity and the Chinese dream, a dream that looks most splendid when the less splendid realities are hidden in the dark. Interestingly, while Xu Bing transforms harsh reality into illusory constellations, Ouyang Jianghe wrote in his poem, “In the sky, real estate moguls stand / pinching out stars like cigarette butts.”30 With “pinching out stars,” Ouyang Jianghe smashes the illusion Xu Bing creates and forces the reader/viewer back into reality. Xu Bing’s stars are turned into cigarette butts, back into consumed commodities to be discarded, just like construction waste.

From Sight to Site Walter Benjamin famously remarked in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”31 Such barbarism, however, is usually repressed and buried. When the contemporary American artist Fred Wilson put a pair of iron slave shackles next to ﬁne pitchers, steins, and goblets used for silver service in his installation Metalwork 1793–1880 (1992) at the Maryland Historical Society, he salvaged the hidden history of what made the silverware and the lifestyle it stood for possible. The juxtaposition created stark contrasts—one between the ﬁneness of the beautifully designed silverware with shining and intricately decorated surfaces and the dullness of the lusterless, crude iron with a simple, purely functional design, and another between the elegant lifestyle the silverware evoked and the abject life subject to toil and cruelty that the shackles represent. Bringing back what had been hidden away, overlooked, and forgotten, Wilson created shock, tension, and contrast. Xu Bing’s Phoenix, however,

Vol. 17 No. 2 37 Xu Bing, Ghosts Pounding the Wall, 1990–91, installation view at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2014. © Xu Bing Studio.

is not only about outright antagonism—the relationship he has proposed is also complex, mutable, and deceptive. Phoenix suggests a more subtle relationship between labour and capital than sheer enmity. The doubleness of the site, namely, the grand buildings as both a document of civilization and modernity and a document of barbarism and exploitation, is revealed through the doubleness of sight—the promising outlook of prosperity and the harsh view of toil, the harmonious prospect of effaced labour making traceless contributions to the creation of fortune and the crude picture of raw materials bearing scars of labour.

Art historian and critic Rosalyn Deutsche brought forward a perspective on public art in her text “Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City,”

Beginning in the late 1960s, contemporary art and criticism challenged modernist tenets of aesthetic autonomy by exploring art’s functions in mutable social circumstances. Artists initiated this critique by shifting attention away from the “inside” of the artwork—supposed in modernist doctrine to contain fixed, inherent meaning—and focusing instead on the work’s context—its framing conditions. Site-specificity, an aesthetic strategy in which context was incorporated into the work itself, was originally developed to counteract the construction of ideological art objects, purportedly defined by independent essences, and to reveal the ways in which the meaning of art is constituted in relation to its institutional frames. . . . Most fruitfully, artists extended the notion of context to encompass the individual site’s symbolic, social, and political meanings as well as the discursive and historical circumstances within which artwork, spectator, and site are situated. . . . But critical site- specific art, as distinguished from its academic progeny, not only continued to incorporate context as a critique of the artwork but attempted to intervene in the site. The newly acknowledged reciprocity between artwork and site changed the identity of each, blurring the boundaries between them, and paved the way for art’s participation in wider cultural

38 Vol. 17 No. 2 and social practices. For public art, the objective of altering the site required that the urban space occupied by a work be understood, just as art and art institutions had been, as socially constructed spaces.32

Workers making rubbings In the introduction to her book from the Great Wall for Ghost Pounding the Wall, 1990–91. © Evictions, Deutsche summarized Henri Xu Bing Studio. Lefebvre’s idea that “the organization of the city and of space in general is neither neutral nor uniformly advantageous” and that “space is, rather, political, inseparable from the conflictual and uneven social relations that structure specific societies at specific historical moments.”33 Deutsche further argued that urban- aesthetic discourses “mobilize a democratic rhetoric of ‘openness’ and ‘accessibility’,” yet they “are structured by exclusions and, moreover, by attempts to erase the traces of these exclusions.”34 “Exclusions are justified, naturalized, and hidden by representing social space as a substantial unity that must be protected from conflict, heterogeneity, and particularity.”35

By forcing the waste of the building back into itself, Phoenix turns an exclusive space inclusive and imposes heterogeneity back on homogeneity. If on view as a public art piece in Fortune Towers following Xu Bing’s original design, Phoenix would have intervened in the space of its display, attacking the boundary that delimits the inside and outside of that space. Phoenix would have revealed the conﬂicting and uneven economic and social relations between those who construct the building and those who enjoy it. Reintroducing the eradicated heterogeneity back to the site, Phoenix would have called attention to the effacement of traces of exclusion and question the specious claim of openness suggested by the glass facades’ transparency.

“The market community as such is the most impersonal relationship of practical life into which humans can enter with one another,” wrote Max Weber in Economy and Society, “. . . where the market is allowed to follow its own autonomous tendencies, its participants do not look toward the persons of each other but only toward the commodity.”36 “Those who construct the building and those who enjoy it” are in such a market community described by Weber that they do not have any personal relation, hence never “meet[ing] each other.” The relationship between these two groups of people is established through, and only through, the building as commodity.

I have argued that not only are those who construct the building never seen, their existence is consistently in danger of effacement and oblivion. As a typical slogan in Beijing’s CBD goes, Fortune Towers is a place where “those who have created fortune enjoy fortune.”37 Such assertions claim that “those who have created fortune” have created it singlehandedly. Unfortunately,

Vol. 17 No. 2 39 construction workers seem to have no place in this discursive or physical space of fortune. This slogan is more of an alibi to justify the privilege of those who “enjoy fortune” by crediting them for producing it, whereas such privilege actually derives from their acts of consumption through luxury lifestyles. In response to the effacement of construction workers, Phoenix reminds us of the indispensable role these workers provide and asks who has actually created fortune. The construction workers, hired and used to build the walls of Fortune Towers, were, at the same time, building demarcations that eventually fended them off from this privileged space.

Phoenix would not only critique the space where it was to be displayed but also seek to transform it. The atrium of Fortune Towers, with its glass facades, provides an illusion of accessibility for all. The glass wall, however, while transparent, is solid. If you are an average person who passes by or someone who has a manual job in the CBD but who does not enjoy the privilege of a luxury lifestyle, nothing here actually belongs to you. However, if you were to behold the two phoenixes—a public artwork conceived also for you, the luxury building’s discriminatory barrier—the transparent but solid glass partition between the outside and the inside— would become more porous and unstable. Or, if you are lucky enough to be one of those who are comfortable about entering the building as a middle- or high-end consumer, an owner of a luxury apartment, or a white-collar professional, the two phoenixes would reveal what you do not see but has been supporting your lifestyle.

The sheer size of the phoenixes and the issues this work is concerned with bear resemblance to an earlier work by Xu Bing—Gui da qiang (Ghosts Pounding the Wall) (1990–91). Ghosts is a series of large-scale rubbings of parts of the Great Wall. The Great Wall is a document of both civilization and barbarism, a record of technology and stamina as well as corvée labour and suffering. About the Great Wall, “a legend also circulated,” as art historian and critic Wu Hung recounted, describing the popular Chinese folktale of a woman, Mengjiang, in his article “Counter-Monument”:

It tells of an ordinary woman, Mengjiang, whose husband had been sent to the wall construction site. In winter, worrying about his welfare, she set out to take him warm clothes, only to learn after the long journey that she was too late: her husband had already perished and his body had been buried under the wall. Overcome, the woman knelt down and cried. Her grief miraculously caused the wall to break open and reveal her husband’s bones.38

According to the legend, Mengjiang’s husband, Wan Xiliang, as an individual labourer, is physically used as building blocks for the wall. As the wall is built upon his body, his body as proof of barbarism is literally buried. Mengjiang’s weeping miraculously uncovers such barbarism on the verge of its falling into oblivion. “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke),” argues Walter Benjamin, “It means to seize hold of a memory as it ﬂashes up at a moment of danger.”39 Both Ghosts and Phoenix are monumental “works” that entail real work and manual labour;

40 Vol. 17 No. 2 much like the marks left by the workers on the phoenixes, the rubbings of the wall are indexical signs made by the hand of the art workers, pointing to the actual bricks of the wall laid by the labourers in the past. Ghosts and Phoenix therefore seize hold of the memory of labour at a dangerous moment of it being repressed under what is now viewed as a monument of civilization. Indeed, Wu Hung calls Ghosts a counter-monument:

This primary meaning of the project becomes implicit when the paper Long Wall [a literal translation of the Chinese word Changcheng, a.k.a., the Great Wall] is shown in an art gallery. What we encounter now is the ﬁnal consequence of a transformation: the solid brick-structure is transformed into its volumeless shadow; the national symbol is transformed into an installation by an individual artist; and the Long Wall—a prime monument of China—is transformed into a counter-monument. I call it a counter-monument because its violation of a conventional monument is still measured against the conventional monument, and because this violation has resulted in a new monumental form. Like his creator, this paper Long Wall has been dislocated; but its signiﬁcance still lies in its juxtaposition with its origin.40

Xu Bing working with his team Phoenix can also be considered a counter- in Beijing. © Xu Bing Studio. monument. The grand, glass-facade skyscrapers are conceived as monuments of fortune that occupy a position as objects of worship to be looked up to and that distinguish themselves from the baseness of their own construction waste.

From Spatiality to Temporality The making of Ghosts was no less painstaking than that of Phoenix, and, like Phoenix, the process of its making is meticulously documented. According to Wu Hung in the same article:

With a crew of students and peasants, he laboured for twenty-four days to make ink rubbings from a thirty-metre- long section of the Wall. The project was planned and conceived as a grand happening. Every stage of its process was meticulously documented, including the endless, monotonous sound and motion of “pounding the wall,” which was recorded on ﬁlm and video.41

The photographs of workers on the scaffold making the rubbings, however, create an anachronistic illusion, as if the modern-day workers were building the Great Wall on a construction site. Yet, this work is not a reenactment of constructing the wall; the workers are actually making art, which may not be as labourious as building the Great Wall but still demands considerable toil. Therefore, like Phoenix, Ghosts plays with the viewer’s ﬁrst impressions, expectations, and, upon closer examination, reconsideration of their experience of it.

Vol. 17 No. 2 41 Under a pre-capitalist economic Furniture designed by Da Lang, a worker who participated in system, it was political power that the production of the Phoenix. © Xu Bing Studio. mobilized labour; the Great Wall literally buried the personal traces of its producers. Nowadays, it is mostly economic forces that drive labour, and the actual makers are again wiped away. If we examine Xu Bing’s earlier work Ghosts and his later work Phoenix side by side, we ﬁnd simultaneity of past and present: the age-old icon of fenghuang and the modern industrial material, the eternity of fenghuang and the cyclical rebirth of the phoenix, as well as the ancient wall and the contemporary art workers. “The time is out of joint.”42 Such anachronism, or perhaps even achronicity, seems to question the linear-progressive narrative of history. Xu Bing’s works make ingenious statements on time and progression: Is the condition of labour today better than that some millennium ago, long since we supposedly entered a more civilized and modernized age? Since the phoenix is reborn again and again, does exploitation remain the same, as the history of labour repeats itself, regardless of its upgraded, mechanized context? “This is how one pictures the angel of history,” described Walter Benjamin vividly:

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.43

What if we replace Benjamin’s angel of history (which is itself inspired by modern art, Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (1920) with Xu Bing’s fenghuang-phoenix? His face and hers are forever turned toward the present, with one eye into the past, the other into the future. The fenghuang- phoenixes would like to advance, flying upward toward Paradise, but a whirl of wind has caught their wings with such violence that they keep revolving. Even if they were to catch fire, a fire called progress, they would not stop. They shed their old feathers that have turned into ashes and start anew, with more and more sleek plumage, yet they are always haunted by the idea that they are merely the return of their own specters from the past and the future.

Flight Within the Cage The making of Phoenix itself produces waste; therefore, Xu Bing’s move is nothing redemptive. He is practical about what art can do in today’s society. With “the atrium space like a crystal box,” Xu Bing envisioned for the phoenixes “an image of arrested ﬂight.”44 The image of ﬂight within a cage is metaphorical for the artist’s situation in a capitalist economy. The

42 Vol. 17 No. 2 Xu Bing, Phoenix, 2008–10, phoenixes themselves are extremely hoisting Phoenix into place at the Today Art Museum, heavy and costly to move. The wires Beijing, 2010. © Xu Bing Studio. that bear the weight of the birds, the hoists that are expensive to rent (as many as six hoists were used in the outdoor exhibition in front of the Today Art Museum), and even Fortune Towers where the giant phoenixes would have been hung all serve as a metaphor for how capital supports the weight of art and how art heavily depends on capital.45 “It is almost impossible for art to function independently of capital in the contemporary society,” as the contemporary Chinese ﬁlmmaker Jia Zhangke commented. The relationship between art and capital is intricate, with both tension and gongmou (collusion).46

Xu Bing uses art to draw attention to the system within its own limitations. Phoenix is a labour-intensive, collaborative project ﬁnished in an art factory led by Xu Bing. Although Xu Bing’s own status as one of the most prominent contemporary Chinese artists was necessary for making such a work possible, Phoenix is presented as a group effort. Xu Bing has allocated the workers and other participants visibility and agency. The copyright of The Story of the Phoenix: Xu Bing’s Phoenix Project does not belong to Xu Bing, but to Xu Bing Studio. The Story documents Phoenix as a collaborative project ﬁnished by Xu Bing’s team and records the names and faces of various contributors such as Xu Bing’s assistants, friends, and the workers at the art factory. The Story acknowledges Dan Bo’s important contribution and gives voice to different people such as Da Lang, one of the workers:

Professor Xu Bing would say, “Doesn’t it look great if you put this thing in that position?” So I would think about it myself and realize that it was better than before. I slowly began to try my own hand at it. Professor Xu was not willing to let you make changes and, in fact, wanted you to propose changes. That doesn’t work with other artists. “Take that thing down, switch this for me!” They usually have that attitude.47

Da Lang was inspired to make pieces of furniture with construction waste, and his works have been exhibited along with the phoenixes. In addition, a documentary accompanies the exhibitions, which gives credit to the art workers who assembled Phoenix with their hands. Hence, the relationship between Xu Bing and the art workers is different from what Phoenix is trying to critique, namely the relationship between those who construct the building and those who ultimately enjoy it.

Calling attention to the condition of workers, Xu Bing faces the ethical problem of how to represent labour and the labourers. He avoids appropriating “iconic” images of others—what Wang Hui called “geming de biaoqianhua (branding revolution).48 By not putting on display the images of the workers labouring in an undigniﬁed condition (though he includes some photographs of workers at work in the documentary video made

Vol. 17 No. 2 43 to accompany the work), Xu Bing avoids the possibility of subjecting the workers to the gaze of idle onlookers.

By allowing the workers’ Workers with Phoenix in a factory in Beijing. © Xu Bing voices to be heard, their Studio. names to be credited, their faces to be seen, and their contributions to be recognized, Xu Bing intends to avoid an ethical mistake—what Craig Owens called “the indignity of speaking for others.”49 Owens criticized Marx’s argument about “the small-holding peasants in France,” in particular Marx’s own remark that, “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”50 Owens continued:

Here, Marx uncritically assumes the traditional role of politically motivated intellectual—or artist—in bourgeois society: he appropriates for himself the right to speak on behalf of others, setting himself up as their conscience— indeed, as consciousness itself. But in order to occupy this position, he must ﬁrst deny them (self-) consciousness, the ability to represent themselves. In other words, Marx overlooks the constitutive role of his own discourse, which is held to be merely representing—and representative.51

Hence, regarding the social function of art, the main dilemma is how art should intervene. With Phoenix, Xu Bing is interested in intervening in the fundamental workings of the relations between production and social spaces.

This article is revised from my undergraduate thesis at Columbia University. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Lydia H. Liu, who supervised my thesis with inspiration and passion. Professor John Rajchman, Professor Peter T. Connor, Professor Rosalyn Deutsche, and Dean Thomas Harford have offered me great advice, support, and encouragement since the start of my academic career. I would also like to thank Sixiang Wang, Alfonso Jimenez, and my editors who read my drafts meticulously and provided insightful feedback.

Notes

1. “Beijing CBD: dibiaoxing jianzhuqun jiang tigong 24 xiaoshi buyecheng shenghuo” (Beijing CBD: Landmark Complexes to Provide 24-hour Sleepless Life), Zhongguo xinwen wang, September 8, 2003, http://www.chinanews.com/n/2003-09-08/26/343952.html/. 2. Ouyang Jianghe, “Fenghuang de yiyi chongdie,” Yishu shidai no. 15, Arttime Sina Blog, July 1, 2010, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_641df8160100jtea.html/. 3. Xu Bing Studio, The Story of the Phoenix: Xu Bing’s Phoenix Project (Beijing: Xu Bing Studio, 2012), 4–5. 4. Ibid., 46. 5. Ibid., 47. 6. Ibid., 57. 7. Ibid., 73. 8. Ibid., 75–76. Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, “New Exhibition Documents the Rise of Xu Bing’s Monumental ‘Phoenixes,’” news release, April 9, 2013, https://www.freersackler.si.edu/press- release/new-exhibition-documents-the-rise-of-xu-bings-monumental-phoenixes/.

44 Vol. 17 No. 2 9. Joseph Nigg, The Phoenix: An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Beast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 19. 10. Erya, Chinese Text Project, s.v. “凰”: “雞頭蛇頸燕頷龜背魚尾,” http://ctext.org/dictionary. pl?if=en&char=凰/. 11. Susan Cross, Xu Bing: Phoenix (North Adams: MASS MoCA, 2012), 9. 12. Erya, s.v. “鳳”: “鳳為火精,” http://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&char= 鳳/. 13. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, “phoenix,” https://www.britannica.com/topic/phoenix-mythological- bird/. 14. Carol Vogel, “Phoenixes Rise in China and Float in New York: Xu Bing Installs His Sculptures at St. John the Divine,” New York Times, February 14, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/15/arts/ design/xu-bing-installs-his-sculptures-at-st-john-the-divine.html/. 15. Cross, Xu Bing: Phoenix, 5. 16. “Xu Bing Fenghuang beihou de gushi: bei ‘dinggou’ de gongong yishupin” (The Background Story of Xu Bing’s Phoenixes: the “Commissioned” Public Artwork), Zhongguo nanfang meishu, September 28, 2012, http://www.zgnfys.com/a/nfms-4562.shtml/, “上帝用泥土創造了我們, 物質是有神性的,” my translation. 17. Ouyang Jianghe, “Xu Bing Fenghuang de yiyi chongdie“; my translation. “凤凰材料上的锈迹斑斑的使用痕迹; 被戴过的安全帽, 让人联想那些安全帽下的曾经的头去了哪里, 正在想什么? 那些被劳动者的双手触摸过, 留有汗液和体温的工具, 劳作的体温和汗渍在时间中变成了锈, 这些生命气息的存在和转换这些工具和材料, 在变成垃圾物过程中所积淀的对生命的体验, 最后变成一种徐冰所说的“神性.” (Chinese original of English translation in quotation.) 18. Xu Bing, “Guanyu Hechu re chen’ai” (On Where Does Dust Itself Collect?), Artron, http://comment. artron.net/20080122/n41082.html/. 19. Xu Bing Studio, Story of the Phoenix, 28. 20. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1990), 164–65. 21. Ouyang Jianghe, Fenghuang: Ouyang Jianghe shige chuangzuo: yu Xu Bing yishu duihua (Phoenix: A poem by Ouyang Jianghe: inspired by Xu Bing), trans. Austin Woerner (Hong Kong: MCCM Creations, 2014), 6. 22. Wang Hui, “Fenghuang ruhe niepan? —guanyu Xu Bing de Fenghuang” (How Does Phoenix Achieve Nirvana?—on Xu Bing’s Phoenixes), Hubei meishu xueyuan xuebao, 2016 (2): 40. 23. Cross, Xu Bing: Phoenix, 11. 24. Xu Bing Studio, Story of the Phoenix, 4. 25. Ibid., 7. 26. Ouyang Jianghe, “Xu Bing Fenghuang de yiyi chongdie.” 27. Marx, Capital, 83. 28. Xu Bing Studio, Story of the Phoenix, 3–4. 29. Ibid., 29. 30. Ouyang Jianghe, Fenghuang, 4. 31. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 256. 32. Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 61. 33. Ibid., xiv. 34. Ibid., xiii. 35. Ibid., Evictions, xiii. 36. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 636. 37. “Beijing CBD”: “創造財富的人, 在這裡享受財富,” http://www.chinanews.com/n/2003-09- 08/26/343952.html/. 38. Wu Hung, “Counter-Monument,” in Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Illinois: University of Chicago, 1999), 32. 39. Benjamin, “Theses,” 255. 40. Wu Hung, “Counter-Monument,” 34. 41. Ibid, 32. 42. Jacques Derrida, “The Time is Out of Joint,” in Deconstruction Is/In America, ed. Anselm Haverkemp (New York: NYU Press, 1995), 14. 43. Benjamin, “Theses,” 257–58. 44. Xu Bing Studio, Story of the Phoenix, 5. 45. Ibid, 72. 46. “Xu Bing Fenghuang beihou de gushi,” http://www.zgnfys.com/a/nfms-4562.shtml/. 47. Xu Bing Studio, Story of the Phoenix, 11, 41. 48. Wang Hui, “Fenghuang ruhe niepan?,” Hubei meishu xueyuan xuebao no. 2 (2016), 39. 49. Craig Owens, “‘The Indignity of Speaking for Others’: An Imaginary Interview,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 259–62. 50. Owens, “The Indignity of Speaking for Others,” 261. 51. Ibid.

Vol. 17 No. 2 45 Yu Hsiao Hwei Art, Making Cities: The Existence and Future of Urban Villages

he Shenzhen section of the 7th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/ Nantou Old Town with Shenzhen skyline in Architecture (UABB) opened on December 15, 2017, in Shenzhen, background. Photo: Zhang 1 Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) T China, through to March 17, 2018. In the wake of more than Organizing Committee. thirty years of urbanization at break-neck speed in Shenzhen, and the whole Pearl River Delta region, UABB 2017 aims to call for alternative models of urbanization based on the concept of “coexistence” and embracing “heterogeneity” and “diversity.” The 2017 edition of UABB was jointly curated by curator and artistic director of MAXXI, Rome, Hou Hanru, and the two founding partners of URBANUS Architecture & Design, Shenzhen/ Beijing, Liu Xiaodu and Meng Yan. Themed as “Cities Grow in Difference”2 and involving more than two hundred participants from over twenty-ﬁve countries, this was a gigantic event, which, in addition to its main venue in Nantou Old Town, had ﬁve satellite venues, located at Luohu, Yantian, Longhua (Shangwei and Dalang), and Guangming New District, and a dozen other collateral exhibitions that unfolded simultaneously across the city, as well as a series of public talks, performances, and workshops taking place during the three months of the Biennale.3

UABB in this new edition featured two innovations. First, it implanted exhibitions into the urban village of Nantou—and the villagers’ daily life— with architectural projects and artworks spread throughout the streets and alleys, in the parks, houses, and factory buildings. Mounting an exhibition

46 Vol. 17 No. 2 Nantou Old Town. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee.

at a white-cube art museum or even at an industrial site repurposed for cultural use is one thing, but intervening directly in the real urban environment, amid shops and restaurants, and interacting directly with villagers, is quite another. Co-curator Meng Yan, who was in charge of the architectural section titled “Urban Village,” stressed more than once that “the vibrant intensity of the street life [of Nantou Old Town] is where this Biennale really takes place!”4 Second, as an event that claims to be “currently the only biennial exhibition in the world to be based exclusively on the set themes of urbanism and urbanization,”5 UABB 2017 was deeply engaged with contemporary art, with an entire section titled “Art, Making Cities” and curated by Hou Hanru, aiming to make “art as a key variable for a full picture of urban development.”6

Nantou Old Town. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee.

Urban Villages: From Demolishing to Documenting and Rescuing Although UABB has chosen for the ﬁrst time an urban village as its main venue, it has in fact dealt with urban villages since its inception in 2005 (when it presented a special section on urban villages), and has interrogated and explored the subject in successive editions. Urban villages (城中村 cheng zhong cun), or, literally, “villages in the middle of the city,” are a particular phenomenon resulting from China’s rapid urbanization and the dual rural-urban land ownership system, where rural lands that are

Vol. 17 No. 2 47 not regulated by centralized urban planning and are mainly composed of crowded multi-story buildings become “villages” surrounded by skyscrapers and other modern urban constructions and infrastructures.7 Engaging with the complex realities of urban villages allows one to go beyond the legend of Shenzhen rising from a sleepy ﬁshing village of 30,000 inhabitants to a thriving megalopolis with ultra-modern high rises and a booming economy. As Shenzhen is likely the city with the most urban villages in China, and about ﬁfty percent of its total population lives in these villages, their management and redevelopment has been one of the priorities of the municipality’s urban renewal plans since the mid-2000s.

Back then, as Shenzhen continued to further accelerate its urbanization process, the city government was planning a large-scale campaign to renovate its urban villages. In October 2004, a “mobilization meeting for the inventory of illegal constructions and transformation of urban villages of the Shenzhen municipality” was held; in 2005, the there was a compiling of Suggestions for Implementing Temporary Regulations Regarding the Renewal of Urban Villages (Old Villages) of the Shenzhen Municipality. Then, in 2006, with the demolition of Yunong Village by explosives, dubbed “China’s No.1 blast” by the local media, the city government rapidly embarked on a new wave of urban renewal projects, and hundreds of urban villages successively disappeared from the map of Shenzhen following different renewal approaches such as “demolish and rebuild,” “partial transformation,” and “comprehensive improvement.”8

This wave of demolishing the urban villages, which were commonly regarded by government ofﬁcials and urban planners as the “cancer” of the city and resulted in the forced migration of large numbers of the population, has provoked a lot of attention and public debate on issues of fairness, equity, and justice with regard to the villagers, and motivated many people to self- consciously document and preserve in various ways memories of these urban villages. Among the numerous initiatives is Bai Xiaoci’s four-year photographic project—the Shenzhen-based photographer and blogger documented the everyday life of some sixty urban villages, which, for him, are “what best represent Shenzhen, what really embody the spirit of Shenzhen.”9 The Shenzhen branch of the Southern Metropolis Daily even initiated a project entitled “Rescuing Urban Villages,” and published a series of in-depth reports on the demolition process of several urban villages, tracing the history of urban villages in Shenzhen, investigating their present status, and proposing various alternatives for how transformation might take place as an alternative to the controversial process of total demolition.10

Calling for a New Concept of Urban Diversity The 2017 edition of UABB strengthened its focus on Shenzhen’s urban villages, and proposed site-speciﬁc projects for the transformation and renewal of Nantou Old Town, at a time when the number of urban villages in Shenzhen had fallen from more than a thousand ten years ago to three hundred and twenty today, and when the push for their survival has arrived at another critical moment. Due to Shenzhen’s land planning policies, which dictate that nearly ﬁfty percent of the city’s total territory should be a protected ecological area,11 thirty percent should be devoted to industrial

48 Vol. 17 No. 2 use, and the remaining share should consist of basic infrastructure such as schools, roads, hospitals, etc., the lack of space for commercial and housing purposes has become a most pressing challenge, and, more than ever, the redevelopment of urban villages is seen by the city government and developers as a means to solve this problem. At the same time, urban villages' typical “shake-hands” buildings, which were often hastily and illegally constructed and thus don’t meet modern ﬁre-safety and hygiene standards, inevitably will be renovated, upgraded, or replaced.

Yet, in contrast to the cliché that characterizes urban villages as “dirty, chaotic, and substandard” (zang, luan, cha), it is their hybrid, anarchic architecture and their turbulent, vibrant, and colourful street life that the curatorial team sought to celebrate and put in the limelight, to provide a sharp contrast, and, probably, an antidote, to the homogeneous and generic cityscapes with globalized high-rise apartment buildings and shopping centres that are based on a “generic” urban model.12 UABB’s interest in urban villages is not something new, and the 2017 theme of "Cities: Grow in Difference" was already announced in October 2016. But the controversial large-scale clearance operation that Beijing authorities launched in November 2017, in the wake of a fire that killed nineteen people in a Beijing urban village— forcing hundreds of thousands of low-income migrant workers to leave the capital—resulted in extra attention on UABB, which opened one month later, two thousand kilometres away. Against the backdrop of Beijing’s actions, UABB 2017—which is organized by the Shenzhen municipal government and thus can be regarded as representing an official position with official endorsement—claims that “respecting otherness is a test of the degree of tolerance of a city,” and that “urban villages are valuable for the bottom-up spontaneous potential,”13 are both thought-provoking and meaningful.

If what we are witnessing in Nantou Old Town is a scenario common to most urban villages in the urbanization process of China, the situation there is also more complex. Nantou is not one of those urban neighbourhoods that grew out of what previously were rural settlements during the rapid industrial urbanization that followed China’s “reform and opening-up” policy in 1978. Nantou’s “urban” history can be traced back to the Eastern Jin dynasty (317–420 AD), and Nantou had long been the seat of local government during the Ming and Qing dynasties (and before that for the imperial salt monopoly). It was with the move of the Bo’an county seat, and, with its corresponding administrative resources, from its historical site in Nantou to Cai Wuwei that Nantou’s development gradually began to lag behind and become a “village.” Today, on the 1,700-year-old historical site of Nantou Old Town, high-density “hand-shake” buildings and the characteristic “pre-modernized” streets (lined with family-run workshops, food stores, butcher shops, small restaurants), a factory compound (still active in the months prior to the opening of UABB 2017, but later turned into exhibition spaces for the Biennale) are juxtaposed with a dozen sites designated for historic preservation (in fact, many are later replicas of old buildings).14 The wide range of architectural and spatial styles makes Nantou Old Town one of the most distinctive among the hundreds of urban villages that remain in Shenzhen.

Vol. 17 No. 2 49 The Biennale as a Catalyst for Shenzhen’s Urban Renewal Zhang Yuxing, the main initiator of UABB and still a member of its academic committee, recalled the background for the creation of the Biennale in 2005. Shenzhen, long regarded as the frontline of China’s reform and opening up, was actively looking for new future directions.15 In addition to conﬁrming the city’s transition from manufacturing to high-tech industries, Zhang Yuxing said, “it also hoped to foster a sense of belonging among the population, mainly migrants from other parts of China, toward the city, through the organization of cultural events and activities.”16 Focused on architectural design and urban research, UABB, since its inception, has situated itself within the framework of the rapid urbanization of the Pearl River Delta. It has directly intervened in the transformation of derelict industrial sites; for instance, the creation of the OCT-LOFT Creative and Culture Park, and the urban regeneration of Shekou area. According to Mary Ann O’Donnell, a Shenzhen-based American artist-ethnographer and co-founder of the Handshake 302 Art Space in the urban village of Baishizhou in Shenzhen, UABB, given the high professionalism of architects who are involved as curators or participants, represents a “third-party” position that offers different perspectives from those of the government and real estate developers.17

Nantou Old Town. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee.

In the 2017 edition, UABB was still expected by the organizational committee, and therefore, by the city government, to play the role of locomotive, giving impetus to the revitalization and upgrading of Nantou Old Town. In fact, over the last ten years, proposals and plans regarding the protection, use, and transformation of Nantou Old Town have abounded. In 2013, in a proposal submitted to Shenzhen government, the Urban Planning, Land and Resources commission established the parameters of their plan for Nantou: “In principle, preserve the street layout . . . by introducing elements of culture, tourism, and commerce, to promote historical, cultural, and commercial values of the Old Town.”18 In early November 2016, not long after UABB’s organizational committee announced the curatorial team and the theme of the 2017 edition, Nanshan district government, the state-own developer Shum Yip Group Limited,

50 Vol. 17 No. 2 and Shenzhen Investment Limited signed a strategic framework agreement of cooperation, pledging their collaboration—in line with the principle “government driven, participated in by enterprises, mutual beneﬁts”— on accelerating Nanshan’s economic and infrastructural development, including the protection of Nantou Old Town.19

Art Making Cities and Gentrification It is still too early to assess to what extent the curatorial concept of Cities: Grow in Difference will affect the protection and destiny of Nantou Old Town. On the other hand, the interventions and transformations undertaken by the UABB 2017 up to now surprisingly fit in with the Shenzhen city and Nanshan district government’s plan for Nantou. The Old Town is designated a “town of design” that integrates history, culture, art, creativity, tourism, and recreation. The organization of UABB 2017 has triggered a series of transformations in the neighbourhood. The two tin- clad structures that previously housed general goods, clothing, and grocery businesses, were torn down to make way for two newly designed multi- function buildings that now house a bookshop and spaces for discussions, lectures, and exhibitions. These buildings are located on Zhongshan South Street and East Street, the main arteries of the neighbourhood, which happen to be the first targets in the government’s plan. According to the plan, Zhongshan South Street is designated as a showcase of Nantou’s rich history and culture, and Zhongshan East and West Streets are to be lined with traditional food shops and creative commerce.

Boa Mistura, PINGHÉNG, 2017, wall painting on UABB exhibition hall, Factory Zone Square. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee.

Although the curators claimed to be extremely cautious about mounting the Biennale in Nantou, hoping to cause minimal interference in the environment and everyday life of the villagers, the government seized the opportunity to accelerate the large-scale renovation process of the Old Town: the historical sites were renovated, the streets were cleaned up, and no longer allowed to be displayed on the sidewalks. Three factories and two dormitory buildings in an industrial compound were repurposed to serve as main exhibition halls for UABB 2017, and are slated for housing cultural and creative industries after the Biennale. Shum Yip Group also carried out what was referred to as a seven-day “Revamp Project” in six Nantou stores—including the newly opened Enclave independent bookshop and ﬁve older businesses that had been set up in Old Town for over ten years, which aimed to “achieve

Vol. 17 No. 2 51 storefront upgrades and demonstrate a renewed life, through the introduction of diversiﬁed cultural and artistic elements.”20 Founded by Shenzhen-based poet Zhang Er, the Enclave bookshop also has spaces upstairs for writers’ and artists’ residencies and art exhibitions. A residential house on Zhongshan South Street was reconstructed into a building with a coffee shop on the ground ﬂoor and a co-working space on the second, in line with the lifestyle and tastes of youth today.

The gentriﬁcation of Nantou Old Town has started. From New York to MVRDV, The Why Factory, 2017. Photo: Zhang Chao. © Berlin, from Vancouver to Sydney, the large-scale gentriﬁcation process UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee. that is happening around the world follows the same pattern: a change in the neighbourhood’s population as a result of housing renovations and industrial upgrades. At the press conference, in response to a question raised by an English journalist regarding the issue, Xue Feng, secretary general of the UABB and deputy director of Shenzhen Planning, Land, and Resources Commission, bluntly spoke of the impact of “art making cities”: “the Biennale has not yet opened, but the rent has gone up!” Meanwhile, curator Hou Hanru warned us to not romanticize urban villages. Indeed, the highly dense, dirty, and chaotic urban villages should not be regarded as locales for an ideal lifestyle, but, rather, as a choice without alternatives. Yet, urban villages, with their affordable rents and access to cheap and convenient public transportation, did contribute to solving the housing problem for students, the working poor, and low-income families. There is also the argument that urban villages are unhygienic and unsafe, a reason that city governments often use to renovate—or wipe out—a whole neighbourhood, and they often collaborate with real estate developers by transferring rural land to urban land. The process involves negotiations between the government, developers, and original villagers—owners of the housing— whereas the interests of migrant residents, that is, their resettlement needs, are simply ignored. This so-called “low-status” population (diduan renkou) is obliged to move further out of the city to the lower-rent outskirts.

52 Vol. 17 No. 2 If commercial development and gentriﬁcation ultimately are inevitable, the degree of civilization of a country depends on whether it can protect the interests of those at the bottom of society, that is, to at least meet their basic living needs. However, among the hundreds of artworks and projects on show at UABB 2017, the topic of “housing justice”—that low-wage workers need to be regarded as equal contributors to the society and thus deserve decent and affordable housing in the city—was almost absent.21 When we are discussing the future of urban villages, what kind of people do we envision living in those buildings and walking those streets? The oldest participant in UABB 2017, 94-year-old Hungarian-born French architect, urban planner, designer, and theorist Yona Friedman, already supported the idea of the empowerment of the intended users in his utopian projects on urban planning, infrastructure, and architecture as early as the late 1950s. Who are the intended users in the minds of government ofﬁcers, developers, and the Biennale participants in their designing of upgrades and transformation for Nantou Old Town? Are they ever consulted?

Street Performances UABB 2017 allowed us to see differences between artists and architects in ways of thinking and working. In the two urban and architectural sections, titled “Global South” and “Urban Village,” curated by Liu Xiaodu and Meng Yan, photos, documentary and animated films, installations, architectural models, texts and data-based materials, dealt with urban realities, utopias, dystopias, and science fiction. Many projects provided macro perspectives or case studies in China and other parts of the world. The number of aerial views almost gave a feeling of god-like vision and power. On the other hand, the art section offered very different sensibilities. In an old factory building that was kept in its original dilapidated condition—a huge contrast to the urban and architectural sections where the buildings were refurbished into white cube galleries—the works on display share the same refusal of purpose or any clear explanation. It wasn’t based on academic knowledge, but personal awareness, reflections, feelings, and criticism of the situation of society today, on its relationship with the city, streets, home, public space, and social production. Amid the bustle of urban development, renewal, and transformation of the Biennale —this is what UABB is about, and many projects did hold valuable insights—the artists’ focus and attention on people, their active engagement with the living conditions, poignantly evoke the pressures and tensions that we all face in everyday life, but also express the desire of the soul to get rid of such constraints. “The role of artists is quite the opposite to that of architects. Architects focus on planning and building, while artists think about how to cut off reality,” Hou Hanru told me.22

On the day of the opening, at 11:30 am, Zhongshan East and West Streets were crowded. In the street paved with cement bricks, Lin Yilin started to compose a long straight line, using all sorts of food and daily necessities ranging from sugarcane, soy bean sprouts, lamb’s heads, chicken, bread, herbal medicines, noodle soup, ﬂy swatters, pumps, telephone charger, and so on, which he alternated with men and women, also lying on the ground, thus opening up a space amid the crowds. On both sides of this line, large crowds of curious people gathered, enquiring, discussing, commenting, and taking photos with their mobile phones. Someone wondered what was

Vol. 17 No. 2 53 Lin Yilin, Merchandises Line, 2017, performance, 2 hours. Photo: Yu Hsiao Hwei. Courtesy of the artist.

this all about and a “volunteer” who participated in Lin Yilin’s performance replied,23 “It’s called art, performance art, you can Baidu [A Chinese web service] when you get home and you will know.” Someone discovered some clues and excitedly explained to others: “When there are shops there will be objects, when there are no shops, then there will be people lying down.” The fishmonger was surprised to find out that the two fish the artist had bought earlier in the morning were right in front of his shop, while some passers- by shook their heads, remarking that this was simply wasting food. Lin Yilin was busy placing items on the ground handed to him by his assistants, making sure that they made up a straight line. His eyes were focused, and great drops of sweat were flowing down his face because he had to fight against time as he was only allowed to use the 300-metre-long streets for two hours. Lin Yilin is famous for his performances in many cities around the world, such as moving concrete bricks by hand across a busy road,24 or walking along streets with his wrist handcuffed to his ankle, as a way to “cut off reality,” making one pause, to see, and to think about the rapid urbanization and globalization process in which we are living. Grounded in the context of Nantou Old Town, Lin Yilin’s performance, titled Merchandises Line—a kind of anthropological investigation and cataloguing of Nantou villagers’ everyday life—is both homage to an urban village like Nantou that provides all basic human needs to its villagers who are often low-income migrant workers, and an experiment to see people’s reactions to food, merchandise, and people that we are surrounded by every day but, sadly, become indifferent to.

It is interesting to note that a large number of the works on display at UABB 2017 were videos, and many of them showed performances of artists on the streets or in public spaces. Koki Tanaka set up a booth at a ﬂea market in Los Angeles to sell palm fronds, the most common and useless thing in

54 Vol. 17 No. 2 Koki Tanaka, Someone’s Junk Is Someone Else’s Treasure, 2011, video. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee.

David Hammons, Bliz-aard Ball California, as a way to question Sale, 1983, performance. people’s attitudes about the value of objects, but the story ended up with him being kicked out by the head of the ﬂea market only a couple of hours later. Tanaka’s Someone’s Junk Is Someone Else’s Treasure (2011) reminds one of David Hammons’s David Hammons, Phat Free, 1995–2000, video. Photo: legendary performances of selling Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing snowballs during the winter in New Committee. York. In Shenzhen, it was another video of a street performance by Hammons that was shown. In the fuzzy footage of Phat Free (1995– 2000), on an almost blank screen, we intermittently hear curious rattling Fang Lu, Sound Bomb, 2011, video. © UABB (Shenzhen) metallic sounds, then the artist Organizing Committee. appears dressed in black, kicking a metal bucket through the streets of the city at night. The disturbing noises can be heard in the whole exhibition space, and the footage ends with a swift, yet extremely subversive and powerful gesture by the artist: he kicks the bucket up into the air, catches it in his hands, and then walks out of shot. Marcela Armas’s video Ocupación/Occupation (2007) shows her walking, stopping, and complying at ease with trafﬁc rules in the busy, often congested streets of Mexico City, as if she were a car. She wears a backpack equipped with seven different car horns and does not hesitate to beep a horn when necessary, reminding other motorists of her existence. In several public spaces—a pedestrian street, on a playground, etc.—in A Single Bed (2011), Li Liao placed a piece of cloth the size of a single bed on the ground and slept on it until he woke up naturally, or was awakened by unexpected situations. Li Bingyuan jumped between two cement piers, placed at a distance of 2.5 metres from each other, every time a car or a pedestrian passed by (Long Jump, 2015). In Fang Lu’s Sound Bomb

Vol. 17 No. 2 55 Marcela Armas, Ocupación/ Occupation, 2007, video. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee.

Li Liao, A Single Bed, 2011, video. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee.

Li Bingyuan, Long Jump, 2015, video. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee.

(2011), the artist placed a suitcase on a pedestrian bridge in a busy shopping district in Beijing, which emitted from time to time a mysterious, mufﬂed screaming sound that provoked surprise, nervousness, or even panic among passers-by. The fact that the artist had chosen a site close to Tian’anmen Square added a subtle political edge to this work.

56 Vol. 17 No. 2 Yin Xiuzhen, The Arena, 2017, installation. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee.

Atelier Bow-Wow, Fire Foodies Club, 2017, installation. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee.

Empowering Villagers One emphasis of the curatorial approach of UABB 2017 was on interactions and collaborations with the local citizens. Based on his philosophy of “mobile architecture,” Yona Friedman’s Street Museum (2004–ongoing), an improvised and ﬂexible structure composed of metal circles, aims to greet, hang, and the display objects (souvenirs of moments, emotions, feelings) belonging to local residents. Marinella Senatore’s ongoing nomadic The School of Narrative Dance (2014–ongoing) involved hundreds of locals— women and men of all ages—and explored individual and collective emotions and stories through choreography and body expression. Sitting on a green lawn and with the modern skyscrapers in the background, Yin Xiuzhen’s The Arena (2017), a huge playground monkey bar in the shape of the skyline of Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and other ﬁctional places, welcomed the public to come to hang, climb, and exercise.

UABB 2017 is not short of extra-large or fantastic projects. Inspired by the urban fabric and street lifestyle of Shenzhen and reﬂecting the “fading”

Vol. 17 No. 2 57 Tatzu Nishi, Continue Forever, 2017, installation. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee.

Tatzu Nishi, Continue Forever, 2017, installation. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee.

industrial history in Nantou Old Town, Atelier Bow-Wow’s Fire Foodies Club (2017) consisted of three gigantic chimneys suspended from a steel frame, and was expected to provoke new energy and test new ways of living and social relationships. Although the original idea of welcoming locals to barbecue on-site was compromised due to Shenzhen’s fire regulations, the work still encouraged shared cooking, eating, and conversation. Tatzu Nishi whimsically constructed a fragment of an asphalted road and suspended it in the air where it went through the third floor of a disused dormitory building. With the idea of a road in an apartment, the contrast between the newly built road and a Skoda automobile on it, and the belongings (such as a fan, clothes, hangers, calendars, etc.) left behind by the former inhabitants, who were factory girls, the artist explores the tensions between public and private, exterior and interior, and amplified by the high-speed urbanization process of Shenzhen, which the artist, with a keen sense of humour, spells out in the installation’s title, Continue Forever (2017).

Xu Tan preferred to share his exhibition opportunity with other artists. With his Village Rain project, he invited three collectives rooted in and addressing the situations of the neighbourhoods they are settled in—Xi San Film Studio (Guangzhou), Seong Jeong Toi Space (Guangzhou), and

58 Vol. 17 No. 2 Xu Tan, Village Rain, 2017, performance/installation. New Who Village (Shenzhen)—to Courtesy of the artist and present their works in a shack made UABB, Shenzhen. of wood, bamboo, and rattan. The ﬁrst collective invited was the Xi San Film Studio, founded in 2017 by a group of artists at the Xi San village, Guangzhou, to focus on the issues of Xi San village. On the day of the opening, dozens of villagers from Xi San took the bus to come to Nantou and attend the “Duck Rice Screening,” sharing the duck rice prepared on site by one of the members of Xi San Film Studio, and listening to artists playing instruments and singing. A documentary, Villagers— Journalists, was also projected. With this documentary, shot by Xi San villagers (then edited and mounted by Xi San Film Studio artists) in Baishizhou, Shenzhen’s biggest urban village, which was slated for demolition, and projected in Nantou Old Town, the fate of these three urban villages and their villagers are intertwined and echo each other. Through helping the villagers to ﬁlm and document these urban villages and raise their civic consciousness, Xi San Film Studio not only intervene Left: Chen Chieh-jen, Mobile in real life, but also gave the right of speech to residents of urban villages. In Children’s Museum, 2017, installation. Photo: Yi Bang the same vein, Taiwan-based Chen Chieh-jen’s Mobile Children’s Museum Chen Art. Courtesy of the artist. demonstrated the same values of openness and sharing, and it empowered Right: Chen Chieh-jen, Mobile the villagers. Chen Chieh-jen invited local children to imagine their ideal Children’s Museum, 2017, installation. Photo: Zhang living environment through drawings, which he then turned into rotatable Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee. comic strips. On the wall, the artists’ names are those of each child.

Vol. 17 No. 2 59 In a city that has adopted “Time is Money, Efﬁciency is Life” as its motto and “(rapid) development” as its main target over the past thirty years,25 artworks, actions, and interventions that are allowed to penetrate the surface of things, perceive individuals’ living realities, and hear different voices are manifesting an incongruous resistance to the mainstream “development at all costs” mindset, with the potential to trigger a quiet revolution—if “revolution” means a fundamental change in consciousness and values.

Notes

1. The Biennale was founded in 2005 and took place only in Shenzhen. Starting with the second edition, in 2007, it has been jointly held with the neighbouring city of Hong Kong, and was renamed the Bi-City Biennale. However, as if in an echo of China’s “one country, two systems” policy, the cross- border biennale operates according to the model of “one biennale, two exhibitions”: the Shenzhen and Hong Kong sections each has its own theme, curatorial team, budget, and participants, and there is little substantive consultation between the two. 2. The Chinese title is 城市共生 (chengshi gongsheng), which can be translated literally as “coexistence of cities.” 3. I was invited to view the exhibition by the UABB Shenzhen during the opening days, but only managed to see the exhibitions in Nantou; the satellite venues and collateral exhibitions of the Biennale opened much later. 4. Spoken during the press conference on December 14; he expressed the same idea in a roundtable with professional media representatives on December 15, and at a thematic forum organized on December 16. 5. See the official website: http://en.szhkbiennale.org/about/. 6. Curatorial statement; see http://szhkbiennale.org/En/Theme/default.aspx?top=1/. 7. Regarding the particular situations in Shenzhen, a blog post by the Shenzhen-based Mary Ann O'Donnell O’Donnell is informative: https://shenzhennoted.com/2010/03/19/what-exactly-is-an- urban-village-anyway/. 8. City government document regarding the 2005 annual plan of transformation of urban villages (old villages); see http://www.sz.gov.cn/ftq/ghjh/ndgzjh/200809/t20080903_1579.htm/. Also, see Chen Wending, ed., No Urban Villages in the Future (weilai meiyou chengzhongcun) (Beijing: China Development Press, 2011). 9. Cited in Chen Wending, ed., No Urban Villages in the Future; the blog no longer exists, but the citation can be found in many sources on the internet. 10. In 2011, these articles were assembled in book form and published as Chen Wending, ed., No Urban Villages in the Future. 11. Regarding Shenzhen’s basic ecological control line policy, see http://www.sz.gov.cn/szzt2010/wgkzl/ glgk/jgxxgk/gtzy/201307/P020130709531837362408.pdf/. 12. The term “generic city” was coined by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau in the mid-1990s to describe the homogenized urban space in the globalized world. 13. Curatorial statement; see: http://szhkbiennale.org/En/Theme/default.aspx?top=1/. 14. A number of seemingly historical buildings were rebuilt late 1990s on the original sites, including the ancient government office, the smoke house, the pawnshop, Dongguan Guild, etc. 15. Zhang Yuxing mentioned an influential internet article titled “Shenzhen, Who Has Abandoned You?,” which addressed the decline of Shenzhen faced with the emergence of Shanghai as a global cultural and economic hub, and provoked great debate on the future of Shenzhen. See Wan Zhiyong, “Shenzhen, Who Has Abandoned You?,” October 15, 2003, http://wwww.china.org.cn/english/2003/ oct/77376.htm/. 16. Interviewed by the author on December 14, 2017, Shenzhen. 17. Interviewed by the author on December 16, 2017, Shenzhen. Mary Ann O’Donnell has lived in Shenzhen since 1995, and has continuously documented and researched the urban transformation of the city. Her blog Shenzhen Noted (https://shenzhennoted.com) is informative regarding Shenzhen’s urban villages. 18. Cited in Yangcheng Evening Paper, January 16, 2014. See http://news.ycwb.com/2014-01/16/ content_5895285_2.htm/. 19. Many local newspapers covered the agreement signing; also see the website of Shenzhen Investment Limited: http://www.shenzheninvestment.com/html/media_artical.php?id=385037/. 20. Cited in many local newspapers, as well as on Shum Yip’s website; see: http://www.shumyip.com.hk/ News/Detail?Id=709/. 21. The few video works dealing with displaced villagers in Beijing were censored after the opening night and taken off the walls. 22. Interviewed by the author on December 17, 2017, Shenzhen. 23. Lin Yilin told me, in a helpless tone, that in China, volunteers still need to be compensated. 24. Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road, 1995, and One Day, 2006. 25. Even today, a gigantic poster, “Time is Money, Efficiency is Life,” still stands as the landmark at the Shekou Industrial district of Shenzhen.

60 Vol. 17 No. 2 Yuling Zhong When Contemporary Art Practices Meet Ethnographic Research in Chinese Societies

rt and ethnography,1 the empirical research technique of anthropology, have had a rich dialogue and exchange over the Ahistory of the twentieth century. Anthropologists conducted ethnographic studies on art within many different cultural contexts; however, they didn’t shift the focus on non-Western art, or what was once called primitive art, until the 1930s, when the Surrealist artists disseminated ethnographic information and knowledge for use in their art production. But the most significant encounter between art and ethnography emerged in the 1960s, an era of counterculture and revolution against social norms. In the 1980s, inspired by avant-garde artistic movements, the influential debate about “writing culture” was concerned with how to provide anthropology with adequate forms of writing, reflexivity, and objectivity within a globalized world. This was further advanced in 1995, with Hal Foster’s iconic The Artist as Ethnographer,2 in which he raised an ongoing reflection and discussion about the “ethnographic turn” in contemporary art.

On the other hand, over the decades, Asian societies, especially Chinese societies—such as those of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan— have been affected significantly by urbanization and globalization. With the revival of Western imperialism, neoliberal globalization, and terrorism in the broader reaches of Asia, where living labour has been exploited by capitalist development and threatened by the rising black flag of ISIS, more and more contemporary Chinese artists are seeking social and political engagement with complex issues such as identity crises, migration, and modernity by exploring the potential of ethnography—its contextuality, intersubjectivity, and reflexivity—that encourages collaboration with local communities. Consequently, since the 2000s, the number of contemporary Asian art projects and artworks that have displayed an interest in anthropology and ethnographic research also has been increasing. This is interesting because anthropology was once accused of working with state policies designed to assimilate indigenous peoples into the modern nations to produce a widespread Eurocentric bias, and projected Orientalist fantasies about Asian societies.

Some scholars have argued that there has been a series of misrecognitions3 and ignorance on the part of artists about the established methods, paradigms, and traditions ethnography within encounters between art and anthropology; other scholars believe that art practice is mostly regarded as something more speculative, experimental, and open-ended, while ethnographic research detects general patterns of behaviour through cultural production, and is considered to be more about in-depth descriptive

Vol. 17 No. 2 61 accuracy. Rather than defining the differences between art and ethnographic research and following existing theoretical discourses that focus mainly on critiquing the ethnographic relevance of finished art products in contemporary art, I will look into the artistic process in order to understand how artists locate themselves within their fieldwork, how they collaborate with anthropologists to tackle the postcolonized assumption of establishing a stable national identity, and explore the non-Western articulations of modernity and how they reflect upon the knowledge production and politics of representation within contemporary art and anthropology.

Locating the Self: from Landscape to Soundscape There are contemporary Asian artists who engage with ethnography as method, and anthropology as theory, in a variety of ways. Fieldwork is one of the most frequently used methodologies. For example, in 2014, the young Chinese photographer Cheng Xinhao spent one year photographing the ever-changing landscape of the Panlong River, which ﬂows through the city of Kunming in Yunnan province. He aimed to capture how the river has shaped its surroundings and thus proposed a new perspective for understanding the passing of time and its spatial relationship beyond the river. These photographs ultimately were presented in book form, The Naming of a River, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Aperture First Photobook Award.

Cheng Xinhao, “Riverside in the Suburbs," in Cheng Xinhao, The Naming of a River (Ningbo: Jiazazhi Press, 2016). © Cheng Xinhao. Courtesy of the artist.

Left: Cheng Xinhao, The Naming of a River (Ningbo: Jiazazhi Press, 2016). © Cheng Xinhao. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Cheng Xinhao, The Naming of a River (Ningbo: Jiazazhi Press, 2016). © Cheng Xinhao. Courtesy of the artist.

Photography, as an important instantaneous artistic medium, has its limits, however, in documenting the richness of time, even with long exposures or through a multi-image photographic series. Cheng Xinhao searched for a new mode of artistic inquiry by using an extended ethnographic research method that focused on in-depth study of concrete cases. Before undertaking his ﬁeldwork, Cheng Xinhao examined the archaeological and geographical information in a found archival image, Pictures of Six Rivers in Yunnan’s Provincial Capital, drawn by Huang Shijie, a Qing dynasty ofﬁcial, which presented multiple images of the Panlong River. In keeping with pursuing a rigorous ethnographic study, Cheng Xinhao spent most of his time engaging with and photographing the surrounding local communities, exploring the associations, differences, and unexpected coincidences that were evident between historical narrative and contemporary individual experience. In the resultant gatefold book, The Naming of a River, a

62 Vol. 17 No. 2 Cheng Xinhao, people living panorama photo of the river was printed on the front side, showing details along the Panlong River, page spread in Cheng Xinhao, The of the riverside scenery from various perspectives, and the images on the Naming of a River (Ningbo: Jiazazhi Press, 2016). © Cheng back side displayed different elements representing the interwoven fabric of Xinhao. Courtesy of the artist. everyday life along the river: the people living at the river banks, the bridges that cross it, the rocks that show the changes over time, and the plants that renew themselves every year. His treatment of images and text balances the visual tension and rhythm, and requires an investment of patient attention from the reader.

Cheng Xinhao, rock samples, page spread in Cheng Xinhao, The Naming of a River (Ningbo: Jiazazhi Press, 2016). © Cheng Xinhao. Courtesy of the artist.

Although photographs since the nineteenth century have been used to document and present ethnographic data as the visual trace of a reality, contemporary anthropologists4 now use photographs as a part of their process of fieldwork observation, from where the images’ specific meanings emerge. Cheng Xinhao was inspired by the static and passively received message that was generated from his process of viewing the hand-drawn Qing map and it further offered him a new model for integrating image and text. In The Naming of a River, images operate as the characters of the text. In general, both maps and photographs are representations of space5 that might be affected by ideologies and politics. As a part of the system of values acknowledging sovereignty, a map inscribes abstract concepts such as “nation state” on images in general, while the photographs fragment the concepts into a collage-like format. In this sense, whereas attempts at achieving the full picture of a river through a scientific sampling strategy may fail, Cheng Xinhao presents a new multidimensional image that reveals unseen and unexplained complexities and the changes that have occurred over time.

Another Hong Kong artist who has also conducted ﬁeldwork research to reconstruct reality is Samson Young. With a Ph.D in music from Princeton University, Samson Young did not receive training solely in contemporary art, but also in classical music composition. But neither

Vol. 17 No. 2 63 is he exclusively a sound artist. His works create innovative cross-media Top: Samson Young, fieldwork documentation for Liquid experiences. He initiated the sonic field investigation project Liquid Borders Borders I, 2012–14. Photo: Dennis Man Wing Leung. © (2012–14) to collect the sounds that form the audio divide that since 2012 Samson Young. Courtesy of the artist and Living Collection, separates Hong Kong and mainland China, the year when the Hong Kong Hong Kong. government decided to gradually open for public access the closed area near Right: Samson Young, 6 fieldwork documentation the Hong Kong/Shenzhen border. Over a period of two years, he regularly for Liquid Borders I, 2012–14. visited this restricted no-man’s land. He used contact microphones to Photo: Dennis Man Wing Leung. © Samson Young. collect and record the vibrations emanating from the wired fences along the Courtesy of the artist and Living Collection, Hong Kong. security border, and used hydrophones to capture the sounds of running Left: Samson Young, fieldwork water from the Shenzhen River. After gathering this body of recordings, he documentation for Liquid Borders I, 2012–14. Photo: edited them into a sound composition that was about thirteen minutes long Dennis Man Wing Leung. © Samson Young. Courtesy of and then transcribed it into graphic notations. the artist and Living Collection, Hong Kong.

This work is a document that alludes to anxiety and fear about the incursion of mainland sentiment in Hong Kong society. The news of the imminent liquidation of the border has been a nightmare for those who strongly reject the overly Beijing-centred control. Neither anti- nor pro-Beijing, Samson Young was intrigued by how objects and landscapes could be shaped by these emotions and the tensions between two territories. In some sense, borders or territories are presumed to be visible, physical, concrete, and stable despite the fact that they are merely lines on maps designated by people.

64 Vol. 17 No. 2 Samson Young, Liquid Borders I, 2012–14, graphical notation, sound composition, annotated cartography, 28.9 × 43.1 cm. © Samson Young. Courtesy of the artist and Living Collection, Hong Kong.

Left: Samson Young, Liquid Borders I, 2012–14, graphical notation, sound composition, annotated cartography, 28.9 × 43.1 cm. © Samson Young. Courtesy of the artist and Living Collection, Hong Kong. Right: Samson Young, Liquid Borders I, 2012–14, graphical notation, sound composition, annotated cartography, 28.9 × 43.1 cm. © Samson Young. Courtesy of the artist and Living Collection, Hong Kong.

It is the invisible cultural and ideological division that is more difficult to detect, and Samson Young sought to reconstruct the border and fill a future archival deficiency, as Hong Kongers, including himself, know very well that all the fences eventually will be dismantled and there will be no border. In this regard, Samson Young has brought to forefront the essence of borders and their non-stop construction and reconstruction. Mapping his routes and visiting dates, he engaged his body as a tool of ethnographic research on thought-provoking field trips. Making his way through the mosquito-infested swamp to the border, Samson Young used his body as the vehicle for accomplishing his fieldwork, recording his observations in an unconventional way by negotiating the spatial context of the border using the least physical, but most transmissive form—sound—to establish an aural-physical archive of an actual border.

Cheng Xinhao and Samson Young have created artwork based on the reconstruction of geographical reality—landscape and soundscape, respectively—which shows us that ethnographic research—that is, fieldwork study deployed in some art practices—can be well thought out and sophisticated enough to serve its purpose of deepening the discussion beyond the works themselves. Meanwhile, rather than adopting the conventional ethnographer-as-stranger strategy,7 they conceived their artwork upon the idea of physical interaction to draw a fine line between intimate engagement with objective material and a detachment from reality in order to uncover a concealed discourse. Neither being self-othering and flipping into self-absorption, nor turning their projects into the practices of philosophical narcissism,8 they created the works by actively using their bodies as an art medium during the process of fieldwork, rather than as

Vol. 17 No. 2 65 mere self-referential objects. Cheng Xinhao situated his body as the nexus of intersections between the urban life and the multilayered landscape, while Samson Young recast himself as a channel for discourse and action.

When artists deploy ethnographic research methods in their practices, a complex set of interactions arise during the production, reception, and interpretation of self through their artworks, and the contemporary artist can develop new possibilities for experimentation in visual research and representation.

Depicting Local Knowledge: From Individual to Community American anthropologist Clifford Geertz offered some inﬂuential insights in the ethnographic research he published in the 1970s. He sees culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”9 In the era of globalization, the process of analyzing local knowledge and collective memory, and their respective social contexts and their economies, is understood in a broader way, especially in the postcolonial arena. When contemporary artists become involved in interpreting a culture’s web of symbols, Geertz’s idea of “thick description”10 can be achieved by reading the visual texts as well by producing them.

Some artists are working like ethnographers, while others prefer to work with anthropologists to make their artworks. Adrian Wong is one of those artists. Having received a master’s degree in developmental psychology from Stanford University in California, he creates most of his artworks through a research-based methodology arising from his academic training in psychology, linguistics, and anthropology, which is quite uncommon in Hong Kong and even mainland China and Taiwan. He relies heavily on a process of long-term research before embarking on his art projects, a process that includes reading essays, delving into archival materials, and carrying out interviews with ﬁgures who might be key to his work. Yet he is not obsessed with textual and archival authentication or with surrounding his works with dry and dated historical material; rather, he looks for the hidden language behind logical and tangible elements like metal grates and hypnagogias11 in Hong Kong public spaces and displays works with well- known art-making techniques, such as conceptually rigorous sculpting and site-speciﬁc performance.

In 2010, with his interest in the redevelopment and historical preservation of modern Hong Kong, Adrian Wong collaborated with the cultural anthropologist Castagña Ventura to conduct a rigorous and elaborate three-month ﬁeldwork study in Western Hong Kong Island. They carried out in-depth interviews with local small business owners and craftsmen, so as to unveil the stories that were overshadowed by the grand historical narrative in that particular district. During the interviews, the life story of a stunning local movie actress, Lei Mei, was repeatedly recounted. This young woman travelled to the West in the 1960s to pursue her dream of acting in movies, but became disﬁgured via botched plastic surgery and ended up dying young in an asylum. This tragic ending earned her admiration in this neighbourhood from where she came. However, intentionally made up by

66 Vol. 17 No. 2 Adrian Wong, Umbrellahead, I Will Find You, 2012, installation view. Courtesy of the artist.

Adrian Wong, Umbrellahead, I Will Find You, 2012, photo documentation. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 17 No. 2 67 a mid-century Chinese-language periodical, this glamorous yet apocryphal character and story were a malicious attack on Western culture, toward which negative feelings were provoked across the community. (image 13) Intrigued by the production of a narrative excavated from memory, Adrian Wong developed the ﬁeld notes into a script with Castagña Ventura and transformed the story into a thirty-minute theatrical work, Umbrellahead, I Will Find You. In this surreal theatrical production, everyday objects such as an umbrella—referring to a professional umbrella craftsman, one of the people he had interviewed—and an empty musical instrument case of the type that ceased to exist during the Cultural Revolution became the main characters. Together with colourful costumes, exaggerated props, and the stage set, these symbolic characters told an alternative story arising from the historical desires of this place and played with the invisible construction of collective memory in colonized Hong Kong.

This work revealed important facets about the artistic process involved in memory retrieval and the act of observing that is central to ethnographic research. And in the tradition of anthropology, visual elements have always been used as research tools to record real events and explore the construction of local knowledge. Nevertheless, Adrian Wong explored the intricate cultural and historical narratives through the filter of fictionalized memory by adopting ethnographic research and absorbing the symbols of recollection. In some ways, Umbrellahead, I Will Find You transmitted more than what was really being “said” and presented a “thicker” description that blurred the lines between the real and the fictional, objects and contexts, images and narratives.

While Adrian Wong depicted the collective illusion of morality that had not become established within the history of Hong Kong, a young Taiwanese artist, Su Yu Hsien, looked into the island’s uncertain political identity after the Japanese colonial period ended in 1945. Since this time, the hybrid folk religion common to Taiwan has attracted generations of anthropologists. Although gaps exist between ethnographic research and contemporary art, the tradition of archiving visual elements of folk religion continues to nurture young artists today.

In 2013, Su Yu Hsien created a Su Yu Hsien, Hua-Shan-Qiang, 2013, video, 21 mins., 47 secs. narrative video work, Hua-Shan- © Su Yu Hsien. Courtesy of the artist and TKG+, Taipei. Qiang, along with photographic portraits and a burnt and collapsed paper house installation displayed in his solo exhibition in Taipei. The title refers to the pediment, a triangular shaped architectural element with decorative relief sculpture that is particularly found on Greco- Roman classical buildings. In traditional Chinese buildings, pediments were also used for ventilation and ﬁre prevention. However, the purpose of pediments gradually shifted from the practical to decorative after Taiwan entered the period of Japanese rule. To capture the shift of historical and social sentiment in Taiwan through the example of an object, Su Yu Hsien deployed Chinese ritual paper offerings and funeral culture to unmask the

68 Vol. 17 No. 2 Su Yu Hsien, Hua-Shan-Qiang, mix of fact and ﬁction. 2013, video, 21 mins., 47 secs. © Su Yu Hsien. Courtesy of the Set in a miniature artist and TKG+, Taipei. paper house made for the dead and narrated in Taiwanese, the video tells of the afterlife of the dead and the subsequent journey

Su Yu Hsien, Hua-Shan-Qiang, to paradise. Though 2013, video, 21 mins., 47 secs. the video employs © Su Yu Hsien. Courtesy of the artist and TKG+, Taipei. the strategy of linear narration, there are two features that illuminate the story—a voice-over and muted papier-maché effigies. The voice- over describes the significance of the scenes being presented. The different papier-maché elements include the architectural elements of the house, housewares, and surroundings, while the effigies serve the spirit-body, the deceased self-immolated human expressing anxiety and impatience over the long wait of being transported to the underworld. As a mirror to the opening of the video, the spirit-body climbs up the Shan-Qiang and jumps into the fire in the concluding sequence, in which the camera brings us back to the physical world.

By animating the ritual paper offerings that reflect human imagination about the underworld in Chinese culture, Su Yu Hsien has constructed a singular space of suspension from social and historical reality that can exist only in moving images to discuss the suicidal tragedy of freedom of speech activist Cheng Nan-Jung,12 serving as a metaphor alluding to the prevalence of confusion that lies behind a self-recognition trapped between the past and future, life and death, reality and fiction, and the discourse of nationalism and an uncertain political identity. Metaphorically, the dream of paradise that keeps everyone waiting will never come, much like the long-awaited dream of an independent state. Without being constrained by the conventional aesthetics of contemporary video art, Su Yu Hsien has employed fully folkloristic imagery and language through a six-month archival and fieldwork study on the production of Taiwanese ritual paper offerings. As part of Taiwanese folk culture, ritual paper offerings are evident in multiple examples of the reworking of local knowledge, which helps both individuals and social groups creatively make sense of the circumstances where they live. Analysing local knowledge as a resource for the creation of his work, Su Yu Hsien has treated the acquisition and frequent misinterpretation of local knowledge, and the potential narrative within it, as a dynamic process of innovation and adaptation. Knowledge is not for acquisition only, but is an asset to be enriched as well. It took Su Yu Hsien a further six months to complete Hua-Shan-Qiang and thus reaffirm the association between vision and knowledge, as well as to bridge the gap between visual art and political space in response to individual recollection.

Vol. 17 No. 2 69 Su Yu Hsien, Hua-Shan-Qiang, 2013, video, 21 mins., 47 secs. © Su Yu Hsien. Courtesy of the artist and TKG+, Taipei.

Through their works, the interplay and tension of local knowledge and power has been revealed. Adrian Wong transformed the process of excavating local memory in order to interrogate the legitimacy of authoritative discourse, and Su Yu Hsien appropriated folkloristic objects to demonstrate the fact that local knowledge has been shaped and reshaped by ideology and desire. In addition, during the process of their ﬁeldwork, they have observed the status of the objects they have used as the embodiment of the human psyche and imagination; the local knowledge they attained in order to grasp the political relations within their respective geographical spaces will, in turn, enrich collective knowledge systems.

Representing Contemporary Art: From Camera to Body In 1986, anthropologists James Clifford and George Marcus edited a highly influential volume, Writing Culture,13 to address the “poetics and politics of ethnography” in an increasingly fragmented, globalized, and postcolonial world. This book gave rise to a debate throughout the 1990s that was a multifaceted reflection on reflexivity, objectivity, and the politics of representation, and led to a growing body of experimental ethnographies14 in cross-cultural contexts that attempted to overcome the limits of textual representation and challenge the conventional ways of ethnographic writing.

Moreover, a growing number of anthropologists began to emphasize engagements with embodiment, arguing the important roles of sense perception and body in human experience, especially the non-visual experiences in the process of doing ﬁeldwork. Meanwhile, the continuing appropriation of the anthropological ﬁeld by contemporary artists likewise has led to an impulse to push forward new boundaries within artistic practices. This indicates that the ethnographic turn in contemporary art, to a large extent, is associated with the sensory turn in anthropology. These turns, as a result, encourage interdisciplinary collaborations, and some anthropologists are gradually applying themselves to art and audio-visual media practices. Artist-anthropologists have become active in the international art scene.

To explore the non-linguistic sensory experience and expression across different cultural contexts, sensory ethnography15 emerged in the context of an interdisciplinary ﬁeld of practice. Established and directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor in 2006, the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University16 has become the main force behind combining intense ethnographic ﬁeldwork with artistic strategies, among them digital media.

70 Vol. 17 No. 2 Libbie Cohn and J. P. Sniadecki, People’s Park, 2012, video, 78 mins. © Libbie Cohn and J. P. Sniadecki. Courtesy of the artists.

J. P. Sniadecki, who earned a Ph.D in Social Anthropology with Media from this lab, is a filmmaker active in China and the United States whose films explore the collective experience in urban China through the intersection of cinema and sensory ethnography. In 2012, he co-directed with Libbie Cohn a vivid documentary, People’s Park, of a bustling urban park, People’s Park in Chengdu. The film captured a slice of public life of hundreds of locals singing karaoke, dancing to Chinese pop songs, playing mahjong, making kung-fu tea, and practicing calligraphy. The camera also surveyed the wide panorama of subtle gestures that represent human emotions. Throughout the filming, certain people warily turned their faces away, while others actively performed for the camera by waving, smiling, and flashing peace signs. Without any cuts or edits, Sniadecki and Cohn rolled the camera and completed this seventy-five-minute-long film in one tracking shot. However, the smooth movement of the camera required meticulous preparation and accurate execution. Cohn, sitting in a wheelchair, held the camera and shotgun mic with headphones strapped on, and Sniadecki pushed her along. The process took them months; they visited the park, refined their route, and took three weeks to shoot, completing the film after twenty-four attempts.

Libbie Cohn and J. P. If one is to say that People’s Park Sniadecki, People’s Park, 2012, video, 78 mins. © Libbie Cohn is about capturing the people and J. P. Sniadecki. Courtesy of the artists. of Chengdu, encountering the spectacles of daily life in a wheelchair with camera is in its own right a kind of performance and spectacle. Wherever the camera moved, it would still be in the arena of watching, ceaselessly watching and being watched. The film ended with a striking sequence of an old man bending backwards while dancing and staring into the camera lens. Thus, filming and being filmed, watching and being watched, constructed a confrontation between these pairs of spectacles, injecting the visceral imagery of urban activity into conventional anthropological representation—a reminder for one to reflect on the ways of seeing. Moreover, as a viewer, watching this film as an immersive unbroken journey is akin to unfolding the scroll of a traditional Chinese landscape painting.

Vol. 17 No. 2 71 Ethnographic film as a genre is now more integrated into the contemporary art scene, in response to global politics and its representation today. Most of the ethnographic film makers are sophisticated structural storytellers, recording the customs and habits of social groups in an expository way. The aspiration to document real events might at times overlook the possibilities that the images potentially contain—explorations of human perception, renewed ways of seeing, and unexpected interpretations. People’s Park, on the other hand, has deviated from the conventional strategies of presenting the subject-object dilemma, and has attached no importance to the construction of relationships by the juxtaposed collision of meanings that most documentary work emphasizes, but is, instead, committed to expanding the visual vocabulary of ethnographic film in order to achieve a holistic experience. Thus this work has offered an alternative mode of representation in anthropology and should not be misinterpreted as documenting true life in one shot but directly reflecting the messy reality in one day as a whole.

To represent is to re-present, meaning “to exhibit” in Latin. Hence, representation itself is not an appendage to an artwork, including ethnographic presentations, but part of its essence. Representation requires self-reﬂexivity, a scalable and comprehensive ethnographic kind of research that is built upon the political, historical, literary, and artistic knowledge-ﬁeldwork-creation mechanism that can potentially engage in cross-cultural dialogue.

Ten years ago, Taiwan artist Kao Jun-Honn had his physical and emotional disorders healed by wandering around in Mt. Jinminzi. Since then, he has embarked on countless journeys into the mountains. Walking along the Frontier Guard Line—from the mountainous areas in Xindian to Taoyuan—which segregated the indigenous Taiwan natives from the Han Chinese immigrants, he crossed over graveyards of the nameless and betel nut groves. Nature became his refugee camp, yet he was also caught up in the histories of the abandoned industrial and public facilities in the mountainous regions, such as the remaining site of a once-popular amusement park, the ruins of a coal mine, and numerous abandoned industrial roads. During his extensive research of these areas, Kao Jun- Honn felt deeply haunted by historical photographs of Liugui Village in Kaohsiung City taken in 1871 by the pioneering photographer and traveller John Thomson, who, over a period of ten years, was one of the ﬁrst photographers to document the scenery and people of the Far East. Like most photographers at that time, Thomson opened a window to the orient and attempted to demonstrate the superiority of European culture in contrast to the decadent non-European ones. Met with an astonishingly exotic natural environment, his works were embedded in practices of a taxonomical and anthropological encounter, and to some degree served a colonial function. In addition to the unease of being the subjects of colonial viewing, Kao Jun-Honn realized that “modern capitalism” could be embodied in the form of photography.

Besides the mountains and natural forests that motivated him to question the absences within colonial histories and the mythology of economic transformation of Taiwan in the societies contemporary to Thomson’s,

72 Vol. 17 No. 2 Kao Jun-Honn, The Ruin Image Crystal Project: 10 Scenes— Zong Ye/All Down!, 2012, colour photograph, 60 x 100 cm. © Kao Jun-Honn. Courtesy of the artist and A+ Contemporary, Shanghai.

Kao Jun-Honn also performed his in-depth fieldwork in abandoned infrastructures such as Boai Market, the Taiwan Motor Transport Machinery Part Plant, the Haishan Coal Mine, and the Ankang Prison, located within the vicinity of urban cities. In 2012, based on found photographs, including the group photographs of Taiwanese soldiers, factory workers, and high school girls bidding farewell to a kamikaze17 pilot taking off, and some news photographs capturing the aftermath of mining disaster in New Taipei City in 1984 taken by photojournalist Wen-Ji Li, he initiated a two-year site-specific project, The Ruin Image Crystal Project: 10 Scenes, and carried out multisite fieldwork research in ruins of military camps, factories, and an amusement park, collecting archival documents and the memories of local neoliberal individuals. Kao Jun-Honn attempted to reconnect these fragmented historical images of modernity with specific sites through the reproduction, representation, and re-enactment of the found photographs—transforming the enlarged found and news photographs into charcoal drawings on the wall of abandoned spaces, turning the ruins into white cubes. In his solo exhibition at A+ Contemporary, Shanghai, in 2017, he presented seven photographic posters of different people posing in front of the charcoal drawings. Some of them were in the original found photographs, while others imitated the appearance of the figures in the drawings so that the posters succeeded in creating images within images. Kao Jun-Honn might agree with Walter Benjamin18 that this project appropriated no ingenious formulations but merely showed what he found and made good use of. Hence, his practice dialectically transforms the essence of these images by disintegrating the original visual perspective and replacing them with the ephemeral charcoal paintings contrasting the reality of these related areas. Kao Jun-Honn’s fieldwork-led artistic practice revisited the spectres of history and re-engaged with an earlier century of the ethnographic gaze. More importantly, this practice has strengthened him to further probe into the history and reality of the brutality and absurdity of modernization that the Taiwanese people suffered from. With the charcoal paintings, the abandoned spaces, and the wilds of the mountains, he exhibited a panorama of dystopia.

Raising an awareness of the predicament of those people who have been muted by historical or economic displacement in society, Kao Jun-Honn has been engaged in a process of self-reﬂection in a mutual process of weaving

Vol. 17 No. 2 73 Left: Kao Jun-Honn, The Ruin Image Crystal Project: 10 Scenes—TaLe/Yuko Sugimoto, 2012, colour photograph, 60 x 100 cm. © Kao Jun-Honn. Courtesy of the artist and A+ Contemporary, Shanghai. Right: Kao Jun-Honn, The Ruin Image Crystal Project: 10 Scenes—White Butterfies/ Resolves problems of education, economics, and the name of Taiwan, 2012, colour photograph, 60 x 100 cm. © Kao Jun-Honn. Courtesy of the artist and A+ Contemporary, Shanghai. Bottom: Kao Jun-Honn, The Ruin Image Crystal Project: 10 Scenes—Hu Siao/Good afternoon, my dear brother, 2012, colour photograph, 60 x 100 cm. © Kao Jun-Honn. Courtesy of the artist and A+ Contemporary, Shanghai.

the fabric of his life into that of others, and it is these interwoven narratives of human life that concern him.

Fieldwork as the Site of Art Activism Many current discussions about the encounters between contemporary art and anthropology centre on the question of the politics behind ethnographic methodologies appropriated within art practices—that is, a critique that ﬁeldwork study within art making is quasi-ethnographic. The phenomenon of the ethnographic turn in contemporary art is central to our time because it encompasses a comprehensive critical and reﬂexive thinking about histories and realities that are responding to a new wave of global modernity, rather than a new fashion within the aesthetics of art making.

I propose that the concept of alterity in ethnography requires deep contiguity with a wide array of cultural contexts, some of which can seem to be incompatible. Thus, the probing into a world that is framed by incompatibility can arouse self-consciousness and critical thinking through reﬂection upon social life in other cultural contexts. In other words, ethnography’s great impact on the world is not simply the result of research nor its thirst for radical alterity, but self-reﬂexive thinking driven in a way that anthropologists and ethnographers can reveal the awkwardness, confront the differences, and question the contradictions embedded in their values to others and beyond.

From this perspective, the encounter of contemporary art and ethnography is neither the easy recognition nor reinterpretation of traditional art and culture, nor turning the ﬁeldwork into another form of cultural barriers and hierarchies. Rather, it is visual transformation and the registration of otherness by the speculative cameras, such as Liquid Borders by Samson Young and People’s Park by J. P. Sniadecki and Libbie Cohn; or the

74 Vol. 17 No. 2 excavation and aesthetic mining of histories, as in the works Umbrellahead, I Will Find You by Adrian Wong and Hua-Shang-Qiang by Su Yu Hsien.

Once ethnographic fieldwork proliferates in other areas as a practice, I am not convinced that its virtues can be solely owned by any one discipline, for example, under the umbrella of anthropology. Therefore, the discussions should not focus on whether ethnography-led art practices should be in accord with anthropological principles, but, rather, in how these practices engage a knowledge network in order to come up with more flexible yet interpretative languages for interdisciplinary dialogue. As a result, locating themselves within the practice of fieldwork, artists are empowered as alternate activists in addressing cultural power structures and work closely with communities to represent and produce knowledge instead of focusing on traditional art objects. Artists don’t necessarily directly get involved in social action or put forward any conclusions to help address global issues, but they develop a knowledge-fieldwork-creation mechanism to inspire audiences to understand the dynamics of local knowledge, the representation of cultural products, and the transformations unfolding around us.

Notes

1. Briefly speaking, anthropology is the study of people throughout the world, concerned with both the biological features of human beings and cultural aspects of society. Ethnography is a methodology associated with anthropology. It is a literary genre and a brand of qualitative fieldwork within the social sciences that records and analyzes a culture or society. Ethnography that is based on participant observation and results in a written account is considered one of the most distinctive features of anthropology. 2. Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in The Traffic in Culture, eds. George Marcus and Fred Myers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 302–09. 3. Ibid. 4. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (New York: New York Academic of Sciences, 1942). 5. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 39-41. 6. This border was built in 1951 by the Hong Kong British Government to separate the territory from China. 7. Classical ethnographic research begins with the recognition that the observer starts as a stranger or outsider to the group being studied; this is in order to avoid over-familiarity and to achieve a professional and personal distance. 8. Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” 304–05. 9. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 89. 10. Ibid. Further developed by Geertz, “thick description” refers to a detailed description of human behaviour within a particular context. It has gradually become recognized as the method of interpretative anthropology. 11. Adrian Wong, ”Selected projects,” http://www.adrianwong.info/selected/. 12. Cheng Nan-Jung was a Taiwanese activist who established the Freedom Era Weekly in the 1980s. He committed suicide by self-immolation to fight for total freedom of speech in 1989. 13. James Clifford, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography: A School of American Research, Advanced Seminar, eds. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press,1986). 14. Peaking in the 1970s and 1980s, anthropological filmmakers (or anthropologists in partnership with documentary filmmakers) created ethnographic films about the cultures they were studying. In the late 1980s, the anthropologists placed the cameras in the hands of their cultural subjects and encouraged them to create their own auto-ethnographic films, which blossomed out of the postmodern turn in anthropological thought. See Pamela Wilson, “Ethnographic Film,” Oxford Bibliographies, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo- 9780199791286-0183.xml/. 15. Sarah Pink, “The future of sensory anthropology/the anthropology of the senses,” Social Anthropology 18 (2010), 33–33. 16. Sensory Ethnography Lab, http://sel.fas.harvard.edu/. 17. In the closing stages of the Pacific campaign of World War II, the Japanese Special Attack Units initiated suicide attacks against Allied naval vessels to destroy the warships. Kamikaze were a part of these military aviators. Yilan airport in Taiwan was the air force base of Kamikaze during the war. 18. Walter Benjamin, “Convolutes,” in The Arcade Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 29.

Vol. 17 No. 2 75 Julie Chun Southern Port of Call: Guangzhou’s Current Galleries

uangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, commands its place as third of the largest and most populated cities in GChina, after Beijing and Shanghai. With glossy skyscrapers in Zhujiang New Town marking what the Guardian has termed the “Great Leap Upward,” the soaring might of Guangzhou’s economic commerce is reinforced by the city’s futuristic zones of urban planning and its ever- expanding infrastructure of highways.1 With palpable wealth visibly pronounced in ultra-luxury malls to rival Hong Kong and Los Angeles and in the built culture of prominent ediﬁces like the Zaha Hadid-designed Guangzhou Opera House and the state-of-the art Guangzhou Library, the city has revived the Guangzhou Triennial (established in 2002 at the Guangdong Museum of Art) with renewed vigor while the Guangdong Times Museum (established 2010) continues to sustain quality exhibitions.2

Yet, beyond its identity as an expansive metropolis, the familiar moniker “Canton” also conjures up nostalgic visions of a bustling port life in southern China that has resolutely endured on the estuary of the Pearl River Delta. Even merely ﬁve years ago, in 2012, when there existed only a handful of galleries, the notable trailblazers of contemporary art were CANTONBON (established in 1993) and Vitamin Creative Space (established in 2002). In recent years, due to increasing interest in the region by the global arts community, the founding players of the Canton art world have stepped up and increased their game, which this essay seeks to examine. Moreover, how are the young emerging and mid-career artists locating their inspiration and expressing their unique artistic voice in a way that has resonance to their place in society? Can the next generation attempt to follow in the giant steps forged by the heavyweight artists and artistic groups of the past such as Chen Tong, Xu Tan, Zheng Guogu, and the late Chen Shaoxiong?

Mirrored Gardens Annually, when the global art community descends upon Hong Kong for Art Basel, those seeking respite from the intensity of the art marketplace would make the just over 100 kilometre trek to Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou. Established in 2002 by Zhang Wei with writer Hu Fang, the original space consisted of a third-ﬂoor exhibition room at 29 Hao Heng Yi Jie, situated above a “wet” market (selling local meat and fresh produce). Representing many artists who have gained critical and commercial acclaim, such as Cao Fei, Zheng Guogu, Duan Jianyu, Pak Sheung Chuen, Zhou Tao, Xu Tan, just to name a few, Vitamin’s mission has been to explore the “alternative working mode speciﬁcally geared to the contemporary Chinese

76 Vol. 17 No. 2 context [that is] constantly inspired by the confrontation between the contemporary life and ancient Chinese philosophy.”3 With unique modes of curation for a commercial gallery, Vitamin Creative Space took on the guise of a contemporary museum with installations that provoked rather than appeased the viewer. By 2013, Zhang Wei was given 91st place in the Power 100 listing by ArtReview for having “a vague vision of a space that would function between a gallery and a not-for-profit organization.”4 What might have seemed “vague” was none other than Vitamin’s unusual hybrid identity as a not-for-profit independent art space that pursues the agendas of a for- profit commercial gallery, as evinced by its active participation in global art fairs at FIAC and Art Basel. According to Zhang Wei and Hu Fung, non-profit and for-profit are not mutually exclusive, as they are demarcated in the West, but can prove to be mutually complimentary and highly practical in China, where alternative and self-organized artistic spaces are not provided institutional or governmental support.5 It is this independent strategy that fostered Vitamin Creative Space to open The Pavilion in Beijing in 2008, which, after several relocations, closed as an exhibition site and currently operates as an administrative office.

Mirrored Gardens, Panyu Despite its presence in Beijing, District, Guangzhou, exterior landscaping. Photo: Bebe widespread recognition in Jacobs. international art circles, and the departure of some of the artists to greater urban centres in China and abroad, Vitamin Creative Space has been unable to untangle itself from its close association with the city of Guangzhou. The original experimental third-floor space is no longer extant, but in Mirrored Gardens, Panyu District, Guangzhou, galleries. 2015 it reemerged as the elegant Photo: Julie Chun. and polished Mirrored Gardens in Hualong Agriculture Grand View Garden in Panyu District, about an hour’s drive from Guangzhou’s city centre. The entrance is flanked by walls of reflecting metal that literally evoke and name the environs. A welcoming single-file stone pathway beckons the visitor into the expanse of the lushly verdant and secluded premises. The initial experience of stepping from the pathway onto the wooden deck of Mirrored Gardens is akin to entering not only a discreet secret garden but a secret garden operating according to the high mandates of a self-sustaining twenty- first century ecosystem. With the aesthetics of sophisticated charm that characterize the work of its architect, Sou Fujimoto, the natural landscape of indigenous local trees and flora is carefully balanced by the quietude of a koi fish pond that fronts a picturesque, rustic hut. Situated on the walkway that runs along the inner perimeter are airy galleries of both intimate and

Vol. 17 No. 2 77 Left: Mirrored Gardens, Panyu District, Guangzhou, interior looking out. Photo: Bebe Jacobs. Right: Lee Kit, Now it’s all gone wrong, 2008, acrylic on fabric. Photo: Julie Chun.

large scale to embody the harmonious ideals of an integrated community. The muted spaces of the galleries, lit by natural light, are relatively austere, as if to grant each painting, sculpture, or installation the autonomy in which to breathe amid the sanctuary of the building’s natural ecology. Despite its removed distance from the city centre, the prestige of Mirrored Gardens has already attracted not only high-proﬁle artists such as Olafur Eliasson, who has been working with Vitamin Creative Space for some years, but also a younger crowd of jet-setting notable art stars such as Firenza Lai, Danh Vo, Ming Wong, and Lee Kit.

Canton Gallery While prominent curators and museum directors may make the special pilgrimage to Mirrored Gardens, those resolute in locating emerging talent in Guangzhou will venture to seek out Canton Gallery. Occupying Room 307 on the third floor of the nondescript Jinle office building on 51 Yile Road in Haizu District, Canton Gallery was established in 2015 by artists Hu Xiangqian and Lin Aojie, along with their friend Lin Jingxin who provides financial support. The gallery is uncommon in several respects. First, it is one of the few artist-run galleries in China. Due to the commitment involved in developing their own practice and producing their art, few artists have the time, energy, or sufficient business acumen to professionally operate and manage a commercial art gallery. Second, true to its name, Canton Gallery’s succinctly short mission statement highlights that it is “persistently focusing on Pearl River Delta Area based artists.”6 Arguably, Canton Gallery appears like an iteration of the early Vitamin Creative Space. Drawing on local talent sourced from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and emerging groups of artists from Hong Kong, exhibitions are often presented in collaboration with the presenting artist in the eighty square-metre space.

With Hu Xiangqian currently residing in New York, Lin Aojie is overseeing the daily operations of the gallery with a keen consideration that positions the interest of the artist as the gallery’s foremost priority. Such planning and production consumes a signiﬁcant amount of time for any artist, and since neither Hu Xiangqian nor Lin Aojie exhibit their own works of art at Canton Gallery, it has become a magnet for lesser-known artists. Such support is indispensable to artists striving to bring attention to their works. Yet, what are the criteria for the selective judgement made by the two artists in charge? Lin Aojie answers, “There are numerous young artists being matriculated but no gallery system to support them in Guangzhou,

78 Vol. 17 No. 2 which eventually leads most to enter the professional work force and take on careers such as graphic designers and illustrators. This then leaves only those who are serious enough to pursue a life as artists. Most of us at Canton Gallery know what that difﬁcult path is like because we are all on the same passage in varying degrees and circumstances. You can consider Canton Gallery a platform and a support system for the truly resilient artists. So the selection process is not always about the gallery choosing them but it’s also about the artists demonstrating their earnestness as we work together so that the artists can experiment and expand beyond the scope of what they are able to do by themselves.”7 Accordingly, the list of artists on the Canton Gallery roster is as diverse and wide-ranging as the inhabitants of the city itself.

Wu Sibo, Holiday Makers, Born in 1976 in Maoming, Guangdong 2017, oil on canvas, 110 x 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist and province, Wu Sibo has been residing in Canton Gallery, Guangzhou. Guangzhou since 1994, having attended and graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. His paintings are consistently executed in his preferential style of varying shades of grey, as if to represent the interstice between black and white, where reality and imagination blends as ineffable ambiguity. As such, the paintings capture the liminality that lies somewhere between dusk and dawn, afﬂuence and destitution, and even reason and madness. Wu Sibo’s serenely rendered paintings may be devoid of the more vibrant colours represented in real life, yet they poignantly manage to capture the heartbeats of life’s ordinary moments. The canopied rowboat that is momentarily suspended in time in the sparse landscape of Holiday Makers (2017) belies its title. In China, it is a well-established reality that holiday outings tend to be inconvenient struggles (via foot, plane, train, car, or boat) from point A to point B through throngs of mass humanity. Better to stay at home than venture out where multitudes tend to engulf and obstruct the picturesque scenic locality. The sheer barrenness of the landscape with only two perceptible ﬁgures in subdued and intimate discussion on the boat confounds the vision of what is expected as expressed by the painting’s title. We are confronted with the rather un-glorious spectacle of the commonplace at the least expected place and moment.

Wu Sibo, Miss Liu in the Offce, The subtext that conjoins many of Wu Sibo’s 2008, oil on canvas, 125 x 99 cm. Courtesy of the artist and painted canvases is this paradoxical encounter Canton Gallery, Guangzhou. of serenity and serendipity that is also lucidly exemplified in the painting Miss Liu in the Office (2008). The cropped leggings echo the composition of the cropped head in the portrait of Miss Liu, whose full identity we will never know. Her unraveling stocking peeks out from beneath her light lavender dress against the artist’s grey suffused background. Casual attire is a conventional sight in many workplaces in Guangzhou, where the average office dress code is not as formal or sophisticated as other urban cities in China. Aside from a perception of what appears quite

Vol. 17 No. 2 79 ordinary and recognizable, this painting is tinged with an ambiguous sense of displacement and mystery that extends beyond the question of who Miss Liu might be to why she is standing there and what she intends to do.

Sun Wenhao, Stall Cassidy, 2016, single-channel video, 1 min., 40 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Canton Gallery, Guangzhou.

A sense of bold impetus rather than Sun Wenhao, Nanting- Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Next Art a calculated strategy toward art Basel, 2017, exhibition view. Courtesy of the artist and making was the inspiration for early Canton Gallery, Guangzhou. Guangdong province artists and groups working in the 1990s, most notably the Big Tail Elephant and the Yangjiang Group. Their undaunted courage for experimentation as their unique visual voice continues to resonate in the practice of younger Guangzhou artists such as Sun Wenhao. About a week before the opening of the 2017 Hong Kong Art Basel, Sun Wenhao presented in Canton Gallery his own Nanting-Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Next Art Basel (March 17 to April 19, 2017). While large expanses of crudely scrawled paintings ﬁlled the gallery proclaiming the monetary transactions that dictate the art market, a golden dance pole emerged from a squat toilet like a penile erection. The most acerbic piece was a video entitled Stall Cassidy (2016) that diminutively mimics Asia’s largest art fair with a multitude of small found and purchased non-essentials crammed around an actual squat toilet in the conﬁnes of a tiny bathroom. This provocation, while literal, resonates with detonating force the impassioned institutional critique that has not been so boldly expressed since Feng Boyi and Ai Weiwei’s dissent against the Shanghai Biennale with the notorious Fuck Off exhibition in 2000. Sun Wenhao’s audacity reveals the lengths to which some artists are willing to go to question the system of which they are a part. Sun Wenhao remains fearless, not unlike his senior alumni Hu Xiangqian, who is also no stranger in offering critiques to the hands that feed him.

As the eldest artist represented at Canton Gallery, Qin Jin is a former teacher of Sun Wenhao and scores of others who graduated from the Fifth Studio of Oil Painting Department at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, where she has been teaching since 2003. As a female artist, historically outnumbered in the Guangzhou art world, Qin Jin has managed to maintain her high level of quality with painstakingly rendered works that explore various issues, in general, relating to a person’s place in China and, in particular, to a woman’s

80 Vol. 17 No. 2 Qin Jin, When I am Dead, place in Chinese society. Activating 2014, three-channel video, 39 mins., 48 secs.. Courtesy of the discourse of autobiography, the artist and Canton Gallery, Guangzhou. she explores the female voice in her assiduously constructed paintings, photographs, sculptures, and videos. In the three-channel video When I Am Dead (2014), we are gently enfolded into the lives of three women. Signifying the three stages of humanity (youth, middle-age, elderly), we follow the quotidian sequence of ordinary tasks such as the brushing of hair, or washing and bathing, which forms a confession about the futile efforts of self-preservation that nonetheless lead closer, day by day, to our inevitable death.

Qin Jin, Twenty-Nine Years Plus The confessional trope is further Eight Months And Nine Days, 2006–09, child’s dress, ironed reiterated in Qin Jin’s three-year- multiple times. Courtesy of the artist and Canton Gallery, long performative project that Guangzhou. culminated in the series Twenty- Nine Years Plus Eight Months And Nine Days (2006–09). The accompanying video and drawings provide context to the pristinely cauterized clothes that were subjected to repetitive gestures of ironing until the form collapsed into ﬂattened conﬁgurations, taking on the yellowed patina of old sepia photographs. A man’s suit jacket and a child’s dress serve as mementos of homage to excessive love, as if the care and labour of domestic idyll had exceeded beyond the necessity of its purpose. The constant pressure exerted on the small baby’s dress quietly reify the burdens of mundane everyday routines and reveals the oppressive state of obligation that often comes tethered to the responsibilities of care-giving.

Qin Jin’s works were introduced to a broader international audience at the gallery Capsule Shanghai in the two-person exhibition with her former student Chen Dandizi, Fleeting Memories (December 23, 2016, to February 23, 2017), through joint sponsorship with Canton Gallery. This dual gallery collaboration created a symbiotic dynamic linking the two recent galleries located in two enterprising cities. Enrico Polato, founder of Capsule Shanghai, notes, “Guangzhou has a vibrant local art scene with very talented artists, but it is still somewhat undiscovered by the international public. I feel that this potential has recently been unveiled by a renewed interest in the area, the establishment of new art galleries, and their participation in global art fairs. Moreover, Guangzhou’s art scene is growing organically while preserving its own special ﬂavour. It is still partially detached from the main centres of the art market in China, but its proximity to cities like Shenzhen and Hong Kong have created an environment that fuels experimentation, thanks to its independence, without being totally isolated.”8 Endeavours such as this in expanding the reach of artists from the Pearl River Delta to international audiences and a collector base, have prompted Canton Gallery to participate in Shanghai’s West Bund Art Fair in 2016 and 2017, with future sights set for Art Basel Hong Kong.

Vol. 17 No. 2 81 bonacon gallery In the immense expanse of Chen Tong’s empire under the platform of CANTONBON (founded 1993) that comprises the Libreria Borges Institute for Contemporary Art, a bookshop in a mall specializing in Chinese translations of French publications, and the interoperable project Video Bureau (with branches in Guangzhou and Beijing), the newest addition is bonacon gallery that opened in December 2016. The expansive space of 300 square metres possesses all the cultivated charm of the lane-house galleries found in Shanghai’s former French Concession, but is ﬁrmly sited in Guangzhou’s historic merchant district on 84 Taikang Road. The distressed walls and the original tiles maintain an authentic localism while the ambient gallery lighting and the open minimalist space highlight the contemporary chic pervasive in many commercial galleries worldwide. Bonacon is directed by Younghwa Jeon, who has ambitious plans to connect with collectors in Hong Kong, mainland China, and beyond. True to Chen Tong’s objective to establish a wider international network for contemporary art in Guangzhou, bonacon’s strategy is not unlike that of the Mirrored Gardens, which also has forged artistic exchanges between Guangdong and global artists.

While collaborative relationships bonacon gallery, exhibition view with work by Cai Zebin. between galleries are often contested Courtesy of bonacon gallery, Guangzhou. and not always amicable elsewhere, the process seems unusually ﬂuid in Guangzhou. Perhaps some of this has to do with the smaller, closer- knit society of the arts circles. Or perhaps the sheer reality of a limited collector base for contemporary art in Guangdong fosters a willing environment of support for each other. “When there is an art opening in Guangzhou, everyone in the arts community shows up,” notes Lin Aojie.9 Even as a co-founder of a gallery in the same city, Lin Aojie had no qualms about showing his own works at bonacon. As if to seal his commentary about this collaborative spirit, his work in the group exhibition at bonacon gallery’s New Notes of Guangdong (March 17 to May 20, 2017) incorporated dual portrait photographs of himself with Chen Tong seated on a couch entitled Two Artists (2017), as well as in A Family (2017), where Lin Aojie placed himself between Chen Tong and Younghwa Jeon to parody typical Chinese family portraiture of a mother, a father, and a son. According to Younghwa Jeon, the decision to install Lin Aojie’s photographs, especially the larger format work Two Artists, focusing on the older and younger artist, was to provide a visual and literal link between Chen Tong, the early “godfather” of contemporary art in Guangzhou, with Lin Aojie, who epitomizes the next generation of aspiring and entrepreneurial artists. As if maintaining one gallery was not enough, in July 2017, Lin Aojie opened up YHSPACE (named after You He Road, on which it is located) within the lower level of XLL Art Café Social as an extension of Canton Gallery.

The self-referential nod to Guangzhou’s society and even its arts community is evoked as an intuitive gesture by some artists, such as those discussed above, who frame their artistic expressions within the urbanscape and lifestyle alluding to their intimate knowledge and awareness of their

82 Vol. 17 No. 2 Lin Aojie, Two Artists, 2017, regional surroundings. This is not to imply that Guangzhou artists do not photograph, 52 x 79 cm. Courtesy of the artist and explore themes that focus on broader worldly topics, which young and older bonacon gallery, Guangzhou. artists certainly do, but there is a palpable engagement with the arts in this southern port city that embraces while alternatively scrutinizing the unique conditions of its locality. No artist accomplishes this feat as eloquently as Liu Sheng. Born, raised, educated, and residing in Guangzhou, Liu Sheng creates deftly executed portrayals of people and sights he frequently encounters, rendered with strokes of watercolour that possess an immediacy to rival any Instagram post. One can almost breathe in the dense humidity and feel the bodies in motion in his arresting Huangsha series, which captures the activities at the local fish market in Huangqi, Nanhai district. There is an allusion to classical repose of the Hellenistic Sleeping Eros in the napping worker who slumbers atop a makeshift bed of cardboard mat upon Styrofoam fish packing boxes in Huangsha (7) (2016). The artist aptly bleeds the watercolours on the mottled walls and cement floor, echoing the aqueous working conditions while also alluding to the blurred world of dreams. The small, notebook-sized painting celebrates not only the trope of regeneration, but also sweet reprieve from exhausting manual labour into a state of blissful unconscious fantasy where the hardships of life can be temporarily suspended.

Liu Sheng, Huangsha (7), Hou Hanru, also hailing from Guangzhou, 2016, watercolour on paper. Courtesy of the artist and has remarked that geographical bonacon gallery, Guangzhou. independence, cultural hybridity, and radical experimentation is what characterizes the work of Canton artists, whom he describes as “more experimental and non-commercial, and, hence, completely free and limitless.”10 Conversely, Chen Tong has cautioned against the “narrow-minded understanding of regionalism,” and he is of the opinion that the label “Cantonese” is “pretty much an illusion.”11 As political writer Emily Chertoff notes, “To be called a regionalist is either

Vol. 17 No. 2 83 to be slandered or to be praised, bonacon gallery, 2017, with installation by Lo Lai Lai depending on who you ask.”12 Natalie at left and paintings by Liu Sheng at right. Courtesy Certainly, there is no overarching of the artists and bonacon gallery, Guangzhou. characteristic that sets art from Guangdong apart from other regions or even from within. Yet, that is not to deny there are attributes and particularities inherent to Canton that have been sources of local pride. Delectable cuisine, the dual-dialect culture of Cantonese and Mandarin, mild climate, the famous Cantonese opera, and an openness to foreigners and foreign enterprises are only a few of the many qualities that have distinguished Guangdong province throughout China’s long history.

Despite criticisms of art succumbing to regionalist “local flavour,” a notable example that addressed the polyphonic voices of the city’s largest demographic of local residents was the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (September 2017 to January 2018), held throughout the greater Los Angeles area.13 The exhibitions highlighted the works by Latino artists, and quite successfully demonstrated that we still fall into the trap of underappreciating what is obviously around us but have failed to notice and, thus, recognize. The manifestation of a local-specific vernacular is best articulated by those who are truly from a given place, and not those passing through. In Guangzhou, where its port was officially forced open in 1685, many artists had painted the landscape and scenes they witnessed because it was the only world they ever knew, with some even surpassing the skills of their Western instructors.14 As Guangzhou continues to develop and expand as one of China’s central hubs for international commerce and global intersection for transportation, insightful Cantonese artists have long recognized that the power of art lies in revealing the different facets of similarly lived lives, oftentimes from the vantage point of the very place they are most familiar with.

Notes

1. Eric Hilaire and Nick Van Mead, “The Great Leap Upward: China’s Pearl River Delta, then and now,” Guardian, May 10, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/10/china-pearl-river-delta- then-and-now-photographs/. 2. For a full listing of past exhibitions at the Times Museum, please see http://en.timesmuseum.org/ exhibitions/. 3. “About Us,” Vitamin Creative Space, http://www.vitamincreativespace.art/en/?page_id=2/. 4. Art Review, Power 100, 2013, https://artreview.com/power_100/zhang_weivitamin_creative_space/. 5. Edward Sanderson, “Nutrition Spaces: Guangzhou and Beijing,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 11, no. 6 (November/December 2012), 88–89. 6. “About,” Canton Gallery, http://www.cantongallery.com.cn/about.php/. 7. Lin Aojie in conversation with the author, Guangzhou, September 7, 2017. 8. Enrico Polato in conversation with the author, Shanghai, May 6, 2017. 9. Lin Aojie in conversation with the author, Guangzhou, September 7, 2017. 10. Hou Hanru, “Canton Express,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 3, no. 1 (March 2004), 15. 11. Xiaofei Mo, Wang Jing, and Chen Tong, “CANTONBON: A Case Study of Locality, Autonomy, and Hybridity since 1993,” ed. Jane DeBevoise, Asia Art Archive in America, http://www.aaa-a.org/ programs/cantonbon-a-case-study-of-locality-autonomy-and-hybridity-since-1993/. 12. Emily Chertoff, “The Rejection of the Regionalists: Wyeth, Wood, and the New Americans,” Harvard Advocate, http://theharvardadvocate.com/article/13/the-rejection-of-the-regionalists-wyeth-wood- and-the-new-americans/. 13. For the official site of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, please see http://www.pacificstandardtime.org/ en/about/. 14. Hong Kong Museum of Art; Peabody Essex Museum, Views of the Pearl River Delta: Macau, Canton and Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Urban Council of Hong Kong, 1996).

84 Vol. 17 No. 2 Sophia Kidd

Inside/Outside—Black and White: 5th Chengdu Up-On International Live Art Festival

would like to discuss the Chengdu Up-On International Live Art Festival’s recent 5th iteration (October 13 to 23, 2017) from two Iperspectives: inside and outside. As an American, I will never be an insider in the southwest China performance art scene, but eight years of researching and curating within this milieu and writing on it for this and other publications has provided me with some understanding of the regional intricacies informing this festival. In fact, as an outsider, I might better be able to place this festival and its artworks in contexts within a transnational performance art milieu. This year’s Up-On was unintentionally timed to coincide with the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) 19th National Congress. A number of strategies and tactics undertaken by Up-On proved useful, and it reached a successful conclusion on October 23, unlike numerous other festivals, conventions, expos, meetings, and exhibitions planned to take place during this period that were either cancelled or postponed. There is no clear answer as to why these events were cancelled or postponed, and those who shared their experiences with me were not given reasons, or, if they were, I was not privy to them. There is speculation that these decisions were made for security reasons, to keep people from gathering at a time when a great deal of political energy and security measures were focused on Beijing’s Congress.

From the Inside It seemed as though this year’s Up-On International Live Art Festival might be clamped down on. Through conversations with artists whose recent events had been cancelled or postponed because of the Congress, some feared that Up-On also would be disrupted, much like Tianjin’s OPEN performance art festival had been earlier the same month. Like OPEN, Up-On lost most of its funding not long before opening day, most likely due to direct or indirect pressure on sponsors to divest from forms of art that are still strongly associated with resistance to CPC’s ethical and aesthetic standards. The difference between the two festivals came down to Up-On’s curators willingness to place parameters on artists’ projects and tone down promotion of the event having connections to Chengdu’s real estate and ﬁne arts sectors.

Curators This year’s Up-On was curated by Chengdu performance artists Zhou Bin and Liu Chengying, together with independent Chengdu curator Lan Qingwei. From March 2011 to August 2017, Lan Qingwei served as acting director for the Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art. During his tenure, he excelled at ﬁnding private funding for exhibitions of experimental art

Vol. 17 No. 2 85 forms ranging from new media and live art to painting and installation. However, the assumed independence that comes with being funded by the private sector has its murky side too. There were concessions Lan Qingwei at times had to make with sponsors, and radical online Chengdu art critic ARTWOCA was quick to criticize this in at least one instance. It was during an exhibition featuring 3D printing technology, when ARTWOCA challenged the artistic integrity of a video installation that equivocated between being art and promotion. Eventually, though, it was not the private sector that wore Lan Qingwei down, precipitating his resignation, but, rather, pressure from government censors for him to produce portfolios on artists he was working with that would include a complete history of each artists’ work so that any sensitive or anti-government matters could be identiﬁed. Lan Qingwei is now independently curating exhibitions while, at the same time, working for the Chengdu Guanghui Fine Art Museum, which is slated to open in 2019. Lan Qingwei’s most recent curatorial project, Rhetoric of Geneology, with co-curator Du Xiyun, opened on October 28, 2017, as one of four components of the 2017 Anren Biennale, which ran through to February 28, 2018.

Liu Chengying and Zhou Bin originally formed the Up-On festival in 2008 with Chengdu independent curator Yan Cheng and Singapore performance artist Li Wen. Zhou Bin and Liu Chengying went on to curate Up-On’s second iteration four years later in 2012 with Yan Cheng, another independent curator based in Chengdu. Lan Qingwei got involved in 2015, co-curating the 3rd Chengdu Up-On with Zhou Bin and Lan Qingwei. For the next three years, this trio would produce Up-On annually in 2015, 2016 (with Chengdu/France curator Geng Xin also participating), and most recently in 2017. From the beginning, however, the two consistent curators have been Zhou Bin and Liu Chengying. While Zhou Bin networks all over Asia, Europe, North America, and Australia, gaining allies in avant- garde and professional art circles, Liu Chengying brings local history and tradition to the table.

Zhou Bin and Liu Chengying began collaborating together as performance artists in the late 1990s as part of 719 Artist Studio Alliance, well known for presenting social intervention-based artworks, especially the Betsy Damon- led performance project Keepers of the Water (1995, 1996). Members of this collective also included Chengdu performance artists Dai Guangyu, Zhu Gang, Yin Xiaofeng, Zeng Xun, Yu Ji, Zhang Hua, and Luo Zidan, as well as Chengdu art critics Chen Mo and Zha Changping, who ﬁgure prominently as writers of the few texts we see today on performance art in southwest China. Dai Guangyu relocated to Beijing in 2004 and now works primarily in contemporary Chinese ink-wash painting, incorporating performative elements into that artform. Zhu Gang is still actively producing work in Chengdu, though not usually more than a single artwork per year. His work is limited by the risks involved with producing solely street-based performance artworks as well as the difﬁculties involved with refusing to accept representation by galleries, museums, or corporate sponsors. Yin Xiaofeng, Yu Ji, and Zhang Hua now work mostly in the more commercial sectors of China’s creative industries, primarily in graphic design. Zeng Xun is curator of the Chengdu Luo Dai Nibang Ceramic and Porcelain Art Museum,

86 Vol. 17 No. 2 located about an hour northeast of the Chengdu city centre. Luo Zidan seldom produces artwork and seems to be holding out for Western gallery representation, frustrated with the aesthetic controls placed upon Chinese artists. Liu Chengying occasionally produces performance artworks outside of Chengdu, with his most recent local performance occurring in 2011 at the Frequency Live Art Exhibition held in White Night Bar, a poetry-enclave opened by celebrated Chinese poet Zhai Yongming and her then partner, well-known Chinese painter He Duoling. Joining the 719 collective later than its other artists, Zhou Bin is by far the artist to have achieved the greatest international acclaim and to be proliﬁcally producing artworks today.

Sponsors One of the advantages of co-curating with Lan Qingwei is that, as previously mentioned, he is a genius at securing funding for risky projects; this was helpful for Zhou Bin, whose work as a performance artist is seen as a risky project in and of itself. As co-curator of one of the four components of the 2017 Anren Biennale, which opened just ﬁve days after the conclusion of Up-On, Lan Qingwei was unable to be present for much of the performance art festival. One knew, however, that his role in this festival had largely been in negotiations with sponsors and that his contribution to the festival could not be understated. While OPEN had to downscale at the last moment due to sponsors pulling out in response to government pressure, Up-On’s main sponsors also withdrew their support. Fortunately for all involved, Chengdu’s A4 Museum, which recently relocated from the Lushan luxury real-estate development to the new and even more luxurious Luhu real-estate development zone, provided the festival with 70,000 RMB (USD $10,600). None of the curators or other organizers accepted any payment for their efforts in the festival. All monies were used to house, feed, transport, and otherwise support the participating artists. Another sponsor for the festival was Art Hotel in Chengdu, which provided accommodation for artists as well as organizers at more than half off regular rates.

Venues Each of the four venues for the festival also sponsored the event, providing publicity during and after the festival as well as space for the performances—one day each in the case of A4 Museum, JZFZ Museum, and Southwest Jiaotong University, and two days in the case of Sichuan University Art Museum. JZFZ Museum provided their support and space as a venue with very few reservations. With the harsh political climate in China due to the 19th National Congress being in session, Up-On curators were willing to do what is known as “self-censorship” (ziwo shencha ). That is, they accepted controls regarding what types of performance artworks could be carried out at the festival—there could be no violence, nudity, or direct political intervention in the artwork—and Southwest Jiaotong University, JZFZ Museum, and A4 Museum were reassured by the curators’ willingness to self-censor. Sichuan University Art Museum, on the other hand, was less cooperative, requiring all artists choosing this site for performance ﬁrst to register and pay for insurance, as well as to submit in writing all details of their work beforehand. This may be an indication that attitudes are changing, or that procedural controls on art production are tightening, as in previous years of their cooperation with the festival, Sichuan University had never asked for anything of the kind.

Vol. 17 No. 2 87 Ideological Controls and Strategies for Dealing with Them Ever since 2014, when Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, President of the People’s Republic of China, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission gave a talk at the Beijing Forum on Art and Literature, the arts in China have found themselves more and more under ﬁre. Whereas Chairman Mao Zedong’s 1942 Yan’an talk at the Forum on Art and Literature stipulated that “Art must serve the people,” Xi Jinping’s aesthetic policy asks that art workers “lead the people” by example. The difference lies in the role that art workers play in society. Mao brought artists “down” to the level of the proletariat worker, believing that there is no level of professional difference between the average labourer and the art worker. Xi Jinping, on the other hand, admits that art professionals can be highly trained and specialized in their ﬁeld. However, similar to Mao’s, Xi Jinping’s aesthetic policy still subjugates art to social, economic, and political ends.

Strategies used by Up-On’s curators include cooperation, as in the case of subjecting to review works planned to be performed at public universities; pre-emptive self-censorship, as in the case of works to be performed at all venues; and tactical methods of promotion. The latter consisted mainly in the strategy of not promoting the festival until after it had begun. While promotional materials had been created and even printed beforehand, artists and organizers were notiﬁed to not disseminate digital promotional materials until after October 18, when the live artworks had begun. These strategies and tactics proved successful, unlike the other events planned to take place during this period that were cancelled or postponed by the authorities.

From the Outside For the fifteen performance artists showing up for the festival from outside of China, there was no real indication of the present political climate aside from the lack of long-won creative freedom, namely, the freedom to do any artwork at all, including pieces that involved violence, nudity, or direct political messages. After speaking with many of these artists, I discovered they weren’t surprised and were already aware of China’s heavy hand when it came to aesthetic and ideological control. It was simply part of the package, the price one paid for the chance to participate in a Chinese performance art festival. Few of these artists were aware of the history of the festival, how it was financed or who, besides Zhou Bin, was involved in the festival’s organization. In conversation with many of them, I also discovered their understanding of performances by many of the Chinese artists was quite limited. This is perhaps truer for performances by southwest Chinese artists, who, unlike Beijing and Shanghai artists, are adept at using regionally developed or idiosyncratic semiotic systems of performance language to encode ideological messages. This has to do with the more advanced commercial nature of contemporary art in the first-tier cities Beijing and Shanghai, whereas Chengdu, a second-tier city (now poised on the edge of being a first-tier city), has enjoyed relative freedom from the market-oriented demand for artists to fall in line with Western anti-China ideologies. That being said, if one were looking at Up-On from the outside; that is, just arriving there to participate in the festival as an artist, then the things one would pay greatest attention to would be performers and artworks, especially one’s own artwork.

88 Vol. 17 No. 2 5th Chengdu Up-On Performers International Live Art Festival organizers, sponsors, and The performers and performances at this year’s Up-On festival were of critics. Courtesy of Up-On, Chengdu. diverse orientation but of consistently high quality. Participating artists from outside China included Dai Jian (France), Tomasz Vollmann (Austria), Daniel Aschwanden (Switzerland), Franzisca Siegrist (Switzerland), Robert Catalusci (USA), Nicoleta Auersperg (Austria), Vera Bourgeois (German), Willem Wilhemus (Holland), Shimuzu Megumi (Japan), Aye Ko (Burma), Daisuke Takeya (Japan), Eric Scott Nelson (USA), John Court (England), Michael Poellinger (Austria), Duan Yinmei (Germany), Joern J. Burmester (Germany), and Lala Nomada (Austria). Chinese artists performing in the festival included Wan Qiao (Chongqing), Chen Yufei (Hefei), Wang Yanxin (Chengdu), Gao Yuan (Xining), He Libin (Kunming), Liu Wei (Chengdu), Wang Mengnan (Chongqing), Liu Xiangjie (Xi’an), Dong Jinling (Beijing), Hu Jiayi (Chongqing), Sa.zi (Beijing), Han Xiaohan (Shenyang), Tong Wenmin (Chongqing), He Ling (Hunan), and Qiu Wenming (Chengdu). Of these, Shimuzu Megumi, Eric Scott Nelson, Gao Yuan, He Libin, Liu Wei, Tong Wenmin, and He Ling had all performed in previous years of Up-On.

Performances I do not have space here to go into all of the performances that are well deserving of description in detail. In order to do a focused analysis of the festival artworks, I have chosen to focus on a single component of the performance artworks—the visual element. While audience interaction was a prominent aspect of a nearly overwhelming portion of works in this year’s Up-On, it was not as artistically compelling as the choice of many artists to employ black and white for either materials or attire, and in more than one case, both. These choices concerning colour (or lack of colour, as there is debate as to whether black and white are colours), were not a preconceived thematic by the curators, nor had these choices been disclosed to the curators

Vol. 17 No. 2 89 prior to the live performances. The prevalence of black and white with so many of the artworks, however, did serve to isolate an artwork’s visual component within a mode of starkness. With the audience focused on visual content rather than more discursive “narrative” content, artists were able to code ideological content. Black and white serve as metaphors for absolute values, yes and no, right and wrong, allowed and not-allowed—the absence of grey areas or any colourful celebration of cultural, aesthetic, or ideological diversity. This visually persistent element ran through all four days of performance artworks, starting with Dai Jian’s Links/Restrictions (October 18, 2017) in alternating black and white; and ending with Lala Nomada’s concluding artwork of the festival, s./t. (October 22, 2017), all in black.

Dai Jian opened the festival at A4 Museum with the three-hour, three-phase Dai Jian, Links/Restrictions, 2017, performance, 180 mins. artwork Links/Restrictions. In its first section, he was clothed in a loose Courtesy of the artist and Up-On, Chengdu. white suit covering him from head to toe, while his face was covered by a white fencing mask. He stood within a geometrically intricate section of the museum while connecting himself to three surrounding walls using eight six-foot-long steel poles. Invariably, the poles would clamour to the ground, creating a cacophony of steel on concrete, adding an acoustic element to an already visually stunning piece. In the second phase of this artwork, the artist wore all black and submerged himself in three feet of water, which filled the bottom area of a large black cube designed on the concrete embankment of a river flowing by the museum. In the third phase of the artwork, it was impossible to know whether the artist wore black or white, because this phase was conducted in a dark room on the second level of the museum, into which no audience members were admitted. This artwork was also highly interactive, as participating audience members joined in a dance with the artist, each working hard to maintain steel poles between the artist and themself. Then, during the second phase, some members of the audience unexpectedly jumped into the water with the artist.

This set an overall tone for the festival, which saw a high degree of audience interaction with other performances, as in Tomasz Vollmann’s Afterall (October 19, 2017), Daniel Aschwanden’s Dog Man (October 19, 2017), Wan Qiao’s Atmostphere Q (October 19, 2017), Chen Yufei’s Unreliable Data (October 19, 2017), Wang Yanxin’s Hidden (October 19, 2017), Gao Yuan’s Art Makes You Fall (October 20, 2017), Willem Wilhelmus’ This is Too Well- Known (October 20, 2017), Daisuke Takeya’s Painting, Commodity/Painting Commodity (October 20, 2017), Liu Wei’s Carnival (October 20, 2017), Wang Mengnan’s I and 160/84A (October 21, 2017), He Ling’s About My Highest Scale (October 22, 2017), Robert Catalusci’s Ask the Man a Question and He Will Give You an Answer (October 22, 2017), and Qiu Wenqing’s

90 Vol. 17 No. 2 Illusion (October 22, 2017). Thus, just over a third of the festival artworks required audience participation, with a couple, like Dai Jian’s and Daisuke Takeya’s artworks, either enjoying or suffering audience intervention, depending upon how you view it. While these two artists managed more or less to seamlessly incorporate this unexpected audience enthusiasm for participation into their artwork, Beijing artist Sa.zi, in Dialogue (October 21, 2017), while allowing audience members who wore black to join in the piece, turned away those who did not visually integrate into the work.

Wan Qiao, Atmosphere Q., 2017, performance, 40 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Up-On, Chengdu.

Atmosphere Q, by Wan Qiao, featured thick lines of chalk dust drawn straight and in circles to demarcate zones through which she guided audience members, whom she clothed in white shirts. The visual diagrams and choreography for participants were idiosyncratic, and her use of white for drawing material and costume seemed to be aesthetic, giving an institutional feel to the whole piece, an interpretation reinforced by the white cube environment of the Sichuan University Art Museum. The artist herself wore a white belted dress. Wang Yanxin’s Hidden (October 19, 2017), one of the more political works in the show, took place on Sichuan University Art Museum’s rooftop, which is extensive and has a large overgrown garden. Wang Yanxin stood along the top of a tiled cement planter and invited audience members up, gave them some gum to chew or candy to swallow, and then asked them how the weather was. Regardless of how an audience member responded, the artist then reached down into the cement planter to grab one of the many umbrellas he had stashed there, opened the umbrella, and stood a while with him or her before handing the umbrella over and moving on to invite the next guest up. The umbrellas themselves, eventually numbering nearly twenty, were neither black nor white. At the end of the performance, the artist went off to retrieve a very large black umbrella and stood in the middle of the cement planter. Over his head, he opened the umbrella, from which gallons of white chalk dust poured over his body, covering him completely in white. The visual effect of this was heightened by the black clothing worn by the artist. Wang Yanxin’s choice of black for his clothing and umbrella may have been made for aesthetic reasons, to contrast with the powder which covered him, leaving us with a snapshot of a ghost-like artist with long black hair tied back, grimacing and squinting his eyes upon which white dust had settled. Then again, the umbrella element

Vol. 17 No. 2 91 Wang Yanxin, Hidden, 2017, performance, 20 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Up-On, Chengdu.

could be seen as referring to protests Wang Yanxin, Hidden, 2017, performance, 20 mins. in Hong Kong in recent years, Courtesy of the artist and Up-On, Chengdu. representing political resistance to full-integration with mainland China and symbolizing freedom as well as democracy. It should be noted that the numerous other opened umbrellas held by audience participants in the artwork were not black, but a blue plaid, further frustrating any simple interpretation of the artist’s aesthetic or encoded semiotic choices.

He Libin, Words and Objects, 2017, performance, 20 mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the artist.

He Libin’s Words and Objects (October 20, 2017) was another of what could be considered the more politically charged artworks in the festival. The artist wore white while he stood in a doorway and set a book of poems

92 Vol. 17 No. 2 by Tang dynasty poet Du Fu on a desk before him. He proceeded to place a steel ruler on the desk. He then picked up the ruler and began to beat the book until the binding was broken and the pages were ripped into fragments. He then took to the ﬂoor, crawling into an adjoining exhibition hall, leaving behind a trail of paper fragments. He crawled for some time before reaching a wall to which was attached a bottle of Chinese ink. He then proceeded to use his hands to cover his face with the black ink. He continued to do this until his face, neck, and shirt were covered in black. While I say this was a politically charged piece, let the record indicate that when asked, and I have known the artist for a few years, He Libin looked me in the eye and denied my interpretation. But the insistent violence perpetrated on the very words of those pages, as well as the aggressiveness with which he covered his face and neck with black ink, covering ears, eyes, nose and mouth, did lend themselves to an interpretation in which the artist expresses desperate anguish and feelings of suffocation.

Aye Ko’s What is Peace? (October 20, 2017) was a moving artwork advocating pacifism. In this artwork, the artist placed nearly twenty long- stemmed wine glasses on a table, filled half of them with white milk and the other half with black ink. He then wrapped his head and face in white gauze in order to attach two transistor radios, one to each ear, with each broadcasting news channels. He used red lipstick to trace where his mouth was located beneath the gauze, creating a horrific visual effect with the transistor radio antennae giving the artist an insect-like visage. He then blindly began overturning and balancing half of the wine glasses on top of the other half, one at a time, mixing together the black and white fluids. Then, laying on the ground and tying his ankles to two of the table legs, he proceeded to crawl along the ground with force, such that the table was jerkily pulled along as glasses fell, rolled, and then shattered onto the ground. With each thrust of his movement, the artist screamed, “What is peace?”—with the spilling milky ink and sharp shards of glass conceivably representing broken attempts at peaceful homogenization.

Aye Ko, What is Peace?, 2017, performance, 20 mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 17 No. 2 93 Daisuke Takeya, Painting, Commodity/Painting Commodity, 2017, performance, 30–45 mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the artist.

In Daisuke Takeya’s Painting, Commodity/Painting Commodity, (October 22, 2017) the artist spent an entire day prior to his performance painting (on-site) in 2-D an image of a 3-D large installation. Then on the day of his performance he interacted with the audience using objects from the 3-D large installation, later painting each object black, then painting over his 2-D painting in black as well. Daisuke Takeya’s choice of black as prime material for his performance may have been purely aesthetic, the visual effect of each square centimetre of the painting and installation covered over in black and appearing as a kind of erasure. As mentioned earlier, the audience played a larger role in this artwork than Daisuke Takeya had intended, and in some cases disruptively; for example, when audience members began picking up objects from the installation, eating edible items, and so on. While the artist succeeded in incorporating this energetic element into his artwork, he had the last word—at the conclusion of the artwork, with every last surface and object pared down to nullity, it became an iteration of emptiness.

Liu Wei’s Carnival (October 20, 2017) involved the artist’s signature use of large inﬂated red balloons in the shape of Chinese Lanterns. In this artwork, the artist stood at a distance of about thirty feet from the audience before reaching down and pressing the palm and ﬁngers of his hand into a small pile of prepared white pigment. As a confrontational piece, he then raised one of the balloons high, as a tennis player would serve a tennis ball, and

94 Vol. 17 No. 2 Liu Wei, Carnival, 2017, hit the balloon forcefully with his performance, 30 mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the white-pigmented hand, casting the artist. pigment-tainted balloon into the audience. What ensued was chaos; audience members clamoured to hit the balloons, to keep them suspended in the air, or to bombard other audience members in the room. The artist continued to project into the air seven or eight additional balloons, until nearly everyone was smeared in white. Some audience members—a lot of the most active audience members were other festival artists—became increasingly engaged, with one artist being taken to the hospital afterwards. Although no one was seriously hurt, many people present for the artwork were covered in white pigment, which, fortunately, turned out to be water-soluble. Either white or black could have been used as the invasive pigment, as the red lanterns along with black trousers with white shirt the artist wore prescribed a traditional Chinese aesthetic. On the other hand, with the lanterns being red, perhaps white was chosen to create the largest visual impact on an art-going audience dressed mostly in black.

Eric Scott Nelson, Meeting of a In Eric Scott Nelson’s four-hour-long Fallen Wall, 2017, performance, 240 mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Meeting of Fallen Wall (October 21, Courtesy of the artist. 2017), the artist followed the girding of the entire face of an older building, a wing in Southwest Jiaotong University’s Sculpture Department, which was being reconstructed, and consisted of many different protruding and receding sections. The artist used his two bare feet to clean the area, which was full of construction materials such as old rusted nails and other waste, as well as a large amount of white plaster dust. After gathering all of the stone and other solid objects into a few piles in some of the corners, he used the white dust to create a forty-foot-long and one-foot-wide white line leading away from the wall in a perpendicular orientation. Shoes off, the artist performed the labour of ordering, of tidying, of moving and guiding the refuse left over from reconstruction, thus addressing the aspect of redevelopment of many of China’s public spaces.

Eric Scott Nelson, Meeting of a Fallen Wall, 2017, performance, 240 mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the artist.

I did not have an opportunity to discuss the choice of black or white with any of the artists but one, John Court (October 21, 2017). Court’s approach to performance art is radically avant-garde, adamantly resisting interpretation or discursive treatment. When I asked him why he had chosen black to

Vol. 17 No. 2 95 Left and right: John Court, Untitled, 2017, performance, 240 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Up-On, Chengdu.

rub on his torso and neck before beginning his four hour labour-based performance Untitled, he expressed no reason for it. The black trousers and shirt, the long thin black wooden bars and the ink the artist used were all black. A white powder he kept in his trouser pockets and occasionally sprinkled onto the ﬂoor accented his artwork. The intensity of Court’s labour felt threatening at times, with the artist wielding the long black wooden bar in circles above his head until his grip loosened and the bar slipped increasingly out of his hand, ultimately clamouring onto the ﬂoor.

Left and right: Dong Jinling, Anniversary, 2017, performance, 30 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Up-On, Chengdu.

Dong Jinlin’s Anniversary (October 21, 2017) saw the artist, dressed in a billowy black shirt and skirt, spending half an hour tossing about long black bolts of cloth that were soaked in water. She would ﬁrst wrap a long bolt of cloth around her arm, leaving half of it loose, before hurling the loose end toward the audience and then reeling it in to repeat her action. She did this twenty to thirty times for each of the four bolts, before laying the cloth down to form of one of four letters that spelled out the word “MISS.” The original Chinese title for Anniversary is jinian, and it means to commemorate, hence, “miss,” and in this case could mean to miss someone or to commemorate an event. The confrontational aspect of the performance served to intensify what it is that might be missed.

Joern J. Burmester’s Color Box/ Jörn J. Burmester, Color Box/Alchemists 4, 2017, Alchemists 4 (October 22, 2018) performance, 180 mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the was an artwork wherein the artist artist. worked in four coloured phases (black, white, yellow, red), standing between two large pieces of paper pasted along two walls that met in a corner. While painting on the paper, the artist would also paint his body, becoming a painting that painted itself. His use of black and white served as a base, taking up the ﬁrst two hours of his four-hour-long artwork, with yellow and red taking over as palette directives in the third

96 Vol. 17 No. 2 Jörn J. Burmester, Color Box/Alchemists 4, 2017, performance, 180 mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the artist.

and last of the artwork’s four colour phases of alchemy. In Tong Wenmin’s Texture (October 22, 2018), the artist, who disrobed down to her black underwear and bra, proceeded to use her hand to slowly cover her entire body in black ink. She then stood in front of a light bulb that hung from a long rope attached to the ceiling, with the bulb located just above the artist’s knee height. She then swung the light bulb as a pendulum, creating vast quivering shadows along the walls and breadth of the audience huddled in front of her. Tong Wenmin then pulled a black cloth over her body and lay in fetal position beneath the light bulb for over an hour on a cold cement ﬂoor, eventually beginning to shiver under her sheath. Tong Wenmin almost always works with black materials and costume, and these choices could be aesthetic or political, there is no way of knowing as she works within a complex system of coded semiotics typical of Chengdu and Chongqing performance artists.

The ﬁnal artwork that employed the visual effects of black and/or white is Lola Nomada’s s./t. (October 22, 2018) After working for a period with purely white milk, she has been working over the past year primarily with black coal, and this artwork was no exception. Nomada’s work is scientiﬁc in nature, a result of her recent residency at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) inspiring a series of artworks with carbon in its blackest

Vol. 17 No. 2 97 form. The first part of the artwork was conducted in complete darkness, with Left to right: Tong Wenmin, Texture, 2017, performance, one hearing only the sound of coal being dumped from a large sack onto the 90 mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the artist. floor, followed by the sound of a hammer being used to pound against coal and cement. When the lights came on, the artist, dressed all in black, then proceeded to bury her head and face in the black matter while holding her body in an inverted yoga pose such that her feet and legs stuck up into the air. She stayed that way for nearly fifteen minutes before coming down from the pose, rolling over, and revealing her blackened face.

While I have focused on the use of black and white at the 5th Up-On International Live Art Festival, we have seen the prevalence of the former— black—over the latter. This resonates deeply with the aura of paranoia in which the festival was carried out—the inability to send out posters online with Wechat, QQ, Weibo, or Facebook, and the constant fear that the festival would be cancelled. The appearance of festive colours in many of the artworks would have created an atmosphere of celebration, ease, leisure, decadence, or revelry. There was, indeed, colour in many of the artworks, such as Michael Pollinger’s Metallic Light Shining Live (October 21, 2017) and Robert Catalusci’s Ask the Man a Question and He Will Give You an Answer (October 22, 2017), but they did not make as indelible an impression as did black and white artworks described above. Perhaps for international artists on the outside, mostly untouched by the internal pressures of China’s political and aesthetic atmosphere, this leaning into black fails to signify or resonate as it does for Chinese artists, curators, critics, art students, and public audiences on the inside.

Lala Nomada, s./t., 2017, performance, 20–30 mins. Photo: Sophia Kidd. Courtesy of the artist.

98 Vol. 17 No. 2 Shih-yu Hsu Spectrosynthesis: Incomplete Rainbow?

Jun-jieh Wang, Passion, 2017, 3-channel HD video, 11 mins., 40 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong.

017 marks a milestone in the history of the LGBTQ movement in Taiwan. In May, Taiwan’s top court announced that bans on same-sex 2marriage were unconstitutional, making Taiwan the ﬁrst country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. In such an exhilarating and supportive atmosphere, there was more than legislative recognition to be celebrated by the Taiwanese LGBTQ community. Spectrosynthesis—Asian LGBTQ Issues and Art Now, the ﬁrst queer art exhibition in Taiwan, opened on September 9, 2017, in a government-run museum—Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA Taipei.) It not only showed once more the positive attitude from the authorities toward the LGBTQ community, but the exhibition adds to the number of other queer art exhibitions that took place in different countries this year, among them in the United Kingdom and Brazil.

Curated by independent Taiwanese curator Sean C. S. Hu, the title Spectrosynthesis, which combines “spectrum” with “photosynthesis,” attempts to signify its queerness by linking together the image of a light spectrum and the queer movement icon rainbow. In the curatorial statement, the exhibition aims to explore the spectrum of light that represents the LGBTQ community’s rich and diverse history and to “serve as an intermediary for a dialogue about diverse issues in society.”1 Backed by the Hong Kong-based Sunpride Foundation, the exhibition includes more than ﬁfty artworks by twenty-two artists. The director of Sunpride Foundation, Patrick Sun, joined Sean C. S. Hu in the process of selecting the art, resulting in a presentation of diverse mediums ranging from sculpture and painting to multi-channel videos.

Vol. 17 No. 2 99 Hou Chun Ming, Man Hole (artist’s sides), 2014–16, 13 oil pastel on paper drawings, 55 x 237 cm each. Courtesy of Ho Chun Ming Studio.

Not surprisingly, artworks that Hou Chun Ming, Man Hole (participants’ sides), 2014–16, explicitly illustrate and celebrate 13 oil pastel on paper drawings, 55 x 237 cm each. homosexuality and queerness were Courtesy of Ho Chun Ming clearly evident in the exhibition. For Studio. example, inspired by scenes from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Querelle (1982), Jun-jieh Wang’s Passion (2017) depicts a fictional homicide that took place at a harbour dock garishly decorated with a giant penis-like column. The forbidden desire for intimacy with people of the same sex, for masculinity, and the compelling sense of voyeurism embedded in the artwork are unveiled through the vivid colours of the film set, numerous closeups of virile bodies, and the recurring images of a camera lens. While Jun-jieh Wang’s film creates a powerful visual impact in its theatricality, it does not tackle emotional depth as profoundly as Hou Chun Ming’s Man Hole (2014). Presented in a relatively dimly-lit gallery, Man Hole is composed of thirteen double-sided oil pastel drawingson paper, each co-created by the artist and one gay participant—Hou Chun Ming’s drawing is on one side and the participant’s is on the other. The drawings were made after sharing an intimate two-day conversation and massage between the the artist and each of the participants. Each participant was then asked to draw a self-portrait while lying naked on the ground. These seemingly irrelevant requirements in the actual making of a drawing have their own magic, as if the participant’s physical and mental presence melted directly into the mark making. The juxtaposition of the two drawings—Hou Chun Ming’s typically bright and sincerely delicate works in his signature Chinese folk style, and the participant’s often primitive and genuinely chaotic renderings— reveal how the trauma, pain, and joy of being an outcast in society can be transformed and transcended through art.

Apart from the inclusion of renowned Taiwan-based artists, Spectrosynthesis does not fail in bringing to Taiwanese audiences some sought-after artists from the Western art world. Martin Wong, the late Chinese-American queer artist who died of complications from AIDS in 1999 and who was recently exhibited at the Bronx Museum, New York, was shown for the ﬁrst time in

100 Vol. 17 No. 2 Martin Wong, Ferocactus Peninsulae V. Viscainensis, 1997–98, acrylic on canvas, 76 x 122 cm. Courtesy of The Martin Wong Estate and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York.

Left: Wu Tsang, Duilian, 2016, ﬁlm installation, 28 mins., 1 sec. Courtesy of the artist, Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin. Right: Samson Young, Muted Situations #5: Muted Chorus, 2016, single-channel HD video, 6 mins., 45 secs. Courtesy of Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong.

Taiwan. At MOCA Taipei, in a gallery dedicated to Martin Wong’s artworks, four paintings touched upon the predicaments and confinement that a gay person can face in daily life; yet he celebrated his gay sexuality by creating an idiosyncratic visionary state that drew viewers in. In Ferocactus Peninsulae V. Viscainensis (1996–98), for example, a sense of homoeroticism is expanded through the uneasy tactility in the rendering of the glowing golden spines of the cactus, which are contrasted with a lone and dark areole making up the majority of the image, as if the entire space has become occupied by an impending solitariness and death. On the same floor, Wu Tsang’s Duilian (2016) may be more familiar to Taiwanese audiences, as it previously was exhibited in the group show Discorded Harmony, at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in 2016. Duilian is the artist’s re-interpretation of the life story of the revolutionary Chinese heroine figure Qiu Jin, with Wu Tsang herself and her long-time collaborator boychild playing the protagonists. In this video, the artist imagines the history between Qiu Jin and her close female friend Wu Zhiying, whose story is less well known. By combining Chinese martial arts and Cantonese narration with the artist’s own translation of a Qiu Jin poem, an invisible queer history and the tension of being the “other” is brought before the eyes of viewers. Such tension is also seen in Samson Young’s Muted Situations #5: Muted Chorus (2014), in which a group of chorus members are consciously singing without using their voices. Viewers hear only the ambient sounds, the inhaling and exhaling of breath as well as the noise created by the swaying bodies of the chorus members. As Sean C. S. Hu said in his statement, the unheard voice is resonant of the isolated social situation experienced by many in the LGBTQ community.

Not all works in the exhibition directly addressed homosexuality and/ or queerness. Talk About Body (2013), a short video by Tao Hui, engaged the dynamic of performativity in shaping perceptions about identity. By dressing in a female Muslim outﬁt, Tao Hui assumed the identity of

Vol. 17 No. 2 101 Tao Hui, Talk About Body, 2013, single-channel video, 3 mins., 45 secs. Courtesy of Aike- Dellarco Gallery, Shanghai.

an ethnic minority and sat on a bed surrounded by a group of people consisting of friends and family. Feigning a middle-aged woman’s voice, Tao Hui described the biological characteristics of a Muslim female using scientiﬁc and anthropological terms. This incomprehensible jargon, carried out in a robotic and ﬂat tone, reminds viewers how prejudice, discrimination, and hatred have been perpetuated through ideology, especially in the name of science and progress.

While clearly there was some strong work Ho Tam, Hotam #1: A Brief History of Me, 2013, self in this exhibition, there is an underlying published book, 64 pages. Courtesy of the artist. issue that affects its success. Identity politics has always been a central issue in the LGBTQ community, and, surprisingly, of all twenty-two artists selected for Spectrosynthesis, every one of them is ethnic Chinese. This seems odd when the exhibition subtitle includes “Asian LGBTQ Issues” and is frequently marketed as the first exhibition in Asia dedicated to an Asian LGBTQ theme; though the curator Sean C. S. Hu qualified this claim by saying “It is difficult to cover all the regions in Asia because Asia is huge.”2 Of course, no exhibition could clearly define what Asia is and how Asia should be represented. But if Spectrosynthesis is a monumental point within Asian queer history, the diversity that exists in terms of ethnic identity and sexual identity should be more fully addressed, or, at the very least, more deeply acknowledged. The lack of non-Chinese ethnic artists not only means that the exhibition fails to provide the comprehensive survey its title suggests, but also that it does not genuinely contribute to the essential goal of equality that the LGBTQ community has strived to achieve for such a long time.

Indeed, most exhibitions that focus on speciﬁc identities are hardly able to escape this quandary of identity politics. Queer British Art 1861–1967, a recent queer thematic exhibition at Tate Britain (April 5 to October 1, 2017), raised debate about the inclusion or the omission of some artworks.3 Perhaps one of the solutions to this kind of problem is to provide sufﬁcient context and background about the selected artwork and the reason for selecting it. If the context of including the artwork is not presented properly,

102 Vol. 17 No. 2 whether through its display, in the wall text, or interpretive material, only speculation as to why this piece is in this exhibition, or whether this artist is gay or not, will be left to the audience, and the difficulties and discrimination the LGBTQ community encounters everyday remain unheard. Spectrosynthesis does express a bold ambition by contextualizing the history of the LGBTQ community in Taiwan—on the website of MOCA Taipei and at the main wall at the entrance to the exhibition, the chronology of the Taiwan queer movement in various fields including literature, music, and social movements is listed in detail, parallelled with historical moments in the international LGBTQ movement. For viewers, however, it is still difficult to find the connection between the artworks in the exhibition and this LGBTQ history, or even the connections among artworks themselves.

Ming Wong, The Life and Death in Venice, 2010, 3-channel HD video, 16 mins., 8 secs. Courtesy of the artist.

In spite of this, these imperfections do not undermine the signiﬁcance of Spectrosynthesis. After all, a LGBTQ exhibition in a government-run museum in Asia is worthy of a place in Asian queer history. Unlike an exhibition with a similar topic in Brazil, Queermuseum: Queer Tactics Toward Non-Heteronormative Curating, at Santander Cultural, Porto Alegre (August 15 to October 8, 2017), which was forced to close on September 11, one month earlier than scheduled, Spectrosynthesis did not encounter any of the protests that Sean C. S. Hu and Patrick Sun may have anticipated. Both of them hope the exhibition will tour to a different country in Asia. Apparently, they are aware of the problem of a lack of diversity at MOCA Taipei; they stated that “We would like to include local artists if the exhibition travels to other countries.”4 Hopefully, next time, if there is a next time, the spectrum of the rainbow can be more fully represented.

Notes

1. “Spectrosynthesis—Asian LGBTQ Issues and Art Now,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, http://www.mocataipei.org.tw/index.php/2012-01-12-03-36-46/past-exhibitions/194-exhibition-revi ew-2017/2452-2017-07-07-05-28-08/. 2. Sean C. S. Hu and Patrick Sun, in conversation with the author, Taipei, October 20, 2017. 3. Laura Cumming, “Queer British Art 1861-1967 review: Indifferent Shades of Gay,” Guardian, https:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/09/queer-art-tate-britain-review-laura-cumming/. 4. Sean C. S. Hu and Patrick Sun, in conversation with the author, Taipei, October 20, 2017.

Vol. 17 No. 2 103 Chinese Name Index

Bai Xiaoci Hu, Sean C. S. Ouyang Jianghe Xu Bing 白小刺胡朝聖歐陽江河徐冰 Big Tail Elephant Huang Tao Pak Sheung Chuen Xu Tan 大尾象工作組黄陶白雙全徐坦 Cao Fei Huang Yongping Qin Jin Xu Wei 曹斐黃永砅秦晋徐渭 Chen Chieh-jen Jia Zhangke Qiu Jin Xue Feng 陳界仁賈樟柯秋瑾薛峰 Chen Mo Jiang Junjie Qiu Wenqing Yan Cheng 陳默蔣俊潔邱文青閆城 Chen Shaoxiong Kao Jun-Honn Qiu Zhijie Yang Jiechang 陳劭雄高俊宏邱志� 楊詰蒼 Chen Tong Lai, Firenza Sa Zi Yang, Martina Köppel 陳侗黎清妍薩子楊天娜 Chen Yufei Lam, Barry Su Yu Hsien Yangjiang Group 陳宇飛林百里蘇育賢陽江組 Cheng Xinhao Lan Qingwei Sun Wenhao Yin Xiaofeng 程新皓藍慶偉孫文浩尹曉峰 Da Lang Yue Minjun Sun, Patrick Yin Xiuzhen 大郎岳敏君孫啟越尹秀珍 Dai Guangyu Lee Kit Tam Ho Young, Samson 戴光郁李傑譚浩楊嘉輝 Dai Jian Lee Shau-kee Tao Hui Yu Hsiao Hwei 戴劍李兆基陶輝余小蕙 Dan Bo Li Bingyuan Tong Wenmin Yu Ji 淡勃厲檳源童文敏于吉 Dong Jinling Li Liao Tsang Wu Zeng Xun 董金玲李燎曾吳曾循 Duan Jianyu Li Wen Wan Qiao Zha Changping 段建宇李玟萬巧查常平 Duan Yinmei Li Wen-Ji Wan Xiliang Zhai Yongming 段英梅李文吉萬喜良翟永明 Fei Dawei Lin Aojie Wang Hui Zhang Er 費大為林奥劼汪暉張耳 Gao Yuan Lin Jingxin Wang Jun-jieh Zhang Hua 高元林敬新王俊傑張華 Gu Dexin Lin Yilin Wang Mengnan Zhang Wei 顧德新林一林王孟楠張巍 Han Xiaohan Liu Chengying Wang Xizhi Zhang Yuxing 韓蕭寒劉成英王羲之張宇星 He Libin Liu Sheng Wang Yanxin Zheng Guogu 和麗斌劉聲王彦鑫鄭國谷 He Ling Liu Shengying Wong, Adrian Zhong Yuling 何玲劉詩園王浩然鍾玉玲 Hou Chun Ming Liu Wei Wong, Martin Zhou Bin 侯俊明劉緯黃馬鼎周斌 Hou Hanru Liu Xiangjie Wu Hung Zhou Tao 侯瀚如劉翔捷巫鴻周滔 Hsu Shih-yu Liu Xiaodu Wu Sibo Zhu Gang 徐詩雨劉曉都伍思波朱罡 Hu Fang Luo Zidan Wu Zetian 胡昉羅子丹武則天 Hu Jiayi Meng Yan Wu Zhiying 胡佳藝孟岩吳芝瑛 Hu Xiangqian Mengjiang Xin Jinping 胡向前孟姜習近平

104 Vol. 17 No. 2 Vol. 17 No. 2 105 106 Vol. 17 No. 2 Vol. 17 No. 2 107 108 Vol. 17 No. 2 Vol. 17 No. 2 109 JOURNAL OF CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ART

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112 Vol. 17 No. 2 DAI JIE A Parenting Specialist Using the Concept of Wu Xing

ccording to the Chinese philosophy, all things in the universe are governed by the yin-yang and the fve elements (wu xing). By understandingA the interplay of dynamic tensions between opposing forces—the yin and yang—one will be able to resolve any confict experienced in life and at work, and to contemplate the following:

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