oɴe pe ʀ s o ɴ’s cʟassɪcs of mouɴtaɪɴ aɴd sea: oɴ qɪɴ ʏufeɴ aɴd ʜeʀ ɪɴsta ʟ ʟ atɪoɴ aʀt

ʙɪɴɢʏɪ ʜua ɴ ɢ

Qin Yu f e n , Floating Boat, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 2004. Courtesy of the University of Buffalo Art Galleries.

The gallery is wide open, but few feel the urge to walk in. In this vast and sunny space, Floating Boat, Qin Yufen’s installation, feels oddly suffocating. Strangely, the Lightwell Gallery at the University of Buffalo becomes all at once empty and occupied, isolated and accessible, specific and abstract. Numerous threads hang from the ceiling, with each anchoring a transparent “boat” about 3 by 4 inches in size. The transcendental materiality of the work draws me into a closer view. Here, I realize that the boats are made of the disposable masks we usually find at a dental clinic. I also hear a mysterious sound composed of many voices. They are not exactly musical, but revealing, whining, sighing, as if someone is telling a story not expected to be understood.

This work resonates not only with me, but also in the work of others, such as in the writing of Wallace Stevens, who penned a rather humorous piece in 1922 entitled “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”:

Proud of such novelties of the sublime, Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk, May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves. A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.1

If S tevens is asserting that rel i g ious rh etoric has no high er meaning than on e’s priva te imagi n a ti on , Qin, on the other hand, notes that no conceptual, philosophical, or political discourse can replace one’s fictional or emotional attachment to, and elaboration of, life as oneness. Simply put, the most powerful interpretation of Qin Yufen’s art is one’s physical encounter with her work. Neither gender nor Asian philosophy can fully represent Qin’s essential curiosity. She is a keen observer of the broader human condition, but she also declines to present a superficial dramatization of social

44 issues such as identity and globalism. In her art, Qin Yufen raises a fundamental question for all critics; namely, how can we read materialized artistic expression in critical terms that are not limited by aesthetic beauty or simplistic cultural symbolism? This inquiry will serve as the backdrop of this essay. It traces the development of Qin as an artist through an analysis of various visual and artistic strategies the artist has formulated over the years. It also discusses Qin’s contribution to the early development of installation art in and Europe in the late 1980s and 1990s. Through reading her provocative shifts between reminiscence and myth and her staging of a superfluous simplicity, we gradually approach a broader understanding of the evolution of contemporary art practice in both Chinese and Western societies. pɪctuʀe fʀame: eaʀʟʏ wo ʀ k Qin became involved with the early Chinese avant-garde movement through participating in the activities of the influential No Name School (Wuminghuapai). Founded by Zhao Wenliang and Yang Yushu in the early 1970s, No Name School developed the earliest significant discourse in China to concentrate on the notion of abstract painting. Qin was one of the few women members of the group. Her senior colleague Ma Kelu noted that Qin’s precise control of composition and colour resonates with the style of Robert Motherwell.2 Qin’s early paintings can certainly be addressed in such formalist terms. However, her most significant concern was not simply to compose beautiful pictures or to achieve subtle colour modulations. She was inspired more by the potential for a two-dimensional space to develop into a three-dimensional one. In his critique of Minimalism, Michael Fried argues that its theatricality finds expression in an anthropomorphism that constitutes a breaking point between formalist painting and the later movement into installa- tion.3 In comparison, Qin Yufen placed emphasis on the notion of experience, even more so than performance. To Qin, the singularity of the picture frame itself became anthropomorphic, which is both culturally alive and personally telling. In 1986, Qin Yufen left for Germany with her husband Zhu Jinshi. Prior to her departure, she had developed a number of ideas for installation projects, but it was only in that she began to create the physical reality of these proposals.

Qin Yufen and her early abstract paintings. Courtesy of the artist.

4 5 Qin Yu f e n , Negative Print, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 1988. Courtesy of the artist.

In 1988, the year before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Qin installed Negative Print (Yinwen). At that historical moment, Qin lived near the Berlin Wall, and in her daily strolls around the city as a newcomer, she found Berlin surreal. She experienced an alienation that was generated by various ruptures in her life relating to history, time, language, and personal destiny. The local newspaper was the only way for her to acquire information from the outside, but somehow, it also disconnected her from it. Therefore, in Negative Print she decided to use a combination of newspapers from Berlin and rice paper from China. In the Western pictorial tradition, the picture frame is defined by stretcher bars and wall spaces, hence setting up physical parameters for the composition, subject matter, and, more importantly, the autonomous space of art and art history. The Chinese classical practice fashions the picture frame through a different approach. The idea of mounting a work of art is a tangible and elastic process. The rice paper is usually mounted onto another layer of rice paper; then later a layer of silk brocade envelops the mounted picture. As a result, the mounted painting is never finalized by one form, size, or presentation. Each rolling out of the scroll varies, and thus each viewing varies. In Negative Print, Qin brushes liquid glue behind the blank ri ce paper so that her stro kes and ge s tu res su rf ace on the mounted “ i m a ge .” She mounted numerous layers of rice paper and newspaper onto the wall. In the end, her painting was only a negative expression and ultimately existed as null. The installation disappeared during the process of its making.

More than a remark on the sharp contrast between two cultural traditions, Negative Print exposes an innate tension between the two-dimensional picture plane and the execution of a three-dimen- sional work. While a picture is framed and “contained” by its mounting, here the very act of the mounting of the picture becomes the picture itself. Is the notion of “frame” ever a genuine embodiment of the stability of art’s autonomy? Or is it the ultimate expression of objecthood? The idea of Yinwen came from the stone carving and rubbing tradition. Historically, the Chinese used rubbings from stone carvings to “frame” the original writing. However, there is a paradox embedded in this practice. The original writing is presumably preserved in the carving, as stone is considered permanent. The rubbing in fact reverses this process. The question becomes whether the negative print (a two-dimensional image) can contain the stone carving (a three-dimensional execution) and still maintain an intimate connection to the two-dimensional writing. In Negative

4 6 Qin Yu f e n , Marriage Chamber, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

Print, if the rice paper indicates a displacement of history, the local newspaper in the German language seems to complicate the matter by hinting at an additional element of displacement.

Around the time Qin made this work, a number of important artists in Beijing were working with the idea of mounting and traditional pictorial forms. Among their work are striking examples such as Xu Bing’s A Book from the Sky (1988) and Wu Shanzhuan’s Big Character Banners (1989). While both artists were working with these historical forms and social formats, Qin seems at that time to have departed from that specific content or subject matter and to have begun to devise a more detached method of contemplation.

In her 1992 installation Marriage Chamber (Guifang), Qin employed a more resolved visual language. The idea of picture frame was replaced by a mythology of things and a sensuality that was both mundane and provocative. The installation was conceived with three kinds of objects: two wash stands, two sets of diaphanous mosquito nets, and a Chinese ceramic vase. What defines the physical reality of the work, or the “frame,” are the wash stands—evidence of modernity and industrialization—while the mosquito nets structure an abstract interior that is both gendered and cultured. Although today Kunst-Werke has become one of the most important galleries in Berlin featuring contemporary art, Qin recalls that fourteen years ago when she exhibited the work, the space was semi-abandoned and still contaminated by the smell of dead fish from its original function as a storehouse for seafood. The laboured process of mounting exemplified in Negative Print was now translated into the simple touch of hanging. Nevertheless, the power of the “frame” remains: a soft and simple structure manages to transform a vulnerable and tangible material into a sculpturalized fantasy. The artist no longer dwells on the relationship between the “image” and the “thing,” or between “art” and “history.” Now she has begun to navigate an allegory that is entirely her own. Critics have elaborated on the fantastic and utopian quality evident in Qin’s art and have argued that much of her “paradise” was derived from her experience in China as a young woman struggling to come to terms with turmoil and various difficulties.4 Nonetheless, Marriage Chamber seems to be detached from the specificity of Qin’s biography. The washstands allude to the passing of time, since the process of “drying” implies a gradual evaporation of water and, possibly, memory. In contrast, the vase appears to be a quiet receptor and container of time,

47 Qin Yu f e n , Yu t a n g ch u n, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 1994. Courtesy of the artist. events, and violence. The tension that arises between the subtleties of these common objects is maximized by the bareness of the environment itself. Three years after the fall of the Berlin wall, this install a ti on evo ked the mem ory of death and dec ay (the fish smell ) , the difficult and sen s a ti on a l confrontation of two social systems, and the antagonism that accompanied such friction.

1 9 9 4 – 2 0 0 1: tʜe ʏeaʀs of supe ʀ f ʟuous mɪɴɪmaʟɪsm 1994 was an unusual year. There are a few factors that might have contributed to the impressive burst in Qin’s creativity. The first was the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart inviting her to participate in an exhibition entitled Logo of Body. The second had to do with Qin’s return to China the previous year, at which time she was able to realize the first large-scale installation, completed in Wanzhuang, a suburban village near Beijing. That project featured a total of six hundred fans planted in a man-made pond. The third was related to her job as a technician at a dental clinic,

4 8 which allowed her to more clearly under- stand the social environment in Berlin. Qin, all of sudden, became increasingly exposed to the memory of her youth, to contemporary German society, and to the European art scene.

ʏ u ta ɴ ɢ c ʜ u ɴ: ʙ e tweeɴ peʀfoʀmaɴce aɴd aʀt The title of Qin’s installation in the open courtyard of the National Gallery in Berlin is Yutangchun. A total of one hundred and twenty-three washing lines were placed in a serene sequence. On each line hung various layers of rice paper. Between the layers were hidden six hun- dred and forty-eight speakers. In the vast open space designed by British architect James Sterling, Qin located a stage, the picture frame that she had been searching out for decades. Two features made this Qin Yu f e n , 100 Meters, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 1994. Courtesy of th e artist. piece striking in terms of her personal development. One was the impressive application of seriality, the other was her sophisticated use of sound. This was one of the most melodious installations of her early career. In the discourse of the Western contemporary art, the dichotomy of music vs. art has been long lasting. Some have focused on the difference between the two domains in arguing for the “autonomy” of visual experience, while others, such as Clement Greenberg, reinforce the similarity between music and formalist art to argue for the absoluteness of formalism. Qin Yufen’s installation, however, was based on a daring proposal: that is, it is not only music, but also the physical embodiment of music (the speakers), that can be composed into a coherent theatricality.5 Therefore, music and art “visually” became one in this installation. Such an ambiguous approach complicated the issue of theatricality because the mind’s eye could no longer experience the difference between the stage and the experience of the stage. In this scenario, the picture frame (whether determined by the open courtyard or the seriality of the stands) lost its temporal stability and, therefore, did not suggest a beginning or an end to the theatricality. Hence, the border between performance and art was blurred, if not broken down. The provocative nature of this installation can be juxtaposed with the classical Chinese pictorial tradition—if we can compare music to writing, that is. In Yutangchun, such comparison is especially meaningful because the music was based on a recording of lyrics sung by the female protagonist of the Beijing opera classic Yutangchun. The traditional Chinese picture frame is usually a balanced collaboration of writing (a literary voice) and painting (a visual image). In addition, it is not only the abstract meaning of the two, but also the physical parameters of the two that have to be integrated into one act. Taking this tradition as a philosophical idea and an aesthetic pre-condition, Qin employs this principle as the foundation of her mythmaking. She presents a super-reality in which all senses lose conventional barriers and sequence of priority.

The surrealism implicit in Qin’s storytelling cannot be bound to one specific story. Nevertheless, her approach seems to recall her youth in Beijing with a profound sense of detachment. Qin came

49 of age during the . As a teenager, she worked at a factory making industrial parts for large machinery. Thus, in an indirect way, she encountered the aesthetics of Minimalism: industrial materials, serialized placement, and minimal and repetitive gestures. However, Qin feels that Minimalism does not possess the strong tension that it portends to evoke in the face of history and society. Instead, she attributes an emotional content and an externalization of sentiment and melancholia to these objects. In terms of execution, she often covers the industrial- ized objects with sensual and vulnerable material and adds narrative through the use of sound. During the early 1990s, Qin developed another material strategy that was to emerge as one of her fundamental visual strategies. Gravity, or, the natural tendency exerted by a celestial body, such as the earth, became her ultimate expression of myth-making. feɴɢʜe: ɢʀav ɪ t ʏ as ʀememʙʀa ɴ c e If in Marriage Chamber and Yutangchun gravity is a straightforward application of a natural tendency, an enactment of a universal law, in Fenghe (1994), gravity becomes a perpetual question of the possibility of remembrance. In the quietness that was framed by the lotus pond and the wind, Qin uttered her pensive contemplation on issues of social change and urbanization: How much memory can one sustain, and to what extent can one fully possess that memory? Furthermore, how can one come to terms with change that is so drastic that reality turns into only one version of transient history? The idea for Fenghe came from Qin’s Wanzhuang project of 1993, the year after Deng Xiaoping’s speech announcing the final privatization of the national economy. This installation took place in the moment prior to Beijing’s daunting and difficult struggle with demolition and industrialization. By floating ten thousand pan-leaf fans in the lotus pond, Qin suspended temporal experience within a space where gravity usually implies downward movement. The deferral of gravitational forces by the density of the water seemed to generate an illusion of time. Furthermore, the installation reversed the drying process of the pan leaf during the making of the fans by equating a desiccated an organic form (the fans) to the living entities of lotus petals in the lake. Through Qin’s melancholic gaze, the dreamy Imperial garden, the Garden of Harmony and Peace, is seen here as a mysterious ruin from the past, even though it appears to be blossoming with the most glorious beauty. tʜe weʟʟ: ɢʀav ɪ t ʏ as ʟɪteʀa ʀʏ aʟʟu s ɪ o ɴ In 1998, Qin installed her most distilled project driven by gravity. Her installation 100 Meters consisted only of one stream of white silk cascading into a well located in a cloister. The absence of detail, the purity of the material, and the lack of manipulation contributed to the elements of abstraction in the work. Visually and physically, it is the aspect of gravity that connects this piece to Yutangchun. However, there is another dimension to the interconnectedness between these two pieces. In the music of Yutangchun, Qin chooses a piece of oration expressing the lead character’s sorrow upon her execution. The lyrics read:

Susan is leaving Hongtong County for execution, Stumbling along the street with sorrow . . . If you are departing for Najian, Can you send my loved one my last words . . . In my next life I will return his love.

Hence, Yutangchun is about the struggle with life and death and the separation of two loved ones by space and time. The well, on the other hand, resonates with the idiom beijinglixiang, which literally means that one leaves her native place as she leaves her well behind. The connection between the two installations is reinforced by the symbolism of white silk and its association with death. In other words, the monumental descent of the white silk indicates that only in death may

50 one find love and home, which constitutes a powerful sub-reading of Yutangchun. With an u n d erstanding of Q i n’s pers onal history, it seems conven i ent to re ad 100 Meters a utobi ogra ph i c a lly. Yet such a reading is limited, because the significance of 100 Meters is that which emerges through the unexpected convergence of water and silk; the artist manages to address difficult philosophical notions such as the idea of “homelessness” under the pressure of globalization. f ʟ e e tɪɴɢ ʙoats: ɢ ʀ av ɪ t ʏ as pʀo pʜecʏ In 1996, Qin arranged three thousand disposable facial masks and two hundred and forty speakers into an ocean of floating boats at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover. Compared to mainstream artists working at the time in Europe, Qin was distinct in her avoidance of any obvious reference to identity politics or social discourse. Floating Boat is Qin Yu f e n , F e n g h e, i n s t a l l a t i o n , 1994. Courtesy of the artist. prob a bly her most repre s en t a ti on a l and figurative project of this period. The masks alluded to the physicality of the human body, a body that is conditioned by fear and ailment. The installation also evoked street scenes in Beijing where people wear face masks due to the cruel winter climate. In its simple and straightforward presentation, Floating Boat appeared to be a strange prophecy about the unknown future of the world, on some unexpected development that may arise or a parable told in the past. In the spring of 2004, such a prophecy was manifested with the outbreak of SARS. For weeks, photographs of people wearing white masks flooded the news media around the world. However, evidence of such photojournalism disappeared altogether a few months later, as if the epidemic never struck the city of Beijing. In November 2004, Qin decided to reinstall the project in the Lightwell Gallery at University of Buffalo, which in turn transformed the prophecy into an epitaph, a quiet crystallization of both the possibility and the documentation of a catastrophe.

ʀeceɴt woʀks 2002–2006: fa ʙ ʀ ɪ c atɪoɴ aɴd ʀemɪɴɪsceɴce The year 2001 was a turning point for Qin and for the rest of the world. The most obvious shift in her focus was that she became more concerned about social concerns and human conflicts. She was especially observant of the rising nationalistic sentiment in German society. Projects such as her Beautiful Violence (2001) at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh and Making Paradise (2002) at Hamburger Bahnhof testify to this shift. Yet the most effective project during this period was The Roles of Lovers of 2006, a work created in memory of the German playwright Heiner Müller. In Lovers, the commemoration of a particular individual was positioned within a philosophical realm between fabrication and documentation. It departed from her earlier pristine, minimalist, and harmonious aesthetic, and moved into a strange mixture of brutality and fantasy. Her classic and graceful embodiments of natural forces were replaced by a gestural arrangement of various forms, fabrics, colours, and textures, all of which had an ambiguous tension with each other. Furthermore, the seriality of her previous installations gave way to the specificity of spatial and temporary relationships. In the scene of the “King,” the memory of the physical presence of one person was fragmented into the parts of a destroyed sewing machine, the body parts of dolls placed on a ceramic tabletop, and the messy display of various organic forms hovering over the

51 Qin Yu f e n , Roles of Lov e r s , “ K i n g ” and “ R o m a n c e ” s c e n e s , i n s t a l l a t i o n , 2006. Courtesy of the A r t i s t

floor. The sense of “Romance,” on the other hand, was literalized by the poem written by Müller’s wi fe , wh i ch was em broi dered on the blue tabl ecl o t h . Hen ce , on the su rf ace , the acti on of m a s c u l i n e power con tra s ted with the qu i etness of a feminine space . Non et h el e s s , s i n ce the scene of the “ Ki n g” was based on Müller’s play, the masculine space remained fictional and manipulated, whereas the scene of “Romance” was biographical, the interaction between the man and the woman one that indeed did take place. If this subtle subversion represents an internal logic coordinating politics and culture, Qin’s interpretation can be read as a bold investigation into the balance and battle between a global political structure that is increasingly aggressive and a cultural practice that is both assertive and impotent.

ʀ e tuʀɴɪɴɢ to tʜe 1980s In 1985, Qin published a private and thoughtful essay on the notion of abstract painting, in which she wrote:

In painting I have found a life, an existence or an act, in hope [of] transcend[ing] mundane reality. In each new image, a new world is given life and birth. In th[is] new world, I search for my own narrative and linguistics. This world is simultaneously estranged yet familiar. This world gives me a home to return to.6

Twenty years later, this statement still stands as the best testimony to her art practice.

Notes 1 See Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (San Francisco: University of California Press, 1985), 122. 2 See Ma Kelu, Wumingniandai, unpublished manuscript, booklet 2, 5–6. 3 See Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Artforum (1967): 5, 12–23. 4 See Hou Hanru’s informative essay “Making a Paradise—Some Guess at Qin Yufen’s work,” in Qin Yufen (Berlin: Wasmuth, 2001), 12–17, esp. 15. 5 For a summary, see Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Tradition of Surrealism,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 87–118. 6 From Qin Yufen’s 1984 manuscript “The Language that I Choose—Abstract Painting,” 2, unpublished.

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