JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2013 VOLUME 12, N UMBER 1

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Third Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art Artist Features: Chen Chieh-jen, Chen Zhen, Wang Qingsong, Han Feng Curatorial Inquiries 12 The Art of Archiving

Exhibitions in Istanbul and London Li Kunwu: A Chinese Life

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VOLUME 12, NUMBER 1, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2013

CONTENTS  Editor’s Note 29  Contributors

6 Third Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art

9 The Context of Contemporary Chinese Art in the New Century Lü Peng

16 Unauthorized Archive: Profane Illumination in 42 Chen Chieh-jen’s Works Chou Yu-ling

29 Transexperiencing Chen Zhen’s Art Amjad Majid

42 Wang Qingsong’s Use of Buddhist Imagery (There Must Be a Buddha in a Place Like This) Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky

55 The “Being and Nothingness” of Han Feng Voon Pow Bartlett 55 66 Curatorial Inquiries 12 Nikita Yingqian Cai and Carol Yinghua Lu

71 The Art of Archiving: A Conversation with Karen Smith Elizabeth Parke

83 On Form and Flux: Change and Transformation in Chinese Art at the Istanbul Modern and the Hayward Gallery, London 71 Stephanie Bailey

95 Li Kunwu: A Chinese Life Ryan Holmberg

106 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Chen Zhen at Le Magasin, Centre national d'art 95 contemporain, Grenoble, France, 1992. Photo: Xu Min.

We thank JNBY Art Projects, Canadian Foundation of Asian Art, Ping Chen, Mr. and Mrs. Eric Li, and Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison for their generous contribution to the publication and distribution of Yishu.

Vol. 12 No. 1 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art  Katy Hsiu-chih Chien   Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C.C. Liu Yishu 54 opens with texts by recipients of the   Ken Lum Third Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on -- Keith Wallace Contemporary Chinese Art. They are Lü Peng,   Zheng Shengtian  Julie Grundvig recommended by Wu Hung, and Chou Yu-Ling Kate Steinmann recommended by Chia Chi Jason Wong. Lü Peng Chunyee Li   Larisa Broyde has been writing for many years and Chou Yu-Ling   Michelle Hsieh represents a younger generation, exemplifying Maryon Adelaar    Chunyee Li that this award honours a range of writers who have made a strong contribution to the discussion   Judy Andrews, Ohio State University of contemporary Chinese art. In his text, Lü Peng Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum takes stock of contemporary Chinese art in the John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Museo Reina Sofia first years of the twenty-first century, while Chou Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Yu-Ling builds upon her in-depth study of the work Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator of Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen. Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh In addition to this study of the work of Chen Chieh- Hou Hanru, Critic and Curator Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop jen, we are presenting three other artist features. Katie Hill, University of Westminster Amjad Majid looks at specific artworks by the late Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian Chen Zhen to coax out their complex transcultural Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator references. Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky writes Lu Jie, Long March Space Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore about Wang Qingsong’s frequent use of Buddhist Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University motifs and his growing skepticism towards the Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art rectitude of religion in contemporary society. Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator Voon Pow Bartlett turns to a younger artist, Han Wu Hung, University of Chicago Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District Feng, to show how the aspects of emptiness and solitude that inhabit his painting and sculpture are  Art & Collection Group Ltd. 6F. No. 85, Section 1, in fact signs of hope. Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Nikita Cai and Carol Lu, whose on-going Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 platform, Curatorial Inquiries, introduces its E-mail: [email protected] twelfth installment and it will become a regular    Jenny Liu feature in upcoming issues of Yishu. In Yishu Alex Kao 54 they emphasize the lack of a systematic   Joyce Lin   Perry Hsu account of exhibition histories in China and Betty Hsieh abroad, and propose that our understanding  Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. of the contemporary should not be ahistorical but, instead, be based on its connection to such   http://yishu-online.com   Design Format histories. Complementing the concern to keep  1683 - 3082 history vital, Elizabeth Parke talks with Karen Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited Smith about the fate of her extensive personal in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, archive, which serves as a valuable document March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: of contemporary Chinese art from the 1990s into the 2000s. Yishu Editorial Office 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada In conclusion, Stephanie Bailey reviews V6Z 2P3 Phone: 1.604.649.8187 exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art Fax: 1.604.591.6392 presented in two diverse cultural contexts— E-mail: offi[email protected] Istanbul and London—and their attempts to   illustrate the vast changes in China and its 1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) contemporary art during the past three decades. 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com) Ryan Holmberg reviews one of the first Chinese graphic novels to be published in English, a    Leap Creative Group   Raymond Mah memoir by Li Kunwu, and checks in on a life lived   Gavin Chow through the Cultural Revolution as expressed in  Philip Wong this popular genre of publishing. 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. Keith Wallace Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 200251

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6 (Larisa Broyde) (Chunyee Li)

(Philip Tinari) 9 (Judy Andrews) (Britta Erickson) 16 (Melissa Chiu) (Sebastian Lopez) (Claire Hsu) (John Clark) (Pauline J. Yao) 29 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 42 Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda

55 66 856 : (886) 2.2560.2220 (886) 2.2542.0631 [email protected]

71 Yishu Office 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada : (1) 604.649.8187 (1) 604.591.6392 : offi[email protected] 83 Leap Creative Group, Vancouver 95 6

106 http://yishu-online.com Design Format

Contributors

Stephanie Bailey is a writer, artist, and educational curating, exhibition studies, and educator with an M.A. in Contemporary Art institutional critique. She graduated from the Theory from Goldsmiths College, London. Journalism School of Fudan University and She played a formative role in designing the was a participant in the de Appel Curatorial Foundation Course in Art and Design offered Programme, Amsterdam, 2009–10. at Doukas Education, Greece, where she lived and worked between 2008 and 2012 while Chou Yu-ling was a research assistant for covering contemporary art and culture around the Taiwan Media Art Archives project at the the world and from a global perspective for Graduate School of Arts and Technology, publications including Art Papers, Aesthetica, Taipei National University of the Arts. She Artforum, Frieze, Naked Punch, LEAP, and was assistant curator of Chen Chieh-Jen’s Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. She exhibition Empire’s Borders —Western is currently Managing Editor of Ibraaz and is Enterprises Inc., at the Chinese Arts Centre in on the editorial committee for Naked Punch. Manchester, United Kingdom in 2009. In 2010 she co-curated Plug in x Add on: Taiwanese Voon Pow Bar tlett, Ph.D., is an artist, curator, Contemporary Art with +8 at the Rag Factory, lecturer, and writer, as well as an associate London. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the London member of the Institute of Chartered Consortium. Her research interests cover media Accountants in England and Wales. She was art theory, video art, and art cinema. born in Beijing and educated internationally. Her focus is on exploring an expanded field Ryan Holmberg is an independent writer in the study of the complex causal framework and editor currently based in Mumbai, India. influencing the global discourses on fine art. He earned a Ph.D. in Art History from Yale She currently works at Tate Research Centre: University in 2007. He specializes in modern Asia Pacific, in London. and contemporary Japanese art, with a particular focus on comics. Much of his Nikita Yingqian Cai currently lives in recent research on the subject is published Guangzhou and is Curator at the Guangdong semi-monthly online at The Comics Journal Times Museum. She has curated and edited (www.tjc.com). He is also currently editing publications for A Museum That is Not (2011) and translating two lines of historical manga and Jiang Zhi: If This Is a Man (2012, co- for PictureBox Inc., New York, one focusing curated with Bao Dong) and organized No on icons of alternative manga, the other on Ground Underneath: Curating on the Nexus Japanese mongrelizations of American pop of Changes (2012, co-curated with Carol culture; the latter is titled “Ten-Cent Manga.” Yinghua Lu). She was one of the founders of Ping Pong Space (2008–10), in Guangzhou, Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky holds the which functioned as a platform of activities O. Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at Bard and artistic production for local artists. She is College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. also a critic and writes frequently for various She has published several books, on subjects catalogues and publications. Her major such as the art of the Tang dynasty and Chinese focuses are context-responsive curating, Buddhist art, and she has served as Editor of

4 Vol. 12 No. 1 Journal of Chinese Religions. She has written Amjad Majid is a critic, writer, and IT many catalogues and has curated several shows consultant. He was born in Kashmir, India, on contemporary Asian art. and obtained an M.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, in 2007. He received the Carol Yinghua Lu lives and works in Beijing. 2004 Washington University Borges Award in She is a contributing editor for Frieze. She Spanish Language and Literature. In 2009, he has written frequently for international art moved back to India, where he became active in journals and magazines including e-flux, the New Delhi art world as a critic, writing for The Exhibitionist, Yishu, Tate Etc., and international and local publications such as Art Contemporary. She was on the jury for the Slant and Pulse Media, as well as contributing Golden Lion Award at the 2011 Venice essays to catalogues. He has worked with Biennale and was one of the co-curators for prestigious art venues such as the National the 9th Gwangju Biennale, in 2012. Together Gallery of Modern Art (Bangalore), the India with Liu Ding, Lu co-curated the 7th Shenzhen Habitat Center (New Delhi), Gallery Espace Biennale 2012, and they will be the guest (New Delhi), and Sakshi Gallery (Mumbai), curators for Museion, Bolzano, in 2013. with prominent artists such as Waswo X. Recently, she joined the editorial team of Waswo, and curators such as Maya Kóvskaya. Yishu's Chinese language edition He also made a sound piece for Chinese artist Tao Aimin’s video documentary, Fragmented Lü Peng is Director of Institutions at Chengdu Lotus (2011), and participated in the making Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and of an upcoming video-painting installation for Associate Professor in the Department of Art leading Indian artist Ranbir Kaleka. In 2012 History and Theory at the China Academy of he relocated to Beijing and is now tackling his Art in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. He was sixth language, Chinese. awarded a Ph.D. in Critical Theory from the China Art Academy, in 2004. Lü Peng was chief Elizabeth Parke is a Ph.D. candidate in editor of the journal Theatre and Film, from the Department of Art at the University of 1982 to 1985 and also served as Vice Secretary Toronto. She examines the relationships among of the Sichuan Dramatists Society, from 1986 contemporary Chinese art, urban planning, to 1991. He subsequently held the position of and visual culture. Her research approach is executive editor at the magazine Art and Market, transdisciplinary, and she uses methodologies from 1990 to 1993, and in 1992 he served as from art history, cinema studies, urban artistic director of the First Guangzhou Biennial geography, and visual anthropology. Her Art Fair. His most recent curatorial projects dissertation, “Infrastructures of Critique: Art include A Gift to Marco Polo (Venice Biennale, and Visual Culture in Contemporary Beijing 2009) and Reshaping History (Beijing, 2010). (1978–2008),” establishes the influence of In 2011 he curated Art Changsha and Chengdu urban planning on Chinese art production by Biennale. His recent publications include A drawing parallels between artistic practices History of Art in Twentieth-Century China and representations of infrastructure and the (2010); A History of Chinese New Art from Year capital’s historical and contemporary urban to Year 1900-2010 (2012). infrastructure.

Vol. 12 No. 1 5 Third Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art Lü Peng, Chengdu Chou Yu-ling, Taipei/London

ishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art is pleased to announce the recipients of the Third Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on Y Contemporary Chinese Art. Two invited jurors each made an independent selection: Wu Hung, an internationally renowned scholar, curator, and author born in Beijing and based in Chicago since 1994 selected Lü Peng; and Chia Chi Jason Wang, a curator and critic who has been central to the discourse of contemporary art in Taiwan and beyond selected Chou Yu-ling.

Each award carries a value of $5,000 CAD and texts by each of this year’s recipients are published in this issue of Yishu. The Yishu Awards for Critical Writing were established to encourage and recognize writers who are making an outstanding contribution to understanding the history and current issues of contemporary Chinese art.

Currently an Associate Professor at the China National Academy of Fine Arts, Lü Peng has been one of the most active promoters of contemporary Chinese art since the early 1990s and remains one of the most prolific writers in this field. In 1991, he founded the Art and Market (Yishu yü shichang) magazine, hoping to develop an operative economic system for contemporary art in China. With the same intentions, the next year he organized the First 1990s Art Biennale in Guangzhou (often recognized as the First Guangzhou Biennale). Since then, he has curated many other influential, and at times controversial, exhibitions, including the contemporary art section of the 2011 Chengdu Biennale.

As a writer, Lü Peng has contributed to the field of contemporary Chinese art with two groups of important work. The first consists of general introductions to modern and contemporary Chinese art based on first- hand research. Major titles include The History of Modern Chinese Art, 1979 to 1989 (Zhongguo xiandai yishushi 1979–1989), co-written with Yi Dan and published in 1992, A History of Contemporary Chinese Art, 1990–1999 (Zhongguo dangdai yishushi, 1990–1999) published in 2002, and A History of Art in 20th Century China published in 2010. The first two books provide detailed information about the development of contemporary Chinese art during the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. The last book is the first comprehensive survey of twentieth century Chinese art published in English. All three books are foundational texts in the field of modern and contemporary art.

6 Vol. 12 No. 1 The second group of Lü Peng’s writings on contemporary Chinese art focuses on individual artists. In addition to many texts featured in exhibition catalogues, his bilingual Case Studies of Artists in Art History and Art Criticism contains detailed accounts of twenty-two artists and one art collective. He also initiated and organized Contemporary Artists Series (Dangdai yishujia congshu, 2007), a compilation that consists of biographical studies of twenty- five artists based on interviews and archival research.

Wu Hung notes that “Lü Peng’s curatorial and writing projects demonstrate a strong contextual approach, treating contemporary Chinese art as part of a broad social and historical process, and connecting it, in particular, to the emergence and development of a market economy. His recent 2010 publication, The Historical Process of Contemporary Chinese Art and Its Commodification (Zhongguo dangdai yishu de lishi jincheng yu shichanghua qushi), is the latest installment demonstrating his interest in this issue, which he traces back twenty years. In sum, Lü Peng is a serious critic and historian of contemporary Chinese art who has made major contributions to this field. His track record is very strong, and he remains actively engaged in the development of this field.”

Chou Yu-ling, born in 1978, belongs to the younger generation of Taiwanese art critics. In Taiwan, art criticism as an academic discipline was not initiated until the late 1990s, and National Tainan University was very first institution to launch such a program. Having graduated from Shih Hsin University with a major in photography, Chou Yu-ling entered the National Tainan University of the Arts to receive formal training in art criticism in 2000, developing a monograph on the unorthodox contemporary Taiwanese photographer Hou Tsung-Hui as her master’s thesis, the condensed version of which won her the 2004 Aesthetic Writing Award established by the S-An Cultural Foundation.

Between 2002 and 2007, making the transition from graduate student to a young practitioner aiming for serious art criticism, Chou Yu-ling soon found her personal critical concern and acute consciousness in the problematic of photography and the critique of image theory, including the study of video art, film and new media art. In 2007, she went abroad to the United Kingdom to immerse herself in further study in London. Her vision and knowledge has been broadened ever since. She has written variously on important film makers, such as Edward Yang and Stanley Kubrick, traditional Eastern and Western pioneer photographers, including Luo Hsiang-Ling and John Thomson, and contemporary video artists, especially Jeremy Deller, Yuan Goang-Ming and Chen Chieh-Jen. Issues of vision, memory, historical mise-en-scène, reenactment, heterogeneous spaces, otherness, and periphery are among her critical concern. Her writings are not limited to contemporary Taiwanese art only.

Chou Yu-ling is currently a Ph.D. candidate for the Humanities and Cultural Studies at The London Consortium, Birkbeck College, University of London. More recently, she has also developed a keen interest in the

Vol. 12 No. 1 7 study of archives, particularly in the consciousness and technology of archiving. Taking the renowned contemporary Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-Jen and his works as her main subject, she has written several papers from the perspective of archives and archiving. Strategically, the “missing” of historical archives and the “lack” of archiving are two primary starting points for her study.

In his recommendation, Chia Chi Jason Wang states, “Chou Yu-ling is capable of deep, complex, and historical thinking while maintaining skill as a writer, which I deem as essential for a good critic. Unlike a lot of art critics or writers, at least in Taiwan, Chou Yu-ling is able to employ contemporary cultural theories without letting her reader feel lost in an overly philosophical abyss or linguistic labyrinth. Equipped with good academic training, she has the ability to dig into various forms of scholarship and incorporate cultural theories into her critique of contemporary art and, thus, deepen our understanding. Viewed from a broader perspective—or at least from this recommender‘s experience as a veteran art critic and curator—Chou Yu-ling can be seen as a young exemplary who enables us to look into the optimistic future of contemporary art critique in the Chinese- writing world.”

Support for the awards is courtesy of the generosity of the Canadian Foundation for Asian Art, and Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison.

8 Vol. 12 No. 1 Lü Peng The Context of Contemporary Chinese Art in the New Century

rom 2008 onwards, China became embroiled in the global economic crisis; it was the inevitable outcome of a process initiated by a Fpolitical decision made at the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Party Central Committee some thirty years previously. At that momentous gathering in 1978, the Communist Party of China (CPC) shifted its political line from one in which “class struggle” served as the “cornerstone,” to a policy that stresses economic reconstruction. This led to the gradual introduction into socialist China the laws and regulations needed to sustain a capitalist market economy. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the status of the Chinese market might not yet have been fully acknowledged by the international community, but China’s accelerating participation in the process of globalization was patently obvious.

The economic crisis caused Chinese artists and critics to fully realize the nature of globalization’s impact. According to common sense and experience of the Chinese people, globalization stemmed from economic strength. Economists such as Alan Rugman define globalization as multinational firms crossing national boundaries, engaging in direct foreign investment, and setting up commercial networks to create activities of value. Other scholars think globalization should be interpreted as a complicated process as it involves different regions and ways of life, and includes diverse fields including the economy, politics, culture, and technology. But it is the combined strength of politics and culture generated by economic forces that actually affect all other human activities in a comprehensive way. Thus Chinese artists faced a dilemma: On the one hand, they clearly realized that local Chinese criteria could not provide authority and legitimacy for artistic value; on the other hand, the construction of a Chinese national culture is also subject to global pressures, and China, unlike Western countries, did not go through the process of systematically constructing a national culture. In the absence of Western validation and opportunities, Chinese artists sense a lack of self value, yet when Westerners do lend validation it is hard for Chinese artists to avoid the suspicion that it might arise from “cultural colonialism.” As early as the mid 1990s, the critic Huang Zhuan clearly expressed the resulting contradictions in culture and the arts:

In terms of cultural meaning, when contemporary art of the Third World expresses its own ideas and issues, it always confronts this paradox: It finds itself in the position of constantly resisting the cultural oppression of the doctrine that the West is the centre, and whenever it discards its own

Vol. 12 No. 1 9 position of submission, it must also constantly be vigilant to avoid falling into the trap of the ideology of old-fashioned nationalism; in terms of methods, when it establishes its own independent cultural identity, necessarily using the intellectual resources and modes of discourse of the First World, it must also be vigilant in describing how this may have brought alienation to its own identity.1

In the art world, discussions on several artistic questions in the 1990s such as modernism and socialism may have extended into the new century in different forms, and those artists who were important players in modernist and contemporary art in China during the 1980s and 1990s were already middle aged. Artistic sensitivity and differences about artistic issues— creativity, Western influence, the market—are now the concerns of a younger generation, and investigating the work of these young Chinese artists is different from analyzing the art of artists born in the 1950s and 1960s.

Artists born in the 1970s, especially those born after the middle of the decade, have little to no direct experience of history before 1976. They were born when China was beginning to restore the national economy and to draw upon Western thought—especially Western liberal thought—to undertake a critical summary and analysis of the Cultural Revolution period from 1966 to the end of 1976. The young directly benefited from the opening up to Western knowledge and thought and the relatively relaxed freedom of speech of that time, but, at the same time, could read next to nothing in their textbooks about the thirty years of the Communist Party of China, from 1949 to 1978. Thus, although they had acquired some new Western knowledge, they lacked the direct experience to make any historical comparisons. When the state used its various media opportunities to create propaganda and to educate about the success of reform, the content was largely limited to praising China’s Open Door Policy, and, as one can imagine, younger people gained little knowledge about history simply because of the government’s preoccupation with its opening up to the West.

Indeed, Western thought already permeated intellectual discourse in every corner of society, but in the field of education, which the state controlled, the political and moral education that students received from primary school to university was mainly confined to Party ideology and government propaganda. No basic knowledge about human civilization in the rest of the world, or any traditional ethical teaching about equal rights and freedom of speech was systematically imparted, and such “universal” values and concepts were fuzzy notions from the West that China has never fully discussed. The state has continued to the present day to remind the population how hostile Western forces will use these “universal” values as a pretext to subvert socialist China, and, if necessary, they are often subjected to critique by the Chinese authorities.2 It is true that the Party and the media increasingly propagate concepts of democracy, fairness, and justice, but the political system of China remains one-party rule, and “socialism” continues to exist both as an ideological concept and as a social system.

10 Vol. 12 No. 1 It is contradictory that even though the intellectual emancipation of the 1980s provided the possibility for individualism in various forms, this did not mean that everyone acquired a systematic understanding of democratic systems and free thought; some young people interpreted individual freedom to mean that one could do whatever one wants, and so they lacked any concrete historical consciousness. Most young people are unaware that whatever freedom or individualism they have today is because of the adoption in July 1977 by the Tenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China at its Third Plenary Session of the “Resolution on Comrade Deng Xiaoping Resuming his Post”; they do not realize that the current situation is also related to the publication on May 10, 1978, in Theoretical Trends (Lilun dongtai), the internal organ of the CPC’s Party school, of an article authorized by Hu Yaobang (1915–89) titled “Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth”; they are also unaware of the connection with the November 25, 1978, decision made at the working conference of the CPC Central Committee’s plenary session reversing the original verdict that those involved in the Tian’anmen Incident of April 5, 1976 were “counter- revolutionaries” (This incident was a memorial for Zhou Enlai and a victory for the protest against the “Gang of Four” during the Cultural Revolution). Thus few young people concern themselves with subsequent questions such as: What was the historical significance of such a major event as the decision of the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Party Central Committee, to make all Party work from 1979 onwards to “switch to the socialist modernization drive?”

Only the young are able to enjoy the benefits of these events—the older generation still had the memory of their suffering—and even regard the freedoms of today and the legitimacy of the individual’s private world as natural, not knowing the underlying background and political reasons for this “natural” situation. In fact, the young care little about the political issues that concerned people in the 1950s, and there is only a minority, such as the writer Han Han, who is idolized for his novels and blogs, who consider the large number of institutional factors (such as the Great Firewall erected on the Internet to prevent free conversational exchange) as serious problems to be tackled.

Since 1949, Chinese art has been inextricably linked with politics. At the beginning of the 1980s, critics called on people to pay greater attention to the aesthetic function of art and to abandon the position that art is the tool of doctrine. Because of history—especially the ten years of the Cultural Revolution—present day artists and critics have tended to avoid the vocabulary of “politics.” Unlike economists who regard politics as a mechanism that accompanies the distribution of public goods, artists and critics mainly interpret politics as thought, concepts, and ideology, and in this way, for reasons of inertia and ideology, contemporary artists in China often either intentionally or unintentionally combine art with political matters, but invariably rarely elaborate on the relationship between art and politics. Artistic and critical circles in China remain in an atmosphere that strenuously avoids controversial political issues, even though political issues are constantly at the forefront of questions related to journalism, online

Vol. 12 No. 1 11 media, exhibition inspections, and the allocation of money and manpower. At the same time, the complexity of social affairs has also led to complexity in the expression of politics—for example, political sensitivity stemming from ecological problems, the process of appropriating and demolishing people’s houses and then relocating them as a result of urbanization, and even rescue efforts during natural disasters.

Just as the works of many young artists proclaim the high-speed development of the market economy and material “progress”—mainly in the urban context—and when “made in China” is also becoming a fashionable concept globally, many people—including of course those young artists—naturally seemed to readily regard today’s world as one very different from that perceived by artists born in the 1950s and 1960s. In academia and art circles, the two decades since the beginning of the 1990s—brimming with “postmodern” theory, the streets and lanes crowded with goods that circulate in world markets, and global links established by the Internet—had deluded people into thinking that national boundaries are illusory. In artistic circles, it had become routine for artists to fly to New York, Paris, Venice, London, and numerous other cities in the West to participate in exhibitions or attend activities. The net effect of this also blurred the notion of borders—between nations, histories, politics, economies, cultures, ideologies, and even habits and customs—and these feelings also blurred people’s judgmental viewpoints.

Changes in the material world generally led people to think that the reform and market economy had basic legitimacy, based on the indirect and latent characteristics of the impact of politics on daily life and on the basis of society’s lack of any new guiding values. As a result, the development of the economy, background interests, experience, and personal knowledge begin to influence people’s judgments about their lives. The 2000 Shanghai Biennale, the first truly international biennial in China, gave some people the feeling that ideology had been dispelled and the atmosphere was fully globalized because the different concepts of art, taste, and interest and the economic criteria of the Biennale’s policy makers, operators, and participants, as well as their varying degrees of political sensitivity, dispelled any unified ideological criteria. Many critics still doubted that the reality of such “globalization” could enjoy any assurances from the political system in China, but the political rule that was decided upon in the early 1990s— that the demarcation lines between “capitalism” and “socialism” could not be debated—sustained and perpetuated this non-debatable reality by not allowing it to surface as ideological conflict.

In China, people had been forced for a long time to accept the view that economics and politics were quite separate: capitalist markets and technology served the socialist economy and were not considered contradictory. However, this kind of explanation provided no corresponding foundation in the political system or any unified system of value judgments for the fields of literature and art. Some contemporary artists and critics (mainly teachers in some institutions) had different degrees of contact with the political system, simply by being, for example, teachers or professors in

12 Vol. 12 No. 1 institutions, with different degrees of intensity and technology they relied on while moving back and forth or inside and outside of the system.

This does not mean that there were no demarcation lines around the political system. Since the beginning of the 1990s, two realities—one inside the system and one outside the system—had gradually taken shape in parallel, and regardless of however unclear artistic criteria within the political system was, the old ideology and the official standards that depended on this system for their survival continued to exist; the “main tune” (zhuxuanlü) that officialdom propagated was merely an ambiguous term substituting what had in the past been called “political tasks.” Those artists who needed to rely on galleries and the market were not controlled by such criteria; as a result, there were two art worlds in China, even though information about these two art worlds was often presented to the world on the same Web site—for example, Artron.

After the year 2000, at a time when the legal identity of capitalists (who, if willing, could now also join the ranks of the Communist Party as a proletarian vanguard) occupied the mainstream, the questions of whom art should serve and the direction in which art should develop had further emerged in the mechanism of the art market and exhibition system. The complications within economic sectors had produced complex social strata, but, ultimately, it was undecided which stratum was mainstream in this society or whether the different strata constitute a new historical totality. Within the official art system, few people could articulate, or even contemplate, these questions.

Most people could see that the economic reforms seriously challenged the authority of the old system, as well as the right of “experts” and “authorities” to speak out. Wu Guanzhong was a senior painter within the system, and he was an interesting special case because he frankly stated that he was suspect about the necessity of the Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the “artists’ associations,” and the state academies, and this made official “authorities” and “experts” extremely tense and enraged. In essence, they found that Wu Guanzhong’s criticism challenged their very legitimacy in this new historical period. In fact, these organizations continued to exist throughout the period of a rapidly developing market economy because there had been no change in China’s political system, and the old ideological criteria in the worlds of art and culture continued to exist. In step with the reforms and seeing things from the positions of tactics and cost accounting, the expenditures consumed by these organizations was insignificant compared with other areas of the old system. Because of the system itself, the propaganda function of art still occupied an important role in the work of ideological administrative departments, and the continuation of these organizations still had political raison d’être since the power of the markets and their institutional improvement had not impinged on the power of mandatory intervention that these organizations enjoyed.

At the same time, because artworks had the attributes of being goods that could be immediately exchanged for currency, those in the official

Vol. 12 No. 1 13 art system who consumed taxpayers’ money to benefit themselves could similarly place their own works in the market through the privilege of language skills and the ability to allocate resources. As a result, they not only had power and capital, but also obtained material benefits offered by the market, and they made use of these twin opportunities presented both from within the political system (power) and outside the political system (the market). From this perspective, capital also played a part in maintaining the old system.

During the thirty years of reform, official arts organizations in China never staged an exhibition of modern or contemporary Chinese art, except in 1989, when the China Art Gallery (now the National Art Museum of China) allowed the China Avant/Garde exhibition to be staged. This demonstrates that there was no new art system to support new art and artists, and the system and criteria under which art operated were not in accord with the historical reforms this country had attained. The question of which works of art state galleries should ultimately collect had become seriously pressing given that the actual requirements of the stage that historical reform had reached were to be met. However, against a background in which the state constitution finally contained guarantees for the protection of private property, and contemporary art products were constantly circulating in society as private property items, it was unavoidable that as private collections grew there was an acute need to be able to convert these important resources of the newly constructed system from private commodities into public holdings.

One phenomenon that perplexed critics in the first ten years of the new century entailed the startlingly sky-high prices that Cynical Realist and Political Pop artworks produced since 1993 were realizing on international markets. Until 2008, critics had launched direct attacks on the artists whose works were obtaining such high prices in auction salesrooms. Meanwhile, also participating in this criticism of high-priced artists were some critics of the older generation, such as Gao Minglu, who had lived in the USA the previous twenty years, but who clamored to add his voice to those critics. On the other hand, contemporary Chinese art since the beginning of the 1990s had never received approval from the official artists’ associations, and even in December 2008, the Chinese Artists’ Association’s “Work Report” still singled out contemporary art for censure. As a consequence, Cynical Realism and Political Pop consistently found themselves under fire from two groups of critics: those critics of the high-priced artists mentioned previously who had never made their values and position, clear and those of the official line spelled out by the artists’ associations.

The transitions in the political system and the reforms that had taken place in the economic system over the previous thirty years were incompatible, and the “solution” has been to describe this as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” However, the main embodiment of these “Chinese characteristics” was the material wealth generated through the development of the market economy and the reality of an incomplete market transition that resulted in a uniquely “fractured society.” In any case, the nature of

14 Vol. 12 No. 1 “socialism”—the Communist Party holding power and the incomplete market economy—received its guarantees from the official media, ideological propaganda, the structure of education, and the political system. This was also the reason the National Artists’ Association, administered by the government under the leadership of the Party, could use large amounts of taxpayers’ money to hold an art exhibition extolling the Communist Party, while art that reflected or embodied real problems and new concepts had to continue to survive in an uncertain market environment without any state funding.

Politics still functions as a brake on contemporary art by controlling the mechanisms of public property. One only has to investigate the history of the fine arts since 1979 to realize that whenever there is any discussion about platforms for artistic exchange or the environments in which artists are paid or compensated, one can see the influence politics exerts on contemporary art. It is the official fine arts organizations that really hold the legal power, the opportunities, and the resources to conduct exchanges, and these official organizations control the right to represent China through exhibitions in other countries. Those contemporary Chinese artists who already play a significant role in the international community have never become the representatives of China’s contemporary national culture, and it is the enforcers (or messengers) of the national ideology, the National Artists’ Association, who have no understanding at all of the position in the world of these artists but suspect instead that there is some ulterior motive behind the forces that have pushed these Chinese artists to such a prominent status.

Today’s art circles have no conceptual construct that can represent the economic and cultural era after China’s opening up to the rest of the world, demonstrating that Chinese art has over the first decade of the twenty-first century entered a more complicated new stage. When we consider how the new system related to art was produced by the economic development of the market, the diversification of artistic phenomena, the multiplicity of positions in critical circles, the chaotic confusion in values, and the multi-layering of stances, viewpoints, and tactics, we can regard this first decade of the new century as the decade of the possibly inevitable (and appropriate) shattering and dissolution of the revolution in modernist and contemporary art that began after 1979.

Notes 1 Huang Zhuan, “Issues in the Third World and Approaches to Contemporary Art and Forms in Third- World Contemporary Art” (Disan shijie dangdai yishu de wenti yu fangshi), www.chinese-art.com/ Contemporary/volume3issue1/review2.htm. 2 In February 2007, one of the Party’s leaders, Wen Jiabao, made the following statement in an article entitled “On the Historical Tasks in the Primary Stage of Socialism and Several Problems I Have Encountered in Foreign Policy” (Guanyu shehui zhuyi chuji jieduan de lishi renwu he wo guo duiwai zhengce de jige wenti [Guangjiaojing]), Panorama no. 456 (September–October 2010): “Science, democracy, a legal system, freedom, and human rights are not the exclusive preserve of capitalism, but are values that mankind has pursued in common in the course of a long historical process, and they are the fruits of civilization created together.” However, this statement has had no bearing on the critique of “universal values.” In 2008, Chen Kuiyuan, Head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, made the following criticism: “In the past, Christianity advocated its religious doctrines as universal values, and today the West authoritatively pronounces its ‘democratic views,’ ‘views on human rights’ and its free market economic theory to be universal values; China is like a shadow following a person when we too talk volubly about wanting to integrate with ‘universal values’.”

Vol. 12 No. 1 15 Chou Yu-ling Unauthorized Archive: Profane Illumination in Chen Chieh-jen’s Works

n 1996, Chen Chieh-jen began his genealogical project Revolt in the Chen Chieh-jen, Revolt in the Soul and Body,1990–1999: Soul and Body, 1990–1999. Since this time he has regularly used found Genealogy of Self, 1996, Hahnemühle Photo Rag (R) images as references in his works or as a starting point. For example, Baryta, 208 x 260 cm. Courtesy I of the artist. in Revolt in the Soul and Body, 1990–1999, he appropriated a series of photographic images of punishment—lingchi (death by a thousand cuts)— sourced from books, and, using digital technology, inserted images of himself into these found photographs.1 I will focus on the archival materials that are manipulated in Revolt in the Soul and Body, 1990–1999 based on a discussion about the source materials acquired by Chen Chieh-jen, namely, images scanned from pirated books rather than using “original” archival images. I propose that the inaccessibility, or even his refusal to use the original archival image is characteristic of Chen Chieh-jen and reflects the material culture of Taiwan in the 1990s. My discussion of a “copy” differs from that of Taiwanese scholars; for instance, Joyce C. H. Liu and Sing Song- Yong, who tend to identify the origin of images in regard to a historical

16 Vol. 12 No. 1 locale and event. For them, the appropriation of the actual historical images is a way of reclaiming the witnessing and reinterpretion of the histories that surround images of trauma. My approach, in contrast, is to reapply the historical material to contemporary contexts in order to consider a specific archival condition in Taiwan. Here I will focus on the pretext of Chen Chieh-jen’s Genealogy of Self (1996). By pretext I mean an artwork is not only the content that is presented, it is a process of production; therefore, there is a plurality of virtual texts behind the constituted text.2 Pretext refers to the text or context on which Chen Chieh-jen’s work is based. Therefore, I will consider how the image of lingchi has been circulated transnationally, having been continually presented over many years until finally resting in Chen Chieh-jen’s hands.3 My questions will be: How does the image relate to contemporaneity of Taiwan in the 1990s? What urged Chen Chieh-jen to appropriate the image of lingchi, thus breaking his eight-year hiatus from making art after the lifting of martial law?

Lingchi image from Georges Regarding the pretext of Genealogy Bataille’s The Tears of Eros, published by City Lights of Self, the source from which Books, San Francisco, 1989. was scanned is Georges Bataille’s The Tears of Eros (1961). The photograph is featured in the final chapter of Bataille’s book and is distinguishable from other images in the volume, such as paintings, since a painting can only be a “representation” of death and erotic desire. This photograph is of a real death and Bataille believed it corroborated his conviction about the connection between sacrifice and eroticism. The image of death, for Bataille, is real evidence that helps him to fulfil the hypothesis that “the religious horror disclosed in sacrifice becomes linked to the abyss of eroticism.”4 This image had haunted the author constantly since 1925, when it was given to him by his analyst, Dr. Adrien Borel, who used the unorthodox method of presenting a photograph of torture in order to awaken Bataille’s own issues on guilt, violence, and suffering.5 The experience of viewing this image is represented throughout Bataille’s writing and was especially linked to his experiences with meditation. According to Bataille, in Guilty (1944):

I didn’t choose God as an object (for meditation), but humanly, the young Chinese (a condemned felon) shown in the photo was covered with blood while the executioner tortures him (the blade’s already in his knee-bone). I was connected to this unhappy being in ties of horror and friendship. But when I looked at this image to the point of harmony, the necessity of being only myself was cancelled. And at the same time this object I chose disintegrated into vastness and, in a storm of pain, was destroyed.6

In this image, the spectacle of punishment results from the framing of the shot, since in China execution was not intended as a spectacle. In general,

Vol. 12 No. 1 17 lingchi takes place at ground level in a crowd; executioners and spectators stand at almost the same height as the criminal who is bound to a wooden frame of three stakes, making him only slightly taller than those around him. As Jerome Bourgon suggests, the visual difference between “execution” in China and the “supplices” (torture) of Christian Europe is based on their visual functions as the declaration of judgment or the spectacle for a “brave death” of redemption.7 In Europe, specific aesthetic devices were employed in the act of execution. For instance, stages were used for distancing the execution from the spectators, and the timeframe was emphasized to dramatize the ritual. Along the carefully chosen routes for the procession to the gallows, executioners and criminals transformed themselves into characters in a “play” that told a story of expiating sin for redemption. Such visual expectations are deeply rooted in Western culture, based on an extremely rich Christian iconography of martyrdom.8 Overlapping with such visual expectations, the photo-image of Chinese punishment in The Tears of Eros is framed in a style akin to that of the iconography of Saint Sebastian, who exposed himself to suffering. The photographer shot the image from a low angle in order to frame the scene with an upward view. This composition produces a stage-like effect in which the triangular wooden framework holds up the dismembered body, leading the gaze of the viewer to the bleeding wound and the dazed face of the criminal.

In response to curiosity and visual expectations, this scene of execution became a spectacle answering to different needs. In Bataille’s case, contemplating this photographic image of death, which expressed not fear but ecstasy, bridged the gap between sacrifice and eroticism. This could be interpreted as a kind of redemption for Bataille, a promise of a better future after death: “I can still project this future into another world. A world into which I can be introduced only by death.”9 While writing The Tears of Eros, he was suffering from poor health, and the anguish of death shadowed him unceasingly. He died one year after the completion of the book.

Faced with the photograph of the execution scene, Bataille set himself the task of bringing this image to life: “The game I am setting up for myself is to represent what they were living at the moment the lens fixed their image on the glass or on the film.”10 Bataille was fully aware of the function of the camera, which fixed the scene on film and made it accessible. He made an attempt to bring death to life by projecting his fascination with the image. On the one hand, this contemplation rescued him from the shadow of death by promising a better future; on the other hand, his comments overlap with the visual composition of the photograph that matches the Christian perception of the Western viewer. Susan Sontag observed Bataille’s obsession and its relation to religious tradition in Europe noting that:

Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure at the sight of this excruciation. But he is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as something more than just suffering, as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which likens pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation.11

18 Vol. 12 No. 1 The tendency to search for visual familiarity in relation to Christian perceptions can be seen in the way that Bataille deliberately arranges the layout of his book, where images of lingchi are juxtaposed with images of Aztec human sacrifice and an inconspicuous caption noting that “certain artists have expressed sadomasochistic tendencies in painting the martyrdom of Christians or similar scenes; the determining influence of underlying sadistic tendencies that in fact led them to seek out such scenes. . . .”12 This short caption seems like a confession from Bataille, exploring his tendency to seek out familiar transformations of the iconography of martyrdom. Thus the image of Chinese punishment is interpreted simultaneously as spectacle, sacrifice, and eroticism. As Bataille states, “knowledge of death cannot do without a subterfuge: spectacle.”13

Making the Fixed Image Fluid Again In Genealogy of Self, Chen Chieh-jen manipulated this appropriated image by expanding the top left side of the border of the picture.14 The dismembered body is thereby moved to the centre of the composition, directly confronting the spectator. Due to this recomposition, the viewpoint of the image seems to have been raised from a low angle to eye level. Faced with the wide-open wound on the chest, viewers cannot turn their view away from the grotesque, two-headed figure.15 Meanwhile, Chen Chieh-jen inserted his own self-images on the left as onlookers. In the front of the image, a newly added executioner fills a gap that had originally existed as a vacant space in the crowd.

Chen Chieh-jen’s manipulation challenges the spectatorship and authorship in which the represented image was supposedly fixed (remember what Batallie had said: “the lens fixed their image . . .”). If Bataille’s meditation on this lingchi image was a legacy from the Judeo-Christian iconographical tradition, then he imparted a fictional scenario that was constantly cited as a vicious case.16 For instance, Jean-Toussaint Desanti addressed the issue of violence through an example of execution in China that was used as evidence to criticize its notorious reputation. In 1982 Desanti wrote that:

I’ve never met an executioner: someone whose job it is to kill a man according to the rules in the name of the law. I have seen illustrations, though. One in particular: it was a photograph found in Georges Dumas’s old Traite de Psychologie, in the chapter on pain. It pictures the torture (Chinese, as you’d expect) “of a hundred cuts.” The story is well known: A young man had carried out an attack on emperor’s family. The law required that he be burnt alive, over a low fire. In a spirit of leniency, the emperor had declared: “the punishment by fire is too cruel; the condemned man will undergo the torture of being cut into a hundred pieces. Respect this judgment!17

The anecdote behind this image almost coincides with Bataille’s commentary, which shows the impact of the “common knowledge” as disseminated by

Vol. 12 No. 1 19 him. But in a change to the “original story,” Desanti embroidered it by adapting the crime from assassinating a Mongol prince to attacking the emperor’s family. Interestingly, if Traite de Psychologie was the only source for Desanti to see this picture of execution, then there was no such story documented in the book, nor was there a caption explaining where the image was taken.18 However, Desanti automatically identified this event and adapted the “well-known” story without due consideration of the facts.

Historians Timothy Brook, Jerome Bourgon, and Gregory Blue have recently discovered numerous historical errors connected to the image of lingchi as it was represented in The Tears of Eros.19 However, the entire (exotic) story continues to be widely retold. For instance, Matthew Collings fabricates an interview with Bataille in 2011 and mentioned the motivation of the photo shoot of lingchi: “He murdered a prince, his punishment was to be executed in that way (being cut into pieces) and the event was photographed.”20 Chen Chieh-jen once responded to these accumulated Bataillean accounts of the image; for him, this circulation of fixed interpretation is bound up with a key technique, which is “to fix,” to make an image or certain interpretation stay permanently on the paper. The complex relationship between seeing (interpreting) and being seen (interpreted) operates within this very practice, “to fix.” In order to reveal and reverse such a relationship, Chen Chieh-jen adds, “I would like to start from the fixed historical image, and make it fluid again.”21

The Unspeakable Disconnection Versus the Primal Scene Fever The material sources that Chen Chieh-jen acquires are mostly unsubstantiated or unclear when it comes to the date, ownership, photographer, and identity of the photographed subjects, partly because the material is acquired primarily from pirated volumes that do not provide this information.22 Although the copy of The Tears of Eros that Chen Chieh-jen has is not a pirated version, the history of the lingchi image remains indefinite. The indefinites that are attached to this image prevent an attempt to return to the origin. The idea of searching for the origin and reconstructing the historical locale is what Jacques Derrida called “archive fever,” the desire to look for “where things started.”23

Nevertheless, with respect to the work Revolt in the Soul and Body, 1990–1999, I will argue that this feverish tracing of the origin is mainly driven by viewers rather than the artist himself, since it is the experience of discontinuity, the split of/from history and identity that matters for Chen Chieh-jen:

I deliberately chose these images, for which the dates they are taken, the photographers and the subjects photographed are all indefinite. Since I am not interested in national history, but a history of an image in which the event is unclear, the photographed subject is unknown. In such conditions, uncertainty generates a sense of trance and unspeakable disconnection.24

20 Vol. 12 No. 1 I will take Joyce C. H. Liu’s research as an example to illustrate how the idea of locale and origin can be related to Chen Chieh-jen’s works owing to viewers’ expectations. Liu sees Chen Cheih-jen’s works as symptoms of traumatic historical events, and she comments on Revolt in the Soul and Body, 1990–1999 as “photographic interpretation(s) of the historical moment.”25 For Liu, Chen Chieh-jen’s manipulation of historical images is a way to participate in the “primal scene” in which traumatic witness occurs in each historical moment. Through art, the repressed memories of previous generations return. I refer to the Freudian “primal scene” to analyze Liu’s understanding, since she not only locates Chen Chieh-jen’s gaze upon the historical scene but also examines his presences within these historical images as a means of witnessing the moment of conception of successive traumatic events in the twentieth century. In Freudian terms, “primal scene fantasy” is the fantasy of observing parental sexual intercourse, the desire to be at the scene of one’s conception. The primal scene therefore refers to fertilization—a person who is in kinship with the observer will be expected to be born in the future. Hence, by witness, these series of images of punishment became a pedigree of traumatic events sharing the same parentage. By composing the line of descent, Liu contextualizes the indefiniteness introduced by Chen Chieh-jen, narrating them alongside the structure of Chinese modernity. Thus the enigmatic aspects of Chen Chieh- jen’s works are efficiently reconciled by a chronological evocation of history as the result of the fantasy of the primal scene.

The difference between Chen Chieh-jen and his works’ spectators depends on the fact that the materiality of the archival sources is overlooked by viewers. For the spectators, this indexical material is a direct reference to the past.26 Nonetheless, Chen Chieh-jen recognizes the feature of his materials—mostly appearing to come from unclear, deterritorialized, and unauthorized sources. And it is material that in contemporary Taiwan reflects the socioeconomic conditions of the late 1980s to 1990s.

Unauthorization The manufacturing mode of duplication became rooted in Chen Chieh- jens’s life as a result of his experience working in the cartoon animation industry between 1983 and 1986, when he worked in the Far Eastern Industrial Park, where the final production of eighty per cent of US television cartoon series’ was completed.27 During this production work, which imitated the Hollywood shooting formula, Chen Chieh-jen worked on scripts drawing. From this experience, he acquired a thorough understanding of the fate of what is called sub-manufacturing, in which capitalist investors would set up several factories and invest only the minimum amount of capital necessary to ensure the basic survival of each of them. This led to a situation in which manufacturers were obliged to compete against each other in order avoid being excluded from the flow of capital.28

In 1987, when martial law was lifted, Chen Chieh-jen resigned after three years working in this field. Having no source of income, he relied for financial support on his younger brother, who made handbags and sold them on the street.29 From this time onward, Chen Chieh-jen became

Vol. 12 No. 1 21 part of the shadow economy (the black market) and “shadow knowledge.” The former is generally understood to refer to economic activities that are unregistered and not taken into account in officially calculated gross national income. “Shadow knowledge,”30 or appropriation without authorization, was one of the most dynamic ways of producing knowledge at the time, providing a theoretical framework for intellectuals that quickly enabled them to cope with rapid political and social changes taking place after the rescinding of martial law.

In the era of liberation and chaos, unauthorized appropriation rapidly reproduced knowledge while avoiding censorship. The culture of piracy also reflected Taiwan’s situation of isolation from the global community that began 1971 when the United Nations refused to continue to recognize the ROC as a permanent member, which also led to its absence from the International Intellectual Property Regulation network. Furthermore, in 1978 the U.S. not only severed official diplomatic relations with Taipei, instead recognizing Beijing under the one-China principle, but also broke off Taiwanese-American trade agreements. After that, at the level of international legislation, there were very few restrictions on so-called “piratical publishing” and “film piracy” in Taiwan.31 One example of a firm based on the principles of piratical publishing was Taipei’s Tan Chiang Book Company, which received most of its supplies from the US. Later, in 1984, the company opened a bookshop near National Taiwan University and helped young intellectuals to publish translated and unauthorized editions.

This mode of appropriation was practiced by a group of marginalized film and theatre critics; namely Li Shang-jen, Lin Poa-yuen, and Shao Yi-de.32 It appears that Chen Chieh-jen befriended them around 1987, the year when he entered the shadow economy. The activities of this group of young critics took the form of a reading group; later, using the name War Machine, they cooperated with the Tan Chiang Book Company to publish and translate a series of anthologies on radical film theories, including The Death of the New Cinema (1991), Jean-Luc Godard: Image, Sound and Politics (1991),33 and Towards a Third Cinema—Manifesto of The Third World Cinema (1987).34 At the same time the group anticipated the use of film as a critical instrument with which to explore social reality. In practice, the concept of Third Cinema that was generated after the Second World War and during the Cold War as forms of resistance to imperialism reflected the concern that domestic films were struggling under the impact of Hollywood. Together with the import of so-called “Left-wing avant-garde aesthetics,”35 the group was drawn to other means of filmmaking and media phenomena, such as alternative media, independent/experimental films, piracy, and MTV (distinguished from the US MTV with popular cinémathèques based on “film piracy.” One of the most distinguished MTV companies, The Solar System, was famous for its collections and claimed itself as a “guardian of image culture”).36 Shifting their attention to broader means of cultural phenomena, the group identified two other kinds of filmmaking— alternative media and independent filmmaking. Alternative media groups like “The Green Team” and “The Third Image” recorded social and political

22 Vol. 12 No. 1 events on portable video cameras and attempted to disseminate an unofficial viewpoint by selling the videotapes.37

Independent filmmakers such as Wang Jen-jieh and Kao Chung-li associated themselves with the marginalized film and theatre critics, attempting to confront the restructuring of society through filmmaking. They demanded a more direct and radical, yet manageable, method of filmmaking in order to engage more directly with society. For instance, in 1989, the documentary film How Does History Become a Wound (1989) was made collectively by Wang Jen-jieh, Cheang Shu-lea, Hsieh Cheng-chung, and the Image Concept Studio, which received a great deal of attention from War Machine since the film represented an immediate and critical response to the Tian’anmen Square massacre of 1989. The work consisted of two main parts: the first part contained edited footage that Wang Jen-jieh had recorded from various TV stations, and the second part consisted of Cheang Shu-lea’s on-the-spot documentary footage of the event. Using montage, this work juxtaposed TV reports of the incident from both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Spending only two weeks on production, they attempted to achieve a quick response and to criticize the way in which this event was manipulated by different media with diverse purposes. It is clear that it was the independent filmmakers’ commitments to a confrontation with society, as well as their demand for alternative modes of filmmaking and film production, that brought marginalized film critics and independent filmmakers together. This was particularly true for the latter, since independent film production represented a kind of media democracy, freed from dependency on the conventional industrial circuit and its marketing. In addition, it created a dynamic field, enabling filmmakers to experiment with a cross-disciplinary creation connecting film and art. On this basis, Wang Jen-jieh, Kao Chung-li, Chen Chieh-jen, and Lin Ju organized a series of exhibitions called Xi Rang, which began in the late 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s.38

Film Documentation as an Initial Act of Archiving Although he had been in close contact with marginalized film critics and independent filmmakers since the late 1980s, Chen Chieh-jen had not yet considered film an autonomous medium for his artistic creation. Painting was his primary medium, a result of the conventional art education he had received. As he recalled:

Impressionism and classical realism were taught in class; we were trained to sketch ancient Greek plaster statues. It has no link to my life experience at all. In terms of Chinese art, its manner of ancient literati and its transcendental life values are also alien to the conditions in Taiwan.39

Conditioned by the emphasis on verisimilitude and positioned at the receiving end of Western art, Chen Chieh-jen was beset by the incapacity of representation, the fact that representation functions merely as a mimetic surface to imitate objects in the real world. It took him almost eight years to rid himself of this frustration.40

Vol. 12 No. 1 23 Chen Chieh-jen, Malfunction No. 3, 1983, performance. Courtesy of the artist.

Nevertheless, in the 1980s Chen Chieh-jen attempted to make a film with the camera being an indispensable documentary device that recorded his guerrilla-style performance, discussed below, that attempted to challenge the boundaries of authority. In May 1983, to coincide with the elections of representatives to the legislative assembly, the government declared a “democratic vacation,” during which the restrictions on freedom of gathering and speech were temporarily lifted. Taking advantage of this opportunity, Chen Chieh-jen and his friends performed Malfunction No. 3 (1983) in Hsimen District. In this twenty-minute performance, two 8-mm cameras and one video camera recorded footage. A group of people in their early twenties stood in a row, wearing eye patches and black headgear, with their hands bound. Then they walked, like dysfunctional figures, through the bustling city. After walking some distance they started to shout, fell down, beat their chests, and stamped their feet. This performance soon attracted the attention of the police, but because of the “democratic vacation” they were exempted from further investigation.41 In another case, some years later, Chen Chieh-jen attempted to shoot an experimental film near a military camp. He and some friends were carrying an 8-mm film camera and when they started filming, a group of soldiers quickly approached, confiscated their camera, and arrested them. The film was subsequently destroyed. “The officer thought we were intelligence agents, so our films were confiscated. Instantly, ‘reality’ appeared to me,”42 recounted Chen Chieh-jen. What, then, was the “reality” here? Reality appeared only when he confronted prohibitions that are hidden in everyday life, a life that seemed tedious and ordinary but in fact regularized oppression.

Now I will introduce Boris Groys’s contention regarding art and art documentation, since it offers a possible perspective that allows us insight into the relationship between Chen Chieh-jen’s action and his documentation. Groys suggests that art, especially fine art, conventionally was considered not reality but a representation of reality.43 Fine art established itself at the level of a signifier, something that refers to reality. In other words, that which was signified had been seen conventionally as separate from the sphere of art. Life itself as pure activity, as pure duration, was inaccessible to traditional art.44 Putting this into a local context, during

24 Vol. 12 No. 1 the martial law period in Taiwan, the removal of art from reality was put into practice through art education and art policy. In art education, instruction in the technique of verisimilitude gave rise to the imitation of artistic genres. The official art institutions in Taiwan deliberately emphasized the supremacy of ontology and the autonomy of art, thereby discouraging the practice of using art to refer to reality. For instance, the Taipei Fine Art Museum held an exhibition entitled The Art of Color and Form: An Exhibition of the Avant-garde, Installation, and Spatial Design (1985) that promoted Americanized modern art, in which “art for art’s sake” was a popular slogan.45 Here, the signifier refers back to the signifier itself (the art form), and the meaning of art is thus self-contained. To a great extent, during the martial law period, art in Taiwan was apolitical and devoid of the capacity to confront outward reality.

Installation view of The Art of Color and Form: An Exhibition of the Avant-garde, Installation and Spatial Design, 1985. Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Yet, beyond official art institutions, individuals were being shaped and restricted by severe controls. There is no way that such a condition, in which the life of an individual is constantly being shaped, can be revealed apart from using art in life as a pure activity. There was an urgent need for art to become involved in life itself. The reality that Chen Chieh-jen encountered was a life that regularized oppression, in which documentation as a form of self-writing and expression was unthinkable. “Unauthorized recording” was prohibited and this led to events happening, and then disappearing as though they never occurred. The crisis of self-documentation resulted in the martial law period becoming known as the Taiwanese “vanished period.” And the “technique of making things oblivious” (Chen Chieh- jen proposed the term “obstruction surgery”) that was exercised by the authorities has become the core issue that Chen Chieh-jen tries to confront. In his performances, such as in Malfunction No. 3, which reveal both an individual and collective regulation of life at the most detailed level, he used his body to create an event for the world, an oppressive world in which nothing was allowed to happen. In order to allow an event to have its effect live on, something of the event has to remain. A filmed documentary acts as

Vol. 12 No. 1 25 a trace, referring to the event itself, as well as being a medium that enables a relationship with others. Through the newly generated relationship a new becoming subject can be formed. Yet, in the martial law era, the only subject free to exist was the absolute authority of the state. And ensuring that no traces of certain events were left was one of the techniques the government employed to prevent the generation of an alternative perspective. Once again, along with his experience in the martial law period, the fact that he had no access to (past) events haunted him constantly. Events happened that were temporarily experienced by him, and then they disappeared, with no traces remaining that could refer back to the cause, and life appeared as a riddle. As he recalled:

When I was a child, I couldn’t always work out what was going on behind the things that happened. But these things just happened and surrounded me. For example, I did not know what was my father doing when he was in China and Kinmen. . . . But one day suddenly he came back home like a stranger. I have always lived in fragments.46

I Pirate My Own Work Chen Chieh-jen, I Pirate My Own Work—Free Donation In Chen Chieh-jen’s early artistic Project, 2007–present, performance. Photo: Amy career, film served as documentation Cheng. Courtesy of the artist and Amy Cheng. to record his actions. His film engaged in the sphere of life itself; it revealed a situation that no “representation” could achieve. This was because, first of all, representation was distanced from life itself; moreover, what he found was a life that had not yet archived its cultural representation, a life without the right to freedom of speech, and therefore mute. Above all, the issue here is that an event is unthinkable owing to its inaccessibility on account of “authorization,” without which no traces can be left. Hence, “making a copy” out of an event and generating alternative subject matter was the way Chen Chieh- jen challenged authority. The alternative way to access what is inaccessible related to a great extent to the social conditions of the late 1980s and early 1990s; the challenge of authority with knowledge and politics relied on the technique of duplication realized through the shadow economy and knowledge. I will take another example as my conclusion to crystallize the entire discussion. In 2007, Chen Chieh-jen carried out a performance called I Pirate My Own Work—Free Donation Project in which he offered pirated versions of his own DVDs at a vending stand. People could take

26 Vol. 12 No. 1 copies of his works with any amount of donation. The pirated DVDs are almost identical to those that he sells in limited editions at galleries; the only difference is the certification of authenticity attached to the latter. The certification of authenticity attempts to abolish the possibility of duplication, ensuring commercial value by claiming its uniqueness, but Chen Chieh-jen’s pirated works were sold to the masses, whose donations went to various charities that engaged with different social situations. The “consecration” of the origin, and its authenticity, ensures capital accumulation, whereas the copy and the pirated are mobile and siteless and challenge the accumulative logic of the art market in the era of neoliberalism. This project is based on the shadow economy that is often evident in Taiwan and that embodies Chen Chieh-jen’s experiences in the late 1980s. Above all, it inspires my perspective in attempting to bring the material into to its contemporary milieu (in this case 1990s Taiwan) and examine how the object embodies socio-economic factors and further shapes Chen Chieh-jen’s art. Transformations in society and art are dynamically interrelated in his artistic practice.

Notes 1 These images are of historical events, namely, the death penalty during the late Qing dynasty, the Communist rivalry during the liquidation period in the 1930s, the Musha Incident during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan in the 1930s, the Civil War in the 1940s, and the Cold War on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait in the 1950s. 2 "Genetic Criticism," http://www.textualscholarship.org/gencrit/index.html. 3 Photographs of lingchi were not available in Chinese-language publications before 1997; therefore, it is likely that Chen Chieh-jen was the very first person to appropriate photographs of Chinese lingchi for the purposes of refiguration. Amy Huei-hwa Cheng, “A History of the Photographed Subject: On Lingchi—Echoes of a Historical Photograph,” (Bei She Ying Zhe De Li Shi Yu Chen Chieh- jen Dui Tan: “Ling Chi Kao: Yi Zhang Li Shi Zhao Pian De Hui Yin”) http://www.itpark.com.tw/people/essays_ data/43/166. 4 Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989), 185. 5 Roland A. Champagne, Georges Bataille (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), 3. 6 Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone (Venice and San Francisco: The Lapis Press,1988), 46. 7 Jerome Bourgon, “Chinese execution: Visualising their differences with the 'Supplices' of Christian Europe,” http://turandot.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/Essay.php?ID=34&. 8 Ibid. See also Lionello Puppi, Torment in Art: Pain, Violence and Martyrdom (New York: Rizzoli, 1991). 9 Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 19. 10 Ibid., 185. 11 Sontag Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Picador, 2004), 99. 12 Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 208. 13 Georges Bataille, “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice,” in The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 287. 14 Genealogy of Self is the first work in the series Revolt in the Soul and Body, 1990–1999. Others works are Being Castrated (1996), Self-Destruction (1996), Lost Voice (1997), Rule of Law (1997), The Image of Identical Twins (1998), The Image of an Absent Mind (1998), Na-Cha’s Body (1998), and A Way of Going to an Insane City (1999). 15 According to Chen Chieh-jen, this image of a double-headed figures was inspired by a Western Xia double-headed Buddhist statue and the image of Janus, the ancient Roman god of gateways. Wang Pin-hua, “The body image in the scene of death: Chen Chieh-jen’s art creation,” Art Criticism in Taiwan, no. 41 (2010), 147. 16 "The Mongolian Prince demanded that the aforesaid Fou-Tchou-Le, guilty of the murder of Prince Ao-Han-Ouan, be burned alive, but the Emperor found this torture too cruel and condemned Fou- Tchou-Li to slow death by Leng-Tch-e (cutting into pieces). Respect this!" Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 204. 17 Jean-Toussaint Desanti, in "La Violence, Douze leçons de philosophie,” Le Monde dimanche, Summer, 1982, 17. Quoted in Timothy Brook, Jerome Bourgon, Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts, (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 223–24. 18 Ibid. 19 For details, see Timothy Brook, Jerome Bourgon, and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts. 20 See Matthew Collings, “Georges Bataille on Evil,” Artreview, no. 51 (Summer 2011), http://www. artreview.com/profiles/blogs/no-5-georges-bataille-on-evil?xg_source=activity. 21 Amy Cheng Heui-hua, “Existing with Imagination and Persistence,” Modern Art, no. 112 (February 2004), 26–27.

Vol. 12 No. 1 27 22 Pirated books here means those books that are copied or translated without authorization from the author or original publisher. In his early artistic creation, Chen Chieh-jen spent a substantial amount of time scanning historical photo-images from pirated books. Also see Mao Yafen, “Chen Chieh-jen: Art is an Action,” eslite reader, no. 72 (December 2006), 6–8. 23 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1. 24 Amy Cheng Huei-hua, “On Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (March 2003), 77–81. 25 Joyce C. H. Liu, “The Gaze of Revolt: Chen Chieh-jen’s historical images and his aesthetic of horror, “ Cultural Dilemmas During Transitions conference, October 15–17, 2000, http://www.srcs.nctu.edu.tw/ joyceliu/mworks/mw-interart/GazeOfRevolt/GazeOfRevolt.htm. 26 Similar perspectives can also be seen in Sing Song-Yong’s writings; he argues that Chen Chieh-jen “revisits” the locale of lingchi by reconstructing the scene, based on evidential photo-images. Chen Chieh-jen witnesses how things are, and therefore he is able to carry the testimony. Sing Song-Yong, “The phantom lives in the sound insulated ruin: Chen Chieh-jen’s image archive and body,” FA, no. 129 (10–12, 2006), 37–42. 27 Chen Chieh-jen, artist statement, “A Brief Introduction to the Real Military Court and Prison and Environs,” provided by the artist. 28 Lin Chih-ming, “The most personal is the most political: The artistic creation that is found in retrospect of life experience,” Art Criticism in Taiwan, no. 41 (January 2010), 150–154. 29 Ibid. 30 "Shadow knowledge" is a self-coined term. By using the term, I attempt to draw a parallel between the model of knowledge production with the shadow economy, both of which were practiced in many cases without authorization and both of which were crucial ways of life for Chen in the late 1980s. 31 For instance, Tan Chiang was copying the version that Encyclopaedia Britannica completed for the People's Republic of China in 1986. Two principals of Tan Chiang were sent to court because of copyright infringement, but they were freed because a judge said that Encyclopaedia Britannica does not possess a Republic of China copyright on the books because Taiwanese-American trade agreements were broken in 1978. 32 Chen Chieh-jen got to know these young critics through Wang Mo-lin, a theatre critic who has influenced Chen Chieh-jen profoundly. Lin Chih-ming, “The most personal is the most political,” 150–154. 33 Colin MacCabe, Jean-Luc Godard: Image, Sound and Politics, first published in 1980 by Macmillan Press, London, with an unauthorized translation published in Taiwan in 1991. 34 Li Shang-jen translated several articles from different sources, such as Movie and Method and Argentine Cinema, and then edited them into an anthology entitled Towards A Third Cinema: Manifesto of the Third World Cinema (Taipei: NanFang, 1987). In this book were included articles such as "Aesthetic of Hunger" (1965) by Glauber Rocha, "Towards a Third Cinema" (1969) by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, and "For an Imperfect Cinema" by Julio Garcia Espinosa. The publication was strongly motivated by the anxiety of geographical imagination, that is, by an impulse to re-map Taiwan in the global community after the country’s long isolation during the martial law period. 35 In the Chinese version of Jean-Luc Godard: Image, Sound and Politics (1991), translator Lin Poa-yuan added a short biography of Colin MacCabe, who is the original author, emphasizing his theoretical background, which was in Marxism, cultural materialism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism. Highlighting a cross-disciplinary approach to film study, the translator attempted “from the standpoint of the subjectivity of the East, to investigate the Western radical aesthetics (the so-called Left-wing aesthetic avant-garde).” Therefore, here, the definition of “left-wing avant-garde aesthetic” refers to film theory that is based on Marxist cultural theory, which analyses the political ideology of films. Colin MacCabe, Jean-Luc Godard: Image. Sound and Politics, trans. Lin Poa-yuen (Taipei: Tan Chiang, 1991). 36 Editors, Imagekeeper Monthly (Advertisement), Imagekeeper, no. 1 (November 20,1989), 1. 37 Peng Hsiao-fen, “The little shrimp fights against the big whale: Interview with a member of The Green Team, Li San-Chung,” Outside and After the New Cinema (Taipei: Tan Chiang, 1994), 3–7. 38 In 1986 Xi Rang 1 was organized by Chen Chieh-jen. He invited cultural workers, experimental film- makers, and artists to the show, namely, Kao Chung-Li, Wang Jun-jieh, Lin Ju, Lu Xian-ming, Ni Chung-li, Shao Yi-de, and Mai Jen-chieh. 39 Chou Yu-ling, Interview with Chen Chieh-jen (unpublished), November, 2009. 40 Chou Yu-ling, Interview with Chen Chieh-jen, 2005 http://mfa.techart.tnua.edu.tw/~gmyuan/ mediaart/?p=123. 41 Yao Jui-chung, Performance Art in Taiwan, 1978–2004 (Taipei: Yuan-Liou Publishing, 2005), 34. Chou Yu-ling, “Interview with Chen Chieh-jen,” http://mfa.techart.tnua.edu.tw/~gmyuan/mediaart/?p=123. 42 Interview by ArtEmperor, “Chen Chieh-jen: Reoccurrence of the sense of body,” Vimeo, http://vimeo. com/9927839. 43 Boris Groys, “Art in the age of Biopolitics,” in Art Power (Cambridge, Mass., and London: The MIT Press, 2008), 55. 44 Ibid. 45 Hsieh Tung-shan and Han Hsiu-jung, eds., The Art of Color and Form: An Exhibition of the Avant- garde, Installation and Spatial Design (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1985), 2. 46 Lin Chih-ming, “The most personal is the most political,” 150–154.

28 Vol. 12 No. 1 Amjad Majid Transexperiencing Chen Zhen’s Art

In my work, the absence of any image of the human body is a “visual trap.” The spirit of man is always there.1 –Chen Zhen

Chen Zhen at a street market or an artist whose practice thoroughly in Shanghai, 1996. Courtesy of Xu Min. eschews imagery of the human figure, FChen Zhen’s work is remarkably saturated with a profound human quality. This characteristic permeates the body of artwork recently shown in the exhibition Même lit, rêves diffèrents (“Same Bed, Different Dreams”), at the Faurschou Foundation2 in Beijing’s 798 Art District. The exhibition gathered a significant selection of Chen Zhen’s works from the 1990s to the early 2000, with pieces such as Même lit, rêves diffèrents (1999), Crystal Landscape of the Inner Body (2000), Un-interrupted Voice (1998), Les textes de la lumière/La lumière des textes (1992), Short-circuit (1999), Un village sans frontières (2000), Exciting Delivery (1999), Six Roots/Memory (2000), Le bureau de change (1996-2004), and La désinfection (1997) that encompass a diverse set of preoccupations that suffuse the artist’s practice. Among them are concepts such as the short-circuit in artistic creation (I will explain below), transculturation and cultural hybridity, synergy, and “transexperience,” a concept developed by the artist himself, among others. By meditating on the theoretical nucleus around which Chen Zhen’s artistic practice coheres, we can explore the ways in which these concepts animate and illuminate his work from within.

Chen Zhen was born in 1955 in Shanghai to a family of doctors and medical practitioners. At an early age he recalled that he “dreamed of leaving” his “family, whose members were all doctors, for art” and “becoming a real ‘black sheep’, a rebel.”3 Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, Chen Zhen was influenced by traditional Chinese philosophy, which he would later combine with Western ideas in his practice. His inclination toward art led him to immigrate in 1986 to Paris, where he attended the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts and then the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques. Chen Zhen suffered from autoimmune hemolytic anemia, a rare and ultimately fatal medical condition that ended his life in 2000. Living in the ominous shadow of his own mortality, Chen Zhen was deeply driven by a desire to produce work that could harmonize human differences as well as offer a kind of therapy and relief from conflict.

Vol. 12 No. 1 29 Working within an oeuvre mainly based on installations and mixed media, Chen Zhen referenced diverse ideas about multiculturalism, traditional Chinese philosophy, Chinese and Western medicine, life and death, spirituality and materialism, the environment and the ecology, and consumerism and globalization in his work. A look at the artworks themselves affords us insights into how these core concerns spoke through his practice, creating a body of work of major critical and international importance that has lost none of its potency and freshness over time.

The Works

Même lit, rêves diffèrents (1999) Top: Chen Zhen, Même lit, rêves differents, 1999, The Même lit, rêves diffèrents Chinese bed, metal, Plexiglas, fabric, mattress, matches, consists of a bed that is divided polystyrene balls, motion sensor, television, 400 x 600 x between a lotto device that 800 cm. Courtesy of Faurschou Foundation, Beijing. randomly pumps and mixes Left: Chen Zhen, Même lit, numbered white Styrofoam lotto rêves differents (detail), 1999, Chinese bed, metal, Plexiglas, balls into the air, and a therapeutic fabric, mattress, matches, polystyrene balls, motion mattress on a traditional Chinese-style bed framed in glass, onto which the sensor, television, 400 x 600 x 800 cm. Courtesy of Faurschou lotto balls land. Alongside the bed is a television that loops a video about Foundation, Beijing. Chinese medical practices and treatments. Rows of round glass medical flasks that contain water hang above the bed. A silver sheet as backdrop emphasizes the sense of movement in the installation, from the randomly rotating lotto balls landing on the mattress to the flasks filled halfway with water and the video loop.

The work signifies messages derived from the silence of partners in a relationship, and as such silence is employed to reflect a conflictive, dissonant, and often absent communication.4 The work also delves into the manifestation of synergy and its specific role in yielding an innumerable set of relationships among different fragments and parts within a whole, the work itself. Même lit, rêves diffèrents meditates on the disequilibrium in

30 Vol. 12 No. 1 communication and in human relationships (guanxi) and provides a setting for the harmonization of these relationships, whether in a social, political, spiritual, or cultural context. The Chinese proverb tong chuang bu tong meng, which Chen Zhen renders in French as “même lit, rêves diffèrents,” or “same bed, different dreams” pertains to people who cohabitate but are driven by different, and often contrary, aspirations.5 The installation, which carries the same title encapsulates this idea while reflecting the intimate and personal air of the bedroom, with the bed as an object common to us all (as symbol of union, life, and death) and dreaming as an activity in which we all partake.

Chen Zhen, Crystal Landscape of Inner Body, 2000, crystal, iron, glass, 95 x 70 x 190 cm. Courtesy of Faurschou Foundation, Beijing.

Crystal Landscape of the Inner Body (2000) In Crystal Landscape of the Inner Body, the fragility of our inner anatomy and its relationship to the outer world is expressed in twelve organs made of glass corresponding to the “twelve Chinese astrological signs.”6 The crystalline organs with their reflective surfaces capture the outer world while containing the brittle inner world that is interposed with the fragile body in its exposure to the surrounding environment.

A dialogue between the body and the spirit is found in the play between the transparency of the crystal and the light that it reflects. The organs in their delicate crystal incarnation are arrayed on a glass table that is set for medical examination and diagnosis. Chen Zhen portrays diagnosis first in the Chinese context of wang wen wen qie (“observing, listening, asking, and feeling”) and second as an artistic synthesis of “miraculous reasoning, experiencing, intuiting, imagining, and awakening,” or, in summary, as art itself (“That is art!” Chen Zhen claims).7

Vol. 12 No. 1 31 The arrangement creates a space of exchange between medical science and spiritual faith as it pertains to illness, treatment, and healing, and most importantly the preservation of the fragile body. In the process of seeking treatment, we must make leaps of faith that surpass the empiricism of science when it fails to provide a cure for us. Like the light that passes through, refracts from, and reflects on the crystal organs, faith is also capable of feats that defy physical and bodily limitations, as a source of energy, as the qi (chi) that embodies a certain permanence, resonance, and transcendence.

Un-interrupted Voice (1998) Chen Zhen, Un-interrupted Voice, 1998, chairs, wood, cow Based on the amalgamation of a chair with a drum, Un-interrupted hide, string, chain, 86 x 122 x 37 cm. Courtesy of Faurschou Voice produces a new object of artistic, cultural, and therapeutic value. Foundation, Beijing. Considering drumming to be a healing and purifying activity, Chen Zhen affirms that “Art has the same function as medicine.”8 The piece conveys the historical importance of the drums in human cultures, given that the drum is the most primitive and culturally common musical instrument known to humanity. The ritualistic practice of drumming is combined with the act of sitting, both of which are conveyed through the cross between drums and chairs—ordinary objects that perform a social function involving groups of people and their congregation.

On the one hand, ordinary and commonly recognized objects of human culture are employed to highlight the therapeutic value of drumming, with percussion as a recurrent theme in Chen Zhen’s work. On the other hand, these items are combined and transformed into a derived object; that is, brought into existence by recycling an already existing thing, or an après-objet (post-object), that entails a new use and view, as well as a new understanding, regenerating the cultural and symbolic significance of the objects from which it is made.9 Chen Zhen explains that “the object is a ‘child of man’. It is produced, consumed discarded, salvaged, exhibited, preserved, mummified,

32 Vol. 12 No. 1 set apart. . . . It is taken in its natural, cultural and economic, symbolic and artistic cycles . . . I am trying to create a new fate for the object, a new development in its history . . . New cycles. . . .”10 In the process, Chen Zhen’s art turns ordinary found objects into artifacts that accrue an artistic and cultural value transcending their basic utilitarian purposes.

Chen Zhen, Les textes de la lumière/La lumière des textes, 1992, metal, Plexiglas, glass, neon, pigment paste, Letraset, found objects, 190 x 140 x 31 cm. Courtesy of Faurschou Foundation, Beijing.

Les textes de la lumière/La lumière des textes (1992) With its glass windows illuminated by a red neon light, the cabinet installation Les textes de la lumière/La lumière des textes holds several “found objects” in paper ash, including items such as an old-style typewriter, a telephone, a television set, an alarm clock, a camera, a radio, and other electronic devices that characterize the technological development of the last century. Special attention is given to the audiovisual field. The see- through glass allows us to view each of these carefully ordered objects as if they were meant to be conserved for posterity.

This work involves the recurrent theme of the après-objet found in many of Chen Zhen’s artworks.11 Using post-objects, he places defunct technological devices in the ash from newspapers, photographs, and other paper media, to contrast humanly made objects with natural byproducts. Objects such as the ones used in this piece share the common trait of being consumer products that eventually become useless either due to malfunction or by going out of style. Similarly, the use of newspapers reflects a consideration for the

Vol. 12 No. 1 33 ephemeral nature of these objects produced by consumer-driven societies, and used and discarded on a daily basis. Chen Zhen’s art enables objects such as newspapers to endure and to acquire a larger ontological meaning than the one ascribed to them based on their original quotidian use.

Short-circuit (1999) Chen Zhen, Short-circuit, 1999, hair, electric plug, 63 x 8.5 In Short-circuit long strands of cm. Courtesy of Faurschou Foundation, Beijing. black hair are seen emerging from an electrical plug connected to a jack in a wall. The piece is a cross between two unusually paired objects—an electrical plug and human hair—that forms yet another object. Plugged into an electrical socket, Short-circuit is a subtle piece, not easily noticeable at first glance. However, the work’s physical proportions and boundaries open it up to a wide set of interpretations. It is not easy to determine if this work includes the outlet to which it is attached, and given that it is literally plugged into the wall, one even begins to imagine that this wall becomes part of the artwork as well.

Given its ability to continue into the wall, Short-circuit seems to “connect” with the environment and thus incorporates the surroundings into its domain by prompting us to consider everything attached to it as a part of the actual work. In this regard, Chen Zhen notes that “In today’s creation, not only should we consider the problem of expanding the concept of artistic works, but also develop the cognition of the scope and implications of the context.”12

Short-circuit embodies a concept by the same name that Chen Zhen elaborates in his practice. For the artist, the short-circuit as a concept refers to the electrical phenomenon when “two opposite electrodes meet: irrelevant, yet from the same electrical circuit,” which in the artistic process is translated into the creative outburst that goes into making art. The creative artistic process is thus driven by a short-circuit that Chen Zhen explains, stating that “every time an artist runs across different contextual factors, he will feel—in varying degrees, scopes, and measures of power— conflicts, dialogues, and a ‘call from time and space’ or a transformation of each other. In short, he will experience the ‘short circuit’ phenomenon.”13 In this work, Chen Zhen emphasizes the connection between art and environment representing them as corresponding parts of a whole.

Un village sans frontières (2000) A collection of ninety-nine children’s chairs, gathered from many countries and used to support candle houses that hang side-by-side on a wall, make up the full set of works in Chen Zhen’s Un village sans frontières. Two such

34 Vol. 12 No. 1 Left: Chen Zhen, Un village sans frontiers, 2000, chair, candles, 64 x 60 x 37 cm. Courtesy of Faurschou Foundation, Beijing. Right: Chen Zhen, Un village sans frontiers, 2000, chair, candles, 63 x 33 x 31 cm. Courtesy of Faurschou Foundation, Beijing.

representative pieces from this body of work were shown in the Faurschou show. This piece ties together a theme of multicultural and international resonance with the innocence of childhood to reflect on “equality, community, tolerance and mutual understanding, coexistence” for “a dialogue without frontiers.”14

Apart from the use of candles and candlelight as symbols of the “life of an individual” in Chinese culture, the use of fragile and malleable materials such as wax, combined with small, sturdy wooden chairs, creates a sense of uniformity in the work even though each wax arrangement on each chair is different (in colour and pattern). The collection of chairs represents the similarities and intricate differences between human cultures, societies, individuals, and communities as they come together in the human enterprise.15

Fragility in this work is underlined by the use of wax and wood, materials that are both, yet differently, susceptible to fire. This instantiates the vulnerability of our human condition and the delicacy of the various belief systems cultures and societies strive to uphold, especially when these involve all of us, in multicultural and globalized world.

Chen Zhen, Exciting Delivery, Exciting Delivery (1999) 1999, metal, bicycle wheels and inner tubes, toy cars, A great mass precariously perched on paint, 250 x 130 x 135 cm. Courtesy of Faurschou bicycle wheels, Chen Zhen’s Exciting Foundation, Beijing. Delivery is a black rubber sculpture made from bicycle tire tubes that are interwoven and covered with black toy cars. The toy cars seem to erupt from the interwoven tire mass so that it looks like a rotting organ or a massive insect carcass being pierced by hundreds of antlike black forms. Describing this piece, Chen Zhen recounts: “I come from a country of bicycles. I remember that, during my childhood, I repaired voluntarily the

Vol. 12 No. 1 35 Chen Zhen, Exciting Delivery (detail), 1999, metal, bicycle wheels and inner tubes, toy cars, paint, 250 x 130 x 135 cm. Courtesy of Faurschou Foundation, Beijing.

bikes of passers-by in front of our house in order to become ‘a good student and a good citizen’.”16

This ecologically concerned work meditates on the future of China. Chen Zhen once stated that “during a trip to China several years ago, I saw a government slogan: ‘By the year 2000, 100,000,000 Chinese will have their own cars. China welcomes the competition of automobile industry’.” Impacted by this advertisement, Chen Zhen, through his work, wonders, “isn’t this parturition ‘from bicycles to cars’ a metaphor of this ambition or future catastrophe?” Hence, Chen Zhen asks, as he elaborates this work, “how far are we going to go with our material desires in the presence of so many ecological problems?”17

Six Roots/Memory (2000) Chen Zhen, Six Roots/Memory (detail), 2000, fabric, iron, ink, Relying heavily on Buddhist 300 x 400 x 200 cm. Courtesy of Faurschou Foundation, philosophy, Six Roots/Memory takes Beijing. its understanding of the “main senses” of the human body from the customary five senses to the sixth sense of consciousness or “knowing.” The piece thus involves this borrowed notion to evoke six stages of the human condition that start with Birth, Childhood, and enter into Conflict and Suffering, and end with Memory and Death-rebirth. At the Faurschou Foundation exhibition in Beijing, Memory was displayed individually without the other five “roots,” and consists of a hodgepodge of stitched clothes and cloth from different parts of the world with messages and signatures scribbled on it by international people. “Memory” is exhibited as hanging from the ceiling in a yin-yang shape. Like many of his works dealing with cross-cultural relationships, this work projects a collective human presence in elaborating a metaphor for the fifth stage (Memory) in human development.

36 Vol. 12 No. 1 Chen Zhen, Six Roots/Memory, 2000, fabric, iron, ink, 300 x 400 x 200 cm. Courtesy of Faurschou Foundation.

Memory is presented as preserved and recorded through writing upon used clothes that had been discarded and were then donated for the creation of the piece. Again the idea of the “post-object” comes into play in creating a cross- cultural artwork that embodies a sense of community, unity, and collective memory. Regarding Memory, Chen Zhen explains: “‘Nothing exists by chance’ . . . It was after visiting the Zagreb MOCA space with its sequence of six rooms interconnected by doors that I conceived Six Roots. This space has a human dimension, which also made me think of a series of organs: a body in six parts, a life in six stages. . . .”18 In this way, we again see the deep interconnection of ideas undergirding the various elements of Chen Zhen’s practice.

Chen Zhen, Le bureau de Le bureau de change (1996–2004) change, 1996–2004, wood, metal, water, coins, glass, light, Taking the external form of a 290 x 367 x 423 cm. Courtesy of Faurschou Foundation, wooden room, Le bureau de change Beijing. is an installation constructed like a typical Chinese public toilet joined with a foreign exchange bureau. This room is divided into a men’s and women’s section, with the Chen Zhen, Le bureau de middle partition where water flows change (detail), 1996–2004, wood, metal, water, coins, constantly, filled with coins that are glass, light, 290 x 367 x 423 cm. Courtesy of Faurschou rusting away beneath flowing water. Foundation, Beijing. This intermediary space in the room represents the part of the public toilet where urine would normally flow towards its disposal. Chen Zhen produces a metaphor of public exchange intersecting rusting coins (money) with human waste (urine), thus projecting the unhygienic and unclean nature of money. In this respect, both urine and currency are presented as private matter that passes into a public space and in doing so is exchanged and interchanged to produce new symbolic meaning.

Vol. 12 No. 1 37 La désinfection (1997) Chen Zhen, La désinfection, 1997, hot plates, aluminum The installation La désinfection pots, bamboo steamers, books, 100 x 120 x 42 consists of Chinese steam cookers cm. Courtesy of Farschou Foundation, Beijing. arranged on top of one another and connected to gas stoves below the cookers. Within the stack of Chinese steam cookers, books are being cooked. The work focuses on cooking as a medical practice of disinfecting and purifying. Simultaneously, the work provides an alternative metaphor for the various meanings of nourishment and consumption. Like food, knowledge and information are devoured, consumed, digested, and absorbed. In a parallel process, both knowledge and information can produce both positive and adverse effects on the body, mind, and spirit. Food and books are equated as sources of nutrition to be consumed. Similarly, the body and the mind are nurtured respectively by food and knowledge.

Transculturation and cultural hybridity A variety of Chen Zhen’s works address modernity, the advent of consumerism and consumer-driven societies, and the dominance of “Western capitalism,” as Hou Hanru points out.19 Works such as Les textes de la lumière/La lumière des textes, Exciting Delivery, and Le bureau de change construct signs that integrate China with the Western world. Works such as Les textes de la lumière/La lumière des textes address the vacuum of consumerism by introducing the post-object, a key motif in the artist’s repertoire used to produce alternative and extended life cycles for ordinary things that are transformed from items of everyday use to objects of art by Chen Zhen’s artistic interventions.20 Exciting Delivery considers the repercussions of the excesses of consumerism, Westernization, modernization, and status quo with the widespread growth of the automotive industry in China and its subsequent impact on the environment as local populations shift from riding bicycles to driving cars. Similarly, Le bureau de change reflects the scatological aspects of late-modern capitalism with its proliferation into the “non-Western” world by intersecting two unrelated sites, a foreign exchange bureau and a Chinese public toilet.

A central preoccupation expressed by these works is the conflicting nature of the encounter between East and West, the advances of capitalism, and the proliferation of a Western modernity that promotes consumerism amid “the reality of global geopolitical restructuring.”21 Indeed, a deeper look into the role of conflict in the work establishes transculturation at the center of these larger concerns. According to the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, transculturation is a set of processes by which aspects of a foreign and dominant culture transfer and mix into a host and recipient culture,

38 Vol. 12 No. 1 in a majority of cases in a conflictive manner, thereby governing the more susceptible one.22 In Chen Zhen’s artworks, however, transculturation is a harmonizing and hybridizing force that integrates differences, intersecting them synergistically within the artwork. Chen Zhen actively produces signs and metaphors that derive from both Western and Chinese (Eastern) aesthetics. In doing so, he engages a Western problematic through an Eastern philosophy, and vice versa, to create an in-between space of contemplation from which to mediate the reality inscribed in his artwork.

When asked by critic Zhu Xian, “Is your world China or the West?” Chen Zhen responds “Somewhere in between.”23 Chen Zhen’s ability to create “in-between” heterotopic art relieves tensions and conflicts of the “East- West” dialectic that are addressed in many of his artworks. He recognizes, for example, that although “the modernization of Asia has some unique characteristics, nevertheless, this type of modernization is brought about by overlapping foreign things over Asia’s own traditional culture, rather than being evolved purely from the internal logic of Asia’s own traditional culture.”24 In this regard, Chen Zhen’s artistic practice demonstrates the necessity to find harmony and balance in the cultural hybridity that surfaces in the topics his art addresses and that responds to the process of transculturation at play in a world of geopolitical and postcolonial inequalities. As such, a second, better fitting definition of transculturation by Ortiz applies well to Chen Zhen’s artistic practice and artwork: “Transculturation is a set of ongoing transmutations; it is full of creativity and never ceases; it is irreversible. It is always a process in which we give something in exchange for what we receive: the two parts of the equation end up being modified. From this process springs out a new reality, which is not a patchwork of features, but a new phenomenon, original and independent.”25 Ortiz concludes that the last step in transculturation is the possibility of harmony, which is precisely what is both pursued and embodied in many of Chen Zhen’s works.

Synergy as “Energy-gathering” In several of Chen Zhen’s artworks, cultural hybridity and transculturation are facilitated through a process of “synergy.” According to Chen Zhen, “‘synergy’ in fact is a medical term” that “describes the coordinating functions and synthetic capacities of the different organs in the human body or that of various medicines.”26 Yet the artist allows for a broader interpretation of the word “in its various implications and connotations to the artistic context in connection with such questions as how to absorb the nutrition of various cultures, how to assimilate different inter-disciplinary thinking modes, how to gather multi-cultural energy and capacities from different backgrounds.” In this sense, synergy becomes a “mode of thinking” in a “networked context” as it places “one thing in the context of another,” thereby developing a “common language” to consider things “in the contexts of” their “background factors.” Moreover, Chen Zhen applies “synergy” as a form of “energy-gathering” in his artistic process in such a way that he transforms the artwork itself into a “field of synergy.”27

Vol. 12 No. 1 39 In works such as Même lit, rêves diffèrents, various objects are put into play with one another to create a field of synergy. A bed in a frame, infinitely rotating lotto balls, medical flasks hanging from above, and a television displaying medical treatments are brought together to create a flow of energy in a self-contained microcosm where meanings are constantly being negotiated. In Un-interrupted Voice two completely unrelated objects such as a drum and a chair are brought together to produce a new object of cultural value. The same process of synergistic amalgamation is at play in Un village sans frontières where children’s chairs are combined with candles to produce an installation consisting of a community of houses. In Short-circuit, the artist combines braids of hair with an electrical outlet and in Le bureau de change a public toilet is crossed with a foreign exchange bureau by means of an artistic synergy to give meaning to these artworks. Similarly, in each of the works in this exhibition, synergy is expressed in order to construct new objects of art with a fresh meaning, and also to combine ordinary objects that are not likely to be seen together in an unusual way to produce varied meanings, leading to a wider range of interpretations.

Transexperiencing Chen Zhen’s Art Chen Zhen once said “Nothing is self-contained, nothing is fixed.”28 Taking into account this belief, he applied the concept of transexperience to his artistic practice. The term transexperience “summarizes vividly and profoundly the complex life experiences of leaving one’s native place and going from one place to another in one’s life.”29 According to him, transexperience “is not a pure concept; rather, it is an impure empirical concept” that gathers old experiences with new ones and combines personal experiences with those of others. As such, experience is never approached as a fixed or isolated phenomenon.30 Therefore, the result of transexperiences is not merely bound to place and geography, but often includes time, both past and present.

It is apparent that Chen Zhen’s work cannot be reduced to over-simplified views on cultural hybridity, in which one culture merely mixes with another to produce something new. Recognizing that we live in a world where cultural hybridity is not free from power inequalities, domination, and hegemony, Chen Zhen began using the concept of transexperience as a means of integrating differences and inequalities as parts of a whole. The need to create harmony within the clashing of cultural forces brought about by the inequities of transculturation thus became a factor driving his work.

Through transexperience, the process of harmonization of differences and inequalities is made possible and elaborated within Chen Zhen’s artwork. We become immersed in works that are inherently multicultural and contemporary in the way they innovatively incorporate existing cultural signs to produce new signs and to construct new metaphors. By bridging time and place, Chen Zhen’s work transcends a wide range of dichotomies, including Chinese traditional philosophy and Western contemporary thought, Chinese and western medicine, Eastern spirituality and Western consumerism. In doing so, Chen Zhen achieves a rare and enduring sense of

40 Vol. 12 No. 1 contemporaneity. Still resonating across geographical boundaries decades after its creation, the import and contemplative capacity of his art overflows the boundaries of a given culture, society, or epoch, offering us a remarkably amplified view of ourselves without ever evoking a single human figure, and yet transforming us in the process. Indeed, to engage Chen Zhen’s work is nothing less than to transexperience it.

Notes 1 David Rosenberg and Xu Min, ed., “The Object, Second Nature,” in Chen Zhen: Invocation of Washing Fire (Prato-Siena: Gli Ori, 2003), 121. 2 Founded in Copenhagen twenty-five years ago, Faurschou opened its capacious 1,000-square-metre Beijing space in 2007 and soon thereafter transitioned from commercial gallery to foundation, with a growing presence in the Asian art world. Its new 1,500-square-metre space in Copenhagen was recently opened with the solo show Cai Guo-Qiang: A Clan of Boats. 3 David Rosenberg and Xu Min, ed., “Life Project: Becoming a Doctor,” in Chen Zhen: Invocation of Washing Fire, 312. 4 Faurschou Foundation, “Chen Zhen: Même lit, rêves diffèrents,” Faurschou Foundation, http://www.faurschou.com/work-descriptions-chen-zhen-exhibition/about-artwork-m%C3%AAme- lit,-r%C3%AAves-differents-by-chen-zhen.aspx. 5 Ibid. 6 David Rosenberg and Xu Min, ed., “Life Project: Becoming a Doctor,” in Chen Zhen: Invocation of Washing Fire, ed. David Rosenberg and Xu Min, 400. 7 David Rosenberg and Xu Min, ed., “From Energy to Synergy: A Conversation Between Chen Zhen and Zhu Xian,” in Chen Zhen: Invocation of Washing Fire. 8 David Rosenberg and Xu Min, ed., “Life Project: Becoming a Doctor,” in Chen Zhen: Invocation of Washing Fire, 352. 9 ADAC—Association des Amis de Chen Zhen, “Mots Clefs,” ADAC—Association des Amis de Chen Zhen, http://chenzhen.org/francaise/page.php?id=40. 10 David Rosenberg and Xu Min, ed., Chen Zhen: Invocation of Washing Fire, 108. 11 ADAC—Association des Amis de Chen Zhen, “Mots Clefs,” ADAC—Association des Amis de Chen Zhen, http://chenzhen.org/francaise/page.php?id=40. 12 ADAC—Association des Amis de Chen Zhen, “’Short Circuit’ as a Creative Method,” ADAC— Association des Amis de Chen Zhen, http://chenzhen.org/francaise/page.php?id=32. 13 Ibid. 14 Chen Zhen, Field of Synergy (Prato: Gli Ori, 2001), 93. 15 Ibid. 16 David Rosenberg and Xu Min, ed., “Transexperiences,” in Chen Zhen: Invocation of Washing Fire, 249. 17 Ibid. 18 David Rosenberg and Xu Min, ed., Chen Zhen: Invocation of Washing Fire, 312. 19 David Rosenberg and Xu Min, ed., Chen Zhen: Invocation of Washing Fire, 24. 20 ADAC—Association des Amis de Chen Zhen, “Mots Clefs,” ADAC—Association des Amis de Chen Zhen, http://chenzhen.org/francaise/page.php?id=40. 21 David Rosenberg and Xu Min, ed., “Chen Zhen, An Extraordinary Adventure into the Realm of Synergy,” in Chen Zhen: Invocation of Washing Fire, 25. 22 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 23 ADAC—Association des Amis de Chen Zhen, “The Cultural Bank of Genes: Revitalizing the Past and Enlivening the Present,” http://chenzhen.org/francaise/page.php?id=32. 24 David Rosenberg and Xu Min, ed., “Transexperiences,” in Chen Zhen: Invocation of Washing Fire, 178. 25 GIRA: Interdisciplinary Research Group on the Americas, “Transculturation and Cultural Hybridity: The First Encounter, Fundamental Component of Transculturation Processes,” http://www.gira.info/ en/about-us/research-questions-and-key-notions/transculturation-and-culturalhybridity. 26 Chen Zhen, Field of Synergy, 116. 27 Ibid., 117. 28 David Rosenberg and Xu Min, ed.,“Transexperiences,” in Chen Zhen: Invocation of Washing Fire, 150–53. 29 ADAC—Association des Amis de Chen Zhen, “Interviews,” http://chenzhen.org/francaise/page. php?id=32. 30 David Rosenberg and Xu Min, ed., “Transexperiences,” in Chen Zhen: Invocation of Washing Fire,150–53.

Vol. 12 No. 1 41 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky Wang Qingsong’s Use of Buddhist Imagery (There Must Be a Buddha in a Place Like This)

he re-creation of Buddhist icons is a recurring theme in Wang Wang Qingsong, Thinker, 1998, C-print, 180 x 90 cm. Courtesy Qingsong’s body of work; they appear in some of his earliest efforts of the artist. Tand continue into his most recent. Incorporating Buddhist motifs is not rare in contemporary Chinese art;1 most notable among Chinese artists using them is Zhang Huan who, since 2002, has been creating sculptures that in title and subject elicit this icon.2 Zhang Huan recreated fragments of the Buddha in large scale and experimented with a wide variety of materials—in 2006 he cast in copper a limb of a colossal Buddha, and in the following year he made Buddha heads out of incense ash; Zhang Huan’s Buddhistic work has also been discussed in an article written for this journal by Amerila Mariani.3 In contrast to Zhang Huan, however, Wang Qingsong has not taken Buddhist vows nor does he identify himself with Buddhism. Rather, the number of works in which Wang Qingsong employs Buddhist images represents his changing attitude towards Buddhism in particular, and religion in general, within the context of the dramatic social evolution that has taken place over the last two decades in China. Wang Qingsong’s works are also a response to the renewed role of religion in China since the liberalization policy of the 1980s. To consider his works from this perspective also affords a view of his artistic evolution. Looking at these images alongside the artist’s writing about them, and the information gleaned through multiple interviews I had with the artist in his Beijing studio and elsewhere,4 reveals the artist’s attitude not only toward the revival of this ancient religion, but also toward the role of religious practice in China.

As early as 1998, Wang Qingsong appropriated the characteristics of a typical Buddhist icon to create a self-portrait. Like most of his works, these photos are large in scale. Wearing green-striped bathing trunks, but otherwise naked, in Thinker the artist is seated in a cross-ankle position, his hands held before his chest, crossing one palm over the other. With his head inclined, he looks upward, reverently. Most significant for the reading of the image are the quasi-Buddhist posture and the green cabbage leaves that replace the traditional base of lotus leaves. Emblazoned on his chest is the McDonald’s golden arches and logo. Occupying the background is a blurry nocturnal urban scene, like a photo taken from a fast-moving vehicle. To begin to understand the work, it is useful to consider to what Wang Qingsong has written:

In food, it is well known that McDonald’s and Pizza Hut are just fast-food stores in Europe and America, nothing more than convenience. However, when they came into China,

42 Vol. 12 No. 1 Vol. 12 No. 1 43 they became the top cuisine and hot rendezvous for people to have parties, invite friends, celebrate birthdays and meet lovers. On the surface, this phenomenon of going after what is Western style represents an ideal for Euro-American materialistic life. But in such an era of globalization, does this ideal also represent worship that can create a lot of ridiculous contradictions? With this thinking, I created many photographic works including Thinker (1998), Prisoner (1998), Catcher (1998), Requesting Buddha series (1999), Can I Cooperate with You? (2000), Look Up! Look Up! (2000), Bath House (2000), Forum (2001), and Beggar (2001).5

The comment above, like the image, touches upon several issues. First and foremost is the subject of food. Chinese cuisine is important both as daily pleasure and as a source of national pride. It is so fundamental to the culture that the way to say “How are you?” is “Have you eaten?” Thus, in the 1980s and 1990s, when Western food chains became increasingly popular, they were perceived as a threat to Chinese culture, much as they once had been in France. The introduction of Western fast food chains stimulated fierce competition for the traditional Chinese restaurant. Criticism of the fast food phenomena in the West was not only directed to the health aspects of the food that was served, but included the charge that such restaurants were destructive to the integrity of families, for they replaced the leisurely communal meal that bound together friends and family through common experience and shared conversation.6 However, James L. Watson has pointed out that, ironically, in China fast food restaurants seem to be an antidote for the new problems of urban isolation caused by the small size of the nuclear family and the large population of elderly single retirees who gather for companionship there.7 In his statement, Wang Qingsong expresses his belief that adulation of Western commercial enterprise is problematic, noting in particular the disparity of their status in the West and China—the cachet of fast food restaurants has transformed them into trendy spots, leaving the Chinese open to Western ridicule. By way of explanation of this craze, Yunxiang Yan described how the fast food chains’ friendly service, modern technology of food production, and concerns for hygiene made them a more modern and desirable destination for eating out than local Chinese restaurants.8 The upscale appeal is such that in Hong Kong, McDonalds even has a wedding package.9

Although all of these issues are interesting to consider, the question here is why a Buddhist-type image is the vehicle of this message? Such appropriations of art to prior periods of history may be seen within the context of other works by Wang Qingsong, which often look back to examples of art of the past as in his famous re-creations of images of the Cultural Revolution from 1997, Old and Young Soldiers and Take Up the Pen, Fight to the End.10 By employing the Buddhist image and juxtaposing it with products of commercial enterprise, Wang Qingsong creates a sense of transgression, of defilement. Secondly, his mock reverential expression in the photo conveys China’s apparent infatuation with the “brand.” Moreover,

44 Vol. 12 No. 1 there is a sense of anachronism created by the blurry background behind the posed figure—one represents fast-paced progress, the other what will be transformed in the “great march forward.” Thus, here, the Buddhist image of the meditative figure represents the innocence of China succumbing to the blandishments of Western taste and new social conventions.

Wang Qingsong, Old and New Before progressing on to the other Soldiers, 1997, C-print, 180 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist. examples, a short discussion of the role of Buddhism may be helpful. The form of Buddhism created by its founder, Shakyamuni, in the sixth century BCE, was largely one based upon meditation and aimed at releasing the self from the karmic cycle of rebirth. Within five hundred years, the religion morphed into a salvic system with a host of supra-human beings who could aid the worshipper in bettering his or her present life and even facilitating rebirth. With the success of the Communist party in 1949, all religions were outlawed, and during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the party extirpated all forms of religious practice. There were assaults on monuments of the past—temples were disassembled, icons smashed, and scriptures burned. In 1980, the government permitted worship to resume at all state regulated religious places of worship—Buddhist, Daoist, and Christian. Since that time, state funds, along with local and personal monies, have enabled the restoration of monuments, and once again Chinese visit Buddhist sanctuaries, often located in the forested mountains, to worship and seek help with daily problems.

Wang Qingsong, Pick Up the In the Requesting Buddha Series Pen, Fight Till the End, 1997, C-print, 180 x 95 cm. Courtesy No. 2 (1999), the artist has more of the artist. closely re-created the appearance of a Buddhist icon, and, in this case, it is the Bodhisattva Guanyin, who as the God of Compassion has since the Tang era been equipped with multiple arms to enhance his ability to aid the devout. Typically, the hands hold Buddhist ritual objects—a rosary, scriptures, bells, and more. In the first of the two photographs, the artist, seemingly naked, is seated in the cross-legged position, supported on a faux lotus seat composed of colorful paper foil flowers and a Coca-Cola bucket. In his eleven hands, he holds a variety of consumer objects, some imported

Vol. 12 No. 1 45 Left: Wang Qingsong, Requesting Buddha Series No. 2, 1999, C-print, 180 x 110 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Wang Qingsong, Requesting Buddha Series No. 1, 1999, C-print, 180 x 110 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

from the West—a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, a CD, a fist full of dollars, a garish trophy, the Chinese national flag, a cell phone, a golden cup, a photo of this work, and a box of camera film. The image is a fanciful recreation of a Buddhist icon and, clearly, there are many inconsistencies with traditional iconography, most notably, the number of arms—eleven (Buddhist deities always have an even number of arms), the modern products held in the hands, and the bowtie, an accessory of formal Western attire.

The second image differs significantly, for the artist has montaged his head onto a female figure and provided her an additional six arms. She stands in a one-legged stance atop a large, artificial, brilliantly green cabbage. The fully exposed frontal posture suggests vulnerability on the part of the icon. The hands hold a can of Coca-Cola, a golden bowl, cell phone, a toy, gun, a trophy, a jar of instant coffee, and a knife. Placed across the figure’s chest is the Coca-Cola logo. In the artist’s words:

As the quintessence of Chinese traditional culture, Buddhism has accompanied Chinese civilization for thousands of years. It brings comfort and fortune to the people, inspires their soul and enlightens a responsibility for having good relations with others. This Buddha used to set its goal to save the suffering through self-devotion. However, in the current commercial society, the respectable Buddha has also been changed. It reaches out its hands insatiably for money and material goods towards every troubled person. The Requesting Buddha Series (1999) is the faithful representation of such a phenomenon, overflowing with desires, hypocrisy, and exaggeration.11

The function of the original objects in the deity’s hands—ritual objects, scriptures, etc.— was to help the faithful, but, here, in Wang Qingsong’s explanation, these are now objects of desire avidly sought by the deity. That is, the religion itself has been corrupted by the commercialism of its

46 Vol. 12 No. 1 modern context. More than that, Wang Qingsong accuses the religion of hypocrisy. Buddhism, represented by the statue, is now polluted, and even its icons are bereft of their salvic function. The Buddha, here, expresses only the rapacious hunger of consumer society.

Top: Wang Qingsong, More startling is the series Preincarnation Preincarnation, 2002, three C-prints, 190 x 120 each. (2002), which differs from the previous works Courtesy of the artist. Dakini, Tibetan Style, Ming in several essential ways. First, the artist is not dynasty, 1368–1644, gilt bronze, 25 cm. Courtesy of the subject of the photo, second, the images are Capital Museum, Beijing. monochromatic, and third, the icons are clearly disfigured. In addition, the artist has provided no written statement, no diatribe explaining the nature of the work. In my conversation with Wang Qingsong, he proposed that these are gods

existing in a stage prior to deification.12 The Buddhist references in this near transformation to the sacred are multiple. The figures, based on Tibetan bronze sculptures that stand on lotus pedestals, are largely naked, with an appreciable sensuality to their bodies. But, shockingly, they have sagging flesh, damaged limbs, and missing hands that are all too human in comparison to a Buddhist icon. Although these figures are bedecked in jewels, their bodies are coated in mud. And though they stand in yogic postures, they seem uncertainly balanced. Wafting up from the ground are drifts of fog, perhaps clouds of incense. Arranged as a trinity, with two females flanking a central male, all three deities are of the same size. And the miniscule worshippers flanking the two goddesses exhibit an extreme contrast in scale that lends the deities a grandeur and spirituality. These worshippers, dwarfed by the icons, wear the clothes of labourers—a sleeveless T-shirt and green shorts, the figure on the left has a rolled up shirt exposing his chest in a fashion often seen in rural China in the hot summer. Thus the costume identifies the worshippers as men from the countryside and alludes to the potentially important role of religion in placating the uneducated, hungry, and impoverished of the world. The worker on the left also holds what appears to be a weapon, a gun perhaps, and the one on the

Vol. 12 No. 1 47 right an ax. Ordinarily these figures would be the donors, whose beneficence granted them the honour of being present in the realm of the gods. All of these contradictions—clay-covered, deformed, and unstable deities— could well be the result of the corruption within modern society as Wang explained in the previous quotation. And now the gods also seemed to have suffered from warfare as evidenced by their physical damage, the result of some violent occurrence—the central deity having lost his leg now leans on a crutch, and each of them have lost a hand. This suggests the role religion often plays in the justification of warfare, which has aided and abetted destruction—but here the gods themselves are suffering the consequences. The gods, in this case, are revealed as impotent to act beyond man’s desires.

Such down-to-earth sentiments seem in keeping with the artist who began his life far from Beijing. Born in 1966 in Daqing, Heilongjiang province, Wang Qingsong, like his father, who died prematurely, worked in the mines until he decided to go to art school in 1993 when he enrolled in the Oil Painting Department of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. Deeply dedicated to communal welfare, Wang Qingsong grew up in the shadows of communism and the Cultural Revolution, and so religion was never a part of his personal experience. Yet he seems to have started out with a respectful and hopeful attitude towards Buddhism when the state began to tolerate religious practice in the 1980s. He stated in 1999, “As the quintessence of Chinese traditional culture, Buddhism has accompanied Chinese civilization for thousands of years. It brings comfort and fortune to the people, inspires their soul and enlightens a responsibility for having good relations with the other. . . .”13 In sum, in ancient times Buddhism conferred benevolence on humanity. But he contends that the religion was soon altered by the consumer wants of contemporary China, “. . . in the current commercial society, the respectable Buddha has also been changed. It reaches out its hands insatiably for money and material goods towards every troubled person.” Following Wang Qingsong’s war series of 2001, Preincarnation continues to reflect his anti-war sentiments, posing the universal question: If there are gods, why do they allow such terrible things to happen?

In Incarnation (2002), the companion piece to Preincarnation, the gods have reached their final stage of transformation which is based on the traditional Buddhist idea of gradual evolution towards enlightenment accomplished through the accumulation of good karma. Now they are seated comfortably on their lotus seats, their skin is golden, their crowns and jewels far more ornate. Evidentially, Wang Qingsong had been studying the appearance of Buddhist icons and these particular recreations are far more authentic in appearance. But the expressions on the faces of Wang’s gods, compared to the compassionate mien of a traditional Buddhist deity, are impassive, their postures stiff and withdrawn, and they seem incapable of helping mankind. At the left, one of the two tiny human devotees assumes a posture of reverence, while on the right, another appears as a tourist taking a photo. This is all too common an experience at Buddhist temples nowadays, where national, state, and local associations along with benefactors have restored temples and made them a destination that is crowded with tourists and

48 Vol. 12 No. 1 Top: Wang Qingsong, believers and well-stocked gift and food stalls that Incarnation, 2002, three C-prints, 190 x 120 cm each. support the local economy. Hastily, the faithful offer Courtesy of the artist. Right: Green Tara, Tibetan incense and kowtow three times under the watchful style, Ming dynasty, 1368– 1644, gilt bronze, 21.5 cm, eyes of temple attendants. Often freshly painted Courtesy of Capital Museum, Beijing. in gold and brilliant colors, the newly refurbished deities, sometimes nearly comic in appearance, do not fail to attract visitors.

Wang Qingsong, Offering, 2003, C-print, 120 x 230 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Wang’s growing disappointment with Buddhism begins to crescendo in a work from 2003, Offering. Here, Wang Qingsong uses a new technique in which he engages multiple actors, providing them with costumes, props, a constructed setting, and dramatic lighting, thus turning the photograph into a cinematic scenario. In this work, he has re-created a vision of local worship in the countryside. An icon of a naked golden goddess, seated upon a golden lotus base with a filigree halo rising behind her head, floats in the water; she is the focus of attention of a group of almost two dozen, nearly naked worshippers most of them women, who avidly vie to give her flowers, fruits, and other ritual offerings. As in Incarnation, the deity is impassive compared to the enthusiasm of her devotees. Moreover, the watery setting suggests the island of Puto, the island home of Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy portrayed in Wang Qingsong’s work, which as been the destination of many millions of worshippers over the centuries.14 In its restored state,

Vol. 12 No. 1 49 Wang Qingsong, Flooding, 2003, C-print, 120 x 210 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

avid devotees once again populate the idyllic island off the coast of China near Ningbo.15 Comparison can be made to another work from 2003 entitled Flooding which shares a similar aquatic composition, but here dejected naked actors—except for two clothed men—some holding onto a damaged tree trunk, look out from the composition, imploringly, in search of a saviour after a natural disaster. In the left midground of both works is the same heavily bearded man dressed in a white shirt who looks out of composition. It is not clear if this is the image of the artist himself.

Wang Qingsong’s most recent work to incorporate Buddhist motifs is Temple (2011). This work is much larger in scale than the previous ones, measuring nearly three hundred centimetres in width and depicting an enormous architectural setting populated by one hundred or so actors. At the centre of this image is the figure of the Buddha of the Future, a deity who is readily identifiable in popular culture as the smiling and chubby Buddhist saviour. In Buddhist doctrine, the coming of the Buddha marks a cosmic renewal that is preceded by a period of degeneracy; the ancients saw a perpetual decline in the quality of life—from the eras of gold, silver, and copper. Thus, since the medieval period decadence among the Buddhist monks and the lawlessness and immorality of society were anticipated as the precondition for salvation. But gradually this figure was transformed into a jolly god who symbolized the giver of good fortune and children. In Wang Qingsong’s image, this immense, nearly naked and overweight figure leans against the back wall of the temple-like setting. Surrounding him is a corona formed by innumerable golden heads that extend along the sidewalls as well. Here, the representation of the Buddha is no longer a made-up human stand-in, but an immense fabrication. Kneeling before him are naked actors covered with ash, performing the ritual homage, heads bent to the ground and lost in their abject faith.

Wang Qingsong speaks with frankness of the pervasive belief in supernatural powers. He explained how it is still so prevalent that the labourers/actors who participated in this photograph, and who for the most part happen to be Christian converts, refused to look upon the image directly. This is a compelling point, for this image is a staged creation; it has not been sanctified by Buddhist ceremony, in which priests complete the finished image then initiate its service for worship so that the deity can

50 Vol. 12 No. 1 be present in the icon for communion with the faithful. In Buddhist belief, only then is the image a proper vehicle for the god to inhabit when called upon by the worshipper. Thus an unconsecrated image has no power or efficacy; it is an empty shell. Yet for the Christian labourers hired to pose for this photograph, the image possessed the power of a pagan idol because of its similitude to a real one.

Wang Qingsong further disparages the increasingly secular role of Buddhist belief in contemporary life, and even in Chinese politics, as religious organizations are under the administration of the government. Like the Party, Buddhism is never questioned; its spiritual authority lies unchallenged. Wang Qingsong also describes what he has widely observed as an increasing laxity among the orders of monastics and their growing presence in lay society. For Wang Qingsong, this is fake Buddhism, and, he says, it is easy to recognize.

But it is the attitude towards sin that seems most egregious to him. Buddhist lore is filled with stories of conversion: the five hundred thieves, for example, who, meeting the Buddha, are instantaneously transformed into peace-loving, law-abiding members of society.16 At one time, when people heard such stories, they were prompted to avoid making future mistakes and to act with compassion. But for him this practice has been corrupted. Now, like the selling of indulgences in medieval Europe, acts of contrition and ritual offerings are enacted to make amends for immoral conduct. Successful people from all ranks of society offer donations and perform acts of penitence to accumulate good karma, for, after accumulating too many depraved acts, one must restore a balance. Although, it is their hope that their behaviour will be spiritually erased, its effects on society are not, and no social redress is pursued; thus, people act with impunity by counting on buying spiritual credits in order to restore their moral status.

Wang Qingsong consciously adopts Buddhist images as a consistent theme in his large and complex oeuvre. Looking at his works over a period of nearly two decades, one can observe a progressively critical attitude in his perception of this particular religion. In these works, he criticizes a practice that increasingly fosters a superstition that masks genuine relief for life’s problems or that allows superficial remedies for the conscience of those who forsake the common good for personal enrichment. One can also observe this through the ever more convincing portrayal of the deities, the fragile appearance or physical corruption of the icons, and the growing grandeur of the religious images in relation to its diminutive devotees, a symbol of their lowly status.

Although this work addresses the role of Buddhism in China, as a transnational artist, his observations on the role of religion in society are not limited to the context of his homeland. What started out as a statement on the innocence of a nation duped by Western commercial endeavours has become a grander statement about the blindness induced by religious belief, about the uselessness of religion to reform society and its destructive power.

Vol. 12 No. 1 51 52 Vol. 12 No. 1 Vol. 12 No. 1 53 Previous page: Wang Qingsong, Temple, 2011, C-print, 180 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Left: Buddha of the Future, Ming dynasty, 1368–1644, bronze. Courtesy of Capital Museum, Beijing.

Wang Qingsong is adamant that he is not a believer in any particular religion; these images are simply a vehicle with which he can express his feelings about contemporary society. The nakedness of the actors reflects the human condition—we enter this world naked and leave the same way. It should be said, however, that after shooting Temple, when the stage set of was being taken apart, Wang Qingsong talked of simply walking away, of leaving the remainder to his assistants, for he, too, was apprehensive of the pseudo idol.

Notes 1 See, for example, the exhibition of 2012 in honour of the Dalai Lama titled The Missing Piece (see http://tmpp.org/en/artists/) and other group shows such as Remember That You Will Die —Death Across Cultures, March 19, 2010–August 9, 2010, at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York City, (see http://www.rmanyc.org/nav/exhibitions/view/543). 2 See the artist’s Web site for these images: http://www.zhanghuan.com. See, for example, Big Buddha, 2002, wood, steel, and stone, 590 x 400 x 300 cm. 3 Amelia Mariani, “Zhang Huan’s Big Buddha Ten Years Later,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 11, no. 4 (July/August 2012), 56–62. 4 This article is the result of numerous meetings with the artist and the encouragement of his wife, Fang Zhang. 5 Citation from Wang Qingsong’s Web site from the caption to the work Thinker: See http://www. wangqingsong.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=50&Itemid=11. 6 Yunxiang Yan, “Of Hamburger and Social Space: Consuming McDonald’s in Beijing,” The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader, James l. Watson and Melissa l. Caldwell, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005): 81–103. 7 See James l. Watson, “China’s Big Mac Attack,” in The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader, 70–79. Watson also points out that the dwindling size of the family and the large single urban populations have transformed the McDonald’s experience into one of refuge in the big city. 8 Yunxiang Yan, "Of Hamburger and Social Space: Consuming McDonald's in Beijing," 85. 9 Tiffany Lam,”Would you like a wife with that? McDonald’s offers weddings—Hong Kong becomes the first place in the world to have McDonald’s wedding packages,” CNN Travel News, October 12 2010 http://www.cnngo.com/hong-kong/life/mcdonalds-hong-kong-offers-weddings-494226. 10 Images of such works are available on the artist’s Web site. http://www.wangqingsong.com/index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8&Itemid=11&lang=en. 11 For the text see the artist’s Web site: http://www.wangqingsong.com/index.php?option=com_content &view=article&id=51&Itemid=11. 12 For this image, see the artist’s Web site: http://www.wangqingsong.com/index.php?option=com_cont ent&view=article&id=70&Itemid=14. 13 For the citation see the artist’s Web site: http://www.wangqingsong.com/index.php?option=com_cont ent&view=article&id=52&Itemid=11. 14 Chen Zhen, Field of Synergy (Prato: Gli Ori, 2001), 93. 15 See a description and history of the Buddhist pilgrimage spot in Chün-Fang Yü, “P’u-t’o shan Pilgrimage and the Creation of the Chinese Potolaka,” Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China (Studies on China) eds. Susan Naquin and Chün-Fang Yü (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 190–245. 16 For a representation of the scene painted at the Buddhist cave site of Dunhuang, Gansu province, see the Web site for the Dunhuang Institute: http://enweb.dha.ac.cn/0018/index.htm.

54 Vol. 12 No. 1 Voon Pow Bartlett The “Being and Nothingness” of Han Feng1

Left: Han Feng, The Corner of mpty corridors, an eerily deserted underground tube station, stairs Tube, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 250 x 200 cm. Right: Han devoid of human existence—these are some of the paintings you are Feng, The Corner of Stairs, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 330 confronted with as you entered Han Feng’s first solo UK exhibition at x 190 cm. Installation view at E Chinese Arts Centre. Courtesy the Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester, which took place during September 13 of the artist and Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester. to October, 20, 2012. Han Feng was born and brought up during the Cultural Revolution, living his daily life in the heart of one of China’s major cities— Shanghai— and has produced a critique of profound perspicacity.2 With his exhibition, he reflects a solemnity that repudiates some popular critiques of contemporary Chinese art as being merely a search for novelty.3

The Corner of Stairs (2011), depicts a flight of some thirty steps ascending from the base of the painting. The steps are painted in a heavily diluted translucent charcoal black and are reminiscent of an ink painting on rice paper. The top of the steps narrows by about a third, halfway up the canvas, to a dead end, a distant landing surrounded by white walls and ceiling. There are no doors or windows. This is a flight of steps that leads to nowhere.

Vol. 12 No. 1 55 This ghostly, diluted colour continues Robert Ryman, Untitled, 1965, oil on linen, 28.4 x 28.2 cm. © in the rest of the paintings. The Corner 2012 Robert Ryman. Collection of Museum of Modern Art, of Tube (2012) is an almost white New York. Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser. painting, redolent of Robert Ryman. Unlike Ryman, however, it is less about discovering what can be done with white paint and substrates, and more about creating a mood. Whereas Ryman’s series of white paintings are virtually white paint on canvas, Han Feng’s paintings appear to be constructing a challenge about how to create a white painting with as little colour as possible.4 Whilst Ryman’s “real purpose of painting is to give pleasure,” Han Feng’s appears to be about instilling a wave of despondency not unlike an initial encounter with Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.5 The tiled walls, the ceiling, and the floor in The Corner of Tube are rendered using different shades of white, both warm and cold. The neutrality of white allows a heightened sense of space, an unnerving emptiness. Perhaps his intention is simply to make a painting about what the painting is about—that is, a corner of the tube, (metro), a set of stairs, a corridor, etc. However, the delicacy with which the paint has been applied on the canvas creates an unassuming scene that instills a surprising presence and an aura of discovery, of possibility. The literal title of The Corner of Tube amplifies and provokes further meaning beyond the depth of some chemical compound of acrylic mixed in with various degrees of pigments and placed on a plain woven cotton fabric, much as did René Magritte’s titling of his painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1929)—it depicted a pipe but was not about a pipe but about the illusion of painting, so Han Feng’s painting of a tube corridor was also more than the sum of the physical and the literal.

Unlike the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by photography but rejected its technology, Chinese artists have more affinities with the Futurists of the early twentieth century who welcomed new technological innovations. The invention of photography in 1839 profoundly changed the way people in Europe perceived their lives and artists their artworks. Even though “the artists rarely used photography, their paintings nevertheless revealed that they absorbed photography’s precision of focus, flattening of forms, compositional and radical cropping of the visual field.”6 Albeit, more than one hundred years later, Chinese artists wholeheartedly embraced photography, considered the saviour of contemporary Chinese art, releasing artists from the shackles of traditional painting and in some ways catapulting them from being denigrated as an analogue player in a digital world.”7 And they did not echo the feelings of the Pre-Raphaelites, that “in the machine age, beauty and spirituality had been lost, to thwart their use of photography.”8

Nonetheless, contemporary Chinese artists do share some similarities with the Pre-Raphaelites. The Pre-Raphaelites rejected history painting, those narratives of military heroism or idealized Greco-Roman scenes inhabited by languid nudes.9 Instead, they focused on intimate relationships that represented broader currents of human experience. Many contemporary Chinese artists

56 Vol. 12 No. 1 also rejected aspects of their tradition such as ink paintings that depicted idealized landscapes and are now drawn to representing their everyday lives, using quotidian images to transmit philosophical ideals. They also share in their urban environment the rampant materialism of Victorian Britain.

Han Feng uses photography for its creative potential as a starting point for his paintings, evoking a “subdued atmosphere and mood” that suggests Edward Hopper.10 Both Han Feng and Hopper can be regarded as painters of loneliness.11 They are also acute observers of vernacular urban architecture through the perspectival viewpoint of the camera lens. Many of Hopper’s paintings depict public and semi-public places, minus any human presence, leading some critics to stress the theme of solitude.12 Han Feng has a similar way of working—he takes numerous snapshots of the cityscape and then renders them into a painting that erases all traces of life. These cityscapes allude to urban entrapment and human vulnerability, suggesting that:

Everyday life is a crust of earth over the tunnels and caves of the unconscious and against a skyline of uncertainty and illusion that we call modernity. . . . [T]he unconscious is only consciousness ignoring its own laws . . . and in this respect everyday life is indeed modernity’s unconscious.13

In particular, Han Feng’s depiction of archetypal cityscapes recalls the mood of Hopper’s Chop Suey (1929), which captures a restaurant scene in which two young women are having tea, and where “Chop Suey appears to depict a view of modern life that is desolate but also matter-of-fact. The influence of consumerism on the city is depicted here by a sign outside the window.”14 The contrast of darkness inside and the light steaming in from outside emphasizes the emotional detachment of the women. Hopper’s message is made even more poignant as it was painted in 1929, the year of the Wall Street crash. One could almost imagine the two women in Hopper’s work inhabiting any of Han Feng’s paintings, painfully alone, even though they are together in a public space.

The visual spectacle of socialist China and the embodiment of the Maoist utopian longing for a full and complete life, shape much of the critique about daily life by Chinese artists. The deep utopian impulse of Maoist revolutionary culture is in contrast to the culture of Western modernity— Mao valourized an egalitarian commitment to social harmony and promoted revolutionary artwork that was perspectival and panoramic, or stylized images of happiness, while the other, the modern, actively valourizes a full and complete life, or at least one that privileges the ordinary everyday life.

Han Feng’s work depicts a tension, one in which there is a constant negotiation between the archaic and the modern, the personal and the communal. The “empty” spaces in the paintings of Han Feng are like an invasion from a spaceship insinuating itself into our front door. The lack

Vol. 12 No. 1 57 Edward Hopper, Chop Suey, 1929, oil on canvas, 81.28 x 96.52 cm. Private collection.

of human figures in his paintings, as in much of Hopper’s work, combines apparent incompatibilities—the modern in its bleakness and simplicity, and a nostalgia for the communal past of China. The facades of modernity contain miles of concrete and steel highrises with their Hollywood style entrance halls, capacious stairwells, and interminable corridors. These were not familiar surroundings for Han Feng in the years he was growing up, which might have been more akin to that captured by Marc Riboud’s photograph Suburbs of Peking (1957), that evokes a rare moment of freedom yet reveals both vulnerability and privacy. To the ordinary Chinese, the streets had been for centuries an extension of their home, their daily life. You can skulk and loiter, play and eat, toil and relax, barter and sell.15 Some fifty years on, this communal life has been reduced in large part to incarceration in highrise apartments akin to matchboxes. Street life is disappearing behind closed doors, and the open communal life of hutong and courtyard houses has turned into a ritual of watching television and the comings and goings of one’s neighbours through the peepholes of closed doors.

Indeed, Mao Zedong had a perfect understanding of the power of the spectacle within communality. Through his consummate skill, he employed mass images of solidarity, reinforced with uniforms, in which everyone wore the same the Mao suit. Propaganda art adapted itself to folk art, slogans, and portraiture, all approved by Mao.16 He capitalized upon the hysterical carnivalesque excitement of mass assemblies, such as National Day Celebrations, and he ensured that propaganda art was everywhere—sold in shops, placed in magazines, newspapers, on walls, and even on floors. The posters depicting protective deities that traditionally hung on the outside of doorways were no longer permitted and were replaced by propaganda art as decoration for people’s homes.

Perhaps Han Feng unconsciously absorbed Mao’s talent for the use of spectacle, but, instead, turned it on its head by creating an anti-spectacle. While spectacle tends to become more real and seductive than reality

58 Vol. 12 No. 1 Next page: Han Feng, 2011, itself, Han Feng’s bland and empty paintings fool us into believing another 2012, transpaper, colour prints, dimensions variable. Photo: reality—a reality where everyday life provides the overarching dialectic Han Feng. Courtesy of the artist. with its qualities of the banal, tediousness, the boring, and insignificance. He explores the everyday life of borrowed Western modernity in the daily reality of urban China. Whereas in the West, the process of modernity affirms a full human life “in terms of labour and production on the one hand, and marriage and family life on the other,”17 it also involves a process of desacralization and an acknowledgement of ordinary secular life as indispensable to modern human identity. In China, Mao’s version of modernity lacked political freedom and the affirmation of everyday life that has the capacity to lead to a rewarding lifestyle.18 Therefore, an integral part of the socialist movement in modern China has been and still is, a collective desire to resist the inertia of everyday life.

Han Feng’s paintings represent a shift from the grand themes of history and the political nature of early Chinese avant-garde art to the smaller narratives of the everyday lives of ordinary people. He interrogates how the idea of life has changed from the industrialization of an agrarian society, from an egalitarian commitment to social harmony, to one of freedom and choice in the heterogeneous life of today.19 The idea of freedom may be embraced by some modern societies as a right, but for Han Feng and his generation it is a matter of being born at the right time. They have grasped this opportunity with eagerness and allowed themselves a moment of men xin zi wen—self- examination. In doing so, they have rejected a long tradition that they perhaps are not even so well acquainted with.

The paintings in the exhibition are interpolated with an ongoing series of paper sculptures, titled 2011, made of tracing paper delicately printed with photographs of city highrises and then folded to form tall, slim, three-dimensional towers leaning limply against the wall of the exhibition space; an evocation of the city as empty and hollow. The dense network of highrises where thousands now live is reduced here to an architectural model just above human height. Buildings made of concrete, steel, and glass are rendered as something light and flimsy. This suggests a visualization of Marx’s famous dictum from the Communist Manifesto, “all that’s solid melts into air, all that is holy is profane and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.”20

Han Feng’s sanitized cityscape, a modern realism focused on everyday life in the city, again forms a powerful critique of the results of Mao’s utopian vision of urban China and the impact on its inhabitants.21 The work recounts an almost perennial building site, especially following Deng Xiaoping’s leadership, that represents an amazing metamorphosis of mass culture from its socialist past, a city cannibalized by an increasingly voracious consumerism.22 The situation is made more complex by a temporal desynchronization; that is, the many layers of life coexisting in the same time frame.23 Han Feng’s seemingly playful toy town poses a poignant question regarding the origin of China’s transformation. It is a reminder of

Vol. 12 No. 1 59 60 Vol. 12 No. 1 Vol. 12 No. 1 61 Mao’s unique endorsement of Marx’s vision of utopia—one where enemy Han Feng, 2011 (detail), 2012, transpaper, colour prints, number one of the State is the bourgeoisie, the merchant class. In Marx’s dimensions variable. Photo: Han Feng. Courtesy of the view, the bourgeoisie are the most spectacular commercial force, their artist. livelihood sustained by a zeal for accumulation that treats the world as one big market for exchange thereby creating a capitalist mode of production. Mao adopted this Marxist dogma, which fundamentally altered almost all aspects of a Confucian Chinese society, even down to the family, destroying traditional ways of life and rural civilization and leading to the creation of an enormous concrete giant of a city.

The way that Han Feng has abbreviated cityscapes into tracing paper is analogous to how many Chinese cities that were perhaps once custom-built for the emperor have been reduced to tourist destinations. The sculpture tells a story of the process of urbanization that has commodified private spaces that once represented a family’s own particular world. This socialist utopia has been referred to as a “spreading pancake,” transformed into a category of dystopia without coherence.24 Any remaining slum areas have now become a jarring blend of structures trapped within narrow backstreets of drab, low-rise, utilitarian work communes. These previously low-cost forms of housing for workers have undergone a momentous change resulting in a shift of demographics that many believe has affected the fabric of society. Although they were homes for many centuries to ordinary city populations, these forms of housing now have been deemed by the government to have passed their expiry date. Subject to constant commercial pressures for their demolishment, the government’s excuse is that they are a major embarrassment as they project an impression of latent social violence and repression and do not represent a perfect image to the world, especially during the run up to the Olympics 2008.

Han Feng is among many Chinese artists who portray this disconnection from society. Filmmaker Director Tian Zhuangzhuang’s film The Blue Kite (1991) soulfully narrates stories about these communal spaces that are now sought-after for redevelopment by powerful social and political groups, and projects the memory of a previously carefree life or at least the lively social junctions and functions of some old towns.25 For Han Feng’s generation, communality often means lack of privacy, rustic simplicity means living on the bread line, and ideology is an excuse for persecution and power. Xing Danwen’s series Urban Fictions (2004–05), also depict a model-like metropolis that echoes the shimmering steel and glass structures that have become a monument to the age of global capitalism.26 Xing Danwen’s digitally manipulated photographs of architectural maquettes for real estate developments expose the underbelly of manufacturing industries with a Hollywood aura, and reduce to a minimum the final vestiges of local community life, with a heightened sense of the discreet, often violent, human dramas. Liu Xiaodong’s The Man With Nothing To Do And The Dying Rabbit (2001) is also a dramatic allusion of modern alienation and solitude. With COSPlayers (2005), Cao Fei makes work showing people dressing up as characters from fantasy worlds as an expression of their alienation from traditional values.27

62 Vol. 12 No. 1 Born in 1972, Han Feng was part the first generation to be born and brought up in the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution. This generation was surrounded by hardship, hopelessness, jealousy, treachery, anguish, and injustice, all forms of the worst of human nature that intensifies when one is placed in a survival mode. As a child and then adolescent, he would have witnessed the cities in China develop beyond recognition. Old architecture and streets were sacrificed in pursuit of new styles. Familiar and existing spaces were carved up and rearranged to suit the government’s requirements. The feeling of a city as a living, organic, and social place became but a distant and poignant memory. The private and the public reflect “a dissociation that reveals specific social relations, those of a bourgeois society and the capitalist mode of production.”28 Traditional homes such as the hutong in Beijing have been transformed into theme parks, a kind of Disneyfication, benefitting only the construction industry, the tourists, the nouveau riche and foreign investors. The real city, the traditional city, and the homes of many, have been sacrificed to suit global rather than local requirements.29

The rest of the work at the Chinese Arts Centre appears, with humour and wit, to point to Han Feng’s philosophical entreaty, which redeems any foregone conclusion about the emptiness in his paintings and corresponds more than superficially to Sartre’s optimism about the human ability to choose what one can become. According to Sartre, it is our “self” that makes us human, that we should be able to take control of our own lives and think beyond the limitations imposed on us by our social situation and upbringing. Many critics of Sartre are skeptical of his certitude on the degree of human freedom, and they would say that feeling free is not the same as being free, and that social, political, and economic pressures are far more constraining than Sartre seems to acknowledge.30 Han Feng’s “empty paintings” seem to allude to this idea of a Sartrean freedom, which is “our ability to see things as unrealized, or as to be done, that reveals to us a world brimming with possibilities”31—in other words, to share in a belief that “existence precedes essence,” and to believe that there is no pre-existing blueprint of humanity, that we choose what we become.32

Han Feng, Clothes for Bat, Certainly, the rest of the sculptural 2012, sheepskin, zip fastener, 90 x 26 cm. Photo: Han Feng. pieces in the exhibition also have Courtesy of the artist. an air of optimistic humour. Birds made from wood and zipped up in leather casings are suspended on rods of stainless steel, hanging from the ceiling. Birds’ claws encased in Han Feng, Clothes for Bird, laced-up leather shoes are paraded 2012, leather zip fastener, metal hinge, hanging frame, on platforms as in a fashion show. 120 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Chinese Arts Centre, Bats made out of leather are Manchester. suspended near the wall. One can imagine that the inspiration for the laced-up leather shoes may have come from the ice skating rinks of

Vol. 12 No. 1 63 Harbin, where Han Feng was born. Tongue-in-cheek, or, indeed, seriously, Han Feng, Shoes for Ostrich, 2012, sheepskin, wood, 32 x Han Feng seems to ask: Are we as lucky as bats or as unlucky as these birds 18 x 15 cm. Photo: Han Feng. Courtesy of the artist. incarcerated with leather?33 Both Sartre and Han Feng, it would seem, are motivated by life as it is lived and felt.34

To be a painter of everyday life invariably involves a degree of solitude in order to observe, reflect, and to endure the often painstaking time required to make paintings that can convey one’s thoughts.35 Although there is a sadness and melancholy in Han Feng’s work, the nothingness alluded to in the paintings does not denote a void but, rather, a search for a deeper meaning, a meaning of life that prompts a Sartrean existential quality.36 Perhaps the resonance of this Sartrean concept offers solace and hope; as consciousness is always about a consciousness of something and therefore nothingness is the experience of recognizing that something is absent, not that nothing is there—that would be hopelessness. So, these “empty” paintings are Han Feng’s narration of his life, not about how to live, but about what it is like to live, about hope and the human predicament.37

Notes 1 This title refers to Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). 2 Jiehong Jiang, ed., Burden or Legacy, discusses whether the consequence of the Cultural Revolution was a burden or a legacy. From the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 1–32. 3 Chinese critic Pi Li commented that the relationship between art and society in China today has now become simply a search for novelty. See Carolee Thea, "Cao Fei, Global Player: One on One," Art Asia Pacific, Fall 2006, 66. 4 "Abstractions," Deidre Adams, September 19, 2012. 5 Ibid. 6 Brochure text for Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (London: Tate Modern, 2012), 8. 7 The term used by a character who played a consultant in the movie Oceans 13 to Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

64 Vol. 12 No. 1 8 Brochure text for Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, 3. 9 Ibid., 5–6. 10 Carter Foster, curator of drawings at the Whitney Museum, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts- entertainment/art/exhibit-reveals-intrigue-behind-painter-hoppers-us-realism-2017627.html. 11 A characterization Hopper is disputed, http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-artists/edward- hopper.htm. 12 “With Hopper the whole fabric of his art seems to be interwoven with his personal character and manner of living.” Charles Burchfield, http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hopper.html. 13 Tani E. Barlow, “Pornographic City,” Chaohua Wang ed., One China, Many Paths (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 185–190. 14 http://chopsueyhopper.blogspot.co.uk. 15 Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment (London: Abacus, 2006), 123. 16 “Staying at the Top: Mao and the Art of Management,” The Economist, December 22, 2007, 122–4. 17 Charles Taylor, in Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern, The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 280. 18 Goldstein sees the political situation through the bamboo food basket. His definition of “common people,” ie., the workforce, the shangban zu (“go to work clan”), which is made up of the majority of the masses in China, is that they do not have a full social life, as they have to work to make a living, in other words, their daily working hours occupy most of their daily energy and productive hours. Joshua L. Goldstein and Madeleine Yue Dong, eds., Everyday Modernity in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 191. 19 Tang, Chinese Modern, 280. 20 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 331–62. 21 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 89. 22 Tang, Chinese Modern, 3. 23 A. Dirlik and Zhang Xudong, eds., Postmodernism and China (Durham and London: Duke University, 2000), 126. 24 Hou Hanru’s paper, “The Expanding future,” from my notes taken at the conference on Soldiers at the Gate open forum on “Hutong and the City of Beijing, The Historic Centre—Protection and Development,” Beijing, May 19, 2006. 25 Tian Zhuangzhuang’s film, The Blue Kite (1991) evoked, in almost real time, the everyday life of a Beijing hutong. The painfully meticulous narration brought to life the political and social upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s. 26 Gao Minglu, ed., The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art (Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2005), 323. 27 Cao Fei uses fantasy work to represent political agitation and to address socially disenfranchised groups. See Carolee Thea, “Cao Fei: global player—One on One,” 66. 28 Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, and Eleonore Kofman, Henri Lefebvre, Key Writings (Harper and Row: New York and London, 2003), 156. 29 Zhang Zhijun summed up in “Civil, Civility and Civilisation,” Beijing’s priority as being about building a real modern city and society. From my notes on Zhang Zhijun’s talk at the Soldiers at the Gate Open Forum titled “Hutong and the City of Beijing, the Historic Centre—Protection and Development,” Beijing, May 19, 2006. 30 Nigel Warburton, Philosophy: The Classics (London: Routledge, 2001), 226. Social political and economic pressures are far more constraining than Sartre seems to acknowledge. 31 Ibid., 220–21. Not to admit to free will is what Sartre calls self-deception. 32 Ibid., 218. 33 In the Chinese script, the second of the two words to denote bat is fu (bianfu), and it also shares the same pronunciation (although not the same tone) as “good fortune.” Bats also hang upside down, and the Chinese word for being upside down, dao, also has the same pronunciation (not the same tone) as the word meaning “arrived.” Many Chinese people hang the word fu (good fortune) on red paper upside down on the wall, to hasten the arrival of good fortune. 34 Warburton, Philosophy: The Classics, 219. 35 http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-artists/edward-hopper.htm. 36 Warburton, Philosophy: The Classics, 219. Sartre characterizes human consciousness as a gap at the heart of our being, a nothing. Concrete nothingness is experienced when we recognise that something is absent. 37 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 222.

Vol. 12 No. 1 65 Nikita Yingqian Cai and Carol Yinghua Lu Curatorial Inquiries 12

What of a History? Nikita Yingqian Cai For this version of our discussions in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and the twelfth round of Curatorial Inquiries, an ongoing discussion of curatorial texts and issues between Carol Yinghua Lu and myself, I am recommending an essay by Christian Rattemeyer that was published in the fourth issue of The Exhibitionist.1 In his witty but honest introduction to the essay, Rattemeyer shares with us two of his failed attempts to submit a dissertation on the topic of exhibition history, and he remains a Ph.D. candidate because his scholarly approach to the history of exhibitions is still not academically recognized. Compared with the recent fascination with curators and curatorial discourse, the lack of inquiry into the history of exhibitions at that time is seemingly beyond comprehension. In response, Rattemeyer calls for “an accepted canon of important exhibitions” and “a developed terminology and methodology of scholarly description,”2 and poses a series of questions that consolidate his proposition. Interestingly, the writing of history is always connected to the idea of the canon. History is, therefore, a process of inclusion and exclusion. Rattemeyer’s writing fills us with visions about canonization, but in the midst of writing history, one might have to stop and ask “what of a history”?

History, Why Not? Carol Yinghua Lu Curatorial Inquiries was conceived and initiated by Nikita Cai and myself in July 2011 as a regular column that appeared monthly in Contemporary Art & Investment, an art magazine published in Beijing that existed from 2007 to the beginning of 2012. Nikita Cai is a curator at Guangzhou’s Times Museum, a young institution with an active presence on the horizon of curatorial practice in China. I have worked independently in Beijing as a curator since 2005, mostly in collaboration with Liu Ding and Su Wei. In our practice as curators, Nikita Cai and I both had felt that there was a staggering absence of inquiry into and discussions about curatorial practice in China. The curator has acquired an enormous degree of power as someone who makes arbitrary decisions with respect to the inclusion or exclusion of an artist or a work of art in an exhibition, yet few, in practice, live up to the myth and prestige assigned to curators by the art system. In China, the curator fills up the exhibition space and the pages of the catalogue, but no one really knows what to expect of a curator in his or her involvement in the making of an exhibition. It is a paradoxical situation in which the curator is both highly symbolic and, at the same time, undervalued in terms of his or her professional potential and engagement

66 Vol. 12 No. 1 in both the conceptual development and the actual making of an exhibition, and in creating a context for the artist’s work through the exhibition.

The two of us view the curator as no higher or lower than the artist. A curator doesn’t rule over artists; neither is he or she subordinate to the artist. Ideally, the curator is an equal practitioner to every other role within the art system. We recognize exhibition-making as an artistic practice that is about the creativity and subjectivity of the curator as much as art-making is for the artist. In this sense, a curator, like an artist, is held responsible for and should be valued for his or her distinctive curatorial role, creative contribution to a project, and conceptual rigour.

Nikita Cai and I intended to fill the void and create an awareness of the professional role of the curator by starting a discussion about, and critical analysis of, subject matter related to and imbedded in curatorial practice. The column was devised to take the form of a dialogue. In each dialogue, we take turns in suggesting an existing piece of writing—usually a critical reflection on curating or artistic practice, often written by colleagues from around the world—as a reference for reading, and we then propose a question or make a short comment inspired by the reading of the essay. The question or comment put forward is usually tentative or provocative in order to initiate a discussion. The other one of us takes this as a starting point to write a longer text in response to such an inquiry. The response is sometimes a direct response to a certain issue; in other cases it is indirect. In Contemporary Art & Investment, where this written conversation initially appeared in Chinese, the source materials, usually written in English, would be translated into Chinese, published together with our written responses. In Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, the new home for Curatorial Inquiries, we will indicate and summarize the source of the reading material without publishing it in full. Translating these materials into Chinese was necessary because such reflections and considerations are rarely accessible in China, but in the English-language publishing context, the texts that we will be citing can usually be found online or in journals or books.

Throughout the eleven months that we have carried out this exercise of reading and writing, of reflecting on the practice of a curator in the context of the art profession as well as in the context of a certain set of specific conditions in China, we have looked at the relationship between curators and artists, which we described as one of “dancing partners” in one of our earlier reflections. We have also pondered the politics behind curating and contemplated how curating might function as a means for imagining the world. These are among many reflections that have helped us and our readers understand a little bit more about what a curator does and can do. The Chinese title of Curatorial Inquiries refers to our commitment to exploring issues surrounding curatorial practice as well as some of the problems, difficulties, and areas of confusion we’ve encountered in our own practices.

In this edition of Curatorial Inquiries, Cai and I have attempted a close look at our medium and profession, and Cai cites What History of Exhibitions?, an article published in The Exhibitionist by Christian Rattemeyer, who is the Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator of Drawings at the Museum

Vol. 12 No. 1 67 of Modern Art, New York. This journal, founded in 2010 by Jens Hoffman, formerly director of San Francisco’s Wattis Institute and now the Deputy Director of the Jewish Museum in New York, describes itself as “a journal made by curators, for curators, focusing solely on the practice of exhibition making.”1 Published twice a year, each issue of the journal invites curators and exhibition-makers to examine and analyze curatorial practice, theory, and the discipline itself closely and critically. In his short essay, Rattemeyer gives an account of his personal experience of having his proposal to write a Ph.D. dissertation on group exhibitions since 1945 rejected by the Free University in Berlin and Columbia University in New York, both of which failed to appreciate the relevance of writing a history of art exhibitions.

These events took place in 1998 and 2001 respectively, but the writer argues that even after more than a decade, the value of the history of curating in the field of art is still not fully appreciated by its practitioners and scholars alike. Rattemeyer writes that since the first broad push to move exhibition history into the forefront of art historical study, in the early to mid 1990s, and despite the flourishing of curatorial studies programs in Europe and North America in the past two decades, “the question of the exhibition is only occasionally raised, and then usually in relation to strategies of display, institutional politics, and what might be called a taxonomy of genres of exhibitions. Rarely are exhibition histories, or historical exhibitions more specifically, approached with the same degree of attention, descriptive and analytical precision, or discursive innovation.”2

Why is it so important to look at exhibition histories? How does missing such a history of exhibitions in the discourse of art today affect us? Why is the creation of such a systematic overview of past references and achievements, a trajectory of paradigm shifts in exhibition-making, a necessity today when we also try to shy away from overarching historical narratives and from establishing or reaffirming categorizations in our work so as not to overlook the complexities and nuances of individual positions and practices? Rattemeyer doesn’t elaborate at length on the sense of urgency he felt over such a lack. Yet he does distinguish exhibitions from curatorial practice in terms of what artworks are in relationship to artistic practice. In his view, exhibitions are the results of curatorial practice, which need to be looked at closely. Based on this distinction, to compile a history of exhibitions is to develop a basic structure, a common ground from which to look at and talk about exhibitions before we can make attempts to deconstruct this system of knowledge, then restructure it, rewrite it, question it, and even go against it.

I had recently been invited to speak at a one-day symposium on art history writing entitled Ways of Constructing Contemporary Art History, organized in conjunction with artist Wang Guangyi’s solo exhibition at Today Art Museum—Thing-in-itself: Utopia, Pop and Personal Theology. This exhibition is to a great extent a retrospective of Wang Guangyi’s practice from the mid 1980s to the present, which includes a new site-specific installation. Both the exhibition and the inclusion of such a symposium into the opening program pronounced an aspiration to invite critics and scholars to reconsider Wang Guangyi’s relevance to art history as well as

68 Vol. 12 No. 1 to open up a discussion on the possibility of contemporary art history writing, especially in the Chinese context. Although the symposium was attended by a number of international art critics and museum curators and was not designed to address China specifically, the discussion inevitably returned to issues in China. Participating speakers attempted to present a variety of perspectives in considering art history writing, yet there was an underlying sense of anxiety over how to write a history, how to create a historical framework and a set of coordinates with which to value and talk about works of art. Who has the right to write a history? How does an art historian approach art history writing? How does the subjectivity of the art historian play into the writing of art history? Can art history writing can be subjective and creative? Can art history writing be a legitimate form of artistic practice?

Art history in this discussion was generally perceived as a pragmatic instrument with which artists acquire their value and art historians secure their decision-making power as to what to include and exclude. Part of this anxiety has arisen from the fact that in China there hasn’t been a scholarly study or other respectable account of what has happened with contemporary art over the last three decades. The history book that is a comprehensive overview of contemporary art based on serious and thorough academic research, trustworthy value judgment, recognition and strict exercise of professional and ethical integrity has not yet emerged in China. What has been produced has often been done with a worrying sense of casualness and tinted by the omnipresent market value system. The kind of history books currently available in China fail to serve as a handbook or establish any independent value system for the history of exhibitions.

Among art practitioners in China, there is a pragmatic perception of art history as a reference point for pricing and status quo. There is no shortage of attempts to categorize art practices and the work of artists into what are generally described and accepted as “art movements” and to construct linear narratives of their emergences and the replacement of one over another. The terms that were originally coined by art critics and dealers, for whatever purpose, to summarize the practices of an artist and to help speed up the circulation of works characterized by certain aesthetic styles or ideological content have entered existing historical accounts in the general consciousness and in the vocabulary we use to discuss these works and practices. Many artists who were defined by such descriptions played along until they realized that their practices might forever be trapped in such narrow interpretations and some began to search for new ways of understanding and identifying their work.

What hasn’t been established in China, however, is not only a sense of the history of exhibitions, but also of art, through which we can view artworks, art events, and critical practices. This sense of history that I think is needed is less about a linear notion of time and events and more about a sense of connectivity, an openness and perceptiveness towards discovering how one thing is potentially linked to another from a conceptual and intellectual point of view, and not necessarily from a realistic or definite cause and effect relationship. Generally, there is a sense of distance and a

Vol. 12 No. 1 69 lack of concern for what has happened before, whether long ago or in the immediate past such as the 1990s.

Many young artists either view retrospective exhibitions, such Wang Guangyi’s, as irrelevant to them or just feel that they don’t understand his work. And many think that they know Wang Guangyi’s work well, which is exemplified by certain clichéd imagery in which he covered paintings of revolutionary figures with the logos of international brands. What many don’t know is Wang Guangyi’s other works before or after this period. Even worse, some don’t think that they need to investigate further the overall practice of an artist or the individual history of an artist’s career. Artists themselves often tend to have more interest in the works of their peers than that of artists of older generations. There is still a popular belief in masterpieces, the definitive works that establish an artist’s name, rather than thinking of artistic practice as a life-long commitment and an ongoing process.

Lacking the curiosity or desire to discover and foresee connectivity and relevance among different kinds of practices limits any artist’s vision and perception and, thus, possibilities for artistic exploration. Many younger artists are eager to dismiss the work of older generations, trying instead to break away from such practices, ones they often understand only on a superficial level, preferring instead to invent new forms and new content rather than acknowledge that their practices and thinking may have developed from such a basis. This prevents these younger generations from understanding a larger context, an artistic and conceptual history from which their practices and thinking actually have grown and to which they could potentially contribute. Pride is taken in invention, not in connectivity.

I sympathize with Rattemeyer’s identification with the absence of a history of exhibitions—an absence that keeps us from perceiving current exhibitions in relation to previous curatorial experiments and practices. I would argue that it’s equally urgent and productive for us in China to acquire a sense of history and a sense of connectivity, where everything tends to go out of fashion a bit too quickly. Today’s social temperament allows us neither the patience nor the proper time to look at our own past— immediate or remote—or a sense of time with which we can develop our practices within a historical frame of mind. As the current practitioners of art, we see little relevance in establishing the connectivity between our work and that of former generations, neither do we see the prospect of us being accounted for in the practice of future generations. The motivation to work has mostly come from a desire to shock and to impress—quickly. We need the kind of history writing that doesn’t try to show off its own power, but to put things in perspective and to make discoveries and reveal connections that are not immediately apparent or profitable from a monetary point of view. This is the kind of history that is yet to emerge.

Notes 1 The Exhibitionist Web site, www.the-exhibitionist-journal.com. 2 Christian Rattemeyer, “What History of Exhibitions?,” The Exhibitionist, no. 4 (June 2011), 35–39. 3 Ibid., 36–37.

70 Vol. 12 No. 1 Elizabeth Parke The Art of Archiving: A Conversation with Karen Smith

Jiao Yinqi installing an rom exhibitions announced exhibition in Beijing, 1994. Courtesy of Karen Smith, by fax in the early 1990s Beijing. Fto photographs of artists’ studios in Beijing’s East Village, Karen Smith’s archive is unique in its content, breadth, and scope. I visited Smith in May 2012 at her studio just north of the Forbidden City in Beijing to discuss her archive, its future and preservation, and her coterminous project of annual guidebooks As Seen (2011– 16)1 that chronicles key artworks exhibited in China. We discussed the details of her archive, how she plans to move forward with digitization, and what she sees as the role of the archive, and we reconsidered how the archive will participate in the future of contemporary art from China. With the growing role of digital humanities in the field of art history—from preserving primary documents on paper digitally, to new visualizations of archives through new digital tools, to new ways of disseminating archives— it becomes increasingly vital to understand digitization and storage plans for specific archives such as Smith’s because they offer researchers crucial access to primary documents—digitally and physically—from which alternative, under-examined, and counter-histories of contemporary art from China can be written.

Striking in our interview was Smith’s articulation of the physicality of her archive and the attendant issues of such archives, what Hal Foster terms a “recalcitrantly material” archive.2 Smith’s archive includes two-dozen large boxes of flat material—invites, photos, and negatives—while the exhibition catalogues fill close to double that number of boxes. Recent archival projects underway at the Asia Art Archive (AAA) in Hong Kong, and the publication of collected and edited primary writings in Contemporary Chinese Art Primary Documents (edited by Wu Hung and Peggy Wang) indicate a movement in the field of contemporary art from China focused on examining its past.3 Smith’s archive will significantly augment these projects by pushing this archival movement forward with new material that will in turn provide new insights and interpretations.

Vol. 12 No. 1 71 Elizabeth Parke: A personal archive, unlike an institutional archive, functions as a particular type of collection, one that is fundamentally driven by the interests and concerns of the individual. I’d like to know more about your archival process and if you can pinpoint a moment when all the ephemera associated with contemporary art—be they gallery press releases, invitations to art openings, artists’ statements—became, in your mind, an archive rather than an idiosyncratic collection of printed matter.

Brochure for Ammonal Gallery, Karen Smith: I have always been a hoarder- Beijing, 1994. Courtesy of collector. I have never been able to throw Karen Smith, Beijing. away any kind of book or personal letter, etc., and certainly nothing related to art. When I first came to China in the autumn of 1992, I had no idea how long I would remain, but I had set myself the goal of researching the contemporary art scene—the “avant-garde” as it was then referred to. Thus I held onto any materials I received, often because I was in the process of learning Chinese and knew I needed the original linguistic references for writing that I was doing. It was only several years later, when I came to move home, that I realized how much of a volume of material I was beginning to amass.

My pragmatic concern when I started collecting was to retain evidence of what felt in the 1990s to be already a very transient past that was in danger of slipping away if trace elements were not retained to capture its essence. I cannot stress enough that, despite being only twenty years ago, the 1990s was an era without mechanized recording forms, such as scanners, hard drives, digital video, and imaging. We had only basic cassette recorders, which are now totally obsolete, videocassette recorders, which were very rare, negative and positive film, and very basic computers, which really didn’t support images in any form. It felt essential to hold onto every scrap of paper—there wasn’t much printed material, either, and it felt so much more precious then than it does today.

At that time, when the art world was relatively smaller than it is today, it seemed possible to cover the range and breadth of events—most artists knew each other from one end of the country to the other—by collecting the material related to art events in China. So many materials spoke to the scene and not merely an isolated incident or phenomenon. The fact that I retained everything lends it an authority that it might not otherwise possess. It is still by no means exhaustive, but it is comprehensive.

Elizabeth Parke: Can you describe the current state of your archive, what it contains, and where you see it going as you move toward digitization? Are you continuing to add to it? Did other people’s archives influence you?

72 Vol. 12 No. 1 Karen Smith: The archive is a body of invitations, which often functioned as mini-catalogues; pamphlets that followed the same form; letters from artists; and a huge volume of photographic materials from artists that related to their works—photographs of paintings or objects taken in the spaces in which the artists worked—as well as an equally large volume of photographic materials that I took—portraits of artists, studio scenes, and artworks. There are of photocopies of invites, texts, and various forms of information that circulated at the time. There are printouts of articles that critics had given me to read; such things often circulated by hand in the 1990s. They weren’t necessarily published. I had a lot of faxes because everything was faxed in the 1990s—there were few telephones; otherwise, there was the mail. But many of the faxes no longer exist as fax paper is very unstable. Some of them survived. Although I have scanned some of them, I don’t take the originals out, as they are too fragile.

Geng Jianyi, sketch on a matchbox, 1994. Courtesy of Karen Smith, Beijing.

The problem for an archive of this nature that is in private hands is one of organization. The challenge is to design some kind of labeling system. We have to be able to parallel what’s mine in terms of photographs that I took myself, for example, with those that were provided by the artists. (At the time I was meticulous about keeping all materials pertaining to one specific artist together for practical purposes. I knew which was which at the time, but through the passing years, and due to the volume that has accrued, I no longer have the instant recollection I had then. Some of the images— photographic prints from RongRong, for example—are arguably “original” works, so these also need to be preserved and protected. It means creating lots and lots of files within files, but there also has to be some way of tagging the original materials so that we can know where they are, so that they can be accessed easily but protected at the same time.

Ultimately, the archive represents accumulation without specific parameters; the agenda was to illustrate what was happening in art in China at that time. I have not really seen any other archives that originate from this period other than that of Hans van Dijk, which was a huge inspiration to me in the early 1990s.4

Vol. 12 No. 1 73 Elizabeth Parke: I was hoping all of those things would be part of your archive because they are situated in such a unique moment of history, and these types of primary materials are so critical to current and future researchers. I try to keep whatever ephemera I come across—invitations, exhibition statements, etc., but, as you know, exhibition ephemera becomes unwieldy so quickly and is often fragile. What was your focus initially, and did it change over time? Are you still adding to the archive today?

Qian Weikang, plan for an artwork, 1994. Courtesy of Karen Smith, Beijing.

Karen Smith: As I said, when I began I didn’t really focus so much. I just kept everything. I still keep items from the present, but with the sheer volume of materials, the sheer volume of exhibitions opening across China and around the world—which was not the case in the 1990s—I don’t think they’ll have the same meaning for future research. There will be more records—since this is a digital age—because there are so many more people involved in China’s contemporary art scene today than ever before.

Elizabeth Parke: So eventually yours will be a digitized archive?

Karen Smith: It will have to be a digital archive for it to be a functional one. Some materials are too fragile to store in a general library kind of way. Then there are the photographic negatives. They become brittle and are easily scratched. We can probably keep the negatives if we can find a way of associating the negatives with the pictures. There are a lot more negatives than there are printed photographs. Some images were printed at the time for use as an aid to memory when I wrote reviews of exhibitions or

74 Vol. 12 No. 1 Press Release for an exhibition reports of studio visits. They were by Shi Yong and Qian Wei Kang at Access Artist Run also sent out as part of exhibition Centre, Vancouver, 1994. Courtesy of Karen Smith, proposals—I produced quite a few Beijing. in the second half of the 1990s. The negative strips from the photographs that I took are a bit of a mix of personal observations of China together with the art images. I’m not quite sure how to handle that overlap. Obviously, I don’t want to start cutting out the individual negatives from strips because I’m aware that there’s a context: things that seem unimportant today will be reinterpreted in the future. I might think something is uninteresting now, but it might reveal something to future generations.

Elizabeth Parke: So the rough date range of the archive is the 1990s to the early 2000s?

Karen Smith: Yes, and the most interesting section of the images is the 1990s because at that time there weren’t that many other people who where photographing studios or photographing artists’ work, so even though some of them aren’t great images, they do fix works as being in studios at certain times. This is particularly useful for anyone working on an artist’s catalogue raisonné or detailed research of an artist’s development, or even when works need to be authenticated and provenance established; the photos will be important.

Studio of Song Yonghong, Beijing, 1994. Courtesy of Karen Smith, Beijing.

Elizabeth Parke: I also wanted to ask you about the long-term plans for the archive; you mentioned an interest in donating it after digitization. Where might you envision it going, and how do you see it continuing to interact with the art community in which it’s embedded?

Karen Smith: Well, the obvious place to donate it is Asia Art Archive (AAA), in Hong Kong. It might be that by the time I get around to completing the

Vol. 12 No. 1 75 digitization here, they will have duplicates from other sources, in which case it might make sense to place some physical elements of the archive somewhere else. I came to China not as a Sinologist—I had not studied Chinese or Asian studies, etc.—and so I am not affiliated with any kind of university with a Chinese department. So there’s no alma mater that might benefit from this particular collection of materials. AAA is constantly in need of funds, as digitization is an expensive process, so I thought it might be more helpful to them for me to at least digitize it first. A digital copy of the archive doesn’t have to be with just one place; there can be more than one, so perhaps one in Asia and one in Europe or North America. Of course if it’s digital it doesn’t really matter where it is. I guess one day we might even be wondering if the original materials should be retained, but for the time being I think there’s no substitute for handling the originals in gaining a sense of time and place that can never be captured by a digital copy.

Painting by Xie Nanxing, 1994. Courtesy of Karen Smith, Beijing.

Elizabeth Parke: I was wondering if you feel it is important for the physical objects to be available to scholars, critics, and researchers either in Beijing or Hong Kong.

Karen Smith: I’d like to think that people will want to keep looking at original materials, but maybe they won’t. If you have a digital image, you can blow it up and look at all the details. So, maybe you don’t need to handle it in the same way. Any institution is going to come up against issues of storage. It’s actually an interesting point: with the increase of digitization, what happens to these actual, physical things? I think that Hong Kong would be a better place to preserve materials for the present. The skills, the funding, and the long-term interest to commit to such preservation in mainland China is not yet so obvious.

76 Vol. 12 No. 1 Qian Weikang, sketch for Elizabeth Parke: That reminds me of a recent announcement that the installation at Access Artist Run Centre, Vancouver, 1995. Number Two Historical Archives in Nanjing is closed for digitization Courtesy of Karen Smith, Beijing. of their materials. The final result will be digitization, which will be tremendously useful, but to not have access to primary material for the duration of the digitization process presents huge concerns for researchers.

Karen Smith: I think it is important that the archive be digitized in a completely neutral, non-selective way, because as soon as someone starts to be selective then history is already being edited. Selection is something that can happen after digitization. I don’t want to be selective about the history saved in this archive. Having said that, some form of selection is inevitable: I was thinking of those things that would be relevant to my research and that were going to be aides to memory as well as providing information about some aspect of the scene. The goalposts weren’t precise at the time, because I was not then conscious of an end goal. As far as the 1990s, the archive is broad in its reach. As I said, I’m something of a hoarder by nature, so I kept a lot of things. In terms of taking photographs of artists, there’s a bit of selectiveness there, but in terms of studio visits I took photographs everywhere I went, right up through the 90s. I photographed exhibitions— where possible, for the lighting conditions in many of the spaces used were not ideal, and I was not a professional photographer in terms of equipment and experience. In studios, I took photographs of the general environment because that seemed so much part of the social situation at the time; politics, economy, and social aura reflected in the artists’ living and working conditions. I took photographs of works that interested me. How to qualify what “interested” me? It was work that reflected what I experienced of life in China in the 1990s, and that brought forth many of the concerns that I had observed the artists discussing or experiencing. Since I had been looking at art for many years by that time (I had been obsessed since the age

Vol. 12 No. 1 77 of fourteen), I was drawn to work that was innovative, that was a powerful blend of craft and intent. But most of all, it was work that was true to the artist’s concerns as I understood them—all of them being very different in terms of the various artistic personalities I encountered.

I stopped taking photographs from 1998 Yin Xiuzhen installing her work at The Art Museum of to 2004. That was on the cusp of the Capital Normal University, Beijing, 1995. Courtesy of digital era, when digital cameras came Karen Smith, Beijing. onto the market, but were still not very sophisticated. The images from those cameras weren’t great—the file sizes were small and the computer software that went with them wasn’t yet up to speed for ease of use as it is today. The camera batteries were not good, either. I lost patience, and interest. Previously I had had a Nikon that I used for years and years. Then I dropped it into a lake and couldn’t find a good replacement. So I didn’t make the transition to a new camera at that time; therefore, there’s a gap in my photographic record. By comparison, though, taking pictures today feels kind of irrelevant. Everyone snaps pictures all the time, and artists are in a far better position to document their own output. There’s so much more access to images today.

Elizabeth Parke: We’ve talked about how you established your archive, contributed to it, and your plans for its future preservation. I’d like to ask you about your current projects and their relationship to your archive. I was reading about the annual guides, As Seen, you’ve been putting together since 2011—and you’re in the process of doing one for 2012.

Karen Smith: Yes, I’ve just started putting together the 2012 edition.

Elizabeth Parke: Do you see the relationship between those being a contemporaneous outgrowth of the archive? In many ways, for me, your books—Nine Lives and the As Seen guides—create a parenthetical dialogue between the archive and these more finished projects.

Karen Smith: The As Seen guides are Invitation to Beijing Berlin Art Communication archival in a way, because they are about exhibition, The Art Museum of Capital Normal University, documenting the scene from a particular Beijing, 1995. Courtesy of perspective within a specific period of Karen Smith, Beijing. time. What is interesting is the fact that it is possible today to make a book that is about art exhibited in public spaces in China, which was not the case in the 1990s. In the 1990s, a guide such as As Seen would have had to be done largely via studio visits—you would have seen a great deal more plans for the making of works than actual artworks.

78 Vol. 12 No. 1 There is a group of people who work with me to make the final selection of artist presentations to be included. I find it useful to have them as a sounding board. It helps me justify why I believe an artist’s work is deserving of inclusion and also keeps the selection as broad as possible. Since one member of the group is an artist, he/she prefers to remain anonymous. I always think it is important to have an artist’s perspective on the work of other artists, and to have that dialogue because art from an artist’s perspective is different from a curator’s perspective. But within the Chinese art scene where the concept of objectivity lacks credibility for many constituents, some choices may be dismissed for perceived reasons of conflict of interest or problematic personal relations. And it may well be hat the “committee” will change in the future. I’d like to keep the focus on what is great about the exhibition artworks that are included. It is important too to remain aware of the differences of opinion that exist between the internal view of individuals at work within the Chinese art scene, and those who work primarily in the international scene. Having lived in China for twenty years now, I have developed an understanding about art here that is largely shaped by internal views. I still write in English—because to write in Chinese would require greater literary skills than I possess—but, increasingly, there are more publications being China specific, primarily for a domestic audience. But when I look at a lot of the associations I use in describing artworks or artistic trends—either as metaphors, as references, or points of comparison that are cultural or literary—it seems to me that I have certain default settings that remind me how, ultimately, British I am. This is in terms of both habits of the English language and references to a Western framework rather than being things that are necessarily Chinese. It makes for a lot of complexity translating the texts into Chinese equivalents of the English. I do not do the translation myself, but would always work with a translator to edit the Chinese version for accuracy.

Left to right: Dong Wei, Wang Gongxin, Wang Peng, Lin Tianmiao at Wang Peng Three Day Event, Beijing, 1995. Courtesy of Karen Smith, Beijing.

But the As Seen series is really about finding a way to document what’s going on at the moment. The parameters are that the works included must have been part of a solo or group exhibition presented in any public art space—or space to which the public has access—in China. They also have to be works that were shown for the first time in China—the Chinese title fa guangti

Vol. 12 No. 1 79 references an outstanding—or shining—example (in this case of art). For example, Yang Fudong’s Close to the Sea and Revival of the Snake will be in the second volume of As Seen. They are old works, dating to 2003–04, and which have been seen abroad, but this was their public debut in China.

Jiang Jie in her studio, Beijing, 1995. Courtesy of Karen Smith, Beijing.

Elizabeth Parke: In terms of scope, unlike the archive, the guides are not meant to be comprehensive, correct? The intent is, rather, that the guides respond to earlier years and make it possible for an additive discussion of what is included in the guides, almost as if the guides comment on earlier years while also introducing that year’s selected artists as well.

Karen Smith: No, they are not meant to be comprehensive. At times there is a need for a discussion about why a certain work is not included and why something else is simply because it is impossible to include everything. To be useful, choices have to be made. Readers would expect that after so many years spent looking at the work of China’s artists I should be able to make those choices. There are a number of other “famous” artists who were not included. In China, it is often the case that when a topic is difficult to broach, it is left unspoken, cloaked in silence. That is an issue for critics to tackle but is not the scope of As Seen. I’m still trying to provide information about artists, particularly young ones, that anyone interested in the art scene here might not have access to from any other source. I am trying to find ways to be open, to try to set a framework for referencing the leading trends and ideas as they emerge. The shows might have happened the previous year, but for the most part the works remain in circulation. They are still within the framework of the present. My idea is to set up a framework and then bring in other people to contribute, to write, as long as we keep the initial framework in place.

80 Vol. 12 No. 1 Elizabeth Parke: Moving on from your archive and current guidebook project, I would like to raise the question of artists writing about their own work and if you consider this a trend currently. I’m thinking here in particular about the edited volume Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents and how this type of anthology presents artists’ statements. How do we preserve, collect, and disseminate artists’ writings as defined more broadly?

Zhan Wang, Ornamental Karen Smith: Artists are by nature Mountain, at The Art Museum of Capital Normal University, primarily visual, so not all will be Beijing, 1995. Courtesy of Karen Smith, Beijing. comfortable writing. Having said that, there are a number of artists in China who are excellent writers—Jiang Zhi being an immediate example. In terms of writing about their own work, much of the best writing is found in letters. Zhang Xiaogang was exemplary in this field and has already published a complete volume of letters from the early 1980s to 1996. Other artists, in putting together self-directed publications about their work, are following suit—there are examples from Fang Lijun, Jin Shan, and Qiu Xiaofei.

Invitation for group I think perhaps one of the reasons for exhibition at Cifa Gallery, Beijing, 1996. Courtesy of this is that artists feel that the critics or Karen Smith, Beijing. curators they are working with do not always fully grasp their work. They like the opportunity to speak for themselves. They may feel that the interpretations do not match their own view of their work. That of course is an interesting dilemma because once artists put works in the public realm they have no claim over how people read them. One has to learn to let go.

Elizabeth Parke: Undoubtedly it will be fascinating to uncover the resonances and dissonances between artists’ published letters and writings and the documents—curatorial statements, critics’ interpretations, and catalogue essays—in your archive. Lastly, I’d like to ask you to reflect on the possibilities and potential uses of your archive. Do you sense that alternative histories of contemporary art from China are lurking in the archive—that, as researchers begin to work in your archive, perhaps the field’s relationship to its recent past will begin to shift, alter, and reconfigure?

Vol. 12 No. 1 81 Karen Smith: I don’t think there Invitation for exchange exhibition at The Art are alternative histories lurking in Museum of Liu Haishu, Shanghai, 1996. Courtesy of this archive or in any archive. I do Karen Smith, Beijing. believe that if we can find a way to bring them all together it will be possible for future generations to build a clearer, more factually accurate picture of the evolution of China’s contemporary art than is possible at present given the many vested interests that are vying for authority. But that is always the wonderful thing about time being the great leveler; it is a means to put all things in perspective. I do think that in the future, there will be a clearer relation between China’s contemporary art and China’s modern history, but that is more about the position of history within contemporary consciousness than it is about issues of contemporary art.

Notes 1 The As Seen series is composed of annual guidebooks that curate the best works and exhibitions from that year in China. 2011 has been published, and 2012 is in production. Smith has plans for five years of guides, with 2016 the final year. 2 Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (2004), 5. 3 See in particular Asia Art Archive’s digitization and research project “Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980–1990” and the online database available at http:// www.china1980s.org/. 4 Interviewer’s note: Hans van Dijk was a curator, researcher, and writer active in contemporary art in China from1986 to 2002. Along with Ai Weiwei and Frank Uytterhaegen, van Dijk founded the Chinese Art Archives and Warehouse in Caochangdi in1999.

82 Vol. 12 No. 1 Stephanie Bailey On Form and Flux: Change and Transformation in Chinese Art at The Istanbul Modern and the Hayward Gallery, London

History (particularly in the nineteenth-century sense of the word) continues in the form of repetition, yet repetitions are nonetheless always clearly different. –Wang Hui1

s the world continues down its twenty-first century global path, the question of what characterizes contemporary Chinese art has never Abeen more interesting. Perhaps this is why two major institutional exhibitions on Chinese art took place separately, albeit concurrently, in two major world cities. Marking the start of the new exhibition season there was Art of Change: New Directions from China (September 7 to December 9, 2012), at London’s Hayward Gallery, and Transformation: A View on Chinese Contemporary Art (September 21 to November 25, 2012), at the Istanbul Modern Art Museum. Aesthetically, these two exhibitions could not have been more different. Thematically, however, both were predicated on the notion of change and cultural identity, reflecting those years of growth that have defined contemporary China’s current status as a key power in a changing world, where the politics of culture have become central to debates surrounding the processes of globalization. In framing artworks within the national/cultural remit, these two exhibitions raise questions as to what contemporary Chinese art actually is.

For some, contemporary Chinese art is Zhongguo dangdai yishu—art that, as Paul Gladston notes, “tends towards a rather anodyne, formalist mixing of traditional Chinese and modern Western(ised) techniques,” drawing on the “influence of Western(ised) modernism and international postmodernism.”2 Interestingly, Gladston’s description is taken from the catalogue for Art of Change yet does not fit the work on show at the Hayward Gallery. Rather, Gladston’s discussion of what he classifies as guo hua (national art)3 applies entirely to the Istanbul Modern exhibition, Transformation: A View on Contemporary Chinese Art, a classic representation of Chinese art presented at its most conservative. Organized within the framework of the 2012 Year of Chinese Culture in Turkey, a celebration of the fortieth anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries, a planned exhibition of works from the collection at Istanbul Modern will travel to Shanghai in 2013. With the support of the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China, the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the Chinese Embassy in Turkey, the intent of this cross- cultural exhibition exchange is to deepen the relationship between two global powers marked by their dynamic economies, currently redefining— even asserting—a cultural identity in a postcolonial, global world.

Vol. 12 No. 1 83 Zhan Wang, Jiashanshi (Literati Rock), 2001, stainless steel, 245 x 160 x 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Istanbul Modern Museum.

RongRong & inri, Caochangdi, Beijing Series, 2004-2011, hand-dyed silver gelatin print. 50.8 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the artists and Istanbul Modern Museum.

84 Vol. 12 No. 1 Qin Yufen, Chan Juan, 1998, mixed media sound installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Istanbul Modern Museum.

Gao Rong, Level-1/2, Unit 8, According to exhibition materials, Building 5, Hua Jiadi Bei Li, 2010, embroidery of fabric, Transformation: A View on sponge, wood plate, 250 x 155 x 155 cm. Courtesy of the artist Contemporary Chinese Art, curated by and Istanbul Modern Museum. Sun Feng and featuring work by fifteen artists,4 “takes as its point of departure the concept of “internal and external development,”5 which in today’s world points to a dynamic balance based on the internal quest for and external projection of traditional Chinese values.”6 As a whole, the exhibition is exactly what Gladston describes in his account of guo hua: a mix of modern and postmodern practices, employed to present the image of a country with a rich history that was once suppressed. In the show, ideas of nature and balance and the literati tradition are clearly invoked in Zhan Wang’s steel Jiashanshi (Artificial Mountain Rock) (2001), landscape painting of the Tang and Song dynasties in Feng Mengbo’s Wrong Code: Shan ShuiXL01 (2008), a digital image rendered using Bryce software. Liu Jianhua’s, Trace (2011), ceramic rendering of ink drips hung on the gallery’s white walls nearby, recalls the tradition of ink painting and calligraphy, while Miao Xiaochun’s digitally rendered Beijing Handscroll Series (2007–09) evokes Zhang Zeduan’s iconic twelfth-century scroll, Along the River During the Qing Ming Festival. This imperial past is further revived in photography duo RongRong and inri’s Caochangdi, Beijing Series (2004–11), images of the artists and their children standing on their front porch in various stages of the family’s development, sometimes wearing historical costumes that evoke the imperial past. The images are aptly placed alongside Gao Rong’s Level 1/2 Unit 8 Building 5 Hua Jiadi Bei Li (2010), a fabric re-rendering of the entrance to the cheap basement flat the artist rented in Beijing as a student, with Qin Yufen’s ghostly, imperial yellow robes hanging from the ceiling in Chan Juan (1998) in a nearby room.

Vol. 12 No. 1 85 Indeed, no stone has been left unturned in this exhibition. Everything is Top: Feng Mengbo, Wrong Code: Shan Shui2008XL01, there: East/West and historical/contemporary, and imperialist/socialist, as 2008, acrylic, tempera, and VeeJet system on canvas, 280 presented in four paintings rendered in the socialist realist style by Chen x 1800 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Istanbul Modern Xi of television screens presenting images from news and popular media, Museum. consisting of Lift Off of the Zhou Spacecraft (2007), Opening Ceremony of the Olympics (2010), Women’s Volleyball Team on World Stage (2007), and Supergirls (2007). Then there is the nature/urban divide, as depicted in Yang Fudong’s colour film Half Hitching Post (2005), with one couple leaving an isolated village on the Loess Plateau in northern China as another moves in; a donkey and bicycle are the transportation upon which the escape/entrance is made. In each frame, the relationship between the landscape and the individual, nature and the soul, and the pressures of the urban/rural divide are articulated, and the characters move around this landscape as if caught in a cycle of arrival and departure, like a dog eating its own tail. As a whole, curator Sun Feng brings together a strong list of artists and artworks into a tiny space that effectively expresses the curatorial intention. But in the end, the exhibition feels like a pastiche: a reconstructed representation of China as an amalgamation of all of the processes of history through which it has passed, condensed and smoothed out by the soft touch of art and culture.

Miao Xiaochun, Beijing Hand Scroll series, 2007–2009, mixed media, 25 x 280 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Istanbul Modern Museum. Left: Chen Xi, Chinese Memories—Lift Off of Shenzhou Spacecraft, 2009, oil on canvas, 150 x 180 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Istanbul Modern Museum.

Of course, there is nothing really wrong with such an approach or the work on show. Cao Jigang’s Red Ghost (2008), Liu Liyun’s Orchid (2010), and Wang Dongling’s The Character of Dao (1995) present a perfect balance between the influences of Western modernist practices and postmodern

86 Vol. 12 No. 1 Yang Fudong, The Half approaches to classical Chinese art. The Character of Dao renders calligraphy Hitching Post, 2005, 35 mm colour film transferred to as a form of action painting, while Red Ghost obscures the landscape into DVD, 7 mins., music by Wang Wenwei. Courtesy of the artist an abstract expressionist act, as Orchid elaborates on the white canvas/ and Istanbul Modern Museum. representational surface with an interpretation using thread incorporating the principles of zither music. The works represent a side of Chinese art history that has been rediscovered and rehabilitated. It is art that moves away from the notorious 1990s and artists who appropriated the aesthetics of soviet propaganda as a form of critique, evident in the work of some twenty Chinese artists such as Yue Minjun and Ai Weiwei, who emerged onto the world stage at the 47th Venice Biennale despite China having no pavilion of its own. The popularity of Chinese artists that followed, culminating in the Chinese art boom of the noughties (2000–2009), was met with a backlash in China that questioned the “Chineseness”7 of these artists (many of whom studied or lived abroad), viewing this emerging contemporary art as a bastard product of Western packaging and market- driven production.

Cao Jigang, Red Ghost, 2008, And yet, this discussion questioning tempera on canvas, 200 cm in diameter. Courtesy of the artist the “Chineseness” of Chinese art is and Istanbul Modern Museum. perhaps as tired as asserting what exactly contemporary Chinese art is, which is what the object-based presentation at the Istanbul Modern attempted to do, albeit with works selected, it seems, for an audience with a limited knowledge of how varied and complex the art practices that have emerged from China are. In its overt, almost forced “Chineseness,” Transformations: A View on Contemporary Chinese Art thus becomes a closed portrait: an insular and decorative assertion of how “traditional

Vol. 12 No. 1 87 Chinese culture tolerantly accepts external changes while adhering to the Wang Dongling, The Character of Dao, 2005, ink on paper, 145 8 pursuit of internal independence and values.” Rather than an expansive, x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Istanbul Modern Museum. fluid approach to a country that has and still is undergoing rapid and complex social and cultural changes, one is left with a contrived image of a singular China that, some might say, does not exist.

This is where Transformation meets Art of Change: New Directions From China, the perfect foil to the image of China as an almost forcibly constructed, historical amalgamation of imperialist and socialist influences that extend into the global, albeit Western-centric, discussion of modernity and post-modernity as presented at the Istanbul Modern. That is not to say that this aspect of Chinese art has been ignored at the Hayward Gallery, nor should it be. Instead, this exhibition, in this reading at least, becomes the point of departure from which Art of Change focuses on the transformative nature of installation and performance art through the work of nine artists9 within the context of the same time period Sun Feng concentrates on in Istanbul, specifically, “the last 30 years,” in which “works and contributions

88 Vol. 12 No. 1 of several generations of artists . . . have enriched the country’s artistic environment and presented new possibilities for the future.”10

In Art of Change, an alternative art history to that at the Istanbul Modern is presented, complete with a comprehensive archive that outlines the development of installation and performance art within China, practices that were not entirely recognized or supported by the state until the 2000s— as was the case with installation art—or banned altogether—as was the case with performance art. The latter was the result of artist Xiao Lu’s shooting a pistol at Dialogue, her glass installation in the Beijing exhibition China/ Avant-Garde, an event that somehow forebodingly took place in February 1989. According to Stephanie Rosenthal, Chief Curator at the Hayward, “the works of all the artists participating in this exhibition are subject to ongoing change and variation.”11 Partly a reflection of how performance and installation artists had to adapt their practices according to the context of working within China during the 1980s and 90s that inevitably affected the materials used, as well as the intrinsically changeable nature of performance

Vol. 12 No. 1 89 and installation when shown in different contexts and spaces, Rosenthal connects the transience of performance and installation to the way of the Dao, in which “change is the only constant.”12

It is from this angle that the exhibition begins, opening with a vast installation/performance by MadeIn Company, a cultural production company established by artist Xu Zhen in 2009 to replace his artistic identity. In the installation, a poster boldly invites the viewer to “Demonstrate your position, Duplicate your attitude” by bringing in stones symbolizing those thrown by protesters around the world for technicians to cast and make into moulds at a workshop on site. Specially created for the exhibition, Revolution Castings (2012) is presented against Turbulent (2012), a wall of paintings each created with cans of black spray paint applied onto the canvas at close range leaving similar patterns on each surface. The two works recall Rosenthal’s elaboration on the concept of shanzhai, “the Chinese neologism for fake,”13 which reflects a notion interpreted by Byung- Chui Han that “it is not the unique creation, not the ultimate identity but the idea of constant change that determines the Chinese concept of an original.”14 In other words, as Rosenthal puts it bluntly: “The Chinese concept of an ‘original’ differs substantially from the Western,”15 reflecting the idea that “Chinese thinking is posited not on creation with an absolute beginning but on the continuous process without beginning or end.”16 Such a notion enriches an installation like Revolution Castings in that it suggests that revolution is also replicable and continuous.

Liang Shaoji, Bed/Nature Series No. 10, 1993–1999, installation. Courtesy of the artist and ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai.

This sense of continuity in art production allows for creative, productive and transformative processes to become the key factor in the reading of creative output, perhaps best visualized in Liang Shaoji’s installation, Chains: The Unbearable Lightness of Being/Nature Series No. 79 (2003–07) consisting of a large room with old windows, miniature beds, stones, and iron chains suspended from the ceiling, objects over which silkworms are weaving their threads. The installation continues into a second room, where Listening to the Silkworm/Nature Series No. 98 (2006/2012) consists

90 Vol. 12 No. 1 of headphones that emit the recorded sounds of silkworms feeding on mulberry leaves, a sound the artist hears often at night when listening to the worms work as he lies in bed. Meditation pillows are placed on the floor, inviting the viewer to engage in the meditative act of beholding natural creation in action. Beyond this room, silkworms have been installed on straw-made beds, performing that which the viewer had just heard, only moments ago. As a whole, the installation becomes a work that literally moves; enacting what Liang Shaoji refers to as “the line of life of human beings, and also the history of human beings and silkworms.”17 It is what Zhu Zhu refers to, citing Edward W. Said, as “slow politics” or, “the gradual transformation of society through humanity’s gentle healing capacities.”18

Wang Jianwei, Making Do With the Fakes, 2011, performance installation. Courtesy of the artist and Long March Space, Beijing.

This notion of healing in a society faced with its own immediate history is illustrated in Wang Jianwei’s installation of aptly titled works, including documentation of a performance in which the artist worked the land cultivating a wheat crop titled Circulation—Sowing and Harvesting (1993–94), and an eight-channel video installation Making Do with Fakes (2011), projected on two sides of a partial wall lowered from the ceiling that acts as a gateway. On one side of this partition is a room with a sculptural cabinet titled Internal Conflict Installation No. 4 (2011–12) and on the other, a ping-pong table with a surface that is jagged and technically unusable in Surplus Value (2001). The installation is a material reading that visually reflects the Marxist roots of contemporary Chinese society and culture. Here, the pastiche of “Chineseness” is replaced by what constitutes Chinese society now, formed in great part by the history of socialism. This is a more Darwinian approach to history that moves away from a certain “creationist” mythology that attempts to reconcile a lost, imperialist past with the realities of the present, as suggested in a vast, museum-style natural history-inspired installation by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, that consists of works grouped under the larger title I Didn’t Notice What I Am Doing (2012), including a tortoise shell, a dinosaur model, and column crudely- constructed from human fat collected from liposuction procedures titled Civilization Pillar (2001). In this installation, works are combined to mediate a strange duality that contrasts the visceral immediacy of

Vol. 12 No. 1 91 presence and mortality against a cerebral desire for preservation and Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, I Didn’t Notice What I Am Doing, 2012, regeneration: two processes that often feel artificial from both individual installation. Photo: Linda Nylind. Courtesy of the artists. and national perspectives.

A tonic to such a heavy notion Duan Yingmei, Happy Yingmei, 2011–12, performance of weighted, assembled identities installation. Photo: Linda Nylind. Courtesy of the artist. built from the preservation or regeneration of certain histories is perhaps the most profound performance on show, Happy Yingmei (2012), by Duan Yingmei, a tiny space reachable by a child-sized mouse hole. In this room is a small forest, lit by a low, comforting midnight blue with small trees outlining a path to a clearing where the artist awaits, wearing a white nightdress and humming softly. She watches you with the curious eyes of a child, waiting to see if you will follow the path deep into the situation and approach her, slowly moving forward to reach you if you don’t. In her pockets are messages written on paper, folded carefully. Looking into your eyes, she unfolds various notes, reading them carefully as she searches for a clue as to what you might need, deciding which note belongs to you, right now—notes such as “Can you please meet up with some people from your past and see how their lives have changed?” and “When was the last time you looked at your mother’s hands?”

In Duan Yingmei’s little world, adults are reminded of their innocence; an invitation to restore something so often lost in the process of maturation. Within the context of art, the performance restores the generative, soothing qualities of the artwork in a similar fashion to Liang Shaoji’s silkworms; just as gazing upon a scholar’s rock might have provided solace to the philosopher-politician of yesteryear. In turning herself into the aesthetic object of contemplation, Duan Yingmei reacts against the very statement of another work shown outside her sanctuary by MadeIn Company: a white

92 Vol. 12 No. 1 Xu Zhen, The Starving of cube in the centre of the room from Sudan, 2008, installation view at Long March Space, Beijing. which objects are thrown up into Courtesy of the artist and Long March Space. the air like flying sculptures, visible to the viewer standing outside only for a fleeting moment in Action of Consciousness (2011), a critique of the pace with which art objects are today consumed. Nearby, a photograph and video documentation of a 2008 performance/installation by Xu Zhen is presented: The last work the artist made under his name before forming MadeIn Company. It is titled The Starving of Sudan and in the performance the artist restaged Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning image of a starving Sudanese child on the brink of death as a vulture watched her nearby awaiting her imminent death, using a mechanical vulture and a baby African girl in a scene produced within a gallery space. “Exhibition viewers entered the space,” Colin Chinnery writes, “then reproduced the iconic photo time and time again with their digital cameras and mobile phones.”19 In this performance, Xu Zhen shows how art objects are not the only things treated with the kind of dismissal symptomatic of a society predicated on relentless consumption, as critiqued in Action of Consciousness, just as Happy Yingmei insists on giving human innocence the space it needs to exist.

As such, the pairing of Happy Yingmei with The Starving of Sudan is one that articulates the contradictory nature of representation. On the one hand, as observed by Chinnery:

Through the system of multi-layered reproduction Xu Zhen explicitly exposes the exploitation of images and their interpretation, and places himself as an artist in the middle of this sticky equation. By admitting complicity in these problematics, Xu Zhen suggest that no one can claim innocence in this cycle of image production and consumption, especially artists.20

And yet, in her own performance, Duan Yingmei attempts to reassert art as a realm where fantasy and whimsy exists—qualities she bestows on the work, the artist, and the spectator simultaneously in her dreamlike cocoon. Perhaps it is in a childlike space such as Duan Yingmei’s that the particularities of culture cease to be important, just as material objects are shown to be as perishable as the pieces of pork collected and indexed in plastic Tupperware in Gu Dexin’s 16-06-1991-31-10-2001 (1997-2001), or Chen Zhen’s room of objects covered in mud in Purification Room (2000/2012), a work that looks like a room through which a muddy river has just rushed through, as if to cleanse it the same way Hercules did the Augean Stables. What remains after the physical change is the essence, such is the natural order of things. It is something that is always in flux; what survives after physical, ideological or definitive frames have been cast off.

In the end, what Art of Change confirms is a conclusion reached by Gladston on the problem of attempting to define Chinese art as just that:

Vol. 12 No. 1 93 Chinese. “What persists,” he writes, “is a highly problematic double-edged (labrynthine) parallax. By taking account of contemporary Chinese art’s dual relationship to modernity and tradition, there is a danger in . . . overemphasising its cultural separateness from other forms of contemporary art.”21 And yet, in downplaying the cultural roots of Chinese art production, “there is also a risk of overlooking the persistence of tradition as part of the critically resistant construction of a modern Chinese cultural identity.”22

Gladston notes:

The work of the critical interpreter of contemporary Chinese art, as well as the transnational cultural networks that support its production, display and reception (whether Chinese or non-Chinese), is thus revealed to be a profoundly challenging one, which points towards the critical necessity of new (and almost certainly wholly unrealisable) theoretical paradigms beyond those culturally envisaged both within the PRC and in an international context.23

Perhaps the challenge, when it comes to looking at any art framed by a national context, is how to incorporate the complexities of change into the way culture is contemplated and defined. In this challenge lies an invitation: To look at the world beyond immutable and static definitions—often constructed and often artificial—and in doing so, to give those creative processes that activate the transformative powers of representation the freedom to resist rigid distinctions that dictate who and what we are.

Notes 1 Wang Hui, “Preface to the Chinese Edition,” The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (New York: Verso, 2009), xiii. 2 Paul Gladston, “Somewhere (and Nowhere) Between Modernity and Tradition,” Art of Change: New Directions From China (London: Hayward Publishing, 2012), 22 3 Ibid. 4 Cao Jigang, Chen Xi, Ding Yi, Gao Rong, Feng Mengbo, Liu Jianhua, Liu Liyun, Liu Xiaodong, Miao Xiaochun, Qin Yufen, Rong Rong & inri, Wang Dongling, Xu Bing, Yang Fudong, and Zhan Wang. 5 Press release, Transformation: A View of Contemporary Chinese Art, Istanbul Modern, 2012. 6 Ibid. 7 This is a term used by Gladston and others in relation to the discussion surrounding the nature of Chinese art as a form of cultural representation. 8 As quoted from the press release of Transformation: A View of Contemporary Chinese Art, Istanbul Modern, 2012. 9 Chen Zhen, Duan Yingmei, Gu Dexin, Liang Shaoji, Peng Yu and Sun Yuan, Wang Jianwei, Xu Zhen and MadeIn Company. 10 Press release, Transformation: A View of Contemporary Chinese Art, Istanbul Modern, 2012. 11 Stephanie Rosenthal, “Art of Change,” Art of Change: New Directions From China (London: Hayward Publishing, 2012), 13. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 19. 14 Ibid., quoting Byung-Chul Han, 19. 15 Ibid., 19. 16 Ibid., 19. 17 Ibid., 14. 18 Zhu Zhu, “Liang Shaoji: I, The Silkworm,” Art of Change: New Directions From China (London: Hayward Publishing, 2012), 55. 19 Colin Chinnery, “Xu Zhen/MadeIn Company: Not Only, But Also . . .” Art of Change: New Directions From China (London: Hayward Publishing, 2012), 102. 20 Ibid. 21 Paul Gladston, “Somewhere (and Nowhere) Between Modernity and Tradition,” 25. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid.

94 Vol. 12 No. 1 Ryan Holmberg Li Kunwu: A Chinese Life

t was bound to happen. Surprisingly, it did not happen earlier— the arrival in North America of the Chinese graphic novel. It is not Isurprising, though, that its debut should belong to that lucrative genre of non-fiction publishing: the individual or family memoir as personalized history of the grand narrative of modern China. It was no leap from prose to comics; the bridge was built long ago with the success of works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980–91) or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000), the first about the author’s grandfather’s youth as a Polish Jew under the Nazis, the second about Satrapi’s childhood and family’s difficulties during and after the Iranian Revolution. The Chinese graphic novel, when it arrived into English-language publishing last year, was thus born into a highly primed market.

There have been a couple of English-language graphic novels about modern China, They are not by Chinese nationals, and it shows. One of the earliest in North America was Belle Yang’s Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale, published in 2010. Born in Taiwan to landed gentry parents who fled the continent in 1948, Yang, like her parents, is predictably and entirely unsympathetic to the Communists. The conceit is autobiographical: in refuge from an abusive ex-boyfriend, Belle Yang has returned home to her parents in California and her father’s stories of their family’s past in old China. Though organized as vignettes, Forget Sorrow presents an unbroken story of one wealthy landowning Chinese family’s trials in the 1930s and 40s suffering under the Japanese invasion (the setting is Manchuria) and the Communist takeover, but most of all under the smallness of traditional Chinese social values. The novel is illustrated in a flat, naïve, semi-folkish mode so common in literary comics memoirs since the success of French artists Satrapi and David B. As a product of an artist who left Asia at the age of seven, returning only for a stint as an art student in Beijing in the late 1980s and leaving again after the Tian’anmen crackdown, as a book about China it is symptomatically a book without a present tense.

More recently there is a children’s book, Little White Duck (2012), written by professional oncologist Na Liu and illustrated by her husband, Andrés Vera Martinez. It is about the former’s childhood in the countryside near Wuhan, in the years around Mao’s death. The Chairman’s face and sayings still decorate village walls, and Revolutionary hero Lei Feng is still emulated by children. The campaign against pests, active since at least the Great Leap Forward, has dropped the sparrow from its list, but the rat remains an enemy. One of the artist’s earliest memories is the sad day when her mother

Vol. 12 No. 1 95 96 Vol. 12 No. 1 Top: Page from graphic took her to the town square to listen to and publicly mourn the news of novel by Belle Yang, Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale, the death of “Grandpa Mao.” Communism is not the main theme, however, published by W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., New York, and Little White Duck is primarily a book designed to sensitize American 2010, 250 pp. children today to the poverty a distant, now-wealthy country experienced Bottom: Page from graphic novel by Na Liu and Andrés only a generation ago. Vera Martinez, Little White Duck, published by Graphic Universe, Minneapolis, 2012, 108 pp. If those books indicate the first steps towards the coupling of the graphic novel and the history of modern China, they have been outstripped completely by the appearance of Li Kunwu’s autobiographical A Chinese Life (2012), a nearly seven-hundred-page tome co-written with French writer and diplomat Philippe Ôtié and originally serialized in France between 2009 and 2011 as Une Vie Chinoise. For its accomplished artistry and monumental scale, it will likely become the standard against which future Chinese graphic novels are measured. For its politics, on the other hand, it should probably be damned by the liberal literati—for here is a book that, despite its sensitive handling of personal hardship at the hand of the state during the Mao era, seems ready to accept the continuing authoritarianism of the Chinese government in the name of economic growth and global prestige. The established markets of the Chinese prose memoir and the emigrant graphic novel will benefit A Chinese Life, even though Li Kunwu does not share those authors’ generally liberal priorities in the relationship between the individual, society, and the state.

The artist Li Kunwu has serious credibility. Born in Kunming in 1955, he began life as he would live it: very close to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). His father was a Communist Chinese Party Secretary who fought against the Japanese and the Guomindang. His mother was also a member. Accordingly, in A Chinese Life the earliest signs of trouble in the new republic appear at home, as his father strains to reconcile the disheartening facts about the Great Leap Forward to which he is privy with his faith in Mao and the Party. The blow of the Cultural Revolution is swift and hard: there are incorrect class traits in his father’s family history. Yet, even after ten years in a reeducation camp, emerging grey and weary, his father retains his faith in the state. “Even if the times have changed, follow my example,” he tells his son after release. “Give your life to the Party. It is China’s only future!”1

Ideology runs strong in the family. Despite the pain exile has caused, young Li Kunwu decides to follow in his father’s footsteps and commit his life to the “revolution.” He joins the People’s Liberation Army in the early 1970s and endeavours hard to be recognized by the Party, going out of his way to be a model soldier, waking earlier, working harder, helping more, propounding louder, and even volunteering for assignment to an “army agricultural production unit.” The job is pure hell. Basically he becomes a farmer, living alone in a ramshackle hut in the countryside, shouldering backbreaking labour. He befriends the daughter of a country doctor, a pretty girl. The livestock, however, are his only regular companions. But what gets him through army life is not belief in the cause. A pretty girl, the village doctor’s daughter, offers some distraction. What propels him mainly, however, is hope for the day when he can proudly tell his parents that he, too, has gained Party membership. The last chapters of the book conclude

Vol. 12 No. 1 97 Li Kunwu, A Chinese Life, cover.

98 Vol. 12 No. 1 Top left: Li Kunwu, A Chinese Life, p. 160. Top right: Li Kunwu, A Chinese Life, p. 274. Bottom left: Li Kunwu, A Chinese Life, p. 188. Bottom right: Li Kunwu, A Chinese Life, p. 439.

Vol. 12 No. 1 99 with a stunningly forgiving view of contemporary China, and I wonder if Top left: Li Kunwu, A Chinese Life, p. 302. at the root of this is the extended filial piety the author learned in his youth, Top right: Li Kunwu, reaching from father to state. A Chinese Life, p. 25. Bottom left: Li Kunwu, A Chinese Life, p. 464. Early on in A Chinese Life, we get a glimpse of the artist-to-be. Inevitably, Bottom right: Li Kunwu, A Chinese Life, p. 686. given the time and place and the author’s family, Li Kunwu’s first real artistic inspiration comes from propaganda: one of the little study books, in this case from 1960, the government put out to instruct in proper pictorial form and sloganeering. Soon after, while still a young brat, he’s out leading

100 Vol. 12 No. 1 the revolutionary youth charge by painting caricatures of evil landowners on village walls. When the schools close following Red Guard hysteria, Li Kunwu is apprenticed to a local painter specializing in Mao pictures. “For an artist,” his teacher explains, “drawing Chairman Mao is an honour. But it’s also a formidable test of skill . . . What counts the most is the depth of your feeling for the chairman.” But when young Li Kunwu is left alone in the studio, he finds that his teacher has even greater “depth of feeling” for something else: the nudes hidden behind the radiant portraits of the leader. The episode does not feel so much like a statement of hypocrisy as a demonstration that even the slogan-shouters were human. All in all, despite its many pages of persecuting the “Four Olds”—Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas—and the “ox devil” bourgeoisie, A Chinese Life is fairly forgiving of the Cultural Revolution, with many having suffered but no one really to blame.

The motif of sex as a foil to dogma reappears when the novel turns to the Deng Xiaoping era of gaige kaifeng (liberalized “reform and openness”). Art schools are reformed as well, opening their doors to the same Western classical training that the Red Guard had attacked just ten years before. In 1966, casts of Michelangelo’s David and the Venus de Milo are labeled obscene. (126) Now, in 1980: “Ahem! Young comrades,” says a teacher with a beret, “know that you are witnessing an historic occasion: the first nude drawing class in Yunnan province,” reportedly also the first in China since the 1930s in Shanghai. The event is largely comedy. Students’ eyes boggle as the model undresses. The teacher instructs her to spread her legs a little bit wider. The school’s principal president keeps finding reasons to return to the classroom to make sure that everything is going okay. As for Li Kunwu, the sessions seem to have served him well over the long term, for the young women of A Chinese Life—and there are more than a few—are palpably sensuous without being forcibly sexualized.

His day job required art of a different sort. Li Kunwu’s first formal employment as an artist is for the Department of Propaganda during the early Deng Xiaoping years, where he makes paintings of young men as ideal Communist youth. Now they are cooking meals and reading maps in contrast to the raised fists of the Cultural Revolution. It was the success of this softened propaganda work that finally got Li Kunwu into the Party. Some years later (the exact chronology of events in the book’s second half is sometimes hard to determine), he joins the local newspaper, the Yunnan Ribao, as an “artist-reporter.” A Chinese Life unfortunately does not make wholly clear what this involved. But in one case he threatens to expose a security guard for trying to extort junk collectors who rely on factory scrap for a living—for once Li Kunwu used his pen for the people rather than his own private fantasies or the state. Otherwise, Li Kunwu shows himself doing rather conservative work: first there were best-selling humour books about local Yunnan customs, followed by advertisements for the big Dashan beverage company, then onward to Paris and an exhibition of ink renderings of Yunnan’s ethnic minorities.

The length and diversity of Li Kunwu’s career equipped him well for his switch to the format of the graphic novel. It takes serious skill and commitment

Vol. 12 No. 1 101 to take on a project of this scale. Decades of working within institutions in which time and clarity are of the essence no doubt helped prepare him for the task. Stylistically, Li Kunwu’s artwork strikes a balance between classical ink painting, the bombast of Mao-era propaganda, the caricatures of his newspaper days, and an attention to local detail likely mastered while creating exhibition-oriented ethnographic and landscape drawings. The forms of the human figures often rise and stretch in El Greco-esque fashion. Probably the closest stylistic comparison in the field of comics is the work of Matsumoto Taiy, in Japan, who likewise likes to pack his backgrounds with details composed of wonky line work—as if the world itself was perpetually giggling—and create a general atmosphere of humour through figurative caricature just on the edge of the grotesque. Li Kunwu likes to tell jokes in A Chinese Life, and at a formal level, his drawing style is often even funny.

Like so many contemporary Chinese artists, Li Kunwu plays the national art history card. Fortunately, overt references in A Chinese Life are cloying only sometimes, like in the sudden appearance of a wrinkled peasant face that is all-too-like Luo Zhongli’s famous “rusticated” Father (1980), or the return again and again of the Yunnan landscape in a literati “Southern style.” But even then Li Kunwu comes out with a number of interesting moments, like when the peasants clear the hills of trees to fuel the backyard furnaces of the Great Leap Forward, graphically razing a Ni Zan landscape—an eerie if unintended premonition of the destruction of artifacts in the decade to come. Alas, what would otherwise be a beautiful compendium of drawings is marred by bad production values. A Chinese Life is printed on a cheap laminated stock that makes the images seem like they are going to slip off the page. Off-white matte would have given the drawings body. Even worse, a few dozen or so pages in the first third of the book are pixelated, presumably the result of poor scans of the original artwork. The artwork deserves better.

A Chinese Life sails along smoothly for its first five hundred or so pages, which is to say until liberalization takes command. As a personal memoir of the transformation of the People’s Republic, it is adept and entertaining but largely conventional, hitting the same high points and low points that most any timeline does. The main surprises arise from the newness of the presentation: drawing versus prose. That the Mao and early Deng years should be the most coherent is not surprising. Li Kunwu and Philippe Ôtié themselves provide the reason, concluding their introductory chapter to the post-Mao era as follows: “I didn’t know it yet. But my life, like most of my fellow citizens’, would now be less epic. Gone were the great utopian flights of fancy with their tragic ends. . . . Gone, too, the uniformity of fate—something we were all prepared for, to greater or lesser degrees.” The “uniformity of fate” spoken of here is a function of having lived under an authoritarian and highly centralized socialist state. Had Li Kunwu not been Han Chinese, perhaps his experience would have been less typical. As member of a Party family, his life was instead only more wedded to mainstream history. Tellingly, once the story crosses into the 1980s, the writing begins to unravel – episodic as it was before, but now oftentimes without a central thread. Still, the focalizing power of the Chinese state remains strong, even for Li Kunwu’s personal identity.

102 Vol. 12 No. 1 The leitmotif of the last two hundred pages of A Chinese Life is so-called “development,” as in economic development under post-Mao liberalization and its ramifications in the workplace, private life, and the physical environment. One of the more memorable moments in the book occurs in 1980, a few pages from Yunnan’s first nude studio session. On a lunch break in a factory canteen, workers are talking exuberantly about the new “clay rice bowl” and the end of the guarantees of lifetime employment, housing, and healthcare of the “iron rice bowl.” Younger men speak excitedly about the potential opportunities the changes will bring. After mention of the prospect of foreign capital, an older worker loses his temper. Smashing his lunch bowl on the floor in anger, he cries, “I don’t want to hear talk about bosses and especially not foreigners! Foreigners, Japanese, capitalists, landowners, rightists, bosses, and all the rest—we got rid of them, right? Don’t tell me we did all that to wind up licking their boot heels now! My only boss is the state! And they can keep their clay bowl!”

While the last chapters show Li Kunwu enjoying life and making the most of opportunities in this new China, clearly he identifies with this aging throwback of a worker, particularly with his nationalism and his faith in the state. Take, for example, the book’s ending. Li Kunwu presents a series of television broadcasts that seem designed to respond directly to the old worker’s anxieties. First is the Being Olympics. Declares the announcer, “China has at last realized its dream, more than a century old, of proving itself a great nation before the eyes of the entire world.” Li Kunwu recommends the “good show” to his mother. Next is the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the republic, with its pageantry of military vehicles and soldiers in Tian’anmen Square. The masses cheer and wave their national flags. A child screams, “Long live China!” A broadcaster proclaims, “Today’s modern socialist China, open to the all the world, turned towards the future, is rising majestically in the East!” Li Kunwu looks on, smiling.

On its own, such national pride means little. The problem is how it shields post-Mao China from criticism. A Chinese Life closes with Li Kunwu appealing to the idea of what he calls “a simple Chinese life,” based on the hard work and social commitments of an earlier era, which is to say, the Mao and early Deng eras. The rise of China, he suggests, is founded on this honest and plebian ethic. He muses at length: “So yes, of course we’re proud of what we’ve made, even if it’s not perfect yet. Especially since it does not come from the profits of armed conquest, however legitimate, or from the exploitation of a rich subsoil, or from inherited capital skillfully managed to bear fruit. No, none of these things. You will find nothing but sweat here. From our brows and our children, to whom we bequeath lives that will also be made of hard work and sacrifice, for we still have a long way to go down to the road that will lead us from poverty, the road to development.” Of all the slogans that have washed through his life, he upholds a Deng Xiaoping one as his favourite: “Development is our first priority.”

Where to begin? It’s not that Li Kunwu is blind. The last chapters of A Chinese Life depict many of the issues that, with his paean to “development,” he sweeps under the carpet. He shows, for example, the cramped living quarters and endless hours of a girl working for a massage parlour in the

Vol. 12 No. 1 103 104 Vol. 12 No. 1 Top: Li Kunwu, city, far away from home. He shows the teary face of a mother whose house A Chinese Life, p. 592. is slated for destruction in the name of urban renewal. He narrates episodes Bottom : Li Kunwu, A Chinese Life, p. 488. of the greed and callousness of the nouveaux riche. He juxtaposes Dashan Drink’s joint venture with a Swiss “world food industry leader” with the closing of an old danwei-based factory. But why not just say Nestlé? In addition to the danwei worker who has secured a loan for a new high rise apartment, why not show what happens to the family that has lost its home? In addition to the scrap collectors who have risen to restaurant owners, why not spell out the fate of the security guard of the closed factory? One can appreciate the improvements economic growth has brought to life for most in China, yet there is a palpable reluctance in A Chinese Life to engage with its downsides. He touches on the negative fallout of “development,” but never does he dwell. There’s always an upside.

How to explain this bias? I suspect it’s not just optimism or national pride, but, rather, his lifelong proximity to the Party. Consider especially the avoidance in A Chinese Life of questions of civil liberties, which of course directly implicate the Chinese state. It is an omission that is particularly glaring after the long chapters treating the terror of the Mao years. There is specifically no mention of the continuing legacy of authoritarianism and cronyism that contemporary China has inherited from that era. The only time bad government is broached, it is quickly excused, and that is on the subject of the June Fourth Incident, that is, the Tian’anmen Square Massacre of 1989. Pages upon pages of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, yet none on the Democracy Movement or the subsequent crackdown. Instead the matter is consigned to graphically inconsequential text boxes scattered amongst people enjoying themselves in the park. Again the artist is verbose: “I know quite well that, internationally, there is a very dark view of 6/4 . . . I also know that here in China those events caused great suffering. Lives were shattered. Some even lost. I know all that. But the truth is, like almost all my countrymen, my mind is occupied with so many other things I find even more important . . . partly because I’m convinced that, above all, China needs order and stability to develop. The rest is secondary, in my view.” Not everyone would agree.

Notes 1 All quotes are from Li Kunwu, A Chinese Life (London: SelfMadeHero, 2012).

Vol. 12 No. 1 105 Chinese Name Index

106 Vol. 12 No. 1 Vol. 12 No. 1 107 108 Vol. 12 No. 1 Vol. 12 No. 1 109 110 Vol. 12 No. 1 Vol. 12 No. 1 111 W ANG GUANGYI (b. 1957) is a central figure of Yishu the Political Pop movement and recognized as a leader of the New Art Movement in China established in the 1980s. He is most recognized for Edition the socio-political paintings and prints from his Great Criticism series begun in 1998. Through his use of No. 5 the Chinese political icons and symbols of Western commercialism, his images respond to the deeply engrained legacy of propaganda experienced in To purchase a Yishu edition China during the Cultural Revolution. Originally print please send your request painted in 2005, in this work the artist uses his own to [email protected] or call 1.604.649.8187 (Canada), name as a substitute for luxury brand names common or contact Zhang Chaoxuan to his Great Criticism series. By calling attention to 134.6655.9126 (China). the consumer legacy of his own commercial success, Wang provides cheeky commentary on the experience Each edition is commissioned of China’s changing society. by and produced exclusively for Yishu; and is measured the same ARTWOR K DESCR IPTION size as the Journal. ARTIST ------Wang Guangyi TITLE ------Great Criticism — Wang Guangyi (2009) MEDIA ------Serigraph DIMENSION ------210 x 295 mm EDITION SIZE ------200 PRICE ------US $400 plus shipping

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

Since its inauguration in May 2002, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art has raised its profile internationally to become one of the most respected journals devoted to contemporary Chinese art. To further expand our platform for global dialogue and debate concerning issues in this field, Yishu launched its Chinese-language version in May 2012.

This edition is published quarterly—in March, June, September and December—and each issue features scholarly essays, interviews, conference proceedings, and critical commentary selected from Yishu’s English edition. With our English and Chinese editions, we endeavour to increase our efforts in promoting critical writing on, and contributing to the history of, contemporary Chinese art.

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