Maternal Ambivalence in Pan Yuliang's Paintings

:      may / june 10 M a y / j u n e 2 0 1 0 Volume 9, Number 3

Inside

Artist Features: Movana Negotiating Difference: Chen, Cui Xiuwen, Pan Contemporary Chinese Yuliang, Qi Zhilong Art in the Global Context Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council: Permanent (R)evolution: Contemporary Contemporaneity and Reflections on the Historicization of Modernity in Asia Contemporary Chinese Art, Part Two

US$12.00 NT$350.00 printed in Taiwan

VOLUME 9, NUMBER 3, May/June 2010

CONTENTS 2 Editor’s Note 18 4 Contributors

6 Knit Together: Movana Chen and the Politics of Identity in a Global Society. Madeline Eschenburg

18 Cui Xiuwen: Walking on Broken Glass Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky

34 Maternal Ambivalence in 34 Pan Yuliang’s Paintings Phyllis Teo

48 Qi Zhilong and His Chinese Girl Zheng Shengtian

58 Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council: Contemporary Reflections on Modernity in Asia

81 Negotiating Difference: Contemporary 48 Chinese Art in the Global Context Birgit Hopfener and Franziska Koch

96 Permanent (R)evolution: Contemporaneity and the Historicization of Contemporary Chinese Art, Part Two Paul Gladston

103 Chinese Name Index

104

Cover: Qi Zhilong, Chinese Girl (detail), 2009, oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm. Courtesy of the artist and AW Asia, New York.

1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art president Katy Hsiu-chih Chien legal counsel Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C.C. Liu Yishu 38 opens with three texts featuring women   Ken Lum artists who represent different generations, who -in-chief Keith Wallace come from different backgrounds, and whose   Zheng Shengtian work differs stylistically. Yet each artist alludes   Julie Grundvig Kate Steinmann in her work to issues of gender and the social editorial assistant Chunyee Li restrictions faced by women, both historically circulation manager Larisa Broyde and currently, within Chinese society. In an  coordinator Ioulia Reynolds web site  Chunyee Li interesting complement to these texts, Zheng Shengtian writes on Qi Zhilong, a male artist, and advisory  the disconcerting play in his work between the Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum aesthetic and social representation of women John Clark, University of Sydney during the Cultural Revolution and in today’s Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation popular culture. Okwui Enwezor, Critic & Curator Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China We also present the second of two panel Fei Dawei, Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation discussions (the previous published in Yishu 37) Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute from the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop meetings in June of 2009. This panel focuses on a Katie Hill, University of Westminster discussion about the evolution of modernity in the Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian context of Asia. Geeta Kapur from India, Midori Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator Matsui from Japan, and Xu Bing from mainland Lu Jie, Independent Curator China propose thoughtful and timely perspectives Charles Merewether, Critic & Curator Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University on how modernity is inflected in their respective Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand nations’ cultural production and how it adopts its Philip Tinari, Independent Critic & Curator own identities within each context. Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar Related to this is a growing interest in examining the history of contemporary Chinese art, especially  Art & Collection Group Ltd. 6F. No. 85, Section 1, considering a history that represents just over Chungshan N. Road, thirty years of activity. The summary of the Taipei, Taiwan 104 conference Negotiating Difference: Contemporary Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 Chinese Art in the Global Context brings forward E-mail: [email protected] several important issues, among them the kinds of vice general manager Jenny Liu methodologies that are employed in the analysis Alex Kao of contemporary Chinese art from an academic marketing manager Joyce Lin perspective as well as the practical perspective circulation executive Perry Hsu Betty Hsieh of those actively working in the field, and the challenges and benefits of both. We conclude webmaster Website ARTCO, Taipei this issue of Yishu with the second part of Paul  Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd.,

Gladston’s examination of contemporaneity and web site www.yishujournal.com the specifics of its manifestation in the context of  1683 - 3082 China. He offers a considered deliberation on the Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited ideas of art historian and curator Gao Minglu’s in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, analysis of the different trajectories that exist March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, between an Eastern conception of modernism advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: and a Western one. Yishu Office 200–1311 Howe Street Yishu will be hosting booths at the Hong Kong Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 International Art Fair from May 27 to 30 and at Phone: 1.604.649.8187 Art 41 Basel from June 16 to 20. Please come Fax: 1.604.591.6392 and visit us. E-mail: [email protected] subscription rates Keith Wallace 1 year (six issues): $84 USD (includes $24 for airmail postage); in Asia $78 USD (includes $18 for airmail postage). 2 years (twelve issues): $158 USD (includes $48 for airmail postage); in Asia $146 USD (including $36 for airmail postage).

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Xu Bing received an M.F.A. from the Central Academy Paul Gladston is Associate Professor of Critical of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 1987. Since the mid 1980s, his Theory and Cultural Studies at the University work has been selected for numerous solo and group of Nottingham. For the last five years he has exhibitions around the world, including at the 45th been seconded to the University of Nottingham, Venice Biennale; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Ningbo, China, where he has been both Head of the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; and Arthur Department of International Communications and M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Director of the Institute of Comparative Cultural Washington, D.C. He is the recipient of several awards, Studies. He studied fine art at Edinburgh College including the MacArthur “Genius” Award granted by of Art and Yale University before receiving an M.A. the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Ph.D. in critical theory from the University of (1999), the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize (2003), and Nottingham. His recent publications include an the first Wales International Visual Art Prize, Artes edited collection of essays entitled China and Other Mundi (2004). Princeton University Press published Spaces (CCCP, 2009) as well as the essay “Bloody Persistence/Transformation: Text as Image in the Art Animals! Reinterpreting Acts of Violence Against of Xu Bing, a multidisciplinary study of Xu Bing’s Animals as Part of Contemporary Chinese Artistic landmark work Book from the Sky, in 2006. Practice,” which is included in Lili Hernandez and Sabine Krajewski, eds., Crossing Cultural Boundaries: Layla S. Diba is an independent curator living in Taboo, Bodies and Identities (Cambridge Scholars, New York. She began her career as art advisor to 2009). In June 2010, Gladston will return to his post the Private Secretariat of the Shahbanou of Iran. at the University of Nottingham. She served as Director and Chief Curator of the Negarestan Museum of 18th and 19th century Birgit Hopfener is a Ph.D. candidate at the Free Iranian Art from its inception in 1975 until 1978. University of Berlin, where she is working on the She served as Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator topic of Chinese installation art in the transcultural of Islamic Art (January 1990 to 1998) and as context. She works as a freelance art writer for Curator (1998 to December, 2000) at the Brooklyn various magazines and publications and as a curator Museum. In 1994, Dr. Diba was appointed Visiting and cultural manager for numerous art- and culture- Professor at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies related projects between Germany and China. in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture. She writes and lectures on various aspects of Islamic Geeta Kapur is a Delhi-based critic and curator. Her art, specializing in Persian art of the seventeenth books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), century and later. In 2004, she curated an exhibition When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary of the contemporary Iranian photographer Sadegh Cultural Practice in India (2000), and Iconographies Tirafkan at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York. In 2006, she was appointed Islamic Curator for the for the Present (forthcoming). Her curatorial work Cultural Development Master Plan and Abu Dhabi includes the co-curated Bombay/Mumbai, for the Guggenheim Museum Proposal. She is currently 2001 multi-part exhibition Century City: Art and working on a catalogue of the Wolf collection Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern, of Turkoman jewelry, to be published by the London; and subTerrain: artworks in the cityfold Metropolitan Museum of Art. for the 2003 body.city project at the House of World Cultures, Berlin. She is a founder-editor of Journal Madeline Eschenburg is an art historian based in of Arts & Ideas and is advisory editor to Third Text Roanoke, Virginia. She teaches art history at Virginia and Marg. She has lectured worldwide in university Western Community College. This summer she will and museum contexts and has held fellowships at the teach art history at both Kendall College and Aquinas Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; Clare College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In the fall she Hall, University of Cambridge; Nehru Memorial plans to move to China, where she will teach, write, Museum and Library, Delhi; Jawaharlal Nehru and travel. University; and University of Delhi.

4 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky holds the O. Alexandra Munroe, Ph.D., is Senior Curator of Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at Bard College. She Asian Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, has published several books on subjects such as the New York. Since joining the Guggenheim in 2006, art of the Tang dynasty and Chinese Buddhist art, where she heads the Asian art program for the and she has served as Editor of Journal of Chinese museum and its global affiliates, she has organized Religions. She has written for many catalogues and The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, has curated several shows on contemporary Asian art. 1860–1989 (2009), which won the Best Thematic Exhibition in New York City from the International Franziska Koch has been assistant to the chair of Art Critics Association (AICA), and co-organized Global Art History (Monica Juneja) in the Cluster of Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe (2008), which Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context at was among the best-attended exhibitions in the the Universität Heidelberg since July 2009. She is a museum’s history, and whose catalogue won the Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and 2008 Wittenborn Prize for outstanding scholarship, Theory at Philipps-Universität Marburg. Between 2006 design, and production. She publishes widely and and 2009 she was a member of the graduate program lectures frequently on Asian art in Europe, North Image-Body-Medium: An Anthropological Approach America, and East Asia. Her exhibition Japanese at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe. She Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky was the holds a degree in art education (painting, graphics, first survey of postwar Japanese art ever presented art history, and multimedia art) from the Staatliche in Japan or the U.S. She serves as a trustee on the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart. She spent boards of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York one year studying in the Department of Oriental University, the United States–Japan Foundation, and Painting at Seoul National University in South Korea The Korea Society, and is a member of the Council (2000/01) and six months in the Department of on Foreign Relations. National Painting (guohua) at Shandong Normal University in Jinan, China (2003). Phyllis Teo is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History at the Midori Matsui is a Tokyo-based art critic and University of Queensland, Australia. Her thesis scholar. She received her B.A. from Sophia and research focus on women artists in twentieth- University, Tokyo; M.A. from the University of century China. Tokyo; and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University (1996). She has held teaching Zheng Shengtian, Managing Editor of Yishu, is a positions at Tohoku University, Meiji Gakuin scholar, artist, and independent curator. For more University, and Musashino Art University, and is than thirty years he worked at China Academy currently teaching contemporary art and theory at of Art as Professor and Chair of the Oil Painting Tama Art University. She is a reviewer for Artforum Department. He is a founding board member of the International and Flash Art International. She is the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary author of The Age of Micropop: The New Generation Asian Art and a trustee of Long March Foundation. of Japanese Artists (Tokyo: Parco Press, 2007) and He has been a member of the Academic Committee Art in a New World: Post-Modern Art in Perspective for the Shanghai Biennale since 1998 and was a (Tokyo: Asahi Press, 2002). She has also written on co-curator of the 4th Shanghai Biennale (2004). He contemporary Japanese art for numerous exhibition has organized numerous exhibitions, including the catalogues and books, including Painting at the recent exhibition Art and China’s Revolution at Asia Edge of the World (Walker Art Center, 2001); Little Society and Museum, New York. He contributes Boy: The Art of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (Japan frequently to periodicals and catalogues about Society, 2005); and Copyright Murakami (Museum of contemporary Chinese and Asian art. Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007). In 2007, she curated the exhibition The Door into Summer: The Age of Micropop for Art Center Mito, Japan.

5 Madeline Eschenburg Knit Together: Movana Chen and the Politics of Identity in a Global Society

he streets of Hong Kong are likely to produce a sense of familiarity in most visitors because they contain many features found in Ttransnational metropolises across the globe. In traversing this vast urban space, one finds numerous skyscrapers rising above a grid of streets teeming with vehicles and pedestrians. Most of the burgeoning population wears Western-style dresses, T-shirts, jeans, hats, and business suits. To the global citizen today, this scene is hardly out of the ordinary. If you happened to be walking the streets of Hong Kong between May 14 and 18, 2008, near the popular designer clothing store Shanghai Tang, however, you may have noticed a strange being, a figure covered from head to toe in a sock-like garment, silently weaving her way through the crowds.

This mysterious figure who emerged from Shanghai Tang is Hong Kong based artist Movana Chen. Her public meandering was one of many performances during which she donned one of her staple artworks, a fabric made from magazines knitted together, called Body Containers, and confronted the bustling world of the everyday. When viewing a video recording of one of these happenings, it is intriguing to observe the reactions of those around her. Most people quickly pass her by, moving their heads slightly in her direction with a look of curiosity. Others shamelessly take pictures, some with their cameras pointing directly in her face, as she moves past. Others seem to be frightened, moving quickly out of her way, exchanging looks and whispers with their companions. The reaction of the latter group is arguably justified, as her appearance and movements are unsettling. The artist is shorter than most of her “audience,” and she occasionally stops to strike a pose in which she tucks her chin down toward her chest and bends forward at the waist. On a street pulsing with constant activity, her figure stands out as a solitary foil. Chen created this work for ART HK08, the first international art fair in Hong Kong. She was commissioned to construct this body container by Shanghai Tang. It is knitted from approximately 427 shredded pages of their ready-to-wear catalogues.1 Chen’s works are interdisciplinary and are recognized both in the worlds of contemporary art and fashion.

Historically, critics of the Western fashion world have shown great interest in stereotypically Chinese or Asian designs. As a result, many designers in Hong Kong and the mainland have resorted to a self-exoticization in order to make themselves more marketable on an international level. Two

6 examples from Hong Kong, traced by Hazel Clark in her article “Fashioning ‘China Style’,” are Shanghai Tang and Blanc de Chine. Though the two companies are very different, they both developed “brand identities based on ‘Chineseness’, with the shared aims of being the first luxury Chinese brand to capture the global market.”2 Shanghai Tang was established in 1994 by entrepreneur David Tang. Its original goal was to revive the fashion of Shanghai during the 1930s. The brand utilized the skills of Shanghai tailors who had moved to Hong Kong as refugees in the 1940s and 50s. Attached tags advertised the slogan “Made by Chinese” as opposed to the more negative “Made in China.”3 Its first Hong Kong retail space was decorated with a nostalgic motif, an attempt to capture the aura of historical China. David Tang’s primary goal in choosing this motif was to thematically

4 Above and following page: connect Shanghai at its height of power with Hong Kong of the 1990s. The Movana Chen, Body Container ST, 2008, performance at ART goods sold, however, did not fully and authentically draw from historical HK08, costume made from knitted shredded magazines. sources. Instead, they “playfully parodied historical and contemporary Courtesy of the artist and 5 Shanghai Tang. Chinese cultural icons, such as Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping.” The discrepancy between the reality of 1930s Shanghai and what was actually sold in the store can be explained by the fact that Shanghai Tang’s primary clientele were not Hong Kong natives. Rather, “the majority of the customers were local expatriates and foreign tourists, who were not seeking authenticity but recognizable and acceptable signs of Chineseness.”6 Since that time, David Tang sold his majority share to a Swiss luxury goods company, Richemont. The new owners sought to modernize Shanghai

7 8 Tang’s designs, transforming them according to the trends of the global market. In their designs, they purposefully moved away from the kitschy designs popular under original ownership in favour of those that are more in keeping with the aesthetics of historical China.

Given Shanghai Tang’s self-Orientalizing tendencies and its collaboration with Chen for ART HK08, it is fitting to analyze Chen’s Body Containers with this historical context in mind. From this perspective, Chen’s Body Containers could express the boundaries many Asian designers feel when competing in an international, Western-dominated field. Shanghai Tang catalogues are symbols of their success as a brand. Their success, however, has reinforced the trend of self-exoticization in the Chinese fashion design market, thus limiting other lesser known designers who wish to break free of this trend. Furthermore, the pose that she occasionally strikes during her Body Container performances could be seen as a bow, a traditional Chinese gesture reserved for special occasions such as funerals, ancestral worship, and special ceremonies. This movement in conjunction with her mummified form could be seen as an ironic response to Western expectations of Eastern fashion designers.

The problem such limitations put on up and coming designers echoes the opinion of a young, independent designer from Hong Kong called “Leonard,” interviewed by Lise Skov for her 1995 article “Fashion-Nation: A Japanese Globalization Experience and a Hong Kong Dilemma.” His position as a Hong Kong designer in this context is appropriate, since Chen has spent much of her adult life living and working in Hong Kong, even though she was born in mainland China. Leonard expressed embarrassment at Hong Kong fashion designers who relied on traditional Chinese aesthetics because of his feeling that much of China’s past is not shared with Hong Kong. For instance, in design school he once did a project on Chinese minorities: “While he felt that they were completely unknown to him, and therefore exciting, he also felt ambivalent about taking inspiration from mainland China. It was as if it were not legitimate for him to use this source, or as he put it himself: ‘I felt as if I stole it from the Chinese.’”7 Furthermore, he was disgusted by the simplification of a “Chinese” style based on the expectations of the West. An attractive alternative for Leonard is deconstruction fashion in which designers “consciously try to break dressmaking conventions, for example, by placing seams on the outside of a garment and by experimenting with the way in which the cloth is cut.”8 For Leonard, deconstruction was a way of expressing a view of China that cannot be conveyed by a familiar hemline or seam. Chen’s deconstruction of fashion through the shredding of magazines seems to be in line with Leonard’s design philosophies.

In Leonard’s opinion, deconstruction is an appropriate avenue for establishing an aesthetic identity for Chinese fashion design that is in keeping with his personal sense of identity. The deconstruction that Leonard advocates is based on previously established patterns, comparable

9 to the reworking of human features that Picasso enacted in his cubist portraits. In her Body Containers, Chen takes this concept a step further. Her original act of deconstruction is literal—she shreds fashion catalogues into long, thin strips. Her deconstruction is followed by a reconstruction that does not respond to previously established patterns from fashion design, but follows the specific proportions of individual bodies. When they are finished, her containers retain the height and contours of the figures for which they were made. Chen’s Body Containers, therefore, could be the ultimate form of self-expression in fashion design. It is questionable whether these would be acceptable expressions of Chinese (or, more specifically, Hong Kong) identity for Leonard. This might depend on the types of magazines used in the fabric of the containers. Because the Body Containers for ART HK08 were made from catalogues of a Chinese fashion company, it would be easy to read these as an alternative option for Chinese design aesthetics. But, other Body Containers were created from magazines from other countries, some of which are not fashion magazines at all. These works, therefore, could express a common identity characterized by what physically makes us human rather than an expression of national identity.

One obvious aspect of Chen’s body containers is their restrictive nature. They are designed to conceal rather than reveal their inhabitants. Chen seems to be tapping into a duality that is embedded in the concept of fashion. On the one hand, it is used by many as a means to express a unique identity, to set oneself apart from the rest. In this way, fashion can be seen as liberating. On the other hand, the fashion world is restrictive because it creates a culture in which a few decide what is “fashionable” for the many who blindly follow every trend put forth by well-known designers. Furthermore, the competitive nature of the field has lent itself to a Western centrism stemming from the fact that the world of high fashion has historically revolved around Western hubs such as New York, Paris, and Milan. For Chen, the use of catalogues in her designs is highly significant. She states, “The use of magazine pages symbolizes the idea of how media contains our self-perception through fashion.”9 Chen is at once imprisoned by the fashion world as symbolized by the catalogue pages that constricted her movement and liberated by the creative autonomy she enjoys as a contemporary artist and designer. One perspective on the relationship between the artist and Shanghai Tang was expressed by Joyce Hu, the company’s marketing director: “We instantly connected to Chen’s work for her focus on the relationship between the psychology behind fashion consumption and the language of media. . . . The body container challenges us as a fashion brand to step outside our comfort zone to be more innovative.”10 Chen’s unique stance, with one foot firmly planted in the world of fashion and the other in that of contemporary art, could enable her to influence the power struggles occurring between East and West in the fashion world. When the mega-corporations of Hong Kong stop relying on self-Orientalization for international attention, new roads may be opened for lesser-known designers like Leonard who refuse to compromise

10 their creative integrity. More recently, Chen has continued to collaborate with fashion media. In September 2009, she exhibited a body container at a Beijing store as part of Vogue’s International Fashion’s Night Out. She also participated in the Gyeonggi Museum’s Fashion Ethics: Wear Good exhibition in Korea from July to October of the same year.

Because of her position as a woman and her choice of artistic medium, Chen’s works also bring to mind the role of women in the production level of a globalized consumer society. After the 1979 decollectivization in mainland China, many peasants from China’s interior moved to industrial cities to make money for themselves and their families. Additionally, many manufacturers from Taiwan and Hong Kong relocated to mainland China because of the large amount of cheap labour available. The most enticing cities for relocation were those in Special Economic Zones, particularly in Guangdong province. It is noteworthy that among these migrant workers, women outnumbered men.11 In the minds of the migrant workers, these special economic zones symbolized a world of opportunity for economic freedom.

In reality, many factories underpaid and overworked their employees. This was particularly true for the female workers. In her article “Factory Regimes of Chinese Capitalism: Different Cultural Logics in Labor Control,” Ching Kwan Lee studies the management politics of two factories owned by the same company, one in Shenzhen and one in Hong Kong. In the Shenzhen factory, the women were generally young and single. Men held higher positions in the hierarchy, such as foreman and supervisor, while the women generally worked on the production line. These women were referred to as “maidens from the north,” emphasizing the “ . . . young women’s single status, immaturity, imminent marriage, short-term commitment to factory work in Shenzhen, low job aspirations, and low motivation to learn skills.”12 Although the transnational corporation created new spaces for women to make their own money, they were constricted within a bound hierarchical system without much chance of promotion. Their wages were generally low, and they worked so many hours that they had limited free time. They were also physically bound to the company because their living quarters were within the factory premises and strict curfews were enforced.

This is just one example of the thousands of factories located in Southern China taking advantage of the migrating workforce. The position in which these women have been placed provides another interpretive context for Chen’s Body Containers. It is intriguing to note that she was born in Chaozhou, in eastern Guangdong, where she lived until the mid 1980s, after which she moved with her family to Shenzhen and then Hong Kong. At the same time that migrants continued to pour into Guangdong for jobs, Chen’s family moved to a place where manufacturing jobs were dwindling. Although she was not part of this world, the constriction and elasticity of her Body Containers could symbolize both the freedom and constraints felt by contemporary women in a country where gender roles have undergone a radical shift over the last few decades.

11 Left: Movana Chen, Body Containers, 2005–08, sculptural installation of knitted shredded magazines. Courtesy of the artist and Pekin Fine Arts, Beijing.

Right: Movana Chen, Dreconstructing, 2004–08, installation of knitted shredded magazines. Courtesy of the artist and Pekin Fine Arts, Beijing.

Chen has also created knitted sculptures that are different in shape from those of Body Containers. Some of these works were exhibited from September to November 2008 at Pekin Fine Arts in Beijing in an exhibition titled Two Way Communication. In this show, she exhibited some Body Containers, but she also created a large rectangular textile specifically for the show that stretches from ceiling to floor. The bottom edge is uneven, with circular and rectangular holes patterning the fabric. The textile is knitted from an array of “art related magazines of various languages and cultural backgrounds.”13 A press release from the gallery states: “By recycling consumer commodities into new forms of artistic expression, she implicitly asks the question, ‘Where and when are magazines still useful?’ Her art practices of knitting and reconstructing question the original language of the magazines, subverting their message in an alternative means of ‘reading’ print media.”14 Though many of the magazines cannot be read by the artist (because of language barriers), she has taken the commodification of the global consumer society and restructured it into something understandable to her and, it is hoped, understandable to the viewer. In an artist’s statement Chen explains:

The reconstructed paper pieces represent wishes, and are transformed into meanings about daily life. Even though the viewers might not understand these words printed on the shredded papers, the action they take in viewing implies communication, which then breaks the limitation of verbal language exchange. Art thus transforms into a connection with life in an understandable way. It also becomes a focus as well as a sharing of life through various methods by different people.15

The idea of art creating a space for communication was especially evident in her 2007 exhibition at the 10th Seoul Fringe Festival, in which she not only exhibited her wearable art (knitted garments that more closely resemble typical global fashions than the Body Containers), but also invited the guests

12 Movana Chen, Dreconstructing to try them on and helped them knit their own swatches out of shredded (detail), 2004–08, installation of knitted shredded magazines, 6 x magazines. Here, the communication is two-fold: the intermingling of 4 metres. Courtesy of the artist and Pekin Fine Arts, Beijing. Korean and Chinese magazines symbolically connect the two countries despite their lingual and cultural differences; also, the artist and the viewers work together to re-imagine what has already been created. By trying on the

13 garments Chen made, the viewer is recontextualizing them according to his Left: Movana Chen, Wear “Me” Out—Korea, 2007, or her own tastes and personal experiences. interactive installation at Hut Gallery, Seoul, knitted shredded magazines. Courtesy of the artist and Seoul Fringe In her most recent project, Chen has turned her attention from magazines Festival. to books. For the exhibition Travelling into My Bookshelf, a touring art Right: Movana Chen, Wear “Me” Out—Korea, 2007, project, she knitted tapestries out of shredded books donated by friends. In interactive installation at Hut Gallery, Seoul, knitted a press release about the project from Shin Hwa Gallery, the author finds shredded magazines. Courtesy of the artist and Seoul Fringe the change in media to be significant: Festival.

Magazines are often considered as a kind of quick read that are easily disposable. Books are rather different as they contain the owner’s memories and the papers themselves maintain a unique smell as time goes by. Through the knitting process Chen has generated communication with her friends’ memories.16

Movana Chen, Her Piano (left), Their Comic Books (right), 2009, knitted shredded books mounted on canvas, 100 x 100 cm each. Courtesy of the artist and Shin Hwa Gallery, Hong Kong.

It is perhaps also significant that rather than fashioning the books into wearable art, the artist attached the knitted pages to canvases so they could be viewed on the gallery wall, like traditional paintings. This mode of exhibition, smaller in scale and less formidable than that of the Body Containers, invites the viewer to stand before the work for an extended period to read the knitted sentences. This project, like her wearable art, is

14 also a catalyst for uniting many different people; however, it is much more personal. The wearable art is made from magazines from different cultures and displays what the media from each of those cultures has defined as hip or chic. While Chen transforms these magazines into unique designs and invites others to try them on, these creations reflect her personality and taste similar to the way fashion magazines reflect the tastes of editors and consultants. These works represent a blending of global fashions into a new type of global fashion—to which the audience will relate according to his or her own tastes. Books, however, tend to resonate much more deeply in human consciousness than fashion magazines. Perusing someone’s bookshelf (or lack thereof) tells me much more than examining his or her closet. A book has the potential to completely engage the senses. When I read a book that compels me in this way, I am constantly relating my lived experiences to those occurring in the book and my friends to the fictional

Movana Chen, Fringe characters. The books, therefore, become part of my history, my memories. Memories, 2009, knitted shredded books mounted on This sentiment is shared by one of the artist’s friends who donated her canvas, 100 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Shin Hwa books for the exhibition: “To give you my beloved books and let you shred Gallery, Hong Kong. them into pieces, so that they can be reborn as a form of art, I feel reluctant and sad but at the same time very grateful.”17 When viewers examine each

15 16 Opposite Page: Movana Chen, work, they are drawn into the words Travelling Into Your Bookshelf (detail), 2009–, installation that have affected so many of the made of knitted shredded books. Courtesy of the artist artist’s friends. They may be faced and Shin Hwa Gallery, Hong Kong. with indecipherable markings of Right: Movana Chen, Travelling another language or a recognizable Into Your Bookshelf, 2009–, installation made of knitted quote from a well-loved book. As shredded books. Courtesy of the artist and Shin Hwa they read, the undulating words on Gallery, Hong Kong. the canvas weave themselves into viewers’ memories of characters or stories as well as the people and situations in their own lives triggered by those stories. To me, this project, more than the others, most directly brings people of many different backgrounds physically and psychologically together.

Chen’s knitted art projects are a microcosm for the many layers of communication that occur within a transnational economy. This communication revolves around power struggles, national identity, global identity, and personal relationships. Her works illustrate how deeply an individual’s identity politics are fixed within the broader conflicts of gender and cultural hegemony. The intimate nature of her wearable art and knitted books introduces a new way of dealing with these power struggles that focuses on the fostering of individual relationships. Each strand represents an individual or cultural ideal or value. Alone the strands are flimsy and easily torn, but it is the communication that happens between individuals that affords these knitted forms both their strength and their malleability.

Notes 1 Movana Chen, “Body Containers: ART HK08,” www.movanachen.com/pj_08_4.htm (accessed December 2, 2009). 2 Hazel Clark, “Fashioning ‘China style’ in the Twenty-First Century,” in The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity, and Globalization, eds. Eugenia Paulicelli and Hazel Clark (New York: Routledge, 2009), 179. 3 Ibid., 180. 4 Ibid., 181. 5 Ibid., 182. 6 Ibid., 182. 7 Lise Skov, “Fashion-Nation: A Japanese Globalization Experience and a Hong Kong Dilemma,” in Re-Orienting Fashion, eds. Sandra Niessen, Ann Marie Leshkowich, and Carla Jones (New York: Berg, 2003), 235. 8 Ibid., 236. 9 Movana Chen, “Body Containers: ART HK08,” www.movanachen.com/pj_08_4.htm (accessed December 5, 2009). 10 Ibid. 11 Ching Kwan Lee, “Factory Regimes of Chinese Capitalism: Different Cultural Logics in Labor Control,” in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, eds. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini (New York: Routledge, 1997), 116. 12 Ibid. 13 Movana Chen, “Two-way communication: Beijing,” www.movanachen.com/pj_08_5.htm (acccessed March 1, 2010). 14 Ibid. 15 Movana Chen, “Artist Statement,” www.movanachen.com/pf_as.htm (accessed December 10, 2009). 16 Movana Chen, “Travelling into my bookshelf: HK,” www.movanachen.com/pj_09_4.htm (accessed December 13, 2009). 17 Ibid.

17 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky Cui Xiuwen: Walking on Broken Glass1

espite the apparent simplicity of some of Cui Xiuwen’s images, their content is deep and rich in symbolism, and a look at her body of work from the past decade produces insight into their D 2 multifaceted meanings. Born in the 1970s to a large family in Harbin, north China, Cui now lives in Beijing and was one of the four members of the Sirens, along with Li Hong, Feng Jiali, and Yuan Yaomin, all of whom began as figurative painters and were trained at the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts. These artists were not avowed feminists, although, naturally, since they are women, their works do contain themes related to feminine issues. The name Sirens alludes to the story of Ulysses, who had himself bound to the mast of his ship and plugged his ears so that he would not be seduced by the Sirens’ songs as his boat passed through the straits they inhabited. After graduation, the main agenda of the Chinese Sirens group was to find places to exhibit, as during the 1990s such venues for women were few. They showed work in their small apartments, drawing an appreciative crowd.

The Sirens’s manifesto reveals a non-aggressive stance; rather than inciting confrontation with the art establishment, which is dominated by men, the Sirens wanted only to participate in their own artistic activities:

The Sirens of Greek tales are a typical aesthetic vision of a patriarchal society where women are always described as a combination of angels and inner devils. With the belief that women are the origin of all crimes, female wisdom and the artistic value of feminist arts have long been denied [sic]. It’s time for a change. The image of all-powerful man, the pattern found within most societies, is bound to be abandoned. Women’s voices will be increasingly heard and their natural endowments will benefit people of both sexes.3

Cui’s early paintings were somewhat notorious because they featured naked men. Despite the modern curriculum with its emphasis on Western oil painting at the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts and in art colleges throughout China, such themes, especially when executed by a female artist, were startling. Cui’s works from this era directly respond to Chinese art school practice where female nude models were available, but men were rarely used, and when they were, they were modestly covered. At the near center of one such composition is a sprawled nude male seated in the

18 Cui Xiuwen, Rose and Fresh Mint, 1996, oil on canvas, 180 x 160 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

darkened interior of the artist’s studio, which is harshly lit and drawn with extreme foreshortening. The strong compositional elements direct the eye to the near center of the canvas, and the highlighting that illuminates that area inescapably makes the figure’s genitals the focus of the painting. The lounging posture of the figure and the spotlight illumination convey a sense of an interrupted narrative, and we, in the shadows, are privy to an intimate view of the scenario.

By the turn of the century Cui had moved on to video, with which she further explored the issue of sexuality in contemporary China. In one video from 2000, entitled Ladies, a hidden camera was placed in the ladies’ room of a Beijing night club. Young women adjust their make-up, hitch up their bras, fix their hair, change their clothes, and roll up small wads of cash and hide them in their undergarments. Their continuous banter reveals the illicit nature of their liaisons. For example, one irate girl calls her lover on a cell phone threatening to tell his wife of their affair if he does not pay up. This kind of interaction was unknown a decade earlier, for communist China clearly promulgated decorous behaviour, eschewing displays of intimacy. Couples did not touch each other in public and applied for permission to marry and bear a child; moreover, the state vigilantly outlawed commoners’ engaging in prostitution, alcohol, drugs, homosexuality, and the like. In an interview from 2004, Cui averred that she did not wish to proselytize or

19 comment on the social situation Cui Xiuwen, Twice, 2001, video, 9 mins. 12 secs. in China, nor was she promoting Courtesy of the artist. any feminist interpretations.4 Rather, she maintained she wanted only to present the situation for others to experience, without commentary. Like the earlier paintings we are witnesses, looking on from a distance.

Cui is attracted to video, explaining that it provides greater freedom of Cui Xiuwen, Ladies, 2000, video, 6 mins. 12 secs. expression, is far less personal than oil painting, and has a range of potential Courtesy of the artist. images that is without limit. The video Twice, created in 2001, was a further exploration of the new sexuality in China. Here Cui tackles the subject of phone sex: a young beauty, who is Cui herself, is alone in her apartment, engaging in licentious banter with an unseen partner. Lying on her back, Cui caresses herself. Describing the work, Cui explains, “Desire is wandering

20 between the spirit and flesh. Rejection and acceptance have become a contradiction. Sometimes when you enjoy the happiness brought on by the flesh, you give up the pursuit of spirit; and sometimes when you seek the spiritual, you have to restrain your desire.”

A third video, Toot, from 2001, is certainly the most lyrical of her video works. A statuesque Chinese beauty is wrapped from head to toe in a long swath of toilet paper. Looking like a mummy, with her body totally obscured, she stands motionless. Slowly, drops of water cause the toilet paper to disintegrate. As her arms rise up freeing her body, she stands triumphant and naked. Cui had intended to use a model for the shot, but circumstance led to her not showing up, and Cui took her place. Many saw this performance as presenting a controversial stance as public nudity is still eschewed in China.5 Watching the figure being stripped of its delicate wrapping evokes many associations, and the passivity of the figure enhances identification with the traditional male sexual gaze. Looking at this object of desire, standing so submissively and slowly losing her protective covering, makes one feel like a voyeur. But like the erect goddess of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus,6 the figure emerging from her wrapping creates a sense of expectation, of creation in the making, of imminent action. In the end it is a statement of being freed from the bonds of convention, and the work represents freedom—freedom of movement, freedom of identity, freedom from the restriction of clothes, freedom from painting.

The traditional Chinese tune heard in the video, “The Ambush on All Sides,” is played on the traditional lute, the pi-pa; the song has no lyrics but is based on a romantic tale of war during the bitter battle to establish the Han dynasty in 202 B.C. On the eve of defeat by the Han, the Chu leader’s beautiful, deeply beloved concubine Yu Ji killed herself with his favorite sword so that she could not be taken alive by the enemy. Upon seeing her corpse, her lover wept in despair. The next morning, deserted by his soldiers, the Chu leader stood alone with his horse, sang a song mourning his lack of good fortune, cried out his beloved Yu Ji’s name twice, and fell on his sword. The context provided by the music leads one to wonder about the tragic associations of romantic love and this ancient beauty’s acts of self- sacrifice to maintain her purity. One may ask if such acts are still possible or relevant today.

Though at first Cui worked in a lab to have access to the technical equipment for processing and editing her film, with the recent evolution of video cameras she was able to work in her studio by herself, where she was continually drawn to working on themes that deal with nudity, sexuality, and self exploration. In an interview by Wang Yuwin, she explained this aspect of her art:7

Q. Why are you making these images? A: I have to do so for the sake that there is a voice in my heart asking me to do so and that’s the reason.

21 Q. What are you trying to say about the image of women as Cui Xiuwen, Toot, 2001, video, 3 mins. 33 secs. Courtesy of a sex object in China? the artist.

A: As to these images of woman as a sex object, I do not want to make any remarks on them—whether emotionally or morally. Instead I hope those who see them can get something themselves.

Q. What are you trying to say about female sexuality? About the freedom of women to appear nude?

A: The freedom of woman to appear nude is decided by the specific time, situation, and field. There is no such case for one to be restricted because she used her own nude body to create an artwork until now.

Q. About the freedom of women to have sex in China now?

22 A: It is decided by every specific woman; take for example the environment they live in and the education they received. China is such a big country that it is really hard for me to offer a definite answer.

That such questions were posed suggests the slow pace of the emergence of China from the social restrictions of the past. More importantly, Cui’s statements, along with others, establish her desire to let her work speak for itself. In this way, her work is freed from a single interpretation and left open to many levels of meaning.

In 2004, Cui turned to photographic montages, made up of photographs that she took and manipulated on a computer and printed on a large scale. Using this method in the video Sanjie, Cui recreated the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, substituting the original figures in the composition with the image of one young girl multiplied thirteen times and dressed in the same school uniform—a plaid skirt, white short-sleeve shirt with bow tie, and doll-like close-cropped hair and bangs. Cui eerily reconstructs all of the stylized poses and gestures of the original Renaissance painting, the recreation of which is especially jarring in its modern appearance, since it is such a familiar image. This figural substitution raises a multitude of provocative considerations, beginning with the patriarchal nature of the scene and, by extension, the religion. There is a readily apparent disparity between the innocent schoolgirl and her acting out all the roles of one of the world’s greatest tales of betrayal and forgiveness. Since all the figures are the same person, the work poses the question of whether these roles played by the same character could be different facets of the school girl’s individual personality and by extension that of the artist’s and the viewer. Intriguingly, in this work Cui posits the complexity of the human psyche—are we all potential traitors, disciples, or betrayed divinities? Posed like a Zen koan, Cui’s work causes us to question the traditionally accepted meaning of the Last Supper scene. In this way, Cui’s ironic replacement of the fathers of the Christian religion with a young schoolgirl makes the drama a psychological as well as religious one and imbues the subject with a variety of modern interpretations.

In the second phase of this series, Cui took pictures of an older girl, a pre- teenager, and interjected her into a number of scenarios. In one photograph from the series, One Day in Beijing (2004), the child, again dressed like a school girl, stands in the deserted streets of the ancient Forbidden Palace; the cloudless sky is luminous. Here, too, the work makes various cultural references—the architectural setting alludes to the imperial dynasties and their patriarchal agenda, the clear blue sky is familiar in Western art but rarely portrayed in Chinese art, and the girl is surely of our time. Dwarfed by her surroundings, she seems lost and vulnerable. She is shown in three- quarter profile and looks down to the right in a dejected manner. The now all-white schoolgirl uniform adds to her virginal appearance, and in the background seated beneath the palace wall is a second figure of the girl. The

23 isolation of the figures from each other is telling; they have no apparent Top: Cui Xiuwen, Angel No. 1, 2006, photograph, 158 x 200 relationship with each other, and their separation is made more emphatic cm. Courtesy of the artist. by the composition, which comprises broad, horizontal bands of colour— Bottom: Cui Xiuwen, Sanjie, 2003, photograph, 60.6 x 350 the golden palatial roof tiles, grey masonry wall, and empty red banner. It is cm. Courtesy of the artist. only the figures of the girls that relieve the strong horizontal composition.

In a later series entitled Angel No. 1 (2006), the subject is yet again a little older, a teenager. Now much closer to the viewer and in large scale, the girl, pregnant and dressed in a similar outfit, but without the red scarf, stands in a body of dark blue water near the center of the composition, with the moon rising high in the sky, its light illuminating the surface of the sea. Along the horizon are low-lying clouds, the further shore, and a

24 Top: Cui Xiuwen, One Day small hill on the right. This is a similar composition to One Day in Beijing, in Beijing No. 4, 2004, photograph, 126 x 156 cm. with its horizontal bands of colour—the sea, the sky, the clouds, and the Courtesy of the artist. shore provide the backdrop for the figure, making her singly important. A gentle wind blows her garments, and she averts the gaze of the viewer, making one feel like an intruder. This scene is somber, the girl appears alone and troubled, and the joy of pregnancy is not in evidence; instead, the image alludes to the problems of unwanted teenage pregnancy. In Angel No. 13 (2006), the teenager is lying on her back at the bottom of the picture, in the last stage of pregnancy, a tear falling from her eye. The rest of the composition consists of a grand view of the sky and swollen cumulus clouds. With their strange Kabuki-like makeup, the downcast faces of the girl in this series seem bruised.

25 In Angel No. 7 (2008), Cui returns to multiple figure compositions. Here the pregnant teenager appears thirty times in varying sizes and positions on a pyramid of sand by the inner wall of the Forbidden City; there is no way out, no way to climb the hill of sand, no way to get over the ancient masonry wall. Some of the figures, sitting with their legs sprawled, look like dolls; some look down, others look up beseechingly; and the uppermost one, seen from the back, tries to peer beyond the wall. Incongruously, a tall electricity pole rises up left of centre, and behind it a blue sky is filled with russet clouds of oncoming dusk. The works in the Angel series again allude to the problems of young women in a society that is still bound by

traditional values: they are still subject to the patriarchal conventions of Cui Xiuwen, Angel No. 13, 2006, photograph, 100 x 120 the past and the ongoing preference for male children that results in the cm. Courtesy of the artist. abortion of female fetuses and the subsequent reduction of the number of women in China. In addition, government policies restrict child bearing, and pregnant women wanting medical care often need to have a pregnancy certificate. These young girls are trapped by social restrictions, undervalued and rejected. The first time Cui used a model was in Sanjie, and it was

26 Cui Xiuwen, Angel No. 7, 2006, photograph, 1400 x 120.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

the child of a friend. For various logistical reasons new models would be required, and because Cui seeks with each subject to establish the intimacy she had with the first model, she spends at least a month socializing with each girl and her mother before beginning the series. This is in part to make the girl comfortable, but also Cui takes time to assess the subject’s personality in order to plan new ideas for a project. Cui then orchestrates the series—selecting backgrounds and scenery, making portraits of the girl, and, finally, merging the two using computer software. This is a long and arduous process, and one suite of works of a particular model in a specific setting usually take up to two years to complete.

Over the duration of these different series (2004–08), the ages of the young models progressed from three to five, from eight to nine, and finally from

27 thirteen to fourteen. These ages are not arbitrary. Cui avers that children initially become aware of their gender in the first age group, of their sexuality in the second, and of their reproductive capacity in the third. These girls could be considered a reflection of the artist and her experiences growing up though the various stages of physical, psychological, and emotional maturation. In this way, they are like an alter ego. Indeed, they physically resemble Cui as a slender and beautiful youth. Using this indirect kind of self-portrait format enables Cui to explore events in her own life, to externalize her early experiences and the feelings they engendered. Cui describes the painful years of being the youngest of a large and poor family living in an industrial zone; the deprivations of her life which included working hard as a school girl to help out; the fear and curiosity of sexual awareness and the sense of isolation and vulnerability that it brought; and the awful feeling that power and her destiny resided elsewhere than in herself, somewhere in the adult world. In some way, recreating these experiences contributes to freeing Cui of the burdens of the past and allows her to move forward. Through her work she is able to objectively analyze the evolution of her own character, race, gender, and culture.

Despite her current urbane life, Cui remembers well her earlier life as an outsider from the distant province of Harbin. The girls in the works also seem to be outsiders, alone, unprotected, and facing difficult circumstances. Women in general have been outsiders in Chinese society, especially in traditional culture, where they were usually treated as commodities, sold into other families as wives, concubines, courtesans, and maids while still young. Cui’s girls, because of their make-up and sense of isolation, seem damaged despite their attributes of youth and beauty. They are pregnant, and so their hope of a normal life is diminished, for these girls, having been used and then deemed unnecessary, have lost what status they otherwise might have had.

But, as suggested earlier, Cui disavows any feminist agenda, asserting she is not a feminist artist, that feminist themes do not drive her creative process. She says it took so many years to grow up, to master her artistic techniques, to survive, and to accumulate experience that she prefers to see things through the heart rather than intellect. She points out that in the beginning she started painting both sexes, and only later did she focus on girls. She maintains that her subjects, though apparently female, represent the whole of society. But Cui does hope her work will inspire women to become more independent, to make themselves better. For this, education is important, and seeing art gives people a broader vision and exposure to different values. Cui remarks how different society is now, and that her first experience of seeing art was in a museum, and that was only after she went abroad. Now art is widespread and there are many places to see art in the numerous artistic communities that have grown up throughout China, like the 798 Art District in Beijing, where there is a concentration of galleries and artist studios. Opportunities for female artists have improved somewhat—Cui herself has an extremely successful career—and she meets

28 monthly with some of the most prominent women artists in Beijing to discuss their common situations, but this is a private meeting of the minds rather than a professional association.

Thus we must heed Cui’s cautioning that these works are not generated by a feminist concern. She insists that the works are a form of meditation not only on her own life, but on human experience. Representing the various stages of physical and emotional development, the figures encompass several generations of experience. For example, the images with young girls dressed in school uniforms place the figure in a specific context and set of activities associated with the lower school educational experience. The girls are resonant symbols that elicit the sights, sounds, and smells of schoolrooms, playgrounds, and childhood games. Through the repetitive use of adolescent female subjects, Cui narrates a story not only of a single girl’s trauma, but of generations of adolescents and their social problems, insecurities, and fragilities. Such issues are not limited to girls, and many of these feelings do not dissipate with the passage of time. Thus the images have a far greater resonance than is immediately apparent.

To achieve this more general perspective, Cui employs various techniques that imbue the image with a broader context. First, the scenes are spare, stripped of quotidian detail, and illuminated by a nearly clinical light, which is reinforced by the girls’ white dresses and pale skin. In sum, the settings look like artificially illuminated stage sets where even the shadows are suppressed. In one sense, this is a traditional Chinese use of lighting, for there is no single source that consistently illuminates objects in the composition to identify the time of day, like the early morning reading of a letter by a young woman in a Vermeer painting. Second, there is a discernable disjunction between the figures and the composition, each having been shot independently and then reassembled, creating a disharmony that is sensed more than perceived; the girls appear to have been dropped into each scenario. Again, like that of a stage set, the pictorial space is shallow. Moreover, the spare backgrounds contrast with the very clear and detailed image of the girls. The narrative, too, is incongruous; why, for example, would a modern school girl be alone in the inner confines of the Imperial Palace? Another consideration is the use of make-up. It is always odd to see a young girl’s face painted with cosmetics, making it seem artificial, sexualized, and forced into playing a role beyond her age.

The image of the made-up schoolgirl is a multivalent construct that evokes the Chinese opera and actresses who transform the individual and thereby transcend the particularities of a specific times and circumstances. Indeed, male actors in the Chinese opera play the women’s roles. In effect the girls are wearing masks that conceal their identity. And at the same time the make-up, with its reddish blotches around eyes that mar the whitened skin, suggests underlying bruises. But these various disjunctions are offset by the meticulously composed compositions that create harmoniously balanced arrangements of colour and shapes.

29 Cui’s current series introduces a number of new elements. Entitled Chuda Mountain (ice and snow mountain), the series takes place in Liaoning, near her home city of Harbin. The actor is now represented by an older girl, about eighteen years of age, and she is joined by a life-sized doll. The doll resembles the girl, but is clearly fabricated; the joints of the arms and legs that allow for movement are visible. Cui explained that she got the inspiration for the series on a recent trip to Japan where she encountered the popular practice of using dolls in art. Rooted in popular culture, the use of dolls in art and theatre is several centuries old and still prevalent. Cui commissioned the special dolls from artists in Japan.

Predominantly monochromatic, these works refer back to the great tradition of Chinese landscape painting in both their restricted palette and their horizontal format. Though the time of year is early spring, the

weather has not yet become warm. Snow and ice frame the drama. But this Cui Xiuwen, Existential Emptiness No. 2, 2009, is a traditional view of spring in northern China, best expressed in the Song photograph, 78 x 500 cm. Courtesy of the artist. dynasty landscape painting of Guo Xi, dated 1072, in the National Palace Museum in Taiwan.8 In that painting, the spring foliage and flowers have yet to emerge, but the mist encircled energetic mountain forms rendered with erratic patches of light and shade convey the impression of the earth’s churning with the motion of germinating seedlings below ground. It should also be noted that Cui’s new series takes place during the Spring Festival, which is now a national holiday that commemorates dead ancestors, the

30 Cui Xiuwen, Existential Emptiness No. 1, 2009, photograph, 117 x 400 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

time when the family returns to the graveyard to clean and to repair the graves and to report the status of the family to the ancestors.

One silvery long horizontal print entitled Characteristics of Existential Emptiness No. 1, depicts a barren mountain landscape; lying in the snow are the barely distinguishable figures of the doll and the girl, who are separated by some distance. The figures lie face up, mirroring each other in their postures: their heads face towards the center of the composition;

their feet directed towards the frame of the photo. It is an eerily serene and stark snowscape evocative of monumental mountain landscapes. A second composition Existential Emptiness No. 2 also employs the exaggerated horizontal format. In this one, a snow-filled wintry forest occupies the entire middle ground, and the trees and their branches seem etched into the brilliant but diffused and atmospheric light. In a slightly different hue of silver, the girl, holding up the doll in front of her, rises up from the center and seemingly hovers among the branches of the trees. Dominating the centre of a third composition Existential Emptiness No. 3, in the same

31 format, is a long flat boat floating in the middle ground. The girl and doll occupy either end of the boat; the former reclines with a dreamy expression on her face, while the latter is bent over the side. These spare grey compositions, dominated by a strongly delineated horizon, suggest Hiroshi Sugimoto’s solemn and meditative photos of the sea9

The last image Existential Emptiness Nos. 4–6 in this series is quite different: it is a triptych with the three compositions horizontally aligned, and it takes place not in a landscape but in the middle of a highway. In the left photo, the girl and puppet stand in three-quarter frontal view on a nearly deserted thoroughfare at dusk. The headlights of an oncoming car in the far left lane dimly illuminate the road through the haze of snow. Behind the car is a large truck. On the right, red traffic lights glow faintly in the largely monochromatic composition. The subjects have no coats, only their school uniforms; and the billowing tie of the doll indicates a harsh wind. Pedestrians and bicyclists navigate the highway at its perimeter, and the pale silhouette of the smokestacks of an industrial factory sit at the left. In the middle photo the girl holds the doll in front of her, huddled behind its inert body as they bike down the center of a four-lane road in the snow. Her posture conveys a sense of urgency. Slick frost forms a crusty cover on the dark wet pavement. Seen from the rear, the tires of the bike etch a path in the newly falling snow. The right photo replicates the backdrop of the first one, but here the figures face the other direction and the girl holds up the doll before her to shield her body; the doll’s limp hair flies in the cold wind as they huddle together for protection.

These pictures incite all the senses. One can feel the harsh wind, the approaching darkness of night, the muted sounds silenced by damp snow. The relationship between the two figures is one of the major themes. Whether placed together or spaced apart, they are two parts of a puzzle, evoking the dynamic dualities of body and soul, yin and yang, life and the absence of life. At times the doll is a burden to be carried across a wintry highway or a shield behind which to find shelter. In the ethereal forest scene, they rise together in harmony.

The use of the doll can be linked to the great tradition of Japanese puppet theater, Bunraku.10 There, like the masked Noh dramas of the Zen tradition, fiercely emotional themes of loyalty, dishonour, and love are played out by

32 Cui Xiuwen, Existential Emptiness Nos. 4– 6, 2009, photograph, 114 x 450 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

figures bereft of the humanity of actors in Western theatre. Through the artifice of the doll and masks, the drama, made more abstract, becomes even more poignant. Being more abstract, it allows viewers to interject the particularities of their own narratives. The doll replaces the younger models of the earlier works and engenders more apparent symbolic content. The artifice of the doll recalls the mask-like visages of the young girls with painted faces; the doll’s limp mechanical body resembles the dejected postures of the actors in the earlier series. Though the pictorial context has changed from the inner confines of the Forbidden City to the frozen landscape of north China, the figures are still interjected into an alien environment, and the artificiality of this effect still conveys a sense of isolation. Like the flat light of the earlier series, the murky darkness of a snowstorm or snow-filled sky still suppresses the source of light or shadows and robs the scene of any temporality. With this new approach, Cui is able to transcend the specifics of a contemporary scene for a more abstract composition, which, along with the muted palette, long-scroll format, and small-scale figures elicits comparison with great masters of Chinese landscape painting. The focus is no longer on the image of a young girl, but rather on a universal human drama.

Notes 1 This is the title of a song by Annie Lennox: Now every one of us was made to suffer Every one of us was made to weep But we’ve been hurting one another And now the pain has cut too deep So take me from the wreckage Save me from the blast Lift me up and take me back Don’t let me keep on walking I can’t keep on walking on broken glass 2 Cui’s art can be seen at http://www.artzinechina.com/display.php?a=168 and numerous other Web sites. See also Karen Smith, Ciu Xiuwen, (Beijing: DF2 Gallery and Timezone 8, 2006). 3 “The Sirens,” a pamphlet independently printed by the collective in Beijing, 1998. 4 This article draws on over six interviews I conducted with the artist over the last ten years. All quotes by the artist are from these interviews. 5 Private communication. 6 For the Birth of Venus, painted bu Botticelli in 1485, see www.botticellibirthofvenus.com. 7 Wang Yuwin ‘s interview with the artist in 2004 is unpublished; the text was provided courtesy of the artist. 8 For an image and discussion of Early Spring, see A Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization, prepared by Patricia Buckley Ebrey et al., University of Washington, http://depts.washington.edu/ chinaciv/painting/4lndguox.htm. 9 For examples of these and other spare monochromatic landscapes, see http://www.sugimotohiroshi. com/seascape.html. 10 For more information and a video of a bunraku performance, see http://www.bunraku.org/; see also Donald Keene, Noh and Bunraku (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

33 Phyllis Teo Maternal Ambivalence in Pan Yuliang’s Paintings

eople who have heard of the legendary Chinese woman artist Pan Yuliang (1895–1977) are often more attracted to the story of an Pex-prostitute becoming an international artist than being seriously interested in her artistic accomplishments. Chinese art critic Tao Yongbai points out that “Pan Yuliang has become a household name in China today because of her extraordinary life. People are often more interested in her legendary past, and have little knowledge that she was one of the outstanding woman artists in China’s early Western painting movement.”1 Although there have been books written and films made on her dramatic life, in-depth analysis of Pan’s artworks has been scarce and attempted only sporadically. To address the overemphasis on Pan’s life and to situate her within art history, I would like to examine a series of her nude works as pieces representative of the early Western art movement in China that possess distinctive modernist qualities. I will also provide an overview that will help to locate the artist parallel to the sociocultural and political issues of her period.

Pan Yuliang’s childhood coincided with the overthrow of the long-reigning imperial Qing dynasty (1644–1911), when the new Republic of China was still in a state of political disarray. Her dramatic life and career could not be but intertwined with the turmoil and early modernization of China at the turn of the century, and her art evolved within the flux of transformations where the conflicting dichotomies of East and West, tradition and modernity, male chauvinism and emerging feminism co-existed. Pan’s modernist works contain novel sociocultural concepts with which modern reformers strove to replace outdated customs. Wang Lihua, a senior curator and researcher at Anhui Provincial Museum, writes, “Pan Yuliang did not simply synthesize elements of Eastern and Western painting techniques in her works, her personal, difficult experiences are clearly reflected in her art. She expressed and highlighted themes related to her own life as well as common issues and problems that women faced in her time. She is one of the earliest Chinese woman artists who paid close attention to the changing situation of women during the modernizing era.”2

Pan Yuliang was born on June 14, 1895 in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, as Chen Xiuqing, and was renamed Zhang Yuliang when she was adopted by her maternal uncle after the early passing away of her parents.3 Because of poverty, her uncle sold her to a brothel in the city of Wuhu in Anhui

34 province when she was in her early teens. On a chance occasion, she met Pan Zanhua, a customs official, who rescued her from the brothel. Pan Zanhua was an advocate for modernity and a member of Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary league (Tong Meng Hui). He studied at the Waseda University in Japan together with the prominent intellectual Chen Duxiu. Greatly empathizing with Yuliang’s desperate situation, Pan Zanhua took her as his second wife in 1913 and resettled her in Shanghai in 1916 where she learned to read and write. Out of gratitude, Yuliang adopted his surname, “Pan.” Living next to Yuliang’s rented house was artist Hong Ye (1886- 1932), who lectured at the Shanghai Art Academy. Hong started teaching at the academy in 1914, when it was still known as Shanghai Drawing and Art Academy (Shanghai Tuhua Meishu Xue Yuan, the previous name of Shanghai Art Academy). Hong was known for his study and teaching of colours, and whose paintings revealed Western influences. Drawn to Hong’s painting activity, Pan Yuliang started taking oil painting lessons from him in 1917, which laid the foundation for her Western-style painting.

Liu Haisu, Female Nude, 1929, oil on canvas, 91.3 x 72 cm. Collection of Liu Haisu Art Museum.

As China worked its way towards modernization in the early twentieth century, the Shanghai Art Academy, under the bold leadership of its principal Liu Haisu, took in its first batch of women students in 1918. The school’s proposal of co-education was a response to the educational reforms of Cai Yuanpei, the newly appointed Minister of Education in Republican China. With encouragement from Hong Ye and Chen Duxiu, Pan applied for a place in the inaugural intake of women students at the art academy. Shanghai, the place where Pan’s artistic journey began, was, as a result of the enforced Treaty of Nanjing at the end of the Opium War, one of the first five treaty ports along the east coast of China to open up for international trade in 1842. The presence of large communities of foreigners exposed the residents of Shanghai to many aspects of Western culture, and the Shanghai Art Academy was one of the first Chinese art institutions to advocate Western painting. Liu Haisu, a champion of modern European styles, was among the earliest to incorporate Western life drawing into the academy’s curriculum. Liu’s practice of using nude models in class created

35 a public outrage, leading conservatives, including warlords and inflexible moralists, to accuse him of being a “traitor to art” and of perverting truth and humanity. This incident reflected an exciting yet uncertain period when modernists were advocating new foreign concepts while conservatives persisted with tradition.

After graduating from the Shanghai Art Academy, Pan became the first Pan Yuliang, Spring, 1930, oil on canvas. Reproduction from woman artist in the Chinese Republic to win an official scholarship to the 1934 catalogue Pan Yuliang Oil Painting Collection. study in France. During this period, a large number of Chinese art students flocked to France, particularly Paris, for their studies. The large influx of non-French artists living and working in Paris, which included a small number of Asian artists, led to a generally defined fraternity known as the “School of Paris.” This group of Paris-trained Chinese artists who returned home played important roles as mediators of modern Western art. As Li Chu-Tsing writes, “the period from 1927 to 1939 can be considered as the golden age of Parisian influence on Chinese art.”4 In 1921, Pan first began her studies in France at the Institute Franco-Chinois in Lyon, and later studied at the École nationale des beaux-arts in Lyon. Pan was transferred to

36 Paris a year later and studied at the École des beaux-Arts de Paris, where she came under the tutelage of French artists Lucien Simon (1861–1945) and Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (1852–1929).

When Pan graduated from the École in Paris in 1925, she was awarded the prestigious Rome Scholarship at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, where she was also taught sculpture, and her student works were regularly selected for the national art exhibitions in Italy. One of her nude oil paintings also won a 5,000 Lira award at the Italy International Fine Arts Exhibition in 1927. It was the first time that a Chinese artist had ever won such a significant art award in Italy, and upon her return to China after the completion of her studies, Pan was invited to teach Western Painting at the Shanghai Art Academy in 1929. She was also appointed Director of the Western Painting department. In less than a decade after her studies in Europe, Pan subsequently held five solo exhibitions in China, in addition to numerous joint exhibitions and collaborations that took place in various cities in China as well as overseas.

Pan’s individualized artistic vision of early Chinese modernism is manifested through her distinct representation of the nude. Her repeated articulations of the nude proposed challenges to conservative perceptions of the subject in Chinese art circles. The great master Xu Beihong saluted Pan’s valour when he reviewed her works in 1935: “For three hundred years no literati artist has dared tread into the unknown realm of nature’s beauty. . . . in the perilous search for true art, the literati artists have failed . . . save for heroine Madame Pan Yuliang.”5 For the duration of her artistic career, Pan continued to affirm that her nude paintings were her most significant works. In her first publication, Pan Yuliang Oil Painting Collection (1934), nudes are shown to make up a major component of the works done in her early career. Pan indicated that among her earliest works, two nude paintings, Dawn (qingchen), from 1928, and Spring (chun), from 1930, were her most satisfactory.6 During her last exhibition in Paris, in 1977, she told French curator Vadime Elisseeff that she picked her series of Asian nudes for the show because they were her most representative works.7

While Pan had gained artistic recognition with her nude representations, these works created considerable controversy and seem to have made it difficult for her to remain in China. Not having the cultural background and understanding of the nude as an artistic genre, it was generally understood in early twentieth-century Chinese society as the state of being “naked,” and one might have expected Pan to be ultra-sensitive and careful in avoiding public furore over the depiction of nudity. Art historian Sir Kenneth Clark comments that “the idea of offering the naked body for its own sake as a serious subject of contemplation simply did not occur to the Chinese or Japanese mind, and to this day raises a slight barrier of misunderstanding,”8 and indicates that the nude as a genre in art was radical and problematic in the Chinese context.

37 Although Pan’s fortunate change of fate came from the strong support of the artistic intelligentsia with whom she was associated after her marriage, Pan continued to face various challenges in her artistic career. Pan appeared to have encountered many instances of prejudice and injustice in relation to her gender and disadvantaged background. The article of Pan in Seven Chinese Painters Who Studied in France, 1918-1960 writes that “Pan wished to dedicate herself to the art education of China but her unusual background made it difficult for her to achieve this goal in the conservative China . . . ”9 In addition to being a woman artist in a conservative environment, Pan’s background and her pursuit of the nude in her art stirred disapproval and controversy within arts circles and Chinese society at large.

The Chinese art world of the period was still strictly organized by an order of seniority and its system manipulated by an established group of male players. In China, the legacy of traditional ink painting was dominated by male masters, many of whom were deeply rooted in feudalistic Confucius thinking. Their artistic ideologies, embedded in the dominant Chinese culture, made them especially resistant to modern concepts of Western art. Traditionally, aged masters were highly regarded while younger artists were obliged to follow in the seniors’ footsteps. In this context, Pan’s apparent quick rise to fame not only aroused resentment from other artists, but her modern representations of the nude, along with her outspoken ways, contradicted traditions and piqued conservatives in China. Despite the progress made by modern artists in the early twentieth century, the influence of Western art on Chinese society was limited, and the modernist art Pan practiced was understood only by a small group of Westernized elites.

Struggling within predominantly male and conservative art circles, Pan felt rejected by this restrictive environment. She left China in 1937 for Paris, ostensibly to take part in the Exposition Internationale de Paris, but never returned. Taking into account the elements of non-conformity and individuality in her works, Pan should rightly be honoured as a modern artist of her time. Yu Feng, a prominent woman artist who studied under Pan in the 1930s, defended her: “As a highly innovative artist, Pan has every reason to be ranked with her male counterparts, including Xu Beihong and Liu Haisu.”10 While her innovative works should have been given enduring recognition at a time when intellectuals were advocating modern reforms and pioneer feminists were encouraging women to step forward in society, this did not occur. The narrative of Pan highlights contradictions within the early modernization of China.

In pre-modern China, women were associated with the domestic sphere due to long-established Chinese patriarchal culture, where gender hierarchy had a tremendous impact on women’s lives. The May Fourth New Culture Movement (1915 to 1925) convinced Chinese intellectuals that feudal values had to be discarded and created a wave of feminist activism in urban Chinese cities. Wu Yu, a prominent intellectual from the New Culture

38 Following page: Pan Yuliang, movement, denounced Confucianism and wrote about Western women’s My Family, 1931, oil on canvas. Black-and-white reproduction increasingly public roles and called upon Chinese women to follow the from the 1934 catalogue Pan Yuliang Oil Painting trend of the West.11 The increased public awareness of women’s problems Collection.. caused a dramatic rise in women’s participation in the early women’s movement. Wang Zhen, a scholar of Chinese studies, lists out a few areas in which the influence of May Fourth feminism was felt, one of which is: “educated women with a new consciousness entered the public space, demanding social, cultural, and political changes.”12

In the step towards self-definition, early twentieth-century Chinese women artists and writers began to express themselves through personalized works. As a woman artist emerging from the May Fourth generation, Pan’s distinct, modern paintings can be seen as articulations of her experiences, intellect, and emotions. Against the backdrop of women as objects of oppression in traditional patriarchal China, her representations of women can be seen as assertions of a Chinese woman’s individualism in a new society. While there is no record of her participation in feminist activism, Pan’s outspoken ways, outstanding artist career, and leadership roles13 at various times clearly show that she was a modern woman. She was also well connected with the New Cultural Movement intellectuals, and would have been well informed about the Chinese women’s movement. Chen Duxiu, who, as mentioned earlier, was a supporter of Pan, was also the chief editor of the progressive magazine The New Youth (Xin Qingnian) and initiated a column in 1917 that focused on women, “Woman Problem” (nüzi wenti), since 1917.

Although a rising number of women began to receive education, many conservatives only perceived this change as improving women’s abilities so that they could become better-equipped wives and mothers. Beneath the uncertainties accompanying the process of modernization, the evolution of the new Chinese woman was associated with conflicting images. In her pursuit of modernity and independence, the woman was expected to maintain a feminine image to avert male anxiety. Chinese studies scholar Barbara Mittler highlights the ambiguous representations of modern women in the Shanghai media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “Women were considered the agent of modernity—for the glory of China—but at the same time, they were seen and felt to be its most frightening symbol.”14 The political and cultural reformation of this period created great anxieties about men’s former privileges and women’s new roles and responsibilities.

Pan’s emotional world is an ambiguous area that Chinese writers continue to have disputes about. There are a number of paintings in Pan’s late artistic career that express her vision of motherhood. In relation to her maternity paintings, Lu Rongzhi writes, “Her descriptions of mother’s love were even more direct; she repeatedly utilized it as a theme, indicating her deep longing for her mother’s love.”15 It is speculated by some Chinese writers that Pan was once pregnant with Pan Zanhua’s child but had an abortion

39 because she felt a child born from a mother of her background would be despised in Chinese society. Whether by choice or not, Pan never had children of her own in her lifetime. Instead, she chose to lead an alternative lifestyle as a solitary artist in Europe, unusual for a Chinese woman of her period. Pan’s shifting social circumstances, from an orphan, ex-prostitute, and concubine to an art scholar, recognized artist, and professor in China, and finally to a solitary artist in France, could have created problems for her in reconciling personal and professional identities. Are her maternity pictures signs of longing for a mother’s love, or are they an indication of regret for an aborted baby?

It can also be argued that Pan was lonely and conceivably painted these maternity pictures to fill the void of homesickness. She previously articulated a desire for a family life through an oil painting, entitled My Family (1931),16 that featured herself, Pan Zanhua, and one of his sons from an earlier marriage. Yet, My Family is different from a typical family representation, because it focuses on Pan Yuliang the artist wielding the paintbrush, while Pan Zanhua and his son are portrayed looking at her painting in the background. It seems to suggest that Pan’s identity as an artist is as important as, if not more than, her familial relationships. Her family is also unconventional in the sense that it includes one of her husband’s sons, borne of his first wife, who was believed to have come under her care only for a period of time. An analysis of her maternity pictures will further reveal that her artistic revelations of motherhood and familial relationships might not be as simple as some writers propose.

In the ink painting Motherly Love (1958), Pan juxtaposes the contoured curves of two female nudes around a blanketed baby in a serene outdoor setting. One of the nudes is seated with the infant in her arms while the other kneels forward with her head leaning towards the baby. Their postures establish a certain rhythm as their eyes draw towards the centre where the baby is. In a combination of carefully rendered “pointillist” marks and light washes of delicate hues, the figures blend in with the landscape to achieve pictorial coherence. Despite the physical proximity of the figures, one questions the extent of intimacy in the complex three-figure relationship. Ann Phoenix and Anne Woollett, scholars in the subject of motherhood, write, “Incorporated within the term ‘mothering’ is the intensity and emotional closeness of the idealized mother-child relationship. . . .”17 Many paintings will focus on the intimacy between a mother and her child, excluding unnecessary figures from the composition. But who is the real mother in Pan’s picture? The expression of the woman holding the infant seems consciously hidden, with the lower half of her face covered by her awkwardly raised left shoulder. The second woman’s face elicits a serene expression but assumes the role of an observer. Uncertainty about the identity of the “real” mother is apparent here.

40 41 In several of Pan’s maternity paintings, there are two women figures engaged in the task of child-caring. Some Western paintings have incorporated the character of a nursemaid in the portrayal of motherhood, which makes for a three-figure composition. For example, Mary Cassatt, the great modern artist of the maternity subject, portrays the company of a lady, nanny, and child in In the Omnibus. One can differentiate the distinct status of the lady and the nanny by their dress, placement, and demeanour. The element of class distinction, however, is absent in Pan’s paintings. The female figures in Pan’s maternity works are often depicted unequivocally

unclothed, which obliterates costumes Top: Pan Yuliang, Motherly Love, 1958, ink painting, 107 as markers of class. There are often no x 80 cm. Courtesy of Anhui Provincial Museum, Hefei. attributes such as dress or demeanour Right: Mary Cassatt, In the in Pan’s paintings to differentiate the Omnibus, 1890–91, drypoint and aquatint. Courtesy of “real” mother from another woman, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. thus either women could very well be the “real” mother.

In another ink painting, Women in Bath (1958), Pan portrays a lively toilette in which two women prepare a child’s bath. The interior of the room is delineated with undulating black ink, and the details are filled with brilliant transparent hues. The chubby face of the little girl speaks of a childlike innocence, as she sucks her right index finger in contentment. A plump, older-looking nude holds the girl on her lap in the foreground. The physical component of the nude’s voluptuous body provides a stark contrast to the clothed child. A younger, semi-nude woman watches the duo from the background.

42 The facial features as well as the massive physique of the woman carrying the child in Women in Bath bear an uncanny resemblance to Pan herself. This feature has led some writers to think that possibly Pan desired to be a mother. As Jia Defang of Anhui Provincial Museum writes, “Pan was a delicate and sensitive person, many of her paintings depict scenes of parental love, conveying to the viewer a sense of longing for motherhood.”18� The painting first appears as a delightful domestic scene, with its effervescent colours and decorative rendering. Yet a few signs of incoherence embedded in Pan’s images signal the involvement of more complicated issues.

Pan Yuliang, Women in Bath, A strange ambiguity of meaning and mood is apparent, with the woman 1958, ink painting, 68 x 51 cm. Courtesy of Anhui Provincial in the foreground looking elusively at the child on her lap. One senses Museum, Hefei. awkwardness in the way she twists her wrist to hold the child, and her sharp red painted finger nails seem to impose a latent prick on the child’s thigh. The expression of the nude in the background is obscure, with the deliberate omission of the depiction of her nose. But one can almost sense a certain disconcertedness, if not detachment, on the part of the second woman as she directs her gaze towards the two figures in front. Despite deploying dynamic compositional elements and illustrating physical intimacy, one senses a certain emotional diffidence in the motherly images.

43 It appears to me that the woman in the background stands in for a third person’s perception, where one can observe the mother-child relationship from a safe and detached perspective.

Pan’s particular construction of the maternal image is unusual. The “extra” figure in her compositions and the elusive expressions of her motherly figures reveal psychological and emotional inhibitions. French feminist Julia Kristeva has referred to psychoanalytic terms like “displacement” and “sublimination” in the exploration of the maternal body.19 Her writing suggests that the maternal body is constantly split between a relationship to the infant and her personal desires as a woman, and that she is primarily a “subjective social and speaking being.”20 Kristeva’s perception resists conventional stereotypes of maternity. Following this line of thought, Pan’s nude maternity figures might be seen to negate the usual social and symbolic aspect of motherhood, and to bring out a subliminal meaning of the maternal body instead. While attempting to express the intimacy of the mother-child relationship, some of her paintings simultaneously reveal detachment, revealing her ambivalence towards maternity. Entrenched in such a conventional feminine genre might be unexplained personal issues for the artist in traversing her psychological and emotional desires. Pan frequently explored this theme of motherhood in both her oil and Chinese ink paintings, demonstrating her deep interest in as well as her uncertain attitude towards the subject. In understanding Pan’s maternal paintings, one needs to carefully consider her particular personal and social circumstances.

One needs to think beyond the idea that Pan is simply fulfilling a desire to be a mother through her art. Pan’s background as a concubine, a second wife of another woman’s husband, signals a subjugated position not only in society, but also in the private context of the home. According to Chinese sources, when one of Pan Zanhua’s sons (borne by his first wife) moved to Shanghai, Yuliang took up the task of caring and providing for him. Despite initial rejection from the boy, Pan persevered in her role as a stepmother, or “second mother,” as the boy addressed her.21 The painting My Family was possibly inspired by Pan’s short-term mothering of the boy. In their research on stepfamilies, Margaret Robertson and Donna Smith write that, in general, “There is often a high degree of tension and disagreement in a stepfamily, certainly at first, about who really belongs to it, usually accompanied by conflict and confusions of loyality.”22 While Pan was trying to fulfil her duties as a “mother” to her competitor’s son, she was likely to have faced initial rejection from the boy and her subjugated position as the concubine in the Chinese domestic context of the time relegated her to a position not unlike that of a maid.

Her role as a “second wife and mother” in her marriage would have added to the complexity of her identities as a modern woman and an independent artist. According to psychologist Jane Ussher, motherhood was and continues to be defined as the highest route to physical and emotional fulfilment and as essential for all women.23 This view has encouraged frequent romanticization of motherhood and of mother-child relationships.

44 While the mother-child theme was (and continues to be) regarded as an appropriate expression of women’s femininity, embedded in the ostensibly docile genre could be delicate issues that intertwine with Pan’s individual psychological and emotional desires. Pan’s images of women in intimate maternal roles seem to promote ideals of feminine images that would not have been perceived as conventional. Instead, they have generated more complex meanings.

Pan Yuliang, Mother and Child Pan showed a preference for depicting the act of mothering in public spaces, (on the beach), 1961, oil on canvas, 99 x 80 cm. Courtesy such as in Motherly Love as discussed above. Pan’s painting Mother and of Anhui Provincial Museum, Hefei. Child at the Beach (1961), portrays an unclothed mother lying uninhibitedly in a beach setting as her baby leans forward earnestly to latch on to her breast. The task of breastfeeding, normally carried out in private spheres in Chinese context, is seen through a sensual engagement of the unclad mother with her young in a public space. Chinese mother’s concepts of nursing young children in early modern China were still embedded in traditional Chinese cultural context. While breastfeeding was the common nursing practice in Chinese society in the past,24 breastfeeding in public would have been considered embarrassing, let alone a nursing mother being in a state of complete nudity.

45 Women and girls in pre-modern and even early modern China were largely confined to domestic spaces. Elizabeth Croll writes that it was common for girls “to be almost entirely confined to their households whether they be the large gentry-style court yarded compound or the humbler three- room peasant dwelling.”25� Growing up in an era where the experience of girls and women were bound up with gendered definitions and restricted allocation of space, Pan’s repeated representations of naked mothers with their young in public spaces suggest a departure from established Chinese notions of women’s behaviour. Contrary to traditional notions of the nude as “depraved” and “anti-Confucian,” her predilection for depicting mothers as naked in the public seems like challenging conventional beliefs as to what is suitable and dignified as art produced in a traditional Chinese artistic establishment. Perhaps influenced by the May Fourth feminist movement, Pan’s representation seems to transmit an allegory of a woman’s (or a mother’s) desire for freedom, autonomy, and access to the public sphere.

Pan’s personal life and experiences evolved within the flux of transitional periods in both Eastern and Western civilizations. As discussed above, the May Fourth movement resulted in the start of women stepping out into the public sphere to receive education and to work. For Pan, the breakaway from her oppressed past could have happened only in societal transformations where old, embattled feminine social spaces were being challenged. With more women entering the workforce, the issues of household responsibilities, mothering, and motherhood would be considered as potential sites where early Chinese feminism could challenge and work toward. In relation to social changes, Pan’s ambivalent maternity pictures could be reflecting the anxiety about modern women’s shifting identities as well as reconciling the differences between her private experience of the family and that of her viewers. The occasional uneven character of her maternal representations might be understood as an effect of her multiple and complex identities, shaped by her changing gendered self-identification. Although contradictorily at times, Pan’s unconventional images could be seen as attempts to construct new perceptions of the independent, modern woman.

The life and work of Pan offer an occasion for the analysis of sociocultural specificities experienced by early twentieth-century Chinese women artists, particularly those who sought inspiration from Europe. Polarized between two extreme positions, Pan’s narrative exemplifies that of a modern Asian artist who faced a dilemma between choosing the influx of modern Western culture and bearing the burden of one’s tradition. Facing challenges as a woman of underprivileged background, Pan withstood enormous social pressure in reconciling her changing feminine identity as an artist. Given the prescribed notions of femininity and artistic vocabularies available to women of her era, there was neither an easy nor obvious strategy to follow in the representation of the nude. The approach of shuffling between East and West allowed her to gain new insights into both traditional and Western art, while she differentiated, filtered, and naturalized elements that were relevant to her. On the basis of this understanding, she achieved a new way of being modern.

46 Notes 1 Tao Yongbai, “Western Painting Movement’s New Women” (Xihua yundong zhong de xin nüxin), Lost Memories: History of Chinese Women Painters (Shiluo de lishi: Zhongguo nuxin huihuashi), eds. Tao Yongbai and Li Ti (Hunan: Hunan Meishu, 2000), 189. 2 Wang Lihua, “Two Female Anhui Artists in the Art Scene of China: Pan Yuliang and Sun Duoci” (Zhongguo huatan de liang wei Anhui nü huajia), China Cultural Newspaper (Zhongguo Wenwu Bao), December 20, 2006. 3 Primary sources on Pan Yuliang’s life and work are very few. The remaining documents on her are in the possession of various people, including surviving family members (refering to her husband Pan Zanhua’s descendants), and institutions like the Anhui Provincial Museum in China and the Cernuscih Museum in France. There are some disagreements about the details of her life even among researchers. Most of Pan’s biographical information has been generously provided to me by the Anhui Provincial Museum in China. Special thanks to its senior curator and researcher Wang Lihua for granting me an interview on the subject of Pan Yuliang. 4 Li Chu-Tsing, “Paris and the Development of Western Painting in China,” China-Paris: Seven Chinese Painters Who Studied in France, 1918–1960 (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1988), 12. 5 Quoted in Lu Rongzhi, “The Life and Art of Pan Yuliang,” Pan Yuliang: Huahun, (Taipei: The National History Museum, 2006), 24. 6 See Pan Yuliang Oil Painting Collection (Pan Yuliang Youhua Ji) (Shanghai: Shanghai Shuju, 1934), 8, 12. 7 See Quatre Artistes Chinoises Contemporaines: Pan Yu-lin, Lam Oi, Ou Seu-Tan, Shing Wai (Paris: Musée Cernuschi, 1977), Preface. 8 Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), 9. 9 China-Paris: Seven Chinese Painters Who Studied in France, 1919–1960 (Zhongguo-Bali, Zao qi lu fa hua jia hui gu zhan zhuanji) (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1988), 99. 10 Yang Yingshi and Wang Shanshan, “From Red Lights to Painting the Town Red,” China Daily, May 31, 2002, 10. 11 Wu Yu, “Nüquan pingyi” (On Women’s Rights), Selected Studies of Women’s Issues of the May Fourth Period (Wusi Shiqi Funu Wenti Wenxuan (Beijing: Sanlian, 1981), 8–14. 12 Wang Zhen, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 19. 13 Pan was appointed the Director of the Western Painting Department at the Shanghai Art Academy in 1929, played a role in the founding of a few art associations in early twentieth-century China, was elected the president of the Chinese Overseas Artist Association in France in 1945, and led a team of artists to petition the Kuomingtang Government for Japan’s return of plundered Chinese art works (during the Sino-Japanese war) in 1945. 14 Barbara Mittler, “Defy(N)ing Modernity: Women in Shanghai’s Early News-Media (1872–1915),” Research on Women in Modern Chinese History, No. 11, (December 2003), 252. 15 Lu Rongzhi, “The Life and Art of Pan Yuliang,” 24. 16 According to Jia Defang of the Anhui Provincial Museum, the painting My Family was destroyed. See Jia Defang, Reading the Life of Pan Yu-liang from Her Restored Oil Paintings (Huahun: Pan Yuliang, 2006), 32, 38. An image of this painting, however, was published in the 1988 catalogue Pan Yuliang Meishu Zhuopin Xuan (Heifi: Anhui Provincial Musem, 1988), 25. 17 Ann Phoenix and Anne Woollett, “Introduction,” Motherhood: Meanings, Practices and Ideologies, eds., Ann Phoenix, Anne Woollett, and Eva Lloyd (London and Newbury Park: Sage, 1991), 6. 18 Jia Defang, “Reading the Life of Pan Yu-liang from Her Restored Oil Paintings,” Huahun: Pan Yuliang (Taiwan: National Museum of History, 2006), 40. 19 See Julia Kristeva’s “Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini,” in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). See also her “Stabat Mater,” in Tales of Love, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 20 Kristeva, “Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini,” 238. 21 While there is no material evidence to show this, Pan’s painting My Family, completed in 1931, coincided with the boy’s (Pan Zanhua’s son) period of stay in Shanghai, upon which Chinese writers such as Shi Nan have speculated. See Shi Nan, Huahun Pan Yuliang (Changchun: Shi Dai Wenyi Chubanshe, 2003). 22 Margaret Robinson and Donna Smith, Step by Step: Focus on Stepfamilies, (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 76–77. 23 See Jane Ussher, “Negative Images of Female Sexuality and Reproduction: Reflecting Misogyny or Misinformation?,” Psychology of Women Newsletter, 5 (1990), 17–19. 24 See Liu Dong-sheng and Wang Xibin, “Breastfeeding in China,” in Behavioral and Metabolic Aspects of Breastfeeding: International Trends, eds., A. P. Simopoulos, J. E. Dutra de Oliveira and I. D. Desai, (Basel and Freiburg: Karger, 1995), 128–132. 25 Elizabeth Croll, Changing Identities of Chinese Women: Rhetoric, Experience and Self-Perception in Twentieth-Century China (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, Hong Kong University Press, 1995), 24.

47 Zheng Shengtian Qi Zhilong and His Chinese Girl

y the cold spring of 1967, the Chinese Cultural Revolution had entered a phase of all-out power struggle. I lived in Hangzhou Bat the time, working as a young teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts. Because of my political views I was detained, along with other alleged subversives, in a niu peng (cowshed)1 by the Red Guards Militant Team; my punishment was to clean the campus and read Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book every day. One morning a Red Guard who kept us in custody ordered me to clean an abandoned courtyard bathroom that was dark, damp, and dilapidated. Even though I was puzzled as to the reason for the cleaning, I dared not ask why. That same night a young girl was brought in by a group of Red Guards Militant Team members who yelled at and berated her. Wearing a yellow military uniform with a military cap atop her shortly cropped hair, this girl turned out to be the leader of the opposing Red Guards faction known as the “Conservative Red Guards.” Since the time of her capture she had not only lost her freedom, but was also relegated to our company of niu gui she shen (monstrous and demonic evil spirits); following more than a month’s detention, she was finally released. While I knew back then that the Red Guards were not all the same, never had I thought that this particular Red Guard, whose name was Chen Aikang— many years later—would turn out to be my life partner.

The origin of these many militant factions can be traced back to May 29, 1966, when, at the Middle School attached to Tsinghua University in Beijing, a small number of students from families of the so-called “Five Categories of Red Elements” (which included revolutionary cadres, revolutionary military members, workers, and poor and lower-middle class peasants) established a rebel organization they called the “Red Guards.” On August 1, Mao Zedong personally wrote a letter to the Red Guards at the Tsinghua Middle School “to show his staunch support”2 for their rebellious attitude. As a result, the Red Guard movement soon exploded across the entire nation. Adolescent students took pride in joining the Red Guards, and membership in such a group became a coveted identity; revolutionary Red Guard organizations could be found throughout the country. Even though their slogans and propositions differed from one another (sometimes to the extent of being polar opposites), they all wore Red Guard armbands and carried Red Guard flags bearing Mao’s inscriptions.

The female Red Guards depicted in Qi Zhilong’s paintings remind me, first and foremost, of the public aesthetic context that gave rise to them. During

48 “Wanted” poster (detail) for Red Guard Chen Aikang, printed and distributed nationwide by the opposition faction Red Guard Militant Group, Hangzhou. Courtesy of Chen Aikang.

the 1960s, a decade filled with images of fluttering red flags, revolution was clearly in vogue. Followers of this social trend were not necessarily true believers in Maoist ideology; many simply took the Red Guards’s military garments as some sort of fashion statement, not unlike the way famous brands today are strongly coveted by the general public. It did not matter whether a Red Guard uniform was worn or washed out, as long as it was genuine and certified. Military hats and belts, as well as military overcoats with fur collars, were as sought-after as today’s Chanel and Gucci. Young Red Guards exhausted all possible avenues to get their hands on these goods, begging and beseeching their friends and relatives in the military for them. If Red Guards were caught wearing knock-offs they might be ridiculed by their peers, or, worse, charged with committing the crime of being a “pseudo-revolutionary.”

As early as February 1961, Mao Zedong wrote a seven-word poem called Inscription on a Photograph for Militia Women:

How dapper they look, shouldering five-foot guns, when daylight first gleams on the parade ground. Children of China have many aspiring ambitions; they love military attire, not red gowns.3

This poem planted the seed for the widely popular new aesthetic standard for women, seen in full bloom during the Cultural Revolution. According to official Cultural Revolution era reports, on August 18, 1966 Mao and his comrades-in-arms mounted the rostrum of Tian’anmen to review millions of Red Guards from all around the country. While one female Red Guard was pinning a Red Guard armband onto him, Mao asked her “What’s your

Song Binbin putting armband name?” and she answered: “Song Binbin.” Mao asked her “Is that the same on Mao Zedong, 1966. ‘binbin’ as in the phrase wen zhi bin bin (gentle and refined)?’” “Yes,” she said. Mao replied: “Violent is what you ought to be!”4 Many contemporary scholars believe that this playful reply, interpreted as a “highest directive”

49 from Chairman Mao, served as a key catalyst for the Red Guard movement’s sudden escalation in violence and brutality over the ensuing months. But actually, Mao’s reply was rhetorically inaccurate. According to the Analects, Confucius said:

When the inner qualities are in excess of the outer refinement [wen], we are crude; when the outer refinement is in excess of the inner qualities [zhi], we are pedantic. Only when the outer refinement and inner qualities are equally matched can we be a man of true virtue.5

In this passage Confucius uses the word wen to refer to one’s outer refinement Anonymous, Spring in the Desert, 1975, watercolour, 106 and the word zhi to refer to one’s inner virtues. Hence the phrase wen zhi x 76 cm. Courtesy of AW Asia, New York. bin bin means that one should be beautiful both inside and out, balanced and congruent—not “gentle and refined” (the opposite of “violent”) as the term is commonly misunderstood and used. It is unfortunate that a minor error, stemming from a rhetorical misinterpretation, could have set off such an unimaginable tragedy of historic proportion. Not only were innumerable lives humiliated and harmed, but as a result the country as a whole also suffered immeasurable losses.

50 Without doubt, the Cultural Revolution is one of the darkest chapters in Chinese modern history. More significantly, after more than forty years the fallout from the Cultural Revolution is still everywhere to be seen, whether in the realm of political ideology or the domain of daily life. I once had a discussion with a well-known Chinese historian about the art of the Cultural Revolution. In his opinion, no real artwork was created during that period, only political propaganda; thus nothing from that time is of an artistic merit worthy of consideration. There are also people who condemn any non-critical interpretation of the Cultural Revolution, for they regard this as a distortion and a betrayal of history. However, for many people—

Chen Huamin, Learn from including those who did not support the Cultural Revolution—this Dazhai in Agriculture, 1973, gouache on paper, 68 x 98 cm. tumultuous era still evokes a degree of yearning and nostalgia. Courtesy of AW Asia, New York. In an interview with Li Xianting, Qi Zhilong stated:

Members of the Intellectual Youth Generation, born in the 1950s and ’60s, are beginning to look back upon their past with a kind of romantic imagination, one which helps them view their harsh life experience through rose-tinted

51 glasses. They are gradually lightening up and watering down difficult memories, without forgetting them, as well as singling out moments that have inspired the human spirit.6

Born in 1962, Qi grew up during the Chen Yiming, Liu Yulian, Li Bin, Feng (Maples), 1979, gouache years that saw the Red Guard movement on paper. lose steam. Countless young students were sent off to rural villages or remote borders, their past glories buried away— covered with wind, frost, sweat, filth, and dirt. As a result, artistic impressions capturing the era have, to a large extent, been derived from “romanticized” or “sensationalized” cultural memories. A case in point is the sentimental novel Feng (The Maples)—the first example of “Scar Literature” about the Red Guards to be published after the Cultural Revolution— and the award-winning comic strip based on it, which followed. In Feng, a female Red Guard named Lu Danfeng tragically and romantically ends her own life in a narrative that constructs a “Cultural Revolution version” of The Dying Swan.7 Similar phenomena are quite common throughout history; classic examples include the stories of Lara in Doctor Zhivago, Doniya in How the Steel was Tempered, and Lin Daojing in The Song of Youth. These twisted and sensational female tales wrap cruel and bloody revolutionary periods in heartwarming veils. As stated by poet T. S. Eliot: “Mankind cannot bear very much reality.”8 It seems we cannot help but filter out the truth from our lives and histories. Eliot’s observation also explains why nostalgia is forever popular; it satisfies our all-too-common human predilection to escape reality.

Next page right: Posters for the exhibition Mahjong at MdM Mönchsberg Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg, Austria. Photo: Zheng Shengtian.

Perhaps precisely because of this, the Red Guards created by the brushstrokes of Qi Zhilong have slowly become a Chinese Girl “brand” that people feel good about. In fact, Qi’s Chinese Girl has little to do with actual history. Whether consciously or subconsciously, the artist’s depiction of pretty young girls in military uniform alludes to Confucius’s concepts of both wen (outer refinement) and zhi (inner quality). But though they all wear the Red

52 Qi Zhilong, Female Student, 2007, oil on canvas, 220 x 180 cm. Courtesy of the artist and AW Asia, New York.

53 Qi Zhilong, Female Student, 2009, oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm. Courrtesy of the artist and AW Asia, New York.

54 Right: Qi Zhilong, China Girl, 2007, oil on canvas, 220 x 180 cm. Courtesy of the artist and AW Asia, New York.

Bottom: Qi Zhilong, China Beauty, 2008, oil on canvas, 220 x 180 cm. Courtesy of the artist and AW Asia, New York.

Following page: Qi Zhilong, The Idea of Workers No. 2, 2009, oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm. Courtesy of the artist and AW Asia, New York.

55 56 Guard uniform, their faces and expressions do not accurately reflect the reality of that period; plainly put, the wen does not match the zi. For today’s audiences, these pretty faces seem more in line with the aesthetic interests of contemporary pop culture. The artist clandestinely alters the aesthetic values of his work in ways that permit these young girls in military uniform to attract attention in twenty-first-century galleries and exhibition halls, both domestic and overseas. Two years ago, when I was in the ancient city of Salzburg, Mozart’s hometown, I remember people on the street looking at Qi Zhilong’s giant posters of the Red Guards. Though the posters were hung right alongside advertisements for cosmetics that displayed dazzling models, the passersby didn’t seem to find the pairing incongruous, or the pictures out of sync with each other. This kind of strategy also reminds me of the 1996 modernized movie version of Romeo and Juliet by Baz Luhrmann—although in this film, director Luhrmann and his screenwriter used a somewhat different approach to clandestinely alter the aesthetic values of their work. At its core the film retains a sentimental and heartbreaking love story, but the story is infused with late twentieth-century American, super-urban West Coast culture. Though their approaches differ, these two artists have enjoyed similar success.

Dutch scholar Pieter Geyl believes that, in describing the past, historians are inevitably influenced by contemporary events. According to Geyl, not only are the ways that people write history constantly changing, but the ways that different generations perceive history vary from one to another. He said: “Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history; and what is imagination but the projection of an author’s personality?”9 The innocent faces of Qi Zhilong’s Chinese Girl are like a multi-faceted mirror. The reflection helps us see how our trans-century generation is looking for some kindness—and even exquisiteness—against a cruel historical reality; it also helps us cope with an unending and overflowing sense of emptiness and helplessness in today’s world of ostentatious consumption.

Translated into English by Vincent Cheng (Tzu-Wen)

Notes 1 A “cowshed” was where the Red Guards kept detainees during the Cultural Revolution. The detainees in these sheds were mostly leaders, cadres, professors, and experts—or anyone else whom the Red Guards deemed hostile. Collectively the detainees were known as the niu gui she shen (monstrous and demonic evil spirits—literally, “cow ghosts, snake gods”). Red Guards Militant Team was the name of the “Rebel Red Guards” organization at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China National Academy of Fine Arts), where I taught. 2 “Mao Zedong’s Letter to the Red Guards at the Middle School Attached to Tsinghua University,” Chronicles of the People’s Republic of China (Beijing: People’s University Press, 1992), 712. 3 This poem by Mao Zedong first appeared in the book Poems of Chairman Mao, published by People’s University Press in Beijing in December, 1962. 4 Yaowu Song, “I Pinned a Red Armband onto Chairman Mao,” originally published in Beijing’s Guangming Daily on August 20, 1966. 5 This passage is from The Analects: Yong Ye. For the original text, please visit http://www.wenxue360. com/archives/9.html. 6 Xianting Li, “The Charm of Politics and Fashion: A Dialogue between Qi Zhilong and Li Xianting,” ARTCO, no. 171 (December 2006), 195. 7 Feng (The Maples) is a short novel written by youth writer Zheng Yi; it was published in Shanghai’s Wen Hui Daily in February 1979. That same year Beijing’s Comic-Strip Monthly, in its August issue, published the comic strip Feng (The Maples), collectively created by Chen Yiming, Liu Yulian, and Li Bin. The comic strip later received a golden award in the National Art Exhibition celebrating the 30th anniversary of the founding of the republic. 8 T. S. Eliot, Quartet No. 1: Burnt Norton, 1943. For the original poem, see http://www.tristan.icom43.net/ quartets/norton.html. 9 Pieter Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 133.

57 Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council: Contemporary Reflections on Modernity in Asia June 1, 2009

Alexandra Munroe: I have asked Layla Diba to moderate this discussion, which I feel is very important to our thinking as curators, as museum builders, and as artists. All panels for this second Guggenheim Asian Art Council meeting were inspired by conversations with each of you, this particular one by Wang Hui, one of China’s leading intellectual historians. Recently, his research has focused on what he calls contemporary reflections of modernity in China, and is a critical reminder of how particular and original the struggles of modernity are in different regions. These problems, even those he calls the perennial East-West problems, are not limited to contemporary discourse. They are germane to the cultural/ political formation of modernity in each particular region. Wang Hui has also commented on how alarmed he is that so few contemporary Chinese artists are drawing productively and critically from their own modern histories, noting that in the rush to appropriate what Hongnam Kim would call artistic value, they have forgotten aesthetic value, or have simply ignored it and are disconnected from it. These concerns were the origin of this particular panel. With that as an introduction, I hand it over to Layla, who regrets the absence of a Middle Eastern component since the Middle East has so many of its own issues surrounding this problem. Thank you.

Layla Diba: Thank you, Alexandra. This panel’s topic of discussion, the intersection of art and politics, is particularly interesting for those of us involved in thinking about modern Middle Eastern art. As those of you at our 2007 meeting will recall, I participated in the panel “Is there a contemporary Islamic art?” That is, is there a contemporary art from this region, and if so, is it Islamic? What is Islamic about it? I took a historically contextualizing approach, which is the way I look at contemporary phenomena. Based on historic definitions of “Islamic art,” I came to the conclusion that there was indeed a certain amount of “Islamic art” being produced, art that is state-sponsored or state-influenced, and which corresponds to the values of Islam and the ideologies of theocratic or authoritarian states. Simultaneously, however, this art co-existed with art production by transnational, transcultural artists who were not concerned with representing the ideologies and values of the Islamic state but, rather, were artists who belonged to the global art network, such as our own Guggenheim Council members Shahzia Sikander and Xu Bing. At that time, Western museums were slowly beginning to show both contemporary

58 and transnational artists, and I wondered which of these two trends would prevail. It’s now two years later, and I would say that “Islamic contemporary art” has receded in favour of the transnational type of art being produced by artists originating from the “modern Middle East” (or from Western Asia, if one prefers). I think this is a good thing.

One comment I would make is that we should not demonize auction houses and the art market, for they have played a somewhat positive role in this process. The earliest auction catalogues were quite well written, well documented, and grounded in the language of Western art discourses. They opened up this field to many Western collectors, art historians, and connoisseurs who would have not otherwise have been familiar with modern Middle Eastern art. As such, the auction houses took over the role of the academics and museums in the early phases of our studies of contemporary Middle Eastern art. That said, I’m realizing from these discussions that our field is much less advanced theoretically than Asian contemporary art study. Scholarship and presentation in this field is still about documenting the history of modernism. There is not much being done yet in the way of interpretation, so there is a great deal of work that awaits us. One particular area that has received very little attention is the intersection of art and politics in the formation of modern Middle Eastern art. It is a very significant topic in terms of our deliberations. What I would like to do, then—since we also want to broaden the topic—is to consider how to present other modernisms in Western museums, as well as in our regional and local museums. I hate to make that sort of distinction, but I think it’s critical for our discussions here.

I would also like to take a few minutes to talk about contextualization. Hongnam Kim raised the issue of artistic versus cultural aesthetics and the difficulties in translation from one culture to another. The key to this, I believe, is contextualizing, by which I mean considering and studying the genesis of modernism, and doing it comparatively. For example, we who work in the modern Middle East can learn a great deal from the work that studies the genesis of modernism in India, which is closest geographically and, in many ways intellectually, to the modern Middle East, and is midway between the Middle East and East Asia. So I think we have a great deal to learn from the presentation and discussion of other modernisms. As far as themes, I believe that questions of time and distance are of interest in terms of the formation of other modernisms. The Middle East and Asia have experienced artistic movements in a very different way than in the centers where they originated. There is often a time lag. Because of distance, not only is there a chronological difference when these other cultures experienced modernisms, but the visual models and tools they had at their disposal was radically different as well. The sorts of models you would have had available to you in, say, New Delhi in 1930, were very different from those you’d find in Paris in 1930. Perhaps these are

59 some of the questions we can consider. They are particularly important to the evaluation of aesthetic quality, especially if there are both local and regional variations in aesthetics.

We were discussing earlier the question of M.F. Hussain and how important he is to the story of Indian modernism, yet how very little he is considered in terms of modernism generally. This question of other modernisms, how they evolve, the pace at which they evolve, and their standards and criteria deserve our attention. Our first speaker is Geeta Kapur.

Geeta Kapur: Thank you, Layla. I’ll begin by reiterating what I happened incidentally to say in one of the earlier panels: that we should perhaps speak of the Middle East as West Asia so that it becomes a geographical continuity with South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. We then realize we are talking of a very large part of the globe, territorially connected and, to a very amazing extent, culturally linked over centuries. (The other two related continental formations are, of course, Africa and Central-South America.) Asia offers a calibrated account of difference—races, religions, ethnicities, nationalities, independent nation-states, and cultures— imbricated within a civilizational ethos.

What this also suggests is the possibility of inter-Asia exchange. We have, for example, the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Council; the Asia-Pacific Triennial that has taken place in Brisbane since 1993; the Japan Foundation promoting inter-Asia exchanges; the Asia Society in New York with branches elsewhere, including Mumbai; and so on. Each nation-state has also unfurled an Asia umbrella for its own hegemonic purposes. So what is it that we might want to do in the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Council? Is there a project for a real or even notional inter-Asian dialogue, or is it best that each of us presents the conditions of art and cultural production in our own societies for comparison—because “Asia” still raises the question of whether the region as paradigm is valid at all? For me it is valid, if somewhat hypothetical, just as for me the idea of the nation-state is valid—as a subject of regard and interrogation in more than a hypothetical sense. The concept and reality of the nation-state is not over for India or Pakistan, nor for Iraq and Palestine—even as it is not over for the U.S.A. Indeed, large parts of the world are victims of the nation-state that is the United States of America.

But to return to Asia, some of us—artists, art historians, critics, and curators—organized a conference in Delhi in 2007, titled, Elective Affinities, Constitutive Differences: Contemporary Art in Asia. The brief I wrote in collaboration with some younger art historians might be worth reading in part because some of the issues that I’ve just raised were addressed in that brief.

60 Do elective affinities imply the bridging of structural differences? We are not speaking of affinity in a default mode, so when do discrete cultural and economic formations translate into active affiliations—conceptually and in terms of actual exchange? This, here, is a civilizational range: Hindu kingdoms that continue from India into the southeast Asian region, Buddhism across to China, and an Islamic spread right across this entire geography, from West Asia to China. A civilizational ethos is maintained by great Asian empires, yet as much as we might speak of affinities in religion and culture, it is the dismantling of these empires that gives us a critical understanding of their historical import, even perhaps an understanding of current economic strategies and power-block alliances. In her introductory note, Alexandra suggested that there is now a new engagement with classical civilizational models. In an innovative continuation of that theme, it is in our interest to unpack curating as a form of narration that deals with endings as it does with beginnings, as it also does with scrambled sequences and contrary moves that characterize our critical understanding of the narrative paradigm itself. So, let us say, there would be some form of a narrative paradigm in a historical show of modern Indian art that Sandhini Poddar may want to put together for the Guggenheim, but there would also have to be a way of dismantling the narrative paradigm itself— curatorially—in order to foreground historical upheavals and also to make the ruptures visible.

The set of considerations that follow have to do with the public domain in discrete societies, and with the shape of the argument that we derive from the conceptual(ized) form of the public sphere. We should begin with crucial antecedents—the literary, theological, and social systems of knowledge in many Asian cultures have a long tradition of oral commentaries, textual annotations, and elaborate argument. These make up what would be the prototype of the public sphere, including forms of interlocution and intervention within established conventions of collective knowledge. Subsequently, colonial and national archives, both textual and oral, become an important feature in the recuperation of histories ranging from liberation movements to communism to parliamentary democracy and republican states. But for these to become critically useful, they would have to translate as contemporary discourse that is not in the form of the usual binary of tradition and modernity (by now exhausted as a useful discursive device). The contemporary is conjunctural: we should speak of changing political formations and a public sphere that reflects a particular kind of constitution, polity, and civil-society configuration.

Do evidential truths, reconstructed fictions, and the ethics of retrieval of that which is left out, that which is marginalized or erased—does all this constitute the politics in contemporary Asian art in some culturally designated way? There are codes that open and retrace the materials

61 of memory, and there is the documentary voiceover of the present day interlocutor who reads and translates these testimonies. In India, for example, it raises questions, at the vernacular level, of caste and, like everywhere else, of gender, exposing the structural blindness built into state machinery and the institutions of art toward subaltern interventions. The social archive is built on the intersecting spaces of marginality, engendered bodies, and contemporary markers of caste. (And I bring in caste because this is now the most insurgent form of political society in India; more than class, it is caste.) One of the issues that we must deal with is the mode of representations of violence—in the social archive that documents it—as objective history, as well as in terms of what Sandhini, quoting the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami, calls the first-person account.

Okwui Enwezor uses the word “traversal.” The political traverse is now to be seen as national, international/transnational, and transcultural. And, even as we speak today of the global, it must include the inadvertent transnationals—for example, migrant labourers and political refugees who are world citizens but excluded nevertheless from that status and from the privileges bestowed by global consumerist cultures. All these slightly differentiated categories have to be kept alive in order that there be the necessary tension, that the struggles embedded in that traverse are recognized by the artist-interlocutor in the public sphere.

At the same time, let us remember the pleasures of cosmopolitanism, an especially fascinating cultural characteristic of this region. Asian civilizations have held the lure of high sophistication throughout history. Consider Baghdad, Iran, Isfahan, Istanbul, and, in the twentieth century, Shanghai, Bombay, Tokyo. It can be argued that the cultures of these flourishing cities have extended the mandate of modernity in a way that it becomes not only coextensive with European modernity but in effect the more keenly personified, a twin whose face is quizzical, sometimes uncanny, and certainly problematic. There is now, after Edward Said, a tendency among artists to invert the thesis of Orientalism to productive purposes. There is also, within the framework of post-modernism, a retake on beauty that is not, unwittingly, a retake on Asian/Oriental aesthetics to be renewed through art-historical exposition—a retake on beauty, which means both cultural protocol and curatorial play. We are speaking of Orientalism in your face, post-Edward Said but not neglecting or contradicting Said. Shahzia Sikander is a wonderful example; she knows how to enhance the masquerade, making it at once audacious and melancholy.

There is a mythologizing of Asia’s material cultures in terms of a richness of resources, traditions, and continuities in language, styles, and skills. Consider the oeuvre of Xu Bing. But these assets, freely quoted by contemporary artists, are often also used at levels of respect and

62 expediency that need to be questioned. Not only is there a tendency to gloss over the caste-based definition of artisanal practices, as for example in India, but the actual role of available labour and the use of these material cultures in the manufacture of contemporary art often remains unexamined. Recognizing the compound trope of loss and greed, artists will sometimes make self-indulgence a sign of self-mortification and tease out a death wish in the very practice of art. These aspects of value need to be considered critically and in relation to aesthetic and market conditions alike.

Apropos of a value-based economy, the illegal, what is not sanctioned, is a telling trope. In terms of contemporary art, it qualifies in favour of what has been pushed to the edge: art that is erotic/illicit, and/or political/ transgressive. How do Asian artists deploy these means? In contrast to the legacy of the delicately wrought artisanal practices, in contrast as well to the playful recycling of everyday visual cultures, both invoked in the making of contemporary art across Asia, there is a bold new Asiatic scenario studded with spectacles, media-based artworks that seemingly cut across the globe with no undue prejudice in favour of a given culture. Nevertheless, the spectacular does have a site, a politics, a precisely tuned animation, and therefore culturally coded rules of the game that make specialized claims on spectatorial reception. The site and spectacle as marked by Chinese artists can be precise, which we discussed the other day with Cai Guo-Qiang’s show1 and the difficulties that were posed in relation to it.

This is now an urgent concern in the economy and ecology of the globe. The interrupted relationship between country and city in what were until recently peasant economies has resulted in a demographic imbalance, as well as in a ruptured consciousness. To designate this we might invoke the trope of counter-geography. Is the ethical, then, inscribed in a countergeography that marks out a new ground for history? The globe is mapped by urban archipelagos, many of which are in Asia. Networked with each other, many Asian cities are on the move, to quote a famous exhibition title. Artworks seem to chase memory through virtual landscapes, through the detritus of material obsolescence and urban entropy. Apinan Poshyananda’s presentations have had to do with urban entropy in Thailand. Indian urbanologists are also particularly interested in interstitial developments in the urban sector. We have to consider demographic movements between country/city and the social imaginary they yield in an amalgamated paradigm. I hesitate to speak in the presence of Arjun Appadurai because he knows this material so much better, but I bring it up because it gestures towards critical-curatorial issues in art. So much density. What is the measure of the speed with which consciousness comes to terms with this accelerated history? How slowly can the aesthetic impulse establish a spatial phenomenology that best locates the work of art?

63 I conclude with a somewhat long take on the national-global equation as viewed from a specific historical frame relevant to India. The Anglo- European Enlightenment comes to India in the nineteenth century, and the discourse of the individual and the universal, of subjectivity and sovereignty, is embedded in Indian historical thinking from the nineteenth century. The national is not simply the ground for a prolonged political struggle; there is a theorizing of the nation from early on in the nationalist movement. There is conceptual planning for the formation of a nation- state in the twentieth century, and there are theories of the state which develop into an investigative discourse after Indian independence in 1947. That is to say, there is a developed theoretical formulation of the consequences of modernity, as a result of which Indian citizens can claim the privilege of at least comprehending the institutions of democracy, of civil society, of the public sphere, and of the secular. I’m not saying that the Indian republic abides by these, or that the Indian people have honoured these values, but only that they are embedded in the constitution and in public discourse. To that is added developmental planning, which comes from India’s partial affiliation to a socialist ideal during the immediate post-independence decades, whereby a public-sector economy is put in place to create an urban/industrial infrastructure prior to that of the now more economically advanced countries in the rest of Asia. (Among other things, this allows India to maintain a degree of autonomy during the cold war and in the progressive decades of third world politics. For example, the ideological inclination of the Indian nation-state but also the actual theorizing among Indian intellectuals on modernity/democratic sovereignty made it impossible for the U.S.A. to gain a foothold in India up until very recently). Meanwhile, not resting on formal tenets of democracy, Indian political thinkers, several of them Marxists, have continued to repudiate or revise the actualities of the nation-state formation and its developmental model. The more particular interventions by subalternist historians are addressed to the agricultural sector, and in actual political terms there have been attempts since the 1960s by Indian “Maoists” (the Naxals) to reposition sections of the population—the small peasant, tribal and dalit sections of the polity—that have been betrayed in planning priorities, the more so since the late 1980s when India accepted the neoliberal ideology of global capital.

I want to end here, on this point, by reiterating that there is something like a paradigmatic basis on which modernity must examine its own contemporaniety, and that this is significant even when the potential of the contemporary conjuncture is less than realized. The contemporary needs the reflexivity of historical discourse in order for cultural production and also perhaps the practice of art to gain due articulation, and it is this articulation that curatorial contexts—of museums and of seriously conceptualized biennales—can nurture.

64 Layla Diba: Geeta, you gave us a very rich, eloquent presentation that will stimulate our thinking. You’ve pointed out the geographical and historical continuities in this region, the rich array of issues that we have in common that we can investigate, the current artistic practices and questions that artists are involved with, and the intellectual underpinnings and basis for the examination of modernity in India which is, I think, very impressive. I think your perceptions will lead us back to the Islamic world to rethink these issues. I believe that to a certain extent they have been underexplored and undervalued, and even while Geeta and I certainly agree on the importance of contemporary art, our job is the study of modernity. I would now like to ask Midori to take the floor with her paper.

Midori Matsui: My topic today is the inheritance of the postwar Japanese avant-garde practice by young Japanese artists who emerged in the 1990s and after. But before I start, I would first like to refer to two important issues that appeared this morning and were left unaddressed. One is the distinction, brought up by Hongnam Kim, between the artistic and the aesthetic. I find this very interesting because aesthetic elements in contemporary art translate easily into other cultures since the aesthetic, formally realized, can communicate on the level of visual information. On the other hand, the “artistic” element, if I understand Hongnam’s point correctly—and I believe she intends the term “artistic” to include the conceptual capacity of the artwork—refers to the philosophical content of the work and the artwork’s ability to address sociopolitical problems or pose questions about the meaning of doing art in a specific historical situation. Because the content of the “artistic” expression remains abstract, unless its historical or sociopolitical context is revealed, it is extremely difficult to translate into other cultures and is therefore often subject to misunderstanding. It is subject to misunderstanding because in spite of what Hongnam was suggesting, the artistic element is profoundly tied to the complexly layered experience of history and politics of an individual nation. This issue closely relates to the content of my presentation today.

The second issue I would like to address concerns Alexandra’s remarks earlier this morning concerning Japanese collectors who like to buy apparently conventional rather than progressive works of art that might challenge their preconceived “aesthetic” standards. This suggests that despite the general public tendency to regard art as a source of pleasure, contemporary Japanese art, as well as the postwar Japanese avant-garde, tends to address issues that deviate from the bourgeois pastime. It is anti-aesthetic.

My presentation is about precisely this: the anti-aesthetic, or the conceptual heritage of the postwar avant-garde art in the practices of contemporary Japanese artists. My argument is inspired by the book The

65 History of Contemporary Japanese Art as a Deviation, written and published in 1986 by the Japanese art historican and critic Shigeo Chiba. The book became an influential resource to many art students in the early 1990s in spite of charges against its controversial character by some art historians. Re-read from today’s perspective, the book offers many interesting and useful insights for reconsidering several questions about postwar Japanese art, which I hope to address briefly today: the institutionalization of modernity in Japan, the inheritance of its program in the postwar society, and the translation of the oppositional attitudes that arose in reaction to the mechanical process of modernization into a kind of postmodern attitude expressed most obviously by the interventionist practices of the postwar Japanese avant-gardes. To summarize Chiba’s point, from the late-nineteenth-century Meiji Restoration to perhaps the 1960s, modernity in Japan has meant modernization, which was little more than a blanket acceptance of Western sociopolitical institutions and scientific and artistic principles. In effect, the prewar Japanese avant-garde was mainly preoccupied with importing and naturalizing aesthetic styles and theories received from the Western avant-garde.

Postwar avant-garde practice is a departure from this dependence. Starting with the artistic group Gutai, Japanese artists decided to stop imitating Western models. They decided to think on their own and make new artistic decisions in response to new possibilities and problematics arising from rapid cultural and social changes occurring in Japanese society. Such changes were the result of the increasingly extensive program of modernization adopted by the Japanese national government and industrial and commercial institutions, which exhibited a simultaneously populist and repressive character. Chiba suggests that the uniquely oppositional, or “deviationist,” attitudes toward the institutions of modernization, while adopting the rational and critical attitude imbued with the progressive tendency of “modernity” as an ideological or conceptual model, characterizes the internal contradictory drives of the postwar Japanese avant-garde, which he designates as the movement from Gutai, through the 1960s and 70s, up to his contemporaries.

I reformulate Chiba’s thesis in the following way. In the postwar years, Japanese society entered a new phase of modernity, which can be called postmodernity. Preserving the principle of rational reorganization of every sphere of life—which, according to Anthony Giddens, characterizes the institutions of modernity—Japanese society adopted a more concentrated program of rationalization modeled on that of the U.S. This caused a nationwide intensification of heavy industrialization, progressive concentration of capital in industrial and commercial conglomerates, and rapid and large-scale urbanization, all of which resulted in the overall standardization of life. By the early 1960s, the nation had overcome the

66 ravages of the Second World War and was now facing new problems of postmodernity: the large-scale rationalistic reorganization into standardized patterns of minute practices that constitute “everyday life,” or the start of what today we call “globalization.” The spread of American- style capitalism and consumerism, mass media, as well as large-scale projects of urbanization, obviously affected contemporary Japanese life. I understand that the unique development of the Japanese postwar avant- garde, in both its style and methods, is deeply motivated by the need to reflect on, respond to, and hope to change this situation of postmodernity. And since postmodernity is another name of this globalization process that confines us to living under the cumulative pressures of its institutions, their motives and methods are not alien to the concerns of those who live today, and especially to the younger artists who determine their own artistic methods in response to the unique problematics of their time. In fact, the new Japanese art that emerged since the 1990s (represented, for instance, by Takashi Murakami, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Makoto Aida, and even younger artists, including Shimabuku) inherit the oppositional attitude against postmodernity and even, sometimes, the methods of the postwar Japanese avant-garde.

My assumption is that there is a continuity of motives and methods between the conceptual practices of the Japanese postwar avant-garde in the 1960s and 70s and that of the artists who emerged after the 1990s. Both generations were motivated by their decision to confront and hopefully transform negative living conditions caused by the repressive internsification of the institutions of modernity, or globalization. Today, I present some examples of such efforts by focusing on parallels in the interventionist art of the 1960s and the present.

In spite of the apparent novelty of the styles, major expressions that emerged in contemporary Japanese art after the 1990s inherited and continued the spirit and, sometimes, method of the Japanese avant-garde in the postwar years. These two generations of artists are connected to each other in their commitment to art as a vehicle for discovering and redefining their relation to the living world, both historical and phenomenological, beyond the traditional assumption of art as an expression of individual artistic talent or invention of new styles. In this paper, the phrase “Japanese avant-garde in the postwar years” refers to the heritage of art practices made by Gutai, Neo-Dada, Hi-Red Center, various local performance groups including Kyushu-ha and Kobe Art Zero, and the existential performance and site-specific projects of the independent artists Chu-Enoki and Mono-ha. Today, the artists who created a new vocabulary and form to rethink similar problems concerning the relations of art and contemporary life include Takashi Murakami, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Makoto Aida, Shimabuku, Koki Tanaka, Masanori Handa, and Chim Pom.

67 Although many of these artists created concrete objects and paintings, their purpose is to go beyond the aesthetic autonomy of individual forms, to suggest new ways of perceiving familiar things and phenomena. Through their public actions and unfinished or problematic objects that elicit spectators’ speculations, the artists attempted to reflect upon the influences of contemporary events and commodities on the human mind, or to propose different ways of communication that would bring individuals into more dynamic or sympathetic relations with each other. For this reason, their works, so fundamentally conceptual, inevitably have the character of performance, intervention, or event. Since the process of postmodernity, or globalization, was fortified through the rationalistic reorganization of minute aspects of social practices, everyday life became the locus of the Japanese avant-garde’s research and intervention. This applied even to the case of Takashi Murakami, known for his reinterpretation and re-use of styles and icons of Japanese popular culture, since the unique development of Japanese popular culture also constituted an important part of the postwar Japanese life, especially in relation to the formation of the collective dreams and anxieties of those who grew up in Japanese society after the 1960s.

The first postwar avant-garde movement that consciously attempted to intervene in the standardizing processes of postmodern society was Hi-Red Center, a group comprised of three artists: Jiro Takamatsu, Genpei Akasegawa, and Natsuyuki Nakanishi. Officially active in the brief period between 1962 and 1964, Hi-Red Center developed in conjunction with Neo Dada Organizers, the Butoh Dance of Tatsumi Hijikata, and the experimental music of Takehisa Kosugi and Yasunao Tone, all of whom exhibited at the Yomiuri Independent Art Exhibition in the early 1960s. From the outset, Hi-Red Center was concerned with the redefinition of art as anti-aesthetic performance, displacing art’s assumed highbrow status and deviating from the production of formally complete or autonomous objects. In order to challenge art’s privileged status, Hi-Red Center artists frequently adopted everyday objects such as straps and pinches, often inviting spectators to play with them; they also performed actions that involved everyday routines in public space, like riding the train or cleaning the streets, in order to disturb the banality of everyday life and disrupt the distinction between art and life. Their actions include the appearance of Nakanishi in the Yamanote Line train, dressed up as an ordinary businessman but with his face painted white; serving food in toy dishes in the middle of their installation at the 15th Yomiuri Independent Art Exhibition; and dropping various everyday objects, such as clothes, from the top of a building in central Tokyo.

The Street Cleaning Event, performed on October 16, 1964, was the culmination of Hi-Red Center’s interventionist activities. In this project, the group’s members and their friends dressed in white gowns and

68 gloves, and literally cleaned the streets of Ginza in Tokyo. That was the year of the Tokyo Olympics, and this action was conceived of as a satirical commentary on the hurried reconstruction of the city’s urban infrastructure for the major upcoming international event. Because the Tokyo Olympics was considered an important opportunity for the Japanese to demonstrate their recovery from the defeat of the Second World War and emergence as a full-fledged member of the international community, the Japanese government felt it imperative to demonstrate the efficiency of their technological infrastructure. The artists’ deadpan simulation of the sterile regularity of costumes and behaviors of governmental officials indicated the absence of individual agency in these impersonal projects of urbanization that imitated modern Western organizational patterns. Simultaneously, this performance humorously reasserted the humanity of the individual body engaged in the anonymous but physical act of scrubbing stains on the pedestrian walk.

Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s 1993 public action Nasubi Gallery inevitably conjures up the memory of The Street Cleaning Event. For this project, the artist hung a small wooden box, which contained an artwork rented by a fellow artist, on a tree in the streets of Ginza. The box was painted blue outside and white inside in order to humorously evoke the white space of a gallery, for Ozawa had conceived of this project in reaction to the uniquely Japanese convention of the rental gallery, the custom in which the artist rented a gallery space, for a brief period of a week or so, essentially paying for his art to be exhibited. Ozawa’s simple set-up of a milk box as a miniature portable gallery in a public space disrupted the sanctimonious connotations of the professional gallery, laughing at and exposing the exploitation of younger artists by the Japanese art world and its incompetent exhibition systems. At the same time, the fragility of the milkbox as a container of art, accompanied by the boldness of the artist in exposing the work of art in a public space, expressed the freedom of the attitude that considered the essence of art to be in the communicative action, not in the precious object. Furthermore, the milk box, so discreet and easy to overlook, required the spectators to actively search for it by wandering the fashionable streets of Ginza; this allowed them to establish their own unique relations with the urban space. Finally, the local and historical connotation of the milk box, which was so prevalent in the pre-Tokyo Olympic years but disappeared completely from the Japanese cityscape during the heavy commercialization and urbanization of the 1970s, imbued Ozawa’s milk box-as-gallery with a nostalgic aura that conveyed a critical commentary on the total transformation of Tokyo’s urban space and Japanese landscape as a result of globalization.

Let me quickly present a few more examples of the conceptual parallel between the postwar Japanese avant-garde practice and its conceptual counterpart in the 1990s, by referring to the public interventions made

69 by the artists Chu Enoki and Shimabuku. Born in 1944, Chu Enoki is an independent artist active since the early 1970s. He is known for public actions characterized by interventionist intent and his site-specific sculptural interventions.

His works, which commonly used scrap metal as a medium or defunct coffee shops as an installation site, frequently addressed the steady industrialization and urbanization of Japanese postmodern society and the resulting environmental contamination from industrial refuse, garbage landfill, and the destruction of ancient geological strata by land development for new suburbs. Enoki’s public actions presented his individualistic opposition to official control of human activities in public space while actively cultivating the opportunities to refresh the perception of everyday life through his defamiliarizing performances. Typical examples of his early public interventions include Naked Intervention In Pedestrian’s Paradise (1970), in which he walked naked among the pedestrians participating in the officially sanctioned public event The Pedestrian’s Paradise. Sponsored by the government, this event prohibited Sunday afternoon vehicular traffic on Japan’s busiest streets, and was intended to provide the public with a sense of freedom by lifting restrictions on public behaviour caused by chronic traffic congestion. Its naiveté notwithstanding, Enoki’s action sought to expose the institutional hypocrisy inherent in granting the public limited freedom intended to suppress their awareness of the levels of control on their lives, all for the sake of Japanese society’s materialistic development.

Enoki’s other public actions included Every Day Life Multi (1977), in which he converted his house into a gallery and film theatre; Went to Hungary with Hangari (1977), a four-year project in which he lived with one half of his body continuously shorn and which culminated in his 1978 visit to Hungary to visit a friend; and Bar Rose Chu (1979), in which he installed a bar at a gallery and served drinks while dressed in drag. Each action disrupted the boundaries of art and life by opening up Enoki’s private spheres to the public, sometimes interrogating the artist’s own sexuality or even endangering his autonomy, and urging the public to react to irregular happenings in everyday life.

Enoki’s 1991 site-specific project, Pelting the Skin of the Earth, combined characteristics of land art and public intervention by constructing a “situation” that encouraged communicative relations among strangers that might reinstate a sense of locality and neighborhood. In this project, Enoki received permission to dig up the grounds of a site designated for his friend’s house in the newly established suburb of Kobe. While digging the site for half a year, he unearthed various fossils and a geological layer approximately 1,500 million years old; more importantly, the site became a

70 gathering point for local people living in this new town whose inhabitants were strangers to one another. School children, whose parents were at work during the day, habitually stopped by to help Enoki; young people who came to help became friends and, in some instances, married.

Shimabuku, whose full name is Michihiro Shimabuku, was born in 1969 and is an artist who was actively engaged in relational projects throughout the 1990s. Living in the city of Kobe and having been acquainted with Enoki’s work, he inherits from the older artist a commitment to the sublimation of everyday life for moments of elevated or refreshed perception and the cultivation of opportunities for public communication through public action or arranged events. Demonstrating an indebtedness to Enoki’s 1977 performance Going to Hungary with Hangari, Shimabuku’s early performance Disappearing and Appearing of an Eyebrow (1991) involved the artist shaving one side of his eyebrow and travelling around Europe via train.

Shimabuku’s more mature public event Memory of the Future (1996) presents a conceptual affinity with Enoki’s Pelting the Skin of the Earth, while developing his own terms for making public interventions in a humorous and even poetic manner. Memory of the Future began as an official commission from the city of Iwakura for a public monument. A commuter’s town, Iwakura had no communal centre or gathering space for its residents. Shimabuku decided to establish a plinth in a vacant lot in front of the railway station and asked locals to replace the various objects he placed there with objects they brought themselves. Over the course of a year, he visited the town several times to install new objects or give musical performances, his visits recalling those of travelling merchants or actors from the old times. As his performances with the locals gradually gained attention, the audience increased, making the plinth a site for public gathering. Like Pelting the Skin of the Earth, this project intervened in the banal and impersonal public life of the new suburb, rekindling people’s curiosity for each other and enhancing public communications.

Unfortunately there is no time left to explicate the conceptual significance of Takashi Murakami’s work in the context of the Japanese avant-garde’s oppositional practices against the restricting effects of postmodernity or globalization. Suffice it to say that in spite of its different style of presentation, Murakami’s appropriations of the production methods and styles of Japanese popular culture were also part of the attempt to reconsider the meaning of Japanese postwar life through the critical analysis of images and products that constituted a significant strata of Japanese public life and fostered their collective dreams during the years after the 1960s. Furthermore, his linking of the stylistic distortion adopted by Japanese anime culture with the decorative representations of nature

71 by Japanese premodern painting and sculpture provided an aesthetic alternative to the standards set up by Western modernity and modernism.

Let me end by restating that the artists who emerged after the nineties inherited, consciously or not, the spirit and methods of the postwar avant- garde. This is not because they were imitating or academically reiterating their predecessors’ methods, but because they were responding to the same sets of problems fueled by the postmodern condition as those that confronted by the postwar avant-garde artists. Even Takashi Murakami’s works, which seem to be complicit with Japanese mass culture and don’t initially appear to be related to the practices of the postwar Japanese avant- garde, can also be considered a part of the contemporary extension of the postwar avant-garde practice of reflecting, through art, on the specific restrictions and hopes of contemporary Japanese life, and making art a vehicle for discovering meaning in life rendered chaotic and mechanical in the age of globalization. In each work I presented today, the banal and insignificant details of everyday life were used as springboards for opening up new perceptions and relations intended to liberate spectators from their limited interpretive frameworks and activities. The fact that such methods were extracted from specific realities of Japanese postwar life testifies to the uniqueness of the Japanese avant-garde practice that challenged and transformed aesthetic standards provided by Western models of modernity.

Layla Diba: Thank you, Midori. Xu Bing, you are next.

Xu Bing: I know that we have limited time here, but I would like to ask for a few more minutes because I need translation.

We are talking about modernity here. When we speak about Chinese modernity we have to bear in mind that China has been seeking its own modernity since the May Revolution in 1919. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the nation was seeking its own modernity as well, but under those circumstances, it was within the Western Marxist framework. After the Cultural Revolution, and for about thirty years during the opening up and reform movement, Chinese artists have been negotiating between the Western centre and its own methodology. This kind of negotiation of finding modernity within a Western framework and also finding modernity within a Chinese framework has become a new tradition in Chinese history. Now China has embarked on a new round of seeking out Chinese methodology, Chinese modernity, but because of the complication of the Cultural Revolution, of the opening up of the reform movement, and of the socialism in the past couple decades, it has become even more complicated and more layered. Many different forces are working together to achieve a common goal, but their functions, their roles, are actually different from what they used to be.

72 In the past, it was predominantly a Western framework and methodology. But now this force, which was considered conservative, has become a very active force in seeking out modernity in China. What I call conservative energy, conservative force here, is actually a kind of mutated socialism, a mutated socialist methodology.

It’s actually a development by Deng Xiaoping based on Maoism, but that changes the essence of Maoism. With the slogans proposed by Deng Xiaoping such as, “you don’t need to care if it’s a white cat or a black cat; as long as it catches the mouse, it’s a good cat”—the truth is that these kinds of propositions are not really socialist propositions; they’re actually capitalist. But he has inherited Mao’s tradition of ruling, of how to run a government, run a country. Mao’s methodology, on the other hand, was a mutated traditional Chinese methodology. Mao’s methodology, in essence, was very indebted to traditional Chinese thinking. For example, he used a lot of slogans for different sectors of society. He had his own slogan for agriculture, and he had his own slogan for industry. Even today, a lot of Chinese rulers have inherited this kind of tradition, which is a three- word verse, a three-word phrase, something like that, so that people can repeat and chant them easily, so that they can embody the spirit that’s being propagated. We’re talking about modernity here in pursuit of this Chinese methodology, and I think that the Chinese government now has been inheriting this traditional Chinese way of being very flexible, of blurring the boundaries to some extent. For example, in dealing with the Hong Kong case, the Chinese government proposed this system called One Country, Two Systems, which is quite ambiguous to me, but in Chinese history, the central Chinese government has always been using these ambiguous policies in dealing with its relationships with the bordering provinces and the bordering regions.

I was an independent artist outside China for eighteen years, but now I’m back in China because I want to find out what this China methodology is. It has been around for so long, and, especially during the past thirty years, this Chinese methodology has been playing a very important role without actually having society get out of control. So I think there is a value there that I want to seek out by going back to China, and to find out what it can contribute to the present day and what it can contribute to the future. I feel that in order to seek out this value of the Chinese methodology, you have to really be a part of it; you have to be an active and real participant in society. I feel that I can’t learn much from scholars or intellectuals. I have to be a part of the society in which each player has his or her role. For example, I learn from the peasant entrepreneurs, I learn from the real estate developers, I learn from people who are actively working on the Internet. Some people comment that as an artist, I have gone back to the academy and waste a lot of time on administrative tasks,

73 it’s such a pity. But I feel that from the contrast between being an artist and an administrator, I get a lot of inspiration. I have to sit through a lot of meetings. It is indeed a waste of time. But as the meetings are taking place, development is also taking place.

So I’m wondering where this development comes from. I feel that the Chinese methodology nowadays must have a link to the socialist experience. For example, in the socialist period, there is a slogan called, “The more, the quicker, the better, and we save more.” So I think it sheds some light on what we do nowadays. In the face of the global economic recession, the Chinese methodology has its own particularity that has its own value. Ever since the economic downturn, we have been having even more meetings because we feel that we need to summarize, to consolidate our methodology in order to perform better in the future. And we have had so many meetings for the past thirty years, but what these meetings provide is the stability of society provided by the government. When we talk about Chinese modernity, Chinese methodology, both the Westerners and the Chinese have had this fixed, set tendency when thinking about it. For me, for example, after I got back to Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), many people commented that Xu Bing, as an independent artist, has conceded to the system. He used to be outside the system, but now he’s part of the system. People tend to think that this kind of concession has its connotations. When I was an independent artist outside China, working within the Western system, Western museums, the Western art world, many people commented that he’s such a remarkable guy because he could enter that system. But I think that most Chinese don’t really recognize the value of Chinese methodology. It’s not just me who has conceded to Chinese methodology, the Chinese system. Actually, I think most parts of the world have conceded to the Chinese methodology.

After I returned to CAFA, people asked me if I could bring anything modern or anything contemporary to CAFA. But I would answer that Chinese modernity is around us, it’s actually within China. If you look around at CAFA, we have an industrial design department, and we have an architecture department. These departments have been actively producing modernity, producing contemporary Chinese art and culture. Why are these departments, these particular fields developing so fast? It’s because Chinese society is developing so fast. And these departments, these developments in certain industries, certain disciplines, are in correspondence with the societal changes. A lot of young people think that modernity arises from modern and contemporary art. But in my opinion, it actually doesn’t come from art. It comes from the areas outside contemporary art in its traditional sense. There are many phenomena in China that can’t be explained very clearly. For example, there are many little merchants’ markets, street markets around the street corners, and you can’t really trace them down, you can’t really explain why they came

74 into being. What I am proposing here in essence is that when we talk about Chinese problems, Chinese phenomena, we should come from a Chinese perspective in understanding what is happening there. What we can benefit from this investigation is to find the value of the Chinese methodology and how it can shed light to the future.

Xu Bing, Forest Project, How much time do I have left? I just want to discuss a couple of projects. 2008, student drawings, painting, primer, Web site, For Forest Project, I developed a system that is a self-recycling system installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. that allows money to go from rich places to poor places such as the forest Courtesy of the artist. places in Kenya where trees can be planted. I take advantage of the different value money has in different regions. For example, two American dollars is nothing in New York but it can actually buy the seeds for ten trees to be planted in Kenya. The reason why this system can self-recycle is because all parties on this cycle, on this chain, can benefit from this cycle. We take advantage of the Internet, which offers a lot of free facilities, free services; for example, the banking system, the shopping system, which are offered at a very low cost or no cost at all. For example, I produced a little pamphlet, a little book, for this project, but it was not printed in China. It was not printed in the United States. This pamphlet, which teaches kids how to draw trees, was communicated to Kenya through the Internet. So I teach the kids how to draw trees, and when these drawings are produced, they will be auctioned on the Internet, which will benefit these kids and this region financially, and then we can use this money to plant trees in Kenya. So it’s a way to help the kids achieve their dreams. They draw the trees and they see

75 the trees being planted and then growing. There are 223 million students in China. This number is so high because China has an education system that allows it to organize millions of students, and utilizing this system can allow a great number of students to participate in the Forest Project.

Another project I’m working on right now is for a construction site opposite the CCTV tower, which is the Beijing World Financial Center. I’ve been given this huge public space to carry out a public project. Normally I don’t accept public projects like this, but after I got back to CAFA, a developer proposed this project to me, saying that in return he would contribute something to CAFA. So I accepted it. I went on a site visit, and after I visited, I was very shocked by the contrast between the very modernized architecture and the reality of the architectural site. I thought to myself, is it possible for me to use the construction materials, to use the daily materials used by the construction workers to produce a work of art for this huge public space? So they took my proposal, they accepted my proposal, and I started to contemplate the idea of the phoenix. I proposed to make two phoenixes, each twenty-eight meters in length. This is at its experimental stage. The interesting thing that I find about the phoenix is that it looks very fierce, very cruel, but at the same time, it also possesses a kind of aesthetic value, a kind of beauty. The phoenix carries wisdom, scars, wounds. Also, for these two phoenixes, because they are made of construction materials, because they are made of found objects, they are actually very colourful, and they carry this appearance of excavated objects from underneath the ground. They also resemble the shapes of those mutant toys that kids like. It’s something that I’ve been experimenting with.

I aim to reveal the depths, the essence, of capital accumulation in China. It can make the grand buildings look even grander, it can reveal even more the grandeur of the architecture. The splendour of the building itself can also help to reinforce the realism of the phoenix. So for a certain period at night, the lights of the building will be turned down, and then the LED lights within the phoenixes will shine so that they will look like a galaxy of phoenixes. They will look and appear as though they are from very far away, without a sense of realism. This would be the final result.

Because the whole construction of the building was delayed during the Olympics, I could not carry out this project for three months. Now because of the economic downturn, it has been further delayed, so the real estate developer is actually wondering whether we will be able to install them at all. That’s the end of my presentation.

Layla Diba: Because we have so little time, we are going to pass directly to questions and comments. I would like to invite you now to pose your questions. Hanru?

Hou Hanru: Xu Bing insists on Chinese methodology, or Chinese position and perspective, but my question is: which China?

76 Xu Bing, Phoenix, 2007–10, Xu Bing: It’s a very synthetic methodology that embraces different periods construction debris, light emitting diodes, artwork from different times. This kind of synthetic methodology is not new to the in process of fabrication. Courtesy of the artist. present. It was around even back in the Yuan dynasty.

Victoria Lu: But it has nothing to do with the Yuan dynasty, the Mongolian, or the Qing dynasty. This is a cultural China. It’s a tradition, a cultural entity that has persisted for five thousand years. It has nothing to do with nationality or the name of the country.

77 Jane DeBevoise: Cultural essence, I think, is what you’re talking about.

Hou Hanru: Of course I agree, if we can all agree that there is a universalism. There’s different kinds of universalisms. Then we can all agree on these things. A similar question might be, what is Indian? Of course, in a way, that’s more complicated.

David Elliott: Are we talking about a methodology or an essence? In a sense, we’re talking about a methodology.

Geeta Kapur: Xu Bing constantly used the word “methodology.” That’s Xu Bing, Phoenix, 2007–10, construction debris, light already a pragmatic choice of word. emitting diodes, artwork in process of fabrication. Courtesy of the artist. Victoria Lu: Approach.

Geeta Kapur: Approach. Way.

Victoria Lu: Or Chinese way.

Geeta Kapur: More than that, I think “methodology” is a good word to use.

78 David Elliott: Because it seems to be strategic to what Xu Bing is doing.

Alexandra Munroe: Wang Hui, who proposed this panel, has referred often to the 1960 lecture by the sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi called “Asia as Method.” I quoted the lecture in my introduction to The Third Mind because I was using that idea of Asia as method. Takeuchi challenges Japan and China to universalize their cultural values “grounded in Asian principles.” If the goal of Asian modernization is to achieve parity with the West, it must engage itself as a subject in the “process of . . . self-formation.”2

Xu Bing: What I call methodology here is more a way or mode of looking at things. For example, the Chinese never have this dialectical view of things. You wouldn’t think of things as two opposites. One thing resides in the other, and the other resides in the first. It’s this kind of wisdom that has been carried around by the Chinese for centuries.

Arjun Appadurai: I think I know, or I sense anyway, what Xu Bing is talking about. But I have a question that may connect an aspect of your argument with Yuko Hasagawa’s earlier argument. I think the question— it’s a big issue—also relates to Midori’s paper, to Japan. Whether one calls it the Chinese way, or the Chinese essence, or the Chinese mode or method, I think innovation to Japan as well as to China and India—I know I’m being broad here—is another way to look at things. That is, in all these cases modernity is produced in a very complex dialogue with—let’s simply say it—the West. It’s fairly well-documented, for example, that Mao really thought a lot about Rousseau. But—and I speak from an Indian point of view, whose case Geeta has stated very eloquently—I do think there’s an argument to be made that there’s a dialogue that has occurred which, from another perspective, The Third Mind exhibition documented from the Chinese side, from the Indian side. So my concern is this. I don’t mind talking about the Indian way or the Chinese way, or the Japanese way, because there may indeed be some style, but I would hate to see it distract us from the fact that a very powerful and not always chosen conversation occurred throughout Asia. It happened both ways, but . . . I worry about the enclosure that that involves. Xu Bing, you may not mean that at all, but I would like that to open up.

Layla Diba: I think Midori would like to address that.

Midori Matsui: I’m sorry if my emphasis on the specific artistic practice of the postwar Japanese avant-garde as it related to the specific conditions of the Japanese nation sounded self-centered. I didn’t intend to suggest that their responses were an essentially Japanese way of dealing with such problems. On the contrary, I find the Japanese avant-garde’s unique methods of intervention in, and defamiliarization of, everyday life through their oppositional dealings with the process of globalization as having

79 parallels to the conceptual practices of avant-garde art in the West during the 1960s and 70s, namely Fluxus, international situationism, and Land Art. In other words, what I have been describing cannot be characterized as a uniquely Japanese aesthetic or perception. Rather, such attitudes and methods are universal responses to the realities of globalization—and I am being cautious in using the word “universal.” In my paper, I was trying to address the program shared by many people in the world who are living amidst the after effects of the domination of culture by the Western model of modernization. Modernization, as an overall process of rationalization, was a condition that each nation had to accept in order to survive in the modern era. But because of the specific history and cultural climate of each nation or each locality, the process of modernization also gets transformed as soon as it is locally accepted. I have been trying to emphasize a way of dealing with that process of the reception of modernity and its transformation, which is not limited to Japan and which can be shared by many nations in the world. I think this process can be also directed to the conditions of Korea, for example, and now can apply to the discussion of China or India today.

Xu Bing: I just want to clarify one thing. My sensitivity to the Chinese phenomenon, to Chinese contemporary events, to current Chinese social events, actually owes a lot to my experience in the West. Some critics have drawn parallels between my recent work and the ready-made artwork, or found objects, in the West. But I would say it’s different because it’s in the tradition of Chinese folk culture, for example, people make lanterns out of found objects and low-culture materials. China is a country of peasants, so the Chinese are accustomed to using low-culture, cheap materials to achieve lofty goals, to achieve fantasies and dreams.

Layla Diba: To everyone, thank you very much.

Notes 1 Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe, Thomas Krens, Alexandra Munroe, Guoqiang Cai, et al. New York: Guggenheim Museum; London: Thames & Hudson, 2008. Solomon R. Guggenheim Musuem, 2009. 2 Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Asia as Method,” in What is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, trans. and ed. Richard F. Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), cited in Alexandra Munroe, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009), 27.

80 Birgit Hopfener and Franziska Koch Negotiating Difference: Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context

Participants at Negotiating Difference: Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context, House of World Cultures, Berlin. Photo: Wang Chingling.

rom October 22 to 24, 2009, the House of World Cultures (HKW) in Berlin provided the stage for one of the most important Finternational academic conferences on contemporary Chinese art in recent years. The significance of Negotiating Difference: Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context was evident in its deliberately focused historical scope (Chinese artistic production after 1976) paired with a strong emphasis on questions of methodology. The aim was to assess and challenge prevailing research approaches by contributing a decisively transcultural perspective to the emerging field of academic research on contemporary Chinese art. The Call for Papers framed this perspective as an “alternative to single-sided positions that either stress the construction of a ‘Chinese identity’ in essentialist terms or still consider Chinese art only based on a ‘Western’ notion of art.” In contrast, the alternative that Negotiating Difference proposed was to conceive contemporary Chinese art as “evolving out of processes of negotiated difference.” Deliberately excluded from this approach was the assumption that there exists an essential unity or universal homogeneity among all cultures in the world, which is often diagnosed as an effect of global market mechanisms. Alluding to Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist neologism of différance, the concept of the conference also tried to avoid approaching Chinese art through categories of cultural diversity such as the still popular juxtaposition of East versus West. Instead, it was aimed at reflecting on other ways of conceptualizing difference. Ideally, it prompted a methodological and conceptual discussion about how we approach and speak about (cultural) differences in

81 contemporary Chinese art on the one hand, and, on the other, about how we can analyze the conditions of difference.

We, as two of the organizers, consciously built on the fact that although in the last two decades contemporary Chinese art has attracted increasing global attention, in-depth academic research into the phenomenon still remains scarce and very heterogeneous in terms of disciplines and institutions seriously engaged in the field. These include research predominantly undertaken in Chinese studies, art history, and visual culture, and research that is carried out with a background in sociology or political science. Consequently, and for the first time on an international level, a conference was designed to meet the needs of the impressive number of recent young scholars around the world1 who have set out to study in detail aspects of contemporary Chinese art while being situated in various disciplinary, institutional, and cultural contexts. The event was organized and funded by grants from the Department of East Asian Art History of Freie Universität Berlin, chaired by Jeong-Hee Lee-Kalisch, a specialist in traditional East Asian art who also strongly supports research on contemporary art and who believes it is instrumental to reflect upon future curricular implementations of East Asian contemporary art in general.

Thematically, the conference was divided into two parts: the first day was primarily concerned with culture-related theoretical, aesthetic, and art historical questions, while the second day was mainly focused on structural, institutional, and functional issues posed by contemporary Chinese art framed as specific local practices that are substantially entangled with global contexts.

The event started with an opening presentation by Andreas Schmid, a German specialist in the field of contemporary Chinese art since the 1980s, and the academic keynote was delivered by John Clark (Sydney University), renowned as holding one of the few chairs worldwide that specializes in the history of modern and contemporary Asian art.

Andreas Schmid introduced and revisited the history of House of World Cultures, where the Negotiating Difference conference took place.2 He discussed its seminal China Avant-garde exhibition of 1993, the first large group exhibition of contemporary Chinese art in Europe, by means of a slide show that reconsidered the importance of place and individual agency in the formation of contemporary Chinese art and its Western reception. He commemorated the pivotal role of the now-deceased Dutch curator Hans van Dijk, together with whom Schmid and Jochen Noth had curated this exhibition which successfully toured Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and England. Schmid stressed the logistical, economic, and political challenge these curators met, and the enthusiasm of the participating artists and Chinese experts, for many of whom it was their first time visiting Europe and meeting with émigré colleagues who had left China around 1989. He also pointed out that the German public seemed especially curious given its own recent unification that had literally repositioned the HKW

82 from being a peripheral institution, which was originally instrumental in fostering an American cultural policy in face of the Berlin Wall, opposing implicitly East German socialist culture, into a pivotal institution generating multiple new cultural dialogues after the end of the Cold War.

John Clark’s presentation was titled “Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art: Three Issues.” Looking back to the 1920s and introducing artworks by Gao Jianfu, Pan Yuliang, and Feng Zikai, his aim was to elucidate that the division between the so-called guohua (Chinese art) and xihua (Western art) has always been an ideological construction. By focusing on stylistic and iconographic aspects, he was able to show that Chinese and Western art have always been entangled and, therefore, essentialist cultural perspectives on these artistic productions have to be called into question.

These two different talks exemplified what can be described as two dominant modes of discourse in the context of research on contemporary (Chinese) art. On the one hand, there are discussions led by artists, curators, gallery owners, collectors, and engaged critics dealing with this artistic production first hand, on a daily, practical, and professional basis that at times includes individual economic concerns. On the other hand, there are academic scholars who are interested in a distanced, reflexive, and analytic position that takes the former as the object and context of its studies. While this is not necessarily a polarized relationship, since quite a few participants of the conference are well versed in theoretical as well as in practical knowledge of the field,3 the controversial discussions in the conference made it clear that there is no automatically shared belief in the productive complementarity of these two discursive modes. Those representing the practical aspects primarily criticized the inaccuracy of facts that have been used for academic analysis, the incomplete selections of artworks, as well as a certain naiveté in the understanding of what’s currently transpiring in the Chinese art world. In light of this, the advocates of the academic world felt misunderstood, especially with the accusations of insufficient selections of artwork. On the contrary, they emphasized that the aim of a conceptual approach to the phenomena of contemporary art does not necessarily imply the necessity of encyclopedic inclusiveness, questioning whether it could even be achieved.

Until now, discourses around contemporary Chinese art have been predominantly led by people who are active as curators, critics, and researchers and not by purely academic endeavours, which was the reason why we had deliberately invited participants from both spheres. The invited curators-cum-critics or critics-cum-curators like Davide Quadrio (co-founder of BizArt Art Center, Shanghai, and Arthub, Hongkong), Beatrice Leanza (independent curator, Beijing), and Pauline J. Yao (independent writer and curator, Beijing) represent important locally based expertise with highly critical and pronounced perspectives on the daily business of curating and art criticism in China, as well as presenting Chinese art to a global art community.

The conference structure enabled a connection between these two modes of discourse and their different positions, exemplified by the pairing of a talk

83 by Davide Quadrio, “The Perfection of the Imperfection or the Principles of Adaptation,” with one by Meiqin Wang (Assistant Professor, California State University, Northridge) on the phenomenon of Chinese “Curator Fever.” Chaired by Francesca Dal Lago (Research Fellow, Leiden University), this panel showed how economic and cultural globalization affects and forms the profession and how the image of the “independent curator” bears very specific local meaning in China.

Taking an academic and partly systematic approach, Wang introduced a heterogeneous typology of the curator (from “part-time” and “non-profit” to “critics-turned-curators”), showing that Chinese curators in particular have to demonstrate a range of aspects from academically grounded judgment to commercial strategies that in more classical Western art settings tend to be seen as mutually exclusive. Wang concluded that the advent of consumer society and the paradigm of a free market in China has completely altered earlier idealism that was linked to the social role of the curator and now confronts the recent generation of Chinese curators with the burden of a double-edged “ideal realized” that is evident in the commercially motivated, yet often official, turn to supporting contemporary art.

As an independent curator himself, Davide Quadrio, while acknowledging the impact of the “commercial turn” Wang described, saw the professional challenge less in the loss of enthusiasm by Chinese (based) curators regarding the prospect of changing society and art when curating. He did not emphasize generational differences regarding the formerly prominent role of curators as powerful key figures within small circles of avant- garde artists (like the first generation of critics-turned-curators at the beginning of the 1990s Wang referred to). Instead, he stressed the concept of teamwork and productive collaboration. In this regard, his talk echoed Schmid’s account describing the difficulties and potential of the interaction among artists, curators, cultural bureaucrats, and other agents. Quadrio summarized the situation of curators in China today by arguing that the only invariable in the ever-changing social and political Chinese setting for curators is their need to be flexible. He made no secret of the fact that curators, especially those in the alternative art scene, still have to carefully and strategically design their projects regarding ideological censorship, other kinds of official resistance, or institutional inertness.

Yet Quadrio also illustrated with several exhibition cases that there is no clear-cut line in official reaction towards non-mainstream art activities. He proposed that no fixed criteria exist that would allow curators to judge the potential success or failure of a cooperation with Chinese official institutions or international partners respectively. Nor does he see fixed parameters helping to judge the efficiency of the chosen exhibition spaces regarding their ability to mediate potentially critical art successfully— whether such mediations are carried out in public or in privately owned gallery spaces. Still, Quadrio was very outspoken about the fact that things do change and curators have the possibility to transform their environment. In his view, this change inalienably needs curators to “adapt” themselves as well, that is, to continuously reassess and change their concepts and

84 strategies. For Quadrio, the Chinese setting in particular requires a need to base projects on intensive teamwork, profound knowledge of the local language, communication skills, and an openness to all kinds of unthought of collaborations, as well as the ability to embrace failure.

Similar to this pairing of talks, the productive tension between an insider’s view and a more theoretical academic perspective was also perceivable in the first panel of the second day that focused on “Strategies of (Dis-) Engagement,” which was chaired by Thomas Berghuis (Assistant Professor, Sydney University). Beatrice Leanza provided rich documentary material on non-commercial, or at least non-mainstream, activities and spaces in Beijing and Shanghai. Elaborating in part on the regional and political differences between these two prominent Chinese centres and their alternative art scenes, and, in particular, their locally and socially engaged art, she argued that their most recent common characteristic should be seen “in a non-antagonistic contradiction” to official art concepts and spaces in the People’s Republic of China.

In this respect, her talk strengthened the earlier thesis of scholars like John Clark, arguing from a political science perspective that the official versus non-official divide is no longer an effective categorization within the Chinese art context. Leanza’s paper set an example for the productive broadening of earlier methodological approaches by introducing the “spatial turn,” which bears special relevance in light of the ongoing, profound, and rapid spatial transformation in China’s metropolises that (in)forms art spaces, their agents, and content. Her theoretical attempt to consider this spatial turn with regard to a Chinese spatial term captured in the tiao/kuai expression seemed worth exploring: “This spatial idiom describes the form of bipolar vacillation between centralizing and decentralizing agencies that has historically described the vertical force (tiao) exerted by the central power, and the horizontal one (kuai) performed by more or less autonomous local administrations.”4 Yet the wealth of material Leanza presented in her talk seemed to prevent her from a more focused dispute of the interesting theoretical approaches she introduced.

The other paper presented in this panel was by Zheng Bo (Ph.D. candidate, University of Rochester), and it deepened Leanza’s broader assessment by presenting three recent examples of socially engaged art in China: A documentary film project directed by Wu Wenguang in co-operation with the EU-China Training Program on Village Governance in 2005 that enabled villagers to film their own communities’ activities; Ou Ning’s multimedia research project on Beijing’s Dazhalan district, a scene of massive demolition and relocation of former inhabitants in the name of urban turbo-modernization in which he highlighted the agency of resisting locals behind the camera; and Zheng Bo’s own art project, Karibu Islands, which was elaborated in a Beijing workshop together with queer and straight participants and creatively questioned concepts of gender.

In an attempt to apply Habermas’s criticality to the Chinese context by revisiting the notion of “public space” as a crucial setting for socially

85 engaged art practice, Zheng contrasted earlier artistic movements surrounding the Democracy Wall and the first exhibition of the Stars Group in Beijing with these more contemporary projects regarding their different uses of public places and their strategies to engage with a public audience. Arguing with Western critics like Grant Kester and Claire Bishop, who define socially engaged art as a “a performative, process-based” practice highlighting the artist as “context provider” rather than in the traditional role as “content provider,” Zheng proposed that the earlier artistic movements fit this categorization, too. While the selection and description of the showcases he presented were carefully chosen, historically grounded, and reflected well the similarity of practices and strategies of “social engagement,” the application of Habermas’s concept of “public space,” and Kester’s or Bishop’s categorization onto the Chinese context remained somewhat vague. Zheng concluded that the earlier socially engaged practices he described were instrumental in setting an example for more recent approaches and a substantial transformation, wherein the “abstracted concept of ‘the people’ is replaced by specific publics: villagers, workers, gays and lesbians, urban residents facing collective relocation, etc.”5 In this regard, socially engaged Chinese artists today interact and develop their projects within differentiated communities and consciously consider themselves part of various emerging publics.

Thomas Berghuis, who, in his role as respondent to Zheng and Leanza and as an academic underlined the necessity of an approach that is informed by extensive field research and based on a close-reading of the local discourses, also presented his own paper on the second day in the panel “Dis-Playing Contemporary Chinese Art” which was chaired by Pauline J. Yao, who replaced Hans Belting (Hochschule für Gestaltung/School of New Media, Karlsruhe). Berghuis brought attention back to the discursive context of exhibitions and artistic production in China by means of an analysis of the increased awareness and usage of the term “contemporary” in Chinese discourses. His paper acknowledged and critically reconfigured the agency and desire of prominent Chinese artists, critics, and curators, who, throughout the last three decades led numerous pointed debates on the definition of “modernism” and the question of “contemporary” art. Arguing from a sinologist perspective that is well informed of historical and political science methodology, Berghuis contributed an ambitious analysis of the interrelated Chinese terms for the modern (xiandai), modern times (jindai), the contemporary era (dangdai), and their changing currencies in Chinese art discourse since 1979. Scrutinizing prominent critical writings on this topic, Berghuis demonstrated ways to reconsider the frequent attempts to conceptualize and chronicle this Chinese artistic production, taking seriously the apparent stylistic changes, the artists’ own declarations, and the overall political and cultural contexts.

The pronounced methodological claim of Berghuis already had become clear during the first day of the conference with the discussion following the talks of Wang Ruobing (Ph.D. candidate, University of Oxford) and Doris Ha-lin Sung (Ph.D. candidate, York University, Canada), both residing in

86 the academic world, who presented in the panel “Concepts of Body and Gender in Chinese Contemporary Art.” At the centre of Wang Ruobing’s talk was the photographic artwork of the performance To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (1995), which she interpreted as a contemporary reflection upon the traditional Chinese concept of nature (ziran). With the understanding of the term ziran meaning to be in harmony with nature, she interpreted the deliberate nakedness of the performers as an expression of their desire to be, or to demonstrate being, one with nature. The question of how traditional concepts such as ziran are translated into the context of contemporary Chinese art is very appealing, but requires deeper exploration into the cosmological and philosophical underpinnings in order to find out if and how such notions play a role in contemporary understanding of art than Wang Ruobing was able to show in her contribution.

Doris Ha-lin Sung’s talk, “Expressions of Body and Gender in Chinese Contemporary Art,” concentrated on three Chinese performance artists— He Chengyao, Ma Liuming, and Zhang Huan—and more successfully showed how they reflect on traditional Chinese understandings of the body, and, accordingly, the self, as relational concepts and social constructions. While the critical remarks of Berghuis seemed well founded regarding the fact that Wang Ruobing’s presentation left out crucial facts and events related to To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain that would have helped to argue her points and deepen her analysis, the panelists and respondents were not all in agreement with his more general plea for meticulous assessment of local facts, narratives, and materials, as well as his promotion of analysis that primarily evolves out of these local findings, rather than approaching the field with already established (Western or other) and preconceived methodological concepts in mind. In our view, Doris Ha-lin Sung’s presentation successfully tackled this methodological balancing act, one that presents a basic tension for objects of study that span transcultural problems. Neither omitting nor ignoring local concepts and problems of body and gender or the artists’ self-understanding and narratives, her paper demonstrated how to constructively integrate already existing methodological frameworks in the field of cultural studies and gender theory with an analysis that takes into account the historical facts and locally grounded discursive concepts.

Eva Aggeklint’s (Ph.D. candidate Stockholm University) contribution to this same panel addressing body and gender, “Masquerading Brides and Grooms: An Analysis of Three Art Portraits in the Media of Photography,” showed how ambitious the panel’s methodological aim really was. Since “gender” and “body” as critical and theoretical categories originally evolved in Western disciplinary discourses, it presented a great challenge, especially for young scholars of Chinese area studies or art history, to scrutinize in what ways this categorization can be effective for the analysis of Chinese art contexts today. Aggeklint discussed Chinese conceptual photography and the frequent motif of the bridal couple. She mainly chose an iconographical approach describing and identifying the bride and groom as a recurrent subject that seems to be instrumental in

87 reflecting changing gender roles. Even though the various images of bridal couples—from Qiu Zhen’s staging of a very aged groom sitting under what appeared to be the wedding dress reminiscent of an absent bride6 to Liu Jin’s double self-portraits,7 where he features himself as bride and groom at the same time—were asserting that this motif might serve a specific interest of Chinese artists, Aggeklint’s attempt to read the heterogeneous images iconographically in order to deduce the common denominator of this interest, seemed less convincing. In this regard, her talk exemplified the need to open up the curricula of Chinese cultural or area studies, while making the disciplinary boundaries of art history more flexible in order to guarantee a thorough mentoring that helps young scholars to successfully analyze their findings and combine their language and culture focused knowledge of China with concepts that transcend regional or local categories and frameworks in the age of media and economical globalization.

These examples illustrate the different methodologies practiced by those from academia and those who work outside of it, and the panel discussion on the last day of the conference dealt with this issue in a more expansive way, thus it became clear that there exist very different, sometimes incommensurable approaches in implementing the study of contemporary Chinese art worldwide. The broad variety of disciplines concerned with this area of study, as well as the different national university education systems, will most likely remain not only an obstacle, but also a productive challenge for international conferences like Negotiating Difference, which are trying to strengthen dialogue among the diversity of scholars and institutions.

As we said at the beginning of this article, another important aim of the conference was to reflect on ways of conceptualizing difference. Even though this matter was prevalent during the whole event, it was the first panel of the first day entitled “Contemporary Chinese Art in the Transnational and Transcultural Context. Agents of Cultural Translation” that explicitly made it a topic. This panel included “Multiple Modernities,” scheduled to be chaired by Gao Minglu (at the University of Pittsburgh), and “Processes of Identification” as sub-sections. Since Gao Minglu was unable to attend the conference, John Clark responded to both. The first panel aimed at examining how contemporary Chinese art reflects, from discursive and aesthetic perspectives, on notions of modernity and postmodernity.

The first talk in this panel was given by Juliane Noth (Lecturer, Freie Universität Berlin). It had the title “Landscapes of Exclusion: The No Name Group and Multiple Modernities,“ and was a case study of the No Name Group that was active mainly during the 1980s and was famous for its landscape paintings that, according to Noth, not only refer to Impressionistic-style models of European and Russian origin, but also to older Chinese painting styles of the literati tradition. Being a specialist of Chinese modern landscape painting, Noth re-examined “modernity” in the landscapes of the No Name artists from a stylistic and compositional

88 point of view. She also introduced how the No Name group positioned themselves in terms of artistic role models. She detected conflicts between the younger and older generation and how this coincided with conflicting discourses of modernity.

The first of our own papers (Birgit Hopfener, Ph.D. candidate, Freie Universität Berlin), “Destroy the Mirror of Representation. Negotiating Installation Art in the ‘Third Space’,” was informed by Homi Bhabha’s concept of culture as translation and his concept of the Third Space as a site of negotiating difference. By drawing phenomenological similarities between Bhabha’s Third Space and installation art, the latter was introduced as a medium of transformation that features ideal conditions for the negotiation of cultural difference beyond binary thinking. By detecting a still dominant modernist understanding of art that coincides with the habit of a static identification of meaning in the context of so called non- Western art, the paper showed that this cannot be held on to in the context of installation art which immanently reflects on its “performative” quality, and that makes problematic its context and subject dependency. In order to avoid the interpretation of meaning from a thematic or iconographic point of view, the second part of the presentation argued from an aesthetic perspective. By focusing on two aspects of perception such as “touch” and “animation,” characteristics that the paper argued are dominant in many Chinese moving image installations, it introduced them as sites where traditional Chinese aspects of aesthetic experience are reflected upon.

Brianne Cohen (Ph.D. candidate, University of Pittsburgh) gave a talk titled “Cai Guo-Qiang’s Fireworks: Igniting a Paranational Landscape.” Her starting point was to look at the work of Cai Guo-Qiang beyond the dominant reception of him as an artist playing the Chinese card. Instead of identifying his use of fireworks as a “typical” Chinese technique, Cohen’s approach was to look at the artist’s understanding of art from a theoretical perspective. By applying Gayatri C. Spivak’s notion of the “planetary”—the global as a relational network of interactivity—Cohen was able to show that Cai follows a relational understanding of art in the global context. And by emphasizing the quality of joining together of communities through his explosions, Cohen introduced him as an artist who in his artwork imagines collectivities beyond the binary of East versus West.

While Noth’s aim was to detect and establish alternative Chinese modernities within the Chinese context, the aim of Hopfener and Cohen was to reflect on how to conceptualize cultural difference of Chinese art in the global context. They chose to emphasize a production of meaning that considers cultural difference as a performative process instead of a static concept of cultural identity. Both contributions were informed by cultural theory and contributed to making postcolonial theory fruitful for an understanding of Chinese art in the global context.

Even though essentialist conceptualizations of culture were mostly absent from the conference, there still seemed to exist a lack of consciousness of

89 the necessity to think about how to conceptualize cultural difference. As organizers of the conference, we are convinced that thorough knowledge of historical facts and events, language and cultural context, are very important as a base to start from. But in order to avoid stereotyping and exoticizing so-called Chinese art, we believe research has to go beyond regional contextualizations as the main discursive strategy. By analyzing Chinese art structurally, new conjunctions with Western subjects of study and other regional discourses should become apparent. The integration and exploration of a variety of established academic methods (regardless of whether they are still dominantly from Western discursive backgrounds) applied to and tested by Chinese contexts and scholars might be the precondition for a truly shared, as well as contested, academic discourse of contemporary art beyond either universalist or exoticizing assumptions.

The complexity of this issue, that, in addition to academic discourses, is also implicated in political and economic power relations between China and the rest of the world was presented in Wenny Teo’s (Ph.D. candidate, University of London) contribution “Made in China: Qiu Anxiong’s ‘We are the World’.” She took Qiu’s artwork We Are the World as a starting point to exemplify the complexity of the ways that contemporary Chinese art is positioned, and positions itself, within the global context and structures of power that determine how cultural differences are articulated. In her analysis, by looking from various perspectives that included the socioeconomic, political, and art historical, as well as cultural theoretical points of view, she disclosed the intertwined discourses that are at stake in Qiu’s artwork in respect to commercialization and commodity fetishism, political subversion, and the ideology of originality.

This important discussion on conceptualizing cultural difference continued during the second day of the conference which focused on institutional aspects, discourse, market mechanisms, and the strategies of prominent players working in the field of contemporary Chinese art. The second of our own papers (Franziska Koch’s) examined the exhibition as a phenomenon and a transforming event and offered an analysis of the Western reception of what is called Chinese art. The paper took the influential blockbuster exhibition Mahjong, which featured the collection of the Swiss collector Uli Sigg as its example. However, the paper was concerned as well with contributing to general research on contemporary art exhibitions regardless of the cultural contexts from which they are drawn. It therefore suggested framing exhibitions as a “dispositif,” a term I retraced from Michel Foucault’s and Jean-Louis Baudry’s French conceptualizations to that of the German media theoretician Joachim Paech. In this context, the dispositif is defined as an overall arrangement in space that is crucially marked by personal as well as impersonal strategies and relations of power that are “reinforcing types of knowledge and are reinforced by them.”8 Leading the audience through sections of the Mahjong display as it was staged in Bern in 2005, the paper examined the figure of the collector and the (re-) presentations of his collection on multiple levels. Ending the assessment with a gallery room where the collector himself was exhibited in the form of

90 numerous portraits and a polyester sculpture, I argued for future exhibition research that takes the intrinsic entanglement of the individual as well as the institutional and object-related power strategies into account, and which (in-)form our knowledge on art.

It seems fruitful for the future development of this field of study to explicitly scrutinize seemingly globalized forms and mechanisms like the modern art exhibition because it enables scholars to explore the different local implementations and the changes that these forms undergo in Chinese and other settings, since it is here that processes of negotiated difference and differentiation become visible or stay hidden.

Another kind of a prominent test case providing global character is the market. “Contemporary Chinese Art in the International Auction Market: An Insider’s Overview and Assessment in Comparative Perspective,” given by Joe Martin Hill (Ph.D. candidate, New York University), explored cultural difference from an economic point of view and provided a highly detailed overview of publicly available auction figures that retrace the boom and recent downfall of contemporary Chinese art as a subject of financial investment and speculation. Hill argued that the enormous rise in prices compared to the artworks’ stylistic, artistic, or aesthetic accomplishments, or their supposed art historical importance, calls into question any naïve assumption about the existence of a direct correlation between monetary value and artistic significance. Hill, who worked for the Chinese department of Sotheby’s for some years, aptly demonstrated global market mechanisms which obviously have beneficial consequences for the few happy artists who reach the ranks of selling an artwork for a million dollars at an international auction—a quarter of whom were born after 1950, and almost half of those born after 1960 are now of Chinese origin. Yet, as the lively discussion with the audience showed, it is far from clear what the lessons and structurally imposed consequences of the globalization of the art market are for the many thousands of Chinese artists, who, as recent graduates of China’s art academies, continue to struggle to make a living or find a role model. Another aspect with regard to the local repercussions of the global market paradigm that was missing in Hill’s talk were insights into who is buying contemporary Chinese art in China, and what their motivations and preferences are. In order to understand the cultural differences in the Chinese art market, as well as the global parallels it shares, it would have been interesting to ask what the social, economic, and cultural preconditions are for the “new Chinese collector.”

Another controversial issue that arose during the conference, and that has already been hinted at in this article, was the discussions that evolved between the two different academic directions that were taken; namely a school-based empirical research versus approaches that take more theoretically based conceptualizations to certain phenomena within Chinese art.

While it is not the intention of the authors of this article to depreciate any of the academic schools mentioned—on the contrary, we acknowledge both

91 directions as being important and understand them as complementary ways of researching Chinese art—we do want to raise the point that there seems to exist a deficit of consciousness concerning the necessity to reflect on the scholars’ choices of methodological approaches. Despite the fact that differences in methodological language already hinder constructive discussion, this deficit makes such discussion almost impossible which was also the case for the conference in review here. Maybe this controversy would have been more fruitful and would have enlarged and enriched the positions of the more established generation, if the originally scheduled Hans Belting and Gao Minglu had not been absent due to illness.

Peggy Wang’s (Ph.D. candidate, University of Chicago) talk was a good example to prove that an empirical and hermeneutical approach can bring interesting insights. She elaborated on this contested relationship with the well-chosen cases of several Chinese exhibitions in 1992. She analyzed very convincingly and in detail how the exhibition series Modern Chinese Art Research Documents Exhibition, organized by critic-turned-curator Wang Lin, exemplified the struggle for academicism (xueshuxing), while the First 1990s Biennial Art Fair (Oil Painting Section) curated by Lu Peng deliberately argued for the establishment of a national art market and he demonstrated an acute awareness of commercialism (shangyexing). According to Wang, their common point was that both exhibitions were conceived as a means of legitimizing contemporary Chinese art worldwide, while being concerned about the local establishment of an exhibition and market infrastructure. Her analysis yielded the distinctiveness of both approaches, which were explicitly trying to reconcile “history” and “market” in their efforts to elevate standards and codify value . By investigating each exhibition’s intellectual framework alongside its rhetorical and operational mechanisms, Wang illuminated how these Chinese critics-cum-curators “responded to a sense of cultural urgency in a new age of global capitalism.”

Lee Ambrozy (M.A. candidate, Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing) also chose an empirical and fact oriented approach. She took a close look at artistic education in China and what effects the still dominant instruction in the style of realism have on contemporary art production. Her paper, “The Third Studio––A History of Realism in Chinese Art Pedagogy,” offered a historical contextualization of the “Third Studio,” the location in the Central Academy of Fine Art where students have been trained in the realist style since the end of the fifties until today. Furthermore, she presented artists from different generations, namely Zhan Jianjun (born 1931), Liu Xiaodong (born 1963), Peng Yu (born 1974), and Qiu Xiaofei (born 1978), and explained how they all shared the similar education of being trained in the “Third Studio” even though they decided to abandon the canvas and experiment with other artistic media such as installation as is the case with Peng Yu and Qiu Xiaofei. Even though Ambrozy delivered a solid paper, it would have been useful if she supplemented it with a conceptual approach that, for example, reflected upon which understanding of art is linked to the realist style and what are the artistic strategies in contemporary Chinese art that problematize it.

92 Adele Tan’s (Courtauld Institute, University of London) paper, “A Question of Desire: Women, Bodies and Performance Art in China,” which was included in the panel focusing on questions of gender in Chinese art, combined a close empirical reading of a historical course of events with a conceptual approach derived from a psychoanalytic perspective. Tan proposed a re-reading from a feminist perspective of Xiao Lu’s performance, Dialogue, that was staged during the China/Avant-garde exhibition in 1989 at the National Gallery in Beijing. Instead of attributing the performance to Xiao Lu and her then boyfriend Tang Song, which is the most common historical account, Tan analyzed Xiao Lu’s recent artistic articulations and was able to debunk this version of the event as a symptom of a male dominated art historical discourse on Chinese art in China. Instead, Tan convincingly showed not only that Xiao Lu alone was responsible for her pulling out a gun and shooting her installation, but also that her motivations were grounded in emancipatory reflections of her self.

A final much-discussed topic that came to light during the conference and was alluded to earlier in this text was the question of how to deal with traditional aspects in contemporary art, and it was interesting that many of the conference applications suggested an approach to contemporary Chinese art through this lens of tradition. The panel titled “Negotiation of Tradition” examineed how Chinese art traditions are considered in contemporary Chinese art production, and since tradition in China has played a major role in cultural identification processes, it was enlightening to give a closer look into how and why some scholars choose such an approach today. This panel consisted of papers by Silke von Bersword- Walrabe (Art Collection of Ruhr University) and Wang Ching-ling (Ph.D. candidate, Freie Universität Berlin). These two scholars come from different academic backgrounds, which was evident in their contributions. While Bersword-Walrabe holds a doctoral degree in European art history, Wang Ching-ling is a trained East Asian art historian.

Von Bersword-Walrabe offered a case study of the artist Qiu Shihua and his ephemeral White Paintings series. Since these paintings are impossible to reproduce, Bersword-Walrabe decided to bring the original painting to the conference. In her presentation, “At the Threshold of (In-)Visibility: Qiu Shihua’s ‘White’ Landscape Paintings,” she took a philosophic approach. Her emphasis was on viewer perception and she suggested that it could be fruitful to draw a comparison between traditional Chinese literati painting theory and phenomenological approaches as formulated by the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty. By choosing a comparative approach from an aesthetic perspective in order to discover differences and similarities between the conceptualization of art in traditional China and the West, Bersword-Walrabe offered an ambiguous but much needed methodology of academic research. Placing her talk in the academic field of visual studies and image science, such approaches comparing cultural differences in the understanding of art and image respectively are still at a beginning stage and hold many unburied treasures that are waiting to be excavated. Such endeavours that require knowledge in Eastern and Western art historical and philosophical traditions are often exposed as lacking depth, and Bersword-Walrabe’s contributions could have been explored a bit deeper,

93 but she did succeed in offering a fresh perspective about how to approach Qiu Shihua’s artistic concepts.

The other contribution to this panel, “When Contemporary Art Encounters a National Treasure. Fan Kuan’s Travelers Amid Mountains and Streams, was given by Wang Ching-ling. He discussed contemporary “appropriations” of Fan Kuan’s (active from the late tenth century to the early eleventh century) traditional masterpiece Travellers Amid Mountains and Streams by contemporary artists Zhang Hongtu and Mei Dean-E respectively. As a distinguished East Asian art historian and a specialist in traditional Chinese art, he was able to identify iconographic and stylistic references in Fan Kuan’s original work in the contemporary versions. He also showed quite convincingly that contemporary artists from mainland China and Taiwan until today used Fan Kuan’s artwork, understood traditionally as a symbol of the Chinese nation, to thematize questions of Chinese identity. Wang’s paper exemplified well that there are scholars of East Asian art history working with a traditional notion of art that has to be considered when working with contemporary art. What is usually missing in East Asian art history, which has only recently started to include contemporary art in its field of research, is a necessary theoretical criticality when working with the art of today. Even though Wang raised very interesting questions, he remained at the level of analyzing visual quotations of the traditional in contemporary art but did not show how contemporary artists incorporate the idea of tradition today.

Conclusion and Future Prospects The conference Negotiating Difference brought together experts from various backgrounds and generations and intended to establish and enlarge already existing academic networks. During three very inspiring days of lively discussion, one of the successes of the conference was that not only controversies, but also methodological desiderata, were disclosed that should be followed up in the future.

Summarizing the conference, it can be stated that at present the dominant approaches to the phenomena of contemporary Chinese art are either hermeneutic case studies—mostly in terms of sociopolitical and culture historical contextualizations—as well as iconographic and stylistic approaches that sometimes assert themselves through comparative studies. In contrast, theoretical conceptualizations from a discursive and institutional perspective are relatively sparse.

So far, descriptive approaches outweigh analytical ones. Fact-oriented, empirical approaches are of course very important, and dominated the field but, again, there seemed to exist a lack of consciousness for the benefit of more conceptually oriented approaches. This was particularly evident in the discussions during the first day, and less during the second; not only with the differences in academic languages spoken, but also a lack of conceptual clarity and theoretical knowledge became visible, and this triggered controversy.

Not only does contemporary art demand a critical and conceptual perspective, but, particularly in the transcultural context, it calls for

94 theoretical approaches that can be fruitful endeavours in the unfolding of relationships between agents and institutions, aesthetic concepts and cultural understandings of art on a structural level, which in consequence can help to sharpen insights towards a specific given subject.

Another problematic that came up during the conference was the question of how to deal with references to tradition in contemporary Chinese art. Within current dominant discussions about Chinese identity and “Chineseness,” we are confronted with a tendency not only toward cultural essentialism, but also nationalistic overtones. In this context, references made to tradition mainly serve the purpose of affirming and constructing borders, rather than dissolving them, in order to accentuate cultural difference between China and the rest of the world.

It does not have to be emphasized that this is a dead end. In order to conceptualize cultural difference beyond the dichotomies East versus West and, furthermore, having in mind future research in the context of a global art history, one should not neglect the impact of traditional concepts in contemporary art. On the contrary, contemporary art has to be analyzed from a diachronic as well from a synchronic perspective. Instead of defining Chinese art by “othering” it from “Western art,” we conclude that the future perspective should be to think in modes of cultural translation, to look for possibilities to generate relational structures between different notions of art, and, in this respect, to open up new transcultural spaces of discourse.

Notes 1 The organizers received more than fifty-five abstracts from all over the world. Twenty junior scholars (mostly Ph.D. candidates or post-doctoral researchers, as well as junior art critics and curators) were invited. The rigid selection process was based on the following criteria: the abstracts should reflect on the methodological focus of the conference, demonstrate the ability and dedication to high academic standards and qualities and deal with one of the panel topics in detail. Although the organizers tried to include as many young scholars of Asian, and particularly Chinese origins and study backgrounds, the result proves a huge need for future conferences to foster the existing mutual academic dialogue and dissolve obstacles rooted in a lack of language competence on both sides, different standards at the institutional levels, and cultural differences informing the discursive traditions respectively. 2 The conference contributed to the program of the 7th Asia-Pacific Weeks, Berlin, which ran from October 7 to 18, 2009. The HKW had the show Frenetic Homeland on display, staging two huge installation works of contemporary Asian art: Twilight of the Idols, (mixed media installation, 2009), created by the Beijing-based artist Qiu Zhijie, and Berlin Tree Huts, (wooden installation, 2009), created by the Paris-based artist Tadashi Kawamata. Its project co-ordinator and curator, Susanne Stemmler, guided an introductory tour through the show for the participants of the conference. 3 Five out of the nineteen (junior) speakers had at least partially majored in fine arts or design themselves before undertaking a theoretical master’s and/or Ph.D. project; this partial artistic background is characteristic of the emerging field, and the conference structure tried to embrace this fact in a productive way rather than to exclude it from the agenda and resulting discussions, especially when dealing with contemporary phenomena and discourses, and in the cases of objects of research that tend to cross cultural, national, disciplinary, and institutional borders, making it hard to analyze them in the framework of long-established and neatly settled disciplines and with conventional methods developed for less transgressing and complex fields or historical events and materials. 4 For a more in-depth analysis of the tiao/kuai expression, see “Locating China” Wang Jin, ed., Locating China—Space, Place, and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2005). Also on administrative rescaling and the historical study of the relationship between spatial forms and social organization, see David Bray, Social Space and Urban Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origin to Reform (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 5 Zheng Bo, “Situating Socially Engaged Art in China,” unpublished paper presented at the Negotiating Difference Conference, Berlin, February 23, 2009, 10. 6 Qiu Zhen, My Bride and Me 03, 2006. 7 Liu Jin, The Same Me 1, 1999. 8 Michel Foucault interviewed by Alain Grosrichard during a workshop titled Ein Spiel um die Psychoanalyse: Gespräch mit Angehörigen des Département de Psychoanalyse der Universität Paris VIII in Vincennes, in Michel Foucault, Dispositive der Macht: Michel Foucault über Sexualität, Wissen und Wahrheit (Berlin: Merve, 1978), 118–75, 123, translated into English by this author. The interview was first published in French as “Le jeu de Michel Foucault,”Bulletin périodique du Champ Freudien, no. 10 (Juillet 1977), 66.

95 Paul Gladston Permanent (R)evolution: Contemporaneity and the Historicization of Contemporary Chinese Art, Part Two

his is the second part of a two-part essay that seeks to offer critical commentary on recent attempts to interpret the historical Tdevelopment of contemporary Chinese art from the point of view of emerging debates relating to the concept of contemporaneity. In recent years, these debates have become increasingly influential in providing an intellectual framework for the diversified analysis of contemporary art within differing local and international settings. As a result, where there was once a tendency to interpret contemporary art either from the totalizing perspectives of a modernist world view or in light of the pervasive relativism of postmodernist theory and practice (which itself involves what is arguably a totalizing, anti-foundational vision of modernity), there is now an alternative position that embraces the concurrence of differing approaches toward the interpretation of contemporary art while “grounding” those approaches in relation to the experience and representation of geographically distinct para-modernities.

In part one of this essay, published in the last issue of Yishu, I gave a brief overview of thinking associated with the concept of contemporaneity as well as how that thinking can be understood to have supplemented existing postmodernist readings of the experience and representation of modernity. I also gave a critical reading of a recent essay by the historian and curator of contemporary Chinese art Wu Hung, in which he maps out a new understanding of the historical development of contemporary Chinese art commensurate with the concept of contemporaneity.

In part two of this essay, I shall present a critical reading of a text by art historian and curator Gao Minglu, in which he argues that contemporary Chinese art has been shaped by a localized Chinese conception of modernity markedly different from that of the West, as well as some first thoughts toward a more general critique of the concept of contemporaneity. The texts by Wu Hung and Gao Minglu discussed here are both included in the book Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, an edited collection of essays compiled as the result of a symposium on the subject of contemporaneity at the University of Pittsburgh in 2004.1

Gao Minglu’s essay, “‘Particular Time, Specific Space, My Truth’: Total Modernity in Chinese Contemporary Art,” begins with an assertion that the horizons of contemporary Chinese art have been shaped by a localized

96 Chinese conception of modernity that is markedly different from that associated with the development of modernist and postmodernist art in Europe and North America.2 As Gao would have it, the Western (that is to say, European and North American) conception of modernity is based on two guiding principles set out in the writings of the German critical theorist (and critic of postmodernism) Jürgen Habermas: first, that human history can be articulated according to a sequential unfolding of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern epochs, and that each of these epochs constitutes an advance on that or those that came before it; and second, that modernity can be divided—in light of the European Enlightenment’s instituting of science, morality, and art as autonomous spheres of human activity—into the materialistic modernity of bourgeois capitalist society on the one hand and an aesthetic modernity critical of materialistic modernity on the other. To which Gao adds a further observation that within the context of Western modernity, aesthetic modernity is now widely understood to have taken two distinct forms: an autonomous (socially disengaged) aesthetic often identified with the writings of Clement Greenberg and modernist abstraction; and a critical (socially engaged) aesthetic embodied by the work of Marcel Duchamp and the Western postmodernist conceptualism of the 1970s and 1980s. According to Gao, these structural articulations and divisions have effectively shaped Western art history by framing the historical development of modernist and postmodernist art in the West as “a logical process” coinciding with the “socioeconomic contexts of the transitional age from the early to late modern period.”3

Gao then goes on to argue that the Chinese conception of modernity differs from that of the West because it has, since the very beginnings of China’s entry into modernity during the early twentieth century, involved the combining of aspects of Western modernity—including, among other things, social Darwinism and North American pragmatism—with the pragmatic relativism of traditional Chinese Confucianism. As a consequence of this, contends Gao, the Chinese conception of modernity has tended, unlike its Western counterpart, toward a continual subverting of “dichotomous thought patterns such as subject versus object, and time versus space” that not only has placed modern Chinese art of the last ninety years or so in an invariably close relationship to the material conditions of its immediate production and reception, but allows for the continuation of a specifically Chinese view of history as a decidedly non-linear “network of forever changing relations among human subjectivity, living space and experience” whose space is “always ongoing, mutable, and actual.”4 In Gao’s view, the Chinese conception of modernity can therefore be understood to have diverged strongly from that of the West by upholding a pervasively non-absolutist view of the historical relationship between art and modernity.

Gao’s assertion that the Chinese conception of modernity is a pervasively non-absolutist one suggests an affinity with the anti-foundational deconstructivism of Western postmodernism. Gao is, however, at pains

97 to dismiss the possibility of such a connection on the grounds that deconstructivism’s vision of everything as “contingent, transient, and [lacking] in historical logic” is very much at odds with a durable Chinese belief, as part of Chinese modernity, in the importance of a “historical view” where the past and the contemporary can be seen to meet in the (ritualistic) creation of new cultural forms.5 Indeed, Gao goes further in this regard by also dismissing the relevance of (Western) postcolonialist discourse as a means of interpreting contemporary Chinese art, this time on the grounds that the former’s persistent deconstructive suspension of categorical differences in cultural identity runs contrary to strong assertions of national cultural identity within the non-Western world—including that which is implicated in a specifically Chinese conception of modernity—that have arisen as a form of multidimensional resistance to the Westernizing effects of globalization and that have, Gao argues, consequently led to the overwriting of the West’s temporal view of modernity as a series of successive epochs by an international one that is predominantly spatial in its outlook.

On the basis of this critical assessment of the differences between Chinese and Western conceptions of modernity, Gao then proceeds to develop an extended analysis of contemporary Chinese art involving close readings of a wide range of artworks set in relation to the immediate contexts of their production and reception within China. As part of this analysis, Gao makes three broad assertions about the nature and significance of contemporary Chinese art and its differences from the modernist and postmodernist art of the West. The first of these assertions is that while China has been obliged to assimilate values and practices associated with the Western conception of modernity—thereby binding Western and Chinese conceptions of modernity “in a relationship of inseparability”6—the bringing together of those Western values and practices with local Chinese priorities and points of view (often referred to within China as “Chinese characteristics”) has often involved a practical reordering of the West’s sequential view of history—one that has, for example, seen the widespread adoption of postmodernist architectural stylings within China during the 1980s and 1990s in advance of a growing application of modernist architectural stylings in more recent years. The second assertion made by Gao is that in contrast to that of the West, Chinese modernity has tended towards a closing of the gaps between differing spheres of human activity. Consequently, while Western aesthetic modernity can be understood to have ceased to act as a convincing critical other to the materialistic modernity of bourgeois capitalist society, both because of a failure to sustain itself as a continual focus for formal innovation and because of its recuperation by mainstream art institutions and the international art market, this is, contends Gao, far from being the case with regard to contemporary Chinese art, whose horizons have been continuously shaped by a mix of capitalist and socialist imperatives that make no clear distinction between materialist and aesthetic modernity and that therefore imbricate contemporary Chinese art in a persistent integrative engagement with society and

98 politics. The third of Gao’s assertions is that Western feminist discourse, with its gendered vision of art history, is irrelevant to the interpretation of contemporary Chinese art produced by women because men and woman within China have a shared experience as non-autonomous subjects within a persistently authoritarian Chinese society that overrides any considerations of gendered differences in power/knowledge relations and because of a current need to arrive at “sexual harmony rather than gender conflict and splitting.”7

Like Wu Hung’s mapping of the historical development of contemporary Chinese art, Gao’s assessment of the differences between the Western and Chinese conceptions of modernity and between Western modernist- postmodernist art and contemporary Chinese art is, to some extent, persuasive. Through his writing, Gao draws our attention not only to the persistent and pervasive influence of pre-modern Chinese thought and practice on the historical development of modernity within China, but also to differences in the formal/stylistic developments of Western modernist- postmodernist art and contemporary Chinese art that have come about as a result of their respective interrelationships with very different social, cultural, economic, and political settings. What is less convincing, however, is Gao’s claim that the persistent and pervasive influence of pre-modern Chinese thought and practice on the historical development of modernity within China marks out the Chinese conception of modernity as radically different from that of the West. One of the notable features of the argument set out by Gao in ‘“Particular Time, Specific Space, My Truth” is the absence of any detailed assessment of the historical relationship between Western modernism and postmodernism, and, in particular, the way in which postmodernist thought and practice—which is now culturally dominant within Europe and North America—can be understood from its beginnings in relation to the work of the Western historical avant- gardes to have pervasively deconstructed the modernist assumptions of sequential historical development and specialization that Gao imputes to the whole of the Western conception of modernity. As a consequence, Gao makes the mistake of upholding as his main point of critical reference a staunchly modernist view of the relationship between art and modernity that, while still highly influential on Western thought and practice, is now widely seen in the West to have been overwritten by an immanent sense of historical uncertainty. Gao’s assertion that the pragmatic non-absolutism of the Chinese conception of modernity contrasts strongly with the rational sequential and categorical ordering of its Western counterpart is therefore a highly contestable one.

Indeed, one might go further in this regard by making the point that Gao’s view of deconstruction as a profoundly ahistorical form of analysis is itself also highly contestable. As the literary critic Terry Eagleton has indicated, while deconstruction can be used somewhat absurdly to “deny the existence of relatively determinate truths, meanings, identities, intentions, [and] historical continuities,” it also has the potential to act as a “political” means

99 of dismantling “the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force,” and, thereby, of revealing how presently signified meanings operate as “effects of a wider and deeper history—of language, of the unconscious, of social institutions and practices.”8

Furthermore, it is not at all clear that the prevailing Chinese conception of modernity is as non-absolutist as Gao would have us believe. As anyone familiar with art-historical and critical writing within China since the modernizing May Fourth movement of 1919 will readily attest, much of that writing has, alongside its continued indebtedness to the historical ascendancy of non-absolutist thought within China, been conspicuously aligned with a Western understanding of history as a sequential and progressive unfolding of distinct periods and epochs (an alignment that is, in fact, very much to the fore in Gao’s own historical writings about contemporary Chinese art).9

It could therefore be argued contra Gao that Western and Chinese conceptions of modernity have both involved the co-mingling of absolutist and non-absolutist tendencies and that, in the case of both of these conceptions, non-absolutism is currently at the fore—to which one might add a further observation that Gao’s somewhat categorical assessment of the differences between Western and Chinese conceptions of modernity is not only conspicuously out of joint with the prevalence of postmodernist non- absolutism in the West, but also a paradoxical one given that the Chinese position of enunciation from which Gao presumably speaks involves, as Gao would have it, a pervasive blurring of conceptual boundaries.

This does not mean, however, that Chinese and Western conceptions of modernity should be seen as identical to one another. As Gao indicates, non-absolutist thinking within a Chinese context has tended historically towards the possibility of harmonious reciprocation between otherwise differing states of being—as represented by the well-known Chinese yin yang symbol or yin yang tu. This is in marked contrast to the anti- foundationalism of deconstructive thought and practice that first emerged during the 1960s within the context of an increasingly prominent Western postmodernism as a means of critically revealing the inherent uncertainty of linguistic signification and, therefore, the ontological impossibility of absolute states of totality and difference. Current Western and Chinese conceptions of modernity can therefore be seen to differ not because of a sharp distinction between the absolutism of the former and the non- absolutism of the latter, as Gao would have it, but, instead, differences in viewpoint about the significance and consequence of non-rationalist thought and action.

Harmonious reciprocation has been a recurrent concept in Chinese thought. Variations on this concept can be understood to have informed successive discursive orders within China since antiquity, including a

100 traditional Chinese desire to live in close accordance with nature as well as more recent aspirations toward the building of a harmonious Chinese society under communism. From the point of view of established Chinese discourse, Gao’s assertion that the Chinese conception of modernity has supported a close reciprocal engagement between art and society, and the production of women’s art that looks toward a reconciliation of gender difference, therefore presents itself almost automatically as a positive one. From a current Western discursive perspective strongly informed by postmodernist skepticism with regard to the possibility of absolute states of being, however, assertions of this kind invite a rather more critical reception.10 Seen from this critical perspective, Gao’s view that the Chinese conception of modernity has supported a close reciprocal engagement between art and society can be seen to gloss over any careful consideration of the persistence of strong governmental controls on the critical content of art within China—controls that severely curtail the social and political agency of contemporary Chinese artists. This is not to say that contemporary Chinese art does not a have a critical relationship to Chinese society and politics. Rather, it is to point out that the discursive limits placed by the Chinese government on the critical content of art within China makes that relationship a profoundly skewed one (a state of affairs that has its non-analogous counterpart in the institutional and societal pressures under liberal capitalism that continually threaten the critical autonomy of contemporary Western art). By the same token, Gao’s argument that feminist approaches to art historical interpretation are irrelevant within the context of Chinese modernity can understood to involve a highly problematic abstraction of the position of women in Chinese society that serves to obscure the persistence of a pervasive patriarchalism there despite official protestations of gender equality under communism.

A careful analysis of the wider and deeper structures of thought and practice that inform the line of argument put forward by Gao in “‘Particular Time, Specific Space, My Truth’” is beyond the scope of this present text. However, it might be ventured briefly that Gao’s framing of Chinese modernity as one involving a persistently close interactive relationship between art and society, past and present, and masculine and feminine betrays the traces of an array of discourses contingent on the development of Chinese modernity—not just the pragmatic relativism of Confucian thought and practice to which Gao himself alludes, but, in addition, the mysticism of Daoism and Chan Buddhism, the highly reductive class analysis of Marxian thought, Mao Zedong’s non-rationally inflected interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, and the current Chinese government’s somewhat questionable assertion of a strong national Chinese cultural identity (as evidenced by the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics).

In conclusion, I would like to add some first thoughts toward a critique of contemporaneity based on the critical readings of the essays by Wu Hung and Gao Minglu put forward here. The current debate surrounding

101 contemporaneity is undoubtedly a useful one insofar as it seeks to undercut the potential for interpretive abstraction that arises as part of Western deconstructive postmodernism and in particular the application of deconstructive thought and practice, not least through postcolonialist discourse, as a means of promoting what is arguably a totalizing, anti- foundational vision of modernity. However, when considering conceptions of modernity different from those associated with Western modernism and postmodernism (which are only notionally “Western” given their persistent entanglement with non-Western cultural influences—for example, Dada and Surrealism’s assimilation of non-rationalist Chinese thought and practice) we should be careful not to accept those differing conceptions either at face value or without consideration of their wider ethical and political significance. The alternative is perhaps something close to the world view presented by Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematic work of Nazi propaganda Olympia, in which the diversity of participants at the 1933 Olympics in Berlin is seen not only as irrevocably tied to racial difference and the established limitations of the nation state, but also as open to a worrying association with social Darwinist assertions of national cultural superiority.

Notes 1 Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008). 2 Gao Minglu,‘“Particular Time, Specific Space, My Truth’: Total Modernity in Chinese Contemporary Art,” ibid., 135. 3 Ibid., 135. 4 Ibid., 137. 5 Ibid., 145. 6 Ibid., 134. 7 Ibid., 161. 8 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1983), 148. 9 See, for example, Gao Minglu, The Wall: Reshaping Chinese Contemporary Art (Beijing: The Today Art Museum, 2005). 10 See Donald Wesling, “Methodological Implications of the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida for Comparative Literature: The Opposition East-West and Several Other Observations,” in John J. Deeney, Chinese-Western Comparative Literature Theory and Strategy (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1980), 79–111.

102 Chinese Name Index

Cai Guo-qiang Hu, Joyce Peng Yu Wang Ruobing 蔡國強胡元琴彭禹王若冰

Cai Yuanpei Jia Defang Qi Zhilong Wang Zhen 蔡元培賈德芳祁志龍王政

Chen, Movana Lee Ching Kwan Qiu Anxiong Wu Hung 陳麗雲李靜君邱黯雄巫鴻

Chen Aikang Li Bin Qiu Shihua Wu Wenguang 陳愛康李斌邱世華吳文光

Chen Duxiu Li Chu-Tsing Qiu Xiaofei Xiao Lu 陳獨秀李鑄晉仇曉飛蕭魯

Chen Huamin Li Hong Qiu Zhen Xu Beihong 陳華民李虹邱震徐悲鴻

Cheng, Vincent Li Xianting Song Binbin Xu Bing Tzu-Wen 栗憲庭宋彬彬徐冰鄭子文 Lin Daojing Sung, Doris Ha-lin Yao, Pauline J. Chen Xiuqing 林道静宋夏蓮姚嘉善陳秀清 Liu Haisu Tan, Adele Yu Feng Chen Yiming 劉海粟陳韋純郁風陳宜明 Liu Jin Tang, David Yu Ji Cui Xiuwen 劉瑾鄧永鏘虞姬崔岫聞 Liu Xiaodong Tang Song Yuan Yaomin Deng Xiaoping 劉小東鄧小平唐宋袁耀敏 Fan Kuan Liu Yulian Tao Yongbai Zhan Jianjun 范寬劉宇亷陶詠白詹建俊 Feng Jiali Lu, Victoria Rongzhi Teo, Phyllis Zhang Hongtu 奉家麗陸蓉之張慧玲張宏圖 Feng Zikai Lu Danfeng Teo, Wenny Zhang Huan 豐子愷盧丹楓張温惠張洹 Gao Jianfu Lu Peng Wang Ching-ling Zhang Yuliang 高劍父呂澎王靜靈張玉良(潘玉良) Gao Minglu Ma Liuming Wang Hui Zheng Bo 高名潞馬六明汪暉鄭波 Guo Xi Mei Dean-E Wang Lihua Zheng Shengtian 郭熙梅丁衍王麗華鄭勝天 He Chengyao Ou Ning Wang Lin 何成瑤歐寧王林 Hong Ye Pan Yuliang Wang Meiqin 洪野潘玉良王美欽 Hou Hanru Pan Zanhua Wang, Peggy 侯瀚如潘贊化王必慈

103 104 Minsheng Art Museum Presents Three Decades of Contemporary Chinese Art: Painting (1979-2009)

Left: Li Shan, Duntile, 2001, oli on canvas, 142x245cm Right: Shu Qun, Absolute Pyinciple NO·1, 1984, oli on canvas, 160x200cm

Exhibition Title Three Decades of Contemporary Chinese Art: Painting (1979- 2009) Chief Sponsor Minsheng Art Museum The Exhibition Venue Three Decades of Contemporary Chinese Art: Painting (1979- Minsheng Art Museum, 570 West Huaihai Road, 2009), sponsored by the Minsheng Art Museum, will open in Shanghai Shanghai on April 18, 2010. This inaugural exhibition, presented Exhibition Period as a gift to the World Expo, features more than one hundred April 18 - July 18, 2010 works of over eighty artists who have been instrumental in

About Minsheng shaping contemporary Chinese art in the past thirty years, Art Museum and including Shao Dazhen, Fan Di’an, Li Xianting, Gao Minglu, Xu the Minsheng Center for Arts Research Jiang, Yin Ji’nan, Liu Xiaochun, Wu Hong, Zhu Qingsheng, Yi Fully funded by the private Ying, Hou Hanru, Fei Dawei, Wang Huangsheng, Huang Zhuan, Minsheng Bank, Minsheng Wen Pulin, Lu Peng, Gao Shiming, Yin Shuangxi, Zhao Li, Jia Art Museum’s mandate is to promote contemporary Fangzhou, Peng De, Li Xiaoshan, Wang Lin, Liao Wen, and Lu Chinese art and to foster Hong. Many of these works will be exhibited in Shanghai for academic research and intellectual exchanges. the first time. A joint endeavour in celebrating the significance The Minsheng Center for Arts Research will be of contemporary Chinese art, three generations of critics and launched on the day of the artists have generously contributed their invaluable insights, exhibition opening. support and materials in producing this exhibition as well as a comprehensive catalogue entitled Three Decades of Contemporary Chinese Art. 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 Limited edition prints and photographs by leading contemporary Chinese artists.

To purchase Yishu editions please send your request to [email protected] or call 1.604.649.8187 (Canada) or contact Katherine Don +86 158.1018.9440 (China)

Yan Lei & Hong Hao, Invitation, 2010, offset printing on paper, 295 x 205 mm, Edition of 300.

New Yishu Limited Edition Print released!

Available in Yishu Booth at Art Hong Kong and Art Basel 2010

Also available for purchase:

Rong Rong & Inri, Xu Bing, Book from the Wang Guangyi, 2004 No. 2 Caochangdi, Ground, 2007, ink on Great Criticism — Beijing, 2008, Digital paper, 29.7 cm x 35.6 cm, Wang Guangyi photograph on Hahnemühle Produced by Xu Bing 2009, Serigraphy, rag paper, Produced Studio, New York. 210 X 295 mm, by Three Shadows Edition of 199. signed by the artist. Photography Art Centre, Produced by A Space Beijing. Edition of 200. Art, Beijing. Edition Wei Guangqing, of 200. Made in China Ding Yi, Crosses 08, 2008, 2008, Seriograph on Serigraphy, 297 X 178 paper, 175 x 296 mm. mm, signed by the artist. Produced by the artist. Produced by the artist. Edition of 196. Edition of 200.