September/October 2016 Volume 15, Number 5 Inside

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 VOLUME 15, NUMBER 5

INSI DE

Chengdu Performance Art, 2012–2016 Interview with Raqs Media Collective on the 2016 Shanghai Biennale Artist Features: Cui Xiuwen, Qu Fengguo, Ying Yefu, Zhou Yilun Buried Alive: Chapter 1

US$12.00 NT$350.00 PRINTED IN TAIWAN

VOLUME 15, NUMBER 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016

C ONT ENT S 23 2 Editor’s Note

4 Contributors

6 Chengdu Performance Art, 2012–2016 Sophia Kidd

23 Qu Fengguo: Temporal Conﬁgurations Julie Chun 36 36 Cui Xiuwen Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky

48 Propositioning the World: Raqs Media Collective and the Shanghai Biennale Maya Kóvskaya

59 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Danielle Shang

48 67 Art Labor and Ying Yefu: Between the Amateur and the Professional Jacob August Dreyer

72 Buried Alive: Chapter 1 (to be continued) Lu Huanzhi

91 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Zhang Yu, One Man's Walden Pond with Tire, 2014, 67 performance, one day, Lijiang. Courtesy of the artist.

We thank JNBY Art Projects, Chen Ping, David Chau, Kevin Daniels, Qiqi Hong, Sabrina Xu, David Yue, Andy Sylvester, Farid Rohani, Ernest Lang, D3E Art Limited, Stephanie Holmquist, and Mark Allison for their generous contribution to the publication and distribution of Yishu.

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 Performance art has a strong legacy in FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum southwest China, particularly in the city EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian of Chengdu. Sophia Kidd, who previously EDITORS Julie Grundvig contributed two texts on performance art in this Kate Steinmann Chunyee Li region (Yishu 44, Yishu 55), updates us on an EDITORS (CHINESE VERSION) Yu Hsiao Hwei Chen Ping art medium that has shifted emphasis over the Guo Yanlong years but continues to maintain its presence CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li and has been welcomed by a new generation ADVERTISING Sen Wong of artists. Michelle Hsieh ADVISORY BOARD Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Painting also figures strongly in Yishu 76. Julie Melissa Chiu, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden John Clark, University of Sydney Chun writes on Qu Fengguo, a Shanghai artist Lynne Cooke, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. who since the 1980s has devoted his career Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator to developing the language of abstraction in Fan Di’an, Central Academy of Fine Arts Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator his painting. Like Ding Yi, another Shanghai Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh artist of the same generation, he has refined Hou Hanru, MAXXI, Rome Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop rather than “explored” this genre, in this case Katie Hill, University of Westminster creating a body of work that is in dialogue with Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian the passing of time and the change of seasons. Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator Lu Jie, Long March Space In a different vein, Cui Xiuwen, best known Charles Merewether, Critic and Curator for her photographic scenarios of young girls Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art going through adolescence, has more recently Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator turned to abstraction within the context of both Wu Hung, University of Chicago Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District Chinese and Western art history. ART & COLLECTION GROUP LTD. 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Outside of abstraction is the idiosyncratic Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 painting of Hangzhou artist Zhou Yilun. Danielle E-mail: [email protected] Shang places his work within the realm of “bad VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin painting” and a punk aesthetic, a sensibility that CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu has gained little traction within the mainstream Yishu is produced and published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan and and has come to represent a form of resistance Vancouver, Canada, and published in Taipei, Taiwan. The publishing dates are January, March, May, July, September, and November. All to the accepted art system. Also outside of the subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: mainstream are the paintings of Ying Yefu who YISHU INITIATIVE OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART SOCIETY brings the tradition of gongbi style painting into 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 Phone: 1.604.649.8187 contemporary realms. Jacob August Dreyer E-mail: offi[email protected] discusses Ying Yefu’s work within a critique of DIRECTOR Zheng Shengtian Shanghai’s current art scene and how the artist SECRETARY GENERAL Yin Qing maintains his integrity within an industry that is RETAIL RATES USD $12 / EUR 9 / TWD 350 (per copy) fixated on art as commodity. SUBSCRIPTION RATES 1 Year Print Copy (6 issues including air mail postage): Maya Kóvskaya interviews Raqs Media Asia $94 USD/Outside Asia $104 USD Collective, curators of the 2016 Shanghai 2 Years Print Copy (12 issues including air mail postage): Asia $180 USD/Outside Asia $198 USD Biennale, and queries their approach to 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD curating a large group exhibition and how it 1 Year Print Copy and PDF (6 issues including air mail postage): has the potential to become an immersive Asia $134 USD/Outside Asia $144 USD experience that is propositional and DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah conversational. ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow DESIGNER Philip Wong PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. In conclusion, we present the second WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com installment of Lu Huanzhi’s textual artwork WEB DESIGN Design Format ISSN 1683 - 3082 Buried Alive, a comment upon Chinese society and the role of contemporary art within it. No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher.

Keith Wallace Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版(Yishu)創刊於 2002年5月1日典藏國際版‧第15卷第5期‧2016年9–10月社長：簡秀枝法律顧問：思科技法律事務所劉承慶創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）

編者手記總策劃：鄭勝天 2 主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 4 作者小傳史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 黎俊儀

網站編輯：黎俊儀 6 成都的行為藝術：2012 ─ 2016 Sophia Kidd 中文編輯：余小蕙陳萍郭彥龍

23 曲豐國：時間構造行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 廣告：謝盈盈田珠莉（Julie Chun）黃晨

顧問：王嘉驥田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 36 崔岫聞安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky 巫鴻林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 范迪安招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 48 向世界提問：Raqs媒體小組和上海雙洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 年展胡昉侯瀚如邁涯（Maya Kóvskaya）徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 高名潞 59 《好壞醜——黃金三鏢客》費大爲尚端（Danielle Shang）楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 盧杰 Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor 67 Art Labor畫廊和嬰野賦：在業餘與 Katie Hill 專業之間 Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda Jacob August Dreyer 出版：典藏藝術家庭股份有限公司副總經理：劉靜宜行銷總監：林素珍 72 活埋：第一章（待續）發行專員：許銘文陸換之社址：台灣台北市中山北路一段85號6樓電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 電子信箱：[email protected] 91 中英人名對照編輯製作：加中當代藝術創進協會 (Yishu Initiative of Contemporary Chinese Art Society) 會長：鄭勝天秘書長：陰晴會址： 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 電子信箱: ofﬁ[email protected]

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Julie Chun is an independent art historian for the Future (2011), at the Asia Triennial, and lecturer who has been based in Shanghai Manchester; and Alternatives to Ritual (2012– since 2011. She serves as the Art Convener of 13), at Goethe Open Space Shanghai and the Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai, OCAT, Shenzhen. In 2013, Ciric initiated where she delivers monthly lectures at the seminar platform From a History of museums and galleries to widen the public’s Exhibitions Towards a Future of Exhibition understanding of artistic objects, past and Making. She is a regular contributor to several present. She lectures frequently on art for the Chinese and international art publications, various foreign Consulate General ofﬁces in including Broadsheet, Yishu, Flash Art, Shanghai and organizes art lectures at the and Independent Critic. Ciric has been a jury Shanghai American Center. She holds an M.A. member for a number of awards including the in Art History from San Jose State University Hugo Boss Asia Art Award (2013) and was a and B.A. in Economics from University of member of the nominating council for Vera California at Irvine. She has also completed List Prize for Art and Politics (2014–15). graduate studies in East Asian Modern History She was nominated for the ICI Independent at Yonsei Graduate School of International Vision Curatorial Award in 2012. Studies in Seoul and conducted research in Modern Art at UCLA. She is a regular Jacob August Dreyer is a Shanghai-based contributor to Yishu Journal of Contemporary writer and editor. Recently, he edited LEAP Chinese Art, and her art reviews have been magazine’s special supplement “A New Nature” published in Randian and LEAP online. (January 2016 issue), and he has contributed to the Atlantic City Lab, the Architectural Biljana Ciric is an independent curator Review, and Domus. His book The Nocturnal based in Shanghai and is currently a Wanderer was published by Eros Press in 2015; research fellow for 2016 at Henie Onstad he is researching a second book about urban Kunstsenter in Norway. She is co-curator of space and the creative economy in China. the 2015 Third Ural Industrial Biennale for Contemporary Art (Yekaterinburg, Russia), Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky holds the and her upcoming projects include curating O. Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at Bard an exhibition at Kadist Art Foundation (Paris) College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. as well as speaking at a seminar hosted by She has published several books, on subjects CCA Kitakyushu (Japan) in 2016. Her recent such as the art of the Tang dynasty and curatorial projects include Just as money is the Chinese Buddhist art, and she has served as paper, the gallery is the room (2014), presented Editor of Journal of Chinese Religions. She by the Osage Art Foundation; One Step has written many catalogues and has curated Forward, Two Steps Back—Us and Institution, several shows on contemporary Asian art. Us and Institution (2013), presented by the Guangzhou Times Museum; Tino Sehgal Sophia Kidd is a Los Angeles-based arts Solo Exhibition (2013), at the Ullens Center writer and independent curator specializing for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Institution in contemporary Chinese and live art. She

4 is currently finishing a Ph.D. at Sichuan on art and the Anthropocene in India and University in China, with a focus on literary another book on Indian contemporary geography and regional aesthetics. photography. She blogs on art, ecology, political theory, and philosophy of science at Mutual Maya Kóvskaya, Ph.D., is a political cultural Entanglements: Diffractive Notes on Art and the theorist who has spent the last two decades Anthropocene, www.mutualentanglements.com. living and working in China and established a second home base in New Delhi in Lu Huanzhi lives and works in Shanghai. He 2009. As an independent scholar, she has is an amateur historian and the author of authored, co-authored, edited, translated, and Collected Works on Violence, which is yet to be contributed to many books and articles on how published. His main profession is working for contemporary art intersects with the political, an insurance company. cultural, and ecological. As a curator and critic, Kóvskaya has worked on over thirty Asian Danielle Shang is an independent writer, art contemporary art exhibitions and public art historian, and curator based in Los Angeles. interventions. Having lectured widely on art Her research focuses on the impact of in South and East Asia at institutions across globalization, urban renewal, social change, the world, she has also participated in many and class restructuring on art-making in discussion panels and conferences. An award- China and, recently, in Eastern Europe. She winning university-level teacher, Kóvskaya has been a guest speaker at the Hammer most recently designed and taught a Curatorial Museum, the Art Department and Art History Intensive as part of the M.Phil curriculum of Department at University of California, Los the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Angeles (UCLA), and Sotheby’s Institute of Nehru University (JNU; 2015), New Delhi, Art, and has contributed to journals such as supported by the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation. ArtForum, Art Asia Pacific, Yishu Journal of She also conceptualized and taught Writing Contemporary Chinese Art, LEAP, and Randian. Ecologies, a critical art writing seminar for the She has also collaborated with institutions Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, such as the Hammer Museum, working closely in conjunction with the Yamuna-Elbe Public with Chinese artists on their exhibitions, Art program (2011), and was the inaugural publications, projects, and research. She Critic-in-Residence for the KHOJ Public Art completed her graduate studies at UCLA and Ecology Program, which is now in its fifth year. travels regularly to East Asia. Her teaching As part of the HKW and Max Planck Institute experience includes being a teaching assistant for the History of Science, she was a fellow, in the Art History Department at UCLA. commentator, and speaker at the Anthropocene Campus in Berlin (2014), and was a fellow again at the Anthropocene Campus: Technosphere Issue (2016). She is currently Art Editor for Positions: Asia Critique (Duke University Press) and is working on a book

5 Sophia Kidd Chengdu Performance Art, 2012–2016

ince 2013, the last time I wrote on the subject of performance art in southwest China, Chengdu’s scene has changed a great deal. These Schanges can be understood most easily from two perspectives, structurally and in their trajectory.

Structurally speaking, we have 719 Artist Alliance, late 1990s. Left to right: Liu Chengying, seen the dispersion of four live art Yu Ji, Dai Guangyu, Zhou Bin, Zha Changping, Zeng Xun, collectives and the birth of a new Zhu Gang, Zhang Hua, and Chen Mo. generation of artists working out of Chongqing, just two hours to the east of Chengdu. The solo careers of many artists formerly working in collectives have grown stronger in momentum and geographical scope as they travel throughout China to participate in the ever-increasing number of performance art festivals now taking place in Kunming, Xi’an, Changsha, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangdong. Other artists have spent time abroad travelling to international venues throughout Central and East Asia, the Middle East, North America, the UK, and Europe. Others have ceased producing performance artworks altogether, either transitioning into the static media of painting, turning to curating their own venues, or succumbing to economic pressure by taking jobs within Chengdu’s bourgeoning creative industries. Still other artists, lacking an association with more recent collectives but once part of a much older Chengdu collective formed in the 1990s, the 719 Artist Alliance, with practices based largely though not exclusively in social intervention and now disbanded for over a decade, continue to produce performance artworks, only these days very much under the radar.

In terms of trajectory, what Chengdu appears to consist of now, especially to anyone outside of Chengdu, is one very bright and ﬁxed star, Zhou Bin. For those who look a little deeper, there are in addition a few other younger stars, as well as three remaining giants of the earlier 719 Artist Alliance who now irregularly produce work. Chengdu’s earlier tradition of social-intervention and street performances now appears to be dead. What seems to have been born in its place is an emerging generation of artists

6 Zhou Bin, 4000 li, 2015, six-day trained by Zhou Bin, curator of the Chengdu Up-On International Live performance from Chengdu to Xi’an and back towing a Art Festival and now teacher of performance art at the Sichuan Institute of sculpture, part of Mind in the Box: Action and Image in Fine Art in Chongqing. These emerging artists are highly professional, already Symbiosis, a year-long project with the Chengdu Museum of participating in festivals both domestic and abroad, hyper-aware of the Contemporary Art, Chengdu. Courtesy of the artist. spectrum of choices available to them in developing a performance aesthetic and methodology. Zhou Bin’s instructional method starts with long hours of international performance art history culled from his own collection of archival materials, which he accumulated from extensive travel and meetings with some of Europe’s ﬁnest performance art scholars and artists.

Then, 2012—Chengdu’s Four Performance Art Collectives Chengdu multimedia artist Wei Yan created North Village Independent Factory in the latter half of 2007. Multimedia artist Zhang Yu began working with Wei Yan in the very early months of 2008 as one of the principals of the group, quickly bringing twelve other artists into the fold, among them Chen Qiang, Li Yongzheng, Xue Bowen, Feng Dekui, Liu Fengya, Zhong Lei, Luo Li, and Ma Haijiao. Between the years 2008 and 2013, two exhibitions were held each year, for a total of eleven exhibitions before the first fault line among the members shook the group apart in 2013. In May of that year, Chen Qiang announced his official secession from the collective, as the concluding segment of a raucous live artwork performed at XLY MoMA in Flower Village on the eastern outskirts of Chengdu. Differences of opinion pertaining to funding sources and relationships to state apparatuses leading up to this final exhibition precipitated the fallout.

Art Praxis Workshop was started in 2009 by a central core of artists including Chen Jianjun, Cao Minghao, and Chen Zhou. Also included in

7 Zhang Yu, Wordless One, 2010, performance, 35 mins., part of the North Village Independent Factory group exhibition, Re-C Art Space, Chengdu. Courtesy of the artist.

Chen Qiang and Zhang Yu, 2011, performance, 20 mins., part of the North Village Independent Factory group exhibition, Re-C Art Space, Chengdu. Courtesy of the artist.

8 Art Praxis artists and the roster were Zhang Jianfu, participants in discussion, West Village Lifestyle Center, Cui Rongliang, Chen Zhipeng, 2010. Left to right: Shi Suyao, Zhou Bin, Chen Jianjun, Zhang and Chen Qiulin, among Yingchuan, Feng Hanping, Chen Zhou, Yang Jun, De others. Art Praxis artists were Gang, Cao Minghao, Dong Jie, and Zhou Yumei. slightly younger as a group and more Marxist in artistic temperament than the North Village Independent Factory artists, who specialized in elemental, visually impressive, often violent actions with a tendency toward the hysterical and absurd and with a strong theoretical background in continental thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Art Praxis, on the other hand, was strongly grounded in social issues and geared toward social intervention in rural areas, where it focused on the loss of a collective cultural memory among populations who lost their homes and communities in the wake of urban sprawl and the reconstruction following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Art Praxis was less interested in continental philosophical or aesthetic abstraction than in the social science of Germany’s Frankfurt School, which it integrated with contemporary Chinese social science theory. Between 2009 and 2011, four exhibitions were held before Art Praxis came to an end as a group during the 2012 exhibition See Saw: Collective Practice in China Now at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. It was during the planning and execution of this exhibition that differences arose among members of the group concerning emphasis on the production of meaning: speciﬁcally, whether the meaning of an artwork inheres in an artwork, itself, or in the social context surrounding the production and viewing of an artwork.

Jia Qianlan, Get Over My Frequency was a project started by Body, 2011, performance, 30 mins., part of Frequency 2.0 artist Wu Chengdian and me in at Hemp House, Chengdu. Courtesy of the artist. 2011. The impetus for Frequency was a discussion between the two of us on early-twentieth-century surrealist inter-art collaborations, where artists from various disciplines such as music, poetry, film, painting, and installation worked together. Wu Chengdian graduated from Sichuan Institute of Fine Art in 1993 and was well acquainted with the elders of Sichuan’s creative cultural and fine arts institutions, offering connections for funding and artists for Frequency. From 2011 to 2013, five exhibitions were held, as part of the overall curatorial project, working with a total of twenty-one artists. Each exhibition had its own theme, such as Symbolic Violence or Hyperreality, and all except one was held in a space unrelated in any traditional way with the art world, in an attempt to attract audiences that would not normally seek out experimental art. For the only exhibition held in a “white cube” gallery, at Re-C Art Space, we installed a bar in the gallery to foreground our emphasis on off-site art production. Frequency petered out in 2013 as

9 Wu Chengdian turned toward more lucrative creative design, focusing on Top: Zhang Yu, Even The Working Class Will Perish, public space development, and I delved more deeply into academic work at 2012, performance, 25 mins., part of Frequency 5.0 Live Sichuan University. Art Exhibition, Huotai Space, Chengdu. Courtesy of Sophia Kidd. Bottom: Bai Xiaomo, Chen Celebration—1/6 Comment on Freedom was always Zhou Bin’s project, Jianjun, Dong Jie, Li Kun, Xing Xin, and Zhou Bin, although of the nine exhibitions held between 2009 and 2013, seven were Celebration—1/6 Comment on Freedom (No. 5), 2011, co-curated with other artists and curators of performance art, some of them performance, 1 hr., Chengdu. from Chengdu and others not. Celebration exhibitions traditionally showed Courtesy of the artist. works by six artists, with a shifting proportion between performance, sound, and video art. All six artists performed simultaneously for the duration of one hour, dressed in white, interacting with each other either

10 Zhou Bin, Nothing to Say, harmoniously or obstructively. 2016, exhibition poster, Chengdu Museum of In Celebration’s manifesto, Contemporary Art, Chengdu. we see the philosophical and artistic precepts that underline Zhou Bin’s artistic practices; for example, of the “4 Logical Points of Celebration,” the ﬁrst states that, “Celebration is a premeditated celebration full of the unknown.” The paradox to glean here is the juxtaposition of the known (premeditated) and unknown. The fourth point insists that “Celebration is constituted by indeterminate fragments, full of blind view points and illogical narrative.” Here we observe an emphasis on indeterminacy, the unknown, and the illogical. Zhou Bin’s recent solo exhibition at the Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Lan Qingwei, was titled Nothing to Say, with entrance corridors to the double-story multi-hall exhibition lined with statements by the artist explaining that “Art’s only criteria is that it has no criteria” and “Meaningless meaning testiﬁes to the fact that not only meaning is meaningful.” Again, these were attempts to explore portents of logic and meaning within art production. Celebration’s last exhibition coincided in 2013 with another project curated by Zhou Bin, the 3rd Chengdu Up-On International Live Art Festival. It was then that Zhou Bin started working more closely with and inviting artists from well-known European performance art collectives such as Black Market International—founded in 1985 in Poznan, Poland and now international in membership.

Nothing to Say, 2016, exhibition view, Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art.

11 At that time, there was a high degree of interaction between the four live art collectives. Everyone knew each other, and there was plenty of mutual support among the groups. Many Art Praxis and North Village Independent Factory artists appeared in the Celebration and Frequency exhibitions, though never vice versa, as they were more self-contained entities, rarely inviting artists outside of the collective to participate in their exhibitions. The live art scene in the early 2010s seemed too robust to ever end.

But end it did. Zhang Yu and Chen Qiang of North Village Independent Factory explained in a recent interview that they now have no contact with other members of the group, including founding member Wei Yan, who was not available for comment.1 Also in a recent interview, Chen Jianjun remained reticent when asked to pronounce Art Praxis either dead or merely in cryogenic hibernation. He replied to my inquiry mysteriously by equivocating on the Chinese word chuangzuo, saying, “All I can say is that Art Praxis still has its chuangzuo.” Chuangzuo can either serve as a noun, meaning “artworks,” or it can function as a verb, meaning “artistic creation or production.”2 He would not be more speciﬁc as to whether he was referring to past-completed artworks or future possibilities of collective creation. He did explain, however, that he and Cao Minghao were no longer in communication with their former collaborator, Chen Zhou. As for Celebration, Zhou Bin explains that he may do additional exhibitions in future but will make changes to the project. The trajectory of each collective was distinct, but one common challenge was posed to each— whether or not, or how, to integrate with arts institutions, both private and government, for exposure, media, and funding. Performance art is a relatively independent format, with each collective including more or less radical members. It’s possible that more radical artists continued to resist integration altogether, and although it’s hard to say for sure, this may have contributed irresolvable tension to one or more of the groups, in the end tearing both the collectives and friendships apart.

Now, 2016—The Superstar, the Anti-Star, and Everyone In Between With the closing down of Re-C art space in 2014 and the recent relocation of Thousand Plateaus art gallery from the centre of Chengdu to the far south of the city, there are fewer venues supporting live art performance, although Ye Caibao (Frequency, Celebration) has opened Tianshang Space in Flower Village, where he hosts residencies for emerging performance artists. Even so, a large proportion of works by Chengdu performance artists are exhibited outside of Chengdu. As we do not have the space here to dwell on individual practices, I will brieﬂy discuss what Zhang Yu and Chen Qiang (North Village Independent Factory), Chen Jianjun and Cao Minghao (Art Praxis), He Liping, Dong Jie, Liu Wei (Frequency, Celebration), and Zhou Bin (Celebration) are doing today. I will touch brieﬂy upon the new Chongqing artists and also upon the remaining productive members of the 719 Artist Alliance. My aim is to draw a more accurate map of performance art in Chengdu than the apparent “superstar” model in circulation today in China and, I fear, abroad. My focus will also be to determine, from the

12 Xiao Shengjie, 7 Days, trajectory of performance art in Chengdu today, whether we can ascertain 2015, performance, 7 days, Tianshang Art Space, Flower a living regional Chengdu performance art aesthetic or methodology, Village, Chengdu. Courtesy of the artist. traceable back to the early 1990s with the 719 Artist Alliance.

Chen Qiang, International Oil Of the North Village Independent Prices, 2013, real-time and online performance, crude oil, Factory performance artists, Zhang propylene, and mud on canvas, 1 day, Penghua, Sichuan. Yu and Chen Qiang are still prolific Courtesy of the artist. today; Chen Qiang’s practice has shifted away from the multimedia video/music/performance explosions he earlier was known for. In 2013, he appeared on the site of the controversial Pengzhou Petroleum Refinery (it is suspected that insufficient environmental impact studies for the site were conducted prior to construction and the opening), located northwest of Chengdu, spending enough time on the forbidden grounds of the refinery to complete a one- day performance/painting project titled International Oil Prices. In this project Chen Qiang painted thirty studies of the refinery, using crude oil, propylene, and mud as media on canvas. The artist easily sold all thirty of the paintings on the Internet within ten days at the self-allotted rate of three per day. Earlier in 2013, Chen Qiang had taken to the Chengdu streets to address the clamour and dust being raised not only by the simultaneous building of three subways lines, but also the concurrent construction of an elevated second ring road for expediting traffic around the city. With the opening of the Pengzhou Refinery in that same year, the air was virtually unbreathable, with a PM index—Particulate Matter measures particles found in the air, including dust, dirt, and other pollutants—of

13 well above “unhealthy.” In a couplet Chen Qiang, Walking Backwards Around the Second of performance works, Walking Ring Road, 2013, performance and video, one day, Chengdu. Backwards Around the Second Ring Courtesy of the artist. Road (2013) and Second Ring Road Is a Ring I Give Myself (2013), Chen Qiang interacted creatively with this city that he and his family lived in. Walking involved the artist walking backward around the entire base of the second ring road under construction. As this area was largely cordoned off, when edited in reverse, the video from this day-long project saw the artist in grey desolation walking alone around a dystopian city of rubble, with people receding behind him. The second work in the couplet is a work of conceptual photography in which the artist stands in the centre of the city giving the middle ﬁnger to the elevated second ring road in the back ground. A visual illusion makes the ring road appear to encircle the artist’s ﬁnger.

Since North Village Independent Factory, Zhang Yu’s art practice has Zhang Yu, One Man’s Walden Pond with Tire, 2014, expanded beyond the borders of performance art, the greatest change in his performance, one day, Lijiang. Courtesy of the artist. work the result of his temporary relocation to Yunnan province, directly south of Sichuan province. From 2013 to 2015, he operated out of Lijiang, where he completed the long-term performance project One Man’s Walden Pond, a series of multimedia works illustrating the Daoist aspect of art as art in nature, quite literally in some works, where the artist’s naked body splays across vast grassland expanse, juxtaposed in the frame with mirrors and exotic bird puppets. These live and mostly unattended performances were

14 presented as conceptual photography works. Last year, Zhang Yu moved once again, this time to a mountainous aboriginal community high above the Nujiang River, where he is developing the art-based human geographical Nujiang River Project. Whether in the wild or back on one of his regular sojourns to Chengdu, Zhang Yu is virtually omnipresent in the Chinese art world, having started a number of online Wechat movements that focus on situational art as an anti-art-establishment spatially based art practice— Situational (qingjing) is a term Zhang Yu uses to fuse practices once seen in the Situationist International art movement, prominent in Europe from 1957 to 1972, together with classical Chinese aesthetic notions of place and feeling—and poetry, that is, the online sharing and recitation of poetry, as well as the painting of it in a wild indecipherable Chinese script. Zhang Yu’s situational art movement encompasses three Wechat groups, while the poetry movement has two of its own, with members overlapping between the groups, most of whom are artists and poets and number in the hundreds.

Chen Jianjun and Cao Minghao, Water System Museum, 2015, multimedia, Xinjin Guangtan Village, Sichuan. Courtesy of the artist.

Chen Jianjun and Cao Minghao’s last project with Art Praxis was Kunshan– Under Construction, also named Village Politics Being Watched (2012), in which the artists spent time studying the spatial dimensions of collective memory loss as the collateral damage of earthquake reconstruction in Sichuan. During this project, the duo spent long periods of time at Kunshan Village, which is when they must have developed a sense of kinship and belonging with the waterways that ﬂowed past the village. In their most recent exhibition, Water System Museum: In Collaboration and Re-imagination (2015), at A4 Gallery in Chengdu, the artists returned to an area nearby Kunshan Village, closer to Shuangliu, a county southwest of Chengdu city. They began to create a body of both discourse and artwork based upon a section of the outer Min River called Jinme, or Golden Horse River. They are now working in conjunction with architects, non-

15 government organizations, human geography scholars, and community Chen Jianjun and Cao Minghao, Water System members to complete the long-term Water System Museum project. When Museum, 2015, discussion forum at A4 Contemporary Art asked what connection they felt this project shares with the 1990s 719 Center, Chengdu. Courtesy of the artists. Artist Alliance collaboration with Keepers of the Waters—an on-going project curated by US artist and environmental activist Betsy Damon, who travelled to Sichuan province in the 1990s to work with the 719 Artist Alliance in bringing awareness to local rivers—Chen Jianjun explained that of course there are commonalities between the two projects, but there are more differences. The fundamental difference, he said, is that of site. The 719 Artist Alliance focused on Funan River, also known as Brocade River, which ﬂows through Chengdu city proper, girding Sichuan University’s old campus to the east. The methodology is also completely different, Chen Jianjun explained. The interventions carried out by the 719 Artist Alliance members could be considered critique, artworks meant to shed light on the very serious problem of water contamination and to perhaps bring about change in the future, but they were passive and static as artworks. What Water System Museum is trying to do, as explained by Chen Jianjun, is to generate social meaning through artworks, to draw connections between various elements of communities who are willing to talk with each other about what history has revealed and covered up concerning the area’s waterways, and to discuss how reality can be reconstructed in ways that will change the interaction between people and the waterways we live by.

He Liping, Dong Jie, and Liu Wei have each created a large body of work since graduating from the Chengdu Institute of Fine Art in the early 2000s. He Liping curated the forty-minute performance artwork @41 in 2005, a piece in which forty-one naked young men and women stood and fell like dominoes in the shape of “@,” creating an Internet sensation and much scandal; the government was outraged at the nudity and subsequently prohibited outdoor performance art. Perhaps this explains why these three artists do most of their Chengdu artworks in gallery or museum spaces and

16 He Liping, @41, 2005, travel outside of Chengdu for artist residencies or festival environments to performance, 40 mins., Chengdu. Courtesy of the take on outdoor works. In an odd coincidence, He Liping curated a seven- artist. day live art festival in 2015 titled What’s Important Is Not the Body, using a four-way street intersection as his venue. It was during this festival that He Liping performed what became another China Internet sensation, titled As Long as You Have Sand in Your Heart, Anywhere Is the Maldives. Works by these three artists have not changed ostensibly since the dispersion of Chengdu’s four live art collectives, but without the parallel narratives of these four groups, work by these artists have grown in importance to Chengdu performance art.

Zhou Bin, Diary 1986–2015, There is not enough space here 2015, performance and installation, 10 days, Jiajiang to give justice to Zhou Bin’s vital County, Sichuan, part of Mind in the Box: Action and Image stamina in the local, domestic, and in Symbiosis, a year-long project with the Chengdu international ﬁelds of performance Museum of Contemporary Art, Chengdu. Courtesy of the art over the past four years. He has artist. travelled extensively internationally, visiting Europe twice last year to perform in Austria, Germany, France, and Spain. He has, together with another former 719 Artist Alliance artist, Liu Chengying, curated two more Up-On International Art Festivals; the second was double the size of the one the year before. During this most recent Up-On, with professors and practitioners of performance art in attendance from all over Asia, the UK, the US, and Europe, Lan Qingwei held a solo retrospective of Zhou Bin’s entire body of work at Chengdu MOCA, spanning two decades. At the opening ceremony, a large portion of the Chengdu art community came out to support the artist, with over two hundred people in attendance. With online media upstart Pan Art, principal sponsor of Up-On, present to cover the festival’s every performance in almost real time, along with

17 18 coverage by Beijing’s Absolute Art print edition, online forums were full of feature articles on Zhou Bin, his festival, and his solo exhibition.

Hu Jiayi, Ice Skate, 2014, performance, 1 hr., Chongqing. Courtesy of the artist. Opposite top: Li Ning, Intersection, 2015, performance, 30 mins., part of What's Important Is Not the Body, Live Art Festival, Chengdu. Courtesy of the artist. Opposite middle: He Liping, As Long as You Have Sand in Your Heart, Anywhere Is the Maldives, 2015, performance, 30 mins., part of What's Important is Not the Body, Live Art Festival, Chengdu. Courtesy of the artist. Opposite bottom: Tong Wenmin, Golden Fire, 2016, performance, 2 hrs., part of 4th An important element of Zhou Bin’s work, and one of the reasons he has Chengdu Up-On International Live Art Festival, Chengdu. been so successful at legitimizing performance art in China, is his posting Courtesy of the artist. at the Sichuan Institute of Fine Art, Chongqing, where he has worked since 2012. According to Zhou Bin, his is the first core curriculum performance art course at a Chinese fine arts institute. He has taught fifteen three- week intensive courses so far, totalling hundreds of students, from which a number of strong artists have emerged, among them Tong Wenmin, Hu Yanzi, Hu Jiayi, Deng Shangdong, and Wang Yanxin. When asked if he thought Southwest China’s performance art axis had relocated to Chongqing, Zhou Bin answered no, stating that Chengdu as a focus point has expanded to now include this neighbouring city.3

Hu Yanzi, A Suitcase of Soil— Hometown Soil, 2014–15, performance, 7 months, Chongqing and Macao. Courtesy of the artist.

19 Zhou Bin and Liu Chengying are Deng Shangdong, Fireworks, 2015, performance, 1 hr., two of the performance artists Chingqing. Courtesy of the artist. from the 719 Artist Alliance still Left: Liu Chengying, World, 2011, performance, 20–30 producing work, although Zhou Bin mins., part of Frequency 1.0, White Night Bar, Chengdu. produces about twenty works to each Courtesy of Sophia Kidd. of Liu Chengying’s. There are two other 719 Artist Alliance artists still producing artwork, however, whom I have not talked about in connection with any of the collectives, although Zhu Gang did give permission for video footage of a street performance artwork, Crucial Inch (2011) to be screened at Frequency’s Hyperreality exhibition (2011) as part of the 2011 Chengdu 5th Biennale. Luo Zidan’s last work, titled Form and Emptiness Are One (2012), was performed at the Guangdong Fine Art Museum. After leaving the 719 Artist Alliance early on, Luo Zidan spent most of the 2000s in Beijing, much like 719 Artist Alliance member Dai Guangyu, who departed Chengdu for Beijing in 2004. While Dai Guangyu has developed a successful art practice in Beijing, albeit one no longer based in performance, Luo Zidan has, since the last decade, brought his performance art practice back to Chengdu.

Zhu Gang, who has never left Chengdu, is this city’s best kept performance art secret, known only to locals. He is little known because he generally refuses to have any association with arts organizations or media groups. The press he does receive is due to the quality of his artworks, which admittedly are sparse in number and difﬁcult to obtain pictures of. It is nearly impossible to be in attendance at one of his performances, as he progressively invites fewer people to attend these works done in Chengdu

20 Zhu Gang, Getting Through, 2010, performance, 2 hrs., Chengdu. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhu Gang, Cold Kind Heart, 2013, performance, 30 mins., Chengdu. Courtesy of Sophia Kidd.

public spaces. They are always politically sensitive, and his last artwork in Chengdu, Cold Heart, was performed on June 4, 2013. The piece was visually stunning although chilling to watch, performed within the space of a half hour as the artist stood in all white upon a piece of white rice paper before a commemorative stele in a small public park. Having placed a frozen heart-shaped piece of black Chinese ink on his forehead, he raised his right hand to his heart and bent his head backward, holding this position until

21 the heart of black ink had melted in the humid sun, dripped down his face, stained his white clothes, and then dripped onto the paper beneath him. Zhu Gang’s practice since the early 1990s represents an unbroken stream of social intervention and critique that, as I have attempted to illustrate here, is a shared concern among Chengdu artists even today.

In a recent interview with Zhu Zhu Gang, Cold Kind Heart, 2013, performance, 30 mins., Gang, I spoke with the artist Chengdu. Courtesy of Sophia Kidd. about the strength of poetic abstraction in Zhou Bin’s artwork.4 The two are friends and know each other well, having worked together for years in 719. I suggested that perhaps Southwest Chinese artists need not be tied down by regional social or political concerns. We discussed whether or not a sense of play and exploration were justiﬁed in Chinese art. This question of justiﬁcation in art is a question that arises when art is no longer produced “for art’s sake” alone. Work by Art Praxis and Zhu Gang are extreme examples of practices that never create “art for art’s sake.” Many other Chengdu artists also engage with societal, environmental, and political issues in their artwork, though this is only a part of their overall practice. Zhu Gang did agree to the value in whimsical or even abstract statements about subjective experience or the body’s individual existence in time and space. However, he emphasized that while artists practicing in developed nations had the luxury of living in societies that functionally served their people well, Chengdu artists, living in a still developing nation, had more of a responsibility in their practice to at least address societal issues in an effort to help people address the world and institutions with which they are living.

What I would like to suggest, by way of a brief conclusion here, is that while Zhou Bin’s art practice is important, his inﬂuence may be stronger on trans-locational art practices, where regional concerns and conditions are not necessarily at play. In the meantime, in fathoming the structure and trajectory of Chengdu performance art today, it is important to bear in mind the city’s history of performance art, as well as the diversity of its practice.

Notes

1. Interview with the author, April 23, 2016, unpublished. 2. Interview with the author, April 17, 2016, unpublished. 3. Interview with the author, April 29, 2016, unpublished. 4. Interview with the author, April 25, 2016, unpublished.

22 Julie Chun Qu Fengguo: Temporal Conﬁgurations

he distance Qu Fengguo regularly commutes from his home, near the Shanghai Theatre Academy where he teaches, to his Tstudio north of Shanghai in Baoshan District is roughly twenty- ﬁve kilometres. Despite this relatively short physical distance, the trafﬁc encountered by car or the prolonged subway ride with frequent stops offers the artist a transitional journey in which he is slowly able to leave the perpetual blaring horns of taxis and the mass of humanity on electric scooters to arrive at his studio, where the precious stillness of quietude welcomes him.

Qu Fengguo's CD collection, 2016. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist.

While he revels in his tranquil sanctuary, he confesses, “Sometimes it can get a little too quiet,” which is why he has amassed stacks of CDs of music ranging from Queen, Bjork, and Michael Jackson to jazz and classical symphonies to dispel the silence while he paints.1 Music remains an invisible yet permanent ﬁxture throughout the duration of our two-hour interview. Qu Fengguo’s studio is in an expansive former warehouse, one of the numerous steel factories located in many outlying sites near Shanghai that have now been converted into commercial and creative complexes housing wedding photography studios and small cafes. Located away from the main precinct in the outermost reaches of the complex, his studio offers a comfortable ambience of warmth and coziness despite its immense size. Spring sunlight ﬂoods in through the large open windows in one corner of the room that has been composed as a sitting area.

23 24 Qu Fengguo in his studio, Despite mounds of paint tubes and assorted arrays of stacked canvases, the 2016. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist. space conveys a streamlined sense of calm orderliness, as exempliﬁed by the multiple rows of tightly stretched canvases organized neatly against the wall according to their respective sizes. The pristine studio well reﬂects the methodical personality of the artist. Qu Fengguo’s demeanor and manner of speech are reminiscent of a genteel aristocrat, and he is often described as a contemporary “literati” or wenren (文人) by his colleagues and students. He is a man of few words, his comments often anchored in complex discourses of philosophy that are not always immediately comprehensible. Yet, by following his carefully structured logic through his patient explanations, the listener is rewarded with newfound understanding. Qu Fengguo’s method of gentle explication reveals the traits of a good teacher, a profession he has had extensive experience with since beginning as a painting instructor in 1988 at the age of twenty-two.

Left and right: Qu Fengguo's studio, 2016. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist.

Qu Fengguo is also one of the few Chinese artists of his generation who has dedicated over two decades of his personal artistic practice to exploring abstract oil painting. With each passing season, he stands quietly and solemnly before a series of canvases to mark his hours, days, and years as lines. Although constructed with a ruler rather than a paintbrush, the lines on Qu Fengguo’s canvases represent more than mere strips of complementing colour. They serve as linear metaphors for life, art, death, and spirituality. What transpires in ﬁnal manifestation is time itself, materialized as concrete form, signifying the months and seasons that have managed to quietly slip by unnoticed.

Qu Fengguo’s fascination with abstract art began during his student days while he was attending Shanghai Theatre Academy, from 1984 to 1988. Because he was a non-resident of Shanghai (he was born in Dalian, Liaoning province), the Shanghai Theatre Academy was one of the few Shanghai art institutions that Qu Fengguo could enter to study painting. Cai Guo-qiang is another prominent artist to have attended this academy, from 1981 to 1985. The courses Qu Fengguo had to take consisted of makeup and costume design, sculpture, traditional ink painting, and oil painting. The year of Qu Fengguo’s birth, 1966, was the year the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began. During the decade of Mao’s hard- line policies, 1966 to 1976, art and culture were subject to a strict formulaic mandate, with the adoption of Socialist Realist style from Soviet Union as a visual tool for mass propaganda and indoctrination.2 Even after Mao’s demise in 1976, the artistic legacy of the codiﬁed Socialist Realism ensued well into later years. While his afﬁnity to painting was absolute, Qu Fengguo

25 felt constrained by the academy’s required curriculum, one that privileged Top left: Qu Fengguo, Spring, Four Seasons, 2015, oil on the human ﬁgure as one of the central artistic subject matters. He believed canvas, 120 x 120 cm. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of non-representational art could express ideas and transfer meaning as the artist and Don Gallery, Shanghai. eloquently and as persuasively as recognizable forms. Top right: Qu Fengguo, Summer, Four Seasons, 2015, oil on canvas, 120 x 120 This discontent led him to the library, where he spent many hours poring cm. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and Don over translated philosophical treatises by European thinkers, notably the Gallery, Shanghai. Bottom left: Qu Fengguo, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In looking back at his student Autumn, Four Seasons, 2015, oil on canvas, 120 x 120 days of the mid 1980s, he notes: cm. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and Don Gallery, Shanghai. Our academy library was well stocked with books and Bottom right: Qu Fengguo, Winter, Four Seasons, 2015, journals on art, and we also had open-minded teachers oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. who didn’t try to lead the students or mandate that realism Courtesy of the artist and Don Gallery, Shanghai. was the only available artistic style. Although abstract art was not formally taught as a class, most of the art students were quite familiar with it. During the early years of contemporary art in China, every artist needed to ﬁnd a way to educate oneself. It was through my personal readings of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy that I developed a better understanding of paintings by Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, and other Western abstract artists. Such kind of

26 metaphysical way of painting imparts voice to one’s self- reﬂective inner world. The realistic art presents the world in the context of a certain narrative, while abstract art evokes the direct representation of the artist’s inner being. The more I began to detach myself from the dependence on recognizable objects in my painting, the closer I felt I was to locating the truth. It seems like a paradox, but it is now clearer to me than ever.

In 1988, immediately after graduation, Qu Fengguo was hired to teach at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. During his early teaching career, he was an instructor for courses in makeup and stage design, but after a few years, he was invited by the Painting Group, (a loose collective of artists in Shanghai composed of Li Shan, Zhang Jian-jun, Kong Boji, and Chen Junde, active from the late 1970s to mid 1980s, who experimented with the styles of European modernism) to teach the foundational courses in art. Qu Fengguo admits his professional preoccupation that centered on teaching ﬁguration led him to explore his own preference for abstraction. He began investing his personal time to formulating his own unique vocabulary for art. During his process of exploration, it dawned on him that he had to relinquish the paintbrush, the pivotal instrument responsible for the construction of anthropomorphic images. Thus, it was in the late 1980s that he gave up using the paintbrush, and has not regretted it since. When asked if the decision was subversively motivated, he smiles and replies:

No. I wanted to locate an alternate experience. As an artist, using the brush exhibited a common experience. The paintbrush was never my obstacle. Rather, it was in its release. Relinquishing this fundamental apparatus was a challenge to myself akin to learning a new language. I had to reach a position where I could ﬁnd my voice again to articulate my thoughts.

It was in 1994 that Qu Fengguo embarked on his first series of abstract artworks, called Handwriting. Applying graphite and acrylic directly onto the canvas, the artist used the canvas as a platform for constructing points and ovals that converged into linear formations. One painting from the Handwriting series is hung above the couch where Qu Fengguo is sitting during our discussion, directly in my line of vision. The brown background is overlaid with blurred elliptical forms in black and grey. The darkly muted palette, however, is enlivened by drops and drips of white circular splatters that are reminiscent of raindrops falling upon a windowpane. While not exactly defined as a straight line, the points are nonetheless connected in intermittent and unbroken sequences to form undulating rows of horizontal bands. Despite the visual features of high abstraction, the essence of the hand is made visible by the manual inscription of circular forms that are reinforced by the title, Handwriting. Paradoxically, the plotting of the dots and points alludes to a mechanical process, specifically due to this repetitious gesture.

27 The unique qualities of the Handwriting series led to the inclusion of four Qu Fengguo in his studio, 2016. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. paintings, numbered 17, 18, 19, and 20, in the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, Courtesy of the artist. Shanghai Spirit. This third edition of the Shanghai Biennale was historically signiﬁcant because it distinguished itself from prior editions that served as a domestic showcase, by becoming a truly international platform with works by high-proﬁle artists such as Mathew Barney, Anish Kapoor, Tadao Ando, and many others alongside Chinese artists from the mainland and those residing abroad, like Huang Yongping and Cai Guo-qiang.

It was also in 2000 that Qu Fengguo began to isolate the painted line in his new series, Untitled. He considers these paintings the products of a fruitful experimental phase in which he began to deploy lines as temporal conﬁgurations to express the ideals of Daoist philosophy. He states:

Ideas are often formless, striving to find articulation as forms. I have been pondering how to visually convey this contentious yet dependent relationship. The line is the simplest symbol. It seemed to me the perfect construct for examining complex ideas. In Daoist cosmology, number 1 is represented as a single horizontal line. Yet this symbol is not merely a sign for a number. It is also the basis for Chinese thought of the universe. In China, the number 2 is written as two horizontal lines, representing not only the sky and the earth but also the space between. Man inhabits this space, and he is marked as the third line in the number 3. People flow in and out between the sky and earth. Even when Buddhist thought became synthesized in China, numerology continued to play an important role. As such, 3 is more than a number. It signifies the present, previous, and the next lives of the devotees. The seemingly simple line embodies all things trivial and complex.

28 Qu Fengguo, Handwriting, 1994, graphite and acrylic on canvas. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and Don Gallery, Shanghai.

For the Untitled series, Qu Fengguo primed each canvas with spray paint, then layered the surface with paint squeezed directly from the tube into bands that he delineated with a long ruler. The surface was then scraped and dried until several layers had been formed. Upon the ﬁnal layer, he manually underscored a sequence of individual lines with coloured pens from the top of the canvas to the bottom, thus covering the entire width of the painting, leaving only the small margins at the top and bottom to record the date and time of the painting’s start and completion.

Gazing at one of the Untitled paintings in Qu Fengguo’s studio, my eyes alight on the uppermost sequence of numbers, which colourfully enumerate “2005 06 04 19 16.” Then my vision attempts to process the immeasurable concatenation of ﬁne lines until it rests upon the string of numbers “2005 06 30 17 38,” imprinted on the lowermost reaches of the canvas. The painting, then, can be read as a diary of time, of exactly twenty-seven days, with each hour and minute and second composed into a collective timeline to symbolize the shifting sounds, sights, and mood of a particular moment that Qu Fengguo witnessed and that has since vanished.

Perhaps not entirely satisﬁed with the literal evocation of the date and hours in the Untitled series, Qu Fengguo in 2005 began creating The World and Four Seasons, which he has been developing in parallel for the past eleven years. Composed of Qu Fengguo’s signature minimalist lines layered atop a plane of vibrant colours, The World looms large as a map of the continents in ﬂux with what appears to be a swirling landmass swept up by the vortex of ocean currents. The painting could also be interpreted as a cosmic mapping of silent winds or of nebulous clouds on their poetic journey. The rich colours and oscillating silhouette stirs the imagination, enticing the viewer to locate form in the formless, even as the image is undeniably ensconced in total abstraction.

Of Qu Fengguo’s artistic oeuvre, it is the quad-panel Four Seasons series that the artist is most well known for. Mirroring the methodical passage of seasons, each painting is created through the artist’s labour-intensive system of layering and scraping that can result in six or seven textural strata. Producing a large canvas (e.g., 135 x 200 cm) can take Qu Fengguo almost

29 Qu Fengguo, Untitled, 2000, oil and marker on canvas. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and Don Gallery, Shanghai.

Qu Fengguo, The World, 2015, oil on canvas. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and Don Gallery, Shanghai.

two months. The slow process-based production, in which the artist works completely alone without the aid of any assistants, often results in limited yearly output. Because seasons rotate, the artist has prescribed consistent colours to symbolize each temporal period. Abstract time is thus solidiﬁed as expansive horizontal seas of greens to represent spring; bright red-hot square patches for summer; warm harvest ﬁelds of yellows for autumn; and spectrums of cold, indigo blues to signify winter.

Qu Fengguo’s ﬁrst solo exhibition with Don Gallery (May 12 to June 30, 2013), entitled Into the Spring, was an expansion of his Four Seasons that included the subseries called the Twelve Solstice. In addition to the artist’s

30 Qu Fengguo, Four Seasons, four quintessential canvases 2015, oil on canvas. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of representing Spring, Summer, Fall, the artist and Don Gallery, Shanghai. and Winter, Qu Fengguo introduced additional abstract paintings that embodied the stylistic features of the Four Seasons, yet were differentiated by the use of a broader range of colour palette and distinctive placement of the lines as exempliﬁed in Four Seasons, Autumn Equinox (2012) and Four Seasons, Insects Awaken (2013). It took Qu Fengguo almost three years to produce the next iterations for his most recent solo exhibition, also held at Don Gallery (March 10 to April 30, 2016). The exhibition is aptly titled Mi Sheng, meaning luxuriant plant in Chinese or indicating the month of March in Japanese, as each canvas serenely evokes the vibrant life force of qi (气). In a novel move for display compared to years past, Cheng Xixing, founder and director of Don Gallery, grouped the four canvases of the Four Seasons into a single composition, thus emphasizing the minimalist purity of the paintings’ individual yet collective form.

Qu Fengguo, Mi Sheng and Qing Ming, Four Seasons, 2015, oil on canvas. Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and Don Gallery, Shanghai.

Rather than an impression of contiguous direction, as in the series Untitled and the World, the most prominent feature of the Four Seasons is the aggregate formation of broken lines. From a distance, this division is not so perceptible and only becomes clearer upon closer examination of the painting. A line, according to the Yi Jing, the text Classic of Changes, is represented as yin (a divided line) or yang (a straight line). Combining these two lines into groups of three forms eight trigrams, and combining them into groups of six forms sixty-four hexagrams. Each of these lines could be taken as more or less stable, thus leading to a combination of 4,096 possible readings. Moreover, each line of the hexagram has an associative value indicating a certain date of a month.3 The lines in Qu Fengguo’s paintings

31 serve as more than the visual language of minimalism. They reify the concept Qu Fengguo, Mi Sheng, Four Seasons, 2015, oil on canvas. of dao (道)—the source of nature, life, and existence. The lines act as visual Photo: Kerstin Brandes. Courtesy of the artist and Don metaphors for the polar forces of the yin and yang, which interact through Gallery, Shanghai. consistent cyclical patterns in producing growth as well as entropy. With the advent of each new series of the Four Seasons, Qu Fengguo literally moves the broken line, inching it forward as if recording a renewed position on a timeline to demarcate the future from its past. He comments, “I am interested in the past and the future, which determines the way and form my work. Things that are forgotten and imagined are more poetic than those in the present reality.”

Historically, abstract art in China has resisted categorization because it does not follow the teleological route that marked it in the West. The emergence of pure abstract art in China had no synchronous or direct engagement with the international dialogue, which was ignited with Cubism in Paris, Constructivism in Russia, Expressionism in Germany, and even Futurism in Italy before converging in New York with notable European art émigrés to inaugurate Abstract Expressionism.4

In China, there was no phase of Colour Field or Minimalism as a response to artistic gestural excess. Thus, oil painting in China was able to take the giant leap from figuration to the conceptual without having to defend or assert its autonomous position as a flattened surface as Clement Greenberg had to in the U.S. Knowledge about innovative artistic styles did not enter China consecutively, but flooded in simultaneously through various secondary print sources, through Taiwan and Hong Kong, where modern abstract painting in China first took hold.5 Thus, it is understandable that abstract oil painting in mainland China is still perceived as an alien concept and as an imported artistic language of “the other” from outside. Unlike the prominent position it commands in Western art history, modern abstract

32 painting poses a puzzling conundrum for local viewers and, in particular, for the authorities who took great pains to censor it when it ﬁrst emerged.6 Consequently, the plaguing question remains unresolved: Should abstract art in China be classiﬁed as an independent category of modernist art, or should it be subcategorized as a continuum of the legacy of ink painting?7

These historical circumstances explain, in part, why there are not many Chinese artists whose painting practice is solely dedicated to abstraction. A quick glance at non-ink painting exhibitions readily indicates that contemporary painting by young emerging Chinese artists still embraces figurative genres of landscapes, urbanscapes, still-life, and portraits.8 State- sanctioned art in China also continues to rely heavily on propagating a distinct message through its artistically constructed narrative. To the general masses, the visual identifier of figuration is far more accessible and less disengaging than abstract art that reinforces the individualist imperative of “art for art’s sake.” Morever, works of pure abstraction asks more from its viewers, such as a general working knowledge of European or Chinese metaphysical philosophy because of its implicated association with spiritual resonance.9 Qu Fengguo’s Four Seasons paintings serve as an exponent to highlight one of the critical views regarding the dialectical relationship of the form and the formless within the discourse of Eastern and Western philosophy since Plato, and later reinforced by Christian views, one tenet of European search for the true nature of reality hinged on “the belief that the ultimate principle of the world is transcendent.”10 Plato claimed that art, painting, sculpture, and even poetry, was but a mere imitation of appearances.11 He claimed that the natural world was only the decaying realm of materiality that was but a poor impersonation of the higher, ideal realm of the metaphysical, which to him represented the “truly real.”12 He proposed that the arts be banned from the republic, for they promoted false representations of virtue and thus would corrupt moral young minds. For Plato, the lines of geometry and abstract forms governed by mathematics signified the true essence of beauty beyond any natural forms existing in our physical world.

In China, a radical shift or “a cosmogonic turn” took place in the middle of fourth century B.C, embracing the belief that interrelating patterns of change and interaction were central to understanding the nature of reality. Thus, according to Laozi (老子), chapter 42 of dao de jing (道德经) states “dao (道) gives birth to one (yi or -),” which generates two and three and then myriad things.13 Unlike Plato’s geometrical line,which is located in the metaphysical realm as an ideal construct, Laozi’s concept of a line (or yi, as marked by a single horizontal line) exists simultaneously as form and formless, as alluded in chapter 40 of dao de jing. The Chinese belief of existence, which is symbolized by the number one (yi or -), is “seen not in terms of an abstract being but rather as sheng (生): life, growth, birth, vitality. The fundamental role of sheng appears explicitly in the Xici (繫辭) commentary in the Yi Jing, which states that the foundation of the Changes is shengsheng, ‘generating and generating.’ . . . In employing a univocal

33 conception of being as sheng, Chinese philosophies did not segregate self- generation from the world itself.”14

It is in understanding the guiding principles of Daoist ideology that we can better develop an understanding of Qu Fengguo’s remark, “Though based on time, artistic creation does not need to resort to the present time as its principle. Rather, it accompanies time but is not IN time.” Here, he refers to the duality of polarities existing in the yin and the yang. All that composes a line—the heaven, the earth and man—operates in a symbiosis. This is why, for Qu Fengguo, a line is not only a representation but is the essence of ever-shifting time and season of being. It suggests why he is able to compose lush spectrums of vibrant colours for autumn and winter despite the associations these seasons have with degeneration and death. In Daoism, the change of seasons “places cycles of growth and decay into the broader context of continuous vitality.”15 In Qu Fengguo’s art, life and death reside on the same plane as each abstract line becomes the personification of the seasons and cycles in life we must all encounter. For Qu Fengguo, there is no contradiction in being awakened by the metaphysical thoughts of Nietzsche to delve deeper into his understanding of Laozi. Accordingly, the artist has strived to make the temporal configurations on his painting visually haptic because he believes abstraction, like figuration, serves as an artistic language that has the potential and potency to communicate and even interface. By virtue of order and equilibrium, the formal construction of Qu Fengguo’s lines evokes the perpetuity and disruptions of life, as arduous as it is pleasing. Each line conveyed by the artist resonates with symmetrical balance and harmony that elegantly and eloquently reflect the varying moods of the seasons in the stanzas of the Southern Dynasty poem Midnight Song of the Seasons (子夜四时歌).16

Spring Song The spring wind moves a spring heart, My eye ﬂows to gaze at the mountain forest. The mountain forest’s extraordinarily beautiful, The bright spring birds are pouring out clear sound.

Summer Song Now I’ve ﬁnished tending the ﬁelds and silkworms, The yearning woman’s life is still bitter. I have a new set of summer clothes To send to my departed husband.

Autumn Song The autumn wind enters through the window, The gauze curtain starts to ﬂutter and ﬂy. I raise my head and look at the bright moon, And send my feelings a thousand miles in its light.

34 Winter Song If you wish to make a good friend, Just look at the pine and cypress woods. Amid the frost, they do not fall to earth, Without disloyalty when the year is cold.

As the seasons cycle through their patterns, they encounter the full spectrum of opposing forces of the yin and the yang, which, as alluded to in Midnight Song of the Seasons, signify the dichotomous tensions of loss and longing, work and rest, hope and despair, loyalty and betrayal, life and death. Each of these states, as Yi Jing reminds, are never ﬁxed but can, in the course of time, transform from one state into the other. Like the words of this poem, the lines of Qu Fengguo’s paintings embody the multi-layered language of the hexagrams that quietly comment on the workings of not only nature but the reciprocal dynamics of the cosmos and our human relationship to its changes as we ﬂow in and out of the space between the heaven and earth.

Notes

1. All quotes by Qu Fengguo in this article are from an interview with the author conducted in Shanghai on April 29, 2016. 2. Soviet Socialist Realism, initially devised as a literary construct in the Soviet Union in 1934 by the Congress of Soviet Writers, became an over-arching aesthetic program for cultural production throughout communist countries. For an account of the origins of Socialist Realism in the visual arts, see Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 3. John Blofeld, I Ching: The Book of Change (New York: Arkana, 1965, 1991), 226. 4. The canonical text on Western modern art, still required reading in many introductory courses on the subject, is H. H. Arnason’s History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography (New York: Harry N. Abrams, first published 1968). While this text has gone through six revisions, the narrative of modern art’s trajectory in history remains unchanged. 5. For a concise account of abstract art in Hong Kong and China, see David Clarke, Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 133–61. 6. One of the first public exhibitions in Shanghai with abstract works of mixed media and expressionist painting was the ’83 Experimental Painting Exhibition, which opened on September 5, 1983, at Fudan University Teachers’ Club. The artists included then-current instructors and alumni from the Shanghai Theatre Academy, including Qu Fengguo’s teacher Li Shan. Scheduled to last four days, the exhibition was shut down after one day by city officials. See Biljana Ciric, ed., A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai 1979–2006 (Manchester: Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, 2014), 32–33. 7. A study of abstract qualities in ink painting remains outside the scope of this article. 8. In the most recent John Moores Painting Prize China Exhibition, held from March 28 to May 15, 2016, at the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, seventy-five percent of the paintings were figurative, while only twenty-five were abstract. See Ling Min, ed., Catalogue of John Moores Painting Prize (China) 2016 Exhibition (Shanghai: Shanghai University Press, 2016). 9. Any attempt to define the term “metaphysics” will prove to be polemic, yet for the sake of the current discussion examining how philosophical thoughts had profound effects on abstract art, I have relied on Franklin Perkins, “Metaphysics in Chinese Philosophy,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2015/entries/chinese-metaphysics/. 10. Ibid. 11. For a full discussion of Plato’s aesthetics, see Nickolas Pappas, “Plato’s Aesthetics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-aesthetics/. 12. For an interpretation of Plato’s aesthetics, see Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art: A Philosophical Interpretation, in John Wild with James M. Edie, eds., Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 3–15. 13. Stephen Mitchell, trans., Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York, London, Toronto, and Sydney: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), also at https://u.osu.edu/dialecticseastandwest/ files/2016/02/taoteching-Stephen-Mitchell-translation-v9deoq.pdf/. 14. Perkins, “Metaphysics in Chinese Philosophy.” 15. Ibid. 16. The translations of Midnight Song of the Seasons (子夜四时歌) are from Midnight Song of the Seasons: Spring Song Southern Dynasties Yuefu, http://www.chinese-poems.com/syf1.html. The poems are available in traditional and simplified script as well as in Pinyin and English.

35 Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky Cui Xiuwen

ui Xiuwen won the distinguished commission of the Dame Jillian Sackler International Arts Exhibition Program for a solo exhibition Cat the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University. Miguel A. Benavides curated the exhibition, which was on view from May 27 to August 27, 2016. This annual competition encourages international artists from a multitude of countries to apply.1

Cui Xiuwen’s work, Angel’s Light, is a multi-part installation situated in four different areas of the museum, and although each installation is different in several important ways, they are also related.2 One of the immediate impressions is how the exhibition winds its way from the entrance to the museum, through to the inner courtyard, back into the ancient art galleries, and finally to the main space. Though the sprawling expanse of the building is great, the works manage to fill it. Cui Xiuwen’s overall theme is light, which manifests in different ways in each part of the exhibition. Each gallery has a different light source with the last incorporating the most modern adaptation of light technology. The works, at first sight, seem conventional both in style and media; yet the themes embedded in them are unconventional and make reference to the history of art. There are several threads of unity in addition to light, and there are many possible levels of interpretation.

Part 1: Body

Upon entering the museum, one Cui Xiuwen, Body, 2016, installation. Courtesy of the is confronted by an assortment of artist. soft rectangular sculptures covered in velour of various colours that nearly take up the entire space, which measures 13.41 by 7.73 meters. The audience, whose participation is essential to each part of this exhibition, is encouraged to walk among the sculptures, sit on them, and use them like furniture.

In this ﬁrst part, called The Body, the physical presence of the “furniture” feels intrusive. It is not clear at ﬁrst what guides the choice of shape and colours—red, blue, golden yellow, and green. But in an interview, Cui Xiuwen explained that she has been reconsidering the history of art, both Western and Chinese, and that these particular colours are found in what

36 Top and bottom: Cui Xiuwen, she identiﬁes as the oldest Chinese painting, Loshen Fu, an illustration of Body, 2016, installation. Courtesy of the artist. a poem by Cao Zhi (192–232) written in 222 AD, by renowned artist Gu Kaizhi (c. 344–406).3 In this respect, she grounds her efforts within the history of Chinese art, but the composition of the sculptural shapes and use of textiles clearly relate to the work of minimalist artists of the 1960s, such as

Joseph Beuys’s square piles of grey felt,4 Robert Morris’s felt sculptures,5 and Donald Judd’s arrangements of boxes.6 With these two cultural references embedded in the work, Cui Xiuwen merges disparate aesthetic sensibilities and historical eras. In respect to the lighting, in this ﬁrst room it is artiﬁcial, diffuse, and subtle.

37 Part 2: The Heart Through a set of traditional Chinese Top and left: Cui Xiuwen, Heart, 2016, installation. garden doors, the viewer approaches Courtesy of the artist. Part 2, The Heart, which is located in an adjacent courtyard measuring 21 by 34.38 meters. Dominating this space is a huge ancient rock whose origins can be traced to the great eleventh-century literati painter and court official of the Song dynasty, Mi Fu.7 Mi Fu revered garden rocks, especially those with tortured sculptural shapes and complex convex and concave surfaces, the result of natural erosion, that represent the yang of the eternal yin-yang duality—that is, the adamantine, unchanging, eternal aspect of the universe. Cui Xiuwen explained to me that it was impossible to move the rock, so she built a cage of thin metal rectangular shapes around it. Repeating the palette of Part 1, she transformed the previous three-dimensional solid forms into open linear boxes of similar geometric configurations. The multi-coloured and variously sized metal bars surround the sculpture as if in an embrace, respectful but all-encompassing. Here, as well, an allusion to the minimalist sculptures of the sixties is evident, in particular the open box-like structures of Sol Lewitt.8 But it is important to note that Cui Xiuwen’s linear metal designs embrace the stone, again proposing a contrast between the ancient and modern, Chinese and Western. Here the unifying aspect of light is that of the sun, and it floods the sculpture.

38 Cui Xiuwen, Heart, 2016, installation. Courtesy of the artist.

Part 3: Spirit After a meandering walk through a series of museum rooms displaying ancient Chinese pottery, one reaches Part 3, Spirit. Filling a long but narrow corridor measuring 27.36 by 5 meters is a light installation: a series of thin, upright red metal rectangular forms that comprise a kind of tunnel. Toward the middle of the structure some of the rectangles are tilted to the left and then to the right. Opaque plastic panels ﬁlled with ﬂuorescent lights illuminate the red rectangles as well as the footpath. Walking through the passage provides a sense of travel, but, the tilting rectangles, the zigzag path, and the intense light is disorienting, like a walk through a fun house. The physical experience is that of light-headedness, of spirit without form, an out of body sensation. Here, too, allusions to ancient Chinese art can be cited—the jagged tunnel path is reminiscent of the layout of ancient Chinese scholars’ gardens, which avoid straight lines to enhance the sense of distance and allow for multiple and diverse views of the garden. As for references to modern minimalist art, this time it is Dan Flavin’s neon installations that come to mind.

39 Cui Xiuwen, Spirit, 2016, installation. Courtesy of the artist.

Cui Xiuwen, Spirit, 2016, installation. Courtesy of the artist.

40 Cui Xiuwen, Spirit, 2016, installation. Courtesy of the artist.

41 Cui Xiuwen, Fate, 2016, installation. Courtesy of the artist.

Part 4 Destiny The clue to the designs of the previous compositions becomes apparent in the last room and its closet alcove. Mounted on the wall of the large darkened rectangular main exhibition hall that measures 7.28 by 14.31 meters is a painting with an austere composition of four linear shapes mirroring the same palette and shapes as the first two parts. One immediately senses that it may have been this composition that was deconstructed and reworked—taking the flat abstract arrangement of coloured shapes and making them into sculptural forms of the body in the first chamber and into the open rectangular coloured metal composition in the courtyard. Projected on the wall opposite the painting is an ever- changing representation of the painting using coloured light to render variations of the painting’s structure. A special computer program provides sets of varying hues that culminate in a monochrome design; then this sequencing set of colours is repeated. After the bombast of the light-filled passage, one encounters this clue to the various artistic manifestations of the painting, but it perpetually disappears and reappears before the viewers’ eyes.

Cui Xiuwen, Fate, 2016, installation. Courtesy of the artist.

42 Cui Xiuwen, Fate, 2016, installation. Courtesy of the artist.

To the left is a small curtained closet that measures 2 by 3 meters. On the ﬂoor of its black interior, coloured shapes corresponding to the design of the painting appear as patterns of light. Stepping on a shape causes it to vanish, so as one walks about the enclosed area, one shape disappears and another emerges. Walking on them recalls the children’s game of hopscotch, which Cui Xiuwen avers was the original idea for the work. While the painting in previous room is palpable and has a solid presence, the shapes in this room are ephemeral and elusive.

Interpretations In conversation, Cui Xiuwen admits to no clear interpretation of the work, saying she relied on intuition in her choices. But it is clear from her recent reexamination of art history that this work presents a temporal progression of the arts through time, in its allusion to both Western art (from the soft sculptures of the ﬁrst space to the linear sculptures of the second and the light-ﬁlled displays of the last three rooms) and Eastern art: Gu Kaizhi’s palette and the Mi Fu’s garden rock. There are also transitional sequences in the materials she has employed—beginning with textiles and iron bars, projected light, and digital media, the materials span historical eras from the rock age to the digital.

The light transitions from the initial diffuse artificial light of the first chamber to the natural daylight in the second to the bright concentrated fluorescent light of the third and ending in the darker, intermittent light in the main area and its enclosed alcove. Cui Xiuwen says that she hopes the audience will be spiritually affected by the light displays and playfully interact with the colour and forms in the third and fourth room. She explains in the pamphlet accompanying the exhibition:

Through the theme of the exhibition, Light, we hope people can experience changes at visual, psychological and spiritual

43 levels, from tangible to intangible forms, by interactions in the space and the visuals presented by the exhibition, which is also the journey of experiencing tangible feelings to psychological and spiritual feelings then to the life experience of the totally intangible world beyond spirit. Light is the guide and direction for our lives.9

Using the medium of light to interact with and affect the mood of the audience recalls the light works of James Turrell in his 2013 exhibition at the Guggenheim, New York10 and Olafur Eliasson at Tate Modern, London in 2004,11 but her scale is human and intimate, and in contrast to their overwhelming polychrome illumination, the light in her tunnel is pure white.

Cui Xiuwen says her intention Cui Xiuwen, Fate, 2016, installation. Courtesy of the was also that the audience would artist. participate and intermingle with the different parts of the installation— walking among the sculptured forms, around the metal cage surrounding the rock, through the lighted passage, and into the dynamic light shows of the last two rooms. Thus, aside from the light, there are other unifying elements throughout the entire exhibition that include the palette, the geometric shapes, and the invitation for interactivity. Finally, it is important to consider the suggestive titles of each part; they evoke the cycle of life from the ﬁrst embodiment of form, heart, and spirit, to destiny. In the last darkened chamber, the light-ﬁlled shapes shift from one possibility to another, and I think of Zhuangzi, the fourth-century Daoist sage:12

In the beginning we lack not only life but form. Not form only, but spirit. We are blended into the one great featureless indistinguishable mass. Then a time came when mass evolved spirit, spirit evolved form, form evolved life.

Cui Xiuwen’s recent creation differs greatly from her early work. Her artistic career, which spans decades, was ﬁrst noted for her constructed photographs of young girls in school uniforms.13 The plight of women in China follows the trajectory of the developmental progress of this child to adolescence, though the models change at intervals. The series, with various titles—One Day (2004), and Angel (2006), addresses the disparities between men and women in China; despite Mao’s dictum “women uphold half the sky,” it is a story of physical and emotional abuse, lack of opportunity, and limited resources.14 The pregnant teenager who appears in the last stage

44 Cui Xiuwen, Angel No. 13, of the series represents the problems of rape, enforced abortions, and 2006, photograph, 100 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist. social opprobrium. In the ﬁnal phase of this part of her career, in 2009, Cui Xiuwen employed a life-sized doll, an exact duplicate of the young girl, as a second version of the artist herself and placed the two ﬁgures in the barren snowscape of her native Harbin. The pairing drew thoughtful confrontations between fake and real, live and inanimate, body and soul, and more. Cui Xiuwen has also made videos, beginning with Ladies (2000), in which she secreted a video camera in the ladies’ room of a Beijing nightclub and recorded the stashing of money earned in the dark corners of the club, threats to husbands promising to reveal his doings with the girls to his wife, and primping. Several other videos ensued, and the most recent, Spiritual Realm of 2010, does relate to her work at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art, Beijing. In the video, naked migrant workers were asked to imagine the heavenly reams, moving slowly to music.15 In these works, Cui Xiuwen searched for a way to express the spiritual world, the relationship between body and soul, life and death. In another dramatic reversal of art production, around 2012, she began to make abstract works,

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

45 Cui Xiuwen, Qin-Se No. 1, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 50 x 120 cm. Photo: Phoebe Bournel. Courtesy of the artist.

Cui Xiuwen, Qin-se No. 7, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 45 x 60 cm. Photo: Phoebe Bournel. Courtesy of the artist.

46 striped acrylic paintings with wood embellishments, and video installations. Here she explored the expression of a new kind of deep space, audience participation, and the effects of light and shape on the viewer.16 In the context of her oeuvre, the work on view at the Sackler is the culmination of the exploratory efforts that marked the last ﬁve years as well as her earlier career. Cui Xiuwen is fearless in her ceaseless exploration of herself and her art. “This puzzle about life that will never be ﬁnished or thoroughly solved until we become truly enlightened. That is the destination for life and it is where all human beings will ultimately go. But for now we can only walk . . . or jump . . . step by step.”17

Notes

1. Often a group of artists is selected; it may be that another Chinese artist will not be chosen for ten years, as one of the goals of the award is to recognize artists from a broad spectrum of cultures. See http://www.sackler.org/arts/beijing. 2. Cui Xiuwen, Light, http://www.sackler.org/cui-xiuwen-angels-light. 3. The earliest extant version is attributed to the twelfth century. Three copies dating to the Southern Song dynasty have survived: one in the Palace Museum, Beijing; another in the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and a third in the Liaoning Museum, Shenyang. 4. On display at Dia Beacon, New York. See Joseph Beuys: Fond sculptures, Codices Madrid drawings (1974), and 7000 Oaks, a permanent installation furthering Beuys’ Documenta 7 project, October 9, 1987–June 19, 1988, http://www.diaart.org/exhibitions/main/75/. 5. Robert Morris, Untitled, 1969, 459.2 x 184.1 x 2.5 cm, see https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_ learning/robert-morris-untitled-1969/. 6. See Donald Judd, untitled, 1971, anodized aluminum. Collection of the Walker Art Center, Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1971, see http://www.walkerart.org/press/browse/press- releases/2008/new-walker-art-center-collection-exhibition-f/. 7. Mi Fu (米芾 or 米黻; 1051–1107) was a famous Song dynasty official, poet, painter, and calligrapher known for his extraordinary admiration of rocks. For the symbolism of ancient rocks see Jing Wang, The Story of Stone: Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism in Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, and The Journey to the West (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 178. 8. Sol LeWitt, Two Open Modular Cubes/Half-Off, 1972, enamel on aluminum, 160 x 30.5 x 23.3 cm. Collection Tate Museum, purchased 1974. See http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lewitt-two- open-modular-cubes-half-off-t01865/. Dan Flavin, Untitled (to Don Judd, colorist 1-5), 1987, collection Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. See http://www.artfund.org/what- to-see/exhibitions/2014/08/16/dan-flavin-exhibition/. 9. Cui Xiuwen: Light, a solo exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, May 27 to August 27, 2016, pamphlet, 6. 10. James Turrell, solo show at the Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York, 2013, see http://web. guggenheim.org/exhibitions/turrell/. 11. Olafur Eliasson, Take Your Time, One-way colour tunnel, 2007, see http://archv.sfmoma.org/exhib_ events/exhibitions/232/. Alternatively, see the 2004 The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, see http://www.olafureliasson.net/. 12. Cyril Birch, Anthology of Chinese Literature: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century (New York: Grove Press 1994), 82. 13. Patricia Karetzky, “Cui Xiuwen, Walking on Broken Glass,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 9, no. 3 (2010), 18–33. 14. See cuixiuwen.com. 15. Patricia Karetzky, “Cui Xiuwen’s Recent Work: Spiritual Realms in the Material World,” n.paradoxa 29 (January 2012), 62–65. 16. Cuixiuwen.com. 17. Cui Xiuwen: Light, a solo exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, May 27 to August 27, 2016, pamphlet, 6.

47 Maya Kóvskaya Propositioning the World: Raqs Media Collective and the Shanghai Biennale

Raqs Media Collective will be curating the 2016 Shanghai Biennale, the ﬁrst Raqs Media Collective, left to right: Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica version of this major international biennial to be produced entirely in the Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, 2014. Photo: Eastern hemisphere. During the collective’s critical early stages of formulating Srinivas Kuruganti. curatorial concepts, I spoke with them about their plans for the show and how it will ﬁt into the history of curatorial practice.

Maya Kóvskaya: In 2013, you said: “We are not impresarios, we are not directors, we are not managers. Perhaps the most interesting form our curatorial model of authorship takes is as something of a hybrid between catalyst, witness, agent, and interlocutor.”1 Rather than curating thematic shows in which artworks illustrate an idea laid out by the curator, you have chosen to focus on networks, interconnections, nexuses, interstices, and residues produced through temporary exchanges occasioned by the exhibition. Could you elaborate on the ways this diverse array of concurrent, shifting modalities of curation might be mobilized in the context of the Shanghai Biennale?

48 Raqs Media Collective: We are interested in what we would like to call the “propositional”—as a procedure, as a protocol, as a prognostic. The proposition always has a dual character; it is an utterance as well as an invitation for a response. It enters the present primarily to inﬂect the futures dispersed within it. It calls out, it invites; we could say it offers a promise, even that it holds out the frank possibility of seduction. The proposition is never closed in on itself. To be itself, it has to invoke, invite, or invent a response. It involves a risk, because propositions need not be honoured. They can be refused. But whatever they do, they produce a transformation in the person who responds, regardless of whether the response is an acceptance or a refusal. We are interested in how arguments, counter- arguments, and stories, instead of being tangential or adversarial to each other, can be made to act propositionally. How does one make propositions to the world, and how does the world change in response to what has been said, and imagined, propositionally? This is the important question.

The invitation to the artist, as we see it, is only a starting point. It will cascade further. Artists might build their own invitations on the basis of the one that we send them. They might take the form of speculations, refusals, and prevarications, even, by way of response. Let’s assume that we encounter an artist with an argument: they respond to us with a counter- argument, and we get back to them with a story, which in turn takes both the artist and us to another plane in the argument. We think that this is how we will end up working in Shanghai, by stitching together a range of arguments, vivid counter-arguments, and tangential fables, or, if you like, maneuvers, disputations, and stories. We enjoy the act of slow stitching, of tying together seemingly disparate objects, ﬁne threads, ungovernable affects, laughter, misspelt quotations, blinding insight, and glowing, luminous darkness.

Maya Kóvskaya: Can you give some speciﬁc examples of how your curatorial ethos has manifested itself in some of your most noteworthy curatorial projects, such as Rest of Now, Manifesta 7, Bolzano, Italy, 2008; Seven Steps Away From Oblivion, the show within the show you curated for Indian Highway at Serpentine Gallery, 2008, and toured elsewhere; Sarai Reader 09 at the Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, India, 2012–13; and INSERT2014, New Delhi?

Scenarios at Manifesta 7, 2008, Raqs Media Collective: In Rest of Now, an Trentino, Italy. Courtesy of Manifesta Foundation. exhibition presented in an ex-aluminium factory in Bolzano, over the period of eighteen months we gravitated toward a way of seeing how the “remainder” or “residue” of a delirious history of war driven and post-war economic boom production could be harnessed as a source for life rather than as a mere relic of what had passed. The exhibition we actually

49 “co-curated” (with Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg, and Adam Budak) was Top and bottom: Scenarios at Manifesta 7, 2008, Trentino, titled Scenarios and held at another venue (the Franzenfeste Fortress) near Italy. Courtesy of Manifesta Foundation. the Italian-Austrian border. Scenarios was an exhibition of the building as much as about the building—and so we arrived at a modality that was based on listening and light; we largely left the venue untouched but profoundly transformed its scenario through voice, light, and shadow.

With Seven Steps Away from Oblivion, we wanted to look at how landscape can be constituted, and not only geographically. We invited seven documentary ﬁlmmakers to respond to our sense of key moments in their work. Some of them reshot sequences, some re-edited, others intervened

50 Steps Away From Oblivion, 2008, installation view at Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery, London. Courtesy of Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi.

into their material in other ways. It was also a way of revisiting the memory encoding function of the moving image to make it act against the amnesiac tendencies of our time.

Sarai Reader 09, 2012–13, Sarai Reader 09, which lasted nine full installation view over an eight-month period, Devi Art months at the Devi Art Foundation, was a Foundation, Gurgaon. Photo: Shveta Sarda. Courtesy of different kind of undertaking. Its premise Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi. was promise and possibility, and hence we started with a show that opened up a sense of ripe futurity that was empty and full at the same time. This was a wager on our part to see what time does to a curatorial proposition. So you could say this was a curatorial proposition that had to do with the pleasures and perils of risks, of projecting desires into uncertainty.

Finally, INSERT2014 was more a matter of ﬁnding ways to fold the world into our city and to fold the city into our world. We wanted to make a claim to global centrality, in terms of the ambition and intensity of thinking that we have long known Delhi to be home to. And so, that is what it was—an engine for thinking the world today, from Delhi.

In each of these circumstances, there are shifts of emphasis, new details and desires, but there is also an underlying commitment to curation as an open- ended, generative process.

Maya Kóvskaya: You have noted that “In astronomy, the data sets . . . are so dense that they need collaborative linkages between various capabilities and locations for us to make sense of them.”2 If the world/s we inhabit are of a similar character, how can art speak to this density and complexity, and

51 what kinds of curatorial strategies can build such collaborative linkages, Yogesh Barve, Existing Camouﬂage, 2014, installation co-inhabitable locations, and cascading “new world conversations” within view at Insert2014, Indira Gandhi National Centre of the and through art? Arts, New Delhi. Photo: Umang Bhattacharyya. Courtesy of Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi. Raqs Media Collective: Artists can become as patient and ambitious as astronomers. They can be committed to going the necessary distance and to the exploration of darkness. We think that this mode of practice may yet equip art with a new set of multiverses. What is most interesting in a practice like astronomy is its comfort with the unknown. Astronomers are very happy to admit to not knowing much about most of the sky that they look at. They know a lot, but they know that they don’t know even more. This means that every corner of their vision is an opportunity to make minds move together. Artists and curators can sometimes share this excitement about the unknown. We are with these space cadets, in training, perpetually, for the unknown.

This is not just about being “exploratory”; it is about thinking the unthinkable. It is about assuming responsibility for turning art into a space where difﬁcult and challenging concepts and images can be held up for scrutiny, with care, thought, and consideration. We see contemporary art as a kind of philosophical laboratory and artists as adventurer foragers in the forests of our contemporary consciousness.

Maya Kóvskaya: Above you talk of the role of adventurer and the explorer. The cosmonaut and deep-sea diver both appear in your works as manifestations of this role, in part, as well. Likewise, from early on, ideas of movement across time and space, particularly metaphors of travel, have appeared in your curatorial practices. For example, you posited one type of

52 Raqs Media Collective, Log Book Entry Before the Storm, 2014, installation view at Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014. Courtesy of Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi.

Raqs Media Collective, Log Book Entry Before the Storm, 2014, installation view at Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014. Courtesy of Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi.

curatorial fulﬁllment as “mak[ing] an artwork travel the length and breadth of its own possibilities.”3 You described the collaboration that produced Building Sight, 2006, as “an open ended conversation between fellow travellers.”4 The “new ideas and concepts, discursive as well as aesthetic,” in the platforms of Sarai Reader 09 book and exhibition, are referred to as “travelling companions” who “ﬁnd their separate yet occasionally converging itineraries”5 in the course of their collaborations. In the booklet handed

53 out at Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar—your retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, 2014–15—you addressed the visitors as “passing travellers,” and visitors to the INSERT2014 exhibition were encouraged to become wanderers and ﬁnd spaces to take rest inside the labyrinth of the space housing the exhibition.6

An early ﬁgure of the traveller Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled (T-shirt, No T-shirt), 2011/14, emerged in your public practice installation view at Insert2014, Indira Gandhi National Centre when you co-founded the Sarai of the Arts, New Delhi. Photo: Umang Bhattacharyya. program in 2000 at the Centre for Courtesy of Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi. the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in New Delhi, invoking the caravansarai—a cultural phenomenon shared across much of the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, the Persian Empire, and the Silk Road. The caravan was a group of long-distance travellers, pilgrims and traders, explorers and adventurers, on missions both sacred and profane, and sarai were their sites of shelter— rest stops for wayfarers to sojourn along the road. Through the exchange of stories, beliefs, ideas, capital, and material culture that took place there, these caravansarai became generative nexus points of hybridity, syncretism, and cultural diffusion. In other words, they were places that afforded myriad minds from a vast spectrum of professions and places the rare opportunity to meet and “move together.”

In many ways, your programming at Sarai brought people, ideas, cultural production, and art practices from across the world into this space of concentrated collaborative and multidisciplinary exchange. Sarai performed a similar cultural and ideational function through art, cyber-media practices, urban engagements, publishing, residencies, workshops, research programs, and more. Would it be fair to say that, already, in 2000, with the founding of Sarai, the ethos and modes of your curatorial work had already begun to take shape?

Raqs Media Collective: Everything seems to fit into patterns when viewed with hindsight, doesn’t it? But hindsight is a cruel companion; she allows little by way of surprise, even retrospective surprise. When we were founding Sarai in 2000, curation was not uppermost in our minds. What we knew was that we needed to create a generative space, a context for making and thinking, and a means to gather together different energies and practices. During the first five years of Sarai we were enveloped by the production of various kinds of works and utterances by over a few thousand people. The Sarai Readers (a book series that spanned nine volumes) became a critical platform for writing and thinking. Around the end of 2005 we became aware that a form of thinking called “the curatorial” was happening in Sarai, and we started building on it, with awareness and experimentation. Over time, we have come to recognize that when we curate, we try to create contexts for the generation of ideas, lay the ground

54 Sarai Reader 09, 2012–13, installation view over an eight-month period, Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon. Photo: Shveta Sarda. Courtesy of Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi.

each time for an architecture that can attract a range of practice and multiple disciplines, and create new publics; invoking them out of hunches, desires, and the intersections of patience and prognosis.

Further, around the end of the 1990s, we had already begun to sense that a new generation was emerging that would move between locations, production sites, disciplines, and institutional contexts, with a fragile stability over time. This was happening around us in many domains. Sarai, we think, was an attempt to provide a meeting and sparring ground for this movement. One could argue that “the curatorial” is a mode of thinking that has to deal with a robust undisciplined gathering within fragile time arcs.

Maya Kóvskaya: Are there ways the format of the large-scale biennial-type exhibition is particularly suited to offering opportunities to engender such a “robust” yet “undisciplined gathering”? As I read you, “undisciplined” can be understood in contrast to the kind of repressive discipline Michel Foucault wrote about, or as a kind of unruly freedom. How might a biennial-scale curatorial project afford conditions to create a context for embodying what you have called the “refusal to sustain the rupture between theory and practice, between thinking and doing and creating and reﬂecting?”7 What has this refusal looked like in previous curatorial projects

55 of yours, and how might this injunction play out in the context of the 2016 Shanghai Biennale?

Raqs Media Collective: During our Manifesta, Pirate Bay recycled a junked bus and traveled with it from Stockholm to Bolzano. It reached Bolzano with over thirty participants. They had planned for eight. People had joined in from everywhere en route. The bus was a place where ideas, codes, music, recipes, etc., were created, discussed, and multiplied. It exploded into a great party. This example provides one way of maintaining that refusal to sustain the rupture between theory and practice that you refer to—a form of lived practice. There could be other ways that could involve the unfolding of unconventional and combative artistic research, along with some necessary blurring of disciplinary boundaries. The question of “who is supposed, or required, to do what” could get entangled with the question of “who can be imagined to be doing what,” or, refusals to abide by the protocols that determine what gets put into the separate boxes of theory or practice could quietly slip under the radar of recognition and mix things up. Ancient and early medieval North Indian empires developed codes of what was permissible by drawing up elaborate prohibitions and proscriptions on artists. The rulers themselves were cautioned not to trust artists, as artists were seen a tricksters and impostors. Our guess is that these protocols of caution about and distrust of the artist emerged because artists (or persons we can retrospectively invoke today as artists) refused to play along with the kind of formulaic partition between doing and thinking, between logos and pathos, that were seen as necessary elements of the architecture of social order. We think that the enterprise of breaching the partitions can be potent and full of joy.

Maya Kóvskaya: I can see how this breaching of partitions can foster incredible creative fecundity. This can only grow exponentially when the works are able to form a living, in situ conversation, or constellation of responsive propositions. Is this what you mean when you say that artworks can be curated so that they “relate [to one another], not as frozen entities but as dynamic processes?” I’ve seen you accomplish this in quite distinct ways in two very different exhibitions that you’ve curated, Sarai Reader 09 and INSERT2014. How can a curator promote this kind of dynamic and transformative interaction among the works, and what are some of the challenges you face in creating the conditions for this dynamic to emerge in the 2016 Shanghai Biennale? How do you plan to overcome those challenges?

Raqs Media Collective: During Sarai Reader 09 there was an artist who loved to sleep all day under various artworks. His rationale was that in this way he was able to expand his dream space. His said that sleeping in the same bed everyday was unsatisfying for him. By ﬁnding repose under different works of art he was able to insert his personal world pictures, his dream states, into the space of the exhibition. Learning from this, our effort will be to transform exhibition-making into a quest for the making of a space of repose that can hold the energy of lucid wakefulness as well as the ricochet of dream images.

56 Pirate Bay, recycled bus for The Rest of Now, Manifesta 7, 2008, Bolzano, Italy. Courtesy of Manifesta Foundation.

Maya Kóvskaya: Transforming the Shanghai Biennale into a “space of repose” offers an invitation for us to see ourselves as fellow travellers joining you and the artists you’ve gathered together for a sojourn in your curatorial caravansarai. You have often challenged traditional notions of authorship and authority in productive ways that set in motion collaborations and multiple journeys that intersect in some places even as they diverge in others. If you regard yourselves, together with the artists you are curating, as fellow travellers, and the visitors to the exhibitions are invited to come to your curatorial sarai as passing travellers as well, how does this change the usual hierarchical configuration of authority relations among the curator, artist, and viewer of the artwork? What is at stake in this reconfiguration? What possibilities emerge from disrupting the familiar hierarchical authority relations in which the curator and/or the artist stand in an “authoritative position” in relation to the audience and the artwork? How does this change the experience of the art and challenge what it means to “know” something about art or force us to reconsider who is “qualified” to be an authoritative purveyor of that “knowledge?”

Raqs Media Collective: We recently came across an interesting design for a book cover. It featured a full, dark page interrupted by a small white dot. The book in question was about toxins, and the small white dot was meant to be a graphic representation of the quantum of knowledge that we as humans have gathered till now about toxins. Everything other than the space covered by the small white dot represented all the knowledge that still had to be searched for. To be “authoritative” in today’s world is to be imprisoned by misplaced priorities. We have to think about what other options open up when we stop trying to be authoritative all the time. These openings are what we are looking for within and through our curatorial thinking and actions.

Maya Kóvskaya: You are well known for your theoretical savvy. Your work contains a strong linguistic component, you are widely published, and some have even called you philosophers. So what is it, in spite of all this (or perhaps because of it) that keeps art rather than some other form of creative discourse production at the epicentre of your practice?

57 Foreground: Mai-Thu Perret, Balthazar, 2012; background: Mai-Thu Perret, In the Universe of the Crystal Frontier, 2014, installation view at Insert2014, Indira Gandhi National Centre of the Arts, New Delhi. Photo: Umang Bhattacharyya. Courtesy of Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi.

Raqs Media Collective: Our reason for staying with art, whether as artists or as curators, is to use the visual to go beyond the retinal, to deploy language in order to approach the ineffable, to create even what might be called a set of polyphonic silences along with rich sources of active noise. We think this is important. Our purpose is to let a greater degree of uncertainty have active play in the world. If that happens, people will be compelled to reconsider themselves in the presence of art. That is what we would like to have happen.

Maya Kóvskaya: Thank you for offering some context for anticipating what is to come this November. Between these “polyphonic silences” and “active noises,” whatever emerges in Shanghai 2016 at your Biennale, I expect that the body of works you bring together will sing across time and space in different registers and different tones will produce a glorious polyphony of possibilities that engaging with ourselves and each other through art makes available to us. Or, as you’ve so compellingly put it in the past: “. . . [W]e could learn to speak in tongues, in other voices: in the whisper of sedition and heresy, in the songs sung in pleasure in spite of injury, in forensic diction and visionary stammer, in measured timbres and ecstatic tones, in echolalia and laughter. Even in silence, and always in poetry.”8

Notes

1. Chloé Nicolet-dit-Félix and Gulru Vardar, “Interview with Raqs Media Collective on the exhibition Sarai Reader 09," in “On Artistic and Curatorial Authorship,” On Curating.org no. 19 (June 2013), 39–42. 2. “Raqs Media Collective Interview with Chaitanya Sambrani,” Art iT 7, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2009), 58. 3. Nicolet-dit-Félix and Gulru Vardar, 41. 4. “Raqs Media Collective Interview with Chaitanya Sambrani.” 5. Editorial Collective, “Projections,”Sarai Reader 09: Projections (New Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2013), xi. 6. Raqs Media Collective, INSERT2014 (New Delhi: Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, 2014), 4. 7. Nicolet-dit-Félix and Gulru Vardar, 41. 8. Insert2014, 3.

58 Danielle Shang The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Introduction I accompanied Zhou Yilun on his trips to Los Angeles in the summer of 2015 and Bucharest in the spring of 2016, during which he created two bodies of paintings, installations, and sculptures for Nicodim Gallery’s two locations. This essay is the result of my close observation of how he implements the strategies of chance, assemblage, contradiction, and contingency to overtly put under scrutiny the global postmodern discourse of dissolving what Jean-François Lyotard calls master narratives or metanarratives to embrace incongruity and expose the linear narrative of art history and the socioeconomic relationship between artist and collector, artist and institution, and artist and production.

Barbarous, desultory, elusive, and even whimsical, Zhou Yilun’s ﬁgurative paintings are often overloaded with seemingly random motifs and appropriated imagery that are lifted from art history, mass media, and popular culture and then bandaged with found objects or vandalized with grafﬁti. The mashup of fragmented images causes the picture to become deconstructed in both formal and semantic terms. Instead of creating new meanings, the fragments disrupt and undo one another. As a result, collectors and artists alike often scratch their heads in confusion or dismiss his work as Bad Painting.

Bad Painting Bad Painting is by now established as an art historical term that at one time marked a dialectical divergence from typical modernist painting practices, resulting in fractured imagery and source materials as a means to contradict mainstream capitalist culture. Marcia Tucker first applied the term in 1978 in the context of the exhibition Bad Painting that she organized at the New Museum, New York. She argued that “ . . . it is figurative work that defies, either deliberately or by virtue of disinterest, the classic canons of good taste, draftsmanship, acceptable source material, rendering, or illusionistic representation.” 1 Her exhibition “foreshadowed the renewed vigour and acceptance of (especially figurative) painting in the 1980s, as well as this period’s question of the avant-gardes’ belief in progress and the acceptance of artistic pluralism.” 2 Since then, Bad Painting has become not only a popular strategy for both curatorial and artistic practices, but also a set of theories for evaluating painting. Twenty years later, the Bad Painting— Good Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna brought Bad Painting into focus again. Curator Eva Badura-Triska points out in her essay that bad paintings are:

59 [constantly ﬁghting] against themselves, against all forms of complacency, non-questioning, and ossiﬁcation linked to the perpetuation of a “signature style” once it has been accepted, let alone established as commercially successful. Here, too, the Bad Painters adhere to a brand of radical non-conformism and freedom of thought that is critically at odds with model-based or schematic working methods and the argument used to justify them.3

The idea of “bad painting” already existed prior to Tucker’s exhibition— exempliﬁed by artists such as Pieter Bruegel, Edouard Manet, and Martin Kippenberger—parading alongside “good painting” to embarrass the viewer into questioning his or her reception of works of art and meditating on the spirit of his or her time. The uneasy reception of Bad Painting emphasizes that our ability to appreciate art is limited by our knowledge and our assumptions. What is also interesting is that the embarrassment that accompanies the reception of art almost always arises from ﬁgurative painting. Bad Painting serves as a vehicle for artists to take the drastic step of challenging the condition of painting, negating traditionally what has constituted painting, giving a nod to a new kind of temporality and spatiality, and restructuring a literal quality different from master narratives in the hope of generating self-critique of the medium. New York gallerist Friedrich Petzel observes:

[P]ainting’s relationship to its own critique raises the question of whether painting can offer competent solutions that can be aesthetically formalized, or made operative as historically progressive forces. Accordingly, a confrontation must take place within the artistic conventions of painting as a medium of expression in order to articulate the break with the false promise inherent to criticism.4

However, Bad Painting, which was once supposed to reject all rules of accepted aesthetic conduct, is now becoming such a fashionable genre that it risks being kitsch, supporting our basic sentiments and beliefs instead of disturbing or questioning them. Additionally, Bad Painting as a strategy is not always sustained throughout an artist’s life; instead, it might be an instrument for the artist to open up new spaces for the medium during a liminal phase in his or her career. Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger, for instance, eventually stepped away from what I see as their Bad Painting practice.

Bad Painting has always been saddled with the challenge of transforming “taste.” As Chinese society is fully under the inﬂuence of neoliberal capitalism, the bourgeois lifestyle has become a burgeoning phenomenon. One aspect of bourgeois lifestyle is conspicuously consuming in pursuit of particular tastes. Many Chinese artists are now eagerly emulating canonized works from the West, adapting to West-centred pluralism, and chasing after new aesthetic “nuances” in an effort to be recognized as equal players in the global art world. However, Danish artist Asger Jorn argued, “there is no

60 such thing as different styles, and there never was. Style is the expression of a bourgeois content, and its various nuances are what we call taste.” 5 It is within this context that I want to examine Zhou Yilun’s painting practice. The reception of Zhou Yilun’s work has been largely shadowed by the misperception that he impulsively pursues Western “bad” taste. He rarely articulates the ideas behind his “bad” painting, which further convinces many that he might not have anything signiﬁcant to say about art or about the world in general. This essay sheds some light on the dialectical thinking that invigorates his practice.

Zhou Yilun, Untitled (The Pieta), 2015, oil on cardboard, clothes, and mixed media, 175.2 x 205.7 cm. Photo: Lee Thompson. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery.

Appropriating and Undoing The Masters Most of the works included in Zhou Yilun’s Los Angeles exhibition coalesce into a parody of Renaissance and pre-Renaissance subjects and compositions, featuring Jesus and Madonna, Adam and Eve, and various Christian Saints. Zhou Yilun casts himself as both an imaginary archetypical artist and a prankster with a huge appetite for mockery. His Untitled (The Pieta) (2015) is derived from Michelangelo’s Pieta, which portrays a young, serene Madonna cradling the dead body of Jesus. But Zhou Yilun completely strips away the piousness embedded in the original work and the Renaissance ideal of beauty; his painting is done on a piece of large ragged cardboard salvaged from the street. Garbage such as napkins, masking tape, and rubber washers collected from his temporary apartment in Los Angeles were glued onto Madonna’s face and chest; two defective, cheap t-shirts and a tank top bought from an American Apparel discount warehouse are smeared with dirty colours and hung on the cardboard to cover Jesus’s face and feet. Zhou Yilun’s liberal use of spray paint makes the holy Mother and Son appear obscured. This work references several artistic strategies: the grafﬁto, the readymade, appropriation, action painting, and the incorporation of sculptural elements onto painting. The absurdity in Zhou Yilun’s work relies on the juxtaposition of kitsch imagery, coded narratives,

61 contingency, and contradiction between the visual elements. At the same time, these very devices counteract any predetermined meanings assigned by the artist. Instead, they evoke various readings from various viewers, echoing Duchamp’s premise that art is an intermediary in a process that the artist begins and the viewer completes.

Another untitled painting from 2015 is Zhou Yilun, Untitled (The Madonna Litta), 2015, oil on derived from the Madonna Litta (c. 1481– wood, 84 cm in diameter. Photo: Lee Thompson. 97), a small painting on wood panel Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery. attributed to either Leonardo da Vinci or one of his students. Here, Zhou Yilun depicts the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the baby Jesus on a small round wooden tabletop that he found in the street. He spray-painted the rim of the circle neon yellow and the centre purple and white to make it look like a glowing light bulb. The Madonna and the Child’s silhouettes are simply contoured with thin dribbling lines of blue and white, as if the image were melting in the electric heat of the light bulb.

Much of the imagery incorporated in Zhou Yilun, The Golden Monkeys on Horseback, his paintings for Nicodim Gallery’s 2016, oil and spray paint on canvas, 250 x 190 cm. Photo: Bucharest show was culled from Alexandru Paul. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery. catalogues of European historical, ethnological, and art museums collected during his stay there the month before his exhibition, whereas the rest was derived from flamboyant turn-of-the- century European architecture with sinuous and floral motifs. The city of Bucharest’s many graffiti-bombed streets are littered with this architectural glory from the past, while the communist era also left its brutalist mark on the urban landscape. Nicodim Gallery itself is located in an old French Baroque palace where Zhou Yilun set up his makeshift studio to create the works he later exhibited. But for Zhou Yilun, nothing is sacred; everything is vernacular and subject to his parody. While traveling in Europe, he noticed the ubiquitous equestrian imagery— knights or legendary historical figures riding on horseback. Perhaps one of the most noticeable equestrian portraits that commemorate rulers and military commanders in art history is Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1800–01) by Jacques-Louis David. In one of the paintings he produced in Bucharest, Zhou Yilun took a cue from this classic subject, and the composition indeed recalls David’s Napoleon. However, he mounts a monkey (2016 is the year of Monkey according to the Chinese zodiac) on horseback to replace the heroic and idealized Bonaparte and bestows a tongue-in-cheek title, The Golden Monkeys On Horsebacks (2016), referring to the auspicious Chinese pun combining monkey and horse in order to wish someone an immediate promotion. To further diminish the archetypical grand gesture in the imagery, he veils the painting with a large piece of bubble wrap that

62 is slashed and spray painted. His deconstructing of iconic and familiar European imagery that has been inherited from ancient Greek and Roman empires serves as a point of departure for him to direct critical attention to the globalized art world centred in Europe and the US and deeply rooted in classical Greek philosophy, Renaissance traditions, and the eighteenth- century Enlightenment, which culturally and historically have little signiﬁcance to a Chinese person. It seems preposterous to Zhou Yilun that artists around the world should adapt to the Western version of humanism.

Zhou Yilun’s images do not overturn the original meanings of the imagery he appropriates but, instead, empties them. He is “remaking” European masters’ work but doing it badly. He elaborates that his “painting is about simultaneously representing visual events from different spaces in one intended coincidence. It disrupts the present space and time. The reciprocation occurs unintentionally, but the unintentional is intended.” 6 On the one hand, his engagement with Western art history is different from that of artists in the West, and he makes this very clear not only by showing apathy toward masterpieces in Western art history but also by adulterating them. On the other hand, his deliberate appropriation of highly charged images somehow resonates with what Kippenberger intended in his own work:

[Kippenberger was] intentionally unoriginal, his paintings depend on the renowned paintings from the Renaissance era, as he ﬁrst approximated and then disassembled it. As if he acknowledges his missing the period when visual arts were innovated and transformed. His work is peppered with ironic references to the masters. It was no longer credible to relate oneself to prior work in terms of progress—one could only portray the reality of one’s own belatedness, destined as a successor to some of the greatest artists of all time, never to be more than second best.7

Interior of the Cantacuzino The conflicting reaction of Palace (1901–02), Bucharest, where Nicodim Gallery and both resistance and admiration Zhou Yilun’s makeshift studio were located. Photo: Danielle toward Western artistic canons is Shang. something commonly experienced by artists on the global margins, those who have been force- fed wholesale the knowledge, techniques, prototypes, and forms of representation according to the framework established by the “centre.” This West-centred pluralism in the contemporary globalized art world is what Zhou Yilun ridicules in his paintings; yet he does not attempt to resolve these conflicts. Aside from the narrative of art history, the repertoire of images that he reworks also includes those derived from the everyday spectacle of the middle class and the consumer society exemplified, for example, in television programs and billboards on

63 the street. By manipulating imagery that represents both the art historical and the everyday, he highlights moments of indignity and empties the works of their original pious, heroic, or allegorical meaning. His critique is evasive, often hinted at in his wittily awkward compositions and in the self-vandalization that he performs by mutilating his own canvases and frames, attaching objects found in dumpsters to his paintings and defacing the images. Similar to Tala Madani, a Tehran-born artist based in California, Zhou Yilun plays on “stereotypes and the power of iconic symbols and with a stylistic kinship to political satire and caricature” 8 that lead us “to a pressing discussion on representation and communication in a globalized information society.” 9 Zhou Yilun understands that the problems of painting are not solely the problems of taste on a purely formal level, but also problems with social, ethical, and anecdotal elements. Although he does not paint political banners, his “bad paintings” reﬂect his punk attitude of anti-establishment, anti-mainstream values and a do-it-yourself aesthetic. He shares much with the protagonists of Sergio Leone’s 1966 epic spaghetti Western ﬁlm The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: they are antiheros who foil archetypes and poke fun at societal canons.

The Tension in the Exchange Zhou Yilun, Head I, 2016, charcoal, spray paint on No matter how idealistic an artist drywall and wood board, dimensions variable. Photo: is, he or she cannot escape the Alexandru Paul. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery. uncomfortable relationship of exchange with the gallery and the collector, as the commercial art market is very much a part of the luxury-consumption sector of the economy. Thorstein Veblen in his 1899 The Theory of the Leisure Class calls the collector a “gentleman of leisure” who cultivates his aesthetic faculty to live a life of ostensible leisure that appears opulent.10 Art, often expensive, is regarded as both a valuable éclat and an object expected to last eternally. Zhou Yilun is aware of this, and he insists on challenging this notion by inconveniencing the collector and the gallerist. There is always something “wrong” with his work: either the material he incorporates is too ﬂimsy and a challenge for conservators, the picture too deranged compositionally, or the handmade quality of his assemblage too amateur looking. He chiseled off a few chunks of plaster on the gallery wall in Bucharest to integrate the ruined wall into the work Head I (2016), in spite of repeated warnings from the building management to preserve this building as a historical landmark. Whoever decides to collect this work would be expected to “damage” his or her own wall. Leftovers, swap meet bargains, and useless scraps often make their way onto his paintings as “the icing on the cake,” according to the artist.11 He assembled his installation Relic (2016) at Nicodim Gallery with his paint-smeared clothes, empty containers, plastic tarps that were used to protect the ﬂoor of his makeshift studio, moss that grew on the gallery balcony, and various scraps collected

64 throughout the city of Bucharest on the day he turned the studio back into the gallery space. Nothing was wasted.

Zhou Yilun, Relic, 2016, mixed- He succeeds in making his work media installation. Photo: Alexandru Paul. Courtesy of incongruous and frustrating. This the artist and Nicodim Gallery. intentionally created discomfort is not his attempt to nip at the hand that feeds him; rather, it alerts the audience to the seductions of the prestigious white cube as well as the neatly framed painting hung on a pristine white wall. The ostensibly displayed crudeness in Zhou Yilun’s choice of materials as well as his pictorial idiom brings forth the tension embedded in the artwork as commodity and upsets “the illusion of the artwork’s detachment from the political and economic contexts within which it is produced.”12

The Punk Attitude Zhou Yilun, whose body is almost completely covered with tattoos designed and inked mostly by himself and some friends, constantly goes against the grain and breaks with social consensus. Even his school years were marked with demerits for misdeeds. He opts for a Bohemian lifestyle of a voluntary exile on the periphery of Hangzhou, far away from the central art hubs. Instead of networking with art world’s Who’s Who, he surrounds himself with individuals who are outside the mainstream, or even outcasts. He ﬁnds their eccentric character and non-conformist visions more agreeable, given his own recalcitrant and curious nature. As an artist, not only does he mock the grand narrative of art history and reassess the aesthetic canons at a distance, but he also dismisses the social codes of high culture in favour of the aesthetic found in thrift stores. His favorite pastimes are dumpster- diving in local neighbourhoods and “treasure-hunting” in ﬂea markets.

LBX Gallery, Hangzhou Zhou Yilun does not have an assistant; he does everything himself by hand. In addition to the physical action of painting, he often handcrafts his own stretcher bars and objects; even his furniture at home is made from mundane and often recycled materials that he accumulates on a daily basis. His relentless appropriation and accumulation have become the trademarks not only of his everyday life but also of his artistic practice. His savoring of menial tasks and his interest in the physical evolution that takes place during the process of art making set him apart from the increasing practice of outsourcing the making of art, where the intellectual prowess is removed from physical labour and the artist acts as the consumer relying on others to satisfy his or her needs. It is also worth mentioning that his LBX Gallery (short for the Chinese word laobaixing, “commoners”), a large project space at a location that does not even have a street address because it fails to meet the zoning requirements of the city. At LBX, Zhou Yilun collaborates with all walks of life. Anything produced by anybody, be it homemade cakes, tattoo designs, or outsider paintings, can be put on display and regarded as both art and commodity. Very often, products and items are either traded

65 Left: LXB Gallery, Hangzhou. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Danielle Shang. Courtesy of LBX Gallery. Right: Zhou Yilun’s amateur tattoos. Courtesy of the artist.

directly between owners or simply given away. Guided by his DIY attitude, LBX, a proud commune-like amateur space, creates opportunities through low-cost programs and activities for ideas and visual forms that would not otherwise be heard or circulate. One of LBX’s on-going experiments is “amateur tattoo,” clumsy and crude looking tattoos that are designed and inked by amateurs.

Zhou Yilun’s art and life are inseparable. He uses both to create dissonance and to disrupt normality and challenge the establishment in his own oblique yet playful way. He champions embarrassment, paradox, derivation, and irony. His work is about painting’s capacity (or incapacity) to produce a self-critique, and he seeks alternative constructions of painting through what Asger Jorn and the Situationist International once called “modiﬁcation” or detournement in order to unsettle the viewer’s preconceptions about discourses in art history, global cultures, and social conditions. Consequently, his “bad paintings” often empower the viewer with a sensation of transgression and a sense of freedom not to believe certain things, especially when it comes to assessments of quality, “good taste, draftsmanship, acceptable source material, rendering, or illusionistic representation”13 in art. But at the heart of his deconstructing of classical subjects and his multilayered pictorial commentaries is the reconstruction of the role of the artist in society. In the end, we come full circle to a critical question: If Bad Painting is perhaps only an ephemeral phase for an artist to seek new possibilities, what is next for Zhou Yilun?

Notes

1. Marcia Tucker, Bad Painting (New York: The New Museum, 1978), 5; see http://archive.newmuseum. org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/6415/. 2. Eva Badura-Triska, “Who Becomes a Bad Painter, When, Why, and in What Sense?” Bad Painting, Good Art (Cologne: Dumont, 2008), bilingual edition, 78. 3. Ibid. 4. Friedrich Petzel, “Psycho Sludge,” in Catherine Gudis, ed., Oehlen/Williams 95 (Columbus: The Ohio State University, Wexner Center for the Arts, 1995), 144. 5. Jean Louis Ferrier, Art of Our Century: The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present (New York: Prentice-Hall Editions, 1989), 455. 6. Zhou Yilun, interview with the author, October 2011. 7. Ann Goldstein, Martin Kippenburger: The Problem Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 261. 8. Joa Ljungberg, “An Unsettling Journey Through a Male Wonderland,” Tala Madani: Rip Image (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, and London: Koenig Books, 2013), 52. 9. Ibid. 10. Thorstein Veblen, “The Theory of the Leisure Class” (1899), in Natasha Degan, ed., The Market (London: Whitechapel Gallery, and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 50–52. 11. Zhou Yilun, interview with the author, May 2016. 12. Martin Braathen, “The Commercial Signiﬁcance of The Exhibition Space” (2007), in Degen, ed., The Market, 114. 13. Tucker, Bad Painting, 5; see http://archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_ id/6415/.

66 Jacob August Dreyer Art Labor and Ying Yefu: Between the Amateur and the Professional

ecently, in a group chat on the Chinese app Weixin, I found myself making a tasteless remark about the 2010 Shanghai art scene. RThat was the ﬁrst year that I lived in Shanghai, but it is also a useful marker as 2010 was before Shanghai’s museum and gallery boom: no Rockbund, no West Bund galleries, no Shanghai artists on the cover of Frieze, no K11 Art Village, no Palais de Tokyo partnerships; there was only the Shanghai Bienniale and a handful of galleries. For me, the 2010 Shanghai art scene was amateurish—but in a good way. Since that time, however, the landscape has changed beyond recognition.

Art Labor, established in 2006, was at the time a gallery where, as a silly young man prone to nabbing too many of the free canapés and cheap red wine offered at openings, I could recognize friends and enter the space of contemporary Chinese art in an accessible, friendly, and community oriented way. When Martin Kemble, the gemütlich owner of Art Labor, heard of my remarks on Weixin (I hadn’t stopped to consider that his partner, the curator Shasha Liu, was a member of the group chat) I think he was somewhat offended that I had implied that Art Labor and the artists associated with the space, like Ying Yefu, who recently exhibited there (and who will be discussed here), were somehow less than professional—and rightly so. For me, the art world is simultaneously a profession—with training schools, standard career development strategies, investors and collectors, social hierarchies, networks, trade fairs, etc.—and a space of freedom and imagination. Kemble’s operation seems ﬁnancially successful, as its longevity indicates, so what I meant was simply that he seems receptive to artists who aren’t part of these social networks if he likes their art, which makes Art Labor different from most other Shanghai galleries.

I think that anyone would be irritated to be described as unprofessional, but I hope that my questioning of the influence of the art market on the production of art and rejection of market logic and concepts such as “professionalism” with respect to art finds Kemble okay with my comments. The gallery has been a space that has allowed a genuine community to flourish, free of pretension and accessible to thoughtful non-experts. For members of this community, art and the consideration of the work of contemporary artists improves their lives directly—often in the form of convivial Saturday evening openings in Art Labor’s space off Yongjia Road.

67 I mention this only apropos the vast Ying Yefu, Playing Wrong, 2009, gongbi ink on Chinese changes that have taken place in the bast paper, 49.5 x 35.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Art Shanghai art community since my Labor, Shanghai. arrival. In the handful of years since Ying Yefu’s ﬁrst show at Art Labor, in 2009, the ecology of representation and of the communities around contemporary art, and the attention paid to art by Shanghai’s wider world—a grinding machine that produces shimmering banalities and artists who think too highly of themselves—has been transformed totally. If in 2009, an artist such as Ying Yefu, largely self taught, albeit quite skilful in his use of gongbi style painting—a traditional Chinese form of ink painting characterized by a realist style—and the clever images he creates with that medium, saw his work championed by one of only a handful of serious galleries, his recent show, The Empty Space Between Hope and Despair (May 14 to June 15, 2016), paradrops into an art world of relentless commerce in the forms of art fairs and biennials, of billionaires competing with each other to wave new empty museums into existence along what once used to be a marginal suburban creek, and of the peculiar phenomenon of shopping malls that host large-scale art exhibitions that are often closed to the general public, with opening receptions manned by door guards who allow entry only to VIP shoppers, the press, and the glorious elite deemed worthy of hanging out in a basement underneath a handbag shop. If this is the new professional art world of Shanghai, the term professional is here anchored closely to commerce, much as the question one is asked at gallery openings—“So, what do you do?”—clearly indicates “With what technique do you participate in the capitalist economy of mutual exploitation?” rather than “What do you contribute to the world?,” then Art Labor remains rather amateurish in the best sense: a space where artists who emerged not from art schools directly into exclusive hierarchies, but from a passion for their craft, expression, and the communal space of art, a space where educated laypeople do not feel intimidated into silence, but, instead, feel able to form their own critical opinions about the work.

While Art Labor and Ying Yefu have both evolved considerably since 2009, they maintain a clear resemblance to what they were six years ago. In most cities of the world, this would be quite normal. The art scene in, say, New York or Beijing, has changed somewhat in the past six years, but most galleries remain recognizably what they were in 2009. Six years ago, Shanghai was a marginal city in the international art world and secondary even within mainland China, but subsequently ﬁve or six major institutions have been founded there, and this now makes this city an exception.

68 Installation of The Empty Space Between Hope and Despair, 2016, Art Labor, Shanghai. Courtesy of the artist.

Ying Yefu, The Fatal Wind of Gossip, 2013, gongbi ink on Chinese bast paper, 79.7 x 99 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Art Labor, Shanghai.

Ying Yefu, Balance Image, Ying Yefu has made his career on a 2012, gongbi ink on Chinese bast paper, 86 x 86 cm. reworking of gongbi. While other Courtesy of the artist and Art Labor, Shanghai. practitioners of gongbi are more traditional in their approach and address domestic audiences, Ying Yefu has presented idiosyncratic subject matter—images of impassive children exercising, of men dressed as ofﬁce workers crawling around in a 1930s Shanghai, and of nineteenth-century Japanese soldiers angrily farting—and addresses a more international audience. In his career trajectory, the recent exhibition under discussion amounted to a major shift; if at one point his work may have seemed gimmicky, albeit amusing, his work is now more abstract in a visual sense, the subject matter sparer yet conﬁdent enough not to reduce itself to

69 Ying Yefu, Façade, 2016, gongbi ink on Chinese bast paper, 70.5 x 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Art Labor, Shanghai.

Left: Ying Yefu, Catch, 2016, gongbi ink on Chinese bast paper, 108.8 x 79.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Art Labor, Shanghai. Right: Ying Yefu, The Empty Space Between Hope and Despair—Solved, 2016, gongbi ink on Chinese bast paper, 153.5 x 55.9 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Art Labor, Shanghai.

easy explanation. The children with facial expressions that are impossible to clearly apprehend are still evident, looking as though they had wandered in from a Soviet cartoon about space exploration, but now the images seem to present a series of visual riddles, images that are enigmatic and suggestive rather than obvious. Apparently human subjects are represented along with recognizable symbols, but in contrast to his earlier work there are also pared-down, abstract shapes—balls, boxes, lines. Lacking the jokiness of his paintings of 2013 to 2015, these works, economical with line, allow Ying Yefu’s craftsmanship to become increasingly apparent. It feels as though the artist has less of a need to prove himself and projects more of an inner calm. Over the space of the past eight years, the question of identity has been probed in Ying Yefu’s work. He almost always depicts Asian subjects in the context of modernity—sometimes playfully and sometimes analytically, but progressively less rooted in a specific subjectivity and more, one hesitates to say, in something universal but less burdened with specific signifiers. Of all his work, this is the least programmatic, leaving it up to viewers to form their own conclusions—for me, an indicator of maturity and confidence.

70 Ying Yefu, Samurai Driving Guide, 2015, gongbi ink on Chinese bast paper, 101 x 139 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Art Labor, Shanghai.

It is notable how much Kemble as a gallerist has devotedly supported Ying Yefu’s evolution. As Shanghai’s economy becomes more sophisticated, it is perhaps inevitable that the industries of the spectacle—advertising, PR, marketing—are so dominant that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish contemporary art from the apparatus of its dissemination. Every year, in the streets of the Shanghai’s French concession where Kemble lives and works, there are fewer gawky older folks and more slick media types, less friendliness and more absurd exclusivity, fewer men in overalls whizzing around on motorcycles and more paunchy, stressed out men driving luxury cars. Shanghai’s newfound sophistication, and that of the many new art museums and galleries that have proliferated since Kemble’s support of Ying Yefu’s gongbi painting began, has taken the form of commodified spectacle. Within this brave new world, Art Labor remains stubbornly anachronistic, anti-professional in its own way, a space in which the buying and selling of art still seem to be an afterthought, one in which friends and neighbourhood types gather and in which conversations whose subject is neither stocks nor real estate seem to be feasible. The naiveté that insists that art’s role is as a communal glue, a language that we can use to begin speaking to each other rather than a somewhat marginal component of the luxury goods industry, can feel a bit out of step with the changes that have taken place; nevertheless, it is very refreshing. Next year, in two years, in five years, Ying Yefu will, barring accident or injury, show new works: perhaps deeper into the abstraction and formalism that is now so interesting in his work, insofar as the form is one he has pioneered the contemporary use of, or perhaps back into the direction of direct social and historical commentary, as did his 2015 show. In the garden of cold, glassy towers that downtown Shanghai has increasingly become, Art Labor remains an outlier—the art gallery as communal and social space, one in which artists, critics, art appreciators alike can explore their creativity within a nourishing context conducive to growth.

71 Lu Huanzhi

Buried Alive: Chapter 1 (to be continued)

INTRODUCTION

uried Alive is a text-based artwork by Lu Huanzhi. He has completed the Preface and Chapter 1, and the text is currently B being further drafted for publication through a series of exhibitions and events. Buried Alive was presented for the ﬁrst time at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (February 20–April 30, 2016) within the framework of the exhibition Habits and customs of ______are so different from ours so that we visit them with the same sentiment that we visit exhibitions, which I curated. This exhibition featured works by 3-ply, Irena Haiduk, Ho Tzu Nyen, Siniša Ili, Li Liao, and Lu Huanzhi. The ﬁrst installment of Buried Alive, a work in progress, was published by the Kadist Art Foundation and 3-ply. Yishu is publishing Buried Alive in two installments, the Preface in Yishu 75, and Chapter 1 in this current issue.

Through his book Buried Alive, Lu Huanzhi resists the visual within contemporary art, and creates contemporary art that is, as he describes it, anti-contemporary. He deﬁnes himself as an amateur as he believes that only through so-called informal writing can an individual resist capital and state control, allowing the truth to be revealed to that individual. This model of practice, as well as the structure of the book, references the tradition of the Chinese literati, who would hold ofﬁcial positions within the state, but often spent their leisure time thinking and writing, and would self-publish after retirement. Buried Alive opens up a discussion about the position of the artist within the social context of China, as well as mapping a complex critique of current Chinese society, which pursues pure capitalism without utopia. Buried Alive was translated into English by Elaine Chenyun Wu.

Biljana Ciric

72 Buried Alive: Chapter 1 (to be continued) Buried Alive is a video covering a timeline of 190 years. In other words, the contents that are not duplicated cover 69,350 days, or, let’s say, 1,664,400 hours. And this is just a rough estimate based on the number of people concerned—that is, the nineteen people who have been spied on by Qian Liuxiang for ten years. If we want to calculate the total length of all footage taken by the cameras, then according to the result given by robots scanning in fast-forward mode, it would reach 1,116 years. In other words, each of the nineteen people has been surveilled by at least ﬁve cameras. Obviously, as a piece of contemporary artwork, Buried Alive was not produced for an exhibition. It could even be said that it was not produced for people to watch. No one could sit through all that by themselves. Even to watch a tiny part of it is already an intimidating and arduous task.

“I could also use the same methods that the secret police of the country uses. But I am not from the secret police. What I want to gain is a process—a process that has been deeply hidden by law and by society and that is forbidden to reveal.” During our phone conversation, that was the answer Qian Liuxiang gave to my question: Why did Buried Alive have to use surveillance cameras? As to the extraordinary length of the work, his explanation was simple: “It would not be convincing without such a length.” 1

There was this one time that he, very unusually, showed an interest in discussing Buried Alive with me on phone. He said that originally he just intended to spy on the nineteen people for one year and edit the footage into a nineteen-hour video to exhibit. But then he changed his mind.2

As a matter of fact, there had been two plans from the very beginning. The ﬁrst was to spy on and make records of the nineteen people’s lives for one year, and then a nineteen-hour video work would be edited out of the footage and put on display. The second was to spy on and make records of the nineteen people’s lives for ten years, and no editing would be done to any of the footage. The ﬁrst plan was one of practical consideration. After

73 all, back then Qian Liuxiang—as an artist—still cared about exhibitions. However, after spending one year spying on the nineteen people, he changed his mind signiﬁcantly. Eventually, he gave up on the nineteen-hour edited version and devoted himself to the second plan (see more in Chapter 2).

How did Qian Liuxiang manage to spy on the nineteen people everywhere they went globally? How did he manage to install and change the cameras? Did he do this all by himself? How could he store and transmit such huge amount of visual data? It all remained a mystery during the past twenty years. I have no answers for these questions. Given the super sensitivity of these issues, I never really asked him on phone. I guess he spent a lot hiring a team of hackers to do the surveillance and take care of technical maintenance. And robots were deﬁnitely used during the process. Once I asked the ofﬁcers from the National Security Agency in Shanghai, who as a routine would pay me a visit once every year. They didn’t give a clear answer, but they implied that the FBI was also investigating whether international hacker teams offered Qian Liuxiang assistance.

I know almost nothing about where the funding for Buried Alive came from, or about Qian Liuxiang’s ﬁnancial status. From fragmented information gained from interviews with his acquaintances, I knew he had made quite a bit of money from the stock market and the real estate market. I need to declare that I couldn’t verify if it was real or not. It was probably just hearsay.

Moreover, Buried Alive was also edited by netizens all over the world, leading to thousands of different versions with subtitles in various languages (in this regard, “Subtitle Translators of the World, Unite!”) And dozens of those versions were on sale illegally. Most of them were condensed versions ranging from ﬁve to ﬁfty hours. The longest was an English version, which was eighty-hours long and included the nineteen- hour version Qian Liuxiang edited.

Edited Version The nineteen-hour version edited by Qian Liuxiang caught worldwide attention and was translated into fifteen languages soon after Buried Alive was released.3 This was the only edited part of the footage contained in Buried Alive. It was a piece of finalized contemporary artwork that could be exhibited. The title was straightforward—Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems, the content of which was based on the surveillance Qian Liuxiang imposed upon the nineteen people during the first year. The nineteen people and nineteen videos were arranged in alphabetical order. Each video was about one hour long and featured one of the nineteen people. Before any images appeared, subtitles would first appear on a black screen, indicating the name of the protagonist and the place she or he lived (e.g., Fu Zhou, Shanghai).

The nineteen videos were arranged in the following order: Fu Zhou (Shanghai), Fan Liming (Shanghai), Pei Song (Shanghai), Wang Pinqin (London), Andrew (New York), Kevin (New York), Katherine (Boston), Emma (Paris), Wu Tong (Huo Village, Hunan), Dmitri (Saint Petersburg), Arturo (San Diego), Xu Chunliang (Wenzhou), Guo Peng (Beijing),

74 Song Tingyu (Beijing), Frank (Vancouver), Rossana (Paris), Du Mingjin (Suzhou), Ma Guanjun (Tianjin), and Zhang Lei (Beijing).

Later, Qian Liuxiang said the order was arranged according to whom he had come to know ﬁrst, which was greatly different from his original idea for an exhibition. Originally, he planned to set up nineteen independent, temporary gallery rooms (to keep the usual venues out of trouble, since the footage had been collected illegally) in the places where the nineteen people lived. In other words, each gallery room would have corresponded to the place of living of one of the nineteen people. Then he planned to play the nineteen videos simultaneously and in a loop to prevent the nineteen videos being dispersed around the world and played synchronically without any particular order.4

“To pack them together was to prevent any of them going missing,” Qian Liuxiang explained, referring to why he later connected the nineteen videos together. He admitted that he had foreseen the aesthetic effect and the target revenue that such a change might bring about. “Certainly I had my reasons . . .,” he said hesitantly.5

As he had expected, Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems was hailed as a documentary that truly reﬂected real life. “This is not a reality show but reality itself,” declared one Shanghai-based critic.6 In fact, this kind of dramatic reaction was quite typical, and many who watched the videos in front of their screens shared such a feeling: that the nineteen people featured in the videos had no idea they were under surveillance and hence were not aware of the existence of cameras at all. The way they behaved was super natural and hence the footage recorded was super real.

Another tactic adopted by Qian Liuxiang also worked. During the nineteen- hour videos he didn’t add one single off-camera commentary. Neither was there any background music. Each video was a naked display of the protagonists’ daily life. Each video consisted of visual fragments of various lengths, and images of grey screens were inserted as a mark for image conversion. These fragments were extracted from the surveillance footage collected during the ﬁrst year, and their length varied from ﬁve minutes to one minute. The contents were mainly what the protagonists said, but also contained the actions they took. Some of their speeches were extremely dramatic and infectious.

For instance, in “Guo Peng (Beijing),” a girl was complaining about Guo Peng’s boyfriend. She said he was such a loser: someone who seemed competent but was totally useless when something really happened. Guo Peng, who forced a smile, said she already saw through him, but she was not very demanding as long as he was good in bed. The girl laughed out loud, saying to Guo Peng that she was good-looking and why not ﬁnd someone better. Guo Peng cursed a bit and said that with the police hanging around her all the time how could she ﬁnd someone better. Moreover, it was already quite rare that a boyfriend hadn’t abandoned her. In this regard, he would be seen as a brave man, and she would feel sorry if she broke up with him.7

75 Guo Peng was the assistant to Sun Changyun, a human rights lawyer. In 2000, Sun Changyun was arrested for “subversion of state authority.” Implicated, Guo Peng was put under government surveillance. In mid-July 2002, Qian Liuxiang included Guo Peng in his “nineteen poems” and started to spy on her. The dialogue mentioned above was from the footage collected on October 17, 2002. It also functioned as a piece of “evidence” with which people condemned Qian Liuxiang after he released the videos. To treat a dissident in this way made him even worse than the government, which spied only on her phone, not on her life 24/7.

And the following was from another dialogue in “Guo Peng (Beijing)”:

Teacher Yao was trying to convince Guo Peng: “To put Teacher Sun into prison and constantly postpone the trial was deﬁnitely the government’s fault. We are all protesting. I also wrote articles to express my concerns. But I think the mature thing to do is to protest, and only protest. It’s not necessary to be obsessed with it. You don’t know why his case caught so much attention from the top. You don’t know the inside story behind the case. Moreover, you don’t know that much about Teacher Sun.”

Guo Peng: “Teacher Yao, I think I know Teacher Sun quite well.”

Yao: “What you know is what he wanted you to know. How could what he did on the surface lead to his arrest and even a severe sentence? I think he was probably involved in some struggles among government ofﬁcers and someone just wanted him to die. Such things are beyond your knowledge.”

Guo Peng: “Teacher Yao, do you have any news source for that?”

Yao: “I heard things. But that’s not the point. It’s okay for you to sign the petition. But don’t be obsessed with it. If you become obsessed, certain party factions involved in the political struggles will use you. They will sacrifice you to embarrass others in the party, to crack down on the others. In the history of political struggles, such sacrifices are almost everywhere. In a centralized system, information is not shared in an equal way, making it impossible for any mature political action. So you definitely need to think it over. To save yourself from damage is the most important thing, unless you are willing to sacrifice yourself.”

Guo Peng: “I understand, Teacher Yao.”

Yao: “Sincere words are harsh to hear. It’s better to back off now to retain some decency than to embarrass yourself later, when the pressure becomes too overwhelming to handle.” 8

Teacher Yao came to visit Guo Peng quite often.

Guo Peng used to speculate his intention: “I don’t know if he wants to take advantage of someone who’s vulnerable or if he is sent by the government.” 9

76 However, what Teacher Yao said was not wrong. It was based on his life experience. Given the decisions Guo Peng made later, she listened to him. It also showed that Qian Liuxiang’s decision to include Guo Peng in the “Nineteen Poems” back in 2002 and to keep this dialogue in the edited version was insightful and visionary.

Another example is in “Arturo (San Diego)”:

Arturo was excitedly “scolding” a middle-aged man with a shaved head: “Don’t you ever talk about revolution with me! To drink Evian, and quality wine, and sit in a café writing, talking and working on so-called fucking performance art is one thing; to crouch in the trench with an automatic riﬂe in hand, keeping an eye for the drones is totally another thing. Above us, satellites of the United States are always spying on us. . . .”10

The middle-aged man with a shaved head was Salvador, a friend of Arturo since childhood, a poet and a radical leftist.11 Arturo was a very straightforward person and known for his temper. Back then he just came back from his trip to North Africa and China and he was in a serious mental crisis.12

“Pei Song (Shanghai)” started with a dialogue reminding people “when wine is in, truth is out.” It was instantly eye-catching. Four diners were featured in the video, and they all looked a bit drunk. Besides Pei Song, who was the owner of the house, which he had recently moved into, the other three were: Li Zhizhao, Cheng Wen, and Huo Yunpeng, who were all university teachers.

Huo Yunpeng said: “Tiger13 was showing off his collection of classical music again. I heard he had over 4,000 CDs imported from abroad.”

Following his words, Li Zhizhao said: “Tiger is too greedy. He wants to have everything: the advantages given by the system, and the fame beyond the system. As a matter of fact, without the system, he’s nothing more than a fart.”

Pei Song looked as if he was in pain. He sighed and said: “Tiger actually looks down upon people like them, who came from rural areas. He looks up to the west and worships the higher class. He couldn’t even move his legs when hearing Harvard or Oxford.” The others laughed.

Pei Song continued: “We had a senior classmate who also came from rural village. Once during class, Tiger started to talk about classical music and aristocracy again, as if those who did not listen to classical music were not qualiﬁed scholars. A senior classmate couldn’t bear it anymore and lost it. He stood up, confronting Fu Zhou: ‘Teacher Fu, do you know why so many youngsters choose to follow the communist party? That’s because public intellectuals like you who were born and raised in cities are too highbrow and look down upon people from rural villages. But those people are also smart people. They know there’ll be no hope for them if they follow those highbrow public intellectuals. They will be ridiculed as bumpkins for the rest of their life. That’s why they choose to defend the authoritarian regime

77 and to rely on the party for a better future and a chance to outshine the so-called public intellectuals.’ He left right after he gave that speech. It was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop. People all stared at his back. It was said he quit school the next day.”

“Fantastic!” Cheng Wen asked, “Did he really go to join the communist party?”14

“Fan Liming (Shanghai)” was more like a movie. Several fragments were edited together, and the plot was consistent. First there were two rapid- action scenes, simple and clean. The ﬁrst featured a scene of family gathering. A young woman wearing a pair of glasses, mouth wide open, was in unbelievable shock, and all the people around her were looking at her with embarrassment. The second showed the receding ﬁgure of the young woman running away. Then there came the dialogue.

Jin Yiran (the young woman’s boyfriend) apologized to Fan Liming: “Teacher Fan, I’m sorry. I had no idea she would act like that. It was all my fault. I didn’t explain to her in advance . . .”

Then Fan Liming interrupted, saying, “It’s all right. I understand her feelings.”

Fan Liming’s husband, doctor Fang, also tried to comfort Jin Yiran: “At least it shows she is innocent and didn’t try to pretend.”

Wang Qing agreed: “Yeah. People can be mean. They will let you do them a favour and then call you names behind your back.

Then there came another dialogue, which happened after the gathering.

Dr. Fang: “Do not let it bother you.”

Fan Liming: “No, not at all. I knew there would be this day. It’s just as what I expected.”

Dr. Fang: “Young people tend to be impetuous. So was I when I was young. . . .”

Fan Liming: “Thanks for the comfort. I joined the communist party because I had faith in it. I sincerely believe that only the communist party can lead China to become a developed country. How can a country in which 90% of the population is illiterate grow stronger? It takes power. And only the communist party has such power. Dictatorship is a temporary phenomenon, just like Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I will prove that even if I am a party member and a party secretary I can still produce good poems. Take Wang Wei, for example. He was a high-ranked ofﬁcer in the Tang dynasty but also a great poet.”

Dr. Fang laughed: “You’ve already proved it. People all acknowledge that you are the best contemporary female poet.”

78 Fan Liming: “They are just being kind. If they ﬁnd out I am the party secretary of the hospital, they would immediately turn their backs on me. Don’t you believe that?”15

In “Emma (Paris)” there was a dialogue taking place on a bed. In the video, you could not see any bodies, but you could hear people talking. Emma was complaining to her sex partner, saying that she regretted having helped those Chinese artists who came to the West. She found that they were all using her and had failed to live up to her enthusiasm and all the sacrifices she had made. They were hypocritical. They pretended to be leftists but were in fact all rightists. They often quoted from leftist writers in France to earn themselves a good impression. But actually they didn’t believe in it at all. What they wanted was benefits and benefits only. There was a pause here (perhaps the sex partner on the bed made a gesture indicating he was sorry). Later Emma continued to complain. She said that the most annoying thing was that she had also been influenced by them and had become increasingly practical. And she was also turning rightist politically speaking. She felt she could never go back. She knew she was going downhill. But she didn’t know what to do. At this point, Emma and her sex partner laughed, hysterically. . . .16

The above-mentioned examples were considered neutral and not overly political. In Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems there were a lot of dialogues among the nineteen people that were far more political. Some directly touched on current affairs. Why was that? Through the fast-speed scanning by robots, we learned that during the ﬁrst year of surveillance (which was 2002), most of the dialogues by the nineteen people were about daily life. So why did Qian Liuxiang choose dialogues pertinent to politics and the system, which in fact accounted for only a small portion of the total?

Years later, Qian Liuxiang admitted that back then, as an ambitious artist, subconsciously, more or less, he felt his works were for Westerners. Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems was no exception. Within the Shanghai art scene, these kinds of subconscious feelings were passed down generation by generation as some kind of special knowledge. In other words, without these subconscious feelings you would not be considered professional. You could only be an amateur who would never succeed.17

Of course, it took sophisticated skills to exchange political correctness for recognition from the West. Qian Liuxiang always believed that the body was the place where different ideologies and benefits competed with each other, and dialogues (political as they were, they were part of life) tended to cast more light on the real conditions of the nineteen people, revealing the inner conditions of our body that are visually inaccessible and the influence of ideology and capital (in the form of benefits) upon our body.18 As a result, to use daily conversations as a kind of sample (certainly the intention was to catch the attention of Westerners through contents that were political and could be perceived as critical of China’s reality) to shape the characters was a safe move.

79 That’s how we saw the conditions of Guo Peng, the emotional struggles experienced by Pei Song in face of the system, the changes Emma and Arturo felt, and the thoughts of Fan Liming that were not known to others before. Such a visual way of narration operated to highlight the theme of being “buried alive” through the “self-exposure” of different people. That also explained why in the videos of Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems there was a lot of talking but little action or display of speciﬁc bodies.

The highlighting also relied on make-real technology. Qian Liuxiang installed cameras in the four spaces where the nineteen people spent most of their time, namely: workplace (office), work cell (study), living room, and bedroom. If we were to take a closer look at the nineteen videos, we could draw the conclusion that during the first year Qian Liuxiang installed only one camera in each of those spaces. That is to say, each of the nineteen people was under the surveillance of four cameras. The result was the somewhat too simple and monotonous images, radiating a sense of super realism, as if medical devices had produced the images. Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems made people feel like they were watching a documentary that truly reflected real life, and that was exactly the effect Qian Liuxiang had intended to create.

Through image analysis we would find out that the cameras installed by Qian Liuxiang in the nineteen people’s bedrooms were high above their beds and positioned at a horizontal angle. As a result, viewers could only see the heads of people appearing in that footage, and the parts beneath shoulder level were invisible. The above-mentioned dialogue in “Emma (Paris)” was an example of that. It was not a random decision. It was an intentional design by Qian Liuxiang to highlight the theme of being “buried alive.” If we took the many dialogues featured in Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems into consideration, we would see that during the first year of his surveillance, the bodies that Qian Liuxiang wanted to show to viewers were bodies that were socialized, subjectified, and deprived of organs, but full of talking.

The second piece of evidence for this conclusion was the fact that he didn’t install any cameras in bathrooms. Even during the nine years afterwards, when he installed more surveillance cameras and started to use drones, he never peeped into the bathrooms. The total length of unedited version reached over 190 years, but not a single image showed the bathroom. Bathrooms were forbidden areas.

The third piece of evidence was Fu Zhou. During the surveillance in the ﬁrst year, a camera caught Fu Zhou having sex with a female model in his study. That was purely accidental. In the unedited version, there was footage showing naked bodies and the sound they made was very clear. Such images ﬁt the theme of being “buried alive.” But Qian Liuxiang didn’t edit them into Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems. He just ignored them.

The eventual giving up of Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems was a natural result of the tremendous ideological change Qian Liuxiang had experienced (see more in Chapter 2). But back then, he also reﬂected upon that from

80 the perspective of art. No matter how real the moving images were, he edited them. Editing indicated censorship, ﬁltering, screening, bias, and subjectivity. In other words, as long as there was editing, thematic technology would become too obvious, and the power of narration would be affected, or, in his own words, “not convincing enough.”19 After all, one year was too short a period in which to really observe any substantial change in the nineteen people. He needed to extend the timeframe and not undertake any editing or other processing of the images. He needed works that were considered hostile rather than ordinary contemporary art that was supposed to be sold and consumed by viewers.

Unedited Version The unedited version, namely the entire footage collected for Buried Alive, covered a timespan from mid-July 2002 to early November 2012. When released, Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems had been integrated with the other videos, and Qian Liuxiang entitled the piece Buried Alive: An Imitation of Nineteen Old Poems. Judging from the resolution of the images, we could tell that the cameras had been replaced three times during the ten years. Each time the equipment was updated. The number of cameras increased, and so did the quality and resolution of the images. Qian Liuxiang explained that the replacement of the cameras was to make sure they could function well and produce ideal results.20

Images taken by drones appeared for the first time in the fourth year. But they were not in operation all the time. They were mainly used to keep watch on the nineteen people when they were out or on dates. Through technical analysis, the Shanghai Police Department confirmed that the butterfly spotted by Fu Zhou was a mini-drone that could automatically follow the target by detecting a cell phone signal. The other drones used by Qian Liuxiang functioned the same way. Before Buried Alive, Qian Liuxiang had used drones in another work of his to present the angle of an intelligent bomb diving to the ground at high speed (see more in Chapter 2).

As a matter of fact, the unedited version that was 190 years in length and the 19-hour edited version of Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems resorted to the same techniques: highlighting that the nineteen people were “buried alive” through image narrative, illusion-like hypnotism, and self-performance by the nineteen people themselves. The difference lay in that the unedited version required extraordinary patience given its timespan (ten years) and length (no one could watch it through even if she or he devoted all his or her time to it). It was informative and complicated (so much so that human brains were not able to process it). It presented a panoramic view of how the nineteen people had been “buried alive” in an aesthetically super realistic way as Qian Liuxiang had envisaged. During the ten years, the nineteen people experienced various changes and ups and downs, all of which were transformed into moving images so precise and accurate that every minute detail was faithfully recorded. As long as we wanted to, we could closely observe the details of their actions and dialogues. It felt like we were looking at an enlarged satellite map. The information contained within was far

81 beyond our capacity to comprehend. As a result, it seemed all the more objective and convincing.

That was exactly the most subtle part of Buried Alive: it was very open, letting viewers discover images and edit images so that they could make their own diagnosis that the nineteen people had been “buried alive.” Apparently, in the unedited version, the nineteen people all went back to the mainstream. They shaped their lives according to the criteria the globalized capitalist world uses to measure success. In their earlier years, they fought against the order of reality; but, gradually, they were assimilated and overwhelmed by the raging flood of information. The more you got to know, the less you wanted to fight. Eventually they became invisible within the process of seeking benefits and the pleasure of consumption. In the meantime, their free will was beaten by instinct. Ten years witnessed numerous micro-events and dialogues. The fragmented images that made a record of the events and dialogues verified the authenticity of the work.

For instance, through robot scanning we learned how artist Wu Tong made his way to become a world-renowned contemporary artist through a utopian village project (at Huo Village, in Hunan province) and the promotion of international curators such as Wang Pinqin. The various behind-the-scene stories and fierce struggles for benefits were more than enough to make them the typical bad guys in Hollywood film noir.21

Du Mingjin was also a typical example. Previously she was an innocent girl passionate about public welfare. Later she became a “kind opportunist” (a self-deprecating title she invented) and then a skillful player of the capital game, playing an outstanding role in the global market.

Ma Guanjun also witnessed several signiﬁcant transformations in his life— from a frontline human rights activist to a gang member to a real estate developer who gradually came to deal with the various interest groups of the country—before making himself great fortune and fame. Xu Chunliang also came from a rural village. For years he had devoted himself to ﬁghting against the dictatorial policy issued by local government despite the pressure of being arrested. Later he started his own business and, like Ma Guanjun, became a successful entrepreneur, a celebrity catching worldwide media attention.

Song Tingyu made full use of her network in Beijing, including those having a one-night stand with her, to earn the life she longed for: ﬂying all over the world, gorgeously dressed, giving academic presentations in ﬂuent English, and conquering others with her thoughts and insights.

When Zhang Lei, a former opinion leader, changed his career path to become a real estate developer, he spent a lot of effort pursuing Zhu Yi. Many details were recorded in the unedited version. During the interview twenty years later, Zhang Lei told me that he and Zhu Yi watched Buried Alive from time to time, as it was a record of how they had fallen in love. They also showed it to their friends and kids. Zhu Yi’s life was legendary.

82 Her father was a high-ranking ofﬁcer in Beijing. She was known as a bold feminist. It was said that she once confronted a contractor from Fujian Province at a construction site. She shouted loudly: “Don’t fucking see me as a woman. I am a fucking man with a dick!” The contractor was terriﬁed and surrendered.22 In the unedited version, many images showed that the marriage with Zhu Yi greatly facilitated Zhang Lei’s business. They both studied on the East Coast of the United States. They also invested in the US and made friends with an elite group in Washington, DC.

In the unedited version, we could see that Emma paid increasing attention to how she was dressed and gradually fell in love with cuisine and travelling. She talked a lot about the importance of historical sites and traditional culture. Revolution and the Third World were rarely mentioned. The books she liked reading during the ten years were those she had harshly criticized. They were all books related to consumerism.

On the contrary, Arturo never recovered from his mental breakdown and was still very critical of the whole world.

Katherine’s transformation was thorough. After dating a venture capitalist for a short while, she started her own career on Wall Street, totally leaving behind missions such as subverting dictatorship and ﬁghting against globalization.

In the fifth year, Kevin profited from a misfortune. One day, he had a fight with a black guy, and someone stepped out to give him a helping hand. That someone was Li Jian, a former Chinese marine. He used to garrison islands in South China Sea. After he left the army, he started business dealings in his hometown in Zhejiang province. Kevin and Li Jian became fast friends from their first meeting. As in an inspiring movie, the two of them collaborated and greatly expanded their business enterprises in China and the States.

In Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems, through fragments of dialogues, Qian Liuxiang revealed some early symptoms indicating that they might be buried alive. In this regard, he was truly visionary.

Their failure in fighting against the order of reality was also reflected in the decline of the opposition, their integration into the system, and fighting for the petty benefits offered by the system. For instance, in the unedited version, Pei Song lamented the decay of a democracy fighter who did nothing but type in front of a computer screen. “Thousands and thousands of words cannot compete with a protest on the street.” Once upon a time, Pei Song had been deeply inspired and motivated by such a slogan. He had worshipped this particular democracy fighter. Years later when Pei Song met him on the street, he asked him what he was doing. The democracy fighter said, “Nothing in particular, but I am now a believer.” Pei Song was shocked, asking, “A believer of what?” “Of Christ, for sure.” Pei Song joked that he thought he was now a Buddhist. To his surprise, the democracy fighter lost his temper, responding critically, “How could Buddhism be counted as a religion? It’s all about money worship. They take money and help the sinners to clean themselves.” He was

83 indignant and used a lot of extremely harsh words to curse Buddhism. Pei Song couldn’t bear it anymore and had to excuse himself.

However, less than six months later, Pei Song also raised his voice, quarreling with others, like an uneducated man fighting for the title of associate professor. He almost got into a fight. He was very frustrated and confessed to his friends in private that in order to earn a decent living in the city, he had long become a dependent on the system. Years later we learned from the footage that he was still fiercely criticizing the system and the authority. But he was also aware that it was nothing more than a lame act to comfort the sense of guilt he felt.23

Guo Peng experienced the most dramatic changes during the ten years. Thanks to the nationalistic political climate that had dominated since the new century, she also grew into a nationalist and a patriotic capitalist. Her company offered assistance to state-owned enterprises such as the China National Petroleum Corporation and the China Railway Construction Corporation; she went all the way to Africa to expand markets. It was a huge success. The unedited version made a record of the whole process of her “evolution.” She even publicly claimed that what China needed was genuine rightists, who placed China’s beneﬁt as top priority and wanted to build China into a global empire like the United States. Democracy would certainly come one day, but it required each of us to initiate a molecular revolution.24

That most intriguing thing was that some of the nineteen people also sympathized with the unedited version. Despite the nightmarish harm Buried Alive had effected upon them, a third of them told me during my second round of interviews in 2032 that they partially agreed with Qian Liuxiang’s diagnosis. Now that they looked back, they admitted that the fact that they were seduced by material desires could be seen as being buried alive. Many beautiful visions and dreams were lost along the way. Sometimes they felt it was a pity, but they didn’t regret their choice. Most of the nineteen people believed that they had actually gained a new life. Previously they had been ignorant and brainwashed by an attractive utopian vision. Though it took some time, they woke up eventually. Now they were practical and down-to-earth. With money and social status, you could gain more freedom to do whatever you wanted (see more in Chapter 6).

While I browsed through the unedited data scanned by robots, or as I spoke with Qian Liuxiang, a question would often occur to me: why didn’t Qian Liuxiang spy on himself and make a record of it? I supposed that if Qian Liuxiang also installed some cameras at his home and ofﬁce, it would become clear as to how he had managed his surveillance of the nineteen people wherever they went. Probably we would also have been able to see how he bargained with the hackers and his feelings toward spying on the nineteen people. If the ten years of Qian Liuxiang’s life could have been added into the unedited version and formed a contrast to the life of the nineteen people, that would have been very interesting.

84 One day, I felt that I really couldn’t resist the temptation so I raised my question and shared my assumption. He was very calm, as if he had known I would come to this question. He told me that the idea had occurred to him. But he had thought that since he was aware of the presence of the cameras, he would have played the role of himself rather than been himself. In the end, the footage that had been gained was nothing more than a reality show. On the other hand, to play the role of himself for ten years would have affected him not only physically but also mentally. He feared that it would turn him into a freak, a madman. That’s why he gave up the idea.25 Qian Liuxiang added that to spy on himself for ten years was actually a performance piece he conceived before he started to work on Buried Alive. But he didn’t have the guts to put it into action. And afterwards, his idea changed greatly and he became against performance and performance art. So he had abandoned the proposal for good.26

Judging from the footage of the unedited version, during the ten years, the cameras in the nineteen people’s bedrooms had been replaced, but the quantity remained the same: one for each bedroom. And each camera was always installed right above the bed. It showed that Qian Liuxiang’s idea remained the same: the camera in bedroom was mainly for recording the dialogues that took place there, rather than capturing images of the bodies. But the number of cameras in spaces like ofﬁces, studies, and living rooms increased during the ten years. And it was thanks to those cameras that the nineteen people’s bodies were exposed more and more in front of the viewers.

As it was an unedited all-image narrative, we got to learn that the nineteen people’s concerns about their bodies persisted through the whole ten years. Some used highly expensive instruments to monitor the amount of salt, sugar, and calories in their food. Some would go hiking no matter how bad the weather was. Some became vegetarians. Some ate nothing but organic food. Some bicycled every week and took part in the petition for the government to build lanes designated for bicycles only. Two-thirds of the nineteen people showed an almost superstitious passion for sunbathing and jogging.

Even during the ﬁrst year of the surveillance, although the image resolution was low, we could still ﬁnd many dialogues concerning bodies in the unedited version. For instance, they often exchanged information about healthcare with friends or talked about physical symptoms, nutrition, top-ranked doctors, and the dangers of food additives, or discussed what kinds of spices could enhance the pleasures of orgasm. These kinds of dialogues were discarded by Qian Liuxiang for Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems together with any of the footage showing people doing yoga or exercising on a treadmill.

The nineteen people all had pride and concerns about their bodies and appearance. They all paid a lot of attention to their teeth and appearance (spent huge amounts on cosmetic dentistry, plastic surgery, and skin care). They weighed themselves every day and tried very hard to keep fit. After all, a fit body and a beautiful face could enhance one’s chances for winning and hence were closely related to their success and sense of happiness. The history of their bodies over the ten yeas also reflected the

85 passion for fashion and perfect appearance commonly shared by the middle class all over the world. They were passionate about plastic surgery, gene modiﬁcation surgery, and organ transplants to make your body stay young. And they were not satisﬁed. They looked forward to head transplant surgery becoming possible one day. Wan Pinqin once exclaimed: “Nowadays even organs, embryos, sperms, and ovaries can become commodities and be ordered, circulating globally from one body to another. Why should we make a fuss over the capitalization of art? ”27

Due to its record of the bodies, Buried Alive became more than just a contemporary artwork. It was also a contribution to other disciplines such as the history of organs, the history of human body, individual biology, and physical anthropology. According to some surveys, there were over a dozen disciplines that referenced the unedited version of Buried Alive as a source.28 And at least three books were influential within their professional fields. Talks After Sex, a widely acclaimed book on physical anthropology, was titled after a compilation of footage that an anonymous netizen edited together out the source material of Buried Alive. Based on the unedited version, Pan Kefen, the author, made an analysis of the dialogues the nineteen people made after having sex, casting light on the fleeting holy moments between sensual desire and conversation, when the body was totally at ease. In the book, English letters were substituted for the names of the nineteen people.29 In Beyond the Camera, one of the few books on the history of body, author Milton Mayer probed the footage of the unedited version that focused on bodies, delineating the “subtle and slow changes” during the ten years in terms of the nineteen people’s facial expressions, body movements, and instinctive reactions.30 Philip Caban wrote Beauty Has Spread To The Whole Body, a masterpiece in the study of the history of organs. There were two chapters in the book that mentioned that many of the nineteen people spent a lot of money beautifying their genitals. The author admitted that he came to this conclusion by a close reading of the dialogues collected in bedrooms rather than from visible images. In that book it was written that, back then, it was an emerging industry and reflected the globalization of sex organs.31

In the third year after Qian Liuxiang went underground, he produced two works that were even more radical. These were the new works he presented after Buried Alive. However, everything had changed since then. Due to these two pieces, Qian Liuxiang was included on a list of terrorists by both China and the United States. Afterwards, the contemporary art circle and academia both kept their mouths shut, not mention a word about Qian Liuxiang, as if some kind of consensus had been achieved. Buried Alive also disappeared from books and theses.

But in the eye of the public, Qian Liuxiang became all the more famous because of that. It seemed as if China and the United States collectively launched a huge advertising campaign for him, imbuing his personal act of resistance with an aura of heroism. As a result, it elevated peoples’ expectations and imaginative speculations about him, igniting a spontaneous gala in cyberspace in the name of freedom. Netizens and subtitle translators became motivated to contribute to the free-editing of

86 the unedited version of Buried Alive. It was during this period that more than a thousand freely edited versions appeared. Diverse as they were, most of them (over 800) were sex-related.

According to the data scanned by robots, among the 800 sex-related videos, almost all of them contained footage showing Fu Zhou having sex with a female model in his study, and also him having sex with his wife in his other study in their new house. As to the others, thanks to Qian Liuxiang’s precautions, they were not too exposed. But the noises they made in bedrooms while making love—the foreplay, screams, dirty talk, and after- sex conversations—played a major role in the 800+ videos.

The videos could be roughly divided into two kinds: “On Bed” and “Bed Talk.” “On Bed” accounted for 75% of the total. The contents were quite similar, focusing mainly on the lovemaking of the nineteen people during the ten years. Though no actual sex scenes were shown (except in the case of Fu Zhou), the contents were very detailed and erotic, including the sexual screams, the discussion and practicing of different positions, and the dirty talk to stimulate each other.

“Bed Talk,” as indicated in the name, referred to the dialogues the nineteen people had in bed during the ten years. There were many videos of this type. They could be divided into several different styles. The “Happy Style,” through the addition of cheerful music and a fast-forward playing mode, made the voices and actions of the characters amusing and somewhat ridiculous. In some of the videos, the original voices were erased and dubbed with funnier and dirtier dialogues. The “Humorous Style” edited the nineteen people’s bed talks into some exaggerated plots and made humorous commentaries on the footage. The “Hoaxing Style” was mainly videos shot by youngsters who were half naked and mimicked the nineteen people having sex. Through their exaggerated performances the scenes became all the more erotic and hilarious. Some even integrated footage from the unedited version with new videos shot by themselves. The “Hoaxing Style” was very popular, inspiring more youngsters and netizens to shoot videos of their own, giving rise to even weirder versions.

There was another style of “Bed Talk” that was quite peculiar. It emphasized analyzing. Some processed the bedroom footage of the nineteen people during the ten years based on a strange kind of data analysis. For instance, some focused on analyzing the characters like “at what time, who and who having sex,” “how their relations were,” “how it ended,” and “how their marriage went.” Some resorted to professional audio software to make an analysis of the acoustic frequency of the nineteen people and those having sex with them (to deduce their personality and health conditions). Some calculated the numbers and time of duration of the nineteen people having sex over the ten years (and made the ﬁgures into detailed dynamic data charts).

The most widely known of this type was Talks After Sex, edited by an anonymous netizen under the name “Huang Si Huang.”32 Compared to

87 other videos falling into the category of “Bed Talk,” this video was quite serious in terms of its content. But at the same time, it was quite heavy in taste. The video was three hours in length. “Fire a gun” is a slang term for making love. Talks After Sex (or literally translated as Talks After Gun) featured talks the nineteen people made after “ﬁring a gun,” and an analysis was made concerning their sex-related conditions, such as if they were having an affair, if they had a permanent sex partner, how things went with their marriage, the changes of their sexual organs (men getting hard and women getting wet), the changes of their taste in terms of choosing partners (whether they were more interested in slim bodies or plump bodies, in genitals or asses), the changes of the positions they preferred (all the positions they adopted during the ten years in the form of animated chart) and how satisﬁed they were in bed (the satisfaction degree of both parties whether they were within marriage or beyond).

Talks After Sex, by Pan Kefen, a masterpiece of physical anthropology, in a sense, was a mimicry of the video version of Talks After Sex. The author also confessed quite frankly that to name it after Talks After Sex was to pay homage to “Huang Si Huang.”33

To Be Continued The evaluation of Buried Alive was always very controversial, and the focus of such controversies lay in how to make an evaluation of an incomplete work. Negative comments included: the unedited version was fundamentally a bunch of raw materials rather than a proper work (Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems was a different case);34 the theme was far-fetched and disconnected to the content, and there was no difference between the content and actual daily life;35 and it was too long to make it possible for exhibition or for viewers to watch it through.36

Positive comments included: the state of incompleteness redeﬁned the meaning of the “work” and the future of art, turning it into a brand new and open notion;37 Buried Alive (referring to the unedited version) presented a “full narrative” that required full presence and was not compressible, meaning that every detail was meaningful, every second was about narrating, and it was extremely anti-dramatic;38 and that incompleteness also represented a form of completeness, breaking through the deﬁnition of so-called “successful” art and the restrictions imposed on individual artists by the system.39

Qian Liuxiang himself agreed that the incompleteness of Buried Alive made it surpass a complete work. According to him, he gleaned the inspiration for “to be continued” from a drone: “By presetting the route and program, the drone would ﬂy by itself. It’s not necessary for you edit the images it sends back. You only need to broadcast them.”40

As to Buried Alive, he added that what he did was to present a range and program. Then he retreated and let the work generate on its own, allowing it to move forward as time went by, just like a ticking time bomb.41

88 Among the nineteen people, most held a negative view towards Buried Alive. I interviewed Wu Tong for a second time in 2032. By then he was already a globally acclaimed Chinese contemporary artist, and Qian Liuxiang had long fallen into oblivion. Even the security departments of China and the United States were no longer seriously interested in ﬁnding him. Wu Tong still stuck to the radical comments he made on Buried Alive during my ﬁrst interview with him twenty years ago: “It is nothing more than a large lump of shit. It’s not worth your time or money to write about it at all.”42

Curator Wang Pinqin, also a practitioner of contemporary art, had a somewhat ambivalent attitude. During my second interview, when I, as a layman, told him Qian Liuxiang’s idea of the status of “to be continued” and all the other positive and negative comments, he just looked at me with an elegant smile. He said all these opinions had some kinds of grounds, but they could also be seen as groundless.43

Among all those who had something to do with the contemporary art circle, Emma was the only one who spoke positively of Buried Alive. She said that although it hurt her deeply and she hated Qian Liuxiang, she liked the work. Fu Zhou, Arturo, Song Tingyu, Rossana, and Dmitri all held a completely negative view of Buried Alive. Fan Liming, Katherine, and Pei Song rejected my request for a “second interview” (they rejected the ﬁrst interview also), so I failed to learn their attitudes. As to the other eight people, their attitudes were all loud and clear: they were vehemently against the idea that Buried Alive was art.

When you had meaning in hand, what you gained in the end was always tragedy. Why was that?

During the last year when Qian Liuxiang and I stayed in touch via phone, we discussed this. The calmness he showed when answering my question was so impressive that I still vividly remember it today. He said meaning could grow in your hand, indeﬁnitely and in a non-stop manner. Such meaning was also known as freedom. It was also embedded in your mind. Only through this were we able to transcend life and prevent being buried alive.44

I guess Qian Liuxiang foresaw his own ending. But he couldn’t help it and couldn’t stop. Not only did he produce the globally shocking Buried Alive, but he also made some more radical works afterwards. He, with his own hands, destroyed his career as an artist. It was the freedom that lay at the bottom of his heart that initiated the path for self-destruction. Like a ﬂying moth darting into the ﬁre, he darted into the realm of freedom, which was as terrifying as a black hole. In the end, he let himself be devoured by this freedom.

Notes

1. Records of a conversation with Qian Liuxiang, April 11, the 17th year of the new century. 2. Ibid. 3. The full 19-hour version has been translated into German, English, and Japanese. Parts of the videos have been translated into Korean, Portuguese, Russian, French, Italian, Serbian, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Spanish, Hungarian, Danish, and Czech. 4. Records of a conversation with Qian Liuxiang, April 11, the 17th year of the new century. 5. Ibid.

89 6. Ran Zhengge, This Is Not Reality Show But Reality, published on the website of Art Archive on December 16, 2012. Later the article was selected into his anthology Cat Fighting, No Regret At All (Shanghai: Shanghai Contemporary Art Press, 2014). 7. Qian Liuxiang, Buried Alive (edited videos): Guo Peng. 8. Ibid. 9. Qian Liuxiang, Buried Alive (unedited videos): Guo Peng, October 17, the 2nd year of the new century. 10. Qian Liuxiang, Buried Alive (edited videos): Arturo. All conversations have been automatically dubbed with Chinese subtitles during the fast-speed scanning process by robots. 11. Interview clips: Salvador (September 26, 2013). 12. Qian Liuxiang, Buried Alive (unedited videos): Arturo, November 18, the 2nd year of the new century, and January 15, 2003, the 3rd year of the new century. 13. “Tiger” is Fu Zhou’s nickname. According to him, in Shanghai dialect “Lao Fu” (meaning senior Fu) sounded similar to “tiger” (lao hu), so students who hated him called him “tiger” behind his back. Gradually it became widely known. 14. Qian Liuxiang: Buried Alive (edited videos): Pei Song. 15. Qian Liuxiang: Buried Alive (edited videos): Fan Liming. 16. Qian Liuxiang: Buried Alive (edited videos): Emma. All conversations have been automatically dubbed with Chinese subtitles during the fast-speed scanning process by robots. 17. Records of conversation with Qian Liuxiang, April 11, the 17th year of the new century. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. To my knowledge, at least two documentaries, both of which aimed to criticize contemporary art, made use of the parts pertinent to Wu Tong and Wang Pinqin in the unedited version of Buried Alive through role-play without directly citing the names. (Given that Buried Alive was an illegal visual source, those documentaries couldn’t make direct use of the work but hired actors to replay the scenes.) For more information, please refer to Production Line by Michael Rush and The General Condition of the World by Satake Yasuhiko. 22. Qian Liuxiang, Buried Alive (unedited videos): Zhang Lei, November 17, the 9th year of the new century. 23. Qian Liuxiang, Buried Alive (unedited videos): Pei Song, June 26, the 10th year of the new century. 24. Qian Liuxiang, Buried Alive (unedited videos): Guo Peng, December 2, the 11th year of the new century. 25. Records of conversation with Qian Liuxiang, September 19, the 19th year of the new century. 26. Ibid. 27. Qian Liuxiang, Buried Alive (unedited videos): Wang Pinqin, May 10, the 7th year of the new century. 28. Wang Xiangming, Panoramic Revolution: On the Future of Image Narrative, in New History, first edition (New Wave Press, 2021), 35–75. Qu Ying, An Overview of New History Since 2000, in History Communication no. 901, first edition (Huaxia University Press, 2020), 14–38. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. So far the identity of the anonymous netizen who edited Talks After Sex remains unknown. The pseudonym “Huang Si Huang” is probably inspired by the slang of Shanghai dialect (or Suzhou dialect). It’s a pun referring to both courage and eroticism. With such an assumption in mind, this anonymous netizen is probably from Shanghai or Suzhou. But this is purely based on my speculation. 33. Wang Xiangming, Panoramic Revolution: On the Future of Image Narrative, in Contemporary New History, first edition (Archive Press, 2021), 35–75. Qu Ying, An Overview of New History Since 2000, History Communication no. 9, first edition (Huaxia University Press, 2020), 14–38. 34. Cheng Shu, A Crazy “To Be Continued”—A Review on Buried Alive, published on the website Art Archive on April 20, 2013. Later it was included into his anthology Illusion and the Dark Side, first edition (You Zhi Press, June 2015). He Lu, The Shallow Games in the Era of Emptiness, published on the website New Favor on November 7, 2013. Both Cheng Shu and He Lu treated Buried Alive: Nineteen Old Poems as an independent and complete work, separating it from To Be Continued. 35. Thomas Heather, The Altitude Is Descending, published on the website Contemporary Is Fine on Febuary 15, 2014. Gao Hong, Another Failed Uprising of Art, published on the website We Love Bragging on March 2, 2014 36. Wu Kangliang, From Rebellion to Surveillance, published on the website Liaise More, Exhibit More on July 4, 2014. 37. Wang Bu, Absolute Artist, published on the website New Favor on January 24, 2014, and later was deleted. 38. Juri Hifumi, All Narrative Works, published on the website Art Archive on September 28, 2013. 39. Tang Jiayun, The Completion of “To Be Continued,” published on the website Favorite on January 30, 2014. 40. Records of a conversation with Qian Liuxiang, April 11, the 17th year of the new century. 41. Ibid. 42. From the interview video with Wu Tong on March 29, the 32nd year of the new century. 43. From the interview video with Wang Pinqin on May 3, the 32nd year of the new century. 44. Records of a conversation with Qian Liuxiang, July 17, the 20th year of the new century.

90 Chinese Name Index

Bai Xiaomo Gu Kaizhi Luo Li Xiao Shengjie 白小墨顧愷之駱莉肖勝傑 Cai Guo-qiang Guo Peng Luo Zidan Xing Xin 蔡國強郭彭羅子丹幸鑫 Cao Minghao He Liping Ma Guanjun Xu Chunliang 曹明浩何利平馬冠軍許純亮 Cao Zhi Hu Jiayi Ma Haijiao Xue Bowen 曹植胡佳藝馬海蛟薛博文 Chen Jianjun Hu Yanzi Mi Fu Yang Jun 陳建軍胡燕子米芾楊俊 Chen Junde Huang Yongping Pan Kefen Ye Caibao 陳鈞德黄永砯潘可芬葉彩寶 Chen Mo Huo Yunpeng Ying Yefu Pei Song 陳默霍雲鵬嬰野賦裴頌 Chen Qiang Jia Qianlan Yu Ji Qian Liuxiang 陳鏹賈茜蘭余極錢六想 Chen Qiulin Jin Yiran Zeng Xun 陳秋林金乙然 Qu Fengguo 曾循曲豐國 Chen Zhipeng Kong Boji Zha Changping 陳志鵬孔柏基 Shang, Danielle 查常平尚端 Chen Zhou Lan Qingwei Zhang Hua 陳軸藍慶偉 Shi Suyao 張華史蘇堯 Cheng Wen Laozi Zhang Jian-jun 程文老子 Song Tingyu 張健君宋廷予 Cheng Xixing Li Kun Zhang Jianfu 程曦行李琨 Sun Changyun 張健夫孫長雲 Cui Yongliang Li Liao Zhang Lei 崔永亮李燎 Tong Wenmin 張磊童文敏 Cui Xiuwen Li Ning Zhang Yingchuan 崔岫聞李凝 Wang Pinqin 張穎川 Dai Guangyu Li Shan 王品欽 Zhang Yu 戴光郁李山 Wang Qing 張羽 Deng Shangdong Li Yongzheng 王慶 Zhong Lei 鄧上東李勇政 Wang Wei 仲磊 Dong Jie Li Zhizhao 王維 Zhou Bin 董洁李志照 Wang Yanxin 周斌 Du Mingjin Liu Chengying 王彦鑫 Zhou Yilun 杜明今劉成英 Wei Yan 周軼倫 Fan Liming Liu Fengya 魏言 Zhou Yumei 范里鳴劉風雅周煜嵋 Wu Chengdian Feng Dekui Liu Shasha 吳承典 Zhu Gang 馮德奎劉莎莎朱罡 Wu Tong Feng Hanping Liu Wei 鄔童 Zhu Yi 馮瀚平劉緯朱奕 Wu, Elaine Fu Zhou Lu Huangzhi Chenyun Zhuangzi 傅周陸換之鄔晨雲莊子

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