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The Cryptographic Imagination of Huang Rui: Chinese History in Animal Time Beijing Angle Modern Art, Beijing October 18 to November 16, 2008

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The Cryptographic Imagination of Huang Rui: Chinese History in Animal Time Beijing Angle Modern Art, Beijing October 18 to November 16, 2008 Maya Kóvskaya The Cryptographic Imagination of Huang Rui: Chinese History in Animal Time Beijing Angle Modern Art, Beijing October 18 to November 16, 2008 Huang Rui, Chinese History in Animal Time, 2008, installation at Museo delle Mura, Rome. Courtesy of the artist. rrays of grey bricks from recently demolished Qing and Ming dynasty dwellings in Old Beijing surround carved marble statues of Aanimals representing the twelve years of the Chinese zodiac. Each brick in the square matrices surrounding the animals is engraved with a series of Chinese characters and numbers forming a code that references a complex, alternative history—a history of China that is measured in what Huang Rui calls “animal time.” How are we to decipher this history and interpret the cryptic judgments encoded in its invisible architecture? Huang Rui’s gift is not merely visual perspicacity, but also this systematic preoccupation with discourse and power that informs the body of his work. While some artists are content with explorations in visual language and exercises in form for form’s sake, Huang Rui’s use of form follows the needs of his larger conceptual agenda. From his early years as a pioneer in the path-breaking Chinese avant-garde collective The Stars, to his cross- cultural art practice during his years in Japan and the diverse body of work he has created since his return to China, Huang Rui’s creative development has been guided by an enduring concern with the ordering of power arrangements and the systems of knowledge-making that undergird them. In his installation, Chinese History in Animal Time (2008), numerous strands of inquiry come together to present a brilliant, systematic, epistemological device for making sense of history. In a move best described as "cryptographic," Huang Rui draws upon the rich traditional folk culture of Chinese astrology, bringing it into critical engagement with traditional imperial methods for the recording of dynastic annals; thus, in the context of the Gregorian calendar now dominant in the world, and in opposition to the hegemonic mode of history-making of both the contemporary State and imperial tradition, Huang Rui's “animal time” constitutes an alternative ordering of historical time that is visually embodied in his installation. 90 Huang Rui, Chinese History in Empirically and materially, Animal Time, 2008, installation at Museo delle Mura, Rome. Huang Rui’s “animal time” Courtesy of the artist. manifests a clear lineage to the specter of change in the urban landscape of Reform Era China. The built environment of urban China’s distinctive experiment with revolutionary socialist modernism was first dominated by grey brick left over from pre- revolutionary times, then by red brick during the first decade of Reform and Opening (and in the countryside, still today). Over the past two decades, both kinds of brick structures have been bulldozed and razed en mass in the cities to make way for steel, concrete, and glass skyscrapers—the State’s designated embodiment of the new version of China’s modernity in the current era of “capitalism with Chinese characteristics.” And attendant to this new era is a set of principles and values that rationalize the underlying ideological shifts and changing structure of power embodied in the changing landscape. While Huang Rui’s earlier 2008 solo show in Rome, which unveiled this work for the first time, featured a related installation that revolved around the period from Qin Shi Huang and China’s unification in 221 B.C. through to the present, his most recent incarnation of Chinese History in Animal Time, shown in Beijing in late 2008, was focused on the 720-year epicycle that began in 1924. Based on his allegorical algorithm for calculating “animal time,” the period in which we are currently living is the first 60-year period of the new cycle, starting in 1984 (an interesting coincidence for a number of reasons, Orwell’s brilliant dystopian novel and all that it evokes notwithstanding) and ending in 2043. The 720 Ming and Qing dynasty bricks arranged around the statues of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac are inscribed with Chinese characters and dates, which are the key to the encoding of Huang Rui’s alternative system for the measurement and interpretation of Chinese history, and that lend a strong textual aspect to the work in which he has appropriated and transformed elements of the dynastic methods for recording historical annals. Integrating the Sexagenary Cycle of the 10 Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches—an arcane ordering system for marking the passage of time based on the Lunar calendar and incorporating the five elements of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water—with elements from Chinese astrology—the 12 zodiac animals (Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep (ram or goat), Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Boar, which traditionally represent the character and fate of the individual born under a given sign)—Huang Rui offers a 60-year cycle made from the combination of the twelve animals and five elements. Using this system, Huang Rui has designed a 720-year historical transmigration epicycle (made up of twelve 60-year periods, each ruled 91 by the spirit of a different animal) in which the animals of the zodiac are now used to represent the character of a given era, rather than merely the character of a given individual. Thus, the political leaders and the eras over which they preside can be critically interpreted through this folk-knowledge-based methodology, offering a mode of critical discourse about the relationship between what becomes “history” and entrenched systems of power and knowledge. Offering this system of “animal time” to metaphorically measure and evaluate the character of human rule, Huang Rui has created a trenchant, dark, obliquely humorous visual system for categorizing and ordering historical knowledge. Through this system, then, we can understand figures like Chairman Mao, Qin Shi Huang (the first Chinese emperor who unified China and who burned a bunch of books in the process), and Genghis Khan as rulers under the cyclical sign of the Rat. In Chinese astrology, rats are known to cause chaos, turmoil, and upheaval, as well as contribute major achievements. In “animal time,” the next cycle is the Ox, and that happens to be the period in which we currently live. 1984 marks the beginning of third cycle of the Ox, an animal that symbolizes industriousness and practicality. Oxen are also good with money, and in modern China symbolize the stock market. For example, in 1984, Deng Xiaoping issued the call for “Economic Development as Core Task” as a national policy directive, marking a major break with the revolutionary radical politics of the Maoist era. This ideological and practical shift set in motion a China with Ox characteristics taking the lead. With the Beijing Olympics giving the nation an international “face” on an unprecedented scale, 2008 was bullish for China in many ways, in spite of natural disasters and global economic woes. In some ways, Huang Rui’s move of mind has less in common with his compatriot artists and more in common with that of philosopher Michel Foucault, whose research excavating the relationship between discourse and power in relation to major epistemic shifts can be described as an “archaeology of knowledge.” But while Foucault employed anthropological case studies and textual exegesis in his attempts to unearth the discursive foundations of the dominant, humanly-constructed “order of things,” Huang Rui’s explorations are conducted through a visual practice of conceptual art that is often text-based, or textually grounded. Moreover, while much of Foucault’s work involved the unpacking, deciphering, and disentangling of diverse threads of ideas, Huang Rui’s Chinese History in Animal Time, as well as many other works, involves the re-encoding of commonly recognized data in such a way as to offer a new vista of approach and a new way of understanding made possible by the suggestive techniques of the encoding process. It is in this way that Huang Rui can be described as a cryptographic thinker who is focused on the ways in which knowledge can be packaged and then transformed by the process of deciphering its meaning. Given that the act of deciphering is a form of critical engagement, this process becomes an interactive one that triangulates between creator (author), spectator (reader), and artwork (text) against the backdrop of specific historical, cultural, and political realities that illuminate the object in question as part of a larger context. 92 Huang Rui, Chinese History in Likewise, Huang Rui’s imagination bears a meta-level resemblance to the Animal Time, 2008, installation. Courtesy of the artist and sophisticated and intricate modes of thinking found in the writings of Beijing Angle Modern Art, Beijing. literary giants such as Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Pynchon, and Salman Rushdie, as well as those of myriad Soviet-era intellectuals who used cryptographic techniques ranging from ciphers to allegory to metonymy in building elaborate systems of coding that functioned as the scaffolding for a larger, partially invisible system of knowledge. Poe incorporated cryptograms into his story The Gold Bug (1843), setting off a flurry of popular interest in the cryptogram. Rushdie’s acclaimed Midnight’s Children (1981) is a magical realist allegory for India’s uncertain fate before and after the nation’s 1947 independence from British colonial rule and partition, which led to the creation of a separate Pakistan, and, eventually, Bangladesh. But while Huang Rui’s art bears a methodological resemblance to these works, it is the luminosity of postmodern master Thomas Pynchon, in his Crying of Lot 49 (1966), that evokes most comprehensively the sort of complex and systematic foundations of an alternative vision that characterizes Huang Rui’s Chinese History in Animal Time.
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