Censorship in Consistency: the Case of Chinese Contemporary Art (2004-2014)
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Censorship in Consistency: The Case of Chinese Contemporary Art (2004-2014) Giovanni Bottacini (s1735187) MA Arts and Culture: Contemporary Art in a Global Perspective, Leiden University Supervisor: C. J. M. Zijlmans Word Count: 17 657 16 June 2018 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Mrs. Catherine (Kitty) Zijlmans of the Arts and Culture Department at Leiden University for the consistent and attentive support she gave me in my research via her enlightening and insightful comments. Furthermore, I would like to thank my family for supporting me in my studies and for which I express my utmost gratitude. Thanks to my mother for being able to support me even from afar, and my father for helping me in times of doubt. Finally, I would also like to thank my co-board members, Pepijn and Chris, my friends Elisa, Alice, Alison, Natalie, Selena and so many others, for their academic and moral support and unconditional patience, by being always either physically or virtually present. Without their support this accomplishment would not have been possible. Thank you. 2 Table of Contents Introduction 4 1. The Research on Censorship in China 7 Censorship 7 Censorship in China 9 1960s-1990s 12 Chinese “Harmonious Society” Policy (2004-2014) 13 Gillian Rose - Discourse Analysis I 15 2. No Pornography 19 No Pornography – Ren Hang – Censored 19 No Pornography – Liu Wei – Not Censored 24 Comparison 28 3. No Violence 29 No Violence – Zhang Huan – Censored 29 No Violence – He Yunchang – Not Censored 34 Comparison 38 4. No Political Criticism 39 No Political Criticism – Cao Fei – Censored 39 No Political Criticism – Zhang Dali – Not Censored 43 Comparison 46 Conclusion 47 Appendix – Images 50 Bibliography 57 Other Sources 61 3 Introduction Artistic freedom of expression has always been a hot topic both in the West and in the East. It is enough to think about the controversy of Richard Serra against the US government regarding the removal of Tilted Arc (1981) from the Federal Plaza in New York City in 1989 or the shutting down, in 2017, of the controversial Guggenheim “Art and China after 1989: Theatre of the World” exhibitions featuring abused animals. In the case of China, the issue becomes more complicated, because of what some perceive as the systematic censorship of everything that goes against the government’s narrative and criticizes it. But is this actually always the case? During my research, I encountered the book of a New York art journalist, Barbara Pollack, who for a ten-year long research focused on the Chinese contemporary art market. Here, she discussed two cases: the first is Wang Qingsong, a contemporary Chinese artist who, during the shooting of the video art work in 2006, Blood of the World (fig. 1) was arrested by the Chinese Police under the accusation of pornography. The second is Chi Peng, the first openly gay Chinese artist who reportedly was never censored, even though his statue 2005 I Fuck Me (fig. 2) (naked self-portraits having sexual intercourse) should be as controversial as Wang Qingsong’s, if not more. The author also reports of a conversation with former head of the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), Feng Yuan, who specifies the “Four Nos” which would, according to him, always cause the censoring of art in China: “no pornography, no violence, no attacking the government or making fun of political leaders.”1 From this, a question spontaneously arises: “Why do some artist get censored and others do not?” As I will present below, in researching the theoretical frame of censorship in China, I discussed the two main government’s discourses on it: the Harmonious Society Policy (2004-2014) and the Forum on Literature and Art’s speech (2014-present). Even though I will be focusing my research on the time frame of 2004 until 2014, I think it is also important to introduce the current situation as a reaction to and also informative of the previous state of censorship policies in China. In fact, as journalist Xuechun Murong points out from the columns of the New York Times, after the 2014 speech, many artists “gladly”2 started a campaign of self-censorship with requirements, which were very different and “softer” than the previous policy’s. This, alongside the history of censorship in China suggests a series of discontinuities in the direction of censorship policies throughout Chinese modern history. 1 Barbara Pollack, The Wild Wild East: an American Art Critic’s Adventure in China, (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2010), 182 2 Xuechun Murong, “The Art of Xi Jinping,” The New York Times, November 21, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/opinion/murong-xuecun-china-the-art-of-xi-jinping.html. 4 Following from this, my research question is “Do censors’ and artists’ discourses from 2004 to 2014 suggest consistency and continuity in the enforcement of the Chinese art censorship or not?” This question’s answer will help define the state of art censorship in China in the above- mentioned period, but also its development from the previous decades and into the current state. In order to research this issue, I will have to answer two sub-questions: “What elements of the artists’ and officials’ discourses could have caused the censorship?” This question is aimed at understanding what triggers censorship in controversial cases. The second one is “What elements of the artists’ and officials’ discourses could have helped them in avoiding censorship?” This will be mostly focusing on artworks which could potentially be infringing the “Nos” but were not considered controversial, and I aim to understand why they were not so. In order to answer my research question, I will use the method and model drawn from visual analysis specialist, Gillan Rose for analysing the single case studies, the censored and the un-censored cases for each of the “Nos.” Through this method, I will be discussing the possible triggering factors for censoring art works and the elements that saved other artworks from censorship by searching into primary and secondary documents. The case studies are censored and not censored artworks for each policy core concept exhibited in the period between 2004 and 2014. These artworks were selected after researches in various Chinese and international, art-related and not, magazines reporting on censored art in China. The selection was made based on the availability of the sources, given the recent time frame of the research, but also on the peculiarities and interesting backgrounds of the various artists. The “censored” case studies were thus selected based on the cases of censorship that hit the artist in the specific 2004-2014 time frame. The “non-censored” case studies were more difficult to select, and I was mostly interested in artists with controversial aspects in their careers and artworks. The case studies are solely regarding controversies (or the absence thereof) for artworks exhibited in Mainland China. The case studies are the following: Ren Hang’s Untitled (2012), Liu Wei’s It Looks Like a Landscape (2004) on the topic of pornography, Zhang Huan’s Giant no. 1-2-3 (2008), He Yunchang’s One Meter of Democracy (2010), for the topic of violence and Cao Fei’s RMB City: a Second Life City Planning (2007) and Zhang Dali’s Second History: Chairman Mao Reviews the Red Guards, 1966 (2005), regarding political criticism. The sources for the research are mostly located online; this is a consequence of the recent time frame, which implies an overwhelming majority of online magazines, blogs, video interviews and website-based content. Furthermore, much of this virtual content derives from the websites of the artists and the galleries representing them. Besides this, some of this content is not signed by 5 any specific author, as often happens in the case of art galleries’ websites and private blogs. Therefore I listed these “authorless” contents under “other sources.” The present research will be thus structured: I will begin by presenting the secondary sources, on the topic of censorship in general, and on the specific case of censorship in China. Then I will provide a detailed definition of what the used method will be and introduce the case studies divided into three chapters: the first chapter will deal with the cases of censored and uncensored artworks related to pornography, the second one on the case studies related to violence, and the third will present two artworks related to the topic of political attacks. I mean to point out that this research is not only aimed at discussing censorship in China per se, but also at giving a better understanding of mechanisms which are behind it and the case of Chinese censorship to non-specialists. Another core objective of this research is to encourage the shift of current state academia from its still Western- centric perspective towards a more flexible, transcultural perspective. 6 1. The Research on Censorship in China In the present chapter I discuss my literary sources on the topics of censorship, censorship in China, the Forum on Art and Literature Speech, and the Harmonious Society Policy (henceforth HSP). Censorship I will start by defining the concept of censorship by discussing the perspective of the philosopher Michael Foucault. He addressed the topic of censorship, meant as part of a discourse on sexuality in Victorian society. He provides convincing arguments on the logic of censorship itself. His argument is that repression operates “as a sentence to disappear”, it states the non-existence of something existing, being that the object of censorship “had no right to exist and would be made to disappear upon its least manifestation – whether in acts or in words.”3 Then, he recognized three different forms of interdiction of the object of censorship: “affirming that such a thing is not permitted, preventing it from being said, denying that it exists.” He argued that the relation among these three forms of censorship is problematic.